A Broader Mark For Sorrow, by thedaytheystop [family challenge]
Title: A Broader Mark For Sorrow
Author: thedaytheystop
Challenge: Family
Word Count: 3500+
Rating: hard R
Summary: AU from the Return, Part I. John moves on, and remembers. "After a while-he thinks it’s been a year, maybe more, since he entered Daren by bribing a naïve, curious guard with a story of life beyond the ancestor’s ring-he notices that he’s beginning to look like them, the Darenese."
"He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too."
Benjamin Franklin
Daren is like nothing John’s ever seen before. It’s the red-light district of Bangkok and the back alleys of Philadelphia and the drug quarter in Bogotá, all rolled into one. It’s a thousand dark corners of a thousand Earth cities, smothered in the steaming heat from its three suns, sand flying through the streets at the outskirts of the city from the endless desert stretching over the rest of the continent.
It helps him forget.
He’s only there for two days when he’s offered a job-propositioned-the first time-just long enough for him to get local clothes and rent a stained, run-down back room in a seedy inn.
He laughs it off, the first time, because it’s not something he would ever seriously consider, not when his tac vest and P-90 are still hidden between the wallboards of his room.
He runs out of money during his second week, eating his last almost-falafel in the warm, sandy rain six blocks past the main almost-train station.
When John was a boy, his mother had shown him the letters his grandfather sent home from the invasion of Italy. He wrote of the rain ripping through Calabria, and of waking the next morning to find the tanks splattered with sand carried on the wind all the way from the Sahara.
That’s a bit how John feels, sometimes.
He gets his first job at an almost-pharmacy, cutting what he thinks is almost-cocaine-harith, here-but he hasn’t tried it to be certain. He’s not sure if it’s legal, but they don’t ask him for his red card so he doesn’t ask questions.
After a few hours in the dank basement, weighing and mixing the heavy white powder, his head starts to throb. He finishes out the day anyway and comes back the next, and his new boss, a desert-dweller who moved into Daren with the last sweep of drought, six years ago, grunts and gives him an advance on his pay.
The gate on Mylia is a three-day desert journey from Daren, monitored by the last vestiges of the archduke’s guard. It’s one of the reasons John likes it.
He’s arrested about a month after he arrives, and when he says he doesn’t have a red card-gradizji, forgotten, he insists, the strange words like sand on his lips-the guards punch him in the stomach, and the face, and again, for a while, until a watching warden gestures disdainfully that he’s had enough, and they toss him out into the street, bleeding.
"You need some comfort, honey?" A woman asks from somewhere above him, leaning down in her blood red heels to poke at his chest.
"No," John manages, "thanks."
"Your loss," she says, and stalks away, and after a while and two more indecent proposals, he stands, clutching his stomach and wiping blood off of his face.
Tsceka, the landlady, just shakes her head at him when he finally makes it back to his room.
He goes into work the next day as usual, limping, but his boss shoves him out the door.
"We don't need trouble from the dravni," he snarls, and tosses a bag of coins after John. It's not all the money John’s owed, but John’s not in a position to complain.
He takes a few days to recover, at least until the visible bruises start to fade, and finally goes out to find new work.
The harithi for six streets shut their doors in his face, probably after warnings from his first job. By the end of the day he is sunburnt and filthy, and doesn’t even have energy to reply to the girls who approach him on his way back to his room.
His rent is up the next day and he leaves, rolling his P-90 and the remainders of his-other life-into a burlap bundle and illegally taking the almost-train to the sixth district, across the continent's lone river. The harithi here don’t know him, and the prostitutes aren’t used to seeing him in the streets.
He gets another job cutting-he’s good at it, it turns out, he has an eye for the weighing and enough math skill to proportion everything correctly (McKay would splutter at the indignity, at his beautiful math skills being used for evil)-and another shitty room, this one a little larger than the last.
"Want to make some money?" a man asks him in the street, two months later.
Maybe he's a little high from inhaling harith dust all day, or maybe he’s sick of starving from one almost-pita to the next, but he stops and considers it, for a second.
Maybe he's just starved for touch.
The man laughs and walks away at his hesitation, and John goes back to his room and the filthy communal shower and tries to scrub the sand out of the crevices of his skin, tries not to think about how the people he knew before would react to see him here, dirty and shamed and thinking of selling his body on the streets.
His fingernails start to bleed a few months later, and from the knowing looks from the other cutters he can tell it’s a reaction to the harith.
He doesn't do anything about it until one day they hurt too much to disassemble his P-90, and then he finishes the next pay period and quits, letting the poison of the drug seep out of his pores.
He lasts about a week, unemployed.
"Want to make some money?" a different man asks, in an alley by the canal in the seventh district.
"Sure," John says, "what do you have in mind?"
In the end it's not as bad as he had-maybe-been expecting. It's quick and hot and messy, and he’s sore for a few days but the man had had an almost-condom.
He makes more that night than in two weeks under the harithi, and he tells himself that it was worth it, that the only thing he regrets is the torn pair of pants.
The second time-and there is a second time, because John’s got to eat, and the guards are cracking down and raiding businesses for red cards, which John hasn't got-it's even easier. It’s a woman, which changes things, but doesn’t fool John into thinking he’s in control.
She's wealthy, takes him back to her house across the river, fucks him into the straw mattress while the second sun is setting. She’s got a servant fanning them the entire time, trying to offer some respite from the heat.
John thinks he should be embarrassed, but he isn't. Instead, he turns his head towards the young man and luxuriates in the feeling of the breeze easing over his face.
The woman, though-her skin is a little too dark, her eyes a little too bright, her muscles a little too strong-when he gets up to leave and looks back at her on the bed, the candlelight casting shadows over her, the resemblance knocks the breath out of him. She’s the last woman he fucks in Daren, because suddenly all he can see when he looks at them-any of them, from the whores he passes in the alleyways to his new landlady-is Teyla.
The men don't look like anyone he knew, not really, and he takes refuge in that, throwing his body against theirs and waiting it out until they pay him, sweaty hands counting out the dusty gold coins.
After a while-he thinks it's been a year, maybe more, since he entered Daren by bribing a naïve, curious guard with a story of life beyond the ancestor's ring-he notices that he's beginning to look like them, the Darenese. His skin has burned and tanned and burned again, until it is leather-tough and brown, and he's lost weight, eating meager rations during the day and prowling the streets at night. He’s wearing their clothes, of course, and the end result, he thinks, is that even the guards don’t take a second glance at him anymore.
The second time they catch him and demand his 'forgotten' red card, he lets the warden fuck him and he’s released without so much as a warning. Malitta, the old woman letting him a tiny room in the basement of her whorehouse, smiles at him sadly as he limps back inside after the long night away.
Later, in the cramped harak'shri, senses dulled by the red not-wine and the cloud of harith dust floating through the room, he winds his body down next to hers, barely touching, and speaks of his family. Culled, he says, Ranaslatisi, the wraith. The lie sits heavy in the pit of his stomach, but she reaches out and pulls him into her arms, palms warm against his cheeks, and says the prayers to the Ancestors.
A while after that-weeks, maybe a month or two-one of his fucks, a merchant who works the outpost that services the ring guards, starts to talk.
Yesterday, a strange machine came through the ring, and retreated, immediately, after seeing the ring guards.
John freezes and only the continuing thrusts from the fuck keep him in the moment.
If they’ve sent a MALP-it's time to go, but maybe it's only a routine scout, maybe it's nothing to do with him at all. Maybe he can-
What the hell is a MALP doing in the Pegasus galaxy, anyway?
John lies low for the next month, only taking work in the sixth district and not venturing out during the day. It kills him-his rooms swelter during the day and he's slowly running out of food-but it's necessary.
In the end, it isn't enough.
John's in alley with a fuck, easing his pants down over his hips, when an achingly familiar shadow clouds John's vision, and, when he looks up, it's Harless, one of the hulking Marines that John only vaguely knows from his miserable months at the SGC.
John pulls away from the merchant-"I paid you, hrothi, what do you think you're-", jerks his pants up, and takes off down the other end of the alley, pulling a knife out of his belt, but before he can escape two marines-unfamiliar marines-appear, aiming at him, and Major Lorne is standing behind them, waiting.
"Stand down, Colonel," Lorne says, and John feels Harless advancing towards his back, until John can practically feel the other man’s body heat.
John laughs, once, bitterly, and raises his hands. Harless grabs them and twists them down behind his back, and another marine steps in and pats him down, brutal and efficient.
"Sorry, sir," Lorne says, as they start to hustle him out of the alley, through the dank streets to wherever it is that they’ve got a jumper hidden. "Orders."
It turns out John's wrong-they haven’t got a jumper at all, but rather the Daedalus, which beams them up as soon as they reach a square and Lorne taps his radio.
Caldwell is waiting, along with a few others, and he just looks at John, sweating and filthy, and shakes his head.
"Upon return to the SGC, Colonel, you and the others were implanted with tracers during your initial check-ups, in case you were needed quickly in the event of re-establishment of Atlantis," Caldwell says.
John feels anger-and fear-coiling up in the pit of his stomach.
"What now?"
"Why don't you get cleaned up, and then you'll tell us what happened and we'll determine where to go from there," One of the men with Caldwell-General O'Neill, John realizes in shock, who must have made it back through the gate, when---then.
John holds his hands up in surrender, and Harless and the others shuffle him out of the room, depositing him in front of one of the barren guest quarters and tossing a spare flight uniform in onto the bed.
John showers and yeah, that feels good, clean pressurized water for the first time in ages, but when he comes back out his clothes are gone, and he resents that more than he thought he would-that shirt took three weeks to earn, dammit, and the pants were a gift from Malitta, when she saw how bad his first pair had gotten. He tries not to think about the bundle of things he left behind, including his treasured P-90-he left it disassembled, and can only hope that whatever whore finds it in his rooms hasn’t got the sense to put it back together.
The flight suit is itchy and uncomfortable, and he resents that, too.
"I don't want to talk about it," John says, minutes later.
"Look, Sheppard, there’s nothing-" O'Neill starts, almost sympathetically.
"That’s a direct order, Colonel," Caldwell says.
John takes a moment to close his eyes and breathe out slowly. Images flash across his eyelids and he stops them, abruptly, thinking instead of the summer suns on Daren and the way the sand whips across your feet through the thin leather irraji, stinging.
"What do you want to know?" John asks blandly.
"What happened to the others?" Caldwell asks bluntly. "Weir, Beckett, and McKay?"
"And Teyla and Ronon," John adds, loudly, bitterly. Caldwell nods, a moment too late to be sincere.
"They're dead," John says, and the words-the words he hasn’t said-are like sandpaper in his mouth, rough and dry and wearing him down.
O'Neill frowns and looks away. Caldwell looks down and shakes his head, slowly, and John realizes that yes, these men knew them too, but it is different for them.
"All of them?" O'Neill asks, a moment later.
"I saw Weir, Beckett, and Teyla go down," John says, closing his eyes. "McKay and Ronon were behind me when--I didn't see it."
"What happened next?"
"The Replicators took me," John says, "Kept me for about a month, until the Wraith came. They battled it out and in the end I was able to leave through the gate. I checked life signs for McKay and Ronon but -there was nothing."
"And you went to PX8-19L?"
"Mylia," John says, "It's-Mylia. And-it was a lot more complicated than that. Sir."
"Well, tell us about it," Caldwell says, not giving an inch. John thinks that they must not be over the jumper theft and escape attempt, even if O'Neill and Woolsey made it out alive.
"I think that’s enough for now, guys," O'Neill interrupts, deceptively mild. "Colonel, why don't we take this up to the bridge," he says, standing up. Caldwell stands instantly and John follows, a beat too late.
"Sheppard, get some sleep. We'll continue this later."
O'Neill steers Caldwell out of the conference room and John is alone, trapped in a mechanical monster light-years from the desert and his gritty bed, even further from the cold ruined city he’d once called home.
Harless and his guys escort John back to the guest quarters. He sleeps.
The next day there’s more conversation-no one asks what John was doing with the guy in the alley, and John thinks that might have more to do with Major Lorne’s tact than Colonel Caldwell’s-and more endless hours of sitting in his room, alone.
He wonders, briefly, why he ran. Why he had such a great fear of retribution-they were probably happy to see him, after all, probably thought they were rescuing him from an alien world, until he pulled the knife. Why he feared the MALP, why his skin itched to move on, run to another world in the back alleys of the galaxy and construct another life from the ashes of his former self.
It hits him during one of the supervised meals he takes in the mess, a spoonful of Jell-o halfway to his lips (and nowhere near as flavorful as the malac’rai he’d learned to cook during a sandstorm five moons ago, his lungs burning from the harsh black smoke of the fire).
He can’t leave Pegasus.
He forgets the Jell-o entirely, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath.
He can’t leave Pegasus.
He can’t leave them, all alone in the ruins of Atlantis, their loss covered in paperwork and wrapped in a bow for their grieving families billions of miles away.
The Daedalus has been operating from the Alpha Site, John learns, and they arrive there only two days after he is taken from Mylia. It's a stopover, nothing more - now that they know the fates of their people, of Elizabeth and Carson and Rodney, they will begin their last, permanent journey back to the Milky Way. There's nothing left to stay for.
"We'll be in orbit for a few hours," Caldwell says, after the daily briefing, his face sour. "General O'Neill suggested that you be allowed a supervised visit down to the planet, as you know it from your time at Atlantis."
"Yes," John says, almost instantly, because he knows where this is going, has known it, somewhere, from the moment O'Neill's eyes swept him up and down, clad in his Darenese robes, skin burnished by alien suns. This is a story that O'Neill knows. "That would be…nice, sir."
John feels numb as he waits, then, the interminable minutes before his escorts appear. He thinks, idly, that he ought to look around the Daedalus, appreciate it; like a traveler leaving a famed city for the last time. He doesn’t.
His escorts are O'Neill, Lorne, and two Marines. When they are beamed down, O'Neill casually orders the others off to help the teams pack up the last of their equipment from the camp. Lorne leaves with a crisp salute, lips pursed tightly, and a long look in John’s direction.
"Well," O’Neill says (sighs).
"Thank you, sir," John says.
"Yeah," O'Neill replies, and unzips his tac vest, sliding it off of his shoulders and holding it out to John. A peace offering.
"Look, kid," O'Neill says, when John takes it. "Thanks for saving my ass. And for saving Woolsey, much as he continues to be a pain in the aforementioned region."
John nods.
"I get it," O’Neill continues. "I get that you have this streak, this thing, and you're not the first and you won’t be the last, and I have this knack to get caught up in all of it, all of you people. Don’t think I haven't noticed you on the Daedalus the last few days, how your eyes aren't focused and you're scratching at the uniform and pulling at the chain of your tags. I get it. I've felt it myself. And I'm-well, there’s someone back home who probably wouldn't ever talk to me again if I put you on that ship and locked you in that cabin and brought you back to Earth."
John notices, abstractly, that O’Neill doesn’t say "home."
"If the Goa'uld show up, hide your wife," O'Neill says, voiced tinged with something like regret. "Now, knock me out and make a break for it. Go."
John clips O'Neill in the temple, hard, before he can change his mind.
The first year after that, a frost spreads in his stomach, peaceful and numb. They aren't going to come back, ever, and he’s going to be free. Free to live. Free to remember.
He settles in a village on PX8-173, a tundra planet with patches of evergreen forest. It's as far from Daren as he can get, the villagers welcoming him with open arms as a much needed hand in the not-potato fields. He doesn't have to turn tricks, and by winter he has his own log cabin, sheltered from the bitter snow. There are wooden pegs left over from its construction. He takes them and sets them over his hearth--five pegs for five people.
Eventually he will carve them, shape the heads into faces and the sides into arms and legs. Eventually they will have names.
He stops thinking about Earth. Stops thinking about his family-about Dave, and his father, and after a while it's almost as though they never existed, these strangers tied to him only by blood.
During the dark of the winter, that short period when there is no light in the world, not for weeks, the villagers invite John to join the nightly gatherings around the flames of the fire in the Council Hall. On the sixth night, with days to go before sunlight strikes again, the children ask John for a story. The word quickly spreads and soon the whole hall is hushed, waiting for the foreigner to tell them tales of the stars.
"In my family, I had three brothers," John begins, a lump in his throat, heat spreading downward from the hot mulled mead in the mug between his hands. "The first was a giant, far larger than you and I, and equally brave. His name was-"
John breaks off, looks down, and swallows, slowly, because he can’t do this, can’t even think this, can't acknowledge that there is a world in which these events have come to pass-and a russet-haired child, Livan, settles into the space between John’s legs, drowsy and warm. John breathes out.
"His name was Ronon."
Author: thedaytheystop
Challenge: Family
Word Count: 3500+
Rating: hard R
Summary: AU from the Return, Part I. John moves on, and remembers. "After a while-he thinks it’s been a year, maybe more, since he entered Daren by bribing a naïve, curious guard with a story of life beyond the ancestor’s ring-he notices that he’s beginning to look like them, the Darenese."
"He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too."
Benjamin Franklin
Daren is like nothing John’s ever seen before. It’s the red-light district of Bangkok and the back alleys of Philadelphia and the drug quarter in Bogotá, all rolled into one. It’s a thousand dark corners of a thousand Earth cities, smothered in the steaming heat from its three suns, sand flying through the streets at the outskirts of the city from the endless desert stretching over the rest of the continent.
It helps him forget.
He’s only there for two days when he’s offered a job-propositioned-the first time-just long enough for him to get local clothes and rent a stained, run-down back room in a seedy inn.
He laughs it off, the first time, because it’s not something he would ever seriously consider, not when his tac vest and P-90 are still hidden between the wallboards of his room.
He runs out of money during his second week, eating his last almost-falafel in the warm, sandy rain six blocks past the main almost-train station.
When John was a boy, his mother had shown him the letters his grandfather sent home from the invasion of Italy. He wrote of the rain ripping through Calabria, and of waking the next morning to find the tanks splattered with sand carried on the wind all the way from the Sahara.
That’s a bit how John feels, sometimes.
He gets his first job at an almost-pharmacy, cutting what he thinks is almost-cocaine-harith, here-but he hasn’t tried it to be certain. He’s not sure if it’s legal, but they don’t ask him for his red card so he doesn’t ask questions.
After a few hours in the dank basement, weighing and mixing the heavy white powder, his head starts to throb. He finishes out the day anyway and comes back the next, and his new boss, a desert-dweller who moved into Daren with the last sweep of drought, six years ago, grunts and gives him an advance on his pay.
The gate on Mylia is a three-day desert journey from Daren, monitored by the last vestiges of the archduke’s guard. It’s one of the reasons John likes it.
He’s arrested about a month after he arrives, and when he says he doesn’t have a red card-gradizji, forgotten, he insists, the strange words like sand on his lips-the guards punch him in the stomach, and the face, and again, for a while, until a watching warden gestures disdainfully that he’s had enough, and they toss him out into the street, bleeding.
"You need some comfort, honey?" A woman asks from somewhere above him, leaning down in her blood red heels to poke at his chest.
"No," John manages, "thanks."
"Your loss," she says, and stalks away, and after a while and two more indecent proposals, he stands, clutching his stomach and wiping blood off of his face.
Tsceka, the landlady, just shakes her head at him when he finally makes it back to his room.
He goes into work the next day as usual, limping, but his boss shoves him out the door.
"We don't need trouble from the dravni," he snarls, and tosses a bag of coins after John. It's not all the money John’s owed, but John’s not in a position to complain.
He takes a few days to recover, at least until the visible bruises start to fade, and finally goes out to find new work.
The harithi for six streets shut their doors in his face, probably after warnings from his first job. By the end of the day he is sunburnt and filthy, and doesn’t even have energy to reply to the girls who approach him on his way back to his room.
His rent is up the next day and he leaves, rolling his P-90 and the remainders of his-other life-into a burlap bundle and illegally taking the almost-train to the sixth district, across the continent's lone river. The harithi here don’t know him, and the prostitutes aren’t used to seeing him in the streets.
He gets another job cutting-he’s good at it, it turns out, he has an eye for the weighing and enough math skill to proportion everything correctly (McKay would splutter at the indignity, at his beautiful math skills being used for evil)-and another shitty room, this one a little larger than the last.
"Want to make some money?" a man asks him in the street, two months later.
Maybe he's a little high from inhaling harith dust all day, or maybe he’s sick of starving from one almost-pita to the next, but he stops and considers it, for a second.
Maybe he's just starved for touch.
The man laughs and walks away at his hesitation, and John goes back to his room and the filthy communal shower and tries to scrub the sand out of the crevices of his skin, tries not to think about how the people he knew before would react to see him here, dirty and shamed and thinking of selling his body on the streets.
His fingernails start to bleed a few months later, and from the knowing looks from the other cutters he can tell it’s a reaction to the harith.
He doesn't do anything about it until one day they hurt too much to disassemble his P-90, and then he finishes the next pay period and quits, letting the poison of the drug seep out of his pores.
He lasts about a week, unemployed.
"Want to make some money?" a different man asks, in an alley by the canal in the seventh district.
"Sure," John says, "what do you have in mind?"
In the end it's not as bad as he had-maybe-been expecting. It's quick and hot and messy, and he’s sore for a few days but the man had had an almost-condom.
He makes more that night than in two weeks under the harithi, and he tells himself that it was worth it, that the only thing he regrets is the torn pair of pants.
The second time-and there is a second time, because John’s got to eat, and the guards are cracking down and raiding businesses for red cards, which John hasn't got-it's even easier. It’s a woman, which changes things, but doesn’t fool John into thinking he’s in control.
She's wealthy, takes him back to her house across the river, fucks him into the straw mattress while the second sun is setting. She’s got a servant fanning them the entire time, trying to offer some respite from the heat.
John thinks he should be embarrassed, but he isn't. Instead, he turns his head towards the young man and luxuriates in the feeling of the breeze easing over his face.
The woman, though-her skin is a little too dark, her eyes a little too bright, her muscles a little too strong-when he gets up to leave and looks back at her on the bed, the candlelight casting shadows over her, the resemblance knocks the breath out of him. She’s the last woman he fucks in Daren, because suddenly all he can see when he looks at them-any of them, from the whores he passes in the alleyways to his new landlady-is Teyla.
The men don't look like anyone he knew, not really, and he takes refuge in that, throwing his body against theirs and waiting it out until they pay him, sweaty hands counting out the dusty gold coins.
After a while-he thinks it's been a year, maybe more, since he entered Daren by bribing a naïve, curious guard with a story of life beyond the ancestor's ring-he notices that he's beginning to look like them, the Darenese. His skin has burned and tanned and burned again, until it is leather-tough and brown, and he's lost weight, eating meager rations during the day and prowling the streets at night. He’s wearing their clothes, of course, and the end result, he thinks, is that even the guards don’t take a second glance at him anymore.
The second time they catch him and demand his 'forgotten' red card, he lets the warden fuck him and he’s released without so much as a warning. Malitta, the old woman letting him a tiny room in the basement of her whorehouse, smiles at him sadly as he limps back inside after the long night away.
Later, in the cramped harak'shri, senses dulled by the red not-wine and the cloud of harith dust floating through the room, he winds his body down next to hers, barely touching, and speaks of his family. Culled, he says, Ranaslatisi, the wraith. The lie sits heavy in the pit of his stomach, but she reaches out and pulls him into her arms, palms warm against his cheeks, and says the prayers to the Ancestors.
A while after that-weeks, maybe a month or two-one of his fucks, a merchant who works the outpost that services the ring guards, starts to talk.
Yesterday, a strange machine came through the ring, and retreated, immediately, after seeing the ring guards.
John freezes and only the continuing thrusts from the fuck keep him in the moment.
If they’ve sent a MALP-it's time to go, but maybe it's only a routine scout, maybe it's nothing to do with him at all. Maybe he can-
What the hell is a MALP doing in the Pegasus galaxy, anyway?
John lies low for the next month, only taking work in the sixth district and not venturing out during the day. It kills him-his rooms swelter during the day and he's slowly running out of food-but it's necessary.
In the end, it isn't enough.
John's in alley with a fuck, easing his pants down over his hips, when an achingly familiar shadow clouds John's vision, and, when he looks up, it's Harless, one of the hulking Marines that John only vaguely knows from his miserable months at the SGC.
John pulls away from the merchant-"I paid you, hrothi, what do you think you're-", jerks his pants up, and takes off down the other end of the alley, pulling a knife out of his belt, but before he can escape two marines-unfamiliar marines-appear, aiming at him, and Major Lorne is standing behind them, waiting.
"Stand down, Colonel," Lorne says, and John feels Harless advancing towards his back, until John can practically feel the other man’s body heat.
John laughs, once, bitterly, and raises his hands. Harless grabs them and twists them down behind his back, and another marine steps in and pats him down, brutal and efficient.
"Sorry, sir," Lorne says, as they start to hustle him out of the alley, through the dank streets to wherever it is that they’ve got a jumper hidden. "Orders."
It turns out John's wrong-they haven’t got a jumper at all, but rather the Daedalus, which beams them up as soon as they reach a square and Lorne taps his radio.
Caldwell is waiting, along with a few others, and he just looks at John, sweating and filthy, and shakes his head.
"Upon return to the SGC, Colonel, you and the others were implanted with tracers during your initial check-ups, in case you were needed quickly in the event of re-establishment of Atlantis," Caldwell says.
John feels anger-and fear-coiling up in the pit of his stomach.
"What now?"
"Why don't you get cleaned up, and then you'll tell us what happened and we'll determine where to go from there," One of the men with Caldwell-General O'Neill, John realizes in shock, who must have made it back through the gate, when---then.
John holds his hands up in surrender, and Harless and the others shuffle him out of the room, depositing him in front of one of the barren guest quarters and tossing a spare flight uniform in onto the bed.
John showers and yeah, that feels good, clean pressurized water for the first time in ages, but when he comes back out his clothes are gone, and he resents that more than he thought he would-that shirt took three weeks to earn, dammit, and the pants were a gift from Malitta, when she saw how bad his first pair had gotten. He tries not to think about the bundle of things he left behind, including his treasured P-90-he left it disassembled, and can only hope that whatever whore finds it in his rooms hasn’t got the sense to put it back together.
The flight suit is itchy and uncomfortable, and he resents that, too.
"I don't want to talk about it," John says, minutes later.
"Look, Sheppard, there’s nothing-" O'Neill starts, almost sympathetically.
"That’s a direct order, Colonel," Caldwell says.
John takes a moment to close his eyes and breathe out slowly. Images flash across his eyelids and he stops them, abruptly, thinking instead of the summer suns on Daren and the way the sand whips across your feet through the thin leather irraji, stinging.
"What do you want to know?" John asks blandly.
"What happened to the others?" Caldwell asks bluntly. "Weir, Beckett, and McKay?"
"And Teyla and Ronon," John adds, loudly, bitterly. Caldwell nods, a moment too late to be sincere.
"They're dead," John says, and the words-the words he hasn’t said-are like sandpaper in his mouth, rough and dry and wearing him down.
O'Neill frowns and looks away. Caldwell looks down and shakes his head, slowly, and John realizes that yes, these men knew them too, but it is different for them.
"All of them?" O'Neill asks, a moment later.
"I saw Weir, Beckett, and Teyla go down," John says, closing his eyes. "McKay and Ronon were behind me when--I didn't see it."
"What happened next?"
"The Replicators took me," John says, "Kept me for about a month, until the Wraith came. They battled it out and in the end I was able to leave through the gate. I checked life signs for McKay and Ronon but -there was nothing."
"And you went to PX8-19L?"
"Mylia," John says, "It's-Mylia. And-it was a lot more complicated than that. Sir."
"Well, tell us about it," Caldwell says, not giving an inch. John thinks that they must not be over the jumper theft and escape attempt, even if O'Neill and Woolsey made it out alive.
"I think that’s enough for now, guys," O'Neill interrupts, deceptively mild. "Colonel, why don't we take this up to the bridge," he says, standing up. Caldwell stands instantly and John follows, a beat too late.
"Sheppard, get some sleep. We'll continue this later."
O'Neill steers Caldwell out of the conference room and John is alone, trapped in a mechanical monster light-years from the desert and his gritty bed, even further from the cold ruined city he’d once called home.
Harless and his guys escort John back to the guest quarters. He sleeps.
The next day there’s more conversation-no one asks what John was doing with the guy in the alley, and John thinks that might have more to do with Major Lorne’s tact than Colonel Caldwell’s-and more endless hours of sitting in his room, alone.
He wonders, briefly, why he ran. Why he had such a great fear of retribution-they were probably happy to see him, after all, probably thought they were rescuing him from an alien world, until he pulled the knife. Why he feared the MALP, why his skin itched to move on, run to another world in the back alleys of the galaxy and construct another life from the ashes of his former self.
It hits him during one of the supervised meals he takes in the mess, a spoonful of Jell-o halfway to his lips (and nowhere near as flavorful as the malac’rai he’d learned to cook during a sandstorm five moons ago, his lungs burning from the harsh black smoke of the fire).
He can’t leave Pegasus.
He forgets the Jell-o entirely, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath.
He can’t leave Pegasus.
He can’t leave them, all alone in the ruins of Atlantis, their loss covered in paperwork and wrapped in a bow for their grieving families billions of miles away.
The Daedalus has been operating from the Alpha Site, John learns, and they arrive there only two days after he is taken from Mylia. It's a stopover, nothing more - now that they know the fates of their people, of Elizabeth and Carson and Rodney, they will begin their last, permanent journey back to the Milky Way. There's nothing left to stay for.
"We'll be in orbit for a few hours," Caldwell says, after the daily briefing, his face sour. "General O'Neill suggested that you be allowed a supervised visit down to the planet, as you know it from your time at Atlantis."
"Yes," John says, almost instantly, because he knows where this is going, has known it, somewhere, from the moment O'Neill's eyes swept him up and down, clad in his Darenese robes, skin burnished by alien suns. This is a story that O'Neill knows. "That would be…nice, sir."
John feels numb as he waits, then, the interminable minutes before his escorts appear. He thinks, idly, that he ought to look around the Daedalus, appreciate it; like a traveler leaving a famed city for the last time. He doesn’t.
His escorts are O'Neill, Lorne, and two Marines. When they are beamed down, O'Neill casually orders the others off to help the teams pack up the last of their equipment from the camp. Lorne leaves with a crisp salute, lips pursed tightly, and a long look in John’s direction.
"Well," O’Neill says (sighs).
"Thank you, sir," John says.
"Yeah," O'Neill replies, and unzips his tac vest, sliding it off of his shoulders and holding it out to John. A peace offering.
"Look, kid," O'Neill says, when John takes it. "Thanks for saving my ass. And for saving Woolsey, much as he continues to be a pain in the aforementioned region."
John nods.
"I get it," O’Neill continues. "I get that you have this streak, this thing, and you're not the first and you won’t be the last, and I have this knack to get caught up in all of it, all of you people. Don’t think I haven't noticed you on the Daedalus the last few days, how your eyes aren't focused and you're scratching at the uniform and pulling at the chain of your tags. I get it. I've felt it myself. And I'm-well, there’s someone back home who probably wouldn't ever talk to me again if I put you on that ship and locked you in that cabin and brought you back to Earth."
John notices, abstractly, that O’Neill doesn’t say "home."
"If the Goa'uld show up, hide your wife," O'Neill says, voiced tinged with something like regret. "Now, knock me out and make a break for it. Go."
John clips O'Neill in the temple, hard, before he can change his mind.
The first year after that, a frost spreads in his stomach, peaceful and numb. They aren't going to come back, ever, and he’s going to be free. Free to live. Free to remember.
He settles in a village on PX8-173, a tundra planet with patches of evergreen forest. It's as far from Daren as he can get, the villagers welcoming him with open arms as a much needed hand in the not-potato fields. He doesn't have to turn tricks, and by winter he has his own log cabin, sheltered from the bitter snow. There are wooden pegs left over from its construction. He takes them and sets them over his hearth--five pegs for five people.
Eventually he will carve them, shape the heads into faces and the sides into arms and legs. Eventually they will have names.
He stops thinking about Earth. Stops thinking about his family-about Dave, and his father, and after a while it's almost as though they never existed, these strangers tied to him only by blood.
During the dark of the winter, that short period when there is no light in the world, not for weeks, the villagers invite John to join the nightly gatherings around the flames of the fire in the Council Hall. On the sixth night, with days to go before sunlight strikes again, the children ask John for a story. The word quickly spreads and soon the whole hall is hushed, waiting for the foreigner to tell them tales of the stars.
"In my family, I had three brothers," John begins, a lump in his throat, heat spreading downward from the hot mulled mead in the mug between his hands. "The first was a giant, far larger than you and I, and equally brave. His name was-"
John breaks off, looks down, and swallows, slowly, because he can’t do this, can’t even think this, can't acknowledge that there is a world in which these events have come to pass-and a russet-haired child, Livan, settles into the space between John’s legs, drowsy and warm. John breathes out.
"His name was Ronon."