Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/4126.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Stargate_Atlantis
  Relationship:
      Rodney_McKay/John_Sheppard
  Character:
      Rodney_McKay, John_Sheppard, Original_Characters
  Additional Tags:
      Time_Travel, Drama, Angst, Wordcount:_10.000-30.000, Age_Regression
  Stats:
      Published: 2009-04-13 Words: 26264
****** Teenage Kicks ******
by Rheanna
Summary
     It's not about changing the past. It's about letting the past change
     you.
Notes
     With thanks to Cathalin, Counteragent and Yahtzee for beta.
Rodney is woken by someone knocking loudly at his door.
He grunts and rolls over in the bed, figuring he can safely ignore it and go
back to sleep for a while longer. It's probably only Sheppard, who's taken to
passing Rodney's quarters on his morning run on days they have early-departure
missions for the sole purpose of rousing him at some uncivilized pre-dawn hour.
The knocking, Rodney knows, is only stage one of a complete strategy, which in
its more advanced phases involves Sheppard paging him on the city-wide address
system and, occasionally, using that damn gene of his to persuade the
environmental systems to blast icy-cold air into Rodney's room. It's unfair, in
Rodney's opinion: they've only ever had to reschedule one mission because he
overslept, and it wasn't even an important one. And right now Rodney could do
without the ministrations of Lieutenant Colonel Punctual, because he was up
until two a.m. fixing the long-range scanners, and he's not ready to face
whatever crisis the new day is bound to bring just yet.
But Sheppard's being unusually persistent this morning and, instead of stopping
after a few seconds, the knocking gets louder. Rodney burrows down deeper
underneath the blankets and tries to tune it out. It doesn't work and, after a
while, he's forced to admit that he's awake and is probably going to stay that
way.
He reaches a hand out to the table next to the bed, feeling automatically for
his radio. In the last four years, he's come to think of it as a detachable
piece of himself, the last thing he takes off before he goes to sleep and the
first thing he puts on when he wakes up.
It's not there.
Instead, his groping hand meets a number of unidentified, unexpected objects
which, as far as he remembers, weren't on his bedside table when he collapsed
exhausted into his bed in the early hours. He grabs something that he thinks
must be his alarm clock, until it clicks under his thumb, and suddenly he's
listening to the chorus of Madonna's Like A Virgin playing at top volume.
Either someone's decided to set up the Pegasus galaxy's first classic pop radio
station without telling him about it, or something is very wrong. Even half-
awake, Rodney knows the second option is by far the more likely.
He sits bolt upright in the bed and stares at his surroundings in dawning
horror. He's in his room. He's not in his Atlantis quarters; he's in his
bedroom. His bedroom, the room he slept in at his parents' old house, the room
he grew up in, the room that hasn't even existed since the house, along with
most of the street, was knocked down and replaced by a shopping mall in 1999.
Okay, so he's having a nightmare. A particularly vivid nightmare, of the kind
that his subconscious takes particular delight in conjuring up to torment him.
Maybe—yes!—maybe that fear-eating energy-crystal creature from M3X-387 is back
again, only this time it's bypassed that superficial stuff about getting
swallowed by whales and is feeding on the real meat of Rodney's nightmares, the
horrors which are rooted so deeply in his mind that he's never been able to
share them with anybody.
He hopes that's the explanation, because the alternative is that this is
actually happening.
He fumbles with the radio and somehow his shaking hands manage to turn it off,
cutting Madonna off just as she's getting to the part about feeling shiny and
new. An all-too-familiar voice from outside the bedroom door says, "I know
you're awake, Meredith. Not even you could sleep through that racket. I'm
coming in there. And don't whine at me about privacy, young man, because I wash
your underwear."
The door opens. Rodney stares.
"...Mom?" he says faintly.
"Don't give me that look," Irene McKay says irritably. "You may think it's
acceptable to lounge in bed until nearly lunchtime, but while you live under my
roof it isn't. Get up."
She turns and walks out again. "Mom," Rodney says again, more out of sheer,
blank shock than anything else. Then it hits him that his voice is wrong, too.
"Oh, no," he says, and hears the words come out sounding thinner and more nasal
than they should. "Oh no, no, no, no—"
He throws off the blankets and runs out of the bedroom, his feet carrying him
unthinkingly along the familiar route down the hall to the bathroom. He dashes
inside like he's diving for cover in a firefight and locks the door behind him.
God, he remembers this bathroom. The avocado-colored toilet and wash-basin, the
dent in the side of the bathtub from the time Jeannie had thrown a tantrum and
kicked it, the ugly lemon-yellow tiles. It's been twenty years since he was
last in this room, but the memories are so deeply rooted that it might only
have been twenty minutes.
It's just a nightmare, he tells himself firmly, some kind of hallucination. He
left all this behind a long time ago. It's not real. It can't be. It's not.
He takes long, slow breaths, trying not to hyperventilate. Then he goes over to
the sink, braces his hands on either side of it, and looks into the bathroom
mirror.
The reflection he sees there is very different to the one he's gotten used to
looking at as he shaves in the morning. His face is thinner and more angular,
with more pronounced cheekbones and a mouth which appears wider and lips which
look fuller against his narrower profile. His skin is ivory-pale and his cheeks
are smooth and flushed bright pink with panic. His hair is fine but much more
abundant than in recent years; it's long enough to flop down on to his
forehead. That feels strange: he keeps wanting to push his fringe out of the
way. The expression in his eyes is one of dismay, mixed in with a kind of weary
what-this-time resignation that looks oddly out of place on his absurdly young
features.
He's a teenager.
Any second now, Rodney thinks desperately, Sheppard's going to jog by and knock
on his door for real and in a couple of hours he'll be on an alien planet,
probably running for his life from Wraith or Replicators or, knowing the kind
of luck they usually have, something even scarier. Any second now, he's going
to wake up. Please, God, let him wake up now.
He starts to turn away from the sink, and as he does so, something catches his
eye.
One of the tiles above the sink is cracked from side to side. Rodney doesn't
remember how it got broken—it's possible it's been like that since the day they
moved into the house—but he does remember that his father promised for years to
fix it, never did, and that the cracked tile gradually achieved iconic status
in his parents' fights, a symbol of every unfulfilled promise and unreasonable
demand that festered between them. Until right now, he'd forgotten all about
that broken tile, but there it is, right in front of him, mocking him with its
mundane awfulness.
It's too authentic a detail for even the most fully realized of nightmares, and
Rodney is forced to accept the appalling truth: this is really happening.
He flips down the lid of the toilet and sits on it, elbows on his knees, head
in his hands.
"How long are you going to be in there, Meredith?" his mother's voice demands
from outside on the landing. "You're not the only person who lives in this
house, you know."
I want to go home, Rodney thinks, but that's the problem, right there.
This is home.

***

By the time Rodney has brushed his teeth, washed his face (no point in shaving:
he won't need to do that regularly for another couple of years) and returned to
his room, the initial shock has subsided enough that he's starting to think a
little more clearly. He doesn't have any answers, but at least he's forming a
list of pertinent questions. He needs to figure out (1) what year it is, (2)
how he got here and, (3) how to get the hell back, and if he could work out (3)
first, he could live in happy ignorance of (1) and (2).
Unfortunately, he's not going to find answers to any of those questions by
doing what he wants to do, which is to stay in his room and not venture out
again, at all.
There's a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt bearing the slogan Future World Leader
lying on the floor near the bed. They look relatively clean, so he puts them
on. His body feels strange and foreign to him, like it's newly minted, fresh
out of the packet. He remembers that he did most of his growing in his early
teens, so he's not too much shorter than he should be, but he hasn't filled out
yet, and his chest and shoulders are narrower and his arms and legs far
skinnier than he's used to. He checks the inside of his forearm for the scar
from where Kolya cut him and finds the skin unblemished. That should come as a
relief—he hates that scar and the memory that goes with it—but instead its
absence is strangely disconcerting, as if a part of who he is has been suddenly
taken away from him.
He hesitates at his bedroom door as if it's an open Stargate with a
particularly hostile world on the other side, then goes through.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, his mother is heating canned soup in a pan on the
stove. She barely glances at Rodney as he comes in. "So you're not entirely
nocturnal, after all. I was beginning to wonder." She walks past him to set a
plate of ham sandwiches in the middle of the table, and Rodney takes the
opportunity to check the date on the page-a-day calendar sitting on top of the
counter.
It's Tuesday, July 24. The year is 1984.
Rodney thinks of George Orwell and decides that the universe doesn't just want
him to suffer, it wants to make a joke at his expense at the same time.
Now he's got a date to work with, his memory fills in the remaining context for
this little jaunt into his own personal hell. If it's the summer of 1984, then
he's sixteen and Jeannie is seven. His parents' marriage is heading into the
final stages of its ugly and inexorable disintegration, and his only hope of
escape is the math scholarship that's going to take him to MIT in September,
two years earlier than normal. CalTech had been going to make him wait another
year, Rodney remembers, but he'd preferred MIT anyway, purely on the grounds
that it was further away from his family. When he thinks of the summer of 1984,
he remembers spending most of it holed up in his bedroom, reading and watching
TV, counting down the days until he left for college.
The only thing he wanted was to get away, and now he's back again. Rodney's
always known, deep down, that some higher power is out to get him. One of these
days he's going to sit down and work out the mathematical proof of it, but
until then, the fact that things like this keep happening to him is ample
empirical evidence to support the theory.
"This is ready," his mother says. "Fetch your sister."
"Where is she?"
"What, do I look like I have radar? You're supposed to be intelligent. Go and
find her."
Rodney opens his mouth to bite out a reply. It should be easy; after all, the
source of his natural flair for sarcasm, and the person he has to thank for
training him so thoroughly in its use as an offensive weapon, is standing right
in front of him. But somehow the words just won't come, and he's left there,
standing in dumb silence, feeling resentful and belittled.
He walks out without saying anything.
Jeannie's not in her bedroom, and she's not in the living room or the den
either. He's standing at the bottom of the stairs, wondering if she's playing
in the yard, when he hears a sing-song, girlish monologue coming from the hall
closet.
He pulls open the door. Jeannie is crouching inside, her toys arranged
carefully around her. Her hair is tied up in bunches and the expression on her
round little face when she looks up at him is one of undisguised loathing.
"This is my house. We're having a party. You're not allowed in. Go 'way."
Rodney hunkers down in the door of the closet. "I wonder why I don't feel hurt
by that. Oh, wait, I know: it's because your entire social circle consists of
Beach Fun Barbie and a stuffed bear."
Jeannie grabs the bear—Mister Huggy, he remembers, and, God, he could have
lived without ever dredging that up from his memory—and squeezes it
protectively against her chest. "Mister Huggy doesn't like you."
"Since Mister Huggy's a stuffed toy and you're going to grow up to marry a
vegan English teacher, I'm not inclined to take the opinions of either of you
very seriously." Then, less acerbically, he says, "Jeannie, please, just come
and have lunch." He knows he's pleading with her; he knows, too, exactly how
pathetic that is, but he can't face his mother without some kind of support,
even if it's only from someone who thinks the Muppet Show is reality TV.
Grown-up Jeannie would understand, but the seven year old version of his sister
just stares suspiciously at him, as if she suspects he's using some kind of
complex ruse against her. After a couple of seconds she decides to give him the
benefit of the doubt, and comes out of the closet, dragging Mister Huggy with
her.
Back in the kitchen, his mother is ladling soup into three bowls. Rodney takes
a seat at the table and helps himself to a couple of the sandwiches. As he
starts eating he discovers he's a lot hungrier than he realized. In fact, he's
ravenous. He finishes off the first sandwich in a couple of bites and then
takes another. It must be his sixteen year old body's voracious appetite,
because it can't be his mother's cooking, which is just as bad as he remembers
it. She can't even make particularly good sandwiches: the bread's stale and the
ham's dry, and they taste as appetizing as reheated MREs. On the other hand,
Rodney's always quite liked military rations. Suddenly he begins to think this
might be why.
"Leave some for your sister," his mother says as he reaches for a third.
"I'm hungry."
"And don't speak with your mouth full."
"I wasn't—" Rodney stops. It hits him, suddenly and with great force, that he's
forty years old, holds multiple doctorates, has over one hundred highly
qualified professionals reporting to him and can legitimately claim to have
saved the galaxy on at least three separate occasions. In short, he doesn't
have to put up with this.
"Okay, you know what?" he says, standing up. "You can stop that right now.
Maybe I used to put up with this kind of constant emotional abuse, but I'm
significantly more mature and articulate now and it's time we got some things
straight. I don't know why it is you feel the need to find fault with
everything I say and do but it's going to stop because I am—I'm going to be—a
successful and talented adult, renowned for my intellect, celebrated for my
achievements, and I am not this, this—stupid kid you seem to think I am. I
don't know what it is about me that made you decide you hated me from birth,
but I never deserved it and it's not—it's not fair."
He stops there, because his traitor voice wavered up on the last few words, and
they came out of his mouth in a kind of whiny bleat that even Rodney can't
stand to listen to. As rants go, it's not vintage McKay; he might have all the
advantages of his adult mind and experience, but there's something about being
back here, in this house, at this table, which strips away all the layers of
emotional armor he's built up around himself down the years and leaves him
feeling exposed and defenseless. Inadequate.
His mother regards him coolly for several seconds. Then, without any emotion
whatsoever, she says, "You have tomato soup on your chin, Meredith."
Too late, he remembers he never could get the last word with her.
"I'm going out," Rodney says, and gets up from the table.
Upstairs in his bedroom, where his mother can't see him, he wipes his chin.

***
He walks around the neighborhood for a while in a kind of daze, the past
assaulting him afresh with every step he takes. There are things he
remembers—the grocery store on the corner of Spalding Street where he used to
buy Garbage Pail Kids trading cards—and things which he would have lived the
rest of his life without ever thinking about again, like the mangy stray dog
that used to scavenge around the dumpsters behind the Chinese restaurant. It
growls at him as he passes by.
This used to be his entire world: five blocks wide and six long, encompassing
his parents' house, the school, the park and the grocery store. He can't
believe he ever managed to exist somewhere so restricted, so small, so
limiting.
The only place he'd known that hadn't constricted him is where he's heading
now.
The local library is just the way Rodney remembers it, and he remembers it
perfectly—he should do, given the amount of time he used to spend here. He goes
straight to the reference section and shrugs off his backpack as he sits down
at the reading table. He opens the backpack and takes out a clean notepad and a
pen.
He may be sixteen again, but he's still a genius. If anyone can figure out how
this happened, it's him.
Fifteen minutes later, he's still staring at a blank piece of paper.
Think logically, he tells himself firmly. He picks up the pen and writes, at
the top of the first page of the notebook:
POSSIBILITIES
(1) stress-induced mental breakdown (oh god)
(2) hallucination / virtual environment (replicators?)
(3) time travel (ancient tech?)
If it's option one, then there's not much he can do about it, except wait for
Keller to break out the good drugs for him. He doubts it, though: this is too
internally consistent for a psychotic break. If it's option two, and
Replicators have kidnapped him and trapped him in a version of 1984 inside his
own head, then they're more inventively sadistic than he's previously given
them credit for. But he doesn't think that's the most likely explanation,
either, since nothing about this set-up seems designed to extract information
about Atlantis from him.
That leaves option three: time travel.
Bizarre things happen in Atlantis—and to Rodney—with astonishing regularity,
but there's usually some kind of clue as to the cause, even if it's just
Sheppard saying 'Oh shit' at the exact moment a piece of formerly dormant
Ancient technology lights up at his touch.
But nothing even a little bit strange has happened to Rodney for weeks. He
thinks that could be some kind of record.
If he'd done something to send his adult consciousness hurtling back through
time and across light years of space, then surely he'd remember it, but when he
searches his recent memory for clues, he comes up blank. Yesterday, he got up,
worked, went to a couple of briefings, worked, yelled at a number of people for
being morons, worked, ate dinner in front of his laptop, had hurried, fervid
sex with Sheppard in one of the unoccupied rooms near the jumper bay, stayed up
into the small hours fixing the long range scanners, and finally fell into a
dreamless sleep the second his head made contact with his pillow.
It's true that until very recently, one of the things on that list would have
counted as exceptionally unusual. One of the consequences of four-plus years in
the Pegasus galaxy, Rodney has recently realized, is that it's made him a lot
more ready to accept extraordinary situations as the norm. The fact in the last
six months he and Sheppard have somehow become—what? Lovers? Fuck-buddies?
Something he hasn't figured out the word for yet?—is pretty much the ultimate
expression of the phenomenon.
The sex is always good, nearly always initiated by Sheppard, and never, ever
discussed in between times. In all other respects, their relationship is
exactly the same as it's always been: they have dumb arguments, make fun of
each other, save each other's lives and, when required, everyone else's lives,
too. It's just that now they do all that and sneak away afterward to find
somewhere where John can gasp and curse and grind out Rodney's name over and
over, and Rodney can shout when he comes without anyone hearing them.
It's a strange kind of normality, but then again, that's a phrase that pretty
much sums up Rodney's entire life in Atlantis. And if the Arrangement he and
Sheppard have (that's how he thinks of it, complete with a capital letter at
the start: their Arrangement) is not everything Rodney would want, it is still
enough that he's found himself unwilling to bring it to an end, or to say or do
anything which might make John end it.
But as much as he likes thinking about sex with John Sheppard—and Rodney likes
thinking about it a lot—he has to admit that it's highly unlikely to be the
mechanism by which he fell asleep in an alien city in another galaxy and woke
up in Vancouver in 1984.
"Hey, Meredith."
Rodney looks up, and nearly falls off his chair in surprise. "Oh sweet Jesus.
Cheryl Blanchard?"
She giggles, which makes her blond hair bob around her eighteen year old face
in a cute way, and her chest wobble in a really pretty great way. He hasn't
thought about Cheryl Blanchard—the crush of his final year at high school—in
two decades. Cheryl had been a glorious, unattainable ideal, occupying a level
of the class's social hierarchy which Rodney, two years younger and about a
thousand times smarter than everyone else, had been utterly excluded from. And
then her parents had asked his parents if he could help her with her math two
nights a week, and Rodney had spent the most erotic three months of his life up
to that point sitting right beside her on Tuesday and Thursday evenings as she
struggled to comprehend the mysteries of differential equations. Occasionally
he'd even managed to touch her wrist.
And now she's right there in front of him, wearing a tight sweater and that
flowery perfume he never found out the name of and it's just—overwhelming. His
cheeks flush hotly and he can feel himself starting to get hard. He pulls his
chair in tightly against the reading table so she won't see and he tries, with
limited success, to look casual.
"How, how are you?"
She nods. "I'm doing good. I got into UBC."
Rodney nods so hard he thinks his head is going to fall off. "That's great,
that's really good. It's not one of the top universities, but it's certainly
not among the worst, and the physics department isn't a complete loss, or at
least it won't be in twenty years, I'm not sure what the quality of teaching is
like there now and, anyway, it's really quality of research you need to look at
when assessing these kinds of things and, ah, how would you like to go on a
date?"
Cheryl smiles at him, and although it's not cruel, the pity Rodney sees there
is almost harder to take. "I'm really grateful to you for the math lessons,
Meredith. But, you and me? That's kind of silly, don't you think?"
And then Cheryl Blanchard turns around and walks out of Rodney's life again,
eviscerating his hopes with elegant economy as she goes.
Really, he thinks as he watches her receding hips sway artfully from side to
side, he should have been better prepared this time.
***
He stays in the library until Mrs. Flaherty, the crotchety chief librarian,
throws him out, and then he spends a couple of hours just walking around,
trying to think of anything he can do to avoid going home. But he's got no
money to book himself into a hotel, and he can't think of anyone who'd take him
in if he just turned up on the doorstep and asked to stay the night.
By the time he's trudging up the drive to the front door of his parents' house,
it's after midnight and there are no lights on in any of the rooms. He can't
decide whether to feel resentful that his mother wasn't concerned enough to
wait up for him or relieved that she hasn't. On the whole, he's probably more
relieved.
The spare key's exactly where it should be, under the large planter on the top
step. Rodney lets himself in and creeps upstairs to his room, his feet avoiding
the creaky floorboard at the top of the landing before his brain has
consciously remembered it's there. He hates how easily he's readapting to this
time and place; it's like a swamp, gradually sucking him down and down.
He lies down in his bed, but doesn't go to sleep.
After about an hour has passed, he hears a car pull up into the drive, and he
hears another set of footsteps climb the stairs. The footsteps pass by the door
to Rodney's room and go into his parents' bedroom, next door to his own.
A minute later, he hears his mother's voice say something, and his father's
voice answer her. Their words are indistinct, but it doesn't matter that Rodney
can't hear them; he knows what they're saying, knows how this goes.
His mother's voice says something else, her tone sharper, and his father's
reply is short and curt.
Five minutes later, they're shouting at each other, loud enough for Rodney to
make out everything they're saying, including the parts about him.
He puts his hands over his ears and, when that doesn't work, he mentally proves
the Fibonacci recursion and all its generalizations. When that doesn't work, he
gives up and just lies there listening to his parents screaming vitriol at each
other. He should be able to let this wash over him: it should be less painful,
experienced through the filter of maturity, and he ought to be able to distance
himself from it. But it's not and he can't. All he can do is hope with every
fiber of his being that tomorrow he'll be back where and when he should be.
The next morning, he is woken by Tina Turner's voice coming from the tinny
speakers of his radio alarm clock, demanding to know What's Love Got To Do With
It?
Rodney thinks: Not very fucking much.

***

Rodney doesn't remember if Wednesday, July 25, 1984 was a good day for him the
first time he lived it, but on the second pass, it sucks.
He waits until after he's heard his father's car pulling out of the drive, then
gets up and showers. He eats breakfast—a huge bowl of cereal and two slices of
toast—and thinks about just going back to his room for the rest of the day, but
after the previous night, he wants to get out of the house.
The only way he can get money from his mother is by offering to take Jeannie
out, and so he ends up passing the morning at the swing-park. It's not a fun
experience: she's clingy and tearful, and Rodney finds himself starting to
revise his long-held belief that his sister was spared the worst of their
parents' break-up by virtue of being too young to remember most of it. Maybe
his Jeannie doesn't remember those years as well as he does, but she still
lived through them, and the proof of that is right in front of him, fretful and
bad-tempered and unwilling to communicate other than through Mister Huggy.
He takes her home for lunch—canned soup and sandwiches, again, eaten in
oppressive silence—and collects his ten dollars from his mother before going
out. He intends to go straight to the library, but he passes the cinema on the
way and, on a whim, buys a ticket for the latest release, Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom.It's not as good as Raiders, but Rodney doesn't care. He's never
been so grateful for simple escapism.
He gets to the library at about four, and spends the rest of the day writing
out in his notebook everything he knows about the physics of time travel,
deriving the relevant equations from first principles where he has to. By the
time the library's closing, his full notebook contains enough revolutionary
material to win every major scientific prize there is, as well as several that
don't exist yet. It's scant comfort to him.
The last thing he does before the library shuts is to add another possible
explanation to the list on the first page of the notepad:
(4) Have died and gone to hell.

***
He is lying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling and contemplating his
situation with the same dull horror he's been feeling since he first woke up
here, when his mother yells, "Meredith!" from the bottom of the stairs. He
ignores her.
"Meredith!" she shouts, more loudly. "Come down here."
"No!" he yells back. He means it to sound defiant; unfortunately, in his not-
long-broken sixteen year old voice, it just comes out petulant. He loathes
this: he has the mind and memories of an adult, but he can't say anything in
this body without sounding like the teenager he doesn't want to be.
There's a pause, and then he hears his mother's voice, talking to someone. He
can't hear the words, but he recognizes the tone and he remembers how the
script used to go: Such a difficult boy, we don't know where he gets it from,
how he ever expects to get on in the world—
He doesn't hear the reply and he doesn't want to. He can't think of anyone
who'd be likely to visit on a weekday afternoon, but he's confident that
whoever it is, he doesn't want to be dragged downstairs and forced to make nice
with them until they go. It can't be one of his friends because, well, he
doesn't have any. He rolls over on to his stomach and pulls a pillow over his
head.
Which is why he doesn't realize someone has come into his room until a voice
which does not belong to his mother says, "I come all this way and you won't
even say hello? Kind of rude, McKay."
The voice is higher and reedier than it should be, but the delivery—slow,
deliberate, faintly amused—is the same and wonderfully, blessedly familiar.
Rodney throws off the pillow, flips over and sits up in less than half a
second, the movement far faster and more fluid than his forty year old body
could have managed.
The kid leaning against the door of Rodney's bedroom, carrying a small backpack
and wearing a red-and-white striped tee-shirt and jeans that are a little too
big, is John Sheppard.
His hair is exactly the same, sticking up at all angles in a way that Rodney
supposes he will now have to accept has more to do with genetics than styling
products, and the basic shape of his face is virtually unchanged, although
adolescent skinniness makes his features look slightly too big. The bare arms
sticking out from the sleeves of his tee-shirt are covered with fair, downy
hair, and are cord-thin, with no musculature at all; he looks like one strong
gust of wind would blow him away. His skin is smooth, lacking even the hint of
stubble, and there's a scattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks.
Sheppard has freckles. Rodney fights down the urge to laugh hysterically.
His silence must be unnerving Sheppard, because he's starting to look a little
worried. "Uh, okay. You do know this is me, right? Because I have no idea how
I'm going to explain this to you if you don't."
"Of course I know you," Rodney says, his brain still working hard to assimilate
the sheer weirdness of the visual input his eyes are sending it. Sheppard's
about ten months younger than Rodney, so in the summer of 1984 he would have
been—"Fifteen," Rodney says incredulously. "You're fifteen."
Sheppard glances down at himself and says, dryly, "Thanks for pointing that
out, Rodney, I hadn't noticed." But he looks a lot more relieved than annoyed,
and Rodney can't help but feel cheered by the knowledge that, as of this
moment, he's not in this alone.
"I have never, ever been so happy to see you," Rodney tells him sincerely, "and
I'm including that time in the Wraith hive, and the time I thought you'd been
blown up by a nuclear bomb, and the other time I thought you'd been blown up by
a nuclear bomb, and the time on that planet where they wanted to sacrifice me
to their gods—"
Sheppard holds up a hand, not even trying to hide his smile. "Okay, I get it.
You're pleased to see me."
"I'm pleased to see you," Rodney agrees fervently. Then his unfettered joy
subsides sufficiently for him to think that through properly. "Wait, wait. How
did you get here?"
"Took the train," Sheppard says, sounding slightly smug.
"From where?"
Sheppard slides the backpack off his shoulder and sets it down at the end of
Rodney's bed. "San Francisco. Well, first I hitchhiked to San Francisco, and
then I took the train."
Rodney pictures this teenaged version of John strolling along the side of a
highway, casually sticking out his thumb to attract the attention of every
passing axe-murderer and child-molester, with neither the upper body strength
nor the automated weaponry to defend himself. "You hitchhiked?" he asks,
aghast. "You're fifteen."
"No, I'm thirty-nine, I just look fifteen." Sheppard rubs the back of his neck.
The gesture, too adult for his appearance, looks strange, and Rodney wonders if
his own body language is off, too. "You know, adolescence was really crappy for
me the first time round. I'm not wild about doing it all over again."
"You have my complete agreement on that count, Colonel," Rodney says. It slips
out automatically, and Rodney sees his own involuntary wince mirrored in
Sheppard's expression.
"Better drop the rank, Rodney. It just makes us sound like we're playing
soldiers."
"Right." Talking to Sheppard is making him feel weirdly off-balance, and Rodney
suddenly realizes why: John's almost half a head shorter than he is, and he has
to look down to make eye-contact. "Hey, I'm taller than you," he says. It
really shouldn't please him as much as it does.
It doesn't please Sheppard at all. "I was a late developer," he says
defensively.
"How'd you find me, anyway?" Rodney asks.
John picks up the Rubik's Cube sitting on the bedside table and starts to twist
it idly. "I knew your father ran an engineering business. I went through the
phone book until I found a firm with McKay in the name. Which, by the way, took
forever without Google."
Rodney's about to ask John how he knows what his father did, and stops when he
remembers it's because Rodney told him. It had been after the first Wraith
attack, when they'd found that one of the bridges connecting two of Atlantis's
towers had been damaged and was structurally unsound. Rodney had spent several
days frantically trying to figure out a way to stabilize it before it collapsed
and destroyed the building where the main science labs were located; he
remembers complaining bitterly that if he'd wanted to be a civil engineer, he
would have followed his father into the family business.
"Huh," he says. "You actually listen to me?"
"I'm wounded, Rodney. I always listen to you." John twists the Rubik's Cube
several more times, completing the red face. Rodney can't stop looking at his
hands: they are smaller than they should be, fine-fingered and lacking the dark
hair that extends down from adult-John's wrists almost all the way to his
knuckles. It's a weird thought, that those are the same hands—will be the same
hands—that Rodney's grown used to feeling touching him, stroking him, making
him come. He really can't stop staring at them.
"So I got the phone number, called the switchboard, and explained to the nice
lady that I'd met Mr. McKay's son at camp and I'd promised I'd write to him but
I'd lost his home address. She was very helpful."
Typical: Sheppard's barely hit adolescence and he's already got women falling
over themselves to do things for him. "And then what? You just told your
parents, By the way, I'm going to Canada for a while, see you round?"
Another flick of John's wrist, and the blue face is finished, too. "Not
exactly."
Visions of headline news items and police forces mobilizing across the entire
west coast of the U.S. float into Rodney's mind; maybe a shot of a worried-
looking man and woman while a reporter voice-overs, Fears are growing for the
safety of missing teenager John Sheppard...
"Oh, God. You ran away, didn't you?"
John twists the Rubik's Cube one final time and then returns it, completed, to
the bedside table. "It's only running away if someone notices you're missing.
My dad's in San Diego on business and my younger brother's staying with
relatives in Chicago for the summer. Isabella's there, but she's used to me not
being around much. It'll be a while before anyone realizes I'm gone."
Rodney wonders who Isabella is—John's cousin? His step-mother? A kindly aunt?
But then, Sheppard's always been closed-lipped about his family and his
upbringing: the very first time John ever mentioned his father to Rodney was to
say he had to take a couple of days leave to go to his funeral.
John, clearly ready to change the subject, looks around and says, "So, this is
your room?"
He surveys the bedroom with the same appraising gaze Rodney's seen him use
immediately after stepping through the Gate to a new world. It's disconcerting,
because it hits Rodney suddenly that there are a lot of things in his room that
he's not sure he wants John to see. At sixteen his bedroom had been an
uncomfortable mixture of the childish and the grown-up. On his shelves, Hardy
Boys mysteries sit next to Frederik Pohl and Phillip K. Dick novels; the Star
Wars poster over the bed doesn't embarrass him—hell, he's watched Star Wars
with John more than once—but the fact that he has Return of the Jedi bed-linen
does. He feels uncomfortable, exposed.
Self-consciousness, as ever, makes him prickly. "It's my sixteen year old
self's room, not mine," he says defensively. "Anyway, a lot of this stuff got
cleared out before I went to college."
"Relax, McKay," John says, lifting down a model moon-lander from the end of one
of the bookshelves. "I'm not judging you. Actually, it's kind of reassuring to
find out you were a normal kid."
Rodney bridles. "What do you mean, normal?"
"Come on, you built an atomic bomb when you were in sixth grade."
"I built a modelof an atomic bomb," Rodney corrects him, holding up a finger.
"Although it's true that it was, potentially anyway, a working model. I still
maintain that if I'd been able to source some weapons grade plutonium—" He
breaks off, suddenly noticing the look on John's face. "What is it? What's the
matter?"
John is staring at him intensely. "It's just—" He stops. "It's you. I mean, you
look completely different, but you're still you." He takes a step closer. "My
God, you're— Jesus, look at you."
"All right, there's no need to rub it in," Rodney says, shifting uncomfortably
on the spot and wishing he had the power to render himself invisible at will.
"So I'm sixteen. No one looks their best in the hormone-addled throes of
adolescence."
"No, no, that's not what I—" John shakes his head. "You look—incredible."
Rodney stares at him for a second, trying to decide if this an example of
Sheppard's off-kilter sense of humor. But John wouldn't make a joke this cruel,
and after a second of horrible uncertainty, Rodney realizes that he's
completely serious.
"I, um. You really think so?"
"Christ, yes." John takes another step toward Rodney, so that there are barely
a couple of inches between them. Then he lifts his hand and touches his fingers
to Rodney's face, as if testing to make sure Rodney is real. It's an unexpected
gesture—every time John has touched Rodney before, it's always been with a
specific purpose: to help him up when he's fallen, to support him when he's
injured, to make him hard when they have sex. This is the first time Rodney can
think of when John has touched him just to touch him.
Rodney feels John's fingers brush against his lips, tickling a little. "Your
mouth's the same," John says, his own mouth quirking in a smile. "Figures."
"I've always thought it's my best feature," Rodney tells him. His breath puffs
out against the palm of John's hand.
"I want to—" John starts. He hesitates. "I want to kiss you. Can I?"
That's the second surprise; in all their previous encounters, John has never
asked permission to do anything. Rodney supposes that, tacitly if not
explicitly, John sought his permission the first time he came to Rodney's
quarters late at night and alone and Rodney gave it when he didn't turn him
away.
"Yes," he says. "Yes." And then, just in case he hasn't been sufficiently
clear, "Kiss me. Do that, yes."
John leans forward and then he suddenly lifts up a inch and Rodney realizes
it's because he's had to stand on his toes to make up the height difference.
Rodney ducks his head a little to make it easier, but John still holds back.
When Rodney looks questioningly at him, he shakes his head, looking
embarrassed. "I, uh—it's just a little weird. You're sixteen. I feel like I'm
doing something I shouldn't."
Rodney raises a disparaging eyebrow at him. "What, are you worried you're going
to corrupt me or something equally hideous? You're even younger than I am. If
anyone's doing the corrupting here, it's me."
"I'll blame you for my sexual deviancy," John says. He tilts his head up and
brings his mouth to meet Rodney's.
It does feel strange at first, but not because of Rodney's youth, or John's.
It's the way John kisses him that feels different. The Arrangement has
consisted almost entirely of rushed encounters and snatched moments, releases
of tension after or very occasionally during crises. John's kisses have always
been demanding, hasty precursors to the main business.
But this is not the same. John is tentative, holding back a little. It's like a
first date kiss, Rodney thinks suddenly. The comparison makes him hanker
suddenly for a relationship where John is his friend and his lover at the same
time, instead of the strange back and forth see-sawing they have stumbled into.
Then, as John's confidence grows, the kiss deepens. Rodney puts his hand on the
back of John's head, which has the dual advantage of prolonging their contact
and letting him thread his fingers through John's hair. It feels amazingly
soft, almost silky, and Rodney wonders if adult-Sheppard's hair would feel the
same.
John, meanwhile, is hoisting up Rodney's tee-shirt, his fingers—slim and
lacking the calluses that using a gun have put there—slipping under the cotton
to explore skin which is firmer, smoother, tauter than it ever will be again.
Rodney's skin is also, he would swear, more sensitive: it's like he can feel
each and every nerve ending lighting up at John's touch, as if as well as the
Ancient gene, John's got a gene for switching on something in Rodney, too.
Rodney can feel himself getting hard; the difference in their heights means
that the bulge in his jeans rubs against John's flat, tight stomach. He feels
John's erection as a press against the top of his thigh, urgent even through a
couple of layers of clothing on either side.
Not such a late developer after all, then.
Making out, Rodney thinks: they're making out. It's not foreplay—foreplay is
something you do once you reach an age where your body requires advance notice
of intercourse. Making outis for adolescents, who have so much sexual energy
that it spills over at the smallest provocation, like water sloshing out of a
full bucket. Foreplay has technique, but making out is fumbling and unskilled;
although Rodney has the mind of a reasonably experienced adult, it can't keep
up with his body's demands, and so he finds himself rendered clumsy again,
breathless and uncoordinated, so completely overwhelmed that he can't decide
where to put his hands next.
It must be the same for John. He breaks off the kiss and starts tugging at the
belt of his jeans, then switches to working on the belt of Rodney's, like he
really can't make up his mind who he wants to get naked first.
"Bad idea," Rodney says, his mouth up against John's ear.
"Prob'ly," John says indistinctly into Rodney's neck, but his hands keep
working on Rodney's belt regardless.
"No, seriously, bad, badidea," Rodney tells him, hearing the familiar, ominous
tread mounting the stairs. "My mom's coming."
John hisses, "Shit," at the same moment that Rodney pushes him firmly away.
It's really not fair, he thinks, that the best erection he's had in the last
decade is going to go to waste.
By the time the bedroom door opens and Irene McKay comes in, Rodney is sitting
next to John on the edge of the bed, several inches of empty space between
them. Rodney has a large book open on his knees and John, backpack positioned
nonchalantly across his lap, is doing a passable job of feigning interest in
it.
"Well, you boys seem to be having fun," Irene says. "Who wants cookies?"

***

It's not that Rodney's never seen Sheppard using his charm to secure the co-
operation of suspicious natives—he has, on dozens of occasions—it's just that
he's never seen him use it on Rodney's mother. Rodney can't decide which is
more disturbing, his mother's almost-pleasant demeanor, or John's frankly
alarming butter-wouldn't-melt wholesomeness.
"Thanks, Mrs. McKay," he says brightly, taking another cookie from the plate
she's holding out to him.
"Growing boys need their nourishment," Irene says. Rodney reaches for another
cookie, too, but his mother whisks them away before he can take one. "Not you,
Meredith."
"How come he gets more cookies and I don't?"
"Because you had lunch less than hour ago, but John's just made a long train
journey all by himself."
Sheppard looks across the table at Rodney and nods in agreement. "All by
myself."
Rodney scowls at him, but only because getting annoyed at John provides a
momentary distraction from thinking about how much he wants to pin him to the
floor and start up at exactly the point where they were forced to beak off in
his bedroom. His dick, still a little hard from the episode upstairs, throbs
approvingly at the idea, and he has to recite the periodic table to himself to
subdue it. Once he's willed it into grudging submission, he forces himself to
tune back into the conversation.
"Would you like to call your parents to tell them you've arrived safely?" Irene
is asking John.
"No, that's okay," John says around a mouthful of cookie. "My dad's not there
anyway."
"What about your mother?"
"She's not there either." Sheppard's using the same tone he employs on missions
to shut down unwelcome enquiries about Atlantis's exact location or its
defensive capabilities. Rodney's curious, but before he can say anything,
though, the door to the back yard opens and his sister skips in, trailing
Mister Huggy behind her.
John's eyebrows climb about a half-inch up his forehead. "My go—" he starts,
and then, when Rodney kicks him, hastily amends it to, "—gosh. That's Jeannie?
That's Jeannie."
"Well, I see Meredith's been telling you all about us." Irene smiles stiffly,
and Rodney doesn't miss the look of annoyance that underlies her expression and
which is meant just for him. "What a pity he didn't tell us more about you,
John. Like the fact he'd asked you to visit."
While his mother's been speaking, Jeannie has hauled herself up on to one of
the kitchen table chairs and has been staring at John like he's just arrived
from outer space. Which in one sense, Rodney thinks, he actually kind of has.
"Mister Huggy says 'lo." Shyly, Jeannie holds the stuffed toy out across the
table.
John looks at Rodney, who shrugs. "It's her appointed spokesperson.
Spokesbear." He sighs. "Just go with it."
John reaches out and, gravely, shakes Mister Huggy's paw. "Pleased to meet
you," he says, and Jeannie smiles, revealing the gaps where three of her milk
teeth used to be.
"What are you boys going to do this afternoon?" Irene asks.
Staying in Rodney's room groping each other and ordering in pizza is the first
and most appealing—although not the most productive—response that comes to
mind. But Rodney doesn't get a chance to pitch it convincingly, because his
mother already has something else planned for them.
"I know," she says, "you can go to the park and take Jeannie with you. How does
that sound?"

***

"Sounds great, Mrs. McKay," Rodney mimics. He is sitting on a swing, idly
pushing himself back and forth with his feet and, every once in a while,
reaching out to give Jeannie a push when she starts to slow. At Jeannie's
insistence, Mister Huggy has a swing to himself.
John, leaning against the metal frame, shrugs. "Come on, Rodney, she's your
mother. Did you want me to be rude to her?"
"Actually? Yes. She was an evil, shriveled harridan who hated me and used every
opportunity that arose to tell me as much. And she was sarcastic as hell with
it."
"She didn't seem that bad to me."
"Please, you only spent ten minutes with her. I was sentenced at birth to
sixteen and a half brutal years living under the same roof as that woman."
Rodney exhales heavily. "Look, she was—nothing I ever did was ever good enough
for her. Nothing. It didn't matter what I achieved, she was only interested in
what I was going to do next. Even now, every time I succeed at something, I
can't enjoy it without hearing her voice in my head saying—"
"Push! Mer, push!" Jeannie demands as her swing gently comes to a halt.
Rodney breaks off, suddenly grateful for the interruption. He'd meant to list
his mother's flaws so Sheppard understood exactly how dreadful she'd been, and
instead Rodney has an uncomfortable feeling that he's given away a little too
much of himself in the process. He ignores the way John is looking at
him—curious and not unsympathetic—and instead focuses his attention on Jeannie,
giving his sister a shove to start her swinging again. "You have to use your
bodyweight to give you momentum. Come on, Jeannie, this is one of the basic
laws of motion. You're never going to get your doctorate if you don't learn
this stuff early."
"Mister Huggy wants a push too."
"Oh, for Christ's sake."
"I got it," John says, and nudges Mister Huggy's swing. Jeannie beams up at
him, and John grins back. "Your sister's cute."
Rodney holds up a hand. "Ah, no. She's married. Or she will be."
John pulls a face. "Jesus, McKay, not that kind of cute. How old is she,
eight?"
"Seven, and don't forget it."
"I never realized there was such a big gap between you two."
"Jeannie was a late surprise baby." Rodney shrugs. "Officially, at least. It's
probably a lot closer to the truth to say she was the save-the-marriage baby.
It even kind of worked, for a few years." He leans back on the swing, which is
meant for younger kids and is a little too small for his almost-but-not-quite-
adult sixteen year old frame. "And don't think I don't know you're trying to
avoid the subject. What the hell did you doto bring us here?"
John's expression is filled with the righteous indignation of the falsely
accused. "What makes you think this is my fault?"
Rodney gives John his best oh-please eyeroll, the one he usually reserves for
particularly egregious mistakes by people on his staff who should know better.
"Well, it wasn't anything I did, and you have an almost preternatural ability
to attract trouble. Working out where to lay the blame is hardly the greatest
test of my intellect. Now tell me what you did." When John still doesn't say
anything, Rodney adds, "Remember I'm bigger than you now. Tell me or I'll give
you a wedgie."
It's more likely the realization that Rodney's on to him than the threat of
physical intimidation that makes John visibly deflate a little. "You know that
memory machine we found a while back?"
Rodney frowns, not because he doesn't know what John's talking about, but
because he doesn't immediately see its relevance to their current situation.
The device had been one of several they'd found when they'd opened up a new
sector on Atlantis's east pier. Initially, Rodney had thought it was another
control chair, because it bore a close resemblance to the chair they knew
about, but a cursory examination had shown it wasn't connected to the main
network or any of the defense systems. That had been the first disappointment;
the second had been that it didn't appear to do very much at all.
The first couple of gene users who'd sat in it couldn't get it to do anything,
although the scans taken while they were trying to activate it indicated
slightly elevated levels of activity in the regions of the brain associated
with storage of long-term memories. Several more rounds of experiments later,
they'd discovered that sitting in the chair made it easier to recall specific
memories, and that the memories came back with a greater degree of clarity and
immediacy than they did without the device's assistance. Rodney had tried it
out himself, but without great success. He'd chosen to focus on the time he'd
won the Heineman Prize for mathematical physics, but after ten or fifteen
minutes' concentration, all he'd managed to do was remember the buffet that had
been held after the presentation. He'd gotten up from the chair with the newly
rediscovered knowledge that he'd eaten five cheese pastries and a dozen smoked
salmon blinis, which was nice to know, but hardly worth the headache
remembering had given him.
What he'd really wanted to find out, though, was what someone with a strong
natural expression of the gene could get the machine to do. Usually Sheppard
was first in line to try out Rodney's latest Ancient tech discoveries:
sometimes Rodney thought their friendship had been sealed the day they arrived
in the city, when he'd been the one who'd shown Sheppard the puddlejumpers for
the first time, thus creating Pavlovian conditioning whereby John associated
Rodney with cool stufffrom that moment on. But the memory machine had been
different: every time he'd wanted John to try it out, Sheppard had made
excuses, until eventually Rodney had taken the hint and moved on to something
else.
"I remember you didn't seem to be very interested in it. What changed your
mind?"
"Well, I, uh... I've been kind of... thinking about...things," Sheppard says.
"Lately."
He's not being very articulate, but he doesn't need to be. Rodney already knows
what he's talking about. Things means John's father and lately means the month
or so which has passed since he returned to Earth for the funeral.
"I couldn't sleep," John continues, "and, okay, you know how sometimes things
sound like a good idea in your head at three in the morning? Well, I got to
thinking about the memory machine, and I thought maybe if I used it, it might
be easier to—work through some stuff."
Rodney stares at him. "You couldn't just get therapy like any normal person?"
"Believe me, I really wish I had," John says.
It's all starting to make sense, now. "So you went and used it. Except it's not
a memory machine at all. It's a time machine. If the user only has a weak
expression of the gene, all it does is stimulate long term memories. But with
the full gene, it must somehow use the memory as a kind of target—a space-time
destination to lock on to. And then it—I don't know, it must somehow project
the user's consciousness back to that exact point, allowing them to inhabit
their past self." Next to Rodney, Jeannie swings back and forth, singing a
nonsense song to herself. "But that doesn't explain what I'm doing here. I was
sound asleep while you were recklessly fooling around with advanced technology
you didn't understand."
"Oh, and you never do that."
"Hey, I'm not the one who somehow managed to drag us both back to 1984, a year
which marked the nadir of my adolescence."
"It wasn't exactly a golden year for me either," John says angrily.
Rodney opens his mouth to ask him if that's the case, why the hell he was
thinking about it in the first place, but he doesn't get a chance, because
right then Jeannie puts her hands over her ears and makes a whimpering sound.
"Don't fight." She glowers at Rodney. "You fight with everybody, just like
Mommy."
Rodney blinks, taken aback at the comparison, and it's John who pats Jeannie
reassuringly on the arm. "It's okay, we're not fighting. This is just—how we
talk to each other sometimes." With Jeannie placated, he looks over the top of
her head at Rodney and says, more evenly, "Look, I don't want to be here, you
don't want to be here. Any bright ideas for getting us back?"
"Lots," Rodney says. "Unfortunately, they all involve me being at approximately
the same point on the space-time continuum as the thing that sent us here and
not, you know, two and a half decades and an entire galaxyaway."
"Wonderful," John mutters. "Okay, you think it's just our minds which have
traveled in time, right?"
Rodney nods. "Transporting matter over such a huge distance in time and space
like this takes vast amounts of energy, and if the device we found had had
several ZPMs plugged into it, I think I might have noticed. Projecting a
consciousness back in time is more energy efficient by several magnitudes. It's
time travel on a budget, and if I hadn't been turned into a teenager I'd take a
moment to be impressed."
"So our bodies—our adult bodies—are probably lying unconscious in the infirmary
in the future," John says. "Which means that Carter and Zelenka and half the
science division are trying to figure out how to wake us up. All we have to do
is sit tight until they do." He stops. "Do we need to worry about changing
history? I don't want to get back and find we've accidentally wiped out all of
humanity."
Witheringly, Rodney tells him, "Well, yes, we would have to worry about that,
if we'd been transported into the plot of Twelve Monkeys.Luckily for us, we
haven't been."
"Haven't we already altered our own pasts just by meeting like this?" John
asks. "That's got to change things."
Rodney shakes his head. "Not necessarily. You and I aren't the result of this
timeline." When Sheppard looks unconvinced, he goes on, "Look, I'll prove it.
How did we meet for the first time?"
The answer comes immediately: "In Antarctica, when I activated the control
chair."
"Right. Our memories haven't altered, in spite of the fact that we're here
talking to each other as teenagers in 1984. That implies that our own personal
histories aren't being re-written, which in turn implies that the future we
came from and this version of the past are somehow independent of each other.
Which in turn implies that it doesn't matter what we do while we're here,
nothing about the future we've come from will change. Quod erat demonstratum."
"So at least Atlantis is still gonna be there when we get back," John says,
sounding relieved. "Good to know."
"What's 'Lantis?" Jeannie asks innocently.
"Uh, nothing," Rodney says, suddenly remembering that his sister is, in fact,
quite intelligent, and that in light of that, he and John should probably have
been a little more careful talking in her presence. "It's nothing important,
and it's definitely nothing you need to tell Mom and Dad about, understood?"
She looks at him, expression calculating. "I want ice cream."
"Damn, she's good," John says admiringly.
"All right, fine, we'll get ice cream on the way back," Rodney says. He offers
Jeannie his hand and they set off back through the neighborhood, taking a
diversion to stop by the local ice cream parlor. By the time he's bought
Jeannie's silence with two scoops of chocolate ice cream with sprinkles on top,
he's starting to feel a little more sanguine. Sheppard's right: it's only a
matter of time until someone back on Atlantis works out how to return them
home. Until then, all he has to do is survive his family, which will be easier
now that John's presence as a guest in the house will force his parents to be
superficially civil to each other. This is okay; this is feasible. He's been to
another galaxy, after all; he can cope with being sixteen again for a few days.
When they get back to his parents' house, there is car Rodney doesn't recognize
parked outside.
"Expecting visitors?" John asks warily.
"No," Rodney answers. Now that they're closer, he can see it's a rental car:
there's a sticker inside the front windshield.
Then the front door opens and Rodney's mother walks out, followed by a man
wearing a suit who Rodney doesn't recognize. Except that's not completely true,
because even though he doesn't recognize him, he's still oddly
familiar—something about his bearing, or maybe the line of his jaw—
He turns to John. "Is that your—"
He doesn't get to finish the question, but he doesn't need to, because the
appalled look on John's face gives him his answer. "Let's get out of here,"
John says.
But it's too late; they've been spotted. The next thing Rodney hears is his
mother's sharp voice calling, "Meredith Rodney McKay!" at the exact same time
as John's father yells, "John Henry Sheppard!"
Jeannie blithely crunches the last of her ice cream cone. Rodney looks at John.
"We are so screwed."

PART 2

Of all the surreal things which have happened to Rodney—and, at this point, he
could comfortably fill several volumes—possibly the weirdest to date is being
sixteen years old again, sitting in the lounge of his parents' house, listening
to his mother and John's father apologize to each other for their sons'
shortcomings.
"—Always been headstrong, but this is first time he's done anything like this,"
Patrick Sheppard is saying. He casts a disapproving look in his son's
direction. "I'm very disappointed in him."
John, slumped on the couch next to Rodney, says nothing. His arms are folded
across his chest and he's staring straight ahead. Right now, if Rodney didn't
know better, he'd have a hard time believing he was anything other than the
fifteen year old kid he looks like.
"You must have been frantic with worry," Irene McKay replies. "I would have
thought Meredith would have had more sense than to go along with this, but
apparently he doesn't." She sighs. "He can be immature for his age."
"I am actually in the room," Rodney says curtly.
"Please don't interrupt when the adults are talking, dear."
With as much dignity as he can muster, Rodney says, "I am not a child. College
this Fall, remember?"
John's father looks inquiringly at Rodney's mother, who nods. "Meredith has
been accepted by MIT," she says. "They're taking him two years early. They said
they'd never seen test results like his before."
There's a note of satisfaction in her voice, but it doesn't give Rodney any
pleasure to hear it. It was always like this, he remembers: the only time his
mother ever showed any pride in his achievements was in relating them to other
people, when she could use his accomplishments to reflect well on herself.
"You must be very proud," Patrick Sheppard says, and gives his son another
loaded look. "See what some people achieve when they apply themselves, John?"
John doesn't answer. His face is almost expressionless. This worries Rodney,
because the only times he's ever seen Sheppard this outwardly calm have been
right before he's done something insane, reckless, violent, and sometimes all
three at once.
Turning back to Rodney's mother, Patrick Sheppard says, "We've had a tough
year. My wife... my wife is ill. It's been especially hard for John. But that's
no excuse for these kinds of antics." Patrick sets down his coffee cup in a
stiff gesture and stands up. To John, he says, "I think you've imposed on the
McKays' hospitality for too long already. Let's go."
It hits Rodney then that John's father is taking him away, and that as soon as
they walk out the door Rodney is going to be alone with his family again. He
looks at John and sees, with relief, that the unnatural calmness has gone,
replaced with an alarm that reflects Rodney's own. They have to do something,
but for a bleak, horrible moment, Rodney can't think what.
Then John says, "He's helping me with math."
"Really," Patrick says, his tone implying he finds that less than completely
credible.
Rodney nods vigorously. "I used to—uh, I give lessons to the kids at school a
lot." This is mostly true, although Rodney only ever tutored to earn money to
feed his Marvel habit or, in Cheryl Blanchard's case, out of hormone-induced
lust.
"Mr. Levy said he'd keep me back a grade if I don't pass math next year," John
says to his father, which makes Rodney forget their subterfuge for a second and
just stare at him in surprise because, wow, he wasn't expecting that.
"I didn't think you'd taken what your teachers said so much to heart."
"I figured I'd find out what I could achieveif I appliedmyself," John says
pointedly.
From the look on John's father's face, he's not convinced, but is willing to go
along for now. To John, he says, "Since the McKays have been gracious enough to
make you welcome here, it's only right we should do something to make up to
them for the inconvenience." Then he turns to Irene. "Would Meredith like to
come and stay with us for a few days?"
She draws in a breath. "Well, that's generous of you, but I'm sure it would be
an imposition—"
"Not at all," Patrick replies. "We have plenty of room."
Irene still looks reluctant. "Meredith has a very delicate constitution.
Traveling long distances doesn't agree with him."
Rodney exchanges a glance with John, and then realizes what he's going to have
to do. He shuts his eyes for a moment, and thinks of all the things that would
be preferable to this. The long list includes an all-day combat training
session with Ronon and carrying out project evaluations for every single person
in the science division. Twice.
Then he opens his eyes, grits his teeth and draws on whatever deeply-hidden
reserves of well-mannered politeness that his Canadian heritage grants him.
"Mom, please, can I?"
His mother purses her lips, then gives a small nod. "Well, if you're sure you
want to, I suppose."
Rodney breathes out in heartfelt relief, but his ordeal isn't over yet.
"Meredith! Where are your manners? Say thank you to Mr. Sheppard."
Rodney turns to John's father. If his tone isn't completely diffident and
respectful, it's still closer to both qualities than he's managed in maybe
fifteen years. "Thank you, Mr. Sheppard."
Patrick smiles and Irene nods a terse approval. John looks just as relieved as
Rodney feels, and also faintly stunned.
"See?" Irene says. "It's not so hard to be nice, is it?"
And if that isn't taking one for the team, Rodney doesn't know what is.

***

After that, it's only a matter of sitting through a final round of once-again-
say-how-sorry-I-am-Mrs-McKay and no-need-to-apologize-Mr-Sheppardand a lecture
from Irene on the proper care and feeding of her son—which she barely gets to
start before John interrupts with a concise, "Citrus, blood sugar, regular
naps, yeah, I know the drill,"—and the next thing Rodney knows, he's sitting in
the departure lounge of Vancouver airport, waiting for the flight to San
Francisco to be called.
John is sitting between Rodney and his father, slumped in the plastic airport
lounge chair, looking sullen. Patrick's expression is grim, too, and Rodney
figures that the only thing that's prevented a full-blown shouting match so far
is his presence. The Sheppard men, apparently, prefer to fight in private.
His suspicions are confirmed when Patrick takes a couple of bills out of his
wallet and suggests that Rodney might like to go and get sodas for himself and
John. Rodney gives John one of the looks which they've developed over the
course of four years of dangerous missions to alien planets: this one roughly
translates as, If I leave you alone for two minutes, will you still be alive
when I get back?The response from John is a small nod which means, Yes, I'll be
fine.Then again, it might mean, Go, run, save yourself while you can.
Maybe they don't have this whole silent communication thing down as well as
Rodney thought they had.
He takes the money from Patrick and remembers to say thank-you—he'd forgotten
the ignominy of being entirely financially dependent on adults—and heads off to
find out where people bought refreshments before Starbucks. The answer turns
out to be a small, unbranded kiosk. Rodney gets himself a coffee, but when he
takes his first mouthful he nearly has to spit it out: it's much too bitter,
undrinkable. He's about to take it back and complain when he realizes the
problem isn't with the coffee but with his undeveloped sixteen year old sense
of taste. Not liking coffee is such a novelty that he has to take another
couple of sips just to convince himself he really doesn't want it. Finally he
admits to himself that what he's really craving is something sugary, and he
goes back and buys two Coca-Colas.
When he gets back to where he left John and his father, Rodney slows his pace
to a crawl, and then stops completely. They're arguing heatedly, and neither
has noticed his return. Rodney's usual response to this kind of tricky,
emotionally complex situation would be to ignore it completely and barge right
on in—he decided long ago that if he was going to be that bad at negotiating
the subtler aspects of human interaction he might as well not waste any time in
the attempt—but something holds him back. It's like the flip side of how it
felt to have John looking around his bedroom: now it's Rodney's turn to be the
uninvited spectator at someone else's past. Unsure what to do, he ends up
hovering near them, out of sight but not earshot, feeling as awkward and self-
conscious as he must look.
"What in God's name were you thinking?" Patrick is saying. "Did you think no
one would worry? Isabella was cryingwhen she called to tell me you were gone.
How do you think I felt, being called out of a board meeting to be told that
the housekeeper is on the phone in tears because my son is missing?"
"I didn't mean to upset Isabella," John says. "I didn't think—"
"No, you didn't," Patrick interrupts. "My God, John, I run a phone company. How
hard do you think it is for me to get my own records pulled? Did you really
think I wouldn't be able to figure out that if you called an engineering firm
in Vancouver and then immediately ran off, the two things might just be
connected? This may come as a surprise to you, but I didn't get where I am
without possessing a little intelligence." He's silent for a second, and then,
his voice softer, he goes on, "John—son—I know things aren't easy right now. It
isn't easy for me, either—"
"I don't know about that," John says, his voice biting. Rodney has only rarely
heard him this manifestly angry, and he wonders if it's something to do with
being a teenager again, or fighting with his father, or maybe the combined
effect of both. "You didn't have a lot of trouble leaving us to go to San
Diego."
"We've talked about this before," Patrick says. He sounds suddenly tired. "I
have a lot of responsibilities. Things I can't just walk away from. You'll
understand when you're older."
John gives a snort of derision. "Believe me, I understand pretty well right
now. You sent Dave away. You wanted to send me away, too."
"We didn't send your brother away, John." Rodney can hear the clipped
frustration in Patrick's voice. "Louise offered to take him for the summer and
your mother and I—both of us—decided that would be best. You could have gone
too, if you'd wanted."
Stubbornly, John says, "No. We're a family. We should stay together; it's your
job to make sure we do. We're your responsibility."
Patrick sighs. "It's not that simple."
"Yes, it is."
And that, Rodney knows, isn't just adolescent idealism talking. With Sheppard,
family comes first, although his definition of familyis wider and more
inclusive than most people's.
"Don't presume to lecture me on family responsibilities, John," Patrick says
sharply. "Did you stop to consider what hearing about this little stunt of
yours would do to your mother?"
"You told Mom?" John says, his teenage voice shifting up a pitch in anger. "You
shouldn't have told her. She doesn't need to worry about me. I can look after
myself."
"I'd say this episode is ample proof otherwise," Patrick says. Then, after a
tiny pause, he adds, "All your mother knows is that you were visiting a friend
and I went to collect you. I had to tell her something to explain why neither
of us was going to be there to welcome her home from the hospital."
John is silent for several long seconds. "She's—home," he says finally. "She
came home..."
"She was discharged her this morning. She'll be at home when we get back. You
can see her then."
If John replies, it's lost under the blare of the airport announcement system
calling their flight.
The remainder of the journey is scarcely less strained. John barely says twenty
words to his father between take-off and landing, and they're all yesand no. It
falls to Rodney, therefore, to hold up the conversation. He would have relished
this at sixteen, when he'd found it a lot easier to talk to adults than kids
his own age, but from his forty year old perspective John's father's polite
inquiries are just condescending. He manages to keep his responses civil until
Patrick asks, "So, have you thought about what you'd like to be when you grow
up?" at which point Rodney thinks, to hell with it,and replies, "I'm going to
be a genius astrophysicist and intergalactic space explorer."
John snickers, and Patrick doesn't try to talk to Rodney after that.
He and John don't get a chance to speak privately until Patrick stops for
gas—$1.21 a gallon—on the drive from the San Francisco airport to the Sheppard
family's home. Once they're alone in the car, John waves a hand vaguely and
says, "I'm sorry about, you know..."
"It's all right," Rodney reassures him. "You met my dreadful family. It's only
fair I get to meet yours."
"Your family wasn't so bad. I was hitting it off pretty well with Mister
Huggy."
After a couple of seconds have passed, Rodney says, "So, are you, you know...
okay?"
"I'm fine," John says shortly.
Rodney perseveres. "Because it must be weird, talking to your dad when it's
only been a month since—"
"I'm fine, McKay." John is using—or trying to use—the same tone he employs for
giving orders in the field, but he can't quite pull it off with his wavering
fifteen year old voice. Maybe that's why Rodney decides to ignore the strongly
implied drop it.
"It's just that—"
"Rodney," John interrupts. He's sitting in the car's front seat, and he twists
around so he's looking at Rodney, in the back. "None of this is real, okay? All
of this happened a long time ago and it's over now. You said it yourself: it
doesn't matter what we do here, we can't change anything." He turns around so
he's facing forward again, and Rodney can no longer see his face. "I already
dealt with this stuff. I don't need to deal with it again."
But the way he says it, Rodney's not sure whether that's an assertion or a
denial.

***

Shortly after John and Ronon had returned from Earth and John's father's
funeral, Rodney had asked Ronon what Sheppard's family home was like. Ronon had
thought hard for a few seconds before replying, "Big. Impressive." But Rodney
had figured that after spending seven years living rough, Ronon probably found
anything with a roof impressive, and so Rodney hadn't placed a lot of weight on
his opinion.
Now, as the car drives up the seemingly unending tree-lined avenue that leads
to the Sheppards' mansion-like home, Rodney is forced to admit that he probably
should have taken Ronon at his word.
For a start, it isn't so much a house as an estate. It's dark when they finally
arrive, but a multitude of tastefully angled exterior lights show the property
off to its best advantage. The main residence is so large that it could
comfortably swallow Rodney's parents' house several times over; behind it, the
corner of a swimming pool is just visible, lit from beneath so that its surface
ripples and glints invitingly, and beyond that Rodney can see floodlit tennis
courts and stables and the outline of something that could be a guest cottage.
John hops out of the car easily, not even really looking around, and it
suddenly hits Rodney, a truth he's known intellectually but didn't really
knowuntil now, that Sheppard grew up accustomed to the kind of wealth that
Rodney's father worked seventy hour weeks in pursuit of without ever coming
close to emulating. Rodney's never been motivated by money—intellectual
achievement has always been his measure of success—but all the same he can't
help feeling a twinge of envy. John never had to overhear his parents arguing
about money, never had to suffer long lectures about the sacrifices being made
on his behalf, never sat down to Friday night dinner comprised of the week's
leftovers.
But Rodney can't make his jealousy stick, because no matter how hard he tries
to imagine it, he can't make the John Sheppard he knows fit in here. John isn't
interested in possessions for their own sake; it's what things do, what he can
make them do, that fascinates him. He wants to fly jumpers, not own them; even
the few personal possessions he has back on Atlantis—his guitar and
surfboard—are functional objects. Maybe it's a by-product of having the gene;
perhaps Sheppard is hard-wired to want to turn things on, make them work, find
out what they're for. That natural inquisitiveness, more in character for a
scientist than a soldier, was one of the first things Rodney actively liked
about him. Now, as they go into the house, and Rodney finds himself surrounded
by art on the walls and expensive, purely decorative furniture, he finds
himself seeing it the way John might—all these things with no purpose or
function, stifling clutter, costly junk. Stuff.
They are met in the hall by a middle-aged, matronly woman wearing a white apron
over a blue uniform smock—Isabella the crying housekeeper, Rodney figures. She
welcomes the prodigal older Sheppard son home with a huge hug; John wriggles
but can't escape her stout arms, and his expression changes to one of deep
embarrassment when she kisses him on the forehead. Rodney thinks he'd give just
about anything right now for a camera.
"Why do you make me worry about you?" Isabella demands, ruffling John's hair.
John mumbles something in reply, although it's mostly muffled by Isabella's
embrace. "You think you're so big and tough, but you're not."
Rodney can't resist a smirk. "Yeah, I'd go more with small and puny." John, who
has finally managed to extricate himself, glares at him.
"This is John's friend, Meredith," Patrick says for Isabella's benefit.
"Uh, Rodney. I prefer Rodney." Patrick makes a tiny motion of acknowledgment
which is not quite a shrug. It's the gesture of an adult indulging a child's
whim, and Rodney tries hard—really, he does—not to take offense.
"Rodney will be staying with us for a few days," Patrick says, with only the
smallest emphasis on the name. "He can have the large guest room, Isabella.
Now, since it's been a long day and some of us have to get up for work tomorrow
morning, I'm going to bed." Patrick pauses on the first step of the wide marble
staircase. "Your mother's probably asleep, John, but if you want to go up and
see her—"
"I don't want to disturb her," John says. "I'll see her tomorrow."
And that's perfectly reasonable—sensible, even—but there's still something off
about John's response. It's that unnatural calmness again, the unshakeable
composure that Rodney never finds as reassuring as he knows he's supposed to.
Patrick, however, seems to take it at face value. "That's very thoughtful of
you." He starts to go up the stairs. "Good night, boys."
Then they're standing in the hall with Isabella, who says the most welcome
sentence anyone's spoken to Rodney since they left his parents' house: "Who
wants something to eat?"

***
Isabella, it turns out, is a much better cook than Irene McKay—at least, if her
sandwiches are anything to go by. Rodney's about to start into his fourth when
he thinks, regretfully, that he should probably lay off now if he doesn't want
to be up all night with indigestion. Then he remembers that at sixteen he
nevergot indigestion, and happily starts eating again.
When the sandwiches are all gone, Atlantis's Head of Science and the
expedition's military commander drink mugs of hot cocoa with whipped cream and
mini-marshmallows sprinkled on top. Rodney would swear John's the first one to
yawn, but whoever starts it, a minute later neither of them can stop. Isabella
clears away their mugs and escorts them upstairs, where she tells Rodney to
wait in John's room while she makes up his bed. He should probably offer to
help, but Rodney's always had a weakness for letting other people do things for
him and, besides, this is the good part to being a teenage boy again—he's not
expected to be competent at anything even slightly domestic.
Also, he figures he's owed a look at fifteen year old John's bedroom.
He's not disappointed.
"Seriously," he says as soon as he stops laughing for long enough to speak,
"helicopter wallpaper?"
Sheppard scowls. "People who rest their dainty heads on Luke Skywalker
pillowcases shouldn't throw stones."
Rodney relaxes further when he looks around and sees that John's room is, if
anything, even more juvenile than his own. There are at least a couple of dozen
model airplanes and helicopters on display, suspended from the ceiling in an
approximation of flight or sitting on top of the bookcase as if about to take
off. The bookcase shelves are stacked with more sports paraphernalia than
books, but there's a pile of comics in a corner that Rodney makes a mental note
to investigate later. It's fascinating, and while Rodney can tell that John's
just as uncomfortable as Rodney was when their positions were reversed, he
can't help staring. It's like studying the archeology of John Sheppard,
excavating layers of the man to dig down to the foundations buried underneath.
He wanders over to a desk where a vaguely familiar looking console is hooked up
to a bulky television. "My God, what is this, an Atari? I beggedmy parents to
get me one of these. Hey, have you got Pac-Man for it?"
"Somewhere," John says, surveying the general mess.
"Because if you do, we totally have to play that." Rodney wanders over to the
bed and sits down next to John. This proves to be a mistake, because when the
mattress dips under his weight it makes his thigh press against John's, and
that's enough to make his sixteen year old dick start to get hard again.
Manfully (ha), he resists the urge to grope John; instead, he gives a small
groan, less out of uncontrollable desire than the inconvenience of it, because
he's tired and if he were the age he's supposed to be, right now he'd have no
problem collapsing into bed and crashing out. He looks down at the swelling in
his jeans and sighs, "Not again."
"Yeah, I, uh," John says. He shifts a little, making the bulge in his own pants
stand out more clearly. He's actually blushing, which Rodney should not find as
hot as he does.
"Do you think we have time to, ah..."
"Probably not," John says. He glances at the door. "Isabella doesn't always
knock."
"Crap," Rodney says. "Now I know why teenagers are so sexually frustrated—we
don't get left alone long enough to do any serious fooling around."
"We?" John raises an eyebrow.
"Freudian slip," Rodney says. "It's hard to remember I'm actually forty when my
hormones keep insisting otherwise."
"Adult minds, adolescent bodies," John says. He frowns and looks, Rodney
thinks, uncertain. It's not an emotion he associates with Sheppard; then again,
maybe it's just that John's better at hiding it under his adult face. He looks
at Rodney and says, hesitantly, "I feel like I'm—thinking differently. Talking
to my dad, being back here, I feel like—" He breaks off.
"Like a kid again," Rodney supplies.
"Yeah," John says. "I don't like it," he adds, sounding exactly like a
teenager.
"I'm not exactly enthused about this either," Rodney says, "but we're stuck
with it until someone figures out how to bring us back—and, let me tell you,
certain people on my staff will find their slowness to solve this brought up at
their next appraisal. In the meantime, there are certain advantages. Try to
think of this as a vacation—lots of food and sleep and no one trying to kill us
in unexpected and interesting ways."
"I guess," John says, looking unconvinced. Rodney has that same weird, off-
balance feeling he had when Sheppard first showed up back at his parents'
house. This conversation isn't following the normal script: every other time
they've ever gotten into some strange predicament, it's always been Sheppard
reassuring him. But Rodney is finding it a lot easier to be relaxed about their
latest misadventure now that he's several hundred miles away from his mother,
while John appears to be far less well equipped to deal with his own family
than with anything they've ever come up against in the Pegasus Galaxy.
"And maybe there'll even be sex, in the unlikely event we get ten uninterrupted
minutes," Rodney says.
That has the intended effect of making John smile. "So, just like Atlantis,
really."
Rodney smiles, too, although the emotion behind it is mostly relief. Until now,
the Arrangement has been something they've done, not something they've talked
about, and he's pretty sure this is the first time they've discussed it in a
normal conversation. If a conversation they're having in 1984 while inhabiting
the bodies of their teenage selves can in any sense be described as normal.
"Hey, look," Rodney goes on, instilled with new confidence, "maybe this is a
good time for you to be here, if your mom's getting better."
Immediately, Rodney knows he's said something wrong. John's whole body goes
rigid, one hand balling into a fist at his side. When he speaks, he doesn't
turn his head to look at Rodney, and his voice is so quiet that Rodney has to
strain a little to make him out.
"The hospital didn't send her home because she's getting better, Rodney. They
sent her home because they can't do anything else for her."

***
The next morning Rodney wakes up hard, which is possibly the least surprising
thing to have happened to him recently.
Fortunately, the guest bedroom has its own bathroom, and he has a long,
luxurious shower, which is even more pleasurable for the knowledge that his
mother is not going to interrupt him to tell him not to use all the hot water.
The water streams down over his shoulders and back in hot rivulets and he takes
a moment, as he applies soap, to look at himself. He remembers, at sixteen,
hating his body, skipping gym class in favor of the library and refusing to go
to swimming lessons. Now, though, he doesn't know what he was so embarrassed
about. His skin is pale, sure, but it's taut across his stomach, and his chest,
although mostly hairless, actually has some definition, thanks to the muscle
mass that his constant appetite is helping to build. He regrets, now, that he
wasn't able to let himself enjoy being sixteen when he really was this age.
So when he takes his cock in his hand, it's with more anticipation than he's
felt in quite a long time. He strokes himself firmly from base to head, and is
rewarded by spasms of pleasure, like small electric shocks in his nerve
endings.
He strokes himself again, and lets his mind replay the highlights of the
previous day. He thinks about fifteen year old John, thinks about how his
smooth, stubble-free skin felt rubbing against Rodney's cheek, thinks about his
supple hands on Rodney's body.
It feels good, and he knows he could get off on this, but somehow it's not as
satisfying as it should be. And as soon as he's had the realization, the
picture in his head blurs and changes, so that it's the older version of John
who's touching him, his stubbly jaw scratchy against Rodney's face, his hands
rough and callused on Rodney's skin. It's this body which is John Sheppard to
Rodney; during the months since the Arrangement began he has learned to
navigate its contours using scars like landmarks.
In Rodney's head, the image of John leans forward, touches his fingers to
Rodney's lips and whispers, You look incredible, Jesus, I want to, can I—
That does it. He tries to hold back a little longer, but it's just not
possible; one more stroke and he comes so violently that he gasps and nearly
slips on the wet tiles. Then he stands under the hot water for several long
minutes, feeling each separate jet of water pounding his still-sensitive skin,
listening to the blood thrumming in his ears.

***
The day just keeps getting better: Isabella has made pancakes for breakfast.
John's already at the table, working his way through more food than Rodney's
ever seen him eat in one sitting before. It's reassuring to know he's not the
only one affected by the adolescent appetite thing. Rodney sits down opposite
him and snags himself a generous helping of pancakes before John can finish
them all.
At the other side of the kitchen, Isabella is assembling a third breakfast on a
tray: a bowl of fresh fruit, triangles of hot buttered toast and a glass of
orange juice. A mound of fluffy yellow scrambled eggs heaped next to the toast
completes the offering, and then Isabella lifts the tray and starts to go to
the door. She pauses at the threshold and looks over her shoulder at John.
"Your mother says she slept well last night. She's feeling a little better
today."
John nods, but he doesn't look up. He lifts another huge forkful of pancakes,
intent on eating in a way Rodney knows is fake—no matter what his teenage
appetite is like, Sheppard just isn't that interested in food.
Isabella persists, "Maybe you'd like to bring her breakfast to her."
"Can't," John says. "We're going out." His fork scrapes against his plate,
leaving Rodney slightly awed by the sheer speed with which he managed to clear
it. Rodney redoubles his attack on his own pancakes, but John has already
gulped back the last of his juice and is getting up from the table with the
kind of abruptness that reminds Rodney of the way he runs for the Gate Room
when a citywide alert is called.
Isabella pushes her lips into a thin, disapproving line, but she doesn't pursue
it. Instead she says, "Dinner will be at half past seven. Don't be late. Your
father is coming home early specially."
John mutters something under his breath about feeling honored, but if Isabella
hears, she doesn't make an issue of that, either. As soon as she's gone, John
taps the table next to Rodney's plate. "Finish up. We're moving out."
It's time, Rodney decides, to put his foot down. Firmly, he says, "No, I think
not. We're not going anywhere until I've had my breakfast. And, anyway, what's
with this 'moving out' business? This isn't a mission. We don't have to get
back through the Gate for a debriefing. No one expects us to be anywhere." He
stops, struck by what he's just said: today there are no meetings he has to be
at, no petty interdepartmental disputes he'll have to waste time resolving, no
dull administrivia to suck the productivity out of his day. Today, he is
sixteen again, old enough to have a little independence, young enough not to
have accumulated any adult responsibilities. It feels... good.
"I'm not hanging around here all day," John says, as if 'here' isn't a
luxurious estate complete with swimming pool, tennis courts and bowling alley.
Granted, Rodney hasn't actually seen any evidence of a bowling alley, but he
wouldn't be surprised if there was one.
"And how far do you think you're going to get?" Rodney asks. "Because I am not
letting you hitchhike again, I do more than enough walking when we go off
world, and borrowing your dad's car isn't exactly an option."
John grins, and it's the sly, just-had-an-idea grin that always makes Rodney's
heart sink a little, because he rarely likes what comes next.
"You can ride a bicycle, right, McKay?"
Correction: he never likes what comes next.

***
Much to Rodney's regret, one of the bikes John makes him try is about the right
size for him. He considers pretending he doesn't know how to ride, but quickly
rejects that idea, partly because he doesn't want to appear even lamer than he
actually is, and partly because Sheppard would just insist on trying to teach
him.
When he first gets on, for a second he thinks maybe he'll be the first person
to disprove the old adage about never forgetting how to ride a bike, and
wouldn't that be just his luck. But, no. He wobbles for the first fifteen or
twenty yards, and then something in his brain clicks and suddenly his feet are
sure on the pedals, his grip on the handlebar firm. He feels a surge of
exhilaration, just the same way he does whenever he masters any kind of
technology, and he can't help grinning exultantly.
"See? This is fun," John says, mounting his own bike with ease and pedaling to
catch up with him.
Rodney tries to smother his grin and doesn't—quite—manage it. He settles for
declaring airily, "I am not having fun. I am merely adapting to our current
circumstances. And where are we going, anyway?" But John's already accelerated
past him, and Rodney's only option is to follow.
He doesn't get his answer until John stops outside a dilapidated-looking diner
just off the main street of the small town a couple of miles from the Sheppard
family home. For a second, Rodney assumes the owner must have deliberately
decided to go for a shabby-bohemian-chic look, until he realizes that won't be
fashionable for another decade or so. The place doesn't look this way as some
kind of retro-ironic style statement; it looks this way because it hasn't been
painted for a while.
The diner might not be much to look at, but the expression on Sheppard's face
isn't disappointed at all. He's staring up at the peeling frontage with
something like wonder. "We used to come here when I was a kid—a little kid," he
amends, before Rodney can point out the obvious. "All of us, every time we had
something to celebrate. And then Dad got busy so it was just Mom and Dave and
me, and then she got sick..." He trails off, his eyes darkening. "I came back
to find this place, once, and it was gone. Will be gone. But it's here now.
They served the best ice cream sodas anywhere."
Astonishingly, given the mound of pancakes he had for breakfast, the cycle ride
has made Rodney hungry again. "I think I'm going to need some empirical data
before accepting that proposition."
After carrying out a detailed and comprehensive review of the experimental
evidence—two sodas each and a fudge nut sundae between them, which John totally
eats more than his share of—Rodney concedes Sheppard may, just this once, be
right.
They stay in the diner all morning, because they have nowhere else in
particular to be. They talk about Atlantis, being careful, at first, to keep
their voices low enough so that what they're saying doesn't carry beyond the
sides of the booth they're sitting in. Then they realize, more or less
simultaneously, that two adolescent boys discussing distant galaxies and aliens
is going to attract absolutely no attention whatsoever. They start to have fun
with it, taking it in turns to describe loudly and in detail places and events
which would get both of them locked up if they tried the same thing as their
adult selves in the future. For Rodney, who has spent his entire working life
on projects so classified that even the non-disclosure agreements came with
non-disclosure agreements, it's a liberating experience.
Some time around the second ice cream soda, Rodney says, "I used to be able to
do this thing—" and then he stops, because sugar apparently has the same effect
on his sixteen year old body as alcohol does on his forty year old one. "Okay,
no, maybe not."
"Hey, you can't leave me hanging like that," Sheppard says. "What?"
Rodney looks steadily at him for a second and then, figuring the last vestiges
of his dignity are long gone anyway, he lifts his ice cream soda and takes a
gulp. He holds the fizzy mixture in his mouth for a couple of seconds and tilts
his head back, trying to remember exactly how he used to do this. Then he
closes his eyes and jerks his head forward. It works: the liquid jets out of
his nose and back into the glass.
He uses a napkin to dry his face. On the other side of the booth, John is
looking at him, the expression on his face a curious mixture of repulsion and
reluctant admiration. "That was—gross."
"I have no idea why I did that," Rodney says, although he does, kind of. He's a
teenage boy, and aren't all teenage boys gross?
"Seriously, McKay," John says, a grin slowly widening across his face, "that
was really, really disgusting."
"I have two PhDs," Rodney says, trying to keep his face straight and not really
managing it. He holds up the index finger and middle finger of his right hand
for emphasis. "Two."
"You're a genius," John adds. And then he can't hold it in any longer. He makes
a choking sound and—there's no other word for it—giggles.
It sets Rodney off laughing, too. He sags against the side of the booth and
laughs until his eyes are watering and his stomach muscles hurt.
When, finally, he opens his eyes again, he catches sight of the mirror which
hangs on the wall opposite their booth. Reflected in it, Rodney sees himself
and John, two teenage kids drinking ice cream sodas, and the weirdest thing is,
it doesn't look weird at all.

***

"Wait for it," Sheppard says. "Any second now."
Rodney and John are lying side by side on their backs on a grassy slope in an
area of parkland just outside the town limits. The bikes are lying a short
distance away, abandoned where the ground became too soft to ride on. It's an
idyllic, isolated spot, and one, Rodney thinks, that John obviously once knew
very well, given how easily he found it.
"What exactly are we waiting for?"
"Be patient, McKay."
Rodney hears it, then—a distant rumble, growing swiftly in volume until it
becomes a screech of velocity and power. A plane—it looks like some kind of
fighter jet—soars above them, surprisingly low. The roar of its engines is
deafening, but it's still not loud enough to drown out John's delighted whoop
as it flies directly overhead.
"F-15 Eagle," he says admiringly once the jet has gone, the only evidence of
its passing a trail of vapor and Rodney's vibrating eardrums. "That was one of
the C series; they're up to E now. They're still in service."
"There must be a base around here," Rodney says, trying to ignore the faint
buzzing in his ears. Yes, his hearing's definitely been damaged. He'll be deaf
before he's eighteen. It's a tragedy.
"Yeah, it's about thirty miles away," John says. "We're right under the flight
path."
The buzzing in his ears recedes and, with it, the terror of incipient deafness.
Rodney shifts on to his side, lifting himself on to an elbow. "How much time
did you spend here?"
"A lot," John shrugs. "Whole days, sometimes. I used to bring supplies with me.
Lunch, a pile of comics and a walkman."
"Didn't you have better things to do?" Rodney asks.
"Like what?"
"I don't know." Rodney waves a hand. "Hanging out at the mall or whatever you
cool kids did."
John looks at him oddly, and doesn't answer. Suddenly, Rodney realizes he's
been carrying around his own set of assumptions about what Sheppard was like
when he was growing up. He's always subconsciously tagged Sheppard as one of
the popular kids: smart, good-looking, wealthy—someone whom Cheryl Blanchard
wouldn't have called the idea of dating silly. It hits him now, in a kind of
paradigm shift, that he's been wrong all along, and that John was just as much
out of step with his peers as Rodney was. Sheppard grew up inside a bubble of
isolation which was more materially comfortable than Rodney's, but no less
lonely.
He is still assimilating this revelation when John suddenly tilts his head to
one side, half-narrows his eyes and then launches himself at Rodney. Caught
off-guard, Rodney is pushed back on to the grass, and then they're tussling
with each other, rolling backwards and forwards in the warm, soft grass.
"What was that for?" he demands when they break off long enough for him to
catch his breath and speak.
"Wanted to," John grins. He has grass sticking to his face. "And you know what
they say about teenagers."
Rodney looks at him.
"Poor impulse control," John elaborates.
Rodney rolls his eyes. "That's not an adolescent thing, that's just you."
But then John grabs Rodney by the shoulders and they're off again.
In the end it's Rodney, to his immense surprise, who gains the advantage, his
extra height and strength worth more than John's superior skill. But it's not
an easy victory, and by the time he's got John pinned between himself and the
ground, they're both flushed and out of breath.
"Hey, I won," Rodney says. "I won," he repeats, because he's nearly certain
this is going to be the only occasion he'll ever get the better of Sheppard in
hand-to-hand.
"You won," John confirms. He doesn't look very upset about it. "There's a
prize."
"What is it?"
John smiles lazily at him. "No one's gonna walk in on us here."
"Oh," Rodney says. "Oh."
All that rolling around has made John's tee-shirt ride up, exposing his stomach
and most of his chest. Rodney puts his hand on to John's abdomen, palm flat and
fingers splayed, and focuses on the way John's skin feels, warm and sweat-damp.
John is lying still, as if he's holding himself in check, waiting for whatever
Rodney's going to do next. Rodney hesitates, because this is different to the
usual way the Arrangement works: it's normally John who sets the pace,
determining what happens and how fast and to whom. But now, for whatever
reason, he's letting Rodney take the lead, and Rodney is both anxious and very,
very ready.
Rodney lowers his head and puts his mouth just about John's navel, running his
tongue along his smooth, tight skin. He works his way up to John's chest and
his nipples, where he experiences John's heartbeat as a series of pounding
thuds against his lips. Then he moves on, all the way up to John's neck, where
he kisses him in the hollow beneath his Adam's Apple and then works his way
around to nip his earlobe between his teeth. John groans and gasps, but the
best reaction comes when Rodney lightly drags his tongue from his ear to his
shoulder. "Jesus," John chokes out, "Yes, yes, oh fuck, Rodney, yes—"
Rodney redoubles his efforts, and John wriggles beneath him, working feverishly
to pull down first his own jeans and then Rodney's, whispering imprecations all
the while.
And then they're hip to hip, naked against each other, and Rodney can feel
John's erection pressing into his thigh. He twists a little so that their cocks
are touching, actually touching, rubbing against each other.
He reaches down and takes hold of John's cock, delighting in the way it feels
in his hand. The body may be different, but it's still John, and he is giving
himself up to Rodney in a way that he hasn't before. And this is what Rodney
wants. The terms of their Arrangement—terms set by John—did not include this,
and suddenly Rodney sees just what a poor deal he's been getting. It's as if,
up until now, he's been allowed to have sex with John's body but not with John,
the man who is his friend going into hiding when they touch as lovers. And
while he's enjoyed John's body, the idea of getting all of him is quite
possibly the biggest turn on Rodney has ever experienced.
"I want to do everything," he says. "Let's do everything."
"Yes," John hisses, eyes closed. "God, yes, I want, please, do it—" Then,
abruptly, his breathing changes, becoming faster, shallower. "Oh, fuck, no, I
can't—"
Rodney lifts his head, and sees that John's head is tipped back, his face
contorted with the effort of maintaining a control which is even now slipping
away from him. He sees the exact moment at which John gives in. John's cock
jerks and come spills on to Rodney's hand as he bucks underneath Rodney, back
arching, his body rising to meet Rodney's. It's like a chemical reaction, an
explosion of heat pulsing out from the point where they touch, a blast wave
that slams into Rodney and makes any resistance impossible. He shifts his hips,
thinks, Not yet not yet—and then it's too late, and all he can do is give
himself over to it completely.
They slump against each other, spent, breathing hard.
Rodney speaks first. "You came," he says accusingly.
"You came, too."
"Yes, but you came first," Rodney says, dimly aware that even by his and
Sheppard's standards, this is a really stupid argument. Then vague
dissatisfaction gives way to pride as he realizes what happened. "Hey, I made
you come just by talking."
"Rodney, I'm fifteen and you had your hand on my dick. You could've been
reciting pi to fifty decimal places and I would've come." John at least has the
grace to look embarrassed as he grabs a handful of grass and cleans himself
off. "Anyway, you didn't last much longer than me."
"We didn't even get to the really fun stuff," Rodney says with regret, pulling
up his jeans. Then he brightens. "Although the advantage of being this age is a
really short refractory period. We can probably try again in twenty minutes."
"I vote for that."
It strikes Rodney that this is the longest post-sex conversation they've ever
had. Under the Arrangement, as soon as they're done they get cleaned up and
head off in different directions, and the next time they see each other they
both act like nothing happened.
Rodney is just starting to realize how much he hates the fucking Arrangement.
The late afternoon sun is starting to dip toward the horizon, and the sky is
filling with darkening clouds. "If we stay here, we'll miss dinner," Rodney
says.
John casts a sideways look at him. "Sex or food—it's like Sophie's Choicefor
you, isn't it?"
"I don't see why there can't be sex and food," Rodney grumbles. This talk about
dinner, and his recent physical exertions, is making him aware of his empty
stomach. The wind is rising, and it's getting cooler. "Come on, it's going to
rain. There are minor European monarchies with smaller palaces than your
parents' house. We can always find someplace private when we get back." When
Sheppard doesn't move, Rodney begins to feel a little annoyed. He prods John in
the shoulder. "If we stay out much longer your father's going to have the
National Guard out looking for you."
"Let him," John says. As an adult, he could probably make it sound grim and
determined, but filtered through his fifteen year old voice and face it just
comes across as sulky. Rodney's starting to suspect that the only real
difference between 39 year old Sheppard and 15 year old Sheppard is that the
adult version has figured out how to make acting like a teenager somehow look
like grown up behavior.
"Okay, now you're being stupid," Rodney says. "You have to go back some time."
John looks at him, his expression earnest and oddly hopeful. "Today was a good
day, right?"
For a second, the non sequitur puzzles Rodney. "Are you kidding? Yes. Yes. I
mean, I had more fun today than I had in my entire adolescence—"
And then he gets it.
In his head, he replays the whole day, everything they've done since they left
the Sheppards' house after breakfast, and as he does so, the true purpose of
the day reveals itself. They ate ice cream and watched planes and then they had
fumbling, over-too-soon teenage sex that was embarrassingly bad and yet somehow
still the best thing that's happened to Rodney in years. And it was all John's
idea, or done at John's instigation.
Sheppard has been trying to make a perfect day, and he doesn't want anything as
inconvenient as reality spoiling it. It's like he's trying to construct a
version of the past for himself that only includes the parts he wants it to.
Rodney could tell him that it really, really doesn't work like that.
Slowly, he says, "You can't edit the bad stuff out. Believe me, if it was
possible, I'd be first in the line."
"I can try," John says.
The look on his face is obstinate and unreachable, and Rodney knows it's more
than adolescent willfulness. He wishes Teyla were here. She'd drag Sheppard off
somewhere and talk to him quietly and firmly and, if that didn't work, she'd
hit him with sticks until he saw sense. Then he remembers that if Teyla were
here, she'd be a teenager, too, and given the excess of hormones he and John
have between them, her presence would probably just make things even more
complicated.
Rodney shuts his eyes for a second, searching for inspiration in the vast
reaches of his brain. For once, it has nothing to offer him. If this were a
technical problem—if John were a malfunctioning Stargate or a corrupted
database—he'd have twenty different ideas about how to fix whatever was wrong.
But John is John, and Rodney has never wanted so much to make something right,
or had so little idea about how to start.
Awkwardly, he says, "Your mom—"
"Don't," John interrupts at once.
Rodney spreads his hands in exasperation. "Don't what? I'm not even supposed to
mention her now? What the hell is wrong with you? I've seen you do six
terrifying things before breakfast on a typical day, and you won't go and talk
to your own mother?"
"It's not—" John starts, then stops. "Just leave it, okay?"
Rodney's starting to feel genuinely angry now. "Hey, you were the one who
dragged me on this magical mystery tour of your psyche, remember, not the other
way round. You can go right back to compartmentalizing as soon as we're
home—God knows you're good at that—but you can't shut me out of this, because
I'm here. If I have to relive your adolescence as well as mine, then I think I
have the right to have some level of input."
"Oh, you do, do you?" Sheppard says tightly. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize my
past was public property. Please, go right ahead, give me the benefit of your
deep psychological insight."
Rodney knows when he's being goaded, but since he's been asked, he doesn't see
any reason not to give a straight answer. "Fine. You want to know what I think?
I think you need to go and see her."
"Don't tell me what to do," John snaps, and Rodney almost wants to laugh,
because that's a teenage line if he's ever heard one.
"I'm not telling you to do anything," he says. Then he amends, "Well, yes, I am
telling you to do this. But only because I'm right."
His voice thick with sarcasm, John says, "Yeah, and you'd know, because your
relationship with your mother was so good."
"At least I had a relationship with my mother," Rodney shoots back. "I didn't
put her on a pedestal that was so high I couldn't even bring myself to look at
her!"
John goes very, very still, and for a moment Rodney thinks he's going to hit
him, for real this time.
"Fuck you, McKay," he says at last.
Rodney feels something wet hit his bare arm, and when he looks down he sees the
bloated, angry raindrops landing on the grass at his feet and making damp
streaks on his tee-shirt. Somewhere in the distance, sheet lightning flashes
and a few seconds later he hears the distant rumble of thunder.
The bike ride back takes a long time because they have to cycle much more
slowly in the downpour, and the silence between them makes it feel longer
still. Water sloshes under the wheels of their bikes and their sodden clothes
stick to them, and when Rodney has to blink away the moisture in his eyes, it's
easy to tell himself it's just the rain.
***

They're late for dinner, of course.
It doesn't help that by the time they finally get back they're both soaked
through and thoroughly bedraggled. When Isabella meets them inside the door, it
feels the same to Rodney as coming back through the Gate after a mission to a
particularly inhospitable world, the main difference being that Carter doesn't
generally tell them off for staying out in the rain and then send them to their
rooms to get dried and changed.
When they finally skulk into the dining room, wearing dry clothes but with
still-damp hair, John's father is waiting for them. He is sitting at the huge
wooden table like a judge presiding at a trial. He looks thoroughly pissed off.
They take their places in silence, and seconds later Isabella appears to serve
their meals, which are only slightly dry and congealed from having been
reheated. Then she disappears again, presumably to have her own dinner in the
kitchen, where it will be cozy and warm and she can watch TV. Rodney briefly
wonders if it would be really rude to ask if he could join her.
Patrick picks up his cutlery. Rodney spears food on to his fork and realizes,
with a kind of dull surprise, that for the first time since he woke up aged
sixteen, he's not feeling hungry. He makes himself eat anyway, attempting to
focus on his food rather than the oppressive silence which has settled around
the table.
Rodney's never been able to handle silence.
"Sorry," he bursts out, when the strain of not saying anything gets too much to
bear. "We're, um, sorry. For being late."
"There's no need for you to apologize," Patrick says, addressing Rodney but
looking at his son. "You're our guest. It was John's responsibility to bring
you back here on time."
At that, John raises his head and looks at his father, but he doesn't say
anything.
"Your mother wanted to join us this evening," Patrick tells his son. Rodney
glances at John to see his reaction, but can't decipher Sheppard's expression
at all. Patrick goes on, "Your mother wanted to join us, John, but she started
to feel tired again while we were waiting for you and she had to go back to
bed. After dinner, you should go and tell her you're sorry."
In a level, clear voice, John says, "No."
Patrick's hand stops halfway to his mouth. Calmly, he puts his fork down, the
food on it untouched. "That wasn't a request, John."
"I know," John says, equally calmly. "I said no."
"You will go upstairs and speak to your mother or—"
"Or what?" John asks. "What are you gonna do? Ground me? Or maybe it'd be
easier if you sent me away, like Dave. It wouldn't make much difference,
because I'm gonna leave in a couple of years anyway, and I won't be back until
you're dead."
It's not the anger in his voice that chills Rodney, it's the lack of it.
"That's enough," Patrick says icily. "Go to your room."
John stands up. His chair tips over behind him and clatters on to the floor. "I
am not a fucking child."
"You will not use words like that in my house," Patrick barks, standing up as
well.
"Then I guess I'll add it to the list, along with all the other words I'm not
allowed to use," John says caustically. "Like cancer and malignant and
metastasized and terminal."
Patrick blinks once, and his head jerks a little as if he's just received a
physical blow.
"Did you think I didn't know?" John demands. "Why did you think I wouldn't go
with Dave? I was scared to leave. I knew what was coming. Even though you
wouldn't tell me anything, I knew—"
Patrick closes his eyes for a moment. There are lines around his eyes; he looks
exhausted, weary. "Doctors can be wrong," he says.
"Not this time," John says. "Not about this."
"John—"
"I was fifteen," John says. Rodney looks at Patrick, but his eyes are still
shut and he doesn't appear to have noticed that his son's using the wrong tense
all of a sudden. "I was old enough to figure it out. I thought I was the only
one who'd realized. I thought I had to keep it a secret. Do you know how hard
that was? Do you?"
"John, your mother is very sick, but she is going to get better—"
"My mother is going todie."
On the last word, John's unreliable fifteen year old voice cracks and breaks.
He presses his hand to his mouth, as if to hold in any other unwanted truths
that might be preparing to escape. Then he turns and walks out of the room.
Rodney hears the thumps as he rapidly climbs the stairs.
Rodney looks to Patrick expectantly, but John's father doesn't move. "He's just
upset," he says after a few seconds. "He'll get over it in a little while."
Rodney stares at him. "You really think so? Because, take it from me, in twenty
years, he still won't have gotten over it."
He gets up and leaves without waiting for a reply.
PART THREE

Rodney goes upstairs with every intention of talking to John right away, but by
the time he's standing outside the closed door of John's room, his resolve is
weakening. He wishes, not for the first time in his life, that people could be
more like mathematical equations: solvable.
As he's standing there, unsure what to do, he hears a sound coming from the
other side of the door. The noises are soft, muffled by the corner of a blanket
or a fist pressed to the mouth, but he recognizes the hitched, irregular
breaths and small noises of choked-off misery for what they are almost at once.
Rodney doesn't let himself think; he just pushes the door handle down and goes
in.
John is lying on his side on the bed, his face hidden by the pillow he's got it
buried in. He stiffens as Rodney comes in, but he doesn't look up. His
shoulders are shaking a little with the effort of not crying more loudly.
Rodney goes over to the bed and crouches down beside it. Tentatively, he puts a
hand on John's arm, and is relieved when it isn't shrugged off. Most of John's
face is hidden, but Rodney is pretty sure he can see the faint shine of wetness
on his cheeks.
"Um," he says. "You okay?"
John doesn't answer for a second and then, when he whispers, "Yeah," his voice
wavers in a way that contradicts the assertion completely. He swallows hard,
clearly making an effort to calm himself. "I'm thirty-nine years old," he says
in a low voice. "I am a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force. I've served in
war zones and I'm the senior military officer on an expedition to another
galaxy and—" He breaks off, his breathing hitching again. It's not working.
Rodney could have told him it wouldn't, because the truth is that although John
is all those things, he is not any of them here and now. Right now, he's a
fifteen year old kid whose mother is dying in the room down the hall. All
things considered, that's probably worse than all the wars and aliens of two
galaxies combined.
"C'mon," Rodney says, "move over," and he hops on to the bed next to John, who
has to scoot across to make room for him. He loops one arm over John and pulls
him close, embracing him. John's shoulder blades poke sharply into Rodney's
chest, and Rodney thinks how fragile this version of John is, how vulnerable.
They lie like that, spooning together in silence, until John says, quietly,
"She's gonna die in November. November 23, 1984. She died in that room. She's
gonna die in that room."
Rodney squeezes John a little more tightly.
John draws in a breath and continues, "And after that... we're going to fall
apart. She was the glue, you know? She held us together, and we didn't even
know it, not really. It only got worse when I got older. She would've
understood; Dad didn't. The last time we fought he said... he said she would've
been ashamed of me."
Another sob escapes him, and Rodney shifts his position a little so he can rock
John, comfort him. It feels natural and right in these bodies in a way he can't
imagine it would if they were the ages they should be. They're not children—far
from it—but they're not adults, either. They've been fooling themselves to
think otherwise.
"What's the point of being here if I can't change it?" John asks, and Rodney
doesn't think the question is aimed at him so much as it is the universe at
large. "Why make me watch it again when I can't do anything?"
"Is that why you didn't want to see her?"
"All the things I've done," John says. "All the impossible, incredible things,
and I can't change this. It's just one life. Why not just one life? It's not
fair."
Rodney closes his eyes, and rests his chin in the hollow between John's neck
and his shoulder. "June 15, 1999," he says. "Day my mother died. I'm really bad
with dates. I can never remember if my niece's birthday is the first or second
of February. But I remember that."
"In the park, with Jeannie," John says, "you were talking about her in the past
tense."
"She had a stroke in her sleep. Ironic, really: the only thing she did
peacefully in her whole life was die." Rodney stops, takes a breath, steels
himself to continue. "Anyway. I was clearing out her apartment, afterward, and
I found... she'd kept everything. Every report card I ever got, my old piano
exam certificates, school science fair prizes—all of it. Boxes and boxes of it,
all organized and labeled and even categorized."
"What did you do with it?"
"I kept it, of course. It's all in storage. It'll be valuable archive material
for the Smithsonian. You know, for my future biographers."
"Right." John sounds as if he might be smiling a little. Rodney hopes he is.
"And I figured that way at least part of what she'd left me would be useful."
"She left you other stuff?"
"Yeah, lots of things," Rodney says. "The insecurities, the neuroses, the
personality flaws of which I am, contrary to general opinion, not entirely
unaware. Which, again, will be terrific fodder for my future biographers. Not
so great for me, though."
John gives a small, shaky laugh. "So, here we are, not even old enough to vote,
and we're both completely screwed up already."
"Pretty much," Rodney agrees. "Look, you could've thought about anything when
you sat down in that chair, but you remembered this. You wanted to come back
here."
"I thought it was the last thing I wanted," John says, "You know, I got as far
away as I could, Afghanistan and Antarctica and finally all the way to another
galaxy. I thought I'd left everything behind, but I hadn't. I was carrying it
around with me; it was in my head the whole time."
"Yeah," Rodney agrees. "I think that's how it works."
John is silent after that, and gradually Rodney feels his breathing become
steadier and more regular. Rodney's forehead is resting against the back of
John's head; John's hair is tickling his nose. The scents Rodney associates
with John are sweat and blood and gun oil and that odd but not unpleasant
ozone-y smell that is peculiar to the jumpers. He can't smell any of them now,
though, just good-quality soap.
"I want to kiss you," Rodney says. "Can I?"
John's answer is to twist his whole body around so that Rodney is suddenly
looking right into his eyes. His face is still red and a little blotchy from
crying. He nods.
Rodney kisses him gently, lips to lips and then lips to cheeks, lips to
forehead, lips to chin. John exhales with the softness of a sigh, and accepts
each one as the small offering it is.
"I'll stay," Rodney says, when he's run out of places to leave kisses. "If you
want me to stay."
John hesitates. "No."
Rodney lets out a breath. "Okay. I forgot... that's not really how it works for
us, is it?"
"No," John says, and Rodney thinks for a second that he's agreeing, until he
continues, "No, I didn't mean that, I meant—I want you to. I want you to stay.
It's just really not a good idea with my dad around."
"Oh. I, uh—right." Rodney can't decide if he's more disappointed that the
answer's no or elated that it would've been yes. "Maybe when we get back."
"When we get back," John echoes.
A few minutes later, Rodney gets up from the bed, pulls a blanket over John,
and makes his way to the guest bedroom.

***

The next morning there are no pancakes. Rodney thinks this may be Isabella's
way of punishing them for coming in late the previous evening. In all other
respects, though, breakfast follows the same pattern as the previous day, with
Rodney and John doing more eating than talking, while Isabella makes up a
separate breakfast for John's mother.
But when she starts to lift the tray, the morning routine veers off in a new
direction. John puts down his spoon, leaving his cereal to get soggy in the
bowl, and says, "It's okay, Isabella. I'll take that up to mom." He makes it
sound like it's no big deal, but then, Rodney thinks, Sheppard has raised
making things sound like they're no big deal to an art form.
Isabella smiles widely, plainly delighted. "What a nice thing to do, John.
You're a sweet boy."
John looks mortified, because if there's one thing neither fifteen year old
kids nor Air Force Lieutenant Colonels want to be called, it's sweet boy.
He picks up the tray in much the same manner that Rodney's seen him heft a gun
before walking toward a known threat. Rodney hesitates for a second, not sure
whether Sheppard wants to do this alone, then decides that he's stood at John's
side too many times to break the habit now. He abandons his half-eaten
breakfast and gets up from the table.
"I'll get the doors," he says.
John doesn't answer, just nods once. He's got that calm look again, and he
looks, to Rodney, both very young and somehow, at the same time, even older
than Rodney knows he actually is.
The stairs are wide enough that they can climb them side by side. At the top,
John turns right, and Rodney follows him, down the hall, past John's room, past
the guest room Rodney's staying in, past another couple of doors. Their
destination is the very last door.
John is holding the tray; it looks like it's made of solid wood and is laden
down with breakfast dishes and Rodney thinks suddenly that it must be very
heavy for John to carry, all by himself. He reaches for the doorknob.
"Wait," John says.
Rodney waits.
"You'll be right outside."
Rodney's not sure if it's a question or a request or just something John needs
to hear said out loud. He errs on the side of caution, and answers. "I'll be
here. How is it that you military types put it? Oh, yes—I've got your six."
Rodney's never picked up the knack of making military terminology sound
credible; even to his own ears, it always sounds stupid coming from his mouth,
and he figures the effect will be heightened when that mouth is a teenager's.
He's right, and the remark achieves what he means it to: the tension around
John's eyes subsides a fraction.
"Okay," John says. "I'm ready."
Rodney opens the door, and John goes in.
Minutes pass. Rodney stands in the Sheppards' immaculately decorated upstairs
hall, waiting. He counts the number of flowers in the pattern on the carpet,
then he squares it, then squares it again, then takes the result and works out
all its factors and its third, fourth and fifth roots.
The door opens again, and John appears. He looks different: genuinely young,
not just pretending to be.
"Come on in," he says. "I want to introduce you."
The bedroom is just as tastefully and expensively decorated as the rest of the
house. Large windows, framed by soft drapes, overlook the huge gardens; a small
dresser, which looks to Rodney's admittedly untrained eye like an antique, sits
in front of them, its surface cluttered with medicines and pill-bottles. The
room's appearance is spoiled somewhat by the bed, which is metal and plastic
and clearly belongs in a hospital ward.
The woman sitting up in the bed is wearing a soft quilted jacket over her
pajama top and a red silk scarf tied around her head, its tails trailing down
over her shoulders in much the same way as her hair probably used to. The
breakfast tray is sitting across her lap, its contents so far untouched, as far
as Rodney can see. Her face is too thin and her complexion is too pale, but her
smile restores a lot of the attractiveness that illness has taken from her.
She looks a lot like John. No: John looks a lot like her.
"Rodney," John says, not looking away from his mother's face, "this is my mom,
Alice," and his voice is soft and strained and full of wonder and sadness.
"Hi," Rodney says. "It's, um. It's nice to meet you." A moment later he adds,
"Mrs. Sheppard," because he is, after all, sixteen years old and meeting his
best friend's mom for the first time.
Alice Sheppard turns her head slowly, the simple movement clearly an effort.
"Patrick told me we had a house guest. He says you're helping John with his
math."
Rodney starts to agree and then stops. "Actually, he doesn't need much—well,
any—help. We, uh, we only said that so I could come visit."
Alice laughs softly. "I won't tell," she promises. "And I hear you're going to
college this Fall. You must be a very intelligent young man."
"He is," John says, and there's something in his voice that sounds a lot like
pride. It makes Rodney's heart feel strangely full. "He's the smartest person I
ever met."
Rodney notices that John's mother isn't sitting up so much as she's being
propped up by the tilted end of the bed and the pillows. When her smile fades,
the lines on her face—lines that make her look older than she surely
is—reappear at once.
John sits down on the chair next to the bed and pushes the breakfast tray
forward a little, encouraging his mother to take more notice of it. "Isabella
made this for you."
Alice picks up a fork and prods at the egg and toast, but without enthusiasm.
"I'm sure it's delicious, darling, but I don't have much of an appetite just
now."
"Try," John says, and Rodney hears the unspoken, for me, that follows.
"I guess I should," Alice says. Gamely, she lifts a forkful of egg. "Why don't
you talk to me while I eat?"
John opens his mouth and then closes it again, and then looks at Rodney, and
Rodney knows, suddenly, why John asked him to come in. He almost laughs,
because who would've thought that after all this time, they'd finally run into
a situation where Sheppard needed him for his ability to talk?
Rodney is about to say something—because if there's one thing he can do with
consummate ease, it's fill a silence—and then a second realization comes, as
sudden as the first. This is not his silence to fill; it's John's. The silence
of decades.
Rodney looks back at John and says, "Tell her about Atlantis."
John glances at him, pushes his lips together and shakes his head, but Alice
has already heard. "You mean like the place in the myth? Is this something from
a movie you boys went to see?"
"No," Rodney says, "it's a real place."
John doesn't say anything for a second. Then he reaches out and takes his
mother's hand, the one not holding the fork. Their hands are almost identical,
Rodney notices: both small and fine-fingered.
"Go on," Rodney prompts him.
"It's a city," John says at last. "A long way away from here. It's in the
middle of an ocean—a bright blue ocean—and there's no land for a thousand miles
in any direction. When you fly to it, you come in low over the sea, and the
first thing you see is something shining on the horizon. Then, when you get
closer, you can see the towers and spires. They look like they're built on the
surface of the water. Sometimes, in the mist, the whole city looks like it's
floating. And when you get really close, you can hear it, and it's like a song
in your head, welcoming you home."
Rodney blinks, swallows. Thinks: That's what it's like for him—
"I wish," John whispers, "I wish you could see it."
Alice's eyes are closed. "I can."
The moment stretches, crystallizes, as if the bedroom and the three of them
have somehow been transported to the heart of a black hole, to a place the
universe's physical laws cannot penetrate, where time is irrelevant,
meaningless.
Then Alice sets down her empty fork. The metal clinks against the china plate,
and time starts moving forward again.
"It feels like it's been a long time since I've seen you, John."
"It has been," John says, very quietly. Then he looks up at Rodney. "I'm gonna
stay a while."
Rodney nods, and turns to go. He's almost at the door when he hears John,
behind him, say, "Thanks."
Rodney just nods again. For once, there's nothing he wants or needs to say.

***
Left to his own devices, Rodney decides to go exploring. He doesn't find the
suspected bowling alley, but discovers the house has an actual game room with a
pool table, and a library. Well, maybe it's really just a room with a lot of
books, but that's close enough for jazz, as far as Rodney is concerned.
Better still, there's a whole shelf devoted to science fiction. Rodney feels
vindicated: he knew John had to have more books than he saw in his room. He
runs his thumb along the spines with relish, before selecting half a dozen
volumes, and settles in for the rest of the morning, kicking off with a
hardback copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer. A glance inside the dust jacket
confirms that in 1984, it's just been published. Rodney hasn't read it since he
was in college.
Several hours later, he's just starting to think he'd quite like a snack when
John's father walks in.
"Rodney," Patrick says in greeting, as if last night's dinner had been a
pleasant and cordial affair. "I see you're making yourself at home. Where's
John?"
"He's talking to his mom."
This simple statement produces an unexpected reaction from Patrick; an emotion
which is intense but too brief for Rodney to decipher writes itself across his
features and then almost at once disappears again. It might be relief, although
it's gone before Rodney can be sure.
"That's... good," Patrick says. There's an armchair opposite the couch Rodney
is sprawled on (at sixteen, his back doesn't protest no matter what contortions
he inflicts on it), and Patrick sits down in it. "John... John doesn't make
friends easily. You seem to... to care about him. I think right now it's very
important for him to have a friend, a good friend." He pauses. "I hope you know
you're welcome here, Rodney."
Rodney doesn't know what to say to that, so he settles on, "Thanks, Mr.
Sheppard."
Then Patrick, in an apparent attempt to shift the conversation back to more
comfortable territory, nods at Rodney's book and says, "Are you enjoying that?"
"Yes," Rodney says honestly, because he's just spent the whole morning reading,
and when was the last time he got the chance to do that? "John has pretty good
taste," he adds, and holds up the cover of Neuromancer for Patrick to see.
Patrick Sheppard doesn't smile, but the sides of his eyes crinkle a little in a
way which is very, very familiar to Rodney. "Oh, you think so? Well, I'm sure
John will be pleased to know you approve of his reading habits."
The penny drops. Rodney stares at the shelf of science fiction novels, and then
at Patrick Sheppard, company CEO, utilities magnate, businessman. Patrick looks
back at Rodney, wearing that same expression of private amusement that until
right now Rodney had thought was unique in two galaxies. In his eyes, Rodney
sees a man who knows the gap between who he is and how the world sees him is a
large one, and who prefers to keep it that way.
John might look more like his mother, but he's his father's son.
The look on Patrick's face changes to a frown of concern. "Is something wrong?"
Rodney says, "Mr. Sheppard, can I use your phone?"

***
The phone rings just once before it's answered and a small, high-pitched voice
says, "'Lo?"
At seven, Jeannie had just discovered what telephones were for, Rodney
remembers. "Jeannie, it's me, your brother."
"Mer!"
Jeannie sounds more pleased to hear his voice than she will at almost any point
for the next two decades. Rodney takes a moment to feel a little depressed
about that. "Are you—Is Mister Huggy okay?"
"Mister Huggy's sad," Jeannie says, matter-of-factly. "They're shouting again.
He doesn't like it when they shout."
"Yeah, I know. I don't like it either." He lets out a breath. "Look, that
stuffed toy family you're looking after in the closet... you keep doing that.
All that practice is going to pay off for you. You're not gonna be like Mom
when you grow up. You're gonna get it right."
"Okay," Jeannie says, and for a second Rodney almost thinks she might have
understood that.
"Now go get Mom," he says.
"Okay," Jeannie says again. Then there's silence at the other end of the line,
as Jeannie abandons the handset to go and get their mother.
In the silence, Rodney wonders what he's going to say to her. 'You really
screwed me up by pushing me to achieve all the things you didn't' is accurate,
but even Rodney recognizes it's hardly conducive to establishing constructive
communication.
Then he's run out of time to think about it, because his mother's voice is
saying, coolly, "Meredith. So you finally found time to call us."
Just her voice, and her tone, are enough to make all the old feelings of anger
and inadequacy come welling back up again, like bile straight out of the pit of
his stomach. But there's distance between them now—miles and years and
galaxies—and somehow he finds himself able to swallow it down again.
"I had a window in my packed schedule," he tells her, because two can play that
game.
There's a second of silence, and then his mother says, "Well, did you call for
a reason? I'm sure the Sheppards won't appreciate you pushing up their long
distance bill for no good reason, Meredith."
"John's father runs a phone company, Mom. One weekend phone call to Canada
isn't a big deal." Although a phone call across twenty four years is a big
deal. A really big deal. That reminder of what it is that he's actually doing
here prompts him to try again. "I called because I need to tell you—" He stops.
Swallows.
"Meredith, what? Are you homesick? Do you want to come home, is that it?"
Rodney is gripping the phone's handset so hard that his fingers are going numb.
"You're gonna be proud of me," he says. "I need you to know that. Mom, I'm
going to do things. Amazing things."
There's a pause, just long enough for Rodney to realize that he has no idea
what response he expects or even wants to hear.
Then Irene McKay says, brusquely, "Of course you will. You're a genius."
"Do you believe that?" he asks. "Really?"
"Oh, Meredith," his mother says, and he can almost see her rolling her eyes,
the mannerism utterly familiar because she passed it on to him. "You're my son,
aren't you?"
Rodney doesn't answer for a long time. At last he says, "Yes, Mom. Yes, I am."
"Meredith, are you all right? You sound faint. Your blood sugar must be low, go
and eat something." Then, almost as an afterthought, she adds, "By the way, I
miss you."
He closes his eyes. "I miss you, too, Mom."
It's true. He does. He's just never admitted it before.
After the call is over, he stands with the phone in his hand for a long time,
the dial tone buzzing in his ear.

***

"It's true what they say," Rodney muses.
"What is?"
"That youth is wasted on the young. Being sixteen when I was sixteen was grim,
but being sixteen now that I'm forty? Is actually pretty great."
The days are starting to acquire a routine. In the morning, John takes
breakfast to his mother and then spends time—less or more, depending on how
she's feeling—just sitting with her, while Rodney reads. After lunch, when
Alice needs to rest, they go to see a movie (Rodney had forgotten how many good
movies came out in 1984: Ghostbusters! Footloose! The Karate Kid! Classics,
all.) or go for a bike ride. They almost always end up back here, at John's
favorite airplane-viewing spot, where jets streak overhead and no one can see
them.
John is lying on his back, his head resting on his folded arms, legs splayed
comfortably. He is basking in the afternoon sun, loose-limbed and at one with
the world around him. Rodney's always thought that relaxed is John's default
attitude, but now he realizes that's not the case at all: Sheppard's just
supremely good at faking it. This, though—this is real deal. Fifteen year old
John Sheppard at rest is a sight that demands to be savored, and Rodney puts
down the book he's reading (Niven's Ringworld) so he can spend a couple of
minutes appreciating it to its fullest.
After a while, John says, "We can't change anything," and it's not a question
or a challenge, he's just observing the way it is. He turns his head so he's
looking at Rodney. "But if you could—would you?"
"God, yes. I'd make sure I published my paper on point to point energy transfer
before that bastard Johansson. And I'd dump my tech stocks before the dot com
bubble burst in 2001."
"It was a serious question."
"And that was my serious answer. Do you know how much I could've made if I'd
sold six months earlier? It was going to be my retirement nest egg. Although
now that my career has developed in, well, let's say riskier directions than I
formerly anticipated, that's admittedly less of a consideration." He pauses.
"You?"
"I'd skip getting married, for a start." John's tone is light, but there's an
undercurrent of something more reflective in it that makes Rodney wonder how
much he's been thinking about it since they've been there. It makes him
reconsider his own answer.
He lets himself think—really think—what it would be like, to pick up his life
at sixteen, knowing exactly the path that lay ahead of him, the good decisions
and the bad ones, the triumphs he could relive, the mistakes he could avoid.
For a brief, shining second, the possibilities are intoxicating: he could do it
over, get his life right this time.
Then he looks at John and realizes that maybe, completely by accident, he's
already gotten it right.
"You know what?" he says at last. "No. I wouldn't change anything. There are
too many variables, and where I am is... It's okay. It's better than okay."
John nods slowly, looking at him. "Yeah. Me too." He hesitates, then says, "I'm
glad you're here. If you hadn't been, I don't know if I could've..." He trails
off. "I don't know how I brought you back with me, but I think that's why I
brought you. And, uh, I thought you should know that."
Rodney opens his mouth to ask him what he's talking about, and then—just this
once, thank God—his brain kicks into gear in the nick of time.
Rodney had used the memory machine himself, although to much less dramatic
effect than Sheppard. But by using it he must have inadvertently allowed it to
store whatever set of access protocols it needed to gain access to his
consciousness. And then, while Rodney had been asleep, his mind open and
receptive, Sheppard had sat down in the memories chair and thought about the
things he wouldn't let himself during the day. The things he kept hidden in
locked boxes deep inside his head most of the time, and when he came to face
them, his subconscious had known he couldn't do it alone, even if he hadn't.
John didn't just need to come back here; he needed Rodney to come with him.
"There is one thing I'd change," Rodney says. John gives him a questioning
look, and Rodney shrugs. "I'd spend a lot less time mooning over Cheryl
Blanchard."
"Who's Cheryl Blanchard?"
"No one important."
It starts right then, a faint tingling sensation just behind Rodney's eyes.
When he tries to lift his hand to touch his face, his arm is strangely
unresponsive, as if it's no longer his arm. He can still see the thick, golden
sun falling across his bare ankles, but he can't feel it anymore, and the
ground is dissolving beneath him, so that he has the sensation of floating,
weightless and unbound. It feels like waking up, except that up until right
now, he'd thought he was awake.
With a final effort, he lifts his head just enough to look down at his lanky
sixteen year old body, still in possession of just enough consciousness to feel
regret that he will never feel like this again, coupled with gratitude that he
did get to feel like this again.
"Hey, Rodney." John sounds both very close and very far away. "See you in
twenty years."
Twenty years, Rodney thinks. In that time, he's going to go to college, get a
degree and his doctorates; he's going to publish his work and win prizes for
it; he's going to have crushes and affairs and once he'll even think he's in
love; he's going to start working for the US military and go to Area 51, where
he'll spend a couple of years creating mathematical models of wormholes before
he actually sees one. He's going to fuck things up, he's going to tell Sam
Carter that someone on her team should be left to die and expect her to be okay
with that and she's going to have him sent to Siberia and he's going to deserve
it. He's going to spend nearly five years not speaking to his sister and he's
going to tell himself it's because she's wasting her talent when it's really
because he's jealous that she's happy and he's not. When Elizabeth Weir asks
him to work on the Pegasus project he's only going to say yes because he thinks
he's ruined his chances of making it in the main Stargate program. He's going
to meet John Sheppard in Antarctica and go to Atlantis, and then, finally, his
life is going to start.
Rodney's last thought is that it can't come soon enough.
**********
Epilogue
**********

When Rodney wakes up in Atlantis's infirmary, he's forty years old again, with
a slightly receding hairline and a back that's stiff after spending six days
lying on his back unconscious while the supposed experts in Ancient technology
who work for him tried to figure out how to turn off the machine keeping him
that way.
Sheppard's not there; Keller had deemed it too risky to move him from the lab
where they'd found him, insensible in the memory machine chair. His superior
genes (she doesn't actually use the word superior, but Rodney feels it's being
unfairly implied) allowed him to recover more quickly once Zelenka had managed
to pull the plug on their metaphysical excursion to the past, which means that
by the time Rodney's finally given the all clear and allowed to leave, John's
already been pulled into a catch-up briefing with Carter and Lorne. Rodney is
hooking his radio over his ear, about to call him, when it buzzes and Zelenka
says, "So, you are no longer asleep on the job, yes? This is good, because we
have four, no, now it is five, separate crises requiring your attention."
It's six crises by the time Rodney gets to the main science labs.
He does see John in the next twenty-four hours, but only in passing in the
hallways and across tables at various meetings. Sheppard's as flat out as
Rodney is, trying to clear the backlog of work and decisions and problems which
have accumulated while they've been mentally (if not physically) absent.
Teenagers get to spend whole days doing nothing much; grown men who have jobs
and responsibilities and people—lives—depending on them don't. It's not that
Rodney wants to be sixteen again, not really, but sometime around one o'clock
in the morning, when he's staring at a block of Ancient code which is still
refusing to compile three hours after he started working on it, he finds
himself thinking wistfully about how it felt to spend a whole afternoon just
lying in the grass, watching planes soar overhead.
Exactly three minutes later, he's at the door of Sheppard's quarters.
"Hey," John says, stepping to one side to let Rodney come in past him. He's
barefoot, wearing sweats and he looks rumpled and tired. "I'm sorry, I kept
meaning to come find you, but things have been kind of crazy since we got
back."
"Tell me about it," Rodney says. "Apparently you and I are not the only people
to have mastered time travel. The entire science department has discovered the
secret as well, or at least I have to assume that, given that they appear to
have squeezed an entire year's worth of incompetence into the space of six
days." He flops down in the room's only chair and eyes the paperwork which John
is still attempting to bring some kind of order to. "I see the great military
bureaucracy didn't grind to a halt in your absence."
"I kind of wish it had," John says. "I've got nearly a week's worth of reports
to review and sign off on before tomorrow's databurst."
Rodney sighs. "Being a grown up sucks." Then he remembers something else that
sucks. "Incidentally, we need to find time to sit down and figure out what each
of us is putting in our reports on what happened, because I don't know about
you, but I intend mine to be the very definition of selective detail."
John nods. "If you leave out my wallpaper, I won't mention your ice cream soda
party trick."
The thing Rodney likes about Sheppard is that they really do understand each
other.
Then John yawns and Rodney remembers that they both have a lot of things they
have to do before the day can be officially stamped complete. "Well," he says,
a little awkwardly, "that's all I came to say. Hello, goodbye. See you at
senior staff tomorrow." He turns to go.
He's just about the palm the door open when he feels John's hand on his arm. He
turns around again, and John is looking at him. There's a hesitancy in his
expression which makes him look almost like his fifteen year old self again.
Maybe, Rodney thinks, the uncertainty was always there, it's just that he's
only now learned to see past the adult façade to recognize it.
John leans forward and kisses him. His face is rough with stubble and he smells
like cheap military issue soap and the insides of a jumper and Rodney wants to
breathe him in as deeply as he can, because this is his John Sheppard. John
kisses him with less urgency and raw physical need than he did when he was
fifteen, but with far more desire.
"Stay," John says. "I want you to stay."
This time, Rodney does.
~ END ~
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