Anti-climax
by Speranza
Author's Note: Thanks to Lim and Terri and Resonant, for that tiny extra bit of angst.
John had sex with Teyla the first week he was in Atlantis, when she maybe still thought he was an alien hero come to save them all and before she realized he was--well, him. John hadn't been sexually attracted to a woman in years, but he figured that hey, new galaxy, anything was possible, so he slept with her at the first possible opportunity. It was late at night, or maybe early in the morning--it was hard to tell, his internal clock was fubar worse than it had been since he'd started flying supersonic--and they were all well into their twenty-third or -fourth crisis of the week. McKay looked like a ghost.
John was in that state of total sensory crispness that he always got when he was beyond exhaustion. He had been heading toward the control room when he encountered Teyla, who was coming the other way up the corridor. She slowed upon seeing him...Christ, she was beautiful in the dim light. John stopped too, unable not to stare: at her lovely face, the soft slope of her breasts, her rounded hips, two parentheses. His mouth was dry, suddenly, with wanting her. "John," Teyla said softly. He jerked up guiltily and found her smiling a little. She shifted her body, a subtle invitation, and he surged almost helplessly into kissing her, her arms snaking around his neck, her breasts warm against his chest.
He lifted her up, off the ground, and felt her thighs come up against his hips. He staggered into the nearest room, fell with her against the nearest angled surface, and fucked her. Or she fucked him: the whole thing was a blur of groaning mouths and sweet, perfect friction. Teyla steered him, panting softly; her strong hands gripped his shoulders, his hips. She was wet inside. They had fantastic sexual chemistry--speeding together, slowing together, groaning at almost the exact same moments. John held her in his arms and thrust up into her, over and over, going deep. He felt her grinding back against him, shuddering and convulsing. Sweat stung his eyes as he came, biting his moans back against her shoulder. Her hands slid through his hair, cupped his face. It was awesome.
They had a few of these frenzied, amazing couplings, enough that John got kind of confused about himself all over again. But then Teyla began to turn into a friend. John started making faces at her on missions, and then he started making faces at her in bed, and then they started laughing and poking at each other more than fucking. Eventually they decided to skip the sex entirely and maybe just watch the Flutie game again, or they'd go to the gym and beat the shit out of each other, which they both really enjoyed.
It broke up naturally and easily, though they still had sex every once in a while, when they were bored or when things on Atlantis got intense and once, really notably for John, during Teyla's third trimester, when she suddenly appeared like an avenging angel, grabbed him by the shirt, and dragged him off to her bedroom. She never even said what she wanted, gripped as she was by some totally terrifying female lust, but while John could be dense, he wasn't that dense, so he sort of gulped and took his shirt off and prayed for stamina. Having sex with a woman that pregnant totally freaked him out, especially since she kept growling at him and urging him to do it harder; still, John decided that sometimes a guy just had to man up and get the job done. He gritted his teeth and fucked her through one orgasm, then slowed a bit to catch his breath, thinking of the final scores of all the Superbowls he could remember (46-10 Chicago, 39-20 New York, 42-10 Washington...) to help him maintain his erection. After her third orgasm, Teyla sank back with closed eyes and said, still breathing hard, "Thank you, John."
"Hey, anything for the team," John said, and collapsed.
Ronon and John were eyefucking from the first day they met, and John knew that one of them was going to get fucked for real if Ronon stayed in Atlantis. John also knew, in that dumb-stupid way he sometimes knew things, that it had to be him who did the fucking, at least at first, or Ronon would never respect him. Ronon kept looking him up and down, a half-smile on his face. Ronon was waiting for it. John psyched himself up.
He spent a week taking vitamins and raiding energy drinks from the science labs before cornering Ronon in the gym, bending him over a gym horse, and fucking the daylights out of him. Afterwards, he thought he might possibly need some kind of hip replacement/ spinal disc surgery, but it was totally worth it to see Ronon lying there all blissed out and purring like a large cat. And besides, now he could let Ronon fuck him until the cows came home and be all sort of noblesse oblige about it.
He was pretty sure his teammates were having their own affairs; Ronon and Teyla certainly were. More surprising was the fact that John had come upon Rodney kissing Teyla up against the wall in the hallway near her quarters, and okay, that had been a rough mission, but not Rodney and Teyla rough! He backed away, but when he came upon them the next morning, having breakfast, he did some serious eyerolling.
"What?" Teyla said, arching an eyebrow. "What?" Rodney demanded. "You think you're the only one who becomes sexually attractive in adversity?"
"Oh brother," John said, and rolled his eyes some more.
It surprised him, actually, that it took him so long to have sex with Rodney, considering that he spent way more time with Rodney than with anyone else. It ended up happening in the most offhand way possible, with the two of them kicking back in Rodney's room and drinking beer and watching old episodes of Star Trek. Dagger of the Mind, which they'd agreed had Trek's sexiest female scientist, Dr. Helen Noel, even if she was only a soft scientist: a psychiatrist. And then Rodney had grabbed John's arm and pointed out that you could see her underwear in the scene where Kirk pulled her out of the air conditioning vent, and that was actually pretty hot.
They were slumped back together, shoulder to shoulder, so John could feel Rodney squirming beside him. Really, he'd meant it as a joke, sliding his hand over Rodney's belly and down. He'd been expecting to be slapped, but Rodney had taken it as an actual invitation, had pushed his hips up. His hard-on had snugged into John's palm, and suddenly there was unzipping happening and heavy breathing and, embarrassingly enough, about eighteen seconds of actual sex if you defined "sex" as a few sweaty-palmed yanks of your best friend's dick. Still, Rodney's cock was surprisingly attractive, well-shaped and cut with a smooth, softly-flared head, and Rodney's hands were fucking magic, which he should really have figured. There were some embarrassing grunts on both sides and then a really big mess. Like, everywhere: mostly on him.
"Oh, yuck," Rodney said, making a face and wiping his hand on John's shirt.
John glared, taken aback by the rudeness. "Rod-ney--"
"What? Yours was a mess already," and then Rodney's expression grew serious, and his eyes went wide, and he reached out and grabbed John's shoulder and jerked him into an intense, almost movie star-ish first kiss--at which point, John figured out he was being messed with and burst out laughing against Rodney's mouth. Then Rodney put him into a headlock and yelled, "Now you have to take me to the dance!" and put his wet tongue into John's ear. John was laughing so hard he lost most of his motor coordination, so it was harder than it should have been to wrestle Rodney to the floor. "Oh my God, this is homosexual panic!" Rodney yelled, slapping at him in between snorts of laughter. "Workplace harassment! I'm filing a grievance with--help, help, I'm being oppressed!"
Normally for John, sex started out great, and then degraded as he and whoever it was both lost interest. But with McKay, it was the opposite; the sex got better and better. Rodney applied himself to sex the way he did to any other complex puzzle, like giving John terrific orgasms was something he was determined to figure out. Rodney was responsive to the smallest things, gasping at the feel of John's thumb stroking the back of his neck or a half-intentional kiss pressed to a shoulderblade. After-mission hand-jobs turned into sexual marathons, John with his head tipped back and coming his brains out, Rodney with his thigh muscles jittering. John was used to letting himself sleep where he fell--the gym, Ronon's room, the back of the jumper--and more and more, that was in Rodney's bed. He got used to Rodney's mattress and nighttime noises. He got used to Rodney's smug-looking smiles.
And then the smile fell off Rodney's face. Later, John tried to figure out exactly when it happened. He remembered when he first noticed it, anyway. One minute, he'd been gasping up at Rodney's ceiling, brain melting out of his ears; the next, Rodney'd been rolling away from him, pulling himself together, gathering himself up. His face was--complicated: too complicated considering how good the sex had just been.
"I--you should probably go," Rodney said, looking away.
"Um," John said, pushing himself up on weak arms. "Okay." He'd been thirty seconds from falling asleep, and would have, too, if Rodney had let him. He fished around on the floor for his boxers and stole glances at Rodney's face, trying to name what he saw there. Exhaustion, maybe. Maybe Rodney was just coming down with something.
John gave him some space, but it didn't help; John could still sense Rodney's spreading unhappiness. The next time they had sex--a frenzied blow-job, instigated by John, in the back of the jumper bay--John closed his eyes and sucked, hands tight on Rodney's hips, thinking, tell me what I did wrong; tell me. Rodney just groaned and skimmed John's face with his fingers, but he didn't invite John back to his room afterwards.
"Look," John said, one late night in the labs, finally provoked to speech, "are you okay?"
Rodney flushed sharply, a painful red blotch appearing on each cheek. "Yeah, I--I'm fine," and John stared, trying to name the expression. Shame, maybe. Humiliation.
"Because if I did something to...piss you off or whatever," John said slowly.
Rodney barked out a laugh but didn't meet his eyes. "No, no, no. It's not you. It's me, it's totally me," and now John was panicked, because that was a death knell if he ever heard one. "Just, I can be an idiot sometimes, that's all," Rodney muttered, pressing the heel of his palm to one eye. "You should maybe just ignore me for a while," and John suddenly had a white-hot flash of insight and thought, "Holy fuck, he's in love with me." That was a horrible enough thought that he couldn't help but cringe on Rodney's behalf, because--God, it was a terrible bad fucking idea for anyone to be in love with him, ever.
"Right, okay," John said, already backing off. "Yeah. Just so long as you--"
Rodney had seen John get the message, but he didn't seem either relieved or embarrassed, just--tired, suddenly. "Yes, it's fine," he said. "Get out of here," and John fled.
That should have been the end of it. John ignored him for a while, and Rodney tried hard, too, John could see it: Rodney focused his attention on work, focused on building the science team, on handling each crisis as fast as Atlantis could throw it at him. But Rodney had a miserable hunch to his shoulders that wouldn't go away. John remembered Nancy looking the same way, all miserable like that. That only steeled his resolve to fix things; there had to be a way to get him and Rodney back like they were. Rodney began to date Katie Brown with something like grim determination, and awkwardly asked John if he wanted to double date. John immediately asked out one of the biologists, Dr. Lauren Colt, and took her to movie night. They slept together twice and broke up badly, which was reassuring; Rodney almost wasn't so lucky, nearly marrying Katie before figuring out that while not being in love was terrific and everything, a guy needed more than that to sustain a healthy, long-term relationship.
But John still had to live with the dejected slope of Rodney's shoulders, the tense, unhappy line of his mouth. He watched Rodney while pretending not to, waiting for Rodney to get over it. People fell for him hard, fuelled by whatever stories they told themselves, but they got over him fast, once they knew him. Nancy had gotten over him like a bullet once she realized that they weren't ever going to be General and Mrs. Big Washington Player, but then again, Nancy had never really liked him in the first place; not like Rodney liked him. And the problem was, John was discovering, you couldn't just turn it off like a switch: really liking someone. Rodney went on liking him, and John couldn't make him stop. Worse yet, he couldn't make himself not--not--
And that ended up being the real, anticlimactic end of it: John pushing his way into Rodney's room late one night and kissing him fiercely. "What?" Rodney was taken aback, hands coming up to keep John at bay. "John, what are you--" but John just tilted his head and deepened the kiss, gradually working his way into Rodney's mouth, trying to communicate everything he didn't know how to say. Rodney gripped his shoulders, then slowly slid his hands down John's back. The kiss was intense but not sexual: John was hard and tingling pleasantly, but it wasn't fucking he was after. It was-- Rodney hooked an arm round his neck. It was-- He cupped Rodney's soft-bristled cheek.
"Look, it's okay, okay?" John said stupidly, not knowing what else to say. "Us. It's--"
"Really?" Rodney shot him an assessing look; Rodney knew him better than anyone.
"Yeah." John felt maybe a little sick. "I'll...look, I'll try not to break anything."
Rodney slid a hand up John's chest and unerringly pinched a nipple between his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger. The blood drained out of John's brain.
"Okay," Rodney said. His wide mouth tipped up crookedly. "C'mere."
The End