Unidentified, Part 2b
Jul. 9th, 2007 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiercelydreamedTitle: Unidentified
Details: PG-13, ~30,000 words, McKay/Sheppard. An SGA AU inspired by the documentary Unknown White Male.
Summary: Fourteen years, eight months, and seven days after John and Rodney meet, the clock starts all over again.
Notes: Very vague spoilers through season 3. See the index post for full headers and thank-yous.
[Go to previous part] [Index post]
John gets back in L.A. late Monday afternoon and swings by his apartment for a shower and a change of clothes before heading over to Rodney's. He really does need to spend a few hours cleaning his place up -- or call Carson to let him know that the Cedars-Sinai pharmacists can raid his fridge if they're running low on penicillin.
Walking up the hall to Rodney's condo, he can hear the music from nearly twenty feet away; he grins as he unlocks the door, trying to imagine what the LAPD would do with a noise complaint about someone blasting classical. Inside, it stops just short of being painful and only avoids crossing the line because Rodney sank several thousand dollars into his system for exactly this reason: so that every note of the piano would be clear as a stone thrown in a lake and still hit like a bullet to the chest.
"Hey, Rodney, you in the study?" John calls, coming around the kitchen island, and the last word dies in his throat at the sight of Rodney's legs lying on the carpet on the far side of the couch. Hurling his bag down onto the counter, he races to close the last couple yards, skidding to a stop when Rodney raises a hand in the air.
"Wait -- just wait a minute," Rodney whispers, voice dry as sand. He's stretched out on his back with his eyes closed, one hand palm-down on the center of his chest. "This part's one of my favorites."
John stares at him, dumbfounded. Then he recognizes the music. It's the Goldberg Variations. He's seen Rodney pull over onto the side of a road because these were playing and just sit there, engine off, utterly still behind the wheel until the DJ started talking.
A couple minutes pass, then the music transitions and Rodney takes a shuddering breath. "Oh god," he says, blinking his eyes open. They're wet, and blue as John's ever seen them.
He lowers himself quietly to the ground. "Been here long?"
"Most of the day." Dragging one hand over his mouth, Rodney shakes his head. "I can't even ... the thought of someone being able to make something like this ..."
"You used to play," John says, leaning back on his hands and stretching his legs out toward the balcony. "When you were a kid."
Rodney rolls onto his side and props himself up on his elbow, face rapt. "I did? God. Why the hell did I stop?"
Some dickweed music teacher told you your playing was clinical, John thinks, and you quit because you couldn't stand to do something you loved and not be good enough for it. "I don't know." He shrugs and looks past Rodney, out the window. "I guess you got busy with school or something."
Rodney tips himself onto his back again, gazing up at the ceiling. "It's amazing," he says. "This piece, it keeps changing, but underneath that I can hear all these patterns and rhythms -- I can almost see them, you know? Like there's a whole universe on the other side of the music and each variation is just a, a fraction of the surface. Just the part that catches the light."
His hands move as he talks, describing arcs and expanding shapes in the air: the same vocabulary of gesture they use when he's explaining Riemann surfaces or Calabi-Yau spaces. The confluence of word and motion has John mesmerized, and when Rodney finishes they just sit there for a while, the pristine tones of the piano rolling over them both.
When CD whirs to a stop, John turns his head look at Rodney. "You haven't been to the ocean yet, have you?"
Tuesday morning, John ties his surfboard to the roof of his car, grabs a couple of sack lunches from a nearby deli, and drives Rodney out to Point Dume.
It's incredible.
Around nine o'clock, they stumble back into the condo; John throws the balcony door open and wanders out to watch the twilight steeping into true dark. There's a cool breeze whispering over the city, siphoning away the heat baked into the concrete, and the traffic grumbles and murmurs like some large animal shifting as it sinks towards sleep. Days like this, John doesn't really hate L.A. that much. His limbs feel loose and slow from the hours in the sun, like someone's filled his veins with molasses; he stretches one foot behind the other just to feel the tightness of the ocean salt dusting his skin, the sweet grind of the sand still clinging to his legs and feet. Rodney's bare feet pad softly up behind him; he settles his elbows on the railing and hands John a Red Stripe, water beading down its sides. They drink in silence, shoulders pressed companionably together, and watch the lights of the city wink into greater prominence, the highways transforming into slow ribbons of motion, weaving off into the night.
"Now, that was a good day," John says.
Rodney hums in agreement as he tilts the last of his beer back. His voice is low and warm, pitched up close in John's ear the way it gets over the phone. "It really was."
John smiles and turns to say something, and then Rodney looks at John over his shoulder and John loses the thread of it entirely. Rodney's eyes are half-hidden by the sleepy curve of his lashes, irises lit by the glow of the street below them. By that faint ambient light, John can make out the sunburn stain on his nose and cheeks, the chapped bow of his lips. Their faces are eight inches apart at the most and John's breath snags; he forgets whatever trivial thing he was going to say at the way Rodney's watching him, serious and wide open.
"Whoa -- Rodney." John wheels around to the far end of the railing, bracing the heels of his hands on it as he tries to catch his breath. "Hey."
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Rodney straighten, alarmed. "What's -- did I--" he stammers, taking half a step across the balcony.
John holds up one hand to stop him, his fingers still collared around the neck of the bottle. "No, it's okay," he says, not trusting himself to look up yet. "Just, that's not -- that's not how this works, you know? That's not ..."
"Shit," Rodney hisses, and yanks his reaching hand back like it could burn John. He backs up to the opposite corner of the balcony and hunches into it. "Fuck, I'm sorry. I thought ... I don't know." He rubs a hand over his face and laughs shakily. "Fuck."
John's stomach twists. "Hey," he says, trying to keep his voice gentle, but he doesn't quite look in Rodney's direction, "it's okay, just -- we're friends. I don't want you to get the wrong ..."
Rodney nods once and takes a deep breath, the light from inside spilling over his face. "No, that's all right, I've got it." He brandishes the beer bottle. "Alcohol on an empty stomach, right? Let's just forget--" he smiles tightly and shakes his head "--just forget it ever happened."
"Yeah. Okay." John should be relieved that Rodney's letting him off this easy; instead, he's just nauseous. He studies the concrete under his feet, the side of the buildings, the fingerprints on the glass door, until he can't take it and says, "Listen, I should probably get back to my place, it's turning into more of a pit than your room during college--" fuck, fuck, can't take that back so he just runs on past it, "--you've gotta be tired anyway, that sunburn--"
He clamps his mouth shut, sick of the sound of his own bullshit. Rodney leans against the railing, head tilting back as he stares up at the sky. After a few seconds, he swallows, his pale throat shifting with it. "Okay, yeah," he says. "Let's do that. There are about a hundred CDs I still haven't touched, and I should get some sleep sometime."
John nods. When neither of them comes up with anything else, he scrubs a hand through his hair and heads inside. As he retrieves his bag from the counter, Rodney moves into the frame of the open door, turning the bottle around in his hands as he studies the label.
"John?" He looks up at his name, and Rodney meets his eyes from across the room. The resignation laid over his face is fifteen years of familiar, but he wears it like it’s brand new. "Thanks for today."
"Sure," John says, and wishes it sounded more like what he meant, which is thanks, and you're welcome, and we're good, don't worry about it. He's never been sure if Rodney knows how transparent he is, how his eyes can always give his very best poker face away. John's felt for him in the past, for the way every disappointment or desire is hung out to dry, but now he finds himself imagining what his own life would be like if the truth weren't something he had to tell, or not tell: if it was just written on him, for anyone to see. How differently things might have gone.
He slings the bag over his shoulder and smiles as best he's able, as though this is an ordinary moment for walking out the door. "Have a good night, Rodney," he says, and he leaves without looking back.
He doesn't see Rodney the next day, which he spends watching Firefly and rereading back issues of the Aeronautical Journal in the laundry room, or the day after, when he's booked for a San Francisco run and winds up cooling his heels in the hanger for seven motherfucking hours before the client bothers calling the cancellation in to HQ.
On Friday his phone rings at 8:43 in the morning, and he picks up because Teyla's the only one who calls that early. "Come for a hike with me," she says, and he knows he's busted.
They load up on water and do Telegraph Peak, sweating freely in the sun as they work their way from Thunder Mountain into the Cucamonga Wilderness. Clouds of pale dust rise up under their boots as the trail steepens, winding its way through the land's ragged vertebrae, its stunted stubborn forests where to thrive means to endure. At the top, they sit in silence for a long time looking out at the Mojave, soaking in the stoicism of the landscape, its simple indifference to questions of human comfort. For Teyla, walking the land like this is a spiritual experience; it's why she started Lost World. It's not the same for John, but it's still good to feel his muscles burning, his body waking up to the task; it's good to come out to these places that want nothing from him. By the time they get back to the car, his legs are worn out and he's grateful that this is Teyla, who knows him well enough to take the keys and drive back, let him sit in the passenger seat and cradle that last bit of silence that unravels with the highway miles, like a spool of thread with one end still tethered to the spot where he found it, spinning thinner the farther they go.
Back at the one-room cottage she rents from an artist in Topanga Canyon, they make dinner and wash the dishes, head out into her garden to watch the sun set fire to the hills before it smolders out. She hands him a tall glass, ice water with mint in it, and sits down on the bench next to him, tucking her feet up under her. "He called me yesterday," she says, and takes a slow drink. When John doesn't say anything, she continues, "He thinks he did something wrong."
John sighs and hooks an arm over the bench's back, letting his head tip forward. "He didn't."
She's got both hands circled around her glass, something she does when she's thinking; it's one of those everyday gestures that remind him how small she is. "Have you told him yet?"
"Told him what?" John says, but his heart's not in it.
She answers him anyway. "About what happened."
He traces his thumb across the glass, drawing patterns in the condensation. "What would be the point?"
"You don't think he has a right to know?" She shifts in the seat, one foot swinging down to dangle over the stony ground. "John," she says, her voice changing. "Why haven't you told him?"
"Why didn't you and Ronon tell him he's afraid of heights?" John shoots back. A little crease knits itself between her eyebrows and he presses his lips together, ducking his head. "The guy's got two and a half weeks of memories," he says, "there were more important ..." A bullshit excuse; he drops it. He can lie to her, and he has, but she knows every time and he hates doing it. If he just stops talking now, she won't press him. That's how they are.
"He's my friend, I can't ..." He holds up a hand, helpless and empty. "I can't just sit down and tell him everything in his life that's ever gone wrong. Jesus, can you imagine what ..." He looks up at her, to find out if she gets it, and regrets it when he sees how concern has wiped her beautiful face smooth. She gets it, all right, better than he meant her to. He shakes his head. "He can't do anything, about any of it."
When she speaks, it takes him by surprise. "If you don't want to tell him, then you have to accept that he may make different choices this time."
"What are you talking about?" John can't tell what she's getting at, but he's already pretty sure he doesn't want to follow her there. "He's the same person. Not being able to remember doesn't change who he is."
"Exactly," she says, as though it's obvious. He frowns at her, and she fixes her dark eyes on him like they can hold him in place until he gets the picture. "He can't remember anything, but when it comes to you, he still ..."
She bites her lip, weighing her words, and suddenly John sees where this is going. "No. You're wrong."
"This isn't new," she insists, propping the hand holding the glass against the back of the bench as she gestures with the other. "What happened last month -- have you stopped to think that it might have been a mistake? John, I don't think he meant to--"
"No," John snaps, louder than he intended. He locks his jaw down and stares off past the garden wall, past the contrived luxury of the neighborhood streets: wasted water in an arid climate, suburban pastoral. Give him the desert any day. "No, he had to have a reason for it. It's Rodney," he says, and can't keep back a ragged puff of laughter, like fish bones in his throat. "He always has a reason, even if I--"
He swallows. "Teyla, if he ..." It's like someone's propped a stone against the inside of his breastbone; he can breathe, his heart keeps beating, but the pressure doesn't go away. Squinting at the sunset, he mutters, "When he gets his memory back, I don't want to give him a reason to hate me." He closes his eyes and lets the red glow seep in through his lids.
"I'll call him tomorrow, so he knows we're okay," he says, as though the sentence before hadn't happened. She makes a small noise low in her throat and tucks herself against his side, tipping her head against his shoulder. He rests his head on hers and threads his fingers through the ends of her hair, grateful for the warmth of her next to him. Neither of them says anything else; they're both right, and they both know that. There's nothing to do but sit under the weight of that knowledge and watch the sun tilt slowly away from them, leaving them to the night.
[2000. February.]
The building is nicer than John expected, with a big elevator in the middle of the lobby. He takes the stairs two at a time, counting off the landings as he goes, six, six-and-a-half, seven, seven-and-a-half, and onto the eighth floor. It takes him a moment to figure out which way the door numbers are going, then he hangs a left down the long blue hall to #804.
Rodney answers on the third knock, his hands full of shirts and the phone pinned between his shoulder and his ear. "Listen, if you're here to proselytize," he snaps as he fumbles the door open, trying not to drop anything, "I'm sure you'll find lots of under-tended souls in the holding tank when I call the police to arrest you for tres--" He glances up and his face goes slack with surprise. One of the shirts falls out of his hands; John stoops to grab it before it can hit the floor.
"I'm going to have to call you back," he says, eyes riveted on John's face, and thumbs the phone off without waiting for a response from the other end.
"Hey, Rodney." John tucks the shirt back onto the pile Rodney's clutching and smiles, big and broad. Rodney's hair is both shorter and scruffier that the last time he saw it, like he hasn't bothered to cut it in a while. He's got two days of stubble smudged over his jaw and, if anything, he's even paler than usual. John nods his head toward the half-open door. "Mind if I come in?"
As soon as Rodney steps blankly back from the doorway, John bounces inside and starts exploring. It's open and sparsely furnished, with a couple half-empty boxes shoved into the corners and nothing whatsoever in the way of decoration. He likes it, though, the high ceilings, the space. "You know, this isn't half-bad," he says, sliding the balcony door open and leaning out to check out the view.
Rodney pivots to follow John's trajectory as he wanders back inside to inspect the kitchen. "Wait," he says, the phone and the clothes still pressed against his chest. "Aren't you supposed to be in Kosovo?"
"Germany," John corrects, flipping the knob on the range. A blue flame jumps eagerly up; gas cooking, nice. He flips it off again and starts sliding drawers open: silverware, takeout menus, spare notebook, random crap. "And no, I'm pretty sure I'm not."
Rodney frowns. "They let you go on leave already?"
"You could say that." He swings the fridge shut and saunters over to poke his head into the far door, which turns out to be a study. "Kind of a permanent, involuntary one." To his right, there's a bookcase with one shelf half-filled and bracketed by empty spaces. He runs his fingers over the journals, reading the spines. "Is this your stuff? Wow, you must've been busy."
"Oh my god," Rodney says behind him, the words hollow and shocked. John snags the Journal of Computational Physics and flips through it until he finds Rodney's article: "Heuristical Sins: A Definitive Refutation of the Application of Atiyah Axioms to Witten-type QFTs and the Proposal of the McKay Theorem." The abstract looks pretty good; he'll have to read this one later. "John. John."
John raises his head, and Rodney dumps all the shit he's holding onto the counter. "They kicked you out?" he demands.
Shrugging, John gives him a bright smile, feeling it pull at the skin of his face. "What could they do, Rodney? They asked; I told." He slides the journal into place and turns back to Rodney, hooking his thumbs in his pockets and bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. He feels good but kind of wired, like his blood's been replaced with Kool-Aid and his system's still trying to process the sugar. It could have been all that sitting: transatlantic to transcontinental, but stuck in the cabin instead of the cockpit. Or maybe it’s just that he hasn't slept in three days. Either way, all this standing around is starting to make him antsy. "You know what I haven't had in forever? Thai food. You want to grab dinner?"
Rodney looks weird; his face is white and sort of stiff, and his hands are hovering at his sides. John frowns. "You okay, buddy? You haven't been overdoing it on the caffeine again, have you?"
"No," Rodney says. He blinks and his whole posture changes, like he's a DVD that hit a skip and it took him a moment to catch up to himself. "Yes, Thai food, okay -- just give me a minute, I have to make a call--" He grabs the phone off the counter and strides into the bedroom, pulling the door shut behind him.
John kills time flipping through Rodney's DVDs. There are a bunch he hasn't heard of -- eXistenZ, Fight Club, Princess Mononoke, Muppets from Space, man, maybe he can talk Rodney into a movie marathon in a day or two. He could probably sit still for that. Through the wall he hears Rodney's half of the conversation rise and fall in pitch, the words coming in an insistent rush, a pause, a short sentence, and the thump of the handset being dropped on the mattress. John wanders back over to the kitchen and jumps up to sit on the counter, drumming his fingers on the Formica.
"All right, that's done, just let me grab my keys," Rodney says as he comes out; he pulls the door shut behind him, but not before John sees the half-empty suitcase sitting open on the bed.
"Are you going somewhere?" John asks.
Rodney turns his back to sort through a pile of stuff on the coffee table. "What? Oh -- ah, no, I just got back from a trip." He's always been a shitty liar, and inside John there's a weird sense of deceleration, like someone's tossed gravel in the gears that are driving him.
He slides off the counter and looks down at his hands. "It's okay if you've got stuff to do. I can--" go back to my place, he starts to say, only he doesn't have one, he ended his lease when he left for Basic Officer Training. He's moved through the last eighteen hours on autopilot, Germany to LaGuardia, LaGuardia to LAX, LAX to a taxi to the storage unit to get his car and his skateboard and change into jeans and a t-shirt, both of which feel weird, too soft and thin. He left the bag with his uniforms for the homeless guy sleeping outside the fence and then headed for the address Rodney had sent him a few months ago, along with a key and the door code. He doesn’t really remember deciding to come here.
Rubbing his hand along the back of his neck, his mind stalls at the absence of a chain; he can't remember where he left his dog-tags, only that he got rid of them during the trip. It's unsettling not to have them there, like he could be anybody and not know it.
"Sheppard." John's head snaps up and Rodney's right there in front of him, frowning, like he's been trying to get John's attention. His blue eyes are intent on John's face, and John can see the ceiling light reflected in them, and he wonders if it's strange that he can't see himself. "I'm not going anywhere."
He arches his eyebrows in some wordless request for confirmation, and after a second John nods jerkily. Rodney presses his lips together and nods back, then heads for the door, saying, "Now, if you're back on planet Earth, where some of us missed lunch--" and John's body feels light and insubstantial, maybe with relief, as he follows Rodney out into the hall.
They get their food to go and take it back to Rodney's place to eat it out of the cardboard boxes. John asks and so Rodney tells him about the research he's been doing, walking him through the start of two new proofs, and John catches a problem with one of the equations so they argue about it and scribble through several notebook pages until around three in the morning, when Rodney's eyes get puffy and red and his sentences start deteriorating, even though his math's still good. He gives John a set of sheets and folds the futon down and stumbles into his bedroom. The weird, rubbery hyperness is finally wearing away, but John's not tired yet, so he sits quietly until he hears Rodney knock the pillow off the bed and then he slips outside.
He drives around the L.A. streets for hours, picking his turns at random, then by primes, then digits of Pi, trying to get lost enough that he’ll stop thinking like a pilot. It doesn't work; when the sky goes pink he still knows exactly where he is. He stops by a bakery on the way back to Rodney's, where he makes coffee and sits cross-legged on the couch, working his way slowly through the shelf of Rodney's publications. Later in the morning, he talks Rodney into going to the beach, but it's full of people so they drive back and watch movies until around ten. By then John can't sit still anymore, his skin is crawling, so he says, "Hey, you should work on the proof, I'm going to go get some air," and he grabs his skateboard and runs down the stairs. After forty-five minutes he finds a dive bar on Pico where the pool table is open; he gives the bartender his license for the tray of balls and racks them up on the table, breaks full-force to watch them fling apart and ricochet off each other like atoms during combustion, like chaos theory.
He plays round after round of nineball by himself, calculating vectors and velocity, calculating spin, and he ignores everyone who sets a stack of quarters on the rail and everyone who offers to buy him a drink. Three guys start grumbling when he won't give up the table and act like they might want to start something, but when John strips off the sweatshirt Rodney loaned him and they get a look at his shoulders, they decide they don't. He's sending out signals on too many frequencies, torn knees on his jeans and a regulation haircut that hasn't had time to grow out yet, and finally everyone just leaves him alone until closing. He pays up and gets his ID back and slides into the night.
They'd just gotten back to Ramstein from a night of leave, him and a few of the other pilots from the 86th. Buddies, good guys he'd known since they were all at Maxwell together in 1997; all of them 1st Lts and glad to be there, careful to come back tipsy and not drunk, laughing quietly as they split off towards their bunks. Finally it was just him and Vasquez and the long silent hall branching off to the left, and then Vasquez looked John in the eye and ducked backwards, Cheshire grin fading into a spot between the lights.
It was ten seconds and not the start of anything: they'd signed on knowing how this worked. Just one kiss, Vasquez's smile tipped down onto John's lips, the warmth of his palm on the small of John's back. Furtive, like a secret handshake: hi, and I'm here too, and good luck. Ten seconds.
Four days after that, the court martial started. Section 571 of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY1994 prevented prosecutors from asking him about the conduct of other soldiers, so all of their questions focused on him. His choices were to lie or plead guilty. He answered every question they asked. No one threatened or harassed him. Outside of the proceedings, no one really talked to him at all.
Now, it's twenty-nine days later and he's been awake for five days straight. At three-thirty in the morning, he's standing on Rodney's balcony watching the lights of the planes flying over from VNY and LAX, his mind going crazy from the lack of motion, overflowing with numbers: wind speed, trajectory, optimal angle of ascent. John's got both hands clamped around the railing because he's estimating height, thinking 9.8 m/s^2, t = √(2d/g), factoring how many seconds he'd get for the price of the fall. He stands there in the small lost hours of the winter night until his fingers go numb around the metal, until his feet ache, until Rodney says, "Jesus Christ, John," and grabs him by the shoulders and pulls him back inside.
Rodney bypasses the study entirely and steers John into his bedroom, which is windowless and astonishingly dark. "You're such a moron," he mutters, pushing at John's shoulders, and John falls obediently onto the bed, sprawling with his face to the far wall. Eyes wide open in the pitch black, he waits for the sound of Rodney retreating to the main room, to spend the night on the couch or the futon. Instead, he feels the mattress sink down next to him.
They lie there in the dark, silent, neither of them moving. John wonders if Rodney's going to try to have sex with him and he thinks crazily that it might not be that bad: after all, it's the only thing he's good at that he's still allowed to do. Rodney exhales quietly, and the bed shifts; here it comes, John thinks, and a second later Rodney's hand settles carefully on the back of his neck. He curves his fingers around the base of John's skull, where his hair's still shaved down to almost nothing, and then he just stays still.
Minutes pass. Rodney doesn't move any closer, but he keeps his hand there, light like he doesn't want to trespass. John tries to ignore it, but his whole body is dull and distant from standing in the cold, and Rodney's palm is so warm. He can't shut it out. The heat of it finally tears through the invisible membrane that's kept him walled off for the last four weeks, just rips right through it and the world floods over him and everything inside comes pouring out, because oh god, oh god, it's over: he's grounded, he's never going to fly again. His hands are fisted in the sheets and he drags down air in great ragged gulps, the knowledge spearing through him. It hurts too much to breathe and he wants to stop but can't, he's so hot and he can't stop shaking, and Rodney lies there with him and never pulls his hand away.
John sleeps through the day into the evening, when he wanders out to use the bathroom and eat a bowl of cereal, then staggers back into the dark and sleeps again. He wakes briefly in the night to the warmth of another person in the bed, the sound of Rodney breathing, and then sleep rolls him back into the undertow and he stays down there until the next morning.
At 10:32 a.m., he stumbles into the main room, blinking new eyes against the daylight. Rodney's leaning over a newspaper in his robe and pajamas, one hand wrapped securely around a mug of coffee. He looks up at the sound of John's footsteps.
They stare at each other. Rodney's hair is sticking up in strange directions and there are pillow creases across one side of his face. John's spent the last twenty-four hours unconscious. He doesn't know what he looks like anymore.
Rodney waves the paper towards the counter by the stove. "There's coffee and bagels," he says.
John's legs feel weird, kind of unsteady, and he can feel his hand trembling very faintly where it's resting against the door. This must be what it's like to walk after surgery, he thinks. You see the scars and know that nothing can ever work the same again; you're ready for that. But no one warns you that your heart will break just a little when you take those first steps, because your body is stubborn and stupid and will find a way to keep going, no matter what they take from it, and one day you're going to get dressed and walk out your door and no one will know you used to be different at all.
"Thanks," he says; his throat's dry, and it comes out more like a whisper.
Rodney nods once and raises his mug to his mouth, blowing over the surface before he takes a careful sip. "No problem."
---
[Go to part 3 ...]
Details: PG-13, ~30,000 words, McKay/Sheppard. An SGA AU inspired by the documentary Unknown White Male.
Summary: Fourteen years, eight months, and seven days after John and Rodney meet, the clock starts all over again.
Notes: Very vague spoilers through season 3. See the index post for full headers and thank-yous.
[Go to previous part] [Index post]
John gets back in L.A. late Monday afternoon and swings by his apartment for a shower and a change of clothes before heading over to Rodney's. He really does need to spend a few hours cleaning his place up -- or call Carson to let him know that the Cedars-Sinai pharmacists can raid his fridge if they're running low on penicillin.
Walking up the hall to Rodney's condo, he can hear the music from nearly twenty feet away; he grins as he unlocks the door, trying to imagine what the LAPD would do with a noise complaint about someone blasting classical. Inside, it stops just short of being painful and only avoids crossing the line because Rodney sank several thousand dollars into his system for exactly this reason: so that every note of the piano would be clear as a stone thrown in a lake and still hit like a bullet to the chest.
"Hey, Rodney, you in the study?" John calls, coming around the kitchen island, and the last word dies in his throat at the sight of Rodney's legs lying on the carpet on the far side of the couch. Hurling his bag down onto the counter, he races to close the last couple yards, skidding to a stop when Rodney raises a hand in the air.
"Wait -- just wait a minute," Rodney whispers, voice dry as sand. He's stretched out on his back with his eyes closed, one hand palm-down on the center of his chest. "This part's one of my favorites."
John stares at him, dumbfounded. Then he recognizes the music. It's the Goldberg Variations. He's seen Rodney pull over onto the side of a road because these were playing and just sit there, engine off, utterly still behind the wheel until the DJ started talking.
A couple minutes pass, then the music transitions and Rodney takes a shuddering breath. "Oh god," he says, blinking his eyes open. They're wet, and blue as John's ever seen them.
He lowers himself quietly to the ground. "Been here long?"
"Most of the day." Dragging one hand over his mouth, Rodney shakes his head. "I can't even ... the thought of someone being able to make something like this ..."
"You used to play," John says, leaning back on his hands and stretching his legs out toward the balcony. "When you were a kid."
Rodney rolls onto his side and props himself up on his elbow, face rapt. "I did? God. Why the hell did I stop?"
Some dickweed music teacher told you your playing was clinical, John thinks, and you quit because you couldn't stand to do something you loved and not be good enough for it. "I don't know." He shrugs and looks past Rodney, out the window. "I guess you got busy with school or something."
Rodney tips himself onto his back again, gazing up at the ceiling. "It's amazing," he says. "This piece, it keeps changing, but underneath that I can hear all these patterns and rhythms -- I can almost see them, you know? Like there's a whole universe on the other side of the music and each variation is just a, a fraction of the surface. Just the part that catches the light."
His hands move as he talks, describing arcs and expanding shapes in the air: the same vocabulary of gesture they use when he's explaining Riemann surfaces or Calabi-Yau spaces. The confluence of word and motion has John mesmerized, and when Rodney finishes they just sit there for a while, the pristine tones of the piano rolling over them both.
When CD whirs to a stop, John turns his head look at Rodney. "You haven't been to the ocean yet, have you?"
Tuesday morning, John ties his surfboard to the roof of his car, grabs a couple of sack lunches from a nearby deli, and drives Rodney out to Point Dume.
It's incredible.
Around nine o'clock, they stumble back into the condo; John throws the balcony door open and wanders out to watch the twilight steeping into true dark. There's a cool breeze whispering over the city, siphoning away the heat baked into the concrete, and the traffic grumbles and murmurs like some large animal shifting as it sinks towards sleep. Days like this, John doesn't really hate L.A. that much. His limbs feel loose and slow from the hours in the sun, like someone's filled his veins with molasses; he stretches one foot behind the other just to feel the tightness of the ocean salt dusting his skin, the sweet grind of the sand still clinging to his legs and feet. Rodney's bare feet pad softly up behind him; he settles his elbows on the railing and hands John a Red Stripe, water beading down its sides. They drink in silence, shoulders pressed companionably together, and watch the lights of the city wink into greater prominence, the highways transforming into slow ribbons of motion, weaving off into the night.
"Now, that was a good day," John says.
Rodney hums in agreement as he tilts the last of his beer back. His voice is low and warm, pitched up close in John's ear the way it gets over the phone. "It really was."
John smiles and turns to say something, and then Rodney looks at John over his shoulder and John loses the thread of it entirely. Rodney's eyes are half-hidden by the sleepy curve of his lashes, irises lit by the glow of the street below them. By that faint ambient light, John can make out the sunburn stain on his nose and cheeks, the chapped bow of his lips. Their faces are eight inches apart at the most and John's breath snags; he forgets whatever trivial thing he was going to say at the way Rodney's watching him, serious and wide open.
"Whoa -- Rodney." John wheels around to the far end of the railing, bracing the heels of his hands on it as he tries to catch his breath. "Hey."
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Rodney straighten, alarmed. "What's -- did I--" he stammers, taking half a step across the balcony.
John holds up one hand to stop him, his fingers still collared around the neck of the bottle. "No, it's okay," he says, not trusting himself to look up yet. "Just, that's not -- that's not how this works, you know? That's not ..."
"Shit," Rodney hisses, and yanks his reaching hand back like it could burn John. He backs up to the opposite corner of the balcony and hunches into it. "Fuck, I'm sorry. I thought ... I don't know." He rubs a hand over his face and laughs shakily. "Fuck."
John's stomach twists. "Hey," he says, trying to keep his voice gentle, but he doesn't quite look in Rodney's direction, "it's okay, just -- we're friends. I don't want you to get the wrong ..."
Rodney nods once and takes a deep breath, the light from inside spilling over his face. "No, that's all right, I've got it." He brandishes the beer bottle. "Alcohol on an empty stomach, right? Let's just forget--" he smiles tightly and shakes his head "--just forget it ever happened."
"Yeah. Okay." John should be relieved that Rodney's letting him off this easy; instead, he's just nauseous. He studies the concrete under his feet, the side of the buildings, the fingerprints on the glass door, until he can't take it and says, "Listen, I should probably get back to my place, it's turning into more of a pit than your room during college--" fuck, fuck, can't take that back so he just runs on past it, "--you've gotta be tired anyway, that sunburn--"
He clamps his mouth shut, sick of the sound of his own bullshit. Rodney leans against the railing, head tilting back as he stares up at the sky. After a few seconds, he swallows, his pale throat shifting with it. "Okay, yeah," he says. "Let's do that. There are about a hundred CDs I still haven't touched, and I should get some sleep sometime."
John nods. When neither of them comes up with anything else, he scrubs a hand through his hair and heads inside. As he retrieves his bag from the counter, Rodney moves into the frame of the open door, turning the bottle around in his hands as he studies the label.
"John?" He looks up at his name, and Rodney meets his eyes from across the room. The resignation laid over his face is fifteen years of familiar, but he wears it like it’s brand new. "Thanks for today."
"Sure," John says, and wishes it sounded more like what he meant, which is thanks, and you're welcome, and we're good, don't worry about it. He's never been sure if Rodney knows how transparent he is, how his eyes can always give his very best poker face away. John's felt for him in the past, for the way every disappointment or desire is hung out to dry, but now he finds himself imagining what his own life would be like if the truth weren't something he had to tell, or not tell: if it was just written on him, for anyone to see. How differently things might have gone.
He slings the bag over his shoulder and smiles as best he's able, as though this is an ordinary moment for walking out the door. "Have a good night, Rodney," he says, and he leaves without looking back.
He doesn't see Rodney the next day, which he spends watching Firefly and rereading back issues of the Aeronautical Journal in the laundry room, or the day after, when he's booked for a San Francisco run and winds up cooling his heels in the hanger for seven motherfucking hours before the client bothers calling the cancellation in to HQ.
On Friday his phone rings at 8:43 in the morning, and he picks up because Teyla's the only one who calls that early. "Come for a hike with me," she says, and he knows he's busted.
They load up on water and do Telegraph Peak, sweating freely in the sun as they work their way from Thunder Mountain into the Cucamonga Wilderness. Clouds of pale dust rise up under their boots as the trail steepens, winding its way through the land's ragged vertebrae, its stunted stubborn forests where to thrive means to endure. At the top, they sit in silence for a long time looking out at the Mojave, soaking in the stoicism of the landscape, its simple indifference to questions of human comfort. For Teyla, walking the land like this is a spiritual experience; it's why she started Lost World. It's not the same for John, but it's still good to feel his muscles burning, his body waking up to the task; it's good to come out to these places that want nothing from him. By the time they get back to the car, his legs are worn out and he's grateful that this is Teyla, who knows him well enough to take the keys and drive back, let him sit in the passenger seat and cradle that last bit of silence that unravels with the highway miles, like a spool of thread with one end still tethered to the spot where he found it, spinning thinner the farther they go.
Back at the one-room cottage she rents from an artist in Topanga Canyon, they make dinner and wash the dishes, head out into her garden to watch the sun set fire to the hills before it smolders out. She hands him a tall glass, ice water with mint in it, and sits down on the bench next to him, tucking her feet up under her. "He called me yesterday," she says, and takes a slow drink. When John doesn't say anything, she continues, "He thinks he did something wrong."
John sighs and hooks an arm over the bench's back, letting his head tip forward. "He didn't."
She's got both hands circled around her glass, something she does when she's thinking; it's one of those everyday gestures that remind him how small she is. "Have you told him yet?"
"Told him what?" John says, but his heart's not in it.
She answers him anyway. "About what happened."
He traces his thumb across the glass, drawing patterns in the condensation. "What would be the point?"
"You don't think he has a right to know?" She shifts in the seat, one foot swinging down to dangle over the stony ground. "John," she says, her voice changing. "Why haven't you told him?"
"Why didn't you and Ronon tell him he's afraid of heights?" John shoots back. A little crease knits itself between her eyebrows and he presses his lips together, ducking his head. "The guy's got two and a half weeks of memories," he says, "there were more important ..." A bullshit excuse; he drops it. He can lie to her, and he has, but she knows every time and he hates doing it. If he just stops talking now, she won't press him. That's how they are.
"He's my friend, I can't ..." He holds up a hand, helpless and empty. "I can't just sit down and tell him everything in his life that's ever gone wrong. Jesus, can you imagine what ..." He looks up at her, to find out if she gets it, and regrets it when he sees how concern has wiped her beautiful face smooth. She gets it, all right, better than he meant her to. He shakes his head. "He can't do anything, about any of it."
When she speaks, it takes him by surprise. "If you don't want to tell him, then you have to accept that he may make different choices this time."
"What are you talking about?" John can't tell what she's getting at, but he's already pretty sure he doesn't want to follow her there. "He's the same person. Not being able to remember doesn't change who he is."
"Exactly," she says, as though it's obvious. He frowns at her, and she fixes her dark eyes on him like they can hold him in place until he gets the picture. "He can't remember anything, but when it comes to you, he still ..."
She bites her lip, weighing her words, and suddenly John sees where this is going. "No. You're wrong."
"This isn't new," she insists, propping the hand holding the glass against the back of the bench as she gestures with the other. "What happened last month -- have you stopped to think that it might have been a mistake? John, I don't think he meant to--"
"No," John snaps, louder than he intended. He locks his jaw down and stares off past the garden wall, past the contrived luxury of the neighborhood streets: wasted water in an arid climate, suburban pastoral. Give him the desert any day. "No, he had to have a reason for it. It's Rodney," he says, and can't keep back a ragged puff of laughter, like fish bones in his throat. "He always has a reason, even if I--"
He swallows. "Teyla, if he ..." It's like someone's propped a stone against the inside of his breastbone; he can breathe, his heart keeps beating, but the pressure doesn't go away. Squinting at the sunset, he mutters, "When he gets his memory back, I don't want to give him a reason to hate me." He closes his eyes and lets the red glow seep in through his lids.
"I'll call him tomorrow, so he knows we're okay," he says, as though the sentence before hadn't happened. She makes a small noise low in her throat and tucks herself against his side, tipping her head against his shoulder. He rests his head on hers and threads his fingers through the ends of her hair, grateful for the warmth of her next to him. Neither of them says anything else; they're both right, and they both know that. There's nothing to do but sit under the weight of that knowledge and watch the sun tilt slowly away from them, leaving them to the night.
[2000. February.]
The building is nicer than John expected, with a big elevator in the middle of the lobby. He takes the stairs two at a time, counting off the landings as he goes, six, six-and-a-half, seven, seven-and-a-half, and onto the eighth floor. It takes him a moment to figure out which way the door numbers are going, then he hangs a left down the long blue hall to #804.
Rodney answers on the third knock, his hands full of shirts and the phone pinned between his shoulder and his ear. "Listen, if you're here to proselytize," he snaps as he fumbles the door open, trying not to drop anything, "I'm sure you'll find lots of under-tended souls in the holding tank when I call the police to arrest you for tres--" He glances up and his face goes slack with surprise. One of the shirts falls out of his hands; John stoops to grab it before it can hit the floor.
"I'm going to have to call you back," he says, eyes riveted on John's face, and thumbs the phone off without waiting for a response from the other end.
"Hey, Rodney." John tucks the shirt back onto the pile Rodney's clutching and smiles, big and broad. Rodney's hair is both shorter and scruffier that the last time he saw it, like he hasn't bothered to cut it in a while. He's got two days of stubble smudged over his jaw and, if anything, he's even paler than usual. John nods his head toward the half-open door. "Mind if I come in?"
As soon as Rodney steps blankly back from the doorway, John bounces inside and starts exploring. It's open and sparsely furnished, with a couple half-empty boxes shoved into the corners and nothing whatsoever in the way of decoration. He likes it, though, the high ceilings, the space. "You know, this isn't half-bad," he says, sliding the balcony door open and leaning out to check out the view.
Rodney pivots to follow John's trajectory as he wanders back inside to inspect the kitchen. "Wait," he says, the phone and the clothes still pressed against his chest. "Aren't you supposed to be in Kosovo?"
"Germany," John corrects, flipping the knob on the range. A blue flame jumps eagerly up; gas cooking, nice. He flips it off again and starts sliding drawers open: silverware, takeout menus, spare notebook, random crap. "And no, I'm pretty sure I'm not."
Rodney frowns. "They let you go on leave already?"
"You could say that." He swings the fridge shut and saunters over to poke his head into the far door, which turns out to be a study. "Kind of a permanent, involuntary one." To his right, there's a bookcase with one shelf half-filled and bracketed by empty spaces. He runs his fingers over the journals, reading the spines. "Is this your stuff? Wow, you must've been busy."
"Oh my god," Rodney says behind him, the words hollow and shocked. John snags the Journal of Computational Physics and flips through it until he finds Rodney's article: "Heuristical Sins: A Definitive Refutation of the Application of Atiyah Axioms to Witten-type QFTs and the Proposal of the McKay Theorem." The abstract looks pretty good; he'll have to read this one later. "John. John."
John raises his head, and Rodney dumps all the shit he's holding onto the counter. "They kicked you out?" he demands.
Shrugging, John gives him a bright smile, feeling it pull at the skin of his face. "What could they do, Rodney? They asked; I told." He slides the journal into place and turns back to Rodney, hooking his thumbs in his pockets and bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. He feels good but kind of wired, like his blood's been replaced with Kool-Aid and his system's still trying to process the sugar. It could have been all that sitting: transatlantic to transcontinental, but stuck in the cabin instead of the cockpit. Or maybe it’s just that he hasn't slept in three days. Either way, all this standing around is starting to make him antsy. "You know what I haven't had in forever? Thai food. You want to grab dinner?"
Rodney looks weird; his face is white and sort of stiff, and his hands are hovering at his sides. John frowns. "You okay, buddy? You haven't been overdoing it on the caffeine again, have you?"
"No," Rodney says. He blinks and his whole posture changes, like he's a DVD that hit a skip and it took him a moment to catch up to himself. "Yes, Thai food, okay -- just give me a minute, I have to make a call--" He grabs the phone off the counter and strides into the bedroom, pulling the door shut behind him.
John kills time flipping through Rodney's DVDs. There are a bunch he hasn't heard of -- eXistenZ, Fight Club, Princess Mononoke, Muppets from Space, man, maybe he can talk Rodney into a movie marathon in a day or two. He could probably sit still for that. Through the wall he hears Rodney's half of the conversation rise and fall in pitch, the words coming in an insistent rush, a pause, a short sentence, and the thump of the handset being dropped on the mattress. John wanders back over to the kitchen and jumps up to sit on the counter, drumming his fingers on the Formica.
"All right, that's done, just let me grab my keys," Rodney says as he comes out; he pulls the door shut behind him, but not before John sees the half-empty suitcase sitting open on the bed.
"Are you going somewhere?" John asks.
Rodney turns his back to sort through a pile of stuff on the coffee table. "What? Oh -- ah, no, I just got back from a trip." He's always been a shitty liar, and inside John there's a weird sense of deceleration, like someone's tossed gravel in the gears that are driving him.
He slides off the counter and looks down at his hands. "It's okay if you've got stuff to do. I can--" go back to my place, he starts to say, only he doesn't have one, he ended his lease when he left for Basic Officer Training. He's moved through the last eighteen hours on autopilot, Germany to LaGuardia, LaGuardia to LAX, LAX to a taxi to the storage unit to get his car and his skateboard and change into jeans and a t-shirt, both of which feel weird, too soft and thin. He left the bag with his uniforms for the homeless guy sleeping outside the fence and then headed for the address Rodney had sent him a few months ago, along with a key and the door code. He doesn’t really remember deciding to come here.
Rubbing his hand along the back of his neck, his mind stalls at the absence of a chain; he can't remember where he left his dog-tags, only that he got rid of them during the trip. It's unsettling not to have them there, like he could be anybody and not know it.
"Sheppard." John's head snaps up and Rodney's right there in front of him, frowning, like he's been trying to get John's attention. His blue eyes are intent on John's face, and John can see the ceiling light reflected in them, and he wonders if it's strange that he can't see himself. "I'm not going anywhere."
He arches his eyebrows in some wordless request for confirmation, and after a second John nods jerkily. Rodney presses his lips together and nods back, then heads for the door, saying, "Now, if you're back on planet Earth, where some of us missed lunch--" and John's body feels light and insubstantial, maybe with relief, as he follows Rodney out into the hall.
They get their food to go and take it back to Rodney's place to eat it out of the cardboard boxes. John asks and so Rodney tells him about the research he's been doing, walking him through the start of two new proofs, and John catches a problem with one of the equations so they argue about it and scribble through several notebook pages until around three in the morning, when Rodney's eyes get puffy and red and his sentences start deteriorating, even though his math's still good. He gives John a set of sheets and folds the futon down and stumbles into his bedroom. The weird, rubbery hyperness is finally wearing away, but John's not tired yet, so he sits quietly until he hears Rodney knock the pillow off the bed and then he slips outside.
He drives around the L.A. streets for hours, picking his turns at random, then by primes, then digits of Pi, trying to get lost enough that he’ll stop thinking like a pilot. It doesn't work; when the sky goes pink he still knows exactly where he is. He stops by a bakery on the way back to Rodney's, where he makes coffee and sits cross-legged on the couch, working his way slowly through the shelf of Rodney's publications. Later in the morning, he talks Rodney into going to the beach, but it's full of people so they drive back and watch movies until around ten. By then John can't sit still anymore, his skin is crawling, so he says, "Hey, you should work on the proof, I'm going to go get some air," and he grabs his skateboard and runs down the stairs. After forty-five minutes he finds a dive bar on Pico where the pool table is open; he gives the bartender his license for the tray of balls and racks them up on the table, breaks full-force to watch them fling apart and ricochet off each other like atoms during combustion, like chaos theory.
He plays round after round of nineball by himself, calculating vectors and velocity, calculating spin, and he ignores everyone who sets a stack of quarters on the rail and everyone who offers to buy him a drink. Three guys start grumbling when he won't give up the table and act like they might want to start something, but when John strips off the sweatshirt Rodney loaned him and they get a look at his shoulders, they decide they don't. He's sending out signals on too many frequencies, torn knees on his jeans and a regulation haircut that hasn't had time to grow out yet, and finally everyone just leaves him alone until closing. He pays up and gets his ID back and slides into the night.
They'd just gotten back to Ramstein from a night of leave, him and a few of the other pilots from the 86th. Buddies, good guys he'd known since they were all at Maxwell together in 1997; all of them 1st Lts and glad to be there, careful to come back tipsy and not drunk, laughing quietly as they split off towards their bunks. Finally it was just him and Vasquez and the long silent hall branching off to the left, and then Vasquez looked John in the eye and ducked backwards, Cheshire grin fading into a spot between the lights.
It was ten seconds and not the start of anything: they'd signed on knowing how this worked. Just one kiss, Vasquez's smile tipped down onto John's lips, the warmth of his palm on the small of John's back. Furtive, like a secret handshake: hi, and I'm here too, and good luck. Ten seconds.
Four days after that, the court martial started. Section 571 of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY1994 prevented prosecutors from asking him about the conduct of other soldiers, so all of their questions focused on him. His choices were to lie or plead guilty. He answered every question they asked. No one threatened or harassed him. Outside of the proceedings, no one really talked to him at all.
Now, it's twenty-nine days later and he's been awake for five days straight. At three-thirty in the morning, he's standing on Rodney's balcony watching the lights of the planes flying over from VNY and LAX, his mind going crazy from the lack of motion, overflowing with numbers: wind speed, trajectory, optimal angle of ascent. John's got both hands clamped around the railing because he's estimating height, thinking 9.8 m/s^2, t = √(2d/g), factoring how many seconds he'd get for the price of the fall. He stands there in the small lost hours of the winter night until his fingers go numb around the metal, until his feet ache, until Rodney says, "Jesus Christ, John," and grabs him by the shoulders and pulls him back inside.
Rodney bypasses the study entirely and steers John into his bedroom, which is windowless and astonishingly dark. "You're such a moron," he mutters, pushing at John's shoulders, and John falls obediently onto the bed, sprawling with his face to the far wall. Eyes wide open in the pitch black, he waits for the sound of Rodney retreating to the main room, to spend the night on the couch or the futon. Instead, he feels the mattress sink down next to him.
They lie there in the dark, silent, neither of them moving. John wonders if Rodney's going to try to have sex with him and he thinks crazily that it might not be that bad: after all, it's the only thing he's good at that he's still allowed to do. Rodney exhales quietly, and the bed shifts; here it comes, John thinks, and a second later Rodney's hand settles carefully on the back of his neck. He curves his fingers around the base of John's skull, where his hair's still shaved down to almost nothing, and then he just stays still.
Minutes pass. Rodney doesn't move any closer, but he keeps his hand there, light like he doesn't want to trespass. John tries to ignore it, but his whole body is dull and distant from standing in the cold, and Rodney's palm is so warm. He can't shut it out. The heat of it finally tears through the invisible membrane that's kept him walled off for the last four weeks, just rips right through it and the world floods over him and everything inside comes pouring out, because oh god, oh god, it's over: he's grounded, he's never going to fly again. His hands are fisted in the sheets and he drags down air in great ragged gulps, the knowledge spearing through him. It hurts too much to breathe and he wants to stop but can't, he's so hot and he can't stop shaking, and Rodney lies there with him and never pulls his hand away.
John sleeps through the day into the evening, when he wanders out to use the bathroom and eat a bowl of cereal, then staggers back into the dark and sleeps again. He wakes briefly in the night to the warmth of another person in the bed, the sound of Rodney breathing, and then sleep rolls him back into the undertow and he stays down there until the next morning.
At 10:32 a.m., he stumbles into the main room, blinking new eyes against the daylight. Rodney's leaning over a newspaper in his robe and pajamas, one hand wrapped securely around a mug of coffee. He looks up at the sound of John's footsteps.
They stare at each other. Rodney's hair is sticking up in strange directions and there are pillow creases across one side of his face. John's spent the last twenty-four hours unconscious. He doesn't know what he looks like anymore.
Rodney waves the paper towards the counter by the stove. "There's coffee and bagels," he says.
John's legs feel weird, kind of unsteady, and he can feel his hand trembling very faintly where it's resting against the door. This must be what it's like to walk after surgery, he thinks. You see the scars and know that nothing can ever work the same again; you're ready for that. But no one warns you that your heart will break just a little when you take those first steps, because your body is stubborn and stupid and will find a way to keep going, no matter what they take from it, and one day you're going to get dressed and walk out your door and no one will know you used to be different at all.
"Thanks," he says; his throat's dry, and it comes out more like a whisper.
Rodney nods once and raises his mug to his mouth, blowing over the surface before he takes a careful sip. "No problem."
---
[Go to part 3 ...]