My WIP Amnesty Day, Part 1 of 2
I have two challenge fics due in Dec, and a too-long list of holiday ficlets to write for people, so I'm declaring today WIP Amnesty Day in this journal, for the sake of my sanity.
Working Title: Broken in Nebraska (because I require my working titles to be really freaking obvious)
Pairing: John/Rodney PG
Genre: AU earth-set future fic.
What I Managed to Write Before I Conceded Defeat: Several opening and lead-up scenes, followed by a large gap, then some flashback snippets, concluded with a mostly-written epilogue. Approx. 5,000 words.
*
Nebraska is flat and straight and so utterly mind-numbing to drive through that Rodney has to stop for coffee every chance he gets just to stay awake, which means that he has to pull over every fifty miles to piss, and he ends up arriving at his destination two hours later than expected, wired and jittery on caffeine and nerves.
He doesn't suppose it matters because even if he cared about making a good first impression, this isn't a first impression. When he gets out of his rental car--a safe, practical sedan, though he'd been tempted by the cherry red Mustang he'd seen in the rental lot--his knees are rubbery and he wonders idly if they'll give out on him.
They don't, though, and he wasn't really expecting them to because he's been through too much in Pegasus for something as mundane as this to drop him. His hands are shaking, however, and his heart is pounding, and maybe he's on the verge of a panic attack, but he expects all of that.
It might not be a life or death situation, but it's something big, something important, and Rodney will never be a man who can remain calm and stoic and collected.
The house he's standing in front of is quaint and charming and brick, one storey, with a neatly trimmed lawn and what Rodney thinks are azalea bushes lining the walk. It's so normal, so picturesque, so bland, that he double checks the numbers on the door to make sure he's at the right house.
They match, though, and he forces himself to move along the path and up the three steps to the porch. The door is open and through the screen Rodney sees a hallway leading to a tiled kitchen, and doorways to rooms on either side of the small foyer. He lifts a hand, fingers curled in, and his knock is jarring and too hard from how much his hand is shaking.
John comes out of the room on the right and pushes the screen door open slowly. He's wearing glasses, which have slipped down his nose, jeans that look old and worn and have slipped down his hips, and a long sleeved black shirt that has decided to break pattern and has slid up his torso a bit, exposing a band of skin at his abdomen.
Rodney stares at him for a long while, eyes running from his bare feet all the way up to the strands of silver showing in his hair. John looks--healthy and whole. It's a shock, in a way. A part of Rodney was prepared to find a shell of John here in this house, aged and tired and weary. But Rodney's the one who stayed in Atlantis and he guesses that between the two of them, he's cornered the market on aging prematurely and raggedly from stress.
It makes him squirm under John's matching scrutiny but all John does is give him a small smile and step aside. "Hey," he says easily. "Come on in." And Rodney does.
*
John could have stayed in Atlantis. The SGC didn't order him to leave, Elizabeth didn't hint that maybe he should consider it, and the military and science ranks pulled together and came up with over a dozen different options for him.
It took Rodney four years before he stopped thinking that John should have stayed.
*
John settles Rodney on a couch in the living room, casually drops a sheaf of papers onto the coffee table, and asks Rodney if he wants a drink.
"Nothing caffeinated," John adds, his eyes fixed on the way Rodney's left knee is jittering up and down. "I don't think I want to add to your rate of oscillation. And I don’t have anything alcoholic, sorry. Water or juice?"
Rodney's leg moves faster and he doesn't let himself think about why there's no alcohol in John's home. "I'll take water."
John nods but doesn't move right away and Rodney clenches and unclenches his hands on his thighs. Just as he's about to start babbling about pollution rate and water, in a desperate bid to fill a silence that's more awkward than he'd been prepared for, John nods again and abruptly spins on his heel and leaves the room.
There are stacks of journals and books on the floor of the room, lined up against the walls, next to precarious piles of bound paper. Rodney reaches out and picks up the papers from the coffee table and recognizes John's handwriting on the unlined paper. Neat letters and numbers, one next to another, the sum of the parts equaling effortless brilliance.
A shadow falls over him and he looks up slowly. John is standing next to him, holding out a bottle of water, looking vaguely uncomfortable. If it were anyone else Rodney would be rambling a mile a minute about the implications of what he just read, about where it could be taken, what could be done with it. But this is John and the cost of what Rodney's holding in his hand was infinite and aching, so he just tosses it back on the table and takes the bottle.
They sit in silence and Rodney guzzles half the bottle in one trip to his mouth. He has no idea what to say and it's ironic and sad and makes his stomach crawl and twist.
Eventually John speaks, his voice quiet and faint. "Thank you."
Rodney jerks in surprise and turns to look at John. "What? For what?"
John lowers his head, taps his fingers on the arm of the sofa and says, "For coming."
"Like there was a chance I wouldn't," Rodney snaps. "Like I haven't been waiting--" And, no, that's not fair, not at all, and he won't do that to John. Not after everything else. Rodney takes a breath, unwraps his fingers from the empty bottle he's just crumpled in his fist, and tells John, "You're welcome."
John's brow creases in a frown and he shifts on the sofa so that he's facing Rodney. Behind his glasses, his eyes are moving and Rodney can almost feel them on his skin. "I didn't think you'd be different," he murmurs.
That has to be the funniest thing Rodney's heard in years and he laughs. "Right, because I was still going to be the same after six years in Atlantis without you." John flinches and tenses and Rodney curses inwardly. "That's not--I didn't mean--you did--"
"Stop. Stop being so fucking careful. If I wanted careful I would have asked, well, anyone else to come here. I don't want it and I don't need it and it's kind of creeping me out, okay?"
Rodney's hands flail helplessly. "I'm sorry but this is--I don't know what this is but it's not how it used to be--" John cringes again and Rodney points a finger at him. "--and if you want me to stop being careful then you have to stop flinching like I've slapped you every time I'm not careful!"
John's lips twitch. "Slapping? Are you telling me that in six years you haven't moved on to punching, yet? That's sad. I knew I should have ordered Ronon to teach you how to punch before I left."
"I'll have you know," Rodney says clearly, "that I can throw an excellent punch and Ronon had nothing to do with it."
When John arches a brow and grins at him, Rodney freezes for a moment because it's so very John.
"Teyla?" John asks and Rodney nods, almost in a daze, and doesn't think about the opening he's giving John because he's out of practice after all this time. "Which means you punch like a girl, McKay, and you might as well just go around slapping people."
Rodney remembers that this is his cue to get huffy and indignant, maybe remind John that Teyla consistently kicked his ass with the sticks, but it's all too much, and Rodney just sits there and stares at John, whose smile falls away by increments.
"Rodney."
"I--it's--"
"Rodney," John says again, barely a whisper that Rodney almost doesn't hear over the sound of his blood rushing in his ears.
"John," Rodney croaks and then John is leaning over the empty cushion between them, and his hand is on the back of Rodney's neck, and Rodney has to close his eyes.
*
The thing that made it worse was that it happened fast. A lack of time wasn't something any of them were used to. It may not have always been on their side before then but at least they'd had it. Two weeks, an hour, fifteen seconds. Whatever. There'd been time.
But Carson told them that it was instantaneous, immediate, and even if he'd been right there, nothing could have been done for John.
*
Early in the evening John orders Chinese food for them. There's enough to feed a small army--and Rodney knows what it takes to feed a small army, now, so that's not hyperbole--and he blinks at John as they unload the bags in the kitchen.
"What?" John asks awkwardly and keeps his head ducked.
"Did you order one of everything?" Rodney asks suspiciously and John lifts a shoulder, mumbles something incomprehensible, and Rodney's eyes go wide. "Oh my god, you did. I leave you alone for five minutes while I wrestle my bags from the car--"
"Yeah, hey, how long are you planning to stay? Because that's a lot of luggage for a week."
"--which you didn't help me with even after I told you about the gruesome shoulder injury I was subject to--"
"You dislocated it. Five years ago. That's what you said."
"--and instead of doing the sensible thing and getting me ten orders of chicken and broccoli you get one of everything--"
"A little variety won't kill you, Rodney."
"--most of which I won't touch because god only knows how much citrus they've loaded into these innocent looking containers--"
"Innocent? Since when have you started personifying containers? Or anything, really."
"--and my epitaph will read--"
"'Here lies Rodney McKay--All around pain in the ass and hypochondriac.'"
"--that's Doctor Pain in the Ass and, oh my god, is this squid?"
Rodney stares accusingly from the container in his hand to John, and John is grinning at him, open and wide and tilted and toothy. "I'm glad you're here, Rodney."
Rodney's hand falls to the side, a tumble of something squid-like spilling out onto the floor, and he blinks three times before he smiles back. He's not sure if he wants to. He thinks he might still be feeling too off-kilter and out of his element to smile. But John's grins are contagious and Rodney's immune system has long since been compromised, so he smiles, then clears his throat.
"Um, yes, so am I. In spite of my looming death by citrus, that is."
*
When Zelenka found the documentation and distributed it to everyone to read, Rodney only skimmed the approximately three hundred pages. Random words, easily translated after having seen them so often in various Ancient reports, stood out: genetic manipulation, trials begun, unexpected side effects, experiment failed, and project terminated.
Rodney threw up and then went to the briefing.
*
They eat in the living room, John shoving teetering stacks of books and journals away from the satellite box so that Rodney can gorge himself on five hundred channels along with fifty different Chinese dishes.
NOVA stays on for an hour before they have to turn it off before they both have heart attacks about how far behind science is dragging on account of how slowly the SGC is declassifying their work.
"I guess that'll change," Rodney says dimly, feeling a little bit stunned all over again; the last datastream he received before his leave had included an announcement that the SGC was going public with everything.
"I was wondering if you'd heard about that yet."
Rodney frowns at him and speaks around a mouthful of fried rice. "Yet? What do you mean, yet? I heard a month ago. When did you find out?"
John shrugs and leans back on the sofa, hands resting contentedly on his stomach. "Carter told me before then."
"Carter?" Pieces of rice fly from Rodney's mouth and land on John's thigh. "You talk to Carter? And how long before then?"
"God, you're still gross when you eat," John says, making a face, and flicks the rice from his jeans. "Carter called me about six months ago with the news."
"Six months? Oh my god, are you two, like, best friends? Or something else? What?"
"We're nothing, Rodney. Jesus. The only reason she told me was to try to convince me to work with them again."
"Oh." Rodney digs back into his food and turns the channel away from the music video featuring some under aged girl writhing around because it's making him feel old and wrinkled and balding. "Well. I would have loved to hear what kind of increasingly insane offers they made when you kept saying no."
"Why do you assume I said no, huh?" John asks with a frown.
Rodney rolls his eyes. "I know you turned them down. If you hadn't, I wouldn't have had to suffer through a meeting in which the SGC upper echelon tried to convince me to talk you into working for them again."
John chokes on nothing at all. "Are you serious?"
"Infuriatingly enough, I am. That was the entire purpose of the meeting. If there'd been an agenda, there would have been one item on it: Persuade and/or threaten Dr. Rodney McKay to bring John Sheppard back into the fold."
"They threatened you?" John says flatly.
"They're big on threats nowadays. It's nothing new or exciting."
"They threatened you."
Rodney dumps his plate on the coffee table and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand before flapping it and huffing out a gust of breath.
"It was nothing; stop being so melodramatic," he says casually, because John's always been too much like a mama bear, and if Rodney gives even a hint of how threatening the threats actually were then John will do something stupid and crazy and get himself sent to jail, or worse. Some things change; other things don't.
He reaches for his latest bottle of water and clears his throat. "I'm not quite sure why you won't go back to them, to be honest." John freezes and Rodney considers backing off before he remembers what John said about him being careful. "Of course, that could be because I don't know why you stopped working with them in the first place."
"Is this why you came out here?" John asks and gets to his feet. He's looming over Rodney, looking just as capable of violence in his jeans and glasses as he ever did fully kitted out. "To talk me into going back?"
Rodney gapes at him. "You can't be serious!" John just folds his arms over his chest and Rodney sees red, long-dormant rage and helplessness unfurling inside of him and spreading out. He gets to his feet, gives John a tight smile and says, as pleasantly as he's ever said anything in his life, "Thank you for inviting me; let's do it again in another six years. Oh, and fuck you."
Then he leaves not just the room but the house. It's one of the most dramatic exits he's made and it hurts more than he wants to think about that John doesn't try to stop him.
*
The damage seemed so small and innocuous at first.
"It's nothing," John said. Rodney stared behind him at the door to the infirmary and John shrugged and quirked his lips before amending his words with, "It's mostly nothing. Some headaches. Concentration problems. That's all." There was a grin then, a Sheppard trademark special, complete with lopsidedness and bright eyes. "Come on. Nurse Barkley says there's pie in the mess."
They went for pie and Rodney let himself be soothed by the normalcy of it, by that grin he should have known better than to fall for after three years, and he hasn't eaten pumpkin pie since then.
*
Rodney gets into the rented sedan and drives. Just...drives. There isn't much of anything at all, in any direction that he goes, and he wonders what John thinks of the sprawling miles of nothingness all around, wonders if it helps or frustrates.
His hands tighten on the steering wheel and he tries to take a calming breath, the way Teyla taught him after John left (and Rodney actively tried to learn, did learn, because he was a mess at the time and he needed to do something), but he might be a little beyond a few calming breaths.
This trip was a bad idea and Rodney doesn't know why he ever thought otherwise. Of course just a few hours with John would decimate every single half-assed coping mechanism Rodney developed, leaving him wrecked and just as terrifically screwed up as he was six years ago.
He doesn't want to say that he should have known that nothing good could have come from it because, even with the exchange that sent Rodney storming out of the house, having been invited by John was good, and seeing John was...better than good. Maybe he should have just waved at John through the screen door and left. Because Rodney is--
He's tired. It's been almost ten years since they first went to the Pegasus Galaxy, and he's been in the thick of it the entire time: war and fear and pressure and loss and failure and setbacks. He's more tired in more ways than he knew a person could be tired and this was the last thing he needed.
Right around the time when Rodney decides to drive back to John's, gather his stuff, and leave for real, he realizes quite suddenly that he's driving a car and that there's a field of corn on one side of him and a large number of cows behind a fence on the other side, and he manages to pull over before he drives right into the fence. He practically falls out of the car and kneels on the ground, overcome with a sudden wave of cognitive dissonance.
Rodney hasn't taken leave on earth in over six years, has only been back briefly for work that didn't take him outside of the SGC and the Mountain. Ever since he boarded the Daedelus II his focus was getting to John, seeing John, and only now is it sinking in that he's on earth again.
This place is more alien than any world he's visited in Pegasus, and he doesn't belong here, not even a little, which is the most cruelly ironic thing to happen since, well, what happened to John.
Rodney leans against the car door and laughs, weak and wet, and he might as well be tilting at windmills, because too many things come back to John, have always come back to John, and Rodney isn't sure when he started pretending that wasn't the case.
When he can stand up without tippling to the side with vertigo, he gets back in the car and hopes the GPS unit is working, because he has no goddamn idea where he is.
*
Carson was very clear about making them understand it wasn't brain damage. He referred to it as mental rewiring, pointed out the staggering increase in processing percentages in John's mind, and all Rodney could think about were idiot savants who could rattle off prime numbers and calculate pi to its millionth digit with astonishing ease but are missing chunks of their brains.
*
When he finally gets back to John's house, about four hours after he left, nothing is the same.
Every light in the house is lit, Rodney can see them all burning from the street, and when he steps inside he finds John in the living room, working at a massive white board he must have rolled in from somewhere. The stereo in the corner of the room is on, quite loudly, as is the television. A laptop is booted up and sitting on the coffee table, playing a video file of what Rodney thinks is a recent seminar on the need for more interdisciplinary cooperation between fields of study.
When Rodney finishes staggering slightly from overstimulation he looks at the whiteboard and sees that John actually has a marker in each of his hands and is working on two different things at once.
"Oh my god," he says and John doesn't hear him because there are five other things in the room clamoring for John's attention, some of which are quite loud and have drowned Rodney out.
This...this is actually what Rodney was expecting when he prepared himself for this visit, and experiencing it settles something inside of him that was discomfited earlier when John was eating Chinese food and watching NOVA with him.
Rodney leans against a wall, slides down it, and just watches John, who is lost in the complexities of his mind, tangled in strings of formulas, caught among sets and sub-sets.
*
*
*a
*whole
*bunch
*of
*missing
*scenes
*
*
When the senior staff met to discuss the situation, with Caldwell present as representative of the military contingent, Rodney lost it and demanded that Carson cut the crap and just lay it out for them.
There were some expletives, too, and Rodney knew at the time he was giving too much away but he couldn't help it, didn't care, because there was all this talk of something being wrong but he still didn't know what that meant to John, for John.
Carson had rattled off all of the same stuff again: significant difference in the processing of information, cognitive function changes, and alternate processing pathways laid.
"But what does it mean?" Rodney demanded to know.
He wishes sometimes that he hadn't, because he thinks a part of him withered away or shriveled up when Carson answered.
John could probably consider and solve several dozen complex theories at one time, but he wouldn't ever again be able to have just one single thought in his head, would never again be able to focus his mind outwardly enough to function like he used to.
*
The Asgard tried, they really did, despite what Rodney screamed in Hermiod's face afterwards. They dampened some of the effects but even John knew it wasn't enough long before he came into Rodney's lab and failed to activate the testing device.
Atlantis still considered him a threat to himself and others.
*
Rodney stayed close to John's side while they waited for the Daedelus to arrive, seemingly casual touches on John's shoulder guiding him and preventing anyone from realizing that corridors John could have navigated blindfolded a month before now confused and confounded him.
*
There wasn't a going away party when John left. There was just every single member of the expedition lining the corridors, making John walk through them, between them, like he was walking under three hundred crossed swords.
It was quiet and solemn and John looked a little more broken with each person he passed, and Rodney stood among a crowd of people in the gateroom and he had to turn away, because it was too much like a funeral procession--like how John would leave them if he'd been leaving in a coffin--and Rodney would not be a part of that.
*
They had five minutes alone in Elizabeth's office after John had said goodbye to the senior staff. They spent the first four staring at each other and the last one with their faces buried in each others' necks.
*
A year after John left, a file came through the datastream from the SGC for Rodney. It contained the plans and process for recharging a ZPM. The theory work had been done by John. The practical application had been done by Sam Carter.
Working on the ZPM project made Rodney sick to his stomach. John was on Earth, living as far away from an ocean as he could, and he was grounded forever; being able to theorize miracles with hardly any effort didn't make up for any of that.
*
There was something with John's name on it in every datastream for two years straight. Big things like the ZPM plans, little things like a renovation for their troubled sewage disposal system.
Then it stopped and Rodney had to find out through the grapevine that John had resigned from the SGC. He received a message from Sam Carter a few weeks later asking him for help in convincing John to work with them again. Rodney's response was one word: no.
*
Six years after John left, Rodney got a letter from him. An honest-to-god letter, written on paper, folded into an envelope, and addressed to him in John's neat scrawl:
Dr. Rodney McKay
Lab One
Atlantis, Pegasus Galaxy
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL
A week later, Rodney was on the Daedelus.
*
[ This would have been the end. The format here was that the current scenes were, obviously, going to be broken up by the small snippets from the past that explained what happened to John.
Basically it was that an ancient device or something triggered a cerebral change in him that made him super-duper smart to the point where it actually interfered with his ability to, well, even live his life. He couldn't restrict his focus to just one thing, and it was hard for him to outwardly focus at all.
Up above, when Rodney comes back to John's place after storming out, what was going to happen was that Rodney would spot a bunch of pill bottles. John took them before he got there to enable himself to be sort of normal for the visit. The thing is, it takes large doses of them at frequent intervals to actually retain an attention span. Rodney gets all pissy and flushes the pills, and John is all lost and sort of vulnerable, but hides it behind snark.
And over the next few days they kind of drift along in the visit, and Rodney has to do these things to get and keep John's focus--tap morse code on his back, gesture with his hands, and speak with exaggerated facial movements. It's like...one thing presented and expressed in multiple formats actually facilitates focus in John, and Rodney knows it.
I've never been quite sure whether they were an item before John left Atlantis. But even if they weren't, there was something close to it between them, like they were just a half a step away from it. So during this visit they go there (again or for the first time), and Rodney admits that he's left the SGC, and John asks-without-asking him to stay and he does.
And it was going to be deep and sort of hurt-achy-good and all that fun stuff, and it was going to be about how broken things can't always be fixed and that it's not the end of the world. A little bit of hope-like-substance.]
[ Also, there would have been an epilogue that would have gone something like this....]
********
One night Rodney wakes up in the middle of the night, squinting against what he thinks was a flash of light that woke him. He makes a questioning noise and the bed dips. "Go back to sleep," John says, spooning up behind him.
Rodney's not quite sure when this is; maybe Atlantis before John left, or after Atlantis in Nebraska. It doesn't much matter, though, and neither does what woke him, because John is here, telling him to sleep, and Rodney knows it's safe, so he lets himself drift away again.
In the morning John is nowhere to be found and there's writing on the bedsheet under Rodney. He pushes himself up on an elbow and peers at it, then gets up and stands at the foot of the bed.
It's not the whole sheet that's been written on with what Rodney suspects is a Sharpie, just every bit of it around a Rodney-shaped area of whitespace.
There aren't any words, just numbers and symbols, and he pulls over a chair from the corner of the room and sits down with a notebook and a pen. Five hours later John comes in, smelling cool and crisp like the air outside, and looking simultaneously uncomfortable and nervous, more so than Rodney's ever seen him.
"I--it's--God, I don't even know what it is." Rodney would send himself into anaphylactic shock by eating a lemon before admitting that to anyone else on the planet, but this is John and what John can do is unparalleled to anything Rodney's ever seen. "But it's brilliant," Rodney goes on. "Every piece of it is...brilliant. What I understand of it, I mean."
John gives him a small, secretive smile, and doesn't offer to explain. Rodney shakes his head in awe, scribbles notes, and doesn't ask for an explanation.
A month later, when Rodney is a week into a circuit of torturous publicity for the Stargate Program that forces him to answer the questions of people who have communications and English degrees, he finds a book at the bottom of his travel case.
It's the size of a normal sheet of paper, with a thick black cover, and there's a Post-It note stuck on it that reads, in John's handwriting, "Open it from the back and work forward."
Printed on the inside of the back cover is a picture of Rodney asleep on their bed the night that John scrawled on the sheet around him. The pages preceding the back cover are transparency film, and Rodney turns the first one.
The only writing on the transparency is in the area between Rodney's legs, and it's different than what was in that same area on the sheet. There's velum attached to the transparency, under the words, so that the words on the picture don't bleed through.
Rodney is left with something new, made up partially of something he's been obsessed with figuring out for the last four weeks, and his breath catches when he realizes that what's on the transparency is an earlier line of thought that led John to what was on the sheet.
Each page Rodney turns takes him back through twists and turns in John's thought patterns. One section of sheet after another is broken down by multiple transparencies. Rodney is looking at the progression of how John went from simply looking at Rodney, to that theorem he scrawled around Rodney's sleeping form.
Even with all the credit he's given John--and it was more credit than Rodney's given anyone else, ever--it hasn't been enough. Because there is seemingly no logical connection between what's on one transparency and the next in the progression. It's random, to Rodney's eyes, but somewhere in John's head he knows it makes sense, knows that the first transparency page concerning the area to the left of Rodney's torso did, somehow, in some way, lead John to what's on the second transparency page of the same area.
And he realizes that this is John's answer, the only answer he can give, to all the questions that Rodney asks which boil down to: how does your mind work? How do you think of this stuff? How does it happen for you?
It's an explanation of something that's inherently unexplainable, and Rodney knows how much it means that John did this for him, gifted it to him, because John will never been comfortable thinking or even discussing what happened to him.
[Insert neat little scene where Rodney cancels the rest of his appearances and goes home to John and pointedly doesn't mention the book, just wakes him up from a nap with a blow job.]
Working Title: Broken in Nebraska (because I require my working titles to be really freaking obvious)
Pairing: John/Rodney PG
Genre: AU earth-set future fic.
What I Managed to Write Before I Conceded Defeat: Several opening and lead-up scenes, followed by a large gap, then some flashback snippets, concluded with a mostly-written epilogue. Approx. 5,000 words.
*
Nebraska is flat and straight and so utterly mind-numbing to drive through that Rodney has to stop for coffee every chance he gets just to stay awake, which means that he has to pull over every fifty miles to piss, and he ends up arriving at his destination two hours later than expected, wired and jittery on caffeine and nerves.
He doesn't suppose it matters because even if he cared about making a good first impression, this isn't a first impression. When he gets out of his rental car--a safe, practical sedan, though he'd been tempted by the cherry red Mustang he'd seen in the rental lot--his knees are rubbery and he wonders idly if they'll give out on him.
They don't, though, and he wasn't really expecting them to because he's been through too much in Pegasus for something as mundane as this to drop him. His hands are shaking, however, and his heart is pounding, and maybe he's on the verge of a panic attack, but he expects all of that.
It might not be a life or death situation, but it's something big, something important, and Rodney will never be a man who can remain calm and stoic and collected.
The house he's standing in front of is quaint and charming and brick, one storey, with a neatly trimmed lawn and what Rodney thinks are azalea bushes lining the walk. It's so normal, so picturesque, so bland, that he double checks the numbers on the door to make sure he's at the right house.
They match, though, and he forces himself to move along the path and up the three steps to the porch. The door is open and through the screen Rodney sees a hallway leading to a tiled kitchen, and doorways to rooms on either side of the small foyer. He lifts a hand, fingers curled in, and his knock is jarring and too hard from how much his hand is shaking.
John comes out of the room on the right and pushes the screen door open slowly. He's wearing glasses, which have slipped down his nose, jeans that look old and worn and have slipped down his hips, and a long sleeved black shirt that has decided to break pattern and has slid up his torso a bit, exposing a band of skin at his abdomen.
Rodney stares at him for a long while, eyes running from his bare feet all the way up to the strands of silver showing in his hair. John looks--healthy and whole. It's a shock, in a way. A part of Rodney was prepared to find a shell of John here in this house, aged and tired and weary. But Rodney's the one who stayed in Atlantis and he guesses that between the two of them, he's cornered the market on aging prematurely and raggedly from stress.
It makes him squirm under John's matching scrutiny but all John does is give him a small smile and step aside. "Hey," he says easily. "Come on in." And Rodney does.
*
John could have stayed in Atlantis. The SGC didn't order him to leave, Elizabeth didn't hint that maybe he should consider it, and the military and science ranks pulled together and came up with over a dozen different options for him.
It took Rodney four years before he stopped thinking that John should have stayed.
*
John settles Rodney on a couch in the living room, casually drops a sheaf of papers onto the coffee table, and asks Rodney if he wants a drink.
"Nothing caffeinated," John adds, his eyes fixed on the way Rodney's left knee is jittering up and down. "I don't think I want to add to your rate of oscillation. And I don’t have anything alcoholic, sorry. Water or juice?"
Rodney's leg moves faster and he doesn't let himself think about why there's no alcohol in John's home. "I'll take water."
John nods but doesn't move right away and Rodney clenches and unclenches his hands on his thighs. Just as he's about to start babbling about pollution rate and water, in a desperate bid to fill a silence that's more awkward than he'd been prepared for, John nods again and abruptly spins on his heel and leaves the room.
There are stacks of journals and books on the floor of the room, lined up against the walls, next to precarious piles of bound paper. Rodney reaches out and picks up the papers from the coffee table and recognizes John's handwriting on the unlined paper. Neat letters and numbers, one next to another, the sum of the parts equaling effortless brilliance.
A shadow falls over him and he looks up slowly. John is standing next to him, holding out a bottle of water, looking vaguely uncomfortable. If it were anyone else Rodney would be rambling a mile a minute about the implications of what he just read, about where it could be taken, what could be done with it. But this is John and the cost of what Rodney's holding in his hand was infinite and aching, so he just tosses it back on the table and takes the bottle.
They sit in silence and Rodney guzzles half the bottle in one trip to his mouth. He has no idea what to say and it's ironic and sad and makes his stomach crawl and twist.
Eventually John speaks, his voice quiet and faint. "Thank you."
Rodney jerks in surprise and turns to look at John. "What? For what?"
John lowers his head, taps his fingers on the arm of the sofa and says, "For coming."
"Like there was a chance I wouldn't," Rodney snaps. "Like I haven't been waiting--" And, no, that's not fair, not at all, and he won't do that to John. Not after everything else. Rodney takes a breath, unwraps his fingers from the empty bottle he's just crumpled in his fist, and tells John, "You're welcome."
John's brow creases in a frown and he shifts on the sofa so that he's facing Rodney. Behind his glasses, his eyes are moving and Rodney can almost feel them on his skin. "I didn't think you'd be different," he murmurs.
That has to be the funniest thing Rodney's heard in years and he laughs. "Right, because I was still going to be the same after six years in Atlantis without you." John flinches and tenses and Rodney curses inwardly. "That's not--I didn't mean--you did--"
"Stop. Stop being so fucking careful. If I wanted careful I would have asked, well, anyone else to come here. I don't want it and I don't need it and it's kind of creeping me out, okay?"
Rodney's hands flail helplessly. "I'm sorry but this is--I don't know what this is but it's not how it used to be--" John cringes again and Rodney points a finger at him. "--and if you want me to stop being careful then you have to stop flinching like I've slapped you every time I'm not careful!"
John's lips twitch. "Slapping? Are you telling me that in six years you haven't moved on to punching, yet? That's sad. I knew I should have ordered Ronon to teach you how to punch before I left."
"I'll have you know," Rodney says clearly, "that I can throw an excellent punch and Ronon had nothing to do with it."
When John arches a brow and grins at him, Rodney freezes for a moment because it's so very John.
"Teyla?" John asks and Rodney nods, almost in a daze, and doesn't think about the opening he's giving John because he's out of practice after all this time. "Which means you punch like a girl, McKay, and you might as well just go around slapping people."
Rodney remembers that this is his cue to get huffy and indignant, maybe remind John that Teyla consistently kicked his ass with the sticks, but it's all too much, and Rodney just sits there and stares at John, whose smile falls away by increments.
"Rodney."
"I--it's--"
"Rodney," John says again, barely a whisper that Rodney almost doesn't hear over the sound of his blood rushing in his ears.
"John," Rodney croaks and then John is leaning over the empty cushion between them, and his hand is on the back of Rodney's neck, and Rodney has to close his eyes.
*
The thing that made it worse was that it happened fast. A lack of time wasn't something any of them were used to. It may not have always been on their side before then but at least they'd had it. Two weeks, an hour, fifteen seconds. Whatever. There'd been time.
But Carson told them that it was instantaneous, immediate, and even if he'd been right there, nothing could have been done for John.
*
Early in the evening John orders Chinese food for them. There's enough to feed a small army--and Rodney knows what it takes to feed a small army, now, so that's not hyperbole--and he blinks at John as they unload the bags in the kitchen.
"What?" John asks awkwardly and keeps his head ducked.
"Did you order one of everything?" Rodney asks suspiciously and John lifts a shoulder, mumbles something incomprehensible, and Rodney's eyes go wide. "Oh my god, you did. I leave you alone for five minutes while I wrestle my bags from the car--"
"Yeah, hey, how long are you planning to stay? Because that's a lot of luggage for a week."
"--which you didn't help me with even after I told you about the gruesome shoulder injury I was subject to--"
"You dislocated it. Five years ago. That's what you said."
"--and instead of doing the sensible thing and getting me ten orders of chicken and broccoli you get one of everything--"
"A little variety won't kill you, Rodney."
"--most of which I won't touch because god only knows how much citrus they've loaded into these innocent looking containers--"
"Innocent? Since when have you started personifying containers? Or anything, really."
"--and my epitaph will read--"
"'Here lies Rodney McKay--All around pain in the ass and hypochondriac.'"
"--that's Doctor Pain in the Ass and, oh my god, is this squid?"
Rodney stares accusingly from the container in his hand to John, and John is grinning at him, open and wide and tilted and toothy. "I'm glad you're here, Rodney."
Rodney's hand falls to the side, a tumble of something squid-like spilling out onto the floor, and he blinks three times before he smiles back. He's not sure if he wants to. He thinks he might still be feeling too off-kilter and out of his element to smile. But John's grins are contagious and Rodney's immune system has long since been compromised, so he smiles, then clears his throat.
"Um, yes, so am I. In spite of my looming death by citrus, that is."
*
When Zelenka found the documentation and distributed it to everyone to read, Rodney only skimmed the approximately three hundred pages. Random words, easily translated after having seen them so often in various Ancient reports, stood out: genetic manipulation, trials begun, unexpected side effects, experiment failed, and project terminated.
Rodney threw up and then went to the briefing.
*
They eat in the living room, John shoving teetering stacks of books and journals away from the satellite box so that Rodney can gorge himself on five hundred channels along with fifty different Chinese dishes.
NOVA stays on for an hour before they have to turn it off before they both have heart attacks about how far behind science is dragging on account of how slowly the SGC is declassifying their work.
"I guess that'll change," Rodney says dimly, feeling a little bit stunned all over again; the last datastream he received before his leave had included an announcement that the SGC was going public with everything.
"I was wondering if you'd heard about that yet."
Rodney frowns at him and speaks around a mouthful of fried rice. "Yet? What do you mean, yet? I heard a month ago. When did you find out?"
John shrugs and leans back on the sofa, hands resting contentedly on his stomach. "Carter told me before then."
"Carter?" Pieces of rice fly from Rodney's mouth and land on John's thigh. "You talk to Carter? And how long before then?"
"God, you're still gross when you eat," John says, making a face, and flicks the rice from his jeans. "Carter called me about six months ago with the news."
"Six months? Oh my god, are you two, like, best friends? Or something else? What?"
"We're nothing, Rodney. Jesus. The only reason she told me was to try to convince me to work with them again."
"Oh." Rodney digs back into his food and turns the channel away from the music video featuring some under aged girl writhing around because it's making him feel old and wrinkled and balding. "Well. I would have loved to hear what kind of increasingly insane offers they made when you kept saying no."
"Why do you assume I said no, huh?" John asks with a frown.
Rodney rolls his eyes. "I know you turned them down. If you hadn't, I wouldn't have had to suffer through a meeting in which the SGC upper echelon tried to convince me to talk you into working for them again."
John chokes on nothing at all. "Are you serious?"
"Infuriatingly enough, I am. That was the entire purpose of the meeting. If there'd been an agenda, there would have been one item on it: Persuade and/or threaten Dr. Rodney McKay to bring John Sheppard back into the fold."
"They threatened you?" John says flatly.
"They're big on threats nowadays. It's nothing new or exciting."
"They threatened you."
Rodney dumps his plate on the coffee table and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand before flapping it and huffing out a gust of breath.
"It was nothing; stop being so melodramatic," he says casually, because John's always been too much like a mama bear, and if Rodney gives even a hint of how threatening the threats actually were then John will do something stupid and crazy and get himself sent to jail, or worse. Some things change; other things don't.
He reaches for his latest bottle of water and clears his throat. "I'm not quite sure why you won't go back to them, to be honest." John freezes and Rodney considers backing off before he remembers what John said about him being careful. "Of course, that could be because I don't know why you stopped working with them in the first place."
"Is this why you came out here?" John asks and gets to his feet. He's looming over Rodney, looking just as capable of violence in his jeans and glasses as he ever did fully kitted out. "To talk me into going back?"
Rodney gapes at him. "You can't be serious!" John just folds his arms over his chest and Rodney sees red, long-dormant rage and helplessness unfurling inside of him and spreading out. He gets to his feet, gives John a tight smile and says, as pleasantly as he's ever said anything in his life, "Thank you for inviting me; let's do it again in another six years. Oh, and fuck you."
Then he leaves not just the room but the house. It's one of the most dramatic exits he's made and it hurts more than he wants to think about that John doesn't try to stop him.
*
The damage seemed so small and innocuous at first.
"It's nothing," John said. Rodney stared behind him at the door to the infirmary and John shrugged and quirked his lips before amending his words with, "It's mostly nothing. Some headaches. Concentration problems. That's all." There was a grin then, a Sheppard trademark special, complete with lopsidedness and bright eyes. "Come on. Nurse Barkley says there's pie in the mess."
They went for pie and Rodney let himself be soothed by the normalcy of it, by that grin he should have known better than to fall for after three years, and he hasn't eaten pumpkin pie since then.
*
Rodney gets into the rented sedan and drives. Just...drives. There isn't much of anything at all, in any direction that he goes, and he wonders what John thinks of the sprawling miles of nothingness all around, wonders if it helps or frustrates.
His hands tighten on the steering wheel and he tries to take a calming breath, the way Teyla taught him after John left (and Rodney actively tried to learn, did learn, because he was a mess at the time and he needed to do something), but he might be a little beyond a few calming breaths.
This trip was a bad idea and Rodney doesn't know why he ever thought otherwise. Of course just a few hours with John would decimate every single half-assed coping mechanism Rodney developed, leaving him wrecked and just as terrifically screwed up as he was six years ago.
He doesn't want to say that he should have known that nothing good could have come from it because, even with the exchange that sent Rodney storming out of the house, having been invited by John was good, and seeing John was...better than good. Maybe he should have just waved at John through the screen door and left. Because Rodney is--
He's tired. It's been almost ten years since they first went to the Pegasus Galaxy, and he's been in the thick of it the entire time: war and fear and pressure and loss and failure and setbacks. He's more tired in more ways than he knew a person could be tired and this was the last thing he needed.
Right around the time when Rodney decides to drive back to John's, gather his stuff, and leave for real, he realizes quite suddenly that he's driving a car and that there's a field of corn on one side of him and a large number of cows behind a fence on the other side, and he manages to pull over before he drives right into the fence. He practically falls out of the car and kneels on the ground, overcome with a sudden wave of cognitive dissonance.
Rodney hasn't taken leave on earth in over six years, has only been back briefly for work that didn't take him outside of the SGC and the Mountain. Ever since he boarded the Daedelus II his focus was getting to John, seeing John, and only now is it sinking in that he's on earth again.
This place is more alien than any world he's visited in Pegasus, and he doesn't belong here, not even a little, which is the most cruelly ironic thing to happen since, well, what happened to John.
Rodney leans against the car door and laughs, weak and wet, and he might as well be tilting at windmills, because too many things come back to John, have always come back to John, and Rodney isn't sure when he started pretending that wasn't the case.
When he can stand up without tippling to the side with vertigo, he gets back in the car and hopes the GPS unit is working, because he has no goddamn idea where he is.
*
Carson was very clear about making them understand it wasn't brain damage. He referred to it as mental rewiring, pointed out the staggering increase in processing percentages in John's mind, and all Rodney could think about were idiot savants who could rattle off prime numbers and calculate pi to its millionth digit with astonishing ease but are missing chunks of their brains.
*
When he finally gets back to John's house, about four hours after he left, nothing is the same.
Every light in the house is lit, Rodney can see them all burning from the street, and when he steps inside he finds John in the living room, working at a massive white board he must have rolled in from somewhere. The stereo in the corner of the room is on, quite loudly, as is the television. A laptop is booted up and sitting on the coffee table, playing a video file of what Rodney thinks is a recent seminar on the need for more interdisciplinary cooperation between fields of study.
When Rodney finishes staggering slightly from overstimulation he looks at the whiteboard and sees that John actually has a marker in each of his hands and is working on two different things at once.
"Oh my god," he says and John doesn't hear him because there are five other things in the room clamoring for John's attention, some of which are quite loud and have drowned Rodney out.
This...this is actually what Rodney was expecting when he prepared himself for this visit, and experiencing it settles something inside of him that was discomfited earlier when John was eating Chinese food and watching NOVA with him.
Rodney leans against a wall, slides down it, and just watches John, who is lost in the complexities of his mind, tangled in strings of formulas, caught among sets and sub-sets.
*
*
*a
*whole
*bunch
*of
*missing
*scenes
*
*
When the senior staff met to discuss the situation, with Caldwell present as representative of the military contingent, Rodney lost it and demanded that Carson cut the crap and just lay it out for them.
There were some expletives, too, and Rodney knew at the time he was giving too much away but he couldn't help it, didn't care, because there was all this talk of something being wrong but he still didn't know what that meant to John, for John.
Carson had rattled off all of the same stuff again: significant difference in the processing of information, cognitive function changes, and alternate processing pathways laid.
"But what does it mean?" Rodney demanded to know.
He wishes sometimes that he hadn't, because he thinks a part of him withered away or shriveled up when Carson answered.
John could probably consider and solve several dozen complex theories at one time, but he wouldn't ever again be able to have just one single thought in his head, would never again be able to focus his mind outwardly enough to function like he used to.
*
The Asgard tried, they really did, despite what Rodney screamed in Hermiod's face afterwards. They dampened some of the effects but even John knew it wasn't enough long before he came into Rodney's lab and failed to activate the testing device.
Atlantis still considered him a threat to himself and others.
*
Rodney stayed close to John's side while they waited for the Daedelus to arrive, seemingly casual touches on John's shoulder guiding him and preventing anyone from realizing that corridors John could have navigated blindfolded a month before now confused and confounded him.
*
There wasn't a going away party when John left. There was just every single member of the expedition lining the corridors, making John walk through them, between them, like he was walking under three hundred crossed swords.
It was quiet and solemn and John looked a little more broken with each person he passed, and Rodney stood among a crowd of people in the gateroom and he had to turn away, because it was too much like a funeral procession--like how John would leave them if he'd been leaving in a coffin--and Rodney would not be a part of that.
*
They had five minutes alone in Elizabeth's office after John had said goodbye to the senior staff. They spent the first four staring at each other and the last one with their faces buried in each others' necks.
*
A year after John left, a file came through the datastream from the SGC for Rodney. It contained the plans and process for recharging a ZPM. The theory work had been done by John. The practical application had been done by Sam Carter.
Working on the ZPM project made Rodney sick to his stomach. John was on Earth, living as far away from an ocean as he could, and he was grounded forever; being able to theorize miracles with hardly any effort didn't make up for any of that.
*
There was something with John's name on it in every datastream for two years straight. Big things like the ZPM plans, little things like a renovation for their troubled sewage disposal system.
Then it stopped and Rodney had to find out through the grapevine that John had resigned from the SGC. He received a message from Sam Carter a few weeks later asking him for help in convincing John to work with them again. Rodney's response was one word: no.
*
Six years after John left, Rodney got a letter from him. An honest-to-god letter, written on paper, folded into an envelope, and addressed to him in John's neat scrawl:
Dr. Rodney McKay
Lab One
Atlantis, Pegasus Galaxy
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL
A week later, Rodney was on the Daedelus.
*
[ This would have been the end. The format here was that the current scenes were, obviously, going to be broken up by the small snippets from the past that explained what happened to John.
Basically it was that an ancient device or something triggered a cerebral change in him that made him super-duper smart to the point where it actually interfered with his ability to, well, even live his life. He couldn't restrict his focus to just one thing, and it was hard for him to outwardly focus at all.
Up above, when Rodney comes back to John's place after storming out, what was going to happen was that Rodney would spot a bunch of pill bottles. John took them before he got there to enable himself to be sort of normal for the visit. The thing is, it takes large doses of them at frequent intervals to actually retain an attention span. Rodney gets all pissy and flushes the pills, and John is all lost and sort of vulnerable, but hides it behind snark.
And over the next few days they kind of drift along in the visit, and Rodney has to do these things to get and keep John's focus--tap morse code on his back, gesture with his hands, and speak with exaggerated facial movements. It's like...one thing presented and expressed in multiple formats actually facilitates focus in John, and Rodney knows it.
I've never been quite sure whether they were an item before John left Atlantis. But even if they weren't, there was something close to it between them, like they were just a half a step away from it. So during this visit they go there (again or for the first time), and Rodney admits that he's left the SGC, and John asks-without-asking him to stay and he does.
And it was going to be deep and sort of hurt-achy-good and all that fun stuff, and it was going to be about how broken things can't always be fixed and that it's not the end of the world. A little bit of hope-like-substance.]
[ Also, there would have been an epilogue that would have gone something like this....]
********
One night Rodney wakes up in the middle of the night, squinting against what he thinks was a flash of light that woke him. He makes a questioning noise and the bed dips. "Go back to sleep," John says, spooning up behind him.
Rodney's not quite sure when this is; maybe Atlantis before John left, or after Atlantis in Nebraska. It doesn't much matter, though, and neither does what woke him, because John is here, telling him to sleep, and Rodney knows it's safe, so he lets himself drift away again.
In the morning John is nowhere to be found and there's writing on the bedsheet under Rodney. He pushes himself up on an elbow and peers at it, then gets up and stands at the foot of the bed.
It's not the whole sheet that's been written on with what Rodney suspects is a Sharpie, just every bit of it around a Rodney-shaped area of whitespace.
There aren't any words, just numbers and symbols, and he pulls over a chair from the corner of the room and sits down with a notebook and a pen. Five hours later John comes in, smelling cool and crisp like the air outside, and looking simultaneously uncomfortable and nervous, more so than Rodney's ever seen him.
"I--it's--God, I don't even know what it is." Rodney would send himself into anaphylactic shock by eating a lemon before admitting that to anyone else on the planet, but this is John and what John can do is unparalleled to anything Rodney's ever seen. "But it's brilliant," Rodney goes on. "Every piece of it is...brilliant. What I understand of it, I mean."
John gives him a small, secretive smile, and doesn't offer to explain. Rodney shakes his head in awe, scribbles notes, and doesn't ask for an explanation.
A month later, when Rodney is a week into a circuit of torturous publicity for the Stargate Program that forces him to answer the questions of people who have communications and English degrees, he finds a book at the bottom of his travel case.
It's the size of a normal sheet of paper, with a thick black cover, and there's a Post-It note stuck on it that reads, in John's handwriting, "Open it from the back and work forward."
Printed on the inside of the back cover is a picture of Rodney asleep on their bed the night that John scrawled on the sheet around him. The pages preceding the back cover are transparency film, and Rodney turns the first one.
The only writing on the transparency is in the area between Rodney's legs, and it's different than what was in that same area on the sheet. There's velum attached to the transparency, under the words, so that the words on the picture don't bleed through.
Rodney is left with something new, made up partially of something he's been obsessed with figuring out for the last four weeks, and his breath catches when he realizes that what's on the transparency is an earlier line of thought that led John to what was on the sheet.
Each page Rodney turns takes him back through twists and turns in John's thought patterns. One section of sheet after another is broken down by multiple transparencies. Rodney is looking at the progression of how John went from simply looking at Rodney, to that theorem he scrawled around Rodney's sleeping form.
Even with all the credit he's given John--and it was more credit than Rodney's given anyone else, ever--it hasn't been enough. Because there is seemingly no logical connection between what's on one transparency and the next in the progression. It's random, to Rodney's eyes, but somewhere in John's head he knows it makes sense, knows that the first transparency page concerning the area to the left of Rodney's torso did, somehow, in some way, lead John to what's on the second transparency page of the same area.
And he realizes that this is John's answer, the only answer he can give, to all the questions that Rodney asks which boil down to: how does your mind work? How do you think of this stuff? How does it happen for you?
It's an explanation of something that's inherently unexplainable, and Rodney knows how much it means that John did this for him, gifted it to him, because John will never been comfortable thinking or even discussing what happened to him.
[Insert neat little scene where Rodney cancels the rest of his appearances and goes home to John and pointedly doesn't mention the book, just wakes him up from a nap with a blow job.]