enclosed spaces, by laura maxwell

Written very quickly. 720 words.

Title: Warning for travelers
Author: laura maxwell
Challenge: Enclosed Spaces
Rating: PG
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Summary: People, he thinks, respond to stress in different ways.


"-reason you shouldn't be able to do this," he hears Rodney shouting, and when he gets to the lab, he just leans against the doorframe to watch the spectacle. "This is high school astrophysics, and you've screwed the equations all to ... my god," Rodney says. The horribly false look of amazed realization on his face is almost enough to make John laugh. "You're the anti-MacGyver. I give you a laptop; you ruin three simultaneous experiments. Thank god you haven't gotten your hands on a stick of gum and a shoelace. You'd probably kill us all." He turns on his heel and sweeps past the cringing mass of physicists, spinning around at the door to shake a viciously admonishing finger. "Stop fucking up!" he shoots back at them, and brushes past John with a clipped-off nod and a muttered, "Major."

John gives the scientists a smile and a friendly little wave, then shoves his hands in his pockets and strolls down the hall after Rodney. "You're stomping."

"I am walking in an emphatic and purposeful fashion."

"Anti-MacGyver?"

Rodney turns jerkily, like an angry marionette. "I'm very busy, Major, in case you hadn't noticed, so unless the city is in far more imminent danger than I was previously aware of, I'm afraid I don't really have time to chat."

John stops grinning, and tilts his head to the side to peer at him. "How long's it been since you slept last?"

Rodney's forehead creases, as if John has just said something incredibly stupid and it's a terrible burden to Rodney to have to translate it back into recognizable speech. "What?"

John sighs internally and keeps up the look of amiable blankness. "Sleep. You know, when you close your eyes, stop thinking for a few hours, and wake up no longer feeling the need to terrorize the science staff." Rodney glares at him. John narrows his eyes in return. "It's important, Rodney. You're no good to anybody when-"

"Important?" Rodney raises his hands to his temples, pulling at his hair. "Important, he says. Look around you, Major. Look where we are!" His voice is rising steadily, terribly, like floodwater, and he's flinging his hands around like morningstars. "At any moment, something in this city could go horribly, explosively wrong, and there's a better than even chance that no one else here will know how to fix it." John winces. A door across the hall whooshes open before he can really even formulate the thought, and John's never, ever going to get over how creepy that is. He herds Rodney, still talking, towards it. "We have no appreciable defenses, not to mention no way to power them even if we did, and lest we forget, there's an evil alien armada on their way here with every intention of sucking the life out of every one of us!" He's yelling full-out now, and the door hisses shut. "Did I leave out anything? Where the hell are we?"

John looks around. It's dark. Kind of cramped. "Closet?"

"A closet?! I have to save our asses from the Wraith, the weather, and the science staff," and his voice is sounding a little crazy, "and you drag me into a closet?" Well, crazier than usual, and now he's saying something about jumper malfunctions, and John kisses him.

"What the hell," Rodney says muzzily. John kisses him again, gripping his shoulders, and finding his mouth in the dark is pretty much a process of trial and error. They're nice errors, though.

People, he thinks, respond to stress in different ways. This isn't his usual way, but then, nothing about this place is usual.

They're all very tired, and very far from home. There is a certain resigned desperation in that fact.

Rodney's hands come to rest in the small of his back, and he sags a little, planting his forehead in the middle of John's chest. "What was that?"

John blinks. Shrugs. "Don't know."

"Okay," Rodney says. He just breathes for a moment. Deep. Steady. John rubs his hands lightly up and down his back. "Everything," Rodney says softly, and stops. John holds on.

"Everything," he says again, "is so fucking important."

"I really hate it," he says.

No one should come here, John thinks, and wonders why he didn't want to see this coming.

"I know," he says.

-end-