stargateficrec | Last Man Reshuffle by pir8fancier (explicit)

Show: Stargate Atlantis

Rec Category: Episode Related
Pairing: McShep
Characters: John, Rodney
Categories: AU, slash
Warnings: Emotional h/c times a billion
Author on LJ:

pir8fancier
Link: Last Man Reshuffle

Why this must be read: This is an alternate version of The Last Man, one of the shippiest eps of SGA after The Shrine. In it John wakes up in bed with Rodney – who he’d thought was dead, and who he’d never had a romantic relationship with. The house he finds himself in is full of twenty years of history he never experienced. Rodney twigs pretty quickly to the fact that John isn’t his John.

There’s a lot of heartache for both of them, as they struggle to figure out what’s going on and what needs to be done to set things right. Even more, this is John coming to terms with the kind of life he could have for himself, and if he wants it bad enough to make a tough decision.

John spent the next hour and forty-seven minutes with a Beretta aimed at his heart, while Rodney grilled him. "Where did you get that scar?"

"Bugs are us, Rodney. Will you put down the goddamn gun?"

John tried to rein it in, tried to keep it together and light and funny and easy, but around the one hour and fifty-one minute mark he lost it. The old John Sheppard would have teased and poked at Rodney enough that eventually Rodney would have thrown up his hands in defeat and laid the gun on the table. This John Sheppard wasn't wired that way anymore, and with an internal Fuck it, he up-ended the table, managing to crack Rodney square on the jaw. The Beretta went flying as Rodney's chair fell backwards. Despite the bum shoulder, John managed to get to the Beretta before Rodney.

He looked up. Rodney was sitting up, supporting himself on his hands, glassy-eyed with fear. John swallowed back a mouthful of bile.

"It's me, Rodney. Swear on a stack of USAF regs."

Rodney didn't move.

"Swear, buddy. I swear. Remember how the sun would rise over the ice fields at McMurdo and it was like Earth being born anew every fucking day and how I loved that one puddlejumper and the moons over..."

And John found himself on his knees crawling across the floor, mumbling, "It's me. Swear, it's me. Goddamn you. You. You." Because it was Rodney and he was alive and the last twenty years hadn't happened. He grabbed Rodney with his good arm and hauled him close, trying not to wince as one hundred and eighty pounds of McKay slammed into him.

John wasn't sure how long he held Rodney against him. Long enough to sob out that Ronon had been crushed to death by debris from the explosion and how Rodney had ignored Sam's order and insisted on finding them. And how Michael had caught them all and killed them one by one, leaving John for last, making sure, with a sort of sadism that surprised even John, that he be a witness to their deaths. And how Caldwell had beamed him out at the last minute and then destroyed the Cruiser. Killing Teyla. The unborn baby. And how fucking unfair it was that they'd all died and left him. Alone.