#// the whole apartment mudslide shit show is tiring

[blacknpurplewarpster]

Today is an utter shit show and he wants it to be over with.

[salchat]

Someone Furry

Rodney missed his cat.  He missed the way she’d jump up onto his lap and drape herself over his legs, her soft, heavy weight warming him from inside and out.  He missed the feel of her fur between his fingers, the way he could run his hand the whole length of her body from her nose, over her flattened ears, down her soft sides and then, his hand closed to surround it, all the way to the tip of her tail.  He missed her deep, thrumming purr, the chirps and brips she made in response to his voice, so that they often had far more sensible conversations than he ever did with his colleagues.

But most of all he missed her simple presence, her neutral acceptance of everything he did, everything he was; her wide golden eyes that regarded him, not with contempt as some people interpreted the penetrating gaze of a cat, but with all-seeing, all-knowing recognition of him as belonging absolutely and completely to her.

He’d left her.  Of course he’d left her on Earth.  He’d had to.  And he’d known he’d probably never see her again and it had torn a hole in his heart that he didn’t think was ever likely to heal.  Had her feline heart suffered similar damage?  Or did she regard her new owner with that wide-eyed gaze and then jump up onto their lap and present herself for their attention in the way he missed so much?  Probably.  Cats were pragmatists.  It was a fact of life.

Rodney eased out his back and spun around on his stool, unsurprised to find the lab empty.  He stretched up to peer over the top of Radek’s screen, but there were no tufts of wild hair or glinting rims of glasses or exhausted, propped-open eyes.  And no wonder - it was nearly three in the morning.

He yawned, scratched his head, scratched his stomach and then, because there was no one about, he reached up under his shirt and had a general scratch around, chasing an itch that ran from his questing fingers.  He ran it to ground on his right shoulder blade, his left shoulder cracking as he reached behind himself to wipe the itch out of existence with sweeps of his thumb.  Then he stretched himself out again and adjusted his shirt into some kind of order.

Was Sheppard back yet?  No,  He couldn’t be.  It was more than the Gate techs’ lives were worth not to inform him immediately of any updates in John’s status, when he’d given them such very firm, explicit instructions.  Anyway, there was no need to worry, he told himself - again.  John was out doing good works, overseeing both Lorne’s team and Stackhouse’s team while they helped out a village hit by a mudslide.  And what the inhabitants of the Pegasus Galaxy had done before Intergalactic Rescue had shown up Rodney had no idea, but he thought just occasionally they should go back to doing whatever it was they had done before and leave Atlantis out of it, and especially an over-tired, mission-weary, easily-guilt-tripped-into-doing-whatever-you-want John Sheppard.

“They’re our allies, Rodney - they help us, we help them.”

Huh.  Rodney spent a satisfying ten minutes grumbling aloud to himself about a bunch of rustics who’d never have anything useful to contribute apart from a few inferior, knobbly vegetables that tasted of mouldy turnip, so why should John have to bother helping them?  Of course, Rodney had found the problem in their Ancient aqueduct system.  And there’d been that kid who kept hanging around him and calling him Dr Rodanee-sir and bringing him cups of the local drink which tasted remarkably like chocolate milkshake.  But those things were beside the point.  And John had flat-out denied Rodney’s request to go on the rescue mission.

Anyway, he was tired and he missed his cat.  Because sometimes you just needed someone furry, and that was all there was to it.

He went to bed.

In the morning Sheppard still wasn’t back and everyone in the lab was being more than usually stupid and noisy and so wrong that he had to make them all stop what they were doing so that he could enumerate and elaborate on all the ways in which they were wrong, providing each member of his staff with a detailed verbal list that they should damn well take notes on for future reference.  And yes, he would be testing them on their knowledge of their own wrongness at an unspecified future date.

Then Stackhouse’s team came back, exhausted and covered in mud.  Then Lorne’s team, ditto.  Then (and Rodney thought there might be dents in the Gateroom railing from his clenched hands), finally, Sheppard staggered through the Gate, more exhausted and more covered in mud than any of them.

John looked up at Rodney and Rodney looked down at John.  His muddy right hand twitched in what was probably an attempt at a wave conveying his general fineness and that nobody should worry or fuss or do anything that expressed the remotest kind of concern.  It was a pathetic attempt and merely underlined his not fineness and that everyone and most particularly Rodney, should definitely be concerned.

Rodney found himself at John’s side, unsure how he’d transported himself down from the control level - a giant leap over the crushed railing?  Levitation?

Medical staff harried the muddy men and women away, and Rodney followed, at John’s side, not touching him, because… ew.  There wasn’t a square inch of unmuddied skin.  Even John’s eyes were red, as if they’d got mud in too.  And his hair was just unnatural - plastered to his head, showing the actual shape of his skull, which you just never saw, even when he was straight out of the shower because mere water was nothing against the springiness of John Sheppard’s hair.  A couple of times Rodney looked around in case he was shadowing the wrong mud-monster, but no, this brown figure was definitely the right shape and size and seemed to have that slouchy gait, even though its feet were dragging and its arms dangling in abject weariness.

They wouldn’t let Rodney in the infirmary.  And it was Rodney who’d helped install the roomful of showers for just such an occasion as this, when filthy, exhausted teams came back, probably contaminated with all kinds of viruses and parasites, germs and bacteria and no doubt hiding injuries beneath their assorted filth.

So he sat down and waited.  And no, it wasn’t the same as waiting for news when John had been carried to the infirmary, injured and unable to make it under his own steam.  It wasn’t as if Rodney was waiting, terrified, for life-or-death news, biting his nails and chewing the inside of his cheek until it bled.

But he really missed his cat.  And he’d had a bad day - a bad few days.  Which surely must be all John’s fault, because most things were, or at least they were his absence’s fault because you just needed someone like John around all the time for some reason.  Look, he wasn’t going to analyse it, alright?  It was a fact.  And Rodney missed his cat.

And probably Carson would want to keep John here - for observation.  Rodney snorted, spraying bits of chewed up nail onto the floor.  If John needed observing he’d do it - because who better to observe than a scientist?  Observing was what he did.  He’d watch John like a hawk, he’d take notes and draw diagrams, he’d gather data, both quantitative and qualitative, he’d hypothesise and extrapolate.  What more could any medical so-called professional do?

“Yes, you can go.”  The doctor’s long suffering voice followed a round-shouldered scrub-clad figure through the barely slid-open doors.

“Hey, Rodney.”

Rodney stood up, beginning his scrutiny right here and now.  “Your eyes are red.  You need antibiotic drops.”

“Had them.”

“Has that scrape on your face been disinfected?”

“Yeah.”

“The bandage on your wrist - what’s that hiding?”

“t’s just sprained.  Can we get out of here?”

Rodney folded his arms and conveyed through his most steely glare that John had better not try to hide even the most minor of injuries from him or he’d been in a whole shit-tonne of trouble which would make a mudslide look like that time some idiot had knocked over Rodney’s chocolate pudding.

“You’re coming with me.”

He took John’s arm, because there was no way he was allowing a rudderless John Sheppard to drift away from him.  The exhausted man didn’t wriggle away or even protest, which made Rodney grumble angrily under his breath about societies that couldn’t clear up after their own natural disasters and just had to go and impose themselves upon overworked Colonels.

They made it to his room and he let John slither onto the bed and stacked up the pillows around him until he was approximately upright with most of his limbs on the bed.

“This is your room, Rodney.”

“Yes.  It is.  And you’re in it.”

“’kay.”

“Humph.”  Rodney nodded, glad John had accepted his to-be-pushed-around status.  “First you’re going to eat.  And then you’re going to sleep.”

“Yessir,” slurred John.

Rodney boiled some water and made some instant mashed potato, which was one of his preferred food choices in cases of extreme exhaustion.  It was the cheesy mash type, which was his covetously-hoarded favourite, but John looked like a man in great need of a large bowl of cheesy mash.  With a blob of ketchup on top.  Maybe more than one blob.

John smiled a sleepy smile at the ketchup blobs, which may have formed a crude happy face, but that was, of course, a complete accident on Rodney’s part.  The mash was mechanically consumed.  Rodney took the bowl and then pushed a glass into John’s hand, making sure his scraped knuckles curled around it.  The glass contained chocolate milkshake, but only because he’d been thinking today about that stuff they made on the mudslide planet.  He hadn’t gone out of his way to get the powder or the milk.  And absolutely no begging had been involved at the entrance to the hallowed, jealously guarded territory of the kitchen staff.

He sat down next to John, glad that he hadn’t been stupid enough to take his friend back to his own room with its tiny bed.  This way he too could sit propped up by a bank of pillows, which were necessary to support his back while he carried out his purely clinical observations of his team leader.

John drained the glass and he was too tired and too oblivious to wipe away his milkshake moustache, so Rodney did it for him.

Then John smiled another lop-sided sleepy smile, his eyelids drooped and shut down completely and his slumped body slumped even more, slowly slithering down until his head rested in Rodney’s lap.

Rodney missed his cat.  He missed the way she’d jump up onto his lap and drape herself over his legs, her soft, heavy weight warming him from inside and out.  He missed the feel of her fur between his fingers, the way he could run his hand the whole length of her body from her nose, over her flattened ears, down her soft sides and then, his hand closed to surround it, all the way to the tip of her tail.  He missed her deep, thrumming purr, the chirps and brips she made in response to his voice, so that they often had far more sensible conversations than he ever did with his colleagues.

But Rodney had his friend.  He had John, who had fallen asleep on him, his head heavy on Rodney’s thighs, his newly-washed hair fluffy and thick and dark.  He touched the soft strands and they tickled his palm.  Then he ran his hand over and through the dense thicket, from John’s forehead, curving all the way around his head to the nape of his neck where the hairs were short and usually they looked scratchy, but at the moment they too felt soft and fine.  He lifted his hand and stroked again, the hair running through his fingers, dragging and flattening, then freeing itself to spring up into feathery plumes.  Then once again and again, slowly, gently, with a rhythm of love and peace.

And in Rodney’s chest a knot released and something warm and sweet and caramelly-rich blossomed and spread out until his body was as loose and relaxed as John’s.

He missed his cat.  But he had his friend, who he loved and who loved him in return.  And as Rodney stroked and stroked and watched John’s slow, happy rise and fall of deep-sleep breathing, the exhausted man began to snore, in a gentle, thrumming, rumble, which sounded remarkably like a purr.