East Coast Gazette

Title: Lustrous, pt 4/?
Rating: hard R
Summary: Tin is a lustrous gray.

I want to say there’ll only be two more parts of this, but I know where that usually lands me — an extra 20,000 words in the pot. Also, for those of you wondering about the summary: tin is the traditional ten year anniversary gift for married couples. Yeah, fabulously romantic, ain’t it?

*

It’s stupid when Jane thinks about what started the divorce proceedings—that after Rodney had fooled around on her and she’d stopped caring and they’d both suddenly lost interest in having any kind of sex at all, it was senior prom that that spelled their marriage’s demise.

But Jane had gotten the short straw to chaperon, and somehow it had spawned into one of those fights that started in the kitchen and paused long enough for dinner, then blossomed again in the bathroom, that led to slamming doors and thrown crystal and Rodney spending the night in his office.

Jane wanted him to go to prom with her, just as a token gesture of marriage or something; Rodney wanted her to put that thought right out of her mind. Jane wanted to know why he couldn’t take an evening out to do something with her—for her; Rodney wanted to know why she still chose to keep her “joke” of a job, anyway. Then Jane had just wanted Rodney to go straight to hell and take the twelve-year-old, redheaded botanist he’d been fucking at the office with him, so she’d asked him, loudly, and stormed out the door in kitten heels and a black dress.

So by the time she and Coach Murphy had confiscated the heavily-spiked punch—Aristocrat Vodka and red Kool Aid, drink of champions—she was feeling mean and unwanted, ugly inside. And it had seemed to make sense to sneak out behind the hotel with the punch bowl and polish it off with Dan, who was hilarious and had managed to turn their losing team into a winning one—to bum cigarettes off of him and stand too close, to turn the diamond on her ring into her palm for the appearance of propriety.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Jane,” Dan had said, and snubbed out a cigarette—kissed her and she’d tasted red and sugar and the bitter burn of cheap liquor, and instead of pushing him away the way she had the last time he’d tried something with her at the faculty luncheon, she’d spread her legs so he could slide his knee between them.

Dan was big and broad-shouldered, and he’d slid his hands up her sides, cupped her small breasts and then palmed the backs of her thighs, fingers trailing up to tug at her panties—and before the alarm bells even finished going off in her head, before Jane had managed to say, “Wait—stop—I don’t think I mean this, really,” Rodney had been hauling Dan off of her, punching him hard enough to deck him, crumpling him on the ground.

“How long have you been fucking him?” he’d asked her, red-faced and suspiciously glassy-eyed.

“Why do you care?” Jane had snapped back. She’d known her bra was showing—black lace, she’d been looking to start something, she thinks—and she didn’t care; Rodney didn’t look anymore.

Except apparently he did, and he’d come right up in her face, close enough that she could feel his breath hot against her mouth, and Jane had hated the shiver of arousal that had trailed up her spine, the way that had turned her on like a switch—how she’d been hot and wet and ready and wanting when he hitched up her skirt and unzipped his slacks, fucked her into wall, vicious and jealous and desperate.

He’d been trying to rub a come stain out of his pants, later that night—after they’d driven home in silence, with Jane still slick and fucked out from the hotel alley—when she’d stopped in the laundry room doorway and said, “I don’t think I want to be married to you anymore.”

Because after almost fifteen years of knowing Rodney better than anybody, of knowing who she was in his context, she didn’t know what to do anymore, or how to do it anymore—because there wasn’t anything else she knew how to say.

*

Rodney’s first words after she managed to revive Rodney from where he’d fainted dead away on the kitchen floor were, “Have you been to the doctors? What have they said? You should be on bed rest.”

“Yes,” Jane tells him, “I have. They said everything’s fine. And I’d rather die.”

Rodney clenches a fist. “Don’t say that.”

Jane’s silent for a moment before she murmurs, “Sorry.”

There was a clatter of footsteps, and McKay rushes in, bleary-eyed, shouting, “What! What! I heard thumping! I heard thumping and things falling—” and spying Jane over a prostrate Rodney on the floor he trails off “—and I see you’ve told him.”

“You told him first?” Rodney snarls, grabbing her wrist, and Jane shakes him off, pushes herself up again and takes a few steps back, glaring as she says:

“I’m telling you now.”

Rodney manages to get himself up to his feet, and Jane’s eyes widen as she feels McKay put a hand on her elbow, to push her carefully back and put a shoulder in front of her—protective.

McKay told her about John teaching him how to fire a gun, how to throw a punch, and Jane knows that McKay learned those things so he could fire a gun for John, to throw a punch to save his skin. But it’s still strange to see it manifest, to feel his hands warm and on her skin, to watch his mouth turn down into a frown, stepping in front of her. She thinks she knows exactly how the Pegasus Galaxy has written on McKay, how it would have written on Rodney, and it’s horrible to think that she’d trade scars and war stories for whatever is fluttering in her chest, but she would give anything to have this.

“You’re lucky she’s telling you at all,” McKay snaps.

Ignoring him, Rodney asks, “How many months?”

“Four,” Jane tells him.

And she can tell Rodney regrets saying it even as he says it, the way his eyes go just a fraction wider and his skin goes just a touch redder, but he says it anyway, asks, “Is it even mine?”

So she feels entirely all right about McKay’s right hook, how it flattens Rodney out on his back on the cold tile of the kitchen floor, and she follows, wordless, when McKay takes her hand and mutters, “Come on—let’s get the hell out of here,” and drags her upstairs to change.

*

They drive around for hours, McKay at the wheel and Jane lying across the backseat. It starts raining near noon, and they pull into a diner and snag a corner booth, order malted milkshakes and burgers and fries, and McKay asks her questions about her whole life, eating it up.

“I really don’t know why you want to know how my third grade ballet recitals went, McKay,” Jane says, dragging a fry through their communal pool of ketchup. “It’s kind of useless information.”

“You don’t understand,” McKay disagrees. “The sheer, undiluted joy that you’re providing by giving me proof positive that—if born a woman—John would be the girliest girl that ever did girl ever is sending me into a near-orgasmic state.”

Jane snorts. “Glad I could help. Did I mention I got an A++ in home ec?”

McKay groans in delight.

They end up, despite McKay’s ardent protests, at the county fair—a podunk affair with a tiny midway and just a few rickety wooden rides. They eat fried Twinkies and Jane has a piece of frozen banana cream pie, dipped in chocolate, and only gets to eat half of it before McKay bogarts the rest. They share a giant turkey leg and McKay loses $30 of her money trying to win a giant monkey for her. It takes another hour of begging and whining—Jane doesn’t even want to think about why she bothers, she doesn’t need McKay’s permission for anything—before he capitulates under the promise of cheese fries and they ride the ferris wheel.

“What the hell do you two like so much about this thing anyway?” McKay mutters, keeping one hand in an iron grip on the safety bar and another on her wrist—it feels different when he does it.

Jane just grins at him, red-cheeked from the early evening cold. “It’s like floating,” she says easily. “And if you look out instead of staring down at the ground, there’s usually a pretty spectacular view.”

McKay glances into the darkness. “Fantastic,” he says, “Nowheresville, North County, California.”

“Well,” Jane revises, “you could always just look at the sky.”

Even with the fairground lights, the constellations are vivid in the sky, and McKay retrieves a blanket out of her car so they can lie out and he can point out all of his favorites to her: Virgo, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper.

“I’d think that’d be too common for you,” Jane teases, turning on her side.

“Are you kidding?” Rodney says, and his lashes are long and fringed in light from the ring toss booth behind them. “That was the first constellation I could recognize—I love that thing.”

Jane closes her eyes. She feels tired and sore all over. She curves one hand over her belly and listens to McKay shuffle on the picnic blanket, swallows the words she wants to say out loud in favor of putting her face in his shoulder. Sorry, John, Jane thinks to herself, but she hopes he’d understand. She thinks that if their roles were reversed, she’d be happy to give John this, to give him something he needed—neither of them would deny water to a man in the desert.

“What do you think I should do?” Jane asks McKay, mumbles into the cloth of his shirt. She doesn’t have words for how fucked up all of this is. She’s fisting her hands in the front of his jacket and breathing too hard. “I don’t know what to do anymore.”

McKay presses a kiss to her temple, murmurs horse-hushes into her ear, nonsense words and reassurance, lips soft against her skin. He doesn’t have any answers, either, Jane knows, because he’s the smartest man in two galaxies—and Rodney hates him enough by now to have independently solved the answer of how to send him home. Jane knows all of this is an illusion, that she’s lying in the grass with a hologram, somebody imagined, out of phase. He shouldn’t be here with her and she shouldn’t be here with him—but it must mean something that they’ve found each other in two realities, and she hopes that’s enough, that the universe’s internal compass will point her in the right direction.

“I wish I could fix this for you,” McKay tells her, and he sounds wounded, short of breath as he says it.

Jane shuts her eyes even more tightly. She thinks you could, and send Rodney back, and stay, but it’s too terrible for her to say out loud—it’s not fair, it’s stealing, and she could never do that to John. Jane knows what losing Rodney has done to her.

But she can think it, and hold it tight to her chest and never tell.

They don’t make it back to the house until night is tipping over into morning, and as predicted, Rodney is still there, looking more manic than before—hair wild, a triumphant gleam in his eye. He meets them at the door, and whatever he’s going to say in self-righteous praise melts away into awkward silence when he sees Jane huddled behind McKay, their hands still linked together.

“I,” he manages after a beat, clearing his throat, “I figured it out.”

McKay blinks, and they step over the threshold of the house. “How long?” he asks.

“Three weeks,” Rodney admits. “At least.”

“Faster than humanly possible,” McKay gripes, “but still slower than anticipated.”

“Yeah, something like that,” Rodney says, and gritting his teeth, “Now beat it, I’d like to talk to my wife alone.”

*

TBC