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This story is completed
Rodney was snoring, spread-eagled across nearly the whole bed, and while John missed his warmth almost immediately, it was good for his stiff muscles to get moving. He tapped the intercom. "Who is it?"
He figured if it was Lorne or one of his marines he could just talk to them out in the hallway. They weren't allowed to question him. Though it was probably Elizabeth or Teyla anyhow, and he really didn't mind if they found out. Elizabeth had drunkenly expressed her disapproval of DADT at the harvest festival a year back, and Teyla, well, she accepted the Eravian ritual of anointing one's entire body with beetle dung and then fucking oneself on a sea cucumber without a blink, so he figured she wasn't going to be the judgmental type.
But John wasn't expecting the cool mechanical voice of the voice translation device linguists had presented Rodney's biggest fan.
"Could I come in, John?" the voice asked.
"Um . . ." He didn't really want her to catch up to them like this, but then again he always preferred quick and to the point – like ripping a band-aid off. "Come on in."
The door slid open, revealing Ary'l standing there. She was wearing a flowing cream-white dress, fire-red hair swept back into a swirling bun. She didn't seem surprised to see Rodney snoring happily away in John's bed. If anything, she looked resigned.
"So this is how it must be?" The voice synthesizer was cold, but her eyes betrayed the emotion beneath.
"I'm sorry." John felt bad, truly he did, but he couldn't control who he loved anymore than Rodney could control not loving her.
"Don't be. It was foolish of me to have come here. The procedure is forbidden for a reason."
"Procedure?" John pulled her back out into the corridor and then onto the small balcony just across the hall from his room.
"He did not tell you?" she cocked her head to the side. Her eyes truly were beautiful in the morning light.
John shook his head.
"The Ancients, as you call them, created a machine so that we might see the world as they did. It is a transfer of consciousness process that they borrowed from some of their allies. A clone is created from one of the many biological profiles stored in the database and the consciousness is transferred while the original body hibernates. I came here to be with Rodney. I listened to his radio waves. I watched him and I fell in love with him."
"You're the one who saved him before. You circled him until I saw?"
She nodded. So that's what all of the hand motions had been about. "But that was not enough."
"It generally isn't." John thought back to his father, to Josh and that look of anger on his face before they parted with a solid beating and promises to never see each other again.
"I sacrificed everything for him. And yet I am not the one he loves."
She certainly had the melodrama of a fifteen-year-old. "What exactly do you mean by ‘everything?'"
She sighed. "My old body has been too long in hibernation. I cannot go back. That is why she was warning me – the one who attacked us."
"Why didn't you go back?" John cringed. Even though he knew they often were, he didn't want be believe sacrifices could be in vain. He thought back to ____ and how he'd died there in the desert, unable to even watch John's court-martial.
"Use of the machine is forbidden. Men are beautiful but careless. Your souls are noble, noble enough for the Wraith to feed."
Oh. John supposed that if he too could hide under the sea to protect himself from the Wraith, he might do it. "I could see why you might want to stay down there."
"Not just want to. The punishment for trespass of the law is servitude, and the administrator of justice is harsh. Not even my status could save me from her punishment."
"But why would you risk it?" Even as close as he felt to Rodney, John hadn't even had the courage to tell him, let alone break the law and give up his entire life for the chance to be with him.
"I fell in love. What else was I supposed to do?"
John shook his head. "I don't know, wait for someone else to come along?"
She smiled softly at that, nodding towards the door to John's quarters. "Is that what you would do? He told me about your rules. You know the possible consequences of your own actions."
John nodded, looking out across the ocean, enjoying the sea breeze. He hoped that it wouldn't try to kill him again today. "I guess you're right." She was much more perceptive than Rodney seemed to give her credit for. "How'd you get to be so damned wise?"
She shrugged. "Not wise enough."
"What do you mean?"
"You promise never to tell him?"
He shrugged. "Sure."
"My body is deteriorating. It needs . . . if he were to love me, to share himself with me completely, then I could live until the end of his life."
"What do you mean by share himself completely?" The girl seriously needed to stop it with all the euphemisms.
"Genetic donation."
"You mean . . ."
"Sex."
"Well, you could . . . I mean, we can talk to Beckett. He can figure something out. Hey, you're a beautiful girl. Hang out around here and I'm sure you'll find something. If it's between that and dying, I would even . . ."
"No." She was firm. "My kind . . . we fall in love but once."
John kept his word. He didn't tell Rodney, even though he and Carson spent a fair amount of time in the lab, trying to arrange blood transfusions, sperm donations, anything they could think of.
But nothing seemed to work.
"Bastards" Carson grumbled. "It's as though they constructed the machine specifically to do this. No stored samples, no blood transfusion. Nothing!"
John shrugged. "Maybe they did. It was at the height of the war with the Wraith – maybe they wanted to keep their experiments on a very short leash."
"Or maybe they just wanted to have sex all the bloody time."
"That too."
Carson sighed, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. "I hate to say this, but we might have to face the possibility that there's nothing we can do about this. If you can't convince her, I'm not liking our options."
John nodded. "I'll try. Again."
Maybe she wouldn't consent to anyone else, but of course she'd agree if it were Rodney, right? She was in love with him, after all. And being in love with Rodney, like heroin, was pretty addictive. He didn't think she'd given it up. So, all he had to do was convince Rodney to go with her.
Beside him, Rodney grumbled, his grip tightening around John's waist. He looked so peaceful in his sleep, still expressive, but tension-free. John wasn't so romantic as to stay up and watch him sleep – Ary'l probably would, though. But not wanting to watch a guy sleep didn't mean that he didn't enjoy the secretive looks, the new innuendo added to their banter, the amazing sex. It would be hard giving all of this up, but maybe having had it was good enough.
John slipped out of bed and back to his own quarters. Now what would make Rodney break up with him? Actually, what would make him break up with someone?
‘Ah-ha!' John grabbed a duffle and his laundry bag.
Three days later, Rodney noticed the mess and determined that this was John's way of moving in with him. John would've objected, but that was pretty hard to do with someone's mouth wrapped around your cock.
John needed another plan. He'd had plenty of women (and men) break up with him, but normally they did it because he was too ‘emotionally detached' or unwilling to make sacrifices or commitments for them. But he wasn't capable of being emotionally detached from Rodney. Hell, he'd lasted a measly two weeks after Doranda, and it'd been two of the hardest weeks of his life. Sacrifices, too – it was impossible to claim that when you routinely risked your life for someone. And as far as commitments went, he'd already fucked that one up by apparently moving in with Rodney.
Maybe he should just break up with the guy himself.
A week later, Ary'l and John were playing ping-pong in the rec room, when Rodney stumbled in, eyes wilted and tired, stinking of alcohol and with the edges of his shirt singed.
He sunk to his knees in front of John, wrapping his arms around John's waist and pressing a runny nose into the hem of his favorite t-shirt. "I'm so sorry, John. Whatever I did, I didn't mean it. I love you. I'm so sorry. Please, don't leave me. Please."
Ary'l, and pretty much everyone in the rec room (Marines included) shot John a dirty look. There was no way he couldn't lift Rodney up, plant a kiss on his forehead and lead him back to their quarters to sleep it off.
Strike two.
Ary'l was getting worse and worse by the day. Her hair was thinning, much of its brilliant red sheen lost. She was slim before, but it was verging on sickly – emaciated, even. But she continued, unafraid. John had even gotten used to her – having dinner with them in the mess, telling him all about the latest gossip (of which she knew all), excited about the things she was learning in the school on the mainland. One of the young Athosian hunters had even asked her out on the date, nervously asking John his advice the last time he'd flown a supply run out there. But after a romantic picnic on the bluffs overlooking the sea, she'd turned him down. John just couldn't understand it.
"Ary'l is doing nicely," Rodney commented, sighing into the pillows as John massaged his shoulders – they'd been tied up by hostile natives again today. John was seriously considering growing himself some dreads so that he could conceal weapons as well as Ronon. "Though her skills with harmonic frequencies would be better spent working with Miko on the deep space sensors than studying Athosian history out in Hicksville. Elizabeth's against it, of course, but I think that maybe if we . . . I . . . if I adopted her, then Elizabeth would have to respect my educational decisions and . . ."
John didn't hear the rest of Rodney's rant. Part of him thrilled at Rodney's Freudian ‘we' but the other part was panicking. If Rodney was thinking of her as more of a daughter, there was no way that he was going to . . . unless Rodney was single and decided that marrying her would be the best way to gain control over her educational decisions.
Desperate times called for desperate measures.
John looked down at his watch. Rodney had promised to be here in two minutes.
"Is there something you must attend to, John?" Teyla asked, curiously. "We may finish early if you have other engagements."
John looked up, shocked. "No. No, everything's fine, Teyla. I just . . . let me go get a drink. You're pushing me pretty damned hard today."
"It would not be so hard if you were to practice, Colonel."
"Yeah, yeah," John waved her off, staggering over to his gym bag and checking the LSD he'd stashed there. There was a figure just down the hall and approaching fast. Good, just in time.
John stood up, taking a deep breath and stepping towards Teyla. "You know, I've never told you how attracted I am to you."
"John?" Teyla stepped back as John stepped forward.
"I care about you, Teyla. I don't know what I would . . ."
John didn't see the stick coming. The next thing he knew, he was curled up in a ball on the floor, stars in his eyes.
"Oh . . . I thought you'd be done by now," Rodney was saying, coming in, of course, just a second too late.
"Call Doctor Beckett, Rodney. I am afraid that John may have had a relapse."
"I've done every test I could think of, Rodney. His viral count is the same as it's been for the past several months and the scans aren't picking up anything unusual. My best guess would be stress, but I'll run the bloodwork again just to be sure."
"I'm fine! I swear, I wasn't under the influence of anything. I just felt like . . ." John began protesting.
"You are not ‘fine,'" Teyla admonished. "When you are cured you will look back on this and understand."
"But, he said my virus count was . . ."
"Just shut up and let the sheep-loving quack cure you, okay?" Rodney said with an exasperated sigh.
In the end, Carson attributed the whole thing to low potassium levels, or something equally benign. Of course that didn't stop Elizabeth from suspending him from active duty and Teyla and Rodney mothering him nearly to death.
John was getting desperate. What was the number one most annoying thing anyone in a relationship had ever done to him?
Rodney came tumbling through the door, already halfway through a rant about how a Cabbage Patch doll and a Dustbuster would probably get more done than Simpson and Kavanagh when John strode resolutely over to the mirror and asked, "Does this shirt make me look fat?"
Rodney looked from John to the mirror and back again then walked over, grabbed John's wrist and dragged him out the door.
"Fear of commitment is normal, John," Heightmeyer said in way that John was sure she thought was reassuring, "the military isn't an organization that encourages attachment – constant moves, the possibility of death, the objectification of targets."
"I'm not afraid of commitment," John said stubbornly. Well, maybe he was a little bit, but he was a guy, wasn't he supposed to freak out about that?
"And I know that even after Dr. Weir negotiated the compromise on ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell' with the SGC you might still feel as though being in an openly homosexual relationship might end up in trouble, but sometimes we have to take risks. Everyone is afraid of getting hurt, John. But many people choose to fall in love anyway."
John thought of Ary'l, leaving the calm wash of the surf and the blue, blue ocean. He thought about dreams and ambitions and promises people made but could never keep – his mom kissing his forehead when she thought he was asleep before slipping out in the middle of the night, Phillip Hardy and how he'd promised John that they'd stay in touch, no matter what, his drill sergeant during basic, screaming that it wasn't a one man service, that they didn't leave men behind.
"Sometimes," he whispered, "those kinds of sacrifices aren't worth it."
Kate cocked her head to the side, making another note on the goddamned chart she'd been writing in all day. "What kind of sacrifices are you talking about?"
"I'm just saying, what if the person doesn't return those feelings? What if you make sacrifices for them and they leave you hanging out to dry? You can't control who loves you. It's childish to think that if you love someone enough they'll have to want you back." Why couldn't she have just stayed in the ocean where she belonged?
Kate frowned. "You don't think that Rodney loves you?"
"No, he loves me. That's not the point."
"Then what is the point, John? I know that there's something in all this that you aren't telling me."
John sighed. Doctor-patient confidentiality. "It's Ary'l. She'll die if she can't have a constant infusion of human genetic material – in the form of sperm. It's screwed up, but the Ancients wanted it that way."
"And you trying to destroy your relationship with Rodney is going to stop this?"
"She won't take anybody else. It has to be Rodney and he won't – not as long as he's with me."
"So you think that if Rodney breaks up with you, he'll turn immediately to her?"
"No. He thinks of her like a kid. But she's beautiful. She can convince him."
"And you think she'll want to be with him if she knows that he's in love with you?"
"It's her life. She has to value that more than the worry that it's not real."
"But you yourself said that she's willing to die before she'll accept anyone other than Rodney. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that she'd want Rodney to feel the same way she does?"
"No, but . . . I can't let her throw her life away because she wants to find Prince Charming."
"But it's her choice, John. And it's Rodney's choice to be with you."
"But . . ."
"If you and Rodney were to break up right now, do you really think that would save her from her own choices?"
"No."
"If you don't believe in making sacrifices for the possibility of your own happiness, why do you keep trying to do it for not even a chance of other people's happiness?"
John sighed. "I don't know."
When John got home, head perfectly shrunk and so tired his bones creaked, Rodney was waiting there – the lights dimmed, the smell of home cooked steak wafting up from a covered plate on the table.
John raised his eyebrows. "A candlelight dinner?" He and Rodney weren't really into these sorts of romantic, lovey-dovey things.
"Just sit down and enjoy the steak," Rodney admonished. "And oh, I have wine. Elizabeth says it's a good bottle."
Rodney handed it over. John had no idea what a good wine even looked like, but it was dated back to the nineteen seventies and he seemed to remember that old was good, so he picked it up and grabbed the corkscrew.
"How was work?" John asked.
"Terrible. Zelenka looks all nice and cuddly, but I know he's just a power-hungry weasel beneath all that. And Simpson and Kavanagh were at it again today. Do I look like a babysitter? Have some steak. It's delicious."
"What about your salad?"
Rodney waved him away. "I like to eat it in the middle, that way I can keep the taste out of my mouth for as long as possible. Endive should have its own food group – vegetarian vegetable torture."
"If you hate it, why'd you bother?"
"Oh, Katie volunteered to do the cooking. You know, I can build a nuclear bomb from the most unsophisticated, most irradiated materials known to man on three days with no sleep, but a simple thing like marinating a slice of meat escapes me? Try the steak."
John shrugged. He liked salad, but he dug into his steak anyway. "Wow, this is great. Is it real?"
"Yep, fresh from a real dead cow carcass. Ronon wanted me to go out and kill some ceremonial blah-blah with him on a planet with a man-eating crickets or some nonsense."
John frowned. "Wait . . . you got Elizabeth and Ronon and your ex-girlfriend together to cook a dinner for me?"
Rodney rolled his eyes, huffing his ‘put-upon' huff and standing. "I was going to wait until after dinner, but if you're going to keep asking away like Oprah on steroids, then I'm going to have to do it early."
Rodney grabbed something from off the dresser and walked over to John's chair. John leaned back and away from him. Whatever Rodney and company were conspiring, it couldn't be good.
Rodney looked at the floor. "Teyla says that in Pegasus people don't kneel and my knees have been giving me problems recently – I have a history of arthritis in my family," Rodney pronounced, thrusting a small black box into John's hands. "So, what do you think?"
"I haven't opened it yet," John said, though it was pretty obvious what was inside. But as long as he didn't open it, then he wouldn't know for certain and it would be like the Heisenberg Uncertainty proposal and he'd never have to commit to a decision and . . .
"Fine, be a smart ass about it. I'm trying to ask you to marry me, will you just cooperate already?"
John gulped, hands shaking as he opened the box. The ring was simple – a silver band that looked almost knotted. "You can't actually wear it until the wedding, of course, seeing as how we don't want to have to be burdened with having to wear two rings all the time, so that's actually the band. I was debating giving you a Playstation instead, but Kate said that a lot of people in unconventional relationships prefer to keep certain traditions as constants."
"I think I would've preferred a Playstation," John replied, distracted. Rodney really wanted to marry him? They were that serious? Sure, John loved Rodney, probably more than he'd ever love anyone again – more than he thought it was possible to love someone. But that didn't mean they had to get married. And besides, John wasn't exactly the marrying type.
Rodney threw up his hands. "See, I tell them that you're really much easier to please than that, but then there's all this psychobabble and the whole new random physical insecurities thing and . . ."
John looked up, Rodney was looking worried, babbling. He didn't want Rodney to worry. He wanted to hug him and say that yes he did love him, yes he would commit, yes everything would be okay. Except it wouldn't.
"I have to go," John said, rushing out the door.
The ocean was dark, angry beneath the grace of the full moon. John didn't mind it though, not with the stars like teardrops against the dark velvet of the sky.
"You should say ‘yes,'" A mechanical voice said.
John turned, watching Ary'l stalk, barefooted, towards him. In the darkness her hair looked black, her paleness not at all unnatural in the moonlight. "He told you?"
"I'm the one who gave him the idea." She smiled, sitting down beside him and pillowing her head against his shoulder. He pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around her. "I told him that I was sick – that there's nothing that your Doctor Beckett can do to cure me."
"But all you have to do is . . ."
She touched her hand to his lips. "No. Rodney realized how little time he might have left and he wants to spend that time with you." My people have a story. It is very old. It is about a human – a woman. On a planet far away from here, she found a creature, a horrible creature – with pinchers and eyes without pupils and a thick putrid orange belly." John knew that bug. He'd nearly become one.
"We call those ‘Iratus bugs.'"
"Then you know, instinctually, that that creature is bad, just as she knew. But she feared death. Man had conquered nature and spread life throughout the stars. Death was the last thing she had to fear and this monster, this Kraken, held the promise of the end of death. She experimented and from the unnatural creations she stumbled upon came the scourge that killed many of the humans of this galaxy."
"The Wraith," John breathed. Ever since Elizabeth had decoded the Wraith language, John had suspected that they were some Ancient experiment gone wrong, but he'd never before heard confirmation.
"It is why the surface is forbidden," Ary'l continued. "It is not the sea that separates our people, but our fear of death. I had thought that my desire to save Rodney and my fear that he would die made me different. I thought that it meant that I, too, might live forever, like those who followed the path of the scientist, but I am not that way."
"Followed the Wraith, you mean? We're not those people. We're not promising you eternal life, just a longer one. You can live with me and Rodney, we can take care of you. It'll all be okay . . . it doesn't have to be the end . . ."
"No." At least the icy tone of the voice simulator could covey her finality properly.
The sun was bright, spilling down through the glass windows and illuminating the Gateroom with that warm light that had made Atlantis feel like home since the moment it rose up from the depths of the sea. Rodney was a ball of nervous energy beside him, pulling repeatedly at the bow on his tux.
"Stop fidgeting, Rodney! Here, let me retie that for you," Cadman groaned, slapping Rodney's hands away from his neckline.
John's own tux felt stiff and awkward on him. Had he gained weight since Carson took his measurements? And was he seriously wondering about his body image? Rodney was right to have sent him to see a shrink.
"If you're ready, gentlemen," Elizabeth called from the top of the steps, managing to sound exactly like she did when they inevitably ended up bickering during meetings.
John cleared his throat. "Yeah, we're ready." By which John meant that they weren't even close to ready. First of all, Cadman was still messing with Rodney's tie, but John was walking down the aisle first, Teyla looking radiant in some sort of velvety Athosian cloak and holding out her arm to walk him down the aisle, and secondly, wasn't he going to miss breasts like that if he went through with this?
"Take a deep breath, John. You are prepared for this," Teyla whispered. What was she, psychic? Actually, yes, she was. John scowled, only to get an elbow to the ribs.
All of the smiling faces of pretty much everyone in the expedition passed by him in a blur. It wasn't too late to back out now, was it? Before he and Rodney were throwing steak knives and arguing over alimony payments?
But then John caught Ary'l's eye from where she was sitting in a wheelchair next to Ronon, waiting for him. She looked resigned, but happy. He couldn't give this away when she had risked so much just for the slimmest chance to be in his place.
Elizabeth, too, smiled encouragingly as John went to the best parade rest of his life, palms sweating at his sides. On Elizabeth's other side, Carson was crying, Radek handing him the red silk handkerchief he'd stuffed in his pocket earlier that day. John fought the urge to mess with his collar as Rodney had until he heard a sudden laugh from the crowed. He turned around to see that Rodney had tripped coming up the steps.
John smiled and faced forward. So what if they might fuck this up magnificently? It might just be worth it.
John had heard Teyla sing before, around the campfire or to greet the dawn on one of those all-too-familiar mornings when they had survived despite the immense odds against them. But he had never heard her voice so haunting. It was as though it reached inside him, robbing him of all speech, all ability to think and leaving behind the emotion of the song – hope, regret, resignation, but joy, too.
All of the deaths John had seen in the Pegasus Galaxy had been of unnatural causes. This was his first Ring Ceremony.
Rodney's palm was sweaty in his, the silver of their rings burning hot from absorbing their body heat. But they said they would be here. Maybe it would have been different if Rodney had loved her and not John, but it was her choice.
For Teyla's people, it was a joyous day when one knew that they were to die, instead of submitting to its inevitability. Even then, John had trouble finding the silver lining.
When Teyla finished, Ary'l smiled brightly up at them. He remembered her wedding gift to them – a simple piece of stone, a marbled mix of blue and green, washed smooth by the slow turning of the sea. When Rodney had asked what it was, she said only that it was something to believe in.
Ary'l had once told him that when her people died, they dissolved into a mist of sea foam, but she herself disappeared in a white blaze of light.
FIN