Wildcard #5 - Sneak Peek!
Since there is technically no June 31st...
Here is my sneak peek!
“What do you mean, you’re going back?!” Rodney sputtered into his coffee.
“I just am,” John said, staring down at the bowl of cereal he had thought about eating. He realized he really had no appetite after all, though he’d hoped to be able to trick himself into it once something was sitting on the table in front of him. Yeah, nope.
“Look at this, Rodney,” he said, gesturing at the Mess Hall around them, the early morning Atlantian sun shining in the windows, washing the world in the warm ambers of the angular stained glass. “Coffee, eggs, pancakes. Clean clothes on our backs, paycheques waiting for us when we get back to Earth. Look at everything we’ve got. We left those villages with nothing. The Court of the Tower can’t fend for themselves and the villagers are starving. We even took their drones.”
“Oh, god, are you having an attack of conscious now, Colonel? I thought you turned down the kingship.”
“I don’t want it.” John scowled. “What do you mean, now?”
Rodney waved his cup expressively. “I didn’t think you’d care. We got the drones, we got some ‘jumpers, we have the chair, we have the superior city. The Wraith haven’t culled Veritanus in decades, they don’t know that the Tower is defenceless now. Besides, they’re focussing on us - we’ll be the ones to end the Wraith War. The peasants will overthrow the Court of the Tower, and all will be well in the land of Shakespeare-Gone-Wrong,-Wrong,-So-Very-Wrong.”
John slammed his palms down on the table, rattling both the cutlery and Rodney’s flippant mood.
“We left them with nothing, Rodney,” he said, scowling darkly. “We left Vertanus in the middle of a civil war that we started.”
Rodney’s crooked mouth pulled down into a scowl to match John’s. “Is it Princess Mara?”
“What?”
“You want to go back for Mara, don’t you? Or is it Tavius?”
“Jesus, Rodney, is that what you think of me?”
“No! I...” Rodney trailed off, set down his coffee. He made an aborted gesture towards John that may have began with an attempt to place one broad hand over John’s, but ended with rapping a fist angrily on the table top. “Your place is here, Colonel. With ... us. You have a duty to Atlantis. You can’t just leave.”
“The hell I can’t,” John said darkly, and Rodney remembered too late that the worst thing to do to John Sheppard is to challenge him to anything by telling him what he couldn’t do.
“Colonel!”
“Just watch me.”
John got up and left the Mess, and Rodney turned to watch the stretch and play of the furious lines of his back through his black tee-shirt. The anger was nearly visible, it clouded, radiated out of John so forcefully. Even Atlantis’ lights seemed to wince in sympathy.
And that was the last Doctor M. Rodney McKay saw of Colonel John Sheppard for six months.