Fic: Denver Storm (Earthside Challenge)

Author: linaerys
Title: Denver Storm
Rating: Light NC-17
Pairing: Sheppard/McKay
Word Count: ~1200
Summary: In a car, in a storm, in Denver.
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me, nor to I derive any profit from them.
Spoilers: None
A/N: This started out as a birthday present for girly_curl_3, but then I realized it fit this challenge. Happy Birthday!


“Why did they build the airport so far from Denver?” asks Rodney. John is driving, because John always drives—the one time he let Rodney drive, there were mishaps of the speeding ticket kind, the very sexy state trooper kind, the kind of trouble who gave Rodney the eye and not John. So now John always drives when they are on Earth.

Rodney drums his fingers on the dashboard, on his forearms, on John’s knee, which makes John smile over at him. Rodney smiles back, but it has an edge of impatience in it, because Rodney is always impatient. Well, almost always.

“They didn’t want to hear the planes fly overhead, I guess,” says John.

Rodney cranes his head around in all four directions to look at the storm coming in low over the mountains. The sky is starting to get dark with more than just twilight. John can’t get used to it, the way these storms come over the flat Denver bowl faster than he can drive and they way they suck all the light out of the sky. If they were in their mountain, in SGC, now, John wouldn’t see it, but he’d still feel the storm, in the electricity in the air. A pilot is supposed to feel storms coming.

For a moment it’s dark like the inside of a sock, and John flicks on the high beams, only to see them bounce back at him off the heavy air. Then the sky is full of water, beyond rain, a ripping torrent that makes it impossible to see. A flash of lightning sparkles through the wet windshield and then John hears the tapping of something heavier and harder than rain on the roof. It becomes a wild rhythm-free percussion on the top of the car. John remembers trying to get a convertible from the rental agency, and thanks his far-too-generous luck that they didn’t have one available.

Rodney shouts something, but the water hitting the windshield and the roof of the car is louder than his voice, and John hears only indistinct syllables.

“What?” yells John. He might as well have whispered for all the good it does. He can’t even hear himself.

Rodney leans closer to him so John can feel the heat of him, and yells right in his ear, “Pull over.” Yeah, that’s the right thing to do. John would like to say he could drive through anything, but he can’t see and he can’t hear with the storm bearing down on them.

The hailstones are getting bigger; they were peas when they first hit the windshield, but now they are the size of marbles. John remembers from his meteorology class that hailstones get bigger when an updraft kicks them back up into the cold upper air where the moisture they’ve collected freezes, then they fall and yo-yo back and forth until they get too big to stay aloft. If he cuts one open, he’ll see layers like an onion.

Rodney turns on the dome light to look at their itinerary, but it’s not like the plane to Chile is going to take off without them. Air Force transports can’t take off in a storm like this any more than a commercial jet can, and even if they could, they wouldn’t leave Rodney and John on that first leg of the trip back to Antarctica, back to Atlantis and home.

The storm is so loud it might as well be silent. Rodney looks over at John and opens his mouth to say something a couple times, but John can’t hear him, and he gives up. Rodney taps on his watch, then on the digital clock on the car’s dashboard, as if he can force the minutes to tick along and the storm to finish. Then he shrugs and reaches into the back seat where his papers are. If he gets to those he’ll be lost in reading until the storm is over and probably past then, so John grins and turns off the dome light at the same time as he grabs Rodney’s wrist.

He slides his fingers up Rodney’s wrist, over the palm and interlaces his hand with Rodney’s, which he loves to do ever since he figured out how much of an erogenous zone Rodney’s hands are. Rodney might accuse John of jumping head first into everything, but Rodney goes hands first, always digging into the pieces of Ancient tech, the innards of computers, or a plate of alien food.

And Rodney goes hand-first into sex too—he can never resist tracing John’s lips with his thumb, John’s ears with his index finger. Even now, John holds one of Rodney’s hands captive, but his other hand is snaking through John’s hair, hooking into the back of John’s collar, sliding around to the front and dragging John toward him.

The lightning is right on top of them, a deafening crash-boom with no space between, and John can’t hear the noises Rodney makes when they kiss, but knows Rodney is making them anyway. They don’t have much time before the storm will pass over and leave them exposed here on the side of the highway, so while it still cradles them, John undoes Rodney’s pants and feels Rodney doing the same to him, one-handed; Rodney always likes to show off those talented fingers. John feels like he should be raw—three days of fucking in a Denver hotel room, in bed, on the couch, up against the shower wall—he should be more than sated, but his cock springs up again in Rodney’s big, warm hand.

His cock can’t feel anything beyond warm, and tight, but his body remembers how those fingers felt inside him, his tongue remembers running over the calluses on Rodney’s fingertips. John’s hands don’t have a grip on anything but air and he thinks for a moment that he wants to be doing this to Rodney as Rodney is doing it to him, but then Rodney’s thumb runs up the underside of his cock and John forgets everything besides Rodney’s breath in his mouth, and Rodney’s hand around him. He thrusts into Rodney’s hand like the first time they did this.

There was no talk then, either, just a moment of recognition when the looks that Rodney had been giving him, which had seemed to be in a language more foreign than Ancient, suddenly became clear as English, and it didn’t take talking, just some we-almost-died-lets-fuck rubbing and kissing with their pants partially unbuttoned, Rodney pushing him up hard against the door to John’s room, barely a second after it closed.

John realizes he can’t hear the storm anymore a few seconds after he comes, and he opens his eyes and sees the clouds lifting all around them, the storm packing up and taking its blanket of noise and clouds over the mountains to somewhere else. Rodney gets napkins out of a crumpled MacDonald’s bag on the floor to clean them up.

“We’d better get going,” says Rodney, and he looks amused. “Do you need me to drive? Because I can. I won’t even speed this time.”

That shakes John out of his reverie. “Yeah, I can drive, but what about you.” He glances down significantly at Rodney’s half-undone trousers, tented out at the crotch.

“There’s a bathroom on the airplane, right?” says Rodney. “I’ve always wanted to join the mile high club.”

John starts laughing, because it’s silly—they’ve done this in the Pegasus galaxy, which is so many miles high above Earth that they should both be made the president of the club. “We’re already a mile high,” he says with a grin he knows is goofy. “We’re in the Mile High City.”