Peg² (16/?)
Shawn was safely on Earth for the next four days, where he couldn’t cause any trouble (at least, where he couldn’t cause any trouble that John had to deal with), Rodney was awake, and Jesse hadn’t, to John’s knowledge, tried to plug anyone into an Ancient sentient city for at least a day and a half now. He should really take advantage of the respite while he had it. If there was one thing his tours in Pegasus had taught John over the years, it was to appreciate the downtime-because it was probably gonna end dramatically, possibly with explosions, in about five minutes or so. (So he might as well take those five minutes to request more goddamn condoms and peanut butter, or else the Marines were going to start trying to repopulate the Pegasus Galaxy all on their ownsome. And as much as the natives might love the idea, John had no effing clue how he’d explain that situation to the Brass back at the SGC, and didn’t really want to try. As for the peanut butter, John had learned very early in his military career to ignore the demands of the mess hall at his peril.)
Roughly three minutes ahead of schedule, Rodney burst into John’s hiding place-also known on the official blueprints as his office-disheveled and sweaty and red in the face, a damp t-shirt straining across his shoulders and wearing the ratty sweatpants he usually only used as pajama pants. John was on his feet without any recollection of getting there, hand on the gun in his holster and rapping out a demand for a SITREP while his brain was still perseverating on the way Rodney’s broad shoulders filled the doorway. Rodney had looked so shrunken and narrow in the hospital gurney for those hellish two weeks he was in the coma, so it was good to see him taking up the space around him like he owned it again, even though his sweats were hanging a little looser than usual, and the t-shirt wasn’t as tight as it used to be. (John ignored the tight clench of relief in his gut at the sight of Rodney upright and abrasive, if looking thinner and weaker than normal.)
Rodney looked confused and flustered at John’s demand for a report. “What? Are we under attack? Why does no one tell me these things?!” Rodney complained, tapping at his ear and looking momentarily baffled when he didn’t encounter a radio, before comprehension flooded his face and he gestured peremptorily for John to hand his over. John ignored him.
“I thought you were telling me those things,” John replied with a wave at Rodney’s flustered appearance, sinking back down into his chair at the evident lack of immediate impending doom.
“Oh.” Still looking a little bewildered, Rodney hovered in John’s doorway, oddly silent, at least for Rodney.
“Did you need something? Shouldn’t you still be plugged into the wall in the infirmary?” John finally asked, wondering just what exactly the hell was going on.
“Nope. I’m a free man. Atlantis gave me the all clear-except for updates and bug fixes, and seriously, how disturbing is that-a couple of hours ago and Carson released me from the infirmary and into the evil clutches of that sadist Pasha,” Rodney said, frowning when he talked about the physical therapist. Well, that explained his flushed face and sweaty dishabille. Pasha was a overbearing tyrant in his domain, for all he was deceptively soft-spoken and smiling outside it.
John rolled his eyes. “It’s just PT, Rodney, it’s not like he’s trying to torture you until you break. I’m sure you’ll live,” he told Rodney dryly, ignoring that stupid clench in his gut that made itself known again when he joked about Rodney’s close call. It’d go away soon enough with a decent cushion of time between when he’d last seen Rodney in a hospital bed. If it didn’t, he’d make an appointment with Carson for a physical. Getting surprised by mutating into a giant alien space bug once was enough, thanks. Though this felt more like appendicitis had, back when he was in ROTC. Maybe Pegasus had spontaneously regrown his appendix (in the wrong place) and it was thinking about rupturing (again). Stranger things had happened, after all (see: mutating into a giant alien space bug).
“So did you make a break for it, or did Pasha actually let you go?” John asked, not that he was intending on giving Rodney up if he had escaped-John had endured PT with Pasha pretty recently himself, and wouldn’t blame Rodney for playing hooky.
Rodney scowled and grumbled in response to John’s comment, but John tuned out his answer, instead listening to the rising and falling of Rodney’s voice. He hid a smile with some industrious shuffling of requisition forms-he’d missed Rodney the most when he’d sat by his bed and watched the still, silent form hooked up to the machines, a strange simulacrum that was nothing like the man he knew and- John stood up once his fond smile was hidden safely away and Rodney’s breathing had evened out from the harsh rasping he’d been trying to hide when he’d first darkened John’s door not two minutes ago.
“You wanna see what the mess hall can rustle up for an invalid?” John asked. “I bet as long as you keep quiet they’ll be nice and sympathetic and forget how much you usually irritate them,” he grinned sharply over at Rodney as they left John’s rarely-used office.
Oddly, Rodney didn’t get that pinched and annoyed look John’s teasing generally rewarded him with. Instead, he smiled absently in John’s direction-an actual smile, and not just the usual wry twist of lips-and pulled one of his ubiquitous touch-pads out of god knew where (maybe it folded? John couldn’t figure out how it’d fit in Rodney’s sweatpants’ pockets otherwise) and was tapping away at it. Halfway to the mess hall, he waved it in front of John’s face, too close for him to see it clearly and obscuring his line of sight enough to cause him to collide with an innocent Marine.
John grabbed it out of Rodney’s hands to get a better look at the data on the screen, and to prevent any more embarrassing run-ins with other innocent bystanders. Rodney leaned in, too close, resting a hand distractingly on John’s back to steady himself as he peered over John’s shoulder at the screen, pointing at a string of numbers and symbols as they walked. John moved away from the hand and the encroachment on his bubble of personal space, but figured it was too much effort to make a fuss when Rodney just crowded back in and put his hand right back in the same spot, too intent on the screen of the data-pad to notice anything not in the realm of knowledge.
“That’s the equation Atlantis gave you? I want to make sure it made it though that ridiculous game of telephone intact and correct-compare it to that tab she flagged for you in that conversation, will you?” Figured. John felt a little like he imagined printouts of the millennium problems might if they, well, felt-only valued for the information they contained with no regard for themselves. John realized where his train of thought was heading and shook it off with a mental wince, refocusing on Rodney and Atlantis’s very own millennium problem. Eon problem? Whatever over ten thousand years worked out to-
“Uh, yeah. That looks right,” John managed to confirm, still thrown from the combination of Rodney’s ignorance of the concept of personal space and his own thought processes. John refused to acknowledge his awareness of the ridiculous amount of heat Rodney was putting off as his body worked to cool down from his physical therapy session with Pasha, radiating through his palm on John’s lower back and across his entire right side where Rodney was pressed up against him to point out something on the data-pad.
“I’m trying to figure out why she gave this to you. If it’s a formula for the theory of travel between universes, or if it has something to do with the Wraith ships themselves-by the way, we’ve gotta think of a better name for them seeing as they’re not really Wraith ships, especially if Atlantis wants us to embark on some epic quest to free them from slavery or what have you,” Rodney muttered, not really to himself, in one of his half-aware stream-of-consciousness monologues, multitasking as he scrolled through the math on his data-pad without actually taking it back from John, walking down the hall in step with him.
John nudged Rodney into turning into the doorway of the mess hall with a shoulder bump, and Rodney went with a pro-forma squawk of annoyance. Rodney gasped out a curse John was glad Jesse wasn’t around to hear when he walked straight into Ronon’s back and barely saved the data-pad from tumbling to the floor when the bump jostled it from John’s hands. Ronon and Major Morris were talking quietly and intently, halfway through the door to the mess hall, turned towards each other in a way that excluded the rest of the world from their conversation.
“Sharing secrets, guys?” John asked with a raised eyebrow and no real expectation or desire for an answer. The last time he’d actually broken into a conversation between the two of them, he’d ended up in a really fucking confusing discussion that somehow combined base-twelve counting systems and Satedan military history and Steven Segal’s entire filmography in a way that obviously made complete sense to everyone but him.
Ronon grunted and moved out of the way, pulling Major Morris along after him with a big hand wrapped around the Major’s bicep. Morris waved an absent farewell over his shoulder, not halting as he expounded on, from what John could tell, was a heartfelt ode to the benefits of grenade launchers over assault rifles or pulse guns in a manufactured reality.
Rodney snorted and muttered something under his breath about ‘hand-wavy dream physics’ that John didn’t feel like asking him to elaborate on, and tucked his data-pad safely away back wherever it had come from in the first place (about which John was no more enlightened now than he had been in the first place. He suspected, however, that Rodney was keeping it tucked in the waistband of his sweats at the small of his back like the geek version of a gangsta with a gun). “Shall we?” Rodney asked, mockingly waving John ahead of him as they hit the end of the lunch line. Being in a coma had changed the man. Being waved ahead in the lunch line was definitely a first from Rodney.
John craned his neck to see what was on offer today: almost-meatloaf and the disturbing yet delicious violet mashed potatoes, along with the ubiquitous gallons of Pegasus’ version of coleslaw. He reported his findings to Rodney, who clapped his hands together and rubbed them against each other in a disturbingly accurate portrayal of a clichéd B-movie villain. “Excellent,” he cackled with manic eyes, before dropping the (hopefully) character and grinning at John. “Something that almost tastes right. The universe is smiling on me today,” Rodney said lightly, clapping John on the back with a broad, hot hand.
They were sitting down, eating with the silent and focused determination that came from the mess hall producing food that almost tasted like home and was good to boot, when Jesse startled John by appearing at his side (Ronon must have made good on those ‘sneaking’ lessons Jesse had been begging for). “Hi Uncle ‘Kay!” he chirped, before facing John solemnly, a gravely serious expression on his face. “‘Lantis says the ship-people the Wraiths slaved grow like puppies,” his son stated baldly. John froze with horror, his fork paused in the air in front of his mouth, mashed violet almost-potatoes dropping from it to the table with a resounding splat.
Rodney chortled with what looked like unholy glee. John pretended not to notice, and said firmly, “No. Just, no. You’re grounded, and even if you weren’t, you still wouldn’t get a baby Hive ship for your very own.” Internally, he despaired. This was going to be like the pony thing, he could tell already.
“‘Lantis says they’re not Hives, they’re Leevie- Leavvy-” Jesse paused, frowning slightly for a moment before his expression cleared, the low buzz in the back of John’s mind letting him know Atlantis was correcting his son’s pronunciation (and how fucked up was that?), “Leviathans. Geez, Daddy. Also, she wants you to know that she talked to the free ones and they’re coming to visit us.”
John straightened up. “The free ones?” he asked, his voice not breaking like that of an adolescent going through puberty. “I thought they were all-” Atlantis interrupted him with a quick summation of her busy last two hours, and John sagged against the table, glad he was still sitting down. “Two hundred?” he shouted in reply to her briefing, even though she didn’t interpret volume the same way the rest of his command did. Speaking of which, the mess hall quieted significantly, and John lowered his voice when he corrected himself at Atlantis’s iteration of specificity. “One hundred and seventy six. Free Leviathans. Shit.” Meal forgotten, John got to his feet as calmly as he could. He didn’t want to alarm the mess hall filled with soldiers and scientists poised for action after his earlier shout (Pegasus as a whole seemed to have trained them a little too well over the years when it came to the appearance of alarm in Atlantis’ command staff), and headed for the door and Woolsey’s office, walking as quickly as his normal casually unconcerned stride would take him.
This was something he needed to let Woolsey in on in private, and not over the Command channel (which the scientists and scientifically inclined military personnel both hacked into with distressing regularity).
Someone grabbed his hand, and he looked down to see Jesse skipping along beside him, a beatific grin on his mischievous little face. Rodney was trailing along behind them, almost-meatloaf obviously forgotten, tapping at his data-pad with increasing urgency as they closed in on Woolsey’s office.
Jesse recaptured John’s attention, saying, “The baby ones are real small, daddy. Smaller than a pony! And they-” John hung his head in defeat and walked faster. If it wasn’t one thing, these days, it was another.
Seventeen -->
Roughly three minutes ahead of schedule, Rodney burst into John’s hiding place-also known on the official blueprints as his office-disheveled and sweaty and red in the face, a damp t-shirt straining across his shoulders and wearing the ratty sweatpants he usually only used as pajama pants. John was on his feet without any recollection of getting there, hand on the gun in his holster and rapping out a demand for a SITREP while his brain was still perseverating on the way Rodney’s broad shoulders filled the doorway. Rodney had looked so shrunken and narrow in the hospital gurney for those hellish two weeks he was in the coma, so it was good to see him taking up the space around him like he owned it again, even though his sweats were hanging a little looser than usual, and the t-shirt wasn’t as tight as it used to be. (John ignored the tight clench of relief in his gut at the sight of Rodney upright and abrasive, if looking thinner and weaker than normal.)
Rodney looked confused and flustered at John’s demand for a report. “What? Are we under attack? Why does no one tell me these things?!” Rodney complained, tapping at his ear and looking momentarily baffled when he didn’t encounter a radio, before comprehension flooded his face and he gestured peremptorily for John to hand his over. John ignored him.
“I thought you were telling me those things,” John replied with a wave at Rodney’s flustered appearance, sinking back down into his chair at the evident lack of immediate impending doom.
“Oh.” Still looking a little bewildered, Rodney hovered in John’s doorway, oddly silent, at least for Rodney.
“Did you need something? Shouldn’t you still be plugged into the wall in the infirmary?” John finally asked, wondering just what exactly the hell was going on.
“Nope. I’m a free man. Atlantis gave me the all clear-except for updates and bug fixes, and seriously, how disturbing is that-a couple of hours ago and Carson released me from the infirmary and into the evil clutches of that sadist Pasha,” Rodney said, frowning when he talked about the physical therapist. Well, that explained his flushed face and sweaty dishabille. Pasha was a overbearing tyrant in his domain, for all he was deceptively soft-spoken and smiling outside it.
John rolled his eyes. “It’s just PT, Rodney, it’s not like he’s trying to torture you until you break. I’m sure you’ll live,” he told Rodney dryly, ignoring that stupid clench in his gut that made itself known again when he joked about Rodney’s close call. It’d go away soon enough with a decent cushion of time between when he’d last seen Rodney in a hospital bed. If it didn’t, he’d make an appointment with Carson for a physical. Getting surprised by mutating into a giant alien space bug once was enough, thanks. Though this felt more like appendicitis had, back when he was in ROTC. Maybe Pegasus had spontaneously regrown his appendix (in the wrong place) and it was thinking about rupturing (again). Stranger things had happened, after all (see: mutating into a giant alien space bug).
“So did you make a break for it, or did Pasha actually let you go?” John asked, not that he was intending on giving Rodney up if he had escaped-John had endured PT with Pasha pretty recently himself, and wouldn’t blame Rodney for playing hooky.
Rodney scowled and grumbled in response to John’s comment, but John tuned out his answer, instead listening to the rising and falling of Rodney’s voice. He hid a smile with some industrious shuffling of requisition forms-he’d missed Rodney the most when he’d sat by his bed and watched the still, silent form hooked up to the machines, a strange simulacrum that was nothing like the man he knew and- John stood up once his fond smile was hidden safely away and Rodney’s breathing had evened out from the harsh rasping he’d been trying to hide when he’d first darkened John’s door not two minutes ago.
“You wanna see what the mess hall can rustle up for an invalid?” John asked. “I bet as long as you keep quiet they’ll be nice and sympathetic and forget how much you usually irritate them,” he grinned sharply over at Rodney as they left John’s rarely-used office.
Oddly, Rodney didn’t get that pinched and annoyed look John’s teasing generally rewarded him with. Instead, he smiled absently in John’s direction-an actual smile, and not just the usual wry twist of lips-and pulled one of his ubiquitous touch-pads out of god knew where (maybe it folded? John couldn’t figure out how it’d fit in Rodney’s sweatpants’ pockets otherwise) and was tapping away at it. Halfway to the mess hall, he waved it in front of John’s face, too close for him to see it clearly and obscuring his line of sight enough to cause him to collide with an innocent Marine.
John grabbed it out of Rodney’s hands to get a better look at the data on the screen, and to prevent any more embarrassing run-ins with other innocent bystanders. Rodney leaned in, too close, resting a hand distractingly on John’s back to steady himself as he peered over John’s shoulder at the screen, pointing at a string of numbers and symbols as they walked. John moved away from the hand and the encroachment on his bubble of personal space, but figured it was too much effort to make a fuss when Rodney just crowded back in and put his hand right back in the same spot, too intent on the screen of the data-pad to notice anything not in the realm of knowledge.
“That’s the equation Atlantis gave you? I want to make sure it made it though that ridiculous game of telephone intact and correct-compare it to that tab she flagged for you in that conversation, will you?” Figured. John felt a little like he imagined printouts of the millennium problems might if they, well, felt-only valued for the information they contained with no regard for themselves. John realized where his train of thought was heading and shook it off with a mental wince, refocusing on Rodney and Atlantis’s very own millennium problem. Eon problem? Whatever over ten thousand years worked out to-
“Uh, yeah. That looks right,” John managed to confirm, still thrown from the combination of Rodney’s ignorance of the concept of personal space and his own thought processes. John refused to acknowledge his awareness of the ridiculous amount of heat Rodney was putting off as his body worked to cool down from his physical therapy session with Pasha, radiating through his palm on John’s lower back and across his entire right side where Rodney was pressed up against him to point out something on the data-pad.
“I’m trying to figure out why she gave this to you. If it’s a formula for the theory of travel between universes, or if it has something to do with the Wraith ships themselves-by the way, we’ve gotta think of a better name for them seeing as they’re not really Wraith ships, especially if Atlantis wants us to embark on some epic quest to free them from slavery or what have you,” Rodney muttered, not really to himself, in one of his half-aware stream-of-consciousness monologues, multitasking as he scrolled through the math on his data-pad without actually taking it back from John, walking down the hall in step with him.
John nudged Rodney into turning into the doorway of the mess hall with a shoulder bump, and Rodney went with a pro-forma squawk of annoyance. Rodney gasped out a curse John was glad Jesse wasn’t around to hear when he walked straight into Ronon’s back and barely saved the data-pad from tumbling to the floor when the bump jostled it from John’s hands. Ronon and Major Morris were talking quietly and intently, halfway through the door to the mess hall, turned towards each other in a way that excluded the rest of the world from their conversation.
“Sharing secrets, guys?” John asked with a raised eyebrow and no real expectation or desire for an answer. The last time he’d actually broken into a conversation between the two of them, he’d ended up in a really fucking confusing discussion that somehow combined base-twelve counting systems and Satedan military history and Steven Segal’s entire filmography in a way that obviously made complete sense to everyone but him.
Ronon grunted and moved out of the way, pulling Major Morris along after him with a big hand wrapped around the Major’s bicep. Morris waved an absent farewell over his shoulder, not halting as he expounded on, from what John could tell, was a heartfelt ode to the benefits of grenade launchers over assault rifles or pulse guns in a manufactured reality.
Rodney snorted and muttered something under his breath about ‘hand-wavy dream physics’ that John didn’t feel like asking him to elaborate on, and tucked his data-pad safely away back wherever it had come from in the first place (about which John was no more enlightened now than he had been in the first place. He suspected, however, that Rodney was keeping it tucked in the waistband of his sweats at the small of his back like the geek version of a gangsta with a gun). “Shall we?” Rodney asked, mockingly waving John ahead of him as they hit the end of the lunch line. Being in a coma had changed the man. Being waved ahead in the lunch line was definitely a first from Rodney.
John craned his neck to see what was on offer today: almost-meatloaf and the disturbing yet delicious violet mashed potatoes, along with the ubiquitous gallons of Pegasus’ version of coleslaw. He reported his findings to Rodney, who clapped his hands together and rubbed them against each other in a disturbingly accurate portrayal of a clichéd B-movie villain. “Excellent,” he cackled with manic eyes, before dropping the (hopefully) character and grinning at John. “Something that almost tastes right. The universe is smiling on me today,” Rodney said lightly, clapping John on the back with a broad, hot hand.
They were sitting down, eating with the silent and focused determination that came from the mess hall producing food that almost tasted like home and was good to boot, when Jesse startled John by appearing at his side (Ronon must have made good on those ‘sneaking’ lessons Jesse had been begging for). “Hi Uncle ‘Kay!” he chirped, before facing John solemnly, a gravely serious expression on his face. “‘Lantis says the ship-people the Wraiths slaved grow like puppies,” his son stated baldly. John froze with horror, his fork paused in the air in front of his mouth, mashed violet almost-potatoes dropping from it to the table with a resounding splat.
Rodney chortled with what looked like unholy glee. John pretended not to notice, and said firmly, “No. Just, no. You’re grounded, and even if you weren’t, you still wouldn’t get a baby Hive ship for your very own.” Internally, he despaired. This was going to be like the pony thing, he could tell already.
“‘Lantis says they’re not Hives, they’re Leevie- Leavvy-” Jesse paused, frowning slightly for a moment before his expression cleared, the low buzz in the back of John’s mind letting him know Atlantis was correcting his son’s pronunciation (and how fucked up was that?), “Leviathans. Geez, Daddy. Also, she wants you to know that she talked to the free ones and they’re coming to visit us.”
John straightened up. “The free ones?” he asked, his voice not breaking like that of an adolescent going through puberty. “I thought they were all-” Atlantis interrupted him with a quick summation of her busy last two hours, and John sagged against the table, glad he was still sitting down. “Two hundred?” he shouted in reply to her briefing, even though she didn’t interpret volume the same way the rest of his command did. Speaking of which, the mess hall quieted significantly, and John lowered his voice when he corrected himself at Atlantis’s iteration of specificity. “One hundred and seventy six. Free Leviathans. Shit.” Meal forgotten, John got to his feet as calmly as he could. He didn’t want to alarm the mess hall filled with soldiers and scientists poised for action after his earlier shout (Pegasus as a whole seemed to have trained them a little too well over the years when it came to the appearance of alarm in Atlantis’ command staff), and headed for the door and Woolsey’s office, walking as quickly as his normal casually unconcerned stride would take him.
This was something he needed to let Woolsey in on in private, and not over the Command channel (which the scientists and scientifically inclined military personnel both hacked into with distressing regularity).
Someone grabbed his hand, and he looked down to see Jesse skipping along beside him, a beatific grin on his mischievous little face. Rodney was trailing along behind them, almost-meatloaf obviously forgotten, tapping at his data-pad with increasing urgency as they closed in on Woolsey’s office.
Jesse recaptured John’s attention, saying, “The baby ones are real small, daddy. Smaller than a pony! And they-” John hung his head in defeat and walked faster. If it wasn’t one thing, these days, it was another.
Seventeen -->