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sga_flashficPairing: Sheppard/McKay
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: none
Notes: Voyager crossover - guest-starring Seven of Nine
Summary: Sheppard struggles to see the answer
Stupidly Tired
In his time, John Sheppard had been awake for over twenty-four hours straight for many noble and also manly reasons. He’d crawled miles in ventilation shafts, run across deserts, played chicken with thousand-year-old soul-sucking aliens and crept ninja-like around Atlantis, picking off the Genii and managing not to let slip that he had to run the ‘Mission Impossible’ theme in his mind to convince himself he was brave enough to carry it off.
There had in the past been many good reasons. Now, however, he was just awake. Determinedly, fixedly, gratingly awake.
“Do you intend to enlighten us,” said Rodney, through gritted teeth, glaring up from where he sat on the floor of the Puddle Jumper, “as to why you want to incite me to kill you in what will be an amateur and hence inexpressibly painful procedure?”
Sheppard could physically feel himself not finding this amusing. He had a vague recollection that sometimes he found Rodney’s peevishness comical or even slightly endearing, but that seemed very wrong and very long ago. He had a vaguer idea still that he should try and answer with witty banter:
“I’m bored” he managed.
“I’m Canadian”
“Is that relevant?” He went for a sort of rhetorical sarcasm just in case in the last few hours it had actually become so. He was pretty sure that Rodney’s Canadianness (Canadianness? - probably a word) was relevant to quite a few things about him.
“Precisely, not relevant facts” snapped Rodney, “Stop. Tapping. Your fingers.”
Sheppard looked down at his hand in surprise, and stopped. He stretched, felt a few things go pop, and yawned expansively. “When are you two going to be done exactly?”
“Well, since I obviously already know what the answer to our problem is I can tell you how long it will take us to figure out can’t I? Look, could you just be quiet? Sleep, maybe? Or at least be seen and not heard. And actually, really not seen either.” Rodney glanced at his watch, sighed and reached for another energy pill.
Yeah, so in this situation, things were maybe a little different than usual. Sheppard had absolutely nothing to contribute to the problem in hand, or at least he supposed so (he was not, in honesty, 100% sure quite what the problem in hand actually was). In fact, staying awake was directly unhelpful – when justifying denying him the pills, Rodney had pointed this out – as it made him consume more oxygen.
Which, given that there was several days supply, had implied very bad things about how long it was going to take to get out of here, bad things not refuted by the fact that in fourteen hours no visible progress had been made at all.
John had wanted to sleep. He wasn’t an insomania…insomatic…he didn’t have a sleep problem in general.
The thing about falling asleep just then though was that, he was increasingly convinced, that would be when they would start to have sex. And make a noise. And wake him. And then he’d have to see it. The two of them. Rodney and the blonde. The ‘cyborg’ (When he’d realised, Rodney had spoken the word in a guttural half-whisper, the way most guys would say “free cable porn”, or “girl-on-girl”). ‘Seven of Nine.’ Yeah, because that was obviously a real name.
Even now, through eyes that had done the whole aching thing and moved on to burning, the sight of her was kind of striking. Because USB-compatible, Jenna Jameson look-alikes weren’t supposed to exist outside of physicists' wet-dreams. This woman in particular was like some weird niche-fetish product specifically for guys who found the ability to do mental seven-figure long division in less than two seconds jaw-droppingly erotic.
i.e. Rodney McKay.
Okay, so she’d been through some kind of crazy-particle-related incident in the nearest wormhole and was not at all where she planned to be and needed to get back to her base ship, which made her a damsel in distress and Sheppard had been quite down with that program at first. As soon as they’d got her aboard the Jumper he’d started questioning her, trying to figure out what was wrong with her ship.
But she’d turned to Rodney basically at once – must have seen that he was non-military- and asked a question which was about as intelligible to John as Latvian would have been, but which basically implied this was not a case of popping the hood and twiddling some gears.
In response Rodney had picked up a PDA and started jabbing at it with a disturbingly Freudian intensity.
“But that wave coefficient doesn’t feature as a variable once you get past escape velocity” he had said. At least, John had thought that was it – at point he’d still been actually trying to keep up. Seven had raised one eyebrow and murmured something about particle degradation cube roots and Rodney’s jaw had dropped as he scribbled frantically for a few moments before gazing up at her in a kind of slack-jawed awe.
Sheppard had decided, during the many hours he’d had to mull it over, that this was what really got to him – that she didn’t care. It obviously could have mattered less to her that she was the only person in the known universe to have ever, ever, ever made Rodney McKay look like that at them.
The Lab drones back on Atlantis lived from week to week on the few times they were dropped a “Not bad work”. The military denied everything but there was this select cabal of ‘people who have saved Rodney McKay’s guts at one time or another and made him accept that muscles are cool.’ Even Ronon maybe raised an eyebrow a millimetre or so when Rodney got excited about microchips and plasma guns.
Because it took something special to interest Rodney McKay.
Seven, however, in the face of his admiration, had just grabbed up the PDA in a kind of muted exasperation and started tapping at it herself.
They remained – talking, arguing, and pressing the plasma-screens like musical instruments, for hours upon slowly grinding hours.
John had tried sitting on the floor, on the bench, in the control chairs and on the Med Kit. He’d rearranged the rations and decided what to get Zelenka for his birthday. There was nothing to clean on the controls. When he’d tried to run diagnostics he’d got a loud, angry, wordless noise from Rodney, who hadn’t raised his head, and Seven had commented that “If you will desist from operating the systems unless and until an emergency it will be helpful to us.”
Now they were sat in the middle of the floor at the rear, surrounded by screens and fiddly tools, and Rodney intermittently tried pushing the whole ‘sleep is good’ thing – ha ha! Sheppard had seen through that plan! Yes sir, no one would trick him into letting people have sex today! - before suddenly noticing that something had a little flashy light by it and his head pressed in close together with Seven’s, both doing equations under their breath.
In some ways this was actually worse than watching Rodney have sex, Sheppard thought, because you can get sex off anyone, anyone could have offered Rodney sex, but physics… And not plain old vanilla “I could have been a member of MENSA” physics, no – dirty, slutty, hypothetical, improbable physics with quantum paradoxes and everything.
Sheppard stood up, lifted down a box from the luggage rack with manly hefting noises and started disassembling, wiping and reassembling every gun in the Jumper.
Quietly.
Gradually, as he listened with one ear to the Think Thank behind him, he realised the conversation was getting less harmonious. Whilst she clearly knew a lot about wormholes, she knew nothing about Gates or the Ancients or how to dial an address, and Rodney’s teaching skills were terrible bordering on criminal:
“Well, of course, this would be completely right” Rodney said as he handed her calculations back to her “– if the Universe was two-dimensional. Which might be handy but sadly is completely divorced from reality in every single conceivable way. Do you have some kind of short-term memory problem? Seven symbols! Seven symbols!” He chose to enforce this communication by tapping her on the shoulder with each syllable.
See, that was the other thing with Rodney, Sheppard thought, leaning dreamily on the machine gun. Even when you got to him, maybe impressed him for a minute or two – you know, showed him how to steer a Jumper or saved his life or really, really tried to explain football or had a gene that he didn’t or something - the world reset itself to his default ‘Am God. Am flawless. Am not interested in you’ mode all too quickly just the same.
“Seven symbols!” Rodney yelled again, practically poking her this time.
Two seconds later he was lying, prone, on the floor, and Seven was quietly carrying on reading his notes on the PDA, as if she hadn’t just laid him out with a single pinch to the neck.
Sheppard felt himself go cold, hot, adrenaline in waves, all in under a second, all while his heart seemed to have stopped. “What have you done to him?” he yelled, leaping to his feet, very clean gun ready and aiming right at her, trying to see Rodney’s face out of the corner of his eye.
She looked up at him with a tolerant air, “His abuse of myself is not a productive use of time” she said, quite calmly and as if clearly if Sheppard was only another genius he would have seen that at once. “I have merely removed him as a distraction for the equivalent time he would have spent berating me. Have you a stimulant we can wake him with? He is illogical and unnecessarily aggressive but I will need his continuing assistance to use the systems of this shuttle.”
“It’s a Puddle Jumper, for a start” had come Rodney’s voice, kind of squeaky, “and what the hell do you mean ‘unnecessarily aggressive’?”
“No, it’s okay, she’s right” – he waved Sheppard to the side making vague ‘sit down out of the way’ gestures.
She’s right? Someone other than Rodney McKay is allowed to be right now?
“Now, if we consider the wormhole as an ideal-state anomaly for the first readings…” Seven began, holding out her workings.
“No - ideal-state anomaly theory doesn’t encompass the Ancient’s use of location-specifiers. We need Kreigfield’s theorem…” Rodney countered.
Sheppard sat down, finding he was still breathing too quickly.
He tried to start multiplying by three indefinitely, which was how he usually calmed himself, but he felt kind of stupid, in a room with two people having the greatest astrophysics bitch-slap of all time, to be doing just pure math in one axis.
Some of the hours seemed to go slower than others, and one, as far as he could tell, happened twice. He eyed Seven with suspicion.
Was her hair natural? He bet not. Clearly not. Nobody could be that perfect.
Or maybe her breasts? They looked real enough, but would they stand a test, that was the question – when Rodney unpeeled her from her jumpsuit and moved his hands to cup them, maybe pushing his throbbing dick in the cleavage, closing his eyes and making noises like he did when you gave him your leftover popcorn…
Okay, okay, definitely drifting now. Sheppard pinched himself. It was amazing the kind of crap that came into your mind when you going he sleep, he thought, like the time when he was a kid and had tried to imagine what he wanted to be in twenty years time and couldn’t come up with anything satisfying, and started to get desperate and wound up not sleeping till 3am.
Or that time Rodney was supposed to die of nanites, or…yes, it had been nanites but they hadn’t known that at the time, had they? And the gene…yeah, the people with the gene were OK, and he’d sweat bullets later in bed realising that after he, Sheppard, had joined the program there had been no reason at all for Rodney to get that therapy.
More hours, more hours, more hours. He felt each separate nerve in him get ironed out flat and achingly tired, bored and sleepy and pissed and depressed. He realised he hadn’t actually said anything in ten hours, and that no one had said anything to him.
The lower he spiralled into exhaustion, the more sure he was that he knew something, or was knowing something, or was being told something, but gripping after it was like Alice falling down the rabbit hole past the marmalade.
Then, he realised, slowly and kind of as it was happening; Rodney and Seven were inputting figures, dialling it all up and going through the goddamn wormhole:
“No” she said, looking through the front window, “this is not the right place.”
Sheppard rammed his head back against his seat and felt the muscles under his eye start to spasm.
“It’s exactly right” Rodney was replying indignantly. “Look, here -” and he garbled a list of figures at her.
“Prime, not prime, not prime, prime,” Sheppard whispered to himself.
“But it is not right” she looked searchingly from the window. “They are not here for me.”
“Maybe they ran away” said Rodney, acidly, and turned to read a diagnostic, so only Sheppard saw how that made her flinch, and the desperation in her eyes.
Then she turned away from the cockpit:
“This is not the right place – the stars in that constellation are 0.35 degrees clockwise relative to the ones on the trajectory of the wormhole, whereas when I entered they were at 0.37.”
“That’s impossible!” sniped Rodney, “it takes at least a thousand years to register a shift like that!”
Then he looked at her like, well he’d already looked at her like she was the most beautiful thing in the world– but now he got the look back again.
“Oh my God! I see it now! Look at this! You’ve made it travel in time!” he half-whispered, with tears in his eyes.
She bent over the monitor, “Yes, that much is obvious as soon as one utilises the fourth dimension, I had assumed you were also working to that premise.”
It was actually like watching a small, blind, starving puppy getting kicked.
Rodney’s face sort of…crumpled, and he blinked a few times like he wasn’t sure where he was. He swallowed dryly and ran a hand over his head, going slightly grey.
It really wasn’t as funny as Sheppard had always imagined this scenario would be. He felt a lot less like pointing and laughing than he’d expected.
In fact he wished there was something he could think of to say, or do.
“Clearly the energy of the transit must also be modulated to phase-lock with the chronitons, and to do so both ways so that you may return” said Seven, thrusting a data readout under Rodney’s nose.
They might still have sex, Sheppard realised with a sinking feeling. She might give him pity sex and even so afterwards Rodney would be unliveable. The thought of Rodney telling him action replays of shagging the 36DD computer…it made his stomach turn.
“Luckily I possess the requisite technology,” Seven continued, “but due to the rules of my collec…of my people, I must remove all traces of this technology when I leave.”
Sheppard, having caught ‘leave’ if nothing else, nodded vigorously.
“Oh, okay” said Rodney in a small voice, turning docilely and – god no, god no, but it was true – they started doing More. Fucking. Maths, or possibly More. Maths. Fucking, depending on how deeply symbolic you were prepared to go.
Finally, a mere forty-five minutes more down the line, she teleported to her ‘shuttle’ to collect a few necessary things and Rodney sank into the chair next to Sheppard, who looked up, ready to be comforting and friendly, and found Rodney grinning from ear to ear.
“What did you just agree to?” asked Sheppard, suspiciously. “Because something sure as hell turned your mood around fast. Hey! You didn’t…” he swallowed, continued softly, “You didn’t agree to go back with her? Go away? Did you?”
“Huh?”
John grabbed his shoulders, shoved his face directly in Rodney’s line of vision - “Did you Rodney?”
“What? No, don’t be stupid.”
He gave kind of startled yelp as Sheppard roared, leapt from his seat and started pacing the Jumper floor, wishing there was anything in there he could break and not have to pay for.
“All it was” said Rodney, slowly, in a ‘humouring the military – bless them, almost at opposable thumbs’ voice, “was that she said” and he smirked, “she said I was one of the most competent astrophysicists she’d ever worked with. And you know, from someone like her, that means a lot, a real peer as a co-worker for a change, someone I can respect, learn from, and, you know, teach in my turn, of course.”
“Of course” said Sheppard, tightly.
“It’s been so good to do a project and not have to help the little people all the time, people can be so dense.”
“Right.”
A change came over Rodney’s face, all of a sudden, and he raised a hand: “I’m sorry, John, I’m so damn tired,” he started to say, “I didn’t mean that…”
But Sheppard didn’t hear, or at any rate it didn’t process fast enough. Seven had just teleported back, and Sheppard walked up to her, almost chuckling, so pleased with himself for finally figuring out the answer to all his problems- who the fuck was sleep-deprived now? Who was stupid now, eh, McKay?
“Sometimes it takes a physicist, sometimes it takes real man” he said, (so, so proud when he’d thought of that) and he put his hands on her neck and kissed her, deeply and at length. She responded with a perfectly calculated, tolerant acquiescence, but he wasn’t really paying attention to that.
What he was waiting for, what he relished, what gratified him, was the sound of hurt surprise Rodney let out when he did it.
‘I win, I win!’ he thought, sure that, in few moments, he would remember why, how and what the hell he meant.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: none
Notes: Voyager crossover - guest-starring Seven of Nine
Summary: Sheppard struggles to see the answer
Stupidly Tired
In his time, John Sheppard had been awake for over twenty-four hours straight for many noble and also manly reasons. He’d crawled miles in ventilation shafts, run across deserts, played chicken with thousand-year-old soul-sucking aliens and crept ninja-like around Atlantis, picking off the Genii and managing not to let slip that he had to run the ‘Mission Impossible’ theme in his mind to convince himself he was brave enough to carry it off.
There had in the past been many good reasons. Now, however, he was just awake. Determinedly, fixedly, gratingly awake.
“Do you intend to enlighten us,” said Rodney, through gritted teeth, glaring up from where he sat on the floor of the Puddle Jumper, “as to why you want to incite me to kill you in what will be an amateur and hence inexpressibly painful procedure?”
Sheppard could physically feel himself not finding this amusing. He had a vague recollection that sometimes he found Rodney’s peevishness comical or even slightly endearing, but that seemed very wrong and very long ago. He had a vaguer idea still that he should try and answer with witty banter:
“I’m bored” he managed.
“I’m Canadian”
“Is that relevant?” He went for a sort of rhetorical sarcasm just in case in the last few hours it had actually become so. He was pretty sure that Rodney’s Canadianness (Canadianness? - probably a word) was relevant to quite a few things about him.
“Precisely, not relevant facts” snapped Rodney, “Stop. Tapping. Your fingers.”
Sheppard looked down at his hand in surprise, and stopped. He stretched, felt a few things go pop, and yawned expansively. “When are you two going to be done exactly?”
“Well, since I obviously already know what the answer to our problem is I can tell you how long it will take us to figure out can’t I? Look, could you just be quiet? Sleep, maybe? Or at least be seen and not heard. And actually, really not seen either.” Rodney glanced at his watch, sighed and reached for another energy pill.
Yeah, so in this situation, things were maybe a little different than usual. Sheppard had absolutely nothing to contribute to the problem in hand, or at least he supposed so (he was not, in honesty, 100% sure quite what the problem in hand actually was). In fact, staying awake was directly unhelpful – when justifying denying him the pills, Rodney had pointed this out – as it made him consume more oxygen.
Which, given that there was several days supply, had implied very bad things about how long it was going to take to get out of here, bad things not refuted by the fact that in fourteen hours no visible progress had been made at all.
John had wanted to sleep. He wasn’t an insomania…insomatic…he didn’t have a sleep problem in general.
The thing about falling asleep just then though was that, he was increasingly convinced, that would be when they would start to have sex. And make a noise. And wake him. And then he’d have to see it. The two of them. Rodney and the blonde. The ‘cyborg’ (When he’d realised, Rodney had spoken the word in a guttural half-whisper, the way most guys would say “free cable porn”, or “girl-on-girl”). ‘Seven of Nine.’ Yeah, because that was obviously a real name.
Even now, through eyes that had done the whole aching thing and moved on to burning, the sight of her was kind of striking. Because USB-compatible, Jenna Jameson look-alikes weren’t supposed to exist outside of physicists' wet-dreams. This woman in particular was like some weird niche-fetish product specifically for guys who found the ability to do mental seven-figure long division in less than two seconds jaw-droppingly erotic.
i.e. Rodney McKay.
Okay, so she’d been through some kind of crazy-particle-related incident in the nearest wormhole and was not at all where she planned to be and needed to get back to her base ship, which made her a damsel in distress and Sheppard had been quite down with that program at first. As soon as they’d got her aboard the Jumper he’d started questioning her, trying to figure out what was wrong with her ship.
But she’d turned to Rodney basically at once – must have seen that he was non-military- and asked a question which was about as intelligible to John as Latvian would have been, but which basically implied this was not a case of popping the hood and twiddling some gears.
In response Rodney had picked up a PDA and started jabbing at it with a disturbingly Freudian intensity.
“But that wave coefficient doesn’t feature as a variable once you get past escape velocity” he had said. At least, John had thought that was it – at point he’d still been actually trying to keep up. Seven had raised one eyebrow and murmured something about particle degradation cube roots and Rodney’s jaw had dropped as he scribbled frantically for a few moments before gazing up at her in a kind of slack-jawed awe.
Sheppard had decided, during the many hours he’d had to mull it over, that this was what really got to him – that she didn’t care. It obviously could have mattered less to her that she was the only person in the known universe to have ever, ever, ever made Rodney McKay look like that at them.
The Lab drones back on Atlantis lived from week to week on the few times they were dropped a “Not bad work”. The military denied everything but there was this select cabal of ‘people who have saved Rodney McKay’s guts at one time or another and made him accept that muscles are cool.’ Even Ronon maybe raised an eyebrow a millimetre or so when Rodney got excited about microchips and plasma guns.
Because it took something special to interest Rodney McKay.
Seven, however, in the face of his admiration, had just grabbed up the PDA in a kind of muted exasperation and started tapping at it herself.
They remained – talking, arguing, and pressing the plasma-screens like musical instruments, for hours upon slowly grinding hours.
John had tried sitting on the floor, on the bench, in the control chairs and on the Med Kit. He’d rearranged the rations and decided what to get Zelenka for his birthday. There was nothing to clean on the controls. When he’d tried to run diagnostics he’d got a loud, angry, wordless noise from Rodney, who hadn’t raised his head, and Seven had commented that “If you will desist from operating the systems unless and until an emergency it will be helpful to us.”
Now they were sat in the middle of the floor at the rear, surrounded by screens and fiddly tools, and Rodney intermittently tried pushing the whole ‘sleep is good’ thing – ha ha! Sheppard had seen through that plan! Yes sir, no one would trick him into letting people have sex today! - before suddenly noticing that something had a little flashy light by it and his head pressed in close together with Seven’s, both doing equations under their breath.
In some ways this was actually worse than watching Rodney have sex, Sheppard thought, because you can get sex off anyone, anyone could have offered Rodney sex, but physics… And not plain old vanilla “I could have been a member of MENSA” physics, no – dirty, slutty, hypothetical, improbable physics with quantum paradoxes and everything.
Sheppard stood up, lifted down a box from the luggage rack with manly hefting noises and started disassembling, wiping and reassembling every gun in the Jumper.
Quietly.
Gradually, as he listened with one ear to the Think Thank behind him, he realised the conversation was getting less harmonious. Whilst she clearly knew a lot about wormholes, she knew nothing about Gates or the Ancients or how to dial an address, and Rodney’s teaching skills were terrible bordering on criminal:
“Well, of course, this would be completely right” Rodney said as he handed her calculations back to her “– if the Universe was two-dimensional. Which might be handy but sadly is completely divorced from reality in every single conceivable way. Do you have some kind of short-term memory problem? Seven symbols! Seven symbols!” He chose to enforce this communication by tapping her on the shoulder with each syllable.
See, that was the other thing with Rodney, Sheppard thought, leaning dreamily on the machine gun. Even when you got to him, maybe impressed him for a minute or two – you know, showed him how to steer a Jumper or saved his life or really, really tried to explain football or had a gene that he didn’t or something - the world reset itself to his default ‘Am God. Am flawless. Am not interested in you’ mode all too quickly just the same.
“Seven symbols!” Rodney yelled again, practically poking her this time.
Two seconds later he was lying, prone, on the floor, and Seven was quietly carrying on reading his notes on the PDA, as if she hadn’t just laid him out with a single pinch to the neck.
Sheppard felt himself go cold, hot, adrenaline in waves, all in under a second, all while his heart seemed to have stopped. “What have you done to him?” he yelled, leaping to his feet, very clean gun ready and aiming right at her, trying to see Rodney’s face out of the corner of his eye.
She looked up at him with a tolerant air, “His abuse of myself is not a productive use of time” she said, quite calmly and as if clearly if Sheppard was only another genius he would have seen that at once. “I have merely removed him as a distraction for the equivalent time he would have spent berating me. Have you a stimulant we can wake him with? He is illogical and unnecessarily aggressive but I will need his continuing assistance to use the systems of this shuttle.”
“It’s a Puddle Jumper, for a start” had come Rodney’s voice, kind of squeaky, “and what the hell do you mean ‘unnecessarily aggressive’?”
“No, it’s okay, she’s right” – he waved Sheppard to the side making vague ‘sit down out of the way’ gestures.
She’s right? Someone other than Rodney McKay is allowed to be right now?
“Now, if we consider the wormhole as an ideal-state anomaly for the first readings…” Seven began, holding out her workings.
“No - ideal-state anomaly theory doesn’t encompass the Ancient’s use of location-specifiers. We need Kreigfield’s theorem…” Rodney countered.
Sheppard sat down, finding he was still breathing too quickly.
He tried to start multiplying by three indefinitely, which was how he usually calmed himself, but he felt kind of stupid, in a room with two people having the greatest astrophysics bitch-slap of all time, to be doing just pure math in one axis.
Some of the hours seemed to go slower than others, and one, as far as he could tell, happened twice. He eyed Seven with suspicion.
Was her hair natural? He bet not. Clearly not. Nobody could be that perfect.
Or maybe her breasts? They looked real enough, but would they stand a test, that was the question – when Rodney unpeeled her from her jumpsuit and moved his hands to cup them, maybe pushing his throbbing dick in the cleavage, closing his eyes and making noises like he did when you gave him your leftover popcorn…
Okay, okay, definitely drifting now. Sheppard pinched himself. It was amazing the kind of crap that came into your mind when you going he sleep, he thought, like the time when he was a kid and had tried to imagine what he wanted to be in twenty years time and couldn’t come up with anything satisfying, and started to get desperate and wound up not sleeping till 3am.
Or that time Rodney was supposed to die of nanites, or…yes, it had been nanites but they hadn’t known that at the time, had they? And the gene…yeah, the people with the gene were OK, and he’d sweat bullets later in bed realising that after he, Sheppard, had joined the program there had been no reason at all for Rodney to get that therapy.
More hours, more hours, more hours. He felt each separate nerve in him get ironed out flat and achingly tired, bored and sleepy and pissed and depressed. He realised he hadn’t actually said anything in ten hours, and that no one had said anything to him.
The lower he spiralled into exhaustion, the more sure he was that he knew something, or was knowing something, or was being told something, but gripping after it was like Alice falling down the rabbit hole past the marmalade.
Then, he realised, slowly and kind of as it was happening; Rodney and Seven were inputting figures, dialling it all up and going through the goddamn wormhole:
“No” she said, looking through the front window, “this is not the right place.”
Sheppard rammed his head back against his seat and felt the muscles under his eye start to spasm.
“It’s exactly right” Rodney was replying indignantly. “Look, here -” and he garbled a list of figures at her.
“Prime, not prime, not prime, prime,” Sheppard whispered to himself.
“But it is not right” she looked searchingly from the window. “They are not here for me.”
“Maybe they ran away” said Rodney, acidly, and turned to read a diagnostic, so only Sheppard saw how that made her flinch, and the desperation in her eyes.
Then she turned away from the cockpit:
“This is not the right place – the stars in that constellation are 0.35 degrees clockwise relative to the ones on the trajectory of the wormhole, whereas when I entered they were at 0.37.”
“That’s impossible!” sniped Rodney, “it takes at least a thousand years to register a shift like that!”
Then he looked at her like, well he’d already looked at her like she was the most beautiful thing in the world– but now he got the look back again.
“Oh my God! I see it now! Look at this! You’ve made it travel in time!” he half-whispered, with tears in his eyes.
She bent over the monitor, “Yes, that much is obvious as soon as one utilises the fourth dimension, I had assumed you were also working to that premise.”
It was actually like watching a small, blind, starving puppy getting kicked.
Rodney’s face sort of…crumpled, and he blinked a few times like he wasn’t sure where he was. He swallowed dryly and ran a hand over his head, going slightly grey.
It really wasn’t as funny as Sheppard had always imagined this scenario would be. He felt a lot less like pointing and laughing than he’d expected.
In fact he wished there was something he could think of to say, or do.
“Clearly the energy of the transit must also be modulated to phase-lock with the chronitons, and to do so both ways so that you may return” said Seven, thrusting a data readout under Rodney’s nose.
They might still have sex, Sheppard realised with a sinking feeling. She might give him pity sex and even so afterwards Rodney would be unliveable. The thought of Rodney telling him action replays of shagging the 36DD computer…it made his stomach turn.
“Luckily I possess the requisite technology,” Seven continued, “but due to the rules of my collec…of my people, I must remove all traces of this technology when I leave.”
Sheppard, having caught ‘leave’ if nothing else, nodded vigorously.
“Oh, okay” said Rodney in a small voice, turning docilely and – god no, god no, but it was true – they started doing More. Fucking. Maths, or possibly More. Maths. Fucking, depending on how deeply symbolic you were prepared to go.
Finally, a mere forty-five minutes more down the line, she teleported to her ‘shuttle’ to collect a few necessary things and Rodney sank into the chair next to Sheppard, who looked up, ready to be comforting and friendly, and found Rodney grinning from ear to ear.
“What did you just agree to?” asked Sheppard, suspiciously. “Because something sure as hell turned your mood around fast. Hey! You didn’t…” he swallowed, continued softly, “You didn’t agree to go back with her? Go away? Did you?”
“Huh?”
John grabbed his shoulders, shoved his face directly in Rodney’s line of vision - “Did you Rodney?”
“What? No, don’t be stupid.”
He gave kind of startled yelp as Sheppard roared, leapt from his seat and started pacing the Jumper floor, wishing there was anything in there he could break and not have to pay for.
“All it was” said Rodney, slowly, in a ‘humouring the military – bless them, almost at opposable thumbs’ voice, “was that she said” and he smirked, “she said I was one of the most competent astrophysicists she’d ever worked with. And you know, from someone like her, that means a lot, a real peer as a co-worker for a change, someone I can respect, learn from, and, you know, teach in my turn, of course.”
“Of course” said Sheppard, tightly.
“It’s been so good to do a project and not have to help the little people all the time, people can be so dense.”
“Right.”
A change came over Rodney’s face, all of a sudden, and he raised a hand: “I’m sorry, John, I’m so damn tired,” he started to say, “I didn’t mean that…”
But Sheppard didn’t hear, or at any rate it didn’t process fast enough. Seven had just teleported back, and Sheppard walked up to her, almost chuckling, so pleased with himself for finally figuring out the answer to all his problems- who the fuck was sleep-deprived now? Who was stupid now, eh, McKay?
“Sometimes it takes a physicist, sometimes it takes real man” he said, (so, so proud when he’d thought of that) and he put his hands on her neck and kissed her, deeply and at length. She responded with a perfectly calculated, tolerant acquiescence, but he wasn’t really paying attention to that.
What he was waiting for, what he relished, what gratified him, was the sound of hurt surprise Rodney let out when he did it.
‘I win, I win!’ he thought, sure that, in few moments, he would remember why, how and what the hell he meant.
