Someone was banging on the inside of his skull. Rodney groaned and reluctantly let himself be dragged out of a thick daze of sleep enough to recognize that no, actually, someone was banging around outside his head. Using a sledgehammer. And possibly a bulldozer.

He groaned and buried his head underneath the pillow. It didn't muffle the persistent noise even a little bit. Also, he couldn't breathe.

He extracted himself from underneath the pillow and cracked one eye open, peering blearily at the clock. 7.30 AM. God. That was just cruel.

He'd been up half the night, debriefing, picking new personnel (he'd handed in a rather desperate manifesto on why they really needed a substitute for Bates as commanding officer), and finally letting himself get dragged off by his science team to celebrate their miraculous (and fortunately temporary, except, hopefully, for Bates) return to Earth. He'd only fallen into bed three hours ago.

Loud clanging on the metal scaffolding right outside his window joined the racket.

"Oh, that's just not fair," he moaned, to no one in particular.

"What isn't?" a drawling voice answered, and Rodney sat up so fast he tangled himself in his blankets and almost fell back down.

There was a man. Standing outside his window. His third-story window, what the -- no, wait, the scaffolding, it was actually possible to be standing outside his window right now. Damn, and he'd left the window open without a second thought, hadn't even seen the damn thing when he'd returned in the middle of the night. Anyone could have climbed in. Anyone could still climb in, in fact, as evidenced by the man now leaning casually against his window frame, arms crossed over his naked chest, watching Rodney with an amused expression.

Watching Rodney. In his bed. Wait, oh god, was he even dressed? He had a dim memory of dropping into bed fully clothed, but he'd been a little drunk and a lot tired, so -- no, no, dressed. Good. The man made no moves to leave, though.

"What?" Rodney said impatiently. "What are you waiting for?" and then he remembered that he'd been asked a question.

"Oh, right. You want to know what's unfair? Being woken up by a bunch of grown men playing with their toy trucks at an ungodly hour of the morning, not to mention someone stomping around outside my window when I've only gotten to bed three hours ago, on the one and only Ear -- vacation, meant to say vacation, I've had in a year! Which is also the only vacation I'm likely to get in a damn long time."

He glared at the construction worker, who had clearly been responsible for at least part of the noise.

The man grinned and planted one hip on Rodney's windowsill, leaning back against the frame in a casual slouch. "Aww, sorry," he drawled, but Rodney barely noticed the amused and rather ironical undertone, because he was realizing for the first time that the guy was actually pretty hot. Seriously hot, in fact, with wildly tousled hair, a lean, lightly muscled body and tanned, golden skin.

The morning sun was glinting on a thin sheen of sweat on his hairy chest, and Rodney's eyes helplessly followed the trail of hair down to where in disappeared into the waistband of tight blue jeans. His cock, which had already been greeting the morning with a lot more enthusiasm than the rest of him, was now definitely calling for his attention. He drew his knees up to hide it, making shooing motions at the guy with his hands.

"Go away now. Don't you have work to do? I'm sure you'll get fired for sitting around and chatting with me when you should be working."

The man shrugged. "Possibly. But honestly, I don't give a damn. I'm just doing this to kill time until the new university semester starts in the fall, and while it's kind of fun to drive around in a bulldozer, the hours are bad and the pay is lousy. Anyway, I'll go now. Sorry to bother you."

But now Rodney's interest was piqued. "Aren't you a bit old to still be going to university?" he asked, only afterwards realizing that maybe that hadn't been too politely phrased. The guy didn't seem to mind, though.

"Spent a few years in the air force as a pilot, but that didn't work out so well. Just not my thing, you know?" He shrugged, artfully casual, but the look in his eyes said something different. There was a story there, Rodney saw, but didn't pry -- even he recognized that this was an old pain better left alone. "Anyway, thought I'd pick up where I left off, try to get that Ph.D." The man shifted on the sill, propping himself up on one arm, the muscles of his biceps perfectly outlined in the morning sun.

Rodney groaned, letting himself flop back against this pillows. "Okay, this is not happening. Seriously, I'm still sleeping, and you're just a dream I'm going to wake up from any minute now. Hot and smart guys do not just turn up in my bedroom."

"Hey, I'm not in your bedroom," the guy protested, thankfully ignoring the embarrassing parts of the statement.

Rodney arched an eyebrow. "You are sitting on my windowsill," he reminded him. "At this point, the difference is somewhat academic."

The guy grinned. "Point. So I might as well come in, then?" He shifted one leg inside the room, but then hesitated. "Seriously, can I? You're hot, too, you know."

Rodney mutely stared at him, a dozen different answers playing out in his mind at lightning speed, among them 'Are you for real?' and 'Huh?' and 'God, yes please', but, strangely enough, not even a single 'Absolutely not!'

Obviously the man took his lack of an answer as assent. Rodney made a strangled sound as he swung the second leg into the room, drawing the curtains closed and slinking towards Rodney's bed with a predator's effortless grace. He squatted down next to Rodney, putting one hand on his knee over the blanket and rubbing it in gentle, soothing circles. Rodney's cock twitched impatiently.

"I'm John, by the way. John Sheppard," the man said.

"Um. Rodney McKay," Rodney managed, still staring helplessly at that golden hand, stark against his crisp white sheets, and the tousled head on a level with his groin.

John's hand stilled abruptly. "Rodney McKay?" he repeated incredulously. "The McKay who wrote the paper on covariance structure? Wow. That was brilliant. I can't believe I'm just meeting you like this."

Rodney stared. "You read that? Really? Did you understand it?"

John beamed at him. "God, yes. That chapter where you just creamed Kellerson's moronic theory on scalar values in covariance matrices? Fucking brilliant. Although honestly, your point about the overvaluation of multivariate normal distribution as applied to quantum fluctuations seemed a little --"

"Yeah, I admit it's a bit of a weak spot, because we just don't have the experimental data to back it up yet, but if you just --" Rodney interrupted him, grabbing for the pad and pencil he always had lying next to the bed in case he woke up with any brilliant ideas, and started scrawling numbers. "Look, let's say the linear combination is --"

John climbed up on the bed to look over his shoulder, and for a second, the feeling of John's sun-warmed shoulder pressing against his own sidetracked him. But he hadn't had anyone to listen to his theories on this for a long time, because on Atlantis, any branch of mathematics that didn't directly contribute to their continued survival was sadly underrated. And John was nodding along, asking the right questions and looking generally interested, and at one point he grabbed the pen away from Rodney and started scrawling equations at a speed Rodney could barely keep up with -- he was lacking some theoretical basics, of course, and he didn't have Rodney's extensive knowledge of physics, but he clearly knew his math. It was exhilarating. Really fucking hot, too.

His morning erection never did go away entirely, and when John suddenly looked up from the math, smiled a soft, warm smile at him and drew a gentle finger down his shoulder underneath the loose sleeve of his t-shirt, Rodney didn't even try to hide the hitch in his breath.

He let John push him onto his back, the forgotten equations shoved carelessly to the floor. John tugged Rodney's shirt over his head, then crawled on top of him, their naked chests pressing together. Rodney hissed and arched underneath him. God, it had been so long, and John was wonderful, hot and smart and everything he liked in a partner. He could all too easily fall in love with this man, he realized, but it was far too late to back out by now.

John leaned down to lick his nipple, soft tongue and sharp little nips with his teeth alternating in a teasing rhythm. Rodney rubbed his cock against John's stomach urgently, dragging one hand down John's back, feeling the little bumps of his spine and the sweat-slick warmth of his body.

"God, Rodney," John groaned. "I want to -- Can I fuck you? Let me? Please."

Rodney shivered with the raw need in John's voice, pressing his face against the warmth of John's neck and panting. "Yes, okay, do it, lube and condoms in the drawer, come on --"

John shifted and stretched on top of him, although Rodney didn't really pay attention to anything except the delicious way that made his cock rub against John's stomach.

He heard the click of a bottle opening, and then John was slipping slick fingers between his legs, urgent and a bit pushy but oh-so-gentle, opening him up with so much care when Rodney could tell how much he wanted to just go ahead and push in. His fingers were teasing and fluttering inside Rodney, sending little bursts of electricity all the way through his body, making him shudder and writhe on the bed.

"Go ahead, do it already," he gasped, and John shoved his legs up and to the side, slick cock eagerly pushing between Rodney's legs. He slid inside with a groan, fitting their bodies together like they had been created just for this, matter and antimatter meeting in an explosion of blinding pleasure.

John was gasping against his neck, and Rodney could feel his muscles straining and shivering where he was gripping John's strong arms, anchoring them together. This wasn't going to last long, they were both so wound up already, desperate and too close, clinging to each other and moving in a strange, not-quite-synchronous rhythm that was nevertheless so very, very hot.

John leaned down and sealed their lips together, groaning into Rodney's mouth. Rodney reached out blindly, touching his hand to John's cheek, and came. John kept thrusting right through it, driving shivery aftershocks through his body. When he came, he made a helpless gasping sound Rodney knew would be forever burned into his memory, John's voice breaking on something that might or might not have been his name.

John rolled off him, sprawling on the bed next to him, panting and grinning, reaching out a hand. Rodney allowed himself to be pulled into a tight embrace, half on top of John, pressing his face into his shoulder and breathing in the wonderful smell of sex, man and John. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt this good. For the first time, the thought that he'd be returning to Pegasus in three days left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. He tightened his hold on John's shoulder.

And then John was wriggling out from underneath him, disposing of the condom and grabbing tissues of the nightstand. "Hey, is that one of those snow globe things?" he said, and it took Rodney one crucial moment too long to understand what he was talking about.

When he jerked upright, it was already too late. John was picking up the Ancient artifact, and Rodney wouldn't have taken it home if he hadn't been relatively sure that it was harmless, but it was the Ancients and you just never knew -- and then it started to glow, projecting a perfect, three dimensional model of the solar system right underneath the ceiling, lighting up the whole room.

"Um -- was that me?" John said, staring at the beautiful hologram, and Rodney suddenly found himself laughing with sheer delight. Because maybe the SGC wouldn't have let him take a pretty mathematician as his one personal item, but they'd sure as hell sit up and beg for a pilot with the gene.

"John? You ever thought of going to another galaxy? Admittedly, the commanding officer sucks and the hours are lousy, but you'd get to fly to the stars."

John glanced at him warily. "Is that some kind of really wacky metaphor for more sex?" he asked.

Rodney grinned giddily. "That, too, if you want."

=end=