Fic: Call for Change (McKay/Sheppard)
Oct. 27th, 2008 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneTitle: Call for Change
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Category: AU
Length: ~2,600 words
Summary: The one where John and Rodney are Obama campaign phone bank workers.
Author’s Note: Midway through my shift last night, I realized that Rodney would be the most hilarious volunteer in the history of time. This may be a sign that I’ve finally cracked, but… Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
siriaeve for looking this over and for all the encouragement, as always.
Call for Change
It took less than twenty minutes for Rodney McKay to get promoted (as much as one can be promoted when one is not getting paid) from an in-off-the-street volunteer caller to data coordinator. Rodney would tell anyone who asked (and did indeed tell many who didn’t) that this was obviously because his vast intelligence and limitless value to the campaign were instantly recognizable to even the most hippie-dippy, Birkenstock-wearing, fair-trade-coffee-charged phone bank manager. Though if pressed, he might admit that his telling the first McCain supporter he got on the line that she was a feeble-brained idiot who made him appreciate totalitarianism as a governing system may have had something to do with it.
“Hey, listen,” said the phone bank manager, after the sound of Rodney slamming down the receiver had finished reverberating around every corner of the suddenly silent office. “I think you might want to rethink your strategy a bit. Maybe tone it down? Listen to what they say instead of…talking so much?”
The guy—who, according to the sticky tag over his heart, had been cursed with the name “Sheppard”—slouched against the cubicle wall, his puka-shell bracelet knocking lightly against a portrait of a middle-aged blonde woman, presumably the wife of whomever called this cube home in its week-day role as a realtor’s office. He didn’t seem angry—not at Ms. Ruining the Country For the Rest of Us Swing State Voter, nor at Rodney, who could silently admit that he’d been off somewhat in terms of tack (not to mention tact). Rodney found this infuriating. Like everything in the past few months, Sheppard’s no doubt drug-fueled blank-faced serenity made him near-apoplectic with rage. It had gotten so bad that Rodney had overheard one of his coworkers comment that he made Keith Olbermann seem calm.
“Right,” Rodney sneered, “because this election isn’t, like, vitally important to the future of the human race or anything.”
“Not to mention the ursine race,” said Sheppard, nodding solemnly. “Polar bears,” he continued, responding—if it could be called that—to Rodney’s withering glare. “I’ve heard Sarah Palin wants to make beating them to death with hockey sticks the new national sport.”
“Where’d you read that?” Rodney asked. “Daily Kos?” The fact that he wasn’t entirely sure whether or not he intended to pose this question sarcastically might have suggested to him that he needed a) a long, relaxing massage at the hands of a hot blonde; b) serious psychiatric help; or c) for it to be frickin’ November 5th already.
Luckily, pretty much everything Rodney said came out sounding somewhat sarcastic, so Sheppard just smiled and wheezed a small, weird-old man chuckle. He unslouched sufficiently to scratch at his ear, knocking Blonde Wife’s portrait askew. “You good with computers?”
Rodney did not bother to contain his scoff.
Fifteen minutes later, he had processed a dozen call sheets (“Whoa,” said Mr. Slouch for Change, “you type pretty fast”); fixed a self-destructive PC, a sluggish printer, and a caller’s BlackBerry that was on the fritz; and was lecturing some of the other data entry people on how they could be “less ridiculously slo—I mean, more efficient.”
“I have this under control, I can go back to making calls anytime,” Rodney told Sheppard, who had, he claimed, “Just come by to see how things were going”—despite the fact that he hadn’t stopped hovering in Rodney’s vicinity the entire time. “I have a lot more I’d like to say to voters.”
“Nah, I think we need you where you are,” said Sheppard, before being called away to gently correct a caller who kept marking people who DEClined to state a voter preference DECeased.
At the end of the shift, Rodney learned that he’d been made data coordinator for the area, mostly because he’d scared the man who had previously held the position away. (You’d think people would want to be told when they were doing something both painfully slowly and wrong.)
“I’m sure we’re lucky to have you,” Sheppard said.
“Oh,” said Rodney, confidently, “you are.”
*
The next time Rodney saw Sheppard, he was wearing a large blue button that said JOHNS FOR OBAMA.
“Like it?” he said. “I just got it.”
“Huh,” said Rodney. “I wouldn’t think someone like you would have to pay for it.”
Sheppard shrugged. “It’s not like the money doesn’t go to a good cause.”
“That’s an excuse I’ve never heard before,” Rodney muttered, plugging in his laptop.
Rodney co-managed four more phone banks with Sheppard before he found out Sheppard’s name was John. Sadly, this little tidbit, while fitting better with the overall picture, did not really do anything to help Rodney figure Sheppard out.
Not that Rodney was considering a career in a field as puerile as psychoanalysis. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t care if somebody had latent homosexual tendencies or unresolved issues with his mother or whatever else therapists made up for $200 an hour. But Rodney’s current position required that he spend a considerable amount of time working with—not just near, but with—Sheppard, and the man was infuriating. When Rodney saw a drastically different procedural change get passed down from headquarters in Chicago, Sheppard was all, Yes We Can Talk About This Quietly and Not Alarm All Our Volunteers. While Rodney used his breaks to hurriedly browse and mentally collate the latest polling numbers, Sheppard took a bottle of water over to the makeshift lounge-y area and chatted amiably with the resting callers. And when sheets came back to be processed with voter preferences for McCain circled—or even rows of “undecideds” or worse, “100% Not Going to Vote” (“because I’d rather sit on my fat, lazy ass and complain than actually do anything productive,” Rodney editorialized)—Sheppard just shrugged and said, “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion” and “That’s how democracy works” and “Breathe, Rodney” while Rodney hyperventilated and declared loudly that he might not not be in favor of making passing an intelligence test a requirement to vote.
“Look, I know you’ve spent a lot of time aligning your chakras or whatever,” Rodney said, “but this election is really not something you can be Zen about!”
They were at one of their once-weekly planning sessions, which around the same time they’d become bi- and tri- and finally multi-weekly, had ceased to exist purely in the realm of digital communications and had had added to them an element of drinking.
“Zen’s not the same as blasé,” Sheppard said, sipping his (thankfully not organic or microbiotic or anything weird) beer. “I’m not exactly sitting on my ass over here.”
“Like you even have an ass to sit on,” Rodney muttered. He drained his—his fourth? Fifth? Whatever, he was a physicist, not a mathematician—bottle. “I’m just sick of people telling me I’m getting too worked up about this,” he continued, (much) more loudly. “I have coworkers, supposedly with actual degrees in fields that aren’t, you know, botany, who are like, ‘What’s going to happen will happen’ and ‘What do you care anyway, you’re Canadian’ and ‘I don’t have time to do anything.’ They don’t have time? Hello, I don’t think they’re the ones who are close to a breakthrough that will revolutionize our understanding of physics—of the world!—and have the Nobel committee begging me to come to their stupid little—are you okay?”
Belatedly, Rodney noticed that Sheppard was making hacking, esophagus-clearing noises, having apparently choked on his beer. Rodney mentally reviewed the application of CPR, but decided to give him a minute first.
Indeed, Sheppard soon recovered sufficiently to sputter, “You’re Canadian?”
Rodney straightened his shoulders. “So?”
“But that means—” Sheppard paused. Rodney prepared himself for yet another puzzled/pitying expression, and a question about why he was surely giving himself an aneurism about an election for the president of a country that wasn’t even his.
Instead, Sheppard frowned. “You can’t vote.”
“No,” said Rodney, thinking of all the McCain voters, the undecideds, the people 100% not voting, “I can’t.”
“Wow, Rodney.” Sheppard gave him a look that was long and hard and penetrating. Rodney felt himself flush. Here was someone, here was finally someone, who realized the degree to which these last few months had eaten him up, who understood, who would look him in the eye and say—
“Bummer.”
Rodney sighed and downed another beer.
*
Forget April; October was inarguably the cruelest, and by god, the longest fucking month ever in the history of the world. Rodney had begun to seriously consider the possibility that they were experiencing some sort of time dilation phenomenon when he realized he was just going nuts.
“Breathe, Rodney,” Sheppard said.
“Oh, we’ll see if any of us can still breathe after a McCain/Palin administration destroys the environment!” Rodney shouted after Sheppard’s retreating back.
“Shh!” hissed a caller.
Rodney was entering call sheets with his typical lightning-speed when his computer pinged with the news alert. He read, with the usual blend of disgust and terror, that several ACORN offices across the country had been raided by the FBI. “Sheppard!” he shouted, and was shushed just as he remembered that Sheppard had gone next door to print more call lists. He quickly forwarded him the article, adding GREAT—ALL OUR HARD WORK GONE! to the top of the email.
Sheppard came back about ten minutes later, with a new stack of call sheets and flecks of blood and plaster dotting his knuckles.
Rodney stared.
“I think I owe our hostess an apology,” was all Sheppard said on the subject, before trudging off to ask another caller not to unilaterally declare the fine people of Nevada dead.
*
That night Rodney bought the first round. “To victory!” he said. “Or at the very least, to knowing we’ve done everything we possibly could, short of tampering with the electronic voting machines.”
“I bet you could totally do that,” said Sheppard, licking the rim of his bottle.
“Totally,” Rodney echoed, after a moment. “Except I’m not a Republican.”
They laughed together, drunk already with fatigue. Rodney stared at Sheppard’s bandaged hand where it rested on his knee.
“You know, when I first met you,” he said, after a period of comfortable silence, “I thought you were into hookers.”
Rodney’d timed it perfectly—Sheppard did a spit take. “What?”
“Wait, no. When I first met you, I thought you were a dirty hippie. It was the second time we met that I started to think you kept telling people they should drive to Vegas for reasons other than voter registration.”
“Rodney,” Sheppard said, “have you finally cracked?”
“Your button,” said Rodney, by rather oblique way of explanation. “You know—”
“‘Johns for Obama,’” Sheppard finished, his eyebrows shooting off in two different directions. (His hair, as usual, also looked like it was trying to make an escape.) “Um. Well I have to hope I haven’t inadvertently given McCain the evidence he needs to film attack ads claiming Barack favors hos before bros.”
Rodney rolled his eyes. “He doesn’t actually seem to need evidence, so I think you’re all right.”
“What a relief,” said Sheppard. Then an eyebrow went up again. “Dirty hippie?”
“Sorry, but if the Birkenstock fits—”
“Okay, one,” Sheppard said, gesturing rather ridiculously with his injured hand, “those are extremely comfortable, and two, I used to be in the Air Force, which makes me a member of the military-industrial complex, which makes you the dirty hippie, Canada.” He seemed to restrain himself at the last second from adding, So there.
Rodney chose to ignore these barbs, both implicit and ex-, and focus instead on the important question: “They let you in the Air Force?”
“Well, that was before they knew I was gay.” Sheppard drained his bottle. “So.”
The silence was no longer comfortable. Rodney felt dizzy. “Uh,” he said, “I didn’t mean— I didn’t know—”
“Hey, it’s cool,” Sheppard said, although he was no longer looking at Rodney. His left hand moved over his right and scratched at the bandage. Then he turned, a wide grin on his face, and that was ten times worse. “I’m Zen about it, you know?”
For once Rodney had nothing to say. Sheppard slid off the barstool. “See you tomorrow, McKay,” he said, and not for the first time lately, the sound of his own name made Rodney wince.
*
The next day Sheppard was perfectly civil, as nice and as patient—and as distant, Rodney realized—with him as he was with everyone else. “Okay, well, thanks for your time,” Rodney listened to him say, and watched as he circled 5M on his call sheet—McCain supporter. Perfectly calm. Like it didn’t even matter.
Rodney kept working, sighing heavily or groaning or emitting frustrated “Come on!”s when he entered Sheppard’s 5M and all the others. When they were finished, he sent off the final report (“We made 2,557 calls. We probably could have made more if people asked fewer stupid questions during training.”), packed up his stuff, and followed Sheppard out to the parking lot.
Sheppard was trying to load a bunch of placards into the trunk of his clunky old sportscar, while simultaneously trying to keep aloft a stack of sign-in sheets, a bag of leftover sodas, and a backpack containing spare cell phone chargers, Ethernet cables, an assortment of pens, and other supplies. Rodney shifted his laptop under his arm and caught the sodas before they could fall. Sheppard grunted something that could have been gratitude and dumped the rest into his trunk.
The lid slammed closed. Rodney opened his mouth to invite Sheppard out for a drink, but before he could speak, Sheppard aimed a stiff smile in his direction and said, “Thanks for your time, Rodney.”
The sodas fell to the pavement with a thunk. “Oh, come. On!” Rodney said. “That’s all I get? That’s the level you’ve relegated me to—above the stupid racist voter who swears and hangs up, but no higher than some ignorant dipshit voting out of his ass?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sheppard said, watching him calmly. Coldly.
“Yes you do! You think I don’t listen but I do. Well,” Rodney admitted, “maybe not to some random attention-whore swing state voter who just can’t make up his tiny little mind, but you—I have been listening to you. You celebrate every 1 and mourn every 5; the 3s confuse the hell out of you and the 6s make you scream with frustration. You’re just a lot quieter about it than I am. But you feel it,” Rodney declared, forcing his way into Sheppard’s space, backing him up against the trunk of his car. “Don’t tell me you don’t. You feel it just as strongly as I do.”
Sheppard’s voice was low and challenging. “Do I.”
“Yes,” said Rodney, and grabbed Sheppard by the neck and kissed him.
For a second, it crossed Rodney’s mind to worry that Sheppard’s response might be calm, thoughtful, Zen-like, but it seemed he’d finally got the memo. His hand found Rodney’s hip and pulled him tighter, kissing him back with a fervor born of months of hope and fear and elation and despair; an emotional rollercoaster without end, without relief. But here, at least, at last, was release. Here was heat besides his own. Yes. We can. We are. We can.
When they came up for air, Sheppard’s smile no longer had that hollow brittleness to it. Rodney licked his swollen lips and grinned wildly. “Now that,” he said, “is an October surprise!”
Sheppard’s mouth turned down, forming a worried frown. But he didn’t pull away. (In fact, independent sources would agree that he groped Rodney’s ass a bit.)
“Are you…always like this?” he asked.
“Why?” said Rodney, suspiciously. “You haven’t changed your mind, have you? You’re not…undecided?”
Sheppard rubbed his Birkenstock-clad foot against the inside of Rodney’s calf. “Never,” he promised.
NOTES:
1. While this is of course based on my own experiences with the campaign, it should not be taken as an accurate representation of what goes on, mostly because what actually goes on is both more complicated and, in the nitty-gritty details, more boring. And I’ve never actually caught any of the other volunteers making out in the parking lot.
2. It may also be worth noting that while I’ve never actually yelled at a voter, there’s a reason I mostly do data.
3. It’s not too late to volunteer! Go to my.barackobama.com and look for an event near you. Not only do you have a chance to help change the world, who knows who you might meet. ;-)
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Category: AU
Length: ~2,600 words
Summary: The one where John and Rodney are Obama campaign phone bank workers.
Author’s Note: Midway through my shift last night, I realized that Rodney would be the most hilarious volunteer in the history of time. This may be a sign that I’ve finally cracked, but… Thanks to
siriaeve for looking this over and for all the encouragement, as always.Call for Change
It took less than twenty minutes for Rodney McKay to get promoted (as much as one can be promoted when one is not getting paid) from an in-off-the-street volunteer caller to data coordinator. Rodney would tell anyone who asked (and did indeed tell many who didn’t) that this was obviously because his vast intelligence and limitless value to the campaign were instantly recognizable to even the most hippie-dippy, Birkenstock-wearing, fair-trade-coffee-charged phone bank manager. Though if pressed, he might admit that his telling the first McCain supporter he got on the line that she was a feeble-brained idiot who made him appreciate totalitarianism as a governing system may have had something to do with it.
“Hey, listen,” said the phone bank manager, after the sound of Rodney slamming down the receiver had finished reverberating around every corner of the suddenly silent office. “I think you might want to rethink your strategy a bit. Maybe tone it down? Listen to what they say instead of…talking so much?”
The guy—who, according to the sticky tag over his heart, had been cursed with the name “Sheppard”—slouched against the cubicle wall, his puka-shell bracelet knocking lightly against a portrait of a middle-aged blonde woman, presumably the wife of whomever called this cube home in its week-day role as a realtor’s office. He didn’t seem angry—not at Ms. Ruining the Country For the Rest of Us Swing State Voter, nor at Rodney, who could silently admit that he’d been off somewhat in terms of tack (not to mention tact). Rodney found this infuriating. Like everything in the past few months, Sheppard’s no doubt drug-fueled blank-faced serenity made him near-apoplectic with rage. It had gotten so bad that Rodney had overheard one of his coworkers comment that he made Keith Olbermann seem calm.
“Right,” Rodney sneered, “because this election isn’t, like, vitally important to the future of the human race or anything.”
“Not to mention the ursine race,” said Sheppard, nodding solemnly. “Polar bears,” he continued, responding—if it could be called that—to Rodney’s withering glare. “I’ve heard Sarah Palin wants to make beating them to death with hockey sticks the new national sport.”
“Where’d you read that?” Rodney asked. “Daily Kos?” The fact that he wasn’t entirely sure whether or not he intended to pose this question sarcastically might have suggested to him that he needed a) a long, relaxing massage at the hands of a hot blonde; b) serious psychiatric help; or c) for it to be frickin’ November 5th already.
Luckily, pretty much everything Rodney said came out sounding somewhat sarcastic, so Sheppard just smiled and wheezed a small, weird-old man chuckle. He unslouched sufficiently to scratch at his ear, knocking Blonde Wife’s portrait askew. “You good with computers?”
Rodney did not bother to contain his scoff.
Fifteen minutes later, he had processed a dozen call sheets (“Whoa,” said Mr. Slouch for Change, “you type pretty fast”); fixed a self-destructive PC, a sluggish printer, and a caller’s BlackBerry that was on the fritz; and was lecturing some of the other data entry people on how they could be “less ridiculously slo—I mean, more efficient.”
“I have this under control, I can go back to making calls anytime,” Rodney told Sheppard, who had, he claimed, “Just come by to see how things were going”—despite the fact that he hadn’t stopped hovering in Rodney’s vicinity the entire time. “I have a lot more I’d like to say to voters.”
“Nah, I think we need you where you are,” said Sheppard, before being called away to gently correct a caller who kept marking people who DEClined to state a voter preference DECeased.
At the end of the shift, Rodney learned that he’d been made data coordinator for the area, mostly because he’d scared the man who had previously held the position away. (You’d think people would want to be told when they were doing something both painfully slowly and wrong.)
“I’m sure we’re lucky to have you,” Sheppard said.
“Oh,” said Rodney, confidently, “you are.”
*
The next time Rodney saw Sheppard, he was wearing a large blue button that said JOHNS FOR OBAMA.
“Like it?” he said. “I just got it.”
“Huh,” said Rodney. “I wouldn’t think someone like you would have to pay for it.”
Sheppard shrugged. “It’s not like the money doesn’t go to a good cause.”
“That’s an excuse I’ve never heard before,” Rodney muttered, plugging in his laptop.
Rodney co-managed four more phone banks with Sheppard before he found out Sheppard’s name was John. Sadly, this little tidbit, while fitting better with the overall picture, did not really do anything to help Rodney figure Sheppard out.
Not that Rodney was considering a career in a field as puerile as psychoanalysis. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t care if somebody had latent homosexual tendencies or unresolved issues with his mother or whatever else therapists made up for $200 an hour. But Rodney’s current position required that he spend a considerable amount of time working with—not just near, but with—Sheppard, and the man was infuriating. When Rodney saw a drastically different procedural change get passed down from headquarters in Chicago, Sheppard was all, Yes We Can Talk About This Quietly and Not Alarm All Our Volunteers. While Rodney used his breaks to hurriedly browse and mentally collate the latest polling numbers, Sheppard took a bottle of water over to the makeshift lounge-y area and chatted amiably with the resting callers. And when sheets came back to be processed with voter preferences for McCain circled—or even rows of “undecideds” or worse, “100% Not Going to Vote” (“because I’d rather sit on my fat, lazy ass and complain than actually do anything productive,” Rodney editorialized)—Sheppard just shrugged and said, “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion” and “That’s how democracy works” and “Breathe, Rodney” while Rodney hyperventilated and declared loudly that he might not not be in favor of making passing an intelligence test a requirement to vote.
“Look, I know you’ve spent a lot of time aligning your chakras or whatever,” Rodney said, “but this election is really not something you can be Zen about!”
They were at one of their once-weekly planning sessions, which around the same time they’d become bi- and tri- and finally multi-weekly, had ceased to exist purely in the realm of digital communications and had had added to them an element of drinking.
“Zen’s not the same as blasé,” Sheppard said, sipping his (thankfully not organic or microbiotic or anything weird) beer. “I’m not exactly sitting on my ass over here.”
“Like you even have an ass to sit on,” Rodney muttered. He drained his—his fourth? Fifth? Whatever, he was a physicist, not a mathematician—bottle. “I’m just sick of people telling me I’m getting too worked up about this,” he continued, (much) more loudly. “I have coworkers, supposedly with actual degrees in fields that aren’t, you know, botany, who are like, ‘What’s going to happen will happen’ and ‘What do you care anyway, you’re Canadian’ and ‘I don’t have time to do anything.’ They don’t have time? Hello, I don’t think they’re the ones who are close to a breakthrough that will revolutionize our understanding of physics—of the world!—and have the Nobel committee begging me to come to their stupid little—are you okay?”
Belatedly, Rodney noticed that Sheppard was making hacking, esophagus-clearing noises, having apparently choked on his beer. Rodney mentally reviewed the application of CPR, but decided to give him a minute first.
Indeed, Sheppard soon recovered sufficiently to sputter, “You’re Canadian?”
Rodney straightened his shoulders. “So?”
“But that means—” Sheppard paused. Rodney prepared himself for yet another puzzled/pitying expression, and a question about why he was surely giving himself an aneurism about an election for the president of a country that wasn’t even his.
Instead, Sheppard frowned. “You can’t vote.”
“No,” said Rodney, thinking of all the McCain voters, the undecideds, the people 100% not voting, “I can’t.”
“Wow, Rodney.” Sheppard gave him a look that was long and hard and penetrating. Rodney felt himself flush. Here was someone, here was finally someone, who realized the degree to which these last few months had eaten him up, who understood, who would look him in the eye and say—
“Bummer.”
Rodney sighed and downed another beer.
*
Forget April; October was inarguably the cruelest, and by god, the longest fucking month ever in the history of the world. Rodney had begun to seriously consider the possibility that they were experiencing some sort of time dilation phenomenon when he realized he was just going nuts.
“Breathe, Rodney,” Sheppard said.
“Oh, we’ll see if any of us can still breathe after a McCain/Palin administration destroys the environment!” Rodney shouted after Sheppard’s retreating back.
“Shh!” hissed a caller.
Rodney was entering call sheets with his typical lightning-speed when his computer pinged with the news alert. He read, with the usual blend of disgust and terror, that several ACORN offices across the country had been raided by the FBI. “Sheppard!” he shouted, and was shushed just as he remembered that Sheppard had gone next door to print more call lists. He quickly forwarded him the article, adding GREAT—ALL OUR HARD WORK GONE! to the top of the email.
Sheppard came back about ten minutes later, with a new stack of call sheets and flecks of blood and plaster dotting his knuckles.
Rodney stared.
“I think I owe our hostess an apology,” was all Sheppard said on the subject, before trudging off to ask another caller not to unilaterally declare the fine people of Nevada dead.
*
That night Rodney bought the first round. “To victory!” he said. “Or at the very least, to knowing we’ve done everything we possibly could, short of tampering with the electronic voting machines.”
“I bet you could totally do that,” said Sheppard, licking the rim of his bottle.
“Totally,” Rodney echoed, after a moment. “Except I’m not a Republican.”
They laughed together, drunk already with fatigue. Rodney stared at Sheppard’s bandaged hand where it rested on his knee.
“You know, when I first met you,” he said, after a period of comfortable silence, “I thought you were into hookers.”
Rodney’d timed it perfectly—Sheppard did a spit take. “What?”
“Wait, no. When I first met you, I thought you were a dirty hippie. It was the second time we met that I started to think you kept telling people they should drive to Vegas for reasons other than voter registration.”
“Rodney,” Sheppard said, “have you finally cracked?”
“Your button,” said Rodney, by rather oblique way of explanation. “You know—”
“‘Johns for Obama,’” Sheppard finished, his eyebrows shooting off in two different directions. (His hair, as usual, also looked like it was trying to make an escape.) “Um. Well I have to hope I haven’t inadvertently given McCain the evidence he needs to film attack ads claiming Barack favors hos before bros.”
Rodney rolled his eyes. “He doesn’t actually seem to need evidence, so I think you’re all right.”
“What a relief,” said Sheppard. Then an eyebrow went up again. “Dirty hippie?”
“Sorry, but if the Birkenstock fits—”
“Okay, one,” Sheppard said, gesturing rather ridiculously with his injured hand, “those are extremely comfortable, and two, I used to be in the Air Force, which makes me a member of the military-industrial complex, which makes you the dirty hippie, Canada.” He seemed to restrain himself at the last second from adding, So there.
Rodney chose to ignore these barbs, both implicit and ex-, and focus instead on the important question: “They let you in the Air Force?”
“Well, that was before they knew I was gay.” Sheppard drained his bottle. “So.”
The silence was no longer comfortable. Rodney felt dizzy. “Uh,” he said, “I didn’t mean— I didn’t know—”
“Hey, it’s cool,” Sheppard said, although he was no longer looking at Rodney. His left hand moved over his right and scratched at the bandage. Then he turned, a wide grin on his face, and that was ten times worse. “I’m Zen about it, you know?”
For once Rodney had nothing to say. Sheppard slid off the barstool. “See you tomorrow, McKay,” he said, and not for the first time lately, the sound of his own name made Rodney wince.
*
The next day Sheppard was perfectly civil, as nice and as patient—and as distant, Rodney realized—with him as he was with everyone else. “Okay, well, thanks for your time,” Rodney listened to him say, and watched as he circled 5M on his call sheet—McCain supporter. Perfectly calm. Like it didn’t even matter.
Rodney kept working, sighing heavily or groaning or emitting frustrated “Come on!”s when he entered Sheppard’s 5M and all the others. When they were finished, he sent off the final report (“We made 2,557 calls. We probably could have made more if people asked fewer stupid questions during training.”), packed up his stuff, and followed Sheppard out to the parking lot.
Sheppard was trying to load a bunch of placards into the trunk of his clunky old sportscar, while simultaneously trying to keep aloft a stack of sign-in sheets, a bag of leftover sodas, and a backpack containing spare cell phone chargers, Ethernet cables, an assortment of pens, and other supplies. Rodney shifted his laptop under his arm and caught the sodas before they could fall. Sheppard grunted something that could have been gratitude and dumped the rest into his trunk.
The lid slammed closed. Rodney opened his mouth to invite Sheppard out for a drink, but before he could speak, Sheppard aimed a stiff smile in his direction and said, “Thanks for your time, Rodney.”
The sodas fell to the pavement with a thunk. “Oh, come. On!” Rodney said. “That’s all I get? That’s the level you’ve relegated me to—above the stupid racist voter who swears and hangs up, but no higher than some ignorant dipshit voting out of his ass?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sheppard said, watching him calmly. Coldly.
“Yes you do! You think I don’t listen but I do. Well,” Rodney admitted, “maybe not to some random attention-whore swing state voter who just can’t make up his tiny little mind, but you—I have been listening to you. You celebrate every 1 and mourn every 5; the 3s confuse the hell out of you and the 6s make you scream with frustration. You’re just a lot quieter about it than I am. But you feel it,” Rodney declared, forcing his way into Sheppard’s space, backing him up against the trunk of his car. “Don’t tell me you don’t. You feel it just as strongly as I do.”
Sheppard’s voice was low and challenging. “Do I.”
“Yes,” said Rodney, and grabbed Sheppard by the neck and kissed him.
For a second, it crossed Rodney’s mind to worry that Sheppard’s response might be calm, thoughtful, Zen-like, but it seemed he’d finally got the memo. His hand found Rodney’s hip and pulled him tighter, kissing him back with a fervor born of months of hope and fear and elation and despair; an emotional rollercoaster without end, without relief. But here, at least, at last, was release. Here was heat besides his own. Yes. We can. We are. We can.
When they came up for air, Sheppard’s smile no longer had that hollow brittleness to it. Rodney licked his swollen lips and grinned wildly. “Now that,” he said, “is an October surprise!”
Sheppard’s mouth turned down, forming a worried frown. But he didn’t pull away. (In fact, independent sources would agree that he groped Rodney’s ass a bit.)
“Are you…always like this?” he asked.
“Why?” said Rodney, suspiciously. “You haven’t changed your mind, have you? You’re not…undecided?”
Sheppard rubbed his Birkenstock-clad foot against the inside of Rodney’s calf. “Never,” he promised.
NOTES:
1. While this is of course based on my own experiences with the campaign, it should not be taken as an accurate representation of what goes on, mostly because what actually goes on is both more complicated and, in the nitty-gritty details, more boring. And I’ve never actually caught any of the other volunteers making out in the parking lot.
2. It may also be worth noting that while I’ve never actually yelled at a voter, there’s a reason I mostly do data.
3. It’s not too late to volunteer! Go to my.barackobama.com and look for an event near you. Not only do you have a chance to help change the world, who knows who you might meet. ;-)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-27 07:42 pm (UTC)