sga_flashfic | fic: Rite by solvent90

solvent90.livejournal.com posting in

Title: Rite
Author:

solvent90
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating: R
Wordcount: ~1200

rite

When they were finally back on Atlantis, and Rodney was scrubbing the dirt out of his fingernails in the shower, he decided that M3X-9GF rated as officially the worst mission ever - worse than the time with the imprisonment and threats of torture, and the time with the fourteen hours of grinding negotiation in a sweaty room with a clanking fan, and the time with those root vegetables.

It hadn’t started out too badly. The planet had been temperate and bright, green hills and blue sky and all that, the people were friendly in a laidback, vaguely-stoned sort of way, and they had whole rooms-full of Ancient technology they didn’t seem to be that interested in and were willing to give away. Just one small ritual of purification. With stripping. Collective - stripping.

“Stripping?” he’d gone higher than he’d actually known was possible, and John gave him a toothy grin that turned cajoling the second he caught Rodney’s actual expression.

“It’s not stripping, McKay, you just have to - take your clothes off,” he said. “On and off, thirty seconds max.”

He was still laughing, the bastard, trying to hide it under that look of mild persuasion, and Rodney was opening his mouth to say there was nothing they needed that badly, when the priests brought out the ZPM.

“ZedPM, Rodney,” John enunciated, and Rodney swore and took off his vest.

“Can you at least explain to them the concept of underwear?” he said, muffled through his T-shirt, and Teyla murmured until the head priest, slouched in his wicker-basket, lifted a shoulder.

“As you please. It is the,” he paused and stared lazily into space, waiting for the word, these people were such stoners, “ah, symbol of it that matters.”

Rodney was gearing up to say something sarcastic about that to distract from the fact that he was taking off his pants - that John was taking off his pants - when he caught sight of the swirl of intricate black just above the cut of Ronon’s hip (and Ronon wore crisp white boxers, how strange was that). John caught his pause and followed his line of sight, grinned.

“Cool,” he said, and Ronon smiled, small and strangely private, his palm going unerringly to cover the tattoo.

“Thanks,” he said, and then glanced over at Teyla, who was - who was pulling her shirt over her head in a long graceful arch, facing away, and oh, sports bra and a kind of linen skirt-thing. She ran a hand over the nape off her neck, caught Rodney staring and gave him a little amused smile over her shoulder. There was a neat block of what looked like text running down her lumbar spine, glossy over the warm brown skin, and what, did everyone in Pegasus have -

“Stop staring and come on, Rodney,” John said, sounding exasperated, striding straight past him to Teyla, walking with her and Ronon up the low stone steps to the altar. He had something that looked like a wing on his left shoulder blade, high up. Rodney knelt next to the three of them in the cool shadowy room, pressed his hands into the soft dirt as instructed, looking down the length of his bare arm and feeling soft and pale and appallingly naked. Then the ZPM turned out to be barely charged because the stoners hadn’t been maintaining it properly. Worst. Mission. Ever.

*

He had never, ever thought about body art before. It was just - he would have liked to say that it was ridiculously childish and superficial and pointlessly painful, and that he’d thought it all out before he was seventeen and dismissed the idea, but he hadn’t. It wasn’t the sort of thing he thought of.

He thought about it now, though, at random intervals, catching a glimpse of his bare wrist while he worked, looking down the expanse of his chest before he pulled on a T-shirt in the morning. Trying to imagine where it would go. He kept getting the image of Sheppard’s back as he walked up those steps, the way the black gleam of the tattoo over the moving shoulder muscle seemed to bring his entire body into bright focus. Look at me. He blinked at himself in the mirror, and then he washed his face and went down to the labs and didn’t think about it for fourteen hours, even (especially) with Sheppard in the room.

*

“A rite of passage among my people,” Teyla said in a low voice on a slow mission, the others scouting further ahead. They pushed through the undergrowth and walked steadily up a yellow hill for the rest of the afternoon, while she explained the hierarchy of the seven Athosian customs that were marked in the skin.

“It was a gift,” Ronon said, and turned to stare out of the window at Atlantis, tipping his forehead against the glass. He didn’t say anything else and even Rodney didn’t ask.

*

“So, uh” he said casually to John, finally, two weeks later, in the jumper, and John made the little hmm-ing noise that meant he wasn’t really paying attention. Good.

“The, you know,” he waved vaguely at John’s back.

“What?”

“That, the, uh, tattoo,” he said, fiddling with his scanner and trying for nonchalant. “Where’d you get that?”

John brought the jumper in and then turned to look at Rodney over his shoulder and Rodney had a sudden, badly timed, flash-memory of John’s bare shoulder, the spread of the tattoo, this morning in the shower. He could feel his ears start to go red and John blinked slowly at him and then smiled, lazy and teasing.

“Why? You want one, McKay?”

“Maybe,” he said before he could think, and the look on John’s face went narrow and curious, head tilting. “I mean, no, I don’t know,” he amended quickly. “I’m not really a tattoo person.”

John stared at him a second longer and then laughed, got up from the controls.

“You could be a tattoo person,” he said lightly, warmly, brushing past Rodney on his way to the door, and Rodney couldn’t stop his smile, helplessly wider than he meant it to be.

John turned his head just then and there was a caught moment when he just looked at Rodney, laughter fading out of his face, and then he stepped back, closer, the air suddenly changing, and put a hand lightly on the nape of Rodney’s neck, at the base.

“You could have one here,” he said, stroking under the collar of Rodney’s T-shirt, watching his face, and when Rodney made some kind of sound, Sheppard leaned in and kissed him, fingers still pressing at the nape of his neck, the whole time, harder and harder till it felt like they were leaving marks, fingerprints.

“Or here,” he mumbled against the skin of Rodney’s throat, some time later in Rodney’s quarters, hand sliding down the back of Rodney’s pants, squeezing, laughing when Rodney jumped, “or,” and Rodney bit his lip and bit John’s shoulder and came in his hand.

“You really want a tattoo?” John said sometime in the night, mouth brushing Rodney’s shoulder, fingers idly stroking shivers over a mark he’d left on his neck and Rodney tipped his head back a little for more of the touch and said, “no, not really.”

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mecurtin.livejournal.com

*flails*

My, I didn't really know I *had* that kink. gnurble.

From:

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags