Tiny birthday ficlet

[zinnith]

It was the_cephalopod's birthday yesterday! Tiny little Entangled Particles ficlet for her.



Nonverbal Messages

One of the big issues they come back to over and over again is communication. It's not just the fact that they're guys, even though Laura has this theory about how being in possession of an Y chromosome makes you incapable of talking about important stuff (a theory that has no scientific basis whatsoever, something Rodney has informed her of too many times to count).

It's mostly that John just doesn't do talking. Rodney blames the Sheppard family and the Air Force and a lifetime of being forced to hide who he his. Sometimes he feels like John's entire past is a vast minefield and Rodney is afraid that any attempt to try to clear it is going to cause a big nasty explosion that will end with ripped off limbs and crushed hearts and no more John in his life ever.

John's inability to articulate used to drive Rodney crazy in the beginning - the way he keeps things inside and closes himself off. Every single little piece of John is precious and Rodney doesn't want to miss out on anything, not even the parts John himself thinks he needs to keep hidden for Rodney's sake.

It took him a while to realise that John sometimes needs a lot of time to transform his thoughts into words. Rodney has never really reflected over that process before he met John. His own brain-to-mouth filter is pretty much non-existent and it speaking his mind comes naturally to him. John has to think before he speaks, and if there's one thing Rodney has learned about John Sheppard, it is that there's a lot going on inside that shaggy head of his. If Rodney was more of an asshole than he actually is, he could have accused his boyfriend of being slow, but that's not true, not at all. John is just very thorough. He has to look at everything from every possible angle, calculating outcomes and consequences. (And if that means that he frequently overthinks stuff, well, that's just one more slightly frustrating facet of the complicated jigsaw puzzle that is John Sheppard and that Rodney wouldn't want to change for the world.)

So Rodney has gotten used to asking questions and sometimes having to wait for hours until he gets an answer. He knows that whenever they have a fight, it will more often than not take days to resolve it. He's learned that when John locks himself in the garage four evenings in a row, it's not because he doesn't appreciate Rodney's company but because he has something he needs to work out in his head before he can talk to Rodney about it.

It still drives Rodney crazy sometimes. He needs words like he needs breathing, has built his whole existence around them, and he has no idea why he's chosen to spend his life together with someone who's turned laconic into an art form.

In the end, it doesn't really matter. After all this time, Rodney knows that communication doesn't always have to be verbal.

There's the house John gave up his carefully guarded solitude to buy together with Rodney and then renovated piece by piece with his own two hands. There are the plates of sandwiches that will somehow mysteriously turn up just beside Rodney's elbow when he's in the middle of a drawn-out writing session. There's the scratching post John spent three whole weekends building for Newton, spending more money than strictly necessary on materials for something that was basically constructed for being torn to shreds. There's the piano John bought for their first Christmas together in the house. There's the full pot of coffee in the kitchen (which will occasionally be de-caf when John is in one of those moods, but Rodney has come to recognise it for what it is so he's stopped bitching about it and will just pour the swill out when John's back is turned and replace it with proper coffee.) There's the body-memory of their fingers knitted together, perfectly fitting and right.

Now that he has learned to decipher Sheppardese, Rodney can see the words all these things actually spell:

I love you.

-fin-