Coffee Service

 

 

Coffee. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you it’s addictive. Ask me, and I’ll tell you about how slowly my body’s become dependant on the caffeine received from it, how when Italian merchants tried to ban the stuff to protect their wine even the pope himself got addicted to it, baptized the concoction, and proclaimed it a truly Christian beverage. I’ll tell you how coffee is an unstoppable force of nature. I’ll tell you how coffee is both the devil and pure genius for what it does to the human body.

 

I’ll also tell you that I had never had a truly good cup of coffee until I met Major Lieutenant Colonel Whatever-He-Is-Now John Sheppard.

 

The coffee he makes is…it’s bliss in a beverage. I have no idea how he does it, and he refuses to tell me, and I’m damned if I can’t help but drink all of it before I can analyze whatever it is he gives me.

 

I tried to stop myself from drinking it one day, to see what he does to it to make the coffee so damn delicious. It had to be laced with something, I thought. Maybe speed, for what it did to me. Maybe alcohol. Maybe even some nicotine, to make me crave it so much.

 

One cup a day is all he gives me. One measly cup a day. I never see him drinking his coffee (he has a special set of mugs apparently, a nice light blue ceramic that’s never too hot or cold when you hold it, just a nice warm tingly feeling, and in two and a half years I’ve never gotten a cup from a different set), but I know he’s just hoarding it away. Damn coffee dragon.

 

The first time I got his cursedly perfect coffee was the first morning on Atlantis, actually. I was “messing around” in the control room as he tells it, even though I know it was obviously important if I even bothered to do it, and I was naturally kind of pissed at him for evading me when I needed his ATA gene to turn the Ancient technology on. Thank god those days are over.

 

“Morning, McKay,” he said, grinning and holding out a single light blue mug while his hair tried to do an impression of angry road kill.

 

I eyed it carefully. “What is this, some sort of bribe to escape the exploitation of your genetics?”

 

“It’s coffee,” Sheppard said easily, still smiling. He does that a lot, apparently. “You know, highly caffeinated ground bean beverage. Good for snarky scientists at whatever-the-time-is. Figured you could use some.”

 

“I’m amazed, Major. Proof that your mind has deductive capabilities, it’s truly a staggering thought,” I sniped. “Will wonders never cease.”

 

“I am amazingly wonderful, aren’t I?” he nodded in that annoyingly, boyishly charming way, and I grabbed the coffee.

 

And that was when it started.

 

Every morning one of us isn’t dead or dying (usually me, actually, and usually in the process of saving his moronic, self-sacrificing ass) or on a mission, he shows up with that sinfully perfect cup of coffee and just enough intelligence for me to actually not mind his company. Usually.

 

Except, sometimes it isn’t in the morning. Sometimes I get two cups, when we’re up all night saving the city and Earth in the process. And after I reach the 36-hour point, if the man’s still around and not trying to heroically commit suicide like the idiot he is, he’ll give me a mug of coffee every four hours. And at the 72-hour point, all I’ve got to do is get his ass moving.

 

There are times, of course, when I don’t get my coffee. There was this one time that we were trapped in a cave with a bullet-proof saber tooth tiger the size of a dump truck trying to eat us. And then there’s the times we’ve been captured by the hostile natives of the day, the times when we’re quarantined or stuck or trapped in a random area.

 

And of course the times when John Sheppard has to play martyr and get himself as close as possible to death’s door and can’t give me coffee.

 

Which is, naturally, why I sit by his bed. I’m just waiting for him to wake up so he can make me my coffee. Honestly.

 

Okay, fine. I admit it. True, the coffee’s amazing, but so is the company. It’s not just the coffee I look forward to, it’s the service that goes along with it. There, you happy?

 

So maybe it’s not just the coffee I’m addicted to. Maybe it’s just the fact that Major-Colonel-Whatever Sheppard is interesting and can actually manage to hold a decent conversation, even though our conversations sound more like very odd arguments. Maybe it’s the fact he actually manages to make sure I’m not infected with some alien flu, and that I don’t get lemon in my coffee (yes, it has happened. Zelenka has the taste of a fungus), and that every now and then he’ll drink coffee with me when he brings it. Maybe it’s the fact that John actually seems to care, and that I can’t help caring too.

 

Maybe it’s the friendship that comes along with the coffee that’s so pleasant.