nny | (no subject)

Rodney made no secret of the fact that he hated the staff room. That was actually rather a mild term for the insults heaped on the room from afar, 'afar' generally being the little nook in the science corridor he'd appropriated and decorated with one of the softest chairs in the school and a pile of haphazardly stacked books and journals. Possibly the best feature was the fact that no one could see him sitting there until they were right on top of him, meaning he could corner the idiots with the late essays without undue effort. He loved to hear them whimper; Radek had informed him that the students had started calling this section of the halls 'The Gauntlet'.

Apparently no one had told the new maths teacher this, though, since Rodney stalked in one morning with his travel mug firmly clutched in one hand and his eyes barely half open to find that his chair was taken up with an offensively lanky sprawl.

He clicked his fingers impatiently as he attempted to recall the man's name. Baker, or Carpenter; one of those offensively rural names. He'd never been good at listening when Elizabeth was talking, and he'd been studiously ignoring the staff emails since Heightmeyer had worked out how to spam the lot of them with painfully earnest thoughts for the day; he gave up trying to remember in fairly short order and just gestured meaningfully.

"Mine."

Rodney hadn't known it was possible to anthropomorphise eyebrows, but the one raised at him was definitely laconic.

"Yours?"

"My chair," he said impatiently. No one should expect sentences before his first cup of coffee. The maths teacher hooked his arm over the back of the chair - his chair - and considered him.

"Trade you for it."

Rodney stared at him for a moment or two, then shook his head and held up his free hand as he took a long fortifying gulp of his coffee. Then he glared.

"What are you talking about?"

The man's really quite annoyingly pretty mouth curled into a smile and in order to avoid staring Rodney made sure to focus on his - frankly ridiculous - hair instead. Really, the standards of professional appearance in this place were diabolical.

"I'll trade you. You look like a man who knows his coffee; you get the chair, in return you show me the best place to get a decent drink around here. Deal?"

Rodney folded his arms across his chest and opened his mouth to speak but it snapped shut again as the man held up a finger.

"And," he drawled, "you have to make conversation."

"...seriously, what the hell did I do to deserve this?" Rodney drained his cup, then directed his glare back at the occupant of his chair. "Why do you hate me?"

The man - Sheppard, that was it - adopted a pained expression and intoned dramatically, "because our father always loved you more than me."

"...what? What the hell?!"

Sheppard grinned and got to his feet as Rodney searched his memory for the oddly familiar phrase. When it clicked into place he groaned.

"You're just aiming for a whole new embarrassing level of dork, aren't you?"

"What can I say, I'm a trend setter."

"I'm going to cut your heart out with a spoon," he grumbled, and Sheppard shot him another of those blinding grins.

"Over coffee?" and Sheppard, arrogant bastard that he was, didn't bother waiting for an answer but just started walking, expecting Rodney to follow.

Any other day he would've refused; this was shaping up to be one of those mornings where one cup of coffee just wasn't going to cut it.

"You're buying," he told the man's retreating back, and the muppet laugh he got in return made him smile a little, reluctantly. A laugh like that was just ripe for the mocking.

Sheppard had never said the conversation had to be polite.