trinityofone (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
trinityofone) wrote2005-12-29 07:57 pm
trinityofone) wrote2005-12-29 07:57 pm
Fic Repost: Consilience (+Meta & Illustrations)
As some of you may be aware, I was one of the Mystery Schmoop Week writers for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
undermistletoe. Very few people figured out that the story was by me, and a few even thought it was by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
astolat, two things that make me really happy, though for different reasons. (Actually, I’m pleased that people thought the story was by any of the authors svmadelyn grouped me with--in fact, just seeing my name listed with those authors made me giddy with glee.) Unfortunately, my parents came before I got to participate in the guessing of the other stories, which means that I can go back and read them now that the authors have been revealed and go, “Oh, yeah. I would have totally guessed that. Obviously. No question” for each and every one. *eg*
BUT...I’m still interested and amused by why people did or did not guess that my story was by me. So, I’m reposting it here 1) with a couple of pictures, because they are cool and I am a dork, and 2) with some notes at the end regarding the things that I thought (for the most part, incorrectly) were going to give me away. And I’d love hear about people’s thought processes when it came to guessing--not just about my story, but any of them. I think it wasrageprufrock who recently said that writers really just want to talk about their writing ALL THE TIME; this is true, but uh, I hope it is at least somewhat interesting for everybody else, and that you’ll grant me this one last bit of holiday indulgence.
~The Fic~
Title: Consilience
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Length: ~3000 words
Summary: Sometimes Rodney’s brain scares him.
Thanks to:svmadelyn, beta and challenge organizer extraordinaire!
Consilience
Skull of Phineas P. Gage.
Sometimes Rodney’s brain scares him. Not his mind: his brain—three pounds of grey and white tissue, roughly the size of a grapefruit and with the approximate consistency of a bowl of custard. He doesn’t like that the organ that controls his heart lungs stomach eyes hands mind should be so easily comparable to something you eat out of a plastic cup with a spoon. Basically, if he’d never seen Hannibal, he’d be a whole lot happier.
Rodney’s not an idiot—far from! So he knows the basics of how the human brain operates. Neurons fire and dendrites reach out and synapses snap; the signal never stops. His heart beats and his lungs contract to the rhythm of pons, medulla, cerebellum. He marvels and the amygdala marvels with him; he hurts and the thalamus feels his pain; he lusts and the hypothalamus rises to the task. His cerebral cortex is a wonder in any galaxy, brilliant and bursting and alive. His hippocampus helps him to remember.
But it’s all so fragile. So impermanent. He thinks of his brain, sitting nearly-naked and vulnerable at the top of his neck, and it’s all too easy to imagine something—any one of so many things!—going horribly, horribly wrong. He could receive a blow to the head, ingest the wrong combination of drugs, have his supply of oxygen cut off for too long, too long. And then what? A coma, or memory loss, or impairment of thought. That would be the worst. To know the heights he had once attained, but to spend the rest of his life stuck on the ground. He can’t think of anything more terrifying than that.
Well. Almost nothing.
John pushes himself up on his elbow, studying Rodney’s face in the half-light. His brow creases. “You’re doing it again,” he says.
“Doing what?”
“Thinking.”
Rodney forces out a haughty laugh. “Oh, how inconsiderate of me. I’m sorry if my performing a basic brain function disturbs you.”
“Only when you do it so loud,” John says, good-naturedly. Then he says, “Hey”—concerned, because something of what Rodney is feeling must have shown on his face. Something of what Rodney is feeling always shows on his face. “All right,” John says. “Let’s just get this...out there. You’re worried about...the amount of bacteria in your drinking water? The possibility of a giant alien bird getting sucked into one of the puddlejumper’s thrusters? The imminent explosion of Yellowstone National Park?”
Rodney shakes his head. “Phineas P. Gage,” he says.
“That was going to be my next guess.”
Rodney sighs and rolls over so that he and John are facing each other. They used to lie like this, in sleeping bags, on alien planets. John’s a bit of an insomniac, and Rodney’s a heavy sleeper except for when he’s not, so sometimes they would lie awake and whisper to each other, and to Rodney it was like suddenly and unexpectedly finding the best friend he had always secretly wished for, twenty-five years too late.
Only it turned out not to be too late, after all.
“Phineas P. Gage,” Rodney says. “He was a railway worker in Vermont in the mid-nineteenth century. There was an accident and he got an iron bar blasted through his skull.”
“Let me get this straight,” John says. He reaches out and rests a hand on Rodney’s bare arm, reassuring himself that Rodney is solid if not sane. “It’s the middle of the night. We’re in our locked bedroom, several galaxies away from any trains or train paraphernalia, and you’re worried about getting killed by a flying railway spike? Do I have to take away your Buffy DVDs again?”
“Those are Radek’s,” Rodney says quickly. Then he says, “He didn’t die.”
“No, he came back as a ghost and we were all very relieved.”
Rodney would hit John with his pillow, but then John would stop rubbing his shoulder like that. And that would be sad. So instead he says, “Phineas P. Gage”—slowly, carefully enunciating both words and the initial. “He didn’t die.”
“What, the guy with the spike through his head? He didn’t die?”
“No.”
John looks appropriately disturbed. Still, he tries to put a positive spin on it: “Well, that’s good news, right? Proof of medical miracles?”
“Proof that medicine is hardly a science!” Rodney retorts, proving that, among other things, John is certainly good at distracting him. But not quite good enough. “He lived, but he changed.”
“Superpowers?” John says hopefully. “Telekinesis? ESP?”
Rodney remembers how much he enjoyed telling a group of his grade three classmates that no, if a radioactive spider bit them, they would not gain web-slinging abilities and Spidey-sense—really, they would most likely die. He does not feel the same twisted joy now, not even close.
He shakes his head. “His prefrontal lobe was damaged. He became self-destructive, sullen, a habitual liar.” Rodney swallows. “He lost the ability to interact with people.”
“Rodney.” John’s hand moves up, traces the line of his chin. “You don’t have the ability to interact with people now.”
He’s smiling as he says it. There’s a small flurry of activity in Rodney’s hippocampus, and he remembers how, in the beginning, he would have completely misinterpreted that look, seen only the surface, the shallow spread of lips, and missed everything, the world of things, going on beneath. But he knows what to look for now. They stare at each other for what ought to be an inordinate amount of time and Rodney’s amygdala pounds, pulsates, throbs.
John says, “Eadweard Muybridge.”
Rodney blinks. Staring at John’s lips, “The photographer?”
A gentle nod. “He was in a stagecoach accident when he was a young man. He got thrown from the carriage, struck his head, fell into a coma.”
John’s hand drifts downward as he speaks; moves, very slowly and without any particular purpose, up and down Rodney’s side. They’re pretty strange, Rodney thinks, that this is what they talk about, together in bed, like they’re friends and not lovers, like nothing’s changed since they were just two teammates in side-by-side sleeping bags, restless dreamers under an alien sky.
Rodney finds he’s really, extremely okay with that.
Besides, he knows the next line. “And when he woke up...”
“And when he woke up,” John says, “he was different. No longer an average, run-of-the-mill landscape photographer, he saw the world in a way that no one else ever has. He was a man before his time. A genius.”
The word coaxes a different smile out of John, one Rodney likes to think few people get to see. One he’s almost naïve enough to claim for his own. And Rodney wants to smile with him. But his cerebral cortex is still tick tick ticking away. “Didn’t he murder his wife’s lover? Yes, I’m almost positive—”
“He was acquitted!” John says, his fingers ceasing their restless crawl. “Also, you’re missing my point!”
“You had one?”
“Rodney.” John’s head drops to his shoulder and Rodney can feel the heat of his breath, steady puffs of barely contained laughter. Rodney’s chest feels tight; his hindbrain must be falling down on the job.
“Rodney,” John says again; says it like he’s lost all other words and he’s returning to the one thing he still knows. Then an eyeblink and it’s gone, too. Gone; and they’re left with what silent reassurances John’s mouth can offer. With what John’s lips can give to Rodney’s mouth, his jaw, his jugular; to the hot patch of flesh above his beating heart.
Rodney’s brain scares him. Sometimes his heart scares him even more. Pear-shaped, the size of a fist, atria and ventricles divided by a single separating septum. Mitral and tricuspid valves pumping blood, contracting the cardiac muscle seventy to eighty times a minute. Faster in fear and more slowly in sleep, from birth until death, it’s a true constant in an ever-changing world. And it’s not what he’s talking about.
“John,” he says, and rolls him onto his back. Their foreheads bump, and Rodney can feel the brain cells evaporating, exploding into dust and air. His heart is beating, faster and faster and faster.
He wants to say: It’s all so fragile. He wants to say: I can’t bear to lose... He wants to say: It’s all in your hands, I’m in your hands, please be careful, be careful—
He says, “What do you think he saw?”
There’s a flash of something in John’s eyes. Surprise, maybe. “Muybridge?”
“Yes.”
John stares up at him. His head is dark against the pillow; so are his eyes. But his smile... “Consilience.”
And John scares Rodney, too. Mostly at times like these, when John is smiling at him, is warm beneath him, is connecting with him body and mind. Times when as hard as Rodney works to block it out, all he can hear is his mother’s voice: “If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.”
Rodney doesn’t know how much of this he’s letting John see: probably a lot; probably too much. He hopes his sheer pleasure and continual astonishment at the complexities of John’s mind have escaped the muddle. Because he has to say: “That doesn’t exist.”
John’s hand has moved up to hover near Rodney’s face, and Rodney thinks he can feel the pulse of John’s electromagnetic field. The fingers linger just beside the sharp jut of Rodney’s jaw, like John’s holding himself back, afraid to touch, right up until the moment when skin scrapes against skin, and he remembers that he can.
“Maybe not yet,” John says. “But someday.”
And Rodney has to shake his head. “It can’t ever exist. Literature, music, art—they can’t ever be fully united, fully integrated with science. Not hard science, anyway,” by which he of course means real science. “They’re too different. Apples and oranges.”
John thinks about this for a minute, a highly entertaining minute in which he pulls Rodney down, joins their mouths, merging lips and teeth and tongues. Then smugly, “Apples and oranges are both fruit,” he says.
And Rodney should be annoyed. Smug people (who aren’t justified in their smugness; who aren’t, in other words, him) are inherently annoying, and John should be no different. But John... It’s as if the signposts that Rodney had laid out for himself, the markers by which he had mapped his whole life, have been ripped out, or rearranged, or translated into Ancient. He’s lost and he can’t find his way and it should be fucking terrifying. But he feels safe here. Safe: and he thinks that’s what scares him most of all.
Rodney’s parents had been remarkably overprotective for people who otherwise couldn’t give a shit; maybe it was because Jeannie had been sick a lot as a baby, but one of Rodney’s earliest memories is of having an Oreo slapped out of his hand because it had fallen on the floor, because it had germs on it, germs, Rodney, and germs were very very bad. Germs made you sick. But despite the white white walls and the shiny-polished tables and the countertops that reeked of Lysol; despite the permanent repeal of the ten-second rule and his mother washing and rewashing his hands with anti-bacterial soap; despite everything, Rodney got sick. Got sick a lot more often and a lot more seriously than Jeannie ever had. Got sick and resigned himself to a dozen stupid allergies and a really shitty immune system. It’s not paranoia if they’re really after you; Rodney thinks a similar exception should be made for hypochondria.
So Rodney no longer believes that clean and neat and orderly equal safe; the more protected something looks, he’s learned, the more vulnerable it often is. Entropy, chaos theory—the more you know, the more you realize that you know nothing; can predict nothing; can prevent nothing.
Rodney’s a heavy sleeper, except for when he’s not.
He says, “I’m allergic to citrus. An orange could kill me.”
“Okay,” John raises an eyebrow, “I think we’ve started talking about something else.”
Rodney swallows. “Let’s not talk anymore. I want to—” He scoots down John’s body, clutching at his hips. John’s dick is already half-hard, warmed and made ready by the press of bodies. Rodney strokes it, and if it weren’t for the intense look in his eyes, his touch would almost seem lazy, over-familiar. “Will you let me?”
John chuckles. “Like I’d say no.”
Rodney takes John in. Stretches his lips and slides down the length of John’s cock, big mouth good for something. He’s no porn star, though: he can’t deep throat; can’t, however much he may want to swallow John whole. To keep him inside, somewhere safe.
But that’s not how it works. That’s not how it works, and as willing as Rodney is to give John a long lazy blow job, he can tell that John is restless. He can feel John’s fingers roving across his scalp, wanting to touch, to give as well as receive, and so he lifts his head, releases him long enough to say, “You can do me, too, if you like.”
John’s eyes are heavy-lidded and dark; “Oh, I like very much,” he says.
There’s an awkward rearranging of position—comical, really, and Rodney’s never really been a big fan of sexual acts that take this much coordination or pre-planning. But it can be worth it; oh, it can be so worth it, once limbs are all aligned and John’s cock is in his mouth again, and John’s mouth is on his cock, and they’re moving together, a complete unit, a living breathing pleasure machine—yes, it’s worth the clumsiness and the embarrassment and the risk. It’s worth it to feel the pull of John’s lips and tongue and be able to echo it with the suction of his own mouth, motion crashing into motion like waves moving around in a circle. Like a completed circuit, hot with continuous charge.
And the synapses. Connect.
Rodney almost does something ridiculous, like jerk back. But just then John shudders, like he felt it too, shudders and spills into Rodney mouth, and even more miraculously, drags Rodney with him. But that release is nothing compared to the one that came before, and Rodney’s brain feels divorced from his body as he washes off John’s cock, catching the last of his come as if it were something essential or precious. He can feel John doing something similar, stroking along Rodney’s thigh before rolling his shoulders straight. Rodney, however, stays curled on his side with his head against the sharp jut of John’s hip; he can look down John’s body and see his toes, pale and delicate, not yet uncurled.
His legs are bent uncomfortably against the headboard, his eyes level with John’s softening cock. He nuzzles against John’s hairy thigh, thinking: it’s almost kind of perfect, that he should do it backwards like this, that they should do it like this, coming at it from another angle, and an odd one at that. They discuss 19th Century brain injuries in bed; and likewise, when Rodney first says, “I love you,” he says it upside-down, whispering the words to John’s thigh instead of his face.
“What did you say?” John says, poking Rodney in the knee. “Get up here, you big goof.”
“You’re a goof,” Rodney returns automatically, rolling over, scrambling up, an embarrassment of arms and legs and hands. He holds himself up despite quivering forearms, releasing a breath and staring at the fine lines on John’s forehead, etchings of knowledge and memory, of worry and fear and loss.
“And I’m in love with you,” he says. “I’m—”
The words choke him, then; overwhelm him, what little courage he possessed vanishing in a shocked exhalation of breath. But John is there to catch him, clutching at his shoulders and neck, mumbling, “God, Rodney; Rodney, Rodney, oh God, God...”
“I love you, too,” John says, arms braced but trembling, weak. “Fuck. I love you.”
And this is a noise he doesn’t ever remember making: something between a laugh and a sob, but wonderful, glorious, full of relief and joy. They close the remaining space between them, kissing wet and sloppy, kissing as clumsily as their first kiss was targeted and precise. This, Rodney thinks, somewhere at the very back of his unquiet brain, all this: you and me, this bed: everything I know.
They pull apart, grinning. John’s eyes are hooded, but bright with a certain sated look he gets sometimes, like the indulgent blinking of a lazy cat. “That was awful,” he says through an irrepressible curve of lips. “We just shamed a couple of fifteen-year-olds making out in somebody’s rumpus room.”
Rodney feigns a sigh, quickened by the gradual loosening in his chest. “You wanna try again?” he says.
“Sure,” says John. “A little more practice won’t hurt.” And this time the kiss is soft and careful, and just imperfect enough that Rodney knows it’s real.
Singlegayest image from an Eadweard Muybridge Human Locomotion photo sequence.
—END—
A/N: Heavy debt owed to the book Consilience by Edward O. Wilson. I also cribbed most of the info on the human brain from him, so if it’s wrong, 1) he’s very convincing with his erroneous information; 2) I misinterpreted it because I’m dumb; or 3) Rodney dozed off during grade 10 biology—soft sciences, sheesh, who needs ‘em?
~The Meta~
-->First, the things I thought were going to give me away:
•The line: He doesn’t like that the organ that controls his heart lungs stomach eyes hands mind should be so easily comparable to something you eat out of a plastic cup with a spoon. I’m kind of in love with listing things--very often body parts--like that, without helpful commas or ands; I know I’ve done it in other fics, although I can’t think which ones right now. Apparently this is less of a distinct/annoying stylistic whatsit than I thought. (Does that mean I’m allowed to keep using it?)
•“Phineas P. Gage,” Rodney says. “He was a railway worker in Vermont...” I know some people know that I lived in Vermont for 11 years. What? It could have been a clue!
•This run of jokes:
“...You’re worried about getting killed by a flying railway spike? Do I have to take away your Buffy DVDs again?”
“Those are Radek’s,” Rodney says quickly. Then he says, “He didn’t die.”
“No, he came back as a ghost and we were all very relieved.”
The extended, somewhat incongruous use of pop culture for humor just seems...very me to me? (Probably because such humor makes up a good 90% of my novel.) Andnakedwesley actually did get it because of this, so hey! Points!
•Eadweard Muybridge. In general. He’s in my interests list, and I have a tendency to talk about him a lot, as I have a tendency to talk about a lot of my obsessions a lot. (Althoughwychwood, I don’t actually remember talking about him to you. I remember the Wilson conversation, though. *facepalm*)
•This construction: He wants to say: It’s all so fragile. I know I’ve used that before, especially in The U.S.S. Indianapolis, where I also talked about characters “knowing their lines.” I guess it’s not that uncommon, though.
•THIS construction: Rodney’s a heavy sleeper, except for when he’s not. I say things like this ALL THE TIME. I know “I’m a fast writer, except for when I’m not” appeared in my journal recently, for example. But then this may be something that shows up more in personal entries and less in stories, so...
•The last line: And this time the kiss is soft and careful, and just imperfect enough that Rodney knows it’s real. Another thing I have a bit of an obsession with is the realness of things. Fellow writers: if you’ve ever received a comment from me on any of your fic along the lines of “that was so real to me,” then that’s me trying, inarticulately, to give you a very big compliment: it means I believed in it, that it resonated down deep. It means that I felt it and didn’t just think it, and that's an idea I know I’ll return to again and again.
•The author’s note. I actually tried specifically to make it sound less like one of my usual author’s notes (stealth formatting! Whee!) but I still said something along the lines of “If this is wrong, I’m dumb,” which is exactly what I said in the notes to Something Wicked. *fails at spyhattery*
-->Things that actually gave me away:
Um, looking more closely, besides the aforementioned Spike reference that clued innakedwesley and the fact that wychwood has a scary good memory for my more obscure interests, nobody actually listed any reasons why they thought it was me. Other than “gut feeling”--if anyone wants to take a stab at explicating that more thoroughly, I’d love to hear it. If not, I’ll just chalk it up to fannish hivemind. *g*
-->Other stuff:
•Several people said that they DIDN’T think it was me because I usually write more sparely, which is interesting because I’ve been told that my style is spare or sparse before, and I always react the same way: *is flattered* *is confused* Basically, my writing never feels sparse to me--possibly because I’m the one who’s going through and cutting out (not enough of) my own adverbs, but still. Curiosity: piqued.
•ladyagnew decided not to guess me, but she said: “the characterization is suspicious[ly like mine]. The way John is written particularly.” Personally, I think I tend to write John one of two ways: dark, Down From Mt. Olympus!John, or sweet, dorky!John. This is obviously closer to the latter, but what I’m curious about is, what--to ladyagnew or anyone else--is typical of my characterization of our boy Shep?
•Three things that didn’t make people know the story was written by me, but made them pretty sure it wasn’t written by other people, especiallyastolat: 1) the use of the present tense, 2) the swearing, 3) the sex.
1) I love the present tense. (And so should you--especiallysmittywing! *eg*) Not for every story, but a lot of the time: oh yeah. I love the immediacy of it, and I just like how it sounds--a lot of writing is about rhythm to me, and the present tense can be especially...liquid. I wish I could tell you what makes me choose to use it for one story and not another, but I honestly don’t know. I used to think it was a serious/goofy divide or a graphic sex=present tense kind of thing, but both have proven to be completely untrue. Thoughts?
2) “Fuck. I love you.” I still have mixed feelings about that line. I like it because it’s raw, but I also kind of wish I could have come up with something...classier? Swearing in stories: pages and pages of meta could be written just on that. Um. But not by me.
3) Admittedly, this was very much an example of “sex as a metaphor,” or sex as one giant, whomping piece of SYMBOLISM. Which I can’t help but like, weird little litgeek that I am, though I’ll admit that it doesn't make for the sexiest sex in the world. Thankfully, I wasn't trying to write the world’s sexiest sex--although that might be on my list of resolutions for the new year. *eg*
•Why I think other people may have thought I was other people:
eliade: The fewest number of people thought that the story was by eliade, and I would agree that our styles are the least alike. I’m not really sure what makes them seem so dissimilar to me, or why I’m now picturing eliade and myself standing next to each other in a Usual Suspects-style police line-up, but yeah. *cough*
slodwick: Dialogue. A lot of people said that they thought the story was slodwick’s because of the dialogue. As slodwick’s dialogue is awesome, I am very, very okay with that. *g*
oxoniensis: Because we’re both very...thinky? No, really. That’s my reason.
astolat: Because we loves the semi-colons. Yes we do! SEMI-COLON LOVE!
-->In conclusion...well, actually, I don’t have any deep conclusions. Rather, these are just some things I’ve noticed, things that made me smile or cock my head in confusion. I’m waiting to hear what you all have to say, and by our powers combined, I’m sure we can arrive at something profound. Or, to quote one of my favorite movies (here I go again,_inbetween_!): “Draw your own conclusions.” ;-)
undermistletoe. Very few people figured out that the story was by me, and a few even thought it was by astolat, two things that make me really happy, though for different reasons. (Actually, I’m pleased that people thought the story was by any of the authors svmadelyn grouped me with--in fact, just seeing my name listed with those authors made me giddy with glee.) Unfortunately, my parents came before I got to participate in the guessing of the other stories, which means that I can go back and read them now that the authors have been revealed and go, “Oh, yeah. I would have totally guessed that. Obviously. No question” for each and every one. *eg*BUT...I’m still interested and amused by why people did or did not guess that my story was by me. So, I’m reposting it here 1) with a couple of pictures, because they are cool and I am a dork, and 2) with some notes at the end regarding the things that I thought (for the most part, incorrectly) were going to give me away. And I’d love hear about people’s thought processes when it came to guessing--not just about my story, but any of them. I think it was
rageprufrock who recently said that writers really just want to talk about their writing ALL THE TIME; this is true, but uh, I hope it is at least somewhat interesting for everybody else, and that you’ll grant me this one last bit of holiday indulgence.~The Fic~
Title: Consilience
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Length: ~3000 words
Summary: Sometimes Rodney’s brain scares him.
Thanks to:
svmadelyn, beta and challenge organizer extraordinaire!Consilience
Skull of Phineas P. Gage.
Sometimes Rodney’s brain scares him. Not his mind: his brain—three pounds of grey and white tissue, roughly the size of a grapefruit and with the approximate consistency of a bowl of custard. He doesn’t like that the organ that controls his heart lungs stomach eyes hands mind should be so easily comparable to something you eat out of a plastic cup with a spoon. Basically, if he’d never seen Hannibal, he’d be a whole lot happier.
Rodney’s not an idiot—far from! So he knows the basics of how the human brain operates. Neurons fire and dendrites reach out and synapses snap; the signal never stops. His heart beats and his lungs contract to the rhythm of pons, medulla, cerebellum. He marvels and the amygdala marvels with him; he hurts and the thalamus feels his pain; he lusts and the hypothalamus rises to the task. His cerebral cortex is a wonder in any galaxy, brilliant and bursting and alive. His hippocampus helps him to remember.
But it’s all so fragile. So impermanent. He thinks of his brain, sitting nearly-naked and vulnerable at the top of his neck, and it’s all too easy to imagine something—any one of so many things!—going horribly, horribly wrong. He could receive a blow to the head, ingest the wrong combination of drugs, have his supply of oxygen cut off for too long, too long. And then what? A coma, or memory loss, or impairment of thought. That would be the worst. To know the heights he had once attained, but to spend the rest of his life stuck on the ground. He can’t think of anything more terrifying than that.
Well. Almost nothing.
John pushes himself up on his elbow, studying Rodney’s face in the half-light. His brow creases. “You’re doing it again,” he says.
“Doing what?”
“Thinking.”
Rodney forces out a haughty laugh. “Oh, how inconsiderate of me. I’m sorry if my performing a basic brain function disturbs you.”
“Only when you do it so loud,” John says, good-naturedly. Then he says, “Hey”—concerned, because something of what Rodney is feeling must have shown on his face. Something of what Rodney is feeling always shows on his face. “All right,” John says. “Let’s just get this...out there. You’re worried about...the amount of bacteria in your drinking water? The possibility of a giant alien bird getting sucked into one of the puddlejumper’s thrusters? The imminent explosion of Yellowstone National Park?”
Rodney shakes his head. “Phineas P. Gage,” he says.
“That was going to be my next guess.”
Rodney sighs and rolls over so that he and John are facing each other. They used to lie like this, in sleeping bags, on alien planets. John’s a bit of an insomniac, and Rodney’s a heavy sleeper except for when he’s not, so sometimes they would lie awake and whisper to each other, and to Rodney it was like suddenly and unexpectedly finding the best friend he had always secretly wished for, twenty-five years too late.
Only it turned out not to be too late, after all.
“Phineas P. Gage,” Rodney says. “He was a railway worker in Vermont in the mid-nineteenth century. There was an accident and he got an iron bar blasted through his skull.”
“Let me get this straight,” John says. He reaches out and rests a hand on Rodney’s bare arm, reassuring himself that Rodney is solid if not sane. “It’s the middle of the night. We’re in our locked bedroom, several galaxies away from any trains or train paraphernalia, and you’re worried about getting killed by a flying railway spike? Do I have to take away your Buffy DVDs again?”
“Those are Radek’s,” Rodney says quickly. Then he says, “He didn’t die.”
“No, he came back as a ghost and we were all very relieved.”
Rodney would hit John with his pillow, but then John would stop rubbing his shoulder like that. And that would be sad. So instead he says, “Phineas P. Gage”—slowly, carefully enunciating both words and the initial. “He didn’t die.”
“What, the guy with the spike through his head? He didn’t die?”
“No.”
John looks appropriately disturbed. Still, he tries to put a positive spin on it: “Well, that’s good news, right? Proof of medical miracles?”
“Proof that medicine is hardly a science!” Rodney retorts, proving that, among other things, John is certainly good at distracting him. But not quite good enough. “He lived, but he changed.”
“Superpowers?” John says hopefully. “Telekinesis? ESP?”
Rodney remembers how much he enjoyed telling a group of his grade three classmates that no, if a radioactive spider bit them, they would not gain web-slinging abilities and Spidey-sense—really, they would most likely die. He does not feel the same twisted joy now, not even close.
He shakes his head. “His prefrontal lobe was damaged. He became self-destructive, sullen, a habitual liar.” Rodney swallows. “He lost the ability to interact with people.”
“Rodney.” John’s hand moves up, traces the line of his chin. “You don’t have the ability to interact with people now.”
He’s smiling as he says it. There’s a small flurry of activity in Rodney’s hippocampus, and he remembers how, in the beginning, he would have completely misinterpreted that look, seen only the surface, the shallow spread of lips, and missed everything, the world of things, going on beneath. But he knows what to look for now. They stare at each other for what ought to be an inordinate amount of time and Rodney’s amygdala pounds, pulsates, throbs.
John says, “Eadweard Muybridge.”
Rodney blinks. Staring at John’s lips, “The photographer?”
A gentle nod. “He was in a stagecoach accident when he was a young man. He got thrown from the carriage, struck his head, fell into a coma.”
John’s hand drifts downward as he speaks; moves, very slowly and without any particular purpose, up and down Rodney’s side. They’re pretty strange, Rodney thinks, that this is what they talk about, together in bed, like they’re friends and not lovers, like nothing’s changed since they were just two teammates in side-by-side sleeping bags, restless dreamers under an alien sky.
Rodney finds he’s really, extremely okay with that.
Besides, he knows the next line. “And when he woke up...”
“And when he woke up,” John says, “he was different. No longer an average, run-of-the-mill landscape photographer, he saw the world in a way that no one else ever has. He was a man before his time. A genius.”
The word coaxes a different smile out of John, one Rodney likes to think few people get to see. One he’s almost naïve enough to claim for his own. And Rodney wants to smile with him. But his cerebral cortex is still tick tick ticking away. “Didn’t he murder his wife’s lover? Yes, I’m almost positive—”
“He was acquitted!” John says, his fingers ceasing their restless crawl. “Also, you’re missing my point!”
“You had one?”
“Rodney.” John’s head drops to his shoulder and Rodney can feel the heat of his breath, steady puffs of barely contained laughter. Rodney’s chest feels tight; his hindbrain must be falling down on the job.
“Rodney,” John says again; says it like he’s lost all other words and he’s returning to the one thing he still knows. Then an eyeblink and it’s gone, too. Gone; and they’re left with what silent reassurances John’s mouth can offer. With what John’s lips can give to Rodney’s mouth, his jaw, his jugular; to the hot patch of flesh above his beating heart.
Rodney’s brain scares him. Sometimes his heart scares him even more. Pear-shaped, the size of a fist, atria and ventricles divided by a single separating septum. Mitral and tricuspid valves pumping blood, contracting the cardiac muscle seventy to eighty times a minute. Faster in fear and more slowly in sleep, from birth until death, it’s a true constant in an ever-changing world. And it’s not what he’s talking about.
“John,” he says, and rolls him onto his back. Their foreheads bump, and Rodney can feel the brain cells evaporating, exploding into dust and air. His heart is beating, faster and faster and faster.
He wants to say: It’s all so fragile. He wants to say: I can’t bear to lose... He wants to say: It’s all in your hands, I’m in your hands, please be careful, be careful—
He says, “What do you think he saw?”
There’s a flash of something in John’s eyes. Surprise, maybe. “Muybridge?”
“Yes.”
John stares up at him. His head is dark against the pillow; so are his eyes. But his smile... “Consilience.”
And John scares Rodney, too. Mostly at times like these, when John is smiling at him, is warm beneath him, is connecting with him body and mind. Times when as hard as Rodney works to block it out, all he can hear is his mother’s voice: “If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.”
Rodney doesn’t know how much of this he’s letting John see: probably a lot; probably too much. He hopes his sheer pleasure and continual astonishment at the complexities of John’s mind have escaped the muddle. Because he has to say: “That doesn’t exist.”
John’s hand has moved up to hover near Rodney’s face, and Rodney thinks he can feel the pulse of John’s electromagnetic field. The fingers linger just beside the sharp jut of Rodney’s jaw, like John’s holding himself back, afraid to touch, right up until the moment when skin scrapes against skin, and he remembers that he can.
“Maybe not yet,” John says. “But someday.”
And Rodney has to shake his head. “It can’t ever exist. Literature, music, art—they can’t ever be fully united, fully integrated with science. Not hard science, anyway,” by which he of course means real science. “They’re too different. Apples and oranges.”
John thinks about this for a minute, a highly entertaining minute in which he pulls Rodney down, joins their mouths, merging lips and teeth and tongues. Then smugly, “Apples and oranges are both fruit,” he says.
And Rodney should be annoyed. Smug people (who aren’t justified in their smugness; who aren’t, in other words, him) are inherently annoying, and John should be no different. But John... It’s as if the signposts that Rodney had laid out for himself, the markers by which he had mapped his whole life, have been ripped out, or rearranged, or translated into Ancient. He’s lost and he can’t find his way and it should be fucking terrifying. But he feels safe here. Safe: and he thinks that’s what scares him most of all.
Rodney’s parents had been remarkably overprotective for people who otherwise couldn’t give a shit; maybe it was because Jeannie had been sick a lot as a baby, but one of Rodney’s earliest memories is of having an Oreo slapped out of his hand because it had fallen on the floor, because it had germs on it, germs, Rodney, and germs were very very bad. Germs made you sick. But despite the white white walls and the shiny-polished tables and the countertops that reeked of Lysol; despite the permanent repeal of the ten-second rule and his mother washing and rewashing his hands with anti-bacterial soap; despite everything, Rodney got sick. Got sick a lot more often and a lot more seriously than Jeannie ever had. Got sick and resigned himself to a dozen stupid allergies and a really shitty immune system. It’s not paranoia if they’re really after you; Rodney thinks a similar exception should be made for hypochondria.
So Rodney no longer believes that clean and neat and orderly equal safe; the more protected something looks, he’s learned, the more vulnerable it often is. Entropy, chaos theory—the more you know, the more you realize that you know nothing; can predict nothing; can prevent nothing.
Rodney’s a heavy sleeper, except for when he’s not.
He says, “I’m allergic to citrus. An orange could kill me.”
“Okay,” John raises an eyebrow, “I think we’ve started talking about something else.”
Rodney swallows. “Let’s not talk anymore. I want to—” He scoots down John’s body, clutching at his hips. John’s dick is already half-hard, warmed and made ready by the press of bodies. Rodney strokes it, and if it weren’t for the intense look in his eyes, his touch would almost seem lazy, over-familiar. “Will you let me?”
John chuckles. “Like I’d say no.”
Rodney takes John in. Stretches his lips and slides down the length of John’s cock, big mouth good for something. He’s no porn star, though: he can’t deep throat; can’t, however much he may want to swallow John whole. To keep him inside, somewhere safe.
But that’s not how it works. That’s not how it works, and as willing as Rodney is to give John a long lazy blow job, he can tell that John is restless. He can feel John’s fingers roving across his scalp, wanting to touch, to give as well as receive, and so he lifts his head, releases him long enough to say, “You can do me, too, if you like.”
John’s eyes are heavy-lidded and dark; “Oh, I like very much,” he says.
There’s an awkward rearranging of position—comical, really, and Rodney’s never really been a big fan of sexual acts that take this much coordination or pre-planning. But it can be worth it; oh, it can be so worth it, once limbs are all aligned and John’s cock is in his mouth again, and John’s mouth is on his cock, and they’re moving together, a complete unit, a living breathing pleasure machine—yes, it’s worth the clumsiness and the embarrassment and the risk. It’s worth it to feel the pull of John’s lips and tongue and be able to echo it with the suction of his own mouth, motion crashing into motion like waves moving around in a circle. Like a completed circuit, hot with continuous charge.
And the synapses. Connect.
Rodney almost does something ridiculous, like jerk back. But just then John shudders, like he felt it too, shudders and spills into Rodney mouth, and even more miraculously, drags Rodney with him. But that release is nothing compared to the one that came before, and Rodney’s brain feels divorced from his body as he washes off John’s cock, catching the last of his come as if it were something essential or precious. He can feel John doing something similar, stroking along Rodney’s thigh before rolling his shoulders straight. Rodney, however, stays curled on his side with his head against the sharp jut of John’s hip; he can look down John’s body and see his toes, pale and delicate, not yet uncurled.
His legs are bent uncomfortably against the headboard, his eyes level with John’s softening cock. He nuzzles against John’s hairy thigh, thinking: it’s almost kind of perfect, that he should do it backwards like this, that they should do it like this, coming at it from another angle, and an odd one at that. They discuss 19th Century brain injuries in bed; and likewise, when Rodney first says, “I love you,” he says it upside-down, whispering the words to John’s thigh instead of his face.
“What did you say?” John says, poking Rodney in the knee. “Get up here, you big goof.”
“You’re a goof,” Rodney returns automatically, rolling over, scrambling up, an embarrassment of arms and legs and hands. He holds himself up despite quivering forearms, releasing a breath and staring at the fine lines on John’s forehead, etchings of knowledge and memory, of worry and fear and loss.
“And I’m in love with you,” he says. “I’m—”
The words choke him, then; overwhelm him, what little courage he possessed vanishing in a shocked exhalation of breath. But John is there to catch him, clutching at his shoulders and neck, mumbling, “God, Rodney; Rodney, Rodney, oh God, God...”
“I love you, too,” John says, arms braced but trembling, weak. “Fuck. I love you.”
And this is a noise he doesn’t ever remember making: something between a laugh and a sob, but wonderful, glorious, full of relief and joy. They close the remaining space between them, kissing wet and sloppy, kissing as clumsily as their first kiss was targeted and precise. This, Rodney thinks, somewhere at the very back of his unquiet brain, all this: you and me, this bed: everything I know.
They pull apart, grinning. John’s eyes are hooded, but bright with a certain sated look he gets sometimes, like the indulgent blinking of a lazy cat. “That was awful,” he says through an irrepressible curve of lips. “We just shamed a couple of fifteen-year-olds making out in somebody’s rumpus room.”
Rodney feigns a sigh, quickened by the gradual loosening in his chest. “You wanna try again?” he says.
“Sure,” says John. “A little more practice won’t hurt.” And this time the kiss is soft and careful, and just imperfect enough that Rodney knows it’s real.
Single
—END—
A/N: Heavy debt owed to the book Consilience by Edward O. Wilson. I also cribbed most of the info on the human brain from him, so if it’s wrong, 1) he’s very convincing with his erroneous information; 2) I misinterpreted it because I’m dumb; or 3) Rodney dozed off during grade 10 biology—soft sciences, sheesh, who needs ‘em?
~The Meta~
-->First, the things I thought were going to give me away:
•The line: He doesn’t like that the organ that controls his heart lungs stomach eyes hands mind should be so easily comparable to something you eat out of a plastic cup with a spoon. I’m kind of in love with listing things--very often body parts--like that, without helpful commas or ands; I know I’ve done it in other fics, although I can’t think which ones right now. Apparently this is less of a distinct/annoying stylistic whatsit than I thought. (Does that mean I’m allowed to keep using it?)
•“Phineas P. Gage,” Rodney says. “He was a railway worker in Vermont...” I know some people know that I lived in Vermont for 11 years. What? It could have been a clue!
•This run of jokes:
“...You’re worried about getting killed by a flying railway spike? Do I have to take away your Buffy DVDs again?”
“Those are Radek’s,” Rodney says quickly. Then he says, “He didn’t die.”
“No, he came back as a ghost and we were all very relieved.”
The extended, somewhat incongruous use of pop culture for humor just seems...very me to me? (Probably because such humor makes up a good 90% of my novel.) And
nakedwesley actually did get it because of this, so hey! Points!•Eadweard Muybridge. In general. He’s in my interests list, and I have a tendency to talk about him a lot, as I have a tendency to talk about a lot of my obsessions a lot. (Although
wychwood, I don’t actually remember talking about him to you. I remember the Wilson conversation, though. *facepalm*)•This construction: He wants to say: It’s all so fragile. I know I’ve used that before, especially in The U.S.S. Indianapolis, where I also talked about characters “knowing their lines.” I guess it’s not that uncommon, though.
•THIS construction: Rodney’s a heavy sleeper, except for when he’s not. I say things like this ALL THE TIME. I know “I’m a fast writer, except for when I’m not” appeared in my journal recently, for example. But then this may be something that shows up more in personal entries and less in stories, so...
•The last line: And this time the kiss is soft and careful, and just imperfect enough that Rodney knows it’s real. Another thing I have a bit of an obsession with is the realness of things. Fellow writers: if you’ve ever received a comment from me on any of your fic along the lines of “that was so real to me,” then that’s me trying, inarticulately, to give you a very big compliment: it means I believed in it, that it resonated down deep. It means that I felt it and didn’t just think it, and that's an idea I know I’ll return to again and again.
•The author’s note. I actually tried specifically to make it sound less like one of my usual author’s notes (stealth formatting! Whee!) but I still said something along the lines of “If this is wrong, I’m dumb,” which is exactly what I said in the notes to Something Wicked. *fails at spyhattery*
-->Things that actually gave me away:
Um, looking more closely, besides the aforementioned Spike reference that clued in
nakedwesley and the fact that wychwood has a scary good memory for my more obscure interests, nobody actually listed any reasons why they thought it was me. Other than “gut feeling”--if anyone wants to take a stab at explicating that more thoroughly, I’d love to hear it. If not, I’ll just chalk it up to fannish hivemind. *g*-->Other stuff:
•Several people said that they DIDN’T think it was me because I usually write more sparely, which is interesting because I’ve been told that my style is spare or sparse before, and I always react the same way: *is flattered* *is confused* Basically, my writing never feels sparse to me--possibly because I’m the one who’s going through and cutting out (not enough of) my own adverbs, but still. Curiosity: piqued.
•
ladyagnew decided not to guess me, but she said: “the characterization is suspicious[ly like mine]. The way John is written particularly.” Personally, I think I tend to write John one of two ways: dark, Down From Mt. Olympus!John, or sweet, dorky!John. This is obviously closer to the latter, but what I’m curious about is, what--to ladyagnew or anyone else--is typical of my characterization of our boy Shep?•Three things that didn’t make people know the story was written by me, but made them pretty sure it wasn’t written by other people, especially
astolat: 1) the use of the present tense, 2) the swearing, 3) the sex.1) I love the present tense. (And so should you--especially
smittywing! *eg*) Not for every story, but a lot of the time: oh yeah. I love the immediacy of it, and I just like how it sounds--a lot of writing is about rhythm to me, and the present tense can be especially...liquid. I wish I could tell you what makes me choose to use it for one story and not another, but I honestly don’t know. I used to think it was a serious/goofy divide or a graphic sex=present tense kind of thing, but both have proven to be completely untrue. Thoughts?2) “Fuck. I love you.” I still have mixed feelings about that line. I like it because it’s raw, but I also kind of wish I could have come up with something...classier? Swearing in stories: pages and pages of meta could be written just on that. Um. But not by me.
3) Admittedly, this was very much an example of “sex as a metaphor,” or sex as one giant, whomping piece of SYMBOLISM. Which I can’t help but like, weird little litgeek that I am, though I’ll admit that it doesn't make for the sexiest sex in the world. Thankfully, I wasn't trying to write the world’s sexiest sex--although that might be on my list of resolutions for the new year. *eg*
•Why I think other people may have thought I was other people:
eliade: The fewest number of people thought that the story was by eliade, and I would agree that our styles are the least alike. I’m not really sure what makes them seem so dissimilar to me, or why I’m now picturing eliade and myself standing next to each other in a Usual Suspects-style police line-up, but yeah. *cough*slodwick: Dialogue. A lot of people said that they thought the story was slodwick’s because of the dialogue. As slodwick’s dialogue is awesome, I am very, very okay with that. *g*oxoniensis: Because we’re both very...thinky? No, really. That’s my reason.astolat: Because we loves the semi-colons. Yes we do! SEMI-COLON LOVE!-->In conclusion...well, actually, I don’t have any deep conclusions. Rather, these are just some things I’ve noticed, things that made me smile or cock my head in confusion. I’m waiting to hear what you all have to say, and by our powers combined, I’m sure we can arrive at something profound. Or, to quote one of my favorite movies (here I go again,
_inbetween_!): “Draw your own conclusions.” ;-)