FIC: "One Kiss Later" by Lobelia (virgin challenge)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Title: One Kiss Later

Author: Lobelia; lobelia321

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis

Pairing: April Bingham / Rodney McKay

Category: For the virgin challenge at sga_flashfic

Rating: 12 A

Spoilers: SGA 1.17 'Letter from Pegasus'

Summary: When biogenetic mineralogist April Bingham got posted to Atlantis at the far ends of the universe, she had not expected to run into whatsisname from Oshawa High algebra club. Guy with the washcloth mouth and the award for worst kisser of 1986.

Note: My first rise to a challenge! I hope I can duck in just in time. :-) Also, April Bingham is NOT an original character! See quote from SGA 1.17 below. :-)




ONE KISS LATER
by Lobelia

McKAY: I once caught mono kissing a girl in algebra club. Missed an entire month of school. Still, the kiss was, uh, somethin’, so it was, uh, probably worth it. April Bingham – cute blonde! God – you see, I love blondes, especially with the... with the short hair.
(from SGA 1.17, 'Letter from Pegasus')

1.

April Bingham. Okay.

"Why not?" she told herself. "Why ever not?"

She actually said so aloud. In front of the mirror, in her small windowless bathroom with the pink floral tiles and the cosmetics shelf inherited from someone else. The light bulb (naked because she had thrown out the inherited pink tasselled lampshade and never got round to buying a replacement) guttered; her voice stuttered; and her heart did five somersaults.

One, two, three, four.

Five.

Also, she was the kind of girl who liked to say "why ever". She knew words like 'fuck' but she didn't like saying them. They seemed too Hollywood. They did not fit into the world of biogenetic mineralogy.

Which was April Bingham's world.

And, since the 11th inst., it seemed to be some other mysterious people's world, too.

"Professor Bingham?" the phone had said to her.

"Yes, speaking," she had said, her mouth full of tooth picks.

"You are the specialist in biogenetic mineralogy?"

"I'm sorry?"

"The specialist in biogenetic mineralogy?"

All the toothpicks had fallen out of her mouth. Plink, plink, plink on the desktop, among the fiddlesticks model of a toothpicky quartzite DNA coil.

"There is," she had chosen her words carefully, "no such field as biogenetic mineralogy." Except in my own insane brain! "I'm a biogeneticist, and what can I help you with?"

"You are right. There is no field as such. Which is why we need you so urgently."

What to say? What jaw not to drop?

It was kind of creepy, too, though.

But why not? Why ever not go through a circular matter-transporter into another galaxy (science? fiction!) to dig a probe into the animate crust of an alien planet (animate! crust!) and extract real DNA from real minerals in real time?


2.

What she didn't expect at the ends of the universe was whatsisname from Oshawa High algebra club. Guy with the washcloth mouth who'd disappeared from classes for a month for mysterious health reasons. 'Glandular fever', but everybody knew what that meant really.

It was not what she'd expected to find at the other ends of the cosmos.

But she was fine. She was 'cool'. She didn't bat an eyelid when she was introduced.

"And this is Dr Rodney McKay, head of the science division."

"Pleased to meet you." "Pleased to meet you." "Pleased to meet you."

She wasn't the only geneticist transported out to the Pegasus Galaxy. By the time, they got to the end of the line and to her, Dr Rodney McKay, head of the science division, had been called away to do something else. Had been rushed away. Had tapped that ear thing on his head and yapped something into thin air and hurried off.

She heaved a sigh of relief. How to take seriously your line manager when he was a nerdy kid from home room 6B?

"I'm worried I might have a form of the cytomegalovirus."

"That's a big word for a young missie like you."

Fool physician.

He had a moustache. Nobody wore a moustache in those days.

She was the only non-Asian girl in algebra club. The other four girls were June Chang, Cecilia Ming, Parvati Ramachandra and that little dumpy one, Cho somebody. Everyone else was a boy. She didn't remember any of their names.

One thing was for sure, though: kissing had got a lot better since 1986.

And she didn't have the cytomegalovirus. Nor the Epstein-Barr one, either.


3.

Sitting on a wall with Cecilia Ming, dangling their legginged legs and licking their mint-choc cornettos. Cecilia had winklepickers on, with pink socks.

Cecilia was the only fashionable person April knew at that time of her life.

"Her," Cecilia said. "Her for sure."

"Hm," April replied. 'Hm' was non-committal.

"But her, nope. And her? Yeah, total clothes horse!"

Cecilia claimed she could identify whether anyone was a virgin simply by taking one look. Speculation at school about this matter ran rife but Cecilia topped it by taking it out onto the streets.

"Takes one to know one," she'd say sagely.

By 'one', she meant 'one non-virgin'.

"You, though, Apes. Bet you've never even kissed anybody."

"Hm", April replied.

"You have to, you know. Kissing's the first stage. If you haven't kissed a boy, you will never, ever lose your virginity. You will be an old maid."

"I have, too," said April.

"Yeah? Who?"

"That boy, you know. At algebra club."

"What boy? Not Tony Cheung?"

"No, that one, the one, you know."

"April!" Cecilia had enunciated, choc mint spraying all of which ways. "He doesn't even count! He'll kiss anybody! Mister Desperado or what!"

The friendship with Cecilia Ming hadn't lasted. Her trig was ace but you could just not remain friends with someone who kept calling you 'Ape'.


4.

Prophets never return to their home towns. There is nothing dignified about revisiting adolescence. The only tactic available was to brave it out.

Twenty years didn't seem to have been very kind to her because the recognition factor appeared to be zero.

April didn't know whether to be relieved or annoyed about this.

This happened while negotiating the mess hall. Already alarmingly reminiscent of environments left behind with adulthood. Trays, plastic cutlery, standard mugs.

She picked her way carefully, unsure of foot in her new uniform.

"Good morning," she said. You had to say something. Rude not to. He was right ahead of her at one of the tables.

"Oh, yes, yes." Barely looked up from whatever he was doing.

April stopped. "Good morning," she repeated, "Dr McKay."

He waved his fork and mumbled something through a chewing mouth.

"Good morning," she said. "Roger McKay."

"Rodney," he replied. "Rodney." But it made him look up.

He frowned. His eyes flickered. She braced herself.

"Canada, eh?" he said. Crumbs flew all of which ways. He gestured at her flag tag.

For three seconds there, April felt like going all Hollywood on him.

But instead she remembered his style of dancing. He was the boy who did this idiosyncratic arm-flapping thing at school discos. When the music got really out of control, he'd hurl himself onto the floor and writhe. Not in rhythm, either.

"Yes," she said. "Canada."

And grinned.


5.

It was called planet MP3-541. The simulations were a wet dream. The handful of samples in the lab were orgasms in miniature. To put inert matter under your scope and watch it slither and squirm. Nuclei! Cytoplasm! Organelles! Yet the phenotype was clearly crystalline: a crystalline metamorphic rock. Calcium-bearing silicate minerals. Unbelievable!

Toothpicks were nothing.

She was scheduled to go off-world on her fourth day on Atlantis. Apparently, this meant that she was somehow very privileged. "Usually, newcomers don't go off-world for a couple weeks at least. Security risks." But biogenetic mineralogy was, apparently, and to her continued amazement, the hot cross bun of the season.

She looked at videos of the place. She looked at stills. She looked at simulations, and more simulations. She looked at samples and at the analyses of the samples and at the genetic codings of the analyses of the samples.

"MP3-541? Why is it called that?"

A shrug. "Some of the geologists call it Bism."

Figured. Of course, the geologists would know their Narnia.

There was a list, and she had to sign off on it, and somebody else had to okay it, and then the whole thing had to be passed up the line to be signed off a second time by whoever was in charge and then filed and registered. Bureaucracy wasn't so different from uni.

If her face hadn't triggered any reaction, her name clearly had.

The next time she encountered Dr Rodney McKay, head of the science division and worst kisser of 1986, he was beet red even before she got out her cheery "Good morning, Dr McKay!"

"Good morning," he said, and his gaze was fixed somewhere above her right earlobe. "Dr..."

"That's right," she beamed, "still the same. Never married."

It felt good to leave him floundering at the entrance of the whatsit jumper. She almost grinned but she was too excited about Bism 541.


6.

The science division was large. Direct contact with its head did not need to be regular.

The bathrooms were still windowless but the bulbs were sheathed in a translucent glow material. Water gushed forth at a thought. The very make-up of the artificially-generated ATA gene was heaven. She pricked her forefinger and drooled over the wrigglings of her own arterial plasma.

Some of the Bism stones could be directly mapped onto the sarabande of her blood. Cornelians, peridots, sodalites -- except they weren't. Because they all had the Ancient gene.

They were humming, thrumming, live and sentient gem stones.

She was starting to believe the legends of magic rings and witching jewels. Turn it thrice and zoom through time. Slip it on and you will be invisible and Lord of the Rings to boot. Swallow the diamond and you will be able to fly.

Anything was possible.

Labradorites, hypersthenes, agate, emerald and malachite.

She woke up every morning, her heart beating like a song.


7.

"Is your name really April Bingham?"

"Yes, why?" She barely looked up from what she was doing.

"Do you know Dr McKay at all?"

She waved her dust tweezers and mumbled something through a mouth full of bobby pins.

"It's just that there's this videotape."

"Hm."

"When we all thought we were going to die and we made this tape to send back home to earth and Dr McKay recorded a long bit onto it as well and he talked about leadership, it was really illuminating, and he also mentioned you."

"He did?" The bobby pens fell out of her mouth, tink tink tink, onto her model of metallurgic deoxyribonucleic acid built out of pins, plastic forks and tiny orthodontic rubber bands.

"You can watch it, if you like. There's a copy on the mainframe. You need a password, though."


8.

Mono? He claimed she'd given him mono?

Cute blonde??

The kiss was worth it???

An unfortunate side effect was remembering it all in gruesome psychedelic detail.

First, there'd been the groping.

It was not a good kind of groping. With hindsight, it was an even worse kind of groping. It was of the sort where all you could think was 'what if he dislodges my bra?' or 'what if he discovers I don't use tampons but pads?'

Second, there'd been the slobbering.

'No, this is not where my mouth is. My mouth is here. No, please don't drool in my ear. O my god, when did I last wash the inside of my ear? Am I supposed to be moaning now or what? What would Cecilia Ming do?'

Cecilia Ming would grab the boy's privates, that's what she'd do.

April had no idea where a boy's privates were, exactly. Or how to go about surreptitiously locating them and then elegantly fondling them.

They were somewhere in the boy's trousers, it was to be presumed.

'No, don't dribble all over my neck. And now you've got your tongue caught in my necklace.'

Third, there was the lip sucking.

Hoovering was not April's idea of a kiss.

'I don't like kissing, I really don't; I don't care if you have to do it in order to lose your virginity.'

'Don't worry', she wanted to say to her fifteen-year-old self, 'it gets better. It all gets way better.'

Also, he had sweaty hands.

Finally, she managed to put her hands somewhere below the belt line. Things down there were unexpected. There seemed to be two bulges, she couldn't sort it out, and there was also a moist patch, and the apparatus seemed to be upside down or at any rate, reversed to what she had anticipated.

As soon as she hit the bulge, though, his tongue hit the inside of her mouth. And he sort of grunted.

His tongue had the texture and taste of a musty washcloth.

What to do with her own tongue, she had no idea. Possibly something like this?

Or like this?

Or maybe something like that?

Very heavy he was, a sweltering welter weight. And his watch pressed against her ribs under her rucked-up top, and that was uncomfortable. And her bra straps were getting stretched out of shape. And she was trying to keep her lap away from his damp patch in case she got pregnant through two layers of denim. And she wanted to choke, he was thrusting his tongue down to her tonsils, practically.

Where was the swooning? Where was the being transported to other realms?

This was not like the movies, that was for sure.

Huffing, too. His grunting breath hot in her face.

His perspiring palm on her right breast, squashing it into her rib cage. His incisors clanging against her canines. A pearl of sweat snaking its way down her flank.

Later, later. Years later, she would push a diamond up herself, slow and delicious, and that was erotic. That was not to be surpassed. Cool, cut and sentient.

A eukaryotic jade all but dissolving under her tongue.


9.

"April Bingham."

"Yes. Come in. Roger."

"Rodney. Rodney."

Wicked grin. "I know that." Quick double-shuffle.

"Sorry, what is that behind your back?"

"Nothing, nothing. Just some work I've brought home from the lab. A few diamonds, some schorl."

"Right."

"I had no idea, by the way, that you were going to be here in Atlantis."

"Well, how could you? Top-secret. Classified and whatnot."

"And it's been years. Years."

"Yes, I'm sorry I didn't recognise... It's the..." Twirly hands. "... hair. It used to be short."

"Oh. Yes." Quick touch to the back of her head. Bun twisted into a knot and kept in place with nine bobby pins.

"It's nice, though. It looks very nice."

"I heard your recording." That's right. Blurt it right out.

"My... what?"

"The letter home."

"That is top secret! That recording is totally classified! That is not for the general viewing pleasure of..."

"Cute blonde."

"Well, I..."

"You're on the brink of death and you remember some teenage girl from your past?"

"Hm."

"And I'm sorry about the mono. I never got it, you know. Was it the cytomegalovirus? Or the Epstein-Barr?"

"This is all very charming but I have work to do and..."

"Why are you here, then?"

"What? I can't just look in on a colleague and..."

To erase the past it is sometimes helpful to re-enact it.

Second round. Using what you have learned in the meantime.

But yes. Hm.

You're not the only one who's been learning.


10.

Teenagers get very hung up about kissing. What, when, where, who, how. Kissing, despite what Cecilia Ming so haughtily proclaimed, was not a prerequisite for sex. It was a goal all its own. It wasn't something that necessarily led to anything else.

So you had your boobs squashed and your style cramped -- no, you didn't even have a style, that was the worst of it -- and your necklace mauled and your molars bumped, and the moment seemed to go on forever.

Your awkward hand on his awkward shoulder.

Your awkward other hand on his awkward groin.

No way were you letting his clammy paws near your underpants, though.

But then you grew up. And now?

Start slow.

All the time knowing it's just a start.

It's only when their lips touch that she realises she's been thinking about this. Because why else would it feel so surprising, so unexpected, if there hadn't been expectation to begin with?

She holds her lips there, just so.

It's his lips that move first. His lower lip. It moves to cup her lower lip, a soft moist muscle. It holds off, it lifts, it comes back down and over.

She lets her lower lip drop open.

And his lower lip continues to cup and capture but now there's breath as well. Breath breathing into her, and breath breathing out of her. Their tongues are still curled up inside their mouths. Only their lips touch, and their breaths.

She catches his lower lip with her teeth. She pulls at it, softly, biting in tiny nicks.

His hand moves up her flank, across the thick layers of uniform, to her naked nape. And while they're still kissing, tongueless, breathless, he slides the bobby pins out of her bun. All nine of them. One by one. Like pulling tooth picks from a pile of fiddlesticks.

One. Hitch.

Two. Hitch.

One hitched breath per pin.

Tink, they go on the floor. Tink, and another tiny tink.

They're moving their heads now, in some rhythm that comes out of nowhere, or deep from within. That comes from the genetic code stamped into their blood. You only have to know how to release it.

Seven. Eight. The last pin, and her hair tumbles down across the back of his hand.

He pushes his palm up her nape; the hair bunches into twists between his fingers.

Ghost fingers run up and down her spine.

She puts her palm on his groin, towards the left at first, nothing there. But her hand knows to look and on the right side of his fly, there he is.

"Hm," she moans.

Their tongues fall into each other. The jade slithers from one mouth to the next, and Rodney gasps in surprise.

Careful, careful. Keep the lips shut, keep it shut up in its moist twin caves. Excavate it with deliberation. It's not a jelly bean. It's not a rock. It lives in the pouches of their mucous membranes, it swims in the pores of their lust.

They pass the stone from mouth to mouth. Or perhaps it passes itself.

They surpass themselves.

"Why not?" April Bingham whispers as she undoes the flap of his fly. "Why ever not?"

----

THE END
All original bits of this story © to Lobelia.
27 May 2006, typed straight into LJ
http://community.livejournal.com/sga_flashfic/351774.html

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Oh, and I completely forgot to say 'thanks', of course, for the wonderful feedback! :-)