Fic: Present, Imperfect
Title: Present, Imperfect
Author: Sorrel
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard, Ronon/Teyla
Spoilers: general season two
Rating: R
Word Count: 6,502
Summary: "Halfway into a standard recon mission, John walked into a bunker, following a faint power signal. Eighteen hours later, pissed as hell at his team for leaving him behind, he finally managed to finesse the lock and walked out- right into the middle of one hell of a fight."
Notes: This is actually one story out of a large planned series called "Battlefields." It's the first story of four, though chronologically the second, as I'm working on the prologue. Also, John is apparently not a happy camper in this story, since I just sat and coded a ridiculous amount of italics, which for Sheppard is practically histrionic. Hmm.
Present, Imperfect.
~*~
It should have started with a kiss. It didn’t, but it should’ve. All good romances start with kisses; it’s like a rule or something.
John Sheppard was pretty well known for not following the rules, though, and Rodney McKay wasn’t really any good at it either.
So it didn’t start with a kiss. But that’s when things started getting interesting.
~*~
Halfway into a standard recon mission, John walked into a bunker, following a faint power signal. Eighteen hours later, pissed as hell at his team for leaving him behind, he finally managed to finesse the lock and walked out- right into the middle of one hell of a fight.
He didn’t start to realize that something was really wrong (besides the obvious, of course; they were being attacked by spear-waving natives) until they ran back to the jumper and Rodney, instead of falling behind panting like he always did, put on a burst of speed till he was sprinting ahead of them, and he landed in the pilot’s seat- in John’s seat- before John could even get there. The back doors to the jumper slammed shut as soon as his heels cleared the entrance.
Other things started adding up very quickly in the short trip home, as everyone loosened their vest straps and John got his breath back a little. Teyla and Ronon looked pretty much the same as they always did, but even in a combat vest Rodney looked leaner, and the biceps that flexed under the dirt-streaked sleeves of his black t-shirt were striated with heavy muscle. All three of them were carrying Satedan pulse pistols in their modified holsters and there wasn’t a P-90 in sight; Rodney had a combat knife hanging from his belt, right next to the ubiquitous datapad. He piloted the jumper, not well, exactly, but definitely competently, which was more than John could say for some of the Marines who had the gene and took shuttle duty to the mainland, and definitely more than Rodney had been capable of even three days before, when John had taken him up for his last lesson. Panic could make Rodney do a hell of a lot of miraculous things, but actually flying in a straight line was not one of them.
Ronon stood directly behind Teyla, one hand on her shoulder, instead of lurking in the background, and none of them were talking. For Ronon, this was maybe understandable, but he didn’t get why Rodney wasn’t talking, and instead just looked his comments at his team members. All three of them were doing it, a little half-shrug or the line of a furrowed brow seeming to say volumes. It was like fucking War and Peace was being read aloud in the jumper, and John was the only one who couldn’t hear it.
Worst of all, every time one of them glanced over their shoulder and saw John standing there, they did a double-take, like John wasn’t part of the familiar scenery. Teyla in particular kept giving him this wide-eyed like that was totally unlike her, with a soft, relieved, welcoming smile he’d only seen once before, when she’d found a long-lost cousin alive and well on a trading market, years after she’d thought him lost to the Wraith.
It was fucking weird. He’d been gone less than a day, and somehow everything seemed to have changed. And he had no idea why.
“What’s going on?” he asked, but they just shared one of those looks again, a whole conversation in the space of a glance, and Teyla shook her head.
“There is much to explain,” she said helplessly. John looked to Ronon, who just shrugged. No help there.
“Rodney? Care to shed some light?”
“Do I look like a lamp to you?” Rodney snapped in response, not even bothering to glance back. “No, don’t answer that.” And then, in an abrupt subject change as they broke atmo- “Alright, there’s the gate. Teyla, dial us up, please.”
And Teyla just did it, not looking like it was at all weird, or rolling her eyes and telling him that his hands worked fine, thank you, like Rodney always did when John told him to do it. Which John usually did, because Teyla was in Rodney’s seat and that was John’s line that Rodney just stole, just like he’d stolen John’s seat, and what was Rodney doing giving commands in the field? He was vitally important, yes, but he was the scientist. It wasn’t his team. And what was Teyla doing following his orders, anyway?
Seconds later the wormhole whooshed into life ahead of them. Rodney glanced over his shoulder one last time, aimed a tired and distant smile in John’s general direction, and said, “Time to go home, Colonel.”
And then they were through the gate.
~*~
In the beginning, there was this guy. He was a pilot, a damn good one, and he was smart, way smarter than he let on. And he was handsome, and charming, and funny and nice, and everyone who met him liked him. It meant he could get away with a lot of stuff that he shouldn’t have, and it never occurred to him that this wasn’t the natural order of things, until one day he fucked up and it all went away.
There was this other guy, too, who was brilliant and sarcastic and narcissistic and unpleasant, but still one of the best and brightest minds on the planet. It never occurred to him that he wasn’t entitled to the awe of his fellow human beings, until Samantha Carter did her best to rip his ego to shreds and got him sent to Siberia, where he spent an entire five minutes reconsidering the whole awe thing before shrugging and forgetting it.
There was Antarctica, too, which John Sheppard loved, and Rodney McKay pretended to hate but secretly loved just as much. John Sheppard loved it because it was quiet, and he was the kind of guy who liked the quiet, though it was hard to tell that by looking at him. Rodney McKay loved it because it had the Stargate that would eventually take him to the Lost City of the Ancients, and to Rodney that was everything.
They shouldn’t have met. And even if they did, all logic pointed towards the two of them hating each other on sight. They were just too different. It was a case of the two worlds colliding, in a big way. Elizabeth, for one, had planned on running interference on John’s behalf. Even she, who was usually so good reading people, never predicted this.
No one could have predicted it. Because no one could have predicted the Wraith, which makes allies out of desperate men. And nobody in the world could have predicted how similar they really were at the core of it, where no one else could see.
So they became friends. And eventually, that became everything.
~*~
Rodney dropped John off in the gate room before he put the jumper away. “McKay here,” he said into the radio. “Conrad and Mason got there first, but we’re all in one piece, at least.”
“What’s going on?” John demanded again, and was ignored in favor of Elizabeth’s reply.
“I’ll take the good news I can get. Is there some reason you’re hovering in the gate room to tell me this, instead of saving it for the briefing? I’ve heard the comms work perfectly well in the jumper bay, too.”
“Well, I did bring back a little present,” Rodney said lightly, a familiar smirk twisting his mouth. Well, at least something was familiar.
“And it’s not even my birthday,” Elizabeth said, a wary sort of amusement audible in her voice, even through the comm transmission. “What sort of present is it, anyway?”
“Why don’t I unwrap and let you take a look,” Rodney said, and lowered the back ramp of the jumper, holding it carefully just above the floor. John stepped out, wondering what the hell was going on, and he had just enough time to realize, from the look of stunned awe on Elizabeth’s face from the look of stunned awe on Elizabeth’s face, that things were more wrong than he’d thought before she was flying down the steps and wrapping her arms around him in an exuberant hug.
Even in what had to be one of the most extraordinary moments of his life- he didn’t even know that Elizabeth knew how to hug- he was aware of the jumper taking off behind him. He estimated the time it would take him to get the jumper into the bay and get back to gate room, and then calculated it with the McKay factor, i.e. getting distracted by bright shiny things like circuits and coffee. He had enough time to figure out what was up.
“Elizabeth,” he said, gently detangling himself. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve been very worried,” she said. “After the first month, of course, we had to call off the search, but we never stopped hoping.”
“Month?” he said, his eyebrow raised. “I think you’ve gotten me confused with someone else. It certainly felt like forever, but I was only in that bunker for eighteen hours. Less than a day.”
“That’s impossible,” she said, her voice slow and shocky. “You’ve been missing for over a year.”
“A year?” John choked. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’m afraid we’re not, Colonel,” Rodney said, nipping through the doors before they’d fully opened, just like he always did when he was in a hurry. Teyla and Ronon followed at a more sedate pace, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. Apparently, he could no longer count on the Rodney factor, which was a sign of the apocalypse right there, and Ronon and Teyla were together?
John’s brain started hurting.
“Rodney, you know what’s going on?” Elizabeth asked.
“Of course I know what’s going on; I always know what’s going on.” He smirked at the gate room at large, completely unfazed by Ronon’s coughing laugh and Teyla’s more circumspect smile.
“And?” Elizabeth demanded.
“Time dilation,” Rodney said. “You said you were in a bunker?” he asked John, who nodded. “Well, it must have been cloaked and shielded, because we didn’t get a single damn energy signature off the entire planet, much less your life signs reading. If it was designed to wait out a siege, which I think it was, then the time dilation only makes sense.”
“Wait a week and the war has passed,” Elizabeth said. “Ingenious.”
“And useful,” Rodney said. “Especially since the situation with Conrad and Mason is escalating.”
“Save it for the debriefing,” Elizabeth said, and turned to John. “I’d like to get you checked out by Carson, just to make sure that there are no ill effects.”
“Actually,” John said mildly, “I’d like to tag along, if you don’t mind.” No way that they were going to shunt him off to the infirmary before he found out what was going on.
Elizabeth looked to Rodney and Teyla and Ronon, who all nodded. “We would be grateful for Colonel Sheppard’s insight,” Teyla said, and Rodney added, “He’s back on the team as soon as he has medical clearance, so he might as well catch up now.”
Elizabeth looked surprised. Where the hell else would he go? John thought, irritated. And how was it Rodney’s call? Yet another mystery to be solved after the debriefing, he supposed.
He hadn’t counted on the Atlantis grapevine. Even years on various military bases hadn’t gotten him used to how fast gossip traveled, and the sophisticated and universal com system allowed it to approach something like the speed of light. Needless to say, word of his arrival got around, and people started crowding into the gate room to greet him. There were a disturbing number of hugs. Cadman, in particular, looked particularly glad to see him, even though most of his interaction with her had been while she was stuck in McKay’s head. It was damned weird.
It took him another fifteen minutes before he could extract himself from the crowd and get away to the conference room, where his team, Elizabeth, and Major Lorne were all patiently waiting.
“Alright,” John said when he sat down. “Who wants to explain the situation to me?”
“I will,” Elizabeth said. Surprise. “I don’t know how many SGC mission reports you read before you joined this expedition, but in their first year of operation, SG-1 encountered a problem where one of the SG team leaders set himself up as a God the natives of a planet they were exploring.”
“I’m not liking the sound of this,” John said.
“We have a similar problem on our hands, though it’s grown to a much grander scale,” Elizabeth said. “Dr. Alyssa Conrad, one of Carson’s more gifted geneticists, was working on the Wraith enzyme, in the hopes of providing a cure. Instead she managed to perfect a method of synthesizing it, and then she and Captain Alex Mason took all the enzyme we had on hand and escaped through the gate.”
“We pursued, of course,” Lorne continued. “But they skipped back through the gate when we had our backs turned, and we haven’t seen them since.”
“We’ve been hearing from them, though,” Elizabeth said ruefully. “In the six months since their disappearance, they’ve been visiting planets all over the system, targeting the less advanced peoples, and setting themselves up as the children of the Ancestors, the Chosen ones who are gifted with great powers of strength and speed.”
Rodney made a rude noise, clearly unable to contain himself any longer in this little story-telling session. “They’d have to target the less advanced, to get them to believe that kind of bull.”
“The power of faith is well-known even in more advanced cultures, Rodney,” Teyla sniped back, and then turned to John, her expression serious. “The people worship them, Colonel Sheppard. They would die for them.”
“Which is a problem for the teams, sir,” Lorne said. “We have no way of knowing which planets the two have visited, and when we do land on one of their stops, the natives have a bad habit of trying to kill us. So far our superior weaponry has been sufficient, and the worst we’ve gotten are cuts and bruises from the lucky spear or arrow, but things seem to be getting worse, and sooner or later our luck will run out.”
“Which brings us to today,” Rodney said. The corners of his mouth tilted downwards in a quick twitch of irritation.
Elizabeth immediately glanced over at him in concern. “None of you are hurt?” she asked. It was a stupid question, in John’s opinion. If Rodney were injured, he’d have gone straight down to the infirmary, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
“No, not a scratch on us,” Rodney said. “But the situation is definitely escalating. So far Conrad and Mason haven’t had any success on worlds we’ve visited before, but this time they managed to turn the villagers against us.”
“We have had good trade relations with these people in the past,” Teyla said earnestly. “They helped us all they could when we were searching for Colonel Sheppard. They are a superstitious people, but kind. I would not have previously said that they would turn on us in such a manner.”
“Well, they did,” Rodney said. Which was what John was thinking. “So what are we going to do about it?”
Elizabeth sighed and looked tired. “Strategy meeting at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow,” she said, and her tone told him that this was a fairly common thing in Atlantis these days. It wasn’t hard to understand why.
“Right then, boys and girls,” Rodney said, and slapped the table. “Some of us have idiots to baby-sit and chores to attend to. I’ll see you all tomorrow.”
“Don’t be too hard on them,” Ronon said, speaking for the first time. His smile was a tamer version of his hunting grin. “Wouldn’t want to bruise any precious egos.”
“Pfft, they can take it,” Rodney jeered, and then smirked at Ronon. “’Sides, what are you gonna do, spank me?” He slapped Ronon on the shoulder cheerfully before heading out with a loose-hipped strut, already yelling into his com at some idiot or other.
Ronon chuckled, Teyla smiled, Lorne grinned, and Elizabeth looked indulgent. No one looked shocked at Rodney’s bold coarseness. Rodney had always been blunt, but not like this. Not sex jokes, and with Ronon of all people, and definitely not with this particular brand of smirking self-confidence, hip cocked like he could take on the world.
“Rodney does have a point,” Elizabeth said. John raised an eyebrow at her and she ducked her chin a little, a blushing rising on her cheeks. “Not about that. I meant, we can finish this tomorrow.”
Teyla and Ronon got up at the same time, their shoulders brushing together, and both of them paused, looking at him, in their path towards the door. “It is very good to see you well, John,” Teyla said, the careful emphasis on his first name not lost on him, and Ronon added, “Good to know you didn’t get yourself shot, Sheppard.” He nodded back at the both of them, smiling because they had missed him, even if he didn’t know that he was gone, and also because they weren’t so very different now. Not like Rodney, who seemed like he was going to turn John’s world upside-down, just like he always did, only this time might be the time that finally broke his brain, if Rodney had any more surprises to throw at him.
“Likewise, sir,” Lorne said, and shot off a fast salute before following Teyla and Ronon out of the room. John waited till the doors shut behind them, and then turned his attention back to Elizabeth.
“So,” he said.
“So,” she said.
“Tell me what I missed,” he said, and she did.
~*~
For them, it was never about romance. Not even a little bit. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that the whole friends-with-benefits thing, or the fuckbuddy thing, whatever you want to call it- they’ll tell you it never works. And generally speaking, it kinda doesn’t. But sometimes there are exceptions to the rules, and sometimes there are people who just break them.
John and Rodney were both rule-breakers, in their own ways, and this was no different. They were friends, you see. Very good friends, maybe even best friends. More than that, they were team mates, and they trusted their lives to each other on a regular basis. Maybe there were other people in their lives that they could have turned to, that were better suited for a relationship, but if so, neither of them knew who these people were. So they turned to each other.
Sex is always better with a friend. Everyone knows this. It’s a universal constant as much as anything Rodney used in his equations. And since they were best friends, they could come together at night when no one was looking- not that anyone really cared- and they could touch and lick and suck and rock together in time with the ocean waves, and every time they looked into each other’s eyes, every time they pressed their foreheads together or held on tight, they were saying “I love you.” And it still wasn’t romance, because they were best friends, and they could love each other. It was just how things were.
And yet, for some reason, they never once kissed. Neither of them ever even thought about, which is odd if you think about it, because they both loved kissing. But it never crossed their minds.
Not until John went missing. And then suddenly, Rodney couldn’t think of anything else.
~*~
When John went by Rodney’s rooms, there was a new nameplate on the door. John stood there, staring at the unfamiliar name, and it finally hit him that it was real, he had been gone for over a year, and everything was absolutely different now. There was no going back.
Elizabeth had told him a lot of things, not just about Rodney and his team, but about Atlantis in general. It hadn’t taken long for her to hit the highlights of the past year, figuring rightly that he’d hear the rest of it on his own from Rodney, who was the ultimate gossip though he’d deny it to his dying day.
She did tell him about Caldwell, and how he’d taken over after John was officially declared MIA- and that had taken a full two months, which was six weeks longer than regulations called for. That had lasted for all of four months before it was discovered that Caldwell was the host to Goa’uld, and while he’d been reinstated as the commander of the Daedelus after the parasite had been removed and destroyed, he’d been very politely informed that Major Lorne would fill in as acting commander until the SGC assigned someone else. So far, no one else had been assigned.
Lorne had made it clear that he was more than happy to step down and serve under him once again, and he was glad of that. He didn’t take orders particularly well, and he’d discovered while in the Pegasus galaxy that the best way to avoid that was to be the one giving the orders. Elizabeth was the exception that proved the rule- but then again, she was civilian, not military, so maybe the rules didn’t quite apply.
Other transitions weren’t going to be so simple for him. He could easily step back into the shoes of the Atlantis military commander, but he didn’t think it would be so easy to fall back into step with his team once again, especially after what Elizabeth had told him. Rodney hadn’t been the only one to change. They’d all changed, together, without him, and he wasn’t sure he even belonged with them anymore.
He was still standing there helplessly, no idea where to go, when Zelenka found him and took pity on him. “He is in the central spire,” Zelenka explained. “He, Teyla, Ronon- all of alpha team.”
“Except me,” John muttered, looking at the wall. Fuck. Did the whole world move on without him?
“They wanted to be closer to the gate room, in case of emergency,” Zelenka explained, sounding apologetic. “They kept your room, though. Would not let anyone move in. Was quite a fight.”
“I bet,” John murmured. It was also the first good news he’d had in this entire shitty day, and John was pretty sure his relief showed on his face no matter how he tried to hide it. “Thanks,” he said, and Zelenka inclined his head in understanding.
“You’re welcome,” he said, and John could feel his thoughtful gaze on his back all the way to the transporter, but he didn’t care.
He found their rooms easily enough. They were composed of two spacious apartments, right across the hall from each other. One set had “Teyla Emmagen and Ronon Dex” carved in simple steel on the door, and across the hall the door read “Dr. Rodney McKay” on a name plate made out of some unidentifiable alloy that Rodney probably just happened to have lying about in his lab. John was torn between laughter at Rodney’s name plate- only Rodney would include the “Dr.” on his front door- and the moment of vertigo at seeing such blatant evidence of Ronon and Teyla’s entirely unexpected relationship. Not that he hadn’t guessed that they were attracted. He just would never have guessed that they’d ever end up living together.
He knocked lightly on Rodney’s door, and waited for the absent, “Come in!” before opening it. Rodney was leaning over his desk and looking at something on his laptop, still in his boots and BDU pants, but his shirt was on the floor and his weapons had been tossed onto the desk, like anyone else might toss down their keys. His arms were braced against the top of the desk, and John could see all that new muscle, the kind that was only earned by serious hard work and heavy physical training, not just confined to his arms but all over, on his chest and flat stomach and standing out in high relief on broad back thanks to his position. There were new scars on him, some across his back that looked like whip marks, a couple defensive wounds on his forearms, a small grouping of marks on high up on his left that looked like shrapnel scars that John totally hadn’t noticed before, and one barely-healed slice across his bicep, but even with all the differences, the air of distraction as he poured over the data on the screen was all him.
“Hey,” John said, and Rodney looked up so fast he practically gave himself whiplash. John caught the glint of metal around his neck: dog tags. Christ, Rodney was wearing military dog tags. John wasn’t sure if that was depressing, or just hot.
“Hey,” he said. “Carson give you the all-clear?”
“Worst I’ve got is a sore arm from working that lock,” John said. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer a few times, though.” It was the truth, though the leaner, worn-down look was surprisingly good on him. “Get into fights like that a lot? What happened to superior intelligence as a preventative measure for violence?” Even the ache in the joints of his hands from working at the lock wasn’t enough to prevent him from sketching out air quotes with his fingers.
“Yeah, well, even intelligence as vast as mine only gets you so far,” Rodney said distractedly. He shrugged, and even that looked good. “I take it Elizabeth filled you in?”
“She’s been very helpful,” John said. He took that final step inside and closed the door behind him. “She told me all sorts of things. Like, oh, the fact that you and Ronon and Teyla share a brain.”
“We don’t share a brain,” Rodney protested, but it sounded like an old argument. “Cadman came up with that, I’m sure you can guess why, and it’s stuck. It’s not like sharing a brain at all, though.” He scowled. “I should know.”
“I know, I heard, it’s a kind of low-level telepathy and empathy,” John said. “Elizabeth explained.” He smiled, briefly. “When I couldn’t stop laughing, she explained to me that empathy didn’t mean caring about other people’s emotions, it just meant that you could feel them.”
“Ha, ha, very funny,” Rodney said. “You know, if people were less stupid I’d care about their opinions more.”
“She also said it’s why you don’t have a CO,” John continued mildly. Rodney looked rueful.
“It was just awkward,” he said with a shrug. “Cadman was great, but after that? Even she just slowed us down in the field. So I got the training I needed and we figured out how to go it alone.”
That simple phrase made John’s throat close up, just a little bit. “You shouldn’t have had to,” he said. “I should have been there.”
That seemed to be the thing that finally spurred Rodney into moving. He crossed the room, wrapped one large hand around John’s bicep. “Don’t be more of an idiot than you have to be,” he said, his sharp voice smoothed out and affectionate despite his words. “I know you can’t help it, but seriously? You guilt over the weirdest things. Whatever you’re worried about, keep in mind that it would have happened whether you were here or not. You’re important, Colonel, but unlike some of us, you’re not actually vital to the day-to-day survival of Atlantis.”
“That’s bull,” John said, trying to ignore the fact that it was markedly harder to glare effectively from only a couple inches away. “You’re like- you’re like a fucking soldier, Rodney! How can you possibly be okay with that?”
Rodney looked offended. “I’m no such thing,” he said. Definitely offended. “I might have had some combat training, but that doesn’t mean I-“
“Two words,” John interrupted. “Dog. Tags.”
Rodney looked down at his chest, as if surprised to see them there. “Yes. Well. All off-world civilian personnel wear them, now. We should have done it from the start, but.” He shrugged. “People were a lot less willing before every world we stopped at had a fifty-fifty chance of being a convert to the Demonic Duo and therefore trying rather earnestly to kill us. When you’re fighting more than one war, Sheppard, things like knowing people can identify your body start to become a lot more important.”
“That’s what I’m talking about!” John yelled, spinning away from Rodney’s tenacious grip and facing the opposite. He was still working on getting used to Rodney calling him Sheppard, instead of Colonel or, if he was in a good mood or turned on enough to slip, John. “God, listen to yourself. Since when have you even thought about this sort of stuff?”
Rodney’s voice was resigned. “Like I said. Two wars.”
“Like the Wraith weren’t enough,” John muttered. He turned back to Rodney, who was smiling a little sadly. “So you’re really saying that this would have happened anyway. That you would have gotten like this even with me here.”
“Yeah,” Rodney said. “You’ve got to understand, the Wraith are one thing. They’re scary, but they’re kind of cartoon scary. Cadman calls them evil clowns.” John huffed out a surprised laugh and Rodney grinned his quicksilver grin. “Yeah, I know. But what Conrad and Mason are doing… It’s a whole different kind of thing. It’s not so straightforward. The Wraith want to eat us and we want to blow them up, but we can’t exactly blow up an entire tribe of natives that we’ve never before met just because they were conned by a pair of extremely intelligent, power-hungry people.”
He leaned back against the desk, pressing his hip into the edge. “Look. I can’t tell you where we would be, at this exact moment, if you hadn’t disappeared. There are a million and one possibilities, and somewhere out there, there’s probably an alternate reality that could show us, if we had a quantum mirror. But the thing is, this, me changing- it was a long time coming. And after the mind-meld, well. Even geeks have to give in to gravity.”
“What’s it like, anyway?” John asked, casually, like he wasn’t insanely jealous that someone else got to climb into that big brain of Rodney’s and make themselves at home. He always felt closer to McKay than anyone, and he’d always thought that the feeling might be reciprocated. It definitely wasn’t the case anymore. There were two people who were a lot closer to Rodney than he ever would be.
“You’re not alone anymore,” Rodney said thoughtfully. John flinched. “That’s the big one. I mean, sometimes I wish I could just be by myself in here, you know? But we’ve all learned how to block when we need to, more or less, and we have to direct any specific thoughts if we want to be heard, so it works out. And now none of us have to worry about being alone ever again.”
“It sounds great,” John said, his voice a little hoarse. It really did, and it just made him even more envious.
“Hey,” Rodney said, and leaned into him a little. “If I could have picked anyone to mind-meld with? It so would have been you. It just wasn’t in the cards.”
“Yet another thing I missed out on,” John muttered, and immediately felt ashamed for saying it. It was John’s own fault for getting himself locked in a bunker with time-dilation, and Rodney didn’t deserve to have it taken out on him. “Sorry. I’m just… having a hard time adjusting.”
“You and the rest of Atlantis,” Rodney said. “Hell, I think the only one around here who wasn’t thrown was the city herself. She hasn’t lit up like this since you disappeared.”
John managed, by great force of will, not to point out that Rodney had just referred to the city like she was a person. It wouldn’t be fair, since John did it all the time, too, and Rodney had probably picked it up from him. “I’m glad,” he said. “That she’s happy to see me back, I mean. Not that she wasn’t working before.”
“Oh please, I could keep her working fine on my worst day, even without your magnificent presence,” Rodney said, but there was a shrewd gleam in his eye. “She’s not the only one happy to see you back, you know.”
Of course Rodney would pick up on that. He was only observant when you most needed him not to be. “I know you are,” he said with the sincerest smile he could fake. “But it doesn’t mean that there’s gonna be a happy ending, Rodney.”
“Oh, fuck that, Sheppard,” Rodney shot back. “You’re home, you’re team leader again. It’s as close as we get around here.”
“Are you sure?” John asked, and shook his head to cut Rodney off when he opened his mouth. “Not about that. About me being team leader.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Rodney said, impatient and affectionate, like John was his favorite moron. It was a look more familiar than John had realized. It never failed to make him smile back. “Like there was ever any doubt.”
Elizabeth hadn’t thought so, John wanted to say. She thought that you three were too tight for there to be room for anyone. Even me. She didn’t have to tell me that, it was written all over her face.
“I’ll slow you down as much as any other CO,” John pointed out, which sucked but was true. “I’m not a part of your little telepathy groove.”
“I don’t care,” Rodney said fiercely, grabbing his shoulders again. “They don’t either.” When John still looked skeptical, Rodney shook him slightly. “You idiot,” he said. “Don’t you get it? It wasn’t ever about field tactics or strategic advantage. We didn’t want anyone else because they weren’t you. You’re our team leader and a damn good one, weird hair and unhealthy obsession with Ferris wheels aside, and you’re ours. We love you. No one else will do.”
“Oh,” John said, and didn’t hesitate when Rodney pulled him close. He pressed himself up against Rodney’s broader body, tilted his head down and touched foreheads. The Athosians really knew what they were doing there, because that small touch always felt more intimate than any other.
And then Rodney very deliberately tilted his head, giving John plenty of time to say no, and kissed him. And oh fuck, he’d been wrong. Nothing was more intimate than this.
Rodney kissed like he talked- fast jabs and stumbling retreats, only ever slowing down so that you could think you were catching up before darting forward again, pressing his advantage. John kissed back, and he felt all of the seemingly splintered, disparate parts of Rodney, the old Rodney and the new Rodney, the coward and the hero, the scientist and the soldier, acid-tongued and forcefully affectionate, John’s friend and John’s lover- all of the sharp edges came together and smoothed out into something whole and beautiful and shining.
“Oh, god,” John said, ripping his mouth free and panting. “Oh god, that was amazing.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” Rodney said smugly. John looked at him with something akin to wonder.
“I can’t believe we never did that before,” he said, leaning into him through some magnetic force. “You’re a genius, Rodney.”
“I’ve been saying that since I was six, Sheppard,” Rodney said dryly, all unbearable smugness only halfway masking the lurking tenderness in his eyes, and John shut him up with another kiss.
This was good. And yeah, they were at war, and he wasn’t sure what his place was going to be, in Atlantis or with his team, and he was pretty sure that he was in love with Rodney and no idea if Rodney loved him back. But none of that mattered. Because this, right here, this moment in time with Rodney kissing him like he wanted to devour him- this was good.
And he had absolute faith that it was only going to get better.
Author: Sorrel
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard, Ronon/Teyla
Spoilers: general season two
Rating: R
Word Count: 6,502
Summary: "Halfway into a standard recon mission, John walked into a bunker, following a faint power signal. Eighteen hours later, pissed as hell at his team for leaving him behind, he finally managed to finesse the lock and walked out- right into the middle of one hell of a fight."
Notes: This is actually one story out of a large planned series called "Battlefields." It's the first story of four, though chronologically the second, as I'm working on the prologue. Also, John is apparently not a happy camper in this story, since I just sat and coded a ridiculous amount of italics, which for Sheppard is practically histrionic. Hmm.
Present, Imperfect.
~*~
It should have started with a kiss. It didn’t, but it should’ve. All good romances start with kisses; it’s like a rule or something.
John Sheppard was pretty well known for not following the rules, though, and Rodney McKay wasn’t really any good at it either.
So it didn’t start with a kiss. But that’s when things started getting interesting.
~*~
Halfway into a standard recon mission, John walked into a bunker, following a faint power signal. Eighteen hours later, pissed as hell at his team for leaving him behind, he finally managed to finesse the lock and walked out- right into the middle of one hell of a fight.
He didn’t start to realize that something was really wrong (besides the obvious, of course; they were being attacked by spear-waving natives) until they ran back to the jumper and Rodney, instead of falling behind panting like he always did, put on a burst of speed till he was sprinting ahead of them, and he landed in the pilot’s seat- in John’s seat- before John could even get there. The back doors to the jumper slammed shut as soon as his heels cleared the entrance.
Other things started adding up very quickly in the short trip home, as everyone loosened their vest straps and John got his breath back a little. Teyla and Ronon looked pretty much the same as they always did, but even in a combat vest Rodney looked leaner, and the biceps that flexed under the dirt-streaked sleeves of his black t-shirt were striated with heavy muscle. All three of them were carrying Satedan pulse pistols in their modified holsters and there wasn’t a P-90 in sight; Rodney had a combat knife hanging from his belt, right next to the ubiquitous datapad. He piloted the jumper, not well, exactly, but definitely competently, which was more than John could say for some of the Marines who had the gene and took shuttle duty to the mainland, and definitely more than Rodney had been capable of even three days before, when John had taken him up for his last lesson. Panic could make Rodney do a hell of a lot of miraculous things, but actually flying in a straight line was not one of them.
Ronon stood directly behind Teyla, one hand on her shoulder, instead of lurking in the background, and none of them were talking. For Ronon, this was maybe understandable, but he didn’t get why Rodney wasn’t talking, and instead just looked his comments at his team members. All three of them were doing it, a little half-shrug or the line of a furrowed brow seeming to say volumes. It was like fucking War and Peace was being read aloud in the jumper, and John was the only one who couldn’t hear it.
Worst of all, every time one of them glanced over their shoulder and saw John standing there, they did a double-take, like John wasn’t part of the familiar scenery. Teyla in particular kept giving him this wide-eyed like that was totally unlike her, with a soft, relieved, welcoming smile he’d only seen once before, when she’d found a long-lost cousin alive and well on a trading market, years after she’d thought him lost to the Wraith.
It was fucking weird. He’d been gone less than a day, and somehow everything seemed to have changed. And he had no idea why.
“What’s going on?” he asked, but they just shared one of those looks again, a whole conversation in the space of a glance, and Teyla shook her head.
“There is much to explain,” she said helplessly. John looked to Ronon, who just shrugged. No help there.
“Rodney? Care to shed some light?”
“Do I look like a lamp to you?” Rodney snapped in response, not even bothering to glance back. “No, don’t answer that.” And then, in an abrupt subject change as they broke atmo- “Alright, there’s the gate. Teyla, dial us up, please.”
And Teyla just did it, not looking like it was at all weird, or rolling her eyes and telling him that his hands worked fine, thank you, like Rodney always did when John told him to do it. Which John usually did, because Teyla was in Rodney’s seat and that was John’s line that Rodney just stole, just like he’d stolen John’s seat, and what was Rodney doing giving commands in the field? He was vitally important, yes, but he was the scientist. It wasn’t his team. And what was Teyla doing following his orders, anyway?
Seconds later the wormhole whooshed into life ahead of them. Rodney glanced over his shoulder one last time, aimed a tired and distant smile in John’s general direction, and said, “Time to go home, Colonel.”
And then they were through the gate.
~*~
In the beginning, there was this guy. He was a pilot, a damn good one, and he was smart, way smarter than he let on. And he was handsome, and charming, and funny and nice, and everyone who met him liked him. It meant he could get away with a lot of stuff that he shouldn’t have, and it never occurred to him that this wasn’t the natural order of things, until one day he fucked up and it all went away.
There was this other guy, too, who was brilliant and sarcastic and narcissistic and unpleasant, but still one of the best and brightest minds on the planet. It never occurred to him that he wasn’t entitled to the awe of his fellow human beings, until Samantha Carter did her best to rip his ego to shreds and got him sent to Siberia, where he spent an entire five minutes reconsidering the whole awe thing before shrugging and forgetting it.
There was Antarctica, too, which John Sheppard loved, and Rodney McKay pretended to hate but secretly loved just as much. John Sheppard loved it because it was quiet, and he was the kind of guy who liked the quiet, though it was hard to tell that by looking at him. Rodney McKay loved it because it had the Stargate that would eventually take him to the Lost City of the Ancients, and to Rodney that was everything.
They shouldn’t have met. And even if they did, all logic pointed towards the two of them hating each other on sight. They were just too different. It was a case of the two worlds colliding, in a big way. Elizabeth, for one, had planned on running interference on John’s behalf. Even she, who was usually so good reading people, never predicted this.
No one could have predicted it. Because no one could have predicted the Wraith, which makes allies out of desperate men. And nobody in the world could have predicted how similar they really were at the core of it, where no one else could see.
So they became friends. And eventually, that became everything.
~*~
Rodney dropped John off in the gate room before he put the jumper away. “McKay here,” he said into the radio. “Conrad and Mason got there first, but we’re all in one piece, at least.”
“What’s going on?” John demanded again, and was ignored in favor of Elizabeth’s reply.
“I’ll take the good news I can get. Is there some reason you’re hovering in the gate room to tell me this, instead of saving it for the briefing? I’ve heard the comms work perfectly well in the jumper bay, too.”
“Well, I did bring back a little present,” Rodney said lightly, a familiar smirk twisting his mouth. Well, at least something was familiar.
“And it’s not even my birthday,” Elizabeth said, a wary sort of amusement audible in her voice, even through the comm transmission. “What sort of present is it, anyway?”
“Why don’t I unwrap and let you take a look,” Rodney said, and lowered the back ramp of the jumper, holding it carefully just above the floor. John stepped out, wondering what the hell was going on, and he had just enough time to realize, from the look of stunned awe on Elizabeth’s face from the look of stunned awe on Elizabeth’s face, that things were more wrong than he’d thought before she was flying down the steps and wrapping her arms around him in an exuberant hug.
Even in what had to be one of the most extraordinary moments of his life- he didn’t even know that Elizabeth knew how to hug- he was aware of the jumper taking off behind him. He estimated the time it would take him to get the jumper into the bay and get back to gate room, and then calculated it with the McKay factor, i.e. getting distracted by bright shiny things like circuits and coffee. He had enough time to figure out what was up.
“Elizabeth,” he said, gently detangling himself. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve been very worried,” she said. “After the first month, of course, we had to call off the search, but we never stopped hoping.”
“Month?” he said, his eyebrow raised. “I think you’ve gotten me confused with someone else. It certainly felt like forever, but I was only in that bunker for eighteen hours. Less than a day.”
“That’s impossible,” she said, her voice slow and shocky. “You’ve been missing for over a year.”
“A year?” John choked. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’m afraid we’re not, Colonel,” Rodney said, nipping through the doors before they’d fully opened, just like he always did when he was in a hurry. Teyla and Ronon followed at a more sedate pace, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. Apparently, he could no longer count on the Rodney factor, which was a sign of the apocalypse right there, and Ronon and Teyla were together?
John’s brain started hurting.
“Rodney, you know what’s going on?” Elizabeth asked.
“Of course I know what’s going on; I always know what’s going on.” He smirked at the gate room at large, completely unfazed by Ronon’s coughing laugh and Teyla’s more circumspect smile.
“And?” Elizabeth demanded.
“Time dilation,” Rodney said. “You said you were in a bunker?” he asked John, who nodded. “Well, it must have been cloaked and shielded, because we didn’t get a single damn energy signature off the entire planet, much less your life signs reading. If it was designed to wait out a siege, which I think it was, then the time dilation only makes sense.”
“Wait a week and the war has passed,” Elizabeth said. “Ingenious.”
“And useful,” Rodney said. “Especially since the situation with Conrad and Mason is escalating.”
“Save it for the debriefing,” Elizabeth said, and turned to John. “I’d like to get you checked out by Carson, just to make sure that there are no ill effects.”
“Actually,” John said mildly, “I’d like to tag along, if you don’t mind.” No way that they were going to shunt him off to the infirmary before he found out what was going on.
Elizabeth looked to Rodney and Teyla and Ronon, who all nodded. “We would be grateful for Colonel Sheppard’s insight,” Teyla said, and Rodney added, “He’s back on the team as soon as he has medical clearance, so he might as well catch up now.”
Elizabeth looked surprised. Where the hell else would he go? John thought, irritated. And how was it Rodney’s call? Yet another mystery to be solved after the debriefing, he supposed.
He hadn’t counted on the Atlantis grapevine. Even years on various military bases hadn’t gotten him used to how fast gossip traveled, and the sophisticated and universal com system allowed it to approach something like the speed of light. Needless to say, word of his arrival got around, and people started crowding into the gate room to greet him. There were a disturbing number of hugs. Cadman, in particular, looked particularly glad to see him, even though most of his interaction with her had been while she was stuck in McKay’s head. It was damned weird.
It took him another fifteen minutes before he could extract himself from the crowd and get away to the conference room, where his team, Elizabeth, and Major Lorne were all patiently waiting.
“Alright,” John said when he sat down. “Who wants to explain the situation to me?”
“I will,” Elizabeth said. Surprise. “I don’t know how many SGC mission reports you read before you joined this expedition, but in their first year of operation, SG-1 encountered a problem where one of the SG team leaders set himself up as a God the natives of a planet they were exploring.”
“I’m not liking the sound of this,” John said.
“We have a similar problem on our hands, though it’s grown to a much grander scale,” Elizabeth said. “Dr. Alyssa Conrad, one of Carson’s more gifted geneticists, was working on the Wraith enzyme, in the hopes of providing a cure. Instead she managed to perfect a method of synthesizing it, and then she and Captain Alex Mason took all the enzyme we had on hand and escaped through the gate.”
“We pursued, of course,” Lorne continued. “But they skipped back through the gate when we had our backs turned, and we haven’t seen them since.”
“We’ve been hearing from them, though,” Elizabeth said ruefully. “In the six months since their disappearance, they’ve been visiting planets all over the system, targeting the less advanced peoples, and setting themselves up as the children of the Ancestors, the Chosen ones who are gifted with great powers of strength and speed.”
Rodney made a rude noise, clearly unable to contain himself any longer in this little story-telling session. “They’d have to target the less advanced, to get them to believe that kind of bull.”
“The power of faith is well-known even in more advanced cultures, Rodney,” Teyla sniped back, and then turned to John, her expression serious. “The people worship them, Colonel Sheppard. They would die for them.”
“Which is a problem for the teams, sir,” Lorne said. “We have no way of knowing which planets the two have visited, and when we do land on one of their stops, the natives have a bad habit of trying to kill us. So far our superior weaponry has been sufficient, and the worst we’ve gotten are cuts and bruises from the lucky spear or arrow, but things seem to be getting worse, and sooner or later our luck will run out.”
“Which brings us to today,” Rodney said. The corners of his mouth tilted downwards in a quick twitch of irritation.
Elizabeth immediately glanced over at him in concern. “None of you are hurt?” she asked. It was a stupid question, in John’s opinion. If Rodney were injured, he’d have gone straight down to the infirmary, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
“No, not a scratch on us,” Rodney said. “But the situation is definitely escalating. So far Conrad and Mason haven’t had any success on worlds we’ve visited before, but this time they managed to turn the villagers against us.”
“We have had good trade relations with these people in the past,” Teyla said earnestly. “They helped us all they could when we were searching for Colonel Sheppard. They are a superstitious people, but kind. I would not have previously said that they would turn on us in such a manner.”
“Well, they did,” Rodney said. Which was what John was thinking. “So what are we going to do about it?”
Elizabeth sighed and looked tired. “Strategy meeting at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow,” she said, and her tone told him that this was a fairly common thing in Atlantis these days. It wasn’t hard to understand why.
“Right then, boys and girls,” Rodney said, and slapped the table. “Some of us have idiots to baby-sit and chores to attend to. I’ll see you all tomorrow.”
“Don’t be too hard on them,” Ronon said, speaking for the first time. His smile was a tamer version of his hunting grin. “Wouldn’t want to bruise any precious egos.”
“Pfft, they can take it,” Rodney jeered, and then smirked at Ronon. “’Sides, what are you gonna do, spank me?” He slapped Ronon on the shoulder cheerfully before heading out with a loose-hipped strut, already yelling into his com at some idiot or other.
Ronon chuckled, Teyla smiled, Lorne grinned, and Elizabeth looked indulgent. No one looked shocked at Rodney’s bold coarseness. Rodney had always been blunt, but not like this. Not sex jokes, and with Ronon of all people, and definitely not with this particular brand of smirking self-confidence, hip cocked like he could take on the world.
“Rodney does have a point,” Elizabeth said. John raised an eyebrow at her and she ducked her chin a little, a blushing rising on her cheeks. “Not about that. I meant, we can finish this tomorrow.”
Teyla and Ronon got up at the same time, their shoulders brushing together, and both of them paused, looking at him, in their path towards the door. “It is very good to see you well, John,” Teyla said, the careful emphasis on his first name not lost on him, and Ronon added, “Good to know you didn’t get yourself shot, Sheppard.” He nodded back at the both of them, smiling because they had missed him, even if he didn’t know that he was gone, and also because they weren’t so very different now. Not like Rodney, who seemed like he was going to turn John’s world upside-down, just like he always did, only this time might be the time that finally broke his brain, if Rodney had any more surprises to throw at him.
“Likewise, sir,” Lorne said, and shot off a fast salute before following Teyla and Ronon out of the room. John waited till the doors shut behind them, and then turned his attention back to Elizabeth.
“So,” he said.
“So,” she said.
“Tell me what I missed,” he said, and she did.
~*~
For them, it was never about romance. Not even a little bit. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that the whole friends-with-benefits thing, or the fuckbuddy thing, whatever you want to call it- they’ll tell you it never works. And generally speaking, it kinda doesn’t. But sometimes there are exceptions to the rules, and sometimes there are people who just break them.
John and Rodney were both rule-breakers, in their own ways, and this was no different. They were friends, you see. Very good friends, maybe even best friends. More than that, they were team mates, and they trusted their lives to each other on a regular basis. Maybe there were other people in their lives that they could have turned to, that were better suited for a relationship, but if so, neither of them knew who these people were. So they turned to each other.
Sex is always better with a friend. Everyone knows this. It’s a universal constant as much as anything Rodney used in his equations. And since they were best friends, they could come together at night when no one was looking- not that anyone really cared- and they could touch and lick and suck and rock together in time with the ocean waves, and every time they looked into each other’s eyes, every time they pressed their foreheads together or held on tight, they were saying “I love you.” And it still wasn’t romance, because they were best friends, and they could love each other. It was just how things were.
And yet, for some reason, they never once kissed. Neither of them ever even thought about, which is odd if you think about it, because they both loved kissing. But it never crossed their minds.
Not until John went missing. And then suddenly, Rodney couldn’t think of anything else.
~*~
When John went by Rodney’s rooms, there was a new nameplate on the door. John stood there, staring at the unfamiliar name, and it finally hit him that it was real, he had been gone for over a year, and everything was absolutely different now. There was no going back.
Elizabeth had told him a lot of things, not just about Rodney and his team, but about Atlantis in general. It hadn’t taken long for her to hit the highlights of the past year, figuring rightly that he’d hear the rest of it on his own from Rodney, who was the ultimate gossip though he’d deny it to his dying day.
She did tell him about Caldwell, and how he’d taken over after John was officially declared MIA- and that had taken a full two months, which was six weeks longer than regulations called for. That had lasted for all of four months before it was discovered that Caldwell was the host to Goa’uld, and while he’d been reinstated as the commander of the Daedelus after the parasite had been removed and destroyed, he’d been very politely informed that Major Lorne would fill in as acting commander until the SGC assigned someone else. So far, no one else had been assigned.
Lorne had made it clear that he was more than happy to step down and serve under him once again, and he was glad of that. He didn’t take orders particularly well, and he’d discovered while in the Pegasus galaxy that the best way to avoid that was to be the one giving the orders. Elizabeth was the exception that proved the rule- but then again, she was civilian, not military, so maybe the rules didn’t quite apply.
Other transitions weren’t going to be so simple for him. He could easily step back into the shoes of the Atlantis military commander, but he didn’t think it would be so easy to fall back into step with his team once again, especially after what Elizabeth had told him. Rodney hadn’t been the only one to change. They’d all changed, together, without him, and he wasn’t sure he even belonged with them anymore.
He was still standing there helplessly, no idea where to go, when Zelenka found him and took pity on him. “He is in the central spire,” Zelenka explained. “He, Teyla, Ronon- all of alpha team.”
“Except me,” John muttered, looking at the wall. Fuck. Did the whole world move on without him?
“They wanted to be closer to the gate room, in case of emergency,” Zelenka explained, sounding apologetic. “They kept your room, though. Would not let anyone move in. Was quite a fight.”
“I bet,” John murmured. It was also the first good news he’d had in this entire shitty day, and John was pretty sure his relief showed on his face no matter how he tried to hide it. “Thanks,” he said, and Zelenka inclined his head in understanding.
“You’re welcome,” he said, and John could feel his thoughtful gaze on his back all the way to the transporter, but he didn’t care.
He found their rooms easily enough. They were composed of two spacious apartments, right across the hall from each other. One set had “Teyla Emmagen and Ronon Dex” carved in simple steel on the door, and across the hall the door read “Dr. Rodney McKay” on a name plate made out of some unidentifiable alloy that Rodney probably just happened to have lying about in his lab. John was torn between laughter at Rodney’s name plate- only Rodney would include the “Dr.” on his front door- and the moment of vertigo at seeing such blatant evidence of Ronon and Teyla’s entirely unexpected relationship. Not that he hadn’t guessed that they were attracted. He just would never have guessed that they’d ever end up living together.
He knocked lightly on Rodney’s door, and waited for the absent, “Come in!” before opening it. Rodney was leaning over his desk and looking at something on his laptop, still in his boots and BDU pants, but his shirt was on the floor and his weapons had been tossed onto the desk, like anyone else might toss down their keys. His arms were braced against the top of the desk, and John could see all that new muscle, the kind that was only earned by serious hard work and heavy physical training, not just confined to his arms but all over, on his chest and flat stomach and standing out in high relief on broad back thanks to his position. There were new scars on him, some across his back that looked like whip marks, a couple defensive wounds on his forearms, a small grouping of marks on high up on his left that looked like shrapnel scars that John totally hadn’t noticed before, and one barely-healed slice across his bicep, but even with all the differences, the air of distraction as he poured over the data on the screen was all him.
“Hey,” John said, and Rodney looked up so fast he practically gave himself whiplash. John caught the glint of metal around his neck: dog tags. Christ, Rodney was wearing military dog tags. John wasn’t sure if that was depressing, or just hot.
“Hey,” he said. “Carson give you the all-clear?”
“Worst I’ve got is a sore arm from working that lock,” John said. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer a few times, though.” It was the truth, though the leaner, worn-down look was surprisingly good on him. “Get into fights like that a lot? What happened to superior intelligence as a preventative measure for violence?” Even the ache in the joints of his hands from working at the lock wasn’t enough to prevent him from sketching out air quotes with his fingers.
“Yeah, well, even intelligence as vast as mine only gets you so far,” Rodney said distractedly. He shrugged, and even that looked good. “I take it Elizabeth filled you in?”
“She’s been very helpful,” John said. He took that final step inside and closed the door behind him. “She told me all sorts of things. Like, oh, the fact that you and Ronon and Teyla share a brain.”
“We don’t share a brain,” Rodney protested, but it sounded like an old argument. “Cadman came up with that, I’m sure you can guess why, and it’s stuck. It’s not like sharing a brain at all, though.” He scowled. “I should know.”
“I know, I heard, it’s a kind of low-level telepathy and empathy,” John said. “Elizabeth explained.” He smiled, briefly. “When I couldn’t stop laughing, she explained to me that empathy didn’t mean caring about other people’s emotions, it just meant that you could feel them.”
“Ha, ha, very funny,” Rodney said. “You know, if people were less stupid I’d care about their opinions more.”
“She also said it’s why you don’t have a CO,” John continued mildly. Rodney looked rueful.
“It was just awkward,” he said with a shrug. “Cadman was great, but after that? Even she just slowed us down in the field. So I got the training I needed and we figured out how to go it alone.”
That simple phrase made John’s throat close up, just a little bit. “You shouldn’t have had to,” he said. “I should have been there.”
That seemed to be the thing that finally spurred Rodney into moving. He crossed the room, wrapped one large hand around John’s bicep. “Don’t be more of an idiot than you have to be,” he said, his sharp voice smoothed out and affectionate despite his words. “I know you can’t help it, but seriously? You guilt over the weirdest things. Whatever you’re worried about, keep in mind that it would have happened whether you were here or not. You’re important, Colonel, but unlike some of us, you’re not actually vital to the day-to-day survival of Atlantis.”
“That’s bull,” John said, trying to ignore the fact that it was markedly harder to glare effectively from only a couple inches away. “You’re like- you’re like a fucking soldier, Rodney! How can you possibly be okay with that?”
Rodney looked offended. “I’m no such thing,” he said. Definitely offended. “I might have had some combat training, but that doesn’t mean I-“
“Two words,” John interrupted. “Dog. Tags.”
Rodney looked down at his chest, as if surprised to see them there. “Yes. Well. All off-world civilian personnel wear them, now. We should have done it from the start, but.” He shrugged. “People were a lot less willing before every world we stopped at had a fifty-fifty chance of being a convert to the Demonic Duo and therefore trying rather earnestly to kill us. When you’re fighting more than one war, Sheppard, things like knowing people can identify your body start to become a lot more important.”
“That’s what I’m talking about!” John yelled, spinning away from Rodney’s tenacious grip and facing the opposite. He was still working on getting used to Rodney calling him Sheppard, instead of Colonel or, if he was in a good mood or turned on enough to slip, John. “God, listen to yourself. Since when have you even thought about this sort of stuff?”
Rodney’s voice was resigned. “Like I said. Two wars.”
“Like the Wraith weren’t enough,” John muttered. He turned back to Rodney, who was smiling a little sadly. “So you’re really saying that this would have happened anyway. That you would have gotten like this even with me here.”
“Yeah,” Rodney said. “You’ve got to understand, the Wraith are one thing. They’re scary, but they’re kind of cartoon scary. Cadman calls them evil clowns.” John huffed out a surprised laugh and Rodney grinned his quicksilver grin. “Yeah, I know. But what Conrad and Mason are doing… It’s a whole different kind of thing. It’s not so straightforward. The Wraith want to eat us and we want to blow them up, but we can’t exactly blow up an entire tribe of natives that we’ve never before met just because they were conned by a pair of extremely intelligent, power-hungry people.”
He leaned back against the desk, pressing his hip into the edge. “Look. I can’t tell you where we would be, at this exact moment, if you hadn’t disappeared. There are a million and one possibilities, and somewhere out there, there’s probably an alternate reality that could show us, if we had a quantum mirror. But the thing is, this, me changing- it was a long time coming. And after the mind-meld, well. Even geeks have to give in to gravity.”
“What’s it like, anyway?” John asked, casually, like he wasn’t insanely jealous that someone else got to climb into that big brain of Rodney’s and make themselves at home. He always felt closer to McKay than anyone, and he’d always thought that the feeling might be reciprocated. It definitely wasn’t the case anymore. There were two people who were a lot closer to Rodney than he ever would be.
“You’re not alone anymore,” Rodney said thoughtfully. John flinched. “That’s the big one. I mean, sometimes I wish I could just be by myself in here, you know? But we’ve all learned how to block when we need to, more or less, and we have to direct any specific thoughts if we want to be heard, so it works out. And now none of us have to worry about being alone ever again.”
“It sounds great,” John said, his voice a little hoarse. It really did, and it just made him even more envious.
“Hey,” Rodney said, and leaned into him a little. “If I could have picked anyone to mind-meld with? It so would have been you. It just wasn’t in the cards.”
“Yet another thing I missed out on,” John muttered, and immediately felt ashamed for saying it. It was John’s own fault for getting himself locked in a bunker with time-dilation, and Rodney didn’t deserve to have it taken out on him. “Sorry. I’m just… having a hard time adjusting.”
“You and the rest of Atlantis,” Rodney said. “Hell, I think the only one around here who wasn’t thrown was the city herself. She hasn’t lit up like this since you disappeared.”
John managed, by great force of will, not to point out that Rodney had just referred to the city like she was a person. It wouldn’t be fair, since John did it all the time, too, and Rodney had probably picked it up from him. “I’m glad,” he said. “That she’s happy to see me back, I mean. Not that she wasn’t working before.”
“Oh please, I could keep her working fine on my worst day, even without your magnificent presence,” Rodney said, but there was a shrewd gleam in his eye. “She’s not the only one happy to see you back, you know.”
Of course Rodney would pick up on that. He was only observant when you most needed him not to be. “I know you are,” he said with the sincerest smile he could fake. “But it doesn’t mean that there’s gonna be a happy ending, Rodney.”
“Oh, fuck that, Sheppard,” Rodney shot back. “You’re home, you’re team leader again. It’s as close as we get around here.”
“Are you sure?” John asked, and shook his head to cut Rodney off when he opened his mouth. “Not about that. About me being team leader.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Rodney said, impatient and affectionate, like John was his favorite moron. It was a look more familiar than John had realized. It never failed to make him smile back. “Like there was ever any doubt.”
Elizabeth hadn’t thought so, John wanted to say. She thought that you three were too tight for there to be room for anyone. Even me. She didn’t have to tell me that, it was written all over her face.
“I’ll slow you down as much as any other CO,” John pointed out, which sucked but was true. “I’m not a part of your little telepathy groove.”
“I don’t care,” Rodney said fiercely, grabbing his shoulders again. “They don’t either.” When John still looked skeptical, Rodney shook him slightly. “You idiot,” he said. “Don’t you get it? It wasn’t ever about field tactics or strategic advantage. We didn’t want anyone else because they weren’t you. You’re our team leader and a damn good one, weird hair and unhealthy obsession with Ferris wheels aside, and you’re ours. We love you. No one else will do.”
“Oh,” John said, and didn’t hesitate when Rodney pulled him close. He pressed himself up against Rodney’s broader body, tilted his head down and touched foreheads. The Athosians really knew what they were doing there, because that small touch always felt more intimate than any other.
And then Rodney very deliberately tilted his head, giving John plenty of time to say no, and kissed him. And oh fuck, he’d been wrong. Nothing was more intimate than this.
Rodney kissed like he talked- fast jabs and stumbling retreats, only ever slowing down so that you could think you were catching up before darting forward again, pressing his advantage. John kissed back, and he felt all of the seemingly splintered, disparate parts of Rodney, the old Rodney and the new Rodney, the coward and the hero, the scientist and the soldier, acid-tongued and forcefully affectionate, John’s friend and John’s lover- all of the sharp edges came together and smoothed out into something whole and beautiful and shining.
“Oh, god,” John said, ripping his mouth free and panting. “Oh god, that was amazing.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” Rodney said smugly. John looked at him with something akin to wonder.
“I can’t believe we never did that before,” he said, leaning into him through some magnetic force. “You’re a genius, Rodney.”
“I’ve been saying that since I was six, Sheppard,” Rodney said dryly, all unbearable smugness only halfway masking the lurking tenderness in his eyes, and John shut him up with another kiss.
This was good. And yeah, they were at war, and he wasn’t sure what his place was going to be, in Atlantis or with his team, and he was pretty sure that he was in love with Rodney and no idea if Rodney loved him back. But none of that mattered. Because this, right here, this moment in time with Rodney kissing him like he wanted to devour him- this was good.
And he had absolute faith that it was only going to get better.