Chapter Text
The first night the city of Atlantis is back in the Pegasus galaxy (where it belongs), a storm breaks, speeding across the ocean and bringing heavy rain and occasional lightning. It’s not dangerous enough to warrant raising the shield, though Woolsey does a citywide announcement advising people stay indoors as a precaution.
John has no problem with this directive, since he’s the one who flew the whole damn city back here, and he’s exhausted. He flops into bed and closes his eyes, listening to the distant, muted rumble of thunder and feeling for the first time in months like he’s home.
As he drifts off, someone bangs on his door. John is up and answering in seconds, a thousand potential disasters running through his mind.
McKay is outside, soaking wet, eyes huge.
“I fucked up, Sheppard,” he says. “You have to help me.”
“What happened?” John steps back, waiting for McKay to barge in like always. He doesn’t.
“Come with me. I—I have to show you.” He glances over his shoulder like he’s afraid someone is following him. He’s shaking slightly and dripping a trail of water. “Can’t talk here.”
John doesn’t need more convincing. He shoves his boots on and grabs his jacket, then follows McKay down the hall. The reason he’s waterlogged is clear as McKay opens a door to an exterior walkway and goes outside.
The sound of the storm rises and envelops them. John’s soaked in seconds, and he kicks himself for not changing out of his cotton sweats as the cold wind cuts through them. Too late now. He has no idea where McKay is leading him, but he follows.
When they reach street level, though, John grabs McKay’s arm and stops him.
“Where are we going?” he shouts over the wind that’s buffeting several inches of water around their boots.
“My quarters,” McKay shouts back. “Can’t risk a transport. They can track it.” He turns and trudges on, and says something else but the wind rips the syllables to pieces and all John hears is—
—killed her—
John swallows and hopes McKay is exaggerating, but signs are looking pretty fucking grim. He wouldn’t be out in this weather without a serious reason. John hunches against the wind, hurrying to keep up with McKay’s frenzied pace. Lightning illuminates the city, the crack of thunder coming with no delay, but they’re not in any danger. Not from the storm, at least.
Twenty minutes later, they’re back inside another tower, and McKay looks pale and shaken. He leads John up fifteen flights of stairs and doesn’t complain about it once. When John starts to ask him what’s happening, McKay shushes him.
By the time they finally stop in front of a door John doesn’t recognize, he’s in full blown crisis management mode, ready to do whatever it takes to protect McKay.
McKay swipes open the door, revealing spacious quarters full of boxes. There’s a mattress, still wrapped in plastic, leaning against a wall, and a lot of what John suspects is flat-packed furniture awaiting assembly.
“She’s through here,” McKay says, once they’re both inside. He locks the door behind him, and a chill of apprehension creeps up John’s spine. McKay is still shivering from cold but doesn’t stop to dry off.
“What did you do?” John asks, trying not to sound too accusatory.
“What I had to.” McKay looks at him with those wide blue eyes and John believes him, not even knowing the rest. “But—but I wasn’t thinking about the consequences.” He swallows. “Or what might happen if someone finds her.”
“Who is her?” John demands, heart thudding too loudly.
“Cecelia.” McKay wrings his hands.
John doesn’t recognize the name as anyone on the expedition, but that makes it worse. “McKay, where did Cecelia come from?”
“Earth, of course.” McKay blinks at him. “You need to see her, then you’ll understand.” He looks haunted.
John doesn’t want to follow him down a dimly lit hallway toward a closed door at the end, but he does, feeling like every asshole he’s yelled at in a horror movie for not getting out of there while they had the chance. This is McKay, though, so John will see it through, even if there’s the corpse of a dead woman on the other side. They’ll hide the body. Make sure no one ever asks questions. If it comes to it, he’ll get McKay off world.
When the door at the end of the hall swooshes open, his gaze dances from corner to corner, looking for the blood, for the slumped form—for whoever this Cecelia was.
Instead, a dark shadow rushes toward him, and he screams.
“Cecelia, no!” McKay shouts, racing after the shadow as John presses himself against a wall to get out of their way. “Why didn’t you grab her?” McKay admonishes as he runs past.
“Grab the monster? What the fuck was that?”
“What, have you never seen a cat before?” McKay hurries toward the living room, calling Cecelia’s name.
John follows, physically, but is having trouble catching up. “You brought a cat to the Pegasus galaxy?”
“I told you I made a mistake.” McKay looks behind boxes, making a psspsspss noise. It does not seem to be effective.
John joins the search without having to be asked. The living room is large and cluttered, and there are several doors leading off it. One opens to a kitchen, which surprises John, as he’s never known McKay to cook. Another reveals what is presumably destined to be an office, judging from the still-boxed-up desk and ergonomic chair that sit alone inside it.
Through an empty room there’s another door to a large bathroom. Fancy shower, huge tub, spacious sink. John takes it all in quickly, about to move on, but something beneath the sink gives him pause. A shadow darker than the rest. It’s got two big yellow eyes that peer up at him. Gotcha.
He eases himself down into a crouch. Holds out his hand. Waits.
Slowly, Cecelia inches forward. She’s a sleek black cat, either younger than adult or smaller than average. She sniffs at his fingertips, then licks one, her tongue rough as sandpaper, and John falls a little bit in love. She butts her head against his palm, and he scratches behind her ear.
“There you are,” McKay says softly from the doorway. “Guess you’ve had a cat before?”
“Never,” John says, keeping his voice down.
“How’d you know how to get her to come to you?” McKay crouches beside him, and Cecelia abandons John for him. Fickle feline.
John shrugs. “Figure if something’s prickly and has claws, you gotta be patient and let them come to you.”
“You’re not wrong.” McKay gently scoops Cecelia up. “Come on, girl. Let’s get you to bed.”
Now that John isn’t looking for a dead body, he takes in the details of the back room that McKay has apparently given over completely to Cecelia. There’s a small pet bed, an electric litter box, a fully assembled cat tree as tall as he is, and a basket of cat toys. A wide window reflects his damp hair and dripping clothes, the darkness outside occasionally broken by flashes of lightning. On one wall is a hook from which hangs a hot pink leash and harness that match Cecelia’s collar. Beneath them, on the floor, are full food and water bowls.
McKay puts Cecelia on the floor in the middle of the room while John stands guard in the doorway. She hops onto the cat tree, climbing up to the top before settling down. Silently, they leave, shutting the door behind them.
When they get back to the living room with its many unopened boxes, John crosses his arms and waits.
“She’s a rescue.” McKay takes off his damp jacket and tosses it onto a box. Drags a hand down his face like it will erase the exhaustion there.
“That’s nice.” John thinks about asking for a towel to dry off, but he wants to stay annoyed for a little while longer.
“Do you know what happens to cats who get returned to the shelter after a day? Especially black cats.”
John has never given it any thought, but he can guess. “What about Jeannie?”
“Her useless husband is allergic,” McKay snaps. “What kind of person has an anaphylactic reaction to a cat?”
“What kind of person has an anaphylactic reaction to a lemon?”
“Food allergies are different.” McKay sighs and walks to a mini-fridge that’s plugged in but not yet flush to the wall. “Beer?”
John hesitates, then relents. “Sure.” He takes off his soaked jacket and hangs it near where McKay tossed his.
There’s no assembled furniture, yet, so they sit on the floor, side by side, and listen to the storm rage beyond the large window that makes up most of the south-facing wall.
McKay sips his beer, then turns to John. “What did you think I was going to show you?”
“Hm?” John asks, playing dumb. It’s his specialty.
“You were terrified when she ran out at you. I told you outside I smuggled a cat here.”
“I… may have misheard you.” He takes another sip and refuses to elaborate.
“What did you hear?” McKay asks, very doggedly for a cat person.
“That…” John looks at him, then away. “You killed someone.”
McKay chokes on the sip of beer he was trying to take. “What?”
John shrugs. “It was windy.”
“And you came up here anyway? To do what?”
“Help you hide the body.”
“Oh.” McKay pauses. “Really? You’d let me get away with murder?”
“I’m not breaking in another scientist for the team.”
McKay snorts. “You haven’t broken in the first one. I’m allowed to murder innocent women named Cecelia, apparently.”
“Hey, you said you did what you had to do. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt.” To change the subject, John presses, “Tell me how this cat got three hundred million lightyears from home.”
“She’s home now,” McKay mutters, but tells John the story.
A week ago, Rodney had everything he ever wanted. He was at the top of his field, working on the bleeding edge (and if sometimes that’s a little literal, everything else makes up for it) in a place almost no one on Earth could even imagine. He had a team who, despite the occasional bickering, genuinely seemed to like him. He had a semi-functional relationship with his sister and a niece who he sometimes managed to buy the right type of gift for.
And the crowning jewel of all this: he had a girlfriend who put up with him and was showing no signs of stopping.
Rodney’s life was perfect in every way, right up until it wasn’t.
“Long story short, I got Jennifer a cat instead of an engagement ring.” Rodney stares outside, though he can see little of it through the shining glass of these new quarters.
“You proposed with a cat?” Sheppard asks.
“No! Just—let me start at the beginning.”
“So we’re going with the long story.”
“Shut up.” Rodney takes a fortifying sip of beer. Then he lays it all out chronologically and objectively. “When Atlantis was on Earth, Jennifer and I got an apartment together.”
“I was there. I helped move that heavy couch—which I don’t see, by the way, despite how you said you couldn’t live without it—”
“Jesus, you are a terrible audience.” Rodney rolls his eyes and resolves to keep talking no matter how much input he gets from the peanut gallery. “I thought everything was fine. She got a job at a hospital in San Francisco. I had a really weird daily commute involving flying a cloaked ship to a cloaked floating city, blah blah. You were also there for that.”
“’Cept I was smart enough not to move off Atlantis.”
“When we finally figured out how to get the city back home, I just assumed she’d want to come, too.” Rodney pauses, realizing he referred to the Pegasus galaxy as home instead of Earth. Huh. He’s not sure when that happened, but it did. “I was so certain, in fact, I didn’t bother talking to her about it until three days before we left.”
“Yikes,” Sheppard says.
“Thanks so much for your sympathy.” This is the part no one in the city knows. He hasn’t had time to tell it, until now. “She had other ideas. We had a fight. She told me she wanted to put down roots and that you can’t do that in a city that floats on an alien ocean, and I told her—correctly!—that Teyla has a kid and she still does her day job because she knows how important it all is. Then Jennifer said she wasn’t Teyla.” He leaves out the second part, when she said she wasn’t Sheppard, either. He still doesn’t know why she didn’t throw Ronon under the bus with the rest of the team.
Rodney asked her, mid-argument, what she meant, and she accused him of playing dumb, which is something he’d never do, and he thought she knew that.
Sheppard doesn’t need to hear any of this.
“I stormed out, which was a mistake,” Rodney says. “Checked into a hotel and fumed for hours, but when I calmed down I realized how badly I’d fucked up. I decided I needed to do something to make things right. One of those big gestures like in the movies. I quit the expedition—”
“What?” Sheppard half shouts.
“Come on, you know the ending. Let me get there. I thought she was more important to me than my work.”
Sheppard is staring at him, eyes wide, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“I’m not exactly popular with the ladies, and if I want a family, well…” Rodney shakes his head. Takes a long swig of beer. “When I thought things might be ending between us, I panicked. Quit my job. Wanted to prove to her I was committed. So I went to a shelter and adopted that perfect little baby in there. She’s not actually a baby, she’s about four years old.”
“I was wondering about that.”
“I called Jennifer and told her we should meet, and that I had something to give her. She invited me to our place for dinner. I show up, wearing jeans and a polo, and she’s in this gorgeous dress, and I’m holding a cat carrier. She thought I was going to propose.” Rodney tips his head forward. “Didn’t even make it through the front door. She ended it right there. Said we were obviously not on the same page, and she didn’t want to get between me and what makes me happy.”
“I’m sorry, buddy,” Sheppard says stiffly.
“Woolsey took me back, of course. I’m me. But I asked him for permission to bring Cecelia—laying out a very clear case about how her life would be in peril if I left her behind—and he refused. Claimed it was impossible to hire veterinarians to take care of her, and if he let me have a cat, everyone would want a pet, and it was too much of a liability to have a bunch of animals from a different galaxy running around.”
“How’d you manage it?” Sheppard takes another sip of beer.
“Put her in a large box labeled lab equipment, then once she was loaded onto the city I stuffed her under my jacket and came right here. I actually asked for these quarters because this tower is empty. I’m the lone resident. No one will find her.”
“Good plan.” Sheppard tilts his head. “You clearly have it all worked out, and brought her everything she’ll need—for a while, anyway. Why did you show up at my door begging for help?”
“Because I can’t be the only person who knows about her. What if—what if I die off-world? It could take days for someone to come clean out my quarters, and I can’t let Cecelia starve to death all alone.” Rodney puts his head in his hands.
“McKay,” Sheppard says slowly, “in this hypothetical situation where you die on a mission, where am I? Standing around with my dick in my hand?”
“We both know you’re more likely to survive than me.”
“I don’t think we do. But fine. Now I know. Maybe we should loop in someone who doesn’t do off-world missions.” Sheppard stares at the bottle in his hands for a moment before taking a long drink.
Rodney mirrors him, but the carbonation doesn’t settle his stomach like he hoped it would. “There’s no one else we can trust with this.”
Sheppard holds his gaze for a moment, then nods. “Okay. She’s your cat. It’s your call.”
“Thank you.” Rodney is suddenly so tired. He’s been awake for over forty-eight hours, first scrambling to get all his things packed and moved onto Atlantis, then monitoring power and other vital systems as the ship made its way back to Pegasus. Now that he’s off duty, there’s no crisis, everything he brought for Cecelia is set up, and Sheppard is in on the secret… All the adrenaline bleeds out of him, leaving him shaky and exhausted. The beer isn’t helping. “The storm’s supposed to last until morning, so if you want to crash here…” Rodney trails off. He doesn’t even have a couch Sheppard can take.
“I’m definitely not going back out into that.” Sheppard gestures to the large window with his beer, then tips his head back and drains it, throat bobbing. When the bottle is empty he glances around, as if looking for the recycling, before setting it on the floor. “What’s first?”
“What?” Rodney says, distracted.
“Bed, I’m guessing.” Sheppard stands and stretches. Rodney scrambles to his feet. “Where are your tools?”
Only then does Rodney understand he means to assemble furniture in the middle of the night, after they’ve both had such horribly long days. “Aren’t you tired?”
“Nah. Getting dragged through all that rain while convinced I was about to hide a body has cured me of the need for sleep for a few more hours.”
Rodney wants to be offended by Sheppard’s assumption that he would murder someone in cold blood, but he finds it oddly touching that he was so willing to help Rodney get away with it. In light of that, helping him hide the existence of an unauthorized house cat hardly seems like the monumental ask it felt as Rodney made his way through the city on foot in a storm.
After a few minutes of searching, Rodney finds his tools and they start on the bed frame. Things instantly devolve into an argument.
“That’s not the right sized bolt, McKay.” Sheppard snatches the instruction sheet from Rodney’s hands.
“Did you get your PhD in engineering while we were on Earth and forget to mention it? I know what I’m doing, Colonel.”
“How many degrees do you have again? I can’t remember because it’s been a few days since you’ve mentioned.”
Rodney grabs the flimsy paper back from Sheppard and examines it. He swears, then gets the correct size of bolts. If he wasn’t worried about his bed collapsing beneath him, he might have refused to admit he’d misread the confusing instructions.
“Wow, the great Dr. Rodney McKay was wrong.” Sheppard is grinning. Rodney wants to slap the expression off of him.
“Do you think Ronon would help me hide your dead body?” Rodney muses as he starts to bolt two pieces of the frame together.
“That’s no way to talk to your partner in feline crime.” Sheppard grabs a second socket wrench and begins working on another section. They’re quiet for a moment, then Sheppard asks, “Why Cecelia?”
As Rodney recalls the day he adopted her, he can’t help his melancholy smile. “She looked so small and so scared, but when I stopped in front of her pen, she walked right up to me and meowed, and it felt like she was the loneliest creature on the whole planet. I couldn’t walk away after that.”
When the bolt he’s working on is in, he glances up to find Sheppard staring at him.
“What?” Rodney snaps. “I get sentimental when I’m sleep deprived.”
“I was asking why she’s named Cecelia,” Sheppard says.
Trying to ignore the sudden embarrassed flush in his cheeks, Rodney says, “She’s named after Cecelia Payne, the astrophysicist who discovered what stars are made of.”
“Huh. Guess it’s fitting for our little intergalactic explorer.”
“Our?” Rodney looks from the instructions to Sheppard.
“Hey, you made her my problem. No take-backs.”
For a few minutes they construct in silence, then Rodney says, “Cecelia and I have a lot in common. The astrophysicist, I mean, not the cat.”
“Did she also annoy her commanding officer into near-homicidal rage on a regular basis?”
“Ha, ha. She goes uncredited for her discoveries. Much like me.” Rodney takes a moment to imagine all the Nobel Prizes he should have won, and sighs.
“No one gives you credit because you work in another galaxy,” Sheppard says. “Pretty sure Cecelia Payne is ignored because she was a woman working in physics.”
“Semantics.”
“That is not what semantics means.”
Rodney glances over Sheppard’s work on the bed frame, then frowns. “Are you tightening the bolts all the way?”
“Yeah, you’re welcome.”
“You’re not supposed to until the whole thing is assembled. Have you never done this before?” Rodney shoves the instructions under Sheppard’s nose. “Can’t you read? It says so right here.”
“Ah, there’s that near-homicidal rage. Right on cue.”
They manage to get the bed and couch assembled, and Rodney finds a box of linens that contains enough sheets and pillows to make do, though for some reason none of the bedding matches. He sets Sheppard up on the couch then retreats to his almost entirely empty bedroom.
Rodney expects, after the week he’s had, to fall asleep immediately. Though the bed is comfortable and the sheets are cool, he finds himself thinking of poor little Cecelia at the animal shelter, and the way, when she looked at him, he felt like maybe they had a lot in common, too.
John wakes when something hits his abdomen with about a hundred pounds of pressure. He makes a very dignified strangled sound as his eyes pop open and he reaches for his sidearm, which he isn’t wearing.
Cecelia stares at him. She begins to knead her claws into his stomach, which is protected only by a thin blanket and his t-shirt.
“How did you get out here?” John asks, still groggy. He glances at the window. Dawn is only just breaking through the remnants of last night’s storm clouds. The quarters are silent, and McKay’s bedroom door is shut.
Still abusing his stomach, Cecelia lets out a little mew, so he pets her. She begins to purr. John melts, which is mortifying. He can understand why McKay put so much on the line to bring her here.
“I would die for you,” he whispers, because no one is around to make fun of him for it. She digs her claws into his skin. She’s not a large cat, and she can’t weigh more than seven pounds. He can easily pick her up and bring her back to her room, or deposit her on the floor. Instead he lies there, petting her as she pulls threads out of McKay’s blanket.
Eventually, she must tire of causing him pain, because she curls up on his chest, her purring a deep rumble, and falls asleep. Shortly after, John does, too.
John is deep in a dreamless sleep when Cecelia sticks her paw in his mouth. He sputters awake, trying not to accidentally fling her off him—or prompt her to get out her claws—and finds she’s attempting to walk across his face, heading for something she sees out the window, beyond the edge of the couch. By the time he’s fully processed this, she’s past him, except for her tail, which swishes above his head.
He checks his watch, then bolts up. In less than two hours he has a meeting with Woolsey and the other department heads. He’s supposed to present his plans for reintegration into Pegasus and their return to the ongoing war with the Wraith. Presumably he’ll need to be presentable for that, too. And prep something. He’s overslept by hours.
Halfway to the door, John remembers that McKay is also a department head and will need to be at this meeting. They never unpacked an alarm clock. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he bangs on McKay’s door. There’s a muffled yell from beyond it, then it opens.
McKay looks about as awake as John.
“Meeting in—” he consults his watch, “an hour and forty-seven minutes.”
“Fuck, I meant to spend the morning prepping for that.”
“Yeah, well.” John gestures to Cecelia, who’s still staring out the window, perched on the arm of the couch. “Where’s the nearest transporter?”
“You can’t use it.”
“Aren’t you being a little paranoid?”
McKay stares at Cecelia like he’s imagining having to put her down. John sighs.
“Fine,” he relents. “I’ll walk back. This time. Surely it won’t raise any red flags if I visit a member of my own team in his swanky new quarters.”
“Right, yeah,” McKay nods absently. “Just not in the middle of the night. Nothing suspicious.”
“I’m not coming here to visit her in the middle of the night. Or you.”
“I know, because it would be too suspicious. But you can come by during normal hours and play with her.”
John wants to insist he’ll do no such thing, and that if he swings by it’ll be to visit McKay like usual, but they both know that would be a lie, so he saves his breath and hurries off.
He has just enough time to shower, shave, grab a quick breakfast, and get his shit together enough not to embarrass himself at the meeting. McKay arrives five minutes early, looking smug as ever, with a flawless presentation. Bastard.
That night there’s a Welcome Back party, which seems a little weird because everyone here on Atlantis was also here when the city was on Earth, but John stands behind the sentiment. Things are different, being in Pegasus, and an undercurrent of excitement runs through the crowd. An eagerness to jump back into the chaos.
John sips his beer and smiles to himself as he watches Teyla dance with Kanaan. They got a sitter for the night. Across the large room, McKay slips in, clearly trying to remain unseen, but John can always spot him in a crowd. McKay sidles up to him.
“Thought I’d put in an appearance.” He looks nervous.
“How’s our girl?” John asks under his breath, having to lean in close to be heard over the music.
“We really need a code to talk about her,” McKay replies, fidgeting. “Maybe we can refer to her as the package or something.”
“We’re not drug dealers and she’s not a kilo of heroin, so no. How about…” John thinks for a moment. “Our side project.”
“But I have dozens of those—”
John gives him a tight smile. “It’ll be obvious in context, Rodney.”
“What’re you two whispering about?” Ronon asks, voice loud enough to carry over the music. John takes a half step away from McKay.
“Just talking about how glad we are to be back,” John lies easily. Beside him, McKay visibly relaxes, presumably because now he doesn’t have to think of a response.
“Sorry about Jennifer,” Ronon says to McKay.
“What? How did you know—?”
“Amelia told me. She and Jennifer talk.” Ronon shrugs.
“Yes, well. I’m where I belong.” Rodney crosses his arms awkwardly, like he’s not sure what to do with his hands. “So is she.”
“Lemme get you a drink.” John claps McKay on the shoulder, keeping his touch from lingering despite how his hand longs to betray him, and goes to the table that’s straining beneath the weight of so many unopened bottles of beer. When he returns to them, Ronon is talking.
“I can help you unpack. Amelia said you barely had time to get everything loaded onto the city before we took off.”
McKay gets a deer-in-the-headlights look, and John can practically hear his brain misfiring as he tries to think of a way out of Ronon coming to his place where there is a very obvious cat in residence. John personally thinks Ronon won’t give a fuck either way about a pet that’s against regulations, but he promised to take McKay’s lead on this.
“Here’s that drink,” John says, keeping his voice light. McKay grabs the bottle from him almost desperately.
“Thanks,” McKay says to him, then his gaze darts anxiously back to Ronon. “Appreciate the offer, but I’m fine. Almost done unpacking, in fact, and I’m really particular about where I put my stuff anyway so I’d just be micromanaging you—”
“Maybe Ronon could help assemble furniture,” John interrupts, cutting McKay a meaningful look, raising his eyebrows.
“No, I’m good.” McKay stares back at him in panic. “In fact, I’m not really into having visitors at all. It’s why I moved to a quiet part of the city.”
“Okay,” Ronon says slowly, glancing between McKay and John. “Whatever.”
A few minutes later, he joins Amelia on the dance floor, leaving John and McKay (relatively) alone.
“What was that about?” McKay hisses. “He can’t come over, he’ll notice Ce—our side project.”
“It’s not like he’s gonna out us to Woolsey,” John replies.
“Not intentionally, but—he’s not from Earth. I don’t think many people in this galaxy have the luxury of keeping a—side project—and I don’t want to have to explain to him or Teyla why it’s so important.” McKay takes a deep breath. “In a few weeks, maybe, once we’ve gotten our feet under us.”
“All right, buddy. Your call, like I said.” John grips McKay’s arm in a way he hopes is reassuring. “Let’s enjoy the party.”
“Is there food? I’m starving.” McKay sips his drink and seems to relax, a little.
After an hour, McKay tells John he’s going home, and they leave the party together.
“You are distracted,” Teyla says in her slightly disapproving way as John gets to his feet. She’s not wrong—and he’s got fresh bruises now forming on his back to prove it.
“Late night,” he admits, though he managed enough sleep once he left McKay’s.
“Yet I saw you depart from the celebrations early.” Teyla circles him, flicking her wrists, spinning the sticks in her hands in sinuous motions. Her eyes never leave his.
“I was helping Rodney put his office together.” They did some of that, it’s true, but mostly they played with Cecelia.
“Ronon told me Rodney claimed to have already finished setting up his new home.” Teyla strikes, darting forward quick as lightning. John barely parries and can’t catch his breath enough for a counter-attack.
Fuck. He forgot about that lie. “Guess he was exaggerating. You know how he is.” John hopes to distract her from this conversation by landing a blow, but she anticipates his attack and drives him several paces back.
A few ill-thought-out moves later, and she has him on his knees, wood at his throat.
“I do know how Rodney is,” Teyla says. She’s not even breathing hard. “And I know how you are, John.”
Only after she finishes speaking does she let him go. They spend the rest of their sparring session in silence (except for John’s occasional cries of pain).
Before their first off-world mission back in the Pegasus galaxy, John answers a semi-desperate sounding comm call from McKay asking him to come to his quarters for help with a side project. When he arrives, he expects to see a cat-related emergency, but Cecelia is fine. She is, in fact, curled up in an empty cardboard box, asleep.
“What if I never come back?” McKay says softly, pacing near the front door as it closes behind John.
“Rodney, since when have you ever let that possibility stop you?” John halts McKay’s restless motion by grabbing his shoulders. “If this is going to affect your performance on the team—”
“Don’t pull that CO bullshit, Colonel. You know I’m fine, even when I’m having a breakdown.” McKay looks toward Cecelia. “I just… the stakes are different, now. This must be how Teyla feels.”
“Probably not exactly,” John says, words heavy with sarcasm. “Pull yourself together. This mission is routine.”
“They’re all routine.” McKay slumps and steps out of John’s grip. “I’m good now. I was spiraling a little, but nothing has changed.”
Before John can reply, Cecelia hops out of the box and walks up to him. She butts her head against his leg, winding around his feet in a little figure eight. He picks her up.
“You’re holding her wrong,” McKay snaps.
“She likes it.” John scratches her exposed belly.
“She’s about to bite you.”
“No she—ow.” John pulls his hand away. Cecelia reaches her front paws out and grabs his hand, attempting to pull it back to her waiting fangs. “You little monster,” he says, fondly.
“Give her to me before you end up in the infirmary.”
John steps back. “We’re fine.”
“She’s my cat, Sheppard.”
“Yeah, you get to spend all your time with her, and you set draconian visiting hours for me.”
“To keep suspicion down.” McKay reaches for Cecelia, but John is used to dodging Teyla when she’s armed, so avoiding him is easy.
“No one thinks you brought a cat onto Atlantis.” John keeps a step out of McKay’s reach while trying to pet Cecelia, each time having to draw his fingers away from her claws. He makes a game of both.
“Woolsey might suspect something. I was very adamant.” McKay circles a stack of boxes but John keeps his distance. “Can you stop that?”
“Make me.” John hops onto the coffee table and walks backward across it, which scandalizes McKay as much as he hoped.
“Do you have no respect for other people’s property?” McKay huffs. “First you steal my cat, then try to break my furniture.”
“Cecelia isn’t property. She’s her own feline.” John scratches her belly and she nearly draws blood. He steps down from the coffee table.
“That’s not what the tag on her collar says,” McKay huffs.
This causes John to hesitate. “You put your name on her collar?” At great personal risk, he reaches down and flips the little metal plate over so he can read it. Property of Dr. Rodney McKay. If found please return to owner. “Why would you put this on a cat you’re not supposed to have?”
He’s so shocked he barely dodges McKay’s next grab.
“In case she gets lost in the city,” McKay says, like he’s being logical. “I’m a responsible pet owner.”
“Have you ever heard of plausible deniability?”
“Please, she’s in my quarters. If someone sees her, they’ll know she’s mine.” McKay backs John into a corner. He blames it on how distracting this conversation has gotten.
“If you wanna tempt fate, that’s your choice.” John doesn’t fight McKay as he reaches for Cecelia, wary of accidentally hurting her in a scuffle.
“Can’t believe you’re being more paranoid than me about a collar. This is how you’re supposed to hold a cat, by the way,” McKay says, petting her. She starts to purr loudly.
John’s watch beeps. “Time to go.”
McKay nods, then kisses Cecelia on the head and sets her down. “Be a good girl while I’m gone.”
“Look at her,” John says, “she’s never not been good in her life.”
At the door, McKay hesitates and turns. Then he darts back to kneel by Cecelia, taking her collar off. He shoves it into his pocket. “Better safe than sorry.”
John decides not to rub it in that he was right. They leave in a hurry, before Cecelia has a chance to run out the door after them. Because McKay is not always completely paranoid, he allows John to share a transporter with him, but as they’re stepping into the hallway outside the gate room, John pauses, eying McKay’s shirt. It’s covered in black fur.
“Shit,” John says under his breath, then pulls McKay bodily into a nearby closet.
“What are you—?” McKay begins, eyes huge, but John cuts him off.
“Cat hair’s all over us.” He stares down in horror at his own uniform. “If Woolsey spots this—”
“He’ll know I brought her here. Fuck. Do you have duct tape?”
“Not on me.” There’s some in the ready room, but John doesn’t want anyone to see them like this. It feels like there’s a neon sign pointing to them both announcing what they’re doing. He brushes some of the fur, and finds it sort of clumps together. “Get most of it off now,” John says in a hushed voice. “You gotta put a lint roller by your front door going forward.”
“Stop making this my fault,” McKay says as he scrabbles at his uniform.
“How could this possibly be anyone else’s fault?” John finds himself with a handful of soft black fur, which he doesn’t want to toss on the ground, because leaving it there for someone else to find seems almost as incriminating as it being on their uniforms. He shoves it into his pocket.
“What was I supposed to do?”
“I dunno, brush her?”
“I mean about our side project in general,” McKay huffs. “You’re so bad at this. Let me.”
Before John can react, McKay has his hands all over him, plucking away fur with practiced motions. This is one of those times when John can feel his thoughts slipping in a direction he can’t allow, so he falls back on the old standby: poking fun at McKay.
“Forgot you were a crazy cat lady before your career change.”
“I had one cat, thank you. But I do find people take you more seriously around the lab if you’re not covered in animal fur.” McKay is staring at John’s body with a shrewd, calculating eye, then he nods. “Turn around.”
“There’s nothing on my back.”
“I’m not taking your word for it.” McKay reaches out and spins John by his shoulders so deftly he wonders if McKay has been secretly conspiring with Teyla. “Okay, you’re clear,” he announces after a moment, oblivious to what that casual little maneuver has done to John’s psyche. “Check me.”
John does, after a brief pause to gather his wits. Unfortunately, there’s fur sticking to the back of his shirt, and on the seat of his pants. “Have you heard of vacuuming?”
“I’m sorry, I’ve been a little busy keeping this whole city running. You have no idea the number of bugs the new power system introduced—”
“Yeah, yeah, fine. There’s hair all over your back and ass.”
“Well, get it off me! We’re supposed to report for the mission soon.”
John weighs if it’s weirder to protest or comply, and says, “The things I do for our side project.” He gets as much fur off McKay as he can, while moving as quickly as possible and having no thoughts whatsoever about any of it. He absolutely does not catalog any details of how McKay’s body feels beneath his fingertips.
By the time they’re mostly fur-free, John finds himself a little out of breath and a lot disheveled, but it’ll have to do. McKay’s shirt is similarly askew because of John’s haste. As they hurry out of the closet, they nearly run into Ronon.
He pauses and eyes them, but his only reaction is to raise his eyebrows and say, “First mission back.”
“About time,” John replies.
Three hours after they go through the Stargate, McKay trips over a root (normal), and a hot pink collar spills out of his pocket (extremely abnormal). He swears and scrambles to grab it, and John is too transfixed by horror to see if either Teyla or Ronon notice it before McKay stows it in a more secure vest pocket.
Neither of them say anything, so they must not have. McKay’s secret is safe, for now. They haven’t mentioned anything about strange black fur, either, and John feels like they’re in the clear.
The mission continues, and it’s as routine as he promised McKay it would be.