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merryish said, "Write me John and Rodney with robots and pining," and I said "Okay," and a couple hours later I gave her this. I sent it labeled Break Up, No Robot, to make her think that I don't leap to do her bidding. Haha, me. Anyway, it's 1800 words or so, no beta, and it was fun. :) ETA no headers, so I forgot--2nd half of S3 spoilers, sort of.
"Lasers?" Sheppard asked, and Rodney put his head down, groaning.
"No lasers," he said through gritted teeth. "And no razor claws, and no, I don't know, no poisoned pinchers. And it does not spit acid."
"I never asked if it spat acid," Sheppard said. He settled on the bench next to Rodney, straddling it; his bony knees prodded Rodney in the thigh and the ass. Rodney looked up, glaring, but Sheppard looked innocent, like he didn't realize he was way too far into Rodney's personal space. "I never said I wanted poisoned pinchers."
Rodney pointed at him with his stylus. "Razor claws?"
"Razor claws are absolutely not gratuitous." Sheppard widened his eyes. "What if it gets stuck behind debris and needs to chomp its way out?"
"It folds down," Rodney said, for the tenth time, and touched the remote. The rubbler--Sheppard's choice of name, not his--gave a little mechanical sigh, the faint wheeze of hydraulics, and then folded itself into a package no wider or thicker than a paperback book. "No chomping required. Oh, you know--stop pouting, Sheppard. It's just not attractive on a full-grown Lieutenant Colonel who isn't blonde and stacked and Carter."
"I'm not pouting," Sheppard said, but he was slumped over, and the knees had stopped moving. He was poking at the rubbler. "I was just thinking, you know, if you were going to go through all the trouble of making a robot, you might as well give it a few upgrades."
"Night vision," Rodney argued. "Heat sensors. MP3 player."
"No, absolutely, it's awesome already." Sheppard nodded. "Great work, Rodney. Good for scouting. When do you think it'll be done?"
Rodney looked away, cursing himself. He held out the remote. "This one is yours," he said, too quickly. "It's. It's just a prototype. The real rubblers are already done. I, uh. This one just needed some finishing touches."
Sheppard was looking at him. Rodney busied himself poking at the rubbler, polishing its glossy black-painted sides. It was sleeker than the robots they were really going to use. He hadn't bothered to paint those ones, either. They were all a dull grey, with no personality. Perfectly functional, entirely bland.
"Hey," Sheppard said, and the knees were back, poking deliberately this time. "If you need it--"
"Please." Rodney rolled his eyes. "Like I haven't already built three dozen of them? It's just a toaster with toys glued on. You could probably have built it, given sufficient time and detailed step-by-step instructions."
"I can put together Ikea furniture," Sheppard said, agreeing. "I could probably have handled this. But thanks, really. I miss remote-controlled cars."
Rodney had to turn his head for that, gape at Sheppard. "You live in Atlantis. You transport to work. You fly a spaceship."
Sheppard was grinning at him. "And now I have a remote-controlled car." He stood, and stretched, back arching so that his shirt rode up, revealing just a sliver of tanned, lightly furred belly. Then he clapped his hand on Rodney shoulder and Rodney jumped, startled, guilty and flushing. Sheppard leaned around him to grab the rubbler, and for a moment he was warmth all up and down Rodney's side. Rodney swallowed, hard, and Sheppard was gone, rubbler on the floor, remote in hand. "I still wish it had lasers," he said, and when Rodney spun around, inarticulate with confusion and rage, Sheppard was quirking a small smile at him. "But thanks, Rodney."
"You're welcome. And no unauthorized modifications, you understand?"
Sheppard flapped a hand at him, half a wave, half cheerful 'fuck you', and went out the door, rubbler zipping along in front of him. Rodney scowled, then turned around and looked at the mess he'd made, painting the damn thing. Giving it shiny wheels. Souping up the hydraulics. He put his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, and sighed.
He was in deep trouble.
*
The problem was, he believed, that Sheppard had suffered oxygen deprivation related brain damage while landing their flying city with life support almost entirely out and next to no power to draw on. He'd been normal, until then. Or, well, as normal as any guy could be and still turn on lights with his genes and laugh like a braying donkey and go hard-eyed and cold when his people get threatened. Normal in the sense that Rodney had thought he'd known what to expect with all that.
But once he'd landed them and taken down the rest of the shields and opened everything he could open, letting fresh air into the city in a rush, Sheppard had become inexplicably different. He'd gasped like he'd been a breath away from drowning, like everyone else, then collapsed in the chair. While Rodney and the medical team were scrambling to their feet, fighting each other to get to him (and the chair, in more than a few cases), he'd reached out one hand and latched onto Rodney's wrist and pulled him down.
He'd had a grin on his face that Rodney had never seen before; a suicide-mission grin, a rebel's grin, a demon's grin, and while Rodney was smacking at his hand, convinced that Colonel Sheppard had been possessed by something in the database, Sheppard had lunged up and kissed him, right on the mouth.
"We did it," he said, still breathless, while Rodney awkwardly crouched over him and tried to not get infected by whatever it was that had made Sheppard put his too-dry lips right against Rodney's like that. "We did it, Rodney."
"We did," Rodney said, and stopped tugging at his wrist. Sheppard was smiling at him, crazy and, what was that, sweet? He shook his head, wondering if his own brain was scrambled; Sheppard didn't exactly do sweet. "Now I need you to lie down--no, no, I don't want to lie down--Sheppard! Stop it! Could somebody help me here?"
The new chief of medicine, whose name Rodney refused to know even though she was blonde and lovely, pried Sheppard's hands off Rodney's arm and wrist with the help of a Marine, and Sheppard just grinned at Rodney though the whole process.
"That," Sheppard said, while Rodney was taking a step back, rubbing his wrist and scowling, ready to bitch although it didn't hurt, really, it didn't hurt at all, "that was cool, Rodney."
People were bustling around between them. Living people, their friends and co-workers alive after, after all that. Sheppard was alive, and smiling, and exhausted from the effort. Rodney was alive, and he suddenly felt it in a new way, with his wrist burning and his mouth tingling and the city sighing around them like it was taking deep breaths too. It was cool, it was fantastic, and before he knew it Rodney was grinning back at Sheppard, feeling that same freewheeling, maniacal glee that had led Sheppard to kiss him; he moved closer, the crowd of medical staff and military parting for him, and squeezed Sheppard's knee.
"I am amazing," he said, Sheppard's thigh warm under his fingertips; amazing was the word for what he was, oh yes. "And I suppose you weren't half-bad either."
They stayed like that, beaming at each other, connected, until Radek stumbled into the chair room with a dozen crisis reports and emergencies tumbling from his lips in Czech and English, and Rodney's hands and lips were warm for hours; that cold knot in the pit of his stomach that hadn't gone away since he'd been shipped off to Siberia, even that was warm, and it was pretty cool indeed.
*
After that, Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard, finder of personal space when there wasn't any anywhere, when it was like water in a desert, follower of the church of a punch to the arm means you don't suck, he was suddenly underfoot all the time. He was where Rodney needed to be, he leaned into Rodney's space like he had a gravity problem, he watched Rodney build things and type and make repairs. He handed over tools before Rodney asked for them, and his hips were suddenly in Rodney's line of sight a lot. It seemed like he always had that shadow of a smile on his lips, even when they were neck-deep in all the problems that cropped up when you moved a city through space and dropped it into an ocean on a strange planet and didn't have enough power to run it properly.
It was a little confusing. It made Rodney. Want things. It made Rodney think things he was almost entirely positive he wasn't meant to be thinking.
It got overwhelming, fast.
"Don't you have a room to go to?" Rodney finally snapped, a week into Sheppard stalking him. He was exhausted and had just wanted to collapse for a few uninterrupted hours of unconsciousness. But there was Sheppard, sitting on his bed, with Ronon holding up a wall, eyebrows raised. His room seemed to have become the default team lounge, and he'd bitched about it, but he hadn't meant it before. Both Sheppard and Ronon looked surprised.
"I do. I go there. It's not like I've been sleeping in yours," Sheppard pointed out.
"Because you don't sleep!" Rodney said, throwing out his arms. "You're running on the longest, most unbelievable adrenaline rush in the history of the human race and you're going to collapse soon, and die in my room, on my bed, and I will never get eight hours of sleep if your corpse is hogging the pillows!"
"Gotta go," Ronon said. "I think I hear Teyla calling," never mind that Teyla was at least a day's walk away, scouting with a military team while Ronon recovered from a broken ankle. He picked up his crutches and slunk away gracefully, while Rodney fought the urge to break away from Sheppard's serious, intense gaze.
"You're crashing, huh?" Sheppard said, but for once it didn't sound like an accusation or an admonishment. "You eat?"
"Yes, Mom," Rodney said. "And I drank all my milk, even though it tasted like blueberries, which was just wrong."
Sheppard stood up. Rodney's sheets and blankets were wrinkled. His pillows had a Sheppard-sized dent in them. "You should lie down," he said, and he was still looking at Rodney, who put down his laptop, toed off his sneakers like a challenge, shrugged out of his jacket, and looked back.
"Are you going to tell me a bedtime story?" he asked, deliberately snide, and Sheppard quirked a little smile at him, a quiet echo of that crazy smile he'd worn before he kissed Rodney on the mouth.
"No," he said. "But if you ask me nicely, I might rub your back while you fall asleep."
Rodney's heart was suddenly racing in his chest like he was the one riding the adrenaline rush still, pounding hard. His mouth was dry. He licked his lips, and Sheppard watched. For a second Rodney couldn't think past the rush of yes yes yes, and finally, and that tipped him over the edge into true panic. He still wasn't thinking when he said, "And if I asked you nicely to please leave?" It came out cold, mean, distant, and Sheppard's eyes met his.
"I'd do it," he said, eyes narrowed, focus sharp, and they both waited for Rodney to say no, stay, but he was frozen. He didn't say anything at all.
Eventually, Sheppard nodded. "Whatever you want, Rodney," he said, and turned away. He walked out of Rodney's room. The door closed quietly behind him and Rodney was alone, felt alone for the first time since they'd landed on this new planet, and it wasn't what he wanted at all.
*
So, robots.
It was an easy thing to set one aside for Sheppard while he was building all the others; he chose a slightly smaller one, sleeker, rounded like a sports car where the others were rugged like little SUVs. It wasn't hard to find black paint, and it wasn't difficult to modify one of the Wii controllers Jeannie had sent into a very sophisticated remote control. It was tough, though, to not give the rubbler laser eyes and a razored claw. But Rodney was trying not to be obvious, just in case.
And if he had plans for an upgrade kit tucked away in the back of his mind with the ideas for puddlejumper modifications, renewable ZPMs, and superior pizza ovens, well, so be it.
*
At first he thought he'd failed. He didn't see a lot of Sheppard after the day with he handed over the rubbler--Barney, Sheppard had named it--though that might've been because he worked in the most broken regions of the city whenever possible, trying to piece her all back together by himself. Not that he was hiding.
Still, he heard a lot about how Sheppard and some of the Marines had played rubbler Capture the Flag, at which Barney sucked, and he did hear that there were unofficial rubbler races that Barney always won. It didn't take long for word to get around that the mess hall had been declared a rubbler-free zone after an unfortunate incident involving Jell-O, blueberry milk, and Kate Heightmeyer's last silk blouse.
Radek kicked him off-shift eventually. "You are trying to do your job, Elizabeth's, and mine," he complained, pushing Rodney out the door. "What do I have to do to get some time for Solitaire? Minesweeper? Go, Rodney. Allow us to slack off, free of your thunderous presence."
"Fine!" Rodney said, letting go of the door frame. "But only because I'm seeing two of you and one is in a bikini." He went back to his room, bitching under his breath.
"--and that's why we'll never--what the fuck!" he said, and ducked. Barney floated past his head with a contented mechanical murmur.
Rodney turned to look at his bed, still crouching with his arms over his head. Sheppard was sitting cross-legged, pillows braced behind his back. "Colonel Sheppard--"
"You didn't mention he could fly," Sheppard said, and Barney floated past him from behind. Rodney hesitated in the doorway, then stepped inside his room and let the door shut behind him.
"Well," he said, eyes on his laptop as he put it down on his desk, edges perfectly aligned with the corner. "I wanted you to realize that on your own. I wondered how long it would take you."
Barney landed, light as a feather, near his hand. The rubbler's paint was a little scuffed, Rodney noted. It had a dent already, probably from a rubbler race crash. He'd have to give the new ones bumpers. And there was warmth at Rodney's back, Sheppard standing too close all of a sudden, when Rodney hadn't even heard him move.
Sheppard put the remote down beside Barney, and left his hand there, flat on the table. His other hand came to rest on Rodney's shoulder.
"It took too long," Sheppard said, and his voice was very quiet in Rodney's ear, his breath warm enough to make Rodney shiver. "I'm sorry, Rodney."
Rodney cleared his throat and tried to slide away, but Sheppard was holding him too firmly. "Yes, well, we can't all actually belong to MENSA," he said, and winced at the breathless sound of his own voice.
Sheppard hesitated a moment, then kissed the side of his neck. "I'm sorry I left. I didn't realize--it took so long to realize what we could do," he said, his lips on Rodney's skin, and Rodney's head dropped down, chin on his chest, tipping to the side when Sheppard nudged him.
"The city," Rodney said, dazed. "None of us knew what--"
"Not that," Sheppard said, and Rodney pushed to turn around and look him in the eye, or maybe Sheppard pulled, but they were face to face, too close. "I'm sorry it took me so long to realize what we could do, that I waited until we were here, that I never let you know--" and Rodney moved or Sheppard moved or they both did, Rodney didn't know, but they were kissing again. Kissing without that crazed edge, kissing with a much more incendiary focus, kissing like it meant more than adrenaline and familiarity, friendship.
Eventually Sheppard drew back and rested his forehead against Rodney's. They were both panting a little, and when Rodney opened his eyes he could tell that Sheppard was still smiling.
"Amazing," Rodney said, letting himself smile back, and Sheppard wrapped both arms around him and said, "Yeah, you're not half-bad either."
----
Now with bonus ficlet--I was up late last night and asked for ficlet prompts, and I was thinking of Break Up, No Robot when I wrote this one, so I guess it's a sort of unofficial epilogue? 300 words, no beta,
They don't really have enough power to keep the city as warm as they'd like, and they conserve energy by keeping the living quarters dark as much as possible. So John's sitting on a balcony in a mostly-dark wing of the city, watching the lights from the main tower, watching the stars and the glint of moonlight on the water. He's wrapped in a green blanket, the kind that seemed to be made of felt paper, like you'd find in hotels and motels all across America--or all across the universe, really. Rodney had picked these up from one of their new trading partners a few weeks before; a few hundred blankets were paltry compensation for functional generators, he'd complained, but after the first night he'd stopped bitching. Even Rodney could be done in by the combination of soft and warm.
"Do you intend to share my blanket from my bed with me, or should I just stand here and freeze to death?" Rodney asks, and John turns his head, raises an eyebrow. Rodney snorts. "If I die, you'll have to find someone else who can fix coffee machines, keep this stupid broken city limping along, and be the foremost expert on--everything important. Including blowjobs."
"Oh, well," John says, lazy and quiet. "In that case, you better get over here." He shifts enough to hold one arm out, wrapped in the blanket, inviting. Rodney hovers in the doorway for a moment before taking him up on it and settling down beside him on the ground, almost hip to hip. John wraps his arm over Rodney's shoulder, draping him in the blanket and pulling him even closer; Rodney may complain about the cold, but he's the warmest person John's ever known. He presses his lips to Rodney's temple, smiles. "I don't think anyone can fix a coffee machine as well as you do."
Rodney just sniffs. He's relaxing slowly, leaning against John. "No, or--for that matter, I can't believe I powered an entire civilization just to get some blankets," he says after a while, stifling a yawn. "If I don't get the heat and lights going here soon, you'll have to start teaching classes on lighting fires with two twigs and a pile of leaves."
"I don't know," John says. He pushes Rodney down, gently, keeping the blanket behind his back, and follows him. His hips between Rodney's spread thighs, one of his arms behind Rodney's head, the other pinning the blanket down, he's as warm as he's ever been. "This has its pluses," he says, and kisses Rodney while most of the city sleeps around them, wrapped in quiet and soft blankets.
merryish said, "Write me John and Rodney with robots and pining," and I said "Okay," and a couple hours later I gave her this. I sent it labeled Break Up, No Robot, to make her think that I don't leap to do her bidding. Haha, me. Anyway, it's 1800 words or so, no beta, and it was fun. :) ETA no headers, so I forgot--2nd half of S3 spoilers, sort of."Lasers?" Sheppard asked, and Rodney put his head down, groaning.
"No lasers," he said through gritted teeth. "And no razor claws, and no, I don't know, no poisoned pinchers. And it does not spit acid."
"I never asked if it spat acid," Sheppard said. He settled on the bench next to Rodney, straddling it; his bony knees prodded Rodney in the thigh and the ass. Rodney looked up, glaring, but Sheppard looked innocent, like he didn't realize he was way too far into Rodney's personal space. "I never said I wanted poisoned pinchers."
Rodney pointed at him with his stylus. "Razor claws?"
"Razor claws are absolutely not gratuitous." Sheppard widened his eyes. "What if it gets stuck behind debris and needs to chomp its way out?"
"It folds down," Rodney said, for the tenth time, and touched the remote. The rubbler--Sheppard's choice of name, not his--gave a little mechanical sigh, the faint wheeze of hydraulics, and then folded itself into a package no wider or thicker than a paperback book. "No chomping required. Oh, you know--stop pouting, Sheppard. It's just not attractive on a full-grown Lieutenant Colonel who isn't blonde and stacked and Carter."
"I'm not pouting," Sheppard said, but he was slumped over, and the knees had stopped moving. He was poking at the rubbler. "I was just thinking, you know, if you were going to go through all the trouble of making a robot, you might as well give it a few upgrades."
"Night vision," Rodney argued. "Heat sensors. MP3 player."
"No, absolutely, it's awesome already." Sheppard nodded. "Great work, Rodney. Good for scouting. When do you think it'll be done?"
Rodney looked away, cursing himself. He held out the remote. "This one is yours," he said, too quickly. "It's. It's just a prototype. The real rubblers are already done. I, uh. This one just needed some finishing touches."
Sheppard was looking at him. Rodney busied himself poking at the rubbler, polishing its glossy black-painted sides. It was sleeker than the robots they were really going to use. He hadn't bothered to paint those ones, either. They were all a dull grey, with no personality. Perfectly functional, entirely bland.
"Hey," Sheppard said, and the knees were back, poking deliberately this time. "If you need it--"
"Please." Rodney rolled his eyes. "Like I haven't already built three dozen of them? It's just a toaster with toys glued on. You could probably have built it, given sufficient time and detailed step-by-step instructions."
"I can put together Ikea furniture," Sheppard said, agreeing. "I could probably have handled this. But thanks, really. I miss remote-controlled cars."
Rodney had to turn his head for that, gape at Sheppard. "You live in Atlantis. You transport to work. You fly a spaceship."
Sheppard was grinning at him. "And now I have a remote-controlled car." He stood, and stretched, back arching so that his shirt rode up, revealing just a sliver of tanned, lightly furred belly. Then he clapped his hand on Rodney shoulder and Rodney jumped, startled, guilty and flushing. Sheppard leaned around him to grab the rubbler, and for a moment he was warmth all up and down Rodney's side. Rodney swallowed, hard, and Sheppard was gone, rubbler on the floor, remote in hand. "I still wish it had lasers," he said, and when Rodney spun around, inarticulate with confusion and rage, Sheppard was quirking a small smile at him. "But thanks, Rodney."
"You're welcome. And no unauthorized modifications, you understand?"
Sheppard flapped a hand at him, half a wave, half cheerful 'fuck you', and went out the door, rubbler zipping along in front of him. Rodney scowled, then turned around and looked at the mess he'd made, painting the damn thing. Giving it shiny wheels. Souping up the hydraulics. He put his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, and sighed.
He was in deep trouble.
*
The problem was, he believed, that Sheppard had suffered oxygen deprivation related brain damage while landing their flying city with life support almost entirely out and next to no power to draw on. He'd been normal, until then. Or, well, as normal as any guy could be and still turn on lights with his genes and laugh like a braying donkey and go hard-eyed and cold when his people get threatened. Normal in the sense that Rodney had thought he'd known what to expect with all that.
But once he'd landed them and taken down the rest of the shields and opened everything he could open, letting fresh air into the city in a rush, Sheppard had become inexplicably different. He'd gasped like he'd been a breath away from drowning, like everyone else, then collapsed in the chair. While Rodney and the medical team were scrambling to their feet, fighting each other to get to him (and the chair, in more than a few cases), he'd reached out one hand and latched onto Rodney's wrist and pulled him down.
He'd had a grin on his face that Rodney had never seen before; a suicide-mission grin, a rebel's grin, a demon's grin, and while Rodney was smacking at his hand, convinced that Colonel Sheppard had been possessed by something in the database, Sheppard had lunged up and kissed him, right on the mouth.
"We did it," he said, still breathless, while Rodney awkwardly crouched over him and tried to not get infected by whatever it was that had made Sheppard put his too-dry lips right against Rodney's like that. "We did it, Rodney."
"We did," Rodney said, and stopped tugging at his wrist. Sheppard was smiling at him, crazy and, what was that, sweet? He shook his head, wondering if his own brain was scrambled; Sheppard didn't exactly do sweet. "Now I need you to lie down--no, no, I don't want to lie down--Sheppard! Stop it! Could somebody help me here?"
The new chief of medicine, whose name Rodney refused to know even though she was blonde and lovely, pried Sheppard's hands off Rodney's arm and wrist with the help of a Marine, and Sheppard just grinned at Rodney though the whole process.
"That," Sheppard said, while Rodney was taking a step back, rubbing his wrist and scowling, ready to bitch although it didn't hurt, really, it didn't hurt at all, "that was cool, Rodney."
People were bustling around between them. Living people, their friends and co-workers alive after, after all that. Sheppard was alive, and smiling, and exhausted from the effort. Rodney was alive, and he suddenly felt it in a new way, with his wrist burning and his mouth tingling and the city sighing around them like it was taking deep breaths too. It was cool, it was fantastic, and before he knew it Rodney was grinning back at Sheppard, feeling that same freewheeling, maniacal glee that had led Sheppard to kiss him; he moved closer, the crowd of medical staff and military parting for him, and squeezed Sheppard's knee.
"I am amazing," he said, Sheppard's thigh warm under his fingertips; amazing was the word for what he was, oh yes. "And I suppose you weren't half-bad either."
They stayed like that, beaming at each other, connected, until Radek stumbled into the chair room with a dozen crisis reports and emergencies tumbling from his lips in Czech and English, and Rodney's hands and lips were warm for hours; that cold knot in the pit of his stomach that hadn't gone away since he'd been shipped off to Siberia, even that was warm, and it was pretty cool indeed.
*
After that, Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard, finder of personal space when there wasn't any anywhere, when it was like water in a desert, follower of the church of a punch to the arm means you don't suck, he was suddenly underfoot all the time. He was where Rodney needed to be, he leaned into Rodney's space like he had a gravity problem, he watched Rodney build things and type and make repairs. He handed over tools before Rodney asked for them, and his hips were suddenly in Rodney's line of sight a lot. It seemed like he always had that shadow of a smile on his lips, even when they were neck-deep in all the problems that cropped up when you moved a city through space and dropped it into an ocean on a strange planet and didn't have enough power to run it properly.
It was a little confusing. It made Rodney. Want things. It made Rodney think things he was almost entirely positive he wasn't meant to be thinking.
It got overwhelming, fast.
"Don't you have a room to go to?" Rodney finally snapped, a week into Sheppard stalking him. He was exhausted and had just wanted to collapse for a few uninterrupted hours of unconsciousness. But there was Sheppard, sitting on his bed, with Ronon holding up a wall, eyebrows raised. His room seemed to have become the default team lounge, and he'd bitched about it, but he hadn't meant it before. Both Sheppard and Ronon looked surprised.
"I do. I go there. It's not like I've been sleeping in yours," Sheppard pointed out.
"Because you don't sleep!" Rodney said, throwing out his arms. "You're running on the longest, most unbelievable adrenaline rush in the history of the human race and you're going to collapse soon, and die in my room, on my bed, and I will never get eight hours of sleep if your corpse is hogging the pillows!"
"Gotta go," Ronon said. "I think I hear Teyla calling," never mind that Teyla was at least a day's walk away, scouting with a military team while Ronon recovered from a broken ankle. He picked up his crutches and slunk away gracefully, while Rodney fought the urge to break away from Sheppard's serious, intense gaze.
"You're crashing, huh?" Sheppard said, but for once it didn't sound like an accusation or an admonishment. "You eat?"
"Yes, Mom," Rodney said. "And I drank all my milk, even though it tasted like blueberries, which was just wrong."
Sheppard stood up. Rodney's sheets and blankets were wrinkled. His pillows had a Sheppard-sized dent in them. "You should lie down," he said, and he was still looking at Rodney, who put down his laptop, toed off his sneakers like a challenge, shrugged out of his jacket, and looked back.
"Are you going to tell me a bedtime story?" he asked, deliberately snide, and Sheppard quirked a little smile at him, a quiet echo of that crazy smile he'd worn before he kissed Rodney on the mouth.
"No," he said. "But if you ask me nicely, I might rub your back while you fall asleep."
Rodney's heart was suddenly racing in his chest like he was the one riding the adrenaline rush still, pounding hard. His mouth was dry. He licked his lips, and Sheppard watched. For a second Rodney couldn't think past the rush of yes yes yes, and finally, and that tipped him over the edge into true panic. He still wasn't thinking when he said, "And if I asked you nicely to please leave?" It came out cold, mean, distant, and Sheppard's eyes met his.
"I'd do it," he said, eyes narrowed, focus sharp, and they both waited for Rodney to say no, stay, but he was frozen. He didn't say anything at all.
Eventually, Sheppard nodded. "Whatever you want, Rodney," he said, and turned away. He walked out of Rodney's room. The door closed quietly behind him and Rodney was alone, felt alone for the first time since they'd landed on this new planet, and it wasn't what he wanted at all.
*
So, robots.
It was an easy thing to set one aside for Sheppard while he was building all the others; he chose a slightly smaller one, sleeker, rounded like a sports car where the others were rugged like little SUVs. It wasn't hard to find black paint, and it wasn't difficult to modify one of the Wii controllers Jeannie had sent into a very sophisticated remote control. It was tough, though, to not give the rubbler laser eyes and a razored claw. But Rodney was trying not to be obvious, just in case.
And if he had plans for an upgrade kit tucked away in the back of his mind with the ideas for puddlejumper modifications, renewable ZPMs, and superior pizza ovens, well, so be it.
*
At first he thought he'd failed. He didn't see a lot of Sheppard after the day with he handed over the rubbler--Barney, Sheppard had named it--though that might've been because he worked in the most broken regions of the city whenever possible, trying to piece her all back together by himself. Not that he was hiding.
Still, he heard a lot about how Sheppard and some of the Marines had played rubbler Capture the Flag, at which Barney sucked, and he did hear that there were unofficial rubbler races that Barney always won. It didn't take long for word to get around that the mess hall had been declared a rubbler-free zone after an unfortunate incident involving Jell-O, blueberry milk, and Kate Heightmeyer's last silk blouse.
Radek kicked him off-shift eventually. "You are trying to do your job, Elizabeth's, and mine," he complained, pushing Rodney out the door. "What do I have to do to get some time for Solitaire? Minesweeper? Go, Rodney. Allow us to slack off, free of your thunderous presence."
"Fine!" Rodney said, letting go of the door frame. "But only because I'm seeing two of you and one is in a bikini." He went back to his room, bitching under his breath.
"--and that's why we'll never--what the fuck!" he said, and ducked. Barney floated past his head with a contented mechanical murmur.
Rodney turned to look at his bed, still crouching with his arms over his head. Sheppard was sitting cross-legged, pillows braced behind his back. "Colonel Sheppard--"
"You didn't mention he could fly," Sheppard said, and Barney floated past him from behind. Rodney hesitated in the doorway, then stepped inside his room and let the door shut behind him.
"Well," he said, eyes on his laptop as he put it down on his desk, edges perfectly aligned with the corner. "I wanted you to realize that on your own. I wondered how long it would take you."
Barney landed, light as a feather, near his hand. The rubbler's paint was a little scuffed, Rodney noted. It had a dent already, probably from a rubbler race crash. He'd have to give the new ones bumpers. And there was warmth at Rodney's back, Sheppard standing too close all of a sudden, when Rodney hadn't even heard him move.
Sheppard put the remote down beside Barney, and left his hand there, flat on the table. His other hand came to rest on Rodney's shoulder.
"It took too long," Sheppard said, and his voice was very quiet in Rodney's ear, his breath warm enough to make Rodney shiver. "I'm sorry, Rodney."
Rodney cleared his throat and tried to slide away, but Sheppard was holding him too firmly. "Yes, well, we can't all actually belong to MENSA," he said, and winced at the breathless sound of his own voice.
Sheppard hesitated a moment, then kissed the side of his neck. "I'm sorry I left. I didn't realize--it took so long to realize what we could do," he said, his lips on Rodney's skin, and Rodney's head dropped down, chin on his chest, tipping to the side when Sheppard nudged him.
"The city," Rodney said, dazed. "None of us knew what--"
"Not that," Sheppard said, and Rodney pushed to turn around and look him in the eye, or maybe Sheppard pulled, but they were face to face, too close. "I'm sorry it took me so long to realize what we could do, that I waited until we were here, that I never let you know--" and Rodney moved or Sheppard moved or they both did, Rodney didn't know, but they were kissing again. Kissing without that crazed edge, kissing with a much more incendiary focus, kissing like it meant more than adrenaline and familiarity, friendship.
Eventually Sheppard drew back and rested his forehead against Rodney's. They were both panting a little, and when Rodney opened his eyes he could tell that Sheppard was still smiling.
"Amazing," Rodney said, letting himself smile back, and Sheppard wrapped both arms around him and said, "Yeah, you're not half-bad either."
----
Now with bonus ficlet--I was up late last night and asked for ficlet prompts, and I was thinking of Break Up, No Robot when I wrote this one, so I guess it's a sort of unofficial epilogue? 300 words, no beta,
They don't really have enough power to keep the city as warm as they'd like, and they conserve energy by keeping the living quarters dark as much as possible. So John's sitting on a balcony in a mostly-dark wing of the city, watching the lights from the main tower, watching the stars and the glint of moonlight on the water. He's wrapped in a green blanket, the kind that seemed to be made of felt paper, like you'd find in hotels and motels all across America--or all across the universe, really. Rodney had picked these up from one of their new trading partners a few weeks before; a few hundred blankets were paltry compensation for functional generators, he'd complained, but after the first night he'd stopped bitching. Even Rodney could be done in by the combination of soft and warm.
"Do you intend to share my blanket from my bed with me, or should I just stand here and freeze to death?" Rodney asks, and John turns his head, raises an eyebrow. Rodney snorts. "If I die, you'll have to find someone else who can fix coffee machines, keep this stupid broken city limping along, and be the foremost expert on--everything important. Including blowjobs."
"Oh, well," John says, lazy and quiet. "In that case, you better get over here." He shifts enough to hold one arm out, wrapped in the blanket, inviting. Rodney hovers in the doorway for a moment before taking him up on it and settling down beside him on the ground, almost hip to hip. John wraps his arm over Rodney's shoulder, draping him in the blanket and pulling him even closer; Rodney may complain about the cold, but he's the warmest person John's ever known. He presses his lips to Rodney's temple, smiles. "I don't think anyone can fix a coffee machine as well as you do."
Rodney just sniffs. He's relaxing slowly, leaning against John. "No, or--for that matter, I can't believe I powered an entire civilization just to get some blankets," he says after a while, stifling a yawn. "If I don't get the heat and lights going here soon, you'll have to start teaching classes on lighting fires with two twigs and a pile of leaves."
"I don't know," John says. He pushes Rodney down, gently, keeping the blanket behind his back, and follows him. His hips between Rodney's spread thighs, one of his arms behind Rodney's head, the other pinning the blanket down, he's as warm as he's ever been. "This has its pluses," he says, and kisses Rodney while most of the city sleeps around them, wrapped in quiet and soft blankets.
