TEAM ROMANCE: Aftermath, "Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Down"
Title: Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Down
Author: blinkiesays ( interview)
Team: Romance
Prompt: Aftermath
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Summary: John only has a moment to boggle at the fact that Elizabeth knows what a Tyrolese Grey is and what it looks like before he boggles harder at the fact that they've ended up in an uninhabited parallel Stargate-less universe with cows.
Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the Prompt and Team (Genre) information in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
**
Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Down
Rodney lurches in the conference room door twenty minutes late and says, "I have a plan," with this look in his eyes that says, but you're not going to like it, in about ten languages.
Zelenka stumbles into the room a few seconds later, the two of them looking wild-eyed and sleep deprived. There's an awkward moment where they both try to cram themselves into the same uncomfortable office chair before they both just give up and slump to the floor.
From somewhere to the right of Elizabeth's ankles, Zelenka says, "ah, good morning, how is everyone, sorry we are late." Rodney starts snoring softly.
Elizabeth closes her mouth, blinks a few times, clears her throat, and says, "gentlemen." Rodney jerks back awake, and he and Zelenka stand, find separate chairs, and sit down. Teyla pushes her own coffee cup in front of Rodney, and Rodney looks at her like she's given him her first born.
John leans back in his chair, steeples his fingers, raises an eyebrow, and says, "what plan?"
Zelenka and Rodney give each other a look, that moment of you go first, no you go first that siblings have right before explaining to their parents why the Tiffany lamp in the living room is in a dozen pieces on the floor.
Zelenka says, "well, we discovered," and Rodney butts in with, "well, Zelenka discovered really," and John sits up and pays attention because if Rodney is voluntarily sharing credit, it must be the end of the world.
John says, "discovered what?" and, not for the first time, wishes he had the kind of job where he was allowed to freak out about these kinds of things.
Zelenka and Rodney have another Wonder Twins moment before Rodney sighs, looks anywhere but at John and says, "a way to defeat the Wraith. Forever."
Most of John is thinking touchdown! hallelujah! nerds be praised!
The rational part of John's brain, though, still has it together enough to say, "what's the catch?"
Rodney mumbles something that John can't hear. Zelenka kicks Rodney under the table and Rodney mumbles something else that John still can't hear, and then Elizabeth says in her loudest I'm in charge here voice, "trapped."
It's not exactly a question, but Zelenka, now caffeinated, jumps in with an answer anyway. "Yes. Technically."
John shakes his head, asks, "how trapped?"
Rodney sort of half-shrugs and says, "who can really say with these kinds of things," and flaps his hands about in the way that means he's lying his ass off. John glares at him until he deflates under his own weight and says, "forever trapped. Trapped, forever."
John says, "so we've figured out a way to get rid of the Wraith, for good." Zelenka and Rodney nod in eerily perfect synchronization.
Rodney says, quickly and in one breath, "but the catch is, everyone in Atlantis gets stuck in a parallel, uninhabited, Stargate-less universe." Zelenka nods again, this time visibly twitching with the desire to run out of the room and start fixing things.
John says, "no more Wraith. But I have to spend eternity with McKay."
John leans back in his chair again.
After a minute, Rodney asks, "well?" and John says, with a smirk, "give me a minute, I'm thinking."
All in all, after weeks of preparations, the actual plan takes about fifteen seconds to work. Fifteen seconds in which there's a loud light, a bright noise, and John feels like someone's pulling his cerebral cortex out through his nose.
They land with a thump in a grassy field in the middle of nowhere.
The first thing John says is, "did it work?
The first thing Rodney says is, "ow, my head."
The first thing Elizabeth does is point to a clump of nearby animals and say, "those look like exactly like Tyrolese Grey."
John only has a moment to boggle at the fact that Elizabeth knows what a Tyrolese Grey is and what it looks like before he boggles harder at the fact that they've ended up in an uninhabited parallel Stargate-less universe with cows.
Teyla says, "I sense no Wraith presence here," which John assumes is in answer to his original question, because it's not a decent answer at all to his new question, which is more along the lines of what the fuck, cows?
Rodney and Zelenka commune with their laptops and their Ancient sensors and their, as far as John can tell, divining rods and then Rodney says, "it worked," and then, "I think someone shoved a railroad spike through my head," and, "ow."
Ronon says, "suck it up," the same moment Lorne says, "shut up, McKay," and Elizabeth says, "good work, Rodney."
They start calling the planet New Atlantia, though John knows the scientists have been secretly calling it the Forest Moon of Endor. There are forests with impossibly old trees, endless fields of sweet grass and orange wildflowers, odd clusters of birds that are very nearly like chickens, and herds of animals that are almost exactly like cows.
They set up tents to live in and string up tarps to catch rainwater. Ronon and the Marines go hunting every day, the botanists comb the forests for edible mushrooms and root vegetables, and Rodney gleefully starts working his way through the crates and crates of MREs they brought with them.
Rodney and Zelenka and Elizabeth and a rotating panel of experts spend hours in meetings planning out the new settlement: two hundred of Earth's top scientists, one hundred of Earth's finest military officers and enlisted men, fifty-odd alien cast-offs and refugees, trying to build a society out of nothing. Most days it gives John a headache.
In the first few weeks, John learns things about the members of the expedition that he never expected: Rodney has violently strong opinions about late season plowing and soil erosion. Elizabeth knows almost every classification of domestic bovine. Cadman used to work summers on her uncle's ranch helping to break horses. Lorne has an undergraduate degree in city planning. Chuck can tie over a hundred different kinds of knots.
John thinks, I know how to fly a helicopter, and feels completely useless.
The first building, nicknamed The Leaning Tower of McKay, takes about a month and a half to plan and prep and build. It ends up a sort of lumpy brown longhouse-thing, but Rodney keeps beaming at it like it's the one of the Seven Wonders.
After that, though, each successive building takes less and less time to build, until one day John wakes up, three months later, in his own house. For all their new construction skills, the expedition members haven't quite figured out carpentry yet, or how to build a box-spring mattress, so John wakes up on the floor in a sleeping bag, but still, in his own house.
John lays back in quiet contemplation until McKay yells, from the kitchen, "get your ass out of bed or I'm eating all the, um, what are we calling the almost-eggs from the not-chickens?"
That's when John remembers: not quite his own house.
John bangs his head on the wobbly table in the main room of the Leaning Tower and says, "roommates? Why do we have to have roommates? What is this, college?"
Elizabeth gives him a look that reminds him he's acting like a five-year-old. She says, "we simply don't have the space to give everyone their own house right now, John. Even high-ranking members of the expedition like yourself." She gives him another look that reminds him just how useful a huge military presence is when the greatest nearby enemy has hooves. "And besides, Doctor Heightmeyer believes it will better help people adjust to their new lives."
John says, "you would say that. You get to live with Teyla."
Elizabeth rolls her eyes and John absolutely does not stomp out of the room.
John actually thinks that living with Teyla would be exhausting in the way the first few months of a new relationship are exhausting: constantly trying too hard to be nice and not fight or get mad. In contrast, living with Rodney means he gets to yell all the time without consequence. He doesn't think that should be as comforting as it is.
"Visit another galaxy," John says, "see new planets, meet aliens, kill bad guys. Nobody at the SGC told me anything about raising barns." Which isn't exactly true. There was that one story about O'Neill getting stuck off-world for three months. But still.
Ronon says, "suck it up," and lifts an eighteen-foot piece of timber over his head just to show off. Rodney briefly looks up from the make-shift blueprints he's drafted out and says, "stable agriculture is one of the pillars of a modern society."
John thinks briefly of smacking him with a two-by-four, but then Stackhouse shouts, "um, a little help here?" and John has to scramble to hold up one side of the new, Jesus Christ, barn they're putting up for the cows.
John's used to being observant, it's a skill you develop in the military, always being completely aware of your surroundings for tactical assessment purposes. Except without a proper military target, John just keeps finding himself tactically assessing Rodney.
It's taken John a while to get used to living in a society without indoor plumbing or deodorant and the realization that even really beautiful women can smell really bad. John didn't really know what he expected of Rodney, but he's surprised to find that mostly Rodney just smells comforting. It's a good thing, because living together and eating together and working together means that John can smell Rodney everywhere. On everything he touches, almost.
Whatever else John expected about living with Rodney - the mess, the constant talking, going to sleep and waking up and realizing that Rodney's been awake the whole time - he didn't expect how domestic Rodney gets. As soon as the wood-burning stove was installed, Rodney started cooking every meal for the two of them, though he insisted John do the dishes. Whenever they tried to maneuver around each other in the small communal spaces, Rodney always absently guided John by putting his hand on John's lower back, absently touched John on the shoulder when he said goodnight. Living with Rodney feel like John's actually living with someone, feel more comfortable than it had when John had lived with his then-wife.
It's more or less driving John crazy.
Construction work starts to slow down, and everywhere John looks people are breaking off and working on some kind of specialized labor. Teyla and Ronon set up shop tanning hides for leatherworking, Lorne starts working with Zelenka on a sewage system, Stackhouse and the Marines finally start building furniture, and Rodney begins working on how to put together mattresses out of the available materials. Eventually, John realizes he's supposed to do something with his life that's slightly more complicated than lifting heavy things and hammering nails.
He ends up at the thirty or so acres of land that they're calling the Skywalker Ranch.
Nobody knows where Cadman got the flannel shirt and the cowboy hat, but they look more at home on her than Marine fatigues ever did. She's a couple of pigtails and a shaft of wheat between her teeth away from being in Future Farmers of America poster. To her credit, though, she doesn't laugh when John asks for a job on the ranch by immediately blurting out that he actually has no skills, whatsoever.
Cadman smiles at him, tilts her head, and says, "you only ever saw cows in commercials, huh?"
John says, "and by the side of the road. Once."
Cadman laughs and says, "well, welcome to the world of shoulder-length gloves."
Rodney goes out into the woods on some surveying project and comes back with a cat. The cat is purple and hates John, but Rodney says, "her name is Pavlov!" with such joy and enthusiasm that John just lets it slide.
John spends more and more time on the ranch, starts naming the cows. Cadman tells him not to get too attached, but he could swear that the one he's been calling Bessie actually responds to her name. He tries not to think too hard about the way the cow's strange blue eyes remind him of Rodney.
John wakes up one morning, on a bed with a mattress and a set of scratchy stiff newly-woven sheets, to the smell of not-exactly-bacon frying in the kitchen and the sound of Rodney humming Shostakovich off-key, banging out the time on the kitchen counter with a wooden spoon. John wakes up, surrounded by the smell of rough-cut wood and the ointment Rodney makes for John's lower back. John wakes up with the slow, dawning realization that the military has absolutely no say over his life anymore.
He wakes up and walks into the kitchen and Rodney hands-off a plat of yellow bacon and red eggs, asks him if he wants some of the green liquid they've started calling orange juice. John nods, absently, and eats breakfast on autopilot, trying to pay attention to anything besides the comforting smell of McKay, the graceful arcs his hands make as he explains his new ideas for an aqueduct outside of the village. John gets up to go to work and Rodney gets up at that same moment, Rodney's hand on John's lower back as he edges around the kitchen table towards the sink, and John tries not to smell Rodney's hair as Rodney walks by.
John doesn't go straight home after working at the ranch, stumbles instead into Ronon and Teyla's workspace, collapses on the beautifully-worked leather armchair inside the door and says, "I'm. I mean, I think I am. It's just that. I think. I'm. McKay and I."
Teyla says, "you have feelings for Doctor McKay." It isn't really a question, but John nods anyway.
Ronon says, "tough break, man," and hits John on the back so hard he falls back out of the chair.
John lies on the floor, contemplates his life, and says, "ow."
Teyla smiles and laughs and pats her obviously pregnant stomach, which John has noticed for the first time just this second, and says, "sometimes life brings us things we did not expect."
John says, "whoa," and, eventually, "yeah."
John says, "wake up."
Rodney grumbles, "ten more minutes," before tugging the covers up over his head and rolling right off the edge of the bed. John starts laughing, can't stop, and has to sit down to catch his breath. Rodney says, from the floor, "ok, that hurt," and then, "what the hell, Sheppard? It's four in the morning. I only went to bed two hours ago."
John ignores this, grabs Rodney by the upper arm and hauls him up off of the ground. When Rodney refuses to move and just stands there, glaring, tufts of hair going in fifteen different directions, John finally relents and says, "it's about Bessie."
Rodney says, "the cow. You woke me up in the middle of the night for a cow."
John says, "not just any cow, it's Bessie! They're going to kill her and eat her if we don't do something!"
Rodney says, "do something. By 'do something' do you mean 'break into Cadman's ranch in the middle of the night and steal a cow?'"
John doesn't say no.
Rodney looks at him for a long time, spends about thirty seconds rubbing his hands over his face like the world's going to be different when he opens his eyes this time, and then finally says, "fine. But don't give me that 'I'll feed her and clean her litter box' routine and then it ends up being my cow. You are not nearly as cute as Jeannie was when she was seven. If I end up having to take care of this thing we're having meatloaf for a week, you hear me?"
John says, "yeah, yeah," but most of him is thinking, I love you.
Getting into the ranch is the easy part, it's not like they've got security set up against cattle rustlers or wolves or anything. The hard part is getting Bessie to come back with them. She's smart enough to know the ranch means food without having to work for it and protection from the weather, but not smart enough to realize it also means prime rib, and therefore she doesn't want to leave.
John starts pulling on the rope they've got tied around her neck and cursing to himself, but she doesn't budge until he starts cursing in the low, soothing voice he used to use on the puddle jumpers, right before he was about to do something reckless and stupid. He's in the middle of saying, "god damn piece of," when she takes a step. John says, "stupid sack of filet mignon," and she takes another step.
Rodney, stuck in the undignified position of pushing from the back, hisses at him, "keep talking!"
At some point, John feels stupid talking to a cow, and starts reciting Johnny Cash lyrics, sentences like, "but with the second shot she died," and "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," and "they're hanging Joe Bean this morning, for a shooting that he never did."
Rodney just keeps pushing, sighs, and says, "Americans, typical."
John comes home and bangs his head on the doorframe again, nearly trips over the cat, and says, "hi honey, I'm home!" Rodney doesn't even look up. John sighs, walks out of the house, turns around, walks back in, slams the door, and yells, "McKay!" Rodney jumps about a foot. John smiles.
Rodney, now alert and cranky, looks up from whatever it is he's working on and says, "your cow kicked me," only he's scowling and holding his jaw, which has gone all puffy and red, and it comes out more like, her sow hicked he. John has to stop himself from laughing, which is obviously the wrong response and Rodney punches him in the arm with unexpected strength.
"Hey," John says, "Bessie wouldn't hurt a fly. You must have done something to piss her off pretty bad." Rodney just scowls and John wishes, not for the first time, that they had the capacity to make ice.
Rodney looks so utterly miserable, one hand holding his jaw, the other still furiously working over the plans to the aqueduct, that John feels irrational and light-headed for a moment, leans in and kisses Rodney on the forehead. Rodney looks up at him, wide-eyed, and says, "huh?"
John says, intelligently, "what?" Rodney just looks confused. John takes a breath, tells his heartbeat to shut up already, and asks, "what's for dinner? Please don't say meatloaf."
Rodney scowls.
Rodney's jaw heals and Teyla has her baby and four of the cows on the ranch have calves. The coffee finally runs out and Rodney gets epic withdrawal headaches. They discover some kind of raw metallic ore in the mountains and everybody gets really excited about the possibility of indoor plumbing. A couple of the climatologists say winter is coming and Teyla and Ronon kick into high gear getting everyone fitted out with bad-ass suede coats.
Everywhere John looks, people are busy and fearless and happy.
John thinks, I used to fight space vampires, and then, this is better.
John comes home from a perfectly ordinary day on the ranch to Rodney cooking some kind of greenish stew over the wood-burning stove. Without really thinking bout it, John just walks up to him, turns him around, and kisses him. Rodney gasps against his lips, drops the spoon he was holding, and grasps John around the hips, kissing him back.
They could have done this at any moment, since they landed here in a different world and a different life, but John hadn't known, hadn't realized then, that things like this could be easy. The old John had still been waiting for the bad news.
John leans back eventually, catching his breath, his heart in his throat, and Rodney just looks at him with giant, wide eyes and says, "yes," and "yes," and "yes."
They let the stew boil over.
John wakes up and tries to get out of bed as quietly as possible, but forgets about he cat for the split-second it takes her to wind herself around his legs and he falls over, accidentally taking the make-shift nightstand with him. He looks up from his pile of debris and cat fur on the floor to see Rodney poking his sleep-tousled head over the side of the bed. John says, "um, good morning?" and Rodney blearily snorts in response.
John gets back up, rights the nightstand, grabs the cat one-handed to throw her out into the hall and is rummaging around in the piles of clothes and shoes and bits of wood and wire and candle wax that make up their floor when he hears Rodney say, "wait," from the bed.
John says, "can't, barns to be raised, cows to be fed," but when he looks back at the bed, Rodney's sitting up, hand outstretched, his whole body saying, stay, they can wait. John looks down at his foot half-in his pant leg and realizes, with sudden clarity and complete understanding, that he has all the time in the world.
John goes back to bed.
**
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Author: blinkiesays ( interview)
Team: Romance
Prompt: Aftermath
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Summary: John only has a moment to boggle at the fact that Elizabeth knows what a Tyrolese Grey is and what it looks like before he boggles harder at the fact that they've ended up in an uninhabited parallel Stargate-less universe with cows.
Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the Prompt and Team (Genre) information in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
**
Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Down
Rodney lurches in the conference room door twenty minutes late and says, "I have a plan," with this look in his eyes that says, but you're not going to like it, in about ten languages.
Zelenka stumbles into the room a few seconds later, the two of them looking wild-eyed and sleep deprived. There's an awkward moment where they both try to cram themselves into the same uncomfortable office chair before they both just give up and slump to the floor.
From somewhere to the right of Elizabeth's ankles, Zelenka says, "ah, good morning, how is everyone, sorry we are late." Rodney starts snoring softly.
Elizabeth closes her mouth, blinks a few times, clears her throat, and says, "gentlemen." Rodney jerks back awake, and he and Zelenka stand, find separate chairs, and sit down. Teyla pushes her own coffee cup in front of Rodney, and Rodney looks at her like she's given him her first born.
John leans back in his chair, steeples his fingers, raises an eyebrow, and says, "what plan?"
Zelenka and Rodney give each other a look, that moment of you go first, no you go first that siblings have right before explaining to their parents why the Tiffany lamp in the living room is in a dozen pieces on the floor.
Zelenka says, "well, we discovered," and Rodney butts in with, "well, Zelenka discovered really," and John sits up and pays attention because if Rodney is voluntarily sharing credit, it must be the end of the world.
John says, "discovered what?" and, not for the first time, wishes he had the kind of job where he was allowed to freak out about these kinds of things.
Zelenka and Rodney have another Wonder Twins moment before Rodney sighs, looks anywhere but at John and says, "a way to defeat the Wraith. Forever."
Most of John is thinking touchdown! hallelujah! nerds be praised!
The rational part of John's brain, though, still has it together enough to say, "what's the catch?"
Rodney mumbles something that John can't hear. Zelenka kicks Rodney under the table and Rodney mumbles something else that John still can't hear, and then Elizabeth says in her loudest I'm in charge here voice, "trapped."
It's not exactly a question, but Zelenka, now caffeinated, jumps in with an answer anyway. "Yes. Technically."
John shakes his head, asks, "how trapped?"
Rodney sort of half-shrugs and says, "who can really say with these kinds of things," and flaps his hands about in the way that means he's lying his ass off. John glares at him until he deflates under his own weight and says, "forever trapped. Trapped, forever."
John says, "so we've figured out a way to get rid of the Wraith, for good." Zelenka and Rodney nod in eerily perfect synchronization.
Rodney says, quickly and in one breath, "but the catch is, everyone in Atlantis gets stuck in a parallel, uninhabited, Stargate-less universe." Zelenka nods again, this time visibly twitching with the desire to run out of the room and start fixing things.
John says, "no more Wraith. But I have to spend eternity with McKay."
John leans back in his chair again.
After a minute, Rodney asks, "well?" and John says, with a smirk, "give me a minute, I'm thinking."
All in all, after weeks of preparations, the actual plan takes about fifteen seconds to work. Fifteen seconds in which there's a loud light, a bright noise, and John feels like someone's pulling his cerebral cortex out through his nose.
They land with a thump in a grassy field in the middle of nowhere.
The first thing John says is, "did it work?
The first thing Rodney says is, "ow, my head."
The first thing Elizabeth does is point to a clump of nearby animals and say, "those look like exactly like Tyrolese Grey."
John only has a moment to boggle at the fact that Elizabeth knows what a Tyrolese Grey is and what it looks like before he boggles harder at the fact that they've ended up in an uninhabited parallel Stargate-less universe with cows.
Teyla says, "I sense no Wraith presence here," which John assumes is in answer to his original question, because it's not a decent answer at all to his new question, which is more along the lines of what the fuck, cows?
Rodney and Zelenka commune with their laptops and their Ancient sensors and their, as far as John can tell, divining rods and then Rodney says, "it worked," and then, "I think someone shoved a railroad spike through my head," and, "ow."
Ronon says, "suck it up," the same moment Lorne says, "shut up, McKay," and Elizabeth says, "good work, Rodney."
They start calling the planet New Atlantia, though John knows the scientists have been secretly calling it the Forest Moon of Endor. There are forests with impossibly old trees, endless fields of sweet grass and orange wildflowers, odd clusters of birds that are very nearly like chickens, and herds of animals that are almost exactly like cows.
They set up tents to live in and string up tarps to catch rainwater. Ronon and the Marines go hunting every day, the botanists comb the forests for edible mushrooms and root vegetables, and Rodney gleefully starts working his way through the crates and crates of MREs they brought with them.
Rodney and Zelenka and Elizabeth and a rotating panel of experts spend hours in meetings planning out the new settlement: two hundred of Earth's top scientists, one hundred of Earth's finest military officers and enlisted men, fifty-odd alien cast-offs and refugees, trying to build a society out of nothing. Most days it gives John a headache.
In the first few weeks, John learns things about the members of the expedition that he never expected: Rodney has violently strong opinions about late season plowing and soil erosion. Elizabeth knows almost every classification of domestic bovine. Cadman used to work summers on her uncle's ranch helping to break horses. Lorne has an undergraduate degree in city planning. Chuck can tie over a hundred different kinds of knots.
John thinks, I know how to fly a helicopter, and feels completely useless.
The first building, nicknamed The Leaning Tower of McKay, takes about a month and a half to plan and prep and build. It ends up a sort of lumpy brown longhouse-thing, but Rodney keeps beaming at it like it's the one of the Seven Wonders.
After that, though, each successive building takes less and less time to build, until one day John wakes up, three months later, in his own house. For all their new construction skills, the expedition members haven't quite figured out carpentry yet, or how to build a box-spring mattress, so John wakes up on the floor in a sleeping bag, but still, in his own house.
John lays back in quiet contemplation until McKay yells, from the kitchen, "get your ass out of bed or I'm eating all the, um, what are we calling the almost-eggs from the not-chickens?"
That's when John remembers: not quite his own house.
John bangs his head on the wobbly table in the main room of the Leaning Tower and says, "roommates? Why do we have to have roommates? What is this, college?"
Elizabeth gives him a look that reminds him he's acting like a five-year-old. She says, "we simply don't have the space to give everyone their own house right now, John. Even high-ranking members of the expedition like yourself." She gives him another look that reminds him just how useful a huge military presence is when the greatest nearby enemy has hooves. "And besides, Doctor Heightmeyer believes it will better help people adjust to their new lives."
John says, "you would say that. You get to live with Teyla."
Elizabeth rolls her eyes and John absolutely does not stomp out of the room.
John actually thinks that living with Teyla would be exhausting in the way the first few months of a new relationship are exhausting: constantly trying too hard to be nice and not fight or get mad. In contrast, living with Rodney means he gets to yell all the time without consequence. He doesn't think that should be as comforting as it is.
"Visit another galaxy," John says, "see new planets, meet aliens, kill bad guys. Nobody at the SGC told me anything about raising barns." Which isn't exactly true. There was that one story about O'Neill getting stuck off-world for three months. But still.
Ronon says, "suck it up," and lifts an eighteen-foot piece of timber over his head just to show off. Rodney briefly looks up from the make-shift blueprints he's drafted out and says, "stable agriculture is one of the pillars of a modern society."
John thinks briefly of smacking him with a two-by-four, but then Stackhouse shouts, "um, a little help here?" and John has to scramble to hold up one side of the new, Jesus Christ, barn they're putting up for the cows.
John's used to being observant, it's a skill you develop in the military, always being completely aware of your surroundings for tactical assessment purposes. Except without a proper military target, John just keeps finding himself tactically assessing Rodney.
It's taken John a while to get used to living in a society without indoor plumbing or deodorant and the realization that even really beautiful women can smell really bad. John didn't really know what he expected of Rodney, but he's surprised to find that mostly Rodney just smells comforting. It's a good thing, because living together and eating together and working together means that John can smell Rodney everywhere. On everything he touches, almost.
Whatever else John expected about living with Rodney - the mess, the constant talking, going to sleep and waking up and realizing that Rodney's been awake the whole time - he didn't expect how domestic Rodney gets. As soon as the wood-burning stove was installed, Rodney started cooking every meal for the two of them, though he insisted John do the dishes. Whenever they tried to maneuver around each other in the small communal spaces, Rodney always absently guided John by putting his hand on John's lower back, absently touched John on the shoulder when he said goodnight. Living with Rodney feel like John's actually living with someone, feel more comfortable than it had when John had lived with his then-wife.
It's more or less driving John crazy.
Construction work starts to slow down, and everywhere John looks people are breaking off and working on some kind of specialized labor. Teyla and Ronon set up shop tanning hides for leatherworking, Lorne starts working with Zelenka on a sewage system, Stackhouse and the Marines finally start building furniture, and Rodney begins working on how to put together mattresses out of the available materials. Eventually, John realizes he's supposed to do something with his life that's slightly more complicated than lifting heavy things and hammering nails.
He ends up at the thirty or so acres of land that they're calling the Skywalker Ranch.
Nobody knows where Cadman got the flannel shirt and the cowboy hat, but they look more at home on her than Marine fatigues ever did. She's a couple of pigtails and a shaft of wheat between her teeth away from being in Future Farmers of America poster. To her credit, though, she doesn't laugh when John asks for a job on the ranch by immediately blurting out that he actually has no skills, whatsoever.
Cadman smiles at him, tilts her head, and says, "you only ever saw cows in commercials, huh?"
John says, "and by the side of the road. Once."
Cadman laughs and says, "well, welcome to the world of shoulder-length gloves."
Rodney goes out into the woods on some surveying project and comes back with a cat. The cat is purple and hates John, but Rodney says, "her name is Pavlov!" with such joy and enthusiasm that John just lets it slide.
John spends more and more time on the ranch, starts naming the cows. Cadman tells him not to get too attached, but he could swear that the one he's been calling Bessie actually responds to her name. He tries not to think too hard about the way the cow's strange blue eyes remind him of Rodney.
John wakes up one morning, on a bed with a mattress and a set of scratchy stiff newly-woven sheets, to the smell of not-exactly-bacon frying in the kitchen and the sound of Rodney humming Shostakovich off-key, banging out the time on the kitchen counter with a wooden spoon. John wakes up, surrounded by the smell of rough-cut wood and the ointment Rodney makes for John's lower back. John wakes up with the slow, dawning realization that the military has absolutely no say over his life anymore.
He wakes up and walks into the kitchen and Rodney hands-off a plat of yellow bacon and red eggs, asks him if he wants some of the green liquid they've started calling orange juice. John nods, absently, and eats breakfast on autopilot, trying to pay attention to anything besides the comforting smell of McKay, the graceful arcs his hands make as he explains his new ideas for an aqueduct outside of the village. John gets up to go to work and Rodney gets up at that same moment, Rodney's hand on John's lower back as he edges around the kitchen table towards the sink, and John tries not to smell Rodney's hair as Rodney walks by.
John doesn't go straight home after working at the ranch, stumbles instead into Ronon and Teyla's workspace, collapses on the beautifully-worked leather armchair inside the door and says, "I'm. I mean, I think I am. It's just that. I think. I'm. McKay and I."
Teyla says, "you have feelings for Doctor McKay." It isn't really a question, but John nods anyway.
Ronon says, "tough break, man," and hits John on the back so hard he falls back out of the chair.
John lies on the floor, contemplates his life, and says, "ow."
Teyla smiles and laughs and pats her obviously pregnant stomach, which John has noticed for the first time just this second, and says, "sometimes life brings us things we did not expect."
John says, "whoa," and, eventually, "yeah."
John says, "wake up."
Rodney grumbles, "ten more minutes," before tugging the covers up over his head and rolling right off the edge of the bed. John starts laughing, can't stop, and has to sit down to catch his breath. Rodney says, from the floor, "ok, that hurt," and then, "what the hell, Sheppard? It's four in the morning. I only went to bed two hours ago."
John ignores this, grabs Rodney by the upper arm and hauls him up off of the ground. When Rodney refuses to move and just stands there, glaring, tufts of hair going in fifteen different directions, John finally relents and says, "it's about Bessie."
Rodney says, "the cow. You woke me up in the middle of the night for a cow."
John says, "not just any cow, it's Bessie! They're going to kill her and eat her if we don't do something!"
Rodney says, "do something. By 'do something' do you mean 'break into Cadman's ranch in the middle of the night and steal a cow?'"
John doesn't say no.
Rodney looks at him for a long time, spends about thirty seconds rubbing his hands over his face like the world's going to be different when he opens his eyes this time, and then finally says, "fine. But don't give me that 'I'll feed her and clean her litter box' routine and then it ends up being my cow. You are not nearly as cute as Jeannie was when she was seven. If I end up having to take care of this thing we're having meatloaf for a week, you hear me?"
John says, "yeah, yeah," but most of him is thinking, I love you.
Getting into the ranch is the easy part, it's not like they've got security set up against cattle rustlers or wolves or anything. The hard part is getting Bessie to come back with them. She's smart enough to know the ranch means food without having to work for it and protection from the weather, but not smart enough to realize it also means prime rib, and therefore she doesn't want to leave.
John starts pulling on the rope they've got tied around her neck and cursing to himself, but she doesn't budge until he starts cursing in the low, soothing voice he used to use on the puddle jumpers, right before he was about to do something reckless and stupid. He's in the middle of saying, "god damn piece of," when she takes a step. John says, "stupid sack of filet mignon," and she takes another step.
Rodney, stuck in the undignified position of pushing from the back, hisses at him, "keep talking!"
At some point, John feels stupid talking to a cow, and starts reciting Johnny Cash lyrics, sentences like, "but with the second shot she died," and "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," and "they're hanging Joe Bean this morning, for a shooting that he never did."
Rodney just keeps pushing, sighs, and says, "Americans, typical."
John comes home and bangs his head on the doorframe again, nearly trips over the cat, and says, "hi honey, I'm home!" Rodney doesn't even look up. John sighs, walks out of the house, turns around, walks back in, slams the door, and yells, "McKay!" Rodney jumps about a foot. John smiles.
Rodney, now alert and cranky, looks up from whatever it is he's working on and says, "your cow kicked me," only he's scowling and holding his jaw, which has gone all puffy and red, and it comes out more like, her sow hicked he. John has to stop himself from laughing, which is obviously the wrong response and Rodney punches him in the arm with unexpected strength.
"Hey," John says, "Bessie wouldn't hurt a fly. You must have done something to piss her off pretty bad." Rodney just scowls and John wishes, not for the first time, that they had the capacity to make ice.
Rodney looks so utterly miserable, one hand holding his jaw, the other still furiously working over the plans to the aqueduct, that John feels irrational and light-headed for a moment, leans in and kisses Rodney on the forehead. Rodney looks up at him, wide-eyed, and says, "huh?"
John says, intelligently, "what?" Rodney just looks confused. John takes a breath, tells his heartbeat to shut up already, and asks, "what's for dinner? Please don't say meatloaf."
Rodney scowls.
Rodney's jaw heals and Teyla has her baby and four of the cows on the ranch have calves. The coffee finally runs out and Rodney gets epic withdrawal headaches. They discover some kind of raw metallic ore in the mountains and everybody gets really excited about the possibility of indoor plumbing. A couple of the climatologists say winter is coming and Teyla and Ronon kick into high gear getting everyone fitted out with bad-ass suede coats.
Everywhere John looks, people are busy and fearless and happy.
John thinks, I used to fight space vampires, and then, this is better.
John comes home from a perfectly ordinary day on the ranch to Rodney cooking some kind of greenish stew over the wood-burning stove. Without really thinking bout it, John just walks up to him, turns him around, and kisses him. Rodney gasps against his lips, drops the spoon he was holding, and grasps John around the hips, kissing him back.
They could have done this at any moment, since they landed here in a different world and a different life, but John hadn't known, hadn't realized then, that things like this could be easy. The old John had still been waiting for the bad news.
John leans back eventually, catching his breath, his heart in his throat, and Rodney just looks at him with giant, wide eyes and says, "yes," and "yes," and "yes."
They let the stew boil over.
John wakes up and tries to get out of bed as quietly as possible, but forgets about he cat for the split-second it takes her to wind herself around his legs and he falls over, accidentally taking the make-shift nightstand with him. He looks up from his pile of debris and cat fur on the floor to see Rodney poking his sleep-tousled head over the side of the bed. John says, "um, good morning?" and Rodney blearily snorts in response.
John gets back up, rights the nightstand, grabs the cat one-handed to throw her out into the hall and is rummaging around in the piles of clothes and shoes and bits of wood and wire and candle wax that make up their floor when he hears Rodney say, "wait," from the bed.
John says, "can't, barns to be raised, cows to be fed," but when he looks back at the bed, Rodney's sitting up, hand outstretched, his whole body saying, stay, they can wait. John looks down at his foot half-in his pant leg and realizes, with sudden clarity and complete understanding, that he has all the time in the world.
John goes back to bed.
**
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