East Coast Gazette

Title: Lustrous, pt 3/?
Rating: R
Summary: Tin is a lustrous gray.

This story is making me insane.  God damn het.

*

Jane amuses herself with finding something in the kitchen to eat—food, for the last four months, has mostly been divided into two camps: food that makes her puke, and food that she must have immediately right now and also in mass quantities.  This morning, everything in her refrigerator makes her want to die just looking at it, so she grabs a container of raw quick oats out of the pantry and a spoon, trying to ignore the way Rodney and McKay are shouting at each other behind her.

“That work is purely theoretical—even if we had the mathematical model it would be decades before we could even imagine a power source strong enough to start the reaction!” Rodney is shouting, waving his arms furiously.

And McKay is yelling back, “Have you not been listening?  Highly classified and hush hush alien project!  We didn’t develop the power source, we’ve just decoded it—or do you need me to put this onto some sort of graphical representation for you to understand?”

“Moreover,” Rodney yells, “what the hell are you doing in my wife’s house—”

“Ex-wife!” McKay reminds him.

“—half-naked and—”

“I’ve seen it all before,” Jane tells McKay helpfully.

“—and—you stop leering at her this moment!” Rodney finishes, angry and sputtering.

“Oh for—how can you be jealous of yourself?” McKay demands, and sniffing, adds, “Besides, I’m gay.”  He makes a dismissive handwave at Jane’s chest.  “Breasts don’t interest me.”

Rodney has a minor aneurysm, Jane can tell, and she nearly chokes on a mouthful of oatmeal; this is partly because McKay had spent most of the night before staring at her and blushing, and partly because Rodney’s such an appallingly bad liar of course he could only ever fool himself.  While Rodney and McKay stare each other down, Jane finds a jar of half-eaten olives and starts digging out the pimentos, popping them into her mouth and eating them whole.

“I don’t even have anything to say to that,” Rodney manages, making his migraine face and rubbing at his temples.  “I just, I have nothing.”

McKay, sensing weakness, purrs, “Really gay.  Super gay all the time.  I love cock, and it loves me.”

“Argh,” Rodney says, head dropping into his hands.

Sighing, Jane says, “Guys—can you focus?”

McKay restricts himself to one last, lascivious moan of “dick” before he says, “Okay,  anyway, yes, because God knows I don’t want to stay here and watch you ruin our lives.”  Which makes Rodney open his mouth, red-faced and furious, so Jane interrupts, saying:

“Okay, you guys duke it out, I’m going to go grade some tests.”

*

The second miscarriage hadn’t been a surprise like the first, at least not the same way.  The first pregnancy had been an accident; the second the product of another year of trying.  She’d spent most of the three months terrified, and Rodney had all but bubble-wrapped her, drove her to and from work; they’d followed the doctor’s advice to the letter and done everything right—but they’d still been afraid.  Rodney didn’t come up with massive lists of names, and Jane mostly just stared at her flat belly in worry.   So when she’d woken up with lancing pains and cramps, blood trickling down her legs, she’d just laid in bed and cried while Rodney called the ambulance, choking on his own words.

They decided to stop trying.  Rodney claimed they’d only fuck up any children, and Jane had agreed because she’d been too scared to do anything otherwise.

Jane failed half her algebra II class.  Rodney started to work more, and longer, and meaner.  He went through three secretaries in six months and stopped eating at home, which Jane recognized—hilariously—in retrospect, was an old euphemism for a reason.

“You’ve been working a lot,” she’d said, passing him another beer, hockey on faint and far away in the background on

“Yeah,” he’d said, flushing, not meeting her eyes.  “We picked up a new government contract.”

She’d nodded and pulled a blanket up around her knees, curling next to him on the couch, because even when it’d been bad, he’d been good for her.  And Rodney had put an arm around her shoulders instinctively, fingers curling in her hair.

“Your liaison riding you pretty hard?” she’d asked.

Rodney had coughed.  “Yeah,” he’d managed later, looking sick.  “Something like that.”

The thing that had been the most damning, Jane knows now, isn’t that she hadn’t known really, but that she sort of had—you always know, a little at least, she thinks—but that it was easier that way.  At least that way, when everything started to go totally to hell, it wasn’t just her fault.

*

It’s almost midnight by the time Rodney and McKay stop shouting at each other, and the unnatural silence makes Jane worried they’ve killed one another.  So she goes downstairs on tiptoes, wrapped up in the big quilt off her bed and rubbing at her cheek—hoping the green pen she grades in hasn’t rubbed off on her face since she fell asleep.

She’s kind of expecting to see two dead bodies, but instead she finds Rodney asleep at the dining room table—a laptop abandoned by his hands and an empty coffee carafe next to him.  McKay’s still awake, bathed in a pool of orangey light, scribbling hastily on a yellow legal pad, and it’s so jarring that her breath hitches, and the noise is enough to catch McKay’s attention.

He looks up at her, eyes electric blue.  “Hey,” he whispers, hoarse.  “I thought you were asleep.”

Jane runs a hand through her hair, yawning as she says, “I was—but I was grading, and everybody kept you know, getting all the answers right and I fell asleep.”

McKay makes a face at her.  “I can’t believe your class isn’t filled with morons.”

“Oh, it is,” Jane reassures him.  “But in a different way.”  She winks and pads, barefoot, to the refrigerator, pulls out a bottle of Perrier huddles over to sit at one of the kitchen stools, grinning as she says, “They’re all teenaged boys with extensive character sheets in tabletop RPGs—I think I might be the closest thing to the love of a good woman they’ve ever known.”

McKay slides into the stool next to her, hands cupped around a cooled coffee mug.  “Thanks for that absolutely awful mental image.”

“Happy to help,” Jane says, and takes a long sip of water, reaching for a bright green apple.

“You know,” McKay says, smiling at her fondly, “I don’t think seen John eat this much food in all the time I’ve known him—much less in one day.”

“Well,” Jane says around the mouthful of apple, and she has no idea why she’s telling McKay when she hasn’t even told Rodney, “I bet John’s never been pregnant before.”

McKay actually snorts, saying, “Actually, there’s this hilarious story about this one time he—” and then he derails, turns completely white, squeaking out “—what?  You’re what?”

“Knocked up,” Jane says helpfully.  She takes another big bite of apple.  “You know, in a family way.”

“Is it—I mean—” McKay says, in obvious pain, eyes big as plates and now staring roughly where her stomach would be, underneath the quilt.

Jane schools her face into a serious expression.  “It’s one of my students’—he said he needed tutoring.”

McKay whimpers.

“He came over in the rain, crying about a test grade.  I gave him a towel, he told me I had pretty hair,” she goes on.  “It all got kind of out of hand.”

“Uh,” McKay manages, looking sick.

“But you can’t tell anybody, McKay,” she says, mostly because she can’t help herself.  It’s like when she just met Rodney, all over again, when she felt safe teasing him, just to see him sputter angrily later, how he’d sulk and snap and then finally crack, slide his arms around her waist late and night, and mutter, “Brat,” affectionately into her ear.

Raising a shaking first in solidarity, McKay says, “Right.  Uh—seriously?  Really?”

She rolls her eyes and takes another bite of apple.  “No.  Jeez, McKay, do you believe everything?”

“I’m sorry, I’m pretty used to believing in you,” McKay says, snotty, and he can’t possibly know how it feels to hear that Rodney’s voice and someone wearing Rodney’s face.  But faltering, he says after a beat, “But—the pregnancy thing, that’s real?”

Jane smiles, rueful.  “Surprise,” she murmurs.

“Can I?” McKay asks, and Jane figures it can’t hurt, so she sets down the apple and takes McKay’s hand, pulls aside the quilt and slides McKay’s palm over her warm cotton of her t-shirt.  She barely has a bump, and in her normal clothes, it’s hidden completely—but this close, she knows McKay can feel it, the tightness underneath her skin.

And she can tell that once McKay clues in on her lack of waistline, the other details filter in, too.  Her face has gotten rounder, her skin feels brighter, pinker.

“Wow,” McKay whispers, eyes still huge, cheeks bright, “I think I can feel it move.”

“You can’t feel it move yet,” Jane whispers back, but she’s smiling at she says it.  It’s the first time she’s really been able to feel happy about the baby and it feels like cold water in her throat, sweet.

McKay’s face falls.  “Really?”

“Really,” Jane tells him, but she closes a hand over McKay’s, warm through the t-shirt, and reaches up to stroke her other palm over his cheek.  “You know, it’s weird.  But I’m glad you’re here.”

Jane didn’t think McKay could get redder, but he does, and he slides his fingers in between hers as he says, “You know you never tell me that kind of stuff when you’re male, right?”

She grins, and leans over to kiss him on the forehead.  “I bet I mean it all the time, though,” she whispers, close to his ear, and stands up again, let’s McKay pulls the quilt more tightly around her.

“Does he know?” McKay asks, and makes it sound like a dirty word.

Jane glances over at Rodney, still slumped over in sleep—his spine bent at an angle that’s going to have him near tears tomorrow morning.  Jane knows she’s going to have to tell Rodney eventually, and that will lead to more fights and shouting and hair-pulling, complicated meetings with their lawyers; Jane can’t decide if Rodney would want the kid all to himself or not want anything to do with the baby at all, and both hurt the same amount of bad.

Hesitating, she says, “Not yet.”

McKay searches her face for something, but whatever it is, he must find it, and he leans over to press a kiss beneath her ear—and Jane can’t help but feel her toes curl in pleasure at that, to have his mouth on her skin again—and to say, “You should go back to sleep.”

“Yeah,” Jane agrees, shuffling toward the stairs again, “I’m snoozing for two now.”

She hears McKay’s footsteps on the stairs a few minutes later, the creak of his weight entering the guest room, the springs of the bed.

*

In the morning she wakes up to the smell of bacon and eggs and French toast, and it’s so wonderful she drifts downstairs in her bathrobe and bare feet without thinking about what’s waiting for her down there.

Rodney is whistling Bach and turning the toast in a cast iron griddle, and Jane comes up behind him to snatch a piece of bacon from a serving platter, pulls her hand just out of the way before he can snap her on the wrist with the spatula.

“Hey!” Rodney says, his glasses smudged from sleep.  “I thought you didn’t eat breakfast.”

“Things change,” Jane says, and while he’s distracted, s plate and loads it up with a fried egg, another piece of bacon—the first piece of French toast.

Rodney holds up the coffee.  “You want some?”

Jane shakes her head, asks, “Is McKay up yet?”

Rodney’s constipated face turns dark and he pours himself another mug.  “No—and we need to talk about how he got the guest room and I got the dining room table.”

Jane feels not at all sorry for him, and goes in search of juice, knowing full well that Rodney must have come upstairs after she’d gone to sleep, suspicious and searching, checking to make sure she and McKay weren’t having hot, feral, sort-of-married-sex in the whirlpool tub.  She still loves Rodney, in some sort of fucked up way, but it’s not like she doesn’t know the guy.

“You know where the other guest rooms are,” she says airily, piercing the yolk of the egg; Rodney still knows how to fry them just the way she likes them.

This is the first conversation they’ve had in a season that hasn’t degenerated into yelling, into Rodney brandishing his newly-acquired housekey for her newly-installed locks, into her slapping him with a restraining order.  He doesn’t seem scary right now, wrinkled and red-faced, standing in socked feet making breakfast in their kitchen.  It feels like a memory from years ago, when they weren’t angry at each other  yet.

“Well nobody woke me up,” Rodney says, sullen, and contrary to his earlier theatrics, gives her another egg and another two slices of bacon, tips them over onto her plate indulgently.  It’s hard to reconcile him—hair sticking up crazily—with the man she’s been fighting with for so long.

Rodney spares a minute to look uncomfortable, fiddling with the spatula, but eventually, he sets it down and turns off the range, shifts the skillet off the fire.  “Look,” he says, and it sounds like it’s hard for him to form the syllables.  “I wanted to apologize.”

Jane cocks an eyebrow.  “For what,” she says flatly.

“I recognize,” Rodney says carefully, “after extensive discussion and some consideration, that my behavior during the early part of our separation could be construed as somewhat questionable.”

“Weird, huh,” Jane says, grinning hugely, “hearing yourself call you a jackass.”

Cheeks heating, Rodney snaps, “Okay, I take back my apology.”

“No take backs,” Jane crows, and Rodney spitefully takes back a strip of her bacon.

Even though the sense of growing hope she feels is probably false, but she figures she owes him, so Jane sets down her fork and takes a deep breath, says, “Rodney—I should tell you something.”

*

TBC