tiredAuthor:
tarapierson (Marie Whi Mitshue)Pairing: McKay/Zelenka
Rating: R, for blood and angst. Or, FRT (Fan Rated for Teenagers) if you follow the fan system
Warning: a little angst, gore, blood, AU, Character Death
Summary: Those hands shouldn’t be still. They were never still; always snapping at somebody, or pointing, or flying over keyboards, over schematics, over consoles. Firm and steady inside the innards of a nuclear weapon or around the grip of a weapon. Tentative and awkwardly sincere, patting shoulder or arm, when trying to comfort. Their very stillness was an obscenity, a skewing of his worldview that he would never recover from.
Not that he would be given the chance to recover.
Notes: UNBETAED. Literally thrown together in a half-hour, a challenge accepted from an RL friend.
AU, AU, AU, next verse, same as the first: AU.
Short, bloody and unhappy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Blood, bright scarlet, spattered on the dull silver-grey of Atlantis.
Screams, high and harsh and desperate, echoing off high ceilings as thick with scrollwork and ornamentation as a wedding cake was with icing.
The giant, jagged-edged maw of metal closing around fragile, vulnerable flesh, inexorable and unstoppable.
The soft, broken rasp of Rodney McKay’s last breath was somehow more heartbreaking and deafening than the throat-ripping screams that preceded it.
Such a soft noise. Such a soft noise for the last sound from such a loud and animated man. A soft sound that burrowed through his flesh and bone to pierce his heart and leave him shattered.
One limp, lifeless hand draped on the bloody floor, scarlet streaking pale skin and long fingers, pooling in the square palm, the other still curled against the lip of the machine, futilely, both so utterly, wrongly still.
Blue eyes, dull and empty and blank, wide in a pale, bruised face frozen in terror and wet with blood.
Crooked, mobile mouth still, lips parted, flecked with scarlet drops.
Those hands shouldn’t be still. They were never still; always snapping at somebody, or pointing, or flying over keyboards, over schematics, over consoles. Firm and steady inside the innards of a nuclear weapon or around the grip of a weapon. Tentative and awkwardly sincere, patting shoulder or arm, when trying to comfort. Their very stillness was an obscenity, a skewing of his worldview that he would never recover from.
Not that he would be given the chance to recover.
Those eyes, (so blue he often thought they rivalled the intense blue of the stargate’s event horizon, though he’d never say so out loud), should be filled with spark, with life, bright with a hundred different conflicting emotions and arguments and brilliance.
That mouth, so endearing in its very imperfection of crookedness, (another thought he’d always kept unuttered behind his teeth), was never supposed to be quiet, unspeaking. There should be scathing insults, and teasing remarks, brilliant ideas and inept, rare praise flowing from that mouth. Unending rants and tirades, effusive brainstorms and excited discussions, stumbling, exhausted confessions and apologies, joyous cries of discovery and enthusiasm.
He knelt there, on the floor awash in blood and gore, splattered with it, a handbreadth away from the mangled remains of his friend still caught inside the machinery that looked like nothing more that a huge, razor-toothed mouth, and had only one purpose – to cause pain and death.
And the thing standing over them, smiled with another friend’s face, cruel and cold. Familiar eyes made unfamiliar never left his face as one lean hand, wrapped in thin gold and bright gems, reached out, rubbed a gold-tipped fingertip along the left lens of his blood-soaked glasses… and tasted Rodney’s blood.
“So, Radek Zelenka, it is your turn now.” The familiar voice was changed, reverberating, deeper, eerie, but it once was one he trusted with his life. With Rodney’s life.
He trusted no more. His friend was lost, and a mad, vicious stranger lived in his skin now. A stranger who had murdered the only person he had ever truly loved.
And was now going to do the same to him.
What was once John Sheppard moved towards him with a sick smirk on his face, eyes blazing gold, gem cradled in his palm in a web of gold glowing orange. Radek touched his fingertips to Rodney’s unmoving, blood-slick, still-warm fingers, closed his eyes, and prayed, when the agony and hell to come had claimed his life, that his soul would find Rodney’s.
He needed nothing more to make his afterlife paradise; just Rodney.
Sharp pain caught his breath in his throat, but he kept his eyes closed, kept his mind centred on beloved, cherished memories of the man he never had managed to reveal his feelings to. He would not have his last sight be Rodney’s ruined, broken body and the stranger wearing Sheppard’s body killing him with hands that had saved him and Rodney and so many others so many times. He would create his own last sight, of Rodney smiling, truly smiling at him, beautiful and welcoming.
His last breath was Rodney’s name, as a maelstrom of pain and blood and darkness took him down.
End?
Erk! Wow that was….
Hmmmmm, what if Goa’uld!Sheppard has a sarcophagus? Rodney and Radek won’t stay dead for long then, will they? And where are the rest of the Atlanteans??
I’m gonna have to write a sequel, aren’t I?