Chapter Text
Shep/McKay/Weir
- College Professors AU
John is the maths professor who plenty of students swoon over, but he’s also a bit of loner at first. Elizabeth is always curious to find out more about new staff and see how their addition changes the departmental dynamics, so she makes it her business to get to know him.
He bristles at the established way of doing things at times but is perfectly capable of fitting in when he wants to, piling on the charm. She isn’t entirely immune to his charms, but he seems to be aware it’s not that easy to sway her and there’s a respectful impasse there where he doesn’t try too hard anymore. Elizabeth appreciates it, she likes seeing the man behind the swagger. They get on well, often sitting companionably in the faculty lounge to do marking. Despite his cocky persona when questioned by most, he’s often quite quiet and contemplative around her. Anecdotes and stray thoughts are occasionally shared, allowing her to build a better picture of who he is over time. He has his baggage for sure, don’t they all, but he finds she likes what she sees.
Rodney, however, just seems to keep bumping into John, more or less literally at times, and gets ever more exasperated. “How does this keep happening?” which prompts John to quote the actual probability calculated in about two seconds flat. It’s possibly the first time she’s seen Rodney speechless. After that, Rodney starts to warm up to him little by little, and increasingly joins their usual table in the lounge. Of course Rodney still grumps about how oversubscribed John’s units are - the dropout rate is unfortunately fairly high too which she can tell bothers John - but he also sits close and takes some pleasure in watching John absorbed in his maths problems after he’s done his grading.
Rodney has a strange habit of switching positions that develops. He very precisely shares his time between sitting next to John and sitting next to her. As an outside observer, it’s easy to see Rodney’s interest in John but his behavior mirrored with her puts Rodney’s interest in her into question too. She’s known Rodney for about a year longer than John, and she always knew he acted differently around her. People tended to ask for favors from her in convincing Rodney to be a bit more reasonable, which bugged her until she decided to simply accept it as a useful political currency. It wasn’t like she had any hope of convincing Rodney to do anything he wasn’t already open to. She supposes, now that she looks back on it, she should have realized when he’d invited himself along with her to a Robert Frost poetry reading Teyla had organized. It wasn’t really his thing and he’d only accompanied her that one time, so she’d assumed he was expanding his horizons and confirmed his pre-existing notion it wasn’t of interest. Maybe he’d been hoping for a reciprocation or encouragement she hadn’t seen to provide.
Elizabeth decides they need a push in a new direction. To break out from being effectively study buddies of the teaching kind. They all get on well in their various ways and she suspects there’s interest in more. She leaves both John and Rodney an envelope in their pigeon-holes, personalized cryptic clues leading to a private music room she’s booked out for the evening. For John, she mixes up the puzzles, nothing with numbers alone, to make it more challenging for him and to more easily seed some of her own personality into it. She hopes he notices three is a recurring theme in his letter.
Numbers are John’s thing, words are hers, and Rodney - he strives for better, for more knowledge, and, perhaps unwisely, for perfection too. She’s watched how Rodney taps his fingers on the table enough times to know he hasn’t forgotten how to play piano, no matter how hard he’d taken his tutor’s criticism as a teen. The ultimate message she leaves for him is, “Play for us”. She has no doubt he’ll make excuses that he’s rusty, that it won’t be any good, but she has a feeling he’ll play, if he turns up. Because words are her thing and all Rodney really needs to understand is he doesn’t have to be perfect, he can just be, the same as John is with her. That’s all they really need.
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