sga_flashfic | The Greatest Fan (Role Reversal Prompt) (Reply)

Title: The Greatest Fan
Author: sgamadison
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard and implied others
Rating: R for language
Word Count: ~1400 (no, really!)
Spoilers: dialog spoiler for 5.03 Broken Ties if you squint

Notes: Not mine. As if. I wish. And I need to stop smokin' crack.

The Greatest Fan

“Colonel Sheppard,” the Wraith queen rose from her throne as he entered the room, as though he were a visiting dignitary instead of a prisoner being ushered in by her flunkies. She swept down the dais and approached him. “I’m so delighted to meet you.”

The odd thing was, she sounded delighted.

John was nudged a step closer by the drones flanking him. “Um, you are?” So much for sounding cocky and confident in this situation.

The Wraith queen smiled without menace. It was truly a scary sight to behold. “Yes, yes,” she said enthusiastically, “you have no idea what an honor this is. Is the rest of your team with you, by any chance? Dr. McKay? That lovely young boy, Ronon?”

John’s mind boggled at the thought of Ronon’s reaction on being called ‘that lovely young boy’, by anyone, let alone a Wraith. “Um, maybe.” Damn it, this whole situation was rattling him. He had to get a grip here. Taking a deep breath, he leaned forward conspiratorially. “Aren’t you, you know, going to demand that I kneel before you and all that sort of thing?”

Now she would show her true colors; John was sure of it.

“Is that what you want me to do?” A teasing light shimmered in her normally flat, dead eyes. Was she flirting with him?

“Well,” John trotted out the sarcastic drawl in desperation. “It might make for a nice change if you knelt before me instead.”

“In your dreams, Colonel,” the queen laughed. No, she positively trilled. As he watched, her tongue made a suggestive pass over her lips before she caught her lower lip in her sharp, pointed teeth. Her expression was expectant, excited even.

He was starting to have a really bad feeling about this.

She glanced at the guards suddenly, frowning and waving them away. They retreated to the far corners of the chamber, taking up positions against the wall. “That’s better,” she purred when they had moved. “I can’t tell you what a great fan I am of yours, Colonel Sheppard.”

John’s head was starting to swim. She must be exerting some new sort of mind control over him because he was hearing the words all right, but nothing she was saying was making any sense. “A fan?” he said weakly.

“Oh yes,” she nodded, giving herself a little hug in the process. “A huge fan. Your adventures are so many and so varied.” She snapped her fingers and one of the drones stepped forward from the shadows with a laptop—the emblem of Atlantis clearly visible on the casing.

Shit. Fuck. This was a problem. Someone, somewhere along the line had let their laptop get into the hands of the Wraith. Who knew what systems they’d managed to tap into… “Um, excuse me, did you say adventures?”

The queen was caressing the laptop lovingly before moving to a console and setting it up on the flat surface. “Oh yes,” she breathed, the blue light of the opening sequence reflecting on her face and making her look even more ghastly than usual. “Though I do not understand how there can be so many, or that they can take place in seeming contradiction to each other, or that you can have so many partners and yet still be in love with only one person at a time. To be honest, I think I prefer you with Dr. McKay. Although the times they have you paired with a third person as well…” She trailed off, her feeding hand folded at the wrist near her shoulder, shaking in the universal gesture of ‘whew, that’s hot’.

John felt something constrict in his chest. A single bead of sweat began to trickle down from his temple alongside his cheek. As though drawn by the queen’s mental compulsion, when she had as yet to demand anything from him, he moved woodenly over to the console and looked at the website she had opened.

“Um,” he said helplessly as he looked down at the open laptop. “You realize that’s all just fiction, right?”

“Well, of course I do,” the queen said peevishly, sounding frighteningly like Rodney. “After all, the Wraith come off looking rather badly in these stories. But don’t your people have a saying? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire?”

John felt his mouth open and close several times but nothing came out.

“Couldn’t you, I don’t know, persuade the writers to portray the Wraith a little more fairly?” she sidled closer. “And I would dearly love an explanation as to how so many timelines and mission outcomes can be so widely accepted. I mean the variations on Trinity alone…”

John winced. “You know, I really don’t have any influence on the writers here.”

The queen threw back her head and laughed as though he had said the funniest thing in the world. “Oh, my dear Colonel,” she gasped through the laughter. “Of course you do. You have proven so deliciously defiant in all of our dealings with you; I’m certain that you are just as stubborn and recalcitrant in these stories. In fact, I am certain that if someone tries to write you in a way that is contrary to your nature, you simply refuse to go.”

He was back to the open mouth-no words thing again. He was pretty certain he looked like a guppy.

“If you would just do me the honor…?” The queen snapped her fingers again. She accepted a digital camera from one of her goons and beamed at him. “If you could just give us a little expression of defiance maybe? Oh. Well, okay, confusion works nicely too.”

The flash temporarily blinded him. He stood blinking and then stiffened as he felt the queen move next to him and suddenly place an arm around his waist. “And now one of the two of us together. Oh, thank you, you are so kind.” The flash went off again and John could swear the drone was grinning behind his face mask when he lowered the camera.

The queen reluctantly relinquished her contact. “There’s just one more thing,” she said, suddenly looking very shy, fingers twisting in the material of her gown. “I just know if you asked him…”

“Asked who what?” Really, it was a measure of how effective this interrogation technique was that John was scarcely even questioning her motives any more.

The queen looked up at him through her lashes, a neat feat since she was so tall to begin with. “I was wondering if Dr. McKay could help me get a live journal account.”

John bolted upright in bed with a gasp, his chest heaving as he struggled to pull in more air.

“Wha..?” Rodney’s voice came muzzily from beside him, only to sharpen when he lifted his head from his pillow. “Oh for chrissakes, not another nightmare. Let me guess, the clowns again, right?”

John was still shaking slightly, wildly taking in his surroundings, blowing hard like a horse after a race.

“If you’re going to keep this up, Colonel, you can just go back to your own room. Some of us need to get more than two and half hours of shut-eye every evening.” Rodney flopped his head back down to his pillow.

“Shut up, Rodney,” John breathed hard through his nose.

Rodney slowly sat up beside him. “You’re really freaked about this one, aren’t you?” He gave a much put upon sigh before reaching out and placing his arm around John’s shoulder, pulling him into Rodney’s embrace and then back on the surface of the bed. John rolled so that he was tucked into Rodney’s side, burrowing his face in the crook of Rodney’s neck. “You big baby,” Rodney said, his tone an odd combination of affectionate and superiority. His hands soothed John’s back, saying ‘it’s okay’ and ‘I’ve got you’.

Then he had to ruin it by saying smugly, “Maybe next time you’ll listen to me.”

“Listen to you?” John let the warning note enter his voice.

“Yes.” Rodney’s ‘I’m so right’ voice was both irritating and comforting at the same time. “Friends don’t let friends eat Ronon’s chili. I don’t know what you were thinking. It’s not like you have the gastrointestinal tract of an eighteen-year-old any more.”

John pinched Rodney’s side. “Neither do you,” he said snidely.

“Watch it, buster.” Rodney’s fingers tightened on John’s shoulder. “I know what I’m getting you for your next birthday. Maalox. Depends. A knee replacement…”

“I’d settle for a website,” John said, before he started laughing helplessly.

~fin~