Stargate Atlantis Flashfiction

Title: Stairway To Heaven
Author: The Spike
Rating: A for Adult, E for Emo (also may contain references to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll)
Spoilers: general up to end of S2
Thanks: to harriet_spy and justabi for 4 am beta. Do not blame either of them for any misplaced commas, they really really tried.


The first time Rodney had sex was with a smart blonde in a lab when he was seventeen.

It happened while he was working on his doctorate at Northeastern. She was his first physics groupie too -- blonde, chubby, and pretty and she always seemed to be everywhere he was. She was a little older – 20, she said – and working on her M.S. in astrophysics -- something to do with gravity lenses, he thought, although if she’d told him he didn’t remember. At least she wasn’t stupid and could follow what he was saying when he talked about his work. She even came up with the occasional insight that wasn’t entirely useless, but she did kind of babble on about personal stuff which Rodney mostly tuned out. Often he would find her staring at him expectantly, like she’d asked him something and was waiting for an answer. He wasn’t interested enough to ask for repetition though.

Even though he didn’t think about her much, usually images of her were what he masturbated to. He thought a lot about her breasts and her belly and her thighs and her mouth and it worked pretty well for him, not that he ever really needed a lot to get off. He just liked to get it done quickly because he had a lot of work to do.

One late night she turned up at the lab wearing dark pink lipstick and heels and a low, laced shirt that showed a lot of pink cleavage. She smelled like peach schnapps and weaved a little and giggled a lot. It was irritating, more so because it was making him horny and he’d have to go and masturbate soon, right in the middle of the simulation he was running. At least he would if she would just *leave*.

But she didn’t leave and he was doing some delicate calibrations on his laser and turned around and she was right there, inches away, trapping him between her body and the lab bench. Under the alcohol and peaches, she smelled of clean sweat and ‘girl’ and Rodney’s dick slammed to rock hard so fast it actually ached. He knew his face was red. He tried to ease around her but she just pushed him back against the bench with her hands on his skinny hipbones and slowly slid to her knees on the linoleum.

She never took her eyes off his. Rodney went completely still. She undid his jeans, pulled his cock out of his boxers and sucked him. He remembered he made some terrible, loud cry, like a bird, and came so hard he thought he was having a stroke. He can’t remember if she swallowed or spat, although he does remember her wiping her lower lip, delicately, with her fingers.

And he remembers that he couldn’t speak because he suddenly saw her: her sparkling blue eyes, smeared dark-pink lips. Beautiful… so beautiful.

“There,” she said finally.

“Oh,” Rodney had mouthed. Then she got up, brushed her knees off; pulled a round compact out of her bag and fixed her lipstick in the mirror. Then she kissed him on the cheek and left.

He didn’t see much of her after that. She was around, at the lab, but only when she was doing her own work. She always seemed friendly, said ‘hello’ when he did or when she caught him staring, which he did a lot.

He stayed silently in love with her for the next two years, even though she moved on to stalking other brilliant doctorate candidates and put on a little more weight. He had no idea what to do about it, though and eventually he finished his doctorate and life went on.

*

When he tells the story, which isn’t often, he talks mostly about how gorgeous she was, how smart; her breasts... He doesn’t mention the rest.

*

The last time Rodney had sex was ten minutes ago. He and Sheppard still haven’t moved apart. John Sheppard isn’t blond, he isn’t wearing dark pink lipstick and Rodney’s pretty sure he’s not making notches on his bedpost for ‘colleagues bagged’. Not that Sheppard or anyone else on Atlantis *has* a bedpost.

He is smart though, and Rodney has a sneaking suspicion he’s a bit of a physics groupie (although possibly it’s only for one particular astrophysicist). Rodney’s also in love with him but the difference is that Sheppard loves him back.

If he ever gets to tell this story, he won’t leave that part out.

*

The first time Rodney took drugs, it was speed.

He was pretty much the antithesis of a ‘druggy’. The idea of burning brain cells for pleasure revolted him, but like all grad students he was overworked, underpaid and stretched too thin. Between his advisor’s scut work, his own difficult research, the classes he TA’d to supplement his scholarship and his occasional “secret” projects for the Department of Defense he didn’t have time for things like meals, exercise or sleep.

Mostly he lived on coffee, Jolt, PowerBars and No-Doz, until his thesis advisor caught him asleep with his head next to the beam of a running laser. Rodney expected a lecture. Instead his advisor handed over an unmarked bottle of little orange tablets with the admonition not to take more than two in a 24 hour period and for God’s sake not to tell anyone where he got them.

He took two right then. Within half an hour he’d finished the experiment and written up the data. Within another he’d marked all the cosmology mid-terms for the class he was TA’ing and had outlined a journal article based on the preliminary results of his own research.

Then he went back to the dorm and cleaned his room. Then he read two textbooks. Then he read six journals cover to cover and revised his journal article outline to include scathing critiques of both textbooks and several of the articles. Then he wrote the journal article. Then it was morning and he went to class. He started to crash about seven hours later, so he took two more of the orange pills.

He had never been more productive in his life. His mind was a superconductor. A pure, clear arrow that arced towards any target he chose at the speed of light. All the things that had impeded his brilliance melted like ice under a blaze of summer sun. His weak, clumsy body’s dominion over his brain was ended - sleep vanquished like ephemeral shade. He breathed data, drank cosmology, took his power from the elements…

Okay, his heart juddered in his chest like it was breaking apart sometimes, his jaw clenched until it cramped, his hands shook, his pores oozed cold, sticky sweat -- but that was fine. That was acceptable because he was… dare he say it? Yes, he dared! He was a god!

The only thing that slowed him down was people. Slow moving, moronic, question-asking, IN HIS GODDAMNED WAY EVERY MINUTE people. Before speed, he muttered under his breath and worked around them. Speed taught him the power of his voice. His voice was like a laser that cut through idiocy. People *flinched* when he spoke. They moved back, they moved away, they stared in open mouthed horrified awe. It was fucking beautiful.

Less beautiful was the paranoia that hit after the second day: the sense of being universally despised, envied, plotted against – not that it was a new set of ideas, just that the clarity with which he now saw it all made it hard to tell himself that it didn’t matter. He took to hiding things – his notes, his pens, his precious, precious clean tube socks – and sneaking around the campus in the dead of night with a hat pulled down over his eyes.

Of course, heaven or hell, it couldn’t last. After 5 days of non-stop what he later learned was called ‘tweaking’ Rodney ran out of little orange pills.

He crashed just outside the door of the Dunkin Donuts closest to his house. Just ran out of gas, right there and then -- his hand letting go of the giant sized coffee he’d verbally bludgeoned out of them so that it hit the ground with an explosive splash that blistered the side of his calf (although he didn’t notice this until two days later when he was able to drag himself out of bed) -- and started to cry.

He stood there crying – big, wet, heaving sobs, for what seemed like forever. Then he had to sit down, which he did, on the ground in front of the door, next to his puddle of coffee. He didn’t stop crying though.

Eventually one of the counter girls was dispatched to remove him from the flow of foot traffic. It was the one he’d yelled at, of course, but she didn’t seem to hold it against him. There was talk of police and 911 but thank god she just called him a cab in the end. He had to show the driver his license with address of his dorm on it because he was still crying too hard to speak. He vaguely remembers handing over his wallet.

The driver drove him home and manhandled him upstairs to his room and got him inside. Possibly dumped him on the bed. Rodney can’t remember. His wallet was empty of cash when he returned to the world of the sane, so he certainly hopes the guy had the decency to get him to the bed.

He woke up 17 hours later curled up naked on the floor with all the blankets and the mattress pulled down on top of him. He had a dehydration hangover and second degree burns on his leg. He showered, dressed and went back to his advisor in the hopes of getting a few more orange tablets, but his advisor took one look at him and said: “Get your own connection, McKay.”

It took a little effort, but eventually he did. He was much more judicious with his speed use after that, though, only using it in small, necessary doses when he was really under the wire and being very careful to find a nice private place to melt down when it wore off.

*

When he tells the story, he doesn’t mention the part where he cried or the part where he felt like a god; he only uses it to illustrate that Sheppard is not the only one who had a bit of a wild streak as a youth and thank goodness he’s outgrown *that* foolishness.

*

The last time Rodney took amphetamines was 17 hours ago. He built a bigger, better bomb. He built it and then extracted a solemn promise from Sheppard that this time he would not under any circumstances ride it anywhere to his death.

If Rodney was pinning Sheppard to the wall at the time and sobbing big, wet, frantically ugly tears on his shoulder, he trusts Sheppard will understand that he was crashing and have the decency not to mention it should he feel the need to tell the story to anyone else.

Rodney’s certainly not going to be the one to tell.

*

Rodney’s first rock concert happens on Atlantis when he is thirty-eight.

He’d preferred actual music to noise all his life, and while he’d been to many concerts in his youth and adulthood, none of them had ever included amps or roadies or LSD or long-haired leaping gnomes and half-naked girls dancing in the aisles. He doesn’t feel like he’s missed out.

But this concert isn’t exactly typical.

There are no roadies and no gnomes. The band consists of Sgt. Stackhouse, two marines Rodney doesn’t know and a paleozoologist name Dr. Mary Atwan, performing under the name of Minx. Between them they play several guitars, a bass, a keyboard and an electronic drum kit. Minx snaps a mean tambourine.

There is a wall of amps fine-tuned by the best engineers on four continents, so the music is loud and according to the people around him who claim to know these things, pretty ‘fucking’ good. He doesn’t know if there is LSD, but there is definitely the faint, sweet dirt smell of cannabis in the air, so he feels that this is a pretty good approximation of what he has, according to Sheppard, been missing all his life.

There *are* a lot of people – men and women, mostly dressed -- dancing in the aisles of the mess which has been temporarily converted into a dark, mirror balled disco-like venue for the purpose. Elizabeth, Radek, Sheppard, Teyla and Ronon have at various points joined them.

Rodney hasn’t, although Sheppard has been making threats about dragging him out onto the floor for Stairway to Heaven for the last two hours and Sheppard has a disturbing way of getting Rodney to enjoy the hell out of things he’d never even imagined wanting.

To be honest, Rodney doesn’t entirely hate the rock concert experience. A lot of the songs they cover are vaguely familiar to him, if not from his youth, then certainly from the Atlantis Oldies Radio Station that one of the chemists pipes through one of the comm sub-channels after midnight

If he ever gets to tell this story to anyone, he’ll make it funnier than it was and probably leave out the part where it made him ridiculously happy and heartbreakingly sad to be standing with a can of root beer in his hand, watching a bunch of people he not-so-secretly cares about having a very good time while they can.

The Wraith are coming back, of course. His first rock concert could very well be his last.

To his great surprise, Rodney recognizes the opening notes of Stairway to Heaven and to his greater surprise, he’s the one who touches Sheppard’s shoulder and motions him onto the impromptu dance floor with a quick jerk of his chin.

If the room goes quiet at the sight of the Chief Scientist and the head of Atlantis military slow dancing to Led Zeppelin, well it’s only for a moment.

It’s not a story Rodney thinks he’ll ever be the one to tell, although he doesn’t doubt that it will make the rounds somewhere and that it’s probably going to make a hell of a splash.

*

He isn’t wrong.

When Atlantis’ people meet to tell stories of the last days of the war with the Wraith that is the one that makes the rowdy room fall quiet.


[end]