.fic repost: Late Feet - McKay/Sheppard (PG13) 1.1
Title: Late Feet
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard preslash
Rating/Warnings: PG13. Bad words, angst, brief but mortal danger
Disclaimers: Not mine.
Advertisements: Originally written for mz_bstone's sga_santa present, reposted here for a couple reasons, for which see below.
Notes: Reposting "Late Feet" here so I have a copy on my own LJ, but more importantly, I've finally pulled its sequel into order, and will be posting that tomorrow, as soon as I look it over one more time.
LATE FEET
Four years and six months, those six months spent back on Earth and Atlantis a memory forever, and Rodney wonders how he managed to go four years and six whole months in a state of complete obliviousness. Usually he’s faster on the uptake than that.
It hits him when he’s filing away an offprint from his most recent article in The Astrophysical Journal and he hears a heavy, mortal thump upstairs.
“John?” He pauses, the offprint half-filed, one hand resting on the metal frame of the cabinet.
Louder, because John’s probably too busy swearing to hear him: “John?”
Nothing, nothing, and nothing again.
“Oh my God.” He tells himself it’s probably Sheppard being stupid, goes stomping up the stairs to tell John that in person - Col. John Sheppard, you are a fucking moron and do you realize how many years you’ve taken off my life? - and resolutely does not think about what he’s going to find when he opens the door to his bedroom.
He opens the door and for a moment he sees John sitting on the edge of Rodney’s bed, nursing a sore thumb, one he might have accidentally whacked with a hammer, or rubbing a shoulder he’d clocked against the dresser pushed haphazardly into a corner. Has way too much invested in John sitting there with his stupid sloping grin and saying something that will make Rodney feel better and feel like an idiot simultaneously, so that for a heartbeat he doesn’t see John lying on the floor.
But no, the second heartbeat tells him, John really is on the floor. John is, in fact, lying on the floor unconscious, oh God, and not moving.
He drops the offprint, doesn’t remember carrying it up with him.
“John? Col. Sheppard?” Up close John’s face is ashen. No blood that Rodney can see - and Rodney prides himself on his ability to see a single drop of blood from miles away, sort of like a great white shark - and no horrible bruising, nothing obviously wrong other than how still John is.
Which is, of course, what’s wrong.
“Okay, think,” he commands himself. “Don’t hyperventilate, think.”
His brain doesn’t pay attention, spinning out threads of disaster in a nanosecond: John dying right here on Rodney’s bedroom floor, which means he will have to sell the house because John’s ghost will haunt it, or John waking up amnesiac with a freaked-out Canadian hovering over him, or maybe John is already dead and the bare rise-and-fall of his chest is all in Rodney’s imagination.
Rodney, breathe. Get your cell phone, is what John would say if he were awake, alive, if they were in Pegasus and it was all on Rodney to save the day.
“You don’t get to do this,” he tells John shakily as he hunts for his cell phone. Pocket, it’s in his shirt pocket goddammit, and with a shaking hand he pulls it out, flips it open, needs a moment to remember how to dial 911.
He needs another moment to remember to hit send. He wishes he had his headset, or the radio in his tac vest, which he could just smack into life and then holler unambiguously for help.
Now he has to explain stuff to the stranger on the other end of the line, like where he is and the street number, is John dead? If not, is he breathing on his own? If so, don’t move him. Can you see any blood? Any contusions? Do you know how this might have happened?
“He was trying to fix a ceiling lamp with his face,” Rodney shouts at the stranger. “How the hell do I know? I think he fell.”
The woman, damn her, is too used to dealing with hysterical people to get worked up at Rodney’s histrionics. Instead, she tells him the ambulance is on its way; they’ll be there in just a few minutes, and do you need me to stay on the line?
“No,” Rodney snarls. He slams the phone shut and shoves it back in his pocket, collapses next to John because his knees are killing him. Stays close, close enough to see John’s brow furrowed a bit in what looks like pain, or like he’s puzzled, trying to figure out what hurts.
“You’ve had worse doing some idiot stunt in one of those planes of yours,” he tells John shakily. “God only knows how badly g-forces have scrambled your brain. It’s a wonder you’re able to feed and clothe yourself. How is it you’re allowed out of the house? And for that matter, why did I agree to let you come over and handle what is obviously dangerous equipment…”
He lectures John on his carelessness and obvious mental impairment - “and if you’re not brain damaged now, then you will be” - for another minute before segueing into how, while John may be capable of seeing irony in the situation, Rodney really isn’t.
Because you do not do this, you do not fall off a ladder while adjusting a light fixture and hit your head and go unconscious, in this galaxy or any other, when you’ve survived goddamn Wraith and armed maniacs and storms and explosions and nuclear bombs and still more Wraith, and you do not do this when Carson is thousands of miles away in Scotland - so he might as well be on the moon for all the use he is - and you do not do this when there isn’t a stargate or a puddle jumper or a Daedalus to transport or fly or beam you to a hospital.
Rodney tells John all this in a very loud voice as he listens desperately for the ambulance, and keeps John’s hand in a death grip (ha!), memorizes calluses to pass the time. John isn’t wearing his stupid black wristband - he only wore it because of the P90’s recoil, no big thing, he’d explained after Rodney’d finally worn him down on the subject - only a black thready bracelet thing that serves no useful purpose except that John likes to twist it when he’s thinking.
It makes John’s wrist look delicate, the bones underneath it ephemeral, and Rodney tells himself it’s all in his stupid overdeveloped head, that John is not going to die or vanish. John will be fine. As soon as the paramedics get here.
Finally, finally by the time he hears the howl of the sirens John’s hand feels too cool in his, and John’s still so still but at least he’s breathing - Rodney keeps telling himself this, tells John this as he hears heavy feet coming up the steps.
“At fucking last!” he growls as a cadre of paramedics bursts into his room, trampling the offprint underfoot.
“You need to move, sir,” one of them tells him and Rodney almost argues back, No, I don’t need to move, I need to stay right here, and don’t ‘sir’ me, when he realizes that he really does need to move back. Even Carson needed space.
The paramedics do efficient paramedic things, ask Rodney how long John had been out before he’d reached him, get John hooked up to a blood pressure cuff and IV and loaded up onto a stretcher. John makes a small, unhappy sound at that, furrow between his brows deepening in consternation, and Rodney shouts for the medics to be careful.
“He’s coming around,” one of them says, ignoring Rodney’s very pertinent and necessary instructions. “We’re taking him to Mercy; he’ll need a workup to make sure he’s okay.”
“Of course,” Rodney huffs. “I’m coming too. I’m assuming there’s room?” No way is he driving in his state of mind. If he had a jumper, he could have thought Mercy Hospital and the thing could have flown him there itself - of course, if he’d had a jumper he wouldn’t have bothered with 911.
One of the medics - Cam or something ridiculous like that - nods reluctantly as he and his partner pack John off down the stairs. Rodney has enough presence of mind to grab three things - his house keys, the offprint, John’s wallet (with his insurance card, because Rodney’s familiar with the bloodsucking practices of American health care policy), and - crap, almost forgot - his own wallet, because he’ll probably be going into hypoglycemic shock at the hospital and only vending machines will stand between him and a hospital bed of his own.
The ride to the hospital is, Rodney has to concede reluctantly, kind of cool. The sirens are on, so the ambulance gets right-of-way, and Cam rockets madly through the intersections.
“You would so appreciate this,” he tells John’s silent self, pale and still on his gurney. He imagines, briefly, John behind the ambulance wheel, grinning like a man possessed and careering down busy streets, menacing grandmothers and astrophysicists too slow to get out of his way. “Maybe if you’re good we can get a ride back… Which would be a good thing, considering I don’t have my car.”
Once at the hospital they whisk John off to the ER, leaving Rodney standing in an antiseptic aisle, the glare on the tiles blinding, alone with himself, his thoughts, and the PR system paging Dr. Greene to ER 2.
A nurse shepherds him into the waiting room to… to wait. Rodney asks - humbly - to borrow a pen, not really knowing what he’s going to do with it other than draw on himself to pass the time. She brings one to him; it’s half-dry and gives out at inconvenient moments. The offprint, he remembers, is in his back pocket, and he pulls it out, thinks about writing down notes for future ideas - this isn’t the article that’ll win him the Nobel, but it’s a step, something that’ll go in the Guide to the Theoretical Basis of McKayian Wormhole Physics he’s writing in his head.
The numbers and letters blur together into meaninglessness and he feels like an idiot, staring at the neatly printed lines and having them make no sense when physics is supposed to be his first language, and damn John Sheppard for -
for -
Rodney’s mind stutters around the thought, a disjunct between what he wants it to be (for falling off a stupid ladder and making Rodney worry about brain damage and lawsuits) and what it is.
(For falling off a stupid ladder and making Rodney worry about brain damage and lawsuits and making Rodney see that somehow in the past four years John’s made himself necessary, and he’d never once asked for Rodney’s permission to go and do something like that.
(In fact, he’d just shown up at Rodney’s place one day, Loose ends, McKay. I’m bored, and Rodney had put John up in his guest bedroom and put him to work the next day, and they’d spent a week like that, getting Rodney unpacked from his second move in six months. And the entire time Rodney had very carefully not thought about John going back to… wherever he’d come from, that maybe the unpacking could go on forever.
(This was, in fact, highly possible. Rodney has a lot of stuff.)
But - no, wait. Necessary, John is necessary, like the laws of thermodynamics or gravity or the sugar Rodney needs right now before he keels over and joins John in the ER.
Wallet. He needs his wallet for that, needs his head on straight to find his wallet, and he’s processing this when a soft voice interrupts him.
“Sir?”
It’s the nurse who’d given him the pen, and Rodney wonders if she wants it back.
“Your friend, Mr. Sheppard?”
“Colonel,” Rodney snaps. It’s important, though John really isn’t Air Force anymore. “Colonel Sheppard.”
“Oh.” The nurse blinks. “He’s out of the ER and on his way to radiology…”
She says something else medical and mysterious, but all Rodney can understand is that she doesn’t want her pen back, and that John’s okay. A concussion, and the entire hours-long nightmare Rodney had experienced had been about ten minutes of alternating unconsciousness and semi-consciousness without loss of breathing.
“When can I see him?” he asks.
The nurse looks at him quizzically, as though he’s spoken in Ancient.
“You are…?”
She doesn’t know who he is, but then, she probably doesn’t keep up with the cutting edge of astrophysics research. Rodney thinks about giving her the crumpled offprint in his hand, complete with illegible scribbles and places where sweat has made the paper moist.
“Rodney McKay. And I’m not next of kin or anything. He’s… he’s just important, you know? Necessary.” He coughs, realizes he probably shouldn’t have said that. He doesn’t even know what that means. “I mean, he’s a guest at my place and I’m afraid he might sue. I need to talk him out of it.”
“I see.” The nurse’s expression says she really doesn’t; her lips twitch, and Rodney has the distinct impression she’s mocking him. “Well, he’ll be kept for observation of course, so when he’s checked into his room I’ll let you know. You can see him then.”
“Then” means another three hours, during which Rodney bolts a Snickers bar and a bag of Doritos, unwilling to leave the waiting room to safari around the hospital for the cafeteria. His nurse - not really his, but for some reason he thinks of her possessively - occasionally glances at him and smiles a bit, a mysterious smile that reminds him of Cadman.
He spends the time thinking about John, and ways to tell him not to get himself killed because he’s too important to Rodney, but not actually saying that.
At last his nurse - Becky, according to her tag - gives Rodney a room number and directions to Neurology. He almost has apoplexy at that, because Neurology means “something is seriously wrong with your brain if you’re in here,” but she explains to him that the ER’s out of beds and Neurology isn’t, so that’s where John goes.
Rodney accepts the reassurance meekly and trails up the elevator to the third floor. What the hell is he supposed to say to John when he sees him? Somehow, he doubted melodrama would go over well, or tears, or vows of eternal, desperate passion. Not that Rodney would go for any of those options himself because he doesn’t talk about stuff like this, the important stuff that you realize while crammed into an uncomfortable chair, trying not to think that your best friend has nearly done what a whole galaxy full of Wraith, Genii, and replicators couldn’t do.
As he starts to walk down one aisle of Neurology wing, looking for John’s room, he decides to go with his default setting: annoyed. Yes. This will work well, as it usually does; it gives Rodney the advantage of having the offensive, the first word (which means Sheppard will be quiet for as long as Rodney needs to vent at him), and giving him the opportunity to release the tension that’s been building up for the past five hours.
“Is it that you’re an idiot, or are you just insane?” he demands, pushing through the door to Room 311.
“What?” the woman lying in the room’s single bed asks, bewildered.
“You’re not John,” he informs her crossly and stalks out.
Try again, this time with Room 312. They all look and smell the same, pastel and antiseptic.
“Is it that you’re an idiot, or are you just insane?”
“Good to see you too, Rodney.”
(John’s eyes are soft and tired and green.)
“Yes, well…” Rodney grinds to a halt at the foot of John’s bed and glares down at him. Anger works. Yes, anger works very well. A flexible emotion, sort of a general emotional white-out, allowing Rodney to vent pretty much anything - grinding terror, worry, I think I might like you a little more than is healthy, John, or straight for that matter - and still come off as pissed. “I hope you’re happy, giving me a heart attack like that. Do you know what the average response times of ambulances in rural areas are? Not good, that’s what.”
“You live in the suburbs, Rodney.”
“Completely beside the point.” Rodney crosses his arms over his chest and continues to glare at John, who’s pale and obviously not quite with it, but still smirking. “I hope you have a good explanation for this.”
“Umm… I slipped?” John says this very carefully, like Rodney’s searching for the lie that couldn’t possibly be in that statement. “I was getting down to grab another screw for that lamp, and I thought I had one more step under me.” A shrug dismisses the unconsciousness and the concussion, the fact that they’re in a room in the neurological department of a hospital. Rodney can feel his blood pressure spike.
“Yes, well… Don’t let it happen again. As long as you’re in my house, you’re forbidden to use step ladders, or any kind of device that puts you more than one foot above the ground.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can’t believe it… the great Col. John Sheppard nearly killed by a step-ladder. Kolya would be disappointed.” Rodney huffs over to the chair next to John’s bed and collapses in it, eyeing him crankily. He pulls the chair closer, close enough to rest his forearms on the railings, to see that John is in fact okay, no IV, no nothing except the clip over his finger and a bandage low on his scalp. Now that John’s sarcastic and alive, Rodney can yell at him properly but he finds exhaustion weighing the anger down, holding it back, and John is looking at him with eyes that are soft and tired and green. “Just… don’t do that again, okay?”
“Got it, Rodney,” John tells him, soft and serious, and Rodney can’t find a trace of teasing anywhere, no matter how hard he searches for it.
“In fact,” Rodney continues, “you should probably stick around my place for a bit. It’s clear you have no concept of basic household safety, or, you know, self-preservation.”
“Says the man who tries to use 150-watt bulbs when he should use 60.” John’s hand, the one with the medical bracelet, plays with the coverlet even as he shoots a wicked and deliberately provocative look at Rodney. “I’d think a physicist would know something about that.”
“We aren’t talking about me,” Rodney informs John, “we’re talking about you. And while we’re on the subject, I just wanted to say…” Pause. Rewind. “I just wanted to say…It’s been nice, sort of, in a not wholly-unpleasant way, having you around, and I wouldn’t want your death to get in the way of you staying at my place for a bit longer.”
(He likes how John’s mouth quirks up in a smile, not quite a smirk, but something more honest than that, like he’s decoded Rodney’s big secret message.)
“I wouldn’t either. You have a nice place.” And Rodney does, just outside the worst of Denver suburbia. “Close to the slopes.”
“You fall off a ladder and yet are confident in your ability to negotiate a thousand feet of near-vertical slope on flimsy wooden boards. Clearly I’m insane for wanting to deal with you.” He needs another Snickers bar. He needs a drink. He needs John out of the hospital and home and safe, and nowhere near a ski-lift.
“Clearly,” John says happily, and it occurs to Rodney that he’s just asked John to move in with him and John’s just agreed. Agreed to a foreseeable future of mental imbalance, fights over who makes coffee in the morning, and John’s inability to understand the concept of “gravity = hurt when you mess with it.”
“When are you out of here?” he asks, to cover the stupid grin on his face and the relief at having John alive and coming home with him.
“Not soon enough,” John tells him. “They don’t even have good jell-o.”
“I’ve got the blue jell-o at my place,” Rodney says. “When we get home, we’ll make some.”
-end-
> I'm a Stranger Here Myself
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard preslash
Rating/Warnings: PG13. Bad words, angst, brief but mortal danger
Disclaimers: Not mine.
Advertisements: Originally written for mz_bstone's sga_santa present, reposted here for a couple reasons, for which see below.
Notes: Reposting "Late Feet" here so I have a copy on my own LJ, but more importantly, I've finally pulled its sequel into order, and will be posting that tomorrow, as soon as I look it over one more time.
LATE FEET
Four years and six months, those six months spent back on Earth and Atlantis a memory forever, and Rodney wonders how he managed to go four years and six whole months in a state of complete obliviousness. Usually he’s faster on the uptake than that.
It hits him when he’s filing away an offprint from his most recent article in The Astrophysical Journal and he hears a heavy, mortal thump upstairs.
“John?” He pauses, the offprint half-filed, one hand resting on the metal frame of the cabinet.
Louder, because John’s probably too busy swearing to hear him: “John?”
Nothing, nothing, and nothing again.
“Oh my God.” He tells himself it’s probably Sheppard being stupid, goes stomping up the stairs to tell John that in person - Col. John Sheppard, you are a fucking moron and do you realize how many years you’ve taken off my life? - and resolutely does not think about what he’s going to find when he opens the door to his bedroom.
He opens the door and for a moment he sees John sitting on the edge of Rodney’s bed, nursing a sore thumb, one he might have accidentally whacked with a hammer, or rubbing a shoulder he’d clocked against the dresser pushed haphazardly into a corner. Has way too much invested in John sitting there with his stupid sloping grin and saying something that will make Rodney feel better and feel like an idiot simultaneously, so that for a heartbeat he doesn’t see John lying on the floor.
But no, the second heartbeat tells him, John really is on the floor. John is, in fact, lying on the floor unconscious, oh God, and not moving.
He drops the offprint, doesn’t remember carrying it up with him.
“John? Col. Sheppard?” Up close John’s face is ashen. No blood that Rodney can see - and Rodney prides himself on his ability to see a single drop of blood from miles away, sort of like a great white shark - and no horrible bruising, nothing obviously wrong other than how still John is.
Which is, of course, what’s wrong.
“Okay, think,” he commands himself. “Don’t hyperventilate, think.”
His brain doesn’t pay attention, spinning out threads of disaster in a nanosecond: John dying right here on Rodney’s bedroom floor, which means he will have to sell the house because John’s ghost will haunt it, or John waking up amnesiac with a freaked-out Canadian hovering over him, or maybe John is already dead and the bare rise-and-fall of his chest is all in Rodney’s imagination.
Rodney, breathe. Get your cell phone, is what John would say if he were awake, alive, if they were in Pegasus and it was all on Rodney to save the day.
“You don’t get to do this,” he tells John shakily as he hunts for his cell phone. Pocket, it’s in his shirt pocket goddammit, and with a shaking hand he pulls it out, flips it open, needs a moment to remember how to dial 911.
He needs another moment to remember to hit send. He wishes he had his headset, or the radio in his tac vest, which he could just smack into life and then holler unambiguously for help.
Now he has to explain stuff to the stranger on the other end of the line, like where he is and the street number, is John dead? If not, is he breathing on his own? If so, don’t move him. Can you see any blood? Any contusions? Do you know how this might have happened?
“He was trying to fix a ceiling lamp with his face,” Rodney shouts at the stranger. “How the hell do I know? I think he fell.”
The woman, damn her, is too used to dealing with hysterical people to get worked up at Rodney’s histrionics. Instead, she tells him the ambulance is on its way; they’ll be there in just a few minutes, and do you need me to stay on the line?
“No,” Rodney snarls. He slams the phone shut and shoves it back in his pocket, collapses next to John because his knees are killing him. Stays close, close enough to see John’s brow furrowed a bit in what looks like pain, or like he’s puzzled, trying to figure out what hurts.
“You’ve had worse doing some idiot stunt in one of those planes of yours,” he tells John shakily. “God only knows how badly g-forces have scrambled your brain. It’s a wonder you’re able to feed and clothe yourself. How is it you’re allowed out of the house? And for that matter, why did I agree to let you come over and handle what is obviously dangerous equipment…”
He lectures John on his carelessness and obvious mental impairment - “and if you’re not brain damaged now, then you will be” - for another minute before segueing into how, while John may be capable of seeing irony in the situation, Rodney really isn’t.
Because you do not do this, you do not fall off a ladder while adjusting a light fixture and hit your head and go unconscious, in this galaxy or any other, when you’ve survived goddamn Wraith and armed maniacs and storms and explosions and nuclear bombs and still more Wraith, and you do not do this when Carson is thousands of miles away in Scotland - so he might as well be on the moon for all the use he is - and you do not do this when there isn’t a stargate or a puddle jumper or a Daedalus to transport or fly or beam you to a hospital.
Rodney tells John all this in a very loud voice as he listens desperately for the ambulance, and keeps John’s hand in a death grip (ha!), memorizes calluses to pass the time. John isn’t wearing his stupid black wristband - he only wore it because of the P90’s recoil, no big thing, he’d explained after Rodney’d finally worn him down on the subject - only a black thready bracelet thing that serves no useful purpose except that John likes to twist it when he’s thinking.
It makes John’s wrist look delicate, the bones underneath it ephemeral, and Rodney tells himself it’s all in his stupid overdeveloped head, that John is not going to die or vanish. John will be fine. As soon as the paramedics get here.
Finally, finally by the time he hears the howl of the sirens John’s hand feels too cool in his, and John’s still so still but at least he’s breathing - Rodney keeps telling himself this, tells John this as he hears heavy feet coming up the steps.
“At fucking last!” he growls as a cadre of paramedics bursts into his room, trampling the offprint underfoot.
“You need to move, sir,” one of them tells him and Rodney almost argues back, No, I don’t need to move, I need to stay right here, and don’t ‘sir’ me, when he realizes that he really does need to move back. Even Carson needed space.
The paramedics do efficient paramedic things, ask Rodney how long John had been out before he’d reached him, get John hooked up to a blood pressure cuff and IV and loaded up onto a stretcher. John makes a small, unhappy sound at that, furrow between his brows deepening in consternation, and Rodney shouts for the medics to be careful.
“He’s coming around,” one of them says, ignoring Rodney’s very pertinent and necessary instructions. “We’re taking him to Mercy; he’ll need a workup to make sure he’s okay.”
“Of course,” Rodney huffs. “I’m coming too. I’m assuming there’s room?” No way is he driving in his state of mind. If he had a jumper, he could have thought Mercy Hospital and the thing could have flown him there itself - of course, if he’d had a jumper he wouldn’t have bothered with 911.
One of the medics - Cam or something ridiculous like that - nods reluctantly as he and his partner pack John off down the stairs. Rodney has enough presence of mind to grab three things - his house keys, the offprint, John’s wallet (with his insurance card, because Rodney’s familiar with the bloodsucking practices of American health care policy), and - crap, almost forgot - his own wallet, because he’ll probably be going into hypoglycemic shock at the hospital and only vending machines will stand between him and a hospital bed of his own.
The ride to the hospital is, Rodney has to concede reluctantly, kind of cool. The sirens are on, so the ambulance gets right-of-way, and Cam rockets madly through the intersections.
“You would so appreciate this,” he tells John’s silent self, pale and still on his gurney. He imagines, briefly, John behind the ambulance wheel, grinning like a man possessed and careering down busy streets, menacing grandmothers and astrophysicists too slow to get out of his way. “Maybe if you’re good we can get a ride back… Which would be a good thing, considering I don’t have my car.”
Once at the hospital they whisk John off to the ER, leaving Rodney standing in an antiseptic aisle, the glare on the tiles blinding, alone with himself, his thoughts, and the PR system paging Dr. Greene to ER 2.
A nurse shepherds him into the waiting room to… to wait. Rodney asks - humbly - to borrow a pen, not really knowing what he’s going to do with it other than draw on himself to pass the time. She brings one to him; it’s half-dry and gives out at inconvenient moments. The offprint, he remembers, is in his back pocket, and he pulls it out, thinks about writing down notes for future ideas - this isn’t the article that’ll win him the Nobel, but it’s a step, something that’ll go in the Guide to the Theoretical Basis of McKayian Wormhole Physics he’s writing in his head.
The numbers and letters blur together into meaninglessness and he feels like an idiot, staring at the neatly printed lines and having them make no sense when physics is supposed to be his first language, and damn John Sheppard for -
for -
Rodney’s mind stutters around the thought, a disjunct between what he wants it to be (for falling off a stupid ladder and making Rodney worry about brain damage and lawsuits) and what it is.
(For falling off a stupid ladder and making Rodney worry about brain damage and lawsuits and making Rodney see that somehow in the past four years John’s made himself necessary, and he’d never once asked for Rodney’s permission to go and do something like that.
(In fact, he’d just shown up at Rodney’s place one day, Loose ends, McKay. I’m bored, and Rodney had put John up in his guest bedroom and put him to work the next day, and they’d spent a week like that, getting Rodney unpacked from his second move in six months. And the entire time Rodney had very carefully not thought about John going back to… wherever he’d come from, that maybe the unpacking could go on forever.
(This was, in fact, highly possible. Rodney has a lot of stuff.)
But - no, wait. Necessary, John is necessary, like the laws of thermodynamics or gravity or the sugar Rodney needs right now before he keels over and joins John in the ER.
Wallet. He needs his wallet for that, needs his head on straight to find his wallet, and he’s processing this when a soft voice interrupts him.
“Sir?”
It’s the nurse who’d given him the pen, and Rodney wonders if she wants it back.
“Your friend, Mr. Sheppard?”
“Colonel,” Rodney snaps. It’s important, though John really isn’t Air Force anymore. “Colonel Sheppard.”
“Oh.” The nurse blinks. “He’s out of the ER and on his way to radiology…”
She says something else medical and mysterious, but all Rodney can understand is that she doesn’t want her pen back, and that John’s okay. A concussion, and the entire hours-long nightmare Rodney had experienced had been about ten minutes of alternating unconsciousness and semi-consciousness without loss of breathing.
“When can I see him?” he asks.
The nurse looks at him quizzically, as though he’s spoken in Ancient.
“You are…?”
She doesn’t know who he is, but then, she probably doesn’t keep up with the cutting edge of astrophysics research. Rodney thinks about giving her the crumpled offprint in his hand, complete with illegible scribbles and places where sweat has made the paper moist.
“Rodney McKay. And I’m not next of kin or anything. He’s… he’s just important, you know? Necessary.” He coughs, realizes he probably shouldn’t have said that. He doesn’t even know what that means. “I mean, he’s a guest at my place and I’m afraid he might sue. I need to talk him out of it.”
“I see.” The nurse’s expression says she really doesn’t; her lips twitch, and Rodney has the distinct impression she’s mocking him. “Well, he’ll be kept for observation of course, so when he’s checked into his room I’ll let you know. You can see him then.”
“Then” means another three hours, during which Rodney bolts a Snickers bar and a bag of Doritos, unwilling to leave the waiting room to safari around the hospital for the cafeteria. His nurse - not really his, but for some reason he thinks of her possessively - occasionally glances at him and smiles a bit, a mysterious smile that reminds him of Cadman.
He spends the time thinking about John, and ways to tell him not to get himself killed because he’s too important to Rodney, but not actually saying that.
At last his nurse - Becky, according to her tag - gives Rodney a room number and directions to Neurology. He almost has apoplexy at that, because Neurology means “something is seriously wrong with your brain if you’re in here,” but she explains to him that the ER’s out of beds and Neurology isn’t, so that’s where John goes.
Rodney accepts the reassurance meekly and trails up the elevator to the third floor. What the hell is he supposed to say to John when he sees him? Somehow, he doubted melodrama would go over well, or tears, or vows of eternal, desperate passion. Not that Rodney would go for any of those options himself because he doesn’t talk about stuff like this, the important stuff that you realize while crammed into an uncomfortable chair, trying not to think that your best friend has nearly done what a whole galaxy full of Wraith, Genii, and replicators couldn’t do.
As he starts to walk down one aisle of Neurology wing, looking for John’s room, he decides to go with his default setting: annoyed. Yes. This will work well, as it usually does; it gives Rodney the advantage of having the offensive, the first word (which means Sheppard will be quiet for as long as Rodney needs to vent at him), and giving him the opportunity to release the tension that’s been building up for the past five hours.
“Is it that you’re an idiot, or are you just insane?” he demands, pushing through the door to Room 311.
“What?” the woman lying in the room’s single bed asks, bewildered.
“You’re not John,” he informs her crossly and stalks out.
Try again, this time with Room 312. They all look and smell the same, pastel and antiseptic.
“Is it that you’re an idiot, or are you just insane?”
“Good to see you too, Rodney.”
(John’s eyes are soft and tired and green.)
“Yes, well…” Rodney grinds to a halt at the foot of John’s bed and glares down at him. Anger works. Yes, anger works very well. A flexible emotion, sort of a general emotional white-out, allowing Rodney to vent pretty much anything - grinding terror, worry, I think I might like you a little more than is healthy, John, or straight for that matter - and still come off as pissed. “I hope you’re happy, giving me a heart attack like that. Do you know what the average response times of ambulances in rural areas are? Not good, that’s what.”
“You live in the suburbs, Rodney.”
“Completely beside the point.” Rodney crosses his arms over his chest and continues to glare at John, who’s pale and obviously not quite with it, but still smirking. “I hope you have a good explanation for this.”
“Umm… I slipped?” John says this very carefully, like Rodney’s searching for the lie that couldn’t possibly be in that statement. “I was getting down to grab another screw for that lamp, and I thought I had one more step under me.” A shrug dismisses the unconsciousness and the concussion, the fact that they’re in a room in the neurological department of a hospital. Rodney can feel his blood pressure spike.
“Yes, well… Don’t let it happen again. As long as you’re in my house, you’re forbidden to use step ladders, or any kind of device that puts you more than one foot above the ground.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can’t believe it… the great Col. John Sheppard nearly killed by a step-ladder. Kolya would be disappointed.” Rodney huffs over to the chair next to John’s bed and collapses in it, eyeing him crankily. He pulls the chair closer, close enough to rest his forearms on the railings, to see that John is in fact okay, no IV, no nothing except the clip over his finger and a bandage low on his scalp. Now that John’s sarcastic and alive, Rodney can yell at him properly but he finds exhaustion weighing the anger down, holding it back, and John is looking at him with eyes that are soft and tired and green. “Just… don’t do that again, okay?”
“Got it, Rodney,” John tells him, soft and serious, and Rodney can’t find a trace of teasing anywhere, no matter how hard he searches for it.
“In fact,” Rodney continues, “you should probably stick around my place for a bit. It’s clear you have no concept of basic household safety, or, you know, self-preservation.”
“Says the man who tries to use 150-watt bulbs when he should use 60.” John’s hand, the one with the medical bracelet, plays with the coverlet even as he shoots a wicked and deliberately provocative look at Rodney. “I’d think a physicist would know something about that.”
“We aren’t talking about me,” Rodney informs John, “we’re talking about you. And while we’re on the subject, I just wanted to say…” Pause. Rewind. “I just wanted to say…It’s been nice, sort of, in a not wholly-unpleasant way, having you around, and I wouldn’t want your death to get in the way of you staying at my place for a bit longer.”
(He likes how John’s mouth quirks up in a smile, not quite a smirk, but something more honest than that, like he’s decoded Rodney’s big secret message.)
“I wouldn’t either. You have a nice place.” And Rodney does, just outside the worst of Denver suburbia. “Close to the slopes.”
“You fall off a ladder and yet are confident in your ability to negotiate a thousand feet of near-vertical slope on flimsy wooden boards. Clearly I’m insane for wanting to deal with you.” He needs another Snickers bar. He needs a drink. He needs John out of the hospital and home and safe, and nowhere near a ski-lift.
“Clearly,” John says happily, and it occurs to Rodney that he’s just asked John to move in with him and John’s just agreed. Agreed to a foreseeable future of mental imbalance, fights over who makes coffee in the morning, and John’s inability to understand the concept of “gravity = hurt when you mess with it.”
“When are you out of here?” he asks, to cover the stupid grin on his face and the relief at having John alive and coming home with him.
“Not soon enough,” John tells him. “They don’t even have good jell-o.”
“I’ve got the blue jell-o at my place,” Rodney says. “When we get home, we’ll make some.”
-end-
> I'm a Stranger Here Myself