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Later, John wants to say that he recognized him so quickly because he was unforgettable, he was unique, he was the rest of John’s summer. Which are maybe all true things, but mostly the reason John recognizes Rodney the second time he comes back, before John even knows his name, is that John tends to attract a slightly younger crowd. Eight-year-olds and their gum-snapping fourteen-year-old babysitters who have an alarming tendency to toss their hair and straighten their bodies just a little too forward while John fetches little Timmy his popsicle.
Rodney, though, is about John’s age, which is really too old to be doing this. He looks a few years younger; maybe he’s a few older. John caught the title of an article Rodney set on the edge of the truck while he fished around in his pockets for change, and it said, “The Effect of Radiation Pressure on Virial Black Hole Mass Estimates and the Case of Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 Galaxies.”
Or something like that. John took Physics 101 last semester, and it’s summer, he’s wiped his memory clean of the last year, but he remembers enough to know that he never got near anything that looked remotely like that. Freshman year is mostly about satisfying stupid requirements anyway.
Rodney doesn’t say anything to John for two weeks other than, “I need an ice cream sandwich,” and, “A dollar? That’s ridiculous,” and, “Okay, possibly worth it,” although that last isn’t directed at John and is more groaned than spoken.
+++
On Thursday, John’s about to pull away slowly from the curb and continue his drive around the neighborhood when he hears his name.
“John,” Mrs. Crawly calls from her front porch. “Johnny Sheppard, come here.”
Rodney, whose name John still doesn’t know but will find out one day soon, pauses on his way back into the house. He’s got a small smear of vanilla cream on his upper lip. John’s not sure why he notices.
“I baked you a pie, strawberry, just the way your mother liked it best,” Mrs. Crawly tells him, and shoves a pie at his chest. He’s taller than she is by nearly a foot. She used to shoo him along with the firm pressure of her broom on his behind when she was the one who was taller. “And here’s a container of whipped cream to go on top.”
John sees Rodney out of the corner of his eye, watching with complete and total envy written large on his face. “Wow,” John says more enthusiastically than he would have otherwise, although, really, strawberry pie, homemade strawberry pie – Mrs. Crawly’s homemade strawberry pie. “Thank you.”
“Just bring me back my pie plate when you’re done.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says.
Turning down her front walk, he passes Rodney and gestures at the Tupperware resting on top of the pie. “With whipped cream,” he points out smugly, just in case the other boy missed it. Which is the first thing other than, “Sure,” “Got it,” “Here’s your change,” and, “Ice cream sandwich, I know,” he’s said to him.
He probably enjoys the pissed-off look that appears on Rodney’s face a little too much.
+++
Every morning John wakes up earlier than he should, given that it’s summer vacation and he doesn’t have to start driving the truck until two o’clock.
He goes out and mows the lawn under the warming June sun and thinks about the months ahead of him. Two more to go until the fall semester, and he feels this unexplainable kind of thrill, of expectation at the thought. At the thought of the summer stretching out until it bends into fall, into classes, not business classes and legal studies, but math and science and the occasional lit class, too, things John wants to study.
When the rusty old lawn mower makes a gurgling sound and starts ripping up the grass, he goes back in and makes himself coffee – inexpertly, not because he really wants to drink it, but because it seems like the thing to do – and it’s too strong. He drinks it anyway standing in the front door, inhaling the scent of freshly cut grass from the half-mown lawn. There’s got to be a toolbox in the garage, his grandfather’s, maybe.
He’s oddly happy to while away the morning with the smell of grass and machine oil in his nose, grease gooing on his hands, his jeans filthy, too strong coffee jittering through his system. He’s got nothing in particular to do – fix the lawn mower, sell some ice cream, learn some cool shit in a few months. Nothing in particular, and everything in the world ahead of him.
+++
“Hi,” he says the next evening when Rodney appears at the side of his truck looking grumpy. “I’m John.”
“I know that,” replies Rodney, as if it’s obvious. There’s a pause. “Oh. Not that I asked or was – curious. I – Mrs. Crawly. She said so.” He looks up at John, up because John’s inside the truck in his stupid white uniform and Rodney’s on the sidewalk. There’s a jaunty white cap that goes with it, too, but John never wears it. It doesn’t mash down very well over his hair.
“She talks about you.”
John shrugs. “I’ve known her a while.”
“She likes you.” Rodney scowls. “She made you pie.”
‘It’s because of my mother,’ John wants to say, but doesn’t. Instead he glances away from Rodney’s gaze. Because now that Rodney’s actually looking at him for once, his eyes are insistent. “Like I said, I’ve known her a while.”
He grabs Rodney’s ice cream sandwich. “So.”
Rodney blinks at him. “So?”
“I’m John. And you?”
“Oh. Rodney. Rodney McKay.”
“You’re staying in Mrs. Crawly’s basement apartment, aren’t you? She has someone there every summer from the university.”
Rodney hands him money. “It was cheap.” He’s slightly belligerent. “I didn’t know she gave away her pies. I don’t think she likes me that much,” and there’s a note of mourning in his voice. “God.”
John grins at him. “Here,” he says, shoving a container at him. “Saved you some.”
He leaves Rodney on the curb, sputtering.
+++
John doesn’t know why he wants Rodney’s attention. Maybe it’s the way Rodney dismisses him, walks up to his ice cream truck and orders him to pull out a sandwich from the freezer and then leaves, his mind obviously on other things. Maybe it’s because Rodney’s reading articles on things John’s never even heard of and John’s just the ice cream truck driver, and that’s how Rodney treats him.
He tells himself it’s that Rodney’s the only other person around who’s remotely his own age. When you deal with screaming, sticky-fingered kids all day long, the damn tinkling music on the truck luring them far too effectively, you begin to crave conversation with someone who isn’t Jessica or Billy, who isn’t trying to cram an entire frozen baseball mitt complete with baseball gumball into his mouth in one go.
+++
“You know, we do serve flavors other than vanilla ice cream sandwich. Cookies’n’cream, mint chocolate chip. The good stuff, McKay.”
“You’re late,” Rodney says. It’s almost dark out and John can see some of the stars, the brighter ones, glinting through the maple leaves in the sky above them. “Anyway,” Rodney continues, “I can’t eat that. I’m allergic to citrus.”
“Last time I checked, mint chocolate chip didn’t have lemon in it.”
“Last time you checked? Last time you checked?” Rodney shoots him a look of withering scorn, only slightly ruined by the bulge in his cheeks from his partially eaten ice cream sandwich. “And do you customarily go around looking at the labels of the ice cream you sell? Yeah, I didn’t think so. It could kill me. Which would be to deprive the world far too soon of one of its greatest minds. Possibly the greatest mind on earth, in a few years. I’m still finishing up my master's.” He sounds pretty matter-of-fact about it. “Soon, though. Besides, it’s more the scooper spoon that’s the problem. Cross-contamination.”
“O-kaaay.” But John doesn’t think that anyone should be deprived of mint chocolate chip, even if he’s so sick of all forms of ice cream – hell, frozen food – that he never wants to eat it again.
“This is my last stop. I took another route.” On purpose so that he’d be able to linger a bit longer in front of Mrs. Crawly’s house. He doesn’t bother telling Rodney this.
+++
Wednesday, Johns doesn’t drive home after dropping off the truck at the end of his shift. He needs to return Mrs. Crawly’s pie plate.
“It was really good,” he tells her. “My mom was right. You do make the best pies this side of the Mississippi.” John’s not stupid. He knows how to get more.
She laughs at him, a bit creaky, and pats his cheek. “You’re a charmer, just like her.”
He ducks his head, pretending to be bashful, not wanting to talk about his mother. Not to Mrs. Crawly, not to anyone. “Is Rodney downstairs?”
“That boy?” Mrs. Crawly sniffs. “No manners at all. I don’t know why I don’t give him his notice.”
John grits his teeth but says mildly, “He just doesn’t think the way the rest of us do. He’s not really here, you know?”
“That’s no excuse. Boy shouldn’t walk around with his head in the clouds if he ever wants to be a man.”
“I’m just going to go knock on the door, then.” He pokes his head around the doorway that leads down to the basement and shouts, “Hey, Rodney, you there?”
There’s an expectant silence before Rodney says, “John? Is that you? What are you doing here? I’m really busy. But. I suppose you’d better come down.”
+++
Sometimes they sit in the park down the street from Mrs. Crawly’s. “Serpens,” John says. He points into the sky.
“Oh, please.” Rodney’s elbow jabs him as he shifts on the bench. “It’s right next to Libra. How easy can you get.”
“It’s not exactly the brightest constellation up there, Rodney. What about last night when you couldn’t even find - ”
“There was a tree in my way.” Rodney crosses his arms over his chest.
At first, John has to pull him out of his basement hidey-hole nearly every time. Sometimes physically, a hand wrapped around his narrow wrist, because Rodney’s all bone, no bulk, and even John, who’s pretty scrawny himself, has more meat on him. He played football until he just wasn’t big enough for it, and then crew – crew, which he tries not to think about because if that doesn’t mark him as his daddy’s boy, he doesn’t know what does – and he’s always been a runner. John’s never going to be much heavier, though. He thinks Rodney might, later. His frame is broad enough to hold up more. John makes himself look away when he thinks about this too long.
Rodney protests. His thesis won’t write itself; he’s only got until the beginning of August; he spends too much time in the labs at the university even though he has more than enough data and needs to be compiling results; he needs to hurry up and finish this because the next big thing’s coming, coming, and he’s got PhDs to tackle, brilliance to show, places to go.
John thinks sometimes that if he didn’t put his hand against the skin of Rodney’s arm to hold him in place, Rodney would trample him down in his eager forward march. He’s going to walk across the continent, swim through the sea, and find land again, all the straight line of the world. John, though, John just wants to make him pause, to nudge his chin up to the sky and make him actually look at the physics he studies, show him that it’s not all a straight line, that the sky circles the world, and that if you walk long enough, you come back to the same point, but new and fresh and not the same person at all.
Someday John’s going to circle the world, high and free and weightless.
+++
By the time they reach the park, it’s always dark out because John can’t drop the truck off until the light fades and the children all disappear inside for the night.
“Mrs. Crawly won’t care if we sit on her lawn,” Rodney tells him. “Not as long as you’re there, too.”
“She’s nosy.”
Rodney stops and looks at him. “But we’re not doing anything wrong. Anything she could care about.”
John shoves his hands in his pockets. “No.” They’re not. “Only people don’t need to know everything. It’s not their business what I do or who I do it with. I probably shouldn’t even have come back here, but - "
“Your mom used to live here. Mrs. Crawly says you’re staying in the house she grew up in. That your family still owns it.”
“Jesus.” John runs his hand through his hair. “That is exactly what I mean.”
“Sorry,” Rodney says stiffly. “I wasn't trying to - ”
“No, not you,” John snaps, even though he knows he shouldn’t be snapping at Rodney, has no reason to, doesn’t want to and can’t seem to help it. “Everyone else. You’re not – I didn’t want to go back to my dad’s this summer. He hates that I came here, hates that I drive an ice cream truck, just like he hates that I decided to go to Stanford instead of Harvard.” He looks away, up to the blue-black curve of the sky above the trees.
“I’ve got to go.” When he gets to the end of the block, he turns around and sees Rodney still standing there. He’s gazing upwards, following the same path of vision that John had. John wonders what he sees, if he sees the wide open sky and wants to leap into it, or if he sees each piece of it, each equation that makes it up, and wants to bring it down to himself, on paper, in machines.
+++
As an apology, John grabs an extra ice cream scoop when he picks up the truck the next day. He lets the truck’s endless loop of mechanical music draw Rodney out of his basement, blinking into the afternoon sunlight, and he hands over a triple cone of mint chocolate chip.
“Clean scoop,” he says, and Rodney’s mouth tilts up at the right corner.
+++
When Tyler O’Riley catches John in his silly white uniform serving ice cream to the kids, he hoots. John cants his hip against the inside of the truck.
“Shep, hey, what’s this? Haven’t seen you in a few. Thought you went off to some fancy school, and here you are, dishin’ it out. That’s fucking rich,” and he laughs some more.
“Still in your mama’s custody, O’Riley?” John says, because he can, because he knows Tyler hates that he’s still stuck coming here for two weeks every summer because there’s a piece of paper saying he has to until he’s eighteen, which won’t be until September. He’s younger than John. John’s not above holding that over his head.
“It’s a bitch.”
John jerks his head toward the kids clustered around them. “Dude. Watch it.”
“Like they never heard it before. You a gambling man, Shep? I got a pack of cards, something to loosen the throat. Stop over tonight, and you can tell me if there’s anything new to do in this place.” He kicks at the truck’s tire.
“Can’t,” John tells him and digs out an orangesicle for Mary Jane.
“Shit, man. You gotta girl?”
“Nah,” and John snorts because Rodney is anything but.
+++
By Saturday night, Tyler’s bored out of his skull and John can’t shake him. “I have to take the truck back,” he says, which is a mistake because Tyler hops in and now he knows what time John gets off shift. John didn’t drive by Mrs. Crawly’s today because he was planning on grabbing Rodney after his shift ended, only now he can’t.
Rodney isn’t – Tyler wouldn’t – John doesn’t want them to meet. Rodney isn’t meant to be with people like that, idiots who think they’re bigger than they are, and that’s stupid. John can’t decide who Rodney gets to hang out with because Rodney’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself, but John thinks – knows – he’d punch Tyler in the mouth if he insulted Rodney. Sometimes, although Rodney tries never to show it, he’s fragile like the skin on the underside of his wrist.
+++
Sunday is John’s day off, and he lies in bed in the morning, not thinking about Rodney. The windows are open because June has fallen into July. The days have become less forgiving with their heat and the nights closer. The white curtains move gently. John’s mother loved eyelet.
John doesn’t think about the way something is gathering inside him, a coiling slinky. He doesn’t think about the way Rodney’s mouth twisted up on one side when John brought a citrus-free ice cream scooper for him. He doesn’t think about the way he tugs at Rodney’s arm, wrist, or the way John would rather swing into the night sky and reach for the stars while Rodney complains about the mosquitoes than get drunk with Tyler on illicit booze or in some dirty bar they’ve brazened their way into. He doesn’t think about how he deliberately didn’t tell any of his friends where he’d be this summer, about how he didn’t want them to know about his mother’s house left in a peeling neighborhood of old ladies and little kids. About how he wants to show Rodney this house, all the way up to the stupid frilly eyelet curtains in John’s room.
It’s almost always night when he sees Rodney, or getting there. In the daytime, though, he has caught the way Rodney’s eyes turn bright when he starts in on something that interests him.
John gets up.
An hour later, Rodney stands on Mrs. Crawly’s front porch and says, casually, “It’s okay. I had a lot of work to do last night. Barely noticed you didn’t stop by. I’m pretty busy this afternoon, though.”
“Just for a few hours, Rodney. Come on, it’ll be fun,” and John’s heart is beating faster than it should. A dragonfly swirls between them, iridescent.
Rodney stares at him, his mouth flat, his hair falling into his face. Without a word, he turns around and goes back inside, and John stutters forward, calling, “Rodney, hey, wait, I’m sorry, I –”
“Jeez, John,” Rodney says when he reappears. “I was just going to get some sun block. I burn very easily, you know.”
John’s heart thumps back into place under his breastbone and he smiles easily at Rodney, as if that last hadn’t just happened because he doesn’t know why it did. “You might have mentioned that once or twice, yeah.”
Rodney harrumphs, and John keeps him out three, four, five hours, until the tip of Rodney’s nose is pinkening and John can feel his own cheeks turning hot, which is only the result of the summer sun, not Rodney at all.
“Oh, god, my paper,” Rodney moans later. “You! This is your fault.”
“Yup,” John drawls, rocking back on his heels. It’s still light enough that he can see the indignant snap of Rodney’s eyes, which he likes to think is also a flare of pleasure. The first fireflies are coming out with the stars. “You need to relax more, McKay. Learn to play a bit.”
He sits down on the porch. Mrs. Crawly’s visiting her sister this weekend. Rodney hesitates and then sits down next to him. Full of good will, John scoots closer so that he can sling an arm around his shoulders. Rodney flinches a little but doesn’t pull away, and maybe he moves just a bit closer. So the angle’s less awkward.
“Probably the other way around, John. You need to work more,” which is usually the kind of thing that pisses John off, but coming from Rodney, not so much.
“I know you’re not completely stupid. Stanford. You know what they have there, right?” Rodney's voice takes on a dreamy quality. “Who doesn’t want to play in Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Center? They have fellowships. You could get one if you studied physics or engineering. You’re good at math. I totally caught you following one of my proofs the other night. You could do mathematical engineering.”
“Maybe.” John shrugs and the motion bumps his body into Rodney’s. Rodney smells like sunscreen and sweat and the wind. John has to fight not to nose closer, not to dip his face into the side of Rodney’s neck. “Doesn’t really matter too much. I’m going to be a pilot.” He’s already got his private pilot's license, but he hasn’t been able to do any flying this summer because he doesn’t have the money. He’s going to have to suck it up and make good with his dad, because flying is more important, more important than anything, except that he can’t regret coming to his mom’s old house this summer, because Rodney’s body is radiating heat and it’s making John prickle with sweat and something else, and he can’t move away.
He lets the sound of Rodney’s protests over the waste of his brain blend into the cicadas’ scratchy lullaby.
+++
But twice that week John can’t get away from Tyler and he’s determined not to let him and Rodney meet, only this comes at the price of missing Rodney. Tyler will be gone soon anyway. It’s a damn good thing, too, because the burn of John’s resentment and anger simmers under his skin. It’s July now, and June is gone and so will Rodney be, too, come August.
On Tuesday and Wednesday John can feel Rodney pulling back from him, even though those are the days he doesn’t see him and in fact it’s John who’s not there. It makes John lean forward more, off balance, twitchy. On Thursday Rodney says, “It’s no big deal. I got the results compiled from last week’s experiment and I need to correlate them with my previous data,” and his shoulders hunch in more with every word and his hand is fumbling for the door behind him.
John stares at the closed door after he disappears, feeling sick to his stomach, and in that moment, it isn’t Tyler or himself whom John hates, but Rodney, Rodney for making him feel callow and invisible and startled at himself. He goes home and throws himself on his bed, aware of his petulance and not caring, because he knows rationally that he isn’t the first person in the history of the world to feel this – this, whatever it is – but it feels like that, so new and bruised.
On Friday, it’s just as bad as he was afraid it would be if Tyler and Rodney crossed paths. It only takes thirty seconds for Tyler to dismiss Rodney as a geek, someone to make fun of before he saunters away. Rodney’s mouth is as sharp as his eyes flitting back and forth between John and Tyler, putting the pieces of John’s absences together. It’s not what they say, but what Rodney doesn’t. John sees him thinking jock, football player, homecoming king, cool kid, all the things Rodney’s not and professes not to want and probably truly doesn’t – now – but did once upon a childhood.
Suddenly John wants Rodney to see just how insecure he sometimes makes John, and it’s inexplicable because John doesn’t ever want to give up pieces of himself like that. Yet Rodney should know that he’s not the one who should hiss at John, “Just go. Follow him. Go drink with your buddy” – and he sneers the word – “or whatever it is you do.” He says it without looking at John, and John wants him to turn, to see him, to see it’s not like that at all. He craves his attention and fears it at the same time, because John’s going to be a pilot, he’s going to soar, cut cleanly through the curving sky, and this is vertigo.
The sensation of Rodney to John is vertigo, and John stumbles down a step.
“I - " Rodney stops. “I waited for you. In the park.” It’s soft, not a declaration but an accusation.
So that’s where John goes. He stares at the porch, empty after Rodney stalks inside, stiff with anger or maybe hurt, and god, John doesn’t want to think about that, so he walks down the street alone to the park where Rodney had waited. He traces the path of a plane blinking its way across the sky.
+++
All the next week, John goes to sleep and wakes up with the tinny sound of the ice cream truck in his head. He drives past Mrs. Crawly’s and waits, and Rodney never comes to get his ice cream sandwich. His second scooper stays clean for days.
At least Tyler is gone. John’s not sure he believes in second chances because he’s never gotten much in the way of them. His mother was the one who smoothed down his hair and picked him up and gave him a little push to go at it again. His dad’s only satisfied if he gets it right the first time. No son of his is going to be a fuck-up, not that he says it quite like that. And Rodney strikes John as the type who can hold a hell of a grudge.
When he trudges up Mrs. Crawly’s walk on Thursday, still in his uniform, he doesn’t expect to see Rodney and he’s right. “Just tell him that the county fair is this weekend. I’m going to go.” He hates giving Mrs. Crawly so much information, hates her knowing, but he swallows that down because this is the only way to get to Rodney. “He’s welcome to come with me. If he wants.”
“Oh, you’re such a good boy, John. That’s very kind of you, not that I think he appreciates it.”
“No,” John says, “you don’t understand. Make sure he knows that he’d be doing me a favor if he came with me, not the other way around. I want him to come.”
He knows it’s important to stay calm, yet it’s hard to keep his voice from rising just a little. Because it’s been a week since he saw Rodney, and there’s an agony to this, to driving his truck around the neighborhood in loops straining for just one glimpse of him, feeling like a fool, heartsick and stupid and still hopeful, things he’d never admit to anyone but himself and sometimes not even that. He’s eighteen, in college, too old for this. Surely this can’t be him, isn’t him.
+++
John always liked going to the fair. This one, at least, because here he doesn’t have to be John Sheppard, son of Patrick Sheppard. He can walk around and scratch the goats behind their ears instead of having to look solemn and play judge and hand out blue ribbons. He can buy as many dime tickets for cups of chocolate milk as he wants and walk around with a white milk mustache and powdered sugar on his flannel shirt from the funnel cake he scarfs down.
He wins a blue hippo in the arcade and gives it to a little girl. It’s not like he contemplated giving it to Rodney or anything. Rodney’s not here. He didn’t really expect him to show up, and John’s having a good time without him, really. He doesn’t think how much Rodney would enjoy eating a pile of 50-cent baked potatoes piled high with sour cream and cheese and bacon bits. He doesn’t think of the way the morning’s hope curdles into disappointment in his belly.
Late in the afternoon, John decides it’s time. He can never do this too early. He has to build up to the Ferris wheel because it’s the best thing the fair has to offer, even now when he’s flown real planes. It’s still a circle of the world, round and round, into the sky and down, a promise of all the things John’s going to do, places he’s going to fly, fighting gravity in an endless loop. He convinces the kid operating the wheel to let him stay on as long as he can, as long as there’s no line. He lets the wind take him.
It’s the wind that brings him back. It carries words to him, a “Hey, watch it with that bar, I bruise very easily.”
John’s eyes fly open. He’s hovering just above the ground with the machine of the wheel overhead. One more stop backwards and he’d be at the conductor’s step, ready to get in or out, and behind him – behind him is Rodney, Rodney. He’s settling himself on the sticky plastic seating when John twists around, cranes his neck, and Rodney looks up. He looks at John and nothing else, attention nowhere else for once, and the dizzy feeling’s back. John couldn’t help the grin breaking onto his face if the old man himself were standing over him reading him the riot act in those precisely measured tones, clipped and disappointed.
Rodney blinks in that half-startled, half-expectant way he has, and then he grins too. John doesn’t even notice the motion begin again, not until it stops to pick up another rider, and he and Rodney are frozen eight feet apart at the top of the Ferris wheel, right where the world begins to slope down.
“I didn’t think - ” John says.
“Well, I wasn’t—but then I - ” Rodney replies.
This, John thinks, is his second chance, and he’s not going to mess it up. “How did you get here?” Rodney doesn’t have a car.
Rodney shrugs, awkward because of the seat. “Had to pile in with the Smiths. They came a few hours ago. I—I couldn’t find you. I didn’t know where you’d be. Until I remembered how much you like Ferris wheels.”
For the first time ever, John can’t wait to get out of the Ferris wheel because it’s separating them, an impossible gap that he has to bridge. “Come on,” he says, “come on,” when they get out of their seats, and he grips Rodney’s wrist and pulls him since he can’t grab his hand and do the same. Not here.
There’s a spot behind the horse trailers where the green plastic line of water hose crisscrosses itself. John’s never gone back here, never wanted to, but it’s as private as the fair gets. It smells like horse flesh and hay and little bit like manure, which makes Rodney wrinkle his nose, and there’s frying grease in the air from the funnel cakes and the too-sweet odor of cotton candy. They stare at each other. Rodney looks like he wants to touch John’s face, or maybe this is John reading his own wishes onto Rodney because that’s what he wants to do. Reach out for him and cup the sides of his face and draw him forward in a way that means there’s no turning back, that means I’ll meet you halfway, I’ll meet you all the way, just please, please, because I’m standing here and I’m going to find something, discover something and I think –
I think it’s going to be me.
The shiver running up and down John’s spine, goosepimpling his arms, is summer sun and Rodney. It’s foreign and utterly familiar, like a bee sting. He revels in the sense that there exists something bigger than him, bigger than the world itself, and it’s latent knowledge that he must have always known, did always know, the way you wake up sometimes in the morning with a good feeling for no reason at all.
The touch of his lips to Rodney’s is hesitant, a soft hello and a pause to check his welcome. A second or two feels so much longer and he draws back because he doesn’t know, can’t tell from Rodney’s stillness, and then Rodney exhales.
“Did I – is this okay?” John asks.
“Don’t,” says Rodney.
This time it’s Rodney who leans forward so that just their mouths touch, their noses brush. John’s lips open. He hates the angle of their bodies apart as much as he loves the curl of Rodney’s hand on the back of his neck. Here is not the place, yet John can’t end the kiss. He can’t bring himself to do it, so Rodney’s going to have to if they’re ever going to stop, going to breathe, look at each other, and come away. It’s like a notion Rodney tests, minute degrees of separation until John has to open his eyes.
Rodney’s skin is flushed, his lips bruised, and his eyes bright bright like he’s discovered a new law of the universe. John clenches his hand into a fist so hard that his fingernails cut into the flesh on his palm. It’s the only thing he can do in the face of that.
He nudges Rodney’s foot with his. “Ready to go?”
As they drive slowly out of the matted grass parking lot, John sees the Ferris wheel towering above the rest of the rides. He cranks down the window and laughs. Rodney rolls his eyes.
+++
John begins to count time as if that’s the only thing to do with it. Late July, and there are six days until August. John doesn’t have to be back to Stanford until August 15th, but Rodney’s supposed to move out of Mrs. Crawly’s on August 5th.
“You can stay with me,” he wants to say. An extra week, ten days, but he doesn’t. This thing is too new and he has learned that Rodney’s not the only one fragile, with fragile flesh and fragile pulse. He bites back the words and worries his teeth under Rodney’s shoulder blade instead. The feel of Rodney’s skin against his tongue fills his world.
He brought Rodney to his mother’s house after the fair. It was warm inside, windows open but shades down against the slanting sun, and they tumbled to the worn couch. Rodney touched John’s face, oddly diffident for a moment, and then John pushed him back and Rodney’s legs came up around his body and held him tight, no more angles but only them, shifting to fit each other. Rodney thrust up against John and John down on Rodney, his ass pulled firm in Rodney’s hands, back and forth until they shared a mess between them, between half removed clothes.
Later, John discovered the weight of Rodney’s cock in his mouth. Just the head at first, slow and slow, hot and demanding the way Rodney became after he lost his initial reticence. John’s almost content to let it lie on his tongue, to feel the blood pulsing through it, except that Rodney’s thighs tell their own story, tense and desperately trying to hold back. John closes his eyes and hollows his cheeks with an obscene noise that Rodney matches, and it doesn’t matter that his eyes are shut – he knows this is Rodney by the candor of sound and scent and touch.
+++
It stormed the night before. Rodney spent the night and hasn’t gone back to his apartment yet. “You have no idea what you’re doing to my schedule,” Rodney tells him in a way that would be far more grumpy if he weren’t so rumpled. They’re outside in John’s backyard on the grass. Rodney’s got coffee, which, thank god, John’s gotten much better at making in the last month.
“I’m never going to finish at this rate.”
That’s good, John thinks. Is there something wrong with him, he wonders, that he’s already dreading the end before they’ve barely begun? He’s heard it said that you can’t fully appreciate the good without the bad, that bittersweet things are held dearer. He disagrees. He wants it all and doesn’t see why he can’t have it. Someone else – Einstein, Buddha, Segovia, so many variations on the same theme – reputedly said that anything one can imagine is real. This is what John believes. He can do anything he sets his mind to, make it happen, bring it into being. Like man and airplanes. Someone dreamed them before they became real.
When he tells this to Rodney, Rodney’s mouth slants down. “John,” he says. “You can’t - ”
He stops as if there’s a secret he knows and doesn’t want to share because he doesn’t want to be the one to tell John.
“I can,” John reassures him. “We can.”
Rodney hums unhappily. “You know those old maps, the ones that they reprint on the insides of musty books or for fancy frames for libraries? The ones made before they had discovered the New World? They put Europe and Asia in the middle and then the edges are all those blue so-not-ocean swirls with fantastic beasts trolling the waters. Red and green. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. Here Be Dragons.”
Rodney leans back and props himself on his elbows. John watches him watch the clouds float by.
“When I was little, like eight - ” a fine blush suffuses Rodney’s skin – “well, more like six. Five. Four or five. When I was four, I used to look at those books and think that the earth was flat.” He glances over at John hastily. “Not seriously, of course,” lest John think otherwise and John hides his smile.
“It’s just that - ” Rodney grimaces. “If the earth is flat, then you can walk across it. You can go in a line and come to an end, get somewhere finally. You don’t just go round and round. It’s not all pointless.”
John thinks of how, when he first met Rodney, he had the feeling that Rodney was marching and would push past him with his inexorable forward momentum if John didn’t make him pause.
“I mean, I know it’s silly. Of course the earth is round. You can’t have a flat world in any hypothesis of the universe.” By now Rodney looks wretched, as if he regrets speaking at all.
John lies down on the grass beside him. Their shoulders touch, and he hooks his ankle around Rodney’s. He thinks about teasing Rodney about his once-shaky grasp on science, but that’s not the way to go here. He’s not sure why, but it bothers him that Rodney might wish the earth were flat, might want to stop, just stop. John doesn’t want to ever have to stop, and he can’t begin to imagine that he ever will. The great thing about the world is that there’s always more of it ahead of you, that you can keep going forever, that John’s going to keep flying, forever.
“It’s better this way, anyway,” he tells Rodney. He doesn’t really know how to explain something he’s never before considered, something that’s so obvious, something that’s more a buoyant feeling than a thought process. “A round earth means that you can explore it all, the whole thing. You can just keep going and never have to stop. Someday I’ll take you up there and we’ll follow the bend of the earth, like light, and you’ll see.”
He pats Rodney’s belly, making him squawk indignantly. “Look.” He points up. “That cloud’s a Ferris wheel.”
“Oh, please. It’s clearly a doughnut. Mmm, probably glazed. Let’s get some breakfast.”
There’s a damp patch on John’s ass when he gets up. The grass is still wet from the rain.
+++
John wants Rodney to fuck him. They haven’t done that yet, and the only reason he doesn’t try harder to get Rodney to do it is that if Rodney’s cock is up his ass, then it’s not in his mouth. When Rodney doesn’t spend the night, John sucks his name into his mouth and traces it across his torso. The R swirls with a great flourish on his breast bone, and if it were colored, it would be the deep and faded reds and greens of Rodney’s ancient maps. The O encircles his navel, and the D trails a path down his thighs. He hooks the N around his balls, tight and tender, and slips the E into his body with his fingers, unfamiliar and seeking, yearning with the Y of Rodney’s name that Rodney were here and not six blocks away.
He doesn’t name this thing he has for Rodney other than to call it Rodney. Years later, he’ll call it a crush, the last of his puppy loves, or an infatuation, or lust. He’ll forget that, yes, as much as he wanted sex with Rodney, he wanted Rodney himself still more. He won’t remember how he used to fall asleep with his hand resting on the round of Rodney’s thigh, or how Rodney used to see equations written in the trailing plumes of jet exhaust against the blue sky. How John wanted to solve them for him just to see Rodney look at him with the same wonder in his eyes with which John views him.
Still later, he will question how much of it was him, his own youth and expectation and thrill in the world and being alive and invincible, and how much of it was Rodney, this other person outside of himself who became himself for those short weeks. He’ll admit without any understanding of how or why, without expectation, that maybe this is what they call love.
Mostly, he won’t think about it.
Now, though, now he curses the ripening peaches that threaten to steal Rodney from him.
+++
When Rodney fucks him the night before he leaves – “I can’t stay, John. I promised my sister I’d visit her before the semester begins,” and he looks so miserable that John smoothes down one of his eyebrows, still too big for his face, and says, “Okay” – when he fucks him that last night, it hurts. John has mouthed his way across all his favorite places of Rodney’s body, and he knows the indent below his hip and every knob of his spine. His lips and tongue between Rodney’s cheeks made Rodney start and arch up, back, limber and contorted and beautiful, and John held him in place and tried to ignore his own body’s insistence. He wants to give this to Rodney. Neither one of them is very good at holding out, but it doesn’t really matter because then they can just start over again.
They’re both new at this, sliding all over the place with lube, and Rodney has to look to see where he’s trying to get his cock to go. It burns, the stretch of John’s body, and John knows that he was made for this. To be spread open before Rodney, to see the fireflies like stars through the window and the real stars laughing high above them, so high that John’s going to have to fly higher than he ever imagined to reach them, and he can.
+++
They promise to write. To meet at winter break. His first week back he keeps rolling over in his dorm bed trying to sniff out Rodney. At night, his body remembers what his mind isn’t awake to.
Early in October, John’s walking down the street when he sees someone come out of a store. He twists, startled, because isn’t that – it looks like – it couldn’t be – it’s not. His hands are clammy and his heart is pounding. He usually likes the rush of adrenaline, but not this time. Not like this, this crash of longing and missing and feeling hollow inside.
This is the first time John thinks about not. Not writing, not meeting, just severing it all. Because this hurts; because it’s easier to walk away, to not let it linger and die a slow death of distance and time. He even goes so far as to think, briefly, that he’s young and that he’ll meet someone else soon, and that makes his heart clench so hard that he gasps and forces himself to squeeze out a few more letters.
They get shorter. Rodney doesn’t answer them all.
As it turns out, Rodney can’t make Christmas because he’s managed to get a key to one of the labs and no one else is going to be there, and this is the opportunity of a lifetime. Their meeting probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. The thing about the world being round rather than flat is that it just keeps moving whether you want it to or not, and it takes you along with it whether you want it to or not. And even with Rodney, or rather, without Rodney, John wants to go around with it. He’s going to an air show – three days of planes and jets and someday he’s going to fly them all. He’s starting to realize that the best way to do this is to join the Air Force. Which he always knew but didn’t want to do. So it would be more accurate to say that he’s starting to admit that he’s going to have to make a choice, trade something here for something there, but he wants to fly more than anything so it’s not really a question. At nineteen, a year is still a lifetime and he doesn’t have to look back because he’s got so much to look forward to.
+++
John’s father doesn’t take the news that he’s going to become a USAF pilot – informed, not asked – any better than he did four years before when John accepted Stanford’s letter of admission. It’s possible that if he left John to live his own life, John would feel guiltier about looking to the horizon and walking out.
In another four years when John’s up for review by the board to make captain, newly engaged as officers should be, Nancy persuades him to shake hands with his father. Patrick says, “She’s beautiful,” and John replies, “I know,” since he does. She makes him laugh and the sex is good and they agree on the way they should handle their finances. They spend several Christmases with Patrick and Dave, and if John never stutters over Nancy or trips over himself in an effort to meld his very flesh into hers, that’s because he’s not some callow youth.
+++
John never admits that he married Nancy to promote his career, to fly higher. That would be a lie. He married her because he cared for her, because they connected.
“You’re not here sometimes,” she accuses. “I don’t know where you are, probably off in your stupid sky in your stupid jets, only that you’re not here. I’m sick of it. Years, John. I’ve given you years and it only gets worse.”
Sometimes he lies awake in bed beside Nancy and looks out to the stars. He flies now, fairly routinely because he’s the best, he’s John Sheppard and he’s going places fast, the curving sky clean around him. He gets every promotion he’s up for; his men love him; his COs, if they occasionally chew him out for his cockiness, have to admit that he does follow orders and gets the job done.
Thing of it is that she’s probably right. John’s convinced that if he tries hard enough, strains his muscles long enough, then he can’t fail too badly. Mess up, stumble, but not fail.
It doesn’t have to be this way. He’s going to try harder with Nancy.
+++
Nancy never asked him to be her hero. He didn’t set out to be her hero. Maybe he wanted to be one anyway, though. Once upon a time, once upon a decade ago, there was a boy who made John feel like he was a hero.
This is probably a lie, actually. He’s becoming familiar with the way a memory becomes more than the real thing. The real thing couldn’t possibly have been that good, and to be honest, he’d rather not ever encounter the real thing again rather than face the stunned disappointment of a memory betrayed.
Because he is trying, trying as hard as he can, the best he knows how to, between missions he can’t speak about, between eastern lands and southern continents. Somehow – almost inexplicably – his marriage is still falling apart. And he thinks probably it is his fault, his failure, because he's been so busy reaching for that next burst of expectation, of familiar exhilaration to lift him from the ground, that he forgot to lift Nancy with him. Or that somehow, equally inexplicably, those bursts are becoming shorter, less powerful, and they can’t sustain him and Nancy at the same time. John tries not to resent this, not to blame her for this, not to wish that she had lifted herself along with him.
When Nancy thinks he’s asleep, he feels her trace the point of his ear that she used to love so much. She whispers, “You left me behind.”
When John’s on the ground, he knows now in a way he didn’t used to that he can’t sweep his hand along the rim of the sky. The stars are so high that they’re above that endless circle. He’ll fly the rest of his life and never reach them. Yet when he’s in the air, he forgets and strains toward them anyway.
+++
Nancy screams at him, “Would you just look at me? Goddamn it, John, look at me, please,” and he does, sees the mascara streaking her face. He reaches out to her and cradles her in his arms, pets her hair and thinks about failure, as she sobs, “Please, just look at me.”
He’s buttoning the jacket of his dress blues when Nancy walks in with papers in one hand and a pair of stockings in the other. “I can’t do this anymore,” she tells him. “We have to split. You should get out, John. Of the Air Force. You’re a major now, and they’re going to send you to Afghanistan, you know they will. It’s not healthy."
John knows what the papers are, has been waiting for them. Nancy looks to the sky to see if she needs to carry an umbrella with her, which is not why John does. He couldn’t find a way to show her much beyond the underbelly of her umbrella.
“I won’t let them shoot me down,” he says at the same time Nancy points to him, saying, “ And so help me god, John Sheppard, if you smirk at me and tell me you can out-fly them all—”
They both stop. Finally Nancy says, “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. You’re not the man I married.”
People change, John thinks, but he knows better than to say it out loud.
John needs to attend a dinner that evening, and they go together, smiling over their drinks. John can’t leave the Air Force, would never consider it. He’s losing his wife for reasons – her reasons – that he understands, but he’s still not sure why those reasons formed in the first place. How he drove her to this, how bright things became tarnished with age.
He still has his men and the air.
+++
When the divorce is finalized, John’s father sells his mother’s house. Maybe it has nothing to do with Nancy; maybe it’s punishment for not living the life Patrick wants of John. It’s not the same neighborhood anyway. John hasn’t been back in years, since before Mrs. Crawly died.
+++
The low scrub and endless grit of the desert crack the skin on John’s palms. Mitch slaps him on the shoulder and informs him that the ladies recommend regular soaking in goat’s milk to have lovely, tender hands. John swears at him without heat while Dex and Holland laugh with half an ear and concentrate on their poker game.
John’s bombs clear the way for the marines and army, and they in turn beat out the ground for the Air Force’s advance. He stumbles through houses and schools split like shale, open to the merciless desert sky, sometimes infinite, sometimes wrapped in a sinuous embrace around the mountains. Toothless middle-aged men sit slack in an opium haze. The half-feral dogs howl at dusk while he leafs through the pages of a charred book and tries to unroll a heavy sheet of paper. He only gets as far as the elaborate red and green swirling monsters and the wavering edge of old Asia before it falls apart against his fingers.
Holland calls him away, and John spends the night under the harsh glare of the electric bulbs where there is no cloud cover to absorb their starkness. Dex and Mitch put on an impromptu comedy sketch that has the men pissing themselves with laughter, and John too, and it feels good. John mostly laughs at things these days, laughter induced by something, not for the sheer sake of it. He’s not sure, but he thinks that he might remember, one holds a mental memory without the sensation of the thing itself, a time when he laughed simply because he could.
+++
By the time Mitch and Dex burst up from the ground in a red and black inferno, John has flown around the world several times. Not all at once, but his official flight log has seen him through Europe and the Middle East and North America, over the Atlantic in various stages. His unofficial one has hopscotched him across the Pacific and South America. He knows in a visceral way that the earth is round, rounder than the scientists and cartographers understand.
He’s followed the belly of the stars – and followed and followed – and there is no end. No final point, no way off, no way to make the spinning globe stop, and he’s losing his men in the endless rotation. For the first time in years, he thinks of a too-young student working on his master's thesis, his mouth sweet with ice cream sandwiches and bitter with secrets that he shouldn’t have known, not yet. Years ago, John had a conversation with that boy. Rodney, his name was, and he’s usually one of the things John doesn’t think about. At the time it was a conversation so far outside his experience that he didn’t fully understand it. He thinks now he’s beginning to.
Rodney had said that he once wished the world to be flat – since there’s no way John thinks Rodney was ever really ignorant enough to have actually believed it was – and, being flat, that it came to a necessary end. Before this moment, it's never occurred to John to hate Rodney’s parents for not sheltering him more. Because at eighteen, the world should stretch out before you, infinite and glorious, replete with possibility; at eighteen, a boy shouldn’t know any better than that the world is his oyster and he can do anything.
Anything except stop. Wanting to stop – that comes later.
John remembers nudging Rodney away from his books filled with words and charts about the physics of the stars and sky and universe, and instead pointing Rodney’s chin to the visible sky, all the while never realizing how much he was asking of him. He stands at attention in front of Mitch’s closed casket that holds a few of his limbs and half of his head and snaps off the crispest salute he can.
+++
The rolling green of his father’s estate seems too bright to be real. Mutant green, food coloring water-sprinkled across the lawn. John hesitated before stopping by the day after they handed the folded flag to Mitch’s mom – he’s raw – but it seemed the thing to do. Filial piety and all that, and it’s been harder without Nancy between them.
“He just doesn’t know how to show emotion,” she’d said once of his father. “Like his son,” but she'd said it with a little smile. It was early in their marriage. “He cares.”
He goes to see the last mare of his adolescence before she dies or they put her down for age – not that they’re planning on it as far as he knows, but this isn’t the sort of thing Patrick thinks to tell him and the next time John visits, she won’t be there, he knows. He goes to shake Patrick’s hand and hear him say the correct words because this is what Patrick does: “They were good men. I’m sure their families are proud of their service,” not that he ever met them.
But over a bowl of Fiber One, Patrick looks at him long and hard and nods like he’s sitting at the head of his boardroom table, and says, “I’m glad to see you’re finally maturing, son. This is the real world.”
John tries out the word “son” soundlessly on his tongue, delivered as though it were a compliment, and chokes on it and the “fuck you” heaving up from his guts. He’s not shipping out until Tuesday, back to Afghanistan, but he walks out and closes the door behind him.
+++
He sits under the dubious shade of a Soviet chopper. The blood congeals where he gashed his knee, and why won’t Holland’s thigh do the same? The bandages John wrapped around the torn flesh are soaked through already. John shakes away the thought that Holland’s leg isn’t what’s going to kill him.
“Just leave me, damn it, Sheppard. If you get back now, they might let this slide. Mandatory leave for a month, that’s all. You've got a good record. Don’t ruin yourself for a dead man.”
John ignores him. He doesn’t want to haul Holland to his feet because he’s probably bleeding internally, but there’s nothing else for it. He tosses him a grin. “You can buy me a round in Kandahar after this is over.”
Holland coughs out flecks of blood. “You mean the night before your court martial.”
Shaking his head, John slings Holland’s arm over his shoulder and hauls him up. “Better make it the good stuff, then.”
Holland makes a noise that might have been a laugh, in some other world, and says, “You’re one crazy bastard, John,” and John sees shapes, men, moving on the shifting sand and tightens his jaw and makes Holland stagger forward and doesn’t think about the way he just called him John.
“We’re going to make it out of here.” Deep in his pocket, his radio squawks angry orders.
“You can still go.” Holland is slowly becoming heavy against him.
“No.”
“Go.”
“Fuck off, Holland,” John grits out from under his weight. “Don’t make me hit you,” which makes Holland cough up more blood, thicker, and his fist spasms – but maybe it’s meant to be the clench of a friend – against John’s dusty uniform.
“Go,” he says, and John replies, “I won’t.”
He can’t. His men are dead or dying, and the air never seemed so far away, the beloved and pitiless curve of the sky so distant. This is his oyster shell, shattered by a cluster bomb.
+++
Maybe it was always going to be this way.
“Sir, yes, sir,” he says, his eyes landing on the wall just beyond General Shoeman’s shoulder.
“You do realize, of course,” says the general almost conversationally, “that I ought to have followed Colonel Atherley’s recommendation to, and I quote, ‘dishonorably discharge his sorry ass.’”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you think you’re better than your CO? That you know better than him?”
“No, sir.”
Shoeman levels a stare at him. “There’s no one out there who’ll have you now. We don’t have places for people like you, Major.” He pauses. “Except down in Antarctica. For some reason - " he grins mirthlessly, “ - we have difficulty keeping pilots down there. You’re going to cool your heels on milkruns in the ice.”
Which is no less than the sterile papers that John’s already received have told him, but Shoeman probably wanted to blow off a little steam. The USAF doesn’t take kindly to destruction of its choppers, especially against orders, and Holland’s not here to take any flack. John’s been in the general’s office for the last ten minutes, after he spent four hours waiting to be called in.
On the way back to his quarters to pack his gear, he walks by Vegas. “Sir,” Vegas nods. The passing airmen look the other way, but Lerner holds out his hand to him that evening, and Alexandropolis hovers nervously in the doorway until John looks at him. "I just wanted to say - ”
John shakes his head. He doesn’t want to hear it – sympathy, disgust, anything.
“Thank you, sir.”
One of the medics who flew with Mitch stops him the next morning. “Give ‘em hell, Shep,” he tells him, because Mitch isn’t here to. John lets him slap his shoulder.
+++
Landing in Antarctica isn’t like he expected. He didn’t expect anything. He’s been in the Southern hemisphere before and never had anything like this happen. It’s akin to the sensation of vertigo, which he hasn’t felt in years but thinks he once did. Because he’s standing on the very bottom of the world, at the tightest round of latitude where the stars are strange, configured in patterns he doesn’t know, and he can’t shake the idea that he’s upside down. At any minute, he could go soaring headfirst into the sky.
It should be a good thing and maybe it is, only John has always leapt into the sky, not been tossed. This, though, it’s like scratching a wound, one brief moment of relief that only makes it worse. As much as he – always – yearns to fly, gravity yanks him against the circumference of Earth.
He ferries cargo and mail in from New Zealand, the odds and ends that don’t come in by ship. Sometimes it’s people. Most of them are logistics and maintenance personnel, except for the scientists that come and go. He doesn’t really keep track, but sometimes their numbers are uneven, like the choppy waves under his bird. More seem to come than go, and more come than seem to stay in Mac-town.
+++
“Had a couple of your kind lose their heads down here.” Whittington’s voice is gruff, too much salt caught against the tissue of his throat, ice that can’t be filtered out by his grizzled beard. Rumor has it that he’s been here forever and intends to die here as well. He controls the supply rooms.
“The ones who don’t come here for research or to learn. The ones who get stuck here. The snow makes them see things, formless shapes.”
“The abominable snow monster,” John says with a faint quirk to his lips.
Whittington guffaws. “That’s it. Boogeyman.” He tips his head slyly. “You seeing things yet, Johnny boy?”
John wipes his hands on his pants and leaves a sticky streak of machine oil. He grabs a wrench. “Naw,” he says, loose. But he might have, once or twice, felt something tickling the back of his neck, a whisper of something trapped in the deep blue ice.
If it hadn’t been Nancy, and Mitch and Dex, and his father, and Holland, it would have been something else. In fact, he’s probably lucky that he made it as far as he did, into his thirties, before he even became aware that somewhere along the way he’d lost something. There are a few raw recruits down here who somehow manage to reflect the brightness of the sun and the ice. The rest of them, though, bleach into the snow, small and insignificant against the huge frozen expanse of sky and arctic. Some of them even know it.
Whittington says, “Learn to abide, Johnny boy. You ain’t got not’in else here.” He jerks his head toward the white desert beyond them.
When he’s not flying, John works on the choppers. That’s mostly what they’ve got here. There’s a C-17 outsized cargo plane that John’s flown a few times. It isn’t stationed at McMurdo. It’s not his job to keep the choppers in shape, but the mechanics shrug and let him once he proves that he’s not going to screw things up and create more work for them. He likes to get his hands inside his girls.
When he walks, the silence makes his ears pop. Like air pressure rising, the silence expands in the cavity of his gut, empty, empty.
+++
The forever a-rhythm of the ice at times appears stylized. A cartographer’s fanciful touch, blue ocean swirls trailing off the edge of a map, off into the land of fantastic beasts where heedless explorers will fall after finding themselves caught in the rapids at the end of the world.
John has the fleeting thought that it’s too bad the world isn’t flat, and not just because he can only go round and round. If the world were flat, this is the place where all those souls would end up. The logical conclusion of a flat earth, which John didn’t see a year ago and maybe Rodney saw fifteen years ago but couldn’t admit, is that there has to be something at the end. You don’t just run into a wall. Those rapids on the maps, the waterfalls and whirlpools, they have to take you somewhere. And almost certainly it’s an abyss, but maybe, improbably, it’s not.
And maybe this is why Rodney always let John tip his head to the sky and pick out the constellations and cloud patterns as if he could reach them.
Here, in Antarctica, the last circle of the world, this is that place. This would be the last stop before – Before.
And John's there. Waiting.
+++
As summer heads toward them, more people arrive. That means more shipments, which in turn means more flying. When some general John’s never heard of shows up on his roster, he doesn’t care about the general but where they’re going. It says he’s to fly him to a “research facility,” which as far as John knows is McMurdo, right here. Someone must have copied the information wrong because John’s not scheduled to pick up the general and fly him to McMurdo, but rather to fly him out of McMurdo. The thing about generals, though, is that they’ll usually tell you in no uncertain terms if you’re not doing what they want you to do, so John amuses himself plotting a course to nowhere.
A few days later, the general, O'Neill, shows up shows up, hands him some documents, and says, “Sign.”
John mentally shrugs and signs. Doesn’t matter these days.
“Confidentiality agreement,” O’Neill tells him belatedly. He’s standing there with his hands in his pockets, not quite like any general John’s met before.
John shrugs again, imperceptibly. Confidentiality forms are nothing new.
The general hands him a slip of paper. “These coordinates are where we’re going.” His voice sharpens. “Think you can handle that, Major?”
Which makes John wince, just a bit, because it looks like O’Neill caught those hidden shrugs, and to be fair, he seems like a decent guy. Especially considering he’s the brass.
Aside from that, it’s a calm ride, things are going fine, until it’s not and, shit, they’re not, not fine at all because what the fuck is that thing, and then he’s not thinking anything except “crap, crap, Holy Fuck, EVASIVE MANEUVERS,” and the world is curving faster than usual as he makes the chopper jitterbug under his hands. He’s never seen anything like the – what, missile? – that’s dogging his every twist in the middle of a clear blue sky until it just stops and skids down to the ice limply like a toy that's lost its batteries, even as he and O’Neill are scrambling out of the chopper.
“What was that? Sir.” He remembers to tack it on at the last moment.
O’Neill bends over and examines it just a little too casually. He lifts his eyebrow at John. “Flying Spaghetti Monster.”
John stares at him, and the only thing he can say is, “Great noodle in the sky.”
“Yup.” O’Neill rocks back on his heels. “Well,” he says after a small and infinite silence. “Better get going.”
+++
Once under the ice, deep and deep into wherever this is, this research facility, O’Neill leaves him with a, “Don't touch anything.” John can just hear the, “Behave, kiddo,” in his voice.
He wanders around for a while, absorbing the languages crisscrossing one another from the scientists, wanting to be bored after three hours and not quite managing it. He can’t figure out what’s going on down here, but it’s something big. John can feel the pulse of everyone’s excitement swirling around him. It’s so strong, so palpable that John almost feels like he’s seeing something he’s not meant to. He’s vaguely uncomfortable. His fingers are itching. He shoves them in his pockets so that he doesn’t reach out and touch something. Not because the general ordered him not to, but because John hasn’t reached out for anything in a long time.
Because, “Oh dear, I’m so sorry, it was my fault – I did launch that drone at you, but it was an accident. Sorry. You have to understand that we’re dealing with things so far beyond us - ” and there’s something about security clearance and, “Ah – ah, Major, no, don’t, don’t sit in that chair!”
And then he is in the chair and leaning back, and he can see it all here at the lowest curve of the world, and there it is above him, Earth, his world, round and exploding around him. Everything he spent his life learning, painfully, age and experience mapping over the innocent expectation he knew as a child, Dad and Holland and Nancy and Mitch and Dex and –
“Think of where we are in the universe, Major.”
—and Rodney, and John's looking around for the shattered pieces of his world, and all he can see are frozen ceiling and stars and planets hovering above his head. Their glittering bodies remind him of fireflies on a summer’s evening, sparkling and small and seen out of the corner of his eye as he kissed an eager mouth.
“Did I do that?” he asks the room at large or the man he hasn’t seen yet, whose voice ordered him to summon the sky, but he already knows he did. He thought that universe into existence.
“Whoa,” he says. He sits up. Already he’s wanting to tilt back again, to do it again and make sure it really happened. He forces himself to focus on the voice, finds the man who’s bossing him about, and then stops and stares, and here in the cold he breaks into a sweat from adrenaline – the chair, the man. Christ.
There’s a man over there in front of him where there used to be a boy John knew, focused and impatient and standing at the end of the world, even so deep underground, and there’s no way John can be surprised. Not here in this place where fireflies flit under the ice, because Rodney always turned John on his head.
He was always vertigo to John, an upwelling melee of sensation. Things that Rodney did to him, the almost nauseous feeling of wanting something, someone, that badly; the way John wanted to do the impossible for him and actually felt like he could; the sense of being overwhelmed and not knowing what else to do other than grin and hand over an ice cream sandwich. Things Rodney really had nothing to do with, like a disassembled lawnmower under a warm sun and waking up happy just to lie in bed with eyelet curtains fluttering nearby and knowing, just knowing, that if he jumped into the great blue, he could fly.
He’s caught somewhere in between now, sitting in the chair, because Rodney didn’t really have anything to do with this, and yet – Ferris wheels and mint chocolate chip ice cream and homemade strawberry pie, and anything, anything you can imagine is real.
“For crying out loud,” Rodney says. “There’s no need to cause a ruckus,” which totally ignores that mostly it’s him creating the commotion. O’Neill’s shoved his hands back in his pockets – “I thought I told you not to touch anything!” – and the woman in the red shirt hasn’t spoken yet. She has the look of someone about to choose her words carefully. The doctor is wringing his hands. Rodney narrows his eyes with something that might be envious annoyance. “Of course you’d have the ATA gene.” John can hear the “flyboy” hanging off his words, impersonal disgust that he’s not a scientist, someone really useful to him.
But then Rodney stops and looks at John, actually looks at him in that same way that John always craved, Rodney so quick to glance, so hesitant to truly look at a person and give him his attention, because he can’t take the time lest he risk too much. His face shifts, recognizing and bright and covetous.
“Of course you would,” he says again, and he’s not saying the same thing at all.
+++
Rodney’s finally filled out his frame, all that lanky potential turned into the kinetics of broad shoulders and strong legs. He actually looks quite different now. The tousled fair hair John used to love to run his hands through has receded and darkened. The points of his face and body have softened, and yet John didn’t see any of this until he looked for it. Rodney’s always been about motion and energy, and that – that’s the same. More. Better, even. His hands fly while he tells John about other galaxies and wormholes and one-way trips and spaceships and energy weapons and aliens and ZPMs and—
“Major? Sheppard? Are you even listening to me? Did I lose you along the way? Somewhere, oh, probably around the time I said ‘space ship?’”
John looks down at his feet just to make sure that they’re still on the floor, because he’s starting to feel weightless, like he might just float up and hit the ice.
“Why I bother,” Rodney mutters. “Okay, listen. The important part is not space ships because we don’t have one. We don’t get to take one. So you can’t fly it, I’m sorry,” and he does look sorry, at least for a moment until he says, “But we have enough power in the ZPM to get us there. Atlantis! The lost city of the Ancients, who, yes, yes, you don’t know who they are yet, but you will.”
It’s like the last fifteen, almost twenty years never passed. Rodney doesn’t seem to be aware that this is supposed to be awkward, that they’re supposed to have become strangers in the meantime. Maybe they haven’t. Maybe it’s far too late for that by decades and lifetimes, because Rodney’s underground again, just like he used to be in Mrs. Crawly’s basement, only this time he’s managed to find a sky wider and deeper than John has ever dreamed of touching. Ever knew could exist.
“I don’t know,” says John slowly. “A one-way trip? To another galaxy?”
“What.” Rodney is the only person John's ever met who could manage to sneer derisively while bouncing on his toes. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of what we might find. Of course we’re going to encounter horrible things. They’ll probably kill us. That’s not the point!”
John’s not scared of finding freaky aliens or a destroyed city or even nothingness on the other side of the wormhole. It’s not that. It’s that he’s learning to abide here, Antarctica in the silent snow where he's left all his innocence behind. He can’t start over again.
Rodney’s studying him. “You can. We can,” which is what John assured him once. “It’s worth the risk,” as if he’s reading his mind, and John realizes that Rodney's leaving, whether John is or not. “It’s out there, it's real, despite – well, everything,” and there’s a story there that means nothing to John, not yet.
"Don’t you get it, John? John. I’m going through that wormhole. I’m going to step outside the circle of the world. The world is flat, and I’m going to the end and beyond.”
+++
The SGC puts John up for two weeks before the expedition leaves. In that time, he has to make his decision.
When the doorbell rings on Thursday, it’s the UPS man. “Need you to sign for this.” He holds out a long, round tube. John doesn’t recognize the address. That seems to be happening a lot these days.
It’s some kind of poster. He unrolls it, listening to the noon fire whistle rise shrill in the background. The poster is large, the kind you hang on a big white space, and it’s sort of old-fashioned looking. There are three ships with tall masts sailing across a blue ocean that abruptly ends in a great waterfall. The waterfall doesn’t end, although toward the bottom of the poster are swirling rapids and whirlpools out of which leap sea monsters and fearsome beasts. The ships are labeled Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria across their bows.
John eyeballs it. He stares at the ships heading over the edge of the flat world, and he laughs because at the bottom in the broad white margin it says in very small print, “I told you so.”
Which is, of course, a lie, because Rodney didn’t think so and they both know it. At most, he only hoped, but god, he was right.
Maybe John decides to go so that he gets the chance to call Rodney on his lie or so that he can hear Rodney squawk in indignation, "What do you mean? Of course I knew. Genius here!" Maybe he decides to go because, even now when he should know better, does in fact know better, he can’t let Rodney do it without him.
John’s always been the one to look up, to nudge Rodney into doing the same, and he finds he does, after all, want to be back in that position. Not so that he can lord it over Rodney, not so that he can be the leader between them, but because this is something he can do. And before John grew up and found out how many things he couldn't do, he first learned that when he gave something to Rodney – kisses, the sky, now, even though he still doesn't understand it, his gene – Rodney always gave it back to him tenfold.
+++
The gateroom is crowded. Scientists with their equipment trying to squeeze in, the marines and Sumner at their head. Dr. Weir on the ramp, giving them all one last chance to walk away.
After Sumner turns from him, John rolls his eyes and looks around the room, trying not to appear as though that’s what he’s doing. He looks until he sees, there, pushing his way to the front, Rodney.
The gate engages with a blue swish that, even though he’s now seen it in action several times over the last three days, still makes John lean forward just a bit, makes his heart freeze and then tumble over itself for a minute.
“Is this going to hurt?” he asks a young soldier next to him, Ford, he thinks. Ford grins at him and jumps into the blue with a whoop just as Rodney comes up next to him. Rodney doesn’t say anything, but his eyes meet John’s and then he smiles, and it’s sweet in the way that Rodney’s smile can be, as it was, once upon a time. It catches at John and makes him overbalance even as Rodney steps though the gate, and then John’s there too, tipping after him, throwing himself off the edge of the world.