There is a tree on New Athos that smells like lilacs - not the flowers, which are large and blue and odorless and close like fingers into fists at nightfall, but the thick, velvet leaves that seem to stretch and reach beneath the moonlight, unfurling in the dark. Rodney leans his head against the trunk and breathes the scent in, the shapes and patterns of it, the intricate sonata of its notes. The bark is rough against his scalp, against his back through the cotton of his shirt. It's possible that he's just a little bit drunk.
From the village, he can hear voices, laughter, drifting and falling, star bursts of human noises against the backdrop of the wind through the trees. The musicians have packed away their instruments by now, but the party is still lingering, not quite wanting to break up. He catches strands of Teyla's rich alto, in counterpoint with Torren's sleepy boy soprano; the guest of honor not in bed yet, though it's long past his usual time - six years old today, by the Athosian reckoning, and a full member of the tribe. Growing up. Ronon has already started to teach him tracking; Rodney has seen smaller children practicing with their first real sticks in the field down by the stream. Part of him wants to think it's terrifying, but then he remembers that when he was six he spent hours a day at the grand piano, had a notebook under his pillow with thoughts on Yang-Mills. Maybe the terrifying thing is just that forty years have gone by since.
He still has a notebook on Yang-Mills.
"Hey," a warm voice says, close in the darkness, and John at least isn't sober, he can hear that from just the lilt of the word. "What're you thinking about there, looking all...thinky-like?"
He opens his eyes, and there's Sheppard a few feet away beneath the cover of the tree with him, his white shirt mottled with the shadows of foliage, a strange midnight camouflage.
"Time," he says. "I was thinking about time. And I believe the word you were looking for is 'pensive'."
John tilts his head, as if actually weighing the matter carefully.
"Nah," he says. "I'm sticking with 'thinky-like'. Much more you."
Rodney opens his mouth to protest, but then on second thought, John might have a point. ‘Pensive’ sounds like a third-rate romantic poet waxing lyrical over the growth of moss on tombstones - he certainly hopes he isn’t there yet. He bites his objections back.
John comes closer, last year’s leaves crackling beneath his feet as he steps across the grass. His movements are impossibly more loose-limbed than usual, the way they always are when he’s drunk. He leans up against the tree next to Rodney, shoulder touching shoulder.
"It’s gone fast, huh?" he says.
"Blink of an eye," Rodney agrees.
But no, that’s not really true. Many blinks, an infinite number in an infinite string looping through the years, through the spiral arc of space and time, and he remembers every one, sharp like snapshots in perfect resolution. The contrast stark and vivid, like the pattern of leaves across John’s chest.
He reaches for John’s hand, where it rests against the trunk next to his own. Strokes his thumb over John’s knuckles.
"I always liked this tree," he says.
"Mhmm," John says. "I remember."
It’s clear from the slow, gritty weight of his voice that he does, and that particular snapshot flashes bright in Rodney’s mind: John’s naked skin against the bark, John’s heat around him, the way the scent was everywhere, as if he could taste it in the sweat at the nape of John’s neck, in the crease of John’s hip - lilacs and salt and the ocean flavor of Atlantis that clings to them now wherever they go. They’d been like teenagers, that first summer after they brought the city back from Earth, after John slammed him up against the jumper bay doors and kissed him, never more than a second from tearing each other’s clothes off. A bit ridiculous, in hindsight. But then he feels like a teenager now, too, holding hands with his sweetheart underneath a moonlit tree. If Kanaan hadn’t brought out the hard liquor, earlier, that thought would probably seem a lot more disturbing; as it is, it mostly makes him want to laugh. A good laugh, warm inside his chest like John is warm along his side.
He turns, pushing away from the tree so that John is in front of him, so that John is between him and the trunk, all that warmth within his arms when he leans close.
"I’m going to kiss you, now," he declares, "and then I’m going to find Ronon and borrow a knife, so I can carve ‘Rodney ♥ John’ into the trunk of this excellent tree."
John’s lips twitch, and Rodney isn’t so drunk that he doesn’t know when John is making fun of him inside the privacy of his own head, but John’s free hand comes up to close around the back of his neck and pull him in, and it’s just the way it should be.
"Okay," John says against his lips. "Okay, you do that." His tone is surprisingly serious.
As he drags his tongue along the curve of John’s mouth, he wonders how long it will be, before Torren is the one standing here, kissing his first girl or boy beneath the lilac-scented leaves of this tree. How much longer before it’s someone he’ll want to come back with, year after year.
A blink of an eye, probably.
He parts his lips, lets John’s tongue slip inside. Presses their joined hands into the bark.
