Fic: The True Story of When They Went A-Wandering Part 2 of 2 (Gen, R)
Title: The True Story of When They Went A-Wandering
Author: auburnnothenna
Recipient: ceitie
Rated: R
Size: ~16,290 words
Genre: Gen, Humor.
A/N: Many thanks to my beta who shall also remain anonymous until the reveal.
Spoilers: S5 through 5.13 Inquisition.
Summary: It's just like a mission, only not.
Part 1
In Which Our Heroes Drink and Dance
The cats gave up during the night. A careful survey of the plain revealed them - or their doubles - chowing down on some poor animal far, far away. The way was clear. Down the tree they went and back to the stargate at a fast trot.
"Pimat, Delli, I'd say it's been nice," John started to say.
"But it's been a nightmare," Rodney interrupted to finish for him. He touched his right pec with a grimace. "Ow, ow, ow."
"Hurry up, Ronon," Teyla called.
Ronon picked up his pace, but his face twisted into an expression of discomfort. John thanked whatever remnant of sanity had made him stick with earrings himself.
"Anyway, you guys will be all right?" he asked. Teyla gave him an approving nod.
They were at the DHD by then. Delli went forward and began dialing out.
"Oh, yes. We'll meet with my cousin's troupe and stay away from Talaruba for a while, but it will be fine," Delli said.
"I'm going to learn sword-swallowing," Pimat added.
There was a joke there, but John decided to leave it alone. Teyla was within kicking distance of his shins.
"Bye," Rodney muttered as the stargate whooshed open and they parted ways with Delli and Pimat, off to live happily ever after together.
Once the stargate disengaged after them, John dialed up the gate address Lerdat had given them and they headed through too.
They exited onto another plain, but with normal height grass and a slender girl in a beaded loin cloth, many necklaces and corn-rowed hair hopping up and down before the DHD (which was covered in white splats of bird crap along with the stargate) and yelling at them.
"You messed everything up! You made it stop. I was going to join the Lanteans and fight wraith!" the girl shouted.
"You know how to get to Atlantis?" Ronon asked her.
Her expression turned mulish. "I'd find someone who would tell me."
"Hunh."
John kept his eyes above her collarbones, because Jesus, jailbait for one thing and it just felt wrong anyway; from the way she dressed her culture didn't make a big thing of breasts, but his did, and him staring would therefore be skeevy.
He reached over and thwapped the back of Rodney's head. "Eyes forward and up."
"I was looking at her necklaces!" Rodney protested. "I think some of those beads are naquadah."
"Sure you were."
"Don't talk to me."
"I have heard the Lanteans guard the way to their home, keeping it a secret even from those they most trust, and without the proper pass words, to try to pass through the gate to Atlantis is death," Teyla told the girl. "They do not wish anyone to surprise them, even allies."
"They would me," she insisted.
"If they knew you, perhaps," Teyla said gently. She slid her arm around the girl's narrow shoulders. "What is your name?"
"Garu of the Harupa."
"I'm Teyla and these are my friends, Dex, Atchoo and Gesundheit," Teyla introduced them with a wicked smile.
John winced and stomped on Rodney's foot to keep him quiet. If Garu had heard of Atlantis enough to want to come and fight wraith with them, then she might know the names of its most (in)famous gate team.
"Could you guide us back to your people?" Teyla asked. "We are wanderers in search of new friends."
"Oh, fine, I guess I can do that," Garu admitted.
It took two hours to get to the Harupa camp and they met a search party out looking for Garu shortly after they sighted the yurts. By then, Rodney had quizzed Garu about where her beads came from and Teyla had complimented her on the intricate braids decorating her elegant skull. Also the rich red ocher coloring them. Ronon had just looked more and more pinched around the mouth and walked hunched over a little.
Garu didn't know where the beads came from. Her father had traded for them offworld when he sold half their herd of gorps the summer before last and came back with stories of the brave Lanteans who killed whole hives of Wraith. Her aunt did her hair. The color came from the mud from the greatest river that split the plains her tribe grazed their herds on. She fingered Teyla's hair and grinned at her, saying they could fix it, even though it was very straight.
No one asked why Ronon was walking hunched over.
To be frank, none of them wanted to know.
Garu also failed to mention her father was the chief of the Harupa.
Chief Jund was delighted that they had returned Garu, who had snuck away before dawn and scared the crap out of him when he thought she might have made it through the stargate. Like his daughter, he wore a loincloth, only his was heavily beaded and had tassels that brushed the dusty ground. He wore even more necklaces, anklets and bracelets than his daughter too. His hair had been dressed with a heavy white clay into thick wavy spikes radiating from his head in a stylized sunburst.
Delighted translated as party time among the Harupa.
Of course, it looked like in between following their gorp herds across the plain and once in a while selling any excess through the stargate, everything and anything was an excuse to party for the Harupa.
John liked that in a people.
He wasn't as enthusiastic about the fermented gorp milk, served hot with dollops of gorp butter floating on the surface. The smell alone made him cautious. Teyla shoved a pointy elbow into his ribs though and told him in a hard undertone, while smiling at the Harupa, "Drink or they will be insulted and cut our heads off."
John drank, smacked his lips and handed the gourd to Rodney, who did everything but hold his nose, but got it down too.
Ronon grinned at the gourd when it reach him and emptied it. "Just like Mom made," he said. He up-ended the gourd to show the Harupa he'd emptied it. "Mother's milk."
"Now I'm really grateful we'll never have to try Satedan cuisine," Rodney muttered.
John kicked him.
The gourd had been refilled and was being passed around again. The alcohol had hit on John's empty stomach and left him feeling warm and loose and he drank a little deeper the next time. The awful taste didn't seem as awful after a couple more turns and Rodney had flushed pink and begun swaying to the sound of the drums that were starting up.
After a day spent drinking and eating sweet beans, roasted tubers and gorp steaks, the Harupa began dancing as the sun went down. Even Rodney joined them, bouncing from foot to foot and up and down, arms up, arms down, head bobbing. If John hadn't been right there with him, he'd have laughed like a hyena.
Jund finagled out of John - it wasn't hard - that he was the team's leader. This needed to be honored, Jund insisted, gesturing to his own head. It percolated through John's that no one else among the Harupa had a white mud coiffure. After another gourd, he thought Jund was absolutely right and he needed one too.
He was very, very drunk.
Garu and four or five other women - it could have been more, but they kept doubling - were braiding beads into Teyla's hair. Firelight gleamed off all of them, sharp reflections stabbing off the shiny naquadah beads and stabbing into John's eyes.
Rodney had passed out. He sprawled with their packs, an empty gourd next to him, snoring loudly, spit bubbling at the corner of his mouth.
Two of the Harupa boys were holding Rodney's hands up and giggling over the orange coloring.
Ronon was still bopping with the other dancers between gourds of Mother's milk, dreads flying in every direction, often hitting those too close in the face. That just made everyone laugh and fall down.
Jund dragged John to his yurt and brought out a basket pot filled to the brim with noxious white mud. After a second of sane second thoughts, John bent his head and let his new buddy work the stuff into his hair. After all, it was mud; he would rinse it out when they left.
***
Waking up in a yurt wasn't so bad.
Waking up in a yurt with a snoring team-mate lying across his stomach was.
Waking up in a yurt with a snoring team-mate lying across his stomach, who smelled like sour milk and stale alcohol, was worse.
Experiencing that to the auditory and olfactory accompaniment of another team-mate determinedly puking up everything he had ever eaten in the last nine years could be described as very near to waking up in hell.
Doing so while suffering the worst hangover in the history of drinking, could and did lead to John rolling on to his side and vomiting onto the dirt floor. Rodney flopped off him and off the mat John occupied with a thump and a pained groan.
"Death," Rodney gagged. "Death to you."
That sounded like a mercy to John.
His head felt the size of a planet. One being nuked from orbit. Another volcanic explosion finished emptying his stomach and he clutched at the mat under him, riding out the ensuing earthquake. He squinted his eyes open. On the other side of the yurt, Ronon went on puking like it was a new Olympic sport. Teyla bent over him, holding his scarlet dreadlocks away from his face.
Scarlet.
"What the hell happened to your hair?" Rodney demanded. Every word set off another bomb in John's head.
"Stop shouting," he whispered. Stop the bombing. He'd been bombed last night. He wished he'd stopped. "Oooooooh."
Someone had dyed Ronon's hair red.
"I'm not shouting," Rodney said, still entirely too loudly for John. "I am speaking in a reasonable voice and oh my God! What happened to you, you look like a Colonel Sanders Ken Doll!"
John's hand went immediately to his crotch, finding everything still attached, to his relief.
Ronon moaned and barfed some more.
"John. Rodney. Please stop shouting. I have a small headache this morning," Teyla said. "Also, you are making Ronon worse."
"Could anything make Ronon worse?" Rodney mumbled. A whiff of whatever had come up and out hit them and Rodney clapped his hands over his nose and mouth, moaning as he did so.
"Rodney," John whispered. Please let him be talking about Ronon. Or hallucinating. John was afraid feel his head and find out. "What are you talking about? Ken Doll?"
"Colonel Sanders," Rodney replied. "White hair. Plastic head."
John whimpered and lifted his fingers apprehensively to his head and hit something hard. Something hard and attached to his scalp. He moaned, remembering the mud and Jund and too many gourds of Mother's milk.
"Teyla..."
"It will come out," she said. "Eventually."
"What do you mean, eventually?" Rodney asked.
John squeezed his eyes shut.
"It has to dry and flake off. That can take up to a week, according to Garu," Teyla replied. "If you try to wash it out, the mud will only cling longer. The water rejuvenates it."
He really hated Teyla right then.
Rolling over and seeing that someone had dyed Rodney's thinning hair the same brilliant red as Ronon's only helped a little bit. Deciding not to tell him helped a little more. Between Ronon and Rodney and Teyla's new corn-rows, at least when they made it back to Atlantis, he wouldn't be the only one being stared at.
John covered his eyes with his arm and pretended he couldn't hear Ronon starting to heave again.
"I can't stand it," Rodney declared and crawled to the door of the yurt, where he clawed his way up onto his feet and staggered outside with a shriek of pain as the sun hit his eyes.
John prayed for death or unconsciousness.
In Which Our Intrepid Team Pays For It
Chief Jund gave them the gate address to the world where the Harupa sold their excess gorps at breakfast. That was when Teyla finally lost her cool too. Rodney wouldn't even come near the pots and John had waved his away without even looking, while Ronon was off sticking his head in a bucket of water. The bowl Jund handed Teyla had something alive in it. She took one look, squealed and dropped the bowl before darting off to the edge of the camp. The tell-tale sound of gagging reached them soon.
One of the Harupa reached for the black, slimy thing humping along the muddy spot where Teyla had flung it, but it looked entirely too much like a cross between a starfish and leech for John's peace of mind. He casually shuffled to the side and stomped it flat.
"Thank you," Rodney whispered and John guessed he'd checked out the scanner pictures of the Second Childhood parasite and felt about it the same way John did large bugs.
"We've got to make a start for the stargate," he told Jund before anyone could offer them anything else the Harupa considered a tasty breakfast. If Ronon kept puking he was going to strain something.
Jund took the hint, but did press a loincloth that matched his into John's hands.
They stumbled off toward the stargate; each of them squinting against the awful light of the sun and the painful impact on their skulls of every step they took.
John compulsively kept feeling the hardened spikes on his head and imagining what it looked like.
They dialed Grepta and went through without any discussion.
The crowd that had cleared space for the activating stargate didn't give them more than a passing glance as they stepped into the hot, dusty afternoon of the stockyard town that had built up around Grepta's gate.
The crowd seemed made up of people from more than one different world; their differences great enough the team didn't draw any special attention at all. They were migrating away from the gate plaza toward the other end of town, out where the stockyard smells were stronger.
"What's going on?" John asked as he bumped into the man ahead of him.
"They're hanging a Wraith collaborator."
John shared a glance with his team and the let the crowd propel them forward until, with a little judicious maneuvering, they could all see the gallows built from part of a dismantled corral fence.
The crowd around them muttered and growled furiously as the guilty party, bound and gagged and bearing more than a few visible bruises, was dragged out and brought before them.
Another man stood up and declared the guilty sentence.
"This is Aming Hopht. The Council of Grepta has found him guilty of deliberately killing his brother Padet Hopht during the last Wraith culling. Padet's wife and three other witness saw Aming push his brother into a culling beam."
The roar from the crowd made Ronon clutch at his head, but Teyla stared up at the man with an expression just as hard as everyone's around them.
John expected some more talk, anything but the abrupt dropping of the noose over Hopht's neck and two men on the ground drawing the rope taut until he had to balance on his toes, tears streaming down his reddened face.
The speaker jumped down from the platform. He raised his voice.
"The verdict is death."
The platform was unceremoniously kicked out from under Hopht's feet. He fell with a snap that made John flinch. Beside him, Ronon grunted. John turned away, noticing that Rodney already had.
"I can understand it," Rodney said, "but I can't make myself like it."
John nodded.
"Let's get out of here and find some place to stay the night."
Easier said than done. It seemed everyone that Grepta supplied with animals from their stockyards had come to see the hanging. The town was by no means large in the first place, but it had three inns, which was two more than most villages in Pegasus, and every one of them was booked up. John wouldn't have minded camping out for the night if it hadn't been for the manure reek and the strong possibility of getting trampled by something hundreds of pounds heavier than him in the night.
They wandered through the town aimlessly, hoping to find someone willing to sell them the floor in a spare room or even a store room and having no luck.
"Couldn't we just go home?" Rodney whined.
"Rodney, you agreed to the seven day plan," Teyla remonstrated him.
"Yeah, Rodney, you agreed," John backed her up.
People poured around their little group, either heading for the auction yard or the various taverns that dotted the town. It bore an eerie resemblance to an Old West town in a movie. Only none of the movies John had ever seen had included smell-o-vision. The popularity of Westerns would have petered out much more quickly if they had.
Rodney folded his arms and gave John a mulish glare.
"You just don't want to go back until that stuff in your hair falls off," he accused John.
The tips of John's ears went hot in embarrassment. He'd been pretending that nothing was wrong with his hair. Interestingly, Grepta was cosmopolitan enough no one had given him or Rodney or Ronon a second glance. All second glances bent Teyla's way were of the admiring sort she always got.
Some time during the day, Rodney had become aware of the state of his own hair, too. Ronon's snickers might have been the give away.
"If I have to go back like this," Rodney now said, "so do you."
John couldn't help kidding him.
"Aw, Rodney, you make a good redhead."
"I'm hungry," Ronon stated before Rodney could come up with a come back.
"What, now?"
"Yeah, I didn't get breakfast."
"That would be because you were busy throwing up the universe," Rodney pointed out.
Ronon's stomach rumbled.
"Great. Fine. Let's find somewhere to eat. Maybe we can find some place to sleep afterward. I still say we could just go through the stargate to the next planet that isn't over run with execution groupies."
"Deserved it," Ronon said.
"I agree," Teyla added in a cool tone.
Rodney looked from her to Ronon and sighed. John knew how he felt. It wasn't that Teyla and Ronon were more ruthless than them, but that they didn't experience the doubts and regrets anyone from Earth did.
"I'm just not comfortable with making punishment and death into an entertainment opportunity," Rodney said.
Ronon stared at him until the grumbling from his stomach became disturbing.
"Let's just get that food," John said.
Grepta didn't have much in the way of restaurants. Food could be bought in the taverns and the main rooms of the inns, but they were packed too tight to even try getting a meal there. They settled on meat and vegetable kebabs from a street vendor and leaned against a wall out of the way of most passers-by as they ate.
A local bought a kebab and sidled over next to them. She cocked her hip as she nibbled at her kebab and studied the four of them.
"Saw you earlier," she said.
"We didn't see you," Rodney said.
They really should have. She had on a red leather bustier, a ragged skirt of something filmy, a black-and-white checkerboard stockings, and clunky sandals with red wooden heels. Her hair was teased out into a blond cloud. A yellow flower was painted onto the top of her left breast.
Hooker, that meant. Well, what it really meant according to Halling - Teyla had refused to explain - was that she wouldn't expect anyone to marry her after sex. It was kind of a universal sign all across Pegasus, anyway. Instead of marriage, the wearer would expect a gift, something usually worked out before there was sex.
She lifted her shoulders and rolled them into a full-body shrug that advertised a very nice body.
"I'm Kela."
"Hi," John said, smiling at her until Rodney stepped down hard on his foot. He turned a glare on him. "Hey!"
"Space clap."
Kela rolled her eyes and addressed Teyla. "Town's full up, but you could hire a girl," here she glanced at John, making him blush, "or a boy for the night at Jale Madel's and stay in the room."
Rodney opened and closed his mouth several times, while Teyla frowned, answering, "I do not believe we will need to take such...measures."
"Wait, wait, wait," Rodney said. "Would there be beds?"
Kela did her ripply shrug again, making everything in the stiff leather bustier shift and jiggle and Rodney's eyes bug out a little.
"A bed," she replied. She grinned, tore off a mouthful of kebab and licked the hint of shiny grease from her lips after she'd swallowed. "Pay enough and you could get the big bed."
Rodney turned to John.
"A bed," he said.
"Rodney," Teyla interrupted.
Rodney waved her off. "A bed, not a mat, not a freaking nest, but a genuine bed. I say we do it."
"Rodney," John muttered, leaning in close so his words wouldn't carry to Kela, "think for a minute about what's gone on in it."
"I'll spray it down," Rodney dismissed it.
Well, that gave a new meaning to sleeping in the wet spot.
"Let's go," Ronon declared.
"John," Teyla appealed to him, looking even more disturbed than John felt.
He held up his hands and nodded at Rodney and Ronon, who were already following Kela away in search of the local whorehouse.
"I think we've been over ruled."
Teyla gave him a suspicious look, obviously thinking he hadn't argued very hard.
***
"It's an orgy bed."
Rodney's description hit the nail on the head. The bed took up pretty much the entire room, leaving just enough room to walk around its edges. Bent over, thanks to the eaves that came down on one side.
"It'll do," John told Jale and handed over the money for the night.
She looked at Teyla, then Ronon, then Rodney and then back to John and shook her head a little. "You need anyone else?" she asked.
"No," he said, choking a little at what she thought they were going to be doing. Together. To each other.
"I'll have Toba bring up some supplies," she said.
"That will not be necessary," Teyla said in a severe tone.
"No, no, wait," Rodney interrupted. "Towels?"
"Towels and wash water in the room at the end of the corridor," Jale told them.
Toba, who looked and sounded a lot like Cher, if she'd had a bigger Adam's apple and wrists, grinned at them over Jale's shoulder. "Sure you don't want a little more company?" The look sent Ronon's way was sheerly predatory, enough so that Ronon had a spooked expression on his face for once.
"No, thank you," Teyla stated.
"My loss," Toba said, still cheerful, and, "Back in a tick."
Jale followed her away.
Rodney rummaged through his pack and pulled out a bottle which he handed to John. "Here. Spray this on the bed."
"Rodney."
"Do you want to bring home some six or eight-legged passengers?"
John shuddered and told Teyla and Ronon, "Stand back."
"I'm going to wash up as much as I can," Rodney declared and headed down the corridor.
John began spraying the bed and hoped the smell of the bug spray would dissipate quickly.
It did and they all fitted into the bed with room enough to sleep as comfortably as they had since leaving Atlantis.
Or, perhaps, a little too well.
Their packs, right down to their clothes, were gone when they woke in the morning.
Jale's mouth went thin and angry when John stumbled down the stairs wrapped in a sheet he'd forcibly torn out of Rodney's hands, and told her they'd been robbed.
"Quisla!" she screamed.
John followed her to the back of the house, where there were smaller rooms that belonged to the girls and boys working there.
Quisla's had been cleaned out.
While he stumbled along behind the madam, trying not to trip over the hem of the sheet, Jale checked through the house, discovering that Quisla had done a number on several of her co-workers and three other customers, who were still out cold and bare-ass naked.
"She had to have had help," Jale snarled. "If she ever comes back here, I'll have her shaved and marked as a thief."
John tightened his grip on the sheet with one hand while rubbing his neck with the other. He had a headache on par with his hangover of the day before, only without the fun of the party. He wondered what Quisla had used to knock everyone out. It had even taken Ronon out.
"You figure she took off through the stargate," he said.
Jale gave him a contemptuous look. "Of course she did."
Toba stumbled out of her room, wrapped in a short, semi-transparent robe. She needed to shave, but she smiled at John. He smiled back weakly.
"Clothes," he said. "We need clothes."
"Buy some," Jale said.
"Yeah, well, your light-fingered friend took all our money along with our clothes," he pointed out.
"Not my problem."
"Jale...," Toba murmured.
John narrowed his eyes at her. "You don't really want everyone in town knowing you had a thief working for you. They'll find somewhere else to get their kicks and you'll end up out of business."
Jale frowned at him, then turned to Toba. "Fine. You and the others, get these four and the other idiots some clothes."
Toba smiled. "Oooh, fun."
John buried his face in his hands. The sheet fell.
"Ooooh," Toba said again.
***
Of course Quisla had left the loincloth. It was the only thing that had been left. Even Rodney's bug spray had been taken. The loincloth had fallen and been kicked half under the bed, though, and forgotten.
"I don't know what you're complaining about," Rodney snapped. He tugged at the hem of his shorts. The tiger-striped leather refused to shift, clinging so skintight there was absolutely no reason for him to wear the suspender-harness that came with them. "I'm the one about to rupture something. External genitalia were never meant to be compressed to this extent."
"There's a draft," John complained.
"I can barely walk," Teyla added. The candy apple red Capri hot pants looked like they'd been sprayed onto her. Which wasn't necessarily a bad thing: Teyla's legs and ass were outstanding. But Teyla was not happy. She plucked at the equally tight white halter top and scowled.
"As soon as we get to the next world, we'll all buy new clothes," John promised. They still had money after Harupa, Talaruba and the Land of the Lost.
"With what?" Rodney asked darkly. "Did the scum-sucking thief who took our clothes conveniently leave behind our money?"
He'd forgotten.
Crap.
The thought of coming back to Atlantis in the Harupa loincloth and the net shirt the whores had given him, dangling earrings in his ears, and his hair twirled into demented spikes coated in white mud made John's privates shrivel. He thought even Rodney might agree that just stripping off and going back naked would be better.
Toba and Kela led Ronon back in at that point and even Rodney fell silent.
Nudity, John decided. Nudity would be be preferable. Also death.
Ronon's dreadlocks were still a searing red thanks to the Harupa. That should have been enough to make anyone stare, but took a backseat to the 'clothes' he'd been dressed in.
"Ronon," Teyla croaked, somewhere between hysterics and hilarity.
Ronon crossed his arms and scowled. The bustier strapped around his chest threatened to bust and take out someone's eye the first time he took a deep breath. The matching purple mini-skirt just skimmed his thighs and threatened to flash more than John's loincloth. The worst part, and the part that made John wonder if Ronon might still be high on fermented milk or color blind or both, was the artfully torn, pink lace thigh-high stockings.
"It's like he's auditioning for the Best Little Rocky Horrorhouse in Pegasus," Rodney said.
In addition, the whores had made him up with lip paint, eyeshadow, eyeliner and rouge. Tim Curry never growled that low, though.
John resisted the urge to cover his eyes and muttered, "The bustier actually looks a lot like that vest he used to wear. Remember it?"
"No matter how hard I try to forget." He turned and watched as John donned the tangerine satin robe Toba had offered him. At least it was long enough to reach his ankles, thanks to Toba's unusual height. "Not that you get to make any remarks, Elton John."
"You think this crap ever happened to SG-1?"
Rodney shook his head. "If it did, they sanitized the records before I read them."
"Speaking of..."
"I'm already writing the program to hack the gate room close circuit feed and wipe all visual records of when we return," Rodney said.
"You're a good man, Rodney."
In Which Our Heroes Get Sent Up River and Visit the Big House
Toba and the others at Jale's give them a handful of gate addresses, places they'd come from or been to or just heard about from a client. The team picked Elseer, since it was supposed to have a library open to offworlders.
No one mentioned that everyone on Elseer had to be married if they were out in public.
Even the guards at the gate were married.
They didn't blink at the team's get-ups, but they explained that either they all had to marry each other for the extent of their visit to Elseer or turn around and leave.
"It's no big deal. Visitors get married here all the time. We divorce them when they're ready to leave," one guard explained. "Me and Cilbet'll get divorced at the end of our shift. We do it every day."
"And we may...marry...all of each other?" Teyla asked.
"Why not?"
"Yeah," Ronon teased her. "Why not?" He grinned: a truly terrifying sight with the make-up. "You got something against us?"
Teyla gave out a despairing sigh. "No one mentions this to Kanaan."
"We'll let Ronon do our reports," John agreed.
"Went wandering. Came back. End report," Rodney recited.
John pointed at him. "Exactly. That is exactly what I'm writing too."
Teyla frowned through the entire thing, but the guards proceeded to marry them all to each other, and then directed them to the ferry boat that would take them upriver from the tiny island that supported the stargate on Elseer to the city.
"All your worldly goods," John speculated as the boat started chugging upstream. The deck rocked under their feet and Teyla turned an interest shade of chartreuse as soon as it did.
"You can't have my M&Ms," Rodney told him. "We're getting divorced as soon as we leave here."
"Not even in the settlement?" John wheedled.
Teyla ran for the railing, leaned over it and began heaving.
John sighed. This 'wandering' was cursed. He didn't think Teyla would be so quick to suggest 'traditional' Pegasus cultural crap after this. No one on the team had proven immune this time. She'd held out longest, but at this point they'd all upchucked at least once or more on this trip through the gates. He wished they could have done it in Woolsey's office. He made a point of noting to himself that she got seasick and crossed off any boat trips if he ever got the team back to Earth for a vacation. No amusement parks, since mascots freaked Ronon out. Mexico was out, since almost everything there had lime in it. Chartering a yacht and relaxing on the water with no one to trigger his team mates' more lethal reflexes had been a possibility, but not if it meant Teyla being sick the whole time.
Maybe they'd just stay in Atlantis. It would be safer, judging from this trip.
As she bent farther over the rail, the red hot pants pulled taut over her butt gave out an alarming creak and then ripped right down the seam, garnering the attention of the team and every man on the boat.
"And the day only gets better," Rodney commented. "I'm not looking, Teyla. I swear."
Teyla just moaned.
With a sigh, John whipped off the tangerine robe that had really been the only thing between him and complete humiliation. Ronon moved to block anyone else seeing, Rodney steadied her while she went on gagging dribbles in the river, and John carefully threaded the robe onto Teyla's arms so she was covered again. They stayed clumped around her miserable figure until the boat docked and they were shooed off.
Teyla finally recovered enough to belt the robe tight around her. She looked exhausted, pissed off, and miserable.
"We will never speak of this again," she declared in a dead calm tone that put the fear of her wrath into all three of them. "Do you all understand?"
"Of course."
"Never."
"Are you crazy?"
That last was Rodney.
Teyla turned a gimlet-eyed look on him. He threw up his arms in front of him. "I mean, I'd have to be crazy to ever want to tell anyone about the thing that we aren't talking about ever because it didn't happen," he babbled.
She nodded.
"Very well. Let us visit this library, so that we may move on."
"It probably will be pointless," Rodney muttered. He brightened. "But if it is, we can go back to the stargate and go on to another world and that will be it, won't it? We'll be able to go home. Seven worlds. That's what was agreed to, right?"
Sounded good to John.
Of course nothing ever went that simply in Pegasus, though Rodney did get into the library, despite several people who raised their eyebrows at his clothes.
Rodney just lifted his chin and snapped, "What are you looking at? This?" He plucked at a suspender. "This is the traditional scholars' garb of Kinkaju." He pointed at Ronon. "See his hair? That is my husband-assistant." He patted his head. "When he finishes his apprenticeship, he will be allowed to cut off that rat's nest and glory in a proper professor's tonsure."
John started choking about then. Teyla took entirely too much pleasure in thumping his back.
The Elseer librarians still wouldn't let anyone but Rodney inside despite his explanation that not only was Ronon his assistant, but that John and Teyla were his concubine and his bodyguard.
With a sigh, John sat down on the front steps of the library along with Ronon and Teyla.
"We'll just wait out here."
"I won't be too long," Rodney promised. "I mean, what are the odds they'll have anything useful to us?"
Three hours later, Rodney wasn't back.
Four hours later, Rodney wasn't back.
Five hours later, the local cops arrested the three of them for loitering with intent to prostitute.
Since arriving in Pegasus John had not in fact become deeply familiar with the various world's penal systems and facilities, no matter how often Rodney made remarks about being locked up. He had, however, confirmed his abiding dislike of incarceration. Not that he'd needed to do that. It seemed self-evident that being locked up was not pleasant; that was after all one of the salient points of imprisonment: punishment. Comfortable jail cells were contradictions in aim.
John had been locked up by: the Genii, the Asurans, a village full of people bent on selling Ronon back to the Wraith, his own people under various extenuating circumstances involving retroviruses and Lucius Lavin, and most recently, by the Pegasus Coalition.
He rated the Elseer city jail as a solid four. Ten being the worst he'd ever endured - that had been on Earth, ironically, and he only remembered it in nightmares. The Elseer cell had a water faucet that provided cold water, a bucket in one corner and a central drain in the floor, wooden shelf bunks bolted to the stone walls, and the traditional metal bars in front. A single high window provided daylight. Even at midday, the cell was cool and would become chilly over night.
The Elseer got points for not beating them up or groping Teyla and more points for processing them fast.
Conviction followed arrest within an hour. They were marched before a man in a gray suit, found guilty and sentenced to an overnight stay in jail and deportation through the stargate the next day. The Elseer didn't really care about prostitution, but one of the librarians had sent a messenger complaining about them sitting on the front steps.
Considering they meant to leave Elseer the next day anyway, John caught Ronon's gaze, shook his head, and they silently agreed there was no reason to try to escape. It seemed likely Rodney would hear about the arrests once he finally surfaced.
Also, they didn't have any money and the night in jail came with a meal and a roof over their heads. Courtesy of their offworld and marital status, they were even all in the same non-violent and misdemeanor offenders' cell, along with a couple pickpockets and two drunks.
Turned out their stay came with more than one meal, in fact, and the guards delivering it didn't even spit in it. Elseer moved up to number two on John's secret If I Have To Be Locked Up I Want It To Be On __________ List. (Number One wasn't a place, it was 'With My Team, Unless They Can Escape And Break Me Out Too.)
They were just tucking into the tasty Elseer equivalent of ham and cheese sandwiches, some fresh fruit, and berry tarts, when Rodney is shoved into the cell with them. The drunks were passed out on their bunk slabs, so Ronon appropriated their trays. Rodney was in mid-rant, detailing what a bunch of backward, fascistic, moronic, abusive jerks the guards were as he stumbled in. His target shifted as soon as he spotted the rest of the team.
"I can't leave you alone for five minutes without you either hitting on some priestess or princess or getting locked up! Wait, this time you did both didn't you? Prostitution! That's a new low for you, Sheppard!"
John stretched out his legs, contemplating his hairy shins, and pointed out, "Well, we are wearing cast-offs from a bordello."
"What does that mean?" Rodney demanded.
"Are you saying we looked like purveyors of sexual congress for monetary gain, John?" Teyla asked. The sweet look on her face didn't fool anyone.
"Not you," John said quickly.
"I do?" Ronon asked.
John blinked at him.
"Not really."
More like something from a bad trip, but he thought he'd keep that insight to himself.
"Well, that just leaves you," Rodney pointed out.
"And you."
"Oh no, I was arrested for staging a scene in the police station after I found out you were taken there."
"Hunh."
John decided it would be safer to stuff his mouth full of sandwich than say anything else.
Rodney's gaze lit on the food.
"Oh, say, is that a berry tart?"
John shoved the tray his way and Rodney began eating, humming between bites, and batting at John when he reached for the second half of his sandwich.
"Mmph - 's not bad," Rodney mumbled through a mouthful of food, effectively killing John's appetite.
"The Elseer seem quite civilized," Teyla remarked.
"The library has some probably horribly inaccurate but interesting transcriptions of what might have been Ancient tech manuals," Rodney commented.
"Is that what took you so long?" Ronon asked.
"Mmmph."
"Then we should advise Mr. Woolsey to send a team back here to explore the library and perhaps initiate a trade agreement," Teyla said.
"And get more of these tarts," Rodney agreed.
They'd have to send Lorne's team. John didn't think they'd be too convincing, even if they came back in normal Atlantis mission gear. They had records here.
With a sigh, he tried to get comfortable on the wooden bunk bench. It was going to be a long and boring afternoon. Maybe he'd take a nap.
He woke for dinner and when the guards handed out blankets to wrap around them for the night.
"You're the best jail guards ever," Rodney told them sincerely. It seemed to disturb the Elseer. Come morning, they were fed, escorted to the ferry and sent on their way with what looked like great relief.
In Which Ronon Gets Squirrelly
"You know," Rodney pointed out from his seat on a rock, where he was watching Ronon turn a knife, a rock, and a handful of weeds into a fire, "the Elseer forgot to divorce us when they de-gated us this morning."
"Hmm," John said. He turned to Teyla, who was still wrapped in his tangerine robe and looking distinctly disgruntled. "Did this sort of thing happen to you on your first Wandering?"
"No," she said.
"Anyone you know?"
"No."
"Just us?"
"Yes."
"Did me," Ronon said.
"And you didn't say anything?" Rodney demanded.
"Didn't want to do it again, did I?" He struck the flint with his knife, expertly sending a shower of sparks into the dry, torn up pile of weeds. Flame crawled up the tinder.
"Next time just say something," John told him. He reached up and scratched at his head. His hand came away coated in white flakes.
"You look like you have the worst case of dandruff in the universe," Rodney said.
John shook his head, sending flecks of the finally dried mud onto Rodney and Teyla. Teyla glared at him and edged away.
Ronon fed sticks into the fire until it was burning steadily. Then he striped off the pink stockings.
"What's he doing now?"
John watched as Ronon used his knife on the stockings, slicing them up then tying together the pieces into a skinny rope.
"No idea," he said.
"Making a snare," Ronon told them. "I'm going to catch one of those things." He nodded toward the rodents that kept poking their heads up out of the many holes littering the ground around their proposed camp.
"Those squirrelly things?" Rodney said. He peered at one. "Do you think they'll taste good?"
"Not if they taste like squirrel," John muttered.
"Well, maybe they'll taste like rabbit."
"You two are not being helpful," Teyla said in reproof.
"Yes we are," he and Rodney chorused.
"We are not interfering with the expert," Rodney explained.
Teyla gave them a disbelieving look. With a sniff, she got up and stalked over to a rock nearer the fire.
"Think she's mad at us?" Rodney asked.
"Uhuh."
"Me too."
They turned their attention to Ronon, who was stealthily working his way closer and closer to the squirbit colony.
"You know," John said conversationally, "I'm disturbed by the fact that I'm not actually disturbed by the fact that I'm watching Ronon crawl around in a purple mini-skirt."
Rodney shook his head.
"Not as disturbed as I am by the way he keeps flashing us. How high did he have to get to get pierced there?"
In Which Our Heroes Return Chastened But Triumphant
Rodney needed a shave. John needed a shave really bad. Their razors, like everything else, had been in their packs. The packs that had been stolen at Jale's bordello. John hoped Quisla or whoever ended up with them nicked themselves unmercifully. Ronon didn't need a shave because he'd used his knife, but John didn't need a shave badly enough to risk cutting his throat.
Besides, Ronon wouldn't share.
Teyla's braids had leaves stuck to them. He felt this was only fair, because otherwise, she looked a fresh as a daisy. If a daisy was wearing a pair of split up the ass red hot pants.
"I need coffee," Rodney moaned.
"You need a shower," John told him.
"I need coffee and a shower," Rodney agreed.
"Breakfast," Ronon said.
"Breakfast," Rodney agreed.
John's stomach grumbled. The roasted squirbit hadn't exactly been a ribsticking meal. It had also been over twelve hours earlier.
"I am looking forward to seeing Torren again," Teyla said. A secretive smile showed before she ducked her face. "And Kanaan."
John caught Ronon and then Rodney's gazes and they all smirked. Lucky dog. Even if he had been on diaper duty for the last week.
He dusted his hands together and squinted at the rising sun. It glinted off the upper curve of the stargate at the other end of the valley. He remembered why they hadn't camped near it, but the prospect of the long walk back before they could dial Atlantis didn't make him a happy camper. "Everybody ready to get out of here?"
Rodney looked at him. "No, seriously, I thought I might relax here and try to catch a little more sleep while lying in the dirt being stabbed by every sharp rock on this planet."
"Well, if you want to..."
After another silent, but dirty look at him, Rodney started walking.
"I wonder what Zelenka's managed in the labs without you?" John teased as he caught up.
Ronon and Teyla fell into step with them.
"It'll be a miracle if the city is still in one piece when we dial," Rodney replied. He tripped over nothing and John caught his arm, steadying him automatically. Rodney looked at him, eyes round and mouth working. "Oh my God, do you still have the GDO?"
"You mean you don't?" John asked innocently.
Rodney clutched at his hair. "This is not good, this is so not-"
"I have mine," Teyla said.
"Teyla, you are officially my favorite person ever."
"Does that mean you will give me your chocolate chip muffins next time the mess serves them?" she asked.
John and Ronon both snorted and Rodney looked stricken.
"Of course," Rodney finally choked out. "I'll just - Let you have mine."
Teyla smiled again and lengthened her stride. "I believe the cooks were going to make them today."
"Was I just played?" Rodney asked.
"It's not even a question, buddy," John told him while Ronon just chuckled.
It wasn't until they reached the DHD and dialed that John started to wonder where Teyla had had her GDO.
He decided he didn't want to know. No doubt it was like Ronon's knives or another of those Pegasus Galaxy exceptions to the rules of physics that Rodney was always complaining about.
Or those swords on Highlander.
Maybe that was why Ronon liked those movies so much.
The stargate whooshed open, Teyla sent through their identities, John gave his still half-muddy head another scratch and then they marched through the event horizon and into the gate room, heads high.
Like everything else Pegasus could throw at them, his team had survived the Wandering.
"My God, what happened to you?" Woolsey exclaimed from the gate room stairs.
Now maybe they could get back their real jobs.
Driving Woolsey insane.
John grinned at him and said, "Well, we got drunk, then we went to a wedding, ended up staying the night in a bird's nest-"
Rodney waved his hands for everyone to see. "My fingers are still orange!"
Ronon took up the recital, "Got pierced-"
"Got high," Rodney added. "Got our hair done."
"Got drunk again," Ronon had to say.
Rodney mock sneered at Ronon. "Puked a lot."
"Attended a hanging," Teyla said, "and were robbed."
"Got married, went to the library, got arrested, spent the night in jail and did some camping out," John finished.
"Married?" Woolsey echoed weakly.
"Oh, like we haven't done that before anyway," Rodney dismissed it as he headed for the transporters.
With a shrug, John followed him.
"Ms. Emmagan," Woolsey murmured as Teyla stalked by, "I think perhaps we need to rethink any more attempts to conform to some Pegasus traditions."
"Good idea," Ronon said. "My first time was even worse."
Yeah, John wasn't even going to touch that one.
End
Author: auburnnothenna
Recipient: ceitie
Rated: R
Size: ~16,290 words
Genre: Gen, Humor.
A/N: Many thanks to my beta who shall also remain anonymous until the reveal.
Spoilers: S5 through 5.13 Inquisition.
Summary: It's just like a mission, only not.
Part 1
In Which Our Heroes Drink and Dance
The cats gave up during the night. A careful survey of the plain revealed them - or their doubles - chowing down on some poor animal far, far away. The way was clear. Down the tree they went and back to the stargate at a fast trot.
"Pimat, Delli, I'd say it's been nice," John started to say.
"But it's been a nightmare," Rodney interrupted to finish for him. He touched his right pec with a grimace. "Ow, ow, ow."
"Hurry up, Ronon," Teyla called.
Ronon picked up his pace, but his face twisted into an expression of discomfort. John thanked whatever remnant of sanity had made him stick with earrings himself.
"Anyway, you guys will be all right?" he asked. Teyla gave him an approving nod.
They were at the DHD by then. Delli went forward and began dialing out.
"Oh, yes. We'll meet with my cousin's troupe and stay away from Talaruba for a while, but it will be fine," Delli said.
"I'm going to learn sword-swallowing," Pimat added.
There was a joke there, but John decided to leave it alone. Teyla was within kicking distance of his shins.
"Bye," Rodney muttered as the stargate whooshed open and they parted ways with Delli and Pimat, off to live happily ever after together.
Once the stargate disengaged after them, John dialed up the gate address Lerdat had given them and they headed through too.
They exited onto another plain, but with normal height grass and a slender girl in a beaded loin cloth, many necklaces and corn-rowed hair hopping up and down before the DHD (which was covered in white splats of bird crap along with the stargate) and yelling at them.
"You messed everything up! You made it stop. I was going to join the Lanteans and fight wraith!" the girl shouted.
"You know how to get to Atlantis?" Ronon asked her.
Her expression turned mulish. "I'd find someone who would tell me."
"Hunh."
John kept his eyes above her collarbones, because Jesus, jailbait for one thing and it just felt wrong anyway; from the way she dressed her culture didn't make a big thing of breasts, but his did, and him staring would therefore be skeevy.
He reached over and thwapped the back of Rodney's head. "Eyes forward and up."
"I was looking at her necklaces!" Rodney protested. "I think some of those beads are naquadah."
"Sure you were."
"Don't talk to me."
"I have heard the Lanteans guard the way to their home, keeping it a secret even from those they most trust, and without the proper pass words, to try to pass through the gate to Atlantis is death," Teyla told the girl. "They do not wish anyone to surprise them, even allies."
"They would me," she insisted.
"If they knew you, perhaps," Teyla said gently. She slid her arm around the girl's narrow shoulders. "What is your name?"
"Garu of the Harupa."
"I'm Teyla and these are my friends, Dex, Atchoo and Gesundheit," Teyla introduced them with a wicked smile.
John winced and stomped on Rodney's foot to keep him quiet. If Garu had heard of Atlantis enough to want to come and fight wraith with them, then she might know the names of its most (in)famous gate team.
"Could you guide us back to your people?" Teyla asked. "We are wanderers in search of new friends."
"Oh, fine, I guess I can do that," Garu admitted.
It took two hours to get to the Harupa camp and they met a search party out looking for Garu shortly after they sighted the yurts. By then, Rodney had quizzed Garu about where her beads came from and Teyla had complimented her on the intricate braids decorating her elegant skull. Also the rich red ocher coloring them. Ronon had just looked more and more pinched around the mouth and walked hunched over a little.
Garu didn't know where the beads came from. Her father had traded for them offworld when he sold half their herd of gorps the summer before last and came back with stories of the brave Lanteans who killed whole hives of Wraith. Her aunt did her hair. The color came from the mud from the greatest river that split the plains her tribe grazed their herds on. She fingered Teyla's hair and grinned at her, saying they could fix it, even though it was very straight.
No one asked why Ronon was walking hunched over.
To be frank, none of them wanted to know.
Garu also failed to mention her father was the chief of the Harupa.
Chief Jund was delighted that they had returned Garu, who had snuck away before dawn and scared the crap out of him when he thought she might have made it through the stargate. Like his daughter, he wore a loincloth, only his was heavily beaded and had tassels that brushed the dusty ground. He wore even more necklaces, anklets and bracelets than his daughter too. His hair had been dressed with a heavy white clay into thick wavy spikes radiating from his head in a stylized sunburst.
Delighted translated as party time among the Harupa.
Of course, it looked like in between following their gorp herds across the plain and once in a while selling any excess through the stargate, everything and anything was an excuse to party for the Harupa.
John liked that in a people.
He wasn't as enthusiastic about the fermented gorp milk, served hot with dollops of gorp butter floating on the surface. The smell alone made him cautious. Teyla shoved a pointy elbow into his ribs though and told him in a hard undertone, while smiling at the Harupa, "Drink or they will be insulted and cut our heads off."
John drank, smacked his lips and handed the gourd to Rodney, who did everything but hold his nose, but got it down too.
Ronon grinned at the gourd when it reach him and emptied it. "Just like Mom made," he said. He up-ended the gourd to show the Harupa he'd emptied it. "Mother's milk."
"Now I'm really grateful we'll never have to try Satedan cuisine," Rodney muttered.
John kicked him.
The gourd had been refilled and was being passed around again. The alcohol had hit on John's empty stomach and left him feeling warm and loose and he drank a little deeper the next time. The awful taste didn't seem as awful after a couple more turns and Rodney had flushed pink and begun swaying to the sound of the drums that were starting up.
After a day spent drinking and eating sweet beans, roasted tubers and gorp steaks, the Harupa began dancing as the sun went down. Even Rodney joined them, bouncing from foot to foot and up and down, arms up, arms down, head bobbing. If John hadn't been right there with him, he'd have laughed like a hyena.
Jund finagled out of John - it wasn't hard - that he was the team's leader. This needed to be honored, Jund insisted, gesturing to his own head. It percolated through John's that no one else among the Harupa had a white mud coiffure. After another gourd, he thought Jund was absolutely right and he needed one too.
He was very, very drunk.
Garu and four or five other women - it could have been more, but they kept doubling - were braiding beads into Teyla's hair. Firelight gleamed off all of them, sharp reflections stabbing off the shiny naquadah beads and stabbing into John's eyes.
Rodney had passed out. He sprawled with their packs, an empty gourd next to him, snoring loudly, spit bubbling at the corner of his mouth.
Two of the Harupa boys were holding Rodney's hands up and giggling over the orange coloring.
Ronon was still bopping with the other dancers between gourds of Mother's milk, dreads flying in every direction, often hitting those too close in the face. That just made everyone laugh and fall down.
Jund dragged John to his yurt and brought out a basket pot filled to the brim with noxious white mud. After a second of sane second thoughts, John bent his head and let his new buddy work the stuff into his hair. After all, it was mud; he would rinse it out when they left.
***
Waking up in a yurt wasn't so bad.
Waking up in a yurt with a snoring team-mate lying across his stomach was.
Waking up in a yurt with a snoring team-mate lying across his stomach, who smelled like sour milk and stale alcohol, was worse.
Experiencing that to the auditory and olfactory accompaniment of another team-mate determinedly puking up everything he had ever eaten in the last nine years could be described as very near to waking up in hell.
Doing so while suffering the worst hangover in the history of drinking, could and did lead to John rolling on to his side and vomiting onto the dirt floor. Rodney flopped off him and off the mat John occupied with a thump and a pained groan.
"Death," Rodney gagged. "Death to you."
That sounded like a mercy to John.
His head felt the size of a planet. One being nuked from orbit. Another volcanic explosion finished emptying his stomach and he clutched at the mat under him, riding out the ensuing earthquake. He squinted his eyes open. On the other side of the yurt, Ronon went on puking like it was a new Olympic sport. Teyla bent over him, holding his scarlet dreadlocks away from his face.
Scarlet.
"What the hell happened to your hair?" Rodney demanded. Every word set off another bomb in John's head.
"Stop shouting," he whispered. Stop the bombing. He'd been bombed last night. He wished he'd stopped. "Oooooooh."
Someone had dyed Ronon's hair red.
"I'm not shouting," Rodney said, still entirely too loudly for John. "I am speaking in a reasonable voice and oh my God! What happened to you, you look like a Colonel Sanders Ken Doll!"
John's hand went immediately to his crotch, finding everything still attached, to his relief.
Ronon moaned and barfed some more.
"John. Rodney. Please stop shouting. I have a small headache this morning," Teyla said. "Also, you are making Ronon worse."
"Could anything make Ronon worse?" Rodney mumbled. A whiff of whatever had come up and out hit them and Rodney clapped his hands over his nose and mouth, moaning as he did so.
"Rodney," John whispered. Please let him be talking about Ronon. Or hallucinating. John was afraid feel his head and find out. "What are you talking about? Ken Doll?"
"Colonel Sanders," Rodney replied. "White hair. Plastic head."
John whimpered and lifted his fingers apprehensively to his head and hit something hard. Something hard and attached to his scalp. He moaned, remembering the mud and Jund and too many gourds of Mother's milk.
"Teyla..."
"It will come out," she said. "Eventually."
"What do you mean, eventually?" Rodney asked.
John squeezed his eyes shut.
"It has to dry and flake off. That can take up to a week, according to Garu," Teyla replied. "If you try to wash it out, the mud will only cling longer. The water rejuvenates it."
He really hated Teyla right then.
Rolling over and seeing that someone had dyed Rodney's thinning hair the same brilliant red as Ronon's only helped a little bit. Deciding not to tell him helped a little more. Between Ronon and Rodney and Teyla's new corn-rows, at least when they made it back to Atlantis, he wouldn't be the only one being stared at.
John covered his eyes with his arm and pretended he couldn't hear Ronon starting to heave again.
"I can't stand it," Rodney declared and crawled to the door of the yurt, where he clawed his way up onto his feet and staggered outside with a shriek of pain as the sun hit his eyes.
John prayed for death or unconsciousness.
In Which Our Intrepid Team Pays For It
Chief Jund gave them the gate address to the world where the Harupa sold their excess gorps at breakfast. That was when Teyla finally lost her cool too. Rodney wouldn't even come near the pots and John had waved his away without even looking, while Ronon was off sticking his head in a bucket of water. The bowl Jund handed Teyla had something alive in it. She took one look, squealed and dropped the bowl before darting off to the edge of the camp. The tell-tale sound of gagging reached them soon.
One of the Harupa reached for the black, slimy thing humping along the muddy spot where Teyla had flung it, but it looked entirely too much like a cross between a starfish and leech for John's peace of mind. He casually shuffled to the side and stomped it flat.
"Thank you," Rodney whispered and John guessed he'd checked out the scanner pictures of the Second Childhood parasite and felt about it the same way John did large bugs.
"We've got to make a start for the stargate," he told Jund before anyone could offer them anything else the Harupa considered a tasty breakfast. If Ronon kept puking he was going to strain something.
Jund took the hint, but did press a loincloth that matched his into John's hands.
They stumbled off toward the stargate; each of them squinting against the awful light of the sun and the painful impact on their skulls of every step they took.
John compulsively kept feeling the hardened spikes on his head and imagining what it looked like.
They dialed Grepta and went through without any discussion.
The crowd that had cleared space for the activating stargate didn't give them more than a passing glance as they stepped into the hot, dusty afternoon of the stockyard town that had built up around Grepta's gate.
The crowd seemed made up of people from more than one different world; their differences great enough the team didn't draw any special attention at all. They were migrating away from the gate plaza toward the other end of town, out where the stockyard smells were stronger.
"What's going on?" John asked as he bumped into the man ahead of him.
"They're hanging a Wraith collaborator."
John shared a glance with his team and the let the crowd propel them forward until, with a little judicious maneuvering, they could all see the gallows built from part of a dismantled corral fence.
The crowd around them muttered and growled furiously as the guilty party, bound and gagged and bearing more than a few visible bruises, was dragged out and brought before them.
Another man stood up and declared the guilty sentence.
"This is Aming Hopht. The Council of Grepta has found him guilty of deliberately killing his brother Padet Hopht during the last Wraith culling. Padet's wife and three other witness saw Aming push his brother into a culling beam."
The roar from the crowd made Ronon clutch at his head, but Teyla stared up at the man with an expression just as hard as everyone's around them.
John expected some more talk, anything but the abrupt dropping of the noose over Hopht's neck and two men on the ground drawing the rope taut until he had to balance on his toes, tears streaming down his reddened face.
The speaker jumped down from the platform. He raised his voice.
"The verdict is death."
The platform was unceremoniously kicked out from under Hopht's feet. He fell with a snap that made John flinch. Beside him, Ronon grunted. John turned away, noticing that Rodney already had.
"I can understand it," Rodney said, "but I can't make myself like it."
John nodded.
"Let's get out of here and find some place to stay the night."
Easier said than done. It seemed everyone that Grepta supplied with animals from their stockyards had come to see the hanging. The town was by no means large in the first place, but it had three inns, which was two more than most villages in Pegasus, and every one of them was booked up. John wouldn't have minded camping out for the night if it hadn't been for the manure reek and the strong possibility of getting trampled by something hundreds of pounds heavier than him in the night.
They wandered through the town aimlessly, hoping to find someone willing to sell them the floor in a spare room or even a store room and having no luck.
"Couldn't we just go home?" Rodney whined.
"Rodney, you agreed to the seven day plan," Teyla remonstrated him.
"Yeah, Rodney, you agreed," John backed her up.
People poured around their little group, either heading for the auction yard or the various taverns that dotted the town. It bore an eerie resemblance to an Old West town in a movie. Only none of the movies John had ever seen had included smell-o-vision. The popularity of Westerns would have petered out much more quickly if they had.
Rodney folded his arms and gave John a mulish glare.
"You just don't want to go back until that stuff in your hair falls off," he accused John.
The tips of John's ears went hot in embarrassment. He'd been pretending that nothing was wrong with his hair. Interestingly, Grepta was cosmopolitan enough no one had given him or Rodney or Ronon a second glance. All second glances bent Teyla's way were of the admiring sort she always got.
Some time during the day, Rodney had become aware of the state of his own hair, too. Ronon's snickers might have been the give away.
"If I have to go back like this," Rodney now said, "so do you."
John couldn't help kidding him.
"Aw, Rodney, you make a good redhead."
"I'm hungry," Ronon stated before Rodney could come up with a come back.
"What, now?"
"Yeah, I didn't get breakfast."
"That would be because you were busy throwing up the universe," Rodney pointed out.
Ronon's stomach rumbled.
"Great. Fine. Let's find somewhere to eat. Maybe we can find some place to sleep afterward. I still say we could just go through the stargate to the next planet that isn't over run with execution groupies."
"Deserved it," Ronon said.
"I agree," Teyla added in a cool tone.
Rodney looked from her to Ronon and sighed. John knew how he felt. It wasn't that Teyla and Ronon were more ruthless than them, but that they didn't experience the doubts and regrets anyone from Earth did.
"I'm just not comfortable with making punishment and death into an entertainment opportunity," Rodney said.
Ronon stared at him until the grumbling from his stomach became disturbing.
"Let's just get that food," John said.
Grepta didn't have much in the way of restaurants. Food could be bought in the taverns and the main rooms of the inns, but they were packed too tight to even try getting a meal there. They settled on meat and vegetable kebabs from a street vendor and leaned against a wall out of the way of most passers-by as they ate.
A local bought a kebab and sidled over next to them. She cocked her hip as she nibbled at her kebab and studied the four of them.
"Saw you earlier," she said.
"We didn't see you," Rodney said.
They really should have. She had on a red leather bustier, a ragged skirt of something filmy, a black-and-white checkerboard stockings, and clunky sandals with red wooden heels. Her hair was teased out into a blond cloud. A yellow flower was painted onto the top of her left breast.
Hooker, that meant. Well, what it really meant according to Halling - Teyla had refused to explain - was that she wouldn't expect anyone to marry her after sex. It was kind of a universal sign all across Pegasus, anyway. Instead of marriage, the wearer would expect a gift, something usually worked out before there was sex.
She lifted her shoulders and rolled them into a full-body shrug that advertised a very nice body.
"I'm Kela."
"Hi," John said, smiling at her until Rodney stepped down hard on his foot. He turned a glare on him. "Hey!"
"Space clap."
Kela rolled her eyes and addressed Teyla. "Town's full up, but you could hire a girl," here she glanced at John, making him blush, "or a boy for the night at Jale Madel's and stay in the room."
Rodney opened and closed his mouth several times, while Teyla frowned, answering, "I do not believe we will need to take such...measures."
"Wait, wait, wait," Rodney said. "Would there be beds?"
Kela did her ripply shrug again, making everything in the stiff leather bustier shift and jiggle and Rodney's eyes bug out a little.
"A bed," she replied. She grinned, tore off a mouthful of kebab and licked the hint of shiny grease from her lips after she'd swallowed. "Pay enough and you could get the big bed."
Rodney turned to John.
"A bed," he said.
"Rodney," Teyla interrupted.
Rodney waved her off. "A bed, not a mat, not a freaking nest, but a genuine bed. I say we do it."
"Rodney," John muttered, leaning in close so his words wouldn't carry to Kela, "think for a minute about what's gone on in it."
"I'll spray it down," Rodney dismissed it.
Well, that gave a new meaning to sleeping in the wet spot.
"Let's go," Ronon declared.
"John," Teyla appealed to him, looking even more disturbed than John felt.
He held up his hands and nodded at Rodney and Ronon, who were already following Kela away in search of the local whorehouse.
"I think we've been over ruled."
Teyla gave him a suspicious look, obviously thinking he hadn't argued very hard.
***
"It's an orgy bed."
Rodney's description hit the nail on the head. The bed took up pretty much the entire room, leaving just enough room to walk around its edges. Bent over, thanks to the eaves that came down on one side.
"It'll do," John told Jale and handed over the money for the night.
She looked at Teyla, then Ronon, then Rodney and then back to John and shook her head a little. "You need anyone else?" she asked.
"No," he said, choking a little at what she thought they were going to be doing. Together. To each other.
"I'll have Toba bring up some supplies," she said.
"That will not be necessary," Teyla said in a severe tone.
"No, no, wait," Rodney interrupted. "Towels?"
"Towels and wash water in the room at the end of the corridor," Jale told them.
Toba, who looked and sounded a lot like Cher, if she'd had a bigger Adam's apple and wrists, grinned at them over Jale's shoulder. "Sure you don't want a little more company?" The look sent Ronon's way was sheerly predatory, enough so that Ronon had a spooked expression on his face for once.
"No, thank you," Teyla stated.
"My loss," Toba said, still cheerful, and, "Back in a tick."
Jale followed her away.
Rodney rummaged through his pack and pulled out a bottle which he handed to John. "Here. Spray this on the bed."
"Rodney."
"Do you want to bring home some six or eight-legged passengers?"
John shuddered and told Teyla and Ronon, "Stand back."
"I'm going to wash up as much as I can," Rodney declared and headed down the corridor.
John began spraying the bed and hoped the smell of the bug spray would dissipate quickly.
It did and they all fitted into the bed with room enough to sleep as comfortably as they had since leaving Atlantis.
Or, perhaps, a little too well.
Their packs, right down to their clothes, were gone when they woke in the morning.
Jale's mouth went thin and angry when John stumbled down the stairs wrapped in a sheet he'd forcibly torn out of Rodney's hands, and told her they'd been robbed.
"Quisla!" she screamed.
John followed her to the back of the house, where there were smaller rooms that belonged to the girls and boys working there.
Quisla's had been cleaned out.
While he stumbled along behind the madam, trying not to trip over the hem of the sheet, Jale checked through the house, discovering that Quisla had done a number on several of her co-workers and three other customers, who were still out cold and bare-ass naked.
"She had to have had help," Jale snarled. "If she ever comes back here, I'll have her shaved and marked as a thief."
John tightened his grip on the sheet with one hand while rubbing his neck with the other. He had a headache on par with his hangover of the day before, only without the fun of the party. He wondered what Quisla had used to knock everyone out. It had even taken Ronon out.
"You figure she took off through the stargate," he said.
Jale gave him a contemptuous look. "Of course she did."
Toba stumbled out of her room, wrapped in a short, semi-transparent robe. She needed to shave, but she smiled at John. He smiled back weakly.
"Clothes," he said. "We need clothes."
"Buy some," Jale said.
"Yeah, well, your light-fingered friend took all our money along with our clothes," he pointed out.
"Not my problem."
"Jale...," Toba murmured.
John narrowed his eyes at her. "You don't really want everyone in town knowing you had a thief working for you. They'll find somewhere else to get their kicks and you'll end up out of business."
Jale frowned at him, then turned to Toba. "Fine. You and the others, get these four and the other idiots some clothes."
Toba smiled. "Oooh, fun."
John buried his face in his hands. The sheet fell.
"Ooooh," Toba said again.
***
Of course Quisla had left the loincloth. It was the only thing that had been left. Even Rodney's bug spray had been taken. The loincloth had fallen and been kicked half under the bed, though, and forgotten.
"I don't know what you're complaining about," Rodney snapped. He tugged at the hem of his shorts. The tiger-striped leather refused to shift, clinging so skintight there was absolutely no reason for him to wear the suspender-harness that came with them. "I'm the one about to rupture something. External genitalia were never meant to be compressed to this extent."
"There's a draft," John complained.
"I can barely walk," Teyla added. The candy apple red Capri hot pants looked like they'd been sprayed onto her. Which wasn't necessarily a bad thing: Teyla's legs and ass were outstanding. But Teyla was not happy. She plucked at the equally tight white halter top and scowled.
"As soon as we get to the next world, we'll all buy new clothes," John promised. They still had money after Harupa, Talaruba and the Land of the Lost.
"With what?" Rodney asked darkly. "Did the scum-sucking thief who took our clothes conveniently leave behind our money?"
He'd forgotten.
Crap.
The thought of coming back to Atlantis in the Harupa loincloth and the net shirt the whores had given him, dangling earrings in his ears, and his hair twirled into demented spikes coated in white mud made John's privates shrivel. He thought even Rodney might agree that just stripping off and going back naked would be better.
Toba and Kela led Ronon back in at that point and even Rodney fell silent.
Nudity, John decided. Nudity would be be preferable. Also death.
Ronon's dreadlocks were still a searing red thanks to the Harupa. That should have been enough to make anyone stare, but took a backseat to the 'clothes' he'd been dressed in.
"Ronon," Teyla croaked, somewhere between hysterics and hilarity.
Ronon crossed his arms and scowled. The bustier strapped around his chest threatened to bust and take out someone's eye the first time he took a deep breath. The matching purple mini-skirt just skimmed his thighs and threatened to flash more than John's loincloth. The worst part, and the part that made John wonder if Ronon might still be high on fermented milk or color blind or both, was the artfully torn, pink lace thigh-high stockings.
"It's like he's auditioning for the Best Little Rocky Horrorhouse in Pegasus," Rodney said.
In addition, the whores had made him up with lip paint, eyeshadow, eyeliner and rouge. Tim Curry never growled that low, though.
John resisted the urge to cover his eyes and muttered, "The bustier actually looks a lot like that vest he used to wear. Remember it?"
"No matter how hard I try to forget." He turned and watched as John donned the tangerine satin robe Toba had offered him. At least it was long enough to reach his ankles, thanks to Toba's unusual height. "Not that you get to make any remarks, Elton John."
"You think this crap ever happened to SG-1?"
Rodney shook his head. "If it did, they sanitized the records before I read them."
"Speaking of..."
"I'm already writing the program to hack the gate room close circuit feed and wipe all visual records of when we return," Rodney said.
"You're a good man, Rodney."
In Which Our Heroes Get Sent Up River and Visit the Big House
Toba and the others at Jale's give them a handful of gate addresses, places they'd come from or been to or just heard about from a client. The team picked Elseer, since it was supposed to have a library open to offworlders.
No one mentioned that everyone on Elseer had to be married if they were out in public.
Even the guards at the gate were married.
They didn't blink at the team's get-ups, but they explained that either they all had to marry each other for the extent of their visit to Elseer or turn around and leave.
"It's no big deal. Visitors get married here all the time. We divorce them when they're ready to leave," one guard explained. "Me and Cilbet'll get divorced at the end of our shift. We do it every day."
"And we may...marry...all of each other?" Teyla asked.
"Why not?"
"Yeah," Ronon teased her. "Why not?" He grinned: a truly terrifying sight with the make-up. "You got something against us?"
Teyla gave out a despairing sigh. "No one mentions this to Kanaan."
"We'll let Ronon do our reports," John agreed.
"Went wandering. Came back. End report," Rodney recited.
John pointed at him. "Exactly. That is exactly what I'm writing too."
Teyla frowned through the entire thing, but the guards proceeded to marry them all to each other, and then directed them to the ferry boat that would take them upriver from the tiny island that supported the stargate on Elseer to the city.
"All your worldly goods," John speculated as the boat started chugging upstream. The deck rocked under their feet and Teyla turned an interest shade of chartreuse as soon as it did.
"You can't have my M&Ms," Rodney told him. "We're getting divorced as soon as we leave here."
"Not even in the settlement?" John wheedled.
Teyla ran for the railing, leaned over it and began heaving.
John sighed. This 'wandering' was cursed. He didn't think Teyla would be so quick to suggest 'traditional' Pegasus cultural crap after this. No one on the team had proven immune this time. She'd held out longest, but at this point they'd all upchucked at least once or more on this trip through the gates. He wished they could have done it in Woolsey's office. He made a point of noting to himself that she got seasick and crossed off any boat trips if he ever got the team back to Earth for a vacation. No amusement parks, since mascots freaked Ronon out. Mexico was out, since almost everything there had lime in it. Chartering a yacht and relaxing on the water with no one to trigger his team mates' more lethal reflexes had been a possibility, but not if it meant Teyla being sick the whole time.
Maybe they'd just stay in Atlantis. It would be safer, judging from this trip.
As she bent farther over the rail, the red hot pants pulled taut over her butt gave out an alarming creak and then ripped right down the seam, garnering the attention of the team and every man on the boat.
"And the day only gets better," Rodney commented. "I'm not looking, Teyla. I swear."
Teyla just moaned.
With a sigh, John whipped off the tangerine robe that had really been the only thing between him and complete humiliation. Ronon moved to block anyone else seeing, Rodney steadied her while she went on gagging dribbles in the river, and John carefully threaded the robe onto Teyla's arms so she was covered again. They stayed clumped around her miserable figure until the boat docked and they were shooed off.
Teyla finally recovered enough to belt the robe tight around her. She looked exhausted, pissed off, and miserable.
"We will never speak of this again," she declared in a dead calm tone that put the fear of her wrath into all three of them. "Do you all understand?"
"Of course."
"Never."
"Are you crazy?"
That last was Rodney.
Teyla turned a gimlet-eyed look on him. He threw up his arms in front of him. "I mean, I'd have to be crazy to ever want to tell anyone about the thing that we aren't talking about ever because it didn't happen," he babbled.
She nodded.
"Very well. Let us visit this library, so that we may move on."
"It probably will be pointless," Rodney muttered. He brightened. "But if it is, we can go back to the stargate and go on to another world and that will be it, won't it? We'll be able to go home. Seven worlds. That's what was agreed to, right?"
Sounded good to John.
Of course nothing ever went that simply in Pegasus, though Rodney did get into the library, despite several people who raised their eyebrows at his clothes.
Rodney just lifted his chin and snapped, "What are you looking at? This?" He plucked at a suspender. "This is the traditional scholars' garb of Kinkaju." He pointed at Ronon. "See his hair? That is my husband-assistant." He patted his head. "When he finishes his apprenticeship, he will be allowed to cut off that rat's nest and glory in a proper professor's tonsure."
John started choking about then. Teyla took entirely too much pleasure in thumping his back.
The Elseer librarians still wouldn't let anyone but Rodney inside despite his explanation that not only was Ronon his assistant, but that John and Teyla were his concubine and his bodyguard.
With a sigh, John sat down on the front steps of the library along with Ronon and Teyla.
"We'll just wait out here."
"I won't be too long," Rodney promised. "I mean, what are the odds they'll have anything useful to us?"
Three hours later, Rodney wasn't back.
Four hours later, Rodney wasn't back.
Five hours later, the local cops arrested the three of them for loitering with intent to prostitute.
Since arriving in Pegasus John had not in fact become deeply familiar with the various world's penal systems and facilities, no matter how often Rodney made remarks about being locked up. He had, however, confirmed his abiding dislike of incarceration. Not that he'd needed to do that. It seemed self-evident that being locked up was not pleasant; that was after all one of the salient points of imprisonment: punishment. Comfortable jail cells were contradictions in aim.
John had been locked up by: the Genii, the Asurans, a village full of people bent on selling Ronon back to the Wraith, his own people under various extenuating circumstances involving retroviruses and Lucius Lavin, and most recently, by the Pegasus Coalition.
He rated the Elseer city jail as a solid four. Ten being the worst he'd ever endured - that had been on Earth, ironically, and he only remembered it in nightmares. The Elseer cell had a water faucet that provided cold water, a bucket in one corner and a central drain in the floor, wooden shelf bunks bolted to the stone walls, and the traditional metal bars in front. A single high window provided daylight. Even at midday, the cell was cool and would become chilly over night.
The Elseer got points for not beating them up or groping Teyla and more points for processing them fast.
Conviction followed arrest within an hour. They were marched before a man in a gray suit, found guilty and sentenced to an overnight stay in jail and deportation through the stargate the next day. The Elseer didn't really care about prostitution, but one of the librarians had sent a messenger complaining about them sitting on the front steps.
Considering they meant to leave Elseer the next day anyway, John caught Ronon's gaze, shook his head, and they silently agreed there was no reason to try to escape. It seemed likely Rodney would hear about the arrests once he finally surfaced.
Also, they didn't have any money and the night in jail came with a meal and a roof over their heads. Courtesy of their offworld and marital status, they were even all in the same non-violent and misdemeanor offenders' cell, along with a couple pickpockets and two drunks.
Turned out their stay came with more than one meal, in fact, and the guards delivering it didn't even spit in it. Elseer moved up to number two on John's secret If I Have To Be Locked Up I Want It To Be On __________ List. (Number One wasn't a place, it was 'With My Team, Unless They Can Escape And Break Me Out Too.)
They were just tucking into the tasty Elseer equivalent of ham and cheese sandwiches, some fresh fruit, and berry tarts, when Rodney is shoved into the cell with them. The drunks were passed out on their bunk slabs, so Ronon appropriated their trays. Rodney was in mid-rant, detailing what a bunch of backward, fascistic, moronic, abusive jerks the guards were as he stumbled in. His target shifted as soon as he spotted the rest of the team.
"I can't leave you alone for five minutes without you either hitting on some priestess or princess or getting locked up! Wait, this time you did both didn't you? Prostitution! That's a new low for you, Sheppard!"
John stretched out his legs, contemplating his hairy shins, and pointed out, "Well, we are wearing cast-offs from a bordello."
"What does that mean?" Rodney demanded.
"Are you saying we looked like purveyors of sexual congress for monetary gain, John?" Teyla asked. The sweet look on her face didn't fool anyone.
"Not you," John said quickly.
"I do?" Ronon asked.
John blinked at him.
"Not really."
More like something from a bad trip, but he thought he'd keep that insight to himself.
"Well, that just leaves you," Rodney pointed out.
"And you."
"Oh no, I was arrested for staging a scene in the police station after I found out you were taken there."
"Hunh."
John decided it would be safer to stuff his mouth full of sandwich than say anything else.
Rodney's gaze lit on the food.
"Oh, say, is that a berry tart?"
John shoved the tray his way and Rodney began eating, humming between bites, and batting at John when he reached for the second half of his sandwich.
"Mmph - 's not bad," Rodney mumbled through a mouthful of food, effectively killing John's appetite.
"The Elseer seem quite civilized," Teyla remarked.
"The library has some probably horribly inaccurate but interesting transcriptions of what might have been Ancient tech manuals," Rodney commented.
"Is that what took you so long?" Ronon asked.
"Mmmph."
"Then we should advise Mr. Woolsey to send a team back here to explore the library and perhaps initiate a trade agreement," Teyla said.
"And get more of these tarts," Rodney agreed.
They'd have to send Lorne's team. John didn't think they'd be too convincing, even if they came back in normal Atlantis mission gear. They had records here.
With a sigh, he tried to get comfortable on the wooden bunk bench. It was going to be a long and boring afternoon. Maybe he'd take a nap.
He woke for dinner and when the guards handed out blankets to wrap around them for the night.
"You're the best jail guards ever," Rodney told them sincerely. It seemed to disturb the Elseer. Come morning, they were fed, escorted to the ferry and sent on their way with what looked like great relief.
In Which Ronon Gets Squirrelly
"You know," Rodney pointed out from his seat on a rock, where he was watching Ronon turn a knife, a rock, and a handful of weeds into a fire, "the Elseer forgot to divorce us when they de-gated us this morning."
"Hmm," John said. He turned to Teyla, who was still wrapped in his tangerine robe and looking distinctly disgruntled. "Did this sort of thing happen to you on your first Wandering?"
"No," she said.
"Anyone you know?"
"No."
"Just us?"
"Yes."
"Did me," Ronon said.
"And you didn't say anything?" Rodney demanded.
"Didn't want to do it again, did I?" He struck the flint with his knife, expertly sending a shower of sparks into the dry, torn up pile of weeds. Flame crawled up the tinder.
"Next time just say something," John told him. He reached up and scratched at his head. His hand came away coated in white flakes.
"You look like you have the worst case of dandruff in the universe," Rodney said.
John shook his head, sending flecks of the finally dried mud onto Rodney and Teyla. Teyla glared at him and edged away.
Ronon fed sticks into the fire until it was burning steadily. Then he striped off the pink stockings.
"What's he doing now?"
John watched as Ronon used his knife on the stockings, slicing them up then tying together the pieces into a skinny rope.
"No idea," he said.
"Making a snare," Ronon told them. "I'm going to catch one of those things." He nodded toward the rodents that kept poking their heads up out of the many holes littering the ground around their proposed camp.
"Those squirrelly things?" Rodney said. He peered at one. "Do you think they'll taste good?"
"Not if they taste like squirrel," John muttered.
"Well, maybe they'll taste like rabbit."
"You two are not being helpful," Teyla said in reproof.
"Yes we are," he and Rodney chorused.
"We are not interfering with the expert," Rodney explained.
Teyla gave them a disbelieving look. With a sniff, she got up and stalked over to a rock nearer the fire.
"Think she's mad at us?" Rodney asked.
"Uhuh."
"Me too."
They turned their attention to Ronon, who was stealthily working his way closer and closer to the squirbit colony.
"You know," John said conversationally, "I'm disturbed by the fact that I'm not actually disturbed by the fact that I'm watching Ronon crawl around in a purple mini-skirt."
Rodney shook his head.
"Not as disturbed as I am by the way he keeps flashing us. How high did he have to get to get pierced there?"
In Which Our Heroes Return Chastened But Triumphant
Rodney needed a shave. John needed a shave really bad. Their razors, like everything else, had been in their packs. The packs that had been stolen at Jale's bordello. John hoped Quisla or whoever ended up with them nicked themselves unmercifully. Ronon didn't need a shave because he'd used his knife, but John didn't need a shave badly enough to risk cutting his throat.
Besides, Ronon wouldn't share.
Teyla's braids had leaves stuck to them. He felt this was only fair, because otherwise, she looked a fresh as a daisy. If a daisy was wearing a pair of split up the ass red hot pants.
"I need coffee," Rodney moaned.
"You need a shower," John told him.
"I need coffee and a shower," Rodney agreed.
"Breakfast," Ronon said.
"Breakfast," Rodney agreed.
John's stomach grumbled. The roasted squirbit hadn't exactly been a ribsticking meal. It had also been over twelve hours earlier.
"I am looking forward to seeing Torren again," Teyla said. A secretive smile showed before she ducked her face. "And Kanaan."
John caught Ronon and then Rodney's gazes and they all smirked. Lucky dog. Even if he had been on diaper duty for the last week.
He dusted his hands together and squinted at the rising sun. It glinted off the upper curve of the stargate at the other end of the valley. He remembered why they hadn't camped near it, but the prospect of the long walk back before they could dial Atlantis didn't make him a happy camper. "Everybody ready to get out of here?"
Rodney looked at him. "No, seriously, I thought I might relax here and try to catch a little more sleep while lying in the dirt being stabbed by every sharp rock on this planet."
"Well, if you want to..."
After another silent, but dirty look at him, Rodney started walking.
"I wonder what Zelenka's managed in the labs without you?" John teased as he caught up.
Ronon and Teyla fell into step with them.
"It'll be a miracle if the city is still in one piece when we dial," Rodney replied. He tripped over nothing and John caught his arm, steadying him automatically. Rodney looked at him, eyes round and mouth working. "Oh my God, do you still have the GDO?"
"You mean you don't?" John asked innocently.
Rodney clutched at his hair. "This is not good, this is so not-"
"I have mine," Teyla said.
"Teyla, you are officially my favorite person ever."
"Does that mean you will give me your chocolate chip muffins next time the mess serves them?" she asked.
John and Ronon both snorted and Rodney looked stricken.
"Of course," Rodney finally choked out. "I'll just - Let you have mine."
Teyla smiled again and lengthened her stride. "I believe the cooks were going to make them today."
"Was I just played?" Rodney asked.
"It's not even a question, buddy," John told him while Ronon just chuckled.
It wasn't until they reached the DHD and dialed that John started to wonder where Teyla had had her GDO.
He decided he didn't want to know. No doubt it was like Ronon's knives or another of those Pegasus Galaxy exceptions to the rules of physics that Rodney was always complaining about.
Or those swords on Highlander.
Maybe that was why Ronon liked those movies so much.
The stargate whooshed open, Teyla sent through their identities, John gave his still half-muddy head another scratch and then they marched through the event horizon and into the gate room, heads high.
Like everything else Pegasus could throw at them, his team had survived the Wandering.
"My God, what happened to you?" Woolsey exclaimed from the gate room stairs.
Now maybe they could get back their real jobs.
Driving Woolsey insane.
John grinned at him and said, "Well, we got drunk, then we went to a wedding, ended up staying the night in a bird's nest-"
Rodney waved his hands for everyone to see. "My fingers are still orange!"
Ronon took up the recital, "Got pierced-"
"Got high," Rodney added. "Got our hair done."
"Got drunk again," Ronon had to say.
Rodney mock sneered at Ronon. "Puked a lot."
"Attended a hanging," Teyla said, "and were robbed."
"Got married, went to the library, got arrested, spent the night in jail and did some camping out," John finished.
"Married?" Woolsey echoed weakly.
"Oh, like we haven't done that before anyway," Rodney dismissed it as he headed for the transporters.
With a shrug, John followed him.
"Ms. Emmagan," Woolsey murmured as Teyla stalked by, "I think perhaps we need to rethink any more attempts to conform to some Pegasus traditions."
"Good idea," Ronon said. "My first time was even worse."
Yeah, John wasn't even going to touch that one.
End