The Water Grinds the Stone

by Auburn

Summary: War and peace, ebb and flow, love and loss, damned duty and dearest enemies, end and begin and come around again. When the Starge Program goes public, old loyalties are set against new ambitions for the Atlantis team.

Story Meta

• Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
• Rating: mature
• Warnings: torture, violence, death
• Author Notes: written for SGA Big Bang 2008
• Date: 2008
• Length: 242740 words
• Genre: m/m, m/f
• Category: crossover [SG1], drama, angst, adventure, space opera, romance, futurefic
• Cast: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex, Richard Woolsey, Evan Lorne, Jennifer Keller, Vala Mal Doran, Radek Zelenka, Sam Carter, Jack O'Neill, Jeannie McKay Miller, Madison Miller, Cameron Mitchell, Carson Beckett, Chuck Campbell, Supporting and Original Characters.
• Betas:
• Disclaimer: Not for profit. Transformative work written for private entertainment.

Fandoms

• Stargate Atlantis
• Due South
• Alias
• Once Upon a Time in Mexico
• Magnificent Seven

Navigation

• Email
• Comment
• Dreamwidth
• LiveJournal
• InsaneJournal
• Fiction Index
• Most Recent

John squinted at the pale blue sky, watching a distant bird wheel and soar and vaguely aware of the sweat running down his back under the layers of tee shirt, uniform shirt, and tac vest. The dip and rise of Rodney's voice filled the quiet meadow holding the stargate, familiar and necessary as the air and sunshine. Somewhere something like a dog barked, but neither Teyla or Ronon so much as twitched from where they were sitting a few yards away. They looked bored out of their minds.

Just the way John liked his missions to go.

"I could train monkeys to do this. I could even train marines to — Ow!"

John glanced down. Rodney remained on his knees before the DHD console, but he'd backed out and was clutching the top of his head.

"Maybe you should watch your head in there," John suggested, perfectly aware he was about thirty seconds too late.

Rodney twisted to glare at him. "I would never have thought of that, Colonel."

John folded his arms over the stock of his P90 and gave him a bland smile. "Glad to help."

The smile only earned him a huff of exasperation. Rodney turned back to the DHD, then pawed through his portable toolkit, before diving back in.

"How much longer?" Ronon called out, sounding lazy as a lion in the sun.

"As long as it takes," Rodney replied. "What, does he think he could do this faster?" He hummed and wriggled in deeper, resting his weight on his elbows and pulling his pants taut over a tempting target for John's boot.

John resisted. Ronon and Teyla would make him suffer if they ended up stuck here because he made Rodney jiggle the wrong part in the DHD.

Rodney reached back with one hand and groped through his toolkit, muttering in annoyance when what he wanted didn't magically leap into his fingers. John crouched between the kit and the gleaming bronze case of the sealed TID. "Which one?" he asked. The sooner Rodney finished, the sooner they could activate the TID, dial Atlantis and go home. These installation missions were becoming a bore.

"The Number Four Engler."

John stared into the kit at the assortment of tools, meters, sensors, and crystals. Some of them had come straight from Earth — he thought he recognized a Torx wrench and needle nosed pliers — and others had been appropriated from Atlantis' own stores. Still more had been hand tooled in the machine shop Sergeant Portilla had set up, where he and two other marines worked to the exacting design specifications provided by Zelenka and the other engineers. He didn't see a Number Four Engler, probably because he hadn't a clue what it was.

Rodney snapped his fingers.

"Oh, for the love of — orange rubberized handle, octagonal crystal at the point. It telescopes — "

John found it and slapped into Rodney's palm. "You could have just said."

"I did."

Rodney's hand and the Number Four Engler disappeared into the guts of the DHD. John sighed. Suhash Pratap had charge of the kitchen according to the schedule emailed out every week, which meant dinner would be curried something Pegasus, mulligan stew, plenty of fruit and breads, that vegetable thing with the pepper sauce that made his nose run, and a choice of fruit cobbler or brownies for dessert. No one would say boo if he took one of both.

"If you get us out of here in the next hour, I'll give you my brownie at dinner," he offered.

"What'll you give me if I get us out of here in half an hour?" Rodney asked in a low voice.

John lightly brushed his hand over the sun-warmed fabric stretched over Rodney's back. "Find out."

"Don't distract me," Rodney complained. He twisted to the side, muscles rippling in his back. "Move, you stubborn piece of — gotcha!" He handed out the Number Four Engler. John put it back in the kit. Rodney twisted even further to the side and rose up enough John heard his head thunk inside the DHD again. He muttered unintelligibly and turned enough to present both hands. "Give me the TID. Narrow S-curve oriented upward."

John picked up the Telepathic Interference Device gingerly. The necessity of fitting it inside the already crowded interior of a DHD console so that it could leach power from the stargate had resulted in an awkwardly contorted piece of equipment. Portilla's skills and one of the anthropologists with an artistic bent had created something that looked Ancient, angled and asymmetric yet balanced. Turquoise crystal interfaces on several facets were the only interruption in the Ancient alloy forming the case. As it did each time he handled one, the weight impressed him, as did the way Rodney took it without a bobble and proceeded to thread it into place.

"Done yet?" Ronon asked, a looming black silhouette between John and the sun, outlined in light. John jumped in surprise, then cast a dirty look up at him. Sneaky bastard loved doing that.

"Almost," Rodney answered, muffled voice high with normal annoyance. "I don't see why Zelenka can't go on some of these missions. He's...stunted. It's that bad Communist diet he grew up with, it's a miracle he has a brain at all, but the point is, he can squinch himself into a pretzel and not — ow — smash his fingers."

"Dr. Zelenka does not like going offworld," Teyla observed as she joined them.

"Well, this sucks."

"Buck up," John advised. "You could be installing it on an orbital gate."

"No doubt I will be sooner or later."

Rodney grunted, pushed at something, and finally backed out of the DHD again. His face and neck were red and shining with perspiration; his hair matted down and dark with it too. He blew out a loud breath. "Did someone ever say I did?" he demanded of Teyla. He swiped at the sweat on his upper lip. "Because not so much. It's like an oven in that thing."

Teyla smiled down at him and handed over her water bottle. Rodney took it, gulped down a swallow and poured the rest over his head. Droplets glittered on his eyelashes. John stared, then ostentatiously checked his watch, making sure Rodney saw.

"No one's shooting at you," John pointed out.

"Yes, I will admit, that is a major improvement in our missions of late."

"Are you done now?" Ronon asked.

"Yes," Rodney snapped back.

"You sure?" John asked. "'Cause I don't feel anything."

The field the TID generated made John itchy. He hated admitting it, but it made him cranky too, like someone was hissing in the back of his brain. It gave Teyla a piercing headache and bothered more than a few other members of the expedition too, though not nearly to the extent it affected the Wraith. Given an opportunity, Wraith would do anything to get out of range of the field. If they couldn't, they seemed to go insane or catatonic. Any of which worked to protect a planetary populace from them. So far it had worked on every planet they'd equipped with a TID.

"I've told you before, that's all in your head."

"Right," John drawled. He got to his feet, pleased his knees hadn't creaked as he did. "So turn it on and we can head home."

Rodney closed up his toolkit before he rose with a groan and a hand clutching at the small of his back. That meant he'd want the brownie and a back rub later.

Teyla touched John's arm. "Do you not think we should try to explain what we have done to the Elbixi again?"

John shrugged. "Well, you know, we already tried twice. Do you think the third time'd be the charm?"

She gave him a wry smile.

"It doesn't actually need them to know what it is for it to work," Rodney asked, "so why does it matter?"

"He's got a point," Ronon agreed.

Teyla sighed and gave in.

Rodney began entering the symbols for Atlantis into the DHD. The stargate activated with its normal half mechanical, half electrical noise. At the same time, the hairs on John's arms stood up like he had a swarm of bugs running all over him. Teyla sucked in a deep breath, her brow pleating in pain. John rubbed at his arms and glared at Ronon, who was watching him and Teyla.

"Guess it's working," Ronon commented.

"Of course it is." Rodney didn't bother turning around.

The wormhole splashed open, bright even in the daylight. Rodney sent through his IDC and John activated his radio to give the word of the day. "Atlantis, this is Sheppard. Everything is copacetic. Is it still raining there?

A faint crackle of static accompanied Chuck Campbell's familiar voice replying the counter-sign.

"AR-1, this is Atlantis. Everything is here is tickyboo too and, yeah, it's coming down in buckets."

'Tickyboo,' Rodney mouthed and John grinned. Every day a randomly chosen expedition member provided the signs and counter-signs for radio communication in the form of four innocuous words that had to be included in any wormhole contact, two for all okay, two for something wrong.

"Really?" John asked.

"No sir. Shield's down."

John waved the team forward and they stepped through the event horizon together into Atlantis. Rodney turned to him and snapped his fingers imperiously. "Under half an hour. Pay up."

John gave him a slow smile and a look. "Right here in the gate room?"

Rodney gulped and then sneered. "Fine. Later. Don't think I'm forgetting about the brownie, either."





Ronon slapped Rodney's back as they exited the jumper, nearly sending him to his knees.

"I can't believe it was that easy," John repeated for the third time.

"Stop saying that, you'll jinx the next mission," Rodney told him, but he grinned with the same glee bubbling through the rest of the team.

They handed their weapons and the remaining explosives off to Corporals Mullen and Parker for return to the armory on the way to medical, received Keller's all clear, and reported to Woolsey to debrief. He was waiting for them, arms crossed over his chest, wearing the same expressive mixture of emotions he did at every debriefing: disapproval, apprehension, fascination and concern.

"I see you've all survived unscathed once more," he commented. "Did it work?"

"Did it work?" Rodney repeated. He glanced at John, who was grinning, to Ronon, who smirked and to Teyla, who also had a wide smile. Rodney ducked his head, an answering smile spreading over his own face.

"Yes, did it work?" Woolsey demanded.

John strolled over to the conference table and perched on it. "Waltz in the park."

"Candy from a baby," Rodney said.

"Beating up Sheppard."

Sheppard slanted Ronon a sour look, then laughed anyway.

The conference room oriented to the west and morning briefings saw it always still on the shadowed side and requiring lights, but by afternoon light reflected from the reddish walls and gave the entire room a warm cast. It gleamed off Woolsey's skull, too.

"Perhaps you might supply a little more detail than that?"

"The Wraith had no idea we were even there until it was too late," Rodney said. "With the jumper cloaked, we landed in one of the dart bays and simply waited for half an hour after activating the TID."

"It all went exactly according to our plan," Teyla finished. "Though I admit to a certain amount of relief that it is over. Being too near the device is quite...unpleasant."

"Were there other humans on the ship?" Woolsey asked

Some of the euphoria drained away.

"We didn't check the cocoon holds," John said. He rubbed the back of his neck. "Not that we could have done anything for anyone there if we had. The jumper will only hold so many people and we really didn't know how long the TID would affect the Wraith...We didn't see any worshippers wondering around, though. That hive might not have had any."

"I don't think we need to worry much about what happens to Wraith worshippers," Rodney said.

"They are human, Rodney," Teyla said.

Ronon scowled at her. "Not to me."

"Quite understandable," Woolsey said. He straightened his shoulders. "Well. I'll begin my own report for the IOA. I'll expect your reports by tomorrow afternoon." He made a shooing gesture toward all four of them.

"No problem," John told him. He slid off of the table and headed for the door, snagging Rodney's tac vest in one hand. "Let's get some dinner. I wouldn't want to pass out from low blood sugar, after all."

Rodney trotted after him. "Oooh. Lasagna tonight."

"That's right."

Teyla laughed behind them.





Rodney walked back from disposing of the clean towel in the washroom. John had come out of his post-sex coma and taken it upon himself to change the sheets. Which meant John wouldn't be dressing and heading back to his own quarters yet.

Rodney smiled and rejoined him, tucking in a sheet corner, only to have John redo it to his exacting standards.

John insisted on hospital corners. John also hated the wet spot, which meant Rodney's bed often received this treatment, since they usually had sex in his quarters. It made sense; bigger, better bed and even the marines had grown used to John's nocturnal rambling through the city, so seeing him in a corridor outside, even at the earliest hours, raised no eyebrows. A few people knew about them, but they'd remained discreet as possible over the years.

He stepped back and let John finish, admiring the play of bare skin and muscle, then slid into the crisp sheets and patted the spot next to him. He was already thinking of how messy they could get this set of sheets in the morning. They'd both have to have a shower anyway before heading out.

John got into the bed and after a moment of hesitation — he always hesitated and Rodney always wondered — squirmed closer and wrapped an arm around Rodney's middle. They'd wriggle apart some nights, when one or the other of them dreamed, but just as often Rodney woke to this same tickle of warm breath against his neck, John pressed close, whether Rodney was on his stomach or facing up the way he was now.

He could tell when John was awake by that breath, the slowed rhythm and faint snuffle on each inhale, the weight of him against Rodney's side, slack with sleep. He'd learned so much about John in the years they'd slept together, since the first nights on Nsheen and since, much more than just his secrets. He knew for instance that John didn't talk often in bed, but he didn't mind if Rodney did.

The small lights along the floor and next to the door dimmed to their lowest setting automatically without any movement in the room to keep them on.

Rodney relaxed and let his thoughts roam and tumble out while looking up at the dark ceiling.

"You know that this proves that the Ancients weren't all that bright," he said.

"Ung?" John mumbled.

Rodney shifted and got his arm around John's shoulders, where he could pet his back.

"Yes. At least the ones who were trying to fight the Wraith. Maybe they suffered some sort of brain drain. They were certainly past their prime. I mean, you don't really think those ascension-obsessed egomaniacs could have built Atlantis, do you?"

"Hmm."

He took that as agreement. In reward, he stroked his fingers over John's nape.

John hummed contentedly and murmured, "Go on."

"I mean, the TID isn't that complicated. But no, the Ancients thought they'd fight the Wraith with sentient robots or nanites or exploding freaking tumors. When they ran into a disease, they fled to another galaxy and when they ran into the Wraith they ran away again and even when they ascended, they were pretty much all useless."

"What about, um, whatsername, Ganos Lal?"

"Pretending to be a hologram?" Rodney snorted his derision. "Very classy. Very useful. Only not."

"Give them a break, they were just afraid of dying," John said. "Just like everyone else."

"I don't think so," Rodney replied, feeling stubborn and slightly arbitrary enough to continue arguing his point, despite his body's desire to slide into sleep now that it was warm and sated. "The two best minds they had, Janus and Merlin, had to go behind their backs to accomplish anything. What does that tell you?"

"That they didn't want them exploding any solar systems?" John replied, sounding snippy and more awake.

"Maybe," Rodney conceded.

John nosed against his jaw. "Can we go to sleep now?"

Rodney hmphed and turned enough to pull John tighter to him. "If we must."

"I must. I've got a five o'clock run with Ronon." John settled closer and sighed with what sounded like contentment. "Maybe they never thought of it because they were trying to kill the Wraith, not save people."

Rodney frowned at the ceiling, parsing that out. Did John mean that philosophically, as in the Ancients had been a selfish bunch who didn't really care about the human population the Wraith would prey on when they gave up? Or had he been referring to specifics, to the Athosians and Michael's other victims, the ones the TID had been developed to free from his influence? Which reminded him...He needed Captain Hailey assigned to the science department permanently. Her work on powering the TIDs had been impressive. Plenty of the marines could fly jumpers and all of them could shoot, but how many of them were world class astrophysicists who had been mentored into the Stargate Program by Sam? Hailey was being wasted in the Air Force. Something he meant to change.

"John?"

John made a grumbling sound.

Rodney decided to let it go. After all, they had Teyla and her son back, safe and sane, though some of Michael's other victims would never be the same or, like Kanaan, had not survived at all. He could talk to John about Jennifer Hailey at morning staff.

He listened to John's steady breathing and let it lull him into sleep too.





Rodney actually waited until Teyla had finished telling them what was known about the Zidari.

"McKay?"

He concentrated on Hailey's work. If an error slipped through the simulations, into the testing phase, the best they could hope for was large scale destruction, with casualties minimized only because Rodney had every intention of evacuating anyone not critical to the first test charge.

"McKay." Significantly more emphasis and annoyance colored John's voice.

Enough to make Rodney look up. "What?"

"You with us?"

"Actually, no," Rodney said. He ignored John's frown. "This is completely beneath my skills, not to mention a criminal waste of my time. Someone else can do it."

"You're part of the team," John replied, definitely sounding annoyed.

"Yes, whatever," Rodney said. "Look, I know I can do the job twice as fast as anyone else, but Bryce is willing to go — I talked to her — and she's not incompetent." He didn't look up from his screen, scrolling through line after line of symbols, following the logic of the attributes they described, looking for flaws. "Zelenka and Hailey and I are incredibly close..." His voice trailed away as he frowned at the laptop. His hands paused over the keyboard, hovered, then he blew out a breath, muttering, "Still smarter than you, Hailey. We have to account for the..." and tuned out everything else, forgetting where he was entirely.

He heard John tell Woolsey. "It really is routine at this point. We can take Dr. Bryce. It looks like Rodney's pretty busy."

"You won't be sorry," Rodney muttered as everyone else gathered their tablets, clothes rustling as they rose. Hailey hadn't made an error, but she'd jumped five steps without supporting her methodology.

"I'll leave that up to you, Colonel Sheppard," Woolsey said.

Rodney blinked tiredly. If he hadn't been up until three in the morning, it might have been different. He might have found the prospect of getting into the field for a few hours a pleasant break. He couldn't turn his brain off though. He kept circling the concept. It wasn't radical, not by the standards of science as practiced in Atlantis, but he felt sure that it went a different direction entirely than what the Ancients had done. However they had actually manufactured ZPMs, they hadn't intended to recharge them or there would have been some facility or reference to it in the database.

This, what he and Radek were pioneering along with Hailey, was something new.

Last night the three of them and Mundy, the expedition's best pure mathematician, had gone over every calculation. Rodney had looked up finally when a rattling snore startled him out of his own daze and found Hailey asleep on the lab floor. Radek had the lab cot, proving that tired scientists were seldom gentlemen, and Mundy had been sitting upright on a stool. Rodney had considered waking him for a half second, then shrugged. Sooner or later, Mundy would fall over and wake himself.

He'd staggered back to his own quarters and faceplanted on the bed, not even kicking off his boots.

Four hours sleep weren't enough to operate on offworld. They'd once traded with a people who considered yawning a deadly insult. Ronon had been the one to get them chased off that planet.

"Dr. McKay?"

"Eh?"

"I have more reports to write for the IOA. Though, admittedly, the successes we've had lately have made for a nice change in writing them. I'll leave you to your own work."

Rodney nodded absently.

If all the math checked out, they would begin running a simulation the next day. He knew if he went down to the lab now, Hailey would want to start the simulations. If he waited until after lunch though, she could be threatened with sitting up to wait through the night for any results.

Woolsey walked out.

Rodney went on working until he heard the stargate cycle, then shot up out of his seat and out of the conference room. He might not be going with them, but he'd see his team off.

Ronon was carrying the TID and Bryce had on more gear than Rodney usually carried. He watched her balk for a second at the event horizon and sighed. She'd said she wanted more offworld experience. Ronon gave her a little push and she went through.

John turned and looked back and up, his face creasing into a smile when he caught sight of Rodney. Teyla turned and smiled too before walking after Ronon and Bryce.

John waved.

Rodney gave him a thumbs up and grimaced the instant John disappeared into the gate. His stomach protested and he remembered that he hated it when his team went anywhere without him. He walked back to the conference room with the full intention of finishing his review before lunch. They would begin the simulations and Hailey could stay up all night monitoring them. The next mission the team went on he would be with them.

---

Rodney corralled Hermiod and Novak the instant the Daedalus arrived in beaming range. Something about stressed quantum particles and Asgard shielding. John had been chewing his breakfast muffin and wondering if he'd have to limp down to the infirmary and have Keller look at his knee or could get away with liniment and an Ace bandage. It might have been stressed shielding and Asgard particles. He'd been distracted. His knee had twinged every time he bent it and he'd had to work at not letting it show. He hated the way everything that had always been unthinking and easy about his body had become an effort when he ticked over forty.

Maybe he hadn't done quite as good a job as he'd thought, because Rodney found him in his office, plowing through the paperwork that went with inventory and new personnel long past when he normally quit. Rodney set down a bottle of aspirin, a Powerbar and a bottle of water. "I asked at the mess hall if you'd made it in for lunch."

"Didn't figure you'd finish in the lab before midnight," John replied. He pushed his laptop away and picked up the still sealed bottle of aspirin. "Keller know you have this?"

"Novak brought it and a couple of other things," Rodney said. He dropped into the single chair on the opposite side of John's desk. There hadn't even been that chair until Lorne brought it in. Which was only fair, considering the amount of time Lorne spent in John's office. "Besides, what Keller doesn't know won't hurt either one of us. To wit, whatever the hell you did to your knee running with Ronon this morning."

"Sparring," John corrected him.

He got the cellophane off, popped the cap and tore open the foil seal. The aspirin threatened to jump out and he wondered when drug companies stopped using cotton balls to cushion pills.

"Whatever. He's over ten years younger than you. Take the aspirin." Rodney sniffed the air. "Well, at least you had sense enough to put liniment on it. Of course, now you smell like a stable."

He didn't mind smelling like a stable. The smell of horse liniment brought back some of the pleasanter memories of childhood. The horses had been an escape in themselves beyond the promises of speed and riding away someday, warmth and strength without pretense. Not that he'd ever explain that, even to Rodney, unless something forced it out of him. But he'd never object to the reminder or the scent of stables, unless Rodney was referring to manure.

"Not quite."

"Better than Aqua Velva, anyway."

He opened the bottle of water and downed the aspirin with a swallow, then tore open the Powerbar. John peered at it. Rodney had brought him his favorite flavor. "Thanks."

"So, Novak brought some interesting news," Rodney told John while John chewed his way through the Powerbar.

John swallowed. "And?" He looked inquiringly at Rodney. "You had to rush right over and clue me in. Thanks for thinking of me, walled away here with nothing to do but count ammo and make sure we got all the MREs we requisitioned before I sign for them."

He did have paperwork to finish, some of it electronic and some still on actual paper, before the Daedalus left for Earth again. With his knee still hurting enough he didn't want to limp around on it more than necessary, John had taken over the worst part of the job and sent Lorne to physically inspect each crate beamed down to make sure the contents matched the bill of lading. Boring, tiring work either way, but no matter how lackadaisical he was about the pissant parts of the military, John made sure every cartridge and sock was accounted for in and out of Atlantis.

“Hmn, no. Teyla stole Hermiod right out the lab. I didn't know she'd ever even talked to him before.”

John nodded, only half listening.

He'd been lucky to have Bates that first year when things got lean and luckier with Lorne now, but he did his share of the work. Entirely too much of it had to be handled by the commander of the base and couldn't be foisted off on any of his subordinates.

"The SGC has started turning over the technology they promised to the other Gate Alliance Treaty signatories and they've declassified an entire category of scientific papers that have been on the Wait List," Rodney said. He leaned forward, excitement lighting up his face. "Anything derived from but not specifically referencing as evidence the Program or offworld data."

John raised an eyebrow and took a another bite of Powerbar. Rodney nearly bounced in his seat.

"This is huge, Sheppard. Some of these papers have been written and archived for years. People have been waiting to publish all that time. Some of them since the Stargate was opened. Jackson must have ten books worth of comparative archaeolinguistic analysis. The math, the physics, and even the engineering work on improved materials created from alloys we've learned about from the Goa'uld and the Ancients are going to revolutionize..." He frowned at John. "Why aren't you excited?"

John finished chewing while pointing at his laptop and the work still on it.

Rodney hmphed and sat back in his chair. "Fine. But dozens of us who have been working unacknowledged are about to be vindicated. No more going to conferences on our area of study and being asked what happened and why we haven't done any new work. Telling everyone your work is classified sounds great the first fifty times, but then people start thinking it's an excuse. They point and say, there's McKay. Brilliant start, but no one's seen anything from him since he worked on the Canadian Arm."

"Sorry, buddy."

"Sure you are."

John shrugged.

"And it's not like I'd trade what I've been doing for all the accolades — "

John muffled a snort that made Rodney frown at him.

"Fine, yes, but fame gets you tenure and grants and the best equipment and people to work with, you know."

Worry replaced the excitement and annoyance on Rodney's face. His knee jiggled.

"What?" John demanded.

"Look, this is - this is important, you have to understand. This is the first step to disclosure. It's going to change everything."

John went back to his inventory check, comparing the manifest for P90 ammunition with what they'd requisitioned and what Lorne reported had been delivered. According to the paperwork, the SGC had sent it all. According to the Daedalus's records, they'd loaded it all. According to Lorne's count, they were missing five crates. Crap. If someone had skimmed five crates of ammo, there was going to be a mess that would end in an investigation. He didn't want to find out someone in the expedition was blackmarketing their equipment. They had enough enemies in this galaxy and some of them had got their hands on lost or cached material, which John hated. Bad enough to be shot at without supplying the ammo and guns to do it.

Maybe it had been misdirected. To save time, they had specific supplies beamed straight to relevant storage areas. He opened a window with the food supply delivery checklist.

He touched his radio, opening the channel he used to communicate with his officers. "Major Lorne, this is Sheppard. Send Lt. McCready down to Mess Hall Supply Room Four. They have five extra crates listed. Looks like someone on the Daedalus figures we eat bullets for breakfast."

"A natural enough mistake, sir. I'll have the lieutenant confirm that's our missing ammunition and send a squad to remove it to the armory. Lorne out."

"Are you even listening to me?" Rodney demanded.

"No."

"If the Stargate Program is declassified, they may reveal the existence of Atlantis too. Zelenka thinks they won't, but you know it will come out. Or what if they don't? You don't think that's going to affect us? Budgets! Someone has to pay for the bullets."

"Rodney..." John looked up at him. "Exactly what am I supposed to do about it? Either way?"

Rodney slumped. "I don't know."

"Look, I'll be there when they hand you your Nobel."

"Promise."

"Pinky swear."

"Good, good." Rodney bounced to his feet. "I'm going back to the lab. Hermiod had the most ridiculous suggestion about modulating the subspace stream using..." John lost the gist of it at that point, other than that Rodney was going to prove Hermiod wrong, wrong, so wrong and incidentally, he would be winning the Nobel for this work.

"That's what you said last week."

"It's still true. So stay off that knee. I don't want a gimp showing up at Stockholm," Rodney told him on the way through the door.





Rodney kept worrying at it, the prospect of disclosure and what it would mean. He paced back and forth and around John's bed, going over the pros and cons. Several of Teyla's candles burned in place of brighter lights, their flames swaying whenever he passed, sending shadows chasing over Johnny Cash's poster. John sat back and watched, periodically making little encouraging sounds.

"Pro, Nobel. There's absolutely no way they could ignore what I've accomplished, even before the work I've done in Atlantis," Rodney said. "Con, of course, I'll be expected to defend and explain it all, since most people really aren't up to grasping even the basic concepts."

"Mmhm."

John had his boots and socks off. He stretched and wiggled his toes in cat-like ecstasy, derailing Rodney's train of thought. John had long feet and long toes. Dark hair dusted the joints. He practically melted when given a foot rub, but other than in the infirmary, Rodney didn't think he'd ever seen John go barefoot around anyone but him.

Rodney coughed and shifted his gaze to the side table with its picture of tiny John ad Evil Knievel and John's latest Russian novel. He'd asked about John's penchant for Russian fiction once and received only a drawled, "I like it." Months later, waiting while Teyla hammered out a deal for gredel berries and falk seed, John had offered up a tiny clue. In a pause between Rodney complaining about the snow, the distance from the stargate on foot, and the resemblance of the local militia to Cossacks, and while John might like Doctor Zhivago, he, Rodney, could do without the replay of his time in Siberia, John had said, "My mother loved Doctor Zhivago."

It looked like John had started on Solzhenitsyn since then.

"Pro, publishing," Rodney made himself go on. He watched John slide down on the bed, the way he stretched and squirmed, getting comfortable, all the while watching Rodney through a veil of half-lowered eyelashes. "Con, Atlantis is so isolated, any number of people will publish before I can. Which is doubly unfair — "

"Rodney," John said. He placed his hands on the first button of his BDUs. "Do we really need to talk about this?" He flicked the button open. "Now?"

The familiar, sweet tightening in his groin convinced Rodney that John had a point. He toed off his shoes while starting on his own belt and walking toward the bed, a feat of coordination he thought would be amazing in other circumstances.

John finished unbuttoning, lifted his hips and pushed the BDUs down, then kicked them off. They landed in a heap beyond the foot of the bed. Rodney stepped over them, shed his own pants, and crawled onto the bed to kneel between John's bare legs. He let his hand rest on the knee still wrapped in an Ace bandage.

"Go easy on me," John told him seriously. "I'm fragile." The tip of his tongue peeked between his lips.

Rodney slid his hand up the smooth inside of John's thigh, letting his fingers stir the hair on the top. John caught his breath and shifted artlessly. The bulge in his boxers grew.

"Mmm, yes, I can see that."

He paused at the hem of John's boxers, just tucking the tips of his fingers underneath. Heat rose up through John's skin and Rodney broke into a light sweat himself. He held himself to moving his thumb in small circles, watching as John's cock got harder and harder, tenting his boxers impressively.

"Not that easy, you bastard," John finally panted, curling up and reaching for Rodney's hand, and then guiding it under his waistband to his cock.

The weight of John's cock in his hand, hot, taut flesh, the way he flexed his hips to fuck into Rodney's fist made Rodney groan. His own erection poked insistently at the front his boxers, a damp spot forming over the head.

He worked his way further up the bed, straddling John without letting go, and kissed him.

They managed to lose both pairs of boxers after that, but never got to their shirts, hands and mouths everywhere, touching and licking and sucking, everything easy and urgent all at once. They ended up in a debauched tangle afterward, Rodney's shirt rucked up to his armpits, sweat and come drying on his belly and the black cotton of John's tee. When Rodney could breathe steadily again without actively thinking about it, he staggered into the bathroom to clean up before dressing.

John couldn't afford to have Rodney walk out of his quarters reeking of sex. He couldn't afford to have Rodney stay the night either, so Rodney put his clothes back on post clean up, then sat on the foot of the bed to don his shoes.

"Blow out the candles?" John asked lazily. He had barely moved, except to finally strip off his tee shirt, which was typical of John, who truly did have a lazy streak or at least a fondness for wallowing in the afterglow.

Rodney put on his second shoe and stood. He walked around the room putting out the candles, pausing at the last one. He looked at John by its light, a naked chiaroscuro of golden skin and shadow, long curves and lean lines. John's eyes glittered.

"Hey," he said and held out his hand.

Rodney walked back to the bed and let himself be pulled down into a long, sleepy kiss. When he finally stepped back, John smiled at him.

"When you finish recharging the ZPMs, we won't have to ration power consumption. You'll be able to keep up with whatever's being published back on Earth."





John turned in a circle, studying the village, not liking what he saw. It had never been a rich place, just wattle-and-daub huts, surrounded by checkerboard fields of mixed crops, all of them wilted and untended. It had a distinct sense of decay and abandonment, too. That might not have been surprising if it had been culled, but they'd glimpsed people moving around before they approached the outskirts. Smoke rose from fires inside most of the huts. The populace had disappeared though, the instant they glimpsed the team. The only things left moving were some almost goats wandering loose between the huts. More of them were out in the fields, something he'd bet no farmer would allow given a choice.

He wanted to scratch his head. It didn't make sense.

The villagers hadn't acted frightened of them, hadn't screamed or run; indeed, it had been more of a fast and lurching shuffle on several peoples' part.

Now they were standing in the middle of the it, next to the well, and John thought they were being watched, but no one would come out. Maybe they were all taking a siesta. The heat here was breathtaking.

"We're friendly," he called out. "Just here to do a little work on the stargate. When we're through the Wraith won't bother you again."

He wrinkled his nose as the wind shifted and the stench of an open latrine hit.

"God, what's that reek?" Rodney exclaimed. He clamped his hands over his nose and mouth.

Ronon sniffed the air. "Sickness," he declared.

"Sickness?" Rodney bleated. "I knew I should have sent Bryce again. Can we get out of here? The last thing I need is to catch whatever mutant death flu is brewing in this — this — backwards, backwoods sty." He'd already gone pink and sweat-stained from the heat. Everyone who knew him long found out Rodney despised extreme temperatures of hot or cold. He liked being near any illness even less than either.

"Calm down, Rodney," John told him. He turned on his heel, looking for any sign of anyone willing to come out and talk to them. "We'll head back to the stargate in a few."

Teyla studied the huts and the pieces of daily life that had been abandoned near the well. A basket of laundry spilled in the dirt and a handful of fruit had been left out; the fruit looked soft and rotten, left in the sun too long, and a line of ant-like insects had found it.

"They know we are here," she said.

"Yep."

Sadness creased her features. "Perhaps it would be best if we respected their obvious wishes."

"What she said." Rodney had pulled open one of the pockets on his tac vest, found a paper face mask, and was in the process of hooking it over his nose and mouth. John snatched it away. "What?"

"Do you think you could be any more insulting?" he asked.

Rodney glared back at him. "Let me try. And give that back."

"No." John stuffed the mask into his own pocket.

"We should go," Ronon said.

One of the almost goats wandered over to him fearlessly, then butted its head against his leg. It had a single, blunt nose horn and coarse black and white hair. If it had come past half way up Ronon's calf and had a little more force and a point, it might have hurt.

"Looks like you've made a friend," John observed.

Ronon looked down at it. It had begun mouthing his trousers. John hid a grin as Ronon shook his leg to make the almost goat leave. It blew out a snotty breath with a loud bleat and trotted away.

"Okay, that was disgusting," Rodney said, eyeing the dark stain left on Ronon's leg, half some kind of phlegm and speckled with well chewed green stuff.

Ronon wiped the worst of the slime off with his hand, looking less than pleased, then crossed his arms over his chest. "Let's go," he said.

"Okey dokey," John said. Teyla was right. No use pushing their presence on these people. Not like this village had anything to offer in trade anyway. He shrugged enough to resettle his tac vest and took a step back toward the gate.

A rock hit the earth a yard away, accompanied by a wordless yell from its thrower. John spun toward the noise while Ronon had his gun out and aimed.

Another yell and another rock followed. The man doing both staggered and nearly fell, but the rock didn't come near any of them. He braced his hand against the side of a hut and gabbled something else at them, shaking his other hand at them wildly.

The whine of Ronon's gun powering up sounded loud in the quiet following the outburst.

"Ronon, stop," Teyla said. She moved ahead of John and him and held her hands out in the open, showing they were empty. "We mean you no harm."

The man stooped awkwardly, scrabbled in the dirt and found another rock. This time it almost reached his target, kicking up dust onto Teyla's boots. She hesitated and he yelled something so slurred John couldn't guess if it was a language they hadn't heard before or just incoherent. A wet stain appeared at his crotch and he stumbled back into his hut.

"He's drunk," Rodney said in disgust.

"Maybe, probably," John replied. He felt uneasy. Maybe the whole village was recovering from week long bender, but why would they all hide? "I think we've worn out our welcome anyway."

"I'm not going to argue."

That rated a smile. "There's a first."

"I believe you and Ronon are right," Teyla said. "We should go."

"Hey, what about me? I wanted to get out of here before the rocks started flying, you know."

Teyla patted Rodney's arm in passing, as she headed out of the village with her easy stride. "I know, Rodney."

"Well. Just so you know," he said, uncertainly, then hurried after her.

John hesitated, glancing around a last time.

"Sheppard," Ronon growled.

"Come on."

Ronon kept an eye on the village as they left, but no one stirred from the huts and no one followed them back to the stargate. The TID installation began the way a hundred others had: Rodney on his hands and knees, head in the DHD, complaining about the heat, cursing the Ancients, and worrying the Wraith would show up before he had it running. Ronon stayed a little more alert, looking back toward the village and prowling an invisible perimeter. Teyla sat down next to John.

One thing Rodney had right; the heat made mirages shimmer in the middle distance. She shone with perspiration, as did Ronon. John just felt sweaty.

Rodney backed out the DHD and knelt with his hands braced on his thighs, head hanging. He was alarmingly red.

"You okay, buddy?" John asked.

"Yeah, I just need to wipe my hands down and maybe dive in a freezing cold river," Rodney panted.

Ronon wandered back and crouched next to Rodney, tailor-fashion. "You need to drink something."

That made Rodney sneer, though the wet sheen of sweat on his face and the way he almost glowed with heat took the edge off his scorn. "Really? You're just a font of homespun wisdom, aren't you?"

Ronon fished Rodney's canteen from the pile of equipment set next to the DHD and handed it to him. Then he clapped Rodney on the forearm, before rising and striding away. "I'm going to check the tree line."

Rodney stared at his forearm and scrubbed futilely at it. "God, tell me you washed your hands sometime since using them to wipe goat-thing snot from your pants!" He wiped his hand on his own pants, leaving a dark smear of sweat. "Yuuch!"

"How much longer?" John asked before he could begin the hygiene rant.

Rodney paused between opening his canteen and drinking from it. "Two hours, maybe a little more."

A frown creased John's forehead. "McKay? McCready's team has a better time than that."

"Well, McCready's team isn't dealing with DHD that's already been modified by some ham-fisted cretin. If the Ancients hadn't been obsessed with multiple redundancies — which I highly approve of when it comes to reconstituting my atoms in the right order — this thing wouldn't have even dialed in. It won't dial out again until I finish fixing it."

"Christ."

John glanced at Teyla. She sighed and wiped her forehead. She hadn't known anything about this planet; it had been on a list Halling had from his father, who got it from another trader, but none of the Athosians had ever used the gate address. Or if someone had, maybe they'd ended up stuck on this side of the stargate. One of these days, the scientists needed to rig a MALP with some way to test whether the gate could be dialed successfully from the other side. John had been on a few too many trips that would have been one way without Rodney along.

"You think maybe the villagers just hadn't seen anyone new in a long time?"

She shook her head. "If they were truly isolated, I think they would have been more curious."

He turned back to Rodney. "You can fix it, though?"

"Yes, of course, I've fixed worse. I'll install the TID when I've finished replacing the KR3 crystal so that we can dial out." Rodney sighed and pulled his toolkit closer. He began going through it. "Luckily, I always carry one."

"Sure," John agreed. This was why Rodney was always a good guy to have on your team. He got up and stretched. "I'm going catch up with Ronon." Maybe hang out in the shade for a few minutes.

"I will stay with Rodney," Teyla said.

"Good, good," Rodney muttered. He opened a small case of crystals and plucked one out. "Teyla has better hands than you for small work."

"Thank you," she said.

"Use the radio if something comes up," John told her and strolled away.





Two falls into their sparring session, Teyla hit John with a move that didn't stop when it should have. John went down a third time, wondering if she hadn't just broken one of his ribs and only vaguely heard her bantos sticks hit the mat. He knelt and tried to breathe through clenched teeth.

"John, should I call for a doctor?"

He shook his head. He'd had beatings and walked away from several crashes that had banged him up worse. He just hadn't expected it. If Teyla wasn't going to pull her blows, she told him up front. That had been an awkward, unrestrained move, so out of character John had left himself wide open.

"John?"

Teyla's voice held a tremble that made him look up.

Her hands were shaking, held out before her, and she was staring at them, her dark eyes wide with alarm.

By the time they made it to one of the transporters, Teyla's hands were okay again, though she folded them into tight fists, held her arms close to her body and walked carefully. John knew she hadn't broken his rib, but he expected a hell of a bruise, and knew Keller would insist on a scan to make sure it hadn't cracked. He touched the destination screen for the infirmary and tried to ignore the tingling sensation that had started in his heels several days before. It had spread up to his calves the night before, then disappeared when he woke up.

It came back during breakfast, after his run with Ronon, but he'd ignored it in favor of teasing Rodney over his phantom pains, until Rodney developed a twitch and left the mess hall without finishing the contents of his tray.

The tingling had been there through the whole sparring session, distracting and slowing John down, and felt even stronger when he stood still. He shifted uneasily. Rodney could have been feeling much the same thing. Rodney didn't pride himself on toughing anything out; not when it could be treated, unlike Ronon, who preferred to ignore anything that didn't prostrate him. Rodney worried over every freckle and bruise and yes, he was a hypochondriac when he had too much time on his hands to obsess over the myriad potential betrayals of the body, but maybe he hadn't been imagining those pains he had described.

It suddenly didn't seem so funny.

Funny pretty much disappeared from the picture entirely by the end of the day.

Keller had John in one bed, with Teyla and Rodney in the next ones. Her mouth drew tighter and tighter as the tests came in, but she didn't tell them anything when Teyla asked.

"I can't make a diagnosis yet," she explained.

"But there's something wrong," Rodney groaned. "I knew it! If you'd listened to me yesterday — "

"Rodney, let her do her job," Teyla said from her bed. She'd hidden her hands under the sheet.

John drew his legs up and then had to bite back a moan at the pain from his side. He ground the heels of his feet into the bed, trying to alleviate the tingling. It had become more a kind of annoying slow burn as the day progressed. He thought from the way Keller had kept asking, "Do you feel this? This? Now?" and frowning, that he'd lost some sensation in his feet, too.

He still didn't think it was what Rodney was feeling, but Rodney was feeling something and Teyla's hands kept shaking. That was three of them with screwy symptoms. Keller's secretiveness telegraphed that whatever she'd found was serious enough to worry her. That didn't reassure John and wouldn't make Rodney or Teyla feel any better either.

He tried to be upbeat anyway. "We'll all be fine."

Rodney gave him a patently disbelieving look.

"She'll fix us up," John added, more for Teyla's benefit than Rodney's. Platitudes just weren't ever going to placate Rodney, but Teyla sometimes accepted words in the sense they were meant. Worrying themselves sick wouldn't help them. Keller was good and generally saved her indecisiveness and second thoughts for after emergencies. They could count on her; she'd proved herself under literal fire before.

This time, though, Teyla looked away.

"Teyla?" Rodney questioned, proving once and for all that he did pay attention to nonverbal cues from people.

"I miss Tanaan," she murmured, "but I find myself relieved he is with Halling at the settlement."

"Yeah," John agreed, his voice gone rough. He knew she missed Tanaan, but Atlantis didn't have schools or daycare, and the kid needed to be with other kids. "Yeah, that's, that's probably a good thing."

Rodney always had to state the obvious. "You wouldn't want him to catch whatever it is we've got, would you?" John knew that Teyla realized he only meant it as a comfort or he would have thrown the water cup on the beside table at him.

The infirmary doors slid open admitting Ronon. Blood trickled from a cut in his lip and he staggered, clutching at the edge of the door to stay on his feet.

John sat up so fast he caught the line of the IV Keller had insisted on, causing a nasty spike of pain that reminded him he had to stay in the bed and let someone else rush to his friend's side.

Keller and an orderly moved to do just that, but Ronon held up his hand and John noticed the energy pistol in it for the first time.

"Stay back," Ronon slurred. "You don't want to catch it."

His gaze roved over the infirmary, locking onto John and the rest of their teammates. Pain crumpled his features. The muzzle of his gun moved toward them and John tensed, ready to dive off the bed.

"Ronon," Teyla called, "you must be calm. What ever has happened — "

The trickle of blood reached Ronon's chin and fell to the floor. John saw it hit and the infirmary floor flared red.

"What in hell?" the orderly exclaimed. He stared down in shock. Floors didn't often light up back on Earth.

The frightening blare of the quarantine alarm accompanied the pulsing lights. The door behind Ronon slammed shut, nearly taking his braced hand with it. Ronon let his gun fall from slack fingers and dropped down to his hands and knees, head bowed and hanging.

"Oh, shit," the orderly exclaimed. He wasn't new, but he hadn't been through any real lockdowns before and he looked around, half panicked, white showing all around his eyes.

"Someone get me a laptop, right now!" Rodney ordered. He was sitting up, halfway out of bed.

"Forget that," Keller snapped. She pointed at the orderly. "Henson. Hazmat suits."

Her glance strayed to where Ronon's blood stained the floor.

"Whatever this is, it's contagious through body fluids."

Ronon lifted his head. His voice was hoarse and he had to raise it to be heard. "I should have figured it out before. Didn't until I fell on my face."

Rodney hesitated at the edge of his bed. He drew back. His eyes were wide with real fear.

John curled his hand into the sheet on his own bed. He forced himself to breathe in shallow pants in deference to his sore side. He stayed in place because the last thing he needed to do was spook Ronon into going postal with an energy pistol in the locked down confines of the infirmary. He had a bad feeling any help he could offer would be useless anyway.

Keller stayed at a distance from Ronon, but eyed him critically. "What is it?"

"Belar's Shake."

The sound Teyla made then, half sob and half scream, scared John more than kneeling before a Wraith Queen.

The alarm went on wailing.



26 February 2010
Pegasus
M35-117 Atlantis


"We're incredibly lucky you aren't a touchy-feely bunch," Keller joked when she came in the fifth day.

"Funny how I don't feel lucky," Rodney replied. He had a laptop and could continue with at least some of his work. John had noticed that his typing had steadily slowed down in the last day, however, and Rodney kept frowning at the screen, blinking rapidly and repositioning the laptop.

John didn't feel lucky either. He had a laptop too and had been plowing through some of the paperwork he always put off; the less than urgent things that generally ended up waiting until they suddenly became urgent. He'd managed to finish the quarterly personnel evaluations during the first three days. It made him feel wistful for Elizabeth. She'd always had her own sea of paperwork, but she'd made time to go through the parts of his that would affect more than the military in the city, talking out the ramifications of every decision in a way that had made him a better military officer oddly enough.

She would have done better locked up in the isolation ward than John. Or maybe she would have been as restless as he felt.

Keller had moved the four of them to an isolation room immediately, then began quizzing Teyla and Ronon about Belar's Shake. Ronon, mostly, since Teyla curled onto her side and answered in monosyllables. That and the the sniffs they could hear from her periodically freaked John out more than the way Ronon looked at them like they were already dead. After all, he didn't feel that bad.

He started feeling bad about the time Keller explained she'd diagnosed seven more people infected before Atlantis' sensors were tripped. The infected could harbor the virus for several days before it registered outside their cells. It had taken Ronon's blood on the significantly more sensitive infirmary floor to trigger an alarm. They hadn't known the infirmary had enhanced sensors, though it made sense. Too bad they hadn't been sensitive enough to pick up on the contagion before it spread beyond the team.

Two nurses and a doctor who had checked the team when they returned from the last mission tested positive within a day of John's diagnosis. Corporal Anderson, who regularly sparred with Ronon, showed up hours later complaining of the same shooting pains Rodney had. Keller figured out that the virus didn't aerosolize, but it had an equally frightening ability to burrow right through the skin. The enhanced electron scan of a sample showed a virus unlike anything on Earth, a pointed protein trailing a spiral tail that flexed and screwed itself forward to drive between dead cells until it found a living target. A little spit or sweat on bare skin was sufficient to pass the infection on. Once established it replicated slowly without destroying the cells it co-opted at first. Keller hadn't been positive what it did do the last time she'd come in and had been called away before she could explain what she did know. Two of Rodney's scientists had followed Anderson in and finally Lt. Vega, the new marine pilot John had tutored in flying the jumpers.

Lorne radioed John with the news about Vega.

He'd shaken her hand.

"Should just shoot us and burn everything we've touched," Ronon said. He'd wedged himself in a corner and glared at Keller. His frustration steamed off him, given away by jerky movements and a back-off snarl when John had tried to talk with him.

"Don't you think that would be jumping the gun a little?"

John could see Keller force a smile, despite the heavy Plexiglas shield of the hazmat suit's headgear.

"Is it?" he asked.

So far he just had the tingling and some numb patches, mostly on his feet, but one of his fingers had stopped bending the day before, and he couldn't walk across the room without losing his balance. He'd fallen twice, until Rodney's white-faced leap to follow him back and forth each time he tried pacing had driven him back to his bed.

It had been just as well. John thought his pacing had made Ronon's mood worse, since the sudden jerks of his constantly trembling legs and arms made it impossible for Ronon to move without infinite care.

"Going to die anyway," Ronon declared.

John looked at Keller.

"It is hopeless," Teyla said, startling them all. She been stubbornly silent and then thrown her dinner tray on the floor the night before. Another symptom, John realized, but the loss of her equilibrium still hurt them all. "There is no cure for Shake. Ronon's right."

"I'm not about to kill you," Keller insisted. "We can beat this." She bit her lip. "And if we run out of time, you can go into stasis."

"Right, because that's working out so well for Carson's clone," Rodney said bitterly. Months and then a year had passed and Medical was no closer to stabilizing the deterioration that would kill the clone if they brought him out of stasis. Atlantis kept the stasis room cool and the clone stood in his pod like a changeling sleeping in ice.

Thinking about Carson only served to remind John of another stay in isolation with his team, when it had been Ford going stir crazy, and they'd been facing a death sentence at the end of their stay. They'd been luckier than they had any right to be back then; they'd come out the other side alive and sane, if lonelier than ever before. Luck ran out, though. It ran out for Ford and then in an ironic twist, turned on Carson and Elizabeth, costing them their lives within Atlantis' confines. It didn't matter that Carson's clone now occupied a stasis pod. Carson was dead and Elizabeth's life had ended before Keller and Rodney tried that last gambit with the nanites.

"Just be straight with us," Rodney requested.

For the first time John heard his words slur. He whipped his gaze to the side, staring at Rodney. Rodney worked his mouth soundlessly, then looked down at his hands. He didn't say anything more.

John thought of the list of symptoms Ronon had recited for Keller. Blurred vision, slurred speech, balance problems, loss of coordination, spasmodic movement and twitches, trembling and shaking that progressed into helpless immobility. Victims who didn't kill themselves and had someone to care for them — and inevitably become infected doing so — starved to death, unable to chew and eventually to even swallow fluids. Most didn't last that long; if someone didn't kill them, the mood swings, insomnia and anxiety escalated into depression and suicide. The longest anyone lived with the Shake had been a couple months. No one in Pegasus knew much more than that: the disease would flare into being in one village and spread from gate to gate until someone recognized it early enough to kill the victims and burn everything associated with them.

"Everybody is working on this," Keller told them. She sat down the tray she'd brought in with her. "I need to do another blood draw. Once I've analyzed that, I'll be back with some medication that will help with the mood swings."

Rodney held out his arm for her. "You know it's not a mood swing to feel like shit when your body feels like shit because you are dying of some alien plague that will eventually turn you into a crazy, stupid, helpless blob."

Keller's gloved hands paused on Rodney's arm and John knew she'd heard the slur this time too.

"No one's saying you're crazy," she said.

"Not yet," Rodney concluded. He looked away as she drew out two vials of his blood.

Keller continued, taking samples from Teyla, then Ronon, before finishing with John.

"Any idea how we got it? I mean, we didn't touch anything in that village and the stone throwing guy was never even close," John asked.

Keller handed him a cotton ball and he pressed it into the crook of his arm. She worked carefully, affixing the vials into a rack after dropping each used needle into the hazardous waste bin. Everything would go through decontamination when she exited the isolation room.

"I've been thinking about that and the way the disease flares up out of nowhere," she said. "Ronon?"

"Yeah?"

"The animals you mentioned were loose in the village? Are they common?"

"Kutra. Yeah."

Keller nodded. "I think the virus might be hitching a ride in them between outbreaks. Director Woolsey has authorized a medical investigation team to go back to the planet and take some samples for testing. There may be some survivors and victims still there in need of help, too."

"You think it's the kutra?" Ronon demanded. He let out a ragged laugh.

"Well, it might be. It might be more than one species, too," Keller said, only slightly defensive. "It's just a theory at this point."

"One of them sneezed all over him," Rodney muttered to John. "Remember?"

He did. He remembered Ronon's careless touch to Rodney's arm at the DHD afterward. Ronon had pushed John through the gate later with one big hand on the back of his neck.

He sighed and replied quietly, "No," because Ronon didn't need to carry that extra weight of guilt over an innocent moment of contact. He checked the puncture in his arm and since it had stopped bleeding, tossed the cotton into the waste bin.

Ronon had probably touched Teyla too, then or later. Of the four of them, Ronon was the most physically demonstrative and then there was the fact that John thought Ronon and Teyla were sleeping together sometimes. No one said and he didn't ask because it didn't matter; the four of them were already as close as they could be; a little physical pleasure and comfort wouldn't change what they already felt.

John squeezed his eyes shut for a breath, hoping Rodney would get it.

In one of those moments that mimicked telepathy, Rodney did. "Could've been anything," he mumbled. "Pollen. Bugs. You probably touched something."

"Maybe you got it from the DHD," John teased.

"I put nothing past this galaxy."

John watched Keller leave with her blood samples and a promise lunch would be delivered before she came back with new meds and news from the planet of almost-goats. Kutra. Whatever.

He couldn't face writing another evaluation, so he clicked on his video golf icon.

"You want to play too?" he asked Rodney.

"Why not? I'm not accomplishing anything else here."

John started to get out of the bed and felt the room swing and whirl around him. He fumbled the laptop to the side and clung to the edge of the bed.

"No, no, you stay there," Rodney exclaimed.

John didn't have much choice unless he wanted to hit the floor again.

"You're going to crack your head open if you keep falling over," Rodney told him. He seated himself on the bed next to John and locked a steadying hand on John's arm, but didn't try to move him.

When John could move without wanting to throw up, he shifted himself until they could both use his laptop. Pretending that hadn't happened seemed like the best way to go.

"So, golf? " he asked.

"I'm going to kick your ass this time."

"Sure you are."





Rodney imagined he could feel his brain flaking away, cell by cell, and wanted more than anything to find some way of fighting it. The hideous and eventually humiliating physical impairment made him angry, but the loss of his ability to think and learn wounded him too deeply to articulate.

Words were his enemy now. No, not words, but his inability to form them, to make himself understood; an old, dull frustration known since childhood honed to a sharp new edge. Every slur and gabbled, wrong word gave away how much he was losing to the virus's effects each day. John tried to talk to him, but the sound of his own thick words, the stiffness of his lips and tongue refusing to work naturally horrified Rodney and he answered with grunts and silence until John gave up.

Before he'd recognized the stutter in his thoughts, Rodney had secretly wondered at the near intelligent malevolence of the virus. Out of an array of symptoms, it seemed to strike each of them where it would hurt the most, ripping away Teyla's emotional poise, destroying Ronon's physical prowess, trapping Sheppard in a bed. The irony hadn't escaped him when he found himself rereading a simple equation three times, unable to follow the math to its logical conclusion.

Irony offered little in the way of comfort.

He shut down his laptop then and hadn't opened it since.

John quit playing on his laptop not long after. Even video golf paled with time, but Rodney had noticed his and John's scores falling before he withdrew to his own bed and silence.

He thought he might go raving mad eventually. He'd stared at the walls until he could trace the outlines of the Ancient embellishments with his eyes closed. The calm colors of the panels and the floor, earthen and bronze-brown, were inescapable. They made him long for an hour out on a balcony, the salt wind and the blues, greens, and grays of the ocean and the sky.

If he was going stir crazy in the isolation room's confines, it had to be worse for John and Ronon, who were both always moving and doing.

The lights dimmed finally at the end of the day. Rodney turned on to his side, so that he didn't have to look up at the glass windows of the observation level. If he didn't look, he could pretend there weren't watchers and cameras recording everything in the room.

He listened as Teyla began whispering an Athosian prayer, a plea to the Ancestors, interspersed with Tanaan's name and muffled sobs that made his eyes prickle in sympathy.

"Teyla," John called to her. "Teyla. Talk to us."

Rodney kept his eyes squeezed shut, but couldn't help hearing Ronon leave his bed and lurch toward Teyla's. He felt his bed jostle as Ronon clutched at the foot of it to steady himself before staggering on to John's. He listened as Ronon reached Teyla's side and spoke.

His eyes snapped open as he heard a fist impact flesh. For one instant he imagined Ronon attempting to finish what he already saw as ended. The lights remained dimmed, but he could see Ronon sprawled on the floor, one hand clapped over an eye. Teyla sat up in her bed, her face still glistening from her crying jag, and glared furiously down at him. Her hands were both in fists and Rodney realized that she'd punched Ronon.

John had rolled onto his side. All Rodney could see from where he sat was his back.

"Jesus, Teyla," John murmured.

"This is unbearable," she declared. When she uncurled her fingers, the tremors ran from them up her arms and made her voice quaver.

Ronon scrabbled back, staying on the floor, his hands and legs jerking worse than the day before. Rodney wondered sickly if Ronon could even coordinate himself back onto his feet.

"Better dead," Ronon said.

Rodney stared at John's back. Teyla lay down again, curling into a fetal ball, drawing the sheet and thin blanket high over her shoulders. After a minute, John rolled onto his back. His fingers closed on the blanket, clutching at it and Rodney deduced he was suffering through another bout of vertigo brought on by even that small movement.

Too late now, he thought of telling Ronon.

If he'd had a clue to what would happen, he would have asked Ronon to pull the trigger when he walked into the infirmary. Ronon didn't have his gun now. Someone had confiscated it while they were being transferred into the isolation ward.

"Yeah, buddy, I'm starting to get that idea," John said after a while. "But, you know, there's still a chance Keller will beat this thing."

Rodney stared at the ceiling and bit his lip.

Ronon eventually made it back into his bed.

None of them slept. Rodney knew the sound of that. The noises he heard were to rough, too quick and too uneven to even mimic sleep. The dim light offered the closest approximation of privacy they had, though, and he lied to himself that they weren't awake, so he finally spoke.

The sound of his voice made him wince. He kept himself simple words and forced them out, dropping like pebbles into the pond of silence surrounding him.

"Cure. Doesn't. Fix."

He heard John's violent exhale.

"Living. Worse. Like. This."

Ronon grunted.

"Okay," John whispered. "Okay. Not like this."

Rodney figured it was a promise. He knew it would kill John to do it, too, but John would.

Teyla said it for him.

"Thank you, John."

"Don't thank me," John replied.





Keller had portable screens two orderlies brought in to provide a modicum of privacy while she did her examinations. Seeing them meant another set of blood draws and batteries of tests.

"Breakfast afterward," she told them.

John hated the false cheer in her voice, but didn't call her on it. Keller didn't really think they bought it. She did it for herself and so he extended her courtesy of ignoring the effort.

Rodney let out a wordless, irritated huff. John had no trouble understanding that.

"Rodney, you'll be getting a protein shake."

John let his head sag back against his pillow. So Keller had noticed Rodney picking at his food the last day or so, leaving behind anything that required much chewing. He'd meant to mention it if she hadn't.

"Colonel, we'll start with you today," Keller said.

"Good idea," he agreed.

At least he wouldn't lose his breakfast that way. The vertigo that had replaced his vanished sense of balance meant every change of position came with a surge of nausea. The movement inherent in Keller's exams would leave him dry heaving for what felt like an eternity each time.

The orderlies set up the screens and retired back to the doors.

"Sorry about this," she told him as she worked and he gagged. She kept her touch professional but gentle and didn't force him into any swift movements that would exacerbate the nausea. The rubbery cool feel of the hazmat suit's gloves made his skin goose pimple up.

"Not your fault," he panted.

He wanted to close his eyes but didn't dare. Darkness made the spinning sensations much worse. He focused on the weave of the pale yellow scrubs he had on. The color made even Teyla look bad and he hadn't known that was possible. The weave was tight, but the fabric was thin as paper. It crumpled into wrinkles that threatened to tear apart when he closed a fist around a handful of it.

"I'd like to get you under the Ancient scanner again, but I don't want to trigger another lockdown and I'm afraid of what would happen if you were in a hazmat suit," Keller said.

"Knock me out," John suggested.

He found it hard to read Keller's expressions and movements through the hazmat suit and hood. Reflections on the face plate kept obscuring her face. He could see she was sweating inside the suit. Her hair was matted down, a lock stuck to her cheek. Her breath misted the inside of the faceplate when she sighed.

"You know we have audio surveillance turned on at night?" she asked.

John waited.

"You shouldn't give up so easily."

"There's nothing easy about this," he replied. "If you can't fix this — It's just torture."

Keller looked down and fiddled with one of her instruments. "I thought you'd do anything for your team."

He had understood Rodney clearly. The disease was dismantling Rodney's cognitive abilities, his capacity to learn and think in new directions, and leaving him horribly aware of it. John couldn't think of a worse torture for a man like Rodney. Nothing else, not Teyla's tears or Ronon's fury, could have wrested that promise from him. He'd pulled the trigger for a man he'd only known a few weeks. He would do no less for his team, especially Rodney, than he'd done for Colonel Sumner, if it came to that.

"Even that," John said.

Keller lifted her gaze. She studied him. "You can't even sit up."

"Then you better fix us quick."

She set the instrument back on the tray. "You don't have to worry, Colonel," Keller promised in a low voice. She set her gloved hand on his hand for an instant. "I won't let it come to that for you." She offered him a sad smile. "I'll take care of all of you."





"Feeding time at the zoo again already?"

John's voice, following the shuff of negative pressure from the airlocked doors, broke Rodney out of the half-doze he'd been in. John hadn't moved, something Rodney knew because he'd rolled onto this side to watch John earlier. Couldn't lie down with him, couldn't hold or touch him, because they were in the fishbowl of the isolation room. He given up the game of counting who came to literally 'look in' on them days back. Lost count and interest. They were probably gloating, some of them, happy to see the great Rodney McKay brought low.

John's mood had darkened to match Teyla and Ronon's in the last week.

Keller's light voice wasn't accompanied by the rattle of a cart carrying food. Rodney wondered if it was time for another meal. He'd lost track of time. The unchanging lights gave no sense of the day passing and the nights were long and endless, stretched beyond the normal quota of hours.

"Major Lorne and Dr. Abiki's medical team brought back samples from the kutra on PL4-44D."

"It doesn't matter," Teyla said.

Rodney agreed with her.

"We've isolated the virus from the blood samples."

So they had found their vector. Medical would be happy. It still didn't do the team any good.

Keller moved closer, probably out of courtesy to John, so that he could see her without shifting. The red hazmat suit squeaked with her movements. Rodney could hear the Darth Vader hiss of the air supply though, when she remained still. It reminded him again they weren't just sick, they were infectious.

"How're the others?" John asked.

"Progressing at the same rate."

"So, not so good."

"No," Keller admitted. "But I have some better news."

John's eyelids drooped half closed while he studied Keller. Rodney couldn't see her face from his angle, so he watched John's expression instead.

"What?" Ronon demanded.

"Dr. Zelenka and Captain Hailey are ready to test the ZPM charger."

Rodney sat up with a jerk. Had it been that long? They'd been running simulations every day, improving the design before they manufactured the actual parts, before he'd stopped reading Zelenka's emails. He needed to go over the work before they tested. There were safety precautions. He'd meant to do it in one of the hazardous process labs on the far end of a pier. He —

He slumped back onto the bed. He couldn't do anything. Couldn't make himself understood without slowing work to a crawl. Couldn't concentrate enough to find an error if it was underlined and in red. He couldn't even chew his damn food any more. He'd choked on a piece of fruit the night before.

He groaned out loud. Useless. He was useless now.

"They've been working night and day to finish it," Keller said.

She didn't have to say the rest. If it wasn't finished soon, Rodney wouldn't be around to see. He might still be breathing, though he honestly hoped not, but he wouldn't be himself enough to understand the achievement. It made him want to shoot himself right then and there.

"Rodney," John said, low and worried.

He gave out a grunt and waved his hand where John could see it.

"They knew you'd want to see, so we're going to rig a feed that you can all watch," Keller went on. "And, Rodney, I know you don't believe finding the virus in the kutras means anything for all of you, but it provides another key to narrow the database search we're doing."

He glanced at John again, seeing the pained set to his mouth, the bruised, pale look he took on when he couldn't rest.

"Was that all?" Teyla asked. "I want to be alone as much as I can in this cage you're keeping us in."

"I thought you would be more interested," Keller said.

"Not really," Ronon told her.

Rodney closed his eyes and kept them that way while technicians in hazmat suits came in and nervously set up a group of monitors. He kept them that way until he heard Zelenka's voice through a speaker.

"I know you are not asleep, Rodney. So open your eyes and stop sulking like child."

He slitted one eye open and found an image of Zelenka peering into the camera on one monitor. His designated scientific heir apparent had apparently decided razors and combs were implements for lesser beings. The second monitor showed a selection of graphs, the numbers in repose, blue lines on black, that would display the progress of the charging process. The third showed the ZPM, hooked up to their equipment.

It looked dulled, a soapy orange color. He knew it would be cool to the touch. The cases were miracles of shielding, holding vast amounts of energy within so efficiently none bled through. Any flare of light or radiant heat was a product of the less efficient equipment drawing energy from a ZPM. Fully charged it wouldn't look any different to the human eye.

They'd worked long and hard on heat and radiation shielding because of the leakage factor. He hoped Zelenka had made the necessary safety precautions a priority. Rodney had been working on a variation of the city shield as a containment field that would absorb any energy and heat and convert it back into energy it would use to power itself.

He couldn't help sitting up and studying everything he could see. Was that a blue shimmer surrounding the ZPM?

"We were able to shield the entire charging assembly and ZPM the way you had theorized," Zelenka said. He stepped back and the camera showed a control room clearly built by Earth humans and not Ancients, but something in the design still reflected their surroundings. It didn't look like a control room on Earth.

Captain Hailey sat before one control console. She flicked a glance toward the camera, then nervously smoothed her hand over her hair, though not a strand had dared come loose from its smooth blond bun.

Rodney made a humming, inquiring sound and Zelenka detailed each step they'd taken.

"We will begin now," Zelenka declared. He joined Hailey at the controls, peered past her shoulder, then nodded. "Please leave now," he told her.

"But — " She frowned ferociously at Zelenka. Rodney had always found her a little pouty and there it was: Hailey pushed her lip out as Zelenka interrupted her.

"You will have to find our mistake if something goes wrong," Zelenka said.

Rodney's breath caught in his throat.

It wouldn't be him. It wouldn't be him anyway, because if he could, he'd be down there, throwing Zelenka out for his own good. It still cut him painfully, that all he could do was watch.

"Now go and cry crocodile tears over my vaporized corpse later while stealing all of my and Rodney's research and blaming us for your mistakes."

Hailey looked indignant before stomping away. She was biting her lip as she went.

In the next bed, John snorted out a short laugh. "He's not up to your standard yet, Rodney. He forgot the vow of vengeance from beyond the grave if she got him killed."

"Engaging the Mark Vs," Zelenka stated.

The power spiked up on the screen recording the naquadah generator output, then settled into a steady rise to maximum generation, coming to a stop and hovering just below the overload red line.

"Initializing primary containment field."

Rodney watched as the blue shimmer he'd only imagined before formed around the ZPM and its attachments. The shimmer resolved into a brilliant azure glow without obscuring what lay within it. He caught his breath, impressed despite himself. The shield didn't generate any visible color or light without a tweak that had been his own suggestion. The ability to immediately visually check for its presence had been worth the headache.

Plus it looked cool as hell.

"Testing field integrity," Zelenka said. He typed a command into the keyboard before him.

Ronon and Teyla were watching now too, as riveted as Rodney and John. John had gritted his teeth and wiggled up in his bed enough to prop his head where he could see too.

The containment field pulsed, deepening to royal blue for an instant. The power consumption figures on the other monitor reflected the response with barely a flicker, consumption actually dropping to thirty percent from thirty-one. They stabilized there. So it worked. The field converted heat and radiation into energy to maintain itself. Too bad the effect couldn't be reversed to create a shield that became stronger under bombardment. Rodney had meant to work on that and now knew he likely never would. It had never been an urgent project, just something to fiddle with when he was too tired to rest but too fried to do anything concrete.

Zelenka nodded to himself. His hands sped over the keyboard and he hummed something unidentifiable.

"Initializing secondary containment field," he said. "ZPM connection is on and stable. This is a small precaution I developed, Rodney. If the Mark Vs overload, the secondary field should absorb most any explosion without using a prohibitive amount of power."

Zelenka had always been cautious. Belt and suspenders and clean underwear, all just in case. Rodney grunted. Considering the power they'd be pumping into the ZPM, he approved.

"Rodney says good job," John called out.

Rodney glared at him. He most certainly did not. Zelenka didn't need his ego stroked.

"I'm sure he has said no such thing, Colonel," Zelenka replied with disgusting good cheer. "None the less, I know he approves." He typed in another command. On the second monitor, a schematic of Atlantis showed a series of bulkheads locking closed between the highlighted lab on the 2W pier and the center of the city, as well as on levels below it.

"Blast doors closed."

Zelenka activated his radio. "Major Lorne, this is Doctor Zelenka. I am preparing to test the ZPM charge."

"Thanks, Doc. We'll brace for it."

"There should be nothing to brace for, Major," Zelenka said in a prim voice.

"Just in case, Doc."

It should have been Rodney radioing Elizabeth and John. Or at least John, since Woolsey preferred a less direct contact than a radio headset filling his ear with the constant chatter that meant Atlantis was operating in the green. Lorne would inform him of the test.

The all-city comm activated as if to confirm Rodney's musings.

"This is Director Woolsey. The Science Department will be conducting a ZPM charge test. Anyone not directly involved in this should evacuate the 2W pier as a matter of precaution. Please be aware that there is no reason to expect problems, but remain calm and obey the emergency protocols if necessary." A small cough. I know you'll join me in wishing them complete success."

The bleat of the alert echoed through the city following the announcement. It wasn't as familiar as the emergency alarm or as Rodney had always thought of it, the 'bend over and kiss you ass goodbye' warning. Normally, Atlantis didn't have time to alert its inhabitants to get ready for an emergency. The alert sounded for ten minutes, allowing time to shut down computers and secure experiments, then shut off.

Ronon laughed. "That'll keep 'em calm."

Teyla joined in the laughter, clapping her hands over her face.

Zelenka glanced back at the camera. "I am ready." He squared his shoulders and began typing. "Initiating subspace tap."

The power readings shivered then spiked out of the sensor range. The city shuddered for an instant.

Rodney stared as a sphere that was really a hole tore open inside the charging chamber. He couldn't imagine what it really looked like. Wouldn't have been able to know even if he'd been standing in the chamber with it. Subspace, like hyperspace, couldn't be seen by human eyes evolved to interpret a specific spectrum of light. The eyes saw only the incidental photons excited by the exotic radiation and the brain made whatever sense of the information it could.

The camera in the chamber fared little better than his own eyes would have. The sphere showed as black and white static in a two dimensional circle.

It still made Rodney catch his breath in wonder.

They'd tapped subspace and they'd done it with their equipment and ideas, not the Ancients' abandoned toys. Even if they were about to use it to recharge one of those toys. Back on Earth, there were so many, many scientists still dreaming of finding the key to the first step and here in Atlantis, humanity already had the stargates, FTL ships that crossed the intergalactic gulfs in months, and now they were turning the key that would unlock unfathomable power.

The Ancients had achieved so much. Rodney couldn't and didn't want to deny that. But they hadn't reached the limits of what could be achieved. Humanity could take what they'd done and use it to go farther and become more than the Ancients had. They'd begin standing on the shoulders of giants. How much higher then could they reach?

He held his breath as energy lashed from the subspace tap to the receptors, writhing tendrils hotter and with more power than solar plasma. First one, then more, until a dozen blazes of lightning brightness crawled everywhere within the containment field, turning it black wherever they touched.

The energy began pouring into the ZPM. At the same time the internal heat sensors showed a gradual rise in the temperature of the receptors. The charge in the ZPM rose from .000005 percent to .00009 then jumped to 1 and 2. The hairs on Rodney's arms rose. The blue containment field darkened to indigo streaked with white where the brilliance blazed through. It wasn't going to hold much longer. Rodney checked the heat index. It was climbing too, along with the ZPM's charge.

Five percent.

Rodney imagined he could smell overheating crystals and metal.

Seven percent.

The containment field became a solid black sphere on the screen.

"Radek," he tried to say and bit his tongue.

John spoke for him. "Zelenka. Rodney's — "

"I am shutting down, Colonel," Zelenka answered, his voice shaking with excitement.

His hand hovered over the kill button.

The heat index held just below destructive levels.

Ten percent.

Eleven.

Twelve.

The containment field pulsed white. The heat index jumped. The overload alarm on the Mark Vs screamed from the speakers in the test lab.

Thirteen percent.

"Zelenka!" John shouted. He struggled upright and gagged. Rodney knew he wanted to get to his feet and run to the test lab before success flipped over into disaster.

Fourteen percent.

Zelenka hit the button.

The shudder running through the city that Rodney had barely been aware of cut out. The containment field faded back to its original azure hue, the entire picture a little faded, as though the camera's optics had been slightly fried. Like Rodney's nerves had been. His hands were curled into fists pressing down on his thighs.

One of the receptors had melted. The ZPM appeared in perfect condition however and the eerie hole in reality had disappeared.

"Subspace tap terminated," Zelenka whispered.

"Cutting it a little close there, Doc," John said.

Rodney checked the readouts. Two minutes thirty seconds had passed.

On the screen, the ZPM registered a fifteen percent charge.

"We did it," Zelenka said. He was still staring at the screen in front of him, his back to the camera. Then he stepped back, turned and pumped his fist in the air. "We have done it, Rodney!"

You did it, he wanted to say. Instead, he closed his eyes and wept.





Rodney heard Ronon and Teyla give in to sleep, their breath smoothing into a resting rhythm, but he waited past that, waited until the clock on the laptop open next to his bed registered night ticking over into another day.

Just as he knew two of his teammates were sleeping, he knew John wasn't.

He moved with a drunkard's care as he got out of his bed and crossed the space between it and John's, then crawled in beside him with even more care not to jostle. Part of him considered the risk of discovery, but another part had already given up on any future in which it mattered.

"Hey," John whispered.

Rodney curled around him, so close his lips brushed the scratchy beard John hadn't bothered to shave in the last few days, whether out of apathy or because his hands had begun to shake like Teyla's.

"Heh," he whispered back.

John turned his head carefully. His nose slid against Rodney's and Rodney rubbed back. John's lips curled into a smile Rodney could feel pressed against his.

"Eskimo kisses."

"Primate behavior," Rodney corrected. He could barely understand his own words, but John seemed to have some Rodney translator that functioned anyway.

"Are you calling me a chimp?" he asked, his voice pitched only for Rodney's ears.

Rodney stroked his hand down the center of John's chest, then rubbed a circle over his belly. He shook his head, letting John feel the movement. "Do you miss Ford?"

John's surprise tensed his body next to Rodney's for an instant. "What? Now, here?"

Rodney nodded, then shook his head. John chuckled quietly, relaxing again.

"Well, that's clear." He paused, then answered, "Not as often as I think I should. I miss the idea of who he could have become, I guess. Rationally, I know he's dead, but..."

Rodney got it. He did. For John, believing Ford was dead, without a body, without answers to give his family back on Earth, would be abandoning him.

"Were you thinking of the mushroom planet?"

Rodney nodded.

"Yeah," John murmured. "Me too." His lips, chapped and warm, brushed against Rodney's mouth, a touch delicate as dandelion fluff on the wind. "And Nsheen."

Rodney kissed him back, dry and tender and achingly slow, a kiss that didn't go anywhere, content to stay where they were, connected to each other by its touch. Nothing more, nothing but the chaste press of mouth to mouth, because he feared even teeth and tongue would betray him now.

Nsheen. He knew John didn't mean the end of that mission, but the first and second nights they spent together.

When they let their mouths part, he rested his forehead against John's and matched his breath to the body next to him, letting it mingle with John's. He had a question he had to ask.

"Regret?"

"No," John answered immediately. "No."

John placed a hand on Rodney's where it rested on his stomach.

"You?" he asked.

"No," Rodney managed to enunciate clearly. He squeezed John's hand.

"Really?"

Rodney shook his head.

"Really no, or no you do have or no you don't want to answer?"

Rodney kissed the corner of John's mouth and John stopped talking. He squeezed John's hand again. John sighed when Rodney finally let go and got out of the bed and back into his.





The second trip to PL4-44D had provided some answers about the virus after all.

The virus the Ancients had engineered.

They had buried the data on yet another failed experiment in the weapons directory of the database, along with a cryptic warning to their own personnel to avoid the kutra in the spring. A change in the hormonal balance of kutra after they gave birth to their young triggered the usually harmless virus to replicate itself with a single different protein. It made no difference to the kutra, but that tiny difference meant Shake easily jumped from kutra to human.

Sputum, blood, even the kutra's milk were saturated with the virus after it switched proteins.

At least kutra milk wasn't popular in Pegasus and farmers seldom butchered does with young. Cross infection probably only happened when farmers tried to help out a doe having trouble giving birth.

Small mercy.

"Why weapons?" John had asked. He'd been staring at the ceiling, which he had memorized. He could tell exactly where someone stood in the room by the fall of their shadow on it. Keller's shadow shifted. A suspicion bloomed in him. He chuckled and voiced it. "They made it, didn't they?"

"They did," Keller confirmed.

"Another case of remove the food supply?"

"In this case, no," she said. "It was engineered to infect the Wraith, but it mutated. The Wraith immune system resists viruses very successfully, as we've learned through our own experiences. The protein shift made humans a much more vulnerable host for the virus."

She went on, explaining everything that had been in the single uncensored report that had been wrested from the database, likely only left intact through some bureaucrat's insistence on redundancy. The Ancients hadn't kept their history intact, preferring to erase the evidence of the work that went into their achievements and especially their failures. John thought that lack of history had been the fault underneath their overweening arrogance. When the Shake moved into the humans of Pegasus, the Ancients had been spooked. They'd already fled a plague in one galaxy. They locked worlds where the Shake appeared out of the gate network only to have it appear on others, spread by the Wraith themselves during cullings. The Wraith had quickly become immune to the Shake, though they didn't carry it the way the kutra did.

A vaccine had finally been created and the Ancients had inoculated their population against the Shake. They hadn't found a cure and they hadn't bothered sharing the prophylactic vaccine with the rest of Pegasus.

No surprise there.

Dr. Abiki had found the vaccine itself in the medical database; one of an array of inoculations the Ancients gave every child. Shake was just another disease no one suffered in Atlantis. Abiki had been able to synthesize the vaccine using samples from John's team and the rest of the infected. No one else in the expedition would catch it. They'd begin offering the vaccine with the rest of the medical package that formed Atlantis' commonest trade good. Lagniappe. Maybe it would garner them a little extra good will.

So something good would come of this, but John hadn't heard anything that meant good news for his people, for Lieutenant Vega or the two scientists, the doctor and nurses, or Corporal Anderson. Nothing that would help Rodney, Ronon or Teyla. Nothing that would have him on his feet again.

"I've gone over the treatments the Ancients used against viruses," Keller said. "They were partially successful against the Shake and I ..." She paused, then rushed the rest of the words out, less assured than was reassuring under the circumstances, "I believe I've come up with an improved treatment."

"You can cure the Shake?" Ronon asked.

John didn't blame him for the disbelief. The Shake had been killing people in Pegasus for over ten thousand years. Maybe it wasn't as visible an enemy as the Wraith, but the virus occupied the same niche in the pantheon of this galaxy's horrors. Ronon had told some of the stories in a burst of words in their third week in isolation.

All John could think was of Rodney's fear.

A cure wouldn't undo the damage done to the neurons in their brains by the mHtt cytoplasmic protein the virus forced their own cells to manufacture. Keller's lecture on apoptosis, mediation of endocytosis, brain-derived neurotrophic factors, and neuron starvation in the striatum had stopped being interesting when John remembered brain cell loss wasn't replaced.

Keller could kill the virus, but the neurological loss would remain. All those medium spiny neurons were gone.

Keller nodded. "I — Yes. It's a immuno-accelerant treatment. We've already infected lab mice and seen the complete destruction of the virus after giving them the treatment. Zero viral load in three days."

"Sounds impressive," John said. "When are you going to try it on us?"

"Today," she answered. "If you agree. It is an experimental treatment. Normally, something like this would go through years of clinical trails and monitoring for long term side effects, but if you agree to it, well, I can fudge and call it a prototype introductory compassionate program."

John suppressed a snort. Carson had never fussed so much. But Carson had been used to being the king of his particular hill, the final medical authority in Atlantis, and hadn't had the IOA hanging over his shoulder. Keller clearly worried about losing her license someday.

"Rodney?" he asked.

Rodney made an affirmative grunt.

"We're in. Teyla? Ronon?"

"Will it mean we won't be held in isolation?" Teyla asked.

"Once you are free of the virus," Keller confirmed.

"And we won't get any worse," John clarified. "Or any better."

Ronon snapped, "What?"

"Stopping the virus won't undo the effect it has already had on your neurological processes," Keller admitted.

John closed his eyes. He honestly didn't know what would happen to Teyla and Ronon, but the SGC wouldn't leave a man who couldn't move out of bed without puking in charge of Atlantis' military or a scientist who couldn't talk as CSO. Rodney and he would be warehoused into some care facility.

The thought of that life made him sick and reminded him of the understanding he'd thought he had with Keller.

"Not good enough," he rasped out.

"There is one more possible option," Keller said.

John waited along with the others for her to go on.

"I've been studying the changes Carson made to the ascension machine to restore Rodney's DNA."

The silence stretched into a painful space. John didn't know what that meant.

"There might be a way to use it to overwrite your DNA. The changes it made would include the damaged areas of your brains." Keller's voice betrayed her, betrayed the nervous habit she had of biting her lip. "It's possible."

"Didn't Carson use a sample of Rodney's DNA as a template? Why not use — "

"Yes and, no, that won't work," Keller interrupted. "Using your own DNA template wouldn't result in any change. The original purpose was to encourage rapid physical evolution that allowed the Ancients to achieve ascension more easily. Carson reprogrammed it to change Rodney from the state his body had reached to another one. In that case, his original DNA template."

"Huh."

"I've, I've found a DNA template for the Ancients, the base they wanted to evolve beyond," Keller went on. "It's different enough I think it might work. The Ancients' brains were more active in certain areas and I think the difference would result in the regrowth of the lost neurons."

"Sounds pretty bastardized," John ventured.

He wasn't sure about getting his DNA changed into something more Ancient.

He heard Keller's smile this time.

"Very."

"Guys?" John asked finally.

"Yes," Teyla said.

"Ronon?"

"You have to ask?"

"I thought it would be polite," John insisted.

Keller smothered a laugh.

"Rodney?"

John rolled to the side, swallowing bile as his bed seemed to spin and fall beneath him, and watched Rodney nod emphatically.

"We're in," he said though he knew Keller could see that.

"We'll begin with the immuno-accelerant today." She sounded decisive now. "Once your systems are clear of the virus, we'll take the second step."

"Looking forward to it," John said. "Woolsey know about this?"

"I thought I'd wait to explain the details," Keller said on her way out.

The first real hope curled open inside John's chest. Nothing could keep the smile that went with it inside. Keller had a lot in common with Rodney, down to the last minute, impossible saves. She wouldn't let anything get in the way of helping her patients, not Woolsey or anyone back on Earth. He had done her a disservice, thinking she cared about that.

Rodney twisted his head to the side and met John's gaze. He'd lost a lot of the expressiveness that once marked his face. It looked like a slack mask. But John thought he saw the same hope he felt in Rodney's eyes.





John eyed the ascension machine skeptically.

Despite all his kidding, he had never actually wanted to try it out. Aside from preferring to avoid ending up as a puddle of protoplasm or dead, a brief bout of superpowers hadn't seemed worthwhile if he had to ascend at the end of it.

The room it occupied had been locked up on Elizabeth's orders after Rodney's encounter with it. Zelenka must have gotten Keller past the locks to work on it; no one else except Rodney could have managed it and not tripped an alarm in the control room.

The gurney ride had passed in blur of vertigo for John, but he barely gagged. Apparently a month was enough to get used to the sensation. He'd skipped breakfast and lunch anyway, anticipating it. He'd still fall over just trying to sit up, so one of the nurses had strapped him into the gurney like a Wraith cocooning its prey.

No one had routed more than the minimum power to the area. Other than the columns of half-lit emergency lights, the corridors leading down to it and inside were all dark. No one had cleaned up the tossed about pieces of Ancient furniture and junk that still littered some of the wider corridors. There had just never been time; a little over four hundred people lived in Atlantis at present, all busy with their own duties. None of them, scientist or soldier, had the temperament to volunteer for garbage duty for the entire city. Most sections were still off limits anyway.

Possibly the power remained dialed down to avoid drawing attention from the control room. John suspected Keller still hadn't briefed Woolsey on her plan. Zelenka and Lorne were along, though. No surprise. Since Woolsey assumed the mantle of Director of the Atlantis Expedition, they'd all learned to go ahead and do what needed to be done, then present him with the accomplished deed. It was just easier and probably saved Woolsey more than one panic attack.

"All right," Keller said. "Is it ready?"

Zelenka checked a last read-out on his tablet and unplugged it from the console. He moved nervously and stayed off the dais that the console actually stood on.

"It is as ready as I can make it," Zelenka said.

Keller turned back to them and smiled. A lock of her hair had slipped free of the ponytail and she flicked back from her face. The low light tinged her skin blue, giving her a pale cast.

"Who wants to go first?"

"I will," Ronon said before John could say anything.

"Okay."

Keller signaled to two of the marines who had helped wheel their four gurneys down from the infirmary. They scooped Ronon off his and walked him over to the dais, then gently laid him down on the reddish-bronze pattern that echoed the emitter in the ceiling.

This was it. This was the last ditch, Hail Mary chance at repairing the damage the virus had left behind. Keller had even explained why a Goa'uld sarcophagus, if they'd had one, would have been useless. The sarcophagus wouldn't repair what had already healed. It wouldn't take away scars, regrow limbs, or replace lost neurons. Neither would a handheld healing device or they would have requested one of SG-1 take a trip to Atlantis. No, this had been the only answer Keller could find.

That didn't ease his nervousness.

John wasn't afraid the machine would fail, he realized. He was afraid it would force them to ascend. Chaya and Teer had both taken him closer to that step than he'd ever wanted to go. He'd seen Rodney hover at the edge of death or ascension. The thought of losing any of his teammates to either scared the hell out of him.

"Major Lorne," Keller said. "Would you touch the second yellow touch pad? The device requires an ATA positive to initiate."

"Yes, ma'am," Lorne said. He kept his feet on the floor and stretched, bracing one hand on the console edge. The yellow, green and amber display in front flashed on as he came in contact with the console. Lorne pressed the touch pad and pulled away fast as a blue light lit the room, illuminating up the dais where Ronon half sat, braced against the side of the console, one leg jerking spastically.

Keller and the marines inched back in reaction as well.

A deep hum filled the room, familiar from the last time they'd been there. Brilliant light snaked down and around Ronon, spiraling down and then up in a double helix. Then it disappeared, leaving them all blinking away afterimages.

Ronon slowly got to his feet, stretching his arms out, rolling his shoulders, and then stamping bare feet against the dais floor.

"Did it work?" Lorne asked.

Ronon's eyebrows went up.

"Feels like it." He stretched again. "Kind of tired though."

"That's because you haven't been eating well and the process burned a lot of calories," Keller said. She hurried to Ronon's side and tugged him off the dais. "I want you to lie down. We'll scan you once we're back in the infirmary — "

Zelenka coughed.

"We should continue, before anyone in the control room reports the power spikes," Zelenka said.

"They'd just call you anyway, Doc," Lorne said.

"That is true."

Ronon sat on his gurney rather than lie down. John studied him. He looked exactly the same. Whatever Frankensteinian patchwork Keller had made up of Ancient and human DNA hadn't had an obvious effect. She'd said their DNA would be slightly altered and John had wondered.

"Hey, you really okay, buddy?" he called softly.

Keller and Lorne were helping Teyla onto the dais. Ronon was watching. He turned and grinned at John. "Yeah."

The light engulfed Teyla and by the time John had finished blinking, she had already stepped off the dais. "I am tired, but I feel well," she declared. She set her hands on Keller's shoulders and pulled her into the forehead touch. "Thank you, Jennifer."

Keller gave out a hiccupy, almost sob and hugged Teyla. "I'm so glad," she said.

Lorne started over to John's gurney, but John redirected him. "Rodney next."

Lorne didn't need to activate the console for Rodney. As soon as he stood swaying in front of the console, the light flooded down. As it faded, Rodney patted at his chest, looked down and wiggled his bare toes and then looked straight at John, his face lit up by a smile of pure joy.

"I am back," he declared. Then he turned on Zelenka. "What in hell were you thinking during that test!? You should have shut down at ten percent. Were you trying to blow the 2W pier and destroy my work?"

"Your work!?" Zelenka snapped back. "You have been lazing around in bed for weeks — "

"You should try it sometime, but wait, no, you never got sick because you never go offworld unless someone drags you by the hair," Rodney volleyed back and they were off. Everyone in the room grinned at the sound of Rodney's abrasive words.

John had been so intent on him, he hadn't noticed Lorne's approach along with Ronon.

"You next, sir," Lorne said. His fingers were busy unbuckling the straps holding John onto the gurney.

Between them, Ronon and Lorne slung John between them and walked him to the console dais. His head was spinning, the display a blur of green, amber, and yellow streaks and he hadn't been upright in weeks. Even if he'd had his balance the headrush would have left him woozy. He grabbed onto the edge of the console and held on, telling his knees to lock.

The light swept around him and into him. The sensation resembled nothing he could describe, not even the retroviral effect that had nearly transformed him into a proto-Wraith. A thrill ran through his limbs and into his head and left him shivering but steady, the humming feel of Atlantis he'd always been aware of clearer than ever before.

"Wow," he said as he stepped down. He imagined flying a jumper or the city with a sharper, faster interface between him and the equipment and grinned.

"How do you feel, Colonel?" Keller asked him.

"Good," he said. "You do good work."

She smiled at him, then hurried to the gurney holding her colleague, Dr. Lofgren.

"You're next, Sven."

John joined Ronon and Teyla on a gurney and listened to Rodney continue to berate Zelenka. He felt fizzy and light, yet tired at the same time, but the good tired that came after an evening run with Ronon, and overlying it all a giddy sense of relief.





Keller kept them in the infirmary for twenty-four hours, monitoring them as a precaution. Woolsey even stopped in, awkwardly expressing his relief and congratulations.

Rodney opened his laptop for the first time in weeks, put on a radio headset, and mainlined everything he'd missed while they were isolated, viciously taking apart the work of more than one of the scientists who had slacked off in his absence.

Teyla and Keller sat together, heads bent toward each other, quietly planning a trip to the Athosians' latest settlement. She wanted Tanaan inoculated as soon as possible. Keller smiled and nodded. "We set up a lab devoted to manufacturing it. The first batch went to everyone here in Atlantis, with samples sent back to the SGC. The second lot will be ready by tomorrow. We can leave the next day if Mr. Woolsey and Colonel Sheppard give the okay."

"Hey, as long as I get to come along, it's a go," John said.

"Me too," Ronon added.

"Ah, don't forget to include me," Rodney said. "I'll have my department back up to proper speed by then."

"Longing for some fresh air?" John kidded him.

"Well...I rather miss Tanaan."

Teyla's brilliant smile flashed. "I am sure he has missed you as well."

John took advantage of his returned mobility and used the infirmary shower to get luxuriously clean, then dressed in his own uniform again. Then he commandeered one of the nurse's desks and read through Lorne's report on the trip to PL4-44D, along with three TID missions. He ate a cheeseburger for lunch with purple fries, took a nap, and then had a snack along with all the recoverees. Ronon slept, Teyla stretched and meditated, and Rodney relaxed in his own special way, writing up a report of his own on the ZPM Charge Project.

"Too much energy loss to heating," he explained. "The specifications on the parts will have be much stricter, but even so we only lost one receptor. Seriously, if we had to rebuild everything each time for a fifteen percent charge, it would still be cost effective."

"I guess so," John said, deliberately doubtful.

Rodney refused to be baited, though, just smiling. "You know, I can feel the difference. This must be what it's like for you. I can't wait to get in a jumper."

"Yeah, me too."

Keller wandered over to where they were sitting and cocked her head. "I wondered if you would feel a difference. The tests indicate you now possess ninety percent of the ATA complex as expressed by the Ancients. That's on par with the figures for General O'Neill, if you're interested."

"Better than Carson had?" Rodney asked.

She nodded.

"Better than Sheppard?" he asked with a sly look at John.

Keller laughed and glanced at John, a question in her expression. He nodded to her that she could answer. "Afraid not. Colonel Sheppard tested at ninety-two percent."

"Oh."

Rodney's glum response made John laugh with Keller. "Before," he added wickedly, while reaching over and cuffing Rodney's shoulder.

"It actually dropped to ninety percent after the retrovirus incident, but he tests at ninety-eight point five percent now. He's practically an Ancient."

John grimaced because that wasn't something he thought anyone should want to brag about.

"Don't make that awful face around me," Rodney said. He turned back to Keller. "What about Ronon and Teyla?"

"Interestingly, considering they hadn't had the gene therapy before, they both have a mild expression of the ATA gene now."

"That's it?" Rodney asked. "That's the only difference? We're not going to suddenly feel compelled to wear white and ecru or start meditating?"

Keller reached over and gently closed his laptop. "Not because of your genetics, at least. The only other difference that may result might be a slightly extended life span. The Ancients had an average life span of two hundred years, but whether that was genetic or a result of superior medical care isn't clear."

"Two hundred years?" Rodney squeaked.

"We'll have to wait and see," Keller said. "Now, it's time for you to get some rest. Your bodies need it."

"But, I — "

"Be good and I'll let you out of here in the morning."

Rodney looked mutinous for a moment, then gave in with a slump. "All right." He headed for the bed he'd been assigned to for the night. Teyla and Ronon were already in theirs.

Keller turned her gaze on John. "You, too, Colonel."

"I'm kind of still enjoying being able to stay upright."

"Now."

He got up, glorying in that simple movement, the steadiness of his feet under him and the way the room didn't spin no matter how fast he turned his head. "Okay, fine. But I'm holding you to the same deal as Rodney."

One step toward the bed and he paused and looked back. "Two hundred years?"

"Maybe," she replied. "Now go."

He went.





Ronon and Teyla disappeared as soon as Keller gave the okay. Rodney and John weren't so lucky. The instant they settled their headsets in place, they were summoned to Woolsey's office along with Keller, then trapped in a staff meeting that stretched through the morning. Woolsey was finally placated by the prospect of presenting the IOA with Keller's immuno-accelerant treatment, with its potential to wipe out half the viral scourges on Earth and news of the successful test charge on the depleted ZPM. Both were the kind of solid discoveries that would benefit Earth and so far more impressive back there than the TID's unexpected success against the Wraith.

Rodney had to admit, even he had been impressed when Keller shyly told them the immuno-accelerant held the potential to cure a round dozen chronic viral and parasitic diseases, from HIV to malaria.

"It's wiped out everything we've given the lab mice so far," she'd said and her voice had quivered.

Lorne ambushed John on the way out of the control room. Rodney knew John would be buried in catching up on his own duties for the rest of the day by the way he slumped faintly and accepted the tablet Lorne waved at him.

"Going to get something to eat," Rodney told him and nodded to Lorne as he sidled around them.

"That's right, save yourself," John replied. He'd already bent his neck, bowed to duty, and begun reading. "I should have known you'd all abandon me."

"Every man for himself, Sheppard."

Lorne chuckled and started to edge away.

John's free hand shot out and clamped onto Lorne's collar. "Not you, Major. You get to stay and suffer with me."

Rodney stepped into the transporter, turned and waved at John before the doors closed. John let go of Lorne long enough to flip him off.

The mess hall never closed, but all the morning goodies were long gone, cold or stale by the time Rodney reached it. He snagged himself a cup of coffee though and a plate full of the fresh fruit, none of it from Earth, that the kitchen staff kept available at all times. He took a seat at a table with a view of the sea birds turning and wheeling over the glistening sea and enjoyed the quiet.

He spent the rest of the day with Zelenka and Hailey. They'd dismantled the Charge device and begun analyzing the stress damage to all of the parts. They needed to rethink the materials used in the receptors. He had an idea involving that rare element from PR6-749.

Zelenka disagreed, insisting that tighter production specifications could resolve any difficulties with heat damage to the receptors. Hailey had sided with Zelenka and argued vehemently that they should continue working with materials available on Earth. Rodney thought it likely she'd return to Earth as soon as she could, no matter how exciting the work in Atlantis was. Some people just didn't adapt to living offworld, no matter how comfortable they were with stargate travel.

They tabled the argument eventually. Rodney would request a second mission to PR6-749's second continent in a jumper. The geologists would extract a decent amount of the element and they would experiment with it back in Metallurgy. If alloys including it genuinely conducted power the way the database implied, they would experiment with receptors made from it.

His thoughts were still on material half lives as he entered his quarters.

They stuttered to a halt and evaporated as John caught his wrist, pulled him inside and palmed the control that closed and locked his door in one smooth motion. Rodney's breath caught as John pressed closer, turning them both until John had his back to the wall.

"God, yes," John groaned as Rodney leaned into him, pinning him back against the wall. A leg shoved between his made John buck and grab onto Rodney's shoulders. "I've been waiting for you."

Rodney shoved his hands between them and feverishly fumbled at belts and buttons, biting his lip in an effort to hold onto some control. "You," was all he could say. "You just make me — " Jesus. If he'd known John was here, like this, he would have agreed with Zelenka just to get out of the lab sooner.

John ducked his head and began sucking at Rodney's throat, hot and wet, then pulled back and licked at the abruptly tender skin. He bit at the soft flesh under Rodney's chin, moaning and grinding against Rodney in a way that made Rodney's cock jerk and jump in his pants. He was already leaking and ready and his fingers wouldn't cooperate, the sensation of his own hand through the layers of pants and boxers almost too much when he wanted so much more.

The pressure of John's hands on his shoulders was going to leave red marks that would still be there in the morning. He rubbed himself against Rodney's thigh and panted. One leg came up and hooked around Rodney's hip, changing the angle, and Rodney gave up on his own buttons. He hadn't touched himself to do more than piss in a month, hadn't even thought about it, but he had to come now and John seemed in the same state.

He turned his head and caught John's mouth against his. This kiss was the antithesis of the only one they'd shared while in isolation. Rodney pushed his tongue deep into John's mouth and tried to taste and breathe the same air. His head buzzed with the need for oxygen, but he didn't ease back. John's moans vibrated into his mouth, almost a word, but Rodney kept kissing him.

John's body tensed against Rodney's, his movements becoming more frantic. Rodney shoved his hand inside John's pants, wrapped his fingers around John's cock and then pressed his thumb just under the head. John's hips jerked, he whimpered into Rodney's mouth, and came.

Rodney couldn't move his hand, but he squeezed gently, drawing out John's shuddering climax, pressing his aching cock against the back of his wrist because he needed just a little more. Just a little. He rocked his hips forward, the drag of his boxers over his erection a painful tease.

John went limp in the aftermath and Rodney finally parted their mouths so that he could breathe. The dazed, half-lidded look he gave Rodney threatened to make him come in his pants, as did the way he slid down and plucked the rest of the buttons open on Rodney's BDUs.

He had to brace both hands against the wall and squeeze his eyes closed when John nosed against the cotton covering his straining erection, then blew on the already damp fabric. A shudder ran through him. "John," he rasped.

"I've got you," John croaked in a voice already destroyed by sex, the sound shivering through Rodney, his imagination supplying how much hoarser John would be after he'd taken Rodney deep.

He peeled Rodney's pants and boxes down to his thighs and then wrapped his lips around Rodney's cock, hands locked around the back of Rodney's thighs. The sensation of John's lips sliding over the head of his cock, the hot smooth wet feel of his mouth made Rodney snap his eyes open. John's eyelashes were lowered, his cheeks hollowed as he began to suck, and Rodney's knees trembled as the feeling in his chest rose up and filled him. He had to reach down and stroke his hand through John's hair.

He cradled his palm against the back of John's skull and gasped as his orgasm washed through him. His elbow buckled and he bent over John with a second, harsher gasp. John swallowed all but a trickle, his throat working, tongue pressing against the underside of Rodney's cock, teasing out exquisite aftershocks, even after Rodney felt himself softening. He let Rodney's cock slip out of his mouth finally and rested his forehead against Rodney's hip, the gust of his breath on wet, still oversensitized flesh making Rodney twitch and shiver.

He petted John's head, felt John press his lips against the crease between his groin and thigh, and finally pushed away from the wall.

John sat back on his heels and reached for his hair. "Tell me you didn't stick the hand you had my come on in my hair."

Rodney glanced at the wet smear on the wall where his hand had been braced. "Uh... No. Would I do that?"

John looked at him suspiciously while finger combing his hopelessly mussed hair. It needed cutting and the cowlicks were out of control. His expression cleared finally.

Rodney extended his dry, clean hand and pulled John to his feet. "Come on. Clean up. Then bed for a while."

John plucked at his BDUs, pulling them away from his crotch, as he ambled toward the bathroom. He grinned foolishly. "Jesus, Rodney, you think next time you could get me out of my pants?"

"Not my fault that you still come like a teenager," Rodney replied with a shrug and a smug grin.

John paused in the doorway. He didn't turn around. "You know... Well, you know," he said.

Which translated into just with you, Rodney knew.

He yanked up his pants enough to hobble to his bed, sat and began taking off his boots, smiling to himself.





Not many people knew it, but Rodney liked parties. Not kiss-up academic receptions, but gatherings of people he liked or didn't actively despise, celebrations, having a reason to celebrate, he liked. Plus large quantities of free food and larger quantities of free booze were always good things. The first had supplemented his grad school diet of peanut butter, ramen and take-out, the second had contributed significantly to how often he got laid.

He should have enjoyed this one more.

Parties in Atlantis, rare though they were, were superior in that he never had to worry about citrus. The food included many Pegasus delicacies along with familiar ones imported from Earth. This party offered more than had been set out in Atlantis in Rodney's memory and he had every intention of taking full advantage. He made his way straight to the buffet and filled a plate.

Eating gave him an excuse to fade back and watch John dance with Teyla, then flirt with Esposito, before spinning Bryce out onto the dance floor. When Sally Roche made John laugh, he could blame the sour taste in his mouth on overcooked gredel berries.

It would be petty to wish John wouldn't have a good time.

The irony, of course, lay in the truth. John, unlike Rodney, really didn't like parties. Too many formal command performances putting on his best face as part of his family's wealthy social scene had taught him how to fake it perfectly, though. He smiled and flirted and mingled and would be miserable by the end of the evening.

It might have been different if John had been able to be himself. At least, if they hadn't been hiding their relationship, Rodney could have run interference and warned off the woman currently trailing her fingers over the back of John's neck while they danced.

"You are frowning, Rodney," Zelenka said from beside him.

"Don't eat the gredel cakes. The berries are sour."

Zelenka gave him a shrewd look, then followed Rodney's gaze to the dance floor. John waltzed well, there had been dance lessons for a shy and awkward youth apparently so that he wouldn't embarrass anyone, and he glided over the floor with the blond chemist making it look effortless. Blond, Rodney thought grimly. Of course she was blond, her hair was even long and loose. Pretty too, and glowing at John when he said something to her.

Rodney could dance too, but the only time he and John had ever danced together had been as part of a country dance on Brana, after half of Atlantis helped bring in the hay ahead of a building storm. They'd danced in the middle of a barn all night afterward, celebrating beating the weather and a record crop. The Branans' music, drums and a fiddle crossed with a lyre, had mingled with the sound of rain drumming on the roof over the loft. The dancers had kicked confetti bright chaff into the air that caught the lantern light and the air inside the barn had smelled of alfalfa and apple blossoms. John's hand had been a scrape of callus and fleeting warmth as their palms slid together, there and gone again, as they spun and released, moving to their next partner with a jump and side kick.

"Hmm."

He glanced at Zelenka, then looked away from the knowing expression. Of course, Zelenka knew, one of the very few. Bates and Ford were gone. They'd never told Carson or Elizabeth. Keller probably suspected and whatever Lorne knew, he kept to himself. Except for Ronon and Teyla, there was no one else. Sometimes it made Rodney ache. He put it down to an incipient stress ulcer and not his heart.

"I get tired of it sometimes," Rodney said out of the blue. Zelenka would know what he meant.

"Then I will accept Nobel instead of you," Zelenka replied, compassionately refusing to address what Rodney had really meant.

"Dream on," Rodney told him. He stuffed a piece of candied seaweed from Beeln into his mouth and went on, "That Nobel is mine as soon as the program is declassified."

Zelenka winced and Rodney realized he'd been talking with his mouth full again. He swallowed. "Sorry."

Zelenka waved it off. "Do you think Teyla would dance with me?"

"It's Teyla, of course she would. Besides, she likes you."

Zelenka straightened his glasses. "I am most likeable."

A burst of laughter from the unofficial but well-stocked bar drifted over the music. Atlantis wasn't totally dry any longer. Carter had changed that. Not that there hadn't been alcohol before that, but now it wasn't a matter of smuggling it in or the chemists' efforts at bootlegging. It still wasn't common enough for anyone to have a head for it, though. Keller was laughing, red-faced and wobbly.

Rodney sighed. He should be as happy as Keller.

The city was operating at full power, with three fully charged ZPMs, for the first time since they took it back from the Asuran Replicators. The McKay Theorem had proved itself, had translated itself into the reality of the subspace energy recharging mechanism. A month of work had resulted in an improved version that had required only a single precautionary shut down. The depleted ZPMs that had originally powered Atlantis had been recharged. The ZPM Rodney had drained sending Rod back to his own universe sat in a specially shielded storage locker with a one hundred percent charge. The empty ZPM the Genii had once used as bait sat next to it, gleaming with the same promise, along with two salvaged from the Lord Protector's city. The third had been charged and switched with the ZPM that shielded M7G-677. That one, now also at one hundred percent, completed the Atlantis collection.

He caught Woolsey watching him from the other side of the room. Woolsey toasted him and Rodney rolled his eyes and lifted his own drink. He didn't drink much, though. A hangover would be bad enough, but if he got blasted and gave something away, it would be John who paid the price.

Two beers and he'd switch to the punch the Athosians had taught them to make, the stuff Ford had called super sarsaparilla. Mixed with tonic water, it didn't taste too bad. Thinking of Ford made him wince, however. He'd find some coffee instead.

Rodney went back the buffet, deliberately pretending he hadn't seen John's head turn toward him. He felt raw somehow, alone, despite the party being in his and Keller's honor. Looking into John's eyes and pretending he didn't feel more than friendship would just be too hard suddenly.

He was debating between the miniature sausages wrapped in cheese and pastry or the crab stuffed mushrooms when Ronon snatched his plate and set it down, then dragged Rodney onto the dance floor to join Teyla, John, Lorne and Keller. The music changed to a pounding rhythm laced with sharp toned strings that had never been heard on Earth. Rodney recognized the recording one of Lorne's team had brought back from a trading mission. Ronon had identified it as a traditional Satedan piece though not performed with instruments he knew.

"Come on," Ronon ordered, shoving Rodney into place behind Teyla. He fetched Zelenka next and then took his own place. "Do what I do," he told them.

"This isn't going to be like the one where you hop on one foot and beat me up, is it?" John asked.

"Just do it."

"God, now I'm trapped in a Nike commercial," Rodney muttered.

He slapped his hands against his thighs when Ronon did and did his best to follow the rest of the moves, which grew wilder and faster and more athletic, until the only one not sweating and panting and dragging behind the beat was Teyla. They were all laughing by then, though, and finished to a round of applause from everyone else.

Eyes shining and a real grin gracing his face for the first time that night, John cuffed Ronon lightly. "No offense, but I'll stick to ballroom."

"Wuss," Lorne declared. He grinned too as he wiped sweat from his forehead discreetly.

"Lieutenant Colonel Wuss to you," John replied.

"I'm going to go have my heart attack now," Rodney said.

Panting, Zelenka agreed. "I think I will go with you."

John trailed them out onto the balcony, where the sea breeze cooled Rodney's heated cheeks. John walked to the rails and leaned over enough to spot the second moon rising from the horizon.

"It doesn't get any better than this," he said.

"I find myself in need of a drink," Zelenka murmured to Rodney and slipped back inside.

Rodney reminded himself — again — to credit Zelenka in his Nobel acceptance speech. Even though he expected Zelenka would be there, receiving one himself.

He let his feet take him across the short space to stand next to John.

"The Wraith in retreat, enough ZPMs to do almost anything, Keller's cure, and all of us..." John's voice trailed away.

Rodney knew that look. Knew John's thoughts were on Elizabeth and Ford, Carson, Kate, even Carson's clone. He had his own contingent of ghosts, Dumais and Abrams, Brendan Gall, Griffin, Collins and Peter Grodin. Just as Teyla and Ronon had their roster of the lost and regretted. Every one of them would have been happy to see Atlantis sparkling against the night sky, still whole and triumphant.

"Yes," he said simply. "It really can't get any better than this."

He smiled at John as he spoke and neither of them mentioned any of the things they wished for that would have made the moment better.

John stirred eventually and spoke quietly. "One of us should head back inside, before someone starts wondering what we're doing out here."

Rodney just nodded and told him, "I'll go first," and didn't point out that they hadn't been doing anything. It was all about appearances, after all. "I think I'll call it quits for the night."

The doors had already shushed open when John murmured, "Good night, Rodney."

Rodney kept going.

"Good night, John."

He hated that it sounded so much like goodbye.





John grinned when Rodney set his tray down next to John's and opposite Teyla's. This forced Ronon to reach across the table and over Teyla's tray to steal from Rodney, he'd confided to John. Teyla could be counted on to whack a fork or spoon down hard over Ronon's knuckles these days; she didn't want Tanaan growing up with bad manners he'd picked up from the team.

Zelenka hovered beside the table and asked, "May I join you?"

Rodney rolled his eyes and said, "What? Of course, are you brain damaged? We said lunch together," before stuffing half a muffin into his mouth.

"I was not addressing you," Zelenka said.

John waved a lazy hand. "Sure, Radek. Sit. This place is packed."

The new, daily databurst had included a shocker that had spread through the Atlantis grapevine faster than light. The mess hall held a real crowd. Everyone had taken lunch off to talk about it.

Rodney scarfed down the second half of his muffin and snagged Zelenka's while Zelenka was pulling up another chair. "You snooze, you lose," he said.

"You are a thief, Rodney," Zelenka replied grumpily. He pulled his tray closer to himself and the edge of the table.

"I do not approve of such behavior," Teyla said. "Do not indulge in it before Tanaan."

Rodney blinked at her. "I know. Tell Uncle Ronon, there."

"I know where your quarters are," Ronon told Rodney.

"I know how to lock you in the gym."

Zelenka looked glum. "He does." He picked up his sandwich and peeled the bread back to peer at its contents. "Why must they always try to make mayonnaise? It does not taste right."

Rodney picked his own sandwich up and took a bite out of it. "'s okay," he mumbled as he chewed.

John closed his eyes.

"Please refrain from speaking with your mouth full, Rodney," Teyla said.

Zelenka began on his own sandwich with a small shrug.

Rodney swallowed and spoke, obviously continuing a conversation with Zelenka from earlier.

"They announced right before the G8 Summit. Can you believe that?" He almost glowed with excitement. "Press conference, international television coverage, press hand out and — "

"G8+5," Zelenka corrected him. He stabbed a fork into his salad. A piece of lettuce flipped away onto the table.

Teyla sighed.

"Whatever," Rodney dismissed the details. "You know what this means."

Zelenka chewed his bite of salad and nodded, light reflecting from his glasses. He swallowed and replied, "Yes. This means you will be even more annoying and bad tempered when you don't win a Nobel Prize." He held up a finger. "Or, you will be even more annoying and smug than usual, if you do."

Rodney mouth opened and closed, then he was off and running, "No, you petty, petty, small, sorry, little man. It means we can publish. Everything. You are looking at a superstar, no, a supernova, in the scientific firmament. Of course, my brilliance will overshadow yours, but you can publish too. I'm sure you have work that has been waiting for years."

"Of course I do."

"Supernova?" John repeated, chuckling. He sat back and nudged his boot against Rodney's. Rodney kicked him in return. John just grinned.

"Try to keep up, Colonel."

"So why do you think they finally cracked?" he asked.

Rodney shared a glance with Zelenka.

"It could be the ZPMs," Zelenka offered. "Clean power." He moved on to his fruit cup, spooning up peaches that had come all the way from Earth.

"Yes, yes, we all watched the press conference download," Rodney said impatiently. "Clean power, cure for AIDS, Hermiod the Last Asgard, triumph of the spirit of humanity, we are not alone." He rolled his eyes. "If you buy that, I have a nice vacation condo in a Wraith hive you'll want to buy."

"So?" John prompted him. He kind of agreed; the various governments that knew about the Stargate Program had all been perfectly happy to keep their citizens in the dark.

Rodney tapped his index finger against the yellow melamine tray, squinting a little, thinking it out.

"I think someone somewhere must have been close to breaking the story anyway. You remember Colson? He almost managed it, would have if the Trust hadn't set him up. Too many people have been involved with the SGC for the secret to hold much longer. Half the astronomers working have had the Air Force show up and confiscate their film or readings off their sensors because someone was playing with their space ships in orbit again."

"I thought Colson did a Vesco after the SEC came down on his company?" John said. He frowned. He'd been overseas at the time and tried to steer clear of the sort of business and industry news that might slap him in the face with a mention of Sheppard Industries anyway, but there had been the whole Roswell aliens gimmick. Hunh. Looking back now, he realized that had been an Asgard or a pretty good mock up of one.

"Cover story to debunk his reputation. He's working research out of the Beta site," Rodney said.

"Hunh."

Rodney nodded with satisfaction. "That's going to bite someone in the ass when some smart reporter that hasn't been bribed or scared off puts it together and starts asking what really happened to him."

John could see that.

"It is still a momentous thing," Zelenka declared.

Ronon and Teyla glanced at each other, obviously not getting it. John just shrugged. He'd try to explain a little more later.

Rodney nodded. "Historic. June first. You know they're going to call it Disclosure Day."

---

Cheyenne Mountain would never feel like home, too gray and concrete, but John joked to Teyla as they walked down the ramp in its gate room, at least the only torture they'd face there would be endless bureaucratic meetings. Rodney muttered something at that and Ronon growled.

It had been late afternoon in Atlantis when they stepped through the gate, but the SGC was in the middle of a bustling morning. They were hustled out of the gate room, passing a geared-up team on their way to gating out and John reflected that the SGC needed to revamp its infectious security. Incoming groups needed to use different, sealed corridors that could be sterilized between incoming teams, separate from the outgoing teams. SG-14 could have easily picked up something from them in passing and spread it beyond Earth into the Milky Way.

He went through the routine medical examination and tests patiently, thinking about the changes he'd make if anyone gave him the chance. The forty-eight hour quarantine keeping them inside the mountain was a bad joke, considering they were shoved into debriefings with SGC personnel who would leave the Mountain to go home that evening as soon as Lam's people released them.

The four of them were irritable and suffering from gate lag by the time the military and IOA representatives released them.

Ronon's stomach growled audibly as they trooped into the SGC mess hall and even Teyla looked frazzled. Not all the coffee on Earth could improve Rodney's mood either.

"How many times do I have to explain that the McKay Theorem is so far beyond their puny brains that they couldn't grasp it if they spent the next ten years studying physics?" he griped. "Can't they be satisfied with it's brilliant and it works?"

"I don't know, buddy," John told him wearily. "You'd think the brass would be happy we found a cheap way to repel the Wraith too, but they kept bugging me for enemy casualty counts. Like anyone can do body counts on blown up hive ships." He propped his chin on one hand and closed his eyes. "What time is it on Atlantis?"

"Morning," Ronon grunted. "Need to run. This place is too small."

"I need sleep," Rodney moaned. "Rest is intrinsic to good health. I'm losing valuable brain cells because of these jack — " He glanced at Teyla and amended that to, "nincompoops. There. See? I'm trying to be better even when I'm not around Tanaan."

"Thank you, Rodney," she told him.

"What about you two?" John asked Ronon and Teyla. "What did they go after you on?"

Ronon shrugged.

Teyla pursed her lips. "Mr. Coolidge and a Ms. Shen? Wished to inquire whether I felt any resentment toward Atlantis and Earth over the impending defeat of the Wraith." Her eyes narrowed. "Considering my genetic ties to them."

"Ow," John said.

Rodney peered at her over his coffee cup. "You didn't kill them did you?"

"No, I did not. It was difficult. Mr. Coolidge continues to address me as honey."

"Probably wise," John said. "The not killing them thing, not the calling you honey."

"Don't pay attention to them," Ronon added. "They're just stupid."

"Truer words, my friend, truer words," Rodney agreed.

They picked at the food they'd taken and talked desultorily over the possibilities of getting out of the Mountain and away from the SGC sometime in the next week.

"Going to see your brother?" Ronon asked.

John shrugged uncomfortably. "Ah, probably not."

Ronon stared at him.

"Look, you saw, I'm just not — I never did fit," John mumbled.

Teyla looked disapproving and Ronon lifted an eyebrow, but John could live with that. It wouldn't do any good to explain how different family ties could be on a world swollen to the billions, where school and career and duty could separate families by generations and years. Pegasus ties were tighter; they lost too much to the Wraith to give up anyone to apathy or misunderstandings and quarrels. It was what he liked about them; he knew Teyla and Ronon would never let him drift out of their orbit.

"You might be wrong," Rodney commented, but thankfully let it go. He understood. "So, ah, what hell do you have scheduled for tomorrow?"

"Full debrief on the Pegasus Situation, threat analysis and thumbscrews," John said. "Then an interview with General Landry. Followed by something called a Current Events Orientation, which I gather will be a little more in depth than which celebrity got picked up for DUI last week."

"Hunh. I've got more IOA briefings. Then Landry and the other thing."

"Anthropology and Linguistics have scheduled interviews with Ronon and I all through tomorrow, but we are also to attend a meeting with General Landry and this Current Events Orientation," Teyla said.

John noticed the three people headed for their table a minute before they arrived, he nodded just enough to let them know they were welcome.

"Well, would you look at what the cat dragged in," Cam Mitchell exclaimed with a broad grin. "All the way from the Pegasus Galaxy."

Teal'c and Vala Mal Doran were with him. Teal'c inclined his head to Ronon. "Ronon Dex."

Ronon leaned back in his chair, making it groan. "Teal'c."

"Teyla Emmagan."

She smiled at him, then at Vala and finally Mitchell, saying, "Please join us, Colonel Mitchell."

"Don't mind if I do," Mitchell said. He snagged a chair from another table and dragged it over, sitting down on it backwards, with his forearms folded over the seat back.

Teal'c and Vala seated themselves as well. Vala took a chair next to John. She leaned close enough he caught the scent of a very expensive perfume, mixed with the spice and dust of another world, an exotic and entrancing mixture. Teyla often smelled of her incense. He wondered if she wouldn't enjoy perfume.

When he felt Vala's hand on his thigh, he just said, "I don't have my wallet on me."

"Wise," Teal'c said.

Vala only leaned closer and snatched a chip from his tray. "The food on that last planet was terrible."

John shifted his tray beyond her reach. Vala turned her gaze on Rodney, making big eyes at him.

Rodney inched his chair away from her, which made Vala pout. "Don't you like me, Dr. McKay?"

"I like you fine when we're in separate galaxies," he replied. "You're an agent of chaos and I get enough of that in my life anyway."

"An agent of chaos," Vala repeated and slowly smiled. "I like that."

"You would," Mitchell told her fondly.

"So," John said after a minute. He pointed at one of the God-awful motivational posters on the mess walls. "Who the hell is responsible for that?"

Mitchell winced. "They had some quack in, babbling about lack of windows and telling General Landry we were all about to turn psycho from the pressure and the next day those appeared. He said if anything happened to them, the next time it would be pictures of the presidents. Now, I'm as patriotic and true red white and blue as a boy can get, but I can't say I want to have Henry Hayes watching me while I eat my Cheerios. Might give me a complex."

"Atlantis has windows," Rodney offered around a mouthful of Salisbury steak.

"And yet, you're all still crazy," Mitchell replied.

John shrugged. "Works for us."

"And that, boys and girls, is all that matters."

Ronon, Teal'c and Teyla were bent over the table, Teal'c sketching something with his finger they both appeared to find fascinating. "Say something Goa'uld," Ronon requested.

Teal'c said something that made no sense to John and obviously bewildered Ronon and Teyla.

"You have no Ring-Tongue?" Teyla asked.

"Everybody that goes through the Ring comes out speaking it," Ronon explained.

"We have no such common language, though the Jaffa and all Goa'uld occupied planets learned their language," Teal'c explained.

"You know," Mitchell murmured, "that drives Jackson batshit whenever he reads any of the Atlantis reports. Stargates in the good old Milky Way don't stick automatic translators in our heads."

"Yeah, but first contact's still a bitch," John replied.

"It's the stargates," Rodney said. "The ones in the Milky Way are older versions. The stargates in Pegasus seem to have been an improved version with some extra bells and whistles."

"Oh, I think our stargates work just fine," Mitchell told him.

"Of course they do, the Ancients, though they apparently had as much sense as a potato, did build to last." Rodney paused before adding, "No planned obsolescence for them."

Mitchell's grin faded into seriousness. "Any of you been outside the Mountain yet?"

"Just got in," John checked his watch and reminded himself to reset it to Earth, Mountain time, "seventeen hours ago. Forty-eight hours wait until we're loose, even though Midway's gone."

"Yeah, doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?" Mitchell nodded his agreement. "Okay, kids, here's the skinny. The brass had SG-1 on the publicity carousel for months after Disclosure Day. They're going to throw you to the wolves next, because the media are still slavering after everything they can get on the Program and everyone in it. Atlantis is the next big thing. You and your team are going to be the next bone that gets thrown out."

"Vultures," Rodney muttered.

"Pretty much."

"They are most persistent and unpleasant," Teal'c said.

"I thought it was fun," Vala disagreed, smiling brightly. She walked her fingers up John's thigh. "I think they're going to eat up Colonel Sheppard with a spoon." He caught her hand, gave a warning squeeze and set it back on her own knee, all without shifting his attention from his coffee cup.

Mitchell grinned, either at Vala's opinion or the byplay between her and John. Maybe both. "Takes a while to get used to seeing your face plastered all over magazines and tabloids, but sooner or later it will all die down."

"It's about time the world acknowledged my brilliance," Rodney said, perking up at the thought.

It sounded like a circus to John. Nothing he looked forward to, but Mitchell was probably right. The SGC would parade them around and then their fifteen minutes would be up and the media machine would grind on to the next scandal or celebrity wedding. With any luck at all, they'd be sent back to Atlantis before Rodney said something unforgivable on camera. He wasn't worried about Teyla and Ronon; they would treat it all like an extended mission to another planet with crazy customs. Which wouldn't be far off at all, he conceded.

"Well," Mitchell said. "I've got a report to finish and an archaeologist to pry out of his office, so I'll leave you kids to your dinner."

"See ya," John said.

Vala popped to her feet and trailed after Mitchell with a flirty wave for John and Rodney. Teal'c stayed, quietly arranging a time to spar with either Teyla or Ronon early in the morning before the day's meetings began. Rodney finished his dinner and went back in search of a dessert that wouldn't put him into shock.

John sat back and tried to figure out exactly what the SGC would have in store for them after they testified before Congress. The Pegasus Situation was as stable as it had ever been since Atlantis rose. Better than it had been in thousands of years, with the Wraith on the run, their numbers thinned so far in just a few months that John had begun to wonder if they might be looking at eventual extinction. He had no idea how many queens were necessary to maintain a viable Wraith gene pool, but they had to be skating close to the limit. Out of sixty identified hive ships, forty-three had been destroyed either by in-fighting, the Asurans, Atlantis' and Earth's efforts, or from the effects of the TIDs. No one knew how many cruisers were still out there, of course, or how many of them were commanded by younger queens, but the Wraith had taken a greater beating in the last few years than the Ancients had handed out during their long war.

He didn't know what that would mean for Atlantis. More scientists? A cut back in the military contingent? As long as Chuck wasn't right and they didn't start sending through tourist groups, they'd probably survive.

Maybe Landry would tell them the next day.

Rodney plopped a plate with ice cream and a brownie down before him. "Here. The cogs in your brain are starting to lock up."

John dug his fork into the brownie. "Thanks."

Rodney shoveled in a spoonful of ice cream and shrugged. "Feed one desire since I can't have another," he said in a low voice. His gaze flicked toward Teal'c and he added, "Colonel Carter still doesn't see what an excellent couple we'd make."

Teal'c raised an eyebrow but didn't comment.

John kicked him under the table.

Rodney ate the rest of his ice cream.


8 January 2011
Milky Way
Earth, Cheyenne Mountain


"And this is Margo Langtry, assistant publicity director for the SGC," Landry said.

The sour look on his face might have been for the model thin woman in the purple power suit or for AR-1. Rodney couldn't tell. He didn't actually care, either. Margo Langtry swept her eyes over the four of them like they were sides of beef, before nodding abruptly. "Yes, they'll do nicely." She aimed a smile at John that put Rodney's hackles up. "Very photogenic and I imagine they can be coached."

"Coached?" John asked her. He smiled at her all loose-limbed and friendly in a way Rodney was all too familiar with from missions.

Rodney shared a look with Ronon and Teyla, who both looked stoic.

Missions. Rodney reminded himself to treat this stay on Earth like a mission. Don't piss off the natives and don't get separated. He wished for a headset and resolved that the first thing he would do would be buying encrypted cells for the team to carry to supplement the cheap low bid ones the SGC supplied.

"Don't worry about it," Margo told John.

The way she looked at John was all too familiar as well. Margo Langtry looked hungry and not in the anorexic/bulimic way that got her into that size zero outfit. At least she wasn't blond, Rodney thought. It must have taken a bottle of shellac to set her asymmetric black bob into utter immobility, though.

Margo glanced at Landry. "They're even better than the pictures, the three of them."

"Three?" Landry's bushy eyebrows went up his forehead.

Margo waved at Rodney. "Really, it's better Dr. McKay isn't handsome — "

"Hey! I am too handsome," Rodney interrupted in annoyance. "Okay, maybe I'm not 'in Sheppard's league' to quote my sister, but I'm not going to break the cameras."

Margo pursed her lips and shrugged a bony shoulder. "I was going to say the public doesn't expect scientists to even be attractive."

"Hmph."

She turned back to Landry. "Really, thank heavens none of them are ugly, it's half the battle to spin the Atlantis Expedition into good publicity."

"Publicity," Rodney snorted. "We don't need publicity, our work speaks for itself."

"Well, Dr. McKay, the SGC does need good publicity," Landry told him. "Since Disclosure, the SGC has been under a microscope, with every decision made in the last thirteen years brought into question. The recent successes in Pegasus are what we need to remind the public that we're heroes."

Rodney caught John's gaze. John mouthed, 'Heroes?'

Rodney mouthed back, 'We're?' When the hell was the last time Landry went out into the field to do more birdwatch?

"We'll begin with Inside Access, of course," Margo declared. "Julia Donovan has an introductory piece ready to air tomorrow. She'll want to follow up with a group interview." She frowned at Teyla and Ronon. "My God, they do speak English, don't they?"

John's easy smile congealed. "As insulting as that was, you'd be luckier if they didn't," he said.

"We speak English," Teyla added.

"What a relief," Margo swept on. "Thank God, you aren't some kind of giantess. With that skin tone we'll need to go in a different direction than we used with Colonel Carter and Mal Doran. But we definitely have to get you out of the cavewoman Xena look. We'll need a day to outfit you all, those clothes are completely unacceptable. We'll fly into New York tomorrow. I know a tailor who will do the work overnight."

"Fine, fine, that's your responsibility, Ms. Langtry," Landry said. "Now, if you'll excuse us, I need to speak with them privately about some matters above your classification."

Margo's red-painted mouth gave away her unhappiness at that, but she stalked toward the office door, heels clacking, and said, "I'll need an outside line to begin making arrangements."

"Of course. Sergeant Grimes will take care of that for you," Landry told her.

Margo slowed. "And someone needs to remind Col. Carter that she can't blow off the Sightline interview with Evelyn Waller again."

"Colonel Carter is currently offworld," Landry explained.

"Then get her back," Margo snapped. "You can't imagine the favors I pulled in to arrange that interview." She stalked out of Landry's sanctum and snapped her fingers at the airman sitting at the desk in the outer office. "You! Phone."

Landry closed the door behind her.

"Now," he said, "before Ms. Langtry delivers you to the media in New York, there are a number of incidents that you are not to discuss. Preferably guide any questioning away from the subjects, but if you are asked straight out, answer only with no comment and that you aren't at liberty to reply regarding still classified information. Beginning with the Henry Wallace fiasco."





Gray light resolved vague forms into furniture, dim blue and unfamiliar. Shadows caught in the sheets rucked down to Rodney's waist. John rolled onto his side and watched Rodney sleep. The bedroom of the hotel suite felt cooler than quarters in Atlantis, but Rodney always slept hot. He'd kicked the sheet off his feet too and sprawled face down on the wide bed.

Noise drifted up from the street, the endless cacophony of people that made up New York, even before dawn.

John knew why he'd woken: habit of years to rise before the sun on any night he risked staying with Rodney at all, to get up and get out before anyone else stirred to see. He stretched and settled a little more into the bed, then gave in to impulse and ran the sole of one foot up from Rodney's ankle to his calf.

Rodney snuffled into his pillow. The milky sweep of his naked back rose and fell with each slow, sleeping breath, smooth and tempting as the light warmed, as if marble flushed into living flesh with the sunrise.

John gave in again and rolled close to Rodney's side. He kissed the round curve of a bicep, then the slope of a heavy shoulder, then Rodney's shoulder blade, warm skin smooth beneath his lips. He reached up and laced his longer fingers between Rodney's on the pillow.

On the street in front of the hotel, a car horn honked, long and furious. It might even have been the limo scheduled to pick him up soon. Rodney had made the arrangements with the hotel service the night before, muttering about stalkerazzi while John sprawled on the bed and laughed.

Thoughts of limos and photographers on the hunt dissolved as John kissed his way from Rodney's nape down to the hollow at the base of his back, feeling muscle shift and tense and relax as Rodney woke up.

"Hnnn," Rodney muttered. He smacked his lips twice and snuggled deeper, clutching the pillow close.

Fingers trailed over Rodney's sides, almost tickling, made him squirm. John played with the tuft of brown hair in one armpit, entranced by the softness there, and when he bent closer and kissed where arm met torso, by the scent of sleep-warmed skin. He nudged Rodney's arm away from the pillow and urged him to roll onto his back.

The sheets tangled tighter around their legs. He kicked them off entirely after an instant's indecision. They slid of the end of the bed to the rug with a soft rustle.

John sat up and then knelt, one bent knee in contact with Rodney's hip. He let his hands rest loose on his thighs and watched Rodney slowly blink his way into wakefulness.

"Hey," he said, strangely hoarse from the warm feeling that spread all through him, as Rodney's eyelids slitted open.

"Guh?"

A silly grin took over John's face at the barely aware sound. Everything took an extra couple of seconds for Rodney to process before he got his caffeine fix and put his walls in place for the day. No one else saw him quite like this, softened and sweetly vulnerable, still sleep crumpled.

"Good morning to you too, sunshine."

Rodney wrinkled his nose and blinked at him, then wiped the sleep gunk from his eyes, before looking around and finding the room's clock. "Aren't you supposed to go to some interview thing?" he grumbled.

"Yeah," John admitted.

Margo had shuffled them through airports to New York, overseen new wardrobes that wouldn't look screwy on camera, had a coach drill them on how to look into the camera and a dozen other tricks. She'd pushed and snapped and literally caught Rodney's sleeve and dragged him at one point through a week of press conferences, interviews with reporters and on camera. They'd been in New York, then DC, back to Colorado and now New York again. She constantly had her cellphone in one hand and a PDA in the other and never once looked less then perfectly made up. She chivvied them like a razor-tongued sheepdog, drank more coffee than Rodney, and had started seating herself next to John when they were on planes after Julia Donovan asked if John wasn't the brother of David Sheppard, CEO and majority stockholder of Sheppard Industries.

John figured out how to deal with the society husband hunters before his eighteenth birthday, though. It was even easier now. "Yeah," he told her. "Dad left everything to Dave." Not true in fact. Dave got eighty-five percent and firm control, but John's fifteen translated into obscene wealth in addition to his mother's trust fund. Sooner or later, some reporter would ferret out that truth, he only hoped he was back in Atlantis by then.

He hated the spotlight. The Julia Donovan interview had just been the beginning. The media seemed to have chosen John as their darling, probably because he could crack a joke, didn't come with the freight of a wiped out world, the subtly alien cadence of Teyla's English or Rodney's too erudite and arrogant lectures.

He knew Ronon loathed the make-up, the hot lights and the inane questions. Teyla missed Tanaan, who they had left back on Atlantis. Rodney wouldn't say it, but he resented the attention being poured on John and why shouldn't he? John won the genetic lottery and knew how to shoot things; for every time John had saved Rodney, Rodney had saved Atlantis, worlds, maybe even a galaxy. It didn't seem fair. Rodney should have been the one on the front of magazines captioned Hero of Pegasus.

At the very least, Hero of Atlantis.

"So?" Rodney said.

"So?" John replied quizzically.

"Shouldn't you be vaulting out of this bed, getting back to your bedroom and getting ready?"

"Hmm," John said. He knee-walked up the bed far enough to lean over Rodney and kiss him, stale morning breath equal between them, slow and deep, heat stirring in his belly. He tugged on Rodney's lower lip finally, then kissed each corner of his mouth and then his nose. "Yeah. I should really do that."

He glanced down Rodney's body, finding a half hard cock and feeling his own stir in response.

"But you know? Don't care."

"Margo's going to throw a hissy fit."

John smiled at Rodney. "I'm not scared of her."

"Oooooh, brave words."

Rodney's cock rose, filling as John squirmed back down the bed and bent over it.

"Well, I am a hero."

"In your own mind."

"According to Time magazine," John murmured as he bent closer, inhaling the scent of arousal and musk rising from Rodney's body. He stroked his hand down over Rodney's hip, wondering as always at the heat Rodney's skin radiated. He blew a stream of air over the tip of Rodney's erection and grinned as it twitched.

"Would you quit teasing and blow me?" Rodney complained.

"I'm not teasing, I'm taking my time."

It was a hell of a lot better than faking a smile for the camera and the studio audience of Rise and Smile, New York, he reflected as he went down on Rodney. He'd really got into it, rubbing his own cock against the rumpled bedding, listening to Rodney pant and whisper half words that ended in harsh, hungry moans, because God, that never stopped turning him stupid with want, the sound of Rodney coming apart, when an already annoyingly familiar ring tone sounded.

"Uh, that's yours," Rodney half moaned. He batted a hand toward the nightstand, with its pretty lamp and two cellphones set down on the shining wood surface. He missed, maybe because he screwed his eyes shut when John's hand cupped his balls and then rolled them at the same time he sucked Rodney even deeper.

John kept his eyes closed and concentrated on opening his throat, taking Rodney all the way down and then swallowing. That always made Rodney babble. His jaw ached a little and moisture seeped from the corners of his eyes in response to the ache in his lungs. He needed to breathe, but held on, intent on the feel and weight of Rodney filling his mouth so deep. He swallowed again and knew his throat would be raw and scratchy all the rest of the day.

It would be worth it.

"God, like that," Rodney groaned, and, "John. John. John."

He propped one arm over Rodney's hips as they began arching, holding him down, still alternating using his other hand on Rodney's balls and his perineum, rubbing and pressing and making Rodney whine high in his throat. The cellphone went on ringing and Rodney fisted his hands in the bottom sheet. John rocked his hips into the mattress and tried fluttering his tongue a little, lost in the act, the sunlight coming through the curtains in a line that warmed his back.

So good and yes and always flickered through his thoughts, froth on the wave of pleasure cresting through him, matching the way Rodney curled up despite the weight of John's arm, his body tensing, hands in John's hair, a sound like pain tearing from him finally as he came, nearly choking John. He only let go when John had to pull away or pass out, a last dribble of come smearing from the tip of his cock over John's lips. His hands stayed on John's head, but slack, while John gasped for breath, thoughts scattered, rubbing frantically against the bed.

John pushed one hand down under him, wrapped it around his cock and gave two pulls, the head just dragging over the sheet where he'd already leaked a wet spot, friction and slip wet perfect pressure. Rodney's smell and taste filled him up, and the weight of his hand connected John, held him together as he jerked his hips a last time and spurted onto himself and the bed with a helpless cry.

He sucked in as much air as he could afterward, eyes closed, riding out the aftermath in a happy haze, sprawled against Rodney. Rodney ran his fingers through John's hair. Eventually it registered that both cellphones were ringing now.

A thump on the bedroom door made John lift his head finally.

"Sheppard!" Ronon shouted through the door. "That woman was yelling on my phone."

John rolled onto his back and raised his voice, still breathless, enough to be heard. "Tell her you couldn't find me!" He'd been right. He sounded like he'd scoured his throat with sandpaper. He wiggled his jaw, trying to work some of the ache out.

"Already did, but she's going to come up here so if you don't want her finding you two, you better do something."

"Shit," Rodney commented.

"It'll be okay."

"Sure it will," Rodney snapped. "That witch wants in your pants or your bank account. You think she wouldn't use it if she walked in here and found you giving me head?"

John forced himself to sit up. "That's what locks are for."

"Two words: Asgard beam."

John shuddered at the alternatives that sprang to mind: Margo appearing in the bedroom or having him beamed buck naked to the Apollo or which ever ship was in orbit currently. "Fine," he said, feeling grumpy when he should have been basking in a nice afterglow and maybe falling back asleep for another hour. "Nice as this suite is," and it was nice, Rodney had taken one look at the accommodations the SGC had provided and moved them to the St. Regis on his own dime, "I'll be damned glad to get back to Atlantis. At least the interruptions there are emergencies."

He left the bed, pulled on the pants he'd left crumpled on the floor the night before, grabbed his cellphone, and started for the door. He needed a shower and the dress uniform which Margo insisted he wear for on camera spots was waiting in the closet of the suite's second bedroom. He glanced back at Rodney, still occupying the unmade bed, pale thighs splayed open and absently scratching his balls. Rodney's hair, cut even shorter than usual, couldn't really stand up, but it looked ruffled. He needed a shave almost as much as John did. The crooked smile he gave John made John hesitate and grope for words.

"We'll be fine, you know," he said.

Rodney rolled his eyes. "Get out of here."

"Wow, the gratitude runs out fast."

"What gratitude?"

"I nearly sucked your brains out," he pointed out.

"I should thank you for doing something you like?"

"Well..."

"Fine. Thank you for the stellar blowjob."

John grinned and opened the door.

Ronon and Teyla were lounging in the suite's living room. They were both already dressed in their Margo-approved clothes: a suit for Ronon and an airy sun dress for Teyla which showed off her shoulders and arms. Ronon scowled at him, but Teyla smiled.

"I don't like that woman," Ronon declared.

"I get that," John said. He headed for his own bedroom.

"There is coffee in the dining room," Teyla said.

She and Ronon had mastered the concept of twenty-four hour room service without difficulty.

"That'll make Rodney happy." He paused at his door and smiled back at her. "I'll get some once I'm dressed. If Margo calls again, tell her I'm in the shower." Which he would be. "You want to take the limo after it drops me off? Driver's on retainer. You could sight see."

Ronon rolled his shoulder. "Better than sitting around here." His expression conveyed his discomfort with the delicate, French-influenced furnishings, the gilding and moldings and marble that were a universe away from either Atlantis' angles and stained glass or the average farming village built of wood or daub back in Pegasus. Sateda had been high tech, close to Earth's current level, but its architecture and decor had displayed a more nineteen-fifties' industrial aesthetic.

"I have the credit card you arranged for me," Teyla said.

"Ronon, buddy, I think you may wish you'd stayed home," John remarked and ducked into his room before either of his friends could reply.

Rodney was dressed and waiting as well, sucking down what was probably his third cup of coffee, when John exited.

"Did you leave any for me?" he asked.

He ran his hand over his chin and jaw, double checking he hadn't missed any spots shaving, enjoying the way Rodney's cup stalled on its way to his lips and his eyes focused on him.

"There might be a cup left," Rodney finally said.

"Thanks, buddy," John replied.

The staccato rap of a fist against the suite's door had him detouring to open it. "Morning, Margo," he said as soon as he opened it.

She marched in, already frowning, eyes darting from John to everyone else, then back to him. "Thank God, you're dressed. I thought we'd have to do it in the limo. We have to go now," she said immediately.

So much for coffee.

"Who died and made you God?" Rodney muttered, before slurping down the last of his coffee and rising.

"General Landry," Margo snapped.

"Oh, if only," Rodney said in an undertone.

"I don't see why you're coming with us anyway," she went on.

"Because I asked him," John told her. He smiled at her. "Ease off, Margo. Try relaxing a little. We're looking at this as kind of a vacation."

"Well, your vacation is my job and my reputation," she replied. "I'm not about to let your friends or your slacking ruin either."

"Fine, let's go, before the world ends on the tragic note of you losing one of the most meaningless and parasitic jobs in the universe," Rodney said and strode out the door.

Teyla and Ronon followed him, so John gestured Margo to precede him, made sure he had his cell, wallet and key card and stepped into the corridor after her.



17 January 2011
Milky Way
Earth, New York


"How does it feel to be an intergalactic hero?"

"I'll let you know when I get there," John replied, grinning, because he might know he wasn't, but that didn't mean hearing himself described as one didn't feel good. He'd been called a fuck-up often enough. Might as well enjoy the fame while it lasted. "I'm just a guy."

Lisa Henson smiled at him. "Well, a lot of us here think you're a hero." She recrossed her legs, showing them off.

"Why go on what might be a one-way mission?"

He shrugged, remembering O'Neill nearly daring him to say no. It had been more than that, of course. His career in the Air Force had been effectively over post Afghanistan and he hadn't cared for any of the options waiting in the civilian world.

"Who wouldn't want to explore a whole new galaxy? I'd've had to be whacked to say no."

"See, that's what makes you so much braver than me. I'd like to stay here on Earth where it's safe," she replied.

"You could be carjacked or mugged or trip on a crack in the sidewalk and break your leg right here on Earth."

"Fair enough," she said with a flirty laugh. Turning a more serious look on him, she asked, "What did you think when you first reached Atlantis?"

John leaned back a little and acted like he was replaying the moment. He'd been somewhere between pissed at Ford for telling him going through the stargate would hurt like hell and working on not bending over and barfing all over the floor. Then he'd been trying to figure if he was the only one with that buzzing not-sound pushing at his nerves. It had been the weirdest feeling, until he realized it felt like sitting in that chair in Antarctica, strange but right and he'd relaxed. As if he could breathe without constriction for the first time in his life.

He didn't think the viewing public wanted to hear that stepping into Atlantis had untied a knot he'd never known was inside him.

"Wow. Even in the dark, you could see Atlantis was something else," he told Hensen instead. "Well, and then, who's turning the lights on?"

"And that was you?"

"Me and the other ATA positives."

Inside, where he'd never said it to anyone else, John still felt like Atlantis had woken up for him. All the other positives had come through the wormhole after him.

Hensen nodded. Her gaze flicked to one of the people behind the cameras and she turned slightly away from John to face the camera directly. The guy held up his hand and counted down the seconds. "We have to go to a commercial now, but we'll be back with more with Colonel John Sheppard of the SGC."

Hensen slumped back a little and flicked her hair back over her shoulders. "And we're off." She fussed with the microphone pinned to her blouse. "You could give me a little more than just the party line, you know."

John glanced past her to the wings of the stage, where Rodney was watching. Or had been. He'd retreated and bent over his laptop. Which made it look like he was working, but John knew neither of them had taken anything classified out of the Mountain. The laptop was one Rodney had picked up the day before and he was probably hunting for Easter Eggs in the latest Tiger Woods golf game. Looking busy kept anyone from talking to him, though.

"I'm being straight with you," he told Hensen. He was. No need to lie, when a light and joking answer and some subtle evasions would do the same job without ever coming back to bite him on the ass. It had held true since he was a kid being polite to his father's fellow business men, been a pretty good defense mechanism in the service, and worked better in first contact than telling people they were crazier than a bedbug on LSD, no matter what he privately thought sometimes.

"Okay, I get it," she said.

A make-up person darted out onto the stage and touched up Hensen's powder, then dusted John's face, which made him wrinkle his nose, trying not to sneeze. The damned lights were enough to make anyone sweat.

"We're back on in thirty!" someone yelled. Make-up girl scurried off the set, one of the big cameras shifted, and the cue card guy straightened up.

Hensen turned back to him. "Ready?"

"Sure."

"Five, four, three, two, and you're on."

"So, Colonel Sheppard, what is it like being commanding officer of a base in another galaxy?"

"Best job I've ever had," John answered, meaning it. "I," he coughed and ducked his head, "developed a lot more respect for my former commanding officers. I don't know how they put up with me."

"It doesn't frighten you?"

"I'd have to be crazy not to be afraid of messing up. It's up to me to keep my people alive, keep Atlantis safe, and that's humbling, I guess. I don't take it lightly."

"You've done a magnificent job."

"I've scraped by, but I didn't do it alone."

"Hear that, audience, not only handsome and brave, but modest too," Hensen addressed the camera and studio audience with another practiced smile.

She shifted her attention back to John. "Obviously, the world was shocked on Disclosure Day, but you were already in the Pegasus Galaxy then. What did you think when you learned about the Stargate, the Program, and aliens?"

John laughed. "That maybe I'd crashed my helo and was hallucinating or really doped up."

Hensen laughed with him.

"I'd been flying supplies and people in and out of the Antarctic base for about a year by then, so I was curious as hell. I've got to say, everyone there was so blasé, that I just went with it. Aliens? Sure, why not? The US military sure never developed a missile that looked like a squid." John shook his head. "It didn't really sink in until the first time I saw the Stargate." He grinned. "And then I just thought, cool."

"What about when you found out you had the ATA gene complex?"

"I didn't really get what that would mean until later. I did start worrying I'd run out of blood before the docs stopped taking samples."

"And when people say that having the ATA means you aren't human?" Hensen asked. Her gaze was intent. "What do you say to them?"

That hadn't been on the list of pre-approved questions Margo had shown him in the limo. John didn't mind, though. He figured he knew what to say without pissing off Margo or Stargate Command.

"They should check out the pictures of Goa'uld outside a host and the other nonhumanoid aliens the SGC has encountered and recorded that are on the Program's website. There's years of study and information there that's been declassified."

"That's at Stargate Science dot edu dot net?"

"Yeah."

"If you missed that, we'll have the information at the end of the program or you can find it at our own website," Hensen said to the camera.

She wasn't ready to let the original question go, though. "How does it make you feel though, knowing that some people think the ATA makes you an alien?"

John frowned.

"It's bull. Like saying anyone with red hair or who is under four feet tall or has a birthmark isn't human. My mother and father were human, no matter what I thought as a teenager, and so am I. So is anyone with ATA, latent or active."

"I can see you have strong feelings about that." Hensen sat back. "Okay, a different tack. What does your family think about what you do?"

"They approve," John said, thinking of Rodney, of Teyla and Ronon. They were his family and he knew they believed in what they were doing in Atlantis and Pegasus.

"Do you miss your family?"

He knew she meant Dave, his father while he'd been alive, and he hadn't. They'd been too far apart even before he went to Pegasus. They hadn't been a family for years before then.

The weeks on Earth after the Ancients exiled them from Atlantis, though, he'd been hollowed out, missing Rodney's voice and company, worrying for Ronon and Teyla.

"Yes," he said. "I miss them like hell when we're separated."

"How about this, because a lot of us wonder about it; how did you feel when you met your first aliens?"

"Depends on what you think is an alien, I guess." John shifted a little uncomfortably. "Humans on other planets don't count as aliens, so I guess the first ones I encountered were the Wraith. Or part of one. The marines shot a dart down and there was this hand crawling out of the burning wreckage."

Hensen and the audience all gasped and it occurred to John that sounded rather gruesome.

"Yeah, I kind of thought when's Boris Karloff going to show up? I already knew by then I wasn't going to like them."

John wanted to rub his neck and look away, but Margo had been insistent that he not look like he was evading anything — even if he very much was. "Don't look away," she'd told them. "The audience will think you're hiding something."

He reached for the mug of water he'd been given, understanding why everyone on a talk show always got one now: the hot lights and talking left him dehydrated and dry-mouthed. He swallowed a mouthful before going on.

"If you meant the Athosians, though: I liked them. They're just people who happen to live somewhere I hadn't been before. But Athos wasn't as strange as Shanghai or Antarctica, to tell the truth," he said.

"Fair enough. Colonel, you mention the Wraith, so I have to ask, how scary are they?"

"Pretty damn scary."

"And what do the Queens look like?"

John quirked an eyebrow at her. "Pretty damn ugly."

Laughter filled the studio.

Hensen leaned forward.

"Colonel, do you think the Stargate Program has benefited Earth?"

John sat back, but answered immediately. "Absolutely."

"How?"

"Knowledge. Defense." He held up his hands. "Hope."

"How do you mean?"

"Don't you like knowing there are other worlds with people out there? That we really aren't alone?"

"I find it a little disturbing, actually," Hensen replied. "It's so big, the idea of so many worlds out there is daunting. The Goa'uld, the Wraith, the Ori, they're so powerful and frightening."

John leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and caught her gaze, saying seriously, "They're all already spacefaring too. They'd still be out there without the Program and they'd have ways to get here, while we had nothing. Without the Stargate Program, we wouldn't have hyperdrive starships to protect Earth. We just wouldn't be ready for them when they came." That was the party line Landry had told them to sell. John didn't even mind. He figured Earth would have got there eventually without the Stargate, but it was a hell of a leg up and what if the Goa'uld had found them before then? They'd have been screwed royally without the Asgard on their side.

A murmur of approval came from the audience.

"I hadn't thought of it like that."

"Someone once said you can judge a person by his enemies. I think Earth looks pretty good if you look at our enemies."

"We're running out of time, but the audience has submitted some questions," Hensen said. "Are you game, Colonel?"

"Sure."

"Favorite movie?"

"Back to the Future," John answered immediately. He knew it annoyed Rodney. His actual favorite, non comedy, was Gallipoli. He doubted many people remembered it and didn't want to reveal that much about himself anyway. Back to the Future was the easy answer.

"What's your favorite food?"

"Pizza."

"What's the wormhole feel like?"

"Riding the biggest, baddest roller coaster in the universe in less than an eye blink."

"Is Rodney McKay really as cranky as he seems?"

John burst out laughing. "Worse."

"What's the scariest thing you have ever seen?"

"McKay without coffee after a three-day emergency."

Hensen laughed with him. Rodney would make him pay later, but John wanted to keep it light. No one wanted to hear about villages that had been culled, the baby in a crib he'd once found, a wizened husk left behind by the Wraith, being fed on or an Iratus bug nest.

"What kind of car do you drive?"

"None. Sold my last one before I deployed and haven't been back in the States long enough since to buy anything else."

Hensen gave him the flirty smile again. "Two more."

"Okay."

"How do you date in Atlantis?"

"Who has time?" John replied, still smiling back.

"Last question. What are you going to do next?"

"Get a pizza and rescue Ronon. Teyla headed out this morning armed with credit cards and he went with her."

The audience laughed again, as did Hensen. "Well, thank you for stopping by, Colonel Sheppard. Come back next time you're in New York and good luck in Atlantis."

"Thanks, Lisa."

The audience applauded on cue, surprisingly enthusiastic.

"And we're off," the director called out.

Hensen touched John's arm. "You're a natural."

"You made it easy."

Rodney was glaring from the wings. The make-up girl swept out again, while Margo and one of the assistants waved John off stage.

"Nice meeting you," John told Hensen and gave a wave to the audience.

"Never mind the pizza," Margo said as they head for the green room. "Emmett Bregman wants a one on one interview for his Atlantis documentary. We need to get across town in the next half hour."





Anger propelled John out onto the sidewalk in front of Bregman's studio. He didn't know where it was in relation to the hotel and right then he didn't care, even if he ended up soaked by the threatening rain. He needed to get away from Bregman's questions and Margo and most of all Rodney.

"John!"

Rodney had followed him out, past the building lobby, into the drizzling gray afternoon.

"Damn it, John!"

John hesitated a moment, half turning back toward Rodney. He fisted his hands at his sides.

"Could you slow down for a minute?" Rodney wasn't out of breath, but John had been moving fast when he walked away. Rodney dodged around a woman with a poodle and a giant shopping bag, busily talking into her cellphone, trying to catch up.

"No," he said, staring at Rodney, "I can't." He spun on his heel and walked away, past poodle woman and two businessmen, dodged between a woman in a dress and sweater who was glaring at the sky and a mail carrier.

"John!"

He ignored Rodney's shout the way Rodney had ignored him earlier, lengthening his stride and losing himself in the crowd moving steadily up and down the sidewalk.

I can't. He didn't mean he couldn't slow down, thought he meant he couldn't look at Rodney, or talk to him, but it felt like I can't do this. What ever this was. His chest hurt and he felt stupid. He knew how Rodney was, the things he said usually rolled off John's Teflon temperament. This should have been no different.

It shouldn't have happened. It wouldn't have, if Bregman hadn't spotted Rodney with him and insisted on setting up the interview with both of them. Rodney had immediately been enthusiastic. Bregman's interest had been a balm on his ego, easing the resentment left by Lisa Hensen ignoring him earlier. Bregman took advantage, catering to Rodney's sense of importance with every word. Any reluctance Rodney felt had disappeared the instant Bregman said the documentary would be a historical record and they needed Rodney's input.

For accuracy.

John had chuckled at the time. He'd seen the documentary Bregman had done at the SGC and been impressed despite himself. Getting Jackson to talk wasn't hard, but getting him to open up had been impressive. Considering the events of the time, including the death of someone who had obviously been well liked and part of the SGC for so long, Bregman had done an outstanding and sympathetic job.

Bregman had been impeccably polite to Margo. Someone had hammered manners into the man in his childhood that no amount of time, cynicism or rude women could erode away.

Margo had tried to nix the double interview, but Bregman obviously had experience with getting past watchdogs as well as sweet talking reluctant and awkward interviewees. One of his assistants had cannily separated Margo from them with a promise of coffee before she could finish objecting. John had watched with amusement.

The interview hadn't been bad at first. Bregman reminded John a little of Rodney, intelligent, impatient, unimpressed. Looks hadn't gotten Bregman to the top of the heap, certainly.

He started out with an easy one.

"Why the Air Force?"

"I wanted to fly," John answered. The same answer he always gave.

"With the money your family has, you could have done that without joining the military," Bregman responded. "Doesn't Sheppard Industries own several private jets?"

John found himself nodding, because he'd realized that he could be a pilot the day his father's pilot had let him sit in the co-pilot's seat of the Sheppard Industries Gates Lear and told him what each of the instruments did and what that translated to in the air. It had been all he could talk about for three days afterward, until his father declared that 'pilots work for other people, they're just chauffeurs'. He'd shut up but he hadn't forgotten.

"Civilian jets are okay," he said, "but they don't compare to the high performance aircraft the Air Force has." His father would have never let John fly anything he owned, anyway. "Test pilots in the private sector are mostly retired military, too."

"You were never part of the F302 program, though, were you?" Bregman asked shrewdly.

He shrugged.

"No, by then I was flying helos in the Mid East. I guess I didn't have the right profile."

God, he would have loved flying the F302s back then, but he already had a reputation as a maverick. He got along with the ground crews better than his fellow officers. Not the guy the Air Force wanted to trust with multimillion dollar superclassified alien-derived extra-atmosphere craft. There were always more pilots than places to drive jets; once you lost your place you didn't get it back, someone else moved up the list. The other thing was he was too damn good with the helos. Then came the incident with Holland.

"You mean you weren't enough of a kiss ass," Rodney said.

John glanced at him. Bregman had seated John and Rodney on a couple of stools side by side, angled to face a Bregman on a third stool. The studio was an echoing loft refitted with wooden floors, lights and equipment. Bregman kept his crew to a minimum: camera man, sound man, and a third guy handling the lights and anything else. Margo and the assistants had been exiled to the far end of the room, beyond a glass wall that insulated them from any stray noise. Now and then traffic noise or the building's heating system reached them. John figured that would be edited out later.

"No, I meant what I said," John corrected. "Besides, odds are if I'd been with the Snakeskinners, I wouldn't be here now."

Rodney looked stricken. "Not you."

"Thanks, but even the hottest pilots were shot down over Antarctica."

"Like Lt. Colonel Mitchell," Bregman said. “He was in command of the 1st. SFW during the Anubis incursion, right?”

John nodded. “Is that what it's being called now? An incursion?” Surviving being shot down over the Ice, finding a way to walk again, and buying SG-1 the time they'd needed had bought Cam his ticket into the SGC and a merit promotion. “He was a major back then, though.”

"You mention serving in the Middle East," Bregman said. "You were in Desert Storm and flew in Afghanistan. How does serving in the SGC differ from regular Air Force operations?"

"I don't know, maybe it's the fact that he's fighting vicious aliens?" Rodney snapped.

"Rodney..."

"What? It's a stupid question!"

John sighed.

"He's kind of right," he told Bregman. "I feel better about what I do for the SGC. I think everyone does." He elbowed Rodney. "Even McGrumpy here."

"So, if you were reassigned to fly bombing missions over New Congo, what would you do?" Bregman asked.

"I wasn't aware we were bombing New Congo," John said cautiously.

"Hypothetically."

John thought about it. He didn't know if he could do it any more. Atlantis and Pegasus had changed him. "I can't answer," he said. "You're asking something too general. I can say I don't like the idea of wasting human lives."

"But I can safely assume you wouldn't agree with the decision?"

"The Joint Chiefs don't consult me for my opinion," John said.

"Not about New Congo, but you're here on Earth to testify before the Senate Committee," Bregman pointed out.

"About Pegasus, not Africa," Rodney interrupted. He rolled his eyes at Bregman. "We have more important things to worry about than which warlord is working on dictator status. Though, seriously, with the Asurans wiped out and the Wraith on the run, probably the biggest worry in Pegasus is which dictator will take control of the Genii if something happens to Ladon Radim."

"Rodney," John drawled.

"I'd like to talk about that, Dr. McKay," Bregman said, smoothly switching his attention from John to Rodney. "Stargate Command and the IOA considered the Asuran Replicators a serious enough threat they sent the Apollo to Pegasus with express orders to wipe out their ship building facilities. You worked on the naquadah-enhanced warheads that were used."

"Zelenka and I did," Rodney said. He squirmed a little. "It was a moronic plan, but nothing we did or said was going to stop Ellis, who is exactly the sort who reminds me why I mostly despise the military, by the way — "

"Rodney," John repeated, tensing up a little.

People were going to see and hear this. It really didn't matter if Rodney told the world he thought Colonel Ellis was a tool, but the dig against the military would stick in the brass's memory. Sooner or later, when Atlantis desperately needed something from Earth, someone would remember and refuse it, just to stick it to that prick McKay. Damn it, if keeping that sort of thing in mind made him a kiss up, John didn't care. He'd spent years bucking the system in his own way, until Elizabeth taught him the fine art of maneuvering.

"We did contemplate sabotaging the bombs," Rodney went on, ignoring him.

"You what?" John demanded.

Rodney had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. "We didn't. Obviously." His chin came up. "Though in retrospect, I wish we had. The Asurans attacked Atlantis because of the Apollo's attack. Elizabeth...Elizabeth might not be dead."

"Jesus, Rodney," John whispered. He stared at Rodney's intransigent, angry expression and couldn't believe he'd never said any of this before. He'd always known Rodney blamed himself for the nanites, for what the Asuran Replicators had done after he changed their base code. He hadn't known Rodney blamed the SGC too. Blamed him for following the orders.

He was only peripherally aware of Bregman staring at them or the camera recording everything.

"What do you think we should have done? Refused to do the work on the Apollo's bombs?" John demanded. "You know they still would have gone on to attack M7R-227, so maybe you think we should have sabotaged the ship. Maybe hijacked it? What?"

"Something that didn't involve dropping bombs," Rodney snapped. "That's your answer to everything." He switched his attention back to Bregman and said, "You know, I can answer the question you asked him. He'd bomb New Congo or anywhere else if they gave the order."

"You really think that?" John asked.

Rodney looked away.

"I think if you had backed Elizabeth instead of listening to Ellis tell you Atlantis should have been under your command, we could have found a better answer."

"Shit." John waved at the camera man. "Shut it off — "

Bregman shook his head.

John stood up and took a step back. "Fine." He turned toward Rodney. "How can you even be in the same room if you think I backstabbed Elizabeth over Ellis's bullshit?" He gritted his teeth. "You were the one who thought he'd be put in charge of the expedition after we lost her."

"I'm not the one who said no to the nanite treatment," Rodney shouted.

John recoiled. Rodney froze as if he'd only heard himself after the words were out.

"John — "

He held up his hands. "Enough, okay? You go ahead and tell it your way. I'm done."

He walked out.





It began to rain.

Rodney stayed put.

Umbrellas opened, upside down colorful flowers brought out by the weather instead of the sun. People flowed around Rodney like a river around a boulder. Like a river, the current tugged at him, tumbling him forward a few steps, before his own weight brought him to a stop again. He stared, but Sheppard's dark head had been swept onward and he'd lost sight of him in the sea of umbrellas bobbing along the sidewalks.

The rain soaked into Rodney's shoulders. It chilled his bare head and slid under his collar. Droplets fell from his fingertips to the darkened sidewalk. He had to blink them out of his eyes.

He felt dazed. Elbows no longer dug into his sides and the crowd began skirting wider around him, because rudeness called up rudeness in response but crazy always made people flinch away. Standing in the rain, hair plastered to your head, whispering I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, qualified for crazy, even in New York.

He couldn't believe he'd said any of it. The words had just been there, hanging in the air, like someone else had spewed them out and John's face had assumed that terrible blankness that Rodney hated because it scared him.

He knew he needed to go back inside and try to undo some of the damage he had just done, but he couldn't make himself move. How had everything gone to hell so fast?

Of course, his ego had done it to him again.

"You," Margo hissed, making Rodney jump as she materialized out of the crowd. She'd imbued the single word with the sort of venom he associated with Wraith Queens. The glare she gave him would have shriveled him if he hadn't been busy berating himself already.

"What?" he asked. He knew he should be wary, but in a way she had every right to be furious with him.

"You are coming back inside, finishing the interview and answering all of Bregman's questions," Margo told him. "Politely."

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.

"Are you listening to me, McKay?" she went on. One hand closed around his wrist and she dug her long nails into the soft flesh of his wrist. "You're lucky this wasn't live, because nothing I could have done would have cleaned that mess up. I just bullied, blackmailed and outright bribed that man and the technicians into erasing the last five minutes of that interview. I had to swear I'd get Colonel Sheppard back here, along with you, and all of SG-1 too for his follow up documentary. I had to offer to let Bregman go to Atlantis and film. Exclusively."

The rain had begun darkening the shoulders of her gray suit. A curl of black hair had come loose from her bob and hung over one baleful eye.

"Let go."

She tightened her grip instead. "Shut up. After this, you are never, ever going on camera again."

"Fine, whatever," Rodney snapped back at her. He jerked his arm free and pushed his way back to the lobby doors. He spent the next three hours answering Bregman's questions, sitting in his shirt sleeves, because a towel could dry his hair but not his jacket. Bregman didn't ask the puff piece questions either.

What do you say to comments that venturing into another galaxy whilst there are so many problems in our own smacks of imperialism? Earth already has major problems with refugees in Africa and now India fleeing starvation and drought. Can we afford to get involved in a situation that creates refugees from other planets? Should countries not part of the IOA have reason to fear the growth of weapons far beyond the capability of nuclear weapons? What do you say to charges that the SGC and Atlantis expedition has been engaged in genocidal activities?

Rodney winced and struggled to answer both honestly and politically, reining in his normal sarcasm and explaining that Pegasus refugees wouldn't be coming to Earth or even the Milky Way, that the expedition was first proposed as scientific in aim and they weren't colonizing planets, certainly not planets with populations. He did slip and point out that Bregman should have said specicide if he was referring to the Wraith and that in fact the Replicators were the ones who had used that as a tactic in their war not Atlantis.

"What about current worries that the introduction of the zero point modules will upset the energy economy of Earth, leaving many people without jobs?"

That made Rodney snap.

"Maybe you'd rather go back to torches and hunting with rocks," he suggested. "Of course, you would be out of a job too then. But if that's what you like, I know five different planets where using a stick to dig for grubs is the height of technological advancement. Change is inevitable and it is the very depths of stupidity to wish to go backwards."

Bregman sat back and smiled, obviously pleased he'd finally prodded Rodney into speaking honestly.

The questions went on.

The rain sheeted down outside the studio and he wondered where John was.

He waited until the camera had been turned off and the the technicians were breaking their equipment down.

"Mr. Bregman."

His voice sounded stiff.

Bregman stopped and looked at him. The man had a shrewd mind, Rodney had realized as the interview had gone on and on.

"Yes?"

"Whatever you may think of me, Colonel Sheppard didn't deserve what I said earlier. I often..." Rodney paused and marshaled his determination. "I often let my emotions run away with my mouth and say the most hurtful thing possible, whether I believe it or not. I realize that Margo believes she has you convinced, for whatever reasons, to not use that part of the interview. I'm asking you to not use it. What I said was neither fair nor correct, but it's all anyone would remember if they saw it."

"I didn't believe you would bring it up," Bregman said.

"I'm not asking for myself."

"Ms. Langtry has promised me a full access tour of Atlantis."

"You'll get it," Rodney promised. He didn't have the clout to push it through, but he could convince Sam to persuade Landry. "I swear."

"And cooperation from anyone I want to interview there?"

Rodney swallowed and nodded, then had to amend it, "I can't speak for Sheppard's soldiers. Or, or Director Woolsey. Or the Athosians. And if you want to interview any of the Genii, well, that's just insane."

Bregman chuckled. "I won't expect the impossible."

"Good...good. Ah. Thank you," Rodney told him. "I'm going to, I'm leaving now. Thank you."

Margo spent the taxi ride back to the St. Regis on her phone. Rodney stared out the rain streaked windows at all the people. New York had a population larger than many planets in Pegasus. The crowds made Rodney nervous. The city itself bothered him. Atlantis had never seemed as empty as it did in comparison with Manhattan; it boggled his mind to imagine his city as filled with people.

He swiped at the fogging glass of the window with the side of his hand as the taxi slowed to a halt in traffic. Their driver hit his horn, inched the vehicle forward, cursed and then offered them a casual apology. A sting in his wrist made Rodney turn his hand and notice the blood dotted marks left by Margo's vicious nails. Fingernails. It made him shudder. He'd have to disinfect the scratches. Human nails were nasty and he'd likely end up with an infection. Blood poisoning would follow as he turned septic. He'd die in his hotel room, no doubt alone, since he'd managed to alienate John.

The taxi jolted forward as the driver wove it into gap in the traffic. Rodney curled his hand into a fist. If John had been with them, he would have complained about the man's driving. He couldn't bring himself to speak to Margo.

"Tell Colonel Sheppard you are both scheduled to fly to DC for the hearings three days from now," Margo stated as the cab came to stop in front of the hotel. "I've canceled everything after today."

"You can message him — "

"He's already ignoring all my messages, but since you and the rest of your team are sharing the suite, you should see him."

"I'll tell him if I see him," Rodney acceded. He left the cab without caring that he was sticking her with the fare. She'd charge it to the SGC anyway.

When the concierge raised an eyebrow at Rodney's waterlogged jacket and still damp shoes, he snarled back silently.

Ronon and Teyla were in the living room along with more shopping bags than Rodney wanted to count. He hadn't known it was possible for Ronon to look both exhausted and shellshocked, but Teyla looked pleased until she caught sight of Rodney.

"Where's Sheppard?" Ronon asked as Rodney walked past him.

"You'd have to ask him," Rodney replied. He shut his bedroom door behind him before either Teyla or Ronon could ask anything else.

He dropped the laptop he'd had with him on the room's desk and began shedding his damp clothes. One hot shower later, dressed in comfortable clothes rather than the things Margo had picked out, he slunk out of the bedroom to wait for a room service order of pizza and beer.

"What'd you do?" Ronon demanded.

"Ronon," Teyla said, before Ronon could ask anything else. She looked at Rodney, but he mulishly ignored both of them.

He'd begun getting angry again. Fine. He'd said something awful. Did John have to take off like some sulky brat? He could have stayed and fought it out with Rodney. They'd done it before...Not in front of cameras, admittedly, but the principle remained. He would never had said what he had if they'd ever actually talked out what happened during and after the Asuran attack on Atlantis. But that wasn't John's way. John preferred to stuff everything away and act like everything was all right, until eventually life settled back into some normal rhythm, or some new disaster pushed the last one out of their thoughts. John didn't deal with emotions very well. He had them, but talking about them seemed almost impossible for him.

Only sheer desperation ever pulled words about his feelings from John and then they were incomplete and nearly incoherent.

It could, at times, infuriate Rodney.

He wondered when the master of avoidance would finally come back to the hotel suite. John would come back though, if only for Teyla and Ronon, however angry Rodney had made him.

The pizza arrived with china plates, which vaguely disturbed Rodney. Tradition demanded cardboard, he felt, at least while they were on Earth. Atlantis' pizza was always served onto a tray like everything else in the mess and often included toppings for which there were no words. He tried to explain this to Teyla as she neatly cut away pieces of the extra mushroom, extra cheese, all meat extravaganza. The extra mushroom was for Teyla, who really liked them.

"But isn't this more pleasant to the eye?" she asked.

Rodney gave up.

They easily consumed the entire pizza between the three of them. Ronon had no problems with eating it the proper way with his hands, either.

Ronon didn't believe in stopping to talk while eating either, so that provided Rodney a small reprieve from any questions about John. It lasted through a second beer.

The weight of Teyla's expectant, compassionate gaze got to him of course. Then Ronon swiped Rodney's third slice off his plate — the last slice — and ate it in five bites. "You were letting it get cold," he said afterward.

Rodney broke under their combined interrogation technique.

"I may have said something injudicious," he said.

"To John," Teyla clarified.

He picked at bit of melted cheese stuck to his otherwise empty plate.

"On camera."

"I see," Teyla said.

Rodney shook his head.

"I didn't mean it."

"Then John will understand."

"I sort of accused of him of, uh..." Rodney swallowed and told himself the burning sensation in his chest was indigestion. "I made it sound like he wanted Elizabeth to die," he blurted out fast. He jerked his chair back, anticipating Ronon making a grab for him.

Ronon just stared at him.

"I didn't mean it!"

"Oh, Rodney," Teyla said.

Rodney slumped down. "I was angry." He frowned at his beer bottle, turning the neck between his fingers nervously. "I don't even know why I was angry, but it just spilled out." He resisted the urge to fling the bottle at the suite's dining room's wall. "It's all Bregman's fault."

Ronon grunted, took another beer, and walked back to the living room. Teyla just looked at Rodney sadly until he wanted to squirm. He couldn't hold her gaze and stared at his empty plate instead. "One good thing, though. No more interviews for me, ever, according to Margo."

Teyla slid her chair back and stood. She walked around the table and then set her hand gently upon the crown of Rodney's head for a beat. She'd begun doing things like that after giving birth to Tanaan. Then she left him and joined Ronon in the living room.

Rodney finished his beer. A glance into the living room showed him Ronon on the cellphone Rodney had bought for him and since Ronon didn't exactly know a lot of people on Earth, Rodney assumed he was checking in with John. It made him feel better, enough that he realized he'd been suppressing a twinge of sick worry just because John was separated from the rest of the team on a strange planet. He watched Ronon finish the call and fold the cellphone closed. Ronon looked satisfied, which translated to John being fine.

Rodney ducked away and headed for his bedroom. The sooner he went to sleep, the sooner this horrible day would be in the past.

The bed was twice as big as his prescription mattress back in Atlantis, bigger than the bed he had in his Colorado Springs apartment, covered in huge, wonderful pillows made to be curled around, topped with a duvet as light and airy as the proverbial cloud. The sheets were smooth, fresh and no doubt sinfully expensive; Rodney fully intended on finding out what they were and taking some back to Atlantis.

After he brushed his teeth, Rodney stripped down to his boxers and got in the too big, too empty, too cold bed and shivered.

Eventually, he did drowse off, though, jolting awake periodically as some foreign sound of the city reached the room and, finally, well past midnight, to the settling of a weight on the edge of the bed.

He waited for John to pull away the blankets and get in bed beside him, but John only sat motionless.

Rodney rolled onto his side, toward John, and tried to make out more than a silhouette in the dark room. John's back was a long curve as he rested his forearms on his knees, with his neck bent and head sagging down under some invisible weight. Gravity tugged him toward John but it was his own choice to tentatively reach for him. John's back was warm through his shirt. He tensed beneath Rodney's open palm.

"I didn't mean it," Rodney told him, voice hoarse and low.

"Yeah," John said. A weary acceptance sounded in the word. Rodney wanted to insist, but he knew John well enough now to understand it would make no difference.

"Where'd you go?" he asked instead.

"Bar."

"Well, that was an innovative choice," Rodney said before he could think.

John chuffed out a laugh. "Imaginative, that's me." He sounded sad.

"Hmm."

He sniffed and caught a hint of beer and cigarettes, the scents no doubt caught in John's hair along with some awful perfume. The tension beneath his hand eased. Rodney began rubbing circles over the small of John's back, not pressing, just rhythmic, a settling touch.

"You don't sound drunk," he said.

"I'm not." John bent and took off his shoes, then pulled away and stood. He stretched. "I need a shower."

He padded toward the in-suite bathroom.

Flicking on the light made Rodney groan and bury his face in a pillow. Too bright and John hadn't closed the door behind him until afterward. John did things like that deliberately. He could be damned passive-aggressive. Rodney waited until he heard the door close before opening his eyes again and sitting up.

Keeping his eyes slitted, he flipped on the bedside light and waited through the sounds of John undressing, one surprising exclamation of shit and then the noise of the shower. The air in the bedroom felt cool on his bare chest and he shivered once. He wondered if they were going to have to talk about all the things they normally shoved aside or just left unspoken to make what he'd said right.

If so, he thought they might need to raid the in-suite bar. Rodney could never say the right thing and John was so inarticulate about feelings as to be able say nothing. It would require alcohol to loosen themselves up enough to have any kind of heart to heart.

The thought made Rodney wish for a world threatening emergency.

He even checked his SGC issued cellphone, hoping for a recall message.

Then he checked the clock. John didn't normally take long showers.

The door opened, releasing a wave of steam and the scent of soap and shampoo. Rodney squinted at John as he came out, towel wrapped low around his hips, water still beaded in his chest hair, hair spiky and still wet, jaw unshaved and dark. John fumbled for the switch and turned off the bathroom light, but not before Rodney spotted several shadows that had to be bruises.

Rodney opened his mouth to demand John tell him what he had done, then closed it. John wandered over to the other side of the bed and peeled back the sheets and blankets. He tossed the towel over a chair and crawled into the bed. The bedside lamp provided more than enough illumination to show the bruise turning purple under his right eye.

Rodney reached over and traced his hand in the air over the bruise.

"Ow."

"Caught me by surprise."

"Ronon's going to laugh at you."

The tightened lines at the corners of John's eyes and around his mouth gave away a headache and weariness. He looked at Rodney warily, then moved a little closer and leaned his head against Rodney's side. "Yeah," he breathed against Rodney's skin, make it prickle and warm.

"Are you okay?"

"Sure," came the laconic reply.

"Does the other guy look worse?"

"Nah, I got him in a headlock and marched him out the doors."

"So no police."

"No police."

Rodney chanced stroking his hand over John's shoulder. When John relaxed, he knew they were all right. John never lied in bed, gave up everything with his body that he could never speak in words.

"Ronon's the bar fight type, not you," he commented, implying the question rather than asking it, in case John didn't want to explain.

"Guy got bent out of shape when his girlfriend started hitting on me," John said, but he tensed again. Something more there, Rodney thought, and wondered if he'd ever know what.

"Hunh."

"Get the light?" John asked.

Rodney smoothed his hand over John's silky damp hair. The warm light of the bedside lamp made it shine and turned John's skin golden.

"Rodney," he whined.

"Fine."

He reached over, turned off the light, and wiggled back down into the bed, tugging the blankets up over John's shoulder.

John slung an arm over Rodney's waist and relaxed a little more.

Rodney thought that might be it, that they'd both go to sleep, but John surprised him.

"The guy."

John didn't say any more and Rodney considered prompting him, but sometimes John would, if let alone, come around and say something important. Rodney wasn't good at the patience thing, but he'd figured out he could fake it with silence sometimes. He rubbed John's shoulder to let him know he hadn't fallen asleep.

"Did you ever think I wasn't human?" John asked.

"Did I — what? You mean like when Lorne dreamed you were a replicator?" Rodney hummed to himself. "Actually, you — well, not you-you, but a duplicate you I suppose you could say, have been a replicator." He knew John hadn't meant that, of course. "I've often thought you're an idiot, but that's definitely a human trait."

"Because of the ATA."

Rodney frowned. "You don't — "

"No, not really," John replied hurriedly, "but the guy in the bar was bothered because of that more than the flirting."

Not really meant John had, at least briefly. Rodney pulled John closer.

He supposed that if they'd thought about it, they should have recognized that some percentage of the population would freak out over the possibility of having alien ancestors. Ancients in the woodpile. Ethnicity and skin color still formed the basis of prejudice, how much worse to really know aliens had mixed their blood with human for the fanatics out there. Thinking about it now, he knew it could potentially become very bad. So many human beings were absolute morons.

"Crap."

"Margo's going to shit a brick when she sees the shiner, isn't she?" John murmured.

"Don't worry about it," Rodney told him. "She's so pissed already, she canceled anything until after we testify. We've got a week at least."

"Good."

John tangled his feet between Rodney's and went nearly limp, falling asleep between one breath and the next. He had that knack, probably learned in the military, of dropping off when he could.

Rodney watched shadows dash and dart over the ceiling long afterward, already too rested to fall back asleep easily, turning over Bregman's questions and his own feelings, along with all the possibilities for good and bad that were opening up in the wake of disclosure. He listened to John breathe and hoped he was right, that they'd get back to Atlantis and everything would be all right again.

He wanted everything to be the way it was before. John would act like nothing had been said, of course, but the words would still be there in both their memories.

"I am sorry," he said into the darkness. "I'll — I'll do better. I promise."




20 May 2011
Pegasus
M35-117 Atlantis


Richard Woolsey died in March and Rodney found himself back at the SGC in May. John stayed in Atlantis. One of them had to. Ronon and Teyla remained behind as well.

The banality of Woolsey's death from a stroke, without warning or reason, haunted Rodney afterward. Keller swore the man had been as healthy as anyone in Atlantis.

Rodney took over the civilian aspects that Woolsey had handled and shared command with John. They'd done it before and fell back into the routine they'd established between losing Elizabeth and Carter's appointment. The IOA, fracturing under pressure from countries now aware of the program and Atlantis, couldn't settle on a new director and insisted on an in-person briefing on the state of Atlantis from Rodney.

He hadn't been offworld since coming back from Earth, swamped in paperwork, and regarded the blue ripple of the wormhole with a jaundiced eye. Bureaucracy had never been his strongest point. But it would be a break from doing Woolsey's job and continuing as head of science. The only break he or John had had in the period following that had been Bregman's arrival with his film crew.

John had convinced Ronon and Teyla to do interviews. Rodney had taken Bregman around the city himself.

"Take care of my city," Rodney told John as they headed down the gate room stairs.

"No blowing up anything without you," John promised with that lazy grin and a thumbs up.

Rodney huffed and then addressed Teyla. "Keep him out of trouble."

"Of course," Teyla replied.

She stepped forward and grasped Rodney's shoulders. He dipped his head to touch foreheads with her and held until she let go. "Want anything from Earth when I come back?"

"Just you, buddy," John murmured low enough no one but the three of them would hear.

"You don't need to worry, even if they do come up with a new director, I'll still be coming back."

"Well, in that case, make sure you get me a case of the good golf balls."

"Of course, I should have thought of that myself," Rodney muttered. He looked around. "Where's Ronon?"

"Here," Ronon declared, entering the gate room from the transporter on the level below the control room. He dropped Rodney's duffle on the floor. "What did you pack in there anyway?"

"Nothing breakable, I hope," John murmured.

Rodney sniffed. "Several ingots of the element from P— "

"Never mind," John said with a wave of his hand. "Go on, go show Earth we're still here."

"Right. Well. I will see you when I'm done. I'm not sure how long that will be. I might go see Jeannie if there's time," Rodney said. He hefted the duffle and started toward the wormhole. "I'll send updates with the regular databursts."

"Go on," John said. He clapped his hand on Rodney's shoulder and squeezed briefly, the most he could do in public.

"See ya," Ronon said and gave Rodney a light push, sending him through the event horizon before he could reply.

He stepped out onto the metal ramp up to the stargate in the SGC gate room. The SFs on watch nodded to him as the gate closed with a squelch. He looked up to the control room window and caught Harriman and Landry both watching. "Medical, I suppose?" he called out.

"Dr. Lam is waiting," Landry said over the intercom.

Rodney sighed and headed for his exam and forty-eight hours of wasted time. At least he'd have Internet access while he waited it out. He'd take the chance to work on the ZPM equations that had been bothering him since they succeeded in recharging. Zero point might be a misnomer, the assumption leading them in the wrong developmental direction.

He hoped Sam was on Earth. If not, he'd run the math by Jeannie.

They gave him a VIP room, which he found only right, though surprising. Sam and Mitchell stopped by, Mitchell grinning like a buffoon and hefting a stack of what Rodney thought were newspapers at first, but turned out to be tabloids.

"They'll either make you laugh or make you stroke out," Mitchell said.

"Cam," Sam remonstrated.

"Oh. Right. Whoops. Sorry about Woolsey."

Rodney grunted and flipped through the stack, noticing some were glossy mags and some were still printed on newspaper. Star, Grit, National Enquirer, People, Us, Globe, Weekly World News, Sun, Entertainment Weekly, Astrology Digest, Psychology Today, We.

Mitchell snatched one out and stuffed it into Rodney's hands, still grinning. The picture on the front showed SG-1 in sleeveless black tee shirts, glowering at the camera against a white background, the caption Masters of the Universe. "Cover of Rolling Stone," Mitchell declared gleefully.

"But you still can't play guitar," Rodney said with a snort, thinking of John's guitar, neglected until the strings had dust on them, even in Atlantis, where almost all dust and dirt was disposed of by the city's built-in cleaning equipment and programs. They'd learned to shut those off in the kitchens after the cleaning system sucked up all the flour and sugar more than once, in the second year, when they'd started running some tertiary systems.

He frowned at captions declaring The Ancient Conspiracy: They're Here, Asgard Relationship Tips: How to Stay in Love Without Sex, Samantha Carter's Secret Heartbreak, Goa'uld Larva Found in New York Sewers, Rodney McKay's Love Child Tells All.

"What!?" he squawked. "Love Child? I'll sue."

"That's not even the worst," Mitchell commented. "I'm apparently married to fourteen different women and I'm not talking about offworld ceremonies."

"This is insane," Rodney muttered as he flipped through more. The headlines, accompanied by terrible photos of Batheaded Boys and plastic children's' toys photoshopped into pictures with no regard to proportion or believability, had a hideous fascination.

Man Gives Birth to Iratus in Rio, How He Walked Again: Colonel Cameron Mitchell's Inspirational Story, Tattoo Monthly Features Ronon Dex, John Sheppard: Sexiest Man Alive, Chicago Parish Priest Ascends!, Playboy Flyboy Pwnz Pegasus Princess! He wondered if that one meant Mara, then saw the smaller picture of Teyla inset in the corner. Rodney snorted and set that one aside. He wanted to watch when Teyla kicked John's ass over it.

Lost Leader: The Elizabeth Weir Tragedy, SGC Black Widow Dates Mick Jagger, How to Lose Fifteen Pounds in Five Days: The Jaffa Diet, HIV History? Roche-Beyer Begins Clinical Trials of the Keller Cure, Is Nessie Really a Furling, Entire Town Disappears in Arizona — Aliens Did It, Walk Like An Egyptian — Dr. Jones Meet Dr. Jackson, Winter Fashion: Paris Goes Tok'Ra, Twenty-Seven Recipes to Make Your Meals Out of This World, George Clooney, Jessica Alba and Gene Hackman Signed For Wormhole Extreme Movie.

"God, these are ridiculous."

Mitchell nodded in agreement. "And those are just the ones at the supermarket checkouts. Wait until you see what's on the Internet."

"Or catch the nightly Alien Watch on TV," Sam added gloomily. "Everyone said it would peter out and they'd find someone else to follow around." She pointed at The Star. "Try getting a date when you're the 'Black Widow' of the SGC. I've never even heard of half the guys they say have dated me and died."

Rodney pushed the tabloids away and opened his laptop. "Never mind that crap. I need you to look at this."

Sam peered over his shoulder. "Oh. That's interesting. You think we should — "

"Yes. We've been hobbling ourselves trying to recreate everything the Ancients did the way they did it," Rodney said, feeling excited because she'd seen the same implication he had. "All we need to know is that they did it. If it's possible, we can do it too, and maybe do it better anyway."

"I can see you two are going to be busy, so I think I'll find Vala and get some supper," Mitchell said.

Sam waved him away. "Not now, Cam."

Rodney began typing. "See? Here. If we stop assuming that the only way is — "

"Then we have to — "

"Right. I want to get Jeannie in on this, too."

"Look, I think if we combine this with the Asgard equations on vacuum resonance then we're looking at an entirely different material specification." Sam sat down on the bed next to Rodney. The tabloids slid to the floor. "Not crystals."

"Not crystals," Rodney agreed. "Possibly a biological."

"Wow." Sam pushed a strand of hair back behind her ear and then pointed at a line of numbers. "That can't be right, though."

"Radek thinks so."

"No...Well, here, give me the laptop. It should be..."

Mitchell grabbed an apple out of the fruit basket near the door and headed out.

They made enough progress in the next twelve hours for Rodney to feel confident that the new angle of attack would yield a satisfactory method of building ZPM casings. Biologicals weren't reliable enough, too much variation, but neutered nanites could 'grow' casings molecule by molecule. Current math didn't encompass the complexities of a physical atomic structure that would achieve the level of energy containment they needed, but he could see the directions he needed to go.

He had to abandon any more work on the project once Medical cleared him for travel. The IOA was meeting in The Hague, which meant an interminable cross-Atlantic flight, security issues, and leaving all of his classified research locked up in an SGC lab. Three days of briefings left him convinced afterward that he'd be returning to Atlantis as unofficial interim director, since the US and China were at each other's throats again.

Rodney figured even the paperwork he'd still be stuck with would be better than if they sent Coolidge. He suspected Teyla or Ronon would arrange for Coolidge to be standing on the wrong side of the stargate when it opened if he ever came to Atlantis.

He thought the European media might be a little saner, but one glimpse of a magazine kiosk in the airport proved him wrong. The photoshopped picture of O'Neill kissing Teal'c was an offense to the eye and good taste. Rodney grimaced and kept moving, managing to catch his flight to Vancouver after assuring at least one customs agent that he hadn't brought any alien food stuffs from another galaxy and if he had it would never have made it out of the Mountain, much less to the Netherlands.

The food in first class made the mess hall offerings in Atlantis a fond memory. At least some of that was supposed to be purple. Rodney didn't want to think about what had to be done to Earth food to achieve that shade in anything that wasn't a beet.

Jeannie picked him up at the airport. She didn't say much until they were in the Prius, which Rodney put together with the tight set to her mouth to mean he'd pissed her off again.

He slumped down in the passenger seat as they made their way toward the suburbs, trying to calculate what time it would be in Atlantis and what John would be doing. The silence got to him though, niggling through his nearly paralyzing case of gate and jet lag, as they drove through streets lined by houses with neat yards filled with trees, lawns and flowers. Jeannie's hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

"Did you change your hair?" Rodney ventured. It seemed like a safe subject. The last time he'd seen Jeannie, her hair had been all curls not a harsh bun.

"I almost dyed it brown," she snapped. "And I'm wearing sunglasses.

Rodney blinked at her, feeling more confused than before. He hadn't really registered the large, dark sunglasses she'd had on, even in the airport.

"Why?"

"So no one would take a picture of me with you!"

Jeannie turned a glare at him.

"Keep your eyes on the road!" Rodney yelped, clutching at his seat belt. "This thing doesn't have an autopilot. My God, why don't cars have autopilots and anticollision shields yet?"

"Get a grip, Meredith," Jeannie said, but she relaxed a little, while turning her gaze back to the road.

"Why would you dye your hair?" Rodney asked.

Jeannie steered the car onto the street where she lived, then turned into the driveway of the Miller house.

"Because I don't want reporters following me or Madison or Kaleb around just because we happen to be related to you," she explained.

She put the Prius into park, switched off the key and turned to look at Rodney again. "I'm just glad I started using Kaleb's name when we got married, otherwise we would have had to change it."

Rodney stared at her.

"Why?"

"Because, according to Joseph Barnes, you're a race traitor," Jeannie said. "I should say, the Reverend Marshal Joseph Barnes, head of the Defenders of a Pure Humanity."

"I — What? Who? Is the world insane?" Rodney got out of the Prius, retrieved his bag, and followed Jeannie up the steps to her door. "What am I saying, of course, the world is crazy, but race traitor? What the, uh, heck, does that mean?" He peered around for the blond guided missile that masqueraded as his niece. "Where's Madison?"

"Piano lessons," Jeannie said.

She paused in the entry hall and took down her hair, shaking it loose.

"Piano," Rodney repeated. "Is she any good?"

"Mer, she's just starting. Kaleb and I have agreed it doesn't matter if Madison is good or not, as long as she's enjoying the learning process."

"Hmph. Have you checked out her teacher? Background checks are important. What qualifications does this person have? And equipment...Madison's hands are still small. She needs a keyboard sized for — "

"Meredith!"

Jeannie checked her watch. "I have to go pick her up. I didn't want to take you by the school, in case anyone recognized you."

"So now I'm something to be ashamed of?"

Jeannie opened and closed her mouth twice, then grabbed Rodney and squeezed him into a painful hug. "No, you idiot. I just don't want strangers bothering us while you're here."

He relaxed and hugged her back.

Jeannie pulled away and then thumped Rodney's arm with a fist. "You're such a jerk."

"I am not!"

"I have to go. Don't sic any private investigators on my child's piano teacher."

Rodney sniffed. "I'd get the NID to do it," he muttered.

"Well, don't," Jeannie said. "Or it will be tofu and bean curd and nothing else while you're here."

"Why did I want to visit you again?"

"Just take your stuff up to the guest room and relax."

"If I relax I'm going to go to sleep," Rodney muttered after she slipped back out the front door.

He took his bag up to the guest room that doubled as his when he visited, then washed up, before wandering back downstairs with his traveling laptop. None of his work was on it, but he used it to Google the Defenders of Pure Humanity.

A few minutes reading and Rodney began to wish he'd never heard of Joseph Barnes or the Pure.

According to the first article, while the world's religions had been dealing with the implications of Goa'uld masquerading as gods and debating whether aliens had souls since Disclosure Day, a significant portion of people had declared that inheriting the ATA meant alien ancestry and anyone with it wasn't human. Joseph Barnes, who had worked in a DNA lab as a technician, had led the movement, which continued gathering proponents. As far as Rodney could tell, Barnes' believers weren't restricted to the US, either.

Barnes wanted everyone in the US and then the world tested for the ATA. That wouldn't be easy, but didn't differ too much from what half the IOA had been talking about at The Hague. The IOA wanted to make the gene therapy mandatory for everyone at the SGC. China was already administering it to all of their military.

No one at the IOA had been talking about writing laws that made it illegal for anyone with the ATA to marry and have children with someone who didn't. Joseph Barnes was and making it sound...plausible.

Joseph Barnes had been born in Oklahoma City, son of a surgical nurse and the owner of a John Deere tractor sales lot. He'd served in the Army, married his high school sweetheart and been divorced three years later with no children, gone to community college, and went duck hunting every year. He was forty-seven years old, six-foot tall, and had a thatch of graying blond hair. He looked a little like a young Burt Lancaster and had a voice deeper than James Earl Jones. According to every article, Barnes was smart but unmotivated before Disclosure.

He used that, used it all, to present himself as rational, giving persuasive interviews rather than ranting, and people flocked to hear him speak.

Barnes had charisma.

Rodney had to turn off a clip of Barnes speaking at a Pure rally in Des Moines. He closed the laptop and bent over with his face in his hands, just breathing and trying to quiet his mind. The Defenders of Pure Humanity hadn't popped up overnight. But almost a year after disclosure, ten thousand people had attended one of their gatherings. Yet nothing about it had been in any of the databursts from the SGC.

The Defenders of Pure Humanity were raising money to develop a fast and dirty blood test for the ATA. In the US, they were lobbying for laws to restrict which jobs an ATA positive could hold. The news articles laughed at their aims, but Rodney couldn't get away from the realization that there were people who felt like that, who thought Carson Beckett was a monster for creating the gene therapy. Who were using science the way generation after generation of fanatics and zealots had used religion.

The only people the Pure disliked more than those born with the ATA were people who had taken the gene therapy. So that was what Jeannie had meant by 'race traitor'. Rodney wondered what they'd think if they knew a chunk of his DNA had been replaced with an Ancient version.

Nothing pleasant.

At least none of the SGC personnels' medical histories had been made available. Military or civilian. It looked like the Pure hated O'Neill and John about equally, but if it became public that John had traces of Iratus DNA still or Teyla's genetic heritage...The Pure would have a field day.

No wonder Jeannie didn't want anyone knowing her name, where she lived, or connecting her with Rodney or the Stargate Program. The odds were good she carried the same latent ATA complex that had allowed Carson's therapy to succeed with Rodney. Equally good that Madison was also a latent carrier or even an ATA positive if Kaleb possessed it.

The Pure hadn't resorted to violence yet, but that didn't reassure Rodney. He doubted it reassured Kaleb or Jeannie either.

Rodney rubbed his eyes. They were burning and achy after hours spent in the dry, pressurized air of an Airbus and an insistent headache throbbed at the back of his skull, product of the multitudes of pollen and chemicals his body was no longer used to being exposed to after years living in Atlantis' clean environment.

What else hadn't been making it to Atlantis that they needed to know about? He didn't even know who he could approach. Sam wasn't spending much time on Earth, Lee was a blithering idiot outside the lab, Mitchell might have some insight into the military, but once again spent his time focused on offworld missions, Landry was a bad joke, and that left...Jackson. Jackson's second specialty was anthropology; he'd probably been keeping track of what was going on and he still had an in with O'Neill at Homeworld. If anyone knew the real situation, it would be Jackson, and he'd be willing to talk to Rodney, too.

He still scanned everything he could, gathering a picture of the Pure and half dozen other movements that had sprung into life after Disclosure and were still growing. Mostly the religious right, dominated by the Fundamentalists who had united Judaism, Islam and Christianity in the face of revelations of Jackson and others' ascensions, but there were others. The ExoEco movement made Rodney choke and laugh. There weren't a half dozen races in the galaxy, aside from the Nox and the Salish, who gave even a tiny damn about what they did to the ecologies of the worlds they occupied. As for Pegasus, well...he'd like to introduce them to the Genii. Originists at least weren't actually worshipping the Ori, but trying to use the Path of Origin to achieve ascension. They seemed pretty harmless, as did the fringe groups idolizing the Ancients, the Asgard cultists, and the tinhats who swore Disclosure had been a giant hoax.

It was the Danielites, though, that made him laugh until his gut ached and he couldn't breathe. He couldn't wait to tell John. Jackson had his own religion. Oh, that was rich! He'd have to ask Jackson if coffee was the sacrament.

He was searching for the best piano he could buy for Madison when Jeannie arrived back with her, though, having decided he wouldn't bring anything up unless Jeannie or Kaleb did.

He set the laptop aside just in time catch Madison as she leaped into his lap. "What'd you bring me, Uncle Mer?" were her first words. Rodney pulled a toy from his coat and handed it over. He'd found it at the airport, but Madison didn't need to know that. She squealed over it, at least.

"You shouldn't have," Jeannie told him. "It only encourages her."

"I want her to like me," Rodney said. "I'm not above bribery, so...this seemed like the easiest way."

Jeannie gave him a jaundiced look. Rodney returned it.

"Besides," he told her, "this is my way of getting back at you for telling her to call me Uncle Mer."

"Meredith's your name," Jeannie replied.

"Jeannetta Stephanie."

She grimaced.

"So how was piano practice?" Rodney asked Madison.

"Great! I can show you," she replied. She caught Rodney's hand and tugged at it. "Come on. My keyboard's in my room."

Half way there, she proved she'd been listening before. "Is Mum's name really Jeanetta Stephanie?"

"Yes," Rodney told her. "It's actually Jeanetta Stephanie Ingram McKay...Miller. But you should probably only mention the first two."

"Okay."

Madison played for him, her lips pursed in concentration, blowing blond hair out of her eyes but never stumbling once and Rodney found himself holding his breath. Definitely a piano, he decided. She needed a real instrument that she could feel rather than the electronic keyboard. But even with it, her talent came through and something he realized he had had himself once, too: feeling. His teacher had been an idiot; he'd have to make sure whoever Jeannie had teaching Madison didn't stifle her. The piece she used wasn't complicated, but it didn't matter.

"Mum says you used to play."

Rodney flexed his fingers, wishing for a moment to retrieve when they'd moved over ivory keys with the certainty he reserved for a different keyboard now. "A long time ago," he told Madison. "You're going to be better than I ever could have been."

Dinner was easier without needing to talk around what he did and where and Kaleb managed to even ask questions that weren't completely stupid. Certainly no worse than the IOA had asked. Rodney talked a lot about John and Ronon and Teyla. Kaleb told him about the professor who had been forced out, despite tenure, when he wouldn't amend his syllabus to include the new science available since Disclosure.

"Insisted wormholes were an impossibility. The students started calling him Professor Flat Earth," Kaleb said.

"That wasn't Cranston, was it?" Rodney asked idly.

Kaleb nodded.

"His syllabus was out of date twenty years ago," Rodney said.

But Cranston wasn't the only one out of a job because of the changes brought on by Disclosure. Three ZPMs were lighting up most of North America. Seven different nuclear power plants had been shut down. Cheap, clean power apparently came with a price.

He stayed a week and ordered the piano on the last day, to be delivered after he left for Colorado, after spending a day determining which would be best for Madison and actually fit in the Miller house. He wasn't foolish enough to present them with a grand piano, though he imagined the day Madison would play one would come.

It turned out there were benefits to being the least attractive member of his team and Margo's cutting him off from on-camera interviews before. Very few people recognized him, not even in the supermarket when he stocked up on Doritos and bean dip and found himself staring in horror at a copy of the National Enquirer that had a picture of him kissing what was supposed, he thought, to be a whale, captioned Forbidden Desires of the Stargate.

"That's just wrong," he muttered to himself and was glad John wasn't there to laugh at it and him.

He doubted even John would have laughed at the insanity that over took Denver International Airport on the day Rodney flew into Concourse A. He disliked DIA anyway; the ridiculous white tension fabric roof with its tented peaks reminded him of whipped meringue and the murals were freaky.

A special variety of loony had congregated at the airport this time, drawn by conspiracy theories that the world was ending in 2012, or something like that, Rodney couldn't make sense of the shouting, but they believed a secret base was built under the airport and were demanding entrance. He caught sight of a banner proclaiming Escape the Fifth Sun and realized he did not want anyone to recognize him and gave up on catching a connecting flight to Colorado Springs. Getting out of the Great Hall, the airport and Denver became his only goal.

The twenty-five mile drive into Denver left him sweating and swearing. Either side of the road held crowds of Fundamentalists demonstrating against Danielites, who were gathered under the impression Jackson would be arriving sometime that day. They mostly shouted and shook their signs at each other, but at one point the Fundies poured across the pavement in a tide of bodies, attacking the Danielites in a riot that swept up cars trying to drive through and left them toppled and or nose down in the ditches, and in one case, burning. Helicopters swarmed overhead, loudspeakers blaring, and Rodney wondered what would happen if someone saw his face and knew it. When the worst of the violence had drifted off the road he inched his rented hybrid forward until clear tarmac let him hit the gas.

"Never again," he swore to himself as he came up on a road block. "Never. This is what transport beams are for. I've saved the damned planet at least once."

Twenty-minutes later, he handed over his ID to an officer. By then he'd already sketched out a global satellite array that would coordinate beaming from set locations and spot transports using transmitter/credit cards that could be carried in a wallet. Beaming from country to country could be handled with customs hubs.

The police officer looked at the SGC identification and then at Rodney. "You headed for Alien Row?"

"I'm headed for Colorado Springs," Rodney replied. "What the hell is Alien Row?"

"They're setting up embassies for the aliens here," the cop said. He handed the ID back. "I figured if you worked at the Mountain..."

"Perfect," Rodney muttered as he shoved his wallet back into his jacket. "I work in another galaxy. No one mentioned Earth had gone insane while I was gone."

The cop smiled cynically. "Seems about the same as always to me, sir."

Rodney snorted. "Sadly, I believe you're right."

He didn't forget the global transport idea though. It would require a ZPM to run efficiently, but it could be done with a network of Mark VII naquadria generators. He'd seen the specs in the last databurst. If the SGC would share profits, enough venture capitol could be brought in to build it without any government funds involved. He even knew the people to contact.

He spent the night at his apartment, sniffing at musty sheets and checking the use by dates on the canned goods still in his cupboards. Chef Boyardee out of can seemed preferable to dragging himself out to a restaurant or even a fast food drive through.

The Mountain waited the next morning. Sam was offworld again. Rodney spent twenty minutes getting cleared to go down to the lab level, retrieved his laptop with his real work on it from the safe, then had to lock it up again before going to the mess hall on Level 22 to buy coffee and pastries. Running his credit card through the reader, he felt peeved all over again. The SGC made all civilians pay for any meals they took in the mess halls. He didn't understand exactly how it worked for the military, only that as an officer, John paid and received some kind of meal allotment in his pay, while the enlisted people operated on another format. Rodney didn't actually care, he just felt he shouldn't have to pay for the food since working in the Mountain meant he couldn't go get something and security discouraged routinely bringing foodstuffs in or much of anything else.

He supposed they were afraid someone would smuggle in a bomb disguised as a corned beef on rye.

Kavanagh was in the lab when Rodney arrived back, defiantly carrying two muffins and a ham sandwich with him. He manfully resisted the urge to ask if Kavanagh had self-destructed any more multi-billion dollar installations lately, retrieved his laptop again feeling relieved that it hadn't been out where Kavanagh could try to sneak a look at Rodney's work, and began accessing the portions of the Asgard database that might be useful. Kavanagh glared at him and muttered, but stayed on the other side of the lab. Rodney considered that the next thing to a best case scenario.

The itchy feeling of being stared at finally became too much, though.

"What?" Rodney snapped at him. "Why are you even still employed by the SGC, anyway?"

Kavanagh looked sickeningly smug. "They're afraid I'll sue. Even if I lost, the publicity would hurt their precious noble alien allies spin, not to mention all the other dirt I have on the Atlantis expedition."

Rodney gazed at him until Kavanagh blinked first.

"The phrase sour grapes springs to mind," he said at last.

"Well, I wouldn't want to be you," Kavanagh taunted.

"If you weren't too lazy to use the brain you have, you might actually approach Lee's level. Not mine or Sam's or Zelenka's, but still, you could have an impressive body of work," Rodney told him. "If you'd actually work, instead of complaining about the people that do."

He bent back over his laptop ostentatiously.

"No, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes, or even Carter's," Kavanagh said. Then, sounding much more serious, he added, "You should see this."

"See what?" Rodney asked. Irritated, he left his lab bench and stalked over to Kavanagh's. He bent and read the screen Kavanagh had on display. "Pure People dot com? What the..."

The screen held two lists, with several familiar names topping them. Under Impure the site listed General Jonathan O'Neill and Lt. Colonel John Sheppard, followed by others who had become known to the press as ATA positives. Lorne's name was there, along with Carson's. Next to the impure, a second column listed more names: the Tainted. At the very top, Dr. M. Rodney McKay, the recipient of the ATA gene therapy.

Some of the names had addresses appended to them.

Not his, he noted gratefully.

"Where the hell do they get this information?" Rodney demanded.

Kavanagh shrugged. "You'd be surprised how many Pure sympathizers there are in the government. Even the SGC." He smirked at Rodney. "Of course, some of them just don't like Sheppard."

"Well thanks so much for the completely useless heads up," Rodney told him and went back to his own side of the lab.

Deprived of whatever scene he'd hoped to provoke, Kavanagh futzed over his own work for half an hour, then left. Rodney kept working, only vaguely noting the shiver through the concrete that heralded an incoming wormhole. No klaxons or lights cycling red accompanied it, so he assumed it was a scheduled return or check in.

Sam found him still bent over his equations late in the evening. He'd found a stash of granola bars in someone's desk and the lab coffee maker. With those, he'd been able to forgo leaving for any meals. If he was going to be stuck at the Mountain for another three days, he saw no reason not to take advantage. It really would have made more sense to copy the Asgard datacore to Atlantis, but the SGC still didn't have anything efficient enough to contain everything Thor had left for the Tau'ri before the Asgard succumbed.

"McKay," she said.

"What?"

"You need to go home and get some sleep."

He snorted. "I've only been here since six. You know I've worked much longer than that."

"When you had to," Sam pointed out. "This isn't an emergency."

"There's nothing else for me to do here," he complained. "I don't understand why I haven't been sent back to Atlantis by now. You know how many things can go wrong in three days?"

"Rodney."

He looked up at the stern tone of her voice. She had been his boss for some time, after all. "What?" He narrowed his eyes at her amused expression.

"Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard and your team are coming back from Atlantis tomorrow."

"What? What's wrong? What's going on?" Rodney demanded.

"Nothing's wrong," Sam told him. "The Air Force is promoting John to full colonel."

Rodney slumped down in his chair in relief. Then he frowned. "Doesn't he need to be, I don't know," he waved his hand loosely, "a not full colonel for more years or something? Time in grade? He told me once, but I wasn't listening."

"Yes, but he has the minimum twenty years of service," Sam agreed, "and the President is awarding him a medal. And you too."

"Really?"

"You're not supposed to know, so act surprised when Landry calls you in tomorrow," Sam said. "The Air Force has decided to bend the rules to please the President in the hopes they'll retain control of the program and promoting John to colonel is an easy concession, since he's already doing the duties of one."

"I suppose I'll have to wear a suit again," Rodney muttered.

"It might be a good idea." Sam patted his shoulder. "The Prometheus III is going to beam us all to the White House for the ceremony, three days from now."

"Thank God for that," he said. "I'm never stepping foot in another airport so long as I live. Which reminds me. I want you to look at this proposal I've worked out. I think we're all going to be very rich."




John tugged the herringbone tie currently strangling him loose. He preferred it to the bow tie of the mess dress uniform, but only just. God, what a surreal day it had turned out to be. Though he had to give the IOA and the SGC credit for a canny plan, choosing the first anniversary of Disclosure Day to make their announcements and distracting the media with award and promotion ceremonies.

The morning databurst from Earth three days before had included a video feed from the SGC: Landry frowning at John and telling him that he, Ronon and Teyla were to report to the SGC immediately after the end of their transmission. "You'll be briefed after you arrive."

All John could think was that something had happened to Rodney. Landry terminated the connection before he could ask, though.

Forty-eight hours of quarantine later, he still hadn't had a clue what the SGC had brought them to Earth for, though he did at least know Rodney was all right and possibly plotting the economic takeover of the planet along with Carter. There had been a confusing conversation over the intercom involving the Asgard and Rodney declaring, "You have money. I need it. I'm going to put the airlines out of business," making John wonder if Rodney had been reading Spider Robinson again.

He took advantage of the break from Atlantis and slept a lot.

Margo had arrived that morning, along with an assistant, a tailor and a seamstress to put the finishing touches on the outfits she also brought: dress uniform for John, Vera Wang for Teyla, an Italian suit for Ronon. She handed John the credit card he'd left with her during the previous Earthside visit.

"Armani?" John asked her with a nod toward Ronon.

Margo smiled with a touch of real humor. "You have the money and they have the looks. Why not?"

"Mmm. McKay?" he asked. Margo and McKay were white phosphorus and oxygen. He imagined she might have dressed him in a clown suit.

"I made the same arrangements for him. He won't embarrass you."

John opened his mouth to deny that Rodney would ever embarrass him, but couldn't. Rodney had, sometimes still did, and probably always would on occasion. It didn't matter, because he was worth it.

Margo opened her bag and brought out a set of keys and small folder.

"You'll want to change the alarm code, but everything's there: electricity, Internet, security, furniture," she said. "The SUV's in the garage, the keys are in it. You'll have to find a cleaning service, but the kitchen's stocked."

John hefted the keys. "Where is it?" He hadn't thought much about asking Margo to arrange a place for him to live that had room to put up the rest of the team if they were on Earth after heading back to Atlantis. Apparently, she had done it, though.

"The address is in there with the paperwork. It's one of the better neighborhoods."

John flipped open the folder and lifted both eyebrows at the address. Better neighborhoods translated as most expensive in Margo speak. She was right though, he could afford it and he preferred a place that hadn't been arranged through or paid for by the SGC.

"Okay, thanks."

Margo reached up and straightened his tie, tightening it as Rodney barged into the VIP suite. John saw him come to a stop from the corner of one eye.

"Are you ready?" was all Rodney asked, though.

John stepped away from Margo, Margo checked her watch, and the moment faded. "I deeply dislike these shoes," Teyla complained as they joined SG-1, all also in dress uniform or the civilian equivalent. Teal'c cut quite a figure in a suit; someone had spent more than the minimum for both him and Vala.

"They're good for driving into feet," Vala commented.

"They are meant to cripple anyone wearing them," Teyla replied.

General Landry was in dress uniform too as his aide waved them into the office.

"Ladies, gentlemen," he said. "In case you hadn't noticed, today is the first anniversary of Disclosure Day. To celebrate that and honor your service, you are to attend an award ceremony at the White House. Several important announcements will be made regarding the future of the Stargate Program, after which the President herself will present each of you with a token of our country's esteem." He smiled. "I could tell you what that will be, but I believe the President wishes to surprise you."

"Today, sir?" Mitchell asked. "We're kind of in the wrong spot — "

An Asgard beam swept over them in a flare of white that resolved everyone in the office, including Margo and Landry's aide, onto a dais in the White House Rose Garden.

" — or not," Mitchell finished.

John recognized the General of the Air Force, along with the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Speaker of the House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a half dozen others including Coolidge from the IOA, and finally General O'Neill. O'Neill's vaguely sour expression might have related to his relegation to the brass side of the divide or just dislike of ceremony entirely. Then he and the others were directed to join O'Neill and the day went from mysterious and worrisome to surreal.

Cameras recorded the entire thing and he knew he would have to watch it one day, since his own memory was a blur. He would always remember the slight but straight figure of President Abigail Farnham placing her hands on Teyla's shoulders and bowing her head to meet Teyla's or the way Teal'c bowed deeply to let the President place the ribbon holding the US's highest honor around his neck. He didn't remember what he said to the President, only her amused advice as she patted his medals. "Don't faint, Colonel," she said as she unpinned his silver oak leaves and replaced them with silver eagles.

He caught a glimpse of Rodney and Carter smirking at each other.

O'Neill received a third star.

The President addressed the press corps afterward. "Today is the anniversary of a momentous day for our planet. It seemed most proper to honor these men and women who have safeguarded not just the people of the United States, but the population of the entire globe, today with these tokens of the gratitude of our nation. In a few moments, they will leave here to attend several more ceremonies around the globe. I believe Dr. McKay's nation wishes to honor him in particular." She smiled and Rodney straightened up, eyes going round. "And that is proper too, as the United States has not operated the Stargate Program alone and only the contributions of many others have made our successes possible."

Abigail Farnham straightened.

"Today is also the proper day to tell you all that a new organization will assume control of the Stargate Program in the next year. The United Nations of Earth Council will operate all stargate and space force missions, supported and funded by the nations of the globe, drawing its personnel as well from all over the world. It will act as a diplomatic entity in the Milky Way and Pegasus Galaxies and anywhere else the Tau'ri venture, speaking for all of Earth."

"Oh, boy," John heard Mitchell mutter under his breath and agreed as the press exploded into questions.

An hour later, the Governor General of Canada made Rodney a Companion of the Order of Canada, followed by awards to Teyla, Teal'c, Ronon and Vala, and a fulsome speech acknowledging John and the other US military.

John had never seen Rodney rendered speechless by something other than terror.

Jeannie and Kaleb were there for the Canadian ceremony. John managed a moment alone with them. Or rather, Jeannie managed one with him, leaning close and hissing, "Tell my brother that if he ever has a piano delivered to my house again I will strangle him with its wire."

John managed a confused and less than intelligent, "Uh. Sure."

Jeannie laughed at him.

"He gave Madison a piano."

From Canada, they were beamed to Japan, then China, Russia, and west to France and the UK. John lost track of the time, the awards, and everything but his teammates, blinded by camera lights and only half listening to the translators as they stood on podium after podium. There were parties filled with people who wanted to congratulate him, question him, sparkling crystal, bubbling champagne, plates of canapés that would be too expensive even on a planet where more and more people weren't starving to death, women in glittering jewels and formal dresses, a whirl of dances to the tinkle of classical music the same no matter which country they were in, speeches, speeches, speeches. Then a flash of white and they would be beamed to the next reception, crisscrossing the globe, until the voices and faces and places blurred into a bright kaleidoscope.

The final ceremonies were held in Egypt, fireworks bright in the night sky above Giza, and Jackson addressed the crowd in their own language, translators murmuring a beat after his words in English and French.

"If Greece is the birthplace of modern democracy, then here where our ancestors rose up against the Goa'uld and drove Ra from our planet is where we were all freed..."

According to his watch, it was three am in Mountain time, though, when John found Margo and asked, "When can we get the hell out of here?" He was tired of fielding questions about the UNE, the Wraith, Pegasus, and from one Indonesian businessman how much he'd paid for Teyla.

Margo checked her watch, then opened her cellphone and spoke to someone. "Anything else? No? Good, my charges are starting to look a little frazzled."

John figured that meant him. He'd ducked into a washroom at one point with an electric shaver provided by Margo and done something about his five o'clock shadow, but his uniform was losing some of the crispness necessary to present a proper Air Force appearance.

"Where do you want to go?" Margo asked. "I believe you have some kind of three day leave coming."

"Back to the Springs," John said. "I'll get Teyla and Ronon and Rodney."

The Prometheus III beamed them from Egypt to Rodney's apartment in Colorado Springs. The sudden darkness of the closed apartment and its near silence left all four of them blinking, until Rodney clapped his hands, turning on a light next to his sofa.

John suppressed a grin. Of course, Rodney had a clapper.

Ronon grunted and began taking off the ribbons and medals around his neck. He was grumbling in Satedan, a sure sign he disliked something that he knew John wouldn't agree on.

Teyla dropped onto the sofa as ungracefully as John had ever witnessed her. She reached down and took off first one and then the other shoe, then held them up by the backs before her critical gaze, pinched between finger and thumb the way she would have held something disgusting.

Rodney was fingering his award, still looking dazed and amazed.

Teyla dropped the shoes with sharp thump. "I will destroy them in the morning," she announced. She hiked up her skirt enough to free her thighs, then bent one leg and examined her heel. "I have blisters."

"What?" Rodney exclaimed. Teyla extended and rotated her leg, allowing Rodney to examine the blister at the back of her heel. "Ow. I have a first aid kit in the bathroom. Just stay there." He hurried out to fetch what was no doubt the granddaddy of all first aid kits.

John looked at Teyla's heel and winced. "Ouch."

"Stupid," Ronon said.

Teyla pulled off the earrings Margo had provided and massaged her earlobes. John peered at her. "Did you get your ears pierced?" he asked, a little puzzled.

"No," Teyla replied.

She held up one of the earrings and he saw that it had a screw thing on the back that looked like a torture implement. The earring and its mate was dropped rather emphatically onto a pile of physics journals on the side table.

"Horrible things."

Rodney came back with a first aid kit the size of a trunk. "Let me — "

"I can do it myself, Rodney," Teyla told him.

With a sigh, Rodney opened the kit and backed off. Ronon headed into the kitchen. He flicked on a light. John heard him opening cupboards and then water running into a glass at the sink.

He took a deep breath, realized his tie was still snugged to his collar and pulled it loose.

Ronon wandered back out into the living room, carrying a tall glass of water. "Where're we going to sleep?"

Rodney blinked at him. "My bed isn't big enough for all of us," he said.

John felt a stab of disappointment. If they took Ronon and Teyla back to the Mountain, he'd have to go too. It would look too questionable if he stayed with Rodney without them.

Ronon glanced at him and laughed. "Just kidding. I'll sleep on the floor. Teyla can have the couch."

John relaxed a little. "You sure?"

"It's a good couch," Rodney assured Teyla. "I've fallen asleep on it plenty of times...Ah, you might want to check for a corn chip bag under the cushions, though."

Ronon gave John's shoulder a push toward the hallway back to the bedroom. "Go," he said. "I want waffles in the morning, though, if you two get loud."

Rodney flushed bright red, his gaze flickering to John's face and away, and John felt the tips of his own ears heat. They never fooled around on offworld missions and Atlantis had excellent sound proofing, so Ronon had no way of knowing whether he and Rodney were usually loud or not. He was just kidding. It still made John squirm inside a little that he and Teyla knew what he and Rodney did together. The sense of shame over what he wanted still lingered sometimes, something he could not rid himself of no matter what he consciously believed.

Hiding it didn't help, either.

Ronon pushed his shoulder again and John stumbled forward a step, then straightened and made himself walk forward without hesitation.

"C'mon, Rodney," he said and his voice didn't crack.

"Good night, John," Teyla called. "Good night, Rodney."

"G'night," Rodney mumbled.

John felt the heat from Rodney's body just a step behind him as he reached the hallway and suddenly his body filled with anticipation, warmth gathering in his belly, his fingers tingling with the prospect of undressing Rodney and relearning his skin. He lengthened his stride and pulled the bedroom door open.

"C'mon, c'mon," he muttered, reaching back for Rodney's wrist and pulling him inside. "I want you right now."

Rodney might have said good, but John couldn't tell, busy kissing him and pushing him back to his bed with the prescription orthopedic mattress and unmade sheets.




John took them by his new condo after the requisite stop at International House of Pancakes to pay Ronon back for a night spent on Rodney's floor, which still beat out a cave in Pegasus Rodney pointed out. None of them managed to enjoy their food. After the waitress recognized them, half the patrons of the IHOP wanted autographs and even the cook came out, insisting on shaking their hands. The manager showed up about the time John was paying for their meal, half-eaten and gone cold, and insisted it was on the house. Annoyed, John didn't bother arguing.

By that time, people were arriving just to gawk, called by customers already inside.

They made their escape through the back door.

The condo either reflected Margo's taste or what she thought would make John look good. Black leather, track lighting, stainless steel, and shining hardwood floors, with every technological gadget available, including a HD plasma screen that took up an entire wall.

Rodney sniggered. "It's the bachelor's pad to out do every other one in the history of single colonels," he crowed.

Ronon headed for the kitchen and opened the stainless steel refrigerator. "You've got food. And beer."

"We should order pizza," Rodney declared.

Teyla kicked off her shoes again and wandered through the rooms. When she'd finished her inspection, she returned to the living room and raised her eyebrows at John.

"What?" he said defensively.

"It resembles the hallucination you shared with me on M5S-224," she told him with a wicked smile.

John narrowed his eyes at her. "You didn't complain about the high heels then, I remember."

Teyla cocked her head in consideration. "I believe that is because neither you nor the mist people were aware of their discomfort. It was your hallucination, after all."

His hallucination, complete with dead comrades, old school teachers, and girls who wouldn't date him. John resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He had to admit the aliens had pulled the idea of it from his memories, but that hadn't meant he'd ever lived some place like that.

Rodney already had his phone out and was calling in a pizza order.

"We've got three days until Margo shoves us out onto the interview tour according to Sam," he said. He caught John's hand and they ended up on one of the massive couches, John leaning into Rodney, Teyla tucked against his side with her legs stretched out, and Ronon sprawling all over the other couch.

"It's good," Ronon declared. The couch extended a foot beyond his feet.

They ate pizza, drank beer, and watched movies Rodney downloaded. John carefully didn't ask whether they were legal downloads or not. He just sat back, thankful for anything that let them ignore the blitz of news channels and infotainment shows focusing on their team and SG-1.

"You should bring Tanaan here," John said.

He waved toward the four bedrooms. "There's room for him."

Teyla looked thoughtful.

"Perhaps, if we are to remain here for some time," she ventured. "I do miss him and though Atlantis is lovely, Earth is remarkable as well. There is nowhere in Pegasus where he could encounter a world so filled with people and technology both."

"You'll probably want to send him to school here," Rodney said.

Teyla gave him a very neutral look, the one John knew meant she was not saying something.

"Perhaps."

"Worlds are going to start building up again with the Wraith gone," Ronon remarked.

Rodney wiggled deeper into the cushiony couch, causing John to slide down too, so that he ended with his head resting on Rodney's chest. Touching Rodney in front of Teyla and Ronon, showing this part of themselves to them, had made him stiffen up for the first half hour, but then it had suddenly become wonderfully easy. Easy enough a little part of him ached that they wouldn't be able to do the same anywhere else, not even Atlantis. He listened to Rodney's heartbeat beneath his ear and decided to take what he could get.

"It'll be fast too," Rodney agreed. "No one will have to waste time convincing others something is even possible. They'll just go to work and build it."

John smiled at the way Rodney's words rumbled in his chest when he spoke.

"Of course, that's true here now too," Rodney went on. "The possibilities are amazing." He patted John's head. "Did you know I'm going to make you all rich?"

"I consider myself rich already," Teyla said. "I have my life, my child, my family and friends. I have seen the defeat of the Wraith. It is much, much more than I once imagined."

Rodney remained quiet for a long moment. "I know."

John patted his knee. "Money's nice too."

"Things," Ronon dismissed.

"Like that custom couch you're almost making love to," Rodney pointed out.

John turned his head and caught Ronon snatching his hand away from where he'd obviously been petting the leather. "Some good things," Ronon admitted, sheepishly, and Teyla laughed long and delightedly, Rodney and John joining her.

Day two of leave, John and Rodney went back to Rodney's apartment and left Teyla and Ronon at the condo. Despite the size of the king bed in the master bedroom, Rodney preferred his cramped and ratty apartment.

"I know where everything is there, like the lube and condoms, which this place distinctly lacks," he insisted. "Besides, I keep imagining Margo popping in."

"You think everybody wants in my pants," John pointed out, leaning back against the black marble counter in the kitchen.

Rodney eyed him, but said, "Actually, I'm pretty sure she wants in your bank account."

"Is that all?"

"You know she decorated it to compliment her looks."

"You're actually wasting brain cells on my condo's decor?" John asked in amusement.

Rodney looked shifty. "I don't feel comfortable here."

"It's just new," John said. The condo was cold, but it hadn't been lived in. Besides, it wasn't Atlantis. Nothing was going to feel completely right after Atlantis. "Fine, we'll go to your place."

"Good. I want you to fuck me."

John sucked in a harsh breath, his whole body tightening with want. "Christ, Rodney," he rasped out. They almost never did that in Atlantis. Condoms and lube were hard to get and the medical exams before and after each mission were unpleasantly thorough. Enemas tended to make John cramp and Rodney couldn't get past the eww factor so there had to be condoms, but even then, John didn't enjoy the soreness the next day, because he wasn't about to ask Ronon or Teyla to go easy on him because his ass hurt. And Rodney just didn't do anything that John wasn't willing to reciprocate. They got along pretty well without anal sex, but once in a while...He wanted inside Rodney so bad his breath sawed out in a wheeze. "Jesus. Let's go."

Rodney had the gall to laugh at him.

They headed for the door. John yelled, "Hey, we're going back to Rodney's for the rest of the day. Just hang out here, unless you want to head back to the Mountain. Call if you're going to do that."

He did his best to fuck Rodney right through his damned prescription mattress.

Day three, Margo did pop in, though she called first. She had wardrobes for all of them and an itinerary that made John wince.

"I'd leave you out of it if only I could," Margo told Rodney.

"I'd leave you outside an airlock if only I could," Rodney replied.

Teyla looked at the shoes Margo had brought for her. "No."

"What do you mean, no?" Margo demanded.

"No," Teyla replied. "As Rodney could explain, it is a simple negative conveying my refusal to torture my feet again. I will not wear these or the ear jewelry."

"You have to — "

Teyla looked at Margo. "I do not."

Margo swallowed. "Oh, fine. We'll have to find something that doesn't make the outfits look ridiculous. Thank God, most of the interviews will have the cameras focused on your face. Well? Come on, we have to shop." She glanced at her watch. "I don't know why you have be so uncooperative. Mal Doran doesn't give Harry this much trouble."

Teyla smiled a tight, unfriendly smile at her. "No doubt."

"Ronon, you want to go with them?" John asked.

Ronon lifted an eyebrow at him. "No."

"Ronon," Teyla said.

"I remember New York," he said simply.

"You're getting soft, Ronon Dex," Teyla told him and left with Margo.

"You know what's frightening?" Rodney remarked after they'd gone.

John retrieved the remote from Ronon and found a college football game. "No, what?"

"What if those two ever join forces?"

"Never happen," John said, but he shuddered at the potential for evil embodied by an alliance between Margo and Teyla.





Vala adored LA. No surprise there for anyone who knew her. In contrast, Teyla took one look at the city's smog tainted expanse and declared it, "Obscene." No amount of subtle or even blatant questioning elicited why New York was acceptable and Los Angeles was not.

SG-1 were more familiar with the publicity round than John's team. The SGC trotted them out like any other dog-and-pony show between offworld missions, with the exception of O'Neill, who even without the third star, had been too high ranking to be pushed into anything he didn't want. Everyone agreed he was too cranky and sarcastic to make a good impression on the public at large anyway.

John took one look at the set up for the combined team interview they were to do with a gathering of journalists and groaned.

"It looks like a presidential debate," Mitchell commented.

"Or one of those town hall meetings," John agreed.

Daniel began telling them the history of town hall meetings, but even he fell silent when the make-up people arrived. Then they were ushered out onto the stage and the blond they'd first met months ago was addressing the camera's red light. "Hello, I'm Julia Donovan of Inside Access and I'll be moderating tonight. You all know the members of SG-1 and AR-1 by now, at least on the surface. I hope before we're done here, we'll all know them a little better."

They were all seated in extra high director's chairs. Vala, who was wearing high boots and a much shorter than regulation skirt, was swinging her legs and looking around, obviously bored already. Ronon looked ready to go to sleep, an illusion John knew could dissolve in a whirlwind of action in the face of any threat.

Teyla had succeeded against Margo. No surprise there. She sat next to John in a pants suit and low-heeled boots, leaning slightly to the side to speak past Mitchell in a low voice to Teal'c. Rodney was scowling because he hadn't been allowed to bring even a tablet out onto the stage with him. John caught his gaze and mouthed Try to be polite.

Rodney hitched his chin up.

The questions came fast, but Donovan kept moving from reporter to reporter, moving the focus from one of them to the next smoothly, so that no one was hammered for too long. John almost relaxed.

One of the network reporters asked, "No one's told us much about the UNE. How will it affect you and the Stargate Program?"

"Ooh, good one," Vala exclaimed. She grinned at John, Carter and Mitchell. "No one tells me anything either."

"That's because we don't want to ruin the surprise," Mitchell told her.

Vala pouted.

John looked at Carter. Carter pursed her lips. Mitchell gave out a dramatic sigh. "Fine, I'll field this one."

"You are in charge, " Carter told him sweetly.

Mitchell smiled at the reporter and the camera equally, all corn-fed Kansas earnestness. "The truth is, we really don't know much more than you what the UNE will do. Keep running the Stargate Program, but maybe restructure it. The Air Force and the Marines have supplied personnel and equipment since the beginning, including the base where the Stargate is secured. Maybe that'll change. Most I can say is I'm going to be part of it as long as I can. Ain't nothing that beats going through the stargate."

He glanced at John. "Unless you're Sheppard over there and get to pilot a city through hyperspace."

Donovan turned to John. "What is that like, Colonel Sheppard?"

John grinned at Mitchell. "Amazing. Exhausting." He added a smirk meant for Rodney and Carter. "Landing's the hard part."

The guy from CNN, John had already forgotten his name, asked, "My question is for Mr. Dex and Ms. Emmagan. Will you continue consulting with the Program if Colonel Sheppard is reassigned as a product of the UNE's changes?"

John sat up straight and saw Rodney lean forward, both of them intent.

Teyla answered first. "I believe I would continue consulting, but not as a member of a field team." She smiled beautifully. "I am spoilt, you see, by working with John and Rodney. Atlantis has become my home, as well, so I would wish to continue working there."

"Mr. Dex?"

Ronon's shoulders rolled in a heavy shrug. "I could work with Lorne, if I had to." He glanced at John. "I wouldn't walk out on Atlantis if Sheppard got killed. There'd still be the rest of the team." John read the quiet message in Ronon's eyes, though: Ronon could work with Lorne, but he wouldn't for long and only for Rodney and Teyla's sakes. "Wouldn't like it much, though."

"It's hard integrating into a new team after years of working together," Carter commented. "We've all been on missions with other teams or as supernumeraries where one of us had a specific skill necessary while the rest of our team stayed behind, though. We're all pretty adaptable at the SGC."

Another reporter stood up.

"Norton Glenn here, World Watch Weekly." He had a tape recorder in one hand, an eroding hairline, and something fervent in his expression and tone. "Ms. Emmagan mentions Atlantis as her home. But she's actually from Athos, isn't it?"

"Yes," Teyla replied.

"Where the people had been reduced to a primitive, nomadic way of life before the arrival of the Atlantis Expedition in Pegasus."

"My people are traders," Teyla said.

"Mr. Glenn, if you could get to your point?" Donovan prompted him.

Glenn smiled and said, "Of course, of course," in an oily voice. He faced Teyla again. "My question is: do you deny you slept with then Major Sheppard in order to live in Atlantis and that your son, one Kanaan Emmagan, is actually the Colonel's bastard?"

Ronon glared at Glenn, but kept his temper better than Mitchell, who came out of his seat, fists clenched and furious. "You don't talk to a lady like that," he snapped.

John just leaned back, shaking his head, confident that Teyla could handle herself. Rodney had turned to Donovan and asked loudly, "Didn't you screen for crazies?"

"Mr. Glenn, that question is inappropriate," Donovan snapped.

"Colonel Mitchell," Teyla said. She reached forward and caught his arm, drawing him back to his seat next to her. "Thank you, Ms. Donovan, but I have no objection to answering Mr. Glenn's question." She leveled her gaze at the reporter. "My son's name is Tanaan Emmagan. He is not a bastard. He is Athosian, as his father was. His father was Kanaan, who was taken, experimented on by a renegade Wraith, and died as a result." Her voice grew harder as she continued. "I have never been intimate with Colonel Sheppard. Are you satisfied?"

"You know," Rodney said, in his best bright and sarcastic tones, "I'm kind of insulted you didn't ask if Teyla had slept with me. I'm just as important in Atlantis as Sheppard is. Or, hey, why not ask if Ronon slept with someone so he could come live in the City of the Ancestors? Or maybe Teal'c seduced General O'Neill. Love at first sight. Or is that lust?" He snapped his fingers and then pointed at Carter. "Or Sam here. It's an open secret she had a torrid affair with Thor."

"Rodney!" Carter exclaimed, choking and laughing at the same time.

Several of the reporters had begun to titter at Glenn's suddenly red face.

"No, really," Rodney went on, "It's time the truth came out. The world needs to know about the giant orgy we have in front of the Stargate every Wednesday. Opening wormholes between planets doesn't actually cost that much, most of the budget actually goes to buying condoms and lube."

John began snickering helplessly. The rest of the reporters were laughing now too.

Jackson gave Carter a soulful look. "Sam! You never told me. You and Thor. Wow. I don't know how I missed that."

Vala bounced a little in her seat and spoke up. "It's true, of course. Why, the first time I saw Daniel, I — "

"Vala!" Daniel interrupted.

She batted her eyelashes. "Oh, Daniel, don't worry. My heart belongs to Sergeant Harriman now. Why, the way he makes my chevrons light up...and Dr. Lam..." She gave the reporters a coy look. "Do you know the things she can do with her hands are illegal in five different star systems?"

"Vala," Mitchell hissed at her.

She raised her eyebrows at him. "Of course, there's always one spoil sport. Some people, despite their predilections to losing their pants, are terrible disappointments."

Mitchell went red and began to sputter, just as Teal'c weighed in, inclining his head and declaring, "Indeed," the curve of his mouth betraying his own amusement.

John laughed so hard he thought he would cry and even Ronon burst out laughing.

"In the gate room?" Ronon demanded of Rodney.

"Oh, hell, yes, haven't you seen the tabloids?"

Ronon looked at John. "Can we go to work at the SGC instead of Atlantis?"

Glenn stomped out of the studio in a fury.

The next question returned to the subject of the UNE and what would come next for all of them, then a woman reporter in the back asked, "Tell us about Elizabeth Weir."

John had to shut his eyes for a moment, then he met Rodney's gaze and nodded. "Rodney knew her first, so he should begin."

Rodney nodded back.

"I wrote a book about her once..."





A week and a half into the goddamned publicity tour Landry had stuck them with as part of some sadistic power trip, Teyla called it quits. She'd had enough of city after city, cameras, too many people, the constant presence of Homeworld Security agents 'guarding' them, and the endless innuendos as more reporters picked up Glenn's stupid rumor.

"Tanaan's birthday is in a week," she told John as she packed a bag.

"We could all go back to Atlantis," he offered.

Teyla paused with several folded blouses in her hands and stared at him. "How will you do that, John? Will you ask General Landry to cancel Margo's plans for you and the others so that you can return to Atlantis to celebrate a three year old's birthday? That will certainly convince everyone you are not his father."

"I don't care what idiots think," he insisted.

She set the blouses in her case. "I resent the slight to Kanaan, frankly."

John sucked in a breath. He hadn't thought of it that way, too focused on the insult to Teyla.

"He was a good man," she said. She closed her eyes and breathed in, then out, holding still as she gathered calm around her. When her eyes opened again, Teyla smiled at him. "Not that you aren't a good man, John."

"Thanks." Next to Rodney, Teyla knew him better than anyone alive. Her approval eased insecurities he'd never been aware of even having before they'd met.

"But you are not mine."

"No."

Afternoon sun splashed through the hotel room window, bright over a white duvet on the bed. It sparked red and gold highlights in her bronze hair, where it had pulled loose from the ponytail she preferred over other hair styles.

"So, you're going back to Atlantis?" he asked. "You could stay at my place..."

Teyla sighed. "John..."

"Send for Tanaan. We — I could at least get time off to fly back for his birthday."

"I will speak with General Landry," she said at last. She didn't sound hopeful. Landry's subtly patronizing attitude toward women had been the subject of a lively gripe fest between Vala, Teyla and Sam that John suspected he hadn't been meant to overhear.

She closed the suitcase. "I will stay if Tanaan may come here, but if not...I have been away from him for too long, too often."

John nodded, his throat too tight to force out any words.

Ronon went with Teyla and Teal'c left as well, summoned back to Chulak, where the Jaffa were rebuilding. Rodney prevailed on Margo to release him from the rounds, as well, and disappeared into the labs beneath the Mountain.

John tried to convince Landry he and Rodney were needed back in Atlantis, but failed. The Asurans were gone, the Genii quiet, and no Wraith had been tracked near an inhabited planet in months. Lorne, Keller and Zelenka appeared to have everything under control. The good publicity John, Cam, Sam, Vala and Daniel were garnering for the Air Force and the Program was too valuable in the face of the latest political rumblings: Neo-Isolationists who wanted the Program scrapped.

"It isn't going to happen," Landry said over the video phone connection. "But the less political capitol President Farnham has to spend fighting them, the more she has to push through acceptance of the United Nations of Earth Council charter without too much crap attached."

"Yes sir," John replied.

"Anything else, Colonel?" Landry asked impatiently.

"Yes sir. If you could approve Tanaan coming here?"

He watched Landry's image frown and knew the answer would be no. Even when there was no reason to refuse, Landry would.

"I'd like to be able to tell the next interviewer that asks where Teyla is that she's spending time with her son and not that red tape made her miss his birthday," John said.

"Some day, Colonel Sheppard, you will go too far," Landry said.

"Probably, sir," John agreed.

Landry cut the connection, but John felt satisfied Tanaan would spend his third birthday on Earth.

"You're going to give the General an ulcer," Cam observed from behind and a little to the side of John.

They were sharing a hotel room thanks to SGC budget cuts. John wasn't as comfortable waving money around as Rodney, because it often translated into someone thinking he would do the same with Sheppard Industries clout, back when his father had been alive. Besides, Cam wasn't a bad roommate. Sam and Vala were sharing too, though in their case it was to keep a closer eye on Vala.

Daniel was the only one who had a private room.

John just shrugged.

"Want to come get some dinner with the rest of us?" Cam asked. He fished through the closet and pulled out a beat-up leather jacket and a hat.

John checked his messages and shook his head. He wanted to call Rodney and tell him to go by the condo and check on Teyla and Ronon.

"Okay, don't say you weren't invited," Cam said on his way out.

John sat down on his bed and hit Rodney's number on speed-dial, waiting for his call to go through. He waved as Cam went out the door. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do," he called.

"That doesn't contraindicate a major number of actions," Rodney said waspishly from his phone.

"Hey, good, I got a hold of you," John said, letting himself smile as he laid back on the bed and listened to Rodney complain.





Rodney didn't know how John got Landry to okay Tanaan coming to Earth. Whatever it had been it wouldn't have been enough to change how things turned out the week after they celebrated Tanaan's birthday.

At first, they'd figured to just get a cake and the four of them would give Tanaan gifts and that would be it. Athosians didn't make a big ceremony over birthdays. Then apparently Cameron Mitchell heard John talking about it on the phone with Rodney and it ballooned from there. A surprising number of people knew Teyla at the SGC by now and a lot of them wanted to meet her son. Tanaan's birthday had morphed into a SGC party held at John's condo.

Before Rodney could point out the carved wooden rocking horse Mitchell brought was second hand, Teyla had been cooing over it, drawing Mitchell into admitting it had been carved by his great great granddaddy and passed down. Despite the paint half worn away on its red saddle and white mane, it did add something to the condo's decor. So did the balls, pictures done with finger paints, and the other toys, including the souped up baby's first computer Rodney bought for Tanaan. It paid to watch where you were walking however.

Teal'c brought a handmade puzzle from Chulak, a traditional toy given to young Jaffa.

Vala's present made everyone who had ever been on a gate team laugh: she presented Teyla with set of ceramic lock picks in a diaper.

"Not that I've ever borrowed a baby or anything," she said blithely, "but no matter how thoroughly the guards may search you? They never check in a diaper."

"Tanaan's already potty trained," Rodney had pointed out. He thought Tanaan was anyway. He tried to stay as far away from the whole diaper changing business as possible. He was easily nauseated and had a very sympathetic vomit reflex. His grasp of what a three year old should be achieving was slightly slippery too. In any case, he felt sure any child of Teyla's would be ahead of the curve anyway.

Vala grinned. "Then it's time to teach him to use them himself!"

The memory of the party segued into the days afterward as he drove down the Mountain to the Colorado Springs Police Department headquarters, forcing himself to slow down every time he realized he was exceeding the speed limit again.

Teyla and Ronon had agreed to stay at John's condo afterward, with the promise that Rodney would go by every day, even if he stayed at his own apartment. The SGC had swept John and most of SG-1 back onto the road. He had thought everything was fine until the evening before.

Ronon hadn't had any problem mastering cooking in an Earth kitchen, though some of the ingredients he mixed were bizarre. Teyla stayed out of the kitchen and played with Tanaan. Rodney had eaten at the SGC mess, so he stopped in late. He peered into the room Teyla had taken as her own and smiled at Tanaan, who was asleep in his own bed set up next to hers, then wandered out again. Teyla was tidying and looked tired. Ronon was washing dishes, so eerily domestic Rodney had to start a pot of coffee just to normalize his world. If John had been there, life would have been as perfect as it could be outside Atlantis.

Teyla came into the kitchen as Rodney poured his first cup.

"Rodney," she said as she brushed light fingers over his shoulders in a tactile greeting, "should you be drinking coffee so late?"

"God, tell me you haven't been watching TV and picking up all that crap about caffeine being bad for people?" he responded.

"No, she's just used to you," Ronon commented. He had a dish cloth in hand, carefully drying and polishing a stainless steel pot.

Teyla sighed.

Rodney peered at her, at the tight lines at the corners of her eyes and the hint of frown drawing her brows together.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Nothing."

Ronon muttered something in Satedan, then, "Just tell us." He hung the pot up and folded the dish towel.

Teyla sighed again. "Norton Glenn attempted to interview me today."

"Who?" Rodney asked, confused.

"When?" Ronon demanded. "Where?"

"Norton Glenn, the reporter," Teyla reminded Rodney. "The one who wanted to know if Tanaan is John's — "

"Oh."

Ronon glared at her. "What'd he do?"

"He approached me when I took Tanaan to the park. He followed me and yelled questions, which I did not answer, until I chose to bring Tanaan back here."

"Did he follow you here?" Rodney asked.

She shook her head. "I do not believe he did."

Rodney made a note to himself to find out more about Norton Glenn. He didn't worry too much. This was Earth and Teyla could handle herself against a reporter.

"I'll go with you tomorrow, in case he shows up again," Ronon said.

Like an ostrich with its head firmly in the sand, Rodney thought that would solve any problems.

The phone call that had been relayed to his lab at the SGC had blown that idea into orbit.

Teyla's voice had been tight and flat with worry and other pent-in emotions.

"Rodney, I cannot reach John and Ronon has been arrested."

"He — what?" Rodney sat up and waved two scientists away from him. Without thinking about it, he began shutting down his work. The laptop would go straight to the safe. "What happened? Did he kill someone?"

"No," Teyla said. Her voice dropped in volume and he realized she was talking to someone else. "No, that is not necessary. Yes. It is a scrape, I have endured much worse. Yes. Please, yes, I am trying to explain the situation to my contact now. If you could tell me what the charges are? —Rodney, Ronon has been charged with assault. He broke Norton Glenn's arm, his nose, and cracked two of his ribs."

"Wh—Okay, what did Glenn do?" He closed the laptop and went to the safe, entering his code, then pressing his thumb to the print reader.

"We went to the park with Tanaan. I was with Tanaan at the swings and Ronon was watching some boys play basketball. Glenn showed up again with several others. They were...unpleasant."

Teyla believed in understatement. Rodney knew that meant the scene had probably been very ugly.

"I do not believe they realized Ronon was there."

He shoved the laptop inside, slammed the safe shut, and headed for the door.

"Where are you now?"

"We are all at the police department," Teyla told him. "I am to give a statement."

"Okay, uhm, did they read you your rights?" He didn't actually have any experience with being arrested, damn it. Not that he wanted to have a record, just this was nearly as alien to him as it would be to Teyla and Ronon, and my God, he thought, Tanaan was there. He needed John. They needed John. A ember of anger lit inside him that John was off being the star of the SGC or whatever the hell he was doing instead of being with his team.

"I believe they read Ronon his rights," Teyla said.

"Good, good, then — crap, have you been able to talk to him? If you can talk to him tell him to just not say anything, okay? Not until he has a lawyer. We'll get him a lawyer," Rodney said. He walked out of the lab and past Lee in the corridor, following the green line heading for the elevators. "I'm on my way — "

"Oh, Dr. McKay," Lee greeted him with a smile. "I wanted to discuss the the subspace resonance factor in your calculations for — "

Rodney walked past him. "Not now," he snapped.

He reached the elevator bank and shoved in the key card necessary to call on elevator on Level 19, slapped the up button, then jittered in place, telling Teyla, "The SGC has lawyers. They'll know what to do. I'll call them as soon as you've told me the rest." He still had on a lab coat and patted its pockets only to find nothing. Feeling panicky, he checked his pockets and cursed. No, there, he had the SGC cellphone and his car keys.

The first elevator car only took him as far as Level 11, where everyone had to change cars to proceed upward. Rodney glared at the doors until they opened. He shouldered his way in next to a marine major and two airmen. "God, this is a nightmare," he muttered. The major glared at him and Rodney tried to kill him with his brain and the power of his hate. It didn't completely work but the major did step back far enough for Rodney to slap the button for Level One.

"We going to Accounting on Three — " one of the airmen started.

"I don't care."

He turned his back to them and addressed the cellphone again.

"Teyla? How unpleasant? Was anyone else hurt? Were you — I heard you, a scrape? Is that all? What happened?"

"Tanaan is with me. He is well." He heard Teyla's voice catch and went cold. Had that been a sob?

He braced his free hand against the elevator wall as it rose, nerves shrieking with impatience at the incredible slowness of it compared to an Atlantis transporter. C'mon, faster, faster, damn it! The eternal pessimist inside insisted this would be the moment the entire base went on lockdown if he didn't get to the security checkpoint and out immediately.

"Teyla?"

"Glenn and his fellows attempted restrain me," Teyla said. "I do not know if they meant to harm me there or to remove me from the park. They were not clear." He heard her breathe in deeply, the sound remarkably harsh through the cellphone's speaker. "Tanaan was frightened. I freed myself, of course, but he had run away. I think to find Ronon."

Oh God. A three year old, any three year old, but one with no experience of Earth and its dangers, lost and alone...Rodney's stomach threatened to revolt. There were predators on Earth as horrific in their fashion as the Wraith. Rodney squeezed his eyes shut. Not Tanaan. They'd gone through so much to find Teyla and save Tanaan from Michael's plans.

"Is he okay?" he asked and heard his voice crack. The two airmen exchanged looks and the major frowned. The SGC was a small community, really, and by now they'd recognized Rodney and had to guess something was wrong. "Teyla, tell me he's okay?"

"Yes," she said.

Rodney slumped and forgot to move even as the elevator doors opened.

"He ran into the road — "

"He doesn't know about cars." Atlantis didn't have cars. Neither did New Athos or any of the planets they traded with in Pegasus. Hell, most of those worlds didn't have roads. The first thing kids in Pegasus learned was to stay out of the stargate splash zone when the chevrons lit up. Tanaan knew that. He didn't know about staying out of the road.

"He is all right. Even if I had not reached him," Rodney could hear the horror in her words, "the driver of the car saw him and stopped. Neither of us are hurt. By the time I turned back to the park, Ronon had caught Mr. Glenn."

"And beat the snot out of him," Rodney finished, imagining Ronon's fury. "So, Ronon's okay. He didn't resist arrest and get beaten down or anything?" Stupid question. Teyla would have said, but Ronon was intimidating enough to push some dumb cop into shooting him.

"We are all well."

"I'm calling Lt. Colonel Davis," he said. "He'll know how to handle this. And I'll be there as soon as I can. It'll be okay. You should just keep Ronon calm and keep trying to get through to Sheppard. He's got enough money to bail out anyone."

The major had preceded Rodney out of the elevator and was at the checkpoint, telling the guards there to process Rodney through ASAP. He was already hitting the speed dial to connect to Paul Davis.

"Good luck, sir," one of the airman called as Rodney trotted away.

He gritted his teeth through the whole drive to Colorado Springs.

It didn't matter how much money Sheppard had.

"A flight risk!" Rodney yelled at his cellphone from the police station hours later.

He'd been on the phone all day, finding a lawyer willing to represent a literal alien, browbeating the cops into letting him into a holding cell to talk to Ronon and advise him to stay calm while Rodney and the SGC got him out, and trying futilely to reach John. He'd nearly been arrested himself after Ronon was arraigned and denied bail. He knew beyond any doubt that arraignment had been rushed through faster than would have happened for any normal assault case. It all stank of a set up.

Browbeating did finally get him into see Ronon face to face. Since the officers unlocking the holding cell weren't vibrating with hostility or pissing their pants, he knew Ronon hadn't fought them. Teyla had to have told him to cooperate or he would have.

Once inside, the lock clicked closed behind him, Rodney shivered. The cell was little more than a concrete room with a heavy, orange painted door, no windows, just a ventilation grill in the ceiling between two recessed fluorescent lights that flickered and made everything look sick. A toilet sat in one corner opposite a concrete slab that acted as bench and bed. No bedding. The floor sloped down to a drain in the center of the room and a security/surveillance camera panned back and forth from the upper corner opposite the door.

Ronon had been stripped down to jeans and a thin undershirt. Socks, no shoes, no belt, no knives hidden in the dreadlocks he'd cut off a year or two back.

He crouched tailor fashion on the balls of his feet, arms crossed, back to the wall where he could watch the camera and the door.

"Ronon," Rodney said, though he knew Ronon had seen and recognized him instantly.

Ronon looked at him from beneath his eyebrows, head still tipped down. He didn't move.

"You here to get me out or yell at me?"

Surprised, Rodney asked, "Have I ever yelled at you?"

Ronon snorted.

Rodney coughed, "Okay, fair enough." He glanced around the cell in distaste and then shuffled his feet. Maybe Ronon had chosen his position because he didn't want to touch anything. Minimal contact. Rodney certainly didn't wish to touch anything. He tucked his hands inside his pants pockets just to be sure.

"I can't get you out yet," he said. "I'm working on it."

Ronon's lip curled into a sneer.

"You're being remarkably calm," Rodney said in surprise. He'd expected Ronon to be roaring and slamming his fists against the walls, out of control or already planning his violent escape. "Just don't do anything to add to the charges. No dramatic prison breaks. You'll be out. Soon. I swear." He sucked in a breath and shuffled his feet again. "There's always bail, Sheppard will pay it or I will, you know, and good job, not killing Gleen."

"Glenn."

"Glenn, Flem, who cares," Rodney snapped.

Ronon growled under his breath. "I do."

Rodney twitched, remembering Glenn had surely taken part in the plan to snatch or hurt Teyla. He curled his hands closed and shoved them deeper in his pockets. Anger boiled up behind his clenched teeth and was held tight in his fists; when he swallowed he could taste it, burning metal at the back of his tongue, bile bitter. He flexed his fingers and reminded himself Glenn was in the hospital and hadn't escaped the way the rest of the attackers had.

"Where's Sheppard?"

Ronon managed to sound calmer than Rodney felt.

"I. Don't. Know," Rodney enunciated slowly. "Not answering his cell."

Ronon rolled his shoulders restlessly. The cell smelled like chlorine, layered over fecal matter and vomit.

"Get Teyla and Tanaan out of here," Ronon said. "Take them some place safe."

"This is a police station," Rodney replied. "That's as safe as it gets."

Ronon shook his head. "Somewhere not here." He glared at Rodney until Rodney put it together, letting some of the seething rage locked down inside show through for Rodney to see.

It matched Rodney's.

"They were after her, McKay. It was an ambush. I heard one of them call her a dirty alien whore before he ran."

Rodney nodded grimly. "Purists. John ran into one in New York."

"Think something's happened to him?" Ronon asked. He stood at last and Rodney understood why he'd been so still before. He was too big for the cell, filling it, making it smaller with every choked back movement. The limits shrunk down. Ronon could take only three steps before he reached a wall to reinforce that he was in a cage.

Worry stabbed at Rodney, but he dismissed it for Ronon's sake. "He probably tripped and fell into some wannabe starlet's bed and forgot to turn his phone on," he said.

"Get me out of here, McKay," Ronon rumbled

"I will," he promised. He knocked on the door and listened as the officer who had been waiting outside unlocked it, keys clinking, the clunk of the lock's tumblers releasing. "I will."

"I don't like your world," Ronon told him as he stepped out of the cell.

Rodney went back to arguing with anyone he could find, getting louder and angrier with every stumbling block that he ran up against.

The only thing that had stopped him from completely losing it had been Teyla's presence. She was calm, despite everything, and moreover she needed Rodney to keep it together too.

On the other end, Davis coughed and replied, "The DA is arguing that Ronon has no ties to the community."

A uniformed officer detoured around Rodney on the way to the front desk. Rodney ignored his glare, the way he ignored the sad, middle-aged couple waiting on the other side of the room and the lawyer in a suit arguing onto his cellphone. His nose wrinkled and his throat wanted to close up every time he drew in a deep breath and smelled the lemon scent of whatever disinfectant the police department used. Whoever used it didn't use enough; his shoes wanted to stick to the floor.

"Where the hell is he going to go? He doesn't know the planet."

"They're worried the SGC will send him through the stargate," Davis replied. "Look, Dr. McKay, I'm working on it. This incident has everyone upset. If something had happened to Teyla's son, the political repercussions of such a tragedy would have — "

"Fuck the repercussions," Rodney said. "Tanaan's three years old. If anything had happened to him I would find the bastards and kill them slowly myself. Not to mention it would have apparently been all right if they'd beaten the crap out of Teyla or kidnapped her or whatever those lunatics had planned! What's going to happen to Glenn? Why hasn't he been charged with something?"

Teyla had Tanaan in her arms, resting against her hip. She stood up from the plastic scoop chair she'd been using and plucked the phone from Rodney's fingers.

"Lt. Colonel Davis? I too wish to know if Mr. Glenn orchestrated the attack on me and why?"

Rodney leaned close to hear the answer.

"Homeworld Security is working on it, Ms. Emmagan."

Teyla handed the cellphone back to him.

"That doesn't exactly impress me," Rodney snapped at it.

"Just don't make the situation any worse, McKay," Davis told him. "We are working on it. I expect to have Mr. Dex freed by tomorrow morning at the latest."

"And then?"

He heard Davis sigh. "Then he will likely be escorted to the stargate and sent back to Atlantis."

Rodney wanted to growl. "He's going to be PNGed?"

Teyla frowned at him, one strong hand cradling the back of Tanaan's head and it flitted through Rodney's mind that Teyla wouldn't be able to carry Tanaan around much longer, he was just getting too big, she'd ruin her back. Jeannie complained about Madison getting too big to carry too. It looked like Tanaan would probably be as tall as Kanaan had been; he was already tall for a three year old.

"It's more complicated than that," Davis said. "He isn't actually part of a diplomatic party and doesn't have immunity, but no one really wants to put him on trial. The DA will probably be willing to make a deal if he's deported."

"More like deplaneted," Rodney muttered. "This is ridiculous and you know it."

"Yes, but there's only so much I can do until the UNE takes over offworld interactions from the State Department," Davis replied. "This was obviously orchestrated, though rather badly on the ground. The best we can do is keep it all quiet. Just take Ms. Emmagan and her son back to the Mountain and wait until I call you. I swear nothing will happen to Mr. Dex overnight."

"It better not."

He snapped the phone closed and met Teyla's gaze. Tanaan whined into her shoulder, high and unhappy. She patted his back.

"Go home!" Tanaan cried.

"We will, jesha, soon. Just be good a little longer," Teyla told him.

Tanaan kicked his feet a little, but settled against her. "I'm hungry."

"Soon, jesha."

"Davis swears he'll have Ronon out tomorrow," Rodney said. "They'll send him back to Atlantis."

Teyla hefted Tanaan higher and started for the doors. "Then I shall return as well."

Rodney hurried after her. "Teyla..." He didn't know what to say. Should he argue with her to stay? Right this minute he disliked Earth nearly as much as she must. They proceeded out the front door and Rodney began shivering immediately. Life in Atlantis had made it easy to forget how fast the weather could change in Colorado even in July. He'd left his coat back at the Mountain. "Teyla."

"No, Rodney," she said. The old-fashioned street lamps provided a white light that washed the natural color from her skin. She looked weary to the bone and, worse than that, sad. "I wish to go home."

"At least talk to Sheppard first."

She glanced at the cellphone still in his hand. "We have both tried."

He didn't get through to John for another three days. He blamed the SGC and Margo and mostly John, whether he'd forgotten or lost his cell or was just avoiding talking to Rodney. If so, it was a hell of time for John to have one of his freak-out withdrawals, especially when Rodney hadn't done anything to trigger one.

"Off having fun," Ronon commented the next day, when they moved him to the SGC, calm and maddeningly matter-of-fact though he'd been placed in Room 16K7-23 on Level 16, another 'secure' holding cell, as if Ronon were a Goa'uld. Good faith, Paul Davis told them. Landry posted guards outside the cell to Rodney's never ending disgust.

By the time John finally answered a call, Ronon, Teyla and Tanaan were long gone.

Gone back to Atlantis, to Pegasus and their worlds, their lives, and Rodney couldn't help feeling he'd lost something, that he'd blinked and shifted a quantum step from where they had all been, with no chance to return. He'd kissed Tanaan good-bye and rested his forehead against Teyla's, while four SFs stood guard around Ronon, as if he needed an escort through the stargate. The three of them looked like a family as they walked up the ramp to the SGC's stargate and disappeared into the event horizon.

Rodney left the gate room alone.

John hadn't been there and he really thought he would never forgive him for that.





"Hey," Cam had said as he packed his duffle, "I love my team too, but sometimes, God love 'em, you just want to shoot them all."

John glanced at him sidelong, then reluctantly chuckled.

"And McKay..." Cam shook his head. "Wonder how you do it, man."

"Rodney's an acquired taste," John said carefully. He always had to be careful. Rodney never called him on the chickenshit, but John made himself sick sometimes. He sat back and had even taken part as others had teased and belittled Rodney more than once, just because of that. Coming to Rodney's defense would be too easy and give too much away.

"So, we've got two days free thanks to this scheduling snafu," Cam went on. "I say we get away from everything. I've got a buddy in Fairbanks who'll loan me his float plane and a hunting cabin where the SGC would have to beam us out to bother us."

Two days he could spend in Colorado Springs with Rodney. Only Rodney wouldn't be free, he'd be busy on Level 19 or putting together his Global Transporter System Satellite Array proposal.

He'd been about to dig his cellphone out of the bottom of the suitcase where everything heavier than a cotton ball always ended up and call Rodney but then second thoughts crept in.

Cam had made the offer casually in the wake of Margo marching in and declaring they had two days off thanks to some rock star coming out of rehab and hitting the talk show circuit, bumping everybody and screwing her schedule to hell and gone.

He weighed the offer against returning to Colorado Springs.

He and Cam got along, even shared hotel rooms without problem. They shared the same habits mostly, instilled by the Air Force and gate team experience. They hadn't served together before, but they'd both been in the Middle East, Bosnia and various black projects, just at different times. John didn't know what the hell he'd do in a cabin in Alaska, but no newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, Internet or telephones, cell or landline, and no groupies showing up in the hotel bedroom with a purloined key card sounded appealing.

"A real getaway," Cam wheedled and John figured he just didn't want to go by himself. Sam had already bolted, with a determined set to her shoulders, to San Diego. "Her brother," Cam said. It meant nothing to John, but considering his own family history, he'd guess they didn't get along. Vala and Daniel had also disappeared on them, no idea where. Cam was as at loose ends as John on the surface. "Get in some fishing."

"I don't fish," John told him.

The idea did appeal to him. He would do anything for Tanaan or any of his team. Still, sharing the condo with them left him hungry for real solitude sometimes. He could duck out and hole up at Rodney's apartment, but they'd know. Besides, it was Rodney's apartment and there were always the questions to worry about, the damned questions.

He might not even get a night with Rodney out of it if Rodney was too involved in his work at the Mountain.

"So? No one says you have to fish," Cam said. "Finish that book you've been toting around." He paused. "Though who the hell reads Solzhenitsyn voluntarily..."

"Right, because you're completely illiterate."

"Naw, Faulkner's more my speed."

It was tempting, damn it.

Not to mention good cover. John tried to mask the time he spent with Rodney as time spent with the team, though that had its drawbacks too. By the standards of any military organization except the SGC, the team was too close. The SGC seemed to take a different tack, keeping teams that worked well together as long as possible, looking the other way as the fraternization regs ended up bent and mutilated. Atlantis was the exception to most rules anyway; the small population created a fishbowl where fraternization became nearly inevitable. In Atlantis, no one thought it strange John hung out with Rodney and the team; he couldn't spend his off time with the marines and airmen he commanded and he didn't have any officers of equivalent rank to associate with off duty.

Some days, using Teyla and Ronon as cover made him angry too, because their tacit permission came with such disdain for the cultural rules he had to maneuver within and around. He knew the damn rules were stupid, that's why he was breaking them, but they didn't know Earth or the society that had shaped him or Rodney. They never really could, any more than he could ever grasp the deep down fatalism every Pegasan grew up learning.

He'd been in Pegasus long enough the sheer number of people in Earth's cities was getting to him, though. Two days. What the hell would it hurt? Margo had told them to get out of town.

"Yeah, okay, sure," he said. "Hey, what kind of plane is it?" He'd landed with skids in the snow, but never with a float plane.

"Then let's go, before the Wicked Witch of the West changes her mind and locks us up," Cam said.

John grabbed his dopp kit out of the bathroom, shoved a couple of things into his duffle and followed Cam out. He'd forgotten both his SGC issued phone and the other cell.

Not completely accidentally, though he didn't think it out.

Alaskan mosquitoes preferred his blood to Cam's, he discovered, and Cam couldn't be trusted to light a Coleman lantern. He'd loused up every mantle they had with them. The escape from the publicity roundabout came as a relief anyway; the locals at the float plane dock and where they picked up their supplies hadn't given a damn who they were. The float plane's fuel pump started acting up halfway back to Fairbanks though and cost them an extra day. They didn't walk back into the hotel room until three days later.

Cam charged in ahead of him. "Dibs on the shower.

John was pleasantly tired and mostly past any irritation with Cam. He also wanted a shower and fresh clothes, but shrugged and stood back as Cam went straight for the hot water.

Instead he dug around and found the cellphone he'd left behind and speed dialed Rodney's number without checking for messages.

Rodney's first words were flat and without preface. "Where the fuck have you been?"

John sat down on the edge of the second bed. "Alaska," he replied.

"Alaska doesn't have phones?" Rodney asked, still so toneless John twitched. He'd rarely heard or seen Rodney reach the level of fury where his ranting and tangents and raised voice gave way to quiet.

"What's happened?"

"It's a little too late, you sonovabitch."

"How bad is it?" he asked.

"Oh, suddenly you care?"

John leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. He had on a pair of hiking boots. Alaskan mud still clung to the seams in spots, dried dark and brown. It flaked off onto the blue carpet when he shifted his foot. He heard the shower start in the bathroom.

"I hope you had a good time, while I dealt with the mess and the SGC and the stupid, stupid morons and Landry," Rodney went on. "This time you aren't going to be able to swan in and fix everything after I've done all the real work, because I'm not the only one you screwed over."

The sarcasm was normal Rodney, but the real hostility behind it sounded different than he'd ever heard aimed at him. It scared him enough he began to get angry. Enough being jerked around. Rodney could just say it.

"McKay!" he barked. "Just tell me."

He could hear Rodney's breathing, long breaths drawn in through his nostrils and blown out like a spouting whale. He could picture the way Rodney's face went white instead of red, even the set of his mouth, lips pressed together into a hard line.

"Ronon and Teyla are gone," Rodney spat out.

Every muscle in his body seemed to lock up, the air in his lungs caught, his ears buzzing with the words he'd just heard. Then John surged to his feet. "What!?" He had to move and did, pacing to the window and back, staring at the door and calculating how fast he could get back to Colorado Springs. Four in the afternoon Pacific Time; he checked his watch. Later in Colorado. The closest airport was San Francisco International. He could cut through some of the security wait if he flashed his Air Force ID. Faster to buy a ticket on a carrier or charter a flight?

Dirt stains ground into the carpet under his boots each time he spun on his heel.

A glance out the window made him nod to himself. Still plenty of daylight left and no fog to ground any flights in the middle of July.

"I tried to call you," Rodney told him, vicious and angry, "Teyla tried to call you, even Ronon did after they moved him from the jail to, oh, another jail cell in the Mountain. You selfish sonovabitch, you couldn't leave a message to even let us know you were all right."

"Jail," John repeated, catching at the information mixed in with the accusation, flinching because that part was true. His voice caught and scratched. "What do you mean, gone? Where are they?" Another tumbler clicked into place in his thoughts. "Tanaan?"

"Let's not forget Tanaan," Rodney replied. "Who almost died."

John stopped and swayed in place, then stumbled over and dropped onto the end of Cam's bed. "No."

Rodney's voice softened a fraction. "He's okay."

"Would you tell me what the hell is going on?" John ventured.

That set Rodney right off again.

"That reporter, Glenn, turned out to be a Purist, one of those lunatics that think you're a freak that needs to fixed so you don't spawn, found Teyla and Tanaan in the park. The one down the road from your condo. Tanaan likes the swings, did you know that? No, you didn't because you're never actually here." Rodney stopped, then finished harshly, "Ronon put Glenn in the hospital and was arrested."

"Where was Teyla?"

"Tanaan nearly got run down in the street. She was a little busy saving her son. She pulled Ronon off him as soon as she could. Before you start demanding where I was, I was working. You're the one who pulled the disappearing act."

"I'm not a deadbeat dad, for Christ's sake," John said, feeling stung. "I have duties too." It would have sounded better if he had been on duty, instead of trying out Cam's buddy's float plane.

"You're right, you could never make that much of a commitment."

The way Rodney said that, so off hand and as though it was obvious, hit John hard. Rodney and Teyla both knew him and if Rodney thought that, it might be — he closed his eyes — it probably was true.

"Do you think you could be any more paranoid?" John asked. "I didn't — I wasn't avoiding you on purpose."

"Don't talk to me about paranoid, James T. Jerk! What hell were you doing in — in Alaska? Don't tell me the Bitch Queen had you doing interviews with the goddamn caribou, because I know you weren't. They wouldn't set bail for Ronon and I couldn't get him out and I couldn't find you and I had visions of CPS swooping down and snatching Tanaan or some KKK reject taking Ronon out back to teach the 'boy' manners and having to start World War Three to get them back and you weren't here!"

"I — "

"Alaska!" Rodney snapped.

"Never mind that, where is Ronon?" John yelled back. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he noted the shower going off, but it was irrelevant.

"Atlantis. They deported him as an 'alien undesirable' or some crap Landry was spouting. Teyla left too. I just wish I could — " Rodney's voice had risen to painful levels and John jerked the phone away from his ear, still hearing, " — and you were nowhere! We thought — I thought —- Ronon even thought — something had happened to you, but no one would tell me anything, not the hotel, not Landry, not that bitch. I called O'Neill and was put on hold — hold! — then some patronizing little piece of crap calling himself O'Neill's assistant tells me he's out but that the matter is being handled by the State Department.

"They put Ronon in shackles, damn it! He needed you. We needed you. I mean have you ever stuck with anything?" Rodney went on. "The Air Force, but I'm talking about people. No one gets too close, do they, and when it starts to take some effort, with you the effort just isn't there. Not even for your family. When was the last time you talked to your brother? Oh, right, at your father's funeral. Years ago. No wonder your marriage fell apart."

It felt like a vise squeezing his chest. Rodney knew where to hit to hurt.

"Sorry I don't lay out everything for everyone in the universe to know about like you," he forced out.

"Oh, do not make this about me! Or, you know, let's do. What is it? Are you ashamed of being with me or being gay? You can barely stand that Teyla and Ronon know; you'd cut out your tongue before you told anyone else. Is it so important that everyone think you're untouchable and utterly separate and acceptably heterosexual? Is that what you were doing? Screwing some nubile groupie to prove you can still get it up for tits?"

"I wasn't screwing anyone!" John shouted. "I'm not ashamed. I'm not ashamed of you, damn it. Jesus, Rodney, you know what happens if someone figures out you and me are together."

"I know," Rodney snarled back, "but as far as I can tell, we aren't."

He hung up.

John stared at the cell's screen as it blinked to screensaver, then a noise behind him made him look up.

Cam looked at him from the doorway of the bathroom, water still dripping from his hair, wrapped in a towel and nothing else. John couldn't read his non-expression. He replayed what Cam might have overheard since walking through the bathroom door. It was a little like being in freefall; the last time he'd felt so helpless, Rodney had been dying courtesy of the Ancients' ascension obsession.

"Fuck."

After the long silence that followed, Cam hitched his towel a little higher with one hand and said, "Well, this is kind of awkward."

John flipped the phone onto his bed, collapsed onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

"You do know you're on my bed?"

John studied the faint blue-gray shadows on white-painted plaster and considered the events of the last three days.

Cam padded around the bed, opened his suit case and fished out a change of clothes. He dressed silently.

The events he'd missed and the coincidence that he had missed them tumbled around and around until they all slotted into place forming a picture. Scheduling snafu, conveniently completely out of touch, everything already over and done by the time John even heard about it. John turned his head enough to look at Cam again, narrow eyed, rocked between anger and fear. "The fucking fuel pump," he said.

Cam pulled a gray tee shirt over his head, then tugged it down to meet the faded waist of his jeans. He ducked his head. "Yeah, about that. General Landry called. Told me to keep you out of touch until he let me know. I had to improvise."

The engine had choked out over a convenient lake and Cam had brought them down with a feather light touch. Losing power in winged aircraft didn't spell disaster the way it did in helicopters or jumpers. They'd glided down to the glittering blue water, skipped over the surface and come to a stop easily short of the graveled shore, floating as serenely as a the geese in the reeds. The cool silence afterward had soaked into John's bones, broken only by the honking call of the birds. They'd spent the rest of the day hunting down the problem. Cam had sworn it had to be a fouled line and only conceded John was right about the fuel pump as the sun lowered behind the mountains, leaving them in darkness with no lights to work by.

The fuel pump had been fixed within two hours the next morning.

"Smooth," he commented.

"Yeah," Cam said. "Sorry."

John sat up and headed for the bathroom.

"Landry didn't actually tell me why." Cam screwed up his face. "I should've warned you, should've figured he was pulling something again."

John paused at the doorway, one hand on the door jamb. "Purists attacked Teyla and Tanaan. Ronon beat the crap out of one of them. Cops arrested him. The SGC shipped him back to Atlantis. I don't know anymore. Rodney was too pissed to offer details and I wasn't around to do anything about it."

Immediately, he wished he hadn't mentioned Rodney. That could only remind Cam of the rest of the call and what he'd heard.

John swallowed another curse. The damp smell of soap and steam still lingered in the bathroom, distinctly different from the dry air of the air-conditioned hotel room.

"I'll be out of here as soon as I've had a shower."

"Hey, no, Sheppard..." Cam blurted.

John twisted around, hand still braced against the doorway, and looked at him curiously.

Cam held up both hands. "I didn't know about Ronon. That sucks." He met John's eyes and added, quietly, "I got no idea what else you and McKay were talking about. None of my business either."

Some of the tension flowed out of John's shoulders. He'd been looking at losing it all: Teyla, Tanaan, Ronon, Atlantis, Rodney, and his career. Looking at it, but very carefully not letting himself think about all the consequences. Absently, he rubbed his hand over the jamb, feeling the faintest raised grain of the wood beneath the smooth thickness of the layers of enamel paint.

"I still need to get back to the Springs," John made himself say.

"Sure, I get it. Listen, I'll make some calls, find you the earliest flight while you clean up," Cam offered.

"Why?"

"What Landry and Margo pulled stinks. I figure I owe you for my part. I'll even tell McKay, if you need me too."

A rusty, creaking laugh escaped John. "No. Thanks. No."

Cam relaxed. "Good, that's not something I'd look forward too. I'd rather buy you a beer sometime." He gave John an incredulous look. "Sheppard. McKay? Not that I'm asking."

"Get me a flight," John said and didn't answer that he didn't know if there was much left to ask about.

The hot water felt good, but couldn't wash away how John felt, or the adrenaline crash that followed the news he'd just lost two teammates and only avoided losing his career because Cam Mitchell was a decent human being who was willing to turn a deaf ear to what he'd heard and could assume. The hot water felt good, but that was about all that did.





John returned to Atlantis in August, mending what fences he could, catching up on what he'd missed and spending a solid two weeks finishing paperwork Lorne hadn't been able to sign off on. Lorne, long suffering and deserving, took an Earthside leave once he had John up to speed again.

Ronon dismissed it, Teyla greeted him with her usual grace, and Rodney accepted John's explanation eventually. None of those were actual forgiveness. No one forgot and if they had, John wouldn't have let himself. He felt the difference like the wrong note in the harmonic scream of a jet engine, a subtle shudder in the airframe even as it continued to perform according to spec, leaving him always on edge, waiting for it to blow up in his face.

An engine only required a mechanic to tear it apart and rebuild it with new parts. John didn't know how to fix the team or if there was anything to fix. Things were different, not necessarily wrong. Atlantis itself was changing and he felt out of step when he returned along with an influx of new personnel. For the first time, families were being assigned to the city. Some with children.

The first Earth School began operating in the fall of 2012, not long before Rodney returned too. Teyla enrolled Tanaan.

Rodney stomped through the wormhole at the end of October, shortly after the announcement of the 2012 Nobel Laureates, which included Sam Carter and Daniel Jackson, but didn't include his name. He spent the next month reorganizing the labs, shouted at Zelenka a total of five times in public and grimly requalified for field duties without verbal protest.

He walked into John's quarters the first night he was back and declared, "I haven't been laid in months, so if we're still doing this, now's the time to get naked."

John had wondered, too.

Even the sex felt out of tune, their hands no longer familiar, the touches no longer expected. They didn't say much. Move your elbow and I'm not Gumby and Fuck, there, harder mixed with groans and panted breaths. The sticky end arrived quickly, leaving them silent and sweaty, the room filled with the scent of sex. Rodney cleaned up and dressed wordlessly. John forced himself to his feet and decided to change the sheets entirely. He didn't want to sleep in a bed that smelled like them.

Every other month, John or Rodney or both of them went through the wormhole to Earth to present situation and progress reports and receive updated briefings on the progress of the UNE set up and change over to its authority. Teyla and Ronon stayed behind. John and Rodney left Teyla in charge when they both left; Lorne and Zelenka had no problems listening to her and what the IOA didn't know didn't hurt anyone. Apparently, the US was fighting doggedly to retain de facto control of the new governmental entity using money as its lever. Another faction wanted to link patents and licensing of technology developed via the Program and fund it in that manner. John didn't know enough economics to guess if it would work, but those were the people pushing for Rodney's Global Transport System.

Sometimes, he let Cam buy him a beer if they were both at the Mountain at the same time and had a break. It was something to do, a way to unwind after dealing with the bureaucrats and Landry, and kept him from feeling too lonely in the echoing condo. If Cam was Earthside, Carter generally was too, which meant Rodney would disappear into Level 19 and not reappear until they headed back to Atlantis.

Cam never brought up what he'd heard.

They'd all settled into a precarious routine until SG-22 checked in from PY6-409. John was justifying requisitions for school supplies to a stiff-necked major and a GAO accountant on Level 3 at the time. An airman knocked and then poked his head in half an hour after the incoming wormhole klaxon had sounded. On the hour, so everyone had relaxed, recognizing a check-in.

"Sirs, General Landry requests Colonel Sheppard join him in Conference Room One."

John nodded to the airman. "Thank you." He glanced back at the major and the accountant. "Sorry, gentleman, but we'll need to continue this at a later date."

He headed for Level 27 with a feeling of relief mixing with anticipation.

Landry wasn't there when John arrived, but Sergeant Harriman already had a briefing book set out for him, along with a pen, a pencil and yellow legal pad. A pitcher of water and tall glasses had been left at the center of the polished table and a coffee machine gurgled fresh caffeine into the carafe on a small table near the door. Harriman whisked out of the room as John arrived, with a murmured, "General Landry will be here in a moment."

John contemplated asking Harriman if he had any O'Reilly ancestors, then decided it would be better to stay on the man's good side. That joke had probably been tired before Harriman even started work at the SGC. John preferred silent insubordination toward superior officers to pissing off enlisted men anyway. He found nothing pleasurable in making anyone fake a smile and answer yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. So, instead, he nodded and said, "Thank you."

He sat down, poured a glass of water and pulled the briefing book closer. The brown folder had a colorful version of the SGC seal on its cover. That amused John as he opened it. Somewhere in the Mountain, the Air Force had its own print shop or a contractor had been sworn to secrecy after eight or nine months of background investigations just so the company could print that folder and others, back when even the Stargate Program's name had been classified. At least that SAP had been dialed back thanks to disclosure.

PY6-409.

He flipped open the cover and began reading a mission proposal authored by Dr. Hazelhurst of the Archaeo-Linguistics Department. Her direct supervisor and Dr. Jackson had signed off on it. A partially destroyed inscription found during a third survey of Vis Uban had Dr. Hazelhurst in a swivet, though Jackson's cover note was considerably less enthusiastic.

John raised his eyebrows when he checked the date. The proposal was over four years old.

The background on PY6-409 finally offered some indication why the mission had been backburnered. The planet, colloquially known as Akanital, had been one of Ba'al's worlds, taken over after Anubis' defeat. No indication that Ba'al had ever had any major installations there, but that still made it marginally more interesting, since Anubis had been highly invested in collecting anything the Ancients had left behind.

Apparently the Goa'uld had been as frustrated by the gene lock as the Wraith were, though they'd had been more successful in reverse engineering the tech. Possibly because instead of eating anyone with the gene, they'd taken them as hosts.

Landry and an aide appeared as John finished the last pages. John got to his feet and came to attention.

"At ease, Colonel," Landry said as he bustled in.

The aide poured a cup of coffee and sat it in front of Landry at the head of the table before fading back.

"PY6-409," Landry said with a gesture to the briefing book John had just closed. "Caught up yet?"

"Yes sir."

"Good. SG-22 checked in from PY6-409 less than an hour ago. It appears Dr. Hazelhurst may have been correct. They believe they have found an Ancient installation and according to her, it strongly resembles the description Dr. Jackson, Dr. Littlefield and General O'Neill provided of the facility they dubbed Heliopolis. Whether it is a second Heliopolis as Dr. Hazelhurst avers is still up in the air. SG-22 haven't been able to enter it yet. You'll remember Lt. Cadman from her service in Atlantis; she's currently serving with SG-22. The lieutenant suggested it may be necessary to possess the ATA gene to gain entry and re-initialize the facility."

"Sir," John said. He knew if he said he'd be willing to lead a team to PY6-409, Landry would slap him down and insinuate that hadn't been what he'd been called in to do, even though it clearly was.

Landry smiled at him, a fake smile, tight and hiding real dislike. "Since you're here on Earth and the next thing to an Ancient these days, I thought you might be interested in accompanying SG-14 and laying on the hands, so to speak."

Christ, there it was. Landry had had no love for John from the beginning. Elizabeth's political string pulling when they re-established contact with Earth had made sure of that, well before John had stolen a jumper and cut off Landry's transmission at Midway on the way to taking back Atlantis. Landry's opinion of him had never been high, but this felt different and John got it for the first time: it was the difference Keller's treatment to save him had made. Landry looked at him like John made his skin crawl. John wondered how the man could stand to work with Teal'c and Vala or Jackson. Maybe the xenophobia was a reaction to repeated exposure to the weird and alien; maybe Landry hadn't been like this when he was handpicked to takeover the SGC.

It explained the way Landry had orchestrated the fiasco with Ronon, though, if the man simply disliked and distrusted anyone he considered alien. At ninety-nine percent match to Alteran DNA, John supposed Landry considered him alien too, even if John's own heritage proved Alteran and humans could intermix.

It creeped him out, realizing how Landry saw him.

"Yes sir," he said, because all he wanted was to get away from Landry, before he opened his mouth and let out something stupid, like, I'm as human as you are, you prejudiced prick.

"Good," Landry declared. "They're gearing up now. Mission embarkation at 0400."

Fifteen minutes. John would have just enough time to get to the BOQ, pick up his own gear — and lucky he always brought it with him to the SGC — and get back to the gate room.

"Excuse me then, sir, and I'll gear up myself."

The conference room door opened.

"General Landry," Jackson said, already stepping inside. John glimpsed Vala beyond his shoulder. Landry couldn't see her from his angle. She waved and grinned. Both she and Jackson were geared up. "I need to be on this mission."

"Dr. Jackson," Landry started to object.

Jackson held up a hand. "Hazelhurst is an excellent archaeologist, but I have experience translating both Ancient and Asgard. I'm much more likely to accurately evaluate any Rosetta stone giving the key to Nox and Furling." Jackson almost shone with excitement. "Furling! We know less about them than the Nox. We really can't pass up any chance learn more."

Landry gave him a jaundiced look. "Very well, Dr. Jackson, as I see you've already prepared yourself. The rest of SG-1 is on stand down while Colonel Carter finishes her work with Dr. McKay."

"Yes, exactly," Jackson said. He finally noticed John. "Colonel Sheppard's coming with us?"

"Us?" Landry repeated.

Vala peered around the doorway. "I'm bored," she declared.

John thought he saw Landry shift back in his chair. "You have my permission," he said. He glanced back at John, expression still sour. "You're dismissed, Colonel."

"Thank you, sir."

John got to his feet and headed for the door.

"Meet you at the gate room," Jackson said as he passed.

He introduced John to SG-14 fifteen minutes later as they waited for the chevrons to cycle. John noticed Vala's pack was larger and heavier than Jackson's or the four members of SG-14. "Nice to meet you, Colonel," Major Pierson, 14's commander officer said. John replied in kind.

The gate opened with a whoosh that seemed louder in the tight concrete confines of the SGC's gate room.

John looked back just before stepping into the event horizon and noted Landry watching from the glassed in control deck. With a fuck-you shrug and smirk, John raised a hand and waved before following Vala through.





Five minutes after the stargate shut down, while SG-14 fanned out to do a perimeter check, Vala and Jackson were bickering about something, heads bent together. John leaned against the DHD and surveyed their surroundings.

The briefing book had had a page of MALP readings, so he'd known the temperature would be high and the surroundings rock and sand, sans any significant vegetation. A blurry picture from the MALP camera hadn't conveyed how bright Akanital would be, though. The sun high in the nearly white sky glittered off specks of silica and quartz in the rock matrix. The stargate stood in a natural bowl slowly filling with dun-colored sand. The sand spilled in through cracks and low places in a rough wall of ocher and orange rocks, a natural clock counting down grain by grain until the day the desert swallowed the stargate entirely.

SG-14 started up the rocky climb to the top edge of the bowl in single file. Major Pierson reached the top first and stood there, shading his eyes with one hand as he turned. The sergeant whose name John hadn't caught joined him and pulled binoculars from his vest.

John fished his sunglasses out of his vest and donned them against the glare. The bowl acted like a reflector to heat the air to oven-like temperatures. Sweat ran down his back and dust caught in his throat. He resisted the urge to drink from his canteen. Pegasus didn't have many desert worlds with stargates; he was out of practice, but he remembered the Middle East. It was necessary to stay hydrated, but using up your water before you knew where the next canteen would be coming from was stupid.

He tried and failed not to raise his eyebrows as Vala opened her pack, pulled out a roll of leather and silk, then stripped down to bra, panties and socks before redressing. Jackson ostentatiously turned his back. John didn't. He had to admit, the skin tight black leather pants and dull gold silk tunic did a lot more for her than the baggy pants and uniform blouse. She shoved the BDUs and blouse into the pack and straightened, looking straight back at him.

"It's safe to look now, Daniel," she announced. "Isn't it, Colonel Sheppard?"

"You could say so," he agreed.

Vala wrapped her arms around Jackson once he turned around and kissed his cheek, then tripped back to the DHD where John stood. A blinding smile stretched across her face.

She reached up and patted his cheek. "Out of the way, handsome," she said. John shifted enough that she could begin a dialing sequence.

"Going some place?" he asked.

"Always," she replied, stilling smiling and batting her lashes at him.

Jackson joined them. "Vala gathers a lot of intelligence for us. We haven't been offworld in three weeks, though. Normally, Cam goes with her while Sam and Teal'c and I cover the mission."

Vala set her hand on the central crystal and the gate began to move. John noted the chevrons as they engaged. Memorized the address just in case. Vala hefted her heavy pack higher on her shoulders and started toward the gate. "Watch out for Daniel, handsome. I'll be back the day after tomorrow."

"Watch out for yourself," Jackson told her.

Vala blew them both kisses.

"Landry doesn't know," Jackson said after the stargate shut down the second time.

He and John started up the rocky trail SG-14 had taken. In places it was more climb than trail. John couldn't think of a comment that didn't say more than he wanted to commit to, so he kept his mouth shut.

"Pierson and his team will keep their mouths shut." Daniel reached for a handhold and boosted himself up to a ledge. "So will SG-22 and Abby Hazelhurst."

John scrambled after him.

"It's not really my mission," he said once they reached the top. Red, gritty dust coated his palms and under his fingernails. "I'm just here to play light switch."

"You do outrank Pierson and Wade," Jackson pointed out.

John dusted his hands against his pants and tried to figure out which way they'd be walking. He thought he glimpsed something but couldn't be sure; the horizon shimmered, layers of heat mirage blurring real and unreal. With the sun directly overhead he couldn't even pick out an arbitrary east and west. A compass wouldn't be much use so close to the stargate; the naquadah threw off the magnetic field compasses used.

"You should put on some head protection," Jackson said.

John nodded. "You've been at this longer than anyone," he replied, letting that be his answer to Jackson's unspoken request.

"Sirs," Major Pierson called. "This way." He pointed in the direction John had thought he saw something. A scuffed path marked the rocks, then disappeared into the rippling sea of sand.

John grimaced at it, pulled a bandanna out of his tac vest and wished he'd had a chance to pick up desert camo instead of his normal blacks. He hated walking in sand, too.

They were all coated in the flour pale dust that lifted from the sand with each step after two hours walking. The treacherous sand shifted without warning beneath their feet, subsiding and slipping, so that all six of them had fallen at least once. Sergeant Bessemer limped painfully, one hand braced on Lt. Gale's shoulder as a crutch.

Spotting the tower came as a relief to everyone.

Its silhouette gave away its Ancient origins, angular and contemptuous of gravity. A step closer and its truth got lost in the sepia and umber stone added later, obscuring it with Goa'uld decoration on top of even older markings. The desert was deep and old on Akanital. Somewhere at the bed of the ocean of sand there might have been much more than the surreal shapes of a garden of wind-carved stones that still remained above the sand line, entire cities and civilizations built in this place, swallowed back, eroded and eaten away in the belly of time.

White tents were pitched at the tower's base. Someone saw them and gave a yell, but no one left the paltry shade provided by canvas. John didn't blame them. The heat sucked every ounce of energy from the body. The air felt thin. Low on oxygen according to the MALP readings, though not much worse than Denver in fact except they were near or below Akanital's sea level.

Dr. Hazelhurst, tanned nut brown and leathery, a frizzy halo of hair escaped from her braid to surround her round face, met them with a bright smile. "Dr. Jackson! Look at it!"

Jackson gave her a tired nod in return. "Abby. Good find."

John studied the tower, trying to feel any interface with the Ancient tech they thought was there. He spotted places where the stone facing had fallen away from the underlying structure, revealing silver and bronze, familiar Ancient alloys, still smooth and sound after millenia. The first Ancients, the ones who came to the Milky Way and Pegasus and built the stargates, Atlantis and her sister cities, built to last. They'd only grown careless at the end, when their whole existence had turned toward achieving ascension.

The builders he might have liked, the ones who explored the galaxies when they were new. John didn't have any time for the Alterans who ran though, first to Pegasus, then back to the Milky Way, and finally to another plane of existence.

He hadn't mentioned it to anyone, not even Rodney, but he did feel a difference; interfacing and using the gene activated equipment seemed even easier since Keller's treatment. Atlantis responded faster to him and offered up options it hadn't before, the same way it had for Helia and the other Ancients from the Tria. He tried not to think about that much, though, or he ended up worried the Purists were right and he wasn't human any more.

"Colonel Sheppard?" Jackson asked.

John blinked and looked down. He shrugged. He'd have to get closer. Even the Ancients needed to be in contact to operate some of their technology. "No magic answers, sorry."

Jackson accepted the answer without any visible disappointment.

"You should all rest," Hazelhurst said. "We usually work in the mornings, take a siesta, then do our reports, before doing the camp chores and dinner in the evening. We have a well, though it's nearly dry. If we keep it covered during the day, there's usually enough water to wash with by evening." She led them toward the largest tent. "The days are long."

"Thirty-three hours, right?" Jackson asked.

"Yes."

They stepped into the shade of the tent. The white canvas seemed to glow, light seeping through it, but the air in the tent felt cooler. Tables had been set up and were covered with papers and laptops, familiar gear whether in Pegasus or the Milky Way. The four members of SG-22 were already inside, one occupying a cot, Cadman on a camp stool, two of them perched on conveniently located rocks. John took off his sunglasses as his eyes adapted.

Hazelhurst waved at the two groups. "You all know each other, except, this is Co — "

Cadman bounded to her feet. "Colonel Sheppard!"

"Lieutenant," he greeted her. She should have made captain by now and he wondered what had happened. Landry or her own sometimes reckless judgment?

Cadman was a good marine, smart, fast on her feet, a little too casual by most military standards. He'd never been sure how much she'd figured out while occupying Rodney's head and Rodney had never been comfortable with her. She had an instinct for weak spots and took gleeful pleasure in hitting them. She'd picked at Rodney and John hadn't been able to run interference beyond assigning her duties that kept them mostly separate. John had sent her back to Earth the last time without much regret.

"That's right, Cadman, you did a stretch in Atlantis, didn't you?" the captain who had been sitting beside her said.

"You make it sound like she got sent up to the big house, Menard," Major Wade commented. He nodded to John. "Hello, sir."

Wade and John had met before at the SGC. He didn't spring to attention; though they hadn't gotten to know each other beyond a few casual exchanges at the Level 22 officer's mess, Wade had picked up that John didn't stand on formality. They were in the field anyway, where salutes only identified officers to the enemy.

"Major Wade."

He folded his sunglasses.

"Aren't you in the wrong galaxy?" Balinsky, SG-22's anthropologist, asked with a wicked grin and raised eyebrows. His freckled fair skin was pink and peeling over his nose and cheekbones.

John frowned and looked around. "I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque." He tucked the sunglasses away, then pulled off the bandanna he'd used to give his head some cover.

Balinsky and Pierson laughed.

John found a decent spot to sit down and waved at Gale to guide Bessemer over.

"It's just turned," Bessemer protested.

"Let Inoue decide that," Pierson told him. He nodded at their fourth, Sergeant Billy Inoue, who pulled a first aid kit from his pack and told Bessemer, "Get that boot off now. You probably wrenched it."

John wended his way over to where Wade had another camp stool and sat down. "So, I hear you need someone with the gene."

"It looks like it, according to Dr. Hazelhurst and Balinsky," Wade replied. "How'd you end up here?"

"I was handy, I guess."

Wade snorted. "Like swatting a fly with a nuke, isn't it?"

John stretched out his legs and wiggled his toes. He had sand down his socks. "It's better than explaining why Atlantis needs shipments of water colors and building blocks."

Pierson joined them, chuckling as he overheard. "What do you need them for, sir?" he asked.

"I tell them it's for the marines," John replied, with a pointed look at Pierson.

Jackson wandered over. "Abby's ready and raring to see if you can get us inside. Up for a little more walking?"

"Yeah, why not?" John replied with a sigh. He'd get the sand out of socks later.

He donned his sunglasses again as they left the tent. Cadman stayed behind with Bessemer. Wade led the rest of the two teams toward the tower, then inside a stone arch. John noted the unweathered edges of the opening and a pile of rubble piled to the side. "What'd you do, blow open the door?"

"Cadman got a little impatient," Captain Menard answered.

The walls had torch sconces. Balinsky cracked chemical lights that shone green and placed them in the sconces, so that their movements chased eerie shadows through the dark corridor as it descended and descended in a spiral grade that John realized wound round the original Ancient tower's circumference, down far below the sand line.

At least the temperature became cooler, dropping the deeper they went. Jackson kept stopping to trace his flashlight over inscriptions carved into the stone walls. "God, what a find," he commented once, probably more to himself than any of them. John was reminded of Rodney in pursuit of an energy reading.

"So, sir, have you heard any news about what the UNE will do with the Stargate Program?" Menard asked.

John shrugged. The UNE had officially begun its life on the first of the year. He'd given his latest in person briefing to a mixed group: Landry, O'Neill, two IOA reps, and two UNE liaisons. Then he'd attended a briefing, laying out the first changes the UNE meant to make in the SGC. The full reorganization would follow in the next few months, but from what he'd heard, it would take a year or more to straighten out the chaos that would inevitably follow.

They were going to lose a lot of SGC personnel, people who had been with the Program for a decade, right off the bat. Not so many in Atlantis, but Atlantis had a far lower percentage of Americans. Though presuming the people from other countries would be any more likely to give up their citizenships was a fallacy.

He thought about it and there was really no reason not to answer. The UNE's plan couldn't be considered classified, it just hadn't been disseminated yet.

"Reorganize after everyone switches citizenship," he answered.

"What?" Menard stumbled, trying to turn around and stare at John. "Sir?"

"Everyone working in the Program, going off world, will have to be UNE citizens," John explained. "Kind of citizens of the world. Sounded like they mean to translate rank, but if you stick, you'll have to swear an oath to Earth instead of the US. Or wherever you come from; it's going to be same thing for all the scientists working in Atlantis, who are from all over the world, if that makes you feel any better, Captain."

"Homeworld Security will be doing the same thing," Jackson mentioned.

"We're almost there," Hazelhurst told them from up ahead.

"Sir," Menard murmured, his voice lowered so it wouldn't carry, though John knew Jackson at least would hear too, "are you — ?"

John hesitated, not because he hadn't decided as easily as he decided to take a breath and let his heart beat, but because he didn't know if he should say, because it wasn't the same for a young officer like Menard. John was at the end of his Air Force career. He had twenty years in and all the rank he could imagine getting; wouldn't want more if it meant leaving Atlantis. He had the example of O'Neill as proof that promotion could take you beyond where you wanted to be as well as beyond your competency level.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked that," Menard added as the silence stretched.

Their boots sounded quietly, a shush of sand tracked even so deep, between stone and sole, grinding away at the dry-fitted stones.

"Captain Menard," Jackson said just as quietly, "I think Col. Sheppard has his answer, but he considers giving it to you too likely to influence your own decision. He thinks that you're young, though you've been with the SGC longer than he has. You were with Col. Edwards' team before this, weren't you?"

"Yes sir," Menard replied. "SG-11."

"The real question for you, Captain, is if you mean to stick with the Stargate Program or progress your career with the marines," Jackson went on softly. "Because, no matter what the UNE or anyone else says, after you've finished ten years or twenty in service with the UNE, you can go back to being a citizen of the US if you want, but you won't have a place in Marine Corps. Others will have risen through the ranks, paid their dues, and you'll still be a Captain, unless the Corps agrees to honor promotions within the UNE forces."

"Oh."

John leveled a glance at Jackson. "What about you?"

Jackson shrugged. "I've considered myself a citizen of Earth for years now. I can't really imagine leaving the SGC."

John nodded to him. Not that he considered himself a citizen of Earth. But he couldn't imagine giving up Atlantis. There were other things he couldn't imagine. The new military code had no prohibition against homosexuality. He thought that would be harder to deal with than anyone anticipated. Changing a law didn't change a prejudice. Some people were still going to get hurt when they came out.

He wasn't going to be one of them.

"I don't know if I'm ready for that," Menard said.

That didn't surprise John. He thought officer and enlisted would both be mostly like Menard, not like him or Jackson or Rodney, who had given their loyalties to ideals that were abstracted from any one place. Standing guard, searching out, learning more. It was too bad, because most of them had already expanded their world view to encompass protecting the entire world and everyone on it, but they wouldn't want to give up who they were.

Before John felt compelled to say more, their party reached the bottom. The ramp leveled out into a isosceles trapezoidal room that channeled toward a familiar looking doorway.

"This is it," Balinsky said. He raised the battery lantern in his hand higher, throwing more light on the angled interlock of two red-bronze doors. Unlit columns of horizontal light units, ubiquitous throughout Atlantis, bracketed the doorway. A darkened crystal sensor barred the center of the door, enough like the ones back home that John felt a thrum of familiarity.

He and Jackson both walked forward. Hazelhurst and Balinsky shifted to the side to give them room. Hazelhurst watched with bright eyes. She might have been holding her breath.

Jackson ran his fingers over the raised decorations, frowning, the dim light reflecting off his glasses. "I've seen this before."

John cocked his head and studied the shapes. Not writing, but he'd gradually come to realize that much of the decoration in Atlantis meant something more than adornment. When they'd all begun paying attention to that, useful finds had doubled

"Knowledge," he said in a moment of recognition.

Jackson twisted to look back at John.

"We see that design in a lot of places in Atlantis, linked to some kind of data storage usually."

Jackson appeared to want more from John.

"Like, I don't know, a stylized wave painted on a marina sign."

Jackson traced the repeated design again. "Thematic, not symbolic."

"Can you open it?" Wade asked John.

John joined Jackson in front of the door. The smooth surface of the dull white crystal warmed under his palm. It lit, dim and reluctant, a slow, grinding vibration spreading from the lock to the doors and into the rock.

"The Ancients didn't go in for booby traps, did they?" Lt. Gale asked, half nervous and half facetious. "This is definitely where there are booby traps in the movie."

"They liked riddles," Jackson said.

"They liked jerking around anyone not big enough to slap them down," John muttered. He pushed at the door with his will, commanding it to open. With a screech and a puff of sand, the door parted and slid open, stale air rolling out as it did.

Everyone coughed and Dr. Hazelhurst gagged a little. John's eyes watered.

The light columns on each side of the door flickered, the units lighting one after the other, but only for a second, then all but the last, floor level unit dulled again.

"Power's nearly gone," John said.

He walked inside. As he did, the lights inside came up, while those behind him faded out. Menard's voice carried perhaps more than he'd meant, "I guess that's what Cadman meant."

"Inoue," Pierson said. "Stay outside. If something happens, you get back to camp, brief Cadman and Bessemer, then report through the stargate."

"Yes sir."

The rest of them followed John inside the base of the tower. Stifling darkness filled the interior just beyond the paltry light of Balinsky's lantern and the emergency lights that flickered and threatened to fail. It felt material, as though darkness could settle dense and touchable, thicker and heavier with each century, millenia condensed from emptiness and silence, into the spaces left behind.

John flipped on the light mounted on his P90 and edged forward. He missed Rodney's presence behind him, the certainty of Teyla and Ronon beside him.

"I think we'll have to go up," Jackson said.

Menard groaned and Gale laughed. "Come on, Menard, you're a marine. Suck it up."

"We just came all the way down."

John played his light over another set of doors and kept his mouth shut. He'd bet a chocolate bar, two unreleased DVDs, and a basket of gredel berries that those doors hid a transporter, but considering the tower could barely bring up the lights, he wasn't risking his molecules in its transporter. Using the similarity to Atlantis again, he turned to the right, went down three steps and around a corner. A set of stairs went up just where he'd thought they'd be.

They climbed all the way to the top, to a single polygonal room. Four walls of stained glass dominated, alternated with four walls of writing, brilliantly coloring the room and the ceiling that arched far overhead. John recognized only the Ancient writing on one wall. The other three sets of inscriptions were a beautiful mystery. A pedestal resembling a DHD drew the eye to the center of the room. A single ruby red crystal at its top appeared to be the only control, lines of silvery text in the four different alphabets encircling it.

Jackson and Hazelhurst approached it as acolytes to an altar. John hung back with the rest of the military. Balinsky sat his lantern down, drew a video camera from his pack and started recording the walls.

"It's not the same as Heliopolis," Jackson murmured, "It's older." He looked around. "It may have never been meant for anyone but the Ancients, unlike Heliopolis."

Hazelhurst bent close to the pedestal, peering at an inscription. "Daniel, I'm reading this line as Find truth to seek knowledge," she murmured. She took off her pack, knelt on the floor and brought out a sketch pad and pencil. Next came a digital camera that she handed up to Jackson.

Jackson snapped off a dozen pictures from different angles, circling the pedestal, then bent and peered at the same inscription. "It could be a reference to finding a single point of agreement between all the languages. Heliopolis began everything with a visual representation of the elements."

He straightened and stepped back, considering the entire room.

"Abby, you're our best artist, so I want you to sketch everything," Jackson directed. "Cam, finish videoing the walls, then do a three-sixty on the pedestal. Menard, you can draw up a floor plan for this room."

John coughed as Jackson paused. "You should probably record the windows too. In Atlantis, we've started figuring out that some of the stained glass patterns relate to the purpose of the rooms."

Jackson nodded. "Of course, and even if they merely decorative," he smiled there, the inflection ironic, "they're still worth recording, aren't they?"

John and the others sank down and waited patiently while the scientists did their thing. Pierson seemed the most restless; John pegged him as the least experienced working with scientists. The marines were generally dispatched on more 'active' missions at the SGC. John leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, feeling tired and strained, unsure if it was himself or the tower. It had slept so long, it would have slipped into its final end unaware if they hadn't come.

It grumbled to itself like Rodney, complaining about the weather and the lack of coffee and exhaustion.

"Colonel, are you asleep?" a soft, feminine voice asked.

John opened one eye. "Not really." The light through the glass had changed, thickened into honey and gold dust, peridot, ruby, aquamarine, citrine, tangerine. A splash of glowing violet started on Hazelhurst's shoulder, colored her hair and streaked over her cheek. It competed with the smear of dust on her nose. He checked his watch. Three hours had passed. He hadn't been quite asleep, part of him had been listening to the low voices of the others, their movements, alert for any change from a threat, but he'd been in a near meditative state.

Not that he meant to ever tell Teyla that.

Or Rodney either.

"We've finished the preliminary survey," Hazelhurst told him.

She moved back as John got to his feet and stretched.

Jackson stood in front of the pedestal. "If this is a second Library of the Four Races, when I activate this, it will display the first page of shared knowledge. The elements that compose the universe as we know it," he lectured them all.

The crystal remained dark and lifeless under Jackson's hand. He pressed down. Still nothing happened. Even pressing with two hands invoked no response.

"Colonel," Jackson called, sounding and looking annoyed, "maybe you can try it?"

John walked over. He had a feeling. The library tower felt the way Atlantis had, 48,000 years in the future, with only a trickle of power remaining, lost and forgotten on a dead planet circling a dying sun.

Jackson moved aside and John placed his hand on the crystal. The heat he felt could have been left behind by Jackson's touch. The hum that ran through his nerves, aching and slow, came from the technology. John nudged it gently, more of a try than a command of on.

The crystal lit faintly. Shutters older than civilization on Earth closed over the windows, darkening the room they stood in.

"Oh my God," Balinsky whispered.

Above them, a hologram shimmered into existence, orange, amber, yellow, red, neutron, proton, electron, shot through with brilliant green and blue, revolving in the great vault, building into the familiar constant: hydrogen. The beautiful display trembled and faded though and blinked out as John lifted his hand away.

"Wait, turn it back on!" Jackson ordered him.

In the stifling darkness that followed, John knew no one saw him shake his head or stroke the crystal with his hand, half sorry to turn it off, regretting that he had activated it at all. He felt like he'd killed something. Gale cursed and someone tripped, then Major Wade had Balinsky's lantern on again, providing them with its harsh white light.

"It's dead," John said. "That pulled up the last bit of power it had."

"Oh." Abby Hazelhurst sounded like she might be in tears.

"This always happens, I swear," Jackson muttered. "It's like a universal game of bait-and-switch."

John ignored him and followed the starburst of lines on the floor to their center, situated beneath the window opposite the door. He knelt on one knee, ran his fingers over the lines, feeling for the difference, unable to see it in the dim light. His calluses caught at last on a faint depression. He found the other four easily after that, fitted his hand to them, pressed, and rotated his wrist. Clockwise, clockwise, counterclockwise, counter, counter, and clockwise again. With a sigh, a hidden compartment opened and released a ZPM. A dulled, depleted ZPM, but John smiled at it anyway, gathering it up.

"Don't give up so quick," he told Jackson. "Rodney and Radek can recharge this. At least there will be something to show for the mission." He took the ZPM back to his pack where he'd left it by the door, wrapped it in the spare tee shirt he always carried, and tucked it away. He shouldered the pack and looked around. "Not much else to do here, we may as well head back, don't you think?"

Jackson kept looking at him like he'd kicked his puppy off the top of Mt. Everest or something, but followed along. The climb down the stairs seemed to take even longer than up, but they were all tired and disappointed. John felt grateful the camp had been set up right at the tower, even if he considered it a mistake tactically. They should have set up camp far enough away from the tower anyone else coming to it would miss them, then set up a sentry to watch it. But, hell, he wasn't in charge of the mission and Akanital had no population.

Wade planned to post a watch overnight at least. They sat down and ate the MREs they'd brought first though. No campfire to warm the night as it chilled down either; Akanital had nothing to burn, just stubborn, spiky plants that clung to the shadowed crevices in the rocks.

"Make sure you shake out your boots in the morning," Balinsky said. "There's a little six-legged lizard here." He held up his hand, thumb and first finger bent to show its length. "Bright yellow with black spots. Loses its tail to distract predators, but it's the claws you've got to watch out for, they're more like a snake fang and inject a neurotoxin."

"Fatal?" John asked. He hadn't seen anything about lethal lizards in the briefing book.

Wade made a face. "Maybe, if you got enough. Bad enough to make you wish you were dead for a couple hours," he said. "Hurt like a mother."

Balinsky nodded toward Major Wade. "That's how we found out. They're drawn to body heat during the night. Just give everything a good shake, they aren't aggressive."

"Okay," John drawled.

Couldn't be worse the the Iratus bugs and some of the other fauna they'd run into in Pegasus. The mission where they'd waded across a waist high swamp and ended up burning two-headed mutant leeches off their privates had made it to the 'never to be mentioned again' list. He still puckered up when he remembered where a couple of the slick, scarlet, bloodbloated things had been attached. They'd had to wade back through again, strip and de-leech a second time so they could get Teyla back to the infirmary. Not a story he was ever going to tell anyone, even on another gate team.

He abandoned his MRE. Any reminder of the planet of vampire slugs was a guaranteed appetite killer, even years later.

"Mind if I finish that, sir?" Cadman asked, grinning cheekily as if she knew what John was thinking.

He handed the lemon pound cake over. "I'll take first watch, unless someone else wants it," he said.

"Fine by me," Pierson said.

"Cadman, relieve the Colonel at local midnight," Wade directed.

"Bessemer can take third watch," Pierson said. He grinned at the Sergeant. "Since he's been doing nothing but sit around all afternoon."

John left them to it and wandered out of camp. Twilight dyed the desert red, purple, then suddenly indigo and gray as the night spilled down, filling the sky with stars as the sun drowned beneath the horizon. He checked the perimeter out of habit, feeling the lack of Ronon and Teyla distinctly, missing Rodney's grumbling through the radio earpiece he wasn't wearing, feeling out of sorts and out of step, glad to get away from the others for a while. They were good enough people, but they weren't his team, weren't even his people the way Lorne and the scientists and marines of Atlantis were.

He grunted to himself as he climbed to the top of a massive stone twisted into a Dali-esque tree, wider above than below. He scrambled to the flattened top and perched there, where he could see across the desert in every direction. He was the outsider, the Lantean stuck in the wrong galaxy. The fading heat and last light made it possible to see a line of mountains another half day's trek beyond the tower. Whatever water fed the well SG-22 had been using probably came from there. He made himself comfortable and let his thoughts drift while he watched.

The well meant there had been people on Akanital sometime after the Ancients and whatever civilization had come and gone after them. Long gone though. Akanital wouldn't support anything much bigger than the lizards now.

A half moon larger and closer than Luna had glided a third of the way across the night sky when Cadman scrambled up the rocks to relieve him. The sands stretched like a silver sea beneath its light, the shadows it threw sharp and impenetrably dark. The library tower shadow cast across the desert like a razor cut shape taken from a two dimensional photo.

"Cadman," he murmured.

She hunkered down next to him, looking in the same direction. He felt her stiffen beside him as she spotted what had him so interested. A tiny figure crossing the sand from the direction of the stargate, moving at a determined, hurried pace.

Cadman fumbled a set of binoculars from her tac vest. John plucked them away before she could use them and found the figure again with them, dialing it into focus.

Vala.

He watched her crossing the sand for another five minutes, growing more and more uneasy. Day after tomorrow, she'd said. Even presuming a shorter day wherever the hell she'd gone to pick up information, this was far enough ahead of schedule to ring John's alarms. She moved at a running walk, covering ground as fast as she could push without hurting or exhausting herself, and no one set that pace without a reason. He had hightailed it for a stargate enough times to know.

"Keep an eye on her," he directed Cadman. "Look for anyone behind her."

"Who is it?"

"Vala Mal Doran," he said and then dropped off the rocks and headed for the tents to wake Wade and Pierson. The moonlight provided enough light, even inside the tents, to pick out individuals in their sleeping bags. Jackson snapped awake too, the instant John stopped beside Wade and shook his shoulder. Somewhere in his unconscious, Jackson's instincts recognized the difference between a shift change and a problem.

"What is it?" Jackson asked groggily. He groped in the pocket of the shirt he'd worn to sleep in, found his glasses and put them on.

"Vala's coming in," John said.

"Too early," Jackson said immediately.

"That's what I thought."

Jackson looked thoughtfully around the tent they were in. "Let's get the laptops and papers packed up," he said.

Wade and Pierson were already on their feet, waking everyone else.

"Let Abby sleep," Jackson told them.

The laptops weren't much of a problem. SG-22 had carried one each coming in and modified their packs to carry them. The papers were more difficult and John knew Hazelhurst would be ticked if it turned out they hadn't needed to gather them up after all. They ended up stuffed in a sixth pack and shoved into any nook or cranny in SG-14's packs.

"Canteens filled?" John checked with Wade. He knew Wade was technically in charge of the mission, but he couldn't help it, he had to be sure.

"Every night," Wade confirmed.

"Make sure Vala fills hers."

"Yes sir."

He ducked back out of the tent and whistled as he saw Vala reach the first of the contorted rocks littering the ground near the tower. Jackson slipped out of the tent behind him, smothering a yawn with one hand, then rubbing his chin, still drowsy despite whatever shot of adrenaline had accompanied waking.

"Daniel, Colonel," she greeted them as soon as she was in speaking distance. The shit-eating grin was distinctly missing. "We have to get out here."

"Vala — " Jackson started.

"What is it?" John interrupted.

"A Lucian raiding party is on its way," Vala said. "They may already be through the gate, I was only an hour or two ahead of them."

"Why are they coming here?" Daniel demanded.

John didn't waste time asking. He opened the tent flap and told Wade and Pierson. "Lucian Alliance on the way. Break everything down, we have to get out of here." He saw Wade open his mouth and then shut it. Good. John had rank and command experience. He'd been willing to go along before, but not when the chips were down.

"I don't know," Vala answered, tired and annoyed. "They must have received intel there was something interesting to the SGC here."

"How, damn it?"

John thought that was pretty obvious.

"Did you tell someone?" Daniel demanded of her.

John gave him an incredulous look. "Jackson, if she sold us out, she wouldn't be here. Not to mention it takes longer than a half day to put together a raiding party. You were the one who said SG-1 hadn't been off world in three weeks." He dropped his voice. "It's a hell of lot more likely someone in SG-22 is the leak. We should keep that in mind."

Pierson slipped out of the tent and joined them. John nodded. Expressions were iffy to read by moonlight, but the young major looked bothered.

"Let's walk," John suggested.

"You don't really think someone on SG-22 sold information to the Lucian Alliance?" Jackson asked. He kept his voice down too.

"It's a possibility we have to consider, especially if they're guarding our backs." John shrugged and added, "I'd trust Menard and I know Cadman, but nothing's sure."

Vala stayed silent, but she nodded in a way that meant she had the same experience.

"I know Cam Balinsky and Abby Hazelhurst," Jackson insisted. "They'd never — "

"Sir," Pierson interrupted. "Major Wade made the check-in on his own. Bessemer got that from Menard earlier."

"Sonovabitch," John muttered. Wade? He tried to formulate a plan that took into account Major Wade being unreliable. "Okay, we need to get back to the gate before the Lucians — "

A skitter of small rocks interrupted him. Cadman scrambled down from her sentry post. She landed on her feet, slightly breathless, and said, "Sir. A large party is on its way here."

"How many?" John asked.

"I counted forty-five."

He slapped his thigh in frustration. Fuck. They could try an ambush, but even counting Wade, that would be over four to one odds. The Lucians could reinforce through the stargate and it would become a siege situation, until the ammo ran out. The SGC would dial in if they missed more than one check-in, but once more, if the Lucians held the gate any rescue would walk out into the sand bowl onto a perfect killing ground.

"We have to retreat. Try to make it look like we've been and gone," John decided. "Circle around, hope they haven't left more than a few guards at the gate. If they have, we'll have to make for the hills and out wait them. Stay off the radios until the SGC dials in." He looked at Cadman and could make out only the pale curve of a cheekbone and forehead by moonlight. Her eyes were only a wet glint in shadow. "Is there water in the hills?"

"If you know where to look and get lucky, sir."

"Good."

He and Vala both turned, cued by the same sound of footsteps approaching.

"Major Wade,"' John greeted the other man. "We're just putting together a plan. Lt. Cadman spotted a forty-five strong force on its way."

"Damn," Wade said. He sounded sincere. "Hazelhurst's throwing a fit."

"Crap," Jackson muttered. "Abby's only been to secured digs before this." He pulled in a deep breath. "I'll handle her."

"Cameron's explaining, but you might help," Wade agreed.

Pierson spoke. "Sir, I have standing orders from the SGC to destroy any potentially useful tech if we have to abandon in place during a mission."

John squinted at him. "So? We've got the laptops, any papers. I don't think leaving some canvas tents behind or a folding table is going to give the Lucians a leg up in the arms race."

"I meant the library tower, sir."

"No!" Jackson hissed. "No, no, no. You can't."

"How would you do it?" John asked. He watched Wade while he spoke, wondering if Wade really could have sold out to the Lucians at some point. If he had, then he'd surely object to destroying the very technology he'd offered the Lucians.

"C4."

John shook his head. "Major, that's an Ancient building under the rocks and I can tell you from experience, it would take a naquadah bomb to bring it down completely. I've seen the kind of hits Ancient architecture can take and stay standing and functional."

"Then, sir, we can't abandon the tower," Pierson insisted.

"I have a simpler solution," John told him. "Without the ZPM, the tower is useless to anyone. If we blow the doorway, the corridor down to the tower's door will fill with rock. I don't think the Lucians will bother trying to excavate. If they do, it still will take them weeks. We can get off this rock and the SGC or the UNE can decide whether its worthwhile to send an expedition to get inside and reactivate the library later, even if they have to throw the Lucians off the planet first." He looked at Jackson. "Fair enough?"

"Yes," Jackson replied. "Thank you."

John nodded to him. "Okay, Major Wade, I'll need Cadman to help set the charges." He headed for the tent again. "Everyone carries their packs with them from now until we evac." He ducked inside and scooped up his own, shouldering it. A small chemical light had been cracked to offer a little more light in the tent and everyone else, even Hazelhurst, was breaking down the interior. "Water, food, and ammo are our first priorities, people," John told them. "Cadman. C4. You're with me. We're blowing the tower entrance."

"I've got timers, radio detonators, and I can rig up both motion and weight sensors," Cadman said. "I could set up some booby traps too."

"First the tower," John decided.

He caught Vala's elbow as he went out. "Fill your canteen. Make sure everyone else checks theirs." Wade had indicated the job was done, but he couldn't trust that now. That thought in mind, he shook his own canteen, listening to the reassuring slosh, then opened it and sniffed.

Vala's eyes narrowed, but she just nodded.

"Inoue," Pierson called. "Get up on one of the rocks, keep an eye on the Lucians, we want to get out before they're too close."

They moved out just under forty-five minutes later, at the same running walk Vala had used, the charges set to collapse the entire stone corridor that ramped down from the surface to the tower's base. John had levered the tower doors closed and watched the lock engage mechanically. It would require someone with Rodney's expertise to hook it up to a power source to open again. The timers were set for two hours, with a motion sensor spitefully hooked into the detonators halfway down the long ramp to bring it down on the Lucians' heads if possible. Cadman's suggestion, but John had no objection to thinning the odds against them.

They circled northward, toward the hills on the horizon, taking advantage of the cool of the night to move fast. The moonlight made for both a blessing and curse. It let them see, but it meant that anyone with sufficient elevation could see them too.

Menard and Cadman took point. Pierson assigned Gale to walk drag. Balinsky walked beside Hazelhurst, then Inoue and Bessemer just ahead of them, then Wade and Pierson, John, Jackson, and Vala. John wanted Wade where he could watch him.

The sand slipped under their boots and Bessemer was still limping, but they set a hard pace and stayed with it, only faltering when the C4 went off, the roar echoing across the desert, the ground shivering under their feet.

"Keep moving," John snapped at everyone.

According to his watch, they had at least four more hours before dawn. They could either try to push through to the stargate and face retreating back across the desert in broad daylight or hole up in the hills through the day and try an approach after night fell again.

Slowing his pace so that he fell back from the two majors, John asked Jackson, "Has this been happening often?"

"You mean raiders showing up?" Jackson asked. "The last gamma site was wiped out, everything looted. Four personnel are still unaccounted for."

"That didn't make it to the databurst," John said.

Jackson sneered. "Landry. I don't think it made it to the IOA, either. The equipment losses are buried in paperwork, the people are listed as MIA. It's what we wanted Vala to get a line on."

Vala slipped in close between John and Jackson, so she could speak as softly as possible. "I went to Bem'rar," she murmured. "Tau'ri equipment is showing up in the markets in the Hole. My contact told me three Tau'ri engineers had been for sale, but they died in the slave barracks before auction."

"No IDs?" Jackson asked.

"I'm sorry, but that's all my contact had, except for the news that Kefflin was dispatching a strike force to take a Ancient site in Ba'al's old territories. Someone talked when they were buying supplies."

"If you hadn't warned us, we might all be prisoners of the Lucians," John told her.

Vala gave a little shudder. "I have no desire to visit the Hole as a slave."

"PY4-33K," Jackson said. "You can't reach it by stargate. There are two blackholes near the system. The gravity tides between the system and the two blackholes tear apart Goa'uld and Asgard hyperdrives and anything we've got too. It takes at least a week to pilot a ship from the boundary to the planet using sublights."

"How do you know about it?"

"Vala told us."

"The route changes constantly," Vala added. "It's the galactic safe haven for pirates, slavers, smugglers and black marketeers. You can buy anything there if you can pay for it. The local government takes a cut of every transaction and the cream of any technology. They enforce neutrality within the system. Not even the System Lords could take it." Vala's voice held a wealth of spiteful amusement. "Though many tried."

"What about ships being ambushed when they leave the system?" John asked. It sounded pretty wild even to him. "Don't rivals just sit outside the boundary like a cat at a mouse hole?"

Vala patted his arm. "They would, but there's no way to predict where the route out to the boundary will be for any given ship."

"Gotcha."

The sand under their feet firmed and gave way to gritty earth and rocks. They'd reached the edge of the hills. John scanned the dark outlines. There was cover at least, though it would still be an oven when the sun came up and the heat reflected off every rock face.

"If we get up high enough, we should be able to see the stargate," he said.

The two teams hunkered down at the base of a particularly tall spire. John caught Jackson's attention and flicked his gaze toward Wade, wanting someone to keep an eye on him. Jackson nodded.

John climbed the spire after Cadman, who went up it fast as a monkey. The top yielded a ledge with enough room for John. Cadman perched above him, one arm wrapped around the rock to hold herself in place. They surveyed for pursuit first, but found none, just the distant pale cloud of dust from the explosion over the dark horizon, still settling.

"We got some of them, sir," Cadman said. "The timers still had fifteen minutes."

"Good," John said. "They won't know when we left. The traps could have been left days ago."

They'd swept the sand behind them for the first half hour and trusted the ceaseless shift to obscure their tracks after that. Not to say a good tracker couldn't have followed them, but the Lucians weren't exactly disciplined from what he'd read. John doubted they had many men as talented as Ronon or disciplined as Teal'c. Though there were rumors some Jaffa were working for them. The Jaffa Nation was not a monolith. Some Jaffa still served Goa'uld by choice too, though the System Lords' power had been thoroughly broken. If the raiding party had Jaffa, then nothing they did to cover their tracks would have been enough.

He settled his weight on one knee and pulled out his own binoculars, training them in the direction of the stargate.

No one appeared on the upper edges of the bowl, but he spotted movement near the DHD. "I count one," he said. "Lieutenant?"

"Wait, sir," she murmured.

John scanned the area, using the highest magnification he could get. The moonlight created too many shadows where a still sentry couldn't be seen. Human beings, though, weren't that good at being still. John let his eyes unfocus slightly and waited for any movement.

"Two, sir," Cadman said.

He caught the movement an instant afterward. A man, crouched just under the lip of the rocks, stretched prone. "Got him." John watched, calculating where the sentry's field of vision would be blocked, where he was watching. The sentry was focused in the direction of the tower. A high section in the natural rock wall at his seven o'clock formed a natural blindspot. If they came at the stargate at that angle, they could make a close approach before they were spotted. Maybe even take the sentries out before they were seen, but if not, John considered eleven to two odds — he didn't count Hazelhurst in the equation — acceptable.

Improving them wouldn't hurt though. Cadman had left a few other surprises buried around the abandoned camp.

"Can you detonate those special packages from here or from the stargate position?" he asked her.

"No problem, sir."

"Good."

A few booms from the direction of the tower would guarantee the sentries looking in that direction.

"We'll stay here throughout the day," he said when they were down again.

Hazelhurst let out a sigh of relief. Exhaustion and fright were taking their toll on her, though she'd kept up without complaint to this point. He could see her drooping now.

"The SGC will be expecting a check-in before then," Wade pointed out. "They'll dial in when we don't. We can radio for back up."

"We'll observe radio silence until we're ready to go through the gate," John told him. "The Lucians are most likely aware of our radios. Using them will only alert them that we're still out here, if they're listening." He gave Wade a wolfish grin. "I would be."

"The Colonel's right," Pierson said before Wade could say anything else.

"Menard," John said. "You're on watch. Everybody else, get some rest. That means you, Cadman," he finished before she could protest. "Inoue takes over after Menard." He picked his way through rubble of smaller rocks and found a decent place to settle himself, where the shade would get deeper during the afternoon. He dropped his pack down and stretched out with his head propped against it.

He woke long enough to eat an MRE and drink some water midmorning, wandered off into the rocks and took a leak, then came back, stretched out again and closed his eyes, listening to the others as they snorted, snored, farted, and coughed. One by one, people woke and ate their own meals, took their own trips in search of a few minutes privacy, and meandered back. He watched through his eyelashes as Dr. Hazelhurst produced a candy bar, half melted and smushed, from the bottom of her pack and shared it with Wade, as Jackson poured instant coffee grounds into a cup of water and drank it lukewarm, as Vala returned from a potty break dressed once more in BDUs and a thin, ribbed, black tank top. She plopped herself down next him without a hint of self consciousness and used his stomach as a pillow. John twitched and froze for an instant, then drew in a slow breath, hyper aware of the weight and warmth of her head through the cotton of his tee shirt. He could smell a hint of perfume still caught in the heavy silk of her hair: sandalwood and roses.

Morning stretched into afternoon, the long day heated and far too bright beyond the shade they'd found. Inoue climbed the rock spire and replaced Menard.

"All quiet, sir," Menard told Wade, then laid down and dropped off to sleep.

Bessemer pulled his boot off and rewrapped his ankle, grimacing in discomfort as he rocked the foot back and forth, checking his range of motion.

Wade got to his feet and picked up his pack. "Damn chili and macaroni does a number on my gut, every time. This could take a while."

"Trade next time, sir," Cadman said. "I've got an iron stomach."

"See if I don't," Wade told her and made his way out of sight.

Pierson pointed at Gale, who rose from where he'd been playing solitaire with a beat up deck of cards and ghosted after Wade.

Cadman opened her mouth.

"Shut it, Lieutenant," John told her, keeping it low, but using his command voice. Lucky Cadman was used to obeying him. She snapped her teeth together and made a face at him.

Less than ten minutes later, an outraged yell brought them all to their feet. Wade re-entered the shaded crevice they were using, hands locked on the crown of his head. Gale walked back behind him, one hand holding a zat aimed at Wade, the other clutching a communications device with a distinctly Goa'uld look.

"You were right, sir," Gale said. "He was about to use this." He held up the device.

Menard and Balinsky were both gaping, the shock clear in their expressions. Cadman looked furious; her fingers opening and closing.

"Not exactly SGC issue, Major," John said to Wade. "I hear the Lucian Alliance uses a lot of scavenged Goa'uld tech."

Wade had gone gray-faced. His gaze darted around, then settled on Vala, as he began cursing.

John circled Wade and accepted the device from Gale. "I'm guessing you figured to retire offworld."

"No choice," Wade snapped. "The UNE is going to take everyone's oaths using a zat'arc detector. I'd never have been able to fool that."

"How much did the Lucians pay you for the gamma site?" Jackson demanded. "How much was it worth? Six people dead, four others missing, likely sold to slavers. Did the Lucian Alliance pay well for that?"

Wade spat at him. "Fucking Saint Jackson."

The spittle fell short, landing in the dirt near Jackson's boot.

"Why?" Menard asked.

Wade laughed, shook his head and said nothing.

"Make sure he's disarmed and tie him up," John ordered, too disgusted to say anything more. He checked his watch. Six hours until dusk. They wouldn't move until then. "Gale, when that's done, go back and get his pack. We need to make sure he doesn't have anything else useful with him." He worried about a tracking device like Teyla's necklace.

Wade tried to struggle once, while Pierson was patting him down. Cadman pulled her sidearm and aimed at Wade. Her expression stilled him faster than John would have believed possible. After Pierson worked a garrote out of the seam of Wade's shirt collar, he gave up. "Screw this. Strip, you sonovabitch."

They forced Wade to take off everything but an undershirt and his boxers, then secured his hands and ankles with zip ties.

"Maybe we'll give you your boots back when we head out," Pierson told him.

Bessemer stood guard through the rest of the day.

Vala sat down next to John again just before dusk, while they were all working their way through their MREs. She stole his cookie and then leaned her head against his shoulder. "Thanks, handsome," she said and patted his arm.

John pretended she'd meant thanks for the cookie and chuckled. "I'm used to it. McKay usually steals half my meals."

"Well," Vala said quietly, "thanks for the cookie too."

"You're welcome."

He'd never forgotten Bates' suspicion of Teyla and how unwarranted it had been. He figured after as long as she'd been with SG-1, Vala deserved a little trust. Besides, he liked her and he trusted his own instincts.

They waited until the sun set, then set out, staying in the rocks at the foot of the hills and paralleling the desert until they had to cut across the sand to work their way back to the stargate. Wade got his boots back, but only to keep from slowing them down.

John's plan almost worked. Cadman triggered the explosives still left at the tower camp, but one sentry was waiting for them, and it became a race to reach the edge of the rock bowl. Gale went down, hit by a staff blast, giving out a choked scream. John cursed, realizing there was a Jaffa with the Lucians. Maybe he'd been there and John and Cadman had missed him. Maybe he'd arrived via the stargate sometime during the day.

Bessemer scooped up Gale and threw him over his shoulder, running in a stagger and firing his P90 with one hand.

"Abby, get down!" Jackson yelled at Hazelhurst. "Vala, take care of her!"

Wade tackled Inoue, trying for his gun.

"Spread out and get to the gate!" John shouted and fired back where he thought the staff blast had come from. He gambled Inoue could handle Wade. "Move!"

John and the rest ran forward, firing cover for each other, trying to keep the Jaffa's head down so he couldn't aim. The muzzle flashes from their P90s wrecked night vision. John sprayed the area in the rocks where the staff blast had come from and then dived to the side. Muzzle flash also made a beautiful target in the dark and a staff blast sizzled into the sand where he'd been an instant before. He reminded himself a staff blast would do a lot more damage than just knocking him out and leaving him paralyzed for a few hours like a Wraith stunner.

On the other hand, he didn't think the Jaffa would eat him.

He emptied his clip at the Jaffa and rolled, barely moving in time. The arm of his shirt burned and he bit back a yell as the pain hit.

Inoue had clubbed Wade over the head and left him lying in the sand. He was prone behind Wade's body and firing blindly from that tiny bit of cover, P90 held above his head.

Menard and Cadman were working in tandem, leapfrogging each other, firing cover.

Jackson dropped to the sand beside John. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," John snapped. He cleared his empty clip and loaded another, hands moving without conscious direction.

"Good. I'm afraid of McKay."

"Cover me."

Jackson began sprayed bullets toward the enemy.

John rolled up onto his knees, nestled the stock of the P90 to his shoulder and against his cheek, waited, saw the staff blast sizzle out toward Pierson and Balinsky, picked out the Jaffa's silhouette, set the sight on his head, and squeezed the trigger. He held the trigger down and emptied his clip as the figure jerked and flailed, then fell.

He pulled Jackson to his feet and they sprinted forward. John let the P90 drop, caught by the sling clipped to his tac vest, and drew his Beretta as he scrambled up and over the edge, dropping in a half controlled run and fall toward the bowl. He heard and felt Jackson beside him, stones and sand cascading out from beneath their boots, and then he was on the still body of the Jaffa, facing another enemy, moving on automatic.

The sharp sound of another nine-millimeter firing just to the side of him nearly deafened John. He saw the Lucian sentry lose his grip on his own weapon as the bullets hit. Then the man was down and Jackson was moving forward, kicking the zat away from him, watching him scrabble bloody hands over his gut for a few breathless seconds before he went still.

John lifted his finger off the trigger of his pistol and laid it along the side, ready but safe.

The last clatter of fire from a P90 rang against the rocks and faded into an echo across the desert. The rest of the Lucian party would know something had happened at the stargate.

"Everything okay down there?" Pierson yelled.

"Clear!" John shouted back.

He glimpsed a head pop over the edge, silhouetted against the star spattered sky. Then Pierson and Balinsky came over the edge and made their way down. Inoue and Menard followed, dragging Wade. They pushed and pulled Wade down to the floor of the sand bowl, then Menard went back up to help Bessemer and Cadman with Gale. Abby Hazelhurst hesitantly came down last, steadied by Vala.

Inoue began working on Gale, cursing quietly.

John sucked in a harsh breath, suddenly painfully aware of the burn on his arm. Six inches the other way and he'd be in the same shape as Gale.

Rodney was going to kill him and when he got back to Atlantis, Teyla and Ronon were both going guilt trip him, while Lorne would just sigh and tut-tut. At least Menard hadn't been hurt or been the sell-out. Telling Lorne that about an old teammate would have sucked worse than getting grazed by a staff blast.

He rolled his shoulder and swallowed a groan at the stab of bruising pain in his back. He had had his pack on when he rolled, twice, and the depleted ZPM still inside had jammed into a shoulder blade both times.

At least he still had it. Maybe it would be enough to distract Rodney a little.

Inoue's voice rose, urgent and frightened, yelling for his medical kit.

John headed for the DHD and began dialing Earth.





Rodney didn't know John had gone offworld until SG-22 and SG-14 failed to check in. He still had no clue when Sam patted his shoulder and told him not to worry. Of course, those words made him worry, as they would any sane person, and he looked up from his laptop, something in his neck creaking after too many hours hunched over the keyboard. Demanding an explanation proved that he did in fact need to worry: Sam had heard from Mitchell, who had begun haunting the control room, that Landry had sent John, Vala, and Daniel to some planet with a possible Ancient library.

Without the rest of SG-1, without the rest of John's team, and most importantly, without Rodney.

"I'll kill him," he muttered to himself at the time, startling a laugh out of Sam. He didn't know if he meant Landry for sending John off or John himself. Landry mostly, since colonels didn't say no to generals without paying a price.

There was no way to casually lurk in the SGC's gate room or control room, so Rodney did a quick and dirty hack, programming his laptop to alert him whenever the stargate dialed in and giving him the closed circuit camera coverage of the gate room.

Thanks to that, he got to watch as two men were carried out of the wormhole, one burnt and bleeding, one in his skivvies, then the rest of the two SG teams including his little marine nemesis, Cadman, Daniel and some other archaeologist, then Vala, followed last by John, filthy with sand and red dust, blood running down one arm, but plainly whole.

Rodney canceled the feed with a peevishly emphatic twitch of one finger and went back to his work, pretending he didn't want to rush to the infirmary to shout at John, because he knew he couldn't do it without touching him.

He went home at his regular time, ordered two pizzas and left one for John, then sat on the couch with the TV tuned to one of the sports channels Rodney had added to his cable package just for John. He couldn't muster any interest in NASCAR racing — too easily imagining John behind the wheel, slewing side to side, hitting a wall, flipping, burning — and started composing an email to Jeannie on his laptop instead. John showed up well past midnight, letting himself in with the key Rodney had given him — John had after all given keys to his condo to everyone on the team — and met Rodney's gaze with a small wince. He hung up his leather jacket silently, then walked over to the couch where Rodney had stationed himself in one corner.

"There's pizza," Rodney told him.

John studied him without speaking and Rodney resisted the urge to yell. The TV's light flickered blue over them both, the muted voices of the announcers competing with the hum of the refrigerator's compressor kicking on in the kitchen. Rodney looked up and examined John, taking note of the white gauze taped around his biceps below the short sleeve of his black tee shirt, the scruff of beard he hadn't shaved, and the hint of reddish sunburn on his nose and cheeks.

"Hey," John said.

"Don't tell me," Rodney replied. "Something went wrong."

John chuckled. "You could say that. But I brought back an empty ZPM for you to charge."

"Mmm." Rodney set his laptop to the side on the end table, then leaned forward and hooked his fingers through the belt loop of John's jeans. He tugged him closer, to stand between Rodney's legs. John came willingly. His eyelids half lowered and he licked his lower lip.

Rodney tugged the tee shirt free of John's jeans, then slipped his hand under it, flattening his palm over the warm skin of John's belly where silky dark hair trailed downward. The muscles under the skin jumped and John leaned into the touch, but then his stomach grumbled loudly, shocking a laugh out of both of them.

"Food," John said.

"Yes, go eat," Rodney told him. He pulled his hand away reluctantly and let John go, sitting back and listening as John clattered around his kitchen, the microwave's hum and ding, the sound of the refrigerator door and clink of glass. He finally came back with a plate piled with four slices of pizza and bottles of Rodney's precious Phillips Blue Truck ale for both of them.

He sat next to Rodney on the couch and scarfed down two slices hurriedly, then lingered over the third, extending the plate still holding the fourth to Rodney.

Pizza gone, they both lingered over the ale, while brightly colored cars zoomed in circles on the TV screen. John listed to the side until his shoulder rested against Rodney's and his eyelids fluttered down, until his eyelashes were spiky shadows over his cheekbones. He smelled of the soap from the SGC's showers and a whiff of antibiotic from the infirmary.

Rodney reached to the side and finished shutting down his laptop, then plucked the bottle from John's fingers, setting it with his empty and the plate with its smear of grease and tomato sauce.

"Upsy daisy," he told John as he tugged him to his feet.

"I'm not five," John grumbled.

"No kidding."

Rodney smoothed the outer edge of one of John's eyebrows with the pad of his thumb.

John stumbled after Rodney into the bedroom, then the bathroom and accepted the toothbrush Rodney handed him and brushed. They undressed without any more conversation and crawled into bed together. "I missed you," John mumbled into the crook of Rodney's neck, whiskers rasping against his skin afterward as John rubbed his cheek against Rodney.

"Of course you did, I'm surprised you could even find the stargate without me along."

"Mmph."

He thought John was asleep, was warm and comfortable and wrapped in long John arms and John legs, warm damp breath against his throat when John mumbled, "Do you think Vala can feel the stargate?"

Rodney would have been disturbed if he hadn't been used to the way John's mind wandered into tangents and non sequiturs when he hovered at the edge of sleep. He'd once, after three days awake, seriously asked if Rodney knew how many seeds the average pumpkin had, blinking dazedly over a cup of coffee that obviously hadn't had a chance of keeping him awake much longer.

It was an interesting question this time. Rodney considered it, though he was no expert on the subject. "Apparently Goa'uld and Tok'ra can sense each other and ex-hosts," he fished out of memory. Sam could sense Goa'uld from the naquadah in their blood. "You know, she probably can."

"Cool. Human stargate compass," John mumbled and dropped off with his next breath, satisfied.

Four days later, they opened the stargate to Atlantis and sent the empty ZPM through along with several pallets of school supplies. John had been called to DC to meet with O'Neill and Homeworld Security over something that happened with one of the marines on Akanital. Rodney didn't know what; John had been very tight-lipped over it, but there had been a shouting match in Landry's office that included John, Mitchell, and Vala Mal Doran, as well as that Major from SG-14, the day after the mission.

John had been shaking with rage at the end of that day.

Rodney couldn't wait to get back to Atlantis, where their worst enemies were the enemy.

He took advantage of the thirty-eight minute window to video conference with Zelenka, both of them carefully talking around the fact that Teyla was giving the orders. Zelenka mostly wanted gossip from Earth and promises that John and Rodney would return soon.

"Teyla has been visiting New Athos regularly," Zelenka said. Nothing in his words gave anything away, but the intent way he stared at the web cam clued Rodney into realizing he meant something more.

"How are the Athosians?"

"Very well, according to Teyla, though their numbers make it difficult, I think," Zelenka replied carefully. "They are re-establishing their trade networks. I believe Teyla is helping them with this. Much is happening on the worlds where they know the Wraith will not return, you see."

Rodney nodded. If he read between the lines, Zelenka meant Teyla was gating to New Athos and from there to other worlds without anyone from Atlantis with her. He didn't think the Athosians had enough to do much trading at this point, so she was conducting some other sort of business. He tapped his fingers nervously against the desk next to his laptop, thinking about it.

"Any news of when we will have a new, official expedition director?" Zelenka asked. He pushed his glasses back up his nose, then half turned, listening to someone off camera. "No, no, we will schedule the charge for two, three days from now. We must inspect the ZPM first, make sure it has not been tampered with," he told the person, then waved them away impatiently. "I no longer wonder at your bad temper, Rodney. Foolishness. So much foolishness from people I expect to do their work."

Rodney muffled a snort. "Now you know."

"And the paperwork..." Zelenka threw up his hands in mock despair. "Come home soon. We will throw a party and lock you in your office with cake and paperwork."

"What kind of cake?" Rodney asked.

"Gredel," Zelenka replied promptly.

"I can have chocolate here."

"You are selfish, selfish man."

Rodney nodded and told him, "I don't think we can expect a new director until the UNE finishes restructuring the SGC. It's out of the IOA's hands at this point. Whoever it is, will have to be confirmed before the UNE council, pass the background checks and be willing to take the new UNE oath."

"Ah, that."

"That. They're holding John and me here an extra week to get it out of the way for us." Rodney paused. "I hope you won't be among those refusing."

He hadn't even considered refusing himself. He hadn't lived in Canada in decades and felt comfortable that his work in Atlantis and for the SGC had always served not just his country but the entire world — even the galaxy itself — better than any petty territorial loyalties could have. He could always get his Canadian citizenship back if he decided to leave Atlantis and the Stargate Program. With his qualifications, he didn't doubt any country on Earth would happily make him welcome.

Zelenka waved his hand loosely. "No, I will swear whatever. This UNE citizenship, it will let me return to Brno or Prague if I want."

"Anywhere on Earth," Rodney confirmed.

"Mmph."

"Have you made any more progress on the casings?"

Zelenka shoved his glasses up his nose again and sighed. "Very little. I am working from what you sent through with the last databurst, Colonel Carter's suggestions, but it is slow, yes? Hailey runs simulations, but they fail each time."

"Damn it."

"This would go faster with you here, Rodney," Zelenka said.

"I know." Rodney growled to himself. "Send me everything you've done so far, I'll go over it with Sam. We have to be missing something obvious."

Even buried in the Level 19 labs, Rodney heard of the next big shake up. Gossip spread faster than light in the Mountain and the fall of a general, especially their commanding officer, rivaled wormhole travel in how fast the knowledge bubble expanded. Rodney heard about it from Munoz, who overheard Sodowsky and Sherman. Where they got it was anyone's guess, but the gist seemed accurate enough.

Landry was out. He had declined to part ways with the US Air Force or give a new oath to the United Nations of Earth, not even to retain his command of the SGC. Colonel Griffin, his second in command, had sworn his loyalty while monitored by a zat'arc detector and was unofficially in charge until the Council appointed someone new.

Landry had already left the Mountain before anyone outside the UNE Council knew what had happened.

A surprising number of people, given the opportunity, would have been happy to hold the door if it got him out faster.

In the next three days, three different generals were nominated to head the SGC by members of the UNE. Both Chinese failed the zat'arc test. The Russian, who had some gate experience thanks to their program, passed the zat'arc, but failed his background check — his sister-in-law held a GRU rank of colonel and had too many ties to the Trust.

Rodney relayed the juiciest bits of gossip to Zelenka in an email, realizing it might be longer before he got back to Atlantis than he'd anticipated. Radek, he wrote, don't get your heart set on a new boss. I foresee a revolving door here until someone gets their head out of their ass. Predictably, the people who were most qualified were automatically disqualified when they didn't suck up enough or were simply too smart to want the headache.

He missed Hammond, even if the man had colluded with Sam to send him to Siberia.

The best news he heard was that the Council had asked Hammond to sit in on the reorganization committee and offer his suggestions.

Margo swept John off to another set of publicity interviews, hawking the UNE to the masses since he remained the media's favorite.

"Same as the old boss," John muttered as he packed.

Whatever chance at John Margo had had — minuscule as it might have been, even in her own mind — had been wiped out. While John didn't refer to her the way Rodney did, as 'the bitch', he gave her the blank-faced, frozen courtesy that had chilled more than one offworld contact threatening to go bad.

His sour mood only grew worse. Televising their taking the UNE oath left Rodney with a bad taste in his mouth and a telephone message from Jeannie telling him he looked fat on TV. John looked incredible in the charcoal gray and dark green uniform of the UNE Forces. Rodney thought Jeannie was right and he looked like an overfed boa constrictor.

The switchover involved Rodney's bane: paperwork. UNE citizens didn't pay taxes. Unless they were banking their pay in US based banks, owned property or businesses. Most cops and customs agents still didn't recognize a UNE passport or ID, which required an electronic customs stamp, only that equipment hadn't been distributed worldwide yet. No one could agree whether the UNE or the various countries should pay for the equipment. Rodney spent far more time than he wanted to designing the system and the technology so that it would with a judicious upgrade or two be compatible with the Global Transport System when it went on line.

One thing he couldn't convince the higher ups to scrap were the color coded IDs. The cards were blank until the holder pressed a thumb to the center and activated it. The card then displayed a hologram of the holder and could be slipped through a reader, providing whatever information the reader was authorized to access. Different readers accessed more or less from different cards, depending on their capabilities and the security level of the card.

Civilian UNE citizens received blue cards, any family members who chose UNE citizenship but weren't employed by it, such as children, partners or parents, were issued green cards. Diplomats and bureaucrats carried white cards, medics yellow, military and security were issued black with a gray stripe. The darker the card, the higher up the food chain the carrier was.

A red card trumped everything and everyone in and out of the UNE. The council members, whoever would head the SGC and Atlantis, along with Homeworld Security, would all be issued red cards.

Stealing them would be useless. Rodney used a variant of the ATA technology to link each card to the genetic print of a single person. Only they could activate it and if it was separated from them for over twenty-four hours it would go dead.

His card when he received it was a deep blue, nearly black. He and John compared their cards in the SGC mess hall the day after receiving them. John's was black with a narrow charcoal gray stripe.

"Cool," John decided, sliding his thumb over the internal sensor and activating the hologram of his face and a hovering green display with his name and rank, visible from any angle.

"It isn't completely secure," Rodney pointed out in a low voice. "If it's stolen, it's useless, but you and I both know people can be compelled to cooperate."

John deactivated the display and tucked his card into his wallet. "Griffin asked me to take out SG-6. Apparently, Major Mears has declined to take the oath and transferred back to the Air Force."

Rodney put his own ID away. He had a chocolate pudding left on his lunch tray. After a moment, he peeled the seal off it and began spooning it up.

"Rodney?" John asked.

Rodney scraped out another spoonful. "I already know you said yes."

"Okay," John drawled. He sprawled back in his chair and went on, almost chatty, while keeping a wary eye on Rodney. "Just thought I'd let you know. We gate out at 1100 tomorrow morning. Twelve hours on planet, preliminary survey for minerals and anything else interesting within a half day's walk of the stargate."

Rodney finished his pudding cup.

"Looks like a cake walk."

"Whatever."

Rodney pushed his chair back, rose, then scooped up his tray and walked away. He felt John's gaze against his back, but didn't turn.

John's cakewalk turned out for once to be just that. He returned from PX6-966, relaxed and smiling, arriving in the labs after the regular debriefing to tease Rodney that he had to get out and enjoy being on Earth for the evening, since their orders were in and they were headed back to Atlantis the next day.

"Last chance to buy chocolate for Keller."

"I already bought a case of Green & Blacks to bribe her with," Rodney told him. "You, however, may need to lay in something to get back on Lorne's good side again."

"Got that covered," John replied. "Come on. Mitchell's declared it 'We're All Nationless' Day and he's buying. Swears on this Italian place. The deal is, if a plate of lasagna at this place isn't enough to fill Teal'c, Mitchell has to pay for everybody. Vala and Daniel are coming too."

"Sam?" Rodney asked.

"I think he's rounding her up." John leaned a hip against the lab table and grinned lazily at Rodney. "Are you in?"

Rodney eyed him and then shrugged. "Why not?" He pointed at John and spoke for the surveillance bugs and cameras. "But if you get drunk and I have to drive, you're stuck with my couch for the night. I'm not driving across town so you can sleep it off at your condo."

John's grin widened and he nodded, his voice going a little rough, saying, "You've got a deal."

They'd get the night spent in Rodney's bed and no one would raise any eyebrows if they drove in together the next morning after closing up their respective places.

Teal'c ordered a plate of spaghetti and meatballs after the lasagna.

John pretended to drink half a bottle of red, while Sam did, and if Cam or Vala noticed the difference, neither of them would ever say anything.

Rodney drove them to his apartment after the unofficial party broke up. Inside, John pushed him back against the closed door and kissed him until they were both breathless, mouths bruised and wet, hands tangled in each other's clothes. They left pieces of clothing in the hall, on the back of the couch, jackets on the floor, shoes kicked off half way to the bedroom, shirts lost, and dropped on the bed to shove off their pants, so eager for touch they couldn't pause to undress separately.

"Rodney," John gasped against Rodney's neck, hands moving over his shoulders and arms, urgent and paradoxically careful, "Rodney." He rocked his erection against Rodney's thigh and gasped, wet and hot, against Rodney's collarbone.

"Like that," Rodney muttered. He twisted them onto their sides, wrapped his hand around John's cock and began a slide and twist stroke that had him panting, pawing uncoordinatedly at Rodney's upper arm, then finally finding Rodney's cock and matching the rhythm, breathing, "Fuck, fuck, fuck," under each breath, thumb rubbing just over the head, slipping with pre-come, until Rodney came.

John was rutting into his loose grip when Rodney gathered his wits and began jerking him off in earnest. He curled forward, forehead against Rodney's shoulder, breath whistling in then hitching, when he came too.

Rodney fell asleep before he could summon the will to move and clean up, his hand still clasped around John's softened cock, the numbers on the clock on the beside table ticking over to midnight plus ten.

---

In Atlantis, events on Earth were distant and curious, barely impacting them, it seemed. The expedition as a whole, and Rodney and John in particular, found it easy to ignore what happened there. The UNE seemed in no hurry to bring in a new director; they had a system that served Atlantis between them and breathing space for the first time in years. Without the need to search constantly for energy sources and weapons, they scaled back the mission schedules and the science department finally began operating in the manner they'd all dreamed about before they stepped through the stargate to Atlantis the first time.

Rodney completed several projects that had been on hold for years and submitted papers to publication back on Earth, but one continued to stymie him: a stable ZPM casing remained out of reach, each experiment and theory failing in simulations. Frustration still drove him in the labs, but outside them, he was happy.

They didn't need a new expedition director, he decided. As Lorne put it, between Rodney and John, Atlantis had Mom and Dad, who mostly agreed with each other about priorities now that the pressure had eased off. As demanding as Rodney could be in the labs, he had the same laissez-faire attitude toward what their personnel did off duty as John.

It seemed more important to open a new tower with larger quarters for the families, to hold an informal housewarming for Chuck and Onda (Halling's second cousin), who officially moved in together, to debate whether Teyla had completely lost her mind after she invited Ladon Radim and his sister to Tanaan's fourth birthday party, to argue over which were better ammo in food fights: peas or gredel berries, to listen to the recording Jeannie sent of Madison playing the piano and have John agree that she was, indeed, another McKay genius. To go by the infirmary and pretend it wasn't to admire Yan and Maxim's new baby, while declaring that there would be no diaper changing stations in any of the labs, before telling Yan her place would be waiting for her when she wanted it. To hire Anaraya Ven away from the Two Sheaves Inn on Balkan to run the Atlantis kitchens and flirt with Ronon in some Satedan dialect even Teyla couldn't make out her accent was so thick, and watch her make Ronon snort milk from his nose with her hideously awful jokes.

Far more important than the news of anti-Unification riots in Houston and Beijing and Paris, a bombing campaign in Mexico City, a woman with a UNE green card beaten and chased through the streets in Singapore.

Far less depressing than reports that the introduction of ZPM energy really had devastated several industries in both the First and Third Worlds, putting people out of jobs with no good options in exchange.

A UNE base had been established on Akanital, to secure and oversee the dig at the Ancient library tower with Dr. Hazelhurst back and overseeing it, according to an email from Daniel to John. He was working on convincing the Council to return the recharged ZPM so that they could access the library's contents. Vala was continuing her work. John wouldn't tell him what that meant, just grinned and told Rodney to ask her next time they saw SG-1.

With no power worries, they actually saw less of the Daedalus or any other ships from Earth. Supplies were sent through the wormhole once a month. The personnel roster continued to expand and they opened up new labs to handle new projects and still didn't have enough people, until Rodney finally decided Teyla's suggestion of bringing in temporary workers from the higher tech Pegasus worlds, as well as more Athosians who were willing, was the only solution.

Kleipner found the blueprints for manufacturing drones in the database while trying to research their child care system, hoping to find some place in Atlantis they could use for a daycare center and relocate the Earth School from what turned out to be another high energy physics lab space.

Lorne's team variously encountered a matriarchy on M6G-450, an Iratus breeding swarm on P0G-823, vintner monks of both sexes on P3C-195, the non-humanoid sentients of Ux!cie'din who wanted to trade refined trinium for iodine and the poisonous seed pods of the brnko tree, and a partially destroyed Ancient shipyard on M9R-568. AR-1 checked the last out on a follow up mission, climbing out of the rubble that had covered the stargate for several thousands of years before eroding enough to allow passage again, then standing at the lip of a valley filled with tree and weed choked craters, water glittering at their bottoms, staring at the wreckage of another Aurora-class ship, half built and abandoned after what appeared to have been an orbital bombardment.

Rodney's assessment: they'd have to be a lot more desperate than they were to try and rebuild the installation. Earth had its own shipyards now, busily producing the B306s that were the direct follow ons from the B303s and 304s and didn't demand the crew possess that pesky ATA gene.

Teyla looked thoughtful and remarked it might still prove useful to some other civilization in Pegasus.

"Maybe the Genii," Ronon remarked.

"Just what we need," Rodney replied, "Genii with starships," and promptly forgot the exchange even before he wrote his report on the site.

The year passed so peacefully that they lost some of the constant readiness for disaster that might have alerted them of change in the air.

Teyla had gone offworld, with Ronon along, while John and Rodney killed time in the director's office, waiting for them to get back and lackadaisically consulting on the annual personnel evaluations.

"Evans," John said.

"The marine or the linguist?" Rodney asked, rocking back in his chair a little further, feet propped on the desk next to John's elbow. They'd long since dragged a second desk chair behind the desk rather than spin the laptop to face the other side periodically. "Though, really, I can't say either of them has distinguished themselves. Isn't Evans the one who sprained his ankle doing PT?"

John snorted in amusement. "Yeah."

"Evans the linguist is allergic to tava. Everything tava. Everything that has touched tava. He gets hives if he stops by the mess hall on days when they cook tava, just from breathing the same air."

"Send them back?"

Rodney looked out the office into the control room. Chuck was drinking coffee at his console again. His shirt had a suspicious litter of crumbs on the front, indicating he'd been eating forbidden cookies too. As if feeling Rodney's glare, Chuck looked around furtively, then brushed off his chest. "I'm going to tell Onda to cut him off if I have to work on that console again," he commented.

John glanced up. "Who, Chuck?"

"No, the Michelin Man."

"Sure. So, Evans?"

"Evans the linguist should go back to Earth," Rodney decided. "He spends more time in his quarters or the infirmary than he does translating and we can't put in him the field, he has anxiety attacks, which I completely sympathize with, only I don't because if I can deal with having potentially lethal allergies, he could handle getting hives periodically."

"You're a fountain of sympathy."

"I am."

"I'll keep Evans the marine. I don't think he'll sprain his ankle twice."

Chuck sat up straight half a second before Rodney caught the sound of the stargate chevrons cycling. "Incoming wormhole," Chuck announced over the intercom.

John checked his watch and cocked an eyebrow. "Teyla and Ronon?"

Rodney frowned. "They aren't due back until later, are they?"

"That's what I thought," John confirmed. He got to his feet and headed out of the office.

Rodney swung his boots off the desk and followed.

"It's the SGC," Chuck said as they arrived at this console. "IDC confirmed."

"Acknowledge and lower the shield," Rodney said.

John walked down the stairs to the gate room floor as an officer wearing colonel's eagles and UNE gray and blacks exited the wormhole, accompanied by the typical sucking slurp. He pulled a luggage rack behind him and held a file folder in his other hand. Like everyone arriving in Atlantis for the first time, his steps slowed and he gazed around the atrium with its steps rising to the first of many stained glass windows and the soaring ceiling that drew back to admit the jumpers from their bay. Releasing the luggage as the wormhole collapsed behind him, he saluted John with a faint smile.

John's return salute was matched with a quizzical look.

"Colonel Martin Reynolds," the newcomer introduced himself. He extended his hand and John shook it, while Rodney waited a step or two behind him, still on the main stairs. "I'm here to relieve you."

"To what?" Rodney squawked.

Reynolds looked part John and nodded to him. "Dr. McKay."

"New orders?" John asked. Rodney knew Reynolds wouldn't catch the hollowness in his words. No way to step forward and squeeze John's shoulder in reassurance that whatever was going on they'd get through it. Not with Reynolds right in front of them, the regular marine guards at the other gate room exits, Chuck and the control staff all watching from the observation level of the control room above them.

Reynolds extended the file. "From the UNEC, Colonel. As of my arrival in Atlantis, I am the new military commander of this base."

"Give me that," Rodney snapped and snatched the file away from John, flipping it open to read the orders inside. "What the hell is this? What idiot thought this was a good idea?"

John quirked a sardonic smile at Reynolds. "Don't take it personally. McKay pretty much talks about everyone that way," he said, casual and unconcerned as if he hadn't just been blindsided and gutted by the blockheads back on Earth.

"I'll get used to it," Reynolds replied. He faced Rodney and added, "I'm looking forward to working with you."

Rodney opened his mouth to say something as cutting as possible and...stopped. John's tiny headshake stopped him. He let John reclaim the file and read through it and clasped his hands behind him. "I can't say I have been," he told Reynolds, watching John from the corner of his eyes, "but then I didn't know about it. Is the UNEC sending a new expedition director too?"

"Not for the moment," Reynolds answered. "They're satisfied with the job you and Colonel Sheppard have been doing."

"Then why send you?" Rodney demanded bluntly.

Reynolds' eyebrows went up. He slanted a glance at John. "I believe it was a favor General Landry asked for before he resigned command." His gaze switched from John to Rodney and back.

John's bland expression gave absolutely nothing away. Reynolds couldn't see the stiff line of his spine.

"He mentioned that you were refraining from asking for a transfer, despite wanting one," Reynolds said. "All off the record."

"Did he?" John murmured.

Rodney sucked in a breath, wanting to curse that petty, vindictive shit.

"I'm getting the feeling that maybe that isn't the case," Reynold remarked.

"You think?" Rodney said, loosing all his anger in one sarcastic question.

"Come on," John said. "I'll show you the office you'll be using, introduce you to Major Lorne. You'll probably want to pick out a different set of quarters, mine are kind of cramped, but the city has full power now so there's no reason not to choose something a little farther out from the control tower. In the meantime, the guest quarters are set up and close by, if you don't mind a suggestion."

"Not at all."

He waved one of the marines on guard over. "Symons. Get someone up here for the Colonel's gear and have it taken to the guest quarters." He glanced at Reynolds with a tight smile. "A few last orders."

Rodney trailed after the two of them, silent and unhappy. A hundred plans to undo this travesty raced through his brain, but none of them would work. His stomach churned. The utter calm John showed only made it worse.

John showed Reynolds the transporters, provided tips on how to keep from getting lost, showed him the CMO's office, introduced him to Lorne, then in the mess hall, to Zelenka and Keller and half a dozen others, who gaped in shock and muttered awkward hellos that left Reynolds' looking more and more tense. The man obviously hadn't anticipated the absolute lack of welcome facing him.

John excused himself after lunch, smiling self-deprecatingly, murmuring something about packing up a few personal items from the CMO's office, and promising to find Reynolds later and go over everything he'd be turning over to him.

Reynolds was still scarfing up the exquisite pastry Anaraya had made and barely noticed. Rodney made a note to himself to speak to Anaraya about burning all of Reynolds' meals. They'd look into sprinkling brnko seeds in his food later. He knew Anaraya would understand that they couldn't be nice to the interloper, once he explained.

Possibly, he'd need to have Ronon explain.

Ronon and Teyla.

Rodney almost groaned. John had talked about dialing Earth and leaving the next day. What if they weren't back in Atlantis by then? They had to return before John left. Rodney needed them to convince John to stay, even if it meant disobeying orders again.

Even the city itself gave Reynolds the cold shoulder. Reynolds had received the gene therapy successfully, but everything from the doors to the transporters responded a beat slower to him than anyone else.

"I thought the city had full power with three ZPMs?" Reynolds asked when the lights that normally lit in response to movement failed to keep up with them.

"It does," Rodney told him. "It's also over ten thousand years old and has been subject to Wraith bombardment, super hurricanes, Replicator invasions and asteroid damage." He eyed Reynolds meanly. "No matter what anyone told you, it hasn't suddenly become safe as a backyard barbecue. If the UNEC didn't have you sign a hazard waiver, you shouldn't even be here."

Probably pointless to hope Reynolds would lose his nerve and insist on returning to Earth. The man was military and an SGC veteran. But Rodney didn't see any point to making his takeover any more comfortable.

"I guess this turned out to be a real surprise," Reynolds said.

"That's the only way it could have happened," Rodney said before he thought.

"Look, Dr. McKay, obviously you aren't happy, but the fact of the matter is that there's nothing you can do. I do hope we can have a decent, professional working relationship, if not a friendly one, but make no mistake, I am here and here to stay," Reynolds told him.

Rodney nodded stiffly. He'd see about that.

But he didn't, because John walked into his quarters without knocking or ringing. Rodney had been pacing back and forth, waiting for him, and looked up as soon as the sound of the doors breaking their vacuum seal told him John had arrived.

John's blank expression didn't break until the doors were closed behind him. "It's no good," he said before Rodney could even open his mouth. "You can't do anything about this." His face had gone gray.

"What do you mean?" Rodney demanded. He stalked toward John and when they were close enough, he latched onto John's shoulders, shaking him, as always surprised that he could shift John at all.

John shook his head, eyes lowered and not meeting Rodney's.

"If I fight this, I'm not going to stay in Atlantis," he said, dull and unhappy, "I'm just going to get kicked out. No stargate, no clearance." He laughed, a rough sound without humor, and then stopped, pulling away from Rodney and turning his back to him, going to the window and looking out to where the second moon was rising over the water. "Nothing. The Air Force wouldn't have me back."

Rodney saw a shudder run through him.

"I'm not even...We took the UNE oath so casually, but I don't even know what would happen if they canceled a UNE citizenship. I wouldn't belong anywhere."

"John..."

John leaned his head against the glass. Rodney closed the physical distance between them again and wrapped his arms around John from behind. The tension binding John in knots didn't undo itself the way it usually did.

"You know, this is kind of a test. To see if I'll obey orders I don't like," John said. "The UNEC has my records, they know my history, and they've got to wonder."

"Short sighted morons and bureaucrats," Rodney condemned them all. He pressed his forehead against the nape of John's neck, felt him shiver and then John pulled Rodney's arms closer around him.

"Christ," John murmured raggedly.

Rodney pulled him away from the window, back over to his bed, and then tugged John down until they were lying together on their sides, John's back to Rodney chest, and they stayed there, holding on, as long as either of them could bear, their only movements John compulsively twining his fingers with Rodney's over and over. Pulling their hands loose, then immediately coming back. It felt right that Rodney couldn't see his face; he knew how much John hated letting anyone, even Rodney, see him when all the masks fell away, when he was broken open and hurting.

The second moon had risen fully, throwing its silvery-blue light into Rodney's quarters and over the foot of the bed before John finally relaxed and his breathing evened out. Rodney told him, "We won't lose each other. I'll find a way to get you back and I'll come back to Earth. We'll see each other. Every month. The UNEC wants reports, I'll give them reports. In person. Besides, I need to come back and over see the GTS project."

"Sure," John agreed quietly.

Rodney closed his eyes.

Nine years together, most of them sleeping together, on and off. Mostly on, except during that bad time after Earth re-established contact and Rodney's ill-fated stab at a 'normal' relationship with Katie Brown. Even then, he'd spent more time with John than with her. He still wondered why John had tolerated what for lack of better description had been an affair, but that was John's way; John didn't clutch and try to hold on to things, no matter how important they were to him.

He wasn't going to fight the transfer, Rodney knew. He'd known it before John offered his reasons.

John hadn't asked him to give up Atlantis and come back with him, either. Rodney didn't know if he could, but it had never occurred to John to even ask. It made Rodney want to cuff him upside the head. He could have asked. Ass. Did John really think him that selfish?

No.

John just didn't want Rodney to make a choice that would cost him either way.

Nine years. Rodney knew of plenty of marriages that hadn't lasted as long, hadn't mattered as much to the people in them. John's marriage hadn't come close. He pulled John closer, reduced to wordlessness.

He knew nine years was a long time for anyone in the military to be stationed anywhere, but it wasn't enough. This was Atlantis. John wasn't supposed to ever leave. People died. They weren't supposed to leave. Not John, not any of them who came and belonged to Atlantis.

A shudder ran through John's frame and he wriggled closer into Rodney's embrace. His hand found Rodney's at his waist and pulled it down to press against his groin. He wasn't hard. Rodney wasn't either. Rodney squeezed his eyes shut and molded his hand to John's cock through the layers of BDUs and boxers, holding him intimately. He didn't want sex. Anything they did now would be sad or angry or both. John seemed to feel the same way. Both of them just holding on for a little while longer.

Much later, Rodney turned the lights on because he wanted to see. They stripped and touched, skin to skin, face to face, kissing endlessly, John's hands on his ass, Rodney's running up and down John's chest and then his long, smooth back. John's thigh pushed between Rodney's, pressing his knobby knee up behind Rodney's balls. He thought he touched every inch of John's skin. He tasted the back of his knee, pressed his thumb into an armpit, breathed in the smell of John there, licked at silky tufts of dark hair and absorbed the smell of a day's sweat, the scent earthy strong, fingers slipping through the new sweat slicking their skin. John's noises when he tickled the tender skin inside his arm spurred Rodney on, intent on driving John crazy, until John twisted and writhed free, rolled Rodney onto his stomach and straddled him. Then he cursed and growled while John held him down, arms stretched across the rumpled bed, hands locked with Rodney's, and sucked a hickey into the skin at the small of his back.

They teased and trembled and backed off until they could begin again and again, always coming back to each others' mouths. Rodney scraped his fingernails lightly over John's balls, the way that made him toss his head back and keen, sending a pillow off the bed to the floor. John rubbed his stubbled cheeks along the sensitive skin of Rodney's inner thighs, rough enough it burned, making Rodney's cock jerk and leak. They rubbed cock against cock, pre-come slipping between them, and kissed; gasping and breathless, sloppy and wet, just each other. Sweet slick warm mouths and tongues, hungry and comforting and slow so they could both remember. Rodney filing away the way John liked to nip at the tip of his tongue, though he rarely got playful with his teeth otherwise, and sucking on John's lower lip until he whimpered and twined his arms around Rodney's neck and head, hips rocking, eyes wide open and pupils blown, drunk on sensation.

When they finally came, they went on kissing languidly afterward, gentling each other with tender caresses, eyes open and watching each other.

He brushed the pad of his thumb over the soft, faintly swollen curve of John's lower lip.

"You should go now," he croaked, his voice as wrecked as he felt. He didn't know the exact time, but it was late. Or very early, depending on your definition, he acknowledged.

John licked his lips, tongue grazing over Rodney's thumb, and nodded. He rolled away from Rodney, sat on the edge of the bed, the bow of his back bare and heartbreaking, then got up. He fished up his clothes and walked into the bathroom. Rodney sat up, grimaced and moved away from the wet spot, then groped around and found his radio headset on the floor under the pillow.

He switched to the control room channel. "This is McKay. Have Ronon and Teyla returned yet?"

Jimenez answered, sounding twitchy. "Not yet, sir."

Rodney rubbed his face.

"Tell them to get to Sheppard's quarters as soon as they've cleared medical. First thing they come through the stargate. And buzz me."

"Will do, Dr. McKay." The hiss of the carrier signal told Rodney Jimenez hadn't switched off his mic. "This sucks."

Rodney switched off his radio, afraid he would agree with Jimenez and knowing if he did it would be all over Atlantis in the next hour.

He felt wrung out, sticky, weary, though his body still hummed with the aftermath of really stellar sex. He wanted to go to sleep, wished he could, but didn't want to waste what time was left.

Unlike any other night, John hung around, waiting for Rodney to shower and dress, waiting for Rodney to follow him out into the corridor and back to his own quarters. They quietly began packing John's things.

John placed his picture of himself with Evil Knievel into his duffle and added a handful of flash drives from a small box next to it on the nightstand. "Pictures."

Rodney started to say security wouldn't let John take them outside the Mountain and remembered: the world knew about Atlantis.

"Not much chance I'll be doing any surfing in Colorado," John said. "I figure Ronon can have my board."

"Good, he can break his neck instead of you."

"Tanaan can have the guitar. Every time he's in here, he's playing with it," John went on.

This was like portioning out the belongings of the dead during their first year. Rodney sat down at the foot of John's bed. "Right. That leaves Johnny Cash and a box of candles for Teyla and me."

John looked around the room theatrically, then faked a smile. "I don't see Teyla, so you get first dibs."

"Cash then," Rodney told him.

John took down the poster of the Man in Black and rolled it into a tube. He'd just extended it to Rodney when their radios chirped.

"Incoming wormhole. IDC confirmed. Shield down."

"Must be Teyla and Ronon."

No one else had been out.

Rodney's radio activated again. "Message delivered, Dr. McKay."

Neither of them hurried, since they were waiting for their teammates, but they didn't talk much either, as John finished his task. Rodney wanted to say leave everything. Reynolds wouldn't want John's cramped quarters, chosen for their proximity to the gate room, the transporter, and the original armory when they'd been running the city on naquadah generators and spit. It constantly amazed Rodney, how little John possessed in the way of personal items. He took traveling light to new lengths.

The only things left were the DVDs and books John had accumulated.

"Add them to the rec room library," he decided, looking at them.

The door chimed sounded.

John ambled over and swiped his hand over the sensor that would open it.

Teyla and Ronon stalked in, their shoulders and body posture giving away the anger that didn't make it to Teyla's face, at least.

"John," she said, a wealth of emotion, sorrow and frustration and apprehension, in that single pronoun. She caught his arm in both her hands, hands that were small and sure and strong and that John didn't shrug off. Her beautiful brown skin made John's tanned, hair dusted arm look pale in comparison, and his skin went white where her fingers dug in too tight. "Dr. Keller told us of Col. Reynolds arrival while we were receiving our medical checks. Is there no way to undo this?"

"You can't go," Ronon declared.

John's head bowed and he set his hand over Teyla's.

"Not a lot of choice," he said.

Ronon stalked across the room, his glare moving from John to Rodney to the perfectly innocent wall where John's poster had been. "Sucks," he grumbled.

"Tell us something we don't know," Rodney snapped at him.

"Stop," Teyla told them.

Hands still pressed together, she guided John over to the bed and sat so that he sank down next her. "First," she stated, "you cannot leave without bidding Tanaan good-bye."

John's head jerked up. "I wouldn't do that."

Teyla smiled at him. "I know you would not." She turned to Rodney. "With the ZPMs, is there any reason John cannot come to Atlantis to visit his godson?"

"No," Rodney said.

"Nothing except the fact the stargate program isn't being run to foster my social life," John pointed out.

Rodney snapped his fingers. "Ninety-nine point whatever percent. We'll no doubt need your super genes. They'll have to send you back."

"They aren't going to screw over Reynolds like that, Rodney," John said.

Ronon grunted, a sour sound that echoed Rodney's own feelings. He knew John, knew John would never go along with anything that he thought unfairly punished Reynolds just to get John what he wanted. It wasn't the brass who wouldn't screw over Reynolds.

"John," Teyla said. "If this cannot be changed, then I must tell you of the work Ronon and I have been performing, before you go."

Rodney leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms. "Oh? Now? You've been disappearing off for the last year, but now you're going to tell us?"

Ronon winced faintly. "You could have asked."

"We decided to wait," John said.

Teyla inclined her head. "I know. You have both been patient with us. We would have told you soon."

"Told us what?" Rodney prompted impatiently. The minutes of the time John had left on Atlantis were ticking away. The gray no light of the hours before dawn had given away to pale rose light that warmed the blues and bronze-grays of the room. It lit the curve of Teyla's smooth cheek, turned Ronon's eyes wolf gold, faded the olive green of John's duffle to khaki, and crossed Rodney's own bare forearms like a warm hand. He found it nearly unbearable that the sun touched all three of them, touched that stupid duffle, but left John in shadow.

She drew in a quiet breath and appeared to center herself.

"We have been working with the leaders of several worlds, including the Genii, to create an alliance among all our peoples now that the Wraith have been driven back. To find ways to unite our efforts to rebuild our worlds now that we can."

"The Genii," John repeated.

Teyla sighed and nodded. "It would not be possibly to create what I envision without them."

"Leave them out and they're going to be your rivals."

She nodded.

"There is something else," she added.

"Teyla...," Ronon reproached.

"Do you not trust John?" Teyla asked.

"I trust him. I just don't trust the ones he answers to."

"Look if it's that — "

"Have you lost your minds?" Rodney interrupted, overwhelming John's words. As angry and betrayed as he'd felt when John hadn't been there to stand up for Ronon, he'd never once believed John had been