(no subject)

[erda]

Title: Perfect Strains May Float
Author: keefaq
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Disclaimer: Just a tool of the patriarchy here.
Word Count: ~4500 words
Spoilers: none
Summary: Rodney knows how to take good care of things.

zelempa saved this from joining all the other unfinished stories cluttering up my hard drive. She can come up with ideas to jumpstart a stalled story almost as fast as I can steal them. All the better parts of this story came from her. Thanks also go to neevebrody for helping to clean this up and make it shinier.






“For perfect strains may float
'Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced”
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese,
Sonnet XXXII)



It wasn’t that there was anything strange about Sheppard contacting him by radio. He did it all the time. But lately at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, always in the evening, around the time most of the day staff would be settling down to sleep, he seemed to call for no particular reason. No, McKay where are you? Or McKay I need you in the gate room, or anything pointed like that. These were conversations where Sheppard seemed more interested in listening than talking, and he didn’t seem very invested in the topic.

This evening was a case in point. Sheppard had said he was going to turn in early, try to catch up on missed sleep, and Rodney had decided to do the same. But only a few minutes after settling down in bed Sheppard called him. “What are you doing?”

Sheppard’s voice was soft and intimate, and it made Rodney shiver to lie in his bed in the dark and talk to him. “Nothing I would expect you to understand,” he lied. He saw no reason to let Sheppard know he wasn’t working late.

“Try me,” Sheppard said. That was Rodney’s invitation to start talking, but since he wasn’t actually doing anything, he let loose with some of his always available complaints about the incompetence of the people he had to work with. He knew that amused Sheppard, which seemed to be the purpose of the calls, for him to provide some mild diversion so the man could relax enough to sleep. But lately he had a funny feeling like he was missing something just on the edge of his awareness. He listened closely to Sheppard, not that there was a lot to hear, just a stray breath now and then and a soft sound of motion against bedding. Sheppard was in bed apparently.

“Anyway,” he said, wrapping up his complaint. “ I think I disabused her of the notion that I’d go easy on her just because she’s hot.”

“You think she’s attractive?” Sheppard asked. Rodney was surprised. Sheppard hardly ever said a word during these bedtime talks.

“Don’t you?” he asked.

“Don’t know her,” Sheppard said. He sounded a little breathless. “What does she look like? Blonde?”

“Uh, no,” he said. “She has brown hair, actually.” If he hadn’t been straining to hear, he would have missed the little catch in Sheppard’s voice. In fact, he wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it. “You’d like her,” he said more deliberately. “The hair’s long and has a bit of a natural wave, curls down over her neck and shoulders…” and he was sure now that he could hear Sheppard breathing a little heavier. “I might actually ask her out,” he said, which was a complete lie. “I’ve heard she’s a lot of fun. Think I’d get lucky?”

Sheppard snorted. “You? Would you even know what to do?”

“Grow up,” he said to give himself time to think about what he was doing, but it seemed harmless, and he was getting a huge hard on thinking about the possibility that he was turning Sheppard on.

“Hey,” Rodney added. “Maybe she’d invite me back to her room. I’d like to see what she looks like without the uniform, you know? Because she looks good enough in it that you’ve got to want to take it off.”

Sheppard didn’t answer, unless you counted the quick sound of his breathing. Rodney thought about saying more, going into more graphic detail, but he was afraid to push. They were still in the realm of plausible deniability and he wasn’t completely certain he wasn’t imagining what Sheppard was doing, so he backed up. “Yeah, I think I’m going to ask her out.” There was no way he could do that, of course- the woman was a direct subordinate- but Sheppard didn’t object; he’d gone back to silent mode.

There was a long pause before Sheppard spoke again, and it was just to say, “Well, I’m going to get some sleep.”

****

Rodney gazed at the wall of his room after Sheppard signed off, sleep forgotten. It was strange how clean and polished Atlantis had remained over the millennia she’d stood empty. He had the illusion, not for the first time, that if he could be perfectly still and silent he would hear the city breathing, alive and aware.

Rodney thought about his strange conversation with Sheppard over the next few days, trying to remember their previous before bed conversations, because the idea of Sheppard getting off on listening to him was damn flattering and a huge turn on. He hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about sex and Sheppard as conjoined subjects before, but now it was hard to stop thinking about it.

Sheppard had always been reticent about his sex life, which wasn’t surprising- he was not exactly the sharing type about anything-but Rodney had known plenty of guys who never talked about their feelings but were positively verbose concerning their sexual experiences. Sheppard wasn’t that type. He usually shied away from sexual discussions or changed the subject in that fake casual way that seemed to fool a lot of people.

****

Five days passed before Sheppard called again, five days during which Rodney had plenty of time to work out what he intended to do if Sheppard gave him any encouragement at all. “Hey,” Sheppard said, “So did you ask out that woman you liked?”

Rodney didn’t try to suppress a smug smile. Sheppard had not said a word about the woman in five days, and now he went right to it. “No,” he said. “I didn’t ask her. I met somebody I liked better.” He’d decided that if he was going to do this with Sheppard, it wouldn’t be right to use a real person. He’d had five days to make someone up, so he had his story all prepared.

“Yeah?” Sheppard asked. His voice already sounded turned on, though Rodney had to admit to himself that the Colonel could make even duty assignments sound sexy.

“Yeah. She works in the chemistry lab, so not a complete idiot. Listen, if you want to hear about this, I’m not going to tell you her real name, okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” Sheppard replied, sounding almost eager. “Good idea.”

“Okay, well,” he continued. “ I’ll just call her Eva, okay, so I don’t have to keep saying her.” Sheppard didn’t reply, but Rodney could hear him breathing into the radio. “We had supper together in the cafeteria, and then went for a walk and just talked. She’s got dark brown hair, usually wears it up in some twisty thing. Anyway she claimed to have some special coffee she brewed in her room- ha- like she needed a line to get me into her room. So I went, of course, and actually she did have coffee, though it was nothing special. So we’re sitting on her little couch together, and she takes her hair out of the twisty thing. It falls down onto her neck and she reaches under it and shakes it out and stretches.”

“Rodney,” Sheppard interrupted. “Is this line secure?”

“Like I’d be telling you all this on an open line? No one can hear us, I promise. So do you want me to tell you or not?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

There was no longer any doubt in Rodney’s mind that Sheppard was getting off on listening to him, and it was a heady feeling. He didn’t know if Sheppard knew that he was making the whole thing up. “So where was I?”

“Stretching, Rodney,” Sheppard prompted. Rodney smiled. The Colonel sounded downright impatient.

“Oh yeah, well, I was just watching, you know? When she stretched, her blouse rode up and I could see her stomach. She ran her hands down over herself and then grabbed my hand and put it on her breast.” Sheppard took a sudden much louder breath. They were over the line now, both of them. There was no longer any way to misinterpret what they were doing and Sheppard didn’t seem concerned about hiding his response. Rodney could hear him moving slightly. “She took her jacket off and I pulled her blouse over her head. She’s got beautiful breasts, John, and her nipples went hard when I thumbed over them. She leaned up and rubbed against me, then she started pulling at my shirt until I took it off.”

Sheppard made a little hissing noise. “Did she touch you?”

“Um, yeah,” he said, trying to follow Sheppard’s lead. He wasn’t sure what Sheppard wanted to hear. ‘Yeah, she put her hand on my cock.”

“Were you hard?”

The sound of a turned on and not hiding it Sheppard was certainly making him hard now, but he was also a little shocked. “Yeah,” was all he could think to say for a moment.

He could hear Sheppard shifting, his breathing ragged. “Go on,” Sheppard urged.

“We got all the way undressed,” he said. He wasn’t sure how to play things out. He wasn’t all that imaginative sexually, and he didn’t know what Sheppard would like to hear.

“Tell me,” Sheppard said, though it was more like pleading. “Did you kiss her?”

He could go with that. “Yeah, I pushed her back onto the bed. And, uh, she took my hand and put it, you know,” God, this was harder than he’d have thought. “Uh, she was wet, yeah, and she pushed up against my hand. I put my hands under her. Her ass is small, but nice and round and soft. I just eased into her slow as I could.” He stopped, at a loss for how to continue. Sheppard’s breathing was slow and even and he wondered if he’d been imagining that Sheppard was getting off on this.

“Rodney.” Sheppard didn’t sound aroused at all.

“Uh, yeah, it’s getting late.” Could he be any more idiotic? Did Sheppard think he was some kind of pervert?

“I’ll see you at the staff meeting tomorrow, okay?”

To Rodney’s relief he sounded more sleepy than pissed off. “Yeah, sure,” he answered, closing the connection.

****

Sheppard seemed fine at the meeting, quite chipper in fact, smiling indulgently when Rodney interrupted him for the third time. The Colonel had a habit of glossing over facts that annoyed the hell out of Rodney, but at least he didn’t mind when he was corrected.

Rodney spent most of the morning in the med lab setting up a device they’d discovered which looked to be useful in the treatment of viral infections. “I heard you were down here curing the common cold,” Sheppard said from behind him. Rodney didn’t dignify that with a reply, just turned far enough to shoot the Colonel a withering look. Sheppard was doing that thing where he looked everywhere at once, keeping track of the environment so Rodney could concentrate on taking care of the city, which was not necessary in the med lab. But he didn’t point that out.

Rodney had his lunch in the lab, but instead of working he mulled over the previous night’s conversation. If Sheppard wanted to hear another sex story, Rodney wanted to make sure he had one ready, a good one tailor made to everything he knew about the man.

But Sheppard didn’t call that night, or the next night. In fact four days went by before the next call. Four days that allowed Rodney to expand on and polish the scenario he had worked out for John’s entertainment.

John didn’t try to ease into the conversation either, he jumped right in. “So what’s been happening with you and Eva?” he asked.

“We went out last night.” Rodney was so ready. He knew John was going to love this. “We went down to the puddlejumper bay,” he said. “Eva doesn’t have the gene, but she’s fascinated by alien technology. She jumped at the chance to take a ride in one of the jumpers.”

There was a little scratching noise, perhaps made by flesh rubbing against cloth. Rodney lost his concentration for a moment; he wanted to know exactly what that noise meant. “Then what?” John asked.

"Uh, I took the jumper up, put it into a low orbit. Eva was standing right behind me, looking out the view screen.”

He could hear John’s breathing quicken but before he had time to bask in his success he was interrupted. “Rodney. You didn’t.” John sounded angry. “You didn’t start coming on to her in the jumper, did you? Tell me you wouldn’t do something that stupid and dangerous.”

Rodney fell back on his vast experience in backpedaling out of conversational sinkholes. “No, no, of course we didn’t do anything like that. Um, we just…we just enjoyed the view. Uh, she liked watching the planet under us.”

“Oh, yeah,” John sounded mollified. “The view of the planet circling under you. That’s nice. So what happened when you got back?”

Rodney sighed. He couldn’t very well tell Sheppard he had no idea what happened after they got back. “Uh, we went to my room,” he said. There was a long pause while he tried to figure out what to say next.

“Did you have candles?” John asked.

“What?”

“Candles, Rodney. You were planning on bringing her back to your room right? Did you think to have candles?”

“Uh, yeah, I had a, a candle. I had the lights low and I lit a candle.”

“What kind?”

“What kind of what?”

“Jeez Rodney, what kind of candle was it?”

“I don’t know what kind of…sandalwood, okay, it was a sandalwood candle.”

“What did it smell like?”

“Like, uh, like sandalwood. It smelled, I don’t know, woody.”

John sighed. “Sounds nice. What else?”

“I put on some music,” Rodney tried. “Sibelius’ violin concerto. Do you know it?”

“Yeah,” John answered, and god, he sounded so relaxed and decadent and turned on.

“So,” Rodney continued. This was getting easier. “I had some of those little sweet pastry things. The ones you insisted on calling doughnut holes even though they’re not nearly as good as doughnut holes and they’re not even made from… well, never mind that.”

Sheppard was definitely breathing faster. “Did you feed each other?”

“Yeah, I put one in her mouth.”

“Did you touch her face?”

“Do you want to tell this story or are you going to shut up and listen to what happened?”

John laughed. “Sorry, go ahead.”

“Well, I, uh, I touched the side of her face while she chewing. I stroked my thumb down along her cheekbone- she has amazing cheekbones- and let it rest against the corner of her mouth. She turned into my hand and kissed my thumb.” John had gone completely quiet. “I leaned in and kissed her, slow and careful, really taking my time, learning everything about her mouth, her lips…” He felt the moment when John relaxed; it gave him a feeling he couldn’t remember ever having before, warm and connected and special. “Goodnight, John,” he said.

“See you tomorrow, Rodney.”


Sheppard had taken to calling more frequently and Rodney felt a little smug about that. He liked to excel at anything he did, and being able to captivate Sheppard was cool. But with the calls coming more frequently he was having trouble coming up with scenarios. He’d tried a couple of times to feel out what particulars the Colonel liked, but his reluctance to offend kept the stories fairly vanilla. Not to mention he didn’t have any real knowledge of anything kinky, and he wasn’t anxious to advertise his limited sexual repertoire. But he finally came up with an idea that he thought would keep things interesting for a while.

When Sheppard called, he was ready. Sheppard had surprised him enough times that he started slowly in order to dump the whole idea if it didn’t work. “You’ll never guess what happened.”

“What?” Sheppard sounded laconic.

“Eva has these friends. A couple. Steve and Judy. She asked me if she could invite them over.” He waited to see if Sheppard would take the bait.

“Yeah?” Hook, line and sinker; Sheppard’s voice was no longer laconic. Rodney felt a flush of triumph.

“So I was a little surprised, but hey, the more the merrier.”

“So they came over?”

“Yeah.”

“So, come on, give. What happened?” Yeah, Sheppard was definitely liking this turn of events.

“Judy’s got short blonde hair, she’s just my type. So Eva spread some blankets on the floor so we could all get comfortable together. Eva and Judy, they’re close friends, you know? They were together in the middle of the blankets, and Eva leans over and starts kissing Judy. Steve and I were just watching the show. Judy pushes Eva over onto her back and spreads herself out on top of her, still kissing. It was hot.” He was straining to hear anything from John.

“So Steve reaches over and starts stroking Judy’s leg-”

“Eva didn’t want you to do anything, like…you know a lot of women get off watching two guys?”

John had an annoying way of knocking all his carefully planned scenarios to pieces, but Rodney had always been good in a crunch, so he switched gears immediately. “Yeah, well, Judy rolls over onto her back and the two girls are side by side, holding hands, and she pulls Steve over with her other hand…”

“Yeah? What did he do to you?” John’s voice was low and intense, and he could hear a soft swishing noise.

“Um. Judy pushed him over to me…uh…”

“Did he want to blow you?”

Rodney felt the air leave his own body with a sudden huff that sounded embarrassingly loud. “Um, yeah, she pushed his head toward me and he got his mouth onto my cock.” If he’d been in doubt about what John was doing, he wasn’t any more. John’s breathing was labored and the swishing sounds were louder, fast and getting faster.

“You liked that, huh?” John asked. He made a little grunting noise and went quiet.

“Of course I liked it,” Rodney said. He was pretty sure the conversation was over for the night. Silence unraveled between them. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?" He finally asked.

“Sure,” John said. Rodney smiled. John voice was relaxed and sleepy and affectionate, and Rodney had a whole lot of ideas for future conversations.

****

Physically he was partway under the console to the left of the DHD and mentally he was deep inside Atlantis when a familiar stillness snapped him back into the present. He stopped trying to loosen the crystal he had hold of and listened. Sheppard had been milling around the gate room while he worked but had gotten quiet. He looked at his hand pressed up at the gleaming underside of the console. It was as clean and polished here as any other part of the city. He pushed himself out from under the console, meeting Sheppard’s eyes, which were relaxed, warm, happy, affectionate. “What?” Sheppard asked.

He smiled back. “Nothing,” he said, gesturing toward his tools. “Give me that pliers.” Sheppard handed it over and he scooted back under the console to carefully loosen the defective crystal. He rolled it out and felt around for the cloth he’d put the replacement crystal on. After a second Sheppard placed the fresh crystal into his hand and he closed his grip over it, aware of his fingers brushing against Sheppard’s hand as he did so. Sheppard drew his hand away, but not quickly, and he stayed on the floor near Rodney’s leg, his hand stroking the front of the console as if he too was nursing a tenderness for the city. When Rodney finished he glanced around the room where everyone looked busy with their various tasks. No one seemed to notice anything unusual.

Later he’d intended to ask Sheppard to come for supper, but on finding him occupied sparring with Ronon in the gym he didn’t interrupt. He went to the mess by himself, but he didn’t feel left out anymore. He was the one Sheppard called at night; the one Sheppard trusted enough to call.

****

He never touched himself while talking to Sheppard. It was all about Sheppard’s pleasure, about doing something for Sheppard, though after they closed the radio connection and when Sheppard was probably fast asleep Rodney often jerked off, not to the scenarios he’d spun for Sheppard’s pleasure, but to the memory of the tiny sounds he strained to hear and the occasional deceptively laconic question or comment from Sheppard that he savored.

“Steve came by my room last night.” Rodney knew he might be pushing the envelope a little, but he could always switch gears if Sheppard didn’t like it.

“Yeah?” There was that breathy encouraging voice that meant he’d guessed right.

“Yeah, the girls were both working.”

“Did you want to kiss him?”

He had a fifty-fifty chance of being right here. “Yeah, we started kissing.”

“Tell me.”




“I got in his space and grabbed his face. And, uh, I kissed him really hard, with a lot of tongue.”

“I’m guessing he didn’t like that so much…”

Dammit, Sheppard was a confusing person. “Um, he didn’t?”

“Did he slow you down?”

“Fine, yes, he wanted to go slow. Slow and…” Rodney coughed. Sheppard made everything so complicated. “Slow and gentle.” There was the little sigh. “We stretched out on the bed together.” He paused, trying to figure out where to go next. He’d done the whole blowjob thing a number of times, and Sheppard had seemed to like it.

“Did you ask him what he wanted to do?”

That seemed like a good idea, if only he knew what ‘Steve’ wanted. “Uh, yeah, I asked him what he wanted to do.”

“What did he say?”

Damn, that was a good question, and Rodney had no idea what the right answer was. “Guess what he said to me?”

“What?”

“No, guess.”

There was a long pause. When Sheppard finally spoke his voice was rough and so low and hesitant Rodney could barely hear him. “He wanted you to fuck him?” That sent a jolt replete with images of naked needy Sheppard straight to Rodney’s cock, testing his resolve not to touch himself while they were talking.

“Good guess,” he said, not trying to conceal how turned on he was. “He wanted me to fuck him.” He listened to Sheppard’s beautifully heavy breathing. "I put him on his back so I could watch his face while we fucked.” The words were coming easily now, his mind’s eye full of John, John lying on his bed, John trusting him enough to reveal himself just to him. “He’d brought lube and condoms and I slicked him up with my fingers. It didn’t take long, he was relaxed, wanting it, wanting me.” Sheppard made a little whimpering noise, and Rodney could feel his own self-control falling away like shedding his clothes after a messy repair job.

He pressed one hand to his painfully hard cock unthinkingly, only stopping himself by a huge effort of will. “Oh god, John, is that what you want? Do you want me to fuck you?” He took a shaky breath. The radio had gone dead in his ear. It took a second for his brain to process that, for him to realize just how badly he’d fucked up.

****

It was ridiculous of Sheppard to avoid him so completely, hiding from him like a guilty child. Rodney decided the only thing to do was to take his courage and his life signs detector in hand and track Sheppard down. They needed to work this out no matter how much Sheppard didn’t want to talk about it. He would give Sheppard a piece of his mind, too; because Sheppard had no right to make him feel so guilty when really Sheppard himself had started the whole thing. He’d only been following Sheppard’s lead. After working it all out logically in his mind, he gathered up everything he could carry from his
lab and hid in his room.

Unfortunately he couldn’t keep his mind on work. His thoughts kept circling around and around. People had fantasies all the time that they didn’t have any intention of acting on. John had trusted him, shared intimate information with him and he hadn’t been worthy of that trust. He’d just wanted to be close to John, to be special and wow, he was special all right. A very special insensitive jerk trampling all over John’s psyche like Kavanaugh crunching the inner circuits of Atlantis, cocky and sure of himself as he wrecked everything. Hadn’t John made it clear all along that their real life had nothing to do with their little evening chats on the radio? He’d never given any indication, any permission for Rodney to take it further, and if Rodney had been listening this never would have happened.

There was no way to avoid the mission briefing first thing in the morning. Even though he rushed in late he got there before Sheppard. When Sheppard finally did saunter in, he took his usual seat next to Rodney without looking at him at all, and he kept the chair where it was instead of scooting it over so that they could sit close together. His gaze continually skipped over Rodney whenever he spoke, and he left abruptly as soon as the meeting was over.

Ronon, from Rodney’s other side, tilted his chin toward Sheppard’s retreating figure. “He mad at you or something?”

Rodney laughed his fake laugh, the one that made him feel like clapping his hand over his own mouth. “Oh, well, you know how I am,” he said.

“No,” Ronon replied.

“Everyone knows I can be a bit of an asshole sometimes.”

Ronon tilted his head toward the door Sheppard had vanished through so precipitously. “So can he. Want me to talk to him?”

Rodney coughed. “Uh, no, no, no need for that. Believe me, that would just make things worse.” Ronan didn’t look convinced. “Look you gotta promise me not to say anything to him. We’ll work it out, it’s nothing really, there’s nothing to work out.”

“Okay, whatever,” Ronon said.

****

Rodney couldn’t hide in his room anymore without offering some explanation to Radek, so he gave it up and spent the day in the lab. It wasn’t like there was any possibility of running into Sheppard there. He didn’t know how he was going to get through the mission scheduled for the next day. He went straight to his room afterwards, breaking open an MRE he had there even though he wasn’t hungry.

When Sheppard showed up at his door, he wasn’t really surprised, nor did he have any idea what to say. He motioned Sheppard into the room and closed the door without a word. He wasn’t going to start babbling. He just wasn’t. Sheppard could stand there silently until the Americans elected a sane president if he wanted. He wasn’t going to further humiliate himself.

Sheppard finally broke the silence to say, with typical Sheppard illogic, “Look, I know I owe you an apology.”

His resolve not to babble went the way of all his other self-improvement plans. “What? No, no you don’t actually. I get that we were just talking and it was wrong of me to start trying to make it into something you never meant it to be. I always do that, I always step all over people’s boundaries…and really I get the difference between something that sounds hot in fantasy but …I’m sorry, I just want things to be like they were before, you know, before I fucked everything up. It was never my intention to push you where you didn’t want to go.” He took a deep breath and made himself meet Sheppard's eye.


“Yeah, well, see, it wasn’t exactly someplace I didn’t want to go. More like, someplace I- I didn't think you'd want, I mean I've never- I just need to go slowly.”

John stepped in close and Rodney studied his expression carefully. “You’ve never?” he finally asked. John shook his head and broke the intense gaze they’d been sharing, flushed, started to duck his head, but Rodney reached out and stopped him, saying, “That’s okay, I can do slow.” Rodney kissed him then, kissed him gently and as slowly as he could, as slowly as he would examine an ancient device found in an unexplored part of the city, something glowing with unknown potential. John melted against him, pressing their bodies together in a way that made Rodney realize that slow could be good; slow could be the best thing that had ever happened to him. He was pretty sure he still had those candles Teyla had given him laying around somewhere.