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John fell asleep half an hour into Back to the Future.
He'd been released from the infirmary that afternoon, three days after the incident on P3X-989, which was why Rodney had caved and let him watch the stupid movie. That was what he'd said, anyway, with a great deal of huffing to show his disapproval. Truthfully, he didn't particularly mind watching it with Sheppard (though he would never, ever admit that) because Sheppard always smiled at his long-winded rants about the scientific inaccuracies.
But Sheppard was asleep and, without someone to complain to, Back to the Future was just plain stupid. Rodney was still awake, though—it was only just after 2100—and Sheppard seemed comfortable curled against his shoulder, so he figured he could stay a while longer.
He was going to pull up another movie after checking that the city systems were all still running smoothly (he'd been a bit paranoid about that lately), but he spotted the corner of a book peeking from behind one of the couch cushions. It wasn't War & Peace; he could see that it was a paperback, and it definitely wasn't a thousand pages long. Curious, Rodney pulled it from behind the cushion. And stared. Love Signals: A Practical Field Guide to the Body Language of Courtship.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," he muttered.
"Whuh?" Sheppard asked, lifting his head.
"Nothing," Rodney said, quickly shoving the book under a cushion again. "You fell asleep."
"Sorry." John rubbed a hand across his face.
"Just go to bed," Rodney suggested. "We can finish the movie another time. It's not like you don't know how it ends."
"'kay," John said sleepily, getting up and tugging off his t-shirt.
"Good night, Sheppard," Rodney said, hastily gathering up his laptop and pilfering the book.
"G'night, R'dney," John muttered from where he'd collapsed on the bed.
Rodney hurried back to his room, where he promptly dumped his laptop on the desk and sat down on the bed. He was only going to read a little bit. Just to see. (The author was an anthropologist, for crying out loud. Rodney glared at the Ph.D. after the author's name.) And, of course, so he could make fun of Sheppard.
He went back to Sheppard's room at 0547.
He'd finished the book shortly after midnight and immediately read it again to make sure he wasn't imagining things. At 0311, he'd decided that he should really let Sheppard sleep since he'd only just gotten out of the infirmary. He pulled up five project windows on his laptop and attempted to work on them for a couple hours. Really, he was being very nice by waiting until almost 0600 to wake Sheppard up. Besides, the man had fallen asleep at 2100 the night before.
He swiped his hand over the door chime six times before Sheppard opened the door, bleary-eyed and shirtless. "What?" he whined, giving Rodney a look somewhere between a squint and a scowl.
"What is this?" Rodney demanded, waving the book wildly.
"Huh?" John blinked sleepily.
"This!"
John's eyes widened in alarm as they focused on the book Rodney held up an inch in front of his nose.
"Why do you even have this?"
"Um, for reference?" John offered.
"You do all this stuff around me!" Rodney accused. "The leaning and the talking and the dinners. And the eyebrows!"
"Get in here already. You'll wake the whole hall," John said, grabbing a handful of Rodney's shirt and tugging him into the room.
"See! That! That right there!" Rodney gestured at John's hand on his shirt. John quickly took two steps back. "Touching! That's Phase Four of courtship! You've been courting me for years and you never said anything, you moron!"
"You had a girlfriend," John muttered, squirming.
"Yes, and look how that turned out." Rodney paused and narrowed his eyes. "You let me propose! What were you waiting for, you idiot, the wedding day? Oh, it would be just like you to burst in dramatically at the 'any objections' part."
"I'm not good at saying stuff," John said, rubbing the back of his neck. "And you never..."
"Hello? Bad with people!" Rodney said, gesturing at himself. "I never pick up on these stupid body language cues. I can't believe how monumentally stupid you are sometimes. If you'd just said something— What? Why are you looking at me like that? Wait, I know that look..." He began flipping through the book, scanning the diagrams.
John sighed. "It means," he said, pulling the book from Rodney's hands and letting it drop to the floor, "'Shut up and kiss me already, you moron.'"
So Rodney did. He found himself thinking rather ridiculously of "docking spacecraft"1 and the dubious merits of anthropologists as they leaned toward each other, but he was quickly distracted by the scratch of John's morning stubble and the slow slide of lips, warm and dry, against his own.
Anthropology might be a stupid discipline, but sometimes it was best to overlook those sorts of things.
1 "Ever so slowly, the couple's heads will loom closer and closer, like docking spacecraft." (Givens, 91) (Okay, so this is actually from an earlier edition of the book, but it was too good to pass up. So maybe John got the 1983 edition secondhand off eBay or something. Or maybe he's had the book that long...)