Work Text:
-1.
At first, John is just a guy.
Then he’s still just a guy, but one that’s peripherally on Rodney’s radar as attractive. He’s nothing too special, but above averagely nice to look at, in a rakish hair, long legs kind of way.
Then he turns out to be smart, and Rodney’s radar goes ding! Ding! Ding!
*
0.
Those dings are, in theory, a very exciting discovery. In practice they’re problematic, because it’s unclear if there’s any chance of reciprocal sounds. That’s why he puts his hands over his ears and goes LALALA at it for a while, until a few years into the expedition when he’s once again single and lonely.
That’s when he catches himself looking at John sometimes, while John is talking or trying not to fall asleep in a meeting or even infuriatingly biting into an orange like it’s apple, and it makes Rodney want to smile.
This is when he realizes he is also quite possibly just plain in love with John. When John catches him looking and gives him a puzzled smile back, his heart doesn’t just politely say ding anymore, it goes BA-BOOM, BA-BOOM, BA-BOOM. That’s the kind of trouble that will stir a man into action, because said man (Rodney) is way too young and invaluable to die of heart disease.
*
1.
“So,” Rodney says, on a trek back to the gate from some rural village with absolutely zero ZPMs, “men.”
And John says, “Huh?” and Rodney wasn’t prepared for that, so he flounders a bit and goes, “How many kilocalories do you think they should eat per day?” and John rolls his eyes and says, “I’m not giving you my power bar, Rodney,” and that’s that.
It’s not a very successful that, all in all.
*
2.
After a brief recovery period, Rodney figures a second attempt would be well worth the potential for embarrassment. The flaw of the first lay in his own lack of forethought, and his unchallenged assumption that John would start explaining his sexuality in detail upon being given a one-word prompt.
Rodney has, since then, realized that would have been pretty unlikely. A little concerning, even.
He might have needed to herd John to the infirmary to get his head checked out.
The thing about John is that he’s complicated, but comes with a lot of benefits. He is both attractive and smart, and he’s also a colleague, Rodney’s gate team leader, and probably his best friend. Which doesn’t sound like a good combination of factors, but it is, even though it’s also odd all by itself.
Rodney’s best friend is an American and a military man. Where did he go wrong?
Questionable life choices aside, the simple fact of John’s proximity makes him uniquely available. The community of Earthlings in Pegasus is small, other humans can be reached only periodically through the gate, and when it comes to members of the expedition, there’s a danger of complication from the power imbalance. Rodney is a direct superior to a third of them, but not John. John lives one transporter away in Atlantis, is on the same side of the same gate as Rodney 98% of the time, and is the head of his own department. A department full of jocks with guns, but it counts.
And then there’s also the whole BA-BOOM thing, so Rodney would still want John over anyone else even if John were locked in a North-Korean prison in another galaxy, but still. It’s nice to know his heart made a logical choice.
So yeah – available, in theory. But is John actually available, like a piece of pie in the cafeteria that’s just there for the taking, or is he quote-unquote ‘available’, like the perfectly flaky citrus-free apple pie from Rodney’s favorite bakery back on Earth that he can only dream of because it would be heartbreakingly inedible by the time it’s cycled through the entire inspection and shipping process from one galaxy to the next?
That’s what Rodney is still trying to figure out when over breakfast the day after his first failure, he asks, “How do you feel about DADT?”
John’s head whips up. “What?” It’s a step up from huh, at least.
“How do you-”
“I heard you.” John sounds a little stiff. Rodney’s not too happy about that, because it’s not even close to what he’s trying to achieve. “Why? Are you aiming for Heightmeyer’s job?”
Rodney bites into his third piece of toast. Casual. Gotta act casual. “I’m just curious,” he says, casually almost spitting toast crumbs in John’s face.
John barely seems to notice Rodney taking a page out of the Satedan book of table manners. “You don’t have to be. It’s not relevant to you.”
“Well,” Rodney says, and chews his toast while trying to find a way to say but it could be! without making that too obvious. The tricky part about figuring John out is that it would be very easy if he just told John about his own feelings, but there’s a real chance that if he did that John would turn out not to reciprocate them after all, and then where would Rodney be? In some very awkward places, that’s where.
There’s half a bowl of oatmeal left on John’s tray when he picks it up. “Stick training with Teyla,” he says, by way of explanation.
Rodney watches him go and thinks, okay, no marked improvement in successfulness so far.
At least he gets to think about John and Teyla hitting each other with sticks. That’s something.
*
3.
Rodney is on a roll now, and when he’s on a roll, he’s not easily deterred. Granted, so far he has mostly rolled face-first into brick walls, but anyone who’s ever built a little self-driving robot that can navigate its way through a maze knows that just means you need to bounce back and try again while rolling in a different direction. And anyway, breakfast is but one of the meals the people of Atlantis consume on any given day spent in the city while they’re not under imminent threat from something that wants to kill them.
That is, lunch. He determines to try again over lunch, and he uses the intervening time in his lab to formulate a new plan.
He draws up some diagrams to help him. They have absolutely nothing to do with John, but they make it look like Rodney is doing something more productive than fret over whether his crush might like him back.
The gist of it is this: John Sheppard is one third legs, one third how-does-his-hair-do-that and one third indirectness, so Rodney decides he should let that guide him. He can’t grow his legs and his hair stubbornly refuses to do anything even near that cool, which means he’s left copying the whole running straight at a point slightly to the left of the actual point he’s trying to make. Which is much harder than it sounds – Rodney is not very good at subtle. His brain is usually still coming up with the end of a sentence while he’s already talking, and impulsivity isn’t all that conducive to the kind of conversational sneaking he is now attempting to attempt.
So after a morning of doodling line graphs to chart the dwindling number of M&Ms next to him over time, he comes up with one plan very last minute (his specialty) and decides it will just have to do. It’s already halfway out of his mouth before he can weigh pros and cons, anyway. “Were there gay people on Sateda?”
It is indeed what passes for lunchtime on Atlantis, and he’s sharing a table in the cafetaria with his whole gate team. This is the point: John needs to be there for this discussion, so he can indirectly be reminded that guys kissing guys (like, say, John kissing Rodney, for a random example) is an option that exists. Or- Something like that.
Again, Rodney’s not that great at sneaking. His brain is too heavy to tread lightly.
Ronon, who this question was obviously aimed at – because asking John about Earth wouldn’t have made sense and Teyla just recently requested gate transport to the Athosian settlement to witness two of her female friends getting married, Rodney thought that part through at least – glances up from the roast potatoes he’s shoveling into his mouth. He raises an eyebrow in that slightly terrifying way he has. “Yeah.”
“Cool,” Rodney says.
For a scary second that seems to be the very lame, very quick end to the conversation, because he’s not really sure what else to add, but then Teyla’s social skills save the day once again. “Why this interest, Rodney?”
Rodney glances at John, who is just sitting there, chewing some broccoli. He’s paying attention, but he doesn’t look like he’s in the middle of a romantic epiphany just yet.
“Oh,” Rodney says, very casually. “No real reason. Just- Anthropological interest.”
That gets John to pull a face like his broccoli just turned to Brussel sprouts in his mouth. “Anthropological?”
“I can pick up a new hobby.”
“Not this one. You once tried to send a letter to the President asking him to close all anthropology departments and funnel their funding to your research.”
“Ssh!” Rodney hisses, because John’s talking kind of loud in the crowded cafeteria and one of their anthropologists is very good at karate. “It’s not my fault if what I do is actually useful for humanity’s future.”
“I’ll be sure to share that perspective with Dr. Peterson when I meet her for lunch tomorrow,” Teyla says.
Ronon is openly grinning and John has a face like he’s thinking, but in a way that makes Rodney a little nervous rather than one that inspires hope. He gets the feeling that he may be digging a hole for himself.
*
4.
But, he reasons, if he is in fact digging, then all that dirt needs to go somewhere. Sure, it’s a messy process and he may be standing in a hole right now, but once he’s ready he can just climb the pile he created and he’ll still come out on top.
Unless all the dirt he’s handling was loaded with toxic chemicals all this time and he’s poisoned now and it’s going to slowly kill him. It happens.
Rodney’s self-confidence also runs out sometimes. That happens, too.
Before it’s completely gone, he reasons that, considering the prominent place food has unexpectedly taken up in his endeavors so far, he should try to break from that while also sticking to it. Beer is the perfect murky middle ground. Beer can be ingested, and it certainly has a caloric value, but it’s tied to a certain kick up your feet, let down your hair, talk about astrophysics for fun instead of profit kind of mood.
So at the end of lunch, when all the broccoli is gone and they’re putting away their trays and are just about to part in order to do their jobs in different parts of the city, he very sneakily invites John out for a beer on the pier after work.
Just not sneakily enough. John pulls a worryingly conflicted face and says it’s been raining all day, and Rodney doesn’t come outside if he doesn’t have to so he says, “Oh, well, uh,” because he’s thrown off-course again by condensed water vapor off all things, and then John says, “We could-” and Rodney panics about communal spaces and interrupts with, “My room! Want to stop by my room after work!” and it’s not even really a question and he feels very stupid and unsmooth, but then John’s already said, “Sure, see you then,” and walked away like this was just a normal conversation.
Rodney is the greatest. He’s a genius at this. He can do nothing wrong.
He’s doing everything wrong. It’s a painfully slow and boring afternoon at the office, staring at nonsense line graphs and empty bags of M&Ms while his anxiety climbs and climbs. He regains a little peace when he escapes, leaving a bewildered Radek in charge, but it’s only the moment that John shows up at Rodney’s room that Rodney realizes he should’ve changed shirts, probably. His wasn’t dirty, but he’s been wearing it all day, and it’s these kinds of things, the simple ones, that just fly by him sometimes. If he had a different shirt, he’d know John’s Kinsey scale rating by now.
“Are you okay?” John asks, and Rodney realizes he’s been fondling a button on his chest, staring vacantly over John’s shoulder. This, this is the hole, complete with slippery slope. He’s sliding.
“Yeah,” he says, looking at John’s plain black T-shirt that could be the same plain black T-shirt or could be an entirely different new plain black T-shirt. “Of course.”
He waves John in. He dives into his fridge to retrieve two cold beers, flips off the caps, and by then John is standing by the window, looking out over the dreary gray Atlantis evening. Rodney hands him one of the bottles and casts around for small talk that isn’t the weather (it’s raining, they’ve already covered that), so he nods at John’s beer and says, “Do you like it?”
John blinks and turns his own bottle around to read the label. “Isn’t this the same stuff we always drink?”
“Yeah, I guess it is,” Rodney says, because it is, and he doesn’t want John to think he did something weird to it, because he didn’t, except now he might end up looking suspicious because he’s worried about being suspected of something that he didn’t even do. Meanwhile John hasn’t tasted the beer yet, so how would he know if it’s good or not anyway? Shit. Shit, shit- “So Ronon’s kind of hot, huh?” Rodney asks, in a last ditch effort coming from the ditch he’s in now. The shallow grave. The- Whatever. Other dirt metaphor.
John freezes up completely, and then seems to relax very consciously, limb by limb. “You think so?” He asks it carefully, like this is a delicate diplomatic negotiation, or maybe a bomb.
Rodney’s problem, of course, is that he cares so much he doesn’t have much care left. BA-BOOM, his nervous heart goes. He grabs his beer bottle like he would a cliff’s edge. “Don’t you?”
John takes a cryptic sip of his beer. He slouches against the window sill, his posture all legs and hair and points slightly to the left. “You know,” he says, in that overacted way he has when he’s trying to be casual and it makes him very obviously not casual, “I once asked Ronon if he was seeing anyone.”
Rodney is not sure what to do with that, but his interest is peaked. “Okay.”
“He’s not. No woman.” There’s a tiny pause that feels pointed somehow. A tiny point, like all the little raindrops on the window. “No man.”
“You asked him that?” Rodney asks, because this is confusing and he wants to be sure he gets it right. He has to get it right. “About the men?”
“Yep.”
Oh.
Maybe not so tiny a point after all.
*
+1.
So suddenly there are two beer bottles on the window sill because Rodney’s hands put them there, and John looks confused, and Rodney surges forward and presses his mouth to John’s and kisses him hard, because that makes sense, and it’s good, and-
And John is pushing him away with an iron grip on both of his shoulders.
*
5.
“What are you doing?” John asks, panting, wide-eyed, hands still keeping Rodney at arm’s length.
Which is not what Rodney was expecting to hear, at this huge point in time. “What?” He thinks that what he was doing is pretty obvious, as well as why he was doing it. John’s mouth is a little red, a little crushed, a little open still. They were clearly on the same page – Rodney verified that.
And then John says, reading upside-down from an entirely different book, “I thought you were testing out the waters with Ronon.”
So Rodney repeats, more forcefully, “What?”
John’s eyes are wild. “You asked about Sateda.”
“That’s ridiculous.” And technically true, but-
“And then you said he was hot-”
“I did, but-”
“-and seemed glad when I told you he might be into guys,” John finishes.
“I thought you were telling me you were into guys!”
John’s voice does that thing it does when he’s freaked out, where it catches in his throat. “I wasn’t!”
“So you aren’t?”
John brushes a hand over his mouth, but stops short when it seems to hit him what he’s doing. He drops the hand still remaining on Rodney’s shoulder. “No,” he says, and Rodney’s heart sinks like a stone, but then John continues, “I am.”
The ambiguity of language is going to kill Rodney one of these days. Either that, or the fact that his heart isn’t made of stone at all, but is instead a bouncy ball, jumping right back up the moment it seemed to have hit rock bottom. (Maybe that is, in fact, what he was digging for all the time. Solid ground.)
Words are failing him, so he flaps his hands a little to indicate what he means. “Me?”
John gives a nod. “Yeah,” he says, awkward but not at all unwilling. There’s something hopeful in there, something that steadily goes ding, ding, ding, like it’s a sound with which it has a lot of practice.
Which is enough for Rodney to think they’ve probably cleared up their misunderstanding, and that it was a very stupid one to begin with, because it seems they could have been kissing this entire time. The way John grabs his neck and his shirt and tries to pull him in closer when he gives it a second try feels like evidence, and also like heat and affection and ungh, and also just very good.
*
+1.
A forget-climbing-dirt-piles, this-is-Mount-Everest kind of good, maybe. A soaring, flying, of-course-John-Sheppard-would-take-him-to-these-heights kind of good.
*
+2, and so on.
Breakfast on the morning after is much like breakfast on the morning before, until Rodney thinks with some humor that he won’t be making things awkward this time by bringing up US policy, and then promptly finds himself blurting, “But wait.” He stops, clamps his mouth shut, thinks it over for once and decides he still has a point. “I also asked you about DADT.”
“Rodney-” John says, a little stricken, a little like he’d like Rodney to stop talking now.
Rodney doesn’t, because how can he? John is supposed to be smart. “How does that fit into your theory I wanted to sleep with Ronon?”
John eyes him, and then says, begrudgingly, “You don’t know how the military works.” He pokes at his oatmeal with a spoon. It doesn’t rise up or try to fight back, which seems to disappoint him. “Maybe you were confused.”
“I’m confused by you thinking I might think that Ronon would let himself be bound by an American law, especially one that stupid.”
Someone clears their throat, and when Rodney looks across the table, there’s Ronon and Teyla, surprisingly still sitting there just like they were a minute ago. “Are you sure you want to have this conversation right here?” Teyla asks, in that polite way that hints at something. Probably, Rodney wagers a guess, that they shouldn’t be having this conversation right here.
“I don’t want to have this conversation anywhere,” John mumbles, now hiding behind his coffee. Rodney is starting to agree with that, so he gives up and puts himself to more useful work by stealing a forkful of pecan pie from John’s tray. “Hey!” John says, and then ruins his own pretty good indignation by paying too much attention to Rodney’s mouth around the fork.
“You have a very weird breakfast spread today,” Rodney tells him, because who has oatmeal, coffee and pecan pie for breakfast? The pie’s presence may be explained in one way by John’s secret sway over the kitchen staff, but why he would want it in the first place remains mysterious.
“You don’t seem to be complaining,” John says, and Rodney certainly isn’t. He loves pecan pie.
And suddenly and brightly, he can’t help but wonder, with the pie being placed right at the corner of John’s tray that’s closest to Rodney, if John would really-
“Hey, McKay.”
Rodney whips his head up to find Ronon looking right at him. It’s strangely difficult today to remember Ronon and Teyla being here. “Look,” he says, taking a metaphorical stab with John’s oatmeal spoon at the topic Ronon is going to bring up, “please don’t ask me why John thought-”
“Are there any gay people on Earth?” Ronon asks instead, straight-faced. Next to him Teyla is smiling and not even hiding it.
Rodney looks at John to find him already sneaking a glance. “I suppose a couple less than before the Atlantis mission,” Rodney says, and John chokes on his coffee.
“Anthropological interest?” Teyla asks Ronon.
“Nah,” Ronon says, smirking now. “Wanted to see Sheppard’s face.”
Which is when John is mysteriously hit by a second wave of coughing. Rodney pats his back while stealing another bite of perfectly flaky pie, completely available.