xanphibian / Fic: Stuck, or, When It Happened (Sheppard/McKay, PG-13)

Title: Stuck, or, When It Happened
Authors:

xanphibian
Fandom: SGA
Pairing: Sheppard/McKay
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not Ours!
Summary: and that’s when it happened.
Note: Thank you for a sooper quik read-through by

kyrieane, who nodded and smiled.

***

Rodney's foot - leg, whatever - was stuck in a rock.

Not an actual rock rock, more like, he stepped down on the rocky surface of a rocky planet and his foot went down a rocky hole.

And, just like that, he was stuck.

Well, all right, not just like that. There was a splitting of the team for exploration on the seemingly innocuous planet, and then John and Rodney were walking and talking and grinning and kidding around about photon torpedoes and how science fiction television shows should be a little more, well, scientific ...

and that's when it happened.

***

Rodney's leg was trapped. One moment, John was looking at Rodney's grin and thinking how stupidly charming it was, thinking about something that didn't have a whole second to materialize as an actual thought, and then Rodney's face changed and John had this split-microsecond of realization that hey, maybe Rodney was having the same thought. But.

Quick reaction time. Rodney was falling, stumbling, and John was grabbing his arm to keep him from going flat on his face, except ... no. It happened too fast, John couldn't stop it, and the sound of the ground giving way didn't even register until after the fact.

"Shit," Rodney swore, and his hand did this quick grabby thing with John's helping arm and tried to get up, get out of it, and then ... "Shit!"

He was stuck, John could see that clearly, but it didn't stop him from asking, "Can you get it out?"

Rodney just glared. John took it as the proper response to his stupid question.

"Here, hold on to me," John said, like Rodney wasn't already clinging.

That earned him another glare and Rodney snapping, "If you attempt to pull me out, Colonel, without even looking to see if I've broken my ankle, or at least sprained it, or made certain something isn't trying to eat me I -- "

John knelt to take a look. It was a lot easier than listen to Rodney berate him and work himself up to a full-blown panic.

At least, it would have, if it didn't mean he was kneeling in front of Rodney and there was that half-thought again, bigger this time, with definable edges and real mass weighing it down.

"It's pretty wedged in there," he said, poking at the rocky ledge Rodney was trapped under.

"Oh, like I didn't know that already!" Rodney yelled, wincing a little as he attempted to do the exact thing he told John not to do, which was to pull his leg out of the hole. "Ow! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! I think it's broken. Or bleeding. It feels like it's bleeding, I'm feeling faint already, I'm going to bleed to death and I'm stuck in a hole!"

"You're not going to bleed to death," John said, trying to peer down into the darkness. "Let me just see if I can get my hand in there to feel ..."

"Don't you dare!" Rodney said, thwapping him on the shoulder. "Then you'll get stuck and we'll both be stuck, and then you can't save me!"

John looked up and glared. "McKay! Shut up and let me check." His shoulder stung where Rodney had hit it.

Sticking his hand into the small, dark hole was complicated because it was a small, dark hole and Rodney had thick ankles. He managed to get a finger or two in, wiggling them around to brush against stone, dirt, something slick that he really hoped was plant-matter, and Rodney's socks.

"What's that look mean? Tell me!" Rodney demanded. "There's blood, isn't there?" His face was looking white and John hoped it was just from the normal stress of having your foot caught in a hole on an alien planet and not Rodney going into shock.

"Could you give me at least two seconds to check, here?"

"Oh, god, you know what I just thought of?"

John did not, but he was sure Rodney would tell him.

"You know those spiders on Earth that set traps for their prey?" Rodney said, two bright splotches of color appearing on his otherwise pale face. "Maybe this is like that, some huge alien spider trap, and now it's got me and it's going to eat me, and oh, god, Colonel, you've got to get me out of this right now before it injects me with some kind of bone-liquefying venom and ..."

Sheppard really wished Teyla was there. She had this thing where she could just touch Rodney, who'd freak out about being touched by her so much that he’d forget to freak himself out about being eaten by spiders.

John really hoped the slick thing he'd touched, now twice, wasn't actually a man-eating spider trap. Sometimes his imagination was too overactive.

"McKay!" Rodney stopped babbling and looked at him, eyes wide and fearful and very self-satisfied -- Rodney liked to freak out, it reaffirmed his belief as a genius, and John really wished he didn't know that. "Like I said, it's pretty wedged in there," he said, pulling his fingers free and shaking off the dirt. "And it's rock, so I'm not sure digging will be effective, even if we had any tools to dig with."

Standing, he scuffed the ground with his boot. A few pebbles loosened but otherwise there was no give at all. "Maybe I could shoot around your foot? See if that breaks up the stone?"

Rodney scowled. "Why don't you just shoot my entire leg off at the knee, see if that works?"

"It's not like you've never let me shoot you before." From the look on Rodney's face, John's attempt at humor fell incredibly flat. "Look, I'm not going to shoot you, just the ground. If it makes you feel any better, that's what I'd do if I was in this particular situation. Only, I wouldn't let you do it, since I really don't trust your aim that well."

"I've been practicing!" Rodney sounded much less freaked and back into a normal defensive mode.

"Okay, so you have a choice, then. Or, several choices, actually," John said. "One, you can just stay here until the man-eating spider discovers you've fallen into her trap ..." Rodney went pale again and John did some backtracking to fix the problem. "I don't actually think there's a giant spider! This hole thing, it looks just like a natural fissure, and I'm sure it's completely harmless!"

Rodney's color came back slowly as John went on, and his breath seemed a little more even.

"Two, you can take your own sidearm and try to shoot your way out of this. Or -- and this is what I'm strongly suggesting -- Three, you can allow the only one here with actual military training to do it. I promise not to shoot you."

Rodney didn't look entirely convinced.

"Not even a graze, McKay."

That seemed to do it, and Rodney reluctantly nodded his head. John drew his gun and tried to decide where the first shot should go.

"What, you're not even going to ask me for a good-luck kiss?" Rodney asked, and John wasn't entirely sure if he was being sarcastic or teasing or completely serious.

He spent a long minute trying to figure it out, too. Rodney when he was teasing wasn't very obviously, mostly because 'teasing' mode sounded eerily like 'sarcastic' mode, the only differences being he would smile a few moments after the fact and the barbs were perhaps slightly less cutting. This was barb-less, though, and he certainly wasn't smiling.

But serious? Okay, he sounded serious, blue eyes flat and sincere, mobile mouth crooked, but even despite the crookedness and not turned down at one corner. But serious? That was ... that meant ...

Sighing in frustration, John rubbed his forehead. "A what, McKay?"

"A good-luck kiss. In case you miss," Rodney said, still sounding perfectly serious, which didn't actually mean he was serious.

"I'm not going to miss!"

Rodney just looked at him, miraculously gaining a poker face the one time John really needed Rodney to telegraph everything he was thinking and feeling like he usually did.

That thought he'd been trying to ignore gained a little more definition, corners pressing sharply.

"Fine," he snapped and leaned forward for a short, messy kiss that smacked loudly into the silent air.

Rodney hummed a little and smiled, looking much less freaked out about the fact that he was about to have bullets flying into the ground around one of his appendages. "Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?"

John shook his head because he had no idea how to respond to that, aimed, and started shooting.

The sound of a P-90 wasn't as bad as some of the other weapons John had fired, but in the quiet of this particular planet it sounded deafening. Rubble and dust flew into the air, both of them squinting and covering their faces -- Rodney with both hands and shouting imprecations, probably -- as John fired in a half-circle around Rodney's foot.

The quiet echoed when he finally stopped firing.

"Can you move your foot now?"

"What?" Rodney shook his head, peering at John's face. "I can't hear," he said, the words exaggerated and slow.

John sighed and rather than ask again, he grabbed Rodney's leg behind the knee and tugged. Rock shifted with a crunching noise and Rodney's foot moved half an inch.

"Wiggle it," John shouted, doing a ridiculous-feeling wiggle of his own foot in case Rodney couldn't hear him.

Rodney, genius that he was, seemed to understand and did, in fact, wiggle his ankle until his leg was coming up out of the ground and he was -- finally -- free.

"Oh, thank god!" Rodney said, as if he'd just been given the news that the surgery to remove the cancerous growth from his spleen was a success. He launched himself into John's arms and was hugging John, saying things like, "Thank you, Colonel, thank you for not shooting me and thank you for saving me from the giant bug and thank you ..."

John couldn't hear all of what Rodney was actually babbling, but since he could admit he was genuinely relieved no man-eating alien spider had actually eaten the other man, he hugged back. Just a little.

Which Rodney apparently took as some kind of invitation to give John a real kiss.

His lips were chapped, slightly, but lush and soft and very, very talented as they moved over John's mouth, teeth and tongue coming out to play as the seconds stretched and John didn't do anything to push Rodney away. When Rodney bit him, though, he opened his mouth to protest and got a tongue lightly tracing against his own instead and he couldn't help moaning a little.

When Rodney pulled back he looked very, very smug. "So, thank you."

John was sure he had a half-dazed, half-bewildered look on his face, since that was exactly how he was feeling. "Uh, you're welcome?"

His thoughts were cut off by yelling and the image of Teyla and Ronon running toward them both. Apparently, they'd heard the gunfire and were on their way into the fray.

"Oh, shit," Rodney moaned, then hissed, "We are never to speak of this, to anyone."

John frowned. "Which part?"

Rodney rolled his eyes and gave John a little shoulder-to-shoulder bump. "The part where I freaked out over a little hole in the ground." He reached down to rub his slightly scraped, but otherwise perfectly fine ankle.

"And we're not going to talk about the ... uh, kissing?" John asked slowly. He was a little more disappointed at the idea than he ever would have thought.

Rodney straightened and looked John in the eye. "Oh, we'll talk about that. At length," he said, giving John what looked like an attempted leer but actually came across as more of an endearing half-smile. "Long, scientific discussions, with further experimentation to prove varying hypotheses."

John grinned and turned into the sun, prepared to greet the rest of his team. "Sounds good to me."

END

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Flat / Top-Level Comments Only

- Posted by

abbylee

"Not even a graze, McKay."

That was all awesomeness. Thank you!

- Posted by

Fic: Stuck, or, When It Happened (Sheppard/McKay, PG-13)

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