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Three a.m. was pretty much the sole domain of Rodney and a pot of whatever was passing for his caffeine intake this week--coffee, tea, occasional cold drinks from planets where they liked their caffeine to taste like root beer or fermented pumpkin juice.
Tonight it was, thanks to a recent visit from the Daedalus, coffee again, packed up in a thermos while Rodney examined a panel his science team had just turned up in Section 16-D. Instant coffee, maybe, but Rodney had decided that three months' worth of bad coffee was better than two weeks' worth of decent coffee and two and a half months of sporadic caffeination. Maybe later he'd blame the bad judgment call on the Sanka, but right now there was a problem in front of him to which there was only one solution:
"Sheppard? Sheppard. Wake up. It's an emergency."
It took three tries to get more than an irritated mutter out of John, and after Rodney described the part of Atlantis he was currently exploring, John snorted. "It's not a damn emergency, Rodney. It's some piece of technology that'll still be right there when I wake up in four hours. Make a note of it, send me an e-mail, and I'll check it out when I'm awake."
"Hey, it's up to you," Rodney fired back. "You can come down now and take a look at it with me, or I can keep paging you every five minutes until you get down here."
There was a pause long enough for Rodney to pour another cup of coffee, and then John sighed. "How much coffee have you had tonight?"
"Lots."
"All right. But if it's gone when I get there, you get to work with my unconscious body."
Rodney hesitated. "Is that a serious offer? Because if it is, I can think of a lot of things I could do that you wouldn't actually have to be awake for at all--"
"Rodney, shut up and save me some goddamn coffee. I'll be there in ten minutes."
"Make it five," Rodney said, hefting his thermos. "I think there's another cup of coffee in here, but if not, the one I just poured is losing dozens of joules per second."
"If it weren't three in the fucking morning, that would actually be funny. See you in a few."
John actually showed up seven minutes later, not that Rodney was counting. "Great, you're here. Here's the panel--"
"Coffee?"
Rodney shoved the cup into John's hand. "Panel," he repeated, pointing at the panel in question. It was the size of a small conference table, mostly glass--some etched, some clear--set at a forty-five-degree angle at about waist level, and it had several palm-sized brass plates on it. "I can get half of it to light up at any given time," he went on, "but I was thinking that if there were two of us..." He touched two of the brass plates and nodded toward the other end of the panel.
John touched one of the panels. When Rodney opened his mouth to point out the second panel, John rolled his eyes. "Hang on," he said. "Still got half a cup of coffee."
Even with only three hands on the panel, though, things were lighting up a lot better than they had been when it was Rodney on his own. "Drink faster," Rodney said, making mental notes as he inspected the panel. There were glowing pathways snaking across it now, connections forming between Rodney's plates and John's. Rodney nodded at the panel again and raised his eyebrows. "C'mon."
"McKay, it's three in the fucking morning. Take some readings while I finish off your coffee."
"I can't exactly take readings while both my hands are glued to this panel."
John shot him a look. "If you're telling me my presence here is turning out to be useless..."
"No no no, not at all! I'm just going to have to alternate between having my hands on the panel and taking notes."
"Well, then, let's get to it." John finished off the coffee, dropped the cup, and touched the second plate. The entire panel glowed bright white, then gold, with tendrils of light flowing between the two of them. "Cool," John mumbled.
"Do you feel any odd effects?" Rodney asked.
"Oh, now you ask about odd effects--"
"Hey, my hands are on this thing, too!"
The panel suddenly flashed bright enough to light up the entire room, and then there was a shockwave--noiseless, but powerful enough to knock them both flat on their backs. Rodney blinked until his vision came back, then pushed himself up on his elbows.
"Okay," he said slowly. "Well, let's see if that happens every time--"
"Are you out of your mind?" John snapped. "I'm going the hell back to bed. You can get somebody else down here if you want to experiment with falling down the Ancient-technology way."
"But--"
John was out the door already; as the doors closed behind him, Rodney heard him muttering, "See if I jerk off thinking about you this morning."
"What?" Rodney yelled. He stepped out of the room himself, unconsciously rubbing at his tailbone. "What was that?"
"What was what?" John asked. He glared back at Rodney. "I didn't say anything."
"Of course not. I must have been imagining things." Rodney looked over his shoulder. "Maybe this thing causes hallucinations."
"Maybe it's 0300 and you should get some sleep."
"Or that." Rodney sighed. "I can talk to Zelenka when he gets in, I guess. That'll give me... five hours to take a nap."
"Good luck with that."
"Yeah, see you in the morning."
If the Ancient device really was intended to cause hallucinations, it was doing a damn good job of it. Rodney had managed to get a few hours' sleep, but then he'd had this incredibly vivid dream about John--nothing too kinky, just John flat on his back in bed jerking off. It was a pretty nice dream, made even better by the fact that, in his dream, John actually was thinking about Rodney while he masturbated. God only knew how Rodney knew that; some kind of weird dream-related omniscience, he supposed. Anyway, it didn't really matter, and if it was a hallucination brought on by the Ancient panel, it didn't seem too harmful.
The only lasting aftereffect was Rodney's own morning hard-on, which he would have had either way. It wasn't all that different from any other morning, really, except that instead of fantasizing about Sam Carter, he spent a good half-hour in the shower fantasizing about John Sheppard.
Which was a lot less weird than he ever would have thought.
By ten a.m., Rodney was starting to rethink his evaluation of the hallucinations. It was hard to see them as harmless when they'd been coming on hard and fast all morning long. Unfortunately, "hard and fast" was a pretty good descriptor, too--every single one of them had been about John having sex with someone. Dr. Weir. Teyla. Okay, those made some vague amount of sense. But Ronon? Lorne?
When John walked into the lab and the latest hallucination turned into John doing Radek over his desk, Rodney groaned and shut his laptop down. "We need to go back to that panel in Section 16-D."
"What?" John asked, while Radek raised his eyebrows at both of them. Another hallucination slammed into Rodney's mind, and not figuratively; it was him over the desk this time, and he was... babbling something about prime numbers while John fucked him? God, he was reciting Chen primes, only he was getting most of them wrong! What the hell kind of hallucinations were these?
"Rodney?" Radek asked. "Are you feeling all right?"
"Thirty-nine isn't a prime number at all, let alone a Chen prime," Rodney blurted out. Radek's frown deepened, but it was John's reaction that caught Rodney's eye.
John looked surprised, sure. But he didn't look confused. Rodney stared at him and narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out what the hell that expression meant--
"Oh my God. I'm not hallucinating," Rodney said, taking a step away from John. He knocked over a pile of burned CDs, and Radek picked them back up and started re-sorting them, ignoring Rodney's outburst. "I'm not hallucinating at all. I'm reading your mind!" Don't you ever think of anything but sex? he thought, but at least he didn't say it out loud.
Except the mind-reading apparently went both ways. "Hey, cut me some slack," John said, glaring at Rodney. "I haven't gotten laid in five years, and it's not like I'd ever do anything about--"
Radek cleared his throat; both John and Rodney turned in his direction. He was still reorganizing the CD-Rs, taking care not to look either one of them in the eye. "Whatever it is you two are hallucinating, I am hoping it is not contagious," he said. "Dr. Beckett has been asking for my help with the infirmary computers lately. Perhaps now would be a good time."
Once Radek was gone, Rodney picked up his laptop and headed for the door. "Come on," he said impatiently. "If I have to overhear one more of your pointless sex fantasies, I'll--" have to jerk off before I can think straight--oh, fuck, don't think that, he might be listening! "--hang myself with a ribbon cable."
"I did hear you, you know," John said. "I wasn't trying to listen, either; I just can't turn it off."
"Yes, well, how awkward for both of us."
"Does that mean the fantasy this morning about you in the shower was--"
"--live and in-person. Yes, I'd thought of that."
Jeez, you're a lot better-hung than I would have guessed-- "Uh. Sorry."
Rodney buried his head in one of his hands. "Can we get off the topic of sex for ten minutes while I figure out how to fix this?"
"Have you ever tried not to think about pink elephants?"
"What?"
"Somebody asks you not to think about pink elephants, suddenly you can't think of anything else?" Rodney frowned at him. "I guess not. Well, the point is, it's not real easy to not think of stuff." Like sex, John's thoughts continued, and an image of Rodney sucking John's cock was immediately replaced with an image of a big, floating, pink elephant. It was more than a little disturbing. "Sorry," John mumbled.
"Maybe you could try something other than pink elephants. Like, I don't know, flying a puddlejumper or something--" The next image was John flying a puddlejumper while Rodney sucked his dick, and unfortunately, this time Rodney wasn't completely sure it was John's fault. "Or maybe not."
"You have a puddlejumper fetish?" John asked. He was grinning ear-to-ear; even without the mental connection, Rodney could figure out what that grin meant.
Rodney rolled his eyes. "No, I don't have a puddlejumper fetish--"
"Oh, just any moving vehicle, huh?"
"For your information, I happen to care about safety. You know, not crashing cars into trees or whatever." Rodney's ears felt hot. He hoped they weren't as red as they felt.
"Your ears are getting kind of red, actually. And I wasn't exactly offering to give you a ride in my jumper..."
"But you want me to break your five-year cold streak."
Saying that out loud actually brought the conversation to a halt; one or the other of them thought no going back now, huh? Maybe both.
"Panel," John said, finally. "Let's get back to Section 16-D."
"Right," Rodney mumbled. The chances of him being able to think of anything other than fucking John were pretty slim, and breaking the connection probably wasn't going to help with that--okay, you're still sharing a brain with him, so think of something else. Go back to the pink elephants. He tried to conjure up an image of a pink elephant; instead, he got an elephant that was painted pink. Badly. And behind the elephant was a bed, and on the bed was...
"Rodney?"
"Yeah?"
"The pink elephants aren't working."
And because Rodney could hear John making up his mind to do it before it happened, it wasn't a particularly big surprise when John kissed him.
It was hard to tell who was thinking what--there was a lot of you taste like coffee and don't stop now and I want your dick in my mouth/up my ass/I really don't give a shit where between the two of them. It turned out this weird mutual telepathy was actually good for something--instant feedback was absolutely great for kissing, and probably even better for sex--but after a few minutes, Rodney pulled back and looked John over.
"I guess it's not worth pretending I didn't want you to do that," he said.
"It really isn't." John was smirking, and his sex fantasies had gotten nice and specific. The fact that Rodney wasn't sure his body could bend that way didn't really matter; the images were still great. "How about we get this over with and then you fix us?"
"If I didn't have a direct telepathic link to your brain, 'get this over with' wouldn't sound very appealing--"
Rodney, shut the hell up so we can get out of here and fuck!
"--but I can live with that," Rodney said quickly. "Your quarters or mine?"
To: All science personnel
From: Dr. Rodney McKay
Subject: MEMO Regarding the panel in Section 16-D
Testing has revealed that the panel in Section 16-D is a device used to grant temporary thought-link abilities between ATA-capable persons. However, initial experiments suggest that the connection is too unpredictable to be of any practical value. ATA-capable personnel who don't particularly value having private thoughts are welcome to continue testing at their leisure.
-RM
-end-