JOHN AND RODNEY PLEASE. PLEASE. PLEASE. STARCROSSED LOVERS. PLEASE AND THANK YOU
*cheering* I love these two! Thanks for the ask!
Now, star-crossed lovers has sooooo many possibilities. Fairy tale AU, Romeo and Juliet, tweaking canon to add a layer of angsty pining. I've actually had a drabble in my phone memos for forever where Rodney confesses in s3 e14 Tao of Rodney. I may one day go back and actually make a full-blown fic out of it. RN it ends with John sitting on his bed in shock lol.
Anyway the way I keep thinking the best way to answer this would be with an AU that... may not have quite as much star-crossed lovers, but I think and hope it might count? Forewarning that it gets a little dark towards the end tho...
See, my thought is Rodney gets kidnapped by this militant group (maybe a bit like totally-not-O'Brien's group) and made to work on creating stuff for them, and John is part of this group. Now you may have a moment of oh no we're shipping a kidnapper and his kidnappee think of the Stockholm Syndrome but no, see, there's a more complex reason John is in this group... Can you guess?
(If you guessed undercover operation, you guessed correctly!)
So their relationship would start off kinda rocky, and Rodney is of course just as snarky and caustic as canon, but like turned up even higher due to the situation, and John is not afraid to fire quips back. I feel like John would start crushing first tbh, mostly cause Rodney is too annoyed by being kept here against his will to think about why exactly this grunt keeps coming by.
The turning point for Rodney would be finding out how smart John actually is--because of course it is.
(Rodney has been rambling in John's ear since almost the minute he came down to visit the snarky scientist [not to check that he's doing okay or anything, really, just a short visit cause it's funny to rile him up], venting about an issue he's having with the project, and at some point the wheels in John's head turn and he blurts out a suggestion that makes Rodney stop in his tracks and stare at John with furrowed brows.
His mouth hangs open for a few moments before he blinks and turns to his papers, scribbling away madly for a few moments before turning back to John with a strange, almost blank expression, declaring in a faint voice that it worked. There's a question in his eyes, but John just shrugs it off and says something about beginner's luck, even while he's slightly panicking inside. Because his job was to slow down the project, not help Rodney past his hurdles.
But every time he visits after that, Rodney actually seems happy to see him and starts rambling again, his eyes brighter than they have been in the time John's known him, and he decides that it's worth the slip up. [And the frustrated pouting that ensues when John refuses to give any more suggestions is fucking adorable, so win-win all around.])
After that, their relationship would be closer. They'd snark and they'd flirt and there would probably be some heavy glances. But there'd still be this thing hanging between them--Rodney is not here by choice, and John is part of the group that's keeping him here (or so it appears). So they're both pining like trees for almost a month until one night John comes to see Rodney, but he doesn't come in like he usually does.
(Rodney is used to John's visits by now--no, that's not quite the right way to put it. Rodney isn't just used to John now. He anticipates him. He looks forward to every time John comes down to Rodney's laboratory/apartment--and he can't call it a prison cell, even if that's what it actually is--and gives him that half-smirk as he leans casually against whatever lab bench Rodney is currently working at. The way the man lets Rodney ramble at him, even occasionally asking for more information or--on rare occasions--giving an intelligent suggestion that makes Rodney think about his work in a new way and come to a solution he wouldn't have found on his own [difficult as that is to admit].
But tonight is different.
Tonight, John walks in with a stoic face, his footsteps unusually hurried as he makes his way over. Rodney's stopped what he was doing, frozen by the look in the other man's eyes. Some distant part of him wonders if he should be scared as his eyes flit down to the holster on John's hip which was usually empty when he came to visit but this time was stocked with a handgun of some sort. But most of him was simply worried about whatever it was that made John look so serious.
Then John grabbed Rodney's hand. "Do you trust me?"
"Yes." Maybe Rodney should have taken longer to think about it, but the fact is that Rodney had trusted John for a while now. The way the other man had always stayed in his line of sight, never coming up from behind despite his annoying enjoyment of Rodney's irritation. The way he always made sure his footsteps could be heard and--aside from this instance--never brought his gun downstairs with him. And this . . . thing between them that they refused to name or talk about. Really, Rodney didn't even have to think. "I trust you."
John lets his mouth curve up a little, but otherwise his emotions appeared tightly controlled. "Good. I'm getting you out of here."
Rodney's eyes widen, his heart beating at a faster rhythm as he contemplates freedom for the first time in a month. The idea of not being stuck here working on something he couldn't help but feel would be a weight on his shoulders akin to the development of nuclear energy on those of Enrico Fermi and his fellow scientists.... He wanted it so badly. But. "They have my sister and her family."
They'd only let him visit them once a week, and as far as he knew, most of the time they were kept under enough sedation to where they couldn't fight back or think coherently. He didn't know whether to be thankful they didn't seem to know that Jeannie was just as smart as he was--not that he admitted that to her face very often--because he didn't know if it was worse to be trapped here working on something potentially world-ending, or worse to be kept drugged and unaware of what was happening around you. The one time he'd tried to escape and rescue them, he'd been threatened with keeping them in comas and letting their bodies wither away with no medical attention, and he'd stopped thinking about escaping.
"I know," John says. "We've been weaning them off the sedative for the past two weeks in preparation for tonight."
Rodney processed that quickly, relief flooding through him even as he asks, "'We'?"
"I'll explain everything later. First, we have to get you out of here.")
From there, I'd say that things go about how they go for rescue missions. John shoots some bad guys, there's a face-off with the leader of the group wherein John's undercover mission is revealed and the guy gets non-lethally shot and sent to jail. John and Rodney meet up with Teyla, Ronon, and Rodney's family. Everyone is as okay as they can be, though Jeannie's husband is probably having a harder time adjusting than his wife. Thank goodness they'd left their kid with his family, though they hadn't expected to be gone for over a month.
After that is the explanation of John's undercover mission, how Teyla and Ronon are his team and the group had been under their watch for a while before they kidnapped Rodney.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure how the story would end. I'm not even sure if this would be an AU where they're still in Atlantis, or a modern AU on Earth. But now that Rodney is free and John's mission is over, I think they'd finally feel free to admit their feelings and get together. Y'know, if it was an Atlantis AU, I think I'd keep Ronon on Atlantis and have Teyla be John's partner in not!crime. But either way, the four of them would come together in the end and there would be a H.A.P.P.Y. E.N.D.I.N.G!
I don't know why I said it like that lol but thanks again for the ask! I think if I actually wrote this for real I would end up editing a lot and I'd need to rewatch Atlantis lol to get the characters fully down again, but I hope you enjoyed this nonetheless : ) I do love McShepp. Sorry it took me so long!
