Fic: i am the letter you took to war [SGA, John/Various, PG-13]
I do not have much to say here, because: whoah. About twelve hours of marathon writing. But, hey. Out of the slump.
Oh, and also: snow day! Tomorrow! For once, Northern Virginia, I think I love you.
ETA: Northern Virginia, I do not love you, because you come equipped with snow plows, and salt trucks, with spraying salt that hits me in the face. FAIL.
i am the letter you took to war
sga; pg-13. spoilers up to 5.06 The Shrine.
sheppard / nancy, sheppard / mckay
written for sheafrotherdon's fabulous little Friendship / Flirting / Thinking of You Fest.
i. Night in the cloister is a rip of silk sky with no stars. Clear and gauzy. Silent, too, and if it were not for the rustle of birds, John would think that when the cloister slept, the world slept in turn. Waking, he dreams of places other than this - summer homes, army bases, he does not think of anything he could ever call home.
He names them, now: San Diego. Old Virginia. Lackland, Texas, living up to its name, and with it, Aliyah of the wide eyes and kinky hair, welcoming curves he wanted desperately to want. They were both outsiders, and knew the ways of movement; even though she had lived there her whole life, something about her still seemed transitory, like a bird in danger of being startled into the sky. They weren't dating, exactly, but he wrapped himself in her afghan and listened as she read aloud. She mouthed at Eliot, Calvino - all the late great fabulists - and liked to skip around. "Oh dark dark dark. They all go into the dark," she would say. "The vast interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant. I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing."
(He hopes she did not love him.)
Sometimes, though, she would ask, "Why is the measure of love loss?", and not expect an answer.
It sounds profound, and impersonal enough to be used as bedroom talk. He doesn't generally do that - talk after sex - but Teer seems to expect it; traces the thrum of his moving lips with her thumb. She is beautiful, soft and pliant and ready to open in a way nothing in his life ever was, and if he were a better man he would love her, be in love with her. If this were a fairy-tale, this would be a romance. If her body was sharper; if her bones were stronger; if her lips were thinner. All this, and he might be able to fit.
But the light - oh. The light here is orange and bleeding-white, capped by the dome of the sky, and he thinks he could stay here forever, except in all the ways he couldn't.
"Why is the measure of love loss?" he asks aloud into the bedroom night.
"Is it?" Teer asks, even though it's pretty obvious she wants to ask: what?
"Something an old friend used to say," he says, and in present company does not fear to name her thus. (Among his buddies, he names her girlfriend, and apologizes to her memory.) "She signed all her letters with that. I think it was a line from a book or something."
Teer smiles.
"I have never had a man such as you, John Sheppard," she says, and looks like she expects him to say it back.
There are so many things he could have said, then, but he is no Rodney, forever bumbling on the edges of a great truth. Rodney might have scoffed, or blushed. He might have told her: you exist in multitude, for me.
John is kinder, and crueler, and nowhere near as honest. Instead he kisses her, with his hands holding to the sides of her face; bounding her in, setting her parameters: with palms, with lips, with tongue.
*
(He left Aliyah in Lackland with her books and words and afghan, though he folded the last before he left. For all he knows, she's still there. He hopes not, though. He hopes she went on to bigger things, brighter ones - got the taste of dust out of her skin - and forgot the possibility of him loving her, because he could have had he stayed longer, and that is more dangerous to her than any machine gun he's ever fired, bomb he's dropped, vast expanse of the falling-out sky. Shipping out felt like a relief, like getting out from under fire. He did not promise to write.)
*
Folded in meditation, light seeping orange under his eyelids, John dreams.
*
Nancy says he seduced her on a golf course. "John swept me right off my feet," she always jokes, and her smile has a bit of bite. The look that passes between them is typical of married couples; typical of their secrets.
Stories are not finite, though. Every story has within it a thousand stories, and from those, then thousand more - perspectives, moments, slants of the light - until every tale told is really a thousand different versions of the same story, each a bit different from the rest, smashed into one whole. Their love story is, as they say, a composite work.
Within this story, then, there are ten thousand different seductions. One of them goes like this:
"Her name's Nancy Nealson, if you want to go talk," Patrick Sheppard says. "Nice girl. Smart. Beautiful. Isn't she beautiful, son?"
John's sprawled back against the seat of the golf cart, chin tipped towards the clouds. He looks positively decadent, even in polyester-wash golf attire, and under his father's heavy glance he takes a swig of the beer he is technically not allowed to bring out onto the courses. (His father owns the place, though, so it's not as if any of the staff is going to come out to tell him that.) The weather that day is clear, and the sky above is a startling, celestial blue.
"Yes," John says, "yes she is."
*
It takes his chopper crew weeks after his marriage to find out he has a wife. When he asks them, he learns that Mitch and Dex both think he has a different girlfriend. Neither, it turns out, are Nancy.
*
The ring he had picked out for her was solid, respectable, with a big enough diamond to make her cousins squeal.
"You like it?" he asks.
"I like it," she assures him. "I like you even better, though."
If he had been a better man, he knows, he wouldn't have done that to her. He is so tired of hearing declarations he cannot declare back.
(Atlantis has changed everything from his command style to his DNA, though, and he's a different man now then he was then. More intense; more ruthless, and more prone to fits of mercy. Stupid and smart in equal measures. Pegasus is the only place he can walk upon the ground and still feel like a sharpened blade, a coiled spring, the ocean that wraps the city - kinetic, in all the ways that matter.
More than anything else, though, he has become both more and less afraid, for he's learned by now that he deals well with losing, but there's more than ever before to lose.)
*
Life, for a while, is good. Nancy finds a job working for the Department of Agriculture. ("Beans, beans, land tracts," she says. "Sometimes, John, I wish I was the one who could bring a gun to work.") His commanding officers never like him, but almost everyone who never had to give him an order does, and if anyone - wonders - about him, the whispers don't start, not yet. (He keeps his ears open; he would know.)
After all, he is John Sheppard, pilot extraordinaire, one suave sonofabitch. He has a wife and possibly a girlfriend. He wears clothes like a promise of skin. He is always a few inches too far away for that friendly backslap or punch-in-the-arm, but it's not like he's doing it on purpose, and he certainly does not look at other men in the showers, soft furtive glances through his eyelashes as water runs into his eyes and pools in the bow of his lips - parted slightly, moist in the wet air.
*
"When are you getting married?" Ronon asks - not snippy, but mildly amused, and yes, he may have a tiny little crush on Ronon - who doesn't? - but he's not that obvious, damn it, even if he was fishing barely a minute ago.
"I've already done that," he says. "Not very good at it. Besides, there really isn't anyone here that - you know."
Words are powerful, Aliyah told him once. They make things happen. To make something true, name it; speak it aloud.
"See, I always thought you and Teyla would," Ronon says, "you know."
"Really?" John asks, and fights the urge to say: Ew. Because, no. Not beautiful strong wonderful Teyla, the rock that weighs them together and holds them apart, just enough room for breath. No. Not her.
"Yeah," Ronon says, "why not?"
*
The proper poetic answer to that would be: as many reasons as there are salt-cells in the sea. But John doesn't say that. Instead, he offers a sound, something noncommittal and vague, and does his damnedest to try and change the subject.
He may be attracted to artistry, but the truth is, John was never a poet.
*
Being married to Nancy is a great deal like not being married to Nancy. He runs ops, flies; kills. Nothing is never as beautiful on the ground as it is from the sky, when the whole Earth is shapes and smears, vague like art and just as unreal. He spends much of their marriage away from her. Sometimes getting fucked, or going to his knees in an alley. He becomes intimately aware with his own vulnerability, and learns all the names of the clubs, the girls working them, and takes great delight in introducing himself as John, because they all get it, they know what he does and who he is, and they laugh.
Some days, though, he can't stand anything but quiet. Some days he spends running his tongue over his teeth and looking up at the hugeness of the sky, the sheer blue expanse grabbing his ribcage and tearing it open like a creaking door - the hinge of a locket - to the small pulsing heart within. And then, when he is spat back out into his America, chest aching, he goes back to the apartment that is theoretically theirs and slides into his side of the bed. Most nights, the day goes quietly to its death, and he sleeps. Others he spends lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and does not count her breaths rising. Both he and his new wife are side-sleepers, better at being balanced than flat.
Always, though, he is careful not to touch, and by morning they wake with their backs to the walls - curled towards each other like parenthesis, and between them a vast space, cool and unslept-in.
"I didn't want to wake you," he explains. And he makes it sound so caring - the dutiful, doting husband - so how could it be anything but?
*
The sad truth that Nancy learns is this: with John Sheppard, it can be anything but.
*
(He expects to feel guilt at leaving her alone like this, in this thing that grows and shrivels by turns. Worse, though, is when they guilt does not come.)
*
"You know, I grew up in a fishing town," Nancy says. "In New England. God, it was so beautiful there. I'm sure you'd hate it. There was always more water than sky."
Where are you going with this? he wants to ask her, but that's not what good husbands do. Good husbands are patient. If their wives want to play Hamlet, fine. They wait.
"But, the men," she continues," they would go out on their boats for weeks at a time, working these long, long shifts - seventy-two hours, sometimes, and you can stop right there, John, because they didn't get stimulants like you do -"
(Fuck it, he says in his mind. He cannot bring himself to think, Fuck you.)
"- and the women would wait for them. I remember growing up there and thinking, that's never going to be me. I don't want to wait for anyone. But you know what, John?" she asks, sharp, shaking, her hands steady as she turns away from him, "You know what? The funny thing is I wish you would do that. Go away for a while. Only I'm so sick of you leaving."
"I'm sorry," he says, "but you know how it is."
"God, why can't we go back to that first year?" Nancy asks, tired and rhetorical. "Me in Agriculture, you in Afghanistan. I could write you letters and you could pretend to read them."
"Fuck this," he snaps.
"Fuck you," she retorts.
*
He keeps his ring. That's part - but not the sum - of what he doesn't tell McKay after the Katie debacle: that they both have empty rings floating around. John's not sure why he doesn't. Maybe it's because it's really none of his business; maybe it's because he's still smarting over the memory of his wife. (He's not.) More likely, though, it's because he's afraid Rodney will try to do something stupid, like put them to use.
He's not sure what happened to Nancy's ring. He has a vague impression that she pawned it.
*
("Oh, John," she says, years later, when he asks. Her voice is sad. "Of course I didn't.")
ii. Atlantis is unreal in the way of things too real, too visceral: the knife swinging down, the hands holding your face, your buddy blowing up in front of you. Murder. Rape. She is as much of a tool as he ever was - hurting and weary and eager - and she may be a bit of a bitch, but John loves her for it.
She doesn't love him back. Not at first.
That's okay, though. That's good. Heartbreak on only one side. So he breaks her windows, and blows up her towers, and knocks down her doors, and that's okay, too, because he may destroy everything he loves, but Atlantis, at least, he can rebuild.
*
"A blessing, please," the priestess says, waving grandiosely at their new fishing fleet.
"May you have soft waves, good wind, and never a bow to break," Teyla says.
"If it pleases the goddess, let nobody fall overboard," Ronon adds.
They turn to John.
"Um," John starts.
"Oh please," Rodney snorts, and then: "Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory, pray for all those who are in ships - uh, those concerned with every lawful traffic and those who conduct them. Figlia del, del tuo figlio, Queen of Heaven."
The delegation flap their hands appreciatively.
"And, oh, Amen," Rodney adds.
*
Later: "Eliot?" he asks, disbelieving.
Rodney flushes, a deep, dark red. "Don't blame me," he protests. "My literature professor was obsessed with him to a degree I frankly find quite disturbing."
John ignores every bit of that except the important part, which is: "You. In an English class."
"It was a requirement," Rodney says, sourly. "They wouldn't let me have my degree otherwise. I asked."
*
They have one kiss to push off of, to linger on: off-world, during a harvest festival whose name seems to translate to something along the lines of The Festival of Flowers of Unusual Size.
("Exploding Flowers of Unusual Size, Colonel," Rodney spits out, and then really does spit, when some of the pollen floating around gets in his mouth. "Which means: pollen. I have very severe allergies to -"
"Everything," Ronon rumbles.
Rodney deflates a bit. "Well, essentially, yes. But still. I'm holding you accountable, Colonel. You wanted to come here. If I swell up and stop breathing and die it will be all your fault."
(Rodney should not look attractive with puffy eyes and his little turned-up nose reddened, John thinks despairingly. He should not. And he doesn't, not really, but John thinks he does, and that's kind of the whole problem.))
It's not a bad kiss, as kisses go. There's tongue, and Rodney's lips are thin, but softer than John expects.
"I can't," he whispers into the breath-space between their bodies. "McKay, I can't. We have to - I'm military."
The look that Rodney gives him clearly says, And?, so he tries again. "We're team."
"You idiot," Rodney says, "you are not kryptonite. I can actually - uh, love you - and work with you at the same time." He says it sharply, but in a quick mutter, under his breath, as it John might perhaps not notice the hugeness of his words if they were made sound-small enough.
No-go on that one, though. Because John hears him. He hears him loud and clear, and he's never been more fucking terrified in his life.
*
Of course, Rodney blows up 5/6s of a solar system later that week, so it really becomes a non-issue pretty fast. John knows that Rodney blames himself; Rodney thinks that the fact that they do not touch and do not look and do not talk is because of him. John does not disavow him of that notion. Because what is he going to say: it's not you, it's me? He's John Sheppard. He doesn't do that.
*
They don't speak of it. Ever. But sometimes, John has dreams, and can't remember what they were in the morning.
*
"Had one, once," Rodney confesses. They are in a cell; it is dark. More important, though, is the fact that Rodney is sloshed, absolutely plastered on the ceremonial wine that was perhaps stronger than they first thought. And goddamn if he isn't heavy.
"A what?" John asks, doing his best to not think about the damp, or the smell, or the knives the darkness could hold.
"A boyfriend," Rodney explains, as if it should be obvious. "With the - stuff, you know. I think."
"You think."
Rodney shrugs, or at least tries to. "He was a, a grunt. A really smart one. Too smart. Milit'ry," he clarifies, almost shouting in John's shocked face. Just like that - simple and easy, like it's no big deal, like it's not the biggest thing John's heard of since fucking ever, and why can't they have these meaningful conversations without being drunk, first? He really, really wants Rodney to be sober again, so he won't be telling him this stuff. None of it.
"That's nice, McKay," he drawls, in lieu of anything else.
Rodney nods, like that makes sense. "It was," he says, "sort of," and John wants to scoff, because if there's one thing Rodney isn't, it's that, but then again he doesn't really know, does he? And he's never going to find out. He's very determined about that.
So instead, he asks, "What happened?"
"Mmm," Rodney says, trying to burrow into his side. John shoves him away, and tells himself Rodney will thank him for that in the morning. "Whasshisname got stuck in a stargate. The big one, with the thing, here," he says, and kind of slaps himself in the forehead. "Not the stargate. I mean, the stargate was big, but - the guy. The guy was big. I think. Um, hold on," and throws up all over John's boots.
*
The thing is, this is no fairy-tale either. There may be a magical city, but none of the princesses around here live long enough to be rescued if they don't do it themselves, and the only thing that sleeps for a hundred years is the Wraith. In more esoteric terms: what he has with Rodney, it's no better of a romance than what he had with Nancy. There are no happy endings, he wants to tell Rodney. Especially not for me. Because the truth he's been trying to avoid is that Rodney's not everything John's ever wanted, but he's close enough, and so he is too what John will never allow himself to have.
The thing is, Atlantis he can rebuild. Rodney he cannot.
*
The clocks spin on. People die, as they tend to do in Pegasus. Then, suddenly, the deaths start to touch the sphere of safety they've built for themselves, the people at the heart of his city. Beckett is the first to go, then Heightmeyer. Teyla grieves - for what, he does not know, whether it be the death of a friend or lover or just love - and John allows himself to be hugged, runs with Ronon, and does not offer Rodney anything. Much more was lost that day, he knows, but for him the whole episode condenses into three pieces, like the chevron-points of a stargate; mapping where he is, and how to get to him.
It's no surprise that his nightmare is Rodney dying. It's no surprise he is the one who killed him.
It is, however, a surprise that Rodney comes back.
*
"John," Rodney cries whenever he is gone. "John!"
John's never heard his name spoken like that before. He doesn't want to ever again.
Keller dithers. Ronon looms. Teyla prays. John never leaves Rodney, not even in sleep, and doesn't offer Jeannie comfort when she cries - no words or false sympathy - only dreams that he were in her place, holding Rodney closer than she ever would, and hopes what he feels for her isn't hate, because it certainly feels like it.
(Rodney's going to be pissed if John ends up hating his sister, he thinks, and then refuses to think any more.)
He thinks about asking her, though. If she meant what she said. Because Rodney may be no John Sheppard, but why the fuck would he want to be?
*
Rodney lives, of course. But it's another close call, and when did the continued existence of one cranky astrophysicist become the bones of his universe? He never asked for that. He never asked for that at all.
iii. On missions, now, John sleeps curled towards Rodney, safe in his separate sleeping bag. He does not reach, and does not touch. At first he tries very hard to retain the space between them, to the point that if they share close quarters he makes Teyla and Ronon sleep between them, and then take the first watch, and the second, because he never sleeps well on those nights anyways. But Rodney tends to move in his sleep, they learn; to mutter and twitch and roll. So they still sleep in parenthesis, but sometimes when John wakes up the grass between them will be crumpled and bent, body-imprints like a continuum to where Rodney inevitably lies on his stomach, snoring.
And it may not be much, but it's something. It's a start. It's all anyone could ask for.
fin.
Oh, and also: snow day! Tomorrow! For once, Northern Virginia, I think I love you.
ETA: Northern Virginia, I do not love you, because you come equipped with snow plows, and salt trucks, with spraying salt that hits me in the face. FAIL.
i am the letter you took to war
sga; pg-13. spoilers up to 5.06 The Shrine.
sheppard / nancy, sheppard / mckay
written for sheafrotherdon's fabulous little Friendship / Flirting / Thinking of You Fest.
i. Night in the cloister is a rip of silk sky with no stars. Clear and gauzy. Silent, too, and if it were not for the rustle of birds, John would think that when the cloister slept, the world slept in turn. Waking, he dreams of places other than this - summer homes, army bases, he does not think of anything he could ever call home.
He names them, now: San Diego. Old Virginia. Lackland, Texas, living up to its name, and with it, Aliyah of the wide eyes and kinky hair, welcoming curves he wanted desperately to want. They were both outsiders, and knew the ways of movement; even though she had lived there her whole life, something about her still seemed transitory, like a bird in danger of being startled into the sky. They weren't dating, exactly, but he wrapped himself in her afghan and listened as she read aloud. She mouthed at Eliot, Calvino - all the late great fabulists - and liked to skip around. "Oh dark dark dark. They all go into the dark," she would say. "The vast interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant. I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing."
(He hopes she did not love him.)
Sometimes, though, she would ask, "Why is the measure of love loss?", and not expect an answer.
It sounds profound, and impersonal enough to be used as bedroom talk. He doesn't generally do that - talk after sex - but Teer seems to expect it; traces the thrum of his moving lips with her thumb. She is beautiful, soft and pliant and ready to open in a way nothing in his life ever was, and if he were a better man he would love her, be in love with her. If this were a fairy-tale, this would be a romance. If her body was sharper; if her bones were stronger; if her lips were thinner. All this, and he might be able to fit.
But the light - oh. The light here is orange and bleeding-white, capped by the dome of the sky, and he thinks he could stay here forever, except in all the ways he couldn't.
"Why is the measure of love loss?" he asks aloud into the bedroom night.
"Is it?" Teer asks, even though it's pretty obvious she wants to ask: what?
"Something an old friend used to say," he says, and in present company does not fear to name her thus. (Among his buddies, he names her girlfriend, and apologizes to her memory.) "She signed all her letters with that. I think it was a line from a book or something."
Teer smiles.
"I have never had a man such as you, John Sheppard," she says, and looks like she expects him to say it back.
There are so many things he could have said, then, but he is no Rodney, forever bumbling on the edges of a great truth. Rodney might have scoffed, or blushed. He might have told her: you exist in multitude, for me.
John is kinder, and crueler, and nowhere near as honest. Instead he kisses her, with his hands holding to the sides of her face; bounding her in, setting her parameters: with palms, with lips, with tongue.
*
(He left Aliyah in Lackland with her books and words and afghan, though he folded the last before he left. For all he knows, she's still there. He hopes not, though. He hopes she went on to bigger things, brighter ones - got the taste of dust out of her skin - and forgot the possibility of him loving her, because he could have had he stayed longer, and that is more dangerous to her than any machine gun he's ever fired, bomb he's dropped, vast expanse of the falling-out sky. Shipping out felt like a relief, like getting out from under fire. He did not promise to write.)
*
Folded in meditation, light seeping orange under his eyelids, John dreams.
*
Nancy says he seduced her on a golf course. "John swept me right off my feet," she always jokes, and her smile has a bit of bite. The look that passes between them is typical of married couples; typical of their secrets.
Stories are not finite, though. Every story has within it a thousand stories, and from those, then thousand more - perspectives, moments, slants of the light - until every tale told is really a thousand different versions of the same story, each a bit different from the rest, smashed into one whole. Their love story is, as they say, a composite work.
Within this story, then, there are ten thousand different seductions. One of them goes like this:
"Her name's Nancy Nealson, if you want to go talk," Patrick Sheppard says. "Nice girl. Smart. Beautiful. Isn't she beautiful, son?"
John's sprawled back against the seat of the golf cart, chin tipped towards the clouds. He looks positively decadent, even in polyester-wash golf attire, and under his father's heavy glance he takes a swig of the beer he is technically not allowed to bring out onto the courses. (His father owns the place, though, so it's not as if any of the staff is going to come out to tell him that.) The weather that day is clear, and the sky above is a startling, celestial blue.
"Yes," John says, "yes she is."
*
It takes his chopper crew weeks after his marriage to find out he has a wife. When he asks them, he learns that Mitch and Dex both think he has a different girlfriend. Neither, it turns out, are Nancy.
*
The ring he had picked out for her was solid, respectable, with a big enough diamond to make her cousins squeal.
"You like it?" he asks.
"I like it," she assures him. "I like you even better, though."
If he had been a better man, he knows, he wouldn't have done that to her. He is so tired of hearing declarations he cannot declare back.
(Atlantis has changed everything from his command style to his DNA, though, and he's a different man now then he was then. More intense; more ruthless, and more prone to fits of mercy. Stupid and smart in equal measures. Pegasus is the only place he can walk upon the ground and still feel like a sharpened blade, a coiled spring, the ocean that wraps the city - kinetic, in all the ways that matter.
More than anything else, though, he has become both more and less afraid, for he's learned by now that he deals well with losing, but there's more than ever before to lose.)
*
Life, for a while, is good. Nancy finds a job working for the Department of Agriculture. ("Beans, beans, land tracts," she says. "Sometimes, John, I wish I was the one who could bring a gun to work.") His commanding officers never like him, but almost everyone who never had to give him an order does, and if anyone - wonders - about him, the whispers don't start, not yet. (He keeps his ears open; he would know.)
After all, he is John Sheppard, pilot extraordinaire, one suave sonofabitch. He has a wife and possibly a girlfriend. He wears clothes like a promise of skin. He is always a few inches too far away for that friendly backslap or punch-in-the-arm, but it's not like he's doing it on purpose, and he certainly does not look at other men in the showers, soft furtive glances through his eyelashes as water runs into his eyes and pools in the bow of his lips - parted slightly, moist in the wet air.
*
"When are you getting married?" Ronon asks - not snippy, but mildly amused, and yes, he may have a tiny little crush on Ronon - who doesn't? - but he's not that obvious, damn it, even if he was fishing barely a minute ago.
"I've already done that," he says. "Not very good at it. Besides, there really isn't anyone here that - you know."
Words are powerful, Aliyah told him once. They make things happen. To make something true, name it; speak it aloud.
"See, I always thought you and Teyla would," Ronon says, "you know."
"Really?" John asks, and fights the urge to say: Ew. Because, no. Not beautiful strong wonderful Teyla, the rock that weighs them together and holds them apart, just enough room for breath. No. Not her.
"Yeah," Ronon says, "why not?"
*
The proper poetic answer to that would be: as many reasons as there are salt-cells in the sea. But John doesn't say that. Instead, he offers a sound, something noncommittal and vague, and does his damnedest to try and change the subject.
He may be attracted to artistry, but the truth is, John was never a poet.
*
Being married to Nancy is a great deal like not being married to Nancy. He runs ops, flies; kills. Nothing is never as beautiful on the ground as it is from the sky, when the whole Earth is shapes and smears, vague like art and just as unreal. He spends much of their marriage away from her. Sometimes getting fucked, or going to his knees in an alley. He becomes intimately aware with his own vulnerability, and learns all the names of the clubs, the girls working them, and takes great delight in introducing himself as John, because they all get it, they know what he does and who he is, and they laugh.
Some days, though, he can't stand anything but quiet. Some days he spends running his tongue over his teeth and looking up at the hugeness of the sky, the sheer blue expanse grabbing his ribcage and tearing it open like a creaking door - the hinge of a locket - to the small pulsing heart within. And then, when he is spat back out into his America, chest aching, he goes back to the apartment that is theoretically theirs and slides into his side of the bed. Most nights, the day goes quietly to its death, and he sleeps. Others he spends lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and does not count her breaths rising. Both he and his new wife are side-sleepers, better at being balanced than flat.
Always, though, he is careful not to touch, and by morning they wake with their backs to the walls - curled towards each other like parenthesis, and between them a vast space, cool and unslept-in.
"I didn't want to wake you," he explains. And he makes it sound so caring - the dutiful, doting husband - so how could it be anything but?
*
The sad truth that Nancy learns is this: with John Sheppard, it can be anything but.
*
(He expects to feel guilt at leaving her alone like this, in this thing that grows and shrivels by turns. Worse, though, is when they guilt does not come.)
*
"You know, I grew up in a fishing town," Nancy says. "In New England. God, it was so beautiful there. I'm sure you'd hate it. There was always more water than sky."
Where are you going with this? he wants to ask her, but that's not what good husbands do. Good husbands are patient. If their wives want to play Hamlet, fine. They wait.
"But, the men," she continues," they would go out on their boats for weeks at a time, working these long, long shifts - seventy-two hours, sometimes, and you can stop right there, John, because they didn't get stimulants like you do -"
(Fuck it, he says in his mind. He cannot bring himself to think, Fuck you.)
"- and the women would wait for them. I remember growing up there and thinking, that's never going to be me. I don't want to wait for anyone. But you know what, John?" she asks, sharp, shaking, her hands steady as she turns away from him, "You know what? The funny thing is I wish you would do that. Go away for a while. Only I'm so sick of you leaving."
"I'm sorry," he says, "but you know how it is."
"God, why can't we go back to that first year?" Nancy asks, tired and rhetorical. "Me in Agriculture, you in Afghanistan. I could write you letters and you could pretend to read them."
"Fuck this," he snaps.
"Fuck you," she retorts.
*
He keeps his ring. That's part - but not the sum - of what he doesn't tell McKay after the Katie debacle: that they both have empty rings floating around. John's not sure why he doesn't. Maybe it's because it's really none of his business; maybe it's because he's still smarting over the memory of his wife. (He's not.) More likely, though, it's because he's afraid Rodney will try to do something stupid, like put them to use.
He's not sure what happened to Nancy's ring. He has a vague impression that she pawned it.
*
("Oh, John," she says, years later, when he asks. Her voice is sad. "Of course I didn't.")
ii. Atlantis is unreal in the way of things too real, too visceral: the knife swinging down, the hands holding your face, your buddy blowing up in front of you. Murder. Rape. She is as much of a tool as he ever was - hurting and weary and eager - and she may be a bit of a bitch, but John loves her for it.
She doesn't love him back. Not at first.
That's okay, though. That's good. Heartbreak on only one side. So he breaks her windows, and blows up her towers, and knocks down her doors, and that's okay, too, because he may destroy everything he loves, but Atlantis, at least, he can rebuild.
*
"A blessing, please," the priestess says, waving grandiosely at their new fishing fleet.
"May you have soft waves, good wind, and never a bow to break," Teyla says.
"If it pleases the goddess, let nobody fall overboard," Ronon adds.
They turn to John.
"Um," John starts.
"Oh please," Rodney snorts, and then: "Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory, pray for all those who are in ships - uh, those concerned with every lawful traffic and those who conduct them. Figlia del, del tuo figlio, Queen of Heaven."
The delegation flap their hands appreciatively.
"And, oh, Amen," Rodney adds.
*
Later: "Eliot?" he asks, disbelieving.
Rodney flushes, a deep, dark red. "Don't blame me," he protests. "My literature professor was obsessed with him to a degree I frankly find quite disturbing."
John ignores every bit of that except the important part, which is: "You. In an English class."
"It was a requirement," Rodney says, sourly. "They wouldn't let me have my degree otherwise. I asked."
*
They have one kiss to push off of, to linger on: off-world, during a harvest festival whose name seems to translate to something along the lines of The Festival of Flowers of Unusual Size.
("Exploding Flowers of Unusual Size, Colonel," Rodney spits out, and then really does spit, when some of the pollen floating around gets in his mouth. "Which means: pollen. I have very severe allergies to -"
"Everything," Ronon rumbles.
Rodney deflates a bit. "Well, essentially, yes. But still. I'm holding you accountable, Colonel. You wanted to come here. If I swell up and stop breathing and die it will be all your fault."
(Rodney should not look attractive with puffy eyes and his little turned-up nose reddened, John thinks despairingly. He should not. And he doesn't, not really, but John thinks he does, and that's kind of the whole problem.))
It's not a bad kiss, as kisses go. There's tongue, and Rodney's lips are thin, but softer than John expects.
"I can't," he whispers into the breath-space between their bodies. "McKay, I can't. We have to - I'm military."
The look that Rodney gives him clearly says, And?, so he tries again. "We're team."
"You idiot," Rodney says, "you are not kryptonite. I can actually - uh, love you - and work with you at the same time." He says it sharply, but in a quick mutter, under his breath, as it John might perhaps not notice the hugeness of his words if they were made sound-small enough.
No-go on that one, though. Because John hears him. He hears him loud and clear, and he's never been more fucking terrified in his life.
*
Of course, Rodney blows up 5/6s of a solar system later that week, so it really becomes a non-issue pretty fast. John knows that Rodney blames himself; Rodney thinks that the fact that they do not touch and do not look and do not talk is because of him. John does not disavow him of that notion. Because what is he going to say: it's not you, it's me? He's John Sheppard. He doesn't do that.
*
They don't speak of it. Ever. But sometimes, John has dreams, and can't remember what they were in the morning.
*
"Had one, once," Rodney confesses. They are in a cell; it is dark. More important, though, is the fact that Rodney is sloshed, absolutely plastered on the ceremonial wine that was perhaps stronger than they first thought. And goddamn if he isn't heavy.
"A what?" John asks, doing his best to not think about the damp, or the smell, or the knives the darkness could hold.
"A boyfriend," Rodney explains, as if it should be obvious. "With the - stuff, you know. I think."
"You think."
Rodney shrugs, or at least tries to. "He was a, a grunt. A really smart one. Too smart. Milit'ry," he clarifies, almost shouting in John's shocked face. Just like that - simple and easy, like it's no big deal, like it's not the biggest thing John's heard of since fucking ever, and why can't they have these meaningful conversations without being drunk, first? He really, really wants Rodney to be sober again, so he won't be telling him this stuff. None of it.
"That's nice, McKay," he drawls, in lieu of anything else.
Rodney nods, like that makes sense. "It was," he says, "sort of," and John wants to scoff, because if there's one thing Rodney isn't, it's that, but then again he doesn't really know, does he? And he's never going to find out. He's very determined about that.
So instead, he asks, "What happened?"
"Mmm," Rodney says, trying to burrow into his side. John shoves him away, and tells himself Rodney will thank him for that in the morning. "Whasshisname got stuck in a stargate. The big one, with the thing, here," he says, and kind of slaps himself in the forehead. "Not the stargate. I mean, the stargate was big, but - the guy. The guy was big. I think. Um, hold on," and throws up all over John's boots.
*
The thing is, this is no fairy-tale either. There may be a magical city, but none of the princesses around here live long enough to be rescued if they don't do it themselves, and the only thing that sleeps for a hundred years is the Wraith. In more esoteric terms: what he has with Rodney, it's no better of a romance than what he had with Nancy. There are no happy endings, he wants to tell Rodney. Especially not for me. Because the truth he's been trying to avoid is that Rodney's not everything John's ever wanted, but he's close enough, and so he is too what John will never allow himself to have.
The thing is, Atlantis he can rebuild. Rodney he cannot.
*
The clocks spin on. People die, as they tend to do in Pegasus. Then, suddenly, the deaths start to touch the sphere of safety they've built for themselves, the people at the heart of his city. Beckett is the first to go, then Heightmeyer. Teyla grieves - for what, he does not know, whether it be the death of a friend or lover or just love - and John allows himself to be hugged, runs with Ronon, and does not offer Rodney anything. Much more was lost that day, he knows, but for him the whole episode condenses into three pieces, like the chevron-points of a stargate; mapping where he is, and how to get to him.
It's no surprise that his nightmare is Rodney dying. It's no surprise he is the one who killed him.
It is, however, a surprise that Rodney comes back.
*
"John," Rodney cries whenever he is gone. "John!"
John's never heard his name spoken like that before. He doesn't want to ever again.
Keller dithers. Ronon looms. Teyla prays. John never leaves Rodney, not even in sleep, and doesn't offer Jeannie comfort when she cries - no words or false sympathy - only dreams that he were in her place, holding Rodney closer than she ever would, and hopes what he feels for her isn't hate, because it certainly feels like it.
(Rodney's going to be pissed if John ends up hating his sister, he thinks, and then refuses to think any more.)
He thinks about asking her, though. If she meant what she said. Because Rodney may be no John Sheppard, but why the fuck would he want to be?
*
Rodney lives, of course. But it's another close call, and when did the continued existence of one cranky astrophysicist become the bones of his universe? He never asked for that. He never asked for that at all.
iii. On missions, now, John sleeps curled towards Rodney, safe in his separate sleeping bag. He does not reach, and does not touch. At first he tries very hard to retain the space between them, to the point that if they share close quarters he makes Teyla and Ronon sleep between them, and then take the first watch, and the second, because he never sleeps well on those nights anyways. But Rodney tends to move in his sleep, they learn; to mutter and twitch and roll. So they still sleep in parenthesis, but sometimes when John wakes up the grass between them will be crumpled and bent, body-imprints like a continuum to where Rodney inevitably lies on his stomach, snoring.
And it may not be much, but it's something. It's a start. It's all anyone could ask for.
fin.