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.fic: An Equation for Perfect Beauty - R (McKay/Sheppard) 1.1
.title: An Equation for Perfect Beauty
.rating: R for strongly implied sex, angst, darkness
.word count: c. 2,500
.disclaimer: Alas, not mine. Alas.
.advertisements: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
svmadelyn's Kink/Cliche challenge. My prompt was "possessiveness in general." Set some time post-S3, but no real spoilers.
.notes: A (very) loose adaptation of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, with some angst and suffering thrown in. Many thanks tofairestcat and paperwirexit for looking this over! All inconsistencies and written-at-4am bizarrenesses are totally mine.
AN EQUATION FOR PERFECT BEAUTY
He will find it one day in a laboratory near the stasis chambers, dull silver-blue with jointed legs like a spider’s. The database will tell him what it is and what it does, and he will set it aside, but keep it close at hand.
In the darkness he memorizes John with his fingers, the shape of heat where John’s body presses close against his own. Mouth on his and lips, low, fierce words that twist into him as John’s fingers lace through his own – sweatslick, and they slip tightly together – and he rolls Rodney onto his back. The blankets tangle in Rodney’s legs, synthetic and unreal, but John is all suppleness and life.
All smooth length of bone and muscle, draped catlike across their bed. Rodney traces the line of John’s body – chest, how his abdomen curves shallowly inward to where John’s hip rises to a point, axis of his spine. He plots the contours of John’s back, shoulder blade, spine, flesh and tendon woven under skin that wears sweat and scars and wonder.
Rodney thinks in numbers. Poetry, music, the arch of John’s neck and shoulders, ratio, measure, and perfection. A laugh huffs across Rodney’s ear and he turns his face into it, into John’s mouth so they kiss again. John’s body is closer now, encouraging him open.
When John slides into him, they are more than infinity.
And he will remember this night, the last, and will hope John remembers it as he sets the device and its cruel spider legs to John’s forehead, and will remember how sweat had dripped down John’s temple and landed on Rodney’s shoulder.
Lights, Elizabeth’s voice (shut off the damn alarm), and while the lights and Elizabeth’s shirt are red, they are not quite the red red red of John’s blood.
And later John will taste of redness, of cold ash and smoke, when Rodney kisses him before the world ends, before he fills a syringe with blood than no longer holds any life. People will die when he goes to the stasis unit instead of back to the control chair, but Atlantis will live and John might live again, might, and that’s what matters.
The Ancients had known it, that numbers live in flesh, are written into the architecture of blood and bone, that technology walks hand in hand with the body.
Their secret is his now, terrible as Atlantis, beautiful and painful as the memory of John sliding silently from their bed, last kiss between Rodney’s shoulder blades, last time to get going lying heavy in the air. Discovering it would once have meant bragging rights for eternity, warnings from Elizabeth about dangerous technology and playing God. Playing mad scientist, he supposes, but when the numbers flow over him and through, he can’t bring himself to care.
They’re gone now, but Elizabeth’s ghost, Zelenka’s, Carson’s, still hover around him. You can’t keep doing this, they say, you need to stop, they say, the voices of reason he doesn’t hear anymore. The rest of the scientists, the few military left, need you back at the alpha site, you’re crazy, you’re alone and you’re crazy.
He will tell himself this, too, many times the closer he gets, as numbers begin to fashion themselves into familiar flesh, encoding themselves in synapse and muscle and vein. Frankenstein, automata, zombies, but this is John, and John is Rodney’s. Death doesn’t get to keep him.
Teyla worries, but doesn’t pry, doesn’t stray farther into the ghost city than the gateroom the few times she comes through. She and Ronon start bringing food when Rodney doesn’t come back from Atlantis one day, leave a three days’ supply when Rodney finally lets down the iris.
“We should tie you up and haul you back there,” Ronon grunts as he dumps a pile of MREs on the gateroom floor.
“But we won’t,” Teyla adds, glaring at Ronon, who shrugs. “The city is important to us all, Rodney, but you are more so.” Her fond smile, the quick hand on his arm, should annoy him, but doesn’t. The three of them, where four used to be. Two now, though; Teyla and Ronon together, and Rodney alone with his code and a dying city.
The city, the city. It’s still not safe, he tells them. He doesn’t really hear his own words. I don’t want anyone coming back until – Until never.
John waits in one of the stasis chambers, the Ancients’ secret, Rodney’s secret, lying, latent, waiting. The two of them, John, the city, anything to have them back.
And he will wait longer, and the secret will wait, when Teyla and Ronon radio through to ask for Rodney’s help at the alpha site. Rodney will go and fix something Zelenka could have fixed, if Zelenka were alive. When he is done, he will stand at the edge of a fire circle while the Athosians give thanks for life and other meaningless things, and come dangerously close to prayer.
Finally finally he makes it back to Atlantis and her silence. She lights the way for him as best she can, but the light is like funeral torches, or ghost light, because he does not will the city to do what she does, and so he wonders if she understands.
No funeral lights when John had lain in the infirmary, abandoned under a white sheet gone red with blood – nothing to do for the dying, the living need the help – and Rodney had stood over him and felt the failing pulse in John’s wrist and taken the neural imprinter from his pocket.
Anticipation jitters through him, an energy he hasn’t felt since he’d first heard the word stargate, as he enters the room holding the stasis chambers. It is a gold-toned crypt, silent as one and as alien, a place where only the dead live.
He approaches one of the chambers, careful of the wires snaking out of it, connecting it to the last naquadah generator that supplies power in excess of what the dying ZPM can give. Cannibalized parts of Atlantis, other devices Rodney’s scavenged, turn the chamber into a hybrid of elegance and science-fiction horror, a desperate try at what the Ancients had thought needed to be done to turn theory into practice.
They’d found the secret, the words and numbers of it, but had never done this, given it flesh and form. Maybe they hadn’t wanted to, Rodney supposes, too caught up in the escape of Ascension to bother any more with the physical, with touch and sight.
But John, John, worth any number of infinities, all the answers to the universe less important than his hands on Rodney’s skin that last night, his breath in Rodney’s ear and his taste in Rodney’s mouth.
The spider-legged device crouches atop the neural interface, its blue eyes flashing in a steady two-three count. It looks, unexpectedly, hideously, like an Iratus bug, pregnant with a life that doesn’t belong to it.
Rodney thinks, unexpectedly, of Cadman. She’d been lucky, one of the few not killed when Rodney had made his choice between Atlantis and John. He’d come out better in the exchange, cheating physics and chance, winning the city back.
“You’d better work,” he tells the device, the faint shadow of a shape under the opaque hood of the chamber. The city still standing, fine, but John – more Rodney’s than the city was. She’s shrunk to this room, the gateroom, the few things Rodney needs to survive. All three of them are in something like half-life, and Rodney’s not quite sure if he’s not more dead than alive, suspended in a waiting too much like purgatory.
Eight months spent now, spent watching as best he can, wanting the confirmation of flesh under his fingertips, a familiar hand in his, but looking in would have destroyed everything beyond recovery. He’s watched the numbers instead, reading over them, translating algorithms back into the warmth and scarred perfection of John’s skin. The program had finished before he’d gotten back from the alpha site, and the pod is running in stasis only now, waiting for the last command.
The laptop beeps as Rodney powers it up; the blue lights in the device quicken their pace to match Rodney’s heartbeat, which gallops along in terror and hope. Instantly, the screen flashes to the status report, the numbers measuring off pulse and temperature.
One last step, and he doesn’t think, just does it.
Faster and faster go the lights until they form a solid bar of blue, flashflashflash too fast for the eye to pick out the blink, and then they go dark.
The generator powers down.
Behind the hood a shadow moves, stone stillness melting into movement like wax, a head turning to the side as though looking for something.
That morning eight months gone John had turned to him, careless and lazy, slid half over Rodney’s body, welcome although the morning had been warm, Hey, McKay, half-speech, half-kiss against Rodney’s neck.
Rodney can see a hesitant hand reach up, shadow-fingers splaying across the glass. When they withdraw, they leave five oval holes in the condensation.
John’s left hand had worked down Rodney’s arm, sliding around his wrist to turn it. He, they, had forgotten to take his watch off last night, and the wristband had begun to chafe. Shit, fuck, eight-thirty, muttered half-heartedly and not really urgent, and the leg wrapped around Rodney tightened paradoxically.
Rodney’s own fingers shake on the latch of the chamber, fingers that have built bombs and helped destroy hive ships and save a city almost useless at pressing a few buttons.
John firm and hard inside him, slow, oh so slow, lazy with leftover sleep, holding on to their last few minutes together before the day started and took John from him. John pressed all along his back, hard thighs moving against his, and mine mine mine had been on his breath like it had been on Rodney’s.
The hatch hisses open, blood-warm air escaping from it.
Orgasm had been a sweep of heat and pleasure, like it always was, John’s fingers tightening in his, his body heavier, more assertive as it pressed Rodney into the mattress. And he had complained bitterly about being crushed (because hewas being crushed), and John’s laugh had reverberated through him.
A hand, smooth, too young-feeling for the face gazing blankly at him, reaches up and fingers close with improbable strength around Rodney’s own.
Weir’s voice had interrupted, orders to report to the conference room, and John had sighed, pulled carefully out. From the corner of his eye, Rodney saw the line of tendon under the skin, running ridge of vein along the inside of John’s arm.
“We’ll pick this up later,” John whispers. He speaks carefully, mouth re-learning, re-remembering the words.
“We’ll pick this up later,” John had said, last nip at Rodney’s ear.
No numbers now, but Rodney can still see them, hidden under the cloak of a familiar body and staring at him from hazel eyes that sharpen in recognition and memory.
“Wraith,” John whispers. “They – ”
Ambush while the team was off-world. A klick from the stargate and a dart had materialized, all weapons firing. One shot had clipped the jumper’s bow, and the last thing Rodney knew before the blue infinity of the stargate had been a shower of sparks and something hot like blood.
“I – ” Thought lines on John’s brow.
“Don’t think too hard,” Rodney advises. “You might sprain something.” He smoothes away the lines, and oh, touch, John’s skin, strange and familiar all at once.
The Wraith had been watching, waiting for their chance: a try at taking down the jumper while it was off-world, a surprise attack on Atlantis not two days later, while John lay dying in the infirmary. Cloaking technology, how they’d come by it Rodney had no idea – a captured puddle jumper, an alliance with the Replicators, who knew the technology and hated the Atlanteans enough to give the Wraith the key to destroying them.
“But – ”
So close to destruction, but they’d survived, if you can call a half-dead city, an alpha site only half-full, John trapped in something between life and death.
“They don’t get to keep you,” Rodney tells him. Death, the Wraith, the replicators, the Genii, they could be anyone stupid enough to try to take John from him.
“Yeah,” John says, new and beautiful, scarless, and the smile he offers is the quick, surprisingly honest one that teases a smile of his own to Rodney’s lips.
“Just so you know,” Rodney adds.
He watches as John inspects his body, lifting their clasped hands up to the light to study the curiosity of bone and its own sculpture of numbers. His free hand wanders over Rodney’s face, a reacquaintance that has Rodney shivering – so close, and he closes his eyes against it because it’s too much, and he doesn’t need to see John’s body to see him, to remember the contours of it in the dark of their bedroom.
“Hey,” John says, pulling him back to the here and now, to warmth and presence. Familiar flecks in eyes that are close and knowing, and somehow Rodney’s forgotten that John knows him as well as he knows John. He’s half-expecting horror as John puts the pieces together, but instead there’s fierce pleasure, hands possessive now as they pull Rodney into the warm, vital curve of John’s body.
Bone and flesh, blood that Rodney’s calculated out, but the sum defies the numbers and circuitry that have brought John back to him. John’s collarbone is hard against Rodney’s cheek, and just beneath it Rodney can feel his heart. Strong fingers map out his back, his shoulders, come to rest briefly on his hips, a touch light and anchoring all at once.
After a moment, John releases him. Rodney steps back, trying not to fidget as John assesses him, the close study Rodney’s never quite gotten used to.
“You didn’t – ” The thought lines are back, John’s eyes darkening unexpectedly.
“I did.” Nothing more to say to that, but to let John work it out from the evidence.
“I would have – ” John’s gaze flickers around the room, the banks of empty chambers, mouth thin.
Done the same thing.
Rodney nods, runs one hand over a naked arm. A bit paler, without the tan acquired from a life spent under two different suns, but strong, firm, and alive. The touch draws John’s attention briefly back to him, lines and tension smoothing out into a smirk Rodney hasn’t seen for far too long.
“Being alive is good,” John remarks, looking at his hand again, as though that’s all there is to say. And maybe it is.
“You need clothes,” Rodney mutters, watching as John gazes down at the flat expanse of chest and belly, his hips, wiggles his toes experimentally.
“Later,” John says, reaching for him again and kissing him.
His mouth on Rodney's, perfect symmetry.
-end-
.rating: R for strongly implied sex, angst, darkness
.word count: c. 2,500
.disclaimer: Alas, not mine. Alas.
.advertisements: Written for
svmadelyn's Kink/Cliche challenge. My prompt was "possessiveness in general." Set some time post-S3, but no real spoilers..notes: A (very) loose adaptation of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, with some angst and suffering thrown in. Many thanks to
fairestcat and paperwirexit for looking this over! All inconsistencies and written-at-4am bizarrenesses are totally mine.AN EQUATION FOR PERFECT BEAUTY
He will find it one day in a laboratory near the stasis chambers, dull silver-blue with jointed legs like a spider’s. The database will tell him what it is and what it does, and he will set it aside, but keep it close at hand.
In the darkness he memorizes John with his fingers, the shape of heat where John’s body presses close against his own. Mouth on his and lips, low, fierce words that twist into him as John’s fingers lace through his own – sweatslick, and they slip tightly together – and he rolls Rodney onto his back. The blankets tangle in Rodney’s legs, synthetic and unreal, but John is all suppleness and life.
All smooth length of bone and muscle, draped catlike across their bed. Rodney traces the line of John’s body – chest, how his abdomen curves shallowly inward to where John’s hip rises to a point, axis of his spine. He plots the contours of John’s back, shoulder blade, spine, flesh and tendon woven under skin that wears sweat and scars and wonder.
Rodney thinks in numbers. Poetry, music, the arch of John’s neck and shoulders, ratio, measure, and perfection. A laugh huffs across Rodney’s ear and he turns his face into it, into John’s mouth so they kiss again. John’s body is closer now, encouraging him open.
When John slides into him, they are more than infinity.
And he will remember this night, the last, and will hope John remembers it as he sets the device and its cruel spider legs to John’s forehead, and will remember how sweat had dripped down John’s temple and landed on Rodney’s shoulder.
Lights, Elizabeth’s voice (shut off the damn alarm), and while the lights and Elizabeth’s shirt are red, they are not quite the red red red of John’s blood.
And later John will taste of redness, of cold ash and smoke, when Rodney kisses him before the world ends, before he fills a syringe with blood than no longer holds any life. People will die when he goes to the stasis unit instead of back to the control chair, but Atlantis will live and John might live again, might, and that’s what matters.
The Ancients had known it, that numbers live in flesh, are written into the architecture of blood and bone, that technology walks hand in hand with the body.
Their secret is his now, terrible as Atlantis, beautiful and painful as the memory of John sliding silently from their bed, last kiss between Rodney’s shoulder blades, last time to get going lying heavy in the air. Discovering it would once have meant bragging rights for eternity, warnings from Elizabeth about dangerous technology and playing God. Playing mad scientist, he supposes, but when the numbers flow over him and through, he can’t bring himself to care.
They’re gone now, but Elizabeth’s ghost, Zelenka’s, Carson’s, still hover around him. You can’t keep doing this, they say, you need to stop, they say, the voices of reason he doesn’t hear anymore. The rest of the scientists, the few military left, need you back at the alpha site, you’re crazy, you’re alone and you’re crazy.
He will tell himself this, too, many times the closer he gets, as numbers begin to fashion themselves into familiar flesh, encoding themselves in synapse and muscle and vein. Frankenstein, automata, zombies, but this is John, and John is Rodney’s. Death doesn’t get to keep him.
Teyla worries, but doesn’t pry, doesn’t stray farther into the ghost city than the gateroom the few times she comes through. She and Ronon start bringing food when Rodney doesn’t come back from Atlantis one day, leave a three days’ supply when Rodney finally lets down the iris.
“We should tie you up and haul you back there,” Ronon grunts as he dumps a pile of MREs on the gateroom floor.
“But we won’t,” Teyla adds, glaring at Ronon, who shrugs. “The city is important to us all, Rodney, but you are more so.” Her fond smile, the quick hand on his arm, should annoy him, but doesn’t. The three of them, where four used to be. Two now, though; Teyla and Ronon together, and Rodney alone with his code and a dying city.
The city, the city. It’s still not safe, he tells them. He doesn’t really hear his own words. I don’t want anyone coming back until – Until never.
John waits in one of the stasis chambers, the Ancients’ secret, Rodney’s secret, lying, latent, waiting. The two of them, John, the city, anything to have them back.
And he will wait longer, and the secret will wait, when Teyla and Ronon radio through to ask for Rodney’s help at the alpha site. Rodney will go and fix something Zelenka could have fixed, if Zelenka were alive. When he is done, he will stand at the edge of a fire circle while the Athosians give thanks for life and other meaningless things, and come dangerously close to prayer.
Finally finally he makes it back to Atlantis and her silence. She lights the way for him as best she can, but the light is like funeral torches, or ghost light, because he does not will the city to do what she does, and so he wonders if she understands.
No funeral lights when John had lain in the infirmary, abandoned under a white sheet gone red with blood – nothing to do for the dying, the living need the help – and Rodney had stood over him and felt the failing pulse in John’s wrist and taken the neural imprinter from his pocket.
Anticipation jitters through him, an energy he hasn’t felt since he’d first heard the word stargate, as he enters the room holding the stasis chambers. It is a gold-toned crypt, silent as one and as alien, a place where only the dead live.
He approaches one of the chambers, careful of the wires snaking out of it, connecting it to the last naquadah generator that supplies power in excess of what the dying ZPM can give. Cannibalized parts of Atlantis, other devices Rodney’s scavenged, turn the chamber into a hybrid of elegance and science-fiction horror, a desperate try at what the Ancients had thought needed to be done to turn theory into practice.
They’d found the secret, the words and numbers of it, but had never done this, given it flesh and form. Maybe they hadn’t wanted to, Rodney supposes, too caught up in the escape of Ascension to bother any more with the physical, with touch and sight.
But John, John, worth any number of infinities, all the answers to the universe less important than his hands on Rodney’s skin that last night, his breath in Rodney’s ear and his taste in Rodney’s mouth.
The spider-legged device crouches atop the neural interface, its blue eyes flashing in a steady two-three count. It looks, unexpectedly, hideously, like an Iratus bug, pregnant with a life that doesn’t belong to it.
Rodney thinks, unexpectedly, of Cadman. She’d been lucky, one of the few not killed when Rodney had made his choice between Atlantis and John. He’d come out better in the exchange, cheating physics and chance, winning the city back.
“You’d better work,” he tells the device, the faint shadow of a shape under the opaque hood of the chamber. The city still standing, fine, but John – more Rodney’s than the city was. She’s shrunk to this room, the gateroom, the few things Rodney needs to survive. All three of them are in something like half-life, and Rodney’s not quite sure if he’s not more dead than alive, suspended in a waiting too much like purgatory.
Eight months spent now, spent watching as best he can, wanting the confirmation of flesh under his fingertips, a familiar hand in his, but looking in would have destroyed everything beyond recovery. He’s watched the numbers instead, reading over them, translating algorithms back into the warmth and scarred perfection of John’s skin. The program had finished before he’d gotten back from the alpha site, and the pod is running in stasis only now, waiting for the last command.
The laptop beeps as Rodney powers it up; the blue lights in the device quicken their pace to match Rodney’s heartbeat, which gallops along in terror and hope. Instantly, the screen flashes to the status report, the numbers measuring off pulse and temperature.
One last step, and he doesn’t think, just does it.
Faster and faster go the lights until they form a solid bar of blue, flashflashflash too fast for the eye to pick out the blink, and then they go dark.
The generator powers down.
Behind the hood a shadow moves, stone stillness melting into movement like wax, a head turning to the side as though looking for something.
That morning eight months gone John had turned to him, careless and lazy, slid half over Rodney’s body, welcome although the morning had been warm, Hey, McKay, half-speech, half-kiss against Rodney’s neck.
Rodney can see a hesitant hand reach up, shadow-fingers splaying across the glass. When they withdraw, they leave five oval holes in the condensation.
John’s left hand had worked down Rodney’s arm, sliding around his wrist to turn it. He, they, had forgotten to take his watch off last night, and the wristband had begun to chafe. Shit, fuck, eight-thirty, muttered half-heartedly and not really urgent, and the leg wrapped around Rodney tightened paradoxically.
Rodney’s own fingers shake on the latch of the chamber, fingers that have built bombs and helped destroy hive ships and save a city almost useless at pressing a few buttons.
John firm and hard inside him, slow, oh so slow, lazy with leftover sleep, holding on to their last few minutes together before the day started and took John from him. John pressed all along his back, hard thighs moving against his, and mine mine mine had been on his breath like it had been on Rodney’s.
The hatch hisses open, blood-warm air escaping from it.
Orgasm had been a sweep of heat and pleasure, like it always was, John’s fingers tightening in his, his body heavier, more assertive as it pressed Rodney into the mattress. And he had complained bitterly about being crushed (because hewas being crushed), and John’s laugh had reverberated through him.
A hand, smooth, too young-feeling for the face gazing blankly at him, reaches up and fingers close with improbable strength around Rodney’s own.
Weir’s voice had interrupted, orders to report to the conference room, and John had sighed, pulled carefully out. From the corner of his eye, Rodney saw the line of tendon under the skin, running ridge of vein along the inside of John’s arm.
“We’ll pick this up later,” John whispers. He speaks carefully, mouth re-learning, re-remembering the words.
“We’ll pick this up later,” John had said, last nip at Rodney’s ear.
No numbers now, but Rodney can still see them, hidden under the cloak of a familiar body and staring at him from hazel eyes that sharpen in recognition and memory.
“Wraith,” John whispers. “They – ”
Ambush while the team was off-world. A klick from the stargate and a dart had materialized, all weapons firing. One shot had clipped the jumper’s bow, and the last thing Rodney knew before the blue infinity of the stargate had been a shower of sparks and something hot like blood.
“I – ” Thought lines on John’s brow.
“Don’t think too hard,” Rodney advises. “You might sprain something.” He smoothes away the lines, and oh, touch, John’s skin, strange and familiar all at once.
The Wraith had been watching, waiting for their chance: a try at taking down the jumper while it was off-world, a surprise attack on Atlantis not two days later, while John lay dying in the infirmary. Cloaking technology, how they’d come by it Rodney had no idea – a captured puddle jumper, an alliance with the Replicators, who knew the technology and hated the Atlanteans enough to give the Wraith the key to destroying them.
“But – ”
So close to destruction, but they’d survived, if you can call a half-dead city, an alpha site only half-full, John trapped in something between life and death.
“They don’t get to keep you,” Rodney tells him. Death, the Wraith, the replicators, the Genii, they could be anyone stupid enough to try to take John from him.
“Yeah,” John says, new and beautiful, scarless, and the smile he offers is the quick, surprisingly honest one that teases a smile of his own to Rodney’s lips.
“Just so you know,” Rodney adds.
He watches as John inspects his body, lifting their clasped hands up to the light to study the curiosity of bone and its own sculpture of numbers. His free hand wanders over Rodney’s face, a reacquaintance that has Rodney shivering – so close, and he closes his eyes against it because it’s too much, and he doesn’t need to see John’s body to see him, to remember the contours of it in the dark of their bedroom.
“Hey,” John says, pulling him back to the here and now, to warmth and presence. Familiar flecks in eyes that are close and knowing, and somehow Rodney’s forgotten that John knows him as well as he knows John. He’s half-expecting horror as John puts the pieces together, but instead there’s fierce pleasure, hands possessive now as they pull Rodney into the warm, vital curve of John’s body.
Bone and flesh, blood that Rodney’s calculated out, but the sum defies the numbers and circuitry that have brought John back to him. John’s collarbone is hard against Rodney’s cheek, and just beneath it Rodney can feel his heart. Strong fingers map out his back, his shoulders, come to rest briefly on his hips, a touch light and anchoring all at once.
After a moment, John releases him. Rodney steps back, trying not to fidget as John assesses him, the close study Rodney’s never quite gotten used to.
“You didn’t – ” The thought lines are back, John’s eyes darkening unexpectedly.
“I did.” Nothing more to say to that, but to let John work it out from the evidence.
“I would have – ” John’s gaze flickers around the room, the banks of empty chambers, mouth thin.
Done the same thing.
Rodney nods, runs one hand over a naked arm. A bit paler, without the tan acquired from a life spent under two different suns, but strong, firm, and alive. The touch draws John’s attention briefly back to him, lines and tension smoothing out into a smirk Rodney hasn’t seen for far too long.
“Being alive is good,” John remarks, looking at his hand again, as though that’s all there is to say. And maybe it is.
“You need clothes,” Rodney mutters, watching as John gazes down at the flat expanse of chest and belly, his hips, wiggles his toes experimentally.
“Later,” John says, reaching for him again and kissing him.
His mouth on Rodney's, perfect symmetry.
-end-
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