meeting of minds
Sam/Rodney | 1100 words | For runpunkrun, who wanted Sam and Rodney at a science conference.

Sam knew him well enough to see the warning signs: his face was growing steadily redder, twitching hands had sent his hair into wild disarray, and his jaw was working soundlessly as it prepared to deliver whatever torrent of words was reaching boiling point inside that brain of his. If they were back on Atlantis, or inside the SGC, maybe Sam might have let him go—after all, whenever something got McKay this pissed, he was usually right and occasionally entertaining—but they were in the audience of one of the most important physics conferences in the world.

There were several Nobel laureates and Grossman Award recipients in the room, not to mention the heads of the physics departments from dozens of prestigious universities and researchers who were funded by a number of Fortune 500 companies. Sam had already had to endure snide remarks from other attendees because she was there in dress uniform as Colonel Samantha Carter, PhD, but at least the IOA had allowed her to publish a carefully edited paper or two in the last four years; from the raised eyebrows they’d gotten when they checked in, McKay was only there on sufferance, and from the glares they were getting as McKay started to hiss and mumble to himself, he was close to being the first person Sam had ever known to be forcibly ejected from a scientific conference.

If a decade knowing Jack O’Neill and a year in charge of Atlantis had taught her anything, it was how to make an impromptu command decision. Sam grabbed McKay by the lapel of his (truly hideous) sports jacket and hauled him out of the room and through the first available door. For a moment, they were in darkness, and Sam could only hear the startled hitch of McKay’s breath, but then she fumbled along the wall and hit the light switch and—

McKay blinked. “Did you just forcibly pull me into a broom closet?”

Sam blew out a breath. She should have remembered just how often members of SG-1 ended up dead, imprisoned, stuck out of phase and/or harbouring the consciousnesses of alien entities—not all command decisions were necessarily good ones. “Maybe,” she said, prevaricating, “but it’s for your own good, McKay.”

He blinked again and then his jaw dropped. “Is this”—he jabbed a finger at his own chest—“is this some kind of thing? You finally decided to jump me in a broom closet? I mean, not that I’m objecting, because hi, that uniform is seriously hot and also—”

Sam clapped a hand over his mouth, and McKay stopped speaking almost at once, eyes blown wide. “McKay. Stop talking. You were about thirty seconds away from getting kicked out of the conference—getting us both kicked out—and I’m not letting you go back in there until you can behave yourself.”

She kept her hand there for a moment, until she thought her words had had time to sink in—but as soon as McKay had a chance to draw breath, he was off. “Are you kidding me? Thorvaldsen is demonstrably ridiculous! My six-year-old niece could demonstrate the holes in his logic, not to mention his lack of understanding of something as basic as the gravitational effects of—”

“Rodney,” Sam said. She was exasperated with him, but the hell of it was that that exasperation was hard to maintain when McKay was at least partially right. Through the walls, she could hear the faint sound of people applauding Thorvaldsen’s lecture. His work made eminent good sense if you had a grounding in orthodox scientific opinion—Sam, on the other hand, had spent the last ten years like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, and had had to stop herself from wincing at several points while he was speaking. “What little academic reputation we both still have is on the line here. Do you think you could at least sit through the rest of the day without picking another fight with anyone?”

“Nye and Tyson started it,” Rodney muttered.

“So that’s a no?” Sam said wryly.

“You can’t keep me in a broom closet all day!” Rodney yelped.

“Try me,” Sam said sunnily.

“You are a woman with issues.”

“I’m a woman who can kick your ass.”

“I know,” Rodney said mournfully. “And believe me, I wish I didn’t find that so hot.”

“McKay—”

“Yes, yes,” he said, leaning back against a shelving unit loaded with cleaning supplies and closing his eyes. In the harsh light of the single bare bulb, he looked his age—older, even, and Sam was reminded that he’d come here as a sort of vacation after fending off yet another attempt to capture Atlantis. “I am well aware that I blew that particular chance with you a long, long time ago. But that doesn’t mean that recent events haven’t—well, suffice to say that I have an increased appreciation for what it is that you’ve done. You do. At least allow me to, to…” He flapped a hand at her, eyes still closed. “We can take the unrequited thing as a given, right?”

Sam folded her arms and looked at him for a long moment—at the dark circles under his eyes and the mess of his hair and the firm, slanting line of his mouth. From outside, she could hear the muffled words of the moderator introducing the next speaker—Fernandez, she remembered from the schedule, who was about to give a talk on the possible behaviour of wormholes near black holes so wrong-headed that it hurt a little just to think about it. She couldn’t correct Fernandez’ misconceptions any more than McKay could—in so many ways, it was just her and McKay, the two of them, trapped too close together in a too small room.

She inhaled and decided, told herself it didn’t matter that most of her peers were on the other side of that door—after all, who were your peers when you’d bled and fought and snatched something like victory from the jaws of defeat, over and over on half a hundred worlds? She leaned forward—felt the scratchy tweed of his sports jacket against the palms of her hands as she pressed her mouth to his. McKay’s mouth was still against hers for a moment, and then opened to her with a low moan. He kissed her very, very carefully, so slowly that Sam felt herself flush, and when one of his hands came up to cup her cheek, stroke gently into her hair, she let herself press closer to him.

“That was—” His voice was hoarse, pitched low, and utterly sincere. “Thank you.”

“Rodney?” she said. Her forehead rested against his; his arms had come up around her waist.

“Yes?”

“Shut up,” she said, and kissed him again.