aesc
in
sga_flashfic
A Story Involving Blankets (comfort challenge)
.title: A Story Involving Blankets
.by: aesc
.rating: G, nothing horrendous
.characters/pairings: vaguely pre-McShep, but mostly TEAM!
.disclaimers: not mine, like you didn't know that.
.word count: 1,660
.notes: I could not think up a title for this one, but really, blankets.
A Story Involving Blankets
"Remind me why you decided to do this in the middle of winter," John says from underneath a fleece jacket, sheets, and a ratty, mange-eaten plaid flannel… thing. "Also, remind me why we're in your room."
"Have you tried moving a memory foam mattress?" Rodney watches to make sure John doesn't catch his feet on the trailing edge of his mountain-man flannel cloth-thing, because it would be just his luck that Sheppard would trip and find his downward progress impeded by Rodney's desk and the laptops on top of it, and that would mean two more days of recalibrating the city's power systems.
Sheppard deposits his blankets and a duffel bag on an air mattress. "You didn't answer my first question," he points out.
"Please tell me you deloused that thing before coming over here" Rodney says, eyeing the blanket in its quietly festering pile on the mattress. "Also, where did you manage to find a musty closet in Atlantis?"
"Hey," John says, and kneels to disentangle sheets from blanket, neat and economical even doing that.
"I'm just saying." Rodney huffs and turns, in time to see Teyla and Ronon coming through the door, Teyla all warm tones and carrying her own blanket of deep crimson and blue, Ronon invisible behind a pile of mottled browns and greens.
"That looks like dinosaur hide," Rodney says, and what? It does, with a pebbled texture that suggests a night spent with any exposed skin being slowly, painfully abraded.
"It's tyrannosaurus." Ronon claims the third air mattress, dumping the dino-hide comforter on it; the comforter settles with an unexpected softness, not all… slithery or reptilian. "Killed it with my bare hands."
Really? is on Rodney's lips, but Teyla slants a look at Ronon, then at him. "I believe," she says in her slow Teyla-voice of infinite forebearance, "that he was rewatching Jurassic Park 3 the other day."
"Why?" Rodney asks, because, because… Jurassic Park 3? Who in god's name would voluntarily watch that? Sheppard's disheveled head is still bent over his mattress. "I thought," Rodney says carefully, "we agreed there were certain movies we'd never expose them to?"
"You can't keep an eye on them all the time," Sheppard says. He rocks back on his heels, his heels in woolen socks that look like they've spent weeks, possibly months, hanging outside a tent on a sidetrail in the Appalachians. "He's old enough to make his own choices."
"Not about sequels," Rodney mutters, and thinks uncharitable thoughts about Sheppard's stance regarding cinematic education. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to get ready for bed. Some of us have to be up early to keep an eye on things."
He hasn't shared living space since his first year of college, and that had only been because of his university's draconian policies regarding freshman housing, and its curiously misguided belief that eighteen-year-olds benefited from having roommates more interested in forging fake IDs and engineering beer bongs (Rodney's particular speciality, not that they were pieces of engineering wizardry but it was extra money so he didn't get shafted by extortionate university meal plans) than in fluid dynamics and advanced quantum mechanics, and that an individual was somehow better for contracting something off the urinals, showers, and the rims of what Rodney remembered as being toilets which led down into a festering, seething abyss.
Now, twenty years or so removed from the trauma of rooming with a submoronic "political science" major, who had amused himself by farting and grading the output by volume, pitch, duration, and olfactory impact, Rodney finds himself curiously and oddly aware of the three people rustling around his bedroom - not discomfort, precisely, but not acceptance either. They're merely there, unceremonious, as though they do this every day, even though they don't; a good thing, because Rodney hates having to take the city mostly offline in order to interface the naquadah generators and the ZPM.
That's why they're here, really, power cuts to most of the city, including a good part of the crew quarters, so people are doubling or tripling up to avoid two nights of creeping chill. Rodney vaguely remembers extending the offer to Sheppard, partly so he could watch Melissa Varney, engineering newbie who has sacrificed productivity in favor of goggling at Sheppard whenever he slinks in, writhe in jealousy and partly for reasons he's made a habit of not examining closely. Ronon had been there too, and had accepted on behalf of himself and Sheppard, and added Teyla in too, even though Rodney had assumed she'd stay with Jennifer or Carter, or someone else who happened to be female.
"Co-ed," Sheppard had said, and leered and elbowed a fiercely-blushing Rodney in the side. Teyla had frowned and rattled off something about how Athosian men and women never slept apart, it was who you were closest to that mattered, and then she'd taken Sheppard off for a sound beating on the practice floor.
Now, Rodney thinks as he stares at his toothpaste-flecked face in the mirror, they're just here, taking up space on his floor and, aside from softly-traded comments, being mostly quiet. After he wanders out of the bathroom they even take turns, Teyla first, then John, who smells like a storage shed, then Ronon, who smells like dinosaur, and in fifteen minutes they're all more or less sacked out.
"So," Rodney says, and stares at the ceiling and wonders if he should think off the lights. "Did anyone want to read?"
"I'm good," John says around a yawn.
"You should be down here." Teyla's tone isn't quite reproving, only pointing out what should possibly be obvious, and Rodney feels like an idiot - a comfortable-on-his-memory-foam-mattress idiot. Feeling like an idiot never gets any more pleasurable, and he snaps to cover how much he hates it, hello, bad back? and besides there are only three mattresses. "Get over it, McKay," John says to that, "you can live without your box spring for one night," and before Rodney knows it Ronon is out from under his tyrannosaurus blanket and has him up off the bed and the mattress down on the floor and the box spring and frame shoved up against the wall.
He ends up facing John's bright, teasing eyes and breathing in a noseful of old flannel, with one bare foot brushing the corner of Teyla's blanket. It's soft, softer than the softest wool sweater Rodney can remember, frayed a little at the edges but with its colors still undimmed. When he moves, it rubs gently over his ankle.
"Charin wove it for me," Teyla says softly. If Rodney cranes his head just so and doesn't mind a mild sprain, he can see her, the quiet smile on her face, her hair autumn gold and tangled atop the intricate knots and interlace of the fabric. "She tried to teach me, but I never quite managed to learn… I was rather hopeless with the loom," she adds, and Rodney blinks, confounded by the thought of Teyla being hopeless at anything.
"It's quite… that is - it's pretty," Rodney says, just to say anything, and Teyla quietly agress that it is. "Much prettier than Ronon's… what is that?"
"I told you," Ronon grunts, "tyrannosaurus." Rodney doesn't need to twist to see him, looking like a reclining komodo dragon with dreadlocks. "It's stuffed with agrop feathers."
"Agrop," Rodney says flatly. "Is there anything you don't use agrop for?"
"They're dangerous and hard to kill," Ronon says, like Rodney hasn't seen Satedan illustrations of the agrop, like those same illustrations didn't depict what was, essentially, a chicken, albeit one with a sharply curved beak and outsized claws tipped with poison possessing the molecular weight of box jellyfish venom. "So you use everything you can."
Rodney doesn't say the obvious, for once, which is that agrop were native to Sateda, and that probably only Satedans would appreciate a comforter stuffed with the feathers of a poisonous bird. Possibly this is the only agrop comforter in existence, and Ronon would have found it in the ruins of his city, or gotten it from one of the galaxy-rovers who had looted them.
"What about you?" he asks instead, turning to John, already wrapped up in a red-plaid cocoon, all rugged-looking with his end-of-day scruff and an odor Rodney associated with outdoor showers. "Any sentimental attachments to fungal cultures?"
"Not particularly." John rolls over so he stares at the ceiling and Rodney has the full benefit of the long, clean line of John's throat. "I just like it."
"Like you liked Antarctica, as a short interval of masochism between longer periods of self-torment?"
John tilts his head back, squints in a way that suggests he's working on being irritated. "I've had it since I was commissioned," he says at last. "I spent a lot of time camping when I was on leave. Easier than going home."
A lot of things were easier than that, Rodney supposes. He knows intellectually that John was married, but he's never been quite able to make himself believe it. The way John talks about it - a rare enough event - he suspects John feels the same, a perpetual conviction that, surely, that did not, could not have, happened.
He curls up a bit more under his own fleece blanket, safely hypoallergenic and lightweight and warm. When he'd been a kid, his parents had ignored his sneezing and runny nose and itchy eyes, and his insistence that his comforter, down that had weighed a ton on a chest struggling to accommodate breath and phlegm, was the cause.
The corner of Teyla's blanket still laps over his ankle, soft and real, and John's breath, evening slowly out into sleep, brushes through his hair and they're close enough that if Rodney feels exceptionally stupid he could reach out and curl his fingers through warm, water-stained cloth, and even with Ronon so close Rodney doesn't seem to be allergic to agrop.
He remembers, in time, to think the lights off.
-end-
.by: aesc
.rating: G, nothing horrendous
.characters/pairings: vaguely pre-McShep, but mostly TEAM!
.disclaimers: not mine, like you didn't know that.
.word count: 1,660
.notes: I could not think up a title for this one, but really, blankets.
A Story Involving Blankets
"Remind me why you decided to do this in the middle of winter," John says from underneath a fleece jacket, sheets, and a ratty, mange-eaten plaid flannel… thing. "Also, remind me why we're in your room."
"Have you tried moving a memory foam mattress?" Rodney watches to make sure John doesn't catch his feet on the trailing edge of his mountain-man flannel cloth-thing, because it would be just his luck that Sheppard would trip and find his downward progress impeded by Rodney's desk and the laptops on top of it, and that would mean two more days of recalibrating the city's power systems.
Sheppard deposits his blankets and a duffel bag on an air mattress. "You didn't answer my first question," he points out.
"Please tell me you deloused that thing before coming over here" Rodney says, eyeing the blanket in its quietly festering pile on the mattress. "Also, where did you manage to find a musty closet in Atlantis?"
"Hey," John says, and kneels to disentangle sheets from blanket, neat and economical even doing that.
"I'm just saying." Rodney huffs and turns, in time to see Teyla and Ronon coming through the door, Teyla all warm tones and carrying her own blanket of deep crimson and blue, Ronon invisible behind a pile of mottled browns and greens.
"That looks like dinosaur hide," Rodney says, and what? It does, with a pebbled texture that suggests a night spent with any exposed skin being slowly, painfully abraded.
"It's tyrannosaurus." Ronon claims the third air mattress, dumping the dino-hide comforter on it; the comforter settles with an unexpected softness, not all… slithery or reptilian. "Killed it with my bare hands."
Really? is on Rodney's lips, but Teyla slants a look at Ronon, then at him. "I believe," she says in her slow Teyla-voice of infinite forebearance, "that he was rewatching Jurassic Park 3 the other day."
"Why?" Rodney asks, because, because… Jurassic Park 3? Who in god's name would voluntarily watch that? Sheppard's disheveled head is still bent over his mattress. "I thought," Rodney says carefully, "we agreed there were certain movies we'd never expose them to?"
"You can't keep an eye on them all the time," Sheppard says. He rocks back on his heels, his heels in woolen socks that look like they've spent weeks, possibly months, hanging outside a tent on a sidetrail in the Appalachians. "He's old enough to make his own choices."
"Not about sequels," Rodney mutters, and thinks uncharitable thoughts about Sheppard's stance regarding cinematic education. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to get ready for bed. Some of us have to be up early to keep an eye on things."
He hasn't shared living space since his first year of college, and that had only been because of his university's draconian policies regarding freshman housing, and its curiously misguided belief that eighteen-year-olds benefited from having roommates more interested in forging fake IDs and engineering beer bongs (Rodney's particular speciality, not that they were pieces of engineering wizardry but it was extra money so he didn't get shafted by extortionate university meal plans) than in fluid dynamics and advanced quantum mechanics, and that an individual was somehow better for contracting something off the urinals, showers, and the rims of what Rodney remembered as being toilets which led down into a festering, seething abyss.
Now, twenty years or so removed from the trauma of rooming with a submoronic "political science" major, who had amused himself by farting and grading the output by volume, pitch, duration, and olfactory impact, Rodney finds himself curiously and oddly aware of the three people rustling around his bedroom - not discomfort, precisely, but not acceptance either. They're merely there, unceremonious, as though they do this every day, even though they don't; a good thing, because Rodney hates having to take the city mostly offline in order to interface the naquadah generators and the ZPM.
That's why they're here, really, power cuts to most of the city, including a good part of the crew quarters, so people are doubling or tripling up to avoid two nights of creeping chill. Rodney vaguely remembers extending the offer to Sheppard, partly so he could watch Melissa Varney, engineering newbie who has sacrificed productivity in favor of goggling at Sheppard whenever he slinks in, writhe in jealousy and partly for reasons he's made a habit of not examining closely. Ronon had been there too, and had accepted on behalf of himself and Sheppard, and added Teyla in too, even though Rodney had assumed she'd stay with Jennifer or Carter, or someone else who happened to be female.
"Co-ed," Sheppard had said, and leered and elbowed a fiercely-blushing Rodney in the side. Teyla had frowned and rattled off something about how Athosian men and women never slept apart, it was who you were closest to that mattered, and then she'd taken Sheppard off for a sound beating on the practice floor.
Now, Rodney thinks as he stares at his toothpaste-flecked face in the mirror, they're just here, taking up space on his floor and, aside from softly-traded comments, being mostly quiet. After he wanders out of the bathroom they even take turns, Teyla first, then John, who smells like a storage shed, then Ronon, who smells like dinosaur, and in fifteen minutes they're all more or less sacked out.
"So," Rodney says, and stares at the ceiling and wonders if he should think off the lights. "Did anyone want to read?"
"I'm good," John says around a yawn.
"You should be down here." Teyla's tone isn't quite reproving, only pointing out what should possibly be obvious, and Rodney feels like an idiot - a comfortable-on-his-memory-foam-mattress idiot. Feeling like an idiot never gets any more pleasurable, and he snaps to cover how much he hates it, hello, bad back? and besides there are only three mattresses. "Get over it, McKay," John says to that, "you can live without your box spring for one night," and before Rodney knows it Ronon is out from under his tyrannosaurus blanket and has him up off the bed and the mattress down on the floor and the box spring and frame shoved up against the wall.
He ends up facing John's bright, teasing eyes and breathing in a noseful of old flannel, with one bare foot brushing the corner of Teyla's blanket. It's soft, softer than the softest wool sweater Rodney can remember, frayed a little at the edges but with its colors still undimmed. When he moves, it rubs gently over his ankle.
"Charin wove it for me," Teyla says softly. If Rodney cranes his head just so and doesn't mind a mild sprain, he can see her, the quiet smile on her face, her hair autumn gold and tangled atop the intricate knots and interlace of the fabric. "She tried to teach me, but I never quite managed to learn… I was rather hopeless with the loom," she adds, and Rodney blinks, confounded by the thought of Teyla being hopeless at anything.
"It's quite… that is - it's pretty," Rodney says, just to say anything, and Teyla quietly agress that it is. "Much prettier than Ronon's… what is that?"
"I told you," Ronon grunts, "tyrannosaurus." Rodney doesn't need to twist to see him, looking like a reclining komodo dragon with dreadlocks. "It's stuffed with agrop feathers."
"Agrop," Rodney says flatly. "Is there anything you don't use agrop for?"
"They're dangerous and hard to kill," Ronon says, like Rodney hasn't seen Satedan illustrations of the agrop, like those same illustrations didn't depict what was, essentially, a chicken, albeit one with a sharply curved beak and outsized claws tipped with poison possessing the molecular weight of box jellyfish venom. "So you use everything you can."
Rodney doesn't say the obvious, for once, which is that agrop were native to Sateda, and that probably only Satedans would appreciate a comforter stuffed with the feathers of a poisonous bird. Possibly this is the only agrop comforter in existence, and Ronon would have found it in the ruins of his city, or gotten it from one of the galaxy-rovers who had looted them.
"What about you?" he asks instead, turning to John, already wrapped up in a red-plaid cocoon, all rugged-looking with his end-of-day scruff and an odor Rodney associated with outdoor showers. "Any sentimental attachments to fungal cultures?"
"Not particularly." John rolls over so he stares at the ceiling and Rodney has the full benefit of the long, clean line of John's throat. "I just like it."
"Like you liked Antarctica, as a short interval of masochism between longer periods of self-torment?"
John tilts his head back, squints in a way that suggests he's working on being irritated. "I've had it since I was commissioned," he says at last. "I spent a lot of time camping when I was on leave. Easier than going home."
A lot of things were easier than that, Rodney supposes. He knows intellectually that John was married, but he's never been quite able to make himself believe it. The way John talks about it - a rare enough event - he suspects John feels the same, a perpetual conviction that, surely, that did not, could not have, happened.
He curls up a bit more under his own fleece blanket, safely hypoallergenic and lightweight and warm. When he'd been a kid, his parents had ignored his sneezing and runny nose and itchy eyes, and his insistence that his comforter, down that had weighed a ton on a chest struggling to accommodate breath and phlegm, was the cause.
The corner of Teyla's blanket still laps over his ankle, soft and real, and John's breath, evening slowly out into sleep, brushes through his hair and they're close enough that if Rodney feels exceptionally stupid he could reach out and curl his fingers through warm, water-stained cloth, and even with Ronon so close Rodney doesn't seem to be allergic to agrop.
He remembers, in time, to think the lights off.
-end-