Kiss the Sky Deleted Scenes
Finally went through the--omg, six or so drafts of If You Want To Kiss The Sky and pulled out the deleted scenes.
These are mostly bits of John's backstory that I decided not to include; I think it really would have widened the scope of the story, not in a good way. There's also the barest bones of a Cadman subplot, and Elizabeth's one line. One of the themes that people kept mentioning was that I was really ignoring the women in this story, which is true; I felt like I just kept needing to take things out and focus it down as far as I could to make it work at all without it being novel-length. So the exploration of women in this 'verse really got the short end of the stick.
Some bits have lines struck through; this indicates that I used the line elsewhere in the finished story but included it in the deleted scenes for context. The tense is screwy because I was going to put the backstory in past tense, or maybe not, and in any case probably switched some of them back and forth.
The same ratings/pairings/warnings apply as in the finished story:
R, John/Various
Warning: John fucks a lot of people, willingly but not necessarily happily.
Deleted scenes
In 1993 they changed the regs and started allowing servicemen to marry.
John saw a few wedding rings come out of the woodwork, even a couple of kids, but didn't think much about it until one evening when he swung his head into Porter's office and said, "Fuck?" the same way he had every third day for seven months.
(John had two day planners. One sat on his desk and said things like MTG 1100; the other was in his head and said things like TUES: JONES. WED: BRECKINRIDGE, BLOWJOB.) He liked Porter, Porter was easy, a quick fuck and show's over, not the prolonged bullshit some of the guys seemed to always want. John was good at going along with the prolonged bullshit, though; he'd cultivated a reputation as someone who likes everyone, someone who's up for anything--yeah, Shep, great guy, good with knots--but it was a relief, sometimes, to do someone easy. So, every third day, skipping Sundays: ANDY PORTER.
Porter was shrugging on his jacket, though. "Sorry," he said. "Promised the wife I'd be home early."
"No problem," John said, and took the rest of the evening off, smiling at a girl he saw in the grocery store, thinking about a slim gold band like a shield.
**
Which, actually, would have worked on a lot of men who weren't John: bring him in, make him part of the group, and he'd have a hard time walking away. But John's John. So not fucking O'Neill sort of does make him want to be a part of the Atlantis expedition, his disinterest that day and every time John sees him after that: the draw of yeah, we need your blood but not your body, do what you want because it's not like Sumner wants you in his band of brothers.
It's not until he actually gets to Cheyenne Mountain and sees O'Neill's frighteningly close-knit relationship to the rest of SG-1 that John realizes it isn't that O'Neill isn't interested in fraternitas as a concept, it's that there's only one group that matters to O'Neill, and it isn't the military as a whole or the United States Air Force or even the Stargate program. That stepping through the wormhole a hundred times with three other people is the only bond O'Neill would ever need.
And John wonders, not for the first time--and not for the last--just what he's getting himself into.
**
Basic Officer Training was the . . . densest, the most intense time of John's life, including the period when he rewrote his entire eighty-seven-page thesis from scratch.
During the day he ran and shot and stood straight; he learned leadership and decorum, the history of the illustrious Air Force and the logic and rules of fraternitas; in the evenings he learned how to suck cock and not to spent two nights in a row with the same person, and how to look completely happy while doing it.
There are a couple of guys there who he could tell joined the Air Force for the easy cameraderie--for the cock, and a couple more who he could tell are there despite it. John didn't count himself in the latter group because unlike them, he didn't make it so fucking obvious that he wasn't interested in playing by the rules of fraternitas. Instead, he played along: he smiled sidelong and he kissed like his life depended on it and he learned how to tell himself to just shut up and fuck, and no one could tell that Shep would really rather be somewhere else.
Twelve weeks after he wandered into Lackland AFB, he was commissioned as a shiny new second lieutenant, saluting crisply. He looked pretty damn sharp for someone who'd been bent over a desk a half an hour before, but then again they all did.
**
When John was twenty-six, he married a girl named Jenny; she was petite, with an easy smile and curly dark hair that tickled his chin when he put his arms around her, and it only took her about a year to decide that neither one of them was getting what they wanted out of marriage.
To John's credit, he figured it out at about the same time, right around the time he realized that whatever anybody said about diversity and no matter that no one was trying to feel him up in the corner, it was the same fucking Air Force it'd been for his father, and that the ring around his finger was as good as a chain holding him down to the ground.
The day John signed the papers, he let a couple of the guys take him out and get him drunk to celebrate; he woke up, disgusting inside and out with beer and sweat and lube and come, but he shoved aside the feeling. From then on he goes back to making friends with pretty much everybody, and soon he has shiny new rank insignia and a helicopter that he loves like he thought he once loved Jenny.
But this is all he needs--soaring through the sky, the controls almost alive under his hands--this, he would do anything for.
**
Holland went down. Holland went down and John ignored the yelling on his radio and curled back for him, the kind of bullshit move you only see in movies.
Except the only cinematic miracle that happened is that John came out of it alive, which was more than he could say for Holland and Patterson and Reay and two Pave Hawks.
At the hearing John sat silently and listened to them say things, all true, things about how John had disobeyed orders and risked lives. He answered their questions and didn't say, you made me into this. You taught me to get so close to them that I'd do anything for them.
But he didn't, and when they decided that they were going to keep him--by dint, he thought, of being marginally more expensive to replace than the helicopters--he accepted the news without emotion.
Antarctica.
**
"Oh," Elizabeth says to John one day, after a briefing, "Since the larger living quarters in sector seven have been cleared, I'm opening them up to couples."
John raises his eyebrows. "Someone you're thinking of moving in with?" he says, deliberately misunderstanding. He's staying the night at Rodney's pretty often now; his own quarters seem useless and empty when he looks in, even though they're full of his crap, and Rodney's suite with its pictures on the walls and double bed and living breathing Rodney who snuffles and snores in his sleep, a constant reminder of his humanity, enticed him away, and he doesn't need to move his skateboard in with Rodney's diplomas to have it.
**
John spends the next night with Rodney, and the night after that; they have a team night a couple of days later, and when Ronon and Teyla leave, Teyla gives John a smile and a hug before touching foreheads with Rodney.
"Did she just give us her blessing?" Rodney says later, coming back in from brushing his teeth; John's standing looking out Rodney's window, watching rain spatter on the city.
John shrugs. "Probably."
Rodney comes up behind him and carefully puts his arms around John's middle, like he's still afraid John's going to bolt. John covers Rodney's hands with his own, and they're both quiet for a minute.
"Do I need to ask Lorne's permission or something?" Rodney says, and John snorts.
"Pretty sure you've got permission from everyone you need to," he says, and they stand and watch the rain ping off of the spires.
**
John doesn't know why he was so drawn to Chaya. (He never tells McKay that) she kind of looks like Jenny, that maybe he thought that he was getting a second chance at his marriage, maybe this way he could have it both ways: the perfect whoa, sorry guys, gotta get home to see the wife, but one who was far enough removed that neither of their lives would really change. There could be advantages to an interplanetary relationship, John thought.
**
"I just," Rodney says, "I'm not having sex with you because you read it in a handbook somewhere."
"Yeah, well," John says lightly, putting on his shades, "I'm not having sex with you because you're a raving lunatic. Looks like we're even."
**
"Sir, we've got a problem," Lorne says.
No, seriously, they've just gotten back from Earth and John's suddenly got like two hundred extra people to deal with--not to mention the civilians--and does not need any more problems.
"It'd better be that the mess is out of blueberry muffins again," John says, and when Lorne cocks an eyebrow, sighs. "What is it?"
"Laura Cadman," Lorne says, and John just looks at him. "She's the only woman right now."
Which, shit. John could have sworn that there were at least three of them who had come in on the Daedalus, not to mention Erin Kaliski, who--oh. Who had died in the siege.
"Mitchell and McClelland were both caught in that virus thing on the way over," Lorne says. "And now we've got one single female."
John rubs his eyes. "Table nine," he says.
Lorne's giving him the Peppermint Patty "You're weird, sir," look again.
"Stick her in with the international complement for now," John explains.
**
"Why not?" John says. "We integrated the non-American personnel about a month in and didn't have any problems."
Lorne sighs. "I realize that this is an experimental expedition in a lot of ways," he begins, and John cuts across his words smoothly.
"Which is why it'll work," he says, and he feels that little rush he gets when he thinks about the fact that he's just been promoted and is commander of the entire base. He feels invincible right now, which might be why he's trying to subvert all the protocol he's ever learned about keeping female personnel separate from the men.
He leans back and touches his radio. "Cadman?"
"Sir?"
"We're a little short on female personnel right now, so we're just going to rotate you through along with everybody else. You mind?"
He hears a delicate snort over the radio line. "All due respect, sir, I've been playing in the boys' club since high school. No problem."
"Excellent," John says, smug. "Socialize at your own discretion."
"Thank you, sir. You know, I think I've already found my girls' poker night."
John finishes and clicks off and Lorne raises his eyebrows. "I'll bet she has," he says.
These are mostly bits of John's backstory that I decided not to include; I think it really would have widened the scope of the story, not in a good way. There's also the barest bones of a Cadman subplot, and Elizabeth's one line. One of the themes that people kept mentioning was that I was really ignoring the women in this story, which is true; I felt like I just kept needing to take things out and focus it down as far as I could to make it work at all without it being novel-length. So the exploration of women in this 'verse really got the short end of the stick.
Some bits have lines struck through; this indicates that I used the line elsewhere in the finished story but included it in the deleted scenes for context. The tense is screwy because I was going to put the backstory in past tense, or maybe not, and in any case probably switched some of them back and forth.
The same ratings/pairings/warnings apply as in the finished story:
R, John/Various
Warning: John fucks a lot of people, willingly but not necessarily happily.
Deleted scenes
In 1993 they changed the regs and started allowing servicemen to marry.
John saw a few wedding rings come out of the woodwork, even a couple of kids, but didn't think much about it until one evening when he swung his head into Porter's office and said, "Fuck?" the same way he had every third day for seven months.
(John had two day planners. One sat on his desk and said things like MTG 1100; the other was in his head and said things like TUES: JONES. WED: BRECKINRIDGE, BLOWJOB.) He liked Porter, Porter was easy, a quick fuck and show's over, not the prolonged bullshit some of the guys seemed to always want. John was good at going along with the prolonged bullshit, though; he'd cultivated a reputation as someone who likes everyone, someone who's up for anything--yeah, Shep, great guy, good with knots--but it was a relief, sometimes, to do someone easy. So, every third day, skipping Sundays: ANDY PORTER.
Porter was shrugging on his jacket, though. "Sorry," he said. "Promised the wife I'd be home early."
"No problem," John said, and took the rest of the evening off, smiling at a girl he saw in the grocery store, thinking about a slim gold band like a shield.
**
Which, actually, would have worked on a lot of men who weren't John: bring him in, make him part of the group, and he'd have a hard time walking away. But John's John. So not fucking O'Neill sort of does make him want to be a part of the Atlantis expedition, his disinterest that day and every time John sees him after that: the draw of yeah, we need your blood but not your body, do what you want because it's not like Sumner wants you in his band of brothers.
It's not until he actually gets to Cheyenne Mountain and sees O'Neill's frighteningly close-knit relationship to the rest of SG-1 that John realizes it isn't that O'Neill isn't interested in fraternitas as a concept, it's that there's only one group that matters to O'Neill, and it isn't the military as a whole or the United States Air Force or even the Stargate program. That stepping through the wormhole a hundred times with three other people is the only bond O'Neill would ever need.
And John wonders, not for the first time--and not for the last--just what he's getting himself into.
**
Basic Officer Training was the . . . densest, the most intense time of John's life, including the period when he rewrote his entire eighty-seven-page thesis from scratch.
During the day he ran and shot and stood straight; he learned leadership and decorum, the history of the illustrious Air Force and the logic and rules of fraternitas; in the evenings he learned how to suck cock and not to spent two nights in a row with the same person, and how to look completely happy while doing it.
There are a couple of guys there who he could tell joined the Air Force for the easy cameraderie--for the cock, and a couple more who he could tell are there despite it. John didn't count himself in the latter group because unlike them, he didn't make it so fucking obvious that he wasn't interested in playing by the rules of fraternitas. Instead, he played along: he smiled sidelong and he kissed like his life depended on it and he learned how to tell himself to just shut up and fuck, and no one could tell that Shep would really rather be somewhere else.
Twelve weeks after he wandered into Lackland AFB, he was commissioned as a shiny new second lieutenant, saluting crisply. He looked pretty damn sharp for someone who'd been bent over a desk a half an hour before, but then again they all did.
**
When John was twenty-six, he married a girl named Jenny; she was petite, with an easy smile and curly dark hair that tickled his chin when he put his arms around her, and it only took her about a year to decide that neither one of them was getting what they wanted out of marriage.
To John's credit, he figured it out at about the same time, right around the time he realized that whatever anybody said about diversity and no matter that no one was trying to feel him up in the corner, it was the same fucking Air Force it'd been for his father, and that the ring around his finger was as good as a chain holding him down to the ground.
The day John signed the papers, he let a couple of the guys take him out and get him drunk to celebrate; he woke up, disgusting inside and out with beer and sweat and lube and come, but he shoved aside the feeling. From then on he goes back to making friends with pretty much everybody, and soon he has shiny new rank insignia and a helicopter that he loves like he thought he once loved Jenny.
But this is all he needs--soaring through the sky, the controls almost alive under his hands--this, he would do anything for.
**
Holland went down. Holland went down and John ignored the yelling on his radio and curled back for him, the kind of bullshit move you only see in movies.
Except the only cinematic miracle that happened is that John came out of it alive, which was more than he could say for Holland and Patterson and Reay and two Pave Hawks.
At the hearing John sat silently and listened to them say things, all true, things about how John had disobeyed orders and risked lives. He answered their questions and didn't say, you made me into this. You taught me to get so close to them that I'd do anything for them.
But he didn't, and when they decided that they were going to keep him--by dint, he thought, of being marginally more expensive to replace than the helicopters--he accepted the news without emotion.
Antarctica.
**
"Oh," Elizabeth says to John one day, after a briefing, "Since the larger living quarters in sector seven have been cleared, I'm opening them up to couples."
John raises his eyebrows. "Someone you're thinking of moving in with?" he says, deliberately misunderstanding. He's staying the night at Rodney's pretty often now; his own quarters seem useless and empty when he looks in, even though they're full of his crap, and Rodney's suite with its pictures on the walls and double bed and living breathing Rodney who snuffles and snores in his sleep, a constant reminder of his humanity, enticed him away, and he doesn't need to move his skateboard in with Rodney's diplomas to have it.
**
John spends the next night with Rodney, and the night after that; they have a team night a couple of days later, and when Ronon and Teyla leave, Teyla gives John a smile and a hug before touching foreheads with Rodney.
"Did she just give us her blessing?" Rodney says later, coming back in from brushing his teeth; John's standing looking out Rodney's window, watching rain spatter on the city.
John shrugs. "Probably."
Rodney comes up behind him and carefully puts his arms around John's middle, like he's still afraid John's going to bolt. John covers Rodney's hands with his own, and they're both quiet for a minute.
"Do I need to ask Lorne's permission or something?" Rodney says, and John snorts.
"Pretty sure you've got permission from everyone you need to," he says, and they stand and watch the rain ping off of the spires.
**
John doesn't know why he was so drawn to Chaya. (He never tells McKay that) she kind of looks like Jenny, that maybe he thought that he was getting a second chance at his marriage, maybe this way he could have it both ways: the perfect whoa, sorry guys, gotta get home to see the wife, but one who was far enough removed that neither of their lives would really change. There could be advantages to an interplanetary relationship, John thought.
**
"I just," Rodney says, "I'm not having sex with you because you read it in a handbook somewhere."
"Yeah, well," John says lightly, putting on his shades, "I'm not having sex with you because you're a raving lunatic. Looks like we're even."
**
"Sir, we've got a problem," Lorne says.
No, seriously, they've just gotten back from Earth and John's suddenly got like two hundred extra people to deal with--not to mention the civilians--and does not need any more problems.
"It'd better be that the mess is out of blueberry muffins again," John says, and when Lorne cocks an eyebrow, sighs. "What is it?"
"Laura Cadman," Lorne says, and John just looks at him. "She's the only woman right now."
Which, shit. John could have sworn that there were at least three of them who had come in on the Daedalus, not to mention Erin Kaliski, who--oh. Who had died in the siege.
"Mitchell and McClelland were both caught in that virus thing on the way over," Lorne says. "And now we've got one single female."
John rubs his eyes. "Table nine," he says.
Lorne's giving him the Peppermint Patty "You're weird, sir," look again.
"Stick her in with the international complement for now," John explains.
**
"Why not?" John says. "We integrated the non-American personnel about a month in and didn't have any problems."
Lorne sighs. "I realize that this is an experimental expedition in a lot of ways," he begins, and John cuts across his words smoothly.
"Which is why it'll work," he says, and he feels that little rush he gets when he thinks about the fact that he's just been promoted and is commander of the entire base. He feels invincible right now, which might be why he's trying to subvert all the protocol he's ever learned about keeping female personnel separate from the men.
He leans back and touches his radio. "Cadman?"
"Sir?"
"We're a little short on female personnel right now, so we're just going to rotate you through along with everybody else. You mind?"
He hears a delicate snort over the radio line. "All due respect, sir, I've been playing in the boys' club since high school. No problem."
"Excellent," John says, smug. "Socialize at your own discretion."
"Thank you, sir. You know, I think I've already found my girls' poker night."
John finishes and clicks off and Lorne raises his eyebrows. "I'll bet she has," he says.