Sequelae, by The Spike 1/3

[spike21]

Title: Sequelae
Story idea by: Sarah T.
Written by: The Spike
Rating: R
Word Count: 26,000ish
Spoilers: Conversion; Adrift - goes AU from the beginning of S4
Author’s Notes and thanks at end of story

Summary: The weird thing was, when the knock came at his front door, he knew it would be John.



After the hearings, Rodney took his slap on the wrist, his pay cut and his demotion and went to work for Radek Zelenka at Area 51.

He still hated the desert (too hot), the lab (too big), the staff (too impossibly young and stupid) but it was a dull kind of hate, listless and without heat. Mostly he just felt tired. Tired and heavy, as if Earth’s gravity had increased minutely while he’d been away. (It hadn’t; he’d checked.)

The only thing that evoked any feeling in him at all was the work. Their department had been given the bulk of the Atlantis materials to keep working on - the puddlejumpers, the four years of accumulated science reports, the tech that had previously been sent back to Earth for study, the few pieces of unidentified tech they’d rescued at the last minute and the small chunk of the Ancient database they’d managed to transfer to the Apollo before they’d left.

Radek ran the department with what seemed to Rodney to be a lot of polite but insistent herd-riding - prioritizing the projects already in progress (mostly to do with building or recharging ZPMs and all doomed to failure) and thankfully, leaving Rodney alone to pursue whatever he wished.

What he wished was to be back on Atlantis with a working ZPM and a time machine so he could get back the ten goddamned minutes he’d needed to save Elizabeth’s life.

But since none of those options were currently on the table, the only bearable alternative was revisiting the notes he’d made while inhumanly brilliant (even for him.)

The most accessible of these was the application of hyperdrive technology to the puddlejumpers and so that became his work.

His life, really. He couldn’t stomach the idea of living on base, so he leased a newish two-bedroom ranch-style house on two acres of cactus and scrub sage outside Alamo, Nevada and an enormous Volvo four-by-four and commuted the 40 miles to the base and back along Highway 93.

The house had come completely furnished - everything from dishes to furniture -- and the only personal touch Rodney added was a satellite dish that had 739 channels and a 72 inch plasma TV that loomed like some sleek, black insectile robot over the beige and pastel floral blandness of the living room.

Not that there was ever anything good on.

Rodney usually ended up turning the sound down low and dozing fitfully until his back and bladder insisted he get up, pee, and go to bed. At least when he was tired enough, he didn’t dream.

The only socializing he did was the enforced kind - monthly calls from Jeannie, work receptions, retirement parties, eventually Christmas parties at the lab. He never really intended to go, but since he was usually still at work when they started, he’d wander over to peer critically at the hors d’ouevres, make himself a plate, and take it back to the lab with him.

At first people attempted to chat with him, people whose names he didn’t know and didn’t care to try to remember, but Rodney, while he usually had plenty to say about their latest project or whatever physics news had come down the pike, found himself disinclined to share his opinions with these shallow idiots. What would be the point? Either they understood the way things worked or they didn’t and if they didn’t, they certainly weren’t likely to listen to him about it. Eventually they stopped bothering him and it became an easy task to slip in, load up on snacks and slip out again without having to even pretend to play nice.

Radek was the only person he still called a friend. Not that he had much more to say to Radek, but at least Radek knew what it was like to see a city fly, a solar system explode - at least they shared the same bizarre frame of reference. There was a comfort in that - in not having to explain himself or even say much of anything. And Radek’s ideas were not ridiculous. Not particularly brilliant either, but that was comforting too. And Radek did not seem… dissatisfied with having been returned to Earth. Rodney wasn’t sure why that was important to him, since he himself was anything but, but just knowing that Radek wasn’t simmering with resentment was a strange kind of relief.

Not that it had been his fault, of course, but still…

They played chess from time to time, took dinner breaks together at the lab, argued about physics, went for the occasional beer. When Radek began dating a woman, a translator from somewhere in Eastern Europe, contracted to Area 51 to work on the Ancient database, Rodney assumed that would be the end of that too, but he was wrong.

Edita was a friendly, trim, darkly pretty woman around Radek’s age, and unselfconsciously half a head taller than him. Her presence in Radek’s life seemed to increase his sociability not diminish it. In fact Radek claimed that it was Edita who insisted Rodney come to the house once a month for a real meal -- as if he were still the skinny grad student who’d once evoked the mothering impulses of any number of professors and/or their spouses.

And like with those benefactors, Rodney went for the food and ducked the attempts at conversation. He had nothing to talk about but his work, past and present, and that was both classified and nearly impossible to explain.

And so it went from year to year. Rodney found a hook into the unbelievably complex physics of applying the hyperdrive technology to the puddlejumpers and focused more and more on that project alone. Radek turned out to be a pretty good second on the project, when he wasn’t trying to electrocute Rodney, and together they made slow, patchy but tantalizingly promising progress.

Time moved inexorably forward. Radek and Edita married. The SGC fought off the incursion of the Ori and then the Igsithera and then some non-Pegasus human-form replicators designed by a desperate civilian with a sick sister. Rodney heard in passing about various Atlantis personnel.

Chuck was apparently working long-range sensor array technology for the Air Force; Jennifer Keller had been named head of Medical right there at Area 51, Kate Heightmeyer was teaching at Harvard School of Medicine, Katie Brown had gotten attached to a gate team through the SGC and was gaining a reputation for magnificent botanical finds in unlikely places. Nothing about Sheppard though. Never Sheppard.

Not that Rodney particularly cared to know. John had chosen to walk. To burn his bridges. To martyr himself a vicious little voice whispered in Rodney’s heart. Because only John Sheppard had the right to be angry. Only John Sheppard was allowed to be right.

And even thinking about Sheppard, as his intractable brain would do from time to time, brought everything back as if no time at all had passed. It made him angry and miserable by turns, and left him so exhausted he sometimes just stayed in bed, not even bothering to call in sick. Radek seemed to understand, which was more than Rodney could say for himself, but he was grateful not to have to explain and tried to make up for it by working harder and snapping less when he returned.

It didn’t happen that often, although Rodney couldn’t understand why it didn’t happen any less often as time went on. Time was supposed to give some perspective to old hurts and resentments, at least that’s what he’d been told, but this pain never seemed to lose its freshness.

Still, October tended to be a good month for him, promising the end of the September’s unholy heat (temperatures under 100 degrees for days at a time!) and the occasional balm of a cloudy day. On clear nights he could almost imagine he saw Pegasus with his naked eyes if he stared hard enough at the spot. Could imagine himself in a puddlejumper, sighting on the galaxy like a sailor on a familiar star, jumping through the blue- jeweled smear of a hyperspace window to the last outpost of the gate bridge, down through the tunnel of rings and well, ‘straight on ‘til morning’ was in keeping with the far fetched fantasy.

Very far-fetched. Even when they had seemingly broken through the first major hurdle of the hyperdrive puddlejumper hybrid, the SGC refused to even entertain the thought of reopening Pegasus without Atlantis as a base. If they’d softened their position on that, Rodney hadn’t heard.

Still, October was a good month and Rodney could occasionally feel the stirring of hope, which is why, when the growl of a huge engine dopplered to silence in his driveway and the knock came at his front door, he knew with uncanny certainty, that it would be Sheppard.

It didn’t matter that nearly five years had passed without a word, that there was no reason for it ever to be Sheppard, but even so it wasn’t so much prescience, perhaps, as his brain’s instinctive grab for the worst possible case scenario. Who did he least want to ever see again, oh yes, John Sheppard and opening his door he just knew.

Not that it in any way prepared him. He opened his mouth, but no words came from his brain to fill it. As though the shocking disconnect from memory to reality had frozen all his gears.

John was somehow a lot bigger than Rodney remembered him. Solider. He was tanned, deeply scruffy, leather-jacketed, wearing his goddamn aviator shades. Standing there, hands in pockets like some kind of…

Anger thawed him.

“What do you want?” he asked, sounding high and tight to his own ears. John just smiled, the big fake ‘fuck you’ smile Rodney had gotten to know so well.

“Hey, Rodney,” he said. “Good to see you too.”

“Yes, yes, bitterness, recriminations, unpleasantness,” Rodney said. “All witty banter and oblique insults aside, the question still stands. What do you want?” Better. That was better. Stronger. He had his own ‘fuck you’ in case Sheppard had forgotten. He waited for the smile to turn brittle, for John to turn and walk away again. Again. Again. It didn’t happen. Instead John slumped a little, dropped his head, took a breath, like this was hard for him.

Well, good, Rodney thought. This should be hard. In fact, it was going to be impossible, there was no way he was apologizing this time. Been there, done that, got the right hook to the mouth… and John still hadn’t moved. Sweat trickled down Rodney’s back. It was only late morning but October or not, his body already knew the day would be unbearably hot. Even inside the refrigerator quality air conditioning in the bowels of the base he sweated. It didn’t improve his disposition, as Radek never seemed to tire of reminding him. And speaking of whom…

“Well,” he said. “As uncomfortable and unpleasant as this has been, I have to get going.” He took a step back inside the house and John’s head shot up.

“Rodney…” he said. It sounded hoarse and rough and awful and it stopped him. Made him look for things he didn’t want to see. John’s lips were dry, chapped. His stubble was as silver as it was dark. He looked… weary.

“You’re dying,” Rodney blurted.

More worst case thinking, he knew, but it gave him another cold shock. He recognized the feeling now, the thing that had been skirling up like movie monster fog at the fact of John Sheppard on his front steps. That implacable terror that he’d only known in nightmares before he went to the Pegasus Galaxy. Terror with a rage chaser. And there it was. He was suddenly beyond furious, into something cold and sickening. John opened his mouth. Rodney held up his hand.

“Don’t,” he said, swallowing hard. “You don’t get to come back for that.”

And there was John’s brilliant, bitter smile. Almost a relief.

“Good thing I’m not here for the tea and sympathy, then,” he said. The smile turned off like a light switch flicking “I’m not dying, Rodney.”

“Then what,” Rodney said, not waiting for the relief to wash through him. “And why exactly do I care?”

“Not out here,” John said.

“Then not at all,” Rodney crossed his arms firmly over his chest.

“Stubborn son of a…” John muttered. “Look…” He glanced left and right, disturbingly shifty, and then leaned in and used one finger to push his shades down on his nose. Rodney followed the motion, puzzled, waiting for John to start whispering code words or something, but John just stood there waiting until Rodney looked up, questioning.

He wouldn’t have thought he could feel more scared than he had just seconds before but it turned out he was wrong about that too.

“Oh,” he said, a little numbly.

“Oh,” John echoed.

It was the left eye. Green-gold and flat and slit-pupilled like a cat. Or a big, mutant bug. John pushed the shades back up, hiding it. There was no other sign, no blue-gray scales, no talons, no sharp, musty smell that had made Rodney’s skin crawl. Not that he was close enough to smell anything of John now. Not that he wanted to be, but still. He wasn’t an idiot.

“Fuck,” he said. “All right. Come inside.” He stood back and held his breath as John edged past him into the house.

Inside, John walked through the living room and stood with his back to Rodney, staring out the window overlooking the enormous, empty backyard. Rodney watched him from the doorway that led from the foyer, still hugging his arms to his chest, frantically wondering if he could just leave, just grab his laptop and briefcase from the table by the door and head to the lab. John would certainly be gone by the time he got back. And if he wasn’t...

“Nice place,” John said, turning around.

“It’s fine,” Rodney answered, distractedly. “Have you… seen a doctor or anything?” He could see the silent shake of shoulders that was John’s imitation of a laugh.

“No,” John said, vaguely mocking. “I thought that would be a bad idea.”

“Well I don’t know what you think I can do for you,” Rodney snapped. “You should be talking to the SGC. I’m pretty sure they have protocols for--

“No,” John barked, making Rodney jump. His hands had fisted inside his pockets and the tension fairly twanged across his shoulders. “No,” he said, more quietly. He still had the shades on. Rodney couldn’t help looking for other signs, on the v of his neck, the exposed crescents of his wrists.

He couldn’t see anything, but there was very little, he realized, in the way of exposed skin showing. Under the leather and denim and facial hair John could be all blue scales and thorny bristles. Rodney shuddered a little at the thought. Alien. John had been so …alien.

“If they can help…” Rodney said and John shook his head, tightlipped and hard.

“They’ll lock me up,” he said. It sounded ragged, but then John was moving across the floor, too fast and too angry. “That all right with you, Rodney? Did I make a mistake coming here?” He crowded close, not touching, but Rodney was backed up against the doorframe as surely as if John had pinned him there.

“That’s not a fair-“ Rodney said. They were both panting a little. Rodney felt the sweat pool and run down his face, his neck, soaking his shirt.

“No,” John said and suddenly he was standing down, frowning and turning his face away. Rodney felt like he could breathe again, but only carefully, through his mouth. John was still too much in his personal space even if the intensity was dialed down.

“I know,” John said. “Listen, Rodney, I just want to go... I just want to go back.”

“Oh,” Rodney said, ignoring the naked longing in John’s voice. “You just want to go back.”

“I need to go back, Rodney. I’m not safe to be around here. At least in Pegasus I can… I can do some good. Kill some Wraith. Maybe even find Ronon or Teyla. They’d know how to handle things.”

The sound of those names actually hurt. Rodney could feel it in his chest - an ache like an incipient aneurism ready to give. He had a sudden image of John coming through the gate to a circle of waiting arms, hearty backslaps, forehead melds. He had to swallow against the pain.

“Oh, you need to,” he echoed. “Well then…” He snapped his fingers, looked around with exaggerated concern. “Hmm. Didn’t work. Sorry. Out of miracles.”

John sighed, rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Look-“

“No, you look,” Rodney cut him off. “You think you’re the only one who left things -- important things -- behind in Pegasus? Guess what? You’re not. Some of us, some of us, didn’t just walk away. We swallowed our pride and stayed and picked up the pieces and begged for the chance to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Do you know how long that took? Do you know how much crow we had to eat in order to-well no, obviously you don’t know. You couldn’t know because you. Weren’t. There.”

“Feel better?” John asked, after a moment.

“You’d think I would, wouldn’t you?” Rodney said, half to himself. “I’ve been waiting to say that to you for, well, years.”

“It sounded pretty honed,” John said. Rodney shook his head.

“What you’re asking…” he said.

“You think I don’t know that?” John said. “I know what I’m asking. But I don’t exactly have a lot of options here. I can’t -- fuck -- I can’t let them lock me up. That leaves me with two choices. I was kind of hoping to avoid the one where I head out into the desert and blow my head off while I’m still lucid enough to remember how.” John paused, took a shaky-sounding breath. Ran a hand through his hair. “As for Pegasus… I was thinking maybe you owe me.”

“Oh, that’s low,” Rodney said, fury making his own voice shake. “I’d say even for you, but well, even for you.”

John shrugged.

“I guess we still agree to disagree on that point.”

“Sure,” Rodney said. “Whatever. Regardless, I can’t send you back to Pegasus. Not ‘won’t’. Can’t. There’s no way back. No gate, no extra ZPM, no available Asgard ships…. Pegasus is closed, for some pretty compelling reasons I vaguely recall - or did you forget all that when you were dreaming up this lighthearted caper?”

“You know, I had actually forgotten what an asshole you are,” John said, with a snide tilt of his chin. “Thanks for setting me straight.”

“Oh ha ha,” Rodney said. But John was at the front door already, hand gripping the door handle. “Wait…” And fuck, could he not resist for one tiny second? Could he not just keep his mouth shut, let John walk away and take his guilt and his accusations and his huge, unbearable problem out of Rodney’s goddamn life?

Apparently, the answer was still ‘not so much’.

“Wait,” he said again, even though John hadn’t moved. Even though he had nothing. Except… He snapped his fingers as things started to click into place.

“Wait. You know you don’t actually have to go back to Pegasus,” he said. “You just need a cure, right? You just need to stop turning into a, a, a bug. And then you can go back to the… the Hell’s Angels or whatever it is you’re into these days. That’s another option, right?” He didn’t know why he was holding his breath, but when John slowly nodded he felt like he’d just come up from being under water for too long.

“Yeah,” John said, turning slowly back toward Rodney. “I guess that could be an option. If you knew a way to do that.”

“Well,” Rodney said, rubbing his hands together. He still felt a little sick inside, but he was definitely on firmer ground. “I may not be the head of the Science Department any more, but I still have some contacts. I still know some people. I’ll, uh…” John was still standing with his hand on the door handle and it was making Rodney nervous. “Why don’t you sit down? I have a dish,” he pointed to the big TV, the remote. “Seven hundred and thirty eight channels, not that I have much of a chance to… uh, and there’s Coke in the fridge if you want…”

John didn’t look at him as he came back into the living room and slouched down on Rodney’s beige leathercouch, so Rodney couldn’t really explain the dizzying rush that pulsed hot and sticky behind his eyes. Still, he waited until John was flipping intently through the channels before he grabbed his phone and started making calls.

Two hours later, Rodney had Jennifer Keller on the phone.

“Rodney?” she said. “Rodney McKay from the Atlantis project?” She sounded more than surprised. He supposed it made sense. He’d always thought of her as someone he knew reasonably well, but he hadn’t actually spoken to her in a very long time. Calling her suddenly felt risky.

“Atlantis project, yes,” he said. “And I know it’s been a long time but I have a small, uh, crisis of sorts. Not really an emergency, but possibly requiring your kind of expertise and, uh, discretion.”

John hadn’t moved from the couch, nor taken off his jacket or sunglasses, nor spoken three words to him in the last two hours, but Rodney could tell he was listening.

“My schedule is pretty full these days,” Keller was saying. “I could fit you in at the base clinic on Thursday at the earliest. If it’s more urgent than that you’d have to come in to our ER.”

“Actually,” Rodney said. “I had more of a house call in mind. It’s, uh, of a personal nature.”

“Okay…” she said slowly.

“What about tonight?”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said. “But this isn’t some kind of awkward come on, is it? Because I’m really not-“

“No!” Rodney said, colouring. “No. It’s a medical… issue. Look, if it’s too much trouble...”

“No, no,” Keller said, sounding genuinely rueful. “Sorry, Rodney. You just took me by surprise. It’s been years since I even thought about Atlantis. But yes, I can make some time for you tonight.” Still embarrassed, Rodney managed to give her directions to his home.

When he hung up, John was watching him.

“She’ll come tonight,” Rodney said. “In the meantime, I have work to do.”

“Sure,” said John. He was on his feet.

“Where are you going?” Rodney said.

“I’ve got a few things to do myself,” John answered. He opened the door and Rodney grabbed his briefcase and followed him out into the hellish afternoon. There in the packed gravel driveway, just in front of the house, was an enormous motorcycle. It was dusty from the road and obviously well used, but under the dirt it looked space-age and new, all heavy, black-and-chrome curves and dangerous leather.

“Typical,” Rodney said. “Is that from the Rogue Pilot Cliché Catalogue?”

“Just living the dream, Rodney,” John said. He tugged open a saddle bag and pulled out a bag of tools.

“Well, try not to break anything,” Rodney said. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

Rodney made his way across the drive to the garage and punched the tiny remote in his pocket. The garage door rose slowly and the Volvo beeped and thrummed to life.

He got in, the air conditioning already bringing musty but cool air in and backed carefully out into the driveway.

John waved him off without looking up and Rodney sped off along the gravel, knowing he was overcompensating with his foot on the pedal and not caring all that much.

For the first time in ages, work turned out not to be a balm. He was tense and edgy - enough so that Radek, who tended to simply ignore his worst moods, actually interrupted him in the middle of trying to tell some googly-eyed young lab monkey exactly why it was a bad idea to cross-wire pod-nozzle venting feeds with anything with the words ‘internal atmosphere’ on them.

Radek herded him gently up the stairs and into Rodney’s private office overlooking the lab floor. He made Rodney sit down and brought him some water. Rodney drank thirstily, wondering when his mouth had gotten so dry, and why he hadn’t noticed that his heart was hammering. He was still angry, of course, but Radek didn’t admonish him or even ask him to explain what had happened. He simply rested his hip on Rodney’s desk and looked concerned.

“Better?” he asked after Rodney’s breathing had eased and he’d wiped the sweat off his face.

“I’m fine,” Rodney croaked.

“Oh I can see that,” Radek said, dryly. “But perhaps this is a day to be fine at home, yes?” Rodney was inclined to argue on the grounds that Radek was not actually his mother, but the truth was he was terribly anxious about what John was up to in his absence and his concentration was shot and he really didn’t feel all that great.

“Will you at least explain to Dr. Kandinsky-“

“Kandlemann,” Radek corrected.

“Whoever,” Rodney said. “Could you please explain that mistakes in this field cost lives?”

“Of course,” Radek said. “As long as you refrain from taking them yourself.”

“Yes, yes,” Rodney said. “No killing the lab monkeys. I’ve got it.”

“Good,” said Radek, squeezing his shoulder. “I’ll make sure Kandelmann is clear on his wiring protocols and you, go home and get some rest, okay?”

Rodney returned to the house to find John sitting on a blanket by his bike, reading a large hard-cover book. He waved lazily as Rodney drove past him into the garage but didn’t get up. When Rodney opened the door of the house, he looked up.

“Are you coming in?” Rodney asked. John appeared to consider this for a moment before he nodded. He closed the book and folded the blanket, tucking both under his arm as he approached the house.

Inside, John returned to the couch and TV in the living room. Rodney pulled out his laptop and began to work at the kitchen island, self-consciously at first and then eventually losing himself enough to forget the looming presence in his living room for moments at a time. In his peripheral vision John flicked restlessly from channel to channel, settling occasionally on some sports thing or another.

Meanwhile, the air-conditioner roared softly in the background and the hot blue afternoon faded to twilight in silence outside the windows. When the doorbell shrilled they both startled and looked at each other.

“I’ll get it,” Rodney said, even though John didn’t make a move to get up.

Jennifer Keller had cut her hair. It surprised Rodney because he was sure he’d seen her around the base looking not too different from when she’d stood beside him during the IOA hearings. But the woman at the door had short, no-nonsense hair and fine lines beside her eyes and if he thought about it he had to admit they hadn’t exactly become buddies.

“Dr. Keller,” he said, ushering her into the foyer. He caught a turpentine-y whiff of desert wind. “Jennifer. It’s good to uh…”

“Yeah,” she said looking him up and down. “You too.” He hesitated for a moment, still embarrassed by their earlier conversation and unsure of what to say. Keller took pity on him and smiled, awkwardly.

“So what’s this emergency?” She asked. She had a small rolling-type suitcase with her and Rodney wondered if that was her doctor bag. He was trying to decide how to tell her when he heard the squeak of leather on leather behind him, saw her gaze flick over his shoulder.

“Colonel Sheppard?” she asked, her voice full of wonder, as if John were some mythic figure she’d never seen bruised and cranky on her infirmary table. She left her bag at the door, walking toward the couch with her hand out. It hit Rodney all over again what a shock it was to have John here. Too weird. Too much. Two people in his house felt like an invasion, like there wasn’t going to be enough air.

“Just ‘John,’” John said getting to his feet and taking her hand, squeezing it gently, Rodney noted. “I’m not in the Air Force any more.” It sounded so neutral when he said it to her, like he’d never blamed anyone at all for that. Rodney rolled his eyes.

“He’s turning into a bug again,” Rodney said. They both turned to him, then back to each other.

“Yeah,” John said, lightly, putting on a rueful grin. “I guess I should have kept up with those booster shots.”

“Were there really…?” Keller began but John shook his head. His laid back pleasantness grated hard on Rodney’s nerves. He took a step toward them.

“So, if we’re all caught up now,” he said. “Maybe you could just get on with the curing.” Keller looked startled.

“I’ll have to examine you before I make any treatment decisions,” Keller said to John. “I’d prefer to do it in my lab.”

“Yeah, no,” John said, sounding regretful. “The SGC and I didn’t break up on the best of terms.”

“If you need to be contained…”

“No,” John’s voice was low and raw again. If Keller noticed, she didn’t let on.

“I was on Atlantis the first time around, you know,” she said. “I was trauma, not epidemiology, so I wasn’t on your case but I dealt with the casualties.”

“Oh for heaven’s sakes,” Rodney said. “He broke a window and knocked out a few marines. Ronon did that three times a week before breakfast. “If it comes to that I have a garage where we can chain him up. ”

Rodney felt a flush of mean pleasure at John’s sudden flicker of discomfort. He went on, warming to it. “You wouldn’t mind that, right? In the spirit of cooperation?”

Keller still wasn’t looking at him, her eyes on John, who looked away from both of them and shrugged.

“It would be better if it didn’t get to that point,” he said.

“Which is all the more reason for us to bypass the weeks of endless paperwork at the SGC,” Rodney added. Keller looked thoughtful.

“This is far outside my field of expertise,” Keller said, glancing at Rodney before turning her gaze back to John. “I’m not sure I can help you, even if I agree to.”

“Well, of course you’ll agree to,” Rodney said. It blindsided him. “You were… I mean, you’re… You have to.”

“No, what I have to do is report you to the SGC,” she said. “The protocol for alien infection is pretty clear. If I’m caught…”

“If you were caught,” John cut in, smoothly. “You’d probably say I threatened you.” Keller nodded slowly.

“I’d have to get hold of Dr. Beckett’s notes,” she said. “And the serum itself, or at least the necessary components.”

“Without leaving a trail,” John said. They both looked at Rodney.

“Yes, yes,” Rodney said. “I’ll do the heavy hacking. Can we…?”

“After I examine my patient,” Keller said. If Rodney hadn’t been staring right at John he would have missed the flinch.

“Right now?” John asked.

“Seems like a good time for it,” Keller said, the tiny crescents at the corners of her mouth on the verge of lifting. “Since I brought my bag and all.” John didn’t manage an answering smirk. Instead he seemed to steel himself before he nodded.

“Okay.”

“We just need a little privacy,” Keller said, looking once again at John. It took Rodney a minute to realize it was a question directed at him.

“You can use the guest room,” he said, grudgingly, pointing them to a room partway down the hall. He didn’t add: it’s not like I haven’t seen it all before in the field, because, well, that wasn’t even true any more. He didn’t know what else John might be hiding under all those clothes. Middle age spread, maybe, or nipple rings and flaming skull tattoos. It could be anything.

Keller ushered Sheppard into the room before her and closed the door firmly in Rodney’s face.

Rodney stood there for a moment, hearing their voices muffled through the hollow door.

This, he thought, was a very bad idea. John was like a stranger now. He was a stranger.

Alien.

Rodney remembered smashed glass, the bruises around Elizabeth’s neck, all the rumours of super-speed and super strength. His garage wasn’t that secure. He’d need chains, handcuffs, manacles. A stunner. Maybe one of those guns Animal Control used to shoot tranquilizer darts into predatory mountain lions. A taser...

What exactly had he been thinking when he agreed to any of this? It wasn’t like John had turned on the charm for him. Not the way he had with Keller. That had been weirdly painful to watch - restarting the ache just behind his breastbone. Which was probably gas. Like that knot in his guts was probably hunger.

He’d wandered into the living room and picked up the remote, but instead of flipping to the news as he meant to do, he turned the TV off and stood there listening to the sudden silence. Listening hard. Trying to determine if he was imagining the shuffles, clinks and muted thumps from behind the closed guest room door.

By the time he’d inched close enough to tell that yes, that low rumble was John’s voice and that was the sound of glass clinking, he was also too close for any kind of plausible deniability when the door suddenly opened. Keller emerged with her little bag in tow and quietly shut the door behind her. She gave him an assessing look but didn’t comment. Rodney swallowed the terrible need to babble his excuses and went for the offense instead.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well,” Keller said. “I have some tests to run and some reading to do. Assuming you can get the notes.”

“Oh, I’ll get them,” Rodney said. “They’ll be in your in box before you get home.”

“Good,” she said, and then paused.

“What…?” Rodney said, alarmed again. “He’s not all…” He flailed a little with his hands, trying to and failing think of a more tactful phrase than ‘disgustingly buggy’. Something about Keller always made him self-conscious about things like that. Maybe it was the way she never hesitated to call bullshit. She seemed to know what he meant though and gave him an assessing look, which annoyed him.

“Look, I think this trumps doctor-patient confidentiality,” Rodney snapped. “He’s in my house. I’d like to know if he’s going to-“ he flailed again, “--in the middle of the night and kill me in my sleep.”

“How would I know?” Keller said. “You’re the one who volunteered to keep him locked in your basement.”

“Garage,” Rodney said. “And it’s possible I hadn’t worked out all the, the mechanics of the practical-“ Keller waited, but really, he had nothing. He hadn’t actually thought about it at all beyond not getting the SGC involved. Finally, she relented.

“He seems as well as can be expected,” she shrugged. “The skin changes are obviously uncomfortable; his vision is affected by the increase in light sensitivity of the altered eye; his metabolism is in flux, blood pressure’s up…” She paused again.

“Didn’t it make him feel good last time?” Rodney asked. “Better, stronger, faster?”

“He’s not turning bionic, Rodney,” Keller said and Rodney rolled his eyes. “And, as I said, I need to run some tests.”

“What about mentally?” he asked.

“Mentally, he seems… fine,” she said, slowly. “A little depressed maybe, understandable under the circumstances, but no signs of psychosis, paranoia, dementia…”

“Yet,” Rodney said. He didn’t get the rebuke he was expecting. Something about the way Keller was looking past him to the closed door made him think there was more she wasn’t saying.

“And..?” he prompted.

“Nothing,” she said, hesitantly. “I think he’s cold.”

“Believe me,” Rodney said, grimacing. “You saw his good side.”

“I meant physically cold, Rodney,” she said. “It’s freezing in here.”

“Oh, forgive me for keeping my house at a temperature I find bearable,” Rodney said, defensive even though he knew it was true. The air conditioner ran at max 24/7. His electric bills were outrageous. But he couldn’t stand the Nevada heat.

Keller shook her head and walked to the front door. She stopped there, hand on the handle, and turned back to him, a slight frown on her face that might have been disapproval.

“What?” he asked, casting his gaze around with the inane thought that maybe he’d left a copy of Hustler on the guest room night table or something - inane mostly because he hadn’t owned a copy ofHustler since he was 14. And even if he had, what right did she have..? His thoughts trailed off and he brought his gaze back to her face. The assessing look was there again, that slightly worried expression that she’d worn through all the hearings. Then, to his surprise, her expression eased.

“I’m glad you two have settled your differences,” she said, laying a small, cool hand on his arm. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, bird light against his skin, or of the strange compulsion he felt to wrap himself around it, never let her take it back. The touch unsettled him enough that he barely even had time to process her words, let alone form some kind of coherent denial. And then it was too late anyway, she had the door open, letting the night air in and was stepping away from him.

“I’ll get back to you as soon as I have something,” Keller called over her shoulder, and maybe it was too cold in here because the loss of warmth where her hand had been was enough to make Rodney shiver.

The house was quiet and too new to be creaky. Rodney’s stomach whined an interrogative. He supposed he could ask if Sheppard was hungry. Now that he was free to, though, he felt reluctant to approach the closed door of the guest room. Maybe Sheppard was sleeping in there. Maybe he wasn’t. Either way, Rodney doubted he wanted company. Rodney certainly didn’t.

Instead he headed for the kitchen where he nuked himself a frozen chicken dinner from the undiminished stack of identical blue boxes in the freezer and ate it while slowly hacking his way through the SGC’s reassuringly and annoyingly impressive security. A good deal of the hacking was of the ‘create a crack and let it run’ variety so at the same time as he was breaking in through the back door, he logged on legitimately though the ultra secure server in order see what an unsupervised Zelenka had wrought in his absence.

Mostly what he’d wrought turned out to be email detailing approximately one million nitpicky little tweaks and twiddles, each of which Rodney had to vet or argue with or save them from. Working with Radek was a little like working with a nervous grandmother with obsessive compulsive disorder, although he had to admit that the kind of crazed attention to detail that Radek brought to the table could be useful at times. When it wasn’t holding them back.

He was so involved with his work that the sound of the guest room door opening gave him a serious start. He was grateful to hear footsteps pad along the hall and then the muffled sound of water running. By the time Sheppard came into the kitchen he’d managed to get his heart rate under control.

Sheppard looked tired and a little cranky, standing awkwardly in the kitchen doorway in just a pullover and jeans. He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses and the gold-green of his alien eye seemed almost backlit. It gave him a strange distracted appearance. Like Ford had looked after his change, caught halfway between two unreadable expressions. Disturbing. Rodney realized he was staring and his eyes darted around the kitchen, coming helplessly to rest on John again.

“Did you, uh… sleep?” he asked. John shrugged. Then grimaced.

“Look,” he said. “I just… “ He shook his head, annoyed. “I should get a motel room.”

“Right,” Rodney said. “Because they’re so well equipped to deal with…” he gestured at John’s impending bugness.

“I told you, I’m not-“

“There yet,” Rodney said. “Yes. I heard. But personally I’d rather not run the risk of some cleaning lady gossiping about the biker in 21B who leaves a ring of blue scales in the bathtub. It’s not like your people don’t pick up on that kind of thing.”

“My people…” John said it slowly, like the very concept was unknown to him.

“The military.”

Even behind the shades, John’s shock at his words was evident. Rodney felt a pang of discomfort. He almost apologized, but John spoke first.

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” John said.

“Oh yeah,” Rodney said. “It’s been my dream to have you show up mutating and homicidal on my doorstep, and put the one good thing…” He couldn’t actually bear to finish the sentence. John wasn’t really listening to him anyway. He knew that frozen, pleasant expression -- although it didn’t usually look so patently false. “Look, it’ll be a few days, tops. You’ll be cured, I’ll still be employed, Keller can add an exciting new disease experience to her life list and we can all go on with our lives.”

John seemed to consider for a moment, then he nodded.

“Fine,” he said. “I have a bedroll on my bike. I’ll sleep in the garage.”

“My car is in the garage,” Rodney said automatically. The garage was the only thing that kept the Volvo from being a 6000 lb rolling oven when he got into it after the sun had risen. “You can, uh, stay in the guest room.”

John shook his head.

“The guest room’s not secure,” he said.

“You said you’re not there yet.”

“Never know when I’ll turn, though,” John said, with a small, vicious smirk. “The garage or I go.”

“Suit yourself,” Rodney said. If John wanted to sleep out there with the scorpions and lizards and god knows what else rather than share air with him, then Rodney wasn’t going to stop him. John’s desire to be as far away from him as possible had been made clear enough five years ago. Had become more than mutual in the meantime, so Rodney wasn’t entirely sure why it still bothered him.

He went outside, opened the garage door and backed the car out onto the gravel. It was going to be hell in there tomorrow. After a moment’s consideration, he disabled the remote mechanism. Then he closed the garage door by hand - no easy task -- and engaged the ground-lock Then he went back inside.

In the kitchen, he rummaged angrily through his surprisingly full junk drawers for the spare garage key while John went out to get his things. It wasn’t as if he had invited Sheppard to show up on his - aha! There it was. - doorstep. The inside door to the garage was just off the kitchen, although Rodney never used it, in case opening the door were to let in any of the horrifying desert pests- spiders, snakes, scorpions -- sure to be lurking inside.

He fiddled with the stiff lock until it caught and the door opened, then gingerly felt the dusty wall until he found the light switch and flicked it on.

As a place to sleep, the garage was decidedly unappealing - unfinished walls with naked wooden framing and roof exposed, plywood roof, the single light bulb hanging from the rafters cast a greenish light on the brown-painted cement floor. There was a drain in the middle of the floor, dust and cobwebs on every surface. Boxes that Rodney had never unpacked were piled against one wall, an unused lawnmower and gardening tools that had come with the house lined the back wall. There were 6 small rectangular windows in the garage door. A hose hung on a hook nailed into the one uncluttered wall and there was a water spout about six inches off the ground just underneath it. All modern conveniences. The room smelled of dust and gasoline. It was already colder than the air-conditioned house and cooling fast in the desert night.

He heard John’s footsteps behind him.

“There you go,” Rodney said.

“Thanks,” John said, as he moved past him, careful not to touch. John dumped his bedroll on the floor along with an insulated blanket and a battered black leather pouch that looked like it had come off the bike itself. Rodney found himself watching John crouch to unpack. It was… strange having John right there. Right there.

All the imaginary conversations he’d had where he’d told John exactly what he thought of him; all the scenarios he’d imagined where John had come to him begging for forgiveness or help. He thought this had even been one of them, but he couldn’t actually remember how it had gone. He was pretty sure he’d felt better about it all in his imagination. That John had been much less… John-like, he guessed.

This studied (or worse, maybe not even studied) ignoring of him, those quick efficient movements laying out his kit, that stubborn refusal to make any of it anything but as hard as possible for Rodney - this was definitely John. Bug, or no bug, he didn’t know anybody better in the world for that.

He left without saying goodnight, and after a moment’s debate, locked the door behind him. Then he went back to the kitchen and checked his hacks. Still chewing their way through the firewalls and making steady progress. He nuked himself another chicken dinner and ate it while he fiddled with the problems Zelenka had sent him. God they were close. If Sheppard only knew how close. Well, once they’d gotten off the ground, Rodney would be sure to tell him.

He worked on the specs until his crack program beeped at him that he was in. It took only a few minutes of rifling through the database to find Carson’s old notes, which he gathered up with barely a pang, and had the dummy account send to Keller’s inbox.

Then he threw the remnants of his dinner in the garbage, turned out the lights and went to bed.

Rodney woke after a surprisingly restful sleep. There was no sign of John having broken through the garage door in a mutant rage. He did listen at the garage door while he nuked breakfast but didn’t even hear snoring. After another, slightly longer, internal debate he unlocked the garage door but didn’t open it.

Outside, the day was already baking in the late morning sun. The huge, dusty, black=and-chrome monstrosity still sat gleaming in the gravel of his driveway absorbing heat. Rodney walked around it once on the way to his own car. It was the kind of bike that made people stop and stare but not linger to meet the owner. The medallion said Harley Davidson but Rodney had never seen the model before. It looked vaguely Wraith-y in design, and that was disturbing all by itself. Already drenched in the late morning heat, Rodney got into his pale blue Volvo oven and headed to Area 51.

As was usual, Radek made no mention of the previous day’s unfortunate incident, choosing instead to let him settle in while peppering him intermittently with conversational salvos: The last simulation had some troubling numbers, had Rodney seen them? And somebody named Jared had gone and recalculated massing vectors in exactly the way it should not have been done. And there was tuna surprise on the lunch menu for the third day in a row, and had Rodney found any solution for the wobble in the gravitational field inducers?

He didn’t remember Radek being so chatty when they were on Atlantis - but maybe he himself had been more involved in the little details of day to day.

Or perhaps his concentration was not as keen as it usually was. The day passed ridiculously slowly. His mind kept darting back to John - to what he might be doing, thinking, turning into... To Keller and her tests. He debated emailing her to see how things were going, furtively composing short, cryptic notes from various dummy accounts and then deleting them unsent. He even considered phoning the house, knowing that John wouldn’t pick up, his hand straying to the cell in his breast pocket, over and over again.

He caught Radek watching him speculatively -- each time meeting the gently concerned gaze with a scowl and dismissive head shake as though he’d only looked up in the process of puzzling out a problem and not because he could feel himself being watched.

He thought, briefly, about actually telling Radek what was going on so that he would stop watching him - Radek after all had never fallen out with John, had in fact managed to stay in his good graces, even during the hearings, perhaps even after, before John had dropped off the grid entirely.

But really, there was no need for Radek to know. He didn’t need to put his position at risk. And, closer to the truth, the idea of having yet another person tell him how glad they were that he and John had made up just because they were being relatively civil toward one another made him feel uncomfortable.

Or perhaps he was getting sick. Ordinary anxiety couldn’t derail him like this, could it? Not just the distraction of whatever was waiting at home, but the strange blurts of memory he couldn’t stop from coming: Elizabeth’s conspiratorial smile the first time the 8th chevron had locked; the arch of John’s eyebrow when Rodney asked him to help test the personal shield; Lieutenant Ford’s steadying hand on his shoulder in some woods somewhere. Teyla’s face as he handed her a scalding cup of tea; Ronon’s real laugh; Carson’s jostling elbow against his own. Stupid moments. Meaningless moments that no one would ever remember now but him, and what difference did any of it make?

Maybe it was the work itself. Things weren’t immediate here in the way they had been on Atlantis. Everything had seemed important then -- every breath, every choice. He supposed danger did that, made it all seem so very significant. Whereas the reality was that it didn’t matter much what you did, or said, or ate, or who you loved. Choice like that was an illusion.

The reality was that things just happened - people came and went, people died or lived, people were right or wrong, but no matter how smart you were you could never predict the outcome of any decision. However smart you were, the universe was just that much smarter and it really didn’t care whether you were alive or dead or a bug or a replicator or here, or gone…

He realized to his horror that he was near tears.

“Rodney…?” Radek’s voice was soft, careful, in that way it often was when Rodney least wanted his attention. He opened his mouth to tell Radek to fuck off and let him work but found that he was close to choking on the rising tide of feelings and waved Radek off angrily instead.

If Radek hesitated, Rodney pretended not to notice and continued to ignore him until he was gone.

The day was clearly shot, though. The more he tried to engage with the work, the more his mind wandered over territory he had no wish to revisit. In the end it was all he could do to contain his anxiety as he packed up the laptop, and slipped out of the lab.

The drive back through the Nevada wasteland was filled with Rodney’s slowly rising dread. He wasn’t even sure what he feared might have happened, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something had.

But when he arrived home, John’s bike was still there, albeit in a slightly different spot in the gravel. Inside, John was still there as well, sunglasses in place but instead of jeans and biker chic, now he was dressed in used looking sweats and a dark, hooded sweatshirt. The TV was on, but John wasn’t watching. Instead he was lying on the living room floor doing sit ups - something Rodney could not remember ever having seen John do. He looked like he’d been doing them for a long time but almost as soon as Rodney closed the door he leapt to his feet.

“Hey,” he said, overly loudly - the way people did when they were listening to loud music but had forgotten they had earphones in. John wasn’t wearing earphones though.

“Hey,” Rodney replied, uneasily. “You’re… in the house.”

“Yeah,” John said. He was panting a little, his hands twitching at his sides like they wanted to curl into fists. He shrugged unapologetically. “Restless,” he said, like it explained everything.

“Right,” Rodney said, remembering John, yellow eyed and wordless, sprinting away from them into the cave full of bugs. He’d smelled sharp then, sharp and sour like vinegar, the scent lingering in Rodney’s nose while they watched the clock run down on his humanity. Rodney took a cautious sniff but he couldn’t smell anything except the slightly freezer burnt smell of the air conditioned air.

“Any news?” John asked, hopping up to sit balanced on the arm of the sofa, both heels pressed against the pale leather.

“News?” Rodney echoed.

“From Keller?”

“Oh, right. Right,” Rodney said. “No. No news.” Something about the perched, waiting quality of John’s posture made Rodney’s shoulders hunch.

“Look, is everything… okay?” he asked. John raised an eyebrow. “Well obviously not ‘okay’ okay but-“ He broke off when John stood suddenly, moving towards him fast. Rodney stepped back, reflexively clutching his laptop case against his chest, but John just brushed past him into the hall.

”I’m taking a shower,” John said brightly over his shoulder. “Wouldn’t want to leave a ring in the tub.” The door slammed behind him and the sound of water started up.

“Ha ha,” Rodney said to the empty room. Then he stomped over to the kitchen and tossed the laptop case on the island, irritated. It wasn’t like he’d been planning on washing the sweat and dust off after a hard day’s work or anything. He plugged in the charger and booted up the machine. The door to the garage was open. Rodney walked over and stuck his head in.

He was surprised to find the bedroll still spread open on the floor. John’s personal stuff spread out in a little crescent around the pack. John was usually pretty tidy, but who knew this new version of Sheppard. Maybe he was rebelling against all those years of hospital corners. Rodney would be nice though and warn John about scorpions. He heard the water shut off, loud in the pipes. Jerk. Maybe he wouldn’t.

He was eating a frozen dinner by the time John came back into the room, same clothes but he’d left the shades off. His hair was wet and curled around his ears, dampening the neck of his shirt. He made a face at Rodney’s dinner.

“That smells disgusting,” he said.

“No one’s offering,” Rodney said, his hand coming up like a protective shield. Convict style, Jeannie called it. John just huffed a laugh. He drummed a rhythmic little riff on the countertop with his fingers, then did the same thing on one of the cabinet doors. Then he started a circuit of the kitchen, doing a little tippy-tippy-tap-tap on every surface. Rodney pretended to ignore him. His appetite had wilted, but he kept shoveling in the chicken, mashed potatoes, cherry cobbler and peas indiscriminately.

“So how was your day, dear?” John asked, hopping up to sit on the counter beside the sink. “Save any good planets? Or do you just blow them up now? I always get that mixed up.”

“Very funny,” Rodney said.

“No seriously,” John said. “I want to know.”

“Classification?” Rodney said. “Non-disclosure agreement? Any of this ring a bell?”

“Sure,” John said smoothly, coming down off the counter to lean both elbows on the kitchen island, chin in his hands, his mismatched eyes staring laser hot into Rodney’s own. “But are you happy?”

Rodney put his fork down.

“Ecstatic,” he said, getting up and tossing the unfinished dinner into the garbage. “Excuse me.”

Rodney went into the bathroom and turned the shower on. Then he stood at the sink, and looked at his face in the mirror. He didn’t like what he saw. He never did. In fact he barely recognized the pale, sagging face with its dark shadowed eyes and receded hairline. He looked like his father. He looked old.

He turned away and undressed, stepped into the water and let it wash over him. This had been a mistake, he realized, taking Sheppard in. This was all the thanks he would get for it - Sheppard lashing out at him, blaming him.

As if he’d been the one who’d killed Elizabeth. He covered his face with his hands, but the memory still hurt like a physical thing. The panic he’d felt initiating the nanite activation program - he’d been certain enough that he’d neutralized their communication ability, and yet there had been no time to double check anything. And then the guilt when John caught them out. Guilty, even though he’d known he was right. How could John have expected him to let her…

But John was more than prepared for that, it had seemed. John’s anger had been so personal. And then the house of cards coming down. Elizabeth’s brief, confused moments of consciousness - the relief he’d felt at hearing his own name on her lips, and then the rollercoaster drop as her eyes rolled back in her head and she’d twitched and flailed.

And okay, it had been bad, but not as bad as John had thought. As Keller had thought. The nanites hadn’t undone his reprogramming - just a sort of specialized strike force designed to activate when such programming came into play. He’d figured it out almost instantly, could have overridden it -- of course he could have.

He’d explained it over and over at the hearing, answering the committee’s questions, but looking right at John, willing him to understand.

He’d needed ten minutes. Fifteen at the outside. Possibly twenty - it wasn’t an exact science. But John had given him one, counting down from sixty while Myers set up the EMP generator…

Rodney slammed his forearm against the wet tiled wall.

The pain cleared his head a little, but it left him drained. Exhausted. He managed to finish his shower and drag himself to the bedroom.

The television was on in the living room, but he didn’t have the energy to deal with Sheppard right now. He got into clean boxers and a t-shirt and crawled into bed.

Sleep wouldn’t come though. Instead he couldn’t stop thinking about Elizabeth’s last moments. The shape of the program as it had come together in his mind, John’s flat voice counting down the seconds. His fingers itched with the need to type. If it were happening now, how fast could he key in the new code?

He’d finished the program that would have worked - probably would have worked, the little voice in his head that demanded accuracy, insisted - before the Apollo had even found them. Finished it while Zelenka had overridden the safety protocols that let Atlantis jump the short distance to a habitable planet and timed himself over and over again while Sheppard went down to the Chair below and gave the order to jump.

Fifty/fifty, Radek had said and John hadn’t forbidden him from bucking the odds and Rodney still couldn’t understand how it was different.

He’d tried to ask John after the short, terrible debriefing on the Apollo. Atlantis still hanging dead in space outside the conference room window and that condescending bastard Ellis questioning his every statement as if Rodney were the sort of incompetent lab chimp who had ass-kissed his way into his job. John had just sat there, blank-faced and monotone. Yes, sir. No, sir. Like Ellis was someone whose judgment mattered.

He’d tried to ask John then, as they left the tiny conference room. He’d really wanted to understand.

He hadn’t seen the punch coming, or even really understood that John had hit him until afterwards. Like everything to do with the workings of the human mind, the cause and the effect seemed to have no directional arrow. He’d asked John and then he was on the floor, his jaw aching, and he still had no idea how it had all gone wrong.

It suddenly seemed terribly unfair that Sheppard was not lying in the dark, reliving his worst nightmare. Perhaps having him so close at hand was not entirely without its compensations. Rodney got out of bed.

Sheppard was slumped on the couch in the dark, watching television with his sunglasses on. Or pretending to. Rodney picked up the remote and shut the TV off.

“It was a judgment call,” Rodney said. “You don’t have the right to the… the moral high ground.”

John laughed -- a harsh, unpleasant sound.

“So, really, it’s all about you, huh?”

“That’s not fair,” Rodney gritted out through clenched teeth. “And this isn’t funny. I don’t have your ironic distance or whatever you want to call it. This is something that matters to me.”

“Well, that’s different then,” John said, looking up at him from the couch. “’Cause it sure couldn’t matter to me.” And abruptly they were nose to nose. Rodney wasn’t even sure how he’d gotten there, fists balled tight, heart pounding.

John had moved… fast. Silently and suddenly within arm’s reach, smile dazzling. The sharp musty vinegar smell pouring off him…

Rodney felt the immediate fury of the moment ebb abruptly, leaving him queasy with fear. He pointed at John instead.

“This is a, a, a bug thing,” he said. It took a second or two to penetrate, but he saw the moment it did -- John’s grin dimmed a milliwatt. He was vibrating in place now and Rodney felt the back of his neck prickle, but he wasn’t about to back down. “It is. You’re all pumped full of enzyme. I remember exactly how much fun that is.” John opened his mouth, moved his jaw from side to side like he wanted to crack it. Then he shrugged.

“What if it is?” he said.

“We should,” Rodney’s mouth was bone dry. He had to swallow to make enough spit to go on. “We should lock you up.” John was already shaking his head, no, but Rodney had found his voice.

“Think,” he said. “This is why you came here. This is why-“ It hit him suddenly. This was why John had come here. Despite hating Rodney’s guts and Rodney hating his and the five years and the chance that he could end up, if Rodney so decided, locked in the basement of the SGC with the X-Files and the alien autopsy… He was staring straight into John’s eyes - one inhuman and unreadable, the other bright with something Rodney really didn’t want to see.

He did see the moment John slid back into the mental pilot seat. The gauges flipping over from bug crazy to… well, John.

“Do it,” John said.

Part 2