sga bunny hutch kerplosion
I had occasion to look at my bunnies tag tonight, and discovered that a bunch of my SGA bunnies only got posted to my InsaneJournal.
# The one where John is Aladdin and Rodney is the genie and Teyla is the princess, but instead of falling for the princess, John falls for the genie. (Though John and the princess do become the best of friends.)
# The one where Shep keeps a journal, and excerpted pages reveal that one of his recurring ways to pass the time is taking "Field Notes on Dr. R. McKay", which include just about every fact about himself that Rodney's revealed on SGA, intentionally or not, plus some of Shep's own observations.
McK has 3 modes:
excited about science
smug about science
annoyed about everything that's not science
Then the observations would, at some point, take a turn for the more intimate. Shep would list the boxers that look best on Rodney, the movies that most quickly irritate Rodney into giving up watching to instead make out with Shep. By that point they're more like care and feeding notes, really.
# The one where it's Taming of the Shrew, SGA AU style, kind of. Due to culling, Lantea has developed strict traditions around marriage and family; the families of unmarried persons over 30 are fined, and to promote marriage, it's a rule that older siblings have to be married off before the younger ones can be. Rodney's 32 and perfectly willing to pay fines to keep focusing on his work, reclaiming the knowledge and technology of the Ancestors. But Jeannie wants to marry. So when Brigadier John Sheppard asks to call on Rodney to thank him for restoring an outpost shield just in time to save Sheppard and the men under his command, Jeannie has a wonderful idea for how Sheppard can express his gratitude.
# The one where Rodney is Batman and Shep is Superman in a version of the DC universe where Batman and Superman team up a lot and have massive amounts of sexual tension. Teyla is Wonder Woman, Radek is Green Lantern, and Ronon is, uh, not a DC girl here, maybe Martian Manhunter? Anyway.
# The one where Shep is a laid-back Jeeves to Rodney's high-strung Wooster. Rodney's a steampunkish science genius who's unfortunately convinced that his huge brain has to be useful in sticky social situations as well, predictably leading to disaster. Shep gracefully extracts Rodney from engagements and entanglements. At some point, of course, flush with gratitude and no idea how to express it, Rodney designs and builds an airplane for Shep.
# The one that's a pioneer-era AU. Rodney has hired Caldwell's stagecoach to take him to Pike's Peak, just ahead of the Colorado gold rush of 1859; he's got a genius new method for finding and extracting gold that he's sure will make him rich. John's been deputized to catch a gang of stagecoach robbers, and invites himself along on the stagecoach to lie in wait. Rodney is mightily annoyed, and also uncomfortably attracted, and eventually they have makeouts in the shadowed dim of the coach. Then the robbers attack, and John gives chase and pins them down with a shootout til his posse can arrive. Afterward, he escorts Rodney to Rodney's claim, and Rodney's method works and they live happily ever after.
# The one where Rodney spent the first year or so of the expedition painfully in love with John, and dropped one or two hints, which of course, Rodney being Rodney, were either incredibly abstruse or anvilicious. Anyway, he forced himself to give up on John after "Epiphany", making more of an effort to hook up with Katie, instead. Later, after Rodney and Jennifer break up, John eventually admits that he's been in love with Rodney for world enough and time, and contra the usual way of things, Rodney gets extremely pissed off, because he dropped hints! Didn't John get the hints! and John shrugs, guess not? Then Rodney wants to know why John never dropped any hints of his own, and John just mumbles that it never seemed like the right time, and Rodney's disgusted and it's days before he's even calmed down enough to talk to John again. But this time John quits half-assing around and painfully lays it out, yes he knew he could probably have Rodney early on, he didn't go for it because he wasn't sure enough of his command of Atlantis, and by the time that was less of an issue, Rodney was seeing Katie, and so on. Rodney: STILL ANNOYED. But now he's willing to let John make it up to him with sex.
# The angsty post-s5 finale story where Rodney leaves for a normal life with Jennifer. It takes the rest of them by surprise while they're busy trying to convince the SGC to release Atlantis to return to Pegasus now that the crisis is averted. Rodney and Jennifer move to D.C., where Rodney has always had contacts who thought highly of him; he's been promised his own lab there. Meanwhile, he's parked at a university research lab. Jennifer works at the CDC.
It takes about three months for the relationship to fall apart. Jennifer goes to Cheyenne. Rodney stays in D.C. The team, already flummoxed that Rodney left in the first place, is even more puzzled that Rodney doesn't return. All the expedition's attempts to get permission to return to Pegasus are going nowhere, so John takes the team to Washington to talk to Rodney.
It takes considerable finagling to get to the truth, but the team, esp. John, refuses to believe-- as everyone else does-- that Rodney's abandoned Atlantis for a comfy sinecure on Earth and a better shot at the Nobel. They figure out that Rodney has given himself up as a bargaining chip. His new lab will be dedicated to weaponizing his Pegasus research. In exchange, Atlantis will be authorized to return to Pegasus.
John works to uncover that Rodney's been lied to: none of his purported allies have any intention of letting Atlantis go. (And really, only someone of Rodney's colossal ego could believe that the US would let go of a city-sized flying alien warship in exchange for one person's work.) But even once John reveals the lie, and the combined efforts of Woolsey and SG-1 have started to turn the tide and there's hope that Atlantis will be able to go back... even so, Rodney won't come back.
Eventually John learns that Rodney's been trying to get things going with Jennifer and put distance between himself and John since the events of "The Shrine" because Rodney thought his behavior while he was ill made his feelings for John appallingly, humiliatingly clear. Since John never ever mentioned any of it once Rodney was well, Rodney inferred that John's silence was his merciful way of brushing Rodney off. Rodney's tried to make peace with that, but he finally needed to get away from John to feel like he had any chance of recovering from the perceived rejection. Of course nothing could be further from the truth, stilted confessions are confessed, misunderstandings resolved, the team brings Rodney back to Atlantis, and the expedition brings Atlantis back to Pegasus.
All the emotional John/Rodney drama occurs to the tune of The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service.
# The one where, contra fanon, Teyla and Ronon don't generally like American movies. They've seen enough explosions in real life that fictional ones don't entertain them; they've been in enough battles that impossible movie feats and physics just annoy them. The frivolity of all that spectacle bothers them.
Teyla likes documentaries. She loves Planet Earth and Koyaanisqatsi and Capturing the Friedmans, but also, surprisingly, movies like King of Kong, Grey Gardens, Spellbound, and Crumb.
Ronon loves Bollywood films. Most Satedan theater had songs, unless the topic was very serious, so movies without music seem like tragedies to him. And Bollywood films don't have all that kissing. On Sateda, you just didn't fake that kind of thing.
# The one where Jennifer has an actual, recognizable, consistent personality, and she and Rodney hook up in a genuine, non-idiotic way. They connect and bond over the whole prodigy thing. Jennifer talks about her fears and Rodney tells her that he's scared too, it's just that he's even more scared of being a coward in front of people he respects.
This might also be the one where Jennifer wants to know if John and Rodney have something going, and John explains haltingly that she might not understand because she hasn't been on this kind of a team, but when you're relying on each other in the field like a gate team does, you get close in ways that might look like something else from the outside. Maybe he's even telling the truth, or thinks he is.
For some reason this one comes with a title in my head: The Way Things Are Going, a line from "The Ballad of John and Yoko".
# The one where DADT was officially suspended for the Atlantis expedition from the beginning; it's an international effort under civilian leadership, and the US was pressed to discard the most controversial aspects of its Uniform Code.
But Sheppard joined the expedition at the last minute, and while catching up on vital info about the SGC and Atlantis, he had a lot more important things to focus on than changes to the Uniform Code. Once he was in Pegasus, of course, they were in crisis right away, and again, details of the expedition charter weren't really a priority.
John notices that his people aren't really observing DADT, but jesus, he's never agreed with those rules and with all the stress of 200-odd expedition members cut off from Earth vs. all the shit Pegasus throws at them... he's not coming down on his people over this. Then post-Siege, Lorne arrives, and while John's briefing him, he mentions awkwardly that Lorne might notice, well, some behavior-- and Lorne is like... sir... that doesn't apply here. And that explains why in Duet, John is at his maximum gayest, leaning artfully against a cut male mannequin and more or less openly ogling Ronon's ass.
# Jennifer hangs in there for a while after Rodney turns into Meredith; she tells herself it's what's inside that counts, after all, and Meredith is still brilliant and funny and sweetly awkward and all the things Jennifer liked about Rodney. They try to go back to bed together, but when they undress, Jennifer doesn't feel attracted to Meredith's soft, pretty hourglass figure, just self-conscious about her own body. She can't stop comparing the size of her breasts to Meredith's, and it upsets her how much Rodney seems to like his own female body-- Jennifer thinks that if Rodney and Meredith were separate people, Rodney would want Meredith more than he wants Jennifer. It's like Rodney is cheating on her just by being Meredith. And it's just too weird, feeling jealous of her boyfriend-as-a-woman. She breaks it off. Six months later, seeing John and Meredith casually kiss each other goodbye at the door of the jumper bay, she misses Rodney; but she also realizes it's the first time she's missed Rodney in a long while. So maybe it wouldn't have worked out for them after all.
# The one where John is James Bond and Rodney is ~(Vesper Lynn + Q) except scratch the tragic ending. And the betrayal. They go on a dangerous assignment together, they fall in crazy messed up love, then they team up for good with Rodney as the brains, gadget supplier and tech support for John's spy escapades. Oh, and John's CIA or NSA or something instead of English because an English John is just... hard to imagine. At this point it's barely James Bond, you might rightly observe. OH WELL.
# The one where Rodney gets truth serumed much like John does in the wonderful Or Something Like It, and at first everyone's like... Rodney on truth serum? Rodney babbling every damn thing that goes through his head with no filters? Yeah, boy, that'll be a change. Then there's a crisis and instead of storming around yelling at everyone for being morons and vaunting his own genius which fortunately is enormous enough to take care of this mess-- instead, Rodney runs around shouting things like "You should... check the couplings for power loss? What am I saying, you're probably already doing that, it's one goddamn keystroke, god, I'm completely useless as a leader. I'm just yelling because I'm blanking, I've got nothing, I'm not going to be able to pull an answer out of my ass this time, I'm a total fraud and now people are gonna die because they were dumb enough to believe me when I told them I'm the smartest man alive. God! Just see if you can spec out a quick workaround for those couplings, not that it matters, because if we don't solve the reaction problem we're all going to die screaming no matter what workarounds we put in place, and I don't have the first idea how to solve this-- fuck, I wish Sam Carter was here." And so then they realize a Rodney who says what he ACTUALLY thinks is a terrifying Rodney.
# The one where it's season 1 and Rodney has an allergic reaction to a food item offworld, but instead of giving him anaphylaxis, it hits him like eight shots and a pan of pot brownies, making him bizarrely relaxed and giddy and euphoric, and he says to John, "You know what I like about you?" and John figures: shit, I better head this off, he's probably got a thing for me, and Ford really doesn't need to hear it if he does, so John says, "Yeah, buddy, sure do." And Rodney says, "Oh good. Wait... how'd you know about Pokey?" and Ford gets chuckly and intrigued and starts asking while John winces, but it turns out to be completely innocuous: Pokey was Rodney's cat when Rodney was a kid, and Pokey had dark gold eyes that looked green sometimes, and his fur stuck up like a kitty mohawk, and that's what high!Rodney likes about John... John reminds him of his childhood cat. Ford is amused to no end, John laughs it off, but he's also kind of disappointed, weirdly, a little? And strangely enough, that minor incident kicks off his show-long pining. Because hey. Why doesn't Rodney have a thing for him? Don't they kind of have something, there? If they don't, well... anyway, seems like John does.
Years pass, Rodney nearly marries Katie and has a brief romance with Jennifer, which dies when Rodney goes to meet Jennifer's dad and all involved realize to their intense embarrassment that Rodney, in his most relaxed and Jennifer-approved mode, is practically a dead ringer for Keller Sr, who's a workaholic medical researcher, stressy and prickly but kind. So Rodney mopes around in the aftermath of that, and John's trying to cheer him up with beer and a Batman: The Animated Series marathon, but instead of being cheered, Rodney acts sort of despondent and furtive around John, and John eventually buys a clue and realizes that five years ago Rodney admitted that he noticed the color of John's eyes. DUH.
# The one where, in scene one of Brain Storm, Rodney's just a little bit more awkward and Jennifer's just a little more stressed, so when he proposes that she come with him to Tunney's event as his trophy arm candy, she's a little insulted, and tells him so, and he gets defensive, so she turns him down and leaves. Rodney slinks over to eat with the team and gets a critique of his approach from Teyla, who hints that perhaps Rodney was sabotaging himself. Rodney sulks about having to go to the event alone, and John offers to go along: Ronon's not at all into the surfing trip John's been talking up, and John's got some legal inheritance crap he could settle way faster in person on Earth, plus, John wasn't wild about the idea of Rodney going to an undisclosed location without armed backup anyway.
AND SO John goes along to the demo suited up in dress blues, and strategically deploys phrases like "Dr. McKay's not at liberty to discuss that" when people try to needle Rodney about what he's been up to, and of course when Rodney realizes the danger of the experiment, John immediately goes into "Who and/or what do I need to shoot?" mode. Somehow the bridge gets opened anyway, but instead of Keller's genius-sitting kindergarten singalong and double dose of condescending lectures, the middle of the plot involves lots of John and Rodney action-heroing around to close the bridge. There's probably still hypothermic kissing at the end, though.
# The one that's a Shrine episode tag-- yes, oh god, another one. This one starts with Rodney's very early stages of sickness, showing how the infected, nicer version of Rodney interacted with the team and the science staff. Then it skips to after his recovery. Rodney's relatively nice-ish in his halting way for a couple of days, til he watches the videos and reads everyone's reports, and after that, he's incredibly pissed off.
At first everyone welcomes it because hey, the old McKay is back! But after several days of this, they start getting annoyed, because he's seriously being like, his full-on McKayish scathing worst, and he seems really angry. He's only not-an-asshole to Teyla and Ronon.
People really start to get sick of Rodney being amped up to his bastardy worst all the time, but Ronon, oddly enough, continues to defend him. When John and Teyla ask, Ronon says that Rodney is working on a way to create the Shrine's radiation in a directed, controlled way to aid treatment of Second Childhood. The team are proud of Rodney for that, but it doesn't explain why he's biting off heads left and right.
Rodney's acidity is really wearing on people, and at length the team calls him on it. Rodney reveals how incredibly pissed off he is that it seemed that everyone noticed that he was being uncharacteristically nice for several days, but they just enjoyed it and didn't think to check if anything was wrong with him, and that neglect let him in for the most horrible and humiliating experience of his life. His incipient feelings for Jennifer were completely squashed by the revelation that she noticed something was up, but just went with it because he was sweeter. He's massively hurt because to him it seems like everyone was so happy to have a less caustic McKay that they were willing to let him die.
Teyla takes point to explain to him that everyone thought he was so much nicer because he was happier, and of course the people around him want very much for Rodney to be happy. Rodney snidely suggests that they could always lobotomize him if they want him to be 'happy' like that again.
Anyway, he is happy! He's accomplishing great things, he's an intergalactic explorer, he's head of Science & Research on Earth's most strategically crucial outpost, all he needs is a Nobel and he'll be completely satisfied. John asks, isn't there supposed to be a hot blonde wife and some kids in there somewhere? a family? and Rodney shrugs it off: When Jeannie visited, she told him Madison is becoming a piano prodigy. It's only a matter of time til she turns her gifts toward something more substantial. And Jeannie and Kaleb are planning to try again, so while of course Rodney has a responsibility to pass on his genes, there's no hurry, the McKay legacy is already underway.
No "you guys are like family", nothing approaching "there are people in my life that I care about"; it's like Rodney's regressed back emotionally to his pre-Atlantis levels of assholery.
John figures this is as good a way as any to demonstrate that they give a damn about Rodney, and hauls him to the infirmary, telling Jennifer to check him out some more because he's behaving uncharacteristically again.
Of course there's nothing wrong with him, he's just upset and defensive and not thinking about how much it hurts the team to get pushed away after they almost lost him and went to such lengths to help him. And then somehow this eventually leads to John and Rodney makeouts.
This post-The Shrine bunny has an associated ficlet.
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# The one where John is Aladdin and Rodney is the genie and Teyla is the princess, but instead of falling for the princess, John falls for the genie. (Though John and the princess do become the best of friends.)
# The one where Shep keeps a journal, and excerpted pages reveal that one of his recurring ways to pass the time is taking "Field Notes on Dr. R. McKay", which include just about every fact about himself that Rodney's revealed on SGA, intentionally or not, plus some of Shep's own observations.
McK has 3 modes:
excited about science
smug about science
annoyed about everything that's not science
Then the observations would, at some point, take a turn for the more intimate. Shep would list the boxers that look best on Rodney, the movies that most quickly irritate Rodney into giving up watching to instead make out with Shep. By that point they're more like care and feeding notes, really.
# The one where it's Taming of the Shrew, SGA AU style, kind of. Due to culling, Lantea has developed strict traditions around marriage and family; the families of unmarried persons over 30 are fined, and to promote marriage, it's a rule that older siblings have to be married off before the younger ones can be. Rodney's 32 and perfectly willing to pay fines to keep focusing on his work, reclaiming the knowledge and technology of the Ancestors. But Jeannie wants to marry. So when Brigadier John Sheppard asks to call on Rodney to thank him for restoring an outpost shield just in time to save Sheppard and the men under his command, Jeannie has a wonderful idea for how Sheppard can express his gratitude.
# The one where Rodney is Batman and Shep is Superman in a version of the DC universe where Batman and Superman team up a lot and have massive amounts of sexual tension. Teyla is Wonder Woman, Radek is Green Lantern, and Ronon is, uh, not a DC girl here, maybe Martian Manhunter? Anyway.
# The one where Shep is a laid-back Jeeves to Rodney's high-strung Wooster. Rodney's a steampunkish science genius who's unfortunately convinced that his huge brain has to be useful in sticky social situations as well, predictably leading to disaster. Shep gracefully extracts Rodney from engagements and entanglements. At some point, of course, flush with gratitude and no idea how to express it, Rodney designs and builds an airplane for Shep.
# The one that's a pioneer-era AU. Rodney has hired Caldwell's stagecoach to take him to Pike's Peak, just ahead of the Colorado gold rush of 1859; he's got a genius new method for finding and extracting gold that he's sure will make him rich. John's been deputized to catch a gang of stagecoach robbers, and invites himself along on the stagecoach to lie in wait. Rodney is mightily annoyed, and also uncomfortably attracted, and eventually they have makeouts in the shadowed dim of the coach. Then the robbers attack, and John gives chase and pins them down with a shootout til his posse can arrive. Afterward, he escorts Rodney to Rodney's claim, and Rodney's method works and they live happily ever after.
# The one where Rodney spent the first year or so of the expedition painfully in love with John, and dropped one or two hints, which of course, Rodney being Rodney, were either incredibly abstruse or anvilicious. Anyway, he forced himself to give up on John after "Epiphany", making more of an effort to hook up with Katie, instead. Later, after Rodney and Jennifer break up, John eventually admits that he's been in love with Rodney for world enough and time, and contra the usual way of things, Rodney gets extremely pissed off, because he dropped hints! Didn't John get the hints! and John shrugs, guess not? Then Rodney wants to know why John never dropped any hints of his own, and John just mumbles that it never seemed like the right time, and Rodney's disgusted and it's days before he's even calmed down enough to talk to John again. But this time John quits half-assing around and painfully lays it out, yes he knew he could probably have Rodney early on, he didn't go for it because he wasn't sure enough of his command of Atlantis, and by the time that was less of an issue, Rodney was seeing Katie, and so on. Rodney: STILL ANNOYED. But now he's willing to let John make it up to him with sex.
# The angsty post-s5 finale story where Rodney leaves for a normal life with Jennifer. It takes the rest of them by surprise while they're busy trying to convince the SGC to release Atlantis to return to Pegasus now that the crisis is averted. Rodney and Jennifer move to D.C., where Rodney has always had contacts who thought highly of him; he's been promised his own lab there. Meanwhile, he's parked at a university research lab. Jennifer works at the CDC.
It takes about three months for the relationship to fall apart. Jennifer goes to Cheyenne. Rodney stays in D.C. The team, already flummoxed that Rodney left in the first place, is even more puzzled that Rodney doesn't return. All the expedition's attempts to get permission to return to Pegasus are going nowhere, so John takes the team to Washington to talk to Rodney.
It takes considerable finagling to get to the truth, but the team, esp. John, refuses to believe-- as everyone else does-- that Rodney's abandoned Atlantis for a comfy sinecure on Earth and a better shot at the Nobel. They figure out that Rodney has given himself up as a bargaining chip. His new lab will be dedicated to weaponizing his Pegasus research. In exchange, Atlantis will be authorized to return to Pegasus.
John works to uncover that Rodney's been lied to: none of his purported allies have any intention of letting Atlantis go. (And really, only someone of Rodney's colossal ego could believe that the US would let go of a city-sized flying alien warship in exchange for one person's work.) But even once John reveals the lie, and the combined efforts of Woolsey and SG-1 have started to turn the tide and there's hope that Atlantis will be able to go back... even so, Rodney won't come back.
Eventually John learns that Rodney's been trying to get things going with Jennifer and put distance between himself and John since the events of "The Shrine" because Rodney thought his behavior while he was ill made his feelings for John appallingly, humiliatingly clear. Since John never ever mentioned any of it once Rodney was well, Rodney inferred that John's silence was his merciful way of brushing Rodney off. Rodney's tried to make peace with that, but he finally needed to get away from John to feel like he had any chance of recovering from the perceived rejection. Of course nothing could be further from the truth, stilted confessions are confessed, misunderstandings resolved, the team brings Rodney back to Atlantis, and the expedition brings Atlantis back to Pegasus.
All the emotional John/Rodney drama occurs to the tune of The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service.
# The one where, contra fanon, Teyla and Ronon don't generally like American movies. They've seen enough explosions in real life that fictional ones don't entertain them; they've been in enough battles that impossible movie feats and physics just annoy them. The frivolity of all that spectacle bothers them.
Teyla likes documentaries. She loves Planet Earth and Koyaanisqatsi and Capturing the Friedmans, but also, surprisingly, movies like King of Kong, Grey Gardens, Spellbound, and Crumb.
Ronon loves Bollywood films. Most Satedan theater had songs, unless the topic was very serious, so movies without music seem like tragedies to him. And Bollywood films don't have all that kissing. On Sateda, you just didn't fake that kind of thing.
# The one where Jennifer has an actual, recognizable, consistent personality, and she and Rodney hook up in a genuine, non-idiotic way. They connect and bond over the whole prodigy thing. Jennifer talks about her fears and Rodney tells her that he's scared too, it's just that he's even more scared of being a coward in front of people he respects.
This might also be the one where Jennifer wants to know if John and Rodney have something going, and John explains haltingly that she might not understand because she hasn't been on this kind of a team, but when you're relying on each other in the field like a gate team does, you get close in ways that might look like something else from the outside. Maybe he's even telling the truth, or thinks he is.
For some reason this one comes with a title in my head: The Way Things Are Going, a line from "The Ballad of John and Yoko".
# The one where DADT was officially suspended for the Atlantis expedition from the beginning; it's an international effort under civilian leadership, and the US was pressed to discard the most controversial aspects of its Uniform Code.
But Sheppard joined the expedition at the last minute, and while catching up on vital info about the SGC and Atlantis, he had a lot more important things to focus on than changes to the Uniform Code. Once he was in Pegasus, of course, they were in crisis right away, and again, details of the expedition charter weren't really a priority.
John notices that his people aren't really observing DADT, but jesus, he's never agreed with those rules and with all the stress of 200-odd expedition members cut off from Earth vs. all the shit Pegasus throws at them... he's not coming down on his people over this. Then post-Siege, Lorne arrives, and while John's briefing him, he mentions awkwardly that Lorne might notice, well, some behavior-- and Lorne is like... sir... that doesn't apply here. And that explains why in Duet, John is at his maximum gayest, leaning artfully against a cut male mannequin and more or less openly ogling Ronon's ass.
# Jennifer hangs in there for a while after Rodney turns into Meredith; she tells herself it's what's inside that counts, after all, and Meredith is still brilliant and funny and sweetly awkward and all the things Jennifer liked about Rodney. They try to go back to bed together, but when they undress, Jennifer doesn't feel attracted to Meredith's soft, pretty hourglass figure, just self-conscious about her own body. She can't stop comparing the size of her breasts to Meredith's, and it upsets her how much Rodney seems to like his own female body-- Jennifer thinks that if Rodney and Meredith were separate people, Rodney would want Meredith more than he wants Jennifer. It's like Rodney is cheating on her just by being Meredith. And it's just too weird, feeling jealous of her boyfriend-as-a-woman. She breaks it off. Six months later, seeing John and Meredith casually kiss each other goodbye at the door of the jumper bay, she misses Rodney; but she also realizes it's the first time she's missed Rodney in a long while. So maybe it wouldn't have worked out for them after all.
# The one where John is James Bond and Rodney is ~(Vesper Lynn + Q) except scratch the tragic ending. And the betrayal. They go on a dangerous assignment together, they fall in crazy messed up love, then they team up for good with Rodney as the brains, gadget supplier and tech support for John's spy escapades. Oh, and John's CIA or NSA or something instead of English because an English John is just... hard to imagine. At this point it's barely James Bond, you might rightly observe. OH WELL.
# The one where Rodney gets truth serumed much like John does in the wonderful Or Something Like It, and at first everyone's like... Rodney on truth serum? Rodney babbling every damn thing that goes through his head with no filters? Yeah, boy, that'll be a change. Then there's a crisis and instead of storming around yelling at everyone for being morons and vaunting his own genius which fortunately is enormous enough to take care of this mess-- instead, Rodney runs around shouting things like "You should... check the couplings for power loss? What am I saying, you're probably already doing that, it's one goddamn keystroke, god, I'm completely useless as a leader. I'm just yelling because I'm blanking, I've got nothing, I'm not going to be able to pull an answer out of my ass this time, I'm a total fraud and now people are gonna die because they were dumb enough to believe me when I told them I'm the smartest man alive. God! Just see if you can spec out a quick workaround for those couplings, not that it matters, because if we don't solve the reaction problem we're all going to die screaming no matter what workarounds we put in place, and I don't have the first idea how to solve this-- fuck, I wish Sam Carter was here." And so then they realize a Rodney who says what he ACTUALLY thinks is a terrifying Rodney.
# The one where it's season 1 and Rodney has an allergic reaction to a food item offworld, but instead of giving him anaphylaxis, it hits him like eight shots and a pan of pot brownies, making him bizarrely relaxed and giddy and euphoric, and he says to John, "You know what I like about you?" and John figures: shit, I better head this off, he's probably got a thing for me, and Ford really doesn't need to hear it if he does, so John says, "Yeah, buddy, sure do." And Rodney says, "Oh good. Wait... how'd you know about Pokey?" and Ford gets chuckly and intrigued and starts asking while John winces, but it turns out to be completely innocuous: Pokey was Rodney's cat when Rodney was a kid, and Pokey had dark gold eyes that looked green sometimes, and his fur stuck up like a kitty mohawk, and that's what high!Rodney likes about John... John reminds him of his childhood cat. Ford is amused to no end, John laughs it off, but he's also kind of disappointed, weirdly, a little? And strangely enough, that minor incident kicks off his show-long pining. Because hey. Why doesn't Rodney have a thing for him? Don't they kind of have something, there? If they don't, well... anyway, seems like John does.
Years pass, Rodney nearly marries Katie and has a brief romance with Jennifer, which dies when Rodney goes to meet Jennifer's dad and all involved realize to their intense embarrassment that Rodney, in his most relaxed and Jennifer-approved mode, is practically a dead ringer for Keller Sr, who's a workaholic medical researcher, stressy and prickly but kind. So Rodney mopes around in the aftermath of that, and John's trying to cheer him up with beer and a Batman: The Animated Series marathon, but instead of being cheered, Rodney acts sort of despondent and furtive around John, and John eventually buys a clue and realizes that five years ago Rodney admitted that he noticed the color of John's eyes. DUH.
# The one where, in scene one of Brain Storm, Rodney's just a little bit more awkward and Jennifer's just a little more stressed, so when he proposes that she come with him to Tunney's event as his trophy arm candy, she's a little insulted, and tells him so, and he gets defensive, so she turns him down and leaves. Rodney slinks over to eat with the team and gets a critique of his approach from Teyla, who hints that perhaps Rodney was sabotaging himself. Rodney sulks about having to go to the event alone, and John offers to go along: Ronon's not at all into the surfing trip John's been talking up, and John's got some legal inheritance crap he could settle way faster in person on Earth, plus, John wasn't wild about the idea of Rodney going to an undisclosed location without armed backup anyway.
AND SO John goes along to the demo suited up in dress blues, and strategically deploys phrases like "Dr. McKay's not at liberty to discuss that" when people try to needle Rodney about what he's been up to, and of course when Rodney realizes the danger of the experiment, John immediately goes into "Who and/or what do I need to shoot?" mode. Somehow the bridge gets opened anyway, but instead of Keller's genius-sitting kindergarten singalong and double dose of condescending lectures, the middle of the plot involves lots of John and Rodney action-heroing around to close the bridge. There's probably still hypothermic kissing at the end, though.
# The one that's a Shrine episode tag-- yes, oh god, another one. This one starts with Rodney's very early stages of sickness, showing how the infected, nicer version of Rodney interacted with the team and the science staff. Then it skips to after his recovery. Rodney's relatively nice-ish in his halting way for a couple of days, til he watches the videos and reads everyone's reports, and after that, he's incredibly pissed off.
At first everyone welcomes it because hey, the old McKay is back! But after several days of this, they start getting annoyed, because he's seriously being like, his full-on McKayish scathing worst, and he seems really angry. He's only not-an-asshole to Teyla and Ronon.
People really start to get sick of Rodney being amped up to his bastardy worst all the time, but Ronon, oddly enough, continues to defend him. When John and Teyla ask, Ronon says that Rodney is working on a way to create the Shrine's radiation in a directed, controlled way to aid treatment of Second Childhood. The team are proud of Rodney for that, but it doesn't explain why he's biting off heads left and right.
Rodney's acidity is really wearing on people, and at length the team calls him on it. Rodney reveals how incredibly pissed off he is that it seemed that everyone noticed that he was being uncharacteristically nice for several days, but they just enjoyed it and didn't think to check if anything was wrong with him, and that neglect let him in for the most horrible and humiliating experience of his life. His incipient feelings for Jennifer were completely squashed by the revelation that she noticed something was up, but just went with it because he was sweeter. He's massively hurt because to him it seems like everyone was so happy to have a less caustic McKay that they were willing to let him die.
Teyla takes point to explain to him that everyone thought he was so much nicer because he was happier, and of course the people around him want very much for Rodney to be happy. Rodney snidely suggests that they could always lobotomize him if they want him to be 'happy' like that again.
Anyway, he is happy! He's accomplishing great things, he's an intergalactic explorer, he's head of Science & Research on Earth's most strategically crucial outpost, all he needs is a Nobel and he'll be completely satisfied. John asks, isn't there supposed to be a hot blonde wife and some kids in there somewhere? a family? and Rodney shrugs it off: When Jeannie visited, she told him Madison is becoming a piano prodigy. It's only a matter of time til she turns her gifts toward something more substantial. And Jeannie and Kaleb are planning to try again, so while of course Rodney has a responsibility to pass on his genes, there's no hurry, the McKay legacy is already underway.
No "you guys are like family", nothing approaching "there are people in my life that I care about"; it's like Rodney's regressed back emotionally to his pre-Atlantis levels of assholery.
John figures this is as good a way as any to demonstrate that they give a damn about Rodney, and hauls him to the infirmary, telling Jennifer to check him out some more because he's behaving uncharacteristically again.
Of course there's nothing wrong with him, he's just upset and defensive and not thinking about how much it hurts the team to get pushed away after they almost lost him and went to such lengths to help him. And then somehow this eventually leads to John and Rodney makeouts.
This post-The Shrine bunny has an associated ficlet.
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