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sga_flashficTitle: Rebuilding Babel
Author: the_drifter (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fiercelydreamed)
Summary: He wondered if this was how it felt to go crazy -- you didn't lose your mind, it just stopped synching up with the world around you. The Pegasus galaxy makes Rodney an expert in what he can survive without.
Details: 21,000 words, Sheppard/McKay, adult/explicit. Spoilers through S2.
Notes: Huge thanks tosecrethappiness and cathexys for betaing (thoroughly and within time constraints -- man, but they're kind people), and to cindyjade, shaenie, and celli for audiencing. Also, two counts of thanks to cesperanza for using the prompt and for extending the challenge deadline.
Download the soundtrack.
[Go back to Part 1.] [Go back to Part 2.]
Down in the power room, the glow of the new ZPM was pulsing just perceptibly. Radek scrambled around to the console and grabbed the laptop they'd left down here earlier, typing frantically as Rodney peered intently over his shoulder. He knew every display and schematic on the ZPM by heart, along with all of the equations behind them, and oh shit, these graphs were bad, they were very, very bad. The crystals must have been damaged somehow, too subtly for their tests to catch, but the SST region was losing stability and the fluctuations were spiking closer and closer to the limits of what the containment field could withstand. If they didn't get it out of the city before it blew, that was it, toast, there'd be nothing left of Atlantis but ionized molecules scattered over the ocean's surface. Radek knew it too, because by the time Rodney looked up from the screen Radek was already moving toward the central structure, one hand reaching for the release and the other at his earpiece.
But wait, wait, there was something about the underlying curve of the projected fluctuations. Rodney made a loud wordless noise of negation, and Radek jerked his head up, hands hovering just over the release mechanism. He gestured to the ZPM and said something in a strained voice. Rodney waved him furiously off, because yes, he knew they didn't have much time, but there was something, something they were missing. He scanned the screen for another second and then he had it, a sudden flash of understanding, and he practically vaulted over the console to grab Radek by the shirt and drag him back just before his fingertips could touch the release.
Radek shouted and tried to pull away, but Rodney was heavier and stronger; he hurled Radek down into a chair and put all his weight into keeping him there as he groped for the notepad sitting on the console. He threw open the line to Sheppard and didn't even wait for a response before he started firing information at him: straight pipeline to the hand he had clenched on Radek's shoulder and the graphs and equations he was scribbling on a pad of paper, the frantic sequences of logic running through his head. He got a glimpse of Sheppard scrambling out of his chair in the mess and after that he quit paying attention. Radek was still fighting him and Elizabeth had clicked onto the radio, her voice demanding, Sheppard was hauling ass down the corridor and Rodney ignored all of them for the moment, because they were running out of time in two ways at once and there couldn't be any mistakes on this, they had to get it absolutely right.
Just as Rodney scrawled the last symbol down, Sheppard hurtled through the door with a wild look on his face, and he hadn't even skidded to a stop before he started talking faster than Rodney had ever heard him talk before, trying to match the speed of Rodney's transmission. Radek's face went slack with surprise as he studied what Rodney had written, and then he jerked away to snatch the laptop again, pulling up charts as fast as Sheppard could translate back the information. Rodney could already tell they were confirming what he'd realized: the only thing that had kept the ZPM stable this long was the steady drain of the city's systems. It was headed for overload and fast, but it was going to get there a lot faster once they disconnected it -- and now Radek had the numbers, times Sheppard showed him as an analogue clock hooked to a detonator. Forty-one minutes and seven seconds under the current conditions, but the moment they pulled it out, they had thirty-four seconds, god, nowhere near enough time to get it out the gate.
Elizabeth ran in and none of them turned to acknowledge her, too caught up in the urgent flow of information -- Rodney's thoughts from Sheppard's mouth, Radek's hands flying over the keyboard, his answer to Sheppard's ears and Rodney's reply back, almost fast enough for Sheppard to interrupt Radek's sentence. The only way to buy time was to siphon as much power off as quickly as possible, and Radek jumped up and started gesturing to the floor below them. Sheppard shot him a fast sequence of the sister city they'd found on Eldred's planet, the command chair going dead as Rodney powered up the star drive, but Rodney shook his head because yes, that would work only no, it wouldn't. Using the drive or any other system as high-demand and then yanking the power source out from under it could mean a catastrophic failure; at best, they'd deplete their other ZPM trying to power down safely. Radek scrubbed his hand over his mouth and suggested something else, and Rodney threw a hand up, pacing, because no, the generators couldn't handle anywhere near the load they'd need to buffer the--
He whipped back around. The naquadah generators: he'd spent the last month engineering them to be rechargeable. If Radek could regulate the power flow -- if they could dispatch engineering teams to patch them into the city's circuitry -- keep as many generators hooked up as possible, taking on power at the maximum safe rate--
Radek typed furiously for a few seconds, and his head snapped up as Sheppard transmitted his answer. Optimal depletion speed could buy them twenty-eight seconds. A total of a minute and two seconds to get the ZPM out of the power room, through the transport chamber, gate it out and shut down the wormhole before it blew. Barely possible, but it could be just enough.
Stepping forward so she was shoulder-to-shoulder with Sheppard, Elizabeth forced her way into the conversation with an emphatic question, one that she leveled straight at Rodney. He could read the content just from the tone in her voice, because he'd heard it from her in the storm, in the Wraith siege, during Acturus, and a hundred other times besides. Sheppard was staring at Rodney with a different question written all over his face, because they'd been using the device for five weeks now, but neither of them had done anything like this yet. Are you sure? his expression asked, and Rodney jerked his chin up defiantly in the motion of, I can if you can. Sheppard drew in a long breath in the way that meant, Jesus, you'd better be right about this, then he turned to Elizabeth and told her yes, Rodney could do it. They could do it.
She gave Rodney a sharp nod and stepped back, out of the way, and then Sheppard was talking fast into his radio as Rodney started broadcasting on an open channel: a ship's bell ringing the all-hands, the dangerous pulse of the ZPM and warning lights going off all around it, clock winding rapidly down and a computer simulation of the city exploding, people jumping up at the sound of Rodney's voice and sprinting for the power room. Emergency, emergency, everyone who can hear me get your ass down to the power room right now if you want to survive.
Within thirty seconds the first wave came pounding down the hall, and Rodney ran to the door to perform a rapid-fire interrogation of each new arrival and stamp unfamiliar faces into his mind. He dispatched them off around the city in threes and fours, assembling groups to get the full spread of the skills they were going to need: engineering background, programming, gene strength and brute physical ability. One group per generator, with eight pairs of the most skilled technicians assigned to the key junctions that would have to be rerouted. He kept five people on-hand in the power room and deputized the last dozen to provide back-up the others, because it was way too much to hope that they could drain half the charge of a ZPM in thirty-five minutes and not have any casualties along the way. Then he ran back in and headed for the far wall where he'd be clear of the action, spared a last look each for Radek and Sheppard, neither of whom were looking back, and closed his eyes as he threw the line all the way open.
And then he was everywhere at once, peering over shoulders and providing lightning-fast instructions, showing people which crystal to pull, which circuits to rewire, which screen to watch to make sure the flow of power stayed within a generator's maximum tolerance. He could hear the constant flow of Sheppard's voice from across the room, telling Radek when each team was ready, relaying Rodney's orders to anyone who couldn't follow his transmissions fast enough, and coordinating the Marines in the halls and the technicians in the gate room, getting everyone in place as the clock ran down. Circuits blew and Rodney dragged people through a crash-course in Ancient electrical systems bypasses; generators started to max out and Radek rerouted the flow of power just in time to avoid an explosion. As each generator reached maximum charge, the team assigned to it scrambled to reconfigure it so it could power the city, Sheppard cuing Radek to transfer one more system to naquadah power, isolating the faulty ZPM.
Seventeen minutes to go and they had enough generators hooked up to power the gate, and Rodney had the power room team yank the old ZPM and hustle it to the north pier, far enough from the action that no minor explosion could jeopardize it. Sheppard flagged him down, the technicians were dialing an uninhabitable planet they'd found in the database and the wormhole would be open from here on out. Rodney sent back an image of a stopwatch being wound back -- how much time did they have if they pulled the ZPM now? -- and Sheppard relayed Radek's answer: forty-eight seconds. Shit, not as far along as he'd hoped they'd be, too soon to stop if they wanted to be sure it wouldn't blow in the gate room. There was a sudden surge of alarm from the team in the west tower and then a terrifying blast of shrapnel and panic that echoed up the line: fuck, fuck, a generator had gone up. Rodney shot the images to Sheppard, who signaled that he had a fire crew and a medical team on their way, and that was all the thought Rodney could spare the wounded before he had to go back to the teams that were still working, trying to keep the second round of generators connected and charging.
Eleven minutes, ten, and they had the last dozen generators hooked up with fifty-two seconds on the clock. Eight minutes and Radek's voice was getting more urgent, but not yet, not yet, they needed every minute they had left. There was a relay team of Marines lining the halls from the power room to the transport chamber to the gate room to the gate, the fastest runners they had ready to go the second Sheppard gave the order. Six minutes and Elizabeth was on the radio again, saying things that Sheppard didn't translate; five minutes and only four generators still charging--
At three minutes and eight seconds, Sheppard sent a frantic message that they'd pushed their window to fifty-six seconds, and Rodney's eyes shot open as he waved his arms wildly because that was it, the magic number, go go go go GO! Sheppard's hand clamped down onto Radek's shoulder as he barked an order into the radio, and it was like a line of dominoes, the whole intricate chain the three of them had built in the last half-hour. Radek cut the power from the ZPM and one of the Marines yanked the release, the next one pulled it out of the slot and lunged the four meters to the door in three huge strides, where the person waiting grabbed it out of her hands and sprinted down the hall. Rodney had every gene carrier he could spare shoved into doorways along the relay route, and he bounced Sheppard the input he was getting from them as the ZPM made it to the transport chamber, one guy to take it and another to hit the touchscreen, and the instant the doors opened onto the hall outside the gateroom, the guy holding it thrust it through the opening to the next person, who ran it through the open gate room door to a captain who was perched on the far side of the railing. She hooked it under an arm and jumped off the edge, the zipline they'd rigged dragging her straight down to the lower level and tensing just in time to buffer the impact as she shoved the ZPM to Teyla, who sprinted it to Ronon, who whirled like a Olympic shot-putter and just threw it through the gate, and the second it crossed the event horizon the technician hit the button and the wormhole collapsed on itself and winked out into empty air.
There was a tight pause, as though the whole city was holding its breath. Then the technician's voice came over the radio, rippling with relief, and there were exclamations of triumph and fatigue from everyone within earshot. Rodney cut all transmissions, bent forward until his head was nearly between his knees, and flopped gratefully over onto his back.
He lay there for a while with his eyes blissfully shut, listening to other people coordinate the clean-up efforts. Eventually footsteps approached, and someone's boot nudged him lightly in the side. Rodney cracked an eye halfway and saw Sheppard standing over him, looking about as exhausted as Rodney felt. Sheppard raised his eyebrows in a weary question but didn't transmit anything. That was more than fine by Rodney, who had no interest in using the device anytime in the next eight to twelve hours, and he was guessing Sheppard felt the same. He lifted one of his hands a few inches off the ground and gave Sheppard the OK-sign, then let it drop as his eyelid slid closed again.
Eventually Rodney staggered back to his room, washed down a few ibuprofen, and slept through the night and the better part of the morning. When the infirmary chime woke him, he thought seriously about ignoring it -- his bed was so warm -- but he didn't want Carson to overreact to his silence. He fumbled his way to the desk and hit the button to acknowledge, then headed for the shower.
Carson, in a move that had Rodney ready to nominate him for sainthood, had made sure there was a pot of coffee waiting for him, though he undermined his chances for beatification by holding it hostage through the first half of the tests. None of results looked any different this time, and Rodney'd had about three months to memorize them. Carson didn't show any signs of concern as he went through the sequence, so whether or not the device had been designed for that kind of high-bandwidth use, Rodney didn't think it had done him any harm.
Hand wrapped around the hot mug, he slid off the bed and walked over to where Carson was entering a few notes into his laptop. He finished with his typing and glanced up at Rodney, tilting his head in a way that telegraphed inquiry. Rodney cleared his throat and fidgeted at the handle of the mug. The two of them were still mostly miming their way through conversations, because Carson's discomfort with the device was a thick tint layered over anything he managed to send. He tried, but Rodney was his friend as well as his patient and hated to put him through it, so he usually called Sheppard in for anything complicated. This, though -- Rodney had been putting off this question for almost three months, and he wasn't sure he wanted anyone else around for the answer.
Gazing down into his coffee, he killed a couple seconds reviewing his choice of images and then sent them in a cautious sequence, taking a few extra beats before melting one into the next. Himself and the physical therapist, working diligently as the pages of a calendar flipped in the background. His progression from sounds, to words, to halting conversation, and eventually to fluent speech. The trio of symbols +/- (the closest representational equivalent he could manage for or), and then a repeat of the previous images, but with sign language substituted for verbal. Fade to white, which he filled with uncertainty, like a question mark tagged onto the end of the construction.
He glanced back up to find Carson watching him with a conflicted expression, and the two of them just stood there for a while, looking at each other. Rodney tightened his hands down on the mug and braced himself for the inevitable upturned-palms of confusion, to be followed by a call to Sheppard to translate, which he really didn't want. Then Carson raised one hand in the air -- wait -- and closed his eyes in concentration.
An image bloomed slowly in Rodney's mind: a circuit board. As Rodney watched, a lit match dropped onto one corner of the board and lay there until it burned out, the copper and fiberglass under it blackening and melting with the heat. The image blurred and jumped slightly, like Carson was struggling to keep it clear in his mind. Someone flipped a switch and blue light coursed through the board, but the places on the far side of the slagged paths remained dark. The image flickered and dropped out as Carson opened his eyes, and then he passed Rodney a slow bubble of apology, of regret.
Rodney stared at Carson. This was the clearest transmission he'd managed yet. Swallowing past the lump in his throat, Rodney jerked his chin in a short nod -- got it, message received, and started toward the infirmary door. Halfway there, he stopped, pervaded by an inappropriate, confusing gratefulness. Stockholm Syndrome, he thought with automatic cynicism, but he opened the line again and sent a bit of the feeling along. He didn't really know what he was thanking Carson for: for caring, for trying, for the fact that the damage hadn't been worse. For telling him the truth. Even if he'd understood it himself, he didn't think he could have explained any of that properly; he didn't, so it was a moot point.
Carson's expression cleared a little, and one of his hands drifted up, like he was about to pass the whole thing off as his duty or maybe initiate some kind of emotional moment. The inside of Rodney's chest felt bruised, sort of brittle, so he cut either possibility off with a thumb jerked towards the door and a quick visual blip of the power room. Carson shook his head with a smile and turned back to his laptop, letting Rodney make his getaway unwatched.
Rodney spent the day wedged under consoles and halfway into walls, repairing the city systems that had been damaged the night before. It was the right kind of work for his mood, intricate enough to be absorbing but solitary enough that he didn't need to talk to anyone. Carson's answer hovered around the edges of his thoughts, like a ship that wouldn't land, and he kept waiting for what he'd been told to fully materialize, come slamming down. Every time he pulled his shoulders out from whatever tight space he was working in, he found people watching him -- or not watching him, exactly, but reacting to his presence in weird ways.
On the rare occasions in his life that he'd given his workplace interactions any thought, he'd figured out that people who had to work in proximity to him either tuned him out or twitched whenever he spoke like they were waiting for an opportune moment to strangle him. Today, he got eye contact, a scattering of waves and nods, and even a few transmitted greetings -- tentative, but not as awkward as what he was used to receiving from everyone but Sheppard. No one interrupted his work or tried to make small talk, but their acknowledgment unnerved him, made it hard to stay braced for the awfulness to hit. Twice he ducked into a bathroom just to make sure no one had taped anything to his back.
On the way to dinner, he crossed paths with a woman in hospital pajamas; she had one arm in a sling and a long row of stitches climbing up into her hairline. It took him a moment to place her face, but then he did -- she was one of the gene carriers, Marine with a background in electrical engineering. She'd been on the team at the generator that had blown up. Oh, god, he'd forgotten to ask Carson what happened to them -- he hadn't seen any of them in the infirmary, so that had to be good, right? Or maybe it was bad, maybe they were hurt seriously enough to be put in private beds -- or maybe hurt wasn't it, maybe by the time they'd gotten there it'd been too late for anything at all -- and she was going to pass him in about two seconds, and he didn't know her name--
She didn't slow down as they came toward each other, but she grinned tiredly and sketched a mock-salute when she passed. The surprise hit him like a revelation.
Rodney navigated the food line on autopilot, distracted by the feeling that his world had just undergone a paradigm shift, or been jolted and resettled just to the left of where it had been. It was obvious now that he'd known what Carson was going to tell him. If he hadn't, he'd have asked the question a lot sooner. If there'd been even a chance he could recover, they'd have been begged, bullied and blackmailed him into a treatment regimen, device or no device. The fact that no one had brought it up for over a month had been a pretty clear indication what the prognosis was, and the finality of that wasn't sinking in because it had already sunk in -- probably weeks ago, before he was ready to consciously accept it. And now, apparently, he had.
So what was different? Nothing, really, except that he'd just found out he still had a place in this city, and even if he didn't know exactly what it was yet, everyone around him seemed confident he belonged in it.
Late that night, someone knocked on the door to his quarters. He set down his notepad, wondering if maybe it was Teyla; he'd seen her talking to Carson at dinner, and he wouldn't put it past Carson to have asked her to stop by and see if he was taking the news okay. But when he waved the door open, it was Sheppard standing on the other side, hands shoved in his pockets, his posture as tight as Rodney had ever seen it. Sheppard nodded at the room behind him and Rodney stepped aside to let him in, then watched as Sheppard paced an agitated track across the carpet. Frowning, Rodney sent out a faint thread of concern, but Sheppard waved the transmission off. He came to an uneasy stop in front of the window, and Rodney picked up the faintest flicker of uncertainty, aborted before it could solidify, as though Sheppard had opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again.
The lights of the city cast patterns over Sheppard's face, obscuring his expression. After a minute, he bounced a fist off his thigh and wheeled back toward the door. Rodney wasted the time Sheppard spent in transit, torn between asking what the hell was going on and a weird reluctance to intrude -- and then at the last moment Sheppard changed trajectory, grabbed Rodney by the front of his shirt, and jerked him into a kiss.
Rodney froze, his whole body going rigid with the same reflexive terror that hit him every time he got ambushed. Sheppard's mouth was hot and moving against his own, and his hand was fisted tightly enough that the seams of Rodney's shirt were cutting into his armpits. It was like he was determined to see this through, even with Rodney's non-response, and fuck if that wasn't John Sheppard all over: never a halfway decision, just complete inertia or a cannonball dive. Which was when it hit Rodney that Jesus Christ, this was John Sheppard, John, kissing him like it had been running through his mind for days, like he'd spent that long trying to get the balls to do it. He fumbled both hands around Sheppard's waist and yanked him in, clumsy, but it got Sheppard's long bones and muscles pushed against him, mouth and chest all the way down to the knee shoved in between Rodney's and the side of Sheppard's boot against the inside of his foot. Sheppard inhaled, and Rodney could feel the motion of it against his chest, all six-feet-plus of Sheppard pressing as close into Rodney as he could get, solid and vital and warm to the touch. God, Rodney'd wanted this so badly, so badly -- six straight weeks of feeling John's hands on him when they weren't even in the same room, both of them harnessing touch for communication like it wasn't anything and ignoring the fact that they'd crossed half their old boundaries the night John found the device.
And none of that had been real, none of it had been even close, because the transmissions were only as good as your imagination and no one's imagination, not even Rodney's, could get everything right. He'd forgotten the way Sheppard smelled, like skin and nylon and the cleaning solvent he used on his guns, because the only times they'd ever been this close were when one of the them was dragging the other away from certain death. In the real world the difference in their heights meant that Rodney had to angle his head back to get his tongue into John's open mouth, but when John shoved him against the wall, the hard pressure of his body forced Rodney up higher, put their mouths nearly on the same horizontal plane. Sheppard's hand rasped over the back of Rodney's neck, rough with unfamiliar calluses, and he made a harsh noise low in his throat when he rubbed his dick against Rodney's through the fabric of their pants. Rodney's eyes squeezed shut as he grabbed John's hips, pretty sure his knees would be giving out if John weren't practically pinning him upright. His heart was pounding deafeningly loud, he didn't have the faintest clue why this was happening, and he didn't want to stop, not for a second, not at all.
The longer they kissed and groped each other, hands sliding everywhere they could reach, the stranger and hotter and more intense it all got. By the time they made it to the bed, Rodney felt like he was moving through some kind of dissociative haze. He couldn't remember being this turned on in his adult life, but his mind was whirling in manic circles, and neither part was slowing the other done. The sense of disorientation was even more profound because they weren't using the device at all -- Sheppard hadn't transmitted a thing since he first came in. Rodney didn't know what that meant, but he didn't feel like he was in any position to argue with the parameters that John had set, especially not with his own long and humiliating history of screwing up every first anything (first date, first kiss, first handjob, first sex) via the nervous compulsion that made it impossible for him to shut up.
Whatever had kicked this off, John obviously wanted to be here, he was peeling Rodney's jacket off and grinding his hard-on against Rodney's hip in a way that was insanely distracting. Even Rodney couldn't mistake this for anything but consent -- demand, really -- and so he just tried to give as good as he was getting, palming Sheppard's ass and shoving his hands up under his shirt. The air around them was dense with small noises, things Rodney loved and usually missed for talking over them -- tiny grunts and gasps, the creak of the mattress, the hiss of the sheets shifting under them. They were both sweating through their clothes as they wrestled them off, and it was John who was responsible for most of the progress there. Rodney kept detouring away from the goal, getting caught up in the feel of John's skin, the interrupting traces of scar tissue, the way his back flexed slickly under Rodney's hands. Jesus Christ, neither of them had even gotten off yet and it was already the best sex Rodney had ever had.
John pressed the heel of his hand against Rodney's dick and pushed his mouth hotly against the side of Rodney's neck, working both spots at once. Somewhere in that glorious fog of sensation, Rodney became aware of a change in the sounds spilling quiet and thick into his ear. John was talking. Not sending anything, but talking, murmuring things into the base of Rodney's skull and the place where his neck met his shoulder. And the auto-transmit hadn't kicked in.
Rodney had spent two years with his survival and everyone else's depending on his mental alarm system, the one that went off when anything was even slightly out of place. He didn't want to be thinking about this -- God, he didn't want to think -- but the calibrated mechanisms of his mind had already seized the anomaly and started flipping switches, one after another, hunting down the answer before he could stop himself from looking for it. There was only one explanation: John had to be intentionally blocking the transmission. Whatever he was saying, Rodney wasn't supposed to understand.
The thought sank in like a knife between his ribs, because it all made sense now in the worst way. John showing up like this, when half the people in Atlantis probably would have kicked their own doors down to let him in. Coming here, and doing it now.
What had changed recently? What was the one thing John could get with Rodney that he couldn't get anywhere else?
Rodney shoved himself backwards, and John jerked upright, making a startled grab for his wrist. Twisting to evade it nearly landed Rodney on his ass, but he got his feet under him at the last second and stumbled for the far side of the room, desperate to put some distance between them. It would take next to nothing for John to persuade him to keep going, even with what he'd just figured out, but he knew he was going to hate himself for it. Given long enough, he'd hate John, too. And he couldn't have fucked himself over more if he'd tried, because John Sheppard was part of everything for him now -- his teammate, his friend, his advocate, his fucking translator. The best tether he had to Atlantis. The central link in every chance he had of staying. If he blew this, he was going to lose everything.
If it was too late to keep this from ending disastrously -- and it was, that was appallingly clear -- well, then Rodney guessed he wanted the cold comfort of knowing he'd spotted the rocks he was plummeting toward halfway through the fall. That he'd tried to hit the brakes.
His hand shook as he scrubbed it over his mouth, turning so his back was toward the bed -- not like it mattered, it was dark and his eyes were closed, but at least this way he was sure Sheppard couldn't see his face. Behind him, he heard Sheppard slide to the edge of the mattress, feet hitting the ground with a soft thump. The line went live but Rodney broke it before Sheppard could transmit anything, pressed his thumb into the stone in his forearm and thought off at it until the device was just a dead shape pushed into the muscle, a blank and meaningless weight. He didn't need it for this.
"I don't know what we're doing here," Rodney said to the wall in front of him.
It was the first time he'd really spoken in almost three months, and disuse had left his voice cracked, unsteady. "I don't know what you want from me. I've always been sort of ... emotionally colorblind, and maybe you are too, and that should probably make this okay, but it turns out that it doesn't." He held a hand up in the air by his head, trying to focus -- like coherence mattered now, but all the old habits were still there, even after they'd lost any purpose. "You've done a lot for me, in the last few weeks -- no, the last two years, really. I can't begin to pay you back for any of it, and this, right now, isn't anything I wouldn't have gladly--"
Behind him, he could hear John's breath coming light and quick, and he wished to God he still had his pants on, but any one humiliating aspect of the situation wasn't more than a drop in the bucket. He swallowed hard, took a deep breath. "I don't think you have any idea how much I want this. There's no reason you would, but I just, I can't do this. I can't. Not if you're only here because I'm ..." There should have been some safety in the knowledge that John couldn't understand a word he was saying, but that was the worst of it -- that was the point. He pushed his fingertips hard against his forehead. "I don't want to be the place you leave your secrets."
The sounds hung in the air, and Rodney waited stupidly for something to happen, but of course nothing did. The words didn't mean anything, they weren't words at all. He was too panicked to change tactics, he could barely stand to listen to himself and he had to sound worse to John. If he could keep it up long enough it'd have to work, right? So he just started babbling, drowning everything else out as his voice rose to the breaking point. "Okay, so that's that, now I'm just going to stand here while you get dressed, and tomorrow we'll -- oh God, this is pathetic, who am I kidding? I don't know what the hell we're going to do tomorrow, and you're really not stupid, you know it too, so would you just take the hint and leave, please, you don't want this, God, John, just go--"
Out of nowhere, John's hand clamped down on Rodney's elbow and yanked him around, and before he could pull away John had his palm centered right over the exposed stone. Rodney tried to fight him for it, but genetics had the odds skewed so far it wasn't even a contest. A muted glow lit the flesh of John's hand as the device came on, and then Rodney was bombarded with a storm of input, furious and chaotic, sent without any order at all--
--himself twisted and seizing on the floor on Tisros; John's hand locked around his gun as he stalked the Genii through the halls, running on fury as wide as the sea; excitement humming through his own voice as John called up a projection of the solar system; the green glow of the personal shield as he'd walked straight into the energy creature; his desperate expression as Ford's men had hauled him away from where John was sitting in the dart; the two of them playing chess; shouting at each other on the Dorandan space station; cold sweat beading on John's back as he pounded on the jumper door at the bottom of the ocean; the absolute focus on his own face as they stood in the power room and synchronized the city's population to move through the crisis like gears in a clock--
On and on, like John was pulling the drawers out of filing cabinets and throwing their contents into the air, too fast and vivid not to be a catalog he'd kept for a while, his hand digging into John's shoulder that first time they tried the device; their legs bumping at the cafeteria table as Rodney dodged the napkin Teyla threw at him; the thick span of his own shoulders as John shoved him up against the wall; the heat rolling off his own skin; the inside of John's closed eyes as he pressed his face into the side of Rodney's neck and his dick against Rodney's thigh, the images he'd just transmitted spilling out from his murmuring lips like scattered frames projected through the dark toward a movie screen--
The transmission cut off abruptly, and Rodney realized he had his own hand closed down over the one John had wrapped over his arm, their fingers pressing into each other's skin. He didn't remember putting it there, if he'd been trying to pull John's hand away or hold it in place. Both of them were breathing hard, and in the dark John's face looked almost angry, but his pale eyes were wide, like it was him and not Rodney backed up against the wall.
John shifted his weight and took a step back, stopping just at the distance where he'd have to pull Rodney after him or let go. His expression flickered, like he was struggling to keep it fixed in place. Then the last two years of Rodney's life flipped into a different configuration, familiar events reassembling themselves around different logic, a different set of truths. He blinked, and his hand tightened down over John's. When John took another step backward, Rodney let John lead him back to the bed, and then he spent a long time finding ways to say that he'd understood, and he did, too, and yes, to all of it. Yes.
Sometime not long before dawn, John pressed his mouth under the edge of Rodney's jaw and slid out from under the sheets. Rodney could hear the rustle of cloth as John retrieved his clothes from the floor, and Rodney snagged his own boxers, pulled them on, and headed to the bathroom. He didn't do anything in there but lean again the counter for a minute. When he came back out, John was perched on the edge of the bed, lacing up his boots, and without planning it Rodney found himself stopping halfway across the room to watch him. The watery gray light hung over the slope of his shoulders, the exposed line of his neck, picked out the muscles moving in his forearms as he tugged the laces into place. He didn't look guarded or hurried, or like he was conscious of being watched, though Rodney was sure that John had heard his feet on the tile. It was just an ordinary moment.
Knotting the bow down, John smoothed his hands over the knees of his pants and sat up, his eyes going straight to Rodney's as he lifted his head. The question came out without any direction on Rodney's part: the Daedalus entering orbit eight days from now, Caldwell and Elizabeth watching Rodney in the lab, a focused discussion between representatives of SGC and the IOA. Caldwell handing Elizabeth a file as he shook his head regretfully; himself, duffle over his shoulder, taking a last helpless look at the gate room, and then Caldwell touching his earpiece and the white light of the transporter as they were both beamed away.
John went still, and Rodney swallowed but didn't transmit anything more. He knew that he still mattered to this expedition, that he could find ways to do almost everything important that he had before. He'd seen how far the other people here would go to help him do it. But the SGC employed only the best and the brightest, and he didn't know how the IOA would react to the news that the payroll included a man who couldn't even speak his own name. And if they sent him back to Earth, that was it, there wouldn't be anything he could do about it; he couldn't even tell them what they were forcing him to leave behind.
John closed his eyes for a second, but when he opened them and stood, his gaze was clear and steady, and he had his feet planted shoulder-width apart. The answer came back implacable under the faint sheen of humor: Teyla and Ronon tossing General Landry bodily through the wormhole. Rodney's lips moving as he expounded to a panel of IOA bureaucrats, while Radek crouched behind a pillar and held one hand up by his mouth as he threw his voice. Elizabeth giving a teary-eyed eulogy in the south plaza, all of Atlantis wearing appropriately devastated expressions, and John and Rodney hidden in a balcony and trying desperately not to snicker as Sam Carter hurled herself on the closed coffin.
The humor faded as John showed Rodney the city under Wraith fire, the Daedalus racing toward them from half a galaxy too far out, the two of them dodging flames in the control room and working frantically to get the last of their people out. The image froze over the last, cataclysmic explosion, then bright midday sun washed the somber edge away, and now it was Rodney and John, aged seventy, sprawled in lawn chairs on the west pier. Rodney was bald and grizzled under his eye patch, and John had gray hair and a peg leg. They were drinking beer and scowling at the children weaving through the water in a school of small boats, who laughed as the two of them brandished stunners in an unmistakable gesture of hey, kids, get offa my lawn!
Relief washed thickly over him, and John's mouth twitched as he rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. He tipped his head toward the door, and Rodney nodded and swung a hand in that direction, meaning, yes, go on, it'll be light out soon. As John held his hand out just over the sensor, he looked back with a strangely young expression, and passed one last image to Rodney: an analogue clock moving forward an hour and forty-five minutes, and the two of them seated at a table under an open window, eating breakfast in the wide light of the morning sun. Rodney stood there, caught by the thin net of hope John had wrapped around the scene, then he rolled his eyes dramatically and jabbed a finger at the door -- yes, fine, when do I ever say no to food, now would you get out of here already? John shook his head and complied, leaving Rodney with the faint impression of a thumb run lightly over the back of his hand, and the smile he'd caught just a glimpse of as John had ducked out into the hall.
There were at least two hours before the end of the third shift, which meant those on duty would be hunkered down in their solitary stations while the rest of the city slept. Rodney stepped into the shower and put on a clean uniform, then headed out into the silent halls. He had some half-formed idea of going to the lab, but instead he ended up just wandering, skimming one hand over the surface of the walls as he moved past them. His route turned into a strange inventory of places he didn't normally go -- the catwalk over the jumper bay, the staircase up through the storage rooms, the dim blue corridor running next to the secondary life support artery. Just taking stock of the city, which he'd almost lost any number of times now, but which was still here, still whole.
Eventually, he found himself outside the chair room, and he hesitated for a moment, then palmed the door open and slipped inside. The room was dark, quiescent, and he moved carefully in the gloom as he climbed the platform and settled himself in the chair. It didn't light up when he laid his head back against it, but that was fine, he hadn't meant it to. He closed his eyes and felt the broad lines of it under him, the way it seemed to root right down to the heart of the city. Then he looked up at the ceiling and thought, simply, thank you.
And maybe it was the device, or the ZPM, or just a manifestation of Rodney's uncharacteristically sentimental frame of mind, but he could have sworn that for a moment he felt the whole length and breadth of Atlantis, the cool ocean beneath her and the warm rays of the rising sun where they slid over her reflective skin. Her systems pumped life through the rooms and hallways in a complicated heartbeat, drinking power from the sources they'd brought her and guiding it to where it was needed. The sensors mapped out the small glow of her two hundred and eighty-six residents, as real and safe as if he held them cupped in the palms of his hands. And he felt her looking down on him, rising up into his hands where they were pressed against the arms of the control chair, and telling him that he was welcome. That he could stay.
Soundtrack:
1. Dirty Three - Great Waves (feat Chan Marshall)
2. Andrew Bird - A Nervous Tick of Motion of the Head to the Left
3. Modest Mouse - Paper Thin Walls
4. Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day
5. UNKLE - Lonely Soul
6. The National - Brainy
7. Calexico - Quattro (World Drifts In)
8. Stateless - Prism #1
9. Four Tet - Unspoken
Author: the_drifter (
fiercelydreamed)Summary: He wondered if this was how it felt to go crazy -- you didn't lose your mind, it just stopped synching up with the world around you. The Pegasus galaxy makes Rodney an expert in what he can survive without.
Details: 21,000 words, Sheppard/McKay, adult/explicit. Spoilers through S2.
Notes: Huge thanks to
secrethappiness and cathexys for betaing (thoroughly and within time constraints -- man, but they're kind people), and to cindyjade, shaenie, and celli for audiencing. Also, two counts of thanks to cesperanza for using the prompt and for extending the challenge deadline.Download the soundtrack.
[Go back to Part 1.] [Go back to Part 2.]
Down in the power room, the glow of the new ZPM was pulsing just perceptibly. Radek scrambled around to the console and grabbed the laptop they'd left down here earlier, typing frantically as Rodney peered intently over his shoulder. He knew every display and schematic on the ZPM by heart, along with all of the equations behind them, and oh shit, these graphs were bad, they were very, very bad. The crystals must have been damaged somehow, too subtly for their tests to catch, but the SST region was losing stability and the fluctuations were spiking closer and closer to the limits of what the containment field could withstand. If they didn't get it out of the city before it blew, that was it, toast, there'd be nothing left of Atlantis but ionized molecules scattered over the ocean's surface. Radek knew it too, because by the time Rodney looked up from the screen Radek was already moving toward the central structure, one hand reaching for the release and the other at his earpiece.
But wait, wait, there was something about the underlying curve of the projected fluctuations. Rodney made a loud wordless noise of negation, and Radek jerked his head up, hands hovering just over the release mechanism. He gestured to the ZPM and said something in a strained voice. Rodney waved him furiously off, because yes, he knew they didn't have much time, but there was something, something they were missing. He scanned the screen for another second and then he had it, a sudden flash of understanding, and he practically vaulted over the console to grab Radek by the shirt and drag him back just before his fingertips could touch the release.
Radek shouted and tried to pull away, but Rodney was heavier and stronger; he hurled Radek down into a chair and put all his weight into keeping him there as he groped for the notepad sitting on the console. He threw open the line to Sheppard and didn't even wait for a response before he started firing information at him: straight pipeline to the hand he had clenched on Radek's shoulder and the graphs and equations he was scribbling on a pad of paper, the frantic sequences of logic running through his head. He got a glimpse of Sheppard scrambling out of his chair in the mess and after that he quit paying attention. Radek was still fighting him and Elizabeth had clicked onto the radio, her voice demanding, Sheppard was hauling ass down the corridor and Rodney ignored all of them for the moment, because they were running out of time in two ways at once and there couldn't be any mistakes on this, they had to get it absolutely right.
Just as Rodney scrawled the last symbol down, Sheppard hurtled through the door with a wild look on his face, and he hadn't even skidded to a stop before he started talking faster than Rodney had ever heard him talk before, trying to match the speed of Rodney's transmission. Radek's face went slack with surprise as he studied what Rodney had written, and then he jerked away to snatch the laptop again, pulling up charts as fast as Sheppard could translate back the information. Rodney could already tell they were confirming what he'd realized: the only thing that had kept the ZPM stable this long was the steady drain of the city's systems. It was headed for overload and fast, but it was going to get there a lot faster once they disconnected it -- and now Radek had the numbers, times Sheppard showed him as an analogue clock hooked to a detonator. Forty-one minutes and seven seconds under the current conditions, but the moment they pulled it out, they had thirty-four seconds, god, nowhere near enough time to get it out the gate.
Elizabeth ran in and none of them turned to acknowledge her, too caught up in the urgent flow of information -- Rodney's thoughts from Sheppard's mouth, Radek's hands flying over the keyboard, his answer to Sheppard's ears and Rodney's reply back, almost fast enough for Sheppard to interrupt Radek's sentence. The only way to buy time was to siphon as much power off as quickly as possible, and Radek jumped up and started gesturing to the floor below them. Sheppard shot him a fast sequence of the sister city they'd found on Eldred's planet, the command chair going dead as Rodney powered up the star drive, but Rodney shook his head because yes, that would work only no, it wouldn't. Using the drive or any other system as high-demand and then yanking the power source out from under it could mean a catastrophic failure; at best, they'd deplete their other ZPM trying to power down safely. Radek scrubbed his hand over his mouth and suggested something else, and Rodney threw a hand up, pacing, because no, the generators couldn't handle anywhere near the load they'd need to buffer the--
He whipped back around. The naquadah generators: he'd spent the last month engineering them to be rechargeable. If Radek could regulate the power flow -- if they could dispatch engineering teams to patch them into the city's circuitry -- keep as many generators hooked up as possible, taking on power at the maximum safe rate--
Radek typed furiously for a few seconds, and his head snapped up as Sheppard transmitted his answer. Optimal depletion speed could buy them twenty-eight seconds. A total of a minute and two seconds to get the ZPM out of the power room, through the transport chamber, gate it out and shut down the wormhole before it blew. Barely possible, but it could be just enough.
Stepping forward so she was shoulder-to-shoulder with Sheppard, Elizabeth forced her way into the conversation with an emphatic question, one that she leveled straight at Rodney. He could read the content just from the tone in her voice, because he'd heard it from her in the storm, in the Wraith siege, during Acturus, and a hundred other times besides. Sheppard was staring at Rodney with a different question written all over his face, because they'd been using the device for five weeks now, but neither of them had done anything like this yet. Are you sure? his expression asked, and Rodney jerked his chin up defiantly in the motion of, I can if you can. Sheppard drew in a long breath in the way that meant, Jesus, you'd better be right about this, then he turned to Elizabeth and told her yes, Rodney could do it. They could do it.
She gave Rodney a sharp nod and stepped back, out of the way, and then Sheppard was talking fast into his radio as Rodney started broadcasting on an open channel: a ship's bell ringing the all-hands, the dangerous pulse of the ZPM and warning lights going off all around it, clock winding rapidly down and a computer simulation of the city exploding, people jumping up at the sound of Rodney's voice and sprinting for the power room. Emergency, emergency, everyone who can hear me get your ass down to the power room right now if you want to survive.
Within thirty seconds the first wave came pounding down the hall, and Rodney ran to the door to perform a rapid-fire interrogation of each new arrival and stamp unfamiliar faces into his mind. He dispatched them off around the city in threes and fours, assembling groups to get the full spread of the skills they were going to need: engineering background, programming, gene strength and brute physical ability. One group per generator, with eight pairs of the most skilled technicians assigned to the key junctions that would have to be rerouted. He kept five people on-hand in the power room and deputized the last dozen to provide back-up the others, because it was way too much to hope that they could drain half the charge of a ZPM in thirty-five minutes and not have any casualties along the way. Then he ran back in and headed for the far wall where he'd be clear of the action, spared a last look each for Radek and Sheppard, neither of whom were looking back, and closed his eyes as he threw the line all the way open.
And then he was everywhere at once, peering over shoulders and providing lightning-fast instructions, showing people which crystal to pull, which circuits to rewire, which screen to watch to make sure the flow of power stayed within a generator's maximum tolerance. He could hear the constant flow of Sheppard's voice from across the room, telling Radek when each team was ready, relaying Rodney's orders to anyone who couldn't follow his transmissions fast enough, and coordinating the Marines in the halls and the technicians in the gate room, getting everyone in place as the clock ran down. Circuits blew and Rodney dragged people through a crash-course in Ancient electrical systems bypasses; generators started to max out and Radek rerouted the flow of power just in time to avoid an explosion. As each generator reached maximum charge, the team assigned to it scrambled to reconfigure it so it could power the city, Sheppard cuing Radek to transfer one more system to naquadah power, isolating the faulty ZPM.
Seventeen minutes to go and they had enough generators hooked up to power the gate, and Rodney had the power room team yank the old ZPM and hustle it to the north pier, far enough from the action that no minor explosion could jeopardize it. Sheppard flagged him down, the technicians were dialing an uninhabitable planet they'd found in the database and the wormhole would be open from here on out. Rodney sent back an image of a stopwatch being wound back -- how much time did they have if they pulled the ZPM now? -- and Sheppard relayed Radek's answer: forty-eight seconds. Shit, not as far along as he'd hoped they'd be, too soon to stop if they wanted to be sure it wouldn't blow in the gate room. There was a sudden surge of alarm from the team in the west tower and then a terrifying blast of shrapnel and panic that echoed up the line: fuck, fuck, a generator had gone up. Rodney shot the images to Sheppard, who signaled that he had a fire crew and a medical team on their way, and that was all the thought Rodney could spare the wounded before he had to go back to the teams that were still working, trying to keep the second round of generators connected and charging.
Eleven minutes, ten, and they had the last dozen generators hooked up with fifty-two seconds on the clock. Eight minutes and Radek's voice was getting more urgent, but not yet, not yet, they needed every minute they had left. There was a relay team of Marines lining the halls from the power room to the transport chamber to the gate room to the gate, the fastest runners they had ready to go the second Sheppard gave the order. Six minutes and Elizabeth was on the radio again, saying things that Sheppard didn't translate; five minutes and only four generators still charging--
At three minutes and eight seconds, Sheppard sent a frantic message that they'd pushed their window to fifty-six seconds, and Rodney's eyes shot open as he waved his arms wildly because that was it, the magic number, go go go go GO! Sheppard's hand clamped down onto Radek's shoulder as he barked an order into the radio, and it was like a line of dominoes, the whole intricate chain the three of them had built in the last half-hour. Radek cut the power from the ZPM and one of the Marines yanked the release, the next one pulled it out of the slot and lunged the four meters to the door in three huge strides, where the person waiting grabbed it out of her hands and sprinted down the hall. Rodney had every gene carrier he could spare shoved into doorways along the relay route, and he bounced Sheppard the input he was getting from them as the ZPM made it to the transport chamber, one guy to take it and another to hit the touchscreen, and the instant the doors opened onto the hall outside the gateroom, the guy holding it thrust it through the opening to the next person, who ran it through the open gate room door to a captain who was perched on the far side of the railing. She hooked it under an arm and jumped off the edge, the zipline they'd rigged dragging her straight down to the lower level and tensing just in time to buffer the impact as she shoved the ZPM to Teyla, who sprinted it to Ronon, who whirled like a Olympic shot-putter and just threw it through the gate, and the second it crossed the event horizon the technician hit the button and the wormhole collapsed on itself and winked out into empty air.
There was a tight pause, as though the whole city was holding its breath. Then the technician's voice came over the radio, rippling with relief, and there were exclamations of triumph and fatigue from everyone within earshot. Rodney cut all transmissions, bent forward until his head was nearly between his knees, and flopped gratefully over onto his back.
He lay there for a while with his eyes blissfully shut, listening to other people coordinate the clean-up efforts. Eventually footsteps approached, and someone's boot nudged him lightly in the side. Rodney cracked an eye halfway and saw Sheppard standing over him, looking about as exhausted as Rodney felt. Sheppard raised his eyebrows in a weary question but didn't transmit anything. That was more than fine by Rodney, who had no interest in using the device anytime in the next eight to twelve hours, and he was guessing Sheppard felt the same. He lifted one of his hands a few inches off the ground and gave Sheppard the OK-sign, then let it drop as his eyelid slid closed again.
Eventually Rodney staggered back to his room, washed down a few ibuprofen, and slept through the night and the better part of the morning. When the infirmary chime woke him, he thought seriously about ignoring it -- his bed was so warm -- but he didn't want Carson to overreact to his silence. He fumbled his way to the desk and hit the button to acknowledge, then headed for the shower.
Carson, in a move that had Rodney ready to nominate him for sainthood, had made sure there was a pot of coffee waiting for him, though he undermined his chances for beatification by holding it hostage through the first half of the tests. None of results looked any different this time, and Rodney'd had about three months to memorize them. Carson didn't show any signs of concern as he went through the sequence, so whether or not the device had been designed for that kind of high-bandwidth use, Rodney didn't think it had done him any harm.
Hand wrapped around the hot mug, he slid off the bed and walked over to where Carson was entering a few notes into his laptop. He finished with his typing and glanced up at Rodney, tilting his head in a way that telegraphed inquiry. Rodney cleared his throat and fidgeted at the handle of the mug. The two of them were still mostly miming their way through conversations, because Carson's discomfort with the device was a thick tint layered over anything he managed to send. He tried, but Rodney was his friend as well as his patient and hated to put him through it, so he usually called Sheppard in for anything complicated. This, though -- Rodney had been putting off this question for almost three months, and he wasn't sure he wanted anyone else around for the answer.
Gazing down into his coffee, he killed a couple seconds reviewing his choice of images and then sent them in a cautious sequence, taking a few extra beats before melting one into the next. Himself and the physical therapist, working diligently as the pages of a calendar flipped in the background. His progression from sounds, to words, to halting conversation, and eventually to fluent speech. The trio of symbols +/- (the closest representational equivalent he could manage for or), and then a repeat of the previous images, but with sign language substituted for verbal. Fade to white, which he filled with uncertainty, like a question mark tagged onto the end of the construction.
He glanced back up to find Carson watching him with a conflicted expression, and the two of them just stood there for a while, looking at each other. Rodney tightened his hands down on the mug and braced himself for the inevitable upturned-palms of confusion, to be followed by a call to Sheppard to translate, which he really didn't want. Then Carson raised one hand in the air -- wait -- and closed his eyes in concentration.
An image bloomed slowly in Rodney's mind: a circuit board. As Rodney watched, a lit match dropped onto one corner of the board and lay there until it burned out, the copper and fiberglass under it blackening and melting with the heat. The image blurred and jumped slightly, like Carson was struggling to keep it clear in his mind. Someone flipped a switch and blue light coursed through the board, but the places on the far side of the slagged paths remained dark. The image flickered and dropped out as Carson opened his eyes, and then he passed Rodney a slow bubble of apology, of regret.
Rodney stared at Carson. This was the clearest transmission he'd managed yet. Swallowing past the lump in his throat, Rodney jerked his chin in a short nod -- got it, message received, and started toward the infirmary door. Halfway there, he stopped, pervaded by an inappropriate, confusing gratefulness. Stockholm Syndrome, he thought with automatic cynicism, but he opened the line again and sent a bit of the feeling along. He didn't really know what he was thanking Carson for: for caring, for trying, for the fact that the damage hadn't been worse. For telling him the truth. Even if he'd understood it himself, he didn't think he could have explained any of that properly; he didn't, so it was a moot point.
Carson's expression cleared a little, and one of his hands drifted up, like he was about to pass the whole thing off as his duty or maybe initiate some kind of emotional moment. The inside of Rodney's chest felt bruised, sort of brittle, so he cut either possibility off with a thumb jerked towards the door and a quick visual blip of the power room. Carson shook his head with a smile and turned back to his laptop, letting Rodney make his getaway unwatched.
Rodney spent the day wedged under consoles and halfway into walls, repairing the city systems that had been damaged the night before. It was the right kind of work for his mood, intricate enough to be absorbing but solitary enough that he didn't need to talk to anyone. Carson's answer hovered around the edges of his thoughts, like a ship that wouldn't land, and he kept waiting for what he'd been told to fully materialize, come slamming down. Every time he pulled his shoulders out from whatever tight space he was working in, he found people watching him -- or not watching him, exactly, but reacting to his presence in weird ways.
On the rare occasions in his life that he'd given his workplace interactions any thought, he'd figured out that people who had to work in proximity to him either tuned him out or twitched whenever he spoke like they were waiting for an opportune moment to strangle him. Today, he got eye contact, a scattering of waves and nods, and even a few transmitted greetings -- tentative, but not as awkward as what he was used to receiving from everyone but Sheppard. No one interrupted his work or tried to make small talk, but their acknowledgment unnerved him, made it hard to stay braced for the awfulness to hit. Twice he ducked into a bathroom just to make sure no one had taped anything to his back.
On the way to dinner, he crossed paths with a woman in hospital pajamas; she had one arm in a sling and a long row of stitches climbing up into her hairline. It took him a moment to place her face, but then he did -- she was one of the gene carriers, Marine with a background in electrical engineering. She'd been on the team at the generator that had blown up. Oh, god, he'd forgotten to ask Carson what happened to them -- he hadn't seen any of them in the infirmary, so that had to be good, right? Or maybe it was bad, maybe they were hurt seriously enough to be put in private beds -- or maybe hurt wasn't it, maybe by the time they'd gotten there it'd been too late for anything at all -- and she was going to pass him in about two seconds, and he didn't know her name--
She didn't slow down as they came toward each other, but she grinned tiredly and sketched a mock-salute when she passed. The surprise hit him like a revelation.
Rodney navigated the food line on autopilot, distracted by the feeling that his world had just undergone a paradigm shift, or been jolted and resettled just to the left of where it had been. It was obvious now that he'd known what Carson was going to tell him. If he hadn't, he'd have asked the question a lot sooner. If there'd been even a chance he could recover, they'd have been begged, bullied and blackmailed him into a treatment regimen, device or no device. The fact that no one had brought it up for over a month had been a pretty clear indication what the prognosis was, and the finality of that wasn't sinking in because it had already sunk in -- probably weeks ago, before he was ready to consciously accept it. And now, apparently, he had.
So what was different? Nothing, really, except that he'd just found out he still had a place in this city, and even if he didn't know exactly what it was yet, everyone around him seemed confident he belonged in it.
Late that night, someone knocked on the door to his quarters. He set down his notepad, wondering if maybe it was Teyla; he'd seen her talking to Carson at dinner, and he wouldn't put it past Carson to have asked her to stop by and see if he was taking the news okay. But when he waved the door open, it was Sheppard standing on the other side, hands shoved in his pockets, his posture as tight as Rodney had ever seen it. Sheppard nodded at the room behind him and Rodney stepped aside to let him in, then watched as Sheppard paced an agitated track across the carpet. Frowning, Rodney sent out a faint thread of concern, but Sheppard waved the transmission off. He came to an uneasy stop in front of the window, and Rodney picked up the faintest flicker of uncertainty, aborted before it could solidify, as though Sheppard had opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again.
The lights of the city cast patterns over Sheppard's face, obscuring his expression. After a minute, he bounced a fist off his thigh and wheeled back toward the door. Rodney wasted the time Sheppard spent in transit, torn between asking what the hell was going on and a weird reluctance to intrude -- and then at the last moment Sheppard changed trajectory, grabbed Rodney by the front of his shirt, and jerked him into a kiss.
Rodney froze, his whole body going rigid with the same reflexive terror that hit him every time he got ambushed. Sheppard's mouth was hot and moving against his own, and his hand was fisted tightly enough that the seams of Rodney's shirt were cutting into his armpits. It was like he was determined to see this through, even with Rodney's non-response, and fuck if that wasn't John Sheppard all over: never a halfway decision, just complete inertia or a cannonball dive. Which was when it hit Rodney that Jesus Christ, this was John Sheppard, John, kissing him like it had been running through his mind for days, like he'd spent that long trying to get the balls to do it. He fumbled both hands around Sheppard's waist and yanked him in, clumsy, but it got Sheppard's long bones and muscles pushed against him, mouth and chest all the way down to the knee shoved in between Rodney's and the side of Sheppard's boot against the inside of his foot. Sheppard inhaled, and Rodney could feel the motion of it against his chest, all six-feet-plus of Sheppard pressing as close into Rodney as he could get, solid and vital and warm to the touch. God, Rodney'd wanted this so badly, so badly -- six straight weeks of feeling John's hands on him when they weren't even in the same room, both of them harnessing touch for communication like it wasn't anything and ignoring the fact that they'd crossed half their old boundaries the night John found the device.
And none of that had been real, none of it had been even close, because the transmissions were only as good as your imagination and no one's imagination, not even Rodney's, could get everything right. He'd forgotten the way Sheppard smelled, like skin and nylon and the cleaning solvent he used on his guns, because the only times they'd ever been this close were when one of the them was dragging the other away from certain death. In the real world the difference in their heights meant that Rodney had to angle his head back to get his tongue into John's open mouth, but when John shoved him against the wall, the hard pressure of his body forced Rodney up higher, put their mouths nearly on the same horizontal plane. Sheppard's hand rasped over the back of Rodney's neck, rough with unfamiliar calluses, and he made a harsh noise low in his throat when he rubbed his dick against Rodney's through the fabric of their pants. Rodney's eyes squeezed shut as he grabbed John's hips, pretty sure his knees would be giving out if John weren't practically pinning him upright. His heart was pounding deafeningly loud, he didn't have the faintest clue why this was happening, and he didn't want to stop, not for a second, not at all.
The longer they kissed and groped each other, hands sliding everywhere they could reach, the stranger and hotter and more intense it all got. By the time they made it to the bed, Rodney felt like he was moving through some kind of dissociative haze. He couldn't remember being this turned on in his adult life, but his mind was whirling in manic circles, and neither part was slowing the other done. The sense of disorientation was even more profound because they weren't using the device at all -- Sheppard hadn't transmitted a thing since he first came in. Rodney didn't know what that meant, but he didn't feel like he was in any position to argue with the parameters that John had set, especially not with his own long and humiliating history of screwing up every first anything (first date, first kiss, first handjob, first sex) via the nervous compulsion that made it impossible for him to shut up.
Whatever had kicked this off, John obviously wanted to be here, he was peeling Rodney's jacket off and grinding his hard-on against Rodney's hip in a way that was insanely distracting. Even Rodney couldn't mistake this for anything but consent -- demand, really -- and so he just tried to give as good as he was getting, palming Sheppard's ass and shoving his hands up under his shirt. The air around them was dense with small noises, things Rodney loved and usually missed for talking over them -- tiny grunts and gasps, the creak of the mattress, the hiss of the sheets shifting under them. They were both sweating through their clothes as they wrestled them off, and it was John who was responsible for most of the progress there. Rodney kept detouring away from the goal, getting caught up in the feel of John's skin, the interrupting traces of scar tissue, the way his back flexed slickly under Rodney's hands. Jesus Christ, neither of them had even gotten off yet and it was already the best sex Rodney had ever had.
John pressed the heel of his hand against Rodney's dick and pushed his mouth hotly against the side of Rodney's neck, working both spots at once. Somewhere in that glorious fog of sensation, Rodney became aware of a change in the sounds spilling quiet and thick into his ear. John was talking. Not sending anything, but talking, murmuring things into the base of Rodney's skull and the place where his neck met his shoulder. And the auto-transmit hadn't kicked in.
Rodney had spent two years with his survival and everyone else's depending on his mental alarm system, the one that went off when anything was even slightly out of place. He didn't want to be thinking about this -- God, he didn't want to think -- but the calibrated mechanisms of his mind had already seized the anomaly and started flipping switches, one after another, hunting down the answer before he could stop himself from looking for it. There was only one explanation: John had to be intentionally blocking the transmission. Whatever he was saying, Rodney wasn't supposed to understand.
The thought sank in like a knife between his ribs, because it all made sense now in the worst way. John showing up like this, when half the people in Atlantis probably would have kicked their own doors down to let him in. Coming here, and doing it now.
What had changed recently? What was the one thing John could get with Rodney that he couldn't get anywhere else?
Rodney shoved himself backwards, and John jerked upright, making a startled grab for his wrist. Twisting to evade it nearly landed Rodney on his ass, but he got his feet under him at the last second and stumbled for the far side of the room, desperate to put some distance between them. It would take next to nothing for John to persuade him to keep going, even with what he'd just figured out, but he knew he was going to hate himself for it. Given long enough, he'd hate John, too. And he couldn't have fucked himself over more if he'd tried, because John Sheppard was part of everything for him now -- his teammate, his friend, his advocate, his fucking translator. The best tether he had to Atlantis. The central link in every chance he had of staying. If he blew this, he was going to lose everything.
If it was too late to keep this from ending disastrously -- and it was, that was appallingly clear -- well, then Rodney guessed he wanted the cold comfort of knowing he'd spotted the rocks he was plummeting toward halfway through the fall. That he'd tried to hit the brakes.
His hand shook as he scrubbed it over his mouth, turning so his back was toward the bed -- not like it mattered, it was dark and his eyes were closed, but at least this way he was sure Sheppard couldn't see his face. Behind him, he heard Sheppard slide to the edge of the mattress, feet hitting the ground with a soft thump. The line went live but Rodney broke it before Sheppard could transmit anything, pressed his thumb into the stone in his forearm and thought off at it until the device was just a dead shape pushed into the muscle, a blank and meaningless weight. He didn't need it for this.
"I don't know what we're doing here," Rodney said to the wall in front of him.
It was the first time he'd really spoken in almost three months, and disuse had left his voice cracked, unsteady. "I don't know what you want from me. I've always been sort of ... emotionally colorblind, and maybe you are too, and that should probably make this okay, but it turns out that it doesn't." He held a hand up in the air by his head, trying to focus -- like coherence mattered now, but all the old habits were still there, even after they'd lost any purpose. "You've done a lot for me, in the last few weeks -- no, the last two years, really. I can't begin to pay you back for any of it, and this, right now, isn't anything I wouldn't have gladly--"
Behind him, he could hear John's breath coming light and quick, and he wished to God he still had his pants on, but any one humiliating aspect of the situation wasn't more than a drop in the bucket. He swallowed hard, took a deep breath. "I don't think you have any idea how much I want this. There's no reason you would, but I just, I can't do this. I can't. Not if you're only here because I'm ..." There should have been some safety in the knowledge that John couldn't understand a word he was saying, but that was the worst of it -- that was the point. He pushed his fingertips hard against his forehead. "I don't want to be the place you leave your secrets."
The sounds hung in the air, and Rodney waited stupidly for something to happen, but of course nothing did. The words didn't mean anything, they weren't words at all. He was too panicked to change tactics, he could barely stand to listen to himself and he had to sound worse to John. If he could keep it up long enough it'd have to work, right? So he just started babbling, drowning everything else out as his voice rose to the breaking point. "Okay, so that's that, now I'm just going to stand here while you get dressed, and tomorrow we'll -- oh God, this is pathetic, who am I kidding? I don't know what the hell we're going to do tomorrow, and you're really not stupid, you know it too, so would you just take the hint and leave, please, you don't want this, God, John, just go--"
Out of nowhere, John's hand clamped down on Rodney's elbow and yanked him around, and before he could pull away John had his palm centered right over the exposed stone. Rodney tried to fight him for it, but genetics had the odds skewed so far it wasn't even a contest. A muted glow lit the flesh of John's hand as the device came on, and then Rodney was bombarded with a storm of input, furious and chaotic, sent without any order at all--
--himself twisted and seizing on the floor on Tisros; John's hand locked around his gun as he stalked the Genii through the halls, running on fury as wide as the sea; excitement humming through his own voice as John called up a projection of the solar system; the green glow of the personal shield as he'd walked straight into the energy creature; his desperate expression as Ford's men had hauled him away from where John was sitting in the dart; the two of them playing chess; shouting at each other on the Dorandan space station; cold sweat beading on John's back as he pounded on the jumper door at the bottom of the ocean; the absolute focus on his own face as they stood in the power room and synchronized the city's population to move through the crisis like gears in a clock--
On and on, like John was pulling the drawers out of filing cabinets and throwing their contents into the air, too fast and vivid not to be a catalog he'd kept for a while, his hand digging into John's shoulder that first time they tried the device; their legs bumping at the cafeteria table as Rodney dodged the napkin Teyla threw at him; the thick span of his own shoulders as John shoved him up against the wall; the heat rolling off his own skin; the inside of John's closed eyes as he pressed his face into the side of Rodney's neck and his dick against Rodney's thigh, the images he'd just transmitted spilling out from his murmuring lips like scattered frames projected through the dark toward a movie screen--
The transmission cut off abruptly, and Rodney realized he had his own hand closed down over the one John had wrapped over his arm, their fingers pressing into each other's skin. He didn't remember putting it there, if he'd been trying to pull John's hand away or hold it in place. Both of them were breathing hard, and in the dark John's face looked almost angry, but his pale eyes were wide, like it was him and not Rodney backed up against the wall.
John shifted his weight and took a step back, stopping just at the distance where he'd have to pull Rodney after him or let go. His expression flickered, like he was struggling to keep it fixed in place. Then the last two years of Rodney's life flipped into a different configuration, familiar events reassembling themselves around different logic, a different set of truths. He blinked, and his hand tightened down over John's. When John took another step backward, Rodney let John lead him back to the bed, and then he spent a long time finding ways to say that he'd understood, and he did, too, and yes, to all of it. Yes.
Sometime not long before dawn, John pressed his mouth under the edge of Rodney's jaw and slid out from under the sheets. Rodney could hear the rustle of cloth as John retrieved his clothes from the floor, and Rodney snagged his own boxers, pulled them on, and headed to the bathroom. He didn't do anything in there but lean again the counter for a minute. When he came back out, John was perched on the edge of the bed, lacing up his boots, and without planning it Rodney found himself stopping halfway across the room to watch him. The watery gray light hung over the slope of his shoulders, the exposed line of his neck, picked out the muscles moving in his forearms as he tugged the laces into place. He didn't look guarded or hurried, or like he was conscious of being watched, though Rodney was sure that John had heard his feet on the tile. It was just an ordinary moment.
Knotting the bow down, John smoothed his hands over the knees of his pants and sat up, his eyes going straight to Rodney's as he lifted his head. The question came out without any direction on Rodney's part: the Daedalus entering orbit eight days from now, Caldwell and Elizabeth watching Rodney in the lab, a focused discussion between representatives of SGC and the IOA. Caldwell handing Elizabeth a file as he shook his head regretfully; himself, duffle over his shoulder, taking a last helpless look at the gate room, and then Caldwell touching his earpiece and the white light of the transporter as they were both beamed away.
John went still, and Rodney swallowed but didn't transmit anything more. He knew that he still mattered to this expedition, that he could find ways to do almost everything important that he had before. He'd seen how far the other people here would go to help him do it. But the SGC employed only the best and the brightest, and he didn't know how the IOA would react to the news that the payroll included a man who couldn't even speak his own name. And if they sent him back to Earth, that was it, there wouldn't be anything he could do about it; he couldn't even tell them what they were forcing him to leave behind.
John closed his eyes for a second, but when he opened them and stood, his gaze was clear and steady, and he had his feet planted shoulder-width apart. The answer came back implacable under the faint sheen of humor: Teyla and Ronon tossing General Landry bodily through the wormhole. Rodney's lips moving as he expounded to a panel of IOA bureaucrats, while Radek crouched behind a pillar and held one hand up by his mouth as he threw his voice. Elizabeth giving a teary-eyed eulogy in the south plaza, all of Atlantis wearing appropriately devastated expressions, and John and Rodney hidden in a balcony and trying desperately not to snicker as Sam Carter hurled herself on the closed coffin.
The humor faded as John showed Rodney the city under Wraith fire, the Daedalus racing toward them from half a galaxy too far out, the two of them dodging flames in the control room and working frantically to get the last of their people out. The image froze over the last, cataclysmic explosion, then bright midday sun washed the somber edge away, and now it was Rodney and John, aged seventy, sprawled in lawn chairs on the west pier. Rodney was bald and grizzled under his eye patch, and John had gray hair and a peg leg. They were drinking beer and scowling at the children weaving through the water in a school of small boats, who laughed as the two of them brandished stunners in an unmistakable gesture of hey, kids, get offa my lawn!
Relief washed thickly over him, and John's mouth twitched as he rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. He tipped his head toward the door, and Rodney nodded and swung a hand in that direction, meaning, yes, go on, it'll be light out soon. As John held his hand out just over the sensor, he looked back with a strangely young expression, and passed one last image to Rodney: an analogue clock moving forward an hour and forty-five minutes, and the two of them seated at a table under an open window, eating breakfast in the wide light of the morning sun. Rodney stood there, caught by the thin net of hope John had wrapped around the scene, then he rolled his eyes dramatically and jabbed a finger at the door -- yes, fine, when do I ever say no to food, now would you get out of here already? John shook his head and complied, leaving Rodney with the faint impression of a thumb run lightly over the back of his hand, and the smile he'd caught just a glimpse of as John had ducked out into the hall.
There were at least two hours before the end of the third shift, which meant those on duty would be hunkered down in their solitary stations while the rest of the city slept. Rodney stepped into the shower and put on a clean uniform, then headed out into the silent halls. He had some half-formed idea of going to the lab, but instead he ended up just wandering, skimming one hand over the surface of the walls as he moved past them. His route turned into a strange inventory of places he didn't normally go -- the catwalk over the jumper bay, the staircase up through the storage rooms, the dim blue corridor running next to the secondary life support artery. Just taking stock of the city, which he'd almost lost any number of times now, but which was still here, still whole.
Eventually, he found himself outside the chair room, and he hesitated for a moment, then palmed the door open and slipped inside. The room was dark, quiescent, and he moved carefully in the gloom as he climbed the platform and settled himself in the chair. It didn't light up when he laid his head back against it, but that was fine, he hadn't meant it to. He closed his eyes and felt the broad lines of it under him, the way it seemed to root right down to the heart of the city. Then he looked up at the ceiling and thought, simply, thank you.
And maybe it was the device, or the ZPM, or just a manifestation of Rodney's uncharacteristically sentimental frame of mind, but he could have sworn that for a moment he felt the whole length and breadth of Atlantis, the cool ocean beneath her and the warm rays of the rising sun where they slid over her reflective skin. Her systems pumped life through the rooms and hallways in a complicated heartbeat, drinking power from the sources they'd brought her and guiding it to where it was needed. The sensors mapped out the small glow of her two hundred and eighty-six residents, as real and safe as if he held them cupped in the palms of his hands. And he felt her looking down on him, rising up into his hands where they were pressed against the arms of the control chair, and telling him that he was welcome. That he could stay.
Soundtrack:
1. Dirty Three - Great Waves (feat Chan Marshall)
2. Andrew Bird - A Nervous Tick of Motion of the Head to the Left
3. Modest Mouse - Paper Thin Walls
4. Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day
5. UNKLE - Lonely Soul
6. The National - Brainy
7. Calexico - Quattro (World Drifts In)
8. Stateless - Prism #1
9. Four Tet - Unspoken
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-19 03:38 pm (UTC)When I got the story idea, this was exactly what made me want to write it. Because for some reason, I really love taking things away from Rodney McKay and then putting him back together again. I'm glad you liked the result.
Thanks for reading.