They trade one of John's childhood memories and the last of the medical supplies for passage on a cargo ship, and land on Bajan in mid-winter. The memory is nothing exceptional: Rachel Sheppard doing the baseball mom thing on a Saturday afternoon in 1975, at Fort Bragg. She wears a bottle green shirt, the left wrist cuff stained with soda; she yells, "Show them what you're made of, Big J!" when John is up for bat in the fourth inning and Frank Sheppard has left the stands; even with the sun in his eyes, John hits a line drive that takes him to third base. Because little league is nothing anyone in this galaxy has ever heard of, the clip sells at a premium. Teyla holds his hand during the upload and hums an Athosian chant, but John's okay. He's got more where that came from. This starts out full of mystery. With the Little League memory stuck in the middle, grounding things. What you know: 'they' aren't in Atlantis. "They' are in extremis. 'They' include John and Teyla. What you don't know: everything. The mechanism of survival is in the first sentence - the memory trading, which turns out to be this series of constant, tiny Faustian bargains. Teyla's actions during the upload pretty much guarantee that John isn't okay - she's far more perceptive, even about the inside of his head, than he is himself.
That first month, they stay down-city in a cheap resthouse packed with other immigrants, deep in the bowels of Bajan minor where the suns only contribute a permanent kind of dawn. Their room is small and bare, but they keep it clean. The bed is little more than a mattress propped up on the floor, but big enough for the adults to share and for Ben to sleep in a knobby ball against John's back. New character, more mystery. These paragraphs are reminiscent of a lot of grimy urban tenement stories, hand to mouth, no room for the luxury of planning ahead. Strangely, they also remind me, strongly, of Farscape - the episode after Crichton's died, when Aeryn is grieving. It's the futuristic squalid anonymity of the setting, perhaps.
After a long day of menial jobs or no jobs at all, they huddle together, too tired to be bothered by the high-pitched squeals of the critters getting hacked in the kitchen next door. John's arm reaches behind him, curled around his son's slim waist, the child's face tucked between his shoulder blades. Teyla's hand cups John's elbow, fingers splayed over the efflorescence of Ellia's old feeding wound. Very intimate, but no hint that it's sexual. And the his son implies not Teyla's. This is also where I start wondering exactly when the story is set.
The long winter, the constant press of bodies, the economics of memory that leave John shaking: none of that can intrude upon this hard-won peace. Home is a roof over their heads, food that doesn't fight back, and a shield at last. The bargain, spelled out more clearly. And you have to be pretty desperate if the picture that was just painted is something you're happy about.
The city makes it easy to fall into a routine.
In the morning Teyla stands on a bridge with other day laborers and accepts whatever job will bring home food enough for three. John cleans what needs to be cleaned, washes what needs to be washed, and looks after Ben. In the evenings they sit on the floor in a circle and eat, or, in Ben's case, pretend not to eat. Teyla shares some baffling discovery she made about their adoptive world. John attempts to coax Ben into showing off what he learned that day, and ends up running the commentary of their adventures for Teyla: teaching Ben to count; spelling out the really long words from the first chapter of War and Peace with an alphabet of dry noodles; throwing small black nuts to a bird in the park and ending up feeding the whole colony; sitting on the bed Indian-style, quiet, for a really long time. The run-down of the daily routine gives you a little breathing space. The revelation that John has his book is where I changed my assumptions from 'the city has been destroyed and everyone else is dead' to 'they had to leave the city and everyone else is either dead or fine.' John's life is too domestic for the rest of the expedition to be in a state between dead and fine. At times Ben's lips move along with the retelling.
After dinner they bundle up and take a short stroll to the local market place and its colorful displays of leeches. They linger on the suspended bridges, because Ben likes to look down. John holds Ben's right hand, and only when Ben frowns does John know he's squeezing too tight. Or is there something wrong with John? Other than PTSD, which I usually figure is a given in most SGA stories. Every twelve standard days, Teyla returns from work early to sit with Ben, and John walks down to their local immigration office to pay the safety tax. He sleeps badly the night before, and sits on the ledge outside their window, watching the itinerant merchants go by.
Choosing which memory to give up is a little harder each time, even if he doesn't remember what he's lost. John has rules: never give up anything big, anything bad, or anything useful. But what if this is it? The seemingly insignificant event that was the key to the whole edifice; the loss that will unravel him completely. Okay, that's a pretty terrifying concept. Seated in a chair in the extraction room, John watches the digital monitor on the wall where flat, blurred images play out on a loop. The beginning of the process seems clean and clinical, modern. "That's the one you've settled on," the technician says. "Are you sure?"
John nods, forcing his eyes open when the technician brings the leech up to his neck. The bite doesn't hurt more than the pinprick of a needle, and the stimulation of the neural pathways feels pretty good as it happens, like a shot of nicotine. When the pathways are destroyed, it doesn't feel like anything. And takes a little turn for the low tech. Afterwards, the technician conducts a brief neurological check, asks if he wants to lie down, gives him a cup of blue Jell-O that tastes cloyingly sweet. Then, John is allowed to collect three updated ID keys from his case officer at a desk out front. Clarifying the transaction. On the walk home there is always someone sprawled on a public bench who stares at a breach of sky with tell-tale, vacant eyes. These people need the sweetness of blue Jell-O more than he does, so John gives his cup away and eats at the counter of an ambulatory food cart, shredding pita-like bread into a sugary substance the consistency of yogurt. When the last crumb is gone, John sticks his key in the pay-slot, and a fleet of techno-organic bugs no larger than a fingernail swarm over his bowl, and lick the kitchenware clean to the last molecule. So everyone is doing this? Everyone in this weird ghetto? Sometimes he staggers to a nearby alley and is sick immediately. After a session, John's body thrums like the aftermath of a college weekend of sex and the worst trip he's ever had all rolled into one, so it can be hard to keep the food down. A physical reaction, or an emotional one, or both? I guess I read it as both. Back at the resthouse, John has to step over the bodies entwined in the hallway to get to the door. There's a lot of sex in the hallways, which makes sense in a horrible way - having experiences in order to sell the memories, so that whoever the consumers are can live through them, but with the danger/violence/physical consequences removed. Inside he finds Teyla talking quietly to Ben. The boy is huddled under the windowsill, knees drawn tight to his chest, rocking.
"I'm okay," John says, kneeling in front of Ben but not touching. It's never a good time for a hug, for either of them. "I'm back. It's all right. No one took me away."
John tries to be in bed before the shaking starts. He smiles in thanks when Teyla pulls off his boots and piles their blankets and her coat on top of his body. Before he falls asleep, he's aware of Ben's presence at his back, and of Ben's soft keening. Ben's such a quiet passive character up to this point, and now it seems there's something wrong with him, too. Still mysterious and half-drawn. Trauma? What the hell have they all gone through? And did Teyla not go through it as well, or is she just much better at holding her shit together? The touching thing, paired with the quiet, had me thinking severe autism.
When the temperature rises above freezing, they hop on the central elevator and ride all the way up to the spaceport in Bajan major. Breath blooming and wilting on the laminated pane, Ben and John hold their faces to the glass of the cabin window, and watch the cities wilt and bloom around them. Sunlight has been sparse since they landed here, so they packed drinks and sandwiches in Teyla's satchel, having decided by silent consensus to make a bit of a trip of it. It's lovely and subtle, having John & Ben share the same actions. The spaceport's main terminal sits on top of Bajan's tallest skyscraper, improbable perspectives opening up in all directions. The stargate stands to one side on a dais, unmanned but wearing an iris like a great eye patch. Finding a ledge by the busy loading docks they sit against the guardrail. They eat. Teyla and John pretend to look away while Ben takes apart his sandwich. Teyla recounts the story of a hunt that ended with the women trussing up the men like prey, and carrying them to the village on their shoulders and backs.
"They never tried that joke on us again," she says, aggrieved, the memory of offense fresh on her face. "Hiding in the bushes! Wearing the furs of Jacka beasts, faces painted with mud, like children barely higher than a man's knee! I do not care that we were hunting on the night of the Spirits' Ride. We could have shot them all. And we would have, had their smell not been so...distinguishable." Teyla scrunches up her nose at Ben, whose fists are locked in the lining of his father's coat, and something almost like a smile softens the serious face. "Certainly, Marrick could not blame Shena when her arrow found the perfect center of his...moving target."
John chuckles, insides warmed by the rare luxury of an intoxicant and Ben's foray into humor. Caught up in the reminiscing, he almost brings up that time Ronon got laid by his very own alien priestess. Teyla definitely got some from the two altar boys, but she looked at John like he was concussed when he tried to high-five her on the walk back to the jumper. Maybe not a story John should share in Ben's presence. Teyla is filling up the silence, and John self-edits out of taking part. It's a very strange sort of comradery set into a nuclear family structure. When the tart sweets Teyla scrounged up for dessert are gone, they watch the setting of Bajan's blue sun over the skyline, the remnants of day cooling to a teal hue. From this perspective, down-city is blanketed in a haze of fog moving in from the sea, and as the primary star of the binary system disappears, the veil of smoke ignites like a pool of ethylene, blue as the purest flame. And this makes me think of Blade Runner. The effect is transient, a handful of seconds at most, but Ben grips the rail and leans over, and John's whole body flows into the movement, curving around his son's frame like a shell, mouth open on a voiceless shout.
This fear is a sickness. It camps inside John's veins, patient and merciless as an army. He doesn't think that he'll ever learn how to handle it; it doesn't seem possible, now, when his cheek brushes against a head of sweet damp curls, when his clothes smell of child-skin and clean sweat, when his hands cup that thin ribcage and the flutter of life inside it. This is where John's motivations slotted into place for me. Teyla suddenly becomes out-group, despite the way she's acting as caretaker, because all of this fear and the way that John is making himself into both a physical and emotional shield for Ben makes her irrelevant. Ben grows restless when the embrace goes on for too long, so John pushes the fear out in one breath, and pulls them both away from the edge. Ruthlessly ignoring his still-pounding heart, he points to the massive figurehead of a high-rise ahead, and asks, in a voice almost steady, "What should we call this one? Come on, Ben. Who does it look like?"
John doesn't have to trade glances with Teyla to know she'll play along.
"I'm thinking Brad Pitt. What do you say, Teyla? He's got a little something of Brad in the chin and mouth."
"The forehead," Teyla says, in all seriousness. "And this one," she adds authoritatively, pointing to the left, "looks like the pictures I have seen of your country's president. This must be why we feel at home here." Trust John to initiate a pop-culture based game when he is the only person playing who is likely to get any of the referents.
They keep the game going a while. Charlton Heston. Jennifer Aniston. Britney Spears. Squirming, Ben stretches an arm out to the nearest building, mouth open yet incapable of uttering anything but a frustrated whine. "That's right," John whispers against his son's hair, swallowing around the rock in his throat. "You got it, buddy." It's amazing that these last two sentences ramp up so much fear, desperation, and anguish - while still not revealing anything. Later Ben is asleep inside John's coat, and John and Teyla lean into each other, legs dangling over the chasm. From this vantage point, they can almost make out the fractal shore of the cities' bedrock, glimpsed through the tight nest of skyscrapers carved into humanoid shapes, and the web of railroads, transport lanes, and bridges spun around the alien gathering. A last flare of daylight reflects off the contours of muscles and sinew, of necks stretched to the sky, of manes flowing onto collarbones, the severe figures tapering into monoliths of organic steel from the shoulders down. This is very cool, skyscrapers like huge pedestals holding massive portrait sculpture. The first time I read this, I was too busy trying to puzzle out what was going on to really appreciate the setting. It's nicely done world-building. They talk of small things: buying a new coat for Ben, taking a weekend off outside the city. They end up trading inconsequential memories of old relationships: Teyla's boyfriends, who always got taken by the Wraith; and John's girlfriends, who always dumped him. This is the conversation that decided me that Teyla & John are platonic. Maybe because if they were in a sexual relationship, those memories would be weighty information. Eventually the cold needles the back of their heads, and they leave their perch to clear up the leftovers of their picnic. John pries Ben from his neck and settles the boy in Teyla's embrace, wrapping his scarf around woman and child. And now Ben is clingy like a leech, which seems really normal. I think. For the random hazy age I was working out for him in my head, which was 4-8ish. The stars are muted by the cities' glow, the second sun still visible but revolving distantly on another plane--barely felt, irrelevant. The moon rising over Bajan's artificial assembly is brighter, almost close enough to touch. A dark band bisects the disk neatly in the middle, not an accretion ring but a shipyard: thousands of derelict vessels ensnare Bajan's arid satellite. A higher level of technology than we've ever seen in Pegasus onscreen. This makes it easy to believe that this planet can have a shield and an iris on the gate and serve as a sanctuary. After a moment's consideration, John kneels in a pool of darkness and pulls an object the size of a goose egg out of a pocket. Without ceremony he sets it on the ground, presses the crystal in its center, and watches the laser trail of the data burst shoot upwards, moving so fast that it is swallowed by the moon instantly.
Face tilted up, John remains on his knees, and imagines that he can follow the light a while.
Hey there, Rodney. This is your unscheduled check-in.And all the guesses I'd been making? This is where I had to start over again. Ben's doing calculus? Rodney's alive but not with them and John can send a message? What?We've finally found a place. It's lacking in four-star accommodation, but I think we're here to stay. If you could see what I see right now, you'd have a litter of kittens.
Teyla's doing good, and your godson keeps me on my toes. He's fond of drawing inequalities and additions in indelible ink on his hands. I never told you I took remedial calculus in high school, did I? I didn't care all that much, until I learned what I needed to fly.
How're you doing, Rodney? You'd damn better be alive.
In the sixth week John receives a visit from their case officer.
At the first knock his body snaps to alertness, and he drops Teyla's shirt in the sink. The peephole doesn't reveal much more than a short shadow standing in the corridor. John drilled the hole himself, but the door's skin-steel keeps trying to heal over it. Nice juxtaposition of high-tech and squalor, again. Startled, Ben drops a cardboard box covered in existential quantifications, and stares at John in alarm, eyes wide and knowing. John snags him off the floor and tucks him in the door's blind spot, brushing dry lips across the boy's forehead to seal an old covenant. For the first time since they came back from the hive ship, John's glad that his son doesn't have the words to share what's going on inside. And, hive ship. It really does amaze me that the back-story can come out in such tiny pieces and still be so effective. Ignoring the second knock, he collects the 9mm stashed under the mattress, and the clip hidden in a pair of folded socks. Even as he asks loudly for a moment of patience--covering the rattle of the clip sliding home--John is already assessing and discarding his options.
On Atlantis he had made up tactics, techniques, and procedures as he went along--after Kolya, both times; after the nanovirus; after the siege. Procedures for foothold situations, procedures for natural disasters, for hostage crises, for visits from alien priestesses, for contaminations of all kinds, for power failures, for his death, for Rodney's death, for Elizabeth's. He had spent most of his time on Earth running his scenarios through anyone who would listen. I like this idea of John, suddenly in command and double-checking his plans and ideas, knowing he isn't the best qualified, but determined to do the best job possible so that they can all survive. Since they left Atlantis, he's been running his procedures by Teyla, and he thinks of her now. She's taken a full-time position as a security guard in a legal parlor, and her shift ends at sunset. If John has to run, he'll leave a sign in a park two bridges north, but there isn't much more he can do. If it comes to a choice between saving Ben and going back for Teyla, there is no choice. That's John's first priority and Teyla knows it.
Damn it, John. Get a fucking grip.
John cracks open the door.
"Honored Guest Sheppard! I'm glad to find you home."
"Case Officer Ekaterin." John's grip flexes around the sidearm in his pocket. The corridor is empty, except for the honor guard of couples rutting against the walls, and they could hide anything and be anyone. "Did I miss a session?" What's he so paranoid about? Who's after them? "Oh, no! Of course not. I have good news! May I come in?"
Puzzled by the deference to privacy, John reminds himself that case officers are trained to handle the culturally challenged. "Mi casa es su casa," he says, taking a step back to let her through. A quick visual check confirms that she isn't hiding a weapon; there's something to be said for spandex overalls, aside from the obvious. CO Ekaterin is blond, short and curvy, a round face, healthy-pink and good-humored; young, very young, eighteen at the outmost, but on Bajan experience and competence are entirely unrelated to years. More contrast. It's keeping the confusion level high, when this chirpy cheerleader-type shows up in the middle of all the squalor. Particularly when John's gone all fight-or-flight, and she meets that with all this polite respect.
"Of course," says Ekaterin. "Is this Protected Guest Sheppard? What a joy to meet you at last! You're so pretty!"
She takes three quick steps toward Ben, who is pale as snow and plastered to the wall, trying his damnedest to meld with it.
"Don't do that," John grinds out, stepping between them. "Ben's shy. He's not used to strangers."
There's a hair's breath between their chests, but it fails to bother her. She looks up at John with a grin. "Of course," Ekaterin says, unruffled by Ben's distressed whimpers. "Acclimatizing is a lengthy process. Perhaps Protected Guest Sheppard should join one of our schools. The young guests learn to read and write in Bajanian. They memorize great works of arts from the whole galaxy, and take part in physical exercises that develop their motor skills and ensure the fitness of their bodies. Every seven days the young guests receive foods and musical recordings and toys in soft fabrics and bright colors sent especially by our Friends. They get to eat and play until they drop. Learning and experiencing is the work of a lifetime." She winks. "One must start as soon as possible!"
"I don't think that'd be the best option for Ben right now," John says, thinking, over my dead body. He ruffles Ben's hair without looking down, the boy holding onto his leg, panting softly like a wounded animal. "He's had some pretty unique experiences so far and I'd rather stick to home schooling. I'm sure you wouldn't want all that knowledge corrupted by cultural shock or psychological trauma."
That gives her pause. "You're right about that," she says. And, horrified: "What if he were to repress?" Wow. Ekaterin is so very wide-eyed. "Exactly. When Ben reaches the age of consent, it'll be up to him, but in the meantime, I'll be the one taking it for the team."
"You're a distracting guest," Ekaterin chides. "But you remind me that I'm here to impart good news."
"I'm always suspicious of good news," John says.
"Really? Is that a common attitude among your people? A religious imperative, perhaps? You're so interesting! Which is why you've come to the attention of our Friends. You. Personally. Your vast and exotic life experience makes you a rare and treasured guest, Sheppard, and in that spirit our Friends would like to ease your stay here. They wouldn't want to lose you to -- " Ekaterin waves her hand to encompass the room, the din of the kitchens, the traffic, and the corridor. John leans back to avoid getting clocked in the chin. " -- disaffection with your surroundings. We would like to offer you and your Protected and Associated guests lodgings in the green belt outside the cities, as well as more credits per session, and full healthcare benefits. The Friends thing is creeping me out. "Travel to Bajan minor from your new home would be the matter of a cycle by public Rail, but you would be supplied with your own transport anyway." Ekaterin lowers her voice exaggeratedly: "We used to have beamers for transport in and out of the cities, but too many Guests had flashbacks to Wraith cullings and freaked out, so we dismantled them." She clears her throat. "Which is neither here nor there. Of course, Associated Guest Emmagan would be free to pursue her activities, though your upgraded indemnity means she wouldn't have to work anymore. In other words: drinks all around!" She's bubbly, too. It makes it all even more twilight zoney. John coughs. "That's quite a brochure."
"You're very lucky," Ekaterin says pointedly.
"That's me. I'm a lucky guy."
Question: "Is there something I can do to elicit your prompt response? Some ritual or formula I must pronounce?"
Prostrate, Ben hums out of the range of human ears, head bowed so low his forehead brushes the floor. His fingers are stained with ink and poke out of rolled up sleeves, slipping under the hem of John's pant leg and over his boot, tracing patterns of inequality on the skin of John's shin.
Answer: He's still the most beautiful thing his father's ever seen.
"Don't call me," John says, steering Case Officer Ekaterin none too gently out the door--righting her when she trips over one of the Olympic orgasming teams in the corridor. "When I'm ready to hear the catch, I'll call you." Very John Sheppard. Everything he says after she makes her pitch is a distancing non-response. But the way that this is told means you know he probably has no choice but to accept.
The catch is a laundry list of memories Ekaterin wants John to contemplate giving up over the next sessions. It isn't binding, or an ultimatum: they badly want him to stay, and consent is an important cog in the mechanics of the whole system (the legal one, anyway).
It's a short list, and Ekaterin readily agrees to consider one of his own.
"They will demand even more personal things later if you say yes now, and they will seem almost reasonable," Teyla says, face drawn. "Plunge a Fresna in a pot and bring the water slowly to a boil, and it will not be aware of the danger. It will allow itself to be cooked alive."
"That's an intergalactic urban legend," John says. I love this line. He can only afford to plan so far ahead before the stress breaks him down completely, and this gift horse has better teeth than most.
Ekaterin's list reads, in order: sexual practices (any configuration); activities that over-stimulate epinephrine production (other than sex); native foods (sweet); classic works of literature (not War and Peace).
His list reads: absolutely no Bajanian technology in the house; acrylic paint (magenta, emerald, gold, purple, aquamarine, to start with); and: a trip through the stargate, at his discretion.
If he has to use it, John figures he won't need more than one. Finding an escape hatch seems very in character.
The house is built in two days. Its single story sits soberly in the hinterlands like a beached whale, at the foot of a wooded hill worn blunt by wind and rain. The façade is made of white weatherboards and the sides covered in grey shingles. The house creaks from roof to pickled pine flooring like a thing alive and talking, front lawn corralled by a white picket fence and green hedges that grow wild. The two bedrooms and the living room are furnished in mismatched wing chairs, Quaker style desks, beds, and coffee tables, coarse wool rugs and framed watercolors of lighthouses hung on the plain white walls.
On their first visit Ekaterin shows them inside the attic, points out closet space, bangs open the doors of cabinets, jumps on the beds to test the springs, like a realtor on steroids. When she opens a kitchen cupboard to show off the plain white kitchenware, one of the hinges gives out and the door hits her in the head.
"Oops," the officer says, grimacing. "That wasn't supposed to happen."
"It looks kind of like..." John trails off, standing on the porch. From there he can see the ocean and a flat sandy beach beyond a field of tall blue grass. The sea is rolling and crested with foam, rising up to a stubborn sky the color of fresh oysters. Each breath pulls the ocean spray into his lungs. Could there be a setting that contrasts more from where they've been living up to this point? "A Captain house in Nantucket?" Ekaterin volunteers.
"Yeah," John agrees faintly, stunned.
"That's because it is. Our technicians extrapolated the design from a memory you were kind enough to share with us eighteen days ago." That's well-meaningly creepy. John turns to Teyla. "My grandfather used to rent a house and take me on holiday in Nantucket," he says, as if that could mean anything to her. He doesn't remember this house. Did it belong to a neighbor? Did he stay there with his mother? It's inconceivable that he could have given up --
John bends over the balustrade and throws up. The physical panic response he has to this whole process, to the aftermath of the bargains he's made, underline what a huge, terrible thing it is. He pleads a case of spontaneous stomach flu to quash Ekaterin's profuse apologies, and quiet Ben's anxious fussing.
Bajan has two seasons: a protracted winter, and what could generously be called spring.
On the tail-end of the cold days, Teyla, Ben, and John acquaint themselves with the house and its surroundings. Ben won't sleep without John, so they take over the larger bed of the master bedroom, and Teyla relearns the privacy of her own space. Early in the morning the house gets so cold they can almost spot their own breath, so the boys go out on a log-gathering expedition that brings back more mud than wood, and come close to asphyxiation when they start a fire in the hearth. It quickly becomes apparent that Bajan's technicians gathered only a superficial understanding of structural design from John's memory: the flue doesn't actually lead anywhere, and most of the furniture hangs together by accident. It's like they're living in a dollhouse, which seems telling. Armed with nails, hammer, and saw, John can often be found consolidating support beams and strengthening banisters, refurbishing settees and soldering the stove in the backyard under a rain-proof tarp while Ben paints their one set of garden chairs the red of ripe, bitter apples. Something is always breaking down and John is forever fixing and hammering, often without a clue as to what he's doing, and father and son are both delighted.
With the warmer days the countryside takes on more vibrant colors. When they feel brave enough, all three of them ride retro-engineered bicycles through the empty fields. Ekaterin informed John that a handful of other guests lived in the nearby hills, but they have yet to come across anybody. When sun and sky are blue on blue, they put on rubber boots and walk up the hill. It isn't very high, but this area of Bajan's bedrock is mostly flatland, and the vista opens for miles: behind them, the ocean, which covers most of the planet; ahead, a verdant plain seeded with industrial farms and blanketed by the fog; beyond, the uninhabited wilderness of Bajan's single continent, green and mountainous like New Zealand; and, standing in the middle of the plain like an ikebana arrangement, the cities of Bajan stretch their absurd figures out of the haze and spread their shield over the world. More wonderfully drawn setting. It doesn't take long for John to think of the house as a home. It doesn't take him long to get used to the antics of a seven-year-old cycling naked around the garden at midnight, and to learn to drag himself out of a warm bed to chase the gleeful child back to bed. Finally a picture of Ben that's full-formed. I actually think the slow way it comes about is effective, it keeps things tense and means that John's strange ungrounded point of view is consistent. It doesn't take him long to learn to cook for Teyla; to remember to draw her a bath when she comes home eager to shed the smell of the cities; to live up to her trust when she asks him to cut her hair. In those first days John's heart is fuller than it has ever been, and it's almost easy to forget the sacrifices that make it possible. Still so domestic. But some nights he lies in bed, thinking around in circles, and he can swear that he feels every single burned-out pathway in his brain. He wakes up from nightmares, deaf to anything but his own heartbeat, and can't remember his own name. He's woken up and not known Ben until Teyla turned on the lights and gathered them both to her. He's gotten so hot and sick and dizzy that he had to lock himself in the bathroom and listen to Ben cry on the other side of the door. Getting away from the city means that there's mental space to realize that things are getting worse. These are the days when Teyla asks if it's worth it. John suspects that she already knows, but has taken it upon herself to fill the deepest gaps left by Ben's silences.
"There are way more good days than bad," he says, sitting by her side at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of tea.
"Do you believe that the procedure is...affecting you in this way?"
"What else could it be?"
"I see some grey in your hair," Teyla says. The amount you gain from a second reading in this story is astounding. I was sure this was a non-sequitur the first time I read it. I mean, it's Teyla, so I figured it was somehow insightful anyway. Also, I was thinking, John's 38 now, so 38 and 7 makes some grey in his hair perfectly reasonable. John stands, deposits the cup in the sink, and says, "Thanks for the tea," on his way out.
She joins him on the porch later that day. She doesn't speak for a long time, reclining in her red garden chair. When the sun dips below the horizon, she says, "What do you dream about?"
John contemplates walking away again, but his legs feel like wet noodles. "Classic stuff," he says, smiling blandly. "Fast cars, exotic beaches..." He shudders. "Showing up naked for a meeting with Elizabeth."
"Perhaps opening your mind to strangers would not be as much of an ordeal if you would share it with a friend." Oh, Teyla. She's great here, and this scene anticipates the one we actually just saw in Sateda, the one where she tries to get John to talk about his feelings. She says it with a lopsided grin he hasn't often seen, so he's compelled to return it. "You're good," John says, before looking to the shore. He doesn't want to get angry with her; she's not going anywhere, and neither is he. "I've been dreaming about my mother. About my father, too, but mostly her. Maybe the upload knocked something loose."
"Did you not think of her before, then?" Teyla asks curiously, leaning her forearms on her knees.
"No, not often," John says. "She died a few months before we left Earth for Atlantis. Before that, we talked, but it wasn't ever like it was when I was a kid." When they had driven his father crazy, swapping confidences in French over the dinner table, in love with the idea that they could hide anything from him. "She was disappointed when I joined the military. My father sure was, and he didn't try to hide it: I didn't have what it took, I was a slacker, I'd fuck things up and get people killed." Strangely, now that he had fucked up and killed people, it didn't hurt as much to think on a time when they couldn't talk to each other without yelling. They had gotten along so much better after Afghanistan. "But my mother did everything she could to stop me. Going behind my back, pulling strings. And when I did mess up, she wasn't there. Not that I wanted her to intercede, but I was injured and she just..." He shrugs. "She didn't call." Back-story! There are lots of stories that have John & his mother very close, but this also transfers the resentments that you often see between John & his father to John & his mother, which is a really nice twist.
This time John's stumbled out of bed without disturbing Ben's sleep, but not without waking her. He made it all the way out to the tool shed before he fell to his knees, and she caught up with him as he expelled their Christmas dinner. She helped him to his feet and guided him back to the house, but he couldn't stand to be trapped by walls, not yet, so Teyla sat them down on the porch against the clapboards, wrapped them both in a quilt, and guided his head to her lap. The position must have been uncomfortable, but she held him a long time, rubbing his back until John didn't feel like he was having a stroke. By this point in the story, I've concluded that there's no way John & Ben could be surviving at all without Teyla. She's a rock. But also - re-reading - is John reacting hours or days after an upload session, or is it something else? "My mother was taken first," Teyla says, carding through John's hair. Also, much love for John letting himself be comforted physically, pretty much through the whole story. "My father, three years before you came to Athos. Though our leaders are not chosen by blood, members of the same family have at times been called to lead, and that is how it was for us. My mother led, and my father was the keeper of our traditions, before Halling. They both understood that I might be asked to lead after their deaths, because of my gift, and though there is a great honor in that duty, in their hearts -- where they carried the true burden of their leadership -- they wished that I would not know it as well. I like this very practical secession system. Those Athosians know how to survive. "My father feared the toll that the constant choices would take on me; that sacrificing one for the whole would break my spirit; that I would sacrifice myself instead. He was not questioning my character, John, but looking into his own with the eyes of a father. And my mother lamented publicly, in spite of her own example, that taking on the mantle of a leader would make it harder to have my own family; to marry from another tribe. I resented these thoughts, though I let go of the bitterness after they died. I understand them better now that I have watched you with Ben. For this I will never regret following you." This is interesting, expanding Teyla's background, as well as the socio-political stuff about Athos. But it's strange that she's referring to her responsibilities as a leader when she has left her people entirely. I think there's room for rationalization in canon, and that Teyla is still leading from Atlantis, making their tiny refugee nation a part of the Atlantean whole by essentially becoming a part of the command staff. But here she's not even in contact anymore. She's making a point about priorities, but the point relies on a set of information that we don't have yet. It works because we trust Teyla implicitly. She doesn't say, so you shouldn't regret that I came, either, but he hears it over the blood pulsing in his temples, and finds that he hadn't needed her absolution.
"My mother was a leader too," he whispers against her thigh. "Brigadier General Rachel Sheppard, USAR, Retired. She taught military ethics at West Point, until her son was injured and her country was at war and she couldn't deal with it. She loaded a new clip in her sidearm and shot a bullet in her mouth." Clarifying why the tension is between John & his mother - unlike loads of other stories, here his mom is the general, not his dad. There are a lot of stories with John's mom as a suicide. I'm not sure where I stand on that trend, but it works here, particularly as more of the family history comes out. They peel off sweatpants damp with mildew and take turns in the bathroom. When Teyla wraps her arms around him, John's whole body shudders, and he leans into her warmth like a man pulled from a frozen lake, grateful and astounded. I read this as completely desexualized contact, but I'd be interested to know how everyone else reads it. Teyla guides them down to the bed, but as she takes the spot in the middle, Ben against her side, John mumbles, "no, no," and shifts them around until her back is to the wall.
"I'm good," John says. "I'm good." Hugely meaningful act that I didn't figure out the first time through, though it certainly caught my notice. Seems obvious in retrospect.
This is Pegasus, where even the fine print comes with caveats, so, really, life on Bajan isn't such a bad deal.
Residency is conditional on the willingness to lose a few brain cells for the cheap thrills of an alien race on the brink of extinction, but the solar system, perched on the long arm of the galaxy, is months away from the main culling routes, and the gate is locked and the planet shielded. As far as John knows, Ekaterin's Friends have never demonstrated any desire to take the fight to the Wraith, and as long as they keep the immigration under control, the hives seem unwilling to commit the resources necessary to root them out.
Though Ekaterin took him on the Bajan Deluxe tour, John has never met one of the ubiquitous Friends. He's seen pictures of their neotonic bodies, he's heard stories, and he's come to think of them as the Asgards' backwater, inbred cousins: thicker in the shoulders, and, Hermiod notwithstanding, a little grumpier. I love it when I learn new words in fanfic. I do not have a small vocabulary, but it happens a lot. neotonic. He doesn't know if the Greys built Bajan or moved in, or who the humanoid high-rises are supposed to represent, but he suspects that the figures were the Greys, before they cloned themselves out of reproductive organs, imagination, and a decent nervous system.
Working his way through the list Ekaterin gave him, John can't decide if the human-alien relations on Bajan count as adaptive symbiosis in a hostile world, or if the safety tax brings a whole new meaning to the words 'protection racket'. Sets out what the hell is going on, taking all the puzzle pieces and putting them into place. This is a good resting spot, this section - verifying things.
Sexual practices (any configuration)
Recovering the experience of sex when a body is too distracted/exhausted/sick/numb/freaked out to be aroused is damn hard. When his mojo returns, he'll give them Mara. I want to know who Mara is now. Someone with whom the sex was good enough that the memory will be acceptable as trade goods, but who he isn't going to mind forgetting. Hmmm. Actually I can think of one or two people who would fit the bill, so now I'm thinking Mara wouldn't be interesting after all.
John has a lifetime of afternoons at the amusement park, ripe for the picking: popcorn and cotton candy, funnel cake and licorice, fried dough, dipped cones, candy apples, cherry floats, shaved ice, hot fudge, brownies, cinnamon rolls and fried Twinkies.
Because John's a nice guy, he throws in the heartburn.
Classic works of literature (not War and Peace)
Frank Sheppard was third generation California Irish, mother a middle school English teacher, father an assembler at the Ford factory. Rachel Levy Sheppard was the only daughter of French Jews who immigrated to Long Island before the War: her mother was a minor poetess, had hung out with Sartre in the Front Populaire, had taught philosophy at the Lycée Montaigne; her father was a watchmaker.
From his father, John got the complete Hemingway and a leather-bound edition of Huckleberry Finn. From his mother: Fitzgerald, Tournier, Beckett, Rosset, Molière, Epicure, Kafka, Schopenhauer. On a deserted island, John would take Camus and Huxley. I like the implication that desert-island-books and one-way-trip-to-another-universe books are different categories. Because they ought to be, seeing how one is books you'll read in solitude and the other isn't. But I digress. Again. Ekaterin confides that the Greys don't care about the text as much as his reaction to it: the way the words shaped or unshaped him, the stories his people tell about themselves, the meanings they invent to justify the continuation of their race. The literature thing seems really inoffensive, until you get that explanation. How do you give away the memory of something that shaped you? And what does that mean to your personality afterwards? John gives away Shakespeare. The one with Leonardo diCaprio.
Activities that over-stimulate epinephrine production (other than sex)
His second flight. Not his first flight; his first is a commercial flight with his mother, and he's too young and too goddamn scared to enjoy it.
The second time, he sits on his father's knees in the cockpit of a Blackhawk, and he feels the lift up in his stomach, that momentary tug-of-war with gravity before they pull free and rise in the spotless Florida sky, looping over Tallahassee.
He's still scared for a handful of seconds, reaching for the ground, but his father laughs and the horizon tilts sideways, and John whoops, throat too full for words. Frank Sheppard's large hands are wrapped over John's on the stick, his solid thighs bunched under John's as he adjusts the angle of attack with the pedals.
That night at dinner, it's Rachel Sheppard's turn to frown, left out of their connivance, their foreign language, and their private joy. He's so clever and biting with the food and literature requests, and puts off the one about sex, though I think we can assume he's being just as clever there. It makes the idea that he's even momentarily considering giving up the things he lists in this category just gutting.
On the evening of his escape, they bring him up without binding his hands: they want him to hold up a newspaper and make a video. When the camera is rolling, the youngest says something and the others guffaw. John doesn't get it, until a hand yanks on his hair and his mouth is forced open by the canon of an AK47.
He struggles, jabs, kicks, howls. The muzzle hits the back of his throat and he gags. In and out, in and out, the metal oily on his tongue. They're laughing like children on a merry-go-round.
When the camera's battery runs out, the kid holding the AK pulls back and screams at the other two. John doesn't remember making a move for the rifle, or later, lacing on his boots, scrambling outside, limping through the rocks, stumbling upon four Afghan militiamen who sell him back to the Americans like John's a runaway bride.
During the debrief, they tell him that the house has been found and the kids are all dead. In fact, everyone's dead: his crew, killed in the crash after the RPG hit; and the stranded special ops team he broke orders to retrieve in the storm. Jesus. No wonder he loved Antarctica. What kind of stupid fuck is out shooting rockets in a storm?
"It's a tough war," his father says from the side of John's bed at Landstuhl. "They've got suits in DC going over the heads of officers on the ground, Specters aren't allowed to fly in daylight, soldiers pay for their own body armor, and the SEALs keep strutting around like goddamn prima donnas." Nope, no love lost between the Colonel and the SEALs. "Last month the MPs caught a guy at Bagram, dicking a little boy."
Three weeks after the hearing, John stands in his parents' house in Ojai. He is packing for McMurdo, having refused the offer of an early retirement. His father is there. Neither of them talk about the General.
"You did what you had to do," Frank Sheppard says. "You come back from war an asshole, but you don't have to stay that way."
The words are gruff--a kindness and a liberation, perhaps the most natural conclusion of their relationship as men too alike for their own good.
They make such appalling soldiers, Sheppards; all three of them.
Antarctica embraces him like a lover in a dream: the continent is slow, aphonic, and bright. John sleeps in his thermal wear and he's never cold; the horizon is open; he's got a no-music rule in his chopper. Eventually the mess chow stops tasting like cordite, and there are movie nights and the occasional fuck. It helps that his edges stand out so sharply against the ice.
His father writes him twice: great weather in Ojai; he's been asked to speak at SERE; the General's been brought out of retirement to lead a quiet investigation into accusations of misconduct at Camp Nama. Goddamn politicians, goddamn Joint Chiefs, goddamn SEALs. Second verse, same as the first. Rinse, repeat.
Flying back two months later for his mother's military funeral, it occurs to John that the videotape of a bunch of kids raping his mouth might have just made the rounds. Hey, how 'bout that fucked-up helpless guilt? There's enough for everyone, don't be shy.
But when they're jumped by an energy creature that's been sleeping for ten thousand years, it's there. When they die screaming, infected by a nanovirus; when the shield is a little slow to rise; when a Wraith goes undetected in their midst; when a firewall breaks down or a ZPM kicks up a fuss, and every time Atlantis shivers under their touch, it's there: that reluctance, that grudging lust shading into resentment. The sense of an awesome sapience; a beast, primordial and alien and slumbering, awoken by a reckless, demanding, ignorant progeny--shoving into her their alien language, stealing her energy and scarring her walls. The city lights up for John because she can't help it, betrayed by the imperatives of her nature, debased in his presence, helpless but to crave his touch even as he brings fire and death down on her. Oh wow. I really do like the idea of the city as a presence of some sort, AI or otherwise, and this makes sense - she's asleep for ten thousand years, and when she wakes, she's filled with pretenders, interlopers, abominations. John's the lowlife who got the prom queen falling-down drunk, banged her after the dance, and passed around the Rohypnol.
But here is the killer: if not for that understanding, John wouldn't feel kinship, and he wouldn't love her. Maybe Atlantis has seen too much war, and maybe she's kind of an asshole now, but so is John. Maybe she didn't want to leave the bottom of the ocean but couldn't help it, like John didn't want to leave Antarctica but couldn't help stepping through the gate. And maybe she didn't want to be responsible for all of these people, to have to make them her own. Neither did John. He gets that, damn it, he really gets it. I like that John sees himself and the city as equally victims, equally culpable. Atlantis doesn't have to stay an asshole, either.
All of that is either big, bad, or useful.
Instead he gives them:
His first golf round ever. Abdul is Afghanistan's only professional golfer and owes his fussy gait to the Taliban who flogged the soles of his feet with a steel cable. John doesn't even play golf, but there's something about Abdul's weathered face, his irrepressible joy, his determination to reopen Kabul's golf club for business, that appeals to John's sense of the absurd. The green is brown and sandy; the only technique one needs is a good whack--especially at the first tee, hidden behind the carcass of a Russian tank. The fairways are studded with shrapnel, and John's stash of cigars and Chivas goes to bribing Jonesy's de-mining unit. When they give the all clear, Abdul borrows a dozen sheep from a cousin and sends them in. When that doesn't result in an impromptu mechoui, they meet for the first game.
At oh-five hundred, John and Abdul step onto the course, wearing helmets and body armor and grinning like loons. The sky is a piercing, royal blue, and Afghanistan is unbelievably beautiful. Some of John's guys--Mitch, Repro, Kalman, Rodrig and Dex--provide the cheering section. Sitting on beer coolers, they belt out the Star-Spangled Banner and the first measures of the Sououd-e-Melli, in horrifically mangled Pashto that could get them quartered. They yell "Fore!" when Abdul lifts his club, and "Fire in the hole!" when it's John's turn to swing. Only when John's at twelve over par and the entertainment attracts the local drug lord and the mujahideen, does someone remember to invite a medic. This is a great crazy Afghanistan story. And what a relief that this is what he's giving them, after hearing the other options.
"You seem more relaxed," Teyla points out after that session, waiting for him in the kitchen with a snack of his favorite yogurt and bread, and a small jar of preserves that taste like boysenberries. "Have these last procedures not been so taxing?"
John holds up a notebook, unaccountably embarrassed. "I've been writing down the memories before I sit in the chair. Before it felt like that would just make it worse, you know, if I reminded myself of what wasn't there -- that I'd go crazy trying to put pictures and feelings to a Post It note," John says, shrugging. He still wakes up fighting some nights, but he knows how to deal with that. "I don't know if that's what proper therapy is supposed to be like, but I'm spending so much time looking at stuff and putting it in boxes and setting it aside -- Important, Not Important -- it's... I don't know what it is."
Teyla's smile is blinding. "It does not matter, I would guess, what it is that brings you peace. I am glad that you are feeling better."
Her pleasure on his behalf is infectious, and John leans over the tabletop, sharing a conspiratorial wink. "I had a thought," he says. Teyla looks dubious, and he laughs. "Come on, hey, listen: I thought I could ask Ekaterin for a playback interface, a neural headset and a couple of leeches, and I could upload some old games." He points at his forehead. "I have them memorized. You've no idea how many times I've wished I could watch Flutie throw that pass like it was the first time all over again. And I could introduce Ben to football and popcorn and beer. How cool would that be?"
He manages to project innocence through the dawn of horror on Teyla's face, through her confusion and her understanding, but not through her ire.
"John Sheppard," she growls, rising to her feet with murderous intent. "You have a horrible sense of humor! You are a terrible man! You are -- you are worse than Ronon." Hah. Like that's a surprise.
She beats on his shoulder as he doubles over, laughing. She doesn't stop until he yelps and whimpers, "Ow, ow, ow," and Ben, that night, ends up kissing his bruises.
I should have asked for gouache, John finds himself thinking when Bajan settles more firmly into almost-spring.
The days have lengthened. If he is looking for Ben, John's likely to find the boy outside, chasing his spidery shadow, walking the field of tall blue grass that borders the property, or sunk in a mysterious contemplation that never fails to draw the breath faster out of John. On cloudless mornings Ben also likes to climb the mossy limbs of an ancient elm to the tree house John built out of the technicians' failed attempt at a rowboat; Ben'll stand in the door, a frozen sentinel, and look out to the sea. Afternoons are devoted to coating the picket fence in blues and greens, each stake painted neatly, the boards nailed across them delineated with geometric precision. It's gorgeous, the way John keeps stopping to marvel at Ben. A slim brook of water runs down the hill, and when John steps out onto the porch to call Ben for dinner, it's a wet eight-year-old who drags his messy self to the bathroom, bashful as a drowned rat.
"It's acrylic paint," John explains, again, drawing from reserves of patience he hadn't known to be endless. This, clearly, is why they invented combat pay. "Or whatever the nice aliens call it. Cold water isn't going to help, however fun it is to jump feet-first in the stream. Once it's dried, you need the special soap," he shakes the bottle and makes a face, listening to himself, so fucking whipped, and says, "fine, fine," when Ben tugs on his sleeve.
Already drenched, John pulls off his shirt and pants, and steps in the half-filled tub. Ben knows the drill, and sits between his father's legs with his back to John. "That's it, buddy," John says, pouring a dollop of paint remover in his palm, "tilt your head back." He keeps the stream of comments going, massaging the soap into the boy's hair: "Close your eyes, hold still. I don't want to get you, and I don't want to get me. What's Teyla going to say if we show up at the restaurant looking like a pair of spaced raccoons?" Ben's narrow shoulders shake briefly with mirth. "Yeah, that's right. You she'll cluck over; me she'll beat up again."
Tonight they celebrate Teyla's promotion to head of security, so John shaves after the bath, and Ben stands next to him on a stool, combing his hair over and over, small face serious and looking to John for approval. He's come so far, grasping nuances he'd never have before, and John has to pull the blade away from his throat long enough to swallow. Oh, Ben. Getting dressed is the usual test of strategy and cunning. Ben has rituals and will not be deterred, and though whatever internal logic remains consistent, the specifics vary randomly from day to day, leaving John at a loss to predict which pants will find favor, and which shirt will have to be put on and off three times, backwards and forwards, before Ben condescends to wear it. Left to his own devices, Ben would go out stark naked.
Taking advantage of the ten minutes required for Ben to properly mismatch his socks, John toasts two slices of thick brown bread, takes off the crust, and spreads one slice with a thin layer of the pasty yogurt, and the other with an equal layer of jam. After cutting each piece of toast in half, he sets the plate on the living room table, in full view of the bedroom's open door, and wanders off to hunt for a clean pair of camos in the laundry room. When he's located both pants and underwear, he hops on the dryer, plucks out the book tucked between the iron and the washing powder, and reads two more pages of War and Peace.
Ben likes to pretend that he doesn't need to eat. That his body, plainly and simply, does not require food. At the restaurant, he'll sit and stare reproachfully at his plate. To get Ben to eat, John must leave food lying around, hide it in the tree house, or wrap it in tinfoil and stuff it in Ben's coat pockets. It can't be meat, or anything that was ever remotely alive. Sometimes John will prepare something for himself and Teyla, but wander off, as if he's forgotten. He'll find the empty plates later, stacked in a closet or buried in the yard. I love this so much. I love that Ben does it, and I love that John isn't fighting it, or has given up fighting it.
The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power--the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns--should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.John shuts the book, reminded that the General had hated Tolstoy. So I haven't got anything to say about Tolstoy, though I sort of wish I did. I have a feeling that knowing more about War and Peace might pay off here. There are certainly things being said about John, and how he got to this point. But: on the inclusion of the text, in the middle of this scene - I can certainly comment on that. It stretches out the moment, this quiet tranquil afternoon mood, preparing to go out and celebrate. And that's really effective. In the living room the table is spotless, the plate of toast nowhere in sight. Ben sits cross-legged under the windowsill, dwarfed by his yellow raincoat. He stands and trots up to John, holding out a pair of rubber boots, no sign of the food except for the crumbs on his front that John's not allowed to notice. Ben is insanely cute here. Insanely. "So who's driving the minnow?" John asks, struggling to pull the boots on wriggly blue and yellow feet. A small finger pokes his collarbone. "Me, huh? Our vaunted Sheppard cool goes up in smoke each time we're seen in that thing, you know that?" John's kind of insanely cute, too. Their personal transport turned out to be a convertible tin can that looks like half of a dead fish. On a good day it floats a few feet above the ground. No way in hell would John call that flying.We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.
Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.
Outside the dusk is thick with sodium and seaweed, wind blowing in from the deep and sifting through the tall grass with a sound like silk tearing. The skies sag over the shore, burdened by clouds lined with lead. John gets down to one knee on the hard boards of the porch, tugging on the strings of Ben's coat. "Com' ere, Ahab. I think we're about to drown." He ties the hood on with a double bow, because Ben is very particular about his knots. "Who the hell designs a permeable soft top for a floating convertible in the Pegasus galaxy? Couldn't they retro-engineer a T-Bird? No, really, I'm asking." John hopes for a snort--Ben often responds to his tone and his expression more than the actual words--but the shoulders under his hands stiffen, and Ben takes a small step back. "Hey, kiddo, what --" Following the boy's line of sight, John turns around.
There's a man standing at the gate. This set-up is straight out of scary movies. Archetypal, with the weather, and the way everything spins on a dime, from adorably domestic to the panic of every hero-in-hiding in cinematic history.
"No way," John breathes. "No fucking way." One hand feels for the sidearm concealed in his pea coat, while the other reaches back for Ben. "Go inside, buddy. Duck and cover, like we practiced, okay? Duck and cover." He steps backwards, feeling Ben's grip on his thigh, the boy trembling and inching his way back until the door is opened and closed.
"Colonel Sheppard," the man addresses him again, pulling his hands out slowly, raising them. "I'm not here to harm either you or yours."
John doesn't draw his weapon. If it comes to that, he'll kill him quickly, barehanded; he won't blow Kolya's head off in front of his son. "Genii are the freakin' roaches of the Pegasus galaxy," he mutters, angry at himself. He let his guard down. Forgot, for a moment, what was out there.
"I'm not armed," Kolya insists. "Can I come in and speak with you?"
"Let me think on that for a minute. Wait, no, I don't think so," John laughs from the front steps, assessing and calculating odds. Always keep them talking. "Where the hell did you come from? Took an evening stroll, saw the light, thought you'd be neighborly and stop by for a beer?"
"Yes," Kolya says. He points to a direction around the hill. "My house is over this way."
Any minute now, Ekaterin is going to jump over the hedge and yell: Smile, You're on Candid Camera! And then, he'll have to kill her.
"Go away," John says. "Or I'll shoot you where you stand."
"Colonel."
"Last warning."
They understand each other; their kind of assholes always do. Kolya brings his hands down slowly; he is careful to keep them linked at the small of his back when he turns around and walks away.
John needs the better part of an hour to coax Ben out of his hiding place under the bed, where he rolled himself up in a blanket, like a quilted tortoise. John waited ten interminable minutes on the porch after calling Teyla. He made himself wait and listen and scan the property for more intruders before going to Ben and drawing the boy out with the doll-soldiers that John keeps in a special box.
Teyla announces herself on the comm and comes in at a half-run, disheveled and holding her sidearm naked in her hand. She crouches by the settee where Ben is bundled in his father's coat, staring sightlessly at the dark hearth. John sits on the armrest, 9mm in reach on the coffee table but out of the boy's sight. It's like Ben is made of trauma. "I inspected the perimeter for half a mile through the woods, and did not find signs of a presence," Teyla says, eyes trained on Ben's pale blank face. "I borrowed motion sensors from my office and set them up around the yard." She fixes narrowed eyes on John. "You are both unharmed?"
"He walked away when I enforced my property rights."
"John."
She stands and leans over him. Her fingers knot in the hair at the nape of his neck, sweet pressure guiding his forehead to hers.
"We may have to run," John says, breathing her breath. "But if you want to stay --" Oh, come on. That's so John, but how can he even ask? "I would not have it," she cuts him off, though not as sharply as she could.
"We have a good life here."
"Yes, and we will fight for our right to it."
The motion alarm is more of a soft ring than a whine, but it gets John up and aiming at the door.
Teyla brushes a hand over his forearm. "I called Ekaterin," she says, and a brief glance through the curtains reveals the diminutive case officer walking quickly up to the porch.
"I have to talk to Ekaterin for a minute," John says, crouching in front of Ben. "I'm going to step outside, but no one is going to take me away, and no one is going to take you away. I won't allow it. Teyla won't allow it. Okay?" Ben doesn't even blink. "If you hear some yelling and a single shot," John says, throwing Teyla a look, "don't come running too fast." I wonder why this fear that John will be taken from Ben is so strong. I get it, going in the other direction, but I wonder if perhaps part of the reason Ben feels that way is a reflection of John's fear. He stalks out the door, intercepts Ekaterin before she can knock, and drags her by the arm into the backyard, where the wind is holding back the rain.
"Honored Guest Sheppard!" she squeaks. "Associated Guest Emmagan told me you were attacked!"
John shoves her toward a garden chair. "Sit down," he bites out. Ekaterin sits. "What can you tell me about Acastus Kolya?"
She lights up, smiling. Ekaterin wins the special prize for the super-dense, here. "You've met Honored Guest Kolya? Excellent! I knew you would get along famously. He's interesting, too! Not as much as you, of course, but," she leers at him, "memory contributions from our local guests can become so tedious after a while: harvest, harvest, culling, harvest, trading, harvest, harvest. But you and Honored Guest Kolya! I advised that your house be built close to his own. I'm his case officer, too, you see?"
"What? No! I don't see. Me and The Little Fascist That Could are not going to 'get along famously' -- or any other way mortal enemies can get along. He's tried to kill me and some very good friends of mine too many times; pretty much killed my dog and pissed on my Bible, too, and are you crazy?"
"I don't think so," Ekaterin says, but she seems willing to discuss it. The way the question was hidden in a nest of cultural referents would make me willing to discuss it, too. Anthropologically speaking. John resists the urge to pace, or pull out all of his hair. "How did he find out about me? When did he get here?"
"Honored Guest Kolya was with us for a full season before you came to Bajan. As for finding out about your presence, he often has business in the cities. Perhaps he spotted you or Guest Emmagan at the Rail station." She sobers. "It's not our policy to advertise the identity of our guests to each other." Yet she's been hoping they would connect. Ekaterin is just strange enough that you don't forget that she's coming from an alien outlook. It's very effective.
"Why not? You have so much in common."
"Exactly! We have so much violence in common! He's gotta be armed, I'm definitely armed --"
"Oh, pish," Ekaterin says, waving her hand.
"Pish?"
"What kind of hosts would we be if we let our guests come to harm? We take our responsibility toward your safety very seriously. And these weapons are such a hazard -- the contraptions some guests come up with!" She shakes her head. "All weapons are detected and neutralized by maintenance drones upon arrival or soon after."
John stares down at his 9mm, betrayed. He hefts the sidearm and considers testing Ekaterin's confidence in Bajanian technology by shooting her in the leg, but he aims into the woods before squeezing the trigger. Nothing happens. He tries again: nothing. He ejects the clip, shakes it, inspects the bullets: all accounted for. I get that John wouldn't have had a chance to test his gun before, that he's been preoccupied and panicked and ill, but it still seems a little strange. Unless he thought they didn't know about it, which seems like a lot of wishful thinking. And put that way, maybe it is believable - I think John Sheppard has vast resources of self-delusion.
Why can they neuter his gun, he wonders, but can't fix the leaks in the bathroom? These asides are the perfect leaveners in this story. They keep the tone of John's POV just where it needs to be.
"We strive to adapt to the special needs of our Favored Guests in all ways," she continues, as if he hadn't spoken. "Our Friends' basic requirements tend to be simple and specific: they can't eat, can't have sex, and can't die. They can't fuck each other," absurdly, the word shocks him coming from her, "and they can't kill each other, cannot fathom it in fact, which seems to have stunted their capacity for creative problem-solving considerably. These particular requirements make for a very skewed guest population. Therefore our main concerns have been security, and the prevention of sexually propagated diseases." This is interesting because it implies that the system isn't just about entertainment - that it fulfills a need, that the Friends need this input to keep their mental functions intact. Like otherwise they have evolved themselves into complete sensory deprivation. "So you're telling me," John asks, for the sake of clarity, "that Bajan's Favored Guests are either old whores or old soldiers?" He rubs his hand over his eyes. "Gives a whole new meaning to make love, not war."
"Oh, no no no!" Ekaterin exclaims. She winds her arms around John's waist, and hugs him warmly. "There's no rule that says you can't do both."
John contemplates seeking Kolya out: maybe a good old pounding followed by a pissing contest would result in a status quo that'd let him relax a little--though there is no guessing whether Ekaterin would intervene. He wonders at other security provisions, the kind of surveillance which guarantees the safety of the guests, and who does the policing. Whether they are all as polite and amenable as Ekaterin. He doesn't want to test it.
John has more pressing worries, because now it's Ben who can't make it through the night. The boy sleeps fitfully and wakes up wailing and panic-stricken, as frightened by his own shapeless screams as he is by the horrors in his head. Crying and choking on his own incomprehension, howling at the ceiling and the universe that couldn't even grant words for his terror, for his supplications and his brutal beginnings. There's nothing John can do but hang onto the thin body and grit his teeth against the impotence that could so easily be the end of him. But he can't let go, he's all Ben's got, no matter that it kills John to see Ben in so much pain; nothing has ever brought him closer to breaking than this child's suffering.
So they rock together, huddled in the middle of the bed, too far from daybreak for a hope of release, and John makes what few promises he can keep.
"I know, buddy," he whispers over Ben's frustrated growls, "you've got so much to say. But I hear you, I hear you, Ben, and tomorrow we'll walk to the top of the hill. I'll carry you on my shoulders," he stops, jaw locked, throat tight and raw; and Ben pants, eyes wide, "and you can shout to the sky and to the whole world. You can tell them. You let go of that barbaric yawp," John tries to laugh, but his lungs are filled with broken glass, "and everyone will know. We'll all be listening."
Teyla stands in the doorframe, her eyes hard and shining, a hand over her mouth like a shroud pulled over a stillborn scream. John stares at her, and he knows his whole face is begging.
They are enraged and undone, and it doesn't seem right that the universe could hold all of it.
"I love you, Ben. You're not alone. I love you so much. Breathe, Ben, please, breathe with me."
Fuck you, bitch, John will think, right then. Fuck you.
It isn't the grievance of a man toward a nameless deity. Brutal beginnings. And the villain of the piece.
Early on Tuesday morning a hand grips his shoulder and shakes abruptly. John says, "Damn it, Rodney, I have last watch," and wakes up, and jerks to his feet.
The living room is desaturated by dawn, polished furnishings scattered like fish bones washed out on a beach. He fell asleep on the sofa, still dressed, the dregs of a cup of tea on the floor by his feet, an afghan tangled in his legs. He looks for Ben and his sidearm and finds neither. His body and brain feel like he's been tied down and beaten.
"John, are you awake?" Teyla's fingers dig between bone and muscle, jolting him. "I have looked everywhere. I cannot find Ben."
"What?" John processes the state of the living room with one look, trusting Teyla to have checked the integrity of all access points, then strides into the bedroom. "His raincoat's missing, and his boots. He could have gone out to the tree house?" he says, already moving.
"I have searched it. He is not there, nor is he in the backyard nor the field." Teyla meets his frown head on when he pins her with a look, angry that she let him sleep through it. "I found this on the kitchen table."
The strokes of the crayon on the sheet are angry and deep as a stab wound; Ben tried to spell what might have been John's name, but gave up, thwarted and desperate, the letters breaking on a cliff side, a mountain--a hill.
John swears, and briefly squeezes his eyes shut. "He's gone up there. I told him -- and he's gone by himself." Ben's so full of...something. Feeling, emotion, arcing need to express himself. Too big for his little body, his inability to speak, his inability to write anything other than math. "It is raining heavily, and there is little light."
"He'll try to follow the stream. Damn it. How long since he's been gone?"
Teyla's eyebrows fold. "I could not say. I am sorry. The storm has washed the ground clean."
John is already moving, tying on his boots, pulling on gloves and his warmest raincoat; he packs a knapsack--water, first aid kit, flashlight, a small box of biscuits, a handful of magnesium flares--cursing the loss of his tac vest. He pins his Bajan-issue communicator to his collar, and sheathes his combat knife in his right boot; he can't see how the technicians could possibly have neutralized that. Teyla follows suit. "Comm Ekaterin," he says. "If she doesn't already know what's going on, explain. I'll follow the stream as far as I can; it's my best hope of tracking him. As soon as you're done, let me know what's Ekaterin's advice--she has resources we don't--then take the path cutting north through the woods. It's better to cover that one, too. And watch for landslides."
"We will find him," Teyla says, but John's already out the door, down the porch steps, across the front yard and through the gate.
On a clear day, dawn is pristine and liquid blue, the landscape gunmetal grey, as if Bajan were hoarding color and energy, powering low. Today the cloud cover sucks the light out of the ground and leaves only shadows. The rain falls in sheets, thicker and sharper as John pushes deeper into the woods. The meandering brook is already a torrent that surges over rocks and dugged-out roots.
"Ben!" he shouts, "Ben!"
John's eyes shift from the ground to the top of the hill he can only guess at through the liquid curtains drawn between the trees. He trips one, two, three times, and picks himself up, blinded by sweat and rain, grappling at trunks, at helpless saplings and slippery roots. He shouts for Ben again, but his voice is hoarse and the rain bruises the words and pounds them into the ground.
"Sheppard!"
Raindrops shred tree bark into paper paste, peppering John with shrapnel.
"Sheppard!"
A heavy hand grips John's raincoat between his shoulder blades, and he twists around, arm raised, teeth bared, prepared to swing.
"Colonel! Wait!" Kolya lets go and raises his hands. He gestures to the comm unit strapped to his wrist, and yells over the tumult: "Ekaterin called me!"
John's rage rolls out blood-red behind his eyes. "I don't have time for you, Kolya!"
"She sent me to help!" Kolya isn't wearing a cap and the rain pours in rivers down his beard. "My word of honor as a soldier and a Genii: I am here to help you find your son!"
It may be one of the toughest threat assessments he's ever made, but after a moment in which he considers snapping the man's neck, John sets his jaw and points to the top. "He's heading up there, he's wearing a yellow raincoat, I don't know what kind of lead he's got, and he can't call for help. His name is Ben." He doesn't wait for an acknowledgement, turning around and grabbing a low branch to pull himself forward. So much of where John is sits in this decision. I can sort of see him making an alliance with Kolya to save any of his people, if he thought it was necessary, but if it weren't Ben, it would have taken longer than a moment. They don't talk. There isn't breath to spare, and once it looks like Kolya is going to keep to John's left wing, John can't be bothered to think about him. What's a leisurely trek in fair weather requires a single-minded focus close to abnegation. The grove is thinning, taking away handholds and footholds. John shouldn't stay in the torrent's bed, but he refuses to stray from Ben's most likely path.
Fighting the weight of too many sleepless nights, John can't react to Kolya's warning in time.
"Look out!"
His eyes shoot up from the ground and he sees the wall of debris surging ahead of sound: a flash, an instant photograph of mud and hillside boiling where a stream should be.
The flow takes him out above the knees and he spins three-quarters of a turn before going down. There isn't time to yell before the hill fills his mouth and eyes and ears; there is pain, sharp, in too many parts of his body, and disorientation like a short, brutal ride in a centrifuge. It can't be more than seconds before his arm is yanked, reclaiming him from the earth and dislocating his shoulder in a single move. He whites out and comes back to a pressing need for oxygen, water pouring on his face, strong arms wrapped around his ribcage, squeezing until he heaves. He vomits, coughs, vomits again, consciousness weaving around the knife shoved in his shoulder.
Something inside says, let go; and something else snarls, don't you fucking dare.
"Drink," someone says, pressing a water bottle to his lips.
A little water floods his mouth, cool and clean. He throws up again, huddled on his knees, tears flowing with the pain. A callused hand cups his forehead and keeps him from regurgitating forest debris into his own lap. When he's done, tilting sideways with a breath like a sob, another hand braces him by his belt.
Kolya is talking: "-- are you from the promontory? Colonel Sheppard requires immediate medical assistance. Can you triangulate my signal?"
No. John lets himself pitch forward, catching his weight on his good arm, jarred into a bitten scream.
"Have you located the boy? Hold, Teyla Emmagan -- Sheppard, keep still." Surely Kolya knows that the one sure way to make sure John does something is to tell him not to. Clenching his eyes shut against the wire-tight constriction of his sternum and the burn that spreads down his collarbone, John gathers his body and heaves himself upright, functional arm flailing for a hold, legs shaky as a newborn colt's. The rain washed the mud from his face, but his hair is falling in his eyes and he blinks harshly, searching for a direction.
Kolya's shoulder materializes under his hand, and John lets the Genii shore him up. "You're injured, Sheppard. Ekaterin dispatched airborne reconnaissance crafts. They will locate the child."
"Kolya," John rasps; the agony of a scoured throat is exquisite. "Fuck off or help me."
He doesn't have the strength to hold his head up, but he could swear that Kolya smiles when he says, "Very well." This sounds right. Kolya respects strength, and determination in following a path. Even if he might not agree with the way that path is followed. John staggers the rest of the way in a state short of full awareness, each step autonomic and relying on another for direction. Exhaustion, pain, the war drums of cold and rain seem muffled and distant, a story whispered in a stranger's voice against his ear.
They reach the hilltop, buffeted by lateral winds. John doesn't spare a glance for the cities in the plain or the aircraft darting toward them like a cadre of silver fruit flies. He tries to call for Ben, but can only dredge up a croak.
Gripping the sleeve of Kolya's long coat, John asks in a voice all but gone, "Call his name," and Kolya stares at him. "Ben," John says. "Call for him."
When at last the storm weakens, John's strength goes with it. Coughing harshly, he slides down a tree trunk, shoulder held tight to his torso by Kolya's hasty bindings. Kolya is stalking the breadth of the promontory, keeping to the edge of the copse; he searches the ground for tracks, shouting Ben's name over the wind.
John's vision is greying, but as he tips his head back, color flickers through the foliage.
"Hey," he murmurs, "funny little monkey." He lifts his arm and crooks a finger. "Come down," he mouths. "Come here."
Cautiously, shooting nervous looks at the daunting bulk of the Genii, Ben wriggles down the tree and crawls to his father. He is shivering but unhurt, washed clean by the rain.
"Did you tell them?" John whispers, rubbing their noses together. "Did they listen?"
Ben nods and coils on top of him.
"Yeah," John says, before he goes away, "me, too." Jesus.
John comes to briefly as he's loaded on a gurney, Ekaterin hovering over him. "Oh, dear," she says, sounding genuinely upset, "that wasn't supposed to happen."
He drifts up close to the surface some indeterminate amount of time later, to a chest on fire and a familiar sensation of warmth along his spine. Before the bed is jostled and the feeling disappears, Teyla says softly, "No, Ben. Your father is very ill and needs all of his strength to recover. You must not disturb him." Small fingers, clumsy and warm, pat his brow and cheek. "Come, we will collect plants from the herb garden and make a tea that will ease our sore throats." John tries to open his eyes, to let Teyla know that it's okay, he doesn't mind, he wants Ben to stay, but the world slips through his fingers like a goldfish and swims away.
When he wakes up again, he's not really awake. He's back in the cell aboard the hive ship and the bitch is coming for him. He was so cold before, but he's burning up now, and comes out fighting. The inhuman hands of the drones close around arm and hip to hold him down. It hurts to buck up and twist and resist--the right side of his body feels wrong--but what's a little more pain in this hell? What can they possibly do to him now? Voices demand that he give up, but no way, it's the last thing he's got: making it as hard for them as possible, not letting them strap him to that table again without sharing some of his rage. But he hears sobbing, and he remembers Ben--remembers that, as long as the bastards are busy with him, they'll leave Ben alone. So he stops fighting, forces himself to go limp, and lets them take him away. So I'm really not good at anticipating plot twists or putting together the pieces of what's going on. After this paragraph, my thinking went every which way, trying to puzzle out the ways that Ben and John could have been on a Hive ship, tortured. And how that could work with where they are now. I started reading this at just before midnight, and it's things like this that meant I could not stop reading and go to sleep until I was finished. For a while after that reality is a fuzzy patchwork of memories darting past, some indistinct, some much too vivid. He's led back to the world by a beam of light aimed at his right eyelid, a muffled, arrhythmic pounding that originates outside his head, and the mother of all needs to pee. He opens his eyes and flinches away from the play of sunlight across his face, setting off a chain reaction of dull aches everywhere. Swallowing back a groan, he takes stock of his surroundings: his bedroom, his bed, curtains billowing lazily across the open window. The breeze is warm, the mattress comfortable, and despite residual pains and the urging of his bladder, John takes a moment to appreciate that he is millions of light years away from the hive ship.
He's about to investigate his state of dress under the covers when the discomfort in his bladder swells and fades away. Unsettled, John ventures a hand toward the waistband of his drawstring pants, and encounters a solid obstruction the rough shape of a scarab, glued to his skin right above his groin. Having experienced the wonders of Bajanian medicine before, John orders himself sternly not to freak out. However that gizmo works, it beats a catheter Foley by virtue of not being shoved in his dick.
He manages to sit up and haul his legs over the side of the bed on the second try. Movement reveals another scarab at his throat, and one on his ribs, below his bandaged armpit. He doesn't try to rip them off, aware that he should be hurting a lot more than he is, weary enough of pain that he'll put up with the mid-level freak-out of alien med-tech.
The bedroom door is wide open on the hallway and the living room, but there's no one in sight. John debates calling out, but drags himself to his feet and shuffles to the bathroom instead.
He doesn't look that bad for a guy who got caught in a mudslide. Pale skin brings out the scruff of a week-old beard, his hair dried sideways, and a bruise is already turning purple-charcoal-black on his cheekbone, but he's better rested than he's felt in a while. He splashes water on his face and chest, and brushes his teeth. Spreading toothpaste one-handed requires every bit of ingenuity he can dredge up from survival school. He foregoes shaving entirely.
A slow tour of the house reveals a string of empty rooms and a handwritten note in the kitchen. John is drawn outside by the lure of the suns and the forceful hammering echoing through the walls. The front door hangs open on a sun-washed porch. The boards are almost too hot under his bare feet, not enough to scald but enough for the heat to spread up his calves, unlock his knees, and nestle at the base of his spine. Lovely, sensual description. It's the most beautiful day he's seen on Bajan: the grass so green it sparkles, field and ocean and sky preternaturally blue, colors more primordial than primary.
John digs his toes in the lawn and let's the earth remind him that he's safe. That everyone is safe.
"Good afternoon, Sheppard."
John turns and lifts his head slowly, bringing a hand up to support his shoulder. "What the hell are you doing up there?"
Kolya sits on the roof like a Viking with a passion for DIY That might be the best description ever. Awesome. It also brings home that John doesn't see Kolya as an immediate threat anymore, a hammer in one hand and a shingle in the other. It's a mystery to John how the support beams can possibly hold the weight.
"The storm blew off most of the roof cover above your largest room," Kolya says, adjusting the angle of a nail before giving it a firm whack. It goes straight through.
"Ekaterin's technicians couldn't handle the repairs?" Kolya stares down at him, until John's forced to concede, "Yeah. Right. Forget I said anything." It's nice to know the Bajanians aren't any more skilled at Genii home design than they are at building Captain houses. Though how hard can it be to dig an underground bunker? "Thanks," John says, after clearing his throat. "Not for the repairs, though, obviously, for that too. But for helping out during the storm. I owe you one. A big one."
Kolya nods. "Ekaterin said that you would wake up today. Teyla Emmagan took your son to the cities to buy food and other supplies. She seemed to believe that the child's presence would overwhelm you upon waking. She left a note on the kitchen table, assuring you that he is in good health and none the worse for his ordeal."
Which doesn't mean all that much. But it says a lot about what's been going on while he was out, that Teyla would leave him alone with the Genii.
"How long was I out?"
Another shingle. Another whack. "Four days. Your condition was serious, though not so that you couldn't be treated here, with a medical technician monitoring your progress remotely."
The air still carries the clean scent of violent summer rains, and John sits on the stoop's highest step, contemplating the horizon while Kolya works through the rest of the pile of shingles. Whack, whack, whack. The ladder propped against the house creaks ominously under the Genii's weight, but it holds. Kolya walks past John inside the house without comment, and returns with a glass of juice and a bottle of something brown.
They sit side by side, the step wide enough that John doesn't have to fold around the railing or lose another shoulder.
"You know that Cowen isn't in charge anymore, right?" John asks, looking straight ahead. "You've heard about Ladon's hostile takeover?"
"And about your, shall we say, unwitting sponsorship of the new regime?"
There's no way to tell whether Kolya's pissed or amused. "Why didn't you go back? Ladon's a smart guy, but he didn't strike me as being cut for planetary leadership."
"The months I have spent in exile have altered my perspective," Kolya says, "and my strategy, accordingly." Whoa. Okay. And this is where I go WHAT? Because suddenly it isn't at least seven or eight years in the future. It can still be counted in months. "Yeah," John agrees. "It can do that."
After a moment of silence, Kolya says, "A son," and John cuts him a look. The man is shaking his head; the beard and the hair remind John of his father's old black Spaniel. "I have to say the resemblance between you is striking. I wasn't aware that you were a father, Colonel."
"That'd have changed anything?"
"No."
"Thought so," John says. "And quit calling me Colonel. I've resigned my commission."
Kolya frowns, saying, "I suspected, but I didn't want to make assumptions," which is almost comical. "You don't have to tell me, Sheppard."
John sets down his glass, tensing. "I don't."
"No," the Genii says, "though I'd imagine it has something to do with this."
Before John can flinch away, Kolya grabs the bottom of his tee-shirt and lifts the material all the way up, exposing the white feeding mark John knows lies between his shoulder blades. It's faded like an old scar, the size of a melted dime, almost invisible. Notwithstanding the lack of claw marks, no one in the galaxy would doubt its origin. An interested outsider is what's necessary to finally pull back the curtain. This is just amazing, and new parameters for Ben and what's going on are coming hard and fast. John jumps off the porch, moving too fast for the scarabs to keep up. The burst of pain wrenches a cry, and he hunches over, clutching his shoulder.
Kolya is there to hold him up.
"Let go of me!"
John tries to protect his vulnerable side, but Kolya only tows him to a garden chair.
The Genii steps back, arms crossed. He leans against the railing while John recovers his breath, not looking away when John wipes involuntary tears off his face.
"If you touch him, you die slow," John rasps.
"I gave my word," Kolya says. "If I wanted to harm your son, I would have done it when I saw him feed on you."
"He doesn't feed on anyone else," John says, head hanging heavy, adrenaline fading out of his system. "And he takes almost nothing."
Hours, maybe days of his life. John would never have found a better use for that time.
"Emmagan stopped him from draining you." So every time Ben has been snugged up against John's back is recast, as well as the way he coiled around John on the hilltop, and when he climbed into the bed when John was recovering. But it stays so sweet, somehow. Nursing, sort of. John bangs his fist on the armrest. "He's not Wraith! Not any more than Teyla or me..." John looks up. "Not much more than either of us." And since both Teyla and John have a shot of Wraith, or something like, in their genes, that really isn't saying much. Of course, Kolya doesn't know that. Silence settles in the interstice between the words they both lack, and John looks west, to the border of the woods. The storm has wrecked surprisingly little devastation, save for a few snapped branches. If the mudslide reached the bottom of the hill, it didn't come near the house.
"It's a long story," John says. "You're not going to like any of it."
He doesn't know why it should matter that Kolya understands; maybe for the same reason that Teyla's acceptance counted above all others: this place is all Ben's got to call home, and your home shouldn't hate you.
"All the stories my mother ever told me were of the Wraith," Kolya answers dryly. "I never liked those much, either, but I learned to live with them."
John shrugs and bites his lip at the burn. "Fine. Try not to interrupt."
There's no good way to start, but he begins with Teyla, the gift and the Wraith experiments; Beckett and the idea of a retrovirus used as a biological weapon; Ellia and his own conversion. He speaks to the floor or the sky, but he's aware of Kolya moving from curious to startled to appalled.
Midway through, Kolya drags up a chair. He sits elbows on knees and hands clasped, gaze unwavering. When John explains Michael and the deal with the Wraith, Kolya squeezes his fists so tight he must be drawing blood. The muscles of neck and jaw bunch and twist, the grimace of a predator chewing on prey.
"Sheppard, you..." Kolya's wordless with apoplexy. See, this is the thing about Kolya - he's a smart guy, and he's been devoted to fighting the war against the Wraith his entire life. It's so right that the actions of the expedition make him crazy - the expedition is all bull-in-a-china-shop arrogance and it's horrifying. "I know," John says, shoulders hunched and eyes tired. "Don't bother. I got smacked down in ways you'd never have thought of."
Some of the decisions John made in the past year Kolya can appreciate uniquely for being an exile and a soldier; others, less, and for the same reasons. Different histories, different cultures, different militaries--the span of a galaxy between them. There's nothing to gain by sharing some of the realizations John's come to, the questions he's asked himself, given distance and a whole new perspective.
Case in point: if John tried to explain the Atlanteans' failures in terms of a lack of doctrine, or inexperience in asymmetric warfare, Kolya might very well stare blankly at the stupid Earthling before slugging him in the jaw. In Pegasus, no human's ever hoped to experience the symmetric kind. This is a really good point. How could they fail to understand that?
Strategic considerations hadn't entered John's mind when he'd hitched a ride through the hive ship's hyperspace window. He'd been all tactics and objectives: sneak in; free Ronon and Rodney; give the Wraith the run-around while Rodney used his brand spankin' new expertise in Wraith software to develop a virus of his own; if all else failed, break out a canister of retrovirus so that any Wraith who reached the Milky Way did so human. Run like hell.
All else hadn't failed, except for that last part, and John'd yelled at them to go, had watched his teammates take off in a dart from his choice spot on the floor under a Wraith pile. He hadn't doubted for a second that they would come back for him; that they'd try. I can't decide if John really hadn't doubted, that he learned that they wouldn't give up from his experience in Epiphany, or if he's just trying to convince himself that he shouldn't doubt it. I suppose it doesn't matter. "You've ever been interrogated by a Wraith queen?" he asks Kolya, who shakes his head no, but looks grimly intrigued. John rubs his hand over his face. "Turns out that repeated exposure doesn't help."
He wasn't used to thinking of the Wraith as individuals--as personalities-- but she had been smarter, less dogmatic, more patient that the others. Willing to treat him as something other than cattle, to not underestimate the human on his knees. Exposure to Michael had changed that hive.
She had been angry at the loss of Earth and the hyper-drive--of course she'd been pissed, and let the drones bat him around. But she'd asked straightforward questions, too. About command codes and gate addresses and the location of Earth; about troop numbers, the ZPM, the Daedalus, their allies, the ATA, the city's defenses. He'd almost leaned into the drones' fists, then, because he was the military leader of Atlantis, and he'd allowed the enemy access to his base. No one else was to blame. Yes. John's the hero, and compulsively rides to the rescue, but he's command staff as well. He's the last person who should be captured, and he knows it, he knew it when it was Sumner captured. John sees that reflected in Kolya's pockmarked face.
"They kept it up for a couple of days. She held the threat of feeding back. At first I couldn't understand why. She seemed, I don't know, intrigued. Bothered by something."
He hadn't noticed it at first: the lack of sustained pressure on his mind. Michael had drifted in at one point, when John had been struggling to keep himself sharp. Remember, John had said, smirking blood-red: People are friends, not food.
"When she brought in her pet geek, I knew my holiday was about to go downhill," John says, and he remembers the smile that gave send in the clowns a whole new ring, stretching impossibly wide when the Wraith scientist had stripped John naked and strapped him in the scanner. John had named him Dick, because Mengele was too easy. The queen he called Mary Jane, until she became just bitch. She had leaned over the table, her shark's smile close to his mouth, her tongue surprisingly dainty and pink, slipping out, a horrific prelude to a kiss. "Your smell is...enticing," she'd purred, inhaling his fear. "A hive smell. A nest smell. Perhaps," she had licked a strip of skin from his jaw to his ear, mocking him, "you are family." Nest smell. Yes.
"She couldn't get into my mind and she wanted to know why," John says. "Dick's scans showed primordial Wraith genetic material embedded in mine. He thought that my ancestors had been subjected to illegal hybridization experiments, but somehow the trait that gives people like Teyla their 'gift' was bred out of my lineage, closing my mind off to the hive." He coughs, mouth dry. "The bitch wasn't much for that kind of speculation, so she jumped straight to human testing." I like this idea that the Iratus retrovirus has somehow innoculated John against mind control. It's a clever device. John coughs again and lifts his glass, but it's empty. Kolya eyes him, takes the glass inside the house, and returns with two bottles of the brown stuff.
"Root beer with a kick," John comments after a swallow, nodding in appreciation. "Think the doctor would approve?"
"Go on, Sheppard," Kolya says. Without compassion or empathy or much of anything else. But he waits patiently for John to drain three-quarters of the bottle.
"She fed on me." He hadn't known that his throat could produce such a sound, or that his lungs could sustain it that long. "But she gave it all back." This feeding and replenishing thing is extra-creepy. It's similar to what happens in The touch of her hand.
And...time out. For a comment about the story thus far. It's about these constant, nibbled-to-death Faustian bargains, all in the service of Ben's safety and well-being. And up until this point, I thought it was John trading away pieces of his past. But suddenly that's turned on his head - the safety tax is still an awful, chilling thing, but what John has really been doing, the larger thing we haven't been privy to except in constant tiny hints, is trading away pieces of his future. Of his lifespan. It's intimately done, out of love, and so it isn't creepy at all, I think. But John, at this point, standing still in the present, with time being nipped away both behind and ahead of him, that just blows me away.
Teyla and Ben return from the cities loaded with shopping bags, and trailed by Ekaterin. Ben's enthusiasm is visible from the gate as he bounces up the lawn, chin up, free of the tension that had strung out the small body before the storm. It will come again, nothing is ever that easy, but John's gotten pretty deliberate about enjoying the good times in between.
Kolya's mouth is still stretched in a grim line, prompting John to kick him in the shin. "I don't want you to look like that in front of him." He heaves himself out of the deck chair with a grunt. His ass is numb, he feel wrung like an old towel, and now his toes are bruised. "Cheer up. We'll finish this later."
Ben has clearly been wondering why his father's been lounging in bed all week. Impervious to Teyla's imprecations of caution and calm, he tows John to the couch, sits him down, and proceeds to unpack their shopping one item at a time.
"Paint, paint, paint, and oh, more paint!" John laughs. "We're running out of things to paint, you know. You'll have to get started on trees."
When the bags are empty and Kolya has, out of some karmic notion, been relegated to the kitchen to cook dinner under Teyla's supervision, Ben brings out his notebook, leaving John to scour his memory for inferences and entailments and partial derivatives symbols--which he is then required to draw (left-handed) but not, thank God, explain.
Before he's forced to admit to the voice in his head, which sounds a lot like Rodney, that he never cared one wit about tensor products, Ekaterin plops herself down on the couch, flashing her Inoffensive Mogwai smile, and appropriates his good arm. Mogwai! What a great way to show how John sees her. At this point, he even seems to trust Kolya more than Ekaterin.
"Hi, Honored Guest Sheppard." I really like how she's sort of randomly started snuggling with him, but is still using full honorifics. Hilariously alien. "Thanks for the bugs." He nudges the scarab glued to his carotid. "Much less conspicuous than the last one that bit me in the neck."
Ekaterin points at his groin. "You can take that one off."
"Er, thanks."
"But the others must stay on for two more days. If you require assistance --"
"Well. No." Like a true Bajanian resident, he hardly blushes anymore.
"Okay."
"Ekaterin, call me John, all right?"
"All right, John."
That never worked before. Huh.
John bends to ruffle his son's hair, and Ben looks up from the floor. "You keep working on those derivatives," John says gravely, hauling himself to his feet, "because you'll have to explain it all to your old Dad some day." Ben's eyes smile, if not his mouth, and that's enough.
Ekaterin badgers him into a coat before they step outside to watch the tail-end of sunset. When she lights an unfiltered cigarette, John raises an eyebrow. "I didn't know you guys had cigarettes. I didn't know you smoked."
She shrugs helplessly. "I didn't yesterday. I went out to a parlor for a drink, downloaded a smoker's leech, got addicted. Spent the day running around like a Wraith with both hands cut off, hunting for a pack." Ha! Great. John rolls his eyes, and it all comes out, a Bajanian logorrhea: "I'm so sorry, Honored -- John. Protected Guest Sheppard should never have been put in jeopardy without our knowing. Such a breach of contractual safety will never occur again if I have to guard this house myself, you have my word. And I'm so very ashamed that you were injured because of my decision to send Honored Guest Kolya to you. Why, if you had not been distracted by his unwanted presence --"
"Ekaterin, shut up."
She plasters herself to his side, radiating heat, alive on the memories of others. "Please, you're not angry? You won't leave us?" So is Ekaterin becoming more emotionally invested because she is consuming more memories? Because she was cheerfully efficient, before, and now she's all over John.
"Absolutely not!" Ekaterin says. "You're exempt from sessions until your body can handle the stress of extraction, which I have on good authority won't be for another twenty days."
"Oh." He blinks, allowing himself to take that in. It sounds like...a paid vacation. Something for nothing, time for himself, safety with no strings attached. He's not quite sure what to do with that. "Thanks."
Dinner is a surreal experience: Teyla and Kolya make ruthless small talk about the care of herb gardens, Ben builds tensor products with his peas, and Ekaterin instructs John on the wonders of Bajanian catheters (she once traded leeches with a medical technician) while fondling his knee.
He dozes off mid-sentence, and leans on the women all the way to bed.
John sleeps sixteen hours, which doesn't seem to shock anyone, and he gathers from Teyla that the infection in his lungs got pretty bad before it got better.
Breakfast is a cup of black tea in the backyard; another sunny day, still atypical but cooler than the last. Teyla says he isn't confined to the house, so they put together an overly ambitious picnic, lure Ben away from his kaleidoscopic trees with the siren song of multicolored seashells, and pile up in the minnow.
The shore is an hour's rambling walk from the house, a third of that in the transport. John is happy to let Teyla drive. He is aware, not for the first time, that he should miss flying more, that he hasn't tried to sweeten Ekaterin into making him a ship yet, but he doesn't know where that thought could take him and lets it wither in the sun. Ben is humming under his breath between a purr and a song, his back against John's side and his feet up on the backseat. John dozes, rocked gently by the ride and Teyla's sure hand, head resting on the folded soft-top.
The littoral is a wild and deserted stretch of dune, thick grey sand tamed into a narrow beach along the waterline, dotted here and there with outbursts of chaparral. Blackened lengths of driftwood are strewn across the shore, stuck deep into the sediment at the water's edge and reaching out to the sky like severed arms, the unwitting perches of a colony of weary seabirds. The ocean, buoyant and green, never fails to remind John of the Dead Sea, though he's caught some sweet breaks the days before a storm. Here the breeze is cooler and the light hazier, but they spread their blanket in the sweet spot of a dune and the sweaters come off.
"I hope you are feeling better," Teyla says after lunch, when Ben is engaged in a solemn staring contest with the local wild life, and John is letting the sand's magic work the kinks out his shoulder.
He doesn't open his eyes, but smiles. "You're not going to pull an Ekaterin on me, are you? I'm doing fine. In fact, I'm doing great. Ben and I are sleeping better and generally aren't as much of a sour bunch to be around. If a mud bath and a bad shoulder's what it takes, I can live with it."
"I do not know what pulling an Ekaterin means, but I will choose not to be insulted."
John sneaks her a look under his lashes. Teyla's smile is indulgent but distracted. "You've taken a lot of time off work, lately. It's been a problem?"
"Ekaterin has, I believe you would say, pulled some strings. As a result, my employer has been quite understanding."
John sits up too fast, groaning. "Tell me they haven't asked you to..." He points at his temple.
"No." Teyla sounds honestly taken aback. "I would not do such a thing without talking to you about it, first."
"Yeah, sorry." John waves his hand in a don't mind the crazy Earthling gesture, and he keeps still when she tugs at a lock of his hair, submitting to her no-nonsense tenderness. There's nothing sharp about Teyla, he knows that, despite her skill and her fierce love, nothing that can hurt him. He's humbled by her grace. Always has been. "Don't think I don't know how much I take you for granted," he says quietly, "or that I could ever forget what you've done for me and Ben; what you left behind."
Teyla's smile shades into something fond and definitive. "I will tell you a secret, John. I did not do it for you. I did it because it was the right thing to do and I could not have lived at peace with myself otherwise. So you see, I am also selfish."
"I don't think --" He stops, but Teyla's inquiring look incites him to continue. "I don't think we're meant to cut ourselves off from home like this. I've always --" He shakes his head. He spoke the thought half-formed and now it's gone; he's no longer sure what he meant to say: cutting himself off from Earth, or from Atlantis.
"Perhaps we are not meant to leave," Teyla agrees carefully. "But when we have gone, neither can we return."
That gives him a hard jolt, right under his ribs. "You wouldn't -- If Ben and I weren't in the picture, you wouldn't jump on the chance to go back?"
Teyla's hand on his face is cool and transient as rain. "I never had an opportunity for...space." She stops, as if unsure of the word, like it's foreign somehow but she counts on John to translate and make up for the lack. "There was never time to think back on the decisions that were made; all energies went into survival and keeping ahead of the Wraith. When we met, I had to choose quickly what would be best for my people. I have struggled to understand all that was at stake and not lose myself as well." Like this is Teyla's first chance to really find out who she is. Like she's moved out from her parents' house for the first time. She withdraws from their closeness, taking her eyes away to watch Ben's silent conversation with the seabirds. "What we did to Michael...I do not believe that I appreciated what Dr. Beckett's treatment would do. I grasped it in my mind, but your science is still...not something I was raised to understand." She huffs angrily. "I do not seek to make excuses. I am trying to explain that since we left I have looked on past actions with new eyes -- in truth, since you disappeared with the hive ship. I do not think that I could take my new eyes to Atlantis and see what I see and be as I was." This is interesting - Teyla is painted as a person who cannot refrain from doing what she thinks is right, which rings true. What do you mean? he had asked, before his world came crashing down.
They are Wraith, she had answered pointedly, looking right at John like her team leader was a little slow.
He chuckles, now, a whisper of a laugh aimed at himself. "I think your old eyes worked just fine."
On Monday, Teyla goes back to work and John wakes up to a bowl of something foul shoved under his nose, swallowing back his plea for five more minutes, mom. The tax amnesty has moved him to a somatic lethargy he's not experienced since the summers of his childhood and the lazy Saturdays spent at his mother's knee after a hard week of playing and biking and baiting the SFs, when she had worked on her articles and her syllabi, reading her notes out loud. He's been dreaming about her again: nonsensical cameos mixed in with vague impressions of Elizabeth lecturing to a classroom of disappointed children; of Teer, who loved him all of her life and yet left him behind; of Teyla, who drags him down a flight of stairs, skipping two steps at a time--three, five, ten--until they're flying, the handrail their only tether. Dreams of strong women. "They never told me you were moving in," John deadpans into his pillow.
"Get up, Sheppard."
"Sorry, I'm not that kind of a girl."
A meaty hand falls on his shoulder and John is up and shoving Kolya against the wall, a forearm pressed across the Genii's throat, before his eyes are even open.
Pottery shatters against the hardwood, sprinkling John's feet with drops of hot tea. His vision swims with white spots, but he grits his teeth, locks his knees, and hangs on until his blood pressure catches up to the morning calisthenics. "I owe you, but that doesn't mean you can take liberties." He leans forward though the angle is wrong; the other guy has the advantage of height. "Are we clear?"
Kolya's eyes burn darkly, but his expression is set. "We are clear, Sheppard." His chin digs into John's ulna with each word. When John pulls back, Kolya doesn't even pretend to massage his throat.
"Where's Ben?" John asks, unsettled that it wasn't his first question. Poor John. Afraid of not being afraid. "In your tree house. Emmagan was with him until she had to leave for the Rail station. She sent me to get you out of bed."
"Honeymoon must be over," John mumbles, scratching his belly where the scarab left an itchy spot.
The air inside the house is cool on his bare chest. Crossing the hallway and the living room to throw a look out the window, John sees that the quixotic climate has struck again: the sky is milky white and the lawn drenched with dew. Heedless of his half-naked state, John steps out the side door and crosses the few yards to the elm, scaring a murder of black birds into flight. The cold goes down in his lungs like a tall glass of iced water.
"Hey, buddy, you're all right up there?" The rough opening of the tree house yawns a few hand-spans above his head, but John knows better than to violate the sanctuary by popping an eye in uninvited.
Ben appears, a thick woolen sweater thrown over his pajamas, hair standing every which way like a startled porcupine. Pre-pubescent Sheppard boys make my ovaries do funny things. Seriously. "You're warm enough in there?" John asks, grinning. "You're sure you don't need your coat?" Ben shakes his head no emphatically. "I'm about to make myself some breakfast. Want a glass of hot milk?" More head-shaking. "Cookies?" Dark look. It was worth a try. "I should shut up and go away?" Ben nods firmly before retreating inside his lair. "Gotcha."
John slants a look over his shoulder, but no ex-Genii officer is standing in the door laughing his ass off at the ex-military commander of Atlantis.
Said ex-Genii officer is too busy picking china out of the floorboards. I kind of like Kolya. And I'm happy that he's in this story, like this, because it makes me feel like at least there's a reason I like him, and it's not due to some mysterious brain-fever. "You know," John says, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning against the doorframe, "sooner or later you'll have to tell me what's going on with Ekaterin, and the reborn Christian neighborly act, and the whole not being out there stealing other people's hard-earned ZPMs."
Kolya looks up from his crouch, a rag in one hand and a dustpan in the other. "I will tell you, Sheppard."
"If you turn the other cheek, I'm going to lose it."
Confusion flickers across Kolya's face, but smoothes back into neutrality. The guy seems determined not to take anything the wrong way. "Your son is not really your son," he says. "He came from the Wraith."
John blanks, then breathes out. "Still going for the sucker-punch," he says, smiling thinly. "That's my man." He snatches an oversized black turtleneck off the foot of the bed (casualty of Ekaterin's adventures in knitting, but it's warm), and pulls it over his head, crouching to bring himself eye to eye with Kolya. "We're going to talk," John says quietly. "But I'm laying it out now: no one gets to tell me who is or is not my son. You get a free pass this time on account of the storm."
John stalks to the kitchen, pulling pans and preserves out of the cupboards. He's never learned to cook; his mother didn't know how, hated it, and once he joined the Air Force, he never had to worry about it. In the cities, the first non-essential item John splurged on was a cookbook. He still doesn't really enjoy the handling of food, he'll never be a natural or particularly good at it, but there's something easeful about an act so normal, so hands-on, so...necessary. There's both a creativity and a discipline to it, a skill for holding all the parts of a single picture in one's mind--kind of like flying.
Teyla says she enjoys watching him in the kitchen; she hinted, once, that it must be therapeutic. And of course, Teyla can't cook for beans.
"I apologize," Kolya rumbles behind John.
"Grab those roots and clean them, will ya?"
"What are we making?"
"Breakfast casserole." John sticks his head in the fridge, looking for clotted cream. "I got the recipe from Ekaterin. I'm feeling wild."
They work together side by side for a while, mincing, peeling, squashing, Kolya at the dinner table, John standing at the worktop, his back to the Genii.
"After the queen fed on me and restored me, the Wraith were beside themselves," John begins. "Something about me made it easier to take more for longer, made the feed more efficient and rewarding, and that something could be bred, could be passed on." John smiles grimly, peeling a small, local lemon. "You see, those guys, they weren't the type to put all their eggs in the same basket. So while the queen and Michael were after the location of Earth, the scientists had been trying to engineer food." It makes far more sense to me that the Hive would use Michael as a resource, as they do here, than that they would repudiate him. Sure they might look at him funny, but the queen threatening to kill him? I didn't get it. The steady hits of Kolya's blade falter. "They were...making humans?"
"Yeah," John says, frowning. For all that his life turned into a Star Trek franchise after he stepped through the gate, he still forgets that it's just life to those who were born here; that despite their ancestral struggle against a militarily superior enemy, their lost civilizations, their occasional exposure to left-over Ancient technology, guys like Kolya have never heard of in vitro fertilization, or Dolly the sheep, or The X-Files; they've never had to wonder what makes a human human; they don't have the slightest idea of what's possible. "Babies created in test tubes," John says, "using the genetic material of humans they'd culled, selecting the most resistant breeds, incubating the embryos inside women they kept in cocoons." He blinks away that particular horror, refocusing on Ekaterin's instructions. "Rate of growth was the problem, though, because they'd woken up early, and that had fucked them up badly, and the prospect of starvation was literally driving them mad. They wanted a new food source now." That's a good way to explain a lot of the poorer decisions and infighting among the Wraith, actually. John squints sideways at Ekaterin's proportions. Either his Bajanian is going down the drain, or he's cooking for an army. "So they did what we all do. What everyone does in the Pegasus galaxy: they turned to Ancient technology to save themselves."
"But they couldn't use --" Kolya starts. Then, "Ah," he corrects himself. "They had you."
John nods sharply. "They'd salvaged stasis pods from damaged Ancient vessels, and Dick had found a way to reverse the process -- accelerating metabolic functions, rather than slowing them. So the women would bring a child to term in a matter of days, instead of months."
"By the Ancestors," Kolya breathes out behind John, the knife falling silent.
"They succeeded through trial and error, trying to breed the exact characteristics they were looking for, tampering with the embryos in all sorts of ways," John says, staring down at the thin strips of raw meat marinating in spices and bitter fruit juice. "The first pregnant woman they shoved into a pod turned inside out instantly." So this idea was super-horrible in the last paragraph. Now it's both chilling and disgusting. He remembers throwing up on Dick's stylish boots--can still smell the sourness of it. He remembers making himself watch the next woman, and the next, and the next; all the women who died before Dick managed to adjust the ratio of acceleration, cooling micro waves, and combustible energy to something a human body could handle. Even then the first surviving surrogates had birthed stillborn babies.
"Ben was the only viable prototype," John says, staring at the wall and thinking that the Wraith had been desperate, but mostly they