(no subject)
Title: How to Do (Just About) Everything, part 1
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairing: McShep
Notes: Written for the 'Blame Someone Else!' challenge at summercon. My prompt was gven by scribblinlenore: John and Rodney decide they should go on a date before just jumping into bed together, the universe conspires against them. I couldn't finish this for deadline, so rather than cobbling together a rush ending, I thought I'd put up what I have so far, and finish it when I can. I just started lectures for the first time at uni today, so I'm a little preoccupied, you could say :)
Unbetaed, all offers considered (seriously)
This fic includes extracts from the book 'How to Do (Just About) Everything', which is published in the UK by Collins.
Rodney looked at the book. The perky, faux-handwriting on its cover looked back.
He picked up his coffee and looked at the book again. He’d been trying to stop looking for half an hour already, with no joy.
He picked it up, and opened it to the bookmark.
~-~-~-~
HOW TO TELL IF SOMEONE LIKES YOU ROMANTICALLY
1. Pay attention to your conversations with the person in question. Does this person show a special interest in talking with you and, once it’s started, make an effort to keep that conversation going?
2. Does this person ‘accidentally’ run into you in places where he knows you will be, such as at your desk? At the launderette on Tuesdays? At your brother’s birthday party?
3. Notice whether this person mentions future plans to spend time with you: “That band is coming here soon. We should really get tickets.”
4. Notice if the person is making an effort to spend time alone together. Cancelling other plans in order to be with you longer, or finding excuses not to leave, could be a sign of romantic interest.
5. Has the person been calling for seemingly random reasons, such as, “I was wondering if you knew what that pizza place down the street was called,” followed by, “Are you hungry?”
6. Has the person taken a sudden interest in your life and hobbies? This is a sure sign that he is interested in something - and it’s probably not your stamp collection.
7. Observe how the person acts around your friends - he might be extra friendly to your closest pals for a reason.
“Well, shit,” said Rodney.
~-~-~-~
It all started when Colonel Sheppard gave him the damn book.
“This sounded like it might be up your street,” Sheppard said, and laughed at the look on Rodney’s face when he read the title - “How to Do (Just About) Everything”.
“I already do everything around here,” Rodney said, staring at the book. When Sheppard had said he’d got Rodney a birthday present on his last trip to Earth, he’d assumed he’d meant one of two things - either coffee or chocolate, or, if he was very lucky, chocolate-covered coffee beans.
But, no.
“That’s why I bought it.” Sheppard grinned, rocking back and forward on his heels and looking supremely pleased with himself. “This way you can still do everything around here but do it right the first time, instead of causing increasingly unlikely scenarios in which we almost die like you usually do.”
“Hey!”
“You might want to check out number five twenty five,” John added as he hooked his thumbs into his beltloops, seemingly offhandedly, but Rodney knew better than to expect offhandedness from Sheppard when he was obviously trying to mess with Rodney’s head as much as humanely possible in one fell swoop, thereby saving himself lots of catching-up later. “You definitely could use some pointers, McKay.”
By the time Rodney had flipped to the right page and found “How to Get People to Sleep With You” written on a scrappy piece of paper in big black letters and Sheppard’s handwriting, Sheppard himself was gone, whistling as he went.
“You’re such a dick, Sheppard,” he muttered under his breath, but in the back of his mind he was wondering.
~-~-~-~
He made a list and compared it to the one in the book.
How to Know if Sheppard Likes Me Romantically
1. He keeps coming down to the lab and asking questions about stuff and won’t go away even when I throw things at him.
2. He keeps coming down to the lab. Or the Commissary. Or the lab.
3. He keeps making me come to team nights even if Teyla and Ronon can’t make it, even when I’m RIDICULOUSLY BUSY. And then he feeds me popcorn.
4. He keeps making me go to bed when the lab is empty and I can finally THINK without MORONS making stuff explode everywhere.
5. “Rodney, do you know where I left my (insert space here)?”
“In the ‘jumper, where else?”
“Where in the ‘jumper?”
“For goodness’ sake, I’ll come show you, okay?”
6. “Look, Rodney, I brought you coffee.”
7. He keeps asking Zelenka questions about me and what I’m doing when I’m pretending I can’t hear him
~-~-~-~
“The book says we should date first,” Rodney said the next day, when Sheppard sat down across from him for breakfast, that so-on-purpose hair artistically ruffled and ready for the day.
Okay, getting sprayed with coffee was not one of the desired outcomes of this conversation.
“Jesus, Rodney, what the hell?” John spluttered as he wiped coffee off his pants with one of the tiny ineffectual napkins, looking somewhat like a stunned bush baby, all enormous round eyes and stupid quantities of fuzz. “Firstly, before what, and secondly, what the hell?”
“Oh come on, that thing with the book was even less subtle than the alien hookers you seem to land left right and centre every time we go offworld. ‘Oh, come to my room alone at midnight, Colonel Sheppard, I’m holding a special Harvest Party in my pants.’”
“McKay, I - ”
“Come see me when you’ve decided to drop the ‘you misunderstand, miss - oh, what big tits you have’ act,” Rodney added, somewhat smugly, and went back to the lab. Some of the Marines gave him funny looks on the way out, but the incident with the coffee pot and his swift, brutal but - so he liked to think - fair retaliation had beaten any thoughts of messing with him or the other scientists out of their tiny minds months ago.
He realised when he got in the transporter that he was actually humming.
~-~-~-~
Over the next few days Rodney got a lot more work done, because Colonel Sheppard stopped coming to the lab to bother him and turn things on before he was ready for them to be turned on, which inevitably had horrible consequences, this being the Pegasus Galaxy and all. He also woke up face down on a keyboard more often than not, and found that the coffee never lasted as long when he wasn’t being brought extra from somewhere else.
The fact that every time Sheppard saw Rodney anywhere in the city, from meetings to the Commissary, he made that stunned bush baby face and his eyes flicked from side to side searching for an escape route only made Rodney more certain that Sheppard hadn’t expected to be caught out so quickly and hadn’t come up with a response yet that wouldn’t mean he had to admit Rodney’s comparative genius and observational skills.
They were due to go offworld on Thursday morning, and Rodney was just tightening the straps on his vest and making sure he could reach his laptop from where it velcroed on to his back when the door swished open and Sheppard barged his way into Rodney’s room, P-90 in hand and looking really quite wild-eyed, enough so that Rodney flung his arms up in front of his head and yelled “Don’t shoot! A terminal gunshot wound does not a Nobel Prize make!”
Between his fingers Rodney saw the brief moment where Sheppard did his ‘what the hell’ thing before the Colonel noticed the P-90 that was pointing right at his Chief Scientist and lowered it sheepishly. “Jesus, Rodney, I’m not going to shoot you, you moron.”
“How was I supposed to know that? You might be trying to get rid of me so you don’t have to deal with your overwhelming lust for me any longer,” Rodney said, but he lowered his arms.
“I don’t lust for you!” Sheppard waved his arms around emphatically, and the barrel of the P-90 swung around everywhere, which had Rodney yelling too. “It was a joke, McKay, not a come-on!”
“Seriously, though, we’re dating first,” Rodney said when Sheppard had actually let go of the P-90 to let it hang at his side, crossing his arms across his chest and raising an eyebrow. “None of this ‘I can only be here for one night, but our love will last forever if only you sleep with me, I will think of you when I lie alone under the stars in Atlantis’ stuff.”
Across the room Sheppard was biting his lip hard enough that it was going white, and was that blood?
“I don’t believe this.” Muttered quietly, and followed by an explosive sigh. “Rodney, fine, I will never sleep with you unless we have dated first. That is not to say that we are actually ever going to go on a date. Hell will freeze over first.”
Rodney grinned. “Well, this is the Pegasus Galaxy. You never know.”
“We’re going to be late for the mission,” Sheppard said from between clenched teeth, and left.
~-~-~-~
“First you must both be hit with the Stick of Love,” the Head Elder of the Village of Kuungao was saying, smiling beatifically at them both where they had been tied to a post in the centre of the village, bound wrist to wrist on either side of the pole, which was too high to lift one side over and free themselves, “for the trials love brings us.”
“HELL no, I am not letting you hit me with your ‘love stick’,” Rodney snapped, indignant, as Sheppard continued trying to wriggle his wrists enough to loosen their bonds. “That’s called ‘sexual assa- oh.”
Both of them were lightly tapped on the forehead with a leafy twig that smelt like dirt and bugs, and made Rodney sneeze. “Where there are trials, there is growth,” said the old man, handing it off to a boy in a long robe at his side, who took it over to the fire they’d set up just outside on of the huts and set the end alight. “There is also passion,” the Elder said, and kissed Rodney on the forehead before he could do anything to stop him. “And now you are prepared.”
“McKay,” Sheppard whispered as their wrists were untied on one side, his meaning clear as ‘get ready,’ but then two enormous boulders of men wearing nothing but leafy tutus came into view and Rodney could feel the other man deflate as their chance of escape dwindled. “Why does this always happen to us?”
“Because Ronon and Teyla can run faster?”
They were dumped in a hut on the outskirts of the village, built solidly of wood with what they had to assume was a bar being dropped across the door from the outside by the thump.
“We never get nice prisons, either,” Rodney said, looking at the dirt floor beneath his feet as Sheppard used his free hand to untie their wrists. “Nobody here has any idea of Human Rights.”
“I’m not sure ‘don’t tie people up and throw them into a love nest then threaten to kill them if you don’t find them in bed together when you come back’ is on the list at the UN, Rodney,” Sheppard said as the ropes came untied, and pointed at the huge pile of furs and stuff on the other side of the one room.
Rodney stared.
“Did you put them up to this? It’s just the sort of sneaky thing you’d do to get out of your promise,” he snapped finally, shooting Sheppard a dirty look. “You bribed them, didn’t you? With the last of my good coffee!”
“Zelenka steals your coffee all the time, Rodney, you bitch about it to me every day, so why all of a sudden do you think I’m the one who took it? And brought it on a mission and somehow when you weren’t looking bribed the locals to tie us up and throw us into bed together when I’M NOT EVEN GAY? Now shut up and get over there before they come stick us with those spears, they look like they’ve been coated in something, probably unpleasant.”
“You so are,” Rodney muttered, not quite under his breath, and went over to the bed and started to strip.
~-~-~-~
“There’s only one bed,” Sheppard said flatly, looking back from the doorway at Rodney with what might have been described as a desperate gleam in his eye.
This was the fifth mission in a row.
“I hate you,” Rodney said to the attendant who had brought them here, who looked rather shocked. “I hate you with all the burning fury of a thousand suns. We want to date first!”
He was sure he could hear Teyla and Ronon giggling madly in the room next door and making no attempt to hide it.
“He doesn’t mean it, he gets cranky this time of the month,” Sheppard said, and shoved Rodney into the bedroom, shutting the door behind them, before Rodney could so much as object. “They might have a ZPM, Rodney, and you want to piss them off just because you can’t handle the fact that you have to sleep next to me? Hell, I’ll sleep on the floor. Just shut up and go to bed.”
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairing: McShep
Notes: Written for the 'Blame Someone Else!' challenge at summercon. My prompt was gven by scribblinlenore: John and Rodney decide they should go on a date before just jumping into bed together, the universe conspires against them. I couldn't finish this for deadline, so rather than cobbling together a rush ending, I thought I'd put up what I have so far, and finish it when I can. I just started lectures for the first time at uni today, so I'm a little preoccupied, you could say :)
Unbetaed, all offers considered (seriously)
This fic includes extracts from the book 'How to Do (Just About) Everything', which is published in the UK by Collins.
Rodney looked at the book. The perky, faux-handwriting on its cover looked back.
He picked up his coffee and looked at the book again. He’d been trying to stop looking for half an hour already, with no joy.
He picked it up, and opened it to the bookmark.
~-~-~-~
HOW TO TELL IF SOMEONE LIKES YOU ROMANTICALLY
1. Pay attention to your conversations with the person in question. Does this person show a special interest in talking with you and, once it’s started, make an effort to keep that conversation going?
2. Does this person ‘accidentally’ run into you in places where he knows you will be, such as at your desk? At the launderette on Tuesdays? At your brother’s birthday party?
3. Notice whether this person mentions future plans to spend time with you: “That band is coming here soon. We should really get tickets.”
4. Notice if the person is making an effort to spend time alone together. Cancelling other plans in order to be with you longer, or finding excuses not to leave, could be a sign of romantic interest.
5. Has the person been calling for seemingly random reasons, such as, “I was wondering if you knew what that pizza place down the street was called,” followed by, “Are you hungry?”
6. Has the person taken a sudden interest in your life and hobbies? This is a sure sign that he is interested in something - and it’s probably not your stamp collection.
7. Observe how the person acts around your friends - he might be extra friendly to your closest pals for a reason.
“Well, shit,” said Rodney.
~-~-~-~
It all started when Colonel Sheppard gave him the damn book.
“This sounded like it might be up your street,” Sheppard said, and laughed at the look on Rodney’s face when he read the title - “How to Do (Just About) Everything”.
“I already do everything around here,” Rodney said, staring at the book. When Sheppard had said he’d got Rodney a birthday present on his last trip to Earth, he’d assumed he’d meant one of two things - either coffee or chocolate, or, if he was very lucky, chocolate-covered coffee beans.
But, no.
“That’s why I bought it.” Sheppard grinned, rocking back and forward on his heels and looking supremely pleased with himself. “This way you can still do everything around here but do it right the first time, instead of causing increasingly unlikely scenarios in which we almost die like you usually do.”
“Hey!”
“You might want to check out number five twenty five,” John added as he hooked his thumbs into his beltloops, seemingly offhandedly, but Rodney knew better than to expect offhandedness from Sheppard when he was obviously trying to mess with Rodney’s head as much as humanely possible in one fell swoop, thereby saving himself lots of catching-up later. “You definitely could use some pointers, McKay.”
By the time Rodney had flipped to the right page and found “How to Get People to Sleep With You” written on a scrappy piece of paper in big black letters and Sheppard’s handwriting, Sheppard himself was gone, whistling as he went.
“You’re such a dick, Sheppard,” he muttered under his breath, but in the back of his mind he was wondering.
~-~-~-~
He made a list and compared it to the one in the book.
How to Know if Sheppard Likes Me Romantically
1. He keeps coming down to the lab and asking questions about stuff and won’t go away even when I throw things at him.
2. He keeps coming down to the lab. Or the Commissary. Or the lab.
3. He keeps making me come to team nights even if Teyla and Ronon can’t make it, even when I’m RIDICULOUSLY BUSY. And then he feeds me popcorn.
4. He keeps making me go to bed when the lab is empty and I can finally THINK without MORONS making stuff explode everywhere.
5. “Rodney, do you know where I left my (insert space here)?”
“In the ‘jumper, where else?”
“Where in the ‘jumper?”
“For goodness’ sake, I’ll come show you, okay?”
6. “Look, Rodney, I brought you coffee.”
7. He keeps asking Zelenka questions about me and what I’m doing when I’m pretending I can’t hear him
~-~-~-~
“The book says we should date first,” Rodney said the next day, when Sheppard sat down across from him for breakfast, that so-on-purpose hair artistically ruffled and ready for the day.
Okay, getting sprayed with coffee was not one of the desired outcomes of this conversation.
“Jesus, Rodney, what the hell?” John spluttered as he wiped coffee off his pants with one of the tiny ineffectual napkins, looking somewhat like a stunned bush baby, all enormous round eyes and stupid quantities of fuzz. “Firstly, before what, and secondly, what the hell?”
“Oh come on, that thing with the book was even less subtle than the alien hookers you seem to land left right and centre every time we go offworld. ‘Oh, come to my room alone at midnight, Colonel Sheppard, I’m holding a special Harvest Party in my pants.’”
“McKay, I - ”
“Come see me when you’ve decided to drop the ‘you misunderstand, miss - oh, what big tits you have’ act,” Rodney added, somewhat smugly, and went back to the lab. Some of the Marines gave him funny looks on the way out, but the incident with the coffee pot and his swift, brutal but - so he liked to think - fair retaliation had beaten any thoughts of messing with him or the other scientists out of their tiny minds months ago.
He realised when he got in the transporter that he was actually humming.
~-~-~-~
Over the next few days Rodney got a lot more work done, because Colonel Sheppard stopped coming to the lab to bother him and turn things on before he was ready for them to be turned on, which inevitably had horrible consequences, this being the Pegasus Galaxy and all. He also woke up face down on a keyboard more often than not, and found that the coffee never lasted as long when he wasn’t being brought extra from somewhere else.
The fact that every time Sheppard saw Rodney anywhere in the city, from meetings to the Commissary, he made that stunned bush baby face and his eyes flicked from side to side searching for an escape route only made Rodney more certain that Sheppard hadn’t expected to be caught out so quickly and hadn’t come up with a response yet that wouldn’t mean he had to admit Rodney’s comparative genius and observational skills.
They were due to go offworld on Thursday morning, and Rodney was just tightening the straps on his vest and making sure he could reach his laptop from where it velcroed on to his back when the door swished open and Sheppard barged his way into Rodney’s room, P-90 in hand and looking really quite wild-eyed, enough so that Rodney flung his arms up in front of his head and yelled “Don’t shoot! A terminal gunshot wound does not a Nobel Prize make!”
Between his fingers Rodney saw the brief moment where Sheppard did his ‘what the hell’ thing before the Colonel noticed the P-90 that was pointing right at his Chief Scientist and lowered it sheepishly. “Jesus, Rodney, I’m not going to shoot you, you moron.”
“How was I supposed to know that? You might be trying to get rid of me so you don’t have to deal with your overwhelming lust for me any longer,” Rodney said, but he lowered his arms.
“I don’t lust for you!” Sheppard waved his arms around emphatically, and the barrel of the P-90 swung around everywhere, which had Rodney yelling too. “It was a joke, McKay, not a come-on!”
“Seriously, though, we’re dating first,” Rodney said when Sheppard had actually let go of the P-90 to let it hang at his side, crossing his arms across his chest and raising an eyebrow. “None of this ‘I can only be here for one night, but our love will last forever if only you sleep with me, I will think of you when I lie alone under the stars in Atlantis’ stuff.”
Across the room Sheppard was biting his lip hard enough that it was going white, and was that blood?
“I don’t believe this.” Muttered quietly, and followed by an explosive sigh. “Rodney, fine, I will never sleep with you unless we have dated first. That is not to say that we are actually ever going to go on a date. Hell will freeze over first.”
Rodney grinned. “Well, this is the Pegasus Galaxy. You never know.”
“We’re going to be late for the mission,” Sheppard said from between clenched teeth, and left.
~-~-~-~
“First you must both be hit with the Stick of Love,” the Head Elder of the Village of Kuungao was saying, smiling beatifically at them both where they had been tied to a post in the centre of the village, bound wrist to wrist on either side of the pole, which was too high to lift one side over and free themselves, “for the trials love brings us.”
“HELL no, I am not letting you hit me with your ‘love stick’,” Rodney snapped, indignant, as Sheppard continued trying to wriggle his wrists enough to loosen their bonds. “That’s called ‘sexual assa- oh.”
Both of them were lightly tapped on the forehead with a leafy twig that smelt like dirt and bugs, and made Rodney sneeze. “Where there are trials, there is growth,” said the old man, handing it off to a boy in a long robe at his side, who took it over to the fire they’d set up just outside on of the huts and set the end alight. “There is also passion,” the Elder said, and kissed Rodney on the forehead before he could do anything to stop him. “And now you are prepared.”
“McKay,” Sheppard whispered as their wrists were untied on one side, his meaning clear as ‘get ready,’ but then two enormous boulders of men wearing nothing but leafy tutus came into view and Rodney could feel the other man deflate as their chance of escape dwindled. “Why does this always happen to us?”
“Because Ronon and Teyla can run faster?”
They were dumped in a hut on the outskirts of the village, built solidly of wood with what they had to assume was a bar being dropped across the door from the outside by the thump.
“We never get nice prisons, either,” Rodney said, looking at the dirt floor beneath his feet as Sheppard used his free hand to untie their wrists. “Nobody here has any idea of Human Rights.”
“I’m not sure ‘don’t tie people up and throw them into a love nest then threaten to kill them if you don’t find them in bed together when you come back’ is on the list at the UN, Rodney,” Sheppard said as the ropes came untied, and pointed at the huge pile of furs and stuff on the other side of the one room.
Rodney stared.
“Did you put them up to this? It’s just the sort of sneaky thing you’d do to get out of your promise,” he snapped finally, shooting Sheppard a dirty look. “You bribed them, didn’t you? With the last of my good coffee!”
“Zelenka steals your coffee all the time, Rodney, you bitch about it to me every day, so why all of a sudden do you think I’m the one who took it? And brought it on a mission and somehow when you weren’t looking bribed the locals to tie us up and throw us into bed together when I’M NOT EVEN GAY? Now shut up and get over there before they come stick us with those spears, they look like they’ve been coated in something, probably unpleasant.”
“You so are,” Rodney muttered, not quite under his breath, and went over to the bed and started to strip.
~-~-~-~
“There’s only one bed,” Sheppard said flatly, looking back from the doorway at Rodney with what might have been described as a desperate gleam in his eye.
This was the fifth mission in a row.
“I hate you,” Rodney said to the attendant who had brought them here, who looked rather shocked. “I hate you with all the burning fury of a thousand suns. We want to date first!”
He was sure he could hear Teyla and Ronon giggling madly in the room next door and making no attempt to hide it.
“He doesn’t mean it, he gets cranky this time of the month,” Sheppard said, and shoved Rodney into the bedroom, shutting the door behind them, before Rodney could so much as object. “They might have a ZPM, Rodney, and you want to piss them off just because you can’t handle the fact that you have to sleep next to me? Hell, I’ll sleep on the floor. Just shut up and go to bed.”