East Coast Gazette

Title: Lustrous
Rating: R
Summary: Tin is a lustrous gray.

(Obvs. this is a continuation of the shenanigans kicked off here.)

The red phone underneath her desk rings halfway through the period, and half of her class looks up and around, trying to spot who forgot to put their cell phone on vibrate. She waves them back to their tests and picks up the receiver, turns to her whiteboard and says, “Hello?”

“Hey, Jane,” Nell says, her voice a murmur layered over the sounds of the front office: fax machines and photocopiers, Principal Harrison talking in the background, sounding furious. “I don’t want to alarm you.”

“Okay,” she allows, but she feels kind of sick already, and stretches the phone cord to its limit, shutting and locking the classroom door, peering down the hall through the window. Her students are looking at up her with worried eyes, and she knows they all know — it’s high school, and now it’s high school with text messaging and Facebook.

“But he’s on his way,” Nell tells her, voice soft. “We just called security, but we just wanted to let you know in case they don’t…”

She trails off, and Jane says, “What, intercept him in time?” It’s supposed to be a joke, but she hears urgent footsteps coming down the hallway and she knows it’s not funny because it’s true. “Look, I’ll be fine,” she says, as softly as possible, and she can tell from the corner of her eye that Harry and Norm and Reed and Jackson — her class is 95 percent male — are all straining to hear her words, “just get security here as quickly as possible — my kids are taking a test.”

“They’re putting a rush on it,” Nell promises. “Do you want me to stay on the line?”

“I’ll be fine,” Jane says again, and hangs up the phone.

“Mrs. McKay? Everything okay?” Reed asks, and she feels kind of sorry for him. Reed has a jumpiness to him that makes her think of pound puppies — all the same eager desperation for affection and tendency to shiver at loud noises, so Jane digs up a smile for him and ruffles his hair, saying:

“Everything’s fine,” she tells him. “The office just wanted to let me know something.”

He scowls. “It’s him again, isn’t it?” he asks.

She arches a brow, but before she can start another (ultimately useless) conversation about how she won’t ever love Reed the way Reed loves her, there’s a furious clatter at the door—someone banging frantically on it and shouting, “Sheppard! Sheppard! We have to talk—oh, Jesus, do I look like a child molester to you people?”

“You look like you’re violating a restraining order, buddy,” Steve the east campus cop says.

“Restraining—look, I don’t know what happened in this universe, but in mine—” the voice shouts, and Jane finds herself running to the door, unlocking it with shaking hands and jerking it open.

But it’s the same old Rodney, all right: blue eyes and baby bird blond hair and color high in his cheeks, and she doesn’t know why she got so excited—part of her still wants to want him, she guesses, how stupid—but now she’s trapped, standing in the opened door of her classroom in the sudden silence. All of her students are crowded around her in the doorway now, and the combined power of their psychic hate for McKay is a little touching.

“Are you—are you Sheppard?” the man asks, and she recognizes that look in his eyes, too: reasonless hope, desperation around the edges. It’s the name that keeps throwing her off; she hasn’t been ‘Sheppard’ in a really long time, and hearing those syllables in his mouth, in his voice, is jarring.

She stares at him for along minute, watches Steve scowl down at him, until she finally scrapes out of her throat, because she guesses she is now, “Yes—I am.”

“Cue the creepy, romantic music,” Steve mutters, and jerks Rodney up and away.

*

She let’s her class out early—the test is a wash anyway—and gets in her car, snatches up her cellular phone and before she knows what she’s doing she’s calling Rodney’s lawyer. Not because she’s not sure he hasn’t already called the slimeball, but because Mark’s clearly not explaining things correctly if Rodney’s not only violating a restraining order—but that now he’s doing it on campus.

“Jane, I swear to God,” Mark answers the phone, “when I told you my personal line, I didn’t mean for you to randomly call me with new, imagined grievances every six minutes.”

Her hands tighten on the steering wheel, and she sees her knuckles go white in rage. “Imagined? Your fucking client showed up at my school today! How’s that for God damn imagined!”

There’s a long, long silence on the other end of the phone before Mark says, “Hold on—I’m calling him right now.” And before Jane can say, “Who do you think you’re fooling here” he’s gone, and then too-quickly back again, saying, “Jane—I just called his office and his secretary confirms he’s been locked up in development meetings all day.”

She almost steers into a tree, but she manages to say, “Which secretary?”

“The three that hate him,” Mark says, and sighing, says, “Jane—I don’t know what to tell you.”

Jane stares into the traffic for a long time before she says, “If he got arrested at Hollister High where would he be jailed?”

*

Jane met Rodney in a college physics class. She sat in the back left corner and he sat next to her, doodling daleks on a yellow legal pad and writing notes like, “This class is abysmal,” and “I could teach this with one eye and half a brain—right or left lobe,” and also, “Being that you’re ridiculously pretty and smell good and seem to be carrying a 99 average in this class—do you want to go to dinner with me? If the answer is no, just ignore this note because I know you’re reading it (you’re totally not subtle, by the way), and I’ll just go collect the pieces of my self-worth at the front of the room Wednesday.”

She wrote back, on the corner, in purple ink, “Sure. We should have Vietnamese food.”

Rodney’s moved into her apartment by the end of the week—she’d be angry about the encroaching behavior, but he sticks glow-in-the-dark stars in constellations all over her bedroom ceiling, and at night, she can feel his nose in her hair and watch Pegasus swing dizzily overhead. It’s still the happiest she’s ever been.

*

“Oh thank God,” is the first thing Rodney—not Rodney?—says to her, rushing to his feet behind the jail cell bars. His hair is standing on end and he looks, red-eyed, crazy. “I thought you wouldn’t come—and I—I don’t have any phone numbers.”

She swallows hard and stays three feet away from the bars, keeps her arms crossed over her chest.

“Who are you?” she asks. He’s wearing a tan uniform with a Canadian flag sewn onto the shoulder; he looks thinner than she remembers from the last time she saw him across a lawyers table.

He ducks his head and flushes, and so Jane knows for sure—Mark’s right, this isn’t Rodney. She can’t remember the last time Rodney was shy about anything with her.

“I’m, uh, not from around here,” he says.

There’s a scar on his chin she doesn’t remember, and she doesn’t know how it happens, but she gravitates toward the bars, and her fingers are stroking over his stubbly chin, the blond whiskers rough on her palm. “No, you aren’t, are you?” she asks, soft.

He stares at her, and after shock melts away he just looks tired, scared.

“I need your help,” he says, and because really, when it comes down to it, Jane’s never been able to deny Rodney anything, she doesn’t deny him this, either.

*

Jane gets some pretty spectacularly awful looks from the neighbors when she pulls into the driveway—a familiar face in the driver’s side seat. There’s too much shit—Rodney’s shit—in the garage for her to pull her car in, and she wishes she could, because the evil eye that she’s getting from Judy next door is making her skin crawl.

“Oh my God,” the man moans, huddled close to her, afraid—using her as a shield. It’s like looking at Rodney through a mirror from a Lewis Carroll story. Rodney never used her as a shield, although he’d always liked having her an excuse, Jane thinks. “What did I do to your neighbors?”

Jane flushes, fingers fumbling on her housekeys. “Nothing,” she lies.

It’s been a long, ugly year, and the last time Judy saw Rodney he was drunk and sitting on the front porch saying it didn’t mean anything—that he wasn’t the slut in the relationship.

Snorting, McKay—“Just call me McKay,” he’d said, getting into her car at the jail—says, “Fabulous, you’re as a bad a liar in this universe as you are in mine.”

She spent the entire time McKay was being processed for release on the phone with Bob at Rodney’s office, asking, “You’re sure? He’s really still in that meeting?” with Bob murmuring assurances, promising, “Jane, I swear, he’s in there. I hate the guy but I don’t hate you.”

The door finally unlocks, and Jane has a take a steadying breath before she says, “Okay. Come in.”

Jane knows—and Rodney believed—in the possibility of infinite universes, but Jane thinks she probably believes McKay because she wants to believe him so badly. For more than a decade she had locked into somebody’s orbit, he was home and he was good, and suddenly, he was her worst enemy. She’s lying to herself if she says she’s not scared here, standing in her doorway watching McKay cross her threshold, but more than that she’s desperately hopeful.

“You sure it’s okay?” McKay asks her, but he’s looking at her hands, how they’re shaking. She thinks that whoever they are to one another wherever McKay comes from, he must know her well enough to want to close his own fingers over her wrists—and the knowledge of that feels almost as good as the warmth of a touch.

She digs up a smile for him and says, “Yeah. I am.”

*

Rodney had asked her to marry him from the SALT observatory, over the crackling phone line and sounding like he was a hyperventilating half to death. She says, “Sure. We should have Vietnamese food at the wedding,” because Jane’s kind of a punk, but also because the stars on her ceiling are still there, although now Rodney’s clothes have migrated to mix in with her own, their lives intertwined like vines, four years since Rodney made himself at home in her third-floor walk-up.

The wedding, because Rodney is terrified of Colonel Sheppard, is enormous and embarrassing and very classically white—rose settings and damask tablecloths, a string quartet. Jane feels silly in her dress, after a lifetime in blue jeans and t-shirts, to change it all out for silk and organza and a kiss of lace at a too-tight bodice, but Rodney’s voice gets choked and his throat gets closed up like he’s just tasted the sunshine sweet of lemonade, so she just blushes and takes his hand at the alter.

Her father cries copiously and is the first one drunk at the reception—but he manages to restrict his death threat for Rodney to a very reasonable three minutes, and even claps McKay on the shoulder at the end of it. Despite Rodney’s claims later, it never bruised.

“I hope I make you happy,” Rodney told her, hooking up their new VCR in their new house in their new neighborhood in Pasadena, “I never knew I could want that. For another person.”

Jane remembers pressing a kiss to the back of Rodney’s neck—sunburned from their week in Belize—and murmuring, close to his ear and absolutely certain it was true, “You already have.”

*

Jane comes back downstairs—she went to call Rodney’s office one more time, just to be safe, just to be sure—to find McKay holding the honeymoon photo she’s left on the fireplace mantel. Jane hasn’t changed anything, put anything away. She doesn’t know what to remove or what to keep, and what would make her sadder to have or leave—it’s all been part of a whole so long she doesn’t even know what to carve out of her life.

McKay looks up at her, and he looks angry, asks, “What did I do?”

Jane stops on the staircase. “What are you talking about?” she asks, which is stupid because his brows furrow and his mouth turns down at the corner the way it always has. She’s a terrible liar.

“Was I too demanding?” he asks, sounding philosophical about the whole thing. “Was I mean?”

“You were always mean and demanding,” she blurts out, forgetting for a minute who this is and how he hasn’t lived their fights before. “You just stopped trusting me.”

McKay turns all kinds of white, and his knees seem to give out, stumbling back into the couch still clutching the photo. It’s one Rodney had somebody else on the beach take, their faces are almost obscured by the backlighting of the sunset, but it’s unintentionally beautiful—Jane and Rodney gilded by the orange light, too happy.

“It’s no big deal,” Jane hears herself saying, and McKay gives her a look that’s possibly more foul than Judy’s before.

“It’s no big—God, I guess I’m lucky you were born a man in my world,” he says, disgusted, “you’re only like, three-quarters as laconic that way.”

Jane blinks, suddenly distracted by the possibilities. “I was a man?”

“Yes, that’s the other genetic option,” Rodney says, and goes back to staring at the picture.

Frowning, Jane sits down in the love seat. “What was I like?”

Rodney looks uncomfortable. He squirms and says, “Um. You know. You. But male.”

Jane narrows her eyes at him.

“You’re equally hot but in very different ways,” Rodney tells her in a huff, blushing furiously. “Is that what you wanted?”

“No, not really,” Jane tells him, but she can’t help but smile.

“Stop laughing at me,” Rodney pouts, holding the picture frame to his chest like a shield.

Jane presses three fingers to her lips. “Okay,” she allows.

Demoralized, McKay wilts further into the couch, and after a long beat, asks, “Do you have any food?”

After she stops laughing and wiping her eyes, Jane waves McKay into the kitchen, pulls the mace out of her pocket and sets it away on top of the microwave. McKay gives her a dirty look, but settles at one of the bar stools waiting, and Jane starts taking things out of the fridge.

*

TBC