*          *          *

John fell onto his bed, not even wanting to bother taking off his thigh holster or boots.

He knew it was partially his fault too. He knew that. He should have put his foot down and put a stop to the whole mess before Rodney had gotten carried away. But Rodney had swept him along in the tidal wave of enthusiasm for anything scientific that was Rodney McKay, and here they were, 5/6 of a solar system blown up and their friendship in ruins.

He knew Rodney was sorry. He saw the desperate, sad looks the physicist shot his way when John was wearing his sunglasses and Rodney thought he wasn’t looking at him, but John couldn’t help but still be angry.

He didn’t trust people easily. In fact, he could probably count the people he had trusted on one hand. Rodney had been one of them.

Now he wasn’t.

Scientific curiosity was one thing. Willing to get your best friend killed in order to satisfy that curiosity was something else.

And John didn’t know if he could ever get past that. He knew that he and Rodney could still work together and work well together. He worked with lots of people he didn’t trust fully.

So he could do it. He just hated feeling like he had lost something that he never really knew he was looking for.

Damn McKay and his damn ego.

Throwing his arms over his face, he nearly managed to doze off until the straps on his thigh really started irritating him and he pushed himself up to get it off. Then the boots, then the shirt, and because he was already sitting up by this point, he figured he’d check his email quickly before calling it a night.

He scrolled past mission reports, announcements for next weeks football game and golf tournament, a plea for somebody to please bring any found hair ties to the botany department and leave them for one Dr. Teriky and some inventory reports.

Then there was a small message on the bottom, sent from anonymous@atlantis.net with nothing in the subject line. Curious, he clicked on it, and the words “Lift up your lamp. Enjoy and get some sleep.” appeared on the screen.

Automatically suspecting something fishy, John leapt away from his desk, fell backwards onto his bed and eyed his lamp suspiciously. Groping behind him for his gun, he flicked the safety off and sighted down the barrel at his desk lamp.

Studying it for a few minutes and not seeing anything blinking or smoking on it, he gingerly edged his way off the bed and across the floor, the gun never wavering.

He reached the desk and grabbed one of his golf clubs with one hand, gun still clutched in the other. Moving carefully, he used the club to knock his lamp over, dropped the club and got ready to shoot the hell out of whatever practical joke was about to blow up in his face.

Nothing happened. Glaring suspiciously at his desk, John edged a bit closer until he could see what had been lying underneath his lamp.

It was a chocolate bar.

Nodding to himself and thinking he was starting to get what the hell was going on, he used the golf club to gently push the chocolate bar across his desk and into his trash can. Quickly, he dropped the club and looked frantically around his room for something to cover the can with, in case whatever was in there blew.

He automatically thought to put his laptop on it, but knew the sergeant in charge of inventory would kill him. The only other sturdy and large enough object in his quarters was his clipboard, so he grabbed it and gingerly set it on top of the can.

Then he grabbed the can and gently moved it out onto his balcony. Taking off the clipboard, he quickly emptied the can over the railing, watching the chocolate bar and some scrap pieces of paper and tissues float downwards. Leaning over the railing, he watched the chocolate bar, grinning in anticipation of watching it explode in pink dye or whatever the hell it had been rigged with.

The bar fell and fell and fell, and finally hit the deck far below him without a sound. John frowned, squinting down at it. Asides from pieces of paper and tissue floating down around it, some landing in the ocean, there wasn’t a sound.

The chocolate bar lay there, unmoving and not exploding.

He debated going down there to study it further, but decided that if somebody with multiple PhDs was behind this, there was no telling what would trigger the thing.

So he tucked his now empty trash can under his arm, his clipboard in the other and went back into his room.

Sitting down at his desk, he hit reply on the email and wrote “Nice try sucker. This flyboy ain’t that dumb.” and then hit send.

Satisfied that he had outwitted the brain trying to mess with him, he went to bed, surprisingly more cheerful than he had been half an hour ago.

Just before he went to bed though, he couldn’t help thinking that it was a damn shame the chocolate bar hadn’t been genuine.

*          *          *

Two days later there was another email from the anonymous sender. “I know you get paid to be paranoid, but this is a bit too much. There was nothing wrong with the chocolate, and I’ll have you know that I retrieved it from the deck and ate it myself, since you couldn’t appreciate it. Since food apparently can’t be trusted by your paranoid military head, maybe you can appreciate something else.”

Underneath the message was a brain teaser of sorts, but one a lot racier than any John had ever come across. He skimmed it, having to bite his lip at more than one point. He’d never come across a brain teaser that mentioned the words groaning, fucking and cock that many times.

He mulled it over for a few minutes before the answer came to him. When he realized his hands were a bit shaky and certain parts of him were really starting to get interested in things, he realized that the brain teaser might be good for other kinds of teasing too.

Grinning at his unexpected present, he hit reply on the email, wrote out his answer and then added a small ‘thanks’ at the bottom.

Then he turned off his computer and lay back on his bed, sliding his hands down his stomach and sliding them underneath his waistband, grinning to himself.

Now those were his kind of brain teasers.

*          *          *

Over the next week, he got a new brain teaser everyday, all of them focused on sex. Lots of it. With all combinations of people.

Some of them were actually tricky to solve and John forced himself to ignore his aching cock until he had come up with the solution and emailed his mysterious email buddy before lying on his bed and letting the images from the puzzle fill his mind.

His email buddy must have decided that he needed to up the ante on the smut in the puzzles, as well as the intellectual difficulty, since the following week had quite a bit of naughty material falling into John’s inbox.

It got to the point where John stopped focusing on the puzzles themselves and just focused on the words on the screen, letting the images and words fill his head and make him feel good.

It made the crap he went through every day, the sad looks he still got from Rodney everyday, and the mess that was their broken friendship that he waded through each day more bearable.

One night he completely forgot to try to figure out the puzzle and email back an answer, so the next night, he got a very amused and different kind of email.

“LOL! Couldn’t keep the brain on line long enough, huh? Never heard of mind over matter, Colonel? That’s okay. Tell your brain to take a break and enjoy.”

What followed was a short paragraph of pure smut. No long droning introduction of the characters, who they were or why they were having sex. Nope. Just the good stuff. Right off the bat.

John moved his laptop onto his bed and sat down on the edge, since it was more comfortable than sitting in his desk chair. He’d already pulled off his shirt and yanked off his boxers, mentally making sure his door was securely locked.

Then he eagerly started reading, one hand on the downward scroll button, and the other lazily stroking himself.

“—she gasped, her fingers digging into his shoulders as he slid inside of her, so hot and wet. He groaned, feeling his cock throbbing as he pulled out and thrust back into her, leaning down to pull one of her nipples into his mouth.”

John was hard in no time. He stopped reading half way through, closing his eyes and jerking himself off with quick, hard strokes. He waited until he could feel his balls tightening and knew he was close, and then he opened his eyes again and finished reading the paragraph, racing to completion with the characters on the screen.

When he was done, he fell back, gasping and reaching for some tissues to wipe himself off with.

When he’d gotten his breath back, he rolled onto his stomach and reached for his keyboard long enough to type “More please” and then hit send.

*          *          *

His anonymous email buddy complied. And he complied with an enthusiasm that left John nearly panting with thoughts of his laptop during the day. He hoped he wouldn’t start getting hard at just seeing a laptop during the day, since that would just complicate his life in so many ways.

From time to time he wondered who his email buddy was. He tried tracing where the email came from but just as he had suspected, he just hit a bunch of dead ends and then gave up. It had taken him forever to learn how to check his own email, so hacking somebody else’s created email account wasn’t on his list of do-able skills.

He had originally considered Rodney, since the chocolate bar probable-prank was right up McKay’s alley, but he didn’t think Rodney would spend his days writing smut to send to him every night. He didn’t only not have the time, but why the hell would Rodney spend his time giving John fantastic jerk-off material when John was mad at him? It didn’t make sense. Besides, if Rodney was doing this as an olive branch of sorts, doing it anonymously defeated the point by far.

Not that sending John porn and brain teasers would do anything to fix the problems between them, and Rodney wasn’t that bad with people to think so. John hoped.

So that left one of the other geeks. Or it could be one of his military guys too. Spending years in common barracks where everybody jerked-off whenever the mood struck them and everybody shared their porn, it wasn’t unheard of that some guys and girls wrote their own stuff to entertain themselves, so John really didn’t know who his email buddy was.

All he knew was that life was a lot brighter and exciting these days.

To his amusement, he found that his writer seemed better at writing slash than any het material. John swung both ways so he didn’t particularly care. He ended up liking the slash scenes better anyway, since they were longer and hotter than the het. After telling his email buddy that one night, he was supplied with a hot threesome slash scene that left all his previously viewed porn in the dust.

He debated with himself for hours whether to save that one or not. Usually, he deleted all of the emails. Technically the het ones wouldn’t get him in trouble, just embarrass him. But the slash ones would.

But he really didn’t want to lose that one, so he hid it in a random folder within a folder within a folder with an obscure, boring name.

Two days later, he got an irate email from his email buddy. “And here I thought you were mildly capable of using your head! Yes, let’s keep homosexual material hidden on your computer! Very smart move, Colonel. Very smart. Can I reserve front seats for your court martial now or is it first come, first serve? I deleted the file that you ‘hid’. I go through your computer every few days and permanently delete all traces of the emails I send you, so don’t worry about anybody tracing the deleted messages. Don’t do that again. It’s not worth it.”

That was all he got that night and John went to bed, frustrated and a bit mad at himself and his email buddy.

The next morning, he sent an apology and a promise never to do it again.

*          *          *

He didn’t get a reply until a few days later. He eagerly opened it, already taking off his shirt and eager to break his dry spell, and his email buddy didn’t disappoint.

“—His hand slid down one his thighs, pulling him in closer. They both groaned as their cocks slid against each other, slick with precum. He lowered his head and sucked one hard nipple into his mouth, hands clutching his hair, hips slowly rocking against each other.”

For a whole week, John had blissful evenings, looking forward to jerking-off with enthusiasm that he hadn’t felt since he turned thirty and jerking-off had become a necessity rather than an enjoyment.

But despite the fact that he didn’t feel completely alone anymore, feeling like the people hidden in the words on his screen were there feeling as good as him, when it was over, he would suddenly be filled with loneliness again. He’d lie back on his bed, hearing his gasps echo in his small, empty room.

One night, the loneliness felt so unbearable, that he hit reply on the email he’d just read and wrote “How about we make fiction a reality?” and hit send before he could change his mind.

The next morning, his hasty decision didn’t seem too good anymore. What if his email buddy got scared off and stopped writing him? What if his email buddy never wanted to have a physical relationship with him but just liked writing and was happy to discover that John liked what he or she wrote? What if John wasn’t the only email recipient on the mysterious author’s list?

That night, John opened his email with dread, hoping that maybe his email had gotten lost in cyberspace somewhere.

But there was a reply to his email.

“Is fiction not enough for you anymore? I can send you porn files, but they take up a lot of room, and you couldn’t keep the slash ones on your computer.”

John thought about it, but realized that reading and watching porn were pretty much the same thing and that wasn’t his problem.

“I’m just tired of it always being my own hand.” He wrote back, deciding to be blunt. But then he figured, a person who routinely wrote about people sticking their tongues up people’s asses and having orgies wouldn’t mind.

He didn’t get a reply until an hour later. “You don’t even know what sex I am.”

That was easy. “Doesn’t matter. You should know that by now.”

Apparently, that made him sound a bit slutty. “Why is that completely unsurprising? You really want to do this?”

“Only if you do.”

“Of course I do.”

“When are we meeting?”

“You really are horny tonight, huh?”

“It’s your fault. You spoiled me with regular supplies of porn.”

“If you really want to do this, we have to have some ground rules.”

“Such as?”

“I come to your place. You lower the lights and keep them low. Put a blindfold on and keep it on the entire time until I leave.”

John frowned. “Why the blindfold and lights? I don’t tend to laugh at the people sleeping with me.”

“Those are my ground rules. Abide by them or forget it.”

“Fine. My place, low lights, blindfold. Got it.”

“And no peeking. You peek, it’s over.”

“You’re asking me to put a hell of a lot of trust in you, you know that?”

“I’m not tying you up and even blindfolded, you can snap my neck faster than I could blink, never mind hurt you. Besides, if I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn’t have spent weeks writing you porn, now would I?”

John mulled it over. He didn’t feel comfortable being blindfolded while some stranger touched him. But then he realized, the person wasn’t really a stranger. It was somebody he knew, somebody who knew him. And his email buddy was right, he had fast enough reflexes and enough experience with blindfolds and unsavory characters to know what to do if he needed to get away fast.

“Okay. No peeking, I promise. When are you coming?”

“Tomorrow. And John?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not going to talk. You can talk all you want, ask me anything, but I’m not talking.”

“What’s the point of asking questions if I can’t hear your answers?”

“There’s more than one way of communicating.”

John frowned, trying to picture that and then giving up, willing to let himself be surprised. “Okay. See you tomorrow.”

*          *          *

The next night, he got a message that just said “2200 hours” on it. He cleaned up his room a bit, finished up some reports, answered some of his other emails and had a shower.

When 2200 came around, he was sitting on his bed, only the low blue emergency lights on in the corners of his room, casting eerie shadows around his walls. He took the bandanna he had borrowed from Lorne and forgotten to return a few months ago and carefully tied it around his head, making sure it was tight enough not to fall and that he couldn’t see anything.

A small shiver of panic raced up his spine and he clenched his jaw and forced himself to calm down. He wasn’t in any danger right now. There was nobody else in his room.

He tried to calm his nerves and his hearing, which had jumped to super sensitive levels at the deprivation of his sight.

He closed his eyes behind the blindfold, knowing that tended to calm him down a bit.

He heard his door chime, and quickly asked Atlantis to let the person in, not wanting to change his mind at the last second.

He desperately hoped that it was his email buddy and not somebody else, who would have some very confused questions for him.

He heard light footsteps crossing his floor and heard his door shutting again. He heard some metal crunching and some clicking. Atlantis told him that his door was now securely locked from the outside, but he could still open it from the inside with a mere thought.

Then he heard footsteps coming to the bed. He was tense, half anticipating and half fearing that first touch, not able to control when it came.

He felt hands touching his bare feet and he nearly jumped. The hands stilled and after a moment, both thumbs started stroking the tops of his feet. It was a strange, unusual sensation, but the hands stayed there until John got his breathing under control.

Then the hands slowly moved up his legs, past his hips and up his arms until they were gently touching his face.

One of the thumbs gently stroked his lower lip and the other hand reached down and pulled one of his hands up, palm face up. The fingers of the hand wrote out OK? on his palm, obviously asking if he or she could kiss him.

John nodded and whispered a ‘yes’. He knew he was allowed to talk but the silence had settled around him and he was almost afraid to shatter it.

The hand moved back up to join the other on his face and he felt warm breath on his cheeks before soft lips pressed to his. John groaned and pressed back with his own lips before parting them slightly and darting his tongue out to lick at the lips, which opened and let him in. He ran his hands over the arms before him, tracing them up until he touched short hair and brought those lips closer to his own. The analytical part of his mind determined that he was kissing a man with short hair—which excluded Ronon and Radek and the entire female population of Atlantis immediately.

Then he stopped having ideas, since that part of his brain went off line.

The kisses got more heated and deeper, both of their tongues darting around each other, playfully tangling and exploring each others mouths. John was gasping soon and his hands went down to try and find the other person’s shirt hem and growing frustrated at not finding it fast enough.

The lips pulled back and he heard clothes rustling. Then he felt the hands coming back and pulling his shirt off, leaving his dog tags dangling around his neck. One hand gently touched his chest and pushed him back. John got it and lay back, lifting his hips as the quick hands undid his pants and pulled them off.

From that moment on, the lips came back and the hands and lips never left him. The lips kissed their way down his chest, sucked on his nipples, nipped at his collarbone and darted up to lick apart his lips and explore his mouth some more. The hands ran down his legs, traced his ribs, tweaked his nipples when the lips were busy and stroked his cock until he was aching and hard as a rock.

Then the lips closed around his cock and John decided that that was the place he most liked the lips to be at. He gasped, arching up on the bed, feeling the hands back on his nipples. The lips slid up and down his cock, that mouth he had explored so hot and perfect. He finally felt himself tensing up and whispered a small warning, at which the lips just tightened and the mouth increased its sucking and he came, hips snapping up in that wonderful mouth.

When he collapsed, he lay there, limp for a few minutes until he felt he could move again. Then he reached out, blindly groping for the body that had to be somewhere where the hands and lips had been.

He felt short hair beneath his fingers and traced down until he could touch cheeks and those wonderful lips. The lips were parted and were panting out hot breaths and John moved his leg and felt a hard cock pressing against his thigh.

“What do you want?” he whispered.

In answer, one of the hands reached up, took John’s hand and moved it down to that cock John had felt. John shifted over, wrapping one hand around that hard length and using his other hand to pull his mystery person onto the bed beside him and lean over him, jerking him off with sharp, hard pulls.

It was strange not being able to see the expression on the other person’s face, not being able to rely on facial expressions to tell if he was doing well or going too fast or too slow.

But the trembling that John could feel in the body below him tipped him off that it might be good. He ran his other hand up the chest below him, traced his neck and moving up until he was stroking his cheek. “Good?” he whispered. He felt the person nod against his hand and he smiled, rubbing the head of the cock in his hand with his thumb.

He thought about leaning over to try to kiss those lips again, but thought that would take too much guesswork and coordination without his eyes.

So he leaned down and kissed the area he first hit—it felt like a pelvis—and sucked on the tender skin there while the trembling increased and he heard one small gasp before he felt the body below him tensing up, and moments later, he felt warmth spreading over his hand.

He kept working the cock through the aftershocks until he let go of the now soft flesh. Moments later, he felt the body moving and then felt a warm, damp cloth being put into his hands.

“Thanks,” he murmured, impressed with his mystery email buddy’s forethought. Cleaning off his hands, he handed the cloth back, and then was pulled down into strong arms and those lips found his again.

He sighed and draped himself over the warmth below him, lazily kissing the mouth below him and dancing with that tongue again.

Then the lips reluctantly let go and fingers came up to stroke John’s lips. Somehow, John knew that that was the signal that they were done for tonight.

Rolling off him, John lay back and grinned in what he hoped was the direction of his partner’s face.

“You coming tomorrow?”

He felt his hand being picked up again and a Y being drawn on it. He grinned.

“Same time?”

Another Y.

“Same rules?”

Another Y. John tried not to be disappointed. He wanted to see his mystery partner’s face. After this amazing night he really wanted to know who he was lucky enough to have somehow gotten into his bed.

The finger on his palm paused, as if sensing his disappointment. Then an OK? was drawn on to his palm. John sighed. “Yeah. If that’s the way you want it.”

*          *          *

And that’s the way it stayed. Nearly every night, John would lower his lights, get undressed, put his blindfold on—which he realized he would probably never return to his 2IC—and wait for his door to slide open.

His partner would always lock his door externally and then get undressed before gently running his hands up John’s legs, letting him get accustomed to the sensation of being touched without being able to see it.

It took John days until he managed to tone down his paranoia enough not to jump at unexpected touches, but his partner seemed to understand that and always touched him slowly at first, running his hands up John’s body rather than touching him randomly.

John gradually got accustomed to having sex while blind. There were some embarrassing fumbles when he accidentally poked his partner in the eye with a finger while reaching for him and that time he rolled and fell off the bed. Both times he had apologized, but his partner had barely let out a sound, even though that time he fell of the bed, his partner had rolled over, stuck his face in John’s pillow and John could feel his bed shaking from silent laughter for long minutes.

John thought that having a silent partner would be problematic too, but he realized it was damn easy to communicate with a few words, questioning caresses and letters traced into his palm with a finger.

His partner seemed to think John was some blushing virgin and never went further than giving John head or a hand job until finally John lay back, spread his legs and brought one of those wonderful hands down to his opening. His partner got the message and went and hunted around in his bathroom until he found something that passed for lube. John really didn’t care what it was, especially when two slicked up fingers pressed into him, brushing his prostate and gently stretching him.

If anybody would have told him that he would find himself literally blindly trusting somebody whose identity was a mystery to him, he would have laughed at them, but now, it seemed normal.

When his partner pulled on his hands and guided him across his room to the wall, John went without hesitation, knowing that he wouldn’t trip over anything. He leaned up against the wall, spread his legs and waited. When that reassuring warmth beside him vanished, he nearly started freaking out. He knew he was in his room, but he was stuck in a random corner with god knew how many obstacles between him and his bed, but then the warmth was back. Hands wrapped around his waist and soft kisses trailed down his throat and he moaned, letting his head fall back on the shoulder behind him, having forgotten his momentary panic.

After that, there was no more time for panic as those fingers slid into him, opening him up and the other hand reached around and squeezed his cock. Another finger was added and John whispered “Do it already” before he felt that cock pushing into him, and thoughts that he was blinded and in a room with somebody who he didn’t really know faded from his mind.

John found that the arrangement—while strange—worked out remarkably well. He didn’t know who he was having sex with during the night, so he didn’t get uncomfortable and fidgety around anybody during the day. He didn’t fret and have to avoid having those irritating talks and complimenting them on whatever they were wearing or doing. He didn’t have to put any work in to get laid, all he had to do was abide by some simple rules which weren’t bothering him anymore.

He did think it must be strange for the other person though. Passing by him in the corridors everyday, handing in mission reports to him, maybe even calling him ‘sir’ while he spent his nights watching John groaning, swearing and gasping, legs spread and hands clutching that short hair as that tongue did remarkable things to John’s ass.

But nobody treated him any differently than they ever had, so whoever was spending his nights fucking John against a wall, he was remarkable at not showing it during the day.

His mystery partner never stayed the night either. Sometimes they would lie in bed together when they were both exhausted, arms around each other and sweat cooling slowly, lazily kissing and touching, legs and arms tangled around each other.

But then he would feel the body in his arms shifting and he’d get a firm but regretful kiss on the lips and his forehead before he heard shuffling and rustling around his room, and then always found himself alone again.

After two months, John still didn’t know who his night visitor was and he still wasn’t very disturbed by it. His partner always took every precaution in the book to avoid letting John identify him in anyway.

He took John to the bathroom and helped him learn where everything in his bathroom was until John could take care of business on his own. John learned he was allowed to nip, bite and suck on nearly any part of that wonderful but mysterious body, but not on the neck or face, so nobody would see the marks.

There were a few times when he didn’t see his partner but it was never due to either of them not wanting to or forgetting.

Three weeks spent debugging in the infirmary with restraints on him and medical personnel watching him like hawks and his team hovering anxiously had to put their visits on hold.

But the first night he was back in his quarters, he put the blindfold on, not really expecting a visitor. But his partner did come. Instead of having sex, his partner spent a long time gently smoothing moisturizer onto his still tender skin, tugging off remaining flakes of insect skin and kissing John like he had missed him as much as John had missed him.

Spending a few days with Ford and his fellow half crazy junkies also resulted in John sleeping with only a snoring Rodney for company.

Then came six months spent alone with a bunch of meditating ancients. Teer was nice, but obviously had pure vanilla tastes, which was okay a few times, but bored John after a while. He missed his partner more when he was with Teer than when he was lying alone in his bed, staring at the ceiling and making up his own porny brain teasers.

When he was back in his quarters and 2200 rolled around on his first night back, he sat on the edge of his bed, and as soon as the doors opened and he heard the locking mechanism being fiddled with, he got up and stumbled across the room, groping through thin air until he felt that familiar body.

He felt his partner turning around and John shoved them both against the wall, kissing and touching and grabbing any part of him he could reach. His partner didn’t try to slow him down and they came minutes later, pants around their knees and gasping into each others mouths as their cocks ground into each other.

*          *          *

And then he spent a day desperately trying to once again preserve his friendship with Rodney, only this time, it wouldn’t be his trust in Rodney that was in danger of ending, it was Rodney’s life.

John knew they had had their problems and that they still weren’t completely back to where they had been a year ago, but he had never felt so relieved as he did when that jumped door opened and Rodney stood there amidst rushing water pouring out of the jumper, soaking wet, wide eyed and so deeply in shock that he wasn’t even panicking anymore.

Radek and John dragged Rodney into their jumper and slammed the hatch. While John programmed an ascent path with predetermined velocity changes to accommodate the decompression into the jumper, Radek got Rodney out of his soaking wet clothes and wrapped him in blankets.

Then Radek came up to the front, anxiously muttering that he had to re-tweak the systems he had butchered on their way down.

So John sat down beside Rodney, trying to coax some warm water between his lips and rubbing his arms briskly. When he touched Rodney’s arms ten minutes later and discovered that they still felt ice cold, he pulled the other sleeping bags down, opened them up and zipped them together. He pulled off his own clothes and pulled Rodney into the sleeping bag with him, stifling a yelp when ice cold skin touched his.

Radek hurried over and set his tablet down for a moment to bury John and Rodney amongst the blankets and sleeping bags before going back to making sure the jumper actually made it to the surface.

John shifted so that Rodney lay plastered on top of him, John’s legs and arms wrapped around him to warm as much of him as possible. Rodney stank like sweat and sea water but John was just too glad to be smelling Rodney at all to care.

It seemed to take forever until Rodney’s shivering slowed and his skin wasn’t ice cold anymore. John shifted around from time to time, rubbing Rodney’s feet between his and working stiff, cold fingers to get the circulation going properly again.

Rodney started muttering when they were half way up, most of it too soft for John to hear, but he caught the words ‘Sam’ ‘wrong’ and ‘get me’ quite a few times. He muttered back reassurances into his drying hair that they were here, they got him and that he was safe. He decided to ignore the mutterings about Sam for now.

Then Rodney asked what time it was. John had no idea if Rodney knew who he was lying on top of or where they were, but he decided to answer him anyway. He was surprised to discover it was 2138 hours already.

The second he told the physicist, Rodney stiffened and his eyes widened and he struggled, trying to get up.

“Rodney! Quit it! Shh, it’s okay. Stop it. You’re fine. We’re all fine. You have to stay in the nice warm cocoon until we get back to the city, okay?”

Rodney was shaking his head but was too weak to struggle, so when John yanked on his arms, he collapsed back onto John and John pulled the blankets tight around them again.

Rodney murmured something into John’s collarbone that he didn’t hear. “What buddy? Say it again.”

“I have to—I have to—have to send John an email. Tell him not—not tonight.”

John frowned up at the ceiling, wondering if hypothermia could make you go crazy, and then tried to remember what other John they had working in the city.

“Which John, Rodney?”

Rodney shook his head frantically. “Can’t say. Can’t say. No, no. No asking and no telling,” he muttered, sounding close to dozing off.

John craned his neck to see where Radek was and to ask the guy if he could ask Carson about dementia being a side effect of being trapped in small, water logged vessels.

Rodney was still muttering. “He’ll be waiting. And—and he shouldn’t wait all night. I have to send an email. Can you send an email?”

“Sure, buddy. Anything you want. As soon as we’re back in the city, I’ll send John an email and tell him you’re busy.”

Rodney was shaking his head again. “No, no. We have to send it now. It’s almost 2200 and that’s our time. Our time.”

John opened his mouth to lie and say that no, it really wasn’t twenty minutes to 2200, but then stopped. He quickly ran back Rodney’s last few sentences in his head.

No. It couldn’t be. There was no way.

No way.

But…

No. It was a coincidence. That’s all. Just because he and his mystery partner met at 2200 every night and Rodney had to meet his John at 2200 tonight didn’t mean that Rodney was…no.

As Rodney kept muttering about having to send an email, John thought about what to ask Rodney to clear this up once and for all.

“Hey, so I didn’t know you were seeing anybody.”

He felt Rodney shaking his head. “I am, he’s not. That’s why the rules are important. He’s not seeing anybody. If people ask, he can say he’s not seeing anybody because…because he’s not.”

John pressed his lips together. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. But he had to know.

“That would only work if he’s blindfolded whenever you’re together, Rodney. Don’t tell me you blindfold the guy you’re sleeping with.”

Rodney sighed softly, almost sadly. “I don’t want to. He doesn’t want to. But we have to. So if people ask—”

“—then he can say he’s not seeing anybody. Male or female. Pretty clever, Rodney.”

He felt Rodney’s lips turning up at the corners as he smiled into John’s chest, his eyes drifting closed.

“Had to be clever. Can’t get John in trouble and John didn’t trust me anymore. I had to fix it. Had to fix it.”

John lay there, so stunned he couldn’t hear Rodney’s mutterings anymore.

His mystery partner was Rodney McKay. He had been having amazing sex with his best friend for months and he hadn’t known.

And Rodney hadn’t ever let on. There hadn’t even been a hint.

John always wondered what had made his government trust a loud mouth like Rodney with top secret information, but now he knew.

Rodney was a damn good actor and knew exactly what people expected to hear and see from him.

Which was how he spent some nights tangled around John on his bed, gasping and groaning into each other’s necks and other nights sleeping in a sleeping bag two inches beside him, doing nothing more than muttering a ‘good night’ and rolling over.

John ran through a few scenarios in his head, trying to decide why the hell Rodney had done this. Why the hell had he started a relationship with John without allowing him to know it?

He couldn’t have feared him being homophobic, because he had known for years that John was bisexual and hello? Homophobic men didn’t tend to let other men fuck them every night. And if he had wanted to hurt John, humiliate him for some reason, he would have done it by now.

Had the whole charade really only been to protect John in case some higher ups from the SGC ever stuck their nose into things?

But Rodney had to know that John could keep his mouth shut as well as he could. Rodney was right that John could say that he wasn’t seeing anybody, but if asked whether he was engaging in homosexual activities with a man, he would have to say yes, regardless of whether he knew the man’s identify or not.

Maybe it was to protect Rodney. But Rodney wasn’t bound by the same idiotic rules that bound him. He wasn’t military.

So why the hell had he never ‘fessed up and let John know who was making love to him every night?

John argued back and forth in his head all the way back to the city, through getting Rodney untangled and onto a gurney, through his own physical, through the reassurances that Rodney would be fine and the long walk back to his quarters, where he knew he would spend the rest of the night with no company, only thoughts.

*          *          *

When he got an apologetic—anonymous—email two days later saying that his mystery partner had been busy and had to miss a couple of nights, he realized that Rodney didn’t remember anything from the trip back to the city.

John was still at a loss of how to handle the situation, so he decided that turning down good sex or causing a scene prior to that sex was stupid, so he put the blindfold on, turned the lights low and sat on his bed, waiting.

The rest of the night, John kicked himself for not having figured it out earlier. He ran his fingers over Rodney’s face, feeling those familiar features that he had never thought to connect to the visual version he saw everyday.

He heard Rodney groan into his mouth when John ran his tongue over his teeth and marveled at the fact that it was a groan very similar to the ‘oh god we’re doomed’ groan and that he should have figured it out.

He forgot all about confronting Rodney, especially once Rodney pushed inside of him and John wrapped his legs around his waist, pulling him in deeper and Rodney bent down to kiss him and nip his lower lip while slowly thrusting into him.

Once they were done, John lay there, panting and running a hand down Rodney’s sweaty back as he lay on John’s chest, warm breath puffing across his nipples.

“I gotta pee,” John whispered and Rodney shifted off him. John easily navigated his way to the bathroom and took care of business, marveling over the fact that he could do this without using his eyes now.

He knew he wanted to confront Rodney, to tell him that he knew it was him and to ask him why the hell he hadn’t wanted John to know that. But Rodney would run. He knew he would. And then it would all be over.

John mentally asked Atlantis to flush his toilet while he leaned against the counter, thinking things over.

Finally, he had a plan. He grinned to himself, kind of sad that he couldn’t see the grin in the mirror. He liked his devious grins.

He crossed back to his bed and crawled onto it, crawling up Rodney’s body and planting his knees on either side of his hips. Leaning down, he nuzzled the back below him until he found Rodney’s spine. Slowly, he kissed his way up his back while his hands gently grasped both of Rodney’s.

And before Rodney could catch on and squirm away, John twisted his legs and pinned Rodney’s legs with his shins and brought the trapped hands up above Rodney’s head and pinned them to either side of the pillow.

He felt Rodney stiffen, but not a sound escaped him.

“I’m not going to hurt you, moron. Relax. I just don’t want you to run.”

He waited for Rodney to ask him what he wanted, but he remained surprisingly quiet.

John grinned. “You’re a devious, clever little bastard, Rodney McKay, you know that?”

Rodney stiffened even more and a slight tremor ran through the body trapped beneath John.

“You know, consider you never shut up during the day, you’re being awfully quiet.”

John heard a defeated sigh. “If you let me up and let me leave without hurting me, I’ll never speak of this to anyone, Colonel. I swear.”

John frowned. That wasn’t what he had been going for. “What? Why the hell would I want to hurt you? And can you not call me by my rank when we’re both naked in bed together?”

“Please, just let me leave.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No. You want me to leave.”

“What? If I wanted you to leave I would have thrown you out, not trapped you to the bed.”

Rodney stayed quiet and John realized that his inability to use his words to convey anything of importance had really messed things up.

Releasing Rodney, he pulled him onto his back and straddled his hips. Reaching up, he pulled off the blindfold and stared down at Rodney.

They both stared at each other, Rodney looking fearful and obviously trying to seem confident, and John just staring at a naked Rodney lying beneath him.

Finally, John had looked his fill and grinned. “It’s not fair. You’ve had so much more looking time than me.”

Rodney clenched his jaw and briefly closed his eyes. “What do you want?”

It was on the tip of John’s tongue to say “You in me” but knew the question wasn’t based on sex.

“I want to know why you did this.”

Rodney looked defensive. “I never forced you to do anything against your will and I never lied to you.”

“I never said you did. Christ, Rodney! I want to know why you didn’t want me to know it was you.”

Rodney let out a strangled laugh. “Would you have seriously let me do what we’ve been doing if you would have known it was me?”

John frowned. “Rodney, you’re my best friend. I care about you a lot and I’d be lying if I said I never thought about us being—being like this.”

“Even after Doranda?”

John fell silent.

Rodney lifted his chin slightly. “You see?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Fine. You want plain English, I’ll give you plain English. I didn’t want you to know it was me because of DADT. I didn’t want you to know it was me because you might have wanted me like that once but you didn’t trust me anymore. I knew you were sad after Doranda and we couldn’t figure out how to fix things between us, so I wanted to give you something that you’d accept without it seeming like I was only doing it to earn your trust back.”

“But what’s the damn point of giving me something amazing and teaching me to trust you again when I didn’t know it was you?”

“You didn’t have to. I didn’t want to force you to trust me again. I wanted to give you something good, I wanted to be with you in the only way I could, and our relationship during the day would do whatever it did without being influenced by the fact that I give great head.”

John grinned at that. “That you do.”

“So not the point right now.”

They stared at each other in silence for a while until John’s gaze drifted off to the side of the bed. “So now what?”

“What do you want?”

“This isn’t just about me.”

“You know what I want.”

“I want that too.”

“You don’t trust me anymore.”

“Well, at some point, I’m going to have to start to again, won’t I?”

“How do you know I won’t screw up again?”

“I don’t. That’s part of why trusting somebody is so scary. Besides, Doranda was partially my fault too and we both know we won’t let it get to that ever again.”

John leaned down and braced his arms on either side of Rodney’s head, his dog tags pooling on Rodney’s chest. Leaning down, he pressed a soft kiss to Rodney’s lips.

He chuckled and kissed him again. “No more guesswork in landing kisses accurately.”

Rodney smiled. “You’re a pilot. You were never far off even without visual guides.”

“Military perfection, McKay. Eat your heart out.”

Rodney laughed and it was the best sound John had heard for months. Leaning down, John licked Rodney’s neck and kissed his way up to his ear. Rodney tilted his head back to give him more room to play.

They were silent for a while, Rodney letting John explore a body he already knew but had to connect with the visual he was now getting.

“I’m really sorry, John. I made a really big mistake and it almost cost me the best thing in my life.”

John barely paused between kisses to murmur “Your ego?”.

“No, idiot. You.”

“If I’m the best thing you’ve got going, you’re in real trouble, McKay.”

“Shut up. Anyway, I’m sorry. Really, really sorry and I know that doesn’t cover it,   but—”

John pressed a finger against Rodney’s mouth. “It’s okay. I forgive you. I want to put this mess behind us once and for all.” He grinned and wiggled his eyebrows. “We have other things to be doing. More important things.”

Rodney smiled. “Such as?”

“You want a verbal description or a demonstration?”

“What you can’t do both?”

John laughed. “You’re so on.”