post traumatic stress syndrome without the 'post', by americanleaguer, part 2/2
Todd slams both his hands down on the desk, making McKay jump half a foot off his seat and causing all the Marines to bring their guns to bear on him. “This is not going to work!” he bellows. Then he narrows his eyes and breathes through his mouth and generally looks like a Wraith who just had a miniature temper tantrum and is maybe thinking about seeing how much damage he could do if he decided to snap.
McKay’s inclined to agree with him, even though the latest simulation hasn’t finished running yet. He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. He hasn’t really slept in days. They’re starting to run out of time; the Replicators are attacking more and more planets. Every day that he and Todd waste chasing down bad solutions, another whole planet of human beings is wiped out of existence. Or, from Todd’s point of view, another entire feeding ground has been obliterated.
Either way, at least there’s no pressure. God.
“We’re going around in circles,” McKay says. Todd grunts in agreement. “We need a break, or something, we just need to step back and come at this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.” He inclines his head to Todd. “I guess that’s a mammal metaphor. Whatever the equivalent would be for you.”
“Wraith are partly mammalian,” Todd says, although he doesn’t sound particularly proud of it.
“Right, right, Iratus bug plus human, heard it all before.” McKay waves a hand dismissively. What a combo that had been.
Todd gets up and starts pacing quickly around the room. At first McKay thought he was doing it just because it drives the Marines nuts (every cell in their tiny brains probably screaming something like ‘moving target! moving target!’), but he’s been doing it more and more lately. He makes a constant low growling noise as he does, and every time he passes McKay the noise dopplers in and out, making him sound like a low-power jet.
He lets Todd pace for a full minute before he stands up and grabs his arm on the next pass. Todd stiffens. The Marines look at him with a mixture of awe and horror-on the one hand, this is displaying an extremely high level of badass-edness, one they don’t associate with McKay, but on the other hand, he’s voluntarily touching a Wraith, so it’s possible that he’s lost his mind.
“We need to take a break,” McKay repeats. He looks around the lab-the windowless, cluttered lab-and it’s obvious that they’re just not going to come up with anything in here, right now, like this. “We’re going for a walk.”
“I don’t think we can let you do that, sir,” one of the Marines says. “You can go if you want, but he can’t.”
McKay looks at Todd. Todd jerks his head at the door. Telling McKay to go take his break.
“Put those cuff things on him,” McKay says. The Marines all stare at him. “I’m not taking him to the ‘gateroom or the ‘jumper bay, we’re going to walk to the nearest balcony and he can try escaping by drowning himself if he wants. The balconies down here only have one door, you can put 500 fucking Marines on it if it’ll make you feel better. We need a change of scene. We.”
“Sir…”
These Marines have no idea. They think they’ve experienced McKay snarkiness. The scientists would know; not a scientist in Atlantis would mess with McKay right now if they could get a good look at his face. But the Marines aren’t usually stationed near the scientists; they haven’t seen a tenth of Dr. Rodney McKay. Right now McKay is exhausted, and frustrated, and he’s been stuck in a small room with twitchy men with guns and a surly Wraith for far too long, and his equations aren’t working, which pisses him off worse than anything except for people shooting at him.
He takes a deep breath. Todd, who, unlike the Marines, does not rotate on and off duty and has thus spent more time with McKay than any of them, backs up a little.
“Listen up, you monkey-brained primitive military imbeciles. I know that he’s a Wraith and this is Atlantis and blah blah blah security risk blah blah but you know what? You know what? People are dying. You think you know, you think your stupid little Marine life experiences have made you ready for this, but entire planets are dying because we’re not making progress, they don’t tell you shit about that in the Marines or the US Army or where the fuck ever you pea-brained anthroids got your running-through-mud-holding-guns training. But I have been out here in Pegasus longer than most of you, and I’ve been on more missions than probably all of you combined, I have blown up a fucking solar system,” Todd blinks and looks stunned, have to tell him about that sometime, surely that would impress even a Wraith, “I am keenly, painfully aware of what is going on here, how many people are losing their lives with every moment we spend here not killing Replicators. And you know what? You know what? We need a break. We need to get out of this room, and look at the sky, and think complicated mathematical thoughts that you will never in your lifetime come even close to even partially understanding. And we’re going to do it, or more people are going to die. And you can wring your hands as much as you want, and you can go tell Daddy Sheppard that it was my idea, and I made you do it, because I don’t fucking care, at this point, so long as we do something other than go over the same fucking ground over and over and over again!” He slams his hands down on the desk in front of him for emphasis. Just because Todd did it first doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea.
Dead silence. The Marines are terrified and awed. Todd is blinking dazedly. McKay takes another few deep breaths. He points at Todd’s hands. “Put the cuffs on him.” The Marines train their guns on Todd and put the cuffs on his hands, palms held tightly together. “We’re going out now,” McKay says. Two Marines go to clear the hall, one goes to run and tell Sheppard that his science officer has finally gone around the bend, and the rest cover Todd.
He smiles at Todd without mirth and makes a little ‘presenting the door’ gesture. “Break time.”
----
Three of the moons are out, lighting up the ocean in a pretty but completely alien way. McKay leans on the rail and looks out over the water, just inhaling the air for a while. Todd, leaning next to him, does the same. Something like 50 Marines are stationed by the door, but at least they all stayed inside. The assumption seems to be that if McKay gets killed by Todd here, it’s his own fault, and the Marines should just worry about keeping everyone else safe.
After a while they get back to talking shop, of course, but it’s different, out here. No computers to check their work, no walls hemming them in, no sense of breathing the same air they’ve been breathing for months. Of course Atlantis has perfectly good ventilation and they’re not literally breathing the same moldy old molecules, but it was starting to feel that way all the same.
“I still think we should go back to the, what do you call them, the zeta functions,” Todd says.
McKay thumps the rail. “Riemann zeta functions, what do you call them?” Todd makes a throaty hissing noise with a sort of wet click at the end. “Oh, right, of course, that. Silly me. Anyways, what is your thing with the zeta functions? I thought we’d already been through that.”
“We tried them in one application, McKay, it is a complicated function-“
“-a complicated function that doesn’t apply here--“
“-you don’t know that, we have not applied them in enough different ways to know for sure.”
“Seriously, what is your thing with the zeta functions? What did they ever do to deserve your love?”
“What did they ever do to deserve your hate?” Todd shoots back, shrewdly. “Did they kill your hivemate?”
“You know what that is? That is the worst joke ever. Zelenka would make that joke.”
“Who’s joking?”
McKay snorts. “Oh please, don’t even try to pretend that your big scary stoic species doesn’t know what humor is. After all this time you couldn’t hide it from me if you wanted to.”
“It is variable among individual Wraith,” Todd admits.
“Yes, well, it’s the same for humans.”
They silently watch the waves for a little bit. McKay takes stock. He feels OK. The night air is invigorating, waking him up almost as well as coffee. Todd is right at his side, their elbows nearly touching as they lean on the rail, but he feels OK about that too. Honestly, if Todd was going to kill him, he probably would have done so by now. It’s not like McKay has been pulling punches with him recently.
“I don’t know if anyone told you, but when I was offworld dealing with yet another round of Marine idiocy, I had another one of those… Wraith flashbacks, or whatever they are.” He tosses that out there casually, very ‘oh yes, this happens all the time, no big deal’.
“There would be no reason to tell me something like that,” Todd says, still staring out at the water. Touché.
“Well. The Wraith in my head for that one, he was being questioned by a bunch of Ancients because he hadn’t… eaten someone. They made him talk and he said something about, about thinking maybe the Wraith shouldn’t eat just for the sake of eating.” Todd is silent. McKay looks over at him, but his lank white hair is hanging down, obscuring the side of his face. “Anyways. I just thought that would have been a, uh. Pretty progressive opinion. For a Wraith.”
“It would have been.”
They both fall silent again. Waves lap up against the edges of the city, making gentle rushing sounds. A cool breeze blows in over the water and McKay, wearing only a tshirt, shifts to stand closer to the body heat next to him without even thinking about it. Of course as soon as his arm touches the crazy maybe-leather coat thing that Todd wears, he realizes that he’s unconsciously snuggling up to a Wraith, and he freezes.
A number of things flit through his mind, including a long string of swear words (some in Czech, thanks to Zelenka), a quick review of his will, a census of which Atlantis personnel will be saddened by his untimely demise and which won’t, several theories that he’s so close to proving but hasn’t quite got down yet, a quick regret for Jeannie, and a hasty attempt to make peace with God before as usual, mostly failing.
It’s only when he’s finished his little litany that he notices that Todd has not broken free and prepared to feed, or shoved McKay into the ocean, or leapt to the opposite side of the balcony. In fact, unless McKay is very much mistaken, Todd’s shoulder is leaning warmly back into McKay’s.
Huh.
Of course, it’s not really that surprising; Todd has been separated from his entire species, put in an extremely stressful situation, and has guns pointed at him every second of every day. This is probably some Wraith version of post traumatic stress syndrome. Only it’s still going on, so just traumatic stress syndrome, without the ‘post’. Todd’s stress and whatever else he’s going through may have warped his Wraith-y little mind to the point where McKay has become less ‘food’ and more--
----
The room is dark, pitch black, but he can still see general shapes and outlines, faint infrared that he knows most of the food can’t see without special instruments. Every so often he hears a crowd of food go running past the door, but none of them have come in yet. Still, he can’t be careless, it wouldn’t do to be discovered; he’d be killed immediately, and he’s too weak to properly defend himself. He crouches behind the boxes and waits.
A brilliant rectangle of warm light races into the room as the door opens. He hisses and throws an arm up over his eyes as his pupils contract painfully. The door swooshes closed quickly and he gets his hands in front of him, ready to fight if he has to.
“Sorry, sorry, are you hurt?”
He relaxes at the familiar voice. It is Lanik. It is OK. “No. It was only the light.”
Lanik crouches down next to him. He smells like fear-sweat and worry and strongly like blood. Hunger rises up, but he suppresses it. He does not even twitch when Lanik puts a hand on his forearm.
“We must get you out of here,” Lanik says. “You have won, we are going to…. going to. Abandon the city. But you would still be killed if they found you here.” His voice is shaky, broken.
“Lanik.” He reaches out with the arm Lanik is not holding and touches his face, using the backs of his fingers, keeping his palm turned away. He sees the hair-thin infrared outlines of Lanik’s eyelids closing, feels his cheek leaning into the touch, and he knows that he cannot go back, and neither can Lanik. “Come with me. I know where there is a dart, I can fly it, we will find a planet…”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I… your people…” Lanik swallows, and he can feel it in the muscle at the point of Lanik’s jaw.
“You think they will welcome me back into the Hive? You do not understand, Lanik, they will know as soon as I am on board. My Queen will know. I can never go back, believing,” feeling, “as I do.”
“I. How will you live? You need to. Eat.”
“A planet with food that you eat, Lanik, we can both eat.” Lanik’s eyes open and he raises a hand like a mirror image, strokes the side of his face. There is no revulsion in the touch, no hesitation as Lanik’s fingers skim his breathing ridges. It is such a food-such a human gesture. It is one of his favorites.
“Can this be true?”
“Your. Your kind is ideal. For food. But we can eat other things, if we must. If there is a planet with animals that are large enough… I will have to hunt often, and hunt many of them, but it is not impossible.”
Lanik leans his entire body into him, and the blood smell gets stronger, so much stronger. “I would love to,” Lanik says, and his heart leaps momentarily, they will do this, it is possible-- “But I cannot go.”
“Why? Why?”
Lanik takes his hand then and places his fingers under Lanik’s own shirt. He feels the skin there. Bubbled, shattered, sticky. No.
“I will feed you, Lanik, we will leave Atlantis together, let me…”
“No.” Lanik’s hand is back on his face, and he knows it is because Lanik cannot see him in the dark, wants to see him with his fingers. “You have not fed in so long. You will need all your strength to reach the dart and escape. You must not waste any of it.”
Lanik’s hand wanders down and closes around his wrist. Slides his hand up under his shirt, places it against his chest. He can feel it, the life beating there, warm and fluttery with pain.
No.
“Please. I am going to die. I will die happier, knowing that it is helping you get away from this war.”
He whispers, leaning his face over Lanik’s, his hair falling down and making a curtain around them both. “No, Lanik, I cannot…”
“I wish you to. This will not be for nothing, if you do.”
Lanik presses his hand down onto his chest, and he can feel his palm twitch. His body wants this. He lowers his face to Lanik’s, brushes his lips over the man’s forehead, another gesture he has learned from his food. He nuzzles lower. It is something he has only ever done with Lanik; Wraith do not put their faces close to one another unless it is to intimidate.
Lanik’s cheeks are wet, but his lips curve into a smile when he touches them with his own. He pushes down sharply with his palm, the movement activating and injecting the enzyme, feeling Lanik arch under him with one last burst of vitality, then the life flowing into him, a heady rush, freely given and sweeter, far sweeter than he’s ever tasted it--
----
“Holy shit!” McKay says, eyes flying open. “What the fuck was that?!” He blinks. There’s a ring of pale, concerned-looking Marine faces hovering over him, backed by the night sky and Lantean moons. He rolls to his side and pushes himself unsteadily into a sitting position.
Todd is over on the other side of the balcony, sitting down with his back against the rail and a really absurd number of Marines pointing guns at him. He’s cradling his left arm in his lap and McKay catches the glint of something wet there. Sheppard is standing in the middle of the balcony, P-90 cocked and ready, looking from Todd to McKay and back again, a tightly drawn and unhappy expression on his face.
McKay takes a deep breath, hoping that inhaling a lot of fresh Lantean air will stave off his headache or something. “OK. What. Is going on.”
“You were out for a while,” Sheppard says, and wow, McKay hasn’t heard his voice that rigidly controlled in a long time. “Marines saw you slump down, Todd sort of reeled you in and was pulling you closer, they ran out here, shot him, pulled you away.”
“They shot Todd?”
“In the arm. He’ll live.” Sheppard turns to look at McKay, and it’s like a mask has come down over his face. It’s kind of scary. “You were out for a long time, McKay, and you were making these. Noises. Whimpering noises.” He turns away and looks at the moons. “Don’t blame the Marines. They saw a Wraith leaning over you. I probably would’ve done the same.”
“Good to know,” Todd mutters. Sheppard glares down at him, and Todd curls his lip up over his teeth.
“It was a long memory,” McKay says. He closes his eyes and puts his head in his hands. Long, freakish, intense memory. “Look, OK, I need to talk to Todd.”
Sheppard looks shocked. “McKay…”
“He wasn’t trying to eat me,” McKay snaps. “We were standing, talking about Riemann zeta functions, and I passed out-he was probably trying to keep me from smashing my brains out on the rail or the ground or falling over into the ocean…”
“I am not so stupid as to feed on McKay when I know none of the rest of you are smart enough to help defeat the Replicators,” Todd adds.
“See? He’s not stupid, Colonel. He knows I’m indispensable.”
Sheppard stares at the moons again for a long moment. “Alright. All you guys go on, get outta here.” He gestures at the Marines, not quite looking around.
“Sir…”
“I got it covered.” He pats the P-90 fondly. The Marines don’t even hesitate for a second before jumping all over each other in their haste to carry out the order. Sure, they make McKay resort to screaming half-insane rants; all Sheppard has to do is ask and stroke his gun. Stupid military.
Sheppard helps McKay over to the wall near Todd, settling him back against it. Sheppard sits down with his back to the door, legs folded easily and the P-90 in his lap, so that they make a little triangle in the corner of the balcony. “Talk,” Sheppard says, like he can give orders to either one of them.
This is not exactly the ideal situation, but McKay can see at a glance that Sheppard’s presence here is non-negotiable. He rubs his forehead hard. The number of headaches he’s been suffering from lately is really getting out of control, even for him.
“Todd. Does the name ‘Lanik’ mean anything to you?”
Todd winces visibly. Of course it does; the memory came from Todd’s mental stash in the first place.
Sheppard’s eyes narrow. “Rodney. Explain.”
McKay looks down at his hands. Somehow it feels wrong to put it all out in the open-like the memory is something private between him and Todd, although it was neither him nor Todd in the actual memory. He felt it, though, as intensely as if he was that Wraith, and presumably it was the same for Todd when he first… acquired the memory.
“Lanik. An Ancient. He was in the memory of. One of my feed-Wraith,” Todd says, gruff and short, although whether that’s because he just got shot in the arm or because of the memory is impossible to tell. McKay and Sheppard both look at him, but his eyes are closed, his head tipped back against the rail. “He was… involved in the final attack on Atlantis.”
Somehow, with Todd starting it out, it’s easier. “He was hiding in a storage closet,” McKay says, and he goes on from there, narrating the memory as best he can. He fumbles a little over the end, but for fuck’s sake, anyone would.
They’re all silent after he’s done. McKay watches his hands for a while, just making sure the fingers are still working properly and all that, before he risks looking up. Todd is staring directly up into the sky, head tipped back, messy white semi-dreaded hair spilling out between the rails. Sheppard is running a finger up and down the barrel of his P-90, thoughtful.
He’s in an alien city, in an alien galaxy, with multiple moons overhead, sitting cross-legged on a balcony like a little kid, with a star pilot military commander and a scientist rebel life-sucking humanoid insect, quietly musing about a real-life hallucination he just had of a Romeo-and-Juliet love between a member of an Ancient genius race and an old-school version of the aforementioned life suckers.
Good god. He takes a moment to appreciate the fact that this is his life now. This is seriously his life.
“That’s a pretty fucked-up thing to have in your head,” Sheppard says. He smiles a little at McKay; the mask is fully gone now. McKay smiles weakly right back at him. Yeah. It really, really is.
“Try having it in your head as long as I have,” Todd says. He’s still staring at the sky.
Sheppard messes with one of the fiddly little components at the back of his gun. “What happened to him? The Wraith?”
Todd does the head tilt/shrug thing. “He took a dart and went to live the rest of his life on an uninhabited planet. He fed on large mammals that ran wild in the forests.” He drops his chin to look at Sheppard, then at McKay. “I was on my own when I found him. It is… complicated. A Hive and I had had a… disagreement. I felt it best to travel on my own until things had. Calmed down. He was very weak; it is true that we can eat food other than you, but it will not sustain us as well, and as he aged it had grown harder and harder for him to hunt enough to keep himself properly fed.” The teeth make a reappearance. “I assume he thought I was a kindred spirit since I was alone when he met me. He was dying anyways, there were no humans on the planet. He begged me to take the last of his usefulness.”
“And you’ve had that in your head ever since.” Sheppard doesn’t make it a question.
Todd inclines his head forward in acknowledgement. “That is but a small part of it. There had been many… encounters. Between him and this… Lanik.”
“Wraith and Ancient. I never would’ve guessed.” Sheppard gets a familiar look on his face, one that never fails to fill McKay with terror. It’s Sheppard’s ‘thinking hard about complicated things’ expression. “How did they….?”
“How did they what?”
McKay, who knows Sheppard much better than Todd does, is quicker on the uptake. “Oh, no, hell no. We don’t even want to know. Sheppard, that is disgusting.”
“Oh c’mon, Rodney, you’re not even a little curious?”
“No!”
“What?” Todd is looking from one to the other, frowning.
“How’d they do it?” Sheppard asks, easily fighting off McKay with one arm when McKay makes a sincere but admittedly shaky effort to tackle him in order to keep him quiet. “Get it on? I mean, you said they made out with each other, right?”
“It wasn’t ‘making out’!” McKay yells. “They were, they were touching faces, he was a Wraith, Sheppard, he probably didn’t even really understand what making out was!”
Sheppard talks right over him. “I mean, we’ve seen your soldiers get born, that didn’t really look like something we could interface with, if y’know what I mean.”
Todd catches on, finally, and the expression on his face is hard to read, although McKay thinks it’s probably a combination of amusement and horror. He struggles for a moment, and finally manages to choke out, “Only soldiers are made that way. Workers are made by what you might consider more… conventional means. That is partly why there are fewer of us.”
Gross. Gross. McKay can’t help himself anyways. “What about queens?”
“Queens are another process entirely.”
“So Wraith sex is pretty complicated, is what you’re saying.” Sheppard is looking dubiously at Todd, like he’s trying to imagine what his genitalia look like without being obvious about it. Sheppard is terrible at keeping that kind of thing off his face.
McKay cannot believe they are actually having this conversation. He had been all set to have a solemn talk with Todd about Wraith feeding habits and Wraith emotions and serious, important things, and instead he’s sitting here listening to Sheppard try to coax Todd into taking his pants off or something. If the night takes one more left turn he’s probably going to have to try to knock himself unconscious just to retain some small shred of his sanity.
“Very complicated,” Todd says, seriously, but the mark around his eye is crinkling up in the corner again. He flexes his forearm, and McKay realizes that it’s stopped bleeding. “You must remember that some of your… simian anatomy is shared by the Wraith.”
“I guess there are two questions here, Todd.” Sheppard looks at him frankly, openly. “The first is about whether or not I can trust you with the rest of this Replicator mission thing. I’m asking if you manage to keep not eating McKay because you’ve got this Ancient-loving Wraith in your head, or if that’s all you.”
Todd bows his head and doesn’t say anything. McKay swallows hard; what does that even mean? It seems to be enough for Sheppard, though, because he nods to himself like he just figured something out.
“The second question, I guess I was trying to get at… look, do you have a penis or not?”
McKay closes his eyes, clamps his hands over his ears, and starts reciting the Canadian National Anthem as loudly as he can. He runs through it twice before the weird rasping noise he keeps hearing makes him risk a glance.
Sheppard is looking at him with the single biggest shit-eating self-impressed grin in the galaxy, and the unfamiliar wheezing noise is Todd, bent over his healing arm and laughing like he might never stop.
----
The battle alliance negotiations go surprisingly well, despite the fact that the Lanteans are the only ones at all comfortable with a Wraith at the table. Immediately afterwards Sheppard sneaks off to make eyes at the nomad chick with the shirt and the boobs, the Colonels from the Daedalus and the Apollo go off to commiserate about how much smarter McKay is than both of them (probably-- McKay can't imagine what else they'd have to talk about), and Todd comes down to the labs to say goodbye.
Four Marines stay outside the door, and the other scientists flee immediately. The door closes behind them. McKay stands awkwardly next to his laptop, twiddling a data pad in his hands. This is the first time he’s been completely alone with Todd, with no one else watching, since the planet where he got his innards blown to bits.
“Seven hives is not as many as I had hoped, but it is more than I had feared,” Todd says, like they haven’t just gone over this upstairs. McKay nods anyways. Todd steps closer, lowers his voice, the sibilance getting more pronounced. “This will work, McKay.”
McKay inhales deeply. “I know. I know it will. The math is all sound, the equations check out-“
“-the vital and some might even say brilliant integration of the zeta function works perfectly-“
“-god, sometimes you’re as bad as Sheppard, you know that?”
“I am not sure if I should be insulted or complimented,” Todd says, stepping closer still, until he’s right in front of McKay, close enough to reach out and feed at will. McKay wonders if this was what it was like, for that Ancient. The thrill and the terror. Maybe the thrill of the terror.
“Probably insulted,” he says, raising his chin to look Todd in the eye. “Colonel Sheppard is really a very poor example of humanity.”
Todd raises a hand and runs a finger down the side of McKay’s face, palm facing out. His fingernail-really more of a claw-- is cool and smooth against McKay’s cheek. He lowers his head until his mouth is right next to McKay’s ear, so he can speak in a voice barely louder than a gentle hiss. “You really do smell so very edible, did you know that?”
McKay swallows hard, closes his eyes, and expends all of his mental energy to keep from trembling. “No. Not really. Not usually something I hear from other, uh, humans.”
“They do not know what they are missing,” Todd hisses, and then he’s holding the back of McKay’s neck carefully with his fingers, leaving space between McKay’s skin and his palm, and his mouth is on McKay’s, and holy fucking shit, memory-Wraith may not have known the first thing about making out, but Todd is all about angles and demanding tongue action and McKay is not even going to think about where he learned this.
If he had thought about it at all, he would have expected the inside of a Wraith’s mouth to taste like rot and decay, judging from the state of their teeth, but apparently that’s what their teeth look like when healthy, because right now he’s running his tongue over them, avoiding the pointed tips as best he can, and Todd mostly tastes like salt and a little bit like parsley, actually. Weirdly. Like that’s the weirdest thing about this.
He gets his hands in Todd’s hair, tangling the ropy strands around his fingers, terrifying himself by tugging a little. Todd hisses into his mouth and lightly digs his claws into the back of McKay’s neck, and this is really a whole panoply of things that McKay never, ever, ever, in a million googol years expected to turn him on-starting with the male organism part and moving on from there-but here they are, and here he is, and he’s rubbing up against Todd, really, right now.
Todd’s other hand makes a reappearance on the side of McKay’s chest, working its way down and around to his ass. He grinds forward into Todd and Todd rewards him with a hard squeeze. McKay absolutely does not groan around his tongue.
Then, impossibly, Todd is stepping back. He takes both of his hands away and gently disentangles McKay from his hair. McKay is panting hard, staring at him with what he knows are ridiculously wide eyes, but seriously. The Wraith truly are a heinous and cruel species.
“We cannot,” Todd says. He sounds strained, like this is honestly a sacrifice for him, like he wants nothing more than to tackle McKay to the ground right now and feed on him or fuck him or both, which makes McKay feel a little better.
“You. You don’t have a, uh.”
Todd exposes a single tooth with the tiniest of smirks. “We do. But there is additional… anatomy. That humans do not share. You would not enjoy it.” McKay stares. “Do you know how insects mate, McKay? There are clasping appendages involved.”
Oh, wow, talk about an erection-killer right there. McKay gets a little light-headed as all the blood rushes back to his brain.
“We will see each other again.” Todd sounds certain, decisive. He licks his lips with just the very tip of his tongue, something McKay wouldn’t have even seen if he wasn’t looking directly at Todd’s mouth.
He draws himself up straighter. Gets a hold of himself. Picks up his data pad, gives Todd his very best and brightest lopsided smirk. “I look forward to it.”
Todd inclines his head, hisses out of the corner of his mouth. He carefully resettles his coat around his shoulders-McKay must have pushed it a bit out of order-and turns on his heel, sweeping Wraith-ily from the room.
McKay slumps into his computer seat, closes his eyes, and allows himself exactly one second of hysterical mental screaming. Then he leans forward over the keyboard and starts typing. There are a few more adjustments to make to the anti-Replicator weapon code, and then he’s got a universe to save.
Back to Part 1.