Archive of Our Own

"Thank you for coming on such short notice, Agent McKay."

"Well, it's not like I'm extremely busy or anything, given my recent assignment to babysit the new recruits from Quantico. They're barely competent enough to use a pencil sharpener properly, you know; I'm sure in the ten minutes you have me away from them, they'll burn down the building."

"That is why we have a high-tech fire containment and elimination system, Agent McKay. Please, have a seat."

Special Agent Rodney McKay dropped heavily into the chair opposite Section Chief Elizabeth Weir, curious about the hastily scheduled meeting. Perhaps his direct approach in dealing with the newbies had led to one too many agents soiling their grey worsted diapers, and an official complaint had been lodged. Damn. McKay mentally kicked himself for not getting in there first with a verbose report complaining about the painful ineptitude of these kids he kept getting burdened with.

Weir's office was bright and airy, with glass-panelled walls allowing her to keep an eye on her cadre of agents. Next to the laptop on her immaculate desk was a homely little houseplant, freshly watered and verdant, and a strange lumpy thing that was so dreadfully ugly it had to have been a gift from her supervisor that Weir needed to keep on grateful display lest she offended Assistant Director O'Neill. Maybe it's a gourd, thought McKay. His first-hand experience with gourds was understandably limited, but the thing bore a vague resemblance to pictures in a pamphlet he recalled receiving from the Canadian Gourd Society. Junk mail was getting progressively peculiar these days. Definitely a gourd.

Despite the brightness of the room, one corner remained stubbornly, ominously shadowed. In this corner stood a large man, leaning against the lone filing cabinet. A huge man. A man of the biggest proportions possible that would allow him to pass through the metal detectors downstairs without stooping. He had a clump of dreadlocks partially obscuring his face and a smouldering joint in one hand, and in the briefest of instants when McKay caught his eye, he felt an unusually strong presence of mind for someone absorbing Δ⁹-THC. With a slight shiver of discomfort, McKay turned his attention back to Weir as she began to speak.

"You've been with the Bureau several years, Agent McKay," said Weir, leafing through McKay's personnel file, fingertips pausing on pertinent fragments of information. "You achieved a PhD in theoretical astrophysics, yet you chose not to follow that path. Why did you come to work for the FBI?"

McKay rolled his eyes. "That's a question I've been asking myself a lot lately. Because the small-minded world wasn't ready for or capable of comprehending my brilliant insights into the mechanisms of the fabric of the universe?" He folded his arms but one hand kept straying out to gesticulate while he talked at a mile a minute. "Do we have to do the life-story thing right now? Because every minute I'm away from FBI kindergarten there's another catastrophe I'll have to fix." His nostrils twitched. "Do you smell smoke? Have those fumbling idiots actually set the building on fire?"

The Joint Smoking Man in the corner cleared his throat quietly, deliberately.

"…Oh." McKay slid down slightly in his chair, fingers tapping impatiently against his bicep as he looked expectantly at the Section Chief.

Weir's mouth hardened at the agent's self-importance and continued resistance to Bureau etiquette. McKay's employment history was somewhat checkered, yet despite regular suspensions from duty for persistent insubordination, he remained there, buzzing around the corridors of the J. Edgar Hoover building, outstandingly good at his job but also outstandingly loud and obnoxious. She chose to ignore the attitude, and forged ahead. "Are you familiar with an agent named John Sheppard?"

This was an unexpected topic for the meeting. Evidently McKay's charges were too intimidated by him to complain or were developing a cocooning case of Stockholm Syndrome, because none of McKay's numerous previous visits to Weir's office for knuckle-rapping had ever started with a Who's Who of infamous feds.

McKay had never met Sheppard, but talk of him had spread through most divisions of the Bureau. Talk of his crazy obsessions, and his experimental hair. "Yes, I am. By reputation, mainly. Pretty boy, pilot, a good agent but completely unhinged. That the one? He had a nickname at the Academy: Spooky Sheppard."

Weir hiked an eyebrow at this assessment, but by all accounts the rumours were seated in fact. "Agent Sheppard has developed a consuming devotion to an unassigned project outside the Bureau mainstream. Are you familiar with the so-called Stargate Files?"

A derisory snort and a dismissive wave of the hand was McKay's scientific response. "That conspiracy nonsense about alien technology that can take you on a magical mystery tour bypassing all the laws of physics and drop you halfway across the Galaxy?"

"More or less." Weir glanced quickly at the Joint Smoking Man, as if for silent authorization to proceed, and finally came to the purpose of the meeting. "The reason you're here, Agent McKay, is we want you to assist Agent Sheppard on these Stargate Files. You'll write field reports on your activities along with your observations on the validity of the work."

McKay was aghast at this, his eyes wide and incredulous and his jaw working wordlessly up and down as Weir came to the end of her horrifying sentence. "What? Oh, come on! I don't have to work with the guy to tell you how incredibly un-valid that crap is! Aliens? Instant travel across astronomical distances? Can I just give Sheppard a copy of Baby's First Physics Textbook and deal with him once he's learnt at least some basic fundamentals of science?" McKay was out of his chair, throwing up his hands in indignation.

"Agent McKay, we trust you'll make the proper scientific analysis," said Weir blandly in the face of the agent's histrionics.

McKay sagged with defeat and he sighed. "I can't believe you've actually found me an assignment that's more horrific than my current one."

Weir smiled. "You'll want to contact Agent Sheppard now. We look forward to your reports." Her smile stayed frozen in place until McKay exited her office, muttering irately to himself.

Special Agent John Sheppard's unsociable office was tucked away deep in the musty bowels of the FBI Headquarters, at the end of a dimly lit hallway that was mainly used for storing box upon bursting box of ancient paperwork. McKay squeezed his way past several teetering shelves, gathering thick streaks of dust on his dark blue suit. Sheppard's door was ajar, and McKay rapped abruptly on it as he entered.

"Nobody down here but the FBI's Most Unwanted," was the drawling reply.

McKay stopped in the centre of the room and groaned inwardly. Sheppard's shambolic office was the polar opposite of Weir's clean, minimal workspace. Tall shelves laden with books and boxes vied for space with haphazardly arranged filing cabinets, their contents strewn across the floor and Sheppard's desk. Paper-stuffed folders littered the room between piles of yellowing newspapers, strange photographs and scribbled Post-It notes forming a final layer on top of the chaos. Behind the desk—or at least the desk-shaped part of the mess—was a pin-board covered in tatty drawings and photos, clippings with outrageous headlines and a poster depicting a UFO with the accompanying text, "I want to believe". I don't, thought McKay, want to believe. I don't want to believe I'm stuck in a garbage pit with a lunatic whose knowledge of current events comes from Weekly World News and stupidgullibleconspiracynuts.com.

Sheppard emerged from behind the desk where he had been crouched on the floor, sifting through a mound of this weird paraphernalia. Suit jacket lost somewhere in the jumble, he wore his shirtsleeves rolled up and his striped tie was loosened. His defining feature was an impressive spiked sculpture of dark hair that far surpassed McKay's expectation of artistic merit. Here was the man, in the flesh, around whom 40% of FBI office gossip centred.

The corner of McKay's mouth twitched as Sheppard scrutinized his visitor. Make that a garbage pit with a hot lunatic. "Agent Sheppard? I'm Agent McKay, I've been assigned to work with you." They shook hands, a little shock of static tingling McKay's palm.

"Really," said Sheppard, leaning against the edge of the desk, hand on hip. "I've heard of you, Agent McKay—well, I've heard you, actually. Your opinions on Quantico teaching methods sometimes travel all the way to the basement at that expressive volume."

"Huh. Unfortunately my opinions don't seem to reach the places they're actually needed."

"Maybe they do," said Sheppard smoothly, "Which is why you get sent down here. You must've pissed someone off pretty good to get stuck with this detail."

"No, I'm, uh, looking forward to this. I'm sure working with you will be, uh, enlightening? No, wait, interesting? Oh, probably not. It'll be different, yes, I think that's the word I'm looking for." Obvious insincerity and disdain gave way to the beginnings of babbling panic as McKay hovered between his usual blunt honesty and an unsettling desire to set this new professional relationship on a civil, if not amiable, footing, while Sheppard slowly insinuated himself into McKay's personal space, in a way that went well beyond civil and amiable.

"Agent McKay," said Sheppard, a low voice that was barely shades from a purr, an imperceptible fingertip on McKay's chest.

"Yes?" McKay squeaked, aware of his rising pulse and suddenly worrying that this intimacy was supposed to be intimidation, that these little electric thrills trickling up his spine were a very inappropriate and very unprofessional response to bullying in the workplace. Sheppard leaned in to whisper in McKay's ear, filling McKay's world with scent and hair and an even more inappropriate response.

"I get the feeling—" the fingertip brushed down to the hem of McKay's jacket, "—that you've been sent to spy on me. They want to know how close I am to the truth about the Stargate Files."

"Oh, please," scoffed McKay, stepping back far enough to let Sheppard experience the full might of his withering glare and breaking the intoxication of proximity. "Like this 'work' of yours has any basis in reality! This assignment is just a punishment! For me, obviously, not you, since a partner actually capable of rational and brilliant thought is something you sorely need. But this—" he waved vaguely at the contents of Sheppard's office "—this is nonsense! It's all fiction. I mean, look at this here." McKay picked up the closest newspaper clipping that featured a photograph of a beautiful but distraught woman. "'Aliens destroyed my village. Green monster men from another planet sucked the life from hundreds of my people, says Teyla Emmagan of Athos. They drain lifeforce through people's chests with their hands. I am lucky to be alive.' What is wrong with these people? What's wrong with you? Believing all this crap and actually investigating it, like the FBI doesn't have better things to do than chase little green men and their against-the-laws-of-physics totally impossible technology! It is beyond the capacity of the English language to fully describe how ridiculous I think this idiotic rubbish is and how empty-headed you must be to lap it all up!"

Sheppard had been watching this tirade with a spreading grin, and when McKay paused for a breath Sheppard grabbed him and planted a kiss right on McKay's disdain-curled lips, still half-grinning, thumbs on his cheekbones and fingers grazing neatly tapered sideburns. "Finally!" Sheppard crowed, after letting the kiss linger somewhat longer than the smacker McKay had received from the night-shift pathologist Dr Beckett, when he bribed the doctor with doughnuts to get his autopsies bumped to the top of the priority queue. "Finally they send me someone who'll be worth working with!"

McKay broke away from Sheppard's grip with a splutter. "Well, obviously I'm worth working with, but what? What was that?" He knew exactly what it was and exactly how much he had enjoyed it, and that a reoccurrence in the future might not be such a terrible thing, but despite the galvanism of the earlier moment, kissing wasn't usually what followed a rant decrying someone's all-consuming obsession.

Sheppard was energised, positively giddy, as he dug through the debris on his desk, picking out particular documents. "Oh, this is great. This is going to be so cool. They're big green men, by the way, not little ones." He handed McKay a stack of files.

"Uh, Agent Sheppard?" McKay was confused, but he let the other man pile more folders into his arms.

"You know, the more resistant someone is to an idea, the more profound the revelation when he learns it's the truth." He looked McKay straight in the eye. "I can't wait to see the look on your face."

"Truth? Revelation? Oh, you can't be serious. Were you listening to a word I said, specifically the word 'nonsense'?"

"Ever been to Colorado? I think we should start this partnership off with a field trip."

"Why, do the aliens park their spaceships there?" McKay shifted the bundle of folders into the crook of his left arm, flipping through pages of classified military reports and sensationalist journalism.

"Not quite. This is your homework," said Sheppard, planting a final sheaf of paper on top of McKay's reading material. "We'll fly out early tomorrow morning, be here at seven. There's a mountain I think it's time I finally visited."

McKay stopped listening to his new partner as he became transfixed by the curious symbol on the top sheet of curling paper. The sheet was blank save for a few smudged flecks from a photocopier, and a simple, bold glyph in the centre. It was like a capital A lacking the horizontal stroke, with a small circle atop the vertex, a pyramid raised beneath a fiery sun. McKay traced the design with his finger, a strange feeling of foreboding rising in his gut spurred by the symbol. It felt significant and almost familiar, like McKay had seen the glyph in a dream as a signpost for the path home. Perhaps there would be revelations waiting for him. He looked up at Sheppard.

"I can't really advise you on how to pack, I don't get weather reports from outside our solar system."

Revelations and conspiracies and green men of varying sizes. Goodbye, comforting laws of physics; hello, Special Agent John Sheppard. McKay knew it was all obviously ridiculous and unscientific and barely one hackneyed abduction story away from being a complete waste of time.

Still, there was something very appealing about that trip to Colorado.