TEAM TIME: fools rush in, "Times Two"
Title: Times Two
Author: mischief5
Team: Time
Prompt: fools rush in
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard (pre-slash)
Rating: PG-13 for language
Word count: ~3800
Warnings: None
Summary: A device in an Ancient outpost reveals more about Rodney McKay than John Sheppard ever anticipated. Post-series.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to my team of betas-to-be-named-later; couldn't have done it without you!
Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the prompt in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
**
"You know, this isn't your first date. Just screw up your courage and ask her to prom already," Rodney said over the radio.
If John hadn't heard the fond humor under the sarcasm, he might have taken offence. "Rodney, this ain't prom. It's dinner and a movie, chocolate and flowers, a limo ride and champagne and the Empire State Building, and she still won't talk to me. The whole damn outpost is dead."
"What? The naquadah generator is up and running and these consoles have power. You should have lights and doors at least."
"No lights, McKay, not that I can find. No sconces, no doors, nothing." John leaned out over a balcony, his arm wrapped around a not-Doric column, and frowned at the rolling meadow of wildflowers. "It's all… open; just dorms with dusty pallets and big empty rooms." He was starting to have flashbacks to the time dilation planet, but if he mentioned it out loud, Rodney would bring up the beard, call him a Yeti, and the science mission would devolve into a fifth grade field trip complete with slap fights and bad jokes.
"Fine. Give me a minute."
He really wished Teyla and Ronon were here.
He said, just to fuck with Rodney, "I really wish Teyla and Ronon were here."
"Oh, yes, so I could have three useless people wandering around instead of just one. Look, I've almost got this console working. What about the bathrooms?"
"I didn't check." John went back into the hall and headed for the stairs. "Do you think they saved us any of those goat-thing gyros?"
"They better have done," Rodney muttered from three floors away.
Teyla was negotiating a trade agreement with the Minayans; Ronon had stayed behind for the food - and John didn't blame him one damn bit. They'd barely crawled home after the first contact mission, stuffed on the best Mediterranean cuisine this side of - well, the Mediterranean. While the Minayans didn't really need to trade with Atlantis - their level of technology was sufficient to maintain their quality of life without attracting the Wraith - Atlantis always needed local food, and besides, the elders wouldn't let Rodney near this outpost without some kind of diplomatic relations.
"Wait, wait! Go back and check the bathrooms," Rodney said.
"Why?" John asked, careful not to sulk like a teenager.
"Because, despite the faux-Greek architecture, which is an interesting departure from their usual Frank Lloyd Wright motif - and don't tell the anthropologists I said that; they'll start thinking I pay attention - it's still an Ancient facility and something here should respond to your hyperactive gene, even if it's just the plumbing. Check it."
At Rodney's snippy tone, John sighed and stopped dead in the middle of the corridor. Time for the fifth grade field trip. "132,643."
"What?"
"That's how many miles I've walked in the past six years on your say-so alone. Not regular missions, not trade missions, not running from the natives because you've been shot in the ass missions, and certainly not counting all the gate travel."
"Well, of course gate travel doesn't count; you're traveling, not walking. It's instantaneous. Oh, wait! No no no no no!"
John grinned as Rodney rose to the bait. Just hearing his voice made the eerie echoes easier to bear.
"You have so not been keeping track all these years! You just pulled that number out of your skinny ass. So just march that ass ten meters down the hall and - Fuck! Sonofabi-"
The radio cut out.
John tapped his earpiece twice as he jogged toward the stairs. "McKay, what happened?"
No answer. He tapped it again. "McKay, come in!"
Not just dead air but dead.
He hit the stairs at full speed, jumped the railing halfway down the first flight, then slid down the railing the rest of the way on his hip.
Not the generator; an overload would have vaporized half the planet. Not the facility; it still felt silent in his head. The Minayans? No, they didn't worship the Ancestors like most of the Pegasus cultures did. They didn't care about this place other than as a bargaining chip.
Then what?
He landed solid on both feet, his left knee giving a slight twinge, and ran toward the ground floor lab they'd found.
"McKay?" he shouted. "Rodney, god damn it, answer me!"
He used the doorjamb as a fulcrum to slingshot him into the room, skidding to a stop in front of the main console.
"McKay!"
Rodney popped up from behind the console, eyes wide with alarm. "Sheppard, no! Get away from there!"
A stream of light flowed down from the ceiling, looped around his body with a familiar glow, and the room disappeared.
***
John's vision cleared and a room formed around him, smelling of chalk dusk and polished wood. A kid in a hat, long, curly blond hair spilling out from under it, sat at a table, copying equations off a series of blackboards. Something about that profile and the set of his jaw…
"McKay?" It couldn't be. It had to be.
"Busy! Working! Go away!"
John grabbed the hat away and hauled the kid up by his elbow. The chair tipped over as he flailed, all long arms and skinny legs in artfully ripped jeans, and wide, startled eyes with - eyeliner? And earrings?
John clapped the silly, flat fedora back on the kid's head. "You need to do your roots, McKay. And with all that mousse, you never get to give me shit about my hair again."
McKay patted his shirt down, straightened his tie, and said, "Who, exactly, are you?"
"You don't know m- Wait, how did we end up in the '80s? What did you do to that console? What happened with that light?"
John felt a weird head rush as McKay stuffed his hands in his pockets, tilted his head to one side, and put on an air of superior innocence. He could see his Rodney overlapping this one like some sort of double vision, the ghost of McKay past become present.
"One, no, we've never met, surfer dude -"
Surfer dude? John looked down: flip-flops, cut-offs, and his favorite t-shirt from college, Cowboy Surf Shop. Oh, crap.
"- two, I never left the '80s and won't for another four years; three, no consoles here; last, just crappy, florescent lights as always."
John took a step back, fumbling for support, and found a table to lean against. "So you didn't time travel with me." His hands shook as he scrubbed his face. His hair flopped over his fingers; the last time it'd been this long, he'd been in grad school. Christ, did he look as young as McKay?
"Time travel?" McKay huffed a short, sharp laugh, so familiar it sank into John's gut like a knife. "While theoretically possible, currently impossible given our level of technology. Temporal ethics aside, the mechanics of time travel remain well beyond our reach unless -"
"- unless we have a DeLorean." John couldn't resist, not even in the middle of a minor panic attack. He dropped his hands and managed a smirk.
"You did not just say that." McKay came at him, finger pointing, his young face fierce, eyes nearly electric blue.
He was beyond beautiful, all eyebrows and cheekbones and that full, wide mouth. He blazed with youth and cocky confidence and untempered certainty, and John felt the knife again, sweet this time, as McKay tore physics apart and put it back together, outraged. He soared on McKay's round Canadian vowels citing Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Newton's Laws of Motion, and Planck's constant. This old, tired rant seemed fresh and passionate, given new life in McKay's higher, younger voice, and John felt almost giddy with relief.
Yes, this was his Rodney McKay, just twenty some years ago.
"- and besides that, the ice on the outside of the car indicates an unstable wormhole, not time travel -"
"- and an unstable wormhole is the result of stellar drift, which can be compensated for if you have a network in place and can update the software." John nodded, solemn and wise, and waited.
"Huh." McKay's eyes glazed over. John could almost see that big brain running the numbers and considering the mechanics. Long fingers snapped three times and then he pointed at John again. "A network of stable wormholes. That's entirely possible yet highly improbable; we don't have the technology. You're completely delusional."
"You'll see -" John stopped. McKay was right; temporal ethics wouldn't allow him to tamper with the here and now, not even to tell him how they knew each other.
"I'll see what?" McKay demanded.
"Never mind. Look, I need to get home. Tell me how to do that given the technology we do have."
McKay waved a hand at John. "Buy a bus ticket? The gnarly surfing at Half Moon Bay awaits."
John plucked at his t-shirt. "This isn't home. Home is my team, my friends. Home is a city on the sea. Home is -" You. He pushed away from the table, straightened his shoulders, and stood at parade rest. "I'm Colonel John Sheppard, USAF. How do I get back to my own time?"
"Now I know you're delusional," McKay snorted. "You're a teenager with long hair and flip-flops. The Air Force wouldn't have you on a bet."
"Oh, Christ." John pinched the bridge of his nose. "I knew it. I have zits, don't I?"
"No, you're far too pretty for zits." The matter of fact statement left John staring at him, stunned. McKay went on, "And if you're not delusional, how did you get here in the first place? The WABAC Machine?"
"Oh, now, that's just mean," John said.
McKay laughed, dancing back in his red Converse sneakers, one arm thrown across his oversized purple shirt. "Where's Peabody?" he gasped. "With his glasses and bowtie and his key to history?"
John reached out and smacked him upside the head.
"Ow!" He reeled, still laughing. "Maybe we should just wait for the next TARDIS to stop by."
"It's possible," John insisted. "I've read the mission reports, seen the results myself. A self-contained time travel device was mounted inside a pressurized vehicle capable of atmospheric and space flight -"
"- like Jake's widget in the Gay Deceiver -"
"Yes! So can we make that work?" John nearly pleaded.
McKay sighed, tight and frustrated. "Despite the fact that Heinlein's hypotheses were scientifically sound, he didn't include the math, and I highly doubt NASA will loan us a shuttle to test it. So no, we can't make it work. And if you're not delusional, that means there's another you, the you that lived through this time period, out there somewhere, and you can't make contact with him - ever - without invoking retrocausality."
"But if I don't warn him - me -"
"Yes, yes, you'll forever be caught in a twenty three year causality loop."
John froze, fear skittering down his spine. "I never said that. I never told you how far back in time I'd come."
McKay stuck his hands in his pockets and bounced on his toes, smiling cheerfully. "Well, of course you did."
"No, I didn't. Temporal ethics. Anything I tell you now could mess up your future." He slammed his hand against the edge of the table and walked to the window. "This isn't real. Fuck!"
"I hate to tell you this, my friend, but I am not a figment of your imagination. There's a difference between delusion and delusional. Empirical evidence suggests you're a kid from California who wandered into my lab."
"Then why am I here? C'mon, you're the smartest man in two galaxies. Tell me why." He turned and glared at McKay. He knew it, felt it all the way to the bones in his feet, that McKay had the answer. He always had the answers when John needed them.
"You tell me. You're the one having the psychotic break. By the way, don't let the Air Force know about this; they'll never let you fly a hang glider let alone an orbital shuttle."
"Been there, done that, rode the bitch down through re-entry to a forced landing. Not for another twenty years," he added at McKay's alarmed expression.
With a sigh of relief, McKay said, "Not that I want to feed into your delusion, but it's good to know NASA will survive after the Challenger accident."
"Since this isn't real, there's no harm telling you Earth isn't the only planet with a shuttle program."
"Okay, now you're just making shit up. Wait, did you just say I'm the smartest man in two galaxies?"
John shrugged. "Hey, this is my delusion. Either it's all in my head or you're gonna call the guys in the white coats and have me hauled away. I can say anything I want."
"Fine, fine. If you're just going to fuck with me, I'm going back to work." McKay walked backward a few steps, hands out, impatient. He turned, stood over the table, and sifted through the sheets of paper.
John wandered over, hands jammed in his pockets, and looked at the carefully written pages. "That's wrong."
"What? Where? No, it's not." McKay's finger came perilously close to John's nose, the full weight of his reedy body behind it. "Listen up, Mr. Delusional -"
"That's Colonel Delusional to you, kid."
"This is cutting-edge math, the first step on the road to my Nobel, this is -"
"This is kiddie crap coming from you, McKay. You may not believe me, but I'm forty-two years old and a full bird colonel in the United States Air Force. I've got a Bachelor's in aerospace engineering and a Master's in applied math. I've seen your work. It's so fucking brilliant, so fucking advanced, most of your own peers can't follow you, let alone me." He pointed to a page. "I can follow this - and it's wrong."
McKay shoved the paper at his chest. "Show me."
John shoved it back. "Figure it out yourself, geekboy."
"But that means…"
"I know what it means. The whole proof has to be redone; otherwise, your theorem falls apart." John turned away from McKay's panicked, crestfallen face. Real or not, he couldn't resist that look, imploring and crushed. He'd seen it too many times, as if Rodney McKay had learned to expect the universe to thwart him in petty, difficult ways and yet was surprised every time it did. He waited for the pro forma bitching but it didn't come.
Instead, he sat on an aged radiator and watched as McKay abandoned the paper and went back to the blackboard. He tackled the proof with stubborn determination, chalk dust flying as he erased with his fingers, wrote and rewrote, erased again. A little crease appeared between his eyebrows, one John knew would become permanent, intimidating, and almost charming.
It disappeared as McKay's face brightened with inspiration. He wrote faster, his hand guided by confidence, the chalk shrieking on the blackboard. His long fingers described arcs and angles, starbursts and helices, each motion as elegant and beautiful as the concept made manifest.
John walked over, drawn as always by the sheer energy McKay radiated when captured by a thought. McKay huffed a giddy laugh and moved to the next board, writing, writing, pulling brilliance from thin air, dancing in place as though each axiom, each lemma, each statement flowing into the next created music only he could hear.
Maybe that was true, John thought, surprised. Maybe McKay had always heard math as music, but somewhere along the line, had forgotten how to dance to it. Somewhere, somehow, time and age and disappointment and cynicism had robbed Rodney McKay of this unbridled passion, this spinning enthusiasm, this joyous ability to feel the numbers and notations and symbols as living things instead of cold calculations and formulas.
John realized this was McKay in his purest form, undistilled - not wholly untouched by the harsh reality of adulthood but not yet ready to leave the sheer fun of being a kid behind. Heel to toe, he danced, face glowing, until he wrote QED with a flourish and turned to John, flushed with delight.
"And that's what happens when you tell a brilliant scientist he's wrong!" McKay said, pointing one finger with triumph.
"Good thing your ego developed early," John noted dryly.
"It certainly di-" He pointed at John, eyes narrowed. "You know me. You know me personally. You've seen my work."
"Well, yeah, McKay," John said without thinking. "It's kinda hard to miss."
"No one has seen my work except my thesis advisors."
John shifted from one hip to the other and crossed his arms. "Well, no, that's true - right now," he offered weakly.
"You're not delusional; you really are a time traveler!" McKay spun around in a wild circle. "Tell me what happens, tell me about the next twenty years, tell me about my Nobel!"
John sighed. "Look, if this is real, I could mess up your whole life by telling you about your future. Tell me about you; tell me about now."
McKay ducked his head, looked the corrected equations. "If you don't know about me, if he hasn't told you anything, maybe there's nothing about me he wants you to know. Maybe he's ashamed of me -"
John's stomach did a sickening dive and roll. "McKay, no -"
"Then why -?"
"He lives in the moment - no! He lives in the next moment, and the next, and the next. He always has one foot in the future, pushing the envelope, thinking ahead."
"Fools rush in, eh?"
"No, that would be me." John sat down and rubbed his neck. "He doesn’t take stupid risks, except for that once. I'm the one who - but I can't, not with him. He's - I, I've waited too long, didn't say - didn't know what to say -"
"I realize this may be too complex for you to understand; or maybe, given the evidence thus far, beyond your ability to articulate, but answer this question if you can: are you a complete moron?"
"What?" John stared at McKay; that odd double vision had his Rodney layered over this younger version, complete with the classic, pithy glare and crossed arms. The one-hipped slouch was an interesting variation, but without the broad shoulders and the confidence of brought by sheer time, what should have been intimidating seemed kind of - well, adorable.
"I am not only the smartest man on this campus; I am quite possibly the smartest person on this continent, if not this planet. You said I'm the smartest person in two galaxies. I'm fully capable of comprehending complex, intricate, incredibly dense concepts relating to math, physics, and engineering. I'm eighteen years old and working on my second master's thesis. I wouldn't be here if I weren't fully capable of listening. So if someone walks up to me and asks to suck my cock, I'll have a ready answer and it's going to be yes."
"McKay!"
"Oh, please. Who says no to a question like that?"
"You're not gay."
McKay's chin went up; though his lips were full and lacked the hard, slanting line of later life, nothing could hide that derisive sneer. Surprised, John realized Rodney's eyes brimmed with laughter.
"Try not to sprain something with this thought: I'm not gay; I'm not straight; I'm not even bisexual. Eighteen or forty -"
"Forty-one."
"Oh, yes, let's do be precise. Forty-one. While I do have some standards, I'm all for equal opportunity sex. And if you age as well as I think you will, there's no way I'd turn you down."
John blinked. "Well, that's certainly precise."
"Why don't you just talk to me - him?"
"I - can't. He's my best friend."
"Huh." McKay looked impossibly young. "I don't have many friends. People say I'm arrogant -"
"And petty!" John jumped in. "And you yell at your minions, and hog the blue jello, and you treat Zelenka like shit - I don't know why he puts up with you - and you have the emotional acuity of a comatose eggplant!"
"Wow." McKay rocked back on his heels. "That's been a long time coming."
John pointed at him, finger shaking. "See! That's why this can't be real. My McKay doesn't have that kind of insight into other people."
"Would you make up your mind? Either this is an elaborate delusion or you're a time traveler. Which is it?"
"Since I don't have my DeLorean handy, I really can't tell," John said, miffed.
"Oh, get off the DeLorean already. The physics -"
"Focus, McKay!"
"And yet, I'm still your best friend. Future me, that is. Petty and arrogant and bad with people."
John slumped in on himself. "Yeah."
"Oh, Christ, you're in love with me." McKay sounded both horrified and intrigued.
"Yeah," John said mournfully.
"And you even like me?"
"After six years, it's starting to sound like Stockholm Syndrome."
"No, you really like me."
"Now you're starting to sound like Sally Fields."
McKay made an odd noise and John looked up. McKay's expression - confusion, distaste, hope - hit him like a rock to the head.
"Oh, thank you so much; now I'm the Flying Nun." He shuffled, awkward and a little irritated. "Got any advice I can use for my future self?" McKay asked.
Work out. Run five miles every day. Take self-defense classes. Learn to fire a weapon.
"No." John smiled at this proto-Rodney and fell in love all over again. "I like you just the way you'll be."
"Oh, that's cool."
"What?" John asked, confused.
McKay pointed and disappeared.
***
John looked up to see the ribbon of light fall away, fall off his body and vanish. Vertigo made him stumble two steps, right into Rodney - Rodney of today, with his receding hairline, his wide, surprised eyes, his broad shoulders stuffed into a black tac vest.
John kinda missed the hat.
"John! How -"
He cradled Rodney's face between his hands and kissed him, lush, sweet, warm. It took a moment, then Rodney's hand came up, palmed the round of his skull, and kissed him back, kissed again and again, until they were breathless.
John said, "Can I suck your cock?"
"What? Yes, of course! Who says no to a question like that?"
John laughed and let his head fall to Rodney's shoulder. "Do you still dance when you're doing pure math? Do you still dance, Rodney?"
"What? No, not in a long time. How did you know -?" Rodney pushed him up and back, eyes searching. "What did that thing do to you?"
"Dance with me, Rodney, for the rest of our lives."
"From blowjobs to forever - isn't that rushing things a bit?"
John smiled. "No time like the present."
**
Poll
Author: mischief5
Team: Time
Prompt: fools rush in
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard (pre-slash)
Rating: PG-13 for language
Word count: ~3800
Warnings: None
Summary: A device in an Ancient outpost reveals more about Rodney McKay than John Sheppard ever anticipated. Post-series.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to my team of betas-to-be-named-later; couldn't have done it without you!
Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the prompt in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
**
"You know, this isn't your first date. Just screw up your courage and ask her to prom already," Rodney said over the radio.
If John hadn't heard the fond humor under the sarcasm, he might have taken offence. "Rodney, this ain't prom. It's dinner and a movie, chocolate and flowers, a limo ride and champagne and the Empire State Building, and she still won't talk to me. The whole damn outpost is dead."
"What? The naquadah generator is up and running and these consoles have power. You should have lights and doors at least."
"No lights, McKay, not that I can find. No sconces, no doors, nothing." John leaned out over a balcony, his arm wrapped around a not-Doric column, and frowned at the rolling meadow of wildflowers. "It's all… open; just dorms with dusty pallets and big empty rooms." He was starting to have flashbacks to the time dilation planet, but if he mentioned it out loud, Rodney would bring up the beard, call him a Yeti, and the science mission would devolve into a fifth grade field trip complete with slap fights and bad jokes.
"Fine. Give me a minute."
He really wished Teyla and Ronon were here.
He said, just to fuck with Rodney, "I really wish Teyla and Ronon were here."
"Oh, yes, so I could have three useless people wandering around instead of just one. Look, I've almost got this console working. What about the bathrooms?"
"I didn't check." John went back into the hall and headed for the stairs. "Do you think they saved us any of those goat-thing gyros?"
"They better have done," Rodney muttered from three floors away.
Teyla was negotiating a trade agreement with the Minayans; Ronon had stayed behind for the food - and John didn't blame him one damn bit. They'd barely crawled home after the first contact mission, stuffed on the best Mediterranean cuisine this side of - well, the Mediterranean. While the Minayans didn't really need to trade with Atlantis - their level of technology was sufficient to maintain their quality of life without attracting the Wraith - Atlantis always needed local food, and besides, the elders wouldn't let Rodney near this outpost without some kind of diplomatic relations.
"Wait, wait! Go back and check the bathrooms," Rodney said.
"Why?" John asked, careful not to sulk like a teenager.
"Because, despite the faux-Greek architecture, which is an interesting departure from their usual Frank Lloyd Wright motif - and don't tell the anthropologists I said that; they'll start thinking I pay attention - it's still an Ancient facility and something here should respond to your hyperactive gene, even if it's just the plumbing. Check it."
At Rodney's snippy tone, John sighed and stopped dead in the middle of the corridor. Time for the fifth grade field trip. "132,643."
"What?"
"That's how many miles I've walked in the past six years on your say-so alone. Not regular missions, not trade missions, not running from the natives because you've been shot in the ass missions, and certainly not counting all the gate travel."
"Well, of course gate travel doesn't count; you're traveling, not walking. It's instantaneous. Oh, wait! No no no no no!"
John grinned as Rodney rose to the bait. Just hearing his voice made the eerie echoes easier to bear.
"You have so not been keeping track all these years! You just pulled that number out of your skinny ass. So just march that ass ten meters down the hall and - Fuck! Sonofabi-"
The radio cut out.
John tapped his earpiece twice as he jogged toward the stairs. "McKay, what happened?"
No answer. He tapped it again. "McKay, come in!"
Not just dead air but dead.
He hit the stairs at full speed, jumped the railing halfway down the first flight, then slid down the railing the rest of the way on his hip.
Not the generator; an overload would have vaporized half the planet. Not the facility; it still felt silent in his head. The Minayans? No, they didn't worship the Ancestors like most of the Pegasus cultures did. They didn't care about this place other than as a bargaining chip.
Then what?
He landed solid on both feet, his left knee giving a slight twinge, and ran toward the ground floor lab they'd found.
"McKay?" he shouted. "Rodney, god damn it, answer me!"
He used the doorjamb as a fulcrum to slingshot him into the room, skidding to a stop in front of the main console.
"McKay!"
Rodney popped up from behind the console, eyes wide with alarm. "Sheppard, no! Get away from there!"
A stream of light flowed down from the ceiling, looped around his body with a familiar glow, and the room disappeared.
***
John's vision cleared and a room formed around him, smelling of chalk dusk and polished wood. A kid in a hat, long, curly blond hair spilling out from under it, sat at a table, copying equations off a series of blackboards. Something about that profile and the set of his jaw…
"McKay?" It couldn't be. It had to be.
"Busy! Working! Go away!"
John grabbed the hat away and hauled the kid up by his elbow. The chair tipped over as he flailed, all long arms and skinny legs in artfully ripped jeans, and wide, startled eyes with - eyeliner? And earrings?
John clapped the silly, flat fedora back on the kid's head. "You need to do your roots, McKay. And with all that mousse, you never get to give me shit about my hair again."
McKay patted his shirt down, straightened his tie, and said, "Who, exactly, are you?"
"You don't know m- Wait, how did we end up in the '80s? What did you do to that console? What happened with that light?"
John felt a weird head rush as McKay stuffed his hands in his pockets, tilted his head to one side, and put on an air of superior innocence. He could see his Rodney overlapping this one like some sort of double vision, the ghost of McKay past become present.
"One, no, we've never met, surfer dude -"
Surfer dude? John looked down: flip-flops, cut-offs, and his favorite t-shirt from college, Cowboy Surf Shop. Oh, crap.
"- two, I never left the '80s and won't for another four years; three, no consoles here; last, just crappy, florescent lights as always."
John took a step back, fumbling for support, and found a table to lean against. "So you didn't time travel with me." His hands shook as he scrubbed his face. His hair flopped over his fingers; the last time it'd been this long, he'd been in grad school. Christ, did he look as young as McKay?
"Time travel?" McKay huffed a short, sharp laugh, so familiar it sank into John's gut like a knife. "While theoretically possible, currently impossible given our level of technology. Temporal ethics aside, the mechanics of time travel remain well beyond our reach unless -"
"- unless we have a DeLorean." John couldn't resist, not even in the middle of a minor panic attack. He dropped his hands and managed a smirk.
"You did not just say that." McKay came at him, finger pointing, his young face fierce, eyes nearly electric blue.
He was beyond beautiful, all eyebrows and cheekbones and that full, wide mouth. He blazed with youth and cocky confidence and untempered certainty, and John felt the knife again, sweet this time, as McKay tore physics apart and put it back together, outraged. He soared on McKay's round Canadian vowels citing Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Newton's Laws of Motion, and Planck's constant. This old, tired rant seemed fresh and passionate, given new life in McKay's higher, younger voice, and John felt almost giddy with relief.
Yes, this was his Rodney McKay, just twenty some years ago.
"- and besides that, the ice on the outside of the car indicates an unstable wormhole, not time travel -"
"- and an unstable wormhole is the result of stellar drift, which can be compensated for if you have a network in place and can update the software." John nodded, solemn and wise, and waited.
"Huh." McKay's eyes glazed over. John could almost see that big brain running the numbers and considering the mechanics. Long fingers snapped three times and then he pointed at John again. "A network of stable wormholes. That's entirely possible yet highly improbable; we don't have the technology. You're completely delusional."
"You'll see -" John stopped. McKay was right; temporal ethics wouldn't allow him to tamper with the here and now, not even to tell him how they knew each other.
"I'll see what?" McKay demanded.
"Never mind. Look, I need to get home. Tell me how to do that given the technology we do have."
McKay waved a hand at John. "Buy a bus ticket? The gnarly surfing at Half Moon Bay awaits."
John plucked at his t-shirt. "This isn't home. Home is my team, my friends. Home is a city on the sea. Home is -" You. He pushed away from the table, straightened his shoulders, and stood at parade rest. "I'm Colonel John Sheppard, USAF. How do I get back to my own time?"
"Now I know you're delusional," McKay snorted. "You're a teenager with long hair and flip-flops. The Air Force wouldn't have you on a bet."
"Oh, Christ." John pinched the bridge of his nose. "I knew it. I have zits, don't I?"
"No, you're far too pretty for zits." The matter of fact statement left John staring at him, stunned. McKay went on, "And if you're not delusional, how did you get here in the first place? The WABAC Machine?"
"Oh, now, that's just mean," John said.
McKay laughed, dancing back in his red Converse sneakers, one arm thrown across his oversized purple shirt. "Where's Peabody?" he gasped. "With his glasses and bowtie and his key to history?"
John reached out and smacked him upside the head.
"Ow!" He reeled, still laughing. "Maybe we should just wait for the next TARDIS to stop by."
"It's possible," John insisted. "I've read the mission reports, seen the results myself. A self-contained time travel device was mounted inside a pressurized vehicle capable of atmospheric and space flight -"
"- like Jake's widget in the Gay Deceiver -"
"Yes! So can we make that work?" John nearly pleaded.
McKay sighed, tight and frustrated. "Despite the fact that Heinlein's hypotheses were scientifically sound, he didn't include the math, and I highly doubt NASA will loan us a shuttle to test it. So no, we can't make it work. And if you're not delusional, that means there's another you, the you that lived through this time period, out there somewhere, and you can't make contact with him - ever - without invoking retrocausality."
"But if I don't warn him - me -"
"Yes, yes, you'll forever be caught in a twenty three year causality loop."
John froze, fear skittering down his spine. "I never said that. I never told you how far back in time I'd come."
McKay stuck his hands in his pockets and bounced on his toes, smiling cheerfully. "Well, of course you did."
"No, I didn't. Temporal ethics. Anything I tell you now could mess up your future." He slammed his hand against the edge of the table and walked to the window. "This isn't real. Fuck!"
"I hate to tell you this, my friend, but I am not a figment of your imagination. There's a difference between delusion and delusional. Empirical evidence suggests you're a kid from California who wandered into my lab."
"Then why am I here? C'mon, you're the smartest man in two galaxies. Tell me why." He turned and glared at McKay. He knew it, felt it all the way to the bones in his feet, that McKay had the answer. He always had the answers when John needed them.
"You tell me. You're the one having the psychotic break. By the way, don't let the Air Force know about this; they'll never let you fly a hang glider let alone an orbital shuttle."
"Been there, done that, rode the bitch down through re-entry to a forced landing. Not for another twenty years," he added at McKay's alarmed expression.
With a sigh of relief, McKay said, "Not that I want to feed into your delusion, but it's good to know NASA will survive after the Challenger accident."
"Since this isn't real, there's no harm telling you Earth isn't the only planet with a shuttle program."
"Okay, now you're just making shit up. Wait, did you just say I'm the smartest man in two galaxies?"
John shrugged. "Hey, this is my delusion. Either it's all in my head or you're gonna call the guys in the white coats and have me hauled away. I can say anything I want."
"Fine, fine. If you're just going to fuck with me, I'm going back to work." McKay walked backward a few steps, hands out, impatient. He turned, stood over the table, and sifted through the sheets of paper.
John wandered over, hands jammed in his pockets, and looked at the carefully written pages. "That's wrong."
"What? Where? No, it's not." McKay's finger came perilously close to John's nose, the full weight of his reedy body behind it. "Listen up, Mr. Delusional -"
"That's Colonel Delusional to you, kid."
"This is cutting-edge math, the first step on the road to my Nobel, this is -"
"This is kiddie crap coming from you, McKay. You may not believe me, but I'm forty-two years old and a full bird colonel in the United States Air Force. I've got a Bachelor's in aerospace engineering and a Master's in applied math. I've seen your work. It's so fucking brilliant, so fucking advanced, most of your own peers can't follow you, let alone me." He pointed to a page. "I can follow this - and it's wrong."
McKay shoved the paper at his chest. "Show me."
John shoved it back. "Figure it out yourself, geekboy."
"But that means…"
"I know what it means. The whole proof has to be redone; otherwise, your theorem falls apart." John turned away from McKay's panicked, crestfallen face. Real or not, he couldn't resist that look, imploring and crushed. He'd seen it too many times, as if Rodney McKay had learned to expect the universe to thwart him in petty, difficult ways and yet was surprised every time it did. He waited for the pro forma bitching but it didn't come.
Instead, he sat on an aged radiator and watched as McKay abandoned the paper and went back to the blackboard. He tackled the proof with stubborn determination, chalk dust flying as he erased with his fingers, wrote and rewrote, erased again. A little crease appeared between his eyebrows, one John knew would become permanent, intimidating, and almost charming.
It disappeared as McKay's face brightened with inspiration. He wrote faster, his hand guided by confidence, the chalk shrieking on the blackboard. His long fingers described arcs and angles, starbursts and helices, each motion as elegant and beautiful as the concept made manifest.
John walked over, drawn as always by the sheer energy McKay radiated when captured by a thought. McKay huffed a giddy laugh and moved to the next board, writing, writing, pulling brilliance from thin air, dancing in place as though each axiom, each lemma, each statement flowing into the next created music only he could hear.
Maybe that was true, John thought, surprised. Maybe McKay had always heard math as music, but somewhere along the line, had forgotten how to dance to it. Somewhere, somehow, time and age and disappointment and cynicism had robbed Rodney McKay of this unbridled passion, this spinning enthusiasm, this joyous ability to feel the numbers and notations and symbols as living things instead of cold calculations and formulas.
John realized this was McKay in his purest form, undistilled - not wholly untouched by the harsh reality of adulthood but not yet ready to leave the sheer fun of being a kid behind. Heel to toe, he danced, face glowing, until he wrote QED with a flourish and turned to John, flushed with delight.
"And that's what happens when you tell a brilliant scientist he's wrong!" McKay said, pointing one finger with triumph.
"Good thing your ego developed early," John noted dryly.
"It certainly di-" He pointed at John, eyes narrowed. "You know me. You know me personally. You've seen my work."
"Well, yeah, McKay," John said without thinking. "It's kinda hard to miss."
"No one has seen my work except my thesis advisors."
John shifted from one hip to the other and crossed his arms. "Well, no, that's true - right now," he offered weakly.
"You're not delusional; you really are a time traveler!" McKay spun around in a wild circle. "Tell me what happens, tell me about the next twenty years, tell me about my Nobel!"
John sighed. "Look, if this is real, I could mess up your whole life by telling you about your future. Tell me about you; tell me about now."
McKay ducked his head, looked the corrected equations. "If you don't know about me, if he hasn't told you anything, maybe there's nothing about me he wants you to know. Maybe he's ashamed of me -"
John's stomach did a sickening dive and roll. "McKay, no -"
"Then why -?"
"He lives in the moment - no! He lives in the next moment, and the next, and the next. He always has one foot in the future, pushing the envelope, thinking ahead."
"Fools rush in, eh?"
"No, that would be me." John sat down and rubbed his neck. "He doesn’t take stupid risks, except for that once. I'm the one who - but I can't, not with him. He's - I, I've waited too long, didn't say - didn't know what to say -"
"I realize this may be too complex for you to understand; or maybe, given the evidence thus far, beyond your ability to articulate, but answer this question if you can: are you a complete moron?"
"What?" John stared at McKay; that odd double vision had his Rodney layered over this younger version, complete with the classic, pithy glare and crossed arms. The one-hipped slouch was an interesting variation, but without the broad shoulders and the confidence of brought by sheer time, what should have been intimidating seemed kind of - well, adorable.
"I am not only the smartest man on this campus; I am quite possibly the smartest person on this continent, if not this planet. You said I'm the smartest person in two galaxies. I'm fully capable of comprehending complex, intricate, incredibly dense concepts relating to math, physics, and engineering. I'm eighteen years old and working on my second master's thesis. I wouldn't be here if I weren't fully capable of listening. So if someone walks up to me and asks to suck my cock, I'll have a ready answer and it's going to be yes."
"McKay!"
"Oh, please. Who says no to a question like that?"
"You're not gay."
McKay's chin went up; though his lips were full and lacked the hard, slanting line of later life, nothing could hide that derisive sneer. Surprised, John realized Rodney's eyes brimmed with laughter.
"Try not to sprain something with this thought: I'm not gay; I'm not straight; I'm not even bisexual. Eighteen or forty -"
"Forty-one."
"Oh, yes, let's do be precise. Forty-one. While I do have some standards, I'm all for equal opportunity sex. And if you age as well as I think you will, there's no way I'd turn you down."
John blinked. "Well, that's certainly precise."
"Why don't you just talk to me - him?"
"I - can't. He's my best friend."
"Huh." McKay looked impossibly young. "I don't have many friends. People say I'm arrogant -"
"And petty!" John jumped in. "And you yell at your minions, and hog the blue jello, and you treat Zelenka like shit - I don't know why he puts up with you - and you have the emotional acuity of a comatose eggplant!"
"Wow." McKay rocked back on his heels. "That's been a long time coming."
John pointed at him, finger shaking. "See! That's why this can't be real. My McKay doesn't have that kind of insight into other people."
"Would you make up your mind? Either this is an elaborate delusion or you're a time traveler. Which is it?"
"Since I don't have my DeLorean handy, I really can't tell," John said, miffed.
"Oh, get off the DeLorean already. The physics -"
"Focus, McKay!"
"And yet, I'm still your best friend. Future me, that is. Petty and arrogant and bad with people."
John slumped in on himself. "Yeah."
"Oh, Christ, you're in love with me." McKay sounded both horrified and intrigued.
"Yeah," John said mournfully.
"And you even like me?"
"After six years, it's starting to sound like Stockholm Syndrome."
"No, you really like me."
"Now you're starting to sound like Sally Fields."
McKay made an odd noise and John looked up. McKay's expression - confusion, distaste, hope - hit him like a rock to the head.
"Oh, thank you so much; now I'm the Flying Nun." He shuffled, awkward and a little irritated. "Got any advice I can use for my future self?" McKay asked.
Work out. Run five miles every day. Take self-defense classes. Learn to fire a weapon.
"No." John smiled at this proto-Rodney and fell in love all over again. "I like you just the way you'll be."
"Oh, that's cool."
"What?" John asked, confused.
McKay pointed and disappeared.
***
John looked up to see the ribbon of light fall away, fall off his body and vanish. Vertigo made him stumble two steps, right into Rodney - Rodney of today, with his receding hairline, his wide, surprised eyes, his broad shoulders stuffed into a black tac vest.
John kinda missed the hat.
"John! How -"
He cradled Rodney's face between his hands and kissed him, lush, sweet, warm. It took a moment, then Rodney's hand came up, palmed the round of his skull, and kissed him back, kissed again and again, until they were breathless.
John said, "Can I suck your cock?"
"What? Yes, of course! Who says no to a question like that?"
John laughed and let his head fall to Rodney's shoulder. "Do you still dance when you're doing pure math? Do you still dance, Rodney?"
"What? No, not in a long time. How did you know -?" Rodney pushed him up and back, eyes searching. "What did that thing do to you?"
"Dance with me, Rodney, for the rest of our lives."
"From blowjobs to forever - isn't that rushing things a bit?"
John smiled. "No time like the present."
**
Poll