Fiercely dreamed

Summary: I’m not a stoic guy under the best of circumstances, and the best of circumstances would have crossed the street three blocks back to avoid the smell of the day I’d been having. PI Rodney McKay’s past comes full circle, and it may not be his client’s fault, but Sheppard certainly isn’t helping. [SGA AU, McKay/Sheppard, adult/explicit.]
Notes: A chapter from a novel that does not exist. Thanks to Aesc, Amberlynne, and Villainny for letting me borrow their Rodney McKay: Private Eye concept.

“You are seeing today an all-out attempt to marshal the forces of the opposition, using not merely the communists or their fellow travelers — the deluded liberals, the eggheads, and some of my good friends in both the Democratic and Republican Parties who can become heroes overnight in the eyes of the left-wing press if they will just join with the jackal pack.”
– Joseph McCarthy

18.

The stairs up to my apartment stretch out like an Escher drawing, most of the overhead bulbs burned out and flies buzzing fitfully around the few that aren’t. After the last eighteen hours of hell, the ascent into purgatory is grueling enough that I find myself marooned on a landing, staring at a doorwell and wondering just how irked its resident would be if I spent the night on his doormat. I’m three-quarters of the way done running the numbers before I notice that it’s my doormat.

Home sweet home.

I fumble my key into the lock. Even though I took the damn thing apart and reassembled it last week, it’s less than happy to see me. There’s jiggling and swearing and yanking, some coaxing and maybe a little crying, but finally it gives up the ghost and I all but fall across the threshold. The floor looks pretty inviting, but I ignore its advances long enough shut the door, shoot the bolt, and slide the chain into place. The kind of crowd I’ve been tangling with, I can’t fool myself that it’ll stop them, but at least the racket should give me enough warning to toss myself off the broken fire escape and save me some pain and them some trouble.

The wood of the door is cool and reassuring. I give in to the urge to lay the unbruised side of my face against it and just close my eyes for a moment. I haven’t eaten for thirteen hours, my ribs are screaming where Kolya’s goons did a tap dance on them, and the fifteen blocks I ran before they caught me have left my legs feeling like someone swapped the bones for gelatin. Adrenaline’s long gone now and my bravado with it, and there’s a pretty good chance that the deal I made with Todd’s only bought me enough time to appreciate the drop under me before I swing.

But locked in Teyla’s safe are both rolls of blackmail photographs, negatives and all, and if I can finagle my way into Larrin’s safe deposit box, I might be able to get Sheppard out of this alive. An uninterrupted night of sleep, and there’s even a chance I can find a loophole that’ll get me out of it, too.

A breeze slips in from the open window, brushing aside the night’s oppressive heat like cool fingers running over the nape of my neck. I tilt my head toward it, breathing, my mind dulled into silence. It’s not real peace, but any kind of quiet’s in short supply even in the good weeks. I’ve learned to take it when I can get it. After long seconds, one thought emerges from the emptiness, falling slowly like a rock sinking to the river, and I watch it until it comes into focus.

I didn’t leave that window open.

“Late night for you, McKay.”

Sheppard’s voice slices through the dark like a dull blade. Even with the split-second of knowing that something’s coming, my flinch is still violent enough to rattle the chain on the door. I’m not a stoic guy under the best of circumstances, and the best of circumstances would have crossed the street three blocks back to avoid the smell of the day I’d been having. “Jesus Christ.” I pinch the bridge of my nose, pure habit, and regret it as the kick-drum of my swollen eye pounds a little louder in protest. “Congratulations, it’s official: you’re a psychopath. What the hell are you doing here?”

I don’t realize I’m listening for his shrug until a few seconds tick past without the sound of one. “You stood me up.”

“Right, well, so sorry I loused up your evening, but you couldn’t have handled the disappointment with a little more class? You know, fume all night, buy a new dress, meet your girlfriends at Jake’s and spend an hour raking me over the–”

“I said, you stood me up, McKay.” There’s heat and muscle in the words, and they cut me off like a fist to the face. I hear him take a slow, unsteady breath that stands the hair on the back of my neck on end. It was a mistake to get better acquainted with the front door, because my back’s to him and right now, I really don’t want it to be.

When he continues, his tone is lighter, wearing the veneer of his usual casualness. “It’s happened to me before, but not all that often. After a couple of hours, I got curious, so I drove down to the Emerald Green.”

My head jerks toward his voice at that — not enough to turn me around, but it puts a few more feet of the room in the periphery of my good eye. A thin line of blue light cuts through the curtains and across the middle of the floor. From there to the far wall is shadow so thick it might as well be paint. “Oh my god, I take it back. You’re not a psychopath, you’re a suicidal moron! Steve knows about the contract Cowen put out on you — you think that if you go waltzing through his front door, he’s not going to hear about it and start reconsidering that offer?”

Sheppard laughs. It isn’t pleasant. “Worried for me? Don’t be. I know that kind of place. The bouncer and the host may know who to watch for, but the rest of the staff won’t. Too much effort.” My mind’s running down about eight different tracks, each at a different speed, and it frees up a couple thoughts to wonder, yet again, just what it was that Sheppard did after the war, those missing four years where he fell off the map.

He doles the words out at an easy pace, the way you’d strop a razor. “I snuck round the back, found a busboy taking a smoke. Slipped him a fiver and told him I was looking for my brother-in-law. The accountant.” The consonants on that are nice and crisp, and they shouldn’t sting but they do. “I said you’d had a fight with the missus and couldn’t hold your gin, and I was worried you were going to hit the tables and get in over your head.”

I roll my eyes, knowing there’s probably not enough light for him to see me do it. “It’s four a.m. and you’re no Hamlet. Spare me the soliloquy and say whatever it is you’ve got to say.” God damn it, I think. God damn whatever it is about him that made my misanthropy go out for a smoke break whenever he showed up. God damn whatever made me answer his pointless questions about how a guy like me can do a job like this. It’s been a long time since I cared enough what someone thought of me to make an effort. It’s working out about as well as I remember.

“The thing is,” Sheppard says, “he did remember you. He said he’d seen the guy I wanted a couple hours ago, cuddled up to a blonde in a Chinese dress.” I don’t wince, but I want to. Sora. Oh yeah, we’d been real cozy, her hand on my knee and her .22 digging into my ribs. The breeze circles over to me again, bringing with it the sharp smell of whiskey. “Then he said that if it’d make my sister feel better, you were probably dead by now, because the table you were at was Mr. Cowen’s table and the blonde you left with was Mr. Kolya’s girl.”

My mouth goes dry. Down below, a car drives past with its brights on, and the glare of its headlights slide through the shadows at the far end of the room. Half a second and then the dark is back, impenetrable as ever, but I’d been able to catch three things out of place as it passed through. Sheppard himself, not in the chair like I’d expected, but sitting on the edge of my bed. Two fingers of whiskey in a tumbler on the table. And all but hidden in the unmade covers by his thigh, the glint of blued steel.

Fuck.

My .38’s holstered at my side, but all of the bullets are still in Bay City on Kolya’s workbench. If I go for it now, he’s going to see my hands moving a mile before they get there, and I’m certain to the bone that if I pull a piece on John Sheppard, one of us is going to end up shot. With my gun unloaded, there’s no way it’s going to be him, but even with all the chambers full, I wouldn’t put money on me being the man left standing. Buy time, McKay. Buy time. “Sheppard, I–”

I don’t hear or see when he starts to move, but two long strides take him across the line of light and his hand slams down flat right next to my face, making me jump. I can feel the anger rolling off of him like the Santa Ana winds scorching down from the desert. “Shut the hell up,” he hisses.

I do.

He can’t be more than two inches taller than me but he knows how to use them, shoulders curving over mine, face tilted down so that I’m trapped between him and the door with no room to pull away. “What’d he offer you, McKay?” This close, I could read the movement of his lips from the breath ghosting over my ear if I had to. “You wouldn’t do it just for money. A ticket back to MIT, maybe? Get someone to put in a word for you at State so they’ll take you off the blacklist, let you start your research again?”

I close my eyes — stupid, green mistake, but I’ve never kidded myself that I’ve got a poker face. The memory’s still fresh enough to set my hands shaking — Cowen’s avuncular smile, the casual way he spoke of picking up the phone and having my name wiped clean. Two more calls and I’d have my grants back. Just do this one thing for him, and I could leave the shit job that I hated and go back to my labs and my chalkboards and my students, back to work that really mattered. Work that would outlive us all.

When I’d refused, it wasn’t the hit to the guts that made me choke, but the realization that I’d actually turned him down.

Sheppard must see my expression change, because he goes so still that I can almost hear it, sudden tension singing like piano wire. “Son of a bitch,” he whispers. “You bastard. You went over. I can’t — goddammit, I trusted you.” He makes a small broken sound, not a laugh, not anything else I have a name for. “Elizabeth’s on the line for twenty to life, if they don’t send her straight to the chamber, I’m in up to my neck trying to get her out of it, and what do you do? God damn you, you sold us down the river.”

There’s not a drop of whiskey on his breath, and my mind flashes back to the tumbler on the table. A shot for courage, and he hadn’t had the guts to drink it? But then, nothing I know of Sheppard makes me think he’d need to. I wish I could see his other hand.

I take a sharp breath, grasping for words that don’t stand a chance of convincing him. When he slams his palm into the door again, I almost bite through my tongue.

“I said shut the hell up,” he grates out. “You know, for someone who says he’s a genius, you’re not all that bright. So you thought you could keep me on the hook long enough that they’d get me before I figured it out, huh? You thought I was one of the good guys?” His voice sinks lower in the register, rough-edged with promise, and I fight the shiver that goes through me. “Well, let me tell you, I know how to go down in flames, only you’re not going to live to see it, you gutless, backstabbing–”

“Oh come on, quit yammering and just do it already.” The words jerk out of me at four times the decibel level of his hissed threats, and his jaw shuts with a snap. My instinct for self-preservation tends to go offline at the worst possible times, and this ranks right alongside the Committee hearings. I lay the scorn on as thick as I can manage, sneer twisting my face until the bruises ache. “The logic’s seamless, why waste time trying to deny it? You’re absolutely right, Sheppard — I’ve got a cracked rib and rope burn on both wrists because I double-crossed you. I’ve hocked my soul for a shot at that safe deposit box because I want to leave Larrin a birthday present. I tracked down both rolls of blackmail photos because I can’t get enough of Caldwell’s pretty face.”

Sheppard’s gone still again, but now that I’m talking I can’t seem to stop. “What are you waiting for? I just gave you a full confession, so let’s get the show moving here. Call Kolya and his friends while you’re at it, you can have yourselves a nice little firing squad. Believe me, the week I’ve been having, you’ll be doing me a favor.” We’re both breathing much too hard and I think, I have lied and stolen for you. I’ve put two friends in the line of fire. I’ve gambled and I’ve bled and not three hours ago, I turned down the chance to get my old life back. God damn you if you think I’m going to stand here waiting for you to run out of synonyms for coward so you can shoot me in the head. “I know the war was a while ago, but I promise, the trigger’s a very simple mechanism. Just wrap your finger around it, the rest’ll come right back to you.”

“Prove it.” The whisper scrapes up from the bottom of his throat.

“Fuck you.” It snaps out like a reflex.

“Goddammit, McKay!” He grabs my shoulder and hauls me up an extra inch, shoving me against the door and sending pain spiking through my ribs. “You’re going to prove it!”

“Jacket pocket,” I spit. “Left side.” Right now I couldn’t say which one of us I hate more.

Sheppard presses hard against me from my shoulders down to the knee shoved in between mine, pinning me as thoroughly as if he’d tied me to the door. He slides his hand down my back and around my side, groping for my pocket. I can feel his heart pounding against my back, and as wrung-out and beat-down as I am, it still makes my pulse race a little faster. It’s funny like a hole in the head.

His fingers fumble inside the pocket for a few seconds and then his breath catches. “That’s–”

“The key to the safe deposit box.” I’d spent the taxi ride to the Emerald imagining his face when I told him, coming up with modest little asides to make as I held it up to catch the light. The words taste as flat as tap water now. “I still don’t know exactly how it ties in to all this, and it’s going to be a bitch to get to. But I’ve got a few ideas.”

“You said — the blackmail photos?” The fist he’s closed around the key is shaking.

In thirty-six years I’ve never been able to keep the right answer to myself, but I have to grit my teeth and swallow hard against the temptation to tell him nope, sorry, they’re no good — only thing they’ll show a jury is Weir’s boring lingerie. It’s petty vindictiveness, with ten-to-one odds he’ll shoot me later when he finds out I snowed him, but there’s nothing like having someone think the worst of me to make me want to prove them right.

“They put her in Carmel with Caldwell on the morning of Sumner’s murder,” I mutter. “It’ll ruin them both, so you don’t want to use them unless you have to, but if nothing else works out they’ll be enough to clear the charges against her.”

All the air goes out of him in a rush and he sinks bonelessly into me, face dropping down into the curve of my neck. In my pocket, his hand releases the key to clutch at my side.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispers, hoarse as a prayer. “You did it. I can’t believe you did it.”

The loose curl of his body around mine is unfathomable. It’s like he’s been flipped to another station, one where he didn’t break into my apartment with a gun on the strength of two minutes’ conversation with some stoned busboy. His breath seeps through the crumpled fabric of my collar, and the intimacy of it is more than I can take.

He stumbles when I shove out from under him, his left hand still caught in my pocket. I yank my jacket free of him as I walk away, then wrestle it off and throw it onto the chair. It’s an ill-considered move that leaves me pressing one hand against my chest, waiting for the ache to die down. “Yes, well, I’m a marvel of detection. Too bad Cowen’s going to kill both of us for it before she ever gets to trial.”

The tumbler is still sitting on the table by the window. I raise it in a mocking toast, then throw the contents straight back. It’s too much too quickly and I nearly choke. Perfect end to a perfect day.

I press the glass to my swollen eye and behind me, Sheppard lets out a hiss. Before I can find the energy to turn around, he’s crossed the room and taken hold of my arm, one hand at my elbow, the other just below my wrist. He pulls me in front of the window and tugs the curtain open, letting the light from the street spill in.

The cuff of my shirt has fallen back, its buttons the least casualty of the evening’s festivities. Even in the dim glow from the window, the rings of rope-marks are luridly dark around my wrist. I haven’t had a chance to really look at them until now, and the sight turns my stomach. “I wasn’t lying, you know.” My voice comes out faint and a little plaintive, and I want to cringe. “Those Neanderthals Kolya hired tie knots like they’re back on the farm hitching the horse up. I’d be shocked if they don’t snap their shoelaces four tries out of five.”

“Jesus, McKay.” He turns my arm in his hands, checking the damage, and when he looks back up at my face his eyes go wide, like he’s only now registering the bruising there. His expression tightens, and he takes me by the shoulder and marches me into my own bathroom.

The light from the bare bulb sinks into my bad eye like an ice pick, and I squint against the momentary flash of grimy white linoleum I catch before closing my eyes. There’s a click and some quiet shuffling as he rummages through the cabinets, his body positioned squarely between me and the door like he thinks I’m going to make a break for it. The thought holds a certain amount of appeal, but contemplating it’s enough to make me want to lie down on the floor to recover. Besides, where would I go?

The cabinet door shuts. “C’mere,” Sheppard orders, and I jerk upright as he grabs my hips. He maneuvers the two of us around the cramped space until he’s got me leaned back against the sink, then steps in close between my thighs. Taking my jaw in his hands, he tilts my face upward, craning his head back a little so he doesn’t block the light.

“That’s a hell of a shiner they gave you,” he pronounces matter-of-factly, the way someone’d comment on the smashed and dangling headlight of a stranger’s Chevrolet. He twists around to snag the washrag off the shower rod, then makes a face at its dingy hue and chucks it back into the tub. “Ugh.” The hand towel doesn’t pass muster either. He pulls a blue linen square out of his pocket and reaches around me to run it under the tap. “No offense, but you really should think about getting a maid.”

His chest brushes against mine as he peers over my shoulder, and I try to lean back out of his way. “It’s not exactly easy to find someone who’ll go up seven flights of stairs for what I can pay. Not that I don’t appreciate your unsolicited housekeeping advice.”

“Anytime,” he says, and presses the damp cloth against the split skin above my cheekbone. I swear and his eyes narrow, but he doesn’t let up. There’s a rusty smear on the cloth when he pulls it away to rinse it.

His hands move with dispassionate efficiency as he cleans me up, like there’s no difference between wiping blood from another man’s face and cleaning grease off an engine block. I wonder which Sheppard I’m seeing now: the pilot-turned-amateur-mechanic, who spends his time under the hood of his plane when he’s not airborne? The combat veteran, with his standard-issue first aid training? Or maybe that other Sheppard, the one I’ve only heard about in rumor and innuendo, with a sly smile before the speaker knocks back a shot of bourbon or takes a long draw off a cigarette.

Caught uncomfortably between my train of thought and Sheppard’s grip, I fumble around for something to say and come up with a point that hasn’t been addressed yet. “How the hell did you get in here, anyway?”

He sets the cloth down on the edge of the sink and rips off a piece of medical tape. “I came up the fire escape.”

I hiss as he tapes the cut closed. “The fire escape is broken.”

One of his eyebrows tilts up at the corner, though his attention stays focused on the patch job he’s performing. “It wasn’t too hard. I read a lot of Batman comics. You’re gonna want to replace the lock on that window — it didn’t take much to jimmy it open.” He pulls back again to survey his handiwork and the light bounces up off the sink behind me, washing his irises from muddy hazel to a surprisingly clear green.

I look away and force a chuckle. It comes out dry as concrete. “Sheppard, I’m starting to get the feeling that you’d be a lot better at this job than I am.”

He goes tight at that, fingertips tensing on my jaw and leg muscles stiffening where his thighs brush against mine. “Let me see those wrists,” he says brusquely. When I don’t decode the parameters of that non-instruction fast enough, he grabs my arms and pulls them up between us.

“Ow! Hey!” I tug back against his grip.

“Quit squirming,” he snaps, but his fingers immediately loosen. He holds my forearms against my chest with one palm as he twists the cap off the hydrogen peroxide and tips it onto his handkerchief one-handed. Then he pulls my right hand outward so my arm is half-extended and starts dabbing at the abrasions on my wrist.

“That stings,” I complain.

“Yeah, well, it’ll sting a lot more if it gets infected.” His hair’s flopped forward, obscuring my view of his face, but I can hear the scowl well enough to know it’s there. After a minute, he mutters, “You shouldn’t have let them do this.”

I stare down at the top of his head. “Oh gee, why didn’t that occur to me? All this time I never realized, it was just a question of discipline! Next time someone’s pet thugs want to kidnap me and tie me to a chair, I’ll tell them no. Hey, I bet if I smack them on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, that’ll really drive the message home.”

A flush climbs up the back of his neck. “Dammit, that’s not — I just–” He turns my hand over and pours more peroxide onto the cloth. “I meant this would have gone easier for you if you’d agreed to what they wanted.”

“No, not really,” I tell him, incredulity drawing my accent out in the vowels. “If I’d agreed, then I would’ve come back home and you would have shot me. That would only make my life easier in the way where I’d be dead.”

He slaps the cloth down on the sink. “I hired you to get the photos, McKay, not to get your face pasted in by Cowen and his crew! Why didn’t you just finish the job and walk away before you got hurt?” When Sheppard turns to reach for the ointment, I get a quick glimpse of his expression. There’s something wild around the edges of his eyes.

This is the veteran I’m talking to now, I think. The guy the Army Air Forces had to move from Bombardment to Reconnaissance because he kept trying to double back from the far edge of a firefight and find the positions of anyone who’d gotten shot down along the way. I remembered what Lorne had said about him, that if there’d been a way to land a plane on rubble and pick up the survivors, Sheppard would’ve done it; enemy fire be damned.

He squeezes a circle of ointment into the palm of the hand that’s holding mine and scoops it up with the fingers of the other. He’s breathing fast through his nose like an agitated racehorse, but the circling of his fingertips against my wrist is so light I can barely feel it, just the wash of cool the ointment leaves in its wake.

“Just another day on the job at Schrödinger Investigations,” I tell the top of his head. But it isn’t. In five years as a private dick, the most physical job I’ve taken was the first one, sneaking through the rosebushes to get a picture of the pool-boy and the daughter through the kitchen window. I’m not a brave man or a stupid one, and I figured out long ago that I could get paid a lot better for finding the grift in account ledgers than for sticking my neck out for any of the rough stuff. Forty-eight hours after Sheppard wandered through my office door, it’d been crystal-clear that the real job was a lot bigger and a lot messier than what he’d hired me to do, and that either I could get out fast or get tangled up with him.

Why hadn’t I told him to take a powder? With Sheppard’s head only inches from mine and his fingers rubbing over my wrist like he’s trying to erase the last six hours from the record, the answer hangs over us both like the sword of Damocles.

I’m doing my damnedest not to look up.

Sheppard winds a roll of gauze around my wrist, snips the end off, and tapes it in place. When he lets go of my hand, the air feels strangely cool against the spots where he’d been holding it. I twist my wrist, but the bandage doesn’t shift or bind. He picks up the handkerchief, folds it around until he finds a clean section, and wets it down with hydrogen peroxide. I settle the heel of my right hand on the edge of the sink and let him draw my left arm away from my chest.

I watch him work in silence for a while before admitting, “Much as I’d love to blame you for the considerable pain and hassle I’ve undergone tonight, this isn’t actually your fault.”

His hand pauses, but only for a second. His face is tilted down away from mine again. “Oh yeah?” he says, sounding disinterested. “How do you figure?”

Now it’s my turn to go silent, to feel my blood slow down in my veins. I make myself keep breathing, moving air through my longs in measured intervals. In. Out. In. Out. It’s a minute of quiet effort before I can get my throat and tongue working again.

“It’s HUAC.” I can barely make out my own voice. “It’s the loyalty reviews. It’s ‘Americanism with its sleeves rolled up.’” He doesn’t stop what he’s doing, and I let my eyes close. It makes it a little easier. “They took my life away, Sheppard. If I could’ve rolled over for them, I would’ve done it at the hearing, but it wasn’t in me then and it’s not in me now.” I shake my head slowly. “Once I found out why they’d set Weir up, what she was trying to publish, I knew I wasn’t going to stop. No matter what.”

He rotates my wrist to run the cloth over the back of it. “And what if I told you I knew about that?” he asks. “What if I said it was why I came to you?”

I know how to go down in flames, Sheppard had said earlier. He wasn’t kidding. I know more than a little about self-sabotage, but I’ve never met anyone who lined up quicker to take a fall. My mouth tugs up at the corner. “But you didn’t,” I say. “You went to Ronon, only he had too many jobs on the line already. I know he keeps half a dozen different cards in his desk for referrals. What made you pick mine?”

His hand goes away for a few seconds. When it comes back, his fingertips skate in cool circles over my skin. He lets out a slow breath that I hadn’t known he’s been holding. “I liked the name,” he says.

“You liked — oh, Jesus Christ.” It startles a laugh out of me, painful and ragged, more of a cough than anything else. “You liked the name.” I’d chosen it in a moment of hatefulness, a bitter joke about truth and its observers that no one in my new line of work was ever supposed to get. And now it’s brought me full circle, right back to where I started. Only this time it’s someone else trapped in a steel box of accusations, waiting for the scrutiny of the so-called justice system to determine whether or not her life as she knows it has ended. I drop my chin to my chest and swallow hard, trying to get it together.

Sheppard finishes wrapping my wrist. I hear the snip of the shears and feel the end of the gauze tugged into place. I wait for him to step back. Instead, his fingers close over the front of my shirt and nudge a button free.

That snaps my head up fast. “What the hell are you doing?”

He doesn’t raise his eyes to mine, just drops his fingers to the next button. “I’m going to tape your ribs up. It’s hard to do it yourself if you don’t know how.”

“What? No!” I bat at his hands, but he just brushes me off and keeps working on my shirt. I sigh as loudly as I can manage without my bruised side cutting it short. “Look, Sheppard, I was exaggerating, okay? ‘Cracked rib’ made for a better line than ‘a bunch more bruises where you can’t see them.’ I’m fine.”

“That’s great, why don’t you let me take a look at it anyway?” He’s halfway down my chest now.

“Hi, have you met me? I’m a hypochondriac. Do you honestly think I wouldn’t have checked myself into the hospital if I thought there was the slightest chance of a lung collapse? Knock it off.” His hands on my wrists had been strangely soothing, but feeling them moving methodically from button to button makes me want to twitch out of my skin. I’ve been touched by too many people tonight, for too many reasons, and I can’t untangle the careful slide of his fingers over my wrists from his grip on my shoulder shoving me into the door. Half an hour ago I’d betrayed him and he’d been ready to shoot me for it; now I’m back on his side and every bruise is his responsibility. He hasn’t looked me in the eye in minutes. That tells me everything I need to know.

Having him stand with his thighs brushing mine as he undresses me is making me crazy, so close to what I want and still nowhere the same time zone. I grab for his hands in earnest as he gets the last button free, but instead of taking the hint like a reasonable person, he jerks loose and goes for the hem of my undershirt. We spend a minute grappling like school children over my right to remain clothed, and when it’s clear that this is another physical contest I’m destined to lose, I shove myself up off the sink and snatch the pull chain of the overhead light.

We’re doused in blackness, and I’m triumphant for exactly one second — try taking a look at me now, sucker — before I realize that I’m standing chest to chest with Sheppard, one knee insinuated in between his, with his hands tight on my waist and mine hovering above our shoulders like someone’s put a gun to the back of my head. My pulses stumbles and picks itself up into a sprint.

Our litany of threats and insults interrupted, we do a bad impression of the world’s most awkward pair of statues. We’re both panting — from the wrestling match, I remind myself, struggling to keep my grip on basic cause and effect — and with every exhalation his breath washes against my mouth. Any second now I’m going to embarrass myself and end up on the receiving end of the only punch tonight I’ll have actually deserved.

And then, with that strange auditory clarity I only ever experience in the pitch-dark, I hear him lick his lips. The thrill that goes through me matches the sound itself: halfway between the click of handcuffs unlocking and the click of someone pulling the hammer back.

“Did I mention I’m having a really strange night?” I start to ask, but I don’t get more than a syllable into it before Sheppard jerks me in that last inch and interrupts me in the most effective manner anyone’s found yet.

His mouth is slick, demanding and a little off the mark, hitting my upper lip off-center. I pull back reflexively, having botched more than my share of first kisses over the years, and with a frustrated noise he snakes one hand up to the back of my neck and seals our lips together. He doesn’t waste time with formalities; there’s tongue and teeth and the burn of stubble, a cocktail of sensation that sears through me and leaves my head spinning. I drop my hands to the tops of his shoulders, thumbs running up the corded muscles at the base of his neck, and he groans again and angles my head back further, opens his mouth to let me in. We kiss without patience and without any attempt at finesse, just heat, just our strength behind it, a prolonged contest of opposing momentum where only the answering press of each other’s bodies keep us from falling. His muscles flex and tense under my fingers. I run my hands down his chest and he shudders, using his grip at my waist to pull me in as his hips twitch forward. The devastating jolt of sensation nearly takes me out at the knees.

“Okay, not that I’m in a position to complain about the way this is going,” I mumble against the corner of his mouth, “but can we please, please take this to the bed before I humiliate myself by falling over?” In answer, he tips me back against the sink and braces his hand on the wall behind me as his hips roll against mine. Burying his face in the angle of my jaw, he sucks hard at the spot there and gasps as my head drops back.

“Jesus, fine.” The consonants are harsh but his voice frays on the vowels. He pushes himself off me and stumbles for the bathroom door, using a fistful of my shirt to drag me after him.

When we get to the bed, he yanks me in close for another hard kiss and then presses me backwards toward the mattress. It doesn’t go as planned. I’m at about a sixty-five degree angle when every abused muscle in my torso starts screaming in protest. At my hiss, Sheppard gets a hand under my elbow and changes the trajectory of his efforts, helping me lower myself down to sit on the edge of the bed. I’m breathless with pain and relief by the time my weight settles onto the mattress, and I open my mouth to gasp out something sarcastic about this ill-fated attempt at mutual seduction, but Sheppard cups a hand around my jaw and kisses me again and the words won’t come together.

There’s a focused desperation to the movements of his mouth against mine: the persuasive slide of his tongue, the expert way he uses his teeth, all of it fails to soften the onslaught of that kiss. I recognize the feel of it like the sound of my own voice, because Sheppard kisses the way I argue when I’m sure I’m going to lose, throwing everything he has into it in one unceasing rush. It’s the jolt of empathy that undoes me as much as the wash of desire.

This time, when he curls his hands around the collar of my shirt, I let him peel it back off my shoulders, and I cooperate as best I can when he tugs my undershirt up and over my head. The warmth of his palms skimming up my sides, skin along skin, is worth the pain of moving. He makes short work of his own shirt and throws it onto the floor. This much of him I saw that day on his back deck, but then it had been all the sun-burnished skin I’d been trying not to look at as he hauled himself out of the pool. Now, the blue light from the window picks out the contours of his body like frost: the complicated angles of muscle and bone that emerge and disappear as his shoulders move, the narrow outline of his torso, the dark whorls of hair that trail from his chest to his navel to disappear under the waistband of his trousers. He looks thinner and paler in the dark, like a sculpture stripped of an unnecessary coat of paint, leaving the form both starker and less easily defined.

He’s looking at me too, I realize belatedly, and his eyes are flickering with things that don’t fit comfortably together, expressions that shift too fast to be readable. I glance down and see the asymmetrical pattern of bruises painted across my chest and stomach. They couldn’t have been much darker if the fists and feet that had inflicted them had been smudged with ink. Shock forces a laugh out of me — it’s the first time in my life that anything has ever looked as painful as it felt.

Sheppard’s hand enters into my field of vision, hovering over my skin for a moment before coming to rest, palm down, at the base of my ribs, the right angle of thumb and fingers carefully bracketing the worst of the bruises. He traces his fingertips along the edge of the discoloration, a light and painless touch. The breeze from the window picks up and a shiver goes through me. I can’t fool myself that the two are related.

“I should’ve known this was just a ploy to get my shirt off,” I say, but my voice cracks over the i in shirt.

“I guess I’m not as smooth as I thought,” Sheppard says, but his tone is off, tight with something other than his usual smirk. His other hand drifts down to join the first, the mattress creaking as he shifts more weight onto the knee planted between my thighs, leaning in. I close my eyes against the brush of his fingers along the perimeters of my bruises, not wanting to know yet how closely my comment hit the target. Then his touch changes, abandoning the irregular patterns for something firmer, hungrier. His hands press up past my ribs to spread themselves wide across my chest, digging a little too hard into at least four different bruises, like he can’t help himself. It knocks me back onto my elbows, and my head drops back as I’m caught in the bright flare of pain and the way it telegraphs desire, coded into that incautious touch.

The mattress shifts again as he bends over me, and I can hear him breathing in short little gasps, like a runner trying to keep quiet. His breath ghosts over my neck and for half a second I arch helplessly, painfully up to meet him, then I swallow hard and grab his wrists.

He jerks a little and goes still. “Sheppard,” I whisper. He takes a breath but doesn’t say anything. Opening my eyes, I find that I’m not prepared for just how close his face is to mine. It makes it harder to get the words out. “Why are you doing this?”

It’s his turn to swallow now. I can see his Adam’s apple bob as he does it. “McKay,” he says, the syllables blurred around the edges. He dips his mouth toward mine and I duck my head toward my chest to avoid it. It hurts like hell to hold my head and shoulders curled up off the mattress like this, battered muscles spasming in my chest and stomach. It’s my grip on his hands more than anything that lets me do it, the way he’s pulling back against it without actually trying to pull away.

In the dark space between us, I can see the pale circles of my fingers around his tan wrists, the bright white bandages he’d wrapped around mine. “I have two main failings as a person,” I tell him. “I can never take the easy way out, even when it’d be undeniably smarter to do so. And I’ve never learned not to tell the truth even when no one wants to hear it. Sheppard — John. We both know this is a terrible idea. Why are you doing this?”

His fingers curl against my chest, biting into muscle and bruises. A small, involuntary motion. He’s gone still the way an animal penned suddenly in will go still, that electric tension as it tries to render itself invisible, waiting for an escape route to appear. “Because,” he tries. The silence after the word is dense, like the activity level inside his skull has somehow reached an audible intensity. “Today, you … I mean, for two weeks now, since — and then, tonight. I–”

The sentence thins out to nothing as abruptly as if someone had turned off the tap. When I tip my head up to get a look at his face, his eyes lock with mine, and there’s something unsteady them. In the past two weeks, I have seen John Sheppard relaxed, exasperated, uncertain, amused, wracked with guilt, and filled with volatile, gunpowder anger, ready to go up at the slightest spark, but always with his eyes hooded. They aren’t now, and he’s staring at me like I’m standing on land holding a coil of rope and he’s being swept out to sea.

“Please,” he says, with a breathlessness that knocks the wind out of me, too. His hands tighten down on my chest. “Because. I want to. And it’s not, I promise — let me, okay, just let me–”

“Christ,” I mutter, and his stillness cracks wide open like he heard the yes buried in there. He takes a long, ragged breath, his head tipping forward against my shoulder like someone sliced the strings holding it up. My grip on his wrists shifts without any conscious direction from me, my hands running up his arms. He presses his face into the curve of my neck the same way he had earlier, when he’d had me pinned against the door; the same gesture of desperate relief. Then he scrapes his teeth and stubbled mouth over the skin there, and I gasp and drop all the way back against he mattress. My hands find the tops of his shoulders and clutch at them, and then he’s pushing himself up off the bed, pressing open lips against my chest, my side, the spot just above my hip. My legs are still hanging off the edge of the bed and he closes his heavy hands over my thighs, squeezes hard, and then slides to his knees between them. His fingers grasp the edge of my fly and he rubs his face into the fabric below it, and the sound that comes out of my throat is loud and undignified.

“Oh god, I–” I stammer, and Sheppard whispers, “let me,” mouth pressed against the front of my slacks so that I can feel the movement of his lips. My hips roll off the mattress and he takes it for permission, breathing hot against the inside of my thigh as he works the button and zipper, hooking his fingers under the waistband of my slacks and shorts and wrestling them down my hips, guiding first one leg and then the other free and somehow dispensing with my loafers along the way. I hear him toss the whole tangle aside with a thud and then his lips slide wetly across the inside of my knee, hands wrapping around the backs of my calves, sliding down to my ankles and then up the fronts of my legs, palming my hips and pinning me in place as his mouth works its way upward at a mercilessly slow pace. At a crucial moment it stops, lifts away, and I look up to watch him lever himself to his knees. For a long moment we stare at each other; his eyes are bright and feverish in his shadowed face. Then he curls his hand around the base of my prick and drops his dark head to take me in his mouth.

My own moan cuts through the dark and pulls an answering sound from him, and the hum of it has me closer to the edge than I want to be. I’ve done this enough myself to know the angle is a difficult one, but he makes the most of it, forgoing anything over-ambitious for the flat lapping of his tongue and the tight circling of his lips around the head, his hands stroking up and down the length of me, slick with his own spit. My stomach clenches with pleasure and every bruise I have sparks with pain, an unbearable Gordian knot of sensation, all of it in conflict and far too strong. When my hand drops to the back of his head, the surprisingly soft bristles of his hair, he groans and cranes the back of his head into the curve of my fingers, deepening the angle. I gasp and try to guide him away but he only speeds up, cheeks hollowing down around me. My face snaps to the side, my whole body tightening in anticipation, and that’s when I see it: a Smith & Wesson Victory tangled in the sheets, right where it had been when I’d first seen it tonight. He’d never picked it up off the bed, and that’s the last thought I have before ecstasy surges up my spine, wiping my mind clean as I shudder and spill into his mouth.

It leaves me flattened out afterwards, panting up at the shadowed ceiling. I can feel Sheppard’s ribs moving against the insides of my thighs, the humidity of his breath as he gasps against my hip. Then his shoulder lifts and he slides his slick hand out of sight, below the edge of the bed, and a shudder rolls through him. “No, wait,” I tell him, and he tenses, arm flexing. A noise issues from the back of his throat. Sliding my hand down his face to the angle of his jaw, I guide him upwards, scooting myself back and all the way onto the bed as I do so. I hook the gun with my free hand and, for lack of any better ideas, stuff it under the pillows.

“You don’t,” he starts in a ragged voice, braced up off both me and the mattress. I try to roll my eyes but my gaze is caught by the long curve of him, barely visible in the shadow of his body, and I can’t look away.

“Oh, shut up.” I manage to work up a properly acerbic tone, for what little it’s worth when I know he can see me staring. “And would you take your pants off already? I don’t want to catch a zipper anywhere tender.”

“Yes, sir,” he mutters, mustering up a bit of sarcasm as he rolls over to strip himself the rest of the way down, but I can see his hands shaking a little. When he turns back to me, I reach up to grab the back of his neck and pull him down to me before he can get any more stupid ideas, and his mouth is wet and hot, lips a little swollen. There’s a salt and mineral tang there that I know came from me, and I gasp into the kiss, let him slide his tongue deep in my mouth. He drops down onto one shoulder, keeping his torso carefully off mine, but his thigh brushes restlessly over the tops of my legs. I reach down and close my hand over it, feeling the thin covering of hair there, the long muscles flexing and tensing, and then I slide my fingers up to its apex and wrap them around his prick.

He arches into the touch with a long groan, spine curling before he drops his head into the angle of my shoulder, one arm draping itself over the top of my chest, hand flexing and fisting itself in the pillow next to my head. His prick is dry to the touch, except for a bead of moisture at the head, and hot with the blood pumping through the thin skin. There’s no way I’m going to be mobile enough to slide down the bed and give a performance of the same routine he just did for me, so I release him. He makes a sound of protest and twitches his hips forward, rubbing the head of his prick insistently against my hip, and I run my hand up his flank and arm until it reaches my mouth. At the wet sound when I suck my fingers in, Sheppard moans, “Oh, Jesus,” and shudders hard against me. It’s like those two words have cracked the dam, and now they’re spilling out of him in a low murmur as I run my tongue across my palm and reach down between our bodies to wrap my now-wet hand around his prick, working him with a long, even stroke.

He twists and writhes into the touch, still gasping and swearing, and I follow the motion of his body as best I can, taking my pace from the movement of his hips. This goes on for a long time, much longer than I’d lasted in his mouth. He’s slick with sweat, muscles so tense that he’s shaking, and I’m starting to wonder if I somehow lost my knack for this. Then I realize there’s been a change in Sheppard’s litany, that it’s shifted from empty curses into something new: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Jesus, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to, I shouldn’t have thought, I’m sorry, god, I’m so sorry,” over and over again like a record played on a loop, with a long ragged gasp in place of the interrupting drag of the needle back to the start of the track.

My mouth goes dry. “Jesus — Sheppard.” I’ve been out of my depth for almost twenty hours straight, but this is a new downward plummet. If there’s anyone less qualified than I am to deal with another human being cracking under strain, I’ve had the minimal good fortune never to meet them. I roll sideways, sliding my thigh in between his, and push my mouth up against the hinge of his jaw, the only part of his face I can see. “It’s all right, you hear me? It’s okay, just let go now.” I can feel his hand knotted into the pillow behind my head, and I press a dry kiss against the slope of his shoulder as I speed my hand up, feeling hopelessly inept, but he abandons his refrain and just gasps instead, desperate breaths of the stuffy air between us. Only a few seconds later he jerks, going rigid against me, and I stroke him through it as he makes a high, lost noise through closed lips and comes.

Relief rushes through me and brings fatigue after it like an anvil. Sheppard gives one last shudder and rolls loosely over onto his back, the hand that had been fisted behind my head coming up to rub unsteadily at his face. Wincing as stiffened muscles protest, I twist and find yesterday’s shirt where it was stuffed down between the bed and the wall, using it to wipe my hand and stomach off. Sheppard raises the hand draped over his eyes to see what I’m doing, then reaches down to take the shirt from me and perform his own clean-up, about as cursory as my own.

Half-sitting to discard the shirt over the edge of the bed, he twists to look back at me over his shoulder. It’s the same kind of oblique gaze he’s been shooting at me for the past two weeks, but his eyes are still stripped of their usual armor — by sex, by exhaustion, by the night’s earlier events? I couldn’t say and I’m too tired to try and parse it out now. It’ll be true morning in a few hours, and anything else can wait until then.

“You can stay,” I tell him, and only realize how perfunctory it sounds when he continues to watch me from that awkward, intermediate position, which doesn’t commit him to any course of action. I clear my throat and amend my previous statement. “Please. I’d like you too.”

His spine untwists and his head tips down as he drops back onto both elbows. There’s something about the way he looks in this low light, worn down and uncertain, his lean and gorgeous body neither guarded nor displayed on offer, but just resting there. He looks a bit like I’ve seen Ronon look on the rare occasions he unwinds enough to take the last of his knives off, stripped of something that’s both protective and a burden. Not young, though. Whatever Sheppard looks now, it isn’t young.

After a moment, he sighs and dips his chin once in a nod, and though I can’t shake the sense that there’s something crucial left undone, I don’t have the energy to do more than rummage for the top edge of the sheet and blanket, hauling them up over us both. There’s some shifting and rearranging of the pillows, and we both lie there silently on our backs for a couple minutes before his hand brushes the side of mine, lightly enough that it could be accidental. Already sliding towards sleep, I lack the concentration to delicately negotiate an alternate arrangement, so instead I just close my hand over his and tug gently, figuring that the odds are he’ll either freeze or retreat, but either way we’ll have settled the question. To my faint and far-off surprise, he takes a quiet breath and rolls over, leg draping itself over mine and face tucking against the side of my upper arm. His hand slides up my chest and his thumb rubs briefly over the angle of my jaw before his hand drops into a loose curl on my breastbone. He’s pressed closer against me now that he had been ten minutes ago, and under the warmth of his body, the worst of the cramps and aches begin to dull just a little.

As I drift into unconsciousness, only three sources of discomfort stay with me. The slow creep of incipient day from the open window. The slight tingling of my right arm where it’s pinned under Sheppard’s body. And, underneath my pillow, the muffled but still noticeable angles of Sheppard’s gun.

–