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"Huh," says John, and Rodney's shoulders tense, because things that start with John's thoughtful "Huh" often bode ominous for Rodney.
Huh, says John, followed by, looks like we're going to get some powder this weekend, wanna go skiing? Or: Huh. This news article says men over thirty can get cancer from chocolate. And the next thing Rodney knows, he's strapped to fiberglass planks whooshing down a mountain, or discouraged from eating more than a gram a day of his favorite food.
"What," Rodney says, his hands suspended over the keyboard in dread.
"Says here," John tells him, "you can use olive oil to fix a squeaky hinge." And then, portentously, he picks up the extra virgin olive oil.
"What are you doing?" Rodney asks.
"The door of the closet in the guest room is kind of squeaky."
"Well, instead of dripping olive oil everywhere and making the whole room smell like Mediterranean food and hip San Francisco dives, how about using the can of WD-40 that lives in the garage, and has a spray nozzle for just this purpose."
"Yeah, I looked for that a couple days ago," says John blithely. "I didn't see it."
"It's in the garage, it should be right there on the shelf," Rodney answers, and goes back to composing his paper, designed to deftly refute a wrong-headed theory of quantum gravity that's unfortunately winning a few adherents of late. He likes to make sure that the physics community doesn't go completely off the rails while the best minds are busy with the SGC.
"I've got peppermint oil," John says, and Rodney's hands freeze again as John goes on, "If you can use olive oil for a hinge, any essential oil should work, right? So I'll try that. It'll smell good."
"No no no no!"
"Why not?"
"Because, not just any oil will work. Some will gum it up, or contain compounds which can eat at the metal. Some essential oils are corrosive! I suppose you also think, 'Oh, guess I can use any oil to protect my skin from the sun!' I've got news for you, buster, they could be photosensitive and cause second degree burns! And some burn, period, sun or no sun. Ever tried to rub cinnamon oil over your hands?"
"Okay, come on, I know that about cinnamon oil, I handle this stuff all the time at work," John says a little sullenly.
"Okay, and so then you also know that peppermint essental oil is way more expensive than the WD-40, which is made for just this purpose." Rodney sighs. "I can't believe I have to give you chemistry lessons."
"Fine, fine," John rolls his eyes and saunters off, tossing over his shoulder, "I'll go look in the garage again."
Rodney stares blankly at his screen, the cursor blinking away at the end of Consider the absorption of fermion particles by a spinning black hole|
Consider the paradox of John Sheppard, he thinks. Rodney generally tries to avoid preconceptions. The best ideas come to the open-minded, after all, the ones who lack blinders and perceive reality clearly and find solutions to fit the facts, not their own distorted perceptions.
And John defies easy categorization. He's a baker who's also an ex-Air Force pilot, a fit, handsome, football-loving athlete as well as a geek who likes math and science fiction and video games.
Even Rodney, though, falls victim to assumption occasionally. John can fix a car, and appears unintimidated by problems with plumbing, mechanical devices, and consumer electronics. There have never been any blinking 12:00s in his loft or bakery, and Rodney once found him knowledgeably disassembling his mixer to find and solder a loose wire. Rodney was the one who put it back together, because the second John put away the soldering iron, Rodney had no choice but to suck his cock. Still, he has every confidence that John could have reassembled the thing if he hadn't been indisposed, dazed and sloe-eyed, slumped against Rodney's shoulder.
The point being, John is a man of many areas of competence. And when they went house-hunting together, he seemed to have a grasp on the basics of house maintenance. He tested faucets and tapped on walls and examined woodwork with every appearance of his usual savvy know-how.
It's been an almighty kick in the pants, then, to discover after moving in that when it comes to the house, most of the time John has no earthly idea what he's doing. Stud finders, carpet tacks, and crown molding are all a beautiful mystery to John; half the time he treats the place like it's made out of gingerbread.
You can't just screw stuff into the walls? asks John with a charming look of perplexity. You have to anchor it? What with?
Why do we need denatured alcohol, why not just use rubbing alcohol?
That's insulation? I thought maybe you bought a bale of cotton candy.
He might have been sarcastic with that last one, but Rodney has to wonder.
Rodney's back to his paper by the time John finally returns from the garage, a certain stomp in his step as he makes his way back to the guest room. Rodney hears a couple of hisses, interspersed with shrill door-waving noises, and the squeaky hinge quiets.
"There," John says loudly as he passes through again on his way back to the garage.
Even with his paltry social skills, Rodney knows to fear that tone and body language. He's past the glorious pique that drove him to start the paper, anyway, and into the mild tedium of debunking foolishness point by point, so he can shut down the computer with little regret and follow John.
The garage still looks fresh and nice, and if Rodney has his way, it'll stay like this. He had tidy shelving and pegboards put in, and hired a service to coat and seal the concrete against oil stains. He's harbored a few idle fantasies of John tinkering out here; it's not really a big deal that John's not turning out to be a toolbelt kind of guy, but it does dash a few compelling mental images Rodney's had going for a while.
Meanwhile, the real John thumps the WD-40 back on the shelf with a sulky glare.
"What?" Rodney asks. "Hey. It's just a hinge, calm down."
"I'm calm!" John shrugs. "It just took forever to find that stuff and it's annoying."
For some reason, even though he knows it's the exact wrong thing to say, Rodney asks: "Well, where was it?"
"I put it back where I found it," John says, turning the glare up to eleven. It's ridiculously sexy when he does that, maybe the legacy of his time in the Air Force, his take-charge military command... thing.
Rodney tries to focus on that, and not on the screamingly obvious can of WD-40, sitting front and center, blue and bright yellow on the eye-level shelf nearby. He breaks, though, and glances right at it, and John looks still more ferociously displeased-- way out of proportion to one squeaky hinge and can of oil.
"Is it, do you feel bad about the house?" Rodney panics. "Are you having second thoughts?"
"Oh, for..." John's irritation seems to dissolve away, the set of his jaw easing. "No, I'm not having some kind of house breakdown, I just had a hard time finding the can."
"Ah, well, good. Okay. The garage shelves could be better," Rodney concedes, though really, it would be a feat: he organized them himself and they're very logically categorized and ergonomically arranged.
"Nah, they're fine. It was right on the front of the shelf, even," John says. "But it's kind of dark in here. Don't you think? We should change the light bulbs to brighter ones."
Rodney just manages not to say that the light looks fine to him, and gets the stepladder down instead.
"Oh, hey, that's where that is." John sets the light bulb cartons down on the workbench and prods a power tool on the shelf. "While we're out here, I've been meaning to ask, what's this thing?"
"It's a belt sander."
"We need one of those?"
Probably they don't. Rodney isn't likely to ever have time to use it in this lifetime, and John doesn't know what it's for. "Maybe," Rodney hedges anyway. "If we ever wanted to do some woodworking. Build our own bookshelves."
"Hm." John steps up on the ladder and changes the lights. For such a narrow guy, he's really got very well developed arms, and Rodney finds himself a little mesmerized.
Rodney's never been able to quantify why one person is considered attractive while another isn't-- he certainly doesn't understand why his own stock seems to have fallen somewhat over the past five years or so, when apart from losing some hair, he thinks he's looking better than ever.
John, though, is definitely someone people like to look at. Rodney's had plenty of opportunities to watch people watching John; he's heard people flirting with John and flattering him, and as far as he can tell, people seem to like just about everything: John's arms and chest and shoulders, his sharp face and full mouth and startlingly fast-growing stubble, his hair (crazy,) his ass (tight,) his runner's legs and swimmer's torso...
He tries to remember what it was like to look at John and only want him. It must have been easy, lusting after the hot guy manning the bakery at all hours. It's not quite as easy to be in love with John Sheppard, who turns oiling a hinge into a minor furor, who doesn't even seem to know what drywall is, who chose a black stove to match the Johnny Cash poster he insisted on putting up in the kitchen that he hardly ever uses because he's even more reluctant to take time off work than Rodney is.
"Better, huh?" John says, descending the stepladder. The garage is approximately .033 foot-candles brighter. But at least now Rodney has proof that only takes one ex-Air Force fighter pilot to change a light bulb.
Rodney steps into John's space, feeling John's arms slip easily around him. "Yeah," he says, and kisses John's soft mouth, breathing in the warm, familiar scent of him: bay rum aftershave, soap, shampoo, the lotion he puts on his scars, and traces of flour, butter and sugar-- baking smells that Rodney might simply associate with John so strongly that he imagines them even when they're not there.
He rubs his cheek against John's lightly, the grit of their stubble catching and rasping. He loves it all... every little catch and itch and scrape, every bicker and eyeroll, every sulk and panic. Rodney smiles, happy, happier still when John tips to rest their brows against one another, smiling back. "Better."