sga_flashfic | To Sleep with the Lights Off by Purna (Darkness/Amnesty Challenge)

To Sleep with the Lights Off by Purna (Darkness/Amnesty Challenge)
McKay/Sheppard
~4,000 words
Rating: R
Summary: Rodney can't remember.

To Sleep with the Lights Off

"What do you remember?"

"It was dark."

"And?"

Rodney shifted in his chair and cradled his sling closer to his body.

"Is your arm troubling you, Rodney?"

"Dr. Heightmeyer, I thought we agreed..."

"I'm sorry, Dr. McKay, I forgot."

He felt his lips twist into a sneer. "Yes, Kate, how careless of you." He held her gaze for a moment but couldn't maintain the eye contact.

His sarcastic tone sounded a little ragged. "Forgive my discomfort. But, hey, who needs emotional distance in all this." He motioned between them with his right hand, and winced when his left tried to join in the movement.

"I really don't understand this American fixation on instant intimacy, calling someone by his first name practically upon introduction." Rodney stopped and took a breath.

The calm expression on her face didn't change as she repeated her question. "Is your arm troubling you, Dr. McKay?"

"It's fine."

One corner of Dr. Heightmeyer's mouth quirked up. "It's broken. You haven't asked how. Does that mean you know what happened now?"

He closed his eyes and pretended to think about it. "Nope." He opened his eyes and gestured at the door, where two marines stood just out of earshot of them. "But I imagine it has something to do with my jailers over there."

"The marine escort. You think of them as your jailers?"

Rodney ignored the queasy chill that prickled his skin. "It'd be stupid to think otherwise." His snide tone sounded a little hollow.

Her silence was expectant. A tic had started under his right eye, and he finally sighed. "I hurt someone, didn't I?" His voice shook, the words tumbling from his mouth before he could recall them. He stared at the wall over her right shoulder. "I hurt someone, and then the marines took me down, and that's when..." He gestured at his arm.

She looked at him with grave eyes, and he knew the answer even before she nodded.

Rodney looked down at his hands and a sudden rush of images ambushed him.

He is in the control room, his hands moving over the gate controls.

"Rodney!" A voice behind him, someone who'll stop him, Rodney thinks in relief. A premature thought, because there's a gun in his hand, his arm rising, his finger tightening...

"Dr. McKay."

A sound like thunder, the crash of a body against a console...

"Dr. McKay!" The voice and a hand shaking his shoulder brought him back with a jerk so violent he nearly upset the chair. He shoved her away, dimly aware that Dr. Heightmeyer was gesturing to the marines to stay back. Hand clamped over his mouth, he just made it to the washroom in time to vomit into the sink. He heaved, bringing up little more than clear liquid and then hovered there, feeling clammy and ill. His arm throbbed with a bone-deep ache, making it hard to suppress the nausea.

Once he'd fought his stomach into submission, he ran the water. He ducked his head down to fill his mouth with water so cold it made his teeth hurt. He spat and rinsed again. He'd need to eat something soon to buffer his blood sugar, but the thought of food nearly made him retch again.

"Is he dead?" he managed to ask around the acid burn in his throat.

"No, Dr. McKay." She hovered at the open door of the washroom, sounding worried. "Colonel Sheppard's fine. I was sure you already knew that, on some level. I assumed you were stalling, that you didn't want to talk yet."

He leaned against the counter and took in two, then three deep, deliberate breaths. "Just...no. No." Monosyllables were the best he could manage for the moment.

He turned and there was an awkward moment when he felt trapped by her presence blocking the door, a strange near-panic rising, darkness edging his vision. Then he pushed past her brusquely and moved to the center of the room, standing behind the chair he'd occupied.

"I'd like to go to my quarters. Or the brig. Wherever they're going to keep me."

Dr. Heightmeyer moved to her desk to check the tablet PC lying there. "Actually, you're scheduled to see Dr. Beckett as soon as we're done here."

Rodney closed his eyes and sighed. "Of course I am."

*

"The change in brain chemistry is subtle but unmistakable. I've examined your records and it first popped up after an offworld mission a bit less than a month ago. The trip to Erysis." Beckett clicked through a series of scans on the screen until it showed the one he sought. "Here."

Rodney shook his head. "I have no idea what I'm looking at." He looked over at Elizabeth. She was troubled; the forehead wrinkles gave her away.

"I'll split the screen." Beckett tapped the monitor. "This scan is from your initial physical before leaving Earth. Here's the one right after returning from Erysis. And this one is from today."

Eyeing the juxtaposed images, Rodney swallowed.

"Whatever it is, it's progressive, isn't it?" asked Elizabeth.

Beckett hesitated, then nodded. "I think so." He frowned, rubbing his stubble. "And here's something worse. Rodney, you were stopped in the control room, trying to activate the stargate. I asked the gate technician to examine the address you were dialing. You managed to get five chevrons locked in--and they were the first five symbols in the address for Erysis."

Rodney took in a sharp breath, and thought back to the Erysis mission. Boring, hot, humid, farmers, minor gate breakdown, boring. Something flickered at the edge of his memory. He frowned, trying to recall the elusive feeling. Darkness, claustrophobic press on his body...NO! He shuddered, crushing the thought, pushing down the raw feeling of panic that clenched his gut. Boring mission, nothing happened, he thought firmly.

"This is no accident then," Elizabeth said.

Rodney found himself speaking, his voice dull. "Nothing happened on Erysis. It was listed in the database as an Ancient outpost, research station or some such, but no luck. There was nothing there but farmers."

"What about when we left you alone to fix the gate?" It was Sheppard, his voice coming from the door.

Rodney's head snapped around so fast his neck twinged. Sheppard looked pale and tired, and a stark white bandage, peeking out from the sleeve of his black shirt, covered his bicep.

Sheppard turned to Elizabeth. "Rodney was alone fixing the gate while we went to get the banana things they offered to trade. We were gone half the day. Rodney missed a radio check-in and if we hadn't been having radio problems all along because of that magnetic interference, I'd have been back to the gate like a shot. Anyway, water under the bridge. When we got back to the gate, he seemed fine, just hadn't made much progress getting the gate back up. Remember, Rodney?"

Sheppard tried to meet his eyes, but Rodney looked down. "Should you be out of the infirmary?" he asked in a strangled voice.

"Relax, Rodney, you just winged me." He waggled the arm, visibly suppressing a wince, and ignored Beckett's muttered "git." "Looks like you forgot everything I taught you about handling your weapon."

"Don't joke," Rodney snapped. "I've got something in my head that's turning me into a pod person, and I don't even remember how it happened, and let's not forget I tried to kill you."

"If that's you trying to kill someone..."

Elizabeth interrupted. "Gentlemen." When they'd quieted, she continued, "Assuming the database is right about the Ancient outpost on Erysis, the Erysisians had four hours and Ancient technology to work on Rodney. And Rodney doesn't remember any of it."

She raised an eyebrow at Rodney, who looked at her uncertainly. Four hours? It hadn't really been that long, had it? And there was nothing there, no missing time...darkness, claustrophobia. He swallowed and shook his head. "Nothing happened."

"Yeah, right, Rodney," Sheppard began, but Elizabeth cut him off.

"Let's cut to the chase. Rodney, the marine escort continues until we figure out a way to reverse this. Dr. Zelenka can consult with you, but I can't let you near any sensitive technology right now. That means staying away from the labs. Dr. Beckett, you'll have every resource you need to get to the bottom of this. We need Rodney back to normal ASAP."

*

Major Lorne took his team to Erysis to see if he could negotiate for information on what had been done to Rodney. He returned with hollow eyes and two wounded men.

"This is a holy war for them, Dr. Weir," he reported in a tired voice. "They consider themselves the only true descendants of the Ancients, destined inheritors of Atlantis. When they found out we were occupying Atlantis, it was like...desecration, I guess. I think we're violating their most basic creed, just by being here."

Rodney snorted. "Superstitious nonsense," he muttered.

"Dr. McKay, don't dismiss it," Lorne said. "I've seen this before. We go messing with their religion, and people will become martyrs, brainwash their enemy, anything. It's playing with fire."

"I agree with you, Major Lorne," Elizabeth said. "Anything else?"

Lorne hesitated. When he spoke, he sounded troubled. "I think we're damn lucky Dr. McKay was stopped when he was, because if they'd gotten their troops through the stargate..." He took a breath. "I just don't know. Unless we want to go in there guns blazing just to kick ass for its own sake, we're sunk."

Elizabeth ordered Erysis left alone, in spite of Sheppard's violent response. "So maybe we go and bluff 'em. Threaten to blow up the planet, hold their feet to the fire until they tell us what the hell they did to Rodney."

The loud slap of a palm against the table cut him off. "Colonel Sheppard." Elizabeth's voice was cold. "It would not stop at merely bluffing. Major Lorne has already implied that these people would rather die than help us. Are you suggesting we attack a planet out of vengeance? Rodney is alive, as are you. Consider your answer very carefully."

Sheppard swallowed. "No," he said finally. He sighed and closed his eyes. "I was wrong. I apologize."

Elizabeth's gaze was searching. "We're all angry about this, John. But we will fix it, I promise you."

Which didn't help Rodney's predicament in the short term. He became accustomed to the intrusive presence of his own matched set of marines, gritting his teeth when they followed him everywhere. They at least left him alone when he was in his quarters. There he had some privacy; they stood outside his door, giving the scientists walking down the corridor the willies.

What was giving Rodney the willies was Beckett's and Heightmeyer's separate but coordinated efforts to retrieve the memory of the whole Manchurian candidate thing. Which had not happened, most of his brain continued to insist, and he shuddered at how illogical it all was.

The logical part of Rodney could not deny what had happened, could not forget the missing four hours. It was this part of him that flinched when he ran into Sheppard, that made him avoid people in the mess. But if this small part of him shuddered when people got too near, and if he could now only sleep with the lights on, well, that was just the way of things in Atlantis.

Dr. Zelenka solicited his opinion about power fluctuations in the puddle jumpers and quietly listened when it all got too much and Rodney let a tirade break out. "I'm just sick of feeling like a fucking time bomb," Rodney said after a solid minute of bitching. He stopped when he realized how loud he'd been, shouting really.

"I'm sorry," Rodney said after the anger and frustration washed away, reluctantly meeting Zelenka's eyes. Which were not angry, to Rodney's surprise. They were solemn and kind behind his glasses, and Zelenka actually reached out to clasp his shoulder.

"It's hard, Rodney, I know this. If I could not trust my own mind..." Zelenka seemed to suppress a shudder and trailed off uncertainly. "We will fix this. We will find Ancient device, figure something out. You will be back as obnoxious bear of the lab in no time."

Zelenka's smile took the sting out of the last comment, and Rodney smiled back. Zelenka gave his shoulder one last squeeze. "Now, I must go. We are too busy without you. We need you back very badly, Rodney."

A week, then two passed. Heightmeyer, who was working on the psychological side of the problem, tried hypnosis and a few other hocus-pocus psychobabble techniques to no avail. Beckett seemed no closer to a solution. "It's hard to fix something when I don't know how it got broken, Rodney," he said defensively.

"Nothing happened," Rodney snapped and then after Beckett gave him a strange look, "I mean I don't remember."

Rodney's scans had stabilized, but he remained in permanent limbo in terms of doing his job, of going off world, of losing the damn marine escort. His arm had healed, but the memory of shooting a team member, shooting Sheppard of all people, did not.

The days took on a boring sameness. Zelenka consulted with him every now and then; there were trips to Beckett and Heightmeyer and trips to the mess hall. Rodney's nights were often troubled, but he had never needed much sleep anyway. He let himself drift with it.

Until the day he came back to his quarters to find Sheppard sitting on his bed in the dark. Rodney had left the marine escort outside his door, and he frantically gestured at Sheppard. "What are you doing here? I could try to do something. Hurt you, or something."

"You won't. You couldn't." Sheppard's voice held a tremor, a subtle weakness, like flawed piano wire ready to snap. "You could've killed me in the control room, shot me right in the heart. But you didn't. What stopped you, Rodney?" The question sounded almost angry, and Rodney cocked his head in confusion.

"I...I'm not sure. I was mostly out of my mind, I know. But when I saw you...I knew it was you." Rodney took a step closer and stopped. "I'm so sorry. I couldn't stop myself from firing. I tried so hard to miss."

The darkness made Sheppard's expression impossible to read. "Leave it off," Sheppard said roughly when Rodney reached for the lamp.

"Come here," Sheppard commanded. Rodney hesitated--the marines were right outside, this was crazy--then moved over to stand between Sheppard's spread knees. Hard hands on him pulled him forward and down, and then hard lips were on his. Rodney almost pulled back--the thing between them had never included kissing.

It had always been almost accidental, a hand-to-hand lesson getting down and dirty, a chance meeting on a dark balcony, a fast fuck in a storage room. It had been something furtive and rushed, blowing off steam when they'd nearly died again, something to burn out the horror of being forced to kill someone.

This felt different, more dangerous, as though a kiss--intimate, wet--might slice him open and leave him bleeding in a way nothing else they had done together could match. Dangerous, but Rodney gave in, let him in, opened his mouth to Sheppard's tongue, and oh, god, this is good. Sheppard kissed dirty, voracious and needy, barely letting Rodney draw a breath.

But Rodney had never been able to turn his brain off completely, and it was a puzzle, Sheppard appearing like this here and now. "What's wrong?" Rodney asked.

Sheppard tried to kiss him again, but Rodney pulled back. "What's wrong?"

Sheppard's brows pulled down, his mouth forming a thin line. "Caldwell wants to take you back to Earth on the Daedalus. Says they can work on you better at SGC, get you out of a 'sensitive environment.'"

Rodney went cold. "Oh, god. Oh, god, they'll stick me in a little cell, and Atlantis will--"

"Go down in flames, probably. We're stalling him so far. I'm not letting you go, Rodney. Fuck them, I'm not." The last was said in a desperate, tight voice and then Sheppard was on him again, all over him, pushing past Rodney's objections.

"Oh, god, marines at the door, marines at the door. Fuck, what you do to me, yeah, right there." Lust fogged his brain, but he was trying to think, to be sensible. "No, Sheppard...John, we can't." Rodney was shoved down onto the bed, and barely managed a strangled, "We can't."

But when John eased up, Rodney pulled him right back in for a kiss that turned deep and wet. The press of a hard body against his, the warmth of someone near him, the reassurance of it: John was alive, not dead at Rodney's hand, and here was proof, an erection poking his thigh, the smell of sweat and lust.

"We can," John muttered, and they could, they were.

They were both naked and sweaty in the dark, John's body covering Rodney's, his mouth on Rodney's. Rodney tried to shift a little, but John was heavier than he looked, and he couldn't move. Darkness, claustrophobia. He let out a gasp, but it was lost in the overall sex noise, John's breathy moans. Rodney wrenched his mouth away from the kiss, sucking air in noisily; he couldn't breathe. His ears were ringing.

The darkness and the fear and the panic were bubbling inside him. Oh, god, he was in the dark, held down, pressed down, and there was a hand on his arm, the prick of a needle. Fire in his veins, the pain almost familiar--where had he felt this before?

Then--he could sense it, inside him, re-writing something, the click as something slipped into place, and there were meaningless strings of characters dancing in his head. Not meaningless though, C, G, A, T, T, G, A, C. He knew this code, and what are they doing to me, oh, god, I won't.

"I won't, I won't," Rodney screamed, and he fought them, fought them so hard, but it was dark, and he was pressed flat, and the burning in his veins was matched by the burning in his head. "I won't." He was free finally, limbs thrashing, and he scrambled on all fours away from them, away from the darkness, but he hit a surface solid and unyielding. He slumped against it, the wall, he realized, and--

The light came on. "Rodney, shhh, Rodney." John was there, kneeling next to him, a hesitant hand reaching for him. "Shhh."

"I remember," Rodney gasped. "I remember it all. It's genetic."

John's silence prompted him to continue. "Don't you see? It's not brainwashing; they inject you with a program. Coded like DNA. A series of commands to carry out. God, I remember how much it hurt. It felt just like the ATA gene therapy, only worse. Much worse. They held me down, and it was dark and fucking awful."

John slid over and slung an arm around him. "Sounds like it," he said in a quiet voice.

Rodney looked up. "Did I do that?" He reached out to touch John's rapidly darkening eye. John flinched back, but he was smiling.

"Yes, Rodney, and it hurts, so don't touch it."

"I'm sorry. I split your lip, too." The urge to touch was irresistible. He reached out to wipe away the smear of blood from John's mouth, then followed the touch with his mouth.

This kiss was soft and gentle, not at all like their previous ones. For a moment, Rodney wondered if he'd get the chance to catalog the whole spectrum of John's kisses, but then decided to worry about that later. He'd take this kiss as it was, warm and tasting vaguely of copper from the split lip.

John pulled away. "You know what this means? Now that you remember what they did, we can fix it. Before, Beckett and Heightmeyer were on the wrong track, kept looking at this as either brainwashing or the result of some Ancient device. Beckett's a geneticist; this is what he does. If he can stop me from turning into a damn bug, he can get rid of this program they stuck you with."

"What are you doing?" Rodney asked. John was rooting around for his clothes, moving to sit on the bed.

"C'mon, we need to get dressed, go tell Beckett and Weir."

"Oh," Rodney said. "Yeah." He got dressed slowly and then stood there. "I'll go now, okay? Meet in Beckett's office?"

"Okay. Hey." John reached a hand to the back of his neck and pulled him in for a kiss. "It'll be okay."

*

It was rather more complicated that John made it sound, and Beckett was simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the Erysisian genetic programming. It took a month and more experimental gene therapies than Rodney wanted to count. All that tinkering with his DNA was just an appalling thought, and if Rodney eventually sprouted tentacles or something, he was so going to hunt Beckett down.

John was busy with a new crop of marines fresh off the Daedalus, and Rodney was occupied by restoring order to his labs, and the gene therapies left him feeling weak and sick anyway. Together in Rodney's quarters, they didn't have much energy for anything too athletic, but Rodney knew that they had something together. John would show up at Rodney's quarters, a lazy smile on his face.

They'd watch a movie, or John would read while Rodney worked on his laptop, and sometimes they just fell asleep together, and sometimes they'd make out and sometimes they'd fuck, slow and easy. John always left well before dawn. Sometimes the dreams came when he was alone again, but John always flipped a lamp on as he left, so it wasn't too bad.

Rodney didn't know what to call it, didn't know what to call them. And he figured it didn't really matter, because it just was, and it wasn't like he could talk about it with anyone anyway, what with the whole "don't tell" part of the military equation.

Eventually, Beckett declared him free of Erysisian influence and fit for off world missions. Their first mission was a milk run that went a bit pear-shaped, as Dr. Jasthi, one of the new archeologists they'd brought with them to document the Ancient ruins, put it. They ended up running for their lives.

"Who picked this route?" Rodney snarled. They'd taken the low road back to the stargate, which gave their pursuers the cover of the trees.

"You flipped the coin, Rodney," John said, and gave their pursuers something to think about with a few rounds from his P90. "It's not that bad. We'd be sitting ducks up on the ridge. Ronon, two o'clock," he called out suddenly.

Ronon let off a round from his mutant shotgun and nodded his thanks.

"Your definition of 'not that bad' is a world away from mine then."

They continued on in that vein, in whispers to avoid detection and Teyla's wrath, until Dr. Jasthi quietly asked Teyla, "Why do they work together if they hate each other so much?"

"What?" he asked, when she started laughing and couldn't stop. "What's so funny?" he repeated until she shushed him. They continued to bicker through the stargate and into the debriefing, and Dr. Jasthi vowed to never go off world again. Ever, ever, again.

After the debriefing, John followed Rodney to his quarters, and pushed him inside. Rodney shoved John to the bed, and it was hard and fast and rough, and Rodney loved it. Loved the heavy weight of John in his mouth, loved the earthy taste of opening John up with his tongue. Loved to hear the catch in John's breath when Rodney pushed inside him.

Afterwards, tired and spent, Rodney lay there, John's arm curled over him. He looked down at it, the dark hair of John's forearm stark against Rodney's pale chest. The scar on John's bicep from where he'd shot John was faint but there.

They had something together, he and John. Something good and right, even if Rodney still didn't know what to call it. And if they didn't call it anything, didn't really talk about it to each other, and couldn't talk about it to anyone else, that was okay, too. It didn't matter. Because when John was there, breath ghosting the back of Rodney's neck, he could sleep with the lights off.

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ltlj.livejournal.com

I enjoyed this. You really got across how frightened and helpless Rodney felt -- I had to resist skipping to the end to make sure everything turned out okay. :)

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