They’re in all the same scenes, so of course they’re thrown together a lot, even more so during those uncertain stretches of downtime that keep them lingering in costume, their lines so backed up in their heads that no one thinks twice when Jason says Sheppard or when David’s patience threshold cuts off right at McKay’s.

They’re in the same scenes; they know all the same people; they flash the same MGM-issued ID at the gate guard every morning, but Joe and David rarely exchange more than a handful of words throughout the course of the day. Once in a while, Joe will catch David—best friend to everyone and their dog—looking at him with a half-formed question in his eyes, and when that happens, Joe trots off toward craft services or his own trailer, because hey, they’ve both cultivated this friendly-not-friends approach, not just him, and he shouldn’t have to explain it.

Besides, if David is blissfully unaware of why he sidesteps Joe rather than brush past the way he would with anyone else, then let him keep on that way, talking about Joe often but rarely to him, standing near but not with, and all the other things that people who aren’t them probably don’t even notice.

And it’s not easily noticed. David is a master of distraction; there’s always a gadget in his hands so he can send his thoughts out to the world as often as possible, which lets Joe off the hook during situations that might draw attention to the careful distance between them. Situations like this, where everyone else is done shooting for the day, and it’s just Joe and David at the edge of a forest at twilight, waiting for the crew to give the ready.

“Exactly how long does it take to change a light bulb?” David shifts his P-90 to the other arm for the tenth time. His ears and nose are pink from the cold. “But the second I set foot in the trailer, it’ll be fixed.”

“Best to just wait,” Joe agrees. David likes being around people he’s close to, people he can nudge and pat and tease. When it’s just the two of them, he gets like this: edgy like his nerves can’t handle the quiet, or maybe it’s the boredom he can’t take.

No one else has ever accused Joe of being a bore.

“We could go get a drink after this,” David says after a long empty stretch of time. He’s staring off toward the crew when he says it, at the place where the lights flicker on and then die. The quiet sound that rolls through Joe’s throat is lost beneath the crew’s groan of dismay. He doesn’t know how it would have sounded, but it feels like resolve that’s been stretched too thin by things like fondness and proximity and the way David’s hands always reflect what’s going on in his eyes. Right now, those hands are perfectly still.

“We could,” Joe says slowly. A good strong drink would be perfect after standing here in the cold for so long, but David doesn’t know what he’s asking. He’s testing, edging his way past the boundaries they’ve set up because he doesn’t understand them, and Joe gets that, he really does. There are days when he wants nothing more than David’s chatter in his ear, to touch that energy and be touched back in a way that everyone else takes for granted.

“But we won’t,” David guesses.

“We could,” Joe says again, because they could—they could go someplace warm and loud; they could rewrite all those boundaries until it’s fine for David to catcall the way everyone else does when Joe strips his shirt off for a scene; they could let things slide until even David’s chatter isn’t enough for Joe anymore.

“I just feel like we should be closer,” David says, restless again as he paces a small patch of grass. “Why aren’t we closer?”

“I don’t know,” Joe says, but when the repaired equipment suddenly throws on its beams, David’s eyes are on him, the blues nearly translucent in the bright shock of light.

“One drink,” David says.

Someone is yelling for them to get to their marks, and John Sheppard feels appallingly out of reach. “One drink,” Joe concedes, slipping toward David and not away, already caught in the tug of the shifting tide.