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.fic: I'm a Stranger Here Myself - McKay/Sheppard (PG13) 3.3
.<.
* * *
Rodney ignores him when he gets back, though being ignored by Rodney is kind of like one of hell’s lesser torments – that kind of itching, painful, persistent awareness of something being wrong and unfixable. The only thing to do is put up with it, wait it out, though it means a lot of suffering in the meantime, and ‘meantime’ turns into the rest of Monday, the frosty ‘good night’ that Rodney offers him, a ‘good night’ that sounds more like a sincere hope for John to asphyxiate in his sleep.
Tuesday morning John goes to the post office and changes his address, mentions it in passing when he gets home, and Rodney says “Good. Good, good,” the way he would when numbers cooperated, and says no more about it.
John pokes him in the ribs. What am I, chopped liver?
I hate liver, Rodney tells him, and pokes him in the forehead.
Rodney’s eyes are bright, saying more than words ever could, bright like when John had accepted his offer to move in, and happiness sort of belongs there in Rodney’s face.
He likes that, John does, that he’s made Rodney happy when everything and everyone else clearly can’t. Too much for his own good, maybe, but he can’t bring himself to care.
The Princeton letter stays where it is.
* * *
The Friday night after John’s official moving in, he stumbles downstairs at four in the morning. His body insists it’s actually somewhere around eight and he’s going to miss breakfast.
Around him, the house is mostly still, the occasional creak of settling wood. No hum, nothing in the back of his head that whispers about contentment and home.
Lights flicker in the living room and soft, nonsensical noises chase patterns across the wall. The Home Shopping Network, or maybe a late-night Godzilla marathon, the volume’s so low John can’t tell. Through the window in the front hall John can see the noncommittal darkness of a suburban street, synthetic brightness of the streetlamps, and it annoys him in a distant, sleepy way, that Rodney’s elected to live in the goddamn suburbs.
Earth’s far enough out as it is, in its little wisp of stars out in the boondocks of the Milky Way. Not like Atlantis, floating in her pool of light in the heart of her galaxy, silver overlaid on dark water, two oceans of blackness with the bright path of stars arcing overhead. He tries hard to hate the memories of evenings and nights spent out on the balconies, but ends up making himself angry instead.
God, it’s like being hormonal. John hitches at his boxers, rubs along the rise of his hip where a nocturnal itch is still making itself felt, and stomps into the living room.
It’s a Godzilla movie after all, and Rodney’s either hypnotized or half-asleep, his body at once relaxed and oddly tense. A stack of papers, printouts with illegibility scribbled across them, rests precariously at the edge of the table, and next to them a glass of water drips condensation onto the wood, moisture ringing out around it and catching the edge of the Princeton fellowship offer.
John frowns at the piece of paper, not sure whether to be annoyed that Rodney’s apparently considering the offer after he lied and said he wasn’t, or confused at the impulse to be annoyed. It’s Rodney’s life and a damn prestigious fellowship, and that… Yeah, that does annoy him, the possibility that there might be more to Rodney’s life than Atlantis.
He stands there a moment, watching Technicolor reflect in Rodney’s eyes, which have gone glassy with distance, a concentration, a stillness John has a hard time associating with his friend.
And Rodney is his friend. John can’t ever remember applying that term to him before.
Fugue state, his mind supplies, bouncing back to the present before that thought can obsess it too much, shell-shock, or maybe this is what Rodney looks like when no one’s around.
Not liking the stillness, as much because it freaks him out as much as it makes him think about stuff he doesn’t like thinking about, John steps closer, tries to push the furry obstinance of Planck off the couch, Planck who glares at him with green eyes and hops up on Rodney’s lap instead.
Rodney starts and comes to, blinking hazily up at him.
“Sheppard?” he asks, only when the distance vanishes and the haze clears up.
“Yeah.” John tucks himself into the small square of couch not occupied by Rodney. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Obviously,” Rodney sniffs.
He doesn’t move, which makes John roll his eyes and shove at him, though Rodney’s foot is warm against his forearm, covered by the fleece blankets that they’d never gotten around to putting away. Rodney scowls and shoves back, unexpectedly strong, almost four years of running and fighting behind the pressure.
“So,” John says after a minute of watching Godzilla stomping Tokyo into smithereens, “Princeton?”
Rodney’s gaze flickers down to the letter on the coffee table.
“I told you, sabbatical.” Rodney’s looking at him again, and John’s forgotten what it’s like to be on the end of one of those considering, concentrated looks and the silence stretches on into pain, but John can’t bring himself to end it. It’s Rodney’s silence.
“It was my life,” Rodney says quietly. “You know?”
John knows.
“Even before I signed on with the SGC.” Rodney picks at a ball of fleece, touches Planck’s head, taps his fingers on the back of the couch. “I’ve worked on wormholes almost all my life. It’s what I do. Did. Whatever.”
What Rodney does is what he is, like flying is what John is, and since he doesn’t fly anymore, John has no idea what John Sheppard’s supposed to be. And for the first time, it occurs to John that Rodney’s just as lost as he is.
“I don’t know how the hell Radek does it. He teaches, I suppose, I mean, he can actually put up with graduate students. He probably even likes them.” Rodney shudders elaborately. “I can’t imagine a more searing torment than plowing through some wretched doctoral student’s pathetic attempts at formulating a useful thought. Being trapped in a malfunctioning transporter with Kavanagh, maybe, but even then…”
The bitching, weirdly, soothes John, hypnotic watching Rodney’s hands paint agitation through flickering lights, aided by the half-muted cries of terrified citizens and Planck’s purring.
“For God’s sake, they’re still trying to figure out if wormholes could even exist, given the state of theory at the moment.” Rodney’s laugh breaks in the middle. “And even if they did, it’s not like there’s a wormhole right in our backyard – and by ‘backyard’ I mean ‘within the orbit of the moon’ because that’s how far declassified science has gotten – and even if they found one, how the hell would they get there without a spaceship? And I… I’ve been on a spaceship and I’ve walked through a stargate, and I can’t tell anyone this, except for you, and I highly suspect – ”
That you’re going crazy with it? Yeah, John is, too. He’s not used to despair, the way it makes him want to climb out of his skin.
He becomes aware that he’s nodding in a drunken sort of agreement, that they’re pressed together on the couch, and everything about Rodney is jumping out at him, immediate and present and the only real things in the world, a thousand things John had never noticed before: a warm, solid body, spike of sweat and dust, the hum of Rodney like electricity – one of those people whose beauty is in personality, in movement, and even sitting still Rodney is kinetic and real real real.
“Rodney,” he says hoarsely, and wants to say other stuff too, like don’t go to New Jersey, don’t go anywhere, I just changed my address because it’s like – no, it’s not like, it is – leaving a man behind, leaving John behind.
Rodney’s staring at him, eyes desperate, pulling him back to another galaxy when they’re on a mission and it’s all on John, because physics says they’re doomed and only insanity can save them.
And maybe this is insane, only they’re not on a mission anymore, John thinks as he hitches himself closer, hand sliding over leather, over skin, cloth, Rodney’s shoulder, or maybe this is a mission, How to Survive on Planet Earth, and like any other mission they need each other to survive it. He knows there was a whole lot more to Rodney’s offer of a place to stay, a home or something like it, as close as the two of them can get to something as normal as that.
“John,” Rodney says, or half-says, a sigh muted by the clamor from the television, and this close his eyes are dark sea-storm blue, solemn and exhilarated and terrified.
The sound of his name brings John back to himself and he withdraws, vaguely aware that he’d been thinking about kissing Rodney, about sliding his fingers along Rodney’s face, the back of his neck to pull him close. Rodney’s watching him closely, the fear still there, but it’s something closer to anticipation, the fear of wondering what will happen after finally getting what you want, and it occurs to him that Rodney, uncharacteristically, has gone further on down the road than John has.
“It’s cool,” Rodney tells him, for once knowing the right thing to say. “Um, I’m going back up to bed.”
He pushes the blankets aside and stands up, spine cracking emphatically. John carefully doesn’t look as Rodney heads out of the room, tries not to count steps – fifteen in all – as Rodney goes up the stairs. Creak creak creak, pause as though reconsidering, balancing on the edge of some decision, then silence.
“Smooth,” he mutters to himself, glaring at the television and the smoking remains of Tokyo. “Fucking brilliant, Sheppard.”
Only he thinks maybe the stupid thing wasn’t the almost-kiss so much as the hesitating, the pulling-back.
Still, the referees have ruled a fumble on the play.
“Most discouraging,” as Radek would have put it.
John allows himself a few more minutes for the humiliation and stupidity to sink in before turning off the TV and heading upstairs.
* * *
He wakes up with a headache, something to do with the tension that had kept him awake the rest of the night, spinning over and over what the fuck almost happened
Rodney’s face in the half-light of the TV and the lamp on the end table, and Rodney had wanted John to do that, to touch him, to put his mouth on – John tries to shudder away from the thought but can’t, and it pulls him in – for John to put his mouth on Rodney’s, and maybe Rodney had wanted to touch John in the same way – and Rodney’s hands, John thinks (half crazy from a sleepless night) would have been firm but careful, feeling their way across him, and –
“Fuck,” he says, softly and fervently. He’s not aroused, exactly, but something shifts inside, a sensation he can’t put a name to, wanting maybe, though it goes deeper. What he’d almost had last night… he wanted that, not the kiss exactly (or at least, not only the kiss), but Rodney looking at him, all that concentration and focus, Rodney, the only person in the world who understood what this – all this (losing Atlantis, home, direction, everything) – was, being there with him.
His mind can wrap around kissing Rodney, unexpectedly comfortable and intimate with the thought, and that needs some processing, that he can imagine what Rodney’s mouth is like to touch, to cover with his own.
He listens for the sounds of Rodney moving around the house; he can hear him distantly, down in the kitchen, Planck the cat’s high, plaintive meow and Rodney’s exasperated Okay, okay, I’ll feed you, geez, greedy feline not quite hushed enough.
Reluctantly, John gets up and pads to the bathroom, one ear out for Rodney-movement, but all he hears is running commentary directed at Planck, or maybe no one in particular, and he doesn’t stay in the hallway long enough to decipher what Rodney’s saying. He rolls his eyes at his own paranoia, tells himself to get over it – that, in fact, there’s nothing to get over and when he goes downstairs he and Rodney will probably never breathe a word about last night, whether over this morning’s coffee or any other, because that’s what they do.
A shower drums the worst of the tenseness from him, though the headache persists, smoothing out the bumps that keep him from thinking straight, but somehow he keeps coming up against Rodney and last night, and the thought that maybe this is what he needs.
When he finally walks into the kitchen, Rodney goes very quiet and still over his coffee cup, anxiety pouring off him, his mouth thin with the effort of keeping back the words. John’s head throbs unpleasantly with memory, but he manages a lazy grin, the kind calculated to drive Rodney up the wall, and asks after coffee.
“There,” Rodney says, predictably cranky and impatient. What are you, blind?
“McKay, there’s half a cup left.” John shakes the coffee pot meaningfully.
“The early bird gets the caffeine, Sheppard,” Rodney tells him, but pushes his mostly-full mug – his GeNiUS mug – in John’s direction anyway. Big baby.
John takes a sip, resists the temptation to add sugar, aware of Rodney watching him and trying to be covert about it – only Rodney’s about as covert as a flashing neon sign. Hot, blessed caffeine, worth the scrutiny, worth the slight, rueful smile that flashes across Rodney’s face – made better, maybe, because Rodney suddenly seems okay, realizing that they’re not going to talk about Last Night, either what did happen or what didn’t.
“So, Brain, what are we going to do today?”
Rodney re-appropriates his mug and takes a noisy, meditative gulp before announcing he has no idea.
“We sort of need to finish painting,” John says. The study is a federal disaster area.
“The paint fumes were making me high,” Rodney grumbles. “I should have hired someone… Having the study look like someone didn’t decorate it with a bedpan isn’t worth massive brain cell death.”
For a moment, the only sounds are the scrape of the mug being passed back and forth along the table – a lot easier to share this and not what they’d almost had last night – and Rodney’s subvocal complaints about coffee moochers.
“We could go to a park or something,” John says, just to say something.
Rodney stares at him like he’s just proposed drinking vials of Ebola. “Can you think of anything else?”
“Well…” John casts around desperately for something to do. There has to be something. A museum, a movie, but all he can think about is getting out of this house, out of inside, into sky and open air before he explodes. Targ-Mart doesn’t count. “Not really.”
“Oh, fine.” Rodney seems prepared to descend into a sulk, but brightens abruptly. “We can pretend it’s an off-world recon or something. First contact with the natives.” He looks sorry the second the words come out of his mouth, and John’s sorry too.
Rodney had been the one, John thinks suddenly, who’d written all the code, who’d made it possible to save the city even though they’d been exiled from it forever – and it had been all on him to come up with it, him and Radek, and to this second it pisses him off that he hadn’t been able to do anything other than watch as Rodney computed and calculated and swore bitterly.
He wonders how badly that chews at Rodney, if maybe the reason he’s staying here is the same as John – terrified to leave, to move on and away, because any day now they could get the call saying it’s time to go back home. Not a Rodney-like hope, or a John-like one either, but Atlantis has – had – made them unlike themselves in a lot of ways.
Exhaustion tugs at him, exhaustion from having to deal with all of this – with none of it, with absence, with Rodney who’s the only thing John has left of Pegasus – and he’d really like to go back to bed and sleep forever, or until the SGC calls and lets them go back home. He hates living in his head, especially when it’s pounding like this, but there’s no place else to go.
They end up packing lunch and driving out to the Rocky Mountain National Park anyway, because anything is better than being stuck in Rodney’s house for another day, circling around each other, all this new awkwardness piling up on top of the letter and Atlantis and everything else. John drives and Rodney navigates, like always, and they make it without disaster, despite John’s lingering headache and Rodney’s distraction.
John drives, despite Rodney’s accusations of recklessness. Rodney navigates.
It’s probably a bad idea; it’s summer so families and summer-camp kids infest the park, most of them in campers and buses, huge vehicles that hog the road and spit exhaust in their faces. The headache refuses to be appeased by Tylenol, and Rodney’s distraction is fading in the face of constant provocation by idiot tourists.
At last they find a trailhead that looks somewhat abandoned, shady and overlooked by the rest of the hordes of Boy Scouts and camping groups. Rodney scowls at the forest like it’s personally insulted him, but double-checks his pack and water bottle, the movements oddly efficient against the civilian clothing – the khakis and “I’m with Genius” t-shirt, the light jacket (in case) tied to one of the pack straps.
Add in a tac vest, data tablet, and a P-90 – and the day Rodney looked comfortable with one is a day John still remembers, not long after it had become standard procedure for everyone, even scientists, to go armed offworld – and it would be familiar. Add Teyla and Ronon and Ford, and it would be home.
John yanks the pack over one shoulder, lurches a bit as the pack threatens to slide off to the left and throws off his center of gravity.
He’s getting… not younger, John knows. Four years of puddle jumpers and Ancient tech have decreased his tolerance for g-stress, and Atlantis’ circadian rhythms still play hell with his body.
(No, no, his body says, it’s Earth, I don’t belong here.)
And Rodney’s getting not younger, too. He wants to laugh at this, two guys on the wrong side of forty, and forget midlife crisis – this is midlife hell.
They start off at an easy clip, following the winding trail downhill, the path wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side. Rodney mutters something about the air being infested with allergens, but John can hear him breathing deeply. Already the air is sharp with pine and clear despite the heat, no exhaust or modernity touching it, and the white noise of traffic and civilization has vanished, and an odd silence rings in the back of John’s mind, the place where Atlantis used to be.
“Remember,” Rodney says into that silence, “when you tried to explain the World Wide Wrestling Federation to Teyla and Ronon?”
“Ronon couldn’t understand the costumes.”
“I don’t understand them myself,” Rodney says. “Or the attraction in watching large, sweaty men trying to flatten each other.”
The memory doesn’t sting as much as John had thought it would, now that it’s there in the open: some night after a mission, lazy and a bit mad with the promise of downtime for a few days and the Daedalus fresh in with supplies from earth. Ronon had wanted to learn more about Earth sports, so Rodney had explained the Olympics – of which Teyla had approved – and the football World Cup. (The difference between American football and European football – “Soccer,” John had kept insisting – stymied Teyla and Ronon.) John’s contribution had been the WWF.
“Ronon would have been good at it,” John says. “He’s big, scary... All he’d need is a name.”
“The Caveman,” Rodney says immediately. “Remember the flash flood on MX1-450?”
“You mean when I saved your ass from certain drowning? Yeah, I do.”
“I was talking about how I figured out that the weather was being controlled by an Ancient device, which was – of course – malfunctioning, and how I figured out how to fix it.” The huff in Rodney’s breath has nothing to do with exertion. “And how the very grateful natives rewarded us with all that llama meat stuff.”
“Oh. Forgot that part.” That had been back in their first year. John thinks for a minute. “What about MX7-831? You know, the place with the energy field thing?”
“Again, McKay: 1; crappy Ancient design: 0.” Rodney grins, hitching his pack into a more comfortable position. The grin morphs into a scowl. “You know, I don’t miss these things.”
“You know what I remember most?” John pauses, waits the beat for Rodney to look questioningly at him. “Your bitching. It was like my soundtrack or something.”
“Ha ha. Mostly, I remember wondering how you managed to skim off the monthly hair gel requisition, or if maybe you were blackmailing people out of theirs.” Rodney elbows John in the side, rough and confident as Rodney so rarely is, playful almost, back out on a mission again, though they’re really going nowhere in particular.
And they go on like this, memory bouncing back and forth, everything they’re not supposed to talk about, that they’ve been sworn to silence about – everything classified and undisclosable – spilling out with laughter and relief, even when Ford comes up, and the other people they’ve lost, saying these things, God, saying them just to say them, and the only other things around them are the birds and the trees.
Nowhere eventually takes them to the edge of the trees, the path sloping downward steeply before leveling out into a meadow some fifty feet further on. Fresh out of the woods the sun is dazzling, and John’s grateful for his sunglasses.
Rodney shades his eyes with one hand and squints into the distance, where the meadow eventually begins to curve into hills and roll outward up and up into the mountains, where snow still mixes with cloud up at the summits. For the first time in six months the sunlight isn’t completely strange, mixed as it is with grass smell and blue sky.
“I could use a break,” Rodney says, stepping a bit off the path toward a small pile of boulders. Uncomplaining about his back and the sciatica John knows will undoubtedly be aggravated, he dumps his pack and spreads out his jacket, collapses on top of it.
John joins him, elbows on knees, accepts the offered water bottle and a moment of silence. He can sense Rodney recharging beside him.
“They’re never going to call, you know.” The truth hits him, hearing himself say it, they’re never going to call, the reality just as bitter as everyone says.
“I know,” Rodney says quietly. He takes his bottle back and takes a drink, wiping a hand across his mouth. Some moisture still lingers there, there on his lips, and John wants to run his finger across it, see if it makes Rodney’s lips soft.
IOA had decided it would be for the best; no temptation, they said, remembering too clearly the last time Sheppard and the others had been forced to leave Atlantis. No room for a choice, no time to mount a defense against their own people – which John had seriously considered doing – only room for compromise and to win what they could, to keep Atlantis alive and hidden and locked away from them forever. IOA’s terms had been clear: save the city, but you’re gone, all of you.
A kindness, Wolsey had put it – and of course Wolsey would put it that way – though ‘kindness’ in the register of putting something sick and suffering out of its misery. No temptation if they can’t get anywhere near the Cheyenne complex or Area 51, or any of the other installments. Not even Siberia. No, all of them out, done well by: retirement and honorable discharge for John, recommendations to teaching and research posts for the civilians.
Looking back on it, John wonders if the Princeton thing isn’t Rodney’s compensation.
“You think Elizabeth’s doing okay?” Rodney asks after taking another drink.
“Hope so,” John says, though he doubts it. They haven’t heard from her since their discharge from the program, and he’s pretty sure she wants it that way.
Elizabeth’s in Washington now, probably bored out of her mind negotiating peace accords between nations instead of planets. Radek at Cornell, Carson back in Scotland and likely loving it. Lorne and the other Marines are, so far as John knows, still with the SGC, which needs every military body it can get in the war against the Ori and Goa’uld.
Then there’s the two of them, John and Rodney, here at the edge of a terran forest.
Rodney seems content to let the silence ride for a bit, and he seems looser somehow, not like he’s accepted what’s happened but like he’s found he can deal with it – and, John knows from a lifetime of losing people, there’s a huge fucking difference – and for Rodney, that’s saying a lot. He doesn’t do resignation well, which John can understand – he doesn’t, either, and even twenty years in the Air Force hasn’t gotten him used to it. Things have to be acceptable for Rodney; he doesn’t do the grey areas, and John likes that about him.
Concrete, that’s Rodney. Under the hand-waving and motor mouth, he’s all solidity, reliable, and John finds he likes that too.
“It’s a nice day,” Rodney says at length, the remark sounding requisitely grudging at the fact that John’s the one responsible for dragging them on the forced march out into it.
“Yeah,” John agrees, and for the first time doesn’t mind the old sun on his face. He leans back against his rock, brushing against Rodney’s arm as he does, and looks up at the sky despite the glare.
Flying again. He wants to fly again, feels the darkness of that thought brush against him and tries to shrug it away.
“Of course, the UV index is probably in the ‘Melanoma’ range,” Rodney continues, “and I didn’t bring my sunscreen.”
Despite his own thoughts, despite everything, John laughs.
* * *
That night John cooks. Not because he’s good at cooking, or because he particularly wants to, but because he’s getting tired of take-out.
“Even Quattro Canti’s pizza?” Rodney asks in disbelief as John turns to root through the refrigerator. “That’s not possible.”
Most of Rodney’s cooking utensils – improbably high-end, considering Rodney considers the fork to be the apex of food-handling technology – haven’t been touched, the Teflon on the pans still new and shiny. Upon John’s observation of this, Rodney launches into a disquisition on how he’d found out that Teflon releases some kind of chemical when heated... bad for cats and probably living beings in general... no I’m not paranoid, Sheppard, it’s called having a sensible and reasonable concern for one’s health, which I have, unlike some people I know who take swan dives off ladders while fixing lights.
Eggs. They have eggs, and cheese that doesn’t look too suspicious.
“That’s officially getting old, McKay,” John says as he searches for something else, anything else, to make into an omelet and seriously reconsiders the embargo on ordering out.
“No, it isn’t,” Rodney says. He’s sitting on one of the barstools at the island, and even with his back to him, John knows Rodney’s watching him, can feel Rodney’s gaze lasering into his back. “Not when you almost gave me a heart attack with your terminal clumsiness – and it will be terminal one day, Sheppard, and I’m going to laugh when it happens. Don’t think I won’t.” Rodney’s tone teeters on the edge of belligerence, trying to annoy John into immortality. “How was it that the Air Force let you fly things? Remind me again.”
“I was really good at it,” John tells him, more fiercely than he probably should, but he doesn’t take it back. Doesn’t turn around, either, just stares into the bare recesses of the refrigerator.
“I know,” Rodney says, very quiet but still forceful. Not testy or impatient – of course I know, Sheppard – but laced with Rodney’s typical honesty.
John does turn around at that, and Rodney’s face is, like always, an open book, and John knows the language to read it – McKay Decoder Ring, remember? – and a shy interest is written there, though pride has Rodney’s shoulders stiff, fear left over from last night, and annoyance, as always, overpaints much of it.
He offers Rodney a quick smile, and the annoyance fades out, leaving mostly pleasure behind. Rodney’s face is alight with it, uncertain, flickering back and forth between happiness and consternation. It makes him look almost sad, like a smile shouldn’t quite fit, which is strange. John’s seen Rodney happy before, has seen him damn near ecstatic before, and this is happiness and something else.
Rodney looks down, where his fingers have started to play scales across the countertop.
Silence again, not too bad, though John does his best to fill it with industrious noise, breaking eggs, beating them until Rodney asks him if the eggs have offended him personally, chopping the single red pepper and a couple slices of ham (over Rodney’s objections of possible trichinosis), dumps all of it into a frying pan.
“We should order out,” John says after a minute of staring at the omelet from hell.
“You don’t even want to know what I think that resembles.” Rodney shudders elaborately. “Just get the damn menus out.” He pauses. “It’s probably a good thing we never got really, horribly lost in Pegasus. Could you imagine living off tuttle root soup for the rest of your short, miserable life? Because that’s what it would be – short and miserable, and filled with constipation.”
“Please don’t mention that soup, or constipation, ever again. Ever.” John carefully tips the contents of the pan into the sink, trying not to think of the various disasters involving alien vegetables, the various roast beasts, and the thing they’d thought was a potato but turned out to be some kind of carnivorous slug.
“Remember the potato slug?” Rodney asks, like telepathy.
“Don’t mention that, either. Call the pizza place.”
Left without anything to do other than recover his appetite, John heads out to the living room. It’s more familiar than any other place he’s been in his life, more personality in it – not that it’s hard to beat base housing and every apartment complex built since 1970 – and those are his socks half-stuffed under the table, the small space he’s carved out for himself feet on one end of the couch.
He starts to displace the piles of paper that have colonized the coffee table, stacks and stacks of them, and remembers just in time to keep them in order. They’re paginated, thank God, and filled with equations, a novel in another language, and though John knows he can’t intuit what Rodney’s doing, he pauses to have a look.
“It’s my new math,” Rodney says, materializing at John’s shoulder. “You know, from when....” He waves his hand in the general direction of the sky, and John remembers. When I almost died, or Ascended, one of the two, and that sounds kind of good, actually, shutting his eyes and looking into the light or the darkness, or whatever waits there.
“SGC let me keep it, because no one could make sense of it. Not even Hermiod,” Rodney adds smugly, and that must have been a kick, watching the Asgard’s buggy eyes opening and closing, the irritable, foggy Very impressive, Dr. McKay... for a human that was probably as close as Hermiod would ever get to admitting he’d been one-upped by a lesser life form.
“Technically,” Rodney continues, smugness fading as he talks, “it doesn’t concern my work on wormhole theory, and it’s not like it’ll ever be publishable...” He sighs. “Maybe posthumously, assuming someone even more brilliant comes along in the next generation.” He pauses. “Or in the fifth generation down, I suppose. Fifty, because humanity needs to evolve a bit more to understand it.”
“So you stare at this for fun?” John regards the stack of papers in his hands. “I brought Sudoku books.”
Rodney takes the papers, clutches them almost defensively before smoothing them and setting them back down where they’d been.
“I keep hoping I can make sense out of it, you know?” Rodney’s sitting right now, that zoney look in his eyes again as he stares at the lines of equations. “Like, I thought it up, and I should be able to figure it out. Now I know how that guy in Charley feels.” He scowls. “I hated that book.”
John sits down, a bit closer to Rodney than before, encroaching on Rodney’s two-thirds of the couch. Rodney either doesn’t mind, or is too caught up in his irritation to notice.
“Sometimes I feel close, like it’s right there, and if I just think a little harder, I can understand it.” Frustration lines Rodney’s face, fierce and sharp, before it softens into sadness. “I don’t, of course. Usually I just give myself a headache, or insomnia. That’s what I was doing when you came down, um, last night.”
“Oh.” John remembers Rodney’s face, oddly remote, a distance he’d never really associated with Rodney before, Rodney, who’s real and here and present, the only really real thing in the world.
“That why you’re not going to Princeton?”
“Why are you so obsessed with this?” Rodney demands. “Wait, don’t answer that...” Long-suffering sigh that says John’s on thin ice with this, but Rodney continues: “I’m not going to Princeton because... well, I don’t know why. I don’t want to. Not right now, anyway. Remember Area 51? Went over like a fucking Wraith at a retirement party.”
“Nice, McKay.”
“What? What?” Rodney glares at him and pokes him in the head. Concussion, McKay, John says, but Rodney doesn’t seem to hear. “Pointy... Anyway, I don’t want to go. And I’ll... I’ll figure something out, John. Don’t I always?”
“Need a gun to your head to help you out?” John grins. “Life-and-death situations, remember?”
“Nice,” Rodney says, almost managing to get the drawl exactly right. “But as for life or death, well...” He gestures to the living room, suburbia outside. “I still have connections. Carter can help me out, Radek... When I’m ready. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So, yeah.” Rodney shrugs. He taps his fingers on the paper for a moment, gaze darting around in typical distraction. “Where the hell’s the pizza?”
Querulous, which is something John can deal with, though mostly it’s for show, because he can feel the tension in Rodney’s body, and it’s been building, building the entire time Rodney’s been talking, and that same tension catches up his own body – he can feel it, like matching wavelengths – and everything behind it, like water building up behind a wave: falling, years and years of it and not knowing half the time, a fucking step ladder and nights on Rodney’s couch, not talking and saying everything.
It’s easy now with inertia behind him, to do what he’d done last night: fingers playing across Rodney’s wrist, his arm, his face and neck to pull him close.
Something’s on Rodney’s lips, John’s name, please don’t do this, thank God finally, but it vanishes into incoherence against John’s mouth.
Like he’d thought, Rodney kissed slowly, not quite believing, testing it out with careful breaths. John can still remember their first minutes in Atlantis, realizing they were sheltered underwater, and that is impressive, isn’t it? Rodney had said, and yeah, this is impressive too, amazing, terrifying, everything that goes two hundred miles an hour.
As kisses go it’s not complicated, too hesitant for anything more, though Rodney’s a bit more assertive by the end of it.
His right hand’s half under Rodney’s shirt, fabric against the back, warm skin against his palm. Solid, nothing theoretical about the fact that they’re awkwardly curled against each other.
“Hey,” Rodney says after a moment, lost for anything else. “Hey.”
John grins, slow and a bit stupid. “Hey, McKay.”
Rodney’s brows furrow a moment, working out some private equation, and then he’s kissing John again, and fingers that have memorized keyboards, the guts of atomic bombs, have saved John’s life over and over again, feel their way across the side of John’s face, tilting it carefully – calculating angles, maybe – and they couldn’t save Atlantis but they can save each other, can do this, what Rodney had been seeing maybe since he’d walked into John’s hospital room a week ago.
The doorbell rings and they both jump. Rodney’s face is bright, his hair disheveled from John’s fingers running through it.
“Pizza,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the door. “You’re paying this time.”
Of course he is. John uses Rodney as leverage to push himself off the couch, hand molding around the curve of Rodney’s shoulder, shoving harder than he needs to, dancing out of reach when Rodney tries to retaliate by grabbing for his wrist.
He almost – almost – falls over the coffee table.
“Don’t make me kick you out,” Rodney threatens from the couch.
“Never,” John says, and grins – really, honestly, like he almost never does – catches Rodney’s answering one, crooked and honest and happy, before turning to open the door.
-end-
Rodney ignores him when he gets back, though being ignored by Rodney is kind of like one of hell’s lesser torments – that kind of itching, painful, persistent awareness of something being wrong and unfixable. The only thing to do is put up with it, wait it out, though it means a lot of suffering in the meantime, and ‘meantime’ turns into the rest of Monday, the frosty ‘good night’ that Rodney offers him, a ‘good night’ that sounds more like a sincere hope for John to asphyxiate in his sleep.
Tuesday morning John goes to the post office and changes his address, mentions it in passing when he gets home, and Rodney says “Good. Good, good,” the way he would when numbers cooperated, and says no more about it.
John pokes him in the ribs. What am I, chopped liver?
I hate liver, Rodney tells him, and pokes him in the forehead.
Rodney’s eyes are bright, saying more than words ever could, bright like when John had accepted his offer to move in, and happiness sort of belongs there in Rodney’s face.
He likes that, John does, that he’s made Rodney happy when everything and everyone else clearly can’t. Too much for his own good, maybe, but he can’t bring himself to care.
The Princeton letter stays where it is.
The Friday night after John’s official moving in, he stumbles downstairs at four in the morning. His body insists it’s actually somewhere around eight and he’s going to miss breakfast.
Around him, the house is mostly still, the occasional creak of settling wood. No hum, nothing in the back of his head that whispers about contentment and home.
Lights flicker in the living room and soft, nonsensical noises chase patterns across the wall. The Home Shopping Network, or maybe a late-night Godzilla marathon, the volume’s so low John can’t tell. Through the window in the front hall John can see the noncommittal darkness of a suburban street, synthetic brightness of the streetlamps, and it annoys him in a distant, sleepy way, that Rodney’s elected to live in the goddamn suburbs.
Earth’s far enough out as it is, in its little wisp of stars out in the boondocks of the Milky Way. Not like Atlantis, floating in her pool of light in the heart of her galaxy, silver overlaid on dark water, two oceans of blackness with the bright path of stars arcing overhead. He tries hard to hate the memories of evenings and nights spent out on the balconies, but ends up making himself angry instead.
God, it’s like being hormonal. John hitches at his boxers, rubs along the rise of his hip where a nocturnal itch is still making itself felt, and stomps into the living room.
It’s a Godzilla movie after all, and Rodney’s either hypnotized or half-asleep, his body at once relaxed and oddly tense. A stack of papers, printouts with illegibility scribbled across them, rests precariously at the edge of the table, and next to them a glass of water drips condensation onto the wood, moisture ringing out around it and catching the edge of the Princeton fellowship offer.
John frowns at the piece of paper, not sure whether to be annoyed that Rodney’s apparently considering the offer after he lied and said he wasn’t, or confused at the impulse to be annoyed. It’s Rodney’s life and a damn prestigious fellowship, and that… Yeah, that does annoy him, the possibility that there might be more to Rodney’s life than Atlantis.
He stands there a moment, watching Technicolor reflect in Rodney’s eyes, which have gone glassy with distance, a concentration, a stillness John has a hard time associating with his friend.
And Rodney is his friend. John can’t ever remember applying that term to him before.
Fugue state, his mind supplies, bouncing back to the present before that thought can obsess it too much, shell-shock, or maybe this is what Rodney looks like when no one’s around.
Not liking the stillness, as much because it freaks him out as much as it makes him think about stuff he doesn’t like thinking about, John steps closer, tries to push the furry obstinance of Planck off the couch, Planck who glares at him with green eyes and hops up on Rodney’s lap instead.
Rodney starts and comes to, blinking hazily up at him.
“Sheppard?” he asks, only when the distance vanishes and the haze clears up.
“Yeah.” John tucks himself into the small square of couch not occupied by Rodney. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Obviously,” Rodney sniffs.
He doesn’t move, which makes John roll his eyes and shove at him, though Rodney’s foot is warm against his forearm, covered by the fleece blankets that they’d never gotten around to putting away. Rodney scowls and shoves back, unexpectedly strong, almost four years of running and fighting behind the pressure.
“So,” John says after a minute of watching Godzilla stomping Tokyo into smithereens, “Princeton?”
Rodney’s gaze flickers down to the letter on the coffee table.
“I told you, sabbatical.” Rodney’s looking at him again, and John’s forgotten what it’s like to be on the end of one of those considering, concentrated looks and the silence stretches on into pain, but John can’t bring himself to end it. It’s Rodney’s silence.
“It was my life,” Rodney says quietly. “You know?”
John knows.
“Even before I signed on with the SGC.” Rodney picks at a ball of fleece, touches Planck’s head, taps his fingers on the back of the couch. “I’ve worked on wormholes almost all my life. It’s what I do. Did. Whatever.”
What Rodney does is what he is, like flying is what John is, and since he doesn’t fly anymore, John has no idea what John Sheppard’s supposed to be. And for the first time, it occurs to John that Rodney’s just as lost as he is.
“I don’t know how the hell Radek does it. He teaches, I suppose, I mean, he can actually put up with graduate students. He probably even likes them.” Rodney shudders elaborately. “I can’t imagine a more searing torment than plowing through some wretched doctoral student’s pathetic attempts at formulating a useful thought. Being trapped in a malfunctioning transporter with Kavanagh, maybe, but even then…”
The bitching, weirdly, soothes John, hypnotic watching Rodney’s hands paint agitation through flickering lights, aided by the half-muted cries of terrified citizens and Planck’s purring.
“For God’s sake, they’re still trying to figure out if wormholes could even exist, given the state of theory at the moment.” Rodney’s laugh breaks in the middle. “And even if they did, it’s not like there’s a wormhole right in our backyard – and by ‘backyard’ I mean ‘within the orbit of the moon’ because that’s how far declassified science has gotten – and even if they found one, how the hell would they get there without a spaceship? And I… I’ve been on a spaceship and I’ve walked through a stargate, and I can’t tell anyone this, except for you, and I highly suspect – ”
That you’re going crazy with it? Yeah, John is, too. He’s not used to despair, the way it makes him want to climb out of his skin.
He becomes aware that he’s nodding in a drunken sort of agreement, that they’re pressed together on the couch, and everything about Rodney is jumping out at him, immediate and present and the only real things in the world, a thousand things John had never noticed before: a warm, solid body, spike of sweat and dust, the hum of Rodney like electricity – one of those people whose beauty is in personality, in movement, and even sitting still Rodney is kinetic and real real real.
“Rodney,” he says hoarsely, and wants to say other stuff too, like don’t go to New Jersey, don’t go anywhere, I just changed my address because it’s like – no, it’s not like, it is – leaving a man behind, leaving John behind.
Rodney’s staring at him, eyes desperate, pulling him back to another galaxy when they’re on a mission and it’s all on John, because physics says they’re doomed and only insanity can save them.
And maybe this is insane, only they’re not on a mission anymore, John thinks as he hitches himself closer, hand sliding over leather, over skin, cloth, Rodney’s shoulder, or maybe this is a mission, How to Survive on Planet Earth, and like any other mission they need each other to survive it. He knows there was a whole lot more to Rodney’s offer of a place to stay, a home or something like it, as close as the two of them can get to something as normal as that.
“John,” Rodney says, or half-says, a sigh muted by the clamor from the television, and this close his eyes are dark sea-storm blue, solemn and exhilarated and terrified.
The sound of his name brings John back to himself and he withdraws, vaguely aware that he’d been thinking about kissing Rodney, about sliding his fingers along Rodney’s face, the back of his neck to pull him close. Rodney’s watching him closely, the fear still there, but it’s something closer to anticipation, the fear of wondering what will happen after finally getting what you want, and it occurs to him that Rodney, uncharacteristically, has gone further on down the road than John has.
“It’s cool,” Rodney tells him, for once knowing the right thing to say. “Um, I’m going back up to bed.”
He pushes the blankets aside and stands up, spine cracking emphatically. John carefully doesn’t look as Rodney heads out of the room, tries not to count steps – fifteen in all – as Rodney goes up the stairs. Creak creak creak, pause as though reconsidering, balancing on the edge of some decision, then silence.
“Smooth,” he mutters to himself, glaring at the television and the smoking remains of Tokyo. “Fucking brilliant, Sheppard.”
Only he thinks maybe the stupid thing wasn’t the almost-kiss so much as the hesitating, the pulling-back.
Still, the referees have ruled a fumble on the play.
“Most discouraging,” as Radek would have put it.
John allows himself a few more minutes for the humiliation and stupidity to sink in before turning off the TV and heading upstairs.
He wakes up with a headache, something to do with the tension that had kept him awake the rest of the night, spinning over and over what the fuck almost happened
Rodney’s face in the half-light of the TV and the lamp on the end table, and Rodney had wanted John to do that, to touch him, to put his mouth on – John tries to shudder away from the thought but can’t, and it pulls him in – for John to put his mouth on Rodney’s, and maybe Rodney had wanted to touch John in the same way – and Rodney’s hands, John thinks (half crazy from a sleepless night) would have been firm but careful, feeling their way across him, and –
“Fuck,” he says, softly and fervently. He’s not aroused, exactly, but something shifts inside, a sensation he can’t put a name to, wanting maybe, though it goes deeper. What he’d almost had last night… he wanted that, not the kiss exactly (or at least, not only the kiss), but Rodney looking at him, all that concentration and focus, Rodney, the only person in the world who understood what this – all this (losing Atlantis, home, direction, everything) – was, being there with him.
His mind can wrap around kissing Rodney, unexpectedly comfortable and intimate with the thought, and that needs some processing, that he can imagine what Rodney’s mouth is like to touch, to cover with his own.
He listens for the sounds of Rodney moving around the house; he can hear him distantly, down in the kitchen, Planck the cat’s high, plaintive meow and Rodney’s exasperated Okay, okay, I’ll feed you, geez, greedy feline not quite hushed enough.
Reluctantly, John gets up and pads to the bathroom, one ear out for Rodney-movement, but all he hears is running commentary directed at Planck, or maybe no one in particular, and he doesn’t stay in the hallway long enough to decipher what Rodney’s saying. He rolls his eyes at his own paranoia, tells himself to get over it – that, in fact, there’s nothing to get over and when he goes downstairs he and Rodney will probably never breathe a word about last night, whether over this morning’s coffee or any other, because that’s what they do.
A shower drums the worst of the tenseness from him, though the headache persists, smoothing out the bumps that keep him from thinking straight, but somehow he keeps coming up against Rodney and last night, and the thought that maybe this is what he needs.
When he finally walks into the kitchen, Rodney goes very quiet and still over his coffee cup, anxiety pouring off him, his mouth thin with the effort of keeping back the words. John’s head throbs unpleasantly with memory, but he manages a lazy grin, the kind calculated to drive Rodney up the wall, and asks after coffee.
“There,” Rodney says, predictably cranky and impatient. What are you, blind?
“McKay, there’s half a cup left.” John shakes the coffee pot meaningfully.
“The early bird gets the caffeine, Sheppard,” Rodney tells him, but pushes his mostly-full mug – his GeNiUS mug – in John’s direction anyway. Big baby.
John takes a sip, resists the temptation to add sugar, aware of Rodney watching him and trying to be covert about it – only Rodney’s about as covert as a flashing neon sign. Hot, blessed caffeine, worth the scrutiny, worth the slight, rueful smile that flashes across Rodney’s face – made better, maybe, because Rodney suddenly seems okay, realizing that they’re not going to talk about Last Night, either what did happen or what didn’t.
“So, Brain, what are we going to do today?”
Rodney re-appropriates his mug and takes a noisy, meditative gulp before announcing he has no idea.
“We sort of need to finish painting,” John says. The study is a federal disaster area.
“The paint fumes were making me high,” Rodney grumbles. “I should have hired someone… Having the study look like someone didn’t decorate it with a bedpan isn’t worth massive brain cell death.”
For a moment, the only sounds are the scrape of the mug being passed back and forth along the table – a lot easier to share this and not what they’d almost had last night – and Rodney’s subvocal complaints about coffee moochers.
“We could go to a park or something,” John says, just to say something.
Rodney stares at him like he’s just proposed drinking vials of Ebola. “Can you think of anything else?”
“Well…” John casts around desperately for something to do. There has to be something. A museum, a movie, but all he can think about is getting out of this house, out of inside, into sky and open air before he explodes. Targ-Mart doesn’t count. “Not really.”
“Oh, fine.” Rodney seems prepared to descend into a sulk, but brightens abruptly. “We can pretend it’s an off-world recon or something. First contact with the natives.” He looks sorry the second the words come out of his mouth, and John’s sorry too.
Rodney had been the one, John thinks suddenly, who’d written all the code, who’d made it possible to save the city even though they’d been exiled from it forever – and it had been all on him to come up with it, him and Radek, and to this second it pisses him off that he hadn’t been able to do anything other than watch as Rodney computed and calculated and swore bitterly.
He wonders how badly that chews at Rodney, if maybe the reason he’s staying here is the same as John – terrified to leave, to move on and away, because any day now they could get the call saying it’s time to go back home. Not a Rodney-like hope, or a John-like one either, but Atlantis has – had – made them unlike themselves in a lot of ways.
Exhaustion tugs at him, exhaustion from having to deal with all of this – with none of it, with absence, with Rodney who’s the only thing John has left of Pegasus – and he’d really like to go back to bed and sleep forever, or until the SGC calls and lets them go back home. He hates living in his head, especially when it’s pounding like this, but there’s no place else to go.
They end up packing lunch and driving out to the Rocky Mountain National Park anyway, because anything is better than being stuck in Rodney’s house for another day, circling around each other, all this new awkwardness piling up on top of the letter and Atlantis and everything else. John drives and Rodney navigates, like always, and they make it without disaster, despite John’s lingering headache and Rodney’s distraction.
John drives, despite Rodney’s accusations of recklessness. Rodney navigates.
It’s probably a bad idea; it’s summer so families and summer-camp kids infest the park, most of them in campers and buses, huge vehicles that hog the road and spit exhaust in their faces. The headache refuses to be appeased by Tylenol, and Rodney’s distraction is fading in the face of constant provocation by idiot tourists.
At last they find a trailhead that looks somewhat abandoned, shady and overlooked by the rest of the hordes of Boy Scouts and camping groups. Rodney scowls at the forest like it’s personally insulted him, but double-checks his pack and water bottle, the movements oddly efficient against the civilian clothing – the khakis and “I’m with Genius” t-shirt, the light jacket (in case) tied to one of the pack straps.
Add in a tac vest, data tablet, and a P-90 – and the day Rodney looked comfortable with one is a day John still remembers, not long after it had become standard procedure for everyone, even scientists, to go armed offworld – and it would be familiar. Add Teyla and Ronon and Ford, and it would be home.
John yanks the pack over one shoulder, lurches a bit as the pack threatens to slide off to the left and throws off his center of gravity.
He’s getting… not younger, John knows. Four years of puddle jumpers and Ancient tech have decreased his tolerance for g-stress, and Atlantis’ circadian rhythms still play hell with his body.
(No, no, his body says, it’s Earth, I don’t belong here.)
And Rodney’s getting not younger, too. He wants to laugh at this, two guys on the wrong side of forty, and forget midlife crisis – this is midlife hell.
They start off at an easy clip, following the winding trail downhill, the path wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side. Rodney mutters something about the air being infested with allergens, but John can hear him breathing deeply. Already the air is sharp with pine and clear despite the heat, no exhaust or modernity touching it, and the white noise of traffic and civilization has vanished, and an odd silence rings in the back of John’s mind, the place where Atlantis used to be.
“Remember,” Rodney says into that silence, “when you tried to explain the World Wide Wrestling Federation to Teyla and Ronon?”
“Ronon couldn’t understand the costumes.”
“I don’t understand them myself,” Rodney says. “Or the attraction in watching large, sweaty men trying to flatten each other.”
The memory doesn’t sting as much as John had thought it would, now that it’s there in the open: some night after a mission, lazy and a bit mad with the promise of downtime for a few days and the Daedalus fresh in with supplies from earth. Ronon had wanted to learn more about Earth sports, so Rodney had explained the Olympics – of which Teyla had approved – and the football World Cup. (The difference between American football and European football – “Soccer,” John had kept insisting – stymied Teyla and Ronon.) John’s contribution had been the WWF.
“Ronon would have been good at it,” John says. “He’s big, scary... All he’d need is a name.”
“The Caveman,” Rodney says immediately. “Remember the flash flood on MX1-450?”
“You mean when I saved your ass from certain drowning? Yeah, I do.”
“I was talking about how I figured out that the weather was being controlled by an Ancient device, which was – of course – malfunctioning, and how I figured out how to fix it.” The huff in Rodney’s breath has nothing to do with exertion. “And how the very grateful natives rewarded us with all that llama meat stuff.”
“Oh. Forgot that part.” That had been back in their first year. John thinks for a minute. “What about MX7-831? You know, the place with the energy field thing?”
“Again, McKay: 1; crappy Ancient design: 0.” Rodney grins, hitching his pack into a more comfortable position. The grin morphs into a scowl. “You know, I don’t miss these things.”
“You know what I remember most?” John pauses, waits the beat for Rodney to look questioningly at him. “Your bitching. It was like my soundtrack or something.”
“Ha ha. Mostly, I remember wondering how you managed to skim off the monthly hair gel requisition, or if maybe you were blackmailing people out of theirs.” Rodney elbows John in the side, rough and confident as Rodney so rarely is, playful almost, back out on a mission again, though they’re really going nowhere in particular.
And they go on like this, memory bouncing back and forth, everything they’re not supposed to talk about, that they’ve been sworn to silence about – everything classified and undisclosable – spilling out with laughter and relief, even when Ford comes up, and the other people they’ve lost, saying these things, God, saying them just to say them, and the only other things around them are the birds and the trees.
Nowhere eventually takes them to the edge of the trees, the path sloping downward steeply before leveling out into a meadow some fifty feet further on. Fresh out of the woods the sun is dazzling, and John’s grateful for his sunglasses.
Rodney shades his eyes with one hand and squints into the distance, where the meadow eventually begins to curve into hills and roll outward up and up into the mountains, where snow still mixes with cloud up at the summits. For the first time in six months the sunlight isn’t completely strange, mixed as it is with grass smell and blue sky.
“I could use a break,” Rodney says, stepping a bit off the path toward a small pile of boulders. Uncomplaining about his back and the sciatica John knows will undoubtedly be aggravated, he dumps his pack and spreads out his jacket, collapses on top of it.
John joins him, elbows on knees, accepts the offered water bottle and a moment of silence. He can sense Rodney recharging beside him.
“They’re never going to call, you know.” The truth hits him, hearing himself say it, they’re never going to call, the reality just as bitter as everyone says.
“I know,” Rodney says quietly. He takes his bottle back and takes a drink, wiping a hand across his mouth. Some moisture still lingers there, there on his lips, and John wants to run his finger across it, see if it makes Rodney’s lips soft.
IOA had decided it would be for the best; no temptation, they said, remembering too clearly the last time Sheppard and the others had been forced to leave Atlantis. No room for a choice, no time to mount a defense against their own people – which John had seriously considered doing – only room for compromise and to win what they could, to keep Atlantis alive and hidden and locked away from them forever. IOA’s terms had been clear: save the city, but you’re gone, all of you.
A kindness, Wolsey had put it – and of course Wolsey would put it that way – though ‘kindness’ in the register of putting something sick and suffering out of its misery. No temptation if they can’t get anywhere near the Cheyenne complex or Area 51, or any of the other installments. Not even Siberia. No, all of them out, done well by: retirement and honorable discharge for John, recommendations to teaching and research posts for the civilians.
Looking back on it, John wonders if the Princeton thing isn’t Rodney’s compensation.
“You think Elizabeth’s doing okay?” Rodney asks after taking another drink.
“Hope so,” John says, though he doubts it. They haven’t heard from her since their discharge from the program, and he’s pretty sure she wants it that way.
Elizabeth’s in Washington now, probably bored out of her mind negotiating peace accords between nations instead of planets. Radek at Cornell, Carson back in Scotland and likely loving it. Lorne and the other Marines are, so far as John knows, still with the SGC, which needs every military body it can get in the war against the Ori and Goa’uld.
Then there’s the two of them, John and Rodney, here at the edge of a terran forest.
Rodney seems content to let the silence ride for a bit, and he seems looser somehow, not like he’s accepted what’s happened but like he’s found he can deal with it – and, John knows from a lifetime of losing people, there’s a huge fucking difference – and for Rodney, that’s saying a lot. He doesn’t do resignation well, which John can understand – he doesn’t, either, and even twenty years in the Air Force hasn’t gotten him used to it. Things have to be acceptable for Rodney; he doesn’t do the grey areas, and John likes that about him.
Concrete, that’s Rodney. Under the hand-waving and motor mouth, he’s all solidity, reliable, and John finds he likes that too.
“It’s a nice day,” Rodney says at length, the remark sounding requisitely grudging at the fact that John’s the one responsible for dragging them on the forced march out into it.
“Yeah,” John agrees, and for the first time doesn’t mind the old sun on his face. He leans back against his rock, brushing against Rodney’s arm as he does, and looks up at the sky despite the glare.
Flying again. He wants to fly again, feels the darkness of that thought brush against him and tries to shrug it away.
“Of course, the UV index is probably in the ‘Melanoma’ range,” Rodney continues, “and I didn’t bring my sunscreen.”
Despite his own thoughts, despite everything, John laughs.
That night John cooks. Not because he’s good at cooking, or because he particularly wants to, but because he’s getting tired of take-out.
“Even Quattro Canti’s pizza?” Rodney asks in disbelief as John turns to root through the refrigerator. “That’s not possible.”
Most of Rodney’s cooking utensils – improbably high-end, considering Rodney considers the fork to be the apex of food-handling technology – haven’t been touched, the Teflon on the pans still new and shiny. Upon John’s observation of this, Rodney launches into a disquisition on how he’d found out that Teflon releases some kind of chemical when heated... bad for cats and probably living beings in general... no I’m not paranoid, Sheppard, it’s called having a sensible and reasonable concern for one’s health, which I have, unlike some people I know who take swan dives off ladders while fixing lights.
Eggs. They have eggs, and cheese that doesn’t look too suspicious.
“That’s officially getting old, McKay,” John says as he searches for something else, anything else, to make into an omelet and seriously reconsiders the embargo on ordering out.
“No, it isn’t,” Rodney says. He’s sitting on one of the barstools at the island, and even with his back to him, John knows Rodney’s watching him, can feel Rodney’s gaze lasering into his back. “Not when you almost gave me a heart attack with your terminal clumsiness – and it will be terminal one day, Sheppard, and I’m going to laugh when it happens. Don’t think I won’t.” Rodney’s tone teeters on the edge of belligerence, trying to annoy John into immortality. “How was it that the Air Force let you fly things? Remind me again.”
“I was really good at it,” John tells him, more fiercely than he probably should, but he doesn’t take it back. Doesn’t turn around, either, just stares into the bare recesses of the refrigerator.
“I know,” Rodney says, very quiet but still forceful. Not testy or impatient – of course I know, Sheppard – but laced with Rodney’s typical honesty.
John does turn around at that, and Rodney’s face is, like always, an open book, and John knows the language to read it – McKay Decoder Ring, remember? – and a shy interest is written there, though pride has Rodney’s shoulders stiff, fear left over from last night, and annoyance, as always, overpaints much of it.
He offers Rodney a quick smile, and the annoyance fades out, leaving mostly pleasure behind. Rodney’s face is alight with it, uncertain, flickering back and forth between happiness and consternation. It makes him look almost sad, like a smile shouldn’t quite fit, which is strange. John’s seen Rodney happy before, has seen him damn near ecstatic before, and this is happiness and something else.
Rodney looks down, where his fingers have started to play scales across the countertop.
Silence again, not too bad, though John does his best to fill it with industrious noise, breaking eggs, beating them until Rodney asks him if the eggs have offended him personally, chopping the single red pepper and a couple slices of ham (over Rodney’s objections of possible trichinosis), dumps all of it into a frying pan.
“We should order out,” John says after a minute of staring at the omelet from hell.
“You don’t even want to know what I think that resembles.” Rodney shudders elaborately. “Just get the damn menus out.” He pauses. “It’s probably a good thing we never got really, horribly lost in Pegasus. Could you imagine living off tuttle root soup for the rest of your short, miserable life? Because that’s what it would be – short and miserable, and filled with constipation.”
“Please don’t mention that soup, or constipation, ever again. Ever.” John carefully tips the contents of the pan into the sink, trying not to think of the various disasters involving alien vegetables, the various roast beasts, and the thing they’d thought was a potato but turned out to be some kind of carnivorous slug.
“Remember the potato slug?” Rodney asks, like telepathy.
“Don’t mention that, either. Call the pizza place.”
Left without anything to do other than recover his appetite, John heads out to the living room. It’s more familiar than any other place he’s been in his life, more personality in it – not that it’s hard to beat base housing and every apartment complex built since 1970 – and those are his socks half-stuffed under the table, the small space he’s carved out for himself feet on one end of the couch.
He starts to displace the piles of paper that have colonized the coffee table, stacks and stacks of them, and remembers just in time to keep them in order. They’re paginated, thank God, and filled with equations, a novel in another language, and though John knows he can’t intuit what Rodney’s doing, he pauses to have a look.
“It’s my new math,” Rodney says, materializing at John’s shoulder. “You know, from when....” He waves his hand in the general direction of the sky, and John remembers. When I almost died, or Ascended, one of the two, and that sounds kind of good, actually, shutting his eyes and looking into the light or the darkness, or whatever waits there.
“SGC let me keep it, because no one could make sense of it. Not even Hermiod,” Rodney adds smugly, and that must have been a kick, watching the Asgard’s buggy eyes opening and closing, the irritable, foggy Very impressive, Dr. McKay... for a human that was probably as close as Hermiod would ever get to admitting he’d been one-upped by a lesser life form.
“Technically,” Rodney continues, smugness fading as he talks, “it doesn’t concern my work on wormhole theory, and it’s not like it’ll ever be publishable...” He sighs. “Maybe posthumously, assuming someone even more brilliant comes along in the next generation.” He pauses. “Or in the fifth generation down, I suppose. Fifty, because humanity needs to evolve a bit more to understand it.”
“So you stare at this for fun?” John regards the stack of papers in his hands. “I brought Sudoku books.”
Rodney takes the papers, clutches them almost defensively before smoothing them and setting them back down where they’d been.
“I keep hoping I can make sense out of it, you know?” Rodney’s sitting right now, that zoney look in his eyes again as he stares at the lines of equations. “Like, I thought it up, and I should be able to figure it out. Now I know how that guy in Charley feels.” He scowls. “I hated that book.”
John sits down, a bit closer to Rodney than before, encroaching on Rodney’s two-thirds of the couch. Rodney either doesn’t mind, or is too caught up in his irritation to notice.
“Sometimes I feel close, like it’s right there, and if I just think a little harder, I can understand it.” Frustration lines Rodney’s face, fierce and sharp, before it softens into sadness. “I don’t, of course. Usually I just give myself a headache, or insomnia. That’s what I was doing when you came down, um, last night.”
“Oh.” John remembers Rodney’s face, oddly remote, a distance he’d never really associated with Rodney before, Rodney, who’s real and here and present, the only really real thing in the world.
“That why you’re not going to Princeton?”
“Why are you so obsessed with this?” Rodney demands. “Wait, don’t answer that...” Long-suffering sigh that says John’s on thin ice with this, but Rodney continues: “I’m not going to Princeton because... well, I don’t know why. I don’t want to. Not right now, anyway. Remember Area 51? Went over like a fucking Wraith at a retirement party.”
“Nice, McKay.”
“What? What?” Rodney glares at him and pokes him in the head. Concussion, McKay, John says, but Rodney doesn’t seem to hear. “Pointy... Anyway, I don’t want to go. And I’ll... I’ll figure something out, John. Don’t I always?”
“Need a gun to your head to help you out?” John grins. “Life-and-death situations, remember?”
“Nice,” Rodney says, almost managing to get the drawl exactly right. “But as for life or death, well...” He gestures to the living room, suburbia outside. “I still have connections. Carter can help me out, Radek... When I’m ready. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So, yeah.” Rodney shrugs. He taps his fingers on the paper for a moment, gaze darting around in typical distraction. “Where the hell’s the pizza?”
Querulous, which is something John can deal with, though mostly it’s for show, because he can feel the tension in Rodney’s body, and it’s been building, building the entire time Rodney’s been talking, and that same tension catches up his own body – he can feel it, like matching wavelengths – and everything behind it, like water building up behind a wave: falling, years and years of it and not knowing half the time, a fucking step ladder and nights on Rodney’s couch, not talking and saying everything.
It’s easy now with inertia behind him, to do what he’d done last night: fingers playing across Rodney’s wrist, his arm, his face and neck to pull him close.
Something’s on Rodney’s lips, John’s name, please don’t do this, thank God finally, but it vanishes into incoherence against John’s mouth.
Like he’d thought, Rodney kissed slowly, not quite believing, testing it out with careful breaths. John can still remember their first minutes in Atlantis, realizing they were sheltered underwater, and that is impressive, isn’t it? Rodney had said, and yeah, this is impressive too, amazing, terrifying, everything that goes two hundred miles an hour.
As kisses go it’s not complicated, too hesitant for anything more, though Rodney’s a bit more assertive by the end of it.
His right hand’s half under Rodney’s shirt, fabric against the back, warm skin against his palm. Solid, nothing theoretical about the fact that they’re awkwardly curled against each other.
“Hey,” Rodney says after a moment, lost for anything else. “Hey.”
John grins, slow and a bit stupid. “Hey, McKay.”
Rodney’s brows furrow a moment, working out some private equation, and then he’s kissing John again, and fingers that have memorized keyboards, the guts of atomic bombs, have saved John’s life over and over again, feel their way across the side of John’s face, tilting it carefully – calculating angles, maybe – and they couldn’t save Atlantis but they can save each other, can do this, what Rodney had been seeing maybe since he’d walked into John’s hospital room a week ago.
The doorbell rings and they both jump. Rodney’s face is bright, his hair disheveled from John’s fingers running through it.
“Pizza,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the door. “You’re paying this time.”
Of course he is. John uses Rodney as leverage to push himself off the couch, hand molding around the curve of Rodney’s shoulder, shoving harder than he needs to, dancing out of reach when Rodney tries to retaliate by grabbing for his wrist.
He almost – almost – falls over the coffee table.
“Don’t make me kick you out,” Rodney threatens from the couch.
“Never,” John says, and grins – really, honestly, like he almost never does – catches Rodney’s answering one, crooked and honest and happy, before turning to open the door.
-end-