Guises in Four Seasons (1/2)
Another cleaned-up-and-tweaked story from sga_flashfic (well, half of one).
-title- Guises in Four Seasons
-warnings- Gen and suitable for general audiences. Takes place in the asymptotic-to-canon AU I've written in a few times before.
-spoilers- "Autumn" is a missing scene for the Ronon parts of "Duet"; "Winter" takes place sometime after "Epiphany."
-characters- John, Ronon, Rodney
-disclaimer- I own no part of Stargate: Atlantis. Somehow or another a fair bit of Manly Wade Wellman crept into this story here and there; I'm not him, either, and the short stories being referenced can be found here.
--"Autumn"-specific: The second song mentioned is by Bob Dylan. In one line, Sheppard's thinking of Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest.
--"Winter"-specific: I'm not sure if Wellman made up the Appalachian Ancients or whether they're genuine folklore, but I first encountered them in his short story "Shiver in the Pines."
-autumn-
In the evening, after he's shown Ronon around most of the interesting bits of the city, he ducks back into his quarters for Helva and meets the newcomer in a high open room with varying levels and scalable sculptury things, some of which rotate. John thinks that it must be the Ancient equivalent of a park.
John sits on one of the sliding surfaces, some sort of combination of park bench and porch swing, and tunes Helva.
"Musician?" Ronon wonders, leaning against one of the taller structures, far more stiffly than John would.
"This is a guitar," John explains as his fingers slide into 'Coming Round the Mountain,' which has meant home for him for almost as long as he can remember. "Favored instrument of famous performers and guys foozling around after a few drinks."
Ronon shrugs.
John shrugs right back. "Also one of the few instruments that can be carried around in our world's version of Running."
"Said you didn't have Wraith, where you came from."
"We don't. I was running from myself."
Ronon snorts. "Did it work?"
"I found myself eventually. Hadn't seen him for a while." The chords absentmindedly turn into the chorus of 'My Back Pages.' "If I hadn't been given the chance to come to Atlantis, I'd probably be doing that again now. It's simpler, wandering the world with no more than you can carry. Strips you down to yourself and your ghosts, and most of them are too much to keep dragging with you." John notices what he's playing, and modulates it into a tune that goes to eleventeen ballads or so -- this one he knows he can keep up for hours without any input from his brain whatsoever.
"But you stopped."
"I found something worth staying for." Jenny, Jen, Gwenaver -- sun-bright hair and big eyes, and to lose one parent is misfortune but to lose both smacks of carelessness. He'd stayed ground-bound till she left him, running for tomorrow and leaving behind all her yesterdays, and it shouldn't have felt so much like a first breath of fresh air, to sign on the dotted line and know that with time and good marks he'd once again be told to fly.
"This place?" Ronon looks at him challengingly, straightening and using his body to take up more space, holding an aggressive stance. It's very well done, and John's instructors would have graded him well for its execution and then taken off a few points for failing to realize that its recipient was more amused than intimidated.
"These people," John corrects. Because in the end no place -- not even Atlantis -- is worth the life of even one of his people, and the day he forgets that is the day he'd best relieve himself of his command and take on no more responsibility than that of sentient remote control.
He starts trying to fit words to the tune he's playing about the people in question, but gives it up when he realizes he can't think of rhymes for genius or Elizabeth that don't make him want to burst into a fit of snickers and most likely convince Ronon that he's accepted the hospitality of a man with mental issues.
-winter-
"I don't believe you!" Rodney declaims to the vaulting ceiling, stalking back and forth, stomping feet and thrashing arms and shaking head all bearing witness to the fact that yes, John's well and truly put his foot in it this time. (Again.)
"I didn't do anything," John is compelled to point out. "She threw herself at me."
"Yes. I've noticed. They do that." Rodney stops and whirls back toward him. "And have you ever, even once, thrown them back and gone on?"
"Yes."
Rodney folds his arms and glares at him, puffed up with too much indignation to even squeeze the word "Elaborate!" from his throat.
John shrugs and does so anyway. "Before I joined the Air Force, I spent some time tramping over half the Southeast." He doesn't want to explain what sent him there, really doesn't want to get into exactly how old he is, and hurries into the next sentence. "There were, you know, girls, in the farms and the villages, and some of them were nice and some of them were interested."
Rodney rolls his eyes. "It would have been more surprising if there weren't."
"Oh, you know what I meant. My point was, there was just me and I knew how to talk to them, so I knew how to say 'Thank you, but no thank you' and keep saying it until they listened. Or to leave when the nice ones wouldn't."
"And the not-nice ones?"
"I didn't particularly care about them." John thinks for a while. "Oh, and one of them sort of died, and another one wasn't a girl in the first place."
"I like the way you say it so casually." Rodney flings up his arms on the last word.
"Well, you know, these things happen."
"Yes, yes, but my point is -- was -- anyway, if you used to walk off and leave them to get on with their lives, what changed?"
"One of them followed me." He hasn't realized he was ready to talk about it, even obliquely; and yet there the words are, coming as surely as the memory of looking back down the last hill and seeing the small woman trudging up it, hair plastered to her face and shoes tattered on her feet, running on adrenaline fumes and pure undiluted willpower.
"And?" Rodney's voice is impatient.
"And I married her."
Simple words, simple phrase -- Reader, I married him, Eyre/Brontë had written, and summed up a lifetime in four words -- and that said everything and nothing about his wife. His wife, though he'd been married other times: just as, no matter how many sisters he had (and probably more after he'd lost touch), his sister always meant his twin sister, his elder sister, whose name he was barely able to remember without pain, and the woman meant Irene Adler Norton to Holmes and all his followers, his wife always to him meant the small woman with the sunbright hair and a way of standing tall and mild in her own skin that some would have killed to possess.
There are times when Teyla reminds John of his wife so fiercely that he can scarcely breathe, and he'd held her at a distance until he'd learned to know her for herself; Teyla, of all people, deserves better than to be seen through the lens of a woman long gone.
"And then what, she divorced you?" Rodney's voice breaks into the familiar spiral of his thoughts, warm and alive and blessedly human.
"No, that was Deb," John corrects absently. "My first wife died. I couldn't save her. ...I think maybe she took the part of me that knew how to say no with her."
The words hang there, filling the hall, truer maybe than he'd thought they were -- he can count on the fingers of one hand the relationships he's had in the last twenty years that can't be summed up as In retrospect, what the hell was I thinking?, and that includes the weird codependent carried-along-by-expectations thing he'd drifted into with Teer. Which wasn't all that different from the thing he'd drifted into with Deb, what with the parts where she waited for him to make the first moves and he made them on autopilot, right on schedule.
Rodney sits down, not too near John, something not quite as self-centered as chagrin on his face.
"How did she die?"
"Saving kids." John can't quite work up the energy for a snarl, although he does manage something dry and dead that might -- in Bizarro World, in a Dali landscape -- pass for wry laughter at the end.
Rodney winces. "Do you, uh, do you want to talk about it?"
"No."
Each second of the silence comes to weigh like years.
"So, uh, you used to wander around in, like, Kentucky and Georgia and stuff?"
"And stuff," John agrees gratefully. "I did chores and played the guitar and collected stories -- there were lots of stories about things built by 'Ancients,' but the Ancients in those stories didn't sound like Alterans." He thinks for a moment. "They didn't even sound like people. Well, maybe Fearlingas. If they'd gone all feral and shit."
"Feh-ar-whichwhat? Hey. You should tell some of those stories to Jinto and his friends next time Teyla invites herself and us over to the mainland."
"I don't know," John says. "Most of them are kind of scary."
Rodney snorts. "Who was telling them the entire Friday the Thirteenth oeuvre?"
"That's different. Jason and so forth aren't scary scary -- they're scary, but it's cartoon scary, it's not real, everyone watches them for the blood anyway. Well, that and the breasts."
"Usually juxtaposed so as to give you all sorts of interesting complexes later in life."
"But the point is, it's safe scary. Like a roller coaster -- nobody rides a roller coaster thinking that there's an actual chance they could die, unless they spend their time counting out the lethal possibilities of everything." John shoots Rodney a pointed glance. "If they wanted something with a statistically significant risk, they'd learn to fly or take up surfing."
"Or like a Ferris wheel?" Rodney majestically ignores the dig.
"Oh, come on. Who gets scared of a Ferris wheel? Ferris wheels are for hey, I can see my house from here without the ambient noise of rotary wings."
"That's what observation decks are for."
"Yeah, but they don't even move. They're really pretty boring once you've looked once."
"Something like your stories -- seriously, Colonel, these are the kids who were running up and down the halls at night jumping out at each other wearing homemade Wraith masks. Expecting them to get a kick out of slasher movies -- out of retellings of slasher movies -- is like, like, like expecting even the social scientists to get nervous when they're in a room full of people wearing guns."
"But don't -- " John begins. Stops. Thinks about it.
"Yes. See? Exactly."
"Maybe I will tell one or two the next time we go over." He looks up, brightening. "Maybe I'll bring Helva and sing them the songs -- some of them should go into Gatespeech without too much strain."
"Hel -- oh, right, your guitar. And sing? You?"
"My voice isn't that bad."
"I've heard worse. On occasion." Rodney makes one of the backward leaps in conversation that match the way his brain charges off in all directions at once and confuse any mere mortals attempting to follow his train of thought. "Have you even ever been on a Ferris wheel?"
"What?! I -- of course I have, plenty of times, I like Ferris wheels. Were you not paying attention all three hundred times I said so?"
"It's such a pat little introductory script. Hit the right point in the conversation, drop it in, smile and watch the other person nod -- you've had it down to an art, haven't you?"
"Doesn't mean it isn't true," John huffs. "I wouldn't lie about something so easy to check."
"That's reasonable," Rodney says thoughtfully, peering at John with his puzzle-solving expression. "You probably wouldn't, would you."
Of course he wouldn't. The more lies you tell, the more lies you have to keep track of; it was the first principle he'd been taught in Advanced Rhetoric, and only known to be truer since then.
Tell superficial truths to the people you know superficially; tell simple truths to the people you know better, and they will see truth under truth and assume turtles all the way down without ever seeing to the heart of things. He doesn't tell Rodney this, but the man must know on some level, after all.
For John's good -- he knows he's good -- but most of the people who deal with Dr. McKay don't even suspect there's a beneath the underneath the underneath.
The first Mrs. Sheppard kept trying to turn into Evadare until finally I flung my metaphorical hands up and said "All right, fine, she's Evadare, just not officially Evadare."
-title- Guises in Four Seasons
-warnings- Gen and suitable for general audiences. Takes place in the asymptotic-to-canon AU I've written in a few times before.
-spoilers- "Autumn" is a missing scene for the Ronon parts of "Duet"; "Winter" takes place sometime after "Epiphany."
-characters- John, Ronon, Rodney
-disclaimer- I own no part of Stargate: Atlantis. Somehow or another a fair bit of Manly Wade Wellman crept into this story here and there; I'm not him, either, and the short stories being referenced can be found here.
--"Autumn"-specific: The second song mentioned is by Bob Dylan. In one line, Sheppard's thinking of Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest.
--"Winter"-specific: I'm not sure if Wellman made up the Appalachian Ancients or whether they're genuine folklore, but I first encountered them in his short story "Shiver in the Pines."
-autumn-
In the evening, after he's shown Ronon around most of the interesting bits of the city, he ducks back into his quarters for Helva and meets the newcomer in a high open room with varying levels and scalable sculptury things, some of which rotate. John thinks that it must be the Ancient equivalent of a park.
John sits on one of the sliding surfaces, some sort of combination of park bench and porch swing, and tunes Helva.
"Musician?" Ronon wonders, leaning against one of the taller structures, far more stiffly than John would.
"This is a guitar," John explains as his fingers slide into 'Coming Round the Mountain,' which has meant home for him for almost as long as he can remember. "Favored instrument of famous performers and guys foozling around after a few drinks."
Ronon shrugs.
John shrugs right back. "Also one of the few instruments that can be carried around in our world's version of Running."
"Said you didn't have Wraith, where you came from."
"We don't. I was running from myself."
Ronon snorts. "Did it work?"
"I found myself eventually. Hadn't seen him for a while." The chords absentmindedly turn into the chorus of 'My Back Pages.' "If I hadn't been given the chance to come to Atlantis, I'd probably be doing that again now. It's simpler, wandering the world with no more than you can carry. Strips you down to yourself and your ghosts, and most of them are too much to keep dragging with you." John notices what he's playing, and modulates it into a tune that goes to eleventeen ballads or so -- this one he knows he can keep up for hours without any input from his brain whatsoever.
"But you stopped."
"I found something worth staying for." Jenny, Jen, Gwenaver -- sun-bright hair and big eyes, and to lose one parent is misfortune but to lose both smacks of carelessness. He'd stayed ground-bound till she left him, running for tomorrow and leaving behind all her yesterdays, and it shouldn't have felt so much like a first breath of fresh air, to sign on the dotted line and know that with time and good marks he'd once again be told to fly.
"This place?" Ronon looks at him challengingly, straightening and using his body to take up more space, holding an aggressive stance. It's very well done, and John's instructors would have graded him well for its execution and then taken off a few points for failing to realize that its recipient was more amused than intimidated.
"These people," John corrects. Because in the end no place -- not even Atlantis -- is worth the life of even one of his people, and the day he forgets that is the day he'd best relieve himself of his command and take on no more responsibility than that of sentient remote control.
He starts trying to fit words to the tune he's playing about the people in question, but gives it up when he realizes he can't think of rhymes for genius or Elizabeth that don't make him want to burst into a fit of snickers and most likely convince Ronon that he's accepted the hospitality of a man with mental issues.
-winter-
"I don't believe you!" Rodney declaims to the vaulting ceiling, stalking back and forth, stomping feet and thrashing arms and shaking head all bearing witness to the fact that yes, John's well and truly put his foot in it this time. (Again.)
"I didn't do anything," John is compelled to point out. "She threw herself at me."
"Yes. I've noticed. They do that." Rodney stops and whirls back toward him. "And have you ever, even once, thrown them back and gone on?"
"Yes."
Rodney folds his arms and glares at him, puffed up with too much indignation to even squeeze the word "Elaborate!" from his throat.
John shrugs and does so anyway. "Before I joined the Air Force, I spent some time tramping over half the Southeast." He doesn't want to explain what sent him there, really doesn't want to get into exactly how old he is, and hurries into the next sentence. "There were, you know, girls, in the farms and the villages, and some of them were nice and some of them were interested."
Rodney rolls his eyes. "It would have been more surprising if there weren't."
"Oh, you know what I meant. My point was, there was just me and I knew how to talk to them, so I knew how to say 'Thank you, but no thank you' and keep saying it until they listened. Or to leave when the nice ones wouldn't."
"And the not-nice ones?"
"I didn't particularly care about them." John thinks for a while. "Oh, and one of them sort of died, and another one wasn't a girl in the first place."
"I like the way you say it so casually." Rodney flings up his arms on the last word.
"Well, you know, these things happen."
"Yes, yes, but my point is -- was -- anyway, if you used to walk off and leave them to get on with their lives, what changed?"
"One of them followed me." He hasn't realized he was ready to talk about it, even obliquely; and yet there the words are, coming as surely as the memory of looking back down the last hill and seeing the small woman trudging up it, hair plastered to her face and shoes tattered on her feet, running on adrenaline fumes and pure undiluted willpower.
"And?" Rodney's voice is impatient.
"And I married her."
Simple words, simple phrase -- Reader, I married him, Eyre/Brontë had written, and summed up a lifetime in four words -- and that said everything and nothing about his wife. His wife, though he'd been married other times: just as, no matter how many sisters he had (and probably more after he'd lost touch), his sister always meant his twin sister, his elder sister, whose name he was barely able to remember without pain, and the woman meant Irene Adler Norton to Holmes and all his followers, his wife always to him meant the small woman with the sunbright hair and a way of standing tall and mild in her own skin that some would have killed to possess.
There are times when Teyla reminds John of his wife so fiercely that he can scarcely breathe, and he'd held her at a distance until he'd learned to know her for herself; Teyla, of all people, deserves better than to be seen through the lens of a woman long gone.
"And then what, she divorced you?" Rodney's voice breaks into the familiar spiral of his thoughts, warm and alive and blessedly human.
"No, that was Deb," John corrects absently. "My first wife died. I couldn't save her. ...I think maybe she took the part of me that knew how to say no with her."
The words hang there, filling the hall, truer maybe than he'd thought they were -- he can count on the fingers of one hand the relationships he's had in the last twenty years that can't be summed up as In retrospect, what the hell was I thinking?, and that includes the weird codependent carried-along-by-expectations thing he'd drifted into with Teer. Which wasn't all that different from the thing he'd drifted into with Deb, what with the parts where she waited for him to make the first moves and he made them on autopilot, right on schedule.
Rodney sits down, not too near John, something not quite as self-centered as chagrin on his face.
"How did she die?"
"Saving kids." John can't quite work up the energy for a snarl, although he does manage something dry and dead that might -- in Bizarro World, in a Dali landscape -- pass for wry laughter at the end.
Rodney winces. "Do you, uh, do you want to talk about it?"
"No."
Each second of the silence comes to weigh like years.
"So, uh, you used to wander around in, like, Kentucky and Georgia and stuff?"
"And stuff," John agrees gratefully. "I did chores and played the guitar and collected stories -- there were lots of stories about things built by 'Ancients,' but the Ancients in those stories didn't sound like Alterans." He thinks for a moment. "They didn't even sound like people. Well, maybe Fearlingas. If they'd gone all feral and shit."
"Feh-ar-whichwhat? Hey. You should tell some of those stories to Jinto and his friends next time Teyla invites herself and us over to the mainland."
"I don't know," John says. "Most of them are kind of scary."
Rodney snorts. "Who was telling them the entire Friday the Thirteenth oeuvre?"
"That's different. Jason and so forth aren't scary scary -- they're scary, but it's cartoon scary, it's not real, everyone watches them for the blood anyway. Well, that and the breasts."
"Usually juxtaposed so as to give you all sorts of interesting complexes later in life."
"But the point is, it's safe scary. Like a roller coaster -- nobody rides a roller coaster thinking that there's an actual chance they could die, unless they spend their time counting out the lethal possibilities of everything." John shoots Rodney a pointed glance. "If they wanted something with a statistically significant risk, they'd learn to fly or take up surfing."
"Or like a Ferris wheel?" Rodney majestically ignores the dig.
"Oh, come on. Who gets scared of a Ferris wheel? Ferris wheels are for hey, I can see my house from here without the ambient noise of rotary wings."
"That's what observation decks are for."
"Yeah, but they don't even move. They're really pretty boring once you've looked once."
"Something like your stories -- seriously, Colonel, these are the kids who were running up and down the halls at night jumping out at each other wearing homemade Wraith masks. Expecting them to get a kick out of slasher movies -- out of retellings of slasher movies -- is like, like, like expecting even the social scientists to get nervous when they're in a room full of people wearing guns."
"But don't -- " John begins. Stops. Thinks about it.
"Yes. See? Exactly."
"Maybe I will tell one or two the next time we go over." He looks up, brightening. "Maybe I'll bring Helva and sing them the songs -- some of them should go into Gatespeech without too much strain."
"Hel -- oh, right, your guitar. And sing? You?"
"My voice isn't that bad."
"I've heard worse. On occasion." Rodney makes one of the backward leaps in conversation that match the way his brain charges off in all directions at once and confuse any mere mortals attempting to follow his train of thought. "Have you even ever been on a Ferris wheel?"
"What?! I -- of course I have, plenty of times, I like Ferris wheels. Were you not paying attention all three hundred times I said so?"
"It's such a pat little introductory script. Hit the right point in the conversation, drop it in, smile and watch the other person nod -- you've had it down to an art, haven't you?"
"Doesn't mean it isn't true," John huffs. "I wouldn't lie about something so easy to check."
"That's reasonable," Rodney says thoughtfully, peering at John with his puzzle-solving expression. "You probably wouldn't, would you."
Of course he wouldn't. The more lies you tell, the more lies you have to keep track of; it was the first principle he'd been taught in Advanced Rhetoric, and only known to be truer since then.
Tell superficial truths to the people you know superficially; tell simple truths to the people you know better, and they will see truth under truth and assume turtles all the way down without ever seeing to the heart of things. He doesn't tell Rodney this, but the man must know on some level, after all.
For John's good -- he knows he's good -- but most of the people who deal with Dr. McKay don't even suspect there's a beneath the underneath the underneath.
The first Mrs. Sheppard kept trying to turn into Evadare until finally I flung my metaphorical hands up and said "All right, fine, she's Evadare, just not officially Evadare."