toomuchplor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
toomuchplor) wrote2007-02-16 01:09 pm
toomuchplor) wrote2007-02-16 01:09 pm
Entry tags:
WiP Amnesty!
Finally! A fic-posting thing I can do!
It bears re-re-reiteration that this is WiP Amnesty and therefore, no. I won't write more. I promise, this is it, love it or leave it.
Fandom: Smallville
Rating: PG (though it would totally have gotten way smuttier)
Pairing: Clark/Lex
Summary: Clark gets sent back in time. Hijinks ensue.
A/N: Okay, so the idea is that future!SuperClark gets sent back somehow (insert phlebotnum here) into the body of his puppy!Clark self (think 1st season). His enmity for Lex is strong, but eventually he gets to remember how Lex used to be. This turns into noticing how he used to be around Lex. Which of course ends in the gay sex. Amen.
It’s playing dirty, that’s what it is. One second, Superman is facing an enraged Lex Luthor on a rooftop, listening to the usual acrid diatribe and struggling to keep his own temper in check, and the next --
The next --
Wrapped in layers of cotton like a well-known embrace, feeling his toes suddenly nudge against thin leather in shoes nearly outgrown, all the noise and wind of Metropolis whooshing abruptly to a halt so that the ticking of the mantle clock sounds extravagantly resonant to his shuttered ears. And he’s holding a cold glass of milk and he can somehow *taste* the last swallow he took, white and rich on his tongue. And not two feet away, in almost exactly the same place as Luthor was just standing relative to Superman --
Lex.
“What?” Superman utters, but the tone is thin and flexible as a reed. Not Superman’s voice. Clark’s. “What the hell just happened?” He turns his head and takes it in -- yes, Luthor’s Smallville mansion, but no longer the deserted wreck it was when Superman last visited. Nor is it the secure fortress it had been before Superman’s wrath reduced it to rubble. No, it’s a perfect reproduction of what the mansion had once been, every detail sounding a note in Clark’s memory.
“Are you okay, Clark?” Lex asks, and he -- he *reaches out*. He *touches* Clark, right on his arm, his fingers warm through the flannel.
Clark rears back, windmilling his arm out of Lex’s grip. The hand Lex used, that’s the hand with the kryptonite ring, and why exactly is it that Clark isn’t writhing in agony on the hardwood floor this very second?
It hits him with frightening abruptness: Lex’s hand wasn’t cold and lifeless. It was warm and it *gripped* Clark’s forearm. It wasn’t a black glove-sheathed prosthesis; it was flesh and blood.
It’s playing dirty, no doubt about it. Because this is no Metropolis rooftop, and Clark is no superhero. This isn’t 2018. It’s Smallville, and this man in front of Clark is the Lex Luthor he once knew before he became disfigured by hate and greed.
Clark is licking his lips and breathing hard and Lex looks concerned. “I’m not feeling well,” he says. It sounds wooden and strange in his mouth, making excuses to a Lex who genuinely doesn’t know that Clark can’t be sick unless a little green rock is nearby. “I think I’d better go.”
If this is some kind of holographic projection or virtual reality, Luthor will be forced to show his cards now. He can’t let Clark leave if all this is a contrived attempt to throw Superman off-guard.
But Lex just steps back, his hands in his pants pockets. “If you think it’s best.” Clark risks a glance and is struck by how realistic this Lex is: he actually looks regretful that Clark’s leaving. In fact, he almost looks upset.
“I’m -- I’m going now,” Clark repeats, and backs towards the door. It’s been years since he turned his back on Luthor, and he’s not about to reacquire the habit now. He x-rays their surroundings as he edges out of the room, but can’t find any electronics other than standard -- if antiquated-looking -- Luthor surveillance equipment. If this is a trick, it’s not one that Clark can see through in any literal sense.
He gains the corridor and paces quickly to the front door. He blurs across the grounds, through the gate (bending the bars apart and together again like he did a hundred times before in a different age), and safely onto the highway.
But when Clark goes to lift off the ground, intending to fly back to Metropolis, to the Planet and his computer and his life, to figure out what the hell is going on--
He trips over his toes and falls flat out on the asphalt.
No lift, nothing. Like he’s completely forgotten how to fly.
Clark scrabbles back to his feet and tries again, more carefully this time.
He winds up standing with his arm raised in the middle of the road, like a lonely and demented neo-Nazi.
This doesn’t seem to be any kind of trick.
Clark turns around and faces the opposite direction before taking off in a high-speed run.
***
Of course, he would have gone to the farm, found his Dad alive and well, and started to contemplate the idea that this wasn't some Luthorian scheme.
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sam/Dean. See A/N.
Summary: Supposed to have been a sort of 'missing scenes' extravaganza.
A/N: I wrote exactly one extended fic in SPN and I honestly thought I'd write more because I love the show, but it turns out I do have some scruples (damn it!) and I just can't write the brotherly love. This fic was headed that way, and so it got stalled. Sorry about that. But I love pieces of this so much, I wish I could salvage it somehow.
If their lives were a TV show, Sam bets that most of their day-to-day life would never appear on-screen. On TV, there’d be plenty of monster fighting, lots of tense brotherly deliberation, even (for the purposes of exposition) a few scenes of him and Dean sitting in front of their computers trading facts.
But that would be a skewed perspective, really, because most of the time, it’s just the two of them, on the road.
1.
The only movie playing at the theater in Alder, North Carolina is Brokeback Mountain. Sam and Dean stand in front of the marquee with their hands in their pockets, heads tilted back as they read and reread the sign. Like this is some kind of demonic joke, like the sign’s about to change to King Kong, or hell, even something shitty and mindless like Cheaper By the Dozen 2.
“We’re in *North Carolina*,” says Sam at length.
“Dude,” answers Dean with complete sympathy.
“We’re in a *tiny town* in the middle of *North Carolina* and the only movie playing is a movie about *gay cowboys*?” Sam says. He sounds just like he did when he was five and Dad told him about where babies come from.
“Well, it *is* the capital of Buttfuck, Nowhere. Guess it makes sense,” Dean jokes and catches a dark glare from Sam. “Oh, come on, little brother. What doesn’t kill us can only make us --”
“Gayer?” Sam squeaks indignantly. “Dean, practically everybody we run into already thinks you and me’re…”
Dean finds this fact hilarious, always does, but Sammy doesn’t. And it’s not that Sam’s a bigot, far from it -- christ, the kid lived in California long enough that he’s not likely to bat an eye at Heath Ledger spooning Jake Gyllenhaal. Truth be told, it’s mostly that Sam doesn’t like anything that ties him more tightly to Dean.
So Dean swallows down his grin along with the lump that rises in his throat, punches Sam in the arm, and walks up to the box office window. A bored teenager takes Dean’s rumpled twenty while Sam hovers impatiently.
Dean lets Sam choose the snack foods in an attempt to cheer up his grouchy little brother. When they walk into the theatre, Sam has a bag of M&M’s, a large tub of greasy popcorn, and a vat of soda and ice. He’s also smiling. Dean smiles too.
“This movie better not suck,” Dean says.
i.
You would think they had this worked out a long time ago, back before it was the black Impala and both of them in the front seat together. After all, most of Dean’s childhood and all of Sam’s were spent like this, grey asphalt spooling under the car, heat or cold blasting from the air vents depending on the season and the latitude, and nothing but bright green signs to mark their passing.
They should have had it all figured out a long time ago, yes, but now, for the first time it’s just the two of them. And it’s like they’ve never road-tripped before in their lives.
Dad didn’t talk much on the road. He preferred flipping through the radio stations, letting the accents and the topics being discussed be self-explanatory education for his boys. Sam still knows the exact width of the bible belt, measured in scratchy AM radio stations; he knows the sweet smoothness of FM stations signal the presence of a metropolis; he knows that the difference between Texas and Louisiana is found in the pronunciation of the word ‘hot’.
Sometimes Dean would sit in the back with Sam and tell him things: “Watch for the numbers on the little green signs, Sammy. Tells us how many more miles there are in Montana.” Or “That’s our twenty-second Springfield, awesome,” as they leave another town with sweaty waxed cups in their hands. Or, holding a dog-eared MathQuest textbook (pilfered from the latest PS they’d both attended) open between them with his flattened palm, “There’s a faster way to do long division, Sammy, lemme show you.” It helped to pass the hours while Sam fidgeted under the wide nylon lap-belt, while Dean commandeered the hundred-times-folded roadmaps, while Dad just drove and drove and never said a word.
Driving’s not the same, Sam realizes, without Dad’s silence.
2.
Sam skids down the scree on the shoulder of the road, cursing in his flat-soled Skechers while Dean picks his way down the slope more deliberately, arms out for balance. The Appalachians are looming all around and the air is crisp with the feeling of early spring.
“Ow, fuckit,” Sam says, stumbling to a halt on smoother gravel. “Why the hell can’t we keep going until we get to a real rest stop?”
“You’re the one who wouldn’t stop bitching about needing to pee,” Dean points out, coming up even with Sam. Two more feet and they’ve got their thighs pressed up against a dull aluminum guardrail, staring down over a precipice to where a candy-blue stream wends its way around boulders.
“Kinda nice here,” concedes Sam, opening his belt buckle.
“Beats the hell out of a urinal,” Dean agrees easily, glancing back over his shoulder to confirm that no one else is coming down to admire the view.
They pee in tandem and, because they’re brothers, make no pretense of manly disinterest, of staring over at the next mountain and ignoring the way their elbows keep bumping. Instead, they watch their pee fall in glittering arcs and snicker as they each try to go higher than the other, and then farther, and then to aim for a certain rock in the streambed, and then they make an X in the air for a brief second before Dean runs out of pee and has to shake himself off. Sam smirks like he won an unspoken contest, and Dean deliberately knocks Sam hard in the side so that he stumbles and pees on his own hand.
“You nasty sonuvabitch--” chokes Sam, torn between disgust (Sam’s so damn finicky) and laughter. He tackles Dean so he can wipe his hand off on Dean’s pants, hooking one leg around Dean’s thigh and wrapping his elbow around Dean’s neck. Dean’s sort of trying to get away, but mostly he’s killing himself laughing because Sam’s still got his jeans open and he can tell from how Sam’s stumbling behind him that they’re falling down around his knees. They land on the ground a second later, gasping for air and broken up with grins.
“Your dick is still hanging out,” Dean tells Sam, clambering up on his elbows and then to his feet.
Sam flips Dean the bird and pulls himself together with the other hand. “God,” he says, knocking his shoulder into Dean’s as they pick their way back up the slope, stepping in the depressions their footsteps made on the way down, “now I gotta have a shower.”
“Hey,” Dean says, thoughtfully, “isn’t that what you said after we watched all that gay cowboy humping this afternoon?”
“Shut up, Dean,” Sam grouses, but he’s still smiling helplessly.
ii.
The first time Dean tosses Sam the keys, it almost happens in slow motion, and Sam fights hard against the retarded grin that wants to bust his face open. He’s reminded of the year he was ten, of Dean haranguing the shit out of Dad, arguing constantly about being allowed to drive.
(Though years earlier, Dad had taught both Sam and Dean how to put the car into gear, how to start and stop and how to pull the wide wheel between small fingers, sitting on a phone book to see. Just in case, he’d said, the same way he’d said it when he pressed a revolver into Sam’s palm on his tenth birthday.)
Then one day, Dad flipped the keys to Dean and Dean had tripped over himself getting to the driver’s side door, he moved so fast. Sam had almost burst with borrowed pride himself, slinging his skinny arms around the headrest on the back of Dean’s seat, kicking his legs and chirping instructions while Dean fitted the key in the ignition and said, “Shut up, Sammy, I know how to do it.”
They drove to Louisiana that day, leaving behind Sam’s fourteenth school and his third real friend. They left so abruptly that Sam remembers worrying about the half-full carton of chocolate milk sitting on his desk in the lunchroom, abandoned when Dad came in and beckoned grimly. But for once Sam didn’t care, didn’t mind, was so thrilled by the novelty of Dean behind the wheel, Dean serious and studiously casual and intent on the road, Dean choosing where they stopped and what they ate, and Dean getting Dad to consult the map for him, to decide on a route that Sam could trace with his finger. Sam remembers feeling like Dean had abruptly entered some mysterious bastion of manhood, remembers anticipating the day when he too would get to drive, when Dean would navigate for him.
Of course, by the time Sam was sixteen everything had changed. He was angry all the time, Dad was an irrational bastard, and Dean was infuriatingly loyal to Dad, and the day Sam finally got in the driver’s seat and drove, it was halfway through a werewolf job in Georgia. Sam got all the way to Florida before he calmed down enough to turn around. When he stalked back into the hotel room, morose and regretful, Dad and Dean didn’t seem to have realized he was even gone; and if Dad noticed the extra miles on the odometer, he never said a word. It had felt more like a tantrum than a rite of passage, really. A letdown.
Which is why his reaction catches him off-guard when Dean throws him the keys. Sam settles down onto the seat and skims his hands over the curve of the wheel, adjusts the rearview mirror and checks the controls. By the time he throws the car in reverse, Dean’s halfway asleep.
Sam puts his arm across the back of the seat while he drives, just experimentally; he feels the soft brush of Dean’s neck against the inside of his thumb.
3.
Sam flicks the loose grains of salt off the top of the shaker before picking it up and tilting it over his fries. “That was kinda not a bad movie, though,” he says, as though they’re picking up where they left off. In actuality, Sam just woke up when Dean pulled up to the diner and has been silent ever since.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Dean asks, irritably. “That movie ate my balls.” He’s keeping a weather eye on the waitress they didn’t get. She’s maybe twenty-one and Dean likes the way her polyester dress is cinched in at her waist, the way it puckers under her arms.
“You didn’t like it?” asks Sam flatly as he pushes his fries into a puddle of ketchup.
“Lame,” Dean says, distractedly.
“You just hated it cause it reminded you of that Boy Scout camp we went to that year,” Sam tells him with a crooked grin. “What was your boyfriend’s name? Simon?”
“Shut up, you dink,” Dean sneers, and of course that’s when the cute waitress looks over. Dean tries to turn his snarl into a ‘hey there’ kind of smirk. She just looks worried.
“I never got the details on that one anyway,” Sam pursues, leaning in. “So he what? He jumped your bones in the tent?”
“Oh my god, we’re *so* not talking about this,” Dean says.
“All I knew was that one day, the two of you were like brothers and the next day he’s walkin’ around with a black eye and you’re tented up with two different guys.” Sam bites into his hamburger, chuckling around a mouthful of food. The waitress has transferred her attention to Sam now, and Dean doesn’t get the appeal.
“You need a haircut,” says Dean, contemplating Sam’s general appearance.
“Ain’t I purty enough for y’all?” drawls Sam, pitching forward on one elbow, closer to Dean and pursing ketchup-smeared lips in a fake pucker. He’s completely oblivious to the attention of the waitress, as usual. “I mean, I know I’m no Simon, but --”
Dean reaches across and stuffs a fry up Sam’s nose. While Sam’s coughing and bitching and kicking his long legs under the table, Dean looks over and sees that the waitress has lost interest in both of them.
***
The trope of Brokeback Mountain (movie!fic! Ack!) was going to recur, until it became clear that Dean identifies with Jake Gyllenhaal's character a little too much and Sam finally clues into that -- that Dean fears being cast aside or left behind by Sam. Dean's in the present because, bitching aside, he's with Sammy and he loves their lives. Sam, on the other hand, is introspective and weirdly nostalgic, and I didn't want him to snap into the present with Dean until the end of the fic, when he realizes what Dean's trying to say in his special Dean-way.
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Pairing: Sam/Dean. AU. See A/N.
Summary: Sam's a hooker. Dean's his defense attorney. Or something. I never got that far.
A/N: Here's another unfinished Wincest piece. I'm actually under orders from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sparktastic to finish this ("I don't even watch this show, but -- hooker! You HAVE TO OMG."), but I won't.
Sammy didn’t wear a watch. Instead, he kept a compact with a mirror with him, either in his jeans pocket, or, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in his purple vinyl purse. It was a running joke with him and the others – that Sammy checked the time by pulling out his compact and studying the state of his eyeliner. The blurrier it got, the later the hour, and when the heat of the night’s activities led to the black lines transferring onto Sammy’s prodding fingertip, it was time to go home.
His eyeliner was still fresh, so Sammy guessed he’d been working for maybe half an hour – no tricks yet, slow Thursday – when he stepped down the alley for a smoke break. Theresa wouldn’t come with him, and later he was glad, though at the time he just flipped her off and sauntered away alone, knuckles resting insolently on one hip.
For about three seconds, he thought it was a garbage bag. For two seconds, he thought it was a bum taking a nap. And for one blissful second, he hoped it was just a dead body.
The interval in which he stood, stared, and held his breath with disbelief was much longer.
She wasn’t positioned as casually as he’d hoped. One arm thrown back over her head, the other crooked at the elbow to accommodate the way her hand dipped into her opened abdomen. Her legs ended all too abruptly at the ankle and her eyes were missing. Carved into the low dip of her décolletage, there was a pentagram, done post-mortem so as to prevent blood from obscuring the design.
Sammy finally drew breath, teetering a bit on his size 15 wedges as dizziness overcame him. Watching his hand as though it belonged to someone else, he gingerly crouched down and stroked the woman’s forehead, knowing that she would be warm to the touch, though she clearly had been dead for hours.
“Mia,” he whispered, standing up again. “God, I should have told you.”
***
“You found her just like this?”
The CSIs in Vegas weren’t nearly as pretty or as interesting as TV would have you believe, Sammy thought, exhaling with boredom. He looked down at the crime scene photo on the speckled arborite table and stared at the place where Mia’s shoulder joined her neck. “Just like that,” he agreed, and cracked his gum.
“You’re sure you didn’t see anything weird that night?”
Sammy squinted, focusing his eyes just behind the picture – two dead Mias, two pentagrams.
“Do you know what that symbol means?” demanded the investigator, tapping both of the Mias with a forked finger.
“It’s some satanic shit,” said Sammy, sitting back in his chair and sighing. “I don’t know.”
“Right,” said the investigator, sliding the photo back across the table. “Okay, Mr. Forester, that will be all.”
He almost made it out the door in character, but the guilt swept over him in a wave just as he began to shoulder his way through the narrow doorway. He paused, and the investigator caught it.
“Mr. Forester?”
Sammy splayed his fingers against the frame and bowed his head. “Mirrors,” Sammy said, quietly.
“Excuse me?”
“Mirrors reflect back evil,” Sammy said, tautly. “If you put them on the entrances to the alleys, then –”
The investigator looked up and exchanged a glance with the constable who was escorting Sammy from the room.
“I’m not a junkie,” he said, defiantly, even though he could see the investigator eyeing the lines on the inside of Sammy’s elbow.
“Call us if you remember anything useful,” said the investigator, clearly dismissing him.
***
The guy wasn’t a rookie -- no wallet, no identification in any of his pockets, only the homely wad of twenties he’d flashed at Sammy through the car window and the plastic key ring that proclaimed ‘Aruba!’ in neon rainbow letters. Sammy took his fee and sat on the edge of the bed to pull his socks on.
This one had wanted Sammy to fuck him without a single sound, had started things off by clamping his hand over Sammy’s mouth and going “shh shh shh” as he drove. Once they got here (cash motel, room for three hours) it’d taken about ten minutes of Sammy silently doing the guy from behind, his jeans sagging around his knees, before the trick had come with a sigh and collapsed into slumber. He hadn’t seemed bothered that Sammy didn’t come too.
Sammy was okay with that, he was okay with the guy being an obvious veteran of the scene, it was all better than any one of the tricks he’d turned in the beginning, but Sammy wished that he’d haggled for a higher fee, because he was going to have to cab it back to the strip now. He hadn’t made nearly enough to be done for the night, and he was reflex-hard and edgy besides from the too-hasty and sterile fuck.
***
Wow, I don't even remember writing that last bit. Dirty! Anyway, like I said -- I think Dean was going to be Sam's public defender, because it'd be fun to let Dean be the educated one. The untold backstory is that Daddy Wincester died in a hunt and Dean and Sam got taken away by foster care at a young age; Dean won the foster care lottery and was adopted by good people, while Sam -- wasn't. Strangely, I'm pretty sure this fic grew out of watching 'Rent'. I loved the idea of Sam being so street, of Dean being civil service, and the tension there. What made me stop was knowing that I wanted them to get together, but I couldn't decide if it was more disturbing if they figured out right away that they were brothers, or if they found out afterwards. I'm just not meant to write Wincest.
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: I have no clue. Well, initially it's McKay/Brown. But I think it was sort of headed for McKay/Sheppard.
Summary: Katie's POV. It's weird.
A/N: Another fic I can't seem to make any progress with, though this time it's not because of incest, thank god. I love isolated moments of this and I even have a vague idea of what the arc might have been, but it all got a bit jossed by 'Sunday' and I found myself not minding -- so, here:
Braced above her on his knuckles, Rodney looks so fierce and intent that Katie has to bite back the urge to smile. It’s been too long, she’d forgotten how seriously men approach sex -- nothing like TV and movies with the romance and the tenderness and the effortless soft-focus suspension of the laws of physics. Rodney is all about physics, visibly calculating force and rate and pressure and frequency and probably doing some sort of linear regression estimate to try and judge Katie’s satisfaction level.
“Are you close?” he asks, testing his hypothesis. He frees up one hand and drives the broad flat head of his thumb against her, making Katie gasp with surprise.
She manages a nod, closing her eyes against Rodney’s expression because it’s too much like how he looks working equations with Radek in the astrophysics lab and any second now she’s going to blurt out something about how she nearly failed integral calculus in her freshman year -- and never mind her putting out on the third date, *that* would be the thing that made Rodney lose all respect for her.
So she raises her heels and lifts her hips and lets Rodney’s motions draw out her exhalation in little rapid huffs. He’s encouraged; his thumb presses in harder and he picks up the pace.
Katie’s never been comfortable making a lot of noise, in or out of bed, but she knows a handful of great tricks, and one of them is the happy ice cream sound. She keeps her eyes closed and pictures a banana fudge sundae. The sound that comes out from between her pressed lips is like, “Mmm, hmm, mmm,” and Rodney grunts in response.
She’s not close, she’s nowhere near it, but it’s a first time and men take everything too seriously for her to admit failure, so Katie hikes up her thighs and tenses them hard, holding her breath, arching. “Are you?” asks Rodney breathlessly, and answers himself, “Of course you are, yes, just --”
“Mmm,” answers Katie, opening her eyes slowly and smiling.
“God,” Rodney breathes, and kisses her. She loves this best -- not that she’s exactly *very* experienced, but she’s had a few significant others and she knows what she likes, and it’s this -- when the guy finally lets go of his sense of obligation and goes all selfish and frantic. Rodney has one hand on her breast and he’s got his head thrown back and his chest glistening with perspiration and if Katie could find the words to say so, she’d tell Rodney that this is much more exciting than any careful placement of fingers: seeing that he loves this, loves being in her, loves the feeling she’s giving him.
“Not long,” he promises, as though she’s doing him a favor.
She strokes the damp hair off his forehead and subtly angles her hips. He’s too busy to notice the marked difference between her schooled happy ice cream hums and the breathy desperate noises he’s drawing from her now against her will. “You, you,” says Rodney brokenly, and slams in hard before making a sound like their ZPM just shattered.
He moves quickly afterwards, shuffling back on his knees, heading for the bathroom with the used condom, pausing to pull on his boxers on the way back. Katie’s squirmed under the blankets by the time he looks up at her, and he’s clearly wondering what she would like him to do next
“Are you -- I mean. Would you like to --” she begins, hesitantly.
“I have a pre-mission briefing at oh seven hundred,” Rodney says, grimacing, and reaches for his pants. “I’d hate to wake you up.”
“Oh -- sure. I mean, no problem.”
Rodney is already in his shirt and wiggling his way into his socks and boots. He hops on one foot over to the head of the bed and stoops down to kiss Katie’s mouth. “Goodnight,” he says, and his hand moves towards Katie’s breast seemingly of its own volition. It stops, hovering, and Katie laughs before she can help it. “Right,” he says, trying to hide his embarrassment, and straightens up. “I’ll come visit you in your lab tomorrow,” he says.
“I thought you had a mission,” she half-inquires.
“Oh, yes, of course,” Rodney flushes. “Um. Well, the next day then. Assuming everything goes --” He runs out of steam halfway through whatever he was about to say; either it’s classified or Rodney thinks it might be boring.
“Goodnight,” Katie says.
Rodney nods twice and heads for the door.
***
Katie’s displaced Chuck in their little lunchtime clique, and he’s not happy about it. It used to be Chuck who was the center of attention, who regaled them all with stories of the SGA command team’s antics while they giggled around mouthfuls of whatever semi-edible thing the teams had brought home last week. His status as the daytime gate room tech secures him the kind of intimacy with the high-ups that none of the rest of them can boast -- at least until Dr. Rodney McKay deigned to show some interest in Katie.
Not that Katie’s much of a storyteller. She’d prefer it, in fact, if Chuck would continue as if nothing’s changed, but no one else seems to be of the same opinion. They are relentless in their teasing questions and Chuck is moody and withdrawn.
“Suzanne said she *saw* him leaving your quarters after midnight,” insists Uyen, who’s the biggest gossip in the zoology lab. “So dish, girl.”
Katie tilts a spoonful of orange soup over the surface of her bowl, studying its viscosity and trying to pretend she’s not the centre of attention.
“I bet he’s, like, wicked intense in bed. Is he just, like, so *focused*?” asks Uyen, all but clambering across the table in his eagerness to know.
“You’re the gayest nerd I’ve ever met,” Cassie Herbert, the microbiology tech, tells him. “I’ve never heard anyone queen out over a workaholic pompous astrophysicist before. He’s not Heath Ledger, Uyen.”
“Shut up,” Uyen snaps, and turns back to Katie. “Well? On a scale of one to ten?”
“I’m not going to --” begins Katie nobly, and is interrupted by a chorus of boos from everyone but Chuck.
“Leave her alone,” he tells them all, scowling at his jello. “It’s none of our goddamn business how McKay is in bed.”
“You’re just mad because this shoots your pet theory all to hell,” smirks Cassie, and Chuck rolls his eyes.
“What’s your pet theory?” asks Uyen, attention successfully diverted. Katie will have to thank Cassie for that later.
Chuck’s not answering, so Cassie does it for him: “Chuck’s convinced that McKay has a thing for military types.”
“Are you joking?” Uyen asks, stunned. “Have you seen the way he acts around Lieutenant Cadman?”
“Well,” says Cassie slowly, with a pointy grin, “Chuck’s theory actually centers around one particular military person.”
Uyen and Katie both frown for a moment, confused, but Katie surprises herself by being the first to make the connection. “The colonel?” she half-asks, knowing already that she’s right.
“Oh, there’s no *way* -- McKay’s never made so much as a blip on my gaydar,” Uyen insists immediately, and Katie’s strangely relieved.
“Maybe you should run a diagnostic on your gaydar,” suggests Chuck, piping up unexpectedly. “You’re not around to see how McKay gets when Sheppard’s in trouble.” He seems to recall Katie’s presence at this, and shoots her an apologetic glance. “But it probably doesn’t mean anything.”
“How does he get?” Katie asks, and is impressed to hear how dispassionate she sounds. “Rodney, I mean. When the colonel’s in trouble.”
“He just --” begins Chuck, and hesitates, obviously revising his thoughts as he goes. “Well, they all worry. The team’s close. You know.”
“But you think Rodney’s different about it,” Katie presses, still calm.
Chuck lifts one shoulder, not offering any other response.
Katie’s had reason to doubt Chuck’s reports before; some of his stories of what goes on down in the gate room are positively operatic in scale, and above half of them can’t be completely true. He’s the one who kept telling her horror stories about McKay when she and Rodney started talking, and Katie has yet to see the side of Rodney that Chuck described -- brash, condescending, ridiculous. She’s not an idiot; she knows Rodney’s got a reputation for his less-than-stellar management and people skills, but Katie doesn’t think it translates into his personal life, not from what she’s seen.
So Chuck’s unreliable. She knows it, and yet she can’t help asking one more question: “You think Sheppard knows?”
Chuck’s caught off-guard by this. It shows in his lifted brows, the way his hand fumbles as he reaches for his napkin. “Um,” he begins, looking at his tray. “Well.”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Cassie supplies darkly, as if this is an answer.
“Right,” says Katie, feeling her blush, hot under her skin. “Right.” She stands up and lifts her tray. “I have to get back to,” she says hastily, and leaves without bothering to finish her excuse.
***
The thing is, Katie’s always had a pretty good sense about this stuff. She wouldn’t go so far as to call it intuition, but she has instincts and through painful trial and error, she’s learned to follow her gut when it’s telling her something.
The Rodney situation had been blissfully free of any such complications so far, and while she hasn’t quite felt any overwhelming spark of chemistry with Rodney, she’d figured it was wartime: any port in a storm. During dark nights in her quarters, alone with her thoughts of a second Wraith siege, she’d always felt it would be nice to have someone lying beside her, sharing in the unspoken fear.
Rodney had seemed to be the answer to that wish: he was solid and broad and substantial, with shoulders slightly bowed under the huge burden he carried. Katie could imagine him sheltering her in his pragmatic and fallible way, his big hands stroking through her hair and telling her that everything would be fine, and even if it wasn’t, at least they would be with someone else for a little while before the world ended. It wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t the sort of thing Katie had ever pictured for herself, but then she’d never quite envisioned winding up in another galaxy tending soy plants in a floating city either.
“Are you the one I talk to about getting some cucumbers?” asks Colonel Sheppard from the doorway of the greenhouse, and Katie has to clear her throat to answer.
“Yes. I mean. Cucumbers are scheduled for Phase Four,” she manages.
“I miss pickles,” Sheppard states. He’s leaning against the frame and the edge of the blond wood is pulling his American flag away from the Velcro on his sleeve. She’s never seen him up close before.
“Phase Four is next year,” Katie says, almost babbling with sudden nervousness.
“So no pickles until then,” Sheppard concludes. “You’re Dr. Brown?”
It’s not really a question and Katie doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to follow her instincts to know what this unexpected visit is: it is proof that Cassie and Chuck were onto something.
“John,” he says, and comes into the greenhouse. He’s got a Beretta strapped to his right thigh, and Katie’s eyes are entranced with the slick plastic look of the gun’s butt. She knows that Rodney wears one of those off-world, but she can’t picture Rodney’s wide serious fingers curled around the black plastic. John’s hands, conversely, are slender and elegant and yet look like they’re made for war.
“Katie,” she answers belatedly, and busies herself with snipping samples of their six-week soy plants.
“I figured we should meet,” admits Sheppard, coming close enough to poke one of his fingers into the dark loamy soil. “Rodney wouldn’t think of introducing us, but you shouldn’t take it personally. He’s just bad with people stuff.”
Katie thinks of the stories she’s heard, of how Sheppard killed fifty-five Genii and didn’t turn a hair about it during the big storm last year, of how he was so enthralled by some high and mighty Ascended priestess that he defied Weir directly to come to the woman’s rescue. She wonders how exactly Sheppard considers himself to be good with people stuff, or in any way more qualified than Rodney.
“We’re having a movie marathon tonight,” Sheppard says, filling in the little hole he dug in the dirt. “Star Wars. You watched science fiction with McKay yet?”
Katie shakes her head.
“It’s quite the experience,” Sheppard tells her. “We have to keep the subtitles on so we don’t lose track of the plot when he goes off on a rant.”
Katie half-laughs, because Sheppard seems to think he’s making a joke.
“You should come,” Sheppard says, flashing a smile her way. “The common room by the gym, twenty-one hundred hours.”
“I don’t want to intrude,” Katie says, even though she very much wants to intrude. She wants to get Rodney and Sheppard in the same room at the same time and see exactly what her gut has to say about it.
“Nah,” says Sheppard, waving a hand. “It’s just a movie night.” Then he tilts his head and taps his earpiece. “This is Sheppard, what seems to be -- oh, crap. Yeah, hold ‘em back, I’ll be right there.” He raises his palm in a goodbye salute to Katie and jogs backwards out of the room, his hand going for his Beretta before he’s even clear of the greenhouse.
After he leaves, Katie thinks: He’s taller than I expected.
***
Rodney’s so flustered to see Katie in the common room that he spills popcorn all over Teyla Emmagen and they all spend the next two minute on hands and knees, gathering the scattered kernels and bumping foreheads into other people’s limbs at every turn.
“Well, you’re --” says Rodney, blinking and rubbing his skin where he just collided with Ronon’s shoulder.
“Colonel Sheppard asked me to come,” Katie tells him, and Sheppard smiles with half his mouth when Rodney looks over at him. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? No, no, of course I --” Rodney scrambles back and nearly sits in the popcorn bowl all over again before settling down against the couch. He pats the floor beside him like Katie’s a pet poodle. She sits close, but leaves six inches between them. John’s reclined on the couch cushions behind them and Teyla’s perched on the arm by his head. Ronon’s got an armchair to himself.
“We’re just past Leia’s message and Ben Kenobi,” says John, as he hits the spacebar on the laptop connected to the projector.
Rodney’s quiet for the first five minutes. He keeps glancing over at Katie, nervous and compulsive, his hands clenching and relaxing on his knees. Then Obi Wan does his Jedi thing on a storm trooper and Rodney shifts.
“I need to learn how to do that,” drawls Sheppard from behind them.
“Yes, if only you could master the art of mind control,” snipes Rodney immediately.
“Come on, it’d be pretty useful on off-world missions,” says Sheppard, and Ronon snorts. “You *will* give us the ZPM,” he half-chants, waving one hand in the air with panache.
“Well, if there were the slightest scrap of evidence supporting the existence of telepathic phenomena,” says Rodney bitterly.
“Teyla’s psychic,” Sheppard comments.
“Teyla’s able to tap into an alien collective consciousness, it’s completely different,” Rodney answers, twisting around to face Sheppard.
“You say ‘collective consciousness’, Obi Wan says ‘the Force’,” Sheppard answers blithely. “Tomayto, tomahto.”
Rodney sputters for a second and finally manages to say, “You know what, just -- I can’t believe we’re even *having* this conversation.” And he manages to be silent for another two minutes before a light saber appears and he starts ranting about the physical impossibility of a solid-state laser beam that *retracts*.
They sit through Star Wars, and then the Empire Strikes Back, but before the Jedi can return, Teyla yawns and announces that she’s going to bed. Ronon’s been sleeping in his chair since before Han Solo got frozen. Rodney seems game for a third movie, reaching for the DVD case and chattering about cryogenics and the Ancients’ stasis pods and the differences between the two when Sheppard jams a knee between Rodney’s shoulder blades. “Ow! What did you do that for?” Rodney shouts, reaching back to rub the injured spot.
Sheppard reaches out and cuffs Rodney’s head, abandoning the subtle approach. “I think maybe Katie’s getting tired,” he says pointedly, and Rodney abruptly seems to recall that Katie’s in the room.
“Are you tired?” Rodney asks, wide-eyed.
“I --” says Katie.
John interrupts. “Maybe you could walk her back to her quarters, Rodney?”
“Yes, of course I could,” Rodney says hurriedly, “I mean, if you want me to, or we could watch another movie, or you could just go by yourself if you --”
Katie smiles, ignoring the way her stomach is doing slow sick loop-de-loops. “I would like it. If you would walk me back.” She’s had more than enough of Sheppard, and of the unfamiliar version of Rodney she’s experienced this evening. She wants peace and familiarity, if only for a little while.
“Yes, okay, let’s --”
They stand and stretch and leave Sheppard lying in the dark, eyes fixed on the test screen of the idle projector. Katie’s last impression is of Sheppard’s soldier hands, the way they’re clasped over his stomach, the blue-cast skin of them pale against his dark t-shirt.
***
Katie half-expects that Rodney will retain some of the strange frenetic energy he demonstrated in the common room, but as soon as they’re out in the corridor, Rodney reverts to his usual deferential and self-conscious persona. It’s actually a relief; Katie decides that this means that Rodney isn’t hiding something from her, that he’s not putting on a performance. Rodney’s just one of those people who are prismatic in nature, who behave differently with different people. Different patterns of light, but the same single source, Katie tells herself.
As though to confirm her theory, Rodney reaches for her hand and they walk to her quarters with fingers intertwined like eighth-graders.
“It was -- very pleasant. To have you present, I mean. I’m pleased that you --”
“Come in, Rodney,” Katie says.
It’s better the second time. Rodney seems encouraged by the very fact that he’s back in her bed, and much of his urgency ebbs. He takes his time to see Katie’s body, to kiss the bare flat planes of her skin in innocuous places: just above her navel, below her elbow, the outside of her knee. “Can I?” he asks, and though Katie fervently wishes he just *would*, she nods, and Rodney puts one wide palm on each of her thighs, pushes them apart gently, and bows his head between.
Next he moves her onto her side, curls up behind her, and pushes inside. It’s one of Katie’s favorite ways, though of course Rodney couldn’t know. She’s loose-limbed from her first orgasm and she climaxes once and almost twice before Rodney shudders and slams deep inside her at last. “Good, good,” he murmurs into her neck and Katie’s not sure if he’s asking or telling, but either way she involuntarily thinks of Sheppard.
“Mmm,” Rodney breathes out. There’s no sudden leap out of bed this time. Rodney’s movements are sluggish and dreamy. He drops the condom onto the nightstand and rolls back to press grateful kisses along the line of Katie’s breast. “Can I stay, I want to stay,” he says, low and drowsy. “I want to stay like this, just like this.”
Before Katie can answer, he’s dropping into sleep.
He sleeps silently, like a cat, limbs heavy and loose and with his unexpectedly long lashes flush against the skin under his eyes.
***
Mmm. I like that last part. DH's eyelashes *are* long, and thick, and kind of strangely pretty because somehow you don't really notice them until you're trying to notice them.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure this is where this was headed: Katie grows more obsessed with Sheppard and Rodney continues to have a bizarre Rodney-ish one-sided sexual relationship with Katie. John continues his weird passive-aggressive sabotage (because he totally knows Katie's sort of into him) but then throws it back in her face by letting her stumble across him getting a blowjob from a marine. Now Katie knows something about John that Rodney doesn't, and it escalates to the point where she ends up outing John to Rodney. And then I lose track of what would happen in the fall-out. I was sort of afraid of Katie becoming a Mary Sue whose only role was to bring them together, but then I didn't know what sort of role to give her in a story that's really about Rodney and John. It's hard to write a love story from the perspective of the third wheel without being either voyeuristic or Mary Sueish.
Really, this story was me playing with the idea of Rodney's relative straightness (compared to John) and his seeming inability to communicate with women, contrasted with John's apparent charm and his somewhat less apparent need to be alone. I don't know. It's weird, hence the title.
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Rating: R
Pairing: N/A. I think it's sort of gen, though there may have been some established McKay/Sheppard in there.
Summary: Post-apocalypse fic without the apocalypse.
A/N: I love the idea of the post-apocalyptic world, and SGA seems to lend itself to that scenario nicely -- it would be so simple to cut the expedition off from the Milky Way, and with the Wraith, losing Atlantis could be all too simple. My notion with this fic was to write a post-apocalyptic AU where no one talks about what happened and everyone starts to realize that life is just *life*, even after the worst has come and gone. I planned to write the fic as a series of emotional 'postcards' from the Atlantis crew, not really joined up except in theme. It got a bit too disjointed and I lost interest. Oh, and this is the second (2nd) fic where I go into detail about peeing outside. I need help.
The fifth night at the alpha site, Teyla teaches Elizabeth how to pee in the forest.
Elizabeth should probably be embarrassed that she’s reached her age (not young) without ever acquiring this skill, and Teyla should probably be bashful about showing the Atlantis expedition leader how not to pee down the inside of her leg, but some things have already changed, and one of them seems to be that Elizabeth and Teyla can giggle together.
“No, just --“ Teyla instructs, between bursts of laughter, “just bend your knees a bit more, there is no need to worry about your pants.”
“I’ve just been taking them off entirely,” admits Elizabeth, and Teyla (whose own pants are still halfway down her thighs) snorts. “And hoping that no one would wander past.”
Teyla laughs so hard at this that she staggers forward and almost loses her balance before grabbing a nearby tree trunk. She’s got a hand pressed under her nose, and she’s not quite snorting but it’s a close thing.
“Don’t make me laugh, I have to pee!” Elizabeth protests, trying to hold position.
“Is that not why we are here?” Teyla returns, helplessly grinning as she grapples with her pants.
Elizabeth manages to calm down enough to try out Teyla’s maneuver and is inordinately pleased when she realizes she’s managed it. “I miss toilet paper, though,” she confesses, still biting her lips against a smile. For an instant, it’s too serious and they both falter with a threatening wave of grief. Then Teyla smirks again.
“There is a rumor that some of the marines tried to use poison oak leaves and are suffering the consequences,” she says, even though Teyla’s not given to gossip.
“I wondered why Sergeant Porter was squirming so much at mess this morning,” Elizabeth answers thoughtfully, her mouth twisted against a smile. She pulls up her pants and buttons them, head bowed to the task.
When they get back to the camp and the light of the fire, they find that John’s guitar miraculously made it through the gate with the Lantean refugees. And to add wonder to wonder, Rodney can play passably well; he’s got the wooden body cradled over one knee while he complains about calluses and forgetting how to play E Sus4 and John’s substandard nylon strings. Then his fingers find a rhythm and he overrides his own commentary with something weirdly bright and cheerful and casual that turns into the beginning of If I had $1,000,000.
Elizabeth sits down by him, close enough that she hears the squeak of Rodney’s confident fingers sliding up and down between chords, close enough that her shoulder’s nudging Rodney’s knee, close enough that even by firelight she can see that Rodney’s mouthing the words while everyone else sings: “we wouldn’t have to walk to the store.”
Tonight Elizabeth feels less like a refugee.
***
Carson dreams about gauze. In his dreams, he gathers it from dew-wet grass, medical manna; with it he dresses wounds, packs it around grazed elbows, scraped cheekbones, and long neatly sutured cuts. The dreams are familiar, at least; the first month on Atlantis, the first year, had been much the same: troubled nights filled with phantom ace bandages, bottles of disinfectant, boxes of latex gloves, hypodermic syringes.
Of course many of their supplies came through the gate with them, and of course Carson’s not about to surrender hope that the Daedalus will find them. Still, he’s haunted by the possibilities.
And at night, his mind unwinds, its convolutions measurable in lengths of sterile cotton.
***
Twenty-three burrs on the right leg from the knee down, seventeen on the other. John counts them as he picks them off, but Rodney’s not around to care that burrs happen in prime numbers, so he doesn’t say anything.
“D’you think we can get one of those grey things with the tails again?” asks Ronon, who has become oddly chatty in the past two weeks. John had sort of expected that Ronon would regress, lose what little polish he had acquired since coming to Atlantis, but instead he’s -- well. Flourishing, for want of a better word.
“Squirrel stew,” mutters John, now sticking the burrs together and watching how the little hooks bite into the tips of his fingers. “Who’d’ve guessed that the hillbillies were on to something?”
“Beats MREs,” agrees Ronon, his fingers twisting snare wire into cunning loops that ring the trunk of a tree. He was the one who told John about how small animals climb up trees -- not in a straight line but in a spiral, circling the trunk like a roller coaster track. “Lazy,” Ronon had said, lifting an eyebrow and looking over at John’s messy haphazard snares. “Less of an incline to scale that way.”
“Who’s in a hurry to get to the top of the tree anyway?” John had answered, watching Ronon’s hands, graceful on the thin wire.
Now they rise, snares laid, ready for the long march back to camp through thickets of burr-bearing plants. John ignores the way the vegetation tugs at his BDUs as they walk. Instead he thinks about the snares, glittering against the tree bark, how they tighten around the necks of their prey, biting into windpipes and puncturing them.
***
Once, Elizabeth’s parents had a couple over for dinner, acquaintances they had met through their work. Elizabeth was about fifteen, too young to really contribute to the conversation but old enough to be interested by it. The woman was telling the Weirs about how her family had come to America during the Second World War, about the twists of fate, the favors repaid, and the sheer blessed luck that had landed them safe in the United States after fleeing one country after another. They had been Mennonites, exiled first from Germany, then from the Ukraine, then fleeing Czechoslovakia, losing aunts and cousins and grandparents willy-nilly as they went, going from comfortable prosperity to desperate survival in the space of months.
Elizabeth, who’d read about the war, who saw displaced people on the television every night, was fascinated by the constellation of events and circumstances that led to this moment, this quiet dinner party between her parents and this fortunate matter-of-fact woman.
“I often wonder,” said Elizabeth’s father, refilling wine glasses around the table, “if our children’s generation could ever do the things our generation has done, if they had to. I wonder, if something happened and they had to survive, could they --”
“They could,” answered the woman firmly. “People do what they must.” And she met Elizabeth’s eye across the table, and Elizabeth was seized by visions of nuclear fall-out, of a science fictional post-apocalyptic society and herself in it -- thin and desperate but strong and stubborn. Of course she could do it, Elizabeth agreed silently, nodding at the woman. Elizabeth would do what she must.
***
The mundanity of exile, its everydayness, is therefore the biggest surprise in store for Elizabeth. Her whole career, especially since she came to Pegasus, Elizabeth has frequently faced down moments where her iron will was the only thing standing between her people’s safety and certain death. And though no one can really say they’re accustomed to that feeling, Elizabeth thinks she’s at least got a pretty good handle on her instinctive reactions, that she’s able to bluff through fear and danger with outward calm and confidence.
She never guessed that her post-apocalyptic world would have so much to do with toenail clippers.
I never finished this section, but it was going to be a battle over the one pair of toenail clippers that made it out of Atlantis. Because, seriously -- HOW WOULD YOU CUT YOUR TOENAILS? Rodney would have featured prominently. And John would probably be the one who stole the clippers in the first place.
***
They can ill afford to lose anyone now that their numbers are diminished, but somehow worse is the chance that someone should be crippled, that another person might fall ill and waste away in a fever, that any of them might fall prey to something as simple and destructive as a burst appendix.
Ronon brings him twenty feet of ropy grey intestines from something they killed and Carson learns how to make sutures from offal. He dreams about sewing together abdominal muscles, obliques, rectus, fat, about stapling skin.
He palpates his own belly nervously when he’s alone, remembering the shapes without the aid of Ancient imaging: here the upper lobe of the liver, here the lower curve of the stomach, and here the sly turn of the ascending colon as it rolls up and away from the jejunum. He dreams about sterile clamps and retractors.
During the day, he sets out orange peels and stale flatbread and prays for penicillin. Carson dreams about Petri dishes flocked with mold.
This was originally in the first Carson section, and then I decided to try and stretch his monologue out. I don't think it works, though, and if I were ever to continue writing this, I'd find a way to condense Carson down to one section about dwindling supplies. And maybe there'd actually be some kind of action involved. Hmm.
It bears re-re-reiteration that this is WiP Amnesty and therefore, no. I won't write more. I promise, this is it, love it or leave it.
Fandom: Smallville
Rating: PG (though it would totally have gotten way smuttier)
Pairing: Clark/Lex
Summary: Clark gets sent back in time. Hijinks ensue.
A/N: Okay, so the idea is that future!SuperClark gets sent back somehow (insert phlebotnum here) into the body of his puppy!Clark self (think 1st season). His enmity for Lex is strong, but eventually he gets to remember how Lex used to be. This turns into noticing how he used to be around Lex. Which of course ends in the gay sex. Amen.
It’s playing dirty, that’s what it is. One second, Superman is facing an enraged Lex Luthor on a rooftop, listening to the usual acrid diatribe and struggling to keep his own temper in check, and the next --
The next --
Wrapped in layers of cotton like a well-known embrace, feeling his toes suddenly nudge against thin leather in shoes nearly outgrown, all the noise and wind of Metropolis whooshing abruptly to a halt so that the ticking of the mantle clock sounds extravagantly resonant to his shuttered ears. And he’s holding a cold glass of milk and he can somehow *taste* the last swallow he took, white and rich on his tongue. And not two feet away, in almost exactly the same place as Luthor was just standing relative to Superman --
Lex.
“What?” Superman utters, but the tone is thin and flexible as a reed. Not Superman’s voice. Clark’s. “What the hell just happened?” He turns his head and takes it in -- yes, Luthor’s Smallville mansion, but no longer the deserted wreck it was when Superman last visited. Nor is it the secure fortress it had been before Superman’s wrath reduced it to rubble. No, it’s a perfect reproduction of what the mansion had once been, every detail sounding a note in Clark’s memory.
“Are you okay, Clark?” Lex asks, and he -- he *reaches out*. He *touches* Clark, right on his arm, his fingers warm through the flannel.
Clark rears back, windmilling his arm out of Lex’s grip. The hand Lex used, that’s the hand with the kryptonite ring, and why exactly is it that Clark isn’t writhing in agony on the hardwood floor this very second?
It hits him with frightening abruptness: Lex’s hand wasn’t cold and lifeless. It was warm and it *gripped* Clark’s forearm. It wasn’t a black glove-sheathed prosthesis; it was flesh and blood.
It’s playing dirty, no doubt about it. Because this is no Metropolis rooftop, and Clark is no superhero. This isn’t 2018. It’s Smallville, and this man in front of Clark is the Lex Luthor he once knew before he became disfigured by hate and greed.
Clark is licking his lips and breathing hard and Lex looks concerned. “I’m not feeling well,” he says. It sounds wooden and strange in his mouth, making excuses to a Lex who genuinely doesn’t know that Clark can’t be sick unless a little green rock is nearby. “I think I’d better go.”
If this is some kind of holographic projection or virtual reality, Luthor will be forced to show his cards now. He can’t let Clark leave if all this is a contrived attempt to throw Superman off-guard.
But Lex just steps back, his hands in his pants pockets. “If you think it’s best.” Clark risks a glance and is struck by how realistic this Lex is: he actually looks regretful that Clark’s leaving. In fact, he almost looks upset.
“I’m -- I’m going now,” Clark repeats, and backs towards the door. It’s been years since he turned his back on Luthor, and he’s not about to reacquire the habit now. He x-rays their surroundings as he edges out of the room, but can’t find any electronics other than standard -- if antiquated-looking -- Luthor surveillance equipment. If this is a trick, it’s not one that Clark can see through in any literal sense.
He gains the corridor and paces quickly to the front door. He blurs across the grounds, through the gate (bending the bars apart and together again like he did a hundred times before in a different age), and safely onto the highway.
But when Clark goes to lift off the ground, intending to fly back to Metropolis, to the Planet and his computer and his life, to figure out what the hell is going on--
He trips over his toes and falls flat out on the asphalt.
No lift, nothing. Like he’s completely forgotten how to fly.
Clark scrabbles back to his feet and tries again, more carefully this time.
He winds up standing with his arm raised in the middle of the road, like a lonely and demented neo-Nazi.
This doesn’t seem to be any kind of trick.
Clark turns around and faces the opposite direction before taking off in a high-speed run.
***
Of course, he would have gone to the farm, found his Dad alive and well, and started to contemplate the idea that this wasn't some Luthorian scheme.
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sam/Dean. See A/N.
Summary: Supposed to have been a sort of 'missing scenes' extravaganza.
A/N: I wrote exactly one extended fic in SPN and I honestly thought I'd write more because I love the show, but it turns out I do have some scruples (damn it!) and I just can't write the brotherly love. This fic was headed that way, and so it got stalled. Sorry about that. But I love pieces of this so much, I wish I could salvage it somehow.
If their lives were a TV show, Sam bets that most of their day-to-day life would never appear on-screen. On TV, there’d be plenty of monster fighting, lots of tense brotherly deliberation, even (for the purposes of exposition) a few scenes of him and Dean sitting in front of their computers trading facts.
But that would be a skewed perspective, really, because most of the time, it’s just the two of them, on the road.
1.
The only movie playing at the theater in Alder, North Carolina is Brokeback Mountain. Sam and Dean stand in front of the marquee with their hands in their pockets, heads tilted back as they read and reread the sign. Like this is some kind of demonic joke, like the sign’s about to change to King Kong, or hell, even something shitty and mindless like Cheaper By the Dozen 2.
“We’re in *North Carolina*,” says Sam at length.
“Dude,” answers Dean with complete sympathy.
“We’re in a *tiny town* in the middle of *North Carolina* and the only movie playing is a movie about *gay cowboys*?” Sam says. He sounds just like he did when he was five and Dad told him about where babies come from.
“Well, it *is* the capital of Buttfuck, Nowhere. Guess it makes sense,” Dean jokes and catches a dark glare from Sam. “Oh, come on, little brother. What doesn’t kill us can only make us --”
“Gayer?” Sam squeaks indignantly. “Dean, practically everybody we run into already thinks you and me’re…”
Dean finds this fact hilarious, always does, but Sammy doesn’t. And it’s not that Sam’s a bigot, far from it -- christ, the kid lived in California long enough that he’s not likely to bat an eye at Heath Ledger spooning Jake Gyllenhaal. Truth be told, it’s mostly that Sam doesn’t like anything that ties him more tightly to Dean.
So Dean swallows down his grin along with the lump that rises in his throat, punches Sam in the arm, and walks up to the box office window. A bored teenager takes Dean’s rumpled twenty while Sam hovers impatiently.
Dean lets Sam choose the snack foods in an attempt to cheer up his grouchy little brother. When they walk into the theatre, Sam has a bag of M&M’s, a large tub of greasy popcorn, and a vat of soda and ice. He’s also smiling. Dean smiles too.
“This movie better not suck,” Dean says.
i.
You would think they had this worked out a long time ago, back before it was the black Impala and both of them in the front seat together. After all, most of Dean’s childhood and all of Sam’s were spent like this, grey asphalt spooling under the car, heat or cold blasting from the air vents depending on the season and the latitude, and nothing but bright green signs to mark their passing.
They should have had it all figured out a long time ago, yes, but now, for the first time it’s just the two of them. And it’s like they’ve never road-tripped before in their lives.
Dad didn’t talk much on the road. He preferred flipping through the radio stations, letting the accents and the topics being discussed be self-explanatory education for his boys. Sam still knows the exact width of the bible belt, measured in scratchy AM radio stations; he knows the sweet smoothness of FM stations signal the presence of a metropolis; he knows that the difference between Texas and Louisiana is found in the pronunciation of the word ‘hot’.
Sometimes Dean would sit in the back with Sam and tell him things: “Watch for the numbers on the little green signs, Sammy. Tells us how many more miles there are in Montana.” Or “That’s our twenty-second Springfield, awesome,” as they leave another town with sweaty waxed cups in their hands. Or, holding a dog-eared MathQuest textbook (pilfered from the latest PS they’d both attended) open between them with his flattened palm, “There’s a faster way to do long division, Sammy, lemme show you.” It helped to pass the hours while Sam fidgeted under the wide nylon lap-belt, while Dean commandeered the hundred-times-folded roadmaps, while Dad just drove and drove and never said a word.
Driving’s not the same, Sam realizes, without Dad’s silence.
2.
Sam skids down the scree on the shoulder of the road, cursing in his flat-soled Skechers while Dean picks his way down the slope more deliberately, arms out for balance. The Appalachians are looming all around and the air is crisp with the feeling of early spring.
“Ow, fuckit,” Sam says, stumbling to a halt on smoother gravel. “Why the hell can’t we keep going until we get to a real rest stop?”
“You’re the one who wouldn’t stop bitching about needing to pee,” Dean points out, coming up even with Sam. Two more feet and they’ve got their thighs pressed up against a dull aluminum guardrail, staring down over a precipice to where a candy-blue stream wends its way around boulders.
“Kinda nice here,” concedes Sam, opening his belt buckle.
“Beats the hell out of a urinal,” Dean agrees easily, glancing back over his shoulder to confirm that no one else is coming down to admire the view.
They pee in tandem and, because they’re brothers, make no pretense of manly disinterest, of staring over at the next mountain and ignoring the way their elbows keep bumping. Instead, they watch their pee fall in glittering arcs and snicker as they each try to go higher than the other, and then farther, and then to aim for a certain rock in the streambed, and then they make an X in the air for a brief second before Dean runs out of pee and has to shake himself off. Sam smirks like he won an unspoken contest, and Dean deliberately knocks Sam hard in the side so that he stumbles and pees on his own hand.
“You nasty sonuvabitch--” chokes Sam, torn between disgust (Sam’s so damn finicky) and laughter. He tackles Dean so he can wipe his hand off on Dean’s pants, hooking one leg around Dean’s thigh and wrapping his elbow around Dean’s neck. Dean’s sort of trying to get away, but mostly he’s killing himself laughing because Sam’s still got his jeans open and he can tell from how Sam’s stumbling behind him that they’re falling down around his knees. They land on the ground a second later, gasping for air and broken up with grins.
“Your dick is still hanging out,” Dean tells Sam, clambering up on his elbows and then to his feet.
Sam flips Dean the bird and pulls himself together with the other hand. “God,” he says, knocking his shoulder into Dean’s as they pick their way back up the slope, stepping in the depressions their footsteps made on the way down, “now I gotta have a shower.”
“Hey,” Dean says, thoughtfully, “isn’t that what you said after we watched all that gay cowboy humping this afternoon?”
“Shut up, Dean,” Sam grouses, but he’s still smiling helplessly.
ii.
The first time Dean tosses Sam the keys, it almost happens in slow motion, and Sam fights hard against the retarded grin that wants to bust his face open. He’s reminded of the year he was ten, of Dean haranguing the shit out of Dad, arguing constantly about being allowed to drive.
(Though years earlier, Dad had taught both Sam and Dean how to put the car into gear, how to start and stop and how to pull the wide wheel between small fingers, sitting on a phone book to see. Just in case, he’d said, the same way he’d said it when he pressed a revolver into Sam’s palm on his tenth birthday.)
Then one day, Dad flipped the keys to Dean and Dean had tripped over himself getting to the driver’s side door, he moved so fast. Sam had almost burst with borrowed pride himself, slinging his skinny arms around the headrest on the back of Dean’s seat, kicking his legs and chirping instructions while Dean fitted the key in the ignition and said, “Shut up, Sammy, I know how to do it.”
They drove to Louisiana that day, leaving behind Sam’s fourteenth school and his third real friend. They left so abruptly that Sam remembers worrying about the half-full carton of chocolate milk sitting on his desk in the lunchroom, abandoned when Dad came in and beckoned grimly. But for once Sam didn’t care, didn’t mind, was so thrilled by the novelty of Dean behind the wheel, Dean serious and studiously casual and intent on the road, Dean choosing where they stopped and what they ate, and Dean getting Dad to consult the map for him, to decide on a route that Sam could trace with his finger. Sam remembers feeling like Dean had abruptly entered some mysterious bastion of manhood, remembers anticipating the day when he too would get to drive, when Dean would navigate for him.
Of course, by the time Sam was sixteen everything had changed. He was angry all the time, Dad was an irrational bastard, and Dean was infuriatingly loyal to Dad, and the day Sam finally got in the driver’s seat and drove, it was halfway through a werewolf job in Georgia. Sam got all the way to Florida before he calmed down enough to turn around. When he stalked back into the hotel room, morose and regretful, Dad and Dean didn’t seem to have realized he was even gone; and if Dad noticed the extra miles on the odometer, he never said a word. It had felt more like a tantrum than a rite of passage, really. A letdown.
Which is why his reaction catches him off-guard when Dean throws him the keys. Sam settles down onto the seat and skims his hands over the curve of the wheel, adjusts the rearview mirror and checks the controls. By the time he throws the car in reverse, Dean’s halfway asleep.
Sam puts his arm across the back of the seat while he drives, just experimentally; he feels the soft brush of Dean’s neck against the inside of his thumb.
3.
Sam flicks the loose grains of salt off the top of the shaker before picking it up and tilting it over his fries. “That was kinda not a bad movie, though,” he says, as though they’re picking up where they left off. In actuality, Sam just woke up when Dean pulled up to the diner and has been silent ever since.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Dean asks, irritably. “That movie ate my balls.” He’s keeping a weather eye on the waitress they didn’t get. She’s maybe twenty-one and Dean likes the way her polyester dress is cinched in at her waist, the way it puckers under her arms.
“You didn’t like it?” asks Sam flatly as he pushes his fries into a puddle of ketchup.
“Lame,” Dean says, distractedly.
“You just hated it cause it reminded you of that Boy Scout camp we went to that year,” Sam tells him with a crooked grin. “What was your boyfriend’s name? Simon?”
“Shut up, you dink,” Dean sneers, and of course that’s when the cute waitress looks over. Dean tries to turn his snarl into a ‘hey there’ kind of smirk. She just looks worried.
“I never got the details on that one anyway,” Sam pursues, leaning in. “So he what? He jumped your bones in the tent?”
“Oh my god, we’re *so* not talking about this,” Dean says.
“All I knew was that one day, the two of you were like brothers and the next day he’s walkin’ around with a black eye and you’re tented up with two different guys.” Sam bites into his hamburger, chuckling around a mouthful of food. The waitress has transferred her attention to Sam now, and Dean doesn’t get the appeal.
“You need a haircut,” says Dean, contemplating Sam’s general appearance.
“Ain’t I purty enough for y’all?” drawls Sam, pitching forward on one elbow, closer to Dean and pursing ketchup-smeared lips in a fake pucker. He’s completely oblivious to the attention of the waitress, as usual. “I mean, I know I’m no Simon, but --”
Dean reaches across and stuffs a fry up Sam’s nose. While Sam’s coughing and bitching and kicking his long legs under the table, Dean looks over and sees that the waitress has lost interest in both of them.
***
The trope of Brokeback Mountain (movie!fic! Ack!) was going to recur, until it became clear that Dean identifies with Jake Gyllenhaal's character a little too much and Sam finally clues into that -- that Dean fears being cast aside or left behind by Sam. Dean's in the present because, bitching aside, he's with Sammy and he loves their lives. Sam, on the other hand, is introspective and weirdly nostalgic, and I didn't want him to snap into the present with Dean until the end of the fic, when he realizes what Dean's trying to say in his special Dean-way.
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Pairing: Sam/Dean. AU. See A/N.
Summary: Sam's a hooker. Dean's his defense attorney. Or something. I never got that far.
A/N: Here's another unfinished Wincest piece. I'm actually under orders from
sparktastic to finish this ("I don't even watch this show, but -- hooker! You HAVE TO OMG."), but I won't.Sammy didn’t wear a watch. Instead, he kept a compact with a mirror with him, either in his jeans pocket, or, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in his purple vinyl purse. It was a running joke with him and the others – that Sammy checked the time by pulling out his compact and studying the state of his eyeliner. The blurrier it got, the later the hour, and when the heat of the night’s activities led to the black lines transferring onto Sammy’s prodding fingertip, it was time to go home.
His eyeliner was still fresh, so Sammy guessed he’d been working for maybe half an hour – no tricks yet, slow Thursday – when he stepped down the alley for a smoke break. Theresa wouldn’t come with him, and later he was glad, though at the time he just flipped her off and sauntered away alone, knuckles resting insolently on one hip.
For about three seconds, he thought it was a garbage bag. For two seconds, he thought it was a bum taking a nap. And for one blissful second, he hoped it was just a dead body.
The interval in which he stood, stared, and held his breath with disbelief was much longer.
She wasn’t positioned as casually as he’d hoped. One arm thrown back over her head, the other crooked at the elbow to accommodate the way her hand dipped into her opened abdomen. Her legs ended all too abruptly at the ankle and her eyes were missing. Carved into the low dip of her décolletage, there was a pentagram, done post-mortem so as to prevent blood from obscuring the design.
Sammy finally drew breath, teetering a bit on his size 15 wedges as dizziness overcame him. Watching his hand as though it belonged to someone else, he gingerly crouched down and stroked the woman’s forehead, knowing that she would be warm to the touch, though she clearly had been dead for hours.
“Mia,” he whispered, standing up again. “God, I should have told you.”
***
“You found her just like this?”
The CSIs in Vegas weren’t nearly as pretty or as interesting as TV would have you believe, Sammy thought, exhaling with boredom. He looked down at the crime scene photo on the speckled arborite table and stared at the place where Mia’s shoulder joined her neck. “Just like that,” he agreed, and cracked his gum.
“You’re sure you didn’t see anything weird that night?”
Sammy squinted, focusing his eyes just behind the picture – two dead Mias, two pentagrams.
“Do you know what that symbol means?” demanded the investigator, tapping both of the Mias with a forked finger.
“It’s some satanic shit,” said Sammy, sitting back in his chair and sighing. “I don’t know.”
“Right,” said the investigator, sliding the photo back across the table. “Okay, Mr. Forester, that will be all.”
He almost made it out the door in character, but the guilt swept over him in a wave just as he began to shoulder his way through the narrow doorway. He paused, and the investigator caught it.
“Mr. Forester?”
Sammy splayed his fingers against the frame and bowed his head. “Mirrors,” Sammy said, quietly.
“Excuse me?”
“Mirrors reflect back evil,” Sammy said, tautly. “If you put them on the entrances to the alleys, then –”
The investigator looked up and exchanged a glance with the constable who was escorting Sammy from the room.
“I’m not a junkie,” he said, defiantly, even though he could see the investigator eyeing the lines on the inside of Sammy’s elbow.
“Call us if you remember anything useful,” said the investigator, clearly dismissing him.
***
The guy wasn’t a rookie -- no wallet, no identification in any of his pockets, only the homely wad of twenties he’d flashed at Sammy through the car window and the plastic key ring that proclaimed ‘Aruba!’ in neon rainbow letters. Sammy took his fee and sat on the edge of the bed to pull his socks on.
This one had wanted Sammy to fuck him without a single sound, had started things off by clamping his hand over Sammy’s mouth and going “shh shh shh” as he drove. Once they got here (cash motel, room for three hours) it’d taken about ten minutes of Sammy silently doing the guy from behind, his jeans sagging around his knees, before the trick had come with a sigh and collapsed into slumber. He hadn’t seemed bothered that Sammy didn’t come too.
Sammy was okay with that, he was okay with the guy being an obvious veteran of the scene, it was all better than any one of the tricks he’d turned in the beginning, but Sammy wished that he’d haggled for a higher fee, because he was going to have to cab it back to the strip now. He hadn’t made nearly enough to be done for the night, and he was reflex-hard and edgy besides from the too-hasty and sterile fuck.
***
Wow, I don't even remember writing that last bit. Dirty! Anyway, like I said -- I think Dean was going to be Sam's public defender, because it'd be fun to let Dean be the educated one. The untold backstory is that Daddy Wincester died in a hunt and Dean and Sam got taken away by foster care at a young age; Dean won the foster care lottery and was adopted by good people, while Sam -- wasn't. Strangely, I'm pretty sure this fic grew out of watching 'Rent'. I loved the idea of Sam being so street, of Dean being civil service, and the tension there. What made me stop was knowing that I wanted them to get together, but I couldn't decide if it was more disturbing if they figured out right away that they were brothers, or if they found out afterwards. I'm just not meant to write Wincest.
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: I have no clue. Well, initially it's McKay/Brown. But I think it was sort of headed for McKay/Sheppard.
Summary: Katie's POV. It's weird.
A/N: Another fic I can't seem to make any progress with, though this time it's not because of incest, thank god. I love isolated moments of this and I even have a vague idea of what the arc might have been, but it all got a bit jossed by 'Sunday' and I found myself not minding -- so, here:
Braced above her on his knuckles, Rodney looks so fierce and intent that Katie has to bite back the urge to smile. It’s been too long, she’d forgotten how seriously men approach sex -- nothing like TV and movies with the romance and the tenderness and the effortless soft-focus suspension of the laws of physics. Rodney is all about physics, visibly calculating force and rate and pressure and frequency and probably doing some sort of linear regression estimate to try and judge Katie’s satisfaction level.
“Are you close?” he asks, testing his hypothesis. He frees up one hand and drives the broad flat head of his thumb against her, making Katie gasp with surprise.
She manages a nod, closing her eyes against Rodney’s expression because it’s too much like how he looks working equations with Radek in the astrophysics lab and any second now she’s going to blurt out something about how she nearly failed integral calculus in her freshman year -- and never mind her putting out on the third date, *that* would be the thing that made Rodney lose all respect for her.
So she raises her heels and lifts her hips and lets Rodney’s motions draw out her exhalation in little rapid huffs. He’s encouraged; his thumb presses in harder and he picks up the pace.
Katie’s never been comfortable making a lot of noise, in or out of bed, but she knows a handful of great tricks, and one of them is the happy ice cream sound. She keeps her eyes closed and pictures a banana fudge sundae. The sound that comes out from between her pressed lips is like, “Mmm, hmm, mmm,” and Rodney grunts in response.
She’s not close, she’s nowhere near it, but it’s a first time and men take everything too seriously for her to admit failure, so Katie hikes up her thighs and tenses them hard, holding her breath, arching. “Are you?” asks Rodney breathlessly, and answers himself, “Of course you are, yes, just --”
“Mmm,” answers Katie, opening her eyes slowly and smiling.
“God,” Rodney breathes, and kisses her. She loves this best -- not that she’s exactly *very* experienced, but she’s had a few significant others and she knows what she likes, and it’s this -- when the guy finally lets go of his sense of obligation and goes all selfish and frantic. Rodney has one hand on her breast and he’s got his head thrown back and his chest glistening with perspiration and if Katie could find the words to say so, she’d tell Rodney that this is much more exciting than any careful placement of fingers: seeing that he loves this, loves being in her, loves the feeling she’s giving him.
“Not long,” he promises, as though she’s doing him a favor.
She strokes the damp hair off his forehead and subtly angles her hips. He’s too busy to notice the marked difference between her schooled happy ice cream hums and the breathy desperate noises he’s drawing from her now against her will. “You, you,” says Rodney brokenly, and slams in hard before making a sound like their ZPM just shattered.
He moves quickly afterwards, shuffling back on his knees, heading for the bathroom with the used condom, pausing to pull on his boxers on the way back. Katie’s squirmed under the blankets by the time he looks up at her, and he’s clearly wondering what she would like him to do next
“Are you -- I mean. Would you like to --” she begins, hesitantly.
“I have a pre-mission briefing at oh seven hundred,” Rodney says, grimacing, and reaches for his pants. “I’d hate to wake you up.”
“Oh -- sure. I mean, no problem.”
Rodney is already in his shirt and wiggling his way into his socks and boots. He hops on one foot over to the head of the bed and stoops down to kiss Katie’s mouth. “Goodnight,” he says, and his hand moves towards Katie’s breast seemingly of its own volition. It stops, hovering, and Katie laughs before she can help it. “Right,” he says, trying to hide his embarrassment, and straightens up. “I’ll come visit you in your lab tomorrow,” he says.
“I thought you had a mission,” she half-inquires.
“Oh, yes, of course,” Rodney flushes. “Um. Well, the next day then. Assuming everything goes --” He runs out of steam halfway through whatever he was about to say; either it’s classified or Rodney thinks it might be boring.
“Goodnight,” Katie says.
Rodney nods twice and heads for the door.
***
Katie’s displaced Chuck in their little lunchtime clique, and he’s not happy about it. It used to be Chuck who was the center of attention, who regaled them all with stories of the SGA command team’s antics while they giggled around mouthfuls of whatever semi-edible thing the teams had brought home last week. His status as the daytime gate room tech secures him the kind of intimacy with the high-ups that none of the rest of them can boast -- at least until Dr. Rodney McKay deigned to show some interest in Katie.
Not that Katie’s much of a storyteller. She’d prefer it, in fact, if Chuck would continue as if nothing’s changed, but no one else seems to be of the same opinion. They are relentless in their teasing questions and Chuck is moody and withdrawn.
“Suzanne said she *saw* him leaving your quarters after midnight,” insists Uyen, who’s the biggest gossip in the zoology lab. “So dish, girl.”
Katie tilts a spoonful of orange soup over the surface of her bowl, studying its viscosity and trying to pretend she’s not the centre of attention.
“I bet he’s, like, wicked intense in bed. Is he just, like, so *focused*?” asks Uyen, all but clambering across the table in his eagerness to know.
“You’re the gayest nerd I’ve ever met,” Cassie Herbert, the microbiology tech, tells him. “I’ve never heard anyone queen out over a workaholic pompous astrophysicist before. He’s not Heath Ledger, Uyen.”
“Shut up,” Uyen snaps, and turns back to Katie. “Well? On a scale of one to ten?”
“I’m not going to --” begins Katie nobly, and is interrupted by a chorus of boos from everyone but Chuck.
“Leave her alone,” he tells them all, scowling at his jello. “It’s none of our goddamn business how McKay is in bed.”
“You’re just mad because this shoots your pet theory all to hell,” smirks Cassie, and Chuck rolls his eyes.
“What’s your pet theory?” asks Uyen, attention successfully diverted. Katie will have to thank Cassie for that later.
Chuck’s not answering, so Cassie does it for him: “Chuck’s convinced that McKay has a thing for military types.”
“Are you joking?” Uyen asks, stunned. “Have you seen the way he acts around Lieutenant Cadman?”
“Well,” says Cassie slowly, with a pointy grin, “Chuck’s theory actually centers around one particular military person.”
Uyen and Katie both frown for a moment, confused, but Katie surprises herself by being the first to make the connection. “The colonel?” she half-asks, knowing already that she’s right.
“Oh, there’s no *way* -- McKay’s never made so much as a blip on my gaydar,” Uyen insists immediately, and Katie’s strangely relieved.
“Maybe you should run a diagnostic on your gaydar,” suggests Chuck, piping up unexpectedly. “You’re not around to see how McKay gets when Sheppard’s in trouble.” He seems to recall Katie’s presence at this, and shoots her an apologetic glance. “But it probably doesn’t mean anything.”
“How does he get?” Katie asks, and is impressed to hear how dispassionate she sounds. “Rodney, I mean. When the colonel’s in trouble.”
“He just --” begins Chuck, and hesitates, obviously revising his thoughts as he goes. “Well, they all worry. The team’s close. You know.”
“But you think Rodney’s different about it,” Katie presses, still calm.
Chuck lifts one shoulder, not offering any other response.
Katie’s had reason to doubt Chuck’s reports before; some of his stories of what goes on down in the gate room are positively operatic in scale, and above half of them can’t be completely true. He’s the one who kept telling her horror stories about McKay when she and Rodney started talking, and Katie has yet to see the side of Rodney that Chuck described -- brash, condescending, ridiculous. She’s not an idiot; she knows Rodney’s got a reputation for his less-than-stellar management and people skills, but Katie doesn’t think it translates into his personal life, not from what she’s seen.
So Chuck’s unreliable. She knows it, and yet she can’t help asking one more question: “You think Sheppard knows?”
Chuck’s caught off-guard by this. It shows in his lifted brows, the way his hand fumbles as he reaches for his napkin. “Um,” he begins, looking at his tray. “Well.”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Cassie supplies darkly, as if this is an answer.
“Right,” says Katie, feeling her blush, hot under her skin. “Right.” She stands up and lifts her tray. “I have to get back to,” she says hastily, and leaves without bothering to finish her excuse.
***
The thing is, Katie’s always had a pretty good sense about this stuff. She wouldn’t go so far as to call it intuition, but she has instincts and through painful trial and error, she’s learned to follow her gut when it’s telling her something.
The Rodney situation had been blissfully free of any such complications so far, and while she hasn’t quite felt any overwhelming spark of chemistry with Rodney, she’d figured it was wartime: any port in a storm. During dark nights in her quarters, alone with her thoughts of a second Wraith siege, she’d always felt it would be nice to have someone lying beside her, sharing in the unspoken fear.
Rodney had seemed to be the answer to that wish: he was solid and broad and substantial, with shoulders slightly bowed under the huge burden he carried. Katie could imagine him sheltering her in his pragmatic and fallible way, his big hands stroking through her hair and telling her that everything would be fine, and even if it wasn’t, at least they would be with someone else for a little while before the world ended. It wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t the sort of thing Katie had ever pictured for herself, but then she’d never quite envisioned winding up in another galaxy tending soy plants in a floating city either.
“Are you the one I talk to about getting some cucumbers?” asks Colonel Sheppard from the doorway of the greenhouse, and Katie has to clear her throat to answer.
“Yes. I mean. Cucumbers are scheduled for Phase Four,” she manages.
“I miss pickles,” Sheppard states. He’s leaning against the frame and the edge of the blond wood is pulling his American flag away from the Velcro on his sleeve. She’s never seen him up close before.
“Phase Four is next year,” Katie says, almost babbling with sudden nervousness.
“So no pickles until then,” Sheppard concludes. “You’re Dr. Brown?”
It’s not really a question and Katie doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to follow her instincts to know what this unexpected visit is: it is proof that Cassie and Chuck were onto something.
“John,” he says, and comes into the greenhouse. He’s got a Beretta strapped to his right thigh, and Katie’s eyes are entranced with the slick plastic look of the gun’s butt. She knows that Rodney wears one of those off-world, but she can’t picture Rodney’s wide serious fingers curled around the black plastic. John’s hands, conversely, are slender and elegant and yet look like they’re made for war.
“Katie,” she answers belatedly, and busies herself with snipping samples of their six-week soy plants.
“I figured we should meet,” admits Sheppard, coming close enough to poke one of his fingers into the dark loamy soil. “Rodney wouldn’t think of introducing us, but you shouldn’t take it personally. He’s just bad with people stuff.”
Katie thinks of the stories she’s heard, of how Sheppard killed fifty-five Genii and didn’t turn a hair about it during the big storm last year, of how he was so enthralled by some high and mighty Ascended priestess that he defied Weir directly to come to the woman’s rescue. She wonders how exactly Sheppard considers himself to be good with people stuff, or in any way more qualified than Rodney.
“We’re having a movie marathon tonight,” Sheppard says, filling in the little hole he dug in the dirt. “Star Wars. You watched science fiction with McKay yet?”
Katie shakes her head.
“It’s quite the experience,” Sheppard tells her. “We have to keep the subtitles on so we don’t lose track of the plot when he goes off on a rant.”
Katie half-laughs, because Sheppard seems to think he’s making a joke.
“You should come,” Sheppard says, flashing a smile her way. “The common room by the gym, twenty-one hundred hours.”
“I don’t want to intrude,” Katie says, even though she very much wants to intrude. She wants to get Rodney and Sheppard in the same room at the same time and see exactly what her gut has to say about it.
“Nah,” says Sheppard, waving a hand. “It’s just a movie night.” Then he tilts his head and taps his earpiece. “This is Sheppard, what seems to be -- oh, crap. Yeah, hold ‘em back, I’ll be right there.” He raises his palm in a goodbye salute to Katie and jogs backwards out of the room, his hand going for his Beretta before he’s even clear of the greenhouse.
After he leaves, Katie thinks: He’s taller than I expected.
***
Rodney’s so flustered to see Katie in the common room that he spills popcorn all over Teyla Emmagen and they all spend the next two minute on hands and knees, gathering the scattered kernels and bumping foreheads into other people’s limbs at every turn.
“Well, you’re --” says Rodney, blinking and rubbing his skin where he just collided with Ronon’s shoulder.
“Colonel Sheppard asked me to come,” Katie tells him, and Sheppard smiles with half his mouth when Rodney looks over at him. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? No, no, of course I --” Rodney scrambles back and nearly sits in the popcorn bowl all over again before settling down against the couch. He pats the floor beside him like Katie’s a pet poodle. She sits close, but leaves six inches between them. John’s reclined on the couch cushions behind them and Teyla’s perched on the arm by his head. Ronon’s got an armchair to himself.
“We’re just past Leia’s message and Ben Kenobi,” says John, as he hits the spacebar on the laptop connected to the projector.
Rodney’s quiet for the first five minutes. He keeps glancing over at Katie, nervous and compulsive, his hands clenching and relaxing on his knees. Then Obi Wan does his Jedi thing on a storm trooper and Rodney shifts.
“I need to learn how to do that,” drawls Sheppard from behind them.
“Yes, if only you could master the art of mind control,” snipes Rodney immediately.
“Come on, it’d be pretty useful on off-world missions,” says Sheppard, and Ronon snorts. “You *will* give us the ZPM,” he half-chants, waving one hand in the air with panache.
“Well, if there were the slightest scrap of evidence supporting the existence of telepathic phenomena,” says Rodney bitterly.
“Teyla’s psychic,” Sheppard comments.
“Teyla’s able to tap into an alien collective consciousness, it’s completely different,” Rodney answers, twisting around to face Sheppard.
“You say ‘collective consciousness’, Obi Wan says ‘the Force’,” Sheppard answers blithely. “Tomayto, tomahto.”
Rodney sputters for a second and finally manages to say, “You know what, just -- I can’t believe we’re even *having* this conversation.” And he manages to be silent for another two minutes before a light saber appears and he starts ranting about the physical impossibility of a solid-state laser beam that *retracts*.
They sit through Star Wars, and then the Empire Strikes Back, but before the Jedi can return, Teyla yawns and announces that she’s going to bed. Ronon’s been sleeping in his chair since before Han Solo got frozen. Rodney seems game for a third movie, reaching for the DVD case and chattering about cryogenics and the Ancients’ stasis pods and the differences between the two when Sheppard jams a knee between Rodney’s shoulder blades. “Ow! What did you do that for?” Rodney shouts, reaching back to rub the injured spot.
Sheppard reaches out and cuffs Rodney’s head, abandoning the subtle approach. “I think maybe Katie’s getting tired,” he says pointedly, and Rodney abruptly seems to recall that Katie’s in the room.
“Are you tired?” Rodney asks, wide-eyed.
“I --” says Katie.
John interrupts. “Maybe you could walk her back to her quarters, Rodney?”
“Yes, of course I could,” Rodney says hurriedly, “I mean, if you want me to, or we could watch another movie, or you could just go by yourself if you --”
Katie smiles, ignoring the way her stomach is doing slow sick loop-de-loops. “I would like it. If you would walk me back.” She’s had more than enough of Sheppard, and of the unfamiliar version of Rodney she’s experienced this evening. She wants peace and familiarity, if only for a little while.
“Yes, okay, let’s --”
They stand and stretch and leave Sheppard lying in the dark, eyes fixed on the test screen of the idle projector. Katie’s last impression is of Sheppard’s soldier hands, the way they’re clasped over his stomach, the blue-cast skin of them pale against his dark t-shirt.
***
Katie half-expects that Rodney will retain some of the strange frenetic energy he demonstrated in the common room, but as soon as they’re out in the corridor, Rodney reverts to his usual deferential and self-conscious persona. It’s actually a relief; Katie decides that this means that Rodney isn’t hiding something from her, that he’s not putting on a performance. Rodney’s just one of those people who are prismatic in nature, who behave differently with different people. Different patterns of light, but the same single source, Katie tells herself.
As though to confirm her theory, Rodney reaches for her hand and they walk to her quarters with fingers intertwined like eighth-graders.
“It was -- very pleasant. To have you present, I mean. I’m pleased that you --”
“Come in, Rodney,” Katie says.
It’s better the second time. Rodney seems encouraged by the very fact that he’s back in her bed, and much of his urgency ebbs. He takes his time to see Katie’s body, to kiss the bare flat planes of her skin in innocuous places: just above her navel, below her elbow, the outside of her knee. “Can I?” he asks, and though Katie fervently wishes he just *would*, she nods, and Rodney puts one wide palm on each of her thighs, pushes them apart gently, and bows his head between.
Next he moves her onto her side, curls up behind her, and pushes inside. It’s one of Katie’s favorite ways, though of course Rodney couldn’t know. She’s loose-limbed from her first orgasm and she climaxes once and almost twice before Rodney shudders and slams deep inside her at last. “Good, good,” he murmurs into her neck and Katie’s not sure if he’s asking or telling, but either way she involuntarily thinks of Sheppard.
“Mmm,” Rodney breathes out. There’s no sudden leap out of bed this time. Rodney’s movements are sluggish and dreamy. He drops the condom onto the nightstand and rolls back to press grateful kisses along the line of Katie’s breast. “Can I stay, I want to stay,” he says, low and drowsy. “I want to stay like this, just like this.”
Before Katie can answer, he’s dropping into sleep.
He sleeps silently, like a cat, limbs heavy and loose and with his unexpectedly long lashes flush against the skin under his eyes.
***
Mmm. I like that last part. DH's eyelashes *are* long, and thick, and kind of strangely pretty because somehow you don't really notice them until you're trying to notice them.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure this is where this was headed: Katie grows more obsessed with Sheppard and Rodney continues to have a bizarre Rodney-ish one-sided sexual relationship with Katie. John continues his weird passive-aggressive sabotage (because he totally knows Katie's sort of into him) but then throws it back in her face by letting her stumble across him getting a blowjob from a marine. Now Katie knows something about John that Rodney doesn't, and it escalates to the point where she ends up outing John to Rodney. And then I lose track of what would happen in the fall-out. I was sort of afraid of Katie becoming a Mary Sue whose only role was to bring them together, but then I didn't know what sort of role to give her in a story that's really about Rodney and John. It's hard to write a love story from the perspective of the third wheel without being either voyeuristic or Mary Sueish.
Really, this story was me playing with the idea of Rodney's relative straightness (compared to John) and his seeming inability to communicate with women, contrasted with John's apparent charm and his somewhat less apparent need to be alone. I don't know. It's weird, hence the title.
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Rating: R
Pairing: N/A. I think it's sort of gen, though there may have been some established McKay/Sheppard in there.
Summary: Post-apocalypse fic without the apocalypse.
A/N: I love the idea of the post-apocalyptic world, and SGA seems to lend itself to that scenario nicely -- it would be so simple to cut the expedition off from the Milky Way, and with the Wraith, losing Atlantis could be all too simple. My notion with this fic was to write a post-apocalyptic AU where no one talks about what happened and everyone starts to realize that life is just *life*, even after the worst has come and gone. I planned to write the fic as a series of emotional 'postcards' from the Atlantis crew, not really joined up except in theme. It got a bit too disjointed and I lost interest. Oh, and this is the second (2nd) fic where I go into detail about peeing outside. I need help.
The fifth night at the alpha site, Teyla teaches Elizabeth how to pee in the forest.
Elizabeth should probably be embarrassed that she’s reached her age (not young) without ever acquiring this skill, and Teyla should probably be bashful about showing the Atlantis expedition leader how not to pee down the inside of her leg, but some things have already changed, and one of them seems to be that Elizabeth and Teyla can giggle together.
“No, just --“ Teyla instructs, between bursts of laughter, “just bend your knees a bit more, there is no need to worry about your pants.”
“I’ve just been taking them off entirely,” admits Elizabeth, and Teyla (whose own pants are still halfway down her thighs) snorts. “And hoping that no one would wander past.”
Teyla laughs so hard at this that she staggers forward and almost loses her balance before grabbing a nearby tree trunk. She’s got a hand pressed under her nose, and she’s not quite snorting but it’s a close thing.
“Don’t make me laugh, I have to pee!” Elizabeth protests, trying to hold position.
“Is that not why we are here?” Teyla returns, helplessly grinning as she grapples with her pants.
Elizabeth manages to calm down enough to try out Teyla’s maneuver and is inordinately pleased when she realizes she’s managed it. “I miss toilet paper, though,” she confesses, still biting her lips against a smile. For an instant, it’s too serious and they both falter with a threatening wave of grief. Then Teyla smirks again.
“There is a rumor that some of the marines tried to use poison oak leaves and are suffering the consequences,” she says, even though Teyla’s not given to gossip.
“I wondered why Sergeant Porter was squirming so much at mess this morning,” Elizabeth answers thoughtfully, her mouth twisted against a smile. She pulls up her pants and buttons them, head bowed to the task.
When they get back to the camp and the light of the fire, they find that John’s guitar miraculously made it through the gate with the Lantean refugees. And to add wonder to wonder, Rodney can play passably well; he’s got the wooden body cradled over one knee while he complains about calluses and forgetting how to play E Sus4 and John’s substandard nylon strings. Then his fingers find a rhythm and he overrides his own commentary with something weirdly bright and cheerful and casual that turns into the beginning of If I had $1,000,000.
Elizabeth sits down by him, close enough that she hears the squeak of Rodney’s confident fingers sliding up and down between chords, close enough that her shoulder’s nudging Rodney’s knee, close enough that even by firelight she can see that Rodney’s mouthing the words while everyone else sings: “we wouldn’t have to walk to the store.”
Tonight Elizabeth feels less like a refugee.
***
Carson dreams about gauze. In his dreams, he gathers it from dew-wet grass, medical manna; with it he dresses wounds, packs it around grazed elbows, scraped cheekbones, and long neatly sutured cuts. The dreams are familiar, at least; the first month on Atlantis, the first year, had been much the same: troubled nights filled with phantom ace bandages, bottles of disinfectant, boxes of latex gloves, hypodermic syringes.
Of course many of their supplies came through the gate with them, and of course Carson’s not about to surrender hope that the Daedalus will find them. Still, he’s haunted by the possibilities.
And at night, his mind unwinds, its convolutions measurable in lengths of sterile cotton.
***
Twenty-three burrs on the right leg from the knee down, seventeen on the other. John counts them as he picks them off, but Rodney’s not around to care that burrs happen in prime numbers, so he doesn’t say anything.
“D’you think we can get one of those grey things with the tails again?” asks Ronon, who has become oddly chatty in the past two weeks. John had sort of expected that Ronon would regress, lose what little polish he had acquired since coming to Atlantis, but instead he’s -- well. Flourishing, for want of a better word.
“Squirrel stew,” mutters John, now sticking the burrs together and watching how the little hooks bite into the tips of his fingers. “Who’d’ve guessed that the hillbillies were on to something?”
“Beats MREs,” agrees Ronon, his fingers twisting snare wire into cunning loops that ring the trunk of a tree. He was the one who told John about how small animals climb up trees -- not in a straight line but in a spiral, circling the trunk like a roller coaster track. “Lazy,” Ronon had said, lifting an eyebrow and looking over at John’s messy haphazard snares. “Less of an incline to scale that way.”
“Who’s in a hurry to get to the top of the tree anyway?” John had answered, watching Ronon’s hands, graceful on the thin wire.
Now they rise, snares laid, ready for the long march back to camp through thickets of burr-bearing plants. John ignores the way the vegetation tugs at his BDUs as they walk. Instead he thinks about the snares, glittering against the tree bark, how they tighten around the necks of their prey, biting into windpipes and puncturing them.
***
Once, Elizabeth’s parents had a couple over for dinner, acquaintances they had met through their work. Elizabeth was about fifteen, too young to really contribute to the conversation but old enough to be interested by it. The woman was telling the Weirs about how her family had come to America during the Second World War, about the twists of fate, the favors repaid, and the sheer blessed luck that had landed them safe in the United States after fleeing one country after another. They had been Mennonites, exiled first from Germany, then from the Ukraine, then fleeing Czechoslovakia, losing aunts and cousins and grandparents willy-nilly as they went, going from comfortable prosperity to desperate survival in the space of months.
Elizabeth, who’d read about the war, who saw displaced people on the television every night, was fascinated by the constellation of events and circumstances that led to this moment, this quiet dinner party between her parents and this fortunate matter-of-fact woman.
“I often wonder,” said Elizabeth’s father, refilling wine glasses around the table, “if our children’s generation could ever do the things our generation has done, if they had to. I wonder, if something happened and they had to survive, could they --”
“They could,” answered the woman firmly. “People do what they must.” And she met Elizabeth’s eye across the table, and Elizabeth was seized by visions of nuclear fall-out, of a science fictional post-apocalyptic society and herself in it -- thin and desperate but strong and stubborn. Of course she could do it, Elizabeth agreed silently, nodding at the woman. Elizabeth would do what she must.
***
The mundanity of exile, its everydayness, is therefore the biggest surprise in store for Elizabeth. Her whole career, especially since she came to Pegasus, Elizabeth has frequently faced down moments where her iron will was the only thing standing between her people’s safety and certain death. And though no one can really say they’re accustomed to that feeling, Elizabeth thinks she’s at least got a pretty good handle on her instinctive reactions, that she’s able to bluff through fear and danger with outward calm and confidence.
She never guessed that her post-apocalyptic world would have so much to do with toenail clippers.
I never finished this section, but it was going to be a battle over the one pair of toenail clippers that made it out of Atlantis. Because, seriously -- HOW WOULD YOU CUT YOUR TOENAILS? Rodney would have featured prominently. And John would probably be the one who stole the clippers in the first place.
***
They can ill afford to lose anyone now that their numbers are diminished, but somehow worse is the chance that someone should be crippled, that another person might fall ill and waste away in a fever, that any of them might fall prey to something as simple and destructive as a burst appendix.
Ronon brings him twenty feet of ropy grey intestines from something they killed and Carson learns how to make sutures from offal. He dreams about sewing together abdominal muscles, obliques, rectus, fat, about stapling skin.
He palpates his own belly nervously when he’s alone, remembering the shapes without the aid of Ancient imaging: here the upper lobe of the liver, here the lower curve of the stomach, and here the sly turn of the ascending colon as it rolls up and away from the jejunum. He dreams about sterile clamps and retractors.
During the day, he sets out orange peels and stale flatbread and prays for penicillin. Carson dreams about Petri dishes flocked with mold.
This was originally in the first Carson section, and then I decided to try and stretch his monologue out. I don't think it works, though, and if I were ever to continue writing this, I'd find a way to condense Carson down to one section about dwindling supplies. And maybe there'd actually be some kind of action involved. Hmm.
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I'm sorry the McKay/ Brown is a wip amnesty fic :)
I think "Mary-Sue-ism" is a criticism that gets used a little too broadly - I don't think it's a Mary Sue when you have an interesting female character & insights into her perspective. This is the first fic I've seen that has a Katie who's more pragmatic rather than romantic about McKay, and seems like she's using him a bit for her own gratification.
Anyway, just wanted to say it sounds like an interesting story & a cool pov, but I guess it can't be helped if you've lost interest in the main pov character.
Re: I'm sorry the McKay/ Brown is a wip amnesty fic :)
As you said, it didn't really seem to fit with the Rodney/Katie vibe because I was assuming that they dated after Duet. You're right, though, I could probably refit this to make sense as a Sunday coda.
This is the first fic I've seen that has a Katie who's more pragmatic rather than romantic about McKay, and seems like she's using him a bit for her own gratification.
*g* Thanks! I've actually never read any Katie/Rodney, I think, so I guess that's how I've come up with this different take. It *is* hard to imagine what exactly she sees in Rodney, since he seems to alternately flail in her presence and then completely avoid her for -- well -- a *year*. I guess this was my answer to why Katie would bother with him.
Glad you found it interesting.
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I particularly love the two intimate encounters between Katie and Rodney -- they are thoroughly believable and even touching. They make both characters seem *so* real. A fascinating and tantalizing story fragment -- thank you for sharing it!
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I particularly love the two intimate encounters between Katie and Rodney -- they are thoroughly believable and even touching.
Yes, I think they're my favorite bits too. I like the idea of McKay being just as fumbling and clueless in bed with Katie as he is in conversation -- and knowing that it's somehow just not *him*. Thanks!
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Also, you wrote Daddy Wincester which is just so wrong and made me laugh so hard I had tears in my eyes.
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*g* I liked that too. Thanks!
Also, you wrote Daddy Wincester
*tilts head*
*frowns*
So I did.
Heh.
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And hee, peeing in the woods. *g* For some reasons (and I'm absolutely not a Carson fan), the Carson scenes worked the best for me. The part where he dreams of gauze and feels his body to refresh his knowledge of body part really hit me hard.
Thanks for sharing!
holy hell
Poor Katie. And god, Sheppard is such a dick.
oh, man.
This was very charming, despite its bleakness. Giggling with Teyla, Rodney playing Bare Naked Ladies songs, Ronon scaring up squirrel stew...
I'm so glad you posted these, even if you never finish them.
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