sga_flashfic | "Prehistory" by spuffyduds

spuffyduds.livejournal.com posting in

Title: Prehistory
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Warnings: Some non-explicit underage fumbling
Spoilers: Mild for "Sanctuary"
Setting: Late season 1
Length: 2600 words.
Rating: NC17

“Annnnny time now,” John says, because the giant dinosaur-type-thingy is peering in the jumper windshield at him, and right now it just looks curious, but in another second he bets it’s going to look hungry and stompy. And probably the jumper would survive that, no problem, but John’s not really eager to find out, because, Jesus, giant dinosaur.

“Yesyesyes, imminent death, I get it, how can you talk so slowly when we’re about to die?!?” Rodney says from under the console, where he’s yanking at wires and crystals and the Ancient equivalent of fuses.

“We’re always about to die,” John says, calmly, slowly, because that infuriates the hell out of Rodney and makes him work faster. “No point in wasting energy.” But he’s white-knuckling the controls, if you can white-knuckle something with your brain, so that the very second Rodney says--

“Now!” Rodney says, and John floors it, metaphorically--straight backwards and they’re out of there.

The dinosaur raises its head and makes a giant “QUOOORP?” noise which somehow manages to sound lonely, and John almost feels bad.

Rodney clambers up from under the console and into his seat. He’s red and his science shirt is grimy, and he’s got dust bunnies in his hair.

“We have got to get some more people trained as mechanics, do more scheduled maintenance on these things,” he says. “Continual emergency jumper repair is a tragic waste of my—“

“Yeah, Rodney, brain the size of a planet and we’ve got you hotwiring cars, you’re right, I’ll talk to Elizabeth about it.”

“It’s not as if--oh. I am? You will?”

“Sure.”

“Huh. Thanks.”

They’re quiet for a minute and then, just to get Rodney mental again, John says, “You ever notice, all these dinosaur planets we end up on, there’s never a cavewoman running around in a fur bikini?”

Rodney goes into the expected rant about how there were never never never dinosaurs and cavepeople around at the same time, where did John get his prehistory from, Raquel Welch movies? And John relaxes into the rant, lets it be soothing background noise while he heads the jumper back to the gate, until Rodney wraps up with, “Not like you’d know what to do with one anyway.”

John manages not to react, not to flinch, but the jumper reacts for him, jerks up hard and he has to concentrate for a minute to get the flight smoothed out, and then when he turns to Rodney, Rodney’s staring at him.

“What?” John says.

“I just meant. That you haven’t. As far as I know. Since Chaya.”

“Yeah, well. It’s hard to go back to regular women after a goddess, okay?” John says, trying for light, but his voice sounds weird even to him.

“I didn’t mean--I was just giving you a hard time, I didn’t mean anything, oh Christ, are you--“

“Dial the gate, Rodney,” John says.

When they’re through it he sets speed records getting out of his seatbelt while Rodney’s saying, “Wait, wait--“ and then John gives Elizabeth a thirty-second summary of “Add this to the list of whoops, forget THIS planet, dinosaurs,” and takes off for his quarters. Not quite running.

************************************************************************************************

John had been having a pretty great year at a new school, for once. Tenth grade, and his classes were easy but none of the teachers had figured out how smart he was and managed to make everybody hate him, for a change--he was getting better at hiding that. And soccer was helping--he was good at it, fast and tricky, and all the guys who’d known each other since kindergarten were actually letting him in; he was getting invited to the team parties.

And then his best almost-friend on the team hosted one of the parties, got his older brother to buy the beer, and got really really wasted. They were alone in the kitchen with the keg, and Craig was going on and on about John’s goal in the last game; they’d passed off to each other all the way down the field, and then John just soared it past the goalie in a beautiful curve.

“That was just textbook, man,” Craig said. “That was so fucking pretty.”

And then he leaned in and kissed John. John was too stunned to move; he just stood there, and got a mouthful of beery tongue, and then Craig pressed up against him and Craig was hard and oh fuck oh fuck John was too.

John pulled away in a panic, said “Your parents—“

“Gone all weekend,” Craig said, crowded up against him again, nudged him into a corner. “Stay tonight. So fucking pretty,” he said, and went back to the kissing.

And then they heard someone coming down the hall and Craig pulled away. John got the hell out of the party; stumbled through the next few days of school and soccer, not looking at Craig, not looking at anybody. And the next weekend, when his dad announced that he had new orders, that they were moving again, John didn’t throw a month-long sulk like he’d done the last few times. He looked at his dad and smiled, said, “Great. Soon?”

He’d hoped that was the end of it. But every move after that, every new school, he found himself looking at the guys, and remembering, miserably, that he’d liked it.

***************************************************************************************************

Rodney is mostly convinced that he’s fucked up very badly in the jumper, from the way John goes completely white. His eyes look huge and his breathing gets jagged, and God, is he going to pass out, is Rodney going to have to fly this thing?

But they get through the gate okay, and then Rodney is thoroughly convinced that he’s fucked up very badly, because John is almost rude to Elizabeth, none of the usual low-level flirting. And when John trots off, thirty seconds later, he looks--awkward, almost, like he’s having to think about moving fast. Usually when he speeds up like that it looks like his natural state, like he has to hold his body back to keep it at a walking pace most of the time.

Rodney realizes that Elizabeth is still talking, something about what’s wrong with Major Sheppard, and he babbles, “I don’t know, deep-seated dinosaur phobia, I never have any idea what’s going on under that psychotic hair, are we done here?”

Elizabeth blinks and says, “Ooooohkay,” and Rodney heads back to his room to think, because he’s pretty sure that for once he does know what’s happening under the hair, and he’s also pretty sure that John will never, ever do anything about it.

***********************************************************************************************

When Rodney was theoretically in tenth grade he was taking all his real classes at college level, by correspondence. But his high school counselor was insistent about socialization and peer bonding, as if he would want to bond with any of those morons, so he’d ended up in one actual class at the high school, a physics class for God’s sake; he could have taught it. He could have taught the teacher, he could have taught the professors who’d taught the teacher, he was bored out of his fucking mind.

When the teacher announced they were doing science fair projects Rodney actually physically grabbed Scott and announced that they were partners, because he’d noticed that Scott was by far the least cretinous of his classmates, and probably the most capable of just staying out of Rodney’s way. Also he was thinking he could ask Scott how he got his bangs to just flop like that. Rodney’s bangs stood up and argued.

At Rodney’s house that weekend Scott browsed through the books in Rodney’s bedroom while Rodney built the wind tunnel; he’d only had to tell Scott a couple of times not to touch the project. He was proving trainable.

“So,” Scott said, sat down on the bed. “You ever jerk off?”

“What kind of stupid question is that?” Rodney said. He was having a little trouble getting the paper airplane glued to the threads inside the tunnel without it sticking to his hands. “Do you ever, I don’t know, breathe? Of course I jerk off,” he said, and didn’t add that he’d only discovered it recently, a month or so ago, had everybody else figured that out a lot younger?

“You ever trade off?”

“Trade off what?” Rodney said.

“You know, you do me, I’ll do you. At the same time. It works better, it’s really--efficient,” Scott said.

“Huh,” Rodney said, and went to wash the glue off his hands, and it turned out that Scott’s hair did that perfect floppy thing even when it was really sweaty and he’d been squirming and thrashing around, which seemed unfair.

They kept that up for several weeks, and all the adults he knew seemed to be delighted that Rodney had a friend, which was actually kind of insulting. And he and Scott tried some different stuff, but Rodney somehow didn’t get what was going on until they were walking out of class one Friday and Scott was turned toward him, talking about some sort of extra-credit project they were theoretically working on as an excuse to hang around each other’s houses all the time. And Scott bumped into one of the other guys, definitely one on the cretinous end of the scale, and Cretin said, “Don’t touch me, fag.”

Scott flushed, and Rodney thought, oh. And felt incredibly stupid, because he really--he’d never thought about it like that, it just seemed really--pleasurable, and, like Scott said, efficient.

Scott shut up and bolted, and Rodney just stood there for a minute, confused, and then did what he did whenever he was confused, which was go to the library.

On Sunday he biked over to Scott’s house and knocked, and when Scott answered the door he obviously hadn’t slept, he was all gray under the eyes and said, “Hi,” without looking up at Rodney.

“Hi, this is stupid,” Rodney said.

“What?

“It’s stupid to not do this, because, A) I did a ton of research this weekend and lots of people do this and always have, and B) I’m never going to be a bastion of normalcy anyway because unlike most people I have a brain, and C) I’m enjoying it, you’re enjoying it--you are enjoying it, aren’t you?--and there’s no reason we should stop, it would just be illogical.”

Scott leaned against the doorframe and laughed, said, “Great, I’m in love with Spock.”

“I do not want to hear anything about that stupid show, ever, and--wait, you’re in love with me?”

The rest of the year was pretty terrific. They tried everything they could think of and liked most of it, and Scott taught Rodney how to whistle which he’d somehow never figured out, and Rodney actually let Scott touch the physics projects sometimes.

At the end of the year, though, Rodney finally managed to talk everyone into letting him leave for college, now that he was through most of the credits and about to start his master’s. And he and Scott had a few weeks of fraught phone calls and angsty letters and then things just kind of--faded, gently and naturally; they both got interested in people who were around. Some of the people Rodney got interested in were girls, although he was never as good at that; pretty good once they got to the bed part, at least as far as he could tell, but awful at the stammery panicky asking-them-out part. Guys just--guys just seemed to happen.

Scott ended up in Edmonton, married to an orthodontist named Rick. They kept in touch at Christmas, and Scott always scrawled “Hey Spock!” at the bottom of the card.

****************************************************************************************************

John doesn’t show up at dinner; Rodney figured he wouldn’t but went anyway, to gear himself up for--talking, or whatever.

He realizes, two minutes after he leaves the cafeteria, that he has no idea what he ate, and drops by his quarters to brush his teeth, in case it had garlic.

When John opens his door Rodney has a second of flashback--way cooler hair than mine, looking very stressed--and then John says, “Look, McKay, I don’t know what you think you figured out, but you didn’t and I’m not,” and, oh, please.

Rodney shoves into the room and he’s about to be all manly and just grab John when it occurs to him that maybe what John was trying (very badly) to hide earlier was--orientation but not actually attraction, and he says, “Wait, are you--are you in a relationship with somebody already, is that it? I’m not--you can trust me, I’m not telling, for God’s sake.”

John stops arguing, slumps onto the side of his bed. “Jesus, you just don’t let up, do you? No, I’m not in a relationship, I don’t do relationships, they’re--too visible, not safe.”

“Oh,” Rodney says, and that’s all he can manage for a minute there, because he suddenly has a movie in his head of John just slutting his way through life on his knees, one new guy after another, and that--should really not be that hot.

“Fine,” he gasps, and “Shut the door,” and John does, and then Rodney can’t stand it anymore, can’t bear not being on the bed and on John, so that’s where he is suddenly, stretching John out underneath him and pressing him into the mattress.

“Is this okay?” he says, tasting John’s neck, getting his hands up under John’s shirt and onto his stomach, furry and very warm.

John grabs Rodney’s head and tugs at him until they’re kissing, so apparently it’s okay. Rodney nips and sucks at his lips until he opens them, and inside his mouth is hot and slick and God, is giving Rodney serious ideas but, later, later, don’t push.

John’s making little noises now, and rocking his hips up against Rodney’s, and pants need to come off right. This. Second. Or Rodney is going to embarrass himself in his pants.

He gets a hand down in between them, scrabbling at buckles and zippers, and John shoves his hand in there too, which is nice in terms of obvious enthusiasm but is actually in the way, so Rodney snarls, “Don’t help,” and John says “Fine,” and moves his hand. And then finally they’re skin to skin, cock to cock, and Rodney would like to pull away and look but he can’t, can’t stop pushing against John hard and hard and harder. John’s hand comes back but it’s good now, it’s clasping them together and stroking, excellent, and Rodney’s coming.

He collapses abruptly on John and forces a whumpf noise out of him, so he rolls off as soon as he can manage to, rubs his hand in the warm slick on John’s stomach and takes care of John; now that he’s not frantic himself he slows down a lot, squeezing and stroking, and John rocks up into his grip, says, “C’mon, c’mon, bastard,” and Rodney grins and slows down some more.

Finally John comes, arching up off the bed, and Rodney bites back all the things he wants to say about how gorgeous that is. John flops back onto the mattress, manages to open his eyes a sliver, says, “Not bad.”

“Acceptable,” Rodney says.

“Remember,” John says, and stops to yawn. “I don’t. Do. Relationships.”

“Sure, no problem,” Rodney says. “We’ll just do the occasional stress relief. Efficient and logical.”

“Yeahhhh,” John says, and starts snoring before he’s quite done talking, and when he’s been asleep for approximately thirty seconds he rolls over half onto Rodney and throws an arm across his stomach.

Rodney lies there and pets his hair, and has to struggle not to laugh and wake him up.

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From:

abscondinabox.livejournal.com

Oh, oh John. You've been in a relationship with McKay for *months*, haven't you noticed?

I really loved this! The John bits were "oh, John"-inducing, and the Rodney bits were lovely, especially his peculiarly McKay-ish version of the Big Gay Freakout. Absolutely wonderful.

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"Prehistory" by spuffyduds

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