'Wireless' by aesc: commentary by sheafrotherdon
Title: Wireless
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McShep
Rating/Warnings: NC17; sex, angst
Disclaimers: Not mine. Sci-Fi's.
Advertisements: For wordclaim50 challenge #30, "Missing Scene" (my word is 'find'). Set during 3.10, just after the OTP (One True Phonecall).
Notes: Long-overdue request fic for lilithilien, who wanted McShep!phone sex. Coincidentally, I think this is the first bit of phone sex I've ever written. *twitch*
WIRELESS
“Hey, you know, I - ”
“Goodbye, Rodney,” John says impatiently, and then there’s that final, terrible click and Rodney’s cell phone makes the disappointed beep meant to indicate the connection’s been lost.
My favorite tags are always those that root themselves in canon, and this is a wonderful example. Rodney's face, on the show, as John cuts off the call is haunting - lost, defeated, a little unsurprised. Breaking the paragraph here gives us a moment to call up that image before we wade deeper into Rodney's thoughts.
It figures, is the first thought he has after well, that sucked. It figures the one time he takes Jeannie’s advice and tries to keep in touch with other people - with friends - they either fall off the face of the earth (Elizabeth) or hang up on him (John). See if he was ever going to listen to Jeannie ever again, after this. What a… a debacle.
That’s the proper word for it. Debacle. Unmitigated disaster.
One of the things I find most fun to write is the babbling overload of Rodney's thoughts, so this just made me gleeful. I love how many threads of conversation he keeps going with himself, and then how precise he gets with his language. "Debacle. Unmitigated disaster." He's not just maudlin, but still verifying his intelligence while being (justifiably) maudlin.
Note to self: Never try to ask for phone sex ever again. Not only will it be a debacle, it will be humiliating, and will leave you feeling like… Well, like crap.
So nicely done - from this tiny fragment of internal monologue we suddenly realize more's at play that might at first appear. John's someone who Rodney can ask for phone sex - who's apparently said 'no' to phone sex, but at least Rodney felt like trying. It raises more questions - first time proposal? Had they talked about this before? Done this before? Was this brought on by earth separation, or something that pre-dated them leaving Atlantis?
“Yeah,” he mutters to himself, and then forbids the entertaining of any more pitiful thoughts for the day. It’s a resolution he keeps for about .02 seconds, long enough to look around his office and feel like something’s been cut, that he’s floating, directionless despite all the great things he’s supposed to do.
I really enjoy the idea of Rodney "floating, directionless," here, almost as though gravity's been cut. It's a lovely kickback to the idea of space, and to other things we've seen him do - space walking, powering up the satellite in season one etc. It reminds us how much he's lost.
Rodney shoves his cell phone into a random pocket, stalks out of his office, down the iron catwalk and its series of girders. Iron rings discordant under his feet, and when he grips the railing on his way down the stairs - the murderous and steep stairs, and this is so going to aggravate the sciatica he knows he’s developing - the metal zings and slithers and whispers across his palms. Once safe on terra firma, he wipes his hand on his shirt to rub out the sensation but he can still feel it, hear it in his ears.
Once again, this affirms our sense of Rodney's disconnection. Atlantis hovers, unspoken, behind all these words -iron and girders in a cavernous lab contrasting with the beautiful, seamless, glass and crystal he's left behind. He's done worse than walk down steep stairs in the Pegasus Galaxy - his grumbling about sciatica makes me feel such fondness for him, for his default setting of 'complaint' when he's uncertain or upset.
The lab is more like a factory, this massive yawning thing around him, five stories tall, webs of steel and polymer, and the place is so huge that it swallows up sound and spits it back out as nonsense. And when he’d first been assigned it, his own private lab (or as close to private as one can get when contracting with the US military), he’d thought he would be like unto a god, looking down on his creation from his fifth-floor office, his assistants and the technicians like ants fifty feet below.
Yes, all-seeing, all-powerful, all-knowing. Rodney McKay is a vengeful god, a merciless god.
And a frustrated god.
The first part of this section is all Rodney - or at least, the public face of Rodney McKay. Rodney the God, controlling the lives of mere mortals - it seems a short leap from some of his grander, more egotistic announcements to this. Yet it doesn't fit him, and that's the heart of who he really is - a guy who thinks he wants to be god but who finds the experience disappointing and frustrating, more trouble than it's worth, and it ends up he's not that good at vengeance.
The turbines that dominate the lab are only prototypes, hideous ones at that, meant to simulate the sorts of devices that may be necessary to power the creation of a Lorentzian wormhole outside a stargate. Inelegant, which Rodney hates, ugly like the rest of the lab. and if he’d been a god, Rodney would never have created all this unpainted metal, left the iron bones of this place exposed, its joints and rivets bare.
He would have made it like Atlantis, because the Ancients - for all the issues Rodney has with them at the moment - understood that the world is an ordered place under the chaos, a beautiful and elegant place, and Atlantis reflected that. He would have had those flattened curves, that symmetry echoed in metal and stone and glass, the windows that let you look out on the world you wanted so much to know.
And here, aesc spells out what's already been hinted at, that Rodney's frustration is homesickness, that physics and math and all the work he does is in the pursuit of beauty and harmony, and ugliness pains him on practically every level there is.
Besides, he didn’t even create his lab, he inherited it. He thinks this as he stomps past a flock of anxious assistants, ignoring their stammered attempts at conversation. Inherited it from the 1950s school of design, Dystopian Warehouse Nightmare or something like that. He hates it.
He thinks all this deep down in some place he’ll never admit to having. And oddly, bitching about his lab, his assistants, his “choice” of projects to Sheppard hasn’t made him feel any better about any of it.
But he is definitely not going to think about Sheppard.
Instead, he’s going to wonder why his butt is vibrating.
Oh, wait. Cell phone.
I love that aesc's Rodney speaks in grand gestures - Dystopian Warehouse design indeed - but can get derailed at a moment's notice. It's the quintessential essence of Rodney - and the source of so much comedy in the show.
He fishes it out and looks at the ID, and speak of the devil, it’s Sheppard on the other end.
For a moment he contemplates not answering, but the phone rings again and it sounds more annoying, more Sheppardian than usual, Rod-ney, pick up the phone. Grunting to himself, he flips the phone open and barks an impatient What??? into it.
I pause in my admiration of all things in this story just to share that I laughed out loud at the idea that a phone could ring with John's whine. I believe it. I so believe it.
“What are you wearing?”
Rodney grinds to a halt in the middle of the parking lot. The cruel, omnipresent Nevada sun beats down on him and he considers the possibility of heat stroke for a moment, but that could just be the nature of the question John has just asked him.
“Well?” John prompts.
“Not now,” Rodney hisses. “I’m in the car.” He’s not, really. Rodney sprints the last twenty feet to his car in Olympic time and dives inside. Tries to slam the door as quietly as possible, but he knows John’s probably heard it anyway.
“Oh, you’re in the car,” John says understandingly. “That makes it different how?”
“Um, it’s public?” He fumbles with his keys, bites back a curse when he tries to pull the seatbelt over his shoulder and the metal on the buckle scorches his palm. Fuckfuckfuck and he can hear John mocking him, though John isn’t actually saying anything.
“Rodney, ten minutes ago you wanted to do it in your office.”
“That is so completely different.” He can hear John’s I don’t believe you and I’m not even going to pretend I’m humoring you through the static. “For one, my assistants know if they disturb me in my office, they die.”
I knew I'd hit this point - the point where I have nothing useful to say but just point at the screen and suggest do you see? Do you see how THEM it is?
Marsden, a planarian playing dress-up as a quantum physicist, had been very comprehensively deballed the previous week for committing this offense. Now none of the assistants or techs even come to the fifth floor; they stand on the stairs leading up from the fourth floor and shout or whimper pleadingly if they need anything.
“Don’t you have that one glass side that looks out over the entire lab?” He doesn’t remember John being this difficult back on Atlantis.
Yes he does.
Actually he does, but that’s neither here nor there.
See?
“Hello, it’s fifty feet up?” He piles on the sarcasm extra thick. “And my desk is against the far wall, and the windows have blinds. Also, did I mention that if anyone disturbs me in my office, they die?”
“Back to what we were talking about before, do you have your shirt off yet?” John will never admit that Rodney can win in a battle of logic, even if it kills him.
“Driving here. Do you want me to be arrested for simultaneous reckless driving and indecent exposure?”
“It would be kind of hot, actually,” John says meditatively. A pause, then: “Speaking of hot, I just got back from off-world.”
Rodney makes a strangled noise, remembers himself enough to turn the car in the right direction. “Did you - ?”
“Yes, I did.”
“God, I love that field vest.” Rodney has very fond memories of that vest.
“And my thigh holster.”
“Oh, my God.” And the flying lessons with John must be paying off because Rodney’s listening to John’s voice, low and dirty, and imagining John coming back sweaty and elated from a mission, and keeping his car on the road while driving at a speed that could only be called illegal.
I'm not sure what I love best about this exchange - that they're so ridiculously boyish, that I can hear it in David and Joe's voices, that Rodney loves pretty much what I love about John's off-world outfit, or that Rodney is so head over heels he comes undone that quickly.
He makes it across the base to the small housing section, oddly middle-class and green in the middle of military brownness, like a theme park or a zoo. His house is a couple streets in, generic and suburban, and he’s amazed he can actually find it on the first try. Usually, he goes right by it.
This is such a telling, sad detail of Rodney's earthside life. It always catches me off guard and makes me make a sad face - no really, I make sad faces at stories all the time, I know, I know - because there should be something more distinctive for Rodney than a house he can drive by, especially after Atlantis.
“Still driving? Because I don’t think I should tell you any more.” John’s just finished explaining how he hasn’t broken in his field uniform yet, so his BDUs and shirt are still stiff and have the creases in them. Rodney can imagine the fabric, harsh and scratchy and hot from John’s skin, under his cheek. “You might crash or something.”
“Shut up. No, wait. Keep talking.” Rodney flings himself out of his car and up the driveway. Planck the Cat is waiting for him on the other side of his door, twining impatiently around Rodney’s ankles and meowing his shrill Give me food goddammit meow. “You, beat it.” He hears John’s Okay then, talk to you later and manages a strangled “Cat! I was talking to the cat.”
Rodney can see the headlines now: Lust-blinded genius physicist breaks neck falling over feline. Dirty phone sex implicated in fatal distraction. Physics community laments loss.
God, poor, desperate, frantic Rodney. I laugh and yet I want to squeeze him up. Toothpaste-tube McKay.
He’s out of breath, and some of it’s exertion and some of it’s arousal and anticipation and some of it’s memory, because he hasn’t had sex since their last night in Atlantis, since he’d fallen over one of the boxes in John’s room, blind in the darkness, and John had caught him.
And this - this is such a perfect, fragile segue. aesc calls up an image of another Rodney, just as flustered, and has John there to catch him - the action of someone who has your back, who cares for you, who'll set you right, who's there. And now there's distance and desert and a crackling phone line between them and there's a note of loneliness that creeps back in and makes everything that comes after that much more meaningful.
And yeah, they’ll see each other tomorrow and there’ll be time around the airport and having dinner with Carson, whole hours of time… Instead of the years Rodney, in a fit of fantasy and illogic, had planned out.
Gah. He wanted years with John. *clutches heart.* Gah.
“You decent yet?” John asks.
“Never,” Rodney assures him, dropping his briefcase and car keys and wandering through his living room, fending off Planck as he goes. He shrugs out of one of his shirts, realizes he’ll never get the second one off without having to set down the phone. And the stupid piece of plastic and metal is the closest Rodney’s gotten to John in weeks, and he doesn’t want to let that go.
Let John go.
*commentary descends into me going "meeeeeeeeeep" as I continue to clutch my heart*
“So, um.” He’s never been good at this, never able to get past the hesitation of this one moment - the transition between Sheppard teasing and Sheppard being serious.
“Now,” John says, voice low and smoky, tugging at Rodney current-like, “imagine we’re on Atlantis. It’s night.”
It is far too easy to imagine Joe's voice here. I'm just sayin'.
Rodney blinks. John setting the mood? After all the teasing and the talk of field vests and holsters and that, maddening, commanding voice, he’s been expecting Take off your shirt or I’m not even going to wait for you to get your pants off, not mood-setting. But John whispers to him about standing out on the southwest pier at sunset, out where no one else ever went except for them, the sounds of sea and city you can’t hear in the control room or the labs, salt-breeze and remember how we’d stand there, Rodney?
And yeah, he can, how John would press his fingers against Rodney’s jacket, firm warmth even through fabric, and Rodney would talk and John would listen and watch as Rodney gestured his way through his day, until he would wind down and John would say You want to go in?
Goddamn, I'd forgotten HOW much I love this story for moments exactly like this - for the suggestion of something so quiet and deep and meaningful between them, something that's so much more than sex, that's companionship without being sappy, that's sweetness through touch rather than words.
Rodney collapses on his couch, remembering narrow beds and the one open window in John’s quarters, seeing that the sun’s vanished and the belt of stars has come out, and now… now Rodney’s not horny so much as sad, lying on the couch in his living room with desert sunlight pouring through the windows. He should get up and close the drapes but can’t move.
“Rodney,” and the connection makes John’s voice rougher than usual, textured, not smooth like it usually is, “Rodney, close your eyes.”
“How did you - ” know I had them open?
“You always have them open,” John says patiently, and that’s true.
It's the ache that aesc summons here that sets this story apart from so many others that are just focused on phone sex for me. (I have a sense that that's a terribly constructed sentence, but hey, if this were a commentary, I'd be saying this out loud right? And you wouldn't know I can tell where to put commas unless dogeared tells me. Hopefully I'd be talking after just having a slapfight with Joe as well, but I digress . . . .) There's such tenderness here, and it makes me sad for them both, trying to hold something together with phone calls when they're used to seeing each other every day.
But John doesn’t know why that’s true, doesn’t know that the only way Rodney can deal with this - with sex, with John, with them - is with eyes wide open. He’s never liked jumping blindly into things, even after almost three years in Pegasus, doesn’t like walking blindly into the dark places John wants to take him. And if he closes his eyes he’ll picture John above him and the ceiling lights above them both, and he’ll be able to see how that light slides over John, loving him like all the rest of Atlantis does, slipping through his hair like wet ink so when Rodney runs his fingers through it he’ll expect they’ll come away stained with darkness.
I adore this paragraph. I adore the cadence, the pockets of emphasis, each choice of words. I adore the idea of light loving John and his hair like wet ink and I adore, adore, adore how much Rodney loves him, and how it's so readily apparent in everything that's not said here. I love the poetry of two men finding each other, and how aesc manages to convey that without them saying those three little words.
Keeping his eyes open is the only way to make sure this stays phone sex, something to blow off steam before tomorrow, to keep it from veering off into something else.
Oh, Rodney.
Rodney’s not sure it isn’t already there, that he isn’t already there, because when he closes his eyes he can see those stars, how bright they are, two skies’ worth of them: the one above and the one reflected in the ocean. And John’s eyes are bright with them, with teasing as he tells Rodney to pull his shirt up, to pretend it’s John’s hand traveling up over Rodney’s chest, pausing at his ribs, his nipples. Thoughtlessly, Rodney licks his thumb and index finger before stroking himself.
“Your eyes closed?” Sheppard asks. Rodney can hear something snap and come undone.
“Yeah.”
The first time I read this I thought the something snapping and coming undone was someone's heart, not their clothes. I still like to think of it like that.
And those are Sheppard’s hands on him, even though he has to cradle his phone between jaw and shoulder to keep it from slipping, a moment of dissonance before he can feel Sheppard’s hands, the calluses from flying and fighting rough on the skin of his chest - not his own hands, though a lifetime of engineering and building things has left its own marks - deft fingers circling his right nipple, which he hates and loves because it’s teasing and Sheppard’s always teasing.
“I like your dog tags,” Rodney says idiotically. “D’ you have them on?”
John takes his tags off and drops them on the bedside table, don’t like having them on, John says because John doesn’t like being owned and the military is possessive like that, and maybe because John doesn’t like the reminder, don’t ask, don’t tell in their metallic jingle. But Rodney likes them, likes how they’re always warm from resting against John’s chest, and when Rodney licks him there he can taste the imprint of metal.
“Yeah,” John says. “I - ”
“Leave them on,” Rodney tells him. And, bolder: “I hope you have your shirt off.”
“And I hope your eyes are still closed. I can hear you thinking.” John sighs, the kind of sigh that would brush against Rodney’s skin as John stretched out beside him. Rodney fastens on to the memory of that long drape of muscle and bone and taut skin, and John’s arms slide across his chest, under Rodney’s shirt, over his collarbone.
“God, Rodney,” John whispers hoarsely - real John, memory John, Rodney - “you have no idea.”
Is that not one of the most beautiful images ever, John as a "long drape of muscle and bone and taut skin," whispering secrets into Rodney's body, so many that all the John's Rodney's known merge and become one, a little hoarse with the weight of his feelings, naked, touching himself, waiting?
He doesn’t, really, and never did because even when they were together watching John twist against him, eyes dark and glassy and refracting light, he could never quite figure out why things were the way they were, why John looked at him like that. And another galaxy away, on the wrong end of a phone line, Rodney wonders if he’ll ever figure it out.
“Touch yourself,” John says, bossy like he’s right on top of Rodney, kneeling over him - God his eyes are dark and dangerous, and it never occurs to Rodney to disobey John when he’s like that, because that’s the look that kills people and orders Rodney to save himself and tells Rodney to jerk himself off - and Rodney does, fumbling his pants open and getting his zipper down.
He wonders if John hears the soft, choked sound that he makes when his hand closes around his cock. Realizes John does - soft, satisfied hum and John smiles, predatory, superior - and John tells him how much he loves how Rodney feels, hard and hot for him and imagine it’s me now, Rodney, that’s my hand on your dick - mine, and I know how you like me touching you.
Italics have multiple purposes here - to capture memories, to suggest what John's saying - and yet each purpose overlaps. Rodney's overwhelmed, steeped in John, in how he feels, in what John does to him, and there's no hard and fast barrier between past and present, real and imagined.
“I do, you do,” Rodney gasps out, hand tightening almost on the wrong side of pain, long, firm strokes the way he likes and the way John knows perfectly. His pants and boxers are tangled halfway down his legs and graceless he tries to kick them off, but moving anymore would mean breaking the connection between himself and John and memory, so he remembers the one time after this mission
when they fall through his door, and things had been fucked up from the beginning, Wraith and shooting and people being culled and people dying, and John’s mouth is trying to erase the memory of that, impatient and burning and John doesn’t wait for Rodney to undress, pushes him down on the bed and yanks his pants down and his mouth
Rodney’s hand isn’t the same, but still, slick from spit and precome and tight enough and he bucks up into it, and he pictures John doing the same thing - knows he’s doing the same thing because John’s breath is tight and nearly silent, the way it goes when John is close, and he whispers something about You’re so hot like this or maybe it’s I miss you or I love you, he has no idea.
John says his name like it’s important. Rodney.
*flails and shows hands* God. BOYS. *meep*
And somewhere between Atlantis and Earth, stars and sun and water and desert, Rodney comes.
He hears John shuddering and gasping through his own release, and against the red-painted blackness of his eyelids he can see John, and God he’s beautiful, stretched out over Rodney’s imperfect body, sweat glistening like rain in his hair, eyes wide and amazed with it, shuddering and vulnerable but still dangerous, God so dangerous, and yes, Rodney McKay is well and truly fucked in so, so many ways.
I love that here we have no idea when Rodney realized he was fucked - back on Atlantis? Now? Does it matter?
He lies there for a moment, breathing and not wanting to open his eyes, feeling his shirt sticky where it’s ridden up under his arms and come drying on his stomach. The air around him is too cool, anonymous and hygienic, disconcerting because John’s supposed to be there, supposed to be there kissing him, mostly breath for a moment and it’s kind of cool, making John Sheppard breathless, and then stretching out alongside Rodney, pressed close because the bed is narrow, and they lie there for a bit and breathe each other in.
“G’night, Rodney.” Rough and sleek at the same time, sleepy and never mind that it’s not even nineteen hundred hours yet. “See you tomorrow.”
Dimly, Rodney hears the connection break but doesn’t press the disconnect button, lets it ride, pretending the empty air is living breath.
Asdjhflkafdjh that ending STILL brings tears to my eyes. Such aching loneliness, such distance between them, such hunger for small comforts, for breath. They're so utterly connected and yet so far apart, and it breaks me a little every time.
And so, there it is, my commentary. I have no idea how useful that was - mostly I just flail when I read this - but *sigh*. Beautiful. Boys so very much in love.
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McShep
Rating/Warnings: NC17; sex, angst
Disclaimers: Not mine. Sci-Fi's.
Advertisements: For wordclaim50 challenge #30, "Missing Scene" (my word is 'find'). Set during 3.10, just after the OTP (One True Phonecall).
Notes: Long-overdue request fic for lilithilien, who wanted McShep!phone sex. Coincidentally, I think this is the first bit of phone sex I've ever written. *twitch*
WIRELESS
“Hey, you know, I - ”
“Goodbye, Rodney,” John says impatiently, and then there’s that final, terrible click and Rodney’s cell phone makes the disappointed beep meant to indicate the connection’s been lost.
My favorite tags are always those that root themselves in canon, and this is a wonderful example. Rodney's face, on the show, as John cuts off the call is haunting - lost, defeated, a little unsurprised. Breaking the paragraph here gives us a moment to call up that image before we wade deeper into Rodney's thoughts.
It figures, is the first thought he has after well, that sucked. It figures the one time he takes Jeannie’s advice and tries to keep in touch with other people - with friends - they either fall off the face of the earth (Elizabeth) or hang up on him (John). See if he was ever going to listen to Jeannie ever again, after this. What a… a debacle.
That’s the proper word for it. Debacle. Unmitigated disaster.
One of the things I find most fun to write is the babbling overload of Rodney's thoughts, so this just made me gleeful. I love how many threads of conversation he keeps going with himself, and then how precise he gets with his language. "Debacle. Unmitigated disaster." He's not just maudlin, but still verifying his intelligence while being (justifiably) maudlin.
Note to self: Never try to ask for phone sex ever again. Not only will it be a debacle, it will be humiliating, and will leave you feeling like… Well, like crap.
So nicely done - from this tiny fragment of internal monologue we suddenly realize more's at play that might at first appear. John's someone who Rodney can ask for phone sex - who's apparently said 'no' to phone sex, but at least Rodney felt like trying. It raises more questions - first time proposal? Had they talked about this before? Done this before? Was this brought on by earth separation, or something that pre-dated them leaving Atlantis?
“Yeah,” he mutters to himself, and then forbids the entertaining of any more pitiful thoughts for the day. It’s a resolution he keeps for about .02 seconds, long enough to look around his office and feel like something’s been cut, that he’s floating, directionless despite all the great things he’s supposed to do.
I really enjoy the idea of Rodney "floating, directionless," here, almost as though gravity's been cut. It's a lovely kickback to the idea of space, and to other things we've seen him do - space walking, powering up the satellite in season one etc. It reminds us how much he's lost.
Rodney shoves his cell phone into a random pocket, stalks out of his office, down the iron catwalk and its series of girders. Iron rings discordant under his feet, and when he grips the railing on his way down the stairs - the murderous and steep stairs, and this is so going to aggravate the sciatica he knows he’s developing - the metal zings and slithers and whispers across his palms. Once safe on terra firma, he wipes his hand on his shirt to rub out the sensation but he can still feel it, hear it in his ears.
Once again, this affirms our sense of Rodney's disconnection. Atlantis hovers, unspoken, behind all these words -iron and girders in a cavernous lab contrasting with the beautiful, seamless, glass and crystal he's left behind. He's done worse than walk down steep stairs in the Pegasus Galaxy - his grumbling about sciatica makes me feel such fondness for him, for his default setting of 'complaint' when he's uncertain or upset.
The lab is more like a factory, this massive yawning thing around him, five stories tall, webs of steel and polymer, and the place is so huge that it swallows up sound and spits it back out as nonsense. And when he’d first been assigned it, his own private lab (or as close to private as one can get when contracting with the US military), he’d thought he would be like unto a god, looking down on his creation from his fifth-floor office, his assistants and the technicians like ants fifty feet below.
Yes, all-seeing, all-powerful, all-knowing. Rodney McKay is a vengeful god, a merciless god.
And a frustrated god.
The first part of this section is all Rodney - or at least, the public face of Rodney McKay. Rodney the God, controlling the lives of mere mortals - it seems a short leap from some of his grander, more egotistic announcements to this. Yet it doesn't fit him, and that's the heart of who he really is - a guy who thinks he wants to be god but who finds the experience disappointing and frustrating, more trouble than it's worth, and it ends up he's not that good at vengeance.
The turbines that dominate the lab are only prototypes, hideous ones at that, meant to simulate the sorts of devices that may be necessary to power the creation of a Lorentzian wormhole outside a stargate. Inelegant, which Rodney hates, ugly like the rest of the lab. and if he’d been a god, Rodney would never have created all this unpainted metal, left the iron bones of this place exposed, its joints and rivets bare.
He would have made it like Atlantis, because the Ancients - for all the issues Rodney has with them at the moment - understood that the world is an ordered place under the chaos, a beautiful and elegant place, and Atlantis reflected that. He would have had those flattened curves, that symmetry echoed in metal and stone and glass, the windows that let you look out on the world you wanted so much to know.
And here, aesc spells out what's already been hinted at, that Rodney's frustration is homesickness, that physics and math and all the work he does is in the pursuit of beauty and harmony, and ugliness pains him on practically every level there is.
Besides, he didn’t even create his lab, he inherited it. He thinks this as he stomps past a flock of anxious assistants, ignoring their stammered attempts at conversation. Inherited it from the 1950s school of design, Dystopian Warehouse Nightmare or something like that. He hates it.
He thinks all this deep down in some place he’ll never admit to having. And oddly, bitching about his lab, his assistants, his “choice” of projects to Sheppard hasn’t made him feel any better about any of it.
But he is definitely not going to think about Sheppard.
Instead, he’s going to wonder why his butt is vibrating.
Oh, wait. Cell phone.
I love that aesc's Rodney speaks in grand gestures - Dystopian Warehouse design indeed - but can get derailed at a moment's notice. It's the quintessential essence of Rodney - and the source of so much comedy in the show.
He fishes it out and looks at the ID, and speak of the devil, it’s Sheppard on the other end.
For a moment he contemplates not answering, but the phone rings again and it sounds more annoying, more Sheppardian than usual, Rod-ney, pick up the phone. Grunting to himself, he flips the phone open and barks an impatient What??? into it.
I pause in my admiration of all things in this story just to share that I laughed out loud at the idea that a phone could ring with John's whine. I believe it. I so believe it.
“What are you wearing?”
Rodney grinds to a halt in the middle of the parking lot. The cruel, omnipresent Nevada sun beats down on him and he considers the possibility of heat stroke for a moment, but that could just be the nature of the question John has just asked him.
“Well?” John prompts.
“Not now,” Rodney hisses. “I’m in the car.” He’s not, really. Rodney sprints the last twenty feet to his car in Olympic time and dives inside. Tries to slam the door as quietly as possible, but he knows John’s probably heard it anyway.
“Oh, you’re in the car,” John says understandingly. “That makes it different how?”
“Um, it’s public?” He fumbles with his keys, bites back a curse when he tries to pull the seatbelt over his shoulder and the metal on the buckle scorches his palm. Fuckfuckfuck and he can hear John mocking him, though John isn’t actually saying anything.
“Rodney, ten minutes ago you wanted to do it in your office.”
“That is so completely different.” He can hear John’s I don’t believe you and I’m not even going to pretend I’m humoring you through the static. “For one, my assistants know if they disturb me in my office, they die.”
I knew I'd hit this point - the point where I have nothing useful to say but just point at the screen and suggest do you see? Do you see how THEM it is?
Marsden, a planarian playing dress-up as a quantum physicist, had been very comprehensively deballed the previous week for committing this offense. Now none of the assistants or techs even come to the fifth floor; they stand on the stairs leading up from the fourth floor and shout or whimper pleadingly if they need anything.
“Don’t you have that one glass side that looks out over the entire lab?” He doesn’t remember John being this difficult back on Atlantis.
Yes he does.
Actually he does, but that’s neither here nor there.
See?
“Hello, it’s fifty feet up?” He piles on the sarcasm extra thick. “And my desk is against the far wall, and the windows have blinds. Also, did I mention that if anyone disturbs me in my office, they die?”
“Back to what we were talking about before, do you have your shirt off yet?” John will never admit that Rodney can win in a battle of logic, even if it kills him.
“Driving here. Do you want me to be arrested for simultaneous reckless driving and indecent exposure?”
“It would be kind of hot, actually,” John says meditatively. A pause, then: “Speaking of hot, I just got back from off-world.”
Rodney makes a strangled noise, remembers himself enough to turn the car in the right direction. “Did you - ?”
“Yes, I did.”
“God, I love that field vest.” Rodney has very fond memories of that vest.
“And my thigh holster.”
“Oh, my God.” And the flying lessons with John must be paying off because Rodney’s listening to John’s voice, low and dirty, and imagining John coming back sweaty and elated from a mission, and keeping his car on the road while driving at a speed that could only be called illegal.
I'm not sure what I love best about this exchange - that they're so ridiculously boyish, that I can hear it in David and Joe's voices, that Rodney loves pretty much what I love about John's off-world outfit, or that Rodney is so head over heels he comes undone that quickly.
He makes it across the base to the small housing section, oddly middle-class and green in the middle of military brownness, like a theme park or a zoo. His house is a couple streets in, generic and suburban, and he’s amazed he can actually find it on the first try. Usually, he goes right by it.
This is such a telling, sad detail of Rodney's earthside life. It always catches me off guard and makes me make a sad face - no really, I make sad faces at stories all the time, I know, I know - because there should be something more distinctive for Rodney than a house he can drive by, especially after Atlantis.
“Still driving? Because I don’t think I should tell you any more.” John’s just finished explaining how he hasn’t broken in his field uniform yet, so his BDUs and shirt are still stiff and have the creases in them. Rodney can imagine the fabric, harsh and scratchy and hot from John’s skin, under his cheek. “You might crash or something.”
“Shut up. No, wait. Keep talking.” Rodney flings himself out of his car and up the driveway. Planck the Cat is waiting for him on the other side of his door, twining impatiently around Rodney’s ankles and meowing his shrill Give me food goddammit meow. “You, beat it.” He hears John’s Okay then, talk to you later and manages a strangled “Cat! I was talking to the cat.”
Rodney can see the headlines now: Lust-blinded genius physicist breaks neck falling over feline. Dirty phone sex implicated in fatal distraction. Physics community laments loss.
God, poor, desperate, frantic Rodney. I laugh and yet I want to squeeze him up. Toothpaste-tube McKay.
He’s out of breath, and some of it’s exertion and some of it’s arousal and anticipation and some of it’s memory, because he hasn’t had sex since their last night in Atlantis, since he’d fallen over one of the boxes in John’s room, blind in the darkness, and John had caught him.
And this - this is such a perfect, fragile segue. aesc calls up an image of another Rodney, just as flustered, and has John there to catch him - the action of someone who has your back, who cares for you, who'll set you right, who's there. And now there's distance and desert and a crackling phone line between them and there's a note of loneliness that creeps back in and makes everything that comes after that much more meaningful.
And yeah, they’ll see each other tomorrow and there’ll be time around the airport and having dinner with Carson, whole hours of time… Instead of the years Rodney, in a fit of fantasy and illogic, had planned out.
Gah. He wanted years with John. *clutches heart.* Gah.
“You decent yet?” John asks.
“Never,” Rodney assures him, dropping his briefcase and car keys and wandering through his living room, fending off Planck as he goes. He shrugs out of one of his shirts, realizes he’ll never get the second one off without having to set down the phone. And the stupid piece of plastic and metal is the closest Rodney’s gotten to John in weeks, and he doesn’t want to let that go.
Let John go.
*commentary descends into me going "meeeeeeeeeep" as I continue to clutch my heart*
“So, um.” He’s never been good at this, never able to get past the hesitation of this one moment - the transition between Sheppard teasing and Sheppard being serious.
“Now,” John says, voice low and smoky, tugging at Rodney current-like, “imagine we’re on Atlantis. It’s night.”
It is far too easy to imagine Joe's voice here. I'm just sayin'.
Rodney blinks. John setting the mood? After all the teasing and the talk of field vests and holsters and that, maddening, commanding voice, he’s been expecting Take off your shirt or I’m not even going to wait for you to get your pants off, not mood-setting. But John whispers to him about standing out on the southwest pier at sunset, out where no one else ever went except for them, the sounds of sea and city you can’t hear in the control room or the labs, salt-breeze and remember how we’d stand there, Rodney?
And yeah, he can, how John would press his fingers against Rodney’s jacket, firm warmth even through fabric, and Rodney would talk and John would listen and watch as Rodney gestured his way through his day, until he would wind down and John would say You want to go in?
Goddamn, I'd forgotten HOW much I love this story for moments exactly like this - for the suggestion of something so quiet and deep and meaningful between them, something that's so much more than sex, that's companionship without being sappy, that's sweetness through touch rather than words.
Rodney collapses on his couch, remembering narrow beds and the one open window in John’s quarters, seeing that the sun’s vanished and the belt of stars has come out, and now… now Rodney’s not horny so much as sad, lying on the couch in his living room with desert sunlight pouring through the windows. He should get up and close the drapes but can’t move.
“Rodney,” and the connection makes John’s voice rougher than usual, textured, not smooth like it usually is, “Rodney, close your eyes.”
“How did you - ” know I had them open?
“You always have them open,” John says patiently, and that’s true.
It's the ache that aesc summons here that sets this story apart from so many others that are just focused on phone sex for me. (I have a sense that that's a terribly constructed sentence, but hey, if this were a commentary, I'd be saying this out loud right? And you wouldn't know I can tell where to put commas unless dogeared tells me. Hopefully I'd be talking after just having a slapfight with Joe as well, but I digress . . . .) There's such tenderness here, and it makes me sad for them both, trying to hold something together with phone calls when they're used to seeing each other every day.
But John doesn’t know why that’s true, doesn’t know that the only way Rodney can deal with this - with sex, with John, with them - is with eyes wide open. He’s never liked jumping blindly into things, even after almost three years in Pegasus, doesn’t like walking blindly into the dark places John wants to take him. And if he closes his eyes he’ll picture John above him and the ceiling lights above them both, and he’ll be able to see how that light slides over John, loving him like all the rest of Atlantis does, slipping through his hair like wet ink so when Rodney runs his fingers through it he’ll expect they’ll come away stained with darkness.
I adore this paragraph. I adore the cadence, the pockets of emphasis, each choice of words. I adore the idea of light loving John and his hair like wet ink and I adore, adore, adore how much Rodney loves him, and how it's so readily apparent in everything that's not said here. I love the poetry of two men finding each other, and how aesc manages to convey that without them saying those three little words.
Keeping his eyes open is the only way to make sure this stays phone sex, something to blow off steam before tomorrow, to keep it from veering off into something else.
Oh, Rodney.
Rodney’s not sure it isn’t already there, that he isn’t already there, because when he closes his eyes he can see those stars, how bright they are, two skies’ worth of them: the one above and the one reflected in the ocean. And John’s eyes are bright with them, with teasing as he tells Rodney to pull his shirt up, to pretend it’s John’s hand traveling up over Rodney’s chest, pausing at his ribs, his nipples. Thoughtlessly, Rodney licks his thumb and index finger before stroking himself.
“Your eyes closed?” Sheppard asks. Rodney can hear something snap and come undone.
“Yeah.”
The first time I read this I thought the something snapping and coming undone was someone's heart, not their clothes. I still like to think of it like that.
And those are Sheppard’s hands on him, even though he has to cradle his phone between jaw and shoulder to keep it from slipping, a moment of dissonance before he can feel Sheppard’s hands, the calluses from flying and fighting rough on the skin of his chest - not his own hands, though a lifetime of engineering and building things has left its own marks - deft fingers circling his right nipple, which he hates and loves because it’s teasing and Sheppard’s always teasing.
“I like your dog tags,” Rodney says idiotically. “D’ you have them on?”
John takes his tags off and drops them on the bedside table, don’t like having them on, John says because John doesn’t like being owned and the military is possessive like that, and maybe because John doesn’t like the reminder, don’t ask, don’t tell in their metallic jingle. But Rodney likes them, likes how they’re always warm from resting against John’s chest, and when Rodney licks him there he can taste the imprint of metal.
“Yeah,” John says. “I - ”
“Leave them on,” Rodney tells him. And, bolder: “I hope you have your shirt off.”
“And I hope your eyes are still closed. I can hear you thinking.” John sighs, the kind of sigh that would brush against Rodney’s skin as John stretched out beside him. Rodney fastens on to the memory of that long drape of muscle and bone and taut skin, and John’s arms slide across his chest, under Rodney’s shirt, over his collarbone.
“God, Rodney,” John whispers hoarsely - real John, memory John, Rodney - “you have no idea.”
Is that not one of the most beautiful images ever, John as a "long drape of muscle and bone and taut skin," whispering secrets into Rodney's body, so many that all the John's Rodney's known merge and become one, a little hoarse with the weight of his feelings, naked, touching himself, waiting?
He doesn’t, really, and never did because even when they were together watching John twist against him, eyes dark and glassy and refracting light, he could never quite figure out why things were the way they were, why John looked at him like that. And another galaxy away, on the wrong end of a phone line, Rodney wonders if he’ll ever figure it out.
“Touch yourself,” John says, bossy like he’s right on top of Rodney, kneeling over him - God his eyes are dark and dangerous, and it never occurs to Rodney to disobey John when he’s like that, because that’s the look that kills people and orders Rodney to save himself and tells Rodney to jerk himself off - and Rodney does, fumbling his pants open and getting his zipper down.
He wonders if John hears the soft, choked sound that he makes when his hand closes around his cock. Realizes John does - soft, satisfied hum and John smiles, predatory, superior - and John tells him how much he loves how Rodney feels, hard and hot for him and imagine it’s me now, Rodney, that’s my hand on your dick - mine, and I know how you like me touching you.
Italics have multiple purposes here - to capture memories, to suggest what John's saying - and yet each purpose overlaps. Rodney's overwhelmed, steeped in John, in how he feels, in what John does to him, and there's no hard and fast barrier between past and present, real and imagined.
“I do, you do,” Rodney gasps out, hand tightening almost on the wrong side of pain, long, firm strokes the way he likes and the way John knows perfectly. His pants and boxers are tangled halfway down his legs and graceless he tries to kick them off, but moving anymore would mean breaking the connection between himself and John and memory, so he remembers the one time after this mission
when they fall through his door, and things had been fucked up from the beginning, Wraith and shooting and people being culled and people dying, and John’s mouth is trying to erase the memory of that, impatient and burning and John doesn’t wait for Rodney to undress, pushes him down on the bed and yanks his pants down and his mouth
Rodney’s hand isn’t the same, but still, slick from spit and precome and tight enough and he bucks up into it, and he pictures John doing the same thing - knows he’s doing the same thing because John’s breath is tight and nearly silent, the way it goes when John is close, and he whispers something about You’re so hot like this or maybe it’s I miss you or I love you, he has no idea.
John says his name like it’s important. Rodney.
*flails and shows hands* God. BOYS. *meep*
And somewhere between Atlantis and Earth, stars and sun and water and desert, Rodney comes.
He hears John shuddering and gasping through his own release, and against the red-painted blackness of his eyelids he can see John, and God he’s beautiful, stretched out over Rodney’s imperfect body, sweat glistening like rain in his hair, eyes wide and amazed with it, shuddering and vulnerable but still dangerous, God so dangerous, and yes, Rodney McKay is well and truly fucked in so, so many ways.
I love that here we have no idea when Rodney realized he was fucked - back on Atlantis? Now? Does it matter?
He lies there for a moment, breathing and not wanting to open his eyes, feeling his shirt sticky where it’s ridden up under his arms and come drying on his stomach. The air around him is too cool, anonymous and hygienic, disconcerting because John’s supposed to be there, supposed to be there kissing him, mostly breath for a moment and it’s kind of cool, making John Sheppard breathless, and then stretching out alongside Rodney, pressed close because the bed is narrow, and they lie there for a bit and breathe each other in.
“G’night, Rodney.” Rough and sleek at the same time, sleepy and never mind that it’s not even nineteen hundred hours yet. “See you tomorrow.”
Dimly, Rodney hears the connection break but doesn’t press the disconnect button, lets it ride, pretending the empty air is living breath.
Asdjhflkafdjh that ending STILL brings tears to my eyes. Such aching loneliness, such distance between them, such hunger for small comforts, for breath. They're so utterly connected and yet so far apart, and it breaks me a little every time.
And so, there it is, my commentary. I have no idea how useful that was - mostly I just flail when I read this - but *sigh*. Beautiful. Boys so very much in love.