SGA/SG-1 WIP redux
December 2008 edit: This story has been completed as Orpheus.
As anyone who has ever seen behind the curtain of my writing process can tell you, (1) I'm a little needy neurotic and (2) I suck at coming up with titles. So it should come as no surprise that I have a pithy-and-accurate teaser summary for a story that's less than halfway done and not even in possession of a working title. Perversely, I still don't have such a summary for the Will Be Posted Tonight (No, Really!) artword story.
I don't mean to be posting this as a WIP and I'm not going to go too much further with the sneak peaks once the plot kicks in. In hindsight, I should have dropped this in with the first part and have done with it until the story is finished. But I've got nothing else pressing on my plate right now, so I'm back to futzing with this.
Summary: In the annals of SGC history, it will forever be debated whether the decision to remove then-Major John Sheppard from the Atlantis expedition was an act of great folly or one of great fortune.
Continuing from here.
Glossary
September 2005
"What is this?" John asked, gesturing toward the makeshift piggy bank Bagley and Ringler had carried over to his desk with great ceremony. It had once been a water tank, vaguely reminiscent of the the plastic kind that was used in office water coolers, but bigger, dry, and full of pogs. And on top of his paperwork (which he didn't mind) and his Twizzlers (which he sort of did).
Airman First Class Bagley hid a smile. "It's our fundraiser, sir."
John cocked an eyebrow. "This isn't the result of you shaking down Captain Bonaventura for running a ponzi scheme, is it?"
Senior Airman Ringler giggled like a girl. Which was still disconcerting after four months of sharing an office because Senior Airman Ringler was six-foot-five and most definitely not a girl.
"With all due respect, sir," Bonaventura called out from where he was updating the area and action maps with appropriately-colored pins, "I told you it was an opportunity involving Nigerian bank managers looking for help transferring money to offshore accounts. And you promised not to say anything."
"I didn't think you'd cut me in," John called back, then looked up at Ringler. "So if this isn't from an extortion racket, then what is the cause of our sudden largesse?"
Ringler was still a little giggly. "We started up a fundraiser so we could get rid of our pogs before we get out of here, sir. We're going to use it to buy soccer balls and stuff for the kids."
The pogs would still be good at the PX at Kadena, but it was a nice gesture. The mounted patrols were always looking for candy and toys to give out to the kids who swarmed wherever they went. John wondered if he'd been asked to approve the fundraiser and didn't remember or if Breibauer had simply taken care of it on his own.
"Looks like a good haul," he said approvingly. The pogs in the clear blue tank were of various denominations and designs and, even allowing for nickels and dimes among the quarters, it was probably a decent amount of cash. "Are we selling them on eBay or giving them directly to AAFES?"
"You're really killing all of my ideas today, aren't you, sir?" Bonaventura asked with feigned annoyance as he stepped back to admire his handiwork. Their handiwork, because the maps were a testament to the work they (a collective they including everyone at the base) had done. Swaths of territory marked as heavy with insurgents had been reduced to pockets in some places, eliminated in others, or at least reduced in size everywhere else. You couldn't tell from the bullshit on CNN or in the Times, of course. It was no different from Afghanistan, where the reporters were more interested in body counts than in the fact that there were little girls going to school for the first time. The fourth anniversary of 11 September was next week and everyone was talking about how they were glad they'd be too busy getting out of Iraq to see what the news came up with as a way to forget about what it had once meant.
"Isn't 'buzzkill' part of my job description?" John asked, then turned back to Ringler and Bagley. "You're just showing me this so that I can congratulate you, right? I'm not expected to count it?"
He'd gotten the reputation of being a good guy (for a pilot and a commander), but there was no way in hell that he was spending what little spare time he had counting out change in pogs. Not when he had five emails from the SGC to answer -- it could be more by now; he hadn't checked since before dinner.
"No sir," Bagley answered. "We're taking care of it and then getting Master Sergeant Chang to validate our total."
In the three weeks since O'Neill had stopped by to chat, he'd gotten several updates daily via encrypted email. The SGC was planning another trip to the Pegasus galaxy with the Prometheus -- the Daedalus's successor, the Odyssey, would not be ready in time -- and it seemed like he was going to be on board when it left.
"Good," he told the waiting airmen. "So you can get it off my desk before you completely flatten my licorice."
The men complied.
"It's a good thing you've done here, boys," he said before they took it away. "It speaks well of our unit. And all that other nice stuff I'll end up saying later when I give the big 'I'm Proud of Everyone' speech when we get to Kuwait."
"Thank you sir," Ringler said.
He slouched down to get into his pocket. He had a $10 bill from dinner, when he collected on a bet he'd won with the commander of the infantry unit with which they had worked most often. He'd known that the injury-prone Heisman finalist out of Texas A&M would still be injury-prone once he got to Green Bay. He pulled it out and stood up to tuck it in to the jar. "See if they have any footballs," he told them.
"Yes, sir."
Bagley and Ringler disappeared and John picked up his limp candy and looked at it mournfully.
"That shit's not real licorice, sir," Bonaventura offered from his own desk. Bonaventura's wife sent him jelly beans, which he kept hidden because they were the good kind. John routinely pulled rank to get a handful. "You can get the real stuff off of the Norwegians."
John made a face. "I don't want the real stuff," he replied. The Athosians had traded for the Pegasus equivalent, a tarry substance they prized -- and gave as gifts. He might never want the real stuff again. "And every time I try to trade with the Norwegians, they always want things I don't have in return."
"That's because you always offer them helicopter parts, sir," Bonaventura replied. "They don't have helicopters. At least not here. That's why they're always bumming rides."
"You could have mentioned that four months ago," he said with exaggerated frustration and a knowing look at the sergeant at the radios. Bonaventura knew that he knew that the Norwegians didn't have helicopters in Iraq, just as John knew that the enviably virtuous Bonaventura was no candidate to be running scams. But it made the time pass faster and it made the airmen laugh and Bonaventura understood that. "I'll be sure to pass that information on to Colonel Mitros."
Mitros was the commander of the unit replacing theirs. His headquarters staff had been shadowing John's in preparation for the transition, but thankfully they were off on some orientation thing tonight.
He finished up his paperwork and made sure Bonaventura was set to run the show before he left for the night. They had nothing going on for the first night in a week (the maintenance crews were ready to keel over from exhaustion and had long since drafted everyone from unsuspecting fobbits to flight crews and pilots to help fetch and carry) and John wondered if they'd seen the last action they were going to face on this deployment. They hadn't been moved out of their housing yet, so maybe not.
It was close to ten by the time he got back to his room; he turned on his AC and pulled off his boots and stripped down to his t-shirt and boxers. The AC was starting to die -- too much dust sucked in -- and instead of "arctic," it only achieved "pretty cold" these days and that only most of the time. His laptop was faring better, unlike most, and he plugged in the flash drive with the day's emails in it.
The SGC's plans were all unfolding as he'd imagined they would and he couldn't help but feel a little awed and a lot used. He had spent his time in Atlantis doing his damnedest to prove his worth and nearly died in pursuit of that cause. But when it came time to review, instead of acknowledgement that he wasn't the fuck-up who'd barely escaped court martial (he'd been in the Air Force too long to wish for reward), all they'd ever seen was a placeholder between Sumner and Caldwell. They'd questioned his decisions, his judgment, and his honor, then asked that he swallow his pride and accept the command of SG-1 as a consolation prize for doing the job they wanted but not being the person they wanted. But now Caldwell was gone and suddenly he was not trash anymore.
Whether he was suddenly valuable or not, the SGC was still hedging its bets on him. They were giving him his old job but not with the official title, presumably in case they found Caldwell and he was in any shape to take the job. The current acting commander was Radner, a captain who'd come through the wormhole with Everett and stayed on to mind the store while the bosses had gone home for a visit. The irony that Radner had found himself in a position similar to his own had not escaped John's notice. He figured he'd make Radner his XO -- it was the least he could do to acknowledge the job Radner had done essentially running Atlantis since March. The SGC hadn't had the opportunity to replace Elizabeth and, by leaving Radner in charge, had in fact tacitly militarized the expedition. John knew that it hadn't been the SGC's plan to finally wrest control of Atlantis from civilian hands and then drop them into his own, but so far there hadn't been any word of a new civilian leader to share authority.
Tonight's batch of emails confirmed what had only been vaguely assumed before: he would be separated from his squadron as soon as they were officially replaced and he would be transferred back to the Stargate program. The Prometheus was almost loaded and ready to go and they wanted to beam him directly from Iraq to the SGC. John spent an hour and a half composing an email explaining why that would be a very bad idea and that he'd rather take a few days to fly back like someone who didn't know that there was a spaceship in geosynchronous orbit. First, going as far as Kuwait with his unit would give him a chance to properly thank and congratulate them on a mission accomplished and a job well done and it would make this assignment feel less like a marriage of convenience. He didn't want his men thinking that he'd only been with them because he'd had nothing to do between covert assignments. Second, he'd need the time it would take to fly back to Colorado to shift mental gears. Coming through the wormhole from an Atlantis that still smelled of death and damage to arrive at the SGC had been rough and it would not be much easier to do the same thing from Iraq.
Regardless of how his body would travel, his head was already seemingly en route somewhere between here and there; he'd had to constantly remind himself to pay attention and keep his focus and he was grateful that the distraction hadn't affected anything thus far. He didn't want to leave and yet he couldn't wait to go and it didn't matter that he knew that the SGC saw him as nothing more than a key to a lock. That's how he'd gotten to Atlantis the first time and look at what had happened.
As anyone who has ever seen behind the curtain of my writing process can tell you, (1) I'm a little needy neurotic and (2) I suck at coming up with titles. So it should come as no surprise that I have a pithy-and-accurate teaser summary for a story that's less than halfway done and not even in possession of a working title. Perversely, I still don't have such a summary for the Will Be Posted Tonight (No, Really!) artword story.
I don't mean to be posting this as a WIP and I'm not going to go too much further with the sneak peaks once the plot kicks in. In hindsight, I should have dropped this in with the first part and have done with it until the story is finished. But I've got nothing else pressing on my plate right now, so I'm back to futzing with this.
Summary: In the annals of SGC history, it will forever be debated whether the decision to remove then-Major John Sheppard from the Atlantis expedition was an act of great folly or one of great fortune.
Continuing from here.
Glossary
September 2005
"What is this?" John asked, gesturing toward the makeshift piggy bank Bagley and Ringler had carried over to his desk with great ceremony. It had once been a water tank, vaguely reminiscent of the the plastic kind that was used in office water coolers, but bigger, dry, and full of pogs. And on top of his paperwork (which he didn't mind) and his Twizzlers (which he sort of did).
Airman First Class Bagley hid a smile. "It's our fundraiser, sir."
John cocked an eyebrow. "This isn't the result of you shaking down Captain Bonaventura for running a ponzi scheme, is it?"
Senior Airman Ringler giggled like a girl. Which was still disconcerting after four months of sharing an office because Senior Airman Ringler was six-foot-five and most definitely not a girl.
"With all due respect, sir," Bonaventura called out from where he was updating the area and action maps with appropriately-colored pins, "I told you it was an opportunity involving Nigerian bank managers looking for help transferring money to offshore accounts. And you promised not to say anything."
"I didn't think you'd cut me in," John called back, then looked up at Ringler. "So if this isn't from an extortion racket, then what is the cause of our sudden largesse?"
Ringler was still a little giggly. "We started up a fundraiser so we could get rid of our pogs before we get out of here, sir. We're going to use it to buy soccer balls and stuff for the kids."
The pogs would still be good at the PX at Kadena, but it was a nice gesture. The mounted patrols were always looking for candy and toys to give out to the kids who swarmed wherever they went. John wondered if he'd been asked to approve the fundraiser and didn't remember or if Breibauer had simply taken care of it on his own.
"Looks like a good haul," he said approvingly. The pogs in the clear blue tank were of various denominations and designs and, even allowing for nickels and dimes among the quarters, it was probably a decent amount of cash. "Are we selling them on eBay or giving them directly to AAFES?"
"You're really killing all of my ideas today, aren't you, sir?" Bonaventura asked with feigned annoyance as he stepped back to admire his handiwork. Their handiwork, because the maps were a testament to the work they (a collective they including everyone at the base) had done. Swaths of territory marked as heavy with insurgents had been reduced to pockets in some places, eliminated in others, or at least reduced in size everywhere else. You couldn't tell from the bullshit on CNN or in the Times, of course. It was no different from Afghanistan, where the reporters were more interested in body counts than in the fact that there were little girls going to school for the first time. The fourth anniversary of 11 September was next week and everyone was talking about how they were glad they'd be too busy getting out of Iraq to see what the news came up with as a way to forget about what it had once meant.
"Isn't 'buzzkill' part of my job description?" John asked, then turned back to Ringler and Bagley. "You're just showing me this so that I can congratulate you, right? I'm not expected to count it?"
He'd gotten the reputation of being a good guy (for a pilot and a commander), but there was no way in hell that he was spending what little spare time he had counting out change in pogs. Not when he had five emails from the SGC to answer -- it could be more by now; he hadn't checked since before dinner.
"No sir," Bagley answered. "We're taking care of it and then getting Master Sergeant Chang to validate our total."
In the three weeks since O'Neill had stopped by to chat, he'd gotten several updates daily via encrypted email. The SGC was planning another trip to the Pegasus galaxy with the Prometheus -- the Daedalus's successor, the Odyssey, would not be ready in time -- and it seemed like he was going to be on board when it left.
"Good," he told the waiting airmen. "So you can get it off my desk before you completely flatten my licorice."
The men complied.
"It's a good thing you've done here, boys," he said before they took it away. "It speaks well of our unit. And all that other nice stuff I'll end up saying later when I give the big 'I'm Proud of Everyone' speech when we get to Kuwait."
"Thank you sir," Ringler said.
He slouched down to get into his pocket. He had a $10 bill from dinner, when he collected on a bet he'd won with the commander of the infantry unit with which they had worked most often. He'd known that the injury-prone Heisman finalist out of Texas A&M would still be injury-prone once he got to Green Bay. He pulled it out and stood up to tuck it in to the jar. "See if they have any footballs," he told them.
"Yes, sir."
Bagley and Ringler disappeared and John picked up his limp candy and looked at it mournfully.
"That shit's not real licorice, sir," Bonaventura offered from his own desk. Bonaventura's wife sent him jelly beans, which he kept hidden because they were the good kind. John routinely pulled rank to get a handful. "You can get the real stuff off of the Norwegians."
John made a face. "I don't want the real stuff," he replied. The Athosians had traded for the Pegasus equivalent, a tarry substance they prized -- and gave as gifts. He might never want the real stuff again. "And every time I try to trade with the Norwegians, they always want things I don't have in return."
"That's because you always offer them helicopter parts, sir," Bonaventura replied. "They don't have helicopters. At least not here. That's why they're always bumming rides."
"You could have mentioned that four months ago," he said with exaggerated frustration and a knowing look at the sergeant at the radios. Bonaventura knew that he knew that the Norwegians didn't have helicopters in Iraq, just as John knew that the enviably virtuous Bonaventura was no candidate to be running scams. But it made the time pass faster and it made the airmen laugh and Bonaventura understood that. "I'll be sure to pass that information on to Colonel Mitros."
Mitros was the commander of the unit replacing theirs. His headquarters staff had been shadowing John's in preparation for the transition, but thankfully they were off on some orientation thing tonight.
He finished up his paperwork and made sure Bonaventura was set to run the show before he left for the night. They had nothing going on for the first night in a week (the maintenance crews were ready to keel over from exhaustion and had long since drafted everyone from unsuspecting fobbits to flight crews and pilots to help fetch and carry) and John wondered if they'd seen the last action they were going to face on this deployment. They hadn't been moved out of their housing yet, so maybe not.
It was close to ten by the time he got back to his room; he turned on his AC and pulled off his boots and stripped down to his t-shirt and boxers. The AC was starting to die -- too much dust sucked in -- and instead of "arctic," it only achieved "pretty cold" these days and that only most of the time. His laptop was faring better, unlike most, and he plugged in the flash drive with the day's emails in it.
The SGC's plans were all unfolding as he'd imagined they would and he couldn't help but feel a little awed and a lot used. He had spent his time in Atlantis doing his damnedest to prove his worth and nearly died in pursuit of that cause. But when it came time to review, instead of acknowledgement that he wasn't the fuck-up who'd barely escaped court martial (he'd been in the Air Force too long to wish for reward), all they'd ever seen was a placeholder between Sumner and Caldwell. They'd questioned his decisions, his judgment, and his honor, then asked that he swallow his pride and accept the command of SG-1 as a consolation prize for doing the job they wanted but not being the person they wanted. But now Caldwell was gone and suddenly he was not trash anymore.
Whether he was suddenly valuable or not, the SGC was still hedging its bets on him. They were giving him his old job but not with the official title, presumably in case they found Caldwell and he was in any shape to take the job. The current acting commander was Radner, a captain who'd come through the wormhole with Everett and stayed on to mind the store while the bosses had gone home for a visit. The irony that Radner had found himself in a position similar to his own had not escaped John's notice. He figured he'd make Radner his XO -- it was the least he could do to acknowledge the job Radner had done essentially running Atlantis since March. The SGC hadn't had the opportunity to replace Elizabeth and, by leaving Radner in charge, had in fact tacitly militarized the expedition. John knew that it hadn't been the SGC's plan to finally wrest control of Atlantis from civilian hands and then drop them into his own, but so far there hadn't been any word of a new civilian leader to share authority.
Tonight's batch of emails confirmed what had only been vaguely assumed before: he would be separated from his squadron as soon as they were officially replaced and he would be transferred back to the Stargate program. The Prometheus was almost loaded and ready to go and they wanted to beam him directly from Iraq to the SGC. John spent an hour and a half composing an email explaining why that would be a very bad idea and that he'd rather take a few days to fly back like someone who didn't know that there was a spaceship in geosynchronous orbit. First, going as far as Kuwait with his unit would give him a chance to properly thank and congratulate them on a mission accomplished and a job well done and it would make this assignment feel less like a marriage of convenience. He didn't want his men thinking that he'd only been with them because he'd had nothing to do between covert assignments. Second, he'd need the time it would take to fly back to Colorado to shift mental gears. Coming through the wormhole from an Atlantis that still smelled of death and damage to arrive at the SGC had been rough and it would not be much easier to do the same thing from Iraq.
Regardless of how his body would travel, his head was already seemingly en route somewhere between here and there; he'd had to constantly remind himself to pay attention and keep his focus and he was grateful that the distraction hadn't affected anything thus far. He didn't want to leave and yet he couldn't wait to go and it didn't matter that he knew that the SGC saw him as nothing more than a key to a lock. That's how he'd gotten to Atlantis the first time and look at what had happened.