FIC: Planet Of The Weevils (SGA/Torchwood x-over) 1/2
I wanted to keep this thing whole, so I included a reposting of the first part, which was originally in this post. No major changes have been done.
Planet Of The Weevils (Crossover with Torchwood)
Author: moodymuse19
PG-13
Words: roughly 12,000
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard, vague Jack/Ianto, UST Jack/Rodney
A. N.: Blame le_mousquetaire for this. It was her prompt that inspired me.(Crossover Torchwood/SGA --- UST Rodney/Jack, Jealous!Sheppard.)
I had Johnny Cash’s Solitary Man and Marilyn’s Manson’s The Beautiful People almost on continuous loop while writing this. Sometimes, Have you Ever Seen the Rain got in between. Also, Joey Ramone’s version of What A Wonderful World. The soundtrack to this fic is very odd.
Not beta'ed, so point out mistakes you see. Set up in Season 4, mid-season, somewhere before Outcast)
+++
I
Rodney is nervous. He wouldn’t admit it under threat of torture, under threat of someone wiping his laptop hard drive clean, but Rodney is nervous.
What’s worse is that John notices this. Everyone in the SGC’s Gateroom does, Ronon and Teyla well included judging by their little smiles. Hell, Harriman can probably see it from his vantage point up above and may possibly be having a good laugh at him with Landry.
John frowns at him - Rodney is wringing his hands. “Seriously, who is this guy?”
“Need to know basis, Colonel,” says Rodney, and he’s been repeating that for about a day, he knows it won’t work for much longer.
“I have one of the highest clearings available in this country and I’m about to meet the guy. Is he some sort of expert, or -”
Rodney likes that explanation. “After a fashion. Yes, an expert.”
John’s not buying it, but Rodney chooses to ignore this. “Then why does he make you so nervous?”
“He doesn’t. It’s those things we found on the planet”
“Weevils,” says John, his dislike of the name obvious.
“Hey, I didn’t name them!”
“I did,” says Jack Harkness from the doorway.
It’s odd how he fits in. You’d have thought that seeing someone dressed in a long coat from the 1940s, twenty-eight levels down in Cheyenne Mountain would’ve been about as matching as seeing Ronon in ballet slippers, but no. Jack Harkness fits anywhere he goes, it seems, even at a place he found exists only twenty hours ago.
Rodney’s nervousness leaves all of a sudden, he’d forgotten just how good looking the bastard was.
“Ah, it’s good to be in the old country again,” he says, hands on his hips, looking at the Stargate as if he was going to come on to it.
“Which makes no sense because you’re about as American as I am,” says Rodney, trying to sound mildly peeved. He fails, miserably.
“Nice to see you too, Rodney,” says Jack, a hand on his shoulder. “And these are…?”
“My team,” says Rodney. John clears his throat and Rodney rolls his eyes. “His team, whatever. Colonel John Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex.”
Jack shakes hands and receives polite ‘hello’s and actually kisses Teyla’s hand, which amuses her immensely, she’s never thought much of that Earth custom. Ronon has his brow furrowed the same way he does when when’s sharing the same breathing space as Todd. Sheppard seems to share opinions with Ronon.
“Warm welcome,” Jack says conversationally and then turns to Rodney again. “Tell me about the planet.”
Rodney points at the event horizon, which won’t stay open for much more. “Planet of the Weevils? Well, we came across it by pure chance. We hadn’t a chance of connection to that planet for four years and one fine day it did, which usually means the locals unburied the gate…” he keeps talking and talking.
John watches them walk up the ramp, Rodney talking a mile a minute. Harkness is listening with rapt attention and at the same time he’s looking at the event horizon in fascination.
Rodney talks on, and grabs Harkness’s arm, and Harkness touches Rodney’s back and his arm and oh, won’t the next days be lots of fun, John thinks.
+++
II
The worst thing about Harkness, John decides, is that you can’t dislike him, not really. He’s seen it already, he’s seen the women at the SGC and Midway staring at him in that way that universally means ‘Who is that?’
Hell, had Rodney not been in the picture John himself might’ve been staring at the guy. He’s not blind, not really. But John has been stupidly in lust with Rodney for, how long now? So Jack Harkness is really not attracting John’s attention.
Protocol makes them spend a whole day at Midway. Rodney sees entirely too much of Harkness and John doesn’t see enough of Rodney. John, though, sees enough of Bill Lee and Kavanagh to last a lifetime.
Even when they gate to Atlantis they need to wait a whole day to go back to the Weevil planet, which has nights long enough to be called ridiculously long. Rodney had initially looked at the video feed from the MALP and said the planet’s nights might be why the weevils come out mainly at night in Cardiff, which had left everyone in the control room confounded. Weevils? Cardiff? What the -? Had Rodney finally lost it?
And then Sam had laughed a nervous little laugh, and said this odd planet merited the visit of… an old friend of them.
Rodney fills Harkness -
Jack, he had insisted during dinner on the first day; call me Jack. Fine, answers John’s brain in that vindictive little voice he uses sometimes when he catches someone looking at Rodney in that way Rodney never catches and John never misses. It’s the kind of look that makes it very clear they’re not looking at his intelligence, not really, not one bit.
The kind of look Jack has been giving Rodney, of course.
Rodney fills Jack in on everything they’ve got on the Weevil Planet, which is frankly not a whole lot. There were atmospheric readings and videos of the humanoid things transmitted by the MALP. They’d caught a small area not far from the gate, void of both animal and plant life, avoided by the locals, which Rodney was theorizing had to be the center of the ‘rift’.
What that meant, nobody had filled him in yet.
Jack and Rodney call for a meeting a little before lunch, roughly eighteen hours before they’re scheduled to go offworld.
John, Ronon and Teyla and several others are filled in, and learn of the Spacetime Rift, which has been depositing weevils and other strangeness in Cardiff for decades now.
“The weevils have been dropping in on Cardiff for longer than anyone cares to admit,” says Jack, and Rodney, of all things, looks bored, as if he’s heard this a thousand times before. “Once in a while, they’ll come up to the surface and kill people.”
That gets John’s attention. No wonder both the American and British governments had agreed quickly on this mission.
The meeting is informative but brief, and the mission is very clear: find a way to either close the spacetime rift in the Weevil Planet, or find a way for the weevils to stop falling into it.
Jack has a plan, and it sounds easy enough: they can seal the rift by having something explode on it - he explains something about 1869, the Cardiff rift and the ancestor of a friend of his. The explanation leaves Ronon and John frowning at each other in confusion, but the bottom line is clear enough: they have to make something explode.
As soon as the meeting is over, John snatches Rodney away.
He doesn’t do it literally, of course; he simply calls his team over for lunch and hopes Sam will entertain Jack long enough, which she does.
It’s a team lunch like they haven’t had in a while, with Ronon and Rodney playing a silent battle for who can shovel more food into their mouths. Even Teyla is eating normally - she hadn’t been feeling too well lately, but as if the idea of Team Lunch had made Baby behave, she’s back to her usual self.
John lets a good deal of their time go by without touching the subject of Harkness - Jack. They haven’t had a lunch like this in a good while, and he enjoys them more than he lets on.
He is waiting, though, for the perfect moment to start the conversation. The lunch rush has been over for an hour now, and it’s the perfect chance for Rodney to share some past history.
Maybe Rodney will even find out what John’s been thinking lately and he’ll laugh at the mere idea of Jack Harkness and him in that way. Jack’s as straight as they come, Rodney will say.
It sounds about as plausible as Rodney giving up coffee but hey, he can dream, right?
Of course, this is the Pegasus Galaxy. When was the last time things went right in this place?
“So, big explosion?” he says somewhere between Ronon’s third helping and Teyla’s second.
Rodney rolls his eyes. “Leave it to you to reduce an incredibly complex plan to a two-word summary. Do you have any idea of the calibrations and calculations that will have to be done so the explosive device can be beamed where it will make the most damage to the rift?”
“Will it include a big explosion?”
Rodney sighs. “Yes,” he admits reluctantly. John grins.
“So what’s the deal with this guy?” asks Ronon before John has a chance to say anything else. John has to contain himself because he really feels like kissing the big guy right now.
“We’re friends,” shrugs Rodney, frowning at his fries as if they were an equation. John has to grin, because Rodney doesn’t do ‘casual’ in any manner that’s convincing.
Ronon snorts into his glass of juice and Teyla grins, and John feels his grin grow to the widths of the Cheshire Cat’s.
“So you had friends before us,” John teases as he steals a fry from Rodney’s plate.
Teyla kicks his foot. “John…”
“I’ll have you know I did,” says Rodney, waving his finger about and getting his plate farther away from John. “Sam and I worked with him some years ago.”
“That’s it?” asks John as he rubs his foot. Damn Teyla’s shoes, that hurt.
“What, you want me to tell you we saved the world? Actually we did,” he says, smirking, self satisfied. “I’d tell you all about it if it hadn’t been classified by two different governments.”
“When we ask about him we don’t exactly mean the job,” says John, though he’s curious about that too, now.
Rodney’s eyes widens as he gets it. “Oh! Oh. Um.” He seems to be thinking hard of what to say next - it’s an odd expression on him, Rodney tends to have no filter before he speaks. “Jack is… an open minded guy.”
Subtle, thinks John, and he’s not gutsy enough to mention Rodney’s mind is pretty open too. “Certainly looks like it,” he says instead.
“What do you mean?” frowns Rodney.
“He hasn’t stopped touching you since he arrived at the SGC, Rodney,” says John, trying for casual. Ronon’s smirk tells him he fails at casual about as much as Rodney.
“John,” says Teyla sternly, and she means business this time.
“Hey, if I picked up on it, the rest of Atlantis can too,” which surprises even John himself because, wow, it’s true. If Rodney isn’t careful he’ll have the whole city talking about him.
Teyla frowns, troubled, as she admits his point; Ronon shrugs, he’s never understood Earth’s reluctance to accept all kinds of relationships.
Rodney, however, is entirely focused on something else. “He hasn’t stopped touching me?” he asks in disbelief. John fears the tangents Rodney’s mind is taking, but he still shakes his head.
Rodney has this odd look in his face, and he thinks for about two seconds before he stands up. “I have to go,” he says, and is off before John can object.
Ronon is smirking, Teyla touching his arm and saying his name in that voice you better obey or else…
Rodney is still gone. After Jack, probably.
So, thinks John. That didn’t go as planned.
III
With six hours to go to the Weevil Planet, Rodney is still up, using two laptops at the same time, making calculations of all kind. The lab is deserted and silent (the only moment of the day when Rodney can work undisturbed.)
His mind concentrated on the laptops in front of him, he hardly notices the figure that comes to stand at the doorway of the lab, smirking slightly.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” says Rodney absentmindedly. Then he notices it’s Jack on the doorway, not John. “Oh. Hi.”
Jack enters the lab and heads for a chair across Rodney’s desk. “Oh, don’t tell me you forgot about me so soon,” he says, dropping into the chair in a slouch that would give John a run for his money.
“No, no - that’s usually Sheppard’s spot,” he says, waving a hand at the doorway. “He has this annoying habit of appearing at this hour and hauling my ass into bed.”
“Hmm, Ianto has that same habit,” says Jack with that smile of his that only means one thing, and damn him, thinks Rodney, six years later and he still has that effect on him.
Rodney’s is grateful for the desk between them, choosing to ignore the messages his body is sending. He powers down his laptops, busying himself with keys and clicks and saving documents. “No, Ianto does not have the same habit. John is a Colonel and he hauls me into my bed to sleep.”
Jack sighs. “Yes, real waste. I’ve seen some interesting things going around here,” and Rodney can testify to that - Jack’s been staring at Lorne all day long. “Your Colonel included.”
Rodney snorts. “Tell me about it.”
Jack’s eyebrows shoot up in delight. “Ah.”
Rodney regrets ever saying anything. “Don’t - don’t even.” Whatever intentions Rodney had of talking to Jack about what John had said during lunch flies out of the window.
And Jack’s not an idiot, not by far. He knows that John is military, that there’s American militia all over the place here - not exactly the best of places to even think of a relationship between two people of the same sex.
“Right. So, how are calibrations going?” he asks, and Rodney is silently grateful at the change of subject.
“Bad. Be glad tomorrow’s a recon mission only and not the real thing.” He looks at the laptops in disgust. “Unless we get the séance girl your friend used in 1869, we’re going to have a hard time knowing where the rift is stronger. I mean, the MALP barely even picks up any anomaly at all.”
Jack shrugs. “Well, it’s not like we’re in a rush.”
“Unless another weevil slips through while I’m fiddling with this.”
Jack frowns. “And if it does, and if it lands up in Cardiff, Gwen and Ianto are more than able to capture it,” says Jack pointedly, because he knows Rodney, he knows he’s acquired the habit of making his responsibility things that actually aren’t, as if being incredibly smart means all the responsibility has to land on his shoulders and no one else’s.
Maybe he’ll have a talk with Rodney’s Colonel - if he doesn’t bite his head off at some point in the conversation.
Speak of the devil, laughs Jack internally, as John appears on the doorway of the lab.
“McKay, what do -” He stops abruptly when he sees Jack there. “Oh. Didn’t know you -”
“No, no, I was leaving anyway,” says Rodney as he stands up, his laptops already powered down.
“You were?” frowns John because Rodney’s stopped working rather early and is going to bed voluntarily. The last time that happened was… in another universe, probably.
Then Jack stands up, and John feels his heart shrink a little bit. “Oh. Right, of course. I’ll, just -” he says, pointing at the door and wanting to bolt before Jack gets any closer to Rodney and starts touching him again.
Rodney looks peeved. “Don’t be an idiot,” he says, and grabs two laptops off the table. “Here, be useful. Help me get that to my quarters,” he says as he dumps the laptops in John’s arms and he grabs another couple.
John sees Jack frown as they leave the lab, and his reputation goes up a notch in John’s eyes as he consciously makes an effort to walk on one side of Rodney and not between Rodney and John.
“Is there any sensible reason why you would need so many laptops in your quarters?” asks Jack.
“There’s sensitive material I work on…?” he says, and when Jack keeps frowning, Rodney rolls his eyes and goes on. “I’m just not willing to put it up on the base mainframe, readily available for any idiot to screw it up.”
Jack smiles as they get into a transporter. “Ah, that explains it all.”
“No,” says Rodney, punching part of the map on the transporter. “Come back in the morning and look at the people I have to deal with everyday. That will explain it all.”
“Hey, Clarissa,” says John to Rodney. “Remember what Sam had said about appreciating the people who work for you and all…”
“I’ll appreciate them when they are worthy of it,” says Rodney as he gets off the transporter.
Jack sighs. “Oh, the whining. Good to know some things don’t change,” he says, winking at John.
Rodney frowns at Jack. “What, you - you missed my whining?”
“No, no one can miss that. It’s just… soothing,” says Jack, winking at them as he leaves for this quarters. John had never seen anyone wink in a lewd way before.
Rodney frowns at Jack’s back. “Soothing.” He looks at John. “I’m soothing?”
John grins. “No, Rodney.”
“Didn’t think so,” says Rodney, palming the door of his quarters open. “Just, drop those there, thank you.”
John deposits the laptops over Rodney’s bed and is about to leave for the night when Rodney calls him back. “Hey,” he says.
John turns around, and sees Rodney - standing in the middle of the room, looking at nothing in particular; he’s wringing his hands again. John’s mind grinds to a halt and then promptly runs away.
“Did, um. Did you really think there was something between Jack and I? When you arrived at the lab?”
John swears in his mind. He should’ve just gone straight to bed. Damn his idea of checking Rodney’s lab. “Well, you were going to bed voluntarily,” he says lightly, nodding in the direction Jack left. He doesn’t leave the threshold of Rodney’s quarters, hoping for a quick escape
Rodney glares. “You’re an idiot.”
“No, I mean it,” and he does, actually. “Usually I have to drag you out. When I arrived you had everything closed off already. Not many things will do that.”
“What do you think of him?” he frowns.
John shrugs. “I barely know the guy,” he tries.
Rodney crosses the room, hauls John inside and palms the door close. If he was ever nervous about the conversation, it’s all gone now. “You’ve known him for two days now; I think that’s enough time to get a first impression.”
“Why do you want to know what I think of him?”
“I want an outside opinion,” he shrugs. “I’m a scientist, science tends to be a team effort, sadly.” John smiles. He’d bet anything Rodney is thinking of a future Nobel Prize, where he’d have to share his prize with someone else.
“Jack is a person not a science project, Rodney.”
“I know. It’s just -” Rodney sits down on the bed. “Several years ago, Jack and I had to work together. The SGC sent Sam to join us later on when things went even further down the drain - I cannot say more than this, sorry, but the thing is, for about a month, Jack and I worked together, mostly on our own. And well, danger, adrenaline…”
John sits down on the bed besides Rodney. He nods. “One thing led to the other...”
“Exactly. At the end of the three weeks, Sam arrived to help and he started flirting with her, which is when -”
John interrupts, brow furrowed about as deep as it can go. “He cheated on you?”
Rodney shakes his head. “Cheating implies a previous promise of monogamy, which never happened here. Anyway, we're talking Sam, here. Do you see her with someone like Jack?”
John grins. “Not really.” And before Rodney can say anything else, he says, “Jack and you were fuck buddies.”
Rodney winces. “God, Sheppard!”
John leans back a bit, resting on his hands. “Were you?”
“Yes, but I tend to phrase it differently,” says Rodney, trying not to watch John slouching lazily on his very bed. “The arrangement that - well, it didn't agree with me. I mean it did, it, um, seriously did. Several times along -”
Dammit, winces John internally. “McKay!”
“Sorry, sorry,” he says quickly. “But when the next pretty thing crossed his path, I was… relegated.”
“Creep,” mutters John.
“No, no, that's just how he works, he’s a good guy,” he says, because they have to be out in the field tomorrow, and he needs to know John won’t oops! forget Jack back in the planet.
“It’s just very confusing to have him here,” says Rodney. “I like him, but that kind of relationship isn't me, you know? Although I hear he's got someone sort of steady now. He told Sam...” He trails off as he looks at John. “You don’t like him.”
“No, I don’t,” John says sincerely. He hadn’t liked him before when he kept touching Rodney before his very eyes; he likes him even less now that he knows what had happened.
“Why?”
John suddenly stands up. “Look, it’s getting late and we have a mission early tomorrow. Might not be the best time to have this conversation,” he says, smiling slightly, wanting to blow the whole thing off.
And Rodney takes an eternity to answer, an eternity which makes John sweat beyond anything else. He doesn’t want Rodney to find out how he feels for him, not really. He doesn’t want awkward, he doesn’t want Rodney not knowing how to behave himself around John, he really -
“Sure,” says Rodney casually. Possibly a little too casually. “Goodnight.”
And all through the conversation, from the lab to his bed here - hell, from the SGC till now, Rodney had thought that John didn’t like Jack because he was so open about his sexuality. Rodney’s not an idiot, he knew John wasn’t homophobic. But being under the thumb of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, thought Rodney, must make him uncomfortable to even deal with that sort of thing so under his nose.
But now, Rodney wonders, putting his laptops away and undressing and brushing his teeth. Now he wonders if John’s reason to dislike Jack wasn’t one entirely different than what Rodney had supposed.
Predictably, he goes to bed with a smile.
IV
John should really, really start getting suspicious when a mission starts so good.
Seriously, it had started well. Jack was getting less on his nerves today than the previous days, the sun was high up in the sky when they arrived to the Weevil Planet, and not one of those creatures were in sight. They were scary enough on a picture from the MALP, John had no desire to see one in the flesh.
The planet was pretty, too. Dense with vegetation, a waterfall nearby judging from what he could hear, many local birds and animal life. If it weren’t for the Weevils, it could’ve been paradise.
They had found what looked like some sort of city or community deep down in a valley, overlooked by a dense forest growing on top of a cliff. It was a perfect vantage point to look at the community below without being watched.
Jack takes the opportunity to take videos and photos and generally document the weevils below, who are going about in their community like any other society they might’ve come across. The absence of children puzzles everyone, their reproductive methods a mystery they aren’t too eager to uncover just now.
Rodney is into documenting Weevil society about as much as John is, which gives John the chance to sit with Rodney for a good half hour and play chess on their little portable chessboard John always has in his pack.
Teyla keeps Jack entertained, trying to spot similarities in weevil society to those of other societies in the Pegasus Galaxy. Apparently, there are many more than they had initially suspected; John, Rodney and Ronon respond with the same cheer Sam has when faced with the IOA.
After the valley they move on to the clearing in the forest they suspect was the space-time rift, trying to assert location and a confirmation for the viability of their plan.
Really, it had all been going so well.
Ronon is the first to spot them as he guards their six. The weevils are following them, slowly, covertly, but Ronon can spot them just the same. He warns John and Jack, who agree to try and make another klick and see how the weevils behave.
They barely make half a klick before Ronon starts getting worried.
“They have been steadily increasing in numbers ever since we started approaching the clearing,” says Teyla, stopping everyone. “What if that part of their planet is… sacred to them, or forbidden?”
Jack nods. “A place they would guard highly,” he says.
“Like they seem to be doing now,” says Rodney worriedly, he can spot weevils up on the trees.
Jack looks at John. “We could try and get to the clearing, but if there’re too many of them we won’t have a chance.”
John nods. “Let’s get back to the gate.”
“The gate’s the way we came from!” says Rodney.
“Then we’ll make a wider u-turn for the gate. I’m not willing to test just how pissed these guys can get when provoked,” he says.
Jack laughs mirthlessly. “Oh, believe me, you don’t.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Come on,” says John, taking the lead and turning to their left.
That’s when things go awry.
The weevils, probably mistaking their change in direction as either an attack or a trick, launch themselves in attack.
“Get to the water!” Jack screams, and John remembers from the briefing, Jack theorizing they didn’t like the water.
Ronon is shooting his gun, covering their six as they run in the direction the sounds of the waterfall is coming from. It gets louder with every step they take, and it looms before them when they find it.
The waterfall’s not very high, and the river below it kind of small, but it doesn’t matter. They climb up on the rocks besides the waterfall, slippery as they are. The adrenaline rushing in them makes it easy though, as though they’ve been rock climbing all their lives.
They find a small platform were all four of them can stay - four?
John helps Rodney up on the rock platform only to see Jack below, captured by a weevil, being dragged by one of his feet.
“Jack!” screams Rodney, the weevils slowly circling the fallen man.
Jack kneels on the ground, disheveled, and looks in their direction. Then, then - Jack says the most awful of things: “Shoot me!” he yells.
Rodney looks at John, who looks at Ronon, who looks at Teyla, and nobody knows quite what to make of it.
“Shoot me, Sheppard - John, shoot me,” Jack says, staring straight at John, a hand slapping his chest. “Now. Shoot me. Shoot me!”
And John knows that look, he knows it all too well, because it’s the look he saw on Sumner, it’s the look he’s seen so many other times before, when you just want it to be over with, when you just want to be gone.
So John shoots him.
Jack is shot right in the middle of the chest, a perfect shot - as perfect as it was when he shot Sumner, John thinks. The weevils are scared by the shot, they disperse a bit around Jack, the circle becoming a bit more loose.
But Jack’s dead now, dead, and the weevils know this, and as soon as they get the idea, they run away. It could be because they have no interest in the dead, it could be because someone just got killed; no one really cares at this point.
Rodney looks at John as if can’t believe it, and he half scrambles down to the ground to get to Jack before Ronon stops him, an arm across his chest, forcing him to stop until all the Weevils are gone.
Once they are gone, though, Rodney shoots forward, the slippery rock making his descent easier. John is on his heels before Rodney either cracks his head against the rock or a stray Weevil thinks Rodney’s a willing prey.
Rodney kneels besides Jack, taking a look at the scene, but there’s not much that can be done - John is a frighteningly good shot. There’s a small hole on Jack’s clothes, bleeding still, though not much. Jack’s eyes are open wide, and John closes them.
John turns to Ronon and tells him to go ahead and dial the gate, they’ll probably be coming in hot. Rodney keeps still besides Jack, as if not wanting to believe he’s dead.
John takes Rodney’s arms, wanting to get out of there - Jack died to keep them safe, the might as well not make Jack’s death in vain.
And then, of all things to happen, Jack wakes up.
John backs up a step, Teyla and Rodney kneel back down besides him. “Jack?” calls Teyla softly.
Jack groans. “Oh, I hate it when that happens,” he says, rising up to lean on his elbows.
Rodney’s eyes are opened wide. “I- don’t get it.”
“I shot you,” says John.
“And I can’t die,” says Jack, getting up, stretching his hands to help both Teyla and Rodney up, who are in slight shock. “I’m sorry I never told you,” says Jack to Rodney. “It’s a long s-”
Teyla shakes herself, looking around. “We need to get out of here,” she says. “They could come back,” she says, and John notices she's absentmindedly stroking her belly.
“Teyla’s right, we can discuss this in Atlantis,” says John, bringing up their rear as they head for the gate.
+++
Continued in Part 2
Planet Of The Weevils (Crossover with Torchwood)
Author: moodymuse19
PG-13
Words: roughly 12,000
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard, vague Jack/Ianto, UST Jack/Rodney
A. N.: Blame le_mousquetaire for this. It was her prompt that inspired me.(Crossover Torchwood/SGA --- UST Rodney/Jack, Jealous!Sheppard.)
I had Johnny Cash’s Solitary Man and Marilyn’s Manson’s The Beautiful People almost on continuous loop while writing this. Sometimes, Have you Ever Seen the Rain got in between. Also, Joey Ramone’s version of What A Wonderful World. The soundtrack to this fic is very odd.
Not beta'ed, so point out mistakes you see. Set up in Season 4, mid-season, somewhere before Outcast)
+++
I
Rodney is nervous. He wouldn’t admit it under threat of torture, under threat of someone wiping his laptop hard drive clean, but Rodney is nervous.
What’s worse is that John notices this. Everyone in the SGC’s Gateroom does, Ronon and Teyla well included judging by their little smiles. Hell, Harriman can probably see it from his vantage point up above and may possibly be having a good laugh at him with Landry.
John frowns at him - Rodney is wringing his hands. “Seriously, who is this guy?”
“Need to know basis, Colonel,” says Rodney, and he’s been repeating that for about a day, he knows it won’t work for much longer.
“I have one of the highest clearings available in this country and I’m about to meet the guy. Is he some sort of expert, or -”
Rodney likes that explanation. “After a fashion. Yes, an expert.”
John’s not buying it, but Rodney chooses to ignore this. “Then why does he make you so nervous?”
“He doesn’t. It’s those things we found on the planet”
“Weevils,” says John, his dislike of the name obvious.
“Hey, I didn’t name them!”
“I did,” says Jack Harkness from the doorway.
It’s odd how he fits in. You’d have thought that seeing someone dressed in a long coat from the 1940s, twenty-eight levels down in Cheyenne Mountain would’ve been about as matching as seeing Ronon in ballet slippers, but no. Jack Harkness fits anywhere he goes, it seems, even at a place he found exists only twenty hours ago.
Rodney’s nervousness leaves all of a sudden, he’d forgotten just how good looking the bastard was.
“Ah, it’s good to be in the old country again,” he says, hands on his hips, looking at the Stargate as if he was going to come on to it.
“Which makes no sense because you’re about as American as I am,” says Rodney, trying to sound mildly peeved. He fails, miserably.
“Nice to see you too, Rodney,” says Jack, a hand on his shoulder. “And these are…?”
“My team,” says Rodney. John clears his throat and Rodney rolls his eyes. “His team, whatever. Colonel John Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex.”
Jack shakes hands and receives polite ‘hello’s and actually kisses Teyla’s hand, which amuses her immensely, she’s never thought much of that Earth custom. Ronon has his brow furrowed the same way he does when when’s sharing the same breathing space as Todd. Sheppard seems to share opinions with Ronon.
“Warm welcome,” Jack says conversationally and then turns to Rodney again. “Tell me about the planet.”
Rodney points at the event horizon, which won’t stay open for much more. “Planet of the Weevils? Well, we came across it by pure chance. We hadn’t a chance of connection to that planet for four years and one fine day it did, which usually means the locals unburied the gate…” he keeps talking and talking.
John watches them walk up the ramp, Rodney talking a mile a minute. Harkness is listening with rapt attention and at the same time he’s looking at the event horizon in fascination.
Rodney talks on, and grabs Harkness’s arm, and Harkness touches Rodney’s back and his arm and oh, won’t the next days be lots of fun, John thinks.
+++
II
The worst thing about Harkness, John decides, is that you can’t dislike him, not really. He’s seen it already, he’s seen the women at the SGC and Midway staring at him in that way that universally means ‘Who is that?’
Hell, had Rodney not been in the picture John himself might’ve been staring at the guy. He’s not blind, not really. But John has been stupidly in lust with Rodney for, how long now? So Jack Harkness is really not attracting John’s attention.
Protocol makes them spend a whole day at Midway. Rodney sees entirely too much of Harkness and John doesn’t see enough of Rodney. John, though, sees enough of Bill Lee and Kavanagh to last a lifetime.
Even when they gate to Atlantis they need to wait a whole day to go back to the Weevil planet, which has nights long enough to be called ridiculously long. Rodney had initially looked at the video feed from the MALP and said the planet’s nights might be why the weevils come out mainly at night in Cardiff, which had left everyone in the control room confounded. Weevils? Cardiff? What the -? Had Rodney finally lost it?
And then Sam had laughed a nervous little laugh, and said this odd planet merited the visit of… an old friend of them.
Rodney fills Harkness -
Jack, he had insisted during dinner on the first day; call me Jack. Fine, answers John’s brain in that vindictive little voice he uses sometimes when he catches someone looking at Rodney in that way Rodney never catches and John never misses. It’s the kind of look that makes it very clear they’re not looking at his intelligence, not really, not one bit.
The kind of look Jack has been giving Rodney, of course.
Rodney fills Jack in on everything they’ve got on the Weevil Planet, which is frankly not a whole lot. There were atmospheric readings and videos of the humanoid things transmitted by the MALP. They’d caught a small area not far from the gate, void of both animal and plant life, avoided by the locals, which Rodney was theorizing had to be the center of the ‘rift’.
What that meant, nobody had filled him in yet.
Jack and Rodney call for a meeting a little before lunch, roughly eighteen hours before they’re scheduled to go offworld.
John, Ronon and Teyla and several others are filled in, and learn of the Spacetime Rift, which has been depositing weevils and other strangeness in Cardiff for decades now.
“The weevils have been dropping in on Cardiff for longer than anyone cares to admit,” says Jack, and Rodney, of all things, looks bored, as if he’s heard this a thousand times before. “Once in a while, they’ll come up to the surface and kill people.”
That gets John’s attention. No wonder both the American and British governments had agreed quickly on this mission.
The meeting is informative but brief, and the mission is very clear: find a way to either close the spacetime rift in the Weevil Planet, or find a way for the weevils to stop falling into it.
Jack has a plan, and it sounds easy enough: they can seal the rift by having something explode on it - he explains something about 1869, the Cardiff rift and the ancestor of a friend of his. The explanation leaves Ronon and John frowning at each other in confusion, but the bottom line is clear enough: they have to make something explode.
As soon as the meeting is over, John snatches Rodney away.
He doesn’t do it literally, of course; he simply calls his team over for lunch and hopes Sam will entertain Jack long enough, which she does.
It’s a team lunch like they haven’t had in a while, with Ronon and Rodney playing a silent battle for who can shovel more food into their mouths. Even Teyla is eating normally - she hadn’t been feeling too well lately, but as if the idea of Team Lunch had made Baby behave, she’s back to her usual self.
John lets a good deal of their time go by without touching the subject of Harkness - Jack. They haven’t had a lunch like this in a good while, and he enjoys them more than he lets on.
He is waiting, though, for the perfect moment to start the conversation. The lunch rush has been over for an hour now, and it’s the perfect chance for Rodney to share some past history.
Maybe Rodney will even find out what John’s been thinking lately and he’ll laugh at the mere idea of Jack Harkness and him in that way. Jack’s as straight as they come, Rodney will say.
It sounds about as plausible as Rodney giving up coffee but hey, he can dream, right?
Of course, this is the Pegasus Galaxy. When was the last time things went right in this place?
“So, big explosion?” he says somewhere between Ronon’s third helping and Teyla’s second.
Rodney rolls his eyes. “Leave it to you to reduce an incredibly complex plan to a two-word summary. Do you have any idea of the calibrations and calculations that will have to be done so the explosive device can be beamed where it will make the most damage to the rift?”
“Will it include a big explosion?”
Rodney sighs. “Yes,” he admits reluctantly. John grins.
“So what’s the deal with this guy?” asks Ronon before John has a chance to say anything else. John has to contain himself because he really feels like kissing the big guy right now.
“We’re friends,” shrugs Rodney, frowning at his fries as if they were an equation. John has to grin, because Rodney doesn’t do ‘casual’ in any manner that’s convincing.
Ronon snorts into his glass of juice and Teyla grins, and John feels his grin grow to the widths of the Cheshire Cat’s.
“So you had friends before us,” John teases as he steals a fry from Rodney’s plate.
Teyla kicks his foot. “John…”
“I’ll have you know I did,” says Rodney, waving his finger about and getting his plate farther away from John. “Sam and I worked with him some years ago.”
“That’s it?” asks John as he rubs his foot. Damn Teyla’s shoes, that hurt.
“What, you want me to tell you we saved the world? Actually we did,” he says, smirking, self satisfied. “I’d tell you all about it if it hadn’t been classified by two different governments.”
“When we ask about him we don’t exactly mean the job,” says John, though he’s curious about that too, now.
Rodney’s eyes widens as he gets it. “Oh! Oh. Um.” He seems to be thinking hard of what to say next - it’s an odd expression on him, Rodney tends to have no filter before he speaks. “Jack is… an open minded guy.”
Subtle, thinks John, and he’s not gutsy enough to mention Rodney’s mind is pretty open too. “Certainly looks like it,” he says instead.
“What do you mean?” frowns Rodney.
“He hasn’t stopped touching you since he arrived at the SGC, Rodney,” says John, trying for casual. Ronon’s smirk tells him he fails at casual about as much as Rodney.
“John,” says Teyla sternly, and she means business this time.
“Hey, if I picked up on it, the rest of Atlantis can too,” which surprises even John himself because, wow, it’s true. If Rodney isn’t careful he’ll have the whole city talking about him.
Teyla frowns, troubled, as she admits his point; Ronon shrugs, he’s never understood Earth’s reluctance to accept all kinds of relationships.
Rodney, however, is entirely focused on something else. “He hasn’t stopped touching me?” he asks in disbelief. John fears the tangents Rodney’s mind is taking, but he still shakes his head.
Rodney has this odd look in his face, and he thinks for about two seconds before he stands up. “I have to go,” he says, and is off before John can object.
Ronon is smirking, Teyla touching his arm and saying his name in that voice you better obey or else…
Rodney is still gone. After Jack, probably.
So, thinks John. That didn’t go as planned.
III
With six hours to go to the Weevil Planet, Rodney is still up, using two laptops at the same time, making calculations of all kind. The lab is deserted and silent (the only moment of the day when Rodney can work undisturbed.)
His mind concentrated on the laptops in front of him, he hardly notices the figure that comes to stand at the doorway of the lab, smirking slightly.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” says Rodney absentmindedly. Then he notices it’s Jack on the doorway, not John. “Oh. Hi.”
Jack enters the lab and heads for a chair across Rodney’s desk. “Oh, don’t tell me you forgot about me so soon,” he says, dropping into the chair in a slouch that would give John a run for his money.
“No, no - that’s usually Sheppard’s spot,” he says, waving a hand at the doorway. “He has this annoying habit of appearing at this hour and hauling my ass into bed.”
“Hmm, Ianto has that same habit,” says Jack with that smile of his that only means one thing, and damn him, thinks Rodney, six years later and he still has that effect on him.
Rodney’s is grateful for the desk between them, choosing to ignore the messages his body is sending. He powers down his laptops, busying himself with keys and clicks and saving documents. “No, Ianto does not have the same habit. John is a Colonel and he hauls me into my bed to sleep.”
Jack sighs. “Yes, real waste. I’ve seen some interesting things going around here,” and Rodney can testify to that - Jack’s been staring at Lorne all day long. “Your Colonel included.”
Rodney snorts. “Tell me about it.”
Jack’s eyebrows shoot up in delight. “Ah.”
Rodney regrets ever saying anything. “Don’t - don’t even.” Whatever intentions Rodney had of talking to Jack about what John had said during lunch flies out of the window.
And Jack’s not an idiot, not by far. He knows that John is military, that there’s American militia all over the place here - not exactly the best of places to even think of a relationship between two people of the same sex.
“Right. So, how are calibrations going?” he asks, and Rodney is silently grateful at the change of subject.
“Bad. Be glad tomorrow’s a recon mission only and not the real thing.” He looks at the laptops in disgust. “Unless we get the séance girl your friend used in 1869, we’re going to have a hard time knowing where the rift is stronger. I mean, the MALP barely even picks up any anomaly at all.”
Jack shrugs. “Well, it’s not like we’re in a rush.”
“Unless another weevil slips through while I’m fiddling with this.”
Jack frowns. “And if it does, and if it lands up in Cardiff, Gwen and Ianto are more than able to capture it,” says Jack pointedly, because he knows Rodney, he knows he’s acquired the habit of making his responsibility things that actually aren’t, as if being incredibly smart means all the responsibility has to land on his shoulders and no one else’s.
Maybe he’ll have a talk with Rodney’s Colonel - if he doesn’t bite his head off at some point in the conversation.
Speak of the devil, laughs Jack internally, as John appears on the doorway of the lab.
“McKay, what do -” He stops abruptly when he sees Jack there. “Oh. Didn’t know you -”
“No, no, I was leaving anyway,” says Rodney as he stands up, his laptops already powered down.
“You were?” frowns John because Rodney’s stopped working rather early and is going to bed voluntarily. The last time that happened was… in another universe, probably.
Then Jack stands up, and John feels his heart shrink a little bit. “Oh. Right, of course. I’ll, just -” he says, pointing at the door and wanting to bolt before Jack gets any closer to Rodney and starts touching him again.
Rodney looks peeved. “Don’t be an idiot,” he says, and grabs two laptops off the table. “Here, be useful. Help me get that to my quarters,” he says as he dumps the laptops in John’s arms and he grabs another couple.
John sees Jack frown as they leave the lab, and his reputation goes up a notch in John’s eyes as he consciously makes an effort to walk on one side of Rodney and not between Rodney and John.
“Is there any sensible reason why you would need so many laptops in your quarters?” asks Jack.
“There’s sensitive material I work on…?” he says, and when Jack keeps frowning, Rodney rolls his eyes and goes on. “I’m just not willing to put it up on the base mainframe, readily available for any idiot to screw it up.”
Jack smiles as they get into a transporter. “Ah, that explains it all.”
“No,” says Rodney, punching part of the map on the transporter. “Come back in the morning and look at the people I have to deal with everyday. That will explain it all.”
“Hey, Clarissa,” says John to Rodney. “Remember what Sam had said about appreciating the people who work for you and all…”
“I’ll appreciate them when they are worthy of it,” says Rodney as he gets off the transporter.
Jack sighs. “Oh, the whining. Good to know some things don’t change,” he says, winking at John.
Rodney frowns at Jack. “What, you - you missed my whining?”
“No, no one can miss that. It’s just… soothing,” says Jack, winking at them as he leaves for this quarters. John had never seen anyone wink in a lewd way before.
Rodney frowns at Jack’s back. “Soothing.” He looks at John. “I’m soothing?”
John grins. “No, Rodney.”
“Didn’t think so,” says Rodney, palming the door of his quarters open. “Just, drop those there, thank you.”
John deposits the laptops over Rodney’s bed and is about to leave for the night when Rodney calls him back. “Hey,” he says.
John turns around, and sees Rodney - standing in the middle of the room, looking at nothing in particular; he’s wringing his hands again. John’s mind grinds to a halt and then promptly runs away.
“Did, um. Did you really think there was something between Jack and I? When you arrived at the lab?”
John swears in his mind. He should’ve just gone straight to bed. Damn his idea of checking Rodney’s lab. “Well, you were going to bed voluntarily,” he says lightly, nodding in the direction Jack left. He doesn’t leave the threshold of Rodney’s quarters, hoping for a quick escape
Rodney glares. “You’re an idiot.”
“No, I mean it,” and he does, actually. “Usually I have to drag you out. When I arrived you had everything closed off already. Not many things will do that.”
“What do you think of him?” he frowns.
John shrugs. “I barely know the guy,” he tries.
Rodney crosses the room, hauls John inside and palms the door close. If he was ever nervous about the conversation, it’s all gone now. “You’ve known him for two days now; I think that’s enough time to get a first impression.”
“Why do you want to know what I think of him?”
“I want an outside opinion,” he shrugs. “I’m a scientist, science tends to be a team effort, sadly.” John smiles. He’d bet anything Rodney is thinking of a future Nobel Prize, where he’d have to share his prize with someone else.
“Jack is a person not a science project, Rodney.”
“I know. It’s just -” Rodney sits down on the bed. “Several years ago, Jack and I had to work together. The SGC sent Sam to join us later on when things went even further down the drain - I cannot say more than this, sorry, but the thing is, for about a month, Jack and I worked together, mostly on our own. And well, danger, adrenaline…”
John sits down on the bed besides Rodney. He nods. “One thing led to the other...”
“Exactly. At the end of the three weeks, Sam arrived to help and he started flirting with her, which is when -”
John interrupts, brow furrowed about as deep as it can go. “He cheated on you?”
Rodney shakes his head. “Cheating implies a previous promise of monogamy, which never happened here. Anyway, we're talking Sam, here. Do you see her with someone like Jack?”
John grins. “Not really.” And before Rodney can say anything else, he says, “Jack and you were fuck buddies.”
Rodney winces. “God, Sheppard!”
John leans back a bit, resting on his hands. “Were you?”
“Yes, but I tend to phrase it differently,” says Rodney, trying not to watch John slouching lazily on his very bed. “The arrangement that - well, it didn't agree with me. I mean it did, it, um, seriously did. Several times along -”
Dammit, winces John internally. “McKay!”
“Sorry, sorry,” he says quickly. “But when the next pretty thing crossed his path, I was… relegated.”
“Creep,” mutters John.
“No, no, that's just how he works, he’s a good guy,” he says, because they have to be out in the field tomorrow, and he needs to know John won’t oops! forget Jack back in the planet.
“It’s just very confusing to have him here,” says Rodney. “I like him, but that kind of relationship isn't me, you know? Although I hear he's got someone sort of steady now. He told Sam...” He trails off as he looks at John. “You don’t like him.”
“No, I don’t,” John says sincerely. He hadn’t liked him before when he kept touching Rodney before his very eyes; he likes him even less now that he knows what had happened.
“Why?”
John suddenly stands up. “Look, it’s getting late and we have a mission early tomorrow. Might not be the best time to have this conversation,” he says, smiling slightly, wanting to blow the whole thing off.
And Rodney takes an eternity to answer, an eternity which makes John sweat beyond anything else. He doesn’t want Rodney to find out how he feels for him, not really. He doesn’t want awkward, he doesn’t want Rodney not knowing how to behave himself around John, he really -
“Sure,” says Rodney casually. Possibly a little too casually. “Goodnight.”
And all through the conversation, from the lab to his bed here - hell, from the SGC till now, Rodney had thought that John didn’t like Jack because he was so open about his sexuality. Rodney’s not an idiot, he knew John wasn’t homophobic. But being under the thumb of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, thought Rodney, must make him uncomfortable to even deal with that sort of thing so under his nose.
But now, Rodney wonders, putting his laptops away and undressing and brushing his teeth. Now he wonders if John’s reason to dislike Jack wasn’t one entirely different than what Rodney had supposed.
Predictably, he goes to bed with a smile.
IV
John should really, really start getting suspicious when a mission starts so good.
Seriously, it had started well. Jack was getting less on his nerves today than the previous days, the sun was high up in the sky when they arrived to the Weevil Planet, and not one of those creatures were in sight. They were scary enough on a picture from the MALP, John had no desire to see one in the flesh.
The planet was pretty, too. Dense with vegetation, a waterfall nearby judging from what he could hear, many local birds and animal life. If it weren’t for the Weevils, it could’ve been paradise.
They had found what looked like some sort of city or community deep down in a valley, overlooked by a dense forest growing on top of a cliff. It was a perfect vantage point to look at the community below without being watched.
Jack takes the opportunity to take videos and photos and generally document the weevils below, who are going about in their community like any other society they might’ve come across. The absence of children puzzles everyone, their reproductive methods a mystery they aren’t too eager to uncover just now.
Rodney is into documenting Weevil society about as much as John is, which gives John the chance to sit with Rodney for a good half hour and play chess on their little portable chessboard John always has in his pack.
Teyla keeps Jack entertained, trying to spot similarities in weevil society to those of other societies in the Pegasus Galaxy. Apparently, there are many more than they had initially suspected; John, Rodney and Ronon respond with the same cheer Sam has when faced with the IOA.
After the valley they move on to the clearing in the forest they suspect was the space-time rift, trying to assert location and a confirmation for the viability of their plan.
Really, it had all been going so well.
Ronon is the first to spot them as he guards their six. The weevils are following them, slowly, covertly, but Ronon can spot them just the same. He warns John and Jack, who agree to try and make another klick and see how the weevils behave.
They barely make half a klick before Ronon starts getting worried.
“They have been steadily increasing in numbers ever since we started approaching the clearing,” says Teyla, stopping everyone. “What if that part of their planet is… sacred to them, or forbidden?”
Jack nods. “A place they would guard highly,” he says.
“Like they seem to be doing now,” says Rodney worriedly, he can spot weevils up on the trees.
Jack looks at John. “We could try and get to the clearing, but if there’re too many of them we won’t have a chance.”
John nods. “Let’s get back to the gate.”
“The gate’s the way we came from!” says Rodney.
“Then we’ll make a wider u-turn for the gate. I’m not willing to test just how pissed these guys can get when provoked,” he says.
Jack laughs mirthlessly. “Oh, believe me, you don’t.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Come on,” says John, taking the lead and turning to their left.
That’s when things go awry.
The weevils, probably mistaking their change in direction as either an attack or a trick, launch themselves in attack.
“Get to the water!” Jack screams, and John remembers from the briefing, Jack theorizing they didn’t like the water.
Ronon is shooting his gun, covering their six as they run in the direction the sounds of the waterfall is coming from. It gets louder with every step they take, and it looms before them when they find it.
The waterfall’s not very high, and the river below it kind of small, but it doesn’t matter. They climb up on the rocks besides the waterfall, slippery as they are. The adrenaline rushing in them makes it easy though, as though they’ve been rock climbing all their lives.
They find a small platform were all four of them can stay - four?
John helps Rodney up on the rock platform only to see Jack below, captured by a weevil, being dragged by one of his feet.
“Jack!” screams Rodney, the weevils slowly circling the fallen man.
Jack kneels on the ground, disheveled, and looks in their direction. Then, then - Jack says the most awful of things: “Shoot me!” he yells.
Rodney looks at John, who looks at Ronon, who looks at Teyla, and nobody knows quite what to make of it.
“Shoot me, Sheppard - John, shoot me,” Jack says, staring straight at John, a hand slapping his chest. “Now. Shoot me. Shoot me!”
And John knows that look, he knows it all too well, because it’s the look he saw on Sumner, it’s the look he’s seen so many other times before, when you just want it to be over with, when you just want to be gone.
So John shoots him.
Jack is shot right in the middle of the chest, a perfect shot - as perfect as it was when he shot Sumner, John thinks. The weevils are scared by the shot, they disperse a bit around Jack, the circle becoming a bit more loose.
But Jack’s dead now, dead, and the weevils know this, and as soon as they get the idea, they run away. It could be because they have no interest in the dead, it could be because someone just got killed; no one really cares at this point.
Rodney looks at John as if can’t believe it, and he half scrambles down to the ground to get to Jack before Ronon stops him, an arm across his chest, forcing him to stop until all the Weevils are gone.
Once they are gone, though, Rodney shoots forward, the slippery rock making his descent easier. John is on his heels before Rodney either cracks his head against the rock or a stray Weevil thinks Rodney’s a willing prey.
Rodney kneels besides Jack, taking a look at the scene, but there’s not much that can be done - John is a frighteningly good shot. There’s a small hole on Jack’s clothes, bleeding still, though not much. Jack’s eyes are open wide, and John closes them.
John turns to Ronon and tells him to go ahead and dial the gate, they’ll probably be coming in hot. Rodney keeps still besides Jack, as if not wanting to believe he’s dead.
John takes Rodney’s arms, wanting to get out of there - Jack died to keep them safe, the might as well not make Jack’s death in vain.
And then, of all things to happen, Jack wakes up.
John backs up a step, Teyla and Rodney kneel back down besides him. “Jack?” calls Teyla softly.
Jack groans. “Oh, I hate it when that happens,” he says, rising up to lean on his elbows.
Rodney’s eyes are opened wide. “I- don’t get it.”
“I shot you,” says John.
“And I can’t die,” says Jack, getting up, stretching his hands to help both Teyla and Rodney up, who are in slight shock. “I’m sorry I never told you,” says Jack to Rodney. “It’s a long s-”
Teyla shakes herself, looking around. “We need to get out of here,” she says. “They could come back,” she says, and John notices she's absentmindedly stroking her belly.
“Teyla’s right, we can discuss this in Atlantis,” says John, bringing up their rear as they head for the gate.
+++
Continued in Part 2