Fic: Ex igne veritas (McKay/Sheppard, PG13)
Title: Ex igne veritas
Author: krystalicekitsu
Recipient: sundaydriver
Pairing: John/Rodney
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2216
Warnings: None. Maybe a bit of language.
Author's Note: Happy holiday season, my dear!
Summary: For the record, John would like it known that this was not his fault.
-o-
For the record, John would like it known that this was not his fault.
"This is why you do not touch things, flyboy!"
Not even slightly.
"'Oh, look, it's a big freaking button, I think I'll push it!' does not intelligence make!"
John kicks the bulkhead.
"Oh, yes," Rodney snaps, "That's sure to help, why don't you go kick the rest of the fifty-thousand year old equipment?"
John does his best to fight off a glare, but honestly doesn't put much effort into it. He loosens the collar on his jacket and pushes his sleeves up, because if being stuck with Rodney in a trying-to-be-consumed-by-lava jumper for six and a half hours with only a shield between them and certain death wasn't killing his patience there was, oh yeah. All that lava.
Hot lava.
Incredibly, incredibly hot lava.
"'Oh I wonder what this does, let's push it!'" Rodney's glare is digging into the side of his head.
"'Oh, hey, Wraith, let's piss it off!'" John snaps back. Patience, what patience?
"That was not me," Rodney takes the time to look up from his tablet to poke a finger in John's face. He desperately wants to bite it off.
"That? Was not me. I didn't-,"
"That was completely you!" John growls. Fuck patience. He's been stuck in a hotbox with Rodney McKay for seven hours.
"I did no such thi-"
"'These are calculations? My four year old niece can do more advanced calculations!'" John quotes. Verbatim. It's not hard to remember the words directly preceding gunfire being directed his way.
"If you just hadn't opened your big mou-," John continues.
"My- excuse me, now?"
"And for the record, Rodney, I don't just go pressing random buttons; I thought I was initiating internal security protocols-not initializing the self-destruct!" John bites out.
"So the one time you decide to blow us all to hell that was actually unintentional is suddenly a freebie? Apparently the Ancients were just as concerned as you are about clear communication!"
"Don't you even start about ‘clear communication' with me, Mr Let's-Write-All-My-Notes-In-Shorthand-From-Hell! I've had high school boyfriends who communicated better than you do," John retorts.
Rodney throws his hands up, and starts shouting, "Well, maybe if people were more trustworthy-"
"Maybe if someone actually learned how to trust people in the first place, they wouldn't keep seeing betrayal everywhere!" John shouts.
Rodney snarls and throws a pudding cup at him. It runs like water when it explodes against the super-heated hull.
"So mature, Rodney!" John yells.
Rodney throws a fork at him.
"Maybe," Rodney shrieks, "Maybe if someone else would stop parading himself around every woman on every planet in the Pegasus Galaxy, certain people wouldn't have a reason to!"
"I don't ‘parade myself'!" John shouts. Fucking ridiculous. Parade himself? He has a hard enough time getting them to leave him alone in the first place.
Rodney throws the other fork at him.
"That's certainly what it looks like!"
That's the stupidest thing he's ever heard. He tries to make friends who don't want to kill them and take over the city, or steal all their C4. Maybe some nice friends who have a spare, unwanted ZPM lying around and won't get fanatical when they want to take it back to Atlantis.
"If you don't get us out of here, right now, Rodney, I'm going to shoot you," John growls.
"I. Am. Trying, Sheppard!" Rodney hisses back at him and John can see the flicker of thought when he contemplates hurling the tablet at John's head. He holds off, though. Rodney would never treat his tech that way, clear-headed. More consideration than he ever gave John.
Gritting his teeth, John spins about and marches himself right back into the impossibly hotter cockpit. He rotates his neck. Pulls his sleeves back up. Wipes his forehead on his shoulder.
Then gives it all up for a lost cause and strips his jacket and vest off. There's nothing in here that could possibly shoot him-unless you count Rodney, but at this point, John's fairly sure he's going to be the emergent homicidal maniac of the pair of them, so that's perfectly fine. It's just so damn hot.
"Have you fixed it yet, McKay?"
John can feel the glare directed at the back of his head, the weighted pause before a Rodney storm, but the feeling dies down to a dull simmer and he instead gets a snapped, "No, Colonel, I haven't fixed it yet."
John lets that sit there for a moment.
"I can't do anything if you don't tell me what the problem is, McKay."
The dull simmer turns sharp for a half second before being bottled up again.
"Well, Colonel, when I know what the problem is, I'll tell you."
John thinks for a moment. And another one.
"I wasn't talking about the jumper, Rodney."
The aggressive finger tapping he's been listening to for the past six and a half hours turns contemplative. A bead of sweat finishes its long fight with gravity and trickles down behind his ear.
~*~
"No word, yet?" Elizabeth asks.
Teyla shakes her head. "It seems that the inhabitants of Mythan had been preparing for such an eventuality, and have evacuated to another world. Dr Zelenka believes that the jumper's shields will protect them for a time, but does not know why they haven't flown back. He says that the drive pods might be damaged, but the radiation from the volcano is making it impossible to contact John and Rodney and confirm."
"Or they could be dead," Ronon puts out.
Elizabeth sighs, "That's one theory I'm not considering right now, as viable as it might be."
"Well," Ronon adds, "At least it's McKay and Sheppard."
Teyla raises an eyebrow, "I'm not sure I understand, Evan; how is this in their favour?"
Ronon shrugs, "Nothing ever seems to kill those two."
They all think about this for a second.
"Have you ever noticed that the amount of trouble those two get into is staggeringly high?" Lorne muses.
Elizabeth ponders this. "I'm not sure there's an astronomical number high enough to calculate the number of times they've defied the laws of probability."
"And yet," Lorne says, "they're still alive."
~*~
Still hot.
Hot.
Hot.
Very hot.
Think about something else, John tells himself.
Ice cubes-would melt right now.
Snow cones-flavoured puddles.
A blizzard-hissing sheets of steam.
Deep space, dead space-decompression sickness or death fro-
John sits up. "Still nothing, McKay?"
He waits.
"McKay?"
He turns-
to see Rodney sitting down, slumped against the bench seat in the back, his face bright red.
"Rodney!"
He grabs Rodney's shoulder (when did he get aft?) and lifts him up. There's a brighter line of red down his face and left arm where it'd been pressed against the metal. A bit up near his eye is starting to blister.
"Damnit," John hisses and drags his canteen to him from the far corner with one foot. Rodney's breathing is fast and shallow and is making his gut twist in Gordian knots.
"Wake up, McKay," he hisses, wrenching on the canteen's cap.
Rodney's eyes flicker at him.
"Drink," he orders, and places the canteen to Rodney's mouth.
Rodney makes a face and tries to turn away, and John wants to throttle him.
"Drink, Rodney!"
That face again, and John growls before taking a mouthful and kissing Rodney. Rodney swallows most of it, and slurs out, "That was disgusting, don't do that again."
"Drink, then, you ass," John hisses.
"No."
"And why not?" John tries for unemotional, but he's hot and tired and worried and angry and a little hungry and there's only so much of that he can keep out of his voice.
"Can't fix it," Rodney explains.
"Yes, you can," John argues. "You can fix anything."
Rodney huffs a laugh.
"Not us," Rodney says.
John pauses.
"Rodney," he explains, because this is important, this is vitally important, "We aren't broken."
"Yes we are," Rodney smiles sadly at him, "You don't think and I don't listen. And we're too stubborn to admit it."
John swallows. "You just did."
"Me? I'm dying from heatstroke, I have an excuse," Rodney chuckles and the sound constricts like razor wire around John's heart.
"No, you're not," John protests. Lies. Because Rodney's skin is sticky with old sweat, not new sweat, and his skin isn't erasing the pressure marks from the seat, and-
"Why don't you want to drink, Rodney?" John asks softly.
"Because," Rodney explains just as softly, "Zelenka will insist on searching for us, and the water won't stretch for two under these conditions for the four point six hours more that it'll take him to find us."
John bows his head to Rodney's chest.
"Hey," Rodney says, "its fine. There's a slim chance they'll find us in the next twenty four-five, twenty five minutes."
John says nothing. Can say nothing.
"John."
John stays silent.
"John."
"Why can't you fix it?" John asks.
"Because the place I need to be to fix it is outside. And we don't have the level of heat protection I'd need to even think about doing that," Rodney explains.
John thinks. "There's no way to do it from in here?"
"Not with what we have."
John looks up, "What do you need?"
~*~
"-three teams, starting from their last known location and working outwards in a spiral pattern," Weir says.
"Dr Zelenka has modified the life signs detectors to work with the ship's external sensors in a very tight-beam scan, so you'll have to stay within 500 yards of the surface; any greater than that, and the radiation will overpower the readings and swamp the signal," Lorne continues.
"Be advised," Elizabeth says, "John and Rodney have been out of contact for ten hours now. Dr Carson says that they'll be entering the early stages of heatstroke, if they've rationed their water well; they very possibly will be hallucinating, and we can't use sedatives because the dose to put them under might kill them.
"According to the simulations Dr Zelenka has been running, the average exterior temperature on the planet is in the range of six to seven hundred Celsius. In order to not damage the drive pods, you'll have to return to the outer atmosphere every ninety minutes," she finishes.
"Wait, ninety minutes? That's-that's about… Just over two thousand kilometers covered before we have to go to up. That'll take way too long!" A marine protests.
"We're aware," Lorne replies grimly.
"We know you're concerned; we are, too. But the best way to help Rodney and the Colonel is to avoid injuries or repairs that might slow down the search even more. The last thing they need is for us to be rescuing their rescuers," Elizabeth says.
She looks out over the twenty one people gathered in front of her. Soldiers and scientists and medics alike. John and Rodney did this, she thinks. People who had viewed each other with contempt learning from the unlikely and unconventional friendship of their respective leaders.
"Bring them home," she tells them, but knows she doesn't have to.
They'd do it anyway.
"Move out!" Lorne orders and they do, a well-oiled machine of trust and camaraderie. They won't let each other fall. They don't know how.
~*~
"Wait, wait-I think I have something."
Zelenka leans over Lorne's chair, and, yep.
"That is certainly a ‘something'," he replies.
"Now to just see if it is our ‘something'."
~*~
Digging down through actively flowing lava isn't so much digging as it is flash-freezing several hundred feet of solid rock, and then blasting away until they have a glowing, shield-protected egg.
Then remotely convincing the jumper inside the shield to open up, while extending their shield to match frequencies-which is not as easy as Rodney makes it look, let Radek tell you.
When they get inside, they're not met with any scene they'd planned for.
"Shut the door, Lorne; you're letting all the cold out!" Sheppard protests.
Evan looks down at the fog that swirls about his ankles for fractions of a second before evaporating away.
"Sir?"
Sheppard toasts him with his canteen before taking a drink.
Evan swears he hears ice cubes.
He turns to look at McKay.
Dr McKay is hunched in a corner, poking at what looks like a pudding cup, but clinks when he taps his spoon against it.
"I think we made pudding-cicles, Colonel," he complains.
"I told you," Sheppard replies as he stands and starts to gather his gear, "Freezing temperature of Snack Pack pudding cups is negative fifteen C for twenty five minutes."
"And you still won't tell me how you know," McKay points the spoon at him.
Sheppard smiles, slow and easy, and says nothing.
"Communication, Sheppard!" McKay accuses.
"Classified," the Colonel retorts, rocking back on his heels. He has his vest back on now. His jacket dangles from his left hand and he hauls McKay up with his right.
"Come on, Rodney; let's let the nice medics poke and prod your blisters."
"Or not! My blisters are perfectly fine, thank you, without any need for backwater superstition."
Sheppard smiles and says nothing as he hands his teammate off to the waiting medics.
Astronomical, Weir had said.
Evan wonders if there's a higher number than that.
Author: krystalicekitsu
Recipient: sundaydriver
Pairing: John/Rodney
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2216
Warnings: None. Maybe a bit of language.
Author's Note: Happy holiday season, my dear!
Summary: For the record, John would like it known that this was not his fault.
-o-
For the record, John would like it known that this was not his fault.
"This is why you do not touch things, flyboy!"
Not even slightly.
"'Oh, look, it's a big freaking button, I think I'll push it!' does not intelligence make!"
John kicks the bulkhead.
"Oh, yes," Rodney snaps, "That's sure to help, why don't you go kick the rest of the fifty-thousand year old equipment?"
John does his best to fight off a glare, but honestly doesn't put much effort into it. He loosens the collar on his jacket and pushes his sleeves up, because if being stuck with Rodney in a trying-to-be-consumed-by-lava jumper for six and a half hours with only a shield between them and certain death wasn't killing his patience there was, oh yeah. All that lava.
Hot lava.
Incredibly, incredibly hot lava.
"'Oh I wonder what this does, let's push it!'" Rodney's glare is digging into the side of his head.
"'Oh, hey, Wraith, let's piss it off!'" John snaps back. Patience, what patience?
"That was not me," Rodney takes the time to look up from his tablet to poke a finger in John's face. He desperately wants to bite it off.
"That? Was not me. I didn't-,"
"That was completely you!" John growls. Fuck patience. He's been stuck in a hotbox with Rodney McKay for seven hours.
"I did no such thi-"
"'These are calculations? My four year old niece can do more advanced calculations!'" John quotes. Verbatim. It's not hard to remember the words directly preceding gunfire being directed his way.
"If you just hadn't opened your big mou-," John continues.
"My- excuse me, now?"
"And for the record, Rodney, I don't just go pressing random buttons; I thought I was initiating internal security protocols-not initializing the self-destruct!" John bites out.
"So the one time you decide to blow us all to hell that was actually unintentional is suddenly a freebie? Apparently the Ancients were just as concerned as you are about clear communication!"
"Don't you even start about ‘clear communication' with me, Mr Let's-Write-All-My-Notes-In-Shorthand-From-Hell! I've had high school boyfriends who communicated better than you do," John retorts.
Rodney throws his hands up, and starts shouting, "Well, maybe if people were more trustworthy-"
"Maybe if someone actually learned how to trust people in the first place, they wouldn't keep seeing betrayal everywhere!" John shouts.
Rodney snarls and throws a pudding cup at him. It runs like water when it explodes against the super-heated hull.
"So mature, Rodney!" John yells.
Rodney throws a fork at him.
"Maybe," Rodney shrieks, "Maybe if someone else would stop parading himself around every woman on every planet in the Pegasus Galaxy, certain people wouldn't have a reason to!"
"I don't ‘parade myself'!" John shouts. Fucking ridiculous. Parade himself? He has a hard enough time getting them to leave him alone in the first place.
Rodney throws the other fork at him.
"That's certainly what it looks like!"
That's the stupidest thing he's ever heard. He tries to make friends who don't want to kill them and take over the city, or steal all their C4. Maybe some nice friends who have a spare, unwanted ZPM lying around and won't get fanatical when they want to take it back to Atlantis.
"If you don't get us out of here, right now, Rodney, I'm going to shoot you," John growls.
"I. Am. Trying, Sheppard!" Rodney hisses back at him and John can see the flicker of thought when he contemplates hurling the tablet at John's head. He holds off, though. Rodney would never treat his tech that way, clear-headed. More consideration than he ever gave John.
Gritting his teeth, John spins about and marches himself right back into the impossibly hotter cockpit. He rotates his neck. Pulls his sleeves back up. Wipes his forehead on his shoulder.
Then gives it all up for a lost cause and strips his jacket and vest off. There's nothing in here that could possibly shoot him-unless you count Rodney, but at this point, John's fairly sure he's going to be the emergent homicidal maniac of the pair of them, so that's perfectly fine. It's just so damn hot.
"Have you fixed it yet, McKay?"
John can feel the glare directed at the back of his head, the weighted pause before a Rodney storm, but the feeling dies down to a dull simmer and he instead gets a snapped, "No, Colonel, I haven't fixed it yet."
John lets that sit there for a moment.
"I can't do anything if you don't tell me what the problem is, McKay."
The dull simmer turns sharp for a half second before being bottled up again.
"Well, Colonel, when I know what the problem is, I'll tell you."
John thinks for a moment. And another one.
"I wasn't talking about the jumper, Rodney."
The aggressive finger tapping he's been listening to for the past six and a half hours turns contemplative. A bead of sweat finishes its long fight with gravity and trickles down behind his ear.
~*~
"No word, yet?" Elizabeth asks.
Teyla shakes her head. "It seems that the inhabitants of Mythan had been preparing for such an eventuality, and have evacuated to another world. Dr Zelenka believes that the jumper's shields will protect them for a time, but does not know why they haven't flown back. He says that the drive pods might be damaged, but the radiation from the volcano is making it impossible to contact John and Rodney and confirm."
"Or they could be dead," Ronon puts out.
Elizabeth sighs, "That's one theory I'm not considering right now, as viable as it might be."
"Well," Ronon adds, "At least it's McKay and Sheppard."
Teyla raises an eyebrow, "I'm not sure I understand, Evan; how is this in their favour?"
Ronon shrugs, "Nothing ever seems to kill those two."
They all think about this for a second.
"Have you ever noticed that the amount of trouble those two get into is staggeringly high?" Lorne muses.
Elizabeth ponders this. "I'm not sure there's an astronomical number high enough to calculate the number of times they've defied the laws of probability."
"And yet," Lorne says, "they're still alive."
~*~
Still hot.
Hot.
Hot.
Very hot.
Think about something else, John tells himself.
Ice cubes-would melt right now.
Snow cones-flavoured puddles.
A blizzard-hissing sheets of steam.
Deep space, dead space-decompression sickness or death fro-
John sits up. "Still nothing, McKay?"
He waits.
"McKay?"
He turns-
to see Rodney sitting down, slumped against the bench seat in the back, his face bright red.
"Rodney!"
He grabs Rodney's shoulder (when did he get aft?) and lifts him up. There's a brighter line of red down his face and left arm where it'd been pressed against the metal. A bit up near his eye is starting to blister.
"Damnit," John hisses and drags his canteen to him from the far corner with one foot. Rodney's breathing is fast and shallow and is making his gut twist in Gordian knots.
"Wake up, McKay," he hisses, wrenching on the canteen's cap.
Rodney's eyes flicker at him.
"Drink," he orders, and places the canteen to Rodney's mouth.
Rodney makes a face and tries to turn away, and John wants to throttle him.
"Drink, Rodney!"
That face again, and John growls before taking a mouthful and kissing Rodney. Rodney swallows most of it, and slurs out, "That was disgusting, don't do that again."
"Drink, then, you ass," John hisses.
"No."
"And why not?" John tries for unemotional, but he's hot and tired and worried and angry and a little hungry and there's only so much of that he can keep out of his voice.
"Can't fix it," Rodney explains.
"Yes, you can," John argues. "You can fix anything."
Rodney huffs a laugh.
"Not us," Rodney says.
John pauses.
"Rodney," he explains, because this is important, this is vitally important, "We aren't broken."
"Yes we are," Rodney smiles sadly at him, "You don't think and I don't listen. And we're too stubborn to admit it."
John swallows. "You just did."
"Me? I'm dying from heatstroke, I have an excuse," Rodney chuckles and the sound constricts like razor wire around John's heart.
"No, you're not," John protests. Lies. Because Rodney's skin is sticky with old sweat, not new sweat, and his skin isn't erasing the pressure marks from the seat, and-
"Why don't you want to drink, Rodney?" John asks softly.
"Because," Rodney explains just as softly, "Zelenka will insist on searching for us, and the water won't stretch for two under these conditions for the four point six hours more that it'll take him to find us."
John bows his head to Rodney's chest.
"Hey," Rodney says, "its fine. There's a slim chance they'll find us in the next twenty four-five, twenty five minutes."
John says nothing. Can say nothing.
"John."
John stays silent.
"John."
"Why can't you fix it?" John asks.
"Because the place I need to be to fix it is outside. And we don't have the level of heat protection I'd need to even think about doing that," Rodney explains.
John thinks. "There's no way to do it from in here?"
"Not with what we have."
John looks up, "What do you need?"
~*~
"-three teams, starting from their last known location and working outwards in a spiral pattern," Weir says.
"Dr Zelenka has modified the life signs detectors to work with the ship's external sensors in a very tight-beam scan, so you'll have to stay within 500 yards of the surface; any greater than that, and the radiation will overpower the readings and swamp the signal," Lorne continues.
"Be advised," Elizabeth says, "John and Rodney have been out of contact for ten hours now. Dr Carson says that they'll be entering the early stages of heatstroke, if they've rationed their water well; they very possibly will be hallucinating, and we can't use sedatives because the dose to put them under might kill them.
"According to the simulations Dr Zelenka has been running, the average exterior temperature on the planet is in the range of six to seven hundred Celsius. In order to not damage the drive pods, you'll have to return to the outer atmosphere every ninety minutes," she finishes.
"Wait, ninety minutes? That's-that's about… Just over two thousand kilometers covered before we have to go to up. That'll take way too long!" A marine protests.
"We're aware," Lorne replies grimly.
"We know you're concerned; we are, too. But the best way to help Rodney and the Colonel is to avoid injuries or repairs that might slow down the search even more. The last thing they need is for us to be rescuing their rescuers," Elizabeth says.
She looks out over the twenty one people gathered in front of her. Soldiers and scientists and medics alike. John and Rodney did this, she thinks. People who had viewed each other with contempt learning from the unlikely and unconventional friendship of their respective leaders.
"Bring them home," she tells them, but knows she doesn't have to.
They'd do it anyway.
"Move out!" Lorne orders and they do, a well-oiled machine of trust and camaraderie. They won't let each other fall. They don't know how.
~*~
"Wait, wait-I think I have something."
Zelenka leans over Lorne's chair, and, yep.
"That is certainly a ‘something'," he replies.
"Now to just see if it is our ‘something'."
~*~
Digging down through actively flowing lava isn't so much digging as it is flash-freezing several hundred feet of solid rock, and then blasting away until they have a glowing, shield-protected egg.
Then remotely convincing the jumper inside the shield to open up, while extending their shield to match frequencies-which is not as easy as Rodney makes it look, let Radek tell you.
When they get inside, they're not met with any scene they'd planned for.
"Shut the door, Lorne; you're letting all the cold out!" Sheppard protests.
Evan looks down at the fog that swirls about his ankles for fractions of a second before evaporating away.
"Sir?"
Sheppard toasts him with his canteen before taking a drink.
Evan swears he hears ice cubes.
He turns to look at McKay.
Dr McKay is hunched in a corner, poking at what looks like a pudding cup, but clinks when he taps his spoon against it.
"I think we made pudding-cicles, Colonel," he complains.
"I told you," Sheppard replies as he stands and starts to gather his gear, "Freezing temperature of Snack Pack pudding cups is negative fifteen C for twenty five minutes."
"And you still won't tell me how you know," McKay points the spoon at him.
Sheppard smiles, slow and easy, and says nothing.
"Communication, Sheppard!" McKay accuses.
"Classified," the Colonel retorts, rocking back on his heels. He has his vest back on now. His jacket dangles from his left hand and he hauls McKay up with his right.
"Come on, Rodney; let's let the nice medics poke and prod your blisters."
"Or not! My blisters are perfectly fine, thank you, without any need for backwater superstition."
Sheppard smiles and says nothing as he hands his teammate off to the waiting medics.
Astronomical, Weir had said.
Evan wonders if there's a higher number than that.