SGA Fic: When I'm 64 (Final)
Title: When I'm 64
Pairing: John/Rodney
Rating: NC-17
Category: First time, estabished relationship
Notes: A belated birthday gift for seperis.
I started this two years ago so it veers off from canon pretty sharply in early season three.
Summary:
The first time he woke up to John’s body curling sweet and warm around him was the very next morning, John a comfortable presence along his side, their limbs in a tangle of post-coital exhaustion. He ran a hand up John’s side, already addicted to the way John pressed into his touch. He pulled himself in closer, enjoying the slide of skin on skin, and thought, maybe, it was about time he got started on the rest of his life.
Part One
Part two
About three months after Elizabeth left, Teyla brought her fiancée home to meet the in-laws.
Rodney was not pleased.
They’d only just started to find their new dynamic in Ronon’s absence. For months the three of them had retreated from each other in a kind of self-protective silence. Or at least Rodney had been avoiding them. Teyla was off-world most of the time anyway, and any time the three of them were together it only reminded him of the fact that there used to be four. There were reports, a few of them reliable even, of a band of resistance fighters tracking the bands of remaining Wraith from world to world across the galaxy. One such report had included the description of a tall, brutally efficient Satedan who’d asked for news of the Lanteans. But each of these reports had been months’ cold and growing colder. They were no closer to finding Ford’s gang than they had been twelve years ago when he’d first disappeared. Teyla, Sheppard and Rodney had been left to renegotiate the remainder of their team, and Rodney had just been finding his footing before Teyla dropped this bombshell.
She’d been dropping hints for a while. For months, it had been Inaro this or Inaro that. Sheppard claimed they’d met the man-twice even, but Rodney did not remember this.
“His people and mine had been trading partners for decades,” she tried to explain. “But when his planet was culled my people thought they were lost. It was only a year ago that we found them again.”
“Hmmph,” Rodney said. “Usually the Wraith are more thorough.”
Sheppard kicked him under the table.
“What?” Rodney said. “Also, ow.”
“Inaro became the leader of his people after they were evicted from their home,” Teyla said, more stiff than she’d been since their first few months together. Rodney belatedly realized that she was nervous. “He and the other Neriti have been very helpful to us in re-building. We knew each other, a little, as children, and when he returned it was like finding that time again. It is not often we have been able to reclaim things from the Wraith.”
Rodney just bet he was helpful.
“You like him,” Sheppard said, as if this was at all relevant when there were so many more important questions to ask, like, “Is he a sociopath?”, or “Have you met his mother yet?”, or “Who the hell does he think he is?”.
Teyla smiled. “Yes,” she said almost shyly. “I do.”
This was apparently good enough for Sheppard. Rodney had never been so disappointed in him.
Two weeks later, Teyla appeared through the gate in the company of a few of the Athosians and a tall dark-haired man. Rodney supposed you’d probably call him attractive, if one went for perfect coffee skin and swimmers’ builds. Rodney had to admit he didn’t look much like an evil space robot, but then, the Asurans had been awfully tricky at first, too.
“Welcome to Atlantis,” Sheppard said in his most ridiculous, I’m absurdly cute and harmless and everyone totally loves me voice. Rodney would be annoyed except he’d seen it work too many times.
.
“And you remember Dr. McKay,” Teyla said, with an almost-glare at Rodney.
Inaro and Rodney exchanged quick nods. Rodney felt that should take care of his hospitality responsibilities.
“Would you like a tour?” Sheppard asked. That at least explained his insane cheeriness. He loved showing off Atlantis like other people loved thrusting pictures of their squalling spawn on unsuspecting lab managers.
“It would be an honor.”
“You should love this,” Sheppard said, leading him away. “Rodney and his team are building me my own invisible cloak. Teyla said you used to have something like that on your planet.”
“Yes, but it was more like a small shield to hide small objects. You have something powerful enough to shield an entire person?” Inaro said, suddenly looking as excited as Sheppard was.
Rodney could protest that he was building the personal invisibility device for the security of Atlantis, not for John Sheppard’s personal amusement, but who was he kidding?
“They seem to be getting along,” Teyla said hesitantly as they watched Sheppard lead her gigolo man-bot away.
“Yeah,” Rodney said. “Bringing him here was a total mistake. Don’t they have a Vegas in this galaxy?”
Teyla frowned. “It has been taken over by the Genii. Everyone agrees it is no longer the same.”
They spent the rest of the day in the lab. Teyla helped him out taking readings on his new experiment. It wasn’t anything terribly important and Rodney didn’t really need help, but it was . . . nice, spending time with Teyla, especially now that he knew that time was going to be shared from now on.
Inaro and his tour guide appeared briefly just after lunch.
“You told me this place was a city of wonders,” Inaro said, taking her hands. “But I did not imagine nearly so much.”
“I haven’t even shown him the jumpers yet,” Sheppard said.
Rodney smirked. “They’ll think you don’t love them anymore.”
“C’mon,” John said to his new BFF. “The city looks even better from the air.”
“Definitely a mistake,” Rodney said as they tromped away again, Inaro’s excited voice already asking about jumper speeds.
“I had expected this to be a little more difficult,” Teyla said. If Rodney didn’t know better, he’d think she was almost put out by that.
“I don’t like him,” Rodney said. “Are you sure he’s not an Ancient? It would explain why Sheppard’s panting after him.”
Teyla blinked, but then smiled and patted his shoulder. “He is not one of the ancestors, I promise you. But thank you for that.”
They caught up with Sheppard and the boyfriend in the mess after dinner. Inaro had a giant mound of popcorn in front of him and five empty beer bottles.
“You were right,” Inaro said, smiling up at Teyla. “Popcorn is delicious.”
He seemed a little buzzed, if not quite drunk. Teyla pushed a stray clump of his tight curls off of his forehead as if she couldn’t quite keep her fingers from them.
“Yes,” she said, “it is.”
She sat down beside him, their fingers twining together in such easy companionship that Rodney felt abruptly alone for all that he was sitting in a group of three other people.
“Beer?” Sheppard asked, offering Rodney a bottle. His foot brushed Rodney’s under the table almost certainly on purpose, but it only made Rodney feel worse.
Teyla and Inaro spent a few days on Atlantis, allowing Teyla to show him her own view of the city and its people. They went back to Athos on the fourth morning. Sheppard and Rodney stood together, watching them go.
“He’s not good enough for her,” Rodney said.
“Of course not,” Sheppard said. “But who is?”
Teyla and Inaro appeared a few more times before the wedding, sometimes apart. Rodney had to admit that Inaro had been a lot of help in ironing out some of the bugs in Sheppard’s invisibility cloak.
Rodney expected him to be some kind of idiot warrior pretty boy, but it turned out the Neriti were builders and no more fighters than the bulk of the Athosians were. They’d lost much of their knowledge in their nomadic flight from the Wraith, but they still retained more technology than most Pegasus cultures and Inaro knew how to both build and use it.
So, probably not a malicious mandroid after all. Or an Ancient or a disguised Wraith or anything other than a lucky bastard who was getting something far more than he deserved.
Damn it.
* * * * *
The weather on Athos the day of the wedding was crystal clear and beautiful, the leaves on the trees just beginning to take on their post-harvest gold. Despite his reservations about the groom, Rodney was happy.
Teyla deserved to have a perfect wedding.
“You look handsome,” Elizabeth said, a flirtatious glint in her eye. Ever since she’d returned to Earth, she’d seemed somehow more approachable, easier. It made Rodney a little too aware of how good she looked in that dress. Actually, if Rodney were to be honest with himself, he was a little afraid of this more provocative Elizabeth. She’d brought Bra’tac, who fit in with the Athosians like they were lost cousins. Rodney told himself they were just professional friends, but this was a hard illusion to maintain what with the glint in Bra’tac’s eye every time he looked at her in that get up.
Only Rodney and Sheppard came without dates. Rodney tried not to think about what that meant.
“Reminds me of my wedding,” Zelenka said as they watched everyone come together in the gathering twilight.
“Yes, because they have so many perfect, flower-bedecked meadows in Caesar’s Palace,” Rodney said. At least Zelenka had had the decency to do the right thing and elope. Rodney hadn’t even had to buy him a present.
“There were trees.”
“Plastic trees.”
“Don’t worry, Rodney,” Zelenka said, smiling at him in too-perfect benevolence. “Someday it might happen for you. At this time, does not seem likely, true, but somewhere there must be a woman stupid enough.”
Rodney did not dignify that with a response. Zelenka drifted over to his Amazon of a wife, who, in violation of every law of drunken weddings between perfect strangers Rodney had ever heard, was both unbelievably hot and a genius evolutionary biologist who just happened to be a big enough name to get instant clearance to the Stargate program.
The groom appeared down the path from the settlement, almost tripping over his own feet and grinning in blinding stupidity. Rodney hoped Teyla knew what she was getting into. Teyla seemed more sensible than most, but women got so obsessed with this whole wedding business. He didn’t see why they couldn’t have just continued on as they had.
But then Teyla walked down the path after her soon-to-be husband, and Rodney got his answer to that. Even for Teyla, she looked stunningly beautiful, smiling and almost as young as when they first had met. She looked, simply, happy.
Inaro stood beside Halling, looking as if he could not imagine how he had convinced someone like her to come to stand beside him. Rodney felt his throat tighten. He hadn’t really allowed himself to imagine what this really meant. Teyla had been spending less and less time on Atlantis as the settlement of her people took more and more of her time, but she had still been there, still a part of the city even on days Rodney didn’t spend any time with her. But after today, she was going to belong to someone else, too.
The Athosian ceremony was far shorter than its Earth counterpart. The woman announced her intention to take the man as her own, took his hand before the assembled people, and then Halling formalized their union by tying their linked hands together with an intricately woven strip of cloth.
At the feast afterward Rodney sat next to Sheppard, the last remaining holdouts of the original team. Inaro and Teyla circulated the tables, awkwardly feeding each other one-handed with their other hands still bound between them. He laughed and whispered something in her ear, which had her smiling a little wickedly. Rodney had to finally admit that they looked good together. Inaro had managed to keep his people alive for fifteen years as nomads in a distrustful, war-torn galaxy. It was just possible, just, that he might be a good match for her after all.
“Always the bridesmaid, eh Rodney?” Sheppard said, looking a little rueful himself.
“Thank God.” But today Rodney couldn’t quite work up any energy even for pretend distain of what they were witnessing.
Elizabeth came along and claimed Sheppard for a dance. They looked good together, too, negotiating a path through the dancers to the unfamiliar rhythm of the Athosian music. Sheppard had admitted once that he’d taken ballroom dance in college with a girlfriend. Rodney had stopped mocking him for it as soon as he noticed the googly reaction of half of his staff.
Rodney sat there, drinking his gratifyingly strong alcoholic concoction in morose silence. Once upon a time, he would not have been alone. Once upon a time there would have been an amused low voice mocking Sheppard’s terribly concentrated face as a slightly evil Elizabeth mock-flirted with him. Or to point out Radek’s moony face as he slow danced in wretched junior-high-dance fashion with his wife. The two of them, Ronon and himself, had long been accustomed to sitting on the sidelines drinking heavily and pretending they weren’t dancing because it was beneath their dignity, not because the pair of them were hilariously horrible at it. But now beside him there was only a conspicuous void.
The tune changed and Sheppard nearly fled from Elizabeth. In their place swept Teyla and Inaro, drifting about in a lyrical swirling motion that reminded Rodney vaguely of what he remembered of Viennese waltz.
It was easy then, sitting there alone, to admit that he’d always been a little bit in love with her. From earliest days, she’d been beautiful and strong and brave and so much more forgiving of all of them than any of them had probably ever deserved. They’d celebrated together and starved together. They’d suffered sunburn from alien stars and walked under alien moonlight through the ruins of a city so old it had been abandoned even before the Ancients had come anywhere near its shores. They’d lost battles and friends and sometimes even themselves, but in the end, they’d won their war. There was a part of him, he thought, that would always belong here with her, no matter where he might go from here.
Out of habit he looked up and found the star that held Atlantis in its orbit. It was there where it always was, second star to the right, straight on until morning. He’d thought they might always continue like that, Teyla and her lost boys tromping to adventure after adventure.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been wrong, and that had been a dream more foolish than most.
A shout drew Rodney’s thoughts away from their inner spiral.
And there was Rodney’s own personal Peter Pan being swamped by a tribe of real feral children. John Sheppard, the one unchanging center to Rodney’s chaotic universe. There, since this apparently was a night for drunken honesty, was another dream, just as foolish though even after all this time never one Rodney had ever been able to quite exorcize. But it was an old desire, comfortable with time, and if it twinged a little sharply at times, it was at least a familiar pain.
Rodney briefly considered rescuing him, but Sheppard seemed to be holding his own. Two of the girls were twining some of the wedding flowers into his hair, and more urchins of indeterminable gender were pulling on his jacket trying to get his attention. Sheppard just endured all of this with easy aplomb, listening to each childish tale with appropriate seriousness.
Eventually he looked up and noticed Rodney staring at him. His eyes narrowed, probably seeing, as always, more than Rodney would like him to. He stood and made his way over, trailing children behind him like some mad Pied Piper.
He loomed briefly over Rodney, one child hanging down his back, another clomped onto his leg.
“You look ridiculous,” Rodney pronounced.
Sheppard just grinned, shifted the child from his back around to the front and sat in the empty chair beside Rodney. She immediately curled into his chest in childish exhaustion.
He looked good, was what Rodney really thought. Easy and relaxed in ways he rarely was despite the binding lines of the uniform. It made Rodney want things he usually didn’t let himself dwell on.
Which meant that he’d had far too much to drink.
The children buzzed around them, bored of ceremony and unhappy at having their hero’s attention stolen, even for a minute.
“Why don’t you go and find a good spot?” Sheppard told them. “We’ll be along in a minute.”
They looked at Rodney suspiciously, but then trailed off into the night leaving only the child in Sheppard’s lap behind.
Sheppard reached forward and touched Rodney’s arm. Rodney told himself it didn’t mean anything. Sheppard touched people all the time.
But the hand tightened and didn’t move away. “You okay there, Rodney?”
Rodney sighed. “I hate weddings.”
Sheppard tilted his head. “At least this one has good booze.”
Rodney allowed this was true. Inaro’s people distilled a pale strange fruit into a sweet, sharp drink that Rodney suspected probably packed more of a punch than he was feeling yet.
“Come on,” Sheppard said, patting Rodney’s arm. He stood up, easily shifting the sleeping weight of the child to his shoulder. “The kids want to build a fort.”
“A fort.”
“It’ll be fun,” Sheppard said. It sounded nothing like the sort. But Rodney stood up. Watching Sheppard’s semi-drunken efforts at construction might prove entertaining at the least.
As they reached the edge of the clearing, they were stopped by Teyla and Inaro.
“Are you enjoying yourselves?” Inaro asked a little formally. From his expression it looked like it was desperately important that they were.
Rodney realized he might just be a little overwhelmed by them and their role in Teyla’s life. It made him feel better, somehow.
“Sure,” Sheppard said. “Who doesn’t like a party?”
“I see you have made a new friend,” Teyla said, indicating the child in John’s arms.
“Oh,” John said. “This is Kyara. She’s promised she’ll marry me as soon as her mother says okay.”
“It’s about time someone made an honest man out of you,” Rodney said.
Teyla glared at him in mock disapproval.
“You have always been that,” she said, cupping John’s cheek. They leaned forward, touching heads over the child.
“And you as well, Rodney,” she added, pressing Rodney’s shoulder. Rodney felt his throat tighten again and had to look away.
“Where are you going?” Inaro asked.
“We’re building a fort, wanna come?” Sheppard asked.
“We could not leave the others,” Teyla said, frowning.
“It’s your party,” Sheppard said.
“I must admit, I have become tired of dancing,” Inaro put in quickly, proving he was more observant than he looked. “And the children should have supervision.”
Teyla’s mouth curved into a wry smile Rodney knew very well. “That is true. Very well, a short break with the children would be welcome.”
And so the four of them plus the sleeping Kyara went off together, the mingled shrieks of the Athosian and Neriti children leading them on.
* * * * *
Rodney sat at his desk and stared balefully at the rain-drenched landscape outside his windows. He had not planned on being here today. He had planned on cozying up in the den with the giant stack of appearance requests. He’d known that the opening of Atlantis to the public would garner a lot of attention, but somehow he had underestimated it. He had fan mail. Buckets of it. It had gotten so bad he’d had to hire an undergrad to go through it and sort out the serious requests.
Some people thought it was rude not to at least read all of the letters, but Rodney had better things to do with his time than to decipher the well-intentioned but grammatically challenged scribblings of the adoring public. At least his fans were sane, decent people if sometimes a little simple, unlike someone else’s who were clearly a little unhinged. John had just happened to mention on Ellen that he liked to cook, and now bored hausfraus all over the country were sending him recipes. Which was bad enough, but last week he’d actually found John mailing some of his own back.
“Julia Hausbek said she’d send us her recipe for either gumbo or jerk chicken in exchange for the falafel one. Which sounds better to you?” John had actually asked, chewing on the end of his pen. His fingers were already stained blue. “You liked her bean salad, remember?”
Rodney considered his options. Or, more pointedly, the state of their liquor cabinet.
“Julia Hausbek?” he asked faintly.
John frowned. “We met her at the photoshoot. It was only three weeks ago.”
Oh yes, the photoshoot. At People. The one with his boyfriend’s picture that would be appearing clutched in his students’ hands in two months.
“Chicken. Definitely chicken,” Rodney said, giving in. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to make him forget this conversation. Besides which, everyone knew okra was the work of Satan.
Once upon a time John had killed people for a living. Rodney missed those days.
He’d fled to his office, happy to have a place to retreat. But that was last week.
Today he was decidedly less pleased to find himself here. Instead of carefully weighing each flattering request for his attention in the comfort of his own home, he was marooned in his own office on a Sunday afternoon after traveling through the crappiest weather they’d had in weeks.
Somehow this had to be John’s fault. Okay, sure he had told Rodney he was having people over to watch the game, and he’d possibly mentioned that some of the students from his class were coming, and yes, right there on Rodney’s desk calendar was a reminder-Sunday! Football!-written in John’s anally precise hand followed by a smiley face with its own scribbled tuft of hair sticking every which way. But he had not mentioned that this event would take up their house for hours and hours and basically completely ruin Rodney’s hopes for a productive Sunday.
So Rodney had come here to the relative saneness of campus. He’d been a little mollified when he’d seen all of his graduate students huddled over their desk in bloodshot misery. But he was a professor. He had tenure. Everyone knew that was your ticket to getting your weekends back. It was one of the few reasons he tolerated faculty coffee.
He stared balefully at the window. After a few minutes sleet pellets starting knocking against the glass.
Rodney knew he should have stuck with his first instincts. Despite Jeannie and John’s bemused protests, fate most surely did hate him.
He dug into his backpack and yanked at the first stack of letters his assistant had helpfully organized for him. At least he was getting something done, not sitting around with ardent co-eds and ex-soldiers watching a bunch of men crash into each other in pursuit of a ball.
He worked his way through the stack, carefully setting aside those that could be met with a polite refusal and those few that looked interesting enough for further consideration. He’d gone about a quarter of the way through when he was distracted by a light knock on his doors.
Kheryn stood there with unusual hesitation. “Do you have a minute to look at something?”
Rodney frowned. “Is it those calculations I asked you to do on Friday? I wouldn’t have thought you’d have any problems with those.”
She shook her head. “No, it isn’t, and no, I didn’t. It’s something else.”
She handed him a few pages of notes scrawled in about twelve types of brightly colored pen. The ways she reminded him of John sometimes creeped him out a little.
“I had an idea, a couple months ago, about how the gates can connect so quickly, even between here and Pegasus. I think . . . I think I might have found the answer.”
Rodney snatched at the papers, mind racing. It was an old problem. They’d figured out long ago that the gates worked by folding space, so that you traveled a very short distance between each connection and could therefore travel in effect faster than the speed of light. But they’d never figured out how the gates could make that initial connection without being eternally tuned to every gate in existence, which violated everything they knew about how the gates operated and would take an infinite amount of energy to maintain.
She bent down to look over his shoulder.
“I thought maybe it had something to do with quantum entanglement,” she said, voice stronger. “You know, maybe a violation of the no communication rule? There was that paper out of Lorenza de la Fuente’s lab, remember?”
“Yes, yes,” Rodney said, waiving her to silence. He skimmed over her notations. It seemed impossible, and it wasn’t quite right, but there, yes, he could see how stunningly simple it all was. A problem of decades, unraveled here in just a few pages of messy notation.
But it couldn’t, it couldn’t. People had worked on this. He’d worked on this. The answer couldn’t be this, not a half-dozen raggedy edged pieces of notebook paper covered margin to margin in sprawled rainbow ink.
He had to sit back for a moment. He would never have thought of this. Of course, no one had. But Kheryn had this habit of taking these wild leaps into the unknown, smashing together ideas and theories that everyone knew had nothing to do with each other. Usually, she was wrong, but not always, and she was getting better. These intuitive jumps of hers were more and more often landing her on solid ground.
It wasn’t a skill Rodney had. Sam Carter had had it. John, in his strange perpendicular way, sometimes did, too.
Rodney had tried once, flinging himself off comfortable pathways in pursuit of something he alone was sure was right. The better part of a solar system had paid for that attempt. He hadn’t tried again.
“Your math, as always, gets sloppy at the end. I’ve told you to watch that.”
“But it’s good? The basic idea?” She placed a hand on the back of his neck and leaned in further.
Rodney looked at her, the smooth appealing curve of her neck, the wide earnest eyes so unlike her, the slight flush to her oh so young, beautiful skin. She smelled very, very good. Her hand stuttered just a bit on his neck and he realized, at last, something very important about her. About cheese-boy and settling, about what a girl like this was doing in a stuffy office on a Sunday afternoon, and how perhaps the confusion of youth was maybe not all it was cracked up to be.
He felt a spark of near-temptation, but it was just that, a flash of flattered fantasy that fizzled in the same breath. He forgot, sometimes, how very young she was.
“Kheryn.”
She saw him looking at her and jerked away, flush deepening. But she caught herself.
“You’re a little overwhelming sometimes, is all,” she said, rueful shrug bringing out the Kheryn he knew. “God, you’re Rodney fucking McKay, you know?”
Good girl, he thought.
“Of course I know,” he said evenly. “It remains, however, that your math is sloppy and I cannot allow the good name of Rodney fucking McKay to be attached to just anything.”
“But I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Possibly,” he said. Her expression remained determined. “Okay, probably.”
She smirked and took the pages back again.
“Clean up your work there at the end and bring it back to me later in the week. You might have enough to present in Oslo next month.”
“Yes, sir.”
She turned to go.
“Kheryn,” he said, stopping her when she reached the doorway. She paused and looked back over her shoulder. “Good work.”
She nodded, tightly pleased, and skipped off.
Rodney sat there for a long moment just staring out the window. After a while he packed up his things and headed back out into the rain.
As predicted, there was all manner of riffraff scattered across his living room and kitchen. John sat in the center of the couch, battling two ex-Marines for possession of the popcorn.
Rodney boarded himself up in the office, grateful for the soundproofing that kept the noise to a muffled hum.
It was a little ridiculous in a man with as many decorations to his name as Rodney had, but there had always been something more, one last thing he’d always wanted to accomplish before he was done.
It was something private, something he thought maybe only Zelenka might understand. In the last few years, his ambitions had started to fold themselves into smaller spaces. He had the kind of career people were already writing books about. He was known world-over as a hero (or as a godless devil depending on your point of view), an intrepid space explorer who’d boldly gone where no man had gone before. He was celebrated, fought over, the highest paid speaker in the university circuit.
But before John, before Atlantis or even the Stargate program, Rodney had been a scientist. His heroes, growing up, had numbered Einstein and Bohr amongst the usual childish obsessions of Batman and Luke Skywalker. He’d wanted in some small way to stand among them. To come up with something startling and new, some fresh way that changed the way they looked at the world forever.
Oh, he had papers. Hundreds of them at this point. But that was just Ancient science deconstructed to be made accessible to the less brilliant human brain. He was a translator, not inventor.
But this thing of Kheryn’s-it started with Ancient technology but the implications went so much further. God, if she was right . . . it meant faster than light communication that could span galaxies. And she was just at the beginning of her career, just launching herself. Even if this particular spark burned out, Rodney knew with dull certainty that there would be other, brighter sparks. Just as he knew with the same certainty that such things were beyond him now. He didn’t have the drive, the fresh perspective. There were too many other things-his university obligations, his continued work for the SGC, John, taking up too much of his time and energy.
There was not going to be any new McKay unifying theorem to hang amongst the greats.
He sat there, staring out the window, trying to come to terms with this.
After a while he heard the office door open. The noise from the game filtered in briefly, but then the closing door shut it out again.
“I brought you a cupcake,” John said.
“Great.”
“I had to fight three people for it, I’ll have you know.”
“I’m sure it was very brave of you.”
“It was,” John said. “You’re talking to the walking wounded, here.”
Rodney looked up and was startled to find that John really did have a large scrape across one cheekbone and there was a jagged ugly cut along his hairline.
“Christ,” he said. “Come here.”
John sat down on the couch and let Rodney fuss over him. The cut looked ugly, but it wasn’t bleeding so Rodney settled down again.
“You do know it’s supposed to be cake or death, not both?”
John shrugged. “Tara brought them.”
Well then, that was a different matter. Their neighbor’s fluffy chocolate icing was absolutely worth a scuffle, especially if Rodney didn’t have to do any of the scuffling.
Rodney took the proffered cupcake but didn’t eat it.
“Hard day at the office, dear?” John asked, tone ironic though his expression said otherwise.
“I don’t know,” Rodney said. John dropped an arm along the couch behind him in an act he probably thought was subtle.
“Kheryn brought me this idea-it was nonsensical, something every respectable physicist would have known as crap immediately.”
“And?”
“And I think she might be right, what’s and. It’s crazy, it should never work, but it does.” He slumped back into the warmth of John’s arm. “And I think, no I know, I could never have thought of it. That’s what’s and.”
It was, Rodney decided, possibly time for honesty. “She’s just starting, and she comes up with something I could never in twelve careers have done.”
“Rodney, you’re being ridiculous,” John said, sounding amused. Rodney should have known he’d never get it. “Of course you’d have thought of it. You always do.”
Rodney blinked and looked up at him, seeing nothing beyond absolute unquestioned certainty in John’s still-amused face. John’s mouth quirked and he shook his head, like Rodney was the crazy one here.
Of course, it had always been this way. In John Sheppard’s strange world, there was no problem that Rodney could not fix. Since day one, that stupid, absolute, crazy, blindingly necessary faith that had been bent a few times but never broken. Rodney had wondered back then just what Sheppard saw in him, to be so certain when even Rodney himself had never quite believed his own press. Sometimes he thought he’d pulled off half of their crazier schemes just because he hadn’t wanted to lose that, whatever it was.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “This is bigger than that. This new thinking of hers-it’s not the kind of mind that comes along every day.”
“Rodney,” John said with exaggerated patience. “You trained her. You don’t think you had anything to do with that?”
Rodney thought about that. “Oh.”
Oh.
Perhaps there was another way to look at this. “My name will go on the papers.”
“Right.”
“And I’ll be the one to introduce her in Oslo. Oh, we’re going to Oslo by the way.”
“Cool,” John said.
“You know those idiots on the admissions committee didn’t even want to give her an offer? To think, she could have ended up in John McCullough’s lab over at Maryland. A whole lifetime wasted on the decision of one committee.”
Rodney settled deeper into the warmth of John’s arm and ate his cupcake. “I still don’t like her boyfriend.”
John snorted and tightened his grip. “That makes two of us.”
A particularly loud ruckus came in through the soundproofing on the door. Rodney had forgotten about the game.
“You can go back out there, if you want.” He was pretty happy here tucked up against John’s easy warmth after being out in the rain, but people were always telling him it was rude to leave your guests alone.
“No,” John said. “I have something to tell you.”
Rodney twisted around to get a better look at his expression. He didn’t look unhappy, but there was something Rodney didn’t know if he liked in his tone.
“Colonel Makeba sent a report,” John said, indicating the other side of the office with his chin.
There, on John’s barely used desk, sat the thin green folder that signaled one of Makeba’s reports. John’s replacement was a decent, if overly officious man. Generally news arrived through official channels. The folders only arrived when the news was of a more personal nature.
Rodney frowned and slumped back against the cushions of the couch, wondering whether he needed to be worried. “Bad news?”
“No, no,” John said. He swallowed hard, eyes suddenly bright. “Ronon’s back. He came to Athos three weeks ago. He said he was finally ready to come home.”
* * * * *
When Rodney was young, his criminally negligent parents had a bad habit of dumping him and Jeannie off with their nana for the day. Nana had droned on at length on any number of subjects, but the favorite of these had been to warn them to be careful what they wished for. Or else what goes around comes around-whatever that meant-though she tended to save that particular speech for the days one of them called child protective services.
Rodney had always wondered what she could possibly be on about-how could the attainment of an invisible jet car be anything other than ridiculously awesome? But as it turned out, perhaps he should have listened a little better-and wasn’t it just like the old bag to get her revenge by being right after all.
Once the secret of Atlantis was out, the city bloomed, practically overnight. Rodney finally had what in the beginning he thought he wanted-a full team of passably competent, energized people with the time and resources to delve into actual discovery and not play at emergency engineer. Whole sectors of the city that had been deemed too strange or dangerous had been opened up. For the first time since Antarctica, he could spend days in the lab, only passing out for a few hours at night, with no threat of impending doom or stupid “let’s trump through endless swamps to trade for bean paste” missions interrupting things.
“You know,” Rodney said to Teyla on one of her visits. “No one’s shot at me in months. I can’t even remember the last time I had to run anywhere, let alone for my life.”
Teyla smiled at him, as beautifully mysterious as the first day they’d met. She bent forward, pressing their heads together, something she’d rarely done. And then she kissed his cheek, something she’d never done.
“I know, Rodney,” she said. “I miss it, too.”
Rodney had to admit that the new people were not entirely useless, but they took up too much of everything. They took up space at the empty lab benches without filling the holes the Wraith had left, their voices echoed down corridors that before only Radek and Rodney had seen. Their projects multiplied like rabbits in the lab, eating up more and more of Rodney’s time in meeting after meeting as he attempted just to keep up with lab management. Aparna Chaven, Elizabeth’s hand-chosen successor, turned out to be worthy of the position, but she didn’t have Elizabeth’s hand’s off approach. She liked reports, she required a dizzying array of information and asked disturbingly penetrating questions. She did not, as it turned out, take well to being told to “shoo”.
About this time Rodney’s body decided that middle-management wasn’t torture enough and started to outright rebel. He started smelling strange chemical odors everywhere. Atlantis had never been Earth, the aroma of her sea heavier, more metallic. Before it had been pleasant, a subtle daily reminder that hey, they were living in an alien galaxy! But now it pervaded everywhere, in his quarters, seeping into his clothes, tainting the smell of his food. The Earth/Pegasus food hybrids the kitchen, once Rodney’s favorites, now just tasted wrong. Rodney had to start hording his junk food supply from Earth in his room in case the day came when he couldn’t choke down food in the mess at all.
Brain tumor, no doubt about it. Best to give into basic fact and face it like a man.
“You don’t have a brain tumor,” Carson said.
“Do the test again.”
Carson sighed. “We’ve done it three times. Other than a need for exercise, you’re as healthy as a horse.” He blinked at Rodney. “When’s the last time you talked to Dr. Heitmeyer?”
Rodney locked himself in his office. If he was dying of some unidentifiable brain disease beyond Carson’s limited ability to diagnose, he’d better make sure posterity got as many of his thoughts as possible before he cracked up entirely.
One of the members of the lab pestilence knocked on his door an hour later. Rodney ignored them. When the next one tried, he sound-proofed the door.
Zelenka sent him a message the next day:
r.zelenka: When the brain fog kills you, can I have your twizzler supply?
Rodney considered it. Trust Zelenka to get to the heart of the matter. But no, he needed to focus.
The day after that, the door of his office swooshed open and Sheppard leaned against the doorframe like the easy city-seducing hooker he was.
“C’mon, buddy,” he said. “I think it’s time we went for a walk.”
Rodney went. He’d get no peace, otherwise.
Sheppard led them to the nearest transport, his easy arm around Rodney’s waist the only thing keeping Rodney upright. Sheppard smelled like he usually did-a familiar, not unpleasant combination of laundry detergent and gun oil. In the transporter, Rodney pressed his face against Sheppard’s neck and just breathed. Up close he smelled even better. Rodney stopped himself before licking Sheppard’s skin to see how he tasted, but it was a near thing.
Sheppard just cupped the back of his neck and let him. “We’re almost there.”
The transporter opened on one of the higher towers in Atlantis, high above the sea and its not-quite-rightness. The sun was setting far across the ocean, painting everything in glowing light. Sheppard pulled them in a half-stumble away from the transporter and out onto a deck. Rodney breathed in deep. He straightened sharply, his back yelling its protest.
“I smell pizza,” he said. “If I’m wrong, just do me a favor and lie to me, okay?”
Sheppard laughed and shook his head. “Yes, there’s pizza. Fresh delivered straight from Earth.”
There it was, sitting on the deck, an honest to God pizza box. And next to it, a six-pack in a bucket of ice.
“Oh my God,” Rodney said.
“I thought you’d like it.”
Rodney fell to his knees in the closest he ever came to worship.
He inhaled the first slice without even really tasting it. He’d never been so hungry in his life. The second piece went more slowly, each bite savored, enjoyed.
He took another bite, suppressing a moan. Perfection. Warm dough just the right amount of greasy, perfect amount of cheese and just the exact balance of acid in the sauce. No weird metallic taste, no strange odors, just a classic pepperoni pizza.
Sheppard reached across and took a piece of his own.
“Hey!”
Sheppard gave him one of his strange sideways grins. “Delivery charge.”
He flopped down beside Rodney on the deck and bit into his pizza.
And that was when it hit him. The Revelation. The kind only three days without sleep and spiking glucose levels could give you.
Sheppard was frowning at him. “Are you okay there, Rodney?”
Rodney could only gape at him. “I figured it out.”
Sheppard’s frown deepened. “I think you need a nap.”
“I do not need a nap.” Well, okay, a nap sounded pretty great, but after pizza. “I don’t have a brain tumor.”
Sheppard nodded as if this made sense. “Never thought you did.”
Rodney flopped back against the wall, brain racing. He chewed on the pizza, barely noticing it. Sheppard settled in closer, his shoulder and thigh brushing Rodney’s in easy companionship. Rodney felt a familiar twinge in his chest and for the first time, didn’t immediately suppress it. In the beginning, it had been so much harder, this thing he had for Sheppard. Keeping his hands to himself had seemed almost an impossible task at times, especially when the idiot had to keep doing stupid things like being smart and wearing tight black clothes and saving Rodney’s life all the time. Later, it became easier, something to take out and look at once or twice a year, the rest of the time insisting to himself over and over again that he was over that. There were so many reasons why it would be such a horrible idea: the city behind them, the team, the rank in front of Sheppard’s name, the implications for Rodney’s own career.
Usually this was the point where Rodney told himself he’d gone too long without sleep and looked away. But this time, he didn’t. This time he let himself look at the long curve of Sheppard’s neck, the swell of muscle beneath the omnipresent black t-shirt, the way his holster curved around the shape of his thigh. Sheppard noticed him looking and didn’t say a word.
“I’ve had offers,” Rodney said, coming to a sudden conclusion. “From Earth, I mean. Universities.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Sheppard said slowly.
“They want to give me my own lab, my own projects, more money than even I can dream of. And students-I could get them before they’re totally ruined. One of them is even offering to give me my own building.”
Sheppard nodded. “Sounds pretty good. You’ve been bitching you want more time for your own work for months now. What’s stopping you?”
“It wouldn’t be Atlantis,” Rodney said beginning to realize that he was actually serious about this. “So no more alien labs in a totally new galaxy. And I’ve put in a lot of work here getting those monkeys in lab coats down in the lab to remember they’re supposed to be Earth’s best and brightest at least some of the time. It’d be a shame to waste it.”
“Sure.”
“There are things . . . that is to say, people. I couldn’t just leave everyone behind.”
Sheppard shrugged. “There are people on Earth-Elizabeth for one. Things too. Like Ben and Jerry’s. Or Cinnabon.”
“I’m trying to tell you that I’d miss you, you jackass.”
“I don’t see why.”
Maybe Rodney had been a little too quick to dismiss that whole brain tumor thing.
“Seeing as how I’d be living with you and all,” Sheppard continued.
Rodney snapped his mouth shut. Tried to speak and then stopped again.
Sheppard raised an eyebrow. “You were going to ask me to come along, weren’t you?”
“You can’t,” Rodney finally managed. “It’s impossible.”
“I’ve been eligible for retirement forever. Nothing to it.”
“But the city and your job and-I’m trying to be noble here!”
Sheppard put his hand along Rodney’s jaw and stroked his thumb across Rodney’s cheek. Rodney turned into his palm, unable to resist reacting to the touch.
“Maybe I’m tired of noble. Maybe I’ve been tired of it for a while.”
“Oh,” said Rodney.
John watched him, a small shy smile on his face. And so the first time Rodney kissed John turned out to be on the highest tower of Atlantis, the setting sun coloring John and the city in bright streaks of gold, pink and a lurid orange. When Rodney closed his eyes, even years later, he could still see John there, a bright shape against a candy sky.
The first time he woke up to John’s body curling sweet and warm around him was the very next morning, John a comfortable presence along his side, their limbs in a tangle of post-coital exhaustion. He ran a hand up John’s side, already addicted to the way John pressed into his touch. He pulled himself in closer, enjoying the slide of skin on skin, and thought, maybe, it was about time he got started on the rest of his life.
* * * * *
They built their home by the sea. It wasn’t anything either of them had discussed. But when the idea of a second home came up-a retreat from reporters and obligation and the usual invasions forced upon the suddenly famous-a place on the ocean just seemed the natural choice.
They came here when they could, as often as duty and scheduled trips and the university schedule allowed. It was a space as near their own as probably anyone could claim, their only neighbors on the island an older couple more bemused than excited by the identity of the new pair next door.
Rodney blew the steam off his hot chocolate and took a cautionary sip before returning to his journal article. It was hard paying attention. He looked down at John where he lay sprawled across his lap, half-slumbering after a day romping about on the beach with the neighbor’s grandchildren. He ran a hand through John’s hair, far more tempted by the satisfied curl of John’s still very pretty mouth and the way he arched cat-like into the touch than by the distant demands of the board of editors.
But the notes must be finished today.
Tomorrow, Teyla was coming, and she was bringing Ronon and the children with her.
Pairing: John/Rodney
Rating: NC-17
Category: First time, estabished relationship
Notes: A belated birthday gift for seperis.
I started this two years ago so it veers off from canon pretty sharply in early season three.
Summary:
The first time he woke up to John’s body curling sweet and warm around him was the very next morning, John a comfortable presence along his side, their limbs in a tangle of post-coital exhaustion. He ran a hand up John’s side, already addicted to the way John pressed into his touch. He pulled himself in closer, enjoying the slide of skin on skin, and thought, maybe, it was about time he got started on the rest of his life.
Part One
Part two
About three months after Elizabeth left, Teyla brought her fiancée home to meet the in-laws.
Rodney was not pleased.
They’d only just started to find their new dynamic in Ronon’s absence. For months the three of them had retreated from each other in a kind of self-protective silence. Or at least Rodney had been avoiding them. Teyla was off-world most of the time anyway, and any time the three of them were together it only reminded him of the fact that there used to be four. There were reports, a few of them reliable even, of a band of resistance fighters tracking the bands of remaining Wraith from world to world across the galaxy. One such report had included the description of a tall, brutally efficient Satedan who’d asked for news of the Lanteans. But each of these reports had been months’ cold and growing colder. They were no closer to finding Ford’s gang than they had been twelve years ago when he’d first disappeared. Teyla, Sheppard and Rodney had been left to renegotiate the remainder of their team, and Rodney had just been finding his footing before Teyla dropped this bombshell.
She’d been dropping hints for a while. For months, it had been Inaro this or Inaro that. Sheppard claimed they’d met the man-twice even, but Rodney did not remember this.
“His people and mine had been trading partners for decades,” she tried to explain. “But when his planet was culled my people thought they were lost. It was only a year ago that we found them again.”
“Hmmph,” Rodney said. “Usually the Wraith are more thorough.”
Sheppard kicked him under the table.
“What?” Rodney said. “Also, ow.”
“Inaro became the leader of his people after they were evicted from their home,” Teyla said, more stiff than she’d been since their first few months together. Rodney belatedly realized that she was nervous. “He and the other Neriti have been very helpful to us in re-building. We knew each other, a little, as children, and when he returned it was like finding that time again. It is not often we have been able to reclaim things from the Wraith.”
Rodney just bet he was helpful.
“You like him,” Sheppard said, as if this was at all relevant when there were so many more important questions to ask, like, “Is he a sociopath?”, or “Have you met his mother yet?”, or “Who the hell does he think he is?”.
Teyla smiled. “Yes,” she said almost shyly. “I do.”
This was apparently good enough for Sheppard. Rodney had never been so disappointed in him.
Two weeks later, Teyla appeared through the gate in the company of a few of the Athosians and a tall dark-haired man. Rodney supposed you’d probably call him attractive, if one went for perfect coffee skin and swimmers’ builds. Rodney had to admit he didn’t look much like an evil space robot, but then, the Asurans had been awfully tricky at first, too.
“Welcome to Atlantis,” Sheppard said in his most ridiculous, I’m absurdly cute and harmless and everyone totally loves me voice. Rodney would be annoyed except he’d seen it work too many times.
.
“And you remember Dr. McKay,” Teyla said, with an almost-glare at Rodney.
Inaro and Rodney exchanged quick nods. Rodney felt that should take care of his hospitality responsibilities.
“Would you like a tour?” Sheppard asked. That at least explained his insane cheeriness. He loved showing off Atlantis like other people loved thrusting pictures of their squalling spawn on unsuspecting lab managers.
“It would be an honor.”
“You should love this,” Sheppard said, leading him away. “Rodney and his team are building me my own invisible cloak. Teyla said you used to have something like that on your planet.”
“Yes, but it was more like a small shield to hide small objects. You have something powerful enough to shield an entire person?” Inaro said, suddenly looking as excited as Sheppard was.
Rodney could protest that he was building the personal invisibility device for the security of Atlantis, not for John Sheppard’s personal amusement, but who was he kidding?
“They seem to be getting along,” Teyla said hesitantly as they watched Sheppard lead her gigolo man-bot away.
“Yeah,” Rodney said. “Bringing him here was a total mistake. Don’t they have a Vegas in this galaxy?”
Teyla frowned. “It has been taken over by the Genii. Everyone agrees it is no longer the same.”
They spent the rest of the day in the lab. Teyla helped him out taking readings on his new experiment. It wasn’t anything terribly important and Rodney didn’t really need help, but it was . . . nice, spending time with Teyla, especially now that he knew that time was going to be shared from now on.
Inaro and his tour guide appeared briefly just after lunch.
“You told me this place was a city of wonders,” Inaro said, taking her hands. “But I did not imagine nearly so much.”
“I haven’t even shown him the jumpers yet,” Sheppard said.
Rodney smirked. “They’ll think you don’t love them anymore.”
“C’mon,” John said to his new BFF. “The city looks even better from the air.”
“Definitely a mistake,” Rodney said as they tromped away again, Inaro’s excited voice already asking about jumper speeds.
“I had expected this to be a little more difficult,” Teyla said. If Rodney didn’t know better, he’d think she was almost put out by that.
“I don’t like him,” Rodney said. “Are you sure he’s not an Ancient? It would explain why Sheppard’s panting after him.”
Teyla blinked, but then smiled and patted his shoulder. “He is not one of the ancestors, I promise you. But thank you for that.”
They caught up with Sheppard and the boyfriend in the mess after dinner. Inaro had a giant mound of popcorn in front of him and five empty beer bottles.
“You were right,” Inaro said, smiling up at Teyla. “Popcorn is delicious.”
He seemed a little buzzed, if not quite drunk. Teyla pushed a stray clump of his tight curls off of his forehead as if she couldn’t quite keep her fingers from them.
“Yes,” she said, “it is.”
She sat down beside him, their fingers twining together in such easy companionship that Rodney felt abruptly alone for all that he was sitting in a group of three other people.
“Beer?” Sheppard asked, offering Rodney a bottle. His foot brushed Rodney’s under the table almost certainly on purpose, but it only made Rodney feel worse.
Teyla and Inaro spent a few days on Atlantis, allowing Teyla to show him her own view of the city and its people. They went back to Athos on the fourth morning. Sheppard and Rodney stood together, watching them go.
“He’s not good enough for her,” Rodney said.
“Of course not,” Sheppard said. “But who is?”
Teyla and Inaro appeared a few more times before the wedding, sometimes apart. Rodney had to admit that Inaro had been a lot of help in ironing out some of the bugs in Sheppard’s invisibility cloak.
Rodney expected him to be some kind of idiot warrior pretty boy, but it turned out the Neriti were builders and no more fighters than the bulk of the Athosians were. They’d lost much of their knowledge in their nomadic flight from the Wraith, but they still retained more technology than most Pegasus cultures and Inaro knew how to both build and use it.
So, probably not a malicious mandroid after all. Or an Ancient or a disguised Wraith or anything other than a lucky bastard who was getting something far more than he deserved.
Damn it.
* * * * *
The weather on Athos the day of the wedding was crystal clear and beautiful, the leaves on the trees just beginning to take on their post-harvest gold. Despite his reservations about the groom, Rodney was happy.
Teyla deserved to have a perfect wedding.
“You look handsome,” Elizabeth said, a flirtatious glint in her eye. Ever since she’d returned to Earth, she’d seemed somehow more approachable, easier. It made Rodney a little too aware of how good she looked in that dress. Actually, if Rodney were to be honest with himself, he was a little afraid of this more provocative Elizabeth. She’d brought Bra’tac, who fit in with the Athosians like they were lost cousins. Rodney told himself they were just professional friends, but this was a hard illusion to maintain what with the glint in Bra’tac’s eye every time he looked at her in that get up.
Only Rodney and Sheppard came without dates. Rodney tried not to think about what that meant.
“Reminds me of my wedding,” Zelenka said as they watched everyone come together in the gathering twilight.
“Yes, because they have so many perfect, flower-bedecked meadows in Caesar’s Palace,” Rodney said. At least Zelenka had had the decency to do the right thing and elope. Rodney hadn’t even had to buy him a present.
“There were trees.”
“Plastic trees.”
“Don’t worry, Rodney,” Zelenka said, smiling at him in too-perfect benevolence. “Someday it might happen for you. At this time, does not seem likely, true, but somewhere there must be a woman stupid enough.”
Rodney did not dignify that with a response. Zelenka drifted over to his Amazon of a wife, who, in violation of every law of drunken weddings between perfect strangers Rodney had ever heard, was both unbelievably hot and a genius evolutionary biologist who just happened to be a big enough name to get instant clearance to the Stargate program.
The groom appeared down the path from the settlement, almost tripping over his own feet and grinning in blinding stupidity. Rodney hoped Teyla knew what she was getting into. Teyla seemed more sensible than most, but women got so obsessed with this whole wedding business. He didn’t see why they couldn’t have just continued on as they had.
But then Teyla walked down the path after her soon-to-be husband, and Rodney got his answer to that. Even for Teyla, she looked stunningly beautiful, smiling and almost as young as when they first had met. She looked, simply, happy.
Inaro stood beside Halling, looking as if he could not imagine how he had convinced someone like her to come to stand beside him. Rodney felt his throat tighten. He hadn’t really allowed himself to imagine what this really meant. Teyla had been spending less and less time on Atlantis as the settlement of her people took more and more of her time, but she had still been there, still a part of the city even on days Rodney didn’t spend any time with her. But after today, she was going to belong to someone else, too.
The Athosian ceremony was far shorter than its Earth counterpart. The woman announced her intention to take the man as her own, took his hand before the assembled people, and then Halling formalized their union by tying their linked hands together with an intricately woven strip of cloth.
At the feast afterward Rodney sat next to Sheppard, the last remaining holdouts of the original team. Inaro and Teyla circulated the tables, awkwardly feeding each other one-handed with their other hands still bound between them. He laughed and whispered something in her ear, which had her smiling a little wickedly. Rodney had to finally admit that they looked good together. Inaro had managed to keep his people alive for fifteen years as nomads in a distrustful, war-torn galaxy. It was just possible, just, that he might be a good match for her after all.
“Always the bridesmaid, eh Rodney?” Sheppard said, looking a little rueful himself.
“Thank God.” But today Rodney couldn’t quite work up any energy even for pretend distain of what they were witnessing.
Elizabeth came along and claimed Sheppard for a dance. They looked good together, too, negotiating a path through the dancers to the unfamiliar rhythm of the Athosian music. Sheppard had admitted once that he’d taken ballroom dance in college with a girlfriend. Rodney had stopped mocking him for it as soon as he noticed the googly reaction of half of his staff.
Rodney sat there, drinking his gratifyingly strong alcoholic concoction in morose silence. Once upon a time, he would not have been alone. Once upon a time there would have been an amused low voice mocking Sheppard’s terribly concentrated face as a slightly evil Elizabeth mock-flirted with him. Or to point out Radek’s moony face as he slow danced in wretched junior-high-dance fashion with his wife. The two of them, Ronon and himself, had long been accustomed to sitting on the sidelines drinking heavily and pretending they weren’t dancing because it was beneath their dignity, not because the pair of them were hilariously horrible at it. But now beside him there was only a conspicuous void.
The tune changed and Sheppard nearly fled from Elizabeth. In their place swept Teyla and Inaro, drifting about in a lyrical swirling motion that reminded Rodney vaguely of what he remembered of Viennese waltz.
It was easy then, sitting there alone, to admit that he’d always been a little bit in love with her. From earliest days, she’d been beautiful and strong and brave and so much more forgiving of all of them than any of them had probably ever deserved. They’d celebrated together and starved together. They’d suffered sunburn from alien stars and walked under alien moonlight through the ruins of a city so old it had been abandoned even before the Ancients had come anywhere near its shores. They’d lost battles and friends and sometimes even themselves, but in the end, they’d won their war. There was a part of him, he thought, that would always belong here with her, no matter where he might go from here.
Out of habit he looked up and found the star that held Atlantis in its orbit. It was there where it always was, second star to the right, straight on until morning. He’d thought they might always continue like that, Teyla and her lost boys tromping to adventure after adventure.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been wrong, and that had been a dream more foolish than most.
A shout drew Rodney’s thoughts away from their inner spiral.
And there was Rodney’s own personal Peter Pan being swamped by a tribe of real feral children. John Sheppard, the one unchanging center to Rodney’s chaotic universe. There, since this apparently was a night for drunken honesty, was another dream, just as foolish though even after all this time never one Rodney had ever been able to quite exorcize. But it was an old desire, comfortable with time, and if it twinged a little sharply at times, it was at least a familiar pain.
Rodney briefly considered rescuing him, but Sheppard seemed to be holding his own. Two of the girls were twining some of the wedding flowers into his hair, and more urchins of indeterminable gender were pulling on his jacket trying to get his attention. Sheppard just endured all of this with easy aplomb, listening to each childish tale with appropriate seriousness.
Eventually he looked up and noticed Rodney staring at him. His eyes narrowed, probably seeing, as always, more than Rodney would like him to. He stood and made his way over, trailing children behind him like some mad Pied Piper.
He loomed briefly over Rodney, one child hanging down his back, another clomped onto his leg.
“You look ridiculous,” Rodney pronounced.
Sheppard just grinned, shifted the child from his back around to the front and sat in the empty chair beside Rodney. She immediately curled into his chest in childish exhaustion.
He looked good, was what Rodney really thought. Easy and relaxed in ways he rarely was despite the binding lines of the uniform. It made Rodney want things he usually didn’t let himself dwell on.
Which meant that he’d had far too much to drink.
The children buzzed around them, bored of ceremony and unhappy at having their hero’s attention stolen, even for a minute.
“Why don’t you go and find a good spot?” Sheppard told them. “We’ll be along in a minute.”
They looked at Rodney suspiciously, but then trailed off into the night leaving only the child in Sheppard’s lap behind.
Sheppard reached forward and touched Rodney’s arm. Rodney told himself it didn’t mean anything. Sheppard touched people all the time.
But the hand tightened and didn’t move away. “You okay there, Rodney?”
Rodney sighed. “I hate weddings.”
Sheppard tilted his head. “At least this one has good booze.”
Rodney allowed this was true. Inaro’s people distilled a pale strange fruit into a sweet, sharp drink that Rodney suspected probably packed more of a punch than he was feeling yet.
“Come on,” Sheppard said, patting Rodney’s arm. He stood up, easily shifting the sleeping weight of the child to his shoulder. “The kids want to build a fort.”
“A fort.”
“It’ll be fun,” Sheppard said. It sounded nothing like the sort. But Rodney stood up. Watching Sheppard’s semi-drunken efforts at construction might prove entertaining at the least.
As they reached the edge of the clearing, they were stopped by Teyla and Inaro.
“Are you enjoying yourselves?” Inaro asked a little formally. From his expression it looked like it was desperately important that they were.
Rodney realized he might just be a little overwhelmed by them and their role in Teyla’s life. It made him feel better, somehow.
“Sure,” Sheppard said. “Who doesn’t like a party?”
“I see you have made a new friend,” Teyla said, indicating the child in John’s arms.
“Oh,” John said. “This is Kyara. She’s promised she’ll marry me as soon as her mother says okay.”
“It’s about time someone made an honest man out of you,” Rodney said.
Teyla glared at him in mock disapproval.
“You have always been that,” she said, cupping John’s cheek. They leaned forward, touching heads over the child.
“And you as well, Rodney,” she added, pressing Rodney’s shoulder. Rodney felt his throat tighten again and had to look away.
“Where are you going?” Inaro asked.
“We’re building a fort, wanna come?” Sheppard asked.
“We could not leave the others,” Teyla said, frowning.
“It’s your party,” Sheppard said.
“I must admit, I have become tired of dancing,” Inaro put in quickly, proving he was more observant than he looked. “And the children should have supervision.”
Teyla’s mouth curved into a wry smile Rodney knew very well. “That is true. Very well, a short break with the children would be welcome.”
And so the four of them plus the sleeping Kyara went off together, the mingled shrieks of the Athosian and Neriti children leading them on.
* * * * *
Rodney sat at his desk and stared balefully at the rain-drenched landscape outside his windows. He had not planned on being here today. He had planned on cozying up in the den with the giant stack of appearance requests. He’d known that the opening of Atlantis to the public would garner a lot of attention, but somehow he had underestimated it. He had fan mail. Buckets of it. It had gotten so bad he’d had to hire an undergrad to go through it and sort out the serious requests.
Some people thought it was rude not to at least read all of the letters, but Rodney had better things to do with his time than to decipher the well-intentioned but grammatically challenged scribblings of the adoring public. At least his fans were sane, decent people if sometimes a little simple, unlike someone else’s who were clearly a little unhinged. John had just happened to mention on Ellen that he liked to cook, and now bored hausfraus all over the country were sending him recipes. Which was bad enough, but last week he’d actually found John mailing some of his own back.
“Julia Hausbek said she’d send us her recipe for either gumbo or jerk chicken in exchange for the falafel one. Which sounds better to you?” John had actually asked, chewing on the end of his pen. His fingers were already stained blue. “You liked her bean salad, remember?”
Rodney considered his options. Or, more pointedly, the state of their liquor cabinet.
“Julia Hausbek?” he asked faintly.
John frowned. “We met her at the photoshoot. It was only three weeks ago.”
Oh yes, the photoshoot. At People. The one with his boyfriend’s picture that would be appearing clutched in his students’ hands in two months.
“Chicken. Definitely chicken,” Rodney said, giving in. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to make him forget this conversation. Besides which, everyone knew okra was the work of Satan.
Once upon a time John had killed people for a living. Rodney missed those days.
He’d fled to his office, happy to have a place to retreat. But that was last week.
Today he was decidedly less pleased to find himself here. Instead of carefully weighing each flattering request for his attention in the comfort of his own home, he was marooned in his own office on a Sunday afternoon after traveling through the crappiest weather they’d had in weeks.
Somehow this had to be John’s fault. Okay, sure he had told Rodney he was having people over to watch the game, and he’d possibly mentioned that some of the students from his class were coming, and yes, right there on Rodney’s desk calendar was a reminder-Sunday! Football!-written in John’s anally precise hand followed by a smiley face with its own scribbled tuft of hair sticking every which way. But he had not mentioned that this event would take up their house for hours and hours and basically completely ruin Rodney’s hopes for a productive Sunday.
So Rodney had come here to the relative saneness of campus. He’d been a little mollified when he’d seen all of his graduate students huddled over their desk in bloodshot misery. But he was a professor. He had tenure. Everyone knew that was your ticket to getting your weekends back. It was one of the few reasons he tolerated faculty coffee.
He stared balefully at the window. After a few minutes sleet pellets starting knocking against the glass.
Rodney knew he should have stuck with his first instincts. Despite Jeannie and John’s bemused protests, fate most surely did hate him.
He dug into his backpack and yanked at the first stack of letters his assistant had helpfully organized for him. At least he was getting something done, not sitting around with ardent co-eds and ex-soldiers watching a bunch of men crash into each other in pursuit of a ball.
He worked his way through the stack, carefully setting aside those that could be met with a polite refusal and those few that looked interesting enough for further consideration. He’d gone about a quarter of the way through when he was distracted by a light knock on his doors.
Kheryn stood there with unusual hesitation. “Do you have a minute to look at something?”
Rodney frowned. “Is it those calculations I asked you to do on Friday? I wouldn’t have thought you’d have any problems with those.”
She shook her head. “No, it isn’t, and no, I didn’t. It’s something else.”
She handed him a few pages of notes scrawled in about twelve types of brightly colored pen. The ways she reminded him of John sometimes creeped him out a little.
“I had an idea, a couple months ago, about how the gates can connect so quickly, even between here and Pegasus. I think . . . I think I might have found the answer.”
Rodney snatched at the papers, mind racing. It was an old problem. They’d figured out long ago that the gates worked by folding space, so that you traveled a very short distance between each connection and could therefore travel in effect faster than the speed of light. But they’d never figured out how the gates could make that initial connection without being eternally tuned to every gate in existence, which violated everything they knew about how the gates operated and would take an infinite amount of energy to maintain.
She bent down to look over his shoulder.
“I thought maybe it had something to do with quantum entanglement,” she said, voice stronger. “You know, maybe a violation of the no communication rule? There was that paper out of Lorenza de la Fuente’s lab, remember?”
“Yes, yes,” Rodney said, waiving her to silence. He skimmed over her notations. It seemed impossible, and it wasn’t quite right, but there, yes, he could see how stunningly simple it all was. A problem of decades, unraveled here in just a few pages of messy notation.
But it couldn’t, it couldn’t. People had worked on this. He’d worked on this. The answer couldn’t be this, not a half-dozen raggedy edged pieces of notebook paper covered margin to margin in sprawled rainbow ink.
He had to sit back for a moment. He would never have thought of this. Of course, no one had. But Kheryn had this habit of taking these wild leaps into the unknown, smashing together ideas and theories that everyone knew had nothing to do with each other. Usually, she was wrong, but not always, and she was getting better. These intuitive jumps of hers were more and more often landing her on solid ground.
It wasn’t a skill Rodney had. Sam Carter had had it. John, in his strange perpendicular way, sometimes did, too.
Rodney had tried once, flinging himself off comfortable pathways in pursuit of something he alone was sure was right. The better part of a solar system had paid for that attempt. He hadn’t tried again.
“Your math, as always, gets sloppy at the end. I’ve told you to watch that.”
“But it’s good? The basic idea?” She placed a hand on the back of his neck and leaned in further.
Rodney looked at her, the smooth appealing curve of her neck, the wide earnest eyes so unlike her, the slight flush to her oh so young, beautiful skin. She smelled very, very good. Her hand stuttered just a bit on his neck and he realized, at last, something very important about her. About cheese-boy and settling, about what a girl like this was doing in a stuffy office on a Sunday afternoon, and how perhaps the confusion of youth was maybe not all it was cracked up to be.
He felt a spark of near-temptation, but it was just that, a flash of flattered fantasy that fizzled in the same breath. He forgot, sometimes, how very young she was.
“Kheryn.”
She saw him looking at her and jerked away, flush deepening. But she caught herself.
“You’re a little overwhelming sometimes, is all,” she said, rueful shrug bringing out the Kheryn he knew. “God, you’re Rodney fucking McKay, you know?”
Good girl, he thought.
“Of course I know,” he said evenly. “It remains, however, that your math is sloppy and I cannot allow the good name of Rodney fucking McKay to be attached to just anything.”
“But I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Possibly,” he said. Her expression remained determined. “Okay, probably.”
She smirked and took the pages back again.
“Clean up your work there at the end and bring it back to me later in the week. You might have enough to present in Oslo next month.”
“Yes, sir.”
She turned to go.
“Kheryn,” he said, stopping her when she reached the doorway. She paused and looked back over her shoulder. “Good work.”
She nodded, tightly pleased, and skipped off.
Rodney sat there for a long moment just staring out the window. After a while he packed up his things and headed back out into the rain.
As predicted, there was all manner of riffraff scattered across his living room and kitchen. John sat in the center of the couch, battling two ex-Marines for possession of the popcorn.
Rodney boarded himself up in the office, grateful for the soundproofing that kept the noise to a muffled hum.
It was a little ridiculous in a man with as many decorations to his name as Rodney had, but there had always been something more, one last thing he’d always wanted to accomplish before he was done.
It was something private, something he thought maybe only Zelenka might understand. In the last few years, his ambitions had started to fold themselves into smaller spaces. He had the kind of career people were already writing books about. He was known world-over as a hero (or as a godless devil depending on your point of view), an intrepid space explorer who’d boldly gone where no man had gone before. He was celebrated, fought over, the highest paid speaker in the university circuit.
But before John, before Atlantis or even the Stargate program, Rodney had been a scientist. His heroes, growing up, had numbered Einstein and Bohr amongst the usual childish obsessions of Batman and Luke Skywalker. He’d wanted in some small way to stand among them. To come up with something startling and new, some fresh way that changed the way they looked at the world forever.
Oh, he had papers. Hundreds of them at this point. But that was just Ancient science deconstructed to be made accessible to the less brilliant human brain. He was a translator, not inventor.
But this thing of Kheryn’s-it started with Ancient technology but the implications went so much further. God, if she was right . . . it meant faster than light communication that could span galaxies. And she was just at the beginning of her career, just launching herself. Even if this particular spark burned out, Rodney knew with dull certainty that there would be other, brighter sparks. Just as he knew with the same certainty that such things were beyond him now. He didn’t have the drive, the fresh perspective. There were too many other things-his university obligations, his continued work for the SGC, John, taking up too much of his time and energy.
There was not going to be any new McKay unifying theorem to hang amongst the greats.
He sat there, staring out the window, trying to come to terms with this.
After a while he heard the office door open. The noise from the game filtered in briefly, but then the closing door shut it out again.
“I brought you a cupcake,” John said.
“Great.”
“I had to fight three people for it, I’ll have you know.”
“I’m sure it was very brave of you.”
“It was,” John said. “You’re talking to the walking wounded, here.”
Rodney looked up and was startled to find that John really did have a large scrape across one cheekbone and there was a jagged ugly cut along his hairline.
“Christ,” he said. “Come here.”
John sat down on the couch and let Rodney fuss over him. The cut looked ugly, but it wasn’t bleeding so Rodney settled down again.
“You do know it’s supposed to be cake or death, not both?”
John shrugged. “Tara brought them.”
Well then, that was a different matter. Their neighbor’s fluffy chocolate icing was absolutely worth a scuffle, especially if Rodney didn’t have to do any of the scuffling.
Rodney took the proffered cupcake but didn’t eat it.
“Hard day at the office, dear?” John asked, tone ironic though his expression said otherwise.
“I don’t know,” Rodney said. John dropped an arm along the couch behind him in an act he probably thought was subtle.
“Kheryn brought me this idea-it was nonsensical, something every respectable physicist would have known as crap immediately.”
“And?”
“And I think she might be right, what’s and. It’s crazy, it should never work, but it does.” He slumped back into the warmth of John’s arm. “And I think, no I know, I could never have thought of it. That’s what’s and.”
It was, Rodney decided, possibly time for honesty. “She’s just starting, and she comes up with something I could never in twelve careers have done.”
“Rodney, you’re being ridiculous,” John said, sounding amused. Rodney should have known he’d never get it. “Of course you’d have thought of it. You always do.”
Rodney blinked and looked up at him, seeing nothing beyond absolute unquestioned certainty in John’s still-amused face. John’s mouth quirked and he shook his head, like Rodney was the crazy one here.
Of course, it had always been this way. In John Sheppard’s strange world, there was no problem that Rodney could not fix. Since day one, that stupid, absolute, crazy, blindingly necessary faith that had been bent a few times but never broken. Rodney had wondered back then just what Sheppard saw in him, to be so certain when even Rodney himself had never quite believed his own press. Sometimes he thought he’d pulled off half of their crazier schemes just because he hadn’t wanted to lose that, whatever it was.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “This is bigger than that. This new thinking of hers-it’s not the kind of mind that comes along every day.”
“Rodney,” John said with exaggerated patience. “You trained her. You don’t think you had anything to do with that?”
Rodney thought about that. “Oh.”
Oh.
Perhaps there was another way to look at this. “My name will go on the papers.”
“Right.”
“And I’ll be the one to introduce her in Oslo. Oh, we’re going to Oslo by the way.”
“Cool,” John said.
“You know those idiots on the admissions committee didn’t even want to give her an offer? To think, she could have ended up in John McCullough’s lab over at Maryland. A whole lifetime wasted on the decision of one committee.”
Rodney settled deeper into the warmth of John’s arm and ate his cupcake. “I still don’t like her boyfriend.”
John snorted and tightened his grip. “That makes two of us.”
A particularly loud ruckus came in through the soundproofing on the door. Rodney had forgotten about the game.
“You can go back out there, if you want.” He was pretty happy here tucked up against John’s easy warmth after being out in the rain, but people were always telling him it was rude to leave your guests alone.
“No,” John said. “I have something to tell you.”
Rodney twisted around to get a better look at his expression. He didn’t look unhappy, but there was something Rodney didn’t know if he liked in his tone.
“Colonel Makeba sent a report,” John said, indicating the other side of the office with his chin.
There, on John’s barely used desk, sat the thin green folder that signaled one of Makeba’s reports. John’s replacement was a decent, if overly officious man. Generally news arrived through official channels. The folders only arrived when the news was of a more personal nature.
Rodney frowned and slumped back against the cushions of the couch, wondering whether he needed to be worried. “Bad news?”
“No, no,” John said. He swallowed hard, eyes suddenly bright. “Ronon’s back. He came to Athos three weeks ago. He said he was finally ready to come home.”
* * * * *
When Rodney was young, his criminally negligent parents had a bad habit of dumping him and Jeannie off with their nana for the day. Nana had droned on at length on any number of subjects, but the favorite of these had been to warn them to be careful what they wished for. Or else what goes around comes around-whatever that meant-though she tended to save that particular speech for the days one of them called child protective services.
Rodney had always wondered what she could possibly be on about-how could the attainment of an invisible jet car be anything other than ridiculously awesome? But as it turned out, perhaps he should have listened a little better-and wasn’t it just like the old bag to get her revenge by being right after all.
Once the secret of Atlantis was out, the city bloomed, practically overnight. Rodney finally had what in the beginning he thought he wanted-a full team of passably competent, energized people with the time and resources to delve into actual discovery and not play at emergency engineer. Whole sectors of the city that had been deemed too strange or dangerous had been opened up. For the first time since Antarctica, he could spend days in the lab, only passing out for a few hours at night, with no threat of impending doom or stupid “let’s trump through endless swamps to trade for bean paste” missions interrupting things.
“You know,” Rodney said to Teyla on one of her visits. “No one’s shot at me in months. I can’t even remember the last time I had to run anywhere, let alone for my life.”
Teyla smiled at him, as beautifully mysterious as the first day they’d met. She bent forward, pressing their heads together, something she’d rarely done. And then she kissed his cheek, something she’d never done.
“I know, Rodney,” she said. “I miss it, too.”
Rodney had to admit that the new people were not entirely useless, but they took up too much of everything. They took up space at the empty lab benches without filling the holes the Wraith had left, their voices echoed down corridors that before only Radek and Rodney had seen. Their projects multiplied like rabbits in the lab, eating up more and more of Rodney’s time in meeting after meeting as he attempted just to keep up with lab management. Aparna Chaven, Elizabeth’s hand-chosen successor, turned out to be worthy of the position, but she didn’t have Elizabeth’s hand’s off approach. She liked reports, she required a dizzying array of information and asked disturbingly penetrating questions. She did not, as it turned out, take well to being told to “shoo”.
About this time Rodney’s body decided that middle-management wasn’t torture enough and started to outright rebel. He started smelling strange chemical odors everywhere. Atlantis had never been Earth, the aroma of her sea heavier, more metallic. Before it had been pleasant, a subtle daily reminder that hey, they were living in an alien galaxy! But now it pervaded everywhere, in his quarters, seeping into his clothes, tainting the smell of his food. The Earth/Pegasus food hybrids the kitchen, once Rodney’s favorites, now just tasted wrong. Rodney had to start hording his junk food supply from Earth in his room in case the day came when he couldn’t choke down food in the mess at all.
Brain tumor, no doubt about it. Best to give into basic fact and face it like a man.
“You don’t have a brain tumor,” Carson said.
“Do the test again.”
Carson sighed. “We’ve done it three times. Other than a need for exercise, you’re as healthy as a horse.” He blinked at Rodney. “When’s the last time you talked to Dr. Heitmeyer?”
Rodney locked himself in his office. If he was dying of some unidentifiable brain disease beyond Carson’s limited ability to diagnose, he’d better make sure posterity got as many of his thoughts as possible before he cracked up entirely.
One of the members of the lab pestilence knocked on his door an hour later. Rodney ignored them. When the next one tried, he sound-proofed the door.
Zelenka sent him a message the next day:
r.zelenka: When the brain fog kills you, can I have your twizzler supply?
Rodney considered it. Trust Zelenka to get to the heart of the matter. But no, he needed to focus.
The day after that, the door of his office swooshed open and Sheppard leaned against the doorframe like the easy city-seducing hooker he was.
“C’mon, buddy,” he said. “I think it’s time we went for a walk.”
Rodney went. He’d get no peace, otherwise.
Sheppard led them to the nearest transport, his easy arm around Rodney’s waist the only thing keeping Rodney upright. Sheppard smelled like he usually did-a familiar, not unpleasant combination of laundry detergent and gun oil. In the transporter, Rodney pressed his face against Sheppard’s neck and just breathed. Up close he smelled even better. Rodney stopped himself before licking Sheppard’s skin to see how he tasted, but it was a near thing.
Sheppard just cupped the back of his neck and let him. “We’re almost there.”
The transporter opened on one of the higher towers in Atlantis, high above the sea and its not-quite-rightness. The sun was setting far across the ocean, painting everything in glowing light. Sheppard pulled them in a half-stumble away from the transporter and out onto a deck. Rodney breathed in deep. He straightened sharply, his back yelling its protest.
“I smell pizza,” he said. “If I’m wrong, just do me a favor and lie to me, okay?”
Sheppard laughed and shook his head. “Yes, there’s pizza. Fresh delivered straight from Earth.”
There it was, sitting on the deck, an honest to God pizza box. And next to it, a six-pack in a bucket of ice.
“Oh my God,” Rodney said.
“I thought you’d like it.”
Rodney fell to his knees in the closest he ever came to worship.
He inhaled the first slice without even really tasting it. He’d never been so hungry in his life. The second piece went more slowly, each bite savored, enjoyed.
He took another bite, suppressing a moan. Perfection. Warm dough just the right amount of greasy, perfect amount of cheese and just the exact balance of acid in the sauce. No weird metallic taste, no strange odors, just a classic pepperoni pizza.
Sheppard reached across and took a piece of his own.
“Hey!”
Sheppard gave him one of his strange sideways grins. “Delivery charge.”
He flopped down beside Rodney on the deck and bit into his pizza.
And that was when it hit him. The Revelation. The kind only three days without sleep and spiking glucose levels could give you.
Sheppard was frowning at him. “Are you okay there, Rodney?”
Rodney could only gape at him. “I figured it out.”
Sheppard’s frown deepened. “I think you need a nap.”
“I do not need a nap.” Well, okay, a nap sounded pretty great, but after pizza. “I don’t have a brain tumor.”
Sheppard nodded as if this made sense. “Never thought you did.”
Rodney flopped back against the wall, brain racing. He chewed on the pizza, barely noticing it. Sheppard settled in closer, his shoulder and thigh brushing Rodney’s in easy companionship. Rodney felt a familiar twinge in his chest and for the first time, didn’t immediately suppress it. In the beginning, it had been so much harder, this thing he had for Sheppard. Keeping his hands to himself had seemed almost an impossible task at times, especially when the idiot had to keep doing stupid things like being smart and wearing tight black clothes and saving Rodney’s life all the time. Later, it became easier, something to take out and look at once or twice a year, the rest of the time insisting to himself over and over again that he was over that. There were so many reasons why it would be such a horrible idea: the city behind them, the team, the rank in front of Sheppard’s name, the implications for Rodney’s own career.
Usually this was the point where Rodney told himself he’d gone too long without sleep and looked away. But this time, he didn’t. This time he let himself look at the long curve of Sheppard’s neck, the swell of muscle beneath the omnipresent black t-shirt, the way his holster curved around the shape of his thigh. Sheppard noticed him looking and didn’t say a word.
“I’ve had offers,” Rodney said, coming to a sudden conclusion. “From Earth, I mean. Universities.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Sheppard said slowly.
“They want to give me my own lab, my own projects, more money than even I can dream of. And students-I could get them before they’re totally ruined. One of them is even offering to give me my own building.”
Sheppard nodded. “Sounds pretty good. You’ve been bitching you want more time for your own work for months now. What’s stopping you?”
“It wouldn’t be Atlantis,” Rodney said beginning to realize that he was actually serious about this. “So no more alien labs in a totally new galaxy. And I’ve put in a lot of work here getting those monkeys in lab coats down in the lab to remember they’re supposed to be Earth’s best and brightest at least some of the time. It’d be a shame to waste it.”
“Sure.”
“There are things . . . that is to say, people. I couldn’t just leave everyone behind.”
Sheppard shrugged. “There are people on Earth-Elizabeth for one. Things too. Like Ben and Jerry’s. Or Cinnabon.”
“I’m trying to tell you that I’d miss you, you jackass.”
“I don’t see why.”
Maybe Rodney had been a little too quick to dismiss that whole brain tumor thing.
“Seeing as how I’d be living with you and all,” Sheppard continued.
Rodney snapped his mouth shut. Tried to speak and then stopped again.
Sheppard raised an eyebrow. “You were going to ask me to come along, weren’t you?”
“You can’t,” Rodney finally managed. “It’s impossible.”
“I’ve been eligible for retirement forever. Nothing to it.”
“But the city and your job and-I’m trying to be noble here!”
Sheppard put his hand along Rodney’s jaw and stroked his thumb across Rodney’s cheek. Rodney turned into his palm, unable to resist reacting to the touch.
“Maybe I’m tired of noble. Maybe I’ve been tired of it for a while.”
“Oh,” said Rodney.
John watched him, a small shy smile on his face. And so the first time Rodney kissed John turned out to be on the highest tower of Atlantis, the setting sun coloring John and the city in bright streaks of gold, pink and a lurid orange. When Rodney closed his eyes, even years later, he could still see John there, a bright shape against a candy sky.
The first time he woke up to John’s body curling sweet and warm around him was the very next morning, John a comfortable presence along his side, their limbs in a tangle of post-coital exhaustion. He ran a hand up John’s side, already addicted to the way John pressed into his touch. He pulled himself in closer, enjoying the slide of skin on skin, and thought, maybe, it was about time he got started on the rest of his life.
* * * * *
They built their home by the sea. It wasn’t anything either of them had discussed. But when the idea of a second home came up-a retreat from reporters and obligation and the usual invasions forced upon the suddenly famous-a place on the ocean just seemed the natural choice.
They came here when they could, as often as duty and scheduled trips and the university schedule allowed. It was a space as near their own as probably anyone could claim, their only neighbors on the island an older couple more bemused than excited by the identity of the new pair next door.
Rodney blew the steam off his hot chocolate and took a cautionary sip before returning to his journal article. It was hard paying attention. He looked down at John where he lay sprawled across his lap, half-slumbering after a day romping about on the beach with the neighbor’s grandchildren. He ran a hand through John’s hair, far more tempted by the satisfied curl of John’s still very pretty mouth and the way he arched cat-like into the touch than by the distant demands of the board of editors.
But the notes must be finished today.
Tomorrow, Teyla was coming, and she was bringing Ronon and the children with her.