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“Sure,” said Sheppard, “how bad could it be?” and Rodney could only gape at him: horrified, stupefied, shocked.
“Are you nuts?” he demanded as Teyla went to relay their acquiescence. “Or have you simply never watched a movie before in your life? No, scratch that,” he said, as Sheppard opened his mouth to protest, “have you not been awake for the past two years? You can’t say things like that! Saying things like that is like an open invitation for irony and fate to get together and think up new ways to screw us over! Saying things like that is just asking to have our asses handed to us—is jumping up and waving your hand and shouting, ‘Oh yes, pick me for your bizarre alien sex ritual, and hey, while you’re at it, why don’t you bring McKay along for the ride? How bad could it be?’”
Sheppard gave Rodney a hard look. “After that? Not so bad.”
Rodney harrumphed. Sheppard gave him a condescending pat on the shoulder. “Relax, McKay—it’s only a little concert. How bad could—”
Rodney clamped a hand over his mouth. “Don’t say it again! Oh my God, you are nuts!”
“Yes,” said Sheppard, prying Rodney’s fingers off, “optimistic and nuts. Those are the same.”
Rodney crossed his arms. “In this galaxy? Could be!”
“Point,” Sheppard conceded. “Now come on,” he said, giving Rodney a gentle shove in the direction of the amphitheater, from which Teyla had emerged, gesturing toward them in her subtle way. “Let’s be quiet and attentive and clap our little hands off when it’s done. Er,” he said to Teyla, “that is considered polite on this planet, right?” There’d been a minor applause incident on M5H-006, where apparently the only acceptable way to show appreciation for scantily clad tribal dancers was with pin-drop silence.
But Teyla nodded. “Yes,” she said, “and I believe to”—she incongruously snapped her fingers—“is also acceptable.”
“Great,” said Rodney, “it’s a planet of beat poets. Does that mean I’m allowed to get high before this?”
“I sense that there are some wild tales of graduate school hijinks that I have not yet been privileged enough to hear,” Sheppard said, quirking an eyebrow.
“Is that an invitation?” Rodney asked, spraying sarcasm and spittle. “You wanna get together and reminisce? Trade hazing ritual for hazing ritual?”
“Hazing rituals?” Sheppard smiled that dry little grin that made Rodney frustratingly unable to decide whether or not he was being had. “What kind of grad school did you go to?”
“A good one!” hissed Rodney, far too indignant for someone who actually had attended a good grad school. Several, in fact. He watched Sheppard slide smoothly onto the bench next to Ronon and Teyla—they were of course seated in “places of honor,” which meant, oh goody, the front row. Rodney plopped down on the end. “And I’d like to hear what kind—”
“Shh,” growled Ronon, leaning over the Colonel. “Talking at the theater is rude.”
“Yes, you’ll go to the special hell,” Sheppard said cheerfully, and before Rodney could respond, there was an echoing round of finger snapping, and the performers came out on stage.
Apparently, emo had made it to the Pegasus Galaxy along with the beat movement. There were two of them, a man and a woman. Both had irregularly cut jet black hair and wore low-slung pants belted with strips of studded leather. Rodney stared at the male performer’s feet; he would swear those looked like Reeboks.
The musicians knelt down on the stage and pulled out their instruments. These seemed to consist of a box with a lot of switches and a long, skinny piece of wood strung with what Rodney was sure had to be inadequately cleaned bits of animal gut. “I have a very bad feeling about this,” he said, leaning over, but Sheppard refused to turn his head. Instead he poked Rodney with one emphatic finger and whispered, “Special hell.”
Rodney pouted.
But not for long. The musicians gave the audience identical, socially-awkward bows and, never rising from their crouched positions, readied their instruments to play. Idly, and rather to his own surprise, Rodney entertained the possibility that this might not be so bad after all.
He should have known better than to second guess himself. A cochlea-quaking, eardrum-shattering wail erupted from the stage and blasted across the audience. To Rodney, it felt like his aural wallpaper had ripped itself away from his mental sideboard and was attempting to smother his brain. He fumbled for the edge of the bench as another shrieking, animalistic howl penetrated his skull. “Oh my God,” he said. “It’s Vogon poetry set to music!
Sheppard had apparently forgotten his no talking rule, or was willing to make an exception in the heat of battle. “WHAT?” he shouted.
“VOGON POETRY!” Rodney shouted back.
“WHAT?”
“I SAID, IT’S LIKE VOGON POETRY SET TO MUSIC!” Sheppard gave him a blank look. “LIKE DENTAL SURGERY FOR YOUR EARS!” Sheppard shrugged. “LIKE A READY-MADE MIGRAINE!” Sheppard smiled encouragingly, winced sympathetically, and generally looked like he was agreeing with everything Rodney had to say. That settled it. “YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND A WORD I’M SAYING, CAN YOU?”
Sympathetic nod the second. Yup.
Rodney let his voice drop down to his normal tone—which, while generally quite impressive, had nothing on the clattering, capering cacophony coming from the stage. “You have stupid hair,” he said. “And weird, pointy ears. You look like an elf.”
Sheppard nodded like this was perhaps the most profound thing Rodney had ever said.
“You have very sloppy personal habits,” Rodney continued. “You do disgusting things like oil your gun on top of my sleeping bag, and you’re worse than I am about leaving crumpled-up powerbar wrappers all over the place. Also, your boxers are always showing.”
From the look on Sheppard’s face, this was perhaps the most profound statement anyone had ever made, ever, in the history of the universe.
Rodney found it rather encouraging. He also found the confessional aspect of talking to the Colonel when he couldn’t hear to be almost...liberating. Like a session with Heightmeyer, but without anyone rudely interrupting to ask, “And how does that make you feel?”
“I cheated on a test once,” he said suddenly. “True, it was only a grade six history exam, and of course I had better things to do than waste time memorizing the intricacies of the MacNab-Marin Coalition, but I’ve always felt oddly guilty about it.”
As if in response, the male performer—Rodney could no longer classify him as a musician without doing grave insult to elementary school recorder players and Yanni fans everywhere—produced a...a tuba? “NOT THAT GUILTY!” Rodney shouted, as a flaring, farting blare was added to the mix.
The tuba showed no sign of being removed. “Fine,” Rodney said. “Fine. You want guilt?” For some reason, he was addressing Sheppard again. “I made one of my professors cry when I insulted his asinine theory at a faculty function! The summer I was twelve, I shorted out the power in our neighborhood four times in one month! I’m the one who ate the last of the Chex Mix, I’m the one who scratched Jumper Three, and I’m the one who let it slip that you accidentally sexually assaulted that llama thing on M4P-298! And when I was in grade five, I knocked my sister Jeannie down the stairs and blamed it on the dog!”
Sheppard gave Rodney’s knee a charitable pat. On stage, the animal-gut strings rippled and pulsed, washing them all with wave after wave of terrible, thunderous sound. “I hate it when you touch me like that!” Rodney screamed into the din. “Like it doesn’t mean anything! Like you can’t even imagine that I want to—God, I want to...”
He swallowed. “I want to put my hands on you. I want to—to push you up against the wall, to brace myself against your shoulders and just drive into you. I want to touch your cock. I think about touching you, I think about sucking you off, I try to imagine how you’d taste.”
Sheppard was smiling along to all of this, oblivious, oblivious, and it made him bold. “I watch you all the time,” Rodney whispered, the words vanishing as soon as he uttered them. “I stare at your mouth, and I think about you blowing me, the feel of your hot, wet mouth, and I want to taste myself in you. I think about us in bed, and how you’d turn me over and I’d feel your breath hot on my neck as you pushed in, slowly, slowly—or maybe hard and fast, yeah, like you couldn’t control yourself, couldn’t hold yourself back from letting go and just...fucking me.”
The tuba let out a viciously loud blurt and Rodney started, realizing all at once that he was painfully hard—that he had made himself hard, just by talking; that, worse, he had lulled himself into a sort of rhythm and was unconsciously rocking himself, as if he were bobbing in time to the sin-against-music. He froze, mid-motion. He was sure Sheppard could see the horrible blush that was spreading across his cheeks, but the Colonel had turned away, was staring at the stage, glassy-eyed.
Yeah, Rodney could understand the performance having that effect. That, and the ability to render an otherwise sensible person completely insane.
He forced himself to breathe deeply, appalled. And yet—the embarrassment waned remarkably quickly. It didn’t matter what he had revealed, because no one had heard; it was like uttering secrets to a locked and empty room. Pointless. Masturbatory. Irrelevant.
He reached over and tugged on Sheppard’s sleeve. The Colonel half-turned, pointing at his ear, apparently deciding that this was the time to come clean about his deafness. As if Rodney hadn’t already figured it out. As if he hadn’t realized that this was a once in a lifetime time opportunity, a chance to do something he’d most likely never have the courage to do again.
“I think I’m in love with you!” he shouted. He couldn’t even hear himself anymore; if it weren’t for the movement of his lips, the press of tongue against teeth, he wouldn’t believe that he had spoken at all. “I mean, as much as I know what love is, I’m not exactly an expert or anything...but I’d like a chance to find out. To experiment.”
Sheppard put his head in his hands. Rodney knew it was a reaction to the Torturously Unfinished Symphony, but that didn’t stop him from biting down sharply on his tongue. “Relax, it’s not like I’m going to do anything about it,” he said, tasting blood. “Oh, yuck.”
Which was of course when the sound ceased more abruptly than your average Kazaa download, leaving Rodney’s last word echoing around the amphitheater in the profound silence of zero fingers snapping. Soon to be followed by the noise of many fingers reaching for assorted pieces of deadly weaponry.
“Dammit, Rodney!” Sheppard shouted after Teyla’s attempts to apologize fell on (understandably, after that concert) deaf ears and they were once again reduced to fleeing for their lives.
“It’s your fault!” Rodney shouted back. “You jinxed us!”
“Don’t be superstitious!”
“Don’t say stupid things!”
Sheppard flung himself into the jumper, checked to make sure that everyone was present and accounted for, and lifted off as a round of objects both blunt and sharp collided with the windshield. “Oh, I hardly think that I’m the one who needs to be lectured on saying stupid things,” he hissed.
Rodney’s heart performed a move that would’ve been impressive in a high-diving competition but was considerably less fabulous within the confines of his chest. He forced himself to stay calm: Sheppard meant the inopportune “yuck,” that was all. He managed a haughty sniff. “First of all, it’s scarcely my fault that that travesty against music was causing me to bring up food I ate a week ago and never wanted to taste again; and second, if they had been remotely professional musicians, they would have been capable of taking—even appreciating!—a little bit of criticism. In fact, they should have thanked me!”
Sheppard made a face. For a second, Rodney was worried—the Colonel looked like he was in pain; what if he’d been wounded and nobody had noticed? Then Rodney realized that he was just trying really, really hard not to laugh.
Rodney rolled his eyes. “I’ll just give you a moment, shall I?” he said.
Sheppard waved a hand at him, a semi-snort escaping his lips. Rodney went into the back of the jumper and plopped down next to Ronon just in time to hear him turn to Teyla and say, “I thought the fourth movement was really innovative, didn’t you?”
Rodney wasn’t avoiding Sheppard; he had no reason to. But he did have a lot of work to do, and sometimes the Colonel could be like a buzzy black fly that just wouldn’t go away. Like right now, when Rodney was walking purposefully down the hall, his demeanor and general status making it undeniably clear that he had Important Places to Be. Yet still Sheppard persisted in jogging after him, calling, “McKay! Hey, Rodney—wait up!”
Inevitably, a hand closed over his arm, and Rodney turned around, his eyes midway through their roll. “What?”
“That was some fancy speed-walking, there,” Sheppard said. “I’ve been calling you.”
“Well, since that little performance today may have caused permanent damage to my eardrums, you’ll have to speak a bit louder in the future.” Sheppard was looking at him intently; he still hadn’t let go of Rodney’s arm. “Can I do something for you?”
There was a brief pause. “Yeah,” Sheppard said. “I have a few questions about the MacNab-Morin Coalition, and I was wondering...”
“You have questions about 19th Century Can—oh my God.”
“Easy there, Rodney,” Sheppard said, as Rodney tried to utilize the empty air as a fainting couch. Sheppard’s hand on his arm was steadying and warm, but Rodney had to get away, get away—
“Oh my God,” he said again, “you—” And really, he should have learned his lesson about the talking. “You—”
“Funny story,” Sheppard said, leading him...somewhere. Hopefully off a very high cliff. “I ever tell you about how I learned to read lips?”
“Curse you and your hidden depths!” Rodney muttered, and then a door opened, and Sheppard was pushing him inside someplace quiet and dark. Probably somewhere the sound wouldn’t travel and it wouldn’t be too difficult to hide the body.
Or... “Huh,” said Rodney. “This looks like your bedroom.”
“Imagine that,” Sheppard said. Then he grabbed Rodney’s chin, forced Rodney to meet his eyes. “McKay,” he said. “Put your hands on me.”
It was a good thing Sheppard was supporting his jaw, Rodney thought; it would’ve left a nasty dent in the floor.
“Rodney?” John said after a minute of warm, welcoming silence. “Did you hear what I said?”
Rodney reached out and slowly, reverently, ran a hand up John’s side, over the coiled muscles of his back, until he had a firm grip on his shoulder. Then he pushed him back against the wall, hard, the movement shocking a gasp out of John and a pair of hopeful, helpless little laughs out of them both. “Oh yeah,” Rodney said. “I heard you.”
The moved together at the same time, yet what should have been a nasty collision of noses and teeth somehow managed to fall into place: mouths joining; hot, desperate kisses. John’s shirt rucked up in Rodney’s grasp. Convenient: he slipped a hand under it, up over John’s flat stomach, his ribs, then down again, sweeping over skin. He worked his fingers beneath the waistband of John’s boxers, grinning into John’s mouth as John gasped and bucked against him. John fumbled at Rodney’s belt, moving his mouth down and sucking on Rodney’s collarbone through the fabric of his shirt. He switched them with a sudden twist, sending Rodney back against the wall, and then Rodney did it again, sending them both into John’s bureau and ending the life of an innocent lamp. They laughed and Rodney grabbed fistfuls of John’s hair (which, though stupid, was certainly proving to have its uses); and somehow they made it to the bed; and John got Rodney’s shirt off; and John slowly lowered his head and took Rodney’s nipple into his mouth.
And during all this, they said—
“This is crazy.”
“It was,” smiling, “your idea.”
“That’s right, I’m crazy and brilliant.”
“Yes, and—hey, I liked that lamp!”
“Not as much as you’re going to—oh.”
“Let me show you what else I learned about lips.”
—their voices rising and falling, weaving in and out, building toward the inevitable climax, the long-awaited resolution.
“Wait,” said Rodney.
John paused, his mouth tantalizingly close to Rodney’s cock. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“No, I just—you understood everything, right? Everything I said?”
John licked his lips. “I thought I understood about a certain something you wanted me to do with my mouth. I thought I understood that I was going to suck you until you came, and then I was going to flip you over and fuck you into the mattress. I thought I understood that this would be taking place, oh, sometime today.”
“Yes, yes, that all sounds great,” Rodney said impatiently. “What about after that?”
“Um. I guess we could cuddle?”
For someone about two seconds and a couple of centimeters away from getting a blowjob, Rodney could look remarkably irate. “What about what I said after that?”
“After that I kind of needed a moment to...collect myself,” John said. Ever proactive, he grasped Rodney’s cock by its base and began to stroke, his other hand moving down, spreading Rodney’s legs. He bent his neck, his lips pausing just above the head of Rodney’s cock. “Why, did you say something else? Was it—” He extended his tongue. “—Important?”
Rodney watched John smile up at him as he swallowed his cock. “No,” he breathed. “I’ll tell you later.”
John’s mouth moved on him, dulcet, rhythmic. After a moment, Rodney reached down and stroked his fingers through John’s hair. Somehow he found his voice.
“I’ll tell you soon.”