Until Love Can Find Me by isagel (NC-17)
Dec. 11th, 2010 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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stargateficrecShow: SGA
Rec Category: Sheppard/McKay
Characters:: Rodney McKay, John Sheppard
Pairing: Sheppard/McKay
Het/Slash/Gen: Slash
Warnings: Highlight:
Author on LJ:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
isagel
Author's Website: Drops of Moonlight
Link: Until Love Can Find Me
Why This Must Be Read:
This Vegas tag follows Sheppard to New Orleans where he slowly fits himself back into the world. I loved the idea of him leaving messages for McKay detailing his cases and not expecting a response, making it easier for him to talk. Sheppard's world is gritty and sharp-edged, like one of the pulp novels McKay references when they meet again, but John finds he's more alive after his brush with death than he's been for years.
Excerpt:
Being a cop in New Orleans proves much the same as being a cop in Las Vegas. There are fewer casinos and more colonial architecture, less desert and more fragrant marshland. The air is heavy with humidity instead of sandpaper dry, and the southern wind brings ocean salt, not clouds of dust. But the job is no different, the victims and the criminals nothing he isn’t familiar with. A rent boy stabbed in an alley off Bourbon Street is no more dead than a stripper shot behind the Bellagio, has no less claim to justice. It’s still up to John to chase it down.
He spends his first few weeks shadowing a guy named Frank, an old-school detective with hints of a Cajun accent and three months left to retirement. He gets introduced. To the territories of street gangs, the names and haunts of drug lords never convicted, to informants and district attorneys and the bars you’d better not enter without a hand on your gun. He learns. When Frank asks him why he left Vegas, he says the desert air was hell on his complexion. He keeps his tone light, but his eyes go narrow. Frank studies him for a moment, then shrugs and lets the subject drop. He doesn’t bring it up again.
His first solo case is a robbery homicide in the Florida Projects, an old woman in a pool of blood on her kitchen floor. Her husband is kneeling beside her, not crying, but holding her hand. The deep red-black of the blood has seeped into the khaki fabric of his pants, dyed his clothes the color of her death. There are nineteen dollars missing from a tin in the cupboard above the sink. When John talks to the neighbors, everybody mentions the no-good kid in the ground floor apartment, his gang banger friends, how he buys drugs from the crazy Cuban over by Congress Street, how he’s always desperate for money. John stakes out a local pawn shop, catches the kid trying to hawk the old lady’s jewelry. It isn’t complicated or exciting, it’s just ordinary and sad. The punk doesn’t even try to pretend he didn’t do it.
When John brings him in, Frank claps him on the shoulder, tells him “Well done.” John forces a thin, crooked smile, but it’s only on his face.
It’s later, when he packs the evidence away to be filed, that he feels something.
There is a plastic bag with the victim’s jewelry - a cheap wrist watch, a pearl pendant on a thin gold chain, and a wedding band. Looking at it, he can see the husband sitting over the woman’s body, her hand in both of his. His thumb stroking the paler strip of skin where the ring should have been.
He unzips the bag and fishes the ring out. The gold is worn paper thin with age, its gleam dulled by a grey coat of fingerprint powder. He wipes it clean with the tail of his shirt and slips it in his pocket. The other evidence goes in the cardboard box where it belongs, before he leaves his office.
Outside, afternoon is seeping into night, rush hour traffic winding down. It’s a quick drive to the projects.
“Detective,” the husband says, opening his door. “What can I do for you? I thought you caught the boy who did this?” His eyes look red now, as if the crying has been there and gone; over his shoulder, John can see the kitchen floor still wet where the blood’s been washed away.
“Yeah,” John says. “Yeah, we did. He gave a full confession. He’s going away for a long time for what he did to your wife.” He feels suddenly foolish, inappropriate in his wrinkled shirt and uncombed hair. He worries his lip with his teeth, reaches into his pocket for the ring. “I just thought you might like this back as soon as possible.”
The old man takes it from him, the touch of his fingers on the metal delicate, reverent.
“She never took it off,” he says. “Forty-nine years we were married, and she never once took it off since the day I put it on. When I saw her lying there like that…” He looks up, looks John in the eye. There’s something in his gaze that makes John’s chest tight. “Thank you, detective,” he says. “Thank you for doing this.”
John nods, looks away.
“Yeah,” he says. “Look, I should get going. Someone will contact you about…things.”
He puts his sunglasses on as soon as he starts down the stairs.
On his way home, he buys a bottle of scotch, grabs a glass out of his kitchen cabinet without bothering to turn on the lights.
There is an actual bed in his bedroom by now, but not much else. He convinced Mikey to let him leave Vegas without sending someone to break his legs through a promise to make good on his debts, and it’s unlikely Mikey expects him to come through, but either way, regular payments look like a better investment in his continued well-being than furniture. So he settles on the mattress, because it’s the only place to settle, stretching his legs out on the rumpled sheets as he unscrews the cap on the bottle. As he pours, the scotch glimmers amber for a second, clear in the flickering light from outside. He tips his glass to Mr. Cash on the wall and drains it in one go, then pours himself another.
He’s not drunk after the third drink, but maybe it is the scotch that makes him pull his phone out, makes him pick his wallet from the nightstand and dig out McKay’s card. Or maybe it has nothing to do with the scotch at all.
“Hey,” he says to the recording of McKay’s effortless arrogance. “This is John Sheppard.” He pauses, tries to think what it actually is he wants to say. “I closed my first case here today. There was a moment there when the job seemed…worth it. Worth doing. It kinda caught me off guard.”
He pauses again, but that’s really it, so he pushes the end call button.
When he pours his next drink, he raises the glass to McKay, wherever he may be.
...
Rec Category: Sheppard/McKay
Characters:: Rodney McKay, John Sheppard
Pairing: Sheppard/McKay
Het/Slash/Gen: Slash
Warnings: Highlight:
Author on LJ:
isagelAuthor's Website: Drops of Moonlight
Link: Until Love Can Find Me
Why This Must Be Read:
This Vegas tag follows Sheppard to New Orleans where he slowly fits himself back into the world. I loved the idea of him leaving messages for McKay detailing his cases and not expecting a response, making it easier for him to talk. Sheppard's world is gritty and sharp-edged, like one of the pulp novels McKay references when they meet again, but John finds he's more alive after his brush with death than he's been for years.
Excerpt:
Being a cop in New Orleans proves much the same as being a cop in Las Vegas. There are fewer casinos and more colonial architecture, less desert and more fragrant marshland. The air is heavy with humidity instead of sandpaper dry, and the southern wind brings ocean salt, not clouds of dust. But the job is no different, the victims and the criminals nothing he isn’t familiar with. A rent boy stabbed in an alley off Bourbon Street is no more dead than a stripper shot behind the Bellagio, has no less claim to justice. It’s still up to John to chase it down.
He spends his first few weeks shadowing a guy named Frank, an old-school detective with hints of a Cajun accent and three months left to retirement. He gets introduced. To the territories of street gangs, the names and haunts of drug lords never convicted, to informants and district attorneys and the bars you’d better not enter without a hand on your gun. He learns. When Frank asks him why he left Vegas, he says the desert air was hell on his complexion. He keeps his tone light, but his eyes go narrow. Frank studies him for a moment, then shrugs and lets the subject drop. He doesn’t bring it up again.
His first solo case is a robbery homicide in the Florida Projects, an old woman in a pool of blood on her kitchen floor. Her husband is kneeling beside her, not crying, but holding her hand. The deep red-black of the blood has seeped into the khaki fabric of his pants, dyed his clothes the color of her death. There are nineteen dollars missing from a tin in the cupboard above the sink. When John talks to the neighbors, everybody mentions the no-good kid in the ground floor apartment, his gang banger friends, how he buys drugs from the crazy Cuban over by Congress Street, how he’s always desperate for money. John stakes out a local pawn shop, catches the kid trying to hawk the old lady’s jewelry. It isn’t complicated or exciting, it’s just ordinary and sad. The punk doesn’t even try to pretend he didn’t do it.
When John brings him in, Frank claps him on the shoulder, tells him “Well done.” John forces a thin, crooked smile, but it’s only on his face.
It’s later, when he packs the evidence away to be filed, that he feels something.
There is a plastic bag with the victim’s jewelry - a cheap wrist watch, a pearl pendant on a thin gold chain, and a wedding band. Looking at it, he can see the husband sitting over the woman’s body, her hand in both of his. His thumb stroking the paler strip of skin where the ring should have been.
He unzips the bag and fishes the ring out. The gold is worn paper thin with age, its gleam dulled by a grey coat of fingerprint powder. He wipes it clean with the tail of his shirt and slips it in his pocket. The other evidence goes in the cardboard box where it belongs, before he leaves his office.
Outside, afternoon is seeping into night, rush hour traffic winding down. It’s a quick drive to the projects.
“Detective,” the husband says, opening his door. “What can I do for you? I thought you caught the boy who did this?” His eyes look red now, as if the crying has been there and gone; over his shoulder, John can see the kitchen floor still wet where the blood’s been washed away.
“Yeah,” John says. “Yeah, we did. He gave a full confession. He’s going away for a long time for what he did to your wife.” He feels suddenly foolish, inappropriate in his wrinkled shirt and uncombed hair. He worries his lip with his teeth, reaches into his pocket for the ring. “I just thought you might like this back as soon as possible.”
The old man takes it from him, the touch of his fingers on the metal delicate, reverent.
“She never took it off,” he says. “Forty-nine years we were married, and she never once took it off since the day I put it on. When I saw her lying there like that…” He looks up, looks John in the eye. There’s something in his gaze that makes John’s chest tight. “Thank you, detective,” he says. “Thank you for doing this.”
John nods, looks away.
“Yeah,” he says. “Look, I should get going. Someone will contact you about…things.”
He puts his sunglasses on as soon as he starts down the stairs.
On his way home, he buys a bottle of scotch, grabs a glass out of his kitchen cabinet without bothering to turn on the lights.
There is an actual bed in his bedroom by now, but not much else. He convinced Mikey to let him leave Vegas without sending someone to break his legs through a promise to make good on his debts, and it’s unlikely Mikey expects him to come through, but either way, regular payments look like a better investment in his continued well-being than furniture. So he settles on the mattress, because it’s the only place to settle, stretching his legs out on the rumpled sheets as he unscrews the cap on the bottle. As he pours, the scotch glimmers amber for a second, clear in the flickering light from outside. He tips his glass to Mr. Cash on the wall and drains it in one go, then pours himself another.
He’s not drunk after the third drink, but maybe it is the scotch that makes him pull his phone out, makes him pick his wallet from the nightstand and dig out McKay’s card. Or maybe it has nothing to do with the scotch at all.
“Hey,” he says to the recording of McKay’s effortless arrogance. “This is John Sheppard.” He pauses, tries to think what it actually is he wants to say. “I closed my first case here today. There was a moment there when the job seemed…worth it. Worth doing. It kinda caught me off guard.”
He pauses again, but that’s really it, so he pushes the end call button.
When he pours his next drink, he raises the glass to McKay, wherever he may be.
...
