And suddenly, for the moment, it was over. For the moment, at least, the Wraith thought they were gone, destroyed, and they were really, truly, as honestly as they’d ever been since arriving in this galaxy safe.

Elizabeth said, "Go get some sleep Rodney, please," and it was a testament to exactly how tired he was that he didn’t actually argue. Not that he should have, of course, because he’d had what felt like three hours of sleep in the previous four days and his bed, among other things, was calling his name like it had never called to him before. He could already feel the thick mattress beneath his back, the not as soft as he liked pillow beneath his cheek. He could imagine closing his eyes, could feel his brain drifting off into the gentle euphoria of blackness that was waiting for him. He could—

There was a hand on his arm, squeezing at his elbow, and just that touch gave him a jolt. He opened his eyes—when had he closed them?—and looked down at Elizabeth, who was smiling tiredly at him as she said, "I said that I wanted you to get some sleep, yes Rodney, but I didn’t mean you had to get it right here, right where you’re standing."

"No," Rodney said. "Of course not." He gave himself a little shake, then another, and oh good, he could actually feel a little surge of adrenaline entering in his blood stream—not nearly enough to make him useful for much of anything beyond getting him to his quarters, but good enough for that. That was all he needed it for, after all.

One last shake and then he uprooted his feet from the floor, started for the hallway that would lead him to his quarters. He was building up momentum as he went—one foot, then the next, then the next, the next—and then Elizabeth had to go and screw it all up by calling out after him, saying, "Oh, and Rodney?"

He stopped, turned around, and after a beat, she said, "If you happen to see Major Sheppard on your way, you might encourage him to get some sleep as well."

For a moment, a snapped instant, he thought that there was more to what she was saying than was on the surface, but when his eyes met hers there was nothing knowing or evaluating in her gaze. It was just a simple request, an if you have time. Completely innocent.

He let out a little breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding, said, "Yes, yes, fine," and went on his way again.

He didn’t tell her that yes, he would be seeing Major Sheppard, because Major Sheppard should already be in Rodney’s quarters. "I’ll see you tonight," John had said, and even though it wasn’t something Rodney was normally willing to let John risk, for a few hours tonight, at least, he was going to make an exception.

He didn’t tell her that they’d arranged it while Rodney had cornered said Major in a deserted corridor after he’d come back to Atlantis the first time. How he’d held onto John for a whole precious minute like he was never going to let go. How John had mouthed kisses into his hair and said, "I’m here, I’m here," over and over again.

But John wasn’t in Rodney’s quarters when he arrived, and he wasn’t in his own quarters, and it took Rodney’s sleep dulled brain a few minutes to prioritize a list of places that he thought John might go in times such as these.

It was a testament to how well he knew John, he thought, that he got it right on his first try.

Rodney could hear the sounds of fists hitting leather from well down the hallway, and suddenly his feet didn’t seem to be dragging quite so much anymore. He crossed his arms over his chest, sped up a bit, and then he could hear the heavy breathing and grunts of exertion that accompanied any fight. He walked until he was standing in the doorway of the weight room, and then he stopped and leaned against the doorjamb.

Although he had to have heard the door slide open, John didn’t seem notice him at first, not when he was so intent on beating the crap out of the bag in front of him. He was dancing around it, muttering curses at whomever it was that his brain wanted it to be, but eventually he moved to a spot where Rodney was directly in his line of vision. And then he stopped. He got in another few hits, yes, but they slowed until one arm was hanging down limp at his side and the other was wrapped around the punching bag, keeping it from hitting him.

"Rodney," he said. "You should be—"

"In bed, asleep," Rodney finished. "Yes, thank you, I’m quite well aware of that fact. But Elizabeth wanted me to check on you first, to tell you that that’s where you should be, too." He paused, then lowered his voice. "It would have been easier to tell you that, too, if you’d actually been in my room."

John raised an eyebrow and if he hadn’t looked so exhausted, if they hadn’t all been through everything they’d been through in the proceeding 72 hours (two weeks) it might have looked comical. If they’d been in the aftermath of any other situation, John might have sounded playfully seductive when he said, "She did, did she? She asked you to check on me." Instead, he just sounded tired.

"Perfectly innocent," Rodney answered, because he was sure the request had been.

John nodded. "I will," he continued. "I’m going to, but I— I went by your room, I did; I was going to wait, but I couldn’t sit still and since I didn’t know how long you were going to be, I decided I— You didn’t have to come check on me, you know. I was going to come back."

Rodney watched as he tapped his gloved fist into the bag again, then as he raised his arm to wipe it across his sweat covered forehead. Beads of perspiration were working their way down his cheeks, his neck, and his black T-shirt was already soaked through. He was sagging forward, exhausted, defeated looking, and suddenly Rodney thought that maybe Elizabeth had had ulterior motives for mentioning that he should check on John. Maybe she’d suspected that he would be down here, doing something like this—trying to erase actions, memories from his brain—and thought that he needed a friend.

Thought that if anyone was stubborn enough to get John to go to bed, Rodney was probably that person. And she, of course, was right.

Rodney took a step away from the doorway, then another, and there was a weight bench not so many steps to his left so he walked over to that and sat down. It was a mistake; he knew it even as he sat, because now that he was no longer moving, now that he was no longer forcing himself to stay upright, his limbs felt like lead. Even his fingernails felt like they were five-pound weights.

He blinked blearily at John, and for a few moments he thought that the other man would come to him, but he didn’t. He stayed right where he was, although it was starting to look as if he needed the bag rather like Rodney needed the bench. That wasn’t a particularly good sign, Rodney didn’t think.

Closer now, Rodney could see that John’s eyes were red-rimmed, that his lips looked raw, as if he’d been biting at them. Whatever tear tracks there might have been were lost amidst the lines of sweat, but Rodney thought there might have been some.

"It wasn’t your fault," Rodney said, and John gave him one of those looks, one that Rodney understood well enough to know that John knew exactly what Rodney was talking about, he just didn’t want to admit it.

"Ford," Rodney said, because he was too tired to play John’s evasion game tonight, to fall for any diversion. "We had to let him go."

"I know," John said quickly, but he was tensing up again; Rodney could see the muscles flexing in his arms, like he was aching to punch the bag again. "We didn’t have a choice," he said, but he spoke the words like they had, like there was some way they could have changed things.

Aside from shooting the Jumper down, which Rodney was pretty sure they wouldn’t have been able to do without some heavy artillery that would have taken the Control Room with it, Rodney couldn’t think of how.

John was swaying a little now, back and forth, back and forth, so Rodney said, "Come over here." He patted the bench beside him—expect to be obeyed, John had told him more than once, and you will be—and for once it actually worked. John walked towards him, slowly, and then he sank down on the bench beside him, close to him. The bench wasn’t long, but they were closer than they needed to be: thigh to thigh, shoulder to shoulder. It felt, to Rodney, as if John was leaning heavily on him, but given how unsteady he was feeling himself, it was more likely that they were propping each other up.

John’s glove covered hands were resting on his thighs, so Rodney reached for the nearest one and began working at the velcro around the wrist, peeling it back. He could see where John had bitten at the cloth earlier, pulling it tight around his own wrist, and he rubbed his thumb over the nylon, as if he could smooth the marks away. It took a moment to ease the glove off of John’s tightly curled hand, and another to straighten the fingers out again. He began to unwrap the gauze from around John’s wrist and knuckles, crunching it up in his hand as it unraveled. It was sweat-damp, just like the rest of John, but his knuckles didn’t seem to be rubbed raw, so that was good.

John was staring at the mats beneath them, so Rodney said, "A year ago, if anyone had told me that I’d know how to remove boxing gloves…" As Rodney had hoped, a change of subject was all John needed to get him to focus.

"He was just a kid," John said. "Just a kid, Rodney. He shouldn’t have—"

There was a hitch in his breath, then, and his voice sounded thick to Rodney’s ears. Suddenly he was leaning more heavily against Rodney’s shoulder, and Rodney didn’t know what to say. He did what he could, just squeezed John’s hand, gauze all gone, but before he could let go, John squeezed back, almost savagely, painfully.

Inside, Rodney winced, but he was pretty sure that it didn’t show on his face. Not that John was looking at him to see.

"No," Rodney said. "He shouldn’t have. But there are casualties in war."

Then Rodney was alone on the bench, John standing a few feet away, breathing so heavily he was nearly panting. His eyes were flashing, his hands—or at least the one that Rodney had already freed—clenching at his sides.

"Goddamnit," John said, nearly shouted. "Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know—? Do you think I haven’t watched—?" He looked away from Rodney, rubbing his hands over his face, then letting them drop to his sides again. He continued: "I’ve watched goddamn helicopters go— I’ve watched—" A pause, a swallow. "We lost 40 people out there today, yesterday, however long this thing has been going on for—I don’t even know what goddamn day it is. My people, Everett’s people."

Suddenly, Rodney was standing too, when a moment before, he wouldn’t have thought that he’d have the energy. He apparently had one last wind in him, though, and he was thrumming with it, because John hadn’t been the only one—

"And I thought that I’d watched you blow yourself up with a bomb that I fucking built, Major," Rodney said. "’So long, Rodney,’ you said. What the hell sort of goodbye is that?"

This wasn’t a conversation that Rodney wanted to be having now, and, even though he’d known that he was deluding himself even as he’d thought it, he’d hoped maybe not ever. In that first moment he’d seen John walking down the hallway towards him, after he’d first gotten back, all of his anger had faded away, and he’d thought maybe, maybe it was possible. He was too happy, too relieved, and he’d told himself that it didn’t matter what John had done in the previous hours, because John wasn’t dead. All that mattered was that John was here. Alive.

He didn’t want to do this, but now that he’d started, he wasn’t going to stop. "You were nearly one of those people, Major," he said. "I nearly watched you. I thought that I had watched you."

They stared at each other for a long, drawn-out moment, and John was the one to look away first. He seemed to fold in on himself, collapse a bit, crumple, and that was why Rodney hadn’t wanted to get into this now. They were both too tired. They’d both been hurt too much in the last few days.

He walked towards John, and even though they were in a public area, he wrapped his arms around him, and John, trembling, let his forehead fall forward to rest on Rodney’s shoulder.

"I—" John started to say, but Rodney said, "Don’t. Don’t apologize," because he didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t even really sure that John had anything to apologize for, aside from the obvious of making Rodney think he was dead. But really, Rodney just didn’t want to hear it.

He patted John rather awkwardly on the back, and slowly John raised his own arms, tightening them around Rodney’s shoulders. And this was what Rodney had been craving since their little interlude in the deserted corridor. Since the interlude before that, in Rodney’s empty lab. Since Rodney had let himself squeeze John’s hand, just as he sat down in the Ancient’s chair, as they tried to get the jumper systems online, before John had said—

He still didn’t want to do this, so he pressed his nose to the crease of John’s neck, breathed in deeply, and then propped his chin up on his shoulder.

"This is what I was going to say about Ford, and then I’ll drop it for now," he said, and John tensed again, started trying to step away, but Rodney held on tight. "There are casualties in war, Major, and Ford may well be one of them. But he’s still alive. We still have a chance of getting him back. Carson will figure out away to wean him off of the enzyme, and then we, you and me and Teyla, we will find him, we will patch him up, and then we’ll have our team back, okay?"

It took a long moment for John to relax in his arms again, a longer one for him to nod against Rodney’s shoulder, and it was only when he did that that Rodney let go of him. He tried to catch John’s gaze, to see if he could figure out what, exactly, was going on inside the other man’s head, but John was busy undoing the other boxing glove. He was pulling the velcro apart, letting the glove drop to the mat below. He was unwinding the gauze and letting it hang like a tail from his fingers.

Rodney watched as he bent down to grab the glove, and Rodney crouched down to grab the one that he’d dropped on the floor earlier, and then he walked forward, either to grab the one from John’s hands, or to let John take the both of them. Before he could, though, John had wrapped his free hand around Rodney’s wrist, tugging him closer. Then he kissed him: once, hard and fast, then again, slower, exhausted and desperate, with tongue. It was when Rodney heard the gloves drop to the ground for a second time, when he felt Johns’ arms coming up around his shoulders again, that he thought he should pull back. Because they were in public. Anyone could walk in. Wasn’t likely, but it could happen.

He gave himself five, four, three, two—

"John," he said, regaining tenuous control. "Major, not here. Not tonight."

John looked at him with half-lidded eyes, but Rodney was pretty sure that it was mostly from sleepiness, and said, "I thought I lost you too, you know. Twice. When I was in the Jumper. Then again, when you were trying to get the shield up. I thought I—"

And Rodney’s control snapped, finally. He pulled John more tightly against him, letting his hands fist in the small of John’s back. He kissed him and clung to him and let John feel like he was surrounding him. This was what he’d wanted tonight, just for a few hours. Why he’d asked John to meet him in his own quarters, because they deserved a few hours—to sleep, hold, know that the other was really there.

John was apparently thinking along the same lines, because he said in Rodney’s ear, "Your quarters are closer to the transporter."

Rodney nodded, as much as he could in such a tight embrace, anyway. And then he pulled away, but John made a grab for his hand, caught it and held on tight.

"I want to stay tonight, Rodney," he said. "I want the whole night."

Rodney felt himself freeze up, but John was rubbing a callused thumb over his palm, and he knew he should say no, no, absolutely not, because they had rules, they’d made rules.

"I want to wake up and know that you’re really there, that you’re with me," John said. "Screw the rules, okay. Tonight, we say screw it. We deserve this. You know we deserve this."

Rules always had exceptions, though, and he’d been willing to make one before, for the few hours he knew they both needed. Had been, was. He was willing to make one, he was, no matter that he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t, he—

"Okay," Rodney said, and for the first time in several days, he watched John smile.