Angelo
by Pares
"That looks almost frighteningly like acoustical tile in the ceiling," Rodney muttered. "And I'm not excited about its structural integrity right now.""Shut up, McKay. It's pouring out there. At least in here it's... slightly less wet."
John inspected the steeply peaked roof from the inside; McKay was right. The stuff on the ceiling looked for all the world like the stuff you'd find in cheap 70s era office buildings in any state in the USA. The little shanty itself seemed to have been carved out of something as light and fragile as Balsa wood, only the walls were about three feet thick. The wall that had the door in it was swiss-cheesed with irregular holes and held one small, glazed window.
"What are the holes for, do you think? Air? Or insulation?" Rodney held a palm up to the wall, apparently looking for a breeze.
John shook his head. The de Kol people had offered them shelter, such as it was, and John didn't much care what they used for building materials as long as they had towels. Somewhere.
The furniture inside looked tidy enough; a low table that looked to be made out of the same stuff as the walls, and a perfectly square bed nudged into one corner of the single room.
"Indoor plumbing," Rodney sighed. "Is it really too much to hope for?"
"These people get culled every five years, Rodney. They've got more to do than worry about appealing to persnickety tourists."
"Hm." Rodney gave the wall a briefly pitying look and then shrugged off his pack and set it on the table. There were some canary yellow linens folded on the shelf, and he tossed one to John. Towel. Score.
He rubbed its soft nap against his hair; somehow, it smelled like green leaves and new rope. From under the shadow of his towel, he could hear Rodney struggling out of his wet jacket. By the time John had slung the towel around his neck, Rodney was making amusing sputtering sounds as he worked his head out of the neck-hole of his sopping tee shirt. Then he went wide-eyed and made a startled little hop, arching his back and saying, "What the hell—Oh, perfect. The roof is leaking!" He sounded not a little accusing; John was kind of getting tired of always being on hand to take the blame for things that couldn't possibly be his fault.
Reluctantly, John followed Rodney's baleful glare and noted that yeah, water was rushing in from one sagging corner of molding acoustical tile.
"How about that," John said, just to get Rodney's glare to swing his way. It worked.
"You're determined to be all cool about this, just to make me look like a—a person who isn't cool. About this. About a hole in the roof! I mean, it's practically a typhoon out there!"
"It happens," John shrugged. "The bed looks dry enough, anyway." And it did. Tidy and low, like a little raft, with pillows.
"Yeah, sure, until the deluge floods this hellhole and we drown in our sleep. Won't that be nice?"
"I'm sure it'll be fine," John said soothingly.
That was the moment that the ceiling tile failed and mashed itself wetly into Rodney's thinning hair like a rotting plank of Styrofoam. It would have been funny if John hadn't been standing right next to him. The place was pretty small, after all.
"Beautiful," Rodney said, raking crumbled bits of roofing from his forehead. John dabbed at his own head with his damp towel. The tile seemed to have dissolved into dense little beads that he could feel nestling in his hair. The rain, now admitted, battered his hair down one strand at a time, seeming to urge the beads to nestle in for the long haul. John was happy to note that the floor was pitched, and the water rolled harmlessly out of the shelter, a shimmying little line tucked under the space below the hut's only door.
"I don't guess we'll drown," John offered at last, but Rodney only sneered and said, "Only because this place is leaking like a sieve."
John debated hanging a tarp, but in the end just undressed and hung his clothes on some pegs hammered into the wall as far away from the hole in the ceiling as he could get without leaving their pants to drip dry onto the bed. For lack of anything better to do, he and Rodney climbed on the bed in dry shirts and shorts. Even with the storm, there was enough light to read by, and as it was too early to sleep John laid out a deck of cards and played a hand of round the clock solitaire. Rodney futzed with his PDA, poking at it with a stylus and making it chirp now and again.
"I have to pee," he admitted, sometime into John's third hand of solitaire. It was getting to be full dark now, and John couldn't be sure, but he imagined Rodney was glaring at the rain still dumping in through the hole in the roof. "I bet Teyla has indoor plumbing," Rodney sighed bitterly.
"She knows these guys. And she didn't tell them that their math sucks," he pointed out. He was a bit rankled that he'd had to suck it up and room with Rodney, but he wouldn't leave a team member alone off-world if he didn't absolutely have to, no matter how well Teyla knew the natives.
"Angelo," Rodney sniffed. "I just bet she knows him. He had ex-boyfriend written all over him."
John didn't disagree. For an alien with an Italian name, the wiry, big-handed Angelo looked kind of East Indian to John, but what he'd really noted was that Angelo's warm embrace had lingered a bit, and his hands had roamed to questionable places. Ronon had immediately looked at the guy like he was thinking about cutting him up for steaks.
With another beleaguered sigh, Rodney scudded off the bed and rummaged in his pack for his rain poncho. He splashed through the small river on the hard floor and crouched out into the rain, coming back in almost immediately.
"Now my feet are wet," he complained. John had tuned him out; some small movement had attracted his attention.
"Rodney," John said, low and warning.
Rodney went still under the crumpled gray hood of his rain poncho, his eyes wide. Then, following John's transfixed gaze, he turned around.
"Oh my god. Oh my GOD, what IS that?" He staggered backwards into the bed, nearly collapsing on John's lap.
Something wiggly and blue and... glowing, was wriggling out of one of the spaces in the wall.
"Well. It looks like a squid," John said finally. It had what looked like clumps of eyes, as black and shiny as the rain-wet berries on the bushes outside. John got a hint of a pointy little head gathered up into a dozen or so long waving, dimpled arms tipped with wicked looking little hooks. He swallowed hard. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up and his hand was resting on the pommel of his Beretta, which he'd left settled on the bed beside him. "With fangs," he added. Big fucking fangs, he thought.
Another one poked its wavy little tentacles out of another space, and then another, and another until the wall was studded with wavy little glowing squids with huge (probably poison filled, his brain supplied helpfully) motherfucking fangs.
"So I guess this is how the de Kol get rid of unwelcome guests," John said, reaching over to feel around for his P90 without ever looking away from the perforated wall... when the squid-things began to sing.
It wasn't like music, really, it was more like... listening to the sea. They made a low burbling sound that rose and fell, rubbing against his eardrums like the low swish of some kind of giant baby rattle. Somehow, it sounded like rain, it sounded like the ocean, it sounded like the chuckle of every little brook he'd ever walked along at summer camp... and it made him need to take a piss like a son of a bitch. Clearly, it was the local version of a Dream Machine, although what they found restful about glow-in-the-dark squids, he couldn't imagine.
"This is the most fucked-up galaxy ever," Rodney asserted.
John could only nod dumbly as Rodney nudged closer to him on the bed, hugging the poncho around his knees.
"Promise me you'll shoot them if they decide to come creeping out of the wall all the way," Rodney said in a hushed voice.
John cradled the P90 in his lap.
"Believe me, I promise."
"I am not going to be able to sleep to that," Rodney said faintly. "In fact, I may never sleep again."
John didn't bother to answer him, just kept his eyes locked on the wall, his stomach tight with revulsion.
After a few minutes, Rodney's head thunked against his shoulder and he dragged in a long, ragged sigh. Apparently Rodney found the squid-things restful, after all. John himself had calmed considerably since they'd first trundled out of the walls. Their hum was relaxing, and watching their wavy arms reminded him of something he'd heard about how watching fish swim in an aquarium lowered your blood pressure.
Maybe they weren't so bad. And it seemed to him that Teyla had maybe mentioned them to him. The Gy, the lightbringers. At the time, he'd thought they were like gas lamp-lighters in turn of the century London. This certainly hadn't even made the top ten of what he'd had in mind.
Rodney had managed to close a hand in the hem of John's tee-shirt, his head heavy and warm on John's shoulder. He was busy drooling on John's sleeve. Risking a glance at his watch, John figured he could wait to take a leak until after first watch, and trust Rodney to protect him from the glow-squids when it was his turn to sleep.
END
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