Nothing Rhymes, by Hth (Food challenge)
Oct. 13th, 2005 07:50 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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sga_flashficTitle: Nothing Rhymes
Author: Hth
Pairing, Rating: Sheppard/McKay/Ronon, PG
Note: I don’t promise that this is how the Alpha Centauri reality is going to turn out, but I hold out hope. Regardless, you don’t have to have read those stories to appreciate the following, which is a senseless piece of food-fluff.
Nothing Rhymes
by Hth
John has become all but nocturnal; “morning” to him means roughly three in the afternoon. They were all like that for the first week, but ten hours of sleep a day feels unnatural, and only John can sustain it indefinitely.
So they have to amuse themselves, and they do. Rodney is pretty good with mornings, now that he can get out of bed at a quite reasonable nine-thirty or ten and choose what kind of coffee he’s in the mood for. A lot of breakfast food comes out of a box – pancakes, for example, and blueberry muffins, and those fantastic sweet-rolls that burst their metal and cardboard tubes with a celebratory popping sound – and he’s capable of eggs and sausage, too, and cinnamon toast, and sometimes the cold leftovers from dinner last night, and chocolate milk and strawberry milk and apple juice and, oh, God, V8, Rodney loves V8, why wasn’t there any on Atlantis? Why was there only the generic kind of tomato juice that’s flat and sour and not tart and smooth and delicious? Dex only tried V8 one time, and then spat the whole mouthful out in the kitchen sink and gave Rodney a look that came right to the edge of an attempted-murder accusation.
But all the rest of Rodney’s breakfasts have gone over very well. Planning breakfast, cooking breakfast, eating breakfast, and cleaning up after breakfast (Rodney is surprised to remember how much he enjoys a clean kitchen; clean offices, bedrooms, bathrooms, cars, and living rooms mean nothing to him, but now just as much as when he was a child, putting the kitchen in meticulous order means that there’s order, that no one can take that away from him, even if he can’t expect much more from the alleged grown-up around him) can take them right up until lunch if they play it right.
Also, it’s John’s kitchen, and Rodney likes the way he knows where everything in it belongs now. He probably knows his way around the place better than John does.
Rodney has declared lunch the Meal of Fast-Food. By lunchtime he’s usually gotten antsy about work, and it’s a relief to be able to sit on molded plastic and work on his laptop and shove something meat-flavored and familiar into his mouth, something good enough to make him happy to be on Earth again, but not so good that it’s distracting. Unlike some people, Dex does not bother him while he’s trying to work; he’s been very absorbed in his own experiments, which involve the delicate chemistry of the ketchup-mustard-mayonnaise combination. Sometimes he grabs Rodney and kisses him on the way home, and Rodney thinks he’s way overdoing it on the mayonnaise and not nearly enough mustard, but then he just puts his hand on Dex’s chest and contemplates the inscrutable ways of aliens and how John stayed in the Air Force this long when his apartment is located in the fucking Castro district. It’s that charmed life of his, Rodney supposes.
Rodney’s been feeling a bit charmed lately himself.
Television fascinates Dex, so that’s the best part of the afternoon free for Rodney to get something accomplished, too. He doesn’t seem to care what’s on, and in fact he rarely watches any one thing for more than fifteen or twenty minutes – celebrity poker or football, Hanna Barbera cartoons or Dora the Explorer, Star Trek or Charmed, SoapNet or MSNBC, it doesn’t seem to matter. He even seems to like the commercials. Rodney watches him switch over for no apparent reason from Divorce Court to the unveiling of the new Mustang line on the Travel Channel and says, “Did you not have anything like this where you came from?”
“Sure,” Dex says. “But we only had four channels.”
The tv almost always gets set permanently on ESPN when John staggers out of bed, and nobody complains.
When Rodney first realized they weren’t joking about this six-weeks-of-leave business, he imagined suffering through forty-two days of inactivity, useless and wired and bored and bitter. He’d objected to it, loudly and at length, to anyone he thought might have some influence, or to anyone who couldn’t easily escape. He was still objecting while uniformed men were stoically loading his worldly goods onto the Daedalus, and he’d even fomented a half-formed determination to simply refuse to go, but somehow the uniformed men loaded him on the ship, too, and then the time for objecting was past, and there was nothing left for it but complaining, which he did for about five hours, until John kissed him in the cargo bay and said, “If you don’t shut up right now, I am so uninviting you from the honeymoon.”
“Honey...?” he said, a little dazed and still leaning back toward John’s lips.
“Lemme break this down for you. I just saved the Earth – yes, with a significant amount of help, so thank you and good going. I therefore deserve the mother of all vacations, and I am going back to Earth, the land of Italian sports cars, German beer, and ferris wheels, and I am taking my smoking-hot alien boyfriend with me for some much, much-deserved smoking-hot sex in various decadent and possibly semi-public situations. On account of how much I love you, you whiny son of a bitch, I want you there with us. So for the love of all things good and decent in the universe, will you quit your bitching and just enjoy this?”
Twenty-four days in, it’s turning out to be very easy to enjoy.
A quite reasonable nine-thirty suits Rodney fine, but Dex can’t sleep even that late. Rodney usually wakes up briefly around six and lays there, watching him untangle himself from sheets and limbs with that stalking, silent grace that he’s never unlearned, watching the faint, greyed sunlight of San Francisco in the morning streak his skin with ribbons of bronze, watching him pull on the shabby thrift-shop clothes he’d bought up in bulk when they first emerged from Cheyenne Mountain. He falls asleep again to the jingling of keys and the soft click of the bedroom door and John’s slow breathing on the side of his face.
He’ll be home by breakfast.
Rodney doesn’t know for sure where Dex goes in the mornings, although he has a credit card now, so it could be almost anywhere. He knows instinctively that Dex is laying claim to San Francisco the same way that Rodney is laying claim to John’s apartment, by going through it over and over, touching everything, learning how to find things. He knows it’s something Dex can only do alone, so he never feels guilty about not offering to get up and play Earth tour-guide after three hours of sleep.
Twenty-four days in, he doesn’t come back for breakfast. Rodney eats sweet-rolls and Kona coffee and three bananas and tells himself he’s not worried, because how stupid would that be? Who could possibly be more competent to navigate strange alien landscapes than Ronon Dex? He’s lost track of time, that’s all.
He finally comes in at ten minutes til eleven, cradling a large net bag full of produce in one arm. He kicks the door shut and says, “I found farmers.”
Farmers’ market, then. “There’s no breakfast left,” Rodney says, trying not to feel offended. Just because he was sitting here with food he cooked for both of them, staring at the clock on the microwave and wondering what the hell kind of trouble a person can get into at nine in the morning. He’s not Dex’s mother, and it’s none of his business.
But then, how is his kindness repaid? Dex reaches into his bag and hurls an orange at him. Rodney throws up his hands and tries to clamp his jaw shut on a shriek. “What are you doing?” he yells.
Dex’s eyebrows draw together and he says, “You were supposed to catch that.”
“Have you met me? I don’t catch, and I’m – have I happened to mention this? – deathly allergic to citrus!”
“Oh, is that citrus?” Dex says, dropping his bag on the kitchen counter and sitting down at the table with another orange.
Rodney is – is – struck stupid. Dex has always been the loyal one! He’s never looked for betrayal from this quarter before! “You don’t know what citrus is?”
Dex shrugs and sinks his thumbnail into the orange peel. Rodney can smell it from here; he should hold his breath, but he can’t, his heart is racing and he thinks he’s starting to hyperventilate. “I think they grow in warm places. My planet’s pretty cold.”
“You cook for me! You make me those, those – ethnic foods, those strange little stuffed tarts and stir-fried – things – I have no idea what’s in them, but I ask, is there citrus? and you say of course not, and I trust you with my life.”
“You’re still alive,” Dex says. He’s peeling the orange, sinking his fingernails deeper and deeper until Rodney can hear the squish.
“I trust you with my life!”
“These are pretty good.” He has no idea what he’s doing, so he doesn’t pull the orange into segments, just bites right into it, and juice sprays everywhere. Rodney leaps backwards, flattening himself against the refrigerator. He’s nauseous and fascinated and somehow sickly turned-on by the sound of it, the way the little pulpy pieces are getting caught glistening in his beard, that goddamned inevitable way that Dex looks when he’s eating something new that he likes.
“Stop it,” Rodney says, his voice shaking. “You can’t bring oranges into my kitchen, I could have a reaction– “
“Don’t eat any.”
“I could have a reaction! It’s not safe! I had to be hospitalized once even after I picked the pineapple ring off of the pineapple upside-down cake! It’s not safe! This is not how I want to die, dammit!” He can barely see straight now; fear is swamping lust, swamping everything, because it had been a picnic, he’d been ten years old, his piano teacher invited him, and it had taken six hours before anyone could even find his parents, and he really could have died, people think he makes these things up, that he’s nothing but a coward and a hypochondriac, and maybe he is those things, fine, he is those things, but a nurse told Jeannie’s babysitter he’ll live, but it could have gone either way, and that means death, and you can save a kid in anaphylactic shock just like you can save Earth, but it always could go either way, and he has to trust – and he does, but he hates to trust, it’s not easy to – love isn’t hard, but trust is. Trust is, and it could have gone either way, it didn’t have to come out like this.
“Are you okay?” Dex says. He looks worried. He never looks worried unless things are really, really bad. Rodney’s hands won’t stop shaking.
“I’m just saying,” he says, hoarsely, trying so hard to sound normal that it makes his throat hurt, “that a little more concern about my possible imminent demise would not be out of place. I mean, this is me we’re talking about. Rodney McKay? We save each other’s lives occasionally, we’ve been known to have sex? I introduced you to alfredo sauce, all-you-can-eat crab legs, and nipple clamps? You’d miss me if I died.”
Dex shakes his head a little and wipes his mouth with the back of his arm, which has now become poisonous as well, thanks very much. He’s wearing a worn green t-shirt that says Kiss Me, I’m Irish, because he really did walk into the secondhand shop and buy everything large enough to fit him, and Rodney is fated to be the snappiest dresser in this relationship, which is tragic. “I wouldn’t let you die,” he says seriously.
Rodney’s mother got knocked up young; when he almost died from pineapple upside-down cake at ten years old, his parents were no older than Dex is now. Funny how they seemed like grown-ups then, and nobody in Rodney’s life feels old enough now to be in charge of anything, including him. He can’t believe they’re getting away with all of this, with carrying guns and blowing shit up and being diplomats and having people look at them and ask them what to do when lives are on the line.
But at least they show up.
Dex stands up and backs away from him. “I’ll take a shower,” he says. “Then I’ll clean this up.” Rodney rubs his hands over his eyes; this is how he likes his nervous breakdowns, frequent but brief. He can deal with this. “It’ll be okay,” Dex says, low and gentle and still a little nervous.
“I know, I know.”
He seems to have been screechy and insane enough to penetrate even John Sheppard’s titanium-alloy shield of sleep. He can hear the bedroom door open, and John grumble, “Are these our indoor voices? I don’t think they are.”
“Want to take a shower with me?” Dex says. “I’ve got that stuff all over me, that stuff that kills McKay.”
“I can see that,” John says. “Did you know nothing rhymes with orange?”
“I don’t think he’s gonna be writing me any poetry soon. You coming?”
“Nah, you go ahead. I’m hungry.”
Rodney can’t go near the table, but he turns on the water and looks around for something that needs washing so that he can look like he’s doing something. John pads in and tips the farmers’ market bag forward to look through it. “Cool, peaches,” he says.
“I’m fine. Sorry I woke you.”
“Nah,” John says somewhat cryptically, going through the produce. “You know what I really want?” Rodney shakes his head briefly, and John says, “Curly fries. You think I could tag along with– “ and Rodney can’t help turning and putting his arms around John hard, harder than he usually does on account of John’s annoying sharp bone structure. John puts one hand on his back and one on the back of his head and says into his ear, “You’re safe, you know.”
“What’s safe?” Rodney mutters. Maybe the Wraith are contained and maybe they aren’t; maybe it holds forever and maybe it doesn’t. There’s still radiation and cancer and transporter failure and oranges and surfing accidents and plane crashes and convenience-store robberies and weapons of mass destruction, and what is safe? He hears the shower come on across the apartment and buries his face against John’s neck and thinks, hey, at least he can’t say he didn’t know I was a coward and a hypochondriac before he invited me on a honeymoon.
John doesn’t answer that, but he cleans up the kitchen table and puts the produce away, the extra oranges and tangerines wrapped up in tin foil and pushed way out of the way. When Dex comes out, all shining-wet in a March of Dimes t-shirt and the tattered, low-waisted jeans that make Rodney’s knees an unreliable support structure for the rest of his body, he smells like nothing but toothpaste and Ivory soap, and it’s still vaguely terrifying, but in the good way, when he leans down over Rodney and kisses him. Rodney runs his hands across his wide shoulders, his back strong and damp under the t-shirt, and thinks of the ninety other near-death experiences he’s been through with Ronon and Sheppard, and there may be nobody in the universe he trusts less than the two of them to keep him out of danger, but it’s hard to deny that the three of them don’t have the word alone in their vocabulary anymore.
John kisses his temple when he pulls back and says, “My fries? Seriously, I’m starving, and all this stuff is way too healthy.”
“Curly fries,” Rodney specifies for Dex’s benefit.
Dex grins. “Hardee’s.” He is a fine student of the ways of fast-food.
“You’re way too excited about that,” John says. “We have to get you a better class of Earth experiences. Rio, Tokyo, Rome. There’s no law that says we have to spend the whole six weeks in San Francisco, you know.”
“Maybe,” Dex says, and he has the same look on his face that Rodney imagines he himself might be wearing, something intrigued yet reluctant. “I don’t know. I’m just kind of starting to feel at home here.”
“Keeping you bored is probably our best chance of staying out of trouble on this vacation,” Rodney adds, but what he really means is exactly what Dex just said. He knows where everything in this kitchen is now.
Author: Hth
Pairing, Rating: Sheppard/McKay/Ronon, PG
Note: I don’t promise that this is how the Alpha Centauri reality is going to turn out, but I hold out hope. Regardless, you don’t have to have read those stories to appreciate the following, which is a senseless piece of food-fluff.
Nothing Rhymes
by Hth
John has become all but nocturnal; “morning” to him means roughly three in the afternoon. They were all like that for the first week, but ten hours of sleep a day feels unnatural, and only John can sustain it indefinitely.
So they have to amuse themselves, and they do. Rodney is pretty good with mornings, now that he can get out of bed at a quite reasonable nine-thirty or ten and choose what kind of coffee he’s in the mood for. A lot of breakfast food comes out of a box – pancakes, for example, and blueberry muffins, and those fantastic sweet-rolls that burst their metal and cardboard tubes with a celebratory popping sound – and he’s capable of eggs and sausage, too, and cinnamon toast, and sometimes the cold leftovers from dinner last night, and chocolate milk and strawberry milk and apple juice and, oh, God, V8, Rodney loves V8, why wasn’t there any on Atlantis? Why was there only the generic kind of tomato juice that’s flat and sour and not tart and smooth and delicious? Dex only tried V8 one time, and then spat the whole mouthful out in the kitchen sink and gave Rodney a look that came right to the edge of an attempted-murder accusation.
But all the rest of Rodney’s breakfasts have gone over very well. Planning breakfast, cooking breakfast, eating breakfast, and cleaning up after breakfast (Rodney is surprised to remember how much he enjoys a clean kitchen; clean offices, bedrooms, bathrooms, cars, and living rooms mean nothing to him, but now just as much as when he was a child, putting the kitchen in meticulous order means that there’s order, that no one can take that away from him, even if he can’t expect much more from the alleged grown-up around him) can take them right up until lunch if they play it right.
Also, it’s John’s kitchen, and Rodney likes the way he knows where everything in it belongs now. He probably knows his way around the place better than John does.
Rodney has declared lunch the Meal of Fast-Food. By lunchtime he’s usually gotten antsy about work, and it’s a relief to be able to sit on molded plastic and work on his laptop and shove something meat-flavored and familiar into his mouth, something good enough to make him happy to be on Earth again, but not so good that it’s distracting. Unlike some people, Dex does not bother him while he’s trying to work; he’s been very absorbed in his own experiments, which involve the delicate chemistry of the ketchup-mustard-mayonnaise combination. Sometimes he grabs Rodney and kisses him on the way home, and Rodney thinks he’s way overdoing it on the mayonnaise and not nearly enough mustard, but then he just puts his hand on Dex’s chest and contemplates the inscrutable ways of aliens and how John stayed in the Air Force this long when his apartment is located in the fucking Castro district. It’s that charmed life of his, Rodney supposes.
Rodney’s been feeling a bit charmed lately himself.
Television fascinates Dex, so that’s the best part of the afternoon free for Rodney to get something accomplished, too. He doesn’t seem to care what’s on, and in fact he rarely watches any one thing for more than fifteen or twenty minutes – celebrity poker or football, Hanna Barbera cartoons or Dora the Explorer, Star Trek or Charmed, SoapNet or MSNBC, it doesn’t seem to matter. He even seems to like the commercials. Rodney watches him switch over for no apparent reason from Divorce Court to the unveiling of the new Mustang line on the Travel Channel and says, “Did you not have anything like this where you came from?”
“Sure,” Dex says. “But we only had four channels.”
The tv almost always gets set permanently on ESPN when John staggers out of bed, and nobody complains.
When Rodney first realized they weren’t joking about this six-weeks-of-leave business, he imagined suffering through forty-two days of inactivity, useless and wired and bored and bitter. He’d objected to it, loudly and at length, to anyone he thought might have some influence, or to anyone who couldn’t easily escape. He was still objecting while uniformed men were stoically loading his worldly goods onto the Daedalus, and he’d even fomented a half-formed determination to simply refuse to go, but somehow the uniformed men loaded him on the ship, too, and then the time for objecting was past, and there was nothing left for it but complaining, which he did for about five hours, until John kissed him in the cargo bay and said, “If you don’t shut up right now, I am so uninviting you from the honeymoon.”
“Honey...?” he said, a little dazed and still leaning back toward John’s lips.
“Lemme break this down for you. I just saved the Earth – yes, with a significant amount of help, so thank you and good going. I therefore deserve the mother of all vacations, and I am going back to Earth, the land of Italian sports cars, German beer, and ferris wheels, and I am taking my smoking-hot alien boyfriend with me for some much, much-deserved smoking-hot sex in various decadent and possibly semi-public situations. On account of how much I love you, you whiny son of a bitch, I want you there with us. So for the love of all things good and decent in the universe, will you quit your bitching and just enjoy this?”
Twenty-four days in, it’s turning out to be very easy to enjoy.
A quite reasonable nine-thirty suits Rodney fine, but Dex can’t sleep even that late. Rodney usually wakes up briefly around six and lays there, watching him untangle himself from sheets and limbs with that stalking, silent grace that he’s never unlearned, watching the faint, greyed sunlight of San Francisco in the morning streak his skin with ribbons of bronze, watching him pull on the shabby thrift-shop clothes he’d bought up in bulk when they first emerged from Cheyenne Mountain. He falls asleep again to the jingling of keys and the soft click of the bedroom door and John’s slow breathing on the side of his face.
He’ll be home by breakfast.
Rodney doesn’t know for sure where Dex goes in the mornings, although he has a credit card now, so it could be almost anywhere. He knows instinctively that Dex is laying claim to San Francisco the same way that Rodney is laying claim to John’s apartment, by going through it over and over, touching everything, learning how to find things. He knows it’s something Dex can only do alone, so he never feels guilty about not offering to get up and play Earth tour-guide after three hours of sleep.
Twenty-four days in, he doesn’t come back for breakfast. Rodney eats sweet-rolls and Kona coffee and three bananas and tells himself he’s not worried, because how stupid would that be? Who could possibly be more competent to navigate strange alien landscapes than Ronon Dex? He’s lost track of time, that’s all.
He finally comes in at ten minutes til eleven, cradling a large net bag full of produce in one arm. He kicks the door shut and says, “I found farmers.”
Farmers’ market, then. “There’s no breakfast left,” Rodney says, trying not to feel offended. Just because he was sitting here with food he cooked for both of them, staring at the clock on the microwave and wondering what the hell kind of trouble a person can get into at nine in the morning. He’s not Dex’s mother, and it’s none of his business.
But then, how is his kindness repaid? Dex reaches into his bag and hurls an orange at him. Rodney throws up his hands and tries to clamp his jaw shut on a shriek. “What are you doing?” he yells.
Dex’s eyebrows draw together and he says, “You were supposed to catch that.”
“Have you met me? I don’t catch, and I’m – have I happened to mention this? – deathly allergic to citrus!”
“Oh, is that citrus?” Dex says, dropping his bag on the kitchen counter and sitting down at the table with another orange.
Rodney is – is – struck stupid. Dex has always been the loyal one! He’s never looked for betrayal from this quarter before! “You don’t know what citrus is?”
Dex shrugs and sinks his thumbnail into the orange peel. Rodney can smell it from here; he should hold his breath, but he can’t, his heart is racing and he thinks he’s starting to hyperventilate. “I think they grow in warm places. My planet’s pretty cold.”
“You cook for me! You make me those, those – ethnic foods, those strange little stuffed tarts and stir-fried – things – I have no idea what’s in them, but I ask, is there citrus? and you say of course not, and I trust you with my life.”
“You’re still alive,” Dex says. He’s peeling the orange, sinking his fingernails deeper and deeper until Rodney can hear the squish.
“I trust you with my life!”
“These are pretty good.” He has no idea what he’s doing, so he doesn’t pull the orange into segments, just bites right into it, and juice sprays everywhere. Rodney leaps backwards, flattening himself against the refrigerator. He’s nauseous and fascinated and somehow sickly turned-on by the sound of it, the way the little pulpy pieces are getting caught glistening in his beard, that goddamned inevitable way that Dex looks when he’s eating something new that he likes.
“Stop it,” Rodney says, his voice shaking. “You can’t bring oranges into my kitchen, I could have a reaction– “
“Don’t eat any.”
“I could have a reaction! It’s not safe! I had to be hospitalized once even after I picked the pineapple ring off of the pineapple upside-down cake! It’s not safe! This is not how I want to die, dammit!” He can barely see straight now; fear is swamping lust, swamping everything, because it had been a picnic, he’d been ten years old, his piano teacher invited him, and it had taken six hours before anyone could even find his parents, and he really could have died, people think he makes these things up, that he’s nothing but a coward and a hypochondriac, and maybe he is those things, fine, he is those things, but a nurse told Jeannie’s babysitter he’ll live, but it could have gone either way, and that means death, and you can save a kid in anaphylactic shock just like you can save Earth, but it always could go either way, and he has to trust – and he does, but he hates to trust, it’s not easy to – love isn’t hard, but trust is. Trust is, and it could have gone either way, it didn’t have to come out like this.
“Are you okay?” Dex says. He looks worried. He never looks worried unless things are really, really bad. Rodney’s hands won’t stop shaking.
“I’m just saying,” he says, hoarsely, trying so hard to sound normal that it makes his throat hurt, “that a little more concern about my possible imminent demise would not be out of place. I mean, this is me we’re talking about. Rodney McKay? We save each other’s lives occasionally, we’ve been known to have sex? I introduced you to alfredo sauce, all-you-can-eat crab legs, and nipple clamps? You’d miss me if I died.”
Dex shakes his head a little and wipes his mouth with the back of his arm, which has now become poisonous as well, thanks very much. He’s wearing a worn green t-shirt that says Kiss Me, I’m Irish, because he really did walk into the secondhand shop and buy everything large enough to fit him, and Rodney is fated to be the snappiest dresser in this relationship, which is tragic. “I wouldn’t let you die,” he says seriously.
Rodney’s mother got knocked up young; when he almost died from pineapple upside-down cake at ten years old, his parents were no older than Dex is now. Funny how they seemed like grown-ups then, and nobody in Rodney’s life feels old enough now to be in charge of anything, including him. He can’t believe they’re getting away with all of this, with carrying guns and blowing shit up and being diplomats and having people look at them and ask them what to do when lives are on the line.
But at least they show up.
Dex stands up and backs away from him. “I’ll take a shower,” he says. “Then I’ll clean this up.” Rodney rubs his hands over his eyes; this is how he likes his nervous breakdowns, frequent but brief. He can deal with this. “It’ll be okay,” Dex says, low and gentle and still a little nervous.
“I know, I know.”
He seems to have been screechy and insane enough to penetrate even John Sheppard’s titanium-alloy shield of sleep. He can hear the bedroom door open, and John grumble, “Are these our indoor voices? I don’t think they are.”
“Want to take a shower with me?” Dex says. “I’ve got that stuff all over me, that stuff that kills McKay.”
“I can see that,” John says. “Did you know nothing rhymes with orange?”
“I don’t think he’s gonna be writing me any poetry soon. You coming?”
“Nah, you go ahead. I’m hungry.”
Rodney can’t go near the table, but he turns on the water and looks around for something that needs washing so that he can look like he’s doing something. John pads in and tips the farmers’ market bag forward to look through it. “Cool, peaches,” he says.
“I’m fine. Sorry I woke you.”
“Nah,” John says somewhat cryptically, going through the produce. “You know what I really want?” Rodney shakes his head briefly, and John says, “Curly fries. You think I could tag along with– “ and Rodney can’t help turning and putting his arms around John hard, harder than he usually does on account of John’s annoying sharp bone structure. John puts one hand on his back and one on the back of his head and says into his ear, “You’re safe, you know.”
“What’s safe?” Rodney mutters. Maybe the Wraith are contained and maybe they aren’t; maybe it holds forever and maybe it doesn’t. There’s still radiation and cancer and transporter failure and oranges and surfing accidents and plane crashes and convenience-store robberies and weapons of mass destruction, and what is safe? He hears the shower come on across the apartment and buries his face against John’s neck and thinks, hey, at least he can’t say he didn’t know I was a coward and a hypochondriac before he invited me on a honeymoon.
John doesn’t answer that, but he cleans up the kitchen table and puts the produce away, the extra oranges and tangerines wrapped up in tin foil and pushed way out of the way. When Dex comes out, all shining-wet in a March of Dimes t-shirt and the tattered, low-waisted jeans that make Rodney’s knees an unreliable support structure for the rest of his body, he smells like nothing but toothpaste and Ivory soap, and it’s still vaguely terrifying, but in the good way, when he leans down over Rodney and kisses him. Rodney runs his hands across his wide shoulders, his back strong and damp under the t-shirt, and thinks of the ninety other near-death experiences he’s been through with Ronon and Sheppard, and there may be nobody in the universe he trusts less than the two of them to keep him out of danger, but it’s hard to deny that the three of them don’t have the word alone in their vocabulary anymore.
John kisses his temple when he pulls back and says, “My fries? Seriously, I’m starving, and all this stuff is way too healthy.”
“Curly fries,” Rodney specifies for Dex’s benefit.
Dex grins. “Hardee’s.” He is a fine student of the ways of fast-food.
“You’re way too excited about that,” John says. “We have to get you a better class of Earth experiences. Rio, Tokyo, Rome. There’s no law that says we have to spend the whole six weeks in San Francisco, you know.”
“Maybe,” Dex says, and he has the same look on his face that Rodney imagines he himself might be wearing, something intrigued yet reluctant. “I don’t know. I’m just kind of starting to feel at home here.”
“Keeping you bored is probably our best chance of staying out of trouble on this vacation,” Rodney adds, but what he really means is exactly what Dex just said. He knows where everything in this kitchen is now.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:09 am (UTC)damnit.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 03:51 am (UTC)OH NOES.
Stop it. I just wrote a cotton candy fic and am fiending like a teen ager on a sugah high.
Next flashfic challenge: dieting. Or exercising.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-18 09:36 pm (UTC)Hee.
And, Hth, I like this. Gentle, warm, but with resonant characterisation.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:26 am (UTC)It's moments like these that are why I love you so hard.
That was fun and sweet and your voices, Ronon in particular, are fab.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:42 am (UTC)I like this series, no matter how you end it.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:44 am (UTC)He knows where everything in this kitchen is now.
Awww.
And I still have to make dinner, and you're tipping me over to the not-so-healthy choices now, damnit.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:54 am (UTC)Great work!
Alex
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 01:15 am (UTC)It's just so good! The fic, I mean. The chocolate was good too.
McShepDex is so my OT3 in every way, and adding food to it is like maple syrup on bananas in good vanilla ice cream...Ok, I'll be in my freezer.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 01:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 02:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 02:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 02:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 03:52 am (UTC)Nothing Rhymes
Date: 2005-10-14 03:13 am (UTC)But I'm already in my jammies .
Seriously, this is so fun. They deserve a vacation.
I deserve a vacation.
At least I get to see them on their vacation.
Thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 03:51 am (UTC)Rodney is fated to be the snappiest dresser in this relationship, which is tragic. you know, that truly *is* tragic.
“Are these our indoor voices? I don’t think they are.” this makes me crack up each time I read it, cause that phrase is used all. the. freaking. time. at my job - except I totally didn't expect John to come out with it!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 04:22 am (UTC)“Sure,” Dex says. “But we only had four channels.”
*giggles* That's the perfect way to get the aliens to stop attacking Earth, advertise that we have hundreds of different TV channels!
You did a very good job making a trio out of them. I like them in the various pairings but I don't think I've never seen them in a together as a trio in a "more than just sex" fic. Very pretty, although now I'm starving. :P
~ Morgaine
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 05:36 am (UTC)This is, in fact, one of the finest passages in the history of slash.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 06:55 am (UTC)and
“Want to take a shower with me?” Dex says. “I’ve got that stuff all over me, that stuff that kills McKay.”
and oh, Rodney's panic attack, the poor allergic woobie. I heart this. Thanks for posting this.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 07:19 am (UTC)A beautiful story that nonetheless I had bad feelings about -- all of which come out of my hang-ups. I like this OT3, only it only works for me if it's Shep/McKay focused -- Rodney in the outsider-ish role gives my poor heart a work-out. If only this story wasn't so brilliant and pretty, I could ignore it heartlessly. (i.e. damn you)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 07:59 am (UTC)*binges on late night snacks*
*loves more*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 08:57 am (UTC)*hearts*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 08:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 10:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:28 pm (UTC)*stops saying the word fantastic*
Loved it :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 01:31 pm (UTC)I can't really believe the pairing, but I can accept it.
Oh, just so great! ^^
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 10:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 10:21 pm (UTC)I love the Alpha Centauri series but I'm afraid everytime I see a new part posted. I'm a die hard Mckay/Sheppard fan, but somehow this series has me rooting for Ronon/Rodney. Maybe, because John seems to be the most secure person in the whole mess and he knows it. I'm a sucker for the underdog and Rodney is definitely the one with the most to lose. Now that I've rambled on and on let me tell you that I loved the story.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 12:14 am (UTC)Heeeee!
::looks out window at SF::
Love the story.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 01:33 am (UTC)Also -snerkle- I had exactly the same reaction as Dex to V8 when a friend convinced me to take a big slurp of Vanilla Coke: to this day I feel that betrayal deeply.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 01:44 am (UTC)*sighs happily* ... more? =)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 06:46 am (UTC)it was so cute, and Rodney's panic attack made me want to hug him hard.
Great job!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 10:03 am (UTC)And now I, too, want curly fries. And I have no curly fries. Curse you and your evocative food references.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 01:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 02:26 pm (UTC)One small nit-pick. I don't think there are any Hardee's in the Bay Area. We tended to be dominated by the Jack in the Box/Carl's Jr. side of the fast food spectrum. But JitB's curly fries are very good, too!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 10:09 pm (UTC)But I think Arby's curly fries are better than Hardee's.
*g*
Mmmmm, Arby's. It's what might be for dinner now.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-17 02:41 pm (UTC)No matter where you go with A.C., this may be my ending. :)
The whole point of slash for me is to see these men I love forge deep, abiding connections. This story has that in spades. It shows in how Ronon reacts to Rodney's panic attack. It shows in how they both let John sleep in. There's an acceptance of each individual as they are that is both rare and incredibly appealing.
On a more shallow level, I also love the idea of Ronon in torn jeans and ratty t-shirts. I can see him propping his bare feet on a balcony railing and tossing back a Corona.
And this line:
I am taking my smoking-hot alien boyfriend with me for some much, much-deserved smoking-hot sex in various decadent and possibly semi-public situations. On account of how much I love you, you whiny son of a bitch, I want you there with us.
made me all melty. It's Sheppard/Ronon! With a side of Rodney! (well, that's how I read it). I want to learn how that happened, since last we saw, John was still talking about Rodney as "my boyfriend". Maybe I've completely misinterpreted your intention, but I'm just going to go over here in my Corner O' John/Ronon and be happy for awhile.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-19 01:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 06:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-23 12:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-11 03:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-20 08:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-03 04:49 am (UTC)“I can see that,” John says. “Did you know nothing rhymes with orange?”
“I don’t think he’s gonna be writing me any poetry soon. You coming?”
that is going down as one of my favourite pieces of dialogue ever. They should have more conversations on the show like that, also John's annoyingly sharp bone structure is awesome and this is now on my favourites list.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-18 09:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-02 04:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-17 09:51 pm (UTC)Funny how they seemed like grown-ups then, and nobody in Rodney’s life feels old enough now to be in charge of anything, including him. He can’t believe they’re getting away with all of this, with carrying guns and blowing shit up and being diplomats and having people look at them and ask them what to do when lives are on the line.
And THAT just rang so true.