Well Drinks Half-Off by Greensilver

[trelkez.livejournal.com]

Title: Well Drinks Half-Off
Author: Greensilver
Pairing: Sheppard/McKay
Rating: R-ish
Length: 3,789 words
Spoilers: "The Intruder"
Challenge: Amnesty 2 - Buildings and Food
Summary: He needed someone to rescue him from the perils of open mic night; someone, anyone, but mostly Rodney, and it was Rodney he called with the change in his pocket.

----

There's a small, hand-written sign behind the bar that says, happy hour special: well drinks half-off. The sign doesn't say when happy hour is, so maybe well drinks are always half-off - or maybe well drinks are always full price, but the sign is there so the patrons will think they're getting a deal. Regardless, the cheapest liquor flows freely, making friends wherever there are a few crumpled dollar bills on hand.

The liquor has certainly befriended John. He thinks that the murky amber fluid in his glass tastes like it sounds, like the dank, slippery bottom of an unlit well, but it's cheap and it's booze and his glass is never empty for long.

He isn't sure how or why he wound up there, but the poorly-lit hole he finds himself in is a welcome relief from the bright lights and crisp lines of Stargate Command. Nothing is quite so clean-cut here, and the booze isn't the only thing blurring the edges; the whole place is rickety, the kind of rickety he's previously associated with abandoned barns and ancient shacks, structures that fall into the wind one shingle at a time. The bar is like that, decaying inside and out; one good gust would take it down, or one stray match.

There's a microphone stand near the back. Whether or not there's a mic attached is unclear, but there's definitely a mic stand there, set up before a cluster of milk crates that serve as a small stage. Just now, the stage is occupied by a scruffy poet with a Tom Waits voice, and John half-listens to the man's napkin-penned composition as he nurses the last of his latest refill.

Someone pulls out the chair across from John's, and sits. Rodney.

"Of all the gin joints in all the world," John says, and sloshes back the last of his liquor.

Rodney frowns at him, uncomprehending. John wonders if he's going to have to introduce Rodney to Casablanca when they get back to Atlantis.

"You called me," Rodney says.

Now it's John's turn to stare. He most certainly did not call Rodney - not even in an alcohol-induced stupor would he call Rodney, no, not even then.

Except that he did exactly that, and he was sober at the time, that's the kicker.

From the pay phone, outside. He remembers now. He was bored, and he needed someone to rescue him from the perils of open mic night; someone, anyone, but mostly Rodney, and it was Rodney he called with the change in his pocket. There wasn't an awning over the door or the pay phone, so he had to stand out in the rain while he called, and when he got back inside he was soaked and freezing.

But he's not soaked and freezing now, so he must have been inside for long enough to dry off.

What the hell took Rodney so long, anyway?

"I could use a drink," John says, which is as close as he's going to get right now to putting an offer on the table.

Rodney shrugs, completely oblivious to any deeper meaning. "Yeah, me too."

"There isn't a waitress," John says, as patient as one can ever be with Rodney.

"Oh." Rodney looks around - for what, John has no idea - and stands, his chair making a horrible scraping sound as it shudders across the scuffed floor. "Be right back."

"Sure," John says, slouching down and tilting his head back just far enough to let it hang over the back of his chair. He closes his eyes, listening to the Waits wannabe with the beat poetry and Rodney's dragging steps toward the bar. If Rodney picked up his feet a little more, his steps would almost synch up with the beat.

The poet concludes his epic and steps down to scattered applause. John would applaud, too, but he knows that these things are deceptive; just when you're rejoicing in the last guy's finale, another one gets onstage, and he's inevitably even worse than his predecessor.

The Wraith and crappy poetry have more in common than he realized.

When he opens his eyes, Rodney is back. The river-bottom tinge of the liquor in the glasses suggests that Rodney went for the happy hour special, and John smiles, because he'd really expected Rodney to be more of a beer guy.

Rodney smiles back as he sits, but his eyebrows lift toward his receding hairline - he isn't quite sure why he's smiling, but he's doing it anyway. John wonders if he really looks that drunk, or if Rodney is just being that affable. He's never known Rodney to be particularly affable, so it's probably the first one.

"This place is nice," Rodney says, carefully setting down bar napkins before he lets the glasses come to rest on the table. The glasses don't look all that damp, but the napkins wither beneath them just the same; if nothing else, at least this bar is consistent.

John smirks. "Rodney, this place is a hole."

"I like it." Rodney circles a hand over the table, tracing an appearing and disappearing pool of red neon light that John didn't notice before. "This, for instance."

"This," John echoes, trying to follow Rodney's logic and failing, utterly, not for the first time or the last.

"There's a sign in the window, a blinking neon sign, that says ristorante." Rodney pokes at his glass, evidently having thought better of drinking from it. "That's kind of a conundrum, isn't it?"

John just shakes his head, still not getting it.

Rodney leans back on an angle, slinging on arm over the back of his chair. "That word, ristorante. You see that in a window, and you think it'll be the kind of place where a maitre'd in a penguin suit will greet you at the door."

"Gourmet cuisine," John says, catching on.

Rodney nods. "No prices on the menu."

"Because if you have to ask, you can't afford to eat there." John's been to places like that.

Rodney doesn't quite snap and point, but his hand flutters a bit in midair - like he's on the verge of being excited, but isn't quite there yet. "Exactly. If you wandered into the place just on the lure of the word alone-"

"You would wear a nice suit," John says.

"But how many expensive Italian restaurants have neon signs in the window?" Rodney unhooks his arm from the back of his chair and leans forward, starting to get animated.

John almost smiles. "Maybe neon signs are all the rage in Italy."

"Yeah, or," Rodney says, and makes a slight gesture at the rest of the bar.

John glances around. The bar claims to serve food, but the only maitre'd is a sloppy pile of tattered paper menus near the door. He hasn't seen anyone touch those menus since he's come in.

What if you did walk in, all unknowing? The truth of the place would be immediately evident, once the door swung open and neon poured inside as smoke rushed out. The smoke would be heavy with clashing smells, sweet cigars and spicy cloves and bitter cigarettes; before your eyes could adjust, before you could see anything, you'd be able to smell the reality of your surroundings. The instant you opened the door, you'd know you weren't in an expensive restaurant.

John's hand circles over the pool of neon, tracing the shape Rodney made minutes before.

The neon sign says ristorante.

John laughs. He'd failed to notice the sign, but even if he had noticed it, he never would've thought of it that way if Rodney hadn't thought of it first. He doesn't like it when Rodney is one step ahead of him, but he likes it when Rodney surprises him, and that's why he laughs: because he's like the neon sign, he's a conundrum.

He picks his head up off of the back of his chair, leans forward, and swaps his empty glass with Rodney's full one. "What else?"

Rodney just looks puzzled. "What?"

"The bar, the-" John flattens a hand over the center of the table, letting the flashing neon sink into his skin, over and over. "The bar, McKay. What else do you like about it?"

"The drinks are cheap," Rodney says, giving John's empty glass a meaningful poke.

"Yeah, they are." John smiles, a lazy, lopsided sort of smile that bespeaks just how many of those cheap drinks he's had. "What else?"

Rodney hesitates for a moment, giving John an odd sort of smile, and then he points over at the milk crate stage. "The poetry is great."

"The poetry is lousy," John says, feeling obligated to point that out, just in case Rodney isn't being sarcastic.

Rodney pokes the empty glass again. "I didn't know you were a poet."

John shrugs. "I'm not a poet. I hate poetry."

He doesn't really hate poetry, or he wouldn't have wound up getting drunk in the company of piss-poor weekend poets, but he's not particularly inclined to admit that to Rodney.

Rodney looks scandalized, and John starts to wonder what kind of electives Rodney took in college.

"You know, I can always tell when you think you've figured something out," Rodney says, leaning back again. Maybe he's been hanging out around John too long, and bad posture is contagious - or maybe Rodney is just backing away slowly from the blasphemous poetry-hater in the opposite chair. "I can - I can see it coming together in your head, like chemicals mixing in a test tube just before an explosion."

"Have you blown up a lot of test tubes, Rodney?" John says, and finishes off the last of Rodney's liquor.

"Test tubes?" Rodney gathers up the empty glasses, not quite looking at John. "When I was eight, I blew up the garage."

John smirks. "You didn't really blow up the garage."

"And you didn't really call me here to talk about test tubes, did you?" Rodney says, just before heading back to the bar to get them another round - or to get John two more rounds, whichever.

John watches Rodney navigate through the maze of tables that block his way to the bar. Rodney sticks out like a sore thumb here, and John can see that he isn't the only one noticing that fact. John can tell without being able to hear the conversation that the bartender is giving Rodney a hard time, and if John were feeling magnanimous, he would go over there and get the drinks himself.

Instead, he closes his eyes and pretends he's wearing his uniform - that he and Rodney are off-world somewhere, with Teyla and Aiden close at hand.

He hears Rodney sit back down, but he doesn't open his eyes. There've been a few poets in-between the current one and the guy with the gruff voice and ink-stained napkins, and each one has been a step down. The current poet is going for a dramatic reading of a poem on the theme of, "My girlfriend broke up with me and now I'm reading shit poetry in a dive bar." John feels for the guy, really, he does, but there's no rhythm or style to the piece, just one long, endless whine in the form of poorly rhymed couplets.

"John?" Rodney says, his voice low, uncertain.

John opens his eyes just enough to stare at Rodney. Rodney's lips are thin and getting thinner, and his breathing is speeding up as John watches. John can't tell if that's because Rodney finally had something to drink, or because John is a terrible poker player when he's drunk. Maybe Rodney can tell just by looking at him that John wants to bend him back over the rickety bar table and whisper Keats in his ear, because it would surprise Rodney, because he wants to see the look on Rodney's face when he unbuttons Rodney's pants and acquaints him with "This Living Hand."

"I'm really drunk," he says, his tone almost apologetic; once Rodney realizes how drunk John truly is, he probably won't be particularly inclined to take John home, and that means the whole outing has been a wasted trip for them both.

"Like I don't know that." Rodney leans forward a little, and that's when John notices that Rodney doesn't have any drinks this time; either he decided not to put up with the bartender's crap, or he decided not to feed John any more alcohol. Either decision was probably the right one. "John, why are we here?"

He gives Rodney another lazy, lopsided smile. "That's twice in a row you've called me 'John.' What happened to 'Major'?"

"I don't know," Rodney says, sounding a little surprised. "I guess - we're on Earth, you're just a guy here."

John frowns. "I'm not 'just a guy' in Atlantis?"

"You know what I mean," Rodney says, his voice unexpectedly low and rough.

"Actually, I have no idea what you mean, Rodney." The previous round has finally hit his system; the whole room seems to lurch slightly to the left. John resists the urge to sway to one side to correct for that lurch, because he's not that drunk, dammit, and there's a genius astrophysicist sitting in front of him who would probably tell him with authority that it's not really possible to feel the Earth's rotation. "Why don't you explain it to me? Small words."

Instead, Rodney just says again, "Why are we here?"

John picks at a rough spot on the table, pulling up tiny shards of wood with his fingernails. "I have to go see Aiden's cousin."

Rodney's mouth twists a little in what John assumes is sympathy. "And?"

"And I really don't want to see Aiden's cousin," John says, flicking a few shards in Rodney's direction.

Rodney nods slowly. "And?"

"And I might be a little bit homesick," John admits, scowling at the pit he's dug into the table.

Rodney's hand moves back into the pool of flashing neon, his red-soaked fingers not quite brushing John's. "And?"

"And, we both know you're not an idiot, Rodney." John moves his hand back. He might be drunk, but he's not so drunk that he's going to hold Rodney's hand, and he's sure as hell not going to touch Rodney in some dimly-lit hole of a bar. "Don't make me say it." He looks up at Rodney, a slight lift of his eyebrows softening the command to a request.

But Rodney is a jerk, always has been, a big stubborn jerk with his heels perpetually dug in, and he just watches John, waiting.

John is at least as stubborn as Rodney, though, and he just shakes his head, injecting a note of warning into his voice. "Rodney, don't make me say it."

Shaking his head wasn't the most brilliant idea; the room lurches again, and again, and when it finally stills, the chair across from his is vacant.

For just a moment, John thinks that Rodney left - and wow, but that was a shitty thing to do. He hadn't expected that, not even from Rodney.

Then Rodney's hand is under his arm, pulling him up, and he's being steered toward the exit.

"You're really drunk," Rodney says, shouldering open the door.

John tries to smile. "I told you so."

"Yeah, well," Rodney mutters, and maneuvers them out into the parking lot.

The sky has cleared, and there isn't a rainstorm in progress anymore. The temperature has dropped pretty substantially, though, and the first wave of cold air does more to sober John up than ten arguments with Rodney ever could. He manages to make it the rest of the way to Rodney's car unassisted, even gets into Rodney's car unassisted, and those feel like minor achievements, all things considered.

When he reaches for his seatbelt, though, he thinks better of going for a third achievement. Instead, he fumbles with the seatbelt until Rodney makes a sharp, annoyed noise, and reaches across John to grab the seatbelt and lock it for him.

Before Rodney can lean back, John grabs Rodney's head in both hands and kisses him. The uncoordinated collision of their lips is a little jarring, and at first Rodney just sits there making startled mmph mmph sounds, but then Rodney's mouth opens and John's tongue slides in, and maybe it wasn't a completely wasted trip, after all.

The slow lurch of the universe is still keeping John off-balance, and that gently spinning disorientation makes Rodney's lips and tongue the only things John can possibly focus on. Rodney doesn't seem to mind that absolute focus too much - in fact, Rodney seems to have forgotten he's in a car, because he leans forward like he's going to press John down into the seat and gets a parking brake to the stomach for his trouble.

Rodney retreats back into his seat and clutches the steering wheel, eyeing John like the parking brake was John's fault.

"I'm taking you home," Rodney says, and the words alone make John's hands tighten over his seatbelt. "You're going to sleep it off on my couch, and then-"

"I'm sleeping on the couch," John repeats, sounding comically incredulous even to his own ears.

Rodney hesitates, staring at the steering wheel. John plants a forcibly steady hand on Rodney's knee and gives it a light squeeze, and Rodney's whole body jerks like John had touched his cock instead.

"At the very least," Rodney says, his voice a little strained, "you're going to brush your teeth. You, you taste like a five-dollar bottle of whiskey, and I'm not putting up with that all night."

John smirks. "And how do you know what a five-dollar bottle of whiskey tastes like?"

Rodney just glares at him.

"Fine." John pats Rodney's knee and withdraws his hand, slouching back in the passenger seat. "Fine. But I'm not sleeping on your damned couch, Rodney."

"Never really thought you would," Rodney mutters, and starts the car.

Rodney sounds a little nervous, looks a little shell-shocked, and all in all, it would probably be a really bad idea for John to touch Rodney again at any point while the car is in motion. So he settles back against the seat cushions, closes his eyes, and lets the rumbling motion of the car lull him into a half-doze.

"We're here," Rodney says, a split-second before John realizes that the car has come to a stop.

John peers at Rodney's place through the windshield, not yet reaching for his seatbelt. He feels a lot less drunk now than he did when he grabbed Rodney earlier, and now the whole night is starting to feel a few steps to the left of reality - because realistically, he would never have kissed Rodney in the parking lot, would never have called Rodney in the first place. Haunting a rickety old dive bar, that part sounds like him - but the rest is a little mind-boggling.

Rodney's tone is less than patient. "Are you coming in, or are you going to sleep out here in the car?"

"I'm coming in," John says, not even having to stop and think about it. He would be all over Rodney right now if it weren't for the damned parking brake, surreal or not.

But he doesn't get out of the car, and neither does Rodney. They just sit there, John staring at the house and Rodney staring at John, until finally Rodney repeats, his voice softer than before, "Are you coming in?"

"I like poetry," John says, because suddenly it seems very important that he be up-front with Rodney. "Not the country music read-alouds back there in the bar, but poetry, I like it."

"Okay," Rodney says, looking at John like John has just grown a second head.

"But that doesn't mean I'm a talk-about-feelings kind of guy," John plows on. "I'm not going to whisper sweet nothings in your ear."

Rodney's eyebrows shoot up. "I'd be scared if you did-"

"And I'm not going to make you breakfast tomorrow, or hold your hand, or make suggestive comments in the SGC," John says, and finally pauses for a breath.

"Hold my hand?" Rodney repeats, beginning to look annoyed.

"Absolutely no hand-holding, Rodney." John unbuckles his seatbelt so that he can turn and face Rodney, and he leans over into Rodney's space, parking brake be damned. "But most of all, I'm not going to sleep with you tonight only to get screwed over by you when we get home because I'm not just a guy in Atlantis."

"Did you compose that little speech in your head on the way here, or have you been saving it for a special occasion?" Rodney is pissed, and that probably means John will be sleeping on the couch after all. "You're an idiot, you know that? You called me."

"Yeah, I did," John admits, fiddling with the parking brake to keep from putting his hand on Rodney's leg again. "I just want to know that - Rodney-"

"Oh, God - you're a freaking girl," Rodney says, and pulls John in for a longer, wetter kiss than the one in the parking lot. There isn't an alcohol-induced spin this time, but the kiss is pretty damned good just the same, and when John pulls back he finds himself sprawled across the center arm rest with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hand halfway beneath the waistband of Rodney's boxers.

The parking brake isn't buried in John's stomach, but it's a near thing.

"You're, um," Rodney says, staring at John's mouth. "You're a lot more coordinated, than you were-"

"Quick metabolism," John says, pulling his hand out of Rodney's underwear. "We should get inside."

"None of my neighbors work for the SGC," Rodney says, not looking particularly inclined to move.

John rolls his eyes. "I feel like a horny teenager trying to have sex in a Volvo, Rodney."

One corner of Rodney's mouth turns up, and John can feel himself smiling back without even knowing what Rodney is going to say.

"You're right," Rodney says, giving John a little push back onto the passenger seat and turning around to open his car door. "This would work a lot better in a puddlejumper."

John doesn't bother to respond to that directly, because if he thinks too hard about Rodney and sex and puddlejumpers, one of them is going to wind up getting a parking brake to the stomach.

Instead, he waits until Rodney has opened the front door, and says: "Thanks for coming when I called you, Rodney."

Rodney just stands there in the doorway, clearly not knowing what to say.

So John reaches for Rodney's hand, twines their fingers, and pulls him inside.