New story: Long distance call, SGA
Title: Long distance call
Author: eretria
Fandom: SGA
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Ambiguous
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money, just playing.
Spoilers: The Return I
Beta-read: murron, enname, auburnnothenna (who all kicked my sorry bum for nigh on two months, and righteously so. Thank you!)
Summary: Eight hundred miles. Rodney had never been good at forgetting.
Notes: This started out as fic for amireal's prompts of John, Rodney and missing past Return I. It twisted and slid through my fingers and grew a life if its own soon. Hope you'll still find something about this that you'll like, amireal.
What were eight hundred miles in the grand, cosmic scale of things?
1,287.4752 kilometres.
The distance between Earth and the moon was 222756 miles at perigee, 254186 miles at apogee.
Earth’s circumference was 24901.55 miles.
The distance between Pegasus and Earth … barely measurable in miles.
So, really, what were eight hundred miles?
Apparently, the distance it took to try and forget a moment of despair in the empty locker room of the SGC. A hug, borne out of pure loss, which had gone too long. Bruising pressure, their only hug since first meeting each other, but now it felt inevitable, because they had lost, had lost everything, and were about to lose each other, their friendship and the company, too. Eyes screwed shut, just holding on, pressing his forehead against Sheppard’s shoulder. Beard stubble against his cheek, scratching against his own. The scent of aftershave in the back of his throat. Soft, moist lips against his jugular in something that could be an accident or deliberate. He never found out, stiffened, withdrew from, wound out of the hug and saw that Sheppard wasn’t looking him in the eyes anymore, already distant, walled off. Sheppard walked out of the locker room without looking back once. They didn’t see each other again before Rodney left for Area 51.
Eight hundred miles. Rodney had never been good at forgetting.
***
The damn lab never got warm. Too big, too few people and too few heaters to produce any decent warmth. Too many hours spent here. Who would have thought that a desert could be this cold? It had never been quite as cold in Atlantis, not even during their first year when so few systems had been operational.
Had been.
He’d spent enough time thinking about had beens. In fact, he’d been distracting himself pretty damn well in the past few weeks from had beens that crept up every night before he fell into a fitful sleep.
“Dr. McKay.”
Rodney decided to ignore the voice. Hutcheson, the chief of the Area 51 research site, had come by twice in the past few hours, telling him to go home. Home. As if. The small room here on the base suited him just fine. The turnkey apartment in Alamo (the irony wasn’t lost on him) was too big, smelled too new and was too damn far away for a daily drive. He’d gotten used to taking a transporter to get to his quarters. A drive of over an hour one way just wasn’t acceptable. No one was waiting for him and he had a TV here as well anyway. Staying on the base suited him just fine. It wasn’t as if he actually slept. Staying here at least allowed him to work at night, too, when sleep again wouldn’t come.
“Dr. McKay.”
“Not now.”
“Yes, right now.” A large, weather-tanned hand closed the lid of his laptop.
Rodney’s head snapped up. “Have you lost your -“
Hutcheson was a broad-faced, heavily muscled man with kind grey eyes and salt and pepper hair. Not tall, but not short, either. The kind of man who had a presence, no matter what he did. Charisma, people called it. He always smiled, even now. “Think about it, Doctor.”
Rodney crossed his arms in front of him and raised his chin. His eyes felt dry and too large for their sockets. No doubt they were bloodshot. To hell with it. He wasn’t leaving now. And he sure as hell wasn’t backing down just because Hutcheson --
“Think about it,” Hutcheson repeated and slid the laptop over the lab bench away from Rodney.
Everyone else would have had hell to pay if they’d pulled a stunt like that, but Hutcheson was no one to be messed with. The smile hid steel underneath. Rodney suspected that he could snap a man’s neck and would still smile and ask you about the weather afterward.
He released an explosive breath. “Fine.”
Hutcheson nodded. Some other person might have tried patting Rodney’s arm, but Hutcheson just laced his hands together. “There’s a driver waiting for you outside.”
“I don’t need a driver.”
The grey walls in the lab soaked up the meagre fluorescent light and made Hutcheson look older than he was. Sadder, somehow. God, he needed sleep if he started thinking that much about people who were essentially strangers. “It’s been fifty-six hours since you last slept. I’m not letting you drive.”
“How would you--”
“Dr. McKay,” Hutcheson said with a smile, and Rodney could hear the implied “please, don’t insult my intelligence”.
“Fine,” Rodney said, stuffing both hands under his arms and started walking toward the hatch-like door of the lab. He was too damn cold to argue.
Hutcheson fell into step beside him. When they reached the door that lead outside and Rodney’s designated driver greeted Hutcheson with a perfect salute, the older man said conversationally: “I have told the guards at the gate to shoot you should you come back here before Monday.” He smiled at Rodney, stuck out his hand. Rodney was too perplexed at the gesture to stop his reflexive return grasp of the proffered hand. Strong fingers closed around his, nicks and calluses in places that were painfully familiar. “Have a good weekend, Dr. McKay.”
Hutcheson was still smiling. Rodney frowned and suppressed a shudder. He had no doubt that Hutcheson meant what he had said.
***
“Nice evening to be going home, sir,” the driver said.
Rodney snorted and turned his face to the passenger seat window, closing his eyes. Home. Yeah, right.
“The desert looks better by night than it does by day, don’t you think?”
Rodney closed his eyes even tighter. “It’s a desert.”
“You don’t like the desert?”
“Who or what gave you the impression that I wanted to talk? Look, by all means, enjoy the sights, but please don’t land us in a ditch, or I might as well have driven on my own. While you are enjoying the lovely sights, please continue ignoring the fact that a mere 30 miles from here, your lovely country tested their first nuclear weapons, and that your exposure to radiation is high enough by now to seriously diminish your chances of ever sitting in an armchair with grandchildren on your knees.”
The rest of the drive was silent. Thank god. He was in no mood to entertain a foot soldier today. Those times were over. This wasn’t Atlantis, he didn’t need to be on good terms with the military contingent. He told himself that he didn’t care, didn’t miss the smell of gun oil and heavy leather boots and almost managed to believe it.
The smell creeping into his nose instead was a mixture of still warm tar, creosote, gasoline exhaust and the ever-present desert dust. Dust that had settled everywhere, making everything tasteless and flat. He breathed, shallow, and wished for the saline taste of the ocean with an intensity that was almost painful.
When he opened one eye, they were still in the desert, endless sand and dry shrubs, mountains looming in the distance, illuminated by the pale sickle of the moon and a canopy of stars. Stars that were familiar but all wrong. The engine didn’t hum as quiet as a jumper would have. It was far too loud, roaring. The tires hissed on the tarmac, the white sweep of the vehicle's headlights illuminating the endless straight stretch of the road, darkness pressing in on the sides.
Rodney closed his eyes again.
***
The car slowed to a stop and Rodney opened his eyes only to find that he wasn’t anywhere near his apartment.
“What now?”
“The Colonel told me to get you something to eat before you go home.”
“And you drop me off here?” The neon sign over the door said Del Pueblo. The one room he could see through the window was crammed with people. “Lovely.”
“Pizza never hurt anyone, sir.” The driver wasn’t anywhere near as friendly as he had been before. Rodney squared his shoulders. Fine by him.
Pizza. He was dropped off at a Mexican restaurant to get pizza. Great. He’d avoided that since he got back. Too many memories attached. But he was hungry, and one type of food was as good as another.
To hell with memories.
The driver killed the engine and unfastened his seatbelt.
“Look, no, go home.”
The soldier - young, fresh-faced and so damn young Rodney wanted to put him into college and fill him up with beer instead of seeing him work for the military - shot him a confused look. “Sir, Colonel Hutcheson ordered me --“
“And I’m ordering you to turn that damn car around and drive home, to your base, to your friends, to whatever it is you usually do on a Friday night.”
“You’re not --“
“Not your commanding officer, I know.” Rodney unfastened his seatbelt and reached for the passenger side door. “To you I am a cantankerous guy who gets on your nerves. Tell me you want to spend the evening watching me eat pizza?”
“I have my orders, sir.”
“To hell with your orders.” Rodney stepped out of the car and slammed the door. “I’ll call Hutcheson, and now go, before I reconsider and make you pick the bell-pepper off my damn pizza.”
He didn’t check back to see if the kid really left. Only huddled inside his oversized sweater against the dry desert November chill, instead, and went inside.
***
He was back out thirty minutes later. He remembered missing pizza like mad when he was on Atlantis, that he and Sheppard had fantasised about their perfect pizza when they sat in the mess hall. Mushrooms and fresh tomatoes and basil and oregano and mozzarella cheese, ham and salami. They’d spend hours discussing the various ways to make a good pizza. The memory left a sour taste in Rodney’s mouth.
This pizza had been horribly void of taste, too much crust, too much cheese, and not enough tomato sauce. Or maybe he just couldn’t appreciate pizza anymore. Rodney couldn’t tell. He did know, however, that the over generous amount of ice in his glass of coke had left him with a headache, that the fake Mexican accent of the waitress insulted his ears and the music selection had been enough to almost send him running the minute he set foot inside the restaurant.
He left most of the pizza along with a far too generous tip. It didn’t matter.
When he got into his apartment, he put on a fresh pot of coffee. He left the TV off, watched the slow, steady drip of the coffee machine instead. Another one of those things he’d never really appreciated before he’d had to go without on Atlantis.
With a fresh, steaming hot mug of coffee in his hand, Rodney went into his bedroom. Opening the nightstand’s drawer he stood, watching the gleaming metal chain and the black rubber-rimmed silvery dogtags for a long while before closing the drawer again. All in the past now. Just like Ronon and Teyla and Sheppard.
Sheppard, whom he hadn’t heard from in four weeks. Whose face was the last thing he saw every night before he went to bed - that horrible, blank look on his face before he left the locker room, the one that never meant anything good, but which Rodney could never read.
He’d thought about last minute screw-ups so much on those past weeks that he could play out the discussion with himself by now. He didn’t need Sheppard for it. But damn it all to hell, he wanted to.
Sheppard hadn’t called.
Neither had Rodney.
By the time Rodney had finished his coffee, the damn pizza was giving him heartburn. The apartment was empty, smelled of paint and new furniture; his cat was god-knew-where with his neighbour who had moved away a year ago. The town around him was slowly smothering him with its small-minded people, its dry air and its stupid desert all around. The only familiar smell was that of the damn coffee.
He gulped down a couple of Alka Seltzer, picked up the phone and dialled.
It rang five times before it was picked up.
“Sheppard.”
“Hi,” Rodney said, his throat tight.
“Hi.” Sheppard’s voice was carefully blank, void of surprise or anger. Neutral. So neutral Rodney wanted to hurl.
“I, ah …”
Silence. Why the hell had he called? He didn’t remember. Only knew that it felt so damn good to hear Sheppard’s voice again that a part of him would have even accepted Sheppard yelling at him if only that’d -
“Yeah?”
He had to say something. Something. Anything. Just to stop Sheppard from hanging up, to sort this out, to - “I miss pizza.”
“I know the feeling.”
“So …”
Silence.
“Yeah.”
Silence. The line crackled and hissed. Damn long distance calls.
When they finally talked, they both did it at the same time. “Are you -“
“Look, Rodney, was there something you wanted?”
“Nothing,” Rodney said, feeling his heart drop into his shoes. “Nothing.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry to have bothered you. Bye.”
He switched on the light on the nightstand, watched the yellow glow try and fail to illuminate the much too tidy, sterile room.
Eight hundred miles.
Time to forget.
***
The doorbell rang the next morning at seven a.m. He turned in his bed and pulled the duvet over his head. The bell rang again. Persistent.
If that was one of Hutcheson’s people, he’d wring their necks bare-handed. The first uninterrupted sleep he’d gotten in weeks, and they woke him?
He flung the duvet back at the third crescendo ringing.
Stomping to the door, he fiddled with the keys, sleep-slow, his brain still frazzled. “I swear to you, if there isn’t a very good reason for this, you are beyond dea --“
“Hi.”
Rodney didn’t even try to stop himself from gaping.
Sheppard.
John Sheppard in a faded sweater and faded jeans and trainers and a box in his hand that said “Billy’s Old World Pizza, Colorado Springs”.
Rodney blinked. Lifted a hand on automatic and waved. “H - Hi.”
Sheppard. Who he hadn’t seen since he’d left Cheyenne Mountain, whom he’d thought to have lost as a friend forever because of whatever stupid, incomprehensible thing had happened in that locker room.
Now here he was, with that stupid slouch and the stupid half-scared grin and the stupid pizza … God, he’d missed him like the air he needed to breathe.
Rodney took a step, jerky, halting, as though his legs couldn’t remember how to move. Then another, just as difficult, but already a little more fluent. Then he was moving, slapping the pizza box out of Sheppard’s hand and pulling him into a bone-crushing bear hug. Sheppard tensed, but didn’t complain about the pizza. He choked out a breath, made to move away, but Rodney gripped him tighter, didn’t give him the chance to run again. Sheppard’s body was pressed against Rodney’s; warm, bony and familiar, but unresponsive and stiff as a board.
They stood like that for a long time, Rodney keeping Sheppard from moving away, hands clutching shoulders and arms while sharing body heat and heartbeats.
Sheppard’s stubble scratched against Rodney’s cheek and neck, so Rodney lowered his head. The position had his nose pressed against Sheppard’s neck and shoulder.
The smell of warm skin and clean, fresh laundry was familiar, a breath of home. Rodney nuzzled his nose closer to Sheppard’s skin, breathing, just breathing, memorising the scent of open skies.
Sheppard’s hands on his arms gripped him tighter suddenly, stopping him or pulling him in, Rodney couldn’t say. Sheppard was breathing deliberately slow, but his pulse fluttered against Rodney’s cheek; rapid, uneven.
Rodney slid his nose higher and flashed back to the other hug, the one that had gone on too long, had spun out of control and had destroyed everything.
He lifted his head from Sheppard’s shoulder, steeling himself. Felt his lashes brush against Sheppard’s cheek. The blood rushed in his ears, his pulse was a sharp taste on the tip of his tongue. And even though the same thing had led to them drifting apart for those long weeks, he needed more data. He didn’t want this. But he needed to know.
Rodney’s mouth moved over Sheppard’s jaw, butterfly touches, not kisses, just lips on skin, barely there.
Every beat of his heart seemed to make his whole body vibrate, but Rodney pushed the fear aside, slid his lips a little to the left and sealed them over Sheppard’s - John’s.
To his surprise, John opened up to him immediately, almost like an instinctive response, all mobile lips and hot, slick tongue and a deep intake of breath, a wet, messy kiss that had Rodney’s scalp prickling because it lacked everything a kiss should have had. He could feel the way his morning breath mingled with John’s and was struck by how disgusted even he was by this. He kissed John back, trying to find something, anything that would explain why, when his feelings should take over, all that happened was his brain wondering why it wasn’t feeling any of the things it should have. This was invasive, too wet, too forceful, as though they were both trying to make something work that inherently never could. The scrape of stubble was weird, not a turn on in the least, and John’s mouth tasted as bad as his did, no toothbrush seen in too many hours . Their tongues were meeting, twining around each other in a desperate attempt to coax some kind of feeling, some kind of lust out of this, touching teeth and mingling saliva that was stale after a long night and it was awkward and awful and not at all what he would have thought and then exactly what he had, as well.
John released his lips with a wet sound and drew back, a strand of saliva connecting their lips. He rested his shaking hands on Rodney’s shoulders, avoiding Rodney’s eyes.
But Rodney was already analysing and feeling the small eureka of a theory proven right bubbling up. “I had a feeling from the beginning, but I needed more data, but I didn’t know how to get it and can I just say that this really --,“ Rodney began before he pulled back enough to look at John.
“Doesn’t work,” John finished.
“You …” he began, then stopped, feeling like the stupidest person on the face of the earth. John had never . . . Oh, thank god. That meant they were okay. No messy feelings in the way.
“Yes,” John said, a grin creeping up. The explosive sigh of relief shook John’s entire body and correspondingly, Rodney felt that he could no longer keep the laughter that was bubbling up inside him in. His shoulders were shaking with it.
“How about we never do that again?” John asked between gasps for air. His laugh was low and carefree as Rodney had never heard it before.
“God, please, yes.”
He felt lighter, as though several of the weights had been pushing him to the ground ever since he’d set foot back on Earth were gone now, and he could stand upright again.
“The pizza is getting cold,” he said when John wiped at his eyes, at the tears of laughter glistening in his lashes.
“It already is.”
They sat down on the couch side by side, legs and arms pressed together, sharing body heat. The pizza box sat on their knees and Rodney couldn’t remember ever having eaten anything so delicious. The explosion of taste on his tongue -- fresh tomatoes, basil, oregano, salami, ham, mushrooms, god, the cheese --, the sound and feel of John breathing next to him, the dorky, grease-shiny smile John gave him when Rodney snatched a fourth piece and wolfed it down as though he were starving at seven a.m. on a Saturday morning … It was the acute, raw feeling of coming home.
Something unfurled in him, slowly, carefully spreading out beneath his skin.
John had never talked much, and didn't now, so Rodney did. And it felt good, so good to look at John, to watch for his reactions and know that he didn’t consider Rodney insane for this. To be able to look and not long, to touch and know that John understood -- that this, between them, wasn’t conventional. That he had never wanted their friendship to be about sex or to end in sex. He only wanted to be allowed to reach out and reassure himself that John was there.
***
When they said goodbye the next morning, Rodney rested his hand on John’s arm. “Call me, okay?”
John rolled his eyes. “Yes, June Cleaver.”
Rodney laughed out loud, smacked John upside the head in a mirror of John’s usual move. “Get out of here.”
John did. Without turning once.
Rodney felt hollow and old when he saw the cab’s backlights vanish around the corner, only his empty house behind to welcome him.
But that evening, the phone rang. Rodney almost tripped in his haste to reach it.
“Hey, June.”
It was the same greeting every night for the next three weeks.
Rodney didn’t mind it for a second.
Hutcheson walked into the lab three weeks after, when Rodney was on the phone.
“You? You, I’m on the phone with right now and having dinner with tomorrow, so, not so much.”
Hutcheson looked at Rodney, raised an eyebrow and smiled. Rodney leaned against the railing, shrugged and grinned back.
Finis
And, to keep the story company, murron (who is currently visiting and on the couch across from me) said there had to be a compilation. Well. Said and done, and with a beautiful cover courtesy of murron
Long distance call
Right-click and save-as
One small plea: If you download, please let me know, for this is my own, very, very limited webspace. Thanks to the lovely z_rayne, there are no more bandwidth woes. But it'd still be nice to know whether or not you downloaded.
Author: eretria
Fandom: SGA
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Ambiguous
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money, just playing.
Spoilers: The Return I
Beta-read: murron, enname, auburnnothenna (who all kicked my sorry bum for nigh on two months, and righteously so. Thank you!)
Summary: Eight hundred miles. Rodney had never been good at forgetting.
Notes: This started out as fic for amireal's prompts of John, Rodney and missing past Return I. It twisted and slid through my fingers and grew a life if its own soon. Hope you'll still find something about this that you'll like, amireal.
What were eight hundred miles in the grand, cosmic scale of things?
1,287.4752 kilometres.
The distance between Earth and the moon was 222756 miles at perigee, 254186 miles at apogee.
Earth’s circumference was 24901.55 miles.
The distance between Pegasus and Earth … barely measurable in miles.
So, really, what were eight hundred miles?
Apparently, the distance it took to try and forget a moment of despair in the empty locker room of the SGC. A hug, borne out of pure loss, which had gone too long. Bruising pressure, their only hug since first meeting each other, but now it felt inevitable, because they had lost, had lost everything, and were about to lose each other, their friendship and the company, too. Eyes screwed shut, just holding on, pressing his forehead against Sheppard’s shoulder. Beard stubble against his cheek, scratching against his own. The scent of aftershave in the back of his throat. Soft, moist lips against his jugular in something that could be an accident or deliberate. He never found out, stiffened, withdrew from, wound out of the hug and saw that Sheppard wasn’t looking him in the eyes anymore, already distant, walled off. Sheppard walked out of the locker room without looking back once. They didn’t see each other again before Rodney left for Area 51.
Eight hundred miles. Rodney had never been good at forgetting.
***
The damn lab never got warm. Too big, too few people and too few heaters to produce any decent warmth. Too many hours spent here. Who would have thought that a desert could be this cold? It had never been quite as cold in Atlantis, not even during their first year when so few systems had been operational.
Had been.
He’d spent enough time thinking about had beens. In fact, he’d been distracting himself pretty damn well in the past few weeks from had beens that crept up every night before he fell into a fitful sleep.
“Dr. McKay.”
Rodney decided to ignore the voice. Hutcheson, the chief of the Area 51 research site, had come by twice in the past few hours, telling him to go home. Home. As if. The small room here on the base suited him just fine. The turnkey apartment in Alamo (the irony wasn’t lost on him) was too big, smelled too new and was too damn far away for a daily drive. He’d gotten used to taking a transporter to get to his quarters. A drive of over an hour one way just wasn’t acceptable. No one was waiting for him and he had a TV here as well anyway. Staying on the base suited him just fine. It wasn’t as if he actually slept. Staying here at least allowed him to work at night, too, when sleep again wouldn’t come.
“Dr. McKay.”
“Not now.”
“Yes, right now.” A large, weather-tanned hand closed the lid of his laptop.
Rodney’s head snapped up. “Have you lost your -“
Hutcheson was a broad-faced, heavily muscled man with kind grey eyes and salt and pepper hair. Not tall, but not short, either. The kind of man who had a presence, no matter what he did. Charisma, people called it. He always smiled, even now. “Think about it, Doctor.”
Rodney crossed his arms in front of him and raised his chin. His eyes felt dry and too large for their sockets. No doubt they were bloodshot. To hell with it. He wasn’t leaving now. And he sure as hell wasn’t backing down just because Hutcheson --
“Think about it,” Hutcheson repeated and slid the laptop over the lab bench away from Rodney.
Everyone else would have had hell to pay if they’d pulled a stunt like that, but Hutcheson was no one to be messed with. The smile hid steel underneath. Rodney suspected that he could snap a man’s neck and would still smile and ask you about the weather afterward.
He released an explosive breath. “Fine.”
Hutcheson nodded. Some other person might have tried patting Rodney’s arm, but Hutcheson just laced his hands together. “There’s a driver waiting for you outside.”
“I don’t need a driver.”
The grey walls in the lab soaked up the meagre fluorescent light and made Hutcheson look older than he was. Sadder, somehow. God, he needed sleep if he started thinking that much about people who were essentially strangers. “It’s been fifty-six hours since you last slept. I’m not letting you drive.”
“How would you--”
“Dr. McKay,” Hutcheson said with a smile, and Rodney could hear the implied “please, don’t insult my intelligence”.
“Fine,” Rodney said, stuffing both hands under his arms and started walking toward the hatch-like door of the lab. He was too damn cold to argue.
Hutcheson fell into step beside him. When they reached the door that lead outside and Rodney’s designated driver greeted Hutcheson with a perfect salute, the older man said conversationally: “I have told the guards at the gate to shoot you should you come back here before Monday.” He smiled at Rodney, stuck out his hand. Rodney was too perplexed at the gesture to stop his reflexive return grasp of the proffered hand. Strong fingers closed around his, nicks and calluses in places that were painfully familiar. “Have a good weekend, Dr. McKay.”
Hutcheson was still smiling. Rodney frowned and suppressed a shudder. He had no doubt that Hutcheson meant what he had said.
***
“Nice evening to be going home, sir,” the driver said.
Rodney snorted and turned his face to the passenger seat window, closing his eyes. Home. Yeah, right.
“The desert looks better by night than it does by day, don’t you think?”
Rodney closed his eyes even tighter. “It’s a desert.”
“You don’t like the desert?”
“Who or what gave you the impression that I wanted to talk? Look, by all means, enjoy the sights, but please don’t land us in a ditch, or I might as well have driven on my own. While you are enjoying the lovely sights, please continue ignoring the fact that a mere 30 miles from here, your lovely country tested their first nuclear weapons, and that your exposure to radiation is high enough by now to seriously diminish your chances of ever sitting in an armchair with grandchildren on your knees.”
The rest of the drive was silent. Thank god. He was in no mood to entertain a foot soldier today. Those times were over. This wasn’t Atlantis, he didn’t need to be on good terms with the military contingent. He told himself that he didn’t care, didn’t miss the smell of gun oil and heavy leather boots and almost managed to believe it.
The smell creeping into his nose instead was a mixture of still warm tar, creosote, gasoline exhaust and the ever-present desert dust. Dust that had settled everywhere, making everything tasteless and flat. He breathed, shallow, and wished for the saline taste of the ocean with an intensity that was almost painful.
When he opened one eye, they were still in the desert, endless sand and dry shrubs, mountains looming in the distance, illuminated by the pale sickle of the moon and a canopy of stars. Stars that were familiar but all wrong. The engine didn’t hum as quiet as a jumper would have. It was far too loud, roaring. The tires hissed on the tarmac, the white sweep of the vehicle's headlights illuminating the endless straight stretch of the road, darkness pressing in on the sides.
Rodney closed his eyes again.
***
The car slowed to a stop and Rodney opened his eyes only to find that he wasn’t anywhere near his apartment.
“What now?”
“The Colonel told me to get you something to eat before you go home.”
“And you drop me off here?” The neon sign over the door said Del Pueblo. The one room he could see through the window was crammed with people. “Lovely.”
“Pizza never hurt anyone, sir.” The driver wasn’t anywhere near as friendly as he had been before. Rodney squared his shoulders. Fine by him.
Pizza. He was dropped off at a Mexican restaurant to get pizza. Great. He’d avoided that since he got back. Too many memories attached. But he was hungry, and one type of food was as good as another.
To hell with memories.
The driver killed the engine and unfastened his seatbelt.
“Look, no, go home.”
The soldier - young, fresh-faced and so damn young Rodney wanted to put him into college and fill him up with beer instead of seeing him work for the military - shot him a confused look. “Sir, Colonel Hutcheson ordered me --“
“And I’m ordering you to turn that damn car around and drive home, to your base, to your friends, to whatever it is you usually do on a Friday night.”
“You’re not --“
“Not your commanding officer, I know.” Rodney unfastened his seatbelt and reached for the passenger side door. “To you I am a cantankerous guy who gets on your nerves. Tell me you want to spend the evening watching me eat pizza?”
“I have my orders, sir.”
“To hell with your orders.” Rodney stepped out of the car and slammed the door. “I’ll call Hutcheson, and now go, before I reconsider and make you pick the bell-pepper off my damn pizza.”
He didn’t check back to see if the kid really left. Only huddled inside his oversized sweater against the dry desert November chill, instead, and went inside.
***
He was back out thirty minutes later. He remembered missing pizza like mad when he was on Atlantis, that he and Sheppard had fantasised about their perfect pizza when they sat in the mess hall. Mushrooms and fresh tomatoes and basil and oregano and mozzarella cheese, ham and salami. They’d spend hours discussing the various ways to make a good pizza. The memory left a sour taste in Rodney’s mouth.
This pizza had been horribly void of taste, too much crust, too much cheese, and not enough tomato sauce. Or maybe he just couldn’t appreciate pizza anymore. Rodney couldn’t tell. He did know, however, that the over generous amount of ice in his glass of coke had left him with a headache, that the fake Mexican accent of the waitress insulted his ears and the music selection had been enough to almost send him running the minute he set foot inside the restaurant.
He left most of the pizza along with a far too generous tip. It didn’t matter.
When he got into his apartment, he put on a fresh pot of coffee. He left the TV off, watched the slow, steady drip of the coffee machine instead. Another one of those things he’d never really appreciated before he’d had to go without on Atlantis.
With a fresh, steaming hot mug of coffee in his hand, Rodney went into his bedroom. Opening the nightstand’s drawer he stood, watching the gleaming metal chain and the black rubber-rimmed silvery dogtags for a long while before closing the drawer again. All in the past now. Just like Ronon and Teyla and Sheppard.
Sheppard, whom he hadn’t heard from in four weeks. Whose face was the last thing he saw every night before he went to bed - that horrible, blank look on his face before he left the locker room, the one that never meant anything good, but which Rodney could never read.
He’d thought about last minute screw-ups so much on those past weeks that he could play out the discussion with himself by now. He didn’t need Sheppard for it. But damn it all to hell, he wanted to.
Sheppard hadn’t called.
Neither had Rodney.
By the time Rodney had finished his coffee, the damn pizza was giving him heartburn. The apartment was empty, smelled of paint and new furniture; his cat was god-knew-where with his neighbour who had moved away a year ago. The town around him was slowly smothering him with its small-minded people, its dry air and its stupid desert all around. The only familiar smell was that of the damn coffee.
He gulped down a couple of Alka Seltzer, picked up the phone and dialled.
It rang five times before it was picked up.
“Sheppard.”
“Hi,” Rodney said, his throat tight.
“Hi.” Sheppard’s voice was carefully blank, void of surprise or anger. Neutral. So neutral Rodney wanted to hurl.
“I, ah …”
Silence. Why the hell had he called? He didn’t remember. Only knew that it felt so damn good to hear Sheppard’s voice again that a part of him would have even accepted Sheppard yelling at him if only that’d -
“Yeah?”
He had to say something. Something. Anything. Just to stop Sheppard from hanging up, to sort this out, to - “I miss pizza.”
“I know the feeling.”
“So …”
Silence.
“Yeah.”
Silence. The line crackled and hissed. Damn long distance calls.
When they finally talked, they both did it at the same time. “Are you -“
“Look, Rodney, was there something you wanted?”
“Nothing,” Rodney said, feeling his heart drop into his shoes. “Nothing.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry to have bothered you. Bye.”
He switched on the light on the nightstand, watched the yellow glow try and fail to illuminate the much too tidy, sterile room.
Eight hundred miles.
Time to forget.
***
The doorbell rang the next morning at seven a.m. He turned in his bed and pulled the duvet over his head. The bell rang again. Persistent.
If that was one of Hutcheson’s people, he’d wring their necks bare-handed. The first uninterrupted sleep he’d gotten in weeks, and they woke him?
He flung the duvet back at the third crescendo ringing.
Stomping to the door, he fiddled with the keys, sleep-slow, his brain still frazzled. “I swear to you, if there isn’t a very good reason for this, you are beyond dea --“
“Hi.”
Rodney didn’t even try to stop himself from gaping.
Sheppard.
John Sheppard in a faded sweater and faded jeans and trainers and a box in his hand that said “Billy’s Old World Pizza, Colorado Springs”.
Rodney blinked. Lifted a hand on automatic and waved. “H - Hi.”
Sheppard. Who he hadn’t seen since he’d left Cheyenne Mountain, whom he’d thought to have lost as a friend forever because of whatever stupid, incomprehensible thing had happened in that locker room.
Now here he was, with that stupid slouch and the stupid half-scared grin and the stupid pizza … God, he’d missed him like the air he needed to breathe.
Rodney took a step, jerky, halting, as though his legs couldn’t remember how to move. Then another, just as difficult, but already a little more fluent. Then he was moving, slapping the pizza box out of Sheppard’s hand and pulling him into a bone-crushing bear hug. Sheppard tensed, but didn’t complain about the pizza. He choked out a breath, made to move away, but Rodney gripped him tighter, didn’t give him the chance to run again. Sheppard’s body was pressed against Rodney’s; warm, bony and familiar, but unresponsive and stiff as a board.
They stood like that for a long time, Rodney keeping Sheppard from moving away, hands clutching shoulders and arms while sharing body heat and heartbeats.
Sheppard’s stubble scratched against Rodney’s cheek and neck, so Rodney lowered his head. The position had his nose pressed against Sheppard’s neck and shoulder.
The smell of warm skin and clean, fresh laundry was familiar, a breath of home. Rodney nuzzled his nose closer to Sheppard’s skin, breathing, just breathing, memorising the scent of open skies.
Sheppard’s hands on his arms gripped him tighter suddenly, stopping him or pulling him in, Rodney couldn’t say. Sheppard was breathing deliberately slow, but his pulse fluttered against Rodney’s cheek; rapid, uneven.
Rodney slid his nose higher and flashed back to the other hug, the one that had gone on too long, had spun out of control and had destroyed everything.
He lifted his head from Sheppard’s shoulder, steeling himself. Felt his lashes brush against Sheppard’s cheek. The blood rushed in his ears, his pulse was a sharp taste on the tip of his tongue. And even though the same thing had led to them drifting apart for those long weeks, he needed more data. He didn’t want this. But he needed to know.
Rodney’s mouth moved over Sheppard’s jaw, butterfly touches, not kisses, just lips on skin, barely there.
Every beat of his heart seemed to make his whole body vibrate, but Rodney pushed the fear aside, slid his lips a little to the left and sealed them over Sheppard’s - John’s.
To his surprise, John opened up to him immediately, almost like an instinctive response, all mobile lips and hot, slick tongue and a deep intake of breath, a wet, messy kiss that had Rodney’s scalp prickling because it lacked everything a kiss should have had. He could feel the way his morning breath mingled with John’s and was struck by how disgusted even he was by this. He kissed John back, trying to find something, anything that would explain why, when his feelings should take over, all that happened was his brain wondering why it wasn’t feeling any of the things it should have. This was invasive, too wet, too forceful, as though they were both trying to make something work that inherently never could. The scrape of stubble was weird, not a turn on in the least, and John’s mouth tasted as bad as his did, no toothbrush seen in too many hours . Their tongues were meeting, twining around each other in a desperate attempt to coax some kind of feeling, some kind of lust out of this, touching teeth and mingling saliva that was stale after a long night and it was awkward and awful and not at all what he would have thought and then exactly what he had, as well.
John released his lips with a wet sound and drew back, a strand of saliva connecting their lips. He rested his shaking hands on Rodney’s shoulders, avoiding Rodney’s eyes.
But Rodney was already analysing and feeling the small eureka of a theory proven right bubbling up. “I had a feeling from the beginning, but I needed more data, but I didn’t know how to get it and can I just say that this really --,“ Rodney began before he pulled back enough to look at John.
“Doesn’t work,” John finished.
“You …” he began, then stopped, feeling like the stupidest person on the face of the earth. John had never . . . Oh, thank god. That meant they were okay. No messy feelings in the way.
“Yes,” John said, a grin creeping up. The explosive sigh of relief shook John’s entire body and correspondingly, Rodney felt that he could no longer keep the laughter that was bubbling up inside him in. His shoulders were shaking with it.
“How about we never do that again?” John asked between gasps for air. His laugh was low and carefree as Rodney had never heard it before.
“God, please, yes.”
He felt lighter, as though several of the weights had been pushing him to the ground ever since he’d set foot back on Earth were gone now, and he could stand upright again.
“The pizza is getting cold,” he said when John wiped at his eyes, at the tears of laughter glistening in his lashes.
“It already is.”
They sat down on the couch side by side, legs and arms pressed together, sharing body heat. The pizza box sat on their knees and Rodney couldn’t remember ever having eaten anything so delicious. The explosion of taste on his tongue -- fresh tomatoes, basil, oregano, salami, ham, mushrooms, god, the cheese --, the sound and feel of John breathing next to him, the dorky, grease-shiny smile John gave him when Rodney snatched a fourth piece and wolfed it down as though he were starving at seven a.m. on a Saturday morning … It was the acute, raw feeling of coming home.
Something unfurled in him, slowly, carefully spreading out beneath his skin.
John had never talked much, and didn't now, so Rodney did. And it felt good, so good to look at John, to watch for his reactions and know that he didn’t consider Rodney insane for this. To be able to look and not long, to touch and know that John understood -- that this, between them, wasn’t conventional. That he had never wanted their friendship to be about sex or to end in sex. He only wanted to be allowed to reach out and reassure himself that John was there.
***
When they said goodbye the next morning, Rodney rested his hand on John’s arm. “Call me, okay?”
John rolled his eyes. “Yes, June Cleaver.”
Rodney laughed out loud, smacked John upside the head in a mirror of John’s usual move. “Get out of here.”
John did. Without turning once.
Rodney felt hollow and old when he saw the cab’s backlights vanish around the corner, only his empty house behind to welcome him.
But that evening, the phone rang. Rodney almost tripped in his haste to reach it.
“Hey, June.”
It was the same greeting every night for the next three weeks.
Rodney didn’t mind it for a second.
Hutcheson walked into the lab three weeks after, when Rodney was on the phone.
“You? You, I’m on the phone with right now and having dinner with tomorrow, so, not so much.”
Hutcheson looked at Rodney, raised an eyebrow and smiled. Rodney leaned against the railing, shrugged and grinned back.
Finis
And, to keep the story company, murron (who is currently visiting and on the couch across from me) said there had to be a compilation. Well. Said and done, and with a beautiful cover courtesy of murron
Long distance call
Right-click and save-as
One small plea: If you download, please let me know, for this is my own, very, very limited webspace. Thanks to the lovely z_rayne, there are no more bandwidth woes. But it'd still be nice to know whether or not you downloaded.