villainny:

If Teyla had to hear the Atlanteans mention another harvest festival or welcoming ceremony with that snide patronising tone again she was going to stick her bantos rods where the Wraith wouldn’t look for them, and she wasn’t kidding. Dr McKay’s smirks were always the most annoying, yet he seemed perfectly happy to drape lights over dying foliage, or hunt for concealed chocolate, or demand gifts once a year simply for being born.

This particularly custom seemed the most offensive yet. Teyla brushed her chair carefully clean and settled into it, folding her arms across her chest.

“There are organs,” she said. “Shiny pink and red organs. Everywhere.”

“Also cake,” Ronon said, cheerful and muffled. There was frosting in his beard.

“Also,” she conceded, “cake. Are Dr McKay or Colonel Sheppard nearby? I would like them to explain -”

“Rodney first,” Ronon said, with the air of a connoisseur – it was true that McKay’s rants were the more entertainingly nonsensical.

It was at that moment that the noise level in the cafeteria rose abruptly. Teyla looked over to the door to see McKay’s hands waving violently, Colonel Sheppard altering his course and stance to accommodate like a well-practised dance. (The type, she thought sourly, that they had sniggered at on their latest visit.)

“ – stupid, heteronormative tradition with its offensively narrow demarcation of what is and is not a significant relationship -”

He sat without stopping, Sheppard dropping into the chair opposite him and smirking with an air of genuine amusement that wouldn’t stop him teasing without mercy.

“Why do I have folded paper?” Teyla cut in. Once McKay started, he needed forcible diverting.

“Folded paper?” Sheppard asked.

“With poorly rendered drawings of organs on,” Teyla confirmed.

“Oh of course,” McKay said, outraged with an odd sidelong glimpse of genuine hurt. “Of course the alien gets Valentines cards.” He hunched his shoulders automatically, accepting the double head-slap as his due. It didn’t, of course, stop him. “Teyla,” he said pointedly, “gets Valentines cards from admirers, from thickheaded grunts who probably don’t even look past all the midriff-baring tops and fancy hair -”

“I got ‘em too,” Ronon said. “And I’ve only got one of those.”

“Perfect,” McKay said. “Because what I really need to be reminded of is the shallowness of humanity who’d rather celebrate facial symmetry than – not that you’re both not, obviously, so much more than the symmetry of your faces would suggest, but my point is no one else has had opportunity to know that, and I for one find it galling that some people – who have saved the base on multiple occasions, might I add – some people don’t get the appreciation that it could be argued they’re entitled to.”

“Some people,” Sheppard said thoughtfully, after a moment, “obviously haven’t opened their laptop this morning.”

“Haven’t – oh,” said McKay, eyes wide and blue and startled. A gentle flush of color washed across his cheeks, and he was silent after that for a good five minutes.

There may, Teyla reluctantly admitted, be some worth to this celebration after all.