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Title: Hegira - Part 8 of 9
Fandom: SGA
Pairing: John/Rodney
Rating: Adult Themes
Word Count: 2,918
Spoilers: None
Category: AU
Notes: Jack O'Neill and Samantha Carter borrowed from SG-1.
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, no offense, no money.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine
Summary: They had made it to another in a seemingly endless succession of motels on the edge of a dustbowl town when the sun had already started its path across the sky.
They had made it to another in a seemingly endless succession of motels on the edge of a dustbowl town when the sun had already started its path across the sky. Rodney had valiantly tried to pull John from the truck but after a while Jack simply nudged him aside and hefted John over his shoulder.
“He’s a lot lighter than he looks, isn’t he?” Jack arched an eyebrow when Rodney scowled at him.
“I can… he would prefer if I…” Rodney had tried to protest but Jack waved him off.
“You’ll rip your stitches and I’m not in the mood to play nursemaid to both of you,” Jack had commented dryly.
An hour later, John was sprawled on one bed and Jack facedown on the second, leaving Rodney to flip through channels on the decrepit looking television but without cable, there was nothing but sport or some ancient black and white movies. With a put-upon sigh, Rodney made his way out of the room to replenish their ice-bucket so he could at least attempt to combat the stifling heat of the room sans air-conditioning.
There was further cursing when Rodney discovered the ice machine closest to their room was out of order and he would have to traipse down to the next lot of buildings over. He span the metal bucket in his hands as he walked, taking his time because the breeze was a welcome respite from the heat of the room.
When Rodney spotted the girl walking across the car park, something inside him automatically screamed run.
Rodney wasn’t sure what it was, perhaps the fact that how she moved was somehow familiar or the way she also paused, almost imperceptibly when she noticed him, before correcting the direction she was walking in so that she would cross Rodney’s path if he retreated.
Rodney cast his eyes about but it was only just past seven in the morning and no one was around. The motel office was on the other side of the complex as well as his room and he wondered how far it would get him to yell for help. The night manager had actually mentioned that their small party were the first people he had seen in days so Rodney knew that the rooms closest to him would be vacant.
He wondered if the broken ice machine had been purely coincidental.
As she got closer, Rodney could see that the girl's eyes were painted almost shut with heavy eyeliner. When she looked down there was the eerie impression that she had nothing but black pits where they should be, like someone had taken to them with a spoon and had left nothing behind. She looked up at Rodney with a bored smile. "Got any change mister?” she asked and Rodney fought the strong urge to collapse from relief.
As she halted a few steps from Rodney he took note of her short black skirt, fish-net stockings with various rips and tears and a T shirt with the words 'Jesus loves you, Satan loves me' across the front. Rodney was reassured.
She swung a hoop of keys from one black taloned hand to the other as she regarded him. Rodney simply smiled politely and dug into his pockets with a mumbled, “Sure, I think I-“
Rodney realised his mistake as soon as the gentle clink, clink clink if her keys vanished when he looked down.
He didn't finish his sentence. Instead she moved forward and around, spinning up on her toes and her arm coming around his neck all in one fluid movement. Rodney, startled, let the air in his lungs go in a gasp of surprise and she squeezed harder. Rodney opened his mouth to yell for help, knowing it was a little late when nothing but a further rough exhalation escaped. She used his surprise to her advantage, hooking her legs around his waist and hauling upwards so she was now clinging to his back with all her weight pressing back against his windpipe.
Rodney grasped her arms as best he could and yanked but she wasn’t budging. He turned and aimed for the corner of the ice machine and stumbled backwards, mindful that his vision was greying at the edges.
He heard her grunt roughly and her arms loosened for the split second Rodney needed to jam his own upwards and out so her grip came away. She dropped backwards lightly onto her feet and Rodney spun, wanting to keep her in view. He opened his mouth to call for help again but his abused throat wasn’t cooperating and he coughed harshly instead.
She was moving towards him again, a couple of determined strides. Rodney smacked her in the chest with the flat of his palm when she got close enough and she stumbled back a few steps, obviously more surprised by his move than hurt.
Rodney did the only thing he could think of. He dropped his shoulder and charged.
The girl was pushed backwards and her head smacked into the glass front of the ice machine, shattering on impact. She slumped to the ground amidst a pile of bloodied glass and Rodney looked at her, horrified at what he'd done.
"Jesus," he breathed as he approached her. He felt her neck for a pulse and there was none. "Oh my God," he cried and his legs went to jelly underneath him. He sat down hard, staring at the girl's bleeding form.
When her eyes snapped open Rodney screamed.
He scrabbled backwards, not feeling the glass beneath him shredding his hands. The girl got to her hands and knees and then her feet, swaying a little drunkenly and again, Rodney thought it looked horribly familiar.
He remembered John standing in the middle of a road, having picked himself up just after being run down by a car. He’d shaken it off, like she was shaking it off now.
Rodney's back came up against the metal strut holding the awning on the outside of the rooms and he used it to slide himself upwards and get his feet beneath him. The girl used the back of her hand to clear some of the blood from her eyes and looked at it, as if surprised it was there. "Look what you did you little bastard," she growled, holding her hand out indignantly.
Rodney realised he was still holding the ice bucket he’d left the room with and he hefted the weight of it. It wasn’t much but it was metal and better than nothing. He brought it up and swung it as hard as he could at her. The bucket arced harmlessly through the space the girl had been occupying and she appeared at his side. She grabbed his injured arm and twisted up savagely. He cried out as he was forced to his knees with the movement, the bucket dropping bonelessly from his other hand.
The girl grabbed the back of his head by his hair with her free hand and forced his head downwards, his forehead cracking on the concrete beneath with a sickening sound. White pain lanced through his temple, arced down both his arms and pooled in his belly. When she pulled his head away from the floor there was a spray of blood.
The girl released him and allowed Rodney to slump to the ground, rolling over onto his back with a pitiful noise. She put one booted foot on his neck and mercifully it was then that the wave of blackness that threatened Rodney's consciousness finally took it.
~~~
Rodney opened his eyes slowly and he could see nothing but white. Panic threatened until he realised he was looking through the gauzy whiteness that could only be a bandage. He raised a hand to explore and it was captured by another hand. Panic threatened again as the last events that he remembered replayed in his mind.
"Don't touch it. I'll do it." He felt a weight shift on the bed next to him and then the bandages were being carefully taken away. He blinked at the bright light and then his eyes adjusted and the first thing he could see clearly was the concerned face of John hovering over him. He tried to raise his left arm and grunted in pain.
"Your shoulder was out of the socket. I put it back in but it'll be tender for a while," John said, placing a hand on his arm to restrain it from moving again. He raised his other hand and placed a palm against John’s cheek.
"How... you saved me?" he guessed. John smiled and kissed the palm by moving his mouth into it. He lowered it gently back onto the bed.
"Wish I could say I did but that's not what happened,” John said, his eyes skipping over Rodney who turned and followed his gaze, seeing Jack standing in the doorway of the bedroom, a shoulder leant against the jamb.
“Maybe don’t go wandering off by yourself, eh?” Jack raised an admonishing eyebrow and Rodney grimaced.
“How did you…? I mean, I put her head through glass and it only slowed her down.”
Jack grimaced and then reached into his coat, bringing forth a box that he dropped onto the bed by Rodney. He dug into the box and pulled free something that he at first thought was a bullet. It was a smooth, shiny black and had a slick texture that almost looked oily. It flexed in and out, almost as if it was breathing.
"Put them away,” Rodney said, dropping it back into the box and nudging the box towards the end of the bed with a finger. “What are they?”
“Ammo,” Jack said, pulling free the snub-nosed gun Rodney had seen before. “They’re designed specifically to kill something that can… regenerate”
John’s face tightened but he showed no other outward sign of emotion.
“How?” Rodney couldn’t help but ask.
“Not really one hundred percent sure, but I do know that once they are in a body, they keep zinging about, making such a mess that after a while there’s nothing to regenerate. You could shoot someone in the shoulder or the leg with one of these and it will still be a kill shot… eventually. I relieved my friend the General of these on my way out of his house. I know Sheppard’s gone all Number Five is alive here, but remember in that movie there were other robots who weren’t so enlightened.”
“I thought there was only one of him,” Rodney said, confusion on his face.
“Just because he was the best hope they had for the project, doesn’t mean there weren’t a bunch of duds running around that were still essentially viable. They might not have gotten as far in the changeover as Sheppard here has, but I wouldn’t count out there being more of these bas… people about.”
“It was daytime,” John breathed. “She was moving about in the day.”
“Well yes, that’s a whole ‘nother problem,” Jack sighed. “Maybe that girl was unstable or not as strong as they hoped or couldn’t pass for human like Sheppard can. There are a whole lot of reasons why she might not have gotten the full package but the NID is living by the old ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’ coda.”
“What does this all mean?” Rodney asked, grasping John’s forearm with his good hand and squeezing.
“Means we need to find somewhere to hide you both, permanently.”
“Where on Earth?” Rodney grumbled, thumping the mattress with a frustrated fist but John was looking at Jack and Rodney glanced up at him too, seeing a strange smile on the older man’s face.
“Well, you see, I might have an idea about that.”
~~~
John came awake with a start. He had fallen asleep to the gentle sound of Jack making phone call after phone call from their tiny room. He was delving deeply into his network, throwing out tentacles wide to catch even the vaguest scrap of information. He hadn’t told them yet exactly what his plan was and John had left Rodney to wheedle and cajole.
John didn’t sleep often. He never counted the complete body-shutdown that happened to him during the daylight hours as sleep, he pretty much thought of it as being off.
The way Jack had compared him to a robot had cut deeper than John would ever admit because sometimes, that was just the way he felt.
Every now and then though, he would nap like a normal person, drifting into an unconscious state without any outside interference and these were the only times he would dream. He didn’t remember much of his life, a seemingly endless series of operations and tests and nothing before, but he had been a person once, with a life.
He wondered if he should be feeling angry at the world or if his strange detachment and resignation about the whole thing was just one more way that he wasn’t a person any longer, one more thing they took away from him.
“You okay?”
John smiled tiredly at Rodney’s concerned frown. “You know, I make a better pillow than table,” John remarked, looking down the length of his body that was mostly obscured by papers. Rodney was sitting on the edge of the bed he’d been sleeping on, reading something. John noticed the blue folder that held his apparent life story close to his knee and sighed. “Any conclusions?”
“Mostly that my former position that medical science is all voodoo and blind stabs in the dark is right,” Rodney grumbled, burrowing into the pile to retrieve a particular page and managing to skate his fingers along the inside of John’s thigh. John flinched and most of the paperwork went sliding to the floor.
“Not exactly a stable table are you?” Rodney snorted, leaning awkwardly off the end of the bed to retrieve what had disappeared with John’s movement.
“Not when someone is groping me, no,” John quirked an eyebrow and Rodney chuckled. John heard a groan from the other side of the room and saw that Jack had plugged a finger into his ear, the handset of the phone held grimly in the other.
“Anyway, it reads like something out of a Mary Shelley novel. They find these organic samples in a lab they discover while stumbling through something called a Stargate and because the research suggests that the subject had unchartered regenerative power, and by the way, that kinda makes you more Wolverine than vampire which… cool. Anyway, they stick all these poor saps with this genetic material until they find someone who doesn’t die.”
“That’s not exactly what it says,” John cajoled, rolling his eyes.
“Oh excuse me, but you can’t argue that that is the gist of what they’ve done here.”
“Okay, the very simplified version, yes.”
“They identify a gene you have called the…” Rodney rummaged some more until he came up with another page and then waved it derisively. “The AG gene. Do you know what AG stands for?”
John watched Rodney, knowing from experience not to answer any questions thrown at him when Rodney was building up to a really good rant.
“Alien Gene gene. That’s like saying ATM machine or Pin number. Why didn’t they just call it the A gene?”
“That’s your concern?” John asked wryly and Rodney rolled his eyes.
“You’re my concern,” Rodney said in such a no-nonsense way that John felt his heart turn over. He reached out and circled his fingers around Rodney’s forearm, squeezing briefly.
“They were trying for either a fountain of youth or a newer, better soldier. It didn’t seem to matter what the end result was, as long as it was profitable. The UVA light sensitivity looks like nothing more than a way to… store you, as bad as that sounds. It looks like they started getting concerned about how you were tracking in the strength and agility tests. There’s a bunch of very nervous sounding memos, and I’m paraphrasing again, where they basically say that they’re worried you’ll get it into your brain just to punch your way through walls until you're outside.”
John frowned for a moment and Rodney touched him on the shoulder, worried. Finally, John said, “That sounds more like the Hulk than Wolverine.”
Rodney barked out startled laughter as he went back to organising papers and shoving them all back into the folder.
John looked across the room again at the empty bed and then back at Rodney. “Why did you put this stuff on me when you had another bed over there?” he asked absently.
Rodney paused in his page rifling to studiously look anywhere but at John. “You don’t let me near you in the day, but when you actually sleep sleep you don’t really mind so much. I don’t get to… it’s not often I can be near you when you’re like this.”
John breathed for a beat and then looked at Jack, who although turned halfway into the wall, glanced up the moment eyes lighted on his back.
“Do you think you could-?” John flicked his chin in the direction of the door.
Jack rolled his eyes but there was amusement on his face. “There’s a payphone just outside. I’ll be… a while.”
Rodney only managed to get out the word, “What-?” when he was tackled off the bed, both of them landing in a pile if papers, bedding and each other.
Part Nine
Fandom: SGA
Pairing: John/Rodney
Rating: Adult Themes
Word Count: 2,918
Spoilers: None
Category: AU
Notes: Jack O'Neill and Samantha Carter borrowed from SG-1.
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, no offense, no money.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine
Summary: They had made it to another in a seemingly endless succession of motels on the edge of a dustbowl town when the sun had already started its path across the sky.
They had made it to another in a seemingly endless succession of motels on the edge of a dustbowl town when the sun had already started its path across the sky. Rodney had valiantly tried to pull John from the truck but after a while Jack simply nudged him aside and hefted John over his shoulder.
“He’s a lot lighter than he looks, isn’t he?” Jack arched an eyebrow when Rodney scowled at him.
“I can… he would prefer if I…” Rodney had tried to protest but Jack waved him off.
“You’ll rip your stitches and I’m not in the mood to play nursemaid to both of you,” Jack had commented dryly.
An hour later, John was sprawled on one bed and Jack facedown on the second, leaving Rodney to flip through channels on the decrepit looking television but without cable, there was nothing but sport or some ancient black and white movies. With a put-upon sigh, Rodney made his way out of the room to replenish their ice-bucket so he could at least attempt to combat the stifling heat of the room sans air-conditioning.
There was further cursing when Rodney discovered the ice machine closest to their room was out of order and he would have to traipse down to the next lot of buildings over. He span the metal bucket in his hands as he walked, taking his time because the breeze was a welcome respite from the heat of the room.
When Rodney spotted the girl walking across the car park, something inside him automatically screamed run.
Rodney wasn’t sure what it was, perhaps the fact that how she moved was somehow familiar or the way she also paused, almost imperceptibly when she noticed him, before correcting the direction she was walking in so that she would cross Rodney’s path if he retreated.
Rodney cast his eyes about but it was only just past seven in the morning and no one was around. The motel office was on the other side of the complex as well as his room and he wondered how far it would get him to yell for help. The night manager had actually mentioned that their small party were the first people he had seen in days so Rodney knew that the rooms closest to him would be vacant.
He wondered if the broken ice machine had been purely coincidental.
As she got closer, Rodney could see that the girl's eyes were painted almost shut with heavy eyeliner. When she looked down there was the eerie impression that she had nothing but black pits where they should be, like someone had taken to them with a spoon and had left nothing behind. She looked up at Rodney with a bored smile. "Got any change mister?” she asked and Rodney fought the strong urge to collapse from relief.
As she halted a few steps from Rodney he took note of her short black skirt, fish-net stockings with various rips and tears and a T shirt with the words 'Jesus loves you, Satan loves me' across the front. Rodney was reassured.
She swung a hoop of keys from one black taloned hand to the other as she regarded him. Rodney simply smiled politely and dug into his pockets with a mumbled, “Sure, I think I-“
Rodney realised his mistake as soon as the gentle clink, clink clink if her keys vanished when he looked down.
He didn't finish his sentence. Instead she moved forward and around, spinning up on her toes and her arm coming around his neck all in one fluid movement. Rodney, startled, let the air in his lungs go in a gasp of surprise and she squeezed harder. Rodney opened his mouth to yell for help, knowing it was a little late when nothing but a further rough exhalation escaped. She used his surprise to her advantage, hooking her legs around his waist and hauling upwards so she was now clinging to his back with all her weight pressing back against his windpipe.
Rodney grasped her arms as best he could and yanked but she wasn’t budging. He turned and aimed for the corner of the ice machine and stumbled backwards, mindful that his vision was greying at the edges.
He heard her grunt roughly and her arms loosened for the split second Rodney needed to jam his own upwards and out so her grip came away. She dropped backwards lightly onto her feet and Rodney spun, wanting to keep her in view. He opened his mouth to call for help again but his abused throat wasn’t cooperating and he coughed harshly instead.
She was moving towards him again, a couple of determined strides. Rodney smacked her in the chest with the flat of his palm when she got close enough and she stumbled back a few steps, obviously more surprised by his move than hurt.
Rodney did the only thing he could think of. He dropped his shoulder and charged.
The girl was pushed backwards and her head smacked into the glass front of the ice machine, shattering on impact. She slumped to the ground amidst a pile of bloodied glass and Rodney looked at her, horrified at what he'd done.
"Jesus," he breathed as he approached her. He felt her neck for a pulse and there was none. "Oh my God," he cried and his legs went to jelly underneath him. He sat down hard, staring at the girl's bleeding form.
When her eyes snapped open Rodney screamed.
He scrabbled backwards, not feeling the glass beneath him shredding his hands. The girl got to her hands and knees and then her feet, swaying a little drunkenly and again, Rodney thought it looked horribly familiar.
He remembered John standing in the middle of a road, having picked himself up just after being run down by a car. He’d shaken it off, like she was shaking it off now.
Rodney's back came up against the metal strut holding the awning on the outside of the rooms and he used it to slide himself upwards and get his feet beneath him. The girl used the back of her hand to clear some of the blood from her eyes and looked at it, as if surprised it was there. "Look what you did you little bastard," she growled, holding her hand out indignantly.
Rodney realised he was still holding the ice bucket he’d left the room with and he hefted the weight of it. It wasn’t much but it was metal and better than nothing. He brought it up and swung it as hard as he could at her. The bucket arced harmlessly through the space the girl had been occupying and she appeared at his side. She grabbed his injured arm and twisted up savagely. He cried out as he was forced to his knees with the movement, the bucket dropping bonelessly from his other hand.
The girl grabbed the back of his head by his hair with her free hand and forced his head downwards, his forehead cracking on the concrete beneath with a sickening sound. White pain lanced through his temple, arced down both his arms and pooled in his belly. When she pulled his head away from the floor there was a spray of blood.
The girl released him and allowed Rodney to slump to the ground, rolling over onto his back with a pitiful noise. She put one booted foot on his neck and mercifully it was then that the wave of blackness that threatened Rodney's consciousness finally took it.
~~~
Rodney opened his eyes slowly and he could see nothing but white. Panic threatened until he realised he was looking through the gauzy whiteness that could only be a bandage. He raised a hand to explore and it was captured by another hand. Panic threatened again as the last events that he remembered replayed in his mind.
"Don't touch it. I'll do it." He felt a weight shift on the bed next to him and then the bandages were being carefully taken away. He blinked at the bright light and then his eyes adjusted and the first thing he could see clearly was the concerned face of John hovering over him. He tried to raise his left arm and grunted in pain.
"Your shoulder was out of the socket. I put it back in but it'll be tender for a while," John said, placing a hand on his arm to restrain it from moving again. He raised his other hand and placed a palm against John’s cheek.
"How... you saved me?" he guessed. John smiled and kissed the palm by moving his mouth into it. He lowered it gently back onto the bed.
"Wish I could say I did but that's not what happened,” John said, his eyes skipping over Rodney who turned and followed his gaze, seeing Jack standing in the doorway of the bedroom, a shoulder leant against the jamb.
“Maybe don’t go wandering off by yourself, eh?” Jack raised an admonishing eyebrow and Rodney grimaced.
“How did you…? I mean, I put her head through glass and it only slowed her down.”
Jack grimaced and then reached into his coat, bringing forth a box that he dropped onto the bed by Rodney. He dug into the box and pulled free something that he at first thought was a bullet. It was a smooth, shiny black and had a slick texture that almost looked oily. It flexed in and out, almost as if it was breathing.
"Put them away,” Rodney said, dropping it back into the box and nudging the box towards the end of the bed with a finger. “What are they?”
“Ammo,” Jack said, pulling free the snub-nosed gun Rodney had seen before. “They’re designed specifically to kill something that can… regenerate”
John’s face tightened but he showed no other outward sign of emotion.
“How?” Rodney couldn’t help but ask.
“Not really one hundred percent sure, but I do know that once they are in a body, they keep zinging about, making such a mess that after a while there’s nothing to regenerate. You could shoot someone in the shoulder or the leg with one of these and it will still be a kill shot… eventually. I relieved my friend the General of these on my way out of his house. I know Sheppard’s gone all Number Five is alive here, but remember in that movie there were other robots who weren’t so enlightened.”
“I thought there was only one of him,” Rodney said, confusion on his face.
“Just because he was the best hope they had for the project, doesn’t mean there weren’t a bunch of duds running around that were still essentially viable. They might not have gotten as far in the changeover as Sheppard here has, but I wouldn’t count out there being more of these bas… people about.”
“It was daytime,” John breathed. “She was moving about in the day.”
“Well yes, that’s a whole ‘nother problem,” Jack sighed. “Maybe that girl was unstable or not as strong as they hoped or couldn’t pass for human like Sheppard can. There are a whole lot of reasons why she might not have gotten the full package but the NID is living by the old ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’ coda.”
“What does this all mean?” Rodney asked, grasping John’s forearm with his good hand and squeezing.
“Means we need to find somewhere to hide you both, permanently.”
“Where on Earth?” Rodney grumbled, thumping the mattress with a frustrated fist but John was looking at Jack and Rodney glanced up at him too, seeing a strange smile on the older man’s face.
“Well, you see, I might have an idea about that.”
~~~
John came awake with a start. He had fallen asleep to the gentle sound of Jack making phone call after phone call from their tiny room. He was delving deeply into his network, throwing out tentacles wide to catch even the vaguest scrap of information. He hadn’t told them yet exactly what his plan was and John had left Rodney to wheedle and cajole.
John didn’t sleep often. He never counted the complete body-shutdown that happened to him during the daylight hours as sleep, he pretty much thought of it as being off.
The way Jack had compared him to a robot had cut deeper than John would ever admit because sometimes, that was just the way he felt.
Every now and then though, he would nap like a normal person, drifting into an unconscious state without any outside interference and these were the only times he would dream. He didn’t remember much of his life, a seemingly endless series of operations and tests and nothing before, but he had been a person once, with a life.
He wondered if he should be feeling angry at the world or if his strange detachment and resignation about the whole thing was just one more way that he wasn’t a person any longer, one more thing they took away from him.
“You okay?”
John smiled tiredly at Rodney’s concerned frown. “You know, I make a better pillow than table,” John remarked, looking down the length of his body that was mostly obscured by papers. Rodney was sitting on the edge of the bed he’d been sleeping on, reading something. John noticed the blue folder that held his apparent life story close to his knee and sighed. “Any conclusions?”
“Mostly that my former position that medical science is all voodoo and blind stabs in the dark is right,” Rodney grumbled, burrowing into the pile to retrieve a particular page and managing to skate his fingers along the inside of John’s thigh. John flinched and most of the paperwork went sliding to the floor.
“Not exactly a stable table are you?” Rodney snorted, leaning awkwardly off the end of the bed to retrieve what had disappeared with John’s movement.
“Not when someone is groping me, no,” John quirked an eyebrow and Rodney chuckled. John heard a groan from the other side of the room and saw that Jack had plugged a finger into his ear, the handset of the phone held grimly in the other.
“Anyway, it reads like something out of a Mary Shelley novel. They find these organic samples in a lab they discover while stumbling through something called a Stargate and because the research suggests that the subject had unchartered regenerative power, and by the way, that kinda makes you more Wolverine than vampire which… cool. Anyway, they stick all these poor saps with this genetic material until they find someone who doesn’t die.”
“That’s not exactly what it says,” John cajoled, rolling his eyes.
“Oh excuse me, but you can’t argue that that is the gist of what they’ve done here.”
“Okay, the very simplified version, yes.”
“They identify a gene you have called the…” Rodney rummaged some more until he came up with another page and then waved it derisively. “The AG gene. Do you know what AG stands for?”
John watched Rodney, knowing from experience not to answer any questions thrown at him when Rodney was building up to a really good rant.
“Alien Gene gene. That’s like saying ATM machine or Pin number. Why didn’t they just call it the A gene?”
“That’s your concern?” John asked wryly and Rodney rolled his eyes.
“You’re my concern,” Rodney said in such a no-nonsense way that John felt his heart turn over. He reached out and circled his fingers around Rodney’s forearm, squeezing briefly.
“They were trying for either a fountain of youth or a newer, better soldier. It didn’t seem to matter what the end result was, as long as it was profitable. The UVA light sensitivity looks like nothing more than a way to… store you, as bad as that sounds. It looks like they started getting concerned about how you were tracking in the strength and agility tests. There’s a bunch of very nervous sounding memos, and I’m paraphrasing again, where they basically say that they’re worried you’ll get it into your brain just to punch your way through walls until you're outside.”
John frowned for a moment and Rodney touched him on the shoulder, worried. Finally, John said, “That sounds more like the Hulk than Wolverine.”
Rodney barked out startled laughter as he went back to organising papers and shoving them all back into the folder.
John looked across the room again at the empty bed and then back at Rodney. “Why did you put this stuff on me when you had another bed over there?” he asked absently.
Rodney paused in his page rifling to studiously look anywhere but at John. “You don’t let me near you in the day, but when you actually sleep sleep you don’t really mind so much. I don’t get to… it’s not often I can be near you when you’re like this.”
John breathed for a beat and then looked at Jack, who although turned halfway into the wall, glanced up the moment eyes lighted on his back.
“Do you think you could-?” John flicked his chin in the direction of the door.
Jack rolled his eyes but there was amusement on his face. “There’s a payphone just outside. I’ll be… a while.”
Rodney only managed to get out the word, “What-?” when he was tackled off the bed, both of them landing in a pile if papers, bedding and each other.
Part Nine
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But then, you know, it's Mad Science Gone Horribly Wrong and Jack's a cold blooded killer and Rodney and John are on the lamb... ; }
It's a good thing all these people are pretty. That makes up for in the end, right? ; ) That and, you know, not being real.
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Much love for this part. Rodney learning more about John and showing him that he doesn't think John's anything like a robot. Jack to the rescue and coming up with an idea to help. John's Hulk and Wolverine line. I'm so happy to see more!
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Mmmmm
I mean, dislocated shoulder, concussion, the stitches... for John to tackle Rodney like that, though incredibly hot (because, hello, SEX), would make for more owies for our woobie scientist.
I shudder to think what's happened to Carson, hm?
And Sam.
I wonder who the Goth chick used to be?
And damn, they'd been experimenting with Wraith DNA?! AUGH!
More? More soon? More soon please?
-----}-@
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I love this story so much.
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And also right. Damn her. :)
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So Jack!! LOL