For
blue_underwing: John/Rodney, Marked
Being with John Sheppard is difficult. Not that Rodney's ever been someone to back off from a challenge, but sometimes he suspects that he might be in over his head, because John has to be the most complicated human being he has ever met, and that's saying something. Rodney has worked on almost every continent for almost every U.S. governmental agency; he knows complicated.
What throws him the most is the way conversations with John strongly resemble a mine field. Only instead of exploding, John will shut down. Like when Rodney asked him - in all innocence! - if he still had family back on Earth. Or when he remarked that being afraid of clowns like Dr. Carmichael from Chemistry was a really stupid phobia to have. He still doesn't understand why John merely looked at him across the mess hall table before he stood up and left, spending the next few hours doing god knows what while Rodney kept wondering what the hell he'd said this time. John is always like that: never saying what is wrong, simply walking away, and there have been several occasions where they've gone weeks without talking, without touching, without anything except Rodney waiting in frustration for John to drift back to him with a casual smile as if nothing had ever been wrong in the first place. It's annoying, and it's tiring, and sometimes - not often, just… well, sometimes - Rodney wonders if a relationship this high maintenance is really worth the effort. If all the work he invests in John, all the figuring out and trying to adjust, weren't better spent trying to understand the workings of the universe. Or finding a way to defeat the Wraith. Or discovering how to recharge their ZPM. Rodney's blood pressure at least would thank him.
He knows he'll never walk away, though, that all his musings are purely theoretical. For all his distance, John has marked Rodney as his own. Not physically: somewhere below the skin, in some part of his brain that will now and forever equal John Sheppard with home. His blessing, and his curse, and he's entirely helpless against the hold John has on him.
However, Rodney can live with that. As long as he gets to wake up next to John when they're offworld; as long as he owns that private smile and the unspoken trust that he'll be there when John wants or needs him to be; as long as he as that, Rodney will take the silences and the cold stares and turn them into something he can work with. He's a scientist; he is used to turning oddities into advantages.
Because John may be difficult, but he bears Rodney's mark, too.