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So ages ago I signed up for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fanfic100 and said that I would -- eventually -- write 100 stories about Ronon. I figured I was going to do that anyway, in all likelihood, so what the hell.
I have, however, noticed that my "mainline" fiction has been getting longer and longer by the year, and that at this rate I shudder to think how long it'll take me to get to 100...unless I start writing ficlets in addition to the Major Serious Important Fiction. But I don't do one-shots well, particularly not short one-shots, because I am Continuing Narrative Girl, and I love backstory more than life.
So I'm trying this compromise thing, where I'll write a string of ficlets that can kind of clump together. They won't have the through-line that scenes from a proper story need to have to wrap them all into one thing, but they will be album-snapshot sort of things out of a shared universe...until I feel like changing universes.
In order to ease into this, I'm going the easy route and writing for the Alpha Centauri universe, which I spend entirely too much time thinking about anyway, so I might as well.
WARNING: I have no shame. Expect babies, kittens, snuggling, and all the other ridiculously self-indulgent bullshit that you could possibly want in your group-marriage futurefic. And by "you," I mean "me."
37: Sound
Rodney hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in one hundred and eight days. It wasn’t his personal record, but that didn’t mean he was happy about it, either.
“You want to have sex?” Ronon asked, but he asked in kind of a dull voice, as if he didn’t much care either way.
“Of course,” Rodney said, but then he didn’t move and neither did Ronon, and they fell asleep just like that, sprawled out on the bed in their underwear, only touching at their arms and feet.
It was possibly the best night of Rodney’s life, although only a terrible human being would admit that out loud, and only a human being who valued his quality of life not in the slightest would admit it in front of Ronon. But, God, Rodney was exhausted beyond everything that he had previously considered a standard of measurement for exhausted. He was literally off the scales.
He slept like the Lost City of the Ancients itself, and he might have made it to 10,000 years, except that at some hellish, post-midnight hour, Ronon flung himself to his feet with such force that the bed actually skidded sideways, smacking against the uber-plastic alloy of their nightstand and jarring Rodney’s beloved brain inside his skull. “Ow,” he said feebly, and then, “Are we dying?” He almost didn’t care if they were. He raised his head off the pillow and considered it a triumph of willpower.
“You hear that?” Ronon said, prowling close to the door with his head cocked in what Rodney recognized as tracking-posture.
“Hear what?” Rodney said, heaving himself up to one elbow. “Seriously – are we dying? Because if we’re not dying....”
“You can’t hear that?” Ronon said, throwing a narrow-eyed, accusatory look over his shoulder at Rodney. “You can’t hear her crying?”
Rodney let himself return to flat on his back with a thump. “No,” he said, trying for neutral and not quite managing it. “No, I can’t hear her crying. If I could hear her crying, I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
Ronon smacked the door in frustration and said, “Why doesn’t he fucking do something? I’m going over there.”
“Don’t,” Rodney said, rolling onto his side. “No, don’t you dare. They are fine, everything is fine.”
“She’s crying!”
“She’s always crying! She cries! She’s a baby!” Rodney winced as soon as the words were out of his mouth, because he knew better than to yell at Ronon. Yelling at Ronon made it into a contest, and Ronon hated to lose a contest.
There was a moment of tense silence, and then Ronon stalked back toward the bed, leaning over to collect his clothes from the floor. “I’m going over there,” he said.
Rodney slid toward the edge of the bed, close enough to reach out and touch Ronon’s arm. “Not tonight,” he said. “Listen, listen, wait. They’re right across the hall. If he needs any help, he’ll come get us.”
“Why doesn’t he stop her?” Ronon said with that awful mix of anger and misery on his face that always came out when he felt helpless – that look that made Rodney want to cuddle him and hold his head underwater at the same time.
Choosing the former option was healthier, both for their relationship and for Rodney’s physical safety. Rodney valued both of those things very much. He tugged on Ronon’s arm, and reluctantly, Ronon sat down on the bed, letting Rodney rest his head on his thigh. “He will,” Rodney said. “Give him a chance.”
“You really can’t hear it?”
For a moment, Rodney thought maybe he could. But then, he had more than enough memories to fill in at a suggestible moment, and he wasn’t sure if he could hear his daughter crying from across the hall, or if there was just some delusional fatherhood-lobe of his brain that was capable at any moment and for any reason of conjuring up the worst-case scenario: Marina frightened, Marina injured, Marina abandoned, Marina suffering, Marina crying. Rodney swallowed down what his rational self knew was nothing but second-hand hysteria and said, “I don’t hear anything.”
“She needs us,” Ronon said in a strangely small voice. “John doesn’t know how to– “
And this was what made the whole thing dangerous, not merely inconvenient. Rodney took a deep breath and said, “John can learn. John is her father. He’ll learn.”
Truthfully, there wasn’t much either of them knew that John didn’t, in this department. He’d been with them every second of the first six weeks or so – by far the longest solid stretch that John had stayed in their quarters before retreating to his own. He’d learned in the trenches, right along with them: how to tell her hungry cries from her gassy cries, how to hold her slightly away from his body and swing her side-to-side in slow, wide arcs, what tone of voice she liked and how many episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard he had to recap for her before she’d be lulled back to sleep by his voice. John could change a diaper, he could stroke her back, he could heat a bottle to the proper temperature with his eyes closed and before his first cup of coffee. He wasn’t any less technically equipped as a parent than either Ronon or Rodney.
But he’d never been alone with her, never once. He lived up to his duty, like John always did, he performed in any way he was asked to perform, he put on parenthood like one more uniform and, like all his uniforms, Rodney knew this one meant more to him than he was willing to casually let on. He’d never taken her tiny hand between his fingers and showed her how to touch the mobile over her crib, showed her that she could make the universe move with her hands, did it over and over again for an hour, watching her soft dark eyes as they tried to track the moving pieces. He’d never spread his hand over her back, holding her up in the shallow water of her bath, dabbing at her impossibly soft skin with a sponge and marveling at the way her dark waves of hair laid against her skull like ripples of water. He’d never fallen asleep holding her in his lap, her fist stuck in her mouth the last thing he saw before his eyes closed.
Hell, Rodney himself wouldn’t have done any of those things if he let Ronon have his way. But Rodney was more than capable of bullying his way into the things he wanted, and hey, gimme that had been his life’s philosophy long before Marina came along. Ronon couldn’t have her all to himself every hour of every day, however much he thought he should, and Rodney was good at maximizing his window of opportunity. John tended to give up far too easily – Rodney judged that it was a 50/50 split between feeling a little overwhelmed by the whole experience and the way that John was always a bit of a pushover when it came to Ronon.
Ronon gave a somewhat disdainful huff, apparently at the sheer improbability of John learning how to do anything, ever, but he rolled to face Rodney with his back to the door. Rodney put a hand on his shoulder, petting over the taut muscles. “It’s okay,” he said on a yawn. “Just go back to sleep. They’ll manage.”
“Maybe she’s crying because she misses us,” Ronon said. “Maybe she thinks we don’t want– “
“Stop. Right there,” Rodney ordered. “She’s crying the same way she cries every single night, it has nothing to do with that. She’ll settle down.”
“Does he know you can tune the comlink between the channels and get that noise she likes– “
“Stop. Goddammit, stop. He knows.” Rodney edged closer, putting his head right under Ronon’s chin. Ronon’s arm came up over him, his thumb grazing Rodney’s back.
“I hate this.”
“I know.” Rodney got the feeling that Ronon was going to hate a lot of things about the next, oh, eighteen to seventy-five years.
“How are you so calm?” Ronon demanded. “Don’t you – aren’t you – “
“No, I’m not,” Rodney said firmly, and almost entirely truthfully. “Look, when we start leaving her with babysitters, it’ll be my turn for the nervous breakdown. Pencil me in for that. Mark the date and have my padded room reserved. Right now I want to sleep, and you need to sleep, and I have no problem letting her father handle this.”
“Yeah, but– “
“Either he is or he isn’t, Dex,” Rodney said softly. “You and I can’t afford to be confused about this – not if we expect her to figure it all out. Either he is or he isn’t.”
Ronon took a deep breath and let it out on something that wasn’t entirely a growl. “He is,” he admitted grudgingly. “Of course he is.”
“He’s obviously out of his head...how much he loves her....” Rodney said muzzily, about to be asleep again whether he liked it or not. “He doesn’t even let us sleep over at his place.” Ronon snorted, or possibly started to snore.
The next time Rodney woke up, it was because Ronon’s hand went flat and tight on his back, pulling Rodney against him roughly. “Stopped,” he said. His voice dropped to a bare whisper as he said, “It’s gotten so quiet....”
“Good,” Rodney said into his chest. He could hear Ronon’s heartbeat, heavy and just slightly elevated, the perfect accompaniment to sleep. John didn’t have a crib in his quarters; Rodney wondered if Marina had gone to sleep in his arms or lying on the bed beside him, if she could hear his heartbeat, if she could tell Ronon’s from John’s as easily as Rodney could. If she was still learning to tell them apart and to love them both unconditionally or if, like Rodney, she’d simply been born for it. “Sounds good.”
fanfic100 and said that I would -- eventually -- write 100 stories about Ronon. I figured I was going to do that anyway, in all likelihood, so what the hell.I have, however, noticed that my "mainline" fiction has been getting longer and longer by the year, and that at this rate I shudder to think how long it'll take me to get to 100...unless I start writing ficlets in addition to the Major Serious Important Fiction. But I don't do one-shots well, particularly not short one-shots, because I am Continuing Narrative Girl, and I love backstory more than life.
So I'm trying this compromise thing, where I'll write a string of ficlets that can kind of clump together. They won't have the through-line that scenes from a proper story need to have to wrap them all into one thing, but they will be album-snapshot sort of things out of a shared universe...until I feel like changing universes.
In order to ease into this, I'm going the easy route and writing for the Alpha Centauri universe, which I spend entirely too much time thinking about anyway, so I might as well.
WARNING: I have no shame. Expect babies, kittens, snuggling, and all the other ridiculously self-indulgent bullshit that you could possibly want in your group-marriage futurefic. And by "you," I mean "me."
37: Sound
Rodney hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in one hundred and eight days. It wasn’t his personal record, but that didn’t mean he was happy about it, either.
“You want to have sex?” Ronon asked, but he asked in kind of a dull voice, as if he didn’t much care either way.
“Of course,” Rodney said, but then he didn’t move and neither did Ronon, and they fell asleep just like that, sprawled out on the bed in their underwear, only touching at their arms and feet.
It was possibly the best night of Rodney’s life, although only a terrible human being would admit that out loud, and only a human being who valued his quality of life not in the slightest would admit it in front of Ronon. But, God, Rodney was exhausted beyond everything that he had previously considered a standard of measurement for exhausted. He was literally off the scales.
He slept like the Lost City of the Ancients itself, and he might have made it to 10,000 years, except that at some hellish, post-midnight hour, Ronon flung himself to his feet with such force that the bed actually skidded sideways, smacking against the uber-plastic alloy of their nightstand and jarring Rodney’s beloved brain inside his skull. “Ow,” he said feebly, and then, “Are we dying?” He almost didn’t care if they were. He raised his head off the pillow and considered it a triumph of willpower.
“You hear that?” Ronon said, prowling close to the door with his head cocked in what Rodney recognized as tracking-posture.
“Hear what?” Rodney said, heaving himself up to one elbow. “Seriously – are we dying? Because if we’re not dying....”
“You can’t hear that?” Ronon said, throwing a narrow-eyed, accusatory look over his shoulder at Rodney. “You can’t hear her crying?”
Rodney let himself return to flat on his back with a thump. “No,” he said, trying for neutral and not quite managing it. “No, I can’t hear her crying. If I could hear her crying, I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
Ronon smacked the door in frustration and said, “Why doesn’t he fucking do something? I’m going over there.”
“Don’t,” Rodney said, rolling onto his side. “No, don’t you dare. They are fine, everything is fine.”
“She’s crying!”
“She’s always crying! She cries! She’s a baby!” Rodney winced as soon as the words were out of his mouth, because he knew better than to yell at Ronon. Yelling at Ronon made it into a contest, and Ronon hated to lose a contest.
There was a moment of tense silence, and then Ronon stalked back toward the bed, leaning over to collect his clothes from the floor. “I’m going over there,” he said.
Rodney slid toward the edge of the bed, close enough to reach out and touch Ronon’s arm. “Not tonight,” he said. “Listen, listen, wait. They’re right across the hall. If he needs any help, he’ll come get us.”
“Why doesn’t he stop her?” Ronon said with that awful mix of anger and misery on his face that always came out when he felt helpless – that look that made Rodney want to cuddle him and hold his head underwater at the same time.
Choosing the former option was healthier, both for their relationship and for Rodney’s physical safety. Rodney valued both of those things very much. He tugged on Ronon’s arm, and reluctantly, Ronon sat down on the bed, letting Rodney rest his head on his thigh. “He will,” Rodney said. “Give him a chance.”
“You really can’t hear it?”
For a moment, Rodney thought maybe he could. But then, he had more than enough memories to fill in at a suggestible moment, and he wasn’t sure if he could hear his daughter crying from across the hall, or if there was just some delusional fatherhood-lobe of his brain that was capable at any moment and for any reason of conjuring up the worst-case scenario: Marina frightened, Marina injured, Marina abandoned, Marina suffering, Marina crying. Rodney swallowed down what his rational self knew was nothing but second-hand hysteria and said, “I don’t hear anything.”
“She needs us,” Ronon said in a strangely small voice. “John doesn’t know how to– “
And this was what made the whole thing dangerous, not merely inconvenient. Rodney took a deep breath and said, “John can learn. John is her father. He’ll learn.”
Truthfully, there wasn’t much either of them knew that John didn’t, in this department. He’d been with them every second of the first six weeks or so – by far the longest solid stretch that John had stayed in their quarters before retreating to his own. He’d learned in the trenches, right along with them: how to tell her hungry cries from her gassy cries, how to hold her slightly away from his body and swing her side-to-side in slow, wide arcs, what tone of voice she liked and how many episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard he had to recap for her before she’d be lulled back to sleep by his voice. John could change a diaper, he could stroke her back, he could heat a bottle to the proper temperature with his eyes closed and before his first cup of coffee. He wasn’t any less technically equipped as a parent than either Ronon or Rodney.
But he’d never been alone with her, never once. He lived up to his duty, like John always did, he performed in any way he was asked to perform, he put on parenthood like one more uniform and, like all his uniforms, Rodney knew this one meant more to him than he was willing to casually let on. He’d never taken her tiny hand between his fingers and showed her how to touch the mobile over her crib, showed her that she could make the universe move with her hands, did it over and over again for an hour, watching her soft dark eyes as they tried to track the moving pieces. He’d never spread his hand over her back, holding her up in the shallow water of her bath, dabbing at her impossibly soft skin with a sponge and marveling at the way her dark waves of hair laid against her skull like ripples of water. He’d never fallen asleep holding her in his lap, her fist stuck in her mouth the last thing he saw before his eyes closed.
Hell, Rodney himself wouldn’t have done any of those things if he let Ronon have his way. But Rodney was more than capable of bullying his way into the things he wanted, and hey, gimme that had been his life’s philosophy long before Marina came along. Ronon couldn’t have her all to himself every hour of every day, however much he thought he should, and Rodney was good at maximizing his window of opportunity. John tended to give up far too easily – Rodney judged that it was a 50/50 split between feeling a little overwhelmed by the whole experience and the way that John was always a bit of a pushover when it came to Ronon.
Ronon gave a somewhat disdainful huff, apparently at the sheer improbability of John learning how to do anything, ever, but he rolled to face Rodney with his back to the door. Rodney put a hand on his shoulder, petting over the taut muscles. “It’s okay,” he said on a yawn. “Just go back to sleep. They’ll manage.”
“Maybe she’s crying because she misses us,” Ronon said. “Maybe she thinks we don’t want– “
“Stop. Right there,” Rodney ordered. “She’s crying the same way she cries every single night, it has nothing to do with that. She’ll settle down.”
“Does he know you can tune the comlink between the channels and get that noise she likes– “
“Stop. Goddammit, stop. He knows.” Rodney edged closer, putting his head right under Ronon’s chin. Ronon’s arm came up over him, his thumb grazing Rodney’s back.
“I hate this.”
“I know.” Rodney got the feeling that Ronon was going to hate a lot of things about the next, oh, eighteen to seventy-five years.
“How are you so calm?” Ronon demanded. “Don’t you – aren’t you – “
“No, I’m not,” Rodney said firmly, and almost entirely truthfully. “Look, when we start leaving her with babysitters, it’ll be my turn for the nervous breakdown. Pencil me in for that. Mark the date and have my padded room reserved. Right now I want to sleep, and you need to sleep, and I have no problem letting her father handle this.”
“Yeah, but– “
“Either he is or he isn’t, Dex,” Rodney said softly. “You and I can’t afford to be confused about this – not if we expect her to figure it all out. Either he is or he isn’t.”
Ronon took a deep breath and let it out on something that wasn’t entirely a growl. “He is,” he admitted grudgingly. “Of course he is.”
“He’s obviously out of his head...how much he loves her....” Rodney said muzzily, about to be asleep again whether he liked it or not. “He doesn’t even let us sleep over at his place.” Ronon snorted, or possibly started to snore.
The next time Rodney woke up, it was because Ronon’s hand went flat and tight on his back, pulling Rodney against him roughly. “Stopped,” he said. His voice dropped to a bare whisper as he said, “It’s gotten so quiet....”
“Good,” Rodney said into his chest. He could hear Ronon’s heartbeat, heavy and just slightly elevated, the perfect accompaniment to sleep. John didn’t have a crib in his quarters; Rodney wondered if Marina had gone to sleep in his arms or lying on the bed beside him, if she could hear his heartbeat, if she could tell Ronon’s from John’s as easily as Rodney could. If she was still learning to tell them apart and to love them both unconditionally or if, like Rodney, she’d simply been born for it. “Sounds good.”
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Date: 2007-05-03 09:50 am (UTC)From:This is very sweet though, to see Rodney of all people try and be *less* worried.