SGA: Heteronormativity... (het, PG-13) 3/4
Title: Heteronormativity, Gender Construction, and Nonverbal Signalling in Intercultural Communication: A Comedy
Author: mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through season 4
Warnings: Mensa AU, but not related to my Major Zelenka fics in any way, shape or form.
Summary: In which Teyla may be plotting something, Keller may be delusional, Ronon may be cheating and John may in fact be the girl. No pudding cups or Marines were injured in the production of this fanfic.
Heteronormativity, Gender Construction and Nonverbal Signaling in Intercultural Communication: A Comedy
By Mad Maudlin
It turned out that being cool all the time was really kind of hard. John already had the black wardrobe and the soul patch and the cutting wit, but part of being cool sometimes meant not using that wit, or pointing out when people were wrong, or even talking at all. It also generally involved ignoring Teyla, which was a little bit like hiding from her, except for the part where she was still in the room while he did it. But it was kind of like the Schrödinger's cat thing-if he refused to acknowledge it, she was really only half-stalking him, and the other half was simultaneously doing whatever it was Teyla did normally when not stalking him (like beating people up and then meditating about it).
There were other rewards, too, like how Rod stopped nagging him about fiber and stress management. Granted, he occasionally looked at John like he was possessed, but he no longer had actual grounds to question his mental health. John also noticed that the Mensa meeting went way more smoothly than normal, though there weren't enough data points to correlate that with his newly-established coolness. Also, Eldon seemed to have spontaneously gotten smarter.
Coolness also helped him avoid the urge to pin a scarlet letter to Ronon's back, because it meant John could just semi-ignore him when he felt like it. Sort of a Schrödinger's adulterer sort of thing. But since he'd semi-kind-of-not-promised Keller he'd say something to Melena, he did look for an opportunity to talk to her, in a way that was both cool, unobtrusive, and totally unlike something a middle schooler would do. (Though he didn't have much grounds for judging that, since he'd never actually been in a conventional American middle school-during those years he'd lived in four different countries and, briefly, a barge in international waters.)
Sadly, he got his chance shortly after their next mission briefing, because it turned out that Rod really had been putting those off until he was sure John wasn't insane. They looked at the unmanned reconnaissance data, Elizabeth reminded them to check in if they found anything and Sumner reminded them not to die, blah blah blah, only somewhere around the first set of videos John felt somebody kick him in the ankle.
There were only five other people at the table, Rod and Sumner were discussing the terrain and Elizabeth's legs were too short to reach. He looked at Ronon, but he was asleep.
Somebody kicked him again, harder than before.
He looked at Teyla, because she was directly across the table from him and half-stalking him (hence motive, method and opportunity) but she was looking politely at the screen while Sumner described what the UAVs had revealed about the terrain for a couple miles around the gate. It was his right ankle being kicked, so no way could it be Rod or Elizabeth really, and Sumner's legs might've been long enough for some kind of reacharound action if he slouched, but John didn't think that was even possible. (He probably even slept standing up at attention, like a horse.) He got kicked again, really kind of hard this time, and he decided that Ronon was faking because even he had more respect for mission briefings than that.
So John kicked Ronon under the table. Ronon opened one eye, scowled, and kick John hard enough in the knee that he bit his tongue in order to not shout "FUCK!" in the middle of Sumner's never-ending topological lecture. Then somebody kicked his ankle again, and this time he had enough grounds for comparison to know it totally wasn't Ronon, because a) Ronon could kick way harder than that and b) the angle of the kick and the size of the boot were both wrong.
Teyla was still enraptured by Sumner, who was apparently describing every goddamn rock and naming it after his favorite Muppet or some shit. But she was the only one left who could be kicking him. Why was she kicking him? Was she annoyed that he'd been ignoring her? Was this some kind of tenderizing process? Maybe she'd developed some kind of weird kicking disease and didn't even know she was doing it. More importantly, how would a cool person handle this situation? Maybe if he ignored it…
Nope. Teyla could kick as hard as Ronon. John bit his tongue again.
Sumner finally, finally, finally finished talking about rocks, and Elizabeth started talking about ruins. John wondered if it would be rude and/or uncool to just get up and move to a different seat-or maybe a different room-or, hell, he could just resign from the team right now and hide under his bed (with the vents padlocked) for a while. But, no, that was not cool. John was totally cool. Nothing fazed him. Not even being kicked a lot.
Or, you know, having someone grab his foot in some kind of goddamn pincer maneuver and twist it. That hurt like a son of a bitch, but that wasn't the same as being fazed, exactly.
"You all right, Dr. Sheppard?" Sumner asked, because despite his coolness John couldn't entirely hold in a whimper.
The pincer immediately stopped. Teyla didn't even look concerned. "Fine," John declared, because he could be just as cool as she was.
Rod frowned at him. "You sure?"
"Yup."
"'Cause you're looking a little wild about the eyes there."
"'M good," he insisted. (And he was, or at least would be until he tried to stand.)
"Are you going to give me polysyllabic answers any time soon?" Rod asked in a tone of voice normally reserved for kindergarten teachers and orderlies in nursing homes.
John made eye contact with Teyla, finally, but he face was totally unreadable. She didn't look angry or hateful or grumpy or sick or anything. Just Teyla. "Maybe," he allowed.
Rod hissed under his breath, but Sumner just rolled his eyes and said, "If you ladies would let us get back to the briefing, we're almost done here." As soon as he started talking again, Teyla nudged John's sore ankle with her toe-or at least that's what it felt like-and he gave up on cool and tried to kick her back as hard as he could. Instead he hit the leg of the table square on, with sufficient force to both knock his chair over completely and break every bone in his foot. Or at least that's what it felt like.
"Jesus Christ, John!" Rod blurted and tried to help him up. "What's wrong with you?"
John waved his poor abused ankle and managed to blurt out, "Cramp."
So while the rest of his team were off enjoying a refreshing hike across Planet of the Fascinating Rocks, John was back in the infirmary with his leg elevated. And lo and behold, it was Melena who brought him over a fresh ice pack while they were waiting for the scanner to be freed up. "What happened here?" she asked cheerfully as she examined what promised to be colorful and extensive bruising.
"Long story," John said. For once, it seemed like Keller wasn't in the infirmary when he was; Carson was on call, but busy badgering a Marine who'd fallen down a flight of steps somehow. He took a deep breath and figured this was probably his only chance to avoid actually stuffing a note in anybody's locker. "Say, uh, Melena, how's…life?"
Ouch, bad opening. Not very cool. Melena frowned at him. "Good. And you?"
"I mean how's Ronon?" John clarified desperately. "Because he seems, uh, something seems weird with him. I think he fell asleep in the briefing just now?"
That at least morphed the frown from a what-the-fuck kind to an oh-hell-no kind. "He did, did he?"
"I don't know," John said. "I, uh, was busy getting a cramp and falling down."
Melena sighed. "I suppose…well, no, never mind. You are on his team and all, if we can trust anybody it's you."
"Totally," John said, while actually thinking, you'd be surprised. "Something going on?"
"You could say that," she said. "I don't really know how your people put this, but…let's just say Ronon and I are hoping to expand the family a little bit."
Oh shit. Ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit. John swallowed hard, while somewhere in Rock 'n' Roll Heaven Johnny Cash shook his head in disappointment. "Really?" he managed to croak.
Melena nodded. "We weren't planning on telling anyone until we were more certain…don't want to jinx things, I suppose."
"I…that's…wow." Sticking to short words would maybe help a little. "I, um, congratulations?"
"Save it for when we make the announcement, okay?" Melena said, and smiled weakly. "Right now we're not having much luck."
"Have you tried, you know, the rhythm method?" asked John, or rather whatever being had hijacked his mouth while his brain was subsumed in horror.
Melena looked intrigued by that, and the thought of discussing fertility with her at just that second made John throw up in his mouth a little, but luckily Carson appeared and they got back to the much more familiar and less terrifying topic of John himself. Turned out nothing was broken, or even really sprained, and while Carson looked dubious about John's claims of a mysterious cramp (he knew perfectly well it was a stupid defense, but he couldn't very well start changing his story now, could he?) he still let John leave with an inflatable cast and a bottle of ibuprofen. John limped back to his lab and tried to decide how to never tell anybody about that conversation ever again, especially not Keller, because, Jesus.
-\--\--\-
When his team returned, they found him in the lab and asked about his ankle. John had found an Ace bandage to wrap it in, plus the inflatable cast, plus a crutch that he fashioned for himself out of some stray packaging materials they hadn't ever got around to recycling, so it all looked much worse than it really was, and they saw through that in about half a second.
"So when are you cleared to go out again?" Rod asked. He still had leaves in his hair from the mission.
John shrugged. "Day. Maybe two."
"Is that what Carson said or what you're making up?"
"Carson said," John said defensively.
"When's he ever tried to get back on duty that fast?" Ronon asked. John had to try very hard not to look at him, because ohgodohgod.
Rod made a vague hand gesture. "I know, I know, this is John we're talking about, but he's been wearing an awful lot of black lately, and he's stopped running his mouth off, and his research team says he's been alert and working before nine o'clock…"
"What's your point?" John asked, feeling preemptively stung by it.
"Just…you know what, never mind." Rod said quickly. "Nothing at all."
Then Teyla announced, "We will be free until sunrise on M4Z-001."
"Sunrise?" John asked.
Rod waved at him. "It's got a very slow rotation cycle. Night lasts about a hundred hours at the moment. That's why we called the mission, nightfall."
"So…yeah," John said, clinging to the remains of his cool. "Yeah, I'll be ready to go then. And nothing to do until then, right? Yeah."
"Perhaps," Teyla said, "you would honor me by joining me in the gym when your foot has recovered."
Rod chuckled and Ronon laughed out loud, but John broke out in a cold sweat. Was this it, then? Had she given up on subtlety and started moving in for the kill? Rod was right, there was no need to poison him-she could lure him into the gym and brain him with a bantos rod. Or maybe just glare at him hard enough for his heart to stop. If anybody could do that it'd be Teyla.
"He hurt his foot, not his brain," Ronon said. "You think he's actually gonna get in the gym willingly?"
"Remember, this is John you're talking about," Rod added.
"I'd love to," said the thing that sometimes possessed John's mouth while he was panicking. Because, okay, he kind of liked sticking it to Rod and Ronon sometimes. And it was certainly the polite thing to do. Did flies ever fling themselves into spider webs out of politeness?
Rod's mouth actually fell open, but one side of Teyla's went up just the tiniest bit, like a smile. "I look forward to it," she said, and left the lab.
And Rod blurted, "Don't ever start playing golf," and hurried out before John could find out just where the fuck that came from. And he claimed John was the crazy one. Bah.
(Ronon just left with no dramatic exit line, and John was secretly thankful because oh god.)
-\--\--\-
Probably one of the most disturbing things John had seen in Atlantis-disturbing, but not actively horrifying in the same way as turning into a bug was horrifying-was the Mary Kay party that happened in Kusinagi's lab just before the "Yay! Three whole years and not yet dead!" super-tendol feast. Well, he didn't think it was actually Mary Kay specifically, but that was the general tenor of what he saw when he wandered in looking for Kusinagi's results with the crystal extruders and found about two dozen women sitting on pillows in the middle of the room, passing around lipstick and eyeliner and something that suspiciously resembled snickerdoodles.
Mehra had been the first to notice him, and she threw a pillow at his head while sporting two sharply contrasting types of eye shadow that streaked outwards to her temples like war paint. "Hey! This is girls only! No men allowed!"
John had said the only thing that came easily to mind, which was, "You're not a girl."
"Tonight we're all girls, Shep," Cadman had said (looking somehow softened by some kind of cosmetic alchemy). "So either get out or pull up a pillow. I think we've got the right foundation for you."
He had gotten out, but not before noticing Teyla and Sora sharing a folded-up duvet on the opposite side of the room. Sora had apparently gone nuts with the body glitter and was giggling in a manner John never wanted to associate with her again, but Teyla had just been looking at a large, soft brush of some kind with a bemused expression. John had managed to rationalize the experience in his head by imagining that she'd been trying to figure out a way to disembowel somebody with it.
-\--\--\-
John thought about actually breaking his leg to get out of meeting Teyla in the gym, but that seemed a little extreme, and he did have to consider that Rod was watching, and possibly Sumner and Elizabeth at this point too. Then he thought about breaking something in his lab, but that also would probably get him into trouble unless he pinned the blame on Eldon, and at that point it wasn't really worth the effort.
He tried to mentally brace himself by dressing all in black for the event, like a ninja or a Marine or Johnny Cash, but that idea went down the tubes because he didn't have any pants suitable for exercising in except his uniforms, which were gray, or an old pair of flannel pajama bottoms, which were red and green plaid, and he didn't really want to die with a holiday theme. He thought he could at least make himself look competent and prepared with a couple of sweat bands, you know, like a pro something or other might wear, but the closest thing he could find in his quarters on short notice were some pulse warmers Sumner had knit him a couple months ago, and not only did they make him look like some kind of refugee from a 70's porno, they were fuchsia.
So he went to his death in BDU pants and a black T-shirt, and he made sure to set up his personal laptop to upload his will and a video message to the physics department if he didn't return and input his password in two hours. (He didn't think Teyla could get too far in two hours without using the gate. They could bring her justice in two hours, right?) He kind of wanted to say some final goodbyes, but Rod was doing administrative stuff and Lorne was offworld and he didn't even have, like, a fern to call his own. What kind of person doesn't even have a fern to miss him when he's murdered by vengeful alien ninjas? FERN! he wrote on a sticky note and attached it to his laptop, so that in case he did survive he'd remember to get himself one. Maybe Katie the prudish botanist could help with that one.
He had debated how much he should publicize his impending demise, because the bonus of making it harder for Teyla to escape was counterweighted by the possibility that a fair number of people would show up on hand just to point and laugh at him being in the gym at all, and at that point John would probably have killed himself and spared Teyla the trouble. So he studied the internal sensor data to plan the most isolated and private route to Teyla's favorite ass-kicking room, and brought a life signs detector with him to guarantee he wasn't going to be seen. Death with dignity, was his motto, or at least as dignified as he could get while running away very fast.
It did mean he slouched into the gym a little bit late, though. Teyla was already there, wearing the long multipanel skirt thing that she sometimes did. She was twirling one bantos rod in lazy loops, passing it smoothly from one hand to the other, with her eyes shut; she didn't even open them to say, "Hello, John," and in the angled afternoon light she almost looked serene.
"Hi," John said. "You, uh, it's…hi."
Teyla opened her eyes and stopped spinning the bantos. "You may remove your shoes."
"Huh?" John looked at his sneakers, which were a little grody from his last foray into a formerly-flooded lower level but still perfectly serviceable. Then he noticed Teyla was barefoot. "Oh. Is that, uh, like a rule?"
"No," Teyla said.
"Okay," John said. "Just asking." Die barefoot or not? Cowboys were supposed to die with their boots on. John wasn't sure what that had to do with him, but it suddenly seemed very important.
He was so busy obsessing about his footwear that he didn't notice Teyla moving across the room-or maybe it was just that ninja skill of Sudden Appearing at work again. Either way, she touched his arm, and he nearly jumped out of his skin, ready to run screaming from the room to bring a whole squad of Marines to his defense. Except she was just touching him, just a little, on the arm, which didn't seem like much of a finishing move even for a ninja. "John," she said, just like they did this sort of thing every day, the sparring or the touching or whatever. "I am not going to hurt you."
And the most bizarre thing was, when she actually said it that way, he totally believed her.
"Oh," he blurted, to cover up how his brain was abruptly rewriting its interpretation of several weeks' worth of events. "I mean, of course not. I was just…my ankle's still kinda, you know, so I was thinking about, uh, support. And stuff."
Teyla made one of those tiny little smiles again, and pressed her bantos into his hand. "Shall we begin?"
It turned out she hadn't meant to beat John up when she invited him here, she mean to teach him. John would've thought that required more talking than Teyla normally did in a single sitting, but it really didn't; she just demonstrated everything, and John tried to imitate her, and after a few rounds of this she'd grab his arm or shoulder with her hands and guide him through the motion she wanted like a posable doll. It was only slightly more useful than when he'd learned to parallel park with his driver's ed teacher riding the brakes, but John found himself too flustered in entirely other matters to care. Like the fact that she was touching him. And the fact that she was teaching him. And the fact she was not going to hurt him. He wondered if maybe he really had been delusional all this time, or if he just needed to hear it straight from her to really be sure, and if those were maybe kind of the same thing.
He just agreed half-numbly to take off his shoes so he could assume a better stance for some kind of blocking move when his radio beeped. He'd kind of forgotten he'd left it on. "Sheppard, this is McKay. You there?" Rod's voice asked.
John quickly toggled his on and tried not to sound too breathless and weird. "Yeah, uh, hi."
"Everything okay with you?" Rod asked magnanimously.
"Yeah!" John said sharply. "Everything's great. I mean cool. I mean awesome. Is there some reason it might not be great?"
"Well," Rod said. "for starters, I'm looking at your last will and testament in my email, as well as a video of you accusing Zelenka of plagiarism that just got uploaded to the physics server."
John realized with a horrible lurch that he was not wearing a watch. "Shit."
"You may recall that the same video offers up most of the contents of your quarters on a first-come, first-serve basis," Rod continued with surprising calm. "Which is why I'm radioing you from the infirmary, where Gulmira Abdirova and Fern Higgenbotham are recovering from injuries sustained in a scuffle over your laptop, which you were allegedly so kind as to label."
"No, no, no," John said, "don't let those heathens touch anything, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, I, um, fuck." He started to run out of the gym, remembered he was carrying a bantos, and ran back in to hand it to Teyla. "I gotta, there's a, sorry," he stammered.
"I understand," she said. "We can continue another time."
"Ok-really?" John blinked. "Like, again?"
"Yes," Teyla said. Cue tiny little smile.
"Oh. Um. Okay." John swallowed hard. "Thanks. I mean, for-okay, you know this part. Thanks. Later. Bye." And he sprinted off to defend his DVD collection from the marauding hordes, but not without her tiny smile on his mind.
-\--\--\-
It ended up taking like three days to sort everything out, and Sumner had to threaten to conduct room-to-room searches before anyone coughed up John's DS Lite. Luckily everyone was fairly willing to believe that it was all a complicated computer glitch, except for Zelenka (who was a totally plagiarist and pervy pigeon fancier in addition to being very thin-skinned) and Rod, who nearly locked John in a lab again in order to get the full story.
"You keep that kind of thing on your laptop all the time?" Rod asked incredulously.
"Of course," John said. "Normally it's set to upload if I go more than a month without logging in, so, you know, that would probably mean I really was dead, and then Zelenka wouldn't be allowed to call me whatever he just said. What did he just say?"
'You do not want to know," Rod said. "I presume, however, that you've decided you're not about to leave the land of the living."
"Yeah," John said. "Teyla said so."
Rod blinked at him. "She said-?" he asked, but seemed to kind of choke a little before he could finish the sentence.
"She said she's not going to hurt me," John explained. "Look, it's complicated."
"No it's not!" Rod said, and wow, he really was wound up, there was all kinds of flaily hand action there. "You and I had that exact conversation weeks ago, before you started crashing puddle jumpers and breaking your ankle and faking your death! And I told you to talk to her then! And instead you went crazy! The only complicated issue is why you didn't just take my advice to begin with and avoid what's turning into an increasingly bizarre and illogical comedy of errors!"
John, trying to stay cool, shrugged, even though he had basically gone over this all in his head already and realized it was kind of indefensible. "I'm not really good at talking."
Rod got up and left the room for about five minutes. John didn't know what he was doing out there, and towards the end he got kind of worried that maybe he'd thrown himself off a pier or joined a knitting circle or something. But Rod came back in looking far more composed, even if his face was still pretty red. "Okay," he said calmly. "Okay. The important thing now is to deal with this on a going-forward basis. Get beyond the problem. Now that you've decided to believe Teyla's not going to kill you, what do you intend to do next? In non-crazy terms, please."
John had actually been thinking about this since the gym, but unfortunately he'd decided that discarding the "Evil Plot" option had actually made the situation murkier rather than clearer. (Plus there was the revelation that sparring was kind of awesome.) "Still don't know why she was trying to feed me," he pointed out. "Or staring at me. Or kicking me under the conference table. Which technically did hurt me, but I'm willing to believe it was an accident."
"Maybe," Rod said, sounding strained, "you should apply a recently learned lesson to that situation and ask Teyla why she was allegedly feeding you."
But that would imply he might have to admit that he drew the wrong conclusion originally, and John had not gotten to where he was today by admitting his own mistakes. "I just said I'm not good at talking," he said. "Besides, Keller said she was gonna ask for me."
"Keller?" Rod blinked. "You mean Jennifer Keller?"
"If that's hot new doctor Keller, yeah," John said.
Rod rubbed his nose. "Dare I even ask what she's got to do with any of this?"
John had been aggressively suppressing that conversation, so he said, "Probably best if you don't."
"So when is she going to do this asking?" Rod asked. "In study hall?"
"Whenever Teyla happens to be in the infirmary next," John said. "So, uh, you know…"
"Never?" Rod offered. "Metaphorically knocking on wood, of course."
"It's not a perfect plan," John admitted. "But Keller's a woman, and she knows more about people and stuff than me, so maybe she can figure out what's really going on because frankly, at this point, I'm stumped."
"A woman shows you excessive attention," Rod said slowly, "including persistent gifts, and the only conclusion you can draw-and which you jump to immediately-is that she's plotting to kill you."
John folded his arms and stuck his chin in the air. "And what would you think, o wise one? Hmm?"
Rod looked at him with an expression of something like pity. "John, has it occurred to you that this may be Teyla's way of flirting?"
The word flirting ricocheted through John's brain at a high speed, and his thoughts changed tracks so fast he was surprised it didn't cause a spontaneous aneurysm. "No way," was the only thing he could get out of his mouth for a moment.
"Um, yes way," Rod said. "I was trying to avoid pointing it out because, one, I thought it was fairly obvious and two, the word 'yenta' is not in my job description-"
"She scared me!" John said. "She hurt my ankle! How is that flirty?"
"Didn't you ever pull on girls' pigtails you liked when you were little?" Rod asked. "Or, you know, build them a pencil-sharpening robot out of an old electric razor? I did my fair share of both."
"Totally inaccurate analogy," John declared. "I'm not a girl." Rod opened his mouth and then shut it again without speaking. "What? Say it."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You only do that opening-the-mouth-thing when you want to say something but you're too chicken to," John alleged.
Rod, predictably, did not like being called a chicken. "I was just going to say that between your intermittent bouts of screeching hysterics and Teyla's ability to potentially snap you in half over her knee…well, let's just say that Major Lorne isn't the only person around here who's ever questioned your sexuality."
"I do not get hysterical," John stammered, "and I don't screech, and my body weight is normal. I'm totally manly."
"I'm not going to argue that," Rod said airily.
"I am!"
"That doesn't mean Teyla can't be manlier that you, thus making you by default the girl."
John leapt to his feet and thrust a finger in Rod's face. "Lies," he said. "Vicious, vicious lies. You're just trying to mess with my head because I didn't leave you my Dr. Who boxed set in my will."
"Of course," Rod said flatly. "That's exactly it. You've found me out."
"Asshole," John declared, and left the lab.
-\--\--\-
Later, back in his quarters, John dug up an old legal pad (though he had to tear off about six pages of old Tic Tac Toe games and obscene doodles) and a felt-tipped pen. He wrote at the top, I AM NOT THE GIRL.
Then he created a list of evidence:
+ PENIS!
+ facial hair very manly!
+ pwnage at WOW, HL2, all Halos
+ degrees all manly subjects like math
+ animal magnetism -> kidnapping
+ Mensa leadership skills ubermanly
He thought for a minute, looking around the room, then added, Johnny Cash. He couldn't exactly express how that made him particularly manly, but he was certain it helped.
Then he made a second column and headed it, REFUTED
x Not hysterical, merely emphatic
x Baritone - cannot screech
x Joss Whedon is not gay!
He tried to anticipate any further arguments Rod might make on this front, and added after a short time,
x BMI is normal
x kidnapping = rape = no thank you
x have actually had sex with non ascended women
x bee had tentacles
He decided he liked this list, and so he took a digital photo of it and emailed it to Rod. Rod's reply was another email attachment, with two photos: one of John gamely trying on a bright pink cardigan while Sumner, who had knit it, looked gravely on; and one of Teyla sitting on John's chest that time he turned into a bug.
He replied furiously, you know sumner hates me and teyla can kick everyones ass i am no exception this is a spurrious accusation!
Rod's only reply was, TALK TO HER YOURSELF.
-\--\--\-
John did not talk to Teyla. It was a matter of principle, or actually a matter of not wanting to embarrass the hell out of himself if it turned out that Rod was wrong (and he was probably wrong, because John? So not the girl here). He thought about getting Keller to do the talking for him, but then she might ask if he'd managed to talk to Melena yet, and John would have to lie, because there was no way he was reliving that conversation. So it was mostly John being cool and Teyla giving him those tiny little smiles and Rod standing by, rolling his eyes at them both.
This lasted until Sushi Night in the cafeteria. Fish served in Atlantis always had a special fascinating/disgusting quality to John, since the majority of it was procured by sticking a net off one of the piers; on Sushi Night in particular, most of that procurement took place the same day, so there was something primally weird about eating something that until a few hours ago had been eating things itself. Plus, it really was good sushi.
They ate as a team, of course, and Teyla kept trying to bring John more California rolls and rice balls. Rod-dining a la MRE in deference to his allergies-kept coughing and nudging John with his elbow until John seriously considered whether sneaking a piece of shrimp into Rod's entrée would constitute justifiable homicide. "You are harshing my cool," John hissed at him while Teyla was up foraging for space wasabi.
"Since when are you cool?" Rod asked.
"It's my Teyla strategy," John informed him. "Be totally cool and ignore her weirdness until further data becomes available."
"I see. And by 'totally cool' you mean 'dressed like a beatnik?'"
Ronon asked, "You guys here to talk or eat?"
A week of active repression had not managed to completely expunge The Conversation from John's mind, and with his lips loosened by too much high-quality space tuna, he said, "If we're bothering you, maybe you should go sit next to your wife who love so very much."
Ronon raised an eyebrow at him, shrugged, and did just that. Rod blinked at them both. "Did he just-?"
"Yeah. No. Don't ask." He spotted Teyla coming back with the space wasabi (actually blue) in a little cup. "And quit poking me. Jesus, you'd think you're trying to set us up or something."
"It'd do wonders for my own mental well-being," Rod said dryly, and made a point of conspicuously enjoying his wheat snack bread.
Despite Teyla keeping his plate full, John timed himself to only eat for thirty minutes and then gathered up his jacket and his backpack. "Done now. Have fun," he announced.
Rod frowned at him. "You haven't even had desert yet. Normally you eat that first."
John waved the backpack at him. "Pop and Reese's in here, and no, you can't have any."
"Where's the fire?" Rod called out at he made his exit.
John called over his shoulder, "Movie night!"
One of the nice things about Sushi Night was that, in the way of tacky intercultural theme nights everywhere, it was invariably coordinated with Anime Night in the movie room. John did not consider himself an anime fan per se, but sometimes the offerings were sufficiently awesome that he attended even though it involved tolerating Zelenka as master of ceremonies. (Rod had once tried to use it as the basis of a peace accord between them, in fact, but the resulting dub versus sub wars had engulfed three departments before Elizabeth made them lock down those parts of the city wiki.) When Zelenka announced that they were marathoning six episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam-subbed, even!-John had not only procured for himself refreshments, he'd staked out the best couch and calculated the exact time of arrival necessary to claim it for his very own.
He was busily arranging the pillows to his satisfaction (while Zelenka fussed with the projector and Miko complained loudly about whoever had printed up the posters, since they'd managed to flip the image without anyone noticing) when somebody touched his shoulder. He looked up and blinked at Teyla. "May I join you?" she asked.
"Um," John said, distinctly aware of her hand on his shoulder. "Okay? I mean, okay. It's a free movie and all." She sat on the couch, and he realized he should probably offer her at least one of the pillows back, since Ancients had apparently had some weird ideas about ergonomics. She didn't take it, though, nor the pop that John offered her, which he hadn't expected she would 'cause he remembered the first time she tried a carbonated drink she did a spit take. She just sat as straight and still as always on the far end of the couch, and watched out of her peripheral vision while John finished arranging the pillows and busted open his Reese's pieces (which she did sample, but just a couple).
They had to wait a while before the movie started, since John had technically arrived over an hour early in order to claim the good couch. He waited, kind of terrified, for Teyla to try to start making small talk, until he realized that he was waiting for Teyla to talk. But that put the burden of talking all on him, or actually the burden of not talking, because she was right there and an hour was a long time and there was a difference between being cool and being rude, one even John could appreciate. So he told her about the time his mom went to Japan in search of Buddha and they lived in a hotel for three months and he saw the original MS Gundam movie like fifteen times, without even subtitles, just because giant robot suits were awesome. "I could probably make one," he added, "except I'd have to take apart about half the city first. Maybe just two fifths. I'd have to check."
"It would be a fearsome weapon," Teyla said.
By that point there was a crowd coming in, as dinner was finally winding down, and it turned out Zelenka had not brought nearly enough chairs. Erik Sorenson (marine biology, not a Mensa member, always played bards in D&D) came round and stood on one side of John's couch, clearing his throat and clutching a thermos to his chest with both hands. John tried to ignore this, on the grounds that if Sorenson wanted the good couch he should've arrived early like John himself had, but after a few minutes of oto-rhino-laryngeal serenades, he asked, "You got a problem, Erik?"
"Oh, don't mind me," Sorenson said in his goofy Swedish Chef voice. (John couldn't be bothered to remember if Sorenson was actually Swedish or not but that's definitely how he talked.) "I'm just waiting for Radek to bring the chairs."
"Okay," John said. "You do that."
But Teyla suddenly shifted over to the middle of the couch, pushing one of John's cushions out of the way. "You may sit here," she announced. Sorenson got a big goofy smile and plopped down right there on the good couch, and John was torn between protesting the violation of his rightfully-claimed couch territory and potentially offending Teyla, since he'd kind of granted her joint custody of the couch and so she had the right to give up part of her own sitting space without his consultation. Even though it meant she was kind of now pressed up against him all along one side, rubbing arms and knees as he re-settled himself.
Zelenka eventually brought the extra chairs, but of course Sorenson didn't move; instead he opened up the thermos, which contained something that smelled almost exactly like Campbell's soup, only not in a good way. Once people were actually sitting and had stopped whining about not being able to see the screen (another consideration in John's quest for the good couch) Zelenka stood up and launched into a rambling welcome-to-movie-night speech that, among other things, got the time of the anime club meeting wrong. John would've been the first to start yelling "Boo-ring!" if he hadn't been too flustered by Teyla, or rather, by his proximity to Teyla; it seemed like every time he tried to move and get comfortable he bumped up against her in one way or another, and dammit, this was exactly why he'd never wanted to share a tent with her, except he usually did share a tent with her, and there was never this much inappropriate touching then, but they didn't usually have the Swedish Soup Chef, and he thought that maybe faking an allergic reaction to inhaled MSG might've been a valid escape plan if he wasn't still clinging to the notion of keeping cool (and relatively sane). At least Teyla didn't seem bothered by all John's spastic wiggling; of course, she also looked attentive to Zelenka's speech, so maybe she was just repressing the urge to kill.
But eventually, finally, Zelenka stopped talking. John managed to relax when the familiar music came up as Miko navigated the DVD menu. Somebody turned down the lights. Somebody turned the windows opaque. Sorenson was still slurping his damn soup, but John could kind of deal with that, and also the person with the wet hacking cough somewhere in the opposite corner 'cause that was just what happened with free movie nights. Teyla sitting halfway in his lap didn't just happen, but he could deal with that, too, in the interest of coolness and enjoying movie night. More importantly, space robots. Mmm.
Partway through the theme song, Teyla moved. It wasn't a big movement, but it bumped her knee against John's knee. He figured she was trying to get away from Sorenson and his soup (which he slurped-god, it was like the inverse of V for Vendetta, S for Sickening) so he wiggled away to give her more room. She bumped his knee again just before the Zeon attack. He tried crossing his legs. While Fraw Bow collapsed in anguish, she bumped her elbow with his elbow, and seriously, did she have ants in her pants or something? "You okay?" he whispered to her, barely loud enough to hear over the soundtrack and the asshole with the cough.
"I am fine," Teyla said firmly, without looking at him directly.
John wanted to ask if she was fine, why was she moving so damn much, but that didn't seem particularly cool. Instead he finished a bottle of pop and hid it under the couch so he wouldn't have to get up and toss it in the recycling bag. On the screen, Amuro had the instruction book for his mobile suit open in his lap.
Teyla yawned.
"Are you serious?" John hissed at her. "I mean tired? By which I mean, seriously?" Even though he wasn't any louder than Sorenson and his damn soup, somebody shushed him.
"I am sorry," Teyla said.
"Just…this is the good part, coming up," John promised her. Even if she wasn't following the subtitles real well (and he wasn't sure, because he suddenly realized he didn't know if she could read-only that was stupid, because she'd lived with the expedition for over three years, and she'd filed reports and stuff a million times, but there was reading and there was *reading** and it suddenly bothered John that he didn't actually know) everybody liked the mecha battles. Teyla would have to like the mecha battles. He seriously hoped that Teyla would like the mecha battles.
She nodded, and John went back to the movie, leaning forward like he was thirteen again and the only gaijin in the theater, but also half-aware of Teyla next to him and whether she was about to fall asleep form boredom. Which meant, of course, that he was totally conscious of the moment when she yawned again-a small, polite yawn-and stretched her arms over her head in a way that made her back arch and her top stretch out across her chest. Somebody hissed "Down in front!" in their direction, and Teyla let her arms drop down, and one of them fell kind of awkwardly against John's shoulder. He squirmed and tried to twist away so she could drop it to her lap, but she kind of leaned against him instead, and her arm just slipped into the groove between John's back and the back of the couch and stayed there. He looked at her, and was on the verge of asking if she was stuck or something, but then he noticed that she was still staring that the screen and had one hand already in her lap, not stuck somewhere behind Soupy Sorenson, and that was when John realized her hand was on his shoulder and her arm around his back. Her arm was around his back. They were watching a movie and she'd yawned and stretched and-
"'Scuse me," he said, and leapt off the couch. He picked his way through the jumbled chairs of the movie room with a cool so cold he should've been leaving a vapor trail, and made it all the way down to the end of the hallway before he had to jump into the nearest access corridor and fumble with his radio. "Sheppard to McKay."
"I'm here, John. Something up?"
He licked his lips a few times, heart still pounding. "I think I might be the girl."
-\--\--\-
Rod, of course, was useless for a reasonable discussion at that point due to an overwhelming attack of the smug. That left John little recourse but to turn to either Keller or Ronon, since the former was already aware of his previous Teyla issues and the latter was within the team and therefore somewhat trustworthy, if also a dirty cheating cheater who cheated on his trying-to-be-pregnant wife. Luckily, or unluckily, or something, he found them in the mess hall together the next morning, eating breakfast. Or, well, at least they were both eating at the same time and at the same table-Keller was sitting cattycorner from Ronon and she'd turned her chair so she was facing away from him and almost had her tray in her lap. John paused for just a moment to consider whether she was taking the definition of ignoring somebody beyond the limits of its structural integrity.
But that was only for a moment, because there were more important things to talk about, i.e. himself. He took one of the empty chairs and announced, "We need to talk about Teyla."
Keller looked up at John sharply. "What about her?"
John looked around, but no, none of the coven were in sight just then-it was him and Keller and Ronon and Sumner eating with Lorne and some other officers. He lowered his voice anyway though. "I think Teyla's been hitting on me."
"I thought you said she kicked your ankle," Keller said, while Ronon snorted a little.
John shook his head furiously. "Not hitting, hitting on-like, flirting! In some kind of weird Teyla way!"
"Well, duh," Ronon said, and they both turned to stare at him. "What'd you think she was doing?"
John paused to pound his head against the table. He probably should've fixed himself some tavajava before he came down here. (Elizabeth wouldn't let the kitchen staff serve it, as a compromise with Carson, who thought it should be classified as a controlled substance.) Keller said, "Bringing him food at weird hours and trying to break his ankle don't sound like flirty things to me, really. Not like, you know, talking and smiling and…things."
Ronon, completely missing (or ignoring) the insinuation, shrugged. "So she's weird."
"Yeah, and she's treating me like a girl," John added furiously. "Last night at the anime night? Totally did a reach-around."
"You're kidding," Keller said, eyes googly.
"Well, kinda," John said. "I mean, she's not that tall and I was sitting on a pillow and stuff-but she totally tried!"
"You are kinda girly," Ronon said.
"The hell I am!" John asked, and went through his pockets to look for the same list he'd showed Rod, which he'd brought as supporting evidence.
Ronon shook his head. "You've been all quiet lately…not talking…not yelling or running around like you do…"
"Yelling a lot is kind of girly," Keller said. "I yell sometimes."
"I'm cool now, though!" John protested. "The strong, silent type, you know?"
"Exactly," Ronon said. "Totally girly."
"On what planet?"
"Old Athos."
"…oh."
Keller looked confused. "Is that why Teyla's all….you know? Strong and silent type?"
Ronon shrugged again. "That, or she got tortured by the Wraith and stuff. Never asked her."
"If strong and silent is girly for Athosians, what's manly, then?" John asked. "Yelling and running?"
"Pretty much," Ronon said. "Athosian men are supposed to be firey. Shows they're virile."
"I think," John said, "that you're not allowed to say that word ever again."
"Fiery?"
"The other one."
"Virile?"
"Yes."
Keller shook her head. "But don't most cultures say women are supposed to the hysterical ones? I mean, that's where the word hysterical came from, the same word as 'uterus.'"
"Maybe on your planet," Ronon said. "Athosians, Travelers, South Satedans…women are supposed to be all calm and logical. Tied to the cycles of nature."
"Strong and silent," John muttered. He hit his head on the table again. "We need to make, like, a book about this sort of thing. Aliens for Dummies."
Ronon smirked. "I hear Ladon Radim's already writing that one, but it's about you."
"I can't talk to you," John told him. "I just can't. Go…be with your wife or something. Hit on her. Say that word you're not allowed to say to me anymore."
"Virile?" Ronon asked.
"I just said you're not allowed-"
"Don't you think you're virile?" Ronon asked, and he was just grinning too much to be allowed.
John tried to look stern and terrifying, which usually worked on Eldon and most graduate students. "I'm warning you.
"Teyla must think you're vir-"
"Stop it!"
"Vir-"
"Stop!"
"V-"
"I said stop!"
Colonel Sumner suddenly clapped his hands. "Ladies," he called across the mess. "Do we need to separate you two?"
John was not nearly caffeinated enough for this. He found himself climbing to his feet. "For your information, Colonel," he declared, "I am getting a little bit tired of being called a lady by somebody who is currently knitting a cowl-neck poncho out of hot pink Fun Fur!"
Sumner stood up, too, for that, with one knitting needle still in his hand. John had never really appreciated how threatening a pointed piece of aluminum just a centimeter thick could be. "Is that true, Dr. Sheppard?" he asked, slowly.
"Yeah," John managed to squeak. "Just, you know, an observation." Sumner raised an eyebrow at him, looking for a moment like some kind of craggy old guy version of the Rock. John sat down. "That's all."
"So what are you going to do?" Keller asked once Sumner had sat and John was had stopped hyperventilating. "About Teyla, I mean?"
"I don't know!" John whispered. "That’s what I wanted to ask you guys! And by 'you guys' I mean just you because if Ronon talks to me again right now I might scream."
Ronon, looking entirely unrepentant, stuck an entire waffle in his mouth.
Keller looked thoughtful for a moment. "Well," she finally said, "I guess it really depends on what you want."
"What do you mean, what do I want?" John demanded. "I thought this was about what Teyla wanted, which in case you didn't notice, is me, and oh my god I never thought I'd ever get to say that. Why can't anybody around here just talk in plain and simple sentences that don't have any hidden meanings or implications and actually clarify their actions?"
"Do you want her?" Ronon asked around his waffle.
"Oh," John said, and was so busy realizing the answer he forgot to punch Ronon in his adulterous face.
Part One
Part Two
Part Four
Author: mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through season 4
Warnings: Mensa AU, but not related to my Major Zelenka fics in any way, shape or form.
Summary: In which Teyla may be plotting something, Keller may be delusional, Ronon may be cheating and John may in fact be the girl. No pudding cups or Marines were injured in the production of this fanfic.
Heteronormativity, Gender Construction and Nonverbal Signaling in Intercultural Communication: A Comedy
By Mad Maudlin
It turned out that being cool all the time was really kind of hard. John already had the black wardrobe and the soul patch and the cutting wit, but part of being cool sometimes meant not using that wit, or pointing out when people were wrong, or even talking at all. It also generally involved ignoring Teyla, which was a little bit like hiding from her, except for the part where she was still in the room while he did it. But it was kind of like the Schrödinger's cat thing-if he refused to acknowledge it, she was really only half-stalking him, and the other half was simultaneously doing whatever it was Teyla did normally when not stalking him (like beating people up and then meditating about it).
There were other rewards, too, like how Rod stopped nagging him about fiber and stress management. Granted, he occasionally looked at John like he was possessed, but he no longer had actual grounds to question his mental health. John also noticed that the Mensa meeting went way more smoothly than normal, though there weren't enough data points to correlate that with his newly-established coolness. Also, Eldon seemed to have spontaneously gotten smarter.
Coolness also helped him avoid the urge to pin a scarlet letter to Ronon's back, because it meant John could just semi-ignore him when he felt like it. Sort of a Schrödinger's adulterer sort of thing. But since he'd semi-kind-of-not-promised Keller he'd say something to Melena, he did look for an opportunity to talk to her, in a way that was both cool, unobtrusive, and totally unlike something a middle schooler would do. (Though he didn't have much grounds for judging that, since he'd never actually been in a conventional American middle school-during those years he'd lived in four different countries and, briefly, a barge in international waters.)
Sadly, he got his chance shortly after their next mission briefing, because it turned out that Rod really had been putting those off until he was sure John wasn't insane. They looked at the unmanned reconnaissance data, Elizabeth reminded them to check in if they found anything and Sumner reminded them not to die, blah blah blah, only somewhere around the first set of videos John felt somebody kick him in the ankle.
There were only five other people at the table, Rod and Sumner were discussing the terrain and Elizabeth's legs were too short to reach. He looked at Ronon, but he was asleep.
Somebody kicked him again, harder than before.
He looked at Teyla, because she was directly across the table from him and half-stalking him (hence motive, method and opportunity) but she was looking politely at the screen while Sumner described what the UAVs had revealed about the terrain for a couple miles around the gate. It was his right ankle being kicked, so no way could it be Rod or Elizabeth really, and Sumner's legs might've been long enough for some kind of reacharound action if he slouched, but John didn't think that was even possible. (He probably even slept standing up at attention, like a horse.) He got kicked again, really kind of hard this time, and he decided that Ronon was faking because even he had more respect for mission briefings than that.
So John kicked Ronon under the table. Ronon opened one eye, scowled, and kick John hard enough in the knee that he bit his tongue in order to not shout "FUCK!" in the middle of Sumner's never-ending topological lecture. Then somebody kicked his ankle again, and this time he had enough grounds for comparison to know it totally wasn't Ronon, because a) Ronon could kick way harder than that and b) the angle of the kick and the size of the boot were both wrong.
Teyla was still enraptured by Sumner, who was apparently describing every goddamn rock and naming it after his favorite Muppet or some shit. But she was the only one left who could be kicking him. Why was she kicking him? Was she annoyed that he'd been ignoring her? Was this some kind of tenderizing process? Maybe she'd developed some kind of weird kicking disease and didn't even know she was doing it. More importantly, how would a cool person handle this situation? Maybe if he ignored it…
Nope. Teyla could kick as hard as Ronon. John bit his tongue again.
Sumner finally, finally, finally finished talking about rocks, and Elizabeth started talking about ruins. John wondered if it would be rude and/or uncool to just get up and move to a different seat-or maybe a different room-or, hell, he could just resign from the team right now and hide under his bed (with the vents padlocked) for a while. But, no, that was not cool. John was totally cool. Nothing fazed him. Not even being kicked a lot.
Or, you know, having someone grab his foot in some kind of goddamn pincer maneuver and twist it. That hurt like a son of a bitch, but that wasn't the same as being fazed, exactly.
"You all right, Dr. Sheppard?" Sumner asked, because despite his coolness John couldn't entirely hold in a whimper.
The pincer immediately stopped. Teyla didn't even look concerned. "Fine," John declared, because he could be just as cool as she was.
Rod frowned at him. "You sure?"
"Yup."
"'Cause you're looking a little wild about the eyes there."
"'M good," he insisted. (And he was, or at least would be until he tried to stand.)
"Are you going to give me polysyllabic answers any time soon?" Rod asked in a tone of voice normally reserved for kindergarten teachers and orderlies in nursing homes.
John made eye contact with Teyla, finally, but he face was totally unreadable. She didn't look angry or hateful or grumpy or sick or anything. Just Teyla. "Maybe," he allowed.
Rod hissed under his breath, but Sumner just rolled his eyes and said, "If you ladies would let us get back to the briefing, we're almost done here." As soon as he started talking again, Teyla nudged John's sore ankle with her toe-or at least that's what it felt like-and he gave up on cool and tried to kick her back as hard as he could. Instead he hit the leg of the table square on, with sufficient force to both knock his chair over completely and break every bone in his foot. Or at least that's what it felt like.
"Jesus Christ, John!" Rod blurted and tried to help him up. "What's wrong with you?"
John waved his poor abused ankle and managed to blurt out, "Cramp."
So while the rest of his team were off enjoying a refreshing hike across Planet of the Fascinating Rocks, John was back in the infirmary with his leg elevated. And lo and behold, it was Melena who brought him over a fresh ice pack while they were waiting for the scanner to be freed up. "What happened here?" she asked cheerfully as she examined what promised to be colorful and extensive bruising.
"Long story," John said. For once, it seemed like Keller wasn't in the infirmary when he was; Carson was on call, but busy badgering a Marine who'd fallen down a flight of steps somehow. He took a deep breath and figured this was probably his only chance to avoid actually stuffing a note in anybody's locker. "Say, uh, Melena, how's…life?"
Ouch, bad opening. Not very cool. Melena frowned at him. "Good. And you?"
"I mean how's Ronon?" John clarified desperately. "Because he seems, uh, something seems weird with him. I think he fell asleep in the briefing just now?"
That at least morphed the frown from a what-the-fuck kind to an oh-hell-no kind. "He did, did he?"
"I don't know," John said. "I, uh, was busy getting a cramp and falling down."
Melena sighed. "I suppose…well, no, never mind. You are on his team and all, if we can trust anybody it's you."
"Totally," John said, while actually thinking, you'd be surprised. "Something going on?"
"You could say that," she said. "I don't really know how your people put this, but…let's just say Ronon and I are hoping to expand the family a little bit."
Oh shit. Ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit. John swallowed hard, while somewhere in Rock 'n' Roll Heaven Johnny Cash shook his head in disappointment. "Really?" he managed to croak.
Melena nodded. "We weren't planning on telling anyone until we were more certain…don't want to jinx things, I suppose."
"I…that's…wow." Sticking to short words would maybe help a little. "I, um, congratulations?"
"Save it for when we make the announcement, okay?" Melena said, and smiled weakly. "Right now we're not having much luck."
"Have you tried, you know, the rhythm method?" asked John, or rather whatever being had hijacked his mouth while his brain was subsumed in horror.
Melena looked intrigued by that, and the thought of discussing fertility with her at just that second made John throw up in his mouth a little, but luckily Carson appeared and they got back to the much more familiar and less terrifying topic of John himself. Turned out nothing was broken, or even really sprained, and while Carson looked dubious about John's claims of a mysterious cramp (he knew perfectly well it was a stupid defense, but he couldn't very well start changing his story now, could he?) he still let John leave with an inflatable cast and a bottle of ibuprofen. John limped back to his lab and tried to decide how to never tell anybody about that conversation ever again, especially not Keller, because, Jesus.
-\--\--\-
When his team returned, they found him in the lab and asked about his ankle. John had found an Ace bandage to wrap it in, plus the inflatable cast, plus a crutch that he fashioned for himself out of some stray packaging materials they hadn't ever got around to recycling, so it all looked much worse than it really was, and they saw through that in about half a second.
"So when are you cleared to go out again?" Rod asked. He still had leaves in his hair from the mission.
John shrugged. "Day. Maybe two."
"Is that what Carson said or what you're making up?"
"Carson said," John said defensively.
"When's he ever tried to get back on duty that fast?" Ronon asked. John had to try very hard not to look at him, because ohgodohgod.
Rod made a vague hand gesture. "I know, I know, this is John we're talking about, but he's been wearing an awful lot of black lately, and he's stopped running his mouth off, and his research team says he's been alert and working before nine o'clock…"
"What's your point?" John asked, feeling preemptively stung by it.
"Just…you know what, never mind." Rod said quickly. "Nothing at all."
Then Teyla announced, "We will be free until sunrise on M4Z-001."
"Sunrise?" John asked.
Rod waved at him. "It's got a very slow rotation cycle. Night lasts about a hundred hours at the moment. That's why we called the mission, nightfall."
"So…yeah," John said, clinging to the remains of his cool. "Yeah, I'll be ready to go then. And nothing to do until then, right? Yeah."
"Perhaps," Teyla said, "you would honor me by joining me in the gym when your foot has recovered."
Rod chuckled and Ronon laughed out loud, but John broke out in a cold sweat. Was this it, then? Had she given up on subtlety and started moving in for the kill? Rod was right, there was no need to poison him-she could lure him into the gym and brain him with a bantos rod. Or maybe just glare at him hard enough for his heart to stop. If anybody could do that it'd be Teyla.
"He hurt his foot, not his brain," Ronon said. "You think he's actually gonna get in the gym willingly?"
"Remember, this is John you're talking about," Rod added.
"I'd love to," said the thing that sometimes possessed John's mouth while he was panicking. Because, okay, he kind of liked sticking it to Rod and Ronon sometimes. And it was certainly the polite thing to do. Did flies ever fling themselves into spider webs out of politeness?
Rod's mouth actually fell open, but one side of Teyla's went up just the tiniest bit, like a smile. "I look forward to it," she said, and left the lab.
And Rod blurted, "Don't ever start playing golf," and hurried out before John could find out just where the fuck that came from. And he claimed John was the crazy one. Bah.
(Ronon just left with no dramatic exit line, and John was secretly thankful because oh god.)
-\--\--\-
Probably one of the most disturbing things John had seen in Atlantis-disturbing, but not actively horrifying in the same way as turning into a bug was horrifying-was the Mary Kay party that happened in Kusinagi's lab just before the "Yay! Three whole years and not yet dead!" super-tendol feast. Well, he didn't think it was actually Mary Kay specifically, but that was the general tenor of what he saw when he wandered in looking for Kusinagi's results with the crystal extruders and found about two dozen women sitting on pillows in the middle of the room, passing around lipstick and eyeliner and something that suspiciously resembled snickerdoodles.
Mehra had been the first to notice him, and she threw a pillow at his head while sporting two sharply contrasting types of eye shadow that streaked outwards to her temples like war paint. "Hey! This is girls only! No men allowed!"
John had said the only thing that came easily to mind, which was, "You're not a girl."
"Tonight we're all girls, Shep," Cadman had said (looking somehow softened by some kind of cosmetic alchemy). "So either get out or pull up a pillow. I think we've got the right foundation for you."
He had gotten out, but not before noticing Teyla and Sora sharing a folded-up duvet on the opposite side of the room. Sora had apparently gone nuts with the body glitter and was giggling in a manner John never wanted to associate with her again, but Teyla had just been looking at a large, soft brush of some kind with a bemused expression. John had managed to rationalize the experience in his head by imagining that she'd been trying to figure out a way to disembowel somebody with it.
-\--\--\-
John thought about actually breaking his leg to get out of meeting Teyla in the gym, but that seemed a little extreme, and he did have to consider that Rod was watching, and possibly Sumner and Elizabeth at this point too. Then he thought about breaking something in his lab, but that also would probably get him into trouble unless he pinned the blame on Eldon, and at that point it wasn't really worth the effort.
He tried to mentally brace himself by dressing all in black for the event, like a ninja or a Marine or Johnny Cash, but that idea went down the tubes because he didn't have any pants suitable for exercising in except his uniforms, which were gray, or an old pair of flannel pajama bottoms, which were red and green plaid, and he didn't really want to die with a holiday theme. He thought he could at least make himself look competent and prepared with a couple of sweat bands, you know, like a pro something or other might wear, but the closest thing he could find in his quarters on short notice were some pulse warmers Sumner had knit him a couple months ago, and not only did they make him look like some kind of refugee from a 70's porno, they were fuchsia.
So he went to his death in BDU pants and a black T-shirt, and he made sure to set up his personal laptop to upload his will and a video message to the physics department if he didn't return and input his password in two hours. (He didn't think Teyla could get too far in two hours without using the gate. They could bring her justice in two hours, right?) He kind of wanted to say some final goodbyes, but Rod was doing administrative stuff and Lorne was offworld and he didn't even have, like, a fern to call his own. What kind of person doesn't even have a fern to miss him when he's murdered by vengeful alien ninjas? FERN! he wrote on a sticky note and attached it to his laptop, so that in case he did survive he'd remember to get himself one. Maybe Katie the prudish botanist could help with that one.
He had debated how much he should publicize his impending demise, because the bonus of making it harder for Teyla to escape was counterweighted by the possibility that a fair number of people would show up on hand just to point and laugh at him being in the gym at all, and at that point John would probably have killed himself and spared Teyla the trouble. So he studied the internal sensor data to plan the most isolated and private route to Teyla's favorite ass-kicking room, and brought a life signs detector with him to guarantee he wasn't going to be seen. Death with dignity, was his motto, or at least as dignified as he could get while running away very fast.
It did mean he slouched into the gym a little bit late, though. Teyla was already there, wearing the long multipanel skirt thing that she sometimes did. She was twirling one bantos rod in lazy loops, passing it smoothly from one hand to the other, with her eyes shut; she didn't even open them to say, "Hello, John," and in the angled afternoon light she almost looked serene.
"Hi," John said. "You, uh, it's…hi."
Teyla opened her eyes and stopped spinning the bantos. "You may remove your shoes."
"Huh?" John looked at his sneakers, which were a little grody from his last foray into a formerly-flooded lower level but still perfectly serviceable. Then he noticed Teyla was barefoot. "Oh. Is that, uh, like a rule?"
"No," Teyla said.
"Okay," John said. "Just asking." Die barefoot or not? Cowboys were supposed to die with their boots on. John wasn't sure what that had to do with him, but it suddenly seemed very important.
He was so busy obsessing about his footwear that he didn't notice Teyla moving across the room-or maybe it was just that ninja skill of Sudden Appearing at work again. Either way, she touched his arm, and he nearly jumped out of his skin, ready to run screaming from the room to bring a whole squad of Marines to his defense. Except she was just touching him, just a little, on the arm, which didn't seem like much of a finishing move even for a ninja. "John," she said, just like they did this sort of thing every day, the sparring or the touching or whatever. "I am not going to hurt you."
And the most bizarre thing was, when she actually said it that way, he totally believed her.
"Oh," he blurted, to cover up how his brain was abruptly rewriting its interpretation of several weeks' worth of events. "I mean, of course not. I was just…my ankle's still kinda, you know, so I was thinking about, uh, support. And stuff."
Teyla made one of those tiny little smiles again, and pressed her bantos into his hand. "Shall we begin?"
It turned out she hadn't meant to beat John up when she invited him here, she mean to teach him. John would've thought that required more talking than Teyla normally did in a single sitting, but it really didn't; she just demonstrated everything, and John tried to imitate her, and after a few rounds of this she'd grab his arm or shoulder with her hands and guide him through the motion she wanted like a posable doll. It was only slightly more useful than when he'd learned to parallel park with his driver's ed teacher riding the brakes, but John found himself too flustered in entirely other matters to care. Like the fact that she was touching him. And the fact that she was teaching him. And the fact she was not going to hurt him. He wondered if maybe he really had been delusional all this time, or if he just needed to hear it straight from her to really be sure, and if those were maybe kind of the same thing.
He just agreed half-numbly to take off his shoes so he could assume a better stance for some kind of blocking move when his radio beeped. He'd kind of forgotten he'd left it on. "Sheppard, this is McKay. You there?" Rod's voice asked.
John quickly toggled his on and tried not to sound too breathless and weird. "Yeah, uh, hi."
"Everything okay with you?" Rod asked magnanimously.
"Yeah!" John said sharply. "Everything's great. I mean cool. I mean awesome. Is there some reason it might not be great?"
"Well," Rod said. "for starters, I'm looking at your last will and testament in my email, as well as a video of you accusing Zelenka of plagiarism that just got uploaded to the physics server."
John realized with a horrible lurch that he was not wearing a watch. "Shit."
"You may recall that the same video offers up most of the contents of your quarters on a first-come, first-serve basis," Rod continued with surprising calm. "Which is why I'm radioing you from the infirmary, where Gulmira Abdirova and Fern Higgenbotham are recovering from injuries sustained in a scuffle over your laptop, which you were allegedly so kind as to label."
"No, no, no," John said, "don't let those heathens touch anything, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, I, um, fuck." He started to run out of the gym, remembered he was carrying a bantos, and ran back in to hand it to Teyla. "I gotta, there's a, sorry," he stammered.
"I understand," she said. "We can continue another time."
"Ok-really?" John blinked. "Like, again?"
"Yes," Teyla said. Cue tiny little smile.
"Oh. Um. Okay." John swallowed hard. "Thanks. I mean, for-okay, you know this part. Thanks. Later. Bye." And he sprinted off to defend his DVD collection from the marauding hordes, but not without her tiny smile on his mind.
-\--\--\-
It ended up taking like three days to sort everything out, and Sumner had to threaten to conduct room-to-room searches before anyone coughed up John's DS Lite. Luckily everyone was fairly willing to believe that it was all a complicated computer glitch, except for Zelenka (who was a totally plagiarist and pervy pigeon fancier in addition to being very thin-skinned) and Rod, who nearly locked John in a lab again in order to get the full story.
"You keep that kind of thing on your laptop all the time?" Rod asked incredulously.
"Of course," John said. "Normally it's set to upload if I go more than a month without logging in, so, you know, that would probably mean I really was dead, and then Zelenka wouldn't be allowed to call me whatever he just said. What did he just say?"
'You do not want to know," Rod said. "I presume, however, that you've decided you're not about to leave the land of the living."
"Yeah," John said. "Teyla said so."
Rod blinked at him. "She said-?" he asked, but seemed to kind of choke a little before he could finish the sentence.
"She said she's not going to hurt me," John explained. "Look, it's complicated."
"No it's not!" Rod said, and wow, he really was wound up, there was all kinds of flaily hand action there. "You and I had that exact conversation weeks ago, before you started crashing puddle jumpers and breaking your ankle and faking your death! And I told you to talk to her then! And instead you went crazy! The only complicated issue is why you didn't just take my advice to begin with and avoid what's turning into an increasingly bizarre and illogical comedy of errors!"
John, trying to stay cool, shrugged, even though he had basically gone over this all in his head already and realized it was kind of indefensible. "I'm not really good at talking."
Rod got up and left the room for about five minutes. John didn't know what he was doing out there, and towards the end he got kind of worried that maybe he'd thrown himself off a pier or joined a knitting circle or something. But Rod came back in looking far more composed, even if his face was still pretty red. "Okay," he said calmly. "Okay. The important thing now is to deal with this on a going-forward basis. Get beyond the problem. Now that you've decided to believe Teyla's not going to kill you, what do you intend to do next? In non-crazy terms, please."
John had actually been thinking about this since the gym, but unfortunately he'd decided that discarding the "Evil Plot" option had actually made the situation murkier rather than clearer. (Plus there was the revelation that sparring was kind of awesome.) "Still don't know why she was trying to feed me," he pointed out. "Or staring at me. Or kicking me under the conference table. Which technically did hurt me, but I'm willing to believe it was an accident."
"Maybe," Rod said, sounding strained, "you should apply a recently learned lesson to that situation and ask Teyla why she was allegedly feeding you."
But that would imply he might have to admit that he drew the wrong conclusion originally, and John had not gotten to where he was today by admitting his own mistakes. "I just said I'm not good at talking," he said. "Besides, Keller said she was gonna ask for me."
"Keller?" Rod blinked. "You mean Jennifer Keller?"
"If that's hot new doctor Keller, yeah," John said.
Rod rubbed his nose. "Dare I even ask what she's got to do with any of this?"
John had been aggressively suppressing that conversation, so he said, "Probably best if you don't."
"So when is she going to do this asking?" Rod asked. "In study hall?"
"Whenever Teyla happens to be in the infirmary next," John said. "So, uh, you know…"
"Never?" Rod offered. "Metaphorically knocking on wood, of course."
"It's not a perfect plan," John admitted. "But Keller's a woman, and she knows more about people and stuff than me, so maybe she can figure out what's really going on because frankly, at this point, I'm stumped."
"A woman shows you excessive attention," Rod said slowly, "including persistent gifts, and the only conclusion you can draw-and which you jump to immediately-is that she's plotting to kill you."
John folded his arms and stuck his chin in the air. "And what would you think, o wise one? Hmm?"
Rod looked at him with an expression of something like pity. "John, has it occurred to you that this may be Teyla's way of flirting?"
The word flirting ricocheted through John's brain at a high speed, and his thoughts changed tracks so fast he was surprised it didn't cause a spontaneous aneurysm. "No way," was the only thing he could get out of his mouth for a moment.
"Um, yes way," Rod said. "I was trying to avoid pointing it out because, one, I thought it was fairly obvious and two, the word 'yenta' is not in my job description-"
"She scared me!" John said. "She hurt my ankle! How is that flirty?"
"Didn't you ever pull on girls' pigtails you liked when you were little?" Rod asked. "Or, you know, build them a pencil-sharpening robot out of an old electric razor? I did my fair share of both."
"Totally inaccurate analogy," John declared. "I'm not a girl." Rod opened his mouth and then shut it again without speaking. "What? Say it."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You only do that opening-the-mouth-thing when you want to say something but you're too chicken to," John alleged.
Rod, predictably, did not like being called a chicken. "I was just going to say that between your intermittent bouts of screeching hysterics and Teyla's ability to potentially snap you in half over her knee…well, let's just say that Major Lorne isn't the only person around here who's ever questioned your sexuality."
"I do not get hysterical," John stammered, "and I don't screech, and my body weight is normal. I'm totally manly."
"I'm not going to argue that," Rod said airily.
"I am!"
"That doesn't mean Teyla can't be manlier that you, thus making you by default the girl."
John leapt to his feet and thrust a finger in Rod's face. "Lies," he said. "Vicious, vicious lies. You're just trying to mess with my head because I didn't leave you my Dr. Who boxed set in my will."
"Of course," Rod said flatly. "That's exactly it. You've found me out."
"Asshole," John declared, and left the lab.
-\--\--\-
Later, back in his quarters, John dug up an old legal pad (though he had to tear off about six pages of old Tic Tac Toe games and obscene doodles) and a felt-tipped pen. He wrote at the top, I AM NOT THE GIRL.
Then he created a list of evidence:
+ PENIS!
+ facial hair very manly!
+ pwnage at WOW, HL2, all Halos
+ degrees all manly subjects like math
+ animal magnetism -> kidnapping
+ Mensa leadership skills ubermanly
He thought for a minute, looking around the room, then added, Johnny Cash. He couldn't exactly express how that made him particularly manly, but he was certain it helped.
Then he made a second column and headed it, REFUTED
x Not hysterical, merely emphatic
x Baritone - cannot screech
x Joss Whedon is not gay!
He tried to anticipate any further arguments Rod might make on this front, and added after a short time,
x BMI is normal
x kidnapping = rape = no thank you
x have actually had sex with non ascended women
x bee had tentacles
He decided he liked this list, and so he took a digital photo of it and emailed it to Rod. Rod's reply was another email attachment, with two photos: one of John gamely trying on a bright pink cardigan while Sumner, who had knit it, looked gravely on; and one of Teyla sitting on John's chest that time he turned into a bug.
He replied furiously, you know sumner hates me and teyla can kick everyones ass i am no exception this is a spurrious accusation!
Rod's only reply was, TALK TO HER YOURSELF.
-\--\--\-
John did not talk to Teyla. It was a matter of principle, or actually a matter of not wanting to embarrass the hell out of himself if it turned out that Rod was wrong (and he was probably wrong, because John? So not the girl here). He thought about getting Keller to do the talking for him, but then she might ask if he'd managed to talk to Melena yet, and John would have to lie, because there was no way he was reliving that conversation. So it was mostly John being cool and Teyla giving him those tiny little smiles and Rod standing by, rolling his eyes at them both.
This lasted until Sushi Night in the cafeteria. Fish served in Atlantis always had a special fascinating/disgusting quality to John, since the majority of it was procured by sticking a net off one of the piers; on Sushi Night in particular, most of that procurement took place the same day, so there was something primally weird about eating something that until a few hours ago had been eating things itself. Plus, it really was good sushi.
They ate as a team, of course, and Teyla kept trying to bring John more California rolls and rice balls. Rod-dining a la MRE in deference to his allergies-kept coughing and nudging John with his elbow until John seriously considered whether sneaking a piece of shrimp into Rod's entrée would constitute justifiable homicide. "You are harshing my cool," John hissed at him while Teyla was up foraging for space wasabi.
"Since when are you cool?" Rod asked.
"It's my Teyla strategy," John informed him. "Be totally cool and ignore her weirdness until further data becomes available."
"I see. And by 'totally cool' you mean 'dressed like a beatnik?'"
Ronon asked, "You guys here to talk or eat?"
A week of active repression had not managed to completely expunge The Conversation from John's mind, and with his lips loosened by too much high-quality space tuna, he said, "If we're bothering you, maybe you should go sit next to your wife who love so very much."
Ronon raised an eyebrow at him, shrugged, and did just that. Rod blinked at them both. "Did he just-?"
"Yeah. No. Don't ask." He spotted Teyla coming back with the space wasabi (actually blue) in a little cup. "And quit poking me. Jesus, you'd think you're trying to set us up or something."
"It'd do wonders for my own mental well-being," Rod said dryly, and made a point of conspicuously enjoying his wheat snack bread.
Despite Teyla keeping his plate full, John timed himself to only eat for thirty minutes and then gathered up his jacket and his backpack. "Done now. Have fun," he announced.
Rod frowned at him. "You haven't even had desert yet. Normally you eat that first."
John waved the backpack at him. "Pop and Reese's in here, and no, you can't have any."
"Where's the fire?" Rod called out at he made his exit.
John called over his shoulder, "Movie night!"
One of the nice things about Sushi Night was that, in the way of tacky intercultural theme nights everywhere, it was invariably coordinated with Anime Night in the movie room. John did not consider himself an anime fan per se, but sometimes the offerings were sufficiently awesome that he attended even though it involved tolerating Zelenka as master of ceremonies. (Rod had once tried to use it as the basis of a peace accord between them, in fact, but the resulting dub versus sub wars had engulfed three departments before Elizabeth made them lock down those parts of the city wiki.) When Zelenka announced that they were marathoning six episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam-subbed, even!-John had not only procured for himself refreshments, he'd staked out the best couch and calculated the exact time of arrival necessary to claim it for his very own.
He was busily arranging the pillows to his satisfaction (while Zelenka fussed with the projector and Miko complained loudly about whoever had printed up the posters, since they'd managed to flip the image without anyone noticing) when somebody touched his shoulder. He looked up and blinked at Teyla. "May I join you?" she asked.
"Um," John said, distinctly aware of her hand on his shoulder. "Okay? I mean, okay. It's a free movie and all." She sat on the couch, and he realized he should probably offer her at least one of the pillows back, since Ancients had apparently had some weird ideas about ergonomics. She didn't take it, though, nor the pop that John offered her, which he hadn't expected she would 'cause he remembered the first time she tried a carbonated drink she did a spit take. She just sat as straight and still as always on the far end of the couch, and watched out of her peripheral vision while John finished arranging the pillows and busted open his Reese's pieces (which she did sample, but just a couple).
They had to wait a while before the movie started, since John had technically arrived over an hour early in order to claim the good couch. He waited, kind of terrified, for Teyla to try to start making small talk, until he realized that he was waiting for Teyla to talk. But that put the burden of talking all on him, or actually the burden of not talking, because she was right there and an hour was a long time and there was a difference between being cool and being rude, one even John could appreciate. So he told her about the time his mom went to Japan in search of Buddha and they lived in a hotel for three months and he saw the original MS Gundam movie like fifteen times, without even subtitles, just because giant robot suits were awesome. "I could probably make one," he added, "except I'd have to take apart about half the city first. Maybe just two fifths. I'd have to check."
"It would be a fearsome weapon," Teyla said.
By that point there was a crowd coming in, as dinner was finally winding down, and it turned out Zelenka had not brought nearly enough chairs. Erik Sorenson (marine biology, not a Mensa member, always played bards in D&D) came round and stood on one side of John's couch, clearing his throat and clutching a thermos to his chest with both hands. John tried to ignore this, on the grounds that if Sorenson wanted the good couch he should've arrived early like John himself had, but after a few minutes of oto-rhino-laryngeal serenades, he asked, "You got a problem, Erik?"
"Oh, don't mind me," Sorenson said in his goofy Swedish Chef voice. (John couldn't be bothered to remember if Sorenson was actually Swedish or not but that's definitely how he talked.) "I'm just waiting for Radek to bring the chairs."
"Okay," John said. "You do that."
But Teyla suddenly shifted over to the middle of the couch, pushing one of John's cushions out of the way. "You may sit here," she announced. Sorenson got a big goofy smile and plopped down right there on the good couch, and John was torn between protesting the violation of his rightfully-claimed couch territory and potentially offending Teyla, since he'd kind of granted her joint custody of the couch and so she had the right to give up part of her own sitting space without his consultation. Even though it meant she was kind of now pressed up against him all along one side, rubbing arms and knees as he re-settled himself.
Zelenka eventually brought the extra chairs, but of course Sorenson didn't move; instead he opened up the thermos, which contained something that smelled almost exactly like Campbell's soup, only not in a good way. Once people were actually sitting and had stopped whining about not being able to see the screen (another consideration in John's quest for the good couch) Zelenka stood up and launched into a rambling welcome-to-movie-night speech that, among other things, got the time of the anime club meeting wrong. John would've been the first to start yelling "Boo-ring!" if he hadn't been too flustered by Teyla, or rather, by his proximity to Teyla; it seemed like every time he tried to move and get comfortable he bumped up against her in one way or another, and dammit, this was exactly why he'd never wanted to share a tent with her, except he usually did share a tent with her, and there was never this much inappropriate touching then, but they didn't usually have the Swedish Soup Chef, and he thought that maybe faking an allergic reaction to inhaled MSG might've been a valid escape plan if he wasn't still clinging to the notion of keeping cool (and relatively sane). At least Teyla didn't seem bothered by all John's spastic wiggling; of course, she also looked attentive to Zelenka's speech, so maybe she was just repressing the urge to kill.
But eventually, finally, Zelenka stopped talking. John managed to relax when the familiar music came up as Miko navigated the DVD menu. Somebody turned down the lights. Somebody turned the windows opaque. Sorenson was still slurping his damn soup, but John could kind of deal with that, and also the person with the wet hacking cough somewhere in the opposite corner 'cause that was just what happened with free movie nights. Teyla sitting halfway in his lap didn't just happen, but he could deal with that, too, in the interest of coolness and enjoying movie night. More importantly, space robots. Mmm.
Partway through the theme song, Teyla moved. It wasn't a big movement, but it bumped her knee against John's knee. He figured she was trying to get away from Sorenson and his soup (which he slurped-god, it was like the inverse of V for Vendetta, S for Sickening) so he wiggled away to give her more room. She bumped his knee again just before the Zeon attack. He tried crossing his legs. While Fraw Bow collapsed in anguish, she bumped her elbow with his elbow, and seriously, did she have ants in her pants or something? "You okay?" he whispered to her, barely loud enough to hear over the soundtrack and the asshole with the cough.
"I am fine," Teyla said firmly, without looking at him directly.
John wanted to ask if she was fine, why was she moving so damn much, but that didn't seem particularly cool. Instead he finished a bottle of pop and hid it under the couch so he wouldn't have to get up and toss it in the recycling bag. On the screen, Amuro had the instruction book for his mobile suit open in his lap.
Teyla yawned.
"Are you serious?" John hissed at her. "I mean tired? By which I mean, seriously?" Even though he wasn't any louder than Sorenson and his damn soup, somebody shushed him.
"I am sorry," Teyla said.
"Just…this is the good part, coming up," John promised her. Even if she wasn't following the subtitles real well (and he wasn't sure, because he suddenly realized he didn't know if she could read-only that was stupid, because she'd lived with the expedition for over three years, and she'd filed reports and stuff a million times, but there was reading and there was *reading** and it suddenly bothered John that he didn't actually know) everybody liked the mecha battles. Teyla would have to like the mecha battles. He seriously hoped that Teyla would like the mecha battles.
She nodded, and John went back to the movie, leaning forward like he was thirteen again and the only gaijin in the theater, but also half-aware of Teyla next to him and whether she was about to fall asleep form boredom. Which meant, of course, that he was totally conscious of the moment when she yawned again-a small, polite yawn-and stretched her arms over her head in a way that made her back arch and her top stretch out across her chest. Somebody hissed "Down in front!" in their direction, and Teyla let her arms drop down, and one of them fell kind of awkwardly against John's shoulder. He squirmed and tried to twist away so she could drop it to her lap, but she kind of leaned against him instead, and her arm just slipped into the groove between John's back and the back of the couch and stayed there. He looked at her, and was on the verge of asking if she was stuck or something, but then he noticed that she was still staring that the screen and had one hand already in her lap, not stuck somewhere behind Soupy Sorenson, and that was when John realized her hand was on his shoulder and her arm around his back. Her arm was around his back. They were watching a movie and she'd yawned and stretched and-
"'Scuse me," he said, and leapt off the couch. He picked his way through the jumbled chairs of the movie room with a cool so cold he should've been leaving a vapor trail, and made it all the way down to the end of the hallway before he had to jump into the nearest access corridor and fumble with his radio. "Sheppard to McKay."
"I'm here, John. Something up?"
He licked his lips a few times, heart still pounding. "I think I might be the girl."
-\--\--\-
Rod, of course, was useless for a reasonable discussion at that point due to an overwhelming attack of the smug. That left John little recourse but to turn to either Keller or Ronon, since the former was already aware of his previous Teyla issues and the latter was within the team and therefore somewhat trustworthy, if also a dirty cheating cheater who cheated on his trying-to-be-pregnant wife. Luckily, or unluckily, or something, he found them in the mess hall together the next morning, eating breakfast. Or, well, at least they were both eating at the same time and at the same table-Keller was sitting cattycorner from Ronon and she'd turned her chair so she was facing away from him and almost had her tray in her lap. John paused for just a moment to consider whether she was taking the definition of ignoring somebody beyond the limits of its structural integrity.
But that was only for a moment, because there were more important things to talk about, i.e. himself. He took one of the empty chairs and announced, "We need to talk about Teyla."
Keller looked up at John sharply. "What about her?"
John looked around, but no, none of the coven were in sight just then-it was him and Keller and Ronon and Sumner eating with Lorne and some other officers. He lowered his voice anyway though. "I think Teyla's been hitting on me."
"I thought you said she kicked your ankle," Keller said, while Ronon snorted a little.
John shook his head furiously. "Not hitting, hitting on-like, flirting! In some kind of weird Teyla way!"
"Well, duh," Ronon said, and they both turned to stare at him. "What'd you think she was doing?"
John paused to pound his head against the table. He probably should've fixed himself some tavajava before he came down here. (Elizabeth wouldn't let the kitchen staff serve it, as a compromise with Carson, who thought it should be classified as a controlled substance.) Keller said, "Bringing him food at weird hours and trying to break his ankle don't sound like flirty things to me, really. Not like, you know, talking and smiling and…things."
Ronon, completely missing (or ignoring) the insinuation, shrugged. "So she's weird."
"Yeah, and she's treating me like a girl," John added furiously. "Last night at the anime night? Totally did a reach-around."
"You're kidding," Keller said, eyes googly.
"Well, kinda," John said. "I mean, she's not that tall and I was sitting on a pillow and stuff-but she totally tried!"
"You are kinda girly," Ronon said.
"The hell I am!" John asked, and went through his pockets to look for the same list he'd showed Rod, which he'd brought as supporting evidence.
Ronon shook his head. "You've been all quiet lately…not talking…not yelling or running around like you do…"
"Yelling a lot is kind of girly," Keller said. "I yell sometimes."
"I'm cool now, though!" John protested. "The strong, silent type, you know?"
"Exactly," Ronon said. "Totally girly."
"On what planet?"
"Old Athos."
"…oh."
Keller looked confused. "Is that why Teyla's all….you know? Strong and silent type?"
Ronon shrugged again. "That, or she got tortured by the Wraith and stuff. Never asked her."
"If strong and silent is girly for Athosians, what's manly, then?" John asked. "Yelling and running?"
"Pretty much," Ronon said. "Athosian men are supposed to be firey. Shows they're virile."
"I think," John said, "that you're not allowed to say that word ever again."
"Fiery?"
"The other one."
"Virile?"
"Yes."
Keller shook her head. "But don't most cultures say women are supposed to the hysterical ones? I mean, that's where the word hysterical came from, the same word as 'uterus.'"
"Maybe on your planet," Ronon said. "Athosians, Travelers, South Satedans…women are supposed to be all calm and logical. Tied to the cycles of nature."
"Strong and silent," John muttered. He hit his head on the table again. "We need to make, like, a book about this sort of thing. Aliens for Dummies."
Ronon smirked. "I hear Ladon Radim's already writing that one, but it's about you."
"I can't talk to you," John told him. "I just can't. Go…be with your wife or something. Hit on her. Say that word you're not allowed to say to me anymore."
"Virile?" Ronon asked.
"I just said you're not allowed-"
"Don't you think you're virile?" Ronon asked, and he was just grinning too much to be allowed.
John tried to look stern and terrifying, which usually worked on Eldon and most graduate students. "I'm warning you.
"Teyla must think you're vir-"
"Stop it!"
"Vir-"
"Stop!"
"V-"
"I said stop!"
Colonel Sumner suddenly clapped his hands. "Ladies," he called across the mess. "Do we need to separate you two?"
John was not nearly caffeinated enough for this. He found himself climbing to his feet. "For your information, Colonel," he declared, "I am getting a little bit tired of being called a lady by somebody who is currently knitting a cowl-neck poncho out of hot pink Fun Fur!"
Sumner stood up, too, for that, with one knitting needle still in his hand. John had never really appreciated how threatening a pointed piece of aluminum just a centimeter thick could be. "Is that true, Dr. Sheppard?" he asked, slowly.
"Yeah," John managed to squeak. "Just, you know, an observation." Sumner raised an eyebrow at him, looking for a moment like some kind of craggy old guy version of the Rock. John sat down. "That's all."
"So what are you going to do?" Keller asked once Sumner had sat and John was had stopped hyperventilating. "About Teyla, I mean?"
"I don't know!" John whispered. "That’s what I wanted to ask you guys! And by 'you guys' I mean just you because if Ronon talks to me again right now I might scream."
Ronon, looking entirely unrepentant, stuck an entire waffle in his mouth.
Keller looked thoughtful for a moment. "Well," she finally said, "I guess it really depends on what you want."
"What do you mean, what do I want?" John demanded. "I thought this was about what Teyla wanted, which in case you didn't notice, is me, and oh my god I never thought I'd ever get to say that. Why can't anybody around here just talk in plain and simple sentences that don't have any hidden meanings or implications and actually clarify their actions?"
"Do you want her?" Ronon asked around his waffle.
"Oh," John said, and was so busy realizing the answer he forgot to punch Ronon in his adulterous face.
Part One
Part Two
Part Four