new story: The Top of the List
So here's a story, a palate-cleanser sort of thing, because my new plan seems to be that I'm going to finish everything in the reverse order from whenever I started it. So. I started this on Monday.
The Top of the List
Author: Helen
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating: R
Spoilers: Nope
Size: 2663 words
[shout-out to iamsab for saying "sorbet-ish! except these parts here."]
Summary: Rodney tries hard.
There were six red giants visible from PX3-351. They’d had been tracking them for eight months, taking monthly readings and trading for dried fruit and cured fish with the friendly villagers, and Rodney had avoided it completely because he was always doing something vitally important to their continued survival, but then the team had gotten in a little trouble on a routine mission, and Ronon had broken his leg and Teyla had dislocated her shoulder and killed seven guys, Sheppard had killed twelve guys and was fine, and Rodney had cracked a few ribs and killed one guy, and Elizabeth and Carson had given them pinched, concerned looks, and kept sending them on dumb, useless missions, even though Ronon was almost finished with his crutches, and Rodney wasn’t having any more nightmares than usual.
Rodney liked cured fish, though, so he hadn’t objected too much. After dinner, he left John trying to learn to play the local bongo-like instrument, laughing and talking and looking like a Pegasus Board of Tourism advertisement, and followed the village elder, Seketh, up the narrow trail to a flat treeless lookout above the village. Rodney squinted at the sky, took the readings, discovered nothing interesting had happened yet, and was already yawning by the time they got back down to the village green where he and John had pitched their tents earlier. Seketh bowed, tapped his fingers to his forehead once and Rodney did the same, and then Seketh disappeared into one of the small thatched houses that ringed the green. Rodney turned and lifted his flashlight, searching for gopher holes; preoccupied with how it would look if he sprained his ankle on what even Miko thought was a milk run, he was halfway back to his tent when he first heard the soft whimper coming from John’s tent.
One, and then another, and then the heavy sound of fists meeting flesh and Rodney could hear Sheppard gasping in pain, and he was across the green, ripping the tent open. The guy was big; he’d pinned Sheppard’s arms with one hand and was hitting him, open-handed and Rodney had already dragged him off and shoved him on the ground outside the tent before he registered that the guy-Marda, who had been at the feast, laughing and showing John how to shape his hands over the bongos-had-had been-was-raping John.
Rodney hit him, hard, in the face, and Marda fell back, clutching his nose, and then scrambled off into the darkness, clutching his pants around his hips, and Rodney would have followed, but there was John, and he had to get him back to Atlantis, to Carson and Heightmeyer, now, now, right now, so he turned and crawled back inside the tent. It had happened so quickly that John was still just lying there, his pants tangled around his ankles. There were marks on his shoulders and hips and-ass, and when he rolled over, fingertip bruises on his forearms and waist, and his cheeks were pink, and his mouth was-swollen-
“Oh, fuck, oh god, are you-no, obviously, you’re not okay, but it’s-let me,” Rodney said. He wanted to be sick, but instead he pulled off his jacket and tried to get it around John’s shoulders. He worried about a lot of things, every day, but it had never really occurred to him to be worried about John getting raped by some alien, even though John was hot, and kind of pretty, and-
“McKay,” John said. There was a big red mouth mark on his neck. Rodney felt tears start in his eyes, because this should never-it shouldn’t have happened, not to anyone, and especially not to John Sheppard, who was, Rodney suddenly noticed, glaring at him, his eyes narrow. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said, in a perfectly normal voice. “And are you crying?”
“That guy was-look, you don’t have to deny what-happened to you, I think, I mean, I saw-“
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” John said, pulling Rodney’s jacket off and throwing it at him. “You couldn’t have taken readings for a little while longer? It takes Zelenka two hours.”
“But-that guy-“
“We were just having sex,” John said. He sounded bored now, irritated.
“He was hitting you,” Rodney said.
“Because I wanted him to,” Sheppard said, enunciating carefully, biting off every syllable.
“Oh,” Rodney said, feeling stupider than he had since Grade 5, when he hadn’t known what a blowjob was.
“Yeah,” John said tightly.
“I thought-“
“Yeah, that’s pretty obvious.”
“Well, sorry,” Rodney said. His face was burning. “What, do you want me to go get him back?”
“No thanks, the mood’s gone,” John said sourly.
“Oh.” John had yanked his sleeping bag across himself pretty quickly when Rodney had come into the tent, but now Rodney could see that he was still hard, beneath it. He looked away, quickly.
“Go to sleep,” John said. “Please.”
“Yeah, sorry, I-“ Rodney said, and fled. He didn’t sleep well.
* * *
In the morning, Marda, his nose swathed in a clumsy bandage, caught Rodney before they left and apologized.
“I did not realize he was-precious to you,” he said, bowing quickly from the waist, speaking quietly. “He said nothing of it.”
“It’s fine,” Rodney said, quickly. Even with the bandage, Marda was big and handsome; he had a nice smile. “Sorry about your nose,” he said, even though he wasn’t sorry about the nose, hoped it turned black and fell off.
* * *
“Will you stop freaking out?” Sheppard said, in the jumper on the way back.
“I’m not freaking out.”
“Yeah, well-“
“Do you do that a lot?”
“What?”
“Let guys-hurt you.”
He could almost hear Sheppard rolling his eyes. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Well, I didn’t know,” Rodney said. “So, sorry for screwing up your-“
“So I like it a little rough,” Sheppard said. “Sometimes.”
“It’s none of my business,” Rodney said. He was blushing again.
“No,” Sheppard said, and that was that.
* * *
Sheppard liked it rough. Sometimes. The words rolled around Rodney’s brain like marbles, and made him fidgety, made him want to ask questions, made him want a nice clean testable hypothesis and a big big supercomputer to test it, and John went on dates on Atlantis, sometimes, now that the population was big enough that it wasn’t too awkward, but he always dated girls, pretty, tiny girls, and Rodney knew you couldn’t determine much about people from appearances, but somehow he didn’t think Aubrey Tims from xenobiology, was holding John down and punching him while they were fucking.
He didn’t know, though.
Rodney missed Google more than stovetop stuffing, more than sleeping in on Saturdays, more than getting to moderate panel discussions and takeout Indian food and cable television, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t understand that not everyone liked some comfortable semi-athletic sex on a soft bed, or maybe a desk chair, with snacks after, but he woke up from dreams about Googling rough sex and finding some freaks on the internet who were too into it and overly serious about it, wore stupid costumes and said stupid things, so he could just dismiss it as a pathetic waste of time.
He woke up from dreams about other things, too.
* * *
“So, um-“
“Don’t,” Sheppard said.
“You don’t even-“
“I’ve handled my sex life fairly well so far without your intervention-“
“Fine,” Rodney said. “Fine, I don’t know anything about it, and I-just, I think you shouldn’t do it with some stranger, because he could-who knows what-can’t you just get Ronon to do it?”
“I-what?”
“What?”
“Ronon’s a kid,” John said dismissively. “and you-. Don’t worry about it.“
“You don’t think Ronon’s-hot? I mean, not that I-“
”McKay."
“Okay, but. I just. If you don’t ever get to do what you really want to, then-“
“Knock it off,” Sheppard said. He met Rodney’s eyes calmly, but his voice was all wrong.
* * *
Ronon was hot. This was indisputable, Rodney thought. If he had had to choose one person-one guy, anyway-in the entire galaxy to hold him down and fuck him and maybe rough him up a little, Ronon would be at the top of the list.
He got a lot of work done while he thought about it.
* * *
“Okay,” Sheppard said, his eyes weird and opaque, but it was probably just the light in his quarters.
“Okay, what?”
“I know you’re here to offer to fuck me, and I say yes. Okay.”
“I-“ he wasn’t. He was there to try to get Sheppard to move the mission schedule around so Rodney, Simpson and Zelenka weren’t all gone during an eight hour period, and also to borrow back his copy of Bridget Jones’ Diary, which wasn’t really his, but Sheldrake’s in engineering, and which he hadn’t finished, but this was the closest Sheppard would get to asking-this was, in fact, Sheppard asking, and if Rodney really wanted to be honest with himself, which he didn’t-“okay,” he said.
“What, you want to-now?” Sheppard said, grinning, too easy and too light, and what he really meant was that he thought Rodney needed an excuse to get out of doing it at all. Rodney tried to say ‘yes, now,’ but his mouth was too dry, so he made himself put his hand on John’s chest and push him back a little, easy, easier than he thought it would be, his palm against Sheppard’s heart, fingers splayed over the neat arch of his collarbone.
Sheppard fell back, hands loose at his sides, still smiling, and Rodney took one step forward and shoved him with both hands, straight-armed. John’s hands came up a little too slowly to catch his wrists, and John-stumbled, but he was letting Rodney do this, humoring him, staring back at him gravely, up the bare inch to Rodney’s eyes without any real hope that Rodney could. Rodney could think but he couldn’t breath, and John nodded, opened his mouth, and Rodney knew John would say it was okay, call it off, never talk about it again, and so he slapped John across the face so hard John really did stumble, fell sideways, caught himself on the edge of the bed, but then overbalanced and sat down hard.
John blinked up at him, his face a sudden, bright, ridiculous red, and Rodney took a frightened breath and grabbed John’s shirtfront before John could push himself back up, twisted his fingers in the thin cotton, dragged John up and dumped him backwards onto the bed. John fell back awkwardly, one arm bent beneath him.
Rodney expected to feel sick about it, had half-planned to hate it, but when he knelt on the bed John’s thighs opened around him, acquiescent, and Rodney pushed them wider anyway. John’s hands were shaking when he fumbled his pants open; the flap of his underwear was already pushed out of shape by the thickish head of his cock. Rodney waited for him to wrap his hand around it, but John only reached for Rodney’s belt, drew his thumb up Rodney’s fly, licked his lower lip impatiently, and Rodney didn’t know if John wanted to be kissed. Instead he leaned down over him and twisted his fingers in the hair at the nape of John’s neck, pulled until John’s neck was arched, his Adam’s apple jumping desperately, and then, because he couldn’t help it, he bent and pressed his mouth to the hollow of John’s throat.
John tasted hot and salty and squirmed underneath him, made a choked noise in the back of his throat, said,
“oh,” and then “let me,” raggedly, and then bit his lip and yanked the clasp on Rodney’s belt open. It jingled faintly, thwapping against John’s hip when Rodney let himself have half a dozen rough thrusts against John’s thigh, John sliding up to meet him, every time, and then he remembered the plan and pinned John’s wrists against the bed. John strained doggedly against his hands, ungraceful, his mouth open and breathless, and Rodney tightened his fingers around John’s wrists and forced them slowly against the mattress. It wasn’t easy. By the time John stopped struggling, Rodney was breathing harshly, and there was a thin trickle of sweat running down between his shoulder blades. His cock was brushing against John’s with every breath, he wished he’d taken his jacket off, he wanted to slide down and put his mouth on John’s cock, wanted to be kissed, but John was staring at him, his eyes quiet and resigned, his mouth working for breath.
“Now,” he said, “now, n-“ and brought his lips together like he might say please, so Rodney knelt up and backhanded him, pretty hard, twice, snapped his head neatly to the right, and while John was still looking a little dazed, rolled him over, shoved his face into the mattress with one hand and screwed his left arm up behind him, as far as it would go.
John was still for a moment, shuddering, rubbing his hips against the mattress in tiny movements like he couldn’t stop.
“fuck,” he gasped, and tried to pull away, twisting from the shoulder, shoving himself clumsily up his free hand. It had to hurt, Rodney thought, a little incoherently, trying to get his zipper open without loosening his grip on John’s wrist, and Rodney had wanted this, although he’d pictured more skin than John’s t-shirt sliding up over his ribs, pictured his knuckles hurting less, but it was pretty close all the same, John pressing his face into the mattress, bracing himself on his knees and shoulder so he could work his cock, and Rodney dug his fingers into John’s wrist and pulled his arm up toward his shoulders until John came with a muffled groan.
Rodney let go, and John slumped down on the mattress, breathing deeply. Rodney finally got his zipper open.
He’d felt certain while John was underneath him; it was a good feeling, a feeling he enjoyed, a feeling he’d gotten to enjoy a lot less since coming to Atlantis, but now it looked like he was going to overthink and completely lose his hard on, which happened more often than he cared to admit-
“Hey, so-“
“Hey,” Rodney said, making himself shut his mouth before he offered to leave. John had rolled over. He looked cheerful, if a little limp. His bottom lip was puffy. “I didn’t mean to-“
“Yeah, you did,” John said carelessly, pushing himself up on his elbows, eyeing Rodney’s dick with flattering interest. The collar of his t-shirt had a three-inch tear in it.
“I like boring stuff,” Rodney said, in spite of himself. “I like-“ John crawled over and put his hand on Rodney’s cock, drew his fingers up over him in one sticky, wet, stroke, and then another. “okay,” Rodney said.
“Mm,” John said. Then he kissed Rodney, and Rodney came with John’s tongue in his mouth.
* * *
“So I was okay,” Rodney said, in the morning. John’s lip was fine, but Rodney’s hands felt bruised.
“You were okay,” John said, a little noncommittally for someone who’d slept with his mouth pressed against the back of Rodney’s neck.
“Just okay?”
“What, are you fishing for a compliment?” John said.
“Well, no, I-“ John was wearing grey standard-issue boxer briefs and digging through his dresser, and Rodney watched for a minute, the sharp narrow length of his back, his arms, his neck. “Yeah. I’m fishing for a compliment.”
“It was good,” John said, after he’d found a shirt and jerked it over his head, after he’d put on a crumpled pair of pants and pulled out a pair of socks.
“I was good,” Rodney said stubbornly.
“You were good,” John said. He was gripping the socks, white-knuckled. He looked happy.
The Top of the List
Author: Helen
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating: R
Spoilers: Nope
Size: 2663 words
[shout-out to iamsab for saying "sorbet-ish! except these parts here."]
Summary: Rodney tries hard.
There were six red giants visible from PX3-351. They’d had been tracking them for eight months, taking monthly readings and trading for dried fruit and cured fish with the friendly villagers, and Rodney had avoided it completely because he was always doing something vitally important to their continued survival, but then the team had gotten in a little trouble on a routine mission, and Ronon had broken his leg and Teyla had dislocated her shoulder and killed seven guys, Sheppard had killed twelve guys and was fine, and Rodney had cracked a few ribs and killed one guy, and Elizabeth and Carson had given them pinched, concerned looks, and kept sending them on dumb, useless missions, even though Ronon was almost finished with his crutches, and Rodney wasn’t having any more nightmares than usual.
Rodney liked cured fish, though, so he hadn’t objected too much. After dinner, he left John trying to learn to play the local bongo-like instrument, laughing and talking and looking like a Pegasus Board of Tourism advertisement, and followed the village elder, Seketh, up the narrow trail to a flat treeless lookout above the village. Rodney squinted at the sky, took the readings, discovered nothing interesting had happened yet, and was already yawning by the time they got back down to the village green where he and John had pitched their tents earlier. Seketh bowed, tapped his fingers to his forehead once and Rodney did the same, and then Seketh disappeared into one of the small thatched houses that ringed the green. Rodney turned and lifted his flashlight, searching for gopher holes; preoccupied with how it would look if he sprained his ankle on what even Miko thought was a milk run, he was halfway back to his tent when he first heard the soft whimper coming from John’s tent.
One, and then another, and then the heavy sound of fists meeting flesh and Rodney could hear Sheppard gasping in pain, and he was across the green, ripping the tent open. The guy was big; he’d pinned Sheppard’s arms with one hand and was hitting him, open-handed and Rodney had already dragged him off and shoved him on the ground outside the tent before he registered that the guy-Marda, who had been at the feast, laughing and showing John how to shape his hands over the bongos-had-had been-was-raping John.
Rodney hit him, hard, in the face, and Marda fell back, clutching his nose, and then scrambled off into the darkness, clutching his pants around his hips, and Rodney would have followed, but there was John, and he had to get him back to Atlantis, to Carson and Heightmeyer, now, now, right now, so he turned and crawled back inside the tent. It had happened so quickly that John was still just lying there, his pants tangled around his ankles. There were marks on his shoulders and hips and-ass, and when he rolled over, fingertip bruises on his forearms and waist, and his cheeks were pink, and his mouth was-swollen-
“Oh, fuck, oh god, are you-no, obviously, you’re not okay, but it’s-let me,” Rodney said. He wanted to be sick, but instead he pulled off his jacket and tried to get it around John’s shoulders. He worried about a lot of things, every day, but it had never really occurred to him to be worried about John getting raped by some alien, even though John was hot, and kind of pretty, and-
“McKay,” John said. There was a big red mouth mark on his neck. Rodney felt tears start in his eyes, because this should never-it shouldn’t have happened, not to anyone, and especially not to John Sheppard, who was, Rodney suddenly noticed, glaring at him, his eyes narrow. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said, in a perfectly normal voice. “And are you crying?”
“That guy was-look, you don’t have to deny what-happened to you, I think, I mean, I saw-“
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” John said, pulling Rodney’s jacket off and throwing it at him. “You couldn’t have taken readings for a little while longer? It takes Zelenka two hours.”
“But-that guy-“
“We were just having sex,” John said. He sounded bored now, irritated.
“He was hitting you,” Rodney said.
“Because I wanted him to,” Sheppard said, enunciating carefully, biting off every syllable.
“Oh,” Rodney said, feeling stupider than he had since Grade 5, when he hadn’t known what a blowjob was.
“Yeah,” John said tightly.
“I thought-“
“Yeah, that’s pretty obvious.”
“Well, sorry,” Rodney said. His face was burning. “What, do you want me to go get him back?”
“No thanks, the mood’s gone,” John said sourly.
“Oh.” John had yanked his sleeping bag across himself pretty quickly when Rodney had come into the tent, but now Rodney could see that he was still hard, beneath it. He looked away, quickly.
“Go to sleep,” John said. “Please.”
“Yeah, sorry, I-“ Rodney said, and fled. He didn’t sleep well.
* * *
In the morning, Marda, his nose swathed in a clumsy bandage, caught Rodney before they left and apologized.
“I did not realize he was-precious to you,” he said, bowing quickly from the waist, speaking quietly. “He said nothing of it.”
“It’s fine,” Rodney said, quickly. Even with the bandage, Marda was big and handsome; he had a nice smile. “Sorry about your nose,” he said, even though he wasn’t sorry about the nose, hoped it turned black and fell off.
* * *
“Will you stop freaking out?” Sheppard said, in the jumper on the way back.
“I’m not freaking out.”
“Yeah, well-“
“Do you do that a lot?”
“What?”
“Let guys-hurt you.”
He could almost hear Sheppard rolling his eyes. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Well, I didn’t know,” Rodney said. “So, sorry for screwing up your-“
“So I like it a little rough,” Sheppard said. “Sometimes.”
“It’s none of my business,” Rodney said. He was blushing again.
“No,” Sheppard said, and that was that.
* * *
Sheppard liked it rough. Sometimes. The words rolled around Rodney’s brain like marbles, and made him fidgety, made him want to ask questions, made him want a nice clean testable hypothesis and a big big supercomputer to test it, and John went on dates on Atlantis, sometimes, now that the population was big enough that it wasn’t too awkward, but he always dated girls, pretty, tiny girls, and Rodney knew you couldn’t determine much about people from appearances, but somehow he didn’t think Aubrey Tims from xenobiology, was holding John down and punching him while they were fucking.
He didn’t know, though.
Rodney missed Google more than stovetop stuffing, more than sleeping in on Saturdays, more than getting to moderate panel discussions and takeout Indian food and cable television, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t understand that not everyone liked some comfortable semi-athletic sex on a soft bed, or maybe a desk chair, with snacks after, but he woke up from dreams about Googling rough sex and finding some freaks on the internet who were too into it and overly serious about it, wore stupid costumes and said stupid things, so he could just dismiss it as a pathetic waste of time.
He woke up from dreams about other things, too.
* * *
“So, um-“
“Don’t,” Sheppard said.
“You don’t even-“
“I’ve handled my sex life fairly well so far without your intervention-“
“Fine,” Rodney said. “Fine, I don’t know anything about it, and I-just, I think you shouldn’t do it with some stranger, because he could-who knows what-can’t you just get Ronon to do it?”
“I-what?”
“What?”
“Ronon’s a kid,” John said dismissively. “and you-. Don’t worry about it.“
“You don’t think Ronon’s-hot? I mean, not that I-“
”McKay."
“Okay, but. I just. If you don’t ever get to do what you really want to, then-“
“Knock it off,” Sheppard said. He met Rodney’s eyes calmly, but his voice was all wrong.
* * *
Ronon was hot. This was indisputable, Rodney thought. If he had had to choose one person-one guy, anyway-in the entire galaxy to hold him down and fuck him and maybe rough him up a little, Ronon would be at the top of the list.
He got a lot of work done while he thought about it.
* * *
“Okay,” Sheppard said, his eyes weird and opaque, but it was probably just the light in his quarters.
“Okay, what?”
“I know you’re here to offer to fuck me, and I say yes. Okay.”
“I-“ he wasn’t. He was there to try to get Sheppard to move the mission schedule around so Rodney, Simpson and Zelenka weren’t all gone during an eight hour period, and also to borrow back his copy of Bridget Jones’ Diary, which wasn’t really his, but Sheldrake’s in engineering, and which he hadn’t finished, but this was the closest Sheppard would get to asking-this was, in fact, Sheppard asking, and if Rodney really wanted to be honest with himself, which he didn’t-“okay,” he said.
“What, you want to-now?” Sheppard said, grinning, too easy and too light, and what he really meant was that he thought Rodney needed an excuse to get out of doing it at all. Rodney tried to say ‘yes, now,’ but his mouth was too dry, so he made himself put his hand on John’s chest and push him back a little, easy, easier than he thought it would be, his palm against Sheppard’s heart, fingers splayed over the neat arch of his collarbone.
Sheppard fell back, hands loose at his sides, still smiling, and Rodney took one step forward and shoved him with both hands, straight-armed. John’s hands came up a little too slowly to catch his wrists, and John-stumbled, but he was letting Rodney do this, humoring him, staring back at him gravely, up the bare inch to Rodney’s eyes without any real hope that Rodney could. Rodney could think but he couldn’t breath, and John nodded, opened his mouth, and Rodney knew John would say it was okay, call it off, never talk about it again, and so he slapped John across the face so hard John really did stumble, fell sideways, caught himself on the edge of the bed, but then overbalanced and sat down hard.
John blinked up at him, his face a sudden, bright, ridiculous red, and Rodney took a frightened breath and grabbed John’s shirtfront before John could push himself back up, twisted his fingers in the thin cotton, dragged John up and dumped him backwards onto the bed. John fell back awkwardly, one arm bent beneath him.
Rodney expected to feel sick about it, had half-planned to hate it, but when he knelt on the bed John’s thighs opened around him, acquiescent, and Rodney pushed them wider anyway. John’s hands were shaking when he fumbled his pants open; the flap of his underwear was already pushed out of shape by the thickish head of his cock. Rodney waited for him to wrap his hand around it, but John only reached for Rodney’s belt, drew his thumb up Rodney’s fly, licked his lower lip impatiently, and Rodney didn’t know if John wanted to be kissed. Instead he leaned down over him and twisted his fingers in the hair at the nape of John’s neck, pulled until John’s neck was arched, his Adam’s apple jumping desperately, and then, because he couldn’t help it, he bent and pressed his mouth to the hollow of John’s throat.
John tasted hot and salty and squirmed underneath him, made a choked noise in the back of his throat, said,
“oh,” and then “let me,” raggedly, and then bit his lip and yanked the clasp on Rodney’s belt open. It jingled faintly, thwapping against John’s hip when Rodney let himself have half a dozen rough thrusts against John’s thigh, John sliding up to meet him, every time, and then he remembered the plan and pinned John’s wrists against the bed. John strained doggedly against his hands, ungraceful, his mouth open and breathless, and Rodney tightened his fingers around John’s wrists and forced them slowly against the mattress. It wasn’t easy. By the time John stopped struggling, Rodney was breathing harshly, and there was a thin trickle of sweat running down between his shoulder blades. His cock was brushing against John’s with every breath, he wished he’d taken his jacket off, he wanted to slide down and put his mouth on John’s cock, wanted to be kissed, but John was staring at him, his eyes quiet and resigned, his mouth working for breath.
“Now,” he said, “now, n-“ and brought his lips together like he might say please, so Rodney knelt up and backhanded him, pretty hard, twice, snapped his head neatly to the right, and while John was still looking a little dazed, rolled him over, shoved his face into the mattress with one hand and screwed his left arm up behind him, as far as it would go.
John was still for a moment, shuddering, rubbing his hips against the mattress in tiny movements like he couldn’t stop.
“fuck,” he gasped, and tried to pull away, twisting from the shoulder, shoving himself clumsily up his free hand. It had to hurt, Rodney thought, a little incoherently, trying to get his zipper open without loosening his grip on John’s wrist, and Rodney had wanted this, although he’d pictured more skin than John’s t-shirt sliding up over his ribs, pictured his knuckles hurting less, but it was pretty close all the same, John pressing his face into the mattress, bracing himself on his knees and shoulder so he could work his cock, and Rodney dug his fingers into John’s wrist and pulled his arm up toward his shoulders until John came with a muffled groan.
Rodney let go, and John slumped down on the mattress, breathing deeply. Rodney finally got his zipper open.
He’d felt certain while John was underneath him; it was a good feeling, a feeling he enjoyed, a feeling he’d gotten to enjoy a lot less since coming to Atlantis, but now it looked like he was going to overthink and completely lose his hard on, which happened more often than he cared to admit-
“Hey, so-“
“Hey,” Rodney said, making himself shut his mouth before he offered to leave. John had rolled over. He looked cheerful, if a little limp. His bottom lip was puffy. “I didn’t mean to-“
“Yeah, you did,” John said carelessly, pushing himself up on his elbows, eyeing Rodney’s dick with flattering interest. The collar of his t-shirt had a three-inch tear in it.
“I like boring stuff,” Rodney said, in spite of himself. “I like-“ John crawled over and put his hand on Rodney’s cock, drew his fingers up over him in one sticky, wet, stroke, and then another. “okay,” Rodney said.
“Mm,” John said. Then he kissed Rodney, and Rodney came with John’s tongue in his mouth.
* * *
“So I was okay,” Rodney said, in the morning. John’s lip was fine, but Rodney’s hands felt bruised.
“You were okay,” John said, a little noncommittally for someone who’d slept with his mouth pressed against the back of Rodney’s neck.
“Just okay?”
“What, are you fishing for a compliment?” John said.
“Well, no, I-“ John was wearing grey standard-issue boxer briefs and digging through his dresser, and Rodney watched for a minute, the sharp narrow length of his back, his arms, his neck. “Yeah. I’m fishing for a compliment.”
“It was good,” John said, after he’d found a shirt and jerked it over his head, after he’d put on a crumpled pair of pants and pulled out a pair of socks.
“I was good,” Rodney said stubbornly.
“You were good,” John said. He was gripping the socks, white-knuckled. He looked happy.