Archive of Our Own

~~~~~~

John turned his LVMPD car into the apartment block's parking lot, coasted into his spot and turned off the ignition. He sat there for a moment listening to the hot engine ticking, then sighed and pulled himself out with a wince. The near-fatal wound that damn Wraith had given him was a hell of a lot better and he was only a little stiff now after a couple months of PT, but some movements still sent a hot stab of pain through his chest and side. He braced himself and reached into the car to grab the meatlovers pizza he'd picked up on the way home, jammed a file box of cases under his other arm to work on in his spare time, and headed for the elevators.

The lobby was air-conditioned and sleekly impersonal, light-years away from the old flea-pit he'd lived in before . . . before all the crazy hit the fan and left John dying in the desert near the blown-up carcass of an alien serial killer. Oh, and he'd apparently saved the world. He shook his head, not sure if he was trying to throw off end-of-shift tiredness or incredulity. Back then, he'd slipped away into nothingness staring up at the stars, thinking about far-off galaxies and McKay, blue eyes intent, spilling secrets.

He'd come to in an underground military hospital in Colorado after hours of surgery. The doc, not the blonde from Area 51 but a short woman more terrifying than any drill-sergeant he'd ever met, told him he'd almost died, and for a few days he wished he had, it hurt that badly. But he healed, got slowly back on his feet, and one day, there was McKay standing by John's bed in his three-piece suit.

"I got you to thank for the rescue?" he'd asked, and McKay'd flushed, which, okay, was pretty cute, but it wasn't like he was gonna make a move on the guy. Too buttoned-up. 

"Er, yes. I suddenly remembered you might not have heard me tell you not to engage, so I ordered the extraction."

"Make me sound like an ingrown molar, why don'tcha," John had grumbled, easing himself down onto the bed. He'd patted it. "C'mon. Siddown."

McKay'd eyed it dubiously, but sat. "We, ah, beamed you up to a space ship in orbit, then down here, and they rushed you into surgery."

"Beamed me up like Scotty?" John had felt his eyebrows climb into his hair. "High-roller treatment, huh. Why'd you bother?"

McKay'd turned and glared at him. "You had just saved the planet, Sheppard." And of all the things he'd seen and heard, that was still the weirdest.

The SGC paid off his debts as a kind of bribe to keep his mouth shut, or a thank-you—John figured it was a bit of both—and deposited a hefty "consultancy fee" in his bank account. So, here he was with a better apartment and a classic Harley Davidson motorcycle in a storage garage downtown, for weekend getaways. He'd deleted McKay's emails recommending a discreet counseling service for 'problem gamblers' but he had sworn off gambling. He hadn't sworn off liquor, but he'd slowed right down. Spirits hit him hard these days, and for a while there, he'd been on too many pain-killers. He'd even gone cap in hand asking for his old job back, glad he hadn't made too much of a scene or flipped off Captain Hendricks like he'd been tempted to. Well-trained detectives were hard to find, so they took him back, even if they did think he'd killed his creditors in a gunfight to account for being shot all to hell. That Woolsey guy at Area 51 might have pretended to be FBI, but he had real connections—he'd gotten the feds to tell the LVMPD to close the case on his injuries, saying he'd been 'undercover'. No one really bought it and Hendricks eyed him suspiciously and glowered at him a lot. Well, a little more than before: he'd always glowered at John a fair amount.

The elevator, now filled with the scent of warm pizza, pinged for his floor and he got out and let himself into the apartment, enjoying the air-conditioned cool, unlike his old place. He kicked the file box in under a side table by the door and went through to the kitchen, dropping the pizza box on the kitchen counter. Opening the fridge, he grabbed a beer and took a long, cold swallow before leaving it on the table and heading for the bathroom to take a piss.

"Holy crap!"

There was a corpse curled up in the shower stall.

John forced himself into a semblance of calm and crouched, then rested one knee on the tiles and pulled a pair of scene-of-crime gloves from his back pocket before feeling for a carotid pulse. Huh, not dead, just real pale and not moving. There was no blood, and John couldn't see any serious injuries.

He checked the hands in case there were defensive wounds or tissue under the nails. They were clean, but there were a bunch of strange symbols scrawled on one palm in ballpoint pen. John took out his notebook and jotted them down, then went back to his examination.

Maybe the guy had head trauma? John felt over the guy’s head and frowned—that cap of soft brown hair was familiar. He lifted the man's head gently to see his face, the features slack with sleep or unconsciousness.

It was McKay.

~~~~~~

John would have called an ambulance, or tried to get through to Area 51—and yeah, he could imagine how that would've gone: "Area 51, please." "I'm sorry, sir, I think you've been reading too much pulp fiction"—but McKay didn't seem to be harmed, and after a few minutes he stirred and blinked slowly awake. By then, John had carried him to the bedroom, dressed him in some of his own sleep clothes and bundled a comforter around him. The apartment was too air conditioned for someone to lie around naked and McKay's skin had been cool and clammy.

"You okay, buddy?" McKay's eyes had finally focused on him, a crease appearing between his brows as he stared up at John's face.

"What?" McKay shook his head a little, then peered around the bedroom, before fastening on John's face again. "Where am I?" His breathing hiked up and his face scrunched with worry. "And, and who am I. Oh my god. Who am I?"

"Hey, now." John tried to sound reassuring. Must be head trauma, for sure. "You're safe. You remember me, from the LVMPD? Detective Sheppard?" McKay looked even more panicked. "I mean, John. I'm John."

"John," McKay repeated doubtfully. "Do you know me?"

"Yeah, sure. You're Dr. Rodney McKay."

"I'm a doctor?" McKay looked like he didn't believe that for one second.

John rocked his hand. "Scientist type of doctor. Physics and stuff. You work at Area 51." Too late, he realized that'd been stupid. McKay'd never believe him now if he'd forgotten the place was real. But McKay just lay there blinking, looking confused.

"I work in an Area? There are 51 of them?"

"I . . . " John didn't want to touch that. "Looks like you lost your memory a little there, buddy. I'm sure it'll come back real soon, though. We should get you checked over by a medical doctor though, whaddaya say?"

"I don't know," McKay said anxiously. "What do I say?"

"Um," John said. He'd double checked McKay's head and neck and felt down his spine before moving him, trying to make sure there were no fractures. Nothing was obvious, but you couldn’t tell with head trauma. People could be concussed with no obvious wound, like from whiplash or something. He should get McKay to a doctor for a head scan. But what if McKay started remembering a little and babbled classified stuff about aliens? He bet the SGC wouldn't want anyone but their own looking after him.

"I'm hungry," McKay said suddenly. "Is there any food?"

John blinked. "Ah, yeah, there's pizza."

"I . . . do I like pizza?" McKay asked, looking like he was wracking his brains.

"Buddy, everyone likes pizza," John said.

That turned out to be an understatement and John had to heat up a frozen one as well so he could eat something while McKay wolfed down the meatlovers. McKay sure knew how to enjoy his food, John thought, suppressing a chuckle—he even made little pleasurable noises of appreciation which would have been hot if McKay weren't so damn vulnerable, totally unlike the sleek, confident mover and shaker who'd briefed John at Area 51. It made John feel weirdly protective and it made him start thinking of this guy as Rodney, not McKay.

Once Rodney'd finished off the pizza and was blinking drowsily and licking his fingers, John tried again. "Look, we should really get you to a hospital. You've gotta have a head injury to have lost your memory like this."

Rodney immediately looked anxious and shifty. His face was way more expressive than it'd been back when he'd oriented John at Area 51. No, John realized, he was unguarded; his defenses were down. John winced—he knew how much he'd have hated being laid open like that.

"I, ah, I think some of it's coming back," Rodney said, not meeting John's eyes. "I'm fairly sure, no I'm certain, that I don't like hospitals or doctors." He straightened up, thrusting his chin out a little. "So if it's all the same with you, I'll give that a miss. Going to the hospital, I mean."

John frowned, trying to stare Rodney down. He didn't believe Rodney's memory had returned, not this fast. "Yeah, right," he said dubiously. "So tell me some more about Area 51, if you're A-okay."

Rodney squinted at him, annoyed, then a look of relief followed by one of low cunning flashed across his face until he managed to school it into a slightly supercilious expression. Christ, if John hadn't stopped gambling and could get Rodney into a poker game he'd win a fucking fortune. "I can't possibly share that with you," Rodney said, a faint note of triumph in his tone. "It's highly classified."

John rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, but you already briefed me, and I signed the damn nondisclosure agreement."

Rodney's face fell. "Oh. Really?" He glanced away, biting his lip, then looked back at John again. "Look, okay, I still can't remember much, but there's something there, like . . . like feelings, impressions. I think it'll all come back soon, and my head's fine, honestly." He pointed at it. "No pain, no tender bits, no headache. And I can think perfectly well." He held up one finger. "Ask me if 149's a prime number."

"I know it's a damn prime number, Rodney," John said, leaning back and folding his arms. "What about 2047?"

Rodney pointed at him excitedly. "Yes! In fact it's a Mersenne prime! See, I'm fine."

John huffed out a breath, annoyed. "Sure, but remembering Mersenne primes isn't gonna let you survive out in the world, and just 'cause your head's not hurting doesn't mean there's not something wrong with it–"

"Obviously something's wrong," Rodney broke in, nodding like one of those dashboard ornaments. "My memory's . . . temporarily inaccessible. Well, my memory about, um, my life is. I can remember math, and what things are, mostly, and, and theory, like e = mc squared. But going to the hospital's not going to fix that, don't you see?" He stared pleadingly at John.

"Jesus." John rubbed his stubble and sighed. It was a risk, but maybe he could get through to Area 51 somehow and they could sort Rodney out.

"Could we go to this Area place?" Rodney asked hopefully, apparently on the same page as John. "Or phone them?"

John sighed. "We can try, I guess." They've gotta be worried about you if you went AWOL on them."

"AWOL," Rodney said, nodding some more. "Absent without leave, right?" He frowned. "Oh, am I military?" He looked down at his sweatpants and t-shirt. "I don't feel military."

"You're not, you just worked with them. Still do, far as I know." I was the military one, John thought grimly, but you used to know that, and one discussion about Holland and getting thrown out on my ear is more than enough for this lifetime, thanks a bunch. "Phoning Area 51's not gonna be easy—not possible, in fact." He went into the living room and got his laptop, bringing it back and firing it up. "Okay, so here's the local directory service screen—that's local phone numbers."

"Yes, yes," Rodney said impatiently, eyeing the laptop covetously.

John typed in 'Area 51'. "No such number found" flashed up on the screen.

"Here, give me that," Rodney said, and snatched the laptop from him. John made sure Rodney knew what he was doing, but using computers to access search engines was apparently knowledge hard-wired into Rodney's bones, his fingers dancing across the keys as page after page of conspiracy theory horseshit unfolded, lurid all-caps banners about aliens and "eyewitness" articles about flying saucers. John got up and went to make a pot of coffee. He figured Rodney was going to need it.

Rodney looked up at John when he set the mugs down on the table. "Seriously? I worked there? What – researching aliens?" He picked up the mug absently and lifted it on autopilot, then sniffed sharply when it got close to his nose and hastened to slurp down a long swallow, closing his eyes in ecstasy. "Oooh, coffee. How could I have forgotten coffee!" He drained most of the mug, apparently impervious to the temperature.

"Apparently you haven't," John said with a smirk, drinking his own at a more sedate pace. "And yeah, it's true. Area 51 is researching aliens, and you knew about all that. In fact, you'd traveled to another galaxy and seen a bunch of them, even worked with some of them. Pegasus—that's where you told me you were based."

Rodney glared at him. "Apparently you're the one with a head injury," he snapped. "Just because I'm . . . temporarily indisposed . . . that doesn't mean you get to make fun of me. It's, it's mean."

John sighed—he seemed to be doing a lot of that lately—and scrubbed a hand through his hair. "Yeah, sorry, that was a dumb way to break it to you." He put his mug down. "Look, Rodney, it'd be mean all right, except that it's true. And yeah, you're never gonna believe me. Hell, I didn't believe you when you told me about it." He looked across at Rodney, eyes narrowed. "But that was before I met a goddamn alien and it tried to kill me."

~~~~~~

It was another day before they even made it to the security checkpoint at the Area 51 perimeter. Hours on end of John dredging up everything Rodney had told him about his work, his colleagues, the SGC. About Stargates, alternate dimensions, wormholes, the Wraith held captive in the sub-levels of Area 51, every last unbelievable thing.

John had hoped the deluge of information might trigger Rodney's memory and shake something loose, but it didn't, and it became increasingly obvious how ill-equipped John was to explain all this shit. McKay had clearly given him the 'for dummies' version the first time around, and this session with Rodney kept devolving into frustrated refrains of "But how?" and "Look, Rodney, I don't know how, okay? You never told me that part!" In the end John called it quits and staggered off to bed after making up the couch, leaving Rodney hunched over the laptop, searching the internet for clues about who he'd been. Who he still was, maybe.

John's internal clock woke him early in the morning before the day got too hot. He found Rodney snoring softly, crashed out on the couch. He suspected Rodney hadn't gotten a lot of sleep from the dark circles under his eyes and the way the coffee supply in the kitchen had dwindled. He stood looking down at Rodney's sleeping form. They'd been too tired the night before to talk about the fact that Rodney seemed to be living with John now. There wasn't anywhere else for him to go—at least until they gave Area 51 the old college try—and John wasn't the type of bastard to turn him out, memoryless, onto the streets of Vegas with no identity, cash, or clothing.

He'd lived alone for a few years before Rodney’d literally dropped in. John still hadn't figured out how Rodney had broken into the apartment, but he guessed he must have muscle memory of lockpicking skills or some damn thing—and what in hell had happened to his clothes? John shook his head: too many questions. It was odd that the enforced company wasn't bothering him more. He'd lived in close quarters with plenty of guys in his Air Force days of course, but since being forcibly ejected from the military he'd been far more solitary, with no real friends at the precinct and a rep as a loner.

It was Saturday and John wasn't working, but they'd call him if something broke on one of his cases. Christ, he hadn't even had a chance to tell Rodney he was a cop. He left a note saying he'd be back soon and slipped out for a run, returning thirty minutes later with pastries and a fresh bag of coffee. He figured they'd need it.

Rodney woke when John let himself back into the apartment and John got some coffee into him pronto. He looked even more bereft and frazzled on waking, his hair sticking up erratically and his face creased by the couch cushions. Before the fragile coffee and pastry-induced peace could entirely dissipate, John organised them both into showers, found Rodney some slightly more presentable shoes and clothes—well, there was no option but sweatpants; Rodney couldn't fit any of John's jeans—and hustled him out the door. Outside, he bit his lip and stared at the police pool car, realizing he couldn't take it to the Area 51 guard-house. They'd have cameras filming every vehicle there, and he didn't want the car to be traced back to the precinct. Unlikely that he'd get in trouble just for taking Rodney out there, but they were already in Twilight Zone territory with this whole messed-up situation.

On the way to the department he asked a brooding Rodney if he'd found anything on the net.

Rodney's scowl deepened. "Apparently I've published. Mostly in astrophysics journals, with some engineering applications, but nothing at all in the last three years. It's good work, too, and what's more it made sense, unlike your cockamamie nonsense last night about wormholes and alternate dimensions. I can't figure out why I stopped publishing, though."

John shrugged. "I'm guessing working in another galaxy'd cramp your style, and from what you told me the program's not public so the science'd be classified as all get-out."

"Yet another reason why it's far-fetched bullshit of the type I'd never get myself into," Rodney snapped. "It's 'publish or perish' in the academic jungle; that's one fact of life I haven’t forgotten."

John left the car at the motor pool and led Rodney a couple of blocks further to his storage garage, where he retrieved the Harley. Rodney's eyes widened. "I can't ride on that!"

"Gonna have to if you want to try and get into Area 51—these're the only wheels I own." He got his helmet and the spare out of the panniers and made Rodney put his on, checking the chin-strap was adjusted right. "You'll be fine, Rodney. Just follow my lead and lean the way I do. It's centrifugal force, right? We gotta let the force be with us."

"Did you just make a Star Wars joke?" Rodney said accusingly, clambering awkwardly onto the bike and putting his feet where John directed. He clamped his arms around John's waist, hanging on like an oversized limpet. He only tried to lean the wrong way once, on the first corner, and John made him practice getting it right a couple times before they hit the open road. The last thing either of them needed was a real head injury.

It took about an hour to get to where Mercury Highway headed up into "no trespassers" territory. It branched off from Highway 95 which ran along the southern edge of the Nevada National Security Site surrounding Area 51. Once they turned north onto Mercury Highway the white-painted checkpoint wasn't much further along. John pulled up before the guards could wave him down and Rodney clambered down, complaining about his back, while John parked the bike and plastered an agreeable smile on his face.

"Hey there, corporal," he said to the soldier approaching them. "We need to talk to someone in authority about my friend here." John indicated Rodney, who was gawping around like he'd never seen a desert before—maybe he thought a bunch of aliens were going to pop out from behind the dusty sagebrush-covered hills. John kicked him in the shin and Rodney yelped and shot him a wounded glare.

His smile a little tighter, John tried again. "See, this is Dr. Rodney McKay, and he's a scientist who works at Area 51." John waved a hand vaguely at the dry, scrubby landscape beyond the checkpoint. "Problem is, he's lost his ID and, well, kinda lost his memory too, so we figure his colleagues in there are bound to be worried about him."

The soldier's face was a study in impassive disbelief. "This is a restricted security zone, sir. No civilians are allowed to enter."

"We don't have to enter, just if you could make a call and give one of the higher-ups in there his name. He's got security clearance, don't you, Rodney?"

"What?" Rodney turned back from peering at the other guard who was also kitted out in desert camo, rifle at the ready. "Oh, security clearance. Yes, I'm sure I do, I mean I must have." He looked up at the corporal, blue eyes wide. "So Area 51's real, then?"

The corporal lifted an eyebrow. "No, sir. This is an ordinary military security zone, a firing range for army exercises. That's why it's off-limits—it's not safe for civilians to wander about." He turned back to John. "I'm going to have to ask you gentlemen to leave now." He gave John a hard stare. "And no cameras, no matter what bunch of weirdo UFO-spotters you're reporting back to. I see a camera come out and it's history."

John debated getting Rodney to take off the helmet in case the guards knew him well if he'd driven in and out regularly. But he'd mostly worked in another galaxy, not here, and there were other access roads the scientists might have used. He shook his head and dragged Rodney back to the bike by one arm, then hustled him, complaining, back onto the pillion seat. He'd known it was going to be a bust and he didn't want to be any more humiliated or risk a complaint being made against him with the department, if he pushed the limits with the guards here and it came out he was a cop. He wondered if they'd bother checking the bike's registration. Probably not. He didn't think he and Rodney'd come off as any more than idiot alien-watchers, certainly not as a threat.

Rodney was mostly quiet as they retraced their steps, dropping off the Harley, walking back to the motor pool, and driving home. In the car as they pulled into the apartment building's parking lot, he finally stirred. "I guess that's that, then. If I can't talk to anyone at this Area 51 place I may never find out who I am." His mouth pulled down bleakly. "Who I was."

"It'll come back, buddy," John said, trying to keep uncertainty out of his voice. He wasn't the Pollyanna type, was the problem—it'd been a long time since he'd even tried to look on the bright side of anything. Working homicide didn't exactly help that.

"Maybe you could, I don't know, report me as a missing person?" Rodney said, as John unlocked the apartment. John stiffened, then opened the door and went through to the kitchen. He needed a beer.

He gave one to Rodney, took a long drink from his own bottle, and leaned against the counter. "Yeah, no. Look Rodney, with all this going on I,"—he circled his hand vaguely—"forgot to tell you. I'm a cop. A detective. Homicide Division, Las Vegas Municipal Police Department. You knew me as Detective Sheppard . . . before."

"Oh," Rodney said. He sat down in one of the chairs at the table. "Right. But why can’t you report me as missing?"

John lifted an eyebrow. "I can't do that when you're kind of the opposite. Plus, even if I bullshitted, what would I say? 'I have reason to believe Dr. Rodney McKay is missing from Area 51. Yes it does exist, but I can't tell you how I know. No I'm not his next of kin, or even a friend, and I've got no idea how long he's been gone, or what he was doing before he vanished. Or even what he was wearing. Possibly he was naked.'" Rodney winced and pulled a face. John nodded. "Yeah, and I also can't report you as having lost your memory 'cause that's not a police matter and all they'd say is 'take him to hospital'".

Rodney's mouth tightened. "I don't need–"

"Yeah, yeah," John said, coming over to sit at the table as well. "Heard you the first few times." He eyed Rodney consideringly, wondering what had happened to make him so leery of doctors and medicine in general. Maybe Pegasus was a dangerous place and he'd had his share of injuries? John didn't buy it—he'd seen more of Rodney than was prudent for someone who'd sworn off screwing guys, or, well, anyone, and there wasn't a scar on him. He sighed and finished his beer, getting up and snagging a second bottle from the fridge. "Want another?"

Rodney looked up, frowning slightly. "Um, no thanks. I'm still thirsty, though. Is there anything else to drink?"

John scanned the sparse contents of the fridge. "You want juice?"

"Yes, fine." Rodney gave a tired wave. "I'd rather keep what little remains of my faculties intact."

John tilted his head in acknowledgement, feeling kind of guilty at plying Rodney with booze when they still didn't know what'd caused the memory loss. He poured some orange juice into a glass and brought it over, sitting down and sliding the glass across the table top.

"Thanks," Rodney said, and took a long swallow. "What now?" he asked, looking up, the glass clasped between his hands. "I just wait and see?"

John shrugged, a little helplessly. "Yeah, I guess." He took a swig. "Treat it like a vacation."

Rodney looked around at the barely furnished apartment and raised a wry eyebrow. "Uh huh. So—I'm confined to quarters?"

"Well, no," John said, rubbing the back of his neck. "But just . . . you should play it safe. We've got no idea how this happened, and for all we know someone might've . . . y'know. Foul play. I got the impression you were an important guy."

Both Rodney's eyebrows shot up. "Really? You think someone did this to me? What, like sabotage, or, or terrorism or something?" he looked alarmed.

"I, not really," John said. "But, what with the aliens and weird science . . . hell, I don't know. But that's the point. We neither of us know a damn thing, not until your memory comes back."

"If," Rodney muttered morosely. He took another drink. "Well, at least you've got a laptop and an internet connection.

"Hey, John said, smirking." I've got an Xbox as well, and a set of weights."

Rodney snorted and finished his juice. "Like getting pointlessly sweaty is any kind of a vacation." He looked up, his grin shark-like. I'll take you on at Grand Theft Auto though, and at chess, if you've got a set."

Two hours of gaming later, John had to concede that whatever else had happened to Rodney's head, his hand-eye coordination was just fine.

~~~~~~

The days slid past and Rodney's memory was still elusive. John's weekdays were spent in the routine drudgery and drama of homicide investigations, while Rodney amused himself with John's laptop.

John came home one day to find the coffee table covered in sheets of paper filled with calculations and scribbled equations. One page had the symbols John had copied from his palm—Rodney'd been just as baffled by them as John was—rearranged in different sequences. It was covered with angry-looking question marks.

He looked at it all, brows raised until Rodney flailed a hand. "If I never remember, well, anything, I need to brush up on the physics I've missed in the last three years." He looked shifty. "I may have, er, found your credit card password and subscribed to a few on-line journals." He cowered back into the couch, as though expecting John to cuff him. "I'll pay it all back! I'm bound to have a truckload of cash in an account somewhere; I just haven't found it yet."

John shrugged, unbothered. "Hey, the money in that account was a handout from your secret squirrel employers so have at it. There's more there than I'll ever need."

Rodney seemed remarkably content pottering around the apartment and working on John's laptop. He took charge of the take-out menus and organized a pizza, Thai, Chinese or Mexican delivery whenever John got home, since neither of them could cook worth a damn except for breakfast. It was kind of nice, and weirdly domestic, having Rodney greet him at the end of a grueling or tedious day's work. John had to bite back the urge to chirp "Hi, honey, I'm home!" as he came through the door.

A few weeks after Rodney'd appeared in his shower stall, John arrived home to find him going through the contents of the case file box he'd brought home and forgotten about, what with everything that had happened. It wasn't like he needed something to occupy him in the evenings now. He had Rodney to rib and argue cheerfully with about bad movies and TV, Rodney to defeat at Bionic Commandos on Xbox, Rodney's egg rolls and French fries to steal, to the accompaniment of loud protests.

"Whatcha doing?" John asked, curious. The files were supposed to be confidential, of course, but they were all effectively cold cases by now with no new leads to follow, and Rodney was good at keeping secrets.

"Oh, I hope you don't mind?" Rodney flicked a hand at the file box. "I got bored with the idiocies my so-called peers are publishing in what are laughably misnamed scientific journals, so I found this and decided to look it over. I gather the cases were never solved?"

John got a beer then returned, easing himself down into a bean-bag. "Nope. They're not even officially linked, but I had this hunch . . ." He shrugged. "I've got no proof that they're serial crimes, though. All four women were murdered using different methods and there's no correlation in where they were found, or any other connecting factor. The deaths aren't even close together in time, spread out over five years."

"Hmmm," Rodney said. "Well, if you don't mind, I'll keep thinking about it. It's a worthier task than grappling with the dog's breakfast my ex-colleagues are making of theoretical physics."

"Knock yourself out," John said, getting up to answer the door and pay the delivery guy from Mr Wong's Happy Noodle House.

~~~~~~

"You were right," Rodney said a week later, after they'd polished off a container of nachos between them.

"I was? About what?" John licked sour cream off his fingers and sat back on the couch.

"Those cases. There's definitely a link."

"You got a hunch as well?"

Rodney snorted. "Hardly. No, I wrote an algorithm and fed every scrap of data about each case into it. The results prove conclusively that they're linked."

John grimaced. "Good to know, but the DA's office aren't gonna prosecute someone on a mathematical proof, they'll want the real thing."

"Peasants," Rodney said dismissively. "Anyway, I can tell you the likely culprit, so presumably you can get the proof you need, once you know. I gather that's what detectives do? Gather evidence?"

"Yeah, when we aren't planting it," John said with a smirk, but his heart was beating faster. Rodney'd figured out who'd killed those women?

"It was the first victim's boyfriend." Rodney spread his hands. "Trite and obvious, I know, but Occam's Razor and all that."

John sat forward, frowning. "What, the guy called Brett? The one she met at her Computer Studies class? But he was the first one we looked at. He had a cast iron alibi."

"Not so cast iron if he's a hacker," Rodney said. "He doctored the phone company records of his calls and added false data to your system so it looked like he'd been pulled over on a speeding violation across town at the time of the murder."

"But we interviewed the officer from Traffic who gave him that ticket," John said, shaking his head. "He confirmed it, and ID'd the guy from a mugshot spread."

Rodney shrugged. "Brett picked a busy time to kill her, knowing the officer'd be dishing out tickets left right and center and wouldn't recall the time exactly. I bet he arranged it so he got the ticket before he went to her apartment, then later hacked the LVMPD records to change the time so it looked like he couldn't have been in two places at once."

"But there'll be a paper copy in the system," John said. "So unless he's got an accomplice inside the Department—and for Christ's sake don't tell me he has, 'cause I'm persona non grata as it is so accusing one of our own's the last thing I–"

"No, no," Rodney said. "Jeez, calm down. No accomplice, because no paper copy."

"But there's always–"

"Not this time. Brett met her at her college class, but he wasn't a student. I imagine he used the class to stalk potential victims but he already worked for an IT company. I tracked the details down on-line, and his job's mentioned in the investigation files but no one realized what it meant." Rodney leaned forward as well. "Back then, the LVMPD was trialing an experimental paperless system for recording moving violations. The officers had PDAs they entered the citation into and it was all uploaded at the end of their shift, into the department's mainframe. In the end, the system had some bugs and the LVMPD put it on hold and didn't purchase it, but it was in operation at the time of the murder." Rodney lifted a finger. "And before you say that's a hell of a handy coincidence for old Brett, it was no such thing. He was one of the IT staff who installed the trial system so he knew all about it, and he'd have left himself plenty of back doors to access it." He sat back again. "It's the same with the later cases—there's always some system or network that's most likely been tampered with or hacked into, to cover his tracks." Rodney laced his fingers together and cracked the knuckles, looking smug. "The traces are there, though, for an expert to find."

"Christ, Rodney, this is . . ." John rubbed his face, disbelieving. "You really think we can get proof this guy killed them all?"

"I can show you the traces of his hacking—there's some of that—but judges and juries don't much like highly technical data, do they?"

"Nah," John said glumly. "They'd see it as circumstantial, even if you thought it was pretty clear-cut. Juries tend to zone out with that kind of stuff."

"Yes, but you have to do something, and quickly. He's a serial killer, John, and after they kill the first time they find it harder to resist, so the time between victims gets shorter."

John bit his lip, feeling guilty. It was why he'd brought the file box home. He'd calculated the frequency and he reckoned the killer would strike again in the next three months. Then a naked man had turned up, and had turned into Rodney, his take-out, TV and gaming buddy, hell, his roommate, and he'd kind of gotten side-tracked. He looked over at Rodney. "I know that; I've done a profiling course. But how do you know about it?"

Rodney raised his eyebrows. "Hello, genius here? Also, a bored, underemployed genius who could run rings around your average serial killer hacker without breaking a sweat. I looked it up on-line, of course, read a few texts, some articles."

"More credit card charges?" John asked, and Rodney looked furtive again. John grinned. He didn't give a shit about that, not if Rodney'd cracked the damn case.

Rodney coughed. "Anyway, I may be able to help with the 'more proof needed' aspect as well. I figured it was only fair to give Brett a taste of his own medicine, so I tracked him down and I've been stalking him."

John felt a spike of alarm—what in hell had Rodney gotten up to during the days when John was at work? Other than breaking every data-privacy law in existence.

"Hey, whoa, don't bust a blood vessel," Rodney said, waving his hands placatingly. "I meant on-line. I've been stalking him electronically and he's still here in Vegas, still ostensibly working in the IT field, and—wait for it—he's taken up taxidermy, specialising in dear departed pets." He eyed John, grinning. "Which means?"

"Which means," John said slowly, as it dawned on him, "that he's got a workshop somewhere, and I'm betting it's a lockup."

"Give the man a round of applause," Rodney said, looking impossibly smug. "I've even got the address."

"Oh man, Rodney, I could kiss you!" John crowed, because they were going to nail this murderous fucking bastard and stop him killing anyone else. He realized what he'd said. "Er, that is . . ."

"Turn of phrase," Rodney said, looking away and waving it off, pink-cheeked but smiling.

John's ears felt almost as flushed as Rodney's face and he had to haul himself up and go get some celebratory beers from the kitchen or he might just have showed Rodney that it was a hell of a lot more than a verbal slip.

~~~~~~

Captain Hendricks scowled down at Rodney who was confined to John's car for the duration of the op. Rodney had the passenger window rolled down and was looking up, wide-eyed.

"So, what, he's a Fed?" Hendricks asked, glowering. "I know you're a lone wolf, Sheppard, but you don't bring the Feds in without running it past me."

John left off adjusting his tac vest and shook his head. "He's a profiler, Captain, an independent consultant. He's not a Fed."

"More like Sherlock Holmes," Rodney suggested, ignoring the desperate zip-it signs John was making behind Hendricks's back. "A independent consulting genius."

John closed his eyes and counted to five. "He did crack the case, sir," he tried. "I figure we owe him something."

"Goddamned civilians," Hendricks muttered. He glared at John. "I'll be talking to you later. And you." He glared down at Rodney again. "You don't move. Stay in the damn car and wind that window up." Rodney rolled his eyes, but complied.

The lock-ups were on the edge of town, nothing but scrubby desert beyond them. The main strike force was going in the front way while John and Schmidt, a detective from Vice, covered the rear. John headed off after Hendricks, then turned to glance back at the car. Rodney made complicated and incomprehensible hand signals through the window at him and John screwed up his face and mouthed what? at him. Then he had to peel off to duck down a side-alley through to the back of the row of garages. He and Schmidt positioned themselves in the scanty cover offered by the slightly inset doors of the neighboring units, and waited, weapons at the ready. Most likely Brett wouldn't be there: it must be stupidly hot in the daytime.

He distantly heard Hendricks shouting to announce them and demand entry, then some banging, more demands, and finally Hendricks executed the search warrant and had someone smash the padlock off the door.

There was no warning. The back door slammed open and a man, dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, lurched out and pelted toward Schmidt. "Stop or I'll shoot!" Schmidt yelled, but before John could cry a warning, the guy pulled a gun from the front pocket of his hoodie and dived for Schmidt's legs. Schmidt's bullet sped uselessly over his head and they were down, rolling, while John cursed and ran for all he was worth, but too late, goddamn it, the bastard had discharged his gun at Schmidt, knocking him flat, and was now scrambling up again. John didn't waste time with a warning, fuck that, he just aimed, two-handed, and shot the fucker in the knee. The man sprawled in the dust, sobbing and clutching his leg.

John fell to his knees by Schmidt, but thank fuck, the vest had absorbed the bullet. Schmidt was winded and bruised, but he'd be okay. John heard the pounding of feet up the side-alley, and looked up as the back door burst open, smashed almost off its hinges. He didn't see the shot that grazed his side, slicing through his uniform and gouging a red-hot path through skin and muscle. As he fell, cursing, he saw the bastard, gun back in his hand, go down under four officers, yelling abuse. So much for that bullshit about IT types being quiet and geeky.

~~~~~~

"Just a flesh wound?" Rodney hissed, waving his hands. "You were shot, Sheppard! You almost died!"

He'd insisted on coming to the hospital, had harangued the frazzled ED staff and generally been impossible since he'd found out John was wounded in the arrest. If he hadn't been so obviously shaken, John would have told him to shut the fuck up, but whenever Rodney'd slowed down a little John had seen the way his hands were shaking. They were back in the apartment now, John's midriff wrapped in bandages, the pain a dull burn, muffled by heavy-duty pain-killers.

"Rodney," John said, easing himself down on the couch. Rodney fussed with the cushions and muttered darkly about lunatic detectives putting themselves in harm's way. John repeated it more firmly, putting a hand on his arm. "Rodney. This's nothing, compared to . . ." he broke off, grimacing. He'd told Rodney about the shoot-out with the Wraith, but not how bad it'd been. Not that he'd damn near died.

He tried again, "Look, Rodney, I know it's tough with the amnesia an' all. Must've freaked you out to think I might not be around, since you can't remember anyone else." He paused for a second. "Well, or me either, really, but I guess you've had more time to–"

"Oh my god, will you shut up!" Rodney almost shouted, on his knees beside the couch, adjusting a pillow behind John's back to prop him in place and take pressure off his wounded side.

John blinked up at him, squinting through the pain meds. " 's okay, I underst–"

"No, you really really don't," Rodney said desperately, rocking back on his heels and swiping an arm across his face. He looked wrecked and his eyes were suspiciously shiny. Rodney's eyes were pretty, John thought dreamily, a pretty slate blue.

"Y'got nice eyes," John said, then, "Sorry, 'nother turn of phrase. Slipped out. Think I'm kinda high."

"Jesus, our timing's terrible," Rodney groaned, looking up at the ceiling. His mouth was tight and pulled down at one side and John wanted to stroke it and smooth the droop away, but he didn’t think his arms still worked, what with the meds. Rodney looked back down at John, "First I lose my memory and you treat me like an invalid, and now you're bombed out on vicodin after getting yourself shot."

"You've still lost your memory," John pointed out helpfully.

"Yes, thank you for that reminder," Rodney snapped.

Something was bothering John, apart from the ache in his side and how worried Rodney looked. Oh yeah—that was it. "What'd you mean about our timing being off?"

Rodney looked resigned, then his jaw firmed up and he got a reckless, 'do or die' expression. "Our timing in terms of doing this," he said, and leaned in to kiss John.

John's arms really didn't work but he managed pretty well with just his mouth, and Rodney stroked his hair, which he liked a lot. When they broke off the kiss, John felt a sappy grin spreading across his face, and Rodney looked flushed and a lot less droopy. "Jus', hold that thought," John said, because his arms weren't the only thing not working on account of the pain meds. "I'm just gonna have a lil nap, then I'm gonna take y'up on that offer." He yawned hugely and Rodney tilted his head, regarding him with a wry, fond expression.

"Rain check," John said sleepily, which was a damn fool expression to use in Vegas, now he thought about it.

Then he didn't think about anything at all.

~~~~~~

Rodney was skittish the next day, and it wasn't helped by John's aching side, or by waking with his mouth dry and tasting like a dumpster. He swore off the heavy pain killers and got by on nurofen, feeling more human after coffee, even if breakfast didn't appeal.

"Suit yourself," Rodney said snippily. He was also stubbly and still in his sleep clothes, determinedly working his way through a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon. "Although how you're going to heal up if you're starving yourself, I have no idea." He kept shooting nervous glances across the table, as though John were a wild animal.

"Not gonna bite, Rodney," John finally said, annoyed, then, realizing what Rodney might be worried about—well, one of many things, since Rodney multitasked worries like he did everything else—"I can remember what happened yesterday, y'know. The meds weren't that heavy."

"Ah," Rodney said, staring into his coffee. "Yes, about that. I'm sorry."

John's heart sank. He forced the words out, staring into his own coffee. " 'bout what?"

Rodney made a frustrated gesture. "Taking advantage of you of course, when you were . . . not fully yourself."

"I was enough myself to know what was what," John said stubbornly. "But it's me who was taking advantage."

"I kissed you first!" Rodney said hotly, cheeks flushed.

"Yeah, but you still don't remember who you are," John retorted, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "Who knows if you'd still want to kiss me if you were . . . yourself."

"I'm perfectly myself, thank you very much," Rodney said angrily. "And I'll bet when we first met I wanted to kiss you then, too!"

John pushed his chair back roughly and lurched up, turning away to lean heavily on the counter. His bullet graze burned from the sudden movement and he tried to steady his breathing. "Nah," he said after a while, turning to face the music, "you wanted to kiss him."

Rodney's face was thunderous, Hs arms crossed. "Him? What him?"

"The other John Sheppard." John shrugged. "You'd met one from another dimension, another reality or something. Real hero type, a team leader."

Rodney threw up his hands. "I don't believe it! You're feeling inferior to a version of yourself that doesn’t exist in this universe, and a version that this me, what with the amnesia, hasn't even met! Don't you see that what I feel for you now, here, is all about you? It's got nothing to do with your imaginary doppelganger."

Rodney strode around the table and crowded John back against the counter. "And this me, here in your kitchen, wants to kiss you." The anger drained out of his face. "What are we even fighting about?"

"Beats me," John said, licking his lips and staring at Rodney's mouth, and he put his hands on Rodney's shoulders, and bent his head.

~~~~~~

Rodney was gentle and exploratory, gentler than John wanted, because, Christ, John wanted. " 'm not gonna break," he muttered, once they'd eased up and he'd caught his breath.

"You're already broken," Rodney said with some asperity, which, Jesus, pot, kettle.

It took a few more kisses with John whining a little, tugging on Rodney and steering him clumsily, to get them into the bedroom, but finally they were horizontal.

Rodney's hand fluttered anxiously over his wounded side. "Look, I, I don't want to hurt you. Maybe we should postpone this until you've recov–"

"McKay," John groaned, "if you don't get your hands on my dick in the next few seconds, I'm not gonna be the only one with an injury!"

"Charming!" Rodney retorted. "And they say romance is dead." But he pushed down John's pants and his own, gathered both of them up in his big, clever hand, and somehow managed to brace them with a leg between John's thighs so they didn't topple over while he jerked them both off, which the half brain-cell John had to spare that wasn't given over to variations on moregoodpleasenow registered as actually kind of impressive. Rodney came first, but he was a good sport and didn't pull away and leave John's cock lonely, instead using the slickness splashed over his fingers to reduce John to a shuddering, jerking mess in his turn.

Rodney went to the bathroom to get a washcloth and clean them up and John stared dreamily after him. Rodney's ass was every bit as great as he'd hoped. He couldn't wait to get his mouth on it and see what kind of noises he could get Rodney to make. He figured they'd be spectacular.

After Rodney'd come back to bed and John had draped himself over him so as to brace his side and not at all so as to cuddle, he nuzzled into Rodney. "Love your ass. 'm gonna nail it."

Rodney snorted. "Seriously, you should write for Hallmark."

"Roses're red, violets're blue, you're full of sass, 'm gonna nail your ass" John muttered into Rodney's neck.

"Oh my god, you've probably got a wound infection," Rodney said, laughing and feeling John's forehead. John butted into his hand like a cat. "That or hypoglycemia."

~~~~~~

John was busy with work, new cases as well as the wrap-up with Brett the serial hacker. They'd found souvenirs and other damning evidence in the lock-up so the DA's office had taken the case over. It was probably just as well John had work to occupy him, as he was under no illusions about his track-record with relationships. Even so, he spent as much time with Rodney as possible, enjoying this new thing growing between them every second his work permitted.

There was actually less nailing than he'd fantasized about, and more kissing. John found he liked that. There was also a lot of touching, and sleeping curled around each other was John's new favorite thing. John got his mouth on Rodney's ass whenever he wanted and memories of Rodney's cock filling his mouth and trembling on his tongue had him daydreaming at his desk during the day or slipping off to the men's room to jerk off surreptitiously.

John knew it couldn't last, knew that if something else didn't fuck it up he'd most likely fuck it up himself, and sure enough, a few weeks later he got a call from Rodney just as he was wrapping up his paperwork for the day.

"John?" Rodney's voice was tremulous, and John was instantly alert and on his feet. "I need to see you. Now. Will you be home soon?"

He took the Harley, heart racing, needing the rush of wind and the speed to distract him from the fear. He left the bike outside, for once not worrying about it being stolen, and pounded up the stairs, too wired for the elevator.

"What?" he demanded, breathless, after bursting in the door. He grabbed Rodney and checked him over, but Rodney was fine, he was okay, not a scratch on him. A little pale and freaked out-looking maybe, but he wasn't–

"It came back," Rodney said heavily. Then his face crumpled and his eyes filled, and he stumbled into John's arms. "John, it came back!"

John didn't know what to do. He patted Rodney awkwardly on the back. "But, that's a good thing, yeah?"

"Yes, no . . . it's complicated," Rodney said wiping his eyes on his sleeve. He looked up at John. "You'd better sit down."

John felt something give way inside him and moved toward the kitchen on autopilot. "I can tell I'm gonna need a beer."

"No beer," Rodney said, quietly implacable. "You'll be driving. Get a coffee—it's going to be a long night."

~~~~~~

John's head was spinning with all Rodney'd told him. About the armada of Hive ships filled with Wraith that had besieged Atlantis—which was a whole alien city, Jesus. Rodney'd only mentioned Atlantis in passing the first time he'd done the show and tell, and John'd maybe thought it was a fancifully code-named base or something. But no, it was a floating alien city-ship, for fuck's sake. The aliens who built the city had fled from the Wraith millennia ago, and Rodney was close to tears again, explaining that he wouldn't run away like them, but he hadn't been able to save her.

"We just didn't have the power," he said, spreading his hands helplessly. "Not enough power in the ZPMs to run the shield against a full-out bombardment for more than a few days, barely enough to achieve lift-off and low orbit,"—it was a fucking space ship?—"and certainly not enough power to fire up the hyperdrive." Rodney shook his head. "By the time we realized how many Wraith ships there were—they just kept coming, John, more Hives appearing at the edge of the long-range sensors every few hours—well, we realized we didn't have enough power any more to dial back to Earth and evacuate. Not if we were going to maintain the shield long enough to download as much as we could from the database, to save all our research, all that knowledge. We were scientists. We'd sweated blood for that data—people had died for it. We couldn't abandon it and run, and we couldn't submerge the city, either."

John blinked, dazed. It was a submarine as well? "Not enough power," he said.

Rodney nodded. "We couldn't leave Atlantis for the Wraith, though. That's what they were really after, a way to the feeding ground of Earth, all these billions of lives." He swept an all-encompassing arm out. "The city had to be destroyed, and by that I mean vaporized, so they couldn't salvage anything." He turned and caught John's eyes, intent. "It was the last chance, you see, the last hurrah. We'd chosen to stay, we'd chosen Pegasus, but there wasn't much future with Pegasus full of Hive ships. And the Wraith were hungry and desperate, so they'd formed this huge alliance to overwhelm the city and get through to Earth. Most of the Hives in the galaxy were bearing down on us; we'd never get an opportunity like it again."

He slumped down beside John on the couch. "There were only a few of us where the gene therapy'd worked well enough so we could fly her,"—gene therapy?—"and Lorne volunteered." Rodney laughed hollowly, "Hell, he insisted, being military and a pilot. But I knew the timing would be crucial and it was going to need last-minute calculations. He insisted I program them in, and I pretended to. I think Radek knew, or at least he knew it couldn't be done. He left his best bottle of vodka on the console."

Rodney smiled, remembering, and John was suddenly, irrationally jealous of all these people Rodney'd known and lived with for years. Rodney'd been his until all this, but now John had lost him. It was petty and selfish, and John felt ashamed, but it was all going to shit, the disaster of his life unraveling as surely as Rodney's story.

"What'd you do?" John could hear the foreboding in his voice.

Rodney shrugged. "It fell apart, toward the end. The Athosians had gated through to the city, but one Hive attacked the alpha site—our back-up, we were going to evacuate there. Most of the alpha site personnel made it to Atlantis, but we'd lost our evac plan. Ronon—I mentioned him, I think, he was on my team?—was a Pegasus native and he'd been a Runner. That's . . . never mind, it doesn’t matter, but it meant he'd been to a whole lot of worlds. Anyway, Ronon started dialing, shouting that it was a safe place where the Wraith didn't go. Uninhabited, full of caves. So they went. They took all the pallets and jam-packed gateships and they went on through. As the last group left, Ronon pulled me aside before he joined them. 'It's uninhabited 'cause the DHD's busted, McKay,' he said. 'I only got off last time when the Travelers put down to load up on water, but they hardly ever do. You gotta tell Earth to come get us.'"

John screwed up his face. Athosians? Runners? Travelers? And what was a DHD? "But you had no power to get through to Earth," he said uncertainly.

Rodney got up and paced to and fro, waving his hands. "No, no, I could have done it. A high compression databurst takes very little power. Ronon scribbled the dialing sequence on my hand before he stepped through—the, the address, for where they'd all gone. He looked meaningfully at John.

John sat up. "Oh, hey, those weird symbols on your hand!” He thought some more. “But what about that Lorne guy, I thought he was–

"Yes, he was there standing guard, but it got chaotic fast after that. The shield was weakening, Wraith were starting to beam down into the city—we could see them on the life signs detector gathering on the piers, ready to attack. He had to get to the Chair room—you remember the Chair?" John nodded. "Atlantis had one the same; it was the pilot seat for the city. Lorne was yelling, dragging me to the Stargate while I tried to tell him I had to send the databurst. But he just said protecting Earth took priority, so in the end I slugged him."

"You what?" John tried not to look too sceptical. "But he was military, and you're–"

"Not. Yes I'm very well aware," Rodney said, annoyed. "People underestimate how fit you need to be to crawl all over a sprawling ancient city hitting things with giant spanners. I probably covered more ground in a day than any of the Marines on patrol, but just because I didn't choose to run pointlessly on a treadmill or lift weights . . . Anyway, it took Lorne completely by surprise when I whacked him with my laptop case and knocked him through the event horizon. He never saw it coming." Rodney stuck his chin out belligerently. "He was the military commander; they were going to need him."

John raised his hands placatingly, shaking his head. "Okay, fine, you're a badass. So what, then you had to fly the city?"

"I barely made it to the Chair room. Locked myself in there just ahead of the Wraith, and they started trying to break the door down. Ancient alloys, though, they're very tough. I'd fried the Control room consoles so I knew it'd take them hours to get into the database and I figured I'd use the Chair to send the databurst. I hadn't realized the Wraith'd developed a portable DHD - a way to dial the gate. The moment they reached the Control room they dialed out to a Wraith world and tied up the Stargate so I couldn’t send it." Rodney shook his head and looked away, out the window. "Guess they thought they'd feast on any survivors trapped in the city, but there was only me."

He turned back and stared at John, who was leaning forward, riveted. "So I fired up the star drive—and Christ but it was touch and go; there very nearly wasn't enough power—but finally she lifted, well, lurched up in fits and starts, and we were airborne. I couldn't take her too far, couldn't use the hyperdrive at all, and the shield was down so she wasn't spaceworthy." He stopped and grinned savagely. "I was okay—the Chair room was airtight—but all the Wraith in the city died as soon as we left atmosphere. I like to think their self-healing abilities prolonged the agony of exposure to vacuum." He shook himself out of vindictive reminiscence. "Anyway, the Wraith in the Hives didn't want to destroy the city either. They wanted her mostly intact, so as to access the database and get Earth's address. So I led them on a merry chase around the planet in low orbit, not really trying to get away, and they clustered around Atlantis like vultures around a dying wildebeest."

Rodney came over and sat down again. "They're tribal, you see, the different Hives don't trust each other, so they were jostling to be in at the kill." He shot John a glance. "I was counting on that."

"You planned to blow her up and take the Wraith with you?"

Rodney nodded. "The self-destruct would trigger the Stargate itself to explode, and naquadah—what the gates are made of—explodes almost with the force of a small sun."

John frowned, confused. "But then how did you escape?"

Rodney's smile was bittersweet. "I didn't."

John leaned over and poked him in the leg. "Kind of corporeal there, buddy. Never heard of a ghost giving blow jobs." He raised his eyebrows.

Rodney sighed. "I never told you about ascension, did I?"

John frowned. "That some astronomy thing, with flying the city?"

Rodney's eyes were wide and dark blue. "No, it's not."

~~~~~~

Two hours later they were on the road back to the Area 51 checkpoint. John tried not to think about this being the last time Rodney would hold him, tried not to imagine a different motivation in Rodney's desperate grip, clutching John to him like a shield against the world. This was Rodney's show now, and there was fuck all John could do except take him where he was needed.

Despite the late hour, it went very differently this time at the checkpoint. The corporal was the same, but Rodney turned into McKay again, eyes flashing, snapping demands, giving precise names and ranks of the people he wanted contacted and threatening the guards with dire consequences if they delayed. He commandeered the guard-house phone to shout at various "idiots" and "imbeciles". It was quite a performance and if John mourned Rodney, watching McKay bludgeon his way through the layers of military bureaucracy, he kept that to himself.

Finally, a jeep pulled up driven by a hard-eyed Marine sergeant, and a short, balding man clambered out into the pool of light around the guard house, wiping dust from his glasses. His jaw dropped when he saw them, then his face creased in a smile. "Rodney! But we thought you were lost or dead. There was no trace of the city, and we haven't heard–"

The sergeant raised a hand. "No, Dr. Lee. This man's identity needs to be verified first. Can you attest that he at least appears to be Dr. McKay?"

"Oh, goodness yes, certainly I can–"

"Chop chop, Bill, let's get cracking," Rodney said impatiently. "Without wanting to sound overly dramatic, the fate of the Galaxy may be at stake. The Pegasus Galaxy, that is. Did someone get Landry out of bed? I need to speak to him pronto."

The sergeant tried to herd John away, but Rodney was having none of it, grabbing his arm. "He's with me, and he's already read in, so back off."

John was hustled into the jeep alongside Rodney and Lee, and they drove off with him craning around, staring anxiously back as his bike receded, forlorn in the checkpoint's floodlights.

"The SGC will take care of it," Rodney said. John tried to feel reassured, but what the fuck did that mean, and what else were they going to 'take care of'? John himself?

At the Area 51 compound a security detail fell in around them and escorted them to an infirmary to be scanned head to foot, and to have blood drawn. Rodney complained loudly, berating the staff, none of whom John recognized. John figured Rodney was most likely scared, and this was how he handled it. As soon as they'd finished with him he came and sat beside Rodney on the examination couch and knocked his foot against Rodney's.

"Enough with draining us dry, you bloodsuckers," Rodney muttered, but he was a lot less strident.

"The tests are complete for now, Dr. McKay." It was a new Asian doctor with a sheaf of results.

"Lam," Rodney said. "Finally, someone marginally less moronic than this pack of bone-waving leeches."

"Charmed to see you too, Rodney," she said, tilting her head sardonically. "Well, you’re not clones or replicators, or from an alternate dimension,"—they could test for that?—"and you’re not Goa’uld hosts." She glanced up at John. "Detective Sheppard checks out fine other than a more recent, healing bullet graze. The old injuries we're already aware of."  She narrowed her eyes at Rodney. "But I have a question for you, Dr. McKay. Where are your scars? You took an arrow in the ass, a bullet through your left calf, and the forearm knife scar from Kolya’s torture’s gone as well."—torture?—"We monitor the last few sarcophagi, and you haven’t been near them."

Rodney looked smug. "I’ve got two words for you: 'Daniel Jackson'. Oh, and apparently de-ascending clears up life-threatening citrus allergies as well as scars, which, let me tell you, is a huge relief."

John bit his lip, still weirded out by this ascension thing Rodney claimed had happened to him. It was like being beamed up, then down, without the Starship Enterprise in between. The main thing that freaked him out though, was that Rodney had turned up in John's shower stall, out of all the places he could have de-ascended. Hell, he could have turned up in the middle of the SGC and saved himself a whole lot of hassle. Why me? John thought. Had he chosen John? Had someone else sent him there?

His questions didn't get answered in the next few hours during which they were hustled from one meeting to the next. Some featured Bill Lee and other scientists and rapidly devolved into technobabble with them all talking across each other. Rodney usually won. At least John could sneak a nap in those. The meetings with the military on the other hand, one via video-conference to the SGC in Colorado, kept John on edge, always waiting for someone to dredge up his not-so-stellar past. It was uncomfortably like having to hang out with your ex-wife when the marriage had ended badly.

John was napping with his legs kicked up on another chair when he was finally shaken awake. "C'mon. We're going home." John tried to ignore the burst of warmth in his chest whenever Rodney called the apartment home.

"Home?" He blinked up at Rodney who he figured was running on pure caffeine by now, with all the coffee he'd demanded various minions make so he could yammer louder than anyone. "You're not staying here?"

Rodney rolled his eyes. "Yes, because a rock-hard military cot is exactly where I want to spend the rest of the night." He looked at his watch. "Not that there's much night left." He frowned at John. "Will you be all right to drive?"

John rose and stretched, exaggerating it a bit when he caught Rodney ogling his ass. "Yeah. Caught a few zzzs in the boring bits."

Rodney crossed his arms and stuck out his jaw. "Right, because the destruction of Atlantis, the stranding and abandonment of the entire expedition in Pegasus, and me ascending and de-ascending is such a yawn."

"Is when you're hearing it for the fiftieth time." John muttered, but he'd seen the flash of hurt in Rodney's eyes. He reached out and squeezed Rodney's shoulder. " 'm sorry, buddy. Sorry you had to go through that, with losing the city and all. She was really something, huh?"

"Yeah, she really was," Rodney said softly, looking sad.

The sergeant from the jeep turned up to card them through a bunch of locked doors, then they were back in the noisy jeep. John's bike was right where he'd left it and the ride back to Vegas cleared his head a little, filling it with speed and rushing wind. Rodney was a heavy weight at his back and John thought he'd probably fallen asleep with his arms clamped on tight, which meant he was beyond tired. It was touching in a way John didn't want to examine.

They finally fell into bed and Rodney was out like a light the moment his head touched the pillow. John lay on his side, staring at him. A big day, remembering all that and then having to convince everyone at Area 51 about it: no wonder he was exhausted.

John had caught enough of the meetings to know Rodney'd demanded a rescue mission using the Daedalus, which was apparently another space ship, but Earth-built. John figured it'd happen, that Rodney would make it happen, and he knew Rodney would go on the mission.

Well, hell, he'd already known this wouldn't last.

He shut his eyes and tried to sleep.

~~~~~~

For once, Rodney was up first, and John woke to the smell of coffee and frying bacon. He'd only managed a couple hours sleep, so he blew off his morning run and joined Rodney at the table.

"You gotta head back there today?" he asked, wiping up the last of a fried egg with some toast.

"Not today," Rodney said, yawning. "The SGC will pull the mission together but not for a few days. I'll head in tomorrow." Rodney frowned. "It'll take me a while just to fix the gateship Bill Lee's been dismantling." He shook his head in disgust. "He may not have the gene, but that's no reason to be wantonly destructive. I want that gateship on the Daedalus when she leaves."

John studiously ignored the part about the Daedalus leaving. He drank some coffee and squinted at Rodney. "Gateship?"

"A small spaceship designed to go through the Stargate." Rodney waved a hand. "Some planets have space gates in orbit around them."

John stopped with his mug half-raised. "What, you mean someone could dial one of those places and step through into vacuum?"

Rodney nodded. "Yeah, the Ancients were seriously whacked, and they left all sorts of dangerous stuff lying about. Ronon once told me random-dialing the gate was something a few people in Pegasus did when their family'd been culled and they didn't want to live. That or stand in the backsplash zone."

"Christ," John said, feeling sick. He looked away. There was a small device of some sort lying on the end of the table. He leaned over and peered at it but the screen was dark.

"I stole that from Bill," Rodney said casually. "I mean, he can't use it. It's a scanner that detects people, or any living thing of a certain size, actually."

"Huh," John said, curious. "That'd come in handy when we're going in hot with a SWAT team." He reached over and picked it up. The screen lit, showing two glowing dots close together in a wire-frame diagram of the kitchen. He grinned. "Cool." He waved it around a little but nothing changed. He looked up at Rodney, who was watching him with a complex and slightly vindicated expression. "What about everyone else in the apartments?"

"It's only calibrated to show this one."

John looked down again. "Oh, wait," he said. "No, look at that, there everyone is." The screen had gained depth, like a 3D rendering. In the more detailed wire-frame image of the entire block, a handful of dots hovered or moved around. Most residents were at work, of course. "Wonder which of them is us," John murmured, fascinated, and two of the dots started blinking. John laughed. "Wow. It's like it read my mind."

He looked up to find Rodney staring at him, open-mouthed. "What?" John asked, slightly panicked. "What is it?" Rodney made a strangled noise.

John looked guiltily down at the scanner and wished he hadn't activated it. It immediately went dark. He put it down on the table and pushed it away gingerly with one finger. "Sorry. Hope I didn't break it."

"Holy fuck," Rodney whispered, still staring at him. It made John squirm. "Let me get this right. In under a minute, you activated the Life Signs Detector, reprogrammed it to extend its range, tweaked it to differentiate us from the other building occupants, and deactivated it. And all with your mind."

"Huh," John said, scowling at the sneaky mind-reading detector-thingy. "It can do that?"

"Not for most of us," Rodney said, sounding peeved. "I can turn it on but then I have to manually program the functions." He shook his head. "I figured all Sheppards must have the gene to some degree, but this . . . I've never heard of a gene this strong."

So then John had to sit through a whole ATA-gene-101 spiel, and thank Christ Rodney didn't have a PowerPoint as well. Finally he got impatient. "Okay, okay, I'm a genetic whizz-kid or a mutant freak or something, I get it. Not gonna do me a whole lot of good at the LVMPD though, right?" He tilted his head at the scanner. "Unless the SGC'll loan me that thing." He made a face. "Or they might be pissed I messed with it, but how was I to know it was made by aliens?" He glowered across the table at Rodney who'd totally set him up, the bastard.

Rodney looked back at him, brows drawn together. "I don't think you understand how big this is, John. The SGC aren't going to reprimand you, they're going to recruit you. Being able to operate ancient tech's a huge deal, enormous. Bill Lee will be dying for you to come in and play light switch with his cache of ancient artifacts. Besides, don't you want to fly a gateship?"

John bit his lip. Maybe, but he'd left flying back in the desert with the failed mission and all those deaths he'd caused. He didn't want any part of the military anymore and he knew they didn't want him. He let some of the anger seep into his voice. "I'm a cop now, Rodney. This SGC set-up's mostly military, right?" That Landry guy was a general; John had seen the stars. He stared down at his hands, clenched around his mug. "I barely missed being court-martialed after Afghanistan. They covered up the mess back then due to some political bullshit, but the SGC sure as hell won't want me."

"They will, and the expedition's civilian, with military back-up." Rodney regarded him steadily. "John, they need you. Not having enough people who could operate the ancient equipment and technology was the main reason the mission failed last time."

"Thought that was the Wraith," John muttered. He wasn't at all keen to get up close and personal with a whole lot more of those fuckers.

"Well, yes, but we never really unlocked all the city's defensive functions, or the Chair itself. Lorne's natural gene is stronger than my gene-therapy version, but it's nothing like yours."

"All the SGC are gonna do is head on out there, find your buddies and bring 'em all home," John said. He'd flown plenty of rescue missions; he knew how it worked.

"Not if I have anything to do with it," Rodney said angrily. "And most of the others will want to stay as well."

"Rodney, they won't let you," John said, because for all his smarts, Rodney could be blind when he didn't want to see. "You might've killed a bunch of Wraith, but you didn't kill them all. And without the city, what're you gonna do? Live in those caves?" John shook his head.

"What if there was another Atlantis?" Rodney had a glint in his eye.

"Another one?" John couldn't tell if he was bullshitting. "Those Ancients just left 'em lying around all over the place, did they?"

Rodney threw up his hands. "They were a civilization, John, they had more than one city!" He leaned forward. "I found a reference to it in the database. Sure, at the end of the Wraith War the Ancients had consolidated and drawn back to Atlantis, but at their height they probably had several cities. We found a lot of smaller outposts with similar towers and such."

"How come you only just found this other Atlantis?" John asked dubiously. He wouldn't put it past Rodney to make stuff up to get his own way.

Rodney looked stubborn. "Galaxies are big places and we were focused on surviving, then on fighting the Wraith and the goddamn Genii, not on longer-range exploring. The database was a nightmare to search; we never fully cracked how it was organized. I only found the reference just before everything went to hell."

"So you've got the address of this place, then?" John eyed Rodney narrowly.

Rodney waved an airy hand. "It's in the database—I made sure that part got saved in the evacuation. I can find it again."

If they're still all alive on that dead-end planet, John didn't say. If they've made it by themselves for, what is it now? Nearly five months? If the Wraith or some other bastards haven't found them, and if no one tripped and smashed the computer your precious data's stored on. A lot of ifs.

"Well, it's your life," he said eventually. "Guess I can't stop you running off to another galaxy on what's probably a wild goose chase." He nodded at the life signs scanner. "I'd appreciate you keeping this to yourself, though. I don't want to be locked in some basement lab so the SGC can run tests on me."

Rodney was looking hurt and furious. "No one's going to experiment on you, Jesus." Guilt flashed across his face. "And ah, sorry, but I already told Lam to check your blood sample for the gene. I don't know why they didn't test for it the first time they had you at the SGC, but I guess they were too busy saving your life."

"Great, thanks a bunch, that's just peachy." John blew out an angry breath, scraped the chair back and strode into the living room, needing to put some space between himself and Rodney, but Rodney just scrambled up and followed him.

John backed up to the bedroom door, then turned away with his head bowed and fists clenched, trying to get his breathing under control. You were never really out of the military; they could recall you any time if they claimed it was a national emergency. Maybe he should get on the bike and run the hell away? But they'd probably just beam him up.

"I, I don't see why you're so against being part of this," Rodney said in a small voice.

John leaned his head on the doorjamb. "Oh I don't know, Rodney," he said to the wall. "Why wouldn't I want to be back in the military after they kicked me to the curb one time already for trying to save my friends? Especially as I'm gay and not prepared to be closeted any more." He sucked in a breath. "And why wouldn't I want to operate any alien weapons they find?" He turned around, glaring. "You said Lee wanted to use me as a light switch. Well, I wouldn't be a fucking light switch to the military, Rodney, I'd be a fucking trigger."

Rodney was glaring as well. "That's why you have to come with us on the Daedalus," he said, his chin jutting defiantly, brows furrowed. The expedition's under civilian leadership and that DADT nonsense is irrelevant."

"Rodney, I haven't even been asked to go along!"

Rodney's face fell. "Oh, I was sure I . . . really? I forgot to ask you?"

John shut his eyes and tried not to grind his teeth.

"Well, I'm sorry for that oversight, but of course I want you to come with me."

John sighed, the fight going out of him. "You don't need homicide cops out there, Rodney. At least I fucking hope you don't."

"No, but we need gateship pilots and you're brave and you know how to handle weapons." Rodney waved his hands. "And yes, of course we'll need your genetic abilities with Ancient tech, especially once we find Atlantis Mark II."

"Tell me you're not gonna call it that," John groaned.

Rodney bristled. "Why not? It's accurate. What else would we–"

"Pretty much anything except that." John crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall. "Anyway, sounds to me like you think I'm that other Sheppard. He's who you really want, I reckon."

Rodney marched across the room and leaned in, his face thunderous. He poked John in the chest. "For fuck's sake! I met him one time, very briefly. I don’t have a crush on him. You're the one I love, although right now I have no idea why!"

John swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. "Uh, you what?"

Rodney faltered. "Oh. I, um. I might have neglected to mention that as well."

John shut his eyes. "You don't just want me for my fancy genes?"

"No, not even if they've got double-stitched seams and copper rivets," Rodney snapped, starting to take a step back.

John's arm shot out cobra-like and snagged him, then he froze, his hand clamped on Rodney's arm. He couldn't say it back, he just couldn't . . . Christ, he was bad at this. He couldn't even meet Rodney's eyes. "I might . . ." He waved his other hand inarticulately, staring at Rodney's bare feet. "You know."

Rodney sighed heavily. "God. I foresee years of therapy ahead." He moved in again until he was close to John, then wrapped his arms around John's waist in a hug. He was hot and he smelled sweaty. John liked it.

"No therapy," John muttered, putting his arms around Rodney in turn and holding him tight. "I'm gonna be too busy touching things."

"Yes you most certainly are," Rodney said vehemently into his chest. "Touching me, in fact."

John grinned into Rodney's hair. "Okay."

Rodney tilted his head back and looked up, face nakedly hopeful. "Okay you'll come?"

"Okay I'll think about it," John hedged. It wouldn't hurt to give Rodney some motivation to persuade him.

"Oh, you'll come, all right," Rodney said, his voice darkening.

"Promises, promises." John manhandled him back toward the bedroom.

"I take it back," Rodney groaned. "It won't be years of therapy, it'll be years of bad jokes."

"Same thing," John said, grinning, pushing Rodney back onto the bed and climbing on top of him. He pulled Rodney's sweatpants down, pinned his hips with an arm and fisted his half-hard cock, dipping his head to lick the crown.

"Oh jeez!" Rodney yelped, clutching the covers.

John lifted his head. "I'm crap with words, Rodney. I'm better at, y'know, actions." He bent his head and took Rodney's now hard cock into his mouth, sliding down until his lips brushed his hand.

"Oh!" Rodney gasped. "You know, I . . . nggh! . . . I'm surprisingly okay with that."

~~~~~~

Epilogue: Four months later

"You were right, Rodney," Radek said, staring up at the Daedalus's main viewscreen. "The city exists."

"Of course I was right," Rodney said, then he grabbed John's arm. "Oh my god, I was right!"

"We never doubted you for a moment, Rodney," Elizabeth said, smiling, although they had, for a while.

"We're in stable orbit now," Caldwell put in. "You can take a gateship down for an initial exploratory mission whenever you're ready. Any life signs on the scanners, Dr. Novak?"

"None, sir. Looks like the city's deserted. Sensor readings show near-Earth-normal atmospheric and temperature readings." Caldwell nodded.

John leaned forward to stare at the magnified image on the screen of the city far below. "She's beautiful. Is that what Atlantis looked like?"

"She is indeed beautiful, John," Radek said softly. "She is not identical, no. Atlantis was more silvery gray-blue. The alloy used here must have been different."

"And those towers are differently shaped," Rodney said, pointing. "Similar multi-rayed structure with the piers, though. She's shielded, see the light reflecting off the dome?"

Radek nodded. "The shield should recognize gateships as ancient, though, and let them through."

The city on the screens was a honey-gold starburst floating on a deep blue ocean. Tall towers stretched up, with delicate-looking walkways connecting some of them. She was very nearly the most beautiful thing John had ever seen, but he reserved that for Rodney's ass.

"Baltia," Radek said dreamily.

Rodney frowned at him. "What?"

Radek shrugged. "Is the name of an ancient mythical island in the Baltic, heaped with amber."

"Good name," John said. "Baltia she is, the amber city."

"Who gave you naming rights?" Rodney protested.

"I agree," Elizabeth said, her head tilted consideringly. "It's a good name."

Rodney rolled his eyes. "Oh, okay. I guess it rolls off the tongue better than Atlantis Mark II."

John slapped him on the back. "C'mon. let's find Ronon and Teyla and Lorne's team, and gear up. I want to get down there."

He could already hear her singing.

~~~~~~

the end

~~~~~~