[SGA fic] The Best Things in Life are Free (8b/8) [COMPLETE]
This is it, guys. It's been fantastic.
Part Eight-A
"Why don't you have another cup of coffee?" John suggested desperately.
"If I have more coffee," Katie said very carefully, frowning into her mug, "I will have to pee all night long."
John winced and slouched back in his seat. When he'd gone back inside the gym for the last dance, he'd found Katie completely plastered and hanging on Mitch's arm.
"I only spiked the one drink, Shep," Mitch had whispered to him when he'd handed Katie off. "I swear, I wasn't trying to get her smashed."
"Yes, you were," John had grunted, hauling Katie upright. She didn't weigh a hundred pounds, dripping wet so it wasn't that hard. "You just didn't think it would only take one drink."
John snuck them out as the dance was breaking up and drove Katie to the Early Bird to ply her with coffee until she sobered up enough for him to take her home. To her parents.
That was three cups of coffee ago. John wasn't sure Katie could actually drink any more without jittering out of her skin. She wasn't anywhere close to sober and she didn't even look like she was ready to throw up. At least Rodney'd had the courtesy to get sick immediately and John reminded himself that the memory wasn't actually a reason to laugh.
Katie leaned across the table and regarded John intensely. "John," she said very seriously. "I don't think we should go out anymore."
"Um. Okay," John agreed just as seriously. "If that's the way you feel about it."
"It's just that you're not my type at all," Katie expounded, with a sigh that completely deflated her body. She rested her head on her arms, collapsing down on her table. "I think I really like guys who are all, you know, burly."
"Burly?" John asked, taking a sip of his milkshake to keep from laughing out loud. "Rodney's not burly."
"But he has those, those arms, you know?" Katie struggled to sit upright and tried to show the breadth of Rodney's shoulders by holding her hands apart and frowning critically at the space between them. "Mitch, too. You're just…you're just too tall."
"Oh. Too tall." John sipped at his milkshake again and wondered how to get another cup of coffee into her.
Then, as if giving life to his previous thoughts, the front door of the Early Bird opened and Rodney and Vala walked in. They went to the counter where Vala perched on a stool and spun around. Rodney said something to her and then went to the back of the restaurant where the bathrooms were located.
"Katie, I'll be right back," John said quickly, setting his glass aside. "She needs another cup of coffee," he told the waitress as he slid out of the booth and then he headed toward the restrooms. He waited outside the door for a moment, waiting for the sound of running water, and then went in to find Rodney wiping his hands on a paper towel.
"John?" Rodney said, surprised. He probably hadn't even seen John when he'd come in.
"C'mon," John said, grabbing him by the shirt and pulling him into the first stall. He pressed his mouth quickly against Rodney's, closing his eyes against the heat and strength and the taste of Altoids and blood.
"Ow," Rodney mumbled against his mouth, and then hauled him in with both hands, crushing the lapels of John's jacket.
"Ow," John replied, as Rodney's mouth bruised his already-puffy lip, but he wrapped his hand around the back of Rodney's neck and kept kissing for as long as he could. He didn't feel Rodney release his jacket but he felt Rodney's fingers when they tugged his shirt from his pants and pressed, warm and deft, against skin at the small of his back. For just a moment, John wondered if he'd ever been touched there before.
"You taste like chocolate," Rodney said when he pulled back. "Wow, I didn't even know you were here. And -- we can't do this here!"
"I know," John said, his heart thudding in his chest when he realized how stupid he was being. "I know. Look, Katie got drunk, and I brought her here to sober up before her dad kicks my ass. I need to -- "
"Vala -- " Rodney started, overlapping John.
"You go and then I'll go," John said, unlocking the bathroom door and leaning out. They had been the only people in the restaurant when he'd left Katie, but probably people would be trickling in after they'd vacated Carlson Point. "Go."
Rodney left, casting a startled, adoring, backward glance at John. John blew out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and leaned against the sink. He glanced at the mirror and winced at the reflection. His face was still bruised and puffy, but now it was flushed, too, and his suit was rumpled where Rodney had grabbed it. The wrinkles in his suit jacket shook out well enough when he took it off and tucking his shirt back in helped. He ran some cold water in the sink and splashed it on his face and through his hair. It didn't make his face look any better, but it did flatten out some of the cowlicks. He shrugged back into his jacket and went out into the main dining room.
Rodney and Vala were sitting in the booth with Katie, talking to the waitress. Rodney shrugged helplessly at John and John felt himself flush all over again.
"Rodney said some terrible things to Vala," Katie said by way of greeting. "But she's letting him take her home anyway."
"He's buying me eggs," Vala added, perusing the menu. "It's the least he can do for being so rude."
"And she's not going to have sex with him now," Katie added.
"I'm very sorry to hear that," John said, although he totally wasn't. He glanced at the waitress, who seemed completely unfazed and was just tapping her pencil on her pad, waiting for Vala to make up her mind.
"I'll have eggs and bacon," Vala said thoughtfully. "Scrambled. No, wait, maybe make that over easy. Better yet, forget the eggs altogether. I would like some…creamed chipped beef on toast," she said, reading deliberately from the menu. She smiled widely and passed her menu over. "Don't worry," she stage-whispered to Katie. "You'll be sober in no time."
"You want some more milkshake, dear?" the waitress asked John as he slid into the seat next to Rodney.
"No, I'm fine, thanks," he said. "I still have some left."
"No, you don't," Rodney corrected, sliding the glass over to him. "Bring him another one. It's on me," he added apologetically.
John didn't care, he didn't really need more anyway, but maybe it would cool him off. Just sitting in the booth, his thigh pressed against Rodney's, watching Katie sip yet another cup of coffee and listening to Vala prattle on about who-knew-what wasn't making him any less hard or any more patient.
"Oh, here we go!" Vala said when the food arrived. The waitress doled out John's milkshake, a milkshake and fries for Rodney, and then set down Vala's "creamed chipped beef on toast" -- better known in John's house as SOS.
The effect on Katie was instantaneous and amazing. She turned green, then white, and Vala slid gracefully from the booth just in time for Katie to crawl out with her hand clapped over her mouth, and make a dash for the bathroom.
"There," Vala said, taking a dainty bite of her meal. "Didn't I say she'd be right as rain in no time at all?"
"That didn't mean make her throw up," Rodney said around a French fry.
"It helps," John said, mostly because he'd been thinking the same thing earlier. "Doesn't it?" He kicked Rodney under the table and Rodney's face went bright red.
"Well, some people, I suppose," he muttered. But then he kicked John back.
Katie reappeared after a few minutes, looking a little less green and a lot more subdued.
"You okay?" John asked sympathetically.
"Yeah," Katie said, making sure not to look at Vala or her plate. "Do you think we can go now?"
"Yeah, sure," John said, sliding out of the booth to put his body between her and the smell of Vala's early breakfast. "Here, have some of my milkshake. It's cold." She sipped carefully at his drink as he took his wallet out of his pocket.
"Don't worry about it," Rodney said, wiping a napkin over his mouth.
"For the coffee," John said, dropping his father's five on the table. "See you guys later?"
"Toodles," Vala said, waving her fingers at them.
Rodney just said, "Yeah, later," and John had to get Katie out of there before he crawled right back into the booth and kissed Rodney again.
Katie got into the car quietly and learned her head against the window as John drove her home. He pulled the DeLorean up her house and turned off the engine. Sunlight was glimmering at the horizon, lightening the sky without color. He glanced at the house and was relieved that none of the windows in the front rooms were lit.
"Katie," he said, touched her shoulder to rouse her.
"Are we here already?" she asked, sitting straight up.
"Yeah," John said. "Look, I hope you don't mind if I don't, uh, walk you to the door."
"No! I mean, um." Katie cast a look at the house. "Not that I don't…want you to, but I…I'm kind of hoping I can get in without waking up my parents."
"I was just going to say that your father is probably going to kill me and then I won't be much good for anything," John admitted.
Katie grinned at him. "It's okay," she said. "I won't tell him you got me drunk and had your way with me." She leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. "I had a great time," she said sincerely, even though he wasn't the reason for it.
"I did, too," John said, even though she wasn't the reason for him, either. "Don't get too grounded, okay?"
"Okay." Katie let herself out of the car and waved over her shoulder as she ran up the driveway and let herself into the house.
John put the car back in drive and pulled away from the curb. His house was a few blocks away and he was in and almost to his room when he saw the light on under the door of the third bedroom -- his father's office.
He paused. A month ago, he would have just gone to his room and gone to sleep, but now he knocked on the door and waited for his father's quiet, "C'mon in."
"Hey," he said, opening the door and looking inside. Colonel Sheppard was sitting at his desk, a cut glass tumbler of whiskey at his elbow. The safe behind him was closed but not latched and on the desk before him were leather boxes that John knew held medals earned on classified missions.
"Hey, son," Will said quietly. "How was your night?"
John took a seat without being asked, the only other chair in the room. The chair Danny Connors had sat in weeks ago when he'd come to be kicked out of the Air Force.
"It was good," he said, ignoring the butterflies in his stomach and the ghost sensation of Rodney's mouth on his throat. "I spent your five bucks on coffee instead of condoms."
The Colonel's eyebrows went up and he made a face.
"I didn't sleep with her," John said, pleased with the reaction. "Mitch spiked Katie's soda and I couldn't take her home plastered so we went to the Early Bird and now I know everything there is to know about African violets."
"I gave your mother an African violet once," the Colonel said thoughtfully. "They were on sale at the BX and we'd just moved again, I thought maybe it would make the base apartment feel like home."
John stared at his father. They hadn't talked about his mother since she'd died. Not since the night the Colonel had said, Well, your mother's not here to take care of you but I think you're too old for a babysitter. Think you can take care of yourself for a couple of days?
And John had said, Yes, sir and that had been the end of that.
"Did, uh, did she like it?" he asked, wanting the story to go on, to go on forever, and not knowing how to ask.
"She killed it in about a week," Will said with a smile.
John snorted out a laugh and then froze, suddenly horrified about laughing at the memory of his mother. But his father didn't seem to notice.
"That woman couldn't keep a plant alive," Will said, reaching for his glass and taking a sip of his drink. "The only thing she managed not to kill was that little cactus thing you brought home from school."
"That's because she told me that if I wanted to keep it, I had to take care of it," John said, the words falling from his mouth like bright, sharp, pieces of stained glass. "I took it for walks every day for two weeks before she told me that plants didn't need exercise."
Will guffawed and took another sip of his drink. "I remember when she got it in her head to make you peanut butter cup ice cream for your birthday."
"That was good ice cream," John said. He remembered that birthday. His father had been home.
"I would hope so," Will said dryly. "I had to go to three grocery stores that night because you were too excited to sleep until almost midnight and as it turned out, we were out of rock salt."
"I used to wake up sometimes," John said, feeling like he was sharing a secret. "And she'd be out on the couch watching old movies on the television. If it wasn't a school night, she'd made a big bowl of popcorn and we'd stay up to watch the movie and then sleep on the couch."
Will picked up his tumbler and looked inside. He rolled his wrist and John heard the ice clinking against the glass. "Was she sad?" he asked, his voice suddenly low and serious. "When I was gone? I kept saying that it would pay off in the end, that I'd get a stateside posting eventually, something more permanent, and then I could spoil her. Take her out to dinner and buy her things and go dancing. And I never got the chance."
John felt the shift in the atmosphere of the room, something not so funny, not so casual. His father never relaxed like this, was never less than a command presence. It was like his father had just hurled a ball in his direction with no aim, no control, and it was up to John to field it the best he knew how.
"I never saw her cry," he said thoughtfully. "She was always busy. She always had some…project for us to do, or some adventure, or a new math game. When I was in school, she did a lot of volunteer work. She decided she was going to learn to knit one winter and I spent a lot of time holding yarn. She used to -- to talk to me about you. I don't think she was sad, but I think -- I think she did miss you."
"I missed her, too" the Colonel said with a nod and upended his drink. He set the glass down, well away from his papers and medals, and smiled at John, a small, sad smile that reminded him of the small, sad smiles his mother had worn on those late movie nights as she stroked her fingers through his hopeless cowlicks. "And damn," Will added, turning his face toward the window, where the first rays of morning sunlight were turning the shade a dark gold. His voice choked low in his throat. "I miss her now."
If Rodney had thought that the events of the homecoming dance meant that everything would go back to normal -- except with bonus making out with John -- he had been wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
"Has anyone seen the Great Football Star?" Rodney asked crankily as he sat down to lunch.
"John has been in homeroom every day this week," Teyla said serenely as she tried to balance one of the new plastic milk pouches on her plate and stab it with a tiny, pointed straw. "Why? Why did they feel the need to replace the milk boxes with these things?"
"I got it for you," Ford offered gallantly, reaching for her milk bubble. He squeezed one end and rammed the straw through -- all the way through. "Oops."
Teyla covered her mouth casually and tried to cough away her laugh as she piled napkin on the spreading pool of milk and dabbed at Aiden's face.
Rodney rolled his eyes and donated his own napkin to the cause. "Well, he hasn't been at lunch or in study hall," he said.
"Don't worry about it," Ronon said, grabbing both of Rodney's shoulders from behind and shaking him in his seat. "He'll turn up."
"Yeah, great, how do you know that?" Rodney asked, but Ronon was already ambling across the cafeteria to lean on Simpson's table, over where Rodney used to sit. "Wonderful." He finished his lunch and balled his brown paper bag in his fist to throw away.
John hadn’t met him outside to walk to school all week. The one day, Rodney knocked on his door, he was met with a somewhat sleepy Colonel Sheppard who looked confused, went to look in John's room, and then suggested with equal bewilderment that maybe John had left for school early. Clearly, neither of them bought it, but John wasn't available to interrogate, so they both went their separate ways.
By Friday, it was pretty obvious. John was freaking out. Rodney had so called this.
Throwing his trash away, Rodney left the cafeteria and walked down the hall to his locker to get his books for study hall. He wanted to finish his calculus and physics problems so he could spend the afternoon filling out his applications after Mrs. Langford went home.
"Oh, hey, now, there's no need to be rude!"
Rodney would recognize that voice anywhere, and seconds later, Vala stumbled out of Mr. Dixon's classroom and crashed into him. "Oh, Rodney!"
"Vala," Rodney replied untangling himself. He glanced back at the classroom they were passing. The door slammed before he could see anything. He blinked. "Were you trying to -- oh my God! With Mr. Dixon?"
Vala sighed and rolled her eyes. "No! Well. If he were more cooperative maybe. I mean, the man has five kids. You would think he'd be a little more amenable to a little strings-free -- "
"You'd think he'd never want to have sex again," Rodney said. "If he gets a kid every time he tries."
Vala blinked at him. "That…is something I hadn't considered," she admitted reluctantly. She gusted out a massive sigh. "Oh, Rodney! What am I supposed to do?"
Rodney sighed. "Look, you just need high enough marks to graduate, right?
"Well," Vala said, drawing out the word. "A nice grade would certainly be preferable. But really at the rate things are going, I'm really just not doing that well. If you know what I mean." She gazed up at him from beneath her lashes. "I don't suppose you'd reconsider?" she asked. "Surely you see the advantages of a mutually beneficial business exchange."
It wasn't even that Rodney had extreme conscientious objections to changing Vala's grade. He knew that Vala wasn't dumb, wasn't even lazy, really, just wasn't interested in the ridiculously restricted curriculum the school forced upon them. Sure, changing grades was wrong -- especially when it screwed with the class rankings -- but Vala just wanted to graduate and Rodney wasn't unsympathetic to the wish to escape high school and their cloistered little town.
But he wasn't going to extort sex from Vala as payment, even though his conscience reminded him how he's extorted friendship for John in exchange for a thousand dollars.
"Okay, look," he said. "We're friends, right?"
"Er, are we?" she asked, rubbing the corner of her mouth with one fingertip. "I'm not terribly familiar with the concept."
"Yes," Rodney said firmly. "We are friends and you don't have to trade me sexual favors to get me to do something for you."
"What do you want me trade you?" Vala asked, cocking her head to the side.
"You just want to graduate, right?" he asked. Vala bobbed her head. "Okay, so here's the deal. It's only the beginning of November and there's no way your grades can be so bad that you can't graduate in June. I can teach you everything you need to know to pass the tests. You just need to learn it."
Vala brought her clasped hands to her mouth. "I can't pay you," she said hesitantly.
"You don't have to," Rodney said. "You just have to listen to me and do what I tell you to pass your classes."
"That sounds like an awful lot of work. Are you sure you can't just go in and, you know, tweak things a little?"
"That's my final offer," Rodney said boldly. "Take it or leave it."
Vala bit her lip and cast a nervous sideways look at the closed door of Mr. Dixon's classroom. "All right," she said finally. "You have a deal."
John ran into the house and straight to the bathroom, shedding his clothes on the floor and ducking under the warming stream of water. He scrubbed off the sweat from walking Mrs. Davis's dogs and shut off the water, wrapping a towel around his waist to go back to his room. His suit pants were hung up neatly. The white shirt he'd worn to Homecoming was still in the laundry -- no point doing wash until absolutely necessary -- but he had another one in the closet, and he got that buttoned up over an undershirt and the tails shoved into his pants when his father knocked.
"Yeah, come in," he called, unslinging his red tie from the hook inside the closet and pulling the circle over his head. His mother had tied it years ago and he only wore it to interviews and important events when he felt like he needed a little extra luck.
"You almost ready?" his father asked, clearly almost as nervous as John. He was wearing his dress blues, eagles gleaming on the epaulets, and he'd had his hair cut that day.
"Almost," John said, sliding the knot of the tie up under his collar and lining the top half over the bottom. He already had his socks and shoes on, so he shrugged into the jacket and frowned at his hair in the mirror. He'd slicked it up with gel in the bathroom but it still refused to behave. He made an ineffectual swipe at it.
"Fix it in the car," his father suggested. "Your appointment's in an hour."
"Yeah," John said, sliding his wallet into a pocket and following his father out to the garage. They were taking the DeLorean and it would take maybe half that time to get to Senator Goldwater's office, but they both knew how important this was.
"You know you won't meet with the Senator tonight," the Colonel said as he backed the car down the driveway. "He has a -- a nominating committee. You'll be talking to them."
"I know," John said. Danny Connors had said as much at that picnic when he was explaining the application process for the Academy and the nomination process to win an appointment from one of the senators or House representative.
Fifteen miles down the road, a few things became pretty clear. 1) The Sheppards were going to be very, very early to John's interview. 2) John's hair was never going to flatten out.
"Maybe I should have gotten it cut," John said, frowning at his reflection in the DeLorean's window as he got out of the car.
"I'm not even sure that would help," Will said, completely unhelpfully.
They went inside and sat in the waiting room with another boy and a girl with a very short haircut and very pretty face, and shoulders that told John she was definitely a varsity swimmer.
"I guess maybe we didn't have to go 80," Will muttered as he picked up first one TIME magazine and then another. "Speaking of, what were you out doing this afternoon? Isn't football over?"
"Yeah," John muttered from behind his own issue of TIME. "I was um, walking Mrs. Davis's dogs."
"Seriously?" Will asked. "Is that what you were doing the other day when Rodney stopped by?"
John's hearts stuttered in his chest. "When did Rodney come by?" he asked, flipping past an article about California and capital punishment.
"A couple mornings ago," Will said. "He said he was getting you to walk to school."
"Oh, yeah," John said, guilt blossoming in his chest. "They need morning and evening walks. They're kind of, well, they're big dogs." He scanned an article without seeing it, aware of his father's eyes on him and the delay in response.
"If you needed money," Will said carefully, "you could have said something."
"It's not that," John said, turning the page. "Mrs. Davis dislocated her shoulder -- well, I think the dogs did it for her. I just said I'd help out."
"Well. That's nice of you." Will tilted his head toward the inner office where the swimmer girl had just been escorted. "Make sure to tell them that, would you?"
John grinned. "No problem," he said, relieved his dad had believed him. Because this was something he had to do himself.
Mrs. Langford's typewriter was ancient and manual and the E key stuck. Rodney had already taken it apart and reassembled it once. He had plenty of time, really -- if he wanted to be evaluated with the masses of high school graduates with no work prospects and the goal of getting drunk and laid on their parents' dime.
No, Rodney McKay was going to be in the first batch of applicants, sororal sabotage notwithstanding.
He was down to three applications -- East Coast schools like Cornell and Columbia, and the oh-so-important CU Boulder application. It was stupid, maybe, but Rodney couldn't get John's words out of his head.
If you go there, you could come visit me. Come to a football game or something.
Plus the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, he reminded himself hurriedly. The most important thing was that CU Boulder had the LASP.
Mrs. Langford had locked the door behind her when she left at four, promising Rodney that he would be able to get out but no one else could get in. So he was pretty surprised when he heard a key in the lock and the door swing open.
"Hey," John said, poking his messy hair into the typewriter alcove. "Teyla said you were in here."
Rodney fumbled on the keys, adding another half dozen spaces, and gaped at John. "I thought you'd skipped town or something," he said.
John grinned abashedly and lifted the big black case he was carrying onto the counter. "Yeah, sorry about that," he said. "I've had some stuff to take care of. You finishing up your applications?"
"Yeah," Rodney said, curiosity getting the better of him. "What did you -- ?"
But then John unlatched the case and opened it to reveal a beautiful, shiny, black Underwood.
"I thought you could use some help," John said. "I was going to bring my dad's Selectric but he's holed up in his office doing something. This one was my mom's. It was just sitting in the garage so…." He shrugged.
"Wow, yeah, thanks," Rodney blurted out, relieved that he might be able to leave the school sometime before midnight. He pulled the unfinished Cornell application from Mrs. Langford's typewriter and passed it over to John along with the finished pages of his application to Columbia. "Here," he said. "If you can just copy this information over, I can work on the CU Boulder one and then I'll be done."
"Cool," John said. He dragged a chair over to the counter and rolled the first piece of paper into the old typewriter.
Rodney was giddy inside as he pulled the CU Boulder application from its envelope and thought happily of special trips to the LASP and weekends at football games in Colorado Springs. The office was quiet but for the noise of the typewriters.
The peace lasted all of about thirty seconds and then:
"Meredith?" John burst out. "Your first name is Meredith?"
John could do math in his head. It was handy for things like dividing up restaurant checks, adding up the grocery bill, and freaking out his father. It was also good for projecting numbers, and since he'd picked up his last paycheck from the drugstore and twenty bucks from Mrs. Davis for walking the hellhounds, that just about --
"JOHN!" His father's command voice carried down the hall from the kitchen and through John's closed door and John knew better than to do anything but pull the door open and run into the hall. "Phone," his father said, thrusting the receiver at him. Be polite, he mouthed.
"John Sheppard," he said cautiously.
"Please hold for Senator Goldwater," a clipped voice said in reply.
John blinked and raised his eyebrows at his father. His father made the same face back at him.
"John Sheppard?"
"Yes, sir," John said automatically.
"This is Senator Goldwater. How are you doing, John?"
"I'm doing just fine, sir," John said, mindful of his father. "Are you doing well this evening?"
"I am, son, thank you for asking." There was a beat and then the senator said, "I'm calling to offer you a place at the US Air Force Academy. You'll be my last nomination from this office and I'm confident that you will serve your country proudly."
"Yes, sir, thank you, sir," John said, calm on the outside, but everything racing on the inside. "It would be an honor."
"They tell me the formal paperwork will get to you by mail in a few days," the senator continued. "But I wanted to call and offer my congratulations personally. Usually we notify our nominees in January, but I won't be in office much longer. I'm a little envious of you, John. You have a promising career ahead of you."
"Thank you, sir," John said again. Then he remembered discussing the just-passed Goldwater-Nichols Act at the dinner table with his father and added, "Congratulations on your bill passing. If I understand it correctly, we'll be seeing more successful joint operations in the future."
"That's the plan, son," the senator said wryly. "We did what we could on my end. Now it's up to you kids."
The call wrapped up quickly after that and John hung up the phone, feeling a little dazed.
"Well," his father demanded, as if eavesdropping hadn't told him everything he'd needed to know.
"I have the nomination," John said and found himself swept in a bear hug.
"Congratulations," his father said when he'd released John. "I had no doubt." He leaned against the kitchen counter and rubbed the back of his neck, like John did when he was nervous. "I'm glad this happened tonight," he said. "There's something I want to talk to you about."
John's first guess was that they were moving, or rather, his father was moving, as soon as John left home. It wasn't like it was anything unusual and they'd been in Arizona for longer than they were most places. He just hoped it would happen after graduation and not sometime before. "Yeah, what is it?" he asked.
"I have…I have a lot of leave accrued," Will said nervously. "And I was looking at the numbers and feeling kind of guilty because I really shouldn't have that much. I've been away a lot and maybe I didn't have to…I just didn't think I could do my job very well if I wasn't, well, you know, right there. In the middle of things. But you'll be taking off for the Academy, now, in what, six months? Seven? So I thought maybe I'd back off the travel a little, take some time here and there. Maybe a few trips? I mean, we haven't been camping since -- okay, I'm not sure we've ever been camping."
"Yeah, we have," John said. "We went when Mom was alive, and then there was that time they had to come pick you up by helicopter and they sent an airman to drive me home. That was pretty awesome, by the way. We stopped for dinner at this beer and burger joint and the waitress wasn't wearing a bra."
"Great," Will muttered. "This is exactly what I'm talking about. I was a terrible absentee father. I guess what I'm asking is that…if I try to make it up to you now, will you just resent me for horning in on your last year with your friends, or do you want to do this? Spend some time with your extremely uncool old dad? It's okay," he added quickly. "I don't actually expect you to drop everything after I left you to your own devices so long. It's like shutting the barn door after the horse escapes, I guess." He sighed and sat down at the kitchen table.
John thought for a moment. He'd been counting on having the house to himself -- well, to himself and Rodney. Weekend nights spent together, hanging out and kissing and touching and maybe going out to hustle a game of pool now and then, just for old time's sake.
But with luck and confidence in Rodney's vaunted brain, they'd get more time together and it wasn't like his father was going to be around 24-7.
"If you want to bring a friend along when we go somewhere, that's fine," Will added, clearly a peace offering.
John grinned. "You just want to watch Rodney try to start a campfire," he accused.
Will grinned back. "I like Rodney," he said. "I really do. But if you bring him camping, you have to let me have some fun with him."
"Yeah, okay," John said. "I guess it wouldn't suck to have you around."
Will grinned and reached out to tousle John's hair. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "Don't you have homework? Physics or something?"
"I had an A on the last report card!" John fired back.
"And you've got three more to go," Will replied. "So get a move on."
John rolled his eyes and went to his room, where he closed the door and opened the window. He crawled out on the roof, having no real intention of doing more work, and grinned when he saw a dark shape on the roof next door.
"Hey!" John called across the gap between the buildings. "Meredith!"
"Oh, my God," Rodney's voice echoed back. "How many times do I have to tell you, I was named after -- oh, this is that thing where you -- right, very funny, thank you."
John grinned and lay back against the roof. He remembered staring at the stars, wanting to be anywhere but where he was, wanting to flee the tiny town for the great adventure of Colorado Springs, and now that he was going, now it seemed less important to get out. He liked that Rodney was right there on the other roof, not so far away.
"Did you get your Boulder application done?" he called over.
"Yup," Rodney replied. "Mailing it out tomorrow."
"Good," John replied. "Offer still stands, you know." Rodney's silence was a near-palpable thing.
"You think," he said. "Even next year?"
But before John could answer, there was some sort of commotion from Rodney's room and Jeannie's plaintive voice wafted through the window, calling for her brother.
"Crap, gotta go!" Rodney called, and John watched him sit up and crawl back in through the window.
John tucked his arms behind his head and tilted his face up to the stars and imagined that he was flying.
Rodney crammed the last of his application packets into the too-narrow slot of the mailbox. It dropped into the receptacle with a satisfying crash and he grinned at Jeannie, who was holding the little door open for him.
"That's it!" he said, tapping his palm against his other fist. "That was the last one."
"I can let go now?" Jeannie asked. At his nod, she let go the hinged flap and let it slam shut with a final, resounding clang. "Am I done apologizing now?" she asked, falling into step with him on the way back down the street.
"Why, do you have more chocolate?" Rodney asked.
Jeannie kicked him and promptly tripped over her own feet.
"Okay, okay, fine. Don't injure yourself. You can be done apologizing." He glowered down at the top of her head and thought about the noisy fight their parents had gotten into during breakfast. Jeannie had looked at him with wide, desperate eyes, and he'd said, Come help me mail off my stuff.
In nine months, John or not, Rodney would be at college, on his own, and away from all that. But Jeannie had six years left in the house, at least. "Look," he said awkwardly. "It won't be that bad. Once you get to high school you can -- join clubs and play sports if that's what you want, and you don't have to be in the house all the time and -- "
"Oh, my God," Jeannie said, her expression completely horrified. "We're not like, talking about this, are we?"
"No," Rodney said firmly. "Absolutely not. C'mon," he added, reaching out and mussing Jeannie's meticulously teased bangs just to make her shriek and bat his hand away. "Let's go get some ice cream. My treat."
Simmons kept John late after physics, first to berate him on nearly falling asleep in class -- it had been a late night -- and then to congratulate him on his improving scores on the weekly quizzes. John thought about his errand for the afternoon and let the teacher's words wash by him until Simmons said,
"I understand Rodney McKay has been tutoring you," confident with the air of someone who had spies everywhere.
"Uh, yeah," John mumbled, brought suddenly back to the present. He thought guiltily about how many weeks had passed since he had studied with Rodney. But after Saturday that would be a moot point. He wondered who had told Simmons and was surprised to realize he had a choice of culprits.
Four weeks being Rodney's best friend had made John new friends as well.
"Well, as long as you absorb his skills and none of that attitude, you should do just fine," Simmons said, clapping John's shoulder. "Keep up the good work."
John mumbled his thanks and escaped, fighting the urge to wipe off that shoulder. He stopped at his locker to dump his morning books. Something crinkled in the back of his locker as he pushed his physics book to the back. John's locker wasn't cluttered -- it had his books stacked neatly on the top shelf, his sweatshirt hanging on the hook against the back wall, and his skateboard propped diagonally inside. Not like Rodney's locker, which was stuffed so tightly with mimeographed problem sets, crumpled brown lunch bags, and schoolbooks, that everything threatened to cascade down on his head every time he opened the door.
The source of the mysterious sound turned out to be a ball of computer paper. John tugged at the corners, pulling the paper flat, and looked down to see Rodney's name printed in black on a white line.
The match test.
John smiled and folded the page in half, sliding it into his physics book. For all Rodney's bitching and whining about the inaccuracy of the test, his computers had come through for him in the end.
The halls were empty and the lunch line was short when John got to the cafeteria.
"Almost missed it, honey," Marietta the Lunch Lady said, using a gargantuan ice cream scoop to disgorge a lump of macaroni and cheese onto John's tray. There was a brown slab of meat next to it that might have been meatloaf or possibly roast beef.
John smiled and thanked her, grabbing a plastic pouch of milk on his way to the cashier. He paid for his lunch and paused at the end of the line to survey the cafeteria.
Rodney, Teyla, Ford, and Ronon were at their usual table with Mitch and Dex goofing off. As he watched, Katie Brown and Jeannette Simpson ventured over. Ronon immediately jumped out of his seat and offered it to Jeannette. Mitch lost control of the milk carton he was trying to balance on his head and John watched Katie laugh as he came up dripping chocolate milk.
It was like watching television without sound and John was glad to see Rodney in the middle of it, his mouth moving rapid-fire as he shoved napkins at Mitch.
And then John turned around and crossed to a table on the other side of the room and set his tray down across from its lone occupant.
Radek Zelenka looked up from his calculus book and blinked at John. "Hello." He glanced from John to the other side of the room where Rodney and Teyla and everyone else sat. "Not to be impolite, but why are you on this side of the room and not on the other?"
John sat down at the table across from Radek and leaned his elbows on the table.
"Because there's something I need to do," he said. "And I'm going to need your help."
Rodney was having a perfectly decent Saturday afternoon, which could have been improved only with some making out, but that was looking less and less likely as the weeks wore on.
He was bored of playing Impossible Mission by himself and had started sketching out the code for a game of his own when the doorbell rang. Maybe -- Could it be? John had said to trust him so maybe his little freak-out time was over? Rodney jumped up and checked his hair in the mirror. The front was fluffy and he tried to pull a few strands down over his forehead before running for the door.
But he'd dawdled too long -- he heard Jeannie dragging the front door open. Good, fine, perfect. Jeannie could play lady of the house and flirt to her heart's content and John could think Rodney had more important things to do than sit around waiting for him to show up.
Someone knocked on the door, twice, and Rodney threw himself at the desk chair. But despite all odds -- and John's ridiculously polite upbringing -- the door opened before Rodney called for his visitor to enter.
"Get up," Radek said. "You have very important things to do."
"I -- what? You're not John." Rodney stared at Radek, helplessly disappointed.
Radek scowled at him. "You have astronomical expectations. Please with the moving, now."
"Why am I moving?" Rodney asked, getting up anyway. "What could I possibly have to do that's so important? My applications are sent off, my scholarship papers are -- well, there's nothing due this week, at least, and I think I'm supposed to be watching Jeannie or something. Did you see my parents when you were going through?"
Radek rolled his eyes. "I will watch Jeannie but you must go to the school, to the football field."
"To the football field?" Rodney asked, the coffee he'd downed earlier going acidic in his stomach. It really was all a trick -- John had realized that he didn't want to be gay, he was blaming Rodney, and he was dragging Radek into it, too. "Oh, this is because I kind of blew you off for a couple of weeks?" he asked. "Because it's not like I was that great a friend even before that, you know."
"Clearly you are not well," Radek told him, looking confounded. "Are you so terribly insecure that you think I, too, am out to get you?"
Rodney scowled. "I am not insecure," he said as witheringly as possible.
"Fine. So go to the football field, "Radek answered. "I promise that there is no evil plot to make you do exercise or anything."
"Hilarious," Rodney sneered and grabbed his jacket. He didn't really need it -- it was mostly habit from his childhood, when it actually got cold in November not just mildly less hot than the rest of the year.
Halfway to the school, Rodney realized that his great gay-bashing conspiracy theory probably was really stupid and that he really did know John better than that. Even if John was freaking out, he'd sort-of warned Rodney in advance and Rodney had promised to trust him.
Maybe this had nothing to do with John at all. Maybe Ronon wanted Rodney to tend bar for some party? But on the football field? Elizabeth had gone back to California the day after the Homecoming dance, so she couldn't have anything to do with it, despite Radek's slavish devotion to her. Rodney couldn't even get Radek to spill on whether he'd gotten in a kiss or maybe a grope during their one dance. A gentleman never kisses and tells, Radek had said primly and no amount of rationalization or pleading could get Rodney a satisfactory answer.
Maybe this was some sort of elaborate revenge by Teyla? Or Katie? Or Laura? Oh. Laura. Either this was Carson trying to beat him up again or Laura wanting to apologize? But Laura had already apologized, awkwardly in the hallway, and he'd seen her holding Carson's hand in between classes.
Vala? No, as familiar as she was with the underside of the bleachers, Vala wouldn't bother using Radek to get him to meet her. He'd been meeting her in the library after school, teaching her math and science and what little grammar he could remember, or pick up from her textbook as he was tutoring her. Vala wasn't stupid -- she just needed more attention than anyone seemed inclined to give her. It was frustrating that such easy things sometimes took her forever to get, but when she did, her face would light up and she'd clap her hands together and Rodney couldn't hate that.
Lost in his own reasoning, Rodney reached the school and trekked behind the gym and out to the football field. "Hello?" he called when he was in sight of the bleachers.
"I'm in here."
Rodney rounded the end of the bleachers and what he saw on the field stopped him in his tracks.
Before him stood, what was without a doubt, the most beautiful sight in the world. And next to it was John Sheppard, hands shoved awkwardly in his varsity jacket.
John paced the end zone anxiously, flexing his fingers and skimming his palms down the sides of his jeans. He knew Rodney wanted him, wanted to be with him. They'd kissed out behind the gym and Rodney had beamed like nothing could make him happier. The memory of his earlier rejection still burned, though, knotting low in John's stomach and Rodney was so damn flighty, John wasn't sure he'd even show.
He had to show. If he didn't, John was going to march out to Rodney's house and beat him over the head with --
"Hello?"
The metal bleachers made Rodney's voice echo and John promptly forgot about breathing. "Yeah, I'm -- " His voice wasn't loud enough, or strong enough, and he had to clear his throat before trying again. "I'm in here."
"What are you doing -- " Rodney's voice broke off as he came through the opening in the bleachers and saw John. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open in a way that would be utterly unattractive on anyone else. But one thing John had learned about falling in love was that it changed your perspective on everything. "That's -- that's a Meade 8-inch LX2 SCT." Rodney dashed up, dividing his astonished gaze between John and the shining new telescope sitting on its tripod next to him in the end zone. "Did you -- oh my God. You -- "
"I have a proposition for you," John said, before Rodney could get out whatever he was going to say. "I, uh, I have this telescope." He rubbed the back of his neck and cleared his throat. "And I'll -- I'll give it to you. If you'll be my boyfriend for, oh, say a month."
"Monday to Sunday night?" Rodney asked, openly beaming now, and John felt warm explosions in his chest for having put that expression on his face.
"Saturday to Friday night," he said, pulling his hands out of his pockets as Rodney took another step closer. "Since I'm making the rules this time."
"Speaking of rules," Rodney said, glancing between the telescope and John.
"You can tell Radek," John said quickly, "but -- "
"I wasn't going to tell anybody," Rodney said. "But if it's okay for Radek to know, well, he probably would have figured it out anyway. I just wanted to know what happened when the uh, contract was up."
"I'm out of telescopes," John said as straight-faced as he could manage when all he wanted to do was smile. "But if it's looking good in four weeks, I'm sure we can develop some algorithm for trading favors."
"Oh, my God," Rodney said delightedly, reaching for John's jacket and dragging him in close. "You are such a geek!"
John laughed, feeling everything slot into place, and slid his hands around Rodney's waist, tangling his fingers the warm cotton of his shirttail. "Hey," he said, tilting his head so that his mouth lined up with Rodney's. "I learned from the best."
The End
A/N: The Goldwater-Nichols Act passed in October of 1986, reorganizing the upper echelons of the military and setting up a more streamlined command structure for the benefit of joint operations. Barry Goldwater retired in January, 1987, giving up his senatorial seat to John McCain. The process for nominating service academy candidates runs from about September to January. I took a few liberties with the timeline for the purposes of the story.
Link Post
Part Eight-A
"Why don't you have another cup of coffee?" John suggested desperately.
"If I have more coffee," Katie said very carefully, frowning into her mug, "I will have to pee all night long."
John winced and slouched back in his seat. When he'd gone back inside the gym for the last dance, he'd found Katie completely plastered and hanging on Mitch's arm.
"I only spiked the one drink, Shep," Mitch had whispered to him when he'd handed Katie off. "I swear, I wasn't trying to get her smashed."
"Yes, you were," John had grunted, hauling Katie upright. She didn't weigh a hundred pounds, dripping wet so it wasn't that hard. "You just didn't think it would only take one drink."
John snuck them out as the dance was breaking up and drove Katie to the Early Bird to ply her with coffee until she sobered up enough for him to take her home. To her parents.
That was three cups of coffee ago. John wasn't sure Katie could actually drink any more without jittering out of her skin. She wasn't anywhere close to sober and she didn't even look like she was ready to throw up. At least Rodney'd had the courtesy to get sick immediately and John reminded himself that the memory wasn't actually a reason to laugh.
Katie leaned across the table and regarded John intensely. "John," she said very seriously. "I don't think we should go out anymore."
"Um. Okay," John agreed just as seriously. "If that's the way you feel about it."
"It's just that you're not my type at all," Katie expounded, with a sigh that completely deflated her body. She rested her head on her arms, collapsing down on her table. "I think I really like guys who are all, you know, burly."
"Burly?" John asked, taking a sip of his milkshake to keep from laughing out loud. "Rodney's not burly."
"But he has those, those arms, you know?" Katie struggled to sit upright and tried to show the breadth of Rodney's shoulders by holding her hands apart and frowning critically at the space between them. "Mitch, too. You're just…you're just too tall."
"Oh. Too tall." John sipped at his milkshake again and wondered how to get another cup of coffee into her.
Then, as if giving life to his previous thoughts, the front door of the Early Bird opened and Rodney and Vala walked in. They went to the counter where Vala perched on a stool and spun around. Rodney said something to her and then went to the back of the restaurant where the bathrooms were located.
"Katie, I'll be right back," John said quickly, setting his glass aside. "She needs another cup of coffee," he told the waitress as he slid out of the booth and then he headed toward the restrooms. He waited outside the door for a moment, waiting for the sound of running water, and then went in to find Rodney wiping his hands on a paper towel.
"John?" Rodney said, surprised. He probably hadn't even seen John when he'd come in.
"C'mon," John said, grabbing him by the shirt and pulling him into the first stall. He pressed his mouth quickly against Rodney's, closing his eyes against the heat and strength and the taste of Altoids and blood.
"Ow," Rodney mumbled against his mouth, and then hauled him in with both hands, crushing the lapels of John's jacket.
"Ow," John replied, as Rodney's mouth bruised his already-puffy lip, but he wrapped his hand around the back of Rodney's neck and kept kissing for as long as he could. He didn't feel Rodney release his jacket but he felt Rodney's fingers when they tugged his shirt from his pants and pressed, warm and deft, against skin at the small of his back. For just a moment, John wondered if he'd ever been touched there before.
"You taste like chocolate," Rodney said when he pulled back. "Wow, I didn't even know you were here. And -- we can't do this here!"
"I know," John said, his heart thudding in his chest when he realized how stupid he was being. "I know. Look, Katie got drunk, and I brought her here to sober up before her dad kicks my ass. I need to -- "
"Vala -- " Rodney started, overlapping John.
"You go and then I'll go," John said, unlocking the bathroom door and leaning out. They had been the only people in the restaurant when he'd left Katie, but probably people would be trickling in after they'd vacated Carlson Point. "Go."
Rodney left, casting a startled, adoring, backward glance at John. John blew out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and leaned against the sink. He glanced at the mirror and winced at the reflection. His face was still bruised and puffy, but now it was flushed, too, and his suit was rumpled where Rodney had grabbed it. The wrinkles in his suit jacket shook out well enough when he took it off and tucking his shirt back in helped. He ran some cold water in the sink and splashed it on his face and through his hair. It didn't make his face look any better, but it did flatten out some of the cowlicks. He shrugged back into his jacket and went out into the main dining room.
Rodney and Vala were sitting in the booth with Katie, talking to the waitress. Rodney shrugged helplessly at John and John felt himself flush all over again.
"Rodney said some terrible things to Vala," Katie said by way of greeting. "But she's letting him take her home anyway."
"He's buying me eggs," Vala added, perusing the menu. "It's the least he can do for being so rude."
"And she's not going to have sex with him now," Katie added.
"I'm very sorry to hear that," John said, although he totally wasn't. He glanced at the waitress, who seemed completely unfazed and was just tapping her pencil on her pad, waiting for Vala to make up her mind.
"I'll have eggs and bacon," Vala said thoughtfully. "Scrambled. No, wait, maybe make that over easy. Better yet, forget the eggs altogether. I would like some…creamed chipped beef on toast," she said, reading deliberately from the menu. She smiled widely and passed her menu over. "Don't worry," she stage-whispered to Katie. "You'll be sober in no time."
"You want some more milkshake, dear?" the waitress asked John as he slid into the seat next to Rodney.
"No, I'm fine, thanks," he said. "I still have some left."
"No, you don't," Rodney corrected, sliding the glass over to him. "Bring him another one. It's on me," he added apologetically.
John didn't care, he didn't really need more anyway, but maybe it would cool him off. Just sitting in the booth, his thigh pressed against Rodney's, watching Katie sip yet another cup of coffee and listening to Vala prattle on about who-knew-what wasn't making him any less hard or any more patient.
"Oh, here we go!" Vala said when the food arrived. The waitress doled out John's milkshake, a milkshake and fries for Rodney, and then set down Vala's "creamed chipped beef on toast" -- better known in John's house as SOS.
The effect on Katie was instantaneous and amazing. She turned green, then white, and Vala slid gracefully from the booth just in time for Katie to crawl out with her hand clapped over her mouth, and make a dash for the bathroom.
"There," Vala said, taking a dainty bite of her meal. "Didn't I say she'd be right as rain in no time at all?"
"That didn't mean make her throw up," Rodney said around a French fry.
"It helps," John said, mostly because he'd been thinking the same thing earlier. "Doesn't it?" He kicked Rodney under the table and Rodney's face went bright red.
"Well, some people, I suppose," he muttered. But then he kicked John back.
Katie reappeared after a few minutes, looking a little less green and a lot more subdued.
"You okay?" John asked sympathetically.
"Yeah," Katie said, making sure not to look at Vala or her plate. "Do you think we can go now?"
"Yeah, sure," John said, sliding out of the booth to put his body between her and the smell of Vala's early breakfast. "Here, have some of my milkshake. It's cold." She sipped carefully at his drink as he took his wallet out of his pocket.
"Don't worry about it," Rodney said, wiping a napkin over his mouth.
"For the coffee," John said, dropping his father's five on the table. "See you guys later?"
"Toodles," Vala said, waving her fingers at them.
Rodney just said, "Yeah, later," and John had to get Katie out of there before he crawled right back into the booth and kissed Rodney again.
Katie got into the car quietly and learned her head against the window as John drove her home. He pulled the DeLorean up her house and turned off the engine. Sunlight was glimmering at the horizon, lightening the sky without color. He glanced at the house and was relieved that none of the windows in the front rooms were lit.
"Katie," he said, touched her shoulder to rouse her.
"Are we here already?" she asked, sitting straight up.
"Yeah," John said. "Look, I hope you don't mind if I don't, uh, walk you to the door."
"No! I mean, um." Katie cast a look at the house. "Not that I don't…want you to, but I…I'm kind of hoping I can get in without waking up my parents."
"I was just going to say that your father is probably going to kill me and then I won't be much good for anything," John admitted.
Katie grinned at him. "It's okay," she said. "I won't tell him you got me drunk and had your way with me." She leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. "I had a great time," she said sincerely, even though he wasn't the reason for it.
"I did, too," John said, even though she wasn't the reason for him, either. "Don't get too grounded, okay?"
"Okay." Katie let herself out of the car and waved over her shoulder as she ran up the driveway and let herself into the house.
John put the car back in drive and pulled away from the curb. His house was a few blocks away and he was in and almost to his room when he saw the light on under the door of the third bedroom -- his father's office.
He paused. A month ago, he would have just gone to his room and gone to sleep, but now he knocked on the door and waited for his father's quiet, "C'mon in."
"Hey," he said, opening the door and looking inside. Colonel Sheppard was sitting at his desk, a cut glass tumbler of whiskey at his elbow. The safe behind him was closed but not latched and on the desk before him were leather boxes that John knew held medals earned on classified missions.
"Hey, son," Will said quietly. "How was your night?"
John took a seat without being asked, the only other chair in the room. The chair Danny Connors had sat in weeks ago when he'd come to be kicked out of the Air Force.
"It was good," he said, ignoring the butterflies in his stomach and the ghost sensation of Rodney's mouth on his throat. "I spent your five bucks on coffee instead of condoms."
The Colonel's eyebrows went up and he made a face.
"I didn't sleep with her," John said, pleased with the reaction. "Mitch spiked Katie's soda and I couldn't take her home plastered so we went to the Early Bird and now I know everything there is to know about African violets."
"I gave your mother an African violet once," the Colonel said thoughtfully. "They were on sale at the BX and we'd just moved again, I thought maybe it would make the base apartment feel like home."
John stared at his father. They hadn't talked about his mother since she'd died. Not since the night the Colonel had said, Well, your mother's not here to take care of you but I think you're too old for a babysitter. Think you can take care of yourself for a couple of days?
And John had said, Yes, sir and that had been the end of that.
"Did, uh, did she like it?" he asked, wanting the story to go on, to go on forever, and not knowing how to ask.
"She killed it in about a week," Will said with a smile.
John snorted out a laugh and then froze, suddenly horrified about laughing at the memory of his mother. But his father didn't seem to notice.
"That woman couldn't keep a plant alive," Will said, reaching for his glass and taking a sip of his drink. "The only thing she managed not to kill was that little cactus thing you brought home from school."
"That's because she told me that if I wanted to keep it, I had to take care of it," John said, the words falling from his mouth like bright, sharp, pieces of stained glass. "I took it for walks every day for two weeks before she told me that plants didn't need exercise."
Will guffawed and took another sip of his drink. "I remember when she got it in her head to make you peanut butter cup ice cream for your birthday."
"That was good ice cream," John said. He remembered that birthday. His father had been home.
"I would hope so," Will said dryly. "I had to go to three grocery stores that night because you were too excited to sleep until almost midnight and as it turned out, we were out of rock salt."
"I used to wake up sometimes," John said, feeling like he was sharing a secret. "And she'd be out on the couch watching old movies on the television. If it wasn't a school night, she'd made a big bowl of popcorn and we'd stay up to watch the movie and then sleep on the couch."
Will picked up his tumbler and looked inside. He rolled his wrist and John heard the ice clinking against the glass. "Was she sad?" he asked, his voice suddenly low and serious. "When I was gone? I kept saying that it would pay off in the end, that I'd get a stateside posting eventually, something more permanent, and then I could spoil her. Take her out to dinner and buy her things and go dancing. And I never got the chance."
John felt the shift in the atmosphere of the room, something not so funny, not so casual. His father never relaxed like this, was never less than a command presence. It was like his father had just hurled a ball in his direction with no aim, no control, and it was up to John to field it the best he knew how.
"I never saw her cry," he said thoughtfully. "She was always busy. She always had some…project for us to do, or some adventure, or a new math game. When I was in school, she did a lot of volunteer work. She decided she was going to learn to knit one winter and I spent a lot of time holding yarn. She used to -- to talk to me about you. I don't think she was sad, but I think -- I think she did miss you."
"I missed her, too" the Colonel said with a nod and upended his drink. He set the glass down, well away from his papers and medals, and smiled at John, a small, sad smile that reminded him of the small, sad smiles his mother had worn on those late movie nights as she stroked her fingers through his hopeless cowlicks. "And damn," Will added, turning his face toward the window, where the first rays of morning sunlight were turning the shade a dark gold. His voice choked low in his throat. "I miss her now."
If Rodney had thought that the events of the homecoming dance meant that everything would go back to normal -- except with bonus making out with John -- he had been wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
"Has anyone seen the Great Football Star?" Rodney asked crankily as he sat down to lunch.
"John has been in homeroom every day this week," Teyla said serenely as she tried to balance one of the new plastic milk pouches on her plate and stab it with a tiny, pointed straw. "Why? Why did they feel the need to replace the milk boxes with these things?"
"I got it for you," Ford offered gallantly, reaching for her milk bubble. He squeezed one end and rammed the straw through -- all the way through. "Oops."
Teyla covered her mouth casually and tried to cough away her laugh as she piled napkin on the spreading pool of milk and dabbed at Aiden's face.
Rodney rolled his eyes and donated his own napkin to the cause. "Well, he hasn't been at lunch or in study hall," he said.
"Don't worry about it," Ronon said, grabbing both of Rodney's shoulders from behind and shaking him in his seat. "He'll turn up."
"Yeah, great, how do you know that?" Rodney asked, but Ronon was already ambling across the cafeteria to lean on Simpson's table, over where Rodney used to sit. "Wonderful." He finished his lunch and balled his brown paper bag in his fist to throw away.
John hadn’t met him outside to walk to school all week. The one day, Rodney knocked on his door, he was met with a somewhat sleepy Colonel Sheppard who looked confused, went to look in John's room, and then suggested with equal bewilderment that maybe John had left for school early. Clearly, neither of them bought it, but John wasn't available to interrogate, so they both went their separate ways.
By Friday, it was pretty obvious. John was freaking out. Rodney had so called this.
Throwing his trash away, Rodney left the cafeteria and walked down the hall to his locker to get his books for study hall. He wanted to finish his calculus and physics problems so he could spend the afternoon filling out his applications after Mrs. Langford went home.
"Oh, hey, now, there's no need to be rude!"
Rodney would recognize that voice anywhere, and seconds later, Vala stumbled out of Mr. Dixon's classroom and crashed into him. "Oh, Rodney!"
"Vala," Rodney replied untangling himself. He glanced back at the classroom they were passing. The door slammed before he could see anything. He blinked. "Were you trying to -- oh my God! With Mr. Dixon?"
Vala sighed and rolled her eyes. "No! Well. If he were more cooperative maybe. I mean, the man has five kids. You would think he'd be a little more amenable to a little strings-free -- "
"You'd think he'd never want to have sex again," Rodney said. "If he gets a kid every time he tries."
Vala blinked at him. "That…is something I hadn't considered," she admitted reluctantly. She gusted out a massive sigh. "Oh, Rodney! What am I supposed to do?"
Rodney sighed. "Look, you just need high enough marks to graduate, right?
"Well," Vala said, drawing out the word. "A nice grade would certainly be preferable. But really at the rate things are going, I'm really just not doing that well. If you know what I mean." She gazed up at him from beneath her lashes. "I don't suppose you'd reconsider?" she asked. "Surely you see the advantages of a mutually beneficial business exchange."
It wasn't even that Rodney had extreme conscientious objections to changing Vala's grade. He knew that Vala wasn't dumb, wasn't even lazy, really, just wasn't interested in the ridiculously restricted curriculum the school forced upon them. Sure, changing grades was wrong -- especially when it screwed with the class rankings -- but Vala just wanted to graduate and Rodney wasn't unsympathetic to the wish to escape high school and their cloistered little town.
But he wasn't going to extort sex from Vala as payment, even though his conscience reminded him how he's extorted friendship for John in exchange for a thousand dollars.
"Okay, look," he said. "We're friends, right?"
"Er, are we?" she asked, rubbing the corner of her mouth with one fingertip. "I'm not terribly familiar with the concept."
"Yes," Rodney said firmly. "We are friends and you don't have to trade me sexual favors to get me to do something for you."
"What do you want me trade you?" Vala asked, cocking her head to the side.
"You just want to graduate, right?" he asked. Vala bobbed her head. "Okay, so here's the deal. It's only the beginning of November and there's no way your grades can be so bad that you can't graduate in June. I can teach you everything you need to know to pass the tests. You just need to learn it."
Vala brought her clasped hands to her mouth. "I can't pay you," she said hesitantly.
"You don't have to," Rodney said. "You just have to listen to me and do what I tell you to pass your classes."
"That sounds like an awful lot of work. Are you sure you can't just go in and, you know, tweak things a little?"
"That's my final offer," Rodney said boldly. "Take it or leave it."
Vala bit her lip and cast a nervous sideways look at the closed door of Mr. Dixon's classroom. "All right," she said finally. "You have a deal."
John ran into the house and straight to the bathroom, shedding his clothes on the floor and ducking under the warming stream of water. He scrubbed off the sweat from walking Mrs. Davis's dogs and shut off the water, wrapping a towel around his waist to go back to his room. His suit pants were hung up neatly. The white shirt he'd worn to Homecoming was still in the laundry -- no point doing wash until absolutely necessary -- but he had another one in the closet, and he got that buttoned up over an undershirt and the tails shoved into his pants when his father knocked.
"Yeah, come in," he called, unslinging his red tie from the hook inside the closet and pulling the circle over his head. His mother had tied it years ago and he only wore it to interviews and important events when he felt like he needed a little extra luck.
"You almost ready?" his father asked, clearly almost as nervous as John. He was wearing his dress blues, eagles gleaming on the epaulets, and he'd had his hair cut that day.
"Almost," John said, sliding the knot of the tie up under his collar and lining the top half over the bottom. He already had his socks and shoes on, so he shrugged into the jacket and frowned at his hair in the mirror. He'd slicked it up with gel in the bathroom but it still refused to behave. He made an ineffectual swipe at it.
"Fix it in the car," his father suggested. "Your appointment's in an hour."
"Yeah," John said, sliding his wallet into a pocket and following his father out to the garage. They were taking the DeLorean and it would take maybe half that time to get to Senator Goldwater's office, but they both knew how important this was.
"You know you won't meet with the Senator tonight," the Colonel said as he backed the car down the driveway. "He has a -- a nominating committee. You'll be talking to them."
"I know," John said. Danny Connors had said as much at that picnic when he was explaining the application process for the Academy and the nomination process to win an appointment from one of the senators or House representative.
Fifteen miles down the road, a few things became pretty clear. 1) The Sheppards were going to be very, very early to John's interview. 2) John's hair was never going to flatten out.
"Maybe I should have gotten it cut," John said, frowning at his reflection in the DeLorean's window as he got out of the car.
"I'm not even sure that would help," Will said, completely unhelpfully.
They went inside and sat in the waiting room with another boy and a girl with a very short haircut and very pretty face, and shoulders that told John she was definitely a varsity swimmer.
"I guess maybe we didn't have to go 80," Will muttered as he picked up first one TIME magazine and then another. "Speaking of, what were you out doing this afternoon? Isn't football over?"
"Yeah," John muttered from behind his own issue of TIME. "I was um, walking Mrs. Davis's dogs."
"Seriously?" Will asked. "Is that what you were doing the other day when Rodney stopped by?"
John's hearts stuttered in his chest. "When did Rodney come by?" he asked, flipping past an article about California and capital punishment.
"A couple mornings ago," Will said. "He said he was getting you to walk to school."
"Oh, yeah," John said, guilt blossoming in his chest. "They need morning and evening walks. They're kind of, well, they're big dogs." He scanned an article without seeing it, aware of his father's eyes on him and the delay in response.
"If you needed money," Will said carefully, "you could have said something."
"It's not that," John said, turning the page. "Mrs. Davis dislocated her shoulder -- well, I think the dogs did it for her. I just said I'd help out."
"Well. That's nice of you." Will tilted his head toward the inner office where the swimmer girl had just been escorted. "Make sure to tell them that, would you?"
John grinned. "No problem," he said, relieved his dad had believed him. Because this was something he had to do himself.
Mrs. Langford's typewriter was ancient and manual and the E key stuck. Rodney had already taken it apart and reassembled it once. He had plenty of time, really -- if he wanted to be evaluated with the masses of high school graduates with no work prospects and the goal of getting drunk and laid on their parents' dime.
No, Rodney McKay was going to be in the first batch of applicants, sororal sabotage notwithstanding.
He was down to three applications -- East Coast schools like Cornell and Columbia, and the oh-so-important CU Boulder application. It was stupid, maybe, but Rodney couldn't get John's words out of his head.
If you go there, you could come visit me. Come to a football game or something.
Plus the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, he reminded himself hurriedly. The most important thing was that CU Boulder had the LASP.
Mrs. Langford had locked the door behind her when she left at four, promising Rodney that he would be able to get out but no one else could get in. So he was pretty surprised when he heard a key in the lock and the door swing open.
"Hey," John said, poking his messy hair into the typewriter alcove. "Teyla said you were in here."
Rodney fumbled on the keys, adding another half dozen spaces, and gaped at John. "I thought you'd skipped town or something," he said.
John grinned abashedly and lifted the big black case he was carrying onto the counter. "Yeah, sorry about that," he said. "I've had some stuff to take care of. You finishing up your applications?"
"Yeah," Rodney said, curiosity getting the better of him. "What did you -- ?"
But then John unlatched the case and opened it to reveal a beautiful, shiny, black Underwood.
"I thought you could use some help," John said. "I was going to bring my dad's Selectric but he's holed up in his office doing something. This one was my mom's. It was just sitting in the garage so…." He shrugged.
"Wow, yeah, thanks," Rodney blurted out, relieved that he might be able to leave the school sometime before midnight. He pulled the unfinished Cornell application from Mrs. Langford's typewriter and passed it over to John along with the finished pages of his application to Columbia. "Here," he said. "If you can just copy this information over, I can work on the CU Boulder one and then I'll be done."
"Cool," John said. He dragged a chair over to the counter and rolled the first piece of paper into the old typewriter.
Rodney was giddy inside as he pulled the CU Boulder application from its envelope and thought happily of special trips to the LASP and weekends at football games in Colorado Springs. The office was quiet but for the noise of the typewriters.
The peace lasted all of about thirty seconds and then:
"Meredith?" John burst out. "Your first name is Meredith?"
John could do math in his head. It was handy for things like dividing up restaurant checks, adding up the grocery bill, and freaking out his father. It was also good for projecting numbers, and since he'd picked up his last paycheck from the drugstore and twenty bucks from Mrs. Davis for walking the hellhounds, that just about --
"JOHN!" His father's command voice carried down the hall from the kitchen and through John's closed door and John knew better than to do anything but pull the door open and run into the hall. "Phone," his father said, thrusting the receiver at him. Be polite, he mouthed.
"John Sheppard," he said cautiously.
"Please hold for Senator Goldwater," a clipped voice said in reply.
John blinked and raised his eyebrows at his father. His father made the same face back at him.
"John Sheppard?"
"Yes, sir," John said automatically.
"This is Senator Goldwater. How are you doing, John?"
"I'm doing just fine, sir," John said, mindful of his father. "Are you doing well this evening?"
"I am, son, thank you for asking." There was a beat and then the senator said, "I'm calling to offer you a place at the US Air Force Academy. You'll be my last nomination from this office and I'm confident that you will serve your country proudly."
"Yes, sir, thank you, sir," John said, calm on the outside, but everything racing on the inside. "It would be an honor."
"They tell me the formal paperwork will get to you by mail in a few days," the senator continued. "But I wanted to call and offer my congratulations personally. Usually we notify our nominees in January, but I won't be in office much longer. I'm a little envious of you, John. You have a promising career ahead of you."
"Thank you, sir," John said again. Then he remembered discussing the just-passed Goldwater-Nichols Act at the dinner table with his father and added, "Congratulations on your bill passing. If I understand it correctly, we'll be seeing more successful joint operations in the future."
"That's the plan, son," the senator said wryly. "We did what we could on my end. Now it's up to you kids."
The call wrapped up quickly after that and John hung up the phone, feeling a little dazed.
"Well," his father demanded, as if eavesdropping hadn't told him everything he'd needed to know.
"I have the nomination," John said and found himself swept in a bear hug.
"Congratulations," his father said when he'd released John. "I had no doubt." He leaned against the kitchen counter and rubbed the back of his neck, like John did when he was nervous. "I'm glad this happened tonight," he said. "There's something I want to talk to you about."
John's first guess was that they were moving, or rather, his father was moving, as soon as John left home. It wasn't like it was anything unusual and they'd been in Arizona for longer than they were most places. He just hoped it would happen after graduation and not sometime before. "Yeah, what is it?" he asked.
"I have…I have a lot of leave accrued," Will said nervously. "And I was looking at the numbers and feeling kind of guilty because I really shouldn't have that much. I've been away a lot and maybe I didn't have to…I just didn't think I could do my job very well if I wasn't, well, you know, right there. In the middle of things. But you'll be taking off for the Academy, now, in what, six months? Seven? So I thought maybe I'd back off the travel a little, take some time here and there. Maybe a few trips? I mean, we haven't been camping since -- okay, I'm not sure we've ever been camping."
"Yeah, we have," John said. "We went when Mom was alive, and then there was that time they had to come pick you up by helicopter and they sent an airman to drive me home. That was pretty awesome, by the way. We stopped for dinner at this beer and burger joint and the waitress wasn't wearing a bra."
"Great," Will muttered. "This is exactly what I'm talking about. I was a terrible absentee father. I guess what I'm asking is that…if I try to make it up to you now, will you just resent me for horning in on your last year with your friends, or do you want to do this? Spend some time with your extremely uncool old dad? It's okay," he added quickly. "I don't actually expect you to drop everything after I left you to your own devices so long. It's like shutting the barn door after the horse escapes, I guess." He sighed and sat down at the kitchen table.
John thought for a moment. He'd been counting on having the house to himself -- well, to himself and Rodney. Weekend nights spent together, hanging out and kissing and touching and maybe going out to hustle a game of pool now and then, just for old time's sake.
But with luck and confidence in Rodney's vaunted brain, they'd get more time together and it wasn't like his father was going to be around 24-7.
"If you want to bring a friend along when we go somewhere, that's fine," Will added, clearly a peace offering.
John grinned. "You just want to watch Rodney try to start a campfire," he accused.
Will grinned back. "I like Rodney," he said. "I really do. But if you bring him camping, you have to let me have some fun with him."
"Yeah, okay," John said. "I guess it wouldn't suck to have you around."
Will grinned and reached out to tousle John's hair. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "Don't you have homework? Physics or something?"
"I had an A on the last report card!" John fired back.
"And you've got three more to go," Will replied. "So get a move on."
John rolled his eyes and went to his room, where he closed the door and opened the window. He crawled out on the roof, having no real intention of doing more work, and grinned when he saw a dark shape on the roof next door.
"Hey!" John called across the gap between the buildings. "Meredith!"
"Oh, my God," Rodney's voice echoed back. "How many times do I have to tell you, I was named after -- oh, this is that thing where you -- right, very funny, thank you."
John grinned and lay back against the roof. He remembered staring at the stars, wanting to be anywhere but where he was, wanting to flee the tiny town for the great adventure of Colorado Springs, and now that he was going, now it seemed less important to get out. He liked that Rodney was right there on the other roof, not so far away.
"Did you get your Boulder application done?" he called over.
"Yup," Rodney replied. "Mailing it out tomorrow."
"Good," John replied. "Offer still stands, you know." Rodney's silence was a near-palpable thing.
"You think," he said. "Even next year?"
But before John could answer, there was some sort of commotion from Rodney's room and Jeannie's plaintive voice wafted through the window, calling for her brother.
"Crap, gotta go!" Rodney called, and John watched him sit up and crawl back in through the window.
John tucked his arms behind his head and tilted his face up to the stars and imagined that he was flying.
Rodney crammed the last of his application packets into the too-narrow slot of the mailbox. It dropped into the receptacle with a satisfying crash and he grinned at Jeannie, who was holding the little door open for him.
"That's it!" he said, tapping his palm against his other fist. "That was the last one."
"I can let go now?" Jeannie asked. At his nod, she let go the hinged flap and let it slam shut with a final, resounding clang. "Am I done apologizing now?" she asked, falling into step with him on the way back down the street.
"Why, do you have more chocolate?" Rodney asked.
Jeannie kicked him and promptly tripped over her own feet.
"Okay, okay, fine. Don't injure yourself. You can be done apologizing." He glowered down at the top of her head and thought about the noisy fight their parents had gotten into during breakfast. Jeannie had looked at him with wide, desperate eyes, and he'd said, Come help me mail off my stuff.
In nine months, John or not, Rodney would be at college, on his own, and away from all that. But Jeannie had six years left in the house, at least. "Look," he said awkwardly. "It won't be that bad. Once you get to high school you can -- join clubs and play sports if that's what you want, and you don't have to be in the house all the time and -- "
"Oh, my God," Jeannie said, her expression completely horrified. "We're not like, talking about this, are we?"
"No," Rodney said firmly. "Absolutely not. C'mon," he added, reaching out and mussing Jeannie's meticulously teased bangs just to make her shriek and bat his hand away. "Let's go get some ice cream. My treat."
Simmons kept John late after physics, first to berate him on nearly falling asleep in class -- it had been a late night -- and then to congratulate him on his improving scores on the weekly quizzes. John thought about his errand for the afternoon and let the teacher's words wash by him until Simmons said,
"I understand Rodney McKay has been tutoring you," confident with the air of someone who had spies everywhere.
"Uh, yeah," John mumbled, brought suddenly back to the present. He thought guiltily about how many weeks had passed since he had studied with Rodney. But after Saturday that would be a moot point. He wondered who had told Simmons and was surprised to realize he had a choice of culprits.
Four weeks being Rodney's best friend had made John new friends as well.
"Well, as long as you absorb his skills and none of that attitude, you should do just fine," Simmons said, clapping John's shoulder. "Keep up the good work."
John mumbled his thanks and escaped, fighting the urge to wipe off that shoulder. He stopped at his locker to dump his morning books. Something crinkled in the back of his locker as he pushed his physics book to the back. John's locker wasn't cluttered -- it had his books stacked neatly on the top shelf, his sweatshirt hanging on the hook against the back wall, and his skateboard propped diagonally inside. Not like Rodney's locker, which was stuffed so tightly with mimeographed problem sets, crumpled brown lunch bags, and schoolbooks, that everything threatened to cascade down on his head every time he opened the door.
The source of the mysterious sound turned out to be a ball of computer paper. John tugged at the corners, pulling the paper flat, and looked down to see Rodney's name printed in black on a white line.
The match test.
John smiled and folded the page in half, sliding it into his physics book. For all Rodney's bitching and whining about the inaccuracy of the test, his computers had come through for him in the end.
The halls were empty and the lunch line was short when John got to the cafeteria.
"Almost missed it, honey," Marietta the Lunch Lady said, using a gargantuan ice cream scoop to disgorge a lump of macaroni and cheese onto John's tray. There was a brown slab of meat next to it that might have been meatloaf or possibly roast beef.
John smiled and thanked her, grabbing a plastic pouch of milk on his way to the cashier. He paid for his lunch and paused at the end of the line to survey the cafeteria.
Rodney, Teyla, Ford, and Ronon were at their usual table with Mitch and Dex goofing off. As he watched, Katie Brown and Jeannette Simpson ventured over. Ronon immediately jumped out of his seat and offered it to Jeannette. Mitch lost control of the milk carton he was trying to balance on his head and John watched Katie laugh as he came up dripping chocolate milk.
It was like watching television without sound and John was glad to see Rodney in the middle of it, his mouth moving rapid-fire as he shoved napkins at Mitch.
And then John turned around and crossed to a table on the other side of the room and set his tray down across from its lone occupant.
Radek Zelenka looked up from his calculus book and blinked at John. "Hello." He glanced from John to the other side of the room where Rodney and Teyla and everyone else sat. "Not to be impolite, but why are you on this side of the room and not on the other?"
John sat down at the table across from Radek and leaned his elbows on the table.
"Because there's something I need to do," he said. "And I'm going to need your help."
Rodney was having a perfectly decent Saturday afternoon, which could have been improved only with some making out, but that was looking less and less likely as the weeks wore on.
He was bored of playing Impossible Mission by himself and had started sketching out the code for a game of his own when the doorbell rang. Maybe -- Could it be? John had said to trust him so maybe his little freak-out time was over? Rodney jumped up and checked his hair in the mirror. The front was fluffy and he tried to pull a few strands down over his forehead before running for the door.
But he'd dawdled too long -- he heard Jeannie dragging the front door open. Good, fine, perfect. Jeannie could play lady of the house and flirt to her heart's content and John could think Rodney had more important things to do than sit around waiting for him to show up.
Someone knocked on the door, twice, and Rodney threw himself at the desk chair. But despite all odds -- and John's ridiculously polite upbringing -- the door opened before Rodney called for his visitor to enter.
"Get up," Radek said. "You have very important things to do."
"I -- what? You're not John." Rodney stared at Radek, helplessly disappointed.
Radek scowled at him. "You have astronomical expectations. Please with the moving, now."
"Why am I moving?" Rodney asked, getting up anyway. "What could I possibly have to do that's so important? My applications are sent off, my scholarship papers are -- well, there's nothing due this week, at least, and I think I'm supposed to be watching Jeannie or something. Did you see my parents when you were going through?"
Radek rolled his eyes. "I will watch Jeannie but you must go to the school, to the football field."
"To the football field?" Rodney asked, the coffee he'd downed earlier going acidic in his stomach. It really was all a trick -- John had realized that he didn't want to be gay, he was blaming Rodney, and he was dragging Radek into it, too. "Oh, this is because I kind of blew you off for a couple of weeks?" he asked. "Because it's not like I was that great a friend even before that, you know."
"Clearly you are not well," Radek told him, looking confounded. "Are you so terribly insecure that you think I, too, am out to get you?"
Rodney scowled. "I am not insecure," he said as witheringly as possible.
"Fine. So go to the football field, "Radek answered. "I promise that there is no evil plot to make you do exercise or anything."
"Hilarious," Rodney sneered and grabbed his jacket. He didn't really need it -- it was mostly habit from his childhood, when it actually got cold in November not just mildly less hot than the rest of the year.
Halfway to the school, Rodney realized that his great gay-bashing conspiracy theory probably was really stupid and that he really did know John better than that. Even if John was freaking out, he'd sort-of warned Rodney in advance and Rodney had promised to trust him.
Maybe this had nothing to do with John at all. Maybe Ronon wanted Rodney to tend bar for some party? But on the football field? Elizabeth had gone back to California the day after the Homecoming dance, so she couldn't have anything to do with it, despite Radek's slavish devotion to her. Rodney couldn't even get Radek to spill on whether he'd gotten in a kiss or maybe a grope during their one dance. A gentleman never kisses and tells, Radek had said primly and no amount of rationalization or pleading could get Rodney a satisfactory answer.
Maybe this was some sort of elaborate revenge by Teyla? Or Katie? Or Laura? Oh. Laura. Either this was Carson trying to beat him up again or Laura wanting to apologize? But Laura had already apologized, awkwardly in the hallway, and he'd seen her holding Carson's hand in between classes.
Vala? No, as familiar as she was with the underside of the bleachers, Vala wouldn't bother using Radek to get him to meet her. He'd been meeting her in the library after school, teaching her math and science and what little grammar he could remember, or pick up from her textbook as he was tutoring her. Vala wasn't stupid -- she just needed more attention than anyone seemed inclined to give her. It was frustrating that such easy things sometimes took her forever to get, but when she did, her face would light up and she'd clap her hands together and Rodney couldn't hate that.
Lost in his own reasoning, Rodney reached the school and trekked behind the gym and out to the football field. "Hello?" he called when he was in sight of the bleachers.
"I'm in here."
Rodney rounded the end of the bleachers and what he saw on the field stopped him in his tracks.
Before him stood, what was without a doubt, the most beautiful sight in the world. And next to it was John Sheppard, hands shoved awkwardly in his varsity jacket.
John paced the end zone anxiously, flexing his fingers and skimming his palms down the sides of his jeans. He knew Rodney wanted him, wanted to be with him. They'd kissed out behind the gym and Rodney had beamed like nothing could make him happier. The memory of his earlier rejection still burned, though, knotting low in John's stomach and Rodney was so damn flighty, John wasn't sure he'd even show.
He had to show. If he didn't, John was going to march out to Rodney's house and beat him over the head with --
"Hello?"
The metal bleachers made Rodney's voice echo and John promptly forgot about breathing. "Yeah, I'm -- " His voice wasn't loud enough, or strong enough, and he had to clear his throat before trying again. "I'm in here."
"What are you doing -- " Rodney's voice broke off as he came through the opening in the bleachers and saw John. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open in a way that would be utterly unattractive on anyone else. But one thing John had learned about falling in love was that it changed your perspective on everything. "That's -- that's a Meade 8-inch LX2 SCT." Rodney dashed up, dividing his astonished gaze between John and the shining new telescope sitting on its tripod next to him in the end zone. "Did you -- oh my God. You -- "
"I have a proposition for you," John said, before Rodney could get out whatever he was going to say. "I, uh, I have this telescope." He rubbed the back of his neck and cleared his throat. "And I'll -- I'll give it to you. If you'll be my boyfriend for, oh, say a month."
"Monday to Sunday night?" Rodney asked, openly beaming now, and John felt warm explosions in his chest for having put that expression on his face.
"Saturday to Friday night," he said, pulling his hands out of his pockets as Rodney took another step closer. "Since I'm making the rules this time."
"Speaking of rules," Rodney said, glancing between the telescope and John.
"You can tell Radek," John said quickly, "but -- "
"I wasn't going to tell anybody," Rodney said. "But if it's okay for Radek to know, well, he probably would have figured it out anyway. I just wanted to know what happened when the uh, contract was up."
"I'm out of telescopes," John said as straight-faced as he could manage when all he wanted to do was smile. "But if it's looking good in four weeks, I'm sure we can develop some algorithm for trading favors."
"Oh, my God," Rodney said delightedly, reaching for John's jacket and dragging him in close. "You are such a geek!"
John laughed, feeling everything slot into place, and slid his hands around Rodney's waist, tangling his fingers the warm cotton of his shirttail. "Hey," he said, tilting his head so that his mouth lined up with Rodney's. "I learned from the best."
The End
A/N: The Goldwater-Nichols Act passed in October of 1986, reorganizing the upper echelons of the military and setting up a more streamlined command structure for the benefit of joint operations. Barry Goldwater retired in January, 1987, giving up his senatorial seat to John McCain. The process for nominating service academy candidates runs from about September to January. I took a few liberties with the timeline for the purposes of the story.
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