The Human Condition by Alizarin for sga_flashfic AMNESTY
Title: The Human Condition
Author: Alizarin (alizarin_nyc)
Rating: NC-17-lite
Spoilers: None to speak of
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Notes: This started off as one story written for the “slavefic” challenge at SGA_flashfic on Live Journal. Later chapters were inspired by past challenges found at SGA_flashfic and are titled accordingly. Some liberties are taken with the challenges, and for that I apologize. Mistakes are all mine, please point them out so I can make amends and/or ritual sacrifice.
If you've already read "The Human Condition" for the slavefic challenge, you can scroll to the next part, "Abandonment."
The Human Condition
Slavery
It was a better fate than becoming food for the Wraith. Living as part of the slave population for the inhabitants of Testron was no picnic, but they were alive.
The entire Atlantis team was now living in a subterranean dormitory, tight metal collars around each of their necks. At the rise of any negative emotion, such as desperation, anger, sadness, or resentment, the collar released a painful electric shock that put the wearer in agony. As long as the wearer continued to experience the emotion, the collar would continue to emit shocks, until the wearer lost consciousness.
John Sheppard and Teyla handled it pretty well. The others did not.
The toughest members of the rest of the population handled their captivity with a seemingly superficial happiness and pursued every means available to experience pleasure of any kind. They laughed together, patted each other’s backs, complimented each other, hugged, told jokes, and fondled each other in inappropriate ways. Then, there were others that existed in a state of catatonia, drooling on their thin garments and staring blankly at their surroundings. The life had been shocked out of them. But no one was exempt from work. Miles of farmland stretched out far into the distance, the slaves were housed underneath the soil, and there was no way to escape. The collars delivered a lethal snap of electricity to anyone who stepped outside the border.
Not that the Atlantis team had ever seen the borders. But they heard about the various and fatal escape attempts from other prisoners, who informed them dully that their hyperactive hope of prevailing was utterly futile.
After the first few weeks, Rodney could see how things were going to play out. He gave up on escape. He gave up on Stargate Command coming to the rescue. No one knew where they were, or would likely ever know. They were safe from the Wraith, but that was the only ray of sunshine in a very dark place.
Elizabeth was the worst off. She had always been an emotionally charged woman. She was prone to quick flashes of extreme temper and the shocks rendered her helpless for days on end. She felt responsible for all of them, stuck here in this place until the end of days, and her depression and desperation mounted. Finally, she slipped a gear and sat in a state of near-catatonia on the floor of their room. Sheppard brought her food and made her eat, but that was all that could be done. She was never coming back.
Rodney discovered some very unusual things about himself while in captivity. He shared a small room with Elizabeth, Teyla, Ford, Dr. Beckett and Sheppard, as they had instinctively set up a sort of command center at the beginning. As hope wore away, Rodney found that the least painful place for him to be was at Sheppard’s side. This made a kind of sense; John Sheppard was the man with a mission, the man you could trust.
Unfortunately, Rodney found that everyone else thought so too. Teyla hovered near him, as did Ford and of course, Elizabeth, in the beginning. Elizabeth realized quickly that Sheppard could not match her need. Dr. Beckett became wide-eyed with constant fear and became obsessed with caring for Elizabeth, the only doctorly thing he could do under the circumstances. Teyla soon found that Sheppard was not going to get them out of this situation, and she began to tire of talking about it. Rodney was happy to notice that Teyla and Ford began one day to sneak off on their own for private conversations. He thought that it wouldn’t be bad either if they did things other than talk.
After three months, Rodney was feeling the beginnings of a stirring frustration that he could not name. Days of back-breaking work was no cure for the insomnia he had and the strange sensations that occurred whenever he was near - too near - to John. He tried to talk to John about it, but the words didn’t come out right and John shook his head so fiercely that his hair, which had grown rather long, whipped around his face, as they worked together in the middle of a vast field.
“No, no, no, Rodney, what you’re saying is all wrong.”
“Listen, John, I’ve seen the others, I know how they survive. But they’ve given up on escape, don’t you see that?”
“So you’re saying we ought to give up too.”
“No, I’m saying we dig in our heels and give it right back to these, these… what are our captors called anyway?”
“Testrons.” John set his mouth in a flat, grim line.
“Okay, well I thought maybe Testronites, maybe Testroneans, maybe Testosterones.” Oh God, he did not just say that, did he? Talk about Freudian slip.
John didn’t even smirk.
“Testrons. And we’ve seen only a handful of them, from a distance. We have no Intel to go on here, none at all.”
“Again, you’re missing my point.”
John sighed. “What is your point, assuming that you suddenly tripped over one?” He turned away from Rodney and began shoveling dirt furiously, his back flexing with the strain.
Rodney had certainly noticed that John’s already muscular build was leaner, tanner and rugged in a way that he hadn’t thought he ought to appreciate. He was suddenly thankful that he, too, had lost a lot of weight and was using muscles he was sure had entered their own ice age.
He removed his shirt so they’d both be shirtless and then moved to shovel to the left of John, but slightly forward. He was preening, so what?
“What I am actually saying, is that we need to learn from the shiny, happy people and find ways to enjoy ourselves,” Rodney said. “Serotonin to the brain, endorphins, blood pumping - all things that would contribute to our survival. We need to find a way to live.”
“We are surviving. That’s all that matters.”
“But we ought to do more than survive. Don’t you see? We need to start a sort of… a kind of…” Rodney found himself trailing off. What did he really want to say, here? We need to have a meaningful relationship?
“Again, Rodney, I say keep digging and maybe you’ll find your point buried somewhere in this field.”
They dug in silence for several long minutes.
Rodney was first to break the silence. “They watch us, you know.”
“Sorry?” John stopped digging and faced Rodney, his face creased with confusion.
“The Testrailians, or whatever. The guards.”
“What are you talking about; they never get close to us.”
“If you look carefully, you’ll see that they have binoculars and they watch us through them.”
“Well, they are our guards,” John said and ran his blistered hand over the handle of his shovel. Rodney noticed his nails were long and encrusted with dirt, sort of like a reverse French manicure.
“They are observing us. I think -- if you’ll bear with me for a second --” he paused, and a look of resignation crossed John’s face, but Rodney pressed on. “I think they watch us, observe our behavior. I think we’re not only a large labor force but a giant ant colony of sorts. We’re an experiment in human behavior.”
“Uh huh. And this helps us, how?”
“I think that the answer is to show them human compassion, human love, you know, what it means to be human.” Rodney was seriously beating around the bush, but also, he felt he was getting to some core truth that he really, really needed to know.
“And they will be so impressed with that, that they will turn around and just let us go.” John now looked severely annoyed and Rodney felt a twinge of disappointment at his apparent inability to communicate.
“That’s not what I’m saying, John.”
“Well, Rodney, what the hell are you saying?” John looked seriously pissed off, but he was obviously holding it in check as the collar remained dormant.
“I’m saying, John, that what separates us from these beings is something special, something that they will never have. They ought to be jealous of us. We ought to be showing them every day in every way possible that they can never own us. They can never break our spirit.” Rodney suddenly felt the urgency of his conviction. “They don’t care about the catatonic ones, the ones who have no life; they only look at the ones who are living, the ones who are smiling.” His voice began to crack with emotion.
“And you arrived at this very astute observation because you haven’t been eating enough, perhaps?” John leveled his gaze straight at Rodney and Rodney felt his stomach flail. God, but John was a good-looking man. He knew what was going on. He was falling for John Sheppard. Okay, had already fallen, but didn’t understand it fully until maybe right now. Standing in a field, covered in dirt. It wasn’t the most romantic thing ever, but there it was.
And the fact of it was, John certainly did not feel the same way.
“John,” Rodney said in a small voice. His eyes stung and he rubbed a grimy hand over his eyes. Perhaps he hadn’t had enough to eat and in fact, the sun was burning hotly against the back of his neck. He felt suddenly dizzy. And overwhelmed.
The collar went off, delivering a blinding shot of pain and Rodney was rocked back on his heels. His shovel dropped to the ground.
“Rodney,” John’s voice was a warning. “Think of something else.”
But there was nothing else to think about. There was only thinking about John, about all the possibilities and how if he couldn’t have those possibilities, then there was nothing. The collar zapped him again and he rocked forward this time and fell to his knees. There was nothing. But God, yes, there was pain.
Suddenly John was on his knees in front of Rodney, gripping him by the shoulders. “Look at me,” he instructed. Rodney looked. And he could feel that his face was naked, that his desire was laid bare. The pain had stripped him of his defenses. “I get you,” John said. “Hey. Man, I get you. I want to live, and I know you do too. Come on, man.” Rodney had never felt so vulnerable in his entire life, and the collar kept snapping, knocking his brain around with ruthless precision.
“John,” he gasped. He could feel the air around him start to swim and the sky behind John’s head got grey around the edges.
John looked deeply upset, and he tried to steady his breathing, but soon he’d feel the snap himself. When Elizabeth began to garble her sentences, he spent many hours cursing his captors and got stunned into unconsciousness for his troubles. His emotions were like steel, but he couldn’t watch Rodney do this. Not like this.
Running his thumb over Rodney’s crude collar, John whispered, “Don’t hurt yourself, Rodney, please, don’t hurt yourself.” His hand slipped over the metal and to the back of Rodney’s neck and he pulled him in and kissed him gently on the lips. Rodney was instantly still, his breath caught in his ribcage, every atom of his being completely immobilized. John kept kissing him until Rodney began to respond, tentative with surprise.
The pleasure seemed to act as an eraser on the marks of pain and Rodney felt a rush of relief as the pain ceased. He felt a rush of something else, and slipped his arms around John. John curled both his hands around Rodney’s face and kissed him until he felt Rodney’s body relax, and was sure that no more shocks were forthcoming.
“We will show them,” John said, “That we belong to each other and not to them.”
“Now you tell me,” Rodney said, a little put out that he’d spent so much time trying to convince John of something John appeared to already know. “Now you tell me.”
“Now I tell you,” John affirmed, and wrapped his arms around Rodney.
Off in the distance, the eyes behind the binoculars slowly blinked.
***
Abandonment
Rodney saw things in black and white. Now, his life was separated into two different parts; those when John was present, and those when he was not. His insomnia kept up its slow torture as he lay in the dark, thinking about their predicament, and John’s proximity. He could reach out and touch him in the dark, but he didn’t and he couldn’t.
Since their kiss, on their knees in the dirt of the field, John had not yet repeated the intimacy. He also seemed to have no intention of doing so. He worked with Rodney, discussed the state of the team, and they continued on with the daily life of discomfort, hopelessness, and threat of pain. Rodney longed for his freedom, but now he also longed for John. And John held himself away from Rodney. There was confusion and disappointment colliding in Rodney’s brain and he struggled to keep himself together. Move forward, that was all that was left to any of them now.
However, working side by side in the heat of the day, Rodney felt his frustration increase. He wanted something from John. He couldn’t have it, at least not right now. Whatever had happened between them on that particular day had now passed. A new bond was between them, one of friendship and partnership, and secretly Rodney hated it. He needed more now, and if things couldn’t be that way, he’d prefer to return to their semi-combative snark-fests. He wanted to be on uneven footing with John. This business of being his equal, his peer, his co-worker, was just that - business.
So Rodney returned to what he knew best. Science. Gathering data, analyzing it, these were things that he could do. And they were also things that would win John’s approval, and although it was base, Rodney felt it was desirable.
He began to analyze the crops that the captives were required to farm. A plant akin to cotton, a plant that looked and tasted like corn, other strange things that weren’t as easily categorized. He kept records by using a stick to scratch the surface of the floor in their stark dormitory. He forbid any of the others to step on his research, or interfere with it in any way. This was especially tough with Elizabeth, who no longer was expected by the aliens to work, and just sat inside during the day, lying on her own makeshift bed or walking circles in the room. The first time she walked over his scratchings and destroyed them, he’d yelled at her until John came over and shook him by the arm.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” John hissed.
“She has to understand that this work is very important; it may lead us to clues that can help in our survival.”
“Fuck that. She’s a person, Rodney, a suffering person, you have no right to scream at her like that.”
“I wasn’t screaming,” Rodney said and shook John’s arm off. It was the first time John had touched him in weeks and Rodney wanted to scream now. But instead, he breathed in and went to that meditative place that kept him from getting the electric shock treatment. His “happy place” looked like his lab and there was a large coffee cup involved. And a sandwich, also large.
He retreated to his corner and began all over again to mark down the data.
Elizabeth’s hair had grown long, and her face was tan from the time she’d spent working out in the sun. Without makeup and the restrictive clothing of her professional dress, she looked like a different person. Her wide blue eyes had taken on a new innocence; her face had that sharpness etched in by hunger. Rodney could see how beautiful she was, and wondered that he had never noticed before. He knew that the others noticed too, and he worried still about John seeing her in that way. That was selfish, and Rodney was ashamed of his own jealous thoughts.
But it was Carson Beckett who seemed the most taken by Elizabeth. His caring for her had turned into something else, and soon it was quite palpable in the room they all had to share. Elizabeth needed him, reached for him, and she eventually stopped reaching for John or for Teyla. She was doing better. They were all glad, but none more so than Dr. Beckett. Slowly he was teaching her to talk again, and to regain a realization of the outside world. He was careful not to shock her with too much of their current reality.
Rodney also worried about Teyla. She was undoubtedly beautiful, and he knew that John was deeply aware of her appeal. Once again, he could see John drifting into her orbit, and he spent a lot of time with Teyla and Ford in the evenings, talking, trying to keep hope alive.
So Rodney worked on his statistics. He wrote down whatever he could, wherever he could. When he ran out of room on the dormitory floor, he moved out to the dirt floor of the common area, and explained to the other team members and the other humans what he was doing. They encouraged him and even added to his data when they had something worthwhile to contribute. When he ran out of room there, he began to write in the dirt outside, near the field where they all worked, and prayed that there really was no such thing as a rainstorm on this planet.
His genius was the one thing he could count on not to abandon him.
***
First Contact
Several months had passed, and Rodney decided he couldn’t take it anymore.
It was driving him mad, this lust he had for John. He took out his frustrations on the field. He dug their damn trenches, he picked their damn crops, he shook his fist at the aliens in the distance with their damn binoculars. They didn’t do anything, didn’t even react, but most importantly, they didn’t activate his electric collar. So he continued to make rude gestures in their direction.
One time he even mooned them.
Nothing. No reaction. So he began to write to them. He used his shovel to mark out words in the dirt, careful not to disturb their crops. He didn’t really want to make them mad, but even anger would be better than their aloof distance.
He wrote in big letters, each one about two feet long and one foot wide.
First message: “Hello. My name is Rodney. I am a human being.”
The next day, the message was erased from the dirt. Rodney waited until the end of the day and then took his shovel and left another message: “What is your name?”
Again, the message was erased the next day, so Rodney wrote: “I am a man. Who are you?”
In the morning, he saw again with a sinking heart that the message had been erased. But when he looked closer, he saw that there were small markings in the dirt, tiny letters right at the corner of his message space.
“A man and not a man. My name is Telel.”
Rodney tried not to be too excited. He approached John in the field.
“You know that I’ve been leaving messages for our captors?”
“What?” John said, looking up, squinting at Rodney. “What do you mean, messages?”
“In the dirt, over there,” Rodney said. “Have you seen me doing it?”
“No, I haven’t. I thought you were just doing the Farmer’s Almanac for this piece of shit planet.” John went back to digging.
Asshole, Rodney thought. “No, I have been leaving them messages and today I got one back and I want to make sure it’s not some joke you’re trying to pull on me.”
“I haven’t got time for jokes. Or for making nice with the people who torture us.” John again stopped digging and looked up almost angrily. “So, what did these monsters have to say?”
“One monster,” Rodney said. “I think. He says he is a man and not a man.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means there’s one of them that may be willing to communicate with me.”
“Tell him to return us to Atlantis and then he and all his alien brethren can go fuck themselves.”
“What is your fucking problem, John?” Rodney stepped up to John and made him uncomfortably aware that Rodney was in his personal space. John just turned his head and stared coldly at Rodney. “You’ve been acting like an ass for weeks now, and I thought… I thought…”
“You thought what?” John’s eyes narrowed.
“That they weren’t going to get the better of us. That we were going to win.” Rodney narrowed his own eyes and matched John stare for stare.
“Well, that was when I still had a shred of hope that someone, somewhere, would rescue us, or that I’d be able to figure a way out of this. And I can’t, I…”
“Wait. YOU would figure a way out? It seems you’ve done nothing to try to figure a way out and I’ve been actually doing some real work, which you could give a shit about.”
“This isn’t about you, Rodney.”
“Oh, but it is. It is about me, about you, about all of us. All of us. Not just you. So what? You feel guilty because you were once in charge, Mr. Hotshot Military Man, and now you can’t get us out of this situation? How is this your fault?” Rodney felt a sudden wave of sympathy for John, but he fought it down. It was typical of John to be a bull-headed martyr.
“You’ll never understand.” And John turned away and walked to the other end of the field where he took a basket and began to fill it with tiny cotton balls. He didn’t look back.
Yes, Rodney thought, he would never understand John Sheppard. The man was impossible, unreachable. Whatever he had said to Rodney that one day in the field, whatever had driven him to that kiss, it had passed. It had been false. And Rodney needed it more than ever. But it was clear it was not to be.
Next message: “I am glad you are out there. I want to know you.”
***
38 Minutes
The great city of Atlantis fell in 38 minutes.
Rodney knew because he went into the bathroom at 15:24 to take care of some business. When he later sat shackled in the slave ship, in shock and discomfort, he saw by his watch that it was 16:02.
The Testrons seemed to possess a mechanism similar to the Wraith, which could sweep up beings in a giant silver wave. In fact, Rodney thought at first with unmistakable terror that it was the Wraith. But the ship was nothing like a Wraith hive ship, and then there was the fact that they had not been eaten. Yet, anyway. Plus, the Wraith were not the sort of enemy that would make itself scarce, watching its prisoners from a great distance. They’d be up close and uncomfortably personal.
The next three weeks aboard the slave ship were filled with hunger, pain and confusion. Elizabeth and John kept everyone organized and even made them queue up for food when it fell through a hatch in the ceiling. But the stench became unbearable, and the time became interminable. In the last week, they were, one by one, beamed out of the hold only to return moments later with shiny new collars that delivered painful shocks each time someone let themselves lose control.
When they were finally herded out of the hold and into the glaring light of the planet’s one enormous sun, they were nearly blinded. Shocks told them to go, shocks told them to stay together, shocks told them to file down a set of stone steps into the underground catacombs that would become their home.
No one had seen their captors; no one had been spoken to. They were forced again during the day, to leave the space and to work. Other captives showed them the ropes, warned them not to stop working, showed them the meager store of blankets and rough clothing. They were fed just enough to keep working. Rodney now knew he could actually continue to live without a wide selection of food and lots of it.
Rodney kept a list of all the crew from Atlantis, ones he’d seen and ones he had not. He could not account for all of them, but without knowing any better, he could not assume they were dead. He spotted Radek Zelenka far off in another field one day, but all he could do was wave. Zelenka did not wave back.
Rodney pondered the 38 minutes that had changed their lives. Even the Wraith could not have conquered Atlantis in that time. He felt frustrated by his lack of information, his complete and utter ignorance.
38 minutes. His fingers touched the metal band around his neck. He thought about the Wraith technology used to beam living beings from place to place. He thought about metal that could sense behavior and emotion. Teyla’s Wraith DNA. John’s Ancient DNA. Knowing and not knowing. Rodney had an idea, but it refused to form. It was like a word on the tip of his tongue that wouldn’t come forth.
***
Darkness in Enclosed Spaces
There are an endless number of hours in a regular night for the insomniac. The insomniac can feel the minutes cutting into his skin, pushing him further toward the cold and bright light of morning, and aching, unrelenting fatigue. The sleeper, however, closes his eyes and then opens them, recharged, having no sense of his dreams or the long hours the night presented to him.
Rodney wanted to be a sleeper. More than that, more than anything, he wanted a day off. He wanted a lazy Sunday -- although days of the week had no meaning here - he wanted a chance to sleep, a chance to catch up with himself. Instead, he had hours of empty frustration, staring into the black hole of his own head.
The tiniest bit of light crept in through the doorway of the room at night. The planet had 16 moons and eventually, some pale particles of moonlight found their way through the hatch in the ground and filtered into the square, bare room.
It was mostly sound that Rodney had to go by, and from the sounds he was hearing, he believed that Teyla and Ford were having sex. He tried not to hear, yet strained for every sound. Everyone’s pairing off, he thought, leaving me and John- but he couldn’t allow himself to think that way.
Now, here in the dark, he felt the enormous crackle and pressure of sex, filling the air, growing the divide between the have and the have-nots. But he also heard a new sound now, one that didn’t fit in with Teyla’s small sighs - and coming from his right hand side, not his left. He realized with a sinking heart that Sheppard was awake, and he was… well… touching himself. Rodney could hear the sound of the thin blanket moving and almost seeJohn’s movements and his nakedness in the dark.
It’s too much, Rodney thought. Groaning inwardly, he lifted himself off his pallet quickly, trying not to think about what he was about to do. Moving over John quickly, he had the element of surprise on his side. He pinned John’s hands to his sides, rolling him away from the wall and onto his back. He shoved his knee between John’s legs and pushed them open. John hissed at him, but still didn’t quite know what was happening or exactly who was doing it.
He twisted once, twice, then Rodney’s mouth was on his cock, lips sliding down, and John twitched again, and then stopped fighting. Rodney let his mouth grow warm and wet around him before quietly lifting his head and letting it nod down again. John’s fingers reached out and around, searching, but Rodney didn’t trust what could happen if he let go, so he just pressed John’s wrists tighter into the blanket. John’s fingers came back to grip what they could of Rodney’s, and Rodney felt now that he and John were locked together. He felt another rush of pleasure. He sucked harder and heard John gasp and struggle to breathe quietly.
It was everything, all at once that Rodney wanted: he wanted John, wanted to always have John beneath him, right where he could find him. He felt himself orgasm, then John came forcefully too, and his head knocked back on the floor with a muffled crack. Rodney swallowed, grimaced, then smiled. He released John’s wrists and John brought his hands to Rodney’s face, touching in the dark, feeling. But Rodney knew that John knew exactly who it was.
And Rodney returned to his own pallet and dropped off into his first deep, uninterrupted sleep in weeks. He imagined he felt the collar thrum with pleasure too.
***
Drowning
The next day Rodney woke up with a new sense of purpose. And he felt pretty good about things when the message in the dirt said, “I want to help you.” He was making progress. Hope had returned.
He shoveled ferociously until the midday meal, not looking at John, because he knew that John was looking at him. His brain was spinning with serotonin and the collar seemed to sense it and kept up its low-grade thrum. He realized he wasn’t imagining it after all. The collar liked pleasure, just as much as he himself did. He felt his brain open up and release new theories about their existence here, their captors and the planet. Equations came rushing back to him, and he would allow himself small breaks throughout the day to sneak over to his data in the dirt and scratch furiously so nothing would be lost.
Teyla and Ford sat next to him at the midday meal, which consisted of some strange corn muffin thing, and they engaged him in conversation for the first time in a long time. It seemed sex was helping everyone. John sat near, just looking at all of them, almost dumbfounded.
Rodney wrote, “Help us, please. Tell me what to do.” And then he prepared to wait for the next morning when he would receive another message and perhaps embark on something new. He was full of optimism.
At the end of the day, he and John walked together toward the showers, away from the work fields. They were talking about mundane things; the weather, the roughness of the cotton-bearing plants that ripped up skin and caused blisters on top of blisters, the progress Elizabeth was making with Dr. Beckett.
They entered the long, steel runway with the giant pipes that served as mass showers for all, men and women alike. Everyone had become accustomed to it, showering with strangers, friends and no soap. Low steel walls kept the water flowing down and into the fields. They could stay for minutes or up to one hour there, washing themselves and their clothes, using the rough blankets as towels and letting everything dry during the day. It was a pretty good system, Rodney noted, and he liked that their captors acknowledged the basic need for humans to feel clean.
He jumped under the first open pipe he saw, letting the huge rush of water flush away the dirt and sweat of the day. When he opened his eyes, John was standing right in front of him.
“Hey,” he spluttered.
“Hey. We need to talk.”
“Uh…” Rodney gestured to their current state of nudity. “Now?”
“The only moment we’re going to have to ourselves for the foreseeable future, Rodney. Unless, you’re uncomfortable.” John smirked at this and Rodney wondered if asshole-John was going to make another appearance.
“Just as comfortable as I usually am, naked and surrounded by naked men and women,” Rodney said.
“Which is pretty comfortable I gather,” John said.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I mean, you had no problem with a certain naked man last night.”
“Well, technically, you weren’t totally naked, you still had your shirt on, and at that time, I wasn’t naked myself, along with several strangers,” Rodney began.
John cut him off. “Blah, blah, Rodney. The topic is, as you well know, the presumption you have that that was completely okay.”
“I got the sense that it wasn’t totally not okay. Unexpected maybe, but rather okay, actually.”
John grinned unexpectedly. “And you thought this, why?”
Rodney sighed and stepped back slightly, leaning against the low steel wall and affecting a tired, yet hopefully confident stance. He tried to pay as little attention to his cock as he was able, and tried to pay as little attention to John’s wet body as was humanly possible. John wasn’t going to win this one.
“I thought this, John, because I know you are lonely,” Rodney said. “I know you have feelings that you don’t want to discuss. And I know that I want you, and I want to give you as much comfort as possible in this lonely place. No questions asked.”
“No questions?”
“Only the ones you want to ask,” Rodney said. He lifted his chin and looked John straight in the eye.
“Okay. I want to ask one. Just one.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why?” John said. He was standing with the water splashing up around him, his hair wet and dripping into his eyes, the low sun shining in his face and sparking off the water droplets. Rodney almost laughed at the question. Why? Did John not understand how sexy he was and how wonderful? “Why,” John continued, “When I don’t deserve…”
“You deserve, John,” Rodney said, stepping forward. “You deserve.” He pulled John forward and John didn’t resist. He put his mouth right over John’s and was met with an open-mouthed kiss, this one hungry and anxious.
Rodney pulled away and looked into John’s eyes. “Plus, I love you.”
“This is no place for love.”
“It’s the perfect place.” And Rodney drew John under the water and kept kissing him, barely letting John up for air. He could feel their cocks brushing against each other, could hear, through the water, the other people murmuring, shutting off their water, moving away from the lip-locked lovers. Everyone knew the drill. Pleasure had the right of way.
And Rodney thought, I’m drowning, and I don’t care.
***
Voyeurism
Rodney wasn’t ready to let John go, once he’d gotten a hold of him.
And John didn’t seem to mind, so they stood under the pouring water, making out, until the sun started to go down on the day. Rodney had kissed men and women, and now he’d kissed John. At first there was so much to do, he was completely focused on kissing John, and then he realized that they’d better either break apart, or get a room, because things were definitely going places.
But it took so long to get to this point, that Rodney decided he wasn’t going to miss out on a minute of it. He let his hips rub across John’s and felt the returning pressure. John let his head fall back so Rodney could kiss his neck. Then he slid his hand in between their bodies and wrapped it around their cocks. Rodney groaned into John’s neck and dug his fingers into John’s back. He let John stroke them both until he felt himself come, face buried in John’s shoulder. John thrust himself against Rodney until he came too, and then they slowly drew apart.
Rodney looked over John’s shoulder and his eyes opened wide. “What,” John said fuzzily. “What is it?”
“Um, okay. You’re not going to believe this, but just turn around slowly.” Of course John whipped around, his arm swinging down to retrieve a gun that wasn’t there. Heck, there weren’t even pants there. “Easy John, let’s see what he wants.”
Standing just on the other side of the steel divider, watching them closely and carefully from only yards away, stood a tall figure, dressed from head to foot in brown cloth, with immense red goggles over its eyes.
“What do you want?” John yelled. Rodney just stayed frozen to the spot.
The cloth-covered head turned slightly, looking from Rodney to John. It spoke. “Rodney. I am Telel.” The voice was deep but emotionless. “I wish to know you, too.”
***
Bloody, ESP, Culture Clash
Telel was taciturn, and Rodney had so many questions. He wanted to shake him until his goggles rattled right off his head and make him speak faster. Rodney could do several hundred words a minute, why couldn’t Telel?
Despite their shock, John and Rodney managed to get dressed and were able to process one thing Telel made clear, he would share knowledge of this planet’s Stargate with them, if they would then take him with them to Atlantis.
Rodney stared as Telel carefully moved his hands to describe the Stargate, deep in the center of their planet, on the other side of the continent. Weeks of travel by boat on a large and dangerous river. The sixteenth moon was rising and Rodney felt a spurt of strange joy to see it. He had never seen the sixteenth moon, had always been inside, under the earth by the time it rose. It was the most beautiful one, a deep shade of red, lit up like a lantern by the other moons’ glow.
“Can we get to the Stargate, even if we could travel that far?” Rodney asked.
Telel was forever in answering, but finally said, “There is a ladder. It is how we came up to the surface to live here.”
“Okay, so you know that we want to go there. We want to go back to Atlantis,” Rodney said, stepping all over his own impatience.
“Yes. I am here to help you.” Telel’s pale lips barely moved when he spoke, but his words were clear and resonant.
“Can I ask why you want to help us?” John asked. Smart guy, John, Rodney thought. Motive, this guy needs a motive.
“Yes you can ask,” Telel said. And then he did an unexpected thing. He pulled a knife from beneath his robes, unwrapped his hand, and sliced open his palm.
“Wha,” Rodney said, wincing. He couldn’t turn away. The hand was badly scarred and bent with long, thick nails and deep ridges in the flesh. The blood made a tiny spurt then dripped steadily onto the ground.
“This blood is the combination of Wraith and Ancient,” Telel said. “My people were created by the Ancients, then spurned from their presence when we did not meet their expectations. With the right technology, the technology of the Ancients, I believe I can separate our DNA, and my people can live as humans.”
Things were starting to coalesce in Rodney’s brain. An Ancient Wraith, a creature that was two sides of the coin. A being capable of good and evil, who wanted to be free of the Wraith inside himself.
“You want to use the Ancients’ technology to find a way to separate the Wraith from you?” John asked. “And may I ask how in the hell we can even begin to trust you?”
“Wait, John, wait,” Rodney urged his brain to move faster. “You control us, why don’t you just, you know,” he waved at his own neck, hoping he wasn’t just giving Telel the best idea he’d never had. “Zap us into it.”
Telel removed the wrapping from his other hand to reveal a small device strapped to the underside of his wrist. “This is how we know you.”
“So you can shut it off,” John said. “Now, we’re talking.”
“Not without the others knowing.” Telel paused and looked off to the distance where his brethren were usually perched during the day, watching. “There are many who do not think we should give up our power.”
“And why do you?” Rodney asked.
“We experience what you experience. That is why we prefer pleasure to pain. It is why we fear negative emotion and punish it. However, I believe that my people can one day experience their own pleasure, their own pain, and they should give up the power of controlling others to attain this kind of freedom.”
“So we’re stuck with these collars until…” John stayed focused on the collars.
“You can remove them now,” Telel said serenely.
“Huh? How?” John’s voice was reaching toward a shout.
“The combination of Ancient and Wraith DNA, the combination of the blood. My blood will dissolve the direnium,” he paused and looked at John. “Or, your blood and the Athosian’s.”
“You’re kidding me,” John said. “So we’ve had the means of freeing ourselves all along?” John and Rodney looked at each other incredulously. Rodney tried not to let regret overtake his enthusiasm.
“It takes a substantial amount, but it will remove the direnium collar.” Telel cut deeper into his palm, then placed his hands on Rodney’s neck. The movement was so slow, Rodney didn’t bother to flinch. He just stared at Telel. He now wanted to see his face. Telel worked the blood over the band and Rodney began to feel light-headed. Suddenly his head cleared. He looked down and fragments of the silver substance were falling to the ground like bloody snowflakes.
“Wow. Am I free?” Rodney asked, looking at John. “Am I really free?” He felt his neck, warm and wet with blood. “John, quick, say something to piss me off!”
“You’re pretty stupid for a genius,” John said.
“Oh, that’s not working, I’m just too happy right now.” Rodney walked in a slow circle, rubbing his neck, trying to think of something sad.
“We’ve got to get it off of Elizabeth. We can, can’t we?” John asked.
“If our bargain stands,” Telel said, “You may free those you feel you must. We must set out now, while it is still dark, before the others determine our plan.” Telel paused and seemed to search for words. Rodney and John held their breath, waiting. “And you must leave behind those unfit for travel.”
“Oh, oh,” Rodney was practically jumping up and down, “We’ve got a bargain, yes we do. We’d shake on it if, well, if your hand wasn’t all bloody.”
“Leave some behind.” John was frowning.
“When we get back to Atlantis, we’ll fire up a puddle jumper and come back for them.” Rodney was buzzing. “Let Telel dissolve your collar.”
“In fact,” Telel intoned. “It may be safer to leave the others enslaved and travel in a small party to the Stargate. It is an arduous journey, and you will not wish the other humans to be punished if it is discovered you are gone and they are not wearing collars.” He again looked to the distance, where the low hills were covered in shadow. “My people can be fierce fighters despite their reluctance to interact, and would not tolerate it if they knew you were escaping.”
“Won’t we be discovered missing?” Rodney felt a small worry bite at the back of his mind.
“As long as I wear my device, I am able to transmit that I am monitoring you. I am responsible for the six Atlanteans in cell 24-97. Your cell.”
“Us,” John said. “All of us. Elizabeth too.” He seemed visibly relieved. “Rodney, let’s do this.”
“I’ve been on board for 10 minutes now,” Rodney said, thoughtfully. “But then, you knew I would be, didn’t you?” He turned to Telel.
“Yes. It is your genius, and your passion that has indicated to me the moment has come for my people. The collar tells us much.”
Rodney puffed out his chest. “Hear that, John?” He smirked. “My genius. My passion. My…”
“Your will to live? In spite of the fact that I am about to kill you with my bare hands?”
“Ah-ah,” Rodney tsked. “Who’s still wearing his collar?”
John’s smile disappeared. “Um, Telel? Could you, you know, bleed on me now?”
***
The First Night
Ford elected to go with Rodney, John and Telel. Teyla elected to stay, in case their journey wasn’t successful, so that her blood could help free the other humans if it came down to that.
Ford and Teyla had a quick and painful goodbye. Rodney felt a lump in his throat as he bid good bye to Carson, and he could see John was having similar trouble as he held and caressed Elizabeth, putting her hands up so she could feel her bare neck. God, Rodney loved that man.
Teyla began a written calendar on the floor of the room, so she could keep track of how long they’d been gone. If they didn’t return at a certain time, she would begin plans for an uprising.
Telel motioned for them to follow him when they returned above ground. His long robes swept the ground as he walked and Rodney reminded himself that he was going to see the tall figure ahead of him for many, many miles. John fell behind and stood looking back over the fields. Rodney noticed and circled back around to come up alongside him.
“John, time to go,” Rodney said.
“I’ll be along,” John said. “Just saying goodbye.”
Rodney pulled John’s right hand over and pressed his fingers along its calluses, smoothing the hand between his own. “It’s only the first of a lot of long nights, you know.”
“I know.”
“I’ll be with you.”
“I know.”
“So let’s go.”
“Promise me,” John said, “That you won’t let anything happen to prevent us from coming back for them.”
“I promise.” And Rodney meant it.
“Promise me,” John said again, “That you won’t let anything happen to you now that I’ve really found you.”
“I promise, John.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
Rodney turned and they began walking side-by-side. His first night of freedom felt like the first night of the rest of his life.
Author: Alizarin (alizarin_nyc)
Rating: NC-17-lite
Spoilers: None to speak of
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Notes: This started off as one story written for the “slavefic” challenge at SGA_flashfic on Live Journal. Later chapters were inspired by past challenges found at SGA_flashfic and are titled accordingly. Some liberties are taken with the challenges, and for that I apologize. Mistakes are all mine, please point them out so I can make amends and/or ritual sacrifice.
If you've already read "The Human Condition" for the slavefic challenge, you can scroll to the next part, "Abandonment."
The Human Condition
Slavery
It was a better fate than becoming food for the Wraith. Living as part of the slave population for the inhabitants of Testron was no picnic, but they were alive.
The entire Atlantis team was now living in a subterranean dormitory, tight metal collars around each of their necks. At the rise of any negative emotion, such as desperation, anger, sadness, or resentment, the collar released a painful electric shock that put the wearer in agony. As long as the wearer continued to experience the emotion, the collar would continue to emit shocks, until the wearer lost consciousness.
John Sheppard and Teyla handled it pretty well. The others did not.
The toughest members of the rest of the population handled their captivity with a seemingly superficial happiness and pursued every means available to experience pleasure of any kind. They laughed together, patted each other’s backs, complimented each other, hugged, told jokes, and fondled each other in inappropriate ways. Then, there were others that existed in a state of catatonia, drooling on their thin garments and staring blankly at their surroundings. The life had been shocked out of them. But no one was exempt from work. Miles of farmland stretched out far into the distance, the slaves were housed underneath the soil, and there was no way to escape. The collars delivered a lethal snap of electricity to anyone who stepped outside the border.
Not that the Atlantis team had ever seen the borders. But they heard about the various and fatal escape attempts from other prisoners, who informed them dully that their hyperactive hope of prevailing was utterly futile.
After the first few weeks, Rodney could see how things were going to play out. He gave up on escape. He gave up on Stargate Command coming to the rescue. No one knew where they were, or would likely ever know. They were safe from the Wraith, but that was the only ray of sunshine in a very dark place.
Elizabeth was the worst off. She had always been an emotionally charged woman. She was prone to quick flashes of extreme temper and the shocks rendered her helpless for days on end. She felt responsible for all of them, stuck here in this place until the end of days, and her depression and desperation mounted. Finally, she slipped a gear and sat in a state of near-catatonia on the floor of their room. Sheppard brought her food and made her eat, but that was all that could be done. She was never coming back.
Rodney discovered some very unusual things about himself while in captivity. He shared a small room with Elizabeth, Teyla, Ford, Dr. Beckett and Sheppard, as they had instinctively set up a sort of command center at the beginning. As hope wore away, Rodney found that the least painful place for him to be was at Sheppard’s side. This made a kind of sense; John Sheppard was the man with a mission, the man you could trust.
Unfortunately, Rodney found that everyone else thought so too. Teyla hovered near him, as did Ford and of course, Elizabeth, in the beginning. Elizabeth realized quickly that Sheppard could not match her need. Dr. Beckett became wide-eyed with constant fear and became obsessed with caring for Elizabeth, the only doctorly thing he could do under the circumstances. Teyla soon found that Sheppard was not going to get them out of this situation, and she began to tire of talking about it. Rodney was happy to notice that Teyla and Ford began one day to sneak off on their own for private conversations. He thought that it wouldn’t be bad either if they did things other than talk.
After three months, Rodney was feeling the beginnings of a stirring frustration that he could not name. Days of back-breaking work was no cure for the insomnia he had and the strange sensations that occurred whenever he was near - too near - to John. He tried to talk to John about it, but the words didn’t come out right and John shook his head so fiercely that his hair, which had grown rather long, whipped around his face, as they worked together in the middle of a vast field.
“No, no, no, Rodney, what you’re saying is all wrong.”
“Listen, John, I’ve seen the others, I know how they survive. But they’ve given up on escape, don’t you see that?”
“So you’re saying we ought to give up too.”
“No, I’m saying we dig in our heels and give it right back to these, these… what are our captors called anyway?”
“Testrons.” John set his mouth in a flat, grim line.
“Okay, well I thought maybe Testronites, maybe Testroneans, maybe Testosterones.” Oh God, he did not just say that, did he? Talk about Freudian slip.
John didn’t even smirk.
“Testrons. And we’ve seen only a handful of them, from a distance. We have no Intel to go on here, none at all.”
“Again, you’re missing my point.”
John sighed. “What is your point, assuming that you suddenly tripped over one?” He turned away from Rodney and began shoveling dirt furiously, his back flexing with the strain.
Rodney had certainly noticed that John’s already muscular build was leaner, tanner and rugged in a way that he hadn’t thought he ought to appreciate. He was suddenly thankful that he, too, had lost a lot of weight and was using muscles he was sure had entered their own ice age.
He removed his shirt so they’d both be shirtless and then moved to shovel to the left of John, but slightly forward. He was preening, so what?
“What I am actually saying, is that we need to learn from the shiny, happy people and find ways to enjoy ourselves,” Rodney said. “Serotonin to the brain, endorphins, blood pumping - all things that would contribute to our survival. We need to find a way to live.”
“We are surviving. That’s all that matters.”
“But we ought to do more than survive. Don’t you see? We need to start a sort of… a kind of…” Rodney found himself trailing off. What did he really want to say, here? We need to have a meaningful relationship?
“Again, Rodney, I say keep digging and maybe you’ll find your point buried somewhere in this field.”
They dug in silence for several long minutes.
Rodney was first to break the silence. “They watch us, you know.”
“Sorry?” John stopped digging and faced Rodney, his face creased with confusion.
“The Testrailians, or whatever. The guards.”
“What are you talking about; they never get close to us.”
“If you look carefully, you’ll see that they have binoculars and they watch us through them.”
“Well, they are our guards,” John said and ran his blistered hand over the handle of his shovel. Rodney noticed his nails were long and encrusted with dirt, sort of like a reverse French manicure.
“They are observing us. I think -- if you’ll bear with me for a second --” he paused, and a look of resignation crossed John’s face, but Rodney pressed on. “I think they watch us, observe our behavior. I think we’re not only a large labor force but a giant ant colony of sorts. We’re an experiment in human behavior.”
“Uh huh. And this helps us, how?”
“I think that the answer is to show them human compassion, human love, you know, what it means to be human.” Rodney was seriously beating around the bush, but also, he felt he was getting to some core truth that he really, really needed to know.
“And they will be so impressed with that, that they will turn around and just let us go.” John now looked severely annoyed and Rodney felt a twinge of disappointment at his apparent inability to communicate.
“That’s not what I’m saying, John.”
“Well, Rodney, what the hell are you saying?” John looked seriously pissed off, but he was obviously holding it in check as the collar remained dormant.
“I’m saying, John, that what separates us from these beings is something special, something that they will never have. They ought to be jealous of us. We ought to be showing them every day in every way possible that they can never own us. They can never break our spirit.” Rodney suddenly felt the urgency of his conviction. “They don’t care about the catatonic ones, the ones who have no life; they only look at the ones who are living, the ones who are smiling.” His voice began to crack with emotion.
“And you arrived at this very astute observation because you haven’t been eating enough, perhaps?” John leveled his gaze straight at Rodney and Rodney felt his stomach flail. God, but John was a good-looking man. He knew what was going on. He was falling for John Sheppard. Okay, had already fallen, but didn’t understand it fully until maybe right now. Standing in a field, covered in dirt. It wasn’t the most romantic thing ever, but there it was.
And the fact of it was, John certainly did not feel the same way.
“John,” Rodney said in a small voice. His eyes stung and he rubbed a grimy hand over his eyes. Perhaps he hadn’t had enough to eat and in fact, the sun was burning hotly against the back of his neck. He felt suddenly dizzy. And overwhelmed.
The collar went off, delivering a blinding shot of pain and Rodney was rocked back on his heels. His shovel dropped to the ground.
“Rodney,” John’s voice was a warning. “Think of something else.”
But there was nothing else to think about. There was only thinking about John, about all the possibilities and how if he couldn’t have those possibilities, then there was nothing. The collar zapped him again and he rocked forward this time and fell to his knees. There was nothing. But God, yes, there was pain.
Suddenly John was on his knees in front of Rodney, gripping him by the shoulders. “Look at me,” he instructed. Rodney looked. And he could feel that his face was naked, that his desire was laid bare. The pain had stripped him of his defenses. “I get you,” John said. “Hey. Man, I get you. I want to live, and I know you do too. Come on, man.” Rodney had never felt so vulnerable in his entire life, and the collar kept snapping, knocking his brain around with ruthless precision.
“John,” he gasped. He could feel the air around him start to swim and the sky behind John’s head got grey around the edges.
John looked deeply upset, and he tried to steady his breathing, but soon he’d feel the snap himself. When Elizabeth began to garble her sentences, he spent many hours cursing his captors and got stunned into unconsciousness for his troubles. His emotions were like steel, but he couldn’t watch Rodney do this. Not like this.
Running his thumb over Rodney’s crude collar, John whispered, “Don’t hurt yourself, Rodney, please, don’t hurt yourself.” His hand slipped over the metal and to the back of Rodney’s neck and he pulled him in and kissed him gently on the lips. Rodney was instantly still, his breath caught in his ribcage, every atom of his being completely immobilized. John kept kissing him until Rodney began to respond, tentative with surprise.
The pleasure seemed to act as an eraser on the marks of pain and Rodney felt a rush of relief as the pain ceased. He felt a rush of something else, and slipped his arms around John. John curled both his hands around Rodney’s face and kissed him until he felt Rodney’s body relax, and was sure that no more shocks were forthcoming.
“We will show them,” John said, “That we belong to each other and not to them.”
“Now you tell me,” Rodney said, a little put out that he’d spent so much time trying to convince John of something John appeared to already know. “Now you tell me.”
“Now I tell you,” John affirmed, and wrapped his arms around Rodney.
Off in the distance, the eyes behind the binoculars slowly blinked.
***
Abandonment
Rodney saw things in black and white. Now, his life was separated into two different parts; those when John was present, and those when he was not. His insomnia kept up its slow torture as he lay in the dark, thinking about their predicament, and John’s proximity. He could reach out and touch him in the dark, but he didn’t and he couldn’t.
Since their kiss, on their knees in the dirt of the field, John had not yet repeated the intimacy. He also seemed to have no intention of doing so. He worked with Rodney, discussed the state of the team, and they continued on with the daily life of discomfort, hopelessness, and threat of pain. Rodney longed for his freedom, but now he also longed for John. And John held himself away from Rodney. There was confusion and disappointment colliding in Rodney’s brain and he struggled to keep himself together. Move forward, that was all that was left to any of them now.
However, working side by side in the heat of the day, Rodney felt his frustration increase. He wanted something from John. He couldn’t have it, at least not right now. Whatever had happened between them on that particular day had now passed. A new bond was between them, one of friendship and partnership, and secretly Rodney hated it. He needed more now, and if things couldn’t be that way, he’d prefer to return to their semi-combative snark-fests. He wanted to be on uneven footing with John. This business of being his equal, his peer, his co-worker, was just that - business.
So Rodney returned to what he knew best. Science. Gathering data, analyzing it, these were things that he could do. And they were also things that would win John’s approval, and although it was base, Rodney felt it was desirable.
He began to analyze the crops that the captives were required to farm. A plant akin to cotton, a plant that looked and tasted like corn, other strange things that weren’t as easily categorized. He kept records by using a stick to scratch the surface of the floor in their stark dormitory. He forbid any of the others to step on his research, or interfere with it in any way. This was especially tough with Elizabeth, who no longer was expected by the aliens to work, and just sat inside during the day, lying on her own makeshift bed or walking circles in the room. The first time she walked over his scratchings and destroyed them, he’d yelled at her until John came over and shook him by the arm.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” John hissed.
“She has to understand that this work is very important; it may lead us to clues that can help in our survival.”
“Fuck that. She’s a person, Rodney, a suffering person, you have no right to scream at her like that.”
“I wasn’t screaming,” Rodney said and shook John’s arm off. It was the first time John had touched him in weeks and Rodney wanted to scream now. But instead, he breathed in and went to that meditative place that kept him from getting the electric shock treatment. His “happy place” looked like his lab and there was a large coffee cup involved. And a sandwich, also large.
He retreated to his corner and began all over again to mark down the data.
Elizabeth’s hair had grown long, and her face was tan from the time she’d spent working out in the sun. Without makeup and the restrictive clothing of her professional dress, she looked like a different person. Her wide blue eyes had taken on a new innocence; her face had that sharpness etched in by hunger. Rodney could see how beautiful she was, and wondered that he had never noticed before. He knew that the others noticed too, and he worried still about John seeing her in that way. That was selfish, and Rodney was ashamed of his own jealous thoughts.
But it was Carson Beckett who seemed the most taken by Elizabeth. His caring for her had turned into something else, and soon it was quite palpable in the room they all had to share. Elizabeth needed him, reached for him, and she eventually stopped reaching for John or for Teyla. She was doing better. They were all glad, but none more so than Dr. Beckett. Slowly he was teaching her to talk again, and to regain a realization of the outside world. He was careful not to shock her with too much of their current reality.
Rodney also worried about Teyla. She was undoubtedly beautiful, and he knew that John was deeply aware of her appeal. Once again, he could see John drifting into her orbit, and he spent a lot of time with Teyla and Ford in the evenings, talking, trying to keep hope alive.
So Rodney worked on his statistics. He wrote down whatever he could, wherever he could. When he ran out of room on the dormitory floor, he moved out to the dirt floor of the common area, and explained to the other team members and the other humans what he was doing. They encouraged him and even added to his data when they had something worthwhile to contribute. When he ran out of room there, he began to write in the dirt outside, near the field where they all worked, and prayed that there really was no such thing as a rainstorm on this planet.
His genius was the one thing he could count on not to abandon him.
***
First Contact
Several months had passed, and Rodney decided he couldn’t take it anymore.
It was driving him mad, this lust he had for John. He took out his frustrations on the field. He dug their damn trenches, he picked their damn crops, he shook his fist at the aliens in the distance with their damn binoculars. They didn’t do anything, didn’t even react, but most importantly, they didn’t activate his electric collar. So he continued to make rude gestures in their direction.
One time he even mooned them.
Nothing. No reaction. So he began to write to them. He used his shovel to mark out words in the dirt, careful not to disturb their crops. He didn’t really want to make them mad, but even anger would be better than their aloof distance.
He wrote in big letters, each one about two feet long and one foot wide.
First message: “Hello. My name is Rodney. I am a human being.”
The next day, the message was erased from the dirt. Rodney waited until the end of the day and then took his shovel and left another message: “What is your name?”
Again, the message was erased the next day, so Rodney wrote: “I am a man. Who are you?”
In the morning, he saw again with a sinking heart that the message had been erased. But when he looked closer, he saw that there were small markings in the dirt, tiny letters right at the corner of his message space.
“A man and not a man. My name is Telel.”
Rodney tried not to be too excited. He approached John in the field.
“You know that I’ve been leaving messages for our captors?”
“What?” John said, looking up, squinting at Rodney. “What do you mean, messages?”
“In the dirt, over there,” Rodney said. “Have you seen me doing it?”
“No, I haven’t. I thought you were just doing the Farmer’s Almanac for this piece of shit planet.” John went back to digging.
Asshole, Rodney thought. “No, I have been leaving them messages and today I got one back and I want to make sure it’s not some joke you’re trying to pull on me.”
“I haven’t got time for jokes. Or for making nice with the people who torture us.” John again stopped digging and looked up almost angrily. “So, what did these monsters have to say?”
“One monster,” Rodney said. “I think. He says he is a man and not a man.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means there’s one of them that may be willing to communicate with me.”
“Tell him to return us to Atlantis and then he and all his alien brethren can go fuck themselves.”
“What is your fucking problem, John?” Rodney stepped up to John and made him uncomfortably aware that Rodney was in his personal space. John just turned his head and stared coldly at Rodney. “You’ve been acting like an ass for weeks now, and I thought… I thought…”
“You thought what?” John’s eyes narrowed.
“That they weren’t going to get the better of us. That we were going to win.” Rodney narrowed his own eyes and matched John stare for stare.
“Well, that was when I still had a shred of hope that someone, somewhere, would rescue us, or that I’d be able to figure a way out of this. And I can’t, I…”
“Wait. YOU would figure a way out? It seems you’ve done nothing to try to figure a way out and I’ve been actually doing some real work, which you could give a shit about.”
“This isn’t about you, Rodney.”
“Oh, but it is. It is about me, about you, about all of us. All of us. Not just you. So what? You feel guilty because you were once in charge, Mr. Hotshot Military Man, and now you can’t get us out of this situation? How is this your fault?” Rodney felt a sudden wave of sympathy for John, but he fought it down. It was typical of John to be a bull-headed martyr.
“You’ll never understand.” And John turned away and walked to the other end of the field where he took a basket and began to fill it with tiny cotton balls. He didn’t look back.
Yes, Rodney thought, he would never understand John Sheppard. The man was impossible, unreachable. Whatever he had said to Rodney that one day in the field, whatever had driven him to that kiss, it had passed. It had been false. And Rodney needed it more than ever. But it was clear it was not to be.
Next message: “I am glad you are out there. I want to know you.”
***
38 Minutes
The great city of Atlantis fell in 38 minutes.
Rodney knew because he went into the bathroom at 15:24 to take care of some business. When he later sat shackled in the slave ship, in shock and discomfort, he saw by his watch that it was 16:02.
The Testrons seemed to possess a mechanism similar to the Wraith, which could sweep up beings in a giant silver wave. In fact, Rodney thought at first with unmistakable terror that it was the Wraith. But the ship was nothing like a Wraith hive ship, and then there was the fact that they had not been eaten. Yet, anyway. Plus, the Wraith were not the sort of enemy that would make itself scarce, watching its prisoners from a great distance. They’d be up close and uncomfortably personal.
The next three weeks aboard the slave ship were filled with hunger, pain and confusion. Elizabeth and John kept everyone organized and even made them queue up for food when it fell through a hatch in the ceiling. But the stench became unbearable, and the time became interminable. In the last week, they were, one by one, beamed out of the hold only to return moments later with shiny new collars that delivered painful shocks each time someone let themselves lose control.
When they were finally herded out of the hold and into the glaring light of the planet’s one enormous sun, they were nearly blinded. Shocks told them to go, shocks told them to stay together, shocks told them to file down a set of stone steps into the underground catacombs that would become their home.
No one had seen their captors; no one had been spoken to. They were forced again during the day, to leave the space and to work. Other captives showed them the ropes, warned them not to stop working, showed them the meager store of blankets and rough clothing. They were fed just enough to keep working. Rodney now knew he could actually continue to live without a wide selection of food and lots of it.
Rodney kept a list of all the crew from Atlantis, ones he’d seen and ones he had not. He could not account for all of them, but without knowing any better, he could not assume they were dead. He spotted Radek Zelenka far off in another field one day, but all he could do was wave. Zelenka did not wave back.
Rodney pondered the 38 minutes that had changed their lives. Even the Wraith could not have conquered Atlantis in that time. He felt frustrated by his lack of information, his complete and utter ignorance.
38 minutes. His fingers touched the metal band around his neck. He thought about the Wraith technology used to beam living beings from place to place. He thought about metal that could sense behavior and emotion. Teyla’s Wraith DNA. John’s Ancient DNA. Knowing and not knowing. Rodney had an idea, but it refused to form. It was like a word on the tip of his tongue that wouldn’t come forth.
***
Darkness in Enclosed Spaces
There are an endless number of hours in a regular night for the insomniac. The insomniac can feel the minutes cutting into his skin, pushing him further toward the cold and bright light of morning, and aching, unrelenting fatigue. The sleeper, however, closes his eyes and then opens them, recharged, having no sense of his dreams or the long hours the night presented to him.
Rodney wanted to be a sleeper. More than that, more than anything, he wanted a day off. He wanted a lazy Sunday -- although days of the week had no meaning here - he wanted a chance to sleep, a chance to catch up with himself. Instead, he had hours of empty frustration, staring into the black hole of his own head.
The tiniest bit of light crept in through the doorway of the room at night. The planet had 16 moons and eventually, some pale particles of moonlight found their way through the hatch in the ground and filtered into the square, bare room.
It was mostly sound that Rodney had to go by, and from the sounds he was hearing, he believed that Teyla and Ford were having sex. He tried not to hear, yet strained for every sound. Everyone’s pairing off, he thought, leaving me and John- but he couldn’t allow himself to think that way.
Now, here in the dark, he felt the enormous crackle and pressure of sex, filling the air, growing the divide between the have and the have-nots. But he also heard a new sound now, one that didn’t fit in with Teyla’s small sighs - and coming from his right hand side, not his left. He realized with a sinking heart that Sheppard was awake, and he was… well… touching himself. Rodney could hear the sound of the thin blanket moving and almost seeJohn’s movements and his nakedness in the dark.
It’s too much, Rodney thought. Groaning inwardly, he lifted himself off his pallet quickly, trying not to think about what he was about to do. Moving over John quickly, he had the element of surprise on his side. He pinned John’s hands to his sides, rolling him away from the wall and onto his back. He shoved his knee between John’s legs and pushed them open. John hissed at him, but still didn’t quite know what was happening or exactly who was doing it.
He twisted once, twice, then Rodney’s mouth was on his cock, lips sliding down, and John twitched again, and then stopped fighting. Rodney let his mouth grow warm and wet around him before quietly lifting his head and letting it nod down again. John’s fingers reached out and around, searching, but Rodney didn’t trust what could happen if he let go, so he just pressed John’s wrists tighter into the blanket. John’s fingers came back to grip what they could of Rodney’s, and Rodney felt now that he and John were locked together. He felt another rush of pleasure. He sucked harder and heard John gasp and struggle to breathe quietly.
It was everything, all at once that Rodney wanted: he wanted John, wanted to always have John beneath him, right where he could find him. He felt himself orgasm, then John came forcefully too, and his head knocked back on the floor with a muffled crack. Rodney swallowed, grimaced, then smiled. He released John’s wrists and John brought his hands to Rodney’s face, touching in the dark, feeling. But Rodney knew that John knew exactly who it was.
And Rodney returned to his own pallet and dropped off into his first deep, uninterrupted sleep in weeks. He imagined he felt the collar thrum with pleasure too.
***
Drowning
The next day Rodney woke up with a new sense of purpose. And he felt pretty good about things when the message in the dirt said, “I want to help you.” He was making progress. Hope had returned.
He shoveled ferociously until the midday meal, not looking at John, because he knew that John was looking at him. His brain was spinning with serotonin and the collar seemed to sense it and kept up its low-grade thrum. He realized he wasn’t imagining it after all. The collar liked pleasure, just as much as he himself did. He felt his brain open up and release new theories about their existence here, their captors and the planet. Equations came rushing back to him, and he would allow himself small breaks throughout the day to sneak over to his data in the dirt and scratch furiously so nothing would be lost.
Teyla and Ford sat next to him at the midday meal, which consisted of some strange corn muffin thing, and they engaged him in conversation for the first time in a long time. It seemed sex was helping everyone. John sat near, just looking at all of them, almost dumbfounded.
Rodney wrote, “Help us, please. Tell me what to do.” And then he prepared to wait for the next morning when he would receive another message and perhaps embark on something new. He was full of optimism.
At the end of the day, he and John walked together toward the showers, away from the work fields. They were talking about mundane things; the weather, the roughness of the cotton-bearing plants that ripped up skin and caused blisters on top of blisters, the progress Elizabeth was making with Dr. Beckett.
They entered the long, steel runway with the giant pipes that served as mass showers for all, men and women alike. Everyone had become accustomed to it, showering with strangers, friends and no soap. Low steel walls kept the water flowing down and into the fields. They could stay for minutes or up to one hour there, washing themselves and their clothes, using the rough blankets as towels and letting everything dry during the day. It was a pretty good system, Rodney noted, and he liked that their captors acknowledged the basic need for humans to feel clean.
He jumped under the first open pipe he saw, letting the huge rush of water flush away the dirt and sweat of the day. When he opened his eyes, John was standing right in front of him.
“Hey,” he spluttered.
“Hey. We need to talk.”
“Uh…” Rodney gestured to their current state of nudity. “Now?”
“The only moment we’re going to have to ourselves for the foreseeable future, Rodney. Unless, you’re uncomfortable.” John smirked at this and Rodney wondered if asshole-John was going to make another appearance.
“Just as comfortable as I usually am, naked and surrounded by naked men and women,” Rodney said.
“Which is pretty comfortable I gather,” John said.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I mean, you had no problem with a certain naked man last night.”
“Well, technically, you weren’t totally naked, you still had your shirt on, and at that time, I wasn’t naked myself, along with several strangers,” Rodney began.
John cut him off. “Blah, blah, Rodney. The topic is, as you well know, the presumption you have that that was completely okay.”
“I got the sense that it wasn’t totally not okay. Unexpected maybe, but rather okay, actually.”
John grinned unexpectedly. “And you thought this, why?”
Rodney sighed and stepped back slightly, leaning against the low steel wall and affecting a tired, yet hopefully confident stance. He tried to pay as little attention to his cock as he was able, and tried to pay as little attention to John’s wet body as was humanly possible. John wasn’t going to win this one.
“I thought this, John, because I know you are lonely,” Rodney said. “I know you have feelings that you don’t want to discuss. And I know that I want you, and I want to give you as much comfort as possible in this lonely place. No questions asked.”
“No questions?”
“Only the ones you want to ask,” Rodney said. He lifted his chin and looked John straight in the eye.
“Okay. I want to ask one. Just one.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why?” John said. He was standing with the water splashing up around him, his hair wet and dripping into his eyes, the low sun shining in his face and sparking off the water droplets. Rodney almost laughed at the question. Why? Did John not understand how sexy he was and how wonderful? “Why,” John continued, “When I don’t deserve…”
“You deserve, John,” Rodney said, stepping forward. “You deserve.” He pulled John forward and John didn’t resist. He put his mouth right over John’s and was met with an open-mouthed kiss, this one hungry and anxious.
Rodney pulled away and looked into John’s eyes. “Plus, I love you.”
“This is no place for love.”
“It’s the perfect place.” And Rodney drew John under the water and kept kissing him, barely letting John up for air. He could feel their cocks brushing against each other, could hear, through the water, the other people murmuring, shutting off their water, moving away from the lip-locked lovers. Everyone knew the drill. Pleasure had the right of way.
And Rodney thought, I’m drowning, and I don’t care.
***
Voyeurism
Rodney wasn’t ready to let John go, once he’d gotten a hold of him.
And John didn’t seem to mind, so they stood under the pouring water, making out, until the sun started to go down on the day. Rodney had kissed men and women, and now he’d kissed John. At first there was so much to do, he was completely focused on kissing John, and then he realized that they’d better either break apart, or get a room, because things were definitely going places.
But it took so long to get to this point, that Rodney decided he wasn’t going to miss out on a minute of it. He let his hips rub across John’s and felt the returning pressure. John let his head fall back so Rodney could kiss his neck. Then he slid his hand in between their bodies and wrapped it around their cocks. Rodney groaned into John’s neck and dug his fingers into John’s back. He let John stroke them both until he felt himself come, face buried in John’s shoulder. John thrust himself against Rodney until he came too, and then they slowly drew apart.
Rodney looked over John’s shoulder and his eyes opened wide. “What,” John said fuzzily. “What is it?”
“Um, okay. You’re not going to believe this, but just turn around slowly.” Of course John whipped around, his arm swinging down to retrieve a gun that wasn’t there. Heck, there weren’t even pants there. “Easy John, let’s see what he wants.”
Standing just on the other side of the steel divider, watching them closely and carefully from only yards away, stood a tall figure, dressed from head to foot in brown cloth, with immense red goggles over its eyes.
“What do you want?” John yelled. Rodney just stayed frozen to the spot.
The cloth-covered head turned slightly, looking from Rodney to John. It spoke. “Rodney. I am Telel.” The voice was deep but emotionless. “I wish to know you, too.”
***
Bloody, ESP, Culture Clash
Telel was taciturn, and Rodney had so many questions. He wanted to shake him until his goggles rattled right off his head and make him speak faster. Rodney could do several hundred words a minute, why couldn’t Telel?
Despite their shock, John and Rodney managed to get dressed and were able to process one thing Telel made clear, he would share knowledge of this planet’s Stargate with them, if they would then take him with them to Atlantis.
Rodney stared as Telel carefully moved his hands to describe the Stargate, deep in the center of their planet, on the other side of the continent. Weeks of travel by boat on a large and dangerous river. The sixteenth moon was rising and Rodney felt a spurt of strange joy to see it. He had never seen the sixteenth moon, had always been inside, under the earth by the time it rose. It was the most beautiful one, a deep shade of red, lit up like a lantern by the other moons’ glow.
“Can we get to the Stargate, even if we could travel that far?” Rodney asked.
Telel was forever in answering, but finally said, “There is a ladder. It is how we came up to the surface to live here.”
“Okay, so you know that we want to go there. We want to go back to Atlantis,” Rodney said, stepping all over his own impatience.
“Yes. I am here to help you.” Telel’s pale lips barely moved when he spoke, but his words were clear and resonant.
“Can I ask why you want to help us?” John asked. Smart guy, John, Rodney thought. Motive, this guy needs a motive.
“Yes you can ask,” Telel said. And then he did an unexpected thing. He pulled a knife from beneath his robes, unwrapped his hand, and sliced open his palm.
“Wha,” Rodney said, wincing. He couldn’t turn away. The hand was badly scarred and bent with long, thick nails and deep ridges in the flesh. The blood made a tiny spurt then dripped steadily onto the ground.
“This blood is the combination of Wraith and Ancient,” Telel said. “My people were created by the Ancients, then spurned from their presence when we did not meet their expectations. With the right technology, the technology of the Ancients, I believe I can separate our DNA, and my people can live as humans.”
Things were starting to coalesce in Rodney’s brain. An Ancient Wraith, a creature that was two sides of the coin. A being capable of good and evil, who wanted to be free of the Wraith inside himself.
“You want to use the Ancients’ technology to find a way to separate the Wraith from you?” John asked. “And may I ask how in the hell we can even begin to trust you?”
“Wait, John, wait,” Rodney urged his brain to move faster. “You control us, why don’t you just, you know,” he waved at his own neck, hoping he wasn’t just giving Telel the best idea he’d never had. “Zap us into it.”
Telel removed the wrapping from his other hand to reveal a small device strapped to the underside of his wrist. “This is how we know you.”
“So you can shut it off,” John said. “Now, we’re talking.”
“Not without the others knowing.” Telel paused and looked off to the distance where his brethren were usually perched during the day, watching. “There are many who do not think we should give up our power.”
“And why do you?” Rodney asked.
“We experience what you experience. That is why we prefer pleasure to pain. It is why we fear negative emotion and punish it. However, I believe that my people can one day experience their own pleasure, their own pain, and they should give up the power of controlling others to attain this kind of freedom.”
“So we’re stuck with these collars until…” John stayed focused on the collars.
“You can remove them now,” Telel said serenely.
“Huh? How?” John’s voice was reaching toward a shout.
“The combination of Ancient and Wraith DNA, the combination of the blood. My blood will dissolve the direnium,” he paused and looked at John. “Or, your blood and the Athosian’s.”
“You’re kidding me,” John said. “So we’ve had the means of freeing ourselves all along?” John and Rodney looked at each other incredulously. Rodney tried not to let regret overtake his enthusiasm.
“It takes a substantial amount, but it will remove the direnium collar.” Telel cut deeper into his palm, then placed his hands on Rodney’s neck. The movement was so slow, Rodney didn’t bother to flinch. He just stared at Telel. He now wanted to see his face. Telel worked the blood over the band and Rodney began to feel light-headed. Suddenly his head cleared. He looked down and fragments of the silver substance were falling to the ground like bloody snowflakes.
“Wow. Am I free?” Rodney asked, looking at John. “Am I really free?” He felt his neck, warm and wet with blood. “John, quick, say something to piss me off!”
“You’re pretty stupid for a genius,” John said.
“Oh, that’s not working, I’m just too happy right now.” Rodney walked in a slow circle, rubbing his neck, trying to think of something sad.
“We’ve got to get it off of Elizabeth. We can, can’t we?” John asked.
“If our bargain stands,” Telel said, “You may free those you feel you must. We must set out now, while it is still dark, before the others determine our plan.” Telel paused and seemed to search for words. Rodney and John held their breath, waiting. “And you must leave behind those unfit for travel.”
“Oh, oh,” Rodney was practically jumping up and down, “We’ve got a bargain, yes we do. We’d shake on it if, well, if your hand wasn’t all bloody.”
“Leave some behind.” John was frowning.
“When we get back to Atlantis, we’ll fire up a puddle jumper and come back for them.” Rodney was buzzing. “Let Telel dissolve your collar.”
“In fact,” Telel intoned. “It may be safer to leave the others enslaved and travel in a small party to the Stargate. It is an arduous journey, and you will not wish the other humans to be punished if it is discovered you are gone and they are not wearing collars.” He again looked to the distance, where the low hills were covered in shadow. “My people can be fierce fighters despite their reluctance to interact, and would not tolerate it if they knew you were escaping.”
“Won’t we be discovered missing?” Rodney felt a small worry bite at the back of his mind.
“As long as I wear my device, I am able to transmit that I am monitoring you. I am responsible for the six Atlanteans in cell 24-97. Your cell.”
“Us,” John said. “All of us. Elizabeth too.” He seemed visibly relieved. “Rodney, let’s do this.”
“I’ve been on board for 10 minutes now,” Rodney said, thoughtfully. “But then, you knew I would be, didn’t you?” He turned to Telel.
“Yes. It is your genius, and your passion that has indicated to me the moment has come for my people. The collar tells us much.”
Rodney puffed out his chest. “Hear that, John?” He smirked. “My genius. My passion. My…”
“Your will to live? In spite of the fact that I am about to kill you with my bare hands?”
“Ah-ah,” Rodney tsked. “Who’s still wearing his collar?”
John’s smile disappeared. “Um, Telel? Could you, you know, bleed on me now?”
***
The First Night
Ford elected to go with Rodney, John and Telel. Teyla elected to stay, in case their journey wasn’t successful, so that her blood could help free the other humans if it came down to that.
Ford and Teyla had a quick and painful goodbye. Rodney felt a lump in his throat as he bid good bye to Carson, and he could see John was having similar trouble as he held and caressed Elizabeth, putting her hands up so she could feel her bare neck. God, Rodney loved that man.
Teyla began a written calendar on the floor of the room, so she could keep track of how long they’d been gone. If they didn’t return at a certain time, she would begin plans for an uprising.
Telel motioned for them to follow him when they returned above ground. His long robes swept the ground as he walked and Rodney reminded himself that he was going to see the tall figure ahead of him for many, many miles. John fell behind and stood looking back over the fields. Rodney noticed and circled back around to come up alongside him.
“John, time to go,” Rodney said.
“I’ll be along,” John said. “Just saying goodbye.”
Rodney pulled John’s right hand over and pressed his fingers along its calluses, smoothing the hand between his own. “It’s only the first of a lot of long nights, you know.”
“I know.”
“I’ll be with you.”
“I know.”
“So let’s go.”
“Promise me,” John said, “That you won’t let anything happen to prevent us from coming back for them.”
“I promise.” And Rodney meant it.
“Promise me,” John said again, “That you won’t let anything happen to you now that I’ve really found you.”
“I promise, John.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
Rodney turned and they began walking side-by-side. His first night of freedom felt like the first night of the rest of his life.