The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20051221201704/http://fabularasa.arithmancy.net:80/CloseEnough.htm
Close Enough
by Fabula Rasa


Be of love a little more careful than of anything.
                                                         -- e e cummings

John slammed his hand on the wall behind him and the metallic door slid shut, just in time to muffle his voice.

“Goddamnit, McKay, this stops right here, right now.”

“Security cameras.”

“What?”

He crossed his arms in the precise way that made John want to snap both of them off and beat him with them. “All security cameras onboard are on active, may I remind you. Standard on an Asgard ship.” He punctuated it with a glance upwards, to the small black eye that studied them balefully.

Shit. He stood there for a minute, collecting himself, watching the corrugated floor. “Fine,” he said through clenched teeth. “I can have this conversation standing right here. I don’t need to come over there and stomp on your oversized head to do it. I am done, do you hear me? Enough. I am so fucking done. You are going to take your attitude and shove it, are we clear?”

“First off, Major, where the hell do you think you get off, issuing orders to me? And second—”

“It’s Colonel, and you goddamn know it!”

Rodney’s mouth slanted at an impossible angle. “My apologies, Lieutenant Colonel. And excuse me for pointing this out, your Colonel-ness, but you don’t get to have any say about my attitude, are we clear? Besides which, I don’t have any attitude. I am simply going about my business, trying my best to get things done around here and be of assistance to the Daedalus team, and you, you, you’re just pissy because we’re in a spaceship and you can’t go shoot at something, or blow something up, so don’t take it out on me.”

The three feet between them shimmered with John’s glare, but he didn’t move from his spot by the door. In fact, he kept a careful hand on the wall, so he wouldn’t be tempted to launch himself across those three feet and perhaps accidentally rip McKay’s throat open.

“Fine,” he ground out. “If that’s how you want to do this. But from now until we get to Atlantis, no matter what the problem is here, we will not take it out there. That is not happening again, especially not in front of my men. Are we—” he closed his eyes briefly. “Do we have an agreement?”

“Fine, yes, whatever.” McKay crossed his arms. “Now just—” He licked his lips, and when he spoke again, his voice was weary. “Just get out of my room now, can you? Some of us have work to do.”

John took his hand off the wall. Of the thousand and nine things he could say, not a one of them would have done any good, so he hit the doorpad again and let it whoosh shut behind him. He stood for a minute on the other side of the door, surveying the empty corridor, wondering if it was an accident that McKay’s quarters put him so far out of the way, and unsure whether to congratulate Colonel Caldwell on his perception or slug him.

He made his way back to his own cramped quarters off the main axis and laid himself on his bunk, fully dressed. It was no use pretending he was going to sleep tonight.




John took a deep swig of his beer and swallowed it like it didn’t make his mouth explode. After all those months without, the sharp musky taste of the hops, the way it expanded in his mouth – it was almost too much. He didn’t know whether to close his eyes and quietly moan, or to splutter it out over top of the little table. But Rodney was knocking his back like he hadn’t noticed any change, so John took another swig and tipped his chair back, surveying the bar. They were drinking in silence, because the bar was a little too noisy for much of anything else. John brought his chair down with a thump.

“Hey, Rodney?”

“Yeah?” He was staring off in the direction of the pool tables, clearly engrossed in something, head bopping slightly to the music.

“Did you used to come here often?”

“Huh?” The head swiveled back around to him, eyes over-bright with liquor, and how the hell had that happened on two beers? Except he was aware the same thing was happening to him, that ten months in the Pegasus galaxy without alcohol – well, without alcohol except for that sip from Elizabeth’s champagne, that time in the infirmary with the bandage on his neck, back when they had thought the “Hurrah-We’ve-Cheated-Death” celebration was going to be a rare event.

“I said, you used to come here often, or something?”

Rodney shrugged. “Off and on. I mean, it’s right around the corner from my apartment, and it’s got decent music.”

“Uh-huh.” John weighed saying more, but decided to save it.

“Oh, so, Iraq!” Rodney exclaimed, leaning intently over their table. “I spent the morning catching up on current events, and wow, you people really know how to fuck things up, don’t you?”

“And by ‘you people,’ you mean. . .”

“Americans, of course. Naturally. What, do you people have the short term memory of goldfish, or something? Does ‘Vietnam’ mean nothing to you?”

“Goldfish?”

Rodney waved his hands. “Yes, yes, it’s scientifically documented that goldfish have the shortest memory span of any vertebrate, is the joke there, which falls a little flat since I have to explain it to you. It always used to bother me, when I was young, since fish were the only pets we were allowed to have other than – well, that’s another story, but it always used to bother me, the way they spent their whole confined little lives in that tank, and my God, can you imagine the boredom of it? Could you comprehend it? And no way even to kill yourself, really, other than slow starvation, which is, all things considered, an awful way to go. But when I found that out, about their memory span, it made me feel much better about the whole thing, because their life wasn’t an endless round of sameness after all – it was all new, all the time. You know, oh, look! A plastic castle! And seven seconds later, look! A plastic castle!

John grinned. “So I’m a goldfish.”

“Well not you personally, obviously, just your people as a whole. I mean, thank God you went to Atlantis, right?”

“Well, I guess,” he said carefully.

“Because if you’d stayed, you might have ended up deployed over there or something ridiculous like that.”

John finished off his beer. “Nah, no danger of that. Combat is where people get promoted, and no way was any commander going to put me in the way of a promotion. I was at McMurdo for a reason.”

“Would you have gone?” Rodney was leaning forward now, arms propped on the table, leg jiggling up and down. Alcohol apparently made him even more excitable, which was kind of amusing, considering it was supposed to be a barbiturate. Made him a little glad he hadn’t been around for too much of Rodney-on-uppers during the Wraith siege, and a little nervous they had let him build a nuclear bomb in that state.

“What do you mean, would I have gone? I’ll let you in on a little secret, McKay, the military takes a dim view of refusing orders. You don’t get to choose to accept your assignment. What am I, Maxwell Smart?”

“Oh, you are – you are such a dork. Hey, could we have another beer? Two, please?” He waved at the passing bartender, who nodded curtly. “Oh, so, hey. How did things go at the SGC today?”

“Fine. You know. Sorted through the stack of personnel files. Checked out my new second.” He made his voice as casual as he could on that one, though it was still a pleasurable punch in the gut to say it. He had a second in command, now. He fought down the smile that threatened to break out at the corner of his mouth and forced it into a smirk.

“Yes, yes, it’s been almost, oh, fifteen minutes since we last mentioned your promotion. So once again, congratulations, Lieutenant Colonel.”

John set to peeling his empty bottle’s label. “Yeah. Thanks.” He frowned at the bottle, still twiddling it. “Just wish I hadn’t had to murder my CO to get it.” He had meant that to sound more flippant, more hardened, and a little less anguished, but with any luck Rodney hadn’t picked up on it. Rodney didn’t pick up on much, as this place evidenced. But when he looked up Rodney’s eyes were grave on him, and he was raising his beer bottle.

“To Marshall Sumner,” he said quietly.

John swallowed and nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He clinked his empty bottle against Rodney’s half-full one. “Colonel Sumner,” he said at last. They sat in silence for a minute, watching the press of people at the bar, the flickering TV screen. At the jukebox, someone had just put in Abba. You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only se-ven-teen, and if he closed his eyes he really was seventeen again, and the sand was warm under the soles of his feet, the too-bright sun beating on his shaggy head, his life and the possibility of getting laid still in front of him.

“Rodney.”

“Yeah.”

“You know this is a gay bar, right?”

“What?” His beer exited partly through his nose, and that was gratifying. “What are you talking about?”

John cocked a brow at him. “McKay. Seriously. You had not noticed things like, oh say, the lack of women here?”

“What? What the hell are you talking about? This is a sports bar – look, see the TVs? Sports? Sometimes guys just want to hang out together, all right? Jesus, what is it with you military pervert types, making something out of everything – my God, you Americans.”

The bartender plunked down three Amstels. “One from the gentleman at the bar,” he said, jerking his head at the corner of the bar, where a man in a gray business suit nodded pleasantly at John. He swung his head back around in time to see Rodney’s open mouth.

“Oh my God oh my God,” he was whispering. “I am not believing this.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I mean, I used to come here all the time, and nobody ever bought me anything.”

“Well, you know what they say.”

Rondey blinked at him. “What do they say?”

“In this situation? I have no idea.” He leaned forward and fished his wallet out of his back pocket. “I’m buying.”

“Oh what, so now I’m your date?”

John grinned at him. “Look, you’re letting me stay at your place. It’s the least I can do. I’m capable of a little gratitude, now and then, you know.” He took a long swallow off the new beer before setting it regretfully back down. “Come on, maybe we should head on out.”

“But I like this place.”

“Yeah, well, I like working for the US Air Force, so what can you do. Come on, on your feet, soldier.”

“Oh, fine.” Rodney grabbed the jacket off the back of his chair. “By all means, let’s run like scared heterosexual rabbits, lest the little gay electrons start rubbing off on us. And you know—”

“Excuse me.” They turned at the same time to see Gray Business Suit standing behind them, his hand extended to John. “I’m Charles.”

John clasped his hand. “John. Look, my friend and I were just heading out.”

“Oh, okay. Maybe I’ll see you around here again?” His watch – gold, quietly tasteful – flashed as he reached into his breast pocket and extracted a business card. “If you’d ever like to go for a drink.”

He hesitantly took the card. “Um, yeah. My—friend and I are pretty much homebodies.”

“Oh, I see. My apologies, then.”

“No problem. And thanks for the beer.”

Charles nodded, cast a quick assessing glance at Rodney, and headed back to his place at the bar. John landed a firm hand on Rodney’s hyperventilating back and steered him out the door to the car.



“I’m just saying, is all. What, I’m so hideously unattractive that in four years of coming to that bar at least once a week, no one ever, not once, bought me a drink? I mean, the statistical improbability alone—”

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe it’s not that you’re so extraordinarily unattractive, but that I’m extraordinarily attractive?”

Rodney shot him a look from behind the steering wheel. “Frankly, no.”

“Okay, Rodney, whatever.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “A, I can’t believe we are having this conversation, and B, people look for different things, you know? I was just his type, I guess. And C, will you watch the goddamn road?”

“I am watching – will you stop telling me how to drive? This is just like the puddle jumpers, with you all oh-watch-out-Rodney, and oh-don’t-crash-us-into-that-planet-Rodney, and I for one—”

“Yeah, well in a puddle jumper my odds of fiery death are a lot smaller. Will you LOOK OUT?”

Rodney snorted and swerved out of the way of oncoming traffic. “Please. Mr. I’ve-Never-Met-A-Suicide-Mission-I-Could-Sign-Up-For-Fast-Enough, don’t preach to me about avoiding a fiery death.”

This struck John as somehow, really inappropriately and deeply funny, and he curled into a silent chuckle, staring out at the dark rain-slicked street whooshing by. It also struck him that maybe they were both a little drunker than they thought they were, and that Rodney’s driving was not so much hilarious as, possibly, felonious.

“How much further to your place?”

“Next block. What are you, hot for me now? Can’t wait for the Hot Gay Rod of Love?”

This did nothing to help John with his laughing problem, and he doubled over into his seat, his belly aching with it, and with the last ten days, or maybe the last ten years, hard to say. And next thing he knew, the car made a sickeningly sharp lurch to the left, and the gears were screeching as Rodney slammed them into park.

“Ow. Oh. My neck! I think you broke my neck, McKay!”

“Oh please. Don’t be such a baby.”

If the whiplash hadn’t jerked him out of his laughter, he would  have been a goner at that one, because apparently Rodney’s hypocrisy was as boundless as it was unselfconscious. Except instead of pissing John off, it made him want to ruffle his hair, so he threw him a bone.

“Look, McKay. Did you ever stop to think that maybe you give off Deeply Heterosexual Vibes, and that’s why no one has ever put the moves on you? See, they were all just put off by your incredibly strong manly mojo.”

“My manly mojo?” Rodney arched a skeptical brow.

“Sure.”

“Or,” Rodney said, brightly. “It could just be that he was responding to your more superficial attractiveness. Probably he was just looking for an easy lay, a quick one-off, and he was intimidated by my obviously greater depths. Few people are up for the challenge that is Rodney McKay.”

John blinked at him. “That is officially the last time I ever try to make you feel better.” He pointed his finger in baleful warning. “Let me tell you something. Blaming the victim is never the way to go.”

Rodney threw the keys at him. “Shut up and get in the house, slut.”



Rodney’s sofa had proved surprisingly comfortable. Not that he should have been surprised – the man was a sybarite in all else, so why not in his furniture? It was soft and deep, with a high percentage of down, he suspected, and he had slept better in the last five days on it than he had in the last ten months in Atlantis. Or maybe it was the way he was slowly relaxing. Sure, Earth might be in jeopardy, but for fourteen days, he didn’t have to be the one who knew about it. He didn’t have to be the one awakened in the middle of the night to deal with it. He could be the guy who got drunk and ordered pizza and watched Blazing Saddles with his geeky buddy who insisted on saying all the lines in stupid voices.

The morning after his promotion, his shower had been interrupted by Rodney jerking back the curtain and shouting, “The sheriff is a Ni. . .BRASKAN!” and cackling wildly before John even had a chance to say “hey!” and jerk the curtain closed himself. He could hear Rodney intoning, molto basso, “His job to offer battle, to bad men near and f-a-a-r,” from the kitchen, and was only mollified when he discovered that Rodney had driven around the corner to the donut shop for eclairs and crullers.

The first day, while Elizabeth had spent the day wrangling the top brass (and he had some idea of just how much influence she must have had to peddle to get him that promotion, and just how much she never wanted him to know that) had been the day they launched Operation Retrive Rodney’s Cat. ORRC had turned out to be only moderately successful. The day after their arrival, Rodney had knocked on his neighbor’s door, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“Yes?” his neighbor had said, not opening her door all the way.

“Hi, I’m Rodney—Rodney McKay?” And when she had still looked blank, he had offered, “you have my cat?”

“Oh, right,” she had said, chewing on her lip. “Well. . .  she’s sleeping right now.” And then she had shut the door in his face, and that, according to Rodney, had been the end of Round One.

For Round Two on the following day, he had enlisted John’s help. “And what exactly am I supposed to do here?”

“Be charming. Charm her. You know, do your thing.”

“My thing? And while I’m charming her, you’ll be doing what? Diving under her door and throwing a blanket over your cat?”

“If I have to,” Rodney said grimly. So they had knocked, and the door had opened only a fraction, and Rodney had elbowed him in the back, pushing him forward.

“Hi,” he had said, affecting ease. “I’m John Sheppard. I’m—” a burst of inspiration – “your new neighbor.” And then he had lit the slow megawatt smile, and what do you know, that door had opened quite a bit wider.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m Elise.”

“Elise.” He stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.” He cast a glance at Rodney nervously hunched on the stair landing, where he had retreated to be out of sight. “I’m uh, going to be sub-letting Rodney’s place, upstairs.”

She nodded, smiling back at him. “Oh, that’s great. It will be good to have some new faces around. Are you new to Colorado Springs?”

“Um, kinda. Well, not really. I’ve been. . . in and out.” And then, in even more brilliant inspiration—“I’m a Colonel in the Air Force.” The door had opened all the way and Elise’s smile had dialed up to genuinely warm, and half an hour later, he was pushing back Rodney’s door to deposit on the sofa one rather huffy and ungrateful cat, who had had the bad manners to claw him on the stairs.

“Here. Take your Smelly Cat of Death.”

“Maggie!” Rodney had crooned in delight, and John had watched, hovering somewhere between sickened and amused, as Rodney nuzzled and scratched and squeezed and kissed the apparently indifferent animal.

“Well, don’t get too excited. She’s just visiting. I worked out a joint custody arrangement for the next fourteen days – you can have him—”

“Her.”

“Whatever. You can have it from 9 til 5:30, but when she gets back from work, she expects the cat to be in her apartment waiting for her. Key will be under the mat, you are not to touch any of her things, or feed the cat any food.”

Rodney looked up from what John could only call making out with his cat. “What?” His voice was expressive of deepest horror. “I can’t feed her?”

“That was the deal. I guess, you know, bonding issues.”

“That bitch.”

“That was the deal I got. Now I’m going to go take another shower.” He stuck his head back around the corner. “I always thought that people who name their pets human names were kinda weird.”

“It’s short for Magnificat,” Rodney retorted, burrowing his face into the cat’s capacious belly.

John had just rolled his eyes. Never would he tell Rodney that the look on his face had been worth every bit of schmoozing he had had to do downstairs.



So yes, the sofa was comfortable, but tonight sleep was eluding him. He tossed and turned on it, but tonight its softness just irritated him, and he found himself longing for the unforgiving mattresses of Atlantis. Those Ancients must have had incredible posture.

He closed his eyes and willed the thoughts away. Maybe it had been that bar. Maybe it had been the conversation afterward. Although it had been a pleasure to witness a patented McKay freak-out that did not involve evil space vampires or nuclear explosions or lack of oxygen or. .  oh, any number of things. Or maybe – maybe it had been Charles, his grip firm and pleasant, his eyes friendly, not the slightest bit of shame in them, and how the fuck did he manage that?

It had been years since he had even thought about shit like that. More years than he could count, although he knew that if he thought about it, he could count them. He was just refusing to. And it wasn’t like it had been a big deal, or a big part of his life, or anything. He hadn’t even done it more than three or four – well, maybe more, but he hadn’t been counting. Not so many times, was the point.

But he knew the drill. He knew how you slipped into the back of a bar so the light never fell on you, how you quietly sipped your beer, not even looking around, and after a while, maybe, someone would slide into the chair opposite you. Or maybe not, and you went home. But if it did happen, he knew how you rose nonchalantly, making your way to the bathrooms. He knew how you cut the lights, how you ducked into the nearest stall, how you leaned against the wall, waiting for the footsteps to come join you. He knew that it was okay to grip the guy’s head while you came in his mouth, to let your nails dig in. He knew how to drop to his knees and bring the other guy off fast and hard, no mess, no wasted time. Then a quick zip back up, a quick rinse of your hands in the bathroom sink, and you walked out, never a backward look.

It wasn’t like it had been a big deal.

Lots of guys on the bases had done it. It was what you did, when  your own hand wasn’t enough, and you weren’t such a lowlife as to go to a prostitute, or such a scumbag as to pick up a woman at a yuppie bar and use her that way. Other guys were what you used. Not a big deal at all. It was the unspoken code, in the service, the gulf between that, and being gay. Hell, he would be willing to bet that two-thirds of the Joint Chiefs, if not more, had had their cocks sucked in off-base men’s rooms, at one point or another. It didn’t make you. . .  it didn’t make you what that guy at the bar had clearly thought he was.

He shifted and squirmed and weighed the etiquette of jacking off on another guy’s sofa. Rodney slept like the dead, though. Maybe the bathroom? He sighed and swung his legs off the side of the sofa, seeing no help for it, when he heard the creak of Rodney’s door. Hell. Now he would have to wait for Rodney to piss, or whatever it was he was going to do. He hoped to God it was just piss, because Rodney was a pretty tightly-wound guy, and he had noticed it seemed to take him a long time in the bathroom, after morning coffee.

But no, Rodney was shuffling out to the living room, on his way to the kitchen, and he stopped when he saw John sitting up.

“Hey,” he said, voice sleep-fuzzed. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Just—” He was searching for the end of the sentence that would not be “about to jack off” when Rodney came and flopped beside him on the sofa.

“Me too,” he said. “It’s the barometric pressure. I never can sleep when there are radical shifts in barometric pressure.”

John felt the smile tug at him. “You are such a princess.”

Rodney snorted. “Bite me. Is this about the bar? I told you, I swear I didn’t know.”

He let the smile deepen. “Yeah, that much was evident. Don’t worry about it. I think my heterosexuality will survive the assault.”

“I’m sure it will.” He could hear the wry in Rodney’s voice, even in the dark. “God, I must be a real idiot, not to have noticed in four years.”

“Nah. I think oblivious is the word you’re looking for.”

“Possibly. But I know plenty of gay people.” He paused. “I’m sure I must.”

“That’s very enlightened of you, Rodney.”

“Hey, I’m enlightened!”

“Yeah, you’re a regular Voltaire.”

John ducked the pillow aimed at him. “You know, that really pisses me off about you,” Rodney mused. “Making a joke like that, which is, all things considered, not a bad one. It pisses me off, that you don’t make those kinds of jokes in front of people. Because oh, hey, they might catch on.”

John toed the pillow that had tumbled to the floor. “Here’s another military secret, Rodney. In general, Marines do not find Voltaire jokes funny.”

“Yes.” Rodney scratched at his hair, scrubbing it, and cocked his head as if to get a better look at John. “I do get that. But it still pisses me off.” He tilted his head the other way, and the moonlight – or the streetlight – caught his profile. “By the way, I’m over getting snubbed by the hot gay guy. Just so you know. I won’t hold it against you.”

“That’s big of you.”

“It’s not like I’m some rampaging homophobe, you know. I mean. . .” he raised his chin and cut his eyes at John with a ridiculous smirk. “I’ll have you know, I am not without some experience myself.”

“McKay. Are you trying to look worldly? Because it just makes you look smug.”

“Smug is my default position. And I am worldly!”

“Oh, really.”

“Oh yes. In grad school, I had this undergrad assistant, and one night he got very drunk and grateful – well to be honest I think he had a mild case of hero-worship – and next thing I know he’s down on his knees practically pulling my pants off, and wow, he knew what he was doing. So I let him blow me, because I ask you, who is ever going to say no to a blow job, and plus, I was pretty drunk. It was my birthday party, and who says no to a blow job on their birthday, especially? Or maybe it was my roommate’s birthday, I’m not sure. Actually, I wish I remembered more of it other than that it was pretty damn amazing. But then I passed out, so for all I know Ming wildly sodomized me. At least he had the decency to put my clothes back on, is all I can say. You know, it’s probably a good thing I passed out – if I’d been conscious, he would certainly have expected me to reciprocate, and that might have been more than  I could deal with.”

“Wow.”

“Which part?”

“That was wow as in, wow you really are all about the over-share.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“And also, what is it with you and Asians? First Ming, then Miko. . . you’re like Asian Sex Kryptonite. They can’t resist. Remind me never to go to China with you.”

“Now who’s being enlightened? I can’t help it if I am irresistible to the brilliant. If that guy in the bar had been Asian, I would have completely owned you with a p-w-n.”

John let his head fall back against the sofa, laughing soft and low. “You are such a dork, McKay. You are the dorkiest dork ever.”

“Bite me.”

“Tell you what.” John landed a light hand on Rodney’s knee. “Tomorrow night, we can go to the Chinatown gay bars and you can show me your moxie.”

“Please. This is Colorado Springs. Non-white people are barely allowed entry into the city limits, unless it’s to work construction.” He sighed. “I meant to go get something to drink, but I never made it to the kitchen. And now I’m not thirsty anymore. Actually, now I’m wishing I could stop thinking about that blow job.” He leaned his head back on the sofa and closed his eyes. “That’s what we need. Blow jobs. We need to remember to pick some of those up from the store.”

John shifted, trying to focus on the arc of light from the kitchen and not the tightening in his groin. The minute he had suggested midnight-jerk-off-in-the-bathroom to his dick, it had been totally on board. And somehow, it had never got off board, even when McKay had sat down next to him. Especially when McKay had sat down next to him, but he wasn’t going there. The dick wants what it wants, and he knew better than to inquire too closely into what it tended to want. And McKay was still not shutting up.

“So how long has it been, since your last blow job? I mean, I know there was the whole ill-advised evil alien priestess thing, and we won’t even open that can of worms, but does that even count? I mean, I’m guessing there was a limit to how. . . physical. . . an Ascended Ancient could be, in that respect?”

John smirked. “Rodney. Are you asking me to kiss and tell?”

He waved his hand. “Of course I am. Look, of the two of us, you’re the one who’s had the most recent sex, so, spill. Was she any good? Was it all just moonbeams and white lights and, you know, warm floaty sensations, or was there actually some sucking and licking in there? Kissing? Tonguing? Rimming optional, of course.”

John choked and dug his fingers into the blanket he was balling up in front of him. “Jesus, McKay! Give a guy some warning.”

“Please. Isn’t this the stuff you military jocks talk about all the time?”

“Why, yes, Rodney. Yes, it is. On the Spice Channel, what the hell is wrong with you? And also,” he clutched the blanket  a little more firmly to his lap, “I would appreciate it if we could stop talking about sex.”

“Why? Who doesn’t want to talk about sex?”

I don’t want to talk about sex! Just. .  please.” He closed his eyes and ground his teeth together, trying to think of something, anything to dump metaphorical cold water on his embarrassing hard-on. Jerking off on another’s guy’s sofa might be a gray area, etiquette-wise, but sporting a raging stiffie while on said sofa with said guy? Not cool.

Unfortunately for him, Rodney chose this moment to develop perception. “Oh,” he said, in his oh-I-get-it-now sort of voice, and John didn’t have to open his eyes to know exactly what Rodney’s face looked like.

“Yeah, oh,” he said. “Now let’s all just get some sleep, shall we?”

“Oh. Um.” He could hear Rodney’s fingers tap-tap against the back of the sofa. “Listen, I could run to the all-night market on the corner.”

“What? What the hell for?”

“Well. Not really for anything. I mean, I could get something if you wanted me to. Ho-hos? Chocolate milk? Beef jerky?” He chortled at his own pun, and John wondered what the rules of etiquette had to say about decking your host on his own sofa. “Sorry, sorry. Really, I was thinking more along the lines of, maybe I should duck out of the house for a little bit. In case you wanted some privacy.”

That brought his head up. “Rodney. You are not leaving your house at two in the morning so I can. . . just, no. Just, please, can we forget about it?”

“You could go into the bathroom and I could pretend not to know what you were—”

“Rodney!”

“Sorry, sorry. Some people are so touchy.” There was a moment’s pause. “I don’t know how you stand it. Me, I have to jerk off every day, at least. Flossing, maybe on a good day, but jerking off? I just have to, I can’t imagine starting the day without it. Sometimes going to bed, too. You must be in agony, if you’ve been trying all week not to. Have you been trying all week not to? Because I am completely cool with it, it’s not like, when I have people over, that I hang a sign on the front door that says no masturbating allowed – not that I have houseguests that often. Well, ever, really. Although once—”

“Rodney.” He gritted his teeth. “You are not helping.”

“Sorry.” He subsided again, and again John thought he might just get up and finally, finally leave him alone, but when he spoke next his voice was entirely different. “Or. . . I could just do this.” And with that, his hand landed squarely on the part of the blanket that covered his hard-on, cupping him firmly through it, and holy holy shit.

He didn’t move, didn’t dare breathe. They just stayed like that, for what felt like fifteen minutes but was doubtless only a few seconds. His swallow sounded too loud in the room. “Rodney. What are you doing.”

“Waiting for you to hit me?”

Another pause, and still Rodney’s hand was firm and warm on his dick, though motionless, and apparently his dick had decided this was just great, thank you for inviting me, I’m so happy to be here, because it gave a twitch up into the warm hand, hot even through the blanket.

“And yet,” said Rodney. “You don’t seem to be.”

“No,” John agreed, mouth desert-dry. “I don’t seem to be.”

They sat in more silence, until John couldn’t take it anymore. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Just do something, I can’t take it.”

“Yeah, okay,” Rodney whispered back, voice just as dry, and he flung off the blanket and plunged his hand into the gaping boxers, and oh. John’s head hit the back of the sofa as Rodney’s hand closed around his shaft, pulling a bit tentatively.

“No clue here, really,” Rodney was saying softly, into the space beside his head.

“Well you—oh God – practice twice a day—I should think you’d—oh yes. . .” He gave up on speech as Rodney picked up both force and velocity, and wham, just like that he was hit with the image of Rodney jacking himself. Rodney, lying on his bed, covers kicked down, broad hands and thick arms pumping his own dick, mouth hanging open slightly, eyes tight with pleasure, left hand cupping his balls, maybe squeezing a bit, Rodney fucking his own hand. . . “Fuck,” he said aloud, and spilled over Rodney’s hand in long lazy jets that made his spine curl forward and stung the back of his eyes.

He was still regaining air when he felt Rodney slipping off his boxers, leading his hand to his crotch, and man, he was hard. John’s eyes snapped back open to see, and Rodney – Rodney was a sight, flushed and panting and thick red dick sticking straight out, already a little slicked at the tip, and Jesus, had giving him a hand job turned him on that much?

“Me now, please,” he was panting, and John pulled his hand away.

“Uh-uh,” he said.

“What, what the hell do you—” But Rodney’s protest stilled as John slid to his knees, scooted forward, and dropped his head down in his lap. “Oh. Oh yes, oh God,” he moaned, his dick making blind stabs upwards to his mouth, and John considered teasing him a bit, considered doing something artful, but Rodney was a mess, he was so close he was probably in pain, and in the end he decided to go with what he knew how to do, which was eat dick.

“Oh, God,” Rodney yelped, his whole body jerking so hard John had to still him with a hand on his hip, and wow, Rodney really had no idea how to do this, because he was pumping up, basically fucking his mouth, and though this should have pissed John off it was somehow the hottest thing he’d ever felt. So he dug his fingers into Rodney’s hips a little harder and swallowed down a little more firmly, burrowing his chin into Rodney’s balls, and he had time to register no more than soft and musky and hairy when Rodney was grabbing at his shoulders, quite painfully, really.

“I’m gonna—I have to—oh fuck fuck ohhh—” and then he bucked up once, and the sharp viscous flood was spilling into John’s mouth, into his mouth and out the sides, try though he might to swallow it all down. He had never tried to swallow before, because yech, why would you, but he wanted as much of Rodney’s come as he could get, for some cracked reason, and he swiped at his mouth with the poor abused blanket. He just watched Rodney come down, watched his eyelids flutter, his hands spasm, his body twitch through the last of the afterglow, and stroked his thigh as he descended to earth. Before he was aware of it, or nearly ready, Rodney’s eyes were on him, and for once – for once, and why did it have to be this goddamn moment in particular? For once, Rodney apparently found nothing to say, and they just watched each other.

And then Rodney’s hand was stroking the side of his face in an absurdly gentle gesture, just a thumb swiping his temple, and God, did he feel stupid, kneeling here on the carpet between Rodney’s knees. He opened his mouth to make some crack about it, but Rodney seemed to think he had opened his mouth for a different reason, because he lunged forward and kissed him.

Kissed him, and John froze, because, Christ. Kissed him. Slow and lazy and sensuous, like he was. . . like he didn’t know what. Only, after a few seconds, he seemed to clue in that John was not kissing him back, that he was stiff and unyielding and well, frankly, horrorstruck at what Rodney was doing. Rodney pulled back and frowned at him.

“What?”

John turned his face aside. “That’s just. .  not something I’m comfortable with.”

“Ah,” he said, and it was the perfect inverse of his previous “oh.” And then: “Well.” He pushed himself up from the sofa, easier now that John was sitting back on his haunches. He pulled at the blanket in a sorry attempt to straighten it. “Okay.” He nodded, like John had said something, chewing on his lips. “Right. Get some sleep, then.” And with that, he was gone, no more than a retreating line of overly straight back through the doorway.

John closed his eyes and swore viciously.



Unsurprisingly, Rodney had gone to the store when he woke up. There was even a helpful note stuck on the kitchen counter next to the coffeemaker: Gone to the store. Back soon. No time listed, though, and no whimsical flourishy R, like his notes over the past week had had.

So John poured himself some coffee, appropriated the paper, and sat down to wait. After a while he decided to go ahead and shower, and get dressed. There wasn’t much to do or anyplace he could go, really; Rodney had taken the car, which was a rental anyway. By noon it was clear Rodney wasn’t coming back anytime soon, and he began to get pissed off. He had hoped to stop by the SGC today, and the day was rapidly slipping away. Maybe he should just call a cab.

And what the hell was Rondey’s deal, anyway? Was he freaked out that they had fooled around? Pissed about that part at the end, with the not-kissing? That was the height of stupid, because it sure seemed to him that anyone who had just received a fairly competent blowjob, all things considered, had not much of a leg to stand on when it came to being pissed off.

He played around some on Rodney’s bookshelves, all carefully alphabetized, and a little frightening – Heidegger nestled next to Thomas Harris, Pushkin canoodling with Pynchon. He poked at the Russian books a little, then turned them upside down to see if they looked any better that way. He wondered if he could teach himself Cyrillic by deduction, got a piece of paper and a pencil from the kitchen, and began to make some notes. His head hurt like a bitch after about an hour of that, and he would have turned on the TV for some distraction, but Rodney had of course canceled his cable right before he moved to another galaxy, so no luck there.

Finally he curled up on the sofa with Gravity’s Rainbow, dozed off almost at once, and woke ravenously hungry. He heated up the Chinese from the other night and sat down to rifle through Rodney’s CDs, some of which surprised him, some of which shocked him, some of which made him spray his can of Coke across the room in laughter. He was deep in the stack of CDs when he heard the door slam – considered scrambling to his feet, thought better of it, and stretched out, carefully placing his grin to meet Rodney as he came through the door.

“Joan Baez?”

Rodney stopped abruptly, like he hadn’t really expected to see John, like he might have forgotten he was there. He frowned down at him. “What about it?”

“It’s just, you know, it seems to me you should tell me you’re a lesbian before I give you the world’s most spectacular blowjob, is all.”

Rodney crossed his arms. “Well, I wouldn’t say spectacular.”

“What, so I still don’t measure up to Ming?”

“Please. Aim a little lower than that, or you’ll set yourself up for disappointment. Heather Teague, she was my girlfriend from freshman year, she was pretty good.”

John tossed the CD on the pile and let the grin slide to a smirk. “So I’m in Heather Teague territory, is what you’re saying.”

Rodney came and sat on the floor beside him, looking at the wreckage of his living room. “Leave you alone for half a day, and look at the place,” he muttered.

“To quote a friend, bite me.” He yawned and stretched out his feet, wiggling them in their socks. “I’m bored as hell. What were you doing all this time?”

“Oh.” His eyes flicked quickly aside. “I might have stopped by the SGC for a bit. I, uh, didn’t mean it to take this long.”

“Really.”

“Oh, hey!” he said, brightening. “I have an idea. Let’s go mess with Elise’s things. We need to go pick up Maggie anyway. We could, um, reverse her sock and her underwear drawer. Fill her toothpaste tubes with corn starch. Or, you know, with whatever happens to be lying around the SGC labs.”

“Speaking of, how are things back at the ranch?”

“Fine, fine.” Rodney waved his hands. “The usual political crap going on, whatever. Jackson wasn’t there, and neither was Carter, just a bunch of new people I didn’t know and who, heh, obviously had not been fully briefed on minor, insignificant things like how to handle priceless Ancient artifacts and technology.”

“Well, I’m sure you set them straight.”

“Hmm.” Rodney tapped on his knee, seemingly at a loss. In the silence that followed John began stacking the CDs into interesting architectural features.

“So we have eight more days,” he said.

“Um, yes, I think that’s right. I didn’t see any posted change to the Daedalus schedule when I was—”

“Rodney.” He quieted him with a hand on his knee. “We should think about how we want to spend those eight days.”

It turned out Rodney could, in certain circumstances, go perfectly still. After a bit he said, “I think what you’re suggesting is a phenomenally bad idea.”

“No,” he shook his head. “It’s not. It’s an unbelievably bad idea. It’s the worst idea anyone has ever had. It’s a catastrophically bad idea.” He let his hand move up Rodney’s thigh, and circled his thumb.

“Okay. Um. About that. We should – I mean, I’m kind of curious – when did you become – that is, well, for lack of a better word, quite so, um, gay?” He squeaked a little on the last word, and John felt something chilled and leaden seep into the hollows of his lungs. So. It wasn’t the not-kissing that had Rodney freaked out, so much as the other. The guy thing. And if Rodney was freaked, that meant there would have to be talking. And talking meant acknowledgement, talking meant the cold light of day. He removed his hand.

“I’m not, you idiot. I just thought we could, you know, fool around.”

“Fool around.”

“Yeah.”

“And this is something you’ve done before, am I right?”

He scratched at his chest. “Not. . . exactly like this, no.” He took a breath. “Not with anyone whose name I actually knew, for instance.”

“Ah.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That was ‘ah’ as in, ‘ah, I knew the Spice Channel had it right.’”

He took another, deeper breath, aligned his weapons systems, met Rodney’s eyes, deployed. “I’d really like to suck you again.”

He could actually see the iris in Rodney’s eyes puddle into black, and he almost imagined he could see the blood draining his face to travel south. “Like I’m going to say no.”




He woke in the middle of the night to a panicked disorientation, and a sense of falling. He jerked awake, instantly on alert.

“John?” There was a hand on his shoulder, and a quiet voice. Not such a heavy sleeper as he had thought, then.

“’M all right.” He settled back down into the cradle of his own arms, heart still pounding. Maybe it was the wideness of the bed. After all those months on the narrow beds of Atlantis, and the last week on Rodney’s narrower couch, the bed was a bit too much. Too much space. “They won’t be fooled forever, you know.” In the dark, it was easier to say.

Behind him, he could hear Rodney turn over and flop onto his back. “No, they won’t.”

“They’re going to figure it out, sooner or later. That we’re not gone, that Atlantis still exists. They’ll be back.” He stared off into the pitch black.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Talk about your ocean view, but you have to admit, it’s pretty much the worst place in the known universe to live.”

He heard Rodney sigh. “If avoiding a probable and painful death is one of your priorities, then sure, yeah. I would have thought you would love it, with your suicide-mission-lust.”

“Stop it.” He raised his head at that, and turned his bleary eyes to Rodney’s outline in the dark. “Not fucking funny. How many of those jokes do you get to make, anyway? It’s not like I wanted to go, you know.”

The hand was upraised, and it landed on his shoulder again, more hesitantly this time. “I know.”

He burrowed his head into his arms again, his voice muffled. “It’s not like I have a death wish.”

“No,” Rodney said musingly. “I know you don’t. Trust me, I would be the one to know.”

John snorted. “Yeah, nothing wrong with your self-preservation instincts.”

“Well, not these days,” Rodney said into the dark, and in the silence that followed John raised his head again.

“Fuck no,” he said. “Tell me you never.” He found Rodney’s eyes in the dark, and was pleased to see there was no pretense at misunderstanding.

“I was much younger,” was all he said. “I’m fine now. It was – you know, just a very bad time, is all. I was – it was stupid. And anyway, it’s over, and, you know, they found me in time, pumped me out, whatever, so no harm done, really.”

“Jesus!” There was panic skittering in John’s chest now, and he edged up in the bed, fingers digging into Rodney’s shoulder. “You took pills?”

“Yes, and you took F-15s, so spare me.”

There was no answer to be made to that one, so he subsided. They were both awake, both quiet, lost in their own thoughts. “At least they paid me to fly the F-15s,” he muttered at last.

After a while he thought Rodney might be asleep. He raised his head to check and caught the motion of a blink. “You’re still awake.”

“Apparently.”

“You want me to go back to the sofa?”

“What? Why? Of course not, don’t be a moron. You give your host some nice orgasms, you get to share the actual bed.”

“Makes sense. And since we’re on the subject of orgasms—” he slid up and over, pressing against Rodney’s naked body. That part had kind of surprised him. He had kind of thought, when they were done with the fooling around part, that they would at least slip their boxers back on. But Rodney had moved to Naked Land and built a house there, and he wasn’t going to look like the prude. Plus, it had its advantages. “How about I give you some more of them?”

“Um. . .”

“Um? Um, is what you’re saying to me?”

“What I mean is, not that the blow jobs and all aren’t fantastic, but. . .”

Now he was sitting all the way up. “But what?”

“Well, I’m guessing that may be the sum total of your man-on-man experience, am I right?”

He scowled. “Sorry to be boring you, Jesus.”

“No! God, no!” Rodney grabbed at his wrist. “I was just thinking about doing some. . . other stuff, too.”

“Other stuff?”

“I was wondering if you wanted to fuck me, for instance.”

He swallowed and tried to speak at the same time, and ended up coughing in a very un-cool choking fit while Rodney slammed him on the back. “I’m fine,” he said weakly. “I told you, give a guy some warning. Do you just, I mean do you always open your mouth and say whatever you’re thinking? No no, don’t answer that.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“Hell yes, I want to fuck you,” he growled, and crawled on top of him. Crawled on top of him, like it was something he did every day, stretch himself naked on top of another naked guy, but man, did this feel good. He could feel Rodney’s awakening dick nudging at his pretty much completely awake, hello-did-someone-mention-fucking dick. Rodney’s arms curled around him and rested on his ass, which was also completely new, and it was all really nice until Rodney dug his fingers in and pressed their dicks even closer together, and then it shot from nice to holy-shit-must-come-now in three seconds flat.

“This is good, too,” Rodney said, his voice sounding strangled, and “Yeah,” John croaked, above him. Rodney was pushing up into him, making little thrusts, Rodney was fucking himself against his dick.

“Could be good this way – coming—unh, together,” Rodney breathed, and his eyes were wide and locked on John’s, and John rocked into him, grinding their dicks together in a way that should have been painful but really, really wasn’t. Rodney jerked underneath him.

“God!”

“Hold still.” He rocked into him some more, picking up a little speed. “You wanna do it this way?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna come on you.”

“Yeah. I’m gonna—come on you too.”

“Yeah. God.” John dropped his head at that, burying it in Rodney’s neck, and his hips jerked and rocked and “Yeah, yeah, come on,” Rondney was whispering in his ear, and possibly more things, too, but that was the end of what he heard because of the roar of blood in his ears as he came and came and came.




So basically, John got to spend his vacation in the 50s: guy stuff during the day, lots of sex for him at nights. There wasn’t anything for him to do at the SGC, and there wasn’t anyplace he had to be. Once, when he got off the phone with his sister, Rodney asked him (in what he must have imagined was a subtle way) if he wanted to call anybody, but John had just shrugged and shaken his head. During the days, they watched movies together, or played stupid games on Rodney’s computer, or went shopping for some of the more bizarre things on Rodney’s ever-lengthening to-get list.

“Cocoa butter? For what, your stretch marks?”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “Cocoa butter happens to be an excellent base for sunscreen. Put that back.”

John fingered the bright plastic bottles on the shelf, occasionally opening one to sniff. “People put a lot of strange shit on their bodies,” he mused.

“Oh, please. We could have brought another naquadah generator through the stargate, but no, it took two Marines to carry your hair products.”

The gray-haired woman behind the counter in bath and hosiery gave them a curious glance, and John elbowed Rodney, probably harder than he needed to. “Very smooth, Agent 99.”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “I’m not sure Mrs. Philbert there is a threat to national security. Besides, I’ve been arguing for years that declassification of the program is the only way to go. I mean, what, seriously, are they thinking, keeping this kind of information from the public this long? Sure, it was fine when we were talking about some isolated teams going offworld, and sure, there was the whole Goa’uld threat, I can see how you don’t want  imminent planetary destruction at the hands of soul-sucking aliens to hit the pages of Newsweek and start a panic, but at a certain point, when we’re talking about a permanent base in another galaxy –”

“Oh hey, look at this!” John broke in, frantic. “This says it contains glycerin, propylene glycol, AND dimethicone! This is the one, for sure!” He plastered a manic grin on his face and steered Rodney firmly away from the bath and beauty products. “What the fucking hell,” he ground out, digging his fingers into Rodney’s arm to the point of what he hoped was pain. “Are you insane?”

He snatched the cocoa butter. “You really need to get a handle on your tendency to over-react, Colonel. Oh, wow.” He stopped dead in front of a markdown candy display. “Oh, the purple ones, those are the best.” He exhaled in a way that before this week, John would have said were sex noises. Now, of course, he knew that the kind of noises Rodney made in sex were low and guttural, not these high, breathy sounds at all, and wasn’t it just the icing on the cake that the very thought of that – of Rodney McKay’s sex noises – had him getting hard in the candy and seasonals at Walgreen’s. Rodney was busy throwing purple Peeps and Cadbury crème eggs into the cart he had commandeered – hell, he was practically stuffing them under his jacket – and in further disturbing proof that their minds were thinking exactly alike, he said in a distinctly carrying voice:

“Oh, hey! We should get some condoms!”

John closed his eyes and willed himself back in any number of life-threatening situations, even the ones that involved nuclear explosions. The gum-chewing girl at the photo counter looked up from flipping through her magazine to watch them in an idle, interested way.

“Later, McKay,” he murmured.

“What? Why? We’re here now. Unless you’ve changed your mind? About what we talked about?”

“Could you lower your goddamn voice?”

“I will not lower my voice. You know, when the Nebraska comes out in you, it’s really unattractive. Now stop being so uptight and go pick us out some nice shiny rubbers. Oh, and maybe some lube?” he called out to John’s retreating back, which might have been heading for either the pharmacy or the emergency exit.




He figured the video store was safe enough; McKay wanted to replenish his own movie supply as well as rent stuff for them for the next few days, so John trailed after him as he wandered through the wide fluorescent aisles at Blockbuster. McKay’s ability to shop for hours without flagging was, he supposed, unsurprising; he had never seen him do anything by halves.

He flipped through the half-price bin up front – the usual assortment of John Hughes movies, Steven Seagal flicks, and general unwatchables thrown in together. There were some older movies, too, 50s and 60s stuff. His eyes brightened at the little clutch of weird sci-fi, and was that—

“THX 1138?!” Rodney exclaimed over his shoulder, grabbing at it. “This is in their half-price bin? My God, you’re right, the public is too stupid for declassification, if this is what they’re rejecting. Give me that.”

“Hey, back off, I saw it first, Mr. Greedy McGreedypants.” Rodney’s eyebrow arched at him, and he shrugged. “It’s, um, what my mother used to call me when—you know what, never mind. Oh, man,” he said. “Check this out. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Man oh man. Audrey Hepburn in that black dress, with the thingie. . . we have to get this.”

McKay was smirking at him. “And you were worried I was being gay in public.” But John was wrapped up in reading the movie jacket.

“I really really love this movie,” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing it in English.”

“Excuse me?”

“I was at this hospital in Germany, all they had was this one movie channel with old American movies dubbed into German. Breakfast at Tiffany’s almost twenty-four seven. Come on,” he said, tossing it in Rodney’s handbasket. “You ready?”

They paid for their stuff and drove home in companionable silence, and Rodney didn’t speak until they were pulling into the driveway. “This hospital in Germany,” he said quietly. “It wouldn’t happen to have been Landstuhl, by any chance?”

John looked out the window. “It was an operation over Khost that went bad, and I got caught in the middle, went down in some land mines, along with some other guys. Mainly just shrapnel and abrasions. We looked more messed up than we really were – well, most of us. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Uh-huh. Because they evacuate people who aren’t critically wounded to Landstuhl all the time,” Rodney said, unbuckling his seat belt. And then: “Dubbed into German?”

“Yeah. I think I might have missed a couple of crucial plot points, what with not speaking German and all. Do you speak German?”

“Enough to know that puddle jumper, in German, is Pfützenhüpfer. Think about that next time you decide to name something on your own, flyboy,” he said as he clambered out. “Come on, get that other bag behind you, make yourself useful.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” John sighed, but his heart wasn’t in it enough to really bitch; he was just grateful that Rodney, surprisingly, had the occasional gift for knowing when to let something drop.

They unloaded their purchases in the kitchen, and Rodney ticked off what they had against the master list of what they had yet to buy, and John watched him for a minute, bemused. Then he crossed the kitchen, gently took the shopping list out of Rodney’s hands and the pencil from out of his mouth, and pushed aside the mountain of cocoa butter and purple Peeps.

“What? What are you—?”

And then he put his hands on either side of McKay’s face, gripping him – because damned if he was quite sure, on a guy, where the hands were supposed to go for this – and lowered his lips to McKay’s, which were already open with surprise. He had meant it to be a soft closed-mouth kiss, but the fact of McKay’s already open mouth made that impossible, and with no difficulty at all he slipped his tongue inside, just for a quick swipe, a taste. Rodney’s tongue was there to meet his, pushing against him, practically chewing at him in what he would have called horrible technique had it not been so damn sexy his balls were already tightening. McKay tasted exactly like McKay, and he realized with a jolt that beneath the toothpaste and whatever biochemically scouring mouthwash McKay used, he could still taste himself, the faint scent of sex and come and skin. He gave a little groan at that and leaned in further, shivering when Rodney’s hand came up to rest on the back of his neck. Rodney had the occasional gift for knowing where to put his hands, too.

He pulled back and rested his forehead on Rodney’s, Athosian-style, and Rodney’s breath gusted his face when he spoke, his voice gone low the way John liked it.

“Careful,” he said. “We might give ourselves the wrong idea.”

John stroked a thumb on the side of his face, eyes still closed. “I think I’m done being careful.”

“That’s what worries me.” Rodney pulled John’s mouth down and into his again, and for long minutes there was nothing in the kitchen but the ticking of the oven clock and the noise of lips-hands-mouth. Finally John pulled back, holding Rodney in place by the shoulders, getting his breathing under control.

“What?”

“You know,” he frowned. “People don’t eat the purple ones for a reason.”




They were getting pretty good at the climbing-on-top-of-each-other-until-they-came thing, John thought. Sometimes they mixed it up with the roll-around-together-until-they-came thing. He didn’t tell Rodney what happened inside his chest, though, when Rodney got him pinned under his greater mass, when Rodney was lying on top of him, looking down at him with those dark-fanned eyes that God, dismantled him. Because it felt good in all the ways he suspected it shouldn’t, being in bed with someone whose biceps were broader than his own, whose shoulders shadowed and dwarfed his. It felt good to reach up and grab those shoulders, dig his fingers in, feel those arms sliding around him, rough and hungry. No, he suspected it said nothing good about him, that he felt those things, that he liked them. It said nothing good about him that he didn’t give a shit what it said about him.

“Yeah,” he said, when Rodney rolled them.

“You like that.”

“Yeah.”

Rodney shifted, bringing their dicks into better alignment. “Don’t come, okay?”

John raised his head. “Um. Okay.”

Rodney slid off him and flopped beside him, but on his stomach. He turned his head and met John’s eyes. “I don’t want you to come because I want you to come inside me.”

John’s throat constricted with want and something else, and he gathered the something else must have been plain on his face, because Rodney was smirking at him. “You’ve never done anything like this before, have you?”

“What? Of course I have. I’ve, you know, I’ve been pretty adventurous in bed, I’ll have you know. I’ve done all sorts of kinky stuff.”

“Really.” Rodney propped his head on his arm. “Name one.”

“Well, I—” he narrowed his eyes at Rodney’s smug expression. “Bondage.”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “By which you mean, you once let a girlfriend tie your wrists to the headboard with a necktie, right?”

“Hey. It was a lot kinkier than that.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It was—the straps from my flight jacket. I don’t actually own a tie.”

“You’re an animal.”

“Yeah? Like what, like you’re Hugh Hefner. It’s not like you’ve done this before, either.”

Rodney shrugged, or as near as he could propped on one arm. “Sure I have.”

Just like that, all the moisture in John’s mouth evaporated. “You have not.”

“It’s not like it’s a big deal or something, though obviously you’ve just escaped from the set of Witness, because you apparently think it is. And no, of course I haven’t done it with another guy, but evidently I’ve dated more imaginative women than Miss Flight Jacket. What, you mean to tell me you’ve never even played around there at all? You haven’t—” he broke off, and his eyes lit up. “Yes, yes, okay, yeah, all right. Roll over.”

“What? Why? I thought you were the one—”

“Just shut up and do it, okay? Look, just—” he raised a hand, dropped it. “Just trust me, okay?”

John sighed and flipped over, rolling his eyes. His hard-on had deflated a little, so it wasn’t as uncomfortable as it might have been. He craned his neck enough to catch sight of Rodney pulling down the blankets and crawling up between his legs.

“McKay, I don’t mean to disappoint you here, but I’m not really sure this is my thing, you know? I mean—”

“Shut up and trust me.”

So he shut up for the moment, and pillowed his head on his arms as Rodney ran small kisses up and down his back, then began kissing his tailbone, and his ass cheeks. He sighed. Rodney’s voice, when he spoke, was warm against his backside.

“You know you are the worst bisexual ever? In like, the history of the known universe?”

And that really did shut him up, because God. Bisexual? He blinked in shock, not finding any sort of retort for that. And it might have been on the tip of his tongue to find one, but at that exact moment the tip of Rodney’s tongue began to flick along the part of his ass cheeks, and he jumped. Rodney’s steadying hand came down on his ass with unexpected firmness, and in another embarrassing revelation, he felt himself harden at that. He opened his mouth, this time definitely to say something, what are you doing, hey hold on there, if I’d known, I might have been more careful in the shower, but his words became a strangled gasp as Rodney’s tongue dove deeper into his cleft.

“Oh—Rodney—what—”

Rodney’s tongue was just going on a happy little journey up and down, and every time he got closer to—to there, John instinctively flinched, clenching up. Rodney had stopped talking, and that in itself was disturbing. But then again, Rodney’s mouth was kind of busy, because it oh oh oh. Something broad and warm and rough dragged itself across his ass, no, across his asshole, and the noise that came out of his own mouth could only have been called a sob.

Jesus Christ.

The tongue licked and laved and swirled and hell, painted a picture, for all he knew, flicking the rim of his asshole, teasing it, stroking it. Rodney McKay, tonguing his asshole. It felt. . . it didn’t even feel like it could be a tongue, it felt so good. It felt impossible, only wet and wide and oh. He let himself push back into it, just a little, and in response, the tongue dipped inside him, only a little, but enough to break him. He cried out, not caring what his voice sounded like.

“Jesus fuck—”

The steadying hand was back on his ass, and the tongue for the moment was gone. In its place came something else, and it was a sign of how far unraveled he was that he didn’t get what it was for a minute, didn’t get that Rodney was swirling a finger around his asshole.

“It’s good, isn’t it,” came Rodney’s voice, husky, pressed against his ass cheek. “Some people can come from this alone, just this much. I know I can.”

And something snapped loose in his gut at the thought of that, of it being Rodney stretched out like this, reduced to this, Rodney coming on the mattress as he tongue-fucked Rodney’s ass. The finger chose that moment to press just inside him, and he jumped.

“Hold still.”

He didn’t even know what to say, didn’t even know what to ask for. At that moment, the whole normal locate-objective, achieve-objective dynamic of sex came apart, and he wasn’t even sure what it was Rodney was after.

“Bear down.”

He could feel the flush streak him from hair to toe, as it dawned on him what Rodney was asking. But Rodney was saying it in that voice, the low intent one, and so he did, and oh man. Oh man, Rodney’s finger wriggled just a bit more in him, and fucking hell did not stop wriggling, just moved back and forth a little, and he couldn’t take it anymore. He cocked his leg up a little higher, pulled his knee underneath him to give his dick a little more room, to get his hand under him.

“Come on John, fuck yourself. Fuck yourself and let me watch, yeah, come on.”

And he was, he completely was. Forward a little, then back onto Rodney’s hand-finger-whatever-it-is, forward into his own hand wrapped around his leaking dick. He was finding a rhythm, catching it, holding it. Rodney’s fingers – he thought it was fingers, but he couldn’t be sure, maybe it was still just the one – kept moving, and then they shifted, pushing forward just a little, and—

“Ahh!”

“This is me fucking you,” and it helped a little that Rodney’s voice sounded as unstrung as his own, quavering, even. “Can you feel me fucking your gorgeous ass, oh yeah John, that’s it yes—”

Electricity was sparking up and down his dick now, from inside his dick, like something inside him was on fire, so fucking fucking good, and oh Christ, he could see Rodney jacking himself clumsily back there with his free hand, Rodney was going to come, and the hand inside was pounding him now, pounding that electric spot behind his dick fast and hard, and of a sudden something wet was there too. Something wet, and he knew it was Rodney’s tongue, that Rodney’s tongue was curling around his hole even as he finger-fucked him, and he broke.

“Ji—fu—agh—haaaa,” he thought he might have been saying, and his head tucked underneath him could see his dick spitting onto the sheets, could see Rodney’s hand in him. It ripped his orgasm in two, exploded it, that he could feel himself clenching around Rodney’s fingers, God, he had had no idea that was what happened, but it was like coming from inside, if that made any sense, and he knew it didn’t, knew none of this made any sense, knew it even as he keeled forward, collapsed.

Behind him, he could feel Rodney’s weight shift on the bed. There was a new and not-so-pleasant sensation in his ass now, as Rodney slowly twisted and slid his fingers out. Watch it, he tried to say, but higher brain systems were definitely not back on line yet.

“You okay?” Rodney’s voice was not quite like any Rodney-voice he’d ever heard.

“Yeah,” he managed. “My, erf, face broke my fall.”

“Good to know,” Rodney panted. “John, God, I have to come, I have to come now, don’t move.”

He had no idea what Rodney wanted to do, but he knew exactly what he wanted. He hitched himself up a little bit from his sprawl, reached two hands around him, and spread his ass cheeks, spread his hole open for Rodney.

“Jesus, John,” he whimpered, “Fuck—” There was a confused moment when John didn’t quite know what he was doing back there, because he was leaning forward a bit, grabbing at one of John’s hands, then the sheets, and then it hit him, and if he hadn’t already emptied his balls of come, he would have come right there, from Rodney using his come to coat himself. He was so relaxed, so undone and reassembled that his body gave no more than a grunt, an exhalation as Rodney’s dick slid all the way up his ass. And man, that should have hurt like a motherfucker, and probably if he hadn’t been five seconds post-orgasm he would have been clinging shrieking to the ceiling right now, but as it was, he just let his head drop forward onto his hands and gave in to the motion of Rodney’s hips forward, forward, forward.

“Oh—can’t—sorry,” Rodney sobbed, and there was hot and wet spilling in his asshole, he could actually feel Rodney’s dick jerking and pulsing in him, he could feel Rodney pumping him with come. His knees started to give a little, and they tumbled down together, a sweaty messy come-y heap.

“Rodney,” he tried, a few minutes later, or maybe an hour or so, who knew. “Rodney.”

“Mm?”

“It’s—that’s not feeling so good anymore.”

“Oh, shit, sorry.” He raised himself up on his hands, and John was alarmed to feel most of his internal organs preparing to slide out with Rodney’s dick.

“Ah! Watch—”

“Sorry, God, okay, sorry—” Rodney landed to his side. The room was quieter than he had ever known it.

“Oh my God. John.”

“Mmm.”

“John, I’m so fucking sorry, God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean for that to happen, but you—and I—oh, hell.” He covered his face with his hands.

John tried to piece together what Rodney was freaking out about. “Hey. Rodney. Give me something to go on, here. Is this—what’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter?” And there it was, there was the edge of hysteria that John knew. This, at least, was familiar territory.

“We are so screwed, I can’t believe I—”

“Hey.” John poked him with a stern finger. “Don’t talk to me about screwed.”

Rodney dropped his hands at that, and gave him a wide incredulous look. John let his face split into a grin.

“Oh, you—you’re unbelievable, you know that? You’re just—” Rodney rolled onto his side, facing John, but John could see the laughter that he was busy flattening into a smirk. “I cannot believe you said that.”

“Sure you can.”

“John.” A heavy, hesitant hand landed on his back. “I’m sorry. That isn’t how I meant to do that. In my head, it was going to be much—well, much suaver. A little less with the, you know, the—” he waved his hand vaguely, approximating a motion John was glad not to be able to decipher.

“Jesus, Rodney, could you lay off? You’re making me feel like a girl here.”

Rodney lay back down at that, and John watched him watching the ceiling. “No, you don’t,” he said quietly. “You definitely don’t feel like a girl.”

“Ba-dum dum.”

“Could you be serious for one moment here? I’m trying to say—I mean, we really shouldn’t have—I wasn’t careful—”

“Rodney,” he said into the mattress. “Stop it. I’m clean, I know for a fact you’re clean, the US military has been over us with a fine-tooth comb and we both know it. Can we not agonize over that? Because this is not really how I want to spend what is possibly the best afterglow of my life.”

Rodney subsided. After a minute his hand wandered down to rest limply on the swell of John’s backside. “The best, really?” His voice was smaller and entirely more Rodney-like.

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

Rodney rolled again and scooted closer. He started doing something with John’s ear that would probably have to be called nuzzling. John turned his face to meet the lips that were at the moment wrapped around his earlobe, but Rodney shied, ever so slightly.

“Hey. Thought we were over that.”

“Well. Some people might have an issue with kissing at this point, considering where—”

“You have got to be so damn nuts,” he said warmly into Rodney’s neck, “if you think that’s something I care about right now. Shut up and come here.”

This time, he got to do the hand-curled-around-the-back-of-the-neck thing, which was nice, and he got to push Rodney down on the pillow and sink his mouth into him, which was nice too. Rodney’s hand was doing this slow up and down his back thing, and that was even nicer. Rodney’s tongue having been up his ass was just one more thing not to care about, and frankly, John was having a little trouble keeping up with that list.




Rodney and Carson got to handpick the new members of their expanded teams, but John’s team had been handed to him, a stack of personnel folders to peruse two days before they left. Not that base commanders were usually deprived of all say in the matter, but it was clear enough to John that no one had been expecting him to be base commander. Those names had been chosen by someone else, in a room he hadn’t been in. The brass at the SGC had a bagful of little slights like that one for him. He wondered who it had been, the general or colonel they’d been hoping to hand the command to; Elizabeth wasn’t about to let it slip, though doubtless she knew.

Other than Lorne, he’d never laid eyes on any of them, and he really wanted to be able to match faces to names by the time they got back to Atlantis. So the Thursday before they left, he rode in to Cheyenne Mountain with Rodney, and spent the day in a tiny metal room with green plastic chairs, holed up with the files, making notes to himself. He noticed that they had assigned a fair number of women, this time, and that made him roll his eyes; stupid sexist brass, it was so typical of them – send the guys in first to secure the place and make it safe for the little ladies. He entertained a brief but highly entertaining  fantasy of General Lard-Ass Landry going toe-to-toe with Teyla. Now don’t let me hurt you, missie. . .

For lunch, he had peanut M&M’s from the vending machine down the hall, chased with Mountain Dew. He could have gone to the commissary, but he might have gotten roped into conversations he didn’t feel like having, about the Wraith, about the siege, about the hard knot in his chest that was the loss of Ford. Maybe not, though; no one at the SGC had shown a whole lot of inclination to chat him up, or really even to acknowledge his existence. Which was fine by him; the place gave him the creeps, anyway.

By two o’clock, he was bored and ready to head back to Rodney’s place. He called him on his cell and grinned to hear the sigh of exasperation in his, “McKay here.”

“McKay,” he groaned. “I’m bored. Bust me outta here.”

“Well, that’s great for you, Major, but some of us have actual work to do, and actual idiots to train, and actual morons who want to argue particle physics with me instead of just accepting that, what do you know, turns out everything they thought they knew about the way the universe is put together just flew out the window, and my God, the idiocy. I mean, it’s like they can’t accept that my qualification for heading the science division is not that I completed 8th grade biology. Not that biology is an apt example of a real science, I’m just saying—”

“Breathe, McKay. And it’s Colonel.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Look, sounds like you’re gonna be busy for a while. Why don’t I just take a car from the motor pool and head back? You come on when you’re ready.”

“Sure, fine, whatever, just—” and the line went dead. He smiled, wondering how many new members of the science division were wishing they had run in the other direction when the SGC recruiter first knocked on their cubicle doors.

As it turned out, he didn’t end up taking a car from the motor pool. He couldn’t find anyone who could tell him where the sergeant in charge of the motor pool had gone, and after he’d spent forty minutes chasing his last known co-ordinates around the SGC, he was ready to throttle the man with his bare hands and beat him with a hubcap, for good measure. On his way to his latest tip, supply room BX7, he barreled right into Colonel Carter, one of the few members of SGC he did actually recognize, and who had seemed friendly enough. She had no idea about the motor pool, of course, but when he explained why he needed the car, she offered to drive him herself, and though he opened his mouth to refuse – no no don’t bother, that’s fine, don’t worry about it – he found himself taking her up on it, just for the chance to get the hell out of this place.

He didn’t remember until they were in her car and driving back to town that this must be Colonel Blonde Astrophysicist, the one Rodney had gone so dreamy about, whenever anyone mentioned her. So in between making polite conversation, he checked her out, and yeah, he could see Rodney’s point.

“So,” she said, as she turned off the highway. “You survived ten months of Rodney McKay.”

His smile was strained; it wasn’t the first time he’d heard someone from the SGC say McKay’s name in that tone of voice. Probably the same tone they used to say “John Sheppard.”

“Yeah, I survived it,” he agreed. “And I’m not sure I would have survived ten days without him there.”

“Oh? So McKay’s been handy to have around?”

He thought of Rodney, wired and strung-out, staying up thirty-one hours to keep them alive and the Wraith at bay; of Rodney, grabbing a Beretta and emptying it into anything that twitched; Rodney, stepping through alien force fields, ducking poison spears, and wiring naquadah filaments together with his teeth, if it meant keeping them alive five hours, five minutes, five seconds longer. Of a sudden he really disliked this woman and her smug, mildly sneering voice. He turned and looked out the window so he wouldn’t be tempted to unload on her. “Yeah, you might say that.”

Apparently she was more perceptive than he had given her credit for, because the smug was gone from her voice when she spoke next. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just – none of us would have pegged Rodney McKay as someone who, well. . .” she trailed off tactfully.

“I think,” John said stiffly, “that you and I probably know different people.”

She didn’t say anything for another block or so. “I think that’s probably the case,” she said at last. “And I think that’s probably my loss,” she added, which made him instantly rearrange his dislike.

“Yes, it is.”

She slowed as they neared the intersection. “I know what that’s like, you know.”

“Oh?” he said, though he wasn’t quite sure what she was talking about.

“Going offworld, being part of a team like that. It. . . it changes the way you look at people, sure, but it also changes you, changes them, the people around you. And that bond, what you’ve been through together – no one else can really understand it, can come close even. It’s. . . well, it’s closer than family.”

“Yeah,” was all he could think to say.

She looked at him curiously. “I’m glad it’s like that, for the Atlantis team. You guys have been through the wringer.”

He snorted, thinking what a quaint way that was to put it, what had happened to all of them. “That’s an understatement.”

“I just bet it is. We’ve all read the reports, of course, and the data you sent through, we got all that, but that doesn’t begin to tell us what it was like. Remind me, is it this building, or the next one? I never can remember.”

“Right up there. Just pull in,” he said, and then it occurred to him, belatedly, that he hadn’t needed to give her any directions to McKay’s place, and what that might say, but she was already smiling.

“Ah, that’s right, now I remember. Here we go. Rodney is the worst person ever about owning a car – his always used to be in the shop, or he’d done something awful to it, drove it into a storm drain or something. He was always calling me to give him a ride, though that may have just been—” she broke off. “Well. I’m glad we got to spend a little time together, Colonel.”

“Yeah, me too,” he answered, and meant it. He held out his hand. “I appreciate the ride, Colonel.”

“Don’t mention it. And if I don’t see you before you ship out, take care out there, all right?”

“Sure thing,” he said, slamming the car door shut behind him.

In the apartment, he dozed on the sofa, letting the cat use his chest as a pillow. He wasn’t usually one for napping in the day, but his nights had been kind of full of late, and he wasn’t surprised when he snapped awake to find the sun on its way down and the front door clicking shut. “Hey,” he said, groggily craning his neck up.

“Hey,” Rodney replied, heading straight to the kitchen without a glance at him. John deposited the cat on the floor and padded after him.

“Bad day at the office, honey?”

“Oh, you know,” Rodney said, riffling through the stack of papers he had been carrying. “Let’s just say my day didn’t get any better. And um, speaking of that. We should probably, that is, I think we should talk.”

John leaned on the counter, still fuzzed with the heaviness of his nap, too tired to worry about the tension in Rodney’s voice. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “I was going to clean the house and have your drink all ready for you, but it just seemed like the day to have that second Valium.”

Rodney didn’t look up, or even smile. Hell, he didn’t look like he had even heard; he was busy tapping his thumb against the edge of a manila envelope and looking anywhere but at John.

“Rodney? What’s up?”

He did look up, then, and his mouth had that turn it got when things were bad, when the shields were failing, when there were incoming Darts, when the clip had just fallen out of his Beretta. John gave an inward smile; Rodney didn’t know he knew about that, of course, and he would never let on.

“Something happen at the SGC? Other than the idiots, I mean?”

“What? Oh. Um, no, nothing to do with—with work. It’s just—” he ducked his head again, and now John was starting to get worried. Rodney’s hands came up, like he was outlining a schematic. “Look. I’m not sure—” he stopped. “I didn’t see a motor pool car out front.”

“Yeah, I ran into Colonel Carter, and she drove me. Nice lady. Said to give you her regards. McKay, what’s up? You look like hell.”

“Colonel Carter drove you here? Sam? Are you nuts?”

“Uh, well, I didn’t ask her if she would be so kind as to drive me back to your apartment so you and I could have lots of kinky gay sex, if that’s what you’re worried about. Jeez, loosen up.”

“But did you tell her why you were—” he waved his hands in front of him. “Forget it, never mind, not important. Look.” He took a breath, and John’s frown deepened. “Look. What I was trying to say  was—I mean, I’m not sure—I don’t think I can continue to do this.” His voice slowed on the last words in a way that left no room for misunderstanding.

And yet, John did. For a minute, he actually did not know what McKay was talking about. Continue. . . to work for the SGC? Continue to train the idiots? Continue to live in Atlantis? And then, of course, his brain landed on the right one, but still, all he ended up with was, “What?”

Rodney put his hands down. “I’m sorry. This is not something I can do. Apparently, it’s not. I’m really sorry.” He licked his lips, shifted. “I—I thought I could, that this. . .” He hung his head. “I want to be Mr. Cool-With-It, I really really do, I want to be what, what you clearly need me to be, I want for this not to be bothering me, but it is, and it does, and I, I, I think we made a mistake, is all. I’m sorry.”

“You’re—what?”

This time, Rodney did not reply; he just stood there and let the words sink in, let them work. He cocked his head at the kitchen faucet as though it might be about to say something, and John had an absurd desire to turn and look, too. Then he realized that of course, Rodney was just trying to avoid looking at him, and that was the moment he actually got it.

“I think it would be best if you went to a hotel.” He stuck his hand in the manila envelope he had been worrying, and pulled out a silver key with a large blue plastic tag attached. The tag read Holiday Inn. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “This is just more than I can deal with. You’re right to be really quite angry with me, I completely understand that, I do, you’re right. It’s just. . . I just can’t,” he finished, dejectedly, and put the key with its tag on the counter. “I got you a room at the Holiday Inn, though, and it’s, um, it’s really quite nice, their. . . the pool is heated and everything.”

John just blinked at him. Heated pool? He squinted at Rodney like he had a hard time seeing him, like there was a fog or something, like he couldn’t quite make out what it was he was supposed to be seeing. Except, of course, he did see it.

He stepped forward and picked up the key with its big blue plastic tag. He stepped to the sink and dropped it down the gaping black drain. He reached over and flipped the switch on the disposal and let the metal and plastic shred the rotors, let the awful grind and roar fill the kitchen. He didn’t bother to flip off the switch. And then he walked out and began gathering his things.



He ended up at the LaQuinta over on Geyser, partly because that was the only one he knew, and partly because it wasn’t too far from the SGC. Rodney had stayed in the kitchen while he had stashed things in his duffel, and then he had called the cab company and waited out front. If it wasn’t so pathetic, it might have been laughable.

At the hotel, he lay back on the scratchy nylon bedspread and stared at the ceiling. There were a number of things he could do: throw up, go for a run, curl into a ball, get drunk, jerk off, order a movie. If he budgeted his time, he might even be able to do them all. They would all require some effort, though, and that was just the thing he didn’t have to give. He was empty, utterly hollow.

“Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard,” he said to the sprinkler attachment on the ceiling. “Fighter pilot.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Intergalactic base commander. Teenage girl.” The sprinkler did not reply. “Film at eleven.”

After about an hour of that, he decided to unpack. It was military reflex, and he found, as he often had before, that the mindless action the military could instill—the ability to keep moving when  there was nothing inside of you—was a comforting thing. He folded his three clean shirts and put them in the bottom right drawer of the crappy dresser. He rolled his socks and put them in the top right drawer. He laid the contents of his dop kit on the bathroom counter in neat symmetry, then scrambled them and re-ordered them alphabetically by product name. It was when he was shaking out his dirty clothes, prior to carefully folding them, too, so as to take up less room in the cavernous drawers, that the card fluttered out.



Charles, it turned out, was an all right guy.

“I’m in graphic design, but that’s just to pay the bills,” he said, when John asked him what he did for a living. “What I actually want to do is design gaming software. I’ve got some programs already completed, I’ve been shopping them around now – got some pretty good nibbles, so who knows. How about yourself?”

“Oh, I’m—” he had been all poised for a lie, then thought, what the hell. Like it made a difference. “I’m in the Air Force.”

Charles choked into his beer at that one. “Really? That’s – gosh, that’s pretty surprising.”

John cocked a brow at him.

“Surprising because most military guys I know are assholes, and you really don’t seem like you are.”

“Oh, wait till you know me better.”

“I’m looking forward to that,” he said, and as he leaned back to call for the tab, his ankle brushed John’s foot, and he thought, well here we go then.



Fucking Charles was not terribly difficult, if not terribly arousing, either. There were some parts he could have done without; Charles, it turned out, was a grunter, and John found himself wondering how women put up with it, all those male sex noises. Also, John liked to think of himself as a pretty fit guy, pretty buff, all things considering, but Charles was a whole other level of buff, and yeah, that was a bit intimidating.

But he got through it okay, and even went with the kissing, which was okay. For a while there, he wasn’t sure he would be able to come, and that was okay, too – Charles was apparently impressed by his stamina, and just kept driving him on, encouraging him, grunting ridiculous things. This would go a lot faster if you would just shut the hell up, he had the urge to grab his face and say, but he didn’t, of course. Instead, he closed his eyes and lost himself in an elaborate fantasy involving a naked Elizabeth and a DHD console. Her breasts were warm underneath his hands, just filling them, her heels hard against his ass as he slid into her sweet wet clench; come on John, yeah yeah that’s it yeah, this is what I’ve been waiting for. He switched to Teyla for a while, because that one with Teyla and the sticks had always worked well, but it was back to Elizabeth for the home stretch, and he came with a sputter and a groan that finally, finally drowned out Charles’s.

“Oh, that was incredible,” Charles said while John rolled the condom down his still-twitching dick and tied it off. “You’re amazing.”

“Yeah. That was. . . that was something else.”

“You know.” Charles rolled over and propped himself on his side, and all John could think was, hell, he’s a talker. “I thought there had to be some mistake, that night in the bar.”

He froze. “Mistake?”

“I mean, guys like you? You just didn’t exactly ping my gaydar. I thought for sure you had to be straight.”

“Oh,” John said, absurdly gratified. “Well, I’m.” He tried out the word. “I’m bi.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that,” Charles said, and there was a wry note in his voice that made John think, hell, in another time and place, he might have even liked Charles.

“Not such a homebody after all?” was all Charles had said when  he had called him up, and John had laughed grimly. Not tonight, he had replied, and Charles had been kind enough – or eager to get laid enough – that he hadn’t brought the subject up again.



He hadn’t meant to stay the night at Charles’s admittedly quite nice apartment, but here again, he was unsure of the etiquette. Was he expected to get dressed and quietly show himself out? But almost immediately after sex, Charles had rolled over and done a human log imitation, one arm thrown across John, which, okay, was weird, but better than being ignored entirely, he guessed. He sat there in the bed for a while, thinking how really, what he wanted to do was call up every woman he had ever dated – everyone he had ever taken out to dinner and taken home for sex afterwards – and apologize.

The quiet of the darkened apartment was unbearable. In the quiet and the stillness, thoughts were possible, and thinking was what he could not afford. Thinking might cause the slow bleed in his intestines to turn into something worse. Anger – if he could just locate some anger, that would be good. Because, what the hell? What the hell had happened in Rodney’s head, that he had thought – God, the humiliation of it.

There was a lot to be pissed about, he could see that, objectively. He just couldn’t seem to generate any of it. He couldn’t seem to generate any emotion, and that worried him. That had happened to him once or twice before, in combat situations, but massive blood loss had tended to be happening at the same time. Well, he thought, rolling over and giving up. Maybe this wasn’t so different after all.



Charles, thank God, was an early riser, and had no problem swinging John back by his hotel at 6:30 the next morning. He was angling for more time together, John could see that, but all it took was a little adjustment of the truth – sorry, shipping out later today, I’ll call when I’m back in town – for him to drop it. It wasn’t so far from the truth, either, since he had just the one more night. But he really needed some more time with those files at the SGC, and there was some last minute equipment check to do, and right now he just wanted to throw himself back into being Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard, and forget that John had ever existed.

He extended his hand as Charles pulled into the parking lot. “Listen,” he said. “I had a great time.”

Charles gave a slow, tentative smile. “It was great, John. Really great.” And then he leaned in like maybe he was going for a kiss, and John pulled back quickly.

“Okay, so, thanks for the ride,” he said hastily, and made it out the door and a couple of feet towards the building before he saw Rodney, who was white and still and leaning against his car with his arms crossed, doing nothing but watching him.

John kept his walk steady and his eyes forward. “McKay,” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Rodney didn’t answer at once, but John could see his throat working. He turned abruptly, and John thought he was just going to get back in his car and drive away, but he didn’t. He just stood there, bracing his hands on his car, his head down, like he might be trying to breathe.

“You didn’t answer your cell, and I’ve left God knows how many messages,” he said. His voice was small and hard, compressed somehow. “Do you have any idea how many hotels in the area I had to call before I found the right one? Do you? And then God forbid they give me your room number, no, I have to come down here and flash every government ID I have to get even that much out of the little power-tripping pimple-faced desk clerk, who, you know, barely had time to spare to do his fucking job what with running the League of Aryan Bellhops meeting, and then I pounded on your door for half an hour and the nice Korean drug dealers in 217 were really not very understanding, I have to say.” He pushed off from the car and turned to face him again, and Charles began to pull out of the parking lot, moving a bit slowly—watching in his rearview mirror, no doubt. John tightened his jaw. The urge to run Rodney over with something heavy had never been stronger in his life. Rodney spared a glance for the retreating tail-lights. “And please, that is the most ridiculous car I have ever seen. Is he trying to advertise his inadequate penis size?”

“Was there something you wanted?”

“There’s been a change in the Daedalus schedule, which you would know if you had kept your cell with you the way you’re supposed to. We ship out today at 1400.”

“1400? What happened to tomorrow at 1700?”

He sighed elaborately and rolled his eyes. “Call the SGC yourself if you’re so curious. I have better things to do, you know,” Rodney said, as he turned and wrenched his car door open.

“Evidently not, if you’re tracking me down here to hand-deliver messages. Now get out of my way, I have to go shower.”

“I should think so.” He ran a glance down John, who was uncomfortably aware he was taking in everything from yesterday’s clothes to the beard-burn on the side of his face. The corner of Rodney’s mouth veered into a vicious slant. “He’s trying to catch you flat-footed, don’t you get it?”

“What? What the hell are you talking about, you don’t even know—”

Caldwell, you idiot, can you not keep up? It’s Caldwell, all right? And he’s not going to miss an opportunity to make you look bad.”

“Well I guess I don’t have to worry about Caldwell, because I’ve got Rodney McKay to watch my back, don’t I? Gee, thanks for looking out for me, you’re a sweet guy, McKay.”

“Shut up, will you shut up? You have no idea what he—”

“No, I don’t, I don’t know Caldwell at all, but you know? I think I’ll make my own assessment, if you don’t mind, and I don’t think I’ll be relying on your razor-sharp powers of perception. And what, you’re looking out for me now?”

“Yes! Yes, you complete moron, I am looking out for you because you are obviously too stupid to do it yourself! Look, they wanted Caldwell, all right? The command was supposed to go to Caldwell, and it didn’t, and he’s pissed, and all it would take – I mean Christ, John, he’s going to go shopping for reasons to get you sent back to Earth, he will use anything, absolutely anything to make you look bad to the SGC, no matter how petty, he won’t care if it’s true, he won’t care—”

“I can look out for myself, goddamnit!”

“Yeah? What, so you can turn your career into one more suicide run? I am not going to let that happen, not if I can help it, why do you think I—” He broke off and became fascinated by the puddle by his tire. His fist clenched and unclenched his car keys, and he began to chew on his lip. “Why do you think I ran all over this stupid city last night, why do you think I told you—” he waved his hand, turned it into a cradling of his forehead.

“Oh. Oh, I see. So it’s your concern for my career that prompted you to be an asshole to me.”

“Yes! And if you weren’t such a pigheaded self-involved moron, you would see that. John.” He raised his head and met John’s eyes for the first time. “John.” His voice was the voice John knew again, the voice that was for his ears, the voice that almost unraveled him. “You had to have known we couldn’t do this. For a while I thought, okay, maybe yes, maybe we could sneak around, whatever, but when I found out about Caldwell, when I heard the kind of shit he was capable of, no way was I going to let you risk that.”

“Oh what, so this was you being noble?”

“Yes, this was me being noble, damn it! John, listen to me, listen to me, please. Can you honestly tell me, if I had said we had to quit, that we were done, no more, after this week it was over, that you would have gone along with that?”

John spread his arms wide. “Uh, yes?”

Rodney twitched, frowned. “Yes?”

“Yes! Jesus Christ, McKay, do you really think I’m that big an idiot? Not that this hasn’t been great, not that I don’t think you’re terrific and all, but what, did you really think I had it in mind that we were going to go skipping hand-in-hand through the halls of Atlantis or something? I’m military, you know that! How brain-damaged do you think I am, you seriously think I’m going to give up my career for the possibility of getting occasionally horizontal with Rodney McKay?”

In the silence that followed, he heard how loud he had been shouting, and swiped a hand over his face. He took a breath to dial it back down, opened his mouth to finish, and found that he had. He couldn’t think of anything more to say.

“Oh.” Rodney blinked at him. “Oh,” he said again.

“Yeah, oh.”

There didn’t seem to be anyplace left to go after that.

“Well, aren’t I just the stupid one,” Rodney said lightly. John frowned.

“Listen, I gotta shower and throw my stuff together. If you want to get some breakfast—”

“No no no, that’s fine, that’s right, I have to. . .” He waved his hand loosely. “I’d better get busy, too. I’ll um. . .”

“I’ll see you back at the SGC, then.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s. . . yeah, okay.” He looked around the parking lot like he might have forgotten where he was, then ducked into his car. He raised his hand in nervous farewell salute, and John watched him fumble with the seatbelt. The sight irritated him unbearably. He stepped forward, tapped on the glass, and waited for Rodney to roll the window down.

“Yeah? What?”

“So you and this being noble thing.” John glanced at his watch, managed a smirk. “That lasted a whole, what, fourteen hours. That’s quite a reach, for you.” He patted the car. “Hope you didn’t pull something.”

Rodney’s eyes narrowed. “Fuck you, Major.”

John straightened back up. “Fuck you, Colonel,” he said, and this time the smirk was genuine. It settled on his face and carried him all the way back up to his room. He stepped in and dialed the shower to scalding. He couldn’t feel it through his clothes anyway.



It was such a rush, saving the universe with Rodney, that he almost forgot they were anything other than what they had always been.

Amazing, how easy it had been to shove all that aside, and do what had to be done, and somewhere in the middle of one of those nine million frantic re-boots of the Daedalus, his brain said yeah, yeah, think about all that later, save the world now, and they had. When he had been beamed back to the bridge at what he later discovered was about the last possible second, it had seemed natural to look for Rodney first, to measure his own relief by Rodney’s. Just like always, just like before. When the klaxon had sounded in that hangar bay, when the bay doors had opened, it had seemed natural to turn to Rodney, to find his eyes that said nothing but oh shit we’re dead why aren’t we dead. And when they had flown together, in that wild gut-twisting race to the sun, it had been the most natural thing in the world for it to be Rodney with him, all that whining and bitching his own personal Greek chorus, and that it had not in fact ended in tragedy was just another of those holy shit I don’t believe it moments, and he had wanted to laugh with the sheer joy of it.

“Oh my God, this is going to be just like when Luke and Han climbed out of the X-wing, isn’t it, oh my God, everyone’s going to go nuts,” Rodney babbled as they slid, smooth as silk, into the hangar. The hangar which turned out to be empty, and John smiled as he helped Rodney out.

“Sorry, Luke, guess they must not have gotten your memo,” he said, looking around.

“Huh. Yes, well, hail the conquering heroes. I guess they must be pretty busy, probably planning the big festal celebration for later. Must be saving it up.” He slipped a little on the wing, and John automatically reached a hand to steady him.

“Yeah, I’m sure they’re out hiring the Ewoks right now.”

“Ewoks? Ewoks weren’t even in that one! You can’t even keep the Original Trilogy straight, can you—how did they ever let you take an M.S. in anything? And who says you get to be Han, anyway?”

“Oh, I’m definitely Han,” John grinned, unfastening his helmet. He clapped Rodney on the back. “Come on, kid. Your adoring throng is waiting for you.”

“Fine, but no way am I kissing my sister,” Rodney muttered, and just like that, they were back.



Back in Atlantis, if he was careful, it was almost enough.

If he never stood too close to Rodney, in briefings, or in the control room, or out in the field. If he made sure he had a smirk, or a grin, or a wry remark in place before he turned to Rodney. If he always had a perfectly good, Colonel-business type reason for missing movie night, or poker night, or Space Droids night. If he never glanced in Rodney’s direction for a quick roll of the eyes, or a shared shake of the head, or a quirk of the brow. If he was sure to put three feet between them at all times, to avoid being knocked by a stray arm or wrist or God forbid fingers. If he was careful.

One day, if he kept at it, “careful” might turn into something he didn’t have to think about anymore, and one day, “almost enough” might become good enough.

Or, it could happen another way.

It could happen that one day, he would be done with careful again. One day, he might look up at just the wrong time, and meet Rodney’s eyes in just the wrong way, and he might see the same thing in Rodney’s eyes, the thing he didn’t want to see, the thing they never talked about. He might see that Rodney wasn’t being careful back, the way he was supposed to. And then it wouldn’t matter who else was in the room, or what they were supposed to be doing. Because then he would just say, screw it, fuck it all to hell, and he would cross the careful three feet between them and just climb inside Rodney. Just fucking climb inside him.

The days he thought about that were the days he was especially careful.



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