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.wip amnesty: Apocalypse Fic (John, Rodney) 1.1
OMFG, I have been stuck in boring meetings all day, and in.. 26 minutes I have to go and listen to someone natter on for an hour. After absorbing various strains of blather throughout the day, my brain is now mush on the bottom of my skull. Also, my brain is annoyed because after tonight SPN goes on hiatus for the rest of the month and I have no more shows to watch until March.
To sum up: today = lame.
I sort of have this itch to post something, even though the things I'm working on are nowhere near done yet, but I have to have something come out of a more-or-less wasteland of a day. As I have been seeing WIP amnesties going around, I thought I would post one of my own. This is from September 2006, believe it or not. And, after more than two years... I figure it's not going to be done.
Apoca!Fic (PG) John, Rodney | ~2,200
For the first few hours of their acquaintance, he was Man With Wagon. John didn’t get his real name until later; he actually didn’t really meet meet Man With Wagon right away, so much as see his legs – khaki cargo pants and hiking boots – and the Radio Flyer wagon parked outside the tent, which was why John called him Man With Wagon.
Come to think of it, Man With Wagon had most likely been around for a lot more than a few hours. John couldn’t remember much, but he was pretty sure he’d spent at least a day out here, stranded in the high desert with a busted head, a dead alien, and his dead alien plane.
His own plane had crashed a hundred yards from the alien’s, and John had landed tangled in his parachute, hard on his left side and something was probably broken and the sand had been small, hot knives in his skin. Wonderful padding of adrenaline, and he’d kicked himself free and yanked his sidearm from its holster, stood up and run across the sand – blind, stupid, furious and probably about to die – right up to the strange and smoking ship.
Reached it just as what looked like the canopy flickered and vanished and then it was something out of nightmare, pale green skin and claws, hideous teeth, worse to think it looked as though it should have been human.
He’d emptied his sidearm into that face, and the thing had still kept moving, arms flailing blindly through a cloud of bone and blood, and somehow the thing had got its hands around John’s neck and he could feel something happening, a vicious tugging like being pulled out of himself, but then they fell to the sand and the thing fell off him, still twitching.
Desperation drove him to his feet even as the thing – Jesus Christ, what was it? – turned to him, eyeless and ruined and John backed off and reloaded and emptied one more clip, and then collapsed.
By the time he’d woken up, it was dark and the thing was still dead, whatever brains it had scattered all over its cockpit, down the side of the ship, and some all over John, too.
“Just you and me, buddy,” he’d told the monster-corpse-thing. For a moment he expected it to answer, but the bloody cavity of its skull only yawned back at him.
His head seemed loose, spinning oddly on his neck like something had detached, which was a ridiculous thought and made him want to laugh. Dimly he recognized the onset of shock, the delirium that came with being called out from Nellis to fight a swarm of alien ships that had materialized over the desert.
They’d attacked the base, and people had disappeared. Back in the real, rational world where these things didn’t happen, he would have said it was the bad concussion speaking and the dehydration, lurching nausea in his stomach, some alchemy of shock, but the faceless green alien was still lying there, dead, and John was still propped up against the fuselage of its ship. So probably real after all.
When Vampire Martians Attack. Great. Wonderful. He would have sighed, except breathing too deeply hurt. A lot. More than it should, and he should also probably think about trying to fix that or else the aliens would have one less person to experiment on.
Mentally, he catalogued what he had on him, which wasn’t much: a couple more rounds of ammunition, his gun, basic survival stuff, his knife, a radio he wasn’t sure he wanted to use; the last time he’d seen the base, it’d been in flames, and people had disappeared, vanished right off the ground.
Inventory: a couple MREs, a Snickers bar tucked in a spare pocket, his lucky quarter.
Water enough for three days, four if he stretched it.
After that, he had his gun.
And the quarter, if he really needed it.
At one point, he has a dream about someone giving him water, a hand cupping the back of his head to steady him, and that would usually have been enough to freak him out, but it’s nice, being able to drink finally, so he lets the dream go on.
At another he dreams that someone‘s trying to do something to his head – turning it gently, pressure that really hurts and a hand – familiar – over his mouth, and a strange voice tells him to calm down, for Chrissakes please don’t scream and he’s sucking in air through his nostrils and God it hurts until the world flashes red and then tumbles back down into blackness again.
One more time, because his head’s tilted to the side and it hurts even in his dreams: a wagon parked maybe six feet away, red paint glistening, and a pair of khaki legs marching busily around it. Man With Wagon, he thinks dimly.
This happens a couple more times, and maybe a day and a night pass, but he’s not sure.
When John really woke up and was sure he wasn’t dreaming, the light had softened. Dusk or dawn, he couldn’t tell, and needed a minute to figure out was late evening, with the shadows on the distant hills almost gone and the sun setting behind him, to the west.
A big square of canvas was draped over the wing; John could see the creases from where it had been folded, and the warranty tags dangling from a piece of string looped through an eyelet. New, and that seemed important somehow, though he couldn’t say exactly why. Beyond the shade, he saw the side of the alien ship, looking like bone and tendon, a huge severed limb – which he was not going to think about – and a wagon parked there on the sand.
A red wagon, a Radio Flyer even, like the kind he’d had when he was a kid, piled high with stuff: shoes, food, gallon jugs of water, miscellaneous things John couldn’t make out. Rummaging, scavenging sounds came from somewhere up above, as though from the cockpit, but what the hell someone would be doing in there, John had no idea.
For a moment he thought the alien had somehow survived, like anything that had gone to that amount of trouble to kill him was going to stick him under shade, give him water, and bandage his head. Having a concussion was no reason to be an idiot, he told himself.
He tried out a hello that sounded more like a death rattle than an actual word.
“The hell?” said a voice from above and beyond the canvas, followed by a heavy, sandy thump as oddly familiar cargo pants and boots landed next to the wagon.
“Oh my God, you aren’t dead,” said the voice belonging to the boots and cargo pants. “Um, that is, I mean, you’re awake.” The rest of the man followed a moment later: thinning brown hair, solid, sturdy body, narrow blue eyes that were improbably bright when he looked at John. A generous smear of what looked like sun block decorated his face, though not on the back of his neck, which looked uncomfortably red.
“You’re not Air Force,” John said, more than a bit stupidly.
“God, no.” Man With Wagon’s tone was scandalized, and his mouth – a long, expressive mouth – had taken on a definite slant of annoyance. “I’m Canadian.”
“Sorry.” John left Man With Wagon to figure out if he was sorry for the mix-up or sorry for the nationality. “Where – how long have I been out?”
“I’ve been here for a day and a half, so at least that long,” Man With Wagon said. He didn’t sound particularly concerned, more brisk and businesslike, faint irritation with the inconvenience John’s near death had caused him. “You’re not going to throw up again, are you? You’ll get dehydrated if you do, and I only have so much water, and besides, I can’t stand it when people throw up, and cleaning up after you was bad enough. I have a very sensitive stomach.”
“I’ll try not to,” John croaked. His head ached fiercely, deep and steady throbs of pain coming up from somewhere behind his right eye, lighting up every nerve. He wondered how many aspirins he need to take care of it.
“So, who are you?” he asked to distract himself. “I can’t call you ‘Man With Wagon.’”
“That’s my Indian name,” Man With Wagon said. “But you can call me Rodney. Dr. Rodney McKay,” he added after a heartbeat, as though the courtesy title mattered all the way out here.
“Major John Sheppard, US Air Force,” John said solemnly.
“Good to meet you, Major.” Dr. Rodney McKay stared at him a moment, as though at something interesting, and yet grotesque, under a microscope.
“I hope ‘doctor’ in this case means surgeon.” John tried to hitch himself into a different position because his ass was numb and there was sand all up in his flight suit somehow (How? How in the hell did that happen?) and McKay was staring at him still, oddly disconcerting.
“What?” McKay shook his head, snapping out of it. “Do I look like a member of the medical profession? No. I’m an astrophysicist.”
“Sorry.” He watched McKay chew over the ambiguity for a moment. “So, where are you coming from?” The desert around them was anonymous.
“I passed the ‘Welcome to Utah’ sign on my way here,” Rodney said. “A couple miles past the border, I guess. Though what are they welcoming you to, anyway? Crazed polygamist communes? More desert?”
John blinked. Not all that far from Nellis, then, though fighting with that alien ship seemed as though it had taken long enough to fly around the world. And to take down one ship… He remembered, vaguely, watching his students shot out of the sky, long grey slivers of metal vanishing into smoke and flames. They’d been kids, brilliant pilots but kids, still learning and they hadn’t had a chance.
“You okay?” McKay was still watching him, blue eyes narrow and intent.
“Fine.” John pushed them to the back of his mind, along with all the other men and women he’d seen die instead of him. “So what’s a Canadian doing out in the middle of nowhere?”
“Know what? You need water,” McKay said decisively. “Be right back.”
To sum up: today = lame.
I sort of have this itch to post something, even though the things I'm working on are nowhere near done yet, but I have to have something come out of a more-or-less wasteland of a day. As I have been seeing WIP amnesties going around, I thought I would post one of my own. This is from September 2006, believe it or not. And, after more than two years... I figure it's not going to be done.
Apoca!Fic (PG) John, Rodney | ~2,200
For the first few hours of their acquaintance, he was Man With Wagon. John didn’t get his real name until later; he actually didn’t really meet meet Man With Wagon right away, so much as see his legs – khaki cargo pants and hiking boots – and the Radio Flyer wagon parked outside the tent, which was why John called him Man With Wagon.
Come to think of it, Man With Wagon had most likely been around for a lot more than a few hours. John couldn’t remember much, but he was pretty sure he’d spent at least a day out here, stranded in the high desert with a busted head, a dead alien, and his dead alien plane.
His own plane had crashed a hundred yards from the alien’s, and John had landed tangled in his parachute, hard on his left side and something was probably broken and the sand had been small, hot knives in his skin. Wonderful padding of adrenaline, and he’d kicked himself free and yanked his sidearm from its holster, stood up and run across the sand – blind, stupid, furious and probably about to die – right up to the strange and smoking ship.
Reached it just as what looked like the canopy flickered and vanished and then it was something out of nightmare, pale green skin and claws, hideous teeth, worse to think it looked as though it should have been human.
He’d emptied his sidearm into that face, and the thing had still kept moving, arms flailing blindly through a cloud of bone and blood, and somehow the thing had got its hands around John’s neck and he could feel something happening, a vicious tugging like being pulled out of himself, but then they fell to the sand and the thing fell off him, still twitching.
Desperation drove him to his feet even as the thing – Jesus Christ, what was it? – turned to him, eyeless and ruined and John backed off and reloaded and emptied one more clip, and then collapsed.
By the time he’d woken up, it was dark and the thing was still dead, whatever brains it had scattered all over its cockpit, down the side of the ship, and some all over John, too.
“Just you and me, buddy,” he’d told the monster-corpse-thing. For a moment he expected it to answer, but the bloody cavity of its skull only yawned back at him.
His head seemed loose, spinning oddly on his neck like something had detached, which was a ridiculous thought and made him want to laugh. Dimly he recognized the onset of shock, the delirium that came with being called out from Nellis to fight a swarm of alien ships that had materialized over the desert.
They’d attacked the base, and people had disappeared. Back in the real, rational world where these things didn’t happen, he would have said it was the bad concussion speaking and the dehydration, lurching nausea in his stomach, some alchemy of shock, but the faceless green alien was still lying there, dead, and John was still propped up against the fuselage of its ship. So probably real after all.
When Vampire Martians Attack. Great. Wonderful. He would have sighed, except breathing too deeply hurt. A lot. More than it should, and he should also probably think about trying to fix that or else the aliens would have one less person to experiment on.
Mentally, he catalogued what he had on him, which wasn’t much: a couple more rounds of ammunition, his gun, basic survival stuff, his knife, a radio he wasn’t sure he wanted to use; the last time he’d seen the base, it’d been in flames, and people had disappeared, vanished right off the ground.
Inventory: a couple MREs, a Snickers bar tucked in a spare pocket, his lucky quarter.
Water enough for three days, four if he stretched it.
After that, he had his gun.
And the quarter, if he really needed it.
At one point, he has a dream about someone giving him water, a hand cupping the back of his head to steady him, and that would usually have been enough to freak him out, but it’s nice, being able to drink finally, so he lets the dream go on.
At another he dreams that someone‘s trying to do something to his head – turning it gently, pressure that really hurts and a hand – familiar – over his mouth, and a strange voice tells him to calm down, for Chrissakes please don’t scream and he’s sucking in air through his nostrils and God it hurts until the world flashes red and then tumbles back down into blackness again.
One more time, because his head’s tilted to the side and it hurts even in his dreams: a wagon parked maybe six feet away, red paint glistening, and a pair of khaki legs marching busily around it. Man With Wagon, he thinks dimly.
This happens a couple more times, and maybe a day and a night pass, but he’s not sure.
When John really woke up and was sure he wasn’t dreaming, the light had softened. Dusk or dawn, he couldn’t tell, and needed a minute to figure out was late evening, with the shadows on the distant hills almost gone and the sun setting behind him, to the west.
A big square of canvas was draped over the wing; John could see the creases from where it had been folded, and the warranty tags dangling from a piece of string looped through an eyelet. New, and that seemed important somehow, though he couldn’t say exactly why. Beyond the shade, he saw the side of the alien ship, looking like bone and tendon, a huge severed limb – which he was not going to think about – and a wagon parked there on the sand.
A red wagon, a Radio Flyer even, like the kind he’d had when he was a kid, piled high with stuff: shoes, food, gallon jugs of water, miscellaneous things John couldn’t make out. Rummaging, scavenging sounds came from somewhere up above, as though from the cockpit, but what the hell someone would be doing in there, John had no idea.
For a moment he thought the alien had somehow survived, like anything that had gone to that amount of trouble to kill him was going to stick him under shade, give him water, and bandage his head. Having a concussion was no reason to be an idiot, he told himself.
He tried out a hello that sounded more like a death rattle than an actual word.
“The hell?” said a voice from above and beyond the canvas, followed by a heavy, sandy thump as oddly familiar cargo pants and boots landed next to the wagon.
“Oh my God, you aren’t dead,” said the voice belonging to the boots and cargo pants. “Um, that is, I mean, you’re awake.” The rest of the man followed a moment later: thinning brown hair, solid, sturdy body, narrow blue eyes that were improbably bright when he looked at John. A generous smear of what looked like sun block decorated his face, though not on the back of his neck, which looked uncomfortably red.
“You’re not Air Force,” John said, more than a bit stupidly.
“God, no.” Man With Wagon’s tone was scandalized, and his mouth – a long, expressive mouth – had taken on a definite slant of annoyance. “I’m Canadian.”
“Sorry.” John left Man With Wagon to figure out if he was sorry for the mix-up or sorry for the nationality. “Where – how long have I been out?”
“I’ve been here for a day and a half, so at least that long,” Man With Wagon said. He didn’t sound particularly concerned, more brisk and businesslike, faint irritation with the inconvenience John’s near death had caused him. “You’re not going to throw up again, are you? You’ll get dehydrated if you do, and I only have so much water, and besides, I can’t stand it when people throw up, and cleaning up after you was bad enough. I have a very sensitive stomach.”
“I’ll try not to,” John croaked. His head ached fiercely, deep and steady throbs of pain coming up from somewhere behind his right eye, lighting up every nerve. He wondered how many aspirins he need to take care of it.
“So, who are you?” he asked to distract himself. “I can’t call you ‘Man With Wagon.’”
“That’s my Indian name,” Man With Wagon said. “But you can call me Rodney. Dr. Rodney McKay,” he added after a heartbeat, as though the courtesy title mattered all the way out here.
“Major John Sheppard, US Air Force,” John said solemnly.
“Good to meet you, Major.” Dr. Rodney McKay stared at him a moment, as though at something interesting, and yet grotesque, under a microscope.
“I hope ‘doctor’ in this case means surgeon.” John tried to hitch himself into a different position because his ass was numb and there was sand all up in his flight suit somehow (How? How in the hell did that happen?) and McKay was staring at him still, oddly disconcerting.
“What?” McKay shook his head, snapping out of it. “Do I look like a member of the medical profession? No. I’m an astrophysicist.”
“Sorry.” He watched McKay chew over the ambiguity for a moment. “So, where are you coming from?” The desert around them was anonymous.
“I passed the ‘Welcome to Utah’ sign on my way here,” Rodney said. “A couple miles past the border, I guess. Though what are they welcoming you to, anyway? Crazed polygamist communes? More desert?”
John blinked. Not all that far from Nellis, then, though fighting with that alien ship seemed as though it had taken long enough to fly around the world. And to take down one ship… He remembered, vaguely, watching his students shot out of the sky, long grey slivers of metal vanishing into smoke and flames. They’d been kids, brilliant pilots but kids, still learning and they hadn’t had a chance.
“You okay?” McKay was still watching him, blue eyes narrow and intent.
“Fine.” John pushed them to the back of his mind, along with all the other men and women he’d seen die instead of him. “So what’s a Canadian doing out in the middle of nowhere?”
“Know what? You need water,” McKay said decisively. “Be right back.”
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And no SPN for a month??? NOO!!
And I just started it!:(
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Yay for WIP amnesty!
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