toomuchplor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
toomuchplor) wrote2007-03-29 04:13 pm
toomuchplor) wrote2007-03-29 04:13 pm
Entry tags:
SGA Fic: Straight as a Circle 2/3 (Complete!)
Part 1 is here.
(Summary and warnings at the header of Part 1.)
The next day, Rodney and the anthropologists unearth a ZPM on a continent on the opposite side of the planet; the team makes a clean getaway after thanking the chancellor for the chance to read his moldy old scrolls, and then there’s a triumphant return to Atlantis, and after that there’s a drunken celebration in the commissary. John doesn’t set out to do it, but all of Atlantis is buzzing around him giddily, and somehow he winds up being more than three sheets to the wind, hiding it badly.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” John says, earnestly, “but you have really amazing breasts.”
Kate blinks wide blue eyes, the closest John’s ever seen her get to open shock.
“I’m not saying that because I want to --” explains John. “Not that I wouldn’t, if you offered. But I’m not asking you to offer.”
Kate’s maybe a little buzzed herself, because she doesn’t seem as put off by John’s incompetent flirting as she probably should be. She merely frowns at him, puts one long finger just inside the lip of John’s cup. “I didn’t think you,” she begins, uncertainly.
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” he tells her, smiling because it’s funny.
“Really?” she asks, almost breathless, and look -- her pupils have gone wide and dark, and that’s the sort of thing that cuts right through gender lines, isn’t it? John takes a chance and bows his head, brushes his lips against Kate’s generous mouth, feels it open with surprise just like he’d hoped it would. “Not here, John, not here,” she says, but she’s tasting him back.
“We don’t have anything to hide,” John says, astonished with the fact even as he states it.
“Still, there’s such a thing as professional decorum,” Kate protests, and takes him by the hand.
In her quarters, Kate touches a match to a handful of tea lights, she turns down a poppy red duvet, and then she takes John into her as gracefully and easily as she holds all of Atlantis’s secret yearnings.
***
“Oh, wow, so that really happened?” says Kate, waking John.
His shoulder’s stiff from trying not to fall out of the narrow bed all night, making John grunt with discomfort as he struggles to twist himself around towards Kate. “That’s just exactly what a guy likes to hear the morning after,” John says, blinking. Kate’s not throwing off heat like Rodney does, not shoving onto his half of the bed. She’s cool to the touch where John’s knee brushes hers under the duvet.
“You snore a lot,” she confides.
“So Teyla tells me,” John says, covering a yawn.
Her head tilts and she squints. “Teyla?”
“Yeah, she -- oh. No, not like that. Sharing quarters offworld, that sort of thing.” John doesn’t know why he says this; normally he’d be happy to let someone think that he and Teyla -- but it feels important to tell Kate, to set things right I n her mind.
Kate’s mouth makes a little ‘O’ of understanding as she wriggles onto her back. The duvet slips down a bit, exposing the curve of one breast, so John turns his head, polite. That’s how he misses the shift in her mood, he figures, because it catches him off-guard when she speaks again and her voice has slipped out of sleepy friendliness and into quiet suspicion. “This was a bit out of character,” she observes, but not like a normal person. She says it like a shrink, a question without inflection. “For both of us,” she adds.
John sits up, swings his legs over the edge of the mattress, suddenly needing air and space and silence.
“I’m going to have to stop treating McKay,” Kate says, voice going softer. “God, I can’t believe I--”
“What’s Rodney got to do with--” begins John, finding his boxers at the foot of the bed, hastily stepping into them. Then he gets it.
Kate knows. Kate has probably known for a long time, months or years.
John stands, fitfully running his fingers under the elastic waistband of his underwear, turning the fabric so it’s not twisted.
“John,” she says, behind him.
“Yeah, I’ve got a post-mission debrief, I’ve gotta,” John says, turning in circles as he tries to find his pants, his t-shirt.
“John, slow down for a second.” She’s moving too, though, pulling on her underwear, picking a robe off the back of a chair, tying it closed around her body.
All John can think about is that Kate *knows*, she knows about him -- him and *Rodney* -- and it makes him crazy that she’s known all this time and has never treated him like she knew. She should have made some kind of signal, he thinks, should have warned him. She shouldn’t have let him come home with her when she knew.
“It was your first time, last night,” Kate says, and asks, back into therapist-voice. “With a woman, I mean.”
“No, no,” John scoffs. “There were girls before, lots of girls.” He buckles his belt, realizes that Kate took off his wristband when she undressed him last night. His wrist is skinny and bare and ridiculous. “Yes,” he corrects himself, hesitantly. “Yes, it was the first time I--” Wanted it. Liked it. Understood it. “Where’s my wristband?” he asks, scanning the room.
She picks it up off the night table where it was lying curled in on itself, unaccustomed to being open and empty. She brings it over and presses it into John’s open palm. Kate is beautiful in the wash of morning light, even hung over and stressed, even with her hair tangled and her faded blue silk robe falling off one shoulder. He’s tricked into looking at her without meaning to, and because of that, he’s able to see the warring sides of her mind: the professional who wants to understand everything, and the woman who wants to erase it all.
Her fingers trail against his skin for a moment as she moves her hand away, and John impulsively catches them, traps her. She blinks up at him, startled. He can’t decide if he wants to kiss her or to lay his head down on her bare shoulder, let her comfort him.
“Something happened to me,” John says, finally, and squeezes her fingers before releasing them. “The last time we went offworld.”
***
At first Kate says a lot of things about sexuality being a fluid thing, about currents and waves and peaks, like John’s cock is subject to tidal forces. Then John explains to her about the porn test, about the breast thing, and she starts telling him about post-traumatic stress disorder and how it can fracture behavior patterns, shake people into different configurations as they try to cope.
Then John takes a deep breath and tells her about fucking Rodney the first night, about how John had been outright repelled by the act, how he’d barely managed to force an orgasm. He tells her about the other times, before, with other women, and how he remembers what it’s like to make your dick do something it’s not very inclined to do.
“Have you considered,” she says, nursing a cup of coffee and tucking her tangled hair behind one ear, “that you might be subconsciously seeking an avenue of escape as your feelings towards Rodney deepen?”
John kicks his bare feet up on the table between them and throws a narrow look Kate’s way.
“Well, it might explain why you approached me, of all people,” she says, a little less confidently. “You knew Rodney holds me in a position of trust, that to sleep with me would be to betray that trust --” She trails off, going pale. “God, John.”
“It’s not that,” John reassures her. “I’m telling you, that weird-ass shaman *did something*. He flipped a switch.” He pauses before adding the next part. “And don’t take this as a bad thing, but I honestly wasn’t thinking about all that much last night. You know, other than getting laid.”
“You’re saying that this,” Kate says, pointing between them, “had *nothing* to do with your recalcitrance about achieving true intimacy?”
“Not everything,” John says, neatly, “is about Rodney. Can we get back to the part where I’m suddenly… batting left-handed? I don’t know what the hell to do, here.”
Kate levels a long studious gaze at him over her coffee cup. She finally must see what she’s looking for, because she releases a long breath, as though setting herself to work on an arduous task. “I suppose,” she says, “we could do some scans. Run some tests. There are a few anatomical and physiological indicators of sexual orientation that might help support what you’re describing, though they can’t really serve as definitive diagnostic tools.”
“This all stays confidential,” John interjects firmly.
“Of course,” Kate says, smiling a little. “And I’ll see if I can’t somehow go and meet this shaman on P3R-2X7, find out what he thinks he did. And if he can undo it.”
John smiles back as a knot in his chest loosens abruptly.
“But, John,” she says, going serious again, leaning in towards him, “you have to tell Rodney.”
“I’m pretty sure he saw us,” John hedges, avoiding her eyes. “I’m pretty sure *everyone* saw us, at least everyone who wasn’t so drunk they’d already passed out. And you know the gossip mill around here, he’ll have heard by now if he didn’t see for himself last night--”
“Not about that,” Kate corrects him, patiently. “John, you have to tell him about what’s happened to you.”
The knot wrenches taut again. John can’t breathe, dizzy and terrified.
“You owe him that much,” Kate says, and she sounds nothing like a shrink at all.
That’s how John knows that she’s right.
***
Kate wants to come along, volunteering herself as a mediator, but John turns her down. In the event, he’s glad he did, if only because she couldn’t possibly have found Rodney’s reaction very flattering.
“I just, I always thought you’d go with Teyla if you ever decided to do it with someone from Atlantis,” he says around a mouthful of powerbar, matter-of-fact and not at all crazy or violent like John expected.
“You…expected me to…” says John, trying to piece the bits of crazy together and failing to make a coherent whole.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with Heightmeyer,” Rodney is hasty to add, as though leery of giving offense to John. “Only -- did you ever notice that she has one eye bigger than the other? It’s disconcerting -- and once you notice it, it’s all you can see when you look at her.”
“Look, Rodney, I know you might be kind of pissed,” ventures John, but trails off when he realizes that he doesn’t have an ending for that particular sentence.
Rodney swallows the last of his cold coffee and crumples up his foil wrapper. “Well, Colonel, far be it from me to dictate your choice of beards,” he says, magnanimous, “just, if you were asking my opinion, I’d say that you should probably stick to the offworld alien hussies and leave the women in the city alone. Easier that way.”
“Beards?” repeats John.
“You know. Whenever you think things between us are getting too”-- here Rodney makes a waving motion with one hand, opening a spreadsheet on his tablet with the other -- “what’s the word? Too, too” -- he snaps his fingers -- “too gay. That’s when you go mess around with some woman, so you can throw everyone off the scent and convince the military contingent that you’re just a big manly stud.”
“I do not!” says John, open-mouthed.
Rodney snorts, but still doesn’t do John the courtesy of looking up from his work. “Chaya,” he says, pointedly.
“Chaya and I never --”
“I *know* that,” Rodney says, testy, “but as far as everyone else is concerned, you *did*. It’s like the thing with Teer.”
“Teer just -- it was either meditate or let her -- look, which would *you* choose if you thought that everyone --” John starts and stops, remembering the long afternoons in his hut in the Sanctuary, Teer amusing herself with John’s body like it was just another road to enlightenment, John lying back and watching, wondering idly if Teer’s brother would ever be seized by a similar impulse.
“Again,” says Rodney, in a long-suffering tone, “I’m perfectly aware. Just like I know about that spoiled naked princess in the tower, and that fortune-teller gypsy girl from the planet with all the purple bananas.”
“People think I -- with *her*?” John says, genuinely surprised. “But we weren’t even alone together!”
Rodney just smiles with one side of his mouth.
“Okay, so *you* told everyone I --” says John, and stops short when he realizes that this is why Rodney’s not being crazy and violent: Rodney thinks that Kate was just another way in which John said he has commitment issues. “Rodney. With Kate…it’s not what you think.”
“What I think,” Rodney says succinctly, “is that I need to find a new therapist. Thanks for that, by the way. It’s not like there’s a big selection of psychiatric help available in the Pegasus galaxy.” He looks up at John, calculating. “What did you do with her, anyway? Maybe if she didn’t actually, you know, touch your bits, I could work around the hideous awkwardness for the next few sessions.”
“She touched them,” John tells Rodney, grimacing. “She…Rodney, *we*…”
They’re alone in the lab -- John had waited until late at night to make sure that they would be -- but it still catches him by surprise when Rodney reaches out, grabs John by the belt loops, and hauls him in close. It’s completely unromantic -- it’s simply Rodney being pushy and demanding -- but it feels oddly gentle at the same time. “Colonel,” says Rodney, exasperated, sticking his fingers in the back of John’s pants, “*John*. I’m not pissed off at you. So could you please stop acting like I’m an EM pulse generator about to go off?”
“You *will* be pissed,” says John, helplessly, holding his body stiff so he doesn’t accidentally move into Rodney’s touch.
“What, is she having your love child?” says Rodney, impatient with John’s resistance. John takes too long to answer, still trying to think of a way to explain, and Rodney’s expression goes dark. “Please tell me you two weren’t actually too drunk to operate a condom,” he says.
“Rodney, I didn’t go with Kate because -- she wasn’t supposed to be a beard.” This time John doesn’t give Rodney a chance to get a word in edgewise, barreling on without any distinct idea of what he’s trying to say. “And yeah, I had a little too much to drink, but that wasn’t it either.” John has to stop again, to swallow and breathe and think, but Rodney seems to have suddenly realized that John’s attempting to communicate, here, and so John gets to keep going, uninterrupted. “I had sex with her,” John says, the words feeling almost funny in his mouth, “because I wanted to have sex. With a woman.”
Rodney laughs, just half a laugh -- he starts a sarcastic, caustic chuckle and then he stops almost immediately with a soft sound like a stab wound, like something just went through his windpipe and got lodged crosswise in his chest. His hands let go of John’s belt loops, dropping down limp. Then he says, “If you don’t want to fuck anymore, you could just say that. You don’t have to be a dick about it.” The words are Rodney, pure snippy Rodney, but the voice is quiet and slow, so slow.
“This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you,” says John, angry with Kate. “I knew you’d take it all -- fucked up and backwards. Like it’s personal.”
“How is it *not* personal?” exclaims Rodney, hands cutting through the air. “I mean, excuse me for thinking that it’s *personal* when you decide that you’re bored with me, or whatever it is about me that’s just not worth your time anymore.”
“Rodney, shut the hell up and listen to me,” John shouts, hating the way his heart wants to jump into his throat, like he’s standing on a ledge inches wide over a long sickening drop. “It’s not personal, it’s not about you. There’s something wrong with me.”
“Well, sound the alarms!” Rodney yells back, now on his feet and pacing. “Alert the city! John Sheppard’s finally realized that he’s the source of all his own problems!”
“Why is it so impossible for you to listen to a goddamn word I’m saying?” demands John.
“Maybe because I’ve been in love with you for three years and this is the first time you’ve ever bothered to tell me *anything*!” bellows Rodney, and sweeps a pile of papers to the floor -- whether accidentally or on purpose, John can’t decipher -- before he pivots hard and stomps out of the lab, ricocheting clumsily around the benches and chairs as he goes, too angry to look where he’s going.
As for John, he’s still feeling the long freefall in the pit of his stomach long minutes after Rodney is gone.
***
Kate’s scans show that John’s hypothalamus is bigger than it was.
“That’s consistent with your described symptoms,” she tells John, as though he were the one who needed convincing. “It’s far from a sure thing, John, but you do seem to have the brain of a heterosexual man.”
“Is that why I’m suddenly having trouble matching my shoes to my handbag?” says John, wide-eyed.
They agree on a strategy to get Kate offworld: John will feed Elizabeth a line about an anti-depressant herb that the shaman had. They drink tea in Kate’s long narrow office and Kate asks John questions in a pleasantly clinical way, how do you see women differently now? and do you find the stimuli for arousal are more visual than psychological? and what about people you found attractive before? do you still see the attraction or was it an immediate change?, and that’s how John comes out for the first time -- the first time with words and not with his body, anyway.
“I still feel gay,” he tells her.
“In what way?” Kate presses, clearly fascinated.
“In that I still feel like I have this big important secret,” John returns. “I still feel like I’m hiding something from everyone. But I’m not, not anymore.”
“Whether you still harbor sexual feelings for men or not,” Kate reasons, “it doesn’t erase all the years when you did. And I’d venture a guess that the lines between concealment and sexual behavior are very blurry for you, more so because you’ve spent so long trying to hide your identity. Sex and guilt and the need for secrecy are probably deeply conflated in your mind. You can’t expect to let that all go away overnight. It would be the same,” she concludes, “if you’d decided to come out before all this happened.”
“That’s not it,” John disagrees. “I mean, yes. Obviously. But that’s not -- it’s not what I’m feeling.”
“What *are* you feeling?” Kate returns.
John buries his face in his mug, breathing in steam. He doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t ask again, but he senses the dark edges of the troubling secret, biting away at his sense of certainty.
He’s not sure he wants Kate to make things right again, even if she can.
***
John can’t sleep, so tired that as he lies on his back, the pattern of the ceiling above him seems to be crawling slowly from left to right. He sighs, rubs his knuckles over his gritty eyes, and rolls to a sitting position.
The lights in his bathroom refuse to go on but John’s in no mood to argue, so he finds his way to the toilet and then the sink by touch. He staggers back into his bedroom, wondering if it’s irresponsible to start drinking at 3:30 in the morning when he’s technically on duty in two and half hours. He flops back down on his bed, deciding that he doesn’t have the energy to find his half-empty bottle of scotch anyway, and watches the ceiling crawl some more.
Some of the shadows up there, he thinks blearily, look kind of like they’re hopping now, not crawling. John watches the shadows hop for a while, optimistically hoping that this is one of those weird transitions into a dream state, because if not -- it’s actually almost disturbing.
One of the shadows suddenly detaches from the ceiling and falls down onto John’s chest with a slimy plopping noise, and John is forced to jump and scream in response, because there is a goddamn *frog* sitting on him, and as he’s still trying to grasp that turn of events, another frog falls down from the ceiling and lands on John’s hand.
John flails, brushing it off, and lunges for his radio headset. “Control, this is Colonel Sheppard. Why the hell are there frogs all over my quarters?” Because now John’s properly awake, his room is aglow and he can see that the entire ceiling is covered with frogs. The ceiling, the floor, and most of the walls. “Oh my god, there are *frogs* all over my quarters!” John shouts, and tries to decide if standing on his bed and freaking out is really an option.
“Sir?” says the control room tech. “Did you say ‘frogs’, sir?”
“Shit, shit, shit!” John says, and leaps over the moving sea of frogs -- how did he not step on one between his bed and the bathroom? -- until he’s close enough to bolt out the door into the corridor.
Which is filled with hopping frogs.
John is still barefoot.
“Rodney!” John yells, trying another channel, one that hails Rodney’s room this time. “Rodney, pick up your radio, godammit!”
Rodney’s voice comes over the channel. “Lentil,” he says, grouchily, only it’s probably not meant to come out as ‘lentil’. “Colonel?” he tries again.
“Rodney, we have a problem,” John says, picking a path down the corridor. “Check your life signs detector. Calibrate it to pick up things smaller than people.”
“Do you know what time it is?” says Rodney, appalled and finally awake.
“Do it!” John says, reaching a bulkhead that demarcates a different section of the city. He thinks the bulkhead door open and finds a frogless expanse of floor in front of him. Hastily, John leaps over the threshold and thinks the door closed again, trying not to consider what might have happened to any frogs who tried to come along.
“Why am I -- oh my god, what the hell is going on?” asks Rodney. “The entire west pier looks like Woodstock.”
“What’s going on is that the entire west pier,” says John, “is full of frogs.” He’s heading for a transporter, still stepping gingerly and jumping at every little motion in his peripheral vision.
“What did you do?” asks Rodney.
“You honestly think this is my fault?” John snaps. “I just had a frog fall in my face!”
There’s a pause in which John can faintly hear Rodney’s fingers snapping. “Oh, oh, I’ve heard of this. It happens sometimes, something about localized high winds and waterspouts and -- maybe it’s raining frogs outside and someone left their window open?”
“Did you just say that it’s raining frogs?” says John, stepping out into the control room.
“Hallelujah,” returns Rodney ironically.
The control room tech looks surprised to see John, probably because John is wearing a pair of boxers and nothing else. John, for his part, is just profoundly grateful that he’s not wearing any amphibians. He thinks. He runs a hand through his hair just to be sure.
“Okay,” says John, turning to face the windows along the back wall of the room. “I’m looking outside and it seems to be a clear night, some scattered cloud cover, light winds out of the west, and, oh yeah, no frogs falling from the sky.”
“That’s because they’re originating inside Atlantis,” says Rodney over the radio, despairingly, “in a second-level zoology lab. Phillips, you dumb annoying fuck, what did you do with that power expenditure I authorized for you? Shit, he’s pulling juice off the new ZPM at an incredible rate, what is he --”
John sinks into a swivel chair and breathes a sigh of relief. Whatever has gone wrong, Rodney’s going to fix it.
***
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says Rodney, later that day in the conference room, “Dr. Phillips has very inconveniently fumbled across what seems to be an abiogenesis machine.”
“Life from inorganic matter?” says Dr. Keller, stunned.
“Not just life,” says Rodney. “Frogs in particular.”
“But the degree of complexity,” says Dr. Keller, shaking her head, “it’s not possible.”
“Yes, well,” says John, “I’ve got three Glad bags full of dead amphibians that would disagree. And that’s just from my quarters.”
“You should just be happy,” says Rodney, turning to smirk at John, “that the plague machine was set to amphbiae and not insectae.” When John looks askance, Rodney clarfies: “The ten plagues of Egypt? It could have been locusts, and we all know how you feel about bugs.”
John forces a smarmy half-smile in reply.
“Do you really think this device could be an explanation for the Egyptian plagues?” asks Elizabeth, eyes wide, a hand going towards the small grey box but stopping short of touching it.
“It’s possible that it, or more likely something like it, was the reason behind some mythical Earth phenomena,” concedes Rodney, “but at the moment, I’m more concerned with the fact that Phillips burned through eight percent of our new ZPM’s power by zapping Kermit and all his little green friends into existence.”
John kicks back and watches as Rodney alternately doles out parcels of invective and information, feeling strangely soothed by the familiar rise and fall of Rodney’s voice, even angry as it is. It feels a bit like any one of a hundred lazy nights after a mission, hanging out ostensibly watching a movie in Rodney’s quarters, listening to Rodney rant about someone in his department, knowing that it’s all a delicious prelude to the moment when John gets tired of waiting and puts his mouth over Rodney’s.
“You should have just said so,” Rodney tells John, stroking a hand through John’s hair. John opens his eyes, weary, and realizes that they’re alone in the conference room, that John must have fallen asleep in his chair and that everyone left him there. “Heightmeyer showed me the scans,” Rodney adds, “and told me what happened.” He takes his hand off John’s head, regret written into every line of his posture.
“I tried to tell you,” grouses John, unfolding his arms. “You wouldn’t shut up for long enough.”
“Oh, yes, pardon me for --” Rodney begins bitterly, then cuts himself off. John immediately feels sick to his stomach. “Well, congratulations. You’re cured. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and lock up the plague machine before --”
John is on his feet before he can think about it, pressing Rodney back against the wall, wanting to hold him in place -- like everything’s backwards now, even between them, because it’s always Rodney who tries to keep John still and John who resists.
“What are you--” begins Rodney, startled. John leans in, wants to kiss him, but Rodney turns his head away.
“Don’t walk out,” John tells Rodney, and his voice sounds desperate even to his own ears. “Rodney, don’t --”
Rodney’s head turns back and his lips brush over John’s, and John’s body backs away, only for part of a second. John growls low in his throat, frustrated and determined to kiss back, but Rodney’s already turned his head away again. “I don’t want this,” Rodney says, “not like this.”
“Just -- I don’t have to come, just let me,” says John. “Remember, outside the archives, we can still --” He’s trying to hold Rodney still and reach for Rodney’s belt at the same time, and it’s not going well. Rodney’s wriggling like one of the frogs under John’s touch.
“Don’t -- John, stop it,” Rodney gasps, then seizes John by the forearms, forces John to look up at him. “You don’t owe me this. I know -- what I said, before. It doesn’t mean that you owe me anything.”
John wants to tell Rodney that this has surprisingly little to do with Rodney’s impromptu confession of his feelings, that it’s really about John being kind of frantically selfish, but instead he just exhales slowly and remembers what it felt like to lean in and press his lips to that stubborn jaw line.
Then it strikes John that he never has kissed Rodney’s jaw, not the way he wants to now -- just a touch of lips, careful like the placement has to be perfect, holding Rodney steady with John’s hand carded through the hair at the nape of his neck. Three years, and John is only now realizing that he never took as much time as he should have.
“We can still be friends, right?” says Rodney, relaxing his hold on John’s forearms, setting him free. “I mean, I realize that I’ve never sounded *more* like a fifteen year old girl, but --”
“Yeah, you dumbass, of course we can,” John says, feeling a wash of weak relief.
Rodney leaves the room with his arms wrapped around the plague machine. John follows two paces behind, empty-handed.
***
Because of the frogs and the ensuing clean-up, it’s three more days before Kate gets a team to take her offworld to quiz the shaman (John carefully assembles a group of marines who are almost certainly straight); of course, that means that Elizabeth sends John’s team offworld the same day, another first contact with a world reputed to have quality soap and textiles. Rodney immediately dubs it “Bed, Bath, & Horrible Noxious Fumes” because apparently neither soap-making nor cloth-dying are pleasantly aromatic processes.
“Pee,” he tells John, wiping at his watering eyes. “Because of the ammonia. And, ugh. Dog crap.”
Teyla’s watching both of them from a distance with that faintly disgusted look that means, ‘Earth men are so weak.’ Beside her, Ronon’s frowning at a bolt of blue cloth, fingering the weave and examining the thread count.
“I probably have to be on the planet with Kate for it to work, anyway,” John says quietly.
“Would you stop --” Rodney pauses, sniffs the air, and turns his head. “Yes, lovely, here’s the rendered fat part of the tour. Great. And, Colonel, would you stop being a crazy person? If you suddenly feel the urge to take me savagely among the looms, I’m sure you’ll find a way to control yourself.”
“It wouldn’t happen that fast, anyway,” John says, frowning. “It took a whole day, last time. I just -- want to be prepared.”
“I thought you told Kate not to let The Priest do anything yet,” Rodney half-asks, watching Teyla study the vats of lye up ahead.
John waves a hand -- you know shamans and their legendary impatience -- and steps over to a cart loaded with what looks like gold lamé. “Hey,” he says, sweeping his fingertips over the shiny material, “just in case I get my queer back!”
“Huh,” says Rodney, coming over to see. “Straight guys really *can’t* dress themselves. Even their hypothetically gay selves.”
***
They’ve been hanging out a lot, John and Rodney. At first it was awkward -- John fighting the urge to touch and connect, to test himself and his body, Rodney holding himself aloof and throwing John nervous glances -- but soon enough they found themselves arguing over what movie to watch, what video game to play, which Ancient device to try, and then yesterday Rodney had reached across the cafeteria table at lunch and flicked John’s ear, hard, and suddenly John felt like everything would be okay.
Later that night, Radek left the lab for a minute to get something they needed, and Rodney said, after watching him go, “You’re not being as careful as usual.”
John had blinked, confused, looking down at the metronome-shaped machine they were dissecting.
“I mean, before…you’d never have spent as much time with me as you have the last couple of days,” Rodney added, matter-of-fact.
“I wouldn’t?” John said, stupefied, but of course Rodney was right. John was always careful to pace himself when it comes to Rodney, so no one could suspect about them. “But we’re not doing anything wrong,” John protested, mostly to himself.
Rodney had snorted. “I never thought any of it was wrong,” he said, and suddenly the air got thick between them, tense and filled with dark unnamed things. John almost choked on it, almost had to get up and escape the lab, but Rodney was making him hold the bits of the Ancient metronome just *so*, and he couldn’t move or they’d all blow up. It occurred to John, belatedly, that Rodney might have engineered this situation.
“Not *wrong*,” John had backtracked. “You know what I mean. Against regs.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rodney had answered, dismissively. “All I meant to say was -- it’s interesting.”
John’s still trying to decide, a whole day later, if Rodney meant ‘interesting’ as in ‘painful and soul-crushing for me’ or ‘interesting’ as in ‘yet another piece in my masterwork of psychoanalyzing John Sheppard’. But, he figures, since Rodney keeps coming back for more, since he’s not actively telling John to fuck off, it’s probably the latter.
“Check it out!” John says cheerfully, holding a fat clay bottle of the almond-tasting liquor aloft. So far, the liquor’s the only thing that’s managed to chase the ammonia-and-poo stench out of their nostrils.
Rodney’s standing in the doorway of his guest quarters, already wearing his offworld pajamas (t-shirt and BDU bottoms), his hair sticking up like John got him out of bed with his knock at the door. But he doesn’t complain, just swipes at the bottle and gets it out of John’s hand. Then he steps aside and waves John in.
This, John thinks -- closing the door behind him, in full view of at least a couple of passers-by in the hallway -- is far from being careful. But, he reminds himself, as Rodney pulls the cork and tilts a few swallows down his throat, it’s not like they’re doing anything wrong. Nothing against regs.
He sits down next to Rodney on the bed, waits his turn with the bottle, sniffs idly at his fingers and grimaces at the stink of his fingernails from where he stroked the gold lamé. Then Rodney passes him the liquor, and John drinks, and he starts to wonder if he might be the kind of straight guy who gets a little gay after a few drinks. After all, he’d always been the kind of gay guy who could act convincingly straight once he’d tossed back a couple of beers.
John tests his theory after they’ve each had two more turns with the bottle, leaning across and pressing his face into the curve of Rodney’s neck.
“Whoa, hey!” says Rodney, pushing John away.
“Come on,” John wheedles. “I’m pretty sure I’m too drunk to notice if you have a dick or not.”
“As appealing as that is,” says Rodney, rolling his eyes, “I think I’ll pass, thanks.”
John reaches over again, gets a handful of Rodney’s t-shirt this time. “Come on,” he says, dropping his voice about an octave. “I miss you.”
Rodney gets a wonderfully stricken look on his face, clearly torn between the prospect of sex and the equally tantalizing prospect of being self-righteous.
John tips the balance a little by reaching down with his free hand, opening his own pants. “You can blow me. Take as long as you want.”
“And you’ll, what, close your eyes and pretend I’m Christy Turlington?” Rodney complains, but first he made a little motion with his legs, like he wanted to go down into a kneel. John saw it.
“Mmm,” says John, rubbing himself through his boxers. “I was thinking more of that gypsy fortune-teller girl I slept with.”
“Ha ha,” says Rodney, but he moves anyway, comes around in front of John and pushes him back on the bed, pulls John’s knees apart, tugs at his pants and his boxers. “God, it’s just like blowing David Magee in grade eleven,” he complains, “except I’m pretty sure he was always faking the whole gay thing.” And then he opens his mouth and goes down on John, and John’s body doesn’t care at all that Rodney’s fingers are square and strong, that his mouth is wide and that the noises he’s making are low-pitched. John’s body is too busy being ecstatically happy and John suddenly empathizes with every straight guy he’s ever blown -- a blowjob is a good thing, no matter who’s giving it.
And it’s Rodney, John thinks brokenly, reaching down to pat at the short soft hair, all his instincts flooded and submerged. It’s Rodney, thank fuck.
Rodney, holding John to his word, takes a long time, pulls John to the brink and backs away over and over again. They’re both sweaty and flushed and desperate by the time John caves, says, “Now -- this time, let me -- god, Rodney,” and he hears the rustle of fabric as Rodney gets his own pants open, tries not to hear the weirdly disconcerting sound of Rodney getting himself off. John distracts himself by pulling one knee up high to his chest, wetting his right index finger fast, and reaching down and around to --
“Oh, god,” says Rodney, pulling off when he realizes what John’s doing. “You still do that, you still like that?”
“It’s still *my* ass,” John says, a little defensively. “Don’t stop, you were doing pretty good there.”
“No, can I --” says Rodney, and pushes John’s hand away, replaces it with his own. “Wow, so you’re going to have to find a woman who’ll peg you, huh?”
That’s it, that’s all it takes -- the thought of a woman curled around John, fucking him slow and teasing, the way Rodney did, does, is doing -- and John comes, hitting Rodney in the chin, arching and sighing.
The orgasm sobered him up enough that when Rodney clambers up beside him on the mattress, bumps John in the side with his still-hard cock, John involuntarily flinches away.
“Sorry, sorry,” says Rodney, embarrassment in his voice. “I’ll just go in the bathroom, finish up.”
“No,” says John, feeling magnanimous, sleepily reaching out and hauling Rodney back in. “Do it here. I don’t mind.”
Rodney only hesitates for a moment, then throws one leg over John’s thighs, hikes up John’s t-shirt, and curls his hand around his own cock, moving quickly and efficiently. He comes after only a few strokes, striping John’s belly where he’d bared it, then murmurs an apology before using a nearby hand towel to clean up.
“Do you want to go?” asks Rodney, hovering. John’s already melted into the mattress a bit, feeling his body’s borders go blurry with sleep. “It’s kind of late.”
“Nah,” says John, cracking his eyelids open to see Rodney, mouth still red, t-shirt sticking damply to his chest. “Thought I’d stay.”
“You’re not being careful at all,” says Rodney, when John’s already mostly asleep, curled around Rodney.
***
“Their taboos against homosexuality are very deeply ingrained,” Kate tells John, after her visit to P3R-2X7. “The shaman was not very receptive to my request. It seems he thinks he’s granted you a gift from the Ancestors, and he can’t comprehend why you would reject it. It’s blasphemy, in his mind.”
“I knew I should have held onto my receipt,” John says, trying for a light tone.
“John, I’d like you to make a standing weekly appointment with me,” says Kate. “Just for the next little while, until we get you past this initial transition.”
“So you’re giving up on the shaman?” says John as it sinks in. “Just like that? Bam, I’m straight?”
“I’m not giving up,” Kate protests. “I made a first contact, and I plan to try again after giving him some time to mull over what I said, but in the meantime -- John, even if it’s only temporary, this is going to be a difficult time for you.”
“No,” says John. “I’m fine, thanks.”
“I could make it an order,” says Kate, warningly. “I’d have to take it to Elizabeth, get her on board, but --”
“Hey,” says John, blinking hard, “what about patient-doctor confidentiality? You can’t do that.”
“You’re not my patient,” says Kate, “so --”
“I’m pretty sure this is unethical, to blackmail someone you slept with into becoming a patient,” John tells her, but Kate only smiles kindly. “Fine. But only if you keep working on the shaman.”
“So you’ve made your decision?” Kate asks, sitting back in her chair. “You’d like to go back to being homosexual, given the choice?”
John realizes that they’re now doing the therapy thing, and casts Kate a deeply betrayed look before replying. “I let Rodney blow me, offworld,” he tells her.
“It’s interesting, your choice of words,” says Kate, unbothered by the abrupt subject change. “Why do you say that you ‘let’ him do that? Was he pressuring you?”
“No,” says John. “I wanted him to.”
“But you don’t have sexual feelings towards him,” Kate clarifies.
“A blowjob’s a blowjob,” shrugs John.
“So it was about physical release, a means to an end,” says Kate.
She wants John to disagree, to argue with her until he admits all sorts of things, like the way he’d kept his hand curled around the base of Rodney’s neck, during; the way John had let Rodney come on his stomach, after; and the way that they’d woken up together and John had kissed Rodney, just kissed him and kissed him in the morning light, hungry and empty and frustrated.
Kate wants to know all of it, but John doesn’t feel like telling her. It would be too much like betraying Rodney. So instead, John opens his mouth and says, “Yep, that’s about it. Plus he gives great head.”
Part 3 is here.
(Summary and warnings at the header of Part 1.)
The next day, Rodney and the anthropologists unearth a ZPM on a continent on the opposite side of the planet; the team makes a clean getaway after thanking the chancellor for the chance to read his moldy old scrolls, and then there’s a triumphant return to Atlantis, and after that there’s a drunken celebration in the commissary. John doesn’t set out to do it, but all of Atlantis is buzzing around him giddily, and somehow he winds up being more than three sheets to the wind, hiding it badly.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” John says, earnestly, “but you have really amazing breasts.”
Kate blinks wide blue eyes, the closest John’s ever seen her get to open shock.
“I’m not saying that because I want to --” explains John. “Not that I wouldn’t, if you offered. But I’m not asking you to offer.”
Kate’s maybe a little buzzed herself, because she doesn’t seem as put off by John’s incompetent flirting as she probably should be. She merely frowns at him, puts one long finger just inside the lip of John’s cup. “I didn’t think you,” she begins, uncertainly.
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” he tells her, smiling because it’s funny.
“Really?” she asks, almost breathless, and look -- her pupils have gone wide and dark, and that’s the sort of thing that cuts right through gender lines, isn’t it? John takes a chance and bows his head, brushes his lips against Kate’s generous mouth, feels it open with surprise just like he’d hoped it would. “Not here, John, not here,” she says, but she’s tasting him back.
“We don’t have anything to hide,” John says, astonished with the fact even as he states it.
“Still, there’s such a thing as professional decorum,” Kate protests, and takes him by the hand.
In her quarters, Kate touches a match to a handful of tea lights, she turns down a poppy red duvet, and then she takes John into her as gracefully and easily as she holds all of Atlantis’s secret yearnings.
***
“Oh, wow, so that really happened?” says Kate, waking John.
His shoulder’s stiff from trying not to fall out of the narrow bed all night, making John grunt with discomfort as he struggles to twist himself around towards Kate. “That’s just exactly what a guy likes to hear the morning after,” John says, blinking. Kate’s not throwing off heat like Rodney does, not shoving onto his half of the bed. She’s cool to the touch where John’s knee brushes hers under the duvet.
“You snore a lot,” she confides.
“So Teyla tells me,” John says, covering a yawn.
Her head tilts and she squints. “Teyla?”
“Yeah, she -- oh. No, not like that. Sharing quarters offworld, that sort of thing.” John doesn’t know why he says this; normally he’d be happy to let someone think that he and Teyla -- but it feels important to tell Kate, to set things right I n her mind.
Kate’s mouth makes a little ‘O’ of understanding as she wriggles onto her back. The duvet slips down a bit, exposing the curve of one breast, so John turns his head, polite. That’s how he misses the shift in her mood, he figures, because it catches him off-guard when she speaks again and her voice has slipped out of sleepy friendliness and into quiet suspicion. “This was a bit out of character,” she observes, but not like a normal person. She says it like a shrink, a question without inflection. “For both of us,” she adds.
John sits up, swings his legs over the edge of the mattress, suddenly needing air and space and silence.
“I’m going to have to stop treating McKay,” Kate says, voice going softer. “God, I can’t believe I--”
“What’s Rodney got to do with--” begins John, finding his boxers at the foot of the bed, hastily stepping into them. Then he gets it.
Kate knows. Kate has probably known for a long time, months or years.
John stands, fitfully running his fingers under the elastic waistband of his underwear, turning the fabric so it’s not twisted.
“John,” she says, behind him.
“Yeah, I’ve got a post-mission debrief, I’ve gotta,” John says, turning in circles as he tries to find his pants, his t-shirt.
“John, slow down for a second.” She’s moving too, though, pulling on her underwear, picking a robe off the back of a chair, tying it closed around her body.
All John can think about is that Kate *knows*, she knows about him -- him and *Rodney* -- and it makes him crazy that she’s known all this time and has never treated him like she knew. She should have made some kind of signal, he thinks, should have warned him. She shouldn’t have let him come home with her when she knew.
“It was your first time, last night,” Kate says, and asks, back into therapist-voice. “With a woman, I mean.”
“No, no,” John scoffs. “There were girls before, lots of girls.” He buckles his belt, realizes that Kate took off his wristband when she undressed him last night. His wrist is skinny and bare and ridiculous. “Yes,” he corrects himself, hesitantly. “Yes, it was the first time I--” Wanted it. Liked it. Understood it. “Where’s my wristband?” he asks, scanning the room.
She picks it up off the night table where it was lying curled in on itself, unaccustomed to being open and empty. She brings it over and presses it into John’s open palm. Kate is beautiful in the wash of morning light, even hung over and stressed, even with her hair tangled and her faded blue silk robe falling off one shoulder. He’s tricked into looking at her without meaning to, and because of that, he’s able to see the warring sides of her mind: the professional who wants to understand everything, and the woman who wants to erase it all.
Her fingers trail against his skin for a moment as she moves her hand away, and John impulsively catches them, traps her. She blinks up at him, startled. He can’t decide if he wants to kiss her or to lay his head down on her bare shoulder, let her comfort him.
“Something happened to me,” John says, finally, and squeezes her fingers before releasing them. “The last time we went offworld.”
***
At first Kate says a lot of things about sexuality being a fluid thing, about currents and waves and peaks, like John’s cock is subject to tidal forces. Then John explains to her about the porn test, about the breast thing, and she starts telling him about post-traumatic stress disorder and how it can fracture behavior patterns, shake people into different configurations as they try to cope.
Then John takes a deep breath and tells her about fucking Rodney the first night, about how John had been outright repelled by the act, how he’d barely managed to force an orgasm. He tells her about the other times, before, with other women, and how he remembers what it’s like to make your dick do something it’s not very inclined to do.
“Have you considered,” she says, nursing a cup of coffee and tucking her tangled hair behind one ear, “that you might be subconsciously seeking an avenue of escape as your feelings towards Rodney deepen?”
John kicks his bare feet up on the table between them and throws a narrow look Kate’s way.
“Well, it might explain why you approached me, of all people,” she says, a little less confidently. “You knew Rodney holds me in a position of trust, that to sleep with me would be to betray that trust --” She trails off, going pale. “God, John.”
“It’s not that,” John reassures her. “I’m telling you, that weird-ass shaman *did something*. He flipped a switch.” He pauses before adding the next part. “And don’t take this as a bad thing, but I honestly wasn’t thinking about all that much last night. You know, other than getting laid.”
“You’re saying that this,” Kate says, pointing between them, “had *nothing* to do with your recalcitrance about achieving true intimacy?”
“Not everything,” John says, neatly, “is about Rodney. Can we get back to the part where I’m suddenly… batting left-handed? I don’t know what the hell to do, here.”
Kate levels a long studious gaze at him over her coffee cup. She finally must see what she’s looking for, because she releases a long breath, as though setting herself to work on an arduous task. “I suppose,” she says, “we could do some scans. Run some tests. There are a few anatomical and physiological indicators of sexual orientation that might help support what you’re describing, though they can’t really serve as definitive diagnostic tools.”
“This all stays confidential,” John interjects firmly.
“Of course,” Kate says, smiling a little. “And I’ll see if I can’t somehow go and meet this shaman on P3R-2X7, find out what he thinks he did. And if he can undo it.”
John smiles back as a knot in his chest loosens abruptly.
“But, John,” she says, going serious again, leaning in towards him, “you have to tell Rodney.”
“I’m pretty sure he saw us,” John hedges, avoiding her eyes. “I’m pretty sure *everyone* saw us, at least everyone who wasn’t so drunk they’d already passed out. And you know the gossip mill around here, he’ll have heard by now if he didn’t see for himself last night--”
“Not about that,” Kate corrects him, patiently. “John, you have to tell him about what’s happened to you.”
The knot wrenches taut again. John can’t breathe, dizzy and terrified.
“You owe him that much,” Kate says, and she sounds nothing like a shrink at all.
That’s how John knows that she’s right.
***
Kate wants to come along, volunteering herself as a mediator, but John turns her down. In the event, he’s glad he did, if only because she couldn’t possibly have found Rodney’s reaction very flattering.
“I just, I always thought you’d go with Teyla if you ever decided to do it with someone from Atlantis,” he says around a mouthful of powerbar, matter-of-fact and not at all crazy or violent like John expected.
“You…expected me to…” says John, trying to piece the bits of crazy together and failing to make a coherent whole.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with Heightmeyer,” Rodney is hasty to add, as though leery of giving offense to John. “Only -- did you ever notice that she has one eye bigger than the other? It’s disconcerting -- and once you notice it, it’s all you can see when you look at her.”
“Look, Rodney, I know you might be kind of pissed,” ventures John, but trails off when he realizes that he doesn’t have an ending for that particular sentence.
Rodney swallows the last of his cold coffee and crumples up his foil wrapper. “Well, Colonel, far be it from me to dictate your choice of beards,” he says, magnanimous, “just, if you were asking my opinion, I’d say that you should probably stick to the offworld alien hussies and leave the women in the city alone. Easier that way.”
“Beards?” repeats John.
“You know. Whenever you think things between us are getting too”-- here Rodney makes a waving motion with one hand, opening a spreadsheet on his tablet with the other -- “what’s the word? Too, too” -- he snaps his fingers -- “too gay. That’s when you go mess around with some woman, so you can throw everyone off the scent and convince the military contingent that you’re just a big manly stud.”
“I do not!” says John, open-mouthed.
Rodney snorts, but still doesn’t do John the courtesy of looking up from his work. “Chaya,” he says, pointedly.
“Chaya and I never --”
“I *know* that,” Rodney says, testy, “but as far as everyone else is concerned, you *did*. It’s like the thing with Teer.”
“Teer just -- it was either meditate or let her -- look, which would *you* choose if you thought that everyone --” John starts and stops, remembering the long afternoons in his hut in the Sanctuary, Teer amusing herself with John’s body like it was just another road to enlightenment, John lying back and watching, wondering idly if Teer’s brother would ever be seized by a similar impulse.
“Again,” says Rodney, in a long-suffering tone, “I’m perfectly aware. Just like I know about that spoiled naked princess in the tower, and that fortune-teller gypsy girl from the planet with all the purple bananas.”
“People think I -- with *her*?” John says, genuinely surprised. “But we weren’t even alone together!”
Rodney just smiles with one side of his mouth.
“Okay, so *you* told everyone I --” says John, and stops short when he realizes that this is why Rodney’s not being crazy and violent: Rodney thinks that Kate was just another way in which John said he has commitment issues. “Rodney. With Kate…it’s not what you think.”
“What I think,” Rodney says succinctly, “is that I need to find a new therapist. Thanks for that, by the way. It’s not like there’s a big selection of psychiatric help available in the Pegasus galaxy.” He looks up at John, calculating. “What did you do with her, anyway? Maybe if she didn’t actually, you know, touch your bits, I could work around the hideous awkwardness for the next few sessions.”
“She touched them,” John tells Rodney, grimacing. “She…Rodney, *we*…”
They’re alone in the lab -- John had waited until late at night to make sure that they would be -- but it still catches him by surprise when Rodney reaches out, grabs John by the belt loops, and hauls him in close. It’s completely unromantic -- it’s simply Rodney being pushy and demanding -- but it feels oddly gentle at the same time. “Colonel,” says Rodney, exasperated, sticking his fingers in the back of John’s pants, “*John*. I’m not pissed off at you. So could you please stop acting like I’m an EM pulse generator about to go off?”
“You *will* be pissed,” says John, helplessly, holding his body stiff so he doesn’t accidentally move into Rodney’s touch.
“What, is she having your love child?” says Rodney, impatient with John’s resistance. John takes too long to answer, still trying to think of a way to explain, and Rodney’s expression goes dark. “Please tell me you two weren’t actually too drunk to operate a condom,” he says.
“Rodney, I didn’t go with Kate because -- she wasn’t supposed to be a beard.” This time John doesn’t give Rodney a chance to get a word in edgewise, barreling on without any distinct idea of what he’s trying to say. “And yeah, I had a little too much to drink, but that wasn’t it either.” John has to stop again, to swallow and breathe and think, but Rodney seems to have suddenly realized that John’s attempting to communicate, here, and so John gets to keep going, uninterrupted. “I had sex with her,” John says, the words feeling almost funny in his mouth, “because I wanted to have sex. With a woman.”
Rodney laughs, just half a laugh -- he starts a sarcastic, caustic chuckle and then he stops almost immediately with a soft sound like a stab wound, like something just went through his windpipe and got lodged crosswise in his chest. His hands let go of John’s belt loops, dropping down limp. Then he says, “If you don’t want to fuck anymore, you could just say that. You don’t have to be a dick about it.” The words are Rodney, pure snippy Rodney, but the voice is quiet and slow, so slow.
“This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you,” says John, angry with Kate. “I knew you’d take it all -- fucked up and backwards. Like it’s personal.”
“How is it *not* personal?” exclaims Rodney, hands cutting through the air. “I mean, excuse me for thinking that it’s *personal* when you decide that you’re bored with me, or whatever it is about me that’s just not worth your time anymore.”
“Rodney, shut the hell up and listen to me,” John shouts, hating the way his heart wants to jump into his throat, like he’s standing on a ledge inches wide over a long sickening drop. “It’s not personal, it’s not about you. There’s something wrong with me.”
“Well, sound the alarms!” Rodney yells back, now on his feet and pacing. “Alert the city! John Sheppard’s finally realized that he’s the source of all his own problems!”
“Why is it so impossible for you to listen to a goddamn word I’m saying?” demands John.
“Maybe because I’ve been in love with you for three years and this is the first time you’ve ever bothered to tell me *anything*!” bellows Rodney, and sweeps a pile of papers to the floor -- whether accidentally or on purpose, John can’t decipher -- before he pivots hard and stomps out of the lab, ricocheting clumsily around the benches and chairs as he goes, too angry to look where he’s going.
As for John, he’s still feeling the long freefall in the pit of his stomach long minutes after Rodney is gone.
***
Kate’s scans show that John’s hypothalamus is bigger than it was.
“That’s consistent with your described symptoms,” she tells John, as though he were the one who needed convincing. “It’s far from a sure thing, John, but you do seem to have the brain of a heterosexual man.”
“Is that why I’m suddenly having trouble matching my shoes to my handbag?” says John, wide-eyed.
They agree on a strategy to get Kate offworld: John will feed Elizabeth a line about an anti-depressant herb that the shaman had. They drink tea in Kate’s long narrow office and Kate asks John questions in a pleasantly clinical way, how do you see women differently now? and do you find the stimuli for arousal are more visual than psychological? and what about people you found attractive before? do you still see the attraction or was it an immediate change?, and that’s how John comes out for the first time -- the first time with words and not with his body, anyway.
“I still feel gay,” he tells her.
“In what way?” Kate presses, clearly fascinated.
“In that I still feel like I have this big important secret,” John returns. “I still feel like I’m hiding something from everyone. But I’m not, not anymore.”
“Whether you still harbor sexual feelings for men or not,” Kate reasons, “it doesn’t erase all the years when you did. And I’d venture a guess that the lines between concealment and sexual behavior are very blurry for you, more so because you’ve spent so long trying to hide your identity. Sex and guilt and the need for secrecy are probably deeply conflated in your mind. You can’t expect to let that all go away overnight. It would be the same,” she concludes, “if you’d decided to come out before all this happened.”
“That’s not it,” John disagrees. “I mean, yes. Obviously. But that’s not -- it’s not what I’m feeling.”
“What *are* you feeling?” Kate returns.
John buries his face in his mug, breathing in steam. He doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t ask again, but he senses the dark edges of the troubling secret, biting away at his sense of certainty.
He’s not sure he wants Kate to make things right again, even if she can.
***
John can’t sleep, so tired that as he lies on his back, the pattern of the ceiling above him seems to be crawling slowly from left to right. He sighs, rubs his knuckles over his gritty eyes, and rolls to a sitting position.
The lights in his bathroom refuse to go on but John’s in no mood to argue, so he finds his way to the toilet and then the sink by touch. He staggers back into his bedroom, wondering if it’s irresponsible to start drinking at 3:30 in the morning when he’s technically on duty in two and half hours. He flops back down on his bed, deciding that he doesn’t have the energy to find his half-empty bottle of scotch anyway, and watches the ceiling crawl some more.
Some of the shadows up there, he thinks blearily, look kind of like they’re hopping now, not crawling. John watches the shadows hop for a while, optimistically hoping that this is one of those weird transitions into a dream state, because if not -- it’s actually almost disturbing.
One of the shadows suddenly detaches from the ceiling and falls down onto John’s chest with a slimy plopping noise, and John is forced to jump and scream in response, because there is a goddamn *frog* sitting on him, and as he’s still trying to grasp that turn of events, another frog falls down from the ceiling and lands on John’s hand.
John flails, brushing it off, and lunges for his radio headset. “Control, this is Colonel Sheppard. Why the hell are there frogs all over my quarters?” Because now John’s properly awake, his room is aglow and he can see that the entire ceiling is covered with frogs. The ceiling, the floor, and most of the walls. “Oh my god, there are *frogs* all over my quarters!” John shouts, and tries to decide if standing on his bed and freaking out is really an option.
“Sir?” says the control room tech. “Did you say ‘frogs’, sir?”
“Shit, shit, shit!” John says, and leaps over the moving sea of frogs -- how did he not step on one between his bed and the bathroom? -- until he’s close enough to bolt out the door into the corridor.
Which is filled with hopping frogs.
John is still barefoot.
“Rodney!” John yells, trying another channel, one that hails Rodney’s room this time. “Rodney, pick up your radio, godammit!”
Rodney’s voice comes over the channel. “Lentil,” he says, grouchily, only it’s probably not meant to come out as ‘lentil’. “Colonel?” he tries again.
“Rodney, we have a problem,” John says, picking a path down the corridor. “Check your life signs detector. Calibrate it to pick up things smaller than people.”
“Do you know what time it is?” says Rodney, appalled and finally awake.
“Do it!” John says, reaching a bulkhead that demarcates a different section of the city. He thinks the bulkhead door open and finds a frogless expanse of floor in front of him. Hastily, John leaps over the threshold and thinks the door closed again, trying not to consider what might have happened to any frogs who tried to come along.
“Why am I -- oh my god, what the hell is going on?” asks Rodney. “The entire west pier looks like Woodstock.”
“What’s going on is that the entire west pier,” says John, “is full of frogs.” He’s heading for a transporter, still stepping gingerly and jumping at every little motion in his peripheral vision.
“What did you do?” asks Rodney.
“You honestly think this is my fault?” John snaps. “I just had a frog fall in my face!”
There’s a pause in which John can faintly hear Rodney’s fingers snapping. “Oh, oh, I’ve heard of this. It happens sometimes, something about localized high winds and waterspouts and -- maybe it’s raining frogs outside and someone left their window open?”
“Did you just say that it’s raining frogs?” says John, stepping out into the control room.
“Hallelujah,” returns Rodney ironically.
The control room tech looks surprised to see John, probably because John is wearing a pair of boxers and nothing else. John, for his part, is just profoundly grateful that he’s not wearing any amphibians. He thinks. He runs a hand through his hair just to be sure.
“Okay,” says John, turning to face the windows along the back wall of the room. “I’m looking outside and it seems to be a clear night, some scattered cloud cover, light winds out of the west, and, oh yeah, no frogs falling from the sky.”
“That’s because they’re originating inside Atlantis,” says Rodney over the radio, despairingly, “in a second-level zoology lab. Phillips, you dumb annoying fuck, what did you do with that power expenditure I authorized for you? Shit, he’s pulling juice off the new ZPM at an incredible rate, what is he --”
John sinks into a swivel chair and breathes a sigh of relief. Whatever has gone wrong, Rodney’s going to fix it.
***
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says Rodney, later that day in the conference room, “Dr. Phillips has very inconveniently fumbled across what seems to be an abiogenesis machine.”
“Life from inorganic matter?” says Dr. Keller, stunned.
“Not just life,” says Rodney. “Frogs in particular.”
“But the degree of complexity,” says Dr. Keller, shaking her head, “it’s not possible.”
“Yes, well,” says John, “I’ve got three Glad bags full of dead amphibians that would disagree. And that’s just from my quarters.”
“You should just be happy,” says Rodney, turning to smirk at John, “that the plague machine was set to amphbiae and not insectae.” When John looks askance, Rodney clarfies: “The ten plagues of Egypt? It could have been locusts, and we all know how you feel about bugs.”
John forces a smarmy half-smile in reply.
“Do you really think this device could be an explanation for the Egyptian plagues?” asks Elizabeth, eyes wide, a hand going towards the small grey box but stopping short of touching it.
“It’s possible that it, or more likely something like it, was the reason behind some mythical Earth phenomena,” concedes Rodney, “but at the moment, I’m more concerned with the fact that Phillips burned through eight percent of our new ZPM’s power by zapping Kermit and all his little green friends into existence.”
John kicks back and watches as Rodney alternately doles out parcels of invective and information, feeling strangely soothed by the familiar rise and fall of Rodney’s voice, even angry as it is. It feels a bit like any one of a hundred lazy nights after a mission, hanging out ostensibly watching a movie in Rodney’s quarters, listening to Rodney rant about someone in his department, knowing that it’s all a delicious prelude to the moment when John gets tired of waiting and puts his mouth over Rodney’s.
“You should have just said so,” Rodney tells John, stroking a hand through John’s hair. John opens his eyes, weary, and realizes that they’re alone in the conference room, that John must have fallen asleep in his chair and that everyone left him there. “Heightmeyer showed me the scans,” Rodney adds, “and told me what happened.” He takes his hand off John’s head, regret written into every line of his posture.
“I tried to tell you,” grouses John, unfolding his arms. “You wouldn’t shut up for long enough.”
“Oh, yes, pardon me for --” Rodney begins bitterly, then cuts himself off. John immediately feels sick to his stomach. “Well, congratulations. You’re cured. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and lock up the plague machine before --”
John is on his feet before he can think about it, pressing Rodney back against the wall, wanting to hold him in place -- like everything’s backwards now, even between them, because it’s always Rodney who tries to keep John still and John who resists.
“What are you--” begins Rodney, startled. John leans in, wants to kiss him, but Rodney turns his head away.
“Don’t walk out,” John tells Rodney, and his voice sounds desperate even to his own ears. “Rodney, don’t --”
Rodney’s head turns back and his lips brush over John’s, and John’s body backs away, only for part of a second. John growls low in his throat, frustrated and determined to kiss back, but Rodney’s already turned his head away again. “I don’t want this,” Rodney says, “not like this.”
“Just -- I don’t have to come, just let me,” says John. “Remember, outside the archives, we can still --” He’s trying to hold Rodney still and reach for Rodney’s belt at the same time, and it’s not going well. Rodney’s wriggling like one of the frogs under John’s touch.
“Don’t -- John, stop it,” Rodney gasps, then seizes John by the forearms, forces John to look up at him. “You don’t owe me this. I know -- what I said, before. It doesn’t mean that you owe me anything.”
John wants to tell Rodney that this has surprisingly little to do with Rodney’s impromptu confession of his feelings, that it’s really about John being kind of frantically selfish, but instead he just exhales slowly and remembers what it felt like to lean in and press his lips to that stubborn jaw line.
Then it strikes John that he never has kissed Rodney’s jaw, not the way he wants to now -- just a touch of lips, careful like the placement has to be perfect, holding Rodney steady with John’s hand carded through the hair at the nape of his neck. Three years, and John is only now realizing that he never took as much time as he should have.
“We can still be friends, right?” says Rodney, relaxing his hold on John’s forearms, setting him free. “I mean, I realize that I’ve never sounded *more* like a fifteen year old girl, but --”
“Yeah, you dumbass, of course we can,” John says, feeling a wash of weak relief.
Rodney leaves the room with his arms wrapped around the plague machine. John follows two paces behind, empty-handed.
***
Because of the frogs and the ensuing clean-up, it’s three more days before Kate gets a team to take her offworld to quiz the shaman (John carefully assembles a group of marines who are almost certainly straight); of course, that means that Elizabeth sends John’s team offworld the same day, another first contact with a world reputed to have quality soap and textiles. Rodney immediately dubs it “Bed, Bath, & Horrible Noxious Fumes” because apparently neither soap-making nor cloth-dying are pleasantly aromatic processes.
“Pee,” he tells John, wiping at his watering eyes. “Because of the ammonia. And, ugh. Dog crap.”
Teyla’s watching both of them from a distance with that faintly disgusted look that means, ‘Earth men are so weak.’ Beside her, Ronon’s frowning at a bolt of blue cloth, fingering the weave and examining the thread count.
“I probably have to be on the planet with Kate for it to work, anyway,” John says quietly.
“Would you stop --” Rodney pauses, sniffs the air, and turns his head. “Yes, lovely, here’s the rendered fat part of the tour. Great. And, Colonel, would you stop being a crazy person? If you suddenly feel the urge to take me savagely among the looms, I’m sure you’ll find a way to control yourself.”
“It wouldn’t happen that fast, anyway,” John says, frowning. “It took a whole day, last time. I just -- want to be prepared.”
“I thought you told Kate not to let The Priest do anything yet,” Rodney half-asks, watching Teyla study the vats of lye up ahead.
John waves a hand -- you know shamans and their legendary impatience -- and steps over to a cart loaded with what looks like gold lamé. “Hey,” he says, sweeping his fingertips over the shiny material, “just in case I get my queer back!”
“Huh,” says Rodney, coming over to see. “Straight guys really *can’t* dress themselves. Even their hypothetically gay selves.”
***
They’ve been hanging out a lot, John and Rodney. At first it was awkward -- John fighting the urge to touch and connect, to test himself and his body, Rodney holding himself aloof and throwing John nervous glances -- but soon enough they found themselves arguing over what movie to watch, what video game to play, which Ancient device to try, and then yesterday Rodney had reached across the cafeteria table at lunch and flicked John’s ear, hard, and suddenly John felt like everything would be okay.
Later that night, Radek left the lab for a minute to get something they needed, and Rodney said, after watching him go, “You’re not being as careful as usual.”
John had blinked, confused, looking down at the metronome-shaped machine they were dissecting.
“I mean, before…you’d never have spent as much time with me as you have the last couple of days,” Rodney added, matter-of-fact.
“I wouldn’t?” John said, stupefied, but of course Rodney was right. John was always careful to pace himself when it comes to Rodney, so no one could suspect about them. “But we’re not doing anything wrong,” John protested, mostly to himself.
Rodney had snorted. “I never thought any of it was wrong,” he said, and suddenly the air got thick between them, tense and filled with dark unnamed things. John almost choked on it, almost had to get up and escape the lab, but Rodney was making him hold the bits of the Ancient metronome just *so*, and he couldn’t move or they’d all blow up. It occurred to John, belatedly, that Rodney might have engineered this situation.
“Not *wrong*,” John had backtracked. “You know what I mean. Against regs.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rodney had answered, dismissively. “All I meant to say was -- it’s interesting.”
John’s still trying to decide, a whole day later, if Rodney meant ‘interesting’ as in ‘painful and soul-crushing for me’ or ‘interesting’ as in ‘yet another piece in my masterwork of psychoanalyzing John Sheppard’. But, he figures, since Rodney keeps coming back for more, since he’s not actively telling John to fuck off, it’s probably the latter.
“Check it out!” John says cheerfully, holding a fat clay bottle of the almond-tasting liquor aloft. So far, the liquor’s the only thing that’s managed to chase the ammonia-and-poo stench out of their nostrils.
Rodney’s standing in the doorway of his guest quarters, already wearing his offworld pajamas (t-shirt and BDU bottoms), his hair sticking up like John got him out of bed with his knock at the door. But he doesn’t complain, just swipes at the bottle and gets it out of John’s hand. Then he steps aside and waves John in.
This, John thinks -- closing the door behind him, in full view of at least a couple of passers-by in the hallway -- is far from being careful. But, he reminds himself, as Rodney pulls the cork and tilts a few swallows down his throat, it’s not like they’re doing anything wrong. Nothing against regs.
He sits down next to Rodney on the bed, waits his turn with the bottle, sniffs idly at his fingers and grimaces at the stink of his fingernails from where he stroked the gold lamé. Then Rodney passes him the liquor, and John drinks, and he starts to wonder if he might be the kind of straight guy who gets a little gay after a few drinks. After all, he’d always been the kind of gay guy who could act convincingly straight once he’d tossed back a couple of beers.
John tests his theory after they’ve each had two more turns with the bottle, leaning across and pressing his face into the curve of Rodney’s neck.
“Whoa, hey!” says Rodney, pushing John away.
“Come on,” John wheedles. “I’m pretty sure I’m too drunk to notice if you have a dick or not.”
“As appealing as that is,” says Rodney, rolling his eyes, “I think I’ll pass, thanks.”
John reaches over again, gets a handful of Rodney’s t-shirt this time. “Come on,” he says, dropping his voice about an octave. “I miss you.”
Rodney gets a wonderfully stricken look on his face, clearly torn between the prospect of sex and the equally tantalizing prospect of being self-righteous.
John tips the balance a little by reaching down with his free hand, opening his own pants. “You can blow me. Take as long as you want.”
“And you’ll, what, close your eyes and pretend I’m Christy Turlington?” Rodney complains, but first he made a little motion with his legs, like he wanted to go down into a kneel. John saw it.
“Mmm,” says John, rubbing himself through his boxers. “I was thinking more of that gypsy fortune-teller girl I slept with.”
“Ha ha,” says Rodney, but he moves anyway, comes around in front of John and pushes him back on the bed, pulls John’s knees apart, tugs at his pants and his boxers. “God, it’s just like blowing David Magee in grade eleven,” he complains, “except I’m pretty sure he was always faking the whole gay thing.” And then he opens his mouth and goes down on John, and John’s body doesn’t care at all that Rodney’s fingers are square and strong, that his mouth is wide and that the noises he’s making are low-pitched. John’s body is too busy being ecstatically happy and John suddenly empathizes with every straight guy he’s ever blown -- a blowjob is a good thing, no matter who’s giving it.
And it’s Rodney, John thinks brokenly, reaching down to pat at the short soft hair, all his instincts flooded and submerged. It’s Rodney, thank fuck.
Rodney, holding John to his word, takes a long time, pulls John to the brink and backs away over and over again. They’re both sweaty and flushed and desperate by the time John caves, says, “Now -- this time, let me -- god, Rodney,” and he hears the rustle of fabric as Rodney gets his own pants open, tries not to hear the weirdly disconcerting sound of Rodney getting himself off. John distracts himself by pulling one knee up high to his chest, wetting his right index finger fast, and reaching down and around to --
“Oh, god,” says Rodney, pulling off when he realizes what John’s doing. “You still do that, you still like that?”
“It’s still *my* ass,” John says, a little defensively. “Don’t stop, you were doing pretty good there.”
“No, can I --” says Rodney, and pushes John’s hand away, replaces it with his own. “Wow, so you’re going to have to find a woman who’ll peg you, huh?”
That’s it, that’s all it takes -- the thought of a woman curled around John, fucking him slow and teasing, the way Rodney did, does, is doing -- and John comes, hitting Rodney in the chin, arching and sighing.
The orgasm sobered him up enough that when Rodney clambers up beside him on the mattress, bumps John in the side with his still-hard cock, John involuntarily flinches away.
“Sorry, sorry,” says Rodney, embarrassment in his voice. “I’ll just go in the bathroom, finish up.”
“No,” says John, feeling magnanimous, sleepily reaching out and hauling Rodney back in. “Do it here. I don’t mind.”
Rodney only hesitates for a moment, then throws one leg over John’s thighs, hikes up John’s t-shirt, and curls his hand around his own cock, moving quickly and efficiently. He comes after only a few strokes, striping John’s belly where he’d bared it, then murmurs an apology before using a nearby hand towel to clean up.
“Do you want to go?” asks Rodney, hovering. John’s already melted into the mattress a bit, feeling his body’s borders go blurry with sleep. “It’s kind of late.”
“Nah,” says John, cracking his eyelids open to see Rodney, mouth still red, t-shirt sticking damply to his chest. “Thought I’d stay.”
“You’re not being careful at all,” says Rodney, when John’s already mostly asleep, curled around Rodney.
***
“Their taboos against homosexuality are very deeply ingrained,” Kate tells John, after her visit to P3R-2X7. “The shaman was not very receptive to my request. It seems he thinks he’s granted you a gift from the Ancestors, and he can’t comprehend why you would reject it. It’s blasphemy, in his mind.”
“I knew I should have held onto my receipt,” John says, trying for a light tone.
“John, I’d like you to make a standing weekly appointment with me,” says Kate. “Just for the next little while, until we get you past this initial transition.”
“So you’re giving up on the shaman?” says John as it sinks in. “Just like that? Bam, I’m straight?”
“I’m not giving up,” Kate protests. “I made a first contact, and I plan to try again after giving him some time to mull over what I said, but in the meantime -- John, even if it’s only temporary, this is going to be a difficult time for you.”
“No,” says John. “I’m fine, thanks.”
“I could make it an order,” says Kate, warningly. “I’d have to take it to Elizabeth, get her on board, but --”
“Hey,” says John, blinking hard, “what about patient-doctor confidentiality? You can’t do that.”
“You’re not my patient,” says Kate, “so --”
“I’m pretty sure this is unethical, to blackmail someone you slept with into becoming a patient,” John tells her, but Kate only smiles kindly. “Fine. But only if you keep working on the shaman.”
“So you’ve made your decision?” Kate asks, sitting back in her chair. “You’d like to go back to being homosexual, given the choice?”
John realizes that they’re now doing the therapy thing, and casts Kate a deeply betrayed look before replying. “I let Rodney blow me, offworld,” he tells her.
“It’s interesting, your choice of words,” says Kate, unbothered by the abrupt subject change. “Why do you say that you ‘let’ him do that? Was he pressuring you?”
“No,” says John. “I wanted him to.”
“But you don’t have sexual feelings towards him,” Kate clarifies.
“A blowjob’s a blowjob,” shrugs John.
“So it was about physical release, a means to an end,” says Kate.
She wants John to disagree, to argue with her until he admits all sorts of things, like the way he’d kept his hand curled around the base of Rodney’s neck, during; the way John had let Rodney come on his stomach, after; and the way that they’d woken up together and John had kissed Rodney, just kissed him and kissed him in the morning light, hungry and empty and frustrated.
Kate wants to know all of it, but John doesn’t feel like telling her. It would be too much like betraying Rodney. So instead, John opens his mouth and says, “Yep, that’s about it. Plus he gives great head.”
Part 3 is here.
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this is ripping out my insides. both of them are making me feel achy and like everything is wrong, wrong, wrong. poor boys.
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I really like your Heightmeyer, she's more human than she is usually portrayed; she often gets portrayed like a bit of a bitch, and I don't think she is... The best bit was in the conversation in the tent at the end there.
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http://audiofic.jinjurly.com/straight-as-circle
http://audiofic.jinjurly.com/straight-as-circle-audiobook
:-)