19 July 2005
Stargate Atlantis
McKay/Zelenka
almost smutty

He pretends it's not all about brains, but really it is.

Disclaimer: not my sandbox.

For the amazing Spubba, who makes pretty Rodney pictures.




When he was a grad student, Rodney discovered that the women's washrooms on campus had couches in them.  Not one of those things he ever expected to know, but after a few months of continuous all-nighters, he realized that the female researchers in his lab didn't look quite as bad as the male ones, and it turned out they were sneaking naps (2 to 4 a.m., usually) in the ladies' room.

The men's washrooms didn't have couches.

The justification for this gross injustice was that women had cramps, and needed their oh-so-Victorian fainting couches in their ongoing battle with biology.  And that, university life being what it was, any couches in the men's washrooms would have become the sites of unspeakable debauchery.

It proved two things.  First, that the campus planners had never studied the mating habits of engineers, and that they had no idea what was going on in the ladies' room.

Rodney managed to avoid having his first sex ever on one of those ratty brown chaise-lounges, but incidents number two through seven all took place there, tangled up in the ardour of having their creations finally work.

They didn't get credit, of course, because that's why you have supervising faculty, but they got laid, and that was something.

These days, Rodney keeps a couch of sorts in his office, off the labs, because it might be Victorian and girly, but it's also the only way he gets any rest at all.

Bits of things he's working on are all over the floor.  The door to his office has 256-bit encryption on the lock.  And there are a few screamers of his own invention.  He only activates all of them when he needs to sleep more than he needs to punish those who might disturb him.  Mostly, his personality's enough to make people leave him alone.

They're all in place right now.  He's reached that point of exhaustion where even thinking about moving hurts.  So when hands touch his shoulders, he just curls tighter, pulls his jacket tighter around him, and ignores the touch.

Warm body behind his, settling in to sleep on a couch not really big enough for one.

It's like when he still had a cat.  Just shift his body until there's room for both of them wherever he's sleeping.

He knows that cat loved him.  It never once danced on the keyboard of his computer.  He'd find it curled up against his laptop, two little purring creatures, and not one extra character showed up on the screen.

-- think about cats and their coding abilities --

Wakes up later with a hand over his ribs.  Rodney's not a snuggler, as a rule.  He likes his space.  The cat's allowed to share, but the cat's small.

So's Zelenka, though.  He fits right behind Rodney's knees.  Forehead against his shoulder blade, arm around his chest.

Rodney shifts.  He's warm/cold/almost awake.

Behind him, Zelenka says, "It works."

"What?"

"The tidal generator."  Head-nudge on his shoulder, pointing him to the floor.

And yeah, it's there.  Not the actual generator, but a tablet showing its output.  30% of a naquada reactor's capacity and rising.  Rodney finished the math sometime in the period right before his body shut down.  He knew it was going to work.  Knew it.

It's still beautiful.

It's probably a bad sign that he wants to celebrate by blowing something up.  Just something small.  Possibly using only the contents of his pockets and a few homemade fireworks.

Little shift behind him and Zelenka hands him a crumpled page.  It's covered in chemical formulae for fireworks they can make out of supplies on hand.

You just don't find another genius like his all that often.  Rodney knows to appreciate it.  He's made a point of never having sex with anything sporting an I.Q. of less than 143. 

It only took him until he was seventeen to figure out that brains were going to outweigh everything else in his psychosexual complex, probably for the rest of his life.  The fact that his superego likes to add details (blond hair, breasts, military uniforms, short fingernails, mid-atlantic accents) is just evidence that he spends more time thinking about sex than he does having it.

His real constants are less all-American.  He likes friendly, wildly intelligent people who're prepared to put up with his being just slightly dominant in bed.  Like the way Radek just grins against his mouth when Rodney rolls him down and kisses him hard.  Sucks on Rodney's tongue and laughs at him.  And bites him.

Twists under him when Rodney bites him back.  Both of them stubbled and messy and still sleep-warm.  

Couch-sex is always kind of like this.  All attitude and no convenience.  Both of them working to get enough clothes off, making out like the frantic teenagers they never quite were.

Figuring sex out as an adult, Rodney thinks, is actually more fun.  Not that he has anything to compare it with.

It's fun, though.  Even though they're lip-locked and tangling their legs, he knows part of Radek's brain's still working on how to get the power-output ratio up.  Rodney's thinking about it, too.  Enough that he breaks their kiss to explain his idea about reducing the city's drag on the water, and Radek sparks and mutters about shifting the generators out to Pier 3 to check and then locks both arms around the back of Rodney's neck and pulls him down and pushes his mouth open and sucks out all of his thought process and most of his breath.

And while they're thrusting against each other, the idea's still right there between them.

Engineering muscle under the softer flesh, and the hair-scrape that growls male along Rodney's nerves; he loves this.  So much that one of these days they'll probably do it in a bed, actually naked, and he'll get to find out whether Radek likes, say, being scratched.  And they can sprawl alongside each other after and they won't even have to touch.

Total skin access.  That'll be good.

He's making do with what he's got.

And he likes this too.  How they wind up side by side and when he comes, Radek kisses him closed-mouthed and with his eyes open.  Like the whole thing's really amazingly funny, which it kind of is, if only because Rodney's never been able to have sex without thinking about civil engineers and that stupid God joke.

So he tells it.  And Radek knocks their foreheads together, gently.  This little reminder that they've both heard the God-is-an-engineer joke at least once for every class they've been forced to teach.
 
And then they're both on their feet, digging for lost clothing pieces and pulling themselves together and carefully not stepping on any of Rodney's projects.  The tablet on the floor wants him to know the tidal generators have hit 38%.  It's a shiny, pretty number, and the extra power's going to let them run civic systems that'll make life here a little more comfortable.

This second in the half-dark when Radek pulls Rodney's head down and kisses him one more time.  And then full light, not quite fluorescent but still utterly lab-brilliant, while they go back to work.

---

The joke.

Three engineers debate what kind of engineer God is.

The first says, "God is a mechanical engineer.  Look at the body: it's a marvel of moving parts, all fitted cleanly together.  It can run at huge speeds, climb mountains, work tiny objects.  Only a mechanical engineer could have done it."

The second says, "God is an electrical engineer.  Look at the brain: lightning-fast impulses not only power the body, but also let us think. They produce consciousness and let us comprehend the universe.  Only an electrical engineer could have produced such a system."

The third says, "God is a civil engineer, and I can prove it.  Just look at sex: only a civil engineer would have run a waste disposal pipeline through a great recreational area."

---

jane
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