sga_flashfic | Refraction by dracostella (Sickness Challenge)

Title: Refraction
Author: dracostella
Rating: R
Pairing: Sheppard/McKay
~550 words
John feels as if his head is submerged and a slow current of lukewarm water is slowly diffusing into his brain.

Water

John feels as if his head is submerged and a slow current of lukewarm water is slowly diffusing into his brain. The bottom of his stomach is missing in space, a vacuum where there should be substance, matter, something.

He reaches out blindly with his hands but the gravity and the drag around them is disproportionately high--like the pressure of being a hundred feet under water. He grabs on to... Rodney's something--warm and familiar and smelling of earth and coffee and copper.

Rodney's words are low and hurried. They feel like low rumbles of sound waves bouncing off against John's waterlogged head.

"Damn it Colonel, if you die from this, I will kill you," Rodney says in John's ear. Inside his ear. The sounds trapped inside John's tympanic membrane.

Rodney says more, but they don't get past the water barrier. But then John is falling. The feel of a wormhole catching his descent forward, until he touches the bottom.

And it is a harsh landing against the floor of Atlantis' gateroom.

***

Vacuum

They tell him that he is lucky to be alive. They tell him that the poison that the natives used would have killed him in under a hour. They tell him that Rodney saved him.

Rodney, who managed to drag John nearly half a mile to the gate, while he was rapidly bleeding out from his own wound.

They tell him that Rodney's lucky to be alive.

John promises himself to kill Rodney as soon as his world stops spinning.

But when stillness comes, it is a moment stretched out. It is Rodney lying against white sheets--his face pale, and his eyes closed. And Rodney's motionlessness is a heavy rock that settles in the pit of John's gut and slowly gaining in weight.

He leans over Rodney, and buries his face in the space between the edge of the pillow and Rodney's head. He whispers into the fabric, "Don't ever do that again. I can't, I can't... Damn it Rodney, I can't..." And then he really can't say any more, and the silence in the room is just another of his failures--

An ever broadening gap of sound until Rodney whispers hoarsely a million years later, "Don't do that again."

John looks up at him. Rodney's eyes are open and searching. Their faces are inches apart.

***
Air

John feels as if his head is expanding into space. The rush of burning heat engulfing him as he pushes into Rodney. He reaches out blindly to find purchase on something... anything to prevent him from the weightless of being.

But he has nothing but the bulk of Rodney's body to ground him, and his hands are holding Rodney's wrists too tightly as he breathes in the smell of salt and sex and Rodney.

"John, God, John, you have no idea, I--"

John stops the flood of words with his mouth, and feels Rodney's exhale in the back of his throat. They both still for a moment, and he feels both of them trembling in the stale air as he tries and fails to find equilibrium.

When he starts to move again, Rodney moans steadily under him. John swallows each sound greedily so that they reverberate inside him, driving him faster, deeper, higher, until he comes with white stars behind his eyes. And when he falls, he falls gracelessly onto Rodney, his head pillowing Rodney's chest; Rodney's rapid heartbeat his metronome of time.

***

Refraction is the change in direction of a wave due to a change in its speed. This is most commonly seen when a wave passes from one medium to another. Refraction of light is the most commonly seen example, but any type of wave can refract when it interacts with a medium, for example when sound waves pass from one medium into another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refraction