OK Computer part 3
Rodney spent the next few days happily building John's beach plug-in. It snowed, so they stayed inside and kept the fire going all the time, Rodney leaning back against the sofa with his laptop on his knees while John sprawled out above him and read one broadsheet newspaper after another. The grandfather clock chimed a couple of times, but Rodney was seriously not in the mood to have his artistic vision disrupted by violent physical exercise, so he told Ronon he was near to a breakthrough on something very, very important, and asked him to kindly fuck off for a few days. Ronon rolled his eyes and said yeah, all right, whatever, and Rodney went back and put in golden sand, a bright blue sky, miles and miles of clear water churning with white surf. A long stretch of sandy seabed for barrel waves, a nearby reef for the big swells, and Rodney was really enjoying himself, happily constructing the jagged edge of the coastline, when he realized that-holy crap, he was Slartibartfast from Hitchhiker's Guide-and burst out laughing.
"What?" John said, lowering the broadsheet, and Rodney realized, to his delight, that John would get this, and so he turned the laptop's screen toward him and said, "Look, I'm Slartibartfast! Designing the shoreline and-!" John cracked up and shoved the newspaper aside, "-building fjords," Rodney finished, dissolving into gasps of laughter, and John slithered down besides him on the floor and grabbed the laptop, laughing as he saw Rodney's perfect mock-California coast.
"Oh, my God," John said, still grinning helplessly. "You're so pathetic; of course you want to be a Magrathean. 'I am Slartibartfast! Designer of Worlds!'"
"Uh, excuse me, so sorry," Rodney said, wiping his eyes, "but you just a) pulled Magrathea out of your ass and b) made an Oppenheimer reference, so I don't know who you're calling-" and then John's mouth was on his,
Two dorks in love! Jeez, first kisses are so hard to write, and this one just makes me laugh with glee. The key thing is that it doesn't come out of nowhere; it comes out of a fantastic moment of connection-one that of course makes John swell up with love for this ridiculous man until there's no other option but to kiss him. I've read bunches of lead-ups to kisses that feel like exactly that: flimsy excuses to get to the kissing part. In this one, the kiss practically feels like an excuse to get the Slartibartfast jokes in there! Kickass writing. And it has to be John who initiates it, otherwise it would be creepy, and Rodney would always wonder if he'd misprogrammed him somehow out of a subliminal desire to make him want sex.
soft and a little wet. Hands came up to clutch his face, and for a moment, everything lurched-his stomach, the world-and then he was kissing John back greedily, trying to grab hold, hold on.
They kissed for long moments, lips sliding and parting against each other, and then all at once, Rodney couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe. He pushed John away and sucked desperately for air. "I-oh God, oh God," Rodney said, forcing the words out; he had no breath in his lungs, "I need to know, is this you or is this him?" John's face contorted and went terrible. He tried to pull away, but Rodney fisted the red flannel shirt that he had not designed and said, "Please. Please. I know it's a terrible question, impossible to answer. Just-can you remember when, do you have any memory of-"
John couldn't seem to get his face under control. "Rodney," he said raggedly, and tried again to pull away, but Rodney felt out of his mind, preternaturally strong. John could get away, but he'd have to hurt him to do it. Finally John went still and closed his eyes.
"I-" John began, in a choked-up voice. "You. You made a bomb. And I remember-" and Rodney kissed him all in a rush, exhaling his relief, except John's hands were squeezing his wrists hard enough to hurt, and pushing him back. "No, you asked, and now you have to hear the whole answer. Full disclosure," and Rodney stared at his dark eyes, the bitter tilt of his smile, and realized that he was Sheppard, or at least that he had been. "He thought about it, but he decided not to," John said flatly. "He wouldn't ever have done it, Rodney, okay? Because in his own strange way, he loved the Air Force." John let go of Rodney's wrists, and Rodney instinctively rubbed at them. "But I'm thinking that doesn't so much matter now. I'm making that call, all right?"
Real!John can't be out because he's Air Force; VR!John has space to stretch. Canon!John can't be gay because he's a prime time sci-fi leading man; fanfic!John has space to stretch.
"Yes." Rodney's mouth was dry with wanting him so much. "Yes, I-" He leaned in and kissed John hungrily, and John did something nasty and wonderful with his tongue before pushing Rodney away by the shoulders. Rodney moaned in disappointment.
"I'm not him, Rodney," John said dangerously.
"Yes," Rodney said, sharply, "I told you that, remember?" John glared at him for another moment, and then his expression wavered and they were kissing again, fumbling at each other's shirts and tumbling together down onto the floor.
Rodney had wanted to kiss and touch John because he was Sheppard, or part of him, anyway: the only part he had left. But he hadn't expected the raw physical pleasure of it, of having John's long, lean torso underneath him, hands clutching at Rodney's shoulders, mouth everywhere. Rodney wasn't a homosexual, or at least he hadn't thought he was, even though he'd lost his virginity to his advisor at CalTech and had had more than his share of depressing late-night laboratory hand jobs since. It was a survival mechanism: there were too few girls in his world, and they were immediately snatched up by the hottest guys, leaving the rest of them to grumble or go celibate or make do. Sometimes, in years that had a 7 in them, a woman came into his orbit and he got laid ('87: Michelle Smith; '97: Carole Rartha; '07: Katie Brown) but mostly his life was spent with guys like himself, some of whom could be prevailed upon to give hand jobs or blowjobs if they were drunk or you looked really desperate.
Slash in 2008: where the slippage from one sexual orientation to the next takes up all of two paragraphs and not even a sentence's worth of angst. Don't get me wrong; I love the stories (and SGA has damned good ones) that make sexual identity a source of plot and conflict, that go all Butler and Cixous on John and Rodney's asses, but it's also pretty awesome that we can write these third/forth wave slash fics that just take the cosmopolitan attitude as a given, as least for the civilians, and go rolling onward to whatever other concerns catch our fancy.
It didn't mean anything, but more than that, sex with guys had never been good. It was like a Snickers bar or vending machine coffee: it kept you from killing people. But it left him staggeringly unprepared for sex with John, which he'd wanted on an emotional level, needing that closeness, except- Jesus, his spine was melting. John was licking and sucking Rodney's dick wetly, chin slick with it, and Rodney gasped helplessly, because John's eyes were closed and his cheeks were hollow, and he was making noises like he never wanted to stop. Every time Rodney got close to coming, he'd back off, change directions, like he was just prolonging the number of minutes he could spend with Rodney's dick in his mouth. Rodney moaned brokenly, tried to catch his breath, couldn't. God, he didn't know, he'd never felt anything like this. John's mouth was soft on his balls, and then his tongue was sliding down. Rodney's thighs jittered and tried to close, because there was private and there was private, but-
He had his first orgasm with John's fingers in his ass, and could have just lain there, wrung out and happily basking in endorphins for the rest of his life, except John was hauling him off the floor and shoving him and his rubbery limbs toward the bedroom, where he laid Rodney face-down on the bed and fucked him senseless while Rodney mumbled "yes, fuck, yes," into the pillow. After that, they dozed off, John's face mashed against his neck. Rodney had forgotten how much heat two bodies could generate, and felt happily immobilized, curled up against John: lazy with heat, insane with it.
He woke up with John's dick in his hand. "Please?" John murmured sleepily. Rodney leaned over him and jerked him slowly, watching his eyelashes flutter. He loved having the hot, heavy weight of John's cock in his hand. The velvety soft skin of the shaft, the slick, leaking head; holding John like this was more intimate than fucking. As he got near to coming, John's mouth fell open and he began making the most incredibly hot noises, and then wetness spurted through Rodney's loosely curled fingers and up, over his belly. "You can fuck me. If you want to," John said breathlessly, and then: "I want you to."
"Whatever you want," Rodney managed, and it was just as well that he'd stipulated that up front, because John seemed to think getting fucked was some kind of extreme sport, and was surprisingly demanding. "Higher, tilt my-oh God, yeah, right there, oh. Fuck...." and Rodney gasped and heaved and did what John wanted. John closed his eyes and had two gut-wrenching, shuddering orgasms, one after the other. Rodney flew over the edge after him, losing his balance and falling forward, hands still curled around John's legs.
He fell asleep on top, which turned out to be convenient when the grandfather clock started chiming. Rodney hardly bothered to wake to full consciousness, just shoved back the covers, pushed himself off a bitchily moaning John Sheppard, and staggered into the living room, where he yanked a driver from John's golf bag and started bashing at the stupid thing. Ronon could go to hell; he was doing a different John Sheppard memorial today, by God. The old clock let out one final, off-key clang, and Rodney let the bent club drop to the floor and went back to the bedroom, where John had kept the bed warm.
They had sex on every piece of furniture in the cabin. They had sex in every position and at every scale, from nine-second orgasms to ninety-minute ones that left Rodney feeling as if he had to gather up his limbs from isolated corners of the room afterwards. They paused only for meals, huge ones (bacon with everything, at Rodney's insistence: bacon and eggs, bacon cheeseburgers, bacon and tomato sandwiches, because what good was a virtual reality scenario if you didn't get to eat what you wanted?)
http://xkcd.com/418/
or to fall down exhausted. John strolled around the house naked, or nearly so, though Rodney thought frying bacon in the nude was-well, exactly the sort of stupid risk that Sheppard was famous for, actually. But Rodney tried to get into the spirit of the thing by wearing boxers and nothing else, though he kept having stabs of insecurity. It hadn't occurred to him to tweak his interface, so he was WYSIWYG. While John was-well, not only Sheppard, but Sheppard from the day Rodney'd invited him to the porn room; ages ago, now.
"Chill out, Rodney, will you?" John said, and licked the wrinkled corner of Rodney's eye.
Rodney closed his eyes and shivered. "There's no way you were this uninhibited in life."
John voice was like warm honey. "I told you," he said, his mouth skimming Rodney's cheek with its rough scratch of beard. "This is my call."
Rodney impulsively cupped John's face, which had its own, softer, stubble. "Good call," he said in a hoarse voice. "I like your call. Call me any-" and that's when he felt the first stabbing pain in his chest and stumbled forward, his legs buckling under him.
"Rodney!" John had caught him. John was trying to hold him up, but the world was spinning, and Christ, he gritted his teeth and rode out another stab of- "Rodney, what's-" He clutched at his chest. He was going down. "Oh God," John whispered. "Rodney." The floor was at his back. He saw John's hair. The rough beams of the ceiling. Hands on his chest. Pressing. Pumping. "Rodney. Please. Please. Come on-"
"-Clear!" The paddles thumped down onto his chest, and Rodney gasped, and wanted to sit up and yell, "What are you idiots doing?" except he was strapped down to a gurney with an oxygen mask over his face and he didn't have any strength anyway. Above him, faces loomed and disappeared, faded in and out. His eyes shut against a bright light.
"-pull the drip, goddammit! I don't want to risk that again! Use hypodermoclysis, one third normal saline, two thirds 5% glucose. Watch him for hypokalemia and I swear to God, if he crashes again, I'll-" There was dust in the air, or snow, like a bad TV picture.
The drive. Where was the. Rodney tried to reach out, couldn't move, flexed his fingers impotently. "John," he said, but his voice came out thickly, and nobody answered, and Christ, how that hurt, like he had razor blades in his throat. "John! Where-"
"Shh. Don't try to talk, Dr. McKay. Your throat, it's not moist enough to-"
Rodney feebly tried to catch at the white sleeve with his fingers. "John," he managed. "Room. Find," but the world was going brown, and the bright lights flickered and went out.
"Well!" a cheerful, unfamiliar voice chirped when Rodney next opened his eyes, "You gave us quite a scare." Rodney had just enough strength to turn away from her.
The fade in and out of these scenelets works so well to convey the crucial information without taking up much space, while staying inside Rodney's POV and nailing that classic Medical Emergency vibe-the white haze, the babble of jargon, the perky RN voice.
"You're such a dumbass," and Rodney opened his eyes to see Ronon there, arms crossed and staring down at him.
"I know." Rodney's voice was the barest scrape of a whisper, but he was grateful for it.
"If Sheppard were here, he'd kick your ass up and down every hallway in Atlantis," Ronon said. "But he's not. So I guess it's up to me," but Rodney was already gone, thinking of John, the Terrarium, what John would say when, if the drive hadn't been- He impelled his hand toward Ronon's leather-clad arm, and this time, his limbs obeyed him.
"I need," Rodney scraped out, and Ronon frowned and bent down to listen, "in my room, I need you to look for-something of mine, I lost, rectangular, white-" but Ronon was pulling away and staring down at him with narrow eyes. "Please..."
To his surprise, Ronon slid a hand into his vest and pulled out the white drive; Rodney, who had been straining upwards in a desperate urge to be persuasive, fell back, relieved.
"Oh," Rodney breathed. "Oh, thank God. Ronon, you're my hero, you're-give-" He reached for it, but Ronon didn't give it over; instead, he just turned it in his hands.
"It's not safe; doctors'd have it off you in a minute," Ronon said, and Rodney supposed that was true; in his experience, doctors were quick to confiscate anything that made you feel like a human being. "What is it?" Ronon asked. "Some kind of memory book?"
Rodney's eyes pricked with tears and he turned away fast. He should have known there would be no fooling Ronon. "Yeah," he managed. "Something like that."
Way back at, "I know about the lesbians," it was just a joke, a terror of discovery all for a comical, embarrassing hobby.
To his surprise, Ronon sat down beside him and let out a long sigh. He let his hands dangle between his slouched legs. "It's not good, too much remembering," Ronon said, and Rodney actually had to grit his teeth together to suppress a sob, because thank you! fuck you! what the hell was he supposed to do about it now? He supposed he might have moved on, surely would have moved on, if it hadn't been for the stupid lesbians. But how could he ever have deleted that logfile? "You want to remember, but the body knows to forget; the body wants to forget pain. It remembers in other ways," and Ronon raised his head and twisted it to the side so that, even laid flat as he was, Rodney could see his tattoo. "I think maybe we went too fast," Ronon said finally, matter-of-factly. "I think maybe we're not done."
"I'm done," Rodney croaked. "I just-get me out of here."
Ronon's lips curved into a smirk. "Yeah. No. Couple days, they said," and then, tucking the drive back into his vest, "I'll hold this for you."
He was at least allowed to walk around a bit if he wheeled his stupid IV along with him, so he was down the infirmary corridor when he saw her. She came around the corner, so strong and beautiful, carrying a toddler on her hip. "Oh," he said, and stopped short.
Teyla saw him and her face was like the sun. "Rodney," she said; her smile was radiant, though her brown eyes moved over him with obvious concern. Rodney swallowed; he had seen himself in the mirror that morning and looked away fast.
"Oh my God, how did this happen?" Rodney asked, letting go of the pole and extending both arms for the child. "I mean," he added, as Teyla laughed and handed him the little girl, who grinned as sunnily as her mother. "I know the science, I just-"
"I sent a message," Teyla said, almost offhandedly, as she stroked an approving hand down her daughter's back. "I was not then able to come to Atlantis; Zina was a difficult birth and she and her brother have been quite a handful. Quite," Teyla repeated, laughing as Zina turned to show what seemed a deliberately adorable smile.
Kids are another kind of story shorthand. There's life, there's love and growth and joy outside the cage, oh, whoops, I mean Terrarium Rodney has locked himself in. It would be so easy for him to rejoin the world. That's what makes it so strange and hurtful.
The pang of guilt hurt more than cardiac arrest; some heartaches, he now knew, were worse than others. "Teyla, I'm sorry," Rodney said. "I'm so sorry, I should've, I just haven't been-" but Teyla touched his arm and said softly, "I have not been a very good friend to you either as of late." The little girl was warm and a bit heavy, and also she smelled nice. She looked from him to her mother with open curiosity, and so Rodney swallowed hard and offered up his best compliment: "She, er, seems very bright."
"Yes," Teyla agreed, and took the girl back from him. "Yes, I believe she is."
"Come-come inside and sit down," Rodney said in a strangled voice, and together they walked up the hallway into his room. Teyla tried to keep Zina in her lap, but she wouldn't stay, preferring instead to squirm around on the floor and touch things she shouldn't; it was evident this would not be a long visit. They made small talk for a while, with Rodney asking after Teyla's son, and Jinto, and the general state of the Athosians, and with Teyla politely asking after Colonel Carter, and Zelenka, and the general state of the Atlantis science team. Still, Rodney could see that Teyla was working herself up to something, which Rodney could only assume had to do with the fact that he'd been found half-dead in his own rooms because he'd forgotten to eat, drink, or pee for a week. Between them, Ronon and Zelenka had managed to break down what was supposed to be a secured door.
"Rodney," Teyla said suddenly, with her usual intensity, and oh crap, here it was. "I would be most honored if you would come back with me. To New Athos," and Rodney blinked rapidly; he hadn't been expecting that. Teyla took a breath; her face had tightened in a way that was eerily familiar; like Sheppard's, when he had to talk about feelings. "I want my children to know you, Rodney," Teyla said, and then she bit her lip and added, "And I fear that you are no longer happy in Atlantis." She reached out and squeezed the paper-dry skin of his fingers. Her hands were warm and strong. "I hope I do not have to convince you that you have a home in my family wherever I may be."
Love that little touch suggesting how they've all rubbed off on each other, over the years, left traces behind.
He could hardly speak, he was so touched; he could only turn his hand and thread his fingers with hers. "Teyla," he managed, his throat stopping up. "That is, that is so..." but this would not do, not if he had any hope of convincing her, and so he pulled himself together and said, "...very wrong, though it's an understandable mistake. Admittedly, the life of a first class research scientist is a cruel one, and of course, you've never really seen me do any real science, since my time was always spent averting this crisis or that, but let me assure you, Teyla: better men than me-well, no, there really are no better men than me, but for the sake of the rhetoric-better men than me have been hospitalized for worse and longer in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Seriously, Caltech was like a ward." He saw the briefest flash of hesitation in her eyes, and immediately pressed his advantage, "Yes, yes, I know: we're like children, worse than children, in terms of not being able to take care of ourselves, but you have to understand: it's been so long since I've been able to get really obsessed about something. You've never actually seen me obsessed," and Teyla laughed then, and looked at him fondly, and Rodney laughed too, in relief, because all right: it was going to be all right.
His rooms, when he finally saw them again, were a mess: they'd at least put the door back on, but the furniture'd been shoved every which way. His chaise was gone. (He didn't want to imagine the state of the chaise.) There was some all too familiar medical detritus on the floor-some crumpled paper, a snake of IV tubing, the plastic sheath of a hypodermic-and honestly, they could have cleaned up a little. He should clean up now.
And he would; he would in a minute; he just had to check in, tell John he was all right; because after all, for all John knew, he'd just disappeared; he could be dead; he had to be worried. It was really only polite. Rodney awkwardly dragged his narrow bed to the drive slot. He'd blustered and browbeaten the drive out of Ronon ("-incredibly important, literally irreplaceable-" "Here, take it already!") and was on the verge of pushing it into the slot when he remembered the Terrarium was WYSIWYG. He ran a hand over his beard. It would only take a moment to shave and change his clothes.
He materialized in the empty living room. He frowned: usually John contrived to be around when he showed up, reading one of his endless newspapers. But the room was cold, the fireplace dark. Rodney went to the closed bedroom door, hesitated, knocked.
"John?" he asked, trying to sound cheery and normal. "Are you-" but he was already peering around the door into the empty bedroom. The bed was unmade: either John had abruptly broken the tidy habits of years, or he hadn't been to bed since-well, since they'd slept together. Not that John needed to sleep, of course, but he seemed to like to, and he'd always appeared to, though it was a bit like trying to figure out if the light really went out in the refrigerator. John certainly talked as if he lived in a persistent world, and things seemed to change between visits. But now, for the first time, Rodney really believed it; he could feel the heavy weight of time in the room, feel it in the crumpled newspaper and the unwashed dishes and the ashes in the fireplace.
The cold hearth is one of those shorthand signifiers of absence that works over and over, even though-maybe because-it's clichéd. It's got so many echoes of other stories of decline and fall and abandonment huddled up behind it that it borrows their pathos.
...I wonder if I'm the only person who read it and thought, "Huh, that's some sophisticated code, to not only simulate a fire while it's burning, but go through the chemical reactions right down to ash!"
He grabbed a coat, trudged outside; the ski module was attached to the cabin, so he checked that out first, even though he'd just walked past John's skis, propped by the door. There was a mess of John's size 11 footsteps outside in the snow around the house, but they weren't fresh, and they didn't seem to lead anywhere. So Rodney loaded the racetrack from the interface, entirely expecting to hear John's engine slicing the air. Instead, he materialized in the empty bleachers and saw that there was a giant hole in the concrete barrier wall on the far side of the track. He ran toward it and gradually slowed down in shock. It looked like someone had blown through it with a missile launcher. There was a road on the other side of the wall that Rodney'd never seen before, ribboning off toward the horizon through a field of waving wheat.
"Oh my God, he took the car," Rodney said, [so married] and it was then, and only then, that panic engulfed him, flooding and drowning him with waves of metallic-tasting water. Rodney turned, circling helplessly, surrounded by a panorama of brightly colored emptiness: empty racetrack, ringed by flags; empty bleachers, empty field, empty blue sky above.
He went back to the cabin finally: hung up his coat, built a fire, washed the dishes. He tried not to think about John hacking on his own code and accidentally (intentionally?) deleting himself. He tried not to think about John vanishing into an endless expanse of ones and zeroes. He didn't think about what he would do if John didn't come back, because John was of course coming back. But if he didn't, Rodney would go back to Atlantis. He would stay here and search the back roads for John. He would go live in New Athos with Teyla. He would let his clock run down right here in the cabin, which was all those parts of Canada he'd liked best, all those places he'd never lived.
He heard the high-pitched whine of an engine and opened the door just in time to see the red car crest the hill and pull up in front of the lodge, its fat wheels making slush of the snow. Rodney was vaguely aware of being cold, but came outside anyway, rubbing his arms. John got out of the car, slammed the door, and just looked at him. Rodney looked back. No pink today; John was wearing black jeans and a black leather jacket and boots, and looked heartbreakingly like Sheppard, even down to his closed-off body language.
"So," John said, almost offhandedly. "You're back."
"I-yes," Rodney said. "You're back, too."
John shrugged, nodded at the house. "I saw the fire," and Rodney turned and saw smoke billowing out of the chimney.
How great is it that it takes a frakkin' smoke signal in the middle of all this techno-wizardry to relay the message?
Rodney took a half step forward, impelled almost helplessly toward John, and then rocked back, hugging himself against the cold. This was not how he had pictured this conversation. "How'd you get the car from there to-"
John frowned and tossed his head, an oddly equine move, like he was shaking off the question. "You looked pretty sick," he said in that same offhand voice, but his eyes were moving over Rodney with a wary focus that was anything but casual.
"I-yes," Rodney said hurriedly. "But I'm fine. I'm fine now. Right as rain."
John didn't look convinced. He shifted, balled his hands in his pockets.
"I know, I know-look, I was stupid, all right?" Rodney shivered and hugged himself tighter, hopping a little. "You were right, it's just what you said: I'm not in stasis, I have to take care of myself, my body, or I'll-" Boots crunched the snow, and then John tugged at Rodney's thin sleeve with two fingers: a classic Sheppard non-touching touch.
"C'mon," John said quietly. "It's cold. Let's go inside," but Rodney felt defiant and miserable and furious all at once, and said, throat tight, "I don't want to."
John stared at him for a moment, and then he hooked an arm around Rodney's neck and tugged him into a loose hug. Rodney closed his eyes and went, arms still wrapped around himself. The collar of John's leather jacket smelled spicy and warm. John's mouth brushed his ear. "C'mon inside," he said, and then, even more softly: "You scared the crap out of me," and then they were hugging so tight that John's leather jacket creaked, and John was kissing the cold air out of his lungs.
"Tell me everything," John said, once he'd gotten Rodney inside and bundled into a blanket on the sofa in front of the fire. "And don't lie to me. And don't leave anything out, or I'll know," and so Rodney told him everything he remembered: collapsing, the gurney, Ronon, Teyla's visit, everything the doctors said: all of it. John's mouth tightened as his listened, and he got a thoughtful, faraway look which made Rodney interrupt himself to say, more defensively than he meant to: "-look, it's my choice, all right? How to live, where to spend my time-and all right, yes, obviously I need to be more careful, but I still want to live here, in the cabin: be here, with you. And I want-"
John's short bark of a laugh had no humor in it. "You think I want to talk you out of it?" Rodney suddenly felt even colder, and pulled the plaid blanket tight around his shoulders. "I'm not alive," John said. "I mean, I knew that, but now I know it-differently. And I-"
"Jesus. John," Rodney said, suddenly straightjacketed by the blanket, wanting it off.
Nice verb.
"Shut up," John said in a fast, hard voice. "Let me finish." He took a breath, and his chest rose and fell with air that wasn't there. "If something happens to you, I'm in here-forever. I mean," and there was another of those totally humorless laughs, "literally forever, which is not-" and John was speaking with a slow, careful precision, like a drunk man. "Which is not acceptable to me. So. We're going to have to discuss-"
"Yes," Rodney said hurriedly, trying and failing to banish the spectre of all eternity spent in an empty world. "Yes, of course. I can-build you an off-switch, or alter the simulation, add people, or maybe-"
"I'm not done," John said through gritted teeth, and Rodney swallowed hard and shut up. John stared moodily at the fire, and Rodney forced himself to wait, even though his brain was spinning with solutions: solutions were his business. "Look, I know I'm not alive, but I feel like I am," John said finally, softly, to the fire. "And I'm happy, I think. I mean: I like it here. The house. You." He looked at Rodney. "All the beer a guy could drink," and then: "I want you to tie my lifespan to yours," he said, then added sharply, "That's not romantic, Rodney. It's practical. I need to know there's an end to this." Rodney wanted to agree, say yes; anything but he couldn't get the words out. He was suddenly awash in his own monstrosity; what had he done?
John was still talking it through. "And you need an incentive to keep going, I think. It's not enough to run once a day, though that's something, that's a start. But you need more than that. This machine-" and John was waving his hand idly, taking in the cabin, the mountain, all of it, "wasn't meant to be lived in: there's no stasis chamber. It's just for entertainment, Rodney," John said, amused and bitter all at once. "An hour here or there, like a video game. Play some golf, race a car, visit your mistress-"
"No," Rodney managed, because that was so far from what he was doing here, so fucking far from what this meant to him. Entertainment. "That's not-this isn't-"
"I know. I know." John's voice was strained. "But you still can't live here; it wasn't built for living human beings. I'm not alive and you are, so you've got, you've got to at least try to live in the world-"
"I don't want to," Rodney blurted. "John, I love you."
John flinched and turned away. He laced his fingers and stared down at the white knuckles. "Don' t say that," John said. "You don't love me because I'm not Sheppard," and before Rodney could protest, John said, "And I can't love you because I'm not real."
"Oh," Rodney said faintly.
"Yeah. Oh," John said, but then he was leaning in to kiss Rodney 's mouth; sweetly, so fucking sweetly. Rodney let his head loll back against the sofa. And then John was whispering words against his lips: "You've got to live in the world, Rodney."
I can't, Rodney thought. "I'll try," he said.
John coded up a new grandfather clock and encased it in titanium. "No more fucking around," he said when it was done. "When that thing goes off, Cinderella, you go back, you hear me? No exceptions, no excuses," and this meant he was getting it from both sides: John haranguing him from inside the Terrarium, Ronon forcing him through his paces every morning on Atlantis.
"I want you to go spend a couple days with Teyla," John said another morning, and when Rodney argued, John said: "It'll be good for you," and: "I'll make it worth your while."
That shut Rodney up, fast. "Oh?" he said, swallowing as John tucked his fingers into the waistband of Rodney's pajama pants. "What'd you have in..." John slowly dragged the backs of his fingers down along the low curve of Rodney's belly, then turned his hand and curled it around Rodney's cock. "See, that's-" Rodney gasped, as John stroked him to hardness, "-not a good negotiating tactic, because you're already giving me what I-"
John's lip twitched in a barely-there smile. "This isn't for you," he said, and dropped to his knees. Rodney sat down, hard, on the foot of the bed. He knew what was coming: John gave head hungrily and messily and for damn near ever, and Rodney was always struck by how much he wanted it, and how he was willing to let it show that he wanted it. Rodney wasn't used to that; all his guy-on-guy fumblings had been conducted under the tacit assumption that of course, a woman would have been better. But John didn't suck cock like a guy just doing another guy a favor. John sucked cock like a guy who really, really, really liked having a cock in his mouth.
It went on for a long time, and by the end it was John who was moaning helplessly and massaging Rodney's thighs. [That's my favourite line in the scene. Bit of a kink for the servicer having possibly even more fun than the servicee.] Rodney was nearly out of his mind by then-flopped backwards, hips rocking upwards without any input from him, because he'd totally lost the ability to do anything but just lie there and let John do him. When he came it was more of a surprise to him than to John, who knew exactly what he was doing, and then John was slurping off him, swallowing and gasping, his face warm against Rodney's side.
k
John crawled up beside him after a while and slung an arm around him. Already knowing what he would find, Rodney cupped his softening cock, and then slid his fingers through the sticky mess on John's belly. "You know," he said. "I could do that for you."
"Yeah. I know," John replied softly, and then; "Go pack, you're going to Teyla's."
"Am not," Rodney said firmly, "since you haven't yet said what's in it for-"
"A secret," John whispered, breath warm on his ear.
"N'uh-uh. Nice try, flyboy, but you'll have to tell me precisely what you're-"
The heel of John's hand smacked Rodney's forehead. "I am telling you. It's a secret: I'll tell you something about Sheppard, anything you want to know. When you come back," he said, and then he was gracefully rolling up, out of bed, and to his feet.
John had been right to send him to New Athos. Teyla seemed genuinely pleased to see him, besides which little Zina was talking now and calling him, "Uncle Rodney," which freaked him out a little, but was kind of nice in its own way. Rodney hung around the Athosians' communal kitchen and snuck spoonfuls out of the big vats of stew that simmered all day, making the air smell good for miles. He sat out on Teyla's porch and looked out at the thick, old-growth trees that gave shade to the village. They looked wrong, too evenly spaced, lacking the randomness of a really good forest: he'd done better with the trees he'd designed for John's mountain. He got Halling and some of the other men to help him replace their broken old aqueduct with a ram pump, which, he explained, knee-deep in the cold clear water, would be infinitely more efficient; no more hauling buckets up from the river. He slept well.
This answers something I was struggling to articulate up above: one of the differences between Rodney's manipulation of the VR environment and the real world. Out here, Speranza fills up a paragraph with the smell of food that someone cooked from scratch, and sends Rodney down to get his hands dirty installing a pump. Handiwork. Physical connection with the world. It's no accident that Rodney isn't just spending the day playing with Teyla's kids in Atlantis; the point is to get him all the way out of doors, feet on dirt.
A couple nights later, sometime after supper, Rodney was sitting on the porch with Teyla when they saw a light move through the trees. A few minutes later Ronon came up the path to the house, rucksack slung over his shoulder. He bent to kiss Teyla's cheek, and then turned to clasp Rodney's shoulder. "Heard you guys were having a party," he said. "Didn't want to miss it." Teyla laughed and sent him to haul up a cask of wine while she went to get them some glasses; Rodney built a fire and pulled their chairs around the pit.
It took four rounds for them to start talking about Sheppard, and to Rodney's surprise, it was Ronon who got maudlin first. "-s'not the same anymore, Atlantis," he told Teyla, his voice dark and a little blurred. "People are different. Everything's different." Teyla stared down into her wineglass. Rodney blinked and fixed his eyes on the fire. "Ask Rodney," he heard Ronon say. "He'll tell you. He keeps himself to himself, and I don't blame him. I don't blame you, McKay." Rodney felt a lump in his throat and swallowed.
"It's not-" Rodney's throat clogged up. He took a quick sip, then drained his glass. "Ronon's right." He poured more wine with a shaky hand. "It isn't the same."
"You should leave Atlantis," Teyla said. "There are too many ghosts there."
"Only one ghost that matters," Ronon said heavily. "Sheppard made us family. And now we're-"
Teyla's eyes flashed fire. "We are still family, Ronon."
"It's not the same," Ronon insisted doggedly, and suddenly Rodney couldn't keep it together anymore, and raised his arm to cover his leaking eyes. Teyla put her arms around his neck, and he pulled her to him and buried his face in her hair. Holding her reminded Rodney of the day Sheppard died, of how they'd knelt over his broken body and held each other. Ronon's arms came around them both and squeezed.
Christ, how could they still be here? How could they still be in this much pain, all this time later? But there was no doubting it, the total fucking agony of it, so it was easy to give Ronon his arm, to watch him unwrap the soft leather pouch of needles and sterilize them in the fire. It didn't hurt; it didn't hurt any more than he was already hurting; he was feeling no pain. He took another long drink of wine and watched Ronon slide the needle into the pale, freckled skin of his right wrist. Bright blue lines swirled around and around. He turned his wrist so that Ronon could keep working. They were wings. They were the sea. Ronon carefully wiped away drops of blood where they welled up. Teyla held his other hand and smiled.
When Ronon was finished with him, he changed places with Teyla. Rodney stared at the inflamed red skin beneath the blue cuff on his wrist, and thought about wings and water and how Sheppard had always worn that stupid wristband, just there. He blinked and watched Ronon draw the same feathered waves on Teyla's small wrist. He was a good artist. Teyla flinched and Rodney gripped her hand and poured her another drink. It didn't take long for Ronon to finish, and Teyla's wrist didn't have the same ugly swelling, but that's what having sensitive skin got you. He fished in his jacket for ointment, slathering it awkwardly, left-handedly, over Teyla's wrist and then his own.
Ronon downed another glass of wine and said, "Help me." Rodney thought that Teyla'd be the one to do it, but actually, his own hands were steadier, and having seen it twice, he felt he knew what to do. Ronon closed his eyes after a while. Rodney breathed along with him, slow and rhythmic, hypnotized by the careful, repetitive work. The firelight darted over his hands, and he worked steadily, feeling uncannily focused and relaxed.
When Rodney was done, Ronon opened his eyes and inspected his wrist. His eyebrows flew up, impressed. "Good job, McKay. Thank you." "No, thank you," Rodney said, and then Teyla murmured, very softly, "Thank you both," and filled their glasses.
"To John," she said, and drank.
"John," Ronon repeated, and drank, too.
Rodney stared into his glass without saying anything; the wine looked black in the firelight. His wrist hurt but he hardly noticed. "To Sheppard," he said finally.
The tattoo: display your grief on the outside, memory and reminder, so it won't consume you on the inside. Ronon has the right idea. By now, though, Sheppard and John have already diverged in Rodney's mind, even if he hasn't consciously coped to it; he can be sick with grief for the one just hours after saying, "I love you," to the other. What a mess.
Part 4
"What?" John said, lowering the broadsheet, and Rodney realized, to his delight, that John would get this, and so he turned the laptop's screen toward him and said, "Look, I'm Slartibartfast! Designing the shoreline and-!" John cracked up and shoved the newspaper aside, "-building fjords," Rodney finished, dissolving into gasps of laughter, and John slithered down besides him on the floor and grabbed the laptop, laughing as he saw Rodney's perfect mock-California coast.
"Oh, my God," John said, still grinning helplessly. "You're so pathetic; of course you want to be a Magrathean. 'I am Slartibartfast! Designer of Worlds!'"
"Uh, excuse me, so sorry," Rodney said, wiping his eyes, "but you just a) pulled Magrathea out of your ass and b) made an Oppenheimer reference, so I don't know who you're calling-" and then John's mouth was on his,
Two dorks in love! Jeez, first kisses are so hard to write, and this one just makes me laugh with glee. The key thing is that it doesn't come out of nowhere; it comes out of a fantastic moment of connection-one that of course makes John swell up with love for this ridiculous man until there's no other option but to kiss him. I've read bunches of lead-ups to kisses that feel like exactly that: flimsy excuses to get to the kissing part. In this one, the kiss practically feels like an excuse to get the Slartibartfast jokes in there! Kickass writing. And it has to be John who initiates it, otherwise it would be creepy, and Rodney would always wonder if he'd misprogrammed him somehow out of a subliminal desire to make him want sex.
soft and a little wet. Hands came up to clutch his face, and for a moment, everything lurched-his stomach, the world-and then he was kissing John back greedily, trying to grab hold, hold on.
They kissed for long moments, lips sliding and parting against each other, and then all at once, Rodney couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe. He pushed John away and sucked desperately for air. "I-oh God, oh God," Rodney said, forcing the words out; he had no breath in his lungs, "I need to know, is this you or is this him?" John's face contorted and went terrible. He tried to pull away, but Rodney fisted the red flannel shirt that he had not designed and said, "Please. Please. I know it's a terrible question, impossible to answer. Just-can you remember when, do you have any memory of-"
John couldn't seem to get his face under control. "Rodney," he said raggedly, and tried again to pull away, but Rodney felt out of his mind, preternaturally strong. John could get away, but he'd have to hurt him to do it. Finally John went still and closed his eyes.
"I-" John began, in a choked-up voice. "You. You made a bomb. And I remember-" and Rodney kissed him all in a rush, exhaling his relief, except John's hands were squeezing his wrists hard enough to hurt, and pushing him back. "No, you asked, and now you have to hear the whole answer. Full disclosure," and Rodney stared at his dark eyes, the bitter tilt of his smile, and realized that he was Sheppard, or at least that he had been. "He thought about it, but he decided not to," John said flatly. "He wouldn't ever have done it, Rodney, okay? Because in his own strange way, he loved the Air Force." John let go of Rodney's wrists, and Rodney instinctively rubbed at them. "But I'm thinking that doesn't so much matter now. I'm making that call, all right?"
Real!John can't be out because he's Air Force; VR!John has space to stretch. Canon!John can't be gay because he's a prime time sci-fi leading man; fanfic!John has space to stretch.
"Yes." Rodney's mouth was dry with wanting him so much. "Yes, I-" He leaned in and kissed John hungrily, and John did something nasty and wonderful with his tongue before pushing Rodney away by the shoulders. Rodney moaned in disappointment.
"I'm not him, Rodney," John said dangerously.
"Yes," Rodney said, sharply, "I told you that, remember?" John glared at him for another moment, and then his expression wavered and they were kissing again, fumbling at each other's shirts and tumbling together down onto the floor.
Rodney had wanted to kiss and touch John because he was Sheppard, or part of him, anyway: the only part he had left. But he hadn't expected the raw physical pleasure of it, of having John's long, lean torso underneath him, hands clutching at Rodney's shoulders, mouth everywhere. Rodney wasn't a homosexual, or at least he hadn't thought he was, even though he'd lost his virginity to his advisor at CalTech and had had more than his share of depressing late-night laboratory hand jobs since. It was a survival mechanism: there were too few girls in his world, and they were immediately snatched up by the hottest guys, leaving the rest of them to grumble or go celibate or make do. Sometimes, in years that had a 7 in them, a woman came into his orbit and he got laid ('87: Michelle Smith; '97: Carole Rartha; '07: Katie Brown) but mostly his life was spent with guys like himself, some of whom could be prevailed upon to give hand jobs or blowjobs if they were drunk or you looked really desperate.
Slash in 2008: where the slippage from one sexual orientation to the next takes up all of two paragraphs and not even a sentence's worth of angst. Don't get me wrong; I love the stories (and SGA has damned good ones) that make sexual identity a source of plot and conflict, that go all Butler and Cixous on John and Rodney's asses, but it's also pretty awesome that we can write these third/forth wave slash fics that just take the cosmopolitan attitude as a given, as least for the civilians, and go rolling onward to whatever other concerns catch our fancy.
It didn't mean anything, but more than that, sex with guys had never been good. It was like a Snickers bar or vending machine coffee: it kept you from killing people. But it left him staggeringly unprepared for sex with John, which he'd wanted on an emotional level, needing that closeness, except- Jesus, his spine was melting. John was licking and sucking Rodney's dick wetly, chin slick with it, and Rodney gasped helplessly, because John's eyes were closed and his cheeks were hollow, and he was making noises like he never wanted to stop. Every time Rodney got close to coming, he'd back off, change directions, like he was just prolonging the number of minutes he could spend with Rodney's dick in his mouth. Rodney moaned brokenly, tried to catch his breath, couldn't. God, he didn't know, he'd never felt anything like this. John's mouth was soft on his balls, and then his tongue was sliding down. Rodney's thighs jittered and tried to close, because there was private and there was private, but-
He had his first orgasm with John's fingers in his ass, and could have just lain there, wrung out and happily basking in endorphins for the rest of his life, except John was hauling him off the floor and shoving him and his rubbery limbs toward the bedroom, where he laid Rodney face-down on the bed and fucked him senseless while Rodney mumbled "yes, fuck, yes," into the pillow. After that, they dozed off, John's face mashed against his neck. Rodney had forgotten how much heat two bodies could generate, and felt happily immobilized, curled up against John: lazy with heat, insane with it.
He woke up with John's dick in his hand. "Please?" John murmured sleepily. Rodney leaned over him and jerked him slowly, watching his eyelashes flutter. He loved having the hot, heavy weight of John's cock in his hand. The velvety soft skin of the shaft, the slick, leaking head; holding John like this was more intimate than fucking. As he got near to coming, John's mouth fell open and he began making the most incredibly hot noises, and then wetness spurted through Rodney's loosely curled fingers and up, over his belly. "You can fuck me. If you want to," John said breathlessly, and then: "I want you to."
"Whatever you want," Rodney managed, and it was just as well that he'd stipulated that up front, because John seemed to think getting fucked was some kind of extreme sport, and was surprisingly demanding. "Higher, tilt my-oh God, yeah, right there, oh. Fuck...." and Rodney gasped and heaved and did what John wanted. John closed his eyes and had two gut-wrenching, shuddering orgasms, one after the other. Rodney flew over the edge after him, losing his balance and falling forward, hands still curled around John's legs.
He fell asleep on top, which turned out to be convenient when the grandfather clock started chiming. Rodney hardly bothered to wake to full consciousness, just shoved back the covers, pushed himself off a bitchily moaning John Sheppard, and staggered into the living room, where he yanked a driver from John's golf bag and started bashing at the stupid thing. Ronon could go to hell; he was doing a different John Sheppard memorial today, by God. The old clock let out one final, off-key clang, and Rodney let the bent club drop to the floor and went back to the bedroom, where John had kept the bed warm.
They had sex on every piece of furniture in the cabin. They had sex in every position and at every scale, from nine-second orgasms to ninety-minute ones that left Rodney feeling as if he had to gather up his limbs from isolated corners of the room afterwards. They paused only for meals, huge ones (bacon with everything, at Rodney's insistence: bacon and eggs, bacon cheeseburgers, bacon and tomato sandwiches, because what good was a virtual reality scenario if you didn't get to eat what you wanted?)
http://xkcd.com/418/
or to fall down exhausted. John strolled around the house naked, or nearly so, though Rodney thought frying bacon in the nude was-well, exactly the sort of stupid risk that Sheppard was famous for, actually. But Rodney tried to get into the spirit of the thing by wearing boxers and nothing else, though he kept having stabs of insecurity. It hadn't occurred to him to tweak his interface, so he was WYSIWYG. While John was-well, not only Sheppard, but Sheppard from the day Rodney'd invited him to the porn room; ages ago, now.
"Chill out, Rodney, will you?" John said, and licked the wrinkled corner of Rodney's eye.
Rodney closed his eyes and shivered. "There's no way you were this uninhibited in life."
John voice was like warm honey. "I told you," he said, his mouth skimming Rodney's cheek with its rough scratch of beard. "This is my call."
Rodney impulsively cupped John's face, which had its own, softer, stubble. "Good call," he said in a hoarse voice. "I like your call. Call me any-" and that's when he felt the first stabbing pain in his chest and stumbled forward, his legs buckling under him.
"Rodney!" John had caught him. John was trying to hold him up, but the world was spinning, and Christ, he gritted his teeth and rode out another stab of- "Rodney, what's-" He clutched at his chest. He was going down. "Oh God," John whispered. "Rodney." The floor was at his back. He saw John's hair. The rough beams of the ceiling. Hands on his chest. Pressing. Pumping. "Rodney. Please. Please. Come on-"
"-Clear!" The paddles thumped down onto his chest, and Rodney gasped, and wanted to sit up and yell, "What are you idiots doing?" except he was strapped down to a gurney with an oxygen mask over his face and he didn't have any strength anyway. Above him, faces loomed and disappeared, faded in and out. His eyes shut against a bright light.
"-pull the drip, goddammit! I don't want to risk that again! Use hypodermoclysis, one third normal saline, two thirds 5% glucose. Watch him for hypokalemia and I swear to God, if he crashes again, I'll-" There was dust in the air, or snow, like a bad TV picture.
The drive. Where was the. Rodney tried to reach out, couldn't move, flexed his fingers impotently. "John," he said, but his voice came out thickly, and nobody answered, and Christ, how that hurt, like he had razor blades in his throat. "John! Where-"
"Shh. Don't try to talk, Dr. McKay. Your throat, it's not moist enough to-"
Rodney feebly tried to catch at the white sleeve with his fingers. "John," he managed. "Room. Find," but the world was going brown, and the bright lights flickered and went out.
"Well!" a cheerful, unfamiliar voice chirped when Rodney next opened his eyes, "You gave us quite a scare." Rodney had just enough strength to turn away from her.
The fade in and out of these scenelets works so well to convey the crucial information without taking up much space, while staying inside Rodney's POV and nailing that classic Medical Emergency vibe-the white haze, the babble of jargon, the perky RN voice.
"You're such a dumbass," and Rodney opened his eyes to see Ronon there, arms crossed and staring down at him.
"I know." Rodney's voice was the barest scrape of a whisper, but he was grateful for it.
"If Sheppard were here, he'd kick your ass up and down every hallway in Atlantis," Ronon said. "But he's not. So I guess it's up to me," but Rodney was already gone, thinking of John, the Terrarium, what John would say when, if the drive hadn't been- He impelled his hand toward Ronon's leather-clad arm, and this time, his limbs obeyed him.
"I need," Rodney scraped out, and Ronon frowned and bent down to listen, "in my room, I need you to look for-something of mine, I lost, rectangular, white-" but Ronon was pulling away and staring down at him with narrow eyes. "Please..."
To his surprise, Ronon slid a hand into his vest and pulled out the white drive; Rodney, who had been straining upwards in a desperate urge to be persuasive, fell back, relieved.
"Oh," Rodney breathed. "Oh, thank God. Ronon, you're my hero, you're-give-" He reached for it, but Ronon didn't give it over; instead, he just turned it in his hands.
"It's not safe; doctors'd have it off you in a minute," Ronon said, and Rodney supposed that was true; in his experience, doctors were quick to confiscate anything that made you feel like a human being. "What is it?" Ronon asked. "Some kind of memory book?"
Rodney's eyes pricked with tears and he turned away fast. He should have known there would be no fooling Ronon. "Yeah," he managed. "Something like that."
Way back at, "I know about the lesbians," it was just a joke, a terror of discovery all for a comical, embarrassing hobby.
To his surprise, Ronon sat down beside him and let out a long sigh. He let his hands dangle between his slouched legs. "It's not good, too much remembering," Ronon said, and Rodney actually had to grit his teeth together to suppress a sob, because thank you! fuck you! what the hell was he supposed to do about it now? He supposed he might have moved on, surely would have moved on, if it hadn't been for the stupid lesbians. But how could he ever have deleted that logfile? "You want to remember, but the body knows to forget; the body wants to forget pain. It remembers in other ways," and Ronon raised his head and twisted it to the side so that, even laid flat as he was, Rodney could see his tattoo. "I think maybe we went too fast," Ronon said finally, matter-of-factly. "I think maybe we're not done."
"I'm done," Rodney croaked. "I just-get me out of here."
Ronon's lips curved into a smirk. "Yeah. No. Couple days, they said," and then, tucking the drive back into his vest, "I'll hold this for you."
He was at least allowed to walk around a bit if he wheeled his stupid IV along with him, so he was down the infirmary corridor when he saw her. She came around the corner, so strong and beautiful, carrying a toddler on her hip. "Oh," he said, and stopped short.
Teyla saw him and her face was like the sun. "Rodney," she said; her smile was radiant, though her brown eyes moved over him with obvious concern. Rodney swallowed; he had seen himself in the mirror that morning and looked away fast.
"Oh my God, how did this happen?" Rodney asked, letting go of the pole and extending both arms for the child. "I mean," he added, as Teyla laughed and handed him the little girl, who grinned as sunnily as her mother. "I know the science, I just-"
"I sent a message," Teyla said, almost offhandedly, as she stroked an approving hand down her daughter's back. "I was not then able to come to Atlantis; Zina was a difficult birth and she and her brother have been quite a handful. Quite," Teyla repeated, laughing as Zina turned to show what seemed a deliberately adorable smile.
Kids are another kind of story shorthand. There's life, there's love and growth and joy outside the cage, oh, whoops, I mean Terrarium Rodney has locked himself in. It would be so easy for him to rejoin the world. That's what makes it so strange and hurtful.
The pang of guilt hurt more than cardiac arrest; some heartaches, he now knew, were worse than others. "Teyla, I'm sorry," Rodney said. "I'm so sorry, I should've, I just haven't been-" but Teyla touched his arm and said softly, "I have not been a very good friend to you either as of late." The little girl was warm and a bit heavy, and also she smelled nice. She looked from him to her mother with open curiosity, and so Rodney swallowed hard and offered up his best compliment: "She, er, seems very bright."
"Yes," Teyla agreed, and took the girl back from him. "Yes, I believe she is."
"Come-come inside and sit down," Rodney said in a strangled voice, and together they walked up the hallway into his room. Teyla tried to keep Zina in her lap, but she wouldn't stay, preferring instead to squirm around on the floor and touch things she shouldn't; it was evident this would not be a long visit. They made small talk for a while, with Rodney asking after Teyla's son, and Jinto, and the general state of the Athosians, and with Teyla politely asking after Colonel Carter, and Zelenka, and the general state of the Atlantis science team. Still, Rodney could see that Teyla was working herself up to something, which Rodney could only assume had to do with the fact that he'd been found half-dead in his own rooms because he'd forgotten to eat, drink, or pee for a week. Between them, Ronon and Zelenka had managed to break down what was supposed to be a secured door.
"Rodney," Teyla said suddenly, with her usual intensity, and oh crap, here it was. "I would be most honored if you would come back with me. To New Athos," and Rodney blinked rapidly; he hadn't been expecting that. Teyla took a breath; her face had tightened in a way that was eerily familiar; like Sheppard's, when he had to talk about feelings. "I want my children to know you, Rodney," Teyla said, and then she bit her lip and added, "And I fear that you are no longer happy in Atlantis." She reached out and squeezed the paper-dry skin of his fingers. Her hands were warm and strong. "I hope I do not have to convince you that you have a home in my family wherever I may be."
Love that little touch suggesting how they've all rubbed off on each other, over the years, left traces behind.
He could hardly speak, he was so touched; he could only turn his hand and thread his fingers with hers. "Teyla," he managed, his throat stopping up. "That is, that is so..." but this would not do, not if he had any hope of convincing her, and so he pulled himself together and said, "...very wrong, though it's an understandable mistake. Admittedly, the life of a first class research scientist is a cruel one, and of course, you've never really seen me do any real science, since my time was always spent averting this crisis or that, but let me assure you, Teyla: better men than me-well, no, there really are no better men than me, but for the sake of the rhetoric-better men than me have been hospitalized for worse and longer in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Seriously, Caltech was like a ward." He saw the briefest flash of hesitation in her eyes, and immediately pressed his advantage, "Yes, yes, I know: we're like children, worse than children, in terms of not being able to take care of ourselves, but you have to understand: it's been so long since I've been able to get really obsessed about something. You've never actually seen me obsessed," and Teyla laughed then, and looked at him fondly, and Rodney laughed too, in relief, because all right: it was going to be all right.
His rooms, when he finally saw them again, were a mess: they'd at least put the door back on, but the furniture'd been shoved every which way. His chaise was gone. (He didn't want to imagine the state of the chaise.) There was some all too familiar medical detritus on the floor-some crumpled paper, a snake of IV tubing, the plastic sheath of a hypodermic-and honestly, they could have cleaned up a little. He should clean up now.
And he would; he would in a minute; he just had to check in, tell John he was all right; because after all, for all John knew, he'd just disappeared; he could be dead; he had to be worried. It was really only polite. Rodney awkwardly dragged his narrow bed to the drive slot. He'd blustered and browbeaten the drive out of Ronon ("-incredibly important, literally irreplaceable-" "Here, take it already!") and was on the verge of pushing it into the slot when he remembered the Terrarium was WYSIWYG. He ran a hand over his beard. It would only take a moment to shave and change his clothes.
He materialized in the empty living room. He frowned: usually John contrived to be around when he showed up, reading one of his endless newspapers. But the room was cold, the fireplace dark. Rodney went to the closed bedroom door, hesitated, knocked.
"John?" he asked, trying to sound cheery and normal. "Are you-" but he was already peering around the door into the empty bedroom. The bed was unmade: either John had abruptly broken the tidy habits of years, or he hadn't been to bed since-well, since they'd slept together. Not that John needed to sleep, of course, but he seemed to like to, and he'd always appeared to, though it was a bit like trying to figure out if the light really went out in the refrigerator. John certainly talked as if he lived in a persistent world, and things seemed to change between visits. But now, for the first time, Rodney really believed it; he could feel the heavy weight of time in the room, feel it in the crumpled newspaper and the unwashed dishes and the ashes in the fireplace.
The cold hearth is one of those shorthand signifiers of absence that works over and over, even though-maybe because-it's clichéd. It's got so many echoes of other stories of decline and fall and abandonment huddled up behind it that it borrows their pathos.
...I wonder if I'm the only person who read it and thought, "Huh, that's some sophisticated code, to not only simulate a fire while it's burning, but go through the chemical reactions right down to ash!"
He grabbed a coat, trudged outside; the ski module was attached to the cabin, so he checked that out first, even though he'd just walked past John's skis, propped by the door. There was a mess of John's size 11 footsteps outside in the snow around the house, but they weren't fresh, and they didn't seem to lead anywhere. So Rodney loaded the racetrack from the interface, entirely expecting to hear John's engine slicing the air. Instead, he materialized in the empty bleachers and saw that there was a giant hole in the concrete barrier wall on the far side of the track. He ran toward it and gradually slowed down in shock. It looked like someone had blown through it with a missile launcher. There was a road on the other side of the wall that Rodney'd never seen before, ribboning off toward the horizon through a field of waving wheat.
"Oh my God, he took the car," Rodney said, [so married] and it was then, and only then, that panic engulfed him, flooding and drowning him with waves of metallic-tasting water. Rodney turned, circling helplessly, surrounded by a panorama of brightly colored emptiness: empty racetrack, ringed by flags; empty bleachers, empty field, empty blue sky above.
He went back to the cabin finally: hung up his coat, built a fire, washed the dishes. He tried not to think about John hacking on his own code and accidentally (intentionally?) deleting himself. He tried not to think about John vanishing into an endless expanse of ones and zeroes. He didn't think about what he would do if John didn't come back, because John was of course coming back. But if he didn't, Rodney would go back to Atlantis. He would stay here and search the back roads for John. He would go live in New Athos with Teyla. He would let his clock run down right here in the cabin, which was all those parts of Canada he'd liked best, all those places he'd never lived.
He heard the high-pitched whine of an engine and opened the door just in time to see the red car crest the hill and pull up in front of the lodge, its fat wheels making slush of the snow. Rodney was vaguely aware of being cold, but came outside anyway, rubbing his arms. John got out of the car, slammed the door, and just looked at him. Rodney looked back. No pink today; John was wearing black jeans and a black leather jacket and boots, and looked heartbreakingly like Sheppard, even down to his closed-off body language.
"So," John said, almost offhandedly. "You're back."
"I-yes," Rodney said. "You're back, too."
John shrugged, nodded at the house. "I saw the fire," and Rodney turned and saw smoke billowing out of the chimney.
How great is it that it takes a frakkin' smoke signal in the middle of all this techno-wizardry to relay the message?
Rodney took a half step forward, impelled almost helplessly toward John, and then rocked back, hugging himself against the cold. This was not how he had pictured this conversation. "How'd you get the car from there to-"
John frowned and tossed his head, an oddly equine move, like he was shaking off the question. "You looked pretty sick," he said in that same offhand voice, but his eyes were moving over Rodney with a wary focus that was anything but casual.
"I-yes," Rodney said hurriedly. "But I'm fine. I'm fine now. Right as rain."
John didn't look convinced. He shifted, balled his hands in his pockets.
"I know, I know-look, I was stupid, all right?" Rodney shivered and hugged himself tighter, hopping a little. "You were right, it's just what you said: I'm not in stasis, I have to take care of myself, my body, or I'll-" Boots crunched the snow, and then John tugged at Rodney's thin sleeve with two fingers: a classic Sheppard non-touching touch.
"C'mon," John said quietly. "It's cold. Let's go inside," but Rodney felt defiant and miserable and furious all at once, and said, throat tight, "I don't want to."
John stared at him for a moment, and then he hooked an arm around Rodney's neck and tugged him into a loose hug. Rodney closed his eyes and went, arms still wrapped around himself. The collar of John's leather jacket smelled spicy and warm. John's mouth brushed his ear. "C'mon inside," he said, and then, even more softly: "You scared the crap out of me," and then they were hugging so tight that John's leather jacket creaked, and John was kissing the cold air out of his lungs.
"Tell me everything," John said, once he'd gotten Rodney inside and bundled into a blanket on the sofa in front of the fire. "And don't lie to me. And don't leave anything out, or I'll know," and so Rodney told him everything he remembered: collapsing, the gurney, Ronon, Teyla's visit, everything the doctors said: all of it. John's mouth tightened as his listened, and he got a thoughtful, faraway look which made Rodney interrupt himself to say, more defensively than he meant to: "-look, it's my choice, all right? How to live, where to spend my time-and all right, yes, obviously I need to be more careful, but I still want to live here, in the cabin: be here, with you. And I want-"
John's short bark of a laugh had no humor in it. "You think I want to talk you out of it?" Rodney suddenly felt even colder, and pulled the plaid blanket tight around his shoulders. "I'm not alive," John said. "I mean, I knew that, but now I know it-differently. And I-"
"Jesus. John," Rodney said, suddenly straightjacketed by the blanket, wanting it off.
Nice verb.
"Shut up," John said in a fast, hard voice. "Let me finish." He took a breath, and his chest rose and fell with air that wasn't there. "If something happens to you, I'm in here-forever. I mean," and there was another of those totally humorless laughs, "literally forever, which is not-" and John was speaking with a slow, careful precision, like a drunk man. "Which is not acceptable to me. So. We're going to have to discuss-"
"Yes," Rodney said hurriedly, trying and failing to banish the spectre of all eternity spent in an empty world. "Yes, of course. I can-build you an off-switch, or alter the simulation, add people, or maybe-"
"I'm not done," John said through gritted teeth, and Rodney swallowed hard and shut up. John stared moodily at the fire, and Rodney forced himself to wait, even though his brain was spinning with solutions: solutions were his business. "Look, I know I'm not alive, but I feel like I am," John said finally, softly, to the fire. "And I'm happy, I think. I mean: I like it here. The house. You." He looked at Rodney. "All the beer a guy could drink," and then: "I want you to tie my lifespan to yours," he said, then added sharply, "That's not romantic, Rodney. It's practical. I need to know there's an end to this." Rodney wanted to agree, say yes; anything but he couldn't get the words out. He was suddenly awash in his own monstrosity; what had he done?
John was still talking it through. "And you need an incentive to keep going, I think. It's not enough to run once a day, though that's something, that's a start. But you need more than that. This machine-" and John was waving his hand idly, taking in the cabin, the mountain, all of it, "wasn't meant to be lived in: there's no stasis chamber. It's just for entertainment, Rodney," John said, amused and bitter all at once. "An hour here or there, like a video game. Play some golf, race a car, visit your mistress-"
"No," Rodney managed, because that was so far from what he was doing here, so fucking far from what this meant to him. Entertainment. "That's not-this isn't-"
"I know. I know." John's voice was strained. "But you still can't live here; it wasn't built for living human beings. I'm not alive and you are, so you've got, you've got to at least try to live in the world-"
"I don't want to," Rodney blurted. "John, I love you."
John flinched and turned away. He laced his fingers and stared down at the white knuckles. "Don' t say that," John said. "You don't love me because I'm not Sheppard," and before Rodney could protest, John said, "And I can't love you because I'm not real."
"Oh," Rodney said faintly.
"Yeah. Oh," John said, but then he was leaning in to kiss Rodney 's mouth; sweetly, so fucking sweetly. Rodney let his head loll back against the sofa. And then John was whispering words against his lips: "You've got to live in the world, Rodney."
I can't, Rodney thought. "I'll try," he said.
John coded up a new grandfather clock and encased it in titanium. "No more fucking around," he said when it was done. "When that thing goes off, Cinderella, you go back, you hear me? No exceptions, no excuses," and this meant he was getting it from both sides: John haranguing him from inside the Terrarium, Ronon forcing him through his paces every morning on Atlantis.
"I want you to go spend a couple days with Teyla," John said another morning, and when Rodney argued, John said: "It'll be good for you," and: "I'll make it worth your while."
That shut Rodney up, fast. "Oh?" he said, swallowing as John tucked his fingers into the waistband of Rodney's pajama pants. "What'd you have in..." John slowly dragged the backs of his fingers down along the low curve of Rodney's belly, then turned his hand and curled it around Rodney's cock. "See, that's-" Rodney gasped, as John stroked him to hardness, "-not a good negotiating tactic, because you're already giving me what I-"
John's lip twitched in a barely-there smile. "This isn't for you," he said, and dropped to his knees. Rodney sat down, hard, on the foot of the bed. He knew what was coming: John gave head hungrily and messily and for damn near ever, and Rodney was always struck by how much he wanted it, and how he was willing to let it show that he wanted it. Rodney wasn't used to that; all his guy-on-guy fumblings had been conducted under the tacit assumption that of course, a woman would have been better. But John didn't suck cock like a guy just doing another guy a favor. John sucked cock like a guy who really, really, really liked having a cock in his mouth.
It went on for a long time, and by the end it was John who was moaning helplessly and massaging Rodney's thighs. [That's my favourite line in the scene. Bit of a kink for the servicer having possibly even more fun than the servicee.] Rodney was nearly out of his mind by then-flopped backwards, hips rocking upwards without any input from him, because he'd totally lost the ability to do anything but just lie there and let John do him. When he came it was more of a surprise to him than to John, who knew exactly what he was doing, and then John was slurping off him, swallowing and gasping, his face warm against Rodney's side.
k
John crawled up beside him after a while and slung an arm around him. Already knowing what he would find, Rodney cupped his softening cock, and then slid his fingers through the sticky mess on John's belly. "You know," he said. "I could do that for you."
"Yeah. I know," John replied softly, and then; "Go pack, you're going to Teyla's."
"Am not," Rodney said firmly, "since you haven't yet said what's in it for-"
"A secret," John whispered, breath warm on his ear.
"N'uh-uh. Nice try, flyboy, but you'll have to tell me precisely what you're-"
The heel of John's hand smacked Rodney's forehead. "I am telling you. It's a secret: I'll tell you something about Sheppard, anything you want to know. When you come back," he said, and then he was gracefully rolling up, out of bed, and to his feet.
John had been right to send him to New Athos. Teyla seemed genuinely pleased to see him, besides which little Zina was talking now and calling him, "Uncle Rodney," which freaked him out a little, but was kind of nice in its own way. Rodney hung around the Athosians' communal kitchen and snuck spoonfuls out of the big vats of stew that simmered all day, making the air smell good for miles. He sat out on Teyla's porch and looked out at the thick, old-growth trees that gave shade to the village. They looked wrong, too evenly spaced, lacking the randomness of a really good forest: he'd done better with the trees he'd designed for John's mountain. He got Halling and some of the other men to help him replace their broken old aqueduct with a ram pump, which, he explained, knee-deep in the cold clear water, would be infinitely more efficient; no more hauling buckets up from the river. He slept well.
This answers something I was struggling to articulate up above: one of the differences between Rodney's manipulation of the VR environment and the real world. Out here, Speranza fills up a paragraph with the smell of food that someone cooked from scratch, and sends Rodney down to get his hands dirty installing a pump. Handiwork. Physical connection with the world. It's no accident that Rodney isn't just spending the day playing with Teyla's kids in Atlantis; the point is to get him all the way out of doors, feet on dirt.
A couple nights later, sometime after supper, Rodney was sitting on the porch with Teyla when they saw a light move through the trees. A few minutes later Ronon came up the path to the house, rucksack slung over his shoulder. He bent to kiss Teyla's cheek, and then turned to clasp Rodney's shoulder. "Heard you guys were having a party," he said. "Didn't want to miss it." Teyla laughed and sent him to haul up a cask of wine while she went to get them some glasses; Rodney built a fire and pulled their chairs around the pit.
It took four rounds for them to start talking about Sheppard, and to Rodney's surprise, it was Ronon who got maudlin first. "-s'not the same anymore, Atlantis," he told Teyla, his voice dark and a little blurred. "People are different. Everything's different." Teyla stared down into her wineglass. Rodney blinked and fixed his eyes on the fire. "Ask Rodney," he heard Ronon say. "He'll tell you. He keeps himself to himself, and I don't blame him. I don't blame you, McKay." Rodney felt a lump in his throat and swallowed.
"It's not-" Rodney's throat clogged up. He took a quick sip, then drained his glass. "Ronon's right." He poured more wine with a shaky hand. "It isn't the same."
"You should leave Atlantis," Teyla said. "There are too many ghosts there."
"Only one ghost that matters," Ronon said heavily. "Sheppard made us family. And now we're-"
Teyla's eyes flashed fire. "We are still family, Ronon."
"It's not the same," Ronon insisted doggedly, and suddenly Rodney couldn't keep it together anymore, and raised his arm to cover his leaking eyes. Teyla put her arms around his neck, and he pulled her to him and buried his face in her hair. Holding her reminded Rodney of the day Sheppard died, of how they'd knelt over his broken body and held each other. Ronon's arms came around them both and squeezed.
Christ, how could they still be here? How could they still be in this much pain, all this time later? But there was no doubting it, the total fucking agony of it, so it was easy to give Ronon his arm, to watch him unwrap the soft leather pouch of needles and sterilize them in the fire. It didn't hurt; it didn't hurt any more than he was already hurting; he was feeling no pain. He took another long drink of wine and watched Ronon slide the needle into the pale, freckled skin of his right wrist. Bright blue lines swirled around and around. He turned his wrist so that Ronon could keep working. They were wings. They were the sea. Ronon carefully wiped away drops of blood where they welled up. Teyla held his other hand and smiled.
When Ronon was finished with him, he changed places with Teyla. Rodney stared at the inflamed red skin beneath the blue cuff on his wrist, and thought about wings and water and how Sheppard had always worn that stupid wristband, just there. He blinked and watched Ronon draw the same feathered waves on Teyla's small wrist. He was a good artist. Teyla flinched and Rodney gripped her hand and poured her another drink. It didn't take long for Ronon to finish, and Teyla's wrist didn't have the same ugly swelling, but that's what having sensitive skin got you. He fished in his jacket for ointment, slathering it awkwardly, left-handedly, over Teyla's wrist and then his own.
Ronon downed another glass of wine and said, "Help me." Rodney thought that Teyla'd be the one to do it, but actually, his own hands were steadier, and having seen it twice, he felt he knew what to do. Ronon closed his eyes after a while. Rodney breathed along with him, slow and rhythmic, hypnotized by the careful, repetitive work. The firelight darted over his hands, and he worked steadily, feeling uncannily focused and relaxed.
When Rodney was done, Ronon opened his eyes and inspected his wrist. His eyebrows flew up, impressed. "Good job, McKay. Thank you." "No, thank you," Rodney said, and then Teyla murmured, very softly, "Thank you both," and filled their glasses.
"To John," she said, and drank.
"John," Ronon repeated, and drank, too.
Rodney stared into his glass without saying anything; the wine looked black in the firelight. His wrist hurt but he hardly noticed. "To Sheppard," he said finally.
The tattoo: display your grief on the outside, memory and reminder, so it won't consume you on the inside. Ronon has the right idea. By now, though, Sheppard and John have already diverged in Rodney's mind, even if he hasn't consciously coped to it; he can be sick with grief for the one just hours after saying, "I love you," to the other. What a mess.
Part 4