Fic: All Roads Lead
Apr. 9th, 2006 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneAnd apparently, I just went het all of a sudden.
Title: All Roads Lead
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: McKay/Cadman, with incidental Cadman/Beckett & McKay/Sheppard
Spoilers: Very minor through ‘Allies’
Length: ~2300 words
Summary: Five ways Laura Cadman eventually slept with Rodney McKay.
All Roads Lead
I.
“Murf,” said Laura, burrowing more deeply into the pillow and trying to block out the sunlight creeping mercilessly through the blinds.
“Gurk,” replied the person next her.
She pushed closer to him, burying her nose into the warm, comforting expanse of his back. “Mmm, Carson.”
“Mmm,” he echoed. Then, after a slight pause, “John?”
“Ack!” said Laura.
“Gah!” said McKay.
They scrambled to either side of the bed, each trying to take the sheet with them. After a brief scuffle, Laura triumphed, wresting it away. McKay settled for clutching a pillow tightly to his front.
“So,” he said, blinking wildly. “I wasn’t aware that solar eclipses had that effect in this galaxy.”
“Me neither,” said Laura.
They stared at each other.
“Right,” Laura said, “so we’ll never speak of this again.”
“Sounds good.”
“Yes.”
“Agreed.”
Then McKay used up all the hot water in her shower before sneaking home.
II.
In the time it took Laura to say, “I’m sorry, what?” and to blink a lot, McKay had already sighed and said, “With her? Really? Her?”; sighed again; and started stripping off his vest.
The Thelians clearly seemed to take this a sign of full cooperation, bowing to them and leaving the room. Laura switched her incredulity to a much simpler target. “What are you doing?” she barked at McKay, who had the vest off and was currently working on his shirt, exposing the pale stretch of chest Laura was already far, far too familiar with. She was not, by nature, an especially modest person, but she had to control the urge to blush and look away. “You aren’t seriously planning on just...doing what they asked?”
McKay shrugged. “Why not? This happens all the time; it’s much simpler just to go along with it.”
She knew her mouth was hanging open. “Go along?”
“Mutual orgasm is usually all that’s required,” he said, tapping his foot, oddly business-like and impatient. “Don’t worry, Colonel Sheppard has trained us all to be very efficient.”
Okay, now her mouth was hanging open. Because that brought to mind some very...some very interesting mental images, ones that she quickly decided to file away and explore in more detail later.
“You don’t even have to do anything,” McKay said, laying it out there like a plan to save the city. “I figure I can just go down on you and then maybe jerk off.” He licked his lips: broad, clever lips; tongue Laura could still remember as if it had been in her very own mouth.
Her own mouth: lips slowly coming back together, forming words. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I guess that’d be okay.”
III.
On M4S-283, McKay was fuming at her and Laura was trying to deflect it, rolling her eyes and disparaging his manhood as much as possible. So: pretty much like every mission they’d been forced to go on together, which were thankfully few and far between. But for whatever reason, it wasn’t even its usual perverse brand of fun today: instead of turning an increasingly amusing shade of red, McKay was getting more and more sullen, and Laura herself was finding her persistent, nothing-you-say-can-bother-me smile becoming ever more forced.
So when the gnarled old priestess stepped between them and muttered something about “healing the rift,” mostly what Laura felt was relief. Even when the Ancient device lit up in the old woman’s hand, the brief spark of fear came second, and was gone long before it could begin to catch.
Instead she caught: McKay’s eyes, going wide, far bluer than she remembered. And an intense wave of how he smelled: the soapy scent of someone almost fastidiously clean, but overlaid with that day’s dirt and sweat, strong but not unpleasant, musky. “Yes,” Laura said, as McKay, for once in agreement, said, “Yes,” and then the rift vanished completely in a tangle of limbs and—God, yes!—his mouth, moving skilfully, easing the smile back onto her face.
Dimly, she was aware of the priestess staring down at the device in her hand like she was newly unsure of the settings. “I’ll take that, thanks,” she heard Sheppard say, as she arched her neck to give McKay better access to her throat. “Does anybody have a hose?”
IV.
There were a lot of reasons why Laura’s first kiss with Carson was not the best first kiss she had ever had. Number one would probably be the fact that she was in McKay’s body at the time. But still, the memory of that kiss stayed with her, an oddly compelling element to her fantasies. It didn’t bother her; she understood that fantasies, turn-ons, were not always something that a person could control.
Still, it was frustrating, her attempts—and her perpetual failure—to recapture that moment, or more accurately, whatever it was about that moment that still enticed her. That was really the key: if only she could separate out the essential factor, she would be able to replicate it, move beyond it. So when Carson came back to his quarters, sometimes she would be waiting for him. She would grab him by the lapels and pull his mouth against hers, kissing fiercely. And that worked for a while...until it began to annoy him. “Do you have to attack me like that every night?” he asked once, rubbing at his lips. Then quickly apologizing when he saw her face, so nice and kind, and dammit, dammit, not what she wanted, no longer the just-intangible thing that made her breath come quickly, raised her heartrate, made her thrill.
Maybe it was the sense of impending danger that she had liked, she thought, quickly kissing Sergeant Shelmerdine before they were both led out to be shot on M6F-738. The explosives she had planted earlier of course went off perfectly on schedule and provided enough of a distraction for them to escape, and she later explained the kiss away as the product of adrenaline before avoiding Shelmerdine strenuously for weeks. It hadn’t done anything for her, anyway, although it had apparently been enough to turn Shelmerdine into a love-sick fool. Laura eventually had to set him up with Katie Brown to get him off her back.
Which left her right back where she had begun. Maybe, she thought, turning it over again in her head one night: maybe it had actually been the illicitness of the kiss that had captured her imagination? Kissing a man with another man’s lips...or maybe, even (and she sat down, trying to work out how she felt about this) she was just projecting, and it was the earlier kiss that was still tantalizing her: bending Katie back over her (McKay’s) arm and showing her (him) what this kissing business was all about.
When Shelmerdine asked her to come have dinner with him and Katie sometime, Laura found herself eagerly accepting the offer. She was a modern woman, and regs or no, she wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of her happiness. And since her brain was possibly insisting that a lusty lesbian affair with Katie Brown was what would make her happy, well...she figured she could make Shelmerdine really happy, and talk the joyous couple into a threesome, no problem.
Except, ten minutes into dinner (an event to which she had worn her sexiest swoopy red top) she realized that she was the one with a problem: she really wasn’t attracted to Katie. At all. She tried to tell herself that this was simply due to a lifetime’s exposure to society’s strict and outdated social mores, and to the pressures of the U.S. Military, to boot. But really, even if Atlantis were a big free-love hippie commune, it wouldn’t make Katie’s stories about proper soil irrigation any more interesting. Mustering up a healthy dose of prurient interest was difficult when you were minutes away from passing out in your salad. Not to mention the fact that Shelmerdine kept rubbing up against her ankle inappropriately; Laura was reminded that she wasn’t attracted to him, either.
She extracted herself as nimbly as possible, then grimacing, started back through the halls toward her room. She was rounding a corner when she ran smack into McKay, who’d been staring down at a data tablet. “Oh for God’s sake,” he snapped, “can’t you look where you’re going?”
“I was!” she all but shrieked. Normally, she liked to remain loftily above his insults, but right then...
Right then, his eyes stopped checking for damage done to his datapad or person, and switched to admiring her breasts in her red swoopy top.
“McKay,” she said suddenly, grabbing his jacket by the lapels. Then she wrenched him to her, and yes, yes! This was it, the missing piece, and everything came together, perfectly, as if it—as if they had been made for exactly this.
V.
They got McKay back, but it was a close thing. Afterwards, Laura was one of many people to stop by the infirmary and see how he was doing. Not well, was her assessment: he looked pale and unhappy, grim. He didn’t even bother snapping at her, just nodded his thanks when she told him that she glad he was all right, and eventually accepted her awkward, “Okay, I’ll be going now...” with the same weary nod. Laura left feeling distinctly uncomfortable.
“Why do you think that is?” Kate asked her, at their next session.
Laura shrugged. “Maybe...maybe I feel like I ought to understand him, what with having spent that oh-so-special time in his head? So, so it bothers me when I so clearly don’t?”
“But you weren’t in his head,” Kate said, patiently. “You were in his body. Is that really the same thing?”
“No,” Laura admitted. “It’s not. But McKay...he’s not exactly a tricky guy to figure out.”
Kate didn’t reply, and Laura blushed suddenly, remembering that Rodney was her patient, too.
But later, Laura fell back on her conviction that McKay was not a complicated man. She spent plenty of time studying him in order to confirm this. She took note of his persistent pettiness—arguing semantics with anyone who would dare to listen, squabbling with Zelenka over credit for the stupidest things; his easy arrogance—his lips turning up into a smirk, his small, softly-emitted snorts; and his general, almost wilful incompetence when it came to his fellow human beings. But her data (and See? she wanted to say to Kate: she had been in his head; his way of thinking had rubbed off on her) was imperfect, because she also saw him open and unguarded, working through his own obvious fear or hurt; or joking with Sheppard; or putting in a kind word for Zelenka with Doctor Weir when he thought no one (least of all Zelenka himself) was around to hear.
Laura didn’t know what to do with this information, with any of it, so she filed it away, and talked to Kate about other things: her worries about Carson, about how distant he had become; and about the dark pall into which the city seemed to have sunk, the abyss of bad morals and worse choices in which she—a single Marine, no matter how good, no matter how skilled—was useless, and feeling, and resenting, every second of it.
Then they almost lost McKay again, this time to the Wraith instead of to the ocean, and when they got him back, it was like the last time only worse. He lay in the infirmary, looking hollow-eyed and strangely drawn. Laura, once again, felt it her duty to come by and pay her respects, but she left when she heard McKay and Carson talking earnestly from the other side of the curtain. She was angry at herself for running away—still the preferable emotion to wondering which of them she was actually running from.
Time passed and McKay regained much of his bluster. Laura, on the other hand, couldn’t recapture what she and Carson had once had, and wasn’t sure if she wanted to. She felt like some of the shine had come off the Pegasus Galaxy, off the City of the Ancients. This feeling was reinforced when a patrol team she was part of stumbled into a sealed room that had apparently been sealed for a reason. All four of them—Gillis, Andersen, Kane, and Laura herself—were immediately immobilized in shafts of what looked and felt like gelatinous light, and they all had to watch as Gillis, who’d been in the lead, was slowly broken apart, his body drawn, almost delicately, into individual molecules that were then sucked up and swept away. Wide-eyed, she watched: her body not her own, unable even to blink.
Andersen’s fingers were starting to come apart by the time McKay and Zelenka arrived, and it was McKay’s voice she heard as she waited for her turn: to die or be saved, she wasn’t sure. His voice: steady and competent, giving orders, not wasting words on reassurances but having to pause for several seconds after they lost Andersen, and again after Kane faded away.
She could feel herself drifting apart, but something about McKay’s voice was like an anchor, and afterwards, after the last-minute rescue (one out of four; a poor percentage) she knew it was that (and the luck, the pure stupid luck of having been the one on their six and thus the last to enter the room) that had saved her. What McKay’s theories were she never knew: whatever ability to read him she had once possessed was now lost, along with so many other things. But he sat with her in the infirmary, squeezing her hand—tight, tight, tightly—and it took the arrival of Carson to make him let go.
Later, she went to McKay’s room. She wasn’t sure this was what she wanted, but she wanted something, needed something to change, and so she went.
Rodney stared at her for a long time when he opened the door. “This is so, so stupid,” he said.
But still, arms open: he let her in.
Title: All Roads Lead
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: McKay/Cadman, with incidental Cadman/Beckett & McKay/Sheppard
Spoilers: Very minor through ‘Allies’
Length: ~2300 words
Summary: Five ways Laura Cadman eventually slept with Rodney McKay.
All Roads Lead
I.
“Murf,” said Laura, burrowing more deeply into the pillow and trying to block out the sunlight creeping mercilessly through the blinds.
“Gurk,” replied the person next her.
She pushed closer to him, burying her nose into the warm, comforting expanse of his back. “Mmm, Carson.”
“Mmm,” he echoed. Then, after a slight pause, “John?”
“Ack!” said Laura.
“Gah!” said McKay.
They scrambled to either side of the bed, each trying to take the sheet with them. After a brief scuffle, Laura triumphed, wresting it away. McKay settled for clutching a pillow tightly to his front.
“So,” he said, blinking wildly. “I wasn’t aware that solar eclipses had that effect in this galaxy.”
“Me neither,” said Laura.
They stared at each other.
“Right,” Laura said, “so we’ll never speak of this again.”
“Sounds good.”
“Yes.”
“Agreed.”
Then McKay used up all the hot water in her shower before sneaking home.
II.
In the time it took Laura to say, “I’m sorry, what?” and to blink a lot, McKay had already sighed and said, “With her? Really? Her?”; sighed again; and started stripping off his vest.
The Thelians clearly seemed to take this a sign of full cooperation, bowing to them and leaving the room. Laura switched her incredulity to a much simpler target. “What are you doing?” she barked at McKay, who had the vest off and was currently working on his shirt, exposing the pale stretch of chest Laura was already far, far too familiar with. She was not, by nature, an especially modest person, but she had to control the urge to blush and look away. “You aren’t seriously planning on just...doing what they asked?”
McKay shrugged. “Why not? This happens all the time; it’s much simpler just to go along with it.”
She knew her mouth was hanging open. “Go along?”
“Mutual orgasm is usually all that’s required,” he said, tapping his foot, oddly business-like and impatient. “Don’t worry, Colonel Sheppard has trained us all to be very efficient.”
Okay, now her mouth was hanging open. Because that brought to mind some very...some very interesting mental images, ones that she quickly decided to file away and explore in more detail later.
“You don’t even have to do anything,” McKay said, laying it out there like a plan to save the city. “I figure I can just go down on you and then maybe jerk off.” He licked his lips: broad, clever lips; tongue Laura could still remember as if it had been in her very own mouth.
Her own mouth: lips slowly coming back together, forming words. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I guess that’d be okay.”
III.
On M4S-283, McKay was fuming at her and Laura was trying to deflect it, rolling her eyes and disparaging his manhood as much as possible. So: pretty much like every mission they’d been forced to go on together, which were thankfully few and far between. But for whatever reason, it wasn’t even its usual perverse brand of fun today: instead of turning an increasingly amusing shade of red, McKay was getting more and more sullen, and Laura herself was finding her persistent, nothing-you-say-can-bother-me smile becoming ever more forced.
So when the gnarled old priestess stepped between them and muttered something about “healing the rift,” mostly what Laura felt was relief. Even when the Ancient device lit up in the old woman’s hand, the brief spark of fear came second, and was gone long before it could begin to catch.
Instead she caught: McKay’s eyes, going wide, far bluer than she remembered. And an intense wave of how he smelled: the soapy scent of someone almost fastidiously clean, but overlaid with that day’s dirt and sweat, strong but not unpleasant, musky. “Yes,” Laura said, as McKay, for once in agreement, said, “Yes,” and then the rift vanished completely in a tangle of limbs and—God, yes!—his mouth, moving skilfully, easing the smile back onto her face.
Dimly, she was aware of the priestess staring down at the device in her hand like she was newly unsure of the settings. “I’ll take that, thanks,” she heard Sheppard say, as she arched her neck to give McKay better access to her throat. “Does anybody have a hose?”
IV.
There were a lot of reasons why Laura’s first kiss with Carson was not the best first kiss she had ever had. Number one would probably be the fact that she was in McKay’s body at the time. But still, the memory of that kiss stayed with her, an oddly compelling element to her fantasies. It didn’t bother her; she understood that fantasies, turn-ons, were not always something that a person could control.
Still, it was frustrating, her attempts—and her perpetual failure—to recapture that moment, or more accurately, whatever it was about that moment that still enticed her. That was really the key: if only she could separate out the essential factor, she would be able to replicate it, move beyond it. So when Carson came back to his quarters, sometimes she would be waiting for him. She would grab him by the lapels and pull his mouth against hers, kissing fiercely. And that worked for a while...until it began to annoy him. “Do you have to attack me like that every night?” he asked once, rubbing at his lips. Then quickly apologizing when he saw her face, so nice and kind, and dammit, dammit, not what she wanted, no longer the just-intangible thing that made her breath come quickly, raised her heartrate, made her thrill.
Maybe it was the sense of impending danger that she had liked, she thought, quickly kissing Sergeant Shelmerdine before they were both led out to be shot on M6F-738. The explosives she had planted earlier of course went off perfectly on schedule and provided enough of a distraction for them to escape, and she later explained the kiss away as the product of adrenaline before avoiding Shelmerdine strenuously for weeks. It hadn’t done anything for her, anyway, although it had apparently been enough to turn Shelmerdine into a love-sick fool. Laura eventually had to set him up with Katie Brown to get him off her back.
Which left her right back where she had begun. Maybe, she thought, turning it over again in her head one night: maybe it had actually been the illicitness of the kiss that had captured her imagination? Kissing a man with another man’s lips...or maybe, even (and she sat down, trying to work out how she felt about this) she was just projecting, and it was the earlier kiss that was still tantalizing her: bending Katie back over her (McKay’s) arm and showing her (him) what this kissing business was all about.
When Shelmerdine asked her to come have dinner with him and Katie sometime, Laura found herself eagerly accepting the offer. She was a modern woman, and regs or no, she wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of her happiness. And since her brain was possibly insisting that a lusty lesbian affair with Katie Brown was what would make her happy, well...she figured she could make Shelmerdine really happy, and talk the joyous couple into a threesome, no problem.
Except, ten minutes into dinner (an event to which she had worn her sexiest swoopy red top) she realized that she was the one with a problem: she really wasn’t attracted to Katie. At all. She tried to tell herself that this was simply due to a lifetime’s exposure to society’s strict and outdated social mores, and to the pressures of the U.S. Military, to boot. But really, even if Atlantis were a big free-love hippie commune, it wouldn’t make Katie’s stories about proper soil irrigation any more interesting. Mustering up a healthy dose of prurient interest was difficult when you were minutes away from passing out in your salad. Not to mention the fact that Shelmerdine kept rubbing up against her ankle inappropriately; Laura was reminded that she wasn’t attracted to him, either.
She extracted herself as nimbly as possible, then grimacing, started back through the halls toward her room. She was rounding a corner when she ran smack into McKay, who’d been staring down at a data tablet. “Oh for God’s sake,” he snapped, “can’t you look where you’re going?”
“I was!” she all but shrieked. Normally, she liked to remain loftily above his insults, but right then...
Right then, his eyes stopped checking for damage done to his datapad or person, and switched to admiring her breasts in her red swoopy top.
“McKay,” she said suddenly, grabbing his jacket by the lapels. Then she wrenched him to her, and yes, yes! This was it, the missing piece, and everything came together, perfectly, as if it—as if they had been made for exactly this.
V.
They got McKay back, but it was a close thing. Afterwards, Laura was one of many people to stop by the infirmary and see how he was doing. Not well, was her assessment: he looked pale and unhappy, grim. He didn’t even bother snapping at her, just nodded his thanks when she told him that she glad he was all right, and eventually accepted her awkward, “Okay, I’ll be going now...” with the same weary nod. Laura left feeling distinctly uncomfortable.
“Why do you think that is?” Kate asked her, at their next session.
Laura shrugged. “Maybe...maybe I feel like I ought to understand him, what with having spent that oh-so-special time in his head? So, so it bothers me when I so clearly don’t?”
“But you weren’t in his head,” Kate said, patiently. “You were in his body. Is that really the same thing?”
“No,” Laura admitted. “It’s not. But McKay...he’s not exactly a tricky guy to figure out.”
Kate didn’t reply, and Laura blushed suddenly, remembering that Rodney was her patient, too.
But later, Laura fell back on her conviction that McKay was not a complicated man. She spent plenty of time studying him in order to confirm this. She took note of his persistent pettiness—arguing semantics with anyone who would dare to listen, squabbling with Zelenka over credit for the stupidest things; his easy arrogance—his lips turning up into a smirk, his small, softly-emitted snorts; and his general, almost wilful incompetence when it came to his fellow human beings. But her data (and See? she wanted to say to Kate: she had been in his head; his way of thinking had rubbed off on her) was imperfect, because she also saw him open and unguarded, working through his own obvious fear or hurt; or joking with Sheppard; or putting in a kind word for Zelenka with Doctor Weir when he thought no one (least of all Zelenka himself) was around to hear.
Laura didn’t know what to do with this information, with any of it, so she filed it away, and talked to Kate about other things: her worries about Carson, about how distant he had become; and about the dark pall into which the city seemed to have sunk, the abyss of bad morals and worse choices in which she—a single Marine, no matter how good, no matter how skilled—was useless, and feeling, and resenting, every second of it.
Then they almost lost McKay again, this time to the Wraith instead of to the ocean, and when they got him back, it was like the last time only worse. He lay in the infirmary, looking hollow-eyed and strangely drawn. Laura, once again, felt it her duty to come by and pay her respects, but she left when she heard McKay and Carson talking earnestly from the other side of the curtain. She was angry at herself for running away—still the preferable emotion to wondering which of them she was actually running from.
Time passed and McKay regained much of his bluster. Laura, on the other hand, couldn’t recapture what she and Carson had once had, and wasn’t sure if she wanted to. She felt like some of the shine had come off the Pegasus Galaxy, off the City of the Ancients. This feeling was reinforced when a patrol team she was part of stumbled into a sealed room that had apparently been sealed for a reason. All four of them—Gillis, Andersen, Kane, and Laura herself—were immediately immobilized in shafts of what looked and felt like gelatinous light, and they all had to watch as Gillis, who’d been in the lead, was slowly broken apart, his body drawn, almost delicately, into individual molecules that were then sucked up and swept away. Wide-eyed, she watched: her body not her own, unable even to blink.
Andersen’s fingers were starting to come apart by the time McKay and Zelenka arrived, and it was McKay’s voice she heard as she waited for her turn: to die or be saved, she wasn’t sure. His voice: steady and competent, giving orders, not wasting words on reassurances but having to pause for several seconds after they lost Andersen, and again after Kane faded away.
She could feel herself drifting apart, but something about McKay’s voice was like an anchor, and afterwards, after the last-minute rescue (one out of four; a poor percentage) she knew it was that (and the luck, the pure stupid luck of having been the one on their six and thus the last to enter the room) that had saved her. What McKay’s theories were she never knew: whatever ability to read him she had once possessed was now lost, along with so many other things. But he sat with her in the infirmary, squeezing her hand—tight, tight, tightly—and it took the arrival of Carson to make him let go.
Later, she went to McKay’s room. She wasn’t sure this was what she wanted, but she wanted something, needed something to change, and so she went.
Rodney stared at her for a long time when he opened the door. “This is so, so stupid,” he said.
But still, arms open: he let her in.
