Rating: PG-13 for adult language
Category/Characters: Gen; mostly Sheppard & McKay
Spoilers: for a couple of episodes up through (and including) season 2 "Grace Under Pressure"
Summary: John sings; Rodney embraces vertigo; and nobody figures out why the Ancients would build a Stargate on top of a mountain. Written for the 'Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll' challenge at the sga_flashfic community. Contains drugs, a little rock & roll, a lot of rolling rocks, but, alas, no sex.
Revised 6 May 06
Stick Around
by Mahoney
*
Rodney thought of the old slapstick routine where one guy slides down and stops teetering at the edge until the next guy skids into him and sends him over. Human dominoes. Funny, except when the edge is the edge of a cliff and the ground is a really, really long way down.
Rodney lay very still, his hands clutching spasmodically at the mountainside. He tried not to breathe, because he was fairly certain that even something so slight as the expansion of his lungs would send him sliding again. Rocks stung his palms, and dug into the side of his face. The rest of him was cold and numb with fear. At this point, the only thing he really had going for him was that he was on the lee side of the mountain, safe from the winds that blew hard and cold at this elevation.
He could hear stones and dirt, dislodged by their fall, skittering all around him; what he didn’t hear, what he expected to hear, was screaming that went on and on until it stopped with – with – with whatever the sound the human body made when it exploded on impact. But then it occurred to him that John Sheppard wouldn’t scream about something like that. He was absolutely the kind of man who would forget that stoicism was pointless when the ground was rushing up at you at 200 kilometers per hour.
“Sheppard?” he said. It came out a whisper. Saying it didn’t dislodge him, though, so he slowly drew in a deep breath and said louder, “Sheppard?”
“Yeah – yeah, I’m here.”
Rodney froze for half a moment, feeling dizzy. Not possible. Not. Possible. “Are you kidding me? You actually survived going over the side of a mountain? I can't believe you.”
“Gee, thanks McKay. If you give me a minute, I could maybe plummet to my death instead.”
“I just mean, you survive circumstances on a regular basis that would generally kill ninety-eight percent of the rest of humanity – hang on. Were you being serious when you said that thing about plummeting to your death?”
There were scrabbling sounds from over the edge of the cliff; Rodney couldn’t tell how far down Sheppard was, but the sound of his voice and his movements implied a substantial distance.
“Well,” John grunted, his voice briefly muffled as well as distant. “Like I said. Give me a minute.”
“Give you a – okay, sure, I'll just lie here and wait for you to maybe fall. Because writhing in the anticipation of possibly being left alone on the steeply angled side of a mountain with only the echo of your dying screams to keep me company sounds like a really fun way to spend the next several minutes.”
“Rodney, if you –“ He broke off with an ‘oof,’ which was followed by a ripping sound. “ – don’t have a rope to throw to me? Then just – shut the fuck up.”
“No. I can’t shut up. Seriously, how long have you known me?” Rodney took the risk of raising his head slightly. Encouraged by the lack of sliding, he raised it further and looked up the mountain for something more solid to hold onto than the shifting, slate-like rock beneath his body. “When I’m freaking out, I talk. When I’m angry, I talk. I’m told I talk in my sleep. I pretty much just talk, all the time, and this is absolutely not going to be the day I change my modus operandi.”
Around him he saw rocks, rocks, more rocks – good god, was there anything on this stupid mountain besides rocks? “Besides, you’re the one with the rope. How stupid is that, that you have rope and I don’t? And don’t try to blame that on me – just because I refused to add an enormous coil of rope to my already copious supply of mountain survival gear does not mean this is my fault. You’re the one in charge, you’re the expert, you should have made me bring rope! Not –" he trailed off. "Not that I could do anything with it at the moment.”
Sheppard didn’t answer, just continued doing things that involved a great deal of grunting, thumping, and dislodging of stones. It drove Rodney crazy; any second he expected to hear some sound that would be followed by silence and would mean gone. “What are you doing down there, anyway?”
“Hang on. There’s a – little bit of a ledge –“
A ledge. Thank god for ledges, always there when you need them. Or, always there when the hero in the movie needs them, and since Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard was apparently the hero of this action flick - “A ledge. And let me guess, you survived the fall due to a handy sort of vine growing out of the side of the mountain?”
“No.” Sheppard still sounded distant, and a little weary, but he wasn’t exerting himself any more, and the scrabbling sounds had stopped. Rodney guessed he had made it to his ledge. Rodney let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and let his forehead thump back onto the ground.
“No,” John said. “Actually it’s more of a…shrubby thing. With a couple poofy little, I guess, flowers on it.”
Not a vine. A shrubby thing, growing out of the side of what was probably an otherwise sheer, empty rock face. “Of course. Next thing you’ll tell me there’s some hot alien princess clinging to the mountain a few feet away, too.”
“No hot alien princesses, unfor…oh, shit.”
Rodney flinched all over at the sound and slid a very long millimeter downward. “What the hell was that?”
John sneezed again, and again. Then he stopped, and his voice, thin and shaky, drifted up to Rodney. “Holy fuck.”
“Sheppard?”
“It’s these flowers.” Sheppard sniffled loudly. “I’ve got pollen all over me. Jesus, I’m going to sneeze myself off this freaking ledge.” He sneezed again, then after a gasping pause sneezed several more times.
“Can you, um, pull your shirt up over your face or something?” Pollen? When was the hero ever foiled by pollen?
“No, not enough hands. But, I think –“ he sniffled again, and cleared his throat. “Yeah, I think I’m okay now. My nose and my eyes were burning up for a minute there, though.
“Hey, McKay? Speaking of no hands, I’m not going to be able to contact Teyla and Ronon. Any chance you could do that?”
Rodney’s stomach flip-flopped at the very thought of unlocking his fingers from their death grip on the crumbly incline. “That would be a no. Both of my hands are busy hanging onto the side of the mountain at the moment.”
“Ah. Okay. Hm.”
“But they’ll come looking for us in a little while, right? We’ll miss checking in, and they’ll come looking.”
“Yeah. I suppose so.”
Rodney considered the tone of Sheppard’s voice, the circumstances, and, beating the metaphor to death one last time, considered that the hero’s troubles were never really over once he got settled on the ledge. He asked, “So, how big is that ledge, anyway?”
“Oh…you know. Big enough.”
“For what? A jumper? A camel? A can of Coke?”
“I’d say somewhere between the camel and the Coke. Leaning heavily toward the Coke.”
“How much Coke? A truckload? A case?” Rodney wondered if he had a concussion. Or maybe it just easier thinking in metaphors at the moment. Or were they similes? He’d never really bothered to memorize the intricacies of literary terminology.
“Uh, maybe a six pack. Set on its side.”
Oh. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
Rodney nearly asked how the hell he was managing to hang on, but he really didn’t want to know. It’d be harder to use the force of his mind to hold Sheppard to the side of the mountain if his mind kept pointing to mental images of him hanging via itty-bitty finger holds in the rock face and saying That’s just not possible!
“Well,” he said. “Teyla and Ronon, they’ll find us. Soon. I’m sure they will. I mean, it’s you and me. They probably don’t even wait for us to miss a check in before launching a rescue mission any more.”
He heard John chuckle. “Point.”
*
Of course Rodney knew things could get worse. They were both clinging to the side of a mountain, for god’s sake, frozen into place because any move would result in a long drop and a sudden stop. But by ‘worse’ he was thinking something along the lines of muscle cramps, creeping numbness of the extremeties, or the abrupt crumbling of the mountain beneath them (again). He hadn’t actually put hallucinations on the list.
“Hey,” John said suddenly. “Up above us, did you see that?”
“I’m flat on my face. So no. What did you see?”
“It’s right above us. I think it is, anyway. I thought it was a cloud, but it moved.”
Giant bird. Giant man-eating bird. Wraith. No: poisonous gas creature! “What? What is it?”
“It – well, it looks like…I guess it’s just a cloud. But it looks kind of swirly. And…like…fish.”
Silence.
“Fish,” Rodney said.
“A bunch of fish. Actually.”
“Fish.” Rodney resisted the urge to gnaw on the chunk of rock jutting out in front of his nose. “We’re both one stray hiccup from death and you’re playing ‘pictures in the clouds?’ Have you completely lost your mind?”
“No, McKay, I’m serious.” His voice was soft, hushed with amazement. “Can’t you turn your head and look? I swear, it’s like, they’re all these silvery blue fishes just sort of rushing through the – oh. Uh, never mind. They’re gone.”
“O…kay. Are you feeling all right, Colonel?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I feel fine.” He sounded like he felt fine. Unusually fine. “It was just really vivid. I mean…”
Rodney could have sworn he mumbled something about the wind looking like the sea. Something pinged in Rodney’s brain. Before he could zero in on it, though, John shouted excitedly.
“Hey! Hey, you know, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but I could just climb back up.”
“What? How?”
“Well, these shrubby things. I mean, they’re all over down here.”
Rodney felt a surge of hope.
“Wow, and new ones are popping out everywhere. There, there’s one close now, I bet I can reach it.”
“NO!” Rodney felt bits of rock slide under his knees as he tensed. “No! Colonel, do NOT reach for anything. Okay? Just, stop whatever you’re doing and just, just hold still.”
“Rodney.” John actually scoffed. “Calm down. I can do this.”
“No, you can’t! Have you stopped moving? Colonel? JOHN!”
“YES, Jesus, I’m not moving! What’s wrong with you? I can do this.”
Rodney desperately wanted to swing around and peer over the edge, make sure Sheppard really really wasn’t about to attempt to climb phantom shrubbery. “Please, just don’t do anything yet. Okay? Because, I think – look, doesn’t it seem strange that bushes are spontaneously erupting from the side of the mountain? I mean, you were seeing fish in the sky a minute ago. You’re obviously hallucinating.”
A pause, and a sigh. “Rodney, why do you always assume the worst?”
“Because the worst is what always happens! Are you seeing anything else? Flashes of light or color? Do you feel tingly, or floaty, or, or, numb, or anything like that?” He lifted his head to look around again. This time he embraced – or rather, threw himself desperately at – vertigo and looked down toward the cliff edge. Mistake. Large, hulking mistake. The edge was right there.
“Do – do – do –“ he swallowed, closing his eyes, and thought cliff, what cliff, I’m perfectly safe, I’m laying on a nice, solid slab of CRUMBLING MOUNTAIN OH MY GOD. “Do you feel a-a-any euphoria?” he squeaked.
“Euphoria?” Sheppard said thoughtfully. “Fireflies.”
Rodney was sweating, and his hands were definitely beginning to cramp. And it was quite possible the mountain was getting steeper by increments. “What? What? Fireflies?”
“They’re just fireflies. The flashes of light. You know, in the shrub thingies. Never mind. Why do you think I’m hallucinating?”
Rodney choked. It should have been a laugh, but it fell victim to the collision of abject fear and giddy hysteria in his throat and transformed. It sounded terrible on so many levels; Rodney clamped his jaw shut and forced himself not to talk for a moment.
He opened his eyes then, and stared. He hadn’t noticed before, what with being distracted by the complete lack of earth mere inches from his right leg, but there was something that looked suspiciously like a tree stump nearby. It was maybe only a foot, maybe less, from the edge, but it looked solid. Pretty much. And he thought he could reach it easily. Probably.
“Colonel Sheppard?”
“Yep?”
“How close are you to the top of the cliff?”
“The top?” A pause. “Pretty close.”
“Seriously? Because it’s entirely possible that you just think you’re close because you’re under the influence of narcotic optimism.”
“No, I’m real close. You want me to climb up? Hey, there are all these little shrubby things around here, I could use them to –”
“No no no, don’t climb up. I’m – I’m going to try to, well, not come down there, but maybe get closer. Can you hang on for a minute?”
“Sure.” John didn’t just sound amiable, he sounded relaxed. Blissed out.
Hallucinations, euphoria, disordered thinking. It was the pollen, of course. Christ, leave it to John Sheppard to discover alien PCP.
Rodney didn’t really think Sheppard was close to the top – he sounded too far away – but he could be, he might be, and if he was, and if all Rodney had to do was reach down and pull him up; which, Rodney? Pull somebody up from over a cliff via his own muscle power? There was a reason they kept Ronon around, and it wasn’t his sparkling wit.
“But,” Rodney told himself, attempting to flex his fingers in preparation for movement. They refused to flex. “Adrenaline has been known to afford people moments of unusual strength, and I know for a fact that if I end up hanging over the edge of a cliff with dead weight, or, okay, that's a bad phrase to use right now. But, adrenaline, I’ll have more adrenaline running through me than I could ask for, and it will be fine.
“Right. First things first. Get to that tree stump.” He lay very still. If he could, he’d have rolled his eyeballs inward to stare at himself impatiently. “Any time now, Rodney.”
*
“Any girl in the world could have easily known me better.”
Rodney couldn’t remember ever having heard Sheppard sing. No doubt this was why the sound of his voice managed to elbow past the roaring of Rodney’s blood in his ears as he curled, shaking, around the tree stump.
“She said, you’re strange, don’t change, and I let her.”
Think, Rodney, think. Think. Take stock. The tree stump: had not uprooted itself yet. Rodney’s legs: were no longer dangling terrifyingly over the edge in nothingness. Sheppard: was still singing, his voice minus any kind of Doppler effect, and thus he was still attached to the mountain.
“Okay,” Rodney gasped to himself. “Now, just, un- unbend – ohshit – no no, use the feet, arms stay put….” He gave each body part specific directions; some of them had to be cajoled into doing what he said, but eventually he got them working together and started to turn.
Now Sheppard was humming a repetitive refrain; probably the song’s instrumental bridge. The gentle steadiness of his voice surprised Rodney. Sheppard never struck him as the kind of guy who would be able to carry a tune, much less make it sound…pretty.
By the time Rodney managed to get his feet pointed up the mountain and his head pointed down, Sheppard was back to words.
“Stick around, while the clown who is sick…”
Releasing his grip on the tree stump the slightest bit gave him enough reach to peek over the edge of the cliff. The ground – the ground was very far away. His stomach began to slide up into his throat, and he forcibly peeled his eyes away from the distant ground and found Sheppard.
“…does the trick of disaster.”
John was, of course, nowhere near the top of the cliff. And the ledge really was that small.
In fact, it wasn’t really a ledge, just a sloping bit of mountain that jutted further out than the rest of the rock face. Sheppard crouched on it, all his weight on his heels and the front halves of his feet hanging off. His back pressed flat against the vertical surface, and he had a one-handed, white-knuckled grip on a scraggly plant growing out of the rock above his shoulder.
The plant consisted of a couple of long twigs decorated with a bit of greenery and two inordinately large red flowers. It did not merit the name ‘shrub,’ however; it was at best a glorified weed. There were actually more of them scattered across the side of the mountain than he’d expected, but not as many as John thought he saw.
Rodney tried to think of something to say.
“Um. So. What are you singing?” Why that question made it to the top of the list of Things to Say to a Dead Man, Rodney didn’t know, but it had to be better than ‘Oh my god, you’re screwed.’
Sheppard turned his head and tilted it back, looking up. Dark reddish brown specks freckled his face. His features, already uncommonly softened by the opiate effects of the pollen, softened somehow further when he saw Rodney.
“Hey, Rodney,” he said, smiling. Rodney had never seen a smile like that. On anyone. Passingly, he realized that one way or another, he’d probably never see it on Sheppard again, and the thought made his chest tighten painfully. “So what do you think?”
Rodney scowled. “What do I think? I think that on the scale of near-death experiences this one ranks as less horrific than being trapped in a puddlejumper sinking to the bottom of the ocean, but slightly more terrifying than being held hostage by a psycho in a floating city during a hurricane.”
John’s smile lessened, but if anything he looked happier. “Yeah.” He angled his head further back, and his entire body tipped, sliding a few centimeters against the rock.
“Whoa whoa whoa!” Rodney shouted. “Are you crazy?” Well, duh. “Just, just, don’t move!”
John raised an eyebrow and considered Rodney calmly. “You sound blue. Neil Young, he sounds…you know, yellows, oranges, a little bit of red. Like sunset. You’re all blue.”
“I – what?”
“Electric blue. Like a perfect sky. Or maybe like that guy’s eyes in “Dune”.”
“Right,” Rodney said. “I sound blue. Can you, just, hang on for a second? And don’t move?”
“I wonder what color Springsteen is?”
Rodney dragged himself back up and wrapped himself around the tree stump again as John launched into the refrain from “Born to Run.” Once he felt reasonably secure, he moved one hand quickly to tap the communicator.
“Teyla? Ronon? This is McKay. Please, please respond.”
The communicator crackled in his ear. “This is Teyla, Dr. McKay.”
“Oh, thank god. Where are you?”
“Near the Stargate. Our way down the east side of the mountain was cut off by a steep drop-off. We decided to go back to begin exploring the northern slope. Is something wrong?”
“Yes, something is wrong. Why would I be contacting you before the check in time if something was not very, very wrong? Colonel Sheppard and I found a steep drop-off, too, and if you don’t come find us right now and bring rope or, or cable, or bed sheets knotted together or something, the next time you see us we’ll be piles of shattered bones bleaching at the bottom of the chasm.”
Rodney gasped for breath; he realized how shrill he sounded, but he didn’t care. He just hoped neither Teyla nor Ronon would ask any inane questions like ‘what happened?’ or ‘why didn’t Colonel Sheppard contact us?’ or ‘alien PCP?” or anything else that indicated they were not running as fast as humanly possible in this direction, because if they did he was sure he would have to kill them.
“We’re on our way,” was all Ronon said.
Rodney slumped a little against the tree stump. Teyla and Ronon had rope. They both had rope, and they knew which direction Rodney and Sheppard had gone, and they would get here soon and rescue them. It would be better if one of them had the Ancient gene and could fly the jumper here, but Rodney was satisfied at the moment with ‘rope’ and ‘rescue soon.’
He leaned back down, hooking his leg awkwardly around the stump so that he could loosen his grip a little more and stretch further. As he hung his head over the edge again he noticed Sheppard had stopped singing. He still crouched flat against the mountain, his head still tilted back, but his eyes were half-closed.
“Colonel Sheppard?” Rodney said sharply. “Are you still with me?”
With some effort, Sheppard grimaced and opened his eyes a little. “Mmm, yeah. I was just thinking.”
His words slurred and his eyes looked glazed over. That was definitely not good. Sleepiness, lethargy: both counterproductive to remaining perched above a bottomless pit.
“What were you thinking about?”
“Hmm?”
“You said you were thinking. About what?”
Sheppard frowned, and widened his eyes, focusing for just a moment on Rodney. He smiled again, but this time it was tight and pained. “Hey, Rodney.”
“Hey…uh, John.” Rodney floundered. He had to keep Sheppard talking and awake, but how did one guide a conversation with somebody stoned out of his mind? He had only two decent frames of reference for this sort of thing. One of them involved an unsuccessful marijuana experience in college, but he’d been alone for that. And he hadn’t required any talking down off the Wraith enzyme until the point at which he’d been strapped to a bed going through withdrawal. As he recalled, Beckett’s bedside manner had sucked, so Rodney certainly wasn’t going to use him as a role model.
“Hey, Rodney?”
“Um. Yes?”
For a moment John didn’t say anything, just gazed at Rodney, smiling a crooked but still frighteningly open smile. Then he nodded, as if agreeing with something he hadn’t said, and – Rodney couldn’t figure out how he did it without, as previously mentioned, having said anything – he changed the subject.
“Does this feel like flying to you?”
“Flying?” Rodney croaked. Flying was the last thing he wanted to think about at the moment, thank you. “No. Absolutely not. And it doesn’t feel that way to you, either.”
“Well, yes it does.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Yes, it –“
“NO, it doesn’t. Trust me on this. No flying. None.”
John shrugged, slid further sideways, and sighed. Rodney could see a sheen of sweat on his face. Given the importance of John’s grip on the weed, Rodney fervently hoped he wasn’t a clammy-hands kind of guy.
“I flew the first time when I was eleven. I climbed onto the roof of the church down the street and jumped off.”
“That’s not flying,” Rodney said. “That’s more like a leap of stupidity. How many bones did you break, for god’s sake?” Then he winced. Along with flying, Rodney also didn’t want to think about broken bones. He thumped his head on the ground. “Ow.”
“It’s not the landing that matters, Rodney. It’s being in the air.” John said it like it was a secret, said it with longing.
Rodney shivered. “I don’t know,” he said into the dirt, thinking about how he really, really needed to get them off the subject of flying. “I’ve always been more concerned with landings myself. You’d think someone like me, who was required to fly to all corners of the world in the performance of extraordinarily important work, would have gotten used to putting his life in the hands of insane strangers who actually think large metal boxes were meant to float in the air, but –”
John was looking at him. Rodney recognized the expression; he’d seen that expression the first time he’d seen John, sitting in the Ancient chair in Antarctica staring up at the holographic map of the Solar System he’d called up with his mind. The expression was one of fascinated uncertainty, roughed up around the edges with a sense of impending doom. Did I do that?
“I don’t mean you,” Rodney said. “I mean, I sort of do – it’s not personal. I just. You may have noticed I’m a bit of a control freak. Which, you know, is why I wanted to learn to fly the jumpers in the first place, but really, I do actually feel pretty safe with you doing the flying.” And he did, now that he thought about it. There had been a few inevitable crash landings, but thinking back, walking out of the jumper after John had managed to set them down in one piece accounted for quite possibly the only near-death experiences he hadn’t been surprised to get out of alive.
Huh.
But once again, cliff, long drop, flying. “Can we talk about something else now, please?”
Suddenly the communicator crackled in Rodney’s ear again. “Dr. McKay, this is Major Lorne. We’re in the jumper coming to get you. What’s your position?”
Rodney fought back hysteria. “Oh my god, what took you so long?" A jumper, yes, thank you, much much better than rope. "We’re on the west face of the mountain. Fly straight west from the gate and down the slope and you should see us. And please do not take your time. Colonel Sheppard is about two seconds away from falling off the side of this godforsaken piece of rock.”
“On our way.”
Rodney squeezed his eyes shut. He wasn't going to cry. It would be all right now. “Colonel,” he said. “Just hang on a few more minutes, okay? Lorne is coming to get us now.”
“Mmph.” John said, but it was the other sound that made Rodney look down.
John no longer crouch on the little ledge; his feet had slid off, and he was sitting on it. Barely. The only thing really keeping him from falling was his one-handed grip on the weed.
“But I am flying, Rodney,” he said. “How else am I staying up here?”
Rodney’s mouth was dry. This is not happening. John Sheppard was not going to die. Lorne would be there soon, in the jumper –
“You’re hanging onto the shrub thing, remember? Look up, Colonel. You see where you’re holding onto it?”
John looked at the shrub, at his hand. “That’s not my hand.”
“What? Yes it is.”
“It doesn’t feel like my hand.”
Rodney was lost. He was completely lost, and suddenly he was pretty sure he was going to cry. After the Wraith enzyme thing, he’d researched addictive drugs, both the legal as well as the illegal. He had a pretty good idea what was happening. He saw the list of physiological symptoms in his mind; standing out in bold type on that list were distinct changes in body awareness, loss of muscular coordination, anesthesia. He couldn’t do anything, the jumper wasn't going to get there in time, and all Rodney could do was watch, which was the only thing he didn’t want to do.
“It’s – it’s your hand,” he said. His voice had gone very thick. “It’s attached to your arm, your shoulder. And, the other one, the other arm, hand, that’s yours too. You can feel it, right?”
John made a soft sound, a humming sort of sound. His head listed to the side until it lay against the arm he couldn’t feel.
“Sheppard, Sheppard, you, your – you were talking about flying. Right? Do you know what flying is? For me, I mean? I think I know what it is. Flying is when you – I – when something you can’t see is holding you up, and it’s not free fall even though it probably should be, because.”
Rodney’s voice cracked. He swallowed and took off again. “When I was a kid I built a nuclear bomb, and it wasn’t making it go boom at the end that mattered. It’s like you said, it was everything in between, figuring it out, finding the pieces, putting it together, something so complex, so beyond me – making something I didn’t even completely understand, with my own hands.”
He fixed his eyes on John as he babbled, on the top of John's head and on the slouch of his body. On the hand that was no longer white around the knuckles, but that still held on.
“And, I know how wormholes work, in theory I mean, and I understand relativity, and, and so many other things that I can’t see, and I know I act like the hard science is what means everything to me, the accomplishments, the rewards. C-control freak, after all; but given the kind of science I chose to study – theories, and particles maybe doing vaguely inexplicable things on levels that I can’t see – that should maybe freak me out, right? Why didn’t I become an engineer or something, right?”
He didn't know if John could hear him, and he hardly knew what he was saying; he just said whatever came into his head. It didn't even matter that somewhere at the back of his mind he knew what he was saying was true, it just mattered that he kept talking, talking helped, talking made things happen.
“Because not really knowing what’s on the other side of the theory is part of what I love. That’s why I came here, the not knowing; just, leaping off the roof, like you did, into this place, with these people. You said it wasn’t landing that matters, and you were right to a point -”
Rodney saw barely any movement; one moment John slouched against the mountain, the next he was stretched out, swinging gently, his feet scraping the mountainside. As his hand slid toward the end of the weed one of the bright red flowers came suddenly loose and spun away. Rodney’s eyes blurred and he started talking as fast as he could.
“But I was right too because eventually it does matter, and I do know that now, because I came here and I made friends and that’s what flying is, right? Something holding you up that you don’t understand, and, and, god, I sound like a complete idiot – no!”
He never saw it coming; suddenly it was just there, swallowing up the outline of Rodney’s outstretched hand and dropping like a rock, faster than John fell. The back of the jumper was open; Rodney couldn’t see clearly through his watering eyes, but by the size of him, it looked like it was Ronon who caught Sheppard.
*
Rodney let Ronon pick him up by the back of the vest and drag him into the jumper. He felt like he had no bones left, only muscles dissolving, shudder by shudder, into liquid form.
“That was,” he said weakly as he collapsed into a seat, “Obscenely good timing.” He blinked rapidly, looking at no one and fully prepared to explain that there was a lot of dust on a mountainside, if anyone asked about his watering eyes. Of course no one did.
The jumper dimmed inside as the hatch closed, but then the lights brightened to compensate. Carson squatted on the floor next to Sheppard, whose eyes were open but unseeing. Spasms moved lazily through his body, not violent enough to be convulsions, but noticeable enough to be really creepy.
“It was pollen, from a flower,” Rodney said when Carson looked around at him. “It’s that stuff all over his face. I'm sure it's on his clothes, too.”
“Can you describe his symptoms?” Carson asked.
Rodney could, and did, a description illustrated with fish and blue, and backed by a soundtrack featuring Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. He left out the stuff about flying; they’d seen that part.
Rodney didn't really pay attention to Carson’s preliminary diagnosis (ingestion of an apparent natural hallucinogenic compound; Rodney had already worked that out, hello) until Carson mentioned Sheppard's dislocated shoulder. That was news to Rodney. It explained the one-handedness of the death grip, though.
He looked away from Sheppard, watching Ronon carefully step over John and lower himself into the co-pilot’s seat next to Major Lorne. Lorne glanced back at Sheppard once, his expression militarily blank. Still: there had been a point only moments before when all of the responsibility for Sheppard’s well-being had been taken away from Rodney and dropped into Lorne’s lap, and Rodney could see the weight of it still in Lorne’s eyes.
He closed his own eyes and sat and trembled. Cuts and bruises he hadn't realized he had began to sting and ache. His teeth chattered, and even though he wasn’t cold he still appreciated the blanket someone draped around him. Teyla sat down beside him then, her arm slim and light but reassuringly firm when she slipped it around his shoulder.
“I’m not the one who needs a hug,” he said, feeling strange because, had Teyla ever hugged him before? His hand spasmed when he said it, though, and Teyla took it and gave it a soft squeeze. Rodney thought about Sheppard falling away from him, out of his reach, and he squeezed back.
“We went back to Atlantis, to get Dr. Beckett and someone to pilot the jumper,” she said, unnecessarily. Teyla knew how to use her voice to soothe, and sometimes said quiet things simply for that purpose. “We believed –“
“You’d get to us quicker by flying,” Rodney finished for her. He couldn't manage a smile, but he squeezed her hand again. “You were right.”
Note: Lyrics from “Mr. Soul,” by Neil Young; and apologies to the writers of “Pirates of the Caribbean,” from whom I swiped half a phrase, and to the fanfic writer who years and years ago wrote something in some story about somebody's eyeballs turning in to stare at himself.