Work Text:
Occasional fluctuations, odd energy readings, Rodney McKay was acutely familiar with mixed signals. Beginning in his youth, when raised voices and indifference meant love the same as soft words and hugs. During his somewhat truncated coming of age, there were the fretful starts and stops, curiousness and exploration, attempts and failures. It continued, off and on, through his teen years and into young adulthood. Then, somehow, all attempts got lost during his thesis work and his all-consuming passion to prove himself.
Old curiosities would be reawakened years later during a rather debasing exile, but by that time, those signals seemed more clearly defined, even if he still wasn't sure he understood the definitions… like he was missing some integral element in the translation.
After yet other failures, he'd put those needs and desires away – for good he'd believed – when he'd been chosen for an important but dangerous mission. He was to be part of an expedition that had seemed a dream come true for him. He had put everything aside for that opportunity, even knowing the mission might be the last thing he'd ever do.
It hadn't been, though they did live with danger and threat as near constant companions. Rodney had never been sorry for his decision, but he sometimes lamented the loss to the scientific community: papers he would never write, classes he would never teach, lectures he would never give. Discoveries and work that might never garner him the recognition he deserved. For that loss, his compensation had been doing what he was born to do, but some days, he'd been hard pressed to see the trade-off value.
Over the years in Atlantis, he'd been responsible for a few mixed signals of his own. Signals that he thought had been right, but that he'd never felt were right for him. He'd realized – when he'd taken the time to ponder more deeply – that some of those signals from his past weren't so unclear anymore… but it had taken another culture on another world to show him that clarity.
The days he'd spent shackled to Colonel Sheppard on P8M-897 had been his watershed. Again, Rodney had found himself attracted to and physically wanting another man. But not just any man… and strangely, this feeling seemed as old and familiar as time itself. Even so, his yearning had fallen behind the ache in his chest when there had seemed to be nothing he could do to save them. Fortunately, it had been someone else's day to be the hero.
In the months Rodney had spent analyzing his situation, he'd tried to make his feelings work with someone else – someone with less baggage and restrictions – but the results had always been the same. After all, he really didn't like people in general, but then, he'd never thought of Sheppard in general terms; not after that fateful "so long, Rodney" had opened a hole inside him big enough to fly a puddlejumper through.
His thoughts of the Colonel had been quite specific, even if they had always been filtered through a wall of there's-no-way-Sheppard-shares-those-feelings-or-will-ever-share-them. Rodney was convinced that Sheppard had never suffered a day with such bewilderment, self-doubt and indecision.
Right up until the day he found out that he had.
Rodney looked down at the arm slung lazily over his hip and turned to face its owner. John cracked one eye open and smiled – that goofy grin that always seemed to be just for Rodney. The one that painted Rodney's brain in icy heat and left him gaping.
In the brush of soft, warm lips that could whisper his name in awe or bark it out in unreserved passion (either way made Rodney tremble) and inside the unattainable depths of those chameleon-like eyes, Rodney found all the certainty he would ever need.