Fic: Snapshots of a Slow and Certain Seduction (Lorne/Zelenka, PG13)
Title: Snapshots of a Slow and Certain Seduction
Author: elementalv
Recipient: moonlettuce
Pairing: Lorne/Zelenka
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When Evan arrived in the lab, he expected to find McKay there, still bitching about radiation exposure (which absolutely wasn't Evan's fault, no matter what McKay said), so he was surprised to hear Dr. Zelenka say, "So beautiful."
~~*~~
When Evan arrived in the lab, he expected to find McKay there, still bitching about radiation exposure (which absolutely wasn't Evan's fault, no matter what McKay said), so he was surprised to hear Dr. Zelenka say, "So beautiful."
Evan frowned and said, "Excuse me?"
"Beauty needs no excuse, Major." Dr. Zelenka pointed toward the next room and said, "But you did not come down so I could make bad poetry. Please. Come this way. I have an experiment, and you are the perfect guinea pig."
"But -"
"Come, come, Major. Please." And Dr. Zelenka looked so confident and expectant that Evan figured he must have heard wrong to start out with, so he just shook his head and went where he was directed.
~~*~~
After that, Dr. Zelenka started treating Evan like if he was part of the geek population. It was weird, but he was okay with anything that gave him first shot at the good coffee.
~~*~~
Generally speaking, Evan got along with the scientists pretty well, and he thought maybe Parrish had something to do with that. He was pretty well liked by his colleagues, and it stood to reason that they were willing to extend that goodwill to Parrish's teammates and, especially, Parrish's team leader. So Evan was pretty surprised when he heard through the city's grapevine that Zelenka had declared war on the botanists, starting with Parrish.
"Do something, Major," Sheppard said one morning, a week after hostilities began.
(Zelenka had somehow managed to convince Atlantis to convert everything on the botanists' laptops to Ancient. While the linguists were thrilled, word had it that Dr. Weir wasn't at all pleased with the delay on developing local antibiotics.)
Ordinarily, Evan wouldn't dream of questioning his commanding officer, even if that officer was pretty much the antithesis of everything an officer should be, but this? This order was a little confusing.
"Sir?"
"You heard me. Fix this." Sheppard looked kind of haunted. "And fix it today."
"With all due respect, Sir, isn't that Dr. McKay's job?"
"Ordinarily, I'd say yes, but McKay won't go near Zelenka right now." Sheppard muttered something about cowards then added more clearly, "He seems to think you're the only one who can get Zelenka to back off, so I want you to head down there and talk to the man."
Evan almost asked why him, but it was clear that Sheppard was hanging onto his sanity by a thread. Instead, he stiffened his posture to salute his CO, then turned around and head back down to the labs. He had no idea what, exactly, he was going to say to Zelenka, but he figured he would come up with something.
At least, he hoped he would. He didn't like to think about what, exactly, could make Sheppard look so downtrodden. The man had killed anywhere from six to sixty Genii at a single go, depending on who you talked to, so it wasn't like he was a coward. But not even he had been willing to risk Zelenka's temper.
Evan bit back a sigh and entered the transporter. He just hoped his affairs were in order.
~~*~~
In the end, all it took was Evan asking Zelenka to play nice with the botanists. Zelenka blushed slightly and said, "Of course, Major," before adding something in Czechoslovakian.
He could have stayed to figure it out, but Evan decided discretion was the better part of keeping a hot water supply, so he said thanks and got the hell out of there.
~~*~~
Evan really didn't want to be where he was, and he was pretty sure there wasn't a red-blooded human soldier anywhere - Milky Way or Pegasus - who would disagree with him. Hell, even McKay had backed away slowly when Zelenka and Hermiod started in on each other, and that was okay, as far as Evan was concerned. Civilians should flee for their life. Soldiers, on the other hand, should man-up and stay right where they were, especially when they were Air Force colonels in charge of a full contingent of Marines, because Marines didn't let Air Force officers live that kind of thing down.
Not that Evan was bitter. Much.
Zelenka let loose with a string of Czechoslovakian that had Novak going pale and Hermiod turning an alarming shade of violet before he pointed at the door and said, "Go. Now."
He did, dragging Evan along with him. Once they were two levels and several more corridors away from Hermiod's roost, Zelenka paused to wipe his face on a handkerchief. It took another moment for him to stop muttering in Czechoslovakian - and based on the various gestures Zelenka was making, Evan was pretty sure he didn't want to know what was being said - he looked at Evan with a slight smile and a pat on Evan's arm.
"It is good that you were there. If you had not been, I would not have been responsible for my actions." Zelenka gave his arm a gentle squeeze and said, "You are a great source of comfort to me Evan."
Zelenka wandered off after that, and Evan was left thinking, When the hell did he start calling me by my first name? A few minutes later, as he headed back down to Engineering, Evan put the matter out of his head - especially the part where he was a "great source of comfort" to Zelenka, because that was just weird. In a disturbingly sweet way.
~~*~~
Also disturbing (and yes, kind of sweet), was the way Radek occasionally started to refer to Evan as his hero once they got back to Atlantis.
Mostly, though, Evan tried not to think about it. Whenever he did, he ended up with an image of himself in shining armor with Radek handing him a latex glove before sending Evan off to do battle. That took disturbing to a whole new level which Evan wasn't prepared to deal with.
~~*~~
After the incident aboard Daedalus, Radek started inviting Evan along on exploration trips through the city. At first, he was inclined to say no, but then Sheppard asked him to go along.
"I know poking through the city isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but you have the gene, so you can probably keep Radek out of trouble," Sheppard said. "Plus, if you go, you'll get McKay off my ass."
Evan looked at Sheppard, letting his disbelief show. Sheppard snorted and said, "Figure of speech, Lorne. Tell Radek you have a go for 0700 hours tomorrow."
"Sir, yes Sir," Evan said with a snappy little salute.
Sheppard gave him the finger then sauntered out of Evan's office.
~~*~~
City exploration wasn't all that bad, except for the pink goo that somehow made Radek seem like the greatest thing ever since cadmium white.
It wasn't bad, but Evan still blushed about it three months later, since "not bad" was actually code for "so hot, I'm still jerking off to the memory of it." It wasn't embarrassing, but it also wasn't really the kind of thought he wanted to have in the middle of a staff meeting while Radek was talking about power consumption. Nor was it the kind of thought he wanted to have while following Radek around to turn stuff on. Nor was it the kind of thought he wanted to have while watching Radek go all Geekzilla on one of the new scientists.
Really, it wasn't the kind of thought he wanted at all, but it still struck him at odd moments, and he did his best to repress and deny.
~~*~~
It wasn't until Evan was fighting with Radek about potatoes that he realized maybe something was a little off. Or a lot off, because Radek in a tizzy was inevitably - interesting. And hot, which, if he'd been thinking about it at all, he would have realized a hell of a lot sooner. It was such a bizarre epiphany to have, considering that he already sort of knew about it, that Evan had to just stand there for a minute, staring.
Radek eventually wound down enough to notice something was wrong, and he said, "What is it, můj krasavče?"
Evan blinked himself back into the conversation. "What?"
"I asked what is wrong, Evan," Radek said.
"Oh." Thoroughly confused, Evan cocked his head and said, "Are you - are we -? Never mind. What were you saying again?"
~~*~~
After that, Evan started paying closer attention to what Radek was doing, because it turned out it was way more interesting than what he was saying.
~~*~~
"Interesting Christmas tree, Major."
Evan ignored Sheppard for the moment as he stared at the giant poster adorning his door. He'd been trying to figure out for the last five minutes where the poster board had come from, because in some ways, that was easier than thinking about who probably put it there, especially since he was pretty sure a discussion was in his near future. Unlike Colonel Sheppard, Evan didn't have a problem talking about his feelings, but that didn't mean he was comfortable with the idea of initiating the conversation. In the past, his girlfriends had always done that, but he was pretty sure it would be up to him this time.
Sheppard cleared his throat, and Evan tried to speak; he gave up for a moment, and then he tried again.
"I have no idea where it came from," Evan lied.
"Clearly, one of the geeks gave it to you," Sheppard said.
"What makes you say that, Sir?" And really, did Sheppard have to show off how goddamn smart he was all the time?
"Well, first off, after the last Valentine's Day, I think it's safe to say that none of our Marines or Airmen is that romantic," Sheppard said with a sly look at Evan. "Second, I'm not sure any of them has heard of Pascal's triangle, so it's a fair bet they don't know how to make one. Third, even if they have heard of Pascal's triangle, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't relate it to The Twelve Days of Christmas the way your admirer did."
By the time Sheppard finished talking, Evan was completely lost, which, as he thought about it, was a decent metaphor for Sheppard's team in Pegasus and explained a lot about the trouble they regularly got into. Still, even for Sheppard, the explanation was on the cryptic side, because Evan honestly couldn't figure out how a carol related to a mathematical construct.
"The twelve days of - sir?"
"See, you start with one at the top, and that's the partridge in the pear tree. Drop down a row, and you have the two turtledoves. Go down the next -"
"Oh, for god's sake," McKay said from behind them. "Tell me you're not going on about that ridiculous coincidence."
"It's not ridiculous," Sheppard said. "It's perfectly valid. See -"
At that point, Evan quietly slipped away to think a bit about Christmas and Pascal and twelve days of gifts from a true love. Maybe it was time to go to the source.
~~*~~
In the end, it didn't take long to track down Radek. After all, he hadn't developed McKay's sense of paranoia and need to hide from the military. Of course, the fact that Atlantis was willing to help made success a foregone conclusion, and Evan was willing to acknowledge that, just as soon as someone asked. Or maybe not. "Don't tell" was still the preferred option, as far as the military was concerned, though he didn't think Sheppard would care too much.
Meanwhile, Radek was hunched over a dead console, muttering to himself or to someone on his radio about whatever it was that he was working on. Evan crept up on him, and whispered, "Thank you."
Radek's reaction - jumping a good foot straight up and spitting out, "Zatraceně!" - was everything Evan could have hoped for and maybe a little more, because when Radek finally calmed down enough to look at him, he looked nervous. Very, very nervous. And that, right there, told Evan his timing was good.
"Just came from my office, Radek," he said, inching a little closer to him.
"Um, did you?" Radek inched away a little.
"Yep," Evan said, inching closer again. "Colonel Sheppard was there, too."
"Oh?" Radek inched away again, which made Evan smile. It was the first time in a year and a half that he'd felt he was on anything like solid ground with Radek, and that was a nice feeling. He didn't intend to lose track of it again.
"Oh." Evan figured they could keep doing the inching thing until they hit the far wall, but he was a bit impatient, so with a quick move, he pinned Radek against the console and grinned at him. "Someone put a giant Pasta triangle -"
"Pascal's triangle."
"That's right," Evan agreed, nudging his right leg between Radek's thighs. "Anyway, according to Colonel Sheppard, that triangle somehow shows the gifts in The Twelve Days of Christmas."
"Yes, well, you see," Radek said nervously, "the first row is the partridge in -" His voice trailed off as Evan started to nuzzle behind his left ear.
"Radek?"
"Yes, Evan?"
"Was that your way of giving me the twelve gifts of Christmas?"
"Um -" Evan thought he might have been planning to say something else, so he figured it was probably just as well that he'd nibbled on Radek's neck to distract him.
"Is that a yes?"
"Yes?"
Evan put a little space between them to ask, "Does that mean you're my true love?"
Radek started to speak then apparently decided not to, in favor of holding Evan's face to kiss him. As answers went, it wasn't exactly concise, but then again, Evan figured, love wasn't all that concise either.
Author: elementalv
Recipient: moonlettuce
Pairing: Lorne/Zelenka
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When Evan arrived in the lab, he expected to find McKay there, still bitching about radiation exposure (which absolutely wasn't Evan's fault, no matter what McKay said), so he was surprised to hear Dr. Zelenka say, "So beautiful."
~~*~~
When Evan arrived in the lab, he expected to find McKay there, still bitching about radiation exposure (which absolutely wasn't Evan's fault, no matter what McKay said), so he was surprised to hear Dr. Zelenka say, "So beautiful."
Evan frowned and said, "Excuse me?"
"Beauty needs no excuse, Major." Dr. Zelenka pointed toward the next room and said, "But you did not come down so I could make bad poetry. Please. Come this way. I have an experiment, and you are the perfect guinea pig."
"But -"
"Come, come, Major. Please." And Dr. Zelenka looked so confident and expectant that Evan figured he must have heard wrong to start out with, so he just shook his head and went where he was directed.
~~*~~
After that, Dr. Zelenka started treating Evan like if he was part of the geek population. It was weird, but he was okay with anything that gave him first shot at the good coffee.
~~*~~
Generally speaking, Evan got along with the scientists pretty well, and he thought maybe Parrish had something to do with that. He was pretty well liked by his colleagues, and it stood to reason that they were willing to extend that goodwill to Parrish's teammates and, especially, Parrish's team leader. So Evan was pretty surprised when he heard through the city's grapevine that Zelenka had declared war on the botanists, starting with Parrish.
"Do something, Major," Sheppard said one morning, a week after hostilities began.
(Zelenka had somehow managed to convince Atlantis to convert everything on the botanists' laptops to Ancient. While the linguists were thrilled, word had it that Dr. Weir wasn't at all pleased with the delay on developing local antibiotics.)
Ordinarily, Evan wouldn't dream of questioning his commanding officer, even if that officer was pretty much the antithesis of everything an officer should be, but this? This order was a little confusing.
"Sir?"
"You heard me. Fix this." Sheppard looked kind of haunted. "And fix it today."
"With all due respect, Sir, isn't that Dr. McKay's job?"
"Ordinarily, I'd say yes, but McKay won't go near Zelenka right now." Sheppard muttered something about cowards then added more clearly, "He seems to think you're the only one who can get Zelenka to back off, so I want you to head down there and talk to the man."
Evan almost asked why him, but it was clear that Sheppard was hanging onto his sanity by a thread. Instead, he stiffened his posture to salute his CO, then turned around and head back down to the labs. He had no idea what, exactly, he was going to say to Zelenka, but he figured he would come up with something.
At least, he hoped he would. He didn't like to think about what, exactly, could make Sheppard look so downtrodden. The man had killed anywhere from six to sixty Genii at a single go, depending on who you talked to, so it wasn't like he was a coward. But not even he had been willing to risk Zelenka's temper.
Evan bit back a sigh and entered the transporter. He just hoped his affairs were in order.
~~*~~
In the end, all it took was Evan asking Zelenka to play nice with the botanists. Zelenka blushed slightly and said, "Of course, Major," before adding something in Czechoslovakian.
He could have stayed to figure it out, but Evan decided discretion was the better part of keeping a hot water supply, so he said thanks and got the hell out of there.
~~*~~
Evan really didn't want to be where he was, and he was pretty sure there wasn't a red-blooded human soldier anywhere - Milky Way or Pegasus - who would disagree with him. Hell, even McKay had backed away slowly when Zelenka and Hermiod started in on each other, and that was okay, as far as Evan was concerned. Civilians should flee for their life. Soldiers, on the other hand, should man-up and stay right where they were, especially when they were Air Force colonels in charge of a full contingent of Marines, because Marines didn't let Air Force officers live that kind of thing down.
Not that Evan was bitter. Much.
Zelenka let loose with a string of Czechoslovakian that had Novak going pale and Hermiod turning an alarming shade of violet before he pointed at the door and said, "Go. Now."
He did, dragging Evan along with him. Once they were two levels and several more corridors away from Hermiod's roost, Zelenka paused to wipe his face on a handkerchief. It took another moment for him to stop muttering in Czechoslovakian - and based on the various gestures Zelenka was making, Evan was pretty sure he didn't want to know what was being said - he looked at Evan with a slight smile and a pat on Evan's arm.
"It is good that you were there. If you had not been, I would not have been responsible for my actions." Zelenka gave his arm a gentle squeeze and said, "You are a great source of comfort to me Evan."
Zelenka wandered off after that, and Evan was left thinking, When the hell did he start calling me by my first name? A few minutes later, as he headed back down to Engineering, Evan put the matter out of his head - especially the part where he was a "great source of comfort" to Zelenka, because that was just weird. In a disturbingly sweet way.
~~*~~
Also disturbing (and yes, kind of sweet), was the way Radek occasionally started to refer to Evan as his hero once they got back to Atlantis.
Mostly, though, Evan tried not to think about it. Whenever he did, he ended up with an image of himself in shining armor with Radek handing him a latex glove before sending Evan off to do battle. That took disturbing to a whole new level which Evan wasn't prepared to deal with.
~~*~~
After the incident aboard Daedalus, Radek started inviting Evan along on exploration trips through the city. At first, he was inclined to say no, but then Sheppard asked him to go along.
"I know poking through the city isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but you have the gene, so you can probably keep Radek out of trouble," Sheppard said. "Plus, if you go, you'll get McKay off my ass."
Evan looked at Sheppard, letting his disbelief show. Sheppard snorted and said, "Figure of speech, Lorne. Tell Radek you have a go for 0700 hours tomorrow."
"Sir, yes Sir," Evan said with a snappy little salute.
Sheppard gave him the finger then sauntered out of Evan's office.
~~*~~
City exploration wasn't all that bad, except for the pink goo that somehow made Radek seem like the greatest thing ever since cadmium white.
It wasn't bad, but Evan still blushed about it three months later, since "not bad" was actually code for "so hot, I'm still jerking off to the memory of it." It wasn't embarrassing, but it also wasn't really the kind of thought he wanted to have in the middle of a staff meeting while Radek was talking about power consumption. Nor was it the kind of thought he wanted to have while following Radek around to turn stuff on. Nor was it the kind of thought he wanted to have while watching Radek go all Geekzilla on one of the new scientists.
Really, it wasn't the kind of thought he wanted at all, but it still struck him at odd moments, and he did his best to repress and deny.
~~*~~
It wasn't until Evan was fighting with Radek about potatoes that he realized maybe something was a little off. Or a lot off, because Radek in a tizzy was inevitably - interesting. And hot, which, if he'd been thinking about it at all, he would have realized a hell of a lot sooner. It was such a bizarre epiphany to have, considering that he already sort of knew about it, that Evan had to just stand there for a minute, staring.
Radek eventually wound down enough to notice something was wrong, and he said, "What is it, můj krasavče?"
Evan blinked himself back into the conversation. "What?"
"I asked what is wrong, Evan," Radek said.
"Oh." Thoroughly confused, Evan cocked his head and said, "Are you - are we -? Never mind. What were you saying again?"
~~*~~
After that, Evan started paying closer attention to what Radek was doing, because it turned out it was way more interesting than what he was saying.
~~*~~
"Interesting Christmas tree, Major."
Evan ignored Sheppard for the moment as he stared at the giant poster adorning his door. He'd been trying to figure out for the last five minutes where the poster board had come from, because in some ways, that was easier than thinking about who probably put it there, especially since he was pretty sure a discussion was in his near future. Unlike Colonel Sheppard, Evan didn't have a problem talking about his feelings, but that didn't mean he was comfortable with the idea of initiating the conversation. In the past, his girlfriends had always done that, but he was pretty sure it would be up to him this time.
Sheppard cleared his throat, and Evan tried to speak; he gave up for a moment, and then he tried again.
"I have no idea where it came from," Evan lied.
"Clearly, one of the geeks gave it to you," Sheppard said.
"What makes you say that, Sir?" And really, did Sheppard have to show off how goddamn smart he was all the time?
"Well, first off, after the last Valentine's Day, I think it's safe to say that none of our Marines or Airmen is that romantic," Sheppard said with a sly look at Evan. "Second, I'm not sure any of them has heard of Pascal's triangle, so it's a fair bet they don't know how to make one. Third, even if they have heard of Pascal's triangle, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't relate it to The Twelve Days of Christmas the way your admirer did."
By the time Sheppard finished talking, Evan was completely lost, which, as he thought about it, was a decent metaphor for Sheppard's team in Pegasus and explained a lot about the trouble they regularly got into. Still, even for Sheppard, the explanation was on the cryptic side, because Evan honestly couldn't figure out how a carol related to a mathematical construct.
"The twelve days of - sir?"
"See, you start with one at the top, and that's the partridge in the pear tree. Drop down a row, and you have the two turtledoves. Go down the next -"
"Oh, for god's sake," McKay said from behind them. "Tell me you're not going on about that ridiculous coincidence."
"It's not ridiculous," Sheppard said. "It's perfectly valid. See -"
At that point, Evan quietly slipped away to think a bit about Christmas and Pascal and twelve days of gifts from a true love. Maybe it was time to go to the source.
~~*~~
In the end, it didn't take long to track down Radek. After all, he hadn't developed McKay's sense of paranoia and need to hide from the military. Of course, the fact that Atlantis was willing to help made success a foregone conclusion, and Evan was willing to acknowledge that, just as soon as someone asked. Or maybe not. "Don't tell" was still the preferred option, as far as the military was concerned, though he didn't think Sheppard would care too much.
Meanwhile, Radek was hunched over a dead console, muttering to himself or to someone on his radio about whatever it was that he was working on. Evan crept up on him, and whispered, "Thank you."
Radek's reaction - jumping a good foot straight up and spitting out, "Zatraceně!" - was everything Evan could have hoped for and maybe a little more, because when Radek finally calmed down enough to look at him, he looked nervous. Very, very nervous. And that, right there, told Evan his timing was good.
"Just came from my office, Radek," he said, inching a little closer to him.
"Um, did you?" Radek inched away a little.
"Yep," Evan said, inching closer again. "Colonel Sheppard was there, too."
"Oh?" Radek inched away again, which made Evan smile. It was the first time in a year and a half that he'd felt he was on anything like solid ground with Radek, and that was a nice feeling. He didn't intend to lose track of it again.
"Oh." Evan figured they could keep doing the inching thing until they hit the far wall, but he was a bit impatient, so with a quick move, he pinned Radek against the console and grinned at him. "Someone put a giant Pasta triangle -"
"Pascal's triangle."
"That's right," Evan agreed, nudging his right leg between Radek's thighs. "Anyway, according to Colonel Sheppard, that triangle somehow shows the gifts in The Twelve Days of Christmas."
"Yes, well, you see," Radek said nervously, "the first row is the partridge in -" His voice trailed off as Evan started to nuzzle behind his left ear.
"Radek?"
"Yes, Evan?"
"Was that your way of giving me the twelve gifts of Christmas?"
"Um -" Evan thought he might have been planning to say something else, so he figured it was probably just as well that he'd nibbled on Radek's neck to distract him.
"Is that a yes?"
"Yes?"
Evan put a little space between them to ask, "Does that mean you're my true love?"
Radek started to speak then apparently decided not to, in favor of holding Evan's face to kiss him. As answers went, it wasn't exactly concise, but then again, Evan figured, love wasn't all that concise either.