sga_flashfic | Cradle by Salieri (exploring Atlantis)

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Title: Cradle
Author: Salieri
Challenge: exploring Atlantis
Pairing: Sheppard/McKay
Rating: PG for a little language
Notes: erm, I dunno if this counts as exploring Atlantis, since they are outside of Atlantis, but they can see it from a... different angle, I guess. This story is a little bit inspired by

danvers' coooool AU, "Heat," in which there is parachuting (because, obviously, Danvers knows me and loves me and gives me caaaaaandy), so I hope she doesn't mind. Also, I must thank

tafkarfanfic, who made me a cd called "A Sultry Evening," which was playing in the headphones while I was writing.

He couldn't see Rodney's face, but he could feel it when he gave in, gave it up to the universe as they say. Not the universe. John. The first step is a doozy.

Holy fuck.

Rodney nodded, head cracking against John's chin, and there was no resistance in him anymore, even though the fear was like brass wire threaded through all his veins, and it made him stiff, almost brittle. But he let John fold his arms across his chest, wire-taut and compliant.

Holy fuck.

Then they were falling. Ten meters per second per second falling. The air was ripping past them, and in his ear Rodney's voice was speed-torn, stretched to a thin, whipping flag, and John could feel Rodney's heart slamming against him like a fist against a locked door and John couldn't feel his own heart at all. And there was sea-sun-sea-sun-sea-sun, blue chasing white chasing blue and the colours were roaring in his wide open eyes, streaked with spinning, Atlantis pulsing at the edge of things, silver needles pinning the ocean as it tried to sheer away from the sky.

And then he snapped his arms out. The world stopped tumbling and he was looking down past Rodney's head at the ocean, turbulent, and everything inside them was floating, inertia, out-of-sync, resisting with the memory of when they weren't falling, so that for a crazy second it felt like they were falling up. When there was no tension at all anymore on the hooks of the harness, Rodney's body finding its own way to fall, John put his mouth against Rodney's ear and shouted, "Now!" and Rodney's fingers unwound from the straps on his chest and the speed caught him, and his arms went wide and John found his hands and held them tight and counted Rodney's heartbeats pounding inside John's own chest and although the ocean rushed up at them it looked like it wasn't; it was a blanket of crinkled silk and they seemed to hang there above it, windhovers, their jumpsuits rattling against their legs, their mouths full of sound. The world pulled them down and the air pushed against them, a slippery, fruitless grip, and the sky was a scouring, wordless howl.

Thirty seconds. Folding Rodney's arms across his chest, John held them there for a moment, even after Rodney's fingers closed again on the harness straps, and there was only falling that felt like flying, skin bare against wind, and if the planet would only just lean out of the way, they could fall forever, but the silk of the ocean was snagged and unraveling now, whitecapped and crumpled around Atlantis. It was time to

"Stop!" John shouted.

And they did. Not all at once, but with a slowing, stretching loss of momentum, like the air was elastic, space giving way, folding around them, their speed deflected outward in an iridescent rippling that bent the horizon for a moment into a bow. First he felt compressed, squeezed inside two cupped hands--ocean and sky--and then he was expanding from the centre, a bubble filling with breath. Rodney's hands loosened on the straps for a second, floating free until John covered them with his and folded them around the grips again. Around them, the field converted motion to heat, cast it away from them so they were the dark centre of a blooming flower of light. The roaring of air became a sigh.

Tucking his knees, and folding Rodney up, too, he somersaulted them onto their backs so that they could see the last shimmer of their falling as it split the sun into three liquid beads of white and passed on, dissipating into the blue. Then the light was gone and beads melted together again and the world snapped flat again, and John and Rodney drifted down down down and settled just above the chop, swaying like apples in an apron.

Suddenly, Rodney was heavy again, his heart back where it belonged. John's own heart was stumbling, trying to keep pace with his, but slowing, slowing as the gravity field cradled them at the bottom of the well, 8000 feet of speed above them and the jumper a dash like an an iron filing spiraling down toward them.

Rodney lay against him, his head in the crook of his shoulder. His weight kept John from falling into the sky, and it wasn't such a bad thing to lie there in an invisible hammock with his arms still around him, holding Rodney together while the adrenaline and fear shuddered through him and dissolved into the air, gentled away by the motion of the field and the steadiness of John's breathing.

After a little while, when the jumper was still more of a shape than a ship, Rodney stiffly uncurled his fingers from their deathgrip on the harness straps and tapped his helmet headset off. Then he rolled his head a little so his mouth was against John's jaw and said, "The things I do for love."

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