Reconstructing Rome

By Indygodusk


Chapter 19


"In Rome, I particularly love the history, churches, sculptures and architecture and the fact that you can walk along a tiny cobbled street and turn the corner to find the Trevi Fountain."

PHILIP TREACY


Late one night about a week later, John walked past an open door and saw Rome working inside. She was alone. Things had improved since their mission together and she was acting almost normal towards him in meetings. Before he could second-guess himself, he stepped inside. "Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?"

"Huh?" Rome looked up from her screen to blink at him like a sleepy owl. It was adorable. Next to her keyboard sat a notebook full of green equations and blue diagrams. Notations in pink were crammed between the lines and up the margins. Mugs, markers, Ancient crystals, screwdrivers, and wires littered her desktop.

John didn't fight the smile curling his lips. He leaned a hip against her desk, putting his hands in his pockets to stop them from reaching out and brushing across the ink smudged on her cheek. "Can we talk?"

Leaning back in her chair, Rome yawned and stretched. She looked up at him and wrinkled her nose. "All evidence points to yes, as both of us are demonstrating an obvious capacity for speech."

"Cute." John rolled his eyes and her lips twitched at getting a rise out of him. They'd always had fun teasing each other. "I have a proposition for you," he wagged his eyebrows and smirked.

Rome started to grin back but then a thought flickered through her eyes and it was like the gates slammed closed. Her expression went tight and the twist of her lips became dark and jagged. "Nope, not happening Colonel."

"What do you mean, nope? You haven't even heard me out yet," John said incredulously.

"You're not allowed to proposition me since you broke up with me. You don't even want me here, remember?"

John gave an exasperated growl. He was so sick of her prickliness, sick of her pushing him away and blatantly misunderstanding.

Rolling back her chair, she crossed her arms, raised her chin, and narrowed her eyes. "You don't even know what you want, you just know you don't want me anymore. You probably never even saw the real me. I was just one more notch on your belt of conquests, a way to prop up your fragile ego."

"Give me a break. You're the one with the fragile ego who doesn't know what she wants and is never satisfied with what she gets. I'm not the one who keeps bringing up that message—which I already explained and apologized for!—and treating you hot and cold." With effort, John swallowed down the rest of the angry words hovering on the tip of his tongue. He didn't want this to turn into another argument where they spoke in circles and tore chunks out of each other. He was going to be calm.

John took a deep breath and stated evenly, "I just want to talk to you."

Unimpressed, Rome somehow looked down her nose at him despite the fact that she was sitting and he was standing and sneered. "It's obvious you can't handle all of me, John Sheppard, so you might as well say what you came to say and then run away, as usual." She flapped her hand at him dismissively. "That's all you've done since I got here."

John's restraint broke. SNAP. Everything became sharp and crystal clear like he was in the middle of a firefight. "Let's clarify a few things," John enunciated.

BAM! He slammed a hand down on the corner of her desk.

Rome jumped.

Eyes narrow, John leaned over her. "I pick and choose my battles to balance the demands of duty and honor. I don't run away from a fight."

Paling at his expression, Rome pressed back into her seat and swallowed hard.

"So our reunion here sucked. That happens. I'm sorry. I was a little messed up after getting cut off from Earth for a year, having my CO turned into an octogenarian dying of organ failure, unexpectedly being put in charge of keeping everyone safe from aliens who eat people, and fighting a slow and suffocating siege where despite my best efforts every day brought my people closer to death and proved just how powerless I was to save everyone even though I almost killed myself trying. I wasn't at my best. I'm sorry."

Shoulders hunching, Rome met his eyes and he saw her resentment at being lectured. He wasn't getting through.

Putting his hands on the arms of her chair, not touching but definitely looming, John got up into her face and willed her to listen. When she didn't shove him back he took that as tacit permission to continue. "I'm not running right now, Rome. You are. I'm here, trying to fix this, fix us. I don't pick and choose what parts of you to jettison and what to keep. There's a reason that out of everyone, only I call you a name encompassing both Rodney and Meredith. I don't see just one or the other. I don't see someone small or insignificant. You're my Rome."

Breathing heavily, John met her wide eyes. "Nothing can change that… even as life has thrown us together and ripped us apart, duty and career superseding personal desires. For both of us." Inhaling against the tight band that felt like it was squeezing his chest, he stopped caging her in and took a slow step back.

Eyes dropping, Rome's lips pressed tight before she gave a nod of acknowledgment.

His next breath came easier and John's voice softened. "No matter how much we fight each other, I always see through to the real you. This is difficult because it's worth it. You know it's worth it." Rome's shoulders uncurled and her head tipped to the side as if she was finally really and truly listening. "I see you and what I see I want. I want you in my life, all of you, every difficult and magnificent inch of you, mind, body, and soul. I will always want you."

Swallowing hard, she glanced up, her eyes like a distant pool of water in the shadow of a dune. Thoughts battled beneath that inscrutable blue but she kept them hidden.

Undaunted, John slid his gaze down her body before snapping them back up in challenge like a fighter jet suddenly appearing above of the clouds. "I want to handle all of you and someday soon I will. I can handle anything you've got, Rodney Meredith Mckay, and I'm not going anywhere."

A choked sound burst from her mouth, half laugh and half sob. Eyes closing, she turned her face away and rubbed shaking fingers against her mouth, pressing hard until her wrist bent at a painful-looking angle. Her hair fell forward, hiding the smudge of ink on her cheek. After a moment her hand slid down to press against her chest and she opened her eyes. "I can't trust in that. I don't." A single tear ran down her cheek.

The words felt like he'd broken his leg again. Sudden. Unexpected. Excruciatingly painful. Almost impossible to get up from.

Locking his knees, John swallowed twice to get enough moisture into his mouth. "You can."

Two more tears joined the first as she shook her head.

Abruptly the tension in the room was interrupted by the sound of a basketball bouncing past the open door, followed by laughter and talking as a boisterous group walked past on the way to the nearest transporter after a late-night game.

John stepped back with a slow inhale and turned away. Whomever she wanted him to be, he wasn't measuring up. He didn't know what more he could say or do. He paced through the lab and tried to keep his mind from replaying what had just been said on loop. He wanted to hit something, maybe track down Ronon and pick a fight, something to channel the emotion burning up his insides.

This wasn't even what he'd intended to talk about when he'd come in here.

A chair creaked, but he didn't turn to look. Instead, he examined an equation scrawled on a nearby whiteboard in black ink. He pursed his lips and read over the equation again, letting his mind churn through the numbers. "This is wrong."

Arms crossed and face dry, Rome stepped up next to John, not looking at him directly but instead focusing on the whiteboard. "Jorgensen was working on it before he left. Which part?"

Pointing, John followed her lead and kept his eyes focused forward. "He miscalculated the integer for resistance and down here raised the variable to the fifth instead of the sixth power." Looking at her from the corner of his eye, he nudged her gently with his elbow. "Please say I can fix it. It's literally making my teeth hurt."

Rome snuck a look in his direction and then dropped her gaze. The line of her lips softened. Reaching out, she plucked a blue marker off of the tray. "Go ahead, but do it in blue instead of black so he knows someone else had to fix it. I won't tell him you did it. I know you like to pretend you're dumb."

"Shouldn't that be as dumb as I look?" John plucked the marker from her hand and started making corrections. "That's what you usually say." He said it lightly, aching to get back to some kind of normal.

They'd been friends. The best of friends. Couldn't he at least have that?

Rome moved her hands to her pockets and rocked back on her heels, keeping her eyes on his writing. "I only say that because you spend a lot of time styling your hair every morning and it pricks your ego." Her voice softened and went almost husky. "You have to know I don't really think you look dumb." She cleared her throat and looked down to examine her shoes.

Capping the blue marker with an irrepressible smile, John put it back on the tray. "Now you've done it. You've complimented my hair. My ego might not fit through the door after this."

"That just means you'll be stuck in here with me forever."

"Perfect."

Rome moved.

John's head shot up and his body turned, preparing to catch her in his arms and crush her to his chest for a kiss, but this wasn't that kind of movie. His brain still hadn't caught up. She'd turned away from him.

"Stuck with me in my lab, I mean. Doing work. Lightswitch stuff." Her voice sounded jittery as she returned to her desk and started tidying the surface, throwing out crumpled pages, stacking a mug on an empty plate, and gathering loose pens and pencils back into her desk drawer.

A pen escaped her hand and rolled off onto the floor in John's direction. He stopped it with his foot and picked it up. "You better not lose this, it's one of your favorites." He held it out to her with a forced smile. "Green."

Rome took the pen without touching his hand but didn't immediately turn and drop it into her desk drawer. Instead she looked down and twirled it in her fingers. A complicated look crossed her face. Taking a deep breath, she squared her shoulders. "So I've been mad at you off and on for a while because you hurt my feelings and avoided me and it made me say some things that I shouldn't have and I'm sorry." She sucked in a quick breath and kept going, "I know you're honorable and brave and not like your dad at his worst, only like him at his best, so yeah, sorry."

Something turned over in his chest. He quietly responded, "Thank you. I'm sorry too."

John wasn't ready to give up on this woman. Over a decade of friendship wasn't so easily dissolved. He'd lost a battle, not the war. She'd trusted him once. She could trust him again. He just had to be patient and keep fighting even when things got hard. Maybe it was lucky that John had a lot of experience with that.

Rome's computer chimed softly. She hurried over. "My simulation finished." Leaning over the screen, she scrolled through the results. Her shoulders drooped.

"No luck?" John looked at the lines of Ancient computer code on the screen but had no idea what most of it meant. He'd learned the Ancient alphabet and some relevant words, but honestly most of it still looked like a big game of eight-bit Tetris to him.

Rome sighed. "No, another dead end."

"What's it for?"

"I've been working on trying to create a program for a small and portable device to dial a stargate." Mckay gestured to her screen. "I've been working on it for a couple of years, but still haven't cracked it."

Interest sharpening, John stepped forward. "That would be huge. Right now it's either dial at the exposed DHD or use a puddlejumper. Getting hit while dialing the DHD during a retreat isn't uncommon. I've been hit by bullets, arrows, Goa'uld and Wraith stunners, and on one memorable occasion, both a spear and a stunner simultaneously. It delayed the initial pain, but having painful tingles as everything wakes up combined with a puncture wound is a special kind of hell."

Rome's lips thinned. "I'm going to keep working on it until I figure it out." Turning back to the computer, she scowled. "I don't have it yet, but if you ever need to disable a DHD during a retreat to permanently cut a planet off from the gate system, I'm your woman. Just make sure we really hate them first because it's not reversible."

"Right." Licking his lips, John remembered his purpose for coming in. "Speaking of gate travel, I didn't actually come in here to argue with you. I wanted to ask you something, remember?" And maybe this would help her to start trusting him again.

Rome tore herself away from her computer screen with reluctance. "If it's about replicating Ronon's laser rifle, I can't help you. He won't let me disassemble it to figure out how it works and the one time I asked he looked at me like he'd tear off my legs and eat them like chicken wings at a barbeque if I kept pushing it. He's scary."

Although he hadn't been going to ask about Ronon's gun, it was still disappointing news. "Ronon's going to be on my gateteam with Teyla, but we still need a fourth and I want someone from the hard sciences."

Nodding slowly, Rome tapped a finger on the edge of her desk. "Radek said he's gone out with you a lot but would prefer not to anymore if at all possible and the look on his face made even me feel sorry for him. I have either an engineer or a biochemist that might work. Both have gate experience." She turned back to her computer and started typing. "I'll send you the files."

"Actually, I already have somebody in mind, but if she refuses you can forward them to me. I only want the best." He found the energy to smirk.

"She?" Straightening, Rome looked at him narrowly and tilted her head to the side. "I hope you don't mean Miko Kusanagi. She's brilliant but too timid and nice for fieldwork. Since she's also too polite to say no I'll do it for her. No. Her skills would be wasted tromping through the mud meeting with village headmen instead of unlocking the secrets of Atlantis's database."

"Actually I was thinking of asking you, Dr. Mckay."

"Me?" She blinked.

"We've never worked together in the field before last week, so seeing you out there was a revelation. You impressed me. I think you're exactly what I need to help me explore Pegasus and discover new technologies. Your problem-solving skills under pressure are nothing short of spectacular and I know I can trust you to get the job done." He wasn't going to pussyfoot around what she'd said about trust. He was going to get to the bottom of it and make her change her mind.

"This is a professional offer. If you don't trust me to be your team leader, you can say no, but I respect your skills and think you'd be a good fit on my team. I want you. Think about it and get back to me."

"Okay." She bit her lip and rocked on her heels for a few seconds before sucking in a loud breath. "I want to tell you something." Lifting her chin, Rome crossed and uncrossed her arms before finally meeting his eyes. "Okay, look. I built you a Ferris wheel. You can use it if you want. Or not." Spinning around before he could respond, she began saving and shutting down the simulation on her computer.

"I know, thank you," John said, patiently waiting for her to turn and look at him again. He didn't have to wait long.

Rome jerked around, eyes wide and hands flying through the air accusingly. "What do you mean, you know? You couldn't possibly know. It's hidden on an isolated pier with no transporter access because I locked it down. Did you hack the transporter? I know that when you crook your finger Ancient programs roll over and start begging." She poked him in the chest and frowned like a ferocious kitten.

"I didn't have to hack anything. You can see the corner of the Ferris wheel from the balcony of my new office, genius." John smirked and captured her finger, raising it to his lips to kiss the tip. Since words had failed him he'd have to rely more on actions to win her over. He preferred to be a man of action anyway.

"Oh." Fingers going limp in his hold, Rome's cheeks flooded a beguiling pink. "They hadn't opened up that tower yet when I first started construction. A miscalculation."

Lorne had told John that they'd opened the tower and started moving offices less than a week after the command staff left for Earth. That meant she must've started construction almost immediately after their argument. It gave him hope. John felt his smile widening. He cradled her hand to his chest and stroked his thumb down the center of her palm. "I love my Ferris wheel. I've been fantasizing about taking it for a ride ever since I saw it." His voice went from innocent to husky as he dropped his chin and watched her through his lashes.

Rome's breath stuttered and her hand twitched inside his fingers. The pink on her face darkened to red. "You are trouble, John Sheppard." She gently tugged her fingers free and stepped back. "You lost your ticket to ride."

"I'll earn it back."

"Ferris wheels can be dangerous."

"That's part of the fun. The ride is worth the danger."

"You can't get off once the ride starts."

"I won't want to."

"Expectations don't always match reality."

For the first time John faltered, not sure which of them she was referring to. He'd spent most of his life failing to live up to his family's expectations. He didn't want to add her to the list of people he perpetually disappointed. Unfortunately, he wasn't good enough to hide his reaction.

Her expression shuttered and any points he'd gained during their banter disappeared. She turned back to her computer and brought up a new program.

"Rome—"

"I don't need to think about the offer to join your team." She bent over to write something down on her notepad, strands of golden hair falling forward to hide her face.

There was a beat of silence before John's paralyzed lungs found the breath to respond. "Yeah, sure. Okay." Heart sinking, he shoved his disappointment down deep. "Then I—I guess you can send me those names and files to look over." At least evaluating them would give him another excuse to talk to her, another chance to mend things. Feeling hollow and bruised, he reminded himself that tonight was only a temporary defeat. He'd make sure to win the next skirmish.

Standing back up, she looked over at him. "Don't look at me like that," she rolled her eyes. "Seriously, John, you're not a kicked puppy. I don't need to think about it because the answer's yes."

John blinked and stopped breathing again.

Snorting, Rome put a hand on her hip. "If you want the best of course you have to have me. I can figure out technology in situ instead of the knuckleheads you have tripping traps and breaking things. The stuff they bring back is barely useful half the time. Of course you want me. I'm a genius."

Chest filling with helium instead of normal air, John's heart flew up above the clouds. "I know." He grinned. Knocking on the corner of her desk, he turned to go before he lost all restraint and messed things up by taking her into his arms, swinging her around in the air, and licking inside the seam of her lips like he was searching for the center of a Tootsie Pop. "I'll see you for team training tomorrow at eight. I'll send you the schedule."

"Now wait a minute, I don't want to do more training. Major McLean already frogmarches me into sweaty rooms way too often as-is. He never takes no for an answer. I don't want more of that."

"Too late. You're mine now, Mckay." Reaching the doorway, John sent her a cocky grin over his shoulder. "See you tomorrow for team training?"

"Oh, fine." Rome gave a loud, put-upon sigh, but he could tell it was fake from the glimmer of excitement in her eyes. "See you tomorrow, Colonel."

"Tomorrow."


AN: Thanks for all the great comments on the previous plotline. Today outside the sun is shining vs the rain and clouds from earlier in the week, so that's nice. I also figured out how to make potato salad using my Instant Pot. I overcooked the potatoes a little, so it might be closer to mash potato salad, but I licked the spoon and it was yummy so I will count it as a win. Also, my parsley survived the winter. Yay! My houseplant is dying, but that's another story. Sigh. Have you guys found any fun recipes lately? I won't be posting on Sunday but I'll be back on Monday. See you then my friends!