TEAM WORK: hostage to fortune, "Ain't That A Kick In The Head"
Title: Ain't That A Kick In The Head
Author: wojelah
Team: Work
Prompt: hostage to fortune
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: Sometimes the only other option is losing someone important. Someone close. And if those are the only two options, John picks the one where he takes the hit. He's never been good about giving up a hostage to Fortune when she comes to collect.
Author's Notes: Thank god for omglawdork, without whose cheering and betaing, I would've been a sad panda. And thank heaven for trobadora, whose fault this is. :)
Title blatantly stolen from the song of the same name, with apologies to Dean Martin.
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===
Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you.
--- Neil Gaiman
===
"It's a bad plan, Sheppard." Rodney McKay's face is barely visible, a pale blur in the gloom. Too pale, but there isn't anything John Sheppard can do about that part.
"Shut up, McKay." There's the sound of boots crunching past. They freeze for minutes, but nothing else moves.
"I mean it. Really. And I'm not being noble - I'm not good at noble - there's no point in noble." McKay's voice wobbles at the end. His teeth are chattering. "But this? Is a really, really bad idea. Which isn't really surprising, given the usual." John just looks at him, eyebrow raised. "Not that the usual hasn't kept us alive this far and okay. Shutting up. Now." John waits, counting to ten. At eight, Rodney shifts next to him and says, "Except I think you should know that I really can't -"
Anywhere but here, John would laugh. Anywhere but here, he'd lean over and steal a french fry, or nudge McKay in the shoulder, or grin at Ronon, or win a bet with Teyla. Here, in the dark and the quiet, with McKay's speech stuttering and stumbling and a quarter of its usual pace, it isn't funny at all.
He reaches out, hiding in the dark, and grabs Rodney's shoulder hard. "You can." McKay starts some whispered protest, and John just holds on harder. "You can, McKay, because I say you can, and there is not another acceptable option." Beneath his hand, Rodney goes still.
"Okay." McKay says at last. "Okay, yes."
"Good," John answers, and stands. "When the gate's established, you go."
"What about you?"
"I'll be right behind you."
===
The night after the day John Sheppard's mother dies, the moon rises outside his window, huge and curving and golden. It paints his room in blue and white, spilling over the floor and the bed and the picture on his nightstand. In the far bed, David sleeps, his breathing deep and even. John doesn't sleep. He just watches the moon and wonders, with all of his eight-year-old brain, which promise he'd made and broken that all his bargaining with the world hadn't worked.
===
Like every other goddamn thing in Pegasus, it had started out easily. Trading mission. Friendly planet. Demands from the scientists for more of the root that brewed up into something that tasted eerily like a mixture of coffee and chocolate and which, had, as a result, become the elixir of the engineering staff. A need, Woolsey had said firmly, to re-establish ties after so many months back on Earth.
Teyla had agreed, Ronon had shrugged, Rodney had asserted preemptive claim to a portion of any potential haul, and John had rolled his eyes and gone to check the supplies in the puddle jumper, because after nearly six years, he isn't stupid. Things do occasionally go well. More than occasionally, really. It's just - well. Their record is kind of ridiculous, looked at from a certain angle.
After three days on MX-6695, though, he'd been feeling pretty good about things. Which is when, of course, it all falls apart.
"John," Teyla hisses. "Get back."
John doesn't argue - just flings himself away from the high, narrow window. Moments later, something large and on-fire shatters the glass, rolling to a stop in the doorway. The same doorway through which Ronon promptly comes running. The same doorway, as a matter of fact, which promptly ceases to be a doorway and becomes a pile of rubble when the large, flaming whatever-it-is explodes.
===
Night in Afghanistan isn't something John is ready for. It startles him at first, clear and cold and quiet on the nights when everyone isn't actively trying to kill each other. It makes him uneasy - only then he learns to love it like he loves flying, lost in the sweep of the sky above him, the stars so close, so bright, without any light pollution to make them dim, to set them at a distance. He learns to love it, the crunch of gravel under his feet the only thing reminding him that he is still tethered to the ground. It is nothing like the desert in the day, the sun beating on everything, driving it down, down into dust - down like the helicopter he isn't supposed to have taken, down like Holland, who isn't going to get back up again.
===
They dig Ronon out. They dig him out and shout for Rodney, who shouts back, audible through the mess of stone and wood and plaster. That's reassuring, actually, because John can practically see McKay's face, red and worried and mad as hell, based on tone of voice alone. If Rodney is shouting, all isn't right with the world, but there is a reasonable chance that it will be shortly.
Only then Rodney stops yelling and someone else starts. John knows that voice. He hadn't liked it the first time he'd heard it. Warnen is the chief scientist. He'd been thrilled to meet them. Thrilled to talk with them. Thrilled to spend hours and hours over the last few days holed up with Rodney, walking through archives of Ancient tech broken over the centuries and beyond anyone's ability to repair.
"What, are you jealous?" McKay had demanded, when John had balked, the second day. "It's not like I have anything to add. And maybe they've got something interesting. Or useful. Or ZPM-related." He'd turned to Warnen and walked away.
John had looked at Ronon. Ronon had raised an eyebrow. John had said, "I'll owe you."
Ronon had said, "Again," but he'd grinned and followed McKay out. John had tried not to think about the acquisitive look on Warnen's face and focus instead on Teyla and the ongoing discussion about the intrinsic value of mawhu root.
Only now, scrabbling at pieces of rubble to try to get to the other side, John is shouting at Rodney to find out what the hell's going on over there, McKay, and the voice that replies is so horribly pleased that it makes John's stomach roil. "I think," he hears Warnen say, "that I would like to renegotiate our agreement."
===
He is happy in Antarctica. Sort of. Or at least not unhappy. John gets to fly, which is pretty much the main thing he ever wanted to do, and the cold isn't anything like the heat. The other guys around the base are fine, good for a beer, good for a laugh - he isn't a hermit, after all - but he keeps himself to himself, and that's just fine. It is certainly less likely to lead to a court martial. The sky is alive with stars and wind and, on rare occasion, the aurora. It's peaceful.
Then he sits in a chair and thinks about his place in the universe and it occurs to him, as a really loud man wearing a really orange fleece gapes at him and begins reeling off a series of questions that flow over John like water, moving too fast for answers, that maybe peaceful is another word for boring.
When he flips a coin, the outcome is kind of a relief.
===
Rodney hasn't said a word in three minutes, which is a little alarming.
"McKay," John shouts. "What's going on?"
"Ah," Rodney calls back, and then yelps.
"The Council," Warnen's voice interrupts, "has been dissolved."
John resists the urge to bash his head against the nearest solid object. He'd learned long ago that just because the bad guys in Atlantis sound like something out of a B-movie doesn't mean they're any less capable of making life really unpleasant. "Literally?" he asks.
"Funny," Warnen says. "And yes."
Behind him, John hears Ronon moan and shift, hears Teyla murmur. One set of problems at a time. "Look, Warnen," he tries.
"I want Doctor McKay," Warnen snaps. "He will stay here. We will free you, and escort you to the gate."
"No."
"Sheppard," McKay says, voice uneasy. "I think maybe -"
"Not negotiable, McKay."
"Yes, yes, very noble, leave no man behind, I know," Rodney snaps, "only on my side of the wall they're pointing something very large and alarming at me and he wasn't kidding about the dissolving part, Sheppard, so maybe you'd like to reconsider?"
"He stays, Colonel," Warnen says. "Or he doesn't ever leave this hallway."
John tightens his grip on the remnants of the wall. God damn it.
"Look," Rodney says on the other side. "It's not like they're in a position to negotiate when they're stuck behind a ton of wall."
"McKay," John growls.
"You can thank me when you're all not dead," Rodney says, and even through the wall his voice is high and unhappy. "I mean, it would be good if I wasn't dead either, but my chances aren't particularly high given the status quo, so forgive me if I try to change the parameters a little."
"I'm going to find you," is all John says, "and then I'm going to kill you myself."
"That presumes quite a number of highly improbable events of your part, Colonel," Warnen chimes in, oily and smug as hell.
"We're really, really good at improbable," John replies.
"That," Warnen laughs, "is a very pathetic attempt at a threat. Come, Doctor McKay."
Rodney squawks. His protests fade gradually; Warnen's taking him somewhere. Away.
John lets go of the wall. Everything just got very simple. "It wasn't an attempt," he says quietly, and turns to the rest of his team.
===
He goes to Atlantis because he can. Because luck or fate or whatever it is that makes him able to light up a chair means that he can keep on moving, go farther. He's always looked to the sky, always looked up, always gone as far as he could. Going to Atlantis is like snapping another tether. He isn't Sumner's. He's only barely the military's. He supposes he belongs to Weir, if he belongs to anyone, but mostly, he belongs to himself.
Then Sumner dies, and John supposes as de facto military whatever, he belongs to the expedition, but if something happens to him there are other guys, good guys, around. So mostly, John figures, he’s still his own man.
Rodney McKay never gets that memo.
Three days after they don't all die horribly from drowning only to wake up another option that may yet kill them in a still more terrifying fashion but not, at least, immediately, McKay barges into John's quarters and shoves something sort of cubic into his hands.
"Knock much?" he asks, and then nearly drops the thing as it shifts, opening with a series of clicks that sound like an annoyed insect.
McKay just grabs the thing from John's grasp and marches back out the door. He's still talking, but it's kind of interesting, and he doesn't seem to require any contribution on John's part to carry on the conversation. So John follows, mostly out of curiosity and partly to see how long it's going to take McKay to pause for breath. A few days later, he shoots Rodney McKay in the leg and pushes him off a balcony, and it is awesome.
===
Ronon's awake. That's the good part. John's not entirely sure his pupils look great, and Teyla agrees, but he's awake and coherent. Which is a relief, but also a pain in this ass at the immediate moment, since unconscious people can't argue. "This team is not a democracy," he grits.
Teyla looks at Ronon. Ronon looks at Teyla. They both look at John. Teyla does not roll her eyes, but it looks like a near thing.
John shoves his hands through his hair. "We get out of here," he says. "You go liberate the jumper. I go find McKay. We meet you in that clearing on the way to the gate. What part of this plan is a problem?"
Teyla stands, hands on hips. "You and Ronon do not fit through that window."
John eyes the high, narrow ledge. "Okay, so -"
"And I went with McKay to the labs," Ronon adds.
"It's called a map," John tries.
Teyla just keeps going. "And we know nothing about conditions inside or outside the palace. It would be better for us to stick together as much as possible and get to the gate as a group."
John gives them the hairy eyeball.
Five minutes later, he's boosting Teyla up and through the window. "Be careful," he hisses.
She looks down at him. "John," she says, far too calmly for someone no longer wearing a vest and who's got one hand wrapped in a piece of her sleeve to clear the broken fragments of glass. "I will be as careful as you would."
"That's not reassuring," he grumbles, but by then she's hauled herself up and out and the only sound he can hear is the faint crunch of her boots as they hit gravel outside.
Fifteen minutes later, he and Ronon have made at least a marginal dent in clearing the rubble, which isn't really productive, since at the rate they're going it would take hours, but at least it makes them feel better. He nearly drops a chunk of stone on his foot when Teyla calls softly through the debris. "Colonel," she says, "back up."
"What?" he says, blinking, but Ronon's hauled them both up against the far wall. There's a hum like a royally pissed-off swarm of mammoth bees, and then there's a melted puddle of sludge where a lot of the blockage used to be. He's through it in a heartbeat. Teyla has a very unpleasant-looking knife at the throat of a really terrified-looking kid, who's standing by an extremely weird-looking machine that is emitting entirely dubious-looking sparks. She smiles at John.
"Where'd they take our friend?" John asks quietly. It's not the knife that makes the kid's eyes go even wider. John doesn't care.
===
It happens almost without his realizing it. He hadn't expected it. Hadn't looked for it.
Hadn't really wanted it.
But it happens fast.
He should've spotted it when Rodney McKay wades into a pitch-black sea of something wearing an Ancient shield and comes out on the other side. That panic, that sense of relief when McKay opens his eyes and starts grousing - that should've been the first clue.
He could've written it off as responsibility. He tries to. Standing in the rain and the wind and hearing Elizabeth Weir's voice on the radio, he knows it's a lie.
Watching Rodney stand up to Super-Wraith with nothing but a pistol, it feels like raw, scraping pride. Facing down a livid Teyla, arguing over Orin and his family and the things men do in order to survive, it feels like being found wanting. Standing in front of the gate, watching Aiden Ford fly away, it feels like a punch in the gut. Pausing across the room from Elizabeth, en route to a jumper and a nuke and a nearly hundred percent certainty that he isn't coming back, he admits it out loud for the first time, even if all he actually says is, "I have to."
Waiting in Colorado, light-years away and uncertain of his return, it feels like fear, deep and clawing. Offering it to Ronon, watching him decide to take the chance and stay, it feels like taking a risk.
It isn't responsibility. It isn't duty. It isn't obligation. It's home. Atlantis is home. These people, they're his. And he's always had a losing record when it comes to "his".
He's been screwed from very early on.
===
The kid hadn't had any idea about Rodney.
They'd tied him up and left him. The two other guys Teyla'd taken out are groaning their way back to consciousness not too much farther down the hallway. They'd tied them up too. Apart from the now-muffled groaning, it's quiet. Way too quiet.
"We need to get back to the Council Hall," Ronon says, keeping his voice low. "I know the way from there."
"Take point," John says, and falls into place at their six. This isn't routine, not exactly, but they've done this before. There's no need for more conversation. They'll find McKay, they'll get back to the gate, they'll call in reinforcements. It's not till they reach the hall that John starts to worry about how straightforward this is all going to be.
Dissolved is too kind a word.
The Council Table's gone, a wide swath of thick, dark glop smeared down the center of the wide, airy room. The Council - parts of them hadn't been so lucky. "What could do this?" Teyla murmurs. Ronon's face is a mask.
John's just choosing not to process for now. "McKay'll figure it out." And break it into a zillion pieces, he doesn't say. "Ronon. Which way?"
Ronon focuses. "Over there." He nods to a door across the hall. "And then down." He sets off, his path hugging the wall, and they follow.
Why, John wonders, do the evil scientists always live underground? He considers, briefly, the physicists and engineers on Atlantis, their addiction to mawhu root, and the fact that there are, essentially, blackout curtains covering any lab windows between the hours of eight and noon. The whole thing might make some sense, he concedes.
There's another gluey black mess just the other side of the doorway. "Guards," John says aloud as they edge around it and keep going.
"There's not enough people," Ronon replies. "Not compared to how many were here yesterday. Clerks and servants and stuff."
"There's not enough glop, for that matter," John agrees.
Teyla frowns. "They evacuated?"
"Or took hostages," John says, considering. He does not think about what might be happening to McKay.
"'They' who?" asks Ronon quietly.
"Warnen," John answers. "In league with somebody. Maybe military?" Men with big guns tended to be useful for keeping large quantities of people in line.
A door opens, and three sturdy men carrying steampunkish ray guns pop out of a doorway. "Good guess," Ronon growls, and grabs for his weapon. It's over pretty fast, but the quiet doesn't seem as dense any more.
"Keep moving," Teyla says. No one disagrees.
===
When John and Nancy get divorced, she accuses him of being distant. Cold. Uninvolved. He doesn't know how to answer. He doesn't know how to explain to her that the important things always seem to slip through his fingers. And that's exactly what she does - slips away from him before he really recognizes that she's going.
Even with Teyla, with Ronon, it's sometimes difficult, something he fumbles his way towards, something always just slightly awkward.
Rodney McKay, on the other hand, has wormed his way in through the cracks and shows no signs of leaving. He's just there, loud and often cranky and entirely, reliably McKay. It should be distracting. It's frequently aggravating. When Ford holds McKay hostage, it's a new, quiet sense of panic. He might be, John admits to himself, the only person to acquire an Achilles heel that consists of an obstreperous, thirty-something, genius physicist.
Of course, there are no promises of safety in Atlantis. The rational part of John Sheppard knows this; knows that there will always be times that it's not his fault. That he's done all he could. The rational part of John Sheppard knows that for every day spent whale-watching on a pier, there will be a day when something he can't control threatens something important to him.
The rational part of John Sheppard knows this. The irrational, stubborn, defiant part of John Sheppard resolves to do everything in his power to prevent it. When Rodney McKay offers to sacrifice himself to save his sister, John Sheppard realizes exactly what he's willing to do to carry through on that promise. When Rodney McKay waits forty-eight thousand years to see that John gets back to Atlantis safely and on-schedule, John Sheppard wonders what, exactly, would make Rodney McKay do that for him.
===
They find the lab - the part of it Ronon recognizes, at any rate. It gleams, sterile and silver, and it's full of weird contraptions. There's nothing exciting about it at all, to John's eyes. There's a squad of goons to dispense with, which makes for a few tense minutes, but in the end it's just five more guys barricaded into a storage closet while Ronon sets the sixth in his sights and waits.
"Where are they?" John demands.
The guy just glares back. "Wouldn't tell you if I knew."
John steps back. "Fine."
Ronon doesn't hesitate. He's only set the thing to stun, anyway.
"John," Teyla warns behind him. Out in the hall, he can hear boots. And voices.
"God damn it." Something is wrong here. Really, really wrong. He's been trying to ignore it - trying to drown out the feeling in his gut that says Rodney's in deep shit, that they need to find him now, now, now - but nothing's adding up. There's not enough military for a coup. The society's not technologically advanced enough for the standard "and now you will give us all your shiny toys" demands. And he really hadn't liked Warnen around McKay.
The boots are getting closer. He nods at Teyla and they take up stations on either side of the doorway. Ronon ducks down behind a console and takes aim through a crack. For the space of a minute, it's like no one breathes. But the boots keep going. When John chances a look, it's to see them dragging someone along, the body slumped and limp and definitely not McKay.
Teyla's watching his face carefully. When he shakes his head, her expression shows the same mix of relief and aggravation he's feeling. "Come on," is all John says. "Let's see if they'll take us somewhere useful."
It turns out that somewhere useful is a carefully concealed door, the latch for which wouldn't have been evident unless you saw someone use it first. The thing slides aside, giving John a glimpse of dark stairs, and then closes smoothly behind the squad. The panel's practically seamless - but now John knows what he's looking for.
He counts three minutes, the seconds ticking off too slowly. It's stupid to rush, he reminds himself. Let them get a little ways ahead.
Time's up. John signals Teyla and Ronon to wait, runs to the door and throws the mechanism, and waves them through. He's just fumbled it closed behind them when he realizes Ronon's frozen in front of him. It's a second later when John realizes why.
It's not that the air's stale. It's clearly circulating, and it's relatively cool. It's actually relatively pleasant, or it would be but for the faint tang of something John knows too well - knew before he even came to Pegasus. It's faint, but it's there, and it smells like blood and smoke.
"McKay's down there," Ronon says.
"Yeah." John's just as certain as Ronon sounds.
"Then we will get him out," says Teyla, and her tone burns.
This is my team, John thinks, and it's a deep, glad ache against the rising anger. "Damn straight," he says, and is the first one down the steps.
===
John isn't good at affection.
He's not good at words. The things he's thinking don't translate easily. The words get clogged in his throat, come out rough and uneven and stilted.
He's not really all that good at gestures, really. Not when it matters. Hugs catch him by surprise. A punch on the shoulder is easier, but it's still something awkward, something he has to think about. A tap on the arm, a touch on the shoulder - they're all like speaking a foreign language, something to be negotiated, something that will never be second nature.
He's careful about his own space, so careful that sometimes he finds it hard to leave.
Rodney McKay doesn't seem to get it. He nudges. Elbows. Grabs. He leans and waves and flails and invades without having any idea he's doing it, as far as John can tell. It made John edgy at first. Now it's reassuring. Reliable. It's just Rodney. Occasionally John thinks about what it would be like to be able to reach into Rodney's space as easily as McKay reaches into his.
When Rodney, who is not dead, marches into his nightmares and down the gateroom stairs to where John’s fighting himself (literally), it doesn't feel like an intrusion. It just feels right.
===
It's bad.
Not the first fifteen minutes. Those are fine, in a standard oh-this-room-is-full-of-people-trying-to-kill-us kind of way. Fortunately, they have the element of surprise. Amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear, surprise..., John can practically hear Rodney say in the back of his head, even as he's grappling with the guy in the uniform who looks like he might be in charge. He kicks hard at the guy's knee and hears something crack; the guy shouts and drops the knife and that's that taken care of.
Once everyone's down and bound and mostly unconscious, John has a moment to look around.
It's bad. Which is saying something, since John's spent time on Wraith ships and in Genii prisons and trapped under collapsed buildings.
This is another huge white-and-silver lab, shiny with consoles and monitors and buttons. This is a lab bright with lights that hurt the eyes, and chairs with stained leather straps and sinister looking electrodes. This is a lab with notes and charts and drawings that make John almost physically ill as he flips through them.
This is a lab with eight doors, all bolted on the outside, and as silence settles back into the room, John hears someone groan behind one of them. He walks over and cracks the observation window. He's aware that Teyla's doing the same, hears her sharp gasp for breath. Ronon's got his weapon trained on the guy whose knee John destroyed five minutes ago. John shuts the window.
It's bad. And Rodney's still somewhere uncertain. And that makes it very, very simple.
His P-90's heavy at his side, but that's not what he wants right now. The weight of his pistol in his hand is reassuring, an anchor, a focus, because there's anger running cold in every vein and he doesn't care all that much right now about anything besides answers.
He thumbs off the safety. Walks over to the guy with the busted knee. "Where is he?" John demands, low and quiet.
The guy sets his jaw. "Dallin Smov. Citizen number zero-three-two-nine-five-five-one-two dash-"
John cocks the gun and aims. "Dallin," John offers, friendly. "you've got my friend. I don't really care about your social security number." The business end of the pistol comes to rest on the guy's forehead. "Where is Rodney McKay?"
The man sneers. "With Warnen. Talking. He's had the grand tour."
John presses a little more firmly. "Again, don't really care about the social agenda." Which is more than sort of a lie. "Where are they?"
Dallin doesn't answer, but his eyes flicker left. Ronon moves immediately, patting down what looks like a blank wall until he finds a seam and pries it open, revealing the latch for another of those sliding doors.
"Okay." John holds the guy's stare. "The way I see it, you've got one last chance to give me a useful answer. Third time's the charm. How many men, in what combination?"
Dallin's the one who blinks. "Three," he mutters. "One at each corner and one at the door."
John smiles. "Thanks," he says, and smacks the butt of the gun hard against Dallin's skull without any kind of remorse.
===
There's no real timeline for it. John can't pinpoint the day he realized he wanted to touch Rodney McKay. He doesn't know when, exactly, he'd realized it. He doesn't know when, exactly, he'd started to wonder about the slant to Rodney's mouth or the plane of his shoulder. He doesn't know when it happened; he only knows that it didn't ever matter. There was Katie Brown, and then there was Jennifer Keller, and John wasn't unhappy, so it was easy to let it go, to think about it once in a while and put it away.
But Keller hadn't come back to Pegasus. She'd stayed on Earth, and Rodney's mouth had gone a little wistful when Teyla had asked at breakfast some morning. She hadn't come back and once again, John had started to wonder.
Sometimes, he catches a look on Rodney's face and he wonders if all that reaching, all that touching, all those words might have a meaning he's not quite catching. Sometimes John wonders if he knows what Rodney's meaning is and he's deliberately misunderstanding. Sometimes John knows he's a little afraid.
===
Convincing Ronon and Teyla that now is the opportune moment to get back to the gate and call for reinforcements is easier than John had expected. The eight people in the cells, they've been experiments. He doesn't need the details filled in. They've been beaten, bloodied, abused - he's got a god-damn thesaurus-worth of adjectives. They need attention. When the cell doors open, they stand blinking for long moments before taking a step toward the door.
Nobody mentions that they don't have any idea of what McKay will look like when they find him. John very carefully does not mention it, and it is, he thinks, what convinces the two of them to go back, in the end.
Nobody suggests that John might want to be one of the two who goes back, either.
"Please," Teyla says quietly, "If you are able to walk, follow me."
"Who are you?" The voice is rough and low.
"Help." Ronon says. "We're help."
John turns and slides open the door, setting off down the hallway.
The third guard goes down as quietly as the first two. John can't hear much through the door, but most of what he can hear was Rodney, voice tight and defiant and entirely unimpressed. When he cracks the door open, McKay's mid-sentence: "- don't really think I'm going to believe something as stupid as that without proof? There's no way they're dead."
"You overestimate them, Doctor McKay." Warnen's voice crawls over John's skin. The man's losing patience. John eases through the doorway. Warnen's back is to him, blocking his view.
"Even without my admittedly critical contributions," Rodney says, "I don't think so." The room's not well-lit - a single light hangs low in the center of the room, the shade casting odd shadows. John slides behind a console and creeps. Rodney edges into view. There's a clear glass container on a small metal cart, and a flexible tube running between it and a bandage wrapped around Rodney's arm. There's a clamp on the tube just near where it disappears under the bandage, but it’s currently open. John looks back at the glass container, looks at the dark red liquid it contains, and tries to guess how much longer Rodney's got before he hits shock full on. John doesn't like the answer. "They're really, really not people you want to get angry." There's a thready edge to McKay's voice that makes John revise his estimate downward.
"Is that so?" Warnen sounds smug. "And are you angry, Colonel Sheppard?"
John stands slowly, pistol leveled and steady. He looks at Warnen, at the sneer on his face. He thinks about the rooms full of people upstairs, at the groan he'd heard behind a locked door. He thinks about being back in Pegasus, about being home. He looks at the tube in Rodney's arm, at the container full of red. He looks at Rodney, wide-eyed and grey-faced, chin up, mouth a tight, hard slant.
"Yes," John says, and pulls the trigger.
===
"So long, Rodney."
McKay likes to holler about John's suicidal, self-sacrificing tendencies. John doesn't know how to explain to him that it isn't that at all. He likes his life a whole damn lot, thanks, and he'd just as soon not lose it.
It's that sometimes the only other option is losing someone important. Someone close.
And if those are the only two options, he'll pick the one where he takes the hit. Because he's done a lot of losing, and every time it happens, he's not sure how much more he can stand.
Basically, the way John sees it, it's his own little piece of cowardice. It's easier this way.
He's never been good about giving up a hostage to Fortune when she comes to collect.
Rodney, John has come to admit, might be the hardest of all to lose. It's a fact he accepts as too late to change. It makes staying quiet, not touching, not asking, that much simpler.
He's never forgotten that when the Asurans read his mind and stripped it of his worst-case scenario, Rodney offered to flip a coin to stay behind.
"Tell them I said goodbye."
===
"You should've asked," Rodney squawks.
John rolls his eyes, hard, and focuses on untying the bandage. "I was a little busy trying to get you free, McKay." Rodney winces as the needle slides free. "It's not like there was a lot of time to chat."
"Yes, well," Rodney replies, "now we've got ninety minutes to get out of here before the whole thing blows, including the gate, so it's not like we're doing any better."
"How was I supposed to know he had a self-destruct?" John snaps. "Can you walk?"
Rodney snorts. "I'm not that fragile," he huffs, which would work better if John didn't know how he reacts to splinters. He'd point it out, except he thinks this might be one of those times where McKay's exaggerating to make himself feel better. Since John doesn't like the way Rodney's pulse is skittering, he's happy to let it slide. McKay heaves himself up. "If you hadn't shot it," he says, "maybe I could have shut it off. Come on." Rodney starts to stride off, gesticulating, but his knees buckle and he goes down hard.
John doesn't wait, just grabs McKay's shoulder and levers him back up, props a shoulder under his arm and lets him lean. "Let's go."
There's no one in the building. It doesn't make sense, but he doesn't have time to figure it out. They get to the room with the locked doors; the people are gone. Rodney's body's gone tense. "Where?" he asks. He's breathing hard and sweating bullets.
"Ronon and Teyla," John says, and feels McKay ease a little.
"Good," is all Rodney offers as an answer. They don't say anything else till they make it outside. Then there's a lot of cursing, only very, very quietly, because they've found all the people that weren't inside.
It's chaos, which would be good if it weren't full of uniformed people intent on imposing their version of order. It is, at least, dark, so they cling to the shadows until they hit a patch of quiet, and then head for the trees. They're not far under cover when McKay stumbles again, his other hand catching hard on a tree for support.
John hears Rodney's intake of breath, but there's no immediately forthcoming complaint, and that's concerning. "McKay?"
"Sorry," Rodney wheezes. "Sorry, sorry." His hands are cold.
John grips his shoulder, squeezes. He doesn't know how to tell Rodney it's not his fault, to stop apologizing. "Just - just stay there a minute." He tries his radio. "Teyla, Ronon?"
"We're here," Teyla says. "We're at the jumper, and it's cloaked."
"I've got McKay," he says. "Get through the gate. Get back now. Warnen rigged the gate to blow." He glances at his watch. "We've got maybe thirty minutes."
"How will you -"
"We'll get there," John says. "If I have to haul Rodney's ass myself." There's a grumble from beside him in the dark, and it lets something dark and tight and worried ease a little. "Have a medical team waiting."
"Understood." Teyla's voice is dubious but clear. "Hurry."
"We'll do our best. Sheppard out." He reaches out and helps McKay back up. "C'mon, buddy," he says quietly. "Time to go."
"Oh, great," Rodney mutters. He doesn't say anything else until they make it to the gate, which is surrounded by very, very angry men. From the snatches of conversation that filter over to him, it sounds like someone's very, very unhappy that the jumper made it through.
John eases McKay down against a tree; checks his watch again. "Twenty minutes," he says, thinking furiously. "Okay. Here's how it's going to work." If they're close enough to the gate for McKay to stumble through it, if enough of the guards are distracted by gunfire in the opposite direction, if they don't run out of time, it will work. And it's the best he's got.
"It's a bad plan," Rodney argues - it's not like John hadn't expected it. In the end, he's not sure why McKay ends up agreeing, but it's enough that he does.
"What about you?" Rodney demands.
"I'll be right behind you." John promises, and slips off through the trees.
Fifteen minutes later, the guards are off chasing John's abandoned P-90, he's taken out the two remaining men with shots to the knee, and he's dialing the gate with one eye on the treeline. The gate whooshes into life just as the first of the soldiers runs back into the clearing. John sees Rodney lurching towards it just before he gets distracted by the need to return fire. He backs toward the gate, firing steadily, and just as he steps back and through, he hears the dull thump of a far-off explosion and sees sparks spill from the dialing mechanism. His next step is in Atlantis, just before the connection between the gates vanishes.
He can hear the medical team hurrying Rodney off; he can hear Woolsey ordering individuals to assist in the jumper bay; he can hear the quiet thrum of the city all around them. Honey, I'm home, John Sheppard thinks, and goes to see what else needs to be done.
It's just another normal day in the Pegasus galaxy.
===
Rodney is released four days later, after he's driven most of the medical staff and all of the science team entirely crazy - which is, again, par for the course. Everything seems fine. Once or twice he throws John an odd look, but mostly, there's no difference.
John's out on his balcony, watching the moon, when his door bleeps and he tells whomever it is to enter. There's the sound of footsteps, but no one steps outside. When John turns, McKay is standing in the doorway.
He looks tired and he’s still pale, but that could just be the moonlight, which isn't kind to the circles under his eyes. There's gauze wrapped around the hand that got torn up on the tree.
"Hey," John says.
"Hey." Rodney shifts awkwardly. "So. Um. Thanks."
John looks at him. "Thanks?"
"For dragging my butt to the gate. Although, I might add, if you hadn't shot the guy wearing the self-destruct we wouldn't have -"
"McKay."
Rodney cuts himself off and sighs. "Anyway. Thanks." He's watching John very carefully. It's a little unnerving.
John turns back to the ocean. "Just another day in Pegasus, McKay."
"I know." After a minute, Rodney comes and leans on the rail, looking at the waves. "The thing is," he says eventually, in a rush, "the thing is that it's every day in Pegasus, even though we've only just gotten back, and that makes it hard to know what the hell's going to happen next and sometimes I think maybe it would be better just to ask you or do something because who knows what the next day is going to be like, and since you insist on flinging yourself at trouble every ten seconds, it seems like -"
John's just staring at Rodney, and eventually McKay's rambling stumbles to a halt. "Rodney," John asks, genuinely confused, "what the hell was that about?"
"This," Rodney says, and kisses him.
His lips are soft and rough, his hand is solid and warm against John's shoulder. When John gets over his shock and responds, Rodney makes a noise that can only be approval.
It's like a kick in the head, a punch in the gut. It's like flying. It's like home. It's a risk and a dare and another hostage for the universe to use against him - but then, that's been true for a long, long time. Under the moonlight, the waves rushing below, Rodney real and solid against him, it might just be worth it.
===
Every happiness is a hostage to fortune.
--- Arthur Helps
===
Poll
Author: wojelah
Team: Work
Prompt: hostage to fortune
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: Sometimes the only other option is losing someone important. Someone close. And if those are the only two options, John picks the one where he takes the hit. He's never been good about giving up a hostage to Fortune when she comes to collect.
Author's Notes: Thank god for omglawdork, without whose cheering and betaing, I would've been a sad panda. And thank heaven for trobadora, whose fault this is. :)
Title blatantly stolen from the song of the same name, with apologies to Dean Martin.
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 and Team (Genre) information in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
===
Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you.
--- Neil Gaiman
===
"It's a bad plan, Sheppard." Rodney McKay's face is barely visible, a pale blur in the gloom. Too pale, but there isn't anything John Sheppard can do about that part.
"Shut up, McKay." There's the sound of boots crunching past. They freeze for minutes, but nothing else moves.
"I mean it. Really. And I'm not being noble - I'm not good at noble - there's no point in noble." McKay's voice wobbles at the end. His teeth are chattering. "But this? Is a really, really bad idea. Which isn't really surprising, given the usual." John just looks at him, eyebrow raised. "Not that the usual hasn't kept us alive this far and okay. Shutting up. Now." John waits, counting to ten. At eight, Rodney shifts next to him and says, "Except I think you should know that I really can't -"
Anywhere but here, John would laugh. Anywhere but here, he'd lean over and steal a french fry, or nudge McKay in the shoulder, or grin at Ronon, or win a bet with Teyla. Here, in the dark and the quiet, with McKay's speech stuttering and stumbling and a quarter of its usual pace, it isn't funny at all.
He reaches out, hiding in the dark, and grabs Rodney's shoulder hard. "You can." McKay starts some whispered protest, and John just holds on harder. "You can, McKay, because I say you can, and there is not another acceptable option." Beneath his hand, Rodney goes still.
"Okay." McKay says at last. "Okay, yes."
"Good," John answers, and stands. "When the gate's established, you go."
"What about you?"
"I'll be right behind you."
===
The night after the day John Sheppard's mother dies, the moon rises outside his window, huge and curving and golden. It paints his room in blue and white, spilling over the floor and the bed and the picture on his nightstand. In the far bed, David sleeps, his breathing deep and even. John doesn't sleep. He just watches the moon and wonders, with all of his eight-year-old brain, which promise he'd made and broken that all his bargaining with the world hadn't worked.
===
Like every other goddamn thing in Pegasus, it had started out easily. Trading mission. Friendly planet. Demands from the scientists for more of the root that brewed up into something that tasted eerily like a mixture of coffee and chocolate and which, had, as a result, become the elixir of the engineering staff. A need, Woolsey had said firmly, to re-establish ties after so many months back on Earth.
Teyla had agreed, Ronon had shrugged, Rodney had asserted preemptive claim to a portion of any potential haul, and John had rolled his eyes and gone to check the supplies in the puddle jumper, because after nearly six years, he isn't stupid. Things do occasionally go well. More than occasionally, really. It's just - well. Their record is kind of ridiculous, looked at from a certain angle.
After three days on MX-6695, though, he'd been feeling pretty good about things. Which is when, of course, it all falls apart.
"John," Teyla hisses. "Get back."
John doesn't argue - just flings himself away from the high, narrow window. Moments later, something large and on-fire shatters the glass, rolling to a stop in the doorway. The same doorway through which Ronon promptly comes running. The same doorway, as a matter of fact, which promptly ceases to be a doorway and becomes a pile of rubble when the large, flaming whatever-it-is explodes.
===
Night in Afghanistan isn't something John is ready for. It startles him at first, clear and cold and quiet on the nights when everyone isn't actively trying to kill each other. It makes him uneasy - only then he learns to love it like he loves flying, lost in the sweep of the sky above him, the stars so close, so bright, without any light pollution to make them dim, to set them at a distance. He learns to love it, the crunch of gravel under his feet the only thing reminding him that he is still tethered to the ground. It is nothing like the desert in the day, the sun beating on everything, driving it down, down into dust - down like the helicopter he isn't supposed to have taken, down like Holland, who isn't going to get back up again.
===
They dig Ronon out. They dig him out and shout for Rodney, who shouts back, audible through the mess of stone and wood and plaster. That's reassuring, actually, because John can practically see McKay's face, red and worried and mad as hell, based on tone of voice alone. If Rodney is shouting, all isn't right with the world, but there is a reasonable chance that it will be shortly.
Only then Rodney stops yelling and someone else starts. John knows that voice. He hadn't liked it the first time he'd heard it. Warnen is the chief scientist. He'd been thrilled to meet them. Thrilled to talk with them. Thrilled to spend hours and hours over the last few days holed up with Rodney, walking through archives of Ancient tech broken over the centuries and beyond anyone's ability to repair.
"What, are you jealous?" McKay had demanded, when John had balked, the second day. "It's not like I have anything to add. And maybe they've got something interesting. Or useful. Or ZPM-related." He'd turned to Warnen and walked away.
John had looked at Ronon. Ronon had raised an eyebrow. John had said, "I'll owe you."
Ronon had said, "Again," but he'd grinned and followed McKay out. John had tried not to think about the acquisitive look on Warnen's face and focus instead on Teyla and the ongoing discussion about the intrinsic value of mawhu root.
Only now, scrabbling at pieces of rubble to try to get to the other side, John is shouting at Rodney to find out what the hell's going on over there, McKay, and the voice that replies is so horribly pleased that it makes John's stomach roil. "I think," he hears Warnen say, "that I would like to renegotiate our agreement."
===
He is happy in Antarctica. Sort of. Or at least not unhappy. John gets to fly, which is pretty much the main thing he ever wanted to do, and the cold isn't anything like the heat. The other guys around the base are fine, good for a beer, good for a laugh - he isn't a hermit, after all - but he keeps himself to himself, and that's just fine. It is certainly less likely to lead to a court martial. The sky is alive with stars and wind and, on rare occasion, the aurora. It's peaceful.
Then he sits in a chair and thinks about his place in the universe and it occurs to him, as a really loud man wearing a really orange fleece gapes at him and begins reeling off a series of questions that flow over John like water, moving too fast for answers, that maybe peaceful is another word for boring.
When he flips a coin, the outcome is kind of a relief.
===
Rodney hasn't said a word in three minutes, which is a little alarming.
"McKay," John shouts. "What's going on?"
"Ah," Rodney calls back, and then yelps.
"The Council," Warnen's voice interrupts, "has been dissolved."
John resists the urge to bash his head against the nearest solid object. He'd learned long ago that just because the bad guys in Atlantis sound like something out of a B-movie doesn't mean they're any less capable of making life really unpleasant. "Literally?" he asks.
"Funny," Warnen says. "And yes."
Behind him, John hears Ronon moan and shift, hears Teyla murmur. One set of problems at a time. "Look, Warnen," he tries.
"I want Doctor McKay," Warnen snaps. "He will stay here. We will free you, and escort you to the gate."
"No."
"Sheppard," McKay says, voice uneasy. "I think maybe -"
"Not negotiable, McKay."
"Yes, yes, very noble, leave no man behind, I know," Rodney snaps, "only on my side of the wall they're pointing something very large and alarming at me and he wasn't kidding about the dissolving part, Sheppard, so maybe you'd like to reconsider?"
"He stays, Colonel," Warnen says. "Or he doesn't ever leave this hallway."
John tightens his grip on the remnants of the wall. God damn it.
"Look," Rodney says on the other side. "It's not like they're in a position to negotiate when they're stuck behind a ton of wall."
"McKay," John growls.
"You can thank me when you're all not dead," Rodney says, and even through the wall his voice is high and unhappy. "I mean, it would be good if I wasn't dead either, but my chances aren't particularly high given the status quo, so forgive me if I try to change the parameters a little."
"I'm going to find you," is all John says, "and then I'm going to kill you myself."
"That presumes quite a number of highly improbable events of your part, Colonel," Warnen chimes in, oily and smug as hell.
"We're really, really good at improbable," John replies.
"That," Warnen laughs, "is a very pathetic attempt at a threat. Come, Doctor McKay."
Rodney squawks. His protests fade gradually; Warnen's taking him somewhere. Away.
John lets go of the wall. Everything just got very simple. "It wasn't an attempt," he says quietly, and turns to the rest of his team.
===
He goes to Atlantis because he can. Because luck or fate or whatever it is that makes him able to light up a chair means that he can keep on moving, go farther. He's always looked to the sky, always looked up, always gone as far as he could. Going to Atlantis is like snapping another tether. He isn't Sumner's. He's only barely the military's. He supposes he belongs to Weir, if he belongs to anyone, but mostly, he belongs to himself.
Then Sumner dies, and John supposes as de facto military whatever, he belongs to the expedition, but if something happens to him there are other guys, good guys, around. So mostly, John figures, he’s still his own man.
Rodney McKay never gets that memo.
Three days after they don't all die horribly from drowning only to wake up another option that may yet kill them in a still more terrifying fashion but not, at least, immediately, McKay barges into John's quarters and shoves something sort of cubic into his hands.
"Knock much?" he asks, and then nearly drops the thing as it shifts, opening with a series of clicks that sound like an annoyed insect.
McKay just grabs the thing from John's grasp and marches back out the door. He's still talking, but it's kind of interesting, and he doesn't seem to require any contribution on John's part to carry on the conversation. So John follows, mostly out of curiosity and partly to see how long it's going to take McKay to pause for breath. A few days later, he shoots Rodney McKay in the leg and pushes him off a balcony, and it is awesome.
===
Ronon's awake. That's the good part. John's not entirely sure his pupils look great, and Teyla agrees, but he's awake and coherent. Which is a relief, but also a pain in this ass at the immediate moment, since unconscious people can't argue. "This team is not a democracy," he grits.
Teyla looks at Ronon. Ronon looks at Teyla. They both look at John. Teyla does not roll her eyes, but it looks like a near thing.
John shoves his hands through his hair. "We get out of here," he says. "You go liberate the jumper. I go find McKay. We meet you in that clearing on the way to the gate. What part of this plan is a problem?"
Teyla stands, hands on hips. "You and Ronon do not fit through that window."
John eyes the high, narrow ledge. "Okay, so -"
"And I went with McKay to the labs," Ronon adds.
"It's called a map," John tries.
Teyla just keeps going. "And we know nothing about conditions inside or outside the palace. It would be better for us to stick together as much as possible and get to the gate as a group."
John gives them the hairy eyeball.
Five minutes later, he's boosting Teyla up and through the window. "Be careful," he hisses.
She looks down at him. "John," she says, far too calmly for someone no longer wearing a vest and who's got one hand wrapped in a piece of her sleeve to clear the broken fragments of glass. "I will be as careful as you would."
"That's not reassuring," he grumbles, but by then she's hauled herself up and out and the only sound he can hear is the faint crunch of her boots as they hit gravel outside.
Fifteen minutes later, he and Ronon have made at least a marginal dent in clearing the rubble, which isn't really productive, since at the rate they're going it would take hours, but at least it makes them feel better. He nearly drops a chunk of stone on his foot when Teyla calls softly through the debris. "Colonel," she says, "back up."
"What?" he says, blinking, but Ronon's hauled them both up against the far wall. There's a hum like a royally pissed-off swarm of mammoth bees, and then there's a melted puddle of sludge where a lot of the blockage used to be. He's through it in a heartbeat. Teyla has a very unpleasant-looking knife at the throat of a really terrified-looking kid, who's standing by an extremely weird-looking machine that is emitting entirely dubious-looking sparks. She smiles at John.
"Where'd they take our friend?" John asks quietly. It's not the knife that makes the kid's eyes go even wider. John doesn't care.
===
It happens almost without his realizing it. He hadn't expected it. Hadn't looked for it.
Hadn't really wanted it.
But it happens fast.
He should've spotted it when Rodney McKay wades into a pitch-black sea of something wearing an Ancient shield and comes out on the other side. That panic, that sense of relief when McKay opens his eyes and starts grousing - that should've been the first clue.
He could've written it off as responsibility. He tries to. Standing in the rain and the wind and hearing Elizabeth Weir's voice on the radio, he knows it's a lie.
Watching Rodney stand up to Super-Wraith with nothing but a pistol, it feels like raw, scraping pride. Facing down a livid Teyla, arguing over Orin and his family and the things men do in order to survive, it feels like being found wanting. Standing in front of the gate, watching Aiden Ford fly away, it feels like a punch in the gut. Pausing across the room from Elizabeth, en route to a jumper and a nuke and a nearly hundred percent certainty that he isn't coming back, he admits it out loud for the first time, even if all he actually says is, "I have to."
Waiting in Colorado, light-years away and uncertain of his return, it feels like fear, deep and clawing. Offering it to Ronon, watching him decide to take the chance and stay, it feels like taking a risk.
It isn't responsibility. It isn't duty. It isn't obligation. It's home. Atlantis is home. These people, they're his. And he's always had a losing record when it comes to "his".
He's been screwed from very early on.
===
The kid hadn't had any idea about Rodney.
They'd tied him up and left him. The two other guys Teyla'd taken out are groaning their way back to consciousness not too much farther down the hallway. They'd tied them up too. Apart from the now-muffled groaning, it's quiet. Way too quiet.
"We need to get back to the Council Hall," Ronon says, keeping his voice low. "I know the way from there."
"Take point," John says, and falls into place at their six. This isn't routine, not exactly, but they've done this before. There's no need for more conversation. They'll find McKay, they'll get back to the gate, they'll call in reinforcements. It's not till they reach the hall that John starts to worry about how straightforward this is all going to be.
Dissolved is too kind a word.
The Council Table's gone, a wide swath of thick, dark glop smeared down the center of the wide, airy room. The Council - parts of them hadn't been so lucky. "What could do this?" Teyla murmurs. Ronon's face is a mask.
John's just choosing not to process for now. "McKay'll figure it out." And break it into a zillion pieces, he doesn't say. "Ronon. Which way?"
Ronon focuses. "Over there." He nods to a door across the hall. "And then down." He sets off, his path hugging the wall, and they follow.
Why, John wonders, do the evil scientists always live underground? He considers, briefly, the physicists and engineers on Atlantis, their addiction to mawhu root, and the fact that there are, essentially, blackout curtains covering any lab windows between the hours of eight and noon. The whole thing might make some sense, he concedes.
There's another gluey black mess just the other side of the doorway. "Guards," John says aloud as they edge around it and keep going.
"There's not enough people," Ronon replies. "Not compared to how many were here yesterday. Clerks and servants and stuff."
"There's not enough glop, for that matter," John agrees.
Teyla frowns. "They evacuated?"
"Or took hostages," John says, considering. He does not think about what might be happening to McKay.
"'They' who?" asks Ronon quietly.
"Warnen," John answers. "In league with somebody. Maybe military?" Men with big guns tended to be useful for keeping large quantities of people in line.
A door opens, and three sturdy men carrying steampunkish ray guns pop out of a doorway. "Good guess," Ronon growls, and grabs for his weapon. It's over pretty fast, but the quiet doesn't seem as dense any more.
"Keep moving," Teyla says. No one disagrees.
===
When John and Nancy get divorced, she accuses him of being distant. Cold. Uninvolved. He doesn't know how to answer. He doesn't know how to explain to her that the important things always seem to slip through his fingers. And that's exactly what she does - slips away from him before he really recognizes that she's going.
Even with Teyla, with Ronon, it's sometimes difficult, something he fumbles his way towards, something always just slightly awkward.
Rodney McKay, on the other hand, has wormed his way in through the cracks and shows no signs of leaving. He's just there, loud and often cranky and entirely, reliably McKay. It should be distracting. It's frequently aggravating. When Ford holds McKay hostage, it's a new, quiet sense of panic. He might be, John admits to himself, the only person to acquire an Achilles heel that consists of an obstreperous, thirty-something, genius physicist.
Of course, there are no promises of safety in Atlantis. The rational part of John Sheppard knows this; knows that there will always be times that it's not his fault. That he's done all he could. The rational part of John Sheppard knows that for every day spent whale-watching on a pier, there will be a day when something he can't control threatens something important to him.
The rational part of John Sheppard knows this. The irrational, stubborn, defiant part of John Sheppard resolves to do everything in his power to prevent it. When Rodney McKay offers to sacrifice himself to save his sister, John Sheppard realizes exactly what he's willing to do to carry through on that promise. When Rodney McKay waits forty-eight thousand years to see that John gets back to Atlantis safely and on-schedule, John Sheppard wonders what, exactly, would make Rodney McKay do that for him.
===
They find the lab - the part of it Ronon recognizes, at any rate. It gleams, sterile and silver, and it's full of weird contraptions. There's nothing exciting about it at all, to John's eyes. There's a squad of goons to dispense with, which makes for a few tense minutes, but in the end it's just five more guys barricaded into a storage closet while Ronon sets the sixth in his sights and waits.
"Where are they?" John demands.
The guy just glares back. "Wouldn't tell you if I knew."
John steps back. "Fine."
Ronon doesn't hesitate. He's only set the thing to stun, anyway.
"John," Teyla warns behind him. Out in the hall, he can hear boots. And voices.
"God damn it." Something is wrong here. Really, really wrong. He's been trying to ignore it - trying to drown out the feeling in his gut that says Rodney's in deep shit, that they need to find him now, now, now - but nothing's adding up. There's not enough military for a coup. The society's not technologically advanced enough for the standard "and now you will give us all your shiny toys" demands. And he really hadn't liked Warnen around McKay.
The boots are getting closer. He nods at Teyla and they take up stations on either side of the doorway. Ronon ducks down behind a console and takes aim through a crack. For the space of a minute, it's like no one breathes. But the boots keep going. When John chances a look, it's to see them dragging someone along, the body slumped and limp and definitely not McKay.
Teyla's watching his face carefully. When he shakes his head, her expression shows the same mix of relief and aggravation he's feeling. "Come on," is all John says. "Let's see if they'll take us somewhere useful."
It turns out that somewhere useful is a carefully concealed door, the latch for which wouldn't have been evident unless you saw someone use it first. The thing slides aside, giving John a glimpse of dark stairs, and then closes smoothly behind the squad. The panel's practically seamless - but now John knows what he's looking for.
He counts three minutes, the seconds ticking off too slowly. It's stupid to rush, he reminds himself. Let them get a little ways ahead.
Time's up. John signals Teyla and Ronon to wait, runs to the door and throws the mechanism, and waves them through. He's just fumbled it closed behind them when he realizes Ronon's frozen in front of him. It's a second later when John realizes why.
It's not that the air's stale. It's clearly circulating, and it's relatively cool. It's actually relatively pleasant, or it would be but for the faint tang of something John knows too well - knew before he even came to Pegasus. It's faint, but it's there, and it smells like blood and smoke.
"McKay's down there," Ronon says.
"Yeah." John's just as certain as Ronon sounds.
"Then we will get him out," says Teyla, and her tone burns.
This is my team, John thinks, and it's a deep, glad ache against the rising anger. "Damn straight," he says, and is the first one down the steps.
===
John isn't good at affection.
He's not good at words. The things he's thinking don't translate easily. The words get clogged in his throat, come out rough and uneven and stilted.
He's not really all that good at gestures, really. Not when it matters. Hugs catch him by surprise. A punch on the shoulder is easier, but it's still something awkward, something he has to think about. A tap on the arm, a touch on the shoulder - they're all like speaking a foreign language, something to be negotiated, something that will never be second nature.
He's careful about his own space, so careful that sometimes he finds it hard to leave.
Rodney McKay doesn't seem to get it. He nudges. Elbows. Grabs. He leans and waves and flails and invades without having any idea he's doing it, as far as John can tell. It made John edgy at first. Now it's reassuring. Reliable. It's just Rodney. Occasionally John thinks about what it would be like to be able to reach into Rodney's space as easily as McKay reaches into his.
When Rodney, who is not dead, marches into his nightmares and down the gateroom stairs to where John’s fighting himself (literally), it doesn't feel like an intrusion. It just feels right.
===
It's bad.
Not the first fifteen minutes. Those are fine, in a standard oh-this-room-is-full-of-people-trying-to-kill-us kind of way. Fortunately, they have the element of surprise. Amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear, surprise..., John can practically hear Rodney say in the back of his head, even as he's grappling with the guy in the uniform who looks like he might be in charge. He kicks hard at the guy's knee and hears something crack; the guy shouts and drops the knife and that's that taken care of.
Once everyone's down and bound and mostly unconscious, John has a moment to look around.
It's bad. Which is saying something, since John's spent time on Wraith ships and in Genii prisons and trapped under collapsed buildings.
This is another huge white-and-silver lab, shiny with consoles and monitors and buttons. This is a lab bright with lights that hurt the eyes, and chairs with stained leather straps and sinister looking electrodes. This is a lab with notes and charts and drawings that make John almost physically ill as he flips through them.
This is a lab with eight doors, all bolted on the outside, and as silence settles back into the room, John hears someone groan behind one of them. He walks over and cracks the observation window. He's aware that Teyla's doing the same, hears her sharp gasp for breath. Ronon's got his weapon trained on the guy whose knee John destroyed five minutes ago. John shuts the window.
It's bad. And Rodney's still somewhere uncertain. And that makes it very, very simple.
His P-90's heavy at his side, but that's not what he wants right now. The weight of his pistol in his hand is reassuring, an anchor, a focus, because there's anger running cold in every vein and he doesn't care all that much right now about anything besides answers.
He thumbs off the safety. Walks over to the guy with the busted knee. "Where is he?" John demands, low and quiet.
The guy sets his jaw. "Dallin Smov. Citizen number zero-three-two-nine-five-five-one-two dash-"
John cocks the gun and aims. "Dallin," John offers, friendly. "you've got my friend. I don't really care about your social security number." The business end of the pistol comes to rest on the guy's forehead. "Where is Rodney McKay?"
The man sneers. "With Warnen. Talking. He's had the grand tour."
John presses a little more firmly. "Again, don't really care about the social agenda." Which is more than sort of a lie. "Where are they?"
Dallin doesn't answer, but his eyes flicker left. Ronon moves immediately, patting down what looks like a blank wall until he finds a seam and pries it open, revealing the latch for another of those sliding doors.
"Okay." John holds the guy's stare. "The way I see it, you've got one last chance to give me a useful answer. Third time's the charm. How many men, in what combination?"
Dallin's the one who blinks. "Three," he mutters. "One at each corner and one at the door."
John smiles. "Thanks," he says, and smacks the butt of the gun hard against Dallin's skull without any kind of remorse.
===
There's no real timeline for it. John can't pinpoint the day he realized he wanted to touch Rodney McKay. He doesn't know when, exactly, he'd realized it. He doesn't know when, exactly, he'd started to wonder about the slant to Rodney's mouth or the plane of his shoulder. He doesn't know when it happened; he only knows that it didn't ever matter. There was Katie Brown, and then there was Jennifer Keller, and John wasn't unhappy, so it was easy to let it go, to think about it once in a while and put it away.
But Keller hadn't come back to Pegasus. She'd stayed on Earth, and Rodney's mouth had gone a little wistful when Teyla had asked at breakfast some morning. She hadn't come back and once again, John had started to wonder.
Sometimes, he catches a look on Rodney's face and he wonders if all that reaching, all that touching, all those words might have a meaning he's not quite catching. Sometimes John wonders if he knows what Rodney's meaning is and he's deliberately misunderstanding. Sometimes John knows he's a little afraid.
===
Convincing Ronon and Teyla that now is the opportune moment to get back to the gate and call for reinforcements is easier than John had expected. The eight people in the cells, they've been experiments. He doesn't need the details filled in. They've been beaten, bloodied, abused - he's got a god-damn thesaurus-worth of adjectives. They need attention. When the cell doors open, they stand blinking for long moments before taking a step toward the door.
Nobody mentions that they don't have any idea of what McKay will look like when they find him. John very carefully does not mention it, and it is, he thinks, what convinces the two of them to go back, in the end.
Nobody suggests that John might want to be one of the two who goes back, either.
"Please," Teyla says quietly, "If you are able to walk, follow me."
"Who are you?" The voice is rough and low.
"Help." Ronon says. "We're help."
John turns and slides open the door, setting off down the hallway.
The third guard goes down as quietly as the first two. John can't hear much through the door, but most of what he can hear was Rodney, voice tight and defiant and entirely unimpressed. When he cracks the door open, McKay's mid-sentence: "- don't really think I'm going to believe something as stupid as that without proof? There's no way they're dead."
"You overestimate them, Doctor McKay." Warnen's voice crawls over John's skin. The man's losing patience. John eases through the doorway. Warnen's back is to him, blocking his view.
"Even without my admittedly critical contributions," Rodney says, "I don't think so." The room's not well-lit - a single light hangs low in the center of the room, the shade casting odd shadows. John slides behind a console and creeps. Rodney edges into view. There's a clear glass container on a small metal cart, and a flexible tube running between it and a bandage wrapped around Rodney's arm. There's a clamp on the tube just near where it disappears under the bandage, but it’s currently open. John looks back at the glass container, looks at the dark red liquid it contains, and tries to guess how much longer Rodney's got before he hits shock full on. John doesn't like the answer. "They're really, really not people you want to get angry." There's a thready edge to McKay's voice that makes John revise his estimate downward.
"Is that so?" Warnen sounds smug. "And are you angry, Colonel Sheppard?"
John stands slowly, pistol leveled and steady. He looks at Warnen, at the sneer on his face. He thinks about the rooms full of people upstairs, at the groan he'd heard behind a locked door. He thinks about being back in Pegasus, about being home. He looks at the tube in Rodney's arm, at the container full of red. He looks at Rodney, wide-eyed and grey-faced, chin up, mouth a tight, hard slant.
"Yes," John says, and pulls the trigger.
===
"So long, Rodney."
McKay likes to holler about John's suicidal, self-sacrificing tendencies. John doesn't know how to explain to him that it isn't that at all. He likes his life a whole damn lot, thanks, and he'd just as soon not lose it.
It's that sometimes the only other option is losing someone important. Someone close.
And if those are the only two options, he'll pick the one where he takes the hit. Because he's done a lot of losing, and every time it happens, he's not sure how much more he can stand.
Basically, the way John sees it, it's his own little piece of cowardice. It's easier this way.
He's never been good about giving up a hostage to Fortune when she comes to collect.
Rodney, John has come to admit, might be the hardest of all to lose. It's a fact he accepts as too late to change. It makes staying quiet, not touching, not asking, that much simpler.
He's never forgotten that when the Asurans read his mind and stripped it of his worst-case scenario, Rodney offered to flip a coin to stay behind.
"Tell them I said goodbye."
===
"You should've asked," Rodney squawks.
John rolls his eyes, hard, and focuses on untying the bandage. "I was a little busy trying to get you free, McKay." Rodney winces as the needle slides free. "It's not like there was a lot of time to chat."
"Yes, well," Rodney replies, "now we've got ninety minutes to get out of here before the whole thing blows, including the gate, so it's not like we're doing any better."
"How was I supposed to know he had a self-destruct?" John snaps. "Can you walk?"
Rodney snorts. "I'm not that fragile," he huffs, which would work better if John didn't know how he reacts to splinters. He'd point it out, except he thinks this might be one of those times where McKay's exaggerating to make himself feel better. Since John doesn't like the way Rodney's pulse is skittering, he's happy to let it slide. McKay heaves himself up. "If you hadn't shot it," he says, "maybe I could have shut it off. Come on." Rodney starts to stride off, gesticulating, but his knees buckle and he goes down hard.
John doesn't wait, just grabs McKay's shoulder and levers him back up, props a shoulder under his arm and lets him lean. "Let's go."
There's no one in the building. It doesn't make sense, but he doesn't have time to figure it out. They get to the room with the locked doors; the people are gone. Rodney's body's gone tense. "Where?" he asks. He's breathing hard and sweating bullets.
"Ronon and Teyla," John says, and feels McKay ease a little.
"Good," is all Rodney offers as an answer. They don't say anything else till they make it outside. Then there's a lot of cursing, only very, very quietly, because they've found all the people that weren't inside.
It's chaos, which would be good if it weren't full of uniformed people intent on imposing their version of order. It is, at least, dark, so they cling to the shadows until they hit a patch of quiet, and then head for the trees. They're not far under cover when McKay stumbles again, his other hand catching hard on a tree for support.
John hears Rodney's intake of breath, but there's no immediately forthcoming complaint, and that's concerning. "McKay?"
"Sorry," Rodney wheezes. "Sorry, sorry." His hands are cold.
John grips his shoulder, squeezes. He doesn't know how to tell Rodney it's not his fault, to stop apologizing. "Just - just stay there a minute." He tries his radio. "Teyla, Ronon?"
"We're here," Teyla says. "We're at the jumper, and it's cloaked."
"I've got McKay," he says. "Get through the gate. Get back now. Warnen rigged the gate to blow." He glances at his watch. "We've got maybe thirty minutes."
"How will you -"
"We'll get there," John says. "If I have to haul Rodney's ass myself." There's a grumble from beside him in the dark, and it lets something dark and tight and worried ease a little. "Have a medical team waiting."
"Understood." Teyla's voice is dubious but clear. "Hurry."
"We'll do our best. Sheppard out." He reaches out and helps McKay back up. "C'mon, buddy," he says quietly. "Time to go."
"Oh, great," Rodney mutters. He doesn't say anything else until they make it to the gate, which is surrounded by very, very angry men. From the snatches of conversation that filter over to him, it sounds like someone's very, very unhappy that the jumper made it through.
John eases McKay down against a tree; checks his watch again. "Twenty minutes," he says, thinking furiously. "Okay. Here's how it's going to work." If they're close enough to the gate for McKay to stumble through it, if enough of the guards are distracted by gunfire in the opposite direction, if they don't run out of time, it will work. And it's the best he's got.
"It's a bad plan," Rodney argues - it's not like John hadn't expected it. In the end, he's not sure why McKay ends up agreeing, but it's enough that he does.
"What about you?" Rodney demands.
"I'll be right behind you." John promises, and slips off through the trees.
Fifteen minutes later, the guards are off chasing John's abandoned P-90, he's taken out the two remaining men with shots to the knee, and he's dialing the gate with one eye on the treeline. The gate whooshes into life just as the first of the soldiers runs back into the clearing. John sees Rodney lurching towards it just before he gets distracted by the need to return fire. He backs toward the gate, firing steadily, and just as he steps back and through, he hears the dull thump of a far-off explosion and sees sparks spill from the dialing mechanism. His next step is in Atlantis, just before the connection between the gates vanishes.
He can hear the medical team hurrying Rodney off; he can hear Woolsey ordering individuals to assist in the jumper bay; he can hear the quiet thrum of the city all around them. Honey, I'm home, John Sheppard thinks, and goes to see what else needs to be done.
It's just another normal day in the Pegasus galaxy.
===
Rodney is released four days later, after he's driven most of the medical staff and all of the science team entirely crazy - which is, again, par for the course. Everything seems fine. Once or twice he throws John an odd look, but mostly, there's no difference.
John's out on his balcony, watching the moon, when his door bleeps and he tells whomever it is to enter. There's the sound of footsteps, but no one steps outside. When John turns, McKay is standing in the doorway.
He looks tired and he’s still pale, but that could just be the moonlight, which isn't kind to the circles under his eyes. There's gauze wrapped around the hand that got torn up on the tree.
"Hey," John says.
"Hey." Rodney shifts awkwardly. "So. Um. Thanks."
John looks at him. "Thanks?"
"For dragging my butt to the gate. Although, I might add, if you hadn't shot the guy wearing the self-destruct we wouldn't have -"
"McKay."
Rodney cuts himself off and sighs. "Anyway. Thanks." He's watching John very carefully. It's a little unnerving.
John turns back to the ocean. "Just another day in Pegasus, McKay."
"I know." After a minute, Rodney comes and leans on the rail, looking at the waves. "The thing is," he says eventually, in a rush, "the thing is that it's every day in Pegasus, even though we've only just gotten back, and that makes it hard to know what the hell's going to happen next and sometimes I think maybe it would be better just to ask you or do something because who knows what the next day is going to be like, and since you insist on flinging yourself at trouble every ten seconds, it seems like -"
John's just staring at Rodney, and eventually McKay's rambling stumbles to a halt. "Rodney," John asks, genuinely confused, "what the hell was that about?"
"This," Rodney says, and kisses him.
His lips are soft and rough, his hand is solid and warm against John's shoulder. When John gets over his shock and responds, Rodney makes a noise that can only be approval.
It's like a kick in the head, a punch in the gut. It's like flying. It's like home. It's a risk and a dare and another hostage for the universe to use against him - but then, that's been true for a long, long time. Under the moonlight, the waves rushing below, Rodney real and solid against him, it might just be worth it.
===
Every happiness is a hostage to fortune.
--- Arthur Helps
===
Poll