"Oh no. Nonononono," Rodney said, backing away and grabbing a rough pillar of stone for good measure. "No, forget it. No way in hell. Nothing is worth that. And the ZPM is not going to do you one bit of good if the foremost expert on Ancient technology -- and by that I do not mean Zelenka, in case you were wondering -- is splashed all over the bottom of -- of that," he finished, somewhat lamely. His hands remaining firmly clasped around the pillar, he gestured with his chin at the deep, cavernous, seemingly bottomless abyss that slashed the mountain in half.

Sheppard was laughing at him. Okay, more like grinning, but still, he was not displaying the appropriate level of respect for Rodney's completely understandable and commendable concern for his irreplaceable person. Not to mention that the thought of seeing Sheppard splattered over fifty square meters of bedrock wasn't all that terribly appealing, either.

"Don't worry, Rodney. That bridge has been there for a few thousand years now -- it's not going to come crashing down within the next five minutes," Sheppard said, and for a moment Rodney could only stare in appalled horror.

"Okay, I don't believe this!" he finally yelled, when his brain returned from the land of the justifiably stunned. "Seriously, Colonel, sometimes you're so dense you should bend light! Will you look at that thing? It's not the damn bridge I'm worried is going to fall down!"

The bridge did, indeed, look solid enough: hard black stone arching in a graceful arc over a canyon of at least fifty meters breadth, and a depth of maybe -- 200 meters? More? He'd throw in a stone and count, but he didn't think he really wanted to know.

But no, the bridge wasn't the problem. Except in the way that you couldn't even really call it a bridge, because that word implied things like railings. Of which there were none. Only the arc of stone, maybe sixty centimeters wide at best, and the long, long drop underneath it. Nothing to hold on to. Not even the option to lay down flat on their stomachs and crawl, which might have given them some modicum of security, because the bridge was covered in the same sharp, multi-faceted crystals that grew all over the rocks on this mountain.

Rodney's hand was still bleeding a little where he'd touched one of those. The thick soles of the military combat boots had protected their feet so far, but Rodney was just waiting for one of the spikes to penetrate the sole and stab his foot. He really didn't want this stuff under his unprotected hands and knees.

John sighed. "Rodney, relax. Look, if you had to walk on a strip of floor this wide, you wouldn't even hesitate, would you? This is no different. We've just got to take it slow, be careful. ZPM, Rodney. All we need to do is get up there, disable whatever it is that's screwing with the jumper's controls, and Lorne can come fly us down. Easy as pie."

Rodney glared at him. "Easy. Right. At this point I'm willing to believe that if the Ancients placed an outpost in a place that's this incredibly hard to reach, maybe they had a damn good reason. I mean, hello, mountain top? Ten thousand year old bridge without a railing? Scary native legends about the gods protecting this place? You've never seen any Indiana Jones movies, have you. This can't possibly end well."

"So you just want to turn back and leave those energy readings you were going on about earlier?" Sheppard said, voice slick as silk.

Rodney growled at him. Manipulative bastard. "I don't. Want. To. Die!"

"Right. So turn back it is, then," Sheppard said, and then actually turned around and began to walk back down the path they'd come. Rodney let himself slump against the pillar he was using for support, closing his eyes and counting to ten.

"Okay. Okay, you win, we cross the fucking bridge," he said, exasperated. "But if I die a horrible death at the bottom of a canyon, I will come back to haunt you."

Sheppard grinned. "Fine by me. Here, give me your hand --"

Rodney snatched his hand away, cradling it protectively against his chest. "What, so that if you fall, you can drag me down with you? I think not."

Sheppard rolled his eyes at him. "So that when one of us stumbles, the other one can support him," he said, slowly and patiently, as if speaking to a very slow child.

Rodney scowled at him. Oh, that was just not fair. Did the man always have to be so smug and insufferable?

Sheppard reached up and gently but firmly pried his hand open, lacing their fingers together, offering a calm support that didn't exactly make the prospect of crossing that bridge seem any more pleasant, but maybe a little bit more possible. His hand felt strong and warm, rough skin textured with calluses. Rodney only hoped his own wasn't too embarrassingly clammy with sweat.

Sheppard went first, placing one testing foot on the stone arc, slowly shifting his weight onto it. When nothing happened, he drew back a bit and stomped once, hard. Nothing happened. The bridge stayed solid, immovable, and nevertheless very, very scary.

"Well, seems like we're not getting out of this," Sheppard said, almost cheerily. Rodney sighed.

"I know crazy deathtraps like this are right up your alley, but try not to enjoy it too much, will you, Colonel?"

Sheppard only grinned at him.

To his surprise, it turned out to be easier than he'd have thought. The bridge was solid and stable underneath his feet, and as long as he concentrated on nothing but that band of stone, easily broad enough to comfortably support him, it was easy enough to keep going, eyes and mind firmly fixed on nothing but the next step. They were almost in the middle already, with no problem at all.

And then Sheppard slipped. Rodney barely noticed it in time. One second, Sheppard was balancing easily in front of him, the next, a group of jagged crystals underneath Sheppard's feet was crumbling to pieces with a crunching sound. They slipped away, taking his foot with them. He made a surprised, hissing sound, flailing with his free hand, all balance suddenly gone, balanced precariously on one foot and swaying to the side.

Rodney swore. He leaned back a little to brace for the impact -- and then Sheppard's hand was suddenly turning slithery, twisting and trying to slide out of his grip. Almost too late, Rodney realized with brilliant, awful clarity, that Sheppard was letting go. He would let himself fall to his death without a fight before he'd risk drawing Rodney down with him. God, why hadn't he seen that one coming?

He tightened his grip, hanging on desperately, pressing his fingers into Sheppard's rough skin-- his protesting scream surging against his ears as if from far away -- and then there was an awful, terrifying jolt as Rodney was suddenly supporting both their weights, tearing at his already precarious balance, crystals crumbling and sliding away underneath his boots.

Rodney desperately braced himself with his feet on the bridge. It wasn't enough. He could feel himself being tugged to the side, towards the edge, by the heavy weight of Sheppard's slipping body. He threw himself to his knees instead. Fiery, piercing pain knifed through his knees, but now there was enough friction between him and the ground to hold him, to withstand the pull and stop them from falling.

He jerked Sheppard up, back into the middle of the bridge, one hand clutching Sheppard's, the other wrapped around his belt so tight he felt the edges of the leather press painfully into his skin. Sheppard put a hand on his shoulder, and Rodney could feel that it was shaking slightly. They stayed like that for a long moment, hanging on to each other.

"Okay, that sucked," Sheppard finally said, pulling him to his feet, and then, "Oh, fuck, your knees --" but Rodney barely heard him. He could see the abyss over Sheppard's shoulder, hundreds of meters to the ground, free fall right down to the bottom of the canyon, jagged rocks with spear points and razor-sharp edges spiking up towards them, surrounding the trickle of water that had carved the crevice. All that stopped them from falling down was the thin, narrow strip of stone underneath his feet, nothing to hold him up if he fell, nothing between him and the long, long, drop.

He could feel himself shaking, hands clawing into Sheppard, frozen in place where he stood because every movement, every tiny shift might cost his precarious balance and plunge him to his death.

"Rodney? Hey, Rodney, come on!" Sheppard was saying from far, far away. "You were fine just a minute ago!"

But a minute ago he hadn't seen the fall, not really, and he'd still been able to fool himself into thinking this was safe, god, how stupid could he have been?

"Rodney, this is a really bad time to panic -- come on, we need to get off this damn bridge --" Sheppard was beginning to sound nervous, too, and Rodney bit his lips and tried to pull himself together, tried to relax the death grip he had around Sheppard's hand -- he had to be hurting him, part of him realized -- but he couldn't, his body wouldn't obey him at all.

"Oh, for god's sake," Sheppard hissed, and then he gripped Rodney's head firmly with his free hand, turned Rodney's face away from the empty space beneath them. Crowding closer, pulling Rodney's head down to lie against his shoulder, Sheppard let his body shield Rodney from the sight. The thumb of the hand Rodney had captured began to massage the back of Rodney's hand in tiny circles, and Sheppard put his other arm around Rodney to rub his back in long, soothing strokes.

Rodney's head almost turned back around again of its own volition, as if drawn by the terrifying sight. He forced himself to close his eyes instead, leaning his head against Sheppard's shoulder and deliberately taking long, controlled breaths until the panic receded somewhat. Sheppard's presence helped, his calm hands and his familiar scent soothing Rodney's frazzled nerves, adrenaline slowly subsiding to levels that allowed him to think.

Finally he stepped back with an embarrassed little laugh. "Ah, sorry. Calm now," he said apologetically.

He wasn't, not totally, but enough so that when Sheppard started to walk again, he could let himself follow, eyes firmly fixed on the thin strip of bridge and resolutely ignoring the wide open space surrounding it, and the nervous way his heart was pounding against his ribs as if it thought it needed to remind him to the danger. Sheppard didn't falter or hesitate, and he also didn't stumble again, leading them across the bridge with careful, steady steps, but Rodney wasn't the only one who breathed a heavy sigh of relief when they finally reached the other side.

It couldn't have taken them ten minutes, but Rodney, who was used to time speeding up and flying by in a mad rush during moments of danger, couldn't remember a single incident where time had ever passed so agonizingly slowly. All he wanted to do was drop for the floor and sleep for a million years, but night was coming, and the last thing they needed was to try to climb these mountains in the dark, so he let Sheppard drag him on.

The rest of the way wasn't a cakewalk by any standards -- his knees hurt, the ground was uneven and jagged with sharp rocks, and the path climbed a lot steeper than Rodney would have been comfortable with under the best of circumstances. Compared with what they had just put behind them, it was entirely doable, but exhausting and unpleasant, and it took all of his concentration just so he didn't slip and break his neck.

Even Sheppard started to scowl at some point. "This damn path just doesn't want to end, doesn't it," he muttered

"That's what I've been saying for the last hour. Didn't you listen?" Rodney grumbled, but it was good to know that he wasn't the only one who was getting really fucking tired of climbing. Not that he had all that much pride invested in his physical prowess -- as someone with his kind of brain shouldn't have to -- but on a team with three amazingly fit people, it was sometimes a little too easy to forget that.

They reached the little Ancient cabin on the mountain top shortly before nightfall, after two solid hours of climbing. By then, Rodney's scanner readout had been getting increasingly more amazing for at least half an hour, and he was so excited about what they were going to find -- at least one ZPM, and probably some other nifty stuff, too -- that he almost forgot to be relieved.

It was only when he tried to reach for his tablet PC while still checking the scanner that he noticed that Sheppard had never let go of his hand. He hadn't even noticed, but now that he thought about it, he realized that the steady, soothing warmth of the touch had been humming along far in the back of his mind for the last two hours.

"Oh," he said, and Sheppard's mouth quirked up at the corner into a smile that wouldn't have looked nervous to anyone who didn't know him as well as Rodney did. "You --"

"Rodney, it's gonna be dark soon. Don't you want to have a look at all this stuff before it's dark?" Sheppard said quickly, in a blatantly obvious attempt to change the topic, but he was right -- there was half an hour of daylight left at best, and this promised to be the most exciting thing he'd seen in a while. The siren call of knowledge was impossibly to ignore, so Rodney let him.

But he wasn't a genius for nothing, and thinking about a second problem while most of his brain was busy deciphering the secrets of new technology was par for the course for him. So when it was finally too dark to even make out the outline of the consoles anymore without a flashlight, he already had it all figured out.

John was lying sprawled on the single narrow cot in the cabin's tiny bedroom, but sat up very quickly when Rodney entered.

"Find anything interesting?" he asked, going for casual and managing it with the practiced ease of someone who probably had been born a better actor than Rodney could ever manage to be. For a moment, he was almost fooled. But he knew better, he had all the evidence, a beautiful working hypothesis and an easy experiment to prove it with, so when he kneeled down and pressed his lips to John's, gently, testing, he wasn't particularly afraid of rejection.

He hadn't expected the happy, needy sound John made into his mouth, or how good it would feel to let John tug him onto the bed with strong, gentle hands, callused hands rough and soothing against his skin, but that just made it better.

=end=