And I Say, It's Alright

Most days on Atlantis are sunny, which reminds Rodney of Nevada. It was always dry enough to crack his skin there, though, and Atlantis is always humid, the weight of it heavy in his lungs. (He does know that humid air is lighter than dry air, thank you very much, but that never matches the way it feels, thick against his skin.)

Atlantis shines on sunny days, the light catching and reflecting on glass and metal, sometimes bright enough to blind, and when he presses his hand against the surfaces, he knows the residual heat he feels is all absorbed sunlight, but sometimes, when there’s no one else around to know about it, he likes to think he can feel the city’s life itself, warm against his palms.

It’s a common sight, though, Atlantis in the sun, and Rodney’s too used to it to notice most days. Except, sometimes, he’ll be on the balcony next to the mess hall, waiting for his fourth cup of coffee to kick in, and the sunlight will hit at just the right angle, and the city in front of him will be so beautiful it’ll snatch his breath away.

One day, John’s out there with him, leaning on the railing, head tilted toward the morning sun, softly beautiful in the way he gets when he’s content, and something must have passed over Rodney’s face, because John grins, eyes bright with something Rodney can’t name. “Yeah,” John says, his expression open in a way almost no one ever sees. “It’s… yeah.”

And Rodney can only nod in agreement.

On rainy days, Atlantis gets gloomy, soaked through, though there are subtle gradations of both the rain and the mood that Rodney’s learned how to read. He spends most days in his windowless lab, but when it’s raining, it’s easy to tell, because everything seems darker, quieter.

Rodney likes the days where it rains hard but constant, dragged out over the entire day, the sky pale with gray clouds. He kissed John for the first time on a day like that, a routine check-up on M8G-952. The ground had been slick with loose mud, and when Rodney inevitably slipped, he’d crashed into John, bringing them both down. By that point, they were already drenched, hair plastered to their heads, and it had seemed normal, natural for Rodney to lean in, to brush their lips together, his muddy hand against John’s muddy cheek. (They’d split up the team at the time. Teyla and Ronon had been making contact with the nearby village while John and Rodney checked up on some energy readings, and even though they didn’t actually find anything, Rodney walked away from that mission with a sense of accomplishment.)

When it rains like that, he likes to leave a window cracked open so he can hear the steady pit-pat of the rain against Atlantis, a counterpoint to the thu-thump of John’s heart in his chest.

They’re rare, but Rodney thinks he likes the sun showers best, the way the droplets make patterns, shadows on the stained glass, the way the sunlight catches on the drops as they fall, the way they smell, in some undefinable way, of his only really good memory of his father. (The time they went outside together when he was eight to see his first real rainbow, not refracted through the prism his mother gave him, and the rainbow in front of him, bright against the darker clouds, had been exactly what he was expecting and not what he’d expected at all.)

Rodney never tells John that story, but one day, John does drag Rodney out onto one the city’s more isolated balconies (even as Rodney’s ever-so-kindly reminding him of how he doesn’t have time for this sort of nonsense) to see the rainbow that hangs over one of the eastern spires. Rodney’s pretty sure he manages to call John a teenage girl, but then John kisses him, and all Rodney notices is the slide of lips on lips, the rain running down the back of his neck, the sun warm on his face.

He thinks he likes the gloomiest days the least. The splatter of the rain against the windows, the crack of thunder in the sky, they all conjure up memories of the storm and all its attendant miseries (the fear, the pain, the cold press of metal against his skin), and if he works longer, harder on those days, it’s just because he’s busy and there’s too much to get done.

John always gets quiet when Rodney avoids him on those days, like he thinks it’s something he’s done, but if Rodney tries to explain this, it’ll be horrific, a spilling out of everything inside him that he doesn’t want people to see. On those days, he remembers the all too familiar twisting feeling in his chest at the way it had felt to almost lose the city, to almost lose John, and he can’t let that to the surface, so he pulls it close to him and doesn’t let it out.

Those nights, he usually wakes from bad dreams, the rain coming down hard outside his window, the bright flash of lighting overhead.

The city seems to sleep on foggy days, quiet and still. The metal seems duller, paler, and the air is thick and unmoving. It’s impossible to see more than two feet in front of you outside, which is both terrifying and oddly comforting, cocooned inside the city, that strange combination of trapped and protected, even though neither of those things are really true.

The fog feels like it seeps deep into Atlantis, into every nook, every crevice, so that even though Rodney can’t see it as he walks the hallways, it feels like it’s there, everywhere. Rodney always manages to sleep in on days like that, unable to wake to his alarm or to John’s insistent elbows to his ribs, and it always takes more coffee than usual to keep him from nodding off during staff meetings.

John seems calmer on foggy days, even though that doesn’t quite make sense, because he’s a pilot, and Rodney knows that even for the best pilots it’s hard to fly with zero visibility.  Maybe there’s something else to it, something underneath that Rodney really can’t see.

One day, he finds John on one of the highest balconies.  He’s looking out over the city as the afternoon sun cuts through the morning fog, turning the world more gold than gray.  As Rodney stands next to him and watches the fog dissipate, it does almost seem like the city’s coming alive, waking from its slumber. He wonders if the city looked like this when it rose from the water.

“It’s…” Rodney starts, but he can’t finish because the words stick in his throat, words like beautiful and ours and home. Words that almost mean what he wants them to mean, but don’t quite. He’s not sure there are any words that do.

John seems to get that, though, because he smiles, a quirk of his lips, and says, “Yeah. Isn’t it?” and lets his hand drift toward where Rodney’s is resting on the railing, so that their fingers barely touch.

FIN.