Peg² (14/?)
Title: Square Peg, or, Peg² (Pegasus Squared) [A sequel to Full Circle, set in the Epic Crossover ‘Verse]
Chapter: 14 of ?
Author: neensz
Word Count: ~2,300 [31k+ total so far]
Fandom(s): Leverage, Psych, SG:A
Pairing(s): Eliot Spencer/Shawn Spencer, McShep preslash
Rating: PG-13
General Warnings: language, kid!fic, un-beta’d
Beta: None, so please point out errors (or, you know, volunteer).
Disclaimer: Psych and Leverage and SG:A and Harry Potter (as well as any other television show, movie or book in existence) do not belong to me, nor do any of the characters or places or quotes I'm borrowing for my nefarious slashing purposes. I make no profit from the aforesaid borrowing, or only in the currency of squeeing fangirly joy.
A/N: Wrote this a couple weeks ago and put off putting it up for no reason I can really remember. I think I may have been being optomistic on the whole 'getting ahead' thing. EDIT: apologies for the incoherency. I see now why I didn't post it right away, but I'm leaving it up anyway. I'll fix it later when I put it all together for AO3.
Summary: Everything relevant in life is decided by committee meetings.
One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | ϟ | Thirteen | Fourteen
In Which Meetings are Really Just a Giant Waste of Time
--JOHN--
John finally managed to crank his jaw shut and stop imitating a fish, though not quite as soon after Rodney’s bombshell as he would have liked. He directed a quick and only mildly panicked glance over at Carson, half worried that the coma had snapped something in Rodney’s brain and that their CSO was now bat-shit insane, and half worried that it hadn’t. John didn’t know which would be worse. This was Pegasus though, after all, so who the fuck knew. Carson was no help-the man was staring at Rodney with the same expression John guessed was on his own face, and wasn’t meeting John’s eyes.
Rodney rolled his eyes at the both of them and growled something under his breath-probably derisive and insulting and about their combined IQs, if his tone was any indication-and gave a tug on the wall-end of the wires feeding into his wrist. The wires unspooled or stretched or something, and Rodney started to swing his legs over the side of his bed. Rodney’s movement seemed to jar Carson back to reality, and he took control of the room with his customary iron fist. “You stop right there, lad,” he commanded Rodney, then began to shoo the rest of them out of the room. When Rodney tried to protest, Carson cut him off before he’d even managed to say something (quite a feat, with Rodney). “Unless you want the Colonel and his family here while I give you a once over and remove your catheter, then by all means, Rodney, of course they can stay,” Carson told Rodney with deceptive kindness, and Rodney stopped protesting and John stopped ignoring Carson’s attempts to shoo them out. Friendship only went so far, and definitely not as far as catheter removal. There were some thing a man just didn’t need to see, and a big ass needle being stuck in another guy’s dick was one of them.
“I’ll be back with Woolsey and Zelenka for your debrief as soon as Carson’s done with you, Rodney,” John shot back into the room before he shut the door, “and you better have a fucking good story as an excuse for playin’ hooky for two weeks, man. I’m pretty sure Zelenka spent the whole time cursing me out in Czech,” he muttered to himself after the door hissed shut.
A stifled giggle coming from somewhere around his knees reminded John that he had company-and a fully legitimate reason to vent the storm of emotions currently knotting up his intestines. “What. The hell. Were you thinking?” he asked his bastard brother as evenly as he could manage, including Jesse in the question with a sharp glance. John knew his son, and was fully aware that there was a less than zero percent chance his kid had only been along for the ride. Shawn straightened his spine and opened his mouth to respond, but John cut him off with a quick slash of his hand through the air. “You know what, no. Not here.” He’d realized, thankfully before the explanations had started spilling out, that they were in public and John had no clue whether this was classified information or not. They needed privacy, and even though it stuck in his craw, he should wait for Zelenka and Woolsey. They’d have different points of view and would bring insights to the table that he couldn’t-John was hardwired by now to think in terms of strategy and tactics and military applications, and other viewpoints would be helpful. As would witnesses, in case John felt the urge to commit fratricide or lock Jesse in the brig until he was eighteen. “Go to Conference Room B. I’ll meet you there. If anyone tries to stop you, you feel free to tell them-no,” John paused when he caught sight of Morris lurking in the hallway outside the infirmary. “Morris! Escort these two to Conference Room B. No side trips, other than to the head.”
The partners in crime safely disposed of, John gripped the sides of his head in an attempt to keep his skull from exploding. God. Was this what Elizabeth had felt like when dealing with him and Rodney? No wonder she’d always looked frazzled.
\o/
It didn’t take much negotiating to get Carson to bring Rodney up to the conference room, even though the man had been in a coma not two hours previous. The difficult part had been explaining the need to move Rodney to Atlantis, because even if John had wanted to do this all in the infirmary, there wasn’t enough room for all of them to fit. Finally, Atlantis understood the need and managed to pause whatever she was doing to Rodney’s genetic code (which, you know, scared the shit out of John, but whatever fix she was jerry-rigging was obviously working, so it wasn’t like he could just tell her to stop and send Rodney back into a coma) long enough for Carson to stick Rodney in a wheelchair and zip him through the transporters to the conference room. As soon as they entered the conference room, a panel slid open in the middle of the wall and wires obligingly unspooled. Carson inserted the wires into the raw wounds in Rodney’s arm with a grimace, and John clamped down on the vague nausea that surged in his stomach at the sight.
Once they were all seated around the table, Shawn fidgeting like he was the five year old and not Jesse, John let out a long breath in an attempt to calm himself. Jesus. “Ok,” he started. “Someone start explaining. Tell me why stabbing Rodney with parts of Atlantis seemed like a good idea,” he directed at his relatives, “what the hell you meant when you said the Wraith ship was talking to you in your coma,” John looked at Rodney, “and for those of you just tuning in,” he looked over at Woolsey and Zelenka, who were both obviously bursting with questions, “you now know as much as I do.” John clenched his fists on the table in the second or two of silence that followed. “What the fuck is going on, here?” he asked the room at large as quietly as he could when it looked like no one was going to speak up. Jesse’s eyes got big and doe-like, Shawn fidgeted some more, and Rodney looked like he was completely zoned out, staring over John’s head with a distracted expression. When the others on Rodney’s side of the table (Carson, Zelenka and Jesse) started staring off at the same spot over John’s head, however, he turned around.
One of Atlantis’s clear monitors was descending quietly from the ceiling, like a projection screen in a college auditorium. Inside his head, he felt Atlantis volunteering to explain if he would sit in the Chair for her. The monitor flashed the database’s matrix-like startup screen before displaying blueprints of something that looked vaguely like a Wraith Hive as she continued to cajole John into going to the chair room. He resisted for a few seconds before huffing out a breath of assent. “Atlantis says she’s going to explain. I’ll be in the Chair,” he rolled his eyes.
Woolsey’s shrug looked about as helpless as John felt at the moment. “Hopefully the city will have enough information to make sense of this,” he agreed with John and waved him off. “I will get the human side of the story, Colonel Sheppard.” John left his family to Woolsey’s interrogative mercies and headed for the transporter nearest the conference room.
\o/
The Chair hadn’t even started reclining when Atlantis began bombarding John with equations so complex he could barely comprehend the structure of them, let alone their function or meaning. The equations glowed electric blue against the darkness of his mind, graven so deeply in his consciousness that he didn’t think he’d ever be able to forget them. His mind was silent for a few microseconds after the incomprehensible equations stopped unfurling across the clean slate of the back of his eyelids before Atlantis let out what he could only describe as a huff at his incomprehension. She minimized the equations to the side of his mind, highlighting them for him with a memory marker so he’d be able to look at them again later. (She’d taken to Rodney’s homebuilt OS the whole base used like a fish to water, and had started ‘minimizing’ conversations for him so he’d be able to recall them in their entirety later. John couldn’t decide if he thought it was adorable, helpful, or creepy.)
The montage of images and clips that flashed through his brain next were oddly familiar, which distracted him from their content long enough that Atlantis noticed and paused long enough to throw up a brief screenshot of the base’s communal servers’ directory, before resuming her collage. The flashes she was showing him now were clips and stills from pretty much every science fiction show (most likely illegally) downloaded to the servers, with high concentrations of Doctor Who, Torchwood and Star Trek, along with occasional flashes of scanned comic book pages. It was the comics that finally clued him in, once he recognized that all the pages were from the Crisis on Infinite Earths story arc.
Alternate or parallel universe? he asked her silently, and received a brief affirmative before the Cardiff Rift from Torchwood hung solitary in his mind. So, a rift between alternate universes? Another affirmative, and John realized he was effectively playing Pictionary with the artificial intelligence of a flying alien city. Story of his life, he thought. John figured, with all the time he’d spent in Pegasus, he’d stop being surprised when things like the fate of the universe would depend on his ability to play a drunken party game.
There was an unfamiliar sensation in his head, and John got the uneasy feeling that Atlantis thought his martyr complex was adorable.
--SHAWN--
Big Brother came back from his communion with the city looking shaken. He’d been gone for all of ten minutes, but apparently that was enough time for the city to rock his world. But John’s disturbed demeanor wasn’t what had Shawn on the edge of his seat. Rather, it was the realization that Eliot’s team was due back within the hour, and that El was probably not going to too ecstatic regarding Shawn’s extracurricular activities of the day. Shawn doubted he’d get off as easy as Eliot never finding out-he just wasn’t that lucky. No, El was gonna hop on his high horse and probably lecture Shawn about responsibility or something again. Seemed like the only times he saw El anymore was when he was asleep or scared out of his mind for Shawn (which usually came off as ‘enraged at Shawn’, which wasn’t the most pleasant thing ever even when Shawn knew why El was acting all pissed), and this was probably going to fall under option number two as soon as El got back to the city and got wind of it.
Doctor Z brought Shawn’s attention back to what was going on around him with a high pitched exclamation in Czech that Shawn was almost certain translated as ‘Yes, oh my god, fuck, yes!’ (Shawn knew this because it sounded almost exactly like what the student ambassador from Czechoslovakia had screamed that one night Gus had convinced Shawn to visit him in college when Shawn hadn’t actually gotten past the first room in Gus’s dorm hall. Good times. He’d gone back the next night to actually visit Gus, with a really good excuse involving a raccoon, a squirrel, a jar of peanutbutter and a Molokov cocktail, because what Gus didn’t know didn’t hurt Shawn in the form of wooby!Gus giving Shawn the silent treatment.) At times like now, Shawn was actually grateful for his father’s training of Shawn’s eidetic memory. He rewound the past minute to figure out what had gotten Doctor Z so very, very excited, and remembered Big Brother saying something about travel between multiple universes. Caught up now, Shawn started paying real attention to what John was saying.
“The Wraith ships weren’t designed or built by the Wraith. Like the Go’aould, the Wraith are technological scavengers, not developers. Their ships aren’t even built, they’re born. They’re a species, an intelligent and sentient species that somehow migrated between their universe and ours, and got captured and enslaved by the Wraith. Atlantis say’s they’re pretty much insane now, most of them, except for maybe the really really young ones, because they need some sort of partner or symbiote or something to survive. The Ancients came across the ship-creatures before they even started trying for ascension, so I think they might have met them before the Wraith even existed. Atlantis flagged a lot of entries in the Ancient database for Linguistics to translate for us that relate to the ships.” Shawn’s brother stopped talking and stared around the table for a moment. He was met by dumbfounded silence. “Oh,” John continued, like he’d just remembered something, “Atlantis said, Rodney, that the cruiser was trying to turn you into one of those companions that it seems to need. So, yeah. No more sticking body parts into Wraith ships, anyone.” John fell silent again, and Shawn silently marveled at the way John had managed to say all that without sounding like he belonged in an asylum. He was starting to get how everyone around here just shrugged the strangeness off-because things like this happened all the time in the Pegasus galaxy. Shawn was pretty sure that if there was a God, the Pegasus galaxy was a much better indication that he/she/it had a (really fucking twisted) sense of humor than the freaking platypus.
Fifteen -->
Chapter: 14 of ?
Author: neensz
Word Count: ~2,300 [31k+ total so far]
Fandom(s): Leverage, Psych, SG:A
Pairing(s): Eliot Spencer/Shawn Spencer, McShep preslash
Rating: PG-13
General Warnings: language, kid!fic, un-beta’d
Beta: None, so please point out errors (or, you know, volunteer).
Disclaimer: Psych and Leverage and SG:A and Harry Potter (as well as any other television show, movie or book in existence) do not belong to me, nor do any of the characters or places or quotes I'm borrowing for my nefarious slashing purposes. I make no profit from the aforesaid borrowing, or only in the currency of squeeing fangirly joy.
A/N: Wrote this a couple weeks ago and put off putting it up for no reason I can really remember. I think I may have been being optomistic on the whole 'getting ahead' thing. EDIT: apologies for the incoherency. I see now why I didn't post it right away, but I'm leaving it up anyway. I'll fix it later when I put it all together for AO3.
Summary: Everything relevant in life is decided by committee meetings.
One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | ϟ | Thirteen | Fourteen
In Which Meetings are Really Just a Giant Waste of Time
--JOHN--
John finally managed to crank his jaw shut and stop imitating a fish, though not quite as soon after Rodney’s bombshell as he would have liked. He directed a quick and only mildly panicked glance over at Carson, half worried that the coma had snapped something in Rodney’s brain and that their CSO was now bat-shit insane, and half worried that it hadn’t. John didn’t know which would be worse. This was Pegasus though, after all, so who the fuck knew. Carson was no help-the man was staring at Rodney with the same expression John guessed was on his own face, and wasn’t meeting John’s eyes.
Rodney rolled his eyes at the both of them and growled something under his breath-probably derisive and insulting and about their combined IQs, if his tone was any indication-and gave a tug on the wall-end of the wires feeding into his wrist. The wires unspooled or stretched or something, and Rodney started to swing his legs over the side of his bed. Rodney’s movement seemed to jar Carson back to reality, and he took control of the room with his customary iron fist. “You stop right there, lad,” he commanded Rodney, then began to shoo the rest of them out of the room. When Rodney tried to protest, Carson cut him off before he’d even managed to say something (quite a feat, with Rodney). “Unless you want the Colonel and his family here while I give you a once over and remove your catheter, then by all means, Rodney, of course they can stay,” Carson told Rodney with deceptive kindness, and Rodney stopped protesting and John stopped ignoring Carson’s attempts to shoo them out. Friendship only went so far, and definitely not as far as catheter removal. There were some thing a man just didn’t need to see, and a big ass needle being stuck in another guy’s dick was one of them.
“I’ll be back with Woolsey and Zelenka for your debrief as soon as Carson’s done with you, Rodney,” John shot back into the room before he shut the door, “and you better have a fucking good story as an excuse for playin’ hooky for two weeks, man. I’m pretty sure Zelenka spent the whole time cursing me out in Czech,” he muttered to himself after the door hissed shut.
A stifled giggle coming from somewhere around his knees reminded John that he had company-and a fully legitimate reason to vent the storm of emotions currently knotting up his intestines. “What. The hell. Were you thinking?” he asked his bastard brother as evenly as he could manage, including Jesse in the question with a sharp glance. John knew his son, and was fully aware that there was a less than zero percent chance his kid had only been along for the ride. Shawn straightened his spine and opened his mouth to respond, but John cut him off with a quick slash of his hand through the air. “You know what, no. Not here.” He’d realized, thankfully before the explanations had started spilling out, that they were in public and John had no clue whether this was classified information or not. They needed privacy, and even though it stuck in his craw, he should wait for Zelenka and Woolsey. They’d have different points of view and would bring insights to the table that he couldn’t-John was hardwired by now to think in terms of strategy and tactics and military applications, and other viewpoints would be helpful. As would witnesses, in case John felt the urge to commit fratricide or lock Jesse in the brig until he was eighteen. “Go to Conference Room B. I’ll meet you there. If anyone tries to stop you, you feel free to tell them-no,” John paused when he caught sight of Morris lurking in the hallway outside the infirmary. “Morris! Escort these two to Conference Room B. No side trips, other than to the head.”
The partners in crime safely disposed of, John gripped the sides of his head in an attempt to keep his skull from exploding. God. Was this what Elizabeth had felt like when dealing with him and Rodney? No wonder she’d always looked frazzled.
\o/
It didn’t take much negotiating to get Carson to bring Rodney up to the conference room, even though the man had been in a coma not two hours previous. The difficult part had been explaining the need to move Rodney to Atlantis, because even if John had wanted to do this all in the infirmary, there wasn’t enough room for all of them to fit. Finally, Atlantis understood the need and managed to pause whatever she was doing to Rodney’s genetic code (which, you know, scared the shit out of John, but whatever fix she was jerry-rigging was obviously working, so it wasn’t like he could just tell her to stop and send Rodney back into a coma) long enough for Carson to stick Rodney in a wheelchair and zip him through the transporters to the conference room. As soon as they entered the conference room, a panel slid open in the middle of the wall and wires obligingly unspooled. Carson inserted the wires into the raw wounds in Rodney’s arm with a grimace, and John clamped down on the vague nausea that surged in his stomach at the sight.
Once they were all seated around the table, Shawn fidgeting like he was the five year old and not Jesse, John let out a long breath in an attempt to calm himself. Jesus. “Ok,” he started. “Someone start explaining. Tell me why stabbing Rodney with parts of Atlantis seemed like a good idea,” he directed at his relatives, “what the hell you meant when you said the Wraith ship was talking to you in your coma,” John looked at Rodney, “and for those of you just tuning in,” he looked over at Woolsey and Zelenka, who were both obviously bursting with questions, “you now know as much as I do.” John clenched his fists on the table in the second or two of silence that followed. “What the fuck is going on, here?” he asked the room at large as quietly as he could when it looked like no one was going to speak up. Jesse’s eyes got big and doe-like, Shawn fidgeted some more, and Rodney looked like he was completely zoned out, staring over John’s head with a distracted expression. When the others on Rodney’s side of the table (Carson, Zelenka and Jesse) started staring off at the same spot over John’s head, however, he turned around.
One of Atlantis’s clear monitors was descending quietly from the ceiling, like a projection screen in a college auditorium. Inside his head, he felt Atlantis volunteering to explain if he would sit in the Chair for her. The monitor flashed the database’s matrix-like startup screen before displaying blueprints of something that looked vaguely like a Wraith Hive as she continued to cajole John into going to the chair room. He resisted for a few seconds before huffing out a breath of assent. “Atlantis says she’s going to explain. I’ll be in the Chair,” he rolled his eyes.
Woolsey’s shrug looked about as helpless as John felt at the moment. “Hopefully the city will have enough information to make sense of this,” he agreed with John and waved him off. “I will get the human side of the story, Colonel Sheppard.” John left his family to Woolsey’s interrogative mercies and headed for the transporter nearest the conference room.
\o/
The Chair hadn’t even started reclining when Atlantis began bombarding John with equations so complex he could barely comprehend the structure of them, let alone their function or meaning. The equations glowed electric blue against the darkness of his mind, graven so deeply in his consciousness that he didn’t think he’d ever be able to forget them. His mind was silent for a few microseconds after the incomprehensible equations stopped unfurling across the clean slate of the back of his eyelids before Atlantis let out what he could only describe as a huff at his incomprehension. She minimized the equations to the side of his mind, highlighting them for him with a memory marker so he’d be able to look at them again later. (She’d taken to Rodney’s homebuilt OS the whole base used like a fish to water, and had started ‘minimizing’ conversations for him so he’d be able to recall them in their entirety later. John couldn’t decide if he thought it was adorable, helpful, or creepy.)
The montage of images and clips that flashed through his brain next were oddly familiar, which distracted him from their content long enough that Atlantis noticed and paused long enough to throw up a brief screenshot of the base’s communal servers’ directory, before resuming her collage. The flashes she was showing him now were clips and stills from pretty much every science fiction show (most likely illegally) downloaded to the servers, with high concentrations of Doctor Who, Torchwood and Star Trek, along with occasional flashes of scanned comic book pages. It was the comics that finally clued him in, once he recognized that all the pages were from the Crisis on Infinite Earths story arc.
Alternate or parallel universe? he asked her silently, and received a brief affirmative before the Cardiff Rift from Torchwood hung solitary in his mind. So, a rift between alternate universes? Another affirmative, and John realized he was effectively playing Pictionary with the artificial intelligence of a flying alien city. Story of his life, he thought. John figured, with all the time he’d spent in Pegasus, he’d stop being surprised when things like the fate of the universe would depend on his ability to play a drunken party game.
There was an unfamiliar sensation in his head, and John got the uneasy feeling that Atlantis thought his martyr complex was adorable.
--SHAWN--
Big Brother came back from his communion with the city looking shaken. He’d been gone for all of ten minutes, but apparently that was enough time for the city to rock his world. But John’s disturbed demeanor wasn’t what had Shawn on the edge of his seat. Rather, it was the realization that Eliot’s team was due back within the hour, and that El was probably not going to too ecstatic regarding Shawn’s extracurricular activities of the day. Shawn doubted he’d get off as easy as Eliot never finding out-he just wasn’t that lucky. No, El was gonna hop on his high horse and probably lecture Shawn about responsibility or something again. Seemed like the only times he saw El anymore was when he was asleep or scared out of his mind for Shawn (which usually came off as ‘enraged at Shawn’, which wasn’t the most pleasant thing ever even when Shawn knew why El was acting all pissed), and this was probably going to fall under option number two as soon as El got back to the city and got wind of it.
Doctor Z brought Shawn’s attention back to what was going on around him with a high pitched exclamation in Czech that Shawn was almost certain translated as ‘Yes, oh my god, fuck, yes!’ (Shawn knew this because it sounded almost exactly like what the student ambassador from Czechoslovakia had screamed that one night Gus had convinced Shawn to visit him in college when Shawn hadn’t actually gotten past the first room in Gus’s dorm hall. Good times. He’d gone back the next night to actually visit Gus, with a really good excuse involving a raccoon, a squirrel, a jar of peanutbutter and a Molokov cocktail, because what Gus didn’t know didn’t hurt Shawn in the form of wooby!Gus giving Shawn the silent treatment.) At times like now, Shawn was actually grateful for his father’s training of Shawn’s eidetic memory. He rewound the past minute to figure out what had gotten Doctor Z so very, very excited, and remembered Big Brother saying something about travel between multiple universes. Caught up now, Shawn started paying real attention to what John was saying.
“The Wraith ships weren’t designed or built by the Wraith. Like the Go’aould, the Wraith are technological scavengers, not developers. Their ships aren’t even built, they’re born. They’re a species, an intelligent and sentient species that somehow migrated between their universe and ours, and got captured and enslaved by the Wraith. Atlantis say’s they’re pretty much insane now, most of them, except for maybe the really really young ones, because they need some sort of partner or symbiote or something to survive. The Ancients came across the ship-creatures before they even started trying for ascension, so I think they might have met them before the Wraith even existed. Atlantis flagged a lot of entries in the Ancient database for Linguistics to translate for us that relate to the ships.” Shawn’s brother stopped talking and stared around the table for a moment. He was met by dumbfounded silence. “Oh,” John continued, like he’d just remembered something, “Atlantis said, Rodney, that the cruiser was trying to turn you into one of those companions that it seems to need. So, yeah. No more sticking body parts into Wraith ships, anyone.” John fell silent again, and Shawn silently marveled at the way John had managed to say all that without sounding like he belonged in an asylum. He was starting to get how everyone around here just shrugged the strangeness off-because things like this happened all the time in the Pegasus galaxy. Shawn was pretty sure that if there was a God, the Pegasus galaxy was a much better indication that he/she/it had a (really fucking twisted) sense of humor than the freaking platypus.
Fifteen -->