stargateficrec | The Other Half of the Equation by lamardeuse (NC17) (Reply)

Show: SGA
Rec Category: John/Rodney
Characters: Sheppard, McKay
Pairing: John/Rodney
Het/Slash/Gen: slash
Warning: spoilers for various Season 1 episodes
Author on LJ: lamardeuse
Author's Website: when the world is puddle wonderful
Link: The Other Half of the Equation

Why this must be read:

A powerful and endearing look at how war, and a war-setting, can change a man and a relationship. We get to see both John and Rodney in their moments of doubt and pain that conflict can bring. Using situations like having to kill a man to save a friend or not being able to save everyone, lamardeuse brings these two guys to sharp life in their rocky journey. The pain just gives the McShep get-together all that much more power and emotion. I swear you'll feel this one in your hearts and in your tearing eyes.

Story Summary: A few months ago, he’d never have considered that "death without honour" would ever be on a par with "death from soul-sucking alien."

To be fair, recent events tended to skew his perspective at first. The truth was that he was spending more of his life terrified rather than less, but this was so only because the frequency of terror-inducing stimuli had increased dramatically since his entry into the Pegasus galaxy. Not only the quantity: the quality of said terror had also been heightened. Where before his greatest fear had been whether he’d jab the Epipen into his leg fast enough after mistakenly ingesting a sliver of orange rind, now there were about a dozen nightmares competing for the top spot, each of them spectacularly horrific in their own way.

One of them was the fear that he’d die a coward.