stargateficrec | With Intent by shaenie (NC-17)

Show: SGA
Rec Category: Sheppard/McKay
Characters:: Rodney McKay, John Sheppard
Pairing: Sheppard/McKay
Het/Slash/Gen: Slash
Warnings: None
Author on LJ:

shaenie
Author's Website:
Link: With Intent

Why This Must Be Read:

John didn't mean to 'lean' into Rodney but, once he did and Rodney noticed, the result was inevitable. Although he tries to resist seduction by cool toys (his own personal shield), it backfires and leaves him Rodney's oh-so-very-capable-and-irresistible hands. He pays Rodney back with a perfect practical joke. This is light and funny and sexy as they gradually end up leaning...together.

Excerpt:

They have nearly died together one hundred and sixteen times; they have each nearly died separately a combined total of forty-one times (John thirty-two, Rodney nine). Rodney seems to think that the difference in his totals means that it's John's fault when he nearly dies when John is present. John has a different theory (namely, that Rodney can't keep his damn mouth shut off-world, and rarely goes off-world without John there to drag into trouble with him), but that's not the point.

The point is, he's losing his mind or something.

The point is, John has been in the Air Force for almost the entirety of his adult life, and he's been deployed into hostile situations for almost half that. He's no stranger to the ways that you cope, and he's never worried much about the times that coping means frantic, hurried intimacy with someone he knows damned well he should leave alone. Things like that happen if you live under the constant threat of death or capture, and they happen mostly with whomever is on hand when you need it to happen. Guys you like too much are worse than guys you actively don't like, and the guy that you know likes you more than you like him is worse than both. It rarely turns out well, but there are times when it is as necessary as breathing, for you, or for the other guy, or sometimes both. There are times when there's nothing else you can do.

John doesn't think about it much of ever. It's never premeditated, and he refuses to brood about it once it's done.

People do stupid things all the time, even knowing they're stupid. They may think their reasons are justified and their circumstances are unique, but John knows better than that. Sometimes you have to do something, and your options are limited. He knows he isn't alone in occasionally stepping off the edge of the proverbial cliff with his eyes wide open, and he knows what it feels like to do that.

He hasn't actually done it since he came to Atlantis (if you didn't count that one incident with Teyla, but he thinks the fact that he was turning into a bug at the time negates the whole eyes wide open factor), but it's not something he could ever do without recognizing it for what it was, and this isn't it.

This is something else, something he has no frame of reference for at all, and the almost out-of-control feeling that gives him is what stops him mid-lean, blinking with something that feels like equal parts astonishment and disappointment.

He thinks ... the hell? because they aren't in imminent danger, and haven't been for the last couple of weeks. The last time they ran into anything even remotely resembling trouble was the mission where they escorted Princess Snooty-Pants and got ambushed by the Genii, and aside from John's ego (Rodney had predictably taken to calling him Queen Sheppard pretty much the second they got back to Atlantis), they hadn't even ended up with much in the way of bruises from that one. And it had been almost a month ago. Nothing had lately exploded, mutated, escaped the Ancient's really questionable containment measures, or been activated unintentionally with near-deadly results.

Things have been quiet, and there's absolutely no reason for John to randomly lean-with-intent at Rodney.

Or had been quiet, anyway; he gets the idea from the look on Rodney's face - startled, but morphing into comprehension even as John watches - that things are about to get noisy and awkward in a big way. He wishes briefly and intensely that Rodney had been his usual oblivious self, just this once, but he isn't actually surprised. He had been looking right at John, they'd been bullshitting pointlessly for nearly half an hour, and really, it isn't like that lean could have really looked like anything other than what it was.

“I think I'll go to bed,” John says, striving for casual and missing it by a country mile.

Rodney gives him a long, appraising look, and surprises the hell out of John. “Okay,” is all he says, mouth quirked into a crooked almost-smile.

John beats feet out of the lab, leaving Rodney with his laptop and the half cup of coffee John had brought him (after drinking half of it on the way to the lab).

Now that he thinks about it, Rodney hadn't even complained about it.

...