TEAM SPACE: ashes to ashes, "And How Can Man Die Better"
Title: And How Can Man Die Better
Author: wojelah
Team: Space
Prompt: ashes to ashes
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: G
Word count: 3,042
Warnings: None
Summary: The night before they left, Zelenka had looked him and said, “And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?” “There are so many things wrong with that quote,” Rodney had replied, the night before his life changed completely, “that I don’t even know where to start.”
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Rodney remembers the night before they went through the gate - the way all of the sheer crazy, busy, insanity of preparing for life in another galaxy suddenly came to a halt, leaving them washed up in the science labs, watching the Marines wheel away the last crate of materials to the staging area.
His own bags were packed. He’d be one of the first people in the gate room tomorrow, but for the next six hours, there was, for the first time in months, nothing for him to do but wait.
He really hated waiting. He still does.
Waiting gave him time to consider all of the various way a non-military scientist could, in fact, die horribly.
It still does.
The night before they left, Zelenka had looked him and said, “And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?”
“There are so many things wrong with that quote,” Rodney had replied, the night before his life changed completely, “that I don’t even know where to start.”
He still believes that.
---
Then Rodney McKay met John Sheppard. Rodney doesn’t think John cares much about his father’s ashes, and they’ve both been mistaken for gods too often to be anything but skeptical about that particular facet, but Rodney’s watched Sheppard face down fearful odds way more often than anybody should be comfortable with. Rodney’s watched Sheppard come back from fearful odds more often than anyone has any statistical right to.
More importantly, Rodney knows he’s not like Sheppard. Rodney knows this because Rodney doesn’t do goodbye. Rodney does “shut up and let me fix this so we don’t all die horribly.” That’s what Rodney does. And as a result, Rodney’s walked into fearful odds at Sheppard’s side an absolutely appalling amount, because Rodney, himself, is good at impossible problems. It’s logical that if he goes with Sheppard, then it’s more likely that everyone’s going to come back in one piece, which is Rodney’s preferred outcome.
After five years, he supposes, he ought to be used to it, but the thing is, he really doesn’t understand it, this whole “meaningful death” thing. Rodney hasn’t given his life to science, hasn’t travelled to other galaxies, hasn’t come back to do it all again just because he thinks death should mean something. Death isn’t meaningful. It’s just death. When it’s over, it’s over. Ashes to ashes, the end.
Sheppard doesn’t seem to get that, but it’s okay, Rodney knows, because he, Rodney, is very, very good at telling people that they’re wrong, and then fixing it. Sheppard is wrong. Therefore, Rodney will fix it. That is what he does. Q.E.D.
---
Rodney doesn’t wake up thinking about the many horrible ways John Sheppard has managed to almost die. He doesn’t wake up thinking about the many, many times he, Rodney, almost wasn’t fast enough the fix it. He doesn’t wake up thinking about the fact that some day, he might not be able to fix it.
He doesn’t.
---
They’ve been back in Pegasus three weeks, which means it’s probably well past time for something to try and kill them again. Actually, it’s probably overdue, given that the process of flying the city home went off with only minor hiccups, most of which were corrected once Rodney identified the engineer unable to handle the basic calculations from metric to Ancient, demoted him to sanitary systems upkeep, and corrected the error himself.
Rodney takes credit for the invention of the phrase *headdesk*. His entire life seems to revolve around the phrase.
But they’ve been back for almost three weeks, and they’ve gone on four separate missions, and still nothing is going wrong, and, well, Rodney hates to be a Debbie Downer, but their odds are just never this good.
He says as much in the gate room as they’re waiting to head out again, on a trade visit to the M’rai, re-establishing contacts that might have been slightly interrupted (Woolsey’s phrase) by their minor intergalactic vacation.
It nets him three nearly identical eyerolls, and that is just absurdly unfair, because hello, Ronon actually died not six months ago, not ten minutes after Sheppard pulled another one of those “so long, Atlantis” stunts, and five minutes after Ronon miraculously wasn’t dead, he, Rodney, had handed Sheppard the means to blow up the hive ship while he, Rodney, and his entire team were still on board, and Rodney McKay does not, even after five years in Atlantis, does not get the whole self-sacrifice thing. He’s seen it, he’s been the direct beneficiary of it, yes. Maybe, once or twice, he’s even been ready to do it. But he doesn’t just walk into these situations - not the way the rest of the people he cares about seem to be ready to do at a moment’s notice. Not the way Sheppard keeps doing, even after five years of Rodney’s continual, round-the-clock, amazingly successful solutions.
So while they may be back, and they may be safe (for now), Rodney is still ticked about this, even if he’d been too busy fixing the city and re-launching the city and converting from metric and then re-settling the city on a hopefully non-lethal planet to actually yell at anyone about it. There’s just always something else to do. And right now, he’s supposed to be walking through the gate. So he does.
---
The M’rai, it turns out, are not all that happy to see them because in the time Atlantis has been gone there’s been some sort of coup. Not only is Rodney spectacularly unsurprised, he is a little gratified to be proven right, although he would be slightly more gratified if he could’ve been proven right without having to go through the whole “held hostage for trade advantages” part of the routine.
That’s what Rodney thinks it is, at least. He’s no more panicked than usual when they march his team back through the gate and keep him behind. He knows that look on Sheppard’s face. “We’re coming back, Rodney,” Sheppard promises.
Rodney scowls. “Why is it that I get taken by the new regimes and you get taken by the hot women?”
Sheppard doesn’t grin. “Don’t do anything stupid.” And that’s just so patently unfair that Rodney’s still gaping, groping for a retort, when the M’rai shove his team through the gate.
Then they blindfold him. And they take his tac vest. And his shoes.
And then they walk him into some sort of cart or car or travelling box, and when the blindfold comes off, he’s in a room with white walls and high ceilings, with no windows and no furniture, with a nest of blankets on the floor. There’s not even a bed, which is just wholly unreasonable. But by the time he’s opened his mouth to complain about the accommodations, the door is already closed.
He is not happy about this.
He’s also cold. There’s a small vent in the ceiling, just a slit, too high to reach. While air circulation is, he supposes, generally a good thing, it’s also drafty and cold. Which is why, when the door opens again, Rodney’s sitting huddled in the blankets.
Since the jack-booted thugs that march in seem to be perfectly adequately clad, Rodney doesn’t bother getting up. He just scowls. The head thug drops a stack of paper at his feet. Drops a stylus on top of it. “Fix it,” Head Thug growls.
“First of all,” Rodney says, “fix what? Second of all, would it have killed you to start by asking nicely, rather than by taking hostages? And third, no. Because this place is cold, and there’s no computer, and you are not being particularly hospitable. . . .” The door thuds closed as the men leave, and the lock clanks into place. “So - no.”
The word echoes off the walls and subsides.
Rodney sighs, and shoves the papers away. The pen, or pencil, or whatever it is, he keeps.
The advantage of being a member of a team full of people with perilously little regard for their own safety - or, really, any team involving John Sheppard, is that he knows they’re coming for him. Sheppard’s coming.
So Rodney waits.
---
Waiting sucks, actually.
---
No, really. It sucks a lot.
---
Rodney might, actually, be really bad at this.
---
It doesn’t help that the lights never go out. And the vent’s always on.
---
And if they need his brain, they have to feed him sometime, right?
---
Rodney waits.
---
When he can’t sit still any longer, he starts running multiplication tables. Then he recites primes. Then he starts working proofs in his head, working from the most basic propositions to the most complex. Eventually, he’s tired, and he sleeps. He doesn’t know for how long.
When he wakes up, he tries it again.
---
He gets bored of sitting.
He wakes up. He paces the room, counting off the steps. He does it again. He counts in binary. He counts by raising seven to increasing exponential factors. He counts in base sixteen. He paces till his feet hurt, and then he sits down and goes back to proofs. He sleeps.
He does it again.
When he wakes up, the papers are still there.
He starts to pace, and sits down, because damn the skeptics, hypoglycemia is very real and he can’t remember when he last ate or drank. That makes him think about food, and that just makes him more hungry, and so eventually he sighs, and reaches for the pile of paper.
He’s a third of the way through when the door opens and something is tossed in. He doesn’t make it to his feet in time to reach the door, and he’s kind of distracted by the fact that whatever idiot started this is very, very wrong, even if he can’t understand the annotations, the math itself - the physics of it - is just wrong, wrong, wrong. But when he gets up and picks up the small brown paper parcel, it’s just two bars that look a lot like the Earth version of granola and nuts, plus a little box of water.
He pockets one bar and drinks the water.
The other bar, he eats.
Then he goes back to work.
---
He gets two more bars and more water a while later - he doesn’t know how long. The light doesn’t change, and he’s distracted anyway.
He’s halfway through, and he’s got a bad feeling about where this is going.
---
He gets a third set of bars-and-water before the papers all start to make sense and he realizes what’s going on.
And then he realizes exactly what that bomb would do, if they did it right.
Rodney puts the stack of papers down. He’s got three bars. He can wait.
They’re coming.
He sleeps.
---
He goes back to proofs - starts at the beginning again, makes himself write everything out in his mind.
He takes the stylus and goes back and tweaks his math. Makes it wrong, just in case someone, somewhere, could’ve figured out the last few pieces without Rodney McKay doing it all for him. It earns him another round of food and water, and he’d roll his eyes at the sheer stupidity of it all, but then, he’s up two bars of food and not dying of dehydration, so whatever.
---
He sleeps.
---
They take the papers.
He keeps the granola bars. And the stylus.
He hasn’t slept again before something explodes.
The lights go out.
The air stops coming through the vent.
Rodney panics, fumbling in the dark, lost in six by nine feet of space. He pounds at the door till his hands hurt. He hollers his throat raw. He doesn’t remember much for a while after that.
When he does, he’s stumbled back into the nest of blankets. He hits something with his foot that skitters across the floor. He follows the sound and finds the stylus, solid and comforting and something to hold onto in the dark. Sheppard’s coming, Rodney thinks. He’s coming, and then I will fix it. Rodney writes it down.
---
He’s still writing when the door opens, bursting inward and followed by a bright beam of light. It doesn’t much to break up the dark, and he’s so accustomed to the dark by then that they’re painful, but then Sheppard’s voice says “Jesus, Rodney,” and the light drops to point at the floor as Sheppard helps haul him to his feet. Rodney is not at all wobbly, and has no idea why Sheppard says, “whoa, buddy,” and is not at all gripping Sheppard’s shoulder so hard that his hand cramps.
Sheppard just lets him get his balance - and anyone would be unsteady, thank you, after waiting so damn long - and then says, “Sorry we’re late. They sort of blew the place up.” He smells like smoke and ashes and sweat.
“Are you kidding?” Rodney says, and clears his throat. “That was totally me.”
“McKay,” Sheppard says, still holding onto Rodney’s shoulder, but pulling him toward the door, “you were down here in a locked room.”
“I know,” Rodney says, feeling absurdly better, even if he’s stumbling through a dark corridor in his stocking feet. “But I screwed up the math so the bomb they were building would blow before it went critical.”
“You gave them bad math?” Sheppard says, and he sounds like he’s grinning.
Rodney can see daylight ahead of them. “They were going to build it and stick it on the jumper when you came back to ransom me.”
“McKay,” Sheppard says, and with the sun behind him, Rodney can’t quite make out the look on John’s face. Rodney can make out the silhouette of a thug with a gun just fine, though, so he shoves Sheppard out of the way hard, yelling, “Oh shit,” in a way that is entirely masculine and not at all squeaky. Then everything hurts like hell and Rodney decides “Fuck it,” and passes out in an entirely justified manner.
---
He wakes up in the infirmary.
No one is there.
His entire right side hurts.
Rodney does not understand why the universe consistently fails to live up to his positive expectations but has no trouble exceeding the negative ones.
Everything hurts. Including his eyelids. Which are stupidly heavy. So he decides to close them, just as Sheppard opens the door.
Rodney can’t seem to make his eyes open again.
He sleeps.
---
The next time, Sheppard’s there, asleep. There’s a while where Rodney just watches him, and then there’s a moment where Rodney realizes that he, Rodney, may have just tried to take a bullet for him, John Sheppard, and then there’s a moment where Rodney realizes that there have been any number of metaphorical bullets that he’s tried to take for John and mostly succeeded. The next moment is where the painkillers -- at least, Rodney’s blaming the painkillers -- catch up with his brain and he closes his eyes for a few more minutes.
When Rodney opens them again, Sheppard’s still there, and still asleep, slouched along three chairs at an angle that would make Rodney’s spine protest, except that the rest of Rodney’s body is already shouting at full volume and there’s not really room for any additional commentary.
“Ugh,” Rodney manages.
Sheppard cracks an eye open. “Welcome back,” he says, and sit up. Something in his back cracks, and they both wince.
“Ow,” Rodney says, because apparently wincing is not on the approved activities list.
“Yeah,” Sheppard agrees. “You have a big damn hole in your side. And a couple of badly cracked ribs. And a lot less blood than you did.” He looks down at the ground and scrubs his hand through his hair.
“You should see the other guy,” Rodney says, and closes his eyes, because the room is a little spinny.
Sheppard snorts. “Ronon took care of him. He was just a straggler.” Rodney hears fabric rustle. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Sorry,” Rodney says.
“Don’t apologize,” Sheppard snaps, and Rodney does open his eyes at that. He closes them again, though, because he’s never seen that look on John’s face, and he doesn’t know what to do with that information. “Rodney - “ John opens Rodney’s hand and puts something into it.
Rodney knows what it is, but looks down anyway. The stylus is a little battered, but it’s still intact. And Rodney knows, without asking, that Sheppard had seen enough to be able to read what Rodney had written, at the end.
“Sorry I was late,” John says, and turns to leave. He pauses at the door. “McKay. Rodney. You don’t have to fix it. Not always.”
Rodney throws a pillow at him. “You stupid idiot,” he snaps.
Sheppard’s eyes are dark when he turns around. “McKay. I’m sorry.”
“Stop being sorry,” Rodney growls, and then he has to stop and recoup, because apparently cracked ribs do put a crimp in his ability to beat people to death with his brain. “Just stop.”
“Stop what?” Sheppard demands.
“Stop flinging yourself into every damn abyss that comes along,” Rodney hisses back, because shouting is also not on the approved list, judging by the ache in his side. “Give me ten minutes to try and fix it first.”
“Sometimes we don’t have ten minutes, McKay.” John looks at Rodney, and Rodney looks back, and he thinks about the Hive ship, closing in on Earth, and about John saying “Rodney,” and about handing over that tablet, armed and ready to blow.
“As long as it’s we,” Rodney says. “And not just you.”
John just stares at him, baffled. Rodney knows he’s not doing this as well as he could, although this is not something Rodney is known for doing well. But then John blinks, and something shifts in his face. There’s a slow, small smile Rodney hasn’t seen before.
“Oh,” Sheppard says, and takes a step back toward the bed.
Oh, Rodney thinks, and realizes that he doesn’t care about ashes or temples or Gods, but that maybe he gets it after all.
**
Poll
Author: wojelah
Team: Space
Prompt: ashes to ashes
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: G
Word count: 3,042
Warnings: None
Summary: The night before they left, Zelenka had looked him and said, “And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?” “There are so many things wrong with that quote,” Rodney had replied, the night before his life changed completely, “that I don’t even know where to start.”
Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the prompt in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
Rodney remembers the night before they went through the gate - the way all of the sheer crazy, busy, insanity of preparing for life in another galaxy suddenly came to a halt, leaving them washed up in the science labs, watching the Marines wheel away the last crate of materials to the staging area.
His own bags were packed. He’d be one of the first people in the gate room tomorrow, but for the next six hours, there was, for the first time in months, nothing for him to do but wait.
He really hated waiting. He still does.
Waiting gave him time to consider all of the various way a non-military scientist could, in fact, die horribly.
It still does.
The night before they left, Zelenka had looked him and said, “And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?”
“There are so many things wrong with that quote,” Rodney had replied, the night before his life changed completely, “that I don’t even know where to start.”
He still believes that.
---
Then Rodney McKay met John Sheppard. Rodney doesn’t think John cares much about his father’s ashes, and they’ve both been mistaken for gods too often to be anything but skeptical about that particular facet, but Rodney’s watched Sheppard face down fearful odds way more often than anybody should be comfortable with. Rodney’s watched Sheppard come back from fearful odds more often than anyone has any statistical right to.
More importantly, Rodney knows he’s not like Sheppard. Rodney knows this because Rodney doesn’t do goodbye. Rodney does “shut up and let me fix this so we don’t all die horribly.” That’s what Rodney does. And as a result, Rodney’s walked into fearful odds at Sheppard’s side an absolutely appalling amount, because Rodney, himself, is good at impossible problems. It’s logical that if he goes with Sheppard, then it’s more likely that everyone’s going to come back in one piece, which is Rodney’s preferred outcome.
After five years, he supposes, he ought to be used to it, but the thing is, he really doesn’t understand it, this whole “meaningful death” thing. Rodney hasn’t given his life to science, hasn’t travelled to other galaxies, hasn’t come back to do it all again just because he thinks death should mean something. Death isn’t meaningful. It’s just death. When it’s over, it’s over. Ashes to ashes, the end.
Sheppard doesn’t seem to get that, but it’s okay, Rodney knows, because he, Rodney, is very, very good at telling people that they’re wrong, and then fixing it. Sheppard is wrong. Therefore, Rodney will fix it. That is what he does. Q.E.D.
---
Rodney doesn’t wake up thinking about the many horrible ways John Sheppard has managed to almost die. He doesn’t wake up thinking about the many, many times he, Rodney, almost wasn’t fast enough the fix it. He doesn’t wake up thinking about the fact that some day, he might not be able to fix it.
He doesn’t.
---
They’ve been back in Pegasus three weeks, which means it’s probably well past time for something to try and kill them again. Actually, it’s probably overdue, given that the process of flying the city home went off with only minor hiccups, most of which were corrected once Rodney identified the engineer unable to handle the basic calculations from metric to Ancient, demoted him to sanitary systems upkeep, and corrected the error himself.
Rodney takes credit for the invention of the phrase *headdesk*. His entire life seems to revolve around the phrase.
But they’ve been back for almost three weeks, and they’ve gone on four separate missions, and still nothing is going wrong, and, well, Rodney hates to be a Debbie Downer, but their odds are just never this good.
He says as much in the gate room as they’re waiting to head out again, on a trade visit to the M’rai, re-establishing contacts that might have been slightly interrupted (Woolsey’s phrase) by their minor intergalactic vacation.
It nets him three nearly identical eyerolls, and that is just absurdly unfair, because hello, Ronon actually died not six months ago, not ten minutes after Sheppard pulled another one of those “so long, Atlantis” stunts, and five minutes after Ronon miraculously wasn’t dead, he, Rodney, had handed Sheppard the means to blow up the hive ship while he, Rodney, and his entire team were still on board, and Rodney McKay does not, even after five years in Atlantis, does not get the whole self-sacrifice thing. He’s seen it, he’s been the direct beneficiary of it, yes. Maybe, once or twice, he’s even been ready to do it. But he doesn’t just walk into these situations - not the way the rest of the people he cares about seem to be ready to do at a moment’s notice. Not the way Sheppard keeps doing, even after five years of Rodney’s continual, round-the-clock, amazingly successful solutions.
So while they may be back, and they may be safe (for now), Rodney is still ticked about this, even if he’d been too busy fixing the city and re-launching the city and converting from metric and then re-settling the city on a hopefully non-lethal planet to actually yell at anyone about it. There’s just always something else to do. And right now, he’s supposed to be walking through the gate. So he does.
---
The M’rai, it turns out, are not all that happy to see them because in the time Atlantis has been gone there’s been some sort of coup. Not only is Rodney spectacularly unsurprised, he is a little gratified to be proven right, although he would be slightly more gratified if he could’ve been proven right without having to go through the whole “held hostage for trade advantages” part of the routine.
That’s what Rodney thinks it is, at least. He’s no more panicked than usual when they march his team back through the gate and keep him behind. He knows that look on Sheppard’s face. “We’re coming back, Rodney,” Sheppard promises.
Rodney scowls. “Why is it that I get taken by the new regimes and you get taken by the hot women?”
Sheppard doesn’t grin. “Don’t do anything stupid.” And that’s just so patently unfair that Rodney’s still gaping, groping for a retort, when the M’rai shove his team through the gate.
Then they blindfold him. And they take his tac vest. And his shoes.
And then they walk him into some sort of cart or car or travelling box, and when the blindfold comes off, he’s in a room with white walls and high ceilings, with no windows and no furniture, with a nest of blankets on the floor. There’s not even a bed, which is just wholly unreasonable. But by the time he’s opened his mouth to complain about the accommodations, the door is already closed.
He is not happy about this.
He’s also cold. There’s a small vent in the ceiling, just a slit, too high to reach. While air circulation is, he supposes, generally a good thing, it’s also drafty and cold. Which is why, when the door opens again, Rodney’s sitting huddled in the blankets.
Since the jack-booted thugs that march in seem to be perfectly adequately clad, Rodney doesn’t bother getting up. He just scowls. The head thug drops a stack of paper at his feet. Drops a stylus on top of it. “Fix it,” Head Thug growls.
“First of all,” Rodney says, “fix what? Second of all, would it have killed you to start by asking nicely, rather than by taking hostages? And third, no. Because this place is cold, and there’s no computer, and you are not being particularly hospitable. . . .” The door thuds closed as the men leave, and the lock clanks into place. “So - no.”
The word echoes off the walls and subsides.
Rodney sighs, and shoves the papers away. The pen, or pencil, or whatever it is, he keeps.
The advantage of being a member of a team full of people with perilously little regard for their own safety - or, really, any team involving John Sheppard, is that he knows they’re coming for him. Sheppard’s coming.
So Rodney waits.
---
Waiting sucks, actually.
---
No, really. It sucks a lot.
---
Rodney might, actually, be really bad at this.
---
It doesn’t help that the lights never go out. And the vent’s always on.
---
And if they need his brain, they have to feed him sometime, right?
---
Rodney waits.
---
When he can’t sit still any longer, he starts running multiplication tables. Then he recites primes. Then he starts working proofs in his head, working from the most basic propositions to the most complex. Eventually, he’s tired, and he sleeps. He doesn’t know for how long.
When he wakes up, he tries it again.
---
He gets bored of sitting.
He wakes up. He paces the room, counting off the steps. He does it again. He counts in binary. He counts by raising seven to increasing exponential factors. He counts in base sixteen. He paces till his feet hurt, and then he sits down and goes back to proofs. He sleeps.
He does it again.
When he wakes up, the papers are still there.
He starts to pace, and sits down, because damn the skeptics, hypoglycemia is very real and he can’t remember when he last ate or drank. That makes him think about food, and that just makes him more hungry, and so eventually he sighs, and reaches for the pile of paper.
He’s a third of the way through when the door opens and something is tossed in. He doesn’t make it to his feet in time to reach the door, and he’s kind of distracted by the fact that whatever idiot started this is very, very wrong, even if he can’t understand the annotations, the math itself - the physics of it - is just wrong, wrong, wrong. But when he gets up and picks up the small brown paper parcel, it’s just two bars that look a lot like the Earth version of granola and nuts, plus a little box of water.
He pockets one bar and drinks the water.
The other bar, he eats.
Then he goes back to work.
---
He gets two more bars and more water a while later - he doesn’t know how long. The light doesn’t change, and he’s distracted anyway.
He’s halfway through, and he’s got a bad feeling about where this is going.
---
He gets a third set of bars-and-water before the papers all start to make sense and he realizes what’s going on.
And then he realizes exactly what that bomb would do, if they did it right.
Rodney puts the stack of papers down. He’s got three bars. He can wait.
They’re coming.
He sleeps.
---
He goes back to proofs - starts at the beginning again, makes himself write everything out in his mind.
He takes the stylus and goes back and tweaks his math. Makes it wrong, just in case someone, somewhere, could’ve figured out the last few pieces without Rodney McKay doing it all for him. It earns him another round of food and water, and he’d roll his eyes at the sheer stupidity of it all, but then, he’s up two bars of food and not dying of dehydration, so whatever.
---
He sleeps.
---
They take the papers.
He keeps the granola bars. And the stylus.
He hasn’t slept again before something explodes.
The lights go out.
The air stops coming through the vent.
Rodney panics, fumbling in the dark, lost in six by nine feet of space. He pounds at the door till his hands hurt. He hollers his throat raw. He doesn’t remember much for a while after that.
When he does, he’s stumbled back into the nest of blankets. He hits something with his foot that skitters across the floor. He follows the sound and finds the stylus, solid and comforting and something to hold onto in the dark. Sheppard’s coming, Rodney thinks. He’s coming, and then I will fix it. Rodney writes it down.
---
He’s still writing when the door opens, bursting inward and followed by a bright beam of light. It doesn’t much to break up the dark, and he’s so accustomed to the dark by then that they’re painful, but then Sheppard’s voice says “Jesus, Rodney,” and the light drops to point at the floor as Sheppard helps haul him to his feet. Rodney is not at all wobbly, and has no idea why Sheppard says, “whoa, buddy,” and is not at all gripping Sheppard’s shoulder so hard that his hand cramps.
Sheppard just lets him get his balance - and anyone would be unsteady, thank you, after waiting so damn long - and then says, “Sorry we’re late. They sort of blew the place up.” He smells like smoke and ashes and sweat.
“Are you kidding?” Rodney says, and clears his throat. “That was totally me.”
“McKay,” Sheppard says, still holding onto Rodney’s shoulder, but pulling him toward the door, “you were down here in a locked room.”
“I know,” Rodney says, feeling absurdly better, even if he’s stumbling through a dark corridor in his stocking feet. “But I screwed up the math so the bomb they were building would blow before it went critical.”
“You gave them bad math?” Sheppard says, and he sounds like he’s grinning.
Rodney can see daylight ahead of them. “They were going to build it and stick it on the jumper when you came back to ransom me.”
“McKay,” Sheppard says, and with the sun behind him, Rodney can’t quite make out the look on John’s face. Rodney can make out the silhouette of a thug with a gun just fine, though, so he shoves Sheppard out of the way hard, yelling, “Oh shit,” in a way that is entirely masculine and not at all squeaky. Then everything hurts like hell and Rodney decides “Fuck it,” and passes out in an entirely justified manner.
---
He wakes up in the infirmary.
No one is there.
His entire right side hurts.
Rodney does not understand why the universe consistently fails to live up to his positive expectations but has no trouble exceeding the negative ones.
Everything hurts. Including his eyelids. Which are stupidly heavy. So he decides to close them, just as Sheppard opens the door.
Rodney can’t seem to make his eyes open again.
He sleeps.
---
The next time, Sheppard’s there, asleep. There’s a while where Rodney just watches him, and then there’s a moment where Rodney realizes that he, Rodney, may have just tried to take a bullet for him, John Sheppard, and then there’s a moment where Rodney realizes that there have been any number of metaphorical bullets that he’s tried to take for John and mostly succeeded. The next moment is where the painkillers -- at least, Rodney’s blaming the painkillers -- catch up with his brain and he closes his eyes for a few more minutes.
When Rodney opens them again, Sheppard’s still there, and still asleep, slouched along three chairs at an angle that would make Rodney’s spine protest, except that the rest of Rodney’s body is already shouting at full volume and there’s not really room for any additional commentary.
“Ugh,” Rodney manages.
Sheppard cracks an eye open. “Welcome back,” he says, and sit up. Something in his back cracks, and they both wince.
“Ow,” Rodney says, because apparently wincing is not on the approved activities list.
“Yeah,” Sheppard agrees. “You have a big damn hole in your side. And a couple of badly cracked ribs. And a lot less blood than you did.” He looks down at the ground and scrubs his hand through his hair.
“You should see the other guy,” Rodney says, and closes his eyes, because the room is a little spinny.
Sheppard snorts. “Ronon took care of him. He was just a straggler.” Rodney hears fabric rustle. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Sorry,” Rodney says.
“Don’t apologize,” Sheppard snaps, and Rodney does open his eyes at that. He closes them again, though, because he’s never seen that look on John’s face, and he doesn’t know what to do with that information. “Rodney - “ John opens Rodney’s hand and puts something into it.
Rodney knows what it is, but looks down anyway. The stylus is a little battered, but it’s still intact. And Rodney knows, without asking, that Sheppard had seen enough to be able to read what Rodney had written, at the end.
“Sorry I was late,” John says, and turns to leave. He pauses at the door. “McKay. Rodney. You don’t have to fix it. Not always.”
Rodney throws a pillow at him. “You stupid idiot,” he snaps.
Sheppard’s eyes are dark when he turns around. “McKay. I’m sorry.”
“Stop being sorry,” Rodney growls, and then he has to stop and recoup, because apparently cracked ribs do put a crimp in his ability to beat people to death with his brain. “Just stop.”
“Stop what?” Sheppard demands.
“Stop flinging yourself into every damn abyss that comes along,” Rodney hisses back, because shouting is also not on the approved list, judging by the ache in his side. “Give me ten minutes to try and fix it first.”
“Sometimes we don’t have ten minutes, McKay.” John looks at Rodney, and Rodney looks back, and he thinks about the Hive ship, closing in on Earth, and about John saying “Rodney,” and about handing over that tablet, armed and ready to blow.
“As long as it’s we,” Rodney says. “And not just you.”
John just stares at him, baffled. Rodney knows he’s not doing this as well as he could, although this is not something Rodney is known for doing well. But then John blinks, and something shifts in his face. There’s a slow, small smile Rodney hasn’t seen before.
“Oh,” Sheppard says, and takes a step back toward the bed.
Oh, Rodney thinks, and realizes that he doesn’t care about ashes or temples or Gods, but that maybe he gets it after all.
**
Poll