Second String, by Sophonisba [second verse challenge]
-title- Second String; or, Loyauté me lie: a unified field theory of sheppard
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Mostly gen in plotline, with background het. Mentions of slash. Background crossoveriness. Strong language.
-timeframe- Late fourth season.
-spoilers- Up through "Outcast."
-characters- Sheppards original (in both senses of the word) and borrowed, various cameos.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine, but belongs to MGM. So do some of the other works referenced herein. I am not sure of the current owners of the others, but can name among their various creators L. Frank Baum, Walt Disney, Bob Kane, Ian Fleming, Manly Wade Wellman, Jim Henson, George Lucas, Glen Larson, Don Bellisario, and William Goldman. Other such works include Doctor Who, MacGyver, and He-Man. The "Would Tegan Kick My Ass?" test was inspired by WKKMA. Leslie Fish's song "Hope Eyrie" is quoted from, although my mental image was more of the Julia Ecklar cover.
-word count- 9365
-summary- The first time Dave heard of his brother was well before he ever met him.
Second String; or, Loyauté me lie:
a unified field theory of sheppard
The first time Dave heard of his brother was well before he ever met him.
To be perfectly accurate, Dave heard his mother and his cousin Conrad arguing with his father and the telephone, and he put on the TV and waited for it to be over so he could ask what it had been about.
When his mother came and found him, she asked "Dave, how would you like to have a brother about your age?"
"About my age?!" His eyes darted from his mother's flat stomach to her thin tan face, trying to figure out how that would work.
"I don't know whether you know that your Uncle Matthew and Aunt Judy have been acting as foster parents," she began.
Dave shook his head, startled. "They have five kids already. How's that work?"
"Very carefully," Mrs. Sheppard said dryly. "Cousin Conrad would have liked to take care of Johnny himself, but apparently he isn't acceptable to the mighty State of Arizona, and Judy and Matthew are. And now they want to make his situation more permanent, but foster parents don't usually adopt, and as you said they have five kids already, and so it's been suggested that perhaps we could adopt him."
"What's he like?"
"Well, I don't really know. If we thought we might, we'd go and meet him and see whether maybe it might work. Conrad said he's quiet and doesn't speak much English, and Judy said he seems to be learning it slowly, that he tries to be polite, and that he tends to fade into a corner whenever any of her boys are around."
Dave snorted a little. His older Sheppard cousins were big and blond and noisy and looked as if they would grow up to be professional bodybuilders.
Still, he had seen how they treated each other, and it had seemed kind of nice to have a brother...
"Let's go meet him and see if he likes us," Dave said, and his mother smiled.
*
"So why are you involved in all this?" Dave asked when they were on the plane.
"I was in Sedona," Conrad said, managing to sprawl in the narrow airplane seat. Dave liked Conrad, who surfed and played the guitar and had a way of leaning against things that looked as if he had either a few extra joints in his spine or none at all that Dave had tried unsuccessfully to imitate, and who didn't automatically think kids were stupid. "Long story -- but while I was there, I noticed a kid who looked just like I did when I was little, so naturally I wanted to find out who he was. And when I did, it was kind of obvious that the foster care he was in sucked, so I went to Colonel Sheppard and Judy and begged for a favor, and here we are."
"Is he older or younger than me?"
"We're not sure; even now that he's started talking again, we haven't run into anyone who speaks his language or dialect or whatever it is, and he doesn't really volunteer personal information anyway."
"If he wasn't talking, how did you know his name was Johnny?"
"They didn't," Conrad shrugged. "It's short for John Doe, and he answers to it. Maybe someday when he feels more at home he'll tell you or me or your parents what he'd rather be called."
This, if daunting, made sense, and Dave turned the idea over in his head for a bit before something struck him. "Is he a relation or something?"
"I don't see how he can be. I've kept pretty good track of my branch of the family, and yours... look, you know how your dad's grandma came to America, right?"
"No." Dave blinked at him.
"Well... she was from England, and she married one of the American volunteers who came over to help out the RAF, and then went right to America as his wife. And then a few months later your Grandpa Sheppard was born and she quietly divorced her husband so she could marry your Great-Grandpa Brown, and we kind of lost touch with them until I went looking."
"Is that why some of them don't -- " Dave cut himself off before he could say don't like you very much, which might not actually be true and anyway was rude.
"Well, getting divorced was embarrassing back then, so she told everyone that my... great-uncle had died. And he drifted around a lot, and -- anyway, your grandfather was big and blond and burly, and his kids all sort of take after him, while the Sheppards are thin and brown and... " Conrad thought for a moment before coming up with "fine-featured."
"You mean 'too pretty for your own damned good,'" Dave's father grumbled from across the aisle.
Conrad rolled his eyes. "Does Marilyn know you think I'm pretty?" He turned back to Dave. "Anyway, he's a good kid. I'm pretty sure you'll like him."
*
What Johnny proved to be was a shy kid, with a lot of floppy brown hair that fell into his face when he looked at the floor. Dave thought it was considerably lighter than Conrad's, but on the other hand, it was certainly longer.
He had more than enough time to notice, as, other than greeting Conrad with a not-unhappy "Ahm-John" and looking up more nervously when Aunt Judy introduced the rest of them to him, Johnny had spent the rest of the time looking either down or off to one side, even after the children had been banished from the grown-ups' discussion.
"Hey, Star Wars is on," his cousin Lissa said, looking up from the newspaper after her three older brothers had clattered out of the house.
"What channel?" Dave jumped up and covered the distance to the TV in two strides, grateful for something to do other than make conversational overtures that were either ignored or taken up by Lissa, who while not that bad for somebody younger and a girl had something of a habit of monopolizing the conversation.
Johnny, clearly not being an idiot, brightened as soon as the image resolved itself into Han Solo scoffing at the idea that any mystical power controlled his destiny, and settled on the battered couch, rapt-eyed.
"I saw this in the theaters," Dave boasted, sitting at the other end.
"I wanted to," Lissa grumbled, "but Mommy and Daddy said I was too little."
"Well, it does have some sad parts... "
"They took me to see Bambi."
The movie, indeed, exerted enough of an effect on Johnny that he waved his hand in an odd motion at the dogfighting X-wings and TIEs and confided, in an accent that sounded something like Monty Python, "Do that," adding, when Dave blinked, "me."
"You're going to do that when you grow up?" Lissa offered.
Johnny nodded.
"I'm going to be a spy," Dave announced.
Johnny looked at him with incomprehension.
"James Bond," Lissa explained, making the same sort of hand motion at Dave. She thought for a moment, and added "Maxwell Smart."
"LisSA!"
*
Of course it wasn't quite that easy. ("Nothing involving the government ever is," Dave's father had snorted.) Still, eventually Johnny had been moved into the bedroom the Sheppards had made out of what had been the sewing room, officially made over into John B. Sheppard (Dave's mother wasn't sure whether the letter had had some significance before or whether Johnny thought it sounded good now; their father attributed it to a perfectly reasonable taste for Beach Boys songs), given an official birthday picked out by the four of them while debating over a calendar, and had acquired enough English to address his new parents as "Mom" and "Dad" and his whatever-sort-of-cousin-Conrad-was as "Uncle John."
("Why John?" Dave wondered, perplexed. "That's only going to get confusing."
"Conrad John Sheppard," his cousin shrugged, smiling easily. "Maybe he has something against the name 'Conrad,' or he likes the connection. It's not as if there aren't plenty of instances of 'John' in the family history.")
Johnny's understanding of English grew by leaps and bounds, enough to put him into regular school the next year; his understanding of, well, of America, on the other hand...
-- "No, Johnny. Glinda's the good witch. She helps Dorothy. She isn't evil."
"If she wants to help, she can tell Dorothy how to go home there in Munchkinland and take care of the Wicked Witch herself. But she makes Dorothy do all the work, and spies on her even if she helps once, and is evil."
"It makes more sense in the book," Marilyn Sheppard offered dryly, and for the next week the house was full of requests for explanations of what, to Dave, sometimes seemed like every other sentence in The Wizard of Oz. --
-- "Why is that funny?"
"Because Miss Piggy's wearing the outfit she wore in her own television show."
~
"Why is that funny?"
"Because ballet dancing isn't very manly."
"Why not?"
"Because they're dancing around in skintight costumes."
"Like superheroes?"
"Yes, but they're DANCING. I don't know why that makes it different. It just does."
~
"Why is that funny?"
"Because 'She Loves You' is a song by the Beatles, and now it's being sung by Muppet beetles."
"They look more like crickets to me."
"Well, the Beatles did pick their name partly because of the Crickets."
"The who?"
"No, they're later."
Johnny hit him with a throw pillow. --
-- "Did he just EXPLODE?!"
"It's because there's a vacuum in outer space, so the pressure -- "
"Even the vacuum doesn't make you explode, except for little bits like your lungs and maybe your eyeballs. Your skin would hold the rest of you in; it's not like it tears off if you put the vacuum cleaner on it."
"How do you know for sure?"
"Don't they clean tomorrow? We borrow the vacuum for a bit and I'll show you."
"Fine, but you get to do it on you."
"Fine." --
-- "What does this mean?"
"White slavery?" There were days when Dave wished Johnny wasn't trying to catch up on the whole of English literature all at once. "It's, um, making women slaves so you can rent them out as hookers."
"Why is it white? Is sex white?"
"No, THEY'RE white. The girls. Usually."
"So renting men out as hookers is usually a different color of slavery?"
"AAARGH." --
Even after Johnny had mostly gotten acclimated, there were still little blips. Some, Dave was fairly sure, were due to the fact that his brother was a (skinny) big fat dork:
"He's my brother and I have to put up with him, even if he does think Batman's butler is named Duncan and Man-At-Arms is named Alfred."
"What man at arms?" their father wondered, turning a page of The Wall Street Journal.
"Obviously," his helpmeet answered, cutting her eggs, "one called Duncan. Dave, don't make fun of your brother for getting things mixed up."
"I'm not making fun. If I wanted to annoy him, I'd wait until he got back from his morning jog. Besides, Mom, how can he keep thinking Face can fly a, a anything? Murdock is the one who flies. That's why they keep breaking him out, so he can fly them places."
"I thought it was because he was part of the team," Dave's father mildly disagreed.
"Face reminds me of... what was his name? In Star Wars, he ran the floating city..."
"Lando," Dave told her. "Lando Calrissian."
"And he used to fly the Millennium Falcon, so maybe Johnny's subconsciously patching over from that."
and some were almost certainly due to Johnny fucking with him.
"Will you knock it off? They're part of a team. They're practically family. They have to fit into the television screen together. How would you like it if I said Hawke and Archangel from your helicopter show were dating?"
"Well, Archangel might if Marella didn't have a problem with it, but Hawke's too messed up in the head, so neither of them would."
Dave hit him with the much-abused throw pillow.
*
They none of them had thought much, after the nightmare of paperwork was over, about where Johnny had come from, or why he had been found wandering the outskirts of Sedona; he had steadfastly refused to talk about it even once he could, and Dave at least had half-thought it was because he had forgotten.
Then Conrad turned back up, now at loose ends and married(!) to a woman he had found in Mexico, who spoke Johnny's language.
"I thought I might settle down near here," he said. "Spend time with you all -- every time I turn around you boys have grown so much, and I've had enough of missing it!"
This would have sounded like a truly excellent idea to Dave if it hadn't been for his new Cousin Athena, who greeted them all stiffly and then, once they had gone out to the back yard, began talking with Johnny in their own language. It was... really damn irritating to see him chattering away, expansive and open as he so rarely was with them and never with anyone outside their family, and wasting it all on a woman old enough to be his mother who answered in an uninflected, nearly bored tone of voice. Especially when he could almost but not quite understand the substance of their conversation, dotted though it might be with names and borrowed words.
"It sounds sort of Frisian," Conrad said.
Dave jumped and then blinked at his cousin. "What's Frisian?"
"Languages that used to be spoken all along the southeast coast of the North Sea and now are only found in little pockets in the Netherlands and Germanies, many of which can't even understand each other. A lot of the words are the same as in English, and a whole bunch as in Dutch, and I keep thinking I ought to be able to understand what they're saying but I don't." He tilted his head slightly. "This one actually doesn't have many words that are in Dutch but not English at all."
"... why Dutch?" Dave asked, because it was either that or ask why his favorite cousin-removed had married That Woman.
"I speak Dutch. Well, some. I'm kind of out of practice."
"And again: why Dutch?"
"I needed to take a class in another language a long time ago, and my grandfather spoke it, so I knew I could cheat and get his help. Well, not cheat cheat, but... "
"I know what you mean," Dave agreed. "Too bad our high school doesn't offer Dutch."
"I also speak German if you don't need me to spell anything, Mandarin Chinese if I brush the dust off, some Japanese, a bit of Spanish, and way back when I was young and foolish I once picked up some Old English, which... actually wasn't too unlike what those two are speaking now, given different pronunciation. Huh."
"Uncle John?" Dave prompted him, and then slapped his head. "Now you've got me doing it, jerk!"
"Huh? What?" Johnny asked, interrupting his new cousin.
"I, uh, rather like being called, well, 'Uncle John,'" their older cousin said with uncharacteristic awkwardness. "It's, that is, it's sort of like belonging."
"Of course you belong," Marilyn Sheppard said, looking up from her Regency romance. "You always have."
From the hammock, her husband punctuated this with an explosive snore.
"Uncle John," Johnny agreed, and turned back to his companion. "Aunt Athena."
The newly-proclaimed Aunt Athena assumed an Attitude of Surprised Joy, or possibly an Attitude of Cheerfully Being Struck With Fish.
"What's with her?" Dave grumbled as they resumed their conversation.
"The connection between her heart and her face isn't working too well," Uncle Cousin Conrad John said easily. "She usually can't show what she's really feeling, and she's never been trained to act it believably."
Dave blinked, and paid closer attention.
That evening, he asked his brother, "Did you know her? Before?"
Johnny's face closed up, but he said "Yeah," before wiping the shaving cream detritus off.
"Why didn't she... "
"She didn't speak English, she had no identification, they deported her across the nearest border." Johnny dragged a comb ferociously through his getting-too-long-again hair, parting it on the side. "If they'd thought I belonged with her, they'd have thrown me out too."
"Can they do that?" Dave started lathering up his own face. "How did they know she wasn't an American citizen who'd been mugged and gotten speech garbledization from being hit on the head or whatnot?"
"Well, they did." He slapped a quick fingers-worth of gel on the long side of his hair, encouraging it to hold in something resembling place. "About that language idea of yours... I wouldn't ask her for help in Spanish, she didn't speak it before then anyway. I think Mexico was, uh. Bad for her.
"She tried to do what was best for me." Johnny sidestepped his way around his brother and out the door. "Don't tell her otherwise."
And he stalked into his room, the distinct click of the lock resounding in the hall.
Dave rolled his eyes and went on carefully shaving away the minuscule bit of peach fuzz from the right and left sides of his chin.
*
The Matthew Sheppards and offspring were actually visiting the first time any of them saw MacGyver. To be more precise, the children were staying at Dave and Johnny's, the adults were off on a weekend getaway, and Conrad John and Athena were also staying with Dave and the rest, much to the disgust of all the members of the younger generation older than Mary, who felt themselves perfectly capable of looking after themselves for a mere three days.
Still, most of them were clustered around the television when the show began.
Conrad (John) made a surprised noise and slid off the couch.
"Is something wrong?" Lissa asked.
"No, it's just," her cousin wheezed, "he looks and sounds a lot like my uncle Adolphus."
"You have an Uncle Adolphus?" half the Sheppards said in something that could never pass for unison, startled.
"It's too bad you couldn't have met him. He'd have liked you."
"I bet your uncle didn't have a mullet, though," Mark pointed out.
"Actually, he did," (Conrad) John told them. "He'd invented it himself to keep his hair out of his eyes when he was working on things, although it looked... sort of like my hair on the top, only that color, and then it hung down farther than that on the back."
"Farther than what, Uncle John?" Dave asked as he finished wiping off the table and dropped into the recently vacated spot on the couch.
"Than MacGyver's, dumbass," Johnny said, shouldering him.
"Since when is he your uncle?" Matt wondered, craning his neck to look up from his Calculus II homework without having to move from his prone position.
"Since we unofficially adopted him as one," Dave snorted.
"SHUSH," Lissa said terribly, and the conversation waited until the next commercial break.
"We should unofficially adopt you as an uncle, too," Luke said when the pizza ad came on.
"What, to complete the set?" Dave wondered.
"It is complete," Matt said.
"There was a John who came between Luke and Lissa," his youngest sister said cheerfully, "but he died right before she got born, so Johnny was his Dear Replacement."
"Mary Joanna Sheppard!" Mark snapped terribly, jumping to his feet.
"In order to successfully make light of dreadful things," Athena Sheppard said, sitting up very straightly in the wing-back chair, "it is necessary first to be clever, and second, funny. You were neither."
"Besides," Johnny said thoughtfully, "wouldn't you be more likely to be the Dear Replacement?"
"Mary," the eldest Sheppard in the room said, leaning back against the couch as his nephews hastily shifted their legs, "try to think about what you're saying before you say it next time. Those of you who have thought, kindly run it by the 'Would Tegan Kick My Ass?' test. Family at large, who wants strawberries?"
The strawberries proved useful in smoothing over lingering hurt feelings, and by the time they went to bed that night, after the show had finished, after the newly-established-in-general "Uncle John" had picked out its theme on his guitar while they tried to improvise words to it ("screwdriver" proved to fit the rhythm perfectly at one point, but the meter of "Swiss Army knife" proved hard to slot in somewhere on the tune and was eventually left out out in favor of "coffin jetski") and then told a succession of the creepiest, scariest, most immediate-sounding scary stories any of them had ever heard while providing his own soundtrack, most of the Sheppard clan were fairly well convinced that if they had to have an allegedly responsible adult cluttering up the place, they could do worse than Uncle Conrad, or John, as the case might be.
*
"I didn't mean to make them angry," Johnny said, quietly, softly. "I just... ever since I finally fit in neatly with you, they started planning how to slot in the rest of my life, and neither of them ever even asked me. Aunt Athena asked me. Uncle John trusted me to make my own decisions and just said he was there to be leaned on whenever I needed it. Really, even the first time I met you I said something of the sort and you listened... "
"We were what, ten?" Dave scoffed. "I think that was when I'd just started my spy phase. It's not like I'm planning to be a spy now; if the CIA really want me, they know where they can find me, but I hardly think they have any reason to go looking."
"Not in the U.S. they don't," his brother snorted. "They're not allowed to act in here."
"Whatever." Dave stared at him for a long moment.
"What?!"
"Oh, just... you look weird without hair."
"It's just hair. It'll grow back. So, uh, how long do you think it'll take them to calm down?"
"Johnny B. Sheppard," his brother sighed, "on your eighteenth birthday, the birthday we picked out together, you not only ran off and joined the military -- pissing off Dad -- the Air Force, at that -- infuriating Uncle Matthew, he said some very..."
"I have heard his opinion of 'Chair Force wimps,' to put it mildly, several times -- "
" -- you went out and had yourself abrogated by Uncle John and Aunt Athena. Way to spit in the parents' faces, jerkwad."
"I thought we understood that you were raising him because the foster care and adoption system wouldn't let me," the uncle in question said, making both of them jump.
"When did you get here?"
"Just now. If Patrick and Marilyn changed their minds and wanted to keep you, why didn't they say so before this all blew up?"
Dave sputtered, started to say something, thought better of it, began again, stopped, and finally burst out "What planet are you from?"
Johnny shot them both a startled, speculative glance, oddly naked without the floppy hair to shade it.
"This one, I'm fairly sure," Uncle John said in a tone of voice that suggested that he'd actually thought about the question.
Dave threw up his hands, opened his mouth, and then stopped, looking from one to the other. "You two... really look alike without his hair in the way."
"We do?" Johnny said, startled but pleased.
"Oh yeah," his uncle said. "Remind me to hunt up some pictures of me when I was in Basic, we could have used each other for shaving mirrors. Ready to go to dinner?"
"I guess," Dave admitted, as the designated loyal opposition. He thought of something as they headed out to the curb. "How come Uncle Matthew's so... and you're not?"
"I, uh, lucked out into pilot training," his other Sheppard uncle shrugged. "And it's... seriously, rotary-wings are better, but if I had it to do over again I might have tried what Johnny's doing myself, you get a better chance of just being, well, up, his way. Whereas the Brigadier General and his sons are hard-line Marines, and, well... let's just say this is reconciling them to Lissa's career choice."
"Why, what's she doing?" Dave called his petite maroon-haired cousin to mind, trying to think what she might be doing. Social work? Improvisational theater?
"She's going to be going into a part-time clerical position in the Nevada licensed sex worker industry."
"You're joking," both young men breathed.
"I'm really not," their uncle said mildly. "I think she'll be rather good at it, actually. Probably make manager in record time."
Dave tried to picture Lissa managing a brothel, painted by his lurid fancy, while she'd probably be wearing a neat and trim business suit and little pearl earrings... it was disturbing how apt that seemed once he removed the mental neon lights and replaced the purple and red with lavendar and buff gold.
"That's... unsettling," his brother breathed, probably consumed by similar imaginings.
Then Johnny saw some of his new friends ahead, and the envisionings made way for mutual introductions and exploratory questions as they poured into the restaurant in a large chattering hubbub.
The dinner, at least, went well, largely because by mutual agreement the conversation wound up confined to professional baseball and Carly Simon.
When they left the restaurant afterwards, they were in that state where, while by no means drunk, one is significantly more in charity with one's friends, each others' feelings, and the world as a whole. They were pouring down the sidewalk in a slow-moving mass of several individual conversations, keeping to the building side so as to leave room for others to pass, when there was a sudden confusion of lights and engine noise in the alley they were passing.
Dave was jumping for it when he was hit by a wave of something wet -- funny, he hadn't seen a puddle there, it must have been hidden in the shadow of the building -- that propelled him farther forward and onto a guy that was in some of Johnny's classes, or whatever they called them.
"Ow shit," his unexpected cushion said as the whatever-it was finished peeling out down the street from the right it had hung.
"Fucking asshole," another cadet agreed. "Anyone get the number?"
"Ahm John," a quiet and horribly familiar and utterly hopeless voice said.
Dave had turned before he knew it, and for one ghastly moment he wasn't sure which was the holder and which the man whose shoulders were being raised by the other. And then the dim streetlight flickered and went back fully on, bringing out the stubble of his brother's hair as he bent his head forward and the lines on his uncle's face, deeper now as he lay against the younger Sheppard's arm.
"Move," one of the women who'd been introduced as someone invited to make up the numbers -- had she said she was a paramedic? -- said, authoritative and sure, and the confused mess of cadets and friends and family flowed aside to let her through, to kneel on the wet pavement beside them and to splay a dark hand over the older man's torso, almost seeming to flicker as she did so.
And then Uncle John flopped one of his arms up to touch Johnny's other arm, and the both of them... glowed. Too brightly even to look at, for a moment.
When Dave could see them clearly again, the maybe-paramedic was rising to her feet, grave and sorrowful, Johnny was dumbly shaking his head, face scored into lines of grief and horror, and his uncle's face lay slack, so that for one moment as the woman stepped away the moving and the unmoving man looked more like twins than they had before or since.
*
"Come on, Johnny," Dave said, and then corrected himself before his brother could do it. "John, I know, I'm sorry, it'll just take a bit to get used to."
John made an effort to straighten his uniform, and with a grumble his brother stepped forward and did it for him.
"There've been enough rumors over that bit with the light reflecting off all that wet," Dave said sturdily. "You need to go out there and do it right in front of all the guests, for his sake."
"You don't understand," John repeated, as he had been saying since the day of their uncle's death. "For a moment... I knew him, I knew everything he was, I knew everything he knew, and a lot of it stayed with me. Not personal stuff, not mostly, but -- " and he flipped the locks of their uncle's guitar case open, caught up the guitar, and began to play the opening theme to MacGyver, swift and sure.
"I didn't know you played the guitar," Dave said, stung once more by this one more secret.
"I didn't," John answered, hollowly, automatically caressing the instrument's silver strings before laying it back in its bed. "Now I can, I can speak German as well as he spoke it, I can speak Chinese and Dutch and some language that doesn't even have a name, it sounds like English and German got really drunk one night and had a wild and crazy three-way with some cousin of Latin that died out years ago, I remember flying every chopper he'd ever flown as if I'd done it myself!"
"Well... that's... " Dave began, uncomfortable.
"And you don't know who he was, you don't know what he was -- he was older and wiser than he ever let us see and he felt that he was a failure stuck carrying a burden that deserved a stronger man, never realizing that he was the strong one, and that woman there at the end -- you saw her, right?"
"There was a woman who tried to help," Dave said tentatively. "I think she was a paramedic or something."
"A parapsychomedic, maybe," John said, sounding a little more like himself. "She showed... there was a way he could be a ghost, or something, and stay, but he thought that floating around bodiless and having to see was the most horrifying thing he could think of, that no one should ever want to do it unless there was no other choice, and he went on, even though -- even though he wouldn't have gotten hit if he hadn't been busy getting everyone out of the way."
"Well, what else was he supposed to do?" Survivor's guilt. They could deal with survivor's guilt. They could find someone to treat it and do something about these hallucinations.
"He could... he could have stayed. In with me. Or if he couldn't, if it doesn't work that way -- he put all this, uh, knowledge in my head, he could have put more, he could have put himself, or close enough for government work, but now there are all these people mourning him and they don't know, they only knew parts of him, nobody realizes that something preserved and infinitely precious is gone out of the world and Uncle John among it -- "
"You were the one saying you knew him!" And every horror movie about split personality was rising in his head, and all he had to fight it were words -- "Do you seriously think he'd have done that? Ever? Do you think he'd like it if you did? I'd hate it! Mom and Dad would hate it! Don't you dare do this to us, don't you fucking dare -- "
"Asshole," John said, and it sounded like him, it really and truly sounded like him for the first time since he'd opened the guitar case.
The funeral seemed to last forever (John played a few songs on the guitar, favorites of his uncle's, thankfully without any more weird episodes) and then the reception proved that relatively speaking, the funereal rites had been over in the twinkling of a very large and ponderous eye.
Dave was rather surprised at the number and variety of guests. There were old people and young, generals and migrant workers, a man who appeared to be a rather well-known author and the Sheppards' fellow SCAdians (who showed signs of kneeling at the man's feet given minimal provocation).
And there were Luke and Lissa, piledriver and needle, sharply pressed and neatly turned out and bold enough to come straight up to John and Aunt Athena and Dave in the corner behind them.
"What are you doing here?" John said blankly. "He wasn't even related to you, not really."
"And she married one of the American volunteers who came over to help out the RAF, and then went right to America as his wife; and then a few months later your Grandpa Sheppard was born," Uncle John's voice was saying in Dave's memory. Oh. That must have been what he had meant. Wait.
"If a man cares enough to marry a woman in order to give her child a name, even if she's going to go straight on to someone else," Dave said furiously, "we should care enough to wear that name with pride and go to his relations' funerals, and that goes for them too, even if we hadn't all known him!"
Lissa nodded, sharp and commanding, and Luke rumbled "Even if it was only for a little bit, you were our brother too, so of course we came. Duh."
The two of them promptly moved to flank him and help direct guests, and John stumbled all over greeting the first mourner in line, thankfully a motherly-looking woman who took it in her stride.
Aside from the author, who said how much he'd enjoyed collaborating with their uncle on a series, offered to donate the share of the royalties Uncle John had refused to take to his estate after death duties, and invited Athena Sheppard to come and visit him sometime, only two of the line of mourners were particularly noticeable.
The first was a tall, creamy-skinned redhead, who looked both angry and genuinely hurt, rather the way Dave thought he felt when thinking about his uncle rather than how to get his brother through this.
"She's what, two, three years older than me, maybe?" he whispered to his cousins as half the SCAdians attempted to outdo each other with florid and utterly sincere declarations of just how much they'd miss the deceased.
"Try ten," Lissa hissed. "Dresses for power, though. Want me to get you a cup of the mixed nuts to hold you guys until they get through with this?"
"Please," Dave said with fervent gratitude, as Aunt Athena met her niece's eyes and nodded.
"Gwenaver. Jen," John said blankly when the redhead reached them, and Aunt Athena made a little sound of recognition.
"You're his other heir. And his executrix," he went on as the redhead -- Jen -- bristled, "and I'm really, really sorry we're meeting like this."
"Thank you for letting me know," Jen said, steely-eyed, exchanging curt nods with Aunt Athena. "I always thought there'd be more time somehow... "
And she stalked off towards the drinks bar, snatching an apple up from one of the refreshment tables as she left.
"So," Dave said when Lissa returned with his snack. "I hear you've got a job lined up?"
Lissa nodded. "It pays very well for what it is, offers health insurance and dental, and the Venusberg promised that if I do wind up studying accounting they'll give me an internship for it."
"Cool," John roused himself to comment.
His cousin-sister smiled sharply. "Very cool."
The other might be more aptly characterized as a party, consisting of an elderly general with a collection of mini-medals pinned to his chest (including several Dave didn't recognize from the hasty guide Johnny -- John had made him read through before the ceremony), his equally elderly companion, a regal lady whose bone structure remained striking despite its wrinkled covering, a younger blonde, and a man of uncertain age who might be her husband.
"Hey, can I have some of those?" the last-mentioned of the party asked, eying Dave's cup of nuts. "That woman looks like she's going to take a while."
Recognizing the woman in question as his uncle and aunt's next-door neighbor, and agreeing that she'd keep on talking for five minutes (more likely ten), Dave shrugged and held out the cup. "How did you know him?"
"I didn't, actually." The man shrugged, regret in his eyes. "General Cutter asked us to come with them, so... "
Dave nodded, regretfully. "I thought you might be another relation, is all."
The general and his wife looked at them swiftly as the other man blinked. "Look, no offense or anything, but whatever for?"
"Well... " It seemed a stupid train of thought, but -- "My uncle always said that the guy playing MacGyver looked a lot like his uncle Adolphus, and you sort of look like him, so I was kind of wondering if you had a cousin Adolphus Sheppard or something."
"Oh, cripes. Here too?"
"That means," the blonde automatically translated, "that we're afraid we don't know any Adolphuses of any sort, but we're flattered you thought we might be long-lost cousins."
"I take it he gets that a lot," Luke said, having snagged himself a kiwi fruit by dint of his mighty gorilla-like arms and was now turning it from side to side, perhaps debating how to eat it without dripping juice.
"You have no idea."
"We'll finish talking later," Aunt Athena ruthlessly cut her neighbor off, waving her on.
The group moved up in the disgruntled woman's wake, and Dave heard the general's "At ease" while he was eying the end of the line, wondering how long it would take.
Then he heard his brother's voice, lost and confused as it had not been since before the service began. "Brassmonkey?"
Luke and the general's aide exchanged identical, horrified glances -- apparently "Brass Monkey" was not the way to speak to a general with a chest full of medals.
"You should go and rest for a bit, son," the general said, kindly, very gently. "You're starting to pass out on your feet."
"Sir, yes, sir!" Luke said quickly, wrapping an arm around John's shoulders and half-manhandling him away and through the nearest door on legs bending this way and that beneath him.
"What -- " Dave began, starting after them and nearly dropping his nuts all over the floor -- would have, if I'm-tired-of-looking-like-MacGyver hadn't caught the cup.
"Delayed shock," the general said peaceably. "Happens to the best of us. Nothing to be overly worried about."
"Please get in touch with us later," the general's wife added, handing Athena Sheppard a business card embossed with the names of Jake and Elizabeth Cutter.
"I'm really sorry," Dave apologized, moving to stand in his brother's place in the reception line.
"Hey, the guy just lost his father," the aide offered. "He's entitled to be a mess."
And he followed the rest of his party into the reception at large, munching Dave's mixed nut cup.
John didn't return until the last of the interminable reception line had passed, which Dave hoped was due to shameless taking advantage and not to genuine incapacity. When he did, he was carrying his uncle's guitar.
"Johnny," Dave said firmly, blocking his way.
"The more I put my own memories on, the less they poke at me," John shrugged. Dave turned it over, decided he didn't like it, decided there was nothing to be done about it, and moved out of the way.
His brother sat down, tuned the guitar, and began to play a repetitive, haunting rhythm. After a few rounds of it, Aunt Athena lifted her face to the ceiling and began to sing, in a surprisingly cold and pure voice, "Worlds grow old and suns grow cold, and death we never can doubt..."
The young blonde in the straw hat whom Dave had found himself confiding his worries about his brother to not fifteen minutes earlier had joined them, pulling two glass pipettes from the pockets of her sailor-looking suit and striking them together to add percussion, when he saw the two people he'd been looking for all day.
"You made it," he said, relieved.
"Our flight was cancelled," his father explained, "and then they routed us through Denver."
"I told you we should have lent Dave the cellular phone," Marilyn Sheppard added in a tone suggesting that she had said as much, many times, already that day. "We tried to call you from the airport, but nobody answered."
"I may have forgotten to plug the telephone back in," Athena Sheppard shrugged. "It would keep ringing."
John finished his song, looked up, and blinked.
"Oh, hon!" his mother said, and began apologizing to him for their delay.
"Think he'll give up this foolishness now?" her husband wondered to his other son.
"I think he still has a contract left to go," Dave muttered, "and he's acting weird enough without trying to pull him away."
*
"I can't do this," John muttered, shifting back and forth from foot to foot. "I can't do this."
"People get married every day." Dave rolled his eyes. "If you try to make a break for it I'll knock you down, call in our very large and trained first cousins with our Brown cousins to back them up, get one of our skinny and fast cousins to fish the bungee cord out of my trunk, and tie you to the pergola with it. Upside down. We're going to be waiting there for a long time while Nancy gets ready and strolls up, and I only have to get you right-side-up in time to kiss her."
"Asshole."
"Slut."
"How come I'm Janet?"
"If the syllable fits... "
"It's not as if I'm good enough for her, you know."
"Isn't that supposed to be her call?"
"What if she thinks better of all this?"
"Then we'll pig out on the reception feast, get royally drunk, and plan how to talk her back into it once the hangover stops. We got it through Lissa's supplier, so it's not actually going to set you back that much. Seriously, this is why you grabbed me for best man, right? I'm the only one who's known you long enough to start thinking of all the stupid crap you might do."
John rolled his eyes at him. "If I ever find myself another brother, I'll bring him around so you can meet him, okay?"
Someone knocked on the changing-room door.
"Do I have to send for the bungee cord?" At least it was a good excuse to get off the subject.
"I think we'll manage without it," John sighed, and threw the door open.
*
The last time Dave saw his brother and father in the same room, the former not only looked almost exactly like Uncle John (Cousin Conrad, as Dave had been making the effort at the time to remember him) but moved like him and spoke with his inflections.
As might have been expected by anyone whose name was not John Sheppard, it had made an already volatile situation that much worse. Patrick Sheppard had snarled, his long-burning temper banked and glowing like a volcano considering this whole waking thing; John had drawled and shrugged and slipped aside from Patrick's focused and cold fury, and in the end had heard the ultimatum out and sauntered off, the way he always did.
"Look, I'll drive you to the airport," Dave offered, afterwards, and John considered for a moment before nodding briefly.
For half the way there neither one of them spoke. At last, after Car Talk had ended, Dave began "You didn't have to leave."
"Funny. I thought 'Leave this house at once!' meant just that."
"It's not -- "
"It's funny how you always expect me to give my word without acknowledging that I already have elsewhere. I don't run out on the responsibilities I chose."
"Only on those that defaulted to you," Dave managed not to say. Instead, he offered "You get more like him every time I see you. Cou-- Uncle John."
"He was in place to get killed because of me," John said, staring far into the distance. "I've been doing my best to grow into someone like him, so I can do what he would have done."
"Maybe Nancy wanted you for a husband, not Conrad John Sheppard."
"She wanted a husband without any secrets. She told you so herself."
"Maybe you should have told her some of them, even if you won't tell us!"
"The one time I tried to tell you," John said, very precisely, "you thought I was hallucinating and you would have pushed me into mental care and ruined my chances of ever getting to fly anything cool if it hadn't been for Fred."
"You sounded like you were talking about mental telepathy and ghosts," Dave sighed. "What did you expect?"
"The real shame of that little adventure," John eventually grumbled, "is that I picked up the most awesome geek cred ever and nobody but a few of the members of the Barony of Sternberg will ever believe it."
"You might want to think about how you're saying that," Dave rolled his eyes, "since it sounds as if you think it was worse than the funeral."
"I'm not mad at you," John said when he got out of the car.
"I'm mad that you're being an asshole. Slight difference from mad AT you. Anything else?"
"Not really, no." He slung his duffel over one shoulder and turned and walked into the terminal. Dave watched him go until the car behind honked sharply.
*
The last time Dave saw his brother, they'd talked until all hours, slept in in a pile on the floor the way they hadn't since high school, and then gone round and seen all of the mutual relations that lived in something vaguely resembling a reasonable distance.
They'd even started keeping in contact through electronic letters, sent by some delayed method that made them almost as slow as the modern postal service. (The latest one, which he eagerly anticipated opening, bore the subject line "Did you know Lissa gave Ronon Venusberg coupons to give to all my friends?!!")
He was in the leisurely process of packing up his father's house when someone rang the doorbell.
"Hello," he said, blinking at the purple-haired black teenager on the doorstep.
"Mr. Dave Sheppard?" she asked politely.
"Uh, yes?"
"May I see some ID?"
He blinked, dug his wallet out of a back pocket, and held it so that his driver's license showed through the clear window.
She tilted her head, clucked her tongue, and nodded. "I'm an intern at Mukerji, Wang, and Wells," she smiled. "There's a package we've been entrusted with delivering to you on this date at this time; wait while I get it out of my car."
She skipped down the stairs, threw open the door of a fuchsia Camaro, and fished out a flat, thin, dusty package.
"Sign here," she told him when she returned.
Bemused, he did so.
"Do you mind if I stay and watch you open it?" she asked. "We've had it for years, and a couple of us have been wondering what it is. It looks too thin to be the Further Nice and Accurate Prophecies..."
"What's your name?" Dave asked.
"Anthea. Uh, Anthea Maeven."
He thought for a moment, and then gestured expansively. "Sure. Why not."
The application of a key to the packing tape, already starting to go brittle, quickly revealed a number of discs in sleeves (which he hastily grabbed and poured onto an endtable near the front door) and a letter.
A letter which had, for a return address at the top of the first page:
John B. Sheppard
avatarlink, Plane G7
c/o Avatar
South Roschtalia
Mieselia
Pegasus --localnode
Date uncertain
"What the?" he wondered, and began reading the letter.
Dave,
You're probably wondering what the hell.
Remember back when Uncle John died, and I told you he'd had the chance to stick around as a bodiless spirit but thought it was a horrible idea, and you didn't believe me?
You really should have. I've met a couple of the ones that did stick around in my line of work, and they nearly all suck. It sucks. There's a reason it's a bad idea to do it unless you really, really have to.
(This is classified eleventeen ways from Sunday, but it isn't classified yet here where I'm writing this, and either there won't be a me there to be punished for it, or the me that's there won't ever have been the me writing this, so he wouldn't be punished for my barracks-lawyering.)
The thing is... I really, really had to.
We wound up trapped back in time. (Again, this sort of thing seems to happen in our line of work a lot.) However, this time it came with a deadline, emphasis on first syllable, for us and for the future, given that we'd knocked something out of true when we went back.
So -- the thing with beings that have "ascended to a higher plane," as they call it, is that they can do things to affect the world -- heck, they could probably turn the sun purple and stick all the trees in upside down -- but whenever someone does anything more than they could do as a plain old garden variety human or whatever, the others go kind of kamikaze on his ass and come up with new and unpleasant punishments.
I remembered how to. (Not so much from Uncle John's infodump as from one I shared with a higher-level being posing as a space priestess and a love goddess. I wrote some of the details up on one of the other pages, but I figured I'd better get the important stuff down first, in case she catches us.)
So I -- well. It's something like being really, really stoned, without the munchies and with a strong bit of "holy shit we won the championship!" Anyway, I dealt with the problem (it'd take too long to explain), grabbed up Ronon and Jennifer and sort of tossed them in the general direction of the future. I don't know if Jennifer came up last time I was there, but she's got what it takes to be a sister-in-law in this crazy family, and so I had to be sure wherever they landed, they'd do it together. (I know it was somewhere long-term habitable -- it's all in how you throw.)
Then I tried tossing Rodney and Teyla after them, but the Others were showing up just then and I think they went wide. Still somewhere habitable, at least.
Anyway, I got sort of the same punishment as the space priestess, with an... awkward sort of twist, and it isn't as if anyone I know can ever come visit, because we changed history and so I'm in an entirely different universe.
And the thing is, I don't know what the upshot will be. Universes are heavy, and they try to merge back together all the time, which is why testimony from honest witnesses contradicts itself -- one of them remembers one of the ways it was before the merge, and the other one remembers the other way, and it might have Schroedingered over into a third way entirely.
When someone's dead, that usually keeps them apart, because either the person's alive or they're dead, and you can't be sort of dead outside The Princess Bride, it doesn't work.
But when they just vanish -- the way we softly and suddenly vanished away from the place where we were -- well, everything up to that point was exactly the same, so the universes should slide back together again, and since we weren't there in one universe, there'd be nothing to keep the us from the other universe from going right into place, not even the little stumble you usually do when two of you merge together. It's going on all the time; Douglas Adams was right about so many things.
So either we're still here, never having left, and would probably be more than a little alarmed should you show us this letter (and there's a drawing on the back of the wodjet that took us back, so we know to avoid it), or we've softly and suddenly vanished away, and I leave it up to you to decide whether to get in touch with Rodney's sister and Jennifer's parents and reassure them that they're all safe, just in a parallel world, or whether you think it wouldn't.
The woman who wasn't a paramedic is here at the moment, showing her latest protegé around and using me as an object example of What Not To Do, Why, and How Parallel Worlds Form. Dr. Jackson's a pretty nice guy, though, so he agreed to take a letter back and leave it with one of the local law firms for timed delivery; apparently they'll actually do it, unlike the postal service. (By the time this is delivered to you, assuming I haven't just created a new universe AGAIN, he'll have been kicked out for his own bit of meddling and may be able to answer your questions himself. He promised not to peek, so let us hope.)
I am free to act part of the time, when the rest of me is asleep and dreaming; not that I can do much, but I can look at parallel dimensions (and now and then back and forward, but that gets dizzy fast), and copy the things I see down. Except for the one I created, just to torment me. (As I said, inventive.) So here, in return for putting up with me all these years, especially if it didn't work the way I thought it would and I'm gone, are television shows from parallel worlds. Including a couple of seasons of a version of Wormhole X-Treme that didn't suck, and episodes from shows that existed in this world but whose masters got lost, and a world where Larson got the greenlight for his space war show in the wake of Star Wars (the technical values are far lower, but so are the ethical compromises) -- did she send you the FROTHING CAPSLOCK OF RAGE rant too, or am I just lucky?
That aside, um. I've been sitting here for a couple thousand years with not much else to do but surf the interdimensional version of YouTube and think, and grow out of being an emotional chickenshit.
So. My life on Earth kind of sucked -- a lot -- but you didn't suck. (And if you do, I don't want to know about it.) Gwenaver was right; we always think there'll be more time, in the teeth of the evidence. I didn't get the chance to say it to Mom, and I didn't get the chance to say it to Dad, and I barely got the chance to say it to Uncle John, but here. You were the best brother I could have had then, and you're the only one I trust with all of this. I'm sorry if I've disappeared on you.
Enjoy your videos,
John B. Sheppard
"You don't need to sign your full name when you're writing to family," Dave grumbled, staring at the letter in his hand.
"Wow." Anthea straightened up from over his shoulder. "That was definitely worth the gas mileage. Hey, if those are WXT episodes that don't suck, would you consider uploading them?"
"Maybe," he said blankly.
"Thanks!"
When she had driven away, he piled up the letter, and the letter appendices, and the DVDs, and stared at them for a moment.
Then he pulled out his BlackBerry, and composed a quick message to his brother, and sent it along.
It was the day before the mail exchange.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Mostly gen in plotline, with background het. Mentions of slash. Background crossoveriness. Strong language.
-timeframe- Late fourth season.
-spoilers- Up through "Outcast."
-characters- Sheppards original (in both senses of the word) and borrowed, various cameos.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine, but belongs to MGM. So do some of the other works referenced herein. I am not sure of the current owners of the others, but can name among their various creators L. Frank Baum, Walt Disney, Bob Kane, Ian Fleming, Manly Wade Wellman, Jim Henson, George Lucas, Glen Larson, Don Bellisario, and William Goldman. Other such works include Doctor Who, MacGyver, and He-Man. The "Would Tegan Kick My Ass?" test was inspired by WKKMA. Leslie Fish's song "Hope Eyrie" is quoted from, although my mental image was more of the Julia Ecklar cover.
-word count- 9365
-summary- The first time Dave heard of his brother was well before he ever met him.
Second String; or, Loyauté me lie:
a unified field theory of sheppard
The first time Dave heard of his brother was well before he ever met him.
To be perfectly accurate, Dave heard his mother and his cousin Conrad arguing with his father and the telephone, and he put on the TV and waited for it to be over so he could ask what it had been about.
When his mother came and found him, she asked "Dave, how would you like to have a brother about your age?"
"About my age?!" His eyes darted from his mother's flat stomach to her thin tan face, trying to figure out how that would work.
"I don't know whether you know that your Uncle Matthew and Aunt Judy have been acting as foster parents," she began.
Dave shook his head, startled. "They have five kids already. How's that work?"
"Very carefully," Mrs. Sheppard said dryly. "Cousin Conrad would have liked to take care of Johnny himself, but apparently he isn't acceptable to the mighty State of Arizona, and Judy and Matthew are. And now they want to make his situation more permanent, but foster parents don't usually adopt, and as you said they have five kids already, and so it's been suggested that perhaps we could adopt him."
"What's he like?"
"Well, I don't really know. If we thought we might, we'd go and meet him and see whether maybe it might work. Conrad said he's quiet and doesn't speak much English, and Judy said he seems to be learning it slowly, that he tries to be polite, and that he tends to fade into a corner whenever any of her boys are around."
Dave snorted a little. His older Sheppard cousins were big and blond and noisy and looked as if they would grow up to be professional bodybuilders.
Still, he had seen how they treated each other, and it had seemed kind of nice to have a brother...
"Let's go meet him and see if he likes us," Dave said, and his mother smiled.
*
"So why are you involved in all this?" Dave asked when they were on the plane.
"I was in Sedona," Conrad said, managing to sprawl in the narrow airplane seat. Dave liked Conrad, who surfed and played the guitar and had a way of leaning against things that looked as if he had either a few extra joints in his spine or none at all that Dave had tried unsuccessfully to imitate, and who didn't automatically think kids were stupid. "Long story -- but while I was there, I noticed a kid who looked just like I did when I was little, so naturally I wanted to find out who he was. And when I did, it was kind of obvious that the foster care he was in sucked, so I went to Colonel Sheppard and Judy and begged for a favor, and here we are."
"Is he older or younger than me?"
"We're not sure; even now that he's started talking again, we haven't run into anyone who speaks his language or dialect or whatever it is, and he doesn't really volunteer personal information anyway."
"If he wasn't talking, how did you know his name was Johnny?"
"They didn't," Conrad shrugged. "It's short for John Doe, and he answers to it. Maybe someday when he feels more at home he'll tell you or me or your parents what he'd rather be called."
This, if daunting, made sense, and Dave turned the idea over in his head for a bit before something struck him. "Is he a relation or something?"
"I don't see how he can be. I've kept pretty good track of my branch of the family, and yours... look, you know how your dad's grandma came to America, right?"
"No." Dave blinked at him.
"Well... she was from England, and she married one of the American volunteers who came over to help out the RAF, and then went right to America as his wife. And then a few months later your Grandpa Sheppard was born and she quietly divorced her husband so she could marry your Great-Grandpa Brown, and we kind of lost touch with them until I went looking."
"Is that why some of them don't -- " Dave cut himself off before he could say don't like you very much, which might not actually be true and anyway was rude.
"Well, getting divorced was embarrassing back then, so she told everyone that my... great-uncle had died. And he drifted around a lot, and -- anyway, your grandfather was big and blond and burly, and his kids all sort of take after him, while the Sheppards are thin and brown and... " Conrad thought for a moment before coming up with "fine-featured."
"You mean 'too pretty for your own damned good,'" Dave's father grumbled from across the aisle.
Conrad rolled his eyes. "Does Marilyn know you think I'm pretty?" He turned back to Dave. "Anyway, he's a good kid. I'm pretty sure you'll like him."
*
What Johnny proved to be was a shy kid, with a lot of floppy brown hair that fell into his face when he looked at the floor. Dave thought it was considerably lighter than Conrad's, but on the other hand, it was certainly longer.
He had more than enough time to notice, as, other than greeting Conrad with a not-unhappy "Ahm-John" and looking up more nervously when Aunt Judy introduced the rest of them to him, Johnny had spent the rest of the time looking either down or off to one side, even after the children had been banished from the grown-ups' discussion.
"Hey, Star Wars is on," his cousin Lissa said, looking up from the newspaper after her three older brothers had clattered out of the house.
"What channel?" Dave jumped up and covered the distance to the TV in two strides, grateful for something to do other than make conversational overtures that were either ignored or taken up by Lissa, who while not that bad for somebody younger and a girl had something of a habit of monopolizing the conversation.
Johnny, clearly not being an idiot, brightened as soon as the image resolved itself into Han Solo scoffing at the idea that any mystical power controlled his destiny, and settled on the battered couch, rapt-eyed.
"I saw this in the theaters," Dave boasted, sitting at the other end.
"I wanted to," Lissa grumbled, "but Mommy and Daddy said I was too little."
"Well, it does have some sad parts... "
"They took me to see Bambi."
The movie, indeed, exerted enough of an effect on Johnny that he waved his hand in an odd motion at the dogfighting X-wings and TIEs and confided, in an accent that sounded something like Monty Python, "Do that," adding, when Dave blinked, "me."
"You're going to do that when you grow up?" Lissa offered.
Johnny nodded.
"I'm going to be a spy," Dave announced.
Johnny looked at him with incomprehension.
"James Bond," Lissa explained, making the same sort of hand motion at Dave. She thought for a moment, and added "Maxwell Smart."
"LisSA!"
*
Of course it wasn't quite that easy. ("Nothing involving the government ever is," Dave's father had snorted.) Still, eventually Johnny had been moved into the bedroom the Sheppards had made out of what had been the sewing room, officially made over into John B. Sheppard (Dave's mother wasn't sure whether the letter had had some significance before or whether Johnny thought it sounded good now; their father attributed it to a perfectly reasonable taste for Beach Boys songs), given an official birthday picked out by the four of them while debating over a calendar, and had acquired enough English to address his new parents as "Mom" and "Dad" and his whatever-sort-of-cousin-Conrad-was as "Uncle John."
("Why John?" Dave wondered, perplexed. "That's only going to get confusing."
"Conrad John Sheppard," his cousin shrugged, smiling easily. "Maybe he has something against the name 'Conrad,' or he likes the connection. It's not as if there aren't plenty of instances of 'John' in the family history.")
Johnny's understanding of English grew by leaps and bounds, enough to put him into regular school the next year; his understanding of, well, of America, on the other hand...
-- "No, Johnny. Glinda's the good witch. She helps Dorothy. She isn't evil."
"If she wants to help, she can tell Dorothy how to go home there in Munchkinland and take care of the Wicked Witch herself. But she makes Dorothy do all the work, and spies on her even if she helps once, and is evil."
"It makes more sense in the book," Marilyn Sheppard offered dryly, and for the next week the house was full of requests for explanations of what, to Dave, sometimes seemed like every other sentence in The Wizard of Oz. --
-- "Why is that funny?"
"Because Miss Piggy's wearing the outfit she wore in her own television show."
~
"Why is that funny?"
"Because ballet dancing isn't very manly."
"Why not?"
"Because they're dancing around in skintight costumes."
"Like superheroes?"
"Yes, but they're DANCING. I don't know why that makes it different. It just does."
~
"Why is that funny?"
"Because 'She Loves You' is a song by the Beatles, and now it's being sung by Muppet beetles."
"They look more like crickets to me."
"Well, the Beatles did pick their name partly because of the Crickets."
"The who?"
"No, they're later."
Johnny hit him with a throw pillow. --
-- "Did he just EXPLODE?!"
"It's because there's a vacuum in outer space, so the pressure -- "
"Even the vacuum doesn't make you explode, except for little bits like your lungs and maybe your eyeballs. Your skin would hold the rest of you in; it's not like it tears off if you put the vacuum cleaner on it."
"How do you know for sure?"
"Don't they clean tomorrow? We borrow the vacuum for a bit and I'll show you."
"Fine, but you get to do it on you."
"Fine." --
-- "What does this mean?"
"White slavery?" There were days when Dave wished Johnny wasn't trying to catch up on the whole of English literature all at once. "It's, um, making women slaves so you can rent them out as hookers."
"Why is it white? Is sex white?"
"No, THEY'RE white. The girls. Usually."
"So renting men out as hookers is usually a different color of slavery?"
"AAARGH." --
Even after Johnny had mostly gotten acclimated, there were still little blips. Some, Dave was fairly sure, were due to the fact that his brother was a (skinny) big fat dork:
"He's my brother and I have to put up with him, even if he does think Batman's butler is named Duncan and Man-At-Arms is named Alfred."
"What man at arms?" their father wondered, turning a page of The Wall Street Journal.
"Obviously," his helpmeet answered, cutting her eggs, "one called Duncan. Dave, don't make fun of your brother for getting things mixed up."
"I'm not making fun. If I wanted to annoy him, I'd wait until he got back from his morning jog. Besides, Mom, how can he keep thinking Face can fly a, a anything? Murdock is the one who flies. That's why they keep breaking him out, so he can fly them places."
"I thought it was because he was part of the team," Dave's father mildly disagreed.
"Face reminds me of... what was his name? In Star Wars, he ran the floating city..."
"Lando," Dave told her. "Lando Calrissian."
"And he used to fly the Millennium Falcon, so maybe Johnny's subconsciously patching over from that."
and some were almost certainly due to Johnny fucking with him.
"Will you knock it off? They're part of a team. They're practically family. They have to fit into the television screen together. How would you like it if I said Hawke and Archangel from your helicopter show were dating?"
"Well, Archangel might if Marella didn't have a problem with it, but Hawke's too messed up in the head, so neither of them would."
Dave hit him with the much-abused throw pillow.
*
They none of them had thought much, after the nightmare of paperwork was over, about where Johnny had come from, or why he had been found wandering the outskirts of Sedona; he had steadfastly refused to talk about it even once he could, and Dave at least had half-thought it was because he had forgotten.
Then Conrad turned back up, now at loose ends and married(!) to a woman he had found in Mexico, who spoke Johnny's language.
"I thought I might settle down near here," he said. "Spend time with you all -- every time I turn around you boys have grown so much, and I've had enough of missing it!"
This would have sounded like a truly excellent idea to Dave if it hadn't been for his new Cousin Athena, who greeted them all stiffly and then, once they had gone out to the back yard, began talking with Johnny in their own language. It was... really damn irritating to see him chattering away, expansive and open as he so rarely was with them and never with anyone outside their family, and wasting it all on a woman old enough to be his mother who answered in an uninflected, nearly bored tone of voice. Especially when he could almost but not quite understand the substance of their conversation, dotted though it might be with names and borrowed words.
"It sounds sort of Frisian," Conrad said.
Dave jumped and then blinked at his cousin. "What's Frisian?"
"Languages that used to be spoken all along the southeast coast of the North Sea and now are only found in little pockets in the Netherlands and Germanies, many of which can't even understand each other. A lot of the words are the same as in English, and a whole bunch as in Dutch, and I keep thinking I ought to be able to understand what they're saying but I don't." He tilted his head slightly. "This one actually doesn't have many words that are in Dutch but not English at all."
"... why Dutch?" Dave asked, because it was either that or ask why his favorite cousin-removed had married That Woman.
"I speak Dutch. Well, some. I'm kind of out of practice."
"And again: why Dutch?"
"I needed to take a class in another language a long time ago, and my grandfather spoke it, so I knew I could cheat and get his help. Well, not cheat cheat, but... "
"I know what you mean," Dave agreed. "Too bad our high school doesn't offer Dutch."
"I also speak German if you don't need me to spell anything, Mandarin Chinese if I brush the dust off, some Japanese, a bit of Spanish, and way back when I was young and foolish I once picked up some Old English, which... actually wasn't too unlike what those two are speaking now, given different pronunciation. Huh."
"Uncle John?" Dave prompted him, and then slapped his head. "Now you've got me doing it, jerk!"
"Huh? What?" Johnny asked, interrupting his new cousin.
"I, uh, rather like being called, well, 'Uncle John,'" their older cousin said with uncharacteristic awkwardness. "It's, that is, it's sort of like belonging."
"Of course you belong," Marilyn Sheppard said, looking up from her Regency romance. "You always have."
From the hammock, her husband punctuated this with an explosive snore.
"Uncle John," Johnny agreed, and turned back to his companion. "Aunt Athena."
The newly-proclaimed Aunt Athena assumed an Attitude of Surprised Joy, or possibly an Attitude of Cheerfully Being Struck With Fish.
"What's with her?" Dave grumbled as they resumed their conversation.
"The connection between her heart and her face isn't working too well," Uncle Cousin Conrad John said easily. "She usually can't show what she's really feeling, and she's never been trained to act it believably."
Dave blinked, and paid closer attention.
That evening, he asked his brother, "Did you know her? Before?"
Johnny's face closed up, but he said "Yeah," before wiping the shaving cream detritus off.
"Why didn't she... "
"She didn't speak English, she had no identification, they deported her across the nearest border." Johnny dragged a comb ferociously through his getting-too-long-again hair, parting it on the side. "If they'd thought I belonged with her, they'd have thrown me out too."
"Can they do that?" Dave started lathering up his own face. "How did they know she wasn't an American citizen who'd been mugged and gotten speech garbledization from being hit on the head or whatnot?"
"Well, they did." He slapped a quick fingers-worth of gel on the long side of his hair, encouraging it to hold in something resembling place. "About that language idea of yours... I wouldn't ask her for help in Spanish, she didn't speak it before then anyway. I think Mexico was, uh. Bad for her.
"She tried to do what was best for me." Johnny sidestepped his way around his brother and out the door. "Don't tell her otherwise."
And he stalked into his room, the distinct click of the lock resounding in the hall.
Dave rolled his eyes and went on carefully shaving away the minuscule bit of peach fuzz from the right and left sides of his chin.
*
The Matthew Sheppards and offspring were actually visiting the first time any of them saw MacGyver. To be more precise, the children were staying at Dave and Johnny's, the adults were off on a weekend getaway, and Conrad John and Athena were also staying with Dave and the rest, much to the disgust of all the members of the younger generation older than Mary, who felt themselves perfectly capable of looking after themselves for a mere three days.
Still, most of them were clustered around the television when the show began.
Conrad (John) made a surprised noise and slid off the couch.
"Is something wrong?" Lissa asked.
"No, it's just," her cousin wheezed, "he looks and sounds a lot like my uncle Adolphus."
"You have an Uncle Adolphus?" half the Sheppards said in something that could never pass for unison, startled.
"It's too bad you couldn't have met him. He'd have liked you."
"I bet your uncle didn't have a mullet, though," Mark pointed out.
"Actually, he did," (Conrad) John told them. "He'd invented it himself to keep his hair out of his eyes when he was working on things, although it looked... sort of like my hair on the top, only that color, and then it hung down farther than that on the back."
"Farther than what, Uncle John?" Dave asked as he finished wiping off the table and dropped into the recently vacated spot on the couch.
"Than MacGyver's, dumbass," Johnny said, shouldering him.
"Since when is he your uncle?" Matt wondered, craning his neck to look up from his Calculus II homework without having to move from his prone position.
"Since we unofficially adopted him as one," Dave snorted.
"SHUSH," Lissa said terribly, and the conversation waited until the next commercial break.
"We should unofficially adopt you as an uncle, too," Luke said when the pizza ad came on.
"What, to complete the set?" Dave wondered.
"It is complete," Matt said.
"There was a John who came between Luke and Lissa," his youngest sister said cheerfully, "but he died right before she got born, so Johnny was his Dear Replacement."
"Mary Joanna Sheppard!" Mark snapped terribly, jumping to his feet.
"In order to successfully make light of dreadful things," Athena Sheppard said, sitting up very straightly in the wing-back chair, "it is necessary first to be clever, and second, funny. You were neither."
"Besides," Johnny said thoughtfully, "wouldn't you be more likely to be the Dear Replacement?"
"Mary," the eldest Sheppard in the room said, leaning back against the couch as his nephews hastily shifted their legs, "try to think about what you're saying before you say it next time. Those of you who have thought, kindly run it by the 'Would Tegan Kick My Ass?' test. Family at large, who wants strawberries?"
The strawberries proved useful in smoothing over lingering hurt feelings, and by the time they went to bed that night, after the show had finished, after the newly-established-in-general "Uncle John" had picked out its theme on his guitar while they tried to improvise words to it ("screwdriver" proved to fit the rhythm perfectly at one point, but the meter of "Swiss Army knife" proved hard to slot in somewhere on the tune and was eventually left out out in favor of "coffin jetski") and then told a succession of the creepiest, scariest, most immediate-sounding scary stories any of them had ever heard while providing his own soundtrack, most of the Sheppard clan were fairly well convinced that if they had to have an allegedly responsible adult cluttering up the place, they could do worse than Uncle Conrad, or John, as the case might be.
*
"I didn't mean to make them angry," Johnny said, quietly, softly. "I just... ever since I finally fit in neatly with you, they started planning how to slot in the rest of my life, and neither of them ever even asked me. Aunt Athena asked me. Uncle John trusted me to make my own decisions and just said he was there to be leaned on whenever I needed it. Really, even the first time I met you I said something of the sort and you listened... "
"We were what, ten?" Dave scoffed. "I think that was when I'd just started my spy phase. It's not like I'm planning to be a spy now; if the CIA really want me, they know where they can find me, but I hardly think they have any reason to go looking."
"Not in the U.S. they don't," his brother snorted. "They're not allowed to act in here."
"Whatever." Dave stared at him for a long moment.
"What?!"
"Oh, just... you look weird without hair."
"It's just hair. It'll grow back. So, uh, how long do you think it'll take them to calm down?"
"Johnny B. Sheppard," his brother sighed, "on your eighteenth birthday, the birthday we picked out together, you not only ran off and joined the military -- pissing off Dad -- the Air Force, at that -- infuriating Uncle Matthew, he said some very..."
"I have heard his opinion of 'Chair Force wimps,' to put it mildly, several times -- "
" -- you went out and had yourself abrogated by Uncle John and Aunt Athena. Way to spit in the parents' faces, jerkwad."
"I thought we understood that you were raising him because the foster care and adoption system wouldn't let me," the uncle in question said, making both of them jump.
"When did you get here?"
"Just now. If Patrick and Marilyn changed their minds and wanted to keep you, why didn't they say so before this all blew up?"
Dave sputtered, started to say something, thought better of it, began again, stopped, and finally burst out "What planet are you from?"
Johnny shot them both a startled, speculative glance, oddly naked without the floppy hair to shade it.
"This one, I'm fairly sure," Uncle John said in a tone of voice that suggested that he'd actually thought about the question.
Dave threw up his hands, opened his mouth, and then stopped, looking from one to the other. "You two... really look alike without his hair in the way."
"We do?" Johnny said, startled but pleased.
"Oh yeah," his uncle said. "Remind me to hunt up some pictures of me when I was in Basic, we could have used each other for shaving mirrors. Ready to go to dinner?"
"I guess," Dave admitted, as the designated loyal opposition. He thought of something as they headed out to the curb. "How come Uncle Matthew's so... and you're not?"
"I, uh, lucked out into pilot training," his other Sheppard uncle shrugged. "And it's... seriously, rotary-wings are better, but if I had it to do over again I might have tried what Johnny's doing myself, you get a better chance of just being, well, up, his way. Whereas the Brigadier General and his sons are hard-line Marines, and, well... let's just say this is reconciling them to Lissa's career choice."
"Why, what's she doing?" Dave called his petite maroon-haired cousin to mind, trying to think what she might be doing. Social work? Improvisational theater?
"She's going to be going into a part-time clerical position in the Nevada licensed sex worker industry."
"You're joking," both young men breathed.
"I'm really not," their uncle said mildly. "I think she'll be rather good at it, actually. Probably make manager in record time."
Dave tried to picture Lissa managing a brothel, painted by his lurid fancy, while she'd probably be wearing a neat and trim business suit and little pearl earrings... it was disturbing how apt that seemed once he removed the mental neon lights and replaced the purple and red with lavendar and buff gold.
"That's... unsettling," his brother breathed, probably consumed by similar imaginings.
Then Johnny saw some of his new friends ahead, and the envisionings made way for mutual introductions and exploratory questions as they poured into the restaurant in a large chattering hubbub.
The dinner, at least, went well, largely because by mutual agreement the conversation wound up confined to professional baseball and Carly Simon.
When they left the restaurant afterwards, they were in that state where, while by no means drunk, one is significantly more in charity with one's friends, each others' feelings, and the world as a whole. They were pouring down the sidewalk in a slow-moving mass of several individual conversations, keeping to the building side so as to leave room for others to pass, when there was a sudden confusion of lights and engine noise in the alley they were passing.
Dave was jumping for it when he was hit by a wave of something wet -- funny, he hadn't seen a puddle there, it must have been hidden in the shadow of the building -- that propelled him farther forward and onto a guy that was in some of Johnny's classes, or whatever they called them.
"Ow shit," his unexpected cushion said as the whatever-it was finished peeling out down the street from the right it had hung.
"Fucking asshole," another cadet agreed. "Anyone get the number?"
"Ahm John," a quiet and horribly familiar and utterly hopeless voice said.
Dave had turned before he knew it, and for one ghastly moment he wasn't sure which was the holder and which the man whose shoulders were being raised by the other. And then the dim streetlight flickered and went back fully on, bringing out the stubble of his brother's hair as he bent his head forward and the lines on his uncle's face, deeper now as he lay against the younger Sheppard's arm.
"Move," one of the women who'd been introduced as someone invited to make up the numbers -- had she said she was a paramedic? -- said, authoritative and sure, and the confused mess of cadets and friends and family flowed aside to let her through, to kneel on the wet pavement beside them and to splay a dark hand over the older man's torso, almost seeming to flicker as she did so.
And then Uncle John flopped one of his arms up to touch Johnny's other arm, and the both of them... glowed. Too brightly even to look at, for a moment.
When Dave could see them clearly again, the maybe-paramedic was rising to her feet, grave and sorrowful, Johnny was dumbly shaking his head, face scored into lines of grief and horror, and his uncle's face lay slack, so that for one moment as the woman stepped away the moving and the unmoving man looked more like twins than they had before or since.
*
"Come on, Johnny," Dave said, and then corrected himself before his brother could do it. "John, I know, I'm sorry, it'll just take a bit to get used to."
John made an effort to straighten his uniform, and with a grumble his brother stepped forward and did it for him.
"There've been enough rumors over that bit with the light reflecting off all that wet," Dave said sturdily. "You need to go out there and do it right in front of all the guests, for his sake."
"You don't understand," John repeated, as he had been saying since the day of their uncle's death. "For a moment... I knew him, I knew everything he was, I knew everything he knew, and a lot of it stayed with me. Not personal stuff, not mostly, but -- " and he flipped the locks of their uncle's guitar case open, caught up the guitar, and began to play the opening theme to MacGyver, swift and sure.
"I didn't know you played the guitar," Dave said, stung once more by this one more secret.
"I didn't," John answered, hollowly, automatically caressing the instrument's silver strings before laying it back in its bed. "Now I can, I can speak German as well as he spoke it, I can speak Chinese and Dutch and some language that doesn't even have a name, it sounds like English and German got really drunk one night and had a wild and crazy three-way with some cousin of Latin that died out years ago, I remember flying every chopper he'd ever flown as if I'd done it myself!"
"Well... that's... " Dave began, uncomfortable.
"And you don't know who he was, you don't know what he was -- he was older and wiser than he ever let us see and he felt that he was a failure stuck carrying a burden that deserved a stronger man, never realizing that he was the strong one, and that woman there at the end -- you saw her, right?"
"There was a woman who tried to help," Dave said tentatively. "I think she was a paramedic or something."
"A parapsychomedic, maybe," John said, sounding a little more like himself. "She showed... there was a way he could be a ghost, or something, and stay, but he thought that floating around bodiless and having to see was the most horrifying thing he could think of, that no one should ever want to do it unless there was no other choice, and he went on, even though -- even though he wouldn't have gotten hit if he hadn't been busy getting everyone out of the way."
"Well, what else was he supposed to do?" Survivor's guilt. They could deal with survivor's guilt. They could find someone to treat it and do something about these hallucinations.
"He could... he could have stayed. In with me. Or if he couldn't, if it doesn't work that way -- he put all this, uh, knowledge in my head, he could have put more, he could have put himself, or close enough for government work, but now there are all these people mourning him and they don't know, they only knew parts of him, nobody realizes that something preserved and infinitely precious is gone out of the world and Uncle John among it -- "
"You were the one saying you knew him!" And every horror movie about split personality was rising in his head, and all he had to fight it were words -- "Do you seriously think he'd have done that? Ever? Do you think he'd like it if you did? I'd hate it! Mom and Dad would hate it! Don't you dare do this to us, don't you fucking dare -- "
"Asshole," John said, and it sounded like him, it really and truly sounded like him for the first time since he'd opened the guitar case.
The funeral seemed to last forever (John played a few songs on the guitar, favorites of his uncle's, thankfully without any more weird episodes) and then the reception proved that relatively speaking, the funereal rites had been over in the twinkling of a very large and ponderous eye.
Dave was rather surprised at the number and variety of guests. There were old people and young, generals and migrant workers, a man who appeared to be a rather well-known author and the Sheppards' fellow SCAdians (who showed signs of kneeling at the man's feet given minimal provocation).
And there were Luke and Lissa, piledriver and needle, sharply pressed and neatly turned out and bold enough to come straight up to John and Aunt Athena and Dave in the corner behind them.
"What are you doing here?" John said blankly. "He wasn't even related to you, not really."
"And she married one of the American volunteers who came over to help out the RAF, and then went right to America as his wife; and then a few months later your Grandpa Sheppard was born," Uncle John's voice was saying in Dave's memory. Oh. That must have been what he had meant. Wait.
"If a man cares enough to marry a woman in order to give her child a name, even if she's going to go straight on to someone else," Dave said furiously, "we should care enough to wear that name with pride and go to his relations' funerals, and that goes for them too, even if we hadn't all known him!"
Lissa nodded, sharp and commanding, and Luke rumbled "Even if it was only for a little bit, you were our brother too, so of course we came. Duh."
The two of them promptly moved to flank him and help direct guests, and John stumbled all over greeting the first mourner in line, thankfully a motherly-looking woman who took it in her stride.
Aside from the author, who said how much he'd enjoyed collaborating with their uncle on a series, offered to donate the share of the royalties Uncle John had refused to take to his estate after death duties, and invited Athena Sheppard to come and visit him sometime, only two of the line of mourners were particularly noticeable.
The first was a tall, creamy-skinned redhead, who looked both angry and genuinely hurt, rather the way Dave thought he felt when thinking about his uncle rather than how to get his brother through this.
"She's what, two, three years older than me, maybe?" he whispered to his cousins as half the SCAdians attempted to outdo each other with florid and utterly sincere declarations of just how much they'd miss the deceased.
"Try ten," Lissa hissed. "Dresses for power, though. Want me to get you a cup of the mixed nuts to hold you guys until they get through with this?"
"Please," Dave said with fervent gratitude, as Aunt Athena met her niece's eyes and nodded.
"Gwenaver. Jen," John said blankly when the redhead reached them, and Aunt Athena made a little sound of recognition.
"You're his other heir. And his executrix," he went on as the redhead -- Jen -- bristled, "and I'm really, really sorry we're meeting like this."
"Thank you for letting me know," Jen said, steely-eyed, exchanging curt nods with Aunt Athena. "I always thought there'd be more time somehow... "
And she stalked off towards the drinks bar, snatching an apple up from one of the refreshment tables as she left.
"So," Dave said when Lissa returned with his snack. "I hear you've got a job lined up?"
Lissa nodded. "It pays very well for what it is, offers health insurance and dental, and the Venusberg promised that if I do wind up studying accounting they'll give me an internship for it."
"Cool," John roused himself to comment.
His cousin-sister smiled sharply. "Very cool."
The other might be more aptly characterized as a party, consisting of an elderly general with a collection of mini-medals pinned to his chest (including several Dave didn't recognize from the hasty guide Johnny -- John had made him read through before the ceremony), his equally elderly companion, a regal lady whose bone structure remained striking despite its wrinkled covering, a younger blonde, and a man of uncertain age who might be her husband.
"Hey, can I have some of those?" the last-mentioned of the party asked, eying Dave's cup of nuts. "That woman looks like she's going to take a while."
Recognizing the woman in question as his uncle and aunt's next-door neighbor, and agreeing that she'd keep on talking for five minutes (more likely ten), Dave shrugged and held out the cup. "How did you know him?"
"I didn't, actually." The man shrugged, regret in his eyes. "General Cutter asked us to come with them, so... "
Dave nodded, regretfully. "I thought you might be another relation, is all."
The general and his wife looked at them swiftly as the other man blinked. "Look, no offense or anything, but whatever for?"
"Well... " It seemed a stupid train of thought, but -- "My uncle always said that the guy playing MacGyver looked a lot like his uncle Adolphus, and you sort of look like him, so I was kind of wondering if you had a cousin Adolphus Sheppard or something."
"Oh, cripes. Here too?"
"That means," the blonde automatically translated, "that we're afraid we don't know any Adolphuses of any sort, but we're flattered you thought we might be long-lost cousins."
"I take it he gets that a lot," Luke said, having snagged himself a kiwi fruit by dint of his mighty gorilla-like arms and was now turning it from side to side, perhaps debating how to eat it without dripping juice.
"You have no idea."
"We'll finish talking later," Aunt Athena ruthlessly cut her neighbor off, waving her on.
The group moved up in the disgruntled woman's wake, and Dave heard the general's "At ease" while he was eying the end of the line, wondering how long it would take.
Then he heard his brother's voice, lost and confused as it had not been since before the service began. "Brassmonkey?"
Luke and the general's aide exchanged identical, horrified glances -- apparently "Brass Monkey" was not the way to speak to a general with a chest full of medals.
"You should go and rest for a bit, son," the general said, kindly, very gently. "You're starting to pass out on your feet."
"Sir, yes, sir!" Luke said quickly, wrapping an arm around John's shoulders and half-manhandling him away and through the nearest door on legs bending this way and that beneath him.
"What -- " Dave began, starting after them and nearly dropping his nuts all over the floor -- would have, if I'm-tired-of-looking-like-MacGyver hadn't caught the cup.
"Delayed shock," the general said peaceably. "Happens to the best of us. Nothing to be overly worried about."
"Please get in touch with us later," the general's wife added, handing Athena Sheppard a business card embossed with the names of Jake and Elizabeth Cutter.
"I'm really sorry," Dave apologized, moving to stand in his brother's place in the reception line.
"Hey, the guy just lost his father," the aide offered. "He's entitled to be a mess."
And he followed the rest of his party into the reception at large, munching Dave's mixed nut cup.
John didn't return until the last of the interminable reception line had passed, which Dave hoped was due to shameless taking advantage and not to genuine incapacity. When he did, he was carrying his uncle's guitar.
"Johnny," Dave said firmly, blocking his way.
"The more I put my own memories on, the less they poke at me," John shrugged. Dave turned it over, decided he didn't like it, decided there was nothing to be done about it, and moved out of the way.
His brother sat down, tuned the guitar, and began to play a repetitive, haunting rhythm. After a few rounds of it, Aunt Athena lifted her face to the ceiling and began to sing, in a surprisingly cold and pure voice, "Worlds grow old and suns grow cold, and death we never can doubt..."
The young blonde in the straw hat whom Dave had found himself confiding his worries about his brother to not fifteen minutes earlier had joined them, pulling two glass pipettes from the pockets of her sailor-looking suit and striking them together to add percussion, when he saw the two people he'd been looking for all day.
"You made it," he said, relieved.
"Our flight was cancelled," his father explained, "and then they routed us through Denver."
"I told you we should have lent Dave the cellular phone," Marilyn Sheppard added in a tone suggesting that she had said as much, many times, already that day. "We tried to call you from the airport, but nobody answered."
"I may have forgotten to plug the telephone back in," Athena Sheppard shrugged. "It would keep ringing."
John finished his song, looked up, and blinked.
"Oh, hon!" his mother said, and began apologizing to him for their delay.
"Think he'll give up this foolishness now?" her husband wondered to his other son.
"I think he still has a contract left to go," Dave muttered, "and he's acting weird enough without trying to pull him away."
*
"I can't do this," John muttered, shifting back and forth from foot to foot. "I can't do this."
"People get married every day." Dave rolled his eyes. "If you try to make a break for it I'll knock you down, call in our very large and trained first cousins with our Brown cousins to back them up, get one of our skinny and fast cousins to fish the bungee cord out of my trunk, and tie you to the pergola with it. Upside down. We're going to be waiting there for a long time while Nancy gets ready and strolls up, and I only have to get you right-side-up in time to kiss her."
"Asshole."
"Slut."
"How come I'm Janet?"
"If the syllable fits... "
"It's not as if I'm good enough for her, you know."
"Isn't that supposed to be her call?"
"What if she thinks better of all this?"
"Then we'll pig out on the reception feast, get royally drunk, and plan how to talk her back into it once the hangover stops. We got it through Lissa's supplier, so it's not actually going to set you back that much. Seriously, this is why you grabbed me for best man, right? I'm the only one who's known you long enough to start thinking of all the stupid crap you might do."
John rolled his eyes at him. "If I ever find myself another brother, I'll bring him around so you can meet him, okay?"
Someone knocked on the changing-room door.
"Do I have to send for the bungee cord?" At least it was a good excuse to get off the subject.
"I think we'll manage without it," John sighed, and threw the door open.
*
The last time Dave saw his brother and father in the same room, the former not only looked almost exactly like Uncle John (Cousin Conrad, as Dave had been making the effort at the time to remember him) but moved like him and spoke with his inflections.
As might have been expected by anyone whose name was not John Sheppard, it had made an already volatile situation that much worse. Patrick Sheppard had snarled, his long-burning temper banked and glowing like a volcano considering this whole waking thing; John had drawled and shrugged and slipped aside from Patrick's focused and cold fury, and in the end had heard the ultimatum out and sauntered off, the way he always did.
"Look, I'll drive you to the airport," Dave offered, afterwards, and John considered for a moment before nodding briefly.
For half the way there neither one of them spoke. At last, after Car Talk had ended, Dave began "You didn't have to leave."
"Funny. I thought 'Leave this house at once!' meant just that."
"It's not -- "
"It's funny how you always expect me to give my word without acknowledging that I already have elsewhere. I don't run out on the responsibilities I chose."
"Only on those that defaulted to you," Dave managed not to say. Instead, he offered "You get more like him every time I see you. Cou-- Uncle John."
"He was in place to get killed because of me," John said, staring far into the distance. "I've been doing my best to grow into someone like him, so I can do what he would have done."
"Maybe Nancy wanted you for a husband, not Conrad John Sheppard."
"She wanted a husband without any secrets. She told you so herself."
"Maybe you should have told her some of them, even if you won't tell us!"
"The one time I tried to tell you," John said, very precisely, "you thought I was hallucinating and you would have pushed me into mental care and ruined my chances of ever getting to fly anything cool if it hadn't been for Fred."
"You sounded like you were talking about mental telepathy and ghosts," Dave sighed. "What did you expect?"
"The real shame of that little adventure," John eventually grumbled, "is that I picked up the most awesome geek cred ever and nobody but a few of the members of the Barony of Sternberg will ever believe it."
"You might want to think about how you're saying that," Dave rolled his eyes, "since it sounds as if you think it was worse than the funeral."
"I'm not mad at you," John said when he got out of the car.
"I'm mad that you're being an asshole. Slight difference from mad AT you. Anything else?"
"Not really, no." He slung his duffel over one shoulder and turned and walked into the terminal. Dave watched him go until the car behind honked sharply.
*
The last time Dave saw his brother, they'd talked until all hours, slept in in a pile on the floor the way they hadn't since high school, and then gone round and seen all of the mutual relations that lived in something vaguely resembling a reasonable distance.
They'd even started keeping in contact through electronic letters, sent by some delayed method that made them almost as slow as the modern postal service. (The latest one, which he eagerly anticipated opening, bore the subject line "Did you know Lissa gave Ronon Venusberg coupons to give to all my friends?!!")
He was in the leisurely process of packing up his father's house when someone rang the doorbell.
"Hello," he said, blinking at the purple-haired black teenager on the doorstep.
"Mr. Dave Sheppard?" she asked politely.
"Uh, yes?"
"May I see some ID?"
He blinked, dug his wallet out of a back pocket, and held it so that his driver's license showed through the clear window.
She tilted her head, clucked her tongue, and nodded. "I'm an intern at Mukerji, Wang, and Wells," she smiled. "There's a package we've been entrusted with delivering to you on this date at this time; wait while I get it out of my car."
She skipped down the stairs, threw open the door of a fuchsia Camaro, and fished out a flat, thin, dusty package.
"Sign here," she told him when she returned.
Bemused, he did so.
"Do you mind if I stay and watch you open it?" she asked. "We've had it for years, and a couple of us have been wondering what it is. It looks too thin to be the Further Nice and Accurate Prophecies..."
"What's your name?" Dave asked.
"Anthea. Uh, Anthea Maeven."
He thought for a moment, and then gestured expansively. "Sure. Why not."
The application of a key to the packing tape, already starting to go brittle, quickly revealed a number of discs in sleeves (which he hastily grabbed and poured onto an endtable near the front door) and a letter.
A letter which had, for a return address at the top of the first page:
John B. Sheppard
avatarlink, Plane G7
c/o Avatar
South Roschtalia
Mieselia
Pegasus --localnode
Date uncertain
"What the?" he wondered, and began reading the letter.
Dave,
You're probably wondering what the hell.
Remember back when Uncle John died, and I told you he'd had the chance to stick around as a bodiless spirit but thought it was a horrible idea, and you didn't believe me?
You really should have. I've met a couple of the ones that did stick around in my line of work, and they nearly all suck. It sucks. There's a reason it's a bad idea to do it unless you really, really have to.
(This is classified eleventeen ways from Sunday, but it isn't classified yet here where I'm writing this, and either there won't be a me there to be punished for it, or the me that's there won't ever have been the me writing this, so he wouldn't be punished for my barracks-lawyering.)
The thing is... I really, really had to.
We wound up trapped back in time. (Again, this sort of thing seems to happen in our line of work a lot.) However, this time it came with a deadline, emphasis on first syllable, for us and for the future, given that we'd knocked something out of true when we went back.
So -- the thing with beings that have "ascended to a higher plane," as they call it, is that they can do things to affect the world -- heck, they could probably turn the sun purple and stick all the trees in upside down -- but whenever someone does anything more than they could do as a plain old garden variety human or whatever, the others go kind of kamikaze on his ass and come up with new and unpleasant punishments.
I remembered how to. (Not so much from Uncle John's infodump as from one I shared with a higher-level being posing as a space priestess and a love goddess. I wrote some of the details up on one of the other pages, but I figured I'd better get the important stuff down first, in case she catches us.)
So I -- well. It's something like being really, really stoned, without the munchies and with a strong bit of "holy shit we won the championship!" Anyway, I dealt with the problem (it'd take too long to explain), grabbed up Ronon and Jennifer and sort of tossed them in the general direction of the future. I don't know if Jennifer came up last time I was there, but she's got what it takes to be a sister-in-law in this crazy family, and so I had to be sure wherever they landed, they'd do it together. (I know it was somewhere long-term habitable -- it's all in how you throw.)
Then I tried tossing Rodney and Teyla after them, but the Others were showing up just then and I think they went wide. Still somewhere habitable, at least.
Anyway, I got sort of the same punishment as the space priestess, with an... awkward sort of twist, and it isn't as if anyone I know can ever come visit, because we changed history and so I'm in an entirely different universe.
And the thing is, I don't know what the upshot will be. Universes are heavy, and they try to merge back together all the time, which is why testimony from honest witnesses contradicts itself -- one of them remembers one of the ways it was before the merge, and the other one remembers the other way, and it might have Schroedingered over into a third way entirely.
When someone's dead, that usually keeps them apart, because either the person's alive or they're dead, and you can't be sort of dead outside The Princess Bride, it doesn't work.
But when they just vanish -- the way we softly and suddenly vanished away from the place where we were -- well, everything up to that point was exactly the same, so the universes should slide back together again, and since we weren't there in one universe, there'd be nothing to keep the us from the other universe from going right into place, not even the little stumble you usually do when two of you merge together. It's going on all the time; Douglas Adams was right about so many things.
So either we're still here, never having left, and would probably be more than a little alarmed should you show us this letter (and there's a drawing on the back of the wodjet that took us back, so we know to avoid it), or we've softly and suddenly vanished away, and I leave it up to you to decide whether to get in touch with Rodney's sister and Jennifer's parents and reassure them that they're all safe, just in a parallel world, or whether you think it wouldn't.
The woman who wasn't a paramedic is here at the moment, showing her latest protegé around and using me as an object example of What Not To Do, Why, and How Parallel Worlds Form. Dr. Jackson's a pretty nice guy, though, so he agreed to take a letter back and leave it with one of the local law firms for timed delivery; apparently they'll actually do it, unlike the postal service. (By the time this is delivered to you, assuming I haven't just created a new universe AGAIN, he'll have been kicked out for his own bit of meddling and may be able to answer your questions himself. He promised not to peek, so let us hope.)
I am free to act part of the time, when the rest of me is asleep and dreaming; not that I can do much, but I can look at parallel dimensions (and now and then back and forward, but that gets dizzy fast), and copy the things I see down. Except for the one I created, just to torment me. (As I said, inventive.) So here, in return for putting up with me all these years, especially if it didn't work the way I thought it would and I'm gone, are television shows from parallel worlds. Including a couple of seasons of a version of Wormhole X-Treme that didn't suck, and episodes from shows that existed in this world but whose masters got lost, and a world where Larson got the greenlight for his space war show in the wake of Star Wars (the technical values are far lower, but so are the ethical compromises) -- did she send you the FROTHING CAPSLOCK OF RAGE rant too, or am I just lucky?
That aside, um. I've been sitting here for a couple thousand years with not much else to do but surf the interdimensional version of YouTube and think, and grow out of being an emotional chickenshit.
So. My life on Earth kind of sucked -- a lot -- but you didn't suck. (And if you do, I don't want to know about it.) Gwenaver was right; we always think there'll be more time, in the teeth of the evidence. I didn't get the chance to say it to Mom, and I didn't get the chance to say it to Dad, and I barely got the chance to say it to Uncle John, but here. You were the best brother I could have had then, and you're the only one I trust with all of this. I'm sorry if I've disappeared on you.
Enjoy your videos,
John B. Sheppard
"You don't need to sign your full name when you're writing to family," Dave grumbled, staring at the letter in his hand.
"Wow." Anthea straightened up from over his shoulder. "That was definitely worth the gas mileage. Hey, if those are WXT episodes that don't suck, would you consider uploading them?"
"Maybe," he said blankly.
"Thanks!"
When she had driven away, he piled up the letter, and the letter appendices, and the DVDs, and stared at them for a moment.
Then he pulled out his BlackBerry, and composed a quick message to his brother, and sent it along.
It was the day before the mail exchange.