The new leader of the Atlantis expedition, Air Force Colonel Samantha Carter, watched carefully as the man across the room tapped with wicked speed and, one had to assume, accuracy, on the notebook computer. He was seated on the top step of the small stairs that led down from the main staircase to the Stargate, the balcony that housed the main control center of the Ancient city standing high above them, a city ripe with gleaming architectural splendor. It was a beautiful city, Sam had to admit. She looked worriedly at the man sitting hunched over on the steps. The computer, which rested on her friend's knees, looked like it was vibrating, but she knew for sure that it wasn't the inanimate object that trembled so. The man might be forcing himself to stay put, but that didn't mean he would be doing it with anything resembling patience. She walked towards him, checking in with a few others along the way, sat down next to him and looked at him with a practiced eye. She had more than once had to tell Dr. Daniel Jackson when it was finally time to call it quits. Many, many more times than once, in fact. And she'd grown quite accomplished at making those directives actually work, despite Jackson's well-known stubborn single-mindedness and penchant for working himself to exhaustion. After all, she had learned from the master: Jack O'Neill who, in spite of Sam's polished skill at handling the linguist, was the one who truly excelled at 'Daniel Jackson 101'.
She wondered who the expert on all things Dr. Rodney McKay was, though she had an inkling of who it might be even after such a short tenure in command in the Pegasus Galaxy.
"Rodney?" she asked as he ignored her presence. "Are you all right?" she queried. She wasn't generally the kind of person to do this sort of thing, finding the effort of asking something when the answer was already known to her a waste of valuable time. She also knew the less than truthful reply that would soon be tossed her way.
"Nothing's changed, Sam."
"Well, I beg to differ, Rodney. I know you've been cleared to leave, and I know that Dr. Keller has ordered you to your room for the next two days."
Rodney continued typing as he nodded his head once, the only acknowledgement that he'd offered, save the initial clipped response, that he even knew she was there. He stopped, apparently finding a convenient spot to do so, as it was clear that Sam Carter's mere presence no longer held the magic that it once did – Carter'd have to do a little detective work to find out about that change in her friend – and wiped away the sweat that was just preparing to trickle into his brow, and said, "You seem to know a lot, but you don't know it all."
Sam tipped her head to the right and nodded once. "Give me time, McKay. I haven't been here long enough to know it all. Yet." Rodney turned to look at her, and it was clear from his expression that he thought she had a long way to go in the Atlantis learning department. He took a look around the gate room for the first time in, well, a long time. He'd concentrated his glances in one specific direction for some time now.
"Hm. Looks like most everyone's been let go."
"Isn't that sorta what I've been saying?" Carter asked with feigned annoyance.
"Yes. Well, I'm staying. For now."
"Rodney," Sam tried again.
"I have work to do," he said, cutting her off. He tapped the notebook as evidence.
"But you're supposed to be resting."
"And I will…"
"Now," Carter insisted, taking her turn to interrupt her frustrating science colleague. "You're supposed to be resting now." Rodney clammed up; he didn't feel well enough to fight Sam Carter verbally just then, and he knew he didn't have it in him win that fight. And he'd never be able to beat her in a fist fight, even though her persistence at the moment was giving him ideas to try. He pictured a lot of blood when he thought about it, though. All of it his.
"He's going to be fine," Carter said.
Rodney turned back to look at her. "Who?" he asked, a slight hint of a 'deer in the headlights' look in his eyes.
"Sheppard. Who else would I be talking about?"
"Oh. Well, I know that. I'm not worried about him. Why would I be worried about him? He's a big boy, a lieutenant colonel, even. He can take care of himself." He knew he was babbling, and he could tell from the look on Carter's face that she knew it, too.
"You can't lie to me, McKay. I know you care about him."
"Of course I care about him," he said, directing his attention back to the computer. It was a lame attempt at misdirection, shoving his head back into the computer, he knew. But he had to try. John would expect at least that. "I care about a lot of people. Teyla, Ronon, you. Even Radek. K…Katie. I'm not as thoughtless and self-centered as you think."
Sam smiled. 'No, in so many ways you're nothing like the old McKay', she thought. Out loud she offered, "I never thought you were thoughtless." McKay looked in her eyes, raised his brow, and waited for her to continue. Their serious looks both turned to knowing grins as each realized that she would be speaking no further.
"Look, I need to be self-centered for my genius to thrive and," he waved his hand about, "save all of these people." His eyes drifted over to where Sheppard lay, sleeping. Keller had said that the colonel would be fine, that the toxin that had overcome everyone in the gate room just after their team had stepped back through the gate had been worse for the last one in. Ten people had been felled by the noxious substance that had followed Sheppard and his team through; the lockdown and quarantine protocols had worked well for them; they'd practiced several times these procedures after the virus scare just a short six weeks before.
"I have to admit, I'm pretty impressed with how you've been able to perform under pressure," Carter told the chief science officer. "But you aren't needed here now, you aren't working on anything life-saving or Atlantis-saving at the moment." She leaned over to see what was on his screen. "Are you playing Minesweeper?" He shoved her away with his elbow. "Go and rest," she said, her blue eyes big and pleading.
"You know, this time was nowhere near as frightening as the last time," Rodney admitted softly. He was clearly not ready to go and rest.
"You mean the virus that caused us to lose our memories. That was tough, McKay."
"Yes. Yes it was." McKay felt lucky that he had that cover to hide behind now, his friendship with Katie. She was a good sport and a dear friend, and nearly losing her had been more than tough, but what truly haunted him about that time, besides the people who lost their memories before they found a solution, involved the person laying just steps away from them. It was obvious from the sympathetic look that Carter sent McKay's way that she didn't know what had truly and deeply scared him those weeks previous.
"Look," Sam started.
"Excuse me," Dr. Jennifer Keller interrupted. "I've only got Colonel Sheppard left here. We lifted the quarantine two hours ago. He's stable. I thought I could get this all cleared out of here and send the colonel to his quarters. He's taking a little longer to come to, but if I could find someone to stay with him…"
"I can do that," Rodney offered.
"McKay, you're supposed to be resting yourself," Sam challenged.
"Like I haven't rested on the floor before. Hello? Many years at university here," he explained, his index finger shoved in his own face to emphasize his point.
Sam Carter laughed out loud. She had to admit that she, too, had spent innumerable nights camped out on a small patch of floor during her own college years, taking turns napping as a lab partner monitored an experiment, or her head stuck in a book for so long that she woke up with her head actually physically stuck to the book, her drool dampening the text book's pages. She knew exactly what Rodney was talking about.
"Fine. But remember, forty-eight hours. I don't want to see you before then."
"I'll do my best." Carter rolled her eyes.
"What about Sheppard?" Sam asked Keller as they walked towards the colonel's bed.
"Oh, he'll wake up any time now." Sounds of stretching and yawning could be heard as they approached the prone man. The two women smiled at each other at the timing. "He should rest for the next two days, too," Keller continued. To Sheppard, whose eyes were now open, staring dumbly at his visitors, she said, "Once you feel up to it, you can head to your room. Or we can take you there on the gurney."
Sheppard blinked a few times and yawned once more. He looked around and smiled sheepishly at Carter and Keller. Sam was sure he offered a bigger smile to McKay just before his mouth turned to a frown.
"You look like hell, McKay."
"That's because he didn't follow orders and go lay down," Keller noted pithily.
"He's been sitting here for hours, his head in a computer, waiting for you to wake up," Carter added.
"I have not!" Rodney denied fervently, realizing too late that his denial was a little too loud and a lot too adamant. "I mean, I had work to do and I needed to get it done while I was thinking about it, while it was clear in my head."
"And apparently he thinks about it better sitting on a hard, uncomfortable step, not too far from you," Sam theorized knowingly.
"I…I…uh…" Rodney stammered.
"Close your mouth, McKay. You've been outted," Sheppard said as he forced himself to a sitting position, his legs dangling off the side of the gurney.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Rodney asked, horrified.
"How do you feel?" Keller asked her last remaining patient.
Sheppard stretched his arms out, wiggled his shoulders up and down, and breathed in and out deeply. "Good. Really…pretty good."
"That's because you got some good rest," Keller said as she looked to McKay with disdain. The only thing missing from McKay's silent reply was the tongue sticking out of this mouth.
"What did you mean…" Rodney started again with John.
"Drop it, McKay," Carter suggested wisely.
"No, I don't believe I will. What did you mean by…" Rodney started to ask once more.
"What I meant was, you love me." Carter and Keller both snorted a laugh before they could catch themselves. Sheppard playing with McKay like this was the best fun either had enjoyed in a long time.
"What? That's…I…well…"
"Dr. McKay, would you escort the colonel to his quarters? Make sure he's not too wobbly?" the physician asked.
"From the looks of it, that might be the other way around," Sheppard sent back lightly.
"Oh, very funny," Rodney countered. McKay and Sheppard walked out of the gate room as Carter and Keller listened to the banter between the two men.
"Can we avoid steps? I'm still feeling kind of tired." The physicist yawned.
"Sure, Rodney," Sheppard agreed, striding along not at all like a man who'd just woken from a long, frighteningly long, and decidedly unnatural sleep.
"Do you have to do that?"
"What?" Sheppard asked with wide-eyed innocence.
"Ugh," Rodney replied in frustration. Their voices grew distant to the two women who remained in the gate room. "And I'm not sure how it's such a wise thing…" The conversation trailed off as Carter and Keller continued to watch the now empty doorway.
"They're quite a pair," Carter observed.
"I'd almost want to say they're quite a couple, if I didn't know better," Keller replied as she turned and helped her team start to clean up.
"Hmm," Samantha Carter mused as she headed to her office.
In the hallway, as they neared John's quarters, Rodney said, "You liked that, didn't you? Watching me suffer like that."
"I admit…it was fun for me."
"I'm so happy for you. I hope you realize that this has not been fun for me," McKay said miserably.
"Ah, come on, Rodney. It's over. We're all gonna be okay. You came through again, working with Keller to find the solution. Good work."
"I'm exhausted," McKay admitted.
"You should have gone to rest like the doc said."
"Yeah, like that was a possibility."
"You worry too much."
Rodney turned to face John, and grabbed the colonel's arm to stop him. "Do you even know, do you have an inkling of how scary it was watching you not wake up?"
"Rodney…"
"Do you know how much scarier it was with the virus? Thinking that I'd never remember you, or…"
"Hey," Sheppard said. "It didn't happen. I woke up, nobody forgot anybody." Rodney sagged up against the wall. "No, no," John said. "Let's go."
John walked them in silence the rest of the way to his room. They stepped across the threshold, closed and locked the door, and fell into each other's arms and kissed, the kiss so deep, so full of passion and longing and desperate need, as though it had been days, weeks, months, not just hours, since they'd last kissed.
"Oh, man," John said as he took a deep breath. Rodney rested his head on John's shoulder.
"No kidding," Rodney agreed. "You know, Sam's gonna figure out that Katie and I are just friends now. She's smart. She's going to find out about us if you keep doing that stuff."
"It's fun," Sheppard said in explanation.
"Yes, well, I know little boys have to have their fun." Rodney pulled his head from John's shoulder and kissed him again. They separated, but just barely, each breathing heavily from that surprisingly athletic of endeavors.
"I…" John started to make a point, but decided to step closer to actually prove his point. They were touching again, this time chest-to-chest, groin-to-groin. "We seem to have gotten our second wind." Rodney could feel John's hardness up against him. He was sure that John could tell that Little Rodney wasn't in such a playful mood.
"I'm so happy for you," Rodney whined. "Aren't you tired? I'm exhausted." He put his head back on John's shoulder. John kissed him on the cheek and pulled back.
"Maybe later?" John asked hopefully.
"I'm sorry. But definitely later," Rodney added, punctuated by a huge yawn. John laughed.
They both started to change for a long sleep. John decided to offer his lover some advice for the next time this happened to them.
"Rodney, maybe you should kiss me next time I've slept too long. It would be like Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming. Or maybe it's more like Beauty and the Beast."
"Ass," Rodney replied as he lifted the covers, slipped into the cool sheets and held the covers up as an invitation for John to join him. John accepted the silent request. Rodney seemed to shiver slightly as he placed his head on John's chest. John hugged him tight and kissed him through the soft hair on the top of his head.
"I woke up," he whispered reassuringly, his lips touching Rodney's high forehead. "And we'll never forget."
The End.