SGA - Complicated
Title: Complicated
Genre: Slash, McShep, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~ 1,400 words
Spoilers: Tao of Rodney
Synopsis: It was a question John was hoping he would not have to answer.
Author’s Notes: For the cliche_bingo entry “What is this thing you call love?”
Disclaimer: Not mine, they belong to people with far more money than me. I’m just borrowing them and making no profit.
~~~~~~~~~~
“What is that?” Rodney asked. His voice had the absent quality he had taken on recently, so John thought it would pass. Instead, he looked up from his latest creation and repeated, “That thing you said just now, what is it?”
“Love?” John coughed. He looked around, half afraid someone would hear him and half afraid he was on his own in this.
Rodney nodded. “Yeah, that.”
John sighed, knowing there was no getting out of it, not if the look on McKay’s face was anything to go by. Something gnawed at him, told him this was important, so he tried to think of everything that one little word meant, all of its possibilities, and the reality it now held.
He looked at the child before him because, truly, Rodney was no more than that. Gone was the man who had spent five days with nearly no sleep in an attempt to solve the latest catastrophe, only to have everything backfire and turn ever so worse in a matter of moments. Gone was the man who managed to get his entire department out of the room before the damned thing exploded, only to get caught in the destructive wave himself while typing the commands that would save the rest of the city. Gone was the man who suffered, dying slowly as his body shut down and the city started to crumble around him, using the last of his energy to try to save the day once more until he just couldn’t do it again.
Rodney had not died then. As he lay there, more machines than organs supporting his life at that point, he whispered a secret to John and only John, that the Ancients’ ascension machine had worked, that in what had been no more than a breath in this realm of existence there had been an eternity of arguing until they agreed to let him return and save himself, leaving no one the wiser. Then he said something even more unexpected: he thought he could do it again.
So John had held his hand, watched as the lights on the flashing monitors were overwhelmed by a glow from deep within Rodney himself, felt his body dissolve into that light and leave nothing but warmth and tears behind.
Three days they had waited. For three days, they searched every corridor, every closet, used every single sensor they had to try to find him both in the city and on the mainland. Radek tried to both shore up the systems and divert power to those sensors, just in case Rodney had somehow ended up out of range or hidden somewhere they could not find him. Teyla and Ronon sent out feelers to allied planets, visited those that looked promising, but there was no word of his return.
On the morning of the fourth day, they were attacked. A virus hit Atlantis herself, sending environmental controls haywire, toxic gas filling a supposedly benign lab full of biologists, transporters flashing people away only for them to never return again. The ZPM was both overloading and feeding the chaos, and attempting to remove it had cost Simpson two fingers and a fair amount of skin on her left forearm.
By the afternoon of the fifth day, a child had appeared in front of the Stargate without a single alarm ever going off. No one questioned who it was.
Rodney had explained how he took the form of a child to try to use the more malleable brain to retain the knowledge of how to not only defeat the virus, but to rebuild Atlantis and turn her against her enemy. John had read the report of the Ancient Orlin doing something similar at the SGC during the Ori attack, knew there were consequences Rodney was not telling the others.
It did not matter. Rodney was phenomenal. The child found a terminal no one even knew existed in the Chair Room and started typing. Screens lit up at a thought, code streaming by faster than John could read. Someone always stayed with him through those long hours, placing food and drink in his hands and forcing him to pay attention to his physical needs when he would list to the side or the shadows under his eyes grew too deep.
Rodney was successful. He hacked the virus, traced back the coding, started algorithms to repair the damage and sent something even more deadly back to their attackers.
It was when he attempted to flush the environmental systems that they realized he no longer knew his own name.
They dragged him away from the terminal when the coding slowed, when he had to pause to find the right letter or number just to choose what system he wanted to pull up next. His mind was gone, his body following. They restarted his heart only to have to explain what a heart was. The great intelligence that had saved the city had regressed to not just that of a child, but of a child far younger than what he had returned as.
John sat with him, knowing the end was coming. Teyla and Ronon stopped by but left when Rodney introduced himself to them for the eleventh time in as many minutes. Radek built him a robot, but Rodney had no idea how to control it, handing the remote to John as he picked up a crayon instead. The closest thing to a logarithm that he understood was when he beat out a perfect 5/8ths beat with the Lincoln Logs his niece had sent with her mother to give to him. Music was the only thing that calmed him now, a constant melody piped in from a laptop he no longer knew how to use, just letting it play through a near infinite playlist at will, Jeannie occasionally backing it up to a childhood favorite and then running from the room before John could see her cry once more.
Rodney had done it all willingly, knowingly. He had sacrificed everything he was, everything he had the chance to become to save them all. His love for the city, for its people, for his friends, had guided him, drove him to make the decisions he knew they would never agree to. Decisions he knew John would never agree to.
So now, as he leaned against John, feverish forehead rubbing against his sleeve, looking up at him with too-bright blue eyes and asking him what love was, what it could mean, all John could choke out was, “It’s complicated.”
That seemed enough, as Rodney nodded and picked up a blue crayon, coloring in the fur of a cat in messy strokes. When he finished, he handed John the multicolored creation and said simply, “I’m done now.”
John looked down at the picture, tried to find something to say, tried to think up a place where they could hang it where Rodney could not only see it, but recognize it as his own. When he glanced up again, the child was gone, the little nub of crayon laying in the empty space he had left.
John looked around, tried to find him, knew it was a lost cause. He was reaching for his radio when a familiar voice echoed in the nearly empty room.
“Complicated, huh?” Rodney asked, sitting naked as the day he was born on the pallet that had made up his bed these past days.
John blinked back his tears, crossed the space to his lover’s arms, held him close, breathed him in, felt how real he was once more. “Yeah, complicated,” he agreed, pressing his lips to a bare shoulder.
Rodney laughed, lovely and alive. He tilted John’s head up and kissed him proper, let him vent his frustrations and elations all at once.
Years later, after another long day of horrific near misses and miraculous rescues in just the nick of time, John came back to their quarters and took in the sight of Rodney passed out thoroughly on the bed, blankets and uniform askew as he snored on. With a glance over his shoulder to make certain the miracle worker was still asleep, he opened the desk drawer and took out a simple folder, opened it to let his fingers drift over the heavy wax of a crazily colored kitten. With a quirk of his lips, he whispered, “Yeah, complicated.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Feedback is always welcomed.
Genre: Slash, McShep, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~ 1,400 words
Spoilers: Tao of Rodney
Synopsis: It was a question John was hoping he would not have to answer.
Author’s Notes: For the cliche_bingo entry “What is this thing you call love?”
Disclaimer: Not mine, they belong to people with far more money than me. I’m just borrowing them and making no profit.
~~~~~~~~~~
“What is that?” Rodney asked. His voice had the absent quality he had taken on recently, so John thought it would pass. Instead, he looked up from his latest creation and repeated, “That thing you said just now, what is it?”
“Love?” John coughed. He looked around, half afraid someone would hear him and half afraid he was on his own in this.
Rodney nodded. “Yeah, that.”
John sighed, knowing there was no getting out of it, not if the look on McKay’s face was anything to go by. Something gnawed at him, told him this was important, so he tried to think of everything that one little word meant, all of its possibilities, and the reality it now held.
He looked at the child before him because, truly, Rodney was no more than that. Gone was the man who had spent five days with nearly no sleep in an attempt to solve the latest catastrophe, only to have everything backfire and turn ever so worse in a matter of moments. Gone was the man who managed to get his entire department out of the room before the damned thing exploded, only to get caught in the destructive wave himself while typing the commands that would save the rest of the city. Gone was the man who suffered, dying slowly as his body shut down and the city started to crumble around him, using the last of his energy to try to save the day once more until he just couldn’t do it again.
Rodney had not died then. As he lay there, more machines than organs supporting his life at that point, he whispered a secret to John and only John, that the Ancients’ ascension machine had worked, that in what had been no more than a breath in this realm of existence there had been an eternity of arguing until they agreed to let him return and save himself, leaving no one the wiser. Then he said something even more unexpected: he thought he could do it again.
So John had held his hand, watched as the lights on the flashing monitors were overwhelmed by a glow from deep within Rodney himself, felt his body dissolve into that light and leave nothing but warmth and tears behind.
Three days they had waited. For three days, they searched every corridor, every closet, used every single sensor they had to try to find him both in the city and on the mainland. Radek tried to both shore up the systems and divert power to those sensors, just in case Rodney had somehow ended up out of range or hidden somewhere they could not find him. Teyla and Ronon sent out feelers to allied planets, visited those that looked promising, but there was no word of his return.
On the morning of the fourth day, they were attacked. A virus hit Atlantis herself, sending environmental controls haywire, toxic gas filling a supposedly benign lab full of biologists, transporters flashing people away only for them to never return again. The ZPM was both overloading and feeding the chaos, and attempting to remove it had cost Simpson two fingers and a fair amount of skin on her left forearm.
By the afternoon of the fifth day, a child had appeared in front of the Stargate without a single alarm ever going off. No one questioned who it was.
Rodney had explained how he took the form of a child to try to use the more malleable brain to retain the knowledge of how to not only defeat the virus, but to rebuild Atlantis and turn her against her enemy. John had read the report of the Ancient Orlin doing something similar at the SGC during the Ori attack, knew there were consequences Rodney was not telling the others.
It did not matter. Rodney was phenomenal. The child found a terminal no one even knew existed in the Chair Room and started typing. Screens lit up at a thought, code streaming by faster than John could read. Someone always stayed with him through those long hours, placing food and drink in his hands and forcing him to pay attention to his physical needs when he would list to the side or the shadows under his eyes grew too deep.
Rodney was successful. He hacked the virus, traced back the coding, started algorithms to repair the damage and sent something even more deadly back to their attackers.
It was when he attempted to flush the environmental systems that they realized he no longer knew his own name.
They dragged him away from the terminal when the coding slowed, when he had to pause to find the right letter or number just to choose what system he wanted to pull up next. His mind was gone, his body following. They restarted his heart only to have to explain what a heart was. The great intelligence that had saved the city had regressed to not just that of a child, but of a child far younger than what he had returned as.
John sat with him, knowing the end was coming. Teyla and Ronon stopped by but left when Rodney introduced himself to them for the eleventh time in as many minutes. Radek built him a robot, but Rodney had no idea how to control it, handing the remote to John as he picked up a crayon instead. The closest thing to a logarithm that he understood was when he beat out a perfect 5/8ths beat with the Lincoln Logs his niece had sent with her mother to give to him. Music was the only thing that calmed him now, a constant melody piped in from a laptop he no longer knew how to use, just letting it play through a near infinite playlist at will, Jeannie occasionally backing it up to a childhood favorite and then running from the room before John could see her cry once more.
Rodney had done it all willingly, knowingly. He had sacrificed everything he was, everything he had the chance to become to save them all. His love for the city, for its people, for his friends, had guided him, drove him to make the decisions he knew they would never agree to. Decisions he knew John would never agree to.
So now, as he leaned against John, feverish forehead rubbing against his sleeve, looking up at him with too-bright blue eyes and asking him what love was, what it could mean, all John could choke out was, “It’s complicated.”
That seemed enough, as Rodney nodded and picked up a blue crayon, coloring in the fur of a cat in messy strokes. When he finished, he handed John the multicolored creation and said simply, “I’m done now.”
John looked down at the picture, tried to find something to say, tried to think up a place where they could hang it where Rodney could not only see it, but recognize it as his own. When he glanced up again, the child was gone, the little nub of crayon laying in the empty space he had left.
John looked around, tried to find him, knew it was a lost cause. He was reaching for his radio when a familiar voice echoed in the nearly empty room.
“Complicated, huh?” Rodney asked, sitting naked as the day he was born on the pallet that had made up his bed these past days.
John blinked back his tears, crossed the space to his lover’s arms, held him close, breathed him in, felt how real he was once more. “Yeah, complicated,” he agreed, pressing his lips to a bare shoulder.
Rodney laughed, lovely and alive. He tilted John’s head up and kissed him proper, let him vent his frustrations and elations all at once.
Years later, after another long day of horrific near misses and miraculous rescues in just the nick of time, John came back to their quarters and took in the sight of Rodney passed out thoroughly on the bed, blankets and uniform askew as he snored on. With a glance over his shoulder to make certain the miracle worker was still asleep, he opened the desk drawer and took out a simple folder, opened it to let his fingers drift over the heavy wax of a crazily colored kitten. With a quirk of his lips, he whispered, “Yeah, complicated.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Feedback is always welcomed.