Title: Paper Cranes (upstairs, downstairs)
Author: Ladyofthelog
Fandom: Stargate:Atlantis, Stargate:SG1
Pairing: John/Rodney
Rating: Mature, but not terribly explicit
Warnings: None, really
Genre: Romance, mild Angst, First Time
Word Count: 19,000-ish
Summary:
Rodney’s half-expecting John’s family home to be some kind of Gothic monstrosity, and given that they take a long, winding route from the freeway under the dim light of the waning moon, he can surely be forgiven for a little bit of paranoia and an overactive imagination. The house looks pretty normal for a Gothic monstrosity from where they park, though, for values of normal that include recently painted and aggressively landscaped.
Why You Should Read This:
Beautifully written, often hilarious.
John invites Rodney to help him get through his brother’s wedding. This is an unusual John’s!family story, in that John’s family is not terrible. If fact, they are rather nice, and the fact that John does not, and apparently never did, feel like he belongs here, is not the result of any meanness on the part of the remaining family (John’s dad is dead). David and his fiancé are actually quite likable. So is everyone else. Though John is very uncomfortable with these people, Rodney is, strangely enough, not. Which ends up causing a bit of a breach of national security, among other things.
John and Rodney start this story as friends and end it as lovers, but the process that John needs to go through to get there is complex enough to satisfy those of us who like the twists and turns of psychological “issues”, especially when those tangles are plausible and when the writing is fairly subtle. I love John and Rodney both in this.