Ancient Zombies, Brotherly Love, and Other Strange Tales, by shaenie (Gods and Monsters Challenge)
Title: Ancient Zombies, Brotherly Love, and Other Strange Tales.
Author: Shaenie
Rating: NC17
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Spoilers: Through Season One
Warnings: Um. Zombies. Incest. Sex. In some combination. *facepalms*
Word Count: not quite 10,000
Notes: Thanks go to the usual suspects, cindyjade and fiercelydreamed, for all the usual reasons, and also to pir8fancierfor yet another last minute beta, for she is the awesome. This is a pinch-hit for Sweet Charity for bitter_crimson, which just happened to meet the challenge recquirements. I hope very much that sie enjoyes it, because it's pure crack, but it's made to order crack.
Summary: The title really says it all.
First of all, the whole thing with Major Sheppard happens before Rodney even realizes there is even a possibility of a thing with Major Sheppard. This is something that rarely happens to him.
They've been in Atlantis for three days, and so far, they've managed to: save the city; awaken the race of creatures that had sent the Ancients running for distant stars; and adopt Lothar and all of the Hill People (and, oh God, he doesn't really know Teyla that well, but he is absolutely certain that he must never never never say anything remotely like it in her presence; the fact that she wouldn't understand the reference almost certainly wouldn't stop her from comprehending the insult).
Rodney has personally spent thirty of the last thirty-six hours trying to balance the main ballast tanks, which the rest of the expedition apparently doesn't really understand that the city needs in order not to sink because they won't stop bothering him about stupid crap. And, oh, oh yes, if he ever gets a chance, he is going to personally thank the Ancients for the -- totally outside of his realm of expertise, thanks very much -- crash course in nautical engineering by kicking them squarely in their probably practically-atrophied-away-to-nothing balls.
So it's fair to say he is a little on the cranky side when he staggers into his quarters at what his mental clock automatically tells him would have been forty-one minutes past eleven at night Colorado Springs, forty-one minutes past six the following day at McMurdo, and fucked-if-he'd-had-time to work out an equivalent for Lantea's 28.1 hour solar day factoring in fucking light years, but which definitely counts as late, to find Major Sheppard standing at the foot of his bed, staring blearily at it.
Major Sheppard's hair is even more ridiculous than usual; the idea that a guy who can't even control his own hair is in charge of Atlantis' military presence sets off Rodney's absurdity reflex, which might have been more manageable had he got even a handful of hours of sleep in the prior three days.
He snickers.
Major Sheppard turns and gives him a look even blearier than the one he'd been bestowing on Rodney's bed, but only says, "Hey, McKay."
Rodney says, "Yes, yes; why are you here, Major?" and staggers, upright but failing, toward the bed the Major is staring fixedly at.
Major Sheppard makes a listless gesture in direction of the bed. "Tired," he says, and then adds a jaw-cracking yawn as if for punctuation.
Rodney rolls his eyes. "Yes, me too," he agrees, and perches on the side of the bed, hands automatically fumbling at the wet laces of his shoes. His ass isn't wet, but his khakis are soaked up to the knee and he doesn't want to get the bed wet. "That doesn't explain your presence here."
Sheppard stares at him, thick, expressive brows drawn together frowningly, but he isn't actually frowning. His face is soft and dazed, as though his eyebrows are his only features that still have enough energy to express anything at all. "To go to bed?" he says, as though it isn't a question, while his tone definitely makes it sound like one.
"I'm sure I'm no expert, Major," Rodney says, and shrugs out of his science team jacket, which is wet to the elbows, and throws it disgustedly onto the floor. He pops the top button of his khakis, and glances up in time to see Sheppard blinking stupidly at him. "But I am fairly sure they don't assign heads of departments to bunk together." Sheppard stares uncomprehendingly; his eyes are dull and Rodney abruptly sees the mottled shape of a bruise along his jaw and the side of his neck, disappearing down past the collar of his uniform shirt. It occurs to him that he has no idea what Sheppard has spent the last couple of days doing, but it had apparently been just as ass-handing as Rodney's own thirty-six hour stretch of hell. He finds himself gentling his voice in a way that none of his minions would have likely believed possible. "These are my quarters," he tells Sheppard.
"Oh," Sheppard says, and looks around, as though searching for signs of his own occupation. His eyebrows continue to frown, and some of the expression bleeds down to his lips, which twitch downward.
Rodney stands briefly and shoves his khakis down his hips and leaves them in a puddle by the side of the bed, along with his wet socks. Sheppard blinks at him, but his face is starting to show something other than baffled weariness. He looks faintly alarmed.
"I," he says, and Rodney watches his eyes slide down to Rodney's boxers for several seconds, then ease down his thighs with what is nearly a physical sensation.
Huh, he thinks, because he hadn't seen this coming, but he's never been particularly picky about sex or where he gets it, and Major Sheppard is fairly hot, albeit in a befuddled sort of way just at the moment. In his memory, he can see Sheppard's smirky self-confidence, appearing in mid-air with the Puddle Jumper (Rodney sighs aloud at the designation, but he recognizes a futile battle) hovering in the bay, lips cocked and eyes narrowed. He remembers the warm twist of heat in his own belly when Sheppard had said, "Doctor. This is why you brought me here." From Elizabeth's face, she'd been just as aware of the subtle implications of such a statement, but being a diplomat, she's trained to ignore things like that.
Rodney, on the other hand, is a scientist. It isn't in his nature to ignore anything.
Still, a bit more evidence wouldn't be a bad thing, so he yanks the hem of his blue science team shirt up and drags it over his head, dropping it on top of the jacket. When his face emerges from the material, Sheppard is checking out the shape of Rodney's rapidly filling cock through the thin material of his boxers.
There's no way to even pretend it's anything else. Huh, Rodney thinks again, but he doesn't waste time on motives or any of that nonsense. The evidence is enough to act on, the results are desirable enough to risk the slight chance of failure, and he has just spent the last thirty hours wading through sea water. He isn't going to question anybody's motives too closely. His cock has gone from filling to fully hard, and Sheppard doesn't seem to be able to take his eyes off it.
Rodney smirks happily.
Sheppard doesn't even look up until Rodney's halfway to him, and when he does, he doesn't move away. He still looks faintly alarmed, but when Rodney slides a hand around the back of his neck and leans in, Sheppard kisses back, his weight heavy as he sways into Rodney's chest. Sheppard doesn't say anything when Rodney pulls away, but his eyes are clearer, almost sharp. He's giving Rodney a searching look.
"Yes, non-disclosure, discretion, ridiculous regulations, let's pretend we've covered that. I'm too tired to go into it and still be awake when it's time for the orgasms," Rodney tells him, and Sheppard's lips quirk into that starting-to-be-familiar smirk.
He isn't actually handsome, Rodney decides, and neither is he pretty, which is what Rodney would have said previous to this encounter. There are dark circles under his eyes and he's got some swelling coming up along the left side of his face, more evidence that the last few days haven't been a walk in the park for him any more than they have been for Rodney. But he's nice to look at, appealing in an aesthetic way that Rodney can't come up with an actual designation for, so he kisses Sheppard again.
Sheppard kisses back agreeably, cooperative but unmoving for several seconds before his hands apparently receive an abrupt signal from his slowly-processing brain, and they curl warmly around Rodney's upper arms, pulling Rodney closer. Rodney makes a pleased noise into Sheppard's mouth, and Sheppard answers it with a little growl, and they tumble onto the bed with Sheppard still completely dressed.
They only manage handjobs, as tired as they both are, and Sheppard falls asleep with his shirt and pants open but still on, and it's good. It's really pretty spectacularly good.
When Rodney wakes the next morning, he expects Sheppard to be gone. Instead, he's a warmly snoring lump crowding Rodney half off the narrow bed, face relaxed and close to both pretty and handsome in spite of the mottled bruising purpling the side of his face. Rodney suppresses the urge to fetch an icepack, and instead punishes him for hogging the bed with a blowjob. Sheppard wakes halfway through, groaning and rolling his hips, and afterwards murmurs encouragingly, "Yeah, all right. Come here, then," before he proceeds to blow Rodney so hotly that there's no chance in hell he hasn't done this at least a hundred times before.
So then, barely three days into the Pegasus Galaxy, there is the thing where Rodney is sleeping with Major Sheppard.
***
A few days later, the whole incest thing also takes Rodney completely by surprise.
He's still sitting on the infirmary bed, arm stinging where Carson had injected him with the gene therapy, when Carson says: "Right, well, let's take a look at your file for a comparative DNA representation, shall we?"
"Will we be able to tell anything so soon?" Rodney asks, because Carson just said it could take a few hours, and kicks his heels frustratedly against the side of the table.
"No, no," Carson says absently, fingers tip-tapping on the keyboard of a laptop, but there are frown lines developing across his forehead even as he says it.
"What?" Rodney demands, abruptly panicky. "What? You've mutated me, haven't you? I'm going to turn into a horrible crazy-haired mutant from Sheppard's DNA, aren't I? It's going to mutate my magnificent brain, and I'm going to die in some hideous--"
"You're not mutating, Rodney!" Carson interrupts, shooting him an exasperated look. "Well," he adds in a considering tone, "you are, of course, we hope. For the gene therapy to be effective, of course there has to be mutation." Carson gaze returns to the screen, and he frowns again. "I'm not even looking at your present DNA configuration; this is your baseline DNA on file with the SGC. It's all perfectly normal, except..."
"Except what?"
"Well, except you already have a protein sequence analogous to the Major's ATA gene."
Rodney thinks about that for several seconds; genetics isn't his field, but he remembers enough from the courses he was forced to take as an undergrad to recognize that as weird. "You're saying I already have the ATA gene," Rodney says flatly.
"Well, it looks that way," Carson allows, face scrunches into a truly unflattering expression of confusion. "But if that were the case, you'd have come up in screening. And even if you didn't, you'd have been able to operate the Ancient technology we had available to us in the outpost. Except..."
"You said analogous," Rodney says pointedly. "As in: Similar in function but not in structure and evolutionary origin. Which means, a gene that should, in theory, operate in an identical way to the way the ATA gene operates in Major Sheppard, but doesn't look quite the same?"
"Well, yes, that's the understood definition, thank you," Carson snaps, and does something that causes the image he's looking at zoom out a bit, revealing more of Rodney's DNA on the screen. "Except..."
"Will you stop saying that," Rodney snaps.
Carson rolls his eyes, but turns in his chair to give Rodney a long look. "What I mean to say is that you have a protein sequence, a gene, which appears in all respects identical to Major Sheppard's, and yet appears not to confer the same connection to Ancient technology as the Major's ATA gene. An inactive gene."
"What?" Rodney squawks, indignant and annoyed. "How is that even possible? Why?"
"How should I know?" Carson snaps, and rolls his eyes again as Rodney sputters indignantly. He spins back around. "Let's just have a wee peek at the Major's DNA, shall we?"
"Oh, excellent, yes, let's look at the DNA of the man who is completely healthy and non-mutating, and whose ATA gene isn't broken, shall we?" Rodney snipes back, but he slides off the edge of the table so he can watch over Carson's shoulder as he pulls up the Major's genetic profile on the screen. "Then maybe we can have tea and crumpets," he enthuses facetiously.
Carson snarls, "Don't tease me about crumpets, Rodney," in a voice that's disturbingly reminiscent of Linda Blair in her "Exorcist" phase.
Rodney chooses not to answer on the grounds that he's afraid Carson's head will actually rotate, and he still needs to know why his DNA is broken.
"Hmmph," Carson says after a few minutes, while Rodney stands behind him and stares at the screen without any real idea of what he's seeing. There are differences, he can see them, but damned if he can remember what any of them signify. There are similarities, too -- the ATA gene in both windows look identical as far as Rodney can tell. If that's what it actually is and Carson isn't having a lack-of-crumpet-fueled psychotic break. "That's..." He pauses and looks at Rodney. There's an odd, quirky little smile on his lips, but the rest of his face looks tight and strained. "That's odd, aye."
"What?" Rodney demands. "What's odd? My impending mutanthood?"
"You're not mutating, Rodney," Carson says absently, but he's typing away at the laptop screen, and almost seems to have forgotten that Rodney is even present. "No," he murmurs, mouth curled into that quirky smile again, though his voice sounds both amused and uneasy at once. "No, surely not. What are the chances...?"
But the laptop makes a short, bright ding sound, and even from behind Carson, Rodney sees 'INDEX MATCH' pop up in a box on the screen, partially obscuring both twirls of DNA. Carson turns his head slowly and looks at Rodney incredulously.
"What?" Rodney demands.
"Well, it's only an 8 marker test," Carson says, which isn't an answer as far as Rodney can tell. "That's still quite a margin of error. It's a fluke." He taps at the keys. "A fluke," he repeats, and jabs viciously at the enter key with his forefinger. "No, of course I don't have a source of paternal DNA, don't be ridiculous," he snaps at the computer, and taps again, fingers quick and agitated. "Just run the bloody numbers."
This time the two separate windows shift and overlap, and Rodney watches as several of the enlarged sections of double-helix overlap precisely and light up. This time, the box that pops up on the screen says 'INDEX MATCH - 96%.'
"Damn," Carson says, and Rodney blinks in surprise. He gives Rodney a quick, almost furtive glance, and then reaches up to tap his radio. "Major Sheppard, can you report to the infirmary please."
"Carson," Rodney says slowly, staring at the screen with dawning horror. "Carson, tell me that doesn't mean what it looks like it means?"
Carson doesn't say anything.
"Carson," Rodney repeats shakily. "Don't make me rend your soul from your body."
"The good news," Carson says uncertainly, "is that I'm nearly one hundred percent certain that the gene therapy is going to be a success."
"I will destroy your life," Rodney warns. "Bathrooms will explode in your vicinity. Showers will always run cold, computers will always run hot, you will never again receive tech support from a single solitary member of the science staff..."
"Rodney, I've never questioned your request for certain... ah," Carson coughs delicately, his face so red it's nearly purple, and seems to have to swallow hard before he continues, "... certain, um, provisions, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to..."
"Are you freaking kidding me?" Rodney screams, and actually reaches to choke the life out of Carson Beckett.
Sheppard arrives just in time to stop him. The fucker.
**
Then the thing with Major Sheppard and the thing with the incest are both abruptly over, except in the way that Rodney and the Major are still, by some impossible twist of ironic fate (or possibly a tear in the fabric of space-time, Rodney hasn't entirely ruled that one out), brothers.
In the absence of contact with Earth, there's no way for them to figure out how it had happened: no records, no maternal or paternal DNA on file, no one to ask (though John's alleged father is still alive, Rodney discovers, so if they do manage to reestablish contact with Earth someday, they'll be able to seek answers there),simply nothing Rodney can do in order to reconcile the fact that the one person on Atlantis that he has managed to sustain a non-professional relationship with for more than six days (it had actually reached the unimagined heights of eleven days at the time of their last fuck) is his brother.
"Is your sister my sister, or is my brother your brother," Sheppard had asked, dull-eyed with shock, the two of them staring at one another across a sudden and awkward three feet of space between them. He hadn't seemed all that curious about the actual answer, but Rodney had answered anyway, because what the hell else was he supposed to do?
"She looks just like me; I'm pretty sure she's actually my sister."
"Huh," Sheppard had said disinterestedly.
It turns out that the reason that Rodney's inactive gene hadn't come up during the testing they'd all undergone was due to the simple fact that they hadn't been testing for that gene. Sheppard was the first person to show up with that particular expression of it, and it hadn't been added to the database for testing until a few days before the expedition had left for Atlantis, long after Rodney had been tested.
It also turns out that Carson had been right; the gene therapy had not only been effective, it had been wildly, crazily, wonderfully effective. Rodney now has his own equivalent of Sheppard's magic gene. He's always been of the opinion that if one branch of research dead ends, you take the next branch over and start again, so he's so busy using the crap out of it that it's fairly easy to avoid Sheppard entirely.
It probably doesn't hurt that Sheppard is doing his level best to avoid Rodney as well. Rodney distantly thinks this is horrendously unfair; it isn't like he'd known, like it had been his fault or anything. But since he's doing the same thing, he can hardly cast stones.
He does the only thing he knows to do, which is to drown himself (metaphorically speaking, as the ballast tanks are holding up just fine, thanks for asking) in his work.
**
The thing with being on Sheppard's team is, Rodney's pretty sure, a peace offering.
Because he's pretty sure he genuinely likes Sheppard, incestuous sex notwithstanding, and because of some vague, nebulous idea that Rodney ought not to totally piss off and alienate both of his alleged siblings, Rodney accepts.
On their first mission, Sheppard gets bitten by a 'roided up wraith-bug, and dies.
He actually dies, poof, heart stopped, and in the thirty seconds between Ford shocking the life out of him and Teyla dragging him through the event horizon, Rodney makes a deal with a God he doesn't believe in that he will absolutely do anything to make some kind of familial... thing, something, work with Sheppard if only they could just all, please, make it through this.
Afterward, once the official infirmary visit has been dealt with, Rodney sneaks back into the infirmary with a cup of coffee and a packet of Oreos from his own personal stash.
Sheppard is awake. Sheppard is, in fact, looking a little wild around the eyes, and he's drumming his hands against his knees on the infirmary cot. "Get me out of here, McKay," he hisses as soon as Rodney is close enough to hear him.
"Shh," Rodney hisses back. "Do you want Carson to confiscate your caffeine and saturated fat?"
But when Rodney gets close enough to put down the coffee on the table beside Sheppard's bed and holds out the packet of Oreo's, Sheppard merely stares at him for five or so seconds, and then clamps a hand around Rodney's wrist with a surprisingly strong grip -- considering he'd been dead an hour ago -- and drags him over until his thighs bump against the side of the hospital bed. "What--?" Rodney demands, but then Sheppard has a hand hooked around the back of his neck and is dragging him down into an open-mouthed, slick-tongued, totally hot incestuous kiss.
Rodney groans and opens his mouth, and forgets for three-point-oh-six seconds that John Sheppard is his brother. Unfortunately, his brain is simply too powerful to ignore for long, and is currently blaring huge warning klaxons at him, the kind that resonate inside your head and make your fillings loosen in your teeth. He pulls back reluctantly.
"Hello, hi, have you met me?" Rodney whispers haughtily (mostly to hide the fact that he's hard and he can hear the tremor in his own voice). "I'm Rodney McKay, also known as your brother, remember?"
"I don't care," Sheppard whispers furiously back, and drags Rodney's mouth back down, lips hot and wet and, God help him, sinful.
Rodney jerks back again, but this time Sheppard doesn't let him pull back more than four or five inches. "Okay, first of all, incest. I'm not sure if you're aware, but illegal in both of our countries. Also, taboo pounded into people pretty much from birth!"
"Yeah," Sheppard purrs, low and totally and completely and unfairly hot. "Still don't care."
"Sheppard--" he begins, only to be immediately interrupted by the feel of Sheppard's teeth nipping at his lower lip. Rodney's eyelids sag shut, and he discovers several seconds later that he's got a hand in Sheppard's hair and his own teeth are scrapping at the stubble along the line of Sheppard's jaw, and Sheppard is dragging in fast, rough breaths that make Rodney want to shut him up with his tongue. "Fuck," he says when sanity reasserts itself in a way that's likely to leave him walking awkwardly for the next three days at least. "Stop," he mutters unconvincingly, and Sheppard slides his hand around to cradle Rodney's jaw.
"McKay," he says, slowly, voice nearly identical to the one he'd used on Elizabeth in the Puddle Jumper eleven days before. "Incest is taboo to avoid the possibility of mutant babies. Are you planning on having my mutant babies?"
"Uh," Rodney says brilliantly, the abrupt and almost painful realization that Sheppard is right briefly short-circuiting his speech center. "No?"
"Great," Sheppard says, and drags Rodney down to his mouth again.
This time, Rodney doesn't resist; Sheppard is clearly a genius.
Some minutes later, Sheppard is breathing like it's physically painful; he grates out: "Now get me out of here."
Rodney jimmies the heart monitor without a word of protest, and helps Sheppard get all the wires detached.
"Bring the Oreos," Sheppard whispers as they sneak out.
**
The thing with Sheppard -- the incestuous and totally illegal thing with his brother -- is shockingly good. It is, in fact, the hottest thing that has ever happened to Rodney.
The first thing he does when Sheppard is fucking him again, is make Sheppard take the WAIS III. He whines about the it whole time, tops out at 141, and just glares when Rodney says, "Just think what you could have gotten if you'd been trying!"
He's much less grumpy about it when Rodney drops to his knees and blows him in the testing room.
Rodney circumvents Carson's apparent disapproval and foreknowledge of the thing with Sheppard by having Teyla requisition supplies from the infirmary. This leads to at least one moment of absolute hilarity the first time she asks for them right after a mission with the whole team present. Ford looks fascinated and terrified in equal amounts; Carson mutely hands over the bag o' lube-n-condoms without a word, his ears bright red.
Rodney and Sheppard have to duck into a supply closet to laugh hysterically.
Teyla finds them there, and hands over the bag of supplies with a murmured, "I do not understand the ways of your people."
They wait until the door closes behind her to laugh hysterically some more.
Things settle into a kind of routine: Bates hates Teyla, Rodney and Sheppard screw around like monkeys in heat; mission to the planet where kids kill themselves at twenty-five, they fuck in a Puddle Jumper; Carson guilt-ridden from his involvement with Purna on Hoff, get Carson drunk, dump him in his quarters, then go back to Rodney's room and fuck on every available horizontal surface; get nearly killed by the Genii, and trade blowjobs in Rodney's office; and so on.
Rodney is a fan of this. Rodney is, in fact, as content as he's ever been.
Sheppard is hot and pretty/handsome/attractive, he's unexpectedly bright, gets Rodney's jokes and is absolutely hilarious himself, and Rodney likes him. Rodney likes him a lot.
Rodney is sure it can't last, but he doesn't let himself think about the day when Sheppard decides there's too much baggage involved in incestuous sex with his brilliant but balding, slightly older (eleven months according to their birthdays, anyway) astrophysicist brother. He's determined to enjoy it while it does last.
**
The thing with the zombies is totally out of left field.
Rodney has a team in subsection six in a lab that had been sealed so completely that Rodney hadn't even been aware of its existence until the previous week, when repeated barrages from Wraith weaponry had collapsed a section of one wall and sent two of Sheppard's marines tumbling into it.
Rodney is still pissed off at Sheppard for the "so long" comment, and they haven't fucked in the intervening five days. Sheppard's chances of scoring any time in the five days before they're scheduled to return to Earth aren't looking all that good, either. He wants to keep busy, and he likes mysteries, and he's so goddamned mad at Sheppard, which all leads to him not asking Sheppard for a marine escort for his team, or even putting the visit to the lab on the exploration roster, which means when they get there and find nothing but the stasis pods, consoles, and several piles of boxes, it's no one but Rodney and two scientists each from botany, biology, and engineering.
Parrish and Brown look at the stasis pods, sigh and look resentful, and retreat back to wherever it is botanists hide when Rodney can't find a use for their admittedly limited skill set. The biologists twitter excitedly and move to investigate the contents of the pods. The two engineers hrm and look interested and proceed to start poking at consoles.
Rodney sighs and takes a breath to deliver lecture nineteen, the one that involves people who don't know what the hell they're doing touching things that they don't know what the hell do, when the stasis pods hiss loudly open. Then, since it's clearly too late to bother with the lecture -- Rodney abhors wasting time, and he can always deliver it retroactively in the debrief -- Rodney turns and watches along with everyone else as the fronts of the pods shift out of the way and four people step out.
Holy shit, Rodney thinks, because Ancients, but that's before he gets a good look at them, because whoa.
They look ancient. As in, not Ancient, but ancient, as in shriveled and mummy-like, their bodies like bundles of thin sticks held together with twine, their heads far too large proportionately, their eyes barely visible, gleaming faintly and set deeply back into their skulls. They shuffle forward with some weird combination of speed and inelegance -- they scuttle Rodney decides, some part of his mind cataloguing all he can about them even as the rest of him recoils in horror -- and before anyone even moves, two of them have latched onto Martinez.
One of them bites her in the head. "Gah!" Martinez says, eyes going wide, and then the screaming starts.
The other biologist is too slow to dodge away; even as Rodney screeches, "Oh my God, you total idiots; you woke up zombies!" the other two Ancient zombies -- they have to be Ancients, they're wearing the same type of clothes the hologram woman had been wearing -- grab Adams, and one of them bites into his throat. "Out!" Rodney screams at the two gawping engineers, and circles around to the furthest console from where the zombies are eating two of his scientists. "Get out! What are you, blind?"
Rodney's fingers fly across the console, bringing up all the data he can coax out of it, looking mostly for either a) a way to reseal this room, or b) a way to take out zombie Ancients. He doesn't have time to hook up a tablet, and the engineers, of course, gross incompetents that they are, hadn't yet hooked one up either, so he scans the screen desperately, burning all the information he can into his brain for when he will inevitably need it later.
The engineers run, closing the door behind them and Rodney feels the lock engage -- fat lot of good that's going to do, since there is a giant gaping hole in the wall, and also, thanks so much for the concern over Rodney escaping -- and Rodney taps his earpiece and screams over the open command channel, "Sheppard, you son of a bitch!" while his hands try to coax the information he wants out of the control panel.
"McKay?" Sheppard asks, a slow drawl that communicates that he knows Rodney has been avoiding him and isn't about to forgive him any time soon.
"I'm in subsection six, in that sealed lab. Zombies are eating two of my scientists!" Rodney shouts, possibly semi-hysterically. Martinez has stopped screaming, but Adams had joined in on the chorus, and carries on when she falls silent in a dizzying solo performance that Rodney is trying desperately not to hear.
"What?" Sheppard says, tone gone flat and tight, but Rodney doesn't bother answering. He's sure Sheppard can hear the screaming, and the zombies that had been munching on Martinez seem bored with her now that she's stopped screaming and struggling. He doesn't have time to talk, and he can't find anything that will...
"Have your marines meet me at the intersection of subsection six and five. I can't seal the room; I'm going to have to seal off the whole section."
"Rodney--" Sheppard begins, panting, which is a good sign, it means he's already on his way; Rodney cuts him off.
"Have them run!" he demands, and then pitches himself at the furthest wall from the zombies -- Adams stops screaming, and Rodney has the sneaking suspicion that things are about to really start going badly for him in the near future -- and takes the quickest possible way around the room, trying to get to the section where the breach is without having to get too close to the flesh-eating zombie Ancients, trying to keep his eyes on all four of them at once. "Seriously?" he mutters, embarrassingly high-pitched. "Seriously? This is what this galaxy is giving me now? Zombies? Really?"
"McKay? Talk to me," Sheppard demands, and Rodney dodges an Ancient zombie wearing robes that still has scraggly strands of long, blondish hair clinging to its scalp.
"Busy trying not to get eaten, damnit," Rodney snaps back, and then shrieks as a second zombie announces its presence behind him by biting him in the neck. Rodney, totally without thought, drops to his knees out of the zombie's grip and rolls away, a move Teyla has been trying to teach him for weeks now, and which he's never managed successfully until now. Blond-zombie had lunged for him just as he'd gone down, and missed, and Rodney dodges around her as she twitches back upright, gangling and graceless, and scoots around her toward the breach. Her fingertips catch on his jacket, and Rodney sheds it without a second thought. He can feel blood streaming down his neck, but he assumes his jugular is intact because he is still, in fact, capable of running for his life.
"Rodney?" Sheppard demands again, this time with a high, thready note of panic creeping into his voice.
"I know this might not seem like the time," Rodney tells him, panting, holding one hand against his copiously bleeding neck-wound, and dodging a third zombie, "but I think I'm going to go ahead and choose now to call in that familial obligation thing I've heard so much about." He barely slides out of another zombie's grasp, and makes a grab for a conveniently placed pile of boxes, scattering them in the path of the zombies. At least one of them goes down, he's pleased to see, but the rest of them avoid the obstacles easily, without even looking. Rodney frowns, brain skittering around that but unable to grasp the significance of it through his utter, screaming terror, and turns on the ball of one foot, hurling himself bodily over another pile of boxes and through the hole in the wall that is totally the fault of Sheppard's marines, which means all of this is ultimately Sheppard's fault.
"Familial obligation?" Sheppard asks, bewildered, and Rodney has never been so grateful to hear two things at once, which is to say Sheppard's voice on the radio at the same time as he hears it, faintly, from up ahead.
"Yes," Rodney screams, and runs down the corridor at full speed, which is not, unfortunately, fast enough to pull very far ahead of the zombies, which move at a freakishly fast scuttle that has Rodney's skin goose-bumping madly and trying to shudder right off of his body. "Yes, Sheppard, yes! You're my family, and you are obligated to save me!"
"Rodney!" Sheppard yells.
"Can't talk, zombies will eat me," Rodney yells back.
"Get down!" Sheppard screams, and then Sheppard is there, P90 in both hands, and Rodney face-plants right there on the floor, because he wants to be shot only a little bit less than he wants to be eaten by zombies.
There's a burst of gunfire, and Rodney gets a dizzily extreme close up of the toe of Sheppard's combat boot. Then Sheppard is hauling him to his feet and dragging Rodney back the way Sheppard had come from. "They're getting back up," Sheppard tells him grimly.
"They're zombies!" Rodney retorts hysterically, his head swimming crazily with adrenaline and fear and blood loss. "It's what they do."
"You can seal it off from the intersection?" Sheppard wants to know, and Rodney makes a vaguely affirmative sound and pretends not to notice Sheppard's gaze lingering on his bloody neck.
Sheppard half-drags him to the intersection, Rodney leaning heavily on their weight. "Where," he says into the apparently empty air, and then aims another burst of gunfire back toward the pursuing zombies -- which move much more slowly either a) than Sheppard, even while towing Rodney, b) after they've been shot, or c) both -- "are my motherfucking marines?"
Rodney realizes he's talking on the radio at the same time that he registers the steely-scary, almost friendly tone of voice Sheppard's using. Uh oh, slowed cognitive abilities, that's not good, he thinks unhappily, and a second later Sheppard is kissing him, just a firm, hard smack on the mouth, but Rodney jerks back anyway.
"Almost there, sir!" someone says over the radio, and Rodney hears the echo further up the hall.
"Are you crazy?" he hisses, but he turns to the bulky steel doors at the same time; if ever there was a time to multi-task, this is it. He pops the control panel off the door and adds, "No fluid exchange; I've been bitten. It could be contagious!"
"Being bitten could be contagious?" Sheppard asks, amused-steely this time. Rodney swaps crystals and hard-seals the door as the zombies close in to about five feet of it.
"Assholes," Rodney tells them, shaky hand going to his neck again."Get me to a terminal," he tells Sheppard, and then adds, "Yes, contagious. There are four of them."
Sheppard blinks at him; the marines rush into the intersection.
Rodney sighs and waves a hand at the door. "Your timing is a travesty," he tells them. "Really. Don't let anything through this door. Especially not zombies."
Sheppard gives them an affirming nod and slides up and under Rodney's arm as Rodney starts toward someplace with a terminal. "Four of them?" Sheppard says proddingly.
"Yes, four. Not two, not twelve. Too many for it to be the number of Ancients deliberately zombified -- they'd have started with one or two -- and too few for it to be a mass-happening like a lab accident. It was an experiment, almost certainly, and one that didn't go well. It has to be contagious." Sheppard looks thoughtful, but just directs him into a lab with a working terminal. Rodney gives him a withering look as he gets to work at the terminal. "Besides, have you ever even seen a zombie movie?"
Sheppard opens his mouth, lips a little curled as though about to grin, then his gaze fixes on Rodney's neck and his brows and lips both quirk downward. "Yeah, okay. You might have a point."
"I should have a couple of engineers," Rodney says, and sags a little against the wall. Over the radio, he says, "Hello, engineers?" He can't remember their names. That could be further sign of cognitive degeneration, except Rodney isn't sure he'd ever known them.
"We're all right, Dr. McKay," one of them says reassuringly.
"Oh," Rodney says. "That's good, then," and then demands, "Get me a tablet!"
Rodney's head swims alarmingly, but a tablet is shoved into his hands, and he recognizes it with disgust as soon as he powers it on; it's filled with Kavanaugh's deeply flawed schematics. "Shit," he says, scrolling through to make a new document. "More shit. Utter shit. God, how hasn't he managed to suffocate to death under the sheer weight of his idiocy?"
Sheppard chuckles, but it sounds strained to Rodney. He catches Rodney by an elbow and guides him into a seat.
Rodney sinks down into it thankfully and begins transferring everything from the consoles in the sealed lab that he can remember, adding his own notes and ideas, because unless he's very very wrong (quite unlikely), Carson is going to have to half-formulate, half-build an antidote to this thing, and Rodney doesn't trust him to do it without the data he'd gleaned from the lab. He's just got the vague ideas he has about nanites and hive minds and infection down when he catches the scent of something delicious and savory, and raises his head to look around.
"Are we close to the mess?" he asks Sheppard; Sheppard looks faintly alarmed, but answers readily enough.
"Nowhere near," he tells Rodney.
"I think I can smell lunch," Rodney informs him, and hands over the tablet by shoving it across the lab table toward Sheppard. "I'm pretty sure that's not a good sign."
"You're probably right, buddy," Sheppard tells him, and then Rodney passes out.
**
The thing where Sheppard smells fucking fantastic isn't actually new.
Sheppard smells are like a greatest hits album: all good, all the time. Even after the worst missions, when he's dirty and sweaty and cranky, he smells so good it's usually all Rodney can do to get him someplace less public than the gate room before he drags Sheppard's BDU pants down and blows his mind. Sheppard looks at him like he's insane when Rodney mentions this, but the tips of his ears turn pink, which Rodney finds both fascinating and, God help him, cute.
So when he wakes up in the infirmary with Sheppard standing next to him and smelling like coffee and blueberry cobbler and banana supreme pie and filet mignon and every good thing Rodney loves ever, it doesn't immediately occur to him that this is a problem.
"Rodney," Sheppard says, sounding both relieved and uneasy at once. "Can you hear me, buddy?"
"Yes, yes," Rodney says, rolling slightly to one side so he can smell Sheppard better. "Obligation fulfilled, well done," he adds, since he really has been trying to get Sheppard to stick around, and not just for all the sweaty and incestuous reasons.
Sheppard quirks a worried smile at him. "Can you understand me?" Sheppard asks, and that's what sets off Rodney's "oh shit" radar.
"Oh, shit," he says. Sheppard's worried look becomes exponentially more comical; Rodney ignores it. "I'm infected, aren't I? I'm zombified. I'm mutating and I'm going to be shriveled and--"
"You're not going to shrivel, Rodney," Carson says, walking up to stand on the other side of Rodney's infirmary bed. But he, Rodney sees, looks nervous as well. "You--" he says, but Rodney loses track of what he's saying when he notices how Carson smells like cinnamon buns and Rocky Road ice cream and lasagna.
That's the second thing that sets off his "oh shit" radar.
"Oh, shit," he says again, and turns his head a little away from Sheppard, and yes, oh yes, Carson definitely smells edible, and that, friends and neighbors, is most definitely new. He smells like honeydew melon and red velvet cake, and when he turns his head, Sheppard smells like fudge brownies and mashed potatoes, and Rodney gets it, God, he gets it and he really doesn't want to.
Because Carson smells good, no doubt about it, but not as good as Sheppard. Sheppard still smells like the best thing Rodney has ever smelled in his life, all the things he loves best all swirled together into the best-smelling thing he can even imagine, and Rodney is seized by the almost unendurable impulse to lick the hand that Sheppard is resting on his shoulder, to see if he tastes like he smells.
"Rodney!" Sheppard shouts, and Rodney jerks his attention away from the knuckles of Sheppard's hand with real effort.
"What?" he snaps irritably, but what he wants to say is, "God, can I suck you right now? Jesus, you smell like heaven, can I please just suck your dick?"
"Are you tracking, buddy?" Sheppard demands, and removes his hand from Rodney's shoulder to tick-tock one finger in front of Rodney's eyes.
Rodney tracks it, mostly because he really wants to suck on it. "You smell fucking edible," Rodney tells him earnestly, and has the pleasure of watching Sheppard's eyes darken even as he cuts them uneasily to Carson across Rodney's body.
Carson says something, the only part of which Rodney actually catches is, "... your brother, man!" After a second or so, Rodney realizes that Carson sounds scandalized, and has jumped to the entirely wrong conclusion (which isn't really surprising for Carson, really, although Rodney has to admit that the few times that Carson had jumped immediately to the right conclusion had been fairly disastrous for everyone involved).
"No, no," Rodney says, and reaches for Carson's arm. He's dismayed to watch his arm move with familiar, jerky speed, but then he's got his hand wrapped around Carson wrist, and he finds out that he can almost taste Carson through his skin, warm apple cider and tart strawberries. "You do, too, you both smell, God, I..." His mind is so crowded with the scents of them that Rodney is having trouble thinking around it, but he manages, "Get Zelenka, try the nano tech that nearly killed me, Zelenka will understand, also, and also, you, Carson, I think, there is, there needs..."
And then he drops Carson's arms because even with the overripe, delicious smell of him against Rodney's palm, he can still smell Sheppard, caramel and dark chocolate, and he whips around and lunges for Sheppard, overcome with need, with lust, with hunger. Sheppard lets out a wordless cry of surprise and locks his hands around Rodney's forearms, and Rodney babbles, "Please, you, I need-- You smell so good, I need, I--"
And then there are marines, or orderlies, or both, Rodney can't really pay attention to who they actually are when they all smell so fucking good, and Carson is somewhere yelling, "Don't let him bite you, for God's sake," and they wrestle him down onto the bed and a minute or so later Rodney's strapped to the infirmary bed, the weight of the restraints around his arms feeling heavy and tasteless, like denial and starvation. He moans a protest, jerking futilely against them.
"Rodney," Sheppard says, drawing the entirety of Rodney's hunger back in his direction. He sounds faintly horrified, but Rodney can smell that he's half-aroused as well, which makes him smell at least twice as delicious as before.
Rodney rolls his head in Sheppard's direction and a low sound escapes him, need and hunger, and he says, "I can taste through my skin, I can almost taste you standing there, God, I want, I want--"
Crazily, Sheppard actually moves closer, and Rodney can't stop himself from straining against the restraints.He dismisses the orderlies/marines with a significant look, and abruptly it's only Carson and Sheppard Rodney can smell again, but their scent is hugely more appealing anyway. "It's because you're smart, I think, Jesus," Rodney says, the connection hazy and unclear in his brain, but still there at least, his ability to think almost overwhelmed by greedy hunger, thin and sharp and painful enough to make Rodney groan. "God, no wonder zombies want brains, you, God, I--"
"Shh, buddy," Sheppard says, and lays a hand on Rodney's arm.
Something something "... good idea, Major," Carson says, but Rodney barely bothers listening when his skin is trembling and jerking under the taste of Sheppard's hand and he can feel Sheppard's pulse in his palm.
"Shut up," Sheppard says, and then leans over close to Rodney to murmur, "Okay, buddy, I need you to think for me. Can you do that for me, just. Just think for a minute. You said nanites and Zelenka would know what to do; can you tell me what you think is going on?"
"A virus, a constructed virus, probably nanites, probably ascension," Rodney tells him, straining toward him vainly. "Carson, a virus, yes, a virus?"
"Yes," Carson says slowly, and then Rodney misses some of whatever he says next because Sheppard strokes the hand on his arm up to the crook of Rodney's elbow, and Rodney starts to salivate helplessly. He zones back in as Carson is saying, "... shutting his body down, but leaving his consciousness intact, if in an altered state. I assume that part wasn't deliberate."
Sheppard laughs shakily, but his hand tightens around Rodney's arm. "Okay, so he's not dead yet?"
"He's not--"
Rodney loses the thread, closes his eyes and shudders under Sheppard's hands-width contact, recognizing that he's the one making that low, helplessly needy sound, but unable to stop himself from doing it. He's remembering Sheppard panting above him, Rodney's legs hooked over his arms, his cock moving hard and thick and demanding in Rodney's ass as sweat dripped from Sheppard's face and down onto Rodney's, and he wants that now, he wants that so much, and he can't think or remember how to want anything else.
"... don't need to worry about the other two scientists, then, the dead ones?" Sheppard is asking. "They're not going to rise from the dead?"
"...not killing him, just changing... others suffering from severe dehydration, most likely..."
"Touch me, more," Rodney groans. "God, I'm so hungry."
"Get Zelenka, get to work," Sheppard says grimly, his eyes fixed on Rodney's face. "Clear this room and lock it down."
"... into isolation," Carson says hotly, the indignance in his voice enough to draw Rodney's attention briefly, but then Sheppard slides his hand down and curls it against Rodney's, linking their fingers together.
"I'll handle it," Sheppard insists, narrow-eyed and flinty-voiced, beautiful (Ah, Rodney thinks dazedly, Of course, that's the word, that's why I couldn't figure it out) and dangerous, and Carson mutters something Rodney doesn't care about, which Sheppard answers with, "He's my brother; I'll handle him!"
Rodney knows Carson has left only because Sheppard's scent becomes nearly overpowering when it isn't competing with anyone else's for Rodney's attention.
"Please," Rodney whispers desperately, and Sheppard gives him his trademark wicked smirk.
"Your doctor won't approve, and it'll have to be fast," he tells Rodney. "Elizabeth will want to talk to you; if I take the edge off, will you be able to pay attention?"
"I don't, I, maybe?" Rodney manages, and then Sheppard is drawing the thin hospital blanket down to Rodney's thighs, followed by the scrub pants Rodney hadn't even noticed he was wearing. Sheppard's strong, fine-boned hands stroke up Rodney's thighs, and Rodney writhes needily, aware suddenly that he's hard, that he wants to bite Sheppard just as much as he wants to fuck him. "God, this is--" Rodney bites out, and then realizes, "No fluid transfer, John, don't..."
But Sheppard is already rolling a condom onto Rodney's cock while steadying Rodney's hip with one hand, the feel of his bare skin against Rodney's almost enough, almost enough to quiet some of the voracity knotting Rodney's stomach and what feels like every muscle in his body. "Fucking Ancients," Rodney snarls, and Sheppard laughs and runs his tongue along the crease where Rodney's thigh meets his body. "Yes, oh yes," Rodney whines, because Sheppard's tongue, and both of Sheppard's hands cradling his hips, and the pleasure of Sheppard's mouth on his cock is distant, dulled by the condom, but his hands, his hands on Rodney's hips and sliding up his ribs, so good Rodney arches into it, rides up into Sheppard's hands the way he would have done Sheppard's mouth in other circumstances.
Rodney's orgasm happens almost at once, with little fanfare; it does almost nothing to ease the gnawing in his guts. Sheppard seems to sense that, somehow, because he pulls his mouth off Rodney's cock and just puts it to work elsewhere, his hipbone, bellybutton, across Rodney's nipples, assuaging some of the skin-hunger with the flavor of the inside of Sheppard's mouth. Rodney lies there in his restraints, scrub shirt rucked up, scrub pants shoved down, and writhes and moans and croons and makes sounds like he's dying. "Best brother ever," Rodney slurs, content to let Sheppard work his mouth across Rodney's body, content until Sheppard eventually pulls away.
"No," Rodney groans, "no, please, I'm--" and Sheppard leans up to kiss his temple, light brush of lips that Rodney can almost taste, the flavor against his skin sweet and smooth, like the good milk chocolate, melting brightly someplace that isn't his tongue, but can taste Sheppard nonetheless. "I want--"
Sheppard quirks a smirk at him and mutter, "I know what you want," and then, brazenly taunting, slips a finger along Rodney's lower lip. Rodney, impulse and instinct and indignation united in aggravation, makes a whole-hearted attempt to bite him. "Now, now, Rodney, play nice," Sheppard tsks, and leans away to grab a pair of surgical gloves out of the box by Rodney's bed. "If you break your toys, you won't have anything to play with." He makes a production of snapping them in place, and only then removes the condom from Rodney's still-mostly-hard cock. He ties it in a knot and flips it into a hazardous waste container, before stripping off the gloves and shoving them in the container as well. He briskly rearranges Rodney's clothes -- Rodney groans every time Sheppard's fingertips graze his skin -- and pulls the blanket back up to Rodney's chest.
"I hate you," Rodney manages, totally coherent for a few seconds. "Hate."
"I know you do, buddy," Sheppard agrees, and then calls for Carson.
The next few minutes are hazy -- Rodney tries to bite Carson, Carson screams like a girl -- and then Rodney goes to sleep again.
**
The thing where he drifts in and out of consciousness is annoying as hell.
He realizes that they're keeping him sedated the second or third time he wakes up to snatches of conversation happening over his bed.
"...nanites to reverse the effects of the virus..." he hears.
Then, later, "...no way to know for..."
The third time he wakes he hears Sheppard say, "You are not fucking field testing that serum on McKay! I'm his goddamned brother; I think that gives me full motherfucking power of attorney in this case!"
Rodney manages to thank Sheppard for saving him from the depredations of the medical profession by muttering thickly, "Smell like cake, eat your brain."
Sheppard snorts, and says, "Thanks, buddy. Go back to sleep."
Later still, he hears, "...seems to be working on the Ancient, but physiologically we can't be..." and "...aging rapidly..." and "...stasis."
And Sheppard says, "Is it the best you can do?"
He hears Carson's answer clearly: "Without infecting someone else and testing it on someone physiologically human, it's the only thing we can do."
Sheppard grips his hand. Rodney, distantly aware that Sheppard is looking at him, waiting for him, squeezes back.
**
The thing where he wakes all the way up and there's an Ancient sitting on the bed next to him is a total shock.
Rodney stares at him -- an old man, hunched and bald and wearing hospital scrubs just like Rodney -- for several long seconds, mouth agape, and doesn't realize he doesn't smell like anything except dust and old, musty socks until the Ancient gets up slowly, joints creaking, and shuffles over to Rodney's bedside. Rodney recoils instinctively; he's pretty sure this is the guy that bit him.
The Ancient holds both hands up in a placating gesture. "I've come to thank you," he says in a raspy voice. "Dr. Beckett has told me that the work that allowed him and Dr. Zelenka to create an antigen for the mutation my lab staff and I were suffering from was based primarily on your ideas after you had been bitten by one of us."
Rodney blinks. "Ah, yes, well. They were just notes."
The old man... uh, Ancient man, whatever... nods solemnly, and says, "But effective notes. Notes that made sense, which could be used. Your mental fortitude must be very impressive."
"I..." Rodney says, but then stops because he realizes that he can think again. He can think, and no one around him smells like food, and that's just. That's just amazingly great, really.
He needs to find Sheppard and drag him off for a naked, incestuous "meeting" immediately.
But being able to think again means that he's too aware of the fact that there's an actual Ancient sitting right there that he can actually ask questions of, and he sits up and says, "Where are the rest of you?"
"Dead, I'm afraid," he tells Rodney. "The antigen can't reverse the effects of ten thousand years in stasis. Once the nanites in our blood that were affecting our cognition were countered, the age-slowing effects were also countered. Danae and Tolms never woke up. Silla died just a few minutes ago. Soon, I'll join them. But I'm glad to have the chance to thank you. I'm glad for the chance to die as myself."
"It was ascension, wasn't it? You were after more time?"
The old man nodded.
"What else? It was always what we strove for."
Rodney manages to bite back a dubious acerbic comment, but can't quite keep himself from pointing out, "Yes, well, from this end of ten thousand years, it looks a lot like you were trying to corner the market on evil overlord devices." The old man laughs, which gives Rodney a little start. He wouldn't have bet on finding out the Ancients had any sense of humor at all.
He only realizes he'd said as much aloud when the old man laughs again. "We were people, Dr. McKay. People not dissimilar to your people. We loved and lived and fought, and, it would seem, lost."
"And turned yourselves into zombies," Rodney points out.
"That, too." He smiles, but Rodney can see age creeping into his face, a visible indicator of his cells degenerating, like watching a flower bloom and die in fast motion capture on a National Geographic special. "I've left you something," he tells Rodney, indicating a tablet sitting on the table beside Rodney's bed. It's everything Rodney can do not to snatch it up in greedy hands and find out what it is. "As a thank you."
Rodney, who feels that having been turned into a zombie due to this guy's incompetence means never having to say 'thank you' himself, merely nods, and sets to asking every question he could think of in the short span of time they have left.
**
Hirel, the last Ancient in Atlantis, dies less than an hour later; it is not a surprise to anyone. Especially not Hirel, who dies with a smile on his face.
His last words are, "You're quite a cocky one, aren't you?"
To which Rodney answers, "It isn't cockiness if you're really that good."
Sheppard -- who still smells really fucking good, but no longer rouses in Rodney the impulse to brunch on whatever bit of him he can reach -- and Carson -- who now just smells like the lab and whatever horrible hair gel he's been using -- and Elizabeth -- who Rodney is happy not to associate with snacking at all -- are all present when it happens. The four of them let out a collective sigh.
**
The location of the ZPM lab Hirel left on Rodney's tablet (Kavanaugh's really, but why quibble?) nearly gives Rodney a fucking heart attack when he realizes what it is, and then throws him into paroxysms of joy so profound that the only way he can handle them is to escape from the infirmary with Sheppard's help, and drag Sheppard into the nearest empty room with a lock on the door, and fuck him roughly over a bench.
"Do it, do it," Sheppard gasps, fully dressed except for his BDUs down around his ankles, and Rodney licks at the back of his neck and pounds into his willing ass, and grins at the improbable perfection of his whole fucking life. "Rodney, yeah, build me a fucking ZPM, fuck me, I want to fly the fucking city, God," and Rodney comes with all of these images flashing through his mind like a feast.
Author: Shaenie
Rating: NC17
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Spoilers: Through Season One
Warnings: Um. Zombies. Incest. Sex. In some combination. *facepalms*
Word Count: not quite 10,000
Notes: Thanks go to the usual suspects, cindyjade and fiercelydreamed, for all the usual reasons, and also to pir8fancierfor yet another last minute beta, for she is the awesome. This is a pinch-hit for Sweet Charity for bitter_crimson, which just happened to meet the challenge recquirements. I hope very much that sie enjoyes it, because it's pure crack, but it's made to order crack.
Summary: The title really says it all.
First of all, the whole thing with Major Sheppard happens before Rodney even realizes there is even a possibility of a thing with Major Sheppard. This is something that rarely happens to him.
They've been in Atlantis for three days, and so far, they've managed to: save the city; awaken the race of creatures that had sent the Ancients running for distant stars; and adopt Lothar and all of the Hill People (and, oh God, he doesn't really know Teyla that well, but he is absolutely certain that he must never never never say anything remotely like it in her presence; the fact that she wouldn't understand the reference almost certainly wouldn't stop her from comprehending the insult).
Rodney has personally spent thirty of the last thirty-six hours trying to balance the main ballast tanks, which the rest of the expedition apparently doesn't really understand that the city needs in order not to sink because they won't stop bothering him about stupid crap. And, oh, oh yes, if he ever gets a chance, he is going to personally thank the Ancients for the -- totally outside of his realm of expertise, thanks very much -- crash course in nautical engineering by kicking them squarely in their probably practically-atrophied-away-to-nothing balls.
So it's fair to say he is a little on the cranky side when he staggers into his quarters at what his mental clock automatically tells him would have been forty-one minutes past eleven at night Colorado Springs, forty-one minutes past six the following day at McMurdo, and fucked-if-he'd-had-time to work out an equivalent for Lantea's 28.1 hour solar day factoring in fucking light years, but which definitely counts as late, to find Major Sheppard standing at the foot of his bed, staring blearily at it.
Major Sheppard's hair is even more ridiculous than usual; the idea that a guy who can't even control his own hair is in charge of Atlantis' military presence sets off Rodney's absurdity reflex, which might have been more manageable had he got even a handful of hours of sleep in the prior three days.
He snickers.
Major Sheppard turns and gives him a look even blearier than the one he'd been bestowing on Rodney's bed, but only says, "Hey, McKay."
Rodney says, "Yes, yes; why are you here, Major?" and staggers, upright but failing, toward the bed the Major is staring fixedly at.
Major Sheppard makes a listless gesture in direction of the bed. "Tired," he says, and then adds a jaw-cracking yawn as if for punctuation.
Rodney rolls his eyes. "Yes, me too," he agrees, and perches on the side of the bed, hands automatically fumbling at the wet laces of his shoes. His ass isn't wet, but his khakis are soaked up to the knee and he doesn't want to get the bed wet. "That doesn't explain your presence here."
Sheppard stares at him, thick, expressive brows drawn together frowningly, but he isn't actually frowning. His face is soft and dazed, as though his eyebrows are his only features that still have enough energy to express anything at all. "To go to bed?" he says, as though it isn't a question, while his tone definitely makes it sound like one.
"I'm sure I'm no expert, Major," Rodney says, and shrugs out of his science team jacket, which is wet to the elbows, and throws it disgustedly onto the floor. He pops the top button of his khakis, and glances up in time to see Sheppard blinking stupidly at him. "But I am fairly sure they don't assign heads of departments to bunk together." Sheppard stares uncomprehendingly; his eyes are dull and Rodney abruptly sees the mottled shape of a bruise along his jaw and the side of his neck, disappearing down past the collar of his uniform shirt. It occurs to him that he has no idea what Sheppard has spent the last couple of days doing, but it had apparently been just as ass-handing as Rodney's own thirty-six hour stretch of hell. He finds himself gentling his voice in a way that none of his minions would have likely believed possible. "These are my quarters," he tells Sheppard.
"Oh," Sheppard says, and looks around, as though searching for signs of his own occupation. His eyebrows continue to frown, and some of the expression bleeds down to his lips, which twitch downward.
Rodney stands briefly and shoves his khakis down his hips and leaves them in a puddle by the side of the bed, along with his wet socks. Sheppard blinks at him, but his face is starting to show something other than baffled weariness. He looks faintly alarmed.
"I," he says, and Rodney watches his eyes slide down to Rodney's boxers for several seconds, then ease down his thighs with what is nearly a physical sensation.
Huh, he thinks, because he hadn't seen this coming, but he's never been particularly picky about sex or where he gets it, and Major Sheppard is fairly hot, albeit in a befuddled sort of way just at the moment. In his memory, he can see Sheppard's smirky self-confidence, appearing in mid-air with the Puddle Jumper (Rodney sighs aloud at the designation, but he recognizes a futile battle) hovering in the bay, lips cocked and eyes narrowed. He remembers the warm twist of heat in his own belly when Sheppard had said, "Doctor. This is why you brought me here." From Elizabeth's face, she'd been just as aware of the subtle implications of such a statement, but being a diplomat, she's trained to ignore things like that.
Rodney, on the other hand, is a scientist. It isn't in his nature to ignore anything.
Still, a bit more evidence wouldn't be a bad thing, so he yanks the hem of his blue science team shirt up and drags it over his head, dropping it on top of the jacket. When his face emerges from the material, Sheppard is checking out the shape of Rodney's rapidly filling cock through the thin material of his boxers.
There's no way to even pretend it's anything else. Huh, Rodney thinks again, but he doesn't waste time on motives or any of that nonsense. The evidence is enough to act on, the results are desirable enough to risk the slight chance of failure, and he has just spent the last thirty hours wading through sea water. He isn't going to question anybody's motives too closely. His cock has gone from filling to fully hard, and Sheppard doesn't seem to be able to take his eyes off it.
Rodney smirks happily.
Sheppard doesn't even look up until Rodney's halfway to him, and when he does, he doesn't move away. He still looks faintly alarmed, but when Rodney slides a hand around the back of his neck and leans in, Sheppard kisses back, his weight heavy as he sways into Rodney's chest. Sheppard doesn't say anything when Rodney pulls away, but his eyes are clearer, almost sharp. He's giving Rodney a searching look.
"Yes, non-disclosure, discretion, ridiculous regulations, let's pretend we've covered that. I'm too tired to go into it and still be awake when it's time for the orgasms," Rodney tells him, and Sheppard's lips quirk into that starting-to-be-familiar smirk.
He isn't actually handsome, Rodney decides, and neither is he pretty, which is what Rodney would have said previous to this encounter. There are dark circles under his eyes and he's got some swelling coming up along the left side of his face, more evidence that the last few days haven't been a walk in the park for him any more than they have been for Rodney. But he's nice to look at, appealing in an aesthetic way that Rodney can't come up with an actual designation for, so he kisses Sheppard again.
Sheppard kisses back agreeably, cooperative but unmoving for several seconds before his hands apparently receive an abrupt signal from his slowly-processing brain, and they curl warmly around Rodney's upper arms, pulling Rodney closer. Rodney makes a pleased noise into Sheppard's mouth, and Sheppard answers it with a little growl, and they tumble onto the bed with Sheppard still completely dressed.
They only manage handjobs, as tired as they both are, and Sheppard falls asleep with his shirt and pants open but still on, and it's good. It's really pretty spectacularly good.
When Rodney wakes the next morning, he expects Sheppard to be gone. Instead, he's a warmly snoring lump crowding Rodney half off the narrow bed, face relaxed and close to both pretty and handsome in spite of the mottled bruising purpling the side of his face. Rodney suppresses the urge to fetch an icepack, and instead punishes him for hogging the bed with a blowjob. Sheppard wakes halfway through, groaning and rolling his hips, and afterwards murmurs encouragingly, "Yeah, all right. Come here, then," before he proceeds to blow Rodney so hotly that there's no chance in hell he hasn't done this at least a hundred times before.
So then, barely three days into the Pegasus Galaxy, there is the thing where Rodney is sleeping with Major Sheppard.
***
A few days later, the whole incest thing also takes Rodney completely by surprise.
He's still sitting on the infirmary bed, arm stinging where Carson had injected him with the gene therapy, when Carson says: "Right, well, let's take a look at your file for a comparative DNA representation, shall we?"
"Will we be able to tell anything so soon?" Rodney asks, because Carson just said it could take a few hours, and kicks his heels frustratedly against the side of the table.
"No, no," Carson says absently, fingers tip-tapping on the keyboard of a laptop, but there are frown lines developing across his forehead even as he says it.
"What?" Rodney demands, abruptly panicky. "What? You've mutated me, haven't you? I'm going to turn into a horrible crazy-haired mutant from Sheppard's DNA, aren't I? It's going to mutate my magnificent brain, and I'm going to die in some hideous--"
"You're not mutating, Rodney!" Carson interrupts, shooting him an exasperated look. "Well," he adds in a considering tone, "you are, of course, we hope. For the gene therapy to be effective, of course there has to be mutation." Carson gaze returns to the screen, and he frowns again. "I'm not even looking at your present DNA configuration; this is your baseline DNA on file with the SGC. It's all perfectly normal, except..."
"Except what?"
"Well, except you already have a protein sequence analogous to the Major's ATA gene."
Rodney thinks about that for several seconds; genetics isn't his field, but he remembers enough from the courses he was forced to take as an undergrad to recognize that as weird. "You're saying I already have the ATA gene," Rodney says flatly.
"Well, it looks that way," Carson allows, face scrunches into a truly unflattering expression of confusion. "But if that were the case, you'd have come up in screening. And even if you didn't, you'd have been able to operate the Ancient technology we had available to us in the outpost. Except..."
"You said analogous," Rodney says pointedly. "As in: Similar in function but not in structure and evolutionary origin. Which means, a gene that should, in theory, operate in an identical way to the way the ATA gene operates in Major Sheppard, but doesn't look quite the same?"
"Well, yes, that's the understood definition, thank you," Carson snaps, and does something that causes the image he's looking at zoom out a bit, revealing more of Rodney's DNA on the screen. "Except..."
"Will you stop saying that," Rodney snaps.
Carson rolls his eyes, but turns in his chair to give Rodney a long look. "What I mean to say is that you have a protein sequence, a gene, which appears in all respects identical to Major Sheppard's, and yet appears not to confer the same connection to Ancient technology as the Major's ATA gene. An inactive gene."
"What?" Rodney squawks, indignant and annoyed. "How is that even possible? Why?"
"How should I know?" Carson snaps, and rolls his eyes again as Rodney sputters indignantly. He spins back around. "Let's just have a wee peek at the Major's DNA, shall we?"
"Oh, excellent, yes, let's look at the DNA of the man who is completely healthy and non-mutating, and whose ATA gene isn't broken, shall we?" Rodney snipes back, but he slides off the edge of the table so he can watch over Carson's shoulder as he pulls up the Major's genetic profile on the screen. "Then maybe we can have tea and crumpets," he enthuses facetiously.
Carson snarls, "Don't tease me about crumpets, Rodney," in a voice that's disturbingly reminiscent of Linda Blair in her "Exorcist" phase.
Rodney chooses not to answer on the grounds that he's afraid Carson's head will actually rotate, and he still needs to know why his DNA is broken.
"Hmmph," Carson says after a few minutes, while Rodney stands behind him and stares at the screen without any real idea of what he's seeing. There are differences, he can see them, but damned if he can remember what any of them signify. There are similarities, too -- the ATA gene in both windows look identical as far as Rodney can tell. If that's what it actually is and Carson isn't having a lack-of-crumpet-fueled psychotic break. "That's..." He pauses and looks at Rodney. There's an odd, quirky little smile on his lips, but the rest of his face looks tight and strained. "That's odd, aye."
"What?" Rodney demands. "What's odd? My impending mutanthood?"
"You're not mutating, Rodney," Carson says absently, but he's typing away at the laptop screen, and almost seems to have forgotten that Rodney is even present. "No," he murmurs, mouth curled into that quirky smile again, though his voice sounds both amused and uneasy at once. "No, surely not. What are the chances...?"
But the laptop makes a short, bright ding sound, and even from behind Carson, Rodney sees 'INDEX MATCH' pop up in a box on the screen, partially obscuring both twirls of DNA. Carson turns his head slowly and looks at Rodney incredulously.
"What?" Rodney demands.
"Well, it's only an 8 marker test," Carson says, which isn't an answer as far as Rodney can tell. "That's still quite a margin of error. It's a fluke." He taps at the keys. "A fluke," he repeats, and jabs viciously at the enter key with his forefinger. "No, of course I don't have a source of paternal DNA, don't be ridiculous," he snaps at the computer, and taps again, fingers quick and agitated. "Just run the bloody numbers."
This time the two separate windows shift and overlap, and Rodney watches as several of the enlarged sections of double-helix overlap precisely and light up. This time, the box that pops up on the screen says 'INDEX MATCH - 96%.'
"Damn," Carson says, and Rodney blinks in surprise. He gives Rodney a quick, almost furtive glance, and then reaches up to tap his radio. "Major Sheppard, can you report to the infirmary please."
"Carson," Rodney says slowly, staring at the screen with dawning horror. "Carson, tell me that doesn't mean what it looks like it means?"
Carson doesn't say anything.
"Carson," Rodney repeats shakily. "Don't make me rend your soul from your body."
"The good news," Carson says uncertainly, "is that I'm nearly one hundred percent certain that the gene therapy is going to be a success."
"I will destroy your life," Rodney warns. "Bathrooms will explode in your vicinity. Showers will always run cold, computers will always run hot, you will never again receive tech support from a single solitary member of the science staff..."
"Rodney, I've never questioned your request for certain... ah," Carson coughs delicately, his face so red it's nearly purple, and seems to have to swallow hard before he continues, "... certain, um, provisions, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to..."
"Are you freaking kidding me?" Rodney screams, and actually reaches to choke the life out of Carson Beckett.
Sheppard arrives just in time to stop him. The fucker.
**
Then the thing with Major Sheppard and the thing with the incest are both abruptly over, except in the way that Rodney and the Major are still, by some impossible twist of ironic fate (or possibly a tear in the fabric of space-time, Rodney hasn't entirely ruled that one out), brothers.
In the absence of contact with Earth, there's no way for them to figure out how it had happened: no records, no maternal or paternal DNA on file, no one to ask (though John's alleged father is still alive, Rodney discovers, so if they do manage to reestablish contact with Earth someday, they'll be able to seek answers there),simply nothing Rodney can do in order to reconcile the fact that the one person on Atlantis that he has managed to sustain a non-professional relationship with for more than six days (it had actually reached the unimagined heights of eleven days at the time of their last fuck) is his brother.
"Is your sister my sister, or is my brother your brother," Sheppard had asked, dull-eyed with shock, the two of them staring at one another across a sudden and awkward three feet of space between them. He hadn't seemed all that curious about the actual answer, but Rodney had answered anyway, because what the hell else was he supposed to do?
"She looks just like me; I'm pretty sure she's actually my sister."
"Huh," Sheppard had said disinterestedly.
It turns out that the reason that Rodney's inactive gene hadn't come up during the testing they'd all undergone was due to the simple fact that they hadn't been testing for that gene. Sheppard was the first person to show up with that particular expression of it, and it hadn't been added to the database for testing until a few days before the expedition had left for Atlantis, long after Rodney had been tested.
It also turns out that Carson had been right; the gene therapy had not only been effective, it had been wildly, crazily, wonderfully effective. Rodney now has his own equivalent of Sheppard's magic gene. He's always been of the opinion that if one branch of research dead ends, you take the next branch over and start again, so he's so busy using the crap out of it that it's fairly easy to avoid Sheppard entirely.
It probably doesn't hurt that Sheppard is doing his level best to avoid Rodney as well. Rodney distantly thinks this is horrendously unfair; it isn't like he'd known, like it had been his fault or anything. But since he's doing the same thing, he can hardly cast stones.
He does the only thing he knows to do, which is to drown himself (metaphorically speaking, as the ballast tanks are holding up just fine, thanks for asking) in his work.
**
The thing with being on Sheppard's team is, Rodney's pretty sure, a peace offering.
Because he's pretty sure he genuinely likes Sheppard, incestuous sex notwithstanding, and because of some vague, nebulous idea that Rodney ought not to totally piss off and alienate both of his alleged siblings, Rodney accepts.
On their first mission, Sheppard gets bitten by a 'roided up wraith-bug, and dies.
He actually dies, poof, heart stopped, and in the thirty seconds between Ford shocking the life out of him and Teyla dragging him through the event horizon, Rodney makes a deal with a God he doesn't believe in that he will absolutely do anything to make some kind of familial... thing, something, work with Sheppard if only they could just all, please, make it through this.
Afterward, once the official infirmary visit has been dealt with, Rodney sneaks back into the infirmary with a cup of coffee and a packet of Oreos from his own personal stash.
Sheppard is awake. Sheppard is, in fact, looking a little wild around the eyes, and he's drumming his hands against his knees on the infirmary cot. "Get me out of here, McKay," he hisses as soon as Rodney is close enough to hear him.
"Shh," Rodney hisses back. "Do you want Carson to confiscate your caffeine and saturated fat?"
But when Rodney gets close enough to put down the coffee on the table beside Sheppard's bed and holds out the packet of Oreo's, Sheppard merely stares at him for five or so seconds, and then clamps a hand around Rodney's wrist with a surprisingly strong grip -- considering he'd been dead an hour ago -- and drags him over until his thighs bump against the side of the hospital bed. "What--?" Rodney demands, but then Sheppard has a hand hooked around the back of his neck and is dragging him down into an open-mouthed, slick-tongued, totally hot incestuous kiss.
Rodney groans and opens his mouth, and forgets for three-point-oh-six seconds that John Sheppard is his brother. Unfortunately, his brain is simply too powerful to ignore for long, and is currently blaring huge warning klaxons at him, the kind that resonate inside your head and make your fillings loosen in your teeth. He pulls back reluctantly.
"Hello, hi, have you met me?" Rodney whispers haughtily (mostly to hide the fact that he's hard and he can hear the tremor in his own voice). "I'm Rodney McKay, also known as your brother, remember?"
"I don't care," Sheppard whispers furiously back, and drags Rodney's mouth back down, lips hot and wet and, God help him, sinful.
Rodney jerks back again, but this time Sheppard doesn't let him pull back more than four or five inches. "Okay, first of all, incest. I'm not sure if you're aware, but illegal in both of our countries. Also, taboo pounded into people pretty much from birth!"
"Yeah," Sheppard purrs, low and totally and completely and unfairly hot. "Still don't care."
"Sheppard--" he begins, only to be immediately interrupted by the feel of Sheppard's teeth nipping at his lower lip. Rodney's eyelids sag shut, and he discovers several seconds later that he's got a hand in Sheppard's hair and his own teeth are scrapping at the stubble along the line of Sheppard's jaw, and Sheppard is dragging in fast, rough breaths that make Rodney want to shut him up with his tongue. "Fuck," he says when sanity reasserts itself in a way that's likely to leave him walking awkwardly for the next three days at least. "Stop," he mutters unconvincingly, and Sheppard slides his hand around to cradle Rodney's jaw.
"McKay," he says, slowly, voice nearly identical to the one he'd used on Elizabeth in the Puddle Jumper eleven days before. "Incest is taboo to avoid the possibility of mutant babies. Are you planning on having my mutant babies?"
"Uh," Rodney says brilliantly, the abrupt and almost painful realization that Sheppard is right briefly short-circuiting his speech center. "No?"
"Great," Sheppard says, and drags Rodney down to his mouth again.
This time, Rodney doesn't resist; Sheppard is clearly a genius.
Some minutes later, Sheppard is breathing like it's physically painful; he grates out: "Now get me out of here."
Rodney jimmies the heart monitor without a word of protest, and helps Sheppard get all the wires detached.
"Bring the Oreos," Sheppard whispers as they sneak out.
**
The thing with Sheppard -- the incestuous and totally illegal thing with his brother -- is shockingly good. It is, in fact, the hottest thing that has ever happened to Rodney.
The first thing he does when Sheppard is fucking him again, is make Sheppard take the WAIS III. He whines about the it whole time, tops out at 141, and just glares when Rodney says, "Just think what you could have gotten if you'd been trying!"
He's much less grumpy about it when Rodney drops to his knees and blows him in the testing room.
Rodney circumvents Carson's apparent disapproval and foreknowledge of the thing with Sheppard by having Teyla requisition supplies from the infirmary. This leads to at least one moment of absolute hilarity the first time she asks for them right after a mission with the whole team present. Ford looks fascinated and terrified in equal amounts; Carson mutely hands over the bag o' lube-n-condoms without a word, his ears bright red.
Rodney and Sheppard have to duck into a supply closet to laugh hysterically.
Teyla finds them there, and hands over the bag of supplies with a murmured, "I do not understand the ways of your people."
They wait until the door closes behind her to laugh hysterically some more.
Things settle into a kind of routine: Bates hates Teyla, Rodney and Sheppard screw around like monkeys in heat; mission to the planet where kids kill themselves at twenty-five, they fuck in a Puddle Jumper; Carson guilt-ridden from his involvement with Purna on Hoff, get Carson drunk, dump him in his quarters, then go back to Rodney's room and fuck on every available horizontal surface; get nearly killed by the Genii, and trade blowjobs in Rodney's office; and so on.
Rodney is a fan of this. Rodney is, in fact, as content as he's ever been.
Sheppard is hot and pretty/handsome/attractive, he's unexpectedly bright, gets Rodney's jokes and is absolutely hilarious himself, and Rodney likes him. Rodney likes him a lot.
Rodney is sure it can't last, but he doesn't let himself think about the day when Sheppard decides there's too much baggage involved in incestuous sex with his brilliant but balding, slightly older (eleven months according to their birthdays, anyway) astrophysicist brother. He's determined to enjoy it while it does last.
**
The thing with the zombies is totally out of left field.
Rodney has a team in subsection six in a lab that had been sealed so completely that Rodney hadn't even been aware of its existence until the previous week, when repeated barrages from Wraith weaponry had collapsed a section of one wall and sent two of Sheppard's marines tumbling into it.
Rodney is still pissed off at Sheppard for the "so long" comment, and they haven't fucked in the intervening five days. Sheppard's chances of scoring any time in the five days before they're scheduled to return to Earth aren't looking all that good, either. He wants to keep busy, and he likes mysteries, and he's so goddamned mad at Sheppard, which all leads to him not asking Sheppard for a marine escort for his team, or even putting the visit to the lab on the exploration roster, which means when they get there and find nothing but the stasis pods, consoles, and several piles of boxes, it's no one but Rodney and two scientists each from botany, biology, and engineering.
Parrish and Brown look at the stasis pods, sigh and look resentful, and retreat back to wherever it is botanists hide when Rodney can't find a use for their admittedly limited skill set. The biologists twitter excitedly and move to investigate the contents of the pods. The two engineers hrm and look interested and proceed to start poking at consoles.
Rodney sighs and takes a breath to deliver lecture nineteen, the one that involves people who don't know what the hell they're doing touching things that they don't know what the hell do, when the stasis pods hiss loudly open. Then, since it's clearly too late to bother with the lecture -- Rodney abhors wasting time, and he can always deliver it retroactively in the debrief -- Rodney turns and watches along with everyone else as the fronts of the pods shift out of the way and four people step out.
Holy shit, Rodney thinks, because Ancients, but that's before he gets a good look at them, because whoa.
They look ancient. As in, not Ancient, but ancient, as in shriveled and mummy-like, their bodies like bundles of thin sticks held together with twine, their heads far too large proportionately, their eyes barely visible, gleaming faintly and set deeply back into their skulls. They shuffle forward with some weird combination of speed and inelegance -- they scuttle Rodney decides, some part of his mind cataloguing all he can about them even as the rest of him recoils in horror -- and before anyone even moves, two of them have latched onto Martinez.
One of them bites her in the head. "Gah!" Martinez says, eyes going wide, and then the screaming starts.
The other biologist is too slow to dodge away; even as Rodney screeches, "Oh my God, you total idiots; you woke up zombies!" the other two Ancient zombies -- they have to be Ancients, they're wearing the same type of clothes the hologram woman had been wearing -- grab Adams, and one of them bites into his throat. "Out!" Rodney screams at the two gawping engineers, and circles around to the furthest console from where the zombies are eating two of his scientists. "Get out! What are you, blind?"
Rodney's fingers fly across the console, bringing up all the data he can coax out of it, looking mostly for either a) a way to reseal this room, or b) a way to take out zombie Ancients. He doesn't have time to hook up a tablet, and the engineers, of course, gross incompetents that they are, hadn't yet hooked one up either, so he scans the screen desperately, burning all the information he can into his brain for when he will inevitably need it later.
The engineers run, closing the door behind them and Rodney feels the lock engage -- fat lot of good that's going to do, since there is a giant gaping hole in the wall, and also, thanks so much for the concern over Rodney escaping -- and Rodney taps his earpiece and screams over the open command channel, "Sheppard, you son of a bitch!" while his hands try to coax the information he wants out of the control panel.
"McKay?" Sheppard asks, a slow drawl that communicates that he knows Rodney has been avoiding him and isn't about to forgive him any time soon.
"I'm in subsection six, in that sealed lab. Zombies are eating two of my scientists!" Rodney shouts, possibly semi-hysterically. Martinez has stopped screaming, but Adams had joined in on the chorus, and carries on when she falls silent in a dizzying solo performance that Rodney is trying desperately not to hear.
"What?" Sheppard says, tone gone flat and tight, but Rodney doesn't bother answering. He's sure Sheppard can hear the screaming, and the zombies that had been munching on Martinez seem bored with her now that she's stopped screaming and struggling. He doesn't have time to talk, and he can't find anything that will...
"Have your marines meet me at the intersection of subsection six and five. I can't seal the room; I'm going to have to seal off the whole section."
"Rodney--" Sheppard begins, panting, which is a good sign, it means he's already on his way; Rodney cuts him off.
"Have them run!" he demands, and then pitches himself at the furthest wall from the zombies -- Adams stops screaming, and Rodney has the sneaking suspicion that things are about to really start going badly for him in the near future -- and takes the quickest possible way around the room, trying to get to the section where the breach is without having to get too close to the flesh-eating zombie Ancients, trying to keep his eyes on all four of them at once. "Seriously?" he mutters, embarrassingly high-pitched. "Seriously? This is what this galaxy is giving me now? Zombies? Really?"
"McKay? Talk to me," Sheppard demands, and Rodney dodges an Ancient zombie wearing robes that still has scraggly strands of long, blondish hair clinging to its scalp.
"Busy trying not to get eaten, damnit," Rodney snaps back, and then shrieks as a second zombie announces its presence behind him by biting him in the neck. Rodney, totally without thought, drops to his knees out of the zombie's grip and rolls away, a move Teyla has been trying to teach him for weeks now, and which he's never managed successfully until now. Blond-zombie had lunged for him just as he'd gone down, and missed, and Rodney dodges around her as she twitches back upright, gangling and graceless, and scoots around her toward the breach. Her fingertips catch on his jacket, and Rodney sheds it without a second thought. He can feel blood streaming down his neck, but he assumes his jugular is intact because he is still, in fact, capable of running for his life.
"Rodney?" Sheppard demands again, this time with a high, thready note of panic creeping into his voice.
"I know this might not seem like the time," Rodney tells him, panting, holding one hand against his copiously bleeding neck-wound, and dodging a third zombie, "but I think I'm going to go ahead and choose now to call in that familial obligation thing I've heard so much about." He barely slides out of another zombie's grasp, and makes a grab for a conveniently placed pile of boxes, scattering them in the path of the zombies. At least one of them goes down, he's pleased to see, but the rest of them avoid the obstacles easily, without even looking. Rodney frowns, brain skittering around that but unable to grasp the significance of it through his utter, screaming terror, and turns on the ball of one foot, hurling himself bodily over another pile of boxes and through the hole in the wall that is totally the fault of Sheppard's marines, which means all of this is ultimately Sheppard's fault.
"Familial obligation?" Sheppard asks, bewildered, and Rodney has never been so grateful to hear two things at once, which is to say Sheppard's voice on the radio at the same time as he hears it, faintly, from up ahead.
"Yes," Rodney screams, and runs down the corridor at full speed, which is not, unfortunately, fast enough to pull very far ahead of the zombies, which move at a freakishly fast scuttle that has Rodney's skin goose-bumping madly and trying to shudder right off of his body. "Yes, Sheppard, yes! You're my family, and you are obligated to save me!"
"Rodney!" Sheppard yells.
"Can't talk, zombies will eat me," Rodney yells back.
"Get down!" Sheppard screams, and then Sheppard is there, P90 in both hands, and Rodney face-plants right there on the floor, because he wants to be shot only a little bit less than he wants to be eaten by zombies.
There's a burst of gunfire, and Rodney gets a dizzily extreme close up of the toe of Sheppard's combat boot. Then Sheppard is hauling him to his feet and dragging Rodney back the way Sheppard had come from. "They're getting back up," Sheppard tells him grimly.
"They're zombies!" Rodney retorts hysterically, his head swimming crazily with adrenaline and fear and blood loss. "It's what they do."
"You can seal it off from the intersection?" Sheppard wants to know, and Rodney makes a vaguely affirmative sound and pretends not to notice Sheppard's gaze lingering on his bloody neck.
Sheppard half-drags him to the intersection, Rodney leaning heavily on their weight. "Where," he says into the apparently empty air, and then aims another burst of gunfire back toward the pursuing zombies -- which move much more slowly either a) than Sheppard, even while towing Rodney, b) after they've been shot, or c) both -- "are my motherfucking marines?"
Rodney realizes he's talking on the radio at the same time that he registers the steely-scary, almost friendly tone of voice Sheppard's using. Uh oh, slowed cognitive abilities, that's not good, he thinks unhappily, and a second later Sheppard is kissing him, just a firm, hard smack on the mouth, but Rodney jerks back anyway.
"Almost there, sir!" someone says over the radio, and Rodney hears the echo further up the hall.
"Are you crazy?" he hisses, but he turns to the bulky steel doors at the same time; if ever there was a time to multi-task, this is it. He pops the control panel off the door and adds, "No fluid exchange; I've been bitten. It could be contagious!"
"Being bitten could be contagious?" Sheppard asks, amused-steely this time. Rodney swaps crystals and hard-seals the door as the zombies close in to about five feet of it.
"Assholes," Rodney tells them, shaky hand going to his neck again."Get me to a terminal," he tells Sheppard, and then adds, "Yes, contagious. There are four of them."
Sheppard blinks at him; the marines rush into the intersection.
Rodney sighs and waves a hand at the door. "Your timing is a travesty," he tells them. "Really. Don't let anything through this door. Especially not zombies."
Sheppard gives them an affirming nod and slides up and under Rodney's arm as Rodney starts toward someplace with a terminal. "Four of them?" Sheppard says proddingly.
"Yes, four. Not two, not twelve. Too many for it to be the number of Ancients deliberately zombified -- they'd have started with one or two -- and too few for it to be a mass-happening like a lab accident. It was an experiment, almost certainly, and one that didn't go well. It has to be contagious." Sheppard looks thoughtful, but just directs him into a lab with a working terminal. Rodney gives him a withering look as he gets to work at the terminal. "Besides, have you ever even seen a zombie movie?"
Sheppard opens his mouth, lips a little curled as though about to grin, then his gaze fixes on Rodney's neck and his brows and lips both quirk downward. "Yeah, okay. You might have a point."
"I should have a couple of engineers," Rodney says, and sags a little against the wall. Over the radio, he says, "Hello, engineers?" He can't remember their names. That could be further sign of cognitive degeneration, except Rodney isn't sure he'd ever known them.
"We're all right, Dr. McKay," one of them says reassuringly.
"Oh," Rodney says. "That's good, then," and then demands, "Get me a tablet!"
Rodney's head swims alarmingly, but a tablet is shoved into his hands, and he recognizes it with disgust as soon as he powers it on; it's filled with Kavanaugh's deeply flawed schematics. "Shit," he says, scrolling through to make a new document. "More shit. Utter shit. God, how hasn't he managed to suffocate to death under the sheer weight of his idiocy?"
Sheppard chuckles, but it sounds strained to Rodney. He catches Rodney by an elbow and guides him into a seat.
Rodney sinks down into it thankfully and begins transferring everything from the consoles in the sealed lab that he can remember, adding his own notes and ideas, because unless he's very very wrong (quite unlikely), Carson is going to have to half-formulate, half-build an antidote to this thing, and Rodney doesn't trust him to do it without the data he'd gleaned from the lab. He's just got the vague ideas he has about nanites and hive minds and infection down when he catches the scent of something delicious and savory, and raises his head to look around.
"Are we close to the mess?" he asks Sheppard; Sheppard looks faintly alarmed, but answers readily enough.
"Nowhere near," he tells Rodney.
"I think I can smell lunch," Rodney informs him, and hands over the tablet by shoving it across the lab table toward Sheppard. "I'm pretty sure that's not a good sign."
"You're probably right, buddy," Sheppard tells him, and then Rodney passes out.
**
The thing where Sheppard smells fucking fantastic isn't actually new.
Sheppard smells are like a greatest hits album: all good, all the time. Even after the worst missions, when he's dirty and sweaty and cranky, he smells so good it's usually all Rodney can do to get him someplace less public than the gate room before he drags Sheppard's BDU pants down and blows his mind. Sheppard looks at him like he's insane when Rodney mentions this, but the tips of his ears turn pink, which Rodney finds both fascinating and, God help him, cute.
So when he wakes up in the infirmary with Sheppard standing next to him and smelling like coffee and blueberry cobbler and banana supreme pie and filet mignon and every good thing Rodney loves ever, it doesn't immediately occur to him that this is a problem.
"Rodney," Sheppard says, sounding both relieved and uneasy at once. "Can you hear me, buddy?"
"Yes, yes," Rodney says, rolling slightly to one side so he can smell Sheppard better. "Obligation fulfilled, well done," he adds, since he really has been trying to get Sheppard to stick around, and not just for all the sweaty and incestuous reasons.
Sheppard quirks a worried smile at him. "Can you understand me?" Sheppard asks, and that's what sets off Rodney's "oh shit" radar.
"Oh, shit," he says. Sheppard's worried look becomes exponentially more comical; Rodney ignores it. "I'm infected, aren't I? I'm zombified. I'm mutating and I'm going to be shriveled and--"
"You're not going to shrivel, Rodney," Carson says, walking up to stand on the other side of Rodney's infirmary bed. But he, Rodney sees, looks nervous as well. "You--" he says, but Rodney loses track of what he's saying when he notices how Carson smells like cinnamon buns and Rocky Road ice cream and lasagna.
That's the second thing that sets off his "oh shit" radar.
"Oh, shit," he says again, and turns his head a little away from Sheppard, and yes, oh yes, Carson definitely smells edible, and that, friends and neighbors, is most definitely new. He smells like honeydew melon and red velvet cake, and when he turns his head, Sheppard smells like fudge brownies and mashed potatoes, and Rodney gets it, God, he gets it and he really doesn't want to.
Because Carson smells good, no doubt about it, but not as good as Sheppard. Sheppard still smells like the best thing Rodney has ever smelled in his life, all the things he loves best all swirled together into the best-smelling thing he can even imagine, and Rodney is seized by the almost unendurable impulse to lick the hand that Sheppard is resting on his shoulder, to see if he tastes like he smells.
"Rodney!" Sheppard shouts, and Rodney jerks his attention away from the knuckles of Sheppard's hand with real effort.
"What?" he snaps irritably, but what he wants to say is, "God, can I suck you right now? Jesus, you smell like heaven, can I please just suck your dick?"
"Are you tracking, buddy?" Sheppard demands, and removes his hand from Rodney's shoulder to tick-tock one finger in front of Rodney's eyes.
Rodney tracks it, mostly because he really wants to suck on it. "You smell fucking edible," Rodney tells him earnestly, and has the pleasure of watching Sheppard's eyes darken even as he cuts them uneasily to Carson across Rodney's body.
Carson says something, the only part of which Rodney actually catches is, "... your brother, man!" After a second or so, Rodney realizes that Carson sounds scandalized, and has jumped to the entirely wrong conclusion (which isn't really surprising for Carson, really, although Rodney has to admit that the few times that Carson had jumped immediately to the right conclusion had been fairly disastrous for everyone involved).
"No, no," Rodney says, and reaches for Carson's arm. He's dismayed to watch his arm move with familiar, jerky speed, but then he's got his hand wrapped around Carson wrist, and he finds out that he can almost taste Carson through his skin, warm apple cider and tart strawberries. "You do, too, you both smell, God, I..." His mind is so crowded with the scents of them that Rodney is having trouble thinking around it, but he manages, "Get Zelenka, try the nano tech that nearly killed me, Zelenka will understand, also, and also, you, Carson, I think, there is, there needs..."
And then he drops Carson's arms because even with the overripe, delicious smell of him against Rodney's palm, he can still smell Sheppard, caramel and dark chocolate, and he whips around and lunges for Sheppard, overcome with need, with lust, with hunger. Sheppard lets out a wordless cry of surprise and locks his hands around Rodney's forearms, and Rodney babbles, "Please, you, I need-- You smell so good, I need, I--"
And then there are marines, or orderlies, or both, Rodney can't really pay attention to who they actually are when they all smell so fucking good, and Carson is somewhere yelling, "Don't let him bite you, for God's sake," and they wrestle him down onto the bed and a minute or so later Rodney's strapped to the infirmary bed, the weight of the restraints around his arms feeling heavy and tasteless, like denial and starvation. He moans a protest, jerking futilely against them.
"Rodney," Sheppard says, drawing the entirety of Rodney's hunger back in his direction. He sounds faintly horrified, but Rodney can smell that he's half-aroused as well, which makes him smell at least twice as delicious as before.
Rodney rolls his head in Sheppard's direction and a low sound escapes him, need and hunger, and he says, "I can taste through my skin, I can almost taste you standing there, God, I want, I want--"
Crazily, Sheppard actually moves closer, and Rodney can't stop himself from straining against the restraints.He dismisses the orderlies/marines with a significant look, and abruptly it's only Carson and Sheppard Rodney can smell again, but their scent is hugely more appealing anyway. "It's because you're smart, I think, Jesus," Rodney says, the connection hazy and unclear in his brain, but still there at least, his ability to think almost overwhelmed by greedy hunger, thin and sharp and painful enough to make Rodney groan. "God, no wonder zombies want brains, you, God, I--"
"Shh, buddy," Sheppard says, and lays a hand on Rodney's arm.
Something something "... good idea, Major," Carson says, but Rodney barely bothers listening when his skin is trembling and jerking under the taste of Sheppard's hand and he can feel Sheppard's pulse in his palm.
"Shut up," Sheppard says, and then leans over close to Rodney to murmur, "Okay, buddy, I need you to think for me. Can you do that for me, just. Just think for a minute. You said nanites and Zelenka would know what to do; can you tell me what you think is going on?"
"A virus, a constructed virus, probably nanites, probably ascension," Rodney tells him, straining toward him vainly. "Carson, a virus, yes, a virus?"
"Yes," Carson says slowly, and then Rodney misses some of whatever he says next because Sheppard strokes the hand on his arm up to the crook of Rodney's elbow, and Rodney starts to salivate helplessly. He zones back in as Carson is saying, "... shutting his body down, but leaving his consciousness intact, if in an altered state. I assume that part wasn't deliberate."
Sheppard laughs shakily, but his hand tightens around Rodney's arm. "Okay, so he's not dead yet?"
"He's not--"
Rodney loses the thread, closes his eyes and shudders under Sheppard's hands-width contact, recognizing that he's the one making that low, helplessly needy sound, but unable to stop himself from doing it. He's remembering Sheppard panting above him, Rodney's legs hooked over his arms, his cock moving hard and thick and demanding in Rodney's ass as sweat dripped from Sheppard's face and down onto Rodney's, and he wants that now, he wants that so much, and he can't think or remember how to want anything else.
"... don't need to worry about the other two scientists, then, the dead ones?" Sheppard is asking. "They're not going to rise from the dead?"
"...not killing him, just changing... others suffering from severe dehydration, most likely..."
"Touch me, more," Rodney groans. "God, I'm so hungry."
"Get Zelenka, get to work," Sheppard says grimly, his eyes fixed on Rodney's face. "Clear this room and lock it down."
"... into isolation," Carson says hotly, the indignance in his voice enough to draw Rodney's attention briefly, but then Sheppard slides his hand down and curls it against Rodney's, linking their fingers together.
"I'll handle it," Sheppard insists, narrow-eyed and flinty-voiced, beautiful (Ah, Rodney thinks dazedly, Of course, that's the word, that's why I couldn't figure it out) and dangerous, and Carson mutters something Rodney doesn't care about, which Sheppard answers with, "He's my brother; I'll handle him!"
Rodney knows Carson has left only because Sheppard's scent becomes nearly overpowering when it isn't competing with anyone else's for Rodney's attention.
"Please," Rodney whispers desperately, and Sheppard gives him his trademark wicked smirk.
"Your doctor won't approve, and it'll have to be fast," he tells Rodney. "Elizabeth will want to talk to you; if I take the edge off, will you be able to pay attention?"
"I don't, I, maybe?" Rodney manages, and then Sheppard is drawing the thin hospital blanket down to Rodney's thighs, followed by the scrub pants Rodney hadn't even noticed he was wearing. Sheppard's strong, fine-boned hands stroke up Rodney's thighs, and Rodney writhes needily, aware suddenly that he's hard, that he wants to bite Sheppard just as much as he wants to fuck him. "God, this is--" Rodney bites out, and then realizes, "No fluid transfer, John, don't..."
But Sheppard is already rolling a condom onto Rodney's cock while steadying Rodney's hip with one hand, the feel of his bare skin against Rodney's almost enough, almost enough to quiet some of the voracity knotting Rodney's stomach and what feels like every muscle in his body. "Fucking Ancients," Rodney snarls, and Sheppard laughs and runs his tongue along the crease where Rodney's thigh meets his body. "Yes, oh yes," Rodney whines, because Sheppard's tongue, and both of Sheppard's hands cradling his hips, and the pleasure of Sheppard's mouth on his cock is distant, dulled by the condom, but his hands, his hands on Rodney's hips and sliding up his ribs, so good Rodney arches into it, rides up into Sheppard's hands the way he would have done Sheppard's mouth in other circumstances.
Rodney's orgasm happens almost at once, with little fanfare; it does almost nothing to ease the gnawing in his guts. Sheppard seems to sense that, somehow, because he pulls his mouth off Rodney's cock and just puts it to work elsewhere, his hipbone, bellybutton, across Rodney's nipples, assuaging some of the skin-hunger with the flavor of the inside of Sheppard's mouth. Rodney lies there in his restraints, scrub shirt rucked up, scrub pants shoved down, and writhes and moans and croons and makes sounds like he's dying. "Best brother ever," Rodney slurs, content to let Sheppard work his mouth across Rodney's body, content until Sheppard eventually pulls away.
"No," Rodney groans, "no, please, I'm--" and Sheppard leans up to kiss his temple, light brush of lips that Rodney can almost taste, the flavor against his skin sweet and smooth, like the good milk chocolate, melting brightly someplace that isn't his tongue, but can taste Sheppard nonetheless. "I want--"
Sheppard quirks a smirk at him and mutter, "I know what you want," and then, brazenly taunting, slips a finger along Rodney's lower lip. Rodney, impulse and instinct and indignation united in aggravation, makes a whole-hearted attempt to bite him. "Now, now, Rodney, play nice," Sheppard tsks, and leans away to grab a pair of surgical gloves out of the box by Rodney's bed. "If you break your toys, you won't have anything to play with." He makes a production of snapping them in place, and only then removes the condom from Rodney's still-mostly-hard cock. He ties it in a knot and flips it into a hazardous waste container, before stripping off the gloves and shoving them in the container as well. He briskly rearranges Rodney's clothes -- Rodney groans every time Sheppard's fingertips graze his skin -- and pulls the blanket back up to Rodney's chest.
"I hate you," Rodney manages, totally coherent for a few seconds. "Hate."
"I know you do, buddy," Sheppard agrees, and then calls for Carson.
The next few minutes are hazy -- Rodney tries to bite Carson, Carson screams like a girl -- and then Rodney goes to sleep again.
**
The thing where he drifts in and out of consciousness is annoying as hell.
He realizes that they're keeping him sedated the second or third time he wakes up to snatches of conversation happening over his bed.
"...nanites to reverse the effects of the virus..." he hears.
Then, later, "...no way to know for..."
The third time he wakes he hears Sheppard say, "You are not fucking field testing that serum on McKay! I'm his goddamned brother; I think that gives me full motherfucking power of attorney in this case!"
Rodney manages to thank Sheppard for saving him from the depredations of the medical profession by muttering thickly, "Smell like cake, eat your brain."
Sheppard snorts, and says, "Thanks, buddy. Go back to sleep."
Later still, he hears, "...seems to be working on the Ancient, but physiologically we can't be..." and "...aging rapidly..." and "...stasis."
And Sheppard says, "Is it the best you can do?"
He hears Carson's answer clearly: "Without infecting someone else and testing it on someone physiologically human, it's the only thing we can do."
Sheppard grips his hand. Rodney, distantly aware that Sheppard is looking at him, waiting for him, squeezes back.
**
The thing where he wakes all the way up and there's an Ancient sitting on the bed next to him is a total shock.
Rodney stares at him -- an old man, hunched and bald and wearing hospital scrubs just like Rodney -- for several long seconds, mouth agape, and doesn't realize he doesn't smell like anything except dust and old, musty socks until the Ancient gets up slowly, joints creaking, and shuffles over to Rodney's bedside. Rodney recoils instinctively; he's pretty sure this is the guy that bit him.
The Ancient holds both hands up in a placating gesture. "I've come to thank you," he says in a raspy voice. "Dr. Beckett has told me that the work that allowed him and Dr. Zelenka to create an antigen for the mutation my lab staff and I were suffering from was based primarily on your ideas after you had been bitten by one of us."
Rodney blinks. "Ah, yes, well. They were just notes."
The old man... uh, Ancient man, whatever... nods solemnly, and says, "But effective notes. Notes that made sense, which could be used. Your mental fortitude must be very impressive."
"I..." Rodney says, but then stops because he realizes that he can think again. He can think, and no one around him smells like food, and that's just. That's just amazingly great, really.
He needs to find Sheppard and drag him off for a naked, incestuous "meeting" immediately.
But being able to think again means that he's too aware of the fact that there's an actual Ancient sitting right there that he can actually ask questions of, and he sits up and says, "Where are the rest of you?"
"Dead, I'm afraid," he tells Rodney. "The antigen can't reverse the effects of ten thousand years in stasis. Once the nanites in our blood that were affecting our cognition were countered, the age-slowing effects were also countered. Danae and Tolms never woke up. Silla died just a few minutes ago. Soon, I'll join them. But I'm glad to have the chance to thank you. I'm glad for the chance to die as myself."
"It was ascension, wasn't it? You were after more time?"
The old man nodded.
"What else? It was always what we strove for."
Rodney manages to bite back a dubious acerbic comment, but can't quite keep himself from pointing out, "Yes, well, from this end of ten thousand years, it looks a lot like you were trying to corner the market on evil overlord devices." The old man laughs, which gives Rodney a little start. He wouldn't have bet on finding out the Ancients had any sense of humor at all.
He only realizes he'd said as much aloud when the old man laughs again. "We were people, Dr. McKay. People not dissimilar to your people. We loved and lived and fought, and, it would seem, lost."
"And turned yourselves into zombies," Rodney points out.
"That, too." He smiles, but Rodney can see age creeping into his face, a visible indicator of his cells degenerating, like watching a flower bloom and die in fast motion capture on a National Geographic special. "I've left you something," he tells Rodney, indicating a tablet sitting on the table beside Rodney's bed. It's everything Rodney can do not to snatch it up in greedy hands and find out what it is. "As a thank you."
Rodney, who feels that having been turned into a zombie due to this guy's incompetence means never having to say 'thank you' himself, merely nods, and sets to asking every question he could think of in the short span of time they have left.
**
Hirel, the last Ancient in Atlantis, dies less than an hour later; it is not a surprise to anyone. Especially not Hirel, who dies with a smile on his face.
His last words are, "You're quite a cocky one, aren't you?"
To which Rodney answers, "It isn't cockiness if you're really that good."
Sheppard -- who still smells really fucking good, but no longer rouses in Rodney the impulse to brunch on whatever bit of him he can reach -- and Carson -- who now just smells like the lab and whatever horrible hair gel he's been using -- and Elizabeth -- who Rodney is happy not to associate with snacking at all -- are all present when it happens. The four of them let out a collective sigh.
**
The location of the ZPM lab Hirel left on Rodney's tablet (Kavanaugh's really, but why quibble?) nearly gives Rodney a fucking heart attack when he realizes what it is, and then throws him into paroxysms of joy so profound that the only way he can handle them is to escape from the infirmary with Sheppard's help, and drag Sheppard into the nearest empty room with a lock on the door, and fuck him roughly over a bench.
"Do it, do it," Sheppard gasps, fully dressed except for his BDUs down around his ankles, and Rodney licks at the back of his neck and pounds into his willing ass, and grins at the improbable perfection of his whole fucking life. "Rodney, yeah, build me a fucking ZPM, fuck me, I want to fly the fucking city, God," and Rodney comes with all of these images flashing through his mind like a feast.