SGA: The Surly Bonds of Earth (PG-13)
Title: The Surly Bonds of Earth
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: SGA
Rating: PG-13
Length: 5,170
Pairings/Characters: Pretty much everybody ever, with minor acts of Rodney/Keller and Teyla/Kanaan.
Spoilers: "Enemy at the Gate"
Summary: It turns out you can go home again.
The Surly Bonds of Earth
By Mad Maudlin
In the first week, they were deliriously happy to be alive-SGC and Atlantis personnel trading stories and handshakes and the occasional hug. Zelenka starting making a list of what they needed to keep the city floating while Rodney made up grandiose wish lists of all the things they'd never been able to ship on the Daedalus, and they rounded it out with a mass weekend visit to Jeannie's, John and Rodney and Teyla and Ronon and Jennifer invading Vancouver en masse.
xx
In the second week, the "mysterious fireball" story got into the mainstream news, and the military chatter was suddenly all about treaties and concessions. "Apparently," Carson announced, bemused, "I violated North Korean airspace."
"I've done that, it's no big deal," John said, and then pounded on Rodney's back while he choked on his Cheerios.
xxx
In the third week President Hayes himself visited Atlantis, and they spent six days cleaning in preparation for a four-hour event. John shook the president's hand, but it was General O'Neill who fastened the eagles on John's jacket. "Still think I'm whacked?" he asked, softly, under the applause.
"Of course I do," O'Neill said. "Just for different reasons."
xxxx
In the fourth week there were some very aggravated speeches made in the UN Security council about the Mysterious Fireball. Major Lorne and some of John's other officers were suddenly offered transfers to the SGC. Teyla began making noises about getting home, right around the time all the helpful IOA and Homeworld Security guys found something else to be busy with.
xxxxx
In the fifth week, O'Neill invited them all to go fishing.
"This is bad," Rodney said about a dozen times on the way there-often enough that even Jennifer insisted on switching seats during the drive to the cabin. "This is seriously bad. Something awful is about to happen."
"Why do you say that?" John finally asked.
"Since when has O'Neill ever voluntarily socialized with me?"
"…you have a point."
And after fishing and barbecue and touch football and an ill-advised bratwurst-eating contest, O'Neill did sit them all down-John and Rodney and Teyla and Ronon and Jennifer and Woolsey and Sam and Daniel and Mitchell and Vala and Teal'c and Landry. It was a very crowded living room. And the first thing he said, after, "Anyone want another beer?" was, "The president's going ahead with declassification."
He then waited while all the Tau'ri in the room started to express outrage at once, while the aliens looked at one another with the sense of what the hell took them so long?
Rodney raised his hand and shouted "Excuse me!" until he got silence. "Didn't Sam visit an alternate universe where that resulted in rioting and martial law?"
"The Ori had directly attacked Earth in that universe," Sam said. "They had no choice."
"And we are rapidly running out of choices," Jack said. "Every year there's another leak of advanced technology into the public domain. Every attack on Earth gets harder and harder to explain away. We've reached the point where we spend almost as much time, money and resources maintaining our cover stories as we do on actual offworld operations. President Hayes wants to do this on our terms, at our pace, not because of a crisis already in progress."
Woolsey cleared his throat. "And what do the other members of the IOA have to say about the President's plan?" he asked archly.
Jack smiled. "Oh, they're screaming themselves hoarse about it. But since the US still provides the bulk of the operational funding, what are they going to about it? Call us liars?"
"How does the President expect to tell people we've been keeping the stargate a secret for twelve years," Daniel asked, "and not face an explosion of public outrage that borders on psychosis?"
"I believe his phrase was 'controlled release,'" Jack said. "As in, they'll only know it's been twelve years if we tell them. There are sound national security reasons to keep most of the records sealed well into the next century, so he figures the public can be eased into the idea over time." He paused to let them think this over. "Once again: does anybody want another beer?"
Yes, they did.
xxxxxx
So in the sixth week, it was surprising-but not as surprising as it could've been-when John was reassigned. "SG-2 this time," he announced. "I'm moving up in the world."
"And who's supposed to be in charge of the military over here?" Rodney demanded. "They already took Lorne and Taldy, and I do not like the look of that Russian guy, you know, the one with the face."
Woolsey had to explain, "Since we can't operate our stargate without interfering with the SGC, the need for a military presence in the city is sharply reduced."
"And what about when we go back to Pegasus?" Rodney demanded.
xxxxxxx
In the seventh week, the General George Hammond left on her maiden voyage. "Colonel Carter will drop me off on New Athos," Teyla explained, packing her things into a sturdy leather satchel of her own making. "It is part of their planned route. They will retrieve the remaining offworld science teams, evaluate the state of the Wraith, and make…explanations…to former allies of Atlantis, if need be."
John, who was also packing, found Ronon on a balcony: seaside, not shoreside, so the only thing to see was a couple of escort ships at station keeping and the blue horizon. "You're gonna miss your ride, Chewie," John told him.
Ronon didn't look up. "I said I'd never stop fighting the Wraith until every single one of them was dead."
John leaned against the railing beside him. "I think I might recall hearing that a time or two."
"I don't want to leave Atlantis."
John looked over both shoulders, around Ronon's other side, and over the edge of the railing. "I don't see any Wraith here."
"I know."
He left all his dreadlocks in a pile on the floor outside John's room, and John didn't know what that meant, so he twisted a little one into a bracelet and donated the rest to Locks of Love.
xxxxxxxx
In the eighth week, John moved back to Colorado Springs, President Hayes addressed the nation, and Rodney became the science director of the of the Atlantis Research Facility.
XXX
In the third month, John got used to things being different. SG-2 wasn't a bad team: this time he got smart people, including a blonde midget named Captain Hailey who was a lot like Rodney, but with better aim. Landry still hated him, and John still hated Landry, but he got intermittent invitations to SG-1 poker nights and once matched Teal'c word for word in reciting Episode IV, which won him fifty bucks off Cam.
Some people wrote or called or said hey when they met in the corridors. Rodney stayed in touch-in fact, the weekend he went to Chippewa Falls to meet Jennifer's dad, he texted John approximately once every forty-five minutes, ranging from "I never realized how great trees are" and "oh my god best pie ever" to "he is a hunter, den looks like nature show on freeze frame" and "help me john I am wearing a hat shaped like cheese."
Carson got called in when SG-5 became photosynthetic, and he crashed at John's place once the weed killer took effect. "I should be out there," he muttered blearily, looking out the window of John's Mustang. (Because being called a planetary hero on national television had some perks, you know.) "In Pegasus. There's still work to be done."
"You'd run out of your medication," John reminded him. "And it was bad enough losing the first of you."
"Don't lie to me, Colonel. Which galaxy would you rather be in?"
Woolsey showed up for an intelligence briefing, the first John had heard of his new job. "The IOA has dreams of eventually overseeing an integrated, multinational Homeworld Security Task Force," he explained while he compulsively tweaked his tie. "Unfortunately, while some people are designing uniforms and recruitment brochures, the rest of us have to lay the legal and diplomatic groundwork to put any boots in the sky."
"Sounds like it's right up your alley," John suggested. "Mr. Planetary hero that you are."
"Sometimes," Woolsey confessed, getting a momentary gleam in his eye, "sometimes I'm talking to a foreign head of state, and he or she is being particularly obtuse, and sometimes I think…'I could throw him in the brig. I could have Ronon pick him up and throw him bodily in the brig.'" He looked at John with a pinched and guilty face. "Is that neurotic of me?"
"Of course it's not," John said, but it was at that moment he started to formulate the Plan.
XXXX
In the fourth month, John put the Plan into action. He would not actually call it a whisper campaign or a secessionist plot, because while he thought of it as "the Plan" the first steps were really just long conversations and rambling emails with questions like "Wouldn't it be great if…?" or "You know, I kinda miss…"
And the brilliant thing was that is worked. John could send an unprovoked email to Radek, reminiscing about the time they ran out of regular coffee and yet kept Rodney happy via the placebo effect for three days, and suddenly word would get back that some botanist had requested a coffee plant for an Atlantis-based study. He ran into Lorne in the SGC cafeteria and a friendly debate about whether Wraith were more badass than Jaffa turned into an e-book on gunsmithing in John's email inbox. He was conned into giving a PowerPoint presentation on "How to Foster Positive Trade Relationships" and later overheard Landry trying to convince someone on the phone that no, the Atlantis scientists were not hoarding analgesics and glassware, Christ, that's paranoid.
So he wouldn't even call it a Plan, really. It was more like a zeitgeist. Some people just knew what they had to do.
Of course it got more specific than that. It had to. Because at some point asking Rodney what it would take to get Atlantis spaceworthy again turned into asking Rodney what it would take to get Atlantis into space without anyone noticing, and after the third conversational turn like this he asked John straight up, "Would you do it?"
"What, smuggle a naqadah generator through airport security?"
"You know what I mean."
Because they all did. "We're heroes to an entire planet, Rodney."
The phone line was ribboned with static. "Mmm. Yeah. I see your point."
A protest march in Washington turned into a riot, and the president issued zatnikitels to the National Guard, and somehow that made it a commendable show of government restraint. Rodney never asked John if he was serious after that.
XXXXX
During month five, John drove to California twice, and managed to count both trips as business travel by helping out with some "minor glitches" in the Atlantis control chair systems. Both times his trunk was significantly lighter going east.
He also got dragged the other direction, to New York and Washington, because O'Neill still wanted a forward operating base in Pegasus. "And I'd like it to be Atlantis," he confided in John while they drank at taxpayer expense, "because God knows we'd all have less to worry about, but until the geeks from Area 51 put their research back together that city is Earth's primary line of defense."
"And what happens when they do put it back together?" John asked.
O'Neill shrugged and gestured vaguely. "They've got some kind of satellite ray-gun…thingy…magnets…tell you the truth, I have other people read those reports and highlight the good parts. Prototypes are still sitting in a warehouse in Kazakhstan, but the command computer got toasted by the Wraith."
Rodney got pulled away from Atlantis to complete final repairs on the Apollo and the Sun-Tzu and spent the night on John's couch. "You know Jeannie actually likes Jennifer," he reported. "Even if they do bond by abusing me. Oh, and I'm going to be an uncle again."
"They getting any crap from the declassification?" John asked while he put the finishing touches on an email to Woolsey that recounted some hilarious anecdotes of the New York trip.
"Mmm, none they didn't bring on themselves." Rodney stopped on CNN to watch another protest march. "Kaleb actually tried to argue with me about cultural imperialism but then Madison asked what that meant and we all just went to see a Disney movie together. Jennifer and I actually made out in the back row."
"To a Disney movie?"
"Well, you know, you take what you can get."
Carson threw some kind of hissy fit about his funding and threatened to resign until somebody pointed out that he was kind of locked in to his health plan. Zelenka went back to the Czech Republic for two weeks, had some horrible falling out with his sister, and got a wing of a university named after him. Amelia Banks resigned her job, joined an advocacy group for "insteller equality" and ended up on a terrorist watch list.
John kept planning.
XXXXXX
The sixth month started with riots in India, and their government did not issue zats, and President Hayes made a televised address that he was very disappointed. Half the SGC got sent on a road trip to field-test a new energy rifle before they were passed out at Camp Pendleton and SG-2 somehow lost an entire crate of the damn things, at least on paper, an administrative error for which John humbly accepted all the blame. (Hailey insisted it was stolen, possibly by elves. Even General Landry suggested she lay off the coffee for a while.)
John made another "business trip" to California, and on a whim drove by what was left of Area 51, and the spot where he almost left a crater. It made him want to call Dave, for some reason, maybe to say You wanna get dinner together or maybe just guess how many planets I've nearly died on. He did neither, because Dave saw everything on the news and never called him, and he was home before he realized that the 302 was the last time he flew anything.
And the General George Hammond returned from her maiden voyage with an interesting bit of news.
"They want what?" O'Neill asked, on one screen of the video conference.
"Atlantis," Sam said on another. She'd had plenty of time to digest the news and it still seemed to give her heartburn. "The Coalition claims it as cultural property of the Pegasus galaxy, not to mention a holy place for most of their people, and while they welcome our presence in the city as 'caretakers' they 'strenuously insist that the City of the Ancestors be returned to its rightful home.'"
Landry huffed at the main conference table where he'd assembled SG-1 and 2. "Isn't that what we technically did?"
Sam also explains that half the stranded expedition members she'd been sent to rescue did not consider themselves stranded and refused to leave; and that Teyla says hi. There's also something she wants to talk about with Landry but he deliberately sends John away before she brings it up.
XXXXXXX
In the seventh month, John's team got reorganized. "Short-term training assignment," Landry explained, but John couldn't care less, because it's Ronon.
"Couldn't do it," he reported to John as they wandered the swamps of P30-447. "Too much like Running. I don't…I couldn't be alone anymore."
"Genii not hiring this time?" John asked.
Ronon looked at him, and it was weird with his hair so short, but his face was the same. "Atlantis is home. And this is the closest I'm gonna get."
And John told him, right before Haley and Gomez got swallowed by leech monsters. The hair was different but the smirk was still the same.
There were protests across Europe that involved a lot of burning cars and multilingual slogans, and President Hayes made a speech about how we stood on a watershed in the history of a galaxy, and then he let some vegan hippies colonize two moons because nobody else was using them. A Christian fundamentalist suicide bomber attempted to assassinate Daniel Jackson but failed to correctly wire his detonator; Daniel was kept in protective custody for a week to ensure it wasn't a conspiracy and the bomber ended up in traction after Teal'c hit him with a very small car.
John had no time to drive to California, but he did find time to hang around Bill Lee's lab for a while, and coincidentally he cleared out a Staples of eight-gig flash drives.
Richard Woolsey successfully negotiated a joint Sino-Russo-Euro-American Homeworld Defense compact that promised to get the ray gun space magnet things into orbit inside a year, but then he accepted a post at an offworld research base. And Rodney called John and two o'clock in the morning because he'd realized that "Oh my god, I could really do it."
"Do what?" John asked, because he was used to this. (Haley kept him in practice.)
"Kids," Rodney said, voice full of wonder even over the tinny line. "I mean, we could do it, obviously Jennifer has to be involved too, but I mean we could really do it, because our families are all right here and there aren't any Wraith or anything. I could get married and have kids and keep Atlantis."
"Sure you could," John said, and wondered if this was going to work after all.
XXXXXXXX
The eighth month was bad. Rodney went to Chippewa Falls again. There were riots in South Africa and Brazil. John overheard Landry admitting that maybe the Atlantis facility did have some irregular expense reports, somebody better look into it.
And there was a mission that went right to hell, where Gomez had to hike a mile with a fucked-up knee and Haley had to build a DHD out of a flashlight and Ronon got captured and John got shot and they all slept in a big gross pile in a temple and got chased with farm implements and left the planet on fire. But somehow by the law of averages, the one mission that went completely FUBAR was the one Landry commended John for, and while they all got sewn back together in the infirmary they laughed about it, they went for celebratory Jell-o in the commissary and John thought, yeah, maybe I could do it too.
But Zelenka and Carson and Chuck still sent emails with rambling anecdotes and non sequiturs and hypothetical questions. And John still hadn't flown anything since Nevada.
Stephen Caldwell looked him up while the Daedalus was Earthside and they got beers. "Christ, I always thought you'd blow yourself up before you made full bird," was his version of a greeting.
"Plenty of people never thought I'd break Captain," John admitted. "I sent them all DVDs of the news conference."
That made Caldwell laugh, and enough beer made him say, "They're thinking of sending another survey through Pegasus. Confirming the status of the Wraith. Maybe try to collect the last wayward sheep from the expedition."
"Hey, if they wouldn't go with Sam I doubt they'll go with you," John said. "You gonna apologize to the Coalition for keeping Atlantis too?"
"Eh, it probably won't even happen." Caldwell finished his beer and did not order another. "Too expensive, too far from home."
John got a box in the mail with a San Francisco postmark and hid it, unopened, in the back of his locker in the SGC. Just thinking about it made his heart pound, because if they did this-when they did this-there really was no going back.
XXXXXXXXX
Nobody really said anything about it, but the ninth month was when it happened. The date seemed to settle by osmosis, and the timing seemed auspicious, because there were protests and riots for thirty straight days and this time it wasn't cars that are burning, it was embassies and tanks and Buddhist monks. Also the guy auditing their expenses got carpal tunnel and has to put the inquiry on hold.
Zelenka went back to the Czech Republic for just three days to talk to his sister. Carson arranged an anonymous cash bequest to his mother. Lorne passed John in the corridors one day and just shakes his hand and says, "Good luck." Amelia sent him a Hallmark card and the Millers sent him a citrus-free fruit basket. Ronon didn't even say anything, but one day when Landry gave them some down time he followed John to the parking lot and asked, "Are we driving or flying?"
John looked at Ronon's clothes, and the hair starting to twist into little knobs of baby dreads again. "Don't you have to pack?"
Ronon looked at himself and then shrugged. "Not really."
John went back for his Johnny Cash poster and his fruit basked, and topped off the gas tank before they hit the road. A Mustang was a Mustang, after all; no second chances.
They spent the day with the vague intention of sightseeing in San Francisco, but just ended up raiding convenience stores for coffee and chocolate and Jolt. John gave the Mustang keys and the title to the first random stranger who admired it and they walked down the beach with their stash, watching the sun sink on the horizon, behind their city which was a diamond in the bay.
More people arrived as it got dark, in ones and two and trios. Soldiers. Scientists. People John barely remembered, sometimes, and some people to whom he owed his life, and some people he'd never met like parents and spouses and kids. The Plan had worked better than he could ever have hoped and it suddenly seemed like too many and not nearly enough. He and Ronon passed out last commemorative junk food and kept a watch on the water, though it was choppy enough you wouldn't necessarily see a cloaked Jumper break the surface when it did.
Some people, like John, had brought nothing, but others brought bags or boxes or steamer trunks. Woolsey showed up at nearly midnight with a giant hiking backpack, and equally giant rolling suitcase, and a rolling animal carrier that appeared to contain a Yorkie. "I'd like you to know I was normal before I met you people," he told John with a scowl. "You're a horrible influence. All of you."
"We love you too, Dick," John told him, and gave him a Snickers.
Ronon spotted the first Jumper land just up the beach, then the second, and they kept the interior lights down when they opened the hatches so it looked like everyone was being swallowed into the dark. John saw Jennifer's face for just a minute in the scramble and wondered why she'd come out, or if she'd been in Chippewa Falls and needed in, but then he was in a jumper again and he hadn't flown anything in nine whole months.
Rodney was piloting this one and let John take over. "Everything ready to go?"
"Yeah. All set." Rodney looked through the jumper window at the sea and stars.
John closed the hatch and studied Rodney carefully. "What's up?" he asked, but for once Rodney McKay was actually silent, just shaking his head. Instead John got his answer when he brought the jumper around and Jennifer was still standing on the beach, hands tucked under her arms, small and alone.
x
At T minus 10 hours John got back to Atlantis, slipped past the escort ships and into the lower jumper bay. They had to hide for a while in the lower decks, but Rodney promised Chuck was on sensor duty and nobody would see them. So they let Woolsey's dog out and passed the time throwing John's sweatband for her to fetch, until she was worn out and the band was distinctly chewed. If Ronon recognized the hair bracelet John wore under the sweatband he didn't say a word.
At T minus 6 hours the last of the ferry jumpers made it into the city, just in time for Rodney and the rest of the first shift to take their posts. He took a crystal from a wall panel before he went and was already arguing with someone in the control tower about a sensor problem before he hit the transporter.
At T minus 5 hours 54 minutes Zelenka appeared and smuggled John into the chair room disguised as a technician. "Am locking you in for now," he said. "Your access codes will re-active later. Trust me."
"Little late to back out if I didn't," John pointed out, and set his radio to the main command channel.
At T minus 5 hours Atlantis began experiencing various inexplicable power problems.
At T minus 3 hours Rodney listed off four problems with the ZPMs that could mean imminent explosions, and requested permission to move the city further out into the bay. The SGC confirmed; John waited until Carson tapped out a signal on the locked doors, and then climbed into the chair and powered up the stardrive.
At T minus 2 hours 40 minutes the SGC asked why the Atlantis stardrive was not powering down. Rodney claimed not to know.
At T minus 2 hours 30 minutes, Rodney and Zelenka tag-teamed the technobabble to the effect that the stardrive was about to explode and suggested they start evacuating non-essential personnel to the escort ships.
At T minus 1 hours 45 minutes, the commander of the escort fleet asked why the flow of evacuees had stopped, when they weren't even halfway through the lists set up for just this possibility. Zelenka responded with another wall of babble and ordered the escort ships out of blast radius, while Rodney asked the SGC for permission to activate the Atlantis stargate in order to finish evacuations. The SGC confirmed.
At T minus 1 hours 5 minutes, Rodney suggested that raising the shield would contain any explosion and warned the SGC that the communications system could fail at any moment. The SGC confirmed, and the shield went up.
At T minus 1 hours, Rodney shut all outside communications down.
"Good morning, passengers," Woolsey said over the citywide speakers. "This is your commander speaking. The City of Atlantis will soon be departing for the Pegasus Galaxy. Please stow your personal belongs in the overhead containment bins. If your final destination is not the Pegasus Galaxy, please report to the gate room for evacuation. Thank you for flying with the City of Atlantis."
"Damn," John told him on a closed channel. "We are a bad influence."
At T minus 0 hours, 10 minutes they dialed the Alpha Site to send the last outsiders away. "It'll be tricky, but I think we can keep the gate open until we reach orbit," Rodney said. "That way the SGC won't have any warning before we engage the wormhole drive."
"Just as long as we don't fall out of the sky, Rodney," John told him.
"Yes, yes, because I went to all this trouble only to die hideously or get arrested or both."
John willed the city into the air, far out of sight of any prying civilian eyes, up up and away like a bird or a plane. He could feel the ZPMs pumping, the city straining, and this was both harder and easier than before, because he had all the power he needed but he couldn't help but feel they were leaving people behind.
Rodney brought up communications again just so they could hear O'Neill screaming, "Atlantis, what the hell are you doing?"
"Engaging wormhole drive," John announced-he didn't know if that broadcast or not-and then it was Time
x
The first week they spent drifting on the edge of Pegasus because, um, Rodney and Zelenka may have actually overloaded the power grid a little, but the shield held and they made it home alive.
The first month they spent tracking down old friends, starting with Teyla, who along with Kanaan had an entirely different surprise to share. They welcomed her home and she spent an entire night helping Ronon even out his incipient dreads while John and Rodney played with Torren (who had gotten huge) and the newborn girl who Teyla introduced as Meredith Ronon Emmagen.
The first year was spent in terrifying imitation of, well, the first year, because they forgot some things and some people and some ways of surviving, but they had allies and determination and nowhere else to go.
"We took a control crystal out of the DHD," Rodney explained to Teyla while recounting the Plan. "It can't send or receive intergalactic addresses anymore. So even if they find a power source, they can't dial us, and we're less of a threat because no enemies can use our gate to dial them."
"I hid it in my locker," John added. "With a note for Landry. Kinda wish I coulda seen his face when he found it."
"Could they not still send ships to find us?" Teyla asked, and John liked how it was us again so quickly.
"Could do," John allowed. "If they decide it's worth the time and cost. And if they're willing to admit to the general public that their own personnel stole a city right out from under their noses."
"I even lied," Rodney added. "It was kind of amazing."
But one night John joined Rodney in his lab, along with the cats (who were named Jack and Donna, "because I was originally going with Jack and Rose, see, since she looked so much more yellow in the picture, but once I realized she was actually more of a ginger I just had to, well, never mind.") Rodney was working, because they're all working now all the time, but when John asked "What happened?" Rodney didn't pretend to play dumb.
"She couldn't leave," he said. "Funny, isn't it? I'm the one who was always obsessed with the Nobel and my reputation, and Jeannie and I worked so hard these last few years, and… " He cleared his throat. "I asked her to leave. For me. And she asked me to stay for everybody else."
John let Donna chase a loose string hanging from his wristband (the Yorkie had developed a fondness for it) while he said, "I'm glad you're here."
And in spite of everything, Rodney actually managed to smile. "You know what? Me too."
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: SGA
Rating: PG-13
Length: 5,170
Pairings/Characters: Pretty much everybody ever, with minor acts of Rodney/Keller and Teyla/Kanaan.
Spoilers: "Enemy at the Gate"
Summary: It turns out you can go home again.
The Surly Bonds of Earth
By Mad Maudlin
In the first week, they were deliriously happy to be alive-SGC and Atlantis personnel trading stories and handshakes and the occasional hug. Zelenka starting making a list of what they needed to keep the city floating while Rodney made up grandiose wish lists of all the things they'd never been able to ship on the Daedalus, and they rounded it out with a mass weekend visit to Jeannie's, John and Rodney and Teyla and Ronon and Jennifer invading Vancouver en masse.
xx
In the second week, the "mysterious fireball" story got into the mainstream news, and the military chatter was suddenly all about treaties and concessions. "Apparently," Carson announced, bemused, "I violated North Korean airspace."
"I've done that, it's no big deal," John said, and then pounded on Rodney's back while he choked on his Cheerios.
xxx
In the third week President Hayes himself visited Atlantis, and they spent six days cleaning in preparation for a four-hour event. John shook the president's hand, but it was General O'Neill who fastened the eagles on John's jacket. "Still think I'm whacked?" he asked, softly, under the applause.
"Of course I do," O'Neill said. "Just for different reasons."
xxxx
In the fourth week there were some very aggravated speeches made in the UN Security council about the Mysterious Fireball. Major Lorne and some of John's other officers were suddenly offered transfers to the SGC. Teyla began making noises about getting home, right around the time all the helpful IOA and Homeworld Security guys found something else to be busy with.
xxxxx
In the fifth week, O'Neill invited them all to go fishing.
"This is bad," Rodney said about a dozen times on the way there-often enough that even Jennifer insisted on switching seats during the drive to the cabin. "This is seriously bad. Something awful is about to happen."
"Why do you say that?" John finally asked.
"Since when has O'Neill ever voluntarily socialized with me?"
"…you have a point."
And after fishing and barbecue and touch football and an ill-advised bratwurst-eating contest, O'Neill did sit them all down-John and Rodney and Teyla and Ronon and Jennifer and Woolsey and Sam and Daniel and Mitchell and Vala and Teal'c and Landry. It was a very crowded living room. And the first thing he said, after, "Anyone want another beer?" was, "The president's going ahead with declassification."
He then waited while all the Tau'ri in the room started to express outrage at once, while the aliens looked at one another with the sense of what the hell took them so long?
Rodney raised his hand and shouted "Excuse me!" until he got silence. "Didn't Sam visit an alternate universe where that resulted in rioting and martial law?"
"The Ori had directly attacked Earth in that universe," Sam said. "They had no choice."
"And we are rapidly running out of choices," Jack said. "Every year there's another leak of advanced technology into the public domain. Every attack on Earth gets harder and harder to explain away. We've reached the point where we spend almost as much time, money and resources maintaining our cover stories as we do on actual offworld operations. President Hayes wants to do this on our terms, at our pace, not because of a crisis already in progress."
Woolsey cleared his throat. "And what do the other members of the IOA have to say about the President's plan?" he asked archly.
Jack smiled. "Oh, they're screaming themselves hoarse about it. But since the US still provides the bulk of the operational funding, what are they going to about it? Call us liars?"
"How does the President expect to tell people we've been keeping the stargate a secret for twelve years," Daniel asked, "and not face an explosion of public outrage that borders on psychosis?"
"I believe his phrase was 'controlled release,'" Jack said. "As in, they'll only know it's been twelve years if we tell them. There are sound national security reasons to keep most of the records sealed well into the next century, so he figures the public can be eased into the idea over time." He paused to let them think this over. "Once again: does anybody want another beer?"
Yes, they did.
xxxxxx
So in the sixth week, it was surprising-but not as surprising as it could've been-when John was reassigned. "SG-2 this time," he announced. "I'm moving up in the world."
"And who's supposed to be in charge of the military over here?" Rodney demanded. "They already took Lorne and Taldy, and I do not like the look of that Russian guy, you know, the one with the face."
Woolsey had to explain, "Since we can't operate our stargate without interfering with the SGC, the need for a military presence in the city is sharply reduced."
"And what about when we go back to Pegasus?" Rodney demanded.
xxxxxxx
In the seventh week, the General George Hammond left on her maiden voyage. "Colonel Carter will drop me off on New Athos," Teyla explained, packing her things into a sturdy leather satchel of her own making. "It is part of their planned route. They will retrieve the remaining offworld science teams, evaluate the state of the Wraith, and make…explanations…to former allies of Atlantis, if need be."
John, who was also packing, found Ronon on a balcony: seaside, not shoreside, so the only thing to see was a couple of escort ships at station keeping and the blue horizon. "You're gonna miss your ride, Chewie," John told him.
Ronon didn't look up. "I said I'd never stop fighting the Wraith until every single one of them was dead."
John leaned against the railing beside him. "I think I might recall hearing that a time or two."
"I don't want to leave Atlantis."
John looked over both shoulders, around Ronon's other side, and over the edge of the railing. "I don't see any Wraith here."
"I know."
He left all his dreadlocks in a pile on the floor outside John's room, and John didn't know what that meant, so he twisted a little one into a bracelet and donated the rest to Locks of Love.
xxxxxxxx
In the eighth week, John moved back to Colorado Springs, President Hayes addressed the nation, and Rodney became the science director of the of the Atlantis Research Facility.
XXX
In the third month, John got used to things being different. SG-2 wasn't a bad team: this time he got smart people, including a blonde midget named Captain Hailey who was a lot like Rodney, but with better aim. Landry still hated him, and John still hated Landry, but he got intermittent invitations to SG-1 poker nights and once matched Teal'c word for word in reciting Episode IV, which won him fifty bucks off Cam.
Some people wrote or called or said hey when they met in the corridors. Rodney stayed in touch-in fact, the weekend he went to Chippewa Falls to meet Jennifer's dad, he texted John approximately once every forty-five minutes, ranging from "I never realized how great trees are" and "oh my god best pie ever" to "he is a hunter, den looks like nature show on freeze frame" and "help me john I am wearing a hat shaped like cheese."
Carson got called in when SG-5 became photosynthetic, and he crashed at John's place once the weed killer took effect. "I should be out there," he muttered blearily, looking out the window of John's Mustang. (Because being called a planetary hero on national television had some perks, you know.) "In Pegasus. There's still work to be done."
"You'd run out of your medication," John reminded him. "And it was bad enough losing the first of you."
"Don't lie to me, Colonel. Which galaxy would you rather be in?"
Woolsey showed up for an intelligence briefing, the first John had heard of his new job. "The IOA has dreams of eventually overseeing an integrated, multinational Homeworld Security Task Force," he explained while he compulsively tweaked his tie. "Unfortunately, while some people are designing uniforms and recruitment brochures, the rest of us have to lay the legal and diplomatic groundwork to put any boots in the sky."
"Sounds like it's right up your alley," John suggested. "Mr. Planetary hero that you are."
"Sometimes," Woolsey confessed, getting a momentary gleam in his eye, "sometimes I'm talking to a foreign head of state, and he or she is being particularly obtuse, and sometimes I think…'I could throw him in the brig. I could have Ronon pick him up and throw him bodily in the brig.'" He looked at John with a pinched and guilty face. "Is that neurotic of me?"
"Of course it's not," John said, but it was at that moment he started to formulate the Plan.
XXXX
In the fourth month, John put the Plan into action. He would not actually call it a whisper campaign or a secessionist plot, because while he thought of it as "the Plan" the first steps were really just long conversations and rambling emails with questions like "Wouldn't it be great if…?" or "You know, I kinda miss…"
And the brilliant thing was that is worked. John could send an unprovoked email to Radek, reminiscing about the time they ran out of regular coffee and yet kept Rodney happy via the placebo effect for three days, and suddenly word would get back that some botanist had requested a coffee plant for an Atlantis-based study. He ran into Lorne in the SGC cafeteria and a friendly debate about whether Wraith were more badass than Jaffa turned into an e-book on gunsmithing in John's email inbox. He was conned into giving a PowerPoint presentation on "How to Foster Positive Trade Relationships" and later overheard Landry trying to convince someone on the phone that no, the Atlantis scientists were not hoarding analgesics and glassware, Christ, that's paranoid.
So he wouldn't even call it a Plan, really. It was more like a zeitgeist. Some people just knew what they had to do.
Of course it got more specific than that. It had to. Because at some point asking Rodney what it would take to get Atlantis spaceworthy again turned into asking Rodney what it would take to get Atlantis into space without anyone noticing, and after the third conversational turn like this he asked John straight up, "Would you do it?"
"What, smuggle a naqadah generator through airport security?"
"You know what I mean."
Because they all did. "We're heroes to an entire planet, Rodney."
The phone line was ribboned with static. "Mmm. Yeah. I see your point."
A protest march in Washington turned into a riot, and the president issued zatnikitels to the National Guard, and somehow that made it a commendable show of government restraint. Rodney never asked John if he was serious after that.
XXXXX
During month five, John drove to California twice, and managed to count both trips as business travel by helping out with some "minor glitches" in the Atlantis control chair systems. Both times his trunk was significantly lighter going east.
He also got dragged the other direction, to New York and Washington, because O'Neill still wanted a forward operating base in Pegasus. "And I'd like it to be Atlantis," he confided in John while they drank at taxpayer expense, "because God knows we'd all have less to worry about, but until the geeks from Area 51 put their research back together that city is Earth's primary line of defense."
"And what happens when they do put it back together?" John asked.
O'Neill shrugged and gestured vaguely. "They've got some kind of satellite ray-gun…thingy…magnets…tell you the truth, I have other people read those reports and highlight the good parts. Prototypes are still sitting in a warehouse in Kazakhstan, but the command computer got toasted by the Wraith."
Rodney got pulled away from Atlantis to complete final repairs on the Apollo and the Sun-Tzu and spent the night on John's couch. "You know Jeannie actually likes Jennifer," he reported. "Even if they do bond by abusing me. Oh, and I'm going to be an uncle again."
"They getting any crap from the declassification?" John asked while he put the finishing touches on an email to Woolsey that recounted some hilarious anecdotes of the New York trip.
"Mmm, none they didn't bring on themselves." Rodney stopped on CNN to watch another protest march. "Kaleb actually tried to argue with me about cultural imperialism but then Madison asked what that meant and we all just went to see a Disney movie together. Jennifer and I actually made out in the back row."
"To a Disney movie?"
"Well, you know, you take what you can get."
Carson threw some kind of hissy fit about his funding and threatened to resign until somebody pointed out that he was kind of locked in to his health plan. Zelenka went back to the Czech Republic for two weeks, had some horrible falling out with his sister, and got a wing of a university named after him. Amelia Banks resigned her job, joined an advocacy group for "insteller equality" and ended up on a terrorist watch list.
John kept planning.
XXXXXX
The sixth month started with riots in India, and their government did not issue zats, and President Hayes made a televised address that he was very disappointed. Half the SGC got sent on a road trip to field-test a new energy rifle before they were passed out at Camp Pendleton and SG-2 somehow lost an entire crate of the damn things, at least on paper, an administrative error for which John humbly accepted all the blame. (Hailey insisted it was stolen, possibly by elves. Even General Landry suggested she lay off the coffee for a while.)
John made another "business trip" to California, and on a whim drove by what was left of Area 51, and the spot where he almost left a crater. It made him want to call Dave, for some reason, maybe to say You wanna get dinner together or maybe just guess how many planets I've nearly died on. He did neither, because Dave saw everything on the news and never called him, and he was home before he realized that the 302 was the last time he flew anything.
And the General George Hammond returned from her maiden voyage with an interesting bit of news.
"They want what?" O'Neill asked, on one screen of the video conference.
"Atlantis," Sam said on another. She'd had plenty of time to digest the news and it still seemed to give her heartburn. "The Coalition claims it as cultural property of the Pegasus galaxy, not to mention a holy place for most of their people, and while they welcome our presence in the city as 'caretakers' they 'strenuously insist that the City of the Ancestors be returned to its rightful home.'"
Landry huffed at the main conference table where he'd assembled SG-1 and 2. "Isn't that what we technically did?"
Sam also explains that half the stranded expedition members she'd been sent to rescue did not consider themselves stranded and refused to leave; and that Teyla says hi. There's also something she wants to talk about with Landry but he deliberately sends John away before she brings it up.
XXXXXXX
In the seventh month, John's team got reorganized. "Short-term training assignment," Landry explained, but John couldn't care less, because it's Ronon.
"Couldn't do it," he reported to John as they wandered the swamps of P30-447. "Too much like Running. I don't…I couldn't be alone anymore."
"Genii not hiring this time?" John asked.
Ronon looked at him, and it was weird with his hair so short, but his face was the same. "Atlantis is home. And this is the closest I'm gonna get."
And John told him, right before Haley and Gomez got swallowed by leech monsters. The hair was different but the smirk was still the same.
There were protests across Europe that involved a lot of burning cars and multilingual slogans, and President Hayes made a speech about how we stood on a watershed in the history of a galaxy, and then he let some vegan hippies colonize two moons because nobody else was using them. A Christian fundamentalist suicide bomber attempted to assassinate Daniel Jackson but failed to correctly wire his detonator; Daniel was kept in protective custody for a week to ensure it wasn't a conspiracy and the bomber ended up in traction after Teal'c hit him with a very small car.
John had no time to drive to California, but he did find time to hang around Bill Lee's lab for a while, and coincidentally he cleared out a Staples of eight-gig flash drives.
Richard Woolsey successfully negotiated a joint Sino-Russo-Euro-American Homeworld Defense compact that promised to get the ray gun space magnet things into orbit inside a year, but then he accepted a post at an offworld research base. And Rodney called John and two o'clock in the morning because he'd realized that "Oh my god, I could really do it."
"Do what?" John asked, because he was used to this. (Haley kept him in practice.)
"Kids," Rodney said, voice full of wonder even over the tinny line. "I mean, we could do it, obviously Jennifer has to be involved too, but I mean we could really do it, because our families are all right here and there aren't any Wraith or anything. I could get married and have kids and keep Atlantis."
"Sure you could," John said, and wondered if this was going to work after all.
XXXXXXXX
The eighth month was bad. Rodney went to Chippewa Falls again. There were riots in South Africa and Brazil. John overheard Landry admitting that maybe the Atlantis facility did have some irregular expense reports, somebody better look into it.
And there was a mission that went right to hell, where Gomez had to hike a mile with a fucked-up knee and Haley had to build a DHD out of a flashlight and Ronon got captured and John got shot and they all slept in a big gross pile in a temple and got chased with farm implements and left the planet on fire. But somehow by the law of averages, the one mission that went completely FUBAR was the one Landry commended John for, and while they all got sewn back together in the infirmary they laughed about it, they went for celebratory Jell-o in the commissary and John thought, yeah, maybe I could do it too.
But Zelenka and Carson and Chuck still sent emails with rambling anecdotes and non sequiturs and hypothetical questions. And John still hadn't flown anything since Nevada.
Stephen Caldwell looked him up while the Daedalus was Earthside and they got beers. "Christ, I always thought you'd blow yourself up before you made full bird," was his version of a greeting.
"Plenty of people never thought I'd break Captain," John admitted. "I sent them all DVDs of the news conference."
That made Caldwell laugh, and enough beer made him say, "They're thinking of sending another survey through Pegasus. Confirming the status of the Wraith. Maybe try to collect the last wayward sheep from the expedition."
"Hey, if they wouldn't go with Sam I doubt they'll go with you," John said. "You gonna apologize to the Coalition for keeping Atlantis too?"
"Eh, it probably won't even happen." Caldwell finished his beer and did not order another. "Too expensive, too far from home."
John got a box in the mail with a San Francisco postmark and hid it, unopened, in the back of his locker in the SGC. Just thinking about it made his heart pound, because if they did this-when they did this-there really was no going back.
XXXXXXXXX
Nobody really said anything about it, but the ninth month was when it happened. The date seemed to settle by osmosis, and the timing seemed auspicious, because there were protests and riots for thirty straight days and this time it wasn't cars that are burning, it was embassies and tanks and Buddhist monks. Also the guy auditing their expenses got carpal tunnel and has to put the inquiry on hold.
Zelenka went back to the Czech Republic for just three days to talk to his sister. Carson arranged an anonymous cash bequest to his mother. Lorne passed John in the corridors one day and just shakes his hand and says, "Good luck." Amelia sent him a Hallmark card and the Millers sent him a citrus-free fruit basket. Ronon didn't even say anything, but one day when Landry gave them some down time he followed John to the parking lot and asked, "Are we driving or flying?"
John looked at Ronon's clothes, and the hair starting to twist into little knobs of baby dreads again. "Don't you have to pack?"
Ronon looked at himself and then shrugged. "Not really."
John went back for his Johnny Cash poster and his fruit basked, and topped off the gas tank before they hit the road. A Mustang was a Mustang, after all; no second chances.
They spent the day with the vague intention of sightseeing in San Francisco, but just ended up raiding convenience stores for coffee and chocolate and Jolt. John gave the Mustang keys and the title to the first random stranger who admired it and they walked down the beach with their stash, watching the sun sink on the horizon, behind their city which was a diamond in the bay.
More people arrived as it got dark, in ones and two and trios. Soldiers. Scientists. People John barely remembered, sometimes, and some people to whom he owed his life, and some people he'd never met like parents and spouses and kids. The Plan had worked better than he could ever have hoped and it suddenly seemed like too many and not nearly enough. He and Ronon passed out last commemorative junk food and kept a watch on the water, though it was choppy enough you wouldn't necessarily see a cloaked Jumper break the surface when it did.
Some people, like John, had brought nothing, but others brought bags or boxes or steamer trunks. Woolsey showed up at nearly midnight with a giant hiking backpack, and equally giant rolling suitcase, and a rolling animal carrier that appeared to contain a Yorkie. "I'd like you to know I was normal before I met you people," he told John with a scowl. "You're a horrible influence. All of you."
"We love you too, Dick," John told him, and gave him a Snickers.
Ronon spotted the first Jumper land just up the beach, then the second, and they kept the interior lights down when they opened the hatches so it looked like everyone was being swallowed into the dark. John saw Jennifer's face for just a minute in the scramble and wondered why she'd come out, or if she'd been in Chippewa Falls and needed in, but then he was in a jumper again and he hadn't flown anything in nine whole months.
Rodney was piloting this one and let John take over. "Everything ready to go?"
"Yeah. All set." Rodney looked through the jumper window at the sea and stars.
John closed the hatch and studied Rodney carefully. "What's up?" he asked, but for once Rodney McKay was actually silent, just shaking his head. Instead John got his answer when he brought the jumper around and Jennifer was still standing on the beach, hands tucked under her arms, small and alone.
x
At T minus 10 hours John got back to Atlantis, slipped past the escort ships and into the lower jumper bay. They had to hide for a while in the lower decks, but Rodney promised Chuck was on sensor duty and nobody would see them. So they let Woolsey's dog out and passed the time throwing John's sweatband for her to fetch, until she was worn out and the band was distinctly chewed. If Ronon recognized the hair bracelet John wore under the sweatband he didn't say a word.
At T minus 6 hours the last of the ferry jumpers made it into the city, just in time for Rodney and the rest of the first shift to take their posts. He took a crystal from a wall panel before he went and was already arguing with someone in the control tower about a sensor problem before he hit the transporter.
At T minus 5 hours 54 minutes Zelenka appeared and smuggled John into the chair room disguised as a technician. "Am locking you in for now," he said. "Your access codes will re-active later. Trust me."
"Little late to back out if I didn't," John pointed out, and set his radio to the main command channel.
At T minus 5 hours Atlantis began experiencing various inexplicable power problems.
At T minus 3 hours Rodney listed off four problems with the ZPMs that could mean imminent explosions, and requested permission to move the city further out into the bay. The SGC confirmed; John waited until Carson tapped out a signal on the locked doors, and then climbed into the chair and powered up the stardrive.
At T minus 2 hours 40 minutes the SGC asked why the Atlantis stardrive was not powering down. Rodney claimed not to know.
At T minus 2 hours 30 minutes, Rodney and Zelenka tag-teamed the technobabble to the effect that the stardrive was about to explode and suggested they start evacuating non-essential personnel to the escort ships.
At T minus 1 hours 45 minutes, the commander of the escort fleet asked why the flow of evacuees had stopped, when they weren't even halfway through the lists set up for just this possibility. Zelenka responded with another wall of babble and ordered the escort ships out of blast radius, while Rodney asked the SGC for permission to activate the Atlantis stargate in order to finish evacuations. The SGC confirmed.
At T minus 1 hours 5 minutes, Rodney suggested that raising the shield would contain any explosion and warned the SGC that the communications system could fail at any moment. The SGC confirmed, and the shield went up.
At T minus 1 hours, Rodney shut all outside communications down.
"Good morning, passengers," Woolsey said over the citywide speakers. "This is your commander speaking. The City of Atlantis will soon be departing for the Pegasus Galaxy. Please stow your personal belongs in the overhead containment bins. If your final destination is not the Pegasus Galaxy, please report to the gate room for evacuation. Thank you for flying with the City of Atlantis."
"Damn," John told him on a closed channel. "We are a bad influence."
At T minus 0 hours, 10 minutes they dialed the Alpha Site to send the last outsiders away. "It'll be tricky, but I think we can keep the gate open until we reach orbit," Rodney said. "That way the SGC won't have any warning before we engage the wormhole drive."
"Just as long as we don't fall out of the sky, Rodney," John told him.
"Yes, yes, because I went to all this trouble only to die hideously or get arrested or both."
John willed the city into the air, far out of sight of any prying civilian eyes, up up and away like a bird or a plane. He could feel the ZPMs pumping, the city straining, and this was both harder and easier than before, because he had all the power he needed but he couldn't help but feel they were leaving people behind.
Rodney brought up communications again just so they could hear O'Neill screaming, "Atlantis, what the hell are you doing?"
"Engaging wormhole drive," John announced-he didn't know if that broadcast or not-and then it was Time
x
The first week they spent drifting on the edge of Pegasus because, um, Rodney and Zelenka may have actually overloaded the power grid a little, but the shield held and they made it home alive.
The first month they spent tracking down old friends, starting with Teyla, who along with Kanaan had an entirely different surprise to share. They welcomed her home and she spent an entire night helping Ronon even out his incipient dreads while John and Rodney played with Torren (who had gotten huge) and the newborn girl who Teyla introduced as Meredith Ronon Emmagen.
The first year was spent in terrifying imitation of, well, the first year, because they forgot some things and some people and some ways of surviving, but they had allies and determination and nowhere else to go.
"We took a control crystal out of the DHD," Rodney explained to Teyla while recounting the Plan. "It can't send or receive intergalactic addresses anymore. So even if they find a power source, they can't dial us, and we're less of a threat because no enemies can use our gate to dial them."
"I hid it in my locker," John added. "With a note for Landry. Kinda wish I coulda seen his face when he found it."
"Could they not still send ships to find us?" Teyla asked, and John liked how it was us again so quickly.
"Could do," John allowed. "If they decide it's worth the time and cost. And if they're willing to admit to the general public that their own personnel stole a city right out from under their noses."
"I even lied," Rodney added. "It was kind of amazing."
But one night John joined Rodney in his lab, along with the cats (who were named Jack and Donna, "because I was originally going with Jack and Rose, see, since she looked so much more yellow in the picture, but once I realized she was actually more of a ginger I just had to, well, never mind.") Rodney was working, because they're all working now all the time, but when John asked "What happened?" Rodney didn't pretend to play dumb.
"She couldn't leave," he said. "Funny, isn't it? I'm the one who was always obsessed with the Nobel and my reputation, and Jeannie and I worked so hard these last few years, and… " He cleared his throat. "I asked her to leave. For me. And she asked me to stay for everybody else."
John let Donna chase a loose string hanging from his wristband (the Yorkie had developed a fondness for it) while he said, "I'm glad you're here."
And in spite of everything, Rodney actually managed to smile. "You know what? Me too."