John wakes up, as usual, when the shower turns on. It's a quirk of his personality that the seismic pitch and roll of the bed when Rodney gets up never makes him stir, but the soft hiss of water hitting tile always pierces the fog in his brain, makes his eyebrows twitch and his eyelids always open not long after. He stares at the ceiling for a moment, wondering what day it is, what month it is, who he is and why someone is singing.
Rodney likes living with John. He even loves John, although there's no way he'd admit it out loud; they just aren't those guys who say things like that. But still, it's a good thing; loving John means that things--wet, sandy clothes on the bathroom floor, for example--that would normally make Rodney launch into a full fledged rant merely merit a bit of sarcastic grumbling.
But grocery shopping with John? Rodney really hates that.
When the rules change, Rodney is asked, but what he tells isn't precisely accurately.
So far, their twenty fourth kiss is his favourite.
It wasn't really prompted by anything, or at least nothing more compelling than an empty balcony and five crisis-less minutes, but with Rodney standing right there that's pretty damned compelling.
"Nooooooooooooo," Rodney says, right into his pillow. "Nooo-ooooo-oooooo."
"Rodney, come on, we're going to be late!" John has one sock on and the other clutched in his fist, has boxers and pants and a t-shirt on; he took a shower and brushed his teeth; he shaved. He's all . . . fresh! Fresh and awake and ready to face the day, unlike some people. He shoves Rodney's shoulder, not very gently.
Rodney realized that he was happy.
He was alone in the main lab, dim light rising around him. He'd spent most of the night there; it was so late it was early again. Surveying his workstation, he noticed his two mugs, one an official SGC mug -- that always made him laugh; who the hell put the logo of a top-secret facility on mugs? Who designed logos for top-secret facilities? -- and the other one made years ago by Jeannie and Madison, decorated by Madison with her own tiny handprint in pink paint. The paint had flaked, he saw, smiling at it.
"That's not my mouth," Rodney pointed out as John smacked a wet kiss to his jaw.
"S'not," John nodded, swaying slightly. "No. Thisis." And he kissed Rodney's cheek, next to his nose. "Huh."
"You have the best home, Rodney."
Joe Flanigan, who plays John Sheppard on Stargate Atlantis, is a funny guy. But he has a dry sense of humour, so when he's telling a joke it takes a moment to register because the only cue to the fact that he's just said something funny is a slight shift in the cadence of his speech.
In talking with journalists at Vancouver's Bridge Studios in May, he kept the group so relaxed and at ease that the 30 minutes seemed less like an interview session and more like a group of people hanging out at the pub. Flanigan talked about the sorry state of the action-adventure genre in the medium of television and why he prefers the Wraith to the Replicators.
