Fic: When the Rain Washes You Clean You'll Know- by linziday
Title: When the Rain Washes You Clean You'll Know
Author: linziday
Genre: Gen/ angst/ whump/ friendship
Rating: PG13 (cursing)
Spoliers: Takes place immediately before season 1's The Storm and The Eye. In fact, those two eps resolve this fic, so if you haven't seen them, you may feel this lacking.
Prompt: Written for kriadydragon, who asked for a fic in which John took offense to an insult of Rodney's. Her specifics: The source of the insult either Rodney being deliberately cruel for a reason or an accident. Reconciliation. Rodney, and therefore the reader, coming to learn something about John we didn't know before - maybe something about him as a person, maybe something about his past (not a must but would be really nice). Physical whump would be nice, but, again, not a must.
Summary: Rodney says something he shouldn't. John believes something about himself he shouldn't.
A/N: Thank you to sharpes_hussy and wildcat88 for beta-ing! Title comes from the Fleetwood Mac song "Dreams."
** Note: The Storm immediately follows this fic. This may be considered a kind of pre-tag or missing scene. Um. Maybe.
It starts in the morning, but John’s able to ignore it. Mostly. A couple of aspirin from the small first aid kit in his room and he’s good to go, even if his head pounds to the same beat as his feet during his run.
By noon the thudding is deeper, behind his right temple, and harder to ignore. John downs his last two aspirin with a slug of coffee in the mess hall, hoping the caffeine will make the pills work faster. He considers grabbing a sandwich while he’s there, but his stomach protests even the smell of food and he’d rather the aspirin and coffee not make a reappearance. He just got out of the infirmary the night before. He’s really not eager to go back.
John’s leaving the mess when he nearly collides with Rodney.
“Sheppardl! There you are!” Rodney shouts. Or maybe doesn’t shout. Since no one else in the mess looks ready to tackle Rodney to the ground and cover his mouth with duct tape, John’s willing to admit the headache may be making him a little sensitive to noise.
“Hey, buddy,” he answers and, yeah, okay, even his own voice makes his head pound. He grits his teeth against the pain and says, lowering his voice to the softer end of normal, “What’s up?”
“Twelve hours!” Rodney exclaims, poking John in the chest for emphasis. “I spent twelve hours on your jumper.”
It takes John longer than it probably should to figure out what the hell Rodney is talking about. Then he remembers Jumper One’s sluggish interface while they were fleeing MX1-124 yesterday. He’d insisted that something was wrong, even when Rodney’s on-the-fly diagnostic came up clean. “What’d you find?”
“Nothing,” Rodney says as if the answer should have been obvious. “It’s working perfectly.”
John starts to nod, but the headache ratchets up a notch. “Okay. Thanks.”
Rodney stares at him, incredulous. “What? That’s it?”
John scowls. Apparently caffeine doesn’t make aspirin work any faster, and standing here - talking, listening, fighting the urge to cradle his head in his hands and moan - isn’t helping. “What do you want, McKay, a medal?”
Rodney blinks. “No, I - ”
“Look,” John says and moves toward the door. He really needs to get out of here. “I owe you one, all right?”
John’s halfway down the hall, focus on the transporter dead ahead, when he hears Rodney call after him, “I’m holding you to that!”
--
On his way to his room, John radios Teyla to cancel their sparring appointment and Bates to move their inventory meeting to tomorrow. As soon as he’s far enough through the door, he collapses on his bed and passes out.
When John wakes, his room is dark, illuminated only by the thin sliver of moonlight that slants through the window. He’s heavy with sleep, saturated, and it takes him a long time to fully swim up from unconsciousness. Then he really wishes he hadn’t.
It feels like someone has taken a hammer to his skull.
John bumps up the lights, thinking of rifling through his bathroom for any stray pain pills. But even quarter-strength light sends an extra spike of pain through his head and makes his stomach roil. It’s only then that it dawns on him what this is. A migraine. He has a friggin’ migraine.
Forget the stray pain pills - he needs the infirmary. Dammit. It’ll mean hours of scans and blood work, and at the end of it all Beckett will dose him up and make him stay overnight. He’ll probably tell him this is what he gets for leaving the infirmary early with a concussion. And next time it’ll be impossible to convince him to let him go.
John hoists himself up and off the bed, staggering a couple of steps before he gets his feet under him. He needs something for this headache, and if he has to swallow his pride and go to the infirmary to get it, then he -
Or.
Rodney has migraines.
Rodney keeps a stash of migraine medication. Rodney should be willing to share his stash of migraine medication.
John glances at his bedside clock, squinting against the glowing numbers halfway across the room. It’s only 11 p.m. Rodney will still be in his lab.
--
The hall lights are dimmed for night, so the throbbing eases back. Still, the pain’s distracting enough that John pays more attention to it than to where he’s going and he overshoots Rodney’s lab by a good hundred feet. It’s only when he’s at the end of the hallway, facing a solid wall, that he thinks he should probably turn around.
Mercifully, when he finally gets there, the lights in the lab are dim as well. He finds Rodney at his workbench, a hunched shadow framed by the glow of a laptop screen. Rodney looks up, his movements slow and tired. Then his eyes widen with relief.
“Thank god!” Rodney says and thrusts a piece of Ancient equipment at him. “Here, touch this.”
John does what he’s started doing when Rodney demands that he light up a hereto-unknown object: He shoves his hands in his pockets. “What is it?”
“Controlling unit for the water purification system in the residential wing.” Rodney shakes the device under John’s nose. “C’mon, chop chop.”
Even in pain, John can’t help winding Rodney up. “What the hell? The great Rodney McKay needs me?”
Rodney scoffs, a sound that’s probably meant to be hard and sarcastic but which just comes out tired. “What I need is the strongest ATA gene in the city so I can get this thing fixed. And since that gene just happens to be attached to you. . . . ” He shakes the device again.
John notes how pale Rodney is. He’s got dark smudges under his eyes and his hand is trembling. Rodney’s a half step from collapsing from exhaustion, but John knows from experience that he won’t leave until he’s fixed the problem. John reaches for the device.
But as soon as his fingers brush the smooth metal, pain explodes behind his eyes. He yanks his hand away and the headache drops back from excruciating to merely agonizing.
“Sheppard, come on, it’s not going to bite you. Just play light switch for two minutes so I can figure out what’s wrong, fix it, and finally get some sleep.”
John swallows hard against a wave of nausea. “Listen, Rodney, I -
“Oh, no, no, no. No you don’t!” Rodney points at him accusingly. “You owe me. You. Owe. Me.”
“Rodney -”
“No! Look, I’ve been awake for 45 hours. First MX1-124. Then diagnostics on the jumper you insisted was, and I quote, ‘acting hinky.’ And now this.” He brandishes the device as if torn between throwing it down on the desk and throwing it at John. “And I’m pretty sure we’d like this working since our water contains, oh, about a thousand alien microbes.”
John leans against the closest worktable, going for casual. No-one-about-to-fall-over-here, even though he kind of is.
Rodney takes it as something else.
“I’m so glad you aren’t troubled by our imminent death from water poisoning.” Rodney huffs angrily and swivels back to the computer. He flaps his hand at John dismissively. “You know, just go. Go. Forget it. I’ll deal with it myself.”
“Rodney,” John grinds out, “if you’d just shut up a minute and listen -”
“What, Major? What’s the problem?” Rodney whirls around. “You can’t take two minutes to help me because you, what, have something more pressing to attend to? There’s a wall that desperately needs you to slouch against it? Teyla urgently needs to hit you with sticks? What?”
“I have a headache!” John shouts and, shit, that makes his head want to explode right there. Spots dance in front of his eyes for a moment and when they clear, Rodney is staring at him incredulously.
“A headache?”
“Yeah.”
“A headache,” Rodney says flatly.
“Yes.”
“That’s the best you could come up with?”
John pushes off the worktable to stand straight.
“No, really, I want to know,” Rodney continues, his words dripping with sarcasm. “Because if that’s the best lie you can come up with - I have a headache - I seriously question your ability to head security around here. I can just see it now: I’m taken hostage and the only thing you can think of to distract the guy with a knife to my throat is ‘Hey, look over there!’”
John turns to leave, his jaws clenched to keep from shouting back at Rodney - a move he’s pretty sure would cause his head to split open.
“Yeah, sure, just walk off, Major. Leave me to save the city again.”
The infirmary is looking better every second.
“It’s not like I need you!” Rodney shouts after him. “None of us needs you!”
John whirls around. The room spins sickeningly, but he pushes through it, pushes forward. He snatches the device from Rodney’s hand.
Everything explodes in white light and pain.
--
John wakes up a day later.
Beckett fusses at him for a while, adjusting the IV and checking readouts and using words like “aggravated trauma,” “subdural hematoma,” and “daft bugger.”
“And if you think I’m ever letting you out early again, Major, you’ve got another thing coming,” he says, patting John’s shoulder.
John’s on the good drugs, floaty and without pain. So he doesn’t notice when Beckett leaves or when Teyla and Ford come in. Suddenly they’re just there, sitting in chairs on either side of his bed, lulling him back to sleep with murmured conversation.
John can’t help drifting off, even as he looks at the empty third chair.
--
Beckett releases him to light duty two days later. By then he’s drug free, pain free and bored out of his mind. John escapes the infirmary with the vague plan to find something to do. Anything.
But he’s not cleared for missions, Carson won’t let him fly a jumper, and Teyla laughs at him when he suggests sparring. (Actually, she offers him her best diplomatic smile and suggests he might find meditating in his quarters soothing. So. Same thing.)
He heads to Rodney’s lab on autopilot. It’s what he does, what he’s always done, when he’s bored. It isn’t until he’s leaning against the doorway that John realizes this time it’s a bad idea.
Rodney looks up and frowns. “You idiot.”
A very bad idea.
John crosses his arms and frowns back at him. “Nice apology there, McKay.”
“Apology? Apology?” Rodney sputters, launching to his feet. “You were sick. You knew you were sick and you still touched that piece of Ancient garbage. Not even touched. Grabbed. It might as well have been a live electrical wire. It fried your brain.”
“I wouldn’t say fried -”
“Fried,” Rodney says emphatically.
“Hey!” John says, angry. “‘I don’t need you. None of us needs you.’ Sound familiar?”
“You never admit it when. . . so I thought you were being. . . .” Rodney stammers. “Dammit, Sheppard! I didn’t know you were actually sick.”
“And I didn’t know you thought I was so useless!”
Rodney opens his mouth. Closes it. John doesn’t try to fill the silence. They aren’t arguing over the best Batman villain or fighting for the last piece of pie. This isn’t an argument John knows how to fix.
He’s not even sure he wants to.
They stay that way, still and stiff and staring at each other. A long moment later, John turns to leave.
“Sheppard, wait! You grabbed the device just because I said -”
“Don’t flatter yourself, McKay,” John says harshly and walks out. He doesn’t think Rodney - stubborn, defensive, self-centered - will follow him.
He’s wrong.
“You started to touch it once and jerked your hand back. You felt something then, didn’t you?” Rodney demands, nearly jogging to keep up. “You felt something and didn’t want to touch it again but then I said. . . what I said. . . and you, what, had to prove me wrong?”
“No,” John says forcefully, even though, yeah.
The ATA gene got him to Atlantis; bad luck and decent aim got him command. Not talent. Not merit. Not really.
The city needs someone who can light stuff up and someone who can shoot and fly, but the thing is, it doesn’t really need him. Not like it needs Rodney, who - and John would throw himself at the next wraith he sees rather than inflate McKay’s ego further by telling him this - is the only man alive able to coax miracles from 10,000-year-old equipment and thin air. Not like it needs Elizabeth, whose blend of diplomacy and force of will has kept them alive. Not like it needs Teyla, who knows how things work here, how to get things done.
John’s failed as often as he’d succeeded in the last several months, and even the successes cost the city. Cost lives.
He’s not needed here. He knows this.
He just couldn’t stand to hear someone else say it.
John isn’t paying attention to where he’s going, to what Rodney’s saying. When he looks up again, they are standing on the east pier and Rodney is mid-rant.
“. . . knew I should have forced Beckett to let me in to see you. I told him I’d slept, but nooo, the voodoo doctor -”
“Rodney,” John tries to interrupt.
“- but it’s not like you don’t know me. I say things. Especially when I’m tired. I can’t be held accountable for every - ”
“Rodney.”
“ - So, really, when you think about it, this is all your fault - ”
“McKay!” John shouts over him. When Rodney snaps his jaws shut, John continues, “Forget it. Apology accepted.”
“I’m not apologizing. I - wait, what?” Rodney narrows his eyes. “Wait, it can’t be that easy.”
John gazes out at the ocean. It’s twilight now, the water inky black as night begins to fall. Out of the corner of his eye he catches the first city lights as they come on, winking white and yellow against the evening sky. It’s a sight he will never tire of.
“No, it really is that easy,” John says, deciding that it has to be. This is his problem, not Rodney’s. He won’t ruin their friendship over words. Especially words that are true. “You were exhausted.”
“I was,” Rodney agrees.
“You didn’t mean it.”
“That’s right.”
“So we’re good,” John says.
“We’re goo- ” Rodney eyes him. “We’re good?”
“Yeah,” John says and means it. “We’re good.”
Rodney looks at him skeptically but with wary hope.
“Not to get all Afterschool Special here,” Rodney says, “but just so you know, you’re not - ”
John cuts him off. “I know.”
“And you really are - ”
“Sure,” John says.
“Because if you need some sort of grand display to prove to you that the city needs you, this is Pegasus, after all, and I’m sure something will come through the gate any second to - ”
“Rodney!” John says, exasperated.
“Okay!”
Fight over.
They stay for a while, looking out at the water, picking up the pieces of their friendship with talk of food and jumpers and a dozen other important-unimportant things. When the conversation naturally slows, Rodney hitches a thumb over his shoulder and says he has to get back.
“Minions,” he says with a sigh. “They’ll blow the place apart if I’m not there to stop them.”
“Yeah. You better get going,” John says. “I think I’ll stay out here for a few minutes.”
Rodney nods and turns to leave. Halfway to the door, he turns and shouts in a eureka moment, “Beer!”
John isn’t sure he heard him right. “What?”
“Beer,” Rodney says. “Next time. Beer on the pier.”
“Cool,” John says. He doesn’t ask where Rodney thinks they’ll find beer in the Pegasus Galaxy.
When Rodney’s gone, John turns back to the water, watching it lap against the side of the city. His city. Except that it’s not. And Rodney’s outburst showed him it probably never will be.
Not until Atlantis needs him as much as he needs it.
He takes a long, deep breath. The air is humid, thick and heavier than he’s ever felt here before. Teyla mentioned needing to fly to the mainland tomorrow. He can probably talk Beckett into clearing him by then, assuming the weather cooperates.
It feels like it's going to rain.