![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
halotolerant.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
sga_flashficTitle: An Empty Space
Pairing: Rodney/Teyla (McKeyla!)
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Rodney, Teyla and a Yoda-shaped coffee mug in a tale of trigonometry, Twinkies and Thundercats underpants
An Empty Space
Rodney’s room is silent and neither too hot or too cold, and she has gone, now.
That, at least, in this whirl of confused feeling, he has a definite handle on.
He couldn’t tell you, not for the life of him, when she had arrived.
Into Atlantis, obviously, yes, there’s a date and time and documentation. But into Rodney’s life specifically? Hard to say.
It was probably the day he’d awarded himself that extra biscuit from the last box (for services to reverse dimensional-adjusted trigonometry), and even then he has no very great handle on events, or the ones that followed.
On that day he’s fairly sure, looking back, that he hadn’t noticed her for a couple of hours. He was a little…absorbed at the time – it was called ‘The Super-Particulator-Invertor’, at least until he’d found some way of blackmailing Zelenka round to ‘McKay’s Particaliser’.
It was three foot two in height, kind of burnt coloured (also Zelenka’s fault) and absolutely beautiful.
So when he finally popped his cervical vertebrae and turned in blind quest for his coffee mug he was surprised to find Teyla sitting quietly on his chair (his! It had his name on in marker pen and everything), cradling the Yoda-shaped mug of his previously unfinished coffee.
Many, many expressions came to his mind and it was only the sheer weirdness of the situation that stopped him.
“Um…you aren’t normally here” he had said, inspired.
She sat forward in the chair and got off it in one fluid motion, somehow depositing her mug along the way. Despite this she looked a little self-conscious which was not something he associated with Teyla.
Like, the way mass was not something he associated with electrons.
“I wished for some quiet. But I wished also not to be alone.”
“Ah. Right. Well, that all makes sense then. Um, how’s the missioning been going?”
“Pardon?”
“The Away….thingy. With the other two these past few weeks, how is it? It must be hard cheating death without me around.”
“We manage.” She didn’t smile, and didn’t entirely seem to be teasing him. She didn’t, as a rule, he’d found. Humour him, yes, tease, no.
“Good…ah, was there anything else?” he cast his hands around and looked wildly at the ceiling – seriously, had Teyla even been *in* the Labs before? Did she even know where they were? Had she gotten lost on her way to the Cool Clique Beat-em-up Hall?
She was standing very still. Which made him more twitchy.
She spoke very calmly: “No. I was just visiting. See you around.” And, with her carefully produced colloquialism, she turned and left, a row of bemused expressions following her exit.
“So, that was odd” Rodney remarked to the air in general.
“Your Japanese Thundercats underpants are odd,” replied the air, in a Czech accent; “that was bizarre.”
“My underpants are none of your business, Zelenka.”
“So remember to get dressed next time you get everyone up at 3am to make circuit-boards! I will not ever be able to look at Cheetara again.”
“See, *this* kind of talk?” Rodney huffed, applying a screwdriver to the Particliser’s gorgeous outer coating of titanium alloy with integral solar panelling, “this is why beautiful warrior women just do not hang out here.”
- - -
“That is your mug, is it not?”
Those words were what happened next. He finds it hard, now, to remember the in-between times that week, as if there were only these events, linked up like a string of fairy-lights, energy flowing from one glow to the next.
“I, um, who?” He had managed in reply, detaching his mind from the blueprints for the new(er) accelerant matrix for the ‘Little Beauty’ aka ‘McKay’s Particliser’ aka ‘The Super-Particulator-Invertor’.
Teyla was sitting at one chair’s remove from him with her lunch tray in front of her, scraped clean in a way that suggested he’d been ignoring her for quite a while. In her outstretched hand was an old VHS case for ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and her finger pointed at Yoda.
Rodney took it from her hand reverentially: “Yeah, that’s a character called Yoda. Whose is the tape? No one told me we had Star Wars original edition here – I’ve been putting up with the remastered crap on Sheppard’s DVDs.”
Teyla, after a momentary expression of complete bewilderment, rallied bravely and smiled:
“Perhaps you could explain the story to me?” she asked, hooking her ankles onto the crossbar of the chair and tucking up her knees.
“Explain? Even better, we can watch it! Oh boy, we could have Star Wars night!” his hands described arcs in the air, “Dressing up, even! And food, and other people’s food and Sheppard’s Legendary Butterkist cache.”
His hand, coming down, brushed over the display screen with the blueprints on.
“Except, oh bugger, I really ought to…hmmm” he looked up at her. She looked a little…deflated, which was odd. “Hey, it’s OK, Reagen in Hydrophysics has a VHS machine, if you borrow that you can watch it any time and it’s really not hard to follow, mostly because it completely abuses all known laws of physics AND has three major continuity errors in that film alone that render the subsequent…and you really don’t care about that, I guess.”
He pushed back his chair and stood up, feeling awkward. This was Teyla. She possessed all three qualities that made him ill at ease: muscles, breasts and amazing leadership skills. And he liked her, liked her a lot, but she was definitely a Cool Kid and so kind of from another planet.
Well, yeah, duh, but, like *figuratively* as well…
Whereas he? He still used High School metaphors to quantify social relationships in another sodding galaxy, in a fantasy science city of which he was uncrowned king.
She was smiling up at him, a little…well, sadly, and clutching the video in both hands. “Thank-you, Rodney,” she said, “I will remember the advice. Good luck with the project.”
“A true scientist never believes luck beyond his own creation” Rodney replied, happily, and trotted back towards the science labs.
- - -
Some days later, back in the field, Rodney had been alone in a cave tinkering with a shield emitter when Sheppard came in to check on his progress.
“Rodney?”
“Mmmff?”
“What have you done to Teyla?”
“MMMMMMMmmmmmfff?”
“Take the nice, potentially deadly wire out of your mouth and answer me!”
Sheppard’s tone had been mock serious, but veering towards the latter: “She’s been asking me about Yoda all week” he continued, “Well, actually that’s a lie, she asked me who was a short, ugly, green man with long ears and a dressing gown, then when I finally figured out that it was Yoda she made me explain who he was and what he was in and everything. Now there’s only one person on the base that would subject her to any of that and that’s you, so what’s the big idea?”
Rodney assumed an expression of outraged innocence martyred in the face of an unsympathetic peer (which was, fair to say, almost his resting appearance). “I didn’t do a thing! She was asking me the same stuff only the other day. I thought it was weird but then, she is weird sometimes.”
Sheppard gave him a look of such withering scorn that he blushed:
“What? What am I supposed to say? I’m not exactly part of the exclusive hot-and-sweaty group am I? I’m not fluent in lingua-testosterona. I don’t have whatever bizarre, primitive, caveman bond you three seem to get from beating each other up with sticks.”
“Anytime you want to be beaten up, Rodney, just let us know.”
“Oh how considerate” Rodney gave a sneering smile and threw him an empty water canteen: “Why don’t you go and fill that, seeing as how there’s nothing for anyone but the scientist to do?”
Sheppard caught it with ease and turned, chuckling, to leave. At the exit of the cave he stopped, waited a second and slowly turned around:
“Rodney, um, it isn’t like that, the fighting. It isn’t very sexy, when you’re doing it, mostly just painful and kind of humiliating. You think about where to hit and how to, not much about your opponent’s…attributes.”
“I never, ever need to hear you mangle the double entendre again, thank-you very much. Goodbye.”
Sheppard shrugged his shoulders and strode out of the cave, beginning to grin.
- - -
It had been, what – three weeks later? – say three weeks later that the fifth worst idea in the history of the universe had been mooted at a Staff Meeting (he’d considered it carefully but Windows98 still came in just above at fourth place).
The Masquerade Ball, however, was definitely the worst organisational decision since the infamous attempts by the Officials of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to breed mules. It was not only a bad idea, but also a foolhardy, wasteful and selfish one, and anyone who disagreed was unworthy of inclusion in the team.
So most of his team-mates, and indeed anyone in his proximity, had learnt in the weeks leading up to the First Annual Atlantis Masquerade.
“FAAM! I’m gonna’ live forever! I’m gonna’ learn how to fly!” sang John Sheppard, whenever the issue came up. This may not have helped Rodney’s attitude.
A few days before the dreaded event, Teyla had swung by the Labs with the coffee pot and some more Athosian sweeten-bread. Her visits were getting to be so regular that – though still mostly mystified as to why she came at all – no one paid any special attention any longer. Rodney had gotten her a new twirly chair out of the stores and (in a fit of hospitality) bullied an underling into lending him some pink nail-polish to paint ‘Teyla’ on the back.
“Thank-you…you like to label things, I think?” had been Teyla’s comment.
“Oh, round here you have to” Rodney had said, indicating with one hand either the room, the wing, Atlantis in general or the entire Pegasus galaxy, “milk, teabags, chocolate, hand-cream...um, that is to say, um, manly razors – everything.”
So that day she deposited the food on the side, carefully avoiding the irreplaceable blueprints, and settled onto her chair with the Yoda mug in hand. Rodney had taken C3PO out of storage for his own use.
“I see you have completed the booster module” she said, eagerly.
Rodney had smiled proudly around a mouthful of wire casings, then taken them out and replied: “Yes, took us a while to see how to reconfigure the power source but I solved it. How’s life in the world of the idle?”
Teyla, smiling indulgently, swung from side to side on the chair: “I have been helping arrange the Grand Hall with decorations for the party. I think it will look very well by the time it is done.”
“Huh!” said Rodney, twiddling a few screws and then reaching out blindly behind him for the coffee. Teyla caught it just before it could spill on the blueprints and passed it to him. “Hmm, thanks…yeah, the party, why have a party anyway? Why spend…”
“Yes, I know how you feel about it.” Teyla cut in. Her tone was not abrupt or even sarcastic, just accurate. “You think we have better things to do with our time and resources. But it will be a great good to my people, you know, and I can seldom offer them such good at present.”
“Wammmmeeem?” said the mouthful of wires.
“What do I mean? I mean that I never see them. I never have a chance to go and lead festivals of the year – always, it seems, some crisis exactly coincides with them. I had to face down Dr Weir just to perform funeral rites for my dearest friend. I look forward to seeing them celebrate.” She was swinging faster now, little movements, back and forth and back and forth, staring at the floor. As if recollecting herself she had coughed, and darted a glance up.
“Perhaps you will go, Rodney, despite your aversion?”
“Well I might drop by I suppose. Maybe near the end when the dancing gets amusing.”
“You have not been asked as anyone’s ‘date’ then?”
“No, I mean, yes, yes I have, hundreds of them. Katie Brown asked me, actually.”
“I see.”
“I told them all ‘no’, of course.”
“Oh?”
“Like I say, I don’t want to go to this thing. I have days of work left on this beauty,” he stroked the Particliser, “and the whole idea is just so stupid, I mean do you know how many real festivals we haven’t celebrated? Why just the other day I was saying…”
“I was there, Doctor. I know.” Teyla cut in this time with an acerbity that was so unlike her normal tone with him that Rodney actually turned round in surprise and found her standing up, as if to leave.
“Wait!” he said, more forcefully than he expected. He felt rather confused about what was wrong but he knew without question that he didn’t like ‘wrong’, and really, really didn’t want Teyla to be annoyed with him.
“I’ll stop going on about it” he said, holding out a hand, “um, tell me how the generators are doing on the mainland.”
She sat down again, slowly, and started talking, and gradually they fell back into an easy conversation. He screwed in his last wires and moved to sit next to her, taking far more than half of the Athosian bread and gesticulating wildly whenever a full mouth prevented him getting his point across.
The thing, the really odd thing, that he’d found was that often when she was talking it was quite interesting to listen. Sometimes she said things he didn’t already know the answer to or things he had no idea were correct or incorrect. She talked a lot less about fighting and rituals than he had expected, and the thing that really got to him was that she didn’t seem to *know* she was a cool kid. She seemed to think she was a bit of a freak too.
“Oh no!” she exclaimed, laughing at one of his assertions that she must have fought her way to the top of the playground pile as a kid, “Good gracious no! They called me ‘denthla’ and ‘praidok’ – ‘bookhead’ and ‘brain-stuffed-with-words’ – I was the only one who went to learn the songs and chants of the Ancestors. I was the only one to try and learn our history poems.” She took a large bite from her bread and looked into the middle distance a little wistfully, “that was before the attack, before everyone got interested in preserving what was left of our heritage.”
There was a quiet moment. Rodney had felt a strong temptation to say something but some inner brain-lobe had managed to drop-kick his speech centres and he stayed waiting for her to continue:
“It was Charin that taught me to fight with the traditional sticks,” she said, eventually, “I was…targeted by other children. I had to learn to defend myself, indeed to respect myself.”
“I know what you mean” Rodney said, looking at her soft, strong hands on the mug because it was way too embarrassing to look at her face.
The mug moved, and her face came into view. Her eyes were very soft, very intent. “I wish there had been more schooling in my childhood” she said, quietly, “I wish I could have learnt the mysteries of science as you have, that I could be a part of these projects that mean so much to…Atlantis.”
He had a funny feeling in his chest, and felt frozen to the spot, but the answer came naturally: “I could teach…” he started to say.
“Teyla! Hey, Teyla!” cried a harsh male voice from the doorway. Ronon stood there, arms spread as if the very structure of the wall depended on his presence. Rodney spun round on his chair and saw Teyla do the same. He was conscious that they had been closer than co-workers usually got.
Ronon looked fairly inscrutable. “Teyla, we were supposed to start three-quarters of an hour ago” he said, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“The time slipped away from me” Teyla replied, with some dignity. She picked up the coffee pot and the empty bread-tray. “I will see you later, Rodney” she said, not unkindly, but her expression was odd.
As they disappeared down the corridor, Rodney could hear their voices:
“…but I don’t get it!” Ronon was saying, “there’s a million places to go in your downtime and you choose the Labs? There’s nothing there.”
“I hope you have been practising,” said Teyla, icily, “I am not feeling…lenient.”
- - -
On the day of the Masquerade Rodney could remember thinking that he’d been such a fool. A blind, blind, crazy fool!
He’d seen that *obviously* the circuitry for the targeting matrix wouldn’t work unless you coated the whole thing in a stable compound and isolated the conducting elements! A child of three could see that!
Rodney had thrown the defective component into the bin with a triumphant whoop and lifted his arms. He’d forgotten that one of them was still attached to his hand, which was still attached to a half-full mug of coffee.
“Ow!”
“Teyla? Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry! Here, I have tissues, come into the light.”
“…this is not how I planned this” she muttered, and stepped forward, still rubbing at a spreading brown stain over the shoulder of her white…Princess Leia outfit.
And she had the *hair* and everything – the whole cinnamon-swirl caboodle.
“Rodney?” she looked up from her dabbing efforts and took in his stunned appearance. “Are you OK?”
“Ah….yes, I’m good” Rodney drew the back of his hand across his head, “it’s just, um, I had a bit of a thing for Princess Leia at one point and I think my fourteen-year-old self just tried to stage a comeback in my brain.”
‘Teyla is girl! Teyla is a girl!’ screamed his hindbrain ‘How could you miss this? How?’ Girls were (whatever he might say, particularly to Sheppard) kind of the anti-Rodney. Girls meant embarrassment, frustration and a tinge of loneliness, and Teyla had cunningly disguised herself by being gentle, friendly, helpful and dependable.
His fourteen-year-old self was settling into the mental driving seat and adjusting the mirrors.
Meanwhile she smiled, not unkindly and bent down to pick up a package she’d let slip when the coffee hit:
“I just came to give you these. Since you missed the party.”
He untwisted the paper and found two Twinkies. They smelt like paradise, calming him down.
“Oh yessss” he sighed and bit about half one off. Then he paused, mid-chew.
“Um, you full of these already or would you like to have the other one?” he asked, casually, “maybe coffee?”
“Maybe not coffee” she said, darkly, looking at her shoulder, “but thank-you, I would love to share a meal with you.”
She reached out for the other Twinkie and he saw her shoulder was actually turning red.
“Ouch! I think I may have scalded you.” He grabbed a pot of the ‘electrical burns or chemical burns or really inappropriate lube jokes’ cream that was ubiquitous in the Labs and offered it to her. “I’m really sorry, I never plan to cause people I like major injuries. Does tend to happen though.”
“I gave Ronon eight different week-long bruises the other day,” she replied, scooping a glob of cream, “though that was on purpose.”
He started to ask, not least because, well, *hilarious*, but she spoke again before he could:
“I enjoyed those films about the wars in space. They are very exciting, very unpredictable.”
She really had paid attention to her ‘Star Wars’ collection and as the discussion wove on he felt not a little gleeful to have a new audience for his theories on the provenance of Boba Fett (the prequel trilogy, he informed her, was never to be spoken of in his presence. She snorted and pointed out that, one: there were way better lightsaber fights in Episode I than anywhere else, and two: Episode III was genuinely moving if you watched it with Spanish dubbing.)
“Damn. I think I gave you geek” was Rodney’s eventual, stunned response.
She laughed with frank happiness.
“Are there other films about people in space?” she asked, earnestly, “I find I like them more than this ‘football’.”
“More than…? Oh wow, marry me?” he said.
And then, like, actually listened to what he’d just said. And panicked. And blushed. And wondered what to say next. And panicked some more.
All before he’d even blinked.
It was like the moment when you put your hand under the hot tap, and you know it’s hot and you know it’s *going* to hurt like crazy but it hasn’t, not quite yet.
And in the time before it hurts, you know everything, you really finally know what’s going on and why and how and everything is very, very clear.
She was staring at him and he’d felt his stomach flip over. She looked…uncertain.
She held out a shaky hand, stroked it down his face and swallowed visibly:
“Rodney…” she said, like she’d been holding her breath, “Rodney if…I want to be your friend, but I want, oh, so many other things too. I do not know quite when, or how but…I came to your Laboratory that first day because I was sad and I realised I was happier near you. And Rodney, I like your life. I feel…at home, when I am with you.”
And at that point most of his brain just threw up its hands, let off some fireworks and surrendered, and he was kissing her, kissing her, kissing *her*.
The last truly coherent thought he had was that he’d been wrong all along. This wasn’t High School and she wasn’t one of the cool kids. She was the girl who tied back her hair, stopped wearing heels, put her glasses *on* and so became beautiful.
- - -
Now Rodney’s room is silent and neither too hot or too cold, and she has gone, now.
That, at least, in this whirl of confused feeling, he has a definite handle on.
In a few minutes she’ll bring coffee, steaming-fresh from the canteen, and Athosian bread and the DVD of the original ‘Battlestar Galactica’ that Zelenka mistakenly thinks he’s hidden well in the spare rubber-tubing draw in the Lab.
In few minutes she’ll be back, but in the mean time he misses her, acutely and yet somehow in an astonishingly familiar way. Little incidents of the past weeks are joining up in his head and he couldn’t tell you, not for the life of him, when precisely she had arrived in his life.
Normally not knowing an answer, any answer, would make him irritated. Today he lies back on the bed, one hand idly stroking the warm dent she left beside him, and smiles and smiles.
Pairing: Rodney/Teyla (McKeyla!)
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Rodney, Teyla and a Yoda-shaped coffee mug in a tale of trigonometry, Twinkies and Thundercats underpants
An Empty Space
Rodney’s room is silent and neither too hot or too cold, and she has gone, now.
That, at least, in this whirl of confused feeling, he has a definite handle on.
He couldn’t tell you, not for the life of him, when she had arrived.
Into Atlantis, obviously, yes, there’s a date and time and documentation. But into Rodney’s life specifically? Hard to say.
It was probably the day he’d awarded himself that extra biscuit from the last box (for services to reverse dimensional-adjusted trigonometry), and even then he has no very great handle on events, or the ones that followed.
On that day he’s fairly sure, looking back, that he hadn’t noticed her for a couple of hours. He was a little…absorbed at the time – it was called ‘The Super-Particulator-Invertor’, at least until he’d found some way of blackmailing Zelenka round to ‘McKay’s Particaliser’.
It was three foot two in height, kind of burnt coloured (also Zelenka’s fault) and absolutely beautiful.
So when he finally popped his cervical vertebrae and turned in blind quest for his coffee mug he was surprised to find Teyla sitting quietly on his chair (his! It had his name on in marker pen and everything), cradling the Yoda-shaped mug of his previously unfinished coffee.
Many, many expressions came to his mind and it was only the sheer weirdness of the situation that stopped him.
“Um…you aren’t normally here” he had said, inspired.
She sat forward in the chair and got off it in one fluid motion, somehow depositing her mug along the way. Despite this she looked a little self-conscious which was not something he associated with Teyla.
Like, the way mass was not something he associated with electrons.
“I wished for some quiet. But I wished also not to be alone.”
“Ah. Right. Well, that all makes sense then. Um, how’s the missioning been going?”
“Pardon?”
“The Away….thingy. With the other two these past few weeks, how is it? It must be hard cheating death without me around.”
“We manage.” She didn’t smile, and didn’t entirely seem to be teasing him. She didn’t, as a rule, he’d found. Humour him, yes, tease, no.
“Good…ah, was there anything else?” he cast his hands around and looked wildly at the ceiling – seriously, had Teyla even been *in* the Labs before? Did she even know where they were? Had she gotten lost on her way to the Cool Clique Beat-em-up Hall?
She was standing very still. Which made him more twitchy.
She spoke very calmly: “No. I was just visiting. See you around.” And, with her carefully produced colloquialism, she turned and left, a row of bemused expressions following her exit.
“So, that was odd” Rodney remarked to the air in general.
“Your Japanese Thundercats underpants are odd,” replied the air, in a Czech accent; “that was bizarre.”
“My underpants are none of your business, Zelenka.”
“So remember to get dressed next time you get everyone up at 3am to make circuit-boards! I will not ever be able to look at Cheetara again.”
“See, *this* kind of talk?” Rodney huffed, applying a screwdriver to the Particliser’s gorgeous outer coating of titanium alloy with integral solar panelling, “this is why beautiful warrior women just do not hang out here.”
- - -
“That is your mug, is it not?”
Those words were what happened next. He finds it hard, now, to remember the in-between times that week, as if there were only these events, linked up like a string of fairy-lights, energy flowing from one glow to the next.
“I, um, who?” He had managed in reply, detaching his mind from the blueprints for the new(er) accelerant matrix for the ‘Little Beauty’ aka ‘McKay’s Particliser’ aka ‘The Super-Particulator-Invertor’.
Teyla was sitting at one chair’s remove from him with her lunch tray in front of her, scraped clean in a way that suggested he’d been ignoring her for quite a while. In her outstretched hand was an old VHS case for ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and her finger pointed at Yoda.
Rodney took it from her hand reverentially: “Yeah, that’s a character called Yoda. Whose is the tape? No one told me we had Star Wars original edition here – I’ve been putting up with the remastered crap on Sheppard’s DVDs.”
Teyla, after a momentary expression of complete bewilderment, rallied bravely and smiled:
“Perhaps you could explain the story to me?” she asked, hooking her ankles onto the crossbar of the chair and tucking up her knees.
“Explain? Even better, we can watch it! Oh boy, we could have Star Wars night!” his hands described arcs in the air, “Dressing up, even! And food, and other people’s food and Sheppard’s Legendary Butterkist cache.”
His hand, coming down, brushed over the display screen with the blueprints on.
“Except, oh bugger, I really ought to…hmmm” he looked up at her. She looked a little…deflated, which was odd. “Hey, it’s OK, Reagen in Hydrophysics has a VHS machine, if you borrow that you can watch it any time and it’s really not hard to follow, mostly because it completely abuses all known laws of physics AND has three major continuity errors in that film alone that render the subsequent…and you really don’t care about that, I guess.”
He pushed back his chair and stood up, feeling awkward. This was Teyla. She possessed all three qualities that made him ill at ease: muscles, breasts and amazing leadership skills. And he liked her, liked her a lot, but she was definitely a Cool Kid and so kind of from another planet.
Well, yeah, duh, but, like *figuratively* as well…
Whereas he? He still used High School metaphors to quantify social relationships in another sodding galaxy, in a fantasy science city of which he was uncrowned king.
She was smiling up at him, a little…well, sadly, and clutching the video in both hands. “Thank-you, Rodney,” she said, “I will remember the advice. Good luck with the project.”
“A true scientist never believes luck beyond his own creation” Rodney replied, happily, and trotted back towards the science labs.
- - -
Some days later, back in the field, Rodney had been alone in a cave tinkering with a shield emitter when Sheppard came in to check on his progress.
“Rodney?”
“Mmmff?”
“What have you done to Teyla?”
“MMMMMMMmmmmmfff?”
“Take the nice, potentially deadly wire out of your mouth and answer me!”
Sheppard’s tone had been mock serious, but veering towards the latter: “She’s been asking me about Yoda all week” he continued, “Well, actually that’s a lie, she asked me who was a short, ugly, green man with long ears and a dressing gown, then when I finally figured out that it was Yoda she made me explain who he was and what he was in and everything. Now there’s only one person on the base that would subject her to any of that and that’s you, so what’s the big idea?”
Rodney assumed an expression of outraged innocence martyred in the face of an unsympathetic peer (which was, fair to say, almost his resting appearance). “I didn’t do a thing! She was asking me the same stuff only the other day. I thought it was weird but then, she is weird sometimes.”
Sheppard gave him a look of such withering scorn that he blushed:
“What? What am I supposed to say? I’m not exactly part of the exclusive hot-and-sweaty group am I? I’m not fluent in lingua-testosterona. I don’t have whatever bizarre, primitive, caveman bond you three seem to get from beating each other up with sticks.”
“Anytime you want to be beaten up, Rodney, just let us know.”
“Oh how considerate” Rodney gave a sneering smile and threw him an empty water canteen: “Why don’t you go and fill that, seeing as how there’s nothing for anyone but the scientist to do?”
Sheppard caught it with ease and turned, chuckling, to leave. At the exit of the cave he stopped, waited a second and slowly turned around:
“Rodney, um, it isn’t like that, the fighting. It isn’t very sexy, when you’re doing it, mostly just painful and kind of humiliating. You think about where to hit and how to, not much about your opponent’s…attributes.”
“I never, ever need to hear you mangle the double entendre again, thank-you very much. Goodbye.”
Sheppard shrugged his shoulders and strode out of the cave, beginning to grin.
- - -
It had been, what – three weeks later? – say three weeks later that the fifth worst idea in the history of the universe had been mooted at a Staff Meeting (he’d considered it carefully but Windows98 still came in just above at fourth place).
The Masquerade Ball, however, was definitely the worst organisational decision since the infamous attempts by the Officials of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to breed mules. It was not only a bad idea, but also a foolhardy, wasteful and selfish one, and anyone who disagreed was unworthy of inclusion in the team.
So most of his team-mates, and indeed anyone in his proximity, had learnt in the weeks leading up to the First Annual Atlantis Masquerade.
“FAAM! I’m gonna’ live forever! I’m gonna’ learn how to fly!” sang John Sheppard, whenever the issue came up. This may not have helped Rodney’s attitude.
A few days before the dreaded event, Teyla had swung by the Labs with the coffee pot and some more Athosian sweeten-bread. Her visits were getting to be so regular that – though still mostly mystified as to why she came at all – no one paid any special attention any longer. Rodney had gotten her a new twirly chair out of the stores and (in a fit of hospitality) bullied an underling into lending him some pink nail-polish to paint ‘Teyla’ on the back.
“Thank-you…you like to label things, I think?” had been Teyla’s comment.
“Oh, round here you have to” Rodney had said, indicating with one hand either the room, the wing, Atlantis in general or the entire Pegasus galaxy, “milk, teabags, chocolate, hand-cream...um, that is to say, um, manly razors – everything.”
So that day she deposited the food on the side, carefully avoiding the irreplaceable blueprints, and settled onto her chair with the Yoda mug in hand. Rodney had taken C3PO out of storage for his own use.
“I see you have completed the booster module” she said, eagerly.
Rodney had smiled proudly around a mouthful of wire casings, then taken them out and replied: “Yes, took us a while to see how to reconfigure the power source but I solved it. How’s life in the world of the idle?”
Teyla, smiling indulgently, swung from side to side on the chair: “I have been helping arrange the Grand Hall with decorations for the party. I think it will look very well by the time it is done.”
“Huh!” said Rodney, twiddling a few screws and then reaching out blindly behind him for the coffee. Teyla caught it just before it could spill on the blueprints and passed it to him. “Hmm, thanks…yeah, the party, why have a party anyway? Why spend…”
“Yes, I know how you feel about it.” Teyla cut in. Her tone was not abrupt or even sarcastic, just accurate. “You think we have better things to do with our time and resources. But it will be a great good to my people, you know, and I can seldom offer them such good at present.”
“Wammmmeeem?” said the mouthful of wires.
“What do I mean? I mean that I never see them. I never have a chance to go and lead festivals of the year – always, it seems, some crisis exactly coincides with them. I had to face down Dr Weir just to perform funeral rites for my dearest friend. I look forward to seeing them celebrate.” She was swinging faster now, little movements, back and forth and back and forth, staring at the floor. As if recollecting herself she had coughed, and darted a glance up.
“Perhaps you will go, Rodney, despite your aversion?”
“Well I might drop by I suppose. Maybe near the end when the dancing gets amusing.”
“You have not been asked as anyone’s ‘date’ then?”
“No, I mean, yes, yes I have, hundreds of them. Katie Brown asked me, actually.”
“I see.”
“I told them all ‘no’, of course.”
“Oh?”
“Like I say, I don’t want to go to this thing. I have days of work left on this beauty,” he stroked the Particliser, “and the whole idea is just so stupid, I mean do you know how many real festivals we haven’t celebrated? Why just the other day I was saying…”
“I was there, Doctor. I know.” Teyla cut in this time with an acerbity that was so unlike her normal tone with him that Rodney actually turned round in surprise and found her standing up, as if to leave.
“Wait!” he said, more forcefully than he expected. He felt rather confused about what was wrong but he knew without question that he didn’t like ‘wrong’, and really, really didn’t want Teyla to be annoyed with him.
“I’ll stop going on about it” he said, holding out a hand, “um, tell me how the generators are doing on the mainland.”
She sat down again, slowly, and started talking, and gradually they fell back into an easy conversation. He screwed in his last wires and moved to sit next to her, taking far more than half of the Athosian bread and gesticulating wildly whenever a full mouth prevented him getting his point across.
The thing, the really odd thing, that he’d found was that often when she was talking it was quite interesting to listen. Sometimes she said things he didn’t already know the answer to or things he had no idea were correct or incorrect. She talked a lot less about fighting and rituals than he had expected, and the thing that really got to him was that she didn’t seem to *know* she was a cool kid. She seemed to think she was a bit of a freak too.
“Oh no!” she exclaimed, laughing at one of his assertions that she must have fought her way to the top of the playground pile as a kid, “Good gracious no! They called me ‘denthla’ and ‘praidok’ – ‘bookhead’ and ‘brain-stuffed-with-words’ – I was the only one who went to learn the songs and chants of the Ancestors. I was the only one to try and learn our history poems.” She took a large bite from her bread and looked into the middle distance a little wistfully, “that was before the attack, before everyone got interested in preserving what was left of our heritage.”
There was a quiet moment. Rodney had felt a strong temptation to say something but some inner brain-lobe had managed to drop-kick his speech centres and he stayed waiting for her to continue:
“It was Charin that taught me to fight with the traditional sticks,” she said, eventually, “I was…targeted by other children. I had to learn to defend myself, indeed to respect myself.”
“I know what you mean” Rodney said, looking at her soft, strong hands on the mug because it was way too embarrassing to look at her face.
The mug moved, and her face came into view. Her eyes were very soft, very intent. “I wish there had been more schooling in my childhood” she said, quietly, “I wish I could have learnt the mysteries of science as you have, that I could be a part of these projects that mean so much to…Atlantis.”
He had a funny feeling in his chest, and felt frozen to the spot, but the answer came naturally: “I could teach…” he started to say.
“Teyla! Hey, Teyla!” cried a harsh male voice from the doorway. Ronon stood there, arms spread as if the very structure of the wall depended on his presence. Rodney spun round on his chair and saw Teyla do the same. He was conscious that they had been closer than co-workers usually got.
Ronon looked fairly inscrutable. “Teyla, we were supposed to start three-quarters of an hour ago” he said, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“The time slipped away from me” Teyla replied, with some dignity. She picked up the coffee pot and the empty bread-tray. “I will see you later, Rodney” she said, not unkindly, but her expression was odd.
As they disappeared down the corridor, Rodney could hear their voices:
“…but I don’t get it!” Ronon was saying, “there’s a million places to go in your downtime and you choose the Labs? There’s nothing there.”
“I hope you have been practising,” said Teyla, icily, “I am not feeling…lenient.”
- - -
On the day of the Masquerade Rodney could remember thinking that he’d been such a fool. A blind, blind, crazy fool!
He’d seen that *obviously* the circuitry for the targeting matrix wouldn’t work unless you coated the whole thing in a stable compound and isolated the conducting elements! A child of three could see that!
Rodney had thrown the defective component into the bin with a triumphant whoop and lifted his arms. He’d forgotten that one of them was still attached to his hand, which was still attached to a half-full mug of coffee.
“Ow!”
“Teyla? Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry! Here, I have tissues, come into the light.”
“…this is not how I planned this” she muttered, and stepped forward, still rubbing at a spreading brown stain over the shoulder of her white…Princess Leia outfit.
And she had the *hair* and everything – the whole cinnamon-swirl caboodle.
“Rodney?” she looked up from her dabbing efforts and took in his stunned appearance. “Are you OK?”
“Ah….yes, I’m good” Rodney drew the back of his hand across his head, “it’s just, um, I had a bit of a thing for Princess Leia at one point and I think my fourteen-year-old self just tried to stage a comeback in my brain.”
‘Teyla is girl! Teyla is a girl!’ screamed his hindbrain ‘How could you miss this? How?’ Girls were (whatever he might say, particularly to Sheppard) kind of the anti-Rodney. Girls meant embarrassment, frustration and a tinge of loneliness, and Teyla had cunningly disguised herself by being gentle, friendly, helpful and dependable.
His fourteen-year-old self was settling into the mental driving seat and adjusting the mirrors.
Meanwhile she smiled, not unkindly and bent down to pick up a package she’d let slip when the coffee hit:
“I just came to give you these. Since you missed the party.”
He untwisted the paper and found two Twinkies. They smelt like paradise, calming him down.
“Oh yessss” he sighed and bit about half one off. Then he paused, mid-chew.
“Um, you full of these already or would you like to have the other one?” he asked, casually, “maybe coffee?”
“Maybe not coffee” she said, darkly, looking at her shoulder, “but thank-you, I would love to share a meal with you.”
She reached out for the other Twinkie and he saw her shoulder was actually turning red.
“Ouch! I think I may have scalded you.” He grabbed a pot of the ‘electrical burns or chemical burns or really inappropriate lube jokes’ cream that was ubiquitous in the Labs and offered it to her. “I’m really sorry, I never plan to cause people I like major injuries. Does tend to happen though.”
“I gave Ronon eight different week-long bruises the other day,” she replied, scooping a glob of cream, “though that was on purpose.”
He started to ask, not least because, well, *hilarious*, but she spoke again before he could:
“I enjoyed those films about the wars in space. They are very exciting, very unpredictable.”
She really had paid attention to her ‘Star Wars’ collection and as the discussion wove on he felt not a little gleeful to have a new audience for his theories on the provenance of Boba Fett (the prequel trilogy, he informed her, was never to be spoken of in his presence. She snorted and pointed out that, one: there were way better lightsaber fights in Episode I than anywhere else, and two: Episode III was genuinely moving if you watched it with Spanish dubbing.)
“Damn. I think I gave you geek” was Rodney’s eventual, stunned response.
She laughed with frank happiness.
“Are there other films about people in space?” she asked, earnestly, “I find I like them more than this ‘football’.”
“More than…? Oh wow, marry me?” he said.
And then, like, actually listened to what he’d just said. And panicked. And blushed. And wondered what to say next. And panicked some more.
All before he’d even blinked.
It was like the moment when you put your hand under the hot tap, and you know it’s hot and you know it’s *going* to hurt like crazy but it hasn’t, not quite yet.
And in the time before it hurts, you know everything, you really finally know what’s going on and why and how and everything is very, very clear.
She was staring at him and he’d felt his stomach flip over. She looked…uncertain.
She held out a shaky hand, stroked it down his face and swallowed visibly:
“Rodney…” she said, like she’d been holding her breath, “Rodney if…I want to be your friend, but I want, oh, so many other things too. I do not know quite when, or how but…I came to your Laboratory that first day because I was sad and I realised I was happier near you. And Rodney, I like your life. I feel…at home, when I am with you.”
And at that point most of his brain just threw up its hands, let off some fireworks and surrendered, and he was kissing her, kissing her, kissing *her*.
The last truly coherent thought he had was that he’d been wrong all along. This wasn’t High School and she wasn’t one of the cool kids. She was the girl who tied back her hair, stopped wearing heels, put her glasses *on* and so became beautiful.
- - -
Now Rodney’s room is silent and neither too hot or too cold, and she has gone, now.
That, at least, in this whirl of confused feeling, he has a definite handle on.
In a few minutes she’ll bring coffee, steaming-fresh from the canteen, and Athosian bread and the DVD of the original ‘Battlestar Galactica’ that Zelenka mistakenly thinks he’s hidden well in the spare rubber-tubing draw in the Lab.
In few minutes she’ll be back, but in the mean time he misses her, acutely and yet somehow in an astonishingly familiar way. Little incidents of the past weeks are joining up in his head and he couldn’t tell you, not for the life of him, when precisely she had arrived in his life.
Normally not knowing an answer, any answer, would make him irritated. Today he lies back on the bed, one hand idly stroking the warm dent she left beside him, and smiles and smiles.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 02:47 am (UTC)“So remember to get dressed next time you get everyone up at 3am to make circuit-boards! I will not ever be able to look at Cheetara again.”
I about died. The entire Japanese Thundercats underwear will stay with me for some time. (And has Teyla seen said underwear?) You have a lovely, sarcastic voice--very Rodneylike, in a way--and like Rodney at times it's unexpectedly sweet, like here:
This wasn’t High School and she wasn’t one of the cool kids. She was the girl who tied back her hair, stopped wearing heels, put her glasses *on* and so became beautiful.
And that? Is great.
*hearts*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-20 02:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 03:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 03:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-22 11:44 pm (UTC)My theory is that every character in that show is a closet geek. Except Rodney, who is a closet superhero (but more of that some other time!)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-27 06:21 am (UTC)And I adore this fic. It's sweet but not overly so and utterly believable. Great voices. Thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 03:43 am (UTC)I loved that at the start, you make it seem like she's dead, or they're back on Earth, and he'll never see her again, but then the ending lets you know he's a hopeless romantic, and that he misses her when she leaves the room for five minutes.
This brings to mind an image of Rodney and Teyla as the cute smushy couple, that hang onto their phone calls for way too long - "You hang up first! No, you hang up!"
I have to say, I don't often find credible McKeyla (love that) fics, but this was both beautiful, and believable. Sequel? Possibly including Ronon, John, and the-entire-male-contingent-of-Atlantis' reactions to the relationship? :)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-22 11:48 pm (UTC)Yeah, I thought about this challenge and I thought: 'there's so many sad stories one could write here....hmmm, I want to write the happy!missing persons story!'
Mission accomplished then! Thank-you for feeding back x
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 03:46 am (UTC)That was just lovely.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 04:19 am (UTC)I loved this line so much!
And all the rest of it too :).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 04:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 04:48 am (UTC)Of course, now I'm wondering whether III could be genuinely moving when dubbed into Spanish...
I particularly love your description of epiphany, the simile of scalding one's hand and the sentence that follows.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 05:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 05:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 05:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 07:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 07:41 am (UTC)an expression of outraged innocence martyred in the face of an unsympathetic peer (which was, fair to say, almost his resting appearance)
You give some pretty good Rodney, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 09:13 am (UTC)Thank you. :)
review
Date: 2007-01-19 11:03 am (UTC)--Silverthreads
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-19 07:56 pm (UTC)I really liked this unique twist on the Missing Persons concept, too. Nicely sneaky, leading us first to believe that something NotGood has happened to Teyla. But no, he just misses her when she's not near him. Sigh.
Then you turned it around and did the missing person concept in the opposite direction during the development of the relationship. Rodney, while not actually missing physically, was missing to Teyla. Loved how she starts hanging out at his lab when he takes a sabbatical from team missions to work on his machine.
Teyla as a geek - love it!! Very believable as written. Hey - she wasn't leader of her people and the special protege of Charin just because she was good at whacking people with sticks!
So sweet! Excellent voices, excellent Clueless!Rodney. And oh, my gosh, as others have said, the following lines were fabulous:
And at that point most of his brain just threw up its hands, let off some fireworks and surrendered . . .
. . . she wasn’t one of the cool kids. She was the girl who tied back her hair, stopped wearing heels, put her glasses *on* and so became beautiful.
I could really feel Rodney's ache for her at the end. So glad they found each other in your story! Best, chev
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-20 01:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-21 05:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-22 11:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-08 06:20 am (UTC)I have no words for it, it's just mind-boggling and hilarious.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-12 03:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-19 04:37 pm (UTC)This wasn’t High School and she wasn’t one of the cool kids. She was the girl who tied back her hair, stopped wearing heels, put her glasses *on* and so became beautiful.
I really liked how you mirrored the opening and closing, explaining Rodney's thought process by example and somehow reflecting his own comfort with the "unknown' element of the course of events.
♥