Blind
by Fabula Rasa

He had always thought the disability to have, if you got to choose, was blindness.

Deafness would mean silence, and paraplegia would mean wheelchairs, but blindness – blindness meant your other senses became more acute, at least according to anecdotal evidence. (Though why didn't this work for other disabilities, he wondered, and where was the anecdotal evidence that deaf people had preternaturally sharpened sight, and was sharpened sight something you could actually develop the way you might develop sharper hearing? Point of research.) And blindness would work well for him because his hearing was, always had been, his secret weapon, and the point here was that his hearing was not just good. It was terrifyingly, painfully good.

Things he could hear:

1) the low hum of the power source flowing through the lab's consoles, and the slightly higher pitched vibration of the console nearest him, which he suspected was Not A Good Sign, which was why he was going to investigate that right after he finished this set of calculations;

2) the tiny scrubbing noise Zelenka's left pinkie finger made on the caps lock key as he typed;

3) the faint wobble-thump, wobble-thump of Miko fidgeting on the stool with the uneven leg in the next room;

4) each word of Williger and Leavitt murmuring at each other in what they thought was sotto voce, over top of the electron microscope in the lab's far corner;

5) the gurgle-swish, gurgle-swish of the test tube Luhrman was shaking absently;

6) Major Sheppard's retreating footsteps at the end of the hallway, slowing for the transporter;

And because his hearing was so terrifyingly, painfully good, Leavitt's next remark was perfectly audible, at least to Rodney's ears, though pitched only for Williger's. Rodney slammed his stylus down on the table.

"Excuse me, Dr. Leavitt?"

The two moved hastily apart, and Williger had the decency to flush. Leavitt turned startled eyes on his superior. "I didn't—what's the matter?"

"Get out."

Everyone had stopped now. Luhrman's test tube was still, Zelenka's eyes were flicking between him and Leavitt, and even Miko's stool in the adjoining room had stopped wobbling.

"But—what—" Leavitt's eyes had gone wide and darty.

"Get out of my lab now. Get out, and don't come back in it for the rest of the day, and whatever you find to do, it had better be nothing that takes you within fifty meters of this lab, or me. And at the end of this day, you and I will have a little talk, but it will not be here and it will not be now, are we clear?"

Leavitt's mouth was still slightly agape, and he wet his lips. "I don't—" he began.

"Get. Out. Now."

The end of the discussion was apparent in Rodney's voice, and Leavitt hastily scooped up his laptop, exiting in resentful silence. The rest of the lab was studying their feet or the table or anything, really, but Rodney's face and Leavitt's retreating back.

"Oh, for heaven's sake. Are you all eleven? Get back to work already." Rodney aimed a scowl into the general atmosphere, but it had the desired effect. Hands began typing again, test tubes clinked, stools fidgeted. There was no more talking, though, and no more smiling, and soon the niggling twinge that had been teasing the base of his neck all morning had bloomed into unignorable headache. So it was icing on the moldy cake of his day that Elizabeth waved him over in the mess hall at lunch, and only his unfailing courtesy and iron self-control kept him from rolling his eyes.

"Come sit with me a minute, Rodney. And I just have a question, so you can stop rolling your eyes at me."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. My eyes are perfectly level."

"I just want to touch base with you a minute."

"Fine, all right. Touch my base." Which came out more as, kiss my ass, but Elizabeth obviously had some iron self-control of her own, because she only smiled, and sipped her mock-coffee.

"Dr. Leavitt came to see me a little bit ago. Everything all right in the lab?"

"Wonderful. Couldn't be better."

She arched a brow. "Really?"

"Leavitt is just pissed that he got called on unacceptable behavior and came whining, evidently, to you, which would be enough to make someone less even-tempered really extraordinarily angry, considering that I had told him we would be having a discussion about it later in the day, and obviously he couldn't wait to pre-empt that by spinning tales of his persecution to you. What an unbelievable little pri—"

"Rodney!"

"Fine, what an unbelievable prat he is, satisfied?" He took a judicious bite of what looked like pudding.

"Well," was all she said. And then: "He seemed to feel it was more than being called on something. According to him, you threw him out of the lab."

"Correction, I threw him out of my lab, not the lab, and I do still have authority over what goes on in my lab and in my department, do I not?"

"Of course."

"Well then." He dove back into the pudding.

Elizabeth was curling her hands thoughtfully around her mug. "If you don't mind my asking, what was the disagreement?"

"It wasn't a disagreement, and by the way I do mind. Dr. Leavitt was discourteous, and spoke insultingly."

"I see." She set the mug down. "Rodney, the last thing I want to do is interfere with the running of things down in the lab, but you have to keep in mind that your own management style can be, well, brusque, shall we say, and sometimes people will respond to that in ways that aren't—"

"Oh, spare me." He gave up on enjoying his pudding and slammed his spoon down. "I didn't say discourteous to me, Elizabeth, do you think I'm such a baby I would throw someone out of the lab for being rude to me, really?"

She blinked, and shifted.

"Oh my God, that is what you think."

"No, Rodney, no, I didn't mean to imply that at all." She took a breath. "If you don't mind, who was—?"

"I think we've already established that I do mind." Right on cue, the headache arced to his jaw.

"Right. Sorry." She watched him eat for a minute. "I really didn't mean to imply a lack of trust in. . ." she waved her hand a little vaguely.

"Please. It's not like I think distrust of my interpersonal skills is so wildly off base, but really. I have been known to exercise some self-restraint, from time to time. Are you going to eat that?"

"Have at it. That was a tactical error, though, eating the pudding first. Spreading it on the meat made the meat, well, not so bad." She pushed her tray at him and sighed. "All right, back to work. Just let me know if you need any—right, right," she finished quickly, at his ominous look. She pushed back from the table, and he was almost certain he caught the whisper of something not entirely complimentary or even remotely diplomatic under her breath as she walked out.

He was seriously thinking of revising his Ideal Disability list. Deafness was looking better all the time.

~

He rapped on the door of Leavitt's quarters at exactly 2130 hours, though he had wrapped things up in the lab much earlier. It had been tempting to storm off to find him the minute Elizabeth had left the table at lunch, but he had thought that leaving the little shit to stew a while longer might be best. Really draw it out, let him wallow a bit. He could still remember that there were some transgressions, when he was little, that had been beyond his mother to punish, and those had been the times she had just said, in that quiet voice, "Wait in your room for your father to come home." He still felt the wary hush of those afternoons in the pit of his stomach, and sometimes, in his Wraith nightmares (which were many and varied) the Wraith were descending on the city, there wasn't enough time, he had done the wrong thing, his fingers were too slow on the console, his brain couldn't think, it was all his fault, they were all going to die and it was all his fault, and his last vision was of Elizabeth broken and bloodied over a console as a Wraith fed on her chest, mouthing at him, Rodney. Go wait for your father to come home.

He tapped on Leavitt's door and it whooshed open for him. The room was dim and from what he could see, appallingly messy. Almost as bad as his own quarters, though granted he had a little more room to spread out.

"Dr. Leavitt," he said to the figure sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at its shoes.

"Yeah."

All the anger of the morning that had dissipated during the day came rushing back at the sight of Leavitt's too-long, dishwater hair, the downturned pout of his mouth, the narrow glare of his eyes that didn't quite make it up to Rodney's. Rodney stood over him and studied the part in his hair.

"Dr. Leavitt, you and I have some unfinished business."

He waved a hand. "So sit."

"Well, where is really the question. Honestly, Leavitt, you might have taken the opportunity today to do some laundry, instead of running around Atlantis whining about how mistreated you are." He gave a pile of clothes on the hard couchish thing a tentative shove, and sat down.

Leavitt crossed his arms, and now his glare, pure defiance, met Rodney's. "I did not—"

"Okay, shut up. Look, we have two things to discuss and I have somewhere to be in fifteen minutes, so this will go much faster if you just keep your mouth shut, all right? First off, if you have a problem with me, you come to me. And if I tell you we are going to address a problem, you wait until we have addressed it. Then, afterwards, if you feel I have somehow wronged you or persecuted you or failed to understand the genius and pathos that is you, then and only then can you go to Dr. Weir and bitch behind my back. Are we clear?"

Leavitt did nothing more than duck his head and stare at his shoes again. It made the hair flop in his face and God, he looked so young. Almost it was enough to soften Rodney's voice for what came next. Almost, but not quite.

"Dr. Leavitt, I would appreciate some eye contact here."

The head gave a sullen lift.

"I said, are we clear?"

"Yeah. We're clear."

"Very good. Now listen to me," Rodney said, and he let his voice go quite still and flinty. "If you ever, in my hearing or out of it, refer to Major Sheppard as a Ôstupid grunt' again, you are out of my division for good. Your work with me will quite simply be over. Are we clear on that?"

A muscle in the side of Leavitt's face spasmed, and his throat worked. "You can't kick me out," he said softly, but the defiance was undercut by a sharp, panicked rise on the last syllable. Rodney gave a grim smile.

"Can and will. You can spend the rest of your time in Atlantis spritzing down the hydroponic broccoli for all I care. You can help the Athosians tan yak hides, I really don't care. But you will not speak that way of the man who, do I really need to add, has saved our lives more times than I can count." He weighed saying more, decided against it, then couldn't in the end resist it. "Your ingratitude, however, is outweighed by your ignorance. You might want to think twice before being quite so dismissive of a man whose mind could run mathematical rings around yours. Not that you have a bad mind, of course, it's just that, from what I've been able to observe, pure mathematics is not really your long suit, so when next you are around Major Sheppard you might want to take the opportunity to, oh I don't know, shut the hell up for once in your twerpy little life."

Rodney licked his lips and tried to dial it back down. It might be satisfying to rip the kid a new one, but not ultimately productive. Time to steer this back to the avuncular, and it would really help if he could remember Leavitt's first name. Why did he have to be so awful with names? Andy, was it Andy? He had a flash of Andy. But then, if it wasn't Andy, that would not be good. Nothing like getting the name wrong to blow the potential avuncularity all to hell. Possibly something that rhymed with Andy.

"Look," he settled for, dropping his voice. "Leavitt. One of the things you will learn is that genius can lurk in surprising places. It can even, you know, wear a uniform. Occasionally. Well, this once. So you might want to re-think that whole rush-to-judgment thing," he said, sending a silent prayer that the gods would be too busy laughing their asses off at his hypocrisy to strike him dead where he sat.

Leavitt swiped at his nose. "Yeah. Well. Whatever." He shrugged, and Rodney just watched him. He was a twerp, of course, but he was not a bad kid, he was even in fact not an entirely stupid kid, and when had he started thinking of people in their twenties as kids? That was mildly alarming.

"I just. . ." Leavitt was saying. "I just don't like the military, okay? They blow in here like they own the place, Sheppard is always in and out of the lab, always in our space, he just—God."

Rodney nodded. It was a common refrain, and he knew Leavitt's attitude – Alan, that was it, Alan, not Andy, Jesus – was not unusual. The research team in Antarctica had regarded the military presence as necessary, like cable TV repairmen were necessary. They were there to fetch and carry, to provide the scientists with the equipment and protection and transportation they needed, and to stay out of the way until they were summoned. Among his other idiocies, Colonel Everett's ham-fistedness with the science team had undone all the trust and respect Sheppard had gained in the past nine months. Now, he was just Military. Them.

"I'm not asking you to like the military, Alan," he said, settling into just the right balance of firmness and intimacy. He was really getting good at this, and now that he had pulled two sort-of sentences in a row out of Leavitt, he could see the big heart-to-heart looming up ahead, and gosh, look at the time. "I am, however, asking you to keep your opinions, stupid or ill-informed though they might be, to yourself. Especially where Major Sheppard is concerned. Do we have an understanding?"

Leavitt's eyes skated briefly upwards to where Rodney was now standing over him, and then quickly back down. He nodded, a terse jerk of his head. Rodney smiled, a sense of well-being stealing over him. And people complained about parenting being hard. This was ridiculously easy.

"Well good then," he said, weighing whether a hand on the shoulder might not be a good thing. It could go either way. "Good. I'm glad we've got that out of the way. Worked that out. Well." Sheppard, what would Sheppard do with a truculent Marine? He raised his hand, re-considered, raised it again, and ended with a stiff shoulder pat. "Good, good," he said again, and glanced at his watch. "Now fold some of this laundry, will you? Your quarters are revolting." He turned and picked his way out, letting the whoosh-click of the doors serve as his parting admonition. Once on the other side, he took a deep breath, letting the satisfaction seep in. A solid day's work, once again.

~

"Move already, will you?"

"Hm? Oh, sorry." Sheppard's hand shot out from around his book and moved the first piece it landed on. Sheppard never raised his eyes.

"Oh, for—just stop it, will you? Could you at least look like kicking my ass is hard for you? Could you grant me that dignity, at least?"

The corner of Sheppard's mouth twitched, and he let the book fall on his chest. "Don't be so hard on yourself. You're getting better. We're what, twenty moves in, and I haven't even checked you yet."

"Yes, well, that's because you haven't looked up from your book once since I got here. Would the two of you like to be alone? And what the hell are you reading anyway?"

He tossed it aside and yawned, tipping back his chair. "Sorry. No, God, don't go, I'm just whacked, is all." Sheppard stretched his arms behind his head, and Rodney could hear the bones crack. He glanced at the spine of the book on the sofa beside him and rolled his eyes.

"Don't you ever get tired of trying to pass?" he snapped.

Slowly, Sheppard brought his arms down. His face had gone quite still. "What are you talking about," he said, and there was no question mark in his voice.

"I mean," Rodney waved his hands about, "This. You. Don't you ever get tired of hiding yourself, of what you really are, all the damn time? Doesn't it just wear you the hell out?"

Sheppard had not moved, and his face was expressionless, except for the skin around his lips, which was white. He blinked, once, twice. "Occasionally," he said quietly.

"See? Whereas, if you would just stop it and be who you are for a change, it would make my life so much easier."

Sheppard lowered his chair. "Would it," he said in a slow inflectionless voice.

"Yes! Yes! God. I mean, take this morning. Do you know what I've been through because of you today? You come into the lab, and you stand around making inane remarks at me, you hover over Dr. Leavitt's shoulder and say, oh what was that paragon of brilliance? ÔGosh, whatcha doin' there, Doc? Looks pretty complicated.'"

Sheppard only frowned. "I don't—"

"No! No! Of course you don't. You think you're just making conversation, don't you, when you saw exactly what Leavitt was working on, you could probably do the equations on a beer napkin standing on your head, and then he goes and thinks, oh, stupid grunt wasting my time, and I have to deal with him, and between him and Elizabeth my day is shot nine ways to hell and I really do not have the time to deal with these asinine personal issues, and Jesus! Could you just make my life a little easier and throw around some IQ points once in a while, at least in the lab? I mean, who the hell ever made you think that being a genius was something to be ashamed of in the first place? So stop with the Hufflepuff Jock Flyboy TM act already, will you?" He picked up his knight and tapped it against the table, his irritation spent and his concentration coming back online. "Aha. Here we go." He slid his knight into place and leaned back, smiling at Sheppard.

Only Sheppard wasn't moving. He was just breathing in and out, arms crossed, watching Rodney. "You want me to stop hiding the math thing," he said slowly.

"Yes! Hello, is this universal translator on? That's what I've been saying, isn't it? Now move already."

For the merest second Sheppard's eyes shut. Then he opened them again, and he was back, though there was something keen and unpleasant in his voice. "Fine. You want me to dial it up? You got it." He slid his rook across the board. "You're at checkmate in three moves, and there's nothing you can do. Deal with it." He emptied his glass and pushed back from the table, heading to the bathroom. "And don't ever call me a Hufflepuff again," he said over his shoulder.

Rodney listened to the sounds of water running from the bathroom. He could hear the faint change in water pressure that came from now the left tap, then the right one. His hearing really was remarkably good.

He frowned at the board. Normally their games took up more time than this, and it was uncomfortable to think it was because Sheppard was stringing them out on purpose, playing him along. Why would he do that? The bastard. He twiddled with the board, despaired, drank some more of the ripish ale, after a while accepted that Sheppard was not coming out of the bathroom, and left. It must have been, he reflected as he walked back to his quarters, that Athosian dish they had all had some of at the mess tonight.

He was feeling a bit gassy himself.

~

Possibly it was the gas that awakened him, possibly not. But as he was sitting in his bathroom (and wasn't it just a kick in the head that basic toilet design was universally the same, regardless of galaxy?) with his boxer shorts around his ankles, contemplating the ceiling in his murkily lit bathroom, he had an epiphany.

An epiphany that made him gape up at the ceiling, not because of what he was seeing there, but because of what he was hearing, and hearing not in the bathroom at three in the morning, but hearing in his head, because what was playing in his head, for some unknown reason, was the conversation of earlier that evening with Sheppard, and clearly – it was clear now, as many things become while sitting on the toilet at three in the morning softly groaning with food poisoning – clearly his brain had had this particular conversation on continuous loop since he went to sleep.

Saying, as he might say to Zelenka in the lab: Hey, listen to this a minute. Something's not quite right.

Saying: No, play it again, still not catching it.

Saying: Hmm, listen to this, will you.

Saying: Wait, wait, do you hear it?

Saying, at last: Ah!

And it was his misfortune that the moment of "Ah!" came as he was reaching for the toilet paper, which, curse the Ancients, was not quite in reach of his fingertips because whatever their elegant and sophisticated design for butt-wiping must have been, Atlantis's current inhabitants had not yet discovered it, so they kept their rolls of precious toilet paper perched on the floor beside their toilets, and Rodney's happened to have rolled just out of his reach. Which was his misfortune, because as he bent to reach for it, stretching as far as he could go, he must have over-balanced just at the precise moment his brain gave the little jerk of "Ah!"

Which accounted for how he came to, God only knew how much later, stretched full length on the hard cold floor with his shorts around his ankles and a throbbing pulse on his forehead, along with a trickle of something his tentative fingers revealed to be blood. Thank you God, he prayed, for not letting me die like this. He could just hear Ford's voice on the comm now. Sir, we've found McKay. Yes sir, he's been beaten and pantsed and left for dead. Apparently he was taking a crap. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.

"Oh, hell," he muttered, hauling himself upright.

And stopped.

Stopped, because he suddenly remembered what it was that had caused him to tip over in the first place and bang his head with what was, apparently, shocking force on the tiled floor. He blinked, swallowed, and hastily pulled on his clothes. Some things could not wait until morning.

~

"Jesus, Jesus! All right, hang on a minute."

Rodney shifted from foot to foot as he waited for Sheppard to open the door. A bleary head stuck out Sheppard's door, and whatever Rodney had been going to say – not that he had thought of anything on the way here, mind a purposeful blank, nothing other than a refrain of "Ah! Ah! Ah!" – anything he might have said left him at the sight of Sheppard's hair.

"Oh my," he said. "Do you sleep with your head in a vaccum cleaner?"

Sheppard scowled and ran a hand through it. "What's the matter, Rodney?"

"Nothing. I need to see you. Do you mind?"

"Um. Kinda?"

"Nonsense." Rodney pushed him aside and went in, waiting. He knew he was bouncing a little on his feet, but it was entirely involuntary. It was the bounce of discovery, of finally knowing the answer, and he had trouble smothering his grin.

Sheppard was turning from the door, letting it whoosh shut, eyes still a little red and tired, hair a found-object sculpture. He rubbed his neck. "Wha's going on, McKay?"

"I heard it." He smiled.

"Ahh—heard what?"

"Heard. It. You know." He waved his hand a bit impatiently, because in moments of great discovery it was a bit frustrating, trying to keep everybody up to speed. Sheppard was looking at him like he was looped.

"McKay," he was saying. "Are you sure you tapered off those uppers Beckett had you on? And – hang on, what happened to your head?"

Rodney reached a hand up. He had almost forgotten about it. "Just an accident with the, the, the, the. The jumper cables."

"The jumper cables?"

"Yeah, that's all I could come up with, apparently. No no, I fell in the bathroom, but that's not important. What I'm trying to say is—"

"Hold on. Rodney McKay is making light of personal injury? You must have hit your head pretty hard there. Maybe Carson should take a look at that."

"Yes, yes, very funny, ha ha. You're not listening. I'm trying to tell you that I understand. I get it." He couldn't keep the grin from spreading, now, though he tried to control the bounce.

Sheppard scrubbed at his face. "Aw, c'mon already, McKay, it's, what, 0400, I've got maybe an hour and a half of sleep left, that is if I can get back to sleep after this, so do you mind telling me what the hell you're going on about?"

Rodney opened his mouth to begin the inevitable explication, then shut it. "Oh, here," he said eagerly. "This will be much faster."

He closed the distance between them in a millisecond. His lips were fastened on Sheppard's – really, he supposed it should be John, now – in half that time. He braced his hands on either side of John's face, letting his lips do all the talking for him, coaxing and licking and stroking in what he did in fact know to be one of his better kisses, and John's mouth was only slightly open, probably in shock, but that was all right, shock was okay, of course he would take some convincing. Rodney tilted his head and really began to put his back into it, and had a delicious thrill of moist and warm and oh see this really isn't so different after all, and then—

Then something hard and bony and incredibly like Sheppard's knee came up and whited out everything else in a wall of pain when it made contact with his balls.

"Oh," he moaned. "Oof." Which was supposed to be, what the hell did you do that for, you crazy son of a bitch, but he was without the oxygen to spare at the moment, so instead he simply rounded it off with: "Arghh."

"Get the hell off me, McKay." Sheppard's cold snarl was chilling, sure, but a bit unnecessary because he was at the moment bent double cradling his balls, and wow, this was a new one. He'd had passes at women go wrong before, but literally to be kicked in the nuts? New low. He propped his hand on the wall to get his breath.

"What the—oh, ow, oww—fuck did you do that for?"

"I might say the same to you. What the hell is the matter with you, McKay?"

Rodney shook his head, trying to clear it. "No, no," he panted. "You don't understand. I'm not wrong. I'm not wrong. Tonight. Playing chess, in your quarters. Don't you remember?"

Sheppard was cocking his head at him like he couldn't quite hear him. "In my quarters. Tonight. I'm sorry, did I happen to say Rodney, I've got a super idea. Why don't you bang on my door at four this morning and stick your tongue down my throat like an insane person? Was there something I missed, some mission briefing?"

Rodney straightened. He struggled to make himself understood. "John," he began rapidly. "John, listen to me, tonight, we were – I was talking about one thing, and you were talking about something else. I said, don't you ever get tired of trying to pass, and don't you ever get tired of hiding what you really are, and you looked at me so oddly, and I couldn't figure it out, don't you see, I didn't get it, but that isn't what you thought I was talking about at all, is it? It wasn't, I mean. And then when I said it would make my life easier, you must have thought I meant something else entirely, because you looked even more strangely and your voice got that thing that it does, you know, right before you bring the jumper in, but the thing is I didn't hear it. Not then. But I hear it now, and I get it, and I'm not wrong. I'm not wrong, am I? You're gay!" He waved his hands. "Well, bi, whatever. I mean, I'm assuming bi because you sure didn't seem to be faking it with Chaya, and you do watch Teyla's ass more than you're probably aware, but well, we all do that, I suppose that can be chalked up to involuntary human reflex and no real indicator of sexuality either way. But my point is, the thing not to miss here, is that I'm not wrong."

He finished triumphantly, and clasped his hands together.

Sheppard's face was if anything more shuttered, and his voice when he spoke was harder than his eyes. "Rodney. Get out of my rooms now."

He just blinked for a minute, unable to compute. "Get. . . out?"

"Yes. Out. You. Now."

"But—"

And then Sheppard's hand – oh, he was definitely busted back to Sheppard, after this – Sheppard's hand was actually gripping the back of his collar, thrusting him out the door and whooshing it emphatically shut behind him.

The man's cheek was really unbelievable.

~

"Carson, please," Rodney managed, desperate enough to try courtesy.

"The answer is still no. I'm sorry, Rodney, really I am." He went back to scrawling something on his ubiquitous notepad.

"But—"

He put down the pen. "Try to understand here, Rodney," he began, and it struck Rodney that he had just said his given name twice in three sentences, and when medical doctors did that, it was a sure sign of nothing good. So we can express x, where x is how medically screwed one is, as equal to a, where a is number of sentences spoken, divided by b, where b is frequency of given name; thus any value of x equal to or exceeding 1 would mean, mathematically speaking, that you were fucked. Or perhaps a should be more accurately expressed as time elapsed, to allow for disparities in sentence structure; Beckett, for example, had been speaking with him for 2.5 minutes, which would still put the value squarely exceeding 1. So, McKay = fucked. And yet, the man was somehow still talking.

"You have to see that your body just can't take anymore. Stimulants are not intended for longterm use – why, the strain on your cardiovascular system alone would—"

"Yes, yes, I'm not an idiot, I understand all that, but you are overlooking, or perhaps just willfully ignoring, that my physiology clearly differs from your textbook case. I am obviously not affected in the ways normal humans are, so obviously a larger dose is called for. Look, hook me up to any of your monitors, you'll see I'm fine. I'm fine," he repeated, spreading his hands and going for the calmly rational. From the look Beckett was giving him, he was evidently landing closer to the demented.

"Rodney," he began, and stopped. Then he gentled his voice, and Rodney knew his equation needed to take gentling of voice into account as variable y. "Rodney, when was the last time you slept?"

He blinked. "I—well, last night, I suppose."

"For how long?"

"I don't have any idea." He crossed his arms.

Beckett's mouth unbent at the edges for the first time since Rodney had burst into the infirmary. "I've had the good fortune to play cards with you, my friend, so I'm calling the lie. I'll wager, from the looks of you, you've not slept above six hours in the last three days. Do I have the right of it?"

Rodney gave a small shrug. "I don't require as much sleep as most people. I never have."

"Rodney, no. It's been three days now. Three days. That's it, no more. You're done. Understand?"

Three days. It was possible. Three days since Sheppard had forcibly ejected him from his quarters, three days since he had apparently decided that humiliating himself in front of his friend and colleague was the grandest idea ever conceived in late night post-concussion stupor, three days since he had seen anything of Sheppard other than across a daily briefing table. No late night chess, no shared bottles of Halling's ale, no bootleg DVDs of MST3000. No Sheppard. Cold turkey.

"Carson, please," he said again, and to his dismay his voice turned ragged, and he knew his face was scored with desperation. "I have to—please, I need this." He glanced at his watch out of the corner of his eye, surreptitiously trying to reckon the hours since his last dose. Beckett laid down the pen he had picked up, and studied him intently. "I have—I have to finish this project – if I don't finish, the results could be catastrophic – there isn't anyone else who can—Zelenka, for all his basic competency, is simply not equipped—" He pressed his hand, hard, into his eye.

"Ah," was all Beckett said. And then: "So you're there already, then." He rose and crossed the infirmary to a small cabinet, fiddled with a lock, and came back with a tablet in his palm. He laid it on the exam table. "It's the same drug, just a lower dose. We're going to have to taper you off, I'm afraid. You've worked yourself into quite the little addiction this time."

"That's balls," Rodney said, even as he knocked back the first pill, waterless.

"Come back in six hours for another one," Beckett said, and began scrawling on the notepad again. Rodney slid off the table, obviously dismissed, and made his way back to the lab.

The best way to deal with personal disaster was, indisputably, work. When Natalie Ferguson had not only refused his invitation to the 5^th grade dance but actually emitted this little whuffing chuckle, he had plunged himself immediately into building a model of a superconducting supercollider out of aluminum foil and empty paper towel rolls. He had taken first prize at the science fair, which granted he did every year, but that year's victory had held a special piquance. He had wandered the booths afterwards, the weight of the gold medal swinging pleasantly around his neck, and had stopped at Natalie's. She had done hers on the visible light spectrum; there was a tiny prism propped on a stand, a desk lamp, and a piece of black posterboard. He had stood there, studying it, nonchalantly crunching his apple while she glared at him. "Huh," he had said, and gave the exact same chuckle.

And ever since, it had been the same; he had found there was no motivator for professional development like personal stress. Which was why, immediately after leaving—well, being hurled out of—Sheppard's quarters the other night, he had headed straight to the lab to re-design the city's water filtration system. That had been three blurry days ago, and it had been easy enough to convince Beckett that his work was so crucial it warranted the stimulants; the man might be a gifted surgeon, but he couldn't tell the difference between nuclear bomb and gravity-feed pump if his life depended on it.

"Rodney," Zelenka began before he was even all the way through the door. "Please to look at this. Did you set the pressure ratio to feed off the generators or the power coupling?"

"Oh, what am I, an engineer? Obviously it's a power coupling feed, why would I waste time with the generator when we're talking about an isssue of simple mechanics here? And why can't I leave you people alone for fifteen minutes?" He slumped into his stool, cursing Beckett's ineffective voo-doo witch medicine. Probably they were placebos anyway.

"Aw, come on McKay, go easy on the kids," came the easy drawl, and Rodney jerked his head up to see Sheppard, perched on the stool beside Leavitt, regarding him with an amused smirk.

"Major," he said, ironing his surprise into a scowl. "Did you run out of things to shoot at?"

Sheppard's smirk became a smile. "Nah, just came to see what's up." He picked up a spherical object encircled by a ring of tiny spikes and twiddled it, apparently oblivious to Leavitt's disapproving glare. "You feel like a game later on?"

There was nothing in his face but bland camaraderie, and Rodney felt something heavy begin leaking out of his chest. So it was just that easy, then. It went just like that. He felt lightheaded with the relief. He shrugged. "Well, sure. Of course, there's this small matter of saving the entire city from being flooded by inadequate pressure ratios and preserving us all from a watery grave, but sure, I'm easy." He winced inwardly at his choice of words, but Sheppard didn't seem to have noticed. He was standing and peering over Leavitt's shoulder.

"Watery grave, huh? I thought you were, you know, basically purifying the drinking water."

"Well, in layman's terms."

Sheppard bent over Leavitt's shoulder. His finger brushed the laptop screen.

"Major Sheppard, what do you think you're—"

"That's wrong."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Fourth calculation. You've got your figure wrong. No, no, the other one."

Leavitt frowned. "Major, I assure you, you can—" He blinked. "Oh. That. . . Oh."

Sheppard clapped a hand on his back. "Carry on, Doc. So, McKay, you up for another round of ass-kicking?"

He coughed into his not-coffee, trying to hope Sheppard didn't mean it literally. Maybe it was a ruse to lure him somewhere and beat the shit out of him for daring to impugn his manliness. But Sheppard's gaze was open and friendly; too open, if he thought about it, because there was always something tickling at the back of Sheppard's gaze, something he always seemed on the verge of saying. But his gaze today was as flat and impenetrable as, well, Teyla's.

"Please. I've been holding back to encourage you. Tonight, I sharpen the long knives."

"Looking forward to it," he said as he strode out, shaking his head. "Water filtration. The things you do to make yourself feel useful, McKay."

Rodney waved his hands dismissively. Sheppard was already off and down the hall to the transporter, so he returned to his laptop, where the calculations unbent and flowed as though he had not been up for twenty-seven hours straight. The hard heavy liquid in his chest continued to drain away. He would be able to figure the effective fluid velocity if he could fix the kinetic and potential energy per unit volume, where p was the degree of smirk in Sheppard's mouth, and v the degree of anoxia he experienced seeing Sheppard just sitting there, waiting for him to show up. So, McKay = stabilized.

~

"How can you do that?"

"Do what?" Sheppard flipped to the next page, nudged his knight, and sucked on the last wedge of Athosian mock-orange at the same time.

"Oh, never mind. You're getting the board sticky."

"Am not. You're just jealous because I'm eating citrus in front of you."

"Mm. Because anaphylactic shock is just my idea of fun. It's not like I even find the taste, from what I remember, appealing. Your move."

"Yeah, yeah, hang on," Sheppard muttered, flipping to the next page already.

"What, you're skipping ahead?"

"Pierre's introspection can be a bit of a downer. Hey, what the hell kind of move was that?" He peered at the board, frowning.

"I don't know, I made it up. It can't serve me any worse than what I've been trying."

Sheppard was shaking his head. "I thought geniuses were supposed to be good at this game."

Rodney frowned. "Oh for heaven's sake. You could kick any challenger's ass at this game from the time you were twelve, and it never occurred to you that you might be, you know, one of those as well?"

Sheppard tossed the bit of rind towards the trash can. "Not so much."

"And besides, competence might be evidence of intelligence, but it doesn't follow that lack of competence is evidence of, you know, something else. I just never took the time to learn. I had better things to do."

"Yeah, whatever. Keep telling yourself that."

"Will you move already?"

"Oh, keep your shorts on, McKay." He bent forward and studied the board some more.

In the silence, Rodney contemplated the speech he had prepared on the way over here. Major. Sheppard. John. I'm sorry about the other night. I apologize for thrusting my tongue down your throat in what we ought to just agree to call a psychotic break. I'm sorry I sexually assaulted you. I'm sorry I haven't jacked off for three days because I'm afraid of what I might see when I do. I'm sorry I can't stop thinking about what your mouth felt like for the three seconds before you caused permanent testicular damage, you son of a bitch.

Sheppard was twirling a captured pawn in his fingers. "So Bates's team found some interesting geologic readings on MX7-P89."

"Mm?"

"Yeah. You know, you could find out about some of this stuff if you would bother to actually attend other teams' mission briefings."

"I was busy—"

"Preserving us all from a watery grave, I know. The place appears to be uninhabited, is the interesting thing."

"Pre- or post-Wraith?"

"That's what I'd kind of like to find out."

"I attend mission briefings all the time. Excuse me for having critical work to do that doesn't involve, oh, blowing things up."

"You don't attend Bates's briefings."

"I don't particularly like Bates."

"Teyla attends, and she has better cause to dislike Bates than you do. Besides, what the hell? Bates has hardly ever said three words to you."

"Yes, well, suffice it to say I know the type. Trust me, all that stands between me and being shoved in the nearest locker is twenty years and my recent combat training."

Sheppard choked into his glass. "I'm sorry, did you just say your combat training?"

He crossed his arms. "I think, in a fair fight, I could take him."

"Sure. If you define Ôfair' as Bates bound and tranquilized. So, MX7. I'm thinking we ought to go."

Rodney shook his head. "'Uninhabited' offers us no protection. We know the Wraith have long range life scan detectors that far exceed anything the Ancients possessed – well, as far as we know. There is no crevice deep enough to hide in, surely you know that."

"Yeah. Thing is, it's the geologic disturbance that has me interested. According to Bates, his team had a hard time keeping their scanners on line long enough to get much done."

"A seismically generated EM field?"

"I'm thinking."

"Your hypothesis would hold more water if MX7 were inhabited by a robust population of happy, prosperous, technologically advanced humans who had never heard of the Wraith. Besides, don't be an idiot. If they had a stargate –"

"Nope. Stargate was next planet over. Same system."

Rodney raised his eyebrows. "So the team detoured to MX7 because. . ."

"Because Bates wanted to check it out."

"A Marine with initiative, oh goody, doesn't that bode well. And you're thinking the seismic activity might be post-Ancients, and it might not have had an EM field back then. Are you moving anytime this century?"

"Fine, fine. A little eager for your own demise, aren't you?" He pushed his queen forward. "Let's just make things interesting, shall we?"

It was Sheppard's turn to cock a brow. "On the theory that, when all else fails, scream and flail?"

"Something like, yes."

Sheppard smiled absently and nudged his knight. "I'm going to win in three moves. Hey Rodney."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, what."

"You really don't like me when I win, do you? I mean, you're not just putting it on."

Rodney crossed his arms. "I would have to say, on the whole, no. I genuinely find you a distasteful human being when you are, as you put it, well, for lack of a better term, and grossly over-simplifying, winning."

"Yes." Sheppard was nodding. He spoke slowly and carefully. "People don't like it when other people are right."

Rodney frowned. For some reason Sheppard had begun talking like an afterschool special—and not the good ones, where Mandy discovered feelings for her best friend the captain of the cheerleading squad. More like the ones where—oh.

"Oh," Rodney said out loud. "Um, no. I mean, yes. I mean, what was the. . ."

Sheppard set down the chair Rodney hadn't realized he was tipping back. "I'm sorry I kicked the shit out of you."

Don't fuck this up don't fuck this up don't fuck this up sang the chorus in Rodney's head. And why would he be thinking that? What was it he even wanted here, beyond the satisfaction of finding out he was right, which he obviously had just done? But Sheppard's face was still grave, and there was a flicker of something, just something, in his eyes, that might very well have been fear. Sheppard had fear in his eyes a lot; it was what made people want to follow him into the bowels of death, it was what made his men rip their chests open to prove themselves to him, it was what made him the effortless natural leader he was. And those weren't the sort of thoughts you had about your best friend unless you were, yourself, in an afterschool special, which what do you know, it turned out he was.

"No," Rodney said hoarsely. "No, I'm sorry. I, ah, I never should have—I'm—I'm an asshole. I shouldn't—I didn't—well, I'm sure in just a minute I'll complete a sentence here. Hang on."

"'S okay," Sheppard said easily. He acted like they were still talking about seismically generated EM fields. Rodney stood, because all of a sudden it seemed like the thing to do, and his chest was pounding so loudly he was afraid Sheppard might be able to hear it, and he was positive his palms had begun to sweat. Only, when he stood, he saw it.

Maybe it had been the angle of the board. Maybe all this time he had been sitting, when he should have been standing. But somehow, miraculously, he could see it now. He could see every move on the chess board, where before it had just been a tangled ambushing jumble of pieces and patterns. Now, suddenly, he saw it: every move forward and backward. Everywhere he had been, everywhere he was going. And it was beautiful. It was like seeing the world as John Sheppard saw it, and he knew, with a painful stab of clarity, that John went around seeing the world like this all the time; that this was what the entire world looked like to John. And he knew beyond a doubt that he himself was brilliant, that he was the smartest person on the science team, maybe even in the whole Stargate project, but he knew with an equal and even more painful stab of clarity that the man sitting across from him was not brilliant: he was a genius.

"Look," Rodney said. "The thing is, I'm in love with you, and I'm inexpressibly, unbelievably bad at this, and also I have never so much as held hands with a guy, but there's no reason to think I would be any better at that than the utter fucking disaster I am with women."

Sheppard's face was taut around the eyes. "McKay," he whispered. "This was just supposed to be my coming out party, not yours."

"Yes. Well." Rodney bent to the board. "I can't see how to stop you," he mused. "It's not stoppable, is it?"

"No."

"Then—that it's something that I can see what it is you're going to do, isn't it? It's something that I can see that much, anyway."

"Yes."

Rodney dared a glance at him. "So, if I move this here, I could delay you, couldn't I?"

"Yes."

"But not stop you."

"No."

"That's your fourth monosyllable in a row. Please tell me I have not irretrievably fucked up. Look, if need be we can just chalk this whole excruciating exchange up to my little drug problem, which apparently and hurrah I do have now—you ought to see Carson checking me out when I'm eating, he's practically looking to see if I have pills stashed under my napkin—and if you wanted we could just. . .we could. . ." He trailed off, because Sheppard had gotten up and walked to the door. So that was it then.

"What—what are you. . ."

"I'm locking your door, Rodney. Atlantis still listens to me better than you, and I thought this might be one time when a locked door actually needs to mean it."

"Right." Something strong and light flooded Rodney's chest, and he thought, strangely, irrelevantly, of confectioner's sugar floating down onto the top of a cake. Of watching his mother sift it onto the top of a cake, its sweet happy fluffy lightness. Possibly Carson was right about him and his little problem.

"Do you?"

Sheppard was looking at him intently, and that thing was back in his eyes. Rodney strung the conversation back together and arrived at the answer. "Oh. Yes. I do, actually. Mean it, that is. If you were—well. I mean, I mean the part about—well, and the other part too, with the—"

"You scared the fuck out of me." John was still by the door, and Rodney's chest did something else that was not so much fluffy and happy as achy. "The other night."

"I know."

"Well." John was nodding. "Okay. Well. I'm gonna go now."

Rodney's chest did a crunching 180, and it had definitely left powdered sugar land. "You—you're leaving? What the hell, I thought we were having this very deep and meaningful but nonetheless powerfully suggestive and erotic conversation here, and at the end of this conversation there was supposed to be some, some, well, at least some sort of—"

"Rodney," Sheppard said firmly. "I'm leaving now."

"But you locked the door!"

"What the hell, Rodney, did you think at the end of this conversation there was going to be a blowjob for you, or something?"

"Yes! Yes, I did, in fact, but I'm not closed to the idea of a little mutual—"

"Rodney. Listen carefully to me. I'm leaving now. I am going back to my quarters. In exactly one hour, you will show up at my quarters, and that thing you did the other night—that, whatever the hell that was, that thing that I could have filed charges for in at least two galaxies—that thing will definitely not happen again. This time, you will do it right. Is that clear? You will do it the right way. And if in an hour, you don't show up, well, tomorrow night I come back here and we have another game and we never talk about this again. Ever. Are you following me?"

A choice; John was giving him a choice. It had been so many months since he had had one of those he was almost unsure what to do with it. Rodney, go here, Rodney, fix this, Rodney, save us all, Rodney, take out the trash. "Yes," he said, resorting to Sheppardian monosyllables.

"Okay," John said, and his hand was on the doorframe. The door slid open in its noiseless embrace, the way it always only did for him, and he stepped through the door and didn't look back around, and then he was gone.

Rodney walked over to the board, then walked around to the other side and examined it from that angle. It was still the same; he could still see it, like floodlights on a runway. It was almost too metaphorical to be borne. Was it possible? The wires in his head that connected gay sex and chess? What were the odds of that, and in what steamy subtropical fetishistic jungle of his subconscious had that particular thing happened? Maybe he had seen something on TV when he was young, or his first involuntary erection had happened while watching news footage of Gary Kasparov, or Bobby—

The doors whooshed open again. "Forgot my book," Sheppard said, striding back across the room to where his book lay forgotten on the edge of the table.

"That kind of killed your suave exit there."

"Yeah, I'm aware. Look, you're gonna come over, right? Because I was thinking we could just—"

"Fast forward, yeah," Rodney agreed, and in one and a half-steps he was around the table, and had grabbed John by the shoulders of his black T shirt and seized him up roughly to his mouth, and it was possibly the worst kiss of his entire life, given or received, but it didn't matter. It really didn't matter, because Sheppard's—no, definitely John's now, always, only John's—mouth was tucked inside his, full firm lips against his wetter ones, and it was guiding him over the rough spots, slowing him, steering him around the curves. He was going to get whiplash.

"So I was right," he said smugly, when he could claw to the surface for air. He kept dipping back underwater for some more, and then getting sucked under.

"About?" John murmured. He smelled of laundry sanitizer and skin, of flesh, of the faint stubble on his jaw, and that was stupid, stubble couldn't possibly have a smell. He wanted to lick it to be sure, wanted to bury himself in it, and he would have felt like an idiot, like a complete fucking moron, except that he could feel the echo of his own fingers' hungry fumble in John's against him, and he wasn't alone in this, he wasn't alone.

Rodney restrained his bounce with difficulty. "Oh, well, everything. Chess, and life, and you, and that fact that at the end of this conversation, there really is going to be a blowjob for me."

John pulled back, and Rodney noticed that John had dimmed the lights when he wasn't looking. It was hard to see, but he could make out John's frown well enough. "Rodney. Given the opportunity, you could shoot off your own foot with a slingshot, couldn't you?"

"Shut up and suck me, bitch," Rodney said, and counted the retaliatory slam of his back against the bed well worth it, because a) he had just called John Sheppard his bitch and lived, and b) John Sheppard had just landed on top of him on said bed, and therefore McKay = x, where x was an indeterminate variant whose qualities fit no known parameters, in any galaxy.

~

Alan Leavitt shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other outside Dr. McKay's door, reviewing it in his head. Dr. McKay, he would say, here are those figures you were asking for. His voice would have just the right amount of brisk competence, but with a palpable underlayer of stiff resentment nonetheless. He used this voice with Dr. McKay all the time now, ever since what he liked to think of as The Incident. It was part of the little game they played, the two of them, this cat-and-mouse that the other idiots in the lab were completely unaware was going on. And then Dr. McKay, as part of their game, would pretend that he hadn't noticed The Tone, just like he did every day.

Please tell me you haven't managed to screw this up beyond all hope of repair, Leavitt, he had sighed just the other day, while leaning over his workstation.

I think you know I haven't, Alan had replied, his lofty tone conveying, he felt, everything that needed to be said. And McKay had gotten it, too, that much was apparent. It was obvious from the way he had quickly moved on, obvious from the way he had pretended to ignore him. And using that idiot Sheppard to bait him was just too pathetic, too impossibly transparent. The minute Sheppard came into the lab, McKay would move aside whatever he was working on and go huddle with him, talking about God only knew what—nothing with too many syllables, probably—and pretend to ignore him even more. Well, two could play at that. He would see just how much coldness McKay could take before he broke.

"Yes? No, all right, wait, hang—hang on," McKay called, from the other side of his door, and Alan stood there, arranging his face into patience.

"What the hell is it?" McKay said, as the door slid back. A tuft of hair on the side of his head was sticking out. Granted, it was already 2300, but he was still surprised McKay was in a bathrobe. The full depth of the game was becoming apparent.

"Those figures you requested," he said, and he knew he had hit it, he had just the right tone. Pride, superiority, and also indulgence, because if McKay wanted to take this to the next level, he could absolutely do that.

McKay was squinting at him, blocking the rest of his quarters from view. "You walked them here? At eleven-thirty at—oh, hell." He snatched the tablet from Alan's hand, and oh no, he had not imagined it, that meaningful brush of fingers as he seized the stylus along with it.

"There. Initialed. Looks great. Happy now? Although since we're now apparently back to horse-and-buggy days and walking figures around like—here's an idea, why don't you use carrier pigeon next time? We could tie little clay cuneiform tablets to their tiny ankles and wait for information to arrive, because wouldn't that be much more efficient." McKay sighed, and thrust the tablet back at him. Again, the significant brush of fingers.

"The figures look fine. Look, it's not that I don't appreciate all the gung-ho here, but dial it down just a notch or two, all right? You don't always have to—" he glanced quickly over his shoulder, almost anxiously, as though something might be moving around behind him. "Look, just, ah—well, good work. Keep it up, Levine. Seriously." And then McKay put a hand, an actual hand, on his shoulder, which he used to turn him back around and push him—yes, actually push him—the other direction. "Um. Night now."

And the doors clicked shut. Alan stood there, almost incredulous. McKay could not have been any more obvious. The grin that broke out on his face was wide and blinding, he knew it, but he couldn't be bothered to wipe it off, even during the long walk back to his quarters, even passing people in the hall – stupid people, who had no idea what was going on all around them, right under their noses.

But to him at least, things had never been clearer.

Finis

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