Full Circle (23/23)
Title: Full Circle (23/23)
Author: neensz
Word Count: ~59,900
Pairing: Eliot/Shawn
Rating: R
Warnings: Language, violence, graphic language, un-beta’d
Beta: If you feel the urge, let me know and I’ll send you the file.
Disclaimer: Psych and Leverage and SG:A do not belong to me, nor do any of the characters or places or quotes I'm borrowing for my nefarious slashing purposes. I make no profit from the aforesaid borrowing, or only in the currency of squeeing fangirly joy.
A/N: OHMIGOD DONE. I’ve decided to end on 23 because it’s a nice, round prime. (Also, while there is a sequel in the works, I’m not gonna start posting it for another couple weeks--give myself a break and time to study for finals as well as time to get most of it, if not all, down in rough draft first.)
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16.0 | Chapter 16.5 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22
***
Earlier…
Eliot woke up screaming. The back of his neck, his spine, his skull, they burned. The pain was so intense he could almost feel his skin sizzle as the fire lapped at it, could almost hear the drip of his flesh falling to the floor as the acid melted away his nerve endings. He felt the rawness of his throat as he gasped for more air to scream with once his lungs were empty, and while it was negligible and almost unnoticeable compared to the agony of the rest of it, it was a clue to how long he’d been screaming before regaining consciousness. He started to be able to make out other voices underneath his own, though it took him much longer to recognize words within the overlapping sounds of people shouting at each other over that broken, inhuman wail that Eliot realized was coming from him.
“Dear god, how the hell is he still screaming?! The morphine should have-”
“Can’t you shut him up?! I can’t even think-”
“If something went wrong with the extraction-”
“It’s not like we can gag him-”
“The man’s in pain! Have you tried-”
“Too risky, if he’s shrugging off the morphine like-”
“You can’t be in here! Get out-”
“What do we have for non-opiates?”
“There’s propoxy-”
“What the hell do you think you're doing?!”
Suddenly, the pain stopped. Just ceased to exist, like it’d never been. The muscles in his back ached and were knotted with tension, his right shoulder felt kind of like someone had jammed a red-hot poker in it in the not too distant past, and his throat felt like he’d been gargling with bleach; but that was it. No more skin melting off his bones. The lingering aches and pains felt almost pleasant, in comparison. Eliot’s scream broke off into a choking sob of relief.
Blurry people in long white lab coats were frozen in place around his bed, shocked immobile at the sudden cessation of Eliot’s cries and staring at him. And then behind him. They wavered into slightly better focus as Eliot blinked moisture into his scratchy eyes, but God, he was fucking exhausted. Blinking was about all the effort he could bring himself to exert at the moment. Debilitating agony was hard work, and while unfortunately he’d already known that from past experience, at least that meant he wasn’t going to be surprised by the overwhelming urge to sleep for a fucking week that was about to come crashing down on him. He could feel it looming just around the corner.
“An tended to ‘gift’ his hosts with nerve damage on taking them, so they would be less able to fight back if they got the chance, but he was lazy. Easy to fix if you‘ve got the goods,” a woman’s accented voice half-laughed from just beyond Eliot’s peripheral vision. Her accent sounded almost Australian, except for not. Eliot couldn’t quite place it, but, then again, he was too tired to really care. “He always did take the really pretty ones,” she added, and her laughing voice moved further away as she spoke until the sound of a closing door cut off her last word.
“Think Vala heard him all the way from the gate-” He didn’t get a chance to hear the rest of whatever that particular lab coat was saying, because sleep reached out and dragged him down into blissful unconsciousness without giving him a say in the matter.
***
Later…
Shawn had been released from the infirmary roughly an hour after Eliot had woken up, hard on the heels of Colonel Caldwell’s hernia-inducing comment, and Eliot hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him since. It’d taken two more days for Eliot to get cleared to leave the infirmary, and another three hours after that to read through and sign the thickest stack of papers he’d ever seen (Talk about non-disclosure agreements--by the time he’d signed, he wasn’t sure if he was even allowed to admit the United States existed.) before someone would tell him where Shawn was. Needless to say, the revelation of being on a spaceship bigger than the Enterprise palled beneath the irritation and building rage that they were keeping Shawn from him. Or him from Shawn.
After a fruitless hour of interrogating the personnel he came across while stalking through the ship, a baby-faced Major finally informed him that Shawn had been sent planetside--back to Santa Barbara--because he’d refused to sign the non-disclosure agreement. The same Major told him that Colonel Sheppard had stepped in and made sure no one would railroad Shawn into signing by tossing him in the brig until he signed or died of old age, but that was as far as the Colonel had been able to help, seeing as how he was in hot water over the whole Moreau thing himself. Eliot felt distantly grateful to John (as well as mildly surprised by the details someone, somewhere, had let slip to become gossip), but didn’t let it distract him from working his way up the chain of command. He had to find someone to authorize getting him back on the planet--preferably in Santa Barbara--right the fuck now.
A day of browbeating and snarling at people with progressively shinier shoulders finally got him planetside. It was a step in the right direction, at least, even though he was currently sequestered in some General’s office in what had to be the most depressingly grey military complex known to man--at least what little he’d seen of it while being hustled from one bland, sterile, cinderblock and concrete room to another.
Eliot paced the room impatiently as he waited for the General to deign to make an appearance in his own office for a meeting that should have begun eleven minutes ago. Finally, the doorknob rattled and Eliot spun to glare at the door, his legs planted and his arms crossed over his chest, and glowered at the face that peered cautiously through the half open door before it was flung open.
“Finally,” the guy said with a groan of relief. “I swear they move the damn thing around when I’m not looking. Do you know how many doors I had to check to find my own office? Fifteen. And I really didn’t need to see what was going on behind door number fourteen, either. There’s no way I’m old enough to see that yet.” Eliot flicked a glance up to the man’s silver hair, but didn’t comment.
The guy was wearing rumpled BDUs that wouldn’t pass even the most lenient inspection, but the stars on his collar meant he was probably the General Eliot had been waiting for. That, or a guy who’d knocked the General on his head and stolen his uniform after tossing the unconscious officer in a closet. Eliot revised the possibility of the latter upwards as the man tossed himself down into the chair behind the desk and kicked his feet up on a stack of papers centered in the middle of the desk.
“Sit, sit,” the man waved a hand at Eliot and the crappy folding chair he was standing next to. Eliot remained standing. The man shrugged, “Suit yourself.” He dropped his legs to the floor without scattering the stack of papers in a way that implied lots of practice. He sat forward and rested his elbows on the desk, pinning Eliot with a level stare. “So, Vala tells me you had System Lord An in your head--and believe me, with a name like Anne, I totally get why he went to the dark side--Colonel Sheppard will say only good things about you, Dr. McKay says you’re not too stupid to live--which believe me, isn’t something most people get out of him--and the entire SGC is making grabby hands for you, while the Army is pretending you never existed out of one side of their mouth and badmouthing you from the other. But that could just be sour grapes, because they don’t get to play with our cool toys.”
Eliot eyed him silently while the General paused, but the General just stared back at him. Eliot didn’t know if he was waiting for a response or just being a dick. Either way, it was wasting time and impatient didn’t begin to describe how Eliot was feeling at the moment. “And?” he conceded, angling the visitor’s chair (with the accompanying grating screech of metal against poured concrete that he didn‘t attempt to prevent) so the back was no longer facing the door and sat. The chair was just as uncomfortable as it’d looked.
The general leaned back with a smirk and the staring contest continued for another few seconds before the General broke the silence, saying, “the Marines really want a Ranger to play with, but you’d have to promise not to break them.” And that just left Eliot wondering if he’d managed to miss a chunk of the conversation. The one where the General explained what the fuck he was talking about, for instance.
Silence descended briefly as he tried to figure out how to respond. Or how any of this related to why he was meeting with the General in the first place. “Sir.” Eliot finally managed.
“General O’Neill--two L’s,” the General held up three fingers, “or you can just call me Jack.”
Eliot chose to ignore that. “General O’Neill. Sir. What the hell are you talking about?”
O’Neill blinked at him. “Didn’t anyone tell you? We’re reinstating you, and you’re going to work here at the SGC. Probably on an off-world team--SG-12 needs someone to replace Williamson, at least until his leg grows back, and then after that you’ll probably be up for your own team. Officially, you’d be the new Army liaison for Cheyenne Mountain. If you want, that is. Oh, and Boris wants to pick your brains some more on what Annie might have let slip out.”
Until his leg grows back? Eliot silently ran that sentence through his head again, but it didn’t make any more sense with repetition. What the hell kind of place was this? But as much as he wanted to find out, it wasn’t the reason he was here for. “Sir, I came to talk to you about releasing me. I need to get back to Santa Barbara and find- I have something to take care of.” He paused, but O’Neill’s expression didn’t change. “As flattering as all this is, sir, I’m an ex-con. You can’t hire me. I need you to let me go,” Eliot was attempting to mask the desperation in his voice, and his request ended up coming out in a sardonic drawl that skirted the edge of outright offensive.
O’Neill just grinned at him. “Sure I can! The President pardoned you himself. Your record is now as clean and shiny as a brand new- clean and shiny thing.”
Eliot caught himself clenching his fists and leaning forward in his chair. He forced himself to relax his hands and lean back in the chair, and to not lunge across the desk and strangle the General who just wouldn‘t listen. “Sir,” he managed through gritted teeth, “I have to go to Santa Barbara. Now.”
O’Neill leaned back in his chair and swung back and forth in little half circles, the office chair squeaking annoyingly in protest, and he studied Eliot thoughtfully. “How about I give you some time to think it over,” he finally offered, if in a tone that didn‘t really sound like a question.
Eliot clamped down on the growl that wanted to rumble out of his chest. He didn’t need to be stuck on this base until he made the choice they liked- Fuck it. He’d escape if he had to. God knows he’d done it before, if under different circumstances. It had been a different base, obviously, but this one couldn’t be that much-
O’Neill interrupted his train of thought. “You were reinstated and reassigned retroactively, by the way, so you’ve got some back pay coming as soon as you tell HR where to put it, and you’re eligible for retirement if you decide that way. If not, you’re probably due a promotion or two.” O’Neill stood. “You’ve got a week’s leave to make up your mind, soldier. Talk to Harriman, he’s probably hovering outside the door, and he’ll get you to where you want to go for your vacation. Dismissed.”
Eliot found himself on his feet and snapping off a salute in response to O’Neill’s command tone before he knew what hit him. Slightly bewildered, he turned to leave the office. O’Neill’s voice stopped him right before he opened the door, but he stared at the doorframe rather than turning to face the General. “Two things, Corporal Spencer. Off the record. If you could get him to sign, that’d be great, but no biggie if you can’t. And, on an unrelated note, we’re really good here at the SGC at not asking. About anything. Ever.” O’Neill coughed awkwardly, and completely mortified, Eliot took the opportunity to flee the general’s office, the heat in his face a good clue that he was bright red with embarrassment.
Inwardly, though, Eliot was numb. Everything that’d just been dropped in his lap--it was just too much for him to process at the moment.
He was still numb when he got dropped off in front of the Psych office with his new C-bag slung over his shoulder. (Cpl. Spencer was stenciled on the side in dull black letters, and it had come pre-packed by God knows who with God knows what. He still hadn‘t looked inside.) But then again, it’d only been twenty minutes since he’d met with O’Neill, so it wasn’t like he’d really had time to process much of anything. Twenty minutes from Colorado Springs to Santa Barbara, and most of that had been spent being driven around Santa Barbara by a chatty Marine with no sense of direction. If the SGC (and he still wasn’t really clear on what that stood for) ever felt like funding themselves independently, they could put the airlines out of business.
Eliot stared at the door from where his boots were glued to the sidewalk. He’d come this far, but somehow he couldn’t make his feet carry him the last few yards to knock on the door. He caught a glimpse of movement through the picture window with the big PSYCH stenciled on it, and the door was flung open a moment later, making knocking irrelevant.
Eliot drank Shawn in with his eyes. It’d only been two and a half days since Shawn had been released from the infirmary and kicked back to Santa Barbara, only two and a half days since Eliot had last seen him, but it felt more like it’d been two weeks, or two months. They stared at each other silently, Eliot shifting awkwardly from foot to foot on the sidewalk, Shawn still braced in the doorway, one hand holding the outflung door open and the other keeping a white-knuckled grip on the doorframe.
A voice floating out from inside the office broke the silent tableau, “Shawn, who is it? Is it a customer?” and Eliot suddenly had an armful of Shawn. He was all over the place, pressing quick kisses to Eliot’s face, running his hands over Eliot’s shoulders and the back of his neck, pulling back to stare at him briefly before lunging in to press a hard kiss against his mouth and running a cautious hand over Eliot’s right shoulder again. Eliot dropped his C-bag without a thought and ignored the mildly ominous thunk it made when it hit the sidewalk, pulling Shawn close with an arm around his waist and the other slanted over his shoulders, holding Shawn still for the moment and tightly enough to provoke a muttered protest, but Eliot just nuzzled into the crook where Shawn’s neck met his shoulder and just breathed in the smell of sun and salt and sand and pineapple and Shawn.
The End
The Sequel
Author: neensz
Word Count: ~59,900
Pairing: Eliot/Shawn
Rating: R
Warnings: Language, violence, graphic language, un-beta’d
Beta: If you feel the urge, let me know and I’ll send you the file.
Disclaimer: Psych and Leverage and SG:A do not belong to me, nor do any of the characters or places or quotes I'm borrowing for my nefarious slashing purposes. I make no profit from the aforesaid borrowing, or only in the currency of squeeing fangirly joy.
A/N: OHMIGOD DONE. I’ve decided to end on 23 because it’s a nice, round prime. (Also, while there is a sequel in the works, I’m not gonna start posting it for another couple weeks--give myself a break and time to study for finals as well as time to get most of it, if not all, down in rough draft first.)
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16.0 | Chapter 16.5 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22
***
Earlier…
Eliot woke up screaming. The back of his neck, his spine, his skull, they burned. The pain was so intense he could almost feel his skin sizzle as the fire lapped at it, could almost hear the drip of his flesh falling to the floor as the acid melted away his nerve endings. He felt the rawness of his throat as he gasped for more air to scream with once his lungs were empty, and while it was negligible and almost unnoticeable compared to the agony of the rest of it, it was a clue to how long he’d been screaming before regaining consciousness. He started to be able to make out other voices underneath his own, though it took him much longer to recognize words within the overlapping sounds of people shouting at each other over that broken, inhuman wail that Eliot realized was coming from him.
“Dear god, how the hell is he still screaming?! The morphine should have-”
“Can’t you shut him up?! I can’t even think-”
“If something went wrong with the extraction-”
“It’s not like we can gag him-”
“The man’s in pain! Have you tried-”
“Too risky, if he’s shrugging off the morphine like-”
“You can’t be in here! Get out-”
“What do we have for non-opiates?”
“There’s propoxy-”
“What the hell do you think you're doing?!”
Suddenly, the pain stopped. Just ceased to exist, like it’d never been. The muscles in his back ached and were knotted with tension, his right shoulder felt kind of like someone had jammed a red-hot poker in it in the not too distant past, and his throat felt like he’d been gargling with bleach; but that was it. No more skin melting off his bones. The lingering aches and pains felt almost pleasant, in comparison. Eliot’s scream broke off into a choking sob of relief.
Blurry people in long white lab coats were frozen in place around his bed, shocked immobile at the sudden cessation of Eliot’s cries and staring at him. And then behind him. They wavered into slightly better focus as Eliot blinked moisture into his scratchy eyes, but God, he was fucking exhausted. Blinking was about all the effort he could bring himself to exert at the moment. Debilitating agony was hard work, and while unfortunately he’d already known that from past experience, at least that meant he wasn’t going to be surprised by the overwhelming urge to sleep for a fucking week that was about to come crashing down on him. He could feel it looming just around the corner.
“An tended to ‘gift’ his hosts with nerve damage on taking them, so they would be less able to fight back if they got the chance, but he was lazy. Easy to fix if you‘ve got the goods,” a woman’s accented voice half-laughed from just beyond Eliot’s peripheral vision. Her accent sounded almost Australian, except for not. Eliot couldn’t quite place it, but, then again, he was too tired to really care. “He always did take the really pretty ones,” she added, and her laughing voice moved further away as she spoke until the sound of a closing door cut off her last word.
“Think Vala heard him all the way from the gate-” He didn’t get a chance to hear the rest of whatever that particular lab coat was saying, because sleep reached out and dragged him down into blissful unconsciousness without giving him a say in the matter.
***
Later…
Shawn had been released from the infirmary roughly an hour after Eliot had woken up, hard on the heels of Colonel Caldwell’s hernia-inducing comment, and Eliot hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him since. It’d taken two more days for Eliot to get cleared to leave the infirmary, and another three hours after that to read through and sign the thickest stack of papers he’d ever seen (Talk about non-disclosure agreements--by the time he’d signed, he wasn’t sure if he was even allowed to admit the United States existed.) before someone would tell him where Shawn was. Needless to say, the revelation of being on a spaceship bigger than the Enterprise palled beneath the irritation and building rage that they were keeping Shawn from him. Or him from Shawn.
After a fruitless hour of interrogating the personnel he came across while stalking through the ship, a baby-faced Major finally informed him that Shawn had been sent planetside--back to Santa Barbara--because he’d refused to sign the non-disclosure agreement. The same Major told him that Colonel Sheppard had stepped in and made sure no one would railroad Shawn into signing by tossing him in the brig until he signed or died of old age, but that was as far as the Colonel had been able to help, seeing as how he was in hot water over the whole Moreau thing himself. Eliot felt distantly grateful to John (as well as mildly surprised by the details someone, somewhere, had let slip to become gossip), but didn’t let it distract him from working his way up the chain of command. He had to find someone to authorize getting him back on the planet--preferably in Santa Barbara--right the fuck now.
A day of browbeating and snarling at people with progressively shinier shoulders finally got him planetside. It was a step in the right direction, at least, even though he was currently sequestered in some General’s office in what had to be the most depressingly grey military complex known to man--at least what little he’d seen of it while being hustled from one bland, sterile, cinderblock and concrete room to another.
Eliot paced the room impatiently as he waited for the General to deign to make an appearance in his own office for a meeting that should have begun eleven minutes ago. Finally, the doorknob rattled and Eliot spun to glare at the door, his legs planted and his arms crossed over his chest, and glowered at the face that peered cautiously through the half open door before it was flung open.
“Finally,” the guy said with a groan of relief. “I swear they move the damn thing around when I’m not looking. Do you know how many doors I had to check to find my own office? Fifteen. And I really didn’t need to see what was going on behind door number fourteen, either. There’s no way I’m old enough to see that yet.” Eliot flicked a glance up to the man’s silver hair, but didn’t comment.
The guy was wearing rumpled BDUs that wouldn’t pass even the most lenient inspection, but the stars on his collar meant he was probably the General Eliot had been waiting for. That, or a guy who’d knocked the General on his head and stolen his uniform after tossing the unconscious officer in a closet. Eliot revised the possibility of the latter upwards as the man tossed himself down into the chair behind the desk and kicked his feet up on a stack of papers centered in the middle of the desk.
“Sit, sit,” the man waved a hand at Eliot and the crappy folding chair he was standing next to. Eliot remained standing. The man shrugged, “Suit yourself.” He dropped his legs to the floor without scattering the stack of papers in a way that implied lots of practice. He sat forward and rested his elbows on the desk, pinning Eliot with a level stare. “So, Vala tells me you had System Lord An in your head--and believe me, with a name like Anne, I totally get why he went to the dark side--Colonel Sheppard will say only good things about you, Dr. McKay says you’re not too stupid to live--which believe me, isn’t something most people get out of him--and the entire SGC is making grabby hands for you, while the Army is pretending you never existed out of one side of their mouth and badmouthing you from the other. But that could just be sour grapes, because they don’t get to play with our cool toys.”
Eliot eyed him silently while the General paused, but the General just stared back at him. Eliot didn’t know if he was waiting for a response or just being a dick. Either way, it was wasting time and impatient didn’t begin to describe how Eliot was feeling at the moment. “And?” he conceded, angling the visitor’s chair (with the accompanying grating screech of metal against poured concrete that he didn‘t attempt to prevent) so the back was no longer facing the door and sat. The chair was just as uncomfortable as it’d looked.
The general leaned back with a smirk and the staring contest continued for another few seconds before the General broke the silence, saying, “the Marines really want a Ranger to play with, but you’d have to promise not to break them.” And that just left Eliot wondering if he’d managed to miss a chunk of the conversation. The one where the General explained what the fuck he was talking about, for instance.
Silence descended briefly as he tried to figure out how to respond. Or how any of this related to why he was meeting with the General in the first place. “Sir.” Eliot finally managed.
“General O’Neill--two L’s,” the General held up three fingers, “or you can just call me Jack.”
Eliot chose to ignore that. “General O’Neill. Sir. What the hell are you talking about?”
O’Neill blinked at him. “Didn’t anyone tell you? We’re reinstating you, and you’re going to work here at the SGC. Probably on an off-world team--SG-12 needs someone to replace Williamson, at least until his leg grows back, and then after that you’ll probably be up for your own team. Officially, you’d be the new Army liaison for Cheyenne Mountain. If you want, that is. Oh, and Boris wants to pick your brains some more on what Annie might have let slip out.”
Until his leg grows back? Eliot silently ran that sentence through his head again, but it didn’t make any more sense with repetition. What the hell kind of place was this? But as much as he wanted to find out, it wasn’t the reason he was here for. “Sir, I came to talk to you about releasing me. I need to get back to Santa Barbara and find- I have something to take care of.” He paused, but O’Neill’s expression didn’t change. “As flattering as all this is, sir, I’m an ex-con. You can’t hire me. I need you to let me go,” Eliot was attempting to mask the desperation in his voice, and his request ended up coming out in a sardonic drawl that skirted the edge of outright offensive.
O’Neill just grinned at him. “Sure I can! The President pardoned you himself. Your record is now as clean and shiny as a brand new- clean and shiny thing.”
Eliot caught himself clenching his fists and leaning forward in his chair. He forced himself to relax his hands and lean back in the chair, and to not lunge across the desk and strangle the General who just wouldn‘t listen. “Sir,” he managed through gritted teeth, “I have to go to Santa Barbara. Now.”
O’Neill leaned back in his chair and swung back and forth in little half circles, the office chair squeaking annoyingly in protest, and he studied Eliot thoughtfully. “How about I give you some time to think it over,” he finally offered, if in a tone that didn‘t really sound like a question.
Eliot clamped down on the growl that wanted to rumble out of his chest. He didn’t need to be stuck on this base until he made the choice they liked- Fuck it. He’d escape if he had to. God knows he’d done it before, if under different circumstances. It had been a different base, obviously, but this one couldn’t be that much-
O’Neill interrupted his train of thought. “You were reinstated and reassigned retroactively, by the way, so you’ve got some back pay coming as soon as you tell HR where to put it, and you’re eligible for retirement if you decide that way. If not, you’re probably due a promotion or two.” O’Neill stood. “You’ve got a week’s leave to make up your mind, soldier. Talk to Harriman, he’s probably hovering outside the door, and he’ll get you to where you want to go for your vacation. Dismissed.”
Eliot found himself on his feet and snapping off a salute in response to O’Neill’s command tone before he knew what hit him. Slightly bewildered, he turned to leave the office. O’Neill’s voice stopped him right before he opened the door, but he stared at the doorframe rather than turning to face the General. “Two things, Corporal Spencer. Off the record. If you could get him to sign, that’d be great, but no biggie if you can’t. And, on an unrelated note, we’re really good here at the SGC at not asking. About anything. Ever.” O’Neill coughed awkwardly, and completely mortified, Eliot took the opportunity to flee the general’s office, the heat in his face a good clue that he was bright red with embarrassment.
Inwardly, though, Eliot was numb. Everything that’d just been dropped in his lap--it was just too much for him to process at the moment.
He was still numb when he got dropped off in front of the Psych office with his new C-bag slung over his shoulder. (Cpl. Spencer was stenciled on the side in dull black letters, and it had come pre-packed by God knows who with God knows what. He still hadn‘t looked inside.) But then again, it’d only been twenty minutes since he’d met with O’Neill, so it wasn’t like he’d really had time to process much of anything. Twenty minutes from Colorado Springs to Santa Barbara, and most of that had been spent being driven around Santa Barbara by a chatty Marine with no sense of direction. If the SGC (and he still wasn’t really clear on what that stood for) ever felt like funding themselves independently, they could put the airlines out of business.
Eliot stared at the door from where his boots were glued to the sidewalk. He’d come this far, but somehow he couldn’t make his feet carry him the last few yards to knock on the door. He caught a glimpse of movement through the picture window with the big PSYCH stenciled on it, and the door was flung open a moment later, making knocking irrelevant.
Eliot drank Shawn in with his eyes. It’d only been two and a half days since Shawn had been released from the infirmary and kicked back to Santa Barbara, only two and a half days since Eliot had last seen him, but it felt more like it’d been two weeks, or two months. They stared at each other silently, Eliot shifting awkwardly from foot to foot on the sidewalk, Shawn still braced in the doorway, one hand holding the outflung door open and the other keeping a white-knuckled grip on the doorframe.
A voice floating out from inside the office broke the silent tableau, “Shawn, who is it? Is it a customer?” and Eliot suddenly had an armful of Shawn. He was all over the place, pressing quick kisses to Eliot’s face, running his hands over Eliot’s shoulders and the back of his neck, pulling back to stare at him briefly before lunging in to press a hard kiss against his mouth and running a cautious hand over Eliot’s right shoulder again. Eliot dropped his C-bag without a thought and ignored the mildly ominous thunk it made when it hit the sidewalk, pulling Shawn close with an arm around his waist and the other slanted over his shoulders, holding Shawn still for the moment and tightly enough to provoke a muttered protest, but Eliot just nuzzled into the crook where Shawn’s neck met his shoulder and just breathed in the smell of sun and salt and sand and pineapple and Shawn.
The End
The Sequel