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sga_flashficTitle: First Thaw
Author: Hth
Characters: John, Rodney
Warnings: MANY SPOILERS for "Quarantine." Language more suited to HBO than the SciFi channel. Conceptual use of challenge guidelines. Neither plot NOR sex.
First Thaw
by Hth
“Do you think I should’ve been more romantic?”
“Probably.” Rodney threw a napkin at him, which John deflected with his elbow without trying very hard, or even looking up from Golf. Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Buick Invitational included four things that John actually didn’t already know, which was four things more than he expected Rodney to say.
“I’m romantic,” Rodney said.
“No, you’re not.”
“You’re thinking of you. You’re not romantic.”
“I’m not thinking of me, and I didn’t say I was.”
“You aren’t very good at this, are you?”
John turned the page. “You don’t need my help with the self-flagellation, Rodney. You’re doing just fine on your own.”
“It’s not self-flagellation, it’s a post mortem. It’s a combination of a healthy spirit of inquiry and a completely rational investment in not screwing up my love life over and over again in exactly the same way, which necessitates me knowing exactly how I screwed it up this time. I think I should’ve been more romantic. Katie is the most remarkable– “
And John had been hearing this speech for almost three days, so he felt free to go on to the Q&A section and let the details wash over him: kind, generous, insightful, yadda yadda yadda. Katie walks on water, Katie is made of shimmering, pure celestial radiance, life without Katie is a sucking void of existential loneliness and pain. At first he really had felt bad for Rodney; by now he was starting to suspect Rodney was just fine-tuning his memoirs. Tomorrow the ban on Rodney just barging into his room and talking to him all goddamn night was totally going back into effect.
“– communicated that in the best possible way.” None of that sounded like a question, so John didn’t answer it and didn’t know he was supposed to until Rodney barked, “Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes!” John said. “You didn’t communicate in the best possible way.”
“I did try,” Rodney said morosely. “I’m just not good with symbolism. That’s my problem. Women care about the symbolism.” After a pause he said, “Put that down or I am going to kill you.”
John put the magazine down on the bed beside him, but not because Rodney told him to. “I’m listening,” he said. “You think your problem is the symbolism.”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about symbolism! Bringing flowers, opening doors – actions that carry additional layers of meaning within the context of a relationship!” Rodney made a gesture that seemed to indicate slamming a door repeatedly. “It just doesn’t feel natural to me, that particular kind of encoding of emotions. That’s not how I tell a woman I care about her – but then, that’s my problem, isn’t it? I can conduct a relationship perfectly well on the terms that I find comfortable, but placing that framework on it to begin with starts from a place of inherent selfishness, and it’s harder to correct your course midstream than it is just to...not...be like that. To begin with.”
“Well, how do you do it?”
Rodney looked at him blankly – less like he didn’t have an answer and more like he had gotten so used to John ignoring him that he was thrown off by direct participation. “How do I do what?”
John rolled his eyes. “How did you tell her you– how you felt?”
“By telling her!”
“No, I mean, how did you tell her – all that stuff you were saying, how amazing and wonderful she is and how you’re the luckiest etcetera etcetera?”
Rodney turned his hands palms up and looked blankly from them to John. “I told her.”
“You – said all that? Just – like that?”
“Of course I did!” Of course he did. Rodney, after all. “I was in love with her – it wasn’t a fucking state secret! Why wouldn’t I tell her?”
That was the first time Rodney said it in the past tense, which John thought was a good sign that subconsciously, he’d already started to get past obsessing and into dealing. But he didn’t draw attention to it; Rodney’s brain pretty much worked like Wile E. Coyote – he could get pretty far, as long as he didn’t notice he’d just run past the edge of the cliff. “Well...that was probably okay, then,” John said, as nicely as he knew how. “I mean...I’m sure she was fine with that. She already had a lot of flowers anyway,” he added.
“Clearly she wasn’t fine with that,” Rodney muttered. “I always forget about the symbolism....”
“Listen, Rodney. She probably noticed a year ago that you weren’t holding doors open for her. I don’t think that’s why it ended.”
“Also,” Rodney said reflectively, “there aren’t a lot of doors in Atlantis. Of the type that one needs to hold open.”
“Right, but – what? No, who cares? It was a– The point is, she obviously knew– knows how you.... It wasn’t about communication. Not that kind of communication, anyway.”
“Then what– “
“It wasn’t about you, all right?” John snapped. He didn’t mean to snap, he just...did. More gently, he said, “You guys knew each other pretty well, and she liked what she saw. It didn’t work out and that sucks, but...she got to know you a long time ago, and she stuck around. A year and a half isn’t a bad run, McKay. Most people get a lot less than that. Hell, pretty much every relationship I’ve ever been in has gone on a lot less than that so...it’s not like it’s just you.”
Rodney leaned forward in his chair, and John could see all the claws coming out on the fucking spirit of inquiry. “Pretty much?” John shrugged and stared back at him flatly, refusing to be the first to look away. He wasn’t intimidated by Rodney McKay – not now, not ever. “Every relationship except your marriage?”
Okay, that.... John looked away with narrowed eyes, which was not the same as a flinch, not even close. “I liked it better when you and Ronon weren’t friends,” he said. Ronon. He was the biggest fucking gossip on the base, John didn’t know what he’d been thinking when he’d told....
Rodney snorted. “I’m starting to wonder if we are. I get my heart broken, and he’s conspicuously absent. I didn’t even get a decent effort – he just thumped me on the back and said the right woman for me was out there somewhere. At least you had the decency to get me drunk.”
“Don’t take it personally,” John said shortly. “It’s just that he’s getting laid now.”
“Yes, and I’m not! Doesn’t that count for anything?” John gave him a look. “All right,” he grumbled. “I suppose, from Ronon’s point of view, it might count for slightly less than.... Is he really? Do you know that for sure?”
Scratch that thing before. Ronon was the second biggest fucking gossip on the base. “No, I don’t know that for sure, because I haven’t asked, because I’m not an asshole.”
“Clearly he has the option of getting laid – not that he ever didn’t have the option, really, but I mean – you know what I mean – but that’s exactly my point, he’s never been the type to fling himself headfirst into intimate relationships, which is fairly ironic, given that those are about the only thing he’s ever shown unwillingness to fling– oh, oh, my God, you are good at this! You changed the subject just then!”
“No, I didn’t.” Unfortunately.
“You did! We were talking about you.”
“No,” John said firmly. “We weren’t.”
“How long were you married?”
“If you’re feeling better, you can go.”
“Did you get married young? What was her name? Was it an ugly divorce? Did she cheat on you?”
“You’d love it if I said yes, wouldn’t you?”
“A little bit,” Rodney admitted without visible shame. “You managed to get married and I, to date, have not, but that doesn’t mean I might not be on better terms with my ex than you are with yours, and yes, call me petty if you must, but that would make me feel better.”
It hadn’t been an especially ugly divorce, and John thought of them as being on pretty good terms, for two people who hadn’t spoken to each other in years. But he said, “All divorces are ugly, Rodney. You’re hurting someone you used to care about because not hurting them is even worse. There’s nothing about it that isn’t ugly.”
That shut Rodney up for a minute, and when he finally said, “What happened?” it came out kind of quiet. Almost like he was nervous about finding out.
“Oh, Jesus, I don’t know,” John said. “I don’t know, it was – it wasn’t one thing. It was exactly the same thing that happened to you and Katie: we stopped making each other happy.”
“Oh,” Rodney said. After another unusually silent moment, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Do you– I’m not, just one more – Do you miss her?”
John closed his eyes for a second, which was also not a flinch. He rubbed the back of his neck and said, “I don’t know. Not lately.”
Rodney made a sharp, sarcastic little noise in his throat and said, “And how long did that take?”
Longer than he had any intention of telling Rodney. “Eh,” he said, trying for noncommital. “It happens in stages.”
“Did you have a song?”
“I thought you just had one more– did – what?”
“A song,” Rodney said, as if John actually hadn’t heard him and wasn’t just stunned by the total left-fieldness of it. “You know, something that was your song? You made her a mix tape, you played it at your wedding reception, I don’t know, something that symbolized.... It’s the symbolism, I really just think it’s...a lot more about symbolism than you want to....”
John picked absently at the threads on his wristband, watching Rodney’s face as Rodney glowered moodily at the dark window. “Yeah,” John finally said. “We had a song.”
“What was it?”
“Why do you care?” John said, a sudden hammer-strike of anger hitting him in the chest and cracking something, like an ice floe breaking off the shelf. He used to fly over the ice and admire it – how complex it was, how full of contradictions under its stark, uniform surface. Antarctica contained seventy percent of the world’s fresh water, frozen into Earth’s largest desert. What could you do with something like that except admire it? “Why do you care all of a sudden? You just want to feel fucking superior, you want to talk yourself into thinking I got my heart broken worse than you ever did?”
Rodney looked up, wide-eyed. “No! No, I just – I want to know, I want – I want you to tell me. You know everything about me, and you never tell me...anything. I just want you to tell me one stupid thing that even used to mean something to you. Out of all the things I never even ask you to tell me– “
“Rodney, you ask me all the time to– “
“No, there’s a lot I don’t ask! You think I can’t shut up, but there are things– “
“That’s such bullshit. There’s never been one damn thing– “
“I’ve never asked if you were gay.” It wasn’t so much that John didn’t know what to say as that he couldn’t remember how to breathe. He just stared at Rodney, not thinking anything, just a weird rush of white noise in his head, until Rodney started to get agitated. “And I’m not asking you now,” he said. “I know who you are, I know – the position you’re in, and I wouldn’t ask– “
“Right,” John bit off. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I were. Which makes it mean basically jack shit when I say, no, I’m not gay, right?”
“Sort of?” Rodney said. “Oh, but – not in the sense that I don’t believe you, just – I mean – you’re not?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Okay,” Rodney said, not looking terribly convinced.
“Oh, that’s okay with you?”
“No – yes! I mean – yes, that’s okay, but no, that’s not what I– Oh, son of a bitch. Just forget it. Forget the whole thing, I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“That’s two of us,” John muttered.
“I’m feeling a lot better now,” Rodney said, as meekly as Rodney was probably capable of. “And also, wow, it’s later than I– So I’m going to...head off. Thanks for the – and sorry about the – well, I’m – okay, goodnight.”
“G’night,” John said, not watching as Rodney left.
Once he was alone, he slid down the bed onto his back and rubbed hard at his eyes. He picked up Golf, but it seemed like when he flipped through it that all the articles looked the same, and all looked like ones he’d read before. He was kind of hungry, but not hungry enough to get up and go anywhere, and it wasn’t as late as Rodney had tried to make it sound, but it was late enough. He should probably go to sleep.
He wasn’t tired, though. It was always really hard to settle, once he started thinking about Nancy. It was kind of like...somehow like the boundaries of his skin didn’t extend far enough to hold in both himself and the person he’d been when he was somebody’s husband, too. He felt distended, in danger of ripping open at the seams.
The only reason he tapped his radio was to yell at Rodney – or maybe not to yell at him, but to say something that would piss Rodney off, or do something to make Rodney suffer for making him like this, but when Rodney answered with a quick, “What, what’s wrong?” he couldn’t go through with it.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, turning the lights off. “It was High On You.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our song, Nancy’s and my song?” he said impatiently. “It was High On You. But we didn’t play it at the wedding reception. My family would have thought it was some kind of drug song, because they don’t really get metaphors and are also...mainly from Jupiter.” But that was another story entirely. “So we picked The Search Is Over. For our first dance.”
“Thereby satisfying your inner Survivor fans,” Rodney said. If he hadn’t recently had his heart broken, John wouldn’t have let him get away with smirking so loudly.
“Nothing wrong with Survivor,” John said. He tried to keep the same tone in his voice when he said, “I loved my wife. Whatever you think I– whatever you think of me, whatever you.... That doesn’t matter. But I did love my wife.” He didn’t think he was really succeeding on the tone thing.
“I believe you,” Rodney said. “I really do.”
“But...it gets better.”
“Thanks. I.... Thank you.”
He almost cut Rodney off then, but instead he took a second stab at a light and easy tone and said, “And I promise, if I wake up one day and decide I’m gay, you’ll be– Teyla will be the first person I tell. But after Teyla, then probably you.”
“Oh, probably me? Probably me, meaning definitely Ronon?”
“I’ll– I would tell you before Ronon. I promise.”
“I – oh. You would?”
“I promise,” John said roughly. “See you tomorrow, McKay.”
“Goodnight, John.”
John cut the connection abruptly and pulled his radio off. He dropped it on the floor and added a little flick to his wrist so that it went skittering away, out of reach and invisible in the darkness.
He couldn’t think of anything else he was going to want to say to anyone tonight.
Author: Hth
Characters: John, Rodney
Warnings: MANY SPOILERS for "Quarantine." Language more suited to HBO than the SciFi channel. Conceptual use of challenge guidelines. Neither plot NOR sex.
First Thaw
by Hth
“Do you think I should’ve been more romantic?”
“Probably.” Rodney threw a napkin at him, which John deflected with his elbow without trying very hard, or even looking up from Golf. Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Buick Invitational included four things that John actually didn’t already know, which was four things more than he expected Rodney to say.
“I’m romantic,” Rodney said.
“No, you’re not.”
“You’re thinking of you. You’re not romantic.”
“I’m not thinking of me, and I didn’t say I was.”
“You aren’t very good at this, are you?”
John turned the page. “You don’t need my help with the self-flagellation, Rodney. You’re doing just fine on your own.”
“It’s not self-flagellation, it’s a post mortem. It’s a combination of a healthy spirit of inquiry and a completely rational investment in not screwing up my love life over and over again in exactly the same way, which necessitates me knowing exactly how I screwed it up this time. I think I should’ve been more romantic. Katie is the most remarkable– “
And John had been hearing this speech for almost three days, so he felt free to go on to the Q&A section and let the details wash over him: kind, generous, insightful, yadda yadda yadda. Katie walks on water, Katie is made of shimmering, pure celestial radiance, life without Katie is a sucking void of existential loneliness and pain. At first he really had felt bad for Rodney; by now he was starting to suspect Rodney was just fine-tuning his memoirs. Tomorrow the ban on Rodney just barging into his room and talking to him all goddamn night was totally going back into effect.
“– communicated that in the best possible way.” None of that sounded like a question, so John didn’t answer it and didn’t know he was supposed to until Rodney barked, “Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes!” John said. “You didn’t communicate in the best possible way.”
“I did try,” Rodney said morosely. “I’m just not good with symbolism. That’s my problem. Women care about the symbolism.” After a pause he said, “Put that down or I am going to kill you.”
John put the magazine down on the bed beside him, but not because Rodney told him to. “I’m listening,” he said. “You think your problem is the symbolism.”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about symbolism! Bringing flowers, opening doors – actions that carry additional layers of meaning within the context of a relationship!” Rodney made a gesture that seemed to indicate slamming a door repeatedly. “It just doesn’t feel natural to me, that particular kind of encoding of emotions. That’s not how I tell a woman I care about her – but then, that’s my problem, isn’t it? I can conduct a relationship perfectly well on the terms that I find comfortable, but placing that framework on it to begin with starts from a place of inherent selfishness, and it’s harder to correct your course midstream than it is just to...not...be like that. To begin with.”
“Well, how do you do it?”
Rodney looked at him blankly – less like he didn’t have an answer and more like he had gotten so used to John ignoring him that he was thrown off by direct participation. “How do I do what?”
John rolled his eyes. “How did you tell her you– how you felt?”
“By telling her!”
“No, I mean, how did you tell her – all that stuff you were saying, how amazing and wonderful she is and how you’re the luckiest etcetera etcetera?”
Rodney turned his hands palms up and looked blankly from them to John. “I told her.”
“You – said all that? Just – like that?”
“Of course I did!” Of course he did. Rodney, after all. “I was in love with her – it wasn’t a fucking state secret! Why wouldn’t I tell her?”
That was the first time Rodney said it in the past tense, which John thought was a good sign that subconsciously, he’d already started to get past obsessing and into dealing. But he didn’t draw attention to it; Rodney’s brain pretty much worked like Wile E. Coyote – he could get pretty far, as long as he didn’t notice he’d just run past the edge of the cliff. “Well...that was probably okay, then,” John said, as nicely as he knew how. “I mean...I’m sure she was fine with that. She already had a lot of flowers anyway,” he added.
“Clearly she wasn’t fine with that,” Rodney muttered. “I always forget about the symbolism....”
“Listen, Rodney. She probably noticed a year ago that you weren’t holding doors open for her. I don’t think that’s why it ended.”
“Also,” Rodney said reflectively, “there aren’t a lot of doors in Atlantis. Of the type that one needs to hold open.”
“Right, but – what? No, who cares? It was a– The point is, she obviously knew– knows how you.... It wasn’t about communication. Not that kind of communication, anyway.”
“Then what– “
“It wasn’t about you, all right?” John snapped. He didn’t mean to snap, he just...did. More gently, he said, “You guys knew each other pretty well, and she liked what she saw. It didn’t work out and that sucks, but...she got to know you a long time ago, and she stuck around. A year and a half isn’t a bad run, McKay. Most people get a lot less than that. Hell, pretty much every relationship I’ve ever been in has gone on a lot less than that so...it’s not like it’s just you.”
Rodney leaned forward in his chair, and John could see all the claws coming out on the fucking spirit of inquiry. “Pretty much?” John shrugged and stared back at him flatly, refusing to be the first to look away. He wasn’t intimidated by Rodney McKay – not now, not ever. “Every relationship except your marriage?”
Okay, that.... John looked away with narrowed eyes, which was not the same as a flinch, not even close. “I liked it better when you and Ronon weren’t friends,” he said. Ronon. He was the biggest fucking gossip on the base, John didn’t know what he’d been thinking when he’d told....
Rodney snorted. “I’m starting to wonder if we are. I get my heart broken, and he’s conspicuously absent. I didn’t even get a decent effort – he just thumped me on the back and said the right woman for me was out there somewhere. At least you had the decency to get me drunk.”
“Don’t take it personally,” John said shortly. “It’s just that he’s getting laid now.”
“Yes, and I’m not! Doesn’t that count for anything?” John gave him a look. “All right,” he grumbled. “I suppose, from Ronon’s point of view, it might count for slightly less than.... Is he really? Do you know that for sure?”
Scratch that thing before. Ronon was the second biggest fucking gossip on the base. “No, I don’t know that for sure, because I haven’t asked, because I’m not an asshole.”
“Clearly he has the option of getting laid – not that he ever didn’t have the option, really, but I mean – you know what I mean – but that’s exactly my point, he’s never been the type to fling himself headfirst into intimate relationships, which is fairly ironic, given that those are about the only thing he’s ever shown unwillingness to fling– oh, oh, my God, you are good at this! You changed the subject just then!”
“No, I didn’t.” Unfortunately.
“You did! We were talking about you.”
“No,” John said firmly. “We weren’t.”
“How long were you married?”
“If you’re feeling better, you can go.”
“Did you get married young? What was her name? Was it an ugly divorce? Did she cheat on you?”
“You’d love it if I said yes, wouldn’t you?”
“A little bit,” Rodney admitted without visible shame. “You managed to get married and I, to date, have not, but that doesn’t mean I might not be on better terms with my ex than you are with yours, and yes, call me petty if you must, but that would make me feel better.”
It hadn’t been an especially ugly divorce, and John thought of them as being on pretty good terms, for two people who hadn’t spoken to each other in years. But he said, “All divorces are ugly, Rodney. You’re hurting someone you used to care about because not hurting them is even worse. There’s nothing about it that isn’t ugly.”
That shut Rodney up for a minute, and when he finally said, “What happened?” it came out kind of quiet. Almost like he was nervous about finding out.
“Oh, Jesus, I don’t know,” John said. “I don’t know, it was – it wasn’t one thing. It was exactly the same thing that happened to you and Katie: we stopped making each other happy.”
“Oh,” Rodney said. After another unusually silent moment, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Do you– I’m not, just one more – Do you miss her?”
John closed his eyes for a second, which was also not a flinch. He rubbed the back of his neck and said, “I don’t know. Not lately.”
Rodney made a sharp, sarcastic little noise in his throat and said, “And how long did that take?”
Longer than he had any intention of telling Rodney. “Eh,” he said, trying for noncommital. “It happens in stages.”
“Did you have a song?”
“I thought you just had one more– did – what?”
“A song,” Rodney said, as if John actually hadn’t heard him and wasn’t just stunned by the total left-fieldness of it. “You know, something that was your song? You made her a mix tape, you played it at your wedding reception, I don’t know, something that symbolized.... It’s the symbolism, I really just think it’s...a lot more about symbolism than you want to....”
John picked absently at the threads on his wristband, watching Rodney’s face as Rodney glowered moodily at the dark window. “Yeah,” John finally said. “We had a song.”
“What was it?”
“Why do you care?” John said, a sudden hammer-strike of anger hitting him in the chest and cracking something, like an ice floe breaking off the shelf. He used to fly over the ice and admire it – how complex it was, how full of contradictions under its stark, uniform surface. Antarctica contained seventy percent of the world’s fresh water, frozen into Earth’s largest desert. What could you do with something like that except admire it? “Why do you care all of a sudden? You just want to feel fucking superior, you want to talk yourself into thinking I got my heart broken worse than you ever did?”
Rodney looked up, wide-eyed. “No! No, I just – I want to know, I want – I want you to tell me. You know everything about me, and you never tell me...anything. I just want you to tell me one stupid thing that even used to mean something to you. Out of all the things I never even ask you to tell me– “
“Rodney, you ask me all the time to– “
“No, there’s a lot I don’t ask! You think I can’t shut up, but there are things– “
“That’s such bullshit. There’s never been one damn thing– “
“I’ve never asked if you were gay.” It wasn’t so much that John didn’t know what to say as that he couldn’t remember how to breathe. He just stared at Rodney, not thinking anything, just a weird rush of white noise in his head, until Rodney started to get agitated. “And I’m not asking you now,” he said. “I know who you are, I know – the position you’re in, and I wouldn’t ask– “
“Right,” John bit off. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I were. Which makes it mean basically jack shit when I say, no, I’m not gay, right?”
“Sort of?” Rodney said. “Oh, but – not in the sense that I don’t believe you, just – I mean – you’re not?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Okay,” Rodney said, not looking terribly convinced.
“Oh, that’s okay with you?”
“No – yes! I mean – yes, that’s okay, but no, that’s not what I– Oh, son of a bitch. Just forget it. Forget the whole thing, I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“That’s two of us,” John muttered.
“I’m feeling a lot better now,” Rodney said, as meekly as Rodney was probably capable of. “And also, wow, it’s later than I– So I’m going to...head off. Thanks for the – and sorry about the – well, I’m – okay, goodnight.”
“G’night,” John said, not watching as Rodney left.
Once he was alone, he slid down the bed onto his back and rubbed hard at his eyes. He picked up Golf, but it seemed like when he flipped through it that all the articles looked the same, and all looked like ones he’d read before. He was kind of hungry, but not hungry enough to get up and go anywhere, and it wasn’t as late as Rodney had tried to make it sound, but it was late enough. He should probably go to sleep.
He wasn’t tired, though. It was always really hard to settle, once he started thinking about Nancy. It was kind of like...somehow like the boundaries of his skin didn’t extend far enough to hold in both himself and the person he’d been when he was somebody’s husband, too. He felt distended, in danger of ripping open at the seams.
The only reason he tapped his radio was to yell at Rodney – or maybe not to yell at him, but to say something that would piss Rodney off, or do something to make Rodney suffer for making him like this, but when Rodney answered with a quick, “What, what’s wrong?” he couldn’t go through with it.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, turning the lights off. “It was High On You.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our song, Nancy’s and my song?” he said impatiently. “It was High On You. But we didn’t play it at the wedding reception. My family would have thought it was some kind of drug song, because they don’t really get metaphors and are also...mainly from Jupiter.” But that was another story entirely. “So we picked The Search Is Over. For our first dance.”
“Thereby satisfying your inner Survivor fans,” Rodney said. If he hadn’t recently had his heart broken, John wouldn’t have let him get away with smirking so loudly.
“Nothing wrong with Survivor,” John said. He tried to keep the same tone in his voice when he said, “I loved my wife. Whatever you think I– whatever you think of me, whatever you.... That doesn’t matter. But I did love my wife.” He didn’t think he was really succeeding on the tone thing.
“I believe you,” Rodney said. “I really do.”
“But...it gets better.”
“Thanks. I.... Thank you.”
He almost cut Rodney off then, but instead he took a second stab at a light and easy tone and said, “And I promise, if I wake up one day and decide I’m gay, you’ll be– Teyla will be the first person I tell. But after Teyla, then probably you.”
“Oh, probably me? Probably me, meaning definitely Ronon?”
“I’ll– I would tell you before Ronon. I promise.”
“I – oh. You would?”
“I promise,” John said roughly. “See you tomorrow, McKay.”
“Goodnight, John.”
John cut the connection abruptly and pulled his radio off. He dropped it on the floor and added a little flick to his wrist so that it went skittering away, out of reach and invisible in the darkness.
He couldn’t think of anything else he was going to want to say to anyone tonight.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-30 03:59 am (UTC)