When Rodney woke from anxious dreams, he was wearing a woman's body.
He rolled over, half-asleep, because lying on his stomach had become oddly uncomfortable. There was a pressure in his chest that felt strange, and as he pushed himself onto his back, his forearm brushed what was incontrovertibly a breast. His own breast.
That woke him up with a shock and his dreams immediately fled. "No no no," he said, aloud, and his voice sounded wrong to his own ears. "Oh, no, you have got to be fucking kidding me."
He peeled away the sheet and had to swallow hard at the sight of his—his breasts, there was no other way to say it. His breasts and his belly disappearing into his own pair of soft cotton boxers which looked entirely wrong clinging to his new hips.
He lay back down, closed his eyes tight, and thought "wake up!"—but nothing happened. He tried going back to sleep, on the theory that maybe he would wake this time into ordinary reality, but his body was buzzing with adrenaline and he couldn't lie still.
This didn't make sense. They hadn't been offworld in three days, so it couldn't be some kind of allergic reaction to something they'd encountered somewhere else. He didn't think he'd touched any Ancient artifacts recently—he'd learned his lesson from his almost-ascension, thanks. Why did this kind of shit always happen to him?
Panic was starting to look like the right response, but he bit it back.
"I don't know who's responsible for this," he muttered, "but we're fixing it. Right now." He reached for his radio and then froze. The thought of his new voice crackling through every headset in Atlantis was not a happy one.
Email, then. He yanked on his bathrobe, sat at his desk, and woke up his laptop. He ran a quick subroutine to ascertain whether Sheppard was on the intranet, which he was, and then sent an instant message: "Something's wrong. Get to my quarters stat."
And then he waited. It wouldn't take long.
"McKay," Sheppard said, slightly breathless, from outside the door.
The door slid open and Rodney took a deep breath, standing up.
"Is everything," Sheppard began, quizzical, and then closed his mouth. Rodney could see the realization washing across his face. "Huh," he said, aiming for nonchalance and almost getting there. "This is ...different."
"Something is very wrong here," Rodney said, as slowly and calmly as he could manage. Which was not very. He felt on the verge of hyperventilating.
"We'd better get you to see Keller."
"Can't she come here?"
"There's probably...examining," Sheppard began, and Rodney cut him off.
"Right. Fine. Fuck." He scrubbed a hand over his hair, which was mercifully not any longer than it had been, though it felt like his hairline had changed.
"You might want to get dressed?"
Rodney rolled his eyes. "It's not like I've never gone to the infirmary in a bathrobe before."
"Yeah," Sheppard acknowledged, "but, um —"
"Oh, fine." Maybe Sheppard had a point. The bathrobe kept trying to gape open in ways he wasn't used to. It was these—breasts. Which were kind of sizeable, really.
Sheppard lowered his head and turned the other way, studiously examining the pictures and diplomas on Rodney's wall.
"Fuck," Rodney muttered, yanking his dresser drawer open. "This is unbelievable."
"I'll say," John said dryly, and Rodney flipped him the bird.
"Wow," Keller said again cheerfully. Rodney wanted to strangle her. "We'll put this at the top of the list of experiences I never expected to have."
"You never expected to have?"
She had the good grace to look embarrassed. "You've got a point."
"Can I get dressed now?"
"Of course," she said smoothly.
"What's the story," Sheppard called, from outside the curtain.
"Doctor-patient confidentiality," she began, and Rodney cut her off.
"The colonel can hear whatever you have to tell me."
"Right," she said, giving him a slightly odd look that he chose to ignore altogether. "Well, ah—the bad news is, I don't have much to say."
"What?"
"You're a—perfectly healthy woman, as far as I can see," she said, gently. "I don't have any idea what caused this."
Rodney felt a headache settling in. This was going to be a very long day.
Rodney looked around the briefing room table at Elizabeth, Teyla, Ronon, and Sheppard, silently daring them to say the wrong thing so he could bite somebody's head off.
"Never a dull moment in the Pegasus galaxy," Elizabeth said, her expression somewhere between concerned and amused.
"Yes, yes, we've covered that," Rodney said irritably.
"If there is anything I can do," Teyla said, clasping his hand with both of hers. Rodney wasn't really sure what to do with that.
Ronon just looked him over, head to foot, and shrugged. "What's the problem," he said. "You're still McKay in there, aren't you?"
"The problem is, this isn't my body!" Wow, shrill really didn't sound good in this voice.
"I think it might be best if you don't go offworld for the moment," Elizabeth suggested.
"Obviously," Rodney snapped. "We need to figure out what the hell happened, and then reverse it." There was no response. "If no one has anything useful to offer, I'm going to work."
"I paged Radek," Elizabeth said quickly. "I thought you might want to let him know, get some moral support before you tell the rest of the science team."
"What? Yes, fine." Rodney was distracted already, thinking about what kind of scans they might be able to do. This had to be some kind of goddamned Ancient thing, maybe they could reconfigure the lifesigns detector --
"You called," Radek said, looking at Elizabeth, and then his gaze fell on Rodney. "Pane boze!"
"You're going," Rodney gritted, "to help me fix this."
Radek recovered admirably fast. "Yes. Yes, of course. You have ideas?"
"I'm working on it," Rodney said. "Let's go."
"Could be worse," Radek said as they walked. "You could have woken as a giant bug."
"Could we—not go to Kafka?" Sheppard sounded like he was trying hard not to wince.
"Right. Sorry," Radek said, sounding sheepish.
They were at the door to the lab already. Rodney ignored his vague feelings of reluctance. "Can we get this over with?"
"After you," Sheppard said, gesturing gracefully, and Rodney glared.
He had to assume that word had already spread, which explained why everyone was studiously staring at their screens when they walked in, rather than looking at him.
"Listen up," he said, loudly. "I'm not saying this twice." Every head in the room turned and he wished to God he wasn't blushing. "No, we don't know what's wrong with me; yes I am still in charge of this lab; and I do not under any circumstances want to discuss this at all!"
There was some mumbling, to the effect of "right" and "okay then," but thankfully no one talked back. Evidently his glare was still effective; they all turned back to their workstations.
"Right," he muttered. "Database. Chop chop."
"I'll just —" Sheppard looked at the door, then back at Rodney.
"Yes, fine, go away."
It was not a good morning. If the Ancient database contained any information about spontaneous gender disruption, Rodney wasn't finding it.
Then Whyte leaned on his desk and tried to invite him to lunch. Whyte!—who'd only been on the team for three weeks, and was obviously a pig. Besides, Rodney didn't take lunch breaks on the best of days, and this was decidedly not the best of days.
When he came back from the bathroom midafternoon—he had to admit, he was glad there was a unisex single stall not far from the lab; he was in no way prepared to deal with the dynamics of a women's room—a pile of Powerbars and a wrapped sandwich were sitting beside his laptop.
He dug in without a second thought, still scanning columns of glowing green characters as they scrolled by.
By two hours past dinnertime his back hurt and his headache was worse and he had snapped at his team until he had alienated every last one of them for the night. Some of them had seemed genuinely wounded by his attitude, which was bizarre, because he didn't think his behavior was any different than usual. Maybe seeing him in his new guise had given them the mistaken impression that he would actually be pleasant now.
He sank back in his chair, suddenly weary.
"Hey." Sheppard, leaning against the door of the lab.
"I hate this."
Sheppard quirked half a smile. "You're low on sugar. C'mon, it's past dinnertime."
"I know what time it is. I just—I'm not getting anywhere." He gestured at the computer. "I thought I would find something, but —"
"McKay. Dinner. I left that sandwich for you hours ago."
"Oh, that was you?" He supposed he shouldn't be surprised. Sheppard did oddly nice things for him sometimes. "Thanks."
"Anytime," Sheppard said. "Hey, did you read the paper on wormhole thermodynamics that came through from the SGC in yesterday's databurst?"
By the time they got to the mess hall, they were deep in conversation, and for a second it felt so normal, so ordinary, that Rodney forgot all about his transformation. It wasn't until the wolf whistle came from the far side of the room that the memory came flooding back.
"Son of a bitch," Sheppard said, too quietly, and started to set his tray down.
"Colonel! Ignore it," Rodney said, blithely, and added another pudding cup to his tray. It was a single isolated whistle; probably some marine on a dare. There was no way men were actually going to flirt with him. He was Rodney McKay, for God's sake.
They walked to his quarters still talking, and when they got to the door, he stopped his train of thought. "I just—thanks," he said, finally. Sheppard looked blank. "For not treating me like I'm any different."
Something passed over Sheppard's face, too quickly for Rodney to make sense of it. "No problem," he said, easily. "See you tomorrow."
Alone in his room, Rodney took a deep breath, stripped off his clothes, and went resolutely to look in the mirror. He'd avoided looking at himself all day, as though looking at his new body meant accepting that it was his. But it was obvious he wasn't going to be able to figure out how to change back overnight—unless maybe going to sleep just reversed the damage?—so he might as well face what he had.
The funny thing was, it was still his body. Broad shoulders, still—though now they were offset by breasts he honestly had no idea what to do with. His hair was still babyfine. His hands were smaller, but still squarish, as always. A faint silvery line on his forearm still marked the place where Kolya had cut him. All of his scars were still here, in fact. Arrow, gunshot, head wound. Maybe it should have distressed him that he could catalogue so many without flinching, but it didn't. Just one of the ways in which his life in the Pegasus galaxy had gone places he couldn't have imagined.
Of course, there was also the part where he had hips now, curves where there hadn't been any before. He'd always liked women's hips, and he placed his hands on his, a little uncertainly. The hair on his arms and legs was soft and pale, hardly visible, but—he swallowed hard—dark and luxuriant at his groin, where the lack of dick continued to be a visual and palpable shock.
It seemed a little unfair that he was no more beautiful as a woman than he had been as a man. Then again, this whole fucking experience seemed a little unfair. "It's an adventure," Elizabeth had said, brightly, but at this moment it seemed like anything but.
He brushed his teeth on autopilot and got into bed, but he was restless. He was exhausted, but sleep felt like an impossibility.
Well, hell. He could jerk off, couldn't he? Or—whatever the right term was now. It was his body. He could at least make some use of it.
Not that he exactly knew what he was doing. He'd never touched a woman from quite this angle before. But he liked breasts, so he started there, cupping them in his hands. An experimental nipple pinch made him gasp. Damn; these things were sensitive.
Suddenly this was starting to look like fun.
Rodney spent a while there, rolling and twisting his nipples between thumb and forefinger, feeling the unfamiliar sensation of this new kind of ache. It wasn't centered at his groin anymore. His whole body wanted.
He considered his usual stock of fantasies, but they weren't getting him going like they usually did. Getting sucked off, fucking Sam Carter or some anonymous co-ed or Katie Brown—it all felt wrong.
Of course, there were always the fantasies about Sheppard. Which he tried not to indulge in often, first of all because he didn't want to wear them out, plus fantasizing about a coworker always seemed slightly sleazy (and pathetic.) Usually he only let himself go there when he was drunk, or when life was truly miserable and he needed the distraction. But—turning unexpectedly into a woman had to count in that latter category. Didn't it?
Usually he liked to imagine kneeling at Sheppard's feet, sucking his cock.
Oh, that one still worked. Sheppard would let his head fall back into the wall, breathing hard, and he wouldn't be able to help thrusting into Rodney's mouth --
Slowly Rodney moved one hand to his underpants, and as he touched himself through the cotton his legs rolled further open and his back arched. He didn't know what he was doing, exactly, but his body seemed to—oh, that felt good. His fingers circled and he gasped and imagined what a mouth might feel like now—what Sheppard's mouth would feel like, yeah, right there --
...As he drifted toward sleep, the thought crossed his mind that maybe, just maybe, being in this body might offer a perk or two.
Whatever momentary optimism his explorations had generated vanished the next morning. Because when he woke up? He was still female.
And the week just got worse. Several of the men on the science staff took to dropping by his desk, making small talk—obviously attempting flirtation, in the most inept way imaginable. And he couldn't even derive pleasure from telling them to go fuck themselves, because even that sounded different now that his voice was in this new register. More like a come-on than he strictly intended.
(Whyte even tried again. "Hey, Meredith, want to grab dinner?" Rodney hissed that if he ever heard that name out of Whyte's mouth again he was going to rip off Whyte's balls and stuff them down his throat. Which was more graphic than was probably strictly necessary, but it worked—the guy blanched and scurried away and didn't come back.)
The women, meanwhile, were crowding around him at meals, offering him clothing (some of which he reluctantly accepted) and lipstick (which he rejected out of hand, because wearing women's clothing was bad enough, but makeup was beyond the goddamned pale.) In his previous life there might have been something gratifying about being the focus of all of this female attention, but Rodney found it frankly exhausting—and a distraction from what he needed to be doing, which was trying to figure out how to get his old body back.
The only person he could stand to be around was Sheppard. They took to having dinner together every night, on the late side, after most of the crowd had left the mess hall. As if by tacit agreement, they didn't talk about his new body, or his research into regaining the old one. They ate, they talked about books and movies and physics, sometimes they watched a movie on Rodney's laptop, or on John's, whoever's room they were hanging out in.
And if Rodney ended most of those nights with his hand down his pants, immersed in thoughts that were less than strictly platonic—well, that wasn't so different from how his life had been before, was it? His new body responded to Sheppard pretty much exactly as his old one had. And this one had the added bonus of arousal being basically invisible, which meant he could push himself a little further than he used to. Sit closer, on the pretext of needing to see the monitor screen. Get a little thrill from the proximity of what he wanted but knew he couldn't have.
After the third time he came to Keller in search of analgesics for his backaches, she prescribed a bra. Half the women in the city had offered him underwires, but he just couldn't stand them. His hands felt too clumsy to fasten them, and the wire and lace were constant and vaguely humiliating reminders of his new place in the world. It was Teyla who suggested a sports bra. It wasn't that different from wearing a tanktop, and he didn't hate it. Much.
Keller ordered him to start working out, too, at least three times a week. She said it would help him acclimate to his new body. He didn't especially want to acclimate, since he had no intention of keeping it, but as they moved into week two he glumly accepted her advice.
Ronon and Teyla both offered martial arts training, but Rodney opted for weights instead. His arms were substantially weaker than they had been, which pricked his vanity. He went Monday night, on the late side, when the weight room was mercifully empty.
And then on Thursday night Cadman showed up when he was halfway through his first set of bicep curls.
"So," she said, sitting next to him on the padded floor and bending at the waist to stretch toward her toes. "Quite the bodyguard you've got, there."
"Bodyguard?" Rodney started another set of reps with the pink barbells. As long as he didn't pay attention to their color, he didn't mind using them. They really were sized better for these hands.
"Didn't you hear? Sheppard gave Sussman a black eye."
"He what?" Rodney set the barbells down. The idea of Sheppard picking fights on his behalf was—infuriating, and a little bit endearing, and distressingly kind of hot.
"I don't know how you do it, McKay; that's some impressive chivalry," she said, but he was already on his way out the door. He didn't stop until he got to Sheppard's quarters.
"Let me in," he demanded, and the door opened. He could hear the shower running. "Sheppard!"
The water shut off fast. "McKay? Hang on." A moment later Sheppard emerged, hastily holding a towel around his waist. "Is everything okay?"
"What the hell do you think you're doing?"
"Um, showering?"
"You decked Sussman?"
Sheppard grimaced. "Yeah. You weren't supposed to hear about that."
"This isn't that big a city," Rodney pointed out. Now that Sheppard was standing in front of him, dripping wet and looking sheepish, his anger was draining away. "Look—you don't have to protect me," he said.
"He had it coming. Trust me."
Curiosity got the better of him. "What'd he say?"
Sheppard scowled. "You don't want to know."
"Oh, please. I know how men talk."
"Not military men, you don't," Sheppard muttered. "Can I get dressed now?"
"What? Yes, fine," Rodney said airily, and sat down on the bed. "Oh, come on, I've seen it before."
Sheppard faced away from him anyway, tugging on a pair of sweatpants and a faded old T-shirt, and when he turned he was holding his towel loosely over one arm. He sat down at his desk, at the far end of the room.
"He was being an ass," Sheppard said finally.
"Okay," Rodney said, shrugging. "If you say so."
The ensuing pause felt to Rodney like his cue to leave, but he didn't want to go back to the weight room. Talking with Cadman about this—or, honestly, anything—wasn't his idea of a good time. "Look, you want to watch a movie?"
"I might just read for a while."
"Hm, yes, how far along are you in War and Peace, anyway?"
"I might have to start over," Sheppard admitted. "It's been a while since I cracked it."
"Look, I'm sorry I made a fuss about you decking Sussman," Rodney said. "Can we just watch Die Hard again or something?"
"Not tonight."
"What, you have a headache?"
"Maybe I'm just not in the mood," Sheppard said, his voice tight.
"Great. That's just great."
"Okay, McKay, what exactly is your problem?"
"Oh, I don't know, maybe it's that you're the only person here who treats me like he used to? Only now you're—getting angry when people hit on me, and acting like—" Suddenly the light dawned. "Oh my God."
"McKay—" John said, anxiety in his voice, and Rodney gaped at him.
"You have a thing for me," Rodney said, feeling gobsmacked. It all made sense now. The dinners. The movies. The bizarre and frankly unprecedented impulse to defend Rodney's honor. John liked him as a woman.
"It's not what you think —"
"Isn't that just my luck," Rodney muttered. "I'm trying everything I can think of to get my old body back, and you're interested in this one."
"We really shouldn't be having this conversation," John said, sounding desperate. He stood, his hands reaching out like he was bracing himself, or fending Rodney off.
The soft sweatpants and T-shirt clung to John's body, revealing the incipient erection he had obviously been trying to hide. Maybe it was the wash of new hormones; maybe it was the crush Rodney'd been nursing since the day they'd met; but Rodney pushed his scruples firmly aside. This might be the only chance he would get. "Okay," he said, "no conversation," and crossed the room.
The kiss was good. No, the kiss was great, Rodney thought, hazily, as John's arms wrapped around him and drew him closer. Whatever protest John had been on the verge of making, he obviously wasn't going to offer it anymore. John's dick was trapped between their bodies, and the feel of it made Rodney ache with want. He pushed them back toward John's bed and they fell on it in a heap.
Rodney straddled John's hips, yanking off his jog bra because suddenly it was far more confining than he wanted it to be. When John reached up and ran his thumbs over Rodney's breasts, Rodney shuddered.
"More of that," he ordered, and John pinched lightly. "Harder."
Rodney leaned into John's hands, John thrust up beneath him, and everything in Rodney's body clenched, oh, God, he --
"Fuck," he said, aware that he was grinning like a loon but unable to make himself stop.
"Did you just come?" John sounded amazed.
"I can do that more than once, you know," Rodney pointed out, feeling smug.
"That'd be the plan," John said affably, and kissed him again.
Fingers were good. John's mouth was better. Was, in fact, everything Rodney had imagined.
He hadn't meant to beg John to fuck him, but it slipped out of his mouth sometime during his second orgasm of the night. John had been hard for a long time by that point, and Rodney saw him clutch at the base of his cock, looking momentarily pained. God, that was a rush; he knew exactly how that felt, and the thought that he had brought John to that level of arousal just by coming a couple of times was heady stuff.
"Jesus, Rodney," John muttered.
"You can, if you want," he offered, feeling magnanimous now. Given how much this body was enjoying everything else, surely he would enjoy that, too. "Do you want to?"
It was mostly a rhetorical question. John was already digging in his bedside table for a condom.
But he paused once the condom was on, bracing himself over Rodney with one hand, the other aiming where Rodney desperately wanted him to go. "You sure about this?"
"The chivalry's really not necessary," Rodney reminded him, nudging up, and with one hard thrust John slid inside.
"Oh," Rodney gasped, and John groaned.
"This isn't—gonna last long," he gritted, and pulled back and thrust in again.
"Fuck me," Rodney murmured, his voice low from overuse.
John choked back a cry, and stiffened, and Rodney felt him—oh, felt him --
Rodney was still a woman when he woke up in John's bed. For the first time since his transformation, he actually kind of didn't mind. Granted, not having a dick was taking some serious getting used to, and he really wasn't looking forward to his first period, but he had to admit, the female body had its rewards.
He had just brushed his teeth and was about to climb back into bed when John's walkie crackled to life.
"Colonel, do you know whereabouts of Doctor McKay?" The voice was Zelenka's, sounding excited.
John sat up, his hair flattened in every direction, momentarily wild-eyed. He motioned for the walkie and Rodney handed it to him.
"Sheppard here. I think I can find him," he said, giving Rodney a toe-curling grin. "What's up?"
"I think I have answer," Zelenka said.
Rodney's heart did somersaults. The two of them stared at each other. "Be there in ten. Sheppard out."
It was more like twenty minutes before Rodney got to the lab—he desperately needed a shower, and a full set of clothes, since the workout gear he'd worn to Sheppard's quarters the night before wasn't going to cut it—and when he arrived, he found Elizabeth, Zelenka, his staff, and Sheppard crowded in a circle around one of the tables.
"What'd you find," he said, pushing his way through, and stopped still.
On the table was a small black trapezoid that Rodney recognized from one of the labs below the south pier. "What's that doing here?"
"You recognize this? You tried to activate this device," Zelenka reminded him.
"Yes, I know that, I was there," Rodney snapped. "That was almost a month ago, and it didn't do anything."
"This is not precisely true," Radek said, grimacing. "It did nothing that we could see at the time. But!" He picked it up carefully and turned it over, and Rodney saw the shining silver markings glowing on its underside.
"Those weren't there before," he said, unnecessarily.
"First time you touched it, you activated it," Zelenka said, "but the change remained latent until the appropriate phase of the moon. I found a reference in a database entry about harnessing moon energy, and flash of insight brought me to this."
"Which moon? There are three!"
"The closest one," Elizabeth said, quietly. "That's the one that pulls the tides here the most strongly."
"So is there a way to reverse the transformation?" That was Sheppard. Rodney looked over at him, but his expression was unreadable.
"Yes," Zelenka said, and pushed the black box toward Rodney a few inches.
"What, just—touch it and think 'off'?"
Zelenka shrugged. "Worth a try, yes?"
Rodney's heart was in his throat. This might be it—the thing he had wanted—only now, some part of him wasn't exactly sure it was what he wanted anymore.
But he couldn't say that. Besides, it was idiocy. One night of great sex, but it wasn't like he and Sheppard had talked about any of this. And was he honestly even for a split second considering staying in this body because Sheppard liked it? Clearly the estrogen was addling his brain.
He took a deep breath and placed his hands along the machine's sides, and then everything went black.
He woke up in the infirmary.
"Good, you're awake," Keller said, beaming. Rodney looked down, his hand clutching where his breast had been—and wasn't, anymore. Relief and loss mingled in him like conflicting tides.
"How do you feel?"
"Fine," he said, and was momentarily startled to hear his old voice back.
"Let me just check you out," she said, bustling around his bedside. "If you could just sit up —"
"How's he doing?" Elizabeth's voice, from outside the curtain.
"For the love of God, bring me some coffee!"
Keller grinned. "You look fine to me. Go, get some breakfast," she said.
Rodney yanked back the rolling curtain to find Elizabeth, Radek, and John clustered outside. "Stop hovering," he said, and pushed through them.
"It's good to have you back," Elizabeth said, warmly, as they walked toward the mess.
"I was never gone," he said, tartly, and made a beeline for the coffee machine.
Breakfast in the mess hall seemed like the worst possible idea, so he grabbed a muffin and a coffee and headed back to the lab. He'd just wasted the better part of two weeks failing to solve the problem of his transformation; now he was behind on the desalinization project.
He had a lot to do. He wasn't avoiding thinking about anything.
Rodney worked through lunch, as usual. He told himself he wasn't disappointed that Sheppard didn't show up with a sandwich. He was back in his old body; he was perfectly able to go to the mess hall himself.
He sent Jeremenko instead. She brought back the wrong kind of sandwich and he ate it anyway.
It was depressing, but he was already out-of-sorts. Too much on his to-do list, that was all. He hated feeling behind.
Rodney went to dinner late, because work was keeping him occupied. Not because he was waiting for Sheppard to show up and walk with him, because he wasn't.
And he didn't actually expect to see Sheppard at dinner, which was why he brought the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal—well, the latest one the Daedalus had brought over in print. He took a certain pleasure in mentally drafting a variety of excoriating responses to some of their more idiotic articles. He hardly noticed that dinner was basically tasteless.
Afterwards he walked briskly back to his quarters and settled in to read. When the chime on his door sounded, he almost jumped out of his skin.
Sheppard stood in the hallway, looking determined and a little tense.
"Is there something you—" Need, had been about to say, but the word felt too tinged with everything Rodney wasn't about to admit. The best defense was a good offense, right? "What is it?"
"Can I come in?"
Rodney didn't have a good answer for that, so he stepped aside.
Sheppard held up a dvd case. "We never watched the movie," he said, a little lamely. "I thought maybe we could—"
In a flash, Rodney realized: Sheppard was trying to make things feel normal again. The "normal" of the last two weeks. The thought precipitated a peculiar tightness in his throat, because it really was sweet of him, only—only Rodney had been in a different body, and that normal wasn't going to fly any more.
"Listen," he said, "I appreciate what you're trying to do." He felt proud that his voice didn't crack. "But you don't have to let me down easy. I'm not actually a woman, remember? I'm not your type anymore. Which isn't anything new, exactly, so —"
"Rodney," John said, stopping him, and the sound of his first name stopped Rodney in mid-rant. "How about letting me get a word in before you decide what I'm doing?"
Rodney looked him in the eye and felt his heart doing somersaults again.
"There's been a...misunderstanding," John said.
This was excruciating, but Rodney folded his arms tight and waited.
"You look good like this," John said finally.
"I—what?" Rodney said faintly.
John gave a little half-shrug, his emerging smile somehow both shy and predatory in a way Rodney felt certain had never been the case before. Or maybe it had, and he just hadn't seen it.
Oh my God. "Are you hitting on me?" Rodney demanded.
John grinned. "Is it working?"
"But I changed back." It was the most unnecessary observation ever, but he couldn't help making it; his head was spinning.
"Yeah. Male's a good look on you."
Rodney's whole sense of John Sheppard had just turned on its head. His charm and slinkiness—the come-hither way he lounged, at-ease, that made Rodney want to push his way between his knees—these weren't evidence of a fundamentally unfair universe. On the contrary. Sheppard liked women, obviously, but he also liked men.
Sheppard liked him.
"I'm an idiot," Rodney said, big enough to admit it, because his night was obviously about to take a major turn for the better. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders a little, and there was appreciation—anticipation?—in John's eyes.
"By supergenius standards, yes," John agreed. Heat crackled between them.
"Oh," Rodney said, his lips brushing John's, and John let him right in.
John seemed fascinated by Rodney's dick. Which made a kind of sense; it hadn't been there, the night before.
He seemed determined to make Rodney come as quickly as possible, working him hard and fast, his own dick hot and insistent against Rodney's thigh.
"It's not a race," Rodney pointed out, his laugh turning into a moan as John bit his neck.
"I like going fast," John murmured right into his ear, giving a particularly delicious rough twist that made Rodney gasp. "But if you insist..."
He slid down Rodney's body, braced his hands on Rodney's thighs (conveniently holding him down), and gave one slow, languorous lick.
"Oh God," Rodney moaned, trying to thrust and completely unable to. John's chuckle was altogether too wicked, and so was what he was doing with his lips against Rodney's balls.
It didn't take much slow blowjob torture before Rodney broke. "I take it back," he managed, "it is a race, I was wrong, John, please—"
Okay, he would miss multiple orgasms, but oh, coming in this body felt really, really good.
"God," Rodney muttered, blissed-out and not really caring how stupid a look he probably had on his face. "What do you want, you can have anything —"
"A bigger bed."
"Hm, yes, I'll get right on that," Rodney said, realizing as he spoke that it ought to be possible—the requisition would be a little tricky, especially since he'd have to insist on another orthopedic mattress, but --
"Worry about it later," John said, amused, as he pushed his way alongside Rodney. There was a brief tangle of knees and elbows as they traded places, and then Rodney was kneeling over John again, just as he had done the night before. Only this time he felt loose-limbed and post-coital and completely unafraid. Because he was back in his own body, and Sheppard liked him this way.
Sucking John's dick, it turned out, lived up to all of Rodney's fantasies. John made a lot of extremely gratifying noises, and his hands clenched the rucked-up sheets instead of Rodney's hair, and Rodney got to feel smug and self-satisfied and also very, very glad his mouth was back to its original size.
When John came, his body stuttered up beneath Rodney's mouth and hands, and the moan he choked back made Rodney wish he could get hard again this soon.
"You're utterly insane," Rodney said, gulping the rest of his coffee. "The answer is obviously Doonesbury."
"Calvin and Hobbes," John said, as though it pained him to disagree.
"Yes, you would think that, wouldn't you? Excuse me, I need more caffeine before I can demonstrate the error of your ways."
When Rodney returned to the table, Teyla and Ronon had joined them.
"No more breasts, huh," Ronon said, sounding a little regretful.
"Sorry," Rodney said, not sorry in the least.
"It is good that everything is back to normal," Teyla offered.
Rodney looked around the table at his team—his friends—his... what, boyfriend? Partner? Sheppard—and nodded. "It is," he said, grinning. "Normal's all right by me."
The End