East Coast Gazette

Title: Lustrous, pt 2/?
Rating: R
Summary: Tin is a lustrous gray.

See the first part here.

*

“You do realize,” she says, pointing at McKay with a fork, “that is because it is actually a good movie.”

McKay tears at his hair, but he’s not serious about it, and Jane grins at that, because that vanity, that receding hairline, it’s been a part of him as long as Jane has known him—one of him, anyway.

“I’m so appalled the universe would allow the existence of two versions of you convinced that Back to the Future is a good movie,” he moans and goes back to his pancakes, drowning his sorrow in breakfast food.

The kitchen is warm orange, bathed in the overhead light, and behind where McKay is sitting at the tiled counter she can see photographs on the refrigerator, notes with Rodney’s handwriting, grocery lists and receipts, photographs affixed with real estate agent magnets.  She’s glad he’s here, even if the smell of the side of scrambled eggs he’d made for himself—with real butter and real milk, no comments about heart disease and diabetes, for once—is making her gag a little.

Teasing, Jane says, “In fact, I bet that every version of me in every one of the infinite mirror universes actually likes that movie.”

“There is no God,” McKay quips, but shoves another mouthful of egg in around his pancake, so Jane knows he can’t be that upset.

“You knew that anyway,” she tells him.

McKay keeps looking at her ring finger, at the enormous brilliant cut diamond and the two baguettes that flank it on the platinum band; she’s worn it so long she’s almost forgotten it’s there.  Nothing but the best for her, Rodney had declared, still brimming with smugness over his genius award, at being tapped as a forerunner for a Nobel.  He was flush in research offers and working out the details of leaving a career in academia behind, and he’d slipped the ring onto her finger on a raining Thursday night, in the corner booth of their Vietnamese restaurant.

“You can ask,” she tells McKay gently.  It is, in a strange way, his life, too.

It’s disconnected moments like these she misses her father the most, wishes she could call the Colonel and have him tell her stories about soaring high above the clouds, take her flying in his Socata, fishing behind the cabin.  Her father never knew exactly how to raise a daughter, so he’d defaulted to loving her as well as possible, and hoping the rest worked itself out along the way; Jane thinks it did.

He swallows hard.  “How long?  I mean—how long were you married?”

“Ten years,” Jane tells him.  “Well, technically, almost eleven.  He’s refusing to sign the papers.”

McKay sets down his fork and looks as queasy as Jane feels.  “So the restraining order.”

“No,” Jane says, smiling tightly.  “That was for hacking into my computer and reading all my email.”

She doesn’t tell McKay about Rodney showing up at the house angry and still-drunk and smelling like somebody else.  About how his constructed jealousy had gotten bigger like their houses and paychecks and the benefits to which they were invited, and how two years ago they’d gotten into a fight at the Museum of Natural History and he’d grabbed her wrist so hard she’d had a bruise.  It’d scared both of them, and they’d retreated to their corners for a few quiet months—but there’re always new people and new ways for Rodney to convince himself that the Jane who fell for a shitty first date request and a far-shittier proposal would fall for somebody else.

And the way McKay blushes makes Jane think that the email business is probably the type of behavior any Sheppard associated with any McKay regardless of gender or situation can expect, and she tries not to find that romantic—to know that their lives are inextricably linked even through the fabric of universes, into the complex weave of alternate dimensions.

She sets her own fork down and tears at her napkin.  She doesn’t know any better way to ask it other than just to ask it, so she does, and says, “Your Sheppard.  John.  Are you two married?”

“Not yet, but I have a plan that involves tricking him into going to Vancouver and massive amounts of alcohol,” McKay explains dismissively, adding, “He has commitment issues.  Problems with his Dad.”

Maybe her father would have raised sons even worse, Jane thinks, and asks, “Wait—does he even want to get married?”  She feels protective; it’s sort of her virtue, in a way, and she knows how Rodney is: going in balls to the wall in any and all situations, Jane still feels bulldozed.

“If he’s willing to die for me, he better be willing to live with me,” McKay says, too-quietly.

Jane watches him, the delicate flutter of his eyelashes and the pink of his mouth, and wishes she could kiss away his distress—but that would make her the other woman in an odd way, and she doesn’t want anyone to ever feel the way she has.

“You shouldn’t make him lonely,” she tells him.

She thinks it might give away too much, because the look McKay gives her after she says it certainly does.  But it’s the only good advice he can think for McKay, the only thing she knows he might do hurtfully, and over and over again, and never manage to change.  “Just try your best.  Okay?” she asks, and he says, “I will, I promise,” and covers his face with one hand, tired.

*

The less her father had hated Rodney the more Jane had—and at first it’d been irritation: the new car, the big house, the constant self-aggrandizement around his colleagues while she’d been clutched to his side, an accessory in pumps and a plunging neckline.

Rodney had chosen the dress, and when she’d flushed and told him there was no way, he’d seduced her into it, sucking hot, wet kisses down the column of her neck, along the teardrop curve of her breasts, slid his hand up her thigh and ground the heel of his palm into her.  He’d played her—but he had good practice.  Somewhere between his dirty lab and piles of papers, his childlike wonder of science and his multimillion dollar deals, he’d gotten good as that.

“Can we go home?” she asked, close to Rodney’s ear and a little bit desperate.  “Rodney, I’m exhausted.”

He had turned to give her a distracted smile.  “I told you you could quit your job now.”

Jane had glared.  “That’s not the point,” and blushing, she’d said, “You know I hate this kind of stuff.”

“I hate it, too,” Rodney had reassured her, curving one large palm over the small of her back, possessively around the curve of her hip.  Jane has always felt so safe with him, curled up next to his bulk.  She’s always been too skinny and delicate-looking, with too-fine features and too-pale skin, washed out next to her dark curls, green-gray eyes enormous on her thin face.

“But this is work,” he reminded her.  “It’s what I have to do to get funding.”

Jane had glanced at the big clock on the wall—9:30.  “Can we leave at ten?” she begged.  Her feet hurt and she was feeling nauseated, and all week she had been dead on her feet, half-asleep.

“Sure,” Rodney promised.

They’d left at 1 a.m., and Jane had cried all the way home and didn’t know why.

The first miscarriage was bad, but it had changed things at home for the better at least, and Rodney was Rodney again, attentive and funny and sweet and kind during the aftermath, when Jane was bloodless and bedridden—heartbroken over something she hadn’t know she could love.  He had taken three weeks off from work and shouted at anybody who tried to call him, spent entire days curled up with her in bed, stroking in long, thick fingers through her hair and murmuring apologies, how much he loved her.  That they could try again, if they wanted, but always, he’s sorry, he’s so sorry.

*

She fixes up the guest room for McKay, puts down fresh bedding and extra pillows, and as he’s staring at the furniture and flowers in confusion—the HEPA filter is already in there, and the room still looks lived-in.  Jane hasn’t changed anything since Rodney moved out permanently three months ago, and this is airing out more of their dirty laundry than she really has a right to.

“Wow,” McKay says, sitting on the edge of the bed.  “I got exiled, huh?”

Jane sits next to him, twisting a fresh towel in her hands.  “He wanted his own space.”

McKay fists his hands on his knees.  “He’s an idiot.”

“Things happen,” Jane recites, verbatim, from the lecture the marriage counselor had given her one afternoon, when she’d been sitting on a slick leather couch and scared.  “Things change.  People change.  And sometimes, you fall out of love.”  A pause.  “He fell out of love.  I think.”

But McKay gives her a look that cuts through all the psychoanalytical bullshit with the same eerie accuracy of one of Rodney’s incisive glares—the kind that had left her stinging in the middle of an argument, even after all her apologies.

“Did you fall out of love?” he asks.

Jane smirks at him, bitter.  “This would all be much easier if it was mutual, don’t you think?”

McKay’s entire body slumps down, like after everything, this has done it, he’s too exhausted to sit up straight anymore, now.  And she’s sorry she brought him up here—she could have just as easily made up the couch, but before she can apologize, McKay is looking up at her, eyes fierce, saying, “You’re wrong though—I bet I—he, still does.  Love you.”

“He has someone new,” Jane says, and now she’s just being mean, so she says, trying to ease the horror off of McKay’s face, “It’s really—I know you hate it, but it’s not a big deal.  Like, half of marriages end in divorce.”

“Ours shouldn’t,” he snaps, and lies back, pulls a pillow over his face.  “I’m tired now.”

Jane pats McKay’s knee comfortingly.  She didn’t think anybody in the world could take her divorce harder than herself—and she guesses she’s still right.  After all, McKay’s really not from around here.

*

She wakes up the next morning to Rodney, furious on the phone line.

“You’re not supposed to be calling,” she says, half-dumb with sleep.  She’d ended up passing out on top of the sheets, and she wakes up wrapped in a quilt Rodney’s sister had given them as a five year anniversary present.  “That’s violating the restraining—”

“Fuck your restraining order,” Rodney snarls.  “You called my office 20 times yesterday.”  There’s a short, tense silence before he asks, “Is everything okay?  I mean—are you?  All right?”

Jane doesn’t actually know what to say to that, other than to think about McKay and his John Sheppard and how he must hate it here, so far away and in the middle of a nightmare.  She’s always wanted Rodney—any Rodney—to be happy, so she takes a shaking breath before she says:

“Actually—I need your help.”

*

McKay is 500 percent angrier about it than Jane thought he would be, and that was already accounting for his being 100 percent angrier than a normal human being.

“Look,” she tries to explain, following him where he’s storming around the house, “I don’t have a military background and my father died almost six years ago.  I didn’t know who else to ask!”

“You shouldn’t have talked to him!” McKay shouts, bright red and still in his t-shirt and boxers.  “You—you have a restraining order out on him!  And you invited him over here?”

Jane sets her mouth in a severe frown.  “I want to help you get home.”

“Oh,” Rodney yells, “and believe me, I want to get there—but not like this.”

“Well, I didn’t have any other choice!” she yells back.

“You always have a choice!” Rodney shouts this time, slamming his hands on the kitchen counter.

Jane wraps her arms around her stomach and snaps back, “Yeah, and I’ve always chosen you!”

And in the profound silence after that, they hear a key turning in the door lock.  “Oh my God,” McKay says, sounding faintly sick, “you never even got the locks changed.”

Jane figures it’s pointless to say that she did, three separate times, and that was what had started precipitating the restraining order to begin with.  And she doesn’t get a chance anyway, because the door swings open and Rodney’s on the other side, in a sleek black shirt and silver-rim glasses, every inch the millionaire the man she married had become.  He’s actually still on his cell phone, murmuring to somebody on the other line—Samantha, Jane thinks, she bets it’s Samantha, reassuring her that nothing’s going on, that it’s just his crazy ex-wife again—as he shuts the door behind him.  And as he starts to slip the phone, too-casually into his pocket, he looks up to say:

“Jane, I think it’s time we talk about—who the fuck is that?”

Jane can’t help it, the giggle wells up in her chest, and she gets a simultaneous scowl from both of the Rodney’s—which only makes her laugh harder, clutching at her stomach and feeling her knees go soft.   It’s all so ridiculous—and what’s crazier still is that McKay’s the one who grudgingly comes to help her up, takes her arm and sets her down on a kitchen stool, mutters, long-suffering and affectionate in her ear, “God.  Your sense of humor is rotten across dimensions.”

*

TBC