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undermistletoe documentation fic: Graffiti - McKay/Sheppard (PG13) 1.1
Title: Graffiti
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aesc
Fandom: SGA
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 3,200 + art
Notes: Hugest thanks todogeared for beta'ing! This was idea, um, #13 of about twenty for the documentary fic, and... yeah.
There is also a bit of art at the end. Not much, but just a bit.
Graffiti
1.
Rough not-metal under his fingertips, Lantean, familiar, frightening because it has the same permanence Atlantis does that says I will be here forever, and you will not.
He doesn’t know what the grooves – lines, curves, patterns – are, but he can guess, and in the endless darkness he picks up his utility knife for the last time.
2.
McKay collapses in John’s arms when they get him out, folded in on himself and completely, terrifyingly silent, what skin John can see and touch under tangled hair pale and smudged. He bends close, hey buddy, we got you, we got you whispered to a month of beard. McKay’s mouth moves silently around words John can’t make out.
“I got him, Sheppard,” Ronon says, reaching for him, and between the two of them they get McKay moving. For a solid man, McKay threatens to break under John’s hands, the one he has on the forearm thrown over John’s shoulder, the other wrapped around his waist so the low bracket of his ribs brushes John’s wrist. McKay’s legs shake perilously under him, and when it’s clear there’s no way he’s going to make it to the jumper – and God, what the hell happened in there? – John hands him over to Ronon, and he almost freaks out as McKay’s head falls back, despite Ronon’s strong arm supporting shoulders that shouldn’t need any support.
He runs ahead, wanting the movement, wanting anything other than the confusion of terror and a fury he rarely lets himself feel. The jumper waits silent under its cloak, hums to life when he hurtles inside, almost sensing his urgency, and he has to think to keep it on the ground long enough for Ronon to stow Rodney on one of the benches and for Teyla and Radek to strap themselves in, and then he’s moving again, moving, moving.
3.
John doesn’t stick around for Keller’s report; he already knows McKay’s bad off, because his skin is greasy and bruised, and his hair is too long. There’d been blood under his fingernails and nothing in his eyes when they’d opened – just the slightest bit – when John had said, Hey, hey, we’re back, c’mon McKay, up and at ‘em. So, yeah, he doesn’t need to hear the Latin or Keller’s prognostications.
Instead, he heads back out with his team, or his team minus Rodney, plus Radek, to figure out what, other than a carelessly unlocked time dilation room, had happened.
“Wish we’d missed it the first time we came,” John says. Teyla nods and Ronon grunts, and Radek is uncomfortably silent in the copilot’s seat. He lands them closer this time, and the jumper touches down in a confusion of leaves.
The place is almost impossible to see, overgrown and smothering under humid air, and they had almost missed it, except for the unusual energy readings John decides they really need to avoid from now on. There’s a hole in the side of the mound, very symbolic, very Freudian, a corridor they’d spent twenty minutes in while Radek tried to hack into the system, but according to Sam, mission logs showed they’d been gone almost a whole day.
“Lot quieter now,” Ronon mutters as they step inside. John still expects to feel a weird tingling, or for things to slow down as time slows, but there’s nothing other than the knowledge he’s stepped out of time; thinking back, he realizes the time it took for him to fall asleep in Ancient Meditation 101 was enough time, maybe, for someone in the outside world to blink. “Hey, Zelenka, over here.”
Radek beelines to the data port, pushing his glasses up his nose even though they’re fine.
“I will be quick,” he says, barely glancing up at John, laptop already interfaced and humming with data. “Twenty minutes, no more. The field is stable, but… I do not think you wish to be gone yet another day.”
“Getting home ASAP is always a good thing.” John stares at the door to Rodney’s cell, its metal twisted and bent back, and the light from the corridor – which lit a cold and brilliant blue when John had walked in – spills through it to scatter shadows on the floor and illuminate scars in the far wall, where they’d found Rodney huddled.
It’s nothing like his six months in the commune, no monster in there except the long, long dark, and there’s no fighting that. He swallows tightly.
“That is writing,” Teyla says next to him. “Idomeon writing.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sheppard mutters. “What the hell? Can you read it?”
Teyla steps fearlessly into the cell, and John forces himself not to take her by the arm and pull her back, makes himself walk in to stand beside her and stare at the markings on the wall that mean nothing to him, but something to her.
“It says, ‘Ur Noien kai Arpan,’” Teyla tells him and then, seeing John’s blank look, adds, “As I said, it is the writing of the people of Idomeo – M7G-781. We have traded with them. It means, ‘I am Noien, daughter of Arpan,’ or something like it.”
“These are Caphrid runes over here,” Ronon says, scanning the wall, “and these look like Hagali letters.”
“They are.” Teyla runs a careful hand over the wall, her fingers following a path of five parallel grooves, shallow, rimmed with a brown halo John knows is dried blood. “These here, these are the glyphs I’ve seen used in ancient Athosian writing.”
“It’s poetry,” Ronon says, and John needs a moment to work out he’s looking at something else. “’When the jura trees bloom on the hill, and kora birds raise up their song, I know spring comes to Arahol.’”
“Arahol was culled many thousands of years ago,” Teyla says. “It was one of the first planets destroyed by the Wraith.”
The light behind them illuminates only a slice of the cell, shifting and changing as they move and their shadows move with them. The flashlight on John’s P90 sweeps out more writing, more messages Teyla and Ronon translate for him: I have been here forty years and two and eternity); My name is Bol Eran, and I am from Sateda the Great; Those who find this wall, know I lived H – – m of Matharad, and I died – ram– of – – –
I pray, great and ancient lords: let me die.
Holy fuck, and somewhere in the shadows John can see McKay running desperate fingers over the letters, the drawings, looking for a way out and finding nothing except blindness and nonsense. He tries to swallow again and nearly chokes, feels his hand go tight on the grip of his P90, and though Teyla’s voice is soft and sad, and Ronon’s is bitter, when John finally finds his voice, he finds anger too.
“It’s a prison,” he says, turning. His flashlight traces a circle, half-seen letters, words, bits he can read here and there. Solid, it’s almost solid writing and drawing up to about six and a half feet. He steps on words too, some of them smoothed out by desperate feet. He imagines McKay measuring off his prison, trying not to think of the numbers, shaking as his brain calculates them anyway. “It’s a goddamn prison.”
“Yes, it is, Colonel Sheppard.” Radek hovers in the door, gripping his laptop. “This is only one part of the complex, one, ah, cellblock. The schematics?” he nods at the screen John can’t see, “They suggest this was perhaps the Ancient version of… of capital punishment, or perhaps life in prison.”
“How long was he in here?” John asks, voice tight, and it threatens to break on the anger in his throat.
“Perhaps, perhaps a month?” Radek shrugs. “The rate of compression or distension varies according to the section of the complex. It is really…” He trails off, eyeing John and then his gun and weighing his words. “The entire complex is still functional. Stasis chambers, food stores… Really, it is quite remarkable. In a terrible, terrible way, but remarkable.”
“Remarkable,” John mutters. So remarkable that ten thousand years later it trapped McKay, and what the hell was it, psychological torture? Knowing you’d step out arthritic and insane and the people you hurt would be as young as they were six months before they shoved you through the field.
He looks back at the wall, not that there’s anything to see beyond the writing, some letters falling over each other, tangling into incoherence. He can’t read any of it but he doesn’t need to – the messages are clear enough, scraped and cut and gouged, and the despair in them translates with a keenness that makes his breath come tight and fierce.
He’s almost out of the cell, because he can’t fucking take any more, when he sees the edge of the light catch a symbol that isn’t from Pegasus.
Σ
Sigma, shaky and asymmetrical, and it draws John in, enough to see what it belongs to.
Dirac’s equation.
Rodney.
4.
Sometimes he can’t get his head around it, though McKay’s explained it a thousand times, how he has six months of memories, is half a year older than his birthday says he is. Usually John lets it ride, because life is screwed up enough without McKayian paradoxes, but every now and then they sneak up and bite him in the ass anyway.
He makes himself read the rest of McKay’s wall, even though Radek makes anxious noises about going over their twenty minutes. Part of him knows Rodney would never want him to see this, never thought that he would – and McKay seriously, seriously thought he was going to die in there, that they weren’t coming back, and who could blame him? John could, because fuck, geez, McKay, I can’t leave you behind – but he can’t make himself care what McKay wants. He thought he was going to die, he doesn’t get a goddamn vote, and he’s going to have to live with it.
This isn’t why Wallace had to die and sixty Genii three years ago, and why he went into McKay's dreams: to see Rodney scratching himself into the wall, equations, nonsensical lists (Favorite Movie Quotes – mostly nonsense –, Latin declensions, Why Canada Should Rule the World, Why I Hate the Ancients), God, why can’t I kill myself?, tried to meditate today, his will, written with unsound mind, a last note, Hey, Sheppard that John bends over so Ronon and Teyla can’t see.
They leave when Radek can’t be put off any more, and John distractedly reminds himself to send a team back to cover the blast hole and seal the entrance. Mostly his thoughts run over the wall like fingers, touching where McKay’s words had crossed those of another long-dead prisoner, keen, sharp as the knife McKay couldn’t use to kill himself but could use to write despair.
5.
John doesn’t say anything about the wall when he gets back, not that McKay would listen. He remembers way too clearly the shock of spending six months in another world and coming back to find that only hours, barely, had passed, and what had been hours of desperation for everyone else had been six months of boredom for him, and wondering if he’d ever see his team or be able to shave again.
He still doesn’t say anything when McKay gets out – when he goes to his lab, shies away from the other scientists, hovers in the door of his office, avoids the mess hall, goes to his room like solitude is the only thing he knows anymore.
Someone cut his hair and shaved him, and the bruises under his eyes are gone, but the few times John sees him over the next several weeks, he still looks like the man he and Ronon pulled from that dark room.
And the words. John’s starting to wish he hadn’t read them, because he sees them every time he closes his eyes or is zoning out on paperwork, or weird moments in briefings when he looks across the table at McKay – who comes, reluctantly, under orders from the new psychologist; who sits, withdrawn, mind locked in that cell.
John thinks about telling McKay he understands, but he really doesn’t, because living with a bunch of hippies isn’t really like spending a month going crazy in the dark. Well, kind of, because he did go a bit crazy, but not really.
6.
He’s been in his own time dilation field, John thinks as he waits for McKay to come in, time stretched out by uncertainty and what John is pretty sure is the biggest, most selfish mistake he’s ever made in his life. He’s always kind of known what McKay’s thinking – he’s been in the man’s dreams, for fuck’s sake – but there’s McKay and then there’s McKay, like he suspects for McKay there’s Sheppard and Sheppard, two different people who manage to live in the same body.
But John is selfish, which he’ll admit gracefully (not, however, to McKay), selfish enough to watch another man die to feed a Wraith and to be, deeply, darkly, satisfied with it. I can’t, for John, means a lot of things he’s pretty sure McKay never heard.
“Colonel.” McKay looks around John’s room, quick glances over John’s surfboard, guitar, a golf magazine stuffed into War and Peace because John couldn’t find anything for a bookmark. “I… you’re okay?”
“I’m cool.” John collapses on his bed. There’s only room for one person to pace in here, and he’s better at keeping everything throttled back, though he wants to climb out of his own skin. “You?”
“Not cool,” McKay says with his usual stunning honesty. “It really sucks.”
“I know.” It does, and really, there isn’t anything else John can say to that.
“I didn’t know we were in a time dilation field.” McKay’s hands twitch. “I… I thought...”
“We were coming for you,” John says, “as fast as we could. Radek figured it out.” And they had, they had, and still that isn’t enough to erase those words from John’s mind.
“Yeah… yeah, Radek told me.”
“Yeah.” John stares at his own hands, willing them to relax. They won’t. He can’t blame McKay for a lapse of faith; he’s had his own, but still. He wants to grab McKay and shake him, and tell him that so long as he knows John won’t let him die, he’ll be okay.
“I don’t remember you pulling me out. I don’t remember anything, not really.” McKay’s hands are really starting to go now, and his body moves to the same agitated rhythm. “There are things, flashes. Mostly it’s a nightmare… a really, really long nightmare. In the dark.” He releases a breath that shakes all of him. “I remember wanting to die. That’s got to be pretty horrible, don’t you think? Maybe the worst thing the Ancients could think of… wanting to die.”
“You didn’t,” John says fiercely. “And if you had, I’d kill you.”
McKay’s smile is truer now, though not by much.
“You’d think reading comic books would prepare you for this sort of thing,” Rodney says absently. He’s staring at Johnny Cash, though not with his usual barely-veiled disdain.
“Yeah.”
“I’m claustrophobic,” is the next McKay curveball, “and so I had to start thinking about blue skies and wide-open spaces, and I think… I remember trying to meditate, like you showed me, but I don’t think terror helps a lot with that sort of thing, so I gave up. I wrote stuff.”
“Yeah.”
“Mostly I remember that because I remember not being able to kill myself, and whenever I tried, I ended up writing instead.” McKay’s looking at him now, really looking, not staring through John to some place he can’t follow. “And I don’t… I don’t remember what I wrote, but I remember… I remember you.”
“I was on the other side of the door, McKay.”
“No, well, of course you were. It would have been nice to have you with me… You have experience with that sort of thing.”
“And C4. I’m useful when it comes to providing high explosives.” John very carefully doesn’t think about what would have happened if McKay had been on the other side of the door, instead of paralyzed in a corner. The cell had been soundproof, no way to get a warning to him, or to hear McKay shouting and pounding on the door and crying.
“That too,” McKay allows. “But mostly… Mostly it was you.”
McKay’s come to rest at the foot of John’s bed, perched at the very edge as though about to take off again. He stays close to himself, still uncertain of how much space he has. The smile he offers John is equal parts misery and relief.
“I cut myself a bunch of times.” He had, his hands lying on his thighs, fine cuts now mostly gone to new skin. “Accidentally, I mean.” He moves closer with each word, closer than they’ve been in a while, since Jeannie was dying, when McKay had stood in front of him and told him he wasn’t going to ask John’s permission to die, close enough that he’s near enough to touch and feel, for John to touch him.
John keeps his hands to himself.
“John,” McKay says hoarsely. When John looks up at him, Rodney’s expression is unfettered, fearful, brave. “I don’t know what I wrote, but I know… I know it was important.”
“It wasn’t a declaration of love or anything, McKay, geez,” Sheppard says, and even he isn’t convinced by that, though he’s spent the last week telling himself it was, like McKay’s “List of Places I Never Want To See Again,” a sign of isolation-induced madness.
“Of course it wasn’t,” McKay snorts. “Honestly, Sheppard.”
He tries to stand up again, but John grabs him before he can, hand closing around the strong bones of Rodney’s wrist. Rodney stares hard at him, mouth dressed to a soft, surprised ‘o’ as John draws him back down, back down to him, and he comes, amazingly cooperative for Rodney McKay.
“Don’t – ” John shakes his head, tries to clear it of everything filling it up – the prison, the words, Rodney’s desperate loneliness, his own anger – of everything except the now of Rodney looking at him and coming close, and of Rodney’s skin when John finally finds the courage to touch him.
“Okay,” Rodney whispers, “yeah,” and he comes the rest of the way.
Rodney’s mouth on his is perfect, hot, supple and alive, that’s Rodney’s breath whistling in his nostrils and his heart pounding against John’s chest, newly-healed fingers in his hair. And it’s good, great, everything that John almost lost in twenty minutes.
And he wants to say don’t die, don’t volunteer to die, don’t ascend, don’t get stuck in a time-dilation field without me, except he doesn’t say those things, because the closest he’s ever come to anything like this is telling Rodney I can’t.
“Gravitational degrees of freedom,” John says, words turned to Rodney’s smooth cheek, his lips brushing pale skin.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Hey, Sheppard, John, what is described by the Weyl conformal tensor Cabcd?
Author:
aescFandom: SGA
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 3,200 + art
Notes: Hugest thanks to
dogeared for beta'ing! This was idea, um, #13 of about twenty for the documentary fic, and... yeah.There is also a bit of art at the end. Not much, but just a bit.
Graffiti
1.
Rough not-metal under his fingertips, Lantean, familiar, frightening because it has the same permanence Atlantis does that says I will be here forever, and you will not.
He doesn’t know what the grooves – lines, curves, patterns – are, but he can guess, and in the endless darkness he picks up his utility knife for the last time.
2.
McKay collapses in John’s arms when they get him out, folded in on himself and completely, terrifyingly silent, what skin John can see and touch under tangled hair pale and smudged. He bends close, hey buddy, we got you, we got you whispered to a month of beard. McKay’s mouth moves silently around words John can’t make out.
“I got him, Sheppard,” Ronon says, reaching for him, and between the two of them they get McKay moving. For a solid man, McKay threatens to break under John’s hands, the one he has on the forearm thrown over John’s shoulder, the other wrapped around his waist so the low bracket of his ribs brushes John’s wrist. McKay’s legs shake perilously under him, and when it’s clear there’s no way he’s going to make it to the jumper – and God, what the hell happened in there? – John hands him over to Ronon, and he almost freaks out as McKay’s head falls back, despite Ronon’s strong arm supporting shoulders that shouldn’t need any support.
He runs ahead, wanting the movement, wanting anything other than the confusion of terror and a fury he rarely lets himself feel. The jumper waits silent under its cloak, hums to life when he hurtles inside, almost sensing his urgency, and he has to think to keep it on the ground long enough for Ronon to stow Rodney on one of the benches and for Teyla and Radek to strap themselves in, and then he’s moving again, moving, moving.
3.
John doesn’t stick around for Keller’s report; he already knows McKay’s bad off, because his skin is greasy and bruised, and his hair is too long. There’d been blood under his fingernails and nothing in his eyes when they’d opened – just the slightest bit – when John had said, Hey, hey, we’re back, c’mon McKay, up and at ‘em. So, yeah, he doesn’t need to hear the Latin or Keller’s prognostications.
Instead, he heads back out with his team, or his team minus Rodney, plus Radek, to figure out what, other than a carelessly unlocked time dilation room, had happened.
“Wish we’d missed it the first time we came,” John says. Teyla nods and Ronon grunts, and Radek is uncomfortably silent in the copilot’s seat. He lands them closer this time, and the jumper touches down in a confusion of leaves.
The place is almost impossible to see, overgrown and smothering under humid air, and they had almost missed it, except for the unusual energy readings John decides they really need to avoid from now on. There’s a hole in the side of the mound, very symbolic, very Freudian, a corridor they’d spent twenty minutes in while Radek tried to hack into the system, but according to Sam, mission logs showed they’d been gone almost a whole day.
“Lot quieter now,” Ronon mutters as they step inside. John still expects to feel a weird tingling, or for things to slow down as time slows, but there’s nothing other than the knowledge he’s stepped out of time; thinking back, he realizes the time it took for him to fall asleep in Ancient Meditation 101 was enough time, maybe, for someone in the outside world to blink. “Hey, Zelenka, over here.”
Radek beelines to the data port, pushing his glasses up his nose even though they’re fine.
“I will be quick,” he says, barely glancing up at John, laptop already interfaced and humming with data. “Twenty minutes, no more. The field is stable, but… I do not think you wish to be gone yet another day.”
“Getting home ASAP is always a good thing.” John stares at the door to Rodney’s cell, its metal twisted and bent back, and the light from the corridor – which lit a cold and brilliant blue when John had walked in – spills through it to scatter shadows on the floor and illuminate scars in the far wall, where they’d found Rodney huddled.
It’s nothing like his six months in the commune, no monster in there except the long, long dark, and there’s no fighting that. He swallows tightly.
“That is writing,” Teyla says next to him. “Idomeon writing.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sheppard mutters. “What the hell? Can you read it?”
Teyla steps fearlessly into the cell, and John forces himself not to take her by the arm and pull her back, makes himself walk in to stand beside her and stare at the markings on the wall that mean nothing to him, but something to her.
“It says, ‘Ur Noien kai Arpan,’” Teyla tells him and then, seeing John’s blank look, adds, “As I said, it is the writing of the people of Idomeo – M7G-781. We have traded with them. It means, ‘I am Noien, daughter of Arpan,’ or something like it.”
“These are Caphrid runes over here,” Ronon says, scanning the wall, “and these look like Hagali letters.”
“They are.” Teyla runs a careful hand over the wall, her fingers following a path of five parallel grooves, shallow, rimmed with a brown halo John knows is dried blood. “These here, these are the glyphs I’ve seen used in ancient Athosian writing.”
“It’s poetry,” Ronon says, and John needs a moment to work out he’s looking at something else. “’When the jura trees bloom on the hill, and kora birds raise up their song, I know spring comes to Arahol.’”
“Arahol was culled many thousands of years ago,” Teyla says. “It was one of the first planets destroyed by the Wraith.”
The light behind them illuminates only a slice of the cell, shifting and changing as they move and their shadows move with them. The flashlight on John’s P90 sweeps out more writing, more messages Teyla and Ronon translate for him: I have been here forty years and two and eternity); My name is Bol Eran, and I am from Sateda the Great; Those who find this wall, know I lived H – – m of Matharad, and I died – ram– of – – –
I pray, great and ancient lords: let me die.
Holy fuck, and somewhere in the shadows John can see McKay running desperate fingers over the letters, the drawings, looking for a way out and finding nothing except blindness and nonsense. He tries to swallow again and nearly chokes, feels his hand go tight on the grip of his P90, and though Teyla’s voice is soft and sad, and Ronon’s is bitter, when John finally finds his voice, he finds anger too.
“It’s a prison,” he says, turning. His flashlight traces a circle, half-seen letters, words, bits he can read here and there. Solid, it’s almost solid writing and drawing up to about six and a half feet. He steps on words too, some of them smoothed out by desperate feet. He imagines McKay measuring off his prison, trying not to think of the numbers, shaking as his brain calculates them anyway. “It’s a goddamn prison.”
“Yes, it is, Colonel Sheppard.” Radek hovers in the door, gripping his laptop. “This is only one part of the complex, one, ah, cellblock. The schematics?” he nods at the screen John can’t see, “They suggest this was perhaps the Ancient version of… of capital punishment, or perhaps life in prison.”
“How long was he in here?” John asks, voice tight, and it threatens to break on the anger in his throat.
“Perhaps, perhaps a month?” Radek shrugs. “The rate of compression or distension varies according to the section of the complex. It is really…” He trails off, eyeing John and then his gun and weighing his words. “The entire complex is still functional. Stasis chambers, food stores… Really, it is quite remarkable. In a terrible, terrible way, but remarkable.”
“Remarkable,” John mutters. So remarkable that ten thousand years later it trapped McKay, and what the hell was it, psychological torture? Knowing you’d step out arthritic and insane and the people you hurt would be as young as they were six months before they shoved you through the field.
He looks back at the wall, not that there’s anything to see beyond the writing, some letters falling over each other, tangling into incoherence. He can’t read any of it but he doesn’t need to – the messages are clear enough, scraped and cut and gouged, and the despair in them translates with a keenness that makes his breath come tight and fierce.
He’s almost out of the cell, because he can’t fucking take any more, when he sees the edge of the light catch a symbol that isn’t from Pegasus.
Σ
Sigma, shaky and asymmetrical, and it draws John in, enough to see what it belongs to.
Dirac’s equation.
Rodney.
4.
Sometimes he can’t get his head around it, though McKay’s explained it a thousand times, how he has six months of memories, is half a year older than his birthday says he is. Usually John lets it ride, because life is screwed up enough without McKayian paradoxes, but every now and then they sneak up and bite him in the ass anyway.
He makes himself read the rest of McKay’s wall, even though Radek makes anxious noises about going over their twenty minutes. Part of him knows Rodney would never want him to see this, never thought that he would – and McKay seriously, seriously thought he was going to die in there, that they weren’t coming back, and who could blame him? John could, because fuck, geez, McKay, I can’t leave you behind – but he can’t make himself care what McKay wants. He thought he was going to die, he doesn’t get a goddamn vote, and he’s going to have to live with it.
This isn’t why Wallace had to die and sixty Genii three years ago, and why he went into McKay's dreams: to see Rodney scratching himself into the wall, equations, nonsensical lists (Favorite Movie Quotes – mostly nonsense –, Latin declensions, Why Canada Should Rule the World, Why I Hate the Ancients), God, why can’t I kill myself?, tried to meditate today, his will, written with unsound mind, a last note, Hey, Sheppard that John bends over so Ronon and Teyla can’t see.
They leave when Radek can’t be put off any more, and John distractedly reminds himself to send a team back to cover the blast hole and seal the entrance. Mostly his thoughts run over the wall like fingers, touching where McKay’s words had crossed those of another long-dead prisoner, keen, sharp as the knife McKay couldn’t use to kill himself but could use to write despair.
5.
John doesn’t say anything about the wall when he gets back, not that McKay would listen. He remembers way too clearly the shock of spending six months in another world and coming back to find that only hours, barely, had passed, and what had been hours of desperation for everyone else had been six months of boredom for him, and wondering if he’d ever see his team or be able to shave again.
He still doesn’t say anything when McKay gets out – when he goes to his lab, shies away from the other scientists, hovers in the door of his office, avoids the mess hall, goes to his room like solitude is the only thing he knows anymore.
Someone cut his hair and shaved him, and the bruises under his eyes are gone, but the few times John sees him over the next several weeks, he still looks like the man he and Ronon pulled from that dark room.
And the words. John’s starting to wish he hadn’t read them, because he sees them every time he closes his eyes or is zoning out on paperwork, or weird moments in briefings when he looks across the table at McKay – who comes, reluctantly, under orders from the new psychologist; who sits, withdrawn, mind locked in that cell.
John thinks about telling McKay he understands, but he really doesn’t, because living with a bunch of hippies isn’t really like spending a month going crazy in the dark. Well, kind of, because he did go a bit crazy, but not really.
6.
He’s been in his own time dilation field, John thinks as he waits for McKay to come in, time stretched out by uncertainty and what John is pretty sure is the biggest, most selfish mistake he’s ever made in his life. He’s always kind of known what McKay’s thinking – he’s been in the man’s dreams, for fuck’s sake – but there’s McKay and then there’s McKay, like he suspects for McKay there’s Sheppard and Sheppard, two different people who manage to live in the same body.
But John is selfish, which he’ll admit gracefully (not, however, to McKay), selfish enough to watch another man die to feed a Wraith and to be, deeply, darkly, satisfied with it. I can’t, for John, means a lot of things he’s pretty sure McKay never heard.
“Colonel.” McKay looks around John’s room, quick glances over John’s surfboard, guitar, a golf magazine stuffed into War and Peace because John couldn’t find anything for a bookmark. “I… you’re okay?”
“I’m cool.” John collapses on his bed. There’s only room for one person to pace in here, and he’s better at keeping everything throttled back, though he wants to climb out of his own skin. “You?”
“Not cool,” McKay says with his usual stunning honesty. “It really sucks.”
“I know.” It does, and really, there isn’t anything else John can say to that.
“I didn’t know we were in a time dilation field.” McKay’s hands twitch. “I… I thought...”
“We were coming for you,” John says, “as fast as we could. Radek figured it out.” And they had, they had, and still that isn’t enough to erase those words from John’s mind.
“Yeah… yeah, Radek told me.”
“Yeah.” John stares at his own hands, willing them to relax. They won’t. He can’t blame McKay for a lapse of faith; he’s had his own, but still. He wants to grab McKay and shake him, and tell him that so long as he knows John won’t let him die, he’ll be okay.
“I don’t remember you pulling me out. I don’t remember anything, not really.” McKay’s hands are really starting to go now, and his body moves to the same agitated rhythm. “There are things, flashes. Mostly it’s a nightmare… a really, really long nightmare. In the dark.” He releases a breath that shakes all of him. “I remember wanting to die. That’s got to be pretty horrible, don’t you think? Maybe the worst thing the Ancients could think of… wanting to die.”
“You didn’t,” John says fiercely. “And if you had, I’d kill you.”
McKay’s smile is truer now, though not by much.
“You’d think reading comic books would prepare you for this sort of thing,” Rodney says absently. He’s staring at Johnny Cash, though not with his usual barely-veiled disdain.
“Yeah.”
“I’m claustrophobic,” is the next McKay curveball, “and so I had to start thinking about blue skies and wide-open spaces, and I think… I remember trying to meditate, like you showed me, but I don’t think terror helps a lot with that sort of thing, so I gave up. I wrote stuff.”
“Yeah.”
“Mostly I remember that because I remember not being able to kill myself, and whenever I tried, I ended up writing instead.” McKay’s looking at him now, really looking, not staring through John to some place he can’t follow. “And I don’t… I don’t remember what I wrote, but I remember… I remember you.”
“I was on the other side of the door, McKay.”
“No, well, of course you were. It would have been nice to have you with me… You have experience with that sort of thing.”
“And C4. I’m useful when it comes to providing high explosives.” John very carefully doesn’t think about what would have happened if McKay had been on the other side of the door, instead of paralyzed in a corner. The cell had been soundproof, no way to get a warning to him, or to hear McKay shouting and pounding on the door and crying.
“That too,” McKay allows. “But mostly… Mostly it was you.”
McKay’s come to rest at the foot of John’s bed, perched at the very edge as though about to take off again. He stays close to himself, still uncertain of how much space he has. The smile he offers John is equal parts misery and relief.
“I cut myself a bunch of times.” He had, his hands lying on his thighs, fine cuts now mostly gone to new skin. “Accidentally, I mean.” He moves closer with each word, closer than they’ve been in a while, since Jeannie was dying, when McKay had stood in front of him and told him he wasn’t going to ask John’s permission to die, close enough that he’s near enough to touch and feel, for John to touch him.
John keeps his hands to himself.
“John,” McKay says hoarsely. When John looks up at him, Rodney’s expression is unfettered, fearful, brave. “I don’t know what I wrote, but I know… I know it was important.”
“It wasn’t a declaration of love or anything, McKay, geez,” Sheppard says, and even he isn’t convinced by that, though he’s spent the last week telling himself it was, like McKay’s “List of Places I Never Want To See Again,” a sign of isolation-induced madness.
“Of course it wasn’t,” McKay snorts. “Honestly, Sheppard.”
He tries to stand up again, but John grabs him before he can, hand closing around the strong bones of Rodney’s wrist. Rodney stares hard at him, mouth dressed to a soft, surprised ‘o’ as John draws him back down, back down to him, and he comes, amazingly cooperative for Rodney McKay.
“Don’t – ” John shakes his head, tries to clear it of everything filling it up – the prison, the words, Rodney’s desperate loneliness, his own anger – of everything except the now of Rodney looking at him and coming close, and of Rodney’s skin when John finally finds the courage to touch him.
“Okay,” Rodney whispers, “yeah,” and he comes the rest of the way.
Rodney’s mouth on his is perfect, hot, supple and alive, that’s Rodney’s breath whistling in his nostrils and his heart pounding against John’s chest, newly-healed fingers in his hair. And it’s good, great, everything that John almost lost in twenty minutes.
And he wants to say don’t die, don’t volunteer to die, don’t ascend, don’t get stuck in a time-dilation field without me, except he doesn’t say those things, because the closest he’s ever come to anything like this is telling Rodney I can’t.
“Gravitational degrees of freedom,” John says, words turned to Rodney’s smooth cheek, his lips brushing pale skin.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Hey, Sheppard, John, what is described by the Weyl conformal tensor Cabcd?