Time Stamp Meme!
I did this meme around the same time last year, and I think I want to make it a yearly tradition because it's a really cool way to end the fic-year. Last year I came through for all but one request (which is still in my pending folder because I will not give up), and some were small pieces while others were full out fics.
Give me one of my own ( Read more... )
Give me one of my own ( Read more... )
Fred shows up unexpectedly on John's third Saturday back on Earth. She brings a heat-insulated bag filled with what she swears are the best tacos in Los Angeles, a cooler bag stuffed with turkey sandwiches that are almost orgasm inducing, and a stack of graph paper.
They eat the tacos and sandwiches on the living room floor while drawing up intricate games of thirty-two digit Sudoku for one another.
When Fred calls foul at John's use of imaginary numbers, they break for a movie. Fred has a cache of DVDs with her, some of which John can't imagine her owning.
"I borrowed them," she admits as John loads an action movie into his brand new DVD player. "You and Charles have similar movie tastes."
Halfway through the second movie, he and Fred are situated on opposite ends of John's sofa, socked feet tangling together and heads turned to the side to see the television.
"It sort of never occurred to me that you'd come here."
Fred looks away from the movie and gives John a small smile. "Yeah, that's really not how we operate, is it?"
Her Texas accent is slightly more pronounced than it was when she arrived. John knows that his own neutral drawl is slipping into rhythm with hers; he's always had a tendency to pick up other people's accents when he's comfortable and relaxed.
John lifts a brow. "So, why the change?"
"I'm not sure." Fred shrugs and wrinkles her nose. "You just seemed a little...well, a little like I've been a time or two. Lost, maybe. Or adrift."
John's been both lost and adrift in the literal sense more times than he can count, but he's never felt it more than he does now that he's found and anchored. Fred does him the courtesy of looking away as he fights to breathe against the tide of loss that's trying to crush his chest in.
*
When John wakes up the next morning it's to the sound of raised voices in his living room. He stumbles out, not fully coherent, and finds Fred and Rodney facing off over the torn pages of a journal, whisper-screaming at one another. Or, well, Fred is trying to control her volume. Rodney's being a lot louder.
John hasn't seen nor spoken to Rodney since three days after they got back to Earth and John was given a team assignment while Rodney was whisked off to Area 51.
"Now look what you did!" Rodney snaps. He points at John and glares at Fred. "You woke him up."
Fred's lips curl into an impressive snarl and her right hand clenches into a fist. John thinks about it for a second and decides it's way too early to deal with this. He turns around and goes back to bed.
*
Two hours later John gets up again, showers, and finds Rodney and Fred in the kitchen. Fred's standing at the stove, poking at chicken she's frying in a cast-iron skillet that John knows wasn't in his kitchen yesterday. Rodney is sitting at the small bistro table in the corner of the room, bent over a cutting board and cutting honeydew and cantaloupe into neat squares.
John closes his eyes, inhales deeply, and takes in the scent of fried chicken, melon, and biscuits. He's flung back in time to the summer he was sixteen, which was probably the only more-than-tolerable summer of his life. "Oh."
"Come over here," Fred says. John can hear the grin in her voice and, sure enough, when he opens his eyes it's splitting her face in two. "Biscuits are done."
*
"What are you doing here?" John asks Rodney later, after they've eaten authentic southern food and played a marathon game of scrabble that almost resulted in Rodney and Fred coming to blows.
Rodney clears his throat. "Your cousin invited me."
John looks at Fred, who shrugs and rolls her eyes. "He's your friend." Her face darkens somewhat and tugs at her hair, down at the root, seemingly without realizing it. "Friends help. Trust me."
(continued)
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Fred's feet dangle above the ground, and her knee is pressed against John's.
"What is it you do out there in L.A.?" John asks.
Fred does him the courtesy of not responding with whatever job title she's hiding behind this month. She turns too-knowing and overtired eyes on John. "What is it you do for the government?"
They stare each other down for long moments with matching narrow-eyed gazes before both of their expressions slip into arched-brow deflection. They say, simultaneously, "You'd never believe me."
*
Rodney leaves the next day. After a very pointed clearing of the throat from Fred, not to mention a significant look, John and Rodney both promise to keep in touch. John watches Rodney ride off in a government issue sedan and decides that, while he might not feel good to be stuck on Earth instead of free on Atlantis, he feels less bad.
Fred huffs at John like he's a troublesome toddler she's just taught to tie his own shoelaces. "I don't know why you idiots thought breaking all contact was a good idea."
Given the similar paths they seem to have traveled, John figures that Fred has to know that from personal experience. He tilts his head--meaningfully--and Fred squirms.
"Oh, shut up," she mutters. John smirks.
*
The night before Fred leaves they drink an entire case of beer and get drunk as hell.
"Isotropy," Fred slurs. John struggles to focus his gaze, doesn't manage it, and instead claps a clumsy hand over one of his eyes so that Fred will just stop existing in double- and triple-vision. "Direction doesn't matter. Property's still the same."
John isn't sure if she's referring to her and him, to John and his new situation, or to Fred and whatever it is that goes on with her odd life. After careful consideration he decides that it doesn't matter; it's true in any case.
*
Fred leaves behind a case of beer, a fridge full of Southern food, and small satchels of...something...that she hangs at each window and from the handle of John's front door.
"Just trust me and keep them there, okay?" she says when John stares at one with a furrowed, skeptical brow.
John's run a city with his mind, fought alien vampire-things, and walked through Wormholes in another galaxy. He might not know what all Fred is into but he knows that there are more things out there than he can comprehend. He leaves them all where they are.
*
Before John rides off to another galaxy in a stolen Jumper, he thinks of Fred, of isotropy, and realizes that he is who he is, no matter the situation, even when he maybe shouldn't be. He isn't all that bothered by that fact.
*
.End
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This is great--John and Fred work so well together like this.
The Fred/Rodney battle made me weirdly happy. (And now I'm craving chicken and biscuits!)
This was excellent. Thanks so much!
Now I want Fred to meet Cam and watch them try to out-Southern each other.
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