TEAM WAR: Fool's Paradise, "Fly Away"
Title: Fly Away
Author: badwolf36 ( interview)
Team: War
Prompt: Fool's Paradise
Pairings: McKay/Sheppard, Ronon/Amelia, Teyla/Kanaan
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Graphic torture (mostly off-screen)
Summary: Rodney has his perfect life with John on a sabbatical away from Atlantis. And a few nightmares were just the rewards of actually surviving to retirement age in the Pegasus Galaxy. Nothing to worry about at all.
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**
“Just tell us where he is, Doctor McKay. Just tell us where Colonel John Sheppard is and…” And here the man ground the tip of his knife deeper into the old scar tissue along Rodney’s arm. He ground harder with each subsequent word, “all …this … pain … will … end.”
“Noooo!” Rodney sat bolt upright in bed, frantically patting himself down. Nightmares weren’t uncommon after being a resident of the Pegasus Galaxy, but memories of PXY-232 had been haunting him with visceral ferocity lately.
He ran his fingers over his arms, where the scar from Kolya had been expanded by two inches. It still twinged on rainy days and he spent long hours rubbing it when it rained. He doesn’t feel quite the shame he used to about the scar or the attention he gives it, because John does the same thing with the scar on his neck from the Iratus bug feeding.
Rodney glanced around the bedroom as he rubbed the sweat from his forehead. The shelves were full of knickknacks that had been “acquired” from Atlantis over the years and carefully slipped out of Cheyenne Mountain. He was sure he’d seen O’Neill eyeing a few of them with bemusement as he’d waved him out of the mountain.
His nightstand was full of heavily scribbled on physics journals and a set of reading glasses that he would never admit to needing.
Flopping back against the pillows, Rodney rolled onto his side, coming face-to-face with the portrait of him and John on the other nightstand, along with a trendier set of readers and a thick tome that Rodney knew was hollow and contained a Calvin and Hobbes collection.
He smiled. Retirement still felt odd, but at least John was right there with him.
Shaking off the sweaty fear-soaked sheets, Rodney stumbled downstairs in his radioactive symbol boxers to where he could smell breakfast cooking.
“Morning,” John said without looking up. His hair was artfully tousled and the back of his T-shirt was damp from his morning run. It was something that hadn’t changed since their retirement and something that continued to baffle Rodney, but he sure didn’t mind the effect it had on John. He traced a finger down John’s spine and watched him shiver before he hooked his chin over John’s shoulder and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“Mmm, eggs.”
“Omelets,” John corrected, before turning to look at Rodney, obviously noticing the pinched look on his face. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” This was something else that hadn’t changed since retirement. They still had nightmares and they still didn’t talk about them.
Except for when one of them drastically broke the rules. “Want to talk about it?” John asked as he whisked some melting cheese into the eggs.
“Are you sick?” Rodney asked, patting John’s forehead. “You never willingly talk about emotions. Also, no.”
“Okay,” John said, and that was the end of it. Rodney poured out a couple of glasses of apple juice and grabbed a couple of plates, into which John doled out their omelets after adding a few more ingredients.
They ate in silence, but it was a comfortable one that allowed Rodney to finally let go of the remnants of his most recent nightmare. He shuddered one last time, thinking of how the Takasian rebel leader had pulled the knife from his arm, and then smiled as he licked the blade clean.
John gave him an odd look, but didn’t question him. Instead, he scraped up the last bit of his breakfast into his mouth, chewed and swallowed before saying, “Come on. We’re going to be late.”
Twenty minutes later, they were both showered, dressed in slacks for them, with a button-up black shirt for John and a patterned sweater for Rodney, respectively. They were also buckled into John’s cherry red Cobra, going about 20 miles over the speed limit.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god! I am putting inertial dampeners on this damn thing, I swear to god!” Rodney screamed as John cut across three lanes to get to their exit.
“You’re fine,” John yelled over the wind, laughing about how Rodney was gripping the dash. The bastard.
They finally pulled into John’s reserved space, which was the optimal distance from both of their offices and also had the added benefit of being close to the cafeteria.
Rodney shook out his fingers after he managed to unclench them from the car. “I hate you.”
John smirked at him. “No you don’t.”
Rodney sighed. “No, I don’t.”
John snickered before leaning over to plant a wet kiss on his cheek. “Get to class, Dr. McKay. You have doctoral students to terrorize.”
Heaving a dramatic sigh, Rodney unbuckled his seatbelt. “If I must.”
“You must, you must,” John said and Rodney whapped the back of his head. “Hey!”
“What have we said about Mel Brooks references?”
He got a sheepish smile in return. “Limit them to three a week?”
“Exactly. That means you are making dinner all week.”
John put an exaggerated hand to his chest. “How ever will I survive?”
Rodney shoved him against the door. “Go on. You have your own people to torture.”
They parted ways, John heading for the math department and Rodney tracing the familiar path to his office. He had found that one of the perks of donating a building to a university and having a name as big as his led to the plans for said building including space for his dream office and lab.
Which was unfortunately being swarmed by graduate students and doctoral candidates.
He didn’t remember any of the students’ names as he ushered them into his office, but that wasn’t really a surprise. Unless they really stood out, he didn’t bother to take the time to learn their names. It left room in his head for what he was sure would lead to his next Nobel Prize.
Rodney spent the next six hours happily shredding the student’s pet theories on wormhole physics and regaling them with tales of Atlantis’ flagship team. He didn’t quite know when declassification had occurred. After all, SGC functions all kind of blended together when one saved the galaxy so frequently, but he knew that it was a good party. Just like he knew that John loved Ferris wheels - and was considering building one in the backyard, Ronon loved his knives and Teyla loved Torren John. It was one of those things that just was.
He charged one of the lowlier grad students with fetching lunch sometime into telling Jankowski what an idiot he was for trying to fudge a coefficient in his trajectory calculations and spent a good half hour after that extolling the merits of the university cafeteria and their dedication to fried food.
Private conferences done, he headed for his scheduled seminar. He’d designed it to make the more stupid scientists realize their inferiority and bow before his genius at the same time. Radek had attended once and walked away muttering about “ego boosts” or some such nonsense.
It was while Rodney was running through the math on wormhole stabilization that a headache started up in left temple. At first he attributed it to the fumes from the whiteboard markers, before realizing that he had practically lived off the scent while he completed his own graduate degree.
He did his best to shake it off and continued on with his explanation of the theory until a loud ring signified the end of the lecture.
Turning to gather his things, Rodney was startled by the sound of clapping. Whipping around, he snorted as he watched John come down the lecture hall stairs, still clapping his hands like a toy monkey.
“Something?” Rodney asked.
“That was a great lecture, Dr. McKay,” John said, winking excessively. “Do you offer private lessons for bad, bad students like me?”
“Are you serious?” Rodney squeaked, looking around for stray students who might have heard John.
John smirked. “Nope. What did you do today?”
Rodney berated him for three minutes solid about unfair teasing before launching into a detailed explanation of his day. “… and that’s how I saved the field of physics from the tragedies that would have befallen it if Smithson had gone forth with his faulty theories. Uh, how was, um, you know? Your day?”
“You suck at this,” John said affectionately. “Had a decent couple of math lectures, then dropped by the ROTC center to see them shit their pants trying to salute me with proper respect.”
“You have way too much fun doing that,” Rodney said.
“Hey!” John protested. “O’Neill does it in full dress uniform!”
“True. I do love it when you wear that dress uniform though.”
“Mmm, yeah. Remember the last time we did that thing?”
Rodney got a glazed look on his face before thrusting his hand into the air.
John bemusedly pointed at him. “Yes? Do you have a question?”
“Are we too old to have hot monkey sex against a lab table?” Rodney asked urgently.
“As long as you never call it that again and we’re careful of your creaky old bones, then yes. We can have hot monkey sex.”
“Creaky! I’ll show you creaky, General Slinky!” John laughed and shoved Rodney away from him.
“Go shut the doors so we don’t scar some of your students for life.” He paused, considering. “More than you already have that is.”
“Oh hah hah,” Rodney said as he climbed the steps. “Hey. You know one of the things I miss most about Atlantis?” Rodney asked.
“What’s that?” John said as he undid his belt and started shimmying out of his slacks.
“Being able to lock the doors with my mind.”
John sighed regretfully. “Yeah, I miss that too. Now get down here already. Sheesh! First you say you want hot monkey sex and then you take your time lumbering up the stairs to shut a door.”
“Oh shut up,” Rodney said as he reached the ground floor and pulled his pants and boxers down. He boosted John up onto the lab table and pulled John’s boxers down as well, leaving them both with a puddle of clothing around their ankles.
Rodney snorted, couldn’t help it.
“What?” John asked warily.
“Oh nothing,” Rodney said, leaning forward to plant a gentle kiss on the corner of John’s mouth. “It’s just … you have no idea how many times I’ve thought of this. Since my undergraduate days.”
“Hey!”
“Although I have to say, the cast of characters has much improved,” Rodney said before stroking his way down John’s body using tongue and fingers and light scrapes of teeth.
John’s reply got lost somewhere between a moan and a satisfied groan, so Rodney thought nothing more of it.
Instead, he applied himself to taking John apart the best way he knew how, inch by patient inch. He scratched John’s hip where the nerve endings always seemed to make his hips jerk. He kissed him slowly and deeply, tongue dancing with John’s before he slid down to John’s nipple and flicked it with his tongue before gently worrying it with his teeth.
And then, because he was still Rodney McKay, he completely bypassed John’s hard, erect cock and went straight for his kneecaps, sucking a patch into the inside of each one.
“Rodney,” John groaned, making the name last about five syllables.
Rodney popped his head up. “Yes?” he asked innocently.
“Hot sex? Us? Together? Sometime before someone wants to use this hall?”
“Spoilsport,” Rodney muttered, but set to work licking his palm and fingers, which had the added bonus of shutting up John.
That accomplished, he leaned down, stroking John at a lazy pace until he was squirming against the table. “Rodney!”
Rodney slowed down even more before shifting, adjusting the angle, and with the perfect coordination that was born of long practice, wrapped his hand around both their cocks, pressing them together tightly.
John’s voice did what it always did, which was to slip up a few octaves, something which Rodney had never stopped finding hilarious. Of course, he had a bit of trouble laughing when he was a few seconds from coming. “John,” he said breathlessly and John did the impossible, which was to manage to sit up and kiss Rodney right as he came.
It muffled Rodney’s shout, which he supposed was a good thing when he had enough brain cells to ‘suppose’ again. After all, it really wouldn’t be good for the dean to walk in on two of his guest lecturers having sex.
Really, it wouldn’t.
Rodney collapsed to John’s side, cursing the lab table for being so hard before he enjoyed just kind of drifting around in the euphoria.
“You ready to head home?” John finally asked sometime later, idly tracing a finger through the mess on his stomach.
Rodney regretfully stood up, feeling his spine realign with a series of rather sickening pops before he stooped to root around in his laptop bag. He came up with a microfiber cloth used for cleaning screens. He gave himself a cursory wipe down and pulled up his pants before tossing the cloth to John, who did the same. “Uh, what do I do with this?” John asked, holding the cloth daintily between two long fingers.
Rodney just stared at him. “Wash it? Like a normal person?”
“Oh.” And he continued to hold it as if it was a dead mouse until Rodney finally snatched it from his hands and stuffed it into a plastic sack that used to contain pens. “God. And people think I’m the woman.”
John laughed at him before hopping off the table and buckling his belt. “You ready to go home?” John asked again.
Rodney shook the plastic baggie and its contents at him. “No place I’d rather be.”
He didn’t tell John that his headache was back in full force. It would just make the idiot worry.
Rodney jerked awake, nearly rolling of the bed in a bid to get away from the excruciating pain radiating from his left arm.
It took him a long moment to register the bright orange cast that was decorated with a large heart with “JOHN” inscribed inside and even longer to come to the conclusion that his arm was broken, in a cast and that he had no idea how either had happened.
With a fair amount of grunting, he was able to lever himself upright on the bed and then to his feet. From there, he tottered his way unsteadily down the stairs, panting with effort and a dizzy feeling throwing off his balance before he managed to stumble into the kitchen and slump into a chair.
John was instantly by his side, stroking a cool hand over his face. “Pain meds wore off already?”
Rodney didn’t even bother to verbalize a response, instead just giving a pathetic whimper.
“Stay down. Just let me look you over.” John’s hands skated over his face and arms before John disappeared from his side, returning soon after with a cool glass he pressed into Rodney’s hand and a few pills which he dropped onto Rodney’s tongue.
Rodney obediently swallowed them, and after a while where he observed John flip French Toast and the kitchen flip John around in his vision, he finally felt a little better. At least enough to start asking some important questions like, “What happened? Why is my arm broken? Is breakfast ready yet?”
“To answer the last, yes,” John said as he set a stack of syrup-drenched French Toast in front of Rodney, already dicing it before Rodney could point out that his left hand wasn’t as mobile as normal.
John retrieved his own breakfast before he continued. “Who’d have ever thought that we’d survive the Wraith, the Replicators and the odd crazy Genii only to get taken out by a soccer mom?”
“What?” Because Rodney didn’t remember that. At all.
John must have noticed him freaking out because he clamped a hand on Rodney’s uninjured arm. “You have a concussion. It’s normal not to remember what happened. We got taken out by a mini-van that blew a red light.”
They returned to their breakfast, eating slowly.
If Rodney thought about it, really thought about - which he didn’t want to because it hurt - he remembered flashing images of pain and knives and hammers and twisted metal that didn’t make sense and sent an excruciating flash of light through his head.
Suddenly, John was on his knees before him, gently stroking his temples.
“Hey, hey. It’s okay. We’re coming to get you.”
“What?” Rodney asked, feeling like he was shouting, even though he was pretty sure that came out as a whisper.
“I said, it’s okay. The meds should kick in soon and the pain will fade.”
And to his utter shock, after a long, long moment, John’s prediction came true. He gave John a wan smile. “You know, an orgasm would help a lot more with this pain.”
John gave him a disbelieving look before smiling kindly. “Then we should probably go to bed,” he said as he started herding Rodney to the bedroom. “After all, we know from experience that the kitchen floor isn’t exactly the most comfortable place for ‘pain-relieving.’”
Stripped of clothes and settled on the bed, Rodney was starting to appreciate the effects of pain killers, a still active libido at his age and the fact that John was equally naked and prowling toward the bed.
“Orgasm?” Rodney ventured again hopefully.
John just rolled his eyes before he leaned over and rolled Rodney’s balls carefully in his hand. “Who am I to argue with your expert medical advice, Doctor?”
“Exactly,” Rodney gasped, as John’s touch started to put his libido ahead of the painkillers in the race to see whether sex would actually be happening. “Genius, you know.”
“Oh, I know.” John smirked before gracefully arching his neck, slipping his lips around the head of Rodney’s rapidly hardening cock. Rodney whimpered. His arm still hurt like a blazing poker was being thrust through the cast, but he couldn’t bring himself to care when another part of him was immersed in wet, hot heaven.
“John,” he whimpered, stroking the ridiculously soft hair on John’s head and, very gently, trying to urge him in the right direction.
John obliged, sinking further down on him, humming something that may or may not have been the theme from The Terminator. Rodney didn’t particularly care, as long as it didn’t give him a complex the next time John got on a Schwarzenegger kick and as long as John kept doing it.
Which didn’t seem to be a problem as John went further down. Rodney lost track of time as his nerves started firing at random, pain mixing through and spiking the pleasure so that it took him even higher than he’d ever been.
“Oh god, John.” Rodney’s arms flailed out and he ended up scraping his cast across John’s chest.
And subsequently, John’s nipples, which caused the tanned man to shudder and mewl.
“Really?” Rodney asked when he connected action to reaction. John just gave him an exasperated look before plunging back down and Rodney lost track of yet another conversation somewhere between losing his mind and reaching nirvana.
It was a fact he remembered only as he was coming down from euphoria, small white spurts still pulsing out to stripe his chest and groin.
With more coordination then what could be expected of a man in his condition, Rodney reached out and gently brushed the rough material of his cast over John’s nipples. John mewled again and gave up on trying to milk out Rodney’s last aftershocks in favor of rolling onto his back and scooting up the bed to give Rodney better access.
Rodney was lethargic by this point, but he did his best to keep careful, even motion with the scratchy material over John’s nipples, sensitizing them until John was practically crying with sensation before moving down and giving John’s cockhead a quick swipe between his thumb and the cast material. John gave a sharp shout that had distinctive “Rodney” syllables in it as he arched his back and managed to shoot over them both.
He collapsed back down and curled into Rodney’s side, shuddering there every so often before pulling himself further up the bed and lazily sliding his lips against Rodney’s, trading kisses with a casual and passionate ease.
“I canceled classes for both of us,” John said a long time later, having been the gracious lover who stumbled out of bed to get a cloth to clean them up, got them dressed in some clean boxers and T-shirts, then stumbled back into bed and drifted off. “Traumatic experience and all.”
Rodney snorted. “Who’s the one with the broken arm?”
John gave him a wounded puppy dog look, eyes tearing dramatically. “But, but, my poor baby! My beautiful Cobra,” he wailed. Rodney rolled his eyes.
“Fine, fine. Traumatic experience.”
This was why he kept John around. Rodney knew it never would have occurred to him to alert the school of their absence. He conveniently blamed the pain meds and the concussion for scrambling him. He also blamed the concussion for the horrific headache that even a spectacular orgasm hadn’t alleviated.
He didn’t remember anything like this from his last concussion, this lightning arc of pain that ripped up the sides of his skull and made him curl himself more tightly into John’s body.
“Is it over yet?” he whimpered.
“It will be soon,” John said, stroking a gentle hand through his hair. “I’m glad we only decided to spend one semester on Earth. I mean, the students are great, but Atlantis is home. And I think we honestly get into less trouble there.” There was amusement in the last statement.
“I want to go back home,” Rodney said. “I’m sick of being in a place that hurts me.”
“It was one accident, and the woman’s brakes had failed, Rodney!”
“Yeah, well, I seem to recall someone’s accident with their math causing in overload in my nice new Earth-based lab.” Rodney retorted, envisioning how the shards of glass had caused white-hot flares of pain all over his belly and chest. He felt the old wounds flare up with vicious sympathy.
“Hurts,” he managed through gritted teeth, planting his forehead in John’s bony shoulder.
“Hang on,” John said, gently shifting Rodney’s head off his shoulder and onto the pillow. Rodney rolled slightly as John left the bed. There was a long moment where he was just alone with his pain, dealing with the painful flashes that weren’t quite a migraine.
Then John was back with his large cool hands, helping Rodney to sit up. “Here. Sleeping pills. Doc said it would be okay to mix the meds as long as we weren’t stupid about it.”
“Please, put me out of my misery,” Rodney said, not even bothering to open his eyes as a pill was slipped onto his tongue and a glass of water pressed to his lips. There was a heavy pause in the air as the glass was set on the nightstand and it finally compelled Rodney to open his eyes.
John looked strangely solemn. “Hang in there buddy. You’re going to make it.”
“Doesn’t feel like it,” Rodney muttered, swallowing a few times to get the bitter pill taste out of his mouth.
“You will,” John said as he helped Rodney lay back down. “You’ll bounce right back.”
Rodney didn’t bother to answer, just succumbed to the exhaustion and the medicine and the lingering pain.
When Rodney woke up again, he finally felt like the pain medicine was doing some good.
Although he reflected, as he laid a hand across his own forehead, that was perhaps the newfound fever making his head fuzzy.
He dragged himself out of bed, wanting a shower, but not trusting that he could stand that long without John’s help.
He didn’t bother changing his clothes either, even though they felt disgusting. Frankly, Rodney didn’t feel like doing much but going back to bed. But he wanted to see John more than he wanted to stay in their overly warm bedroom, so he took his time tottering down the steps to the kitchen, taking a moment to bask in the late evening sunlight slanting through the windows.
“John?” he called out, leaning heavily against the wall and using it as a support.
“Hey,” John said, looking up from where he was presiding over a sink full of soapy dishes. “How you feeling?”
“Like I got mowed down by a puddlejumper.”
John pulled a face. “Ouch.”
Rodney navigated his way around the kitchen, ending up at John’s side with less difficulty than it had taken to walk down the stairs. “Can I help?”
“You want to help with the dishes?” John asked incredulously, soapy hands still poised above the sink.
Rodney smiled weakly. “I need something to take my mind off all the pain I’m in.”
John was still looking at him like he was crazy, but he dutifully grabbed a rag and pressed it into Rodney’s hands. “You dry, I’ll rinse.”
They worked in comfortable silence for awhile. Rodney’s headache grew worse, this time accompanied by a niggling feeling in the back of his skull that he couldn’t shake.
He thought he’d finally pinned it down when he found that, even when he thought hard about it, he couldn’t remember where Ronon and Teyla were while he and John were off doing their semester of teaching.
“So,” he said casually. “What are Ronon and Teyla up to?”
John hummed tunelessly for a moment before handing Rodney a pan. “Teyla is finishing up that diplomatic liaison course on Atlantis and then she and Kanaan and TJ are going to come out here for a few days to visit us before all of us head back.”
“And Ronon?”
“He and Amelia are somewhere in South America doing cliff-diving and skydiving and base jumping.” John laughed. “I guess it is possible to have a relationship based on ass-kickery.”
“That’s not even a word,” Rodney protested as he accepted another dish from John.
“Sure it is,” John responded. “After all, ours is based on snark and a mutual appreciation of explosions.”
For a bare moment, Rodney had the strangest desire to ask John where he was, but it was a stupid question and he knew it. But he apparently asked it anyways because John answered.
“I’m right here, Rodney,” he said, wiping his hands on a dishtowel before wrapping them around Rodney’s shoulders. “I’m right here. Do you want to go lie down? What’s going on?”
The floor started spinning and Rodney wanted to answer John’s question, but he was so afraid. He was so afraid because he knew the answer and the truth wasn’t something he could bear.
“Rodney?” He was slipping through John’s fingers and then he was screaming.
“No! No! Noooo!”
He woke up to another bucket of icy cold water being tossed in his face.
Rodney knew instantly where he was, even though the knowledge was enough to make him sick. It was the nightmare he’d been having ever since he woke up in his and John’s bedroom. The one where the Takasian rebel leader, Talza, was digging a knife into him and hitting him and tearing him apart to get to John.
“Where do you go?” Talza asked, roughly grabbing Rodney’s chin and leaning so close that Rodney could smell his foul breath. The question was half curiosity and half contempt. Kolya had sounded the same way.
Rodney just stared out at the little room, not really registering it. Real shock was mixing with the shock of being back in this hellhole.
It was perhaps because of that that it took so long for him to notice that his arm was broken and that there were oozing cuts all around his torso.
There was no accident in the lab.
There was no crash between the Cobra and a minivan.
He had been trapped here all along.
He was abruptly sick to his stomach and Talza’s breath was only a contributing factor. Rodney heaved and a watery amount of bile sopped into his ruined shirt and pants.
“It’s of no mind,” Talza said. “Now tell me,” he said, and his voice was as smooth as silk. “Where is John Sheppard?”
Through a haze, Rodney could still see John in their kitchen, saying over and over, “I’m right here.”
“I don’t know!” Rodney gasped out. “Not here. He’s not here.” And it was a relief not to turn John over but a betrayal that he wasn’t here in the first place to get Rodney out of here.
“Perhaps our earlier reminders were not enough,” Talza said. He snapped his fingers and two burly men wearing simple black tunics stepped forward. Talza leaned in close again, resting his hand on Rodney’s broken arm before leaning his weight against the break.
Rodney screamed. He thought he’d never stop.
“Maybe a leg,” Talza said casually, contemplatively. “Or those precious fingers of yours. You’ve begged us to spare them Doctor. But you only need your mouth to tell us where John Sheppard is.”
Rodney moaned his vehement disagreement, not understanding why the Takasian rebels wanted John in the first place. It didn’t matter, but through the pain, he still wanted to understand.
Talza didn’t even give him the chance to vocalize the question.
“We’ll start slow.” He snapped his fingers again and one of the men clad in black handed over a set of crude pliers.
He slipped the tips over and under the pointer fingernail of Rodney’s left hand. He grabbed Rodney’s face one last time, forcing Rodney to meet his eyes.
“You brought this on yourself.”
And then he started pulling.
Rodney snapped to attention while listening as John berated him for chewing his fingernails.
They were bitten down pretty far and they stung like none other. Rodney had never really been a fingernail biter, but he figured retirement was gracing him with new neuroses.
When he really thought about it, he knew there was some other reason behind why he was chewing on his fingernails, some other reason behind why they really hurt. But whenever he did, a headache snapped at him viciously and he let it go, nibbling on his thumbnail.
“Stop that,” John said, slapping his hand away from his mouth.
“Ow!” Rodney said, although it hadn’t really hurt.
But John seemed to take that as a challenge, picking up Rodney’s abused left hand and almost casually sucking Rodney’s middle finger into his mouth. He let it out with a slick pop. “Keep your fingers away from your mouth,” he said sternly before smirking. “They have better places to be.”
Rodney moaned. He wasn’t a teenager anymore, but John certainly made his hormones jump around and feel like he was.
Unfortunately, John’s thoughts weren’t on the same track as Rodney’s.
“So, I was thinking with no classes today, we could make some headway into all those DVDs we bought.” Rodney stared at him. “Maybe start with the box seasons and then move onto the movies.” Rodney continued to stare. And John finally gave up, laughing. “Any maybe after that we can throw in some of the triple-X purchases we made.”
And maybe John’s thoughts had just jumped onto the same rails as Rodney’s. He smiled. “Deal.”
Fifteen minutes later, they were settled down on the black leather couch with a heavy blanket spread over their legs, a gigantic bowl of popcorn, the remote and a DVD of classic Batman episodes already loaded into the DVD player.
They watched mostly in silence, only talking to point out a bit of trivia or to repeat a favorite line. Rodney was having trouble concentrating on the television, but he wasn’t about to let John know that.
Pow! Batman took out the Joker.
Bam! He was looking at the lovely but generic forest of PXY-232, watching himself complain about the heat while John started betting with Ronon on what was for lunch and Teyla watched their six. Except then a bunch of stunner blasts came from the trees and sent Teyla and Ronon to the ground before any of them could react.
Biff! Egghead joined the fray.
Ka-chow! John grabbed Rodney and ran, hopefully leading the thugs away from their fallen teammates. He led Rodney away as fast as he could, but finally seemed to realize that they would be caught. John grabbed Rodney’s shoulders and gripped them tight. “I’ll come get you, but you can’t let them know where I am. You hear me Rodney? You can’t let them know. You have to stay safe.” And then the screen went fuzzy as a stunner blast caught him in the back.
Wham! Batman got knocked back.
Zounds! One of Talza’s goons socked him in the jaw.
Whap! Robin was tossed into a pile of crates and disappeared from sight.
Yowsa! His chair was kicked over and Talza kicked him in the stomach a few times before the goons hauled him back up.
It went on like that for awhile. Rodney took a few moments to study John out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t seem to realize that the Robin fighting on the screen kept flickering between Burt Ward and Ronon and back.
It was as that particular transformation happened for the third time, one of Robin’s gadgets transforming into Ronon’s blaster; that John leaped up.
“You know what game I haven’t played in ages?” he asked, bouncing on the tips of his toes.
“Frogger?” Rodney guessed, still a little dazed. Teyla made a hot Catwoman.
“No, but we should totally get that. I meant Hide-and-Seek.”
“Are you serious?” Rodney couldn’t quite keep the incredulity out of his voice, even though he knew John was like this. The man had one day decided that it would be in their best interests to go to a water park. Rodney was convinced that he still had burns on his backside from the slide. He also remembered it being some of the most fun that he had had since retirement. Well, outside of a bedroom. John grinned at him. “Of course you’re serious.” Rodney sighed.
John turned suddenly solemn. “You can’t tell anyone where I am until I come find you.”
Rodney suddenly had a heavy case of vertigo. The floor couldn’t possibly be spinning that much. “What?”
“The game,” John said; voice back to his normal cheerful levels. “I’ll be counting and you have to wait and hide until I find you. Geez, what games did they teach you in Canada?”
“John?”
“You just have to hide until I can find you. I always come get you, don’t I?”
“Yeah.” Rodney nodded. “Yeah. ‘Leave no man behind,’ right?”
“I won’t leave you behind,” John agreed, nodding. But it wasn’t enough. Rodney flailed out with his hands, latching them onto John’s forearms, which felt as solid and warm and hairy as they always did.
But he knew. He knew there was a reason why the living room was melting around them and his fingernails hurt and his chest hurt and his jaw hurt and his arm was broken.
“This isn’t real, is it?” he whispered. John sat back down on the couch and hugged him, and Rodney knew for certain. “Oh god.”
“You had to stay safe,” John said, stroking Rodney’s hair after tucking Rodney’s head against his chest. “Just like I told you.”
“This isn’t real,” Rodney repeated again. “I made this all up.” He thought about it for a moment. “But what about all that stuff that slipped through? You telling me that you were coming for me and stuff like that?”
John held him tighter. “I don’t know. Maybe it was what you really needed to hear at the time, even if it meant the illusion didn’t hold as well. Or I’ve developed the ability to project my thoughts.” He paused. “Which would be totally wicked.”
Rodney grinned up at him, even as the pain started to seep back in and their living room continued to dissolve in a disturbingly Dali-esque style.
“You know, you may be right. No self-respecting hallucination of mine would ever use the word ‘wicked.’”
John grinned back before kissing him as sweetly as possible.
“I will come for you, you know. I’m sure I’m coming to get you. You’ve just got to hang on a little bit longer.”
Rodney knew he should be brave about the whole thing, put up some false courage. But it was his own head, damnit. If he couldn’t be honest here, then what was the point? “What if I can’t?”
“You can and you will. I want to come back here someday. I want you, us, to have this. And I know you can do it. Give them what you have to, but use your strengths.” John shushed him as Rodney made a noise of protest at that. “You do have strengths Rodney. Use them. Baffle them with Grade-A bullshit.”
John landed a feather-light kiss on his cheek as the couch slipped out of existence from underneath them. “Don’t let us down.”
Rodney could still feel that kiss when he surfaced to agony.
“You are making this very difficult for yourself Dr. McKay,” Talza said, shouting to be heard above Rodney’s screams. “All you have to do is tell us one simple thing and all this nasty business will end.”
He stepped close, sliding his leg between Rodney’s thighs, which were spread wide from his ankles being tied to the chair legs. He grasped Rodney’s chin, cradling it like a lover. Rodney had to stop screaming because Talza’s grip shifted from his chin to his throat.
Talza leaned in close, whispering in Rodney’s ear, “Just tell us where your Colonel Sheppard is and it will end. One simple little thing and I’ll make all this pain go away.” He stroked a hand down Rodney’s chest, making Rodney shudder.
Rodney swallowed around a mouthful of blood, idly wiggling a loose tooth and enjoying the sharp shock of pain that released him from his thoughts and from all the other pain because he was in control of it. He could control this, just like John told him to. Give them something, but don’t give them anything useful.
“Pi,” he mumbled and Talza leaned close.
“What? Is that the location of Sheppard? Where is this Pi?” Talza asked eagerly.
‘Why do they always want Sheppard?’ Rodney wondered as he wiggled the tooth again. “Pi is the answer. 3.14159 … cherry, banana cream, rhubarb, lemon meringue … except that kind’s bad … 2653589 … blueberry, coconut cream, peach.” He started laughing, a hysterical, desperate sound.
“I can tell you pi because that’s something everyone should know and I can tell you pie because everyone likes pie. John likes pie, I like pie, we both like pi because math is awesome don’t you think? John likes pie but he doesn’t like you!” Rodney sing-songed the words, recognizing all the while that Talza’s face was growing redder and that taunting him was childish and dangerous, but he couldn’t help it.
It was what John had wanted, for him to talk, except to say where he was, no, no, couldn’t do that, and then Talza’s face got a lot redder as a bullet entered one side and then ripped out the other, splattering Rodney across the face with blood that for once wasn’t his.
He wasn’t quite sure where he was anymore, still numb to feeling anything as Talza crumpled and fell into his lap. It was like waking up in an unfamiliar place when you were sure you fell asleep somewhere else.
But then John was there, viciously kicking Talza away from him, P-90 in auto mode spraying the small, dark room with bullets as Ronon’s blaster and Teyla’s P-90 joined the fray.
Talza’s two goons fell over dead and John sprayed Talza a few more times, red mist rising from the prone body. Rodney blinked and suddenly John was in front of him, lips forming words he couldn’t hear and couldn’t understand.
Rodney wondered if his sanity had slipped in those last few moments where Talza was threatening him because he didn’t think he was tracking anymore. He blinked and John was gone, Teyla in his place. He couldn’t hear her either, but she was very careful to show him the small blade before she brought it carefully to his bonds and worked on setting him free.
He blinked again and Ronon was carefully setting him upright on his feet, his heavy warmth finally starting to leech through the cold that had permeated Rodney since he left John in their living room.
Rodney blinked again and he worked on concentrating on John, who was methodically rifling through the pockets of the three corpses on the floor. Rodney caught glimpse of a wickedly hooked knife being withdrawn from a sheath on Talza’s hip and Rodney pushed Ronon and Teyla aside for a moment so he could let what was left in his stomach spill out on the floor with all the blood. So much blood.
Teyla handed him a canteen and he swished some water around in his mouth, still not able to completely get the taste of blood and bile out of his mouth, but grateful to have it lessened.
There was motion in front of him and he looked up. And stared.
There was John. And there was John.
One was outfitted in full tactical gear, P-90 pinned to his vest, 9MM holstered at his side and familiar black muscle shirt peeking out from below a leather mission jacket.
But Rodney was focused on the one on the right, the one dressed in that faded old Batman T-shirt Rodney had bought him for his birthday, or maybe an anniversary.
Both Johns were smiling, although the one on the left was still wearing a vicious sort of smile while the other one was warm and comforting. The buzzing in Rodney’s ears finally dissipated enough for him to focus on the words that were coming out of both men’s mouths. Just two simple words, “Found you.”
Rodney wasn’t really aware of pulling away from Ronon or Teyla. He wasn’t aware of stumbling across the small room, kicking away the pliers so that they skittered across the floor. All he was aware of was that his motion carried him forward into John’s arms, the only safe place he seemed to remember from this nightmare. The two John’s finally slipped into one and he took a moment to relish in the warmth and safety he found there.
He leaned up and kissed John, so happy that John had kept his promise and found him. He tried to pack all the sweetness John had given him during his nightmare into that one kiss.
It took him a long moment to realize that John wasn’t returning the gesture. For a moment, he thought it was due to his understandably foul-tasting mouth. But the truth crashed down on him quickly enough.
This wasn’t his John.
He stumbled back, looked at John’s face. Instead of the relief, love and affection he expected, there was something like confusion tinged with mute horror on John’s face.
This wasn’t the John who made fun of him for picking out girly curtains for their bedroom. This wasn’t the John who made eggs just the way Rodney liked them in the morning. This wasn’t the John who knew Rodney’s touch on every inch of his scrawny body. This wasn’t the John who loved him and wanted to spend a lifetime with him, together.
Rodney stumbled further back, landing up with his back against Ronon’s sturdy front. The buzzing started up in his ears again, and he couldn’t hear what his teammate was saying to him. Hands started grabbing for him, but he could hardly feel them when faced with the confusion of the small room suddenly ending up at the end of a long, black tunnel.
Rodney wanted to go back to his John, back to their house with their bed and their couch and their kitchen and John’s ridiculously expensive and fast car. Out loud, he said, “I want to go home.”
John was still giving him a strange look and Teyla and Ronon seemed to have melted from sight, even though he could feel blood being wiped from his face by gentle hands and a steady and strong presence at his back, holding him up.
“We’ll get you back there McKay,” John said.
Rodney didn’t have the strength or the will left to tell John where his home really was and how much the brittle lie spilling off John’s lips hurt so much worse than his physical injuries.
Heartache and blood loss combined with a dizzy feeling and he finally welcomed the blackness, hoping that when he opened his eyes, his John would be there with fresh popcorn and the new boxset of Doctor Who.
Beep.
He shook his head slightly, whimpering as the light outside of his eyelids started to worm it’s way into his comfortable darkness.
Beep.
He tried to stay asleep.
Beep.
God, that was annoying.
Beep.
If he could just turn it off…but that would require opening his eyes, something he resolutely did not want to do.
Beep.
Damnit.
Beep.
Rodney opened his eyes slowly, taking the moment before they focused to glare blearily at the stupid heart monitor, which continued to beep merrily along, though after awhile he was finally able to ignore it.
He sighed.
He hadn’t dreamt at all, and he thought that he’d never cursed the fuzzy goodness that pain meds gave him before.
But he’d wanted to dream, wanted to be back in that safe place with John, even if it was just in his mind.
Shifting himself further underneath the covers, Rodney shut his eyes and desperately attempted to go back to sleep.
Two minutes later, he gave up on that and started wishing fiercely for a laptop or a radio so that he could force one of his minions to fetch him his laptop.
He didn’t get either of those.
Instead, he got John, who walked in with a container of chocolate pudding held out before him like a peace offering. “Hey, how you feeling?” he asked quietly, pulling a tray over and setting the pudding and a metal spoon on it before pushing it in front of Rodney.
“I’m in excruciating amounts of pain,” Rodney snapped, although he didn’t intend to let that keep him from chocolaty goodness. “How about you?”
John didn’t respond, just dug around the side of Rodney’s bed frame until he came up with a small button. He clicked it several times and Rodney felt the tension that had been pinching up his face with pain slowly unravel as good drugs slipped into his IV line.
“Okay. That’s totally better.” He snapped the two fingers that weren’t swathed in bandages and John obligingly helped him get the spoon in his hand before he removed the covering on the pudding.
Rodney happily shoveled pudding into his mouth while John watched with a look of fondness that got tenser and tenser as time went on.
“What?” Rodney finally asked.
“Look,” John said, although he wasn’t looking at Rodney, instead taking the time to study his bootlaces. “About the mission…”
Rodney felt a sharp pain in his chest at the flood of memory from his life with John, away from the torture and the pain and filled with all the things he never thought he’d get in life, like love and a family and true friends who’d stay with him. He dropped the spoon into the empty pudding cup and shoved the tray away before sliding down and turning his back to John. It was only when he had his eyes firmly squeezed shut that he responded, “It was nothing. Already forgotten.”
He waited for a long time, waited for John to just get up and leave already, waited for the relieved sigh that meant that emotions didn’t need to be talked about, nor kisses to friends who didn’t want them.
While he waited, he thought of how John had taken care of him when he was sick, bringing him his favorite soup after tucking him into their bed, crooning Johnny Cash songs as Rodney fell asleep. A tear managed to slip out of the corner of his eye. It wasn’t fair that he thought he could have that life, had had that life and now he couldn’t anymore.
But John still hadn’t left. “See, I don’t think it was,” he said finally.
Rodney had long since lost track of the conversation by then and he was forced to roll over to stare at John. “Don’t think it was what?” he asked irritably.
“Nothing,” John said. He looked nervous as hell as he leaned over, but the chaste kiss he brushed across Rodney’s temple was sure and sweet.
And it was just for a second, but suddenly Rodney’s John and this John were one and the same.
Rodney smiled and sputtered at the same time, “Are you sure?” and John nodded.
He propped himself up on an elbow, not even minding the pain or the gap in the back of his hospital gown as he hauled John in close for a proper kiss.
It wasn’t a retirement home with his dream lab only moments away. It wasn’t their cozy kitchen, filled with laughter and slightly burnt toast. It wasn’t their bedroom, filled with reminders of Atlantis and smelling like sex and home. But it was John.
And Rodney could work with that.
And if he bought John a vintage Batman T-shirt for his next birthday or some other not-dead-yet celebration and started looking at realty catalogues for properties near universities, well, he never had to say why.
Poll
Author: badwolf36 ( interview)
Team: War
Prompt: Fool's Paradise
Pairings: McKay/Sheppard, Ronon/Amelia, Teyla/Kanaan
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Graphic torture (mostly off-screen)
Summary: Rodney has his perfect life with John on a sabbatical away from Atlantis. And a few nightmares were just the rewards of actually surviving to retirement age in the Pegasus Galaxy. Nothing to worry about at all.
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**
“Just tell us where he is, Doctor McKay. Just tell us where Colonel John Sheppard is and…” And here the man ground the tip of his knife deeper into the old scar tissue along Rodney’s arm. He ground harder with each subsequent word, “all …this … pain … will … end.”
“Noooo!” Rodney sat bolt upright in bed, frantically patting himself down. Nightmares weren’t uncommon after being a resident of the Pegasus Galaxy, but memories of PXY-232 had been haunting him with visceral ferocity lately.
He ran his fingers over his arms, where the scar from Kolya had been expanded by two inches. It still twinged on rainy days and he spent long hours rubbing it when it rained. He doesn’t feel quite the shame he used to about the scar or the attention he gives it, because John does the same thing with the scar on his neck from the Iratus bug feeding.
Rodney glanced around the bedroom as he rubbed the sweat from his forehead. The shelves were full of knickknacks that had been “acquired” from Atlantis over the years and carefully slipped out of Cheyenne Mountain. He was sure he’d seen O’Neill eyeing a few of them with bemusement as he’d waved him out of the mountain.
His nightstand was full of heavily scribbled on physics journals and a set of reading glasses that he would never admit to needing.
Flopping back against the pillows, Rodney rolled onto his side, coming face-to-face with the portrait of him and John on the other nightstand, along with a trendier set of readers and a thick tome that Rodney knew was hollow and contained a Calvin and Hobbes collection.
He smiled. Retirement still felt odd, but at least John was right there with him.
Shaking off the sweaty fear-soaked sheets, Rodney stumbled downstairs in his radioactive symbol boxers to where he could smell breakfast cooking.
“Morning,” John said without looking up. His hair was artfully tousled and the back of his T-shirt was damp from his morning run. It was something that hadn’t changed since their retirement and something that continued to baffle Rodney, but he sure didn’t mind the effect it had on John. He traced a finger down John’s spine and watched him shiver before he hooked his chin over John’s shoulder and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“Mmm, eggs.”
“Omelets,” John corrected, before turning to look at Rodney, obviously noticing the pinched look on his face. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” This was something else that hadn’t changed since retirement. They still had nightmares and they still didn’t talk about them.
Except for when one of them drastically broke the rules. “Want to talk about it?” John asked as he whisked some melting cheese into the eggs.
“Are you sick?” Rodney asked, patting John’s forehead. “You never willingly talk about emotions. Also, no.”
“Okay,” John said, and that was the end of it. Rodney poured out a couple of glasses of apple juice and grabbed a couple of plates, into which John doled out their omelets after adding a few more ingredients.
They ate in silence, but it was a comfortable one that allowed Rodney to finally let go of the remnants of his most recent nightmare. He shuddered one last time, thinking of how the Takasian rebel leader had pulled the knife from his arm, and then smiled as he licked the blade clean.
John gave him an odd look, but didn’t question him. Instead, he scraped up the last bit of his breakfast into his mouth, chewed and swallowed before saying, “Come on. We’re going to be late.”
Twenty minutes later, they were both showered, dressed in slacks for them, with a button-up black shirt for John and a patterned sweater for Rodney, respectively. They were also buckled into John’s cherry red Cobra, going about 20 miles over the speed limit.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god! I am putting inertial dampeners on this damn thing, I swear to god!” Rodney screamed as John cut across three lanes to get to their exit.
“You’re fine,” John yelled over the wind, laughing about how Rodney was gripping the dash. The bastard.
They finally pulled into John’s reserved space, which was the optimal distance from both of their offices and also had the added benefit of being close to the cafeteria.
Rodney shook out his fingers after he managed to unclench them from the car. “I hate you.”
John smirked at him. “No you don’t.”
Rodney sighed. “No, I don’t.”
John snickered before leaning over to plant a wet kiss on his cheek. “Get to class, Dr. McKay. You have doctoral students to terrorize.”
Heaving a dramatic sigh, Rodney unbuckled his seatbelt. “If I must.”
“You must, you must,” John said and Rodney whapped the back of his head. “Hey!”
“What have we said about Mel Brooks references?”
He got a sheepish smile in return. “Limit them to three a week?”
“Exactly. That means you are making dinner all week.”
John put an exaggerated hand to his chest. “How ever will I survive?”
Rodney shoved him against the door. “Go on. You have your own people to torture.”
They parted ways, John heading for the math department and Rodney tracing the familiar path to his office. He had found that one of the perks of donating a building to a university and having a name as big as his led to the plans for said building including space for his dream office and lab.
Which was unfortunately being swarmed by graduate students and doctoral candidates.
He didn’t remember any of the students’ names as he ushered them into his office, but that wasn’t really a surprise. Unless they really stood out, he didn’t bother to take the time to learn their names. It left room in his head for what he was sure would lead to his next Nobel Prize.
Rodney spent the next six hours happily shredding the student’s pet theories on wormhole physics and regaling them with tales of Atlantis’ flagship team. He didn’t quite know when declassification had occurred. After all, SGC functions all kind of blended together when one saved the galaxy so frequently, but he knew that it was a good party. Just like he knew that John loved Ferris wheels - and was considering building one in the backyard, Ronon loved his knives and Teyla loved Torren John. It was one of those things that just was.
He charged one of the lowlier grad students with fetching lunch sometime into telling Jankowski what an idiot he was for trying to fudge a coefficient in his trajectory calculations and spent a good half hour after that extolling the merits of the university cafeteria and their dedication to fried food.
Private conferences done, he headed for his scheduled seminar. He’d designed it to make the more stupid scientists realize their inferiority and bow before his genius at the same time. Radek had attended once and walked away muttering about “ego boosts” or some such nonsense.
It was while Rodney was running through the math on wormhole stabilization that a headache started up in left temple. At first he attributed it to the fumes from the whiteboard markers, before realizing that he had practically lived off the scent while he completed his own graduate degree.
He did his best to shake it off and continued on with his explanation of the theory until a loud ring signified the end of the lecture.
Turning to gather his things, Rodney was startled by the sound of clapping. Whipping around, he snorted as he watched John come down the lecture hall stairs, still clapping his hands like a toy monkey.
“Something?” Rodney asked.
“That was a great lecture, Dr. McKay,” John said, winking excessively. “Do you offer private lessons for bad, bad students like me?”
“Are you serious?” Rodney squeaked, looking around for stray students who might have heard John.
John smirked. “Nope. What did you do today?”
Rodney berated him for three minutes solid about unfair teasing before launching into a detailed explanation of his day. “… and that’s how I saved the field of physics from the tragedies that would have befallen it if Smithson had gone forth with his faulty theories. Uh, how was, um, you know? Your day?”
“You suck at this,” John said affectionately. “Had a decent couple of math lectures, then dropped by the ROTC center to see them shit their pants trying to salute me with proper respect.”
“You have way too much fun doing that,” Rodney said.
“Hey!” John protested. “O’Neill does it in full dress uniform!”
“True. I do love it when you wear that dress uniform though.”
“Mmm, yeah. Remember the last time we did that thing?”
Rodney got a glazed look on his face before thrusting his hand into the air.
John bemusedly pointed at him. “Yes? Do you have a question?”
“Are we too old to have hot monkey sex against a lab table?” Rodney asked urgently.
“As long as you never call it that again and we’re careful of your creaky old bones, then yes. We can have hot monkey sex.”
“Creaky! I’ll show you creaky, General Slinky!” John laughed and shoved Rodney away from him.
“Go shut the doors so we don’t scar some of your students for life.” He paused, considering. “More than you already have that is.”
“Oh hah hah,” Rodney said as he climbed the steps. “Hey. You know one of the things I miss most about Atlantis?” Rodney asked.
“What’s that?” John said as he undid his belt and started shimmying out of his slacks.
“Being able to lock the doors with my mind.”
John sighed regretfully. “Yeah, I miss that too. Now get down here already. Sheesh! First you say you want hot monkey sex and then you take your time lumbering up the stairs to shut a door.”
“Oh shut up,” Rodney said as he reached the ground floor and pulled his pants and boxers down. He boosted John up onto the lab table and pulled John’s boxers down as well, leaving them both with a puddle of clothing around their ankles.
Rodney snorted, couldn’t help it.
“What?” John asked warily.
“Oh nothing,” Rodney said, leaning forward to plant a gentle kiss on the corner of John’s mouth. “It’s just … you have no idea how many times I’ve thought of this. Since my undergraduate days.”
“Hey!”
“Although I have to say, the cast of characters has much improved,” Rodney said before stroking his way down John’s body using tongue and fingers and light scrapes of teeth.
John’s reply got lost somewhere between a moan and a satisfied groan, so Rodney thought nothing more of it.
Instead, he applied himself to taking John apart the best way he knew how, inch by patient inch. He scratched John’s hip where the nerve endings always seemed to make his hips jerk. He kissed him slowly and deeply, tongue dancing with John’s before he slid down to John’s nipple and flicked it with his tongue before gently worrying it with his teeth.
And then, because he was still Rodney McKay, he completely bypassed John’s hard, erect cock and went straight for his kneecaps, sucking a patch into the inside of each one.
“Rodney,” John groaned, making the name last about five syllables.
Rodney popped his head up. “Yes?” he asked innocently.
“Hot sex? Us? Together? Sometime before someone wants to use this hall?”
“Spoilsport,” Rodney muttered, but set to work licking his palm and fingers, which had the added bonus of shutting up John.
That accomplished, he leaned down, stroking John at a lazy pace until he was squirming against the table. “Rodney!”
Rodney slowed down even more before shifting, adjusting the angle, and with the perfect coordination that was born of long practice, wrapped his hand around both their cocks, pressing them together tightly.
John’s voice did what it always did, which was to slip up a few octaves, something which Rodney had never stopped finding hilarious. Of course, he had a bit of trouble laughing when he was a few seconds from coming. “John,” he said breathlessly and John did the impossible, which was to manage to sit up and kiss Rodney right as he came.
It muffled Rodney’s shout, which he supposed was a good thing when he had enough brain cells to ‘suppose’ again. After all, it really wouldn’t be good for the dean to walk in on two of his guest lecturers having sex.
Really, it wouldn’t.
Rodney collapsed to John’s side, cursing the lab table for being so hard before he enjoyed just kind of drifting around in the euphoria.
“You ready to head home?” John finally asked sometime later, idly tracing a finger through the mess on his stomach.
Rodney regretfully stood up, feeling his spine realign with a series of rather sickening pops before he stooped to root around in his laptop bag. He came up with a microfiber cloth used for cleaning screens. He gave himself a cursory wipe down and pulled up his pants before tossing the cloth to John, who did the same. “Uh, what do I do with this?” John asked, holding the cloth daintily between two long fingers.
Rodney just stared at him. “Wash it? Like a normal person?”
“Oh.” And he continued to hold it as if it was a dead mouse until Rodney finally snatched it from his hands and stuffed it into a plastic sack that used to contain pens. “God. And people think I’m the woman.”
John laughed at him before hopping off the table and buckling his belt. “You ready to go home?” John asked again.
Rodney shook the plastic baggie and its contents at him. “No place I’d rather be.”
He didn’t tell John that his headache was back in full force. It would just make the idiot worry.
Rodney jerked awake, nearly rolling of the bed in a bid to get away from the excruciating pain radiating from his left arm.
It took him a long moment to register the bright orange cast that was decorated with a large heart with “JOHN” inscribed inside and even longer to come to the conclusion that his arm was broken, in a cast and that he had no idea how either had happened.
With a fair amount of grunting, he was able to lever himself upright on the bed and then to his feet. From there, he tottered his way unsteadily down the stairs, panting with effort and a dizzy feeling throwing off his balance before he managed to stumble into the kitchen and slump into a chair.
John was instantly by his side, stroking a cool hand over his face. “Pain meds wore off already?”
Rodney didn’t even bother to verbalize a response, instead just giving a pathetic whimper.
“Stay down. Just let me look you over.” John’s hands skated over his face and arms before John disappeared from his side, returning soon after with a cool glass he pressed into Rodney’s hand and a few pills which he dropped onto Rodney’s tongue.
Rodney obediently swallowed them, and after a while where he observed John flip French Toast and the kitchen flip John around in his vision, he finally felt a little better. At least enough to start asking some important questions like, “What happened? Why is my arm broken? Is breakfast ready yet?”
“To answer the last, yes,” John said as he set a stack of syrup-drenched French Toast in front of Rodney, already dicing it before Rodney could point out that his left hand wasn’t as mobile as normal.
John retrieved his own breakfast before he continued. “Who’d have ever thought that we’d survive the Wraith, the Replicators and the odd crazy Genii only to get taken out by a soccer mom?”
“What?” Because Rodney didn’t remember that. At all.
John must have noticed him freaking out because he clamped a hand on Rodney’s uninjured arm. “You have a concussion. It’s normal not to remember what happened. We got taken out by a mini-van that blew a red light.”
They returned to their breakfast, eating slowly.
If Rodney thought about it, really thought about - which he didn’t want to because it hurt - he remembered flashing images of pain and knives and hammers and twisted metal that didn’t make sense and sent an excruciating flash of light through his head.
Suddenly, John was on his knees before him, gently stroking his temples.
“Hey, hey. It’s okay. We’re coming to get you.”
“What?” Rodney asked, feeling like he was shouting, even though he was pretty sure that came out as a whisper.
“I said, it’s okay. The meds should kick in soon and the pain will fade.”
And to his utter shock, after a long, long moment, John’s prediction came true. He gave John a wan smile. “You know, an orgasm would help a lot more with this pain.”
John gave him a disbelieving look before smiling kindly. “Then we should probably go to bed,” he said as he started herding Rodney to the bedroom. “After all, we know from experience that the kitchen floor isn’t exactly the most comfortable place for ‘pain-relieving.’”
Stripped of clothes and settled on the bed, Rodney was starting to appreciate the effects of pain killers, a still active libido at his age and the fact that John was equally naked and prowling toward the bed.
“Orgasm?” Rodney ventured again hopefully.
John just rolled his eyes before he leaned over and rolled Rodney’s balls carefully in his hand. “Who am I to argue with your expert medical advice, Doctor?”
“Exactly,” Rodney gasped, as John’s touch started to put his libido ahead of the painkillers in the race to see whether sex would actually be happening. “Genius, you know.”
“Oh, I know.” John smirked before gracefully arching his neck, slipping his lips around the head of Rodney’s rapidly hardening cock. Rodney whimpered. His arm still hurt like a blazing poker was being thrust through the cast, but he couldn’t bring himself to care when another part of him was immersed in wet, hot heaven.
“John,” he whimpered, stroking the ridiculously soft hair on John’s head and, very gently, trying to urge him in the right direction.
John obliged, sinking further down on him, humming something that may or may not have been the theme from The Terminator. Rodney didn’t particularly care, as long as it didn’t give him a complex the next time John got on a Schwarzenegger kick and as long as John kept doing it.
Which didn’t seem to be a problem as John went further down. Rodney lost track of time as his nerves started firing at random, pain mixing through and spiking the pleasure so that it took him even higher than he’d ever been.
“Oh god, John.” Rodney’s arms flailed out and he ended up scraping his cast across John’s chest.
And subsequently, John’s nipples, which caused the tanned man to shudder and mewl.
“Really?” Rodney asked when he connected action to reaction. John just gave him an exasperated look before plunging back down and Rodney lost track of yet another conversation somewhere between losing his mind and reaching nirvana.
It was a fact he remembered only as he was coming down from euphoria, small white spurts still pulsing out to stripe his chest and groin.
With more coordination then what could be expected of a man in his condition, Rodney reached out and gently brushed the rough material of his cast over John’s nipples. John mewled again and gave up on trying to milk out Rodney’s last aftershocks in favor of rolling onto his back and scooting up the bed to give Rodney better access.
Rodney was lethargic by this point, but he did his best to keep careful, even motion with the scratchy material over John’s nipples, sensitizing them until John was practically crying with sensation before moving down and giving John’s cockhead a quick swipe between his thumb and the cast material. John gave a sharp shout that had distinctive “Rodney” syllables in it as he arched his back and managed to shoot over them both.
He collapsed back down and curled into Rodney’s side, shuddering there every so often before pulling himself further up the bed and lazily sliding his lips against Rodney’s, trading kisses with a casual and passionate ease.
“I canceled classes for both of us,” John said a long time later, having been the gracious lover who stumbled out of bed to get a cloth to clean them up, got them dressed in some clean boxers and T-shirts, then stumbled back into bed and drifted off. “Traumatic experience and all.”
Rodney snorted. “Who’s the one with the broken arm?”
John gave him a wounded puppy dog look, eyes tearing dramatically. “But, but, my poor baby! My beautiful Cobra,” he wailed. Rodney rolled his eyes.
“Fine, fine. Traumatic experience.”
This was why he kept John around. Rodney knew it never would have occurred to him to alert the school of their absence. He conveniently blamed the pain meds and the concussion for scrambling him. He also blamed the concussion for the horrific headache that even a spectacular orgasm hadn’t alleviated.
He didn’t remember anything like this from his last concussion, this lightning arc of pain that ripped up the sides of his skull and made him curl himself more tightly into John’s body.
“Is it over yet?” he whimpered.
“It will be soon,” John said, stroking a gentle hand through his hair. “I’m glad we only decided to spend one semester on Earth. I mean, the students are great, but Atlantis is home. And I think we honestly get into less trouble there.” There was amusement in the last statement.
“I want to go back home,” Rodney said. “I’m sick of being in a place that hurts me.”
“It was one accident, and the woman’s brakes had failed, Rodney!”
“Yeah, well, I seem to recall someone’s accident with their math causing in overload in my nice new Earth-based lab.” Rodney retorted, envisioning how the shards of glass had caused white-hot flares of pain all over his belly and chest. He felt the old wounds flare up with vicious sympathy.
“Hurts,” he managed through gritted teeth, planting his forehead in John’s bony shoulder.
“Hang on,” John said, gently shifting Rodney’s head off his shoulder and onto the pillow. Rodney rolled slightly as John left the bed. There was a long moment where he was just alone with his pain, dealing with the painful flashes that weren’t quite a migraine.
Then John was back with his large cool hands, helping Rodney to sit up. “Here. Sleeping pills. Doc said it would be okay to mix the meds as long as we weren’t stupid about it.”
“Please, put me out of my misery,” Rodney said, not even bothering to open his eyes as a pill was slipped onto his tongue and a glass of water pressed to his lips. There was a heavy pause in the air as the glass was set on the nightstand and it finally compelled Rodney to open his eyes.
John looked strangely solemn. “Hang in there buddy. You’re going to make it.”
“Doesn’t feel like it,” Rodney muttered, swallowing a few times to get the bitter pill taste out of his mouth.
“You will,” John said as he helped Rodney lay back down. “You’ll bounce right back.”
Rodney didn’t bother to answer, just succumbed to the exhaustion and the medicine and the lingering pain.
When Rodney woke up again, he finally felt like the pain medicine was doing some good.
Although he reflected, as he laid a hand across his own forehead, that was perhaps the newfound fever making his head fuzzy.
He dragged himself out of bed, wanting a shower, but not trusting that he could stand that long without John’s help.
He didn’t bother changing his clothes either, even though they felt disgusting. Frankly, Rodney didn’t feel like doing much but going back to bed. But he wanted to see John more than he wanted to stay in their overly warm bedroom, so he took his time tottering down the steps to the kitchen, taking a moment to bask in the late evening sunlight slanting through the windows.
“John?” he called out, leaning heavily against the wall and using it as a support.
“Hey,” John said, looking up from where he was presiding over a sink full of soapy dishes. “How you feeling?”
“Like I got mowed down by a puddlejumper.”
John pulled a face. “Ouch.”
Rodney navigated his way around the kitchen, ending up at John’s side with less difficulty than it had taken to walk down the stairs. “Can I help?”
“You want to help with the dishes?” John asked incredulously, soapy hands still poised above the sink.
Rodney smiled weakly. “I need something to take my mind off all the pain I’m in.”
John was still looking at him like he was crazy, but he dutifully grabbed a rag and pressed it into Rodney’s hands. “You dry, I’ll rinse.”
They worked in comfortable silence for awhile. Rodney’s headache grew worse, this time accompanied by a niggling feeling in the back of his skull that he couldn’t shake.
He thought he’d finally pinned it down when he found that, even when he thought hard about it, he couldn’t remember where Ronon and Teyla were while he and John were off doing their semester of teaching.
“So,” he said casually. “What are Ronon and Teyla up to?”
John hummed tunelessly for a moment before handing Rodney a pan. “Teyla is finishing up that diplomatic liaison course on Atlantis and then she and Kanaan and TJ are going to come out here for a few days to visit us before all of us head back.”
“And Ronon?”
“He and Amelia are somewhere in South America doing cliff-diving and skydiving and base jumping.” John laughed. “I guess it is possible to have a relationship based on ass-kickery.”
“That’s not even a word,” Rodney protested as he accepted another dish from John.
“Sure it is,” John responded. “After all, ours is based on snark and a mutual appreciation of explosions.”
For a bare moment, Rodney had the strangest desire to ask John where he was, but it was a stupid question and he knew it. But he apparently asked it anyways because John answered.
“I’m right here, Rodney,” he said, wiping his hands on a dishtowel before wrapping them around Rodney’s shoulders. “I’m right here. Do you want to go lie down? What’s going on?”
The floor started spinning and Rodney wanted to answer John’s question, but he was so afraid. He was so afraid because he knew the answer and the truth wasn’t something he could bear.
“Rodney?” He was slipping through John’s fingers and then he was screaming.
“No! No! Noooo!”
He woke up to another bucket of icy cold water being tossed in his face.
Rodney knew instantly where he was, even though the knowledge was enough to make him sick. It was the nightmare he’d been having ever since he woke up in his and John’s bedroom. The one where the Takasian rebel leader, Talza, was digging a knife into him and hitting him and tearing him apart to get to John.
“Where do you go?” Talza asked, roughly grabbing Rodney’s chin and leaning so close that Rodney could smell his foul breath. The question was half curiosity and half contempt. Kolya had sounded the same way.
Rodney just stared out at the little room, not really registering it. Real shock was mixing with the shock of being back in this hellhole.
It was perhaps because of that that it took so long for him to notice that his arm was broken and that there were oozing cuts all around his torso.
There was no accident in the lab.
There was no crash between the Cobra and a minivan.
He had been trapped here all along.
He was abruptly sick to his stomach and Talza’s breath was only a contributing factor. Rodney heaved and a watery amount of bile sopped into his ruined shirt and pants.
“It’s of no mind,” Talza said. “Now tell me,” he said, and his voice was as smooth as silk. “Where is John Sheppard?”
Through a haze, Rodney could still see John in their kitchen, saying over and over, “I’m right here.”
“I don’t know!” Rodney gasped out. “Not here. He’s not here.” And it was a relief not to turn John over but a betrayal that he wasn’t here in the first place to get Rodney out of here.
“Perhaps our earlier reminders were not enough,” Talza said. He snapped his fingers and two burly men wearing simple black tunics stepped forward. Talza leaned in close again, resting his hand on Rodney’s broken arm before leaning his weight against the break.
Rodney screamed. He thought he’d never stop.
“Maybe a leg,” Talza said casually, contemplatively. “Or those precious fingers of yours. You’ve begged us to spare them Doctor. But you only need your mouth to tell us where John Sheppard is.”
Rodney moaned his vehement disagreement, not understanding why the Takasian rebels wanted John in the first place. It didn’t matter, but through the pain, he still wanted to understand.
Talza didn’t even give him the chance to vocalize the question.
“We’ll start slow.” He snapped his fingers again and one of the men clad in black handed over a set of crude pliers.
He slipped the tips over and under the pointer fingernail of Rodney’s left hand. He grabbed Rodney’s face one last time, forcing Rodney to meet his eyes.
“You brought this on yourself.”
And then he started pulling.
Rodney snapped to attention while listening as John berated him for chewing his fingernails.
They were bitten down pretty far and they stung like none other. Rodney had never really been a fingernail biter, but he figured retirement was gracing him with new neuroses.
When he really thought about it, he knew there was some other reason behind why he was chewing on his fingernails, some other reason behind why they really hurt. But whenever he did, a headache snapped at him viciously and he let it go, nibbling on his thumbnail.
“Stop that,” John said, slapping his hand away from his mouth.
“Ow!” Rodney said, although it hadn’t really hurt.
But John seemed to take that as a challenge, picking up Rodney’s abused left hand and almost casually sucking Rodney’s middle finger into his mouth. He let it out with a slick pop. “Keep your fingers away from your mouth,” he said sternly before smirking. “They have better places to be.”
Rodney moaned. He wasn’t a teenager anymore, but John certainly made his hormones jump around and feel like he was.
Unfortunately, John’s thoughts weren’t on the same track as Rodney’s.
“So, I was thinking with no classes today, we could make some headway into all those DVDs we bought.” Rodney stared at him. “Maybe start with the box seasons and then move onto the movies.” Rodney continued to stare. And John finally gave up, laughing. “Any maybe after that we can throw in some of the triple-X purchases we made.”
And maybe John’s thoughts had just jumped onto the same rails as Rodney’s. He smiled. “Deal.”
Fifteen minutes later, they were settled down on the black leather couch with a heavy blanket spread over their legs, a gigantic bowl of popcorn, the remote and a DVD of classic Batman episodes already loaded into the DVD player.
They watched mostly in silence, only talking to point out a bit of trivia or to repeat a favorite line. Rodney was having trouble concentrating on the television, but he wasn’t about to let John know that.
Pow! Batman took out the Joker.
Bam! He was looking at the lovely but generic forest of PXY-232, watching himself complain about the heat while John started betting with Ronon on what was for lunch and Teyla watched their six. Except then a bunch of stunner blasts came from the trees and sent Teyla and Ronon to the ground before any of them could react.
Biff! Egghead joined the fray.
Ka-chow! John grabbed Rodney and ran, hopefully leading the thugs away from their fallen teammates. He led Rodney away as fast as he could, but finally seemed to realize that they would be caught. John grabbed Rodney’s shoulders and gripped them tight. “I’ll come get you, but you can’t let them know where I am. You hear me Rodney? You can’t let them know. You have to stay safe.” And then the screen went fuzzy as a stunner blast caught him in the back.
Wham! Batman got knocked back.
Zounds! One of Talza’s goons socked him in the jaw.
Whap! Robin was tossed into a pile of crates and disappeared from sight.
Yowsa! His chair was kicked over and Talza kicked him in the stomach a few times before the goons hauled him back up.
It went on like that for awhile. Rodney took a few moments to study John out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t seem to realize that the Robin fighting on the screen kept flickering between Burt Ward and Ronon and back.
It was as that particular transformation happened for the third time, one of Robin’s gadgets transforming into Ronon’s blaster; that John leaped up.
“You know what game I haven’t played in ages?” he asked, bouncing on the tips of his toes.
“Frogger?” Rodney guessed, still a little dazed. Teyla made a hot Catwoman.
“No, but we should totally get that. I meant Hide-and-Seek.”
“Are you serious?” Rodney couldn’t quite keep the incredulity out of his voice, even though he knew John was like this. The man had one day decided that it would be in their best interests to go to a water park. Rodney was convinced that he still had burns on his backside from the slide. He also remembered it being some of the most fun that he had had since retirement. Well, outside of a bedroom. John grinned at him. “Of course you’re serious.” Rodney sighed.
John turned suddenly solemn. “You can’t tell anyone where I am until I come find you.”
Rodney suddenly had a heavy case of vertigo. The floor couldn’t possibly be spinning that much. “What?”
“The game,” John said; voice back to his normal cheerful levels. “I’ll be counting and you have to wait and hide until I find you. Geez, what games did they teach you in Canada?”
“John?”
“You just have to hide until I can find you. I always come get you, don’t I?”
“Yeah.” Rodney nodded. “Yeah. ‘Leave no man behind,’ right?”
“I won’t leave you behind,” John agreed, nodding. But it wasn’t enough. Rodney flailed out with his hands, latching them onto John’s forearms, which felt as solid and warm and hairy as they always did.
But he knew. He knew there was a reason why the living room was melting around them and his fingernails hurt and his chest hurt and his jaw hurt and his arm was broken.
“This isn’t real, is it?” he whispered. John sat back down on the couch and hugged him, and Rodney knew for certain. “Oh god.”
“You had to stay safe,” John said, stroking Rodney’s hair after tucking Rodney’s head against his chest. “Just like I told you.”
“This isn’t real,” Rodney repeated again. “I made this all up.” He thought about it for a moment. “But what about all that stuff that slipped through? You telling me that you were coming for me and stuff like that?”
John held him tighter. “I don’t know. Maybe it was what you really needed to hear at the time, even if it meant the illusion didn’t hold as well. Or I’ve developed the ability to project my thoughts.” He paused. “Which would be totally wicked.”
Rodney grinned up at him, even as the pain started to seep back in and their living room continued to dissolve in a disturbingly Dali-esque style.
“You know, you may be right. No self-respecting hallucination of mine would ever use the word ‘wicked.’”
John grinned back before kissing him as sweetly as possible.
“I will come for you, you know. I’m sure I’m coming to get you. You’ve just got to hang on a little bit longer.”
Rodney knew he should be brave about the whole thing, put up some false courage. But it was his own head, damnit. If he couldn’t be honest here, then what was the point? “What if I can’t?”
“You can and you will. I want to come back here someday. I want you, us, to have this. And I know you can do it. Give them what you have to, but use your strengths.” John shushed him as Rodney made a noise of protest at that. “You do have strengths Rodney. Use them. Baffle them with Grade-A bullshit.”
John landed a feather-light kiss on his cheek as the couch slipped out of existence from underneath them. “Don’t let us down.”
Rodney could still feel that kiss when he surfaced to agony.
“You are making this very difficult for yourself Dr. McKay,” Talza said, shouting to be heard above Rodney’s screams. “All you have to do is tell us one simple thing and all this nasty business will end.”
He stepped close, sliding his leg between Rodney’s thighs, which were spread wide from his ankles being tied to the chair legs. He grasped Rodney’s chin, cradling it like a lover. Rodney had to stop screaming because Talza’s grip shifted from his chin to his throat.
Talza leaned in close, whispering in Rodney’s ear, “Just tell us where your Colonel Sheppard is and it will end. One simple little thing and I’ll make all this pain go away.” He stroked a hand down Rodney’s chest, making Rodney shudder.
Rodney swallowed around a mouthful of blood, idly wiggling a loose tooth and enjoying the sharp shock of pain that released him from his thoughts and from all the other pain because he was in control of it. He could control this, just like John told him to. Give them something, but don’t give them anything useful.
“Pi,” he mumbled and Talza leaned close.
“What? Is that the location of Sheppard? Where is this Pi?” Talza asked eagerly.
‘Why do they always want Sheppard?’ Rodney wondered as he wiggled the tooth again. “Pi is the answer. 3.14159 … cherry, banana cream, rhubarb, lemon meringue … except that kind’s bad … 2653589 … blueberry, coconut cream, peach.” He started laughing, a hysterical, desperate sound.
“I can tell you pi because that’s something everyone should know and I can tell you pie because everyone likes pie. John likes pie, I like pie, we both like pi because math is awesome don’t you think? John likes pie but he doesn’t like you!” Rodney sing-songed the words, recognizing all the while that Talza’s face was growing redder and that taunting him was childish and dangerous, but he couldn’t help it.
It was what John had wanted, for him to talk, except to say where he was, no, no, couldn’t do that, and then Talza’s face got a lot redder as a bullet entered one side and then ripped out the other, splattering Rodney across the face with blood that for once wasn’t his.
He wasn’t quite sure where he was anymore, still numb to feeling anything as Talza crumpled and fell into his lap. It was like waking up in an unfamiliar place when you were sure you fell asleep somewhere else.
But then John was there, viciously kicking Talza away from him, P-90 in auto mode spraying the small, dark room with bullets as Ronon’s blaster and Teyla’s P-90 joined the fray.
Talza’s two goons fell over dead and John sprayed Talza a few more times, red mist rising from the prone body. Rodney blinked and suddenly John was in front of him, lips forming words he couldn’t hear and couldn’t understand.
Rodney wondered if his sanity had slipped in those last few moments where Talza was threatening him because he didn’t think he was tracking anymore. He blinked and John was gone, Teyla in his place. He couldn’t hear her either, but she was very careful to show him the small blade before she brought it carefully to his bonds and worked on setting him free.
He blinked again and Ronon was carefully setting him upright on his feet, his heavy warmth finally starting to leech through the cold that had permeated Rodney since he left John in their living room.
Rodney blinked again and he worked on concentrating on John, who was methodically rifling through the pockets of the three corpses on the floor. Rodney caught glimpse of a wickedly hooked knife being withdrawn from a sheath on Talza’s hip and Rodney pushed Ronon and Teyla aside for a moment so he could let what was left in his stomach spill out on the floor with all the blood. So much blood.
Teyla handed him a canteen and he swished some water around in his mouth, still not able to completely get the taste of blood and bile out of his mouth, but grateful to have it lessened.
There was motion in front of him and he looked up. And stared.
There was John. And there was John.
One was outfitted in full tactical gear, P-90 pinned to his vest, 9MM holstered at his side and familiar black muscle shirt peeking out from below a leather mission jacket.
But Rodney was focused on the one on the right, the one dressed in that faded old Batman T-shirt Rodney had bought him for his birthday, or maybe an anniversary.
Both Johns were smiling, although the one on the left was still wearing a vicious sort of smile while the other one was warm and comforting. The buzzing in Rodney’s ears finally dissipated enough for him to focus on the words that were coming out of both men’s mouths. Just two simple words, “Found you.”
Rodney wasn’t really aware of pulling away from Ronon or Teyla. He wasn’t aware of stumbling across the small room, kicking away the pliers so that they skittered across the floor. All he was aware of was that his motion carried him forward into John’s arms, the only safe place he seemed to remember from this nightmare. The two John’s finally slipped into one and he took a moment to relish in the warmth and safety he found there.
He leaned up and kissed John, so happy that John had kept his promise and found him. He tried to pack all the sweetness John had given him during his nightmare into that one kiss.
It took him a long moment to realize that John wasn’t returning the gesture. For a moment, he thought it was due to his understandably foul-tasting mouth. But the truth crashed down on him quickly enough.
This wasn’t his John.
He stumbled back, looked at John’s face. Instead of the relief, love and affection he expected, there was something like confusion tinged with mute horror on John’s face.
This wasn’t the John who made fun of him for picking out girly curtains for their bedroom. This wasn’t the John who made eggs just the way Rodney liked them in the morning. This wasn’t the John who knew Rodney’s touch on every inch of his scrawny body. This wasn’t the John who loved him and wanted to spend a lifetime with him, together.
Rodney stumbled further back, landing up with his back against Ronon’s sturdy front. The buzzing started up in his ears again, and he couldn’t hear what his teammate was saying to him. Hands started grabbing for him, but he could hardly feel them when faced with the confusion of the small room suddenly ending up at the end of a long, black tunnel.
Rodney wanted to go back to his John, back to their house with their bed and their couch and their kitchen and John’s ridiculously expensive and fast car. Out loud, he said, “I want to go home.”
John was still giving him a strange look and Teyla and Ronon seemed to have melted from sight, even though he could feel blood being wiped from his face by gentle hands and a steady and strong presence at his back, holding him up.
“We’ll get you back there McKay,” John said.
Rodney didn’t have the strength or the will left to tell John where his home really was and how much the brittle lie spilling off John’s lips hurt so much worse than his physical injuries.
Heartache and blood loss combined with a dizzy feeling and he finally welcomed the blackness, hoping that when he opened his eyes, his John would be there with fresh popcorn and the new boxset of Doctor Who.
Beep.
He shook his head slightly, whimpering as the light outside of his eyelids started to worm it’s way into his comfortable darkness.
Beep.
He tried to stay asleep.
Beep.
God, that was annoying.
Beep.
If he could just turn it off…but that would require opening his eyes, something he resolutely did not want to do.
Beep.
Damnit.
Beep.
Rodney opened his eyes slowly, taking the moment before they focused to glare blearily at the stupid heart monitor, which continued to beep merrily along, though after awhile he was finally able to ignore it.
He sighed.
He hadn’t dreamt at all, and he thought that he’d never cursed the fuzzy goodness that pain meds gave him before.
But he’d wanted to dream, wanted to be back in that safe place with John, even if it was just in his mind.
Shifting himself further underneath the covers, Rodney shut his eyes and desperately attempted to go back to sleep.
Two minutes later, he gave up on that and started wishing fiercely for a laptop or a radio so that he could force one of his minions to fetch him his laptop.
He didn’t get either of those.
Instead, he got John, who walked in with a container of chocolate pudding held out before him like a peace offering. “Hey, how you feeling?” he asked quietly, pulling a tray over and setting the pudding and a metal spoon on it before pushing it in front of Rodney.
“I’m in excruciating amounts of pain,” Rodney snapped, although he didn’t intend to let that keep him from chocolaty goodness. “How about you?”
John didn’t respond, just dug around the side of Rodney’s bed frame until he came up with a small button. He clicked it several times and Rodney felt the tension that had been pinching up his face with pain slowly unravel as good drugs slipped into his IV line.
“Okay. That’s totally better.” He snapped the two fingers that weren’t swathed in bandages and John obligingly helped him get the spoon in his hand before he removed the covering on the pudding.
Rodney happily shoveled pudding into his mouth while John watched with a look of fondness that got tenser and tenser as time went on.
“What?” Rodney finally asked.
“Look,” John said, although he wasn’t looking at Rodney, instead taking the time to study his bootlaces. “About the mission…”
Rodney felt a sharp pain in his chest at the flood of memory from his life with John, away from the torture and the pain and filled with all the things he never thought he’d get in life, like love and a family and true friends who’d stay with him. He dropped the spoon into the empty pudding cup and shoved the tray away before sliding down and turning his back to John. It was only when he had his eyes firmly squeezed shut that he responded, “It was nothing. Already forgotten.”
He waited for a long time, waited for John to just get up and leave already, waited for the relieved sigh that meant that emotions didn’t need to be talked about, nor kisses to friends who didn’t want them.
While he waited, he thought of how John had taken care of him when he was sick, bringing him his favorite soup after tucking him into their bed, crooning Johnny Cash songs as Rodney fell asleep. A tear managed to slip out of the corner of his eye. It wasn’t fair that he thought he could have that life, had had that life and now he couldn’t anymore.
But John still hadn’t left. “See, I don’t think it was,” he said finally.
Rodney had long since lost track of the conversation by then and he was forced to roll over to stare at John. “Don’t think it was what?” he asked irritably.
“Nothing,” John said. He looked nervous as hell as he leaned over, but the chaste kiss he brushed across Rodney’s temple was sure and sweet.
And it was just for a second, but suddenly Rodney’s John and this John were one and the same.
Rodney smiled and sputtered at the same time, “Are you sure?” and John nodded.
He propped himself up on an elbow, not even minding the pain or the gap in the back of his hospital gown as he hauled John in close for a proper kiss.
It wasn’t a retirement home with his dream lab only moments away. It wasn’t their cozy kitchen, filled with laughter and slightly burnt toast. It wasn’t their bedroom, filled with reminders of Atlantis and smelling like sex and home. But it was John.
And Rodney could work with that.
And if he bought John a vintage Batman T-shirt for his next birthday or some other not-dead-yet celebration and started looking at realty catalogues for properties near universities, well, he never had to say why.
Poll