Fic: We Have Lingered
Dec. 14th, 2005 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneThe lovely ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wychwood made me not one, not two, but THREE eerie and beautiful covers for my story The U.S.S. Indianapolis. They're here; click on each to see the full image. I would say, "Ooh--that one's my favorite!"; but to be perfectly honest, I can't decide. ;-)
And despite the fact that I should be concentrating on my![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
undermistletoe fic and nothing else, I seem to have written a post-'Grace Under Pressure' story. I couldn't help it; I was physically compelled, I tell you! Yeah, the um, aliens made me do it. *weak grin*
Title: We Have Lingered
Rating: PG
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Spoilers: Through ‘Grace Under Pressure’
Length: ~2000 words
Summary: ‘Grace Under Pressure’ tag. “We have to go back,” he says.
A/N: Many thanks tosdraevn, who said many witty and intelligent things in her episode review, including the thing that inspired this.
We Have Lingered
He can see the glint and glow of the sunlight filtering through the water when he suddenly realizes that they’ve made a horrible, horrible mistake.
He throws off the blanket Radek had wrapped around his shoulders and lurches toward the front of the jumper. Sheppard looks up curiously, giving him the full attention of one smoky green eye, regarding the awkward fingers gripping the back of the pilot’s chair. “We have to go back,” Rodney says. “We left him. We have to go back.”
Sheppard opens his mouth, but before he can get a word out, Rodney’s already blundered back into himself. “No, of course,” he says, “of course we couldn’t bring the body. And I did mean the body,” he adds, seeing the lines of worry etched on Radek’s forehead. “I’m not that...”
He sinks back into the co-pilot’s seat, wondering if it will ever feel natural again. The jumper breaks the surface of the waves.
*
Beckett’s obviously concerned, but they did everything right, took the ascent real slow, gave his body time to adjust. “I don’t see any signs of DCS,” Carson says, like he doesn’t really believe it, and Rodney restrains himself from pulling on Sheppard’s sleeve and whispering, “Ascension” at him; giggling, “We ascended,” just to watch Sheppard’s eyebrows twist, or maybe to see him smile. But Sheppard is all business, quiet and cool and dressed in black. Like somebody attending a funeral, Rodney thinks. He remembers some of the things Sheppard said to him when they were down there, and he wonders if they were a hallucination, too.
By unspoken agreement, Carson lets Elizabeth linger a little longer after the others have all left. They make awkward small talk which he lets her carry, instead drifting around inside his own mind and half-observing the way she keeps looking at him, long and hard, before turning away. And again: turning back, like she’s trying to catch him unawares. Like he’s the hallucination; and wouldn’t that be an interesting twist.
“Well, I better let you get some rest, Rodney,” she finally tells him, and then, then the strangest thing: she reaches down and pulls him into a clumsy hug. Brief--just a few seconds of her hand rubbing against his shoulder blades and her breath hot on his neck--and then she’s drawing back with a series of heavy blinks; fixing him with half a smile; striding from the room. He can still feel the press of Sam’s imagined fingers, and he thinks: This is all wrong. Wrong that he should be welcomed back like a gallant when he couldn’t even save himself; wrong to be treated like a hero when he’s anything but.
When he wakes the next morning he feels a lot more rational. Beckett lets him out of the infirmary and even clears him for low-stress work; he puts on fresh, dry clothes and goes about his business, trying not to think too much about the near-reverent glances some of his colleagues are giving him. He’s all too aware that if he let himself, he could make the whole previous day slide away, retreat into the dream-like haze to which it almost already belongs. He could scream at his people to stop pussyfooting around, but instead he bites his tongue.
*
He lies in bed and listens to the water lapping at the edges of Atlantis. He imagines her sinking, water rising up over the docks and the low, bottom-level rooms that still smell of salt from the last time she submerged; rising up over the labs and the living quarters, washing through the gateroom (he can picture it so clearly) and up over the tips of the tallest towers. He imagines drowning, and even though that was really the least of his worries, he thinks it might be what scares him most: water filling him like it filled the jumper, sucking him down, leaving him to drift across the silent expanse of sand, quiet and cold and alone.
All things considered, he sleeps surprisingly well.
*
So he’s had his turn--had several, even--and when the next time comes around, it really is some other poor bastard. Two of them, actually, both crewmen from the Daedalus, no one he knows. Trapped in one of those salt-smelling rooms with the walls closing in; “I’d make the obligatory Star Wars joke,” Sheppard says, “but I’m not sure it’s really appropriate.”
Rodney waves a dismissive hand, by which he means, Eh, propriety, but which the Colonel seems to take as, Busy now, annoying me, go away. “I’m going to go see if Radek--” he starts, but Rodney says, “No, wait. What were you saying the other day about those new smoke grenades the marines were testing?”
“Huh?” says Sheppard, and for a heart-stopping moment Rodney thinks he may have been-- But: “Oh,” says Sheppard, his eyes lighting up. “Oh! Only you know what’d be even better?”
And they talk through it. Sheppard, it turns out, has some truly brilliant suggestions once you get past his arsenal of stupid similes. Really quite brilliant (if nothing to match his own), so when the doors slide open just in the nick of time, releasing the trapped crewmen and leaving only the squash equipment they’d been fooling around with behind to get crushed (“Idiots,” Rodney mutters, low enough so that only Sheppard can hear; “They nearly deserved their painful, ironic deaths”), Rodney doesn’t even begrudge him that smug little smile. The one that he wears as he says, “I think I’m starting to get good at this.”
“Well, we make a good team,” says Rodney, absently.
He’s startled when, a moment later, it’s Sheppard’s voice he hears: “Yes, we do. We really do.”
*
Elizabeth doesn’t hug the Daedalus crewmen when they come out of the not-a-trash-compactor, but Caldwell shakes their hands, and Rodney’s and Sheppard’s, too. Everyone’s too tired for any real kind of party, what with near-death situations having by now been reduced to the almost-mundane. But mundane or not, people gather in the mess and stay there until late, talking and drinking champagne glasses full of Swiss Miss that must’ve come from Caldwell’s private stash. Rodney slips away, taking his cocoa up to the control tower. It’s empty aside from one of the backup technicians whose name he can never remember; Rodney stares at him long and hard until it comes back: Stearns. He’s young, boyish and skinny with a long neck punctuated by a vulnerable jut of Adam’s apple. Judging by the flag patch on his shoulder, he’s also actually Swiss, and Rodney thinks that’s what makes the longing glances he keeps shooting at Rodney’s champagne glass cross the line from pathetic into unbearable. “Look,” he snaps, “do you want some? There’s still plenty left. Go, satiate yourself, I’ll--” He gestures, broadly but carefully, so as not to spill the cocoa. “--Hold down the fort.”
“Um,” says the boy.
“Oh, just go,” Rodney says, and the tech skedaddles. Rodney glances at his abandoned screen: everything’s quiet, normal...except there’s a lifesigns reading coming towards him as well as away.
“Sheppard,” he says.
“Hey, Rodney.” Casual and soft. “I thought I saw you sneak out. They’re toasting us down there; you’re missing it.”
He shrugs, walking past Sheppard and out onto the catwalk. He stares down at the ‘gate and remembers it awash in waves of black, the cold creep of it across his entire body.
Sheppard leans next to him, the movement marked only by the gentle sound of his knife swaying against his belt. “You’re awful quiet,” Sheppard says.
There are a lot of things Rodney could say in response to that. He settles for, “Oh?”
“You’ve been quiet a lot lately,” says Sheppard, and Rodney can feel him looking, even if his own eyes are fixed firmly forward. “It’s kind of freaking me out.”
“Sorry,” he says, even though: “No, I’m not.”
Sheppard laughs, a gentle, friendly chuckle. But he’s perfectly serious when he says, “You wanna tell me what’s bugging you?”
After a moment in which he doesn’t speak, in which he barely shakes his head, Sheppard bravely jumps back into the silence. “I’ll tell you what’s bugging me.” A beat. “No marshmallows.”
Rodney’s lips turn upward, a taste of an irrepressible grin.
“If we had marshmallows,” Sheppard continues, clearly flush with his own triumph, “we could make s’mores.”
Rodney lifts his chin. “You mean,” he says, “if we had marshmallows, graham crackers, Hershey bars, and a roaring campfire. Then we could make s’mores.”
Sheppard shrugs. “The marshmallows would be a good start,” he says, and he grins: “I’m sure you’d come up with something for the rest.”
Rodney nods, accepting this. A few seconds later--too long or not, he can’t be sure--he blinks and says, “You’d help. I bet you can start a fire just by rubbing on a couple of sticks.”
“I also know how to tie thirteen different kinds of knots,” Sheppard says, full of pride and clearly lying through his teeth. Well, it’s not like Rodney can reverse-engineer graham crackers out of empty air, either.
“I’m glad they taught you something,” Rodney says, staring at his hands. He glances over and realizes that Sheppard’s examining his own: long, clever fingers, dotted with a few odd scars. Fingers that Rodney has seen wrapped confidently around the controls of a jumper or the trigger of a P-90; fingers that have closed around the span of his arms; hands that have picked him up and carried him. Solid hands. Hands that Rodney wants to be able to believe in.
And maybe--maybe he already does.
“Hold this for me,” he says, passing Sheppard his glass, because a theory’s no good until you test it. And testing this theory...it could sink them, Rodney knows; knows only too well. But he also knows, now, that he has to have faith, has to trust them both to trust that it won’t.
“Hold this for me,” he says, and when his hands are free, he reaches up and gently scrapes a finger across the back of Sheppard’s neck. Sheppard doesn’t lean in, but he also doesn’t jerk away, and so Rodney inches closer, the gentle push of his hand bringing Sheppard’s mouth down to his.
Stubble scratches his cheek, but Sheppard’s lips open beneath his as if this were planned. He tastes like the cocoa, warm and sweet and unexpected, a reward for something, one he’s not yet fully certain he deserves.
Sam had been salt and cold and desperation--none of which was really her fault, as she also hadn’t been real. But still he left her at the bottom of the ocean, and sometimes he thinks he left himself there, too. Or part of him, a second self that’s still shuffling across the silent sands with nothing but a ruined jumper and a whale for company. It makes him feel a twist of regret, to think of him, that man; but the Ancients were right about something, at least: when you ascended, certain things had to be left behind.
Luck or fate or something else, he’s still here and he’s still breathing. Mixing his breath with Sheppard’s; an old diving technique, if he remembers correctly: buddy breathing. They’re being careless with their air, however, panting into each other’s mouths, and by necessity they break apart. Rodney can’t stop himself from feeling a spasm of cold fear, but when Sheppard pulls back he’s smiling, and Rodney thinks he sees a shining something glinting beneath the surface of his eyes. Together, they look down at his hands, and at the two glasses, side by side.
John hasn’t spilled a single drop.
*************
NOTES:
1. Title from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a.k.a., that poem that inspires a scary amount of my writing. If you’ve never read it, it is happily available online.
2. Yes, in my world, Caldwell is magically all better and back in command. Deal, okay? ;-)
wychwood made me not one, not two, but THREE eerie and beautiful covers for my story The U.S.S. Indianapolis. They're here; click on each to see the full image. I would say, "Ooh--that one's my favorite!"; but to be perfectly honest, I can't decide. ;-)And despite the fact that I should be concentrating on my
undermistletoe fic and nothing else, I seem to have written a post-'Grace Under Pressure' story. I couldn't help it; I was physically compelled, I tell you! Yeah, the um, aliens made me do it. *weak grin*Title: We Have Lingered
Rating: PG
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Spoilers: Through ‘Grace Under Pressure’
Length: ~2000 words
Summary: ‘Grace Under Pressure’ tag. “We have to go back,” he says.
A/N: Many thanks to
sdraevn, who said many witty and intelligent things in her episode review, including the thing that inspired this.We Have Lingered
He can see the glint and glow of the sunlight filtering through the water when he suddenly realizes that they’ve made a horrible, horrible mistake.
He throws off the blanket Radek had wrapped around his shoulders and lurches toward the front of the jumper. Sheppard looks up curiously, giving him the full attention of one smoky green eye, regarding the awkward fingers gripping the back of the pilot’s chair. “We have to go back,” Rodney says. “We left him. We have to go back.”
Sheppard opens his mouth, but before he can get a word out, Rodney’s already blundered back into himself. “No, of course,” he says, “of course we couldn’t bring the body. And I did mean the body,” he adds, seeing the lines of worry etched on Radek’s forehead. “I’m not that...”
He sinks back into the co-pilot’s seat, wondering if it will ever feel natural again. The jumper breaks the surface of the waves.
*
Beckett’s obviously concerned, but they did everything right, took the ascent real slow, gave his body time to adjust. “I don’t see any signs of DCS,” Carson says, like he doesn’t really believe it, and Rodney restrains himself from pulling on Sheppard’s sleeve and whispering, “Ascension” at him; giggling, “We ascended,” just to watch Sheppard’s eyebrows twist, or maybe to see him smile. But Sheppard is all business, quiet and cool and dressed in black. Like somebody attending a funeral, Rodney thinks. He remembers some of the things Sheppard said to him when they were down there, and he wonders if they were a hallucination, too.
By unspoken agreement, Carson lets Elizabeth linger a little longer after the others have all left. They make awkward small talk which he lets her carry, instead drifting around inside his own mind and half-observing the way she keeps looking at him, long and hard, before turning away. And again: turning back, like she’s trying to catch him unawares. Like he’s the hallucination; and wouldn’t that be an interesting twist.
“Well, I better let you get some rest, Rodney,” she finally tells him, and then, then the strangest thing: she reaches down and pulls him into a clumsy hug. Brief--just a few seconds of her hand rubbing against his shoulder blades and her breath hot on his neck--and then she’s drawing back with a series of heavy blinks; fixing him with half a smile; striding from the room. He can still feel the press of Sam’s imagined fingers, and he thinks: This is all wrong. Wrong that he should be welcomed back like a gallant when he couldn’t even save himself; wrong to be treated like a hero when he’s anything but.
When he wakes the next morning he feels a lot more rational. Beckett lets him out of the infirmary and even clears him for low-stress work; he puts on fresh, dry clothes and goes about his business, trying not to think too much about the near-reverent glances some of his colleagues are giving him. He’s all too aware that if he let himself, he could make the whole previous day slide away, retreat into the dream-like haze to which it almost already belongs. He could scream at his people to stop pussyfooting around, but instead he bites his tongue.
*
He lies in bed and listens to the water lapping at the edges of Atlantis. He imagines her sinking, water rising up over the docks and the low, bottom-level rooms that still smell of salt from the last time she submerged; rising up over the labs and the living quarters, washing through the gateroom (he can picture it so clearly) and up over the tips of the tallest towers. He imagines drowning, and even though that was really the least of his worries, he thinks it might be what scares him most: water filling him like it filled the jumper, sucking him down, leaving him to drift across the silent expanse of sand, quiet and cold and alone.
All things considered, he sleeps surprisingly well.
*
So he’s had his turn--had several, even--and when the next time comes around, it really is some other poor bastard. Two of them, actually, both crewmen from the Daedalus, no one he knows. Trapped in one of those salt-smelling rooms with the walls closing in; “I’d make the obligatory Star Wars joke,” Sheppard says, “but I’m not sure it’s really appropriate.”
Rodney waves a dismissive hand, by which he means, Eh, propriety, but which the Colonel seems to take as, Busy now, annoying me, go away. “I’m going to go see if Radek--” he starts, but Rodney says, “No, wait. What were you saying the other day about those new smoke grenades the marines were testing?”
“Huh?” says Sheppard, and for a heart-stopping moment Rodney thinks he may have been-- But: “Oh,” says Sheppard, his eyes lighting up. “Oh! Only you know what’d be even better?”
And they talk through it. Sheppard, it turns out, has some truly brilliant suggestions once you get past his arsenal of stupid similes. Really quite brilliant (if nothing to match his own), so when the doors slide open just in the nick of time, releasing the trapped crewmen and leaving only the squash equipment they’d been fooling around with behind to get crushed (“Idiots,” Rodney mutters, low enough so that only Sheppard can hear; “They nearly deserved their painful, ironic deaths”), Rodney doesn’t even begrudge him that smug little smile. The one that he wears as he says, “I think I’m starting to get good at this.”
“Well, we make a good team,” says Rodney, absently.
He’s startled when, a moment later, it’s Sheppard’s voice he hears: “Yes, we do. We really do.”
*
Elizabeth doesn’t hug the Daedalus crewmen when they come out of the not-a-trash-compactor, but Caldwell shakes their hands, and Rodney’s and Sheppard’s, too. Everyone’s too tired for any real kind of party, what with near-death situations having by now been reduced to the almost-mundane. But mundane or not, people gather in the mess and stay there until late, talking and drinking champagne glasses full of Swiss Miss that must’ve come from Caldwell’s private stash. Rodney slips away, taking his cocoa up to the control tower. It’s empty aside from one of the backup technicians whose name he can never remember; Rodney stares at him long and hard until it comes back: Stearns. He’s young, boyish and skinny with a long neck punctuated by a vulnerable jut of Adam’s apple. Judging by the flag patch on his shoulder, he’s also actually Swiss, and Rodney thinks that’s what makes the longing glances he keeps shooting at Rodney’s champagne glass cross the line from pathetic into unbearable. “Look,” he snaps, “do you want some? There’s still plenty left. Go, satiate yourself, I’ll--” He gestures, broadly but carefully, so as not to spill the cocoa. “--Hold down the fort.”
“Um,” says the boy.
“Oh, just go,” Rodney says, and the tech skedaddles. Rodney glances at his abandoned screen: everything’s quiet, normal...except there’s a lifesigns reading coming towards him as well as away.
“Sheppard,” he says.
“Hey, Rodney.” Casual and soft. “I thought I saw you sneak out. They’re toasting us down there; you’re missing it.”
He shrugs, walking past Sheppard and out onto the catwalk. He stares down at the ‘gate and remembers it awash in waves of black, the cold creep of it across his entire body.
Sheppard leans next to him, the movement marked only by the gentle sound of his knife swaying against his belt. “You’re awful quiet,” Sheppard says.
There are a lot of things Rodney could say in response to that. He settles for, “Oh?”
“You’ve been quiet a lot lately,” says Sheppard, and Rodney can feel him looking, even if his own eyes are fixed firmly forward. “It’s kind of freaking me out.”
“Sorry,” he says, even though: “No, I’m not.”
Sheppard laughs, a gentle, friendly chuckle. But he’s perfectly serious when he says, “You wanna tell me what’s bugging you?”
After a moment in which he doesn’t speak, in which he barely shakes his head, Sheppard bravely jumps back into the silence. “I’ll tell you what’s bugging me.” A beat. “No marshmallows.”
Rodney’s lips turn upward, a taste of an irrepressible grin.
“If we had marshmallows,” Sheppard continues, clearly flush with his own triumph, “we could make s’mores.”
Rodney lifts his chin. “You mean,” he says, “if we had marshmallows, graham crackers, Hershey bars, and a roaring campfire. Then we could make s’mores.”
Sheppard shrugs. “The marshmallows would be a good start,” he says, and he grins: “I’m sure you’d come up with something for the rest.”
Rodney nods, accepting this. A few seconds later--too long or not, he can’t be sure--he blinks and says, “You’d help. I bet you can start a fire just by rubbing on a couple of sticks.”
“I also know how to tie thirteen different kinds of knots,” Sheppard says, full of pride and clearly lying through his teeth. Well, it’s not like Rodney can reverse-engineer graham crackers out of empty air, either.
“I’m glad they taught you something,” Rodney says, staring at his hands. He glances over and realizes that Sheppard’s examining his own: long, clever fingers, dotted with a few odd scars. Fingers that Rodney has seen wrapped confidently around the controls of a jumper or the trigger of a P-90; fingers that have closed around the span of his arms; hands that have picked him up and carried him. Solid hands. Hands that Rodney wants to be able to believe in.
And maybe--maybe he already does.
“Hold this for me,” he says, passing Sheppard his glass, because a theory’s no good until you test it. And testing this theory...it could sink them, Rodney knows; knows only too well. But he also knows, now, that he has to have faith, has to trust them both to trust that it won’t.
“Hold this for me,” he says, and when his hands are free, he reaches up and gently scrapes a finger across the back of Sheppard’s neck. Sheppard doesn’t lean in, but he also doesn’t jerk away, and so Rodney inches closer, the gentle push of his hand bringing Sheppard’s mouth down to his.
Stubble scratches his cheek, but Sheppard’s lips open beneath his as if this were planned. He tastes like the cocoa, warm and sweet and unexpected, a reward for something, one he’s not yet fully certain he deserves.
Sam had been salt and cold and desperation--none of which was really her fault, as she also hadn’t been real. But still he left her at the bottom of the ocean, and sometimes he thinks he left himself there, too. Or part of him, a second self that’s still shuffling across the silent sands with nothing but a ruined jumper and a whale for company. It makes him feel a twist of regret, to think of him, that man; but the Ancients were right about something, at least: when you ascended, certain things had to be left behind.
Luck or fate or something else, he’s still here and he’s still breathing. Mixing his breath with Sheppard’s; an old diving technique, if he remembers correctly: buddy breathing. They’re being careless with their air, however, panting into each other’s mouths, and by necessity they break apart. Rodney can’t stop himself from feeling a spasm of cold fear, but when Sheppard pulls back he’s smiling, and Rodney thinks he sees a shining something glinting beneath the surface of his eyes. Together, they look down at his hands, and at the two glasses, side by side.
John hasn’t spilled a single drop.
*************
NOTES:
1. Title from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a.k.a., that poem that inspires a scary amount of my writing. If you’ve never read it, it is happily available online.
2. Yes, in my world, Caldwell is magically all better and back in command. Deal, okay? ;-)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 04:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-16 09:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 04:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-16 09:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:00 pm (UTC)That was lovely.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-16 09:27 pm (UTC)Your icon is...intriguing.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:08 pm (UTC)Nothing is wrong with Caldwell magically all better and back in command.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-16 09:29 pm (UTC)Thank you! I kind of wrote it that way. *g*
Nothing is wrong with Caldwell magically all better and back in command
I totally agree. And I hope I'm not wrong and hoping that TPTB will think so, too...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:12 pm (UTC)Oh my god.
*aches*
I just... that's stunning. Your words are always stunning, lovely like poetry and something deeper. *hart*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-16 11:43 pm (UTC)So...thank you. ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:15 pm (UTC)*hyperventilates*
Sam had been salt and cold and desperation--none of which was really her fault, as she also hadn’t been real. But still he left her at the bottom of the ocean, and sometimes he thinks he left himself there, too. Or part of him, a second self that’s still shuffling across the silent sands with nothing but a ruined jumper and a whale for company. It makes him feel a twist of regret, to think of him, that man; but the Ancients were right about something, at least: when you ascended, certain things had to be left behind.
The sheer number of things that pay off in this paragraph? Wow. Ascension, and leaving behind, and all the things that the rescue mean to Rodney. Wow.
And John-and-Rodney are the best team ever. John teasing Rodney so gently with the marshmallows! And relying on him! And Rodney trusting him back!
*wants to curl up in a little ball somewhere*
Also, hey, I'm glad you like the covers! But wow, Rodney looks really kind of... lumpy...
*walks away very fast instead of fiddling with it yet again*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:18 pm (UTC)All things considered, he sleeps surprisingly well.
Love that whole section; scary and wonderful, all at once.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:27 pm (UTC)Good coda piece. Really liked it. Poor Rodney, though. That trip really messed him up.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:33 pm (UTC)I'm desperately in love with every single one of your stories (though I've been shamefully remiss in actually *telling* you that), but this one is just... just perfect. And flawless. And this:
the Ancients were right about something, at least: when you ascended, certain things had to be left behind.
... yes yes yes yes YES.
Loved it. So much. Thank you for sharing!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:33 pm (UTC)and then this: John hasn’t spilled a single drop.
it's just so beautiful, so perfect.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 05:41 pm (UTC)thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 06:08 pm (UTC)*flail*
Oh, that last line made me wibble like custard in a stiff breeze. Grace Under Pressure is classic.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 06:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 06:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 06:13 pm (UTC)And from one Prufrock fan to another, I think Rodney was wreathed in seaweeds red and brown--but that human voices woke him, and to his surprise, he did not drown.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 06:29 pm (UTC)That last two paragraphs were just *guh* The whole story is fantastic and this line really just stuck out:
Luck or fate or something else, he’s still here and he’s still breathing. Mixing his breath with Sheppard’s; an old diving technique, if he remembers correctly: buddy breathing.
He got out, he's alive, he's with John, exactly where he's supposed to be.
And I'm a T.S. Elliot fan myself!!*smile*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 06:30 pm (UTC)Ooh, lovely. Thank you. ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 06:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 06:49 pm (UTC)That was really gorgeous.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 06:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 07:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 07:14 pm (UTC)Given that you're on the right side of the pond, you and
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 09:54 pm (UTC)So come over and introduce us already! ;)
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-14 07:19 pm (UTC)Gorgeous.