Title: Right When you Least Expect it
Team: Fine
Prompt: Twist of Fate
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard, past McKay/Brown, past McKay/Keller
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Word count: 3363
Summary: "God does not play dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein
(Einstein liked inventing phrases such as "God does not play dice," "The Lord is subtle but not malicious." On one occasion Bohr answered, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do." - AIP Center for the History of Physics . )
"Skeleton crew," Rodney muttered, elbow deep in salt-crusted Ancient control crystals. "Who came up with that name, eh?"
John ignored him. Radek ignored him. The bored punk Marine kid that StarGate Command had saddled them with rolled his eyes and shifted his weight to his other foot. Rodney would never have believed it (and would certainly never admit it) but the quality of grunts that they'd had in the Pegasus Galaxy was actually much, much higher than what they got assigned here (as part of their "skeleton crew" - morbid, morbid phrase!) now they were stuck on Earth.
Woolsey was still nominally in charge of the City, even though the Atlantis Expedition itself had technically been disbanded, discontinued, dissolved - whatever you called it when practically everybody had been sent away from the place they'd worked and sweated and bled for all these years. The biologists and the botanists had even been cut loose from the SGC entirely, burdened with iron-clad, under-penalty-of-Gitmo level non-disclosure agreements, to scramble for whatever posts in academia or industry they could get despite the resulting huge ugly holes in their work histories - but that wasn't the point, that wasn't the point. Anyway, Woolsey was still more-or-less in charge, and Rodney guessed that was one small blessing. At least they weren't being commanded by somebody who was actively hostile, or had never been involved with Atlantis before.
"I calculate," said Radek, just a tuft of hair visible over the top of the other water-damaged console that he was working on, "that with current level of staffing, we will have completed Atlantis survey and repairs by year 2138. In May."
"Well, I'll keep coming by to play light switch whenever I get any time off," John drawled. He was leaning over Zelenka's shoulder, gingerly poking at something hidden inside the access panel.
"Ah, yes, will be great help," Radek said solemnly. "Perhaps 2137 then. February."
Rodney had been lucky to be able to keep himself out of Area 51. His influence with the SGC certainly hadn't extended so far as to be able to keep Zelenka here. Radek had had to threaten to retire if they didn't let him stay on Atlantis.
Sheppard wasn't the only former Expedition member who'd been supplementing their "skeleton" research-and-repair crew with volunteer hours. Among others, Katie Brown had spent two weeks assisting them during Stanford's summer break. She was teaching undergraduate Biology now, mostly to pre-med students. She'd told him that it was really easy and amusing to deal with their infant arrogance, after having lived under continual threat of being blown up or eaten by Wraith for several years and also having almost been engaged to him. She'd kissed him on the cheek when she'd left. He wasn't sure what to think about that.
Of course, Sheppard couldn't just go on-leave like a sensible person. He had to burn the candle at both ends. It would have been one thing if he'd just come and spend his vacation in Atlantis, doing regular Atlantis things. (Well, not including Wraith-baiting - the only Wraith-baiting to be had on Earth, thankfully, was back under the Mountain, where Todd functioned as a combination alien-consultant/prisoner-of-war, living off an uneasy combination of tretonin, mad science, and the life-force of reckless guys who attacked SG-27 when he was offworld with them. He was allowed to eat anybody it would have been acceptable to double-zat. Rodney found it very, very disturbing to see how well he got along with Vala.)
No, the problem was that Sheppard had gotten a little 22-foot sailboat from somewhere, and that San Francisco, gay mecca of the United States, was right on the horizon from here. Okay, the real problem (although not really the real problem, as a proud Canadian Rodney fully realized that it was not the real problem) was that U.S. President Obama had finally repealed the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy, and that, as Kirk-like as Rodney had always thought Sheppard when it was just alien princesses and Ascended semi-goddesses that he had to deal with, free-to-be-openly-gay Sheppard with San Francisco within sailboat-range was, to put it bluntly, a real manwhore.
Almost every day (at least twice a week!) Sheppard quit work just after lunch, and recklessly set sail across the treacherous Pacific Ocean to the mainland, where he apparently "just checked out a couple of clubs, Rodney, jeeze, what are you, my wife?" There was drinking and dancing and who-knows-what with who-knows-whom until all hours of the night. Then John would sail back home to Atlantis the next morning, sometimes starting before dawn, in the dark, heading to an essentially invisible city, risking sharks and whales and drowning!
Didn't the Navy used to prohibit "sleeping ashore"? Maybe Rodney should look into that.
Rodney was shaken out of his internal rant (and seriously, he spent way, way too much of his valuable brain power obsessing about the lifestyle of a middle-aged playboy with stupid hair) by a small explosion of sparks and a puff of smoke that emanated from Radek's console.
"Oh," said the Marine kid, way over on the other side of the room. Then he added, "Ow," and toppled over onto the floor.
"What what what?" Rodney sputtered, taking his hands out of the panel.
"Rodney," Zelenka said. He set his tablet carefully down on the ground, and leaned over with his hands braced on his knees. "I do not feel well."
"We gotcha, Doc," Sheppard said, catching hold of Radek and manhandling him upright to lean on Rodney's shoulder. "Haul him back out into the corridor, McKay," he directed. "I got Thompson." John picked the unconscious Marine up off the floor and threw him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. Rodney gaped at him for just a second, unable to keep himself from being impressed whenever John demonstrated that wiry strength. "Rodney! Corridor!"
"Yes, yes. Honestly!" Rodney hissed. Half-carrying Zelenka (fortunately, he was tiny), Rodney followed John into the hallway and all the way down to the nearest transporter. Of course, it was not in working order.
Radek recovered almost immediately upon reaching the corridor, greatly relieving Rodney's perfectly-reasonable fear that they might have stumbled across another cache of Kill-All-the-Non-Ancient-Gene-Carriers poison.
The Marine was still out cold, though. Sheppard laid him out straight on the floor and tapped his face a couple of times. The kid came around pretty slowly, but he seemed mostly okay. Kind of. Hopefully.
Rodney automatically slapped for his radio to call Jennifer, but of course they didn't carry those now that they were back on Earth and their requirements for operational secrecy were so much different, and he just ended up hitting himself in the ear. Now they were required to use those shoulder-mounted radios that the Milky Way SG-teams used, and they were scrambled and shielded and were a huge pain in the neck.
It wouldn't have done much good anyway, even though Jennifer had mostly forgiven him for their spectacular break-up and was totally speaking to him again and everything, because the contents of the Atlantis Infirmary had been moved to the Mountain for research purposes, and she'd gone with them. Duplicating the Ancient healing devices was their priority now, and Jennifer was having a terrific time doing alien-technology-research instead of meatball-surgery, but it meant that the "skeleton crew" here on Atlantis didn't have any actual medical personnel. And as much as Rodney generally denigrated them as voodoo practitioners, he'd far rather have a doctor in the City (which was certainly large enough to qualify to have one) than have to rely on classified military medevac to Onizuka Air Force Station, sixty kilometers away.
The kid was sitting up now, anyway. "What happened?" he said.
"Drs. McKay and Zelenka set off some sort of DO NOT ENTER AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY thing - I could feel it kick in. Zelenka's worked on the City a lot over the years. She - I mean it - recognized him, just gave him a little warning. You're a stranger, and it knocked you out cold. Rodney and I have the ATA gene, so we weren't affected." John looked back towards the room and narrowed his eyes in speculation. "I wonder what's back there? It felt like it was off the left-hand wall..."
"Sir," Thompson interrupted him, "Procedure says that in any case of loss-of-consciousness, no matter what the duration, we report back to Medical. At Onizuka. On the mainland. Sir."
All three of the others looked at him in annoyance. The "by-the-book" attitude that seemed to have been the primary criterion for selecting military personnel for the Atlantis "skeleton crew" was universally disliked among the former Expedition members, even the military guys who came back to volunteer. Lorne had been particularly scathing when he'd spent a week playing light switch a few months ago.
Sheppard sighed. "Yeah, he's right." He hit his radio on the first try, the show-off. "Gateroom, this is Sheppard. We had a little incident with some equipment in room 491, sector 7. Brief loss-of-consciousness, everybody's fine now. We'll want a transport to Medical."
"Sorry, Colonel, no can-do. There's a block on communication and transport - some Homeland Security thing. Procedure says you'll all have to be quarantined."
Sheppard made a face. His voice was that tight, quiet, threatening one that he used to use with Genii. "That's incorrect, Sergeant. The Quarantine Procedure applies when transport to the mainland is impossible due to the condition of the patient, such as violent delusions or changing into a giant bug. It is not invoked when transport is merely impractical or delayed due to 'some Homeland Security thing'."
"Procedure says loss-of-consciousness requires immediate transport to Medical. Immediate isn't possible because of the Op Sec requirements imposed this morning by SGC in response to activities in this area by Homeland Security in conjunction with the Coast Guard. Sir. And Quarantine is invoked when following other Medical SOP is not possible, with all due respect. Sir."
"Let me speak to your commanding officer."
"He's at the Mountain today, at the Command/Control meeting. Went out just before the SGC Op Sec requirements kicked in at 0900. And we also aren't supposed to radio them. All but the short-range on-station frequencies have been blocked."
Sheppard gritted his jaw and frowned. Then he went to the radio again. "I'll be transporting the affected personnel to Onizuka myself. We'll start immediately. No classified technology or restricted radio frequencies will be used. Sheppard out."
"Sir!" the radio protested.
"Just log it, Sergeant. Sheppard out."
Thompson looked extremely skeptical. Radek just looked a little uneasy.
"It's a perfect sailing day; we'll just go in my boat. Lots of sailboats out there today. There's even a pay-phone at the marina. Nobody could possibly claim we're violating Op Sec. We'll call Onizuka when we dock. Hell, if they won't send a car for us, we can get a cab. Come on."
Radek shrugged and got up. The Marine needed John's hand to stand, but looked like he'd be fine to walk to the second-nearest transporter, from which they could get down to the North Pier, where John kept his sailboat tied up.
"C'mon, Rodney."
"Oh no, no, no. You're not getting me into that death trap! I've drowned enough times for Atlantis, thank you! Since 'Procedure' says I can't get any more work done today - " He hated that they were now required to have military accompaniment to work anywhere in Atlantis - "I'm going to go take a bath!"
John looked a tiny bit sad for a second, but then he just said, "Okay, have a nice bath," and led the other two down to the pier.
Rodney usually tried not to think about John in the bath. Physics was the best thing to think about while bathing, or else Ancient technology puzzles. Sometimes the warm water and bubbles just unlocked things inside his head. They hadn't really gotten far enough this morning to give his brain anything to work on. He wished he'd gone back to the room to try to figure out how to get past the left-hand wall, where he'd also gotten the feeling that something interesting might be concealed. It wasn't even lunch time yet. They should have had hours still to look around down there. Stupid Standard Operating Procedure.
Of course, Rodney knew that it could have been much worse. They were lucky that Woolsey and Carter were both willing and able to run interference for them with the IOC and the SGC, to keep the city at least un-dissected and un-scuttled. Carter had had to work pretty damn hard just to get permission to take Teyla and her family and Ronon back to the Pegasus Galaxy; if she didn't have command of her own ship and a great reputation, they might have been stuck on Earth for the rest of their lives - exiles if they were lucky, and lab-specimens if they weren't. Rodney shuddered and added more hot water.
But they were probably all back to Athos (re-populated after the semi-defeat of the Wraith) by now, and Carter should check in back at the Mountain in a few weeks. Rodney hoped he'd see Teyla and Ronon again someday; they were two of his best friends in the universe; they'd been through so much together, but he realized it was wildly optimistic to think that he'd ever even hear from them again in this lifetime. And optimism wasn't really in his nature. He submerged his head briefly, and came up blinking.
Thinking of Carter led to thinking of the puddlejumper he'd almost drowned in, and that led to the alternate-timeline Rodney who had drowned in Atlantis, and all the other times he'd almost drowned, and that led back to John. He wasn't really worried that John would sink his little sailboat. John seemed to be a competent sailor - it probably went back to his upper-class East Coast upbringing, like the horse-riding - and it was a nice day. Rodney kind of had to admit that it wasn't the sailing he hated so much; it was what John almost-certainly got up to in San Francisco when he took those little trips.
Jeannie had been watching iQueer as Folk/i on DVD once when he'd been visiting her - only when Madison was in school, thank God - and Rodney knew what sort of shenanigans they got up to in those "just a couple clubs" that John was checking out! John was a terrible dancer, but he could lean against a wall and smirk knowingly with the best of them. Rodney could just picture him, all in black, drink in his hand, leaning against the wall in some dark, smoky club, checking out all the young twinks, if that's what they were called, dancing and writhing for his pleasure. Some kid, maybe Thompson's age, some pretty boy without a thought in his head, would come up to him and pull him into some disgusting back room, and get on his knees, and...
Or, even worse! Some older guy, some rich guy with a lot of experience, would come up to John and put his hands on John's face and just kiss him, with tongue, right there in the club in front of everybody, and pull him outside to his fancy car, and take him home to his fancy house, and screw him into the mattress all night long. There was no way to figure out if it did or didn't happen - by the time John sailed all the way back to Atlantis the next morning there certainly wouldn't be any discernible difference to his gait anymore, unless the guy (or guys!) really hurt him, and surely John wouldn't let anybody do that to him, would he? After all they'd been through, together, in the Pegasus Galaxy?
This was why Rodney didn't like to think about John in the bath.
When he got out of the tub, Rodney was pruney, hungry, and tired. He didn't even bother to dress again, just put on his robe and took an MRE out onto his balcony for a picnic. Jeannie had come out for a tour of the place just after they'd gotten the City situated in its current location, and she'd brought him patio furniture. "You have a patio; you have to have patio furniture!" she'd insisted, and apparently nobody in the SGC had been able to wrest the aluminum-tubing-and-plastic-mesh contraptions away from her. So he had two chairs, which he usually kept folded up along the railing in case of guests, and a lounge, which he, you know, lounged on.
It was a beautiful day, warm but not hot, windy but not stormy. After he finished his food, Rodney fell asleep.
He dreamed uneasily of Pegasus, of people who'd objected to their presence and chased them back out through the gate. He dreamed somebody shot him with a blowgun dart, and he slapped his hand against his arm, and ran some more. It was a long way to the Stargate; he ran and ran, chasing Ronon and Teyla and John (in real life somebody always stayed with him, or brought up the rear; they never just ran away from him and made him trail after as best he could, and so he knew it was a dream), and he was getting so out of breath!
Rodney woke up and forced his eyes open, and saw a crushed bee in his fingers.
He grabbed instantly for the epi-pen in his pocket, but he hadn't transferred one to the pocket of his robe. He got up to go get the one from his pants pocket, or his jacket pocket, or the nightstand, but his legs didn't work right, and his blood pressure was low, and he fell. His whole arm was red and swollen and tight; he itched all over; he couldn't get his breath. Rodney crawled off the balcony into his room. His eyes were swelling shut even faster than his throat was; he couldn't see to find where he'd left his clothes - were they still in the bathroom? He gave up on finding them and tried to get to the bedside table; he knew there were two epi-pens in the drawer.
He couldn't breathe; he couldn't see; he thought he heard something, but he wasn't sure what it was. Oh, God, oh God, he was going to die, right here, on Earth, not even drowning but just from a stupid, ordinary bee sting. He wasn't going to make it this time.
Rodney passed out.
He came around to the familiar, obnoxious feeling of way too much adrenaline in his system. There were two painful, obviously stabbed places in his thigh, and his arm still felt like it was ready to pop, but countering all that was the bliss of being alive and able to breathe again!
He pried open his eyes with some difficulty. John was sitting on the floor beside him.
"Rodney," John said.
"John," he whispered back.
"You're alive," John said. Were there tears in his eyes? He cleared his throat and added, "I came up when you didn't answer your radio. When I saw you there on the floor - the epi-pen from my pocket wasn't enough; I had to get another one from the drawer. Can you swallow yet, ya think?"
Rodney considered for a moment, tried to swallow, and then shrugged awkwardly. "Not sure," he croaked.
"Yeah, well then, the antihistamines might not be a good idea. Homeland's done for the day; we'll get you medevacced." It was only then that Rodney noticed it was almost dark.
John sniffed once, violently, and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. "I'm gonna do this first, though." John leaned over and kissed Rodney, right on his swollen, painful mouth, leaned over and kissed him and then just kind of held onto him for a second.
Rodney was shocked. And he wanted him to do it again.
John said, "You scared me. Please don't, okay?"
"I'm fine," Rodney whispered.
John smiled at him, and then he got the Gateroom on the radio to request a medevac.
NOTE: I made Onizuka Air Force Station the Atlantis support base because it used to be a secret Air Force installation fairly close to San Francisco, and it might possibly have been able to be used for deep space telemetry. Pillar Point, which is closer yet, is just too small. I imagined Atlantis situated fairly near to the Farallon Islands, and cloaked. And I gave John a 22-foot sailboat because that was the smallest size listed on-line for finishers of the Singlehanded Sailing Society race from San Francisco to Hawaii. There are youtube videos of the Singlehanded Sailing Society races where they go out from San Francisco, circle around the Farallon Islands, and then come back, for which the winning times all seem to be around 8 hours. So I figured that a one way trip to or from Atlantis, not circling around, could just take an afternoon.
DISCLAIMER: The rights to uStargate/u in all its variations belong to someone who isn't me - possibly Double Secret Productions, Gekko Film Corp., or the Syfy Channel.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: A million thanks to Fluffy Llama for the lovely quick beta, and for setting this up and letting me participate in this year's McShep_Match Challenge - the last one ever, they say! Many, many thanks also to librarychick_94 and pampalini007 for their wonderful beta-reading!