East Coast Gazette

SGA-Files, “One Breath”

At Quantico, when Rodney was still hailed as a wunderkind and a headcase, he’d learned about resource distribution, about knowing how to make the tough calls. He knows the FBI doesn’t negotiate with terrorists and won’t negotiate for their own people in a hostage situation, and that sometimes interdepartmental cooperation is vital to the success of a mission, to keeping everybody safe.

But Rodney’s fallen from grace a dozen times over at this point, and this is what he knows now: Rodney knows he’d make any number of stupid choices to talk to Jeannie again, to ask her how she is and what she is doing and if she’s happy — wherever she let the government take her. Rodney knows that he would never share John, even if John likes to pay lip service and pretend he doesn’t mind walking back into the snake pit of the violent crimes unit, doesn’t mind the way Mitchell touches him — proprietary, invasive. Rodney
doesn’t care about rules or regs or what’s best for the agency — he’d barter away weapons of mass destruction and trade off civilians to keep Sheppard safe, to keep Sheppard, period.

So when Daniel Jackson — dissociated psychopath, Rodney had told John, told him dozens of times and told him to ignore the raving and leave the guy to his institutionalized rotting — had kidnapped him, shoved John into the trunk of a car, Rodney — understandably — goes a little crazy.

He doesn’t come back from it for weeks, either, not after O’Neil tells him to calm the fuck down, not after Caldwell puts him on mandatory leave. Still, it doesn’t really hit him that John is gone and that John’s apartment is empty and that John could be hurt or dead or worse until after Teyla shows up at his apartment, weeping even though Rodney would have sworn Teyla was incapable of producing tears.

“Oh fuck,” Rodney says, staring down at her. “Are you crying?”

She slaps the hell out of him and Rodney doesn’t even try to pretend it’s because he’s too stunned by her hiccuping sobs to block the cheap shot.

“You son of a bitch,” Teyla snarls at him, and shoves him, hard, as hard as she can, and Rodney stumbles back into his apartment. He knows it smells like liquor and desperation and like a frat house, abandoned, but he doesn’t care: he has mustard and John’s favorite deli turkey in the fridge and nobody to feed it to — he lost John, and there’s not much else he can bring himself to give a fuck about. “You son of a bitch,” she shouts, slapping her fists against his chest. “I hate you — I fucking hate you.”

“Okay, so, something we agree on,” Rodney tells her, and that’s when it kind of hits him — awareness like a semi or a tsunami washing away the beach: John is alone, and Rodney is the only person who can find him.”

A week later, the trail that Zelenka and Lee and Parrish scent out goes dead in an abandoned train car — and Rodney finds a row of abandoned specimen tubes in deep freeze: JWS.001.321, JWS.001.322, JWS.001.336. He feels sick, he feels like crying. John doesn’t even like it when Mitchell touches his shoulder, his elbow, innocuous things; Rodney can’t stomach the idea of somebody touching John — that anybody has laid hands on his partner and best friend. Rodney hides the sample containers with Zelenka, who just nods and puts them away — doesn’t say anything, not one comment, and doesn’t meet Rodney’s eyes.

Rodney doesn’t waste time wondering why anybody would take John — it makes perfect sense that somebody else would want him, that there was something special to him all along.

When he gets back to DC, he calls Teyla to say he’s sorry, that he failed again, that there’s nothing and nowhere left to look and he doesn’t know what to do anymore — and when she answers the phone, she says, “Rodney — Rodney, he’s back.”

The John that Rodney finds at Bethesda is thin and drawn and pale, his face washed out and his whiskers brushy on his cheeks. He looks soft, like somebody’s rubbed out all of his edges, and he doesn’t talk or move or even open his eyes, just lies there breathing in and out when the machines force him to take a breath. Teyla’s already at John’s bedside when Rodney rushes in, wild-eyed, and she makes room for him, pulling her own uncomfortable plastic seat to the side so Rodney has a space, and they hold a vigil all night, waiting and not saying a word. Rodney knows that the only conversations that have ever existed between them have been about John.

At seven in the morning, Teyla says to him, “I’ve seen John’s living will,” and doesn’t go on. Rodney doesn’t blame her, he can’t scrape the words out of his throat, either — the idea of turning John off like a light or a radio.

Rodney swallows hard. “I know,” he tells her, keeps his hands knotted together in his lap. “I was his witness.”

Teyla reaches over and puts her hand over Rodney’s in a way that already sounds like an apology. “Then you know that if he does not wake,” she says, too gently, “that he would not have wanted to die this way.”

Rodney swallows back all his arguments, his desperate begging. He wants to say, “I think John wouldn’t have wanted to die,” but that would be a lie — and a disingenous one at that: it’s the reason John was sent to him to begin with.

TBC