TEAM SHEPPARD: tall story, "Bad Hair Day"
Title: Bad Hair Day
Author: almostnever
Team: Sheppard
Prompt: tall story
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: Rodney never even noticed Sheppard's hair until it was already some kind of bizarre running joke on Atlantis. He certainly never thought he'd care if it changed.
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+
"I can't believe this. Nothing remotely interesting on the scanner. And those purported Ancient ruins were just a couple of knocked-over rocks!" Rodney sets his life signs detector to bleep if it picks up any energy readings, and puts it away; he just can't take staring at that bleak empty screen any longer. "Words cannot express how little use I have for this outing."
"I do not understand your objection, Rodney. You have always complained that the planets we visit are not sufficiently developed to interest you," says Teyla.
Ronon nods. "Never shuts up about it."
"Figured we could stand to start off slow after being out of the field a while," Sheppard casts back over his shoulder.
"I thought that's what all the milk runs to our allies were about?" says Rodney.
"Sure," Sheppard agrees. "But for our first trip out to a new place... we're still takin' it easy for now."
"Now that Atlantis is restored to Pegasus, and no longer in hiding or mistrusted, we have the opportunity to trade with some of the truly advanced worlds with specialized economies," Teyla says. "I thought you would welcome this chance."
Rodney glares up at one of the picture-signs posted roadside: a street leading to a city skyline. Smaller pictures below show a figure eating, a figure sleeping, and a figure in a bubbling pool. "I'd be ecstatic to visit a world with advanced technology-- not advanced skin care regimens! Why does our first visit to one of these highly developed civilizations have to be Spa World?"
"The Dumarza do not solely trade in personal grooming items," Teyla says. "They also practice herbal medicine. Your medical science has proven the effectiveness of many of our galaxy's traditional treatments for illness. Dr. Keller has expressed an interest in testing more such remedies."
"It's not my medical science. That kind of sloppy, haphazard mumbo jumbo isn't real science. Half the time you'd be better off consulting a flowchart." All right, that might be laying it on a little thick. Rodney's not that bitter about breaking up with Jennifer. Anymore. Much.
Anyway, "You know what real science will tell you? That despite the propaganda of the personal grooming industry, all anyone really needs for cleanliness and basic health are simple surfactants and humectants, which we already synthesize on Atlantis," Rodney educates the others helpfully. "I use some of our synthetic emollients in my homemade sunscreen."
"Nevertheless," says Teyla firmly, in a way that means shut up.
Sheppard finally falls back from point enough to join in, "Not that we haven't dealt with specialized economies before. A lot of Athosians are craftspeople, right?"
"Yes," Teyla says, "our bantos rods and carvings are popular trade items, and so are our weavings. We owe our ties to many worlds to demand for our artisan crafts."
"Sateda was known for performing culture," says Ronon unexpectedly; it's rare that he mentions his lost homeworld.
"Satedan epic poetry and song are prized on many worlds," Teyla agrees.
Rodney tries to keep his voice respectful; he's too curious not to ask, "Have you found any books, or music notations?"
"Our works aren't like yours," Ronon says. "Learning them is part of the art. It's dishonorable to write them down. Recording performances was forbidden for a long time. Same reason."
"No wonder the anthropologists did all those gloomy reports on Satedan culture." Rodney scowls. "So all those pages upon pages really amounted to 'Ronon won't write anything down.' Soft science! Useless."
Ronon makes an indistinct noise that Rodney takes for unqualified and wholehearted agreement.
Rodney moves on to the sensible inquiry, "If the Dumarza are so advanced, why didn't we bring the puddlejumper?"
"What, and miss a chance to hear you complain about walking?" Sheppard calls back over his shoulder.
"Speaking of which, are any of these herbal medicines good for blisters?"
+
Advanced worlds with specialized economies seems to mean, as far as Rodney can tell, that the usual hodgepodge of market stalls is in a covered building, instead of open-air. It stinks so strongly of floral and herbal perfumes that the overall effect is almost sickening, like drowning in nectar.
Teyla takes them to the largest, most garishly overdecorated stall. The man behind the polished wood slab of the kiosk has elaborate, shiny, possibly waxed facial hair and resembles Stromboli from Pinnochio. Though it's possible Rodney only thinks so because his frame of reference has been permanently skewed Disneywards after all those weeks looking after his niece while Jeannie juggled (sometimes literally, it seemed) Rodney's two newborn nephews.
"New friends!" Stromboli booms as Teyla leads them to the lair. "Ah, these faces, I see already, we have just what you need. Lotions for the skin, the hair, the nails, ointments and adornments, we have it all. Please, you must try samples of our offerings, I insist. For such a beautiful woman, this elixir, to apply to the face and retain that youthful glow no matter how long and tiring the day. For the handsome young man, a grooming agent, to render the hair silky and manageable--"
"Vanity," Ronon says.
"--or perhaps this liniment, to soothe taxed muscles after the rigors of exercise," Stromboli changes tack smoothly. "For the man of distinction--" despite the fact that he's clearly a charlatan, Stromboli at least has that right; Rodney stands a little taller-- "aftershave and moisturizer to refresh and tighten the skin, and attract the eye of every gentleman." And he tips his head disastrously just a fraction toward Sheppard, offering the sample flask.
"Not really the right kind of product for him," says Sheppard. "Got anything that attracts the eye of every lady?"
Stromboli just raises his eyebrows, hand still extended.
Rodney takes the little flask gracelessly. "Fine. Yes. Thank you." He can feel Sheppard frowning at him, and he lifts his chin, sending a Deal with it glare Sheppard's way. He's always promised himself he'd never deny being bisexual, even if he's sort of gone out of his way not to acknowledge it in recent years, ever since hitting thirty and becoming convinced he needed to marry and pass on his genes. Eleven years later, his extended time on Earth with Jeannie's brood cured him of that idea.
Sheppard's eyebrows shoot up, but otherwise he doesn't comment or react.
Still. It's not Rodney's most awkward coming-out moment, but only because Jeannie actually walked in on him with... well, two guys; Rodney got an awful lot of play in the eighties. He had to do something to keep him from snapping out of sheer boredom during undergrad.
"I'm afraid we are not here in search of cosmetic products," Teyla finally gets a word in. "Our interest is strictly in medicinal goods."
"Our products cure many ills," replies Stromboli, "the threat of decrepitude, the discouragement of premature aging; you are only as healthy as you feel, and don't we all feel better when we greet a fresh face in the mirror every morning?"
"It's not Spa Planet," Sheppard sottos in a quiet aside to Rodney, "it's Infomercial World."
Not quiet enough. Stromboli turns on him, pressing a bottle into Sheppard's hand. "I think you, sir, will find this of particular interest. A tonic for the hair and scalp. Very soothing. Please, I insist, this is yours; try some, I'm sure you will enjoy it."
"I was told that you also trade in lhumbu root," says Teyla, and the rapturous sales spiel shifts into snake oil territory with promises of unprecedented anesthetic qualities, organ-nourishing vitamins and minerals, bowel-cleansing purgatives and blood-bolstering supplements.
Rodney tunes it all out in favor of starting a game of video chess on his scanner and passing it to Sheppard.
"Hey, we need to pay attention to this. How else are we gonna know what to do if you need your blood bolstered?" Sheppard asks, but he plays a move before he hands it back.
+
Turns out Stromboli was pushing his Body Shop wares so hard because his supposedly more medicinal stock won't arrive until the next day. Rodney would love to overrule the plan to stay overnight here-- he feels like he's choking on the odor of flowers, he's sure it's doing something awful to his sinuses, and while he doesn't technically have any hay fever symptoms yet, it's only a matter of time-- but he scans a specimen of lhumbu root and can't deny it's chemically interesting and, if nothing else, bursting with antioxidants so as to put acai berries to shame.
Also, it's raining, and they didn't bring the jumper, so Rodney withholds his excellent arguments to the contrary and follows along when Teyla checks them into a room at the distressingly quaint, picturesque inn.
Rodney hates to think he's lost his sense of wonder about this sort of thing; it feels like a betrayal of his younger self, the boy who devoured Foundation and Dune novels alongside his astrophysics texts, dreaming of other worlds.
But the fact is, it's an ordinary stay in an ordinary inn that just happens to be on an alien planet. He promises himself that next time they're on a world with several moons or hanging mountains or whatnot, he'll stop and gape extra hard to make up for it.
At any rate, everything goes normally until the next morning.
They're all taking their turns in the (rudimentary, but adequate) bathroom, but when it's his go, Sheppard says loudly, "The hell!"
Rodney bolts out of his chair and into the bathroom before he's really conscious of moving, and Teyla and Ronon are already standing poised and wary, scoping out the area for well-groomed assassins or style-conscious Wraith.
Sheppard looks embarrassed. "Um."
"What caused you to shout, John?" asks Teyla.
"I was just... surprised," says Sheppard. "The stuff he gave me actually works."
Rodney looks at him, and does a double-take.
Sheppard's hair isn't sticking up.
His hair is perfectly tame. It's not sticking up anywhere.
"Will you look at that?" Sheppard's grin is wide and irresistibly goofy. "It hasn't stayed down like that since never."
Ronon shakes his head and goes back to polishing or whetting or whatever he's doing with his knives.
"We're talking to that guy again today, right?" Sheppard asks. "The guy who had this stuff?"
"Yes," says Teyla, and Sheppard doesn't say anything. He just hefts the bottle ominously, still grinning.
+
Rodney never even noticed Sheppard's hair until it was already some kind of bizarre running joke on Atlantis.
Sheppard always wanted the team to eat together daily if possible, and pushed them to clear their schedules so they could have lunch at the same time. It was... fine; it saved time, anyway, to always know where he was going to sit without wasting time looking for a good spot, or equivocating over whether to eat in the mess or take it back to the lab.
But after the mission to Dagan, Rodney felt the team's disappointment too keenly to spend his fleeting spare time enduring silent recrimination because he told Allina a bit too much and lost Atlantis their chance at the Brotherhood's ZPM.
Out of habit, though, he forgot to get portable food, and there was no way he was balancing a tray with a soup bowl all the way back to the lab. Rodney parked his tray at a table with Zelenka, Simpson and Prinya with a crisp, "Good afternoon."
"Aw, are you spurning Major Sheppard for us, Dr. McKay?" Simpson laughed. "Look at him, he's all disappointed. Even his hair looks sad."
"And it takes a lot to make the hair look sad," said Prinya. "Even when he was soaked after the big storm, it was perky."
"What the hell are you two blathering about?" Rodney demanded.
"The hair!" Simpson insisted. "Don't tell me you haven't noticed the hair. Wait, I forgot who I'm talking to... of course you haven't noticed."
"The hair. Major Sheppard's hair?" Rodney snuck a look at the team, at Sheppard in profile. He'd never paid much attention before. He'd seen that Sheppard's hair was still thick and plentiful, and felt slightly... a lot... bitter about that, but that was all he'd registered: Sheppard's hair was dark and he had plenty of it.
Looking again, he saw how Sheppard's hair crested down over his brow and tilted up sort of askew in the back, tufted and spiky.
"It just looks like hair to me," Rodney said.
"It's not really in full flower right now," Prinya said wistfully. "Usually it goes straight up in back, with a couple of bits veering off at different angles to make it more interesting. So hot."
"Messy hair is hot?" Rodney frowned, and looked over at Zelenka. If messy hair were the key to women's hearts, Zelenka should have hordes of admirers following him around the city.
Zelenka cast a baleful look back at him and rededicated himself to his food, determinedly tuning out of the conversation.
"The Major's messy hair is hot," said Prinya. "And mesmerizing. It's always different! It's like it gets taller and pokier when he's happy!"
"It's very expressive," Simpson agreed, somehow maintaining a straight face. "It's like a shiny, pointy, sexy black mood ring."
Rodney choked on his unidentifiable entree. "All right, this is ridiculous. There's nothing special about Sheppard or his hair. You're just trying to get rid of me because you can't exchange unprofessional gossip in front of the boss."
"Forget it, we have easier ways of doing that," said Prinya, turning to Simpson. "So have you noticed that Miko's completely stuck on Dr. McKay?"
"He probably doesn't even know her name."
"I know who Miko is!" said Rodney uncertainly. "It's been months, I do know the physicists in my own lab."
"Oh yeah? Is she the one with the bracelet or the one with the glasses?"
"That's a trick question," Rodney accused.
"Oh, poor Miko," said Prinya.
Simpson shook her head. "She's the one with the glasses who has a gigantic crush on you. She's too shy to tell you but she's been dying for you to notice her."
"Why would you tell me that?" Rodney asked. "Oh. Oh hoho, I see, this is an amusing ploy to get me to look foolish responding to this so-called crush."
Simpson stared. "Has anyone ever told you that you're really scarily paranoid?"
"Who have you been talking to?" Rodney demanded.
Even Zelenka started laughing at him after that.
+
The point is, Colonel Sheppard is nearly as notorious around Atlantis for the haphazard configuration of his hair as he is for constant life-risking escapades, leeriness of hugs, and devotion to the puddlejumpers. It's a key, defining characteristic.
But after the trip to Dumar, it's just... gone.
Well, no, of course it's not gone. Sheppard's hair is just as lush and thick and inviting-- not the right word. Attractive? Also wrong. Fetching? Flattering! That'll do-- as lush and thick and flattering as ever, but it's smooth and floppy now instead of spiky, and it's disconcerting, somehow.
What's still more disconcerting, however, is Sheppard's attitude, which seems to have flopped over and smoothed down with the rest of him.
They send a MALP out to PGL-012, and the camera transmission and sensor readings show an oxygen-rich, forested, wild world... right up until they register absolutely nothing. The cameras show nothing approaching, seismic activity is moderate but stable, the sensors pick up no life-signs coming closer, no energy from missiles or any weapons closing in. The MALP just stops transmitting and doesn't come back.
"Rock from a catapult," Ronon suggests. "Don't need machines for everything."
"It need not even be a weapon," says Teyla. "The MALP might have run over a sinkhole or something may have fallen on it and destroyed it."
"Possible," says Sheppard. "But we need to know for sure. Anything that can take out a MALP is potentially either a threat we need to be aware of, or a resource we could use."
"What do you propose, Colonel?" asks Woolsey.
"We take a cloaked jumper through and check it out."
Predictably Woolsey demurs, "I'm afraid that's just too risky. For all we know, the MALP deactivated because something on that planet affects machinery or electronics, and the same thing could affect a jumper. We can't afford that kind of loss."
Rodney expects Sheppard to push, and argue, and use words like strategic initiative, and borderline whine, and almost pout, and pull out all the other tricks he normally uses to get his way. And it looks like that's how it's going to go, but then Sheppard makes his characteristic I'm-going-in gesture: he tilts his head and shoves his fingers through his hair.
Only that move doesn't quite come off the same way now, because instead of scrubbing his fingers through the spiky cowlicks at the back of his crazy, crazy head, Sheppard encounters no resistance; his hand just smooths on down. His hair still looks neat as a pin.
"You may be right," Sheppard says. "Maybe we could get the engineers to rig us up a smaller MALP, something that's a little stealthier and better shielded. It doesn't need to be equipped with the full complement of sensors, we have all the environmental readings from the transmission we got from the first one. Just something with cameras that can detect life signs and energy. We could send that through, see if we can get a better idea of the risk to reward ratio before we send in anything else."
"I think I can be persuaded to sign off on that," says Woolsey. "Dr. McKay?"
"What?"
Woolsey raises an eyebrow. "Could the engineers--"
"Yes! Of course. Obviously," Rodney rattles out, looking around the table. Incredibly, no one else seems to have noticed that Sheppard has been replaced by a pod person. A flat-haired pod person.
"Good! Let's adjourn for now, then, and when we have a smaller MALP ready we can revisit this subject. Dr. McKay, you can email me later with an ETA."
"I can email you now," Rodney says, doing so for paper trail purposes, "it'll be ready in two days." And a day and a half of it will be spent arguing over who gets stuck with such a boring job, but science and research must maintain some mystique.
"Same time day after tomorrow, then," says Woolsey, dismissing the meeting.
Rodney follows Sheppard out of the meeting room. Now that he's looking for the signs, he realizes it's even worse than he thought.
Sheppard's pants fit. His shoelaces are tied. It's a complete disaster.
Clearly, Rodney needs to intervene.
+
He makes an attempt at dinner. As they finish eating, Rodney steels himself, hardly believing the words are actually passing his lips as he turns to Sheppard and grudgingly asks, "Do you want to play video golf?"
"That'd be cool," says Sheppard, with a trace of his usual indolence. Then he shrugs, "Wish I could, but the Daedalus is going to be here next week. I've got to get my ducks in a row on our requisitions for their next trip out."
"But that's Lorne's job!" Rodney says. "Look, we already have a Lorne. You don't need to go all Single White Female on him just because you have the same hair now! Aren't you worried you're going to make the poor guy afraid for his job?"
"You know, I haven't always shoved all of it off on Lorne," says Sheppard. "And since we've come back to Pegasus with more people and supplies, there's that much more paperwork. I gotta pitch in and do my part. Why don't we make it a movie night next week instead?"
"Oh, and watch what? Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus?"
"Reign of Fire," Sheppard offers.
Rodney is ready to unleash the scorn of a thousand-- well, himselfs; he can't think of anything more scornful-- when he remembers the epic amount of shirtless Christian Bale in that movie. Shirtless Christian Bale who is both hot and, currently, Batman. It's a combination Rodney's helpless to resist.
"That's probably as good as it's likely to get," he agrees.
"Great. See you later," Sheppard strolls off, standing up straight, whistling.
Madness.
+
The mini-MALP scouts out PGL-012 a few days later and sends back images of the first MALP looking for all the world like it's crushed in the middle of a giant footprint, which seems impossible until the mini-MALP also catches a shot of a titan striding past.
"I think I stand vindicated," says Woolsey as they review the footage.
"She must be eight meters tall! And the guy might be even taller! If we'd taken a jumper through, one of them could have swatted us right out of the air!" Rodney sensibly panics.
"My people have never encountered anyone of this size," says Teyla.
Rodney stares. "I'd hope that if you ever had, you would've mentioned it before now!"
"Why?" Ronon sounds bored. "You never asked."
"Did you know about the giant hill people?"
"No."
"Have you ever encountered any other sentient beings with significantly unusual physiology?"
Ronon arches an eyebrow. "What's unusual?"
"Quit messing with Rodney's head," says Sheppard, which is bizarre in itself: Rodney's acutely aware that usually Sheppard is the first in line to mess with his head. "Ronon would have told us about it if he had, he's just yanking your chain."
"If we could return to a more pertinent line of inquiry," says Woolsey, "I'd like to establish a timeline for making contact with the locals of this world. Shall we try for, say, six months?"
"Sounds good," Sheppard nods.
"Six months?" Rodney bolts upright. That's not how this is supposed to work. Woolsey's supposed to give some ludicrously conservative estimate, like six months, and Sheppard is supposed to come back with a ludicrously abbreviated estimate, like two weeks, and then Rodney generally steps in and pretends to offer a compromise and beats the timeline down to six weeks. (And then usually some emergency prompts them to do it in a week with completely inadequate preparation, and it goes drastically wrong, but then they pull it out of the bag anyway, because that's what they do.)
"The MALP's still not picking up any tech, so I don't see any big strategic advantage to rushing it," Sheppard replies. "And your people are going to want time to work up a first contact plan that accounts for these guys being four times our size, right?"
"I'm sure we have contingency plans for something along these lines drawn up already... somewhere; it's not like the soft sciences have much else going on," sniffs Rodney.
"Well, whatever Science and Research has on tap, I'm going to want to equip and drill my people to deal with potentially dangerous folks who can accidentally step on and crush a MALP," says Sheppard. "That means this is happening at least one Daedalus run away, at a minimum."
Woolsey looks like he might burst into tears of pride. Rodney might cry too, for completely different reasons.
+
For his next attempt, Rodney coaxes Sheppard into a remote control car race with more success than the proposal of video golf. He dares to hope this is a sign of normality, or at least a return to the usual abnormality rather than the current unfamiliar variety.
But no, this too goes awry. Every time Rodney trash-talks Sheppard's driving, he just gets a laugh in return. Several times he looks askance at Sheppard only to find Sheppard's already looking his way, barely paying attention to the race at all.
Sheppard loses, and he doesn't even seem to mind.
Afterward Rodney drops by the infirmary. He and Jennifer broke up with a mutual promise to "be friends," and Rodney has it on good authority-- all right, Jeannie's authority, but that's the closest to 'good' he has access to-- that discussing mutual acquaintances is the kind of thing that friends do.
"Do you think Colonel Sheppard's acting weird?" Rodney asks.
"This is a trick question, right?"
He amends, "Differently weird."
She considers it. "He seems a little happier, maybe."
"Happier!" Rodney says. "What about his hair?"
"What about his hair?"
"See, that's what I said five years ago!" says Rodney. "But it turns out that his hair is a thing. Or it was a thing, and now it's not, and that's weird."
Jennifer squints cutely at him. "Have you been drinking?"
"No..." Post-race beers on the pier with Sheppard don't count as drinking, Rodney is convinced, and especially not beers with pod-person Sheppard who mysteriously has Labatt's in his fridge along with his usual Budweiser swill.
"Okay, well, if you haven't been, maybe you should be," says Jennifer. "Go tell Sheppard he owes you a beer."
"I can't do that. Did I not just establish that he's acting differently weird lately?"
"Not really," says Jennifer, "but maybe it's a good weird? It's worth a shot."
"I'm definitely not telling him he owes me a shot," says Rodney, "with the way he's been acting lately, that might involve an actual bullet."
"Well, in that case you can come back here and I'll help you out," says Jennifer, "but til then, get off my exam table and skedaddle, I've got work to do."
"I'm confused," says Rodney, hopping down, "does giving me incomprehensible advice and kicking me out of your office fall under the rubric of 'being friends'?"
Jennifer kisses his cheek and shoves him out the door. "Absolutely."
+
Teyla and Ronon both beg off from movie night, or so Rodney assumes when he arrives to find it's just him, Sheppard, and a bowl of popcorn that's usually shared out in miserly portions between the growing population of team nights, what with Kanaan, Torren, and Amelia becoming part of the crowd.
"Where's the rest of the crew?" Rodney asks, voicing his curiosity once all the popcorn disappears, which happens sometime during the opening credits.
"Doing their own thing, I guess," says Sheppard.
"They didn't even bother to give an excuse?"
"I didn't invite 'em."
"What?" Rodney sits upright, grabs the remote control and stops the movie. "Okay, that tears it. What's going on with you?"
"Uh..."
"You're usually all about doing team stuff, but you didn't even invite them tonight. You're caught up on paperwork. You're agreeing with Woolsey. You haven't done anything stupidly reckless in weeks. You passed up video golf, you didn't get pissy about losing our RC car race, you have non-Budweiser beer in your fridge and flat hair! I think you should give me a sample of that stuff you got from Dumar. A new look can't be responsible for this kind of wholesale, radical personality shift-- something else has changed and I'm going to find out what."
"Rodney!" Sheppard scrubs his face with both hands. "Okay, look. Yeah, something changed. But it doesn't have anything to do with my hair."
"It has everything to do with your hair!" Rodney insists. "None of this was happening before you turned into Smoothy McFollicle!"
"That's not-- what it was," says Sheppard with difficulty, giving him a significant look, as if there were some other obvious alternative explanation, which there so is not.
"What then?" demands Rodney.
"For cryin' out loud," Sheppard mutters, and suddenly he moves in close, closer than Rodney has ever seen Sheppard voluntarily come to anyone.
He tilts his head, just a little, to an unmistakable angle, the coming-in-for-a-kiss angle, not that Rodney has been on this side of it all that often; Rodney is too busy trying to imagine how this fits with Sheppard's pod-personhood to properly react, so Sheppard just drifts in closer and lets his lips glide against Rodney's.
He's shifting back a little with his blankest face before Rodney realizes that it doesn't matter what else is going on because John just kissed him.
Quickly he slaps his hand around the back of John's neck and pulls him in again, opening his mouth to the kiss this time and grabbing the waistband of John's pants with the other hand. Just the backs of his knuckles against the soft skin at John's waist makes Rodney a little dizzy.
Or, well, also the kiss probably has something to do with that, because John is definitely on board now, mouth open, tongue in play, lips unbearably full and stubble rasping.
It's a while before they break to catch their breath, but not so long that Rodney forgets to thwap John's arm. "You could have asked if I dated guys."
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell?"
"Doesn't apply to me," Rodney begins, and then sheepishly says, "Oh. Right."
John rolls his eyes, but he's smiling.
"I still don't get it, though," says Rodney. "If you were trying to win my attentions, you already know mango pudding and classic Doctor Who are the way to my-- relevant internal organs. You didn't have to go to all this trouble."
"I figured if we did this, there might be some 'Colonel Sheppard's acting different' going around. People wondering why."
"So you acted differently... preemptively," Rodney says. "It's all been a tall story to throw people off track."
"That," John says. "Plus, believe it or not, I've been meaning to run a tighter ship around here. We have too many personnel now to let things slide as much. Me and Lorne, we've been planning it for a while. I figured I'd take this situation as a kick in the ass and move on it."
"I can't believe you've been, been-- multitasking with my heart."
"Your heart?" John's eyebrows lift.
"Oh, don't even." Rodney crosses his arms. "I know you know that I... you know."
John fidgets. "Yeah, I know. And, you know, uh..."
"Fine, I suppose I do." Rodney claps his hands briskly. "So that's settled. Can we go back to kissing?"
"Now you're talking," says John, and then, paradoxically, immediately puts a stop to it.
+
Lhumbu root turns out to be a miracle cure for any number of minor but annoying health complaints-- after a while, Jennifer just prescribes Rodney a daily dose, cutting down on his infirmary visits by a fair margin, which makes both her and John seem inordinately pleased.
And so Atlantis establishes regular visits to Dumar for trade. Especially once they make their carefully planned first contact with the Brobdingnagians, establish good relations, and discover the giants have lots of valuable iridium and nutritionally rich foodstuffs to bargain with, and really love exotic perfumes.
By the time AR-1 comes around in the rotation on another trip to Dumar, John's unguents have long since run out, and his crown has resumed its former cowlicked glory. He's mostly come unbuttoned again in other ways, too-- the boots are back to going loose and untied, though the pants continue to fit, a development Rodney has come to greatly approve of, now that he's getting into them.
Stromboli recognizes them as they approach his stall, booming, "Old friends! Dear friends, we have so many new items to demonstrate to you today, and a few old favorites, too." He arranges the pickup of their wagonloads of lhumbu root and perfume oils, and manages to sell conditioner to Ronon and liniment to Teyla before he turns and offers John a familiar bottle.
"I see you could use more of our special tonic!" Stromboli smiles.
Rodney intercedes, waving the bottle away. "I don't think we'll be needing any more of that. I like him au naturel. No further cosmetic intervention needed for either of us, thank you very much."
"Sweet talker," John elbows him, grinning.
"Ah. Well, perhaps then instead I can interest you in another medicinal treatment. An exciting new item," Stromboli drops his voice confidentially, which means he's only outputting at 200 decibels. He proffers a round jar, gleaming with promise. "We have developed a very effective restorative against hair loss."
John barely manages to keep his feet as Rodney lunges for the jar.
+
Poll
Author: almostnever
Team: Sheppard
Prompt: tall story
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: Rodney never even noticed Sheppard's hair until it was already some kind of bizarre running joke on Atlantis. He certainly never thought he'd care if it changed.
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+
"I can't believe this. Nothing remotely interesting on the scanner. And those purported Ancient ruins were just a couple of knocked-over rocks!" Rodney sets his life signs detector to bleep if it picks up any energy readings, and puts it away; he just can't take staring at that bleak empty screen any longer. "Words cannot express how little use I have for this outing."
"I do not understand your objection, Rodney. You have always complained that the planets we visit are not sufficiently developed to interest you," says Teyla.
Ronon nods. "Never shuts up about it."
"Figured we could stand to start off slow after being out of the field a while," Sheppard casts back over his shoulder.
"I thought that's what all the milk runs to our allies were about?" says Rodney.
"Sure," Sheppard agrees. "But for our first trip out to a new place... we're still takin' it easy for now."
"Now that Atlantis is restored to Pegasus, and no longer in hiding or mistrusted, we have the opportunity to trade with some of the truly advanced worlds with specialized economies," Teyla says. "I thought you would welcome this chance."
Rodney glares up at one of the picture-signs posted roadside: a street leading to a city skyline. Smaller pictures below show a figure eating, a figure sleeping, and a figure in a bubbling pool. "I'd be ecstatic to visit a world with advanced technology-- not advanced skin care regimens! Why does our first visit to one of these highly developed civilizations have to be Spa World?"
"The Dumarza do not solely trade in personal grooming items," Teyla says. "They also practice herbal medicine. Your medical science has proven the effectiveness of many of our galaxy's traditional treatments for illness. Dr. Keller has expressed an interest in testing more such remedies."
"It's not my medical science. That kind of sloppy, haphazard mumbo jumbo isn't real science. Half the time you'd be better off consulting a flowchart." All right, that might be laying it on a little thick. Rodney's not that bitter about breaking up with Jennifer. Anymore. Much.
Anyway, "You know what real science will tell you? That despite the propaganda of the personal grooming industry, all anyone really needs for cleanliness and basic health are simple surfactants and humectants, which we already synthesize on Atlantis," Rodney educates the others helpfully. "I use some of our synthetic emollients in my homemade sunscreen."
"Nevertheless," says Teyla firmly, in a way that means shut up.
Sheppard finally falls back from point enough to join in, "Not that we haven't dealt with specialized economies before. A lot of Athosians are craftspeople, right?"
"Yes," Teyla says, "our bantos rods and carvings are popular trade items, and so are our weavings. We owe our ties to many worlds to demand for our artisan crafts."
"Sateda was known for performing culture," says Ronon unexpectedly; it's rare that he mentions his lost homeworld.
"Satedan epic poetry and song are prized on many worlds," Teyla agrees.
Rodney tries to keep his voice respectful; he's too curious not to ask, "Have you found any books, or music notations?"
"Our works aren't like yours," Ronon says. "Learning them is part of the art. It's dishonorable to write them down. Recording performances was forbidden for a long time. Same reason."
"No wonder the anthropologists did all those gloomy reports on Satedan culture." Rodney scowls. "So all those pages upon pages really amounted to 'Ronon won't write anything down.' Soft science! Useless."
Ronon makes an indistinct noise that Rodney takes for unqualified and wholehearted agreement.
Rodney moves on to the sensible inquiry, "If the Dumarza are so advanced, why didn't we bring the puddlejumper?"
"What, and miss a chance to hear you complain about walking?" Sheppard calls back over his shoulder.
"Speaking of which, are any of these herbal medicines good for blisters?"
+
Advanced worlds with specialized economies seems to mean, as far as Rodney can tell, that the usual hodgepodge of market stalls is in a covered building, instead of open-air. It stinks so strongly of floral and herbal perfumes that the overall effect is almost sickening, like drowning in nectar.
Teyla takes them to the largest, most garishly overdecorated stall. The man behind the polished wood slab of the kiosk has elaborate, shiny, possibly waxed facial hair and resembles Stromboli from Pinnochio. Though it's possible Rodney only thinks so because his frame of reference has been permanently skewed Disneywards after all those weeks looking after his niece while Jeannie juggled (sometimes literally, it seemed) Rodney's two newborn nephews.
"New friends!" Stromboli booms as Teyla leads them to the lair. "Ah, these faces, I see already, we have just what you need. Lotions for the skin, the hair, the nails, ointments and adornments, we have it all. Please, you must try samples of our offerings, I insist. For such a beautiful woman, this elixir, to apply to the face and retain that youthful glow no matter how long and tiring the day. For the handsome young man, a grooming agent, to render the hair silky and manageable--"
"Vanity," Ronon says.
"--or perhaps this liniment, to soothe taxed muscles after the rigors of exercise," Stromboli changes tack smoothly. "For the man of distinction--" despite the fact that he's clearly a charlatan, Stromboli at least has that right; Rodney stands a little taller-- "aftershave and moisturizer to refresh and tighten the skin, and attract the eye of every gentleman." And he tips his head disastrously just a fraction toward Sheppard, offering the sample flask.
"Not really the right kind of product for him," says Sheppard. "Got anything that attracts the eye of every lady?"
Stromboli just raises his eyebrows, hand still extended.
Rodney takes the little flask gracelessly. "Fine. Yes. Thank you." He can feel Sheppard frowning at him, and he lifts his chin, sending a Deal with it glare Sheppard's way. He's always promised himself he'd never deny being bisexual, even if he's sort of gone out of his way not to acknowledge it in recent years, ever since hitting thirty and becoming convinced he needed to marry and pass on his genes. Eleven years later, his extended time on Earth with Jeannie's brood cured him of that idea.
Sheppard's eyebrows shoot up, but otherwise he doesn't comment or react.
Still. It's not Rodney's most awkward coming-out moment, but only because Jeannie actually walked in on him with... well, two guys; Rodney got an awful lot of play in the eighties. He had to do something to keep him from snapping out of sheer boredom during undergrad.
"I'm afraid we are not here in search of cosmetic products," Teyla finally gets a word in. "Our interest is strictly in medicinal goods."
"Our products cure many ills," replies Stromboli, "the threat of decrepitude, the discouragement of premature aging; you are only as healthy as you feel, and don't we all feel better when we greet a fresh face in the mirror every morning?"
"It's not Spa Planet," Sheppard sottos in a quiet aside to Rodney, "it's Infomercial World."
Not quiet enough. Stromboli turns on him, pressing a bottle into Sheppard's hand. "I think you, sir, will find this of particular interest. A tonic for the hair and scalp. Very soothing. Please, I insist, this is yours; try some, I'm sure you will enjoy it."
"I was told that you also trade in lhumbu root," says Teyla, and the rapturous sales spiel shifts into snake oil territory with promises of unprecedented anesthetic qualities, organ-nourishing vitamins and minerals, bowel-cleansing purgatives and blood-bolstering supplements.
Rodney tunes it all out in favor of starting a game of video chess on his scanner and passing it to Sheppard.
"Hey, we need to pay attention to this. How else are we gonna know what to do if you need your blood bolstered?" Sheppard asks, but he plays a move before he hands it back.
+
Turns out Stromboli was pushing his Body Shop wares so hard because his supposedly more medicinal stock won't arrive until the next day. Rodney would love to overrule the plan to stay overnight here-- he feels like he's choking on the odor of flowers, he's sure it's doing something awful to his sinuses, and while he doesn't technically have any hay fever symptoms yet, it's only a matter of time-- but he scans a specimen of lhumbu root and can't deny it's chemically interesting and, if nothing else, bursting with antioxidants so as to put acai berries to shame.
Also, it's raining, and they didn't bring the jumper, so Rodney withholds his excellent arguments to the contrary and follows along when Teyla checks them into a room at the distressingly quaint, picturesque inn.
Rodney hates to think he's lost his sense of wonder about this sort of thing; it feels like a betrayal of his younger self, the boy who devoured Foundation and Dune novels alongside his astrophysics texts, dreaming of other worlds.
But the fact is, it's an ordinary stay in an ordinary inn that just happens to be on an alien planet. He promises himself that next time they're on a world with several moons or hanging mountains or whatnot, he'll stop and gape extra hard to make up for it.
At any rate, everything goes normally until the next morning.
They're all taking their turns in the (rudimentary, but adequate) bathroom, but when it's his go, Sheppard says loudly, "The hell!"
Rodney bolts out of his chair and into the bathroom before he's really conscious of moving, and Teyla and Ronon are already standing poised and wary, scoping out the area for well-groomed assassins or style-conscious Wraith.
Sheppard looks embarrassed. "Um."
"What caused you to shout, John?" asks Teyla.
"I was just... surprised," says Sheppard. "The stuff he gave me actually works."
Rodney looks at him, and does a double-take.
Sheppard's hair isn't sticking up.
His hair is perfectly tame. It's not sticking up anywhere.
"Will you look at that?" Sheppard's grin is wide and irresistibly goofy. "It hasn't stayed down like that since never."
Ronon shakes his head and goes back to polishing or whetting or whatever he's doing with his knives.
"We're talking to that guy again today, right?" Sheppard asks. "The guy who had this stuff?"
"Yes," says Teyla, and Sheppard doesn't say anything. He just hefts the bottle ominously, still grinning.
+
Rodney never even noticed Sheppard's hair until it was already some kind of bizarre running joke on Atlantis.
Sheppard always wanted the team to eat together daily if possible, and pushed them to clear their schedules so they could have lunch at the same time. It was... fine; it saved time, anyway, to always know where he was going to sit without wasting time looking for a good spot, or equivocating over whether to eat in the mess or take it back to the lab.
But after the mission to Dagan, Rodney felt the team's disappointment too keenly to spend his fleeting spare time enduring silent recrimination because he told Allina a bit too much and lost Atlantis their chance at the Brotherhood's ZPM.
Out of habit, though, he forgot to get portable food, and there was no way he was balancing a tray with a soup bowl all the way back to the lab. Rodney parked his tray at a table with Zelenka, Simpson and Prinya with a crisp, "Good afternoon."
"Aw, are you spurning Major Sheppard for us, Dr. McKay?" Simpson laughed. "Look at him, he's all disappointed. Even his hair looks sad."
"And it takes a lot to make the hair look sad," said Prinya. "Even when he was soaked after the big storm, it was perky."
"What the hell are you two blathering about?" Rodney demanded.
"The hair!" Simpson insisted. "Don't tell me you haven't noticed the hair. Wait, I forgot who I'm talking to... of course you haven't noticed."
"The hair. Major Sheppard's hair?" Rodney snuck a look at the team, at Sheppard in profile. He'd never paid much attention before. He'd seen that Sheppard's hair was still thick and plentiful, and felt slightly... a lot... bitter about that, but that was all he'd registered: Sheppard's hair was dark and he had plenty of it.
Looking again, he saw how Sheppard's hair crested down over his brow and tilted up sort of askew in the back, tufted and spiky.
"It just looks like hair to me," Rodney said.
"It's not really in full flower right now," Prinya said wistfully. "Usually it goes straight up in back, with a couple of bits veering off at different angles to make it more interesting. So hot."
"Messy hair is hot?" Rodney frowned, and looked over at Zelenka. If messy hair were the key to women's hearts, Zelenka should have hordes of admirers following him around the city.
Zelenka cast a baleful look back at him and rededicated himself to his food, determinedly tuning out of the conversation.
"The Major's messy hair is hot," said Prinya. "And mesmerizing. It's always different! It's like it gets taller and pokier when he's happy!"
"It's very expressive," Simpson agreed, somehow maintaining a straight face. "It's like a shiny, pointy, sexy black mood ring."
Rodney choked on his unidentifiable entree. "All right, this is ridiculous. There's nothing special about Sheppard or his hair. You're just trying to get rid of me because you can't exchange unprofessional gossip in front of the boss."
"Forget it, we have easier ways of doing that," said Prinya, turning to Simpson. "So have you noticed that Miko's completely stuck on Dr. McKay?"
"He probably doesn't even know her name."
"I know who Miko is!" said Rodney uncertainly. "It's been months, I do know the physicists in my own lab."
"Oh yeah? Is she the one with the bracelet or the one with the glasses?"
"That's a trick question," Rodney accused.
"Oh, poor Miko," said Prinya.
Simpson shook her head. "She's the one with the glasses who has a gigantic crush on you. She's too shy to tell you but she's been dying for you to notice her."
"Why would you tell me that?" Rodney asked. "Oh. Oh hoho, I see, this is an amusing ploy to get me to look foolish responding to this so-called crush."
Simpson stared. "Has anyone ever told you that you're really scarily paranoid?"
"Who have you been talking to?" Rodney demanded.
Even Zelenka started laughing at him after that.
+
The point is, Colonel Sheppard is nearly as notorious around Atlantis for the haphazard configuration of his hair as he is for constant life-risking escapades, leeriness of hugs, and devotion to the puddlejumpers. It's a key, defining characteristic.
But after the trip to Dumar, it's just... gone.
Well, no, of course it's not gone. Sheppard's hair is just as lush and thick and inviting-- not the right word. Attractive? Also wrong. Fetching? Flattering! That'll do-- as lush and thick and flattering as ever, but it's smooth and floppy now instead of spiky, and it's disconcerting, somehow.
What's still more disconcerting, however, is Sheppard's attitude, which seems to have flopped over and smoothed down with the rest of him.
They send a MALP out to PGL-012, and the camera transmission and sensor readings show an oxygen-rich, forested, wild world... right up until they register absolutely nothing. The cameras show nothing approaching, seismic activity is moderate but stable, the sensors pick up no life-signs coming closer, no energy from missiles or any weapons closing in. The MALP just stops transmitting and doesn't come back.
"Rock from a catapult," Ronon suggests. "Don't need machines for everything."
"It need not even be a weapon," says Teyla. "The MALP might have run over a sinkhole or something may have fallen on it and destroyed it."
"Possible," says Sheppard. "But we need to know for sure. Anything that can take out a MALP is potentially either a threat we need to be aware of, or a resource we could use."
"What do you propose, Colonel?" asks Woolsey.
"We take a cloaked jumper through and check it out."
Predictably Woolsey demurs, "I'm afraid that's just too risky. For all we know, the MALP deactivated because something on that planet affects machinery or electronics, and the same thing could affect a jumper. We can't afford that kind of loss."
Rodney expects Sheppard to push, and argue, and use words like strategic initiative, and borderline whine, and almost pout, and pull out all the other tricks he normally uses to get his way. And it looks like that's how it's going to go, but then Sheppard makes his characteristic I'm-going-in gesture: he tilts his head and shoves his fingers through his hair.
Only that move doesn't quite come off the same way now, because instead of scrubbing his fingers through the spiky cowlicks at the back of his crazy, crazy head, Sheppard encounters no resistance; his hand just smooths on down. His hair still looks neat as a pin.
"You may be right," Sheppard says. "Maybe we could get the engineers to rig us up a smaller MALP, something that's a little stealthier and better shielded. It doesn't need to be equipped with the full complement of sensors, we have all the environmental readings from the transmission we got from the first one. Just something with cameras that can detect life signs and energy. We could send that through, see if we can get a better idea of the risk to reward ratio before we send in anything else."
"I think I can be persuaded to sign off on that," says Woolsey. "Dr. McKay?"
"What?"
Woolsey raises an eyebrow. "Could the engineers--"
"Yes! Of course. Obviously," Rodney rattles out, looking around the table. Incredibly, no one else seems to have noticed that Sheppard has been replaced by a pod person. A flat-haired pod person.
"Good! Let's adjourn for now, then, and when we have a smaller MALP ready we can revisit this subject. Dr. McKay, you can email me later with an ETA."
"I can email you now," Rodney says, doing so for paper trail purposes, "it'll be ready in two days." And a day and a half of it will be spent arguing over who gets stuck with such a boring job, but science and research must maintain some mystique.
"Same time day after tomorrow, then," says Woolsey, dismissing the meeting.
Rodney follows Sheppard out of the meeting room. Now that he's looking for the signs, he realizes it's even worse than he thought.
Sheppard's pants fit. His shoelaces are tied. It's a complete disaster.
Clearly, Rodney needs to intervene.
+
He makes an attempt at dinner. As they finish eating, Rodney steels himself, hardly believing the words are actually passing his lips as he turns to Sheppard and grudgingly asks, "Do you want to play video golf?"
"That'd be cool," says Sheppard, with a trace of his usual indolence. Then he shrugs, "Wish I could, but the Daedalus is going to be here next week. I've got to get my ducks in a row on our requisitions for their next trip out."
"But that's Lorne's job!" Rodney says. "Look, we already have a Lorne. You don't need to go all Single White Female on him just because you have the same hair now! Aren't you worried you're going to make the poor guy afraid for his job?"
"You know, I haven't always shoved all of it off on Lorne," says Sheppard. "And since we've come back to Pegasus with more people and supplies, there's that much more paperwork. I gotta pitch in and do my part. Why don't we make it a movie night next week instead?"
"Oh, and watch what? Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus?"
"Reign of Fire," Sheppard offers.
Rodney is ready to unleash the scorn of a thousand-- well, himselfs; he can't think of anything more scornful-- when he remembers the epic amount of shirtless Christian Bale in that movie. Shirtless Christian Bale who is both hot and, currently, Batman. It's a combination Rodney's helpless to resist.
"That's probably as good as it's likely to get," he agrees.
"Great. See you later," Sheppard strolls off, standing up straight, whistling.
Madness.
+
The mini-MALP scouts out PGL-012 a few days later and sends back images of the first MALP looking for all the world like it's crushed in the middle of a giant footprint, which seems impossible until the mini-MALP also catches a shot of a titan striding past.
"I think I stand vindicated," says Woolsey as they review the footage.
"She must be eight meters tall! And the guy might be even taller! If we'd taken a jumper through, one of them could have swatted us right out of the air!" Rodney sensibly panics.
"My people have never encountered anyone of this size," says Teyla.
Rodney stares. "I'd hope that if you ever had, you would've mentioned it before now!"
"Why?" Ronon sounds bored. "You never asked."
"Did you know about the giant hill people?"
"No."
"Have you ever encountered any other sentient beings with significantly unusual physiology?"
Ronon arches an eyebrow. "What's unusual?"
"Quit messing with Rodney's head," says Sheppard, which is bizarre in itself: Rodney's acutely aware that usually Sheppard is the first in line to mess with his head. "Ronon would have told us about it if he had, he's just yanking your chain."
"If we could return to a more pertinent line of inquiry," says Woolsey, "I'd like to establish a timeline for making contact with the locals of this world. Shall we try for, say, six months?"
"Sounds good," Sheppard nods.
"Six months?" Rodney bolts upright. That's not how this is supposed to work. Woolsey's supposed to give some ludicrously conservative estimate, like six months, and Sheppard is supposed to come back with a ludicrously abbreviated estimate, like two weeks, and then Rodney generally steps in and pretends to offer a compromise and beats the timeline down to six weeks. (And then usually some emergency prompts them to do it in a week with completely inadequate preparation, and it goes drastically wrong, but then they pull it out of the bag anyway, because that's what they do.)
"The MALP's still not picking up any tech, so I don't see any big strategic advantage to rushing it," Sheppard replies. "And your people are going to want time to work up a first contact plan that accounts for these guys being four times our size, right?"
"I'm sure we have contingency plans for something along these lines drawn up already... somewhere; it's not like the soft sciences have much else going on," sniffs Rodney.
"Well, whatever Science and Research has on tap, I'm going to want to equip and drill my people to deal with potentially dangerous folks who can accidentally step on and crush a MALP," says Sheppard. "That means this is happening at least one Daedalus run away, at a minimum."
Woolsey looks like he might burst into tears of pride. Rodney might cry too, for completely different reasons.
+
For his next attempt, Rodney coaxes Sheppard into a remote control car race with more success than the proposal of video golf. He dares to hope this is a sign of normality, or at least a return to the usual abnormality rather than the current unfamiliar variety.
But no, this too goes awry. Every time Rodney trash-talks Sheppard's driving, he just gets a laugh in return. Several times he looks askance at Sheppard only to find Sheppard's already looking his way, barely paying attention to the race at all.
Sheppard loses, and he doesn't even seem to mind.
Afterward Rodney drops by the infirmary. He and Jennifer broke up with a mutual promise to "be friends," and Rodney has it on good authority-- all right, Jeannie's authority, but that's the closest to 'good' he has access to-- that discussing mutual acquaintances is the kind of thing that friends do.
"Do you think Colonel Sheppard's acting weird?" Rodney asks.
"This is a trick question, right?"
He amends, "Differently weird."
She considers it. "He seems a little happier, maybe."
"Happier!" Rodney says. "What about his hair?"
"What about his hair?"
"See, that's what I said five years ago!" says Rodney. "But it turns out that his hair is a thing. Or it was a thing, and now it's not, and that's weird."
Jennifer squints cutely at him. "Have you been drinking?"
"No..." Post-race beers on the pier with Sheppard don't count as drinking, Rodney is convinced, and especially not beers with pod-person Sheppard who mysteriously has Labatt's in his fridge along with his usual Budweiser swill.
"Okay, well, if you haven't been, maybe you should be," says Jennifer. "Go tell Sheppard he owes you a beer."
"I can't do that. Did I not just establish that he's acting differently weird lately?"
"Not really," says Jennifer, "but maybe it's a good weird? It's worth a shot."
"I'm definitely not telling him he owes me a shot," says Rodney, "with the way he's been acting lately, that might involve an actual bullet."
"Well, in that case you can come back here and I'll help you out," says Jennifer, "but til then, get off my exam table and skedaddle, I've got work to do."
"I'm confused," says Rodney, hopping down, "does giving me incomprehensible advice and kicking me out of your office fall under the rubric of 'being friends'?"
Jennifer kisses his cheek and shoves him out the door. "Absolutely."
+
Teyla and Ronon both beg off from movie night, or so Rodney assumes when he arrives to find it's just him, Sheppard, and a bowl of popcorn that's usually shared out in miserly portions between the growing population of team nights, what with Kanaan, Torren, and Amelia becoming part of the crowd.
"Where's the rest of the crew?" Rodney asks, voicing his curiosity once all the popcorn disappears, which happens sometime during the opening credits.
"Doing their own thing, I guess," says Sheppard.
"They didn't even bother to give an excuse?"
"I didn't invite 'em."
"What?" Rodney sits upright, grabs the remote control and stops the movie. "Okay, that tears it. What's going on with you?"
"Uh..."
"You're usually all about doing team stuff, but you didn't even invite them tonight. You're caught up on paperwork. You're agreeing with Woolsey. You haven't done anything stupidly reckless in weeks. You passed up video golf, you didn't get pissy about losing our RC car race, you have non-Budweiser beer in your fridge and flat hair! I think you should give me a sample of that stuff you got from Dumar. A new look can't be responsible for this kind of wholesale, radical personality shift-- something else has changed and I'm going to find out what."
"Rodney!" Sheppard scrubs his face with both hands. "Okay, look. Yeah, something changed. But it doesn't have anything to do with my hair."
"It has everything to do with your hair!" Rodney insists. "None of this was happening before you turned into Smoothy McFollicle!"
"That's not-- what it was," says Sheppard with difficulty, giving him a significant look, as if there were some other obvious alternative explanation, which there so is not.
"What then?" demands Rodney.
"For cryin' out loud," Sheppard mutters, and suddenly he moves in close, closer than Rodney has ever seen Sheppard voluntarily come to anyone.
He tilts his head, just a little, to an unmistakable angle, the coming-in-for-a-kiss angle, not that Rodney has been on this side of it all that often; Rodney is too busy trying to imagine how this fits with Sheppard's pod-personhood to properly react, so Sheppard just drifts in closer and lets his lips glide against Rodney's.
He's shifting back a little with his blankest face before Rodney realizes that it doesn't matter what else is going on because John just kissed him.
Quickly he slaps his hand around the back of John's neck and pulls him in again, opening his mouth to the kiss this time and grabbing the waistband of John's pants with the other hand. Just the backs of his knuckles against the soft skin at John's waist makes Rodney a little dizzy.
Or, well, also the kiss probably has something to do with that, because John is definitely on board now, mouth open, tongue in play, lips unbearably full and stubble rasping.
It's a while before they break to catch their breath, but not so long that Rodney forgets to thwap John's arm. "You could have asked if I dated guys."
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell?"
"Doesn't apply to me," Rodney begins, and then sheepishly says, "Oh. Right."
John rolls his eyes, but he's smiling.
"I still don't get it, though," says Rodney. "If you were trying to win my attentions, you already know mango pudding and classic Doctor Who are the way to my-- relevant internal organs. You didn't have to go to all this trouble."
"I figured if we did this, there might be some 'Colonel Sheppard's acting different' going around. People wondering why."
"So you acted differently... preemptively," Rodney says. "It's all been a tall story to throw people off track."
"That," John says. "Plus, believe it or not, I've been meaning to run a tighter ship around here. We have too many personnel now to let things slide as much. Me and Lorne, we've been planning it for a while. I figured I'd take this situation as a kick in the ass and move on it."
"I can't believe you've been, been-- multitasking with my heart."
"Your heart?" John's eyebrows lift.
"Oh, don't even." Rodney crosses his arms. "I know you know that I... you know."
John fidgets. "Yeah, I know. And, you know, uh..."
"Fine, I suppose I do." Rodney claps his hands briskly. "So that's settled. Can we go back to kissing?"
"Now you're talking," says John, and then, paradoxically, immediately puts a stop to it.
+
Lhumbu root turns out to be a miracle cure for any number of minor but annoying health complaints-- after a while, Jennifer just prescribes Rodney a daily dose, cutting down on his infirmary visits by a fair margin, which makes both her and John seem inordinately pleased.
And so Atlantis establishes regular visits to Dumar for trade. Especially once they make their carefully planned first contact with the Brobdingnagians, establish good relations, and discover the giants have lots of valuable iridium and nutritionally rich foodstuffs to bargain with, and really love exotic perfumes.
By the time AR-1 comes around in the rotation on another trip to Dumar, John's unguents have long since run out, and his crown has resumed its former cowlicked glory. He's mostly come unbuttoned again in other ways, too-- the boots are back to going loose and untied, though the pants continue to fit, a development Rodney has come to greatly approve of, now that he's getting into them.
Stromboli recognizes them as they approach his stall, booming, "Old friends! Dear friends, we have so many new items to demonstrate to you today, and a few old favorites, too." He arranges the pickup of their wagonloads of lhumbu root and perfume oils, and manages to sell conditioner to Ronon and liniment to Teyla before he turns and offers John a familiar bottle.
"I see you could use more of our special tonic!" Stromboli smiles.
Rodney intercedes, waving the bottle away. "I don't think we'll be needing any more of that. I like him au naturel. No further cosmetic intervention needed for either of us, thank you very much."
"Sweet talker," John elbows him, grinning.
"Ah. Well, perhaps then instead I can interest you in another medicinal treatment. An exciting new item," Stromboli drops his voice confidentially, which means he's only outputting at 200 decibels. He proffers a round jar, gleaming with promise. "We have developed a very effective restorative against hair loss."
John barely manages to keep his feet as Rodney lunges for the jar.
+
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