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.fic: The Home Front - John/Rodney (NC17) 2.2.
[back to part 1]
They go downstairs after Susan’s second summons, even though John isn’t hungry and isn’t looking forward to talking to Dave. He wants their room again, wants Rodney’s mouth on his with a fierceness that surprises him, sharp cuts of clarity across what has felt like two days of hallucination. On the way down (which Rodney describes as a “trek” and requiring sherpas and pack camels), he keeps checking for Rodney’s presence even though he can feel him there, electricity imperfectly contained by flesh and bone.
“Are you okay?” Rodney asks, in the last bit of privacy they have before the dining room. “I mean, this isn’t some sort of mid-life crisis brought on by the unexpected, um... well. Are you okay?”
Leave it to Rodney to ask the hard question when there isn’t time and there’s no answer, not even a lie, that can work or is convincing. John doesn’t answer, just keeps going into the dining room, but thinks to himself that he may be getting there.
“John!”
Or maybe not. Although the high back of the dining room chair conceals her, the voice at least is a warning.
“Pamela.” Not this, not this, not her, not today, not after Rodney. He keeps his face clear, though everything he feels slips out in his voice. Maybe Dave hears it, because he doesn’t correct him.
Pamela – Penelope – smiles up at him from her place at the foot of the table. Dave’s sitting on the opposite end, looking miserable but not miserable enough, the guilt dissonant because John can’t remember Dave being sorry for anything since they were teenagers. Rodney’s standing frozen next to him, trying to excavate himself from stunned silence.
“I didn’t know she was flying in tonight,” Dave says, at the same time that Rodney asks, “Who’re you?”
“Penelope,” she says with a smile John instantly and profoundly despises. She’s slim and short, ten years younger than her husband, with dark curly hair; she reminds John distantly of Elizabeth, but with a pretension Elizabeth had always lacked. “Patrick’s wife.” She slides a sly look at John. “And John and Dave’s evil stepmother.”
Rodney introduces himself and takes her hand like accepting unstable high explosives, glancing anxiously at John as though acknowledging her might be betrayal. “John’s never mentioned you,” he says, and it’s either Rodney’s typical social misfire or purposeful, John can’t tell, but it sets Pamela back a bit before she recovers.
“Well!” she laughs. If there’s more to come, she doesn’t say it; for a man who’s mastered the art of the random monologue, Rodney has the strange ability to silence all pointless, icebreaking conversation without saying anything. Pamela smiles gamely and disengages her hand. “It’s lovely to meet any friend of John’s,” she says at last.
Rodney eyes her suspiciously, looks at John again, and sits down. Susan sweeps in, flawlessly courteous in the face of what she clearly views as bad behavior on John’s part and, possibly, Penelope’s; she endures Rodney’s lecture on citrus, tells Dave that tonight is her bridge night in town and so she will be out of touch until tomorrow, but she’ll be in to make sure all is set for the lawyers, and tells Penelope that there is a guest room for her as well, if she wants it.
“I’ll sleep in our room, thank you,” Penelope says tightly.
She’s mourning too, John supposes, though it’s a stretch to think about her like that, like a woman who’d lost her husband, a man who by some unnatural coincidence happened to be John’s father. There’s something extravagant about her grief that grates on John’s nerves, in her black clothes and blurry makeup. When Susan brings out the plates, she toys with her food, twisting pasta around her fork.
She’d left, he remembers Dave saying, just after the funeral, just flying off for some reason... Just flying off like that, right after her husband was buried, for fuck only knew what.
John tries to push the hate back down, and tells himself wine is a bad idea.
“The lawyers are coming mid-morning,” Dave says.
“Yes, you said.” Penelope sets her fork down with a loud clatter of silver against expensive china. “It’s why I flew back tonight.”
“Is your mother doing better?” Dave says this to her, but looks at John, who frowns and looks away.
“The doctor says her cancer’s still in remission.” Penelope offers Dave a watery smile. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry,” Rodney says, so unexpected John almost chokes on a piece of chicken. Rodney’s not looking at Penelope or John or anyone, but staring at his plate as though comforting it. “I mean, not for the remission because, well, yes, that’s good, very good... But um, my mom died from it some years ago. Breast cancer.”
“Thank you,” Penelope says, with a sincerity that John’s never thought she possessed, and he takes a moment to feel bad about that. Dave is still looking at him, the please stop being stupid, John expression that is so absolutely their father’s John takes a moment to hate him, too. “And I’m sorry.”
“Yes, well, that’s what a lifetime of working with radioactive isotopes will do to you.” Rodney shifts, eyes flickering across John before fixing on the escape route to the kitchen and the living room.
“Oh.” Penelope leans forward, like she wants to take Rodney’s hand in hers, or possibly stand up and flee. “Still, I’m sorry.”
Rodney takes a gigantic bite of pasta and chicken, curls in on himself as he does when confronted by the emotional. Sympathy for a paper cut or brain freeze Rodney will take – indeed, John knows, he demands it – but not for any important kind of loss.
Penelope retreats back to her dinner, tersely answering Dave’s questions and escaping as soon as she can in a whiff of expensive perfume. Rodney relaxes a little, but John can’t. He can’t eat, either, too busy trying to hate Penelope for being Penelope, and Dave for not saying anything and making a bad situation worse, and Rodney for... for being Rodney and inadvertently making Penelope more difficult to dislike.
“Do you still want to be here for the reading?” Dave asks, his voice small and hesitant in the funereal quiet.
“Yeah, I do.” Why, he doesn’t know. To prove to Dave he doesn’t always run? To prove that to his father, who’s dead and doesn’t care?
Dave opens his mouth to press the issue, but he doesn’t. Instead, he takes a bite of pasta and asks Rodney how he likes it.
“Good,” Rodney says. “No citrus.” He looks up from his plate for the first time in five minutes. “So you’re taking over the business?”
“I’ve been running most of the day-to-day operations for ten years now, since Dad retired.” Dave’s forehead creases in confusion, something John can share in; even now, Rodney’s beyond left field questions catch him out. “I’ve been acting CEO for the past six months... I’ll probably take over formally after tomorrow.”
“Good,” Rodney says emphatically. He frowns at John. “It’s just, everyone back on – on base made it clear that if I didn’t come back with you I’d be thrown off the tallest – well, I’d meet a very messy, painful end, and Ronon is really very creative when it comes to that sort of thing, and besides which, I personally would – ” He grinds to a halt, swallows whatever he’s going to say along with a mouthful of wine. “I personally would be irritated at having to find another base commander to break in. Lorne isn’t completely incompetent, but he isn’t – yes. We’ll just say you’re more competent than he is and leave it at that, shall we?”
“Is there a translation for that?” Dave asks, looking winded.
“You need the decoder ring.”
“You’d better not be trying to snake him out from underneath us.” Rodney glares at Dave from over his wineglass.
“Believe me,” John says, “he’s not.”
“Good,” Rodney says, and knifes his pasta mercilessly.
They work through dinner with something approaching civility, although Penelope’s place is as awkward without Penelope in it as it was with her in, and there’s a moment of tension when Rodney suspects the dessert of containing orange peel. John wants to come out of his skin, watching Rodney for any sign of allergic reaction and watching Dave to see what Dave’s thinking about John, Rodney, John and Rodney, the nature of civilian contracting. Dave keeps looking at him, not terribly subtle for a man brought up in the Sheppard school of strategy.
“If you have something to say…” He lets the rest of the sentence ride, puts down his coffee cup before the porcelain breaks in his hand.
“You should cut her a break,” Dave says.
“Look, I didn’t know about her mother.”
Rodney’s looking up from his dessert now, gripping his travel mug – placed conspicuously with the dessert china – his mouth thin with unhappiness. John can’t look at him, but he can’t look at Dave either, or his own murky reflection in his coffee cup.
“I’m not just talking about her mother.” Dave’s hand comes down heavily on the table and Rodney jumps. “Christ, John, you’ve been on her case for twenty-four years.”
“Do I have to be here for this, or can I opt out?” Rodney asks.
“You can clear out, Rodney,” John says. “I’ll be up in a bit,” and he decides Dave can take that any way he likes.
Rodney’s gone, not without a look back over his shoulder, a quick nod that speaks so much more than John thinks he could ever, in quieter moments, decipher. He definitely can’t do it now, with Dave sitting there in his yuppie evening uniform of cashmere sweater and button-down, immaculate like the past week hasn’t touched him. John knows it has, but that’s beside the point; it’s his body that hurts, his head, his heart, every fucking thing, he’s left his home and come back to this whatever-the-hell-it-is that’s made up of a dead father, estranged brother, and stepmother.
“Dad wasn’t trying to replace her.” Dave’s gripping the edge of the table now, voice tense, the same anger from the wake. “He never was, he knew he never could. He loved Mom, John. Jesus.”
“Yeah, well.” You look like your mother.
“Do you seriously think you were the only one of us who missed her?” The silverware clatters as Dave pushes at it; outside, there’s the distant thrum of a plane overhead, the first night sounds of the country. “Mom died, John. It was horrible, and it was a tragedy and it shouldn’t have happened, but it did.”
“Don’t – ” John tries to breathe but through anger and grief can’t remember how. He does remember sirens, flashing lights, and through a screen of police uniforms, his mother’s still body in the street.
He’s tortured people and been tortured, and he’s given pain and received it, knows how to twist words into nooses for men to hang themselves. But this, this there’s no dissociating from, impossible to claw his way to any kind of distance. Dave’s face blurs into his father’s, pale and hollowed out, a demand John’s always lashed out against.
“You have to let this go, John.” It’s something that Kate Heightmeyer would say, if Kate were still alive. “You disappeared for almost four years, you vanish on all these mysterious ‘missions’ – you leave me to take care of the business, to take care of Dad by myself – you do not get to come in here and say anything about me, or Dad, or her.”
Dave pulls in a hitching breath, red-faced and so utterly unlike John remembers him – always the cool, rational older brother, even when their mother had died there’d been something restrained in him that John had hated – that he has no idea what to do. Well, one idea is to get the hell out, to be anywhere but here, tried-and-true strategy for most of his life.
“Do you think my life’s been easy?” He’s allowed his own anger too, though he rarely allows himself access to it.
“I don’t know anything about your life.”
“Then you don’t get to say anything about me, either.” It sounds juvenile – he imagines the two of them as twelve and ten again – but it’s true. “I’ve lost friends these past four years. Good friends. Family.” The kind you make, the kind that doesn’t come with a trust fund and expectations.
“I’m sorry,” Dave says abruptly. He pulls at his collar, another un-Davelike gesture. “You’re right; I can’t assume anything about you. That’s never been a good policy anyway.”
“That’s nice of you to say, seeing as you’ve never had a problem with that before.” John stands, pushing his chair back hard enough to hit the sideboard. The china and crystal on it shiver coldly. “Dad assumed I’d do what he wanted. Dad assumed I’d be okay with him remarrying after Mom died. He assumed – you assumed – that I’d screw anything because I’m gay.” He relishes, with a deep and mean satisfaction, the wince Dave can’t keep back, and he hopes to hell that stings. “And you assumed I came crawling back because I couldn’t hack it on my own.
“So,” he says, and God he’s going to come apart, fucking going to break, “it’d be nice if you’d stop doing that, yeah.”
“I will,” Dave says, and then, more quietly, less certain, “I’ll try.”
The hand John passes over his face is sticky, sweaty, shaking as badly as the rest of his body is. Dave hovers on the edge of standing up, staring at John with nothing of the superiority that’s helped him to second place in John’s Asshole Book. He stays sitting, though, mouth tightening and relaxing with words that won’t come.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Dave says at last, almost a question, enough for John to contest if he wants to drag this out. “Maybe we should… not talk for a while.”
“Not talking’s always good.” Everything’s stretched too thin, and if he keeps talking, he’ll snap, and whatever’s slowly building between the two of them will break forever, past fixing. And it’s an excuse, a lifeline that Dave’s tossing him, and for the first time in possibly ever John’s not too proud to take what’s offered. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Ten,” Dave says, and nods.
He leaves with the odd pressure of his brother’s gaze on his back, persistent even when he makes the shadows of the living room with the barrier of walls between them. He takes the stairs past family portraits, some of them his own, not really seeing them though he can’t begin to count the times he’s gone by them and wondered who the Sheppards thought they were fooling.
John stops in his room to grab his bag, and if Dave comes spying let him assume what he wants and make himself a hypocrite. There’s light under the door of Rodney’s room, more warmth beyond when John opens it, and Rodney in bed already, bent over a journal.
“I um, I hope ,” Rodney starts and doesn’t finish. He doesn’t look up, either, only down at his journal with bright, bloody slashes of red pen on one page.
John drops his bag, and Rodney does look up now, eyes blue and sharp enough to cut through the knots John’s managed to tie himself into today. He moves closer, Rodney becoming more real with each step, details coming out that John’s memorized over four years: sharp chin, the odd quirk of his mouth, his shoulders and how his t-shirt stretches across them. Rodney sets his journal down absently, missing the table so it shuffs and thumps on the carpet, pages bent and sprawling, opens his mouth to say something, but John shakes his head, quiet quiet, and Rodney only nods.
You can do this, John tells himself, wondering when he had to start psyching himself up for sex. This isn’t sex, though, it’s trying to find the space they’d found not three hours ago. It’s something he’s never had, not with his few girlfriends or boyfriends, or even Nancy, who’d known way before he ever did that what they had would never work. And it’s something he’s never wanted, or thought he wanted, much less with Rodney McKay of all people in either galaxy he’s lived in.
But he can have it, or something close to it, something that lets Rodney run his hands up John’s arms and lets John want to stay so Rodney will touch him more. It allows the light to stay on so he can watch Rodney’s face without shadows, and lets him shiver and soak up the heat of Rodney’s body under his shirt, feel the echo of his racketing pulse beneath his palm.
Slow, slow, even though he stretches close over Rodney’s body, time to study and move with something other than desperation. There’s so much he likes, really likes, the subtlety of breath, its hum deep in Rodney’s chest, Rodney moving like he does now, so John can settle between his legs, all his solid weight holding him up. Rodney’s hands, which have already figured him out and are fluent in the language that makes John helpless and makes him not mind being that way. Rodney’s eyes, that change and darken and say everything.
“You okay?” Rodney asks again, sounding afraid of the answer.
“I will be,” John says, and that’s the best answer he has now. He shifts up, a careful drag across Rodney’s cock, and Rodney moans, eyes falling shut in concentration. John does it again and Rodney arches helplessly into him.
“That’s good then,” Rodney whispers, and John can taste the words as Rodney speaks them, sucking wetly on the side of his neck. He bites, hard enough so Rodney goes still in shock, licks over the small marks. Rodney makes a small menacing noise but doesn’t move, head tipped to the side so John can nose and lick and tease the length of his neck, from the soft place under his jaw to the ridge of collar bone.
The house drowses emptily around them, no watching presence now, only Rodney’s hands walking the ladder of John’s spine, tracing pleasure and nonsense into his skin, his thighs cradling John, solid, solid muscle, and Rodney saying things, soft and reverent, how he can’t believe, oh God, that, that again, words tangled up when John kisses him, these complicated kisses, twisting breath and John trying to reach deep, deep, deep and Rodney’s stubble scraping his lips to rawness.
By now, John’s pretty sure, there’d be clothes off, caution gone behind doors safely shut, John needing to hoard what he hasn’t had for four years, Rodney as enthusiastic and absorbed with the two of them as he is by everything else. They’ve learned each other in other ways, with field bandages and late nights on watch, four years of figuring each other out enough to know what they want.
And this wanting is something else again, Rodney hesitant with John’s clothes and John with Rodney’s, a slow slide into bare flesh like they’re drunk and everything needs overthinking. Rodney’s hard, hips moving in erratic hitches under John’s, body cresting into John’s mouth when he mouths one nipple, hands tight in John’s hair to encourage him, to slow him, John doesn’t know, but it’s good, and when he laughs Rodney twists against him and laughs too.
They move like this, careful, thorough, when John slips down Rodney’s body, rubbing, licking, scratching the soft rise of his belly, the transition from torso to hip John’s never quite mapped out. When he takes Rodney’s cock in his mouth, Rodney shifts under him, changes registered against the palms John uses to press him down, thighs tensing, his ass and hips coming half off the bed before John can get him under control. Through the blur of sweat and lamplight John can see Rodney looking down at him, eyes bright and fascinated, expression bare as the rest of him, as they both are.
Fascination falls apart as John begins to suck, running the flat of his tongue along the vein, fingers playing the sensitive skin along hip and thigh, the hollows that run down to Rodney’s groin. Rodney whimpers and twists, and urgency pushes through John’s blood like lightning, his own hips pushing into the mattress even though it’s nowhere near good enough.
“Come here, come here, come here,” Rodney manages, one hand tugging on John’s cowlicks for emphasis, the other brushing his shoulder, nails catching on his skin. Come here, come here, Rodney’s hands, his body, say, and when he can Rodney takes John by the shoulders and pulls John back up to him, back with him, into a kiss that’s salt and heat and Rodney’s wide, wide mouth. It’s mostly lush and sloppy breath because want has driven out everything else in John’s body, including air.
Rodney presses one hand against John’s mouth, nodding frantically, meaningfully, and John gets it enough to lick a wet stripe across Rodney’s palm. Rodney spits gracelessly into his own palm then, gets his hand between them, and wetfirmhot, that’s what Rodney’s hand is when it closes around John’s cock, around the two of them. John buries his face in Rodney’s neck, trying to muffle his own deep, desperate groan, the way he says Rodney’s name, too full of everything John can’t ever say.
“John,” Rodney says, the way John says Rodney’s name, biting at his ear, high on his jaw, an awkward kiss at his temple. Rodney’s neck is a curve of sweat and heat, salt stinging John’s eyes and tongue, and his hand holds them both tight, tight, perfect, calluses rough enough to pull shivers and incoherence through John’s body, to pull him along in time with the pace Rodney wants to set, his heart that gallops lengths ahead of them, up and up and up, and Rodney twists his wrist, twists his hips so their cocks are trapped together and the force of it is gravity or thrust, something that catches John’s body and mind and pulls them both apart.
He comes to, panting and dazed, still between Rodney’s legs and probably pasted there already. The lamp’s yellow light spills lazily over Rodney’s sweaty face, eyes that wear post-sex glaze and a smile hooking Rodney’s mouth.
“You back?” Rodney asks, the tone impatient despite the question being asked of John’s lips. The answer opens into a kiss, into something heading nowhere except itself, and Rodney shifts up on his side to roll them, to turn off the light.
They beat morning to waking up, Rodney still on the Atlantis side of the time difference and already restless and ready for breakfast. Ready for coffee, Rodney adds.
“Stay for a bit,” John says to Rodney’s neck.
“You gave me a hickey,” Rodney mumbles accusingly, “and I don’t see why I should.” But he stays where he is, one hand keeping John’s arm locked around him and doesn’t move until the clock on the table says it’s eight and Rodney’s stomach is trapped between eleven and one, and John knows they have to shower.
And on the bright side, John gets his shower sex, Rodney pressed flat and slippery against the tiles, making sounds the water covers over.
“Susan brought your suit by before dinner, while you were walking around and being angsty,” Rodney tells him while they dress. “She thought you might wear it to the reading.”
John holds to that, the firmness of Rodney’s back against his chest, when they head downstairs. Dave is up already, eyes shadowed like he hasn’t slept, and while the smile he offers is tentative, John can’t find any assumptions in it. Penelope is sitting at the island, a cup of tea in an elegant hand.
“Did you sleep well?” Susan asks, bustling in, brisk and competent where there are four people falling over themselves.
“Very well,” Rodney says, and goes very red. “Yes. Quite well, thank you.” He subsides with one quick, telling glance at John, who shrugs.
Breakfast drags on, hooked into slowness by Dave flipping through the business section and the demure clinks of Penelope’s teacup. She looks worse than last night, washed out and translucent, and though John reminds himself it’s display, because she’s always been theatrical (God, she’d cry whenever John told her how much he hated her, and just... yeah, theatrical), but when Penelope rubs one eye and disarranges her mascara, he can’t make himself believe it completely.
The lawyers show up at five to ten; Rodney takes one look at them, refuses to be introduced, and takes off. John is briefly, powerfully, tempted to go with him; he hasn’t seen three lawyers in the same room since his mother had died and they’d read her will. He’d been thirteen then, handed over to Susan’s charge while six men went into his dad’s office to divide up his mother’s life.
He’s one of those men now, has the suit and tie to prove it, and the right to lead them into his father’s office.
Mahogany and leather close around him, cigars still heavy in the air although his father had given them up years ago. The desk, an assertion of expensive wood and Carrera marble, hasn’t moved once in all of John’s memories of being called into this room. Only the phone, the computers, had ever changed, the pictures of the family on his desk, the framed portrait of Christina Sheppard on the wall opposite.
The lawyers distribute themselves around the desk and hand out the paperwork. John takes his copy and looks at it long enough to see the old-fashioned lettering of the cover page, Patrick John Sheppard in awkward Courier New under Last Will and Testament.
Susan brings coffee, a last breath of kindness, before they start.
The reading feels weirdly like a trade negotiation. He tries to imagine Teyla in a business suit with a P90, Rodney about to explode with frustration in the tiny space, Ronon silently amazed at pointless formality. It helps kill time while McKenzie, Killory, and Stace lay out what they all already know: Dave and Penelope both keep their interests in the business, Dave will be CEO pending approval of the board. John’s in there, which makes him start.
“Mr. Sheppard stipulated that you will keep your 15% share in SPL,” Stace says, eyeing John as though not entirely certain how John’s going to take this. He’s paler than Dave is, not as much hair to varnish into place. “Partly, it’s a matter of keeping controlling stock in family hands, but he also...” Stace shuffles the papers. “He also wanted to be sure you would be provided for, if you ever decided to stay on earth for a while.”
“What?” John shakes his head, thrown by he knows about Atlantis? before remembering that was how his father had always talked, his son kiting off with his head in the clouds.
Stace repeats himself, adds in some information about John’s trust fund, which almost makes him laugh, because things like that – like money, stocks, bank accounts – don’t matter in Pegasus. On Sateda, weapons are passed from generation to generation, on Athos it’s tents and jewelry. The real things, the solid things that tie people together, as real and thick as blood.
The reading wraps up quickly, Penelope and Dave satisfied, John anxious to get out. He wants Rodney for some reason that might have to do with how Rodney can untangle things, whether physics or unfocused grief, things John’s barely started to sort out. He’s dead, he tells himself as he walks back out to the brightness of the kitchen and the real world. Dad’s dead.
Not gone, dead.
He swallows back something like tears, something that comes close to the hollowing feeling that had carved him out when Carson had died, when they’d learned Elizabeth was dead and there’d be no bringing her back.
Dave, sensitive for once, goes into the kitchen. Penelope, ghost-like, trails away to her room. John stands in the dining room, staring at Rodney’s car outside the window, the trees, wondering how everything’s gone all blurry.
There’s movement behind him, hesitant and screaming awkwardness.
“Hey, Rodney.”
“Hey, yourself.” Rodney shuffles in the doorway. John turns, catches a glimpse of the two of them in the mirror, Rodney somehow more Rodney against fancy wood and antiques. He smiles, which Rodney seems to take as invitation to come closer, turning something over and over in his hands.
“Is this you?” Rodney thrusts an old-fashioned picture frame at him, containing a dark-haired woman and a small boy stuck like a postage stamp on the back of a cranky-looking pony. Time has faded the pony’s coat to a weak tan and washed out skin almost to white, but it hasn’t done much to fade happiness.
“Yeah,” John says. He lets himself look at his mother’s smile, her kind face. “That’s me and my mom, and my first pony.”
“I saw your other pictures, with your horses. Explains the thighs.” Rodney coughs, bursts out with rapid-fire, apologetic nonsense. “So, yes, now that I’ve quite possibly – well, it’s true, but anyway, what’s the pony’s name?”
“Primrose,” Dave calls from the kitchen.
“Primrose,” Rodney says, and looks amazed and gleeful both at once.
“I didn’t name him,” John mumbles.
Rodney’s coffee-hoarding again, this time against two hours in traffic to the airport and then hours of transit in which the promise of life-giving caffeine infusions is slim beyond the airport Starbucks. John leaves him to wait for the coffee machine one last time, takes their bags outside on Susan’s suggestion that he make himself useful.
Dave steps in and takes Rodney’s duffel from him.
“It was good seeing you.” Dave fidgets with Rodney’s keys, pressing the lock release so the trunk pops open. “I hope you can come back some time... Adele and Patrice both left while you were busy, but I think they’d like to see you.”
“That’d be good.” It would be awkward as hell, because John’s exchanged about ten words with Dave’s wife, and the last time he’d seen Patrice she’d been five. John stuffs his duffel in beside Rodney’s. “We can go riding.”
“Patrice would love that.” Dave smiles and laughs softly. “She’s like you and Mom, giving Adele grey hairs whenever she goes out in the ring. Adele wants her to stick with hunters, because it’s more civilized.”
“Not as much fun.” John looks back up to the house, the grey, rambling exterior, the neat hedges, the neurotic bay back out in the ring and still circling. Dave’s memories don’t hurt like John thinks they should. Rodney’s probably mainlining the coffee now, or possibly proposing marriage to Susan, or gathering embarrassing stories about John.
“Listen, before we leave, I wanted to tell you something.”
“Shoot,” Dave says.
“Rodney is... he’s a civilian contractor,” John says.
“I know he is.” Dave’s mouth creases in puzzlement. “He told me yesterday.”
“No, he’s...” Somehow breathing works, despite John’s lungs seizing. “He’s my civilian contractor.”
“Oh.” Dave blinks. “Oh.”
“You don’t have to be okay with it.” He does, and John realizes that for the first time ever he wants Dave to be okay with it, him and Rodney. “But I wanted to let you know.”
Dave exhales and studies the interior of the trunk. “How long have you been together?”
“Not long.” Four years, almost, though they hadn’t realized it, four years until John finally touched Rodney to encourage him to something other than saving the day. “But we’ve known each other for a while.”
“That’s good,” and Dave looks surprised at actually meaning it. “Dad would... Well, he’d be weirded out, because Rodney seems pretty strange, but he’d be happy.”
“Dave, I said you don’t have to be okay with it.” John forces himself to stay calm, because this is their last fifteen minutes together for a couple years and he doesn’t – and it’s his turn to be surprised – want it to be like this. “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”
“I do.” Dave pulls the trunk shut. “I don’t understand it, but we’re... I mean, we’ve been doing this too long, John.” He smiles wryly. “I never got you, and I don’t think I ever will, but we... We can be cool, right?”
“We can be,” John says, and realizes that’s the truth.
A moment later his civilian contractor bursts out of the door, laptop case over one shoulder and battered travel mug clutched in both hands. John can’t stop the smile, even though Dave looks away, embarrassed.
“Okay, I’m ready,” Rodney announces. “Did you pack everything?”
“I did. Did you?” Rodney gives him a withering look. “Yes, Rodney, it’s all packed. All two bags.”
“Good. I’m driving.”
“Who needed four hours to get here from the airport? I don’t think so.”
“That was not my fault, it was the GPS, and – ”
Rodney breaks off, becoming aware of Dave for the first time. “Oh.” Rodney shifts the travel mug to one hand. “Um, thank you very much for having me,” he says, and coming from Rodney that’s an expression of deepest gratitude.
Fortunately, Dave takes it as such and offers his hand one more time. “Any civilian contractor of John’s is a friend of mine,” he says. “You’re welcome.”
Rodney peers skeptically at John, mutters something about the terminal weirdness of Sheppards regardless of name, but shakes Dave’s hand and, realizing that John has the keys now, stalks around to the passenger side.
“Take care, John,” Dave says, older-brother authority behind the advice. John looks up at him, sees for the first time that Dave’s eyes aren’t quite like their father’s. “Come home some time.”
It isn’t home and it won’t ever be, John thinks – it’s not spires and water and impossible skies – but it’s closer than before, close enough for him to take Dave’s hand and say he will, and mean it.
-end-
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