Always Sleep With My Guns
Title: Always Sleep With My Guns
Summary: Bodyguard-fic. That pretty much covers it.
Details: SGA AU, John/Rodney, ~2,300 words, rated M for makeouts.
Notes: The last of my Sweet Charity fics, for the completely delightful celli, a long-time friend and 50% of my first-ever fangirl meet-up. This is a day late, to my shame, but I'm hoping that it's enjoyable enough to compensate for my tardiness? It ended up being a massive blast to write, so thank you for the wonderful prompt. Big thanks also to shaenie and thingswithwings for speed-betaing, mocking my typos, and untangling a couple of deeply tortured sentences. Title from Shivaree's "Goodnight Moon."
The kick to the chest sends John slamming back into the wall, knocking the air out of his lungs, and it's only twenty years of combat training that get his arms up fast enough to catch his assailant's forearm before the knife makes contact. Then the two of them are pressed in close, muscle locked against muscle, and John's vision hasn't even cleared before he knows he's not going to win this one. The guy's got an inch and a half and forty pounds of muscle on him, and he's shoved right in between John's knees, leaving no room for a kick or a heel-hook. John's shoulders are pressed flat against the sheetrock, nowhere to go, and his wrists are bent as far as they go as he fights to keep three inches of air between the point of the switchblade and his throat. No leverage, no way to get a hand free, and if he tries for a headbutt he's going to impale his own neck on the knife -- this is it, fucking checkmate.
The guy's breath gusts stale and humid against John's face, the deeply-flushed skin around his close-set eyes all that John can see of him under the balaclava. They've gotta be close to the Sig, John had heard it hit this wall after he'd swung the pipe down and knocked it out of the guy's hands, but even if it were directly underfoot there'd be no way to make a grab for it. John drags air into his lungs in short, sharp gasps, pain shooting up his left forearm as it starts to buckle. Any second now, the strain's going to snap it, the fault line of the decade-old fracture giving way, and John hopes like hell that Rodney's out of the building by now, that he's made it to the car and is gunning it for the nearest highway. John grunts as his heel slips half an inch and the knife nearly kisses skin before he forces it back to a momentary stalemate. He's always known he was going to die on the job, and he's going to be goddamn fucking pissed if his protectee doesn't take every second John is buying him to haul ass for the nearest high-security government facility as fast as is humanly possible. C'mon, McKay, he thinks, come on, and then the man surges up and throws his full weight into the shoulder behind his knife hand, and John's thoughts are obliterated by the twitch and spasm that mean his muscles are about to give way.
He sucks in a deep, deep breath, feeling it sting his lungs, the last he's ever going to take, and suddenly a muffled, staccato burst cuts the air in a pfft! pfft! pfft! pfft! The man's head jerks back half an inch, and he lets out an aborted, gutteral consonant -- then he goes down like a sandbag, dropping so fast that John pitches forward and nearly falls when two hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight drag against the desperate, two-handed grip he's got on the man's wrist. He reels as he lets go, stumbling over the man to catch himself on the lab table, and yanks his gaze up to see Rodney McKay framed in the doorway, face sheet-white and hands shaking as he slowly lowers a cordless nail gun.
For a moment, John just leans there, bent in half with his own pulse pounding loudly in his ears. Rodney's chest is rising and falling like he just ran the Boston Marathon, and the whites are visible all the way around his irises as he stares past John at the man on the ground. Some amount of time goes by, neither of them moving, and then John's brain jerks back online, like a system booting from a backup generator. He shoves himself away from the table, grabbing the broom someone had left leaning against it, and jabs the handle sharply under the man's shoulder to lever him over onto his front. The body tips slackly over without a hint of response or resistance. Buried deep in the coarse wool of the balaclava, the dull heads of four copper nails form a crooked constellation in the back of the man's skull.
There's a barely audible rattle from across the room, and when John jerks his head up it takes him longer than it should to pinpoint the sound as the nail-gun in Rodney's hand. He's got the side of it pressed against his solar plexus in an unwitting approximation of the way a soldier would hold an automatic rifle, but his grip is jittering violently enough that it keeps knocking arrhythmically against the metal zipper of his hoodie. John's been around enough civilians in lethal situations to know that sometime soon -- maybe not in the next minute, but certainly in the next couple of hours -- Rodney is really going to lose his shit, and it would behoove John to call the attack in and get them both the fuck out of here before that happens. But it's disturbingly hard to translate that knowledge into motion, hard to get his mind and his muscles to connect. John's had close calls over the years, but not like this, where death wasn't just imminent but fucking inevitable.
Beyond Rodney, out in the hall, John can see his Beretta lying on the floor, where it had skidded to a stop after the hitman had kicked out of John's hand. That was when John had yelled for Rodney to go, get the fuck out, McKay! Rodney must've run right past it when he'd bolted out of the room, John realizes -- and he hadn't picked it up when he'd come back. John looks from it to the nail gun vibrating in Rodney's grip to the uneven line of nails embedded in the man's head, considering those three things with a kind of detached confusion. Then, all of a sudden, he gets it.
Rodney McKay is the first person ever offered Secret Service protection because of the strategic value of the tech he's invented. He knows the physics behind every projectile, explosive, or radioactive weapon ever invented, because he's the one designing the things that can defend against them. Rodney hadn't taken off past the gun and raided a construction site because he was too terrified to think clearly. He hadn't turned around after suffering an attack of conscience and grabbed the first thing that came to hand on his way back. He'd run past the gun intentionally, and he'd done it because he needed to find something sufficiently non-lethal -- so that if he missed the hitman and shot John instead, there was a greatly decreased chance it would be fatal.
John lets the broom go as he takes an unsteady step forward; he's really got to get Rodney to somewhere safe. He's about halfway across the room when the pole hits the concrete with a clatter so loud he nearly jumps out of his skin. "Shit!" Rodney blurts, jerking like the noise was a slap, and then he's fumbling for the nail gun, fingers slipping over the handle as he tries in vain to juggle it back into his hands. John lunges across the gap between them, knowing he's not going to be fast enough to catch it, and shoves Rodney down and to the side as the thing hits the floor. There's a pfft-thunk! from behind them as John comes down hard on Rodney's chest, breath whooshing out of both of them, and only just keeps his forehead from slamming down into Rodney's nose. He jerks back in time to see Rodney's grimace of surprise veer towards outrage, but it wipes itself completely blank as his eyes lock onto something over John's shoulder. John plants a hand on the gritty concrete floor and cranes back until he sees what Rodney's looking at: the nail half-sunk into the cross-beam directly above where Rodney had been standing.
A second passes. All the adrenaline drains out of John like someone's yanked out a stopper, and he lets his head drop down into the crook of his elbow. He can still hear his own pulse, and through the center of his sternum, he can feel the steady, rapid beat of Rodney's heart. The rush of exhausted relief -- not dead, not dead: I'm not, he's not, holy shit that was close -- makes him stupid enough that he just keeps lying there while his own system decelerates, internal gears spinning in successively slower revolutions.
Eventually, John musters up the energy to push himself partway up, arm muscles twitching with fatigue. "I thought I told you to get out of here," he croaks.
Rodney stares up at him, lips half-parted. From less than a foot away, his features are startlingly vivid, like someone's dialed the contrast up: the fading flush staining his cheeks and forehead, the pale translucent of the skin around his nose and eyelids, his irises a band of luminescent blue against the black of his dilated pupils. John belatedly registers the curl of Rodney's hand around his tricep, where he'd grabbed when John had knocked them to the ground. Rodney's other arm is bent so that his hand rests on the floor next to his head, dirty fingernails tucked in toward his palm. The cuff of his sweatshirt has slipped downward, revealing the inside of his wrist, wide and pale and traced with curving blue veins.
"That's the thing about being a genius," Rodney answers slowly, accent tilting the vowels more noticeably than usual. He sounds like someone who's just been woken out of a coma by having a wet washcloth tossed carelessly over his face. "It makes you very bad at following directions."
John opens his mouth and draws an unsteady breath, pretty sure he's not yet up to thinking of an appropriately sardonic response. Before he can form so much as a syllable, Rodney chokes out, "John, oh my god," and all of a sudden his broad hand is running frantically over John's face and he's kissing John, open-mouthed and shaking, shoulders coming up off the floor. Shock makes John's spine go rigid, sirens screaming in his head because jesus, he can't; Rodney's his protectee, they'll -- and John remembers that no one's going to do anything. He's not in the Service anymore, he's the guy Rodney hired freelance out of medical retirement because he wanted to set the terms of his own protection and Teyla wanted someone that State could trust. There's no one to fire him now, no rules, no bureaucracy: just Rodney, who came back for him, and before John's even conscious of having made a decision, he's cradling Rodney's head in one hand and kissing him back. Rodney's chest is heaving against John's, thick and solid, and his wide mouth is moving constantly under John's, sucking and gasping against his lips. His fingers dig into John's arm, grip tightening until it's just at the edge of painful, and John pushes himself up Rodney's body, knee pressing in between Rodney's, increasing the points of contact between them. John can feel Rodney's pulse against the heel of the hand he's got curled under Rodney's neck, and he can feel his own heart hammering madly inside his ribs, and god, they're alive, they're both alive.
They kiss messily, somewhere on the blurred edge between arousal and desperate relief, until Rodney's got a hand shoved up under John's shirt and John's palm is sweat-slick and starting to skid against over the concrete as he holds himself up. "Jeez, okay, stop," John pants, pulling back, "this is a crime scene, Rodney, I've gotta get you out of here."
Rodney jerks at the words crime scene, his hands twitching open against John's back. John pushes his weight backward until he's kneeling up over Rodney, but he keeps his palm under the back of Rodney's head as he checks his eyes, unsure if the glassiness in them is from the shock or from the kissing.
Rodney squeezes his eyelids shut, head dropping back for a moment into John's grip, but before John's anxiety can come all the way online, he slides a hand over and grabs John's wrist, hanging on for a moment as he draws in long lungfuls of air. "Your safehouse?" Rodney asks, and John nods, relieved by the furrow that's appeared between Rodney's brows, the one that means he's thinking.
"Yes -- fine," Rodney says sharply, eyes coming open again and focusing immediately on John's face, "get me the fuck out of here," and he knots his fingers into the shoulder of John's jacket and uses his grip to pull himself upright. John leans farther back, getting ready to stand, but then Rodney shifts his fist to John's collar and gives him an intent look. "But I am going on the condition that this hideout of yours has a bed with a halfway decent mattress, because I have had an extremely traumatic experience and I really want to have sex with you now -- or sleep," he amends hastily, scanning John's face, "at the very least I think I deserve to sleep--"
John cups Rodney's jaw and kisses him once, closed-mouth and hard, before saying, "I think we can manage both." Then he gets an arm under Rodney's and pulls him to his feet, positioning himself to block Rodney's view of the body, and steers them both rapidly towards the door. On the way into the hall, John stoops to pick up his gun and doesn't reholster it, but he keeps his left hand pressed warmly into the small of Rodney's back as they head for the exit.
Summary: Bodyguard-fic. That pretty much covers it.
Details: SGA AU, John/Rodney, ~2,300 words, rated M for makeouts.
Notes: The last of my Sweet Charity fics, for the completely delightful celli, a long-time friend and 50% of my first-ever fangirl meet-up. This is a day late, to my shame, but I'm hoping that it's enjoyable enough to compensate for my tardiness? It ended up being a massive blast to write, so thank you for the wonderful prompt. Big thanks also to shaenie and thingswithwings for speed-betaing, mocking my typos, and untangling a couple of deeply tortured sentences. Title from Shivaree's "Goodnight Moon."
The kick to the chest sends John slamming back into the wall, knocking the air out of his lungs, and it's only twenty years of combat training that get his arms up fast enough to catch his assailant's forearm before the knife makes contact. Then the two of them are pressed in close, muscle locked against muscle, and John's vision hasn't even cleared before he knows he's not going to win this one. The guy's got an inch and a half and forty pounds of muscle on him, and he's shoved right in between John's knees, leaving no room for a kick or a heel-hook. John's shoulders are pressed flat against the sheetrock, nowhere to go, and his wrists are bent as far as they go as he fights to keep three inches of air between the point of the switchblade and his throat. No leverage, no way to get a hand free, and if he tries for a headbutt he's going to impale his own neck on the knife -- this is it, fucking checkmate.
The guy's breath gusts stale and humid against John's face, the deeply-flushed skin around his close-set eyes all that John can see of him under the balaclava. They've gotta be close to the Sig, John had heard it hit this wall after he'd swung the pipe down and knocked it out of the guy's hands, but even if it were directly underfoot there'd be no way to make a grab for it. John drags air into his lungs in short, sharp gasps, pain shooting up his left forearm as it starts to buckle. Any second now, the strain's going to snap it, the fault line of the decade-old fracture giving way, and John hopes like hell that Rodney's out of the building by now, that he's made it to the car and is gunning it for the nearest highway. John grunts as his heel slips half an inch and the knife nearly kisses skin before he forces it back to a momentary stalemate. He's always known he was going to die on the job, and he's going to be goddamn fucking pissed if his protectee doesn't take every second John is buying him to haul ass for the nearest high-security government facility as fast as is humanly possible. C'mon, McKay, he thinks, come on, and then the man surges up and throws his full weight into the shoulder behind his knife hand, and John's thoughts are obliterated by the twitch and spasm that mean his muscles are about to give way.
He sucks in a deep, deep breath, feeling it sting his lungs, the last he's ever going to take, and suddenly a muffled, staccato burst cuts the air in a pfft! pfft! pfft! pfft! The man's head jerks back half an inch, and he lets out an aborted, gutteral consonant -- then he goes down like a sandbag, dropping so fast that John pitches forward and nearly falls when two hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight drag against the desperate, two-handed grip he's got on the man's wrist. He reels as he lets go, stumbling over the man to catch himself on the lab table, and yanks his gaze up to see Rodney McKay framed in the doorway, face sheet-white and hands shaking as he slowly lowers a cordless nail gun.
For a moment, John just leans there, bent in half with his own pulse pounding loudly in his ears. Rodney's chest is rising and falling like he just ran the Boston Marathon, and the whites are visible all the way around his irises as he stares past John at the man on the ground. Some amount of time goes by, neither of them moving, and then John's brain jerks back online, like a system booting from a backup generator. He shoves himself away from the table, grabbing the broom someone had left leaning against it, and jabs the handle sharply under the man's shoulder to lever him over onto his front. The body tips slackly over without a hint of response or resistance. Buried deep in the coarse wool of the balaclava, the dull heads of four copper nails form a crooked constellation in the back of the man's skull.
There's a barely audible rattle from across the room, and when John jerks his head up it takes him longer than it should to pinpoint the sound as the nail-gun in Rodney's hand. He's got the side of it pressed against his solar plexus in an unwitting approximation of the way a soldier would hold an automatic rifle, but his grip is jittering violently enough that it keeps knocking arrhythmically against the metal zipper of his hoodie. John's been around enough civilians in lethal situations to know that sometime soon -- maybe not in the next minute, but certainly in the next couple of hours -- Rodney is really going to lose his shit, and it would behoove John to call the attack in and get them both the fuck out of here before that happens. But it's disturbingly hard to translate that knowledge into motion, hard to get his mind and his muscles to connect. John's had close calls over the years, but not like this, where death wasn't just imminent but fucking inevitable.
Beyond Rodney, out in the hall, John can see his Beretta lying on the floor, where it had skidded to a stop after the hitman had kicked out of John's hand. That was when John had yelled for Rodney to go, get the fuck out, McKay! Rodney must've run right past it when he'd bolted out of the room, John realizes -- and he hadn't picked it up when he'd come back. John looks from it to the nail gun vibrating in Rodney's grip to the uneven line of nails embedded in the man's head, considering those three things with a kind of detached confusion. Then, all of a sudden, he gets it.
Rodney McKay is the first person ever offered Secret Service protection because of the strategic value of the tech he's invented. He knows the physics behind every projectile, explosive, or radioactive weapon ever invented, because he's the one designing the things that can defend against them. Rodney hadn't taken off past the gun and raided a construction site because he was too terrified to think clearly. He hadn't turned around after suffering an attack of conscience and grabbed the first thing that came to hand on his way back. He'd run past the gun intentionally, and he'd done it because he needed to find something sufficiently non-lethal -- so that if he missed the hitman and shot John instead, there was a greatly decreased chance it would be fatal.
John lets the broom go as he takes an unsteady step forward; he's really got to get Rodney to somewhere safe. He's about halfway across the room when the pole hits the concrete with a clatter so loud he nearly jumps out of his skin. "Shit!" Rodney blurts, jerking like the noise was a slap, and then he's fumbling for the nail gun, fingers slipping over the handle as he tries in vain to juggle it back into his hands. John lunges across the gap between them, knowing he's not going to be fast enough to catch it, and shoves Rodney down and to the side as the thing hits the floor. There's a pfft-thunk! from behind them as John comes down hard on Rodney's chest, breath whooshing out of both of them, and only just keeps his forehead from slamming down into Rodney's nose. He jerks back in time to see Rodney's grimace of surprise veer towards outrage, but it wipes itself completely blank as his eyes lock onto something over John's shoulder. John plants a hand on the gritty concrete floor and cranes back until he sees what Rodney's looking at: the nail half-sunk into the cross-beam directly above where Rodney had been standing.
A second passes. All the adrenaline drains out of John like someone's yanked out a stopper, and he lets his head drop down into the crook of his elbow. He can still hear his own pulse, and through the center of his sternum, he can feel the steady, rapid beat of Rodney's heart. The rush of exhausted relief -- not dead, not dead: I'm not, he's not, holy shit that was close -- makes him stupid enough that he just keeps lying there while his own system decelerates, internal gears spinning in successively slower revolutions.
Eventually, John musters up the energy to push himself partway up, arm muscles twitching with fatigue. "I thought I told you to get out of here," he croaks.
Rodney stares up at him, lips half-parted. From less than a foot away, his features are startlingly vivid, like someone's dialed the contrast up: the fading flush staining his cheeks and forehead, the pale translucent of the skin around his nose and eyelids, his irises a band of luminescent blue against the black of his dilated pupils. John belatedly registers the curl of Rodney's hand around his tricep, where he'd grabbed when John had knocked them to the ground. Rodney's other arm is bent so that his hand rests on the floor next to his head, dirty fingernails tucked in toward his palm. The cuff of his sweatshirt has slipped downward, revealing the inside of his wrist, wide and pale and traced with curving blue veins.
"That's the thing about being a genius," Rodney answers slowly, accent tilting the vowels more noticeably than usual. He sounds like someone who's just been woken out of a coma by having a wet washcloth tossed carelessly over his face. "It makes you very bad at following directions."
John opens his mouth and draws an unsteady breath, pretty sure he's not yet up to thinking of an appropriately sardonic response. Before he can form so much as a syllable, Rodney chokes out, "John, oh my god," and all of a sudden his broad hand is running frantically over John's face and he's kissing John, open-mouthed and shaking, shoulders coming up off the floor. Shock makes John's spine go rigid, sirens screaming in his head because jesus, he can't; Rodney's his protectee, they'll -- and John remembers that no one's going to do anything. He's not in the Service anymore, he's the guy Rodney hired freelance out of medical retirement because he wanted to set the terms of his own protection and Teyla wanted someone that State could trust. There's no one to fire him now, no rules, no bureaucracy: just Rodney, who came back for him, and before John's even conscious of having made a decision, he's cradling Rodney's head in one hand and kissing him back. Rodney's chest is heaving against John's, thick and solid, and his wide mouth is moving constantly under John's, sucking and gasping against his lips. His fingers dig into John's arm, grip tightening until it's just at the edge of painful, and John pushes himself up Rodney's body, knee pressing in between Rodney's, increasing the points of contact between them. John can feel Rodney's pulse against the heel of the hand he's got curled under Rodney's neck, and he can feel his own heart hammering madly inside his ribs, and god, they're alive, they're both alive.
They kiss messily, somewhere on the blurred edge between arousal and desperate relief, until Rodney's got a hand shoved up under John's shirt and John's palm is sweat-slick and starting to skid against over the concrete as he holds himself up. "Jeez, okay, stop," John pants, pulling back, "this is a crime scene, Rodney, I've gotta get you out of here."
Rodney jerks at the words crime scene, his hands twitching open against John's back. John pushes his weight backward until he's kneeling up over Rodney, but he keeps his palm under the back of Rodney's head as he checks his eyes, unsure if the glassiness in them is from the shock or from the kissing.
Rodney squeezes his eyelids shut, head dropping back for a moment into John's grip, but before John's anxiety can come all the way online, he slides a hand over and grabs John's wrist, hanging on for a moment as he draws in long lungfuls of air. "Your safehouse?" Rodney asks, and John nods, relieved by the furrow that's appeared between Rodney's brows, the one that means he's thinking.
"Yes -- fine," Rodney says sharply, eyes coming open again and focusing immediately on John's face, "get me the fuck out of here," and he knots his fingers into the shoulder of John's jacket and uses his grip to pull himself upright. John leans farther back, getting ready to stand, but then Rodney shifts his fist to John's collar and gives him an intent look. "But I am going on the condition that this hideout of yours has a bed with a halfway decent mattress, because I have had an extremely traumatic experience and I really want to have sex with you now -- or sleep," he amends hastily, scanning John's face, "at the very least I think I deserve to sleep--"
John cups Rodney's jaw and kisses him once, closed-mouth and hard, before saying, "I think we can manage both." Then he gets an arm under Rodney's and pulls him to his feet, positioning himself to block Rodney's view of the body, and steers them both rapidly towards the door. On the way into the hall, John stoops to pick up his gun and doesn't reholster it, but he keeps his left hand pressed warmly into the small of Rodney's back as they head for the exit.