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"This is stupid,” Rodney says, and to prove his point he grabs John’s shoulders and lays one on him. It’s a wet, smacking kiss—silly, for show, and completely undignified. John is stiff and immobile in his arms, his lips unresponsive. The kiss is not full of barely-restrained passion or carefully-concealed lust. It certainly isn’t the kiss of two people who have been tragically pining for one another.
When it’s over—and it’s over pretty quickly—Rodney lets go of a tense John and whirls to face Radek, Chuck, and the rest of their assorted, earnest-looking well-wishers. “There!” he scowls, gesturing between himself and John. “You see? There is nothing going on here! We’re just friends!”
He looks over at John and demands, “Help me out, here!”
The smirk John's wearing is of the "lazy flyboy" variety. On the surface, that smirk says, I think this is funny. But what that smirk actually means, Rodney has learned, is I know over four hundred ways of killing you with my bare hands. Or, you know. Something along those lines.
Right now, he’s aiming that smirk at Rodney. A little bit at everyone else in the room, but mostly? Rodney. “I don’t know, McKay—kiss a guy like that, he could get the wrong idea.”
Rodney rolls his eyes and says, “Please. Don’t flatter yourself, Colonel.”
“Nah, you’re right,” John decides, idly scratching the back of his neck. “It was kind of a shitty kiss. I’m pretty sure I could do a lot better than you.”
The assembled crowd mutters, agitated. Clearly, this isn’t going the way they’d planned. Rodney bristles, because surely, that last comment of John’s was a bit unnecessary. But he’s distracted by Radek, who’s looking at them both like—Jesus, like somebody kicked his puppy.
“So, even though you are no longer restricted by the cold and unfeeling strictures of American military policy, you two will still not admit your feelings for one another?”
“There are no feelings!” Rodney yells, throwing his hands in the air. “Get it through your heads, all of you! Sheppard and I are not a couple! We are not going to be a couple! We haven’t spent the past four years tragically pining for each other, and we haven’t been ‘denying our love’—and what the hell does that even mean, anyway?”
Radek opens his mouth, probably to say something stupid, so Rodney quickly says “Actually, I don’t want to know. The point is, this is stupid. All of you get the hell out of my lab.” Then he crosses his arms and glares. Next to him, John is nodding and sending out don’t fuck with me vibes. The tension from earlier is closer to the surface now; Rodney's pretty sure that, if things had gone on much longer, John would have started fondling his gun in that slightly terrifying way of his.
The crowd grumbles, but now that it’s pretty clear no confession of Rodney and Sheppard's Big Gay Love is eminent, they start to drift out the door, muttering among themselves. Radek sadly gathers up the large INTERVENTION banner. He folds it carefully, then turns back to Rodney and John. “You are certain that—”
“Out!” Rodney growls, pointing at the door.
As Radek leaves, Ronon lumbers over to him and says, “You owe me fifty bucks.”
Finally, the door slams shut, and Rodney and John are left alone in the lab. Rodney grabs a Life Signs Detector and gives it a quick scan, but it looks like the meddling hoards really have decided to leave them be: even Radek's dot, still shadowed by Ronon's, is already two corridors away. Still, he gives it a second—two, three—before he bursts out laughing.
John is right there with him, sinking down onto one of the lab benches and letting loose with that terrible guffaw of his. Because they’ve seen some crazy shit in the Pegasus Galaxy over the past five years, sure. But walking into one of the secondary labs and finding their friends staging an honest-to-god intervention in the hopes of saving their (apparently) otherwise-doomed romance? It’s maybe not quite as weird as the space vampires and the killer robots, but it’s definitely up there, right near the top.
“Your face,” John har har hars. Rodney swats ineffectually at his shoulder, but his hands are clumsy with laughter, because Jesus. How is this his life now?
“You’re an asshole,” Rodney tells John, when he can spare the breath. “And it isn’t like you were any better—” he waves his arms, trying to indicate John’s general smarminess but possibly not succeeding. “I pulled all of that out on the spot, thank you. You could have been more helpful. And hey!” he continues, remembering. “I happen to be an excellent kisser!”
John is still smirking, but this time it’s the smirk that he only seems to wear when he’s around Rodney—the one that Rodney is a little afraid to try and translate into words. He settles a little bit deeper into his loose-limbed sprawl on the lab bench and says, “I dunno, McKay. It was kind of a shitty kiss.”
“And you think you can do better than me,” Rodney recalls, scowling at the memory. It had been a completely unnecessary thing for John to say, and it's not like Rodney was hurt or anything, but—
“Pretty sure I can, yeah,” John says, and he licks his lips. Behind them, Rodney hears the door lock.
A slow smile spreads a cross Rodney's face as he looks at John. John, who is unfairly attractive and stupidly heroic, who is lazy, smart, secretly a huge dork and, somehow, Rodney’s. He doesn’t understand this at all. Sometimes he thinks that should worry him more than it does.
Right now, though, he’s got better things to do.
So Rodney climbs onto the lab bench and brackets John’s bony hips with his knees, covers John’s still-smirking lips with his own for a kiss that’s not at all for show. It's just for them, and this time? John kisses back. It’s not silly at all; this kiss is all passion and feeling, all the things that Rodney is terrible at saying aloud but is learning, slowly, to communicate in other ways. It certainly isn’t the kiss of two people who have been tragically pining after one another—it’s easy and comfortable and well-known.
When they break apart, John leans his head forward and they rest their foreheads together. They’re both smiling goofily. John says, “Better,” and Rodney rolls his eyes and says, “Asshole,” and kisses him again.
“We’re not going to be able to keep this from them forever,” John points out, when they break apart the second time.
Rodney nods. “True—Radek’s a tenacious bastard, when motivated. But can you imagine what they’d be like if they knew?”
John laughs, a little crazily, and Rodney knows that he’s imagining the same things that Rodney is. The supportive smiles and the incessant prying and the pressure to do stupid ‘couple’ things. Rodney shudders. “God, they’d make us hold hands in the corridors."
“Or go on dates,” John agrees, nuzzling the skin behind Rodney’s ear.
“We—ah—we already go on dates,” Rodney says, distracted by John's tongue. “We do stuff! Together!”
“They’ll probably say that the RC races don’t count,” John warns him. “They’ll make us go to the movies, or take romantic walks along the South Pier.”
Rodney snorts, because really, that’s just stupid. “Morons.”
“Yeah,” John agrees, and he brings a hand up to Rodney’s cheek and guides him in for another kiss, slow and lazy and full of warmth.