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John’s intended career trajectory might not have included becoming a glorified taxi driver in Antarctica, but, honestly, now that he was here, he didn’t mind it. He got to keep the skies, along with something that was as close to peace as he felt he could manage. Those things were worth one hell of a lot.
But maybe not worth the sudden acquisition of an imaginary friend.
“Seriously, have you listened to a word I’ve been saying? I’m not your imaginary friend, Sheppard, I’m your, entirely real, best friend. Or, at least, I was … or will be … or, rather, would have been, if it wasn’t for the fact that the universe has even more messed up and distressingly overpowered people in it, than I’d previously assumed.”
“See, it’s not so much that I’m not listening, it’s that you’re not really making much sense. Also, you’re transparent. That pretty much shouts out ‘imaginary’ to me.”
John kicked himself for getting into an argument with his own hallucination, but it was almost impossible to ignore him.
He could sort of - almost - understand how this had happened. There was a certain isolation to his life here and something that might have been loneliness, if John hadn’t wanted it this way; hadn’t wanted to keep himself carefully detached from any risk of too deep an emotional attachment, the sort which ended with his heart being kicked straight through his chest.
What he couldn’t fathom, was why his brain had decided that he needed, not someone pretty and encouraging and with an interest in whiling away the evenings with in-depth discussions on Football and Ferris Wheels, but a companion who was bullish, contrary and determined, with a stubborn chin, eyes that managed to combine fiery with scared and vulnerable, and a sheer sense of presence which outweighed the fact that he was completely see-through. Not to mention intangible. John could - and did - stick his hand right through him and waggle it around a bit; which had garnered him a look of, surprisingly affecting, hurt.
Rodney - and why the hell John would pick ‘Rodney’ of all names, he couldn’t fathom - rolled his imaginary eyes.
“Sheppard, if I didn’t know you were smarter than this, I’d give up now and go bug Carter instead. Let me spell it out for you. I’m not imaginary. I’ve just been accidentally erased from existence. All existence. Everywhere.”
Rodney looked down at himself and waved an indicative arm.
“Well. Except for whatever this is, obviously.”
He crossed his arms and sighed.
“Look, I know you don’t know me and you’re not aware of the fact that, if you knew I was missing - which you don’t, because I never existed and, even if I did, you wouldn’t have met me yet - then you’d be very, very upset about it … but I really need your help. And, actually, so does the universe.”
~~~
Rodney had lost count of how many times in his life he had mentally chanted ‘I’m not here, this isn’t happening’, or some variation thereof, but he knew that, since he’d come to Pegasus, the number had increased dramatically.
And this planet, now, was so wrong, in so many ways, that he pretty much set the words on a loop in his head, in the vague hope that eventually they’d come true, while he got on with dealing with everything.
Sheppard, of course, was taking it all with a hefty pinch of ‘nonchalant’; which was annoying and reassuring, all at the same time.
“Is it me, or is this alien planet a bit more … alien than usual?”
Teyla looked around with a mixture of wonder and caution.
“I have never come across a place like this before.”
“Me neither. I think we should leave.”
Ronon definitely had less wonder and more ‘let’s get the hell out’ in his demeanour, and, for once, Rodney felt himself wholly aligned with his worldview.
“Ordinarily, I’d be all for exploration of any exciting new planet which doesn’t look like Canada, for once - but in this case, I’m with Ronon. We should go. Right now.”
Because it wasn’t just different - no trees, no plants of any kind; the sky in a painful shade of something which Rodney wasn’t sure his eyes were fully equipped to see, so that they were straining themselves in trying - but sinister to the very core.
The landscape itself had a menace to it, an undulating quality; and there were shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows and a sense of creeping dread, so palpable, that Rodney could almost reach out and tap it on the shoulder, if he wasn’t so sure it would tap right back.
“I believe that leaving would be wise.”
Teyla looked at Sheppard, who nodded slowly.
“I do get the feeling that the place isn’t exactly welcoming to visitors.”
He stared at something hard for a moment - Rodney couldn’t see what, but then he currently had his own collection of almost things to ignore; along with disturbing ripples in the fabric of reality and a terrifying sense of teeth, sharp and playful, like a cat’s, and not here, not happening, not here, not happening.
“Okay, boys and girls, let’s head on back.”
But, of course, the DHD had broken, somehow - somewhere between them arriving and trying to leave; and, of course, Rodney had to spend ten minutes working on it, while the rest of the team steadily lost their layers of calm and coping mechanisms, in the face of the relentless swirling nightmare of something just out of comprehension, the way that the earth changed shape and the sky grew unblinking eyes and there were memories walking in the shadows around them, all snarling and laughing and “not here, not here, not happening” and just as he’d finished and rose to dial, to tell the others to run straight through and don’t look back, then something came out of the shadows and grinned at him - all grin and nothing else.
“Not here?” it said. “Not happening?”
It grinned again - it couldn’t really help it.
“As you wish.”
~~~
“I felt it. Felt myself - all of my selves - being ripped away from existence, and, oh god, if being fed on by the Wraith is even half as bad, even a quarter, then …”
He shuddered and looked sick and even paler than before.
John had no idea what Rodney was talking about, but he was drawn in, compelled, and he couldn’t look away. His hand lifted to comfort the ghost in front of him, then dropped again, as it brushed the edges of nothing.
“I fought it, somehow. I don’t think there was supposed to be this much of me left - any of me left - but I kind of … clung on to the edges of reality? If that makes sense? I think I had to use everything in the end, teeth, fingernails, sheer outrage at the very idea of being erased like that, but anyway, at some point it all stopped and there I was. And, more importantly, wasn’t.”
Rodney sank to the floor and hugged his legs, looking younger, suddenly, and so distressed and vulnerable that John wanted nothing more than to sweep him into a hug and tell him it would all be okay.
“I went back and checked. Everywhere. Whatever it is that I am right now, I can move through space and time and across realities. I can … ‘see’, as it were, into all realities at once, if I sort of mentally squint, though that’s really, really uncomfortable. You’d think, if you don’t have a body, that you should at least be excused headaches, but apparently not.”
He looked personally offended at that and John couldn’t quite hide his amusement.
“And it turns out that I’m just … gone. There is no current reality in which I was ever even born. Do you have any idea just how badly that sucks? I mean, I get a little bit less corporeal, even just thinking about it.”
And Rodney did actually fade a little, even as he spoke, and he suddenly looked even younger still: a scrawny, wide-eyed twenty, with his hair a whole lot more blond (and just a whole lot … more) and his cheekbones standing out in his face, like defensive weapons.
“Hey, it’s okay. You’re talking to me, right? Just like Descartes said, I discuss my non-existence with an Air Force pilot, therefore I am.”
Rodney half-grinned at that one and John felt an unexpected warmth and relief pulsing through him, as Rodney’s outline thickened up a little. His age fluctuated back and forth, like a ripple running over him, from a small child, to his first appearance, of about fortyish, until he was somewhere in the late twenties - a little more physically solid-looking and with all of that determination back again, in strength.
“Right. And I can’t lose this, lose what’s left of me, because, as it turns out, I’m even more invaluable than I thought I was. And, given that I’m a breathtakingly arrogant man, that’s pretty remarkable.”
There was an edge of bizarrely endearing smugness to him as he explained this, which was somehow the final push that John needed to believe that he genuinely was real after all; not some scrap of John’s loneliness or a fracture in his mind, but a person at the very edge of existence, whose desperation was clear, even through the smug.
John focussed all of his attention on listening.
~~~
Rodney hadn’t felt much of anything for a while, except pain and a sense of loss so huge that he could only hold on to a little piece of it at once.
And then, when the worst of the pain had eased, he had gathered together as much of himself as he could - all of the essential him still there, just not in any physical form - and began working out what he was, what he had, and what had happened to him.
He had known most of it even before he went looking for himself; whether through instinct or genius or memory, he wasn’t sure. And everywhere, and every-when, that Rodney looked, he was just … gone.
Pretty soon, he realised that Jeannie was gone too, because his parents never stayed together without him to shackle them, unwilling, to a one night stand they had never meant to be anything more. For all his ego, it was only then that he realised that his non-existence had consequences beyond just himself.
After that, he went looking for them.
~~~
“The thing is, that while I would obviously like to be completely indispensable to the universe in general, I don’t know how much of it is me, specifically, or whether it’s more the knock on effects from my not having existed. Maybe it’s losing Jeannie that makes the difference. Maybe, if you took almost anyone out of the equation, things would just collapse, somewhere down the line.
“All I know is, that that is exactly what is going to happen. In every universe, within five decades of my … lack of birth … things start to go wrong. Very wrong. At first, I thought that the worst thing was just people dying whom I’d saved - and people they’d saved and so on. That was bad enough. You died, a lot, by the way. Honestly, the trouble you get into without me …”
“How much trouble do I get into with you?”
Rodney’s face looked guilty, affectionate and nostalgic all at once. He was suddenly forty again, his shoulders broad and strong, his eyes a deep, enticing blue.
“That’s irrelevant. But you haven’t died so far, anyway, though not for want of trying on your part.”
He winced.
“Or, rather you have died, now, that’s the problem. One of the problems. Obviously that whole ‘universe collapsing in on itself’ thing, is even more of an issue.”
His face said something else though, as if Rodney put the universe collapsing and the loss of John Sheppard on very much the same shelf of suckiness: and that was … it rocked John back on his heels, to think that anyone might care about him that deeply.
So much so, that it took him a second to fully register what was at stake here.
“The universe is going to collapse? Just because you’re not in it?”
“Yes? That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you! Look, every universe will reach some form of ending eventually, it’s just the nature of things. But how likely is it that every single universe is just supposed to disappear into itself entirely, within twenty years of now? In fact, some of them have already collapsed by this point in their timeline, which … was quite upsetting to watch.”
John reached out his hand again and waved it uselessly, as Rodney flickered down to an unbearably distressed five year old and then struggled up into his teens, fading in and out disturbingly for a moment, before his edges crisped up.
“I didn’t take that close a look at all of them. But, clearly, this needs to be stopped and the only way to do that, is to get me back into existence. I have a feeling that I don’t have much time like this. It’s … not easy to hang on to me.”
He dipped down to age ten, small and wobbly-lipped, and then forced himself back up to twenty, with an obvious effort.
John felt he might do almost anything for that damned beseeching look.
“Okay, then. I was planning to start War and Peace this evening, but … I guess I can fit in saving the universe first. What do you need me to do?”
~~~
When Rodney realised what was happening - had seen more than enough universes winking out of existence, one after the other - then his first thought was to go back to the planet which started this whole mess.
Part of him baulked at the idea, worried that it would just announce to the being who had done this, that it hadn’t quite finished the job; but the rest of him pointed out that he had no other starting point for how to fix this - and that not fixing it was not an option.
So he had set out to return, in the same way that he had managed to get everywhere else so far, simply by deciding that he needed to be there. Except that it hadn’t worked. He hadn’t been able to pin the place down - even thinking about it made his brain throb and everything go slippery and hazy, like he was wrestling with a ghostly bar of soap.
But the more he couldn’t get there, the more that Rodney was convinced that it was the only place from which he could yeet himself back into existence again.
He remembered the address and he could get to a Gate - any Gate he wished to - but he had no capacity to dial; his fingers slipping uselessly through the DHD, his mental commands as blithely ignored as if he were demanding that his cat stop embedding himself cosily into the clean laundry pile and gifting it with fur.
Clearly, he needed the help of someone who was currently following the more standard model of existence. Someone who could take impossible things in their stride and might be willing to take a risk on a person they didn’t know they knew.
And, in order for Rodney to be able to break across the barriers that separated him from existence and make his pathetic ghostly form known, his instincts were telling him that it also needed to be - someone Rodney loved.
~~~
“And you picked me?”
Rodney sprawled out on John’s bed and looked fixedly at the ceiling.
“It wasn’t so much a choice. As soon as I realised I needed to talk to someone, I … well, I was here. I guess part of me must have always known it had to be you.”
Rodney had aged up to his mid-thirties now, parallel with John, and he looked good. Very good indeed. John could easily imagine stroking the curve of his cheek, his shoulder, his thigh. He could picture himself dropping a kiss - a thousand kisses - on that mouth, wide and ever so slightly crooked. He could imagine how those large, restless hands would feel …
John shook his head to clear it. Now was not a helpful time to have fantasies about a ghost, or an echo, or whatever Rodney was. A lingering trace of sheer stubbornness.
“But … look, Rodney, I really want to help you, but I don’t know anything about these Stargate things. Until you showed up, I didn’t even know that aliens existed. Actually, still finding that a little bit of a tricky one.”
“Trust me, it’s one of the less weird things you’ll have to deal with. But, anyway, you’ll find out about them soon enough. All I ask, is that you give me a chance. It’s not just for me, John. It’s for everyone and everything there is. I’d say that’s a pretty worthy cause.”
“It would probably make my top ten.”
Rodney’s voice had been blurring and now he closed his eyes, his body - or the visual representation of it - growing softer and stiller in what looked very like sleep. It wasn’t standard practice for either a ghost or a hallucination, as far as John knew, but his horizons were being broadened rapidly.
But it was also a hell of a lot to take in and accept. Even if Rodney wasn’t just in his head - which he couldn’t entirely rule out - that didn’t mean he was who he said he was. This could all be some elaborate ruse, the purpose of which he wasn’t informed enough to guess.
John squashed down the part of him which was inclined to believe Rodney immediately; which reached out to him and felt a weird, but warm, connection, like a bright golden strand between them; or a long distance hug. He couldn’t let emotion overrule his intelligence and a healthy scepticism.
And he really, really needed some sleep. Maybe, when he woke in the morning, Rodney would be gone and he wouldn’t have to worry about any of this any more.
He tucked himself into bed - awkwardly trying to fit himself around Rodney, because it felt impolite, now they were acquainted, to shove a hand or leg right through him - and tried not to feel a clutching sadness at the idea.
When he woke up embedded in a cocoon of snoring ghost, it wasn’t nearly as weird as it should have been.
~~~
It was unsettling to watch John sit in the control chair and light it up, without seeing himself right there beside him. Everyone else, of course, was just gawping and flapping about, so he had to help John anyway, giving him the right cues, asking useful questions; helping him to adjust to the sensation of Ancient technology.
It didn’t take much. John was a natural - he had told Rodney once, in one of his more forthcoming moods, that when he had first entered Atlantis, it was like being hit in the solar plexus with belonging. Rodney understood that well enough. Even before he’d received the gene therapy, Atlantis was special; something he cared about immediately and more than he rationally should.
It was one of several things John and Atlantis had in common.
Rodney had been relieved to find that John had accepted the fact that he was going to have a guest for a while.
“Looks like you get to be my imaginary friend after all, McKay.”
“Invisible, intangible friend, of questionable existential status, actually.”
“Imaginary friend is snappier.”
It had been a slight adjustment, getting used to a slightly more light-hearted version of his friend; not without trauma, but still with a certain lingering puppyishness to him and a joy and wonder in this new world of aliens and planetary exploration, which hadn’t yet been tempered by the Wraith.
But Rodney loved his John Sheppard, with all of the scars, inside and out; his growth, his maturity - and the small, but defiant, pocket of immaturity, which he just about held onto, through it all.
Rodney suspected he helped with that last one. He was pretty sure he was proud of that.
It had been confusing, at first, as to why his instincts had taken him to this point in time, before John had any access to the Gate. But it didn’t take long before he had worked out his own unconscious reasoning.
Most Atlantis expeditions across the universe now either didn’t get off the ground at all, or happened later in the timeline; often without discovering that Sheppard had the gene and therefore going ahead without him.
And all of them failed within a short period of time (sometimes very short) because people did things differently without them.
If Rodney had shown up next to Sheppard, out of the blue, just when things were getting fraught, and asked if he wouldn’t mind pausing in the whole saving everyone from drowning/the Wraith thing and just dialling a Gate for him, the answer was unlikely to have been ‘sure, complete stranger who may be a figment of my own imagination, anything for you’.
Whereas, this way, he had time for John to get to know him; and to hope that he retained that rare and peculiar ability to like him anyway.
And more than like - trust; because they didn’t have time to try and get permission to gate to the planet. John was just going to have to grab a Jumper and go, breaking all the rules and risking, not only punishment for his actions, but the lives of the rest of the expedition, just on Rodney’s say so.
That would be the sticking point. John would have to be convinced that they were all doomed anyway and this was the only way to save them.
Rodney only hoped he wasn’t wrong.
~~~
John had expected to find it extremely difficult to go about his day with a ghost - or existentially disenfranchised being - constantly at his side, whom no one else could see. He’d seen this sort of thing on TV and whacky hijinks always ensued. Not to mention that, even on short acquaintance, he already had Rodney pegged as someone who just couldn’t keep his mouth shut for long.
But, in the event, Rodney was surprisingly restrained and discreet - not exactly fading into the background, but not trying to talk to him at awkward moments or divert his attention from all of the new people and information that John was having thrown at him in drenching bucketloads, with barely a pause.
John had been surprised enough to have broached the subject, before realising that it might seem offensive, to assume that Rodney would be a jerk about this, however inadvertently.
Rodney hadn’t been particularly upset, though (nor surprised). He just explained that, one, he had seen those TV programmes as well; two, he was a genius; and, three, he’d once had a distressing experience with a Lieutenant stuck in his head, whose voice only he could hear, and there were enough similarities for him to be more than aware of the pitfalls.
So it was more comforting, than distracting, to have Rodney there, to sit with him in silent support through the whirlwind his life had suddenly become and to talk to, in the evenings, whether to help get his head round it all or just to shoot the breeze and talk about anything but aliens.
“Fine, you beat me on Batman villains, but can you name everyone who’s ever been the Flash?”
“Well, now you’re just insulting my intelligence. First, there was Jay Garrick - and don’t get me started on heavy water vapours …”
For a man who wasn’t, in most respects, actually there, Rodney was remarkably easy to talk to. He got John’s jokes and was even funnier in return; drew out his carefully hidden geekiness and let it stretch out, all comfortable and unmocked; listened to his occasional bursts of confidence without awkwardness; filled in the gaps when John had no words, with any amount of his own. Was even silent, when John needed him to be.
And there were little things - offhand comments, a synchronicity between them, the way Rodney talked to him, with the unmistakable familiarity of years - which convinced him that Rodney did really know him. And that maybe, just maybe, some sleeping part of John knew Rodney.
The only truly disconcerting thing was the way that Rodney fluctuated in age without warning; something he barely seemed to notice doing.
“I suppose that, outside of my physical form, there’s no reason but habit to appear the same age. And it’s hard enough trying to hang on to myself at all and keep from just slipping through the cracks of reality, without focusing on being consistent.”
He’d gone younger again almost immediately the question was asked. John had noticed a tendency to do so when he felt insecure or defensive, while he hovered around the early thirties when he was in a more confident, bullish mood. After a while, though, John mostly got used to the changes, barely noticing himself whether Rodney was eighteen or thirty eight.
The important things were always the same. Always distinctly Rodney, whether annoying, endearing or both.
And, with every day and every step closer to a trip to another galaxy, John was finding himself disturbingly close to falling head over heels in love.
~~~
The thing was that, while, when he was alive, Rodney had been fully aware that he loved John Sheppard, he had somehow missed the fact that he was in love with him.
It seemed that having no physical form had made him viscerally aware of how much he really, really wanted to touch.
Not that he would have done; just because Rodney was undergoing a very ill-timed sexual awakening, that didn’t mean that John would be any more likely to throw aside his Kirking tendencies (not to mention the Military Regulations) in order to do naughty, naughty things with his best friend.
But … if this worked; if Rodney got himself back and undid all the damage ricocheting throughout the multiverse, from its severe lack of Vitamin Rodney, then he was going to … going to … well, something.
Even if it was just the biggest damn hug that was ever hugged.
Right now, though, they were finally here; and he needed to focus on the task at hand. He hadn’t mentioned it to John, but he could feel himself becoming harder and harder to hold together, with every day and then every hour. There was a constant ache, now, all through his … whatever he was using to hurt with (and that particular part of him was one which he would cheerfully jettison, if only he knew how).
They needed to get back to that planet and they needed to do it fast.
Rodney had decided on taking a Jumper as being the quickest and easiest way to get through the Gate without being stopped. It also had the bonus of giving John a chance to pilot himself a spaceship, before Rodney dragged him to a planet of evil super-beings, who had the capability of erasing people from not just one, but multiple existences.
It wasn’t exactly a fair exchange, but Rodney didn’t really have much to work with here. John would be dead very soon, in any case, if Rodney didn’t get himself back into the land of the living. At least this way he got to die trying.
Needing to fight death until the very last second, was one of many things that Rodney had slowly realised they had in common.
He waited for the first opportunity that John could slip away, unnoticed, and then directed him to the Jumper bay.
“Don’t worry you’ll get the hang of them fairly … oh. Pretty much instantly, in fact.”
John grinned at Rodney, like his every magic wish had been granted all at once, with a lollipop on top.
“Now this is worth leaving a galaxy for.”
Rodney non-existent insides twisted at the look of sheer happiness on John’s face and he had to roll his eyes to get away from all the feelings.
“Try not to get too much drool on the controls. Okay, look, we need to move fast. Don’t worry about anything else. If we fix this, it won’t matter. If we don’t… well, then, pretty soon nothing will matter.”
John turned to him and shot him a searching look.
“You’re absolutely sure about this?”
Rodney opened his mouth, determined to radiate complete confidence; but his default tendency towards honesty struck again - and a memory of being far too sure once before; and getting scythed down by it.
“No. I’m not sure. I don’t know what to do when we get there and I’m not absolutely certain there even is something to be done. All I know is, we’re running out of time and this is the only chance we have. That everyone has.”
John looked at him for a second longer and then nodded.
“Okay, then. Let’s go do something incredibly stupid.”
Apart from the aching lack of Teyla and Ronon - it felt remarkably like old times.
~~~
John had accepted the idea of aliens - he had walked through a wormhole to another galaxy, after all, straight into a lost city - but it only hit home how very far away from home he was when he looked up, at a sky that clearly didn’t want to be looked at; and around, at the most unearthly, unsettling landscape he could ever have imagined.
“Wow. This is … wow.”
“Yes, well don’t get overexcited. Most of the planets we see have the same set of trees on them, with an occasional desert for variety. Well, and there was the one with the dinosaurs, but we didn’t exactly stay long enough to catalogue the ferns.”
Rodney was a nervy twenty right now, his panic coming through so strongly that John thought it might be more tangible than Rodney himself. John wasn’t sure if a ghost could hyperventilate but he had a feeling he was about to find out.
“Hey. Rodney, it’s okay. We got here. Now, you just need to do your thing and everything’s fixed, right?”
“Right. My thing. I’ll just … do my thing. What was my thing again?”
John reached out, so determined to do something to help, that he actually almost touched Rodney’s arm. There was a moment of something, like an electrical charge, before his hand slipped through.
But it seemed to be enough. Rodney looked down at himself with interest and aged a confident decade.
“Huh. I’ve never sparked before. Maybe it’s this planet. Or maybe it’s …”
Rodney trailed off, looking awkward, but John heard the ‘you’ loud and clear. Privately he kind of hoped that it was him.
But there wasn’t really much time to think about sparks, before the shadows came to horrible, menacing life.
~~~
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Rodney was filled, all through, with a jagged strip of pure ice, forking through him like lightning; but he couldn’t fall to pieces now, not when he was so close. Not when John was right there beside him and in imminent danger of being ripped straight out of the universe as well.
“Actually, I should. I checked. Everywhere. It seems that reality doesn’t do so well without me.”
The shadow radiated contempt.
“I’m sure you would like to think so. No one likes to believe that they’re of as little importance as a gnat. But, I’m afraid that …”
“Oh, well, no wonder you’re making such incredibly stupid errors.”
Rodney was filled with anger suddenly, blasting away his fear like a flamethrower. He pushed forward glaring at what he could make out of the half-formed creature.
“Gnats are important. Every damn part of the ecosystem is important. Every single, separate person is important, even the most obnoxious or imbecilic. Even Kavanaugh. You think, just because you have the power to erase me, that it makes you better than me? Well, congratulations, you just hastened your own death. Because this reality and everything else is coming to an abrupt end very soon, unless you give me my lives back. All of them.”
Rodney crossed his arms and glared into an abyss of twisted and horrible fury which would have sent him cowering into a ball on any other day; but, right here, right now, he was too angry himself to worry about it.
“Go check for yourself. If you can erase my entire existence, you should surely be able to look and see what the result will be. But you didn’t even bother, did you? Because you thought this was just a game, a nothing. You wiped me out for no other reason, than it seemed like a funny thing to do, didn’t you? Well, if you don’t fix it, things won’t look quite so amusing.”
Whether they could check through time or not, they could definitely read his mind, so Rodney deliberately allowed all of his memories of dying universes to come roaring to the surface. He braced himself through death after death. And he thought, even harder “I am here. This is happening. But it won’t be for long; because nothing will.”
The shadows wavered. There was a collective sense of unease, of sudden terror; and then a sort of emotional slap of bravado.
“Petty humans. We don’t need to waste any more time on you. Take back your stupid lives, for all we care.”
Rodney felt John beside him, felt a rising hope; and then felt a snap, like the largest, most stinging, elastic band in the history of ever, as he was shot back into every universe he’d ever existed in, with a resounding, dizzying crack.
~~~
“Rodney?”
The shadows closed in - unfathomable, looming, full of the impression of teeth - and Rodney flickered, like a faulty bulb. John felt a terror washing over him, like nothing he’d ever known, drenching him completely. He had to take several deep, heaving breaths, to even be able to speak.
“McKay!”
And then the shadows vanished, leaving only a sense of anger, and the faint tang of humiliation; and Rodney looked completely solid again.
John didn’t think, he just hugged him, hard, not caring in the moment what Rodney thought, what Teyla and Ronon might think, what he himself was thinking, except that he had an overpowering need to verify Rodney’s existence, which couldn’t be denied.
They ought to leave, he knew, right now; but it took several minutes before he could bring himself to let go.
“It’s okay, it’s over, it’s okay. I’m back.”
Which didn’t make sense - Rodney hadn’t even moved - but, also, it did, in some way which tickled uncomfortably at the back of John’s brain. But he forced himself, finally, to let go and to let Teyla and Ronon hug Rodney too, to reassure themselves, just as he had.
They went back through the gate arm in arm, and damn what anyone thought.
The debriefing took a whole lot longer than he was expecting and they all took a while to absorb Rodney’s story.
Woolsey was politely sceptical.
“Dr McKay, is it not possible that this whole scenario you experienced was some sort of hallucination?”
Rodney shrugged.
“Well, yes, obviously it’s possible. Trust me, I’ve been through so many different hallucinations, vivid dreams and false realities, that sometimes I have to pinch myself at random through the day, just to check. But all I can say is that it felt very real. And we all saw the shadows and how that planet was just so …”
“Messed up. Felt wrong from the start.”
Ronon leaned back in his chair and stared at Woolsey, who stared back and then nodded.
“Indeed. Well, it seems like we have a new potential enemy to worry about.”
John shook his head slightly, not quite a no.
“I don’t think they’re much of a threat to us directly. From what Rodney said, they only messed with us because we were there. They wouldn’t waste energy seeking us out. They’re only dangerous because they’re capable of doing almost unthinkably powerful things but not so much of thinking through the consequences. But at least they proved that they’re capable of listening to reason.”
Rodney snorted.
“Sure, as long as their own asses are on the line. And I somehow doubt that this little experience will lead them to stop by for a consult, before they do anything else potentially universe-collapsing. At least, if anything like this happens again, we’ll probably be dead before we have a chance to worry about it.”
Woolsey pushed his glasses up his nose.
“That’s, um. Very reassuring, thank you.”
After the meeting, the team had been ordered off duty for twenty four hours, to recover from the trauma of the planet; and it was only when they sat together in Teyla’s room, as she rocked Torren with a loving intensity, as though she had lost and found him again, that John realised just how necessary that was. That the shadows and the creepiness of the planet had seeped deep inside them, like a nightmare which lingered long past dark and into the morning, prickling at the edges of your mind.
Rodney hardly said a word and they all exchanged glances of concern, huddling subtly closer to him.
Ronon elbowed him, a little less subtly.
“Would have thought you’d have been happier to find out you’re as indispensable to the universe as you always said you were.”
Rodney shook his head slightly, an unhappy smile pulling at his lips.
“Then you clearly weren’t listening. Look, I realise that I’m not exactly known for my humility, but even I can’t accept that I’m just that important. Some sort of keystone in the multiverse. All it proves is that this whole set of realities we live in is so fragile that if you knock even one piece out of place, then the whole thing can come tumbling down, like that.”
He clicked his fingers sharply, without any of the triumph that usually accompanied it.
“So, forgive me, if I’m just a little terrified out of my mind over that.”
Teyla kissed Torren softly, then kissed Rodney’s forehead, to his evident surprise.
“It may be as you say. But it changes nothing. We have always lived on the edge of death, and always will. All we can do is be grateful for what we have here, and now.”
“There was an old Satedan saying - the darkness will swallow you anyway, so you might as well dance as it comes.”
Rodney reached out a hand and touched each of them, a small deliberate movement, perhaps to assure his memories of ghostliness that he was here and solid and real.
“I only ever learned two dances and one of them was the Macarena, so I’m not sure that applies in my case.”
Ronon grinned and pulled him to his feet, his hand lingering a moment, as if to reassure Rodney just a little more.
“I guess it’s time for lessons, then.”
Rodney protested, inevitably, and gave in, just as inevitably, to his team’s gentle urging.
They all took turns holding Torren as the others danced - a waltz; a smooth, slinky Satedan thing; a twirly traditional Athosian dance which left them breathless; and, finally, with resignation, the Macarena: which Rodney demonstrated with a mixture of embarrassment and self-deprecating amusement; finally flinging himself entirely into the moves, so that they all followed along with such joy, they only stopped because they were laughing too hard.
When they left, at last, John felt pleasantly tired and ready to sleep. But he couldn’t quite shake his not-memory of Rodney: erased from history and a fragile, intangible thing, so close to evaporating entirely that John’s heart stuttered at intervals just at the thought. There was an almost irresistible urge inside him, to follow Rodney around like an imprinted duckling, or a body-guard, or some weird amalgam of both.
It didn’t seem to have taken much for that other John to accept that the loss of Rodney was the loss of everything. For himself, he realised, he hadn’t questioned it even for a moment.
What that meant, exactly … well, he knew what it meant. He just didn’t know what he was going to do about it.
“Do you want to come in?”
And, somehow, they had arrived at Rodney’s quarters, without John even noticing; and it really would be a bad idea to go in, in this frame of mind, where he might just up and say things he really meant.
But apparently BodyGuard Duckling Mode was still on in full force, because his feet followed Rodney in without a moment’s hesitation.
He didn’t get far before Rodney stopped short and turned to him, with a scared, determined look on his face, and John’s world upended itself, because he could see the words forming in the air, even before Rodney opened his mouth.
“So, it has, um, come to my attention during the course of events, that my feelings for you are somewhat deeper than I had previously …”
Rodney’s hand described arcs in the air; his eyes were full of uncertainty and love; his mouth turned down even more than usual, already braced for rejection; and John couldn’t help himself. He leaned forward, slow and gentle and soft, and kissed the words right out of Rodney’s worried lips.
They tasted sweet, with a tang of delicious spice.
“You’re necessary to me. All of you, always. You.”
Rodney was kissing him before the last syllable had set sail from his lips and they wound around each other like awed and wondering pythons, who had each found a compatible python, at long last.
Then Rodney pulled away a little, which was most displeasing to John’s inner python, having just got to a particularly good bit of twining.
“Wait, wait, this isn’t just some sort of … Macarena-addled kiss frenzy, which you’re going to regret when sober?”
John couldn’t help it. He broke down in laughter, fuelled by the release of tensions and the idea of Rodney accidentally Macarening him into bed, with his wicked hip swirls; followed by a groggy, regretful dance hangover, the morning after.
Then he firmly took Rodney back in his arms again.
“Trust me, Rodney. This is all me.”
This time, when he leaned in, there was no pulling back at all.
~~~
The next time they went through the Gate and saw the usual trees and a wide, unremarkable sky, Rodney breathed a sigh of relief.
Even the fact that, an hour later, they were fleeing back to the Gate and ducking arrows, didn’t dispel a general feeling that all was - at least temporarily - right with the world.
His lungs throbbed from running, he was bruised and terrified and his ass kept flinching in anticipation of another ignoble puncturing.
But they were all alive and mostly unhurt; John was right beside him and wreathed in warm, glowing memories; and even the aches and pains reminded him that he was here, he was now. That this was his life and the bad parts were threaded through the good parts and the good parts rested on the bad and they all came together in a heap.
As they stumbled through the Gate, safe and mostly sound, John flashed him a smile, full of relief and reassurance and hot, sweet promises for later.
And Rodney didn’t feel self conscious at all as they walked to their post-mission check up with just a hint of a dance in their steps: sashaying in the face of darkness, one more time.