Skirt Challenge: And I Would Be by Brighid
Aug. 6th, 2005 09:15 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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sga_flashficChallenge: Skirt
Title: And I Would Be
Spoilers: Various for Season 1
Rating: NC-17
Category: Slash
Author: Brighid
Summary: Trapped in yearning.
And I Would Be
by Brighid
The washcloth is smeared, and when he peers into the steamy mirror his eyes look bruised. His mouth is still the colour of dried blood, and he knows that if he touches his throat he can feel the grooves of the collar.
The floor is littered with clothes, some his, some Joey's. The short skirt and stockings are Joey's.
John kicks them under the edge of the vanity and goes under the scalding spray, face lifted to the water. He stands there until it runs cold, and even longer.
)0(
Rodney took the helm in the jumper midway back, when John's arm started to throb. He was quiet and focused and he flew almost perfectly straight. John missed the excited babble of earlier. He suspected that it'd be back, eventually, because McKay had a surprising resiliency, but still.
"He shot himself in the head so I could come help you," Rodney said suddenly, his voice harsh in the silence. "I gave him the goddamn gun. I gave him the gun that he stuck under his chin and ... fuck." He stopped, breathed deeply. "I screwed up."
John looked over at him. "Can you see the whole town from up there?" he said finally. "I hear it's a great view, up on the cross."
Rodney's face grew pinched and angry. "Fuck you, Major."
"Shut-up, Rodney," John said quietly. "Really. Just shut the hell up about how you screwed up. If anyone's to blame, hell, I okayed us going down there. I'm the one in charge of mission safety. Anybody dead is on my ticket, not yours."
"Funnily enough, I have a hard time accepting that," Rodney said, his voice whipsaw, scratched raw. "I gave him the goddamn gun." His fingers were blue-white tight on the steering, and his jaw was twitching, John reached across, gently dug his fingers into the too-tight shoulder closest to him. "I don't want to keep hearing it," Rodney said, his voice far too quiet. "I can't make it stop. It just keeps playing over and over again."
"It will. For awhile." John stood, walked over to crouch beside Rodney. "It gets better." He wanted, desperately, to fix this, to somehow unbreak Rodney. He reached up and touched the back of Rodney's neck, fingers feathering down until something of the tension eased. "It gets better," he repeated.
"When?" and that's when John leaned up and kissed him. Rodney's mouth was sour and for a moment there was nothing, and then suddenly he was wild beneath him, biting, grabbing, clawing at him, kissing him like a drowning man trying to breathe. John pulled back, slightly, thumbed his spit from Rodney's lip.
"Eventually," he said, though Rodney had almost forgotten the question. John pulled his head down, and against all reason, kissed Rodney again.
)0(
John walks away from the car, his mouth still tender, his skin chafing oddly underneath the trench coat. He can still feel the heat of fingerprints on his hipbones, the feel of them sliding under the garter. He can still taste Joey's kiss, coke and rum and liquorice. He's still hard, so goddamn hard.
He unlocks the front door with shaking fingers; it takes three tries.
His dad is sitting in the living room, watching Carson. "You're home late." He looks up, sees John. His lips thin slightly, but not angrily, more like he's thinking. "Rocky Horror Picture Show?" he asks finally.
John nods dumbly.
"Rough night?" his dad asks, and his eyes are unbearably gentle.
John nods again, body tight with misery, burning with wanting.
"Your mother's brother's queer," his dad says at last, his gaze taking in the boots, the fishnets that show beneath the coat, the lipstick that Joey's kisses had smeared, the thousand things he's never let himself notice before. "Uncle Mark. It wouldn't be new for this family. But Johnny ... faggots don't fly. Not with the Air Force, anyway." John flinches at the word, at the crudity of it in his father's mouth, because Andrew Sheppard is a good man; he's always been more than polite to his wife's brother, accepting him for who and what he was without any sign of disapproval.
But he's still right.
"I need to have a shower. Got an early day tomorrow," John says at last, surprised how rough his voice is.
"Good night, Johnny." His dad's voice follows him up the stairs, all the way into the bathroom. He strips down to his skin as soon as the door closes, turns the shower to hot and then he leans over the basin, gags and chokes, but it's just spit.
)0(
Rodney's eyes haunted him.
Pale blue washed almost to grey, they flickered restlessly, echoing the pointless motion of his hands as his food sat untouched on his tray.
"You're not eating," John said finally, interrupting the latest tangent on what the purpose of the nanovirus might have been.
"Have you tasted it?" Rodney replied finally, pushing his fork through the stew. "It's ... what dinner becomes after two weeks at the back of the fridge." He made a face at it. "Uh, listen. I've got the last of my chocolate in my room. Do you want to, I don't know, watch a DVD, share my chocolate and try to pretend we didn't almost die again today?" That people did die again was unvoiced, but it was there in the random twitch of his fingers over the table.
John nodded. "Sure. Movies and your chocolate sound good." If they were watching a movie, he wouldn't have to look into Rodney's eyes and see the fear there, or the trust that somehow John will be there to get him through this.
They were barely through the doors of his quarters before Rodney dropped to his knees, fumbling at John's belt. It was the first time since the last time, since the shuttle, and John closed his eyes, felt his body quicken and stir in Rodney's desperate mouth. He pushed his pants to his ankles, reached behind to touch himself, to make this go harder and faster, but Rodney grabbed his wrist, pulled his mouth free, leaned up to bite the edge of John's hip. "Not fast. Please, not fast."
"Fuck me," John said, surprising himself, and Rodney made a broken noise around his cock and then pulled John over to the bed, stripping them both as they went.
When Rodney was buried in John, whispering incoherently, John thought: "This has got to stop." But his body pushed back hard, his fingers clutched and twisted in the sheets and the sound that came from his throat made Rodney pick up speed until everything inside John shattered into shards, until everything burnt away.
)0(
Joey's mouth is warm and wet, and John's half on top of him. Their bodies glide and catch, and John can feel Joey's fingers finding their way through the nets to touch him where the thong has shifted, ghosting over the backs of his balls. John groans hungrily, wanting this, wanting his body to open wide enough but it can't, he can't get deep enough into Joey.
This was supposed to be the last night before college. This was supposed to be best friends doing something just a little forbidden, just a little wild. John pulls back and Joey's mouth is stained with the lipstick John had put on earlier. Joey's hand slides around the front of the skirt, finds John's hard cock, strokes the head until John's whole body is an ache. He slides down, pushes down the shorts Joey is wearing, licks his cock, and Joey groans out loud, says, "God, I love you Johnny."
John stops, pulls back, his gut gone cold. He reaches for the door, tumbles sideways out of the car and starts running down the alley towards his house, his mouth bitter and hungry his body still warm from Joey's skin.
)0(
John's fingers itched to punch Rodney, and the strength of that longing made him turn away, made him walk away.
He could still see the hurt in Rodney's eyes, the anger and the fear, because. God. He talked about Chaya as a risk to Atlantis, but the fear there was much more personal. It made John feel so goddamn guilty even as it made him so goddamn angry, because he'd never said that they were anything, it wasn't even supposed to have happened once, let alone twice.
But he could still feel the ghost of Rodney on his skin, in his body; he couldn't walk away fast enough, couldn't get enough distance between them.
And ... he had stayed that night, woken up to Rodney's mouth and clever fingers. He'd pinned Rodney to the bed, licked and kissed and rimmed him until he'd broken under John's ruthless attention. And then John had left and he'd been leaving ever since, trying to get enough distance between them.
If Chaya could put it in terms that Rodney would understand, then so be it. She was beautiful, and there was a spark there, if not a fire.
)0(
Joey opened the door and he smiled at John. Best friends for fourteen years, and tomorrow they'd been going their separate ways: Joey to Berkley, John to the Academy in Colorado.
"Hey, dude. You can't believe what I've got lined up for tonight!" He stepped back to let John over the threshold, and John smiled back at him, followed him in.
"So ... gold shorts or fishnets?" Joey asked, and John laughed.
"Fishnets. Dammit. You're making me do Rocky tonight, aren't you?"
Joey grinned at him. "We're going to have such a good time, dude. Trust me."
John's stomach did a slow, quiet flip-flop. "Always, man." Joey flung an arm around John's neck, and kissed the side of his head, and John thought, maybe just this once. He turned, and Joey's mouth was on his, and something inside John cracked open, just a little bit, in the very best possible way.
)0(
Rodney stared inscrutably at him from the small desk he had in his quarters. "Yes, Major? Your reason for overriding my privacy lock is what, again?" His body was tense, as though he were bracing for something.
John let his eyes drop the floor. "You were right about Chaya," John said finally. "Not that she was a threat, but that ... I should have listened to you."
"And it's taken you three weeks to figure out that being led around by your dick is bad for our security?" Rodney asked finally, his voice a mix of incredulity and hurt.
John snorted, glanced up at him. "It's not where my dick takes me that gets me into trouble, Rodney," he said ruefully. "It's where my heart does. That's the bitch."
Rodney face softened slightly, but the hurt was still there. "Look, I'm sorry ... I should have handled it better, but we both know I suck at people and I was worried and ..."
"And hurt," John said. "Because I hurt you. And Chaya ... was not who I meant." He stood there, looking at Rodney, watching his face flicker with thought, then light up in sudden comprehension, because Rodney was, after all, a genius. "Faggots don't fly, Rodney. I spent my whole life knowing that, and I've never ... only once, almost ... let it become something more than fast and anonymous and dirty."
"That sucks," Rodney said when the silence between them had edged towards painful. "I mean ... that sucks."
"You don't get anything you really want without giving something else up," John said. "That's the way it works."
Rodney snorted. "That's ... bullshit. You know? I mean, yeah. Noble and it'd probably make a great addition to Aesop's Fables, but it's still bullshit." He pushed back from the table, walked slowly across the room. John's heart stuttered, hitched, halfway stopped in the seconds between, right up until Rodney touched his face. "How's the fucking view up there?" Rodney said, his mouth just an inch from John's.
"It sucks," John said, and then Rodney kissed him, slow and soft. "It's always really sucked," he said, small snatches of breath and sound between kisses.
"So get down," Rodney said, his hands cupping John's face, holding him in place.
"I don't know how," and it came out on a sigh.
"I'll teach you. I'm smart," Rodney said and then they didn't say anything at all, for a very long time.
)0(
End
Brighid 2005
Title: And I Would Be
Spoilers: Various for Season 1
Rating: NC-17
Category: Slash
Author: Brighid
Summary: Trapped in yearning.
And I Would Be
by Brighid
The washcloth is smeared, and when he peers into the steamy mirror his eyes look bruised. His mouth is still the colour of dried blood, and he knows that if he touches his throat he can feel the grooves of the collar.
The floor is littered with clothes, some his, some Joey's. The short skirt and stockings are Joey's.
John kicks them under the edge of the vanity and goes under the scalding spray, face lifted to the water. He stands there until it runs cold, and even longer.
)0(
Rodney took the helm in the jumper midway back, when John's arm started to throb. He was quiet and focused and he flew almost perfectly straight. John missed the excited babble of earlier. He suspected that it'd be back, eventually, because McKay had a surprising resiliency, but still.
"He shot himself in the head so I could come help you," Rodney said suddenly, his voice harsh in the silence. "I gave him the goddamn gun. I gave him the gun that he stuck under his chin and ... fuck." He stopped, breathed deeply. "I screwed up."
John looked over at him. "Can you see the whole town from up there?" he said finally. "I hear it's a great view, up on the cross."
Rodney's face grew pinched and angry. "Fuck you, Major."
"Shut-up, Rodney," John said quietly. "Really. Just shut the hell up about how you screwed up. If anyone's to blame, hell, I okayed us going down there. I'm the one in charge of mission safety. Anybody dead is on my ticket, not yours."
"Funnily enough, I have a hard time accepting that," Rodney said, his voice whipsaw, scratched raw. "I gave him the goddamn gun." His fingers were blue-white tight on the steering, and his jaw was twitching, John reached across, gently dug his fingers into the too-tight shoulder closest to him. "I don't want to keep hearing it," Rodney said, his voice far too quiet. "I can't make it stop. It just keeps playing over and over again."
"It will. For awhile." John stood, walked over to crouch beside Rodney. "It gets better." He wanted, desperately, to fix this, to somehow unbreak Rodney. He reached up and touched the back of Rodney's neck, fingers feathering down until something of the tension eased. "It gets better," he repeated.
"When?" and that's when John leaned up and kissed him. Rodney's mouth was sour and for a moment there was nothing, and then suddenly he was wild beneath him, biting, grabbing, clawing at him, kissing him like a drowning man trying to breathe. John pulled back, slightly, thumbed his spit from Rodney's lip.
"Eventually," he said, though Rodney had almost forgotten the question. John pulled his head down, and against all reason, kissed Rodney again.
)0(
John walks away from the car, his mouth still tender, his skin chafing oddly underneath the trench coat. He can still feel the heat of fingerprints on his hipbones, the feel of them sliding under the garter. He can still taste Joey's kiss, coke and rum and liquorice. He's still hard, so goddamn hard.
He unlocks the front door with shaking fingers; it takes three tries.
His dad is sitting in the living room, watching Carson. "You're home late." He looks up, sees John. His lips thin slightly, but not angrily, more like he's thinking. "Rocky Horror Picture Show?" he asks finally.
John nods dumbly.
"Rough night?" his dad asks, and his eyes are unbearably gentle.
John nods again, body tight with misery, burning with wanting.
"Your mother's brother's queer," his dad says at last, his gaze taking in the boots, the fishnets that show beneath the coat, the lipstick that Joey's kisses had smeared, the thousand things he's never let himself notice before. "Uncle Mark. It wouldn't be new for this family. But Johnny ... faggots don't fly. Not with the Air Force, anyway." John flinches at the word, at the crudity of it in his father's mouth, because Andrew Sheppard is a good man; he's always been more than polite to his wife's brother, accepting him for who and what he was without any sign of disapproval.
But he's still right.
"I need to have a shower. Got an early day tomorrow," John says at last, surprised how rough his voice is.
"Good night, Johnny." His dad's voice follows him up the stairs, all the way into the bathroom. He strips down to his skin as soon as the door closes, turns the shower to hot and then he leans over the basin, gags and chokes, but it's just spit.
)0(
Rodney's eyes haunted him.
Pale blue washed almost to grey, they flickered restlessly, echoing the pointless motion of his hands as his food sat untouched on his tray.
"You're not eating," John said finally, interrupting the latest tangent on what the purpose of the nanovirus might have been.
"Have you tasted it?" Rodney replied finally, pushing his fork through the stew. "It's ... what dinner becomes after two weeks at the back of the fridge." He made a face at it. "Uh, listen. I've got the last of my chocolate in my room. Do you want to, I don't know, watch a DVD, share my chocolate and try to pretend we didn't almost die again today?" That people did die again was unvoiced, but it was there in the random twitch of his fingers over the table.
John nodded. "Sure. Movies and your chocolate sound good." If they were watching a movie, he wouldn't have to look into Rodney's eyes and see the fear there, or the trust that somehow John will be there to get him through this.
They were barely through the doors of his quarters before Rodney dropped to his knees, fumbling at John's belt. It was the first time since the last time, since the shuttle, and John closed his eyes, felt his body quicken and stir in Rodney's desperate mouth. He pushed his pants to his ankles, reached behind to touch himself, to make this go harder and faster, but Rodney grabbed his wrist, pulled his mouth free, leaned up to bite the edge of John's hip. "Not fast. Please, not fast."
"Fuck me," John said, surprising himself, and Rodney made a broken noise around his cock and then pulled John over to the bed, stripping them both as they went.
When Rodney was buried in John, whispering incoherently, John thought: "This has got to stop." But his body pushed back hard, his fingers clutched and twisted in the sheets and the sound that came from his throat made Rodney pick up speed until everything inside John shattered into shards, until everything burnt away.
)0(
Joey's mouth is warm and wet, and John's half on top of him. Their bodies glide and catch, and John can feel Joey's fingers finding their way through the nets to touch him where the thong has shifted, ghosting over the backs of his balls. John groans hungrily, wanting this, wanting his body to open wide enough but it can't, he can't get deep enough into Joey.
This was supposed to be the last night before college. This was supposed to be best friends doing something just a little forbidden, just a little wild. John pulls back and Joey's mouth is stained with the lipstick John had put on earlier. Joey's hand slides around the front of the skirt, finds John's hard cock, strokes the head until John's whole body is an ache. He slides down, pushes down the shorts Joey is wearing, licks his cock, and Joey groans out loud, says, "God, I love you Johnny."
John stops, pulls back, his gut gone cold. He reaches for the door, tumbles sideways out of the car and starts running down the alley towards his house, his mouth bitter and hungry his body still warm from Joey's skin.
)0(
John's fingers itched to punch Rodney, and the strength of that longing made him turn away, made him walk away.
He could still see the hurt in Rodney's eyes, the anger and the fear, because. God. He talked about Chaya as a risk to Atlantis, but the fear there was much more personal. It made John feel so goddamn guilty even as it made him so goddamn angry, because he'd never said that they were anything, it wasn't even supposed to have happened once, let alone twice.
But he could still feel the ghost of Rodney on his skin, in his body; he couldn't walk away fast enough, couldn't get enough distance between them.
And ... he had stayed that night, woken up to Rodney's mouth and clever fingers. He'd pinned Rodney to the bed, licked and kissed and rimmed him until he'd broken under John's ruthless attention. And then John had left and he'd been leaving ever since, trying to get enough distance between them.
If Chaya could put it in terms that Rodney would understand, then so be it. She was beautiful, and there was a spark there, if not a fire.
)0(
Joey opened the door and he smiled at John. Best friends for fourteen years, and tomorrow they'd been going their separate ways: Joey to Berkley, John to the Academy in Colorado.
"Hey, dude. You can't believe what I've got lined up for tonight!" He stepped back to let John over the threshold, and John smiled back at him, followed him in.
"So ... gold shorts or fishnets?" Joey asked, and John laughed.
"Fishnets. Dammit. You're making me do Rocky tonight, aren't you?"
Joey grinned at him. "We're going to have such a good time, dude. Trust me."
John's stomach did a slow, quiet flip-flop. "Always, man." Joey flung an arm around John's neck, and kissed the side of his head, and John thought, maybe just this once. He turned, and Joey's mouth was on his, and something inside John cracked open, just a little bit, in the very best possible way.
)0(
Rodney stared inscrutably at him from the small desk he had in his quarters. "Yes, Major? Your reason for overriding my privacy lock is what, again?" His body was tense, as though he were bracing for something.
John let his eyes drop the floor. "You were right about Chaya," John said finally. "Not that she was a threat, but that ... I should have listened to you."
"And it's taken you three weeks to figure out that being led around by your dick is bad for our security?" Rodney asked finally, his voice a mix of incredulity and hurt.
John snorted, glanced up at him. "It's not where my dick takes me that gets me into trouble, Rodney," he said ruefully. "It's where my heart does. That's the bitch."
Rodney face softened slightly, but the hurt was still there. "Look, I'm sorry ... I should have handled it better, but we both know I suck at people and I was worried and ..."
"And hurt," John said. "Because I hurt you. And Chaya ... was not who I meant." He stood there, looking at Rodney, watching his face flicker with thought, then light up in sudden comprehension, because Rodney was, after all, a genius. "Faggots don't fly, Rodney. I spent my whole life knowing that, and I've never ... only once, almost ... let it become something more than fast and anonymous and dirty."
"That sucks," Rodney said when the silence between them had edged towards painful. "I mean ... that sucks."
"You don't get anything you really want without giving something else up," John said. "That's the way it works."
Rodney snorted. "That's ... bullshit. You know? I mean, yeah. Noble and it'd probably make a great addition to Aesop's Fables, but it's still bullshit." He pushed back from the table, walked slowly across the room. John's heart stuttered, hitched, halfway stopped in the seconds between, right up until Rodney touched his face. "How's the fucking view up there?" Rodney said, his mouth just an inch from John's.
"It sucks," John said, and then Rodney kissed him, slow and soft. "It's always really sucked," he said, small snatches of breath and sound between kisses.
"So get down," Rodney said, his hands cupping John's face, holding him in place.
"I don't know how," and it came out on a sigh.
"I'll teach you. I'm smart," Rodney said and then they didn't say anything at all, for a very long time.
)0(
End
Brighid 2005
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 04:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 04:55 pm (UTC)Thank you for sharing.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 05:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 05:05 pm (UTC)Lovely.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 05:09 pm (UTC)driveby icon love
Date: 2005-08-09 01:34 pm (UTC)Re: driveby icon love
From:(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 05:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 05:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 05:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 05:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 06:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 06:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 06:22 pm (UTC)But I think that's just how things are some times.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 06:24 pm (UTC)Lovely.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 06:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 06:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 06:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 06:46 pm (UTC)Perfect.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 07:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 07:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 07:31 pm (UTC)I love it that Andrew Sheppard is a good man. Yes, thank you. Let him be a good man.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 07:51 pm (UTC)And I like the reverse structure of the flashbacks--which are in present tense, a nice technique for showing how *present* they are in John's worldview and behaviours.
Ow.
Beautiful, B.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 09:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 10:45 pm (UTC)/cries/
Great job.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 11:27 pm (UTC)Thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-07 12:44 am (UTC)