Disclaimer: I own no rights to these two characters, or to the TV show they derive from. I also own no rights to the song 'Eleven Saints' by Jason Webley. I mean no offence by posting this, and make no money from this.
Much, much later, Rodney will scowl at an uppity grad student and snap, "It was Jason Webley's fault."
And John will snigger, because from Rodney's point of view, it totally was.
John's story is that he fell in like with Rodney the day that Rodney asked John to shoot him. It was such a nice moment that John was kind and only shot Rodney in the leg. As John puts it, he got to enact the recurring fantasy of hundreds, and now it's all just habit.
And they will grin at the freaked out graduate student, who will get violently drunk that night and mutter darkly at the union bar about evil thesis advisers and their gross sex lives with sleazy military men.
But John and Rodney will go home, and John will walk out of the bathroom after a shower dressed only in his pants, throw his wet towel over his bare shoulder, and he will sing 'Eleven Saints' at Rodney until Rodney snaps and tackles him to the bed.
Carefully, of course, because they're not as young as they used to be.
"Shut up, shut up, shut up," Rodney will moan, and suck hard at John's collarbone because he can't suck at John's neck.
The SGC is tolerant and DADT is gone, but John's a full bird Colonel now and he can't turn up to work with hickeys on display like some horny teenager with his first girlfriend.
John will snigger, even while he's halfway to orgasm, and when they're finally breathless and sated and boneless, he will kiss Rodney's jaw and sing 'wheee' into his ear, just to see Rodney shiver and glare sleepily at him.
Because Rodney's kind of right- it was totally Jason Webley's fault.
Way back in 2006, Jason Webley released an album, and on that album was a song called 'Eleven Saints'. And in 2007, the Atlantis Expedient finally came crashing back into Earth's atmosphere, bringing Atlantis with them.
They parked the city in the bay off the coast of San Francisco, the military declared the area a no-go area, and almost everybody swarmed off for shore leave like a bunch of land-drunk sailors.
Of course, John has pointed out that if they had never brought the expedition back to Earth, a geologist would not have discovered this song. And if one of the geologists had not discovered this song, she would never have brought it back onto Atlantis with her, like an infectious disease.
So, is John's argument, it's really Atlantis' fault. Like everything else in their lives.
Rodney rolls his eyes and ignores him.
The thing is, the geologist did discover the song and brought it back, and when everybody else trooped less than enthusiastically back to Atlantis to continue the whole point of the Expedition- which was to discover the knowledge of the Ancients, as opposed to kill Wraith- the song began to spread like wildfire.
Rodney first heard it passing through the mess hall.
He stopped, stared at a group of girls squeal 'wheee', and walked away hurriedly, wondering if it was something in the water.
He braved the water anyway and within a week, that song was everywhere. Rodney learnt to pick it out of the crowd.
It started with the lyrics:
"If my cat looks scared, It's because it knows, it won't be going to heaven..."
To Rodney, this is an evil thing to say. One, because he doesn't believe in Heaven, and two, because he doesn't see why cats shouldn't go to heaven.
Left to himself, Rodney would never have gone further than that. Left to himself, Rodney would have sniffed and scowled. Then he would have gone off to do something that did not require him to listen to that song.
But it was not left to Rodney.
And there were words! God, there were words like 'coffee percolator' and 'fridge' and 'tomatoes' and Rodney's brain was far too adept at puzzles to let these stupid, insufferable lyrics go, especially when the damned tune was so catchy.
By the time he'd got to the point where he wanted to stab himself in the ear with a sharp pencil if he ever heard it again, it had progressed into his apartment.
For that, he blames Jennifer.
But quietly, nicely, and with a large dose of guilt.
John doesn't blame Jennifer. He mostly tries not to end up in any space that involves her. If he can't avoid her, he tries to keep it professional.
She tends to try to poke him out of that- and she's told him ten times already that she's over the whole thing and she doesn't blame him and could they please go back to just being friends- but she's accepted that that's the way it is.
But really, she did take the song into Rodney's apartment in Colorado Springs. She bought the damn CD, in fact, and rearranged his kitchen, and bought a painting she really liked to hang on his wall.
And Rodney overreacted.
It was not a happy time.
And the song just seemed to drive him crazier.
"This is my space," he yelled, "You can't just come in here, and- and intrude."
He still says he didn't mean it like it sounded. John says he was an ass. But then Rodney's said worse things to John- he's almost gotten John killed a few times, too, though they stay away from that one- and John's still around.
Jennifer didn't stick around. She went white, and angry, and they had a huge fight that continued off and on for weeks.
And every morning, Rodney would go into work and someone, somewhere, would be playing that bloody song!
He banned it in his lab. It worked for an hour before people were humming it under their breathes.
He was ready to tear his hair out by the time John was allowed back into Atlantis.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," John said, eyeing the top of his head, "It's not like you have a lot left."
Which is possibly the meanest thing John's ever said to him as a joke.
Rodney points it out as a mark of how upset he was at the time that he didn't even respond to it, just slumped down glumly on John's unmade bed and said, "It's not working."
John had hovered, like some kind of reluctant guardian angel.
"I'm sure it'll be fine, buddy," John said comfortingly.
Which was a big fat lie. It so totally wasn't.
Rodney fell asleep in John's bed that night, and dreamed of goddamn saints and reading Kafka and cats and woke up with that song echoing in the depths of his brain and he groaned, loud as fuck, and startled John into sitting straight up and reaching reflexively for his gun.
"What the hell, McKay," John growled.
"What music do you have?" Rodney asked desperately.
John ignored him, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
Rodney suffered stoically until he couldn't.
John, to shut him up, waved irritably at his laptop and Rodney tortured himself with Johnny Cash instead.
It was a good temporary measure but nothing close to perfect. Especially not on the day that Jennifer broke up with him properly.
"It's not going to work," she said.
So John took him out and got him drunk.
Problem was they were in San Francisco. And they ended up in a gay club. With a lot of loud, tuneless, thumping music.
Which was perfect for Rodney, and turned out to be perfect for John too, who was drunk enough that he ended up plastered against some over-muscled jerk's back, hands tangling in some other guy's shirt and hair.
Rodney scowled that time too. He did a lot of scowling around John. And then he was drunk enough to yank John away from the guy who looked like he could twist Rodney's head off his neck with his bare hands.
The guy backed off. "Hey, didn't know he was with someone."
Rodney wondered if he'd looked crazy enough to scare people.
John wasn't pleased. Put his hands on his hips and slurred, "What the hell's your problem? I didn't fucking drag you off all the women you like."
"Ha," Rodney said, yelling over the music, "That means you wanted to," because it made perfect inebriated sense.
And John kissed him.
And dragged him home.
And fucked him.
Rodney woke up with a raging hangover, a sore ass, a hickey the size of Texas on his back, a mouth like the Sahara desert, and he was so miserable, he'd forgotten all about the song.
"You cured me," he croaked.
John punched him in the shoulder and said, "Later, Rodney. Anything you want. Just let me get some sleep."
Rodney maintains that 'anything you want' actually means 'blow you till your brain leaks out your dick'.
John maintains that 'anything you want' is a self-defence mechanism for getting Rodney to stop talking.
Everybody else says they really, really don't need to know these things. They don't need the details. They don't want the details.
They mostly say that after 2011, once DADT was repealed, and Rodney and John had a little discussion about the future.
"You're what?" Jennifer said, eyes round, and, "Oh."
"I really did love you," Rodney protested, sounding wretched.
"No, I... I mean... um, I hope you're both very happy," she said, and went far, far away for a week.
Ronon just frowned and asked, "How does that work? McKay's not a woman. Is he?"
Which meant someone had to explain gay sex to Ronon. It turned out to be John. Rodney wiretapped the room so they could all enjoy the hilarity. As far as they know, the tapes are still floating around the SGC, two years later.
O'Neill just looks pained when he finally hears and says, "My God. What did they do to Sheppard in the Pegasus Galaxy?"
'Sheppard' looks at the General and says, "Actually, sir, we're blaming Jason Webley."
"Was he on the expedition?" O'Neill asks.
And John carefully does not look across the crowded room to where Rodney is berating some scientist about Ascension with the words "Have you almost Ascended? No? Oh right, I did!" and he says, "In a manner of speaking, sir."
And O'Neill knows better than to question him any further.