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It’s been A Day. The capitalization matters – of course all days everywhere are a day, but only on Atlantis, where the Wraith, the Genii, assorted other alien civilizations, the city and random happenstance seem to continuously trade off on trying to kill you, is almost every day also A Day.
“Are we done?” Rodney asks, on this particular day that is also A Day. Anyone who says being a scientist is not an endurance sport is wrong. There’s a twinge in his knee, his lower back will take days to feel normal again if ever, and his fingers are cramping up from the speed and fury with which he was typing up until a few moments ago. “Is it over?”
Radek drew the longer straw, so he’s the one holed up in the central tower with the heat map of the city. Even from this cushy spot he takes a nerve-wracking few seconds to confirm, “Yes.”
“Good work, everyone,” Woolsey’s wearied voice says over the radio. Rodney sags in his lab chair, but jumps when John drops the former hoover jerry-rigged into a foam-shooting device unceremoniously to the floor.
“Sorry,” John says, but he sounds like he’s too tired to mean it. The crisis has been averted; very suddenly, they’re at loose ends, just two guys standing in the deserted lab instead of frontline heroes fighting for the survival of humanity’s little outpost on this planet.
But Rodney is still wired. Near-death experiences are an underrated replacement for caffeine, so he looks for something to do, and the only thing around is John.
Something about that thought strikes Rodney as worth looking into, but he’s already busy looking at John by then, so he brushes right past it. “Hey, wanna get something to eat?”
“No,” John says, and steps over the now very strange and useless contraption on the floor to make his way to the door.
Rodney jumps up and trails him. “Play some chess?”
“No.”
“A round of video golf?”
“No.”
“Watch a movie?”
“Rodney,” John says, but Rodney has already stepped into the transporter with him, and after a look that doesn’t mean much to Rodney, John just taps the navigation screen.
They’re zapped to the section with the living quarters closest to the East pier, which is the transporter that has John’s room just down the hall. John sets off for it. Rodney follows, but it takes him a moment to think of his next suggestion. “Talk about math?” Perhaps he should have said guns, but there is only so much he’s willing to compromise on his own interests to entice John Sheppard.
“No,” John says again, who in spite of leaving his room door wide open until Rodney is through it, is playing oddly hard to get. “I’m going to sleep.”
“Oh,” Rodney says. It occurs to him John could be tired, but then his eyes fall on the most prominent piece of furniture in the room. Even more prominent now than it used to be – or bigger, at the very least. “Hey, you got a new bed.”
John, standing by said bed, turns around with a face that is – yeah, definitely tired. Also a little unreadable. “You told me to.”
Rodney had; he’d pointed out that they both needed to fit on it together on movie nights. “Oh,” Rodney says again, but this time pleasantly surprised. He has enough incompetent junior scientists under his supervision that just because he says something, it doesn’t mean he expects it to actually get done. John is good at that, though: the doing.
When he wants to be, that is, which makes Rodney feel a little warmer still. Right in his heart, which reminds him of an important part of why he was trying so desperately to hang out with John in the first place.
John peels off his charred jacket, leaving only his black T-shirt. He drops the jacket over one of the wooden posts at the end of his newly bigger bed.
Rodney briefly wonders if he’s imposing. John is not a man who ever holds himself at hard angles, but right now it’s like every corner has been worn out of his body. He sits down on the bed like it doesn’t really matter that it’s there, because his knees would have given out on him either way. Even his hair is uncommonly droopy.
Nah, Rodney decides in the end. The best antidote for drowsiness is coffee (or near death), but the second best is a distraction that keeps nagging at you, and he can be one of those things. (Carson, of course, does not concur – “sleep, Rodney! the best antidote for being tired is sleep!” – but really, what do medical doctors know?)
So Rodney says, “Hey, as we were working on the fire suppression system today-”
“Don’t think you can call it that.”
“Working on?” Rodney supposes they did have to fight it, more than anything.
“Suppression system.” John looks like he would have rolled his eyes if he still had the energy. “It was creating more fire.”
“To get rid of the flames that were already there by eating up anything they could feed on,” Rodney argues. It’s not a great method, but it is one that works. Eventually.
“Like air,” John says. “And flammable materials. And people’s hair and clothes.”
“Clothes are included in the group of flammable-” John looks up sharply, and for him to do that when he’s operating under maximum power saving mode is a sign of something. Rodney makes an educated guess that it’s his imminent expulsion from the room, so he switches back to what he was trying to get off his chest, anyway, before John started arguing technicalities. “So as we were fighting the fire encouragement system today-”
The corner of John’s mouth twitches and Rodney feels very good about himself.
“-I was thinking about love.”
“Love?”
“Love.”
There’s a beat, and then John says, “Okay.” He slumps forward. For a second Rodney thinks he’s falling asleep in an unlikely direction and is about to be woken by the harsh reality of a somersault to the floor, but John’s body stills in time for him to pluck at his laces, merely doubled over.
Rodney takes this as implicit encouragement to continue. “Fire means passion and heat and- You know, fire. And it made me think about what I want in a romantic partner.”
John kicks off his boots and leaves them where they land on the floor, laces a haphazard tangle. His feet look oddly delicate without their cocoon of leather and rubber, especially when he wiggles his socked toes.
Rodney frowns and tears his eyes away. “So I thought you could help me brainstorm. I already have some thoughts. I mean, obviously, hotness is a factor.”
“Uh-huh,” John says. He lies down on his back on top of the covers, hands folded over his flat stomach, the long lines of his body on display. Someone should paint him.
Rodney takes a seat at the end of the bed, pushing John’s toppled boots aside with his own foot. He thinks he’s entitled. It’s been A Day, after all. “Humor is important.”
John huffs a laugh.
“That wasn’t a joke.”
“I know. I just imagined you dating Seinfeld.”
That’s admittedly a little funny, so Rodney indulgently huffs at it too. In Seinfeld’s defense, he did have good hair, once upon a time. Lots of volume. “Not that this is really a requirement, but it would be optimal if I’d known her for a while.” That rules out celebrities. “To have some idea of whether we fit, you know?”
John doesn’t reply for a few seconds. Again Rodney wonders if he fell asleep, but then his eyes open to look at the ceiling. “In the five years that I’ve seen you almost every day, you’ve never dated anyone you were already friends with.”
“I said it wasn’t a requirement. It would just be nice.”
“Okay.” John shrugs while still lying down. “Fair enough.”
Rodney hums agreement. “I need someone who’ll admit when I’m right.” His eyes stumble upon John’s discarded boots and he immediately thinks of another one, the kind of thing he would not have anticipated pre-Jennifer, but that has become very clear after her decision to stay on Earth forced an end to their relationship. “I can’t be with somebody who doesn’t make Atlantis a priority.”
John’s eyes have fallen shut again.
“John?” Rude.
John lets out a heavy sigh. “Look, I spent all day running around the city putting out fires – literally – to make sure there’d still be a bed for me to return to in the end. Can you let me enjoy the victory for a solid five hours? I promise I’ll be all ears if you want to talk after.”
Rodney snaps his fingers, feeling like John just handed him a puzzle piece to an interesting scientific problem. And what is love, deep down, if not just biochemistry that humanity doesn’t quite grasp yet? “Yeah! Much as I hate to admit it, I need someone who’ll let me know if I go wrong.”
“Like when you keep on talking when she really wants to sleep?”
“Yes! Like that.” But not just that. It’s a push and pull. “But I also need someone who’s willing to listen, you know?”
“Yeah,” John says. “I hear ya.”
Something niggles at the back of Rodney’s mind. It’s like working on a problem for so long that you know the solution is staring right at you, but it keeps dancing just out of reach. Like John, when he refuses to hand over the last chocolate-flavored pudding cup that he doesn’t even really want until Rodney trades him a banana for it.
Oh.
Yeah! Food: that’s another thing anyone he’s dating should understand. Might be best if they like very different things than Rodney does, because then there’ll be more left for him.
“You’re thinking about food now, aren’t you?”
It’s unnerving sometimes how well John knows him. “I might be,” Rodney hedges, but at least this adds another point to his list of needs. A sparring partner, someone who can keep up with what he’s thinking, like when he tells John half a plan and John guesses the other half.
God, this is what Heightmeyer meant when she said he might be setting unrealistic standards for himself in romance, wasn’t it? As if a person like that could ever actually exist.
He looks back over at John, still fully clothed on his back in the middle of the mattress. Rodney has an odd impulse to just sit here and watch for a bit. Must be a sign of his own exhaustion.
“Hey, Rodney?” John says, into the contemplative quiet. His eyes are still closed. “I hope you find someone like that. You deserve it.”
Rodney smiles a little. “Thanks. That means a lot.” Kindness. Kindness is important, too. He doesn’t tell John about that because John deserves it more than anyone alive, probably. Which, speaking of- “Night,” he says, and John hums something back, and Rodney pats his ankle and leaves the room to let him sleep.
Somehow, he still makes it all the way down the hall to the transporter before realization hits him like a ton of bricks over the head. He goes cold all over, then very hot, and then he’s back at John’s door, raising his hand to knock and punching air because it’s already sliding open. He stumbles a little, and he takes a few steps inside, and then he’s standing there, in the middle of John Sheppard’s room, weighted down by knowledge.
No – Knowledge, capitalized. Like A Day.
The room lights have dimmed. John is still flat on his back on the bed (Rodney wonders if John sleeps like that, and then stops wondering because he really shouldn’t), but his head is turned and he’s peering at Rodney. “What now?”
“So,” Rodney says, floundering, “I have another question. Let’s say, hypothetically, that I think I found someone who ticks off every single box on my list. Do you think I should tell them?”
John stares at him for what feels like enough time for dinosaurs to evolve and go extinct. “I think,” John finally says, painfully slowly, “that maybe they already know.”
He’s playing the pronoun game. They’re both playing the pronoun game and Rodney could have kept tiptoeing around in accordance with that if he hadn’t tripped over his own feet. And he laces his shoes up right, not like John. “You do?” he blurts, metaphorically sailing straight down to the floor, arms windmilling so wildly it’s a good thing Don Quixote is not anywhere in the vicinity.
But then John says, “I also think that you should close the door. I still need my five hours.”
“Can I-” The doors slide shut, cutting his sentence in half. He’s on the same side of them as John, eliminating the need for the rest of those words anyway.
If she can avoid it, Atlantis never does anything John doesn’t want her to.
When Rodney turns away from the door, John has moved. He’s no longer in the center of the mattress – he’s taking up one side, leaving an open space on the other half. A half of the new bed, which John got because Rodney told him to. John, who is looking right at Rodney.
Rodney squirms a little. “I’m not sleeping in all of my clothes.”
“I’m not taking your clothes off for you.”
“Not tonight, or in general?”
“We’ll see.” John says that, but he also looks Rodney up and down. Rodney feels pretty good about his chances.
Something occurs to him. “Did I plan this? Am I just that smart, without even knowing it?”
“No,” John says. Rodney tries to say hey but it gets smothered because he’s pulling his mostly buttoned-up button-up over his head at the same time. “You wanted someone to tell you when you were wrong,” John adds, like he heard it anyway.
“I really don’t recall saying that.”
“Wrong again.”
After kicking off his shoes and pants, Rodney is left with underwear and a T-shirt. He walks to the bed, almost trips over John’s boot which he put there himself five minutes ago, and has to tug hard on the blanket to get it out from under John, who clearly doesn’t know how to be a normal person when it comes to beds.
“Ugh,” John says, in complaint at being jostled, and then, when Rodney finds it in his heart to maybe not hog the covers on this very first night together and starts tucking him in, “Oh God.”
“What?” Rodney asks.
John gives him one of those unreadable looks again, but it’s like somebody clued Rodney in to the code. The letters have shifted, and now the line of John’s mouth and the soft corners of his eyes very clearly spell I like you a lot, and right now this baffles me. John’s voice says, “Go the fuck to sleep, please.”
“Okay,” Rodney says, and he lies down, and the lights go from dim to off, and he thinks, oh, hey, maybe that’s another thing he needs: someone who gets him to put his head down on a pillow. This is kind of nice, actually.
“Five hours,” John reminds him.
“Five hours,” Rodney promises, and thinks about love, and beds, and John, and how fortunate a combination of those three could be in about 299 minutes, and then falls asleep like John threw that hoover to the floor: quickly, decisively, and completely exhausted.