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wip_amnesty: Fear Death by Water
Feb. 2nd, 2006 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofone"The Waste Land" + 'Trinity' trust issues + being totally scarred by a certain scene in 'Before I Sleep' + my own drowning phobia = a way too long, way too slow, way too melodramatic fic. I started this at almost exactly the same time that I began Little Things, and I can really see why I finished that one and not this. Did I mention that this story totally wins at melodrama? Which is to say, it loses.
However, there are some little bits that I quite like--the odd line, here or there. So here's to their day in the...well, not sun, but uh, partial cloud cover? Right.
Fear Death by Water
Teyla’s hand is on his back, strength radiating from each of the five digits like heat from an electric stove. Rodney thinks that if he could turn around he would see her fingertips glowing orange like a quintet of car cigarette lighters. “This is idiotic,” he says, but he can tell that Teyla grasps his real meaning, a childlike I don’t wanna. Fingers on his back, burning into his spine, she gives him a push. “You must.”
He stumbles inside the tent. It feels like his vest has gotten twisted around; he jerks his shoulders, attempting to pull it straight. He turns and glares at Teyla, but she’s scarcely more than a shadow behind the waving red fabric, and already Rodney can feel the press of eyes upon him, almost as hotly as the finger-push. “You may sit,” says a voice: reedy, a rasp like wind through tall grass. Rodney wants nothing more than to launch into a rant on how there’s no may about it, but he doesn’t call himself a genius for nothing; he’s smart enough to realize that at this point, the easiest way out is through. He stomps farther into the dark recesses of the tent: the owner of the voice is sitting there, wrapped in shawls, perched on some sort of Miss Muffet tuffet, looking out at him from over a long, beak-like nose. “Sit,” she--he thinks it’s a she--says again. She gestures toward another, lower, tuffet-like thing. Rodney sees little choice in the matter. He sits.
The woman--he’s just going to go with woman, and why not?--regards him with an intensity and for a length of time that makes his clothing feel ill-fitting and tight, that makes him want to squirm out of it like a worm pushing free of the dirt. Escaping. He forces himself to stay still, his hands clasped--red fingers, white knuckles--in his lap. “Hmm,” says the woman, and Rodney bloodies his lip to keep from screaming, Get on with your stupid, backward, waste-of-my-valuable-time ritual already! Iron, Fe: a tiny flood on his tongue.
The woman reaches into her mess of shawls in a manner that just a few months ago wouldn’t have made Rodney blink, but now has his fingers twitching and starting for his gun. They’re just cards, though, that she pulls out, just slips of paper. She hands them to him. “What?” he says. “What do you want me to do? Deal Blackjack?” She just looks at him. “Oh, all right, okay, fine,” and he gives the tattered squares an awkward shuffle.
He hands back the cards. The woman nods and starts to lay them out. Rodney doesn’t know much about Tarot--and hey, different galaxy here, this is hardly going to be the kind of thing you’d buy at the Bodhi Tree--but there was that girl, freshman year of college...he never even knew her name. But she was the Tarot girl, and at some party, some party he dragged himself to, she’d gotten drunk and followed him around all night, pressing a card into his hands, telling him to hold on tight. He’d played along for a while--because hello, cute blonde--but finally he’d gotten fed up and thrown the card in her face. Not very mature, but honestly, there’s only so much one can...
He remembers this now because the first card the woman lays out looks very much like the one onto which he’d long ago sloshed rum and Coke: same shadowy figure, same waves of--what? stone, water, ice?--creeping up the edges of the card, lapping against the figure’s feet. Rodney leans slowly forward, his heart settling stone-like in the cavern of his chest.
The woman clucks her tongue. “Oh, Phlebas,” she whispers. “Da. Da. Dayadhvam.”
*
If the dreams came after, that would be one thing. But they don’t. They come before.
Rising. The water is rising, only--they are not rising with it. It washes over his feet--splashes against his legs, a great rushing wave of it--and he should be swept away, but he isn’t. It isn’t that quick. It is slow and stifling, and the entire time he knows what’s coming, what the end will be like, and yet it refuses to overtake him, to finish already, even when he’s sucking great desperate gulps of ocean deep into him, flooding his mouth and throat and lungs.
He’s heard that salt water tastes like tears, but that must be back on Earth because this, this--this is regret and inevitability and a rage so potent it’s almost enough to turn the water into steam.
But it doesn’t.
*
Sheppard comes out of the tent looking so much like a cowboy that all that’s missing is the hat and spurs. Loose-limbs and cocky grin, and Rodney looks at him and feels something twist. He scowls. The Major laughs at him from behind dark lashes and jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “You’re up, McKay.”
Later that night, they sit around the campfire and laugh about what “that old witch”--Sheppard’s phrase, said with affection, as if she were some wacky relative--had to tell them. Or at least, Lieutenant Ford and the Major laugh; Teyla just sits quietly, listening--and, Rodney thinks, after several minutes of careful study, looking kind of pissed. As for him...well, for once, he doesn’t exactly feel like talking.
“--Like a cart,” Ford is saying, “drawn by two lettios--aren’t those those goofy-looking cows? With the purple horns?--two lettios, one black, one white. A cart!” Ford says, laughing again, spreading his arms to allow them all an unobstructed view of his cart-ness. “Me!”
“That’s a good one,” Sheppard says. “I think you’ve one-upped me; I didn’t get compared to any inanimate objects.”
He’s smiling broadly, his chest rumbling with laughter, flying wisps of hair and the flickering light of the fire drawing stripes across his face. “You two are like a pair of twelve-year-old girls at a slumber party, you know that?” Rodney snaps. “Next you’re going to be painting each other’s toenails and daring each other to prank call cute boys.”
“Have a lot of experience with that, do you, McKay?” Sheppard says, and Rodney shouldn’t even have to dignify that with a response.
Luckily, he doesn’t have to, doesn’t even need to resist the temptation, because this is when Teyla chooses to say, “Doctor McKay is right; you are not being very respectful.”
Rodney nods enthusiastically at that, as he’s likely to do in response to any statement that begins, Doctor McKay is right.
But really, Teyla’s right, they’re being assholes, and while normally such a thought would, at most, cause Rodney to give a little shrug and move on, it isn’t sitting too well with him right now. Is sitting worse than the roasted leg of lettio they ate for dinner, in fact, so he gives the military contingent a contemptuous look and says, “You know, you really ought to try being more sensitive.”
Sheppard holds in the laughter about a second longer than Ford, and when even Teyla has to stifle a giggle behind her hand, Rodney can’t say he’s exactly surprised.
*
At the party--the same party? He’s no longer sure, but anyway, some party: lots of people, loud music, and too much to drink, and he stumbled into the bathroom, not to take a piss or throw up, but just because it seemed like an interesting place to go. Bathroom. Ugly bathroom: bad art and one of those horrible fluffy toilet seat covers--hates those, so unsanitary, like a fuzzy pink forest of germs. But the sink was classic white porcelain, nice and cool, and it felt good to lean on it, to rest his arms and his oddly heavy head. He remembers thinking, I shouldn’t drink so much, the risks of cytotoxic effects are too great, I could damage my dendrites, and then he raised his head and looked, blurry-eyed, into the mirror, and the world fell away.
It was kind of like vertigo, he later tried to rationalize, explain: a sensation of falling into himself, of wind rushing past his head. Kind of like traveling through a Stargate, he thought, later still. Like an inexorable descent toward an inevitable destination, toward some truth he just cannot grasp, toward...
A wave of dizziness hits him and the woman in her web of shawls sways in the narrow pocket of his vision, looming shadowy and large. He feels like he’s been drugged. Yet he’s drunk nothing, eaten nothing; unless there was some intoxicant he could have absorbed through his fingertips--the cards!--but no. It is just her voice; the steady, rippling rhythm of it...
“I see crowds of people, walking ‘round in a ring...you and you and you again. There are other world than these, but only one end, Phlebas. For you, for you--”
And Rodney’s breath catches, so harshly he fears he will never get it back.
“For you, it is all the drowning time.”
*
Rodney loves to be right. Not just because he appreciates the inevitable respect, praise, and admiration--and one day, surely, the equally inevitable Nobel Prize. No. Rodney loves to be right because it’s the world’s greatest natural high.
When a solution comes to him, either after a long, sleepless night of work or instantaneously, in a flash, he knows--he knows --that he’s correct, that he’s got it. A grey world is suddenly black and white. There is the truth, his truth--and then there’s everything else.
Elizabeth recently told him that he wasn’t supposed to have intuition, and in a way, she was right. He doesn’t get “feelings.” He knows things.
He knows--
the water rushing into his lungs, choking him, burning him, crushing him beneath its weight. Surrounding him, like a cocoon, like a return to the womb, only he’s to be stillborn--forever enmeshed, forever silent and cold and alone.
He knows: these dreams have got to stop.
*
He goes to see Heightmeyer. She says exactly what he expects her to say.
These nightmares, do you think they have something to do with what the alternate version of Doctor Weir told you? About your...?
Death, you can say it, death. No: I told you, the dreams started before, weeks before we found her and woke her up. Unless you’re suggesting that I’m psychic--
Of course not. But perhaps an old dream has resurfaced, taken on a new significance for you since you learned--
Are you even listening to me? It’s not an old dream! It’s the same dream! Every single night...!
She folds her hands, sighs. Then why don’t you tell me, Rodney, when the dreams began.
He’s just making his excuses when Teyla bursts in and interrupts them; through the embarrassment, even through that, he knows he’s kind of glad.
*
Things get a little hectic after that, and aside from the whole almost-dying-an-unspeakably-horrific-death thing, it’s kind of a relief. His mind is occupied with a thousand thousand things, and Carson has him on so many uppers that he wouldn’t be able to sleep even if he were hit over the head with a two-by-four. So even when they all miraculously do not die, and even after the drugs finally do leave his system and he passes out in the middle of a debriefing: when he sleeps he sleeps deeply, and without dreaming.
(He does not wake in the middle of the night, clutching his throat and gasping for breath. He doesn’t eye the shower with distaste; doesn’t hear the water lapping at the edges of the city and shudder to himself before turning away, fear and shame blushing scarlet across his cheeks.)
Take that! he thinks, and Ha! and Stupid old crone. And soon he has other things to see Heightmeyer about, other things to make him feel fear and embarrassment and scarlet rushes of shame. And just like that, everything’s back to normal.
*
He doesn’t realize--doesn’t allow himself to acknowledge--that the problem’s still real, still there, until the water is lapping at his boots.
They’re standing at the edge of a stream. Well--Sheppard called it a stream, but any idiot can see that it’s actually a river, and a fairly rapid one at that. There’s no bridge, they need to get across--“We’ll ford it!” Sheppard announces; “Hey, Rodney--ever play Oregon Trail?”
“I’ve always had more productive uses for my computers, thanks,” he says, watching Ronon’s ears perk up at the faintest hint of an order; the big man turns without a second’s thought and plunges out into the river, his heavy coat weighed down by the swirling water. He’s already waist-deep by the time the Colonel starts splashing out to join him; the water stops rising about halfway up Sheppard’s chest. “Is this going to be a problem, Teyla?” he calls, and even though he’s only referring to the little height disparity they’ve got going on, Rodney can see her eyes narrow in anger. “No, Colonel, I believe I can manage,” she says--words that from anyone else would emerge dripping with sarcasm, but from Teyla are dry as the desert, with only a hint of sandy-scratch. I could learn a thing or two from her, Rodney thinks, but then he looks down and his brain empties out, leaving nothing but--
--water, so much water, around him and in him, swallowing his whole world in a wash of salt and brine--
--pure, paralyzing fear. His whole body spasms as he takes a reeling step back; he keeps his feet, somehow, but only just. Blackness races at the edges of his vision.
“Doctor McKay?” Teyla’s voice, calm and yet laced with worry. And at the same time: “It’s McKay I’d worry about, if I were you.” And then, finally, Sheppard: “Rodney, whoa. Are you okay? What happened?”
He’s hurrying back toward him, tossing up huge sheets of water in his wake, an inept Moses. “When was the last time you ate?” Sheppard asks, and Rodney’d like to tell him that it’s a stupid question, they all just saw him eat a powerbar not five minutes ago, but Rodney’s mouth is busy sucking in huge, gasping lungfuls of air; so, sorry, your snark will have to be delivered at a later time.
Sheppard’s clutching at his arm, his face in Rodney’s face. His breath smells sweet, like the berries Ronon picked, the berries that Rodney refused to try. “Rodney, you have to tell me what’s wrong. Are you having an allergic reaction? Did you get stung by something?”
Boy, does he wish that were it--and that, if nothing else, proves how fucked up this has become. It was understandable when that which had once been his greatest fear was subsumed by fear of the Wraith--nobody was going to argue if the thought of life-sucking space vampires made you a little weak in the knees. But this, this fear of water, water, so much water, rising, engulfing him--there is no excuse, none, for something as irrational as that.
“Rodney!” Sheppard says, giving his shoulders a sharp jerk, and Rodney comes back to himself enough to shake his head, no. No, you’ve worried about me for nothing; no, you were wrong to trust me with this, too.
He still hasn’t said anything, though, and apparently silence from him is the equivalent of seizures and foaming at the mouth and sucking chest wounds in someone else. “Okay, that’s it!” Sheppard shouts. “We’re going back to the jumper. Ronon, help me--”
“I can walk,” he chokes out, jerking away from Sheppard’s grasp. The forest spins--a dizzying, kaleidoscope of green, and surely all this can’t be psychosomatic, can it?
“You sure about that?” Sheppard asks, and somehow he’s managed to go from staccato concern to skeptical drawl, all in the space of four words. Rodney blinks at him, his mind a confusion of emotions rushing faster than the river, and he’s still trying to decide whether to serve pride or physical comfort when Teyla’s warm hand closes on his arm. “The terrain is rough,” she says, looking at the Colonel, “it would serve us all if we went together, in pairs.”
Their eyes meet, hers and Sheppard’s. It’s an exchange loaded with significance, and Rodney would love to pick it apart, separate the individual strands and examine how they fit together, how they work. But right now, his brain is barely up to the task of keeping him on his feet. So he allows Teyla to lead him along, to take some of his weight; and he allows himself to ignore Sheppard’s, “Well, try not to fall too far behind.” Now’s not the time for that.
That evening, less that five minutes after Carson’s released him from the infirmary, apparently is the time. Sheppard corners him in the corridor outside his room, taking up way too much space for such a skinny stick of a man. “Rodney,” he drawls, like they’re buddies, equals, friends, “you wanna tell me what that was about, today?”
He wants to tell him, I don’t think that’s any of your business, Colonel, but he knows all too well what Sheppard’s response will be: In the field, I am your CO and it damn well is my business. So instead Rodney just says: “No.”
This has the desired effect. “No?” Sheppard hisses, and Rodney can tell that it’s costing him a lot of effort not to bellow. “No?”
Rodney fold his arms, smirks. “You asked me if I wanted to participate in share-time; I don’t. You should be more careful how you phrase your questions, Colonel.”
Rodney uses the seconds Sheppard needs to keep himself under control to slip past him. He opens the door to his quarters and steps inside. Sheppard, as expected, whirls around and leans into the doorway before Rodney can will it shut. “McKay,” he says, in a subtly different tone, “can’t we just talk about this? Come on. Can I come in?”
And Rodney just smiles, not even bothering to pretend that he isn’t enjoying this, that he hasn’t been waiting for it, waiting for weeks. “No,” he says, and Sheppard steps back, surprised, the door sliding shut in his face.
When Rodney wakes up the next morning, he’s been suspended from active duty.
*
Rodney storms into Elizabeth’s office, his entrance spoiled by the fact that she doesn’t even stand, doesn’t look at all surprised. “Rodney,” she says, cutting him off the way few have dared and even fewer actually can, “I know you’re upset, but under the circumstances--”
“Circumstances? What circumstances? I had a little dizzy spell--which Carson said was nothing, by the way--and that’s it, yank, I’m off the team? What about when Ronon got food poisoning from eating that intensely dubious shellfish on MP2-984? What about when Colonel Sheppard almost got us all castrated by doing that...that leaning thing in front of the chieftain’s daughter? He almost deprived two galaxies of generations of future geniuses and Nobel Prize winners, but okay, that’s fine, just as long as he doesn’t start feeling a little faint. I mean, come on, Elizabeth--everybody knows I’m hypoglycemic!”
Elizabeth rides the rant out, nodding patiently to show that she’s listening. But this last argument makes her frown, and he knows she’s disappointed in him (again) for belittling a serious medical condition that people have a hard time taking seriously, for using it as an excuse. Her eyes say, You should know better.
“Well, they do,” Rodney says, because if he’s digging himself a hole, it might as well be deep.
“Colonel Sheppard implied that the...episode...wasn’t the result of low blood sugar,” Elizabeth says levelly, looking at him. Waiting.
For a second he almost does it, almost calls John a liar. But even he knows he’s not that big of an asshole. Not really.
“Okay,” he admits. “Maybe not. But still--”
“He also says that you refused to tell him what the real issue was.” Elizabeth’s voice is quiescent, calm. Rodney feels a flare of genuine hatred for her. “I want you to tell me. Please don’t make me have to make it an order.”
Rodney clenches his fists. Sheppard once told him that he really sucked at lying, and though Rodney suspects the same is not true of Sheppard himself, he knows that that was honest, that was true. Rodney cannot lie his way out of a paper bag. He can obfuscate a little, mislead, but that’s all Jedi mind tricks--it only works on the weak-brained. Elizabeth won’t be so easily fooled.
So: “I don’t know,” Rodney says. “I honestly don’t know what happened, what’s wrong with me. That’s...that’s why I didn’t want to tell Sheppard. That’s why it’s freaking me out.”
There is a grain of truth in that, after all. And from the look on Elizabeth’s face, it seems to be enough.
*
He concentrates on putting on his gear, trying to relish the triumph that the click of each buckle and every strap sliding into place represents. But.
But Sheppard is watching him, and his hands won’t stop shaking.
Sheppard watches him. On M7G-248, where they trade for a strange, dark fruit that is cool to the touch but tastes sticky-sweet like honey, Sheppard watches him. On M3L-966, where they stumble across an abandoned stadium and parade ground, its oversized architecture and crumbling statuary making Rodney think of ancient Rome, of Intolerance, of Nuremberg, Sheppard watches him. On planets lush with vegetation and desert-dry, on planets with natives hostile and friendly, on planets fantastic and frightening and familiar, Sheppard watches him. His eyes are cool and impassive and give nothing away; and Rodney wonders whether he sees too much, or not enough, or nothing at all.
*
“I know you,” said the girl with the long blonde hair, and the far-gone eyes, and the wicked pack of cards. “Look!”
She fell against him, flush against his body, and Rodney’s drink (rum and Coke, with emphasis on the rum) sloshed over their arms, syrupy-sweetness beading in hair fine and not fine, dripping. She didn’t seem to mind, or notice, just pressed the scrap of paper to his chest, whispering, “Those are the pearls that were your eyes,” which Rodney thought might be a compliment, maybe. So he did what she wanted.
He took the card.
*
Rodney’s safely sequestered in his lab when his com hums to life. “McKay”--Sheppard’s voice, right there in his ear, and Rodney has to resist the urge to look over his shoulder. “We’ve got a situation down here on the east pier. We could use--”
“I’m sending Zelenka,” Rodney says, shooting Radek a look that aspires to be commanding, but that’s probably coming off as closer to pleading; either way, Radek rolls his eyes and starts for the door. “No,” says Sheppard’s voice in his ear, “I need you, Rodney.”
He manages a convincing snicker. “Colonel, you do know that this is an open channel?”
There’s an odd hiss of static. Then: “Just get down here, McKay. I’ll be waiting.”
“With bells on, I’m sure,” Rodney says. But there’s no reply.
*
When the transporter’s finished putting him back together again, Rodney walks toward a pair of doors that part silently before him, flooding his nostrils with the scent of the sea. The Atlantean ocean smells much like the ones back on Earth: salt, primarily; salt and a not-unpleasant odor of rotting fish, of things drifting up from a depth, from a time and a place, beyond the limits of the human imagination. Rodney used to like the smell, like he used to enjoy staring up at the infinite heavens, at that vast expanse of stars for which he was just beginning to learn the names.
He knows them, now. And while Rodney has certainly never bought into the idea that ‘ignorance is bliss’--ignorance is just that: ignorance--there are some things...Well. He has a lot to deal with already.
Like the fact that John Sheppard appears to be stretched out in front of him in nothing but his boxer shorts.
Rodney blinks, wondering if he’s having some sort of psychotic episode. Yet Sheppard stays where he is, a stretch of tawny skin and coiled muscle, with that shock of dark hair sticking out on top. Sheppard’s arms are folded, supporting his head; his eyes are closed. As Rodney watches, he drops a foot over the edge of the pier and, waterbug-soft, dips the very tip of his toe beneath the dark waves.
Rodney clears his throat and there’s a small splash: Sheppard’s foot, breaking the surface. He looks unalarmed, though, smiling as he sits up. Rodney cuts him off before he can speak. “Let me guess. You lost your clothes and you need my help searching for them. I’d’ve thought you’d’ve come up with a system for that by now.”
Sheppard just smiles. Rodney’s learned to distrust that smile: it means, it has the potential to mean, too many things, and yet Sheppard uses it so freely, practically throws it away. It’s a careless smile, and one thing Rodney hates is carelessness, is a laxness with anything.
Sheppard smiles at him and he says, “I figured it out.”
Rodney’s heart stops and his breath catches: clichés he suddenly understands as his body, as the moment, simply shuts down. Sheppard can’t know. He can’t know, because if he does, then all of this was a mockery, a taunt...and Rodney, perhaps foolishly, has come to expect a bit more gentleness than that.
Rodney is not good at sublimation; he’s fairly sure that much of this, too much, shows on his face. But he forces his features to resume a blankness. Forces his mouth to twist up into an expression of scorn. Forces his tongue to move. “Very good, Colonel: the underwear does go on first. Come on, next the pants...and don’t forget, socks before shoes.”
Sheppard smirks all through this little snatch of theater, swinging himself up, rippling to his feet. He doesn’t say anything else, just looks Rodney straight in the eye, then with one graceful motion, turns and dives into the water.
First reaction: relief. Because Sheppard hasn’t figured it out, has he--ha ha, joke’s on him. He went digging for secrets and he found one, sure, but not the right one. Not the one that matters.
Then, reaction number two, quick on the heels of the first: a sharp clenching in his chest, and the heart rate that has just begun to slow down speeds up again. Sheppard’s dark, sleek head pokes seal-like out of the water and Rodney feels: darkness, weight, density and destiny pressing down on him, crushing.
His throat goes dry, but he can still taste water in his mouth.
Sheppard is speaking, keeping himself afloat with a casual breaststroke and talking at him, smiling, smiling. “All this lovely ocean and yet almost nobody goes swimming. You want to go swimming with me, Rodney? The water’s nice and warm...”
Christ, the man is obscene. “I have work to do,” Rodney says, haughty as he can manage. “If you called me down here just to prove that you’d graduated from the paddle pool, well, we’re all very proud, but I have things...important things...”
Sheppard dips his head back beneath the waves, frolicking, the comparison to seal ever-more apt. “Aw, you can spare an hour for a swim. It’ll be invigorating--help clear that awesome mind of yours.” His eyes flash, glinting like the light on the water. “You can swim, can’t you, Rodney?”
He’s seriously asking. Hoping--as Rodney had wanted to hope--that it’s merely a physical disability, something that can be quelled with practice and patience. But; “No, I grew up in the Sahara. We were too busy hunting elephants and avoiding stampeding rhinoceri.” Sarcasm was, as always, his bestest bestest friend. Always there when he needed it.
“Uh-huh,” says Sheppard. “So you--”
The words cut off with a snap as Sheppard is jerked down so fast, a tiny burble of bubbles remains as the only evidence that he hasn’t simply winked out of existence. Rodney’s stomach clenches in fear, even as his brain rallies angrily: Oh yes, terrific, because I really need to awaken a latent Jaws phobia on top of everything else.
“Sheppard?” he calls, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice. “Very funny, but why don’t you save your breath and just skip to the part where you grab my ankle. Okay?”
He takes a step back, just in case that really is Sheppard’s intention. But there’s nothing. The surface of the water remains glassy and still. Rodney’s anger twists back on itself, returning to its natural form. He is terrified. He’s lived in a floating city for over a year, and it’s only right now, now, that the implications are sinking in.
They are surrounded. By a vast, alien sea.
“Sheppard!” he calls, desperate, scanning the waves. “John...!”
And he knows what he has to do. The fear is almost paralyzing--he can see himself standing there still as a statue, frozen by it. But he shoves the image away, forces himself to move. Shucks his boots, shucks his jacket. Keys on his radio and bellows, “Medical emergency at the east pier!” before shucking that, too. Tries not to think about what might be waiting for him (water, weight, fate). Doesn’t think. Just moves.
The pier under his bare feet, damp but not slick, sun-warmed. Then empty air, a long suspended moment. And then...
...water, water everywhere...
...it closes over his head, fills his eyes ears mouth nose. His lungs...but no, his breath holds and he struggles to the surface, gasping. “John!” he shouts again--pointlessly; nothing has changed. Everything has changed. His hands beat against the surface of the water, and Rodney closes his eyes and forces himself to dive.
Dark water, endless dark, like the blackness of space after all the stars have (blown) gone out. Yet it’s clear, too; he can see his own body, thrashing around, and he thinks he can see other dark shapes, there with him. But no John. Not John.
He tries to go deeper, but his chest is on fire and he gives in and erupts back to the safety of the surface. Sucks in a welcome lungful of air, but he can’t stay, not when--
And down. How long has it been? he wonders, Is it already too late? But he shoves that away. He can’t think like that; it’s worse than the taste of the water filling his lungs, stealing his breath, his life; it’s worse than any of that, than her cold hands and cold stare, Oh, Phlebas...
Another lungful of air; Carson will be here soon, but right now it’s just him, only him. He kicks his feet, trying to go deeper, deeper, far enough. He spirals down until he feels like it’s been years since he last saw the sun, until it feels like he doesn’t know which way is up anymore. And then he realizes that he really doesn’t know which way is up, and some reduced, logical part of his brain is trying to tell him that if he just stays calm, he’ll naturally float in the right direction, the human body is inherently buoyant...but he can’t stay calm. He is panicking, screaming with his mind and then with his mouth, and the water comes rushing in.
Then strong arms are wrapping themselves around his shoulders, lifting him up; and then he is lying on his back, with Sheppard above him, and the blue, blue sky; and he’s choking and spitting up water; and Sheppard is saying, “I’m sorry, Rodney, God I am so sorry, I didn’t know I didn’t know...”; and their bodies pressed together, thighs entangled like some grotesque parody, From Here to Eternity in Hell; and Carson and a fleet of nurses, coming through the door, tearing them apart; and Rodney surrenders himself to them, like a grateful prisoner, delivered from his captors and into the welcoming sun.
*
“You don’t believe me, do you, Phlebas?” the old woman asks him, and he shakes his head, right-left, No. She smiles at him, thin and beaky, like a great bird. Shawls for wings. “But I know you. Know your life and death, know the before and the everything after. You can’t escape it.”
“Ye-aaah,” Rodney says, hands on his knees, pushing himself up. “I think I’ve had about enough of this--”
She catches his wrist with fingers like iron--strong, cold, elemental. Drains the movement out of him. “Oh no,” she says, with a look that says it’s not nearly enough, won’t ever be enough. “You’ve only just begun.”
*
He opens his eyes, and Sheppard’s there, and he closes his eyes again.
Sheppard apparently doesn’t get the hint, because when Rodney opens his eyes again a few minutes--or hours, or years--later, he’s still there, slouched in a chair: that special Sheppard slouch, the one that looks effortless and insolent, a be cool and a fuck you all in one convenient package. Rodney is not talking to him. He wants Sheppard to know that he is not talking to him, but since that would involve, you know, talking to him, Sheppard’s just going to have to figure it out on his own.
Sheppard does not figure it out on his own. Sheppard sees the flickering movement of Rodney’s eyelashes; he knows Rodney is awake. He says, “Hey.”
Not. Talking. To him.
Sheppard shifts in the chair, straightening infinitesimally. “How are you feeling?”
Rodney thinks, I almost DROWNED, how do you think I feel? He thinks, YOU did this, you almost KILLED ME with your stupid practical joke, and I don’t care what you say or what you do, because you are NOT forgiven.
He thinks, This changes everything.
But Sheppard is watching him with eyes that radiate guilt and fear and...something else, some hidden thing that Rodney cannot find, and nothing’s changed at all.
“I’m sorry,” Sheppard whispers. “I know it doesn’t make any difference for me to say it, I know you probably don’t want to hear it, but. I am.”
Rodney doesn’t say anything, which seems to throw Sheppard off-balance; even Rodney, who’s orchestrating it, finds the whole silence thing rather unnerving. But Sheppard, brave explorer that he is, plunges out into the unknown territory where Rodney’s rant should be. “I was worried about you,” he says, voice level, matter-of-fact, “I knew something was wrong and that you weren’t dealing with it, so I thought I’d. You know. Make you deal with it.
“I fucked up.” His hands scrape through his hair. “I--yeah. I should probably go. I’m sorry.”
He stands up. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and Rodney knows he’s waiting for something, some acknowledgement. For a second, Rodney thinks he’s going to do it, going to be the bigger man--not forgive him, exactly, but let him know--
That may take a while.
Sheppard’s back, as he leaves the room: a straight line, a sign post, receding.
*
Rodney thinks he would feel better if he were at death’s door, but there wasn’t even that much water in his lungs; death’s driveway is more like it, or maybe death’s stately front walk. Anyway, Carson releases him, and seems surprised when Rodney is less than ecstatic to go.
Alone, he goes back to his quarters. He feels unnerved, edgy, like his skin’s crawling with bugs. And there’s an image he certainly didn’t need.
He’d never tell anyone this, but sometimes Rodney really hates his brain.
Like when, in the days after his little plunge off the east pier--days when he really ought to be concentrating on work, on getting back to normal, whatever that means--all he can think about is Sheppard. How he did it. Because while Sheppard may be Mr. Magic Gene and their Fearless Leader and all that--well, it doesn’t mean he can walk on water. Or rather, breathe under it.
How long, Rodney wonders, did he stand on that pier, his fear and panic increasing exponentially, scanning the water and steeling himself to--ha bloody ha--rescue Sheppard? One minute? Two? It had felt longer. Then how much time, in the water itself? That had felt like a long time, too--had felt endless, like an entire lifetime of nothing but wet and dark and cold...
Rodney: So how the hell DID you hold your breath for so long?
John: I was hiding under the pier. It's really cool under there! Wanna come check it out with me?
Rodney: Um, no. I'm still mad at you, plus: major drowning phobia here.
John: Hey, you know what that weird psychic chick actually told me? That I wouldn't be able to rescue the people I really care about, that I would watch them all die.
Rodney: *whistles* Dude, that's fucked up.
John: No kidding.
Rodney: You know what, fuck it. Fuck being afraid all the time. Fuck prophesy. Fuck fate. Show me the underside of your pier.
John: Is that a euphemism?
Rodney: No. But I forgot to add: you can also fuck me.
John: Neat.
Sex: Is had. Possibly in the water. Well, in the shower, at the very least.
Weird Psychic Chick/Author: That's what I meant to happen all along.
Everyone Else: Suuuuuure it was.
However, there are some little bits that I quite like--the odd line, here or there. So here's to their day in the...well, not sun, but uh, partial cloud cover? Right.
Fear Death by Water
Teyla’s hand is on his back, strength radiating from each of the five digits like heat from an electric stove. Rodney thinks that if he could turn around he would see her fingertips glowing orange like a quintet of car cigarette lighters. “This is idiotic,” he says, but he can tell that Teyla grasps his real meaning, a childlike I don’t wanna. Fingers on his back, burning into his spine, she gives him a push. “You must.”
He stumbles inside the tent. It feels like his vest has gotten twisted around; he jerks his shoulders, attempting to pull it straight. He turns and glares at Teyla, but she’s scarcely more than a shadow behind the waving red fabric, and already Rodney can feel the press of eyes upon him, almost as hotly as the finger-push. “You may sit,” says a voice: reedy, a rasp like wind through tall grass. Rodney wants nothing more than to launch into a rant on how there’s no may about it, but he doesn’t call himself a genius for nothing; he’s smart enough to realize that at this point, the easiest way out is through. He stomps farther into the dark recesses of the tent: the owner of the voice is sitting there, wrapped in shawls, perched on some sort of Miss Muffet tuffet, looking out at him from over a long, beak-like nose. “Sit,” she--he thinks it’s a she--says again. She gestures toward another, lower, tuffet-like thing. Rodney sees little choice in the matter. He sits.
The woman--he’s just going to go with woman, and why not?--regards him with an intensity and for a length of time that makes his clothing feel ill-fitting and tight, that makes him want to squirm out of it like a worm pushing free of the dirt. Escaping. He forces himself to stay still, his hands clasped--red fingers, white knuckles--in his lap. “Hmm,” says the woman, and Rodney bloodies his lip to keep from screaming, Get on with your stupid, backward, waste-of-my-valuable-time ritual already! Iron, Fe: a tiny flood on his tongue.
The woman reaches into her mess of shawls in a manner that just a few months ago wouldn’t have made Rodney blink, but now has his fingers twitching and starting for his gun. They’re just cards, though, that she pulls out, just slips of paper. She hands them to him. “What?” he says. “What do you want me to do? Deal Blackjack?” She just looks at him. “Oh, all right, okay, fine,” and he gives the tattered squares an awkward shuffle.
He hands back the cards. The woman nods and starts to lay them out. Rodney doesn’t know much about Tarot--and hey, different galaxy here, this is hardly going to be the kind of thing you’d buy at the Bodhi Tree--but there was that girl, freshman year of college...he never even knew her name. But she was the Tarot girl, and at some party, some party he dragged himself to, she’d gotten drunk and followed him around all night, pressing a card into his hands, telling him to hold on tight. He’d played along for a while--because hello, cute blonde--but finally he’d gotten fed up and thrown the card in her face. Not very mature, but honestly, there’s only so much one can...
He remembers this now because the first card the woman lays out looks very much like the one onto which he’d long ago sloshed rum and Coke: same shadowy figure, same waves of--what? stone, water, ice?--creeping up the edges of the card, lapping against the figure’s feet. Rodney leans slowly forward, his heart settling stone-like in the cavern of his chest.
The woman clucks her tongue. “Oh, Phlebas,” she whispers. “Da. Da. Dayadhvam.”
*
If the dreams came after, that would be one thing. But they don’t. They come before.
Rising. The water is rising, only--they are not rising with it. It washes over his feet--splashes against his legs, a great rushing wave of it--and he should be swept away, but he isn’t. It isn’t that quick. It is slow and stifling, and the entire time he knows what’s coming, what the end will be like, and yet it refuses to overtake him, to finish already, even when he’s sucking great desperate gulps of ocean deep into him, flooding his mouth and throat and lungs.
He’s heard that salt water tastes like tears, but that must be back on Earth because this, this--this is regret and inevitability and a rage so potent it’s almost enough to turn the water into steam.
But it doesn’t.
*
Sheppard comes out of the tent looking so much like a cowboy that all that’s missing is the hat and spurs. Loose-limbs and cocky grin, and Rodney looks at him and feels something twist. He scowls. The Major laughs at him from behind dark lashes and jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “You’re up, McKay.”
Later that night, they sit around the campfire and laugh about what “that old witch”--Sheppard’s phrase, said with affection, as if she were some wacky relative--had to tell them. Or at least, Lieutenant Ford and the Major laugh; Teyla just sits quietly, listening--and, Rodney thinks, after several minutes of careful study, looking kind of pissed. As for him...well, for once, he doesn’t exactly feel like talking.
“--Like a cart,” Ford is saying, “drawn by two lettios--aren’t those those goofy-looking cows? With the purple horns?--two lettios, one black, one white. A cart!” Ford says, laughing again, spreading his arms to allow them all an unobstructed view of his cart-ness. “Me!”
“That’s a good one,” Sheppard says. “I think you’ve one-upped me; I didn’t get compared to any inanimate objects.”
He’s smiling broadly, his chest rumbling with laughter, flying wisps of hair and the flickering light of the fire drawing stripes across his face. “You two are like a pair of twelve-year-old girls at a slumber party, you know that?” Rodney snaps. “Next you’re going to be painting each other’s toenails and daring each other to prank call cute boys.”
“Have a lot of experience with that, do you, McKay?” Sheppard says, and Rodney shouldn’t even have to dignify that with a response.
Luckily, he doesn’t have to, doesn’t even need to resist the temptation, because this is when Teyla chooses to say, “Doctor McKay is right; you are not being very respectful.”
Rodney nods enthusiastically at that, as he’s likely to do in response to any statement that begins, Doctor McKay is right.
But really, Teyla’s right, they’re being assholes, and while normally such a thought would, at most, cause Rodney to give a little shrug and move on, it isn’t sitting too well with him right now. Is sitting worse than the roasted leg of lettio they ate for dinner, in fact, so he gives the military contingent a contemptuous look and says, “You know, you really ought to try being more sensitive.”
Sheppard holds in the laughter about a second longer than Ford, and when even Teyla has to stifle a giggle behind her hand, Rodney can’t say he’s exactly surprised.
*
At the party--the same party? He’s no longer sure, but anyway, some party: lots of people, loud music, and too much to drink, and he stumbled into the bathroom, not to take a piss or throw up, but just because it seemed like an interesting place to go. Bathroom. Ugly bathroom: bad art and one of those horrible fluffy toilet seat covers--hates those, so unsanitary, like a fuzzy pink forest of germs. But the sink was classic white porcelain, nice and cool, and it felt good to lean on it, to rest his arms and his oddly heavy head. He remembers thinking, I shouldn’t drink so much, the risks of cytotoxic effects are too great, I could damage my dendrites, and then he raised his head and looked, blurry-eyed, into the mirror, and the world fell away.
It was kind of like vertigo, he later tried to rationalize, explain: a sensation of falling into himself, of wind rushing past his head. Kind of like traveling through a Stargate, he thought, later still. Like an inexorable descent toward an inevitable destination, toward some truth he just cannot grasp, toward...
A wave of dizziness hits him and the woman in her web of shawls sways in the narrow pocket of his vision, looming shadowy and large. He feels like he’s been drugged. Yet he’s drunk nothing, eaten nothing; unless there was some intoxicant he could have absorbed through his fingertips--the cards!--but no. It is just her voice; the steady, rippling rhythm of it...
“I see crowds of people, walking ‘round in a ring...you and you and you again. There are other world than these, but only one end, Phlebas. For you, for you--”
And Rodney’s breath catches, so harshly he fears he will never get it back.
“For you, it is all the drowning time.”
*
Rodney loves to be right. Not just because he appreciates the inevitable respect, praise, and admiration--and one day, surely, the equally inevitable Nobel Prize. No. Rodney loves to be right because it’s the world’s greatest natural high.
When a solution comes to him, either after a long, sleepless night of work or instantaneously, in a flash, he knows--he knows --that he’s correct, that he’s got it. A grey world is suddenly black and white. There is the truth, his truth--and then there’s everything else.
Elizabeth recently told him that he wasn’t supposed to have intuition, and in a way, she was right. He doesn’t get “feelings.” He knows things.
He knows--
the water rushing into his lungs, choking him, burning him, crushing him beneath its weight. Surrounding him, like a cocoon, like a return to the womb, only he’s to be stillborn--forever enmeshed, forever silent and cold and alone.
He knows: these dreams have got to stop.
*
He goes to see Heightmeyer. She says exactly what he expects her to say.
These nightmares, do you think they have something to do with what the alternate version of Doctor Weir told you? About your...?
Death, you can say it, death. No: I told you, the dreams started before, weeks before we found her and woke her up. Unless you’re suggesting that I’m psychic--
Of course not. But perhaps an old dream has resurfaced, taken on a new significance for you since you learned--
Are you even listening to me? It’s not an old dream! It’s the same dream! Every single night...!
She folds her hands, sighs. Then why don’t you tell me, Rodney, when the dreams began.
He’s just making his excuses when Teyla bursts in and interrupts them; through the embarrassment, even through that, he knows he’s kind of glad.
*
Things get a little hectic after that, and aside from the whole almost-dying-an-unspeakably-horrific-death thing, it’s kind of a relief. His mind is occupied with a thousand thousand things, and Carson has him on so many uppers that he wouldn’t be able to sleep even if he were hit over the head with a two-by-four. So even when they all miraculously do not die, and even after the drugs finally do leave his system and he passes out in the middle of a debriefing: when he sleeps he sleeps deeply, and without dreaming.
(He does not wake in the middle of the night, clutching his throat and gasping for breath. He doesn’t eye the shower with distaste; doesn’t hear the water lapping at the edges of the city and shudder to himself before turning away, fear and shame blushing scarlet across his cheeks.)
Take that! he thinks, and Ha! and Stupid old crone. And soon he has other things to see Heightmeyer about, other things to make him feel fear and embarrassment and scarlet rushes of shame. And just like that, everything’s back to normal.
*
He doesn’t realize--doesn’t allow himself to acknowledge--that the problem’s still real, still there, until the water is lapping at his boots.
They’re standing at the edge of a stream. Well--Sheppard called it a stream, but any idiot can see that it’s actually a river, and a fairly rapid one at that. There’s no bridge, they need to get across--“We’ll ford it!” Sheppard announces; “Hey, Rodney--ever play Oregon Trail?”
“I’ve always had more productive uses for my computers, thanks,” he says, watching Ronon’s ears perk up at the faintest hint of an order; the big man turns without a second’s thought and plunges out into the river, his heavy coat weighed down by the swirling water. He’s already waist-deep by the time the Colonel starts splashing out to join him; the water stops rising about halfway up Sheppard’s chest. “Is this going to be a problem, Teyla?” he calls, and even though he’s only referring to the little height disparity they’ve got going on, Rodney can see her eyes narrow in anger. “No, Colonel, I believe I can manage,” she says--words that from anyone else would emerge dripping with sarcasm, but from Teyla are dry as the desert, with only a hint of sandy-scratch. I could learn a thing or two from her, Rodney thinks, but then he looks down and his brain empties out, leaving nothing but--
--water, so much water, around him and in him, swallowing his whole world in a wash of salt and brine--
--pure, paralyzing fear. His whole body spasms as he takes a reeling step back; he keeps his feet, somehow, but only just. Blackness races at the edges of his vision.
“Doctor McKay?” Teyla’s voice, calm and yet laced with worry. And at the same time: “It’s McKay I’d worry about, if I were you.” And then, finally, Sheppard: “Rodney, whoa. Are you okay? What happened?”
He’s hurrying back toward him, tossing up huge sheets of water in his wake, an inept Moses. “When was the last time you ate?” Sheppard asks, and Rodney’d like to tell him that it’s a stupid question, they all just saw him eat a powerbar not five minutes ago, but Rodney’s mouth is busy sucking in huge, gasping lungfuls of air; so, sorry, your snark will have to be delivered at a later time.
Sheppard’s clutching at his arm, his face in Rodney’s face. His breath smells sweet, like the berries Ronon picked, the berries that Rodney refused to try. “Rodney, you have to tell me what’s wrong. Are you having an allergic reaction? Did you get stung by something?”
Boy, does he wish that were it--and that, if nothing else, proves how fucked up this has become. It was understandable when that which had once been his greatest fear was subsumed by fear of the Wraith--nobody was going to argue if the thought of life-sucking space vampires made you a little weak in the knees. But this, this fear of water, water, so much water, rising, engulfing him--there is no excuse, none, for something as irrational as that.
“Rodney!” Sheppard says, giving his shoulders a sharp jerk, and Rodney comes back to himself enough to shake his head, no. No, you’ve worried about me for nothing; no, you were wrong to trust me with this, too.
He still hasn’t said anything, though, and apparently silence from him is the equivalent of seizures and foaming at the mouth and sucking chest wounds in someone else. “Okay, that’s it!” Sheppard shouts. “We’re going back to the jumper. Ronon, help me--”
“I can walk,” he chokes out, jerking away from Sheppard’s grasp. The forest spins--a dizzying, kaleidoscope of green, and surely all this can’t be psychosomatic, can it?
“You sure about that?” Sheppard asks, and somehow he’s managed to go from staccato concern to skeptical drawl, all in the space of four words. Rodney blinks at him, his mind a confusion of emotions rushing faster than the river, and he’s still trying to decide whether to serve pride or physical comfort when Teyla’s warm hand closes on his arm. “The terrain is rough,” she says, looking at the Colonel, “it would serve us all if we went together, in pairs.”
Their eyes meet, hers and Sheppard’s. It’s an exchange loaded with significance, and Rodney would love to pick it apart, separate the individual strands and examine how they fit together, how they work. But right now, his brain is barely up to the task of keeping him on his feet. So he allows Teyla to lead him along, to take some of his weight; and he allows himself to ignore Sheppard’s, “Well, try not to fall too far behind.” Now’s not the time for that.
That evening, less that five minutes after Carson’s released him from the infirmary, apparently is the time. Sheppard corners him in the corridor outside his room, taking up way too much space for such a skinny stick of a man. “Rodney,” he drawls, like they’re buddies, equals, friends, “you wanna tell me what that was about, today?”
He wants to tell him, I don’t think that’s any of your business, Colonel, but he knows all too well what Sheppard’s response will be: In the field, I am your CO and it damn well is my business. So instead Rodney just says: “No.”
This has the desired effect. “No?” Sheppard hisses, and Rodney can tell that it’s costing him a lot of effort not to bellow. “No?”
Rodney fold his arms, smirks. “You asked me if I wanted to participate in share-time; I don’t. You should be more careful how you phrase your questions, Colonel.”
Rodney uses the seconds Sheppard needs to keep himself under control to slip past him. He opens the door to his quarters and steps inside. Sheppard, as expected, whirls around and leans into the doorway before Rodney can will it shut. “McKay,” he says, in a subtly different tone, “can’t we just talk about this? Come on. Can I come in?”
And Rodney just smiles, not even bothering to pretend that he isn’t enjoying this, that he hasn’t been waiting for it, waiting for weeks. “No,” he says, and Sheppard steps back, surprised, the door sliding shut in his face.
When Rodney wakes up the next morning, he’s been suspended from active duty.
*
Rodney storms into Elizabeth’s office, his entrance spoiled by the fact that she doesn’t even stand, doesn’t look at all surprised. “Rodney,” she says, cutting him off the way few have dared and even fewer actually can, “I know you’re upset, but under the circumstances--”
“Circumstances? What circumstances? I had a little dizzy spell--which Carson said was nothing, by the way--and that’s it, yank, I’m off the team? What about when Ronon got food poisoning from eating that intensely dubious shellfish on MP2-984? What about when Colonel Sheppard almost got us all castrated by doing that...that leaning thing in front of the chieftain’s daughter? He almost deprived two galaxies of generations of future geniuses and Nobel Prize winners, but okay, that’s fine, just as long as he doesn’t start feeling a little faint. I mean, come on, Elizabeth--everybody knows I’m hypoglycemic!”
Elizabeth rides the rant out, nodding patiently to show that she’s listening. But this last argument makes her frown, and he knows she’s disappointed in him (again) for belittling a serious medical condition that people have a hard time taking seriously, for using it as an excuse. Her eyes say, You should know better.
“Well, they do,” Rodney says, because if he’s digging himself a hole, it might as well be deep.
“Colonel Sheppard implied that the...episode...wasn’t the result of low blood sugar,” Elizabeth says levelly, looking at him. Waiting.
For a second he almost does it, almost calls John a liar. But even he knows he’s not that big of an asshole. Not really.
“Okay,” he admits. “Maybe not. But still--”
“He also says that you refused to tell him what the real issue was.” Elizabeth’s voice is quiescent, calm. Rodney feels a flare of genuine hatred for her. “I want you to tell me. Please don’t make me have to make it an order.”
Rodney clenches his fists. Sheppard once told him that he really sucked at lying, and though Rodney suspects the same is not true of Sheppard himself, he knows that that was honest, that was true. Rodney cannot lie his way out of a paper bag. He can obfuscate a little, mislead, but that’s all Jedi mind tricks--it only works on the weak-brained. Elizabeth won’t be so easily fooled.
So: “I don’t know,” Rodney says. “I honestly don’t know what happened, what’s wrong with me. That’s...that’s why I didn’t want to tell Sheppard. That’s why it’s freaking me out.”
There is a grain of truth in that, after all. And from the look on Elizabeth’s face, it seems to be enough.
*
He concentrates on putting on his gear, trying to relish the triumph that the click of each buckle and every strap sliding into place represents. But.
But Sheppard is watching him, and his hands won’t stop shaking.
Sheppard watches him. On M7G-248, where they trade for a strange, dark fruit that is cool to the touch but tastes sticky-sweet like honey, Sheppard watches him. On M3L-966, where they stumble across an abandoned stadium and parade ground, its oversized architecture and crumbling statuary making Rodney think of ancient Rome, of Intolerance, of Nuremberg, Sheppard watches him. On planets lush with vegetation and desert-dry, on planets with natives hostile and friendly, on planets fantastic and frightening and familiar, Sheppard watches him. His eyes are cool and impassive and give nothing away; and Rodney wonders whether he sees too much, or not enough, or nothing at all.
*
“I know you,” said the girl with the long blonde hair, and the far-gone eyes, and the wicked pack of cards. “Look!”
She fell against him, flush against his body, and Rodney’s drink (rum and Coke, with emphasis on the rum) sloshed over their arms, syrupy-sweetness beading in hair fine and not fine, dripping. She didn’t seem to mind, or notice, just pressed the scrap of paper to his chest, whispering, “Those are the pearls that were your eyes,” which Rodney thought might be a compliment, maybe. So he did what she wanted.
He took the card.
*
Rodney’s safely sequestered in his lab when his com hums to life. “McKay”--Sheppard’s voice, right there in his ear, and Rodney has to resist the urge to look over his shoulder. “We’ve got a situation down here on the east pier. We could use--”
“I’m sending Zelenka,” Rodney says, shooting Radek a look that aspires to be commanding, but that’s probably coming off as closer to pleading; either way, Radek rolls his eyes and starts for the door. “No,” says Sheppard’s voice in his ear, “I need you, Rodney.”
He manages a convincing snicker. “Colonel, you do know that this is an open channel?”
There’s an odd hiss of static. Then: “Just get down here, McKay. I’ll be waiting.”
“With bells on, I’m sure,” Rodney says. But there’s no reply.
*
When the transporter’s finished putting him back together again, Rodney walks toward a pair of doors that part silently before him, flooding his nostrils with the scent of the sea. The Atlantean ocean smells much like the ones back on Earth: salt, primarily; salt and a not-unpleasant odor of rotting fish, of things drifting up from a depth, from a time and a place, beyond the limits of the human imagination. Rodney used to like the smell, like he used to enjoy staring up at the infinite heavens, at that vast expanse of stars for which he was just beginning to learn the names.
He knows them, now. And while Rodney has certainly never bought into the idea that ‘ignorance is bliss’--ignorance is just that: ignorance--there are some things...Well. He has a lot to deal with already.
Like the fact that John Sheppard appears to be stretched out in front of him in nothing but his boxer shorts.
Rodney blinks, wondering if he’s having some sort of psychotic episode. Yet Sheppard stays where he is, a stretch of tawny skin and coiled muscle, with that shock of dark hair sticking out on top. Sheppard’s arms are folded, supporting his head; his eyes are closed. As Rodney watches, he drops a foot over the edge of the pier and, waterbug-soft, dips the very tip of his toe beneath the dark waves.
Rodney clears his throat and there’s a small splash: Sheppard’s foot, breaking the surface. He looks unalarmed, though, smiling as he sits up. Rodney cuts him off before he can speak. “Let me guess. You lost your clothes and you need my help searching for them. I’d’ve thought you’d’ve come up with a system for that by now.”
Sheppard just smiles. Rodney’s learned to distrust that smile: it means, it has the potential to mean, too many things, and yet Sheppard uses it so freely, practically throws it away. It’s a careless smile, and one thing Rodney hates is carelessness, is a laxness with anything.
Sheppard smiles at him and he says, “I figured it out.”
Rodney’s heart stops and his breath catches: clichés he suddenly understands as his body, as the moment, simply shuts down. Sheppard can’t know. He can’t know, because if he does, then all of this was a mockery, a taunt...and Rodney, perhaps foolishly, has come to expect a bit more gentleness than that.
Rodney is not good at sublimation; he’s fairly sure that much of this, too much, shows on his face. But he forces his features to resume a blankness. Forces his mouth to twist up into an expression of scorn. Forces his tongue to move. “Very good, Colonel: the underwear does go on first. Come on, next the pants...and don’t forget, socks before shoes.”
Sheppard smirks all through this little snatch of theater, swinging himself up, rippling to his feet. He doesn’t say anything else, just looks Rodney straight in the eye, then with one graceful motion, turns and dives into the water.
First reaction: relief. Because Sheppard hasn’t figured it out, has he--ha ha, joke’s on him. He went digging for secrets and he found one, sure, but not the right one. Not the one that matters.
Then, reaction number two, quick on the heels of the first: a sharp clenching in his chest, and the heart rate that has just begun to slow down speeds up again. Sheppard’s dark, sleek head pokes seal-like out of the water and Rodney feels: darkness, weight, density and destiny pressing down on him, crushing.
His throat goes dry, but he can still taste water in his mouth.
Sheppard is speaking, keeping himself afloat with a casual breaststroke and talking at him, smiling, smiling. “All this lovely ocean and yet almost nobody goes swimming. You want to go swimming with me, Rodney? The water’s nice and warm...”
Christ, the man is obscene. “I have work to do,” Rodney says, haughty as he can manage. “If you called me down here just to prove that you’d graduated from the paddle pool, well, we’re all very proud, but I have things...important things...”
Sheppard dips his head back beneath the waves, frolicking, the comparison to seal ever-more apt. “Aw, you can spare an hour for a swim. It’ll be invigorating--help clear that awesome mind of yours.” His eyes flash, glinting like the light on the water. “You can swim, can’t you, Rodney?”
He’s seriously asking. Hoping--as Rodney had wanted to hope--that it’s merely a physical disability, something that can be quelled with practice and patience. But; “No, I grew up in the Sahara. We were too busy hunting elephants and avoiding stampeding rhinoceri.” Sarcasm was, as always, his bestest bestest friend. Always there when he needed it.
“Uh-huh,” says Sheppard. “So you--”
The words cut off with a snap as Sheppard is jerked down so fast, a tiny burble of bubbles remains as the only evidence that he hasn’t simply winked out of existence. Rodney’s stomach clenches in fear, even as his brain rallies angrily: Oh yes, terrific, because I really need to awaken a latent Jaws phobia on top of everything else.
“Sheppard?” he calls, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice. “Very funny, but why don’t you save your breath and just skip to the part where you grab my ankle. Okay?”
He takes a step back, just in case that really is Sheppard’s intention. But there’s nothing. The surface of the water remains glassy and still. Rodney’s anger twists back on itself, returning to its natural form. He is terrified. He’s lived in a floating city for over a year, and it’s only right now, now, that the implications are sinking in.
They are surrounded. By a vast, alien sea.
“Sheppard!” he calls, desperate, scanning the waves. “John...!”
And he knows what he has to do. The fear is almost paralyzing--he can see himself standing there still as a statue, frozen by it. But he shoves the image away, forces himself to move. Shucks his boots, shucks his jacket. Keys on his radio and bellows, “Medical emergency at the east pier!” before shucking that, too. Tries not to think about what might be waiting for him (water, weight, fate). Doesn’t think. Just moves.
The pier under his bare feet, damp but not slick, sun-warmed. Then empty air, a long suspended moment. And then...
...water, water everywhere...
...it closes over his head, fills his eyes ears mouth nose. His lungs...but no, his breath holds and he struggles to the surface, gasping. “John!” he shouts again--pointlessly; nothing has changed. Everything has changed. His hands beat against the surface of the water, and Rodney closes his eyes and forces himself to dive.
Dark water, endless dark, like the blackness of space after all the stars have (blown) gone out. Yet it’s clear, too; he can see his own body, thrashing around, and he thinks he can see other dark shapes, there with him. But no John. Not John.
He tries to go deeper, but his chest is on fire and he gives in and erupts back to the safety of the surface. Sucks in a welcome lungful of air, but he can’t stay, not when--
And down. How long has it been? he wonders, Is it already too late? But he shoves that away. He can’t think like that; it’s worse than the taste of the water filling his lungs, stealing his breath, his life; it’s worse than any of that, than her cold hands and cold stare, Oh, Phlebas...
Another lungful of air; Carson will be here soon, but right now it’s just him, only him. He kicks his feet, trying to go deeper, deeper, far enough. He spirals down until he feels like it’s been years since he last saw the sun, until it feels like he doesn’t know which way is up anymore. And then he realizes that he really doesn’t know which way is up, and some reduced, logical part of his brain is trying to tell him that if he just stays calm, he’ll naturally float in the right direction, the human body is inherently buoyant...but he can’t stay calm. He is panicking, screaming with his mind and then with his mouth, and the water comes rushing in.
Then strong arms are wrapping themselves around his shoulders, lifting him up; and then he is lying on his back, with Sheppard above him, and the blue, blue sky; and he’s choking and spitting up water; and Sheppard is saying, “I’m sorry, Rodney, God I am so sorry, I didn’t know I didn’t know...”; and their bodies pressed together, thighs entangled like some grotesque parody, From Here to Eternity in Hell; and Carson and a fleet of nurses, coming through the door, tearing them apart; and Rodney surrenders himself to them, like a grateful prisoner, delivered from his captors and into the welcoming sun.
*
“You don’t believe me, do you, Phlebas?” the old woman asks him, and he shakes his head, right-left, No. She smiles at him, thin and beaky, like a great bird. Shawls for wings. “But I know you. Know your life and death, know the before and the everything after. You can’t escape it.”
“Ye-aaah,” Rodney says, hands on his knees, pushing himself up. “I think I’ve had about enough of this--”
She catches his wrist with fingers like iron--strong, cold, elemental. Drains the movement out of him. “Oh no,” she says, with a look that says it’s not nearly enough, won’t ever be enough. “You’ve only just begun.”
*
He opens his eyes, and Sheppard’s there, and he closes his eyes again.
Sheppard apparently doesn’t get the hint, because when Rodney opens his eyes again a few minutes--or hours, or years--later, he’s still there, slouched in a chair: that special Sheppard slouch, the one that looks effortless and insolent, a be cool and a fuck you all in one convenient package. Rodney is not talking to him. He wants Sheppard to know that he is not talking to him, but since that would involve, you know, talking to him, Sheppard’s just going to have to figure it out on his own.
Sheppard does not figure it out on his own. Sheppard sees the flickering movement of Rodney’s eyelashes; he knows Rodney is awake. He says, “Hey.”
Not. Talking. To him.
Sheppard shifts in the chair, straightening infinitesimally. “How are you feeling?”
Rodney thinks, I almost DROWNED, how do you think I feel? He thinks, YOU did this, you almost KILLED ME with your stupid practical joke, and I don’t care what you say or what you do, because you are NOT forgiven.
He thinks, This changes everything.
But Sheppard is watching him with eyes that radiate guilt and fear and...something else, some hidden thing that Rodney cannot find, and nothing’s changed at all.
“I’m sorry,” Sheppard whispers. “I know it doesn’t make any difference for me to say it, I know you probably don’t want to hear it, but. I am.”
Rodney doesn’t say anything, which seems to throw Sheppard off-balance; even Rodney, who’s orchestrating it, finds the whole silence thing rather unnerving. But Sheppard, brave explorer that he is, plunges out into the unknown territory where Rodney’s rant should be. “I was worried about you,” he says, voice level, matter-of-fact, “I knew something was wrong and that you weren’t dealing with it, so I thought I’d. You know. Make you deal with it.
“I fucked up.” His hands scrape through his hair. “I--yeah. I should probably go. I’m sorry.”
He stands up. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and Rodney knows he’s waiting for something, some acknowledgement. For a second, Rodney thinks he’s going to do it, going to be the bigger man--not forgive him, exactly, but let him know--
That may take a while.
Sheppard’s back, as he leaves the room: a straight line, a sign post, receding.
*
Rodney thinks he would feel better if he were at death’s door, but there wasn’t even that much water in his lungs; death’s driveway is more like it, or maybe death’s stately front walk. Anyway, Carson releases him, and seems surprised when Rodney is less than ecstatic to go.
Alone, he goes back to his quarters. He feels unnerved, edgy, like his skin’s crawling with bugs. And there’s an image he certainly didn’t need.
He’d never tell anyone this, but sometimes Rodney really hates his brain.
Like when, in the days after his little plunge off the east pier--days when he really ought to be concentrating on work, on getting back to normal, whatever that means--all he can think about is Sheppard. How he did it. Because while Sheppard may be Mr. Magic Gene and their Fearless Leader and all that--well, it doesn’t mean he can walk on water. Or rather, breathe under it.
How long, Rodney wonders, did he stand on that pier, his fear and panic increasing exponentially, scanning the water and steeling himself to--ha bloody ha--rescue Sheppard? One minute? Two? It had felt longer. Then how much time, in the water itself? That had felt like a long time, too--had felt endless, like an entire lifetime of nothing but wet and dark and cold...
Rodney: So how the hell DID you hold your breath for so long?
John: I was hiding under the pier. It's really cool under there! Wanna come check it out with me?
Rodney: Um, no. I'm still mad at you, plus: major drowning phobia here.
John: Hey, you know what that weird psychic chick actually told me? That I wouldn't be able to rescue the people I really care about, that I would watch them all die.
Rodney: *whistles* Dude, that's fucked up.
John: No kidding.
Rodney: You know what, fuck it. Fuck being afraid all the time. Fuck prophesy. Fuck fate. Show me the underside of your pier.
John: Is that a euphemism?
Rodney: No. But I forgot to add: you can also fuck me.
John: Neat.
Sex: Is had. Possibly in the water. Well, in the shower, at the very least.
Weird Psychic Chick/Author: That's what I meant to happen all along.
Everyone Else: Suuuuuure it was.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-05 10:53 am (UTC)...
Way too long? I didn't think so, since I liked the tarot-related scene interspersions and the dreamy feel that they gave the story. Although I did have to juggle the two different tarot-related incidents with the main thread... You're making me ponder unearthing my TS Eliot book from my stack of university books now. I could see a bridge and a scene covering the ending, if done right.