Originally published on archiveofourown.
No one ever talks about the blood. About the way the color red seeps into your skin, stains the lines of your fingers starkly.
No one ever talks about the blood. About the way even after its scrubbed away you can still feel it, smell it, see it.
No one ever talks about what it's like to kill and hate yourself for it. About what it's like to kill and not regret it.
No one ever talks about the blood.
And now that's all he can think about.
-x-
He met a girl when he was sixteen who carried herself in all the right places, who held her head high without a modicum of reluctance.
She was the first person to ever tell him she loved him, other than Jeannie.
She died in a car accident the night before his seventeenth birthday.
He remembers crawling out of her car, coughing up blood onto the back of his hands, and thinking it was the most disturbing thing he ever saw.
Until he looked back, and saw the blood leaking sluggishly from the corner of her mouth. Until he saw that blank stare in her eyes.
Until he saw her there in the driver's seat, dead.
-x-
It's impossible to forget that stare, but too painful to remember.
Except now, that's all he can think about.
The girl he loved, the one he might have been able to save if he had tried to get her out instead of saving himself first. (And maybe he couldn't have saved her at all, but
he hadn't tried, had he? Not until it was too late.)
He remembers her face, the way it made his heart break into a million sharp pieces.
The way it hurt more than the physical damage of the accident.
-x-
No one he loves will ever get abandoned by him like that. Not again.
-x-
He isn't really thinking about it when it happens. He just sees John there, the blaster pistol pressed up against the back of his head, close enough to brush his hair up
even higher than usual.
He sees the gun, and the resigned look on John's face, and the self-satisfied smirk on the alien's, and he knows.
They hadn't tied Rodney up. What was the point, "he's a scientist," after all.
They'd wrapped the rope so tightly around Teyla's arms that she gasped in pain, used twice as many knots around Ronon with his bulk alone.
But Rodney was a scientist.
Weak.
They took his gun, but hadn't bothered to search him after they had his radio.
Their mistake.
He thinks their worst mistake was putting the gun to John's head and leaving him with that stupid look on his face.
Rodney had known he loved his team for a long time. He just hadn't realized what kind of love he had for John Sheppard until he saw that look.
"I'll go with you," Rodney says, and John resists enough to try and break away.
It earns him a smack to his head with the blaster pistol, and Rodney's raised hands.
"Don't hurt him," Teyla says, and for a brief second, Rodney thinks she means John.
The man looks back at Teyla with that sharp teeth grin, and says "I won't kill you if he behaves-"
And Rodney takes his moment of pride to slam his tac knife into their captor's neck, the blade going in one end and out the other.
The man blinks at him, once, twice.
And then the splatter of blood stops, and the man stops too.
He drops to the ground, eerily still and silent.
Rodney's hands are shaking as he pulls the knife out, the blood slick and wet and warm.
He turns to cut their ropes and something about the stunned looks on their faces makes it real.
He throws up, vomit splattering against the dead man's boots.
It takes ten minutes for his hands to steady enough to cut through John's ropes, by which time their captor's friends are probably already getting suspicious.
But John doesn't hesitate, just slices through Teyla's ropes and leaves her with the knife to cut Ronon's ropes too.
And then he's wrapping his arms around Rodney.
For a ten count, Rodney lets himself go.
And then he brushes John off.
"Let's get out of here," he says, and no one says a word about the way his voice cracks around each syllable.
-x-
No one ever talks about the blood.