mayachain

Title: Beating Holidays
Characters: John/Rodney, Jeannie/Kaleb, David, Madison
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~400
Summary: It's all David's fault.
Notes: This is the Christmas sequel to Beating Hearts, to be concluded within the next 5 days.

This is all your fault, John sighs with badly concealed amusement, peering into the living room where the McKay siblings have covered every inch with miles of paper and incomprehensible lines of symbols. No cell phone, no Internet connection, he was being a good boy until I had to let him out of my sight for you.

Have you ever been to Atlantis, David asks when his brother has located a safe spot to curl up with Madison and watch Jeannie and Rodney work, voicing the question he's been wondering about ever since he came here, and Kaleb shakes his head No, not even seen pictures, because Jeannie hadn't been allowed to take any and As much as we pretend to read each other's minds, we can't actually do that, don't tell Madison.

How can you live with a wife who talks like this, David doesn't ask, wincing at what they can hear of the conversation, meaning how can Kaleb share his life with someone clearly so much smarter than himself? Technically, he supposes John must be in the same situation, but he's in there understanding an admirable third of what comes out of his boyfriends's mouth, and David can admit in the privacy of his mind that it actually helps that Rodney is a man, in this particular case. It's chauvinistic, and he's ashamed of it, but that doesn't mean he possesses the perseverance to overcome the sentiment.

It's... incredible, he tells Kaleb instead of his own experience, the inadequate description the only one he can think of, and how can the man be that bound to earth, that content with whatever actual space travelers choose to tell him, how can he be this damn just not curious? It's all good as long as no-one gets it in their heads to kidnap Madison or Jeannie, Kaleb says, and David doesn't know what to say to that.

Don't you ever wish you could see it, he asks, remembering how he felt in the Atlantis labs. My students, I teach them the truth, that the world may be larger than they might ever be able to dream of, and I try to give them the words to describe it, Kaleb says, and suddenly David sees it, that the man is doing exactly the same with words that Jeannie and Rodney and even John are doing with equations and numbers.

onwards