stargateficrec | Damned If You Do, and Damned If You Don’t by pir8fancier (R)

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

pir8fancier
Author's Website: pir8fancier's ship
Link: Damned If You Do, and Damned If You Don’t

Why This Must Be Read:

Rodney's paranoia pays off when he and John end up on the lam in this post-Enemy At The Gate action/adventure. I particularly enjoy the details of Rodney's planning for Operation Free Sheppard, the interesting OC who helps them, and how everything comes together when they go up against the American military complex on Earth in order to save the Pegasus galaxy from destruction.

Excerpt:

Yes, there were signs, and if he hadn't been thinking with his dick he would have twigged to them immediately. When Jennifer first proposed using their week of leave to take a real vacation and head down the coast, Rodney was immediately torn. As lovely as it would be to spend a week with Jennifer, he'd already promised John they'd go shopping for surf boards. John wanted to hit the waves down in Santa Cruz with his time off, and would Rodney like to help him vet the boards; see which ones were the best, you know, physics wise? Rodney was simultaneously horrified, furious, and chuffed.

The horrified part: Rodney didn't trust the ocean, five years living on one notwithstanding. Things swam in the ocean. Things with tentacles and stingers and teeth. Rodney tried to keep his shark phobia well hidden because it wasn't like people didn't have enough material. Should they live so long, John could milk the citrus allergy alone into the twenty-fifth century. And lots of people were afraid of sharks, plenty of brave people! Plus, why would anyone in their right mind voluntarily wear something that screamed “I am a seal," and then swim in their hunting grounds. Shark Buffet! All You Can Eat! Of course this was the same man who hitched a ride on a nuclear weapon, so there you are.

The furious part: that John would—already having turned Baysian statistics on its head; Rodney had done the math—keep playing craps on the felt of death. Because even though Rodney knew the physics behind surfing, and John was damn near perfect in terms of height to friction to weight ratio and that swim like, well, a seal thing he did, how could he keep throwing those dice? See sharks, tentacles, stingers, and teeth.

Finally, the chuffed part: because John trusted him to pick out the most perfect board.

"Well, I promised Sheppard I'd do a Kervorkian and assist him in his suicide."

"Suicide?" Jennifer fairly choked on that, which was something of a tell, because normally her forehead got this cute June-Cleaver-Boys-Will-Be-Boys crunch to it whenever Rodney brought up John's name.

"The impaired call it surfing. I promised to go down to Santa Cruz with him during with our time off. Gosh, I'm sorry. Should I have asked you first?"

“Don’t be silly, Rodney,” she replied while studying the datapad in her hand. Rodney once again thought, “Thank you, whatever deity you are,” because Jennifer rarely let Rodney’s innate thoughtlessness or his complete inability to navigate the landmines of social and dating niceties bother her. “Besides, it’s not an issue. Major Lorne told me that the Colonel had family business to attend to and has already left for the east coast.”

If Rodney hadn’t been so entranced by the idea of having sex without a radio in his ear, his radar would have immediately gone into red alert: John hadn’t contacted him about this change in plans, which even assuming the guy thing, would have been a gross breach of, well, not etiquette, but certainly du-de-quette, not to mention John plus family equals a definite non-convergence. But as Rodney’s balls had temporarily taken over his brain functions, he fired off a four-sentence email that said, “Asshole. Jennifer says you’ve gone back east. Want to do the surf board thing when you get back? Not that I should enable moronic behavior, but the one thing I’ve learned over the past five years is that you and completely insane behavior go hand in hand and why fight the eternally stupid?” He hit “Send” and then asked Jennifer about the rental car and was she sure it had air bags.

...