Bell Curve by Rageprufrock, commentary by inkscribe 7/8
Title: Bell Curve, or, Ladies Night at the Boom Boom Room
Author: rageprufrock
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
DVD Commentator: inkscribe
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
Part 7
Rodney's first kiss has given him mono; his second got him punched. His third was in a freezing cold observatory with some deranged physics and astronomy graduate student who'd been so hot for some ass even Rodney would do, and they'd jerked one another off on the cold tile floor and both gotten bitched out for failing to produce useable data the next morning. Eventually, Rodney started letting other people trap him into relationships because it was just easier that way--without all the personal risk and professional humiliation.
John was some unholy combination of all of these things: dangerous and painful and exciting, a shock like electric running through Rodney's veins and as familiar as star charts, comforting as the North American sky at night, far away from light pollution where the heavens were clear and earnest. John was no constant, suffered for no sameness, and numbers Rodney had always known slipped out of his grasp and gravity stopped pulling at 9.8 m/s and c stretched out, lengthening like a voice echoing down a long hall.
John was Rodney's 13th first kiss, and he had tasted like coffee and sweet bread and a little like a hospital. John did not hit Rodney or give him mono and Rodney didn't regret anything.
And that was a shocking realization, that of all the hideous embarrassment and public nudity and attempted solicitation that had brought him and John to this strange and precarious place, Rodney wouldn't change a thing, because even so hung over he could barely see, he knew out of sense memories that John was rare and strange, and strange and rare things had to have happened to bring them to this point.
Rodney wanted--and this was stupid, so so stupid--John to be his last first kiss, maybe, and so as he watched the doorknob turn, he couldn't help but think in advance, please, please let this be okay. *fingers crossed!!!!!*
*
When John came through the door, he was pale and drawn and so distracted it took him a whole minute of pulling off his jacket and putting away the key before he realized Rodney was in the living room staring at him, eyes wide and hungry and scared.
"Hi," Rodney said finally, when John's mouth curved into a tight smile.
"You're up," John said. "How's your head?"
Rodney swallowed around the nausea and asked, "Did--what did Norton say?"
John grinned wryly. "I wouldn't worry about the drunken cuddling," he assured Rodney, and walked past him into the kitchen, calling over his shoulder, "Though, for the record? Maybe you should take this as a lesson that you plus too much alcohol can equal inappropriate public nudity." *sniggers*
"Oh like you're one to talk," Rodney sneered, knee-jerk *sniggers again*, and trudged after John, leaning heavily on a counter as John started a pot of coffee, hands busy on the filters and measuring spoons.
"Job hazard," John admitted ruefully, and looked at Rodney sideways.
"He--uh, say anything else?" And at John's curious eyebrow, Rodney admitted sheepishly, "My memory of the evening is spotty at best."
Snickering, John said, "I mean, you don't have to make an honest man of him, if that's what you're worried about." And the smile finally reached his eyes as John said, "I always knew you were easy, Rodney, but that was too easy."
"Ha ha very ha," Rodney said sullenly.
"If it makes you feel any better, Norton doesn't remember anything either," John said. Phew!
Rodney felt something in his chest loosen. John didn't know, and Norton didn't know, and either way John was safe and he was safe and they were safe, and he was so ecstatic that he had to blink hard in the harsh light of the kitchen and when he did, he saw the edge of an envelope peeking out of John's back pocket. *cue worrisome foreshadowing music*
But then John handed Rodney a mug of coffee and hustled him off to bed again, muttering, "I left you a trashcan," before crawling up into bed, too in the late afternoon light, white with winter. John sat over the covers, frowning at the remaining detritus of the latest draft of his thesis, all marked with red comments in Norton's impeccably neat handwriting and scribbled liberally with John's own revisions. Rodney had read John's thesis approximately six billion and four times already, in between thieving drafts of it from Norton's office and over John's shoulder while he was working on it late into the night while Rodney graded miserably and looked for anything--anything--to take his mind off of marking papers, even his TA's ridiculously named ("Not Quite a Delorian, and Definitely Not 88 mph") thesis.
"Hey," Rodney said suddenly. "Don't you still work?"
John stared at him. "If you still have papers to grade, Rodney, I swear to God--"
Waving his hands, Rodney interrupted, "No, no--I mean. Don't you still work at the Boom Boom Room?" And there really was no way to say the name of the club without sounding completely ridiculous.
John raised his eyebrows and turned back to his work. "Not really," he said lightly. "I mean, I thought I was going to have to beg for hours after the car accident but I'm not really going to--" John cut himself off resolutely more foreshadowing ... *meep!*, and Rodney narrowed his eyes in suspicion for a whole half a second before John smiled at him and said, "Besides, being your TA is good times--and no required nudity."
"Actually," Rodney said solemnly, "I think I'm going to start requiring nudity." Ooooh, hey ... great idea!
"Oh is that so," John said, grinning.
Rodney shoved aside December's copy of the Journal of Applied Physics and pushed John's three-ring binder of aerodynamic agony onto the ground, where it made an extremely satisfying thunk, papers rustling. Rodney crawled, hands and knees, over John, until they were very close and Rodney could practically feel John's smile against his own.
"I was working on that, you know," John said, but his eyes were darkening with a smile already.
"I'll do your homework later if you help me out now," Rodney answered, scraping his cheek over John's and feeling John sigh into the touch, fingertips light on Rodney's hips.
"Doesn't speak well of the procedure and integrity of science," John murmured *snickers*, and Rodney felt the butterfly of John's eyelashes on his cheek and felt his heart constrict in his chest.
"Science, who cares, right," Rodney murmured, and closed his mouth over John's, feeling Sheppard's hand come up to palm Rodney's face, stroke his chin, tongue licking into Rodney's mouth and opening his knees so Rodney fell between them, pressed them body to body, John's thighs tight around his ribs.
John stroked his hands down Rodney's sides and slipped them under the waist of Rodney's pajama pants as Rodney smoothed his palms up John's blue t-shirt and they huffed, rearranging themselves in the bed until John was lying back, sideways across the mattress, laughing as Rodney struggled with his button-fly jeans and cursed inventively.
"I'm wearing these pants all the time from now on," John told him around completely unmanly giggles as Rodney finally jerked the jeans down John's slim hips. "There's just too much entertainment value here." Ooooh ... evil!John! *giggles*
"Oh, that's very funny," Rodney said bitterly, "no sex for you," but then immediately contradicted his own decision by applying himself earnestly to making John too breathless to speak, and John just melted beneath him, hands soft on Rodney's back and his sides and palms warm when they cupped Rodney's ass.
And Rodney knew, because it was one of the Eureka moments, that Jeannie was right, that this was different and John was different and they were different and that one day Rodney was going to buy John plane, because it wouldn't be fair if Rodney was the only person who got high off this relationship. Awww ... such wuv. :-)
*
Rodney woke up on January third with a weird, incomplete thought in the back of his mind, a scattershot of images that didn't make sense, disconnected and off-center that resonated for no good reason--
John wandered off early in the morning for some Air Force event which Rodney managed not to make fun of him for, even when John said, "Rodney, I'm serious," as he was crawling out of bed, his Marvin the Martian boxers half hanging off his ass and had borrowed Rodney's car and a pair of sweatpants to drive over to his own apartment and left his crap all over the bedroom and
--and Rodney went to the bedroom and picked up from the floor John's discarded button-fly jeans and pulled the crumpled envelope out of the back pocket and got so far as remembering John's distressed, pale face before he saw the U.S. Air Force insignia and heard the television in the background, heard buildings exploding and war correspondents talking and remembered that he and John were not an island.
Oh. My. God. *weeps for them*
*
The fight they had when John got back later that night started with Rodney saying:
"You could have fucking told me you were shipping out to fucking Bosnia!"
And John's face paling as he said, "You were digging through my mail?"
"Don't even try to change the subject, you asshole," Rodney yelled, so furious he could barely talk straight. "When were you going to tell me? Or were you at all? Was I going to wake up a month from now and find a fucking Post-It note saying HAVE TO GO KILL SELF IN BALKAN WAR ZONE--DON'T FORGET TO GRADE THE QUIZZES, JS." Oh Rodney! *hugs*
"So much for my romantic dinner and breaking it to you gently," John sighed tiredly, setting aside a brown paper bag of takeout.
"That was your romantic dinner?" Rodney balked, and before John could make some sort of irrelevant argument like pointing out that Rodney loved bad Chinese food or that Rodney hated pretentious restaurants, Rodney said, "You should have told me. You should have told me and you shouldn't be going."
Then John scowled and said, "I'm Air Force, Rodney, you knew that. You knew that--" Oh John! *hugs*
"You're a fucking student," Rodney yelled back, voice growing hoarse because all he could think was John and flaming wreckage, the lazy spin of helicopter blades slowing and the shriek of wind. John's face, pale and dirty and cold. "You're writing a thesis that's so brilliantly obscure that nobody will understand it and everybody will want to and--"
"I'm a pilot," John hollered back, and that's when his voice broke a little. "I'm a pilot, Rodney, and I can't just--"
"--John, please, please just--"
"I have to go," John finally said, and he put his hands on Rodney's face, and when Rodney looked in John's eyes it was full of excuses, just like his mouth and Rodney had always thought nothing could make him hate John's mouth, but those full lips shaping around words like, "I'm sorry," and "It's not forever--it's just a tour," and "I'll be fine, Rodney--it'll be fine," made Rodney want to punch him in it. *hugs them both*
"You're not even through with your thesis," Rodney said numbly, eyes huge and his throat tight. "You'll be an academic failure. I'll make fun of you to everybody. I'll trash your drafts." This is such a brilliant declaration of love, in Rodney's own twisted way. *hugs them more*
"You can hang pictures of me in effigy," John said, and smiled in a painful, lopsided way.
"My students will like it too much," Rodney snapped.
"I'll take my chances," John murmured.
Rodney shut his eyes fiercely and gritted his teeth. "God--don't say that--I know enough about statistics that I hate it when people say that--"
But John cut him off with a kiss, and Rodney hated how he could tell from the way he was putting his hands in John's dark hair, and how he scraped his teeth along John's lower lip that he was going to let John off the hook.
Later, when John was curled over Rodney, his back like the arch of a Roman aqueduct, his hips grinding against Rodney and his cock splitting Rodney open and his fingers dotting bruises all over Rodney's hips--Rodney just kept asking for more and harder and fuck--
Rodney wanted marks, scrapes, cuts, tender red skin between his shoulders blades, a crescent of purpling teethmarks on his shoulders, for John not to be careful anymore--anything, anything to prove that this had been real.
This scene just hurts so much, and the need to make it harder and painful and even leaving behind evidence; it's just so real, so painful. *hugs them both and weeps*
*
School started on the fourth, and Rodney made that extra effort to monopolize John as much as possible, giving his students pop quizzes left and right and luring John *waggles eyebrows* into the office for extra grading before throwing the entire stack into a convenient trash *snickers* can and starting a conversation about Dr. Who. John attempted to look disapproving, but seriously, it was Dr. Who.
"You know I have this thesis I'm working on?" John asked sarcastically.
"You're just looking for an excuse to cheat on me with Norton," Rodney shot back, and handed John a muffin. "Here, it's cranberry walnut. Eat it before I steal the top." And John would, because he recognized a love token from Rodney when he saw one. Yes! So much love here!
But Rodney wasn't the only one clambering for John's attention and John, who was getting rides "back to his apartment" from Rodney under the very clever cover that John's car was totaled, was late more often than not for their designated eight o'clock meeting time in one of the faculty lots. And half the time, Rodney didn't even have the heart to yell at him because John looked so ragged around the edges, trying to push through the last bumps of his thesis. Awwwww!
During the three and a half week period John spent throwing himself against a proverbial brick wall and Norton logged billions of extra office hours with his most favorite student, Rodney skulked around corners taping small, inconspicuous objects to the lower corners of Norton's office doorframe I love this bit beyond belief ... so very much like something out of one of the Fleming Bond novels so he could maintain an opening and make sure Norton wasn't taking advantage of John's delirious exhaustion. Mostly, he heard Norton saying soothing, fatherly things like, "You're almost there, John. And this is the last revision, I promise," about three times every day and John bitterly accusing, "You're just fucking with my mind now--I know it."
Rodney was kind of glad that John had de facto moved in with him, because he kept finding his normally-sane TA wandering around the apartment at four in the morning, confused and stubbing his toe on the couch looking for his shoes. Caring!Rodney *grins*
"What are you doing?" Rodney would ask, bewildered.
"I don't know," John would answer, and he sounded so helpless Rodney couldn't help but laugh.
A few weeks before John was supposed to ship out--Rodney had a mental calendar, with red Xs and a big skull and crossbones over The Day--Norton said, "Oh my God, I think you're done," and John said, "I hate aerodynamics. I hate airplanes. I am never flying an airplane again," before he rushed it off to the printers. Yay for completing your thesis, John!
"I think I'm going blind," John said the day Rodney collected him from one of the Caltech computer labs at eight in the morning. He was unshaven and smelled like toner and he had a dozen papercuts on his hands, his sleeves rolled up so Rodney saw the dark hair on his arms, and it struck Rodney that in a few days he wouldn't see stuff like that anymore, so he committed it to memory with the resigned ache he'd been doing for a lot of things in the last few weeks.
"But you're done," Rodney said soothingly, and waited while John feverishly checked through every bound version of his thesis the printers had sent him, remembering fondly his own first master's thesis.
"Oh, God," John said hoarsely. "This is useless. I can't even read anymore."
Which was when Rodney decided this could not go on and took them out of John's hands and walked them over to Delores, queen of the department secretaries, and settled the crate of theses on her desk, ignoring her reflex scowl at him and saying, "Delores--I believe my TA has finished his thesis."
She put her hand over her quivering lip and looked at John proudly, who stared at her with the blank exhaustion of a job well done.
"Oh, John," she said. "And against--" she looked at Rodney pointedly while saying it "--insurmountable odds, too! I'll get these out to the department immediately." Heh heh heh ... I have so much love for this moment. She's so very happy for John, and so pointedly sure that Rodney is part of the insurmountable odds. *grins*
John blinked three times and said, "Wait--what?"
Rodney scowled at her and put his hands on John's shoulders, saying firmly, "And now, you're going home."
"Wait--my thesis," John protested feebly.
"Is out of your hands," Rodney soothed.
John held up his hands as Rodney steered him toward the parking lot and looked at them sadly. "Those pages were really sharp, Rodney," he mourned, and Rodney wondered had he been like this at seventeen, finishing up his first masters and so disoriented he'd walked into a parked car hard enough to jam his knee--which, actually, was a pretty good indication that answer was a yes.
Rodney told John to sleep in the passenger seat but mostly, John just stared straight ahead and breathed loudly until they reached Rodney's apartment. So Rodney sighed, put the car in park, and somehow managed to get them inside where he stripped John carefully, throwing his jeans and t-shirt and track jacket into the wash, and arranged John under a hot shower--joining him under the spray after a moment's indecision. Awwwww ... this is so so sweet! Caring!Rodney makes me grin.
Rodney was halfway through rubbing shampoo through John's ridiculous hair when he felt John wrap his arms around Rodney's chest and bury his face in Rodney's shoulder. Awwww, again.
"Hey," Rodney murmured, close to John's ear, water rolling down his back and legs, and it was strange, to feel John's wet hands on him, slick and wonderful and safe.
"Hi," John said back and took a long breath out before he murmured, "Thanks for everything."
Rodney's throat closed up, and he put one hand on the back of John's neck, saying, "I'll expect you to do some manly pining." Oh yes, definitely!
"I'll cry myself to sleep in my lacy, pink pillow every night, promise," John answered. *snerks*
"Then it's settled," Rodney said decisively, and made sure both of them were rinsed and clean before they stumbled out of the shower, dried off and dumped the towels on the bathroom floor, collapsing into bed, where Rodney pressed John back in the pillows and blew him, slow and sweet and tender, hands holding John's hips and rubbing his cheek against the hollow of John's hipbone. And after John had come with a tiny, choked-off moan, Rodney scooted up his body and batted John's reaching hands away, saying, "Knock it off. You've had a long month."
"You could give a guy a complex," John said blurrily, but his eyes were already closing.
"Eye for an eye," Rodney said softly, and he laid there for a long time watching John asleep. Mmmmm ... again, a lovely, tender scene that just makes the upcoming separation that much more sad.
*
For the next few days, Rodney and Norton called a temporary truce and ran around the school harassing professors into reading John's thesis with a terrifying urgency. They cajoled, threatened, left annoying voice messages, and made absolutely no eye contact with one another. The sekkrit plots of John's boss and advisor! Woot!
"Why is everybody glaring at me?" John had asked, narrow-eyed. Shhhh ... it's a sekkrit.
"They're just jealous of how pretty you are," Rodney had said, which wasn't precisely a lie but probably not the exact truth John was looking for.
"I'm going to go play Oregon Trail now," John had finally said, glaring, "try not to destroy modern physics while I'm gone."
"Stop playing as me," Rodney had complained after him. He was sick of reading, HERE LIES RODNEY MCKAY: CROTCH ROT ENDED HIM on the badly pixilated tombstones on the side of the road. *giggles*
But the point was to speed along the process, and Rodney and Norton beamed from the sidelines like proud parents--only not, because that'd be strange and more than vaguely incestuous *giggles*--as John soldiered through his exams. They ignored all their predetermined rules about personal space and jammed their faces into the crack between the double-doors of the conference room and listened to the faint murmur of voices from Caltech faculty they had harassed, intimidated, and otherwise bludgeoned into reading John's thesis with lighting speed, and felt their hearts race out of their chests as John formulated answers.
"Oh my God--this is too stressful," Rodney moaned at Norton. "How can you do this with more than one student?"
Norton rubbed at his face. "Well, I don't really like most of them," he admitted.
"That makes sense," Rodney was forced to concede.
And they were still beaming like proud parents when John stepped out of his orals, looking flustered and crap, and said, "Oh, God, that was awful," and Rodney had to resist the urge to coo, "All grown up and getting your first master's." I believe you Rodney, I really do. I bet you also had to resist giving him a big hug, right there in front of Norton and everyone.
*
They had a little over three days left at that point, which Rodney had calculated down to hours and minutes even. He'd considered drafting an itinerary *snickers*, but figured he'd mostly end up writing "SEX" or "MORE SEX" and "EATING FOLLOWED BY SEX" all over it anyway so he'd discarded the paper plans and just tackled John into bed the moment they'd gotten into the apartment and got no complaints.
Eventually, though, Rodney convinced himself he'd broken his hip and sent John out to buy him a heating pad and a splint and Cadbury crème eggs.
John came back with a bag of Doritos, a hot water bag, some Hershey's Kisses and a kitten.
"Are you learning impaired?" Rodney demanded around a mouthful of kisses, palming the kitten's grey and white striped head as it yawned in his lap. Then, his eyes lit up as he said, "Wait! If you're mentally unfit for duty then we'll just--"
"No,," John disagreed emphatically, and got down on the floor next to Rodney by the couch, stroking a curled finger over the trembling pink shell of the kitten's ear. "I found her in a box in front of the grocery store. Last one." John smiled at Rodney and said, "Kind of ornery. I thought you two might enjoy one another."
Rodney looked appalled. "You actually pick up strays," he sneered, trying for disgust but actually just missing "disgruntled," largely because the kitten was unbearably cute in that stupid but loveable way that had been his downfall with John, too. Awwww! It was currently licking at Rodney's palm and mewling, blinking its large, sweet eyes and nuzzling into Rodney's lap.
John hummed in agreement and smiled as the kitten blinked at him curiously, waving one forepaw to slap at John's fingers.
"Thought you might want some company," John admitted, and in a far more quiet voice, said as he looked away, "Of course, you're welcome to replace the current line-up in its absence." O.O Ooooohhhh, John! *hugs him* No!!!
It took Rodney about thirty-six seconds to decode whatever the hell John was talking about yeah!, and when he did he made a choking noise and set the kitten down on the floor where it started and knead at the carpet with its baby claws immediately. Then Rodney grabbed John and was torn between punching him or punching him in the nipple for being an asshole.
"You're not replaceable," he finally said, glaring into John's purposefully blank face. Damn straight!
"You don't have to wait for me," John told him calmly.
"No," Rodney disagreed savagely, "I shouldn't have to wait for you."
A flicker of something darker passed over John's face. "I don't want to fight, Rodney." That's right, you don't. There isn't enough time as it is!
Rodney stared at him for along time before he realized he didn't want to either, that he was tired and feeling a little brittle around the edges, with a citrus-poison urgency at the edges of his awareness that had kept him up more nights than he'd actually managed to sleep through the last several weeks. He would stay up as long as he could, arguing math with John or talking about classic scifi or counting John's fingers over and over again, studying the shadows of his face because somewhere along the way John had become dear to him--and Rodney didn't actually know what that meant, but it felt right in his mouth, it seemed to read properly when he stroked his hand over John's shoulder in the morning.
So he sighed long and deep and put a hand on the back of John's neck, pulled him close and pulled him down, until John's face was buried in Rodney's shoulder and they were lying down on Rodney's floor--John's weight heavy and real across Rodney's chest.
"So you have to go," Rodney said dully.
"Yep," John murmured. "Make you sign in blood your third year at the Academy."
"Can't run away, can't be gay, can't avoid conflict with predicted massive U.S. casualties--" Rodney didn't let his voice break over the words, because he'd been watching the news too much lately and feeling the weight of it sink into his head with a sickening sense of reality "--can't stay home and have sex with brilliant astrophysicist--what's in this for you anyway?"
John was quiet for a very long time before he said, "You ever see the sky on a perfectly clear day, Rodney? When it's all blue and huge and almost gold from the light?"
"No," Rodney lied.
"This is the first time I've ever thought that maybe it wasn't worth it," John told him quietly, and then closed his eyes. Ouch. Just ... ouch. That's a huge admission.
Rodney just curled his fingers into the hair at the back of John's head.
*
John shipped out on a Tuesday afternoon and refused to let either Rodney or Norton (hah!) drive him. He just called a cab and kissed Rodney goodbye at the door in such a sick mimicry of war movies it made Rodney's stomach turn I'm torn between giggling and sighing sadly at this image, the poor dears, made him so helplessly furious he knotted his hands in John's reckless hair and bit hungrily at his mouth until John pressed his palms to Rodney's cheeks, until John pulled away and said, "Hey, hey now."
"Don't go," Rodney said--for the millionth time now.
He knew his eyes were too wide and too pleading but he'd been watching the news, been listening to Clinton's solemn discourse on why this was necessary and proper. Rodney knew he wasn't being fair but he didn't care--they could go to Canada. His sister would hide them.
John just smiled at him, crooked and rueful. "I'll be back soon," John said gently, and this time, when he kissed Rodney, it really felt like something in Rodney's chest was going to crack open, like the stressed walls of a dam.
John's mouth was soft and kind and warm on his own, and Rodney felt John just breath into him, close-lipped and so intoxicatingly sweet that Rodney was feeling lightheaded off of it, feeling starry, and this time, when John pulled away he did it so slowly Rodney barely realized they'd stopped kissing until John pressed his mouth to Rodney's temple and said, "Bye," and "Take care of yourself, okay?" and "Don't name the cat Gollum." probably a good one for Rodney to avoid and walked out of the door.
Rodney spent the rest of the day parked in his office at school watching the television he'd liberated from the faculty kitchen and listening to announcers talking about the dead in thousands until he forced himself to go home and feed the cat.
"You're just like that jackass," Rodney berated her as she curled her soft, furry body around his ankles in the living room. "Completely irrational and easily influenced and…you like me," he finished lamely.
He went to bed that night and despite all his best intentions let the cat curl up practically on his face, and when he woke up choking on hair, he realized the world hadn't stopped turning or anything and that it was Wednesday, and he had a class at eleven.
*
It was weird but mostly debilitating and horrible to be alone again after having John and John's long arms and legs taking up so much space for--well, not very long, actually, Rodney sulked.
He spent a lot of time laying in his bed and allowing the cat to lord over the apartment, and ate the entire contents of his increasingly poorly-stocked fridge. Then, he ate pizza, Chinese, Greek--anybody who would deliver and sometimes all in one night and regretted it (a lot) the next morning. The cat looked at Rodney as if he was some sort of beast king, demolishing entire mountains with his iron jaw.
"Oh, like I didn't find you passed-out face down in the food dish yesterday," Rodney told it snottily, which only made the cat narrow its kitten eyes in a remarkably good impression of John when he was annoyed. "That is incredibly creepy," he said, frowning. "Stop it immediately."
A few days later he felt well enough to start picking fights with Norton again, but neither of their hearts were into it, and Rodney spent most of his waking hours investing in newer and better answering machines and voice mail systems and checking his mailbox, waiting for any kind of word at all.
The second week, he got a letter, in John's now-familiar handwriting. It read:
STRANGE BUT TRUE: THE USAF CAN RUIN EVEN ITALIAN FOOD. SERIOUSLY. DON'T NAME THE CAT GOLLUM. JS. PS, SEND NORTON MY LOVE.
Rodney was torn by the warring urges to clutch it to his chest and burn it immediately, which he hated as it was disingenuous and exactly what John had probably wanted.
"I hate your owner," Rodney told the cat.
Again, this is one of those scenes packed with little touches of the mundane and real, that makes the loss feel so real. I want to laugh and I want to sigh and I want to sniff a bit here and there.
*
It really hit him John was gone when they sent him his new TA, huge-eyed and fragile-looking and Rodney wondered how they'd made that terrible decision, like sending the sick one out of the pack to appease the wolf--or some anthropological claptrap. *snickers* Even Rodney's internal snark doesn't have much time for the squishy sciences. :-D
"What's your name?" Rodney asked, passing the kid a stack of illegible quizzes.
He said, "Todd. Todd Ritter," and fumbled as Rodney stuffed yet another stack of file folders into his arms. "Um--I'm excited to be working with you, Dr. McKay."
Rodney rolled his eyes. "You know, I'd be more convinced of your apparent enthusiasm if it didn't look like you were about to hurl all over my office," he said sarcastically, and at Ritter's increasingly green expression, Rodney yelled, "Don't you dare hurl all over my office!"
It was not the most auspicious of beginnings for a new and beautiful working relationship, but then again, Rodney had never been served alcoholic beverages by Ritter, nor had Rodney seen Ritter mostly naked and being lusted at by hundreds of drunken, stoned twentysomethings so all things considered he was already at an advantage over Sheppard. Yes, in some respects, this might be a more auspicious beginning, at least, for working purposes.
His morning class, a significant number of whom were returnees from last semester's Adventures In Physics were equally if not more vicious, and Rodney started keeping his office hours if only because it was kind of hilarious hearing seemingly-harmless undergrads say completely horrible things about Rodney's new TA oh dear! Poor Ritter. He can't have any idea what hit him on this one. It was cruel and Ritter was looking slighter and more ill by the day, but Rodney figured what didn't kill you made you stronger, and there was a better than likely chance Ritter would survive this. True, but Ritter might just end up transferring to psychology or something, at this rate.
"I have this strange feeling none of the students like me," Ritter mourned, feebly grading tests without drawing any F-14s onto the A-papers, for which Rodney hated and judged him silently. *giggles* This type of fantastic contrast in expectations is another little touch that delights me to no end. Rodney would hate Ritter if he did draw F-14s onto the A-papers, and of course, Ritter has no idea that Rodney might even miss such a thing, because who draws F-14s on papers?
"I have no idea where you're getting that impression," Rodney allowed hmmmm ... is Rodney getting better at lying?, and told him to go away and grade in the privacy of his own office and get the hell out of Rodney's. He was in the middle of yet another astonishing breakthrough in wormhole theory and Ritter was disturbing Rodney's zen-inducing solitaire game.
"But Norton said your previous TA did all his work in here," Ritter said, sounding confused.
Rodney vowed to plant a bomb in Norton's toilet at the earliest possible convenience. "Norton is famous for lying," he assured Ritter. "It's a debilitating case of professional jealousy and you shouldn't listen to a word he says about me." Excellent comeback, Rodney.
Ritter widened his eyes in alarm. "He said you'd say that." *snickers*
"Norton also engages in sexual congress with sheep!" Rodney blustered, furious. And counter that with a sheep!.
"He said you'd say that, too!" Ritter gasped, horrified. *dies laughing* Of course Norton did. Hmmm ... I just realised Norton has the same name as a rather well known literature anthology. Perhaps there is more to the deep-seated personal hatred between McKay and Norton than we've already had revealed. Perhaps Norton's first PhD is in English Literature!
Ritter the TA was out of the picture in a record four weeks, but Rodney must have been showing wear and weariness around the edges, because Delores only yelled at him for five minutes and didn't even withhold staples the following week. Awwww ... Delores is fab. Where Rodney's mum is Mother Carlson, Delores is Mrs. Cunningham.
"We all miss John, Dr. McKay," she told him later, when she was dropping by yet another set of apology letters for him to sign. "But we're running out of bright young minds for you to warp, and John was the only guy in this department anywhere near as sick as you." *snickers* Oh, thank you, Delores!
Rodney thought she was being kind to him until he realized that was supposed to be his subtle heads-up at that theretofore unpracticed policy of TA's Are A Privilege, Not A Right was being exercised out of furious spite, and Rodney nursed his bitterness over bad coffee from a nearby café, writing things like, "Are you out of your mind?" and "No, there's no way you can be this stupid," all over the papers he graded.
The only thing that kept him going was the fact that once John had vacated Norton's coveted one thesis student at a time space, the man had garnered a vacuous following even more depressingly unwashed than Rodney's own, and Rodney took enormous pleasure in watching Norton feebly attempt to pass them off to other professors and protect his own academic chastity *snickers*. "It's not you," Norton would say, "it's me--we're just not studying similar-enough fields, Mr. Argent."
But the thing was that no matter how distracting and weird and politicized school was, at the end of the day Rodney still came home to an apartment that was suddenly unwieldy in size, even with all the boxes of John's crap he'd offered to take in John's absence. Another moment of truth - sometimes home just isn't right when the person you need isn't there anymore. *hugs Rodney*
Rodney wandered around his apartment looking for something he never managed to find. So he turned on the television to CNN and watched war coverage and unpacked all of John's stuff--poured it out onto his bland carpet and smoothed his hands over it. And after a couple of days of letting John's clothes and shoes andback copies of Superman comics--Christ, the man had no taste--Rodney realized he was being completely ridiculous and tried to pack all of John's stuff away again but ended up putting it in his closet and his dresser instead. Awwwww!
And then it seemed stupid to just have John's clothes mixed in with Rodney's stuff so he put all of John's videos and CDs with his own and started putting John's books onto the shelves, rereading John's copy of The Giving Tree awwww! and flipped through John's cookbook, touched the edges of the old photograph and missed John so much he couldn't breathe. wheeee! John moves in, even if he doesn't know it.
He read John's undergraduate history textbooks, traced John's handwriting in the margins of chapters about war and death and sacrifice, about how people bore the weight of great and dangerous change, and felt an ache so huge and horrible in his chest that when he pulled the cat into his arms, she only rubbed her soft nose against Rodney's nose like she could feel the weight of loneliness that was holding both of them down.
Rodney spent a lot of time swearing off cable news and then binging on it again and still no news of casualties, which he was alternately grateful for and sickened by, because people were still hurt, U.S. servicemen were still injured, and John could be one of them.
Rodney spent a month trying to figure out what he'd do if he got a call saying John was hurt before he realized that he wouldn't get a call that John was hurt, that to the rest of the world, he was just some guy who'd burdened John with papers to grade for a couple of months and if Jeannie ever found out about Rodney throwing a textbook through a television screen, that's exactly what he'd tell her made him do it. *hugs Rodney tightly* I can't imagine being in this position, but I can imagine it shredding my heart to ribbons.
*
Over the next two months, Rodney got three postcards and four letters. John talked about the weather and the color of the sky when morning was just a pale, pink sheen over it and how the sun looked, furious and ethereal from that high. But John was never chatty in real life and so Rodney hadn't been expecting it in letters, all of which were signed "JS" and the last of which asked what the hell Rodney was calling the cat, anyway.
The cat, who responded in her own cattish way whenever Rodney spoke since they were the only people in this strange, half-empty apartment of theirs, seemed to miss John, too, and always sat docile and still next to Rodney in front of the new television and so the monster returns, listening to bombs go off far away.
"He's going to be fine, Rodney," Jeannie said.
"Well of course he is," Rodney snapped. "I'm pretty sure I might die from sheer irritation if he wasn't and I'm too young and too valuable to the scientific community and God knows I can't let feeble minds like Henry Norton's rule the world of cutting edge physics so of course he will be fine and then I'll live." He paused, listening to something smacking and wet, disgusting and familiar from childhood summers. "Are you eating ice cream?"
"Oh, like you aren't," Jeannie sneered over the phone, and Rodney glared guiltily down at his own tub of fudge ripple. Oh. My. God! They both so have each other's number!
"I have an excuse," Rodney sulked, eyes following the CNN reporter on location and tried to ignore the black ribbon of the closed captioning and any mention of the word "death."
"So do I!" Jeannie argued. "We've only been married for what--a couple of months and Todd is already turning into this completely disgusting slob. I found socks in the microwave this morning, Rodney. Socks. In the microwave." I can see why Rodney wouldn't understand the relevance here, but eeewwww Jeannie, yes ... that's traumatic.
"Okay, being married to you, frankly, I'm surprised Todd hasn't stuck his nuts in the microwave," Rodney snapped. "And your trauma can hardly compare to my own!"
Jeannie disagreed inevitable, of course, and by the time Rodney finally hung up on her an hour later he realized the entire tub of ice cream had melted into a disgusting cream-colored mess and was starting to leak out onto his pants, making completely scandalous stains. *dies laughing* Yes, they're scandalous stains!
"This is ridiculous," he told himself, and then yelled it again later that night when he realized the cat was licking his pants in the laundry basket. Oh dear. What will John be thinking about Rodney having a little pussy on his pants?
The next week, Rodney had almost made it a full three days without panicking over John and where John was and if John was dead and also if he was sleeping with Balkan hussies when Rodney heard the words "fighter jet shot down in Bosnia" on his way to class and felt his knees give out.
*
back to Part 6 | on to Part 8
Author: rageprufrock
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
DVD Commentator: inkscribe
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
Part 7
Rodney's first kiss has given him mono; his second got him punched. His third was in a freezing cold observatory with some deranged physics and astronomy graduate student who'd been so hot for some ass even Rodney would do, and they'd jerked one another off on the cold tile floor and both gotten bitched out for failing to produce useable data the next morning. Eventually, Rodney started letting other people trap him into relationships because it was just easier that way--without all the personal risk and professional humiliation.
John was some unholy combination of all of these things: dangerous and painful and exciting, a shock like electric running through Rodney's veins and as familiar as star charts, comforting as the North American sky at night, far away from light pollution where the heavens were clear and earnest. John was no constant, suffered for no sameness, and numbers Rodney had always known slipped out of his grasp and gravity stopped pulling at 9.8 m/s and c stretched out, lengthening like a voice echoing down a long hall.
John was Rodney's 13th first kiss, and he had tasted like coffee and sweet bread and a little like a hospital. John did not hit Rodney or give him mono and Rodney didn't regret anything.
And that was a shocking realization, that of all the hideous embarrassment and public nudity and attempted solicitation that had brought him and John to this strange and precarious place, Rodney wouldn't change a thing, because even so hung over he could barely see, he knew out of sense memories that John was rare and strange, and strange and rare things had to have happened to bring them to this point.
Rodney wanted--and this was stupid, so so stupid--John to be his last first kiss, maybe, and so as he watched the doorknob turn, he couldn't help but think in advance, please, please let this be okay. *fingers crossed!!!!!*
*
When John came through the door, he was pale and drawn and so distracted it took him a whole minute of pulling off his jacket and putting away the key before he realized Rodney was in the living room staring at him, eyes wide and hungry and scared.
"Hi," Rodney said finally, when John's mouth curved into a tight smile.
"You're up," John said. "How's your head?"
Rodney swallowed around the nausea and asked, "Did--what did Norton say?"
John grinned wryly. "I wouldn't worry about the drunken cuddling," he assured Rodney, and walked past him into the kitchen, calling over his shoulder, "Though, for the record? Maybe you should take this as a lesson that you plus too much alcohol can equal inappropriate public nudity." *sniggers*
"Oh like you're one to talk," Rodney sneered, knee-jerk *sniggers again*, and trudged after John, leaning heavily on a counter as John started a pot of coffee, hands busy on the filters and measuring spoons.
"Job hazard," John admitted ruefully, and looked at Rodney sideways.
"He--uh, say anything else?" And at John's curious eyebrow, Rodney admitted sheepishly, "My memory of the evening is spotty at best."
Snickering, John said, "I mean, you don't have to make an honest man of him, if that's what you're worried about." And the smile finally reached his eyes as John said, "I always knew you were easy, Rodney, but that was too easy."
"Ha ha very ha," Rodney said sullenly.
"If it makes you feel any better, Norton doesn't remember anything either," John said. Phew!
Rodney felt something in his chest loosen. John didn't know, and Norton didn't know, and either way John was safe and he was safe and they were safe, and he was so ecstatic that he had to blink hard in the harsh light of the kitchen and when he did, he saw the edge of an envelope peeking out of John's back pocket. *cue worrisome foreshadowing music*
But then John handed Rodney a mug of coffee and hustled him off to bed again, muttering, "I left you a trashcan," before crawling up into bed, too in the late afternoon light, white with winter. John sat over the covers, frowning at the remaining detritus of the latest draft of his thesis, all marked with red comments in Norton's impeccably neat handwriting and scribbled liberally with John's own revisions. Rodney had read John's thesis approximately six billion and four times already, in between thieving drafts of it from Norton's office and over John's shoulder while he was working on it late into the night while Rodney graded miserably and looked for anything--anything--to take his mind off of marking papers, even his TA's ridiculously named ("Not Quite a Delorian, and Definitely Not 88 mph") thesis.
"Hey," Rodney said suddenly. "Don't you still work?"
John stared at him. "If you still have papers to grade, Rodney, I swear to God--"
Waving his hands, Rodney interrupted, "No, no--I mean. Don't you still work at the Boom Boom Room?" And there really was no way to say the name of the club without sounding completely ridiculous.
John raised his eyebrows and turned back to his work. "Not really," he said lightly. "I mean, I thought I was going to have to beg for hours after the car accident but I'm not really going to--" John cut himself off resolutely more foreshadowing ... *meep!*, and Rodney narrowed his eyes in suspicion for a whole half a second before John smiled at him and said, "Besides, being your TA is good times--and no required nudity."
"Actually," Rodney said solemnly, "I think I'm going to start requiring nudity." Ooooh, hey ... great idea!
"Oh is that so," John said, grinning.
Rodney shoved aside December's copy of the Journal of Applied Physics and pushed John's three-ring binder of aerodynamic agony onto the ground, where it made an extremely satisfying thunk, papers rustling. Rodney crawled, hands and knees, over John, until they were very close and Rodney could practically feel John's smile against his own.
"I was working on that, you know," John said, but his eyes were darkening with a smile already.
"I'll do your homework later if you help me out now," Rodney answered, scraping his cheek over John's and feeling John sigh into the touch, fingertips light on Rodney's hips.
"Doesn't speak well of the procedure and integrity of science," John murmured *snickers*, and Rodney felt the butterfly of John's eyelashes on his cheek and felt his heart constrict in his chest.
"Science, who cares, right," Rodney murmured, and closed his mouth over John's, feeling Sheppard's hand come up to palm Rodney's face, stroke his chin, tongue licking into Rodney's mouth and opening his knees so Rodney fell between them, pressed them body to body, John's thighs tight around his ribs.
John stroked his hands down Rodney's sides and slipped them under the waist of Rodney's pajama pants as Rodney smoothed his palms up John's blue t-shirt and they huffed, rearranging themselves in the bed until John was lying back, sideways across the mattress, laughing as Rodney struggled with his button-fly jeans and cursed inventively.
"I'm wearing these pants all the time from now on," John told him around completely unmanly giggles as Rodney finally jerked the jeans down John's slim hips. "There's just too much entertainment value here." Ooooh ... evil!John! *giggles*
"Oh, that's very funny," Rodney said bitterly, "no sex for you," but then immediately contradicted his own decision by applying himself earnestly to making John too breathless to speak, and John just melted beneath him, hands soft on Rodney's back and his sides and palms warm when they cupped Rodney's ass.
And Rodney knew, because it was one of the Eureka moments, that Jeannie was right, that this was different and John was different and they were different and that one day Rodney was going to buy John plane, because it wouldn't be fair if Rodney was the only person who got high off this relationship. Awww ... such wuv. :-)
*
Rodney woke up on January third with a weird, incomplete thought in the back of his mind, a scattershot of images that didn't make sense, disconnected and off-center that resonated for no good reason--
John wandered off early in the morning for some Air Force event which Rodney managed not to make fun of him for, even when John said, "Rodney, I'm serious," as he was crawling out of bed, his Marvin the Martian boxers half hanging off his ass and had borrowed Rodney's car and a pair of sweatpants to drive over to his own apartment and left his crap all over the bedroom and
--and Rodney went to the bedroom and picked up from the floor John's discarded button-fly jeans and pulled the crumpled envelope out of the back pocket and got so far as remembering John's distressed, pale face before he saw the U.S. Air Force insignia and heard the television in the background, heard buildings exploding and war correspondents talking and remembered that he and John were not an island.
Oh. My. God. *weeps for them*
*
The fight they had when John got back later that night started with Rodney saying:
"You could have fucking told me you were shipping out to fucking Bosnia!"
And John's face paling as he said, "You were digging through my mail?"
"Don't even try to change the subject, you asshole," Rodney yelled, so furious he could barely talk straight. "When were you going to tell me? Or were you at all? Was I going to wake up a month from now and find a fucking Post-It note saying HAVE TO GO KILL SELF IN BALKAN WAR ZONE--DON'T FORGET TO GRADE THE QUIZZES, JS." Oh Rodney! *hugs*
"So much for my romantic dinner and breaking it to you gently," John sighed tiredly, setting aside a brown paper bag of takeout.
"That was your romantic dinner?" Rodney balked, and before John could make some sort of irrelevant argument like pointing out that Rodney loved bad Chinese food or that Rodney hated pretentious restaurants, Rodney said, "You should have told me. You should have told me and you shouldn't be going."
Then John scowled and said, "I'm Air Force, Rodney, you knew that. You knew that--" Oh John! *hugs*
"You're a fucking student," Rodney yelled back, voice growing hoarse because all he could think was John and flaming wreckage, the lazy spin of helicopter blades slowing and the shriek of wind. John's face, pale and dirty and cold. "You're writing a thesis that's so brilliantly obscure that nobody will understand it and everybody will want to and--"
"I'm a pilot," John hollered back, and that's when his voice broke a little. "I'm a pilot, Rodney, and I can't just--"
"--John, please, please just--"
"I have to go," John finally said, and he put his hands on Rodney's face, and when Rodney looked in John's eyes it was full of excuses, just like his mouth and Rodney had always thought nothing could make him hate John's mouth, but those full lips shaping around words like, "I'm sorry," and "It's not forever--it's just a tour," and "I'll be fine, Rodney--it'll be fine," made Rodney want to punch him in it. *hugs them both*
"You're not even through with your thesis," Rodney said numbly, eyes huge and his throat tight. "You'll be an academic failure. I'll make fun of you to everybody. I'll trash your drafts." This is such a brilliant declaration of love, in Rodney's own twisted way. *hugs them more*
"You can hang pictures of me in effigy," John said, and smiled in a painful, lopsided way.
"My students will like it too much," Rodney snapped.
"I'll take my chances," John murmured.
Rodney shut his eyes fiercely and gritted his teeth. "God--don't say that--I know enough about statistics that I hate it when people say that--"
But John cut him off with a kiss, and Rodney hated how he could tell from the way he was putting his hands in John's dark hair, and how he scraped his teeth along John's lower lip that he was going to let John off the hook.
Later, when John was curled over Rodney, his back like the arch of a Roman aqueduct, his hips grinding against Rodney and his cock splitting Rodney open and his fingers dotting bruises all over Rodney's hips--Rodney just kept asking for more and harder and fuck--
Rodney wanted marks, scrapes, cuts, tender red skin between his shoulders blades, a crescent of purpling teethmarks on his shoulders, for John not to be careful anymore--anything, anything to prove that this had been real.
This scene just hurts so much, and the need to make it harder and painful and even leaving behind evidence; it's just so real, so painful. *hugs them both and weeps*
*
School started on the fourth, and Rodney made that extra effort to monopolize John as much as possible, giving his students pop quizzes left and right and luring John *waggles eyebrows* into the office for extra grading before throwing the entire stack into a convenient trash *snickers* can and starting a conversation about Dr. Who. John attempted to look disapproving, but seriously, it was Dr. Who.
"You know I have this thesis I'm working on?" John asked sarcastically.
"You're just looking for an excuse to cheat on me with Norton," Rodney shot back, and handed John a muffin. "Here, it's cranberry walnut. Eat it before I steal the top." And John would, because he recognized a love token from Rodney when he saw one. Yes! So much love here!
But Rodney wasn't the only one clambering for John's attention and John, who was getting rides "back to his apartment" from Rodney under the very clever cover that John's car was totaled, was late more often than not for their designated eight o'clock meeting time in one of the faculty lots. And half the time, Rodney didn't even have the heart to yell at him because John looked so ragged around the edges, trying to push through the last bumps of his thesis. Awwwww!
During the three and a half week period John spent throwing himself against a proverbial brick wall and Norton logged billions of extra office hours with his most favorite student, Rodney skulked around corners taping small, inconspicuous objects to the lower corners of Norton's office doorframe I love this bit beyond belief ... so very much like something out of one of the Fleming Bond novels so he could maintain an opening and make sure Norton wasn't taking advantage of John's delirious exhaustion. Mostly, he heard Norton saying soothing, fatherly things like, "You're almost there, John. And this is the last revision, I promise," about three times every day and John bitterly accusing, "You're just fucking with my mind now--I know it."
Rodney was kind of glad that John had de facto moved in with him, because he kept finding his normally-sane TA wandering around the apartment at four in the morning, confused and stubbing his toe on the couch looking for his shoes. Caring!Rodney *grins*
"What are you doing?" Rodney would ask, bewildered.
"I don't know," John would answer, and he sounded so helpless Rodney couldn't help but laugh.
A few weeks before John was supposed to ship out--Rodney had a mental calendar, with red Xs and a big skull and crossbones over The Day--Norton said, "Oh my God, I think you're done," and John said, "I hate aerodynamics. I hate airplanes. I am never flying an airplane again," before he rushed it off to the printers. Yay for completing your thesis, John!
"I think I'm going blind," John said the day Rodney collected him from one of the Caltech computer labs at eight in the morning. He was unshaven and smelled like toner and he had a dozen papercuts on his hands, his sleeves rolled up so Rodney saw the dark hair on his arms, and it struck Rodney that in a few days he wouldn't see stuff like that anymore, so he committed it to memory with the resigned ache he'd been doing for a lot of things in the last few weeks.
"But you're done," Rodney said soothingly, and waited while John feverishly checked through every bound version of his thesis the printers had sent him, remembering fondly his own first master's thesis.
"Oh, God," John said hoarsely. "This is useless. I can't even read anymore."
Which was when Rodney decided this could not go on and took them out of John's hands and walked them over to Delores, queen of the department secretaries, and settled the crate of theses on her desk, ignoring her reflex scowl at him and saying, "Delores--I believe my TA has finished his thesis."
She put her hand over her quivering lip and looked at John proudly, who stared at her with the blank exhaustion of a job well done.
"Oh, John," she said. "And against--" she looked at Rodney pointedly while saying it "--insurmountable odds, too! I'll get these out to the department immediately." Heh heh heh ... I have so much love for this moment. She's so very happy for John, and so pointedly sure that Rodney is part of the insurmountable odds. *grins*
John blinked three times and said, "Wait--what?"
Rodney scowled at her and put his hands on John's shoulders, saying firmly, "And now, you're going home."
"Wait--my thesis," John protested feebly.
"Is out of your hands," Rodney soothed.
John held up his hands as Rodney steered him toward the parking lot and looked at them sadly. "Those pages were really sharp, Rodney," he mourned, and Rodney wondered had he been like this at seventeen, finishing up his first masters and so disoriented he'd walked into a parked car hard enough to jam his knee--which, actually, was a pretty good indication that answer was a yes.
Rodney told John to sleep in the passenger seat but mostly, John just stared straight ahead and breathed loudly until they reached Rodney's apartment. So Rodney sighed, put the car in park, and somehow managed to get them inside where he stripped John carefully, throwing his jeans and t-shirt and track jacket into the wash, and arranged John under a hot shower--joining him under the spray after a moment's indecision. Awwwww ... this is so so sweet! Caring!Rodney makes me grin.
Rodney was halfway through rubbing shampoo through John's ridiculous hair when he felt John wrap his arms around Rodney's chest and bury his face in Rodney's shoulder. Awwww, again.
"Hey," Rodney murmured, close to John's ear, water rolling down his back and legs, and it was strange, to feel John's wet hands on him, slick and wonderful and safe.
"Hi," John said back and took a long breath out before he murmured, "Thanks for everything."
Rodney's throat closed up, and he put one hand on the back of John's neck, saying, "I'll expect you to do some manly pining." Oh yes, definitely!
"I'll cry myself to sleep in my lacy, pink pillow every night, promise," John answered. *snerks*
"Then it's settled," Rodney said decisively, and made sure both of them were rinsed and clean before they stumbled out of the shower, dried off and dumped the towels on the bathroom floor, collapsing into bed, where Rodney pressed John back in the pillows and blew him, slow and sweet and tender, hands holding John's hips and rubbing his cheek against the hollow of John's hipbone. And after John had come with a tiny, choked-off moan, Rodney scooted up his body and batted John's reaching hands away, saying, "Knock it off. You've had a long month."
"You could give a guy a complex," John said blurrily, but his eyes were already closing.
"Eye for an eye," Rodney said softly, and he laid there for a long time watching John asleep. Mmmmm ... again, a lovely, tender scene that just makes the upcoming separation that much more sad.
*
For the next few days, Rodney and Norton called a temporary truce and ran around the school harassing professors into reading John's thesis with a terrifying urgency. They cajoled, threatened, left annoying voice messages, and made absolutely no eye contact with one another. The sekkrit plots of John's boss and advisor! Woot!
"Why is everybody glaring at me?" John had asked, narrow-eyed. Shhhh ... it's a sekkrit.
"They're just jealous of how pretty you are," Rodney had said, which wasn't precisely a lie but probably not the exact truth John was looking for.
"I'm going to go play Oregon Trail now," John had finally said, glaring, "try not to destroy modern physics while I'm gone."
"Stop playing as me," Rodney had complained after him. He was sick of reading, HERE LIES RODNEY MCKAY: CROTCH ROT ENDED HIM on the badly pixilated tombstones on the side of the road. *giggles*
But the point was to speed along the process, and Rodney and Norton beamed from the sidelines like proud parents--only not, because that'd be strange and more than vaguely incestuous *giggles*--as John soldiered through his exams. They ignored all their predetermined rules about personal space and jammed their faces into the crack between the double-doors of the conference room and listened to the faint murmur of voices from Caltech faculty they had harassed, intimidated, and otherwise bludgeoned into reading John's thesis with lighting speed, and felt their hearts race out of their chests as John formulated answers.
"Oh my God--this is too stressful," Rodney moaned at Norton. "How can you do this with more than one student?"
Norton rubbed at his face. "Well, I don't really like most of them," he admitted.
"That makes sense," Rodney was forced to concede.
And they were still beaming like proud parents when John stepped out of his orals, looking flustered and crap, and said, "Oh, God, that was awful," and Rodney had to resist the urge to coo, "All grown up and getting your first master's." I believe you Rodney, I really do. I bet you also had to resist giving him a big hug, right there in front of Norton and everyone.
*
They had a little over three days left at that point, which Rodney had calculated down to hours and minutes even. He'd considered drafting an itinerary *snickers*, but figured he'd mostly end up writing "SEX" or "MORE SEX" and "EATING FOLLOWED BY SEX" all over it anyway so he'd discarded the paper plans and just tackled John into bed the moment they'd gotten into the apartment and got no complaints.
Eventually, though, Rodney convinced himself he'd broken his hip and sent John out to buy him a heating pad and a splint and Cadbury crème eggs.
John came back with a bag of Doritos, a hot water bag, some Hershey's Kisses and a kitten.
"Are you learning impaired?" Rodney demanded around a mouthful of kisses, palming the kitten's grey and white striped head as it yawned in his lap. Then, his eyes lit up as he said, "Wait! If you're mentally unfit for duty then we'll just--"
"No,," John disagreed emphatically, and got down on the floor next to Rodney by the couch, stroking a curled finger over the trembling pink shell of the kitten's ear. "I found her in a box in front of the grocery store. Last one." John smiled at Rodney and said, "Kind of ornery. I thought you two might enjoy one another."
Rodney looked appalled. "You actually pick up strays," he sneered, trying for disgust but actually just missing "disgruntled," largely because the kitten was unbearably cute in that stupid but loveable way that had been his downfall with John, too. Awwww! It was currently licking at Rodney's palm and mewling, blinking its large, sweet eyes and nuzzling into Rodney's lap.
John hummed in agreement and smiled as the kitten blinked at him curiously, waving one forepaw to slap at John's fingers.
"Thought you might want some company," John admitted, and in a far more quiet voice, said as he looked away, "Of course, you're welcome to replace the current line-up in its absence." O.O Ooooohhhh, John! *hugs him* No!!!
It took Rodney about thirty-six seconds to decode whatever the hell John was talking about yeah!, and when he did he made a choking noise and set the kitten down on the floor where it started and knead at the carpet with its baby claws immediately. Then Rodney grabbed John and was torn between punching him or punching him in the nipple for being an asshole.
"You're not replaceable," he finally said, glaring into John's purposefully blank face. Damn straight!
"You don't have to wait for me," John told him calmly.
"No," Rodney disagreed savagely, "I shouldn't have to wait for you."
A flicker of something darker passed over John's face. "I don't want to fight, Rodney." That's right, you don't. There isn't enough time as it is!
Rodney stared at him for along time before he realized he didn't want to either, that he was tired and feeling a little brittle around the edges, with a citrus-poison urgency at the edges of his awareness that had kept him up more nights than he'd actually managed to sleep through the last several weeks. He would stay up as long as he could, arguing math with John or talking about classic scifi or counting John's fingers over and over again, studying the shadows of his face because somewhere along the way John had become dear to him--and Rodney didn't actually know what that meant, but it felt right in his mouth, it seemed to read properly when he stroked his hand over John's shoulder in the morning.
So he sighed long and deep and put a hand on the back of John's neck, pulled him close and pulled him down, until John's face was buried in Rodney's shoulder and they were lying down on Rodney's floor--John's weight heavy and real across Rodney's chest.
"So you have to go," Rodney said dully.
"Yep," John murmured. "Make you sign in blood your third year at the Academy."
"Can't run away, can't be gay, can't avoid conflict with predicted massive U.S. casualties--" Rodney didn't let his voice break over the words, because he'd been watching the news too much lately and feeling the weight of it sink into his head with a sickening sense of reality "--can't stay home and have sex with brilliant astrophysicist--what's in this for you anyway?"
John was quiet for a very long time before he said, "You ever see the sky on a perfectly clear day, Rodney? When it's all blue and huge and almost gold from the light?"
"No," Rodney lied.
"This is the first time I've ever thought that maybe it wasn't worth it," John told him quietly, and then closed his eyes. Ouch. Just ... ouch. That's a huge admission.
Rodney just curled his fingers into the hair at the back of John's head.
*
John shipped out on a Tuesday afternoon and refused to let either Rodney or Norton (hah!) drive him. He just called a cab and kissed Rodney goodbye at the door in such a sick mimicry of war movies it made Rodney's stomach turn I'm torn between giggling and sighing sadly at this image, the poor dears, made him so helplessly furious he knotted his hands in John's reckless hair and bit hungrily at his mouth until John pressed his palms to Rodney's cheeks, until John pulled away and said, "Hey, hey now."
"Don't go," Rodney said--for the millionth time now.
He knew his eyes were too wide and too pleading but he'd been watching the news, been listening to Clinton's solemn discourse on why this was necessary and proper. Rodney knew he wasn't being fair but he didn't care--they could go to Canada. His sister would hide them.
John just smiled at him, crooked and rueful. "I'll be back soon," John said gently, and this time, when he kissed Rodney, it really felt like something in Rodney's chest was going to crack open, like the stressed walls of a dam.
John's mouth was soft and kind and warm on his own, and Rodney felt John just breath into him, close-lipped and so intoxicatingly sweet that Rodney was feeling lightheaded off of it, feeling starry, and this time, when John pulled away he did it so slowly Rodney barely realized they'd stopped kissing until John pressed his mouth to Rodney's temple and said, "Bye," and "Take care of yourself, okay?" and "Don't name the cat Gollum." probably a good one for Rodney to avoid and walked out of the door.
Rodney spent the rest of the day parked in his office at school watching the television he'd liberated from the faculty kitchen and listening to announcers talking about the dead in thousands until he forced himself to go home and feed the cat.
"You're just like that jackass," Rodney berated her as she curled her soft, furry body around his ankles in the living room. "Completely irrational and easily influenced and…you like me," he finished lamely.
He went to bed that night and despite all his best intentions let the cat curl up practically on his face, and when he woke up choking on hair, he realized the world hadn't stopped turning or anything and that it was Wednesday, and he had a class at eleven.
*
It was weird but mostly debilitating and horrible to be alone again after having John and John's long arms and legs taking up so much space for--well, not very long, actually, Rodney sulked.
He spent a lot of time laying in his bed and allowing the cat to lord over the apartment, and ate the entire contents of his increasingly poorly-stocked fridge. Then, he ate pizza, Chinese, Greek--anybody who would deliver and sometimes all in one night and regretted it (a lot) the next morning. The cat looked at Rodney as if he was some sort of beast king, demolishing entire mountains with his iron jaw.
"Oh, like I didn't find you passed-out face down in the food dish yesterday," Rodney told it snottily, which only made the cat narrow its kitten eyes in a remarkably good impression of John when he was annoyed. "That is incredibly creepy," he said, frowning. "Stop it immediately."
A few days later he felt well enough to start picking fights with Norton again, but neither of their hearts were into it, and Rodney spent most of his waking hours investing in newer and better answering machines and voice mail systems and checking his mailbox, waiting for any kind of word at all.
The second week, he got a letter, in John's now-familiar handwriting. It read:
STRANGE BUT TRUE: THE USAF CAN RUIN EVEN ITALIAN FOOD. SERIOUSLY. DON'T NAME THE CAT GOLLUM. JS. PS, SEND NORTON MY LOVE.
Rodney was torn by the warring urges to clutch it to his chest and burn it immediately, which he hated as it was disingenuous and exactly what John had probably wanted.
"I hate your owner," Rodney told the cat.
Again, this is one of those scenes packed with little touches of the mundane and real, that makes the loss feel so real. I want to laugh and I want to sigh and I want to sniff a bit here and there.
*
It really hit him John was gone when they sent him his new TA, huge-eyed and fragile-looking and Rodney wondered how they'd made that terrible decision, like sending the sick one out of the pack to appease the wolf--or some anthropological claptrap. *snickers* Even Rodney's internal snark doesn't have much time for the squishy sciences. :-D
"What's your name?" Rodney asked, passing the kid a stack of illegible quizzes.
He said, "Todd. Todd Ritter," and fumbled as Rodney stuffed yet another stack of file folders into his arms. "Um--I'm excited to be working with you, Dr. McKay."
Rodney rolled his eyes. "You know, I'd be more convinced of your apparent enthusiasm if it didn't look like you were about to hurl all over my office," he said sarcastically, and at Ritter's increasingly green expression, Rodney yelled, "Don't you dare hurl all over my office!"
It was not the most auspicious of beginnings for a new and beautiful working relationship, but then again, Rodney had never been served alcoholic beverages by Ritter, nor had Rodney seen Ritter mostly naked and being lusted at by hundreds of drunken, stoned twentysomethings so all things considered he was already at an advantage over Sheppard. Yes, in some respects, this might be a more auspicious beginning, at least, for working purposes.
His morning class, a significant number of whom were returnees from last semester's Adventures In Physics were equally if not more vicious, and Rodney started keeping his office hours if only because it was kind of hilarious hearing seemingly-harmless undergrads say completely horrible things about Rodney's new TA oh dear! Poor Ritter. He can't have any idea what hit him on this one. It was cruel and Ritter was looking slighter and more ill by the day, but Rodney figured what didn't kill you made you stronger, and there was a better than likely chance Ritter would survive this. True, but Ritter might just end up transferring to psychology or something, at this rate.
"I have this strange feeling none of the students like me," Ritter mourned, feebly grading tests without drawing any F-14s onto the A-papers, for which Rodney hated and judged him silently. *giggles* This type of fantastic contrast in expectations is another little touch that delights me to no end. Rodney would hate Ritter if he did draw F-14s onto the A-papers, and of course, Ritter has no idea that Rodney might even miss such a thing, because who draws F-14s on papers?
"I have no idea where you're getting that impression," Rodney allowed hmmmm ... is Rodney getting better at lying?, and told him to go away and grade in the privacy of his own office and get the hell out of Rodney's. He was in the middle of yet another astonishing breakthrough in wormhole theory and Ritter was disturbing Rodney's zen-inducing solitaire game.
"But Norton said your previous TA did all his work in here," Ritter said, sounding confused.
Rodney vowed to plant a bomb in Norton's toilet at the earliest possible convenience. "Norton is famous for lying," he assured Ritter. "It's a debilitating case of professional jealousy and you shouldn't listen to a word he says about me." Excellent comeback, Rodney.
Ritter widened his eyes in alarm. "He said you'd say that." *snickers*
"Norton also engages in sexual congress with sheep!" Rodney blustered, furious. And counter that with a sheep!.
"He said you'd say that, too!" Ritter gasped, horrified. *dies laughing* Of course Norton did. Hmmm ... I just realised Norton has the same name as a rather well known literature anthology. Perhaps there is more to the deep-seated personal hatred between McKay and Norton than we've already had revealed. Perhaps Norton's first PhD is in English Literature!
Ritter the TA was out of the picture in a record four weeks, but Rodney must have been showing wear and weariness around the edges, because Delores only yelled at him for five minutes and didn't even withhold staples the following week. Awwww ... Delores is fab. Where Rodney's mum is Mother Carlson, Delores is Mrs. Cunningham.
"We all miss John, Dr. McKay," she told him later, when she was dropping by yet another set of apology letters for him to sign. "But we're running out of bright young minds for you to warp, and John was the only guy in this department anywhere near as sick as you." *snickers* Oh, thank you, Delores!
Rodney thought she was being kind to him until he realized that was supposed to be his subtle heads-up at that theretofore unpracticed policy of TA's Are A Privilege, Not A Right was being exercised out of furious spite, and Rodney nursed his bitterness over bad coffee from a nearby café, writing things like, "Are you out of your mind?" and "No, there's no way you can be this stupid," all over the papers he graded.
The only thing that kept him going was the fact that once John had vacated Norton's coveted one thesis student at a time space, the man had garnered a vacuous following even more depressingly unwashed than Rodney's own, and Rodney took enormous pleasure in watching Norton feebly attempt to pass them off to other professors and protect his own academic chastity *snickers*. "It's not you," Norton would say, "it's me--we're just not studying similar-enough fields, Mr. Argent."
But the thing was that no matter how distracting and weird and politicized school was, at the end of the day Rodney still came home to an apartment that was suddenly unwieldy in size, even with all the boxes of John's crap he'd offered to take in John's absence. Another moment of truth - sometimes home just isn't right when the person you need isn't there anymore. *hugs Rodney*
Rodney wandered around his apartment looking for something he never managed to find. So he turned on the television to CNN and watched war coverage and unpacked all of John's stuff--poured it out onto his bland carpet and smoothed his hands over it. And after a couple of days of letting John's clothes and shoes andback copies of Superman comics--Christ, the man had no taste--Rodney realized he was being completely ridiculous and tried to pack all of John's stuff away again but ended up putting it in his closet and his dresser instead. Awwwww!
And then it seemed stupid to just have John's clothes mixed in with Rodney's stuff so he put all of John's videos and CDs with his own and started putting John's books onto the shelves, rereading John's copy of The Giving Tree awwww! and flipped through John's cookbook, touched the edges of the old photograph and missed John so much he couldn't breathe. wheeee! John moves in, even if he doesn't know it.
He read John's undergraduate history textbooks, traced John's handwriting in the margins of chapters about war and death and sacrifice, about how people bore the weight of great and dangerous change, and felt an ache so huge and horrible in his chest that when he pulled the cat into his arms, she only rubbed her soft nose against Rodney's nose like she could feel the weight of loneliness that was holding both of them down.
Rodney spent a lot of time swearing off cable news and then binging on it again and still no news of casualties, which he was alternately grateful for and sickened by, because people were still hurt, U.S. servicemen were still injured, and John could be one of them.
Rodney spent a month trying to figure out what he'd do if he got a call saying John was hurt before he realized that he wouldn't get a call that John was hurt, that to the rest of the world, he was just some guy who'd burdened John with papers to grade for a couple of months and if Jeannie ever found out about Rodney throwing a textbook through a television screen, that's exactly what he'd tell her made him do it. *hugs Rodney tightly* I can't imagine being in this position, but I can imagine it shredding my heart to ribbons.
*
Over the next two months, Rodney got three postcards and four letters. John talked about the weather and the color of the sky when morning was just a pale, pink sheen over it and how the sun looked, furious and ethereal from that high. But John was never chatty in real life and so Rodney hadn't been expecting it in letters, all of which were signed "JS" and the last of which asked what the hell Rodney was calling the cat, anyway.
The cat, who responded in her own cattish way whenever Rodney spoke since they were the only people in this strange, half-empty apartment of theirs, seemed to miss John, too, and always sat docile and still next to Rodney in front of the new television and so the monster returns, listening to bombs go off far away.
"He's going to be fine, Rodney," Jeannie said.
"Well of course he is," Rodney snapped. "I'm pretty sure I might die from sheer irritation if he wasn't and I'm too young and too valuable to the scientific community and God knows I can't let feeble minds like Henry Norton's rule the world of cutting edge physics so of course he will be fine and then I'll live." He paused, listening to something smacking and wet, disgusting and familiar from childhood summers. "Are you eating ice cream?"
"Oh, like you aren't," Jeannie sneered over the phone, and Rodney glared guiltily down at his own tub of fudge ripple. Oh. My. God! They both so have each other's number!
"I have an excuse," Rodney sulked, eyes following the CNN reporter on location and tried to ignore the black ribbon of the closed captioning and any mention of the word "death."
"So do I!" Jeannie argued. "We've only been married for what--a couple of months and Todd is already turning into this completely disgusting slob. I found socks in the microwave this morning, Rodney. Socks. In the microwave." I can see why Rodney wouldn't understand the relevance here, but eeewwww Jeannie, yes ... that's traumatic.
"Okay, being married to you, frankly, I'm surprised Todd hasn't stuck his nuts in the microwave," Rodney snapped. "And your trauma can hardly compare to my own!"
Jeannie disagreed inevitable, of course, and by the time Rodney finally hung up on her an hour later he realized the entire tub of ice cream had melted into a disgusting cream-colored mess and was starting to leak out onto his pants, making completely scandalous stains. *dies laughing* Yes, they're scandalous stains!
"This is ridiculous," he told himself, and then yelled it again later that night when he realized the cat was licking his pants in the laundry basket. Oh dear. What will John be thinking about Rodney having a little pussy on his pants?
The next week, Rodney had almost made it a full three days without panicking over John and where John was and if John was dead and also if he was sleeping with Balkan hussies when Rodney heard the words "fighter jet shot down in Bosnia" on his way to class and felt his knees give out.
*
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