Lostcityfoundfic: The Undone Years (Genish, PG-13, SGA/SG-1) 2/7
The Undone Years 2/7
Part 1 for header info.
Sheppard decided not to think about Teyla. It was easier that way. He also wasn’t going to think about Ford. Sheppard went and took a shower, instead. The infirmary showers were designed for the medical staff, mostly, since patients were expected to get the sponge bath variety. No way in hell was he consenting to that. Lam said he could get his head wet, but the water pressure might hurt. She was right about that. The showerhead spray stung like hell, even when he adjusted it to the lightest setting. Standing up that long was also kind of hard, and he was well aware he was sort of stumbling rather than walking. He really couldn’t run away even if he wanted to.
Afterwards, he wrapped himself in a scratchy, thin towel and leaned against the wall just outside the shower stall, being pissed that the simple act of showering was now somehow exhausting. He was also pissed that while someone had taken away the patient gown he’d been wearing, they’d left a new, clean one. Sheppard wanted to wear pants.
He rifled around the shower area, eventually finding someone’s sweatpants balled up in the corner underneath a pile of clean towels. They smelled like detergent - maybe accidentally mixed in with the laundry - so Sheppard decided to steal them. The original owner was shorter than him, so the pant legs hit him awkwardly just above the ankle, but it was still better than an ass-baring gown.
Sheppard looked at himself in the mirror. His head was hideous - most of his hair gone and rows of tiny black thread sewn jaggedly here and there. There was some stubble as it grew back, but he really did look Frankenstein. His body looked thinner and flabbier, muscle tone lost. And it was kind of bizarre to look at his hairy chest in the mirror when his head was mostly bald.
It was a little surprising to be left alone as he did this. He guessed as long as he didn’t try to stab anyone or leave the infirmary, he was allowed to move around a little. Where this figured in getting him to divulge information about Atlantis, he didn’t know. Sure he looked like a pathetic, injured victim, but that wasn’t going to make him spill his guts. It mostly just pissed him off.
Worn out, Sheppard wandered back to his little curtain area. He noticed the airman outside was gone, which was a little odd. It must have been a shift change. He again considered trying to get out of the infirmary, decided the way he felt a hundred pound nurse could have captured him. Instead, he climbed back on to the gurney and stretched out.
He was half asleep within minutes, only jerked awake when he heard the curtain jingle on its rod. Sheppard opened one eye, saw the slender figure of a woman outlined against the blue curtain. It wasn’t Lam or Teyla, he could tell, so he decided it was a nurse and he could go back to sleep. Shutting his eye, he heard the hooks jangle again, but ignored it.
Sheppard couldn’t ignore it when a warm, solid weight slammed down on his hips. For some bizarre reason, the woman had entered his room, jumped on to his gurney, and was straddling him. His eyes flew open, hands flying up to try to push her off. The first thing that filled his vision was an enormous, toothy grin. The woman sitting on him was smiling her head off. He recognized her immediately, mostly because the options for sexually aggressive crazy-ass women was really short.
“Hello, darling,” Vala Mal Doran said, leaning over him and still smiling widely.
Sheppard squinted up at her. He put his hands on her hips, tried to shove. It did absolutely nothing to dislodge her. And damn, for a slender woman she was heavy.
“Off,” he grunted.
“Now, now,” Vala said. She pressed her palms against his bare chest. “You may not remember me, so I thought I’d remind you.”
“I know who you are,” he said. “Now move!”
She was toying with his chest hair between her fingers. “No no,” she tsked. “You like it when I do this.”
“I do not,” Sheppard snapped.
Vala ran her hands up then back down his shoulders. “You’re untied, now, though. Pity.”
He took his hands off her hips, shoved pathetically at her shoulders - trying to avoid her breasts as he did so - and discovered he really couldn’t move her at all. That was disheartening.
“Get off!”
Vala made a face, for a second actually looking sincerely hurt. And then he froze, because what the fuck?
“We’re lovers,” she said, sweetly, and then grinned in a way that immediately invalidated that sentence. “Don’t you remember?”
Giving up, Sheppard dropped his hands flat on the gurney. If he remembered correctly, Vala most liked to play when she had an enraged partner. “I’m married to Teyla,” he said. “So they tell me.”
“Well, yes,” Vala admitted. “But I’m your mistress!”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Aren’t you and Jackson - ”
“Daniel doesn’t appreciate me. He’s no fun,” Vala interrupted. At least she’d stopped playing with his chest hair. “You and I have a special connection.”
“Uh-huh,” he muttered. “Can I tell Teyla about our special connection?”
“No!” Vala said, sharply. “She wouldn’t understand and her fists are unpleasantly strong. Your wife is mean.”
“Vala, what the hell are you doing?” That was the other half of the duo, Daniel Jackson standing in the opening of the curtain holding a dinner tray.
Vala turned her head towards the man. “I’m helping him remember,” she said, lightly.
“Get her off!” Sheppard demanded.
But Vala scrambled off on her own accord as Jackson entered and put the tray on Sheppard’s table.
“I was helping,” she repeated, crossing her arms.
“I bet you were,” Jackson said, sarcastically. “Get out of here.”
Vala glanced at Sheppard. “See,” she hissed. “No fun.”
“You could have hurt him,” Jackson snapped. “He’s injured.”
“I wasn’t sitting on his head,” she retorted, then paused. “Although…”
“Out!” yelled Jackson. Sheppard agreed emphatically.
She did leave, sauntering the whole time and easily dodging Jackson’s attempt to kick her in the ass as she went by him.
Sheppard exhaled loudly, glaring at her departing form.
“Sorry,” Jackson apologized, when she was gone.
Sheppard grunted. “What the hell was that?”
Jackson looked at him. “I think,” he said, “she was genuinely trying to help.”
“What?”
“She, um, does do that to you, a lot,” Jackson said. “The, um, molesting and inappropriate touching. Doesn’t ring a bell?”
“No,” Sheppard snarled. “I remember her doing that to you.”
“Oh,” Jackson said. “Well, it loses appeal when she’s allowed to do it.”
The only reasonable response to that was grunting, so Sheppard did it again.
“Um, I brought dinner,” Jackson said, shoving the tray over. “Meatloaf.”
“Fabulous.”
Jackson sat down on the stool while Sheppard examined the tray. It looked disgusting, but this time they trusted him with an actual fork, even if it was plastic. Sighing, Sheppard dug in.
Surprisingly, his dinner guest didn’t want to talk to him like all his previous ones. Jackson whipped out an old, dusty-looking leather bound book from somewhere and buried his face in it while Sheppard ate.
That was weird.
“You don’t want to try to help me remember?” Sheppard asked, with his mouth full. Jackson glanced up, cocking an eyebrow like Sheppard had just asked him to start straddling and molesting, like Vala. “Talking, I mean,” Sheppard amended.
“No,” Jackson said. “Well, I mean, you should know that anything Vala said is probably totally untrue.”
“I know that.”
Jackson shrugged. “I will if you want, but I figured you might want a break.”
“Oh,” Sheppard said. “Okay.”
And a break was okay, kind of nice, even if the meatloaf tasted like a roasted shoe.
~
The next day, Teyla showed up for a really awkward, really silent breakfast. She brought some fruit in addition to the crappy oatmeal, which he appreciated. But she still looked sad and stressed out, and he knew it was because of him, so he mostly kept his mouth stuffed full of food so he wouldn’t have to say anything.
It wasn’t very mature, but he also couldn’t think what he should say.
Teyla did her very best to keep conversation up with a monologue about stuff that had happened around the SGC since his injury. Since he didn’t remember ever being at the SGC, this only accounted for the past two months or so.
Apparently, she was on a basketball team with Vala and Teal’c. He would admit he wasn’t paying close attention until she dropped that sentence.
“What?” he sad. “Basketball?”
Teyla gave a little smile. “Daniel calls it the Off-Worlder Basketball Team. We are two short, though. You and Cameron are allowed to play with us anyway.”
“Basketball,” Sheppard repeated. It really felt like someone had stuck chopsticks in his ears and swirled them around. That’s how much sense this made.
“Daniel is not very good,” Teyla said, “We did better with you.”
And that would have been a blatant ego stroke, if Sheppard had any idea what she was talking about. He couldn’t imagine ever playing on a freaking SGC intramural basketball team. He didn’t even like basketball. That went for team sports in general.
“Oh,” he said. “Huh. Um, Vala was here, yesterday.”
“What did she do?” Teyla asked, eyes narrowing suspiciously.
“Oh, what she probably usually does,” said Sheppard. “She didn’t want to play basketball.”
Teyla just smiled. “She has missed you,” she said.
“Funny way of showing it,” Sheppard muttered. He squinted at her. “You guys are really friends.”
“We are,” Teyla said, sincerely. “She has been a great comfort to me after you were injured.”
“Really?”
Teyla nodded. And she didn’t look particularly pleased that he didn’t believe her, so Sheppard decided to drop it.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be nicer to her next time.”
Teyla’s lips pursed a little. “You do not have to be too nice,” she said, and Sheppard cracked a grin. “Teal’c is off-world with his people, but I am sure he will be relieved that you have recovered.”
Sheppard wasn’t sure he’d describe himself as recovered, but it wasn’t worth mentioning. Instead, he brought up another visitor he hadn’t yet had.
“Hey, Teyla,” he said. She leaned closer, eyes lighting up hopefully. He felt bad that he probably wasn’t going to say anything she wanted to hear. “Is Rodney McKay around?”
Teyla’s face did drop, but only a little. She leaned back. “I am not sure who that is,” she said.
“McKay,” he repeated. “Rodney.”
“That name is not familiar to me,” Teyla said, hesitantly.
“He was on the Atlantis mission,” Sheppard tried. “Trust me, he’s memorable. Um…really loud? Never shuts the hell up. He’s a scientist, um, allergic to lemons and you’d know that because he tells everyone, really smart…”
Teyla shook her head. “The Atlantis mission was some time ago,” she said, gently. “And there were many people. I did not meet all of them.”
“McKay works for the SGC,” Sheppard said. “He worked here before I knew it existed!”
“Perhaps you should ask someone else,” Teyla said. Her voice was calm, but he could read the distress in her face, probably because she thought he was delusional.
“Okay,” Sheppard said. “Yeah, sorry. I’ll do that.”
But now he was alarmed and she was upset, and breakfast was ruined.
“Doctor Lam says you start physical therapy today,” Teyla said, trying to change the subject.
“Why?” he said.
“You’ve been in bed a long time,” she answered. “She said you need to regain your strength.
~
Dr. Jennifer Keller arrived after Teyla left. For a split second, even though he was still in the SGC infirmary, which looked nothing like the Atlantis one, Sheppard hoped that he would blink and it would melt away and he would back where he belonged. But it didn’t. The curtains stayed, the walls stayed, the mundane Earth equipment stayed. Keller said she was there to start his physical therapy and she looked a little confused when he said her name so excitedly.
“Physical therapy,” he echoed.
“Yep.” She smiled. “You’ve been sedentary for a long time. I’ve been working with you a little while you’ve been here, but now you can actually participate.”
“Participate?”
She turned out to have a bunch of tasks for him. Stupid, demeaning, pointless tasks that were allegedly supposed to both strengthen his unused muscles and practice things like hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity in case there were any undiscovered neurological hitches or something. Dumb things like pouring water back and forth between two cups, counting out beans, and stacking blocks. Seriously, it was like being a kindergartner. He would have been madder if those tasks were easy, except they weren’t. And that pissed him off, too, not at her, but at his stupid, lazy body that had forgotten how to do the simplest movements.
Keller also had weights to strap to his arms and legs so he could exercise in bed, which pissed him off, too, even though he was fairly sure that he couldn’t run anywhere and that walking for a long time was probably not going to work either. She said stretching was important in addition to the lifting, suggested stupid, boring yoga-like positions to get started.
“What were you doing before I could participate?” Sheppard asked, glaring at the paperwork she’d given him showing a drawing of a healthy looking dude with hair bending a knee up against his chest.
“Mostly low-impact exercises,” Keller said, brightly. “Avoiding bed sores, a little stretching, preventing severe muscle atrophy.” He scowled and Keller patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’ll take a little while but you’ll be back to normal.”
He didn’t think so. He didn’t think so at all, and he wasn’t talking about his rubbery knees or clumsy fingers.
“Did you talk to me?” he asked. “While I was out?”
Keller gave a little smile. “Yes,” she said. “I tend to do that. Why, do you remember?”
“No,” Sheppard said. And he didn’t.
“Oh.” Keller’s smile dropped.
It was easy to imagine someone claiming that Keller’s voice had penetrated his mind while she’d interacted with his semi-conscious body, that he’d invented everything having to do with her on Atlantis. He didn’t believe it. But he could see how someone would.
“You weren’t on the Atlantis mission,” he said. She’d come later, he thought. Not with the original crew.
“What?” Keller looked a little confused. “God, no,” she said. “That sounded terrifying. We didn’t know if the crew’d ever come back. I couldn’t do that to my parents.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t do that to me, I’m a big ol’ chicken.”
“Okay,” Sheppard said.
“Why?” she asked, looking curious.
“No reason,” he lied, and wouldn’t look at her.
“Alright,” she said, cheerfully. “Want to do some leg lifts?”
Sheppard cooperated. It was hard, ridiculously hard for a 2.5 pound weight strapped to his ankle. The reps soaked him with sweat, got him out of breath almost immediately. Keller didn’t act like it was a big deal, though. She gave him water and encouraged him, even though he didn’t want or need a cheerleader and this was embarrassing enough as it was. He wiped his face with a towel she gave him, realized the motion was dangerously close to wiping his eyes. He blinked a couple of times, made sure he wasn’t crying. There was no reason to, none at all.
~
Sheppard’s brilliant plan not to tell these people anything wasn’t all that subtle. At some point, everyone he’d interrogated about the Atlantis mission must have gotten together with everyone who’d realized that Sheppard was more often that not completely clueless when they mentioned something that they claimed had happened in the past five years. Evidently, this made him look crazy. Or ‘neurologically impaired’. But mostly crazy.
Lam sat down opposite his bed and very firmly explained that in order to coordinate his medical care, she needed to know exactly what was going on in his head. It was very different from aggressive, intimidating captors demanding he reveal everything about Atlantis and threatening him. Sheppard honestly would have preferred that. He was fairly sure Lam wanted to know he was having those kind of thoughts, too, but didn’t feel like telling her.
He was sort of honest.
“The past five years,” he said. “I don’t remember them.” Lam tilted her head, and wrote something down on the clipboard that contained his chart. “I don’t remember what everyone else says I should remember. At all.”
“Okay,” Lam said, trying for neutral but hitting startled instead.
“I remember the Atlantis Mission,” he said. “But I remember it going…differently.”
“And you don’t want me to ask how,” Lam said, “Because you think this might all be a trick to force you to reveal something you shouldn’t to an alien enemy?”
“Yeah.” Sheppard crossed his arms defiantly and tried not to feel ridiculous. “That’s about right.”
“Okay,” Lam said, surprisingly agreeable. She wrote something else on his chart.
He peered at her, tried to read her scribble upside down.
“What’d you say about me?” he asked.
“Post-traumatic Amnesia,” Lam said. She turned the clipboard around so he could look.
“From hitting my head.” She nodded. “And that wiped out five years?”
“It’s unusual,” she said, “but not unheard of.”
“What about the stuff I do remember?” Sheppard asked. “The stuff no one else remembers happening.”
“Disassociative fugue,” Lam said, totally calm. “Formation of alternate memories in the aftermath of head trauma isn’t unheard of, either. It’s usually a temporary state.”
Sheppard was kind of pissed at her for being so casual. “Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah,” Lam said, crisply. “But you need to be honest with us about how much you remember and any progress you make. Since you’re paranoid, I’m not going to let my staff ask you about it, but you need to be honest.”
“I’m not paranoid,” Sheppard snapped. “It’s a legitimate threat in this line of business.”
“I know.” She didn’t sound very sympathetic “But it’s very problematic from my angle.” He scowled. “Do we have a deal?”
“Deal?”
“I don’t ask you anything you find compromising, you don’t lie to me and my staff?”
It made him want to scowl even harder. “Yeah,” he said.
~
His next visitor wasn’t someone he didn’t know. Lucy Hurst, the anthropologist on SG-5. The anthropologist on his team, the team he had zero memory of. He’d never seen the woman before in his life.
Sheppard didn’t know who or what he’d expected. Maybe that’d it be someone in a form he’d recognize - Weir or Heightmeyer or Larrin or someone. A female version of Ronon.
It was just some woman; she had red curly hair and a North Carolina accent. He didn’t recognize her, stared at her blankly ‘til she introduced herself. She knew him, greeting him with effusive fondness and going so far as to try and hug him. The hugging thing would have annoyed him even if he did know who she was, which might have been why she didn’t realize that he staring at her in total confusion for a good five minutes.
“Evan said you remembered people,” she said, when she finally noticed the bafflement on his face. “But not events?”
“I don’t remember the past five years,” he said, bluntly.
“Oh,” she said, startled. “Well, I’m Lucy.”
“You said that, already.” He knew that wasn’t a friendly answer, but he didn’t particularly care. A stranger rang alarm bells. A pretty, female stranger was a classic bait and switch.
He ended up being unfriendly enough that Hurst stayed for a little more one-sided small talk and then made to leave. She had brought with her piles and piles of mission reports, though, as promised to him from Lorne.
“Thanks,” he said, when she pointed to the piles of manila folders on the floor next to the curtain. “And can you tell Colonel Carter I want to speak to her?”
~
“Rodney McKay?” Carter asked. She looked confused. “I haven’t thought about him in years. I’m not sure where he’s at now.”
“He’s not with the SGC anymore?” Sheppard asked, shocked.
“No,” Carter said. “He um, didn’t enjoy the Atlantis trip. I could hear him, er, ‘quitting’ from several stories away the day you guys got back.”
“Rodney quit?”
“Yeah.” Carter nodded. “Pretty emphatically, if I recall. I know he moved to the private sector for a while.” Her eyebrows creased, thinking. “Actually, I know he recently went abroad. There was a lot of controversy given his knowledge of classified material.”
“Huh?”
“He was working for a foreign agency,” Carter said. “Russian, I think. Maybe.” She looked at the expression on Sheppard’s face. “I can try to put you in touch with him, if you want.” Her own face said she couldn’t possibly imagine why he’d want that.
“Thanks,” he said.
~
The mission reports that the Hurst lady had brought weren’t very helpful. They weren’t about Atlantis. Just typical SG reports. Sheppard believed he’d written some of them, maybe. It was his style, anyway, but then again all SG reports were more or less the same. His were shorter and dryer than a few others.
He didn’t remember any of what he’d allegedly wrote. It was all kind of normal, at least as mission reports went. Lots of boring stuff, a little bit of exciting stuff, entirely too much crazy shit.
And it all took place in the Milky Way. Some of it could have happened in Pegasus, he guessed. A lot of the issue with village natives ended up being the same. Stupid superstitions, the occasional hilarious cultural misunderstanding, the far more common equally hilarious incidents involving betrayal, capture, and escape. But no Wraith. No Atlantis. No Teyla, no Ronon, no McKay.
But it hadn’t happened to him. He remembered none of this. It was written in his voice with his name on it. That was all.
Sheppard found one report mentioning an arrow wound to the thigh. His thigh. Curiously, he shoved down his stolen sweat pants and examined himself. He felt kind of stupid - mostly because if a doctor or a nurse walked in on him it’d probably look like he was jerking off - looking for the scar of an event that had likely never happened.
But there it was. On his left thigh towards the inside of his leg, a round and pink indented blemish. And a matching one on the back of the thigh, which must have been the exit wound. Sheppard poked at it, but it didn’t hurt at all. It was just…there.
He jerked out of the gurney with a franticness that came on so suddenly it almost frightened him. Sheppard yanked down the pants all the way, kicked them off. He ripped off the pulse-ox Lam had asked him to continue to wear and ignored the immediate, blaring alarm.
Naked, Sheppard staggered - staggered because he was trying to move too fast and his body just wasn’t up to it - to the bathroom.
Before, when he’d looked at himself in the mirror, he’d been too distracted to search for scars. He’d only seen himself, focused on how sick, thin, and weak he looked.
But now he searched. Looked for the jagged line on his belly from the goddamn beam that had pinned - penetrated - him in Michael’s goddamn lab when the building collapsed.
It wasn’t there.
None of them were there.
It was like a magic wand had been waved over his skin, like all those stupid creams and gels that Carson and then Keller had given him for scar reduction had actually worked perfectly. Except that he’d never used them, because they actually didn’t work, because he was lazy, because he didn’t think erasing the scar erased anything, because they made good stories if nothing else…
But it wasn’t a total blank slate. Just the ones he should have gotten in Pegasus.
The marks on his knuckles from when Dave knocked him out of their tree house when John was like ten…there. The burn on his wrist when he was a teenager and there was a stupid, drunk bonfire…there. All the shit from Afghanistan…there.
But nothing from Pegasus.
Sheppard had new scars, marks he had zero memory of. Besides the one on his thigh, there was an unmistakable bullet wound - dull and pink - hiding in his chest hair just below his shoulder. It was low enough to have been bad, very bad. A few old laparoscopic dots, too, again hidden in his body hair. There was an uneven line on the back of his left arm, long since healed but still visible. Maybe a knife, or something. Or scraped on a rock.
He was staring at himself in the mirror, fingering each scar in turn like they would come away, peel off his body like stage makeup.
“Are you alright, sir?” That was Lam’s cool, assessing voice from behind him.
One glance at the mirror told him he’d left the door ajar. She was giving him the benefit of just standing right outside, for the moment. He could see her concerned face in the crack.
Sheppard didn’t answer immediately and he saw the crack widen substantially as Lam quietly toed it open.
“Sir?” she repeated.
He glanced up the reflection of her face, sharp and curious. God knew what she thought was going on. The patient bathrooms didn’t have locks, but all Sheppard wanted to do was slam the door before she could enter. Barricade himself inside until the world on the outside made some goddamn sense.
“Yeah,” he finally answered, but he heard his voice sound ragged and upset and not at all okay.
Lam took that as permission to enter, because she did. Sheppard forced himself to stop touching the mark on his arm, instead quietly crossed his hands over his junk since he was standing there like a nude maniac.
“You alright?” Lam repeated, quieter. She was peering at his face.
Sheppard nodded, swallowed hard. He didn’t get why he’d been hit so hard, didn’t get why it suddenly hurt as if he’d lost someone.
Lam didn’t ask why he was staring at himself naked in the bathroom mirror.
“You want to go back to bed?” she prompted.
“Yeah, okay,” Sheppard whispered.
She waited for him to start moving, didn’t comment on his slow, shuffling stride.
Back at his gurney, someone had turned off the wailing alarm. Sheppard blinked at it, almost baffled by his own lack of stealth.
Putting back on the discarded sweats was ridiculously hard. Lam let him do it by himself. Sheppard struggled through, though, watched as the stupid round scar that wasn’t his vanished as he finally pulled the waistband up.
Lam waited until he was horizontal again, clipped the monitor back on his finger. And then she watched his high, erratic heartbeat appear on the screen.
“Would you like some valium?” she asked, somehow making the request to dope him sound reasonable.
Sheppard shook his head. He clutched at the sheets pulled over him, wondering if she was going to want to give him some, anyway.
“It’s okay,” was all Lam said. “You’re okay.”
Sheppard held very still, tried not to give her any inclination of how much he disagreed with that statement.
~
By the time his next visitor - Ford - showed up, Sheppard was mostly over his freak out. He didn’t look at his new scars and was trying very hard not to think about his missing old ones. Though Lam hadn’t asked specifically, she definitely wanted to know what had happened. Sheppard wasn’t going to share.
Ford looked like maybe Lam had warned him Sheppard had had some kind of mysterious meltdown a little while ago, face hesitant and smile sort of wary.
Sheppard sat on his gurney and tried to look not crazy.
“Hey,” he said, when Ford entered.
“Hey,” Ford said, smiling growing. “You feeling better?”
“Yeah,” Sheppard lied. “Coming along.”
Ford grinned and nodded enthusiastically.
“Look,” Sheppard said. “I was thinking you could help me clear some things up.”
“Okay.” Ford took a seat on the omnipresent stool. “Like what?”
“What I’m…confused about,” Sheppard said, picking his words carefully. “Is Atlantis. So maybe you could tell me what happened to the mission crewmembers?”
“What happened?” Ford repeated. “You mean there?”
“No,” Sheppard said, “I think Lorne kind of covered that. I mean, where’s Dr. Weir now?”
“Ohhh.” Ford understood. “Dr. Weir? Um, I think she’s working for the UN in -” he paused, eyes tipping up - “Czechoslovakia?”
“Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist any more,” Sheppard said. Then he stopped. “Does it?”
“I guess not,” Ford said, easily. “It was Eastern Europe, that’s all I know.”
Sheppard swallowed. “She’s okay?”
“Yeah,” Ford said, breezily. He regarded Sheppard’s face and his own expression flickered. “Why?”
“I’d like to talk to her,” Sheppard said, even though he already thought it was a really dumb idea. “If that’s possible.”
“I’ll mention it to someone who can make it happen,” Ford promised. He looked like he’d decided to ignore whatever weirdness Sheppard was broadcasting. “Anyone else you want to see?”
“Carson Beckett,” Sheppard said, immediately.
“Okay,” Ford answered. “I bet he’s back in Scotland, though.”
It was awfully convenient that two of the people that died in Pegasus were nowhere to be found.
“There should be some kind of yearbook,” Ford was saying. “Where Are They Now: Atlantis Mission.”
“Yeah,” Sheppard said. “That’d help me.”
It wouldn’t. He didn’t know what it would do, but it wouldn’t help.
~
Everything kind of stayed the same for a while. The same visitors, usually in the same order. Teyla, looking bravely heartbroken. Cameron Mitchell and Sam Carter, both excessively cheerful and trying to talk to him like he remembered their alleged friendships. He didn’t, but they were easier to be around than Ford and Lorne, who didn’t remember their friendships with Sheppard the way he did. Or Teyla, who was clearly trying very hard not show that she was upset and yet made Sheppard feel like crap anyway.
The anthropologist lady he didn’t recognize occasionally came around and Sheppard tried mostly to ignore her. He was having enough trouble with the people he was supposed to know. Jackson, who he also didn’t really know, visited a lot, too. Sheppard wasn’t as annoyed by him. The guy mostly kept quiet and didn’t do much except just be there, which Sheppard didn’t mind. He appreciated the silence, since everyone else jabbered non-stop about crap he didn’t remember or tried to interrogate him.
One very different thing happened. It would have been different regardless, but it just added another bizarre layer of weird to Sheppard’s new life.
His brother called.
Teyla brought him the phone and put it in his hands before he fully processed what she’d said.
“Dave?” he repeated.
Teyla nodded.
For a second, Sheppard just blinked at her. “Does - does he know about my…memory issues?” That was one way to put it, anyway.
“He does,” Teyla said.
He could hear the murmur a voice coming out of the phone, had no choice but to put it to his ear.
And then Sheppard talked to his brother on the phone. Something he hadn’t done in…possibly ever. He’d never had the inclination and if Dave had, the logistics of deployment usually meant Sheppard would have had to initiate or it wouldn’t happen. So, it had never happened. And then Atlantis. Well, not here.
And here, some time while Atlantis hadn’t happened, he and Dave had apparently started talking on the phone.
Dave understood immediately that Sheppard didn’t remember reconciling. Maybe he’d figured it out based on what Teyla had told him, or maybe Sheppard’s voice just sounded that awkward.
Talking to Dave was like everything else. It felt weird. And also okay, which just made it weirder.
Dave sounded worried and falsely upbeat, actually a lot like everyone else who talked to him now. But coming from his little brother, it hit Sheppard right in the chest in a new way. Stirred up old, ancient family shit. Made him feel glad he was alone in the room, except he wasn’t alone since Teyla was leaning against the far wall near the drawn curtain. Sheppard glanced up at her and she must have seen something in his face because her expression flickered, then she dipped her head and slipped silently through the exit.
Sheppard might have felt bad, but he didn’t think he could listen to Dave sounding like that with Teyla standing there looking at him.
He learned from Dave what most of the people around him had only really implied. They hadn’t actually expected Sheppard to wake up. Ever. And Dave was pretty upset about that and not all that able to hide it behind all his relief that Sheppard was in fact awake.
Some how that turned the conversation - well, Dave’s monologue, anyway - to the fact that Dave and Teyla had been in communication during all this. Discussing, among other things, whether Sheppard would be buried in the plot next to Dad.
Dad was dead here, too. But Sheppard had brought Teyla to the funeral, not Ronon. Because Ronon didn’t exist here. It didn’t sound like there’d been a side of Replicator fun, either, though Dave wouldn’t necessarily know about that.
Dave’s words swirled in his head. Death, death, death. Dad. Teyla. Ronon.
A pressure settled on Sheppard’s chest that felt disturbingly like grief. Out of nowhere, solid and heavy and as real as any of this.
His brother interpreted the hitch in his voice as exhaustion. He made excuses to hang up, repeated how glad he was that John was alive.
“It was good to talk to you,” Dave said. “Hopefully, I’ll see you soon.”
“Yeah,” Sheppard said. And it was good to talk to his brother, even if as far as he knew it was just this once. And even though it made him choke up for reasons he didn’t fully understand.
Sheppard was sitting there alone for a few minutes, setting the phone back on its cradle. He was still blinking back stupid tears when Teyla quietly entered. Quickly, he dipped his head, shifted one hand to shield his face. She didn’t say anything, just reached for the phone to take it away.
“This is really hard,” Sheppard said, when she leaned over to pick it up.
Teyla paused. Her hand redirected off the phone, coming to land on his shoulder. After a second, Sheppard raised his own hand and put it over hers.
~
Kate Heightmeyer was alive.
Sheppard found out because she came to see him for a therapy session. Lam had said a shrink was coming, hadn’t given him any choice about it. So he’d mostly just been preemptively pissed off about it. Ford and Mitchell had been around before the appointment, maybe because they knew him well enough to think that even a healthy, non-amnesiac John Sheppard would have tried to run away from a psychologist.
But then Kate walked in. All of Sheppard’s resentment just vanished, replaced by a stultifying wave of emotion that ran intensely up his spine.
“Hi, John,” Heightmeyer said, smiling at him.
She looked the same, mostly. Her hair was a little darker. Sheppard’s eyes traveled downwards, suddenly landing on an unexpected curve in her midsection. Heightmeyer was pregnant.
Somehow, he got his eyes up to her face and managed to make his voice work.
“Hey,” he said.
“I’m Dr. Kate Height-” she began.
“I know,” he interrupted. “I know who you are.”
“Okay.” She took a seat on the stool, still smiling. She wasn’t doing any of the hesitant, awkward body language everyone else was, at least not yet.
Sheppard’s side of the conversation was awkward, though. Maybe Heightmeyer knew how to pretend not to be weirded out by crazy patients - she was a shrink, after all. She acted relaxed and easy-going, even though Sheppard was probably staring at her like a mad man.
When he got it together enough to focus on what she was saying, he learned a couple of things.
For one, she wasn’t here to persuade him that the Atlantis mission hadn’t gone as he remembered it. She didn’t know, of course, that Sheppard thought she was dead. No one would know that unless he told them.
Heightmeyer was here because the ‘dissociative fugue’ Lam had diagnosed him with wasn’t actually a medical condition. It was a psychiatric one. And the moment Sheppard processed that statement, he felt like an idiot. A genuinely crazy idiot.
But Heightmeyer was talking calmly about it, like it didn’t mean anything all that scary. She said she’d treated military personnel with it before. That didn’t actually make him feel better.
“If it’s from hitting my head,” he asked, “how come I don’t remember the whole five years before that happened?”
“It’s a response to trauma,” Heightmeyer said. “I suspect your mind simply recalled the most recent traumatic experience and began…reprocessing those memories.”
Sheppard had a hard time assigning the word ‘trauma’ to the Atlantis mission. Scary, yeah. Intense. Hard, sometimes. Ridiculously hard. But not ‘trauma’.
“Oh,” was all he said.
“We’ll get you back,’ Heightmeyer promised. “There are a lot of techniques. We’ll work together.”
“Now?” Sheppard asked, and something about his voice or his face made Heightmeyer look concerned.
“Not today,” she said. “I just wanted to lay out the game plan.”
“Okay,” Sheppard said, a little relieved.
Heightmeyer smiled. “One step at a time. I’m glad you’re open to the process.”
Sheppard shrugged. Then, he paused. “I’m glad it’s you.” He was. He didn’t particularly want to think about it, but he was so, so glad she was alive.
For some reason, Heightmeyer tilted her head. “Because I was on the Atlantis mission?” she guessed, looking genuinely curious.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know you’re good.”
“I never got to do any therapy there,” Heightmeyer said. “Except dispense anti-anxiety drugs ‘til I ran out.” She was looking at him contemplatively.
“You did,” Sheppard told her, not bothering to wonder if he should be sharing. You were supposed to share with shrinks, which might be why she was here in the first place. And it was working, even if it was a trick. “You did good.”
Heightmeyer nodded, then rose. “I’ll set up a therapy schedule,” was all she said.
“Okay,” Sheppard said. He flicked his eyes downwards at her stomach. “Congrats.”
She paused, half way through the curtain exit. “Thanks.”
~
The dead weren’t just walking around. They were also e-mailing him. Teyla brought him a printed out message from Elizabeth Weir.
“You have received many e-mails,” Teyla said. “I can bring you a laptop so that you may read the rest.” She looked a little guilty, like maybe she thought he wouldn’t like her reading his mail.
“Okay,” he said, not really listening. He took the sheet of computer paper from Teyla’s hands.
He didn’t know what he expected. Lorne had said his condition had leaked - the whole base knew he was awake and wasn’t right in the head. Which was fantastic. Someone must have contacted Elizabeth. Who knew what they’d told her about him.
The e-mail was actually quite short. And not that friendly, either. It was very…professionally terse.
Weir knew he had amnesia about the Atlantis mission. Probably didn’t know he had alternate memories for the past five years. The e-mail was basically a get well card minus any sappy Hallmark illustrations, which he appreciated.
She said she was in Kosovo with the United Nations and her job was ‘interesting and challenging.’ He figured that meant ‘hard as hell.’ Weir expressed concern for his head injury and wished him a speedy recovery. And that was all the e-mail said. It wasn’t emotional or personal or…much of anything. Mostly, it seemed a polite message sent because someone told her to.
And that was…weird. Maybe here Sheppard and Weir had had a crappy relationship. It made his forehead crease, made him again wonder just what the hell had happened beyond what Lorne had told him.
“You know Dr. Weir?” he asked Teyla, who was spinning herself lightly on the visitor’s stool.
Teyla stilled. “Not well,” she said.
“But you met her on the Atlantis mission,” Sheppard pressed.
This got a headshake. “Met, yes. I did not speak to her extensively.” Teyla peered at him. “Why do you ask?”
“Were we friends?” he asked. “Me and her?”
“I do not believe so,” Teyla said. “Colleagues.”
“Yeah,” Sheppard said. “But…”
“It was a difficult time,” Teyla said when he trailed off.
Sheppard thought in silence for a moment. He tried to imagine how he might have dealt with a massive civilian presence under attack in a new environment - under attack by the goddamn Wraith, at that. It was probably not a situation where the military would have obeyed a civilian leader. Not Sumner and not Sheppard. Maybe that contributed to the coolness of Weir’s e-mail.
That shouldn’t have been as upsetting as it was. This Weir was alive and well - married if the hyphen on her e-mail address was any indication - and untouched by all the Replicator shit. Untouched by everything that had happened in Pegasus.
~
Sheppard and McKay weren’t friends in this universe, either. He probably should have just let it go after the indifferent missive from Weir, probably should have let it go the moment he opened his eyes and Lam said the Atlantis mission was long since over.
He didn’t. Sheppard asked Carter to get a hold of McKay for him, after she never followed up on his original request. Even if he’d left the Stargate program, Sheppard correctly guessed that McKay would have still made it possible for Carter if no one else to contact him.
Carter wasn’t a very cooperative messenger. When he asked her, Carter stared at him like he’d grown a second head.
“Why?” she asked, bluntly.
That should have been warning enough.
“I think it would help me,” Sheppard said. That wasn’t wholly true. Nothing was helping. Continuing to explore the vast differences between the life he remembered and the one he’d allegedly lived probably didn’t meet anyone’s - particularly Heightmeyer’s - definition of ‘help.’ “Heightmeyer said it’d be a good idea,” he lied.
“She doesn’t know McKay,” Carter said.
“She was there, too,” he retorted. She looked a little taken aback. “She was,” he said, softer. “Could you look into it for me, please?”
“Yeah,” Carter said, agreeably. “What do you want me to tell him?”
Sheppard shrugged. “The truth,” he said.
“Okay.” Carter paused. “He can be kind of a jerk, you know.” When he didn’t answer immediately, she went on. “You should know that.”
“I know,” Sheppard said. She seemed worried McKay would make him cry or something. “I’m kind of counting on it.”
A few days later, Carter brought him a printed out e-mail. She looked embarrassed. “We should see about getting you a laptop,” she said.
He reached out for the paper. “Thanks.”
It wasn’t a get well card like Weir’s message. Sheppard knew that with a glance. Also, it was much longer.
“What are you expecting?” Carter asked, gently.
Sheppard was expecting a rant. And he got one. This McKay was not a friend of Sheppard’s and he wasn’t a fan, either. His response to Carter’s e-mail was a lengthy inquiry into whether or not Sheppard remembered being a ‘fascist abusive bastard’ during their time in the ‘hellhole that is the Pegasus galaxy.’ And if he didn’t, McKay could visit to personally remind him.
Sheppard read it once, then read it again. Carter stayed in his room while he did so, drifting quietly around the edges.
It didn’t really hit him in a bad way. After Weir’s message and Lorne’s description of the mission arrival, Sheppard had figured that things hadn’t gone in a way that would have made for very happy people. Without asking for any more files, he could imagine the stress of corralling that many civilians in hostile territory under attack by an unknown enemy. He probably had been a fascist abusive bastard. And he’d been counting on McKay’s honesty to elucidate the story a little.
It was a little strange to read that much sincere aggression rather than huffing and puffing from Rodney, but it was still kind of familiar.
Sheppard looked up to find Carter watching him.
“Thanks,” he told her, again.
“Okay,” she said, evidently deciding not to press. That wasn’t her job, anyway. “Glad to help.”
“McKay’s doing okay?” he asked her.
“Yeah,” Carter said, at least concealing her reaction if she was baffled that he cared. “He, um, makes a lot of money in the private sector.” She shrugged. “And we’ve had to call him for help sometimes. That makes him…really smug.”
Sheppard grinned, then hid it with his hand. Carter caught it and blinked in confusion.
“I guess you knew that, anyway,” she said. He nodded. “So, you remember him?”
“No,” Sheppard said. “I don’t.”
~
Sheppard had babysitters. He was never left alone. It wasn’t explicit, but eventually he realized that whenever one companion left, another immediately showed up. There was always a nurse, or an orderly, or a physical therapist, or Ford, or Mitchell, and so on. Occasionally an armed airman got the job, and it was the stiff posture and intense gaze that finally clued Sheppard in to the fact that he was under surveillance.
He didn’t really have the right to be pissed off about it. He had stabbed Dr. Lam, after all. With perfectly good reason, even if they didn’t believe him.
Teyla wasn’t around as much. He didn’t know why. Maybe they didn’t trust her, or didn’t trust him around her, or she didn’t want to be around him.
He missed her.
Even though she wasn’t his Teyla, she was more familiar than anyone else and he was more comfortable around her than any of these strangers. Especially Ford.
They were uncomfortable around him, too. Upset that he wasn’t the John Sheppard they wanted him to be. It was both reassuring and terrifying. Maybe he really was their brain-damaged friend who didn’t remember these people or their friendships. But that would mean that he really was this brain-damaged man with fake memories of friends created by broken and misfiring synapses.
For this, he preferred the professional babysitters. To the medical personnel, he was just a neurologically-impaired patient and they focused mostly on fixing his body and ignored his brain. To the airmen, he was just a potential threat and they paid attention only to his movements and not his emotions. They either hadn’t known him before his brains had been scrambled or they didn’t like him enough to care. Those who had were horribly uncomfortable with him.
Dr. Daniel Jackson wasn’t ill at ease around him.
He didn’t approach Sheppard with ginger hesitancy or overly effusive camaraderie like the others. He also didn’t drop leading comments, trying to figure out if Sheppard remembered random experiences they had allegedly shared. And because he didn’t do either of those things, Jackson also didn’t get visibly upset when it became obvious Sheppard had no fucking clue what he was getting at.
Sheppard didn’t think they’d been friends. Jackson was okay. But if he wasn’t reading, he wasn’t quiet. The man yakked. A lot. Sheppard found it really hard to pay attention to the constant yammering. He knew he should probably listen to the man in case his words rang any bells - of familiarity or of alarm - but the guy never shut up and Sheppard would tune him out.
But Jackson was useful because he’d accompany Sheppard to the upper levels of the SGC and eventually out of the Mountain. The infirmary staff didn’t want their patient to wander that far and the Airmen weren’t authorized to let him outside. Mitchell or Ford would go with him, but they’d use the opportunity to get at him alone to pepper him with questions that he totally couldn’t answer.
Jackson showed up as he always did, at exactly eight pm. He strolled into the room, nodding at Sheppard’s departing babysitter nurse.
“Hey,” he said, as casually as if he’d just randomly decided to stop in. His hands were shoved into his pockets. “How’s it going?”
“Hey,” Sheppard said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. “I want to go to the surface.”
Jackson dipped his head, nodded. “Okay.”
~please feed the author~
Part 3
Part 1 for header info.
Sheppard decided not to think about Teyla. It was easier that way. He also wasn’t going to think about Ford. Sheppard went and took a shower, instead. The infirmary showers were designed for the medical staff, mostly, since patients were expected to get the sponge bath variety. No way in hell was he consenting to that. Lam said he could get his head wet, but the water pressure might hurt. She was right about that. The showerhead spray stung like hell, even when he adjusted it to the lightest setting. Standing up that long was also kind of hard, and he was well aware he was sort of stumbling rather than walking. He really couldn’t run away even if he wanted to.
Afterwards, he wrapped himself in a scratchy, thin towel and leaned against the wall just outside the shower stall, being pissed that the simple act of showering was now somehow exhausting. He was also pissed that while someone had taken away the patient gown he’d been wearing, they’d left a new, clean one. Sheppard wanted to wear pants.
He rifled around the shower area, eventually finding someone’s sweatpants balled up in the corner underneath a pile of clean towels. They smelled like detergent - maybe accidentally mixed in with the laundry - so Sheppard decided to steal them. The original owner was shorter than him, so the pant legs hit him awkwardly just above the ankle, but it was still better than an ass-baring gown.
Sheppard looked at himself in the mirror. His head was hideous - most of his hair gone and rows of tiny black thread sewn jaggedly here and there. There was some stubble as it grew back, but he really did look Frankenstein. His body looked thinner and flabbier, muscle tone lost. And it was kind of bizarre to look at his hairy chest in the mirror when his head was mostly bald.
It was a little surprising to be left alone as he did this. He guessed as long as he didn’t try to stab anyone or leave the infirmary, he was allowed to move around a little. Where this figured in getting him to divulge information about Atlantis, he didn’t know. Sure he looked like a pathetic, injured victim, but that wasn’t going to make him spill his guts. It mostly just pissed him off.
Worn out, Sheppard wandered back to his little curtain area. He noticed the airman outside was gone, which was a little odd. It must have been a shift change. He again considered trying to get out of the infirmary, decided the way he felt a hundred pound nurse could have captured him. Instead, he climbed back on to the gurney and stretched out.
He was half asleep within minutes, only jerked awake when he heard the curtain jingle on its rod. Sheppard opened one eye, saw the slender figure of a woman outlined against the blue curtain. It wasn’t Lam or Teyla, he could tell, so he decided it was a nurse and he could go back to sleep. Shutting his eye, he heard the hooks jangle again, but ignored it.
Sheppard couldn’t ignore it when a warm, solid weight slammed down on his hips. For some bizarre reason, the woman had entered his room, jumped on to his gurney, and was straddling him. His eyes flew open, hands flying up to try to push her off. The first thing that filled his vision was an enormous, toothy grin. The woman sitting on him was smiling her head off. He recognized her immediately, mostly because the options for sexually aggressive crazy-ass women was really short.
“Hello, darling,” Vala Mal Doran said, leaning over him and still smiling widely.
Sheppard squinted up at her. He put his hands on her hips, tried to shove. It did absolutely nothing to dislodge her. And damn, for a slender woman she was heavy.
“Off,” he grunted.
“Now, now,” Vala said. She pressed her palms against his bare chest. “You may not remember me, so I thought I’d remind you.”
“I know who you are,” he said. “Now move!”
She was toying with his chest hair between her fingers. “No no,” she tsked. “You like it when I do this.”
“I do not,” Sheppard snapped.
Vala ran her hands up then back down his shoulders. “You’re untied, now, though. Pity.”
He took his hands off her hips, shoved pathetically at her shoulders - trying to avoid her breasts as he did so - and discovered he really couldn’t move her at all. That was disheartening.
“Get off!”
Vala made a face, for a second actually looking sincerely hurt. And then he froze, because what the fuck?
“We’re lovers,” she said, sweetly, and then grinned in a way that immediately invalidated that sentence. “Don’t you remember?”
Giving up, Sheppard dropped his hands flat on the gurney. If he remembered correctly, Vala most liked to play when she had an enraged partner. “I’m married to Teyla,” he said. “So they tell me.”
“Well, yes,” Vala admitted. “But I’m your mistress!”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Aren’t you and Jackson - ”
“Daniel doesn’t appreciate me. He’s no fun,” Vala interrupted. At least she’d stopped playing with his chest hair. “You and I have a special connection.”
“Uh-huh,” he muttered. “Can I tell Teyla about our special connection?”
“No!” Vala said, sharply. “She wouldn’t understand and her fists are unpleasantly strong. Your wife is mean.”
“Vala, what the hell are you doing?” That was the other half of the duo, Daniel Jackson standing in the opening of the curtain holding a dinner tray.
Vala turned her head towards the man. “I’m helping him remember,” she said, lightly.
“Get her off!” Sheppard demanded.
But Vala scrambled off on her own accord as Jackson entered and put the tray on Sheppard’s table.
“I was helping,” she repeated, crossing her arms.
“I bet you were,” Jackson said, sarcastically. “Get out of here.”
Vala glanced at Sheppard. “See,” she hissed. “No fun.”
“You could have hurt him,” Jackson snapped. “He’s injured.”
“I wasn’t sitting on his head,” she retorted, then paused. “Although…”
“Out!” yelled Jackson. Sheppard agreed emphatically.
She did leave, sauntering the whole time and easily dodging Jackson’s attempt to kick her in the ass as she went by him.
Sheppard exhaled loudly, glaring at her departing form.
“Sorry,” Jackson apologized, when she was gone.
Sheppard grunted. “What the hell was that?”
Jackson looked at him. “I think,” he said, “she was genuinely trying to help.”
“What?”
“She, um, does do that to you, a lot,” Jackson said. “The, um, molesting and inappropriate touching. Doesn’t ring a bell?”
“No,” Sheppard snarled. “I remember her doing that to you.”
“Oh,” Jackson said. “Well, it loses appeal when she’s allowed to do it.”
The only reasonable response to that was grunting, so Sheppard did it again.
“Um, I brought dinner,” Jackson said, shoving the tray over. “Meatloaf.”
“Fabulous.”
Jackson sat down on the stool while Sheppard examined the tray. It looked disgusting, but this time they trusted him with an actual fork, even if it was plastic. Sighing, Sheppard dug in.
Surprisingly, his dinner guest didn’t want to talk to him like all his previous ones. Jackson whipped out an old, dusty-looking leather bound book from somewhere and buried his face in it while Sheppard ate.
That was weird.
“You don’t want to try to help me remember?” Sheppard asked, with his mouth full. Jackson glanced up, cocking an eyebrow like Sheppard had just asked him to start straddling and molesting, like Vala. “Talking, I mean,” Sheppard amended.
“No,” Jackson said. “Well, I mean, you should know that anything Vala said is probably totally untrue.”
“I know that.”
Jackson shrugged. “I will if you want, but I figured you might want a break.”
“Oh,” Sheppard said. “Okay.”
And a break was okay, kind of nice, even if the meatloaf tasted like a roasted shoe.
~
The next day, Teyla showed up for a really awkward, really silent breakfast. She brought some fruit in addition to the crappy oatmeal, which he appreciated. But she still looked sad and stressed out, and he knew it was because of him, so he mostly kept his mouth stuffed full of food so he wouldn’t have to say anything.
It wasn’t very mature, but he also couldn’t think what he should say.
Teyla did her very best to keep conversation up with a monologue about stuff that had happened around the SGC since his injury. Since he didn’t remember ever being at the SGC, this only accounted for the past two months or so.
Apparently, she was on a basketball team with Vala and Teal’c. He would admit he wasn’t paying close attention until she dropped that sentence.
“What?” he sad. “Basketball?”
Teyla gave a little smile. “Daniel calls it the Off-Worlder Basketball Team. We are two short, though. You and Cameron are allowed to play with us anyway.”
“Basketball,” Sheppard repeated. It really felt like someone had stuck chopsticks in his ears and swirled them around. That’s how much sense this made.
“Daniel is not very good,” Teyla said, “We did better with you.”
And that would have been a blatant ego stroke, if Sheppard had any idea what she was talking about. He couldn’t imagine ever playing on a freaking SGC intramural basketball team. He didn’t even like basketball. That went for team sports in general.
“Oh,” he said. “Huh. Um, Vala was here, yesterday.”
“What did she do?” Teyla asked, eyes narrowing suspiciously.
“Oh, what she probably usually does,” said Sheppard. “She didn’t want to play basketball.”
Teyla just smiled. “She has missed you,” she said.
“Funny way of showing it,” Sheppard muttered. He squinted at her. “You guys are really friends.”
“We are,” Teyla said, sincerely. “She has been a great comfort to me after you were injured.”
“Really?”
Teyla nodded. And she didn’t look particularly pleased that he didn’t believe her, so Sheppard decided to drop it.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be nicer to her next time.”
Teyla’s lips pursed a little. “You do not have to be too nice,” she said, and Sheppard cracked a grin. “Teal’c is off-world with his people, but I am sure he will be relieved that you have recovered.”
Sheppard wasn’t sure he’d describe himself as recovered, but it wasn’t worth mentioning. Instead, he brought up another visitor he hadn’t yet had.
“Hey, Teyla,” he said. She leaned closer, eyes lighting up hopefully. He felt bad that he probably wasn’t going to say anything she wanted to hear. “Is Rodney McKay around?”
Teyla’s face did drop, but only a little. She leaned back. “I am not sure who that is,” she said.
“McKay,” he repeated. “Rodney.”
“That name is not familiar to me,” Teyla said, hesitantly.
“He was on the Atlantis mission,” Sheppard tried. “Trust me, he’s memorable. Um…really loud? Never shuts the hell up. He’s a scientist, um, allergic to lemons and you’d know that because he tells everyone, really smart…”
Teyla shook her head. “The Atlantis mission was some time ago,” she said, gently. “And there were many people. I did not meet all of them.”
“McKay works for the SGC,” Sheppard said. “He worked here before I knew it existed!”
“Perhaps you should ask someone else,” Teyla said. Her voice was calm, but he could read the distress in her face, probably because she thought he was delusional.
“Okay,” Sheppard said. “Yeah, sorry. I’ll do that.”
But now he was alarmed and she was upset, and breakfast was ruined.
“Doctor Lam says you start physical therapy today,” Teyla said, trying to change the subject.
“Why?” he said.
“You’ve been in bed a long time,” she answered. “She said you need to regain your strength.
~
Dr. Jennifer Keller arrived after Teyla left. For a split second, even though he was still in the SGC infirmary, which looked nothing like the Atlantis one, Sheppard hoped that he would blink and it would melt away and he would back where he belonged. But it didn’t. The curtains stayed, the walls stayed, the mundane Earth equipment stayed. Keller said she was there to start his physical therapy and she looked a little confused when he said her name so excitedly.
“Physical therapy,” he echoed.
“Yep.” She smiled. “You’ve been sedentary for a long time. I’ve been working with you a little while you’ve been here, but now you can actually participate.”
“Participate?”
She turned out to have a bunch of tasks for him. Stupid, demeaning, pointless tasks that were allegedly supposed to both strengthen his unused muscles and practice things like hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity in case there were any undiscovered neurological hitches or something. Dumb things like pouring water back and forth between two cups, counting out beans, and stacking blocks. Seriously, it was like being a kindergartner. He would have been madder if those tasks were easy, except they weren’t. And that pissed him off, too, not at her, but at his stupid, lazy body that had forgotten how to do the simplest movements.
Keller also had weights to strap to his arms and legs so he could exercise in bed, which pissed him off, too, even though he was fairly sure that he couldn’t run anywhere and that walking for a long time was probably not going to work either. She said stretching was important in addition to the lifting, suggested stupid, boring yoga-like positions to get started.
“What were you doing before I could participate?” Sheppard asked, glaring at the paperwork she’d given him showing a drawing of a healthy looking dude with hair bending a knee up against his chest.
“Mostly low-impact exercises,” Keller said, brightly. “Avoiding bed sores, a little stretching, preventing severe muscle atrophy.” He scowled and Keller patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’ll take a little while but you’ll be back to normal.”
He didn’t think so. He didn’t think so at all, and he wasn’t talking about his rubbery knees or clumsy fingers.
“Did you talk to me?” he asked. “While I was out?”
Keller gave a little smile. “Yes,” she said. “I tend to do that. Why, do you remember?”
“No,” Sheppard said. And he didn’t.
“Oh.” Keller’s smile dropped.
It was easy to imagine someone claiming that Keller’s voice had penetrated his mind while she’d interacted with his semi-conscious body, that he’d invented everything having to do with her on Atlantis. He didn’t believe it. But he could see how someone would.
“You weren’t on the Atlantis mission,” he said. She’d come later, he thought. Not with the original crew.
“What?” Keller looked a little confused. “God, no,” she said. “That sounded terrifying. We didn’t know if the crew’d ever come back. I couldn’t do that to my parents.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t do that to me, I’m a big ol’ chicken.”
“Okay,” Sheppard said.
“Why?” she asked, looking curious.
“No reason,” he lied, and wouldn’t look at her.
“Alright,” she said, cheerfully. “Want to do some leg lifts?”
Sheppard cooperated. It was hard, ridiculously hard for a 2.5 pound weight strapped to his ankle. The reps soaked him with sweat, got him out of breath almost immediately. Keller didn’t act like it was a big deal, though. She gave him water and encouraged him, even though he didn’t want or need a cheerleader and this was embarrassing enough as it was. He wiped his face with a towel she gave him, realized the motion was dangerously close to wiping his eyes. He blinked a couple of times, made sure he wasn’t crying. There was no reason to, none at all.
~
Sheppard’s brilliant plan not to tell these people anything wasn’t all that subtle. At some point, everyone he’d interrogated about the Atlantis mission must have gotten together with everyone who’d realized that Sheppard was more often that not completely clueless when they mentioned something that they claimed had happened in the past five years. Evidently, this made him look crazy. Or ‘neurologically impaired’. But mostly crazy.
Lam sat down opposite his bed and very firmly explained that in order to coordinate his medical care, she needed to know exactly what was going on in his head. It was very different from aggressive, intimidating captors demanding he reveal everything about Atlantis and threatening him. Sheppard honestly would have preferred that. He was fairly sure Lam wanted to know he was having those kind of thoughts, too, but didn’t feel like telling her.
He was sort of honest.
“The past five years,” he said. “I don’t remember them.” Lam tilted her head, and wrote something down on the clipboard that contained his chart. “I don’t remember what everyone else says I should remember. At all.”
“Okay,” Lam said, trying for neutral but hitting startled instead.
“I remember the Atlantis Mission,” he said. “But I remember it going…differently.”
“And you don’t want me to ask how,” Lam said, “Because you think this might all be a trick to force you to reveal something you shouldn’t to an alien enemy?”
“Yeah.” Sheppard crossed his arms defiantly and tried not to feel ridiculous. “That’s about right.”
“Okay,” Lam said, surprisingly agreeable. She wrote something else on his chart.
He peered at her, tried to read her scribble upside down.
“What’d you say about me?” he asked.
“Post-traumatic Amnesia,” Lam said. She turned the clipboard around so he could look.
“From hitting my head.” She nodded. “And that wiped out five years?”
“It’s unusual,” she said, “but not unheard of.”
“What about the stuff I do remember?” Sheppard asked. “The stuff no one else remembers happening.”
“Disassociative fugue,” Lam said, totally calm. “Formation of alternate memories in the aftermath of head trauma isn’t unheard of, either. It’s usually a temporary state.”
Sheppard was kind of pissed at her for being so casual. “Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah,” Lam said, crisply. “But you need to be honest with us about how much you remember and any progress you make. Since you’re paranoid, I’m not going to let my staff ask you about it, but you need to be honest.”
“I’m not paranoid,” Sheppard snapped. “It’s a legitimate threat in this line of business.”
“I know.” She didn’t sound very sympathetic “But it’s very problematic from my angle.” He scowled. “Do we have a deal?”
“Deal?”
“I don’t ask you anything you find compromising, you don’t lie to me and my staff?”
It made him want to scowl even harder. “Yeah,” he said.
~
His next visitor wasn’t someone he didn’t know. Lucy Hurst, the anthropologist on SG-5. The anthropologist on his team, the team he had zero memory of. He’d never seen the woman before in his life.
Sheppard didn’t know who or what he’d expected. Maybe that’d it be someone in a form he’d recognize - Weir or Heightmeyer or Larrin or someone. A female version of Ronon.
It was just some woman; she had red curly hair and a North Carolina accent. He didn’t recognize her, stared at her blankly ‘til she introduced herself. She knew him, greeting him with effusive fondness and going so far as to try and hug him. The hugging thing would have annoyed him even if he did know who she was, which might have been why she didn’t realize that he staring at her in total confusion for a good five minutes.
“Evan said you remembered people,” she said, when she finally noticed the bafflement on his face. “But not events?”
“I don’t remember the past five years,” he said, bluntly.
“Oh,” she said, startled. “Well, I’m Lucy.”
“You said that, already.” He knew that wasn’t a friendly answer, but he didn’t particularly care. A stranger rang alarm bells. A pretty, female stranger was a classic bait and switch.
He ended up being unfriendly enough that Hurst stayed for a little more one-sided small talk and then made to leave. She had brought with her piles and piles of mission reports, though, as promised to him from Lorne.
“Thanks,” he said, when she pointed to the piles of manila folders on the floor next to the curtain. “And can you tell Colonel Carter I want to speak to her?”
~
“Rodney McKay?” Carter asked. She looked confused. “I haven’t thought about him in years. I’m not sure where he’s at now.”
“He’s not with the SGC anymore?” Sheppard asked, shocked.
“No,” Carter said. “He um, didn’t enjoy the Atlantis trip. I could hear him, er, ‘quitting’ from several stories away the day you guys got back.”
“Rodney quit?”
“Yeah.” Carter nodded. “Pretty emphatically, if I recall. I know he moved to the private sector for a while.” Her eyebrows creased, thinking. “Actually, I know he recently went abroad. There was a lot of controversy given his knowledge of classified material.”
“Huh?”
“He was working for a foreign agency,” Carter said. “Russian, I think. Maybe.” She looked at the expression on Sheppard’s face. “I can try to put you in touch with him, if you want.” Her own face said she couldn’t possibly imagine why he’d want that.
“Thanks,” he said.
~
The mission reports that the Hurst lady had brought weren’t very helpful. They weren’t about Atlantis. Just typical SG reports. Sheppard believed he’d written some of them, maybe. It was his style, anyway, but then again all SG reports were more or less the same. His were shorter and dryer than a few others.
He didn’t remember any of what he’d allegedly wrote. It was all kind of normal, at least as mission reports went. Lots of boring stuff, a little bit of exciting stuff, entirely too much crazy shit.
And it all took place in the Milky Way. Some of it could have happened in Pegasus, he guessed. A lot of the issue with village natives ended up being the same. Stupid superstitions, the occasional hilarious cultural misunderstanding, the far more common equally hilarious incidents involving betrayal, capture, and escape. But no Wraith. No Atlantis. No Teyla, no Ronon, no McKay.
But it hadn’t happened to him. He remembered none of this. It was written in his voice with his name on it. That was all.
Sheppard found one report mentioning an arrow wound to the thigh. His thigh. Curiously, he shoved down his stolen sweat pants and examined himself. He felt kind of stupid - mostly because if a doctor or a nurse walked in on him it’d probably look like he was jerking off - looking for the scar of an event that had likely never happened.
But there it was. On his left thigh towards the inside of his leg, a round and pink indented blemish. And a matching one on the back of the thigh, which must have been the exit wound. Sheppard poked at it, but it didn’t hurt at all. It was just…there.
He jerked out of the gurney with a franticness that came on so suddenly it almost frightened him. Sheppard yanked down the pants all the way, kicked them off. He ripped off the pulse-ox Lam had asked him to continue to wear and ignored the immediate, blaring alarm.
Naked, Sheppard staggered - staggered because he was trying to move too fast and his body just wasn’t up to it - to the bathroom.
Before, when he’d looked at himself in the mirror, he’d been too distracted to search for scars. He’d only seen himself, focused on how sick, thin, and weak he looked.
But now he searched. Looked for the jagged line on his belly from the goddamn beam that had pinned - penetrated - him in Michael’s goddamn lab when the building collapsed.
It wasn’t there.
None of them were there.
It was like a magic wand had been waved over his skin, like all those stupid creams and gels that Carson and then Keller had given him for scar reduction had actually worked perfectly. Except that he’d never used them, because they actually didn’t work, because he was lazy, because he didn’t think erasing the scar erased anything, because they made good stories if nothing else…
But it wasn’t a total blank slate. Just the ones he should have gotten in Pegasus.
The marks on his knuckles from when Dave knocked him out of their tree house when John was like ten…there. The burn on his wrist when he was a teenager and there was a stupid, drunk bonfire…there. All the shit from Afghanistan…there.
But nothing from Pegasus.
Sheppard had new scars, marks he had zero memory of. Besides the one on his thigh, there was an unmistakable bullet wound - dull and pink - hiding in his chest hair just below his shoulder. It was low enough to have been bad, very bad. A few old laparoscopic dots, too, again hidden in his body hair. There was an uneven line on the back of his left arm, long since healed but still visible. Maybe a knife, or something. Or scraped on a rock.
He was staring at himself in the mirror, fingering each scar in turn like they would come away, peel off his body like stage makeup.
“Are you alright, sir?” That was Lam’s cool, assessing voice from behind him.
One glance at the mirror told him he’d left the door ajar. She was giving him the benefit of just standing right outside, for the moment. He could see her concerned face in the crack.
Sheppard didn’t answer immediately and he saw the crack widen substantially as Lam quietly toed it open.
“Sir?” she repeated.
He glanced up the reflection of her face, sharp and curious. God knew what she thought was going on. The patient bathrooms didn’t have locks, but all Sheppard wanted to do was slam the door before she could enter. Barricade himself inside until the world on the outside made some goddamn sense.
“Yeah,” he finally answered, but he heard his voice sound ragged and upset and not at all okay.
Lam took that as permission to enter, because she did. Sheppard forced himself to stop touching the mark on his arm, instead quietly crossed his hands over his junk since he was standing there like a nude maniac.
“You alright?” Lam repeated, quieter. She was peering at his face.
Sheppard nodded, swallowed hard. He didn’t get why he’d been hit so hard, didn’t get why it suddenly hurt as if he’d lost someone.
Lam didn’t ask why he was staring at himself naked in the bathroom mirror.
“You want to go back to bed?” she prompted.
“Yeah, okay,” Sheppard whispered.
She waited for him to start moving, didn’t comment on his slow, shuffling stride.
Back at his gurney, someone had turned off the wailing alarm. Sheppard blinked at it, almost baffled by his own lack of stealth.
Putting back on the discarded sweats was ridiculously hard. Lam let him do it by himself. Sheppard struggled through, though, watched as the stupid round scar that wasn’t his vanished as he finally pulled the waistband up.
Lam waited until he was horizontal again, clipped the monitor back on his finger. And then she watched his high, erratic heartbeat appear on the screen.
“Would you like some valium?” she asked, somehow making the request to dope him sound reasonable.
Sheppard shook his head. He clutched at the sheets pulled over him, wondering if she was going to want to give him some, anyway.
“It’s okay,” was all Lam said. “You’re okay.”
Sheppard held very still, tried not to give her any inclination of how much he disagreed with that statement.
~
By the time his next visitor - Ford - showed up, Sheppard was mostly over his freak out. He didn’t look at his new scars and was trying very hard not to think about his missing old ones. Though Lam hadn’t asked specifically, she definitely wanted to know what had happened. Sheppard wasn’t going to share.
Ford looked like maybe Lam had warned him Sheppard had had some kind of mysterious meltdown a little while ago, face hesitant and smile sort of wary.
Sheppard sat on his gurney and tried to look not crazy.
“Hey,” he said, when Ford entered.
“Hey,” Ford said, smiling growing. “You feeling better?”
“Yeah,” Sheppard lied. “Coming along.”
Ford grinned and nodded enthusiastically.
“Look,” Sheppard said. “I was thinking you could help me clear some things up.”
“Okay.” Ford took a seat on the omnipresent stool. “Like what?”
“What I’m…confused about,” Sheppard said, picking his words carefully. “Is Atlantis. So maybe you could tell me what happened to the mission crewmembers?”
“What happened?” Ford repeated. “You mean there?”
“No,” Sheppard said, “I think Lorne kind of covered that. I mean, where’s Dr. Weir now?”
“Ohhh.” Ford understood. “Dr. Weir? Um, I think she’s working for the UN in -” he paused, eyes tipping up - “Czechoslovakia?”
“Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist any more,” Sheppard said. Then he stopped. “Does it?”
“I guess not,” Ford said, easily. “It was Eastern Europe, that’s all I know.”
Sheppard swallowed. “She’s okay?”
“Yeah,” Ford said, breezily. He regarded Sheppard’s face and his own expression flickered. “Why?”
“I’d like to talk to her,” Sheppard said, even though he already thought it was a really dumb idea. “If that’s possible.”
“I’ll mention it to someone who can make it happen,” Ford promised. He looked like he’d decided to ignore whatever weirdness Sheppard was broadcasting. “Anyone else you want to see?”
“Carson Beckett,” Sheppard said, immediately.
“Okay,” Ford answered. “I bet he’s back in Scotland, though.”
It was awfully convenient that two of the people that died in Pegasus were nowhere to be found.
“There should be some kind of yearbook,” Ford was saying. “Where Are They Now: Atlantis Mission.”
“Yeah,” Sheppard said. “That’d help me.”
It wouldn’t. He didn’t know what it would do, but it wouldn’t help.
~
Everything kind of stayed the same for a while. The same visitors, usually in the same order. Teyla, looking bravely heartbroken. Cameron Mitchell and Sam Carter, both excessively cheerful and trying to talk to him like he remembered their alleged friendships. He didn’t, but they were easier to be around than Ford and Lorne, who didn’t remember their friendships with Sheppard the way he did. Or Teyla, who was clearly trying very hard not show that she was upset and yet made Sheppard feel like crap anyway.
The anthropologist lady he didn’t recognize occasionally came around and Sheppard tried mostly to ignore her. He was having enough trouble with the people he was supposed to know. Jackson, who he also didn’t really know, visited a lot, too. Sheppard wasn’t as annoyed by him. The guy mostly kept quiet and didn’t do much except just be there, which Sheppard didn’t mind. He appreciated the silence, since everyone else jabbered non-stop about crap he didn’t remember or tried to interrogate him.
One very different thing happened. It would have been different regardless, but it just added another bizarre layer of weird to Sheppard’s new life.
His brother called.
Teyla brought him the phone and put it in his hands before he fully processed what she’d said.
“Dave?” he repeated.
Teyla nodded.
For a second, Sheppard just blinked at her. “Does - does he know about my…memory issues?” That was one way to put it, anyway.
“He does,” Teyla said.
He could hear the murmur a voice coming out of the phone, had no choice but to put it to his ear.
And then Sheppard talked to his brother on the phone. Something he hadn’t done in…possibly ever. He’d never had the inclination and if Dave had, the logistics of deployment usually meant Sheppard would have had to initiate or it wouldn’t happen. So, it had never happened. And then Atlantis. Well, not here.
And here, some time while Atlantis hadn’t happened, he and Dave had apparently started talking on the phone.
Dave understood immediately that Sheppard didn’t remember reconciling. Maybe he’d figured it out based on what Teyla had told him, or maybe Sheppard’s voice just sounded that awkward.
Talking to Dave was like everything else. It felt weird. And also okay, which just made it weirder.
Dave sounded worried and falsely upbeat, actually a lot like everyone else who talked to him now. But coming from his little brother, it hit Sheppard right in the chest in a new way. Stirred up old, ancient family shit. Made him feel glad he was alone in the room, except he wasn’t alone since Teyla was leaning against the far wall near the drawn curtain. Sheppard glanced up at her and she must have seen something in his face because her expression flickered, then she dipped her head and slipped silently through the exit.
Sheppard might have felt bad, but he didn’t think he could listen to Dave sounding like that with Teyla standing there looking at him.
He learned from Dave what most of the people around him had only really implied. They hadn’t actually expected Sheppard to wake up. Ever. And Dave was pretty upset about that and not all that able to hide it behind all his relief that Sheppard was in fact awake.
Some how that turned the conversation - well, Dave’s monologue, anyway - to the fact that Dave and Teyla had been in communication during all this. Discussing, among other things, whether Sheppard would be buried in the plot next to Dad.
Dad was dead here, too. But Sheppard had brought Teyla to the funeral, not Ronon. Because Ronon didn’t exist here. It didn’t sound like there’d been a side of Replicator fun, either, though Dave wouldn’t necessarily know about that.
Dave’s words swirled in his head. Death, death, death. Dad. Teyla. Ronon.
A pressure settled on Sheppard’s chest that felt disturbingly like grief. Out of nowhere, solid and heavy and as real as any of this.
His brother interpreted the hitch in his voice as exhaustion. He made excuses to hang up, repeated how glad he was that John was alive.
“It was good to talk to you,” Dave said. “Hopefully, I’ll see you soon.”
“Yeah,” Sheppard said. And it was good to talk to his brother, even if as far as he knew it was just this once. And even though it made him choke up for reasons he didn’t fully understand.
Sheppard was sitting there alone for a few minutes, setting the phone back on its cradle. He was still blinking back stupid tears when Teyla quietly entered. Quickly, he dipped his head, shifted one hand to shield his face. She didn’t say anything, just reached for the phone to take it away.
“This is really hard,” Sheppard said, when she leaned over to pick it up.
Teyla paused. Her hand redirected off the phone, coming to land on his shoulder. After a second, Sheppard raised his own hand and put it over hers.
~
Kate Heightmeyer was alive.
Sheppard found out because she came to see him for a therapy session. Lam had said a shrink was coming, hadn’t given him any choice about it. So he’d mostly just been preemptively pissed off about it. Ford and Mitchell had been around before the appointment, maybe because they knew him well enough to think that even a healthy, non-amnesiac John Sheppard would have tried to run away from a psychologist.
But then Kate walked in. All of Sheppard’s resentment just vanished, replaced by a stultifying wave of emotion that ran intensely up his spine.
“Hi, John,” Heightmeyer said, smiling at him.
She looked the same, mostly. Her hair was a little darker. Sheppard’s eyes traveled downwards, suddenly landing on an unexpected curve in her midsection. Heightmeyer was pregnant.
Somehow, he got his eyes up to her face and managed to make his voice work.
“Hey,” he said.
“I’m Dr. Kate Height-” she began.
“I know,” he interrupted. “I know who you are.”
“Okay.” She took a seat on the stool, still smiling. She wasn’t doing any of the hesitant, awkward body language everyone else was, at least not yet.
Sheppard’s side of the conversation was awkward, though. Maybe Heightmeyer knew how to pretend not to be weirded out by crazy patients - she was a shrink, after all. She acted relaxed and easy-going, even though Sheppard was probably staring at her like a mad man.
When he got it together enough to focus on what she was saying, he learned a couple of things.
For one, she wasn’t here to persuade him that the Atlantis mission hadn’t gone as he remembered it. She didn’t know, of course, that Sheppard thought she was dead. No one would know that unless he told them.
Heightmeyer was here because the ‘dissociative fugue’ Lam had diagnosed him with wasn’t actually a medical condition. It was a psychiatric one. And the moment Sheppard processed that statement, he felt like an idiot. A genuinely crazy idiot.
But Heightmeyer was talking calmly about it, like it didn’t mean anything all that scary. She said she’d treated military personnel with it before. That didn’t actually make him feel better.
“If it’s from hitting my head,” he asked, “how come I don’t remember the whole five years before that happened?”
“It’s a response to trauma,” Heightmeyer said. “I suspect your mind simply recalled the most recent traumatic experience and began…reprocessing those memories.”
Sheppard had a hard time assigning the word ‘trauma’ to the Atlantis mission. Scary, yeah. Intense. Hard, sometimes. Ridiculously hard. But not ‘trauma’.
“Oh,” was all he said.
“We’ll get you back,’ Heightmeyer promised. “There are a lot of techniques. We’ll work together.”
“Now?” Sheppard asked, and something about his voice or his face made Heightmeyer look concerned.
“Not today,” she said. “I just wanted to lay out the game plan.”
“Okay,” Sheppard said, a little relieved.
Heightmeyer smiled. “One step at a time. I’m glad you’re open to the process.”
Sheppard shrugged. Then, he paused. “I’m glad it’s you.” He was. He didn’t particularly want to think about it, but he was so, so glad she was alive.
For some reason, Heightmeyer tilted her head. “Because I was on the Atlantis mission?” she guessed, looking genuinely curious.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know you’re good.”
“I never got to do any therapy there,” Heightmeyer said. “Except dispense anti-anxiety drugs ‘til I ran out.” She was looking at him contemplatively.
“You did,” Sheppard told her, not bothering to wonder if he should be sharing. You were supposed to share with shrinks, which might be why she was here in the first place. And it was working, even if it was a trick. “You did good.”
Heightmeyer nodded, then rose. “I’ll set up a therapy schedule,” was all she said.
“Okay,” Sheppard said. He flicked his eyes downwards at her stomach. “Congrats.”
She paused, half way through the curtain exit. “Thanks.”
~
The dead weren’t just walking around. They were also e-mailing him. Teyla brought him a printed out message from Elizabeth Weir.
“You have received many e-mails,” Teyla said. “I can bring you a laptop so that you may read the rest.” She looked a little guilty, like maybe she thought he wouldn’t like her reading his mail.
“Okay,” he said, not really listening. He took the sheet of computer paper from Teyla’s hands.
He didn’t know what he expected. Lorne had said his condition had leaked - the whole base knew he was awake and wasn’t right in the head. Which was fantastic. Someone must have contacted Elizabeth. Who knew what they’d told her about him.
The e-mail was actually quite short. And not that friendly, either. It was very…professionally terse.
Weir knew he had amnesia about the Atlantis mission. Probably didn’t know he had alternate memories for the past five years. The e-mail was basically a get well card minus any sappy Hallmark illustrations, which he appreciated.
She said she was in Kosovo with the United Nations and her job was ‘interesting and challenging.’ He figured that meant ‘hard as hell.’ Weir expressed concern for his head injury and wished him a speedy recovery. And that was all the e-mail said. It wasn’t emotional or personal or…much of anything. Mostly, it seemed a polite message sent because someone told her to.
And that was…weird. Maybe here Sheppard and Weir had had a crappy relationship. It made his forehead crease, made him again wonder just what the hell had happened beyond what Lorne had told him.
“You know Dr. Weir?” he asked Teyla, who was spinning herself lightly on the visitor’s stool.
Teyla stilled. “Not well,” she said.
“But you met her on the Atlantis mission,” Sheppard pressed.
This got a headshake. “Met, yes. I did not speak to her extensively.” Teyla peered at him. “Why do you ask?”
“Were we friends?” he asked. “Me and her?”
“I do not believe so,” Teyla said. “Colleagues.”
“Yeah,” Sheppard said. “But…”
“It was a difficult time,” Teyla said when he trailed off.
Sheppard thought in silence for a moment. He tried to imagine how he might have dealt with a massive civilian presence under attack in a new environment - under attack by the goddamn Wraith, at that. It was probably not a situation where the military would have obeyed a civilian leader. Not Sumner and not Sheppard. Maybe that contributed to the coolness of Weir’s e-mail.
That shouldn’t have been as upsetting as it was. This Weir was alive and well - married if the hyphen on her e-mail address was any indication - and untouched by all the Replicator shit. Untouched by everything that had happened in Pegasus.
~
Sheppard and McKay weren’t friends in this universe, either. He probably should have just let it go after the indifferent missive from Weir, probably should have let it go the moment he opened his eyes and Lam said the Atlantis mission was long since over.
He didn’t. Sheppard asked Carter to get a hold of McKay for him, after she never followed up on his original request. Even if he’d left the Stargate program, Sheppard correctly guessed that McKay would have still made it possible for Carter if no one else to contact him.
Carter wasn’t a very cooperative messenger. When he asked her, Carter stared at him like he’d grown a second head.
“Why?” she asked, bluntly.
That should have been warning enough.
“I think it would help me,” Sheppard said. That wasn’t wholly true. Nothing was helping. Continuing to explore the vast differences between the life he remembered and the one he’d allegedly lived probably didn’t meet anyone’s - particularly Heightmeyer’s - definition of ‘help.’ “Heightmeyer said it’d be a good idea,” he lied.
“She doesn’t know McKay,” Carter said.
“She was there, too,” he retorted. She looked a little taken aback. “She was,” he said, softer. “Could you look into it for me, please?”
“Yeah,” Carter said, agreeably. “What do you want me to tell him?”
Sheppard shrugged. “The truth,” he said.
“Okay.” Carter paused. “He can be kind of a jerk, you know.” When he didn’t answer immediately, she went on. “You should know that.”
“I know,” Sheppard said. She seemed worried McKay would make him cry or something. “I’m kind of counting on it.”
A few days later, Carter brought him a printed out e-mail. She looked embarrassed. “We should see about getting you a laptop,” she said.
He reached out for the paper. “Thanks.”
It wasn’t a get well card like Weir’s message. Sheppard knew that with a glance. Also, it was much longer.
“What are you expecting?” Carter asked, gently.
Sheppard was expecting a rant. And he got one. This McKay was not a friend of Sheppard’s and he wasn’t a fan, either. His response to Carter’s e-mail was a lengthy inquiry into whether or not Sheppard remembered being a ‘fascist abusive bastard’ during their time in the ‘hellhole that is the Pegasus galaxy.’ And if he didn’t, McKay could visit to personally remind him.
Sheppard read it once, then read it again. Carter stayed in his room while he did so, drifting quietly around the edges.
It didn’t really hit him in a bad way. After Weir’s message and Lorne’s description of the mission arrival, Sheppard had figured that things hadn’t gone in a way that would have made for very happy people. Without asking for any more files, he could imagine the stress of corralling that many civilians in hostile territory under attack by an unknown enemy. He probably had been a fascist abusive bastard. And he’d been counting on McKay’s honesty to elucidate the story a little.
It was a little strange to read that much sincere aggression rather than huffing and puffing from Rodney, but it was still kind of familiar.
Sheppard looked up to find Carter watching him.
“Thanks,” he told her, again.
“Okay,” she said, evidently deciding not to press. That wasn’t her job, anyway. “Glad to help.”
“McKay’s doing okay?” he asked her.
“Yeah,” Carter said, at least concealing her reaction if she was baffled that he cared. “He, um, makes a lot of money in the private sector.” She shrugged. “And we’ve had to call him for help sometimes. That makes him…really smug.”
Sheppard grinned, then hid it with his hand. Carter caught it and blinked in confusion.
“I guess you knew that, anyway,” she said. He nodded. “So, you remember him?”
“No,” Sheppard said. “I don’t.”
~
Sheppard had babysitters. He was never left alone. It wasn’t explicit, but eventually he realized that whenever one companion left, another immediately showed up. There was always a nurse, or an orderly, or a physical therapist, or Ford, or Mitchell, and so on. Occasionally an armed airman got the job, and it was the stiff posture and intense gaze that finally clued Sheppard in to the fact that he was under surveillance.
He didn’t really have the right to be pissed off about it. He had stabbed Dr. Lam, after all. With perfectly good reason, even if they didn’t believe him.
Teyla wasn’t around as much. He didn’t know why. Maybe they didn’t trust her, or didn’t trust him around her, or she didn’t want to be around him.
He missed her.
Even though she wasn’t his Teyla, she was more familiar than anyone else and he was more comfortable around her than any of these strangers. Especially Ford.
They were uncomfortable around him, too. Upset that he wasn’t the John Sheppard they wanted him to be. It was both reassuring and terrifying. Maybe he really was their brain-damaged friend who didn’t remember these people or their friendships. But that would mean that he really was this brain-damaged man with fake memories of friends created by broken and misfiring synapses.
For this, he preferred the professional babysitters. To the medical personnel, he was just a neurologically-impaired patient and they focused mostly on fixing his body and ignored his brain. To the airmen, he was just a potential threat and they paid attention only to his movements and not his emotions. They either hadn’t known him before his brains had been scrambled or they didn’t like him enough to care. Those who had were horribly uncomfortable with him.
Dr. Daniel Jackson wasn’t ill at ease around him.
He didn’t approach Sheppard with ginger hesitancy or overly effusive camaraderie like the others. He also didn’t drop leading comments, trying to figure out if Sheppard remembered random experiences they had allegedly shared. And because he didn’t do either of those things, Jackson also didn’t get visibly upset when it became obvious Sheppard had no fucking clue what he was getting at.
Sheppard didn’t think they’d been friends. Jackson was okay. But if he wasn’t reading, he wasn’t quiet. The man yakked. A lot. Sheppard found it really hard to pay attention to the constant yammering. He knew he should probably listen to the man in case his words rang any bells - of familiarity or of alarm - but the guy never shut up and Sheppard would tune him out.
But Jackson was useful because he’d accompany Sheppard to the upper levels of the SGC and eventually out of the Mountain. The infirmary staff didn’t want their patient to wander that far and the Airmen weren’t authorized to let him outside. Mitchell or Ford would go with him, but they’d use the opportunity to get at him alone to pepper him with questions that he totally couldn’t answer.
Jackson showed up as he always did, at exactly eight pm. He strolled into the room, nodding at Sheppard’s departing babysitter nurse.
“Hey,” he said, as casually as if he’d just randomly decided to stop in. His hands were shoved into his pockets. “How’s it going?”
“Hey,” Sheppard said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. “I want to go to the surface.”
Jackson dipped his head, nodded. “Okay.”
~please feed the author~
Part 3