Haven't To Deserve by Mad Maudlin (Wish Fulfillment Challenge)
Title: Haven't To Deserve
Author: Mad_maudlin
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: "Rising," "Outcast" and "Enemy at the Gates," as well as the tenth season of SG-1.
Summary: Family is what you make of it.
A/N: For scifi_lemon, who wished for "John is an Ancient" fic. I'm pretty sure this is not actually what you had in mind, but I made a valiant attempt. I gave John the same birthdate as the Flan, and went with the fanon that he's got a past connection to San Francisco…um, obviously. The title is the lesser-known half of line by Robert Frost. When it comes to research, Google is my friend; the NaNoWriMo boards are my friend with benefits.
Haven't To Deserve
By Mad Maudlin
Moira Higgs had an accent John couldn't place, Australia or New Zealand or something in that general hemisphere, and tiny silver-framed glasses. "Have a seat, Colonel, this isn't going to take but a moment."
"Just so long as I'm not turning into a bug again," John said, because he really couldn't think of many other reasons why a geneticist-their only one when Carson wasn't in the city-would contact him for a private conversation.
She laughed. "No, no, nothing of the sort-it's really nothing important, just a pet project of mine, but I thought you'd be interested in the results."
"Which are?"
She sat at her desk, sorting through the clutter to unearth a laptop. "Well, ever since Carson positively identified the ATA gene, I've made a habit of trying to catalogue all the various mutations of the allele indigenous to Earth-you know what I mean by allele, right?-and trying to cross-reference them geographically. Just an odd hobby, really, since after so many generations there's no way I'd be able to usefully track population movements, but there have been a few pleasant surprises."
"Like what?"
Higgs brought up a map on her laptop and twisted it so John could see, even though the colors and markings didn't make any sense to him. "Well, gene carriers of European descent tend to have the most diverse array of mutations, which makes sense if most of the Ancients settled in modern-day Greece and Italy-they were working from a larger gene pool to begin with. But the British Isles has an unusually high concentration of gene-carriers of a specific mutation class-the one you and Carson and General O'Neill belong to-particularly people with Celtic ancestry."
John smirked. "You implying that maybe Merlin did more than just build a grail when he was hanging around Camelot?"
"I never speak ill of the dead," Higgs said primly. "Though that allele is the most similar to the ones catalogued by the Ancients, which suggests either a drastically lower mutation rate than normal or, uh, more recent introduction. But that's not what I wanted to tell you."
He hoped not, because that would be a little anticlimactic, though out loud he said, "I dunno-it'd be kind of cool to tell people I'm descended from a wizard."
Higgs smiled and brought something else up on her screen but didn't turn it to John yet. "I can do you one better, actually. See, eventually I branched out from just the ATA to look at other co-occurring markers. Have you ever heard of mitochondria?"
After a moment's thought he ventured, "Isn't that what gives you the Force?"
"Not…exactly," she said with a slow blink. "Mitochondria are structures in human cells that have their own, separate DNA, outside the nucleus. They reproduce themselves by mitosis and they're passed along directly from mother to child in the egg cell, so in theory mitochondrial DNA can be used to determine heredity over fantastically long time spans-presuming, of course, that you're concerned only with the female line. Some researchers have used it to pinpoint the origins of our species, so I thought I'd roll the dice and cross-reference the database with the handful of mitochondrial samples we've collected from gene carriers. I mean the odds were really fantastically against me…"
"But I take it I was a hit?" John asked.
"A bull's eye," Higgs said. "To you from your mother from her mother and all the way back to the Ancients. One Ancient in particular, actually…" And she finally turned the screen around.
John briefly forgot how to breathe.
"Her name was 'Argantorota,' if you can pronounce it," Higgs continued obliviously. "Her file's not been completely translated, and I don't pretend to read Ancient well enough to do it myself, but she's the only match who's listed as evacuating to Earth-all the others I found died in the war or of natural causes. If you'd like to take a closer look at it yourself-"
"Please," John said, then cleared his throat. "I mean, yeah, I'd like that. Could you--?"
Higgs gave him the file on a thumb drive, but she was frowning. "Is everything all right, Colonel? You look a little…disturbed."
"Nah, I'm good," he assured her, and headed back to his office-no, better make that his quarters-to get a closer look at that picture.
-\--\--\-
"This the one you're looking for?" Dave asked, wiping a smudge of dust off his face.
"I think so." John took the heavy old scrapbook to the desk, the one he had never, ever, ever been allowed to sit at when he was a kid. He didn't sit at it now, just stood over it so he could open up the book, letting loose the smell of dust and crumbling paper. Dave peered over his shoulder, and it wasn't lost on John that this was possibly the most congenial four hours they'd spent with each other in the last twenty years, and that included the weekend after the funeral.
He'd only ever seen this scrapbook once, when he'd gone snooping in the inviolate sanctum of his father's study during a cocktail party downstairs. It was more or less like he remembered it, allowing for the differences in an eight-year-old's perception and the additional ravages of time: the yellow papers were yellower, the blurry ink was blurrier, a dried flower that had been taped to the front page had crumbled down to dust. Most of the letters and photographs weren't even secured in place, just tucked between pages, sometimes in stacks. John paged through carefully, checking every old picture for the one he remembered.
"Is that Dad?" Dave asked, choking on a laugh and pointing when John turned a page. The picture showed a group of hippies straight from Standard Casting, all tie-dye and fringe, and in the middle was a stocky man in a polo shirt with a neat moustache and a razor-straight part in his hair. As if to ensure nothing was left to the imagination, the note scribbled on the back said San Francisco New Years Eve 1965. Patrick Sheppard had caught little John snooping through these photos, but either generosity or alcohol had compelled him to climb right down on the floor and share some stories.
"His wild and crazy grad-school days," John said dryly, knowing he was close to the one he wanted. There were a few standard touristy shots of cable cars and the bridge, one out-of-focus action shot of a football game, and then the one he wanted, of Patrick-hair a little longer than the Christmas shot, shirt a little less buttoned, how wild and crazy-standing next to a slender young woman in a flowing skirt and yellow-tinted glasses. They were in a park, and she looked awkward, glancing at something off to the side of the camera, hands twined together in front of her; Patrick was grinning, one possessive hand on her hip, oblivious to her distraction.
The caption on the back said Rhoda and me without a date.
"So that's," Dave started to say, and then stopped.
"Yeah," John said. "My mother."
Mom had always meant Betty Sheppard, she of the June Cleaver wardrobe and lame puns and snickerdoodles, who had legally adopted John while pregnant with David. She had never treated her sons any differently from each other, and in truth she'd been the perfect buffer between John and Patrick, at least for a while. But at age eight John had already known, by some kind of osmosis, that there was Mom and there was his mother, the one who had given birth to him and then somehow disappeared. That night in the study was the first time he saw her, though, in this photo and one other.
Rhoda, Dad had said, taking that other picture in his hands with a sigh. Haven't thought of her in years. That's your real mom, you know.
John had an idea that real moms helped you with your math homework, but he'd nodded and said Yes, sir. And, studying her dark, elbow-length hair and narrow face, She's pretty.
That she was. Her name was Rhoda. Sometimes you look like her.
Where'd she go?
Hell if I know. Somewhere not in San Francisco.
Later, after breast cancer took Betty away, John had tried to throw that back in his father's face. You don't even know where my mother is! What kind of a husband is that?
And Patrick, stoney-eyed, had say, What makes you think we were married?
John had taken the other photo of Rhoda, a solo shot, and again in that photo she'd been staring away from the camera into some middle distance, a lock of dark hair tangled in her fingers where it had escaped from her colorful headband. That one had had a year on it, 1966, but he'd lost it somewhere along the line, like so much else. He set the surviving photo of Rhoda aside and kept searching through the scrapbook, checking every face in the crowd, looking for some other sign; he found a couple photos of himself as a bug-eyed infant (already working on his very first cowlick) but the arms and laps that formed the backgrounds were all anonymous. When he closed the scrapbook, Dave had picked up the photo and was studying it.
"You look just like her," he said, handing it back. "You want to tell me what brought this on?"
As an answer, he took the folded print-out from his pocket and smoothed out the creases on the edge of the desk. Argantorota, a young Lantean flight engineer turned civil defender turned evacuee, next to Rhoda the mystery hippie of 1966. The photo wasn't great quality, and the glasses got in the way, but it was easy to see that if you took those off and trimmed Rhoda's hair down to an androgynous shag and gave her one of those bland universal official-photo expressions…
Dave made a low whistling noise. "Jesus, John, who is that?" He pointed at the print-out. "She looks just like…but that's a recent photo, isn't it?" Ten thousand years recent, John thought, but David was noticing the digital quality, and there were no other identifying marks on it. "Is she some kind of relative?"
"I don't know," John said, which was sort of true. He couldn't be sure of it. It could be a crazy coincidence of time and space and DNA. "That's kind of why I'm here."
They spent the rest of the day going through more photo albums and old file folders, while Dave tried to tease a better answer out of John and made vague comments about gold-digging cousins who might only want him for the Sheppard money. They eventually found a copy of John's original birth certificate along with a bundle of papers related to the adoption: on this one, the MOTHER'S NAME field read "Rhoda Jones" and there was no hospital or attending doctor's stamp. John squinted at the faded type, making out the address for MOTHER'S PLACE OF RESIDENCE. "Unless I'm really wrong," he said, "this lists her address as Candlestick Park."
They Googled it. John wasn't wrong.
There were some extra letters with the adoption papers, signed affidavits that Rhoda Jones had pulled up stakes with no forwarding address, had willingly abandoned her child. John knew that it was the same year his father finished his MBA, but the degree was framed on the wall and the commencement photographs he'd have expected were absent-maybe Patrick hadn't attended. No more generic photos, either, and no more cards or letters; it was like an entire year got edited out, the hippies of 1966 jumping to business suits and Betty in 1968 with nothing but those shapshots of John in between. He didn't know whether to vent his frustration at the old man for dying too soon or at Higgs for finding this out too late, or maybe at himself for never finding a way to just ask.
-\--\--\-
He left the following morning, with the requisite number of awkward farewells, and flew to San Francisco. Even without the mysterious Rhoda Jones, it was a place with a lot of mixed-up feelings for him. College had been great, had been fucking fantastic, out from under the old man's thumb with an AFROTC scholarship that (almost) paid his way, but his memories of Travis AFB with Mitch and Dex and Nancy were still more bitter than sweet. He'd come back here, because it was his last residence of record, just before the expedition left-Elizabeth's unspoken bid to let the fearful turn back-and he'd been so out of his head that he'd flipped a coin, heads for Pegasus, tails to just find a badass car, cash out his bank account, and drive until he either hit something or got caught by the military police.
As soon as the plane landed he took the BART into the city and found the same hillside where he'd thought about how little he had to lose. This time he looked past the bridge, though, to the spot of open ocean where Atlantis had temporarily been parked. Those memories, those were the best: well, not the part where they'd all been terrified of being stuck on Earth forever, but the off hours when he took Teyla and Ronon to a Forty-Niners game, got McKay so drunk on Bud Lite that he almost started a fistfight with a Berkley professor over string theory, rescued Zelenka from some transvestites in the Castro when he'd gotten lost on a pizza run, and convinced Woolsey that Pegasus was something worth fighting for. Good times; good friends. Memories layered on memories, and the fact that he'd been born here had always seemed like trivia before.
When he left the park he just wandered. He avoided the touristy stuff on principle, kept clear of the bar he and Mitch and Dex had sworn they'd buy when they hit retirement, didn't go near the hotel where he and Nancy had honeymooned. Instead he went out to the Stick, just for the hell of it, and walked around the empty parking lot for a while. Then back into the city, to Haight-Ashbury, which clung to its past like a starlet gone to seed. He tried to imagine it as a sea of unwashed hippies, grafting together film clips and book descriptions in his mind, and then to put his father in the middle of it. What had Patrick Sheppard come here for when he wasn't at Stanford? He was a lifelong Republican, an MBA student, practically an old man at age 27. Was this his idea of a rebellion, a kind of contact high without the risk of long term side-effects? Or was there something more to the man than John had ever seen, something that withered and ossified back east until he became the stiff-necked dictator John had known?
They'd gleaned some addresses from the scrapbooks and affadavits, and John looked for them in a noncommittal way, but the city had swallowed some of them, or remade them into something else entirely-specialty boutiques or office blocks or parking lots. He ate dinner at the same restaurant where Keller had finished a margarita bigger than her own head on a bet, then got on a redeye back to Colorado Springs. The Daedalus was leaving the next morning and if John missed it, his next vacation would be a skiing trip in Hell.
-\--\--\-
His beam-up time was delayed because of a last-minute tune up of the something-or-other, and so rather than loiter in the gate room he found himself wandering the corridors beyond it with his backpack. Jackson's office wasn't a conscious goal, but John wasn't particularly surprised when he ended up there, slowing down as he passed the door so he could shoot a quick, casual glance inside.
At the same moment, Jackson came around the corner with a bowl of cereal in one hand and a book in the other. John easily sidestepped the potential collision, seconds before Jackson registered his presence. "Oh, hey, Colonel Sheppard, I didn't see you there."
"Obviously," he said.
Jackson tucked the book under his arm so he could adjust his glasses. "I didn't even know you were on Earth, actually. Is there something I can do for you?"
And John said, "Maybe."
With the door propped open just a sliver, he laid out the pictures. He explained the story, in as few words as possible, though for some reason it wasn't as hard as he'd thought it would be; maybe because Jackson had an academic detachment that made it clear, however intriguing the story, it wasn't really about John to him. He took notes on a legal pad and copied the file over from the thumb drive John had brought. And then he voiced the idea that John had been batting around in his head for ages.
"Why would an Ascended Ancient take on human form just long enough to have a child, and then leave him?"
"Maybe she wasn't Ascended," John said, because if he made it academic then he could talk, too. "Maybe it was time travel."
Jackson shrugged. "Could be. Either way, I suppose it wouldn't have been exactly difficult to blend in with the counterculture; we got by with a little cash and a pretty vague cover story."
"We?" John asked.
"Oh, yeah, I spent a couple weeks in 1969 once," Jackson said, and then without missing a beat, "The easiest thing to do, I suppose, is just disprove the whole theory-find Rhoda Jones."
John had never put much thought into the idea; once he'd buried the only mom he'd ever known he found it curiously hard to care about the other one. "Shouldn't be too difficult, since 'Jones' is only, what, the second most common name in America?"
But Jackson suddenly got a funny look in his eye, and he leapt to his bookshelf. "What was the Ancient's name again?" he asked.
"Argantorota," John said.
Jackson found whatever he wanted and started paging through it rapidly. "Jones," he said, "is Welsh."
"Really." Maybe it was all in John's head, then. Maybe he'd have to settle for being great-grandsomething to Merlin, no closer than Carson or O'Neill. He could do that.
"Here." Jackson suddenly jabbed a finger at the page. "I knew that name from somewhere. 'Argantorota' is a very early form of the name Arianrhod, the Welsh goddess of the moon and virginity." He grabbed a piece of chalk and wrote the two names on a corner of his chalkboard; then he underlined the rhod. "Now, that's a proto-Celtic borrowing from Ancient that means 'wheel,' whereas 'Rhoda' is a Classical Greek name that means 'rose,' but…"
"But they're close enough if you just landed in 1966," John said. "And she's the goddess of virginity?"
Jackson suddenly looked slightly nervous. "Well, in the texts…she's mostly known for the immaculate birth of twin sons named Dylan and Lleu. Dylan immediately turned into a fish and swam away, and Lleu was so ugly that Arianrhod put three curses on him and sent him away. The story goes on that Lleu eventually found a way around the curses through various deceptions…but in the end he got betrayed by his wife and turned into an eagle."
"An eagle?"
"Well, that part's a little complicated."
John just looked at his hands instead, and thought about why he'd come to Earth at all, when an email to Dave and a couple of drinks with an anthropologist could've netted him essentially the same results. Hell, if he wanted to know the truth he could've just gotten a blood test, laid out Higgs' claims to Keller and had the results in back in a couple of days. There wasn't any point in this…what was it, anyway? A pilgrimage? He'd come to Earth and spent more time flying above it than on the ground, he'd be stuck on the Daedalus for three weeks now with nothing new…
"You know," Jackson said suddenly, "if Arianrhod is your mother, that makes you about the closest thing to an Ancient there is on this plane."
"Except for the part where I'm totally not," John pointed out.
"Well, I'm sure from their perspective…but the point I was about to make was, in that case, as far as we know, you're basically second in line for ownership of Atlantis after a brain-damaged teenager."
John thought of Helia and her crew storming into the city, thought of Mara's father with his drone-chair throne, and imagined himself waving a scepter to banish people from his realm as he wished. It almost produced a distinctly unmanly giggle. "How do you even decide ownership of a flying city?" he asked.
"There are people at the Pentagon who stay awake at night thinking about exactly that sort of question," Jackson said ominously, and then John's watch beeped, and he realized it was time to go. As he gathered his things, Jackson added, "I'll, ah, I'll see if I can find out anything more for you-if you want me to."
"Sure," John said. "Knock yourself out. And…thanks."
-\--\--\-
The Daedalus got a databurst before they left the Milky Way, and in it were two emails for John. One was from Dave, who'd hired an expensive private investigator to track down Rhoda Jones (in the interest of protecting John from the alleged gold-digging relatives) and come up with nothing: no birth certificates, no marriage or drivers' licenses, no credit cards or rental contracts or bank accounts, no living witnesses among the names gleaned from the scrapbook and the adoption papers. Nothing but a signature on John's birth certificate and a photograph in the bottom of his bag. The other email was from Jackson, who'd done basically the same thing for free and come up with the same results. I couldn't even track down anyone from the city clerk's office who would've been present the day the birth certificate was issued, he added. Which of course neither proves nor disproves anything. If I think of something else, I'll let you know.
John wanted to thank them both for the effort (Jackson slightly more than Dave) but by then they were in the void between galaxies; nothing but emergency communication until they reached Pegasus and could dial a gate for a databurst in the other direction. He spent a little time getting to know the new personnel who were rotating into the city and a lot of time in his quarters, reading or playing computer golf or doing push-ups and sit-ups until his muscles burned. Christ, they needed to get Earth a ZPM.
John ate and worked and slept and passed the time.
At night, he dreamed.
-\--\--\-
He was sitting on the hill in Golden Gate Park, looking at the bridge; she sat next to him, dressed just like the photograph, with braided leather sandals and a flower in her hair. "You're a determined man, you know," she said. "A lot like your father."
"Don't know if I appreciate the comparison," he said slowly, taking in the distorted scenery. To one side, the city; to the other, the bridge; straight ahead, the other city, Atlantis, closer than she'd ever come to land in reality.
"Determined people," she said again, and inhaled from a hand-rolled cigarette. The smoke had no smell in this yellowed and fading space. "I never cared enough to be determined about things, myself."
"You were decorated in the war with the Wraith," he pointed out, not because it was important but because he was pretty sure he knew what this is now and it had always been his nature to needle the people pulling the strings.
She laughed a little, a smoker's laugh that made her sound a bit like Janis Joplin. "That was about duty. Going through the motions. You know how it is."
"And you know that I know."
"It's all right there in your head."
He looked over the bay and asked "Have you been watching me?
"Sometimes," she said.
"Is that why you're here now?"
She let the smoke trickle out of the corners of her mouth. "I'm here because you're owed an explanation."
He shifted around until he was facing her, but she stayed where she was, angled to him. "Well, I gotta admit I got over the whole abandonment thing a while back, but I'm still a bit hung up on this part where you're an alien."
"An alien." One side of her mouth quirked up. "You know, we always learned that the aliens of Earth were the pre-verbal apes in the grasslands."
He considered that a low blow and thus chose to ignore it. "I thought you guys were supposed to have a rule about interfering on this plane."
She huffed another smoker's laugh and ground out her cigarette in the dirt. "Interfering. That's a hard word to define. Am I interfering right now? Or is it only if I tell you something that change the course of a civilization? You have a free will; am I somehow responsible for all that you've made of yourself?"
"I…guess not," he said slowly. "But that doesn't explain what you were doing on Earth in the first place."
He wanted her to look at him; he wanted to see her eyes, even shielded by the yellow glasses. But she stayed looking over the water, out and away. "I did my duty. I did everything the Council asked of me. And when we evacuated, and there was nothing left to do…I made myself a sanctuary by the sea, and laid my burdens down. There was nothing for us on a world where most civilizations were still getting excited about wheels, after all."
"Until the Summer of Love drew you out again?" he asked, dubious.
She smiled softly now. "I don't supposed you can appreciate it from your position, but that time, that place…there was such hope in the world. Innocent, misguided, childish hope, but I think you know well what a drug that can be. Our plane can be beautiful and subtle and terrible all at once, but we have too long been a hunted kind for it to ever be a place of particular hope."
"And Patrick?" he asked.
The smiled turned a shade saucy, and she came the closest yet to meeting his eyes. "I hadn't held a corporeal form in thousands of years, and he had a certain…fire. Determination, if you don't mind. And it was always fun to surprise him."
"Like when you told him you were pregnant?" He looked away this time, over ocean. "'Cause I'm finding it a little hard to believe that a Stanford MBA and an Ancient would forget to use a condom."
"You try being pure energy for a few millennia and see what slips your mind," she said wearily. "Besides, I had helped strike down whole planets when one of our people broke the rules of interference…I didn't think I'd have so much trouble ending you."
He tried to cough to cover his reaction to that, even knowing she could read his thoughts. "Well. Wow. I, uh, I guess I need to get me one of those stickers that says 'Thank God my mom was pro-life.'"
"I could sense all the infinite possibilities of you," she said quietly. "And I respected that. Even if I was a little old for a first-time mother, I decided it was beyond even my wisdom to decide based on possibilities whether or not you deserved to live, and if the Others judged otherwise, so be it."
"So you did your duty," he said.
She nodded and lit another cigarette. "I did my duty."
"And when I was born?"
"I got you to your father, didn't I?" she said. "There was no way I could stay with you, not in the long-term, unless I gave up my memories of Atlantis and Ascension. The Others may look the other way for a year, but not a generation…and I don't think you'd have wanted to come with me."
"Not so much, no." He glanced up at the sky, but it was cloudless and faintly green, as yellowed as his father's photographs. "And I guess I didn't count as interference since, you know, planet still standing and all."
She gestured with her cigarette, drawing a smoky arc through the air. "Oh, if they'd objected, Earth would still be in one piece. We wouldn't."
He nodded, and they both fell silent, watching the twin cityscapes in a way they should never have been able to. After a while he got the impression that she was waiting for him to say something, but he'd become comfortable with silence, turning it into a kind of verbal game of chicken-how awkward can this get before one of us gives in to the need for noise? Lord knew he'd perfected the art of it on Nancy, but he was surprised to find that this time, he was the one who caved first. "Anything else?" he asked, picking at the dry grass.
"I suppose I should ask you that," she said. "If you want to know anything about me. About our people."
"I know my people fine, thanks," he said. "And if I want to know more about yours, I can read it in the database."
She raised and eyebrow at that, peering at him from the corner of her eye. "So you still consider yourself human?"
"Are you honestly saying that surprises you?" he asked, more than half curious himself. "I didn't even know your name until a couple days ago."
"But you've always felt a little different, haven't you?" she prodded. "Like you weren't quite in step with the world? Out of place?"
"Not always," he said. "Look. I figured out pretty early that family is what you make of it. And my family, my friends? Are human, not glowy…energy…thingies. They're the ones who have my back, they're the ones who know me, and they can look me in the face when they talk to me. I don't know what you wanted out of this for yourself, but I don't think you're getting it, because I've got my answers and I'm already on my way home."
That seemed to startle her, enough that she turned and looked, really looked at him for the first time. Her eyes were wide behind the yellow lenses, and he decided she really was as pretty as she'd seemed when he was eight. Then she laughed aloud, a little, and seemed to relax. "Home," she said. "Atlantis."
"Yeah," he said. "Atlantis."
She leaned in and placed a dry kiss on his cheek; then, barely leaning back, pulled a flower from her hair and slid it behind his ear. "Go home, then. And good luck."
-\--\--\-
He got back to Atlantis at an ungodly early hour, wide awake even though the Daedalus had been incrementally shifting its ship's day into synch with New Lantea's solar day. After he tossed his bag in his quarters, he grabbed his laptop and went down to the mess hall, knowing there would be a handful of early risers (or the truly ungodly night owls) also demanding coffee.
By the time Ronon showed up for breakfast, still sweating from a run, John had at least sorted his backlog of email into categories of "now," "later," "never," and "lorne." By the time Teyla, Kanaan and Torren arrived, he'd worked through "now" and forwarded "lorne," and got to tickle the baby's tummy and catch up on the last three weeks as measured in gossip and laughter. He'd just gotten Lorne's ritual passive-aggressive reply back when Rodney shuffled in, and he was the first one to say, "Hey, when did you get back?"
John checked his watch. "About three hours ago. Miss me?"
"Hmm, let's see, you go haring back to Earth with no warning for three weeks? Um, yeah?" Rodney bit into a danish and continued with his mouth full, "I thought you'd been recalled for a court martial or something."
"What are they gonna court martial me for?" John asked.
"I've actually been working on a list." He peered closely at John. "You're not dying, are you?"
"No," John said. "It was just a…family thing. No big deal"
"Everything okay?" Ronon asked.
John glanced around the table, at Ronon's heap of bacon and Teyla's smile and Rodney's vain attempts to slip Torren a Fruity Loop when his parents weren't looking, and then nodded. "Yeah. Everything's fine."
Author: Mad_maudlin
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: "Rising," "Outcast" and "Enemy at the Gates," as well as the tenth season of SG-1.
Summary: Family is what you make of it.
A/N: For scifi_lemon, who wished for "John is an Ancient" fic. I'm pretty sure this is not actually what you had in mind, but I made a valiant attempt. I gave John the same birthdate as the Flan, and went with the fanon that he's got a past connection to San Francisco…um, obviously. The title is the lesser-known half of line by Robert Frost. When it comes to research, Google is my friend; the NaNoWriMo boards are my friend with benefits.
Haven't To Deserve
By Mad Maudlin
Moira Higgs had an accent John couldn't place, Australia or New Zealand or something in that general hemisphere, and tiny silver-framed glasses. "Have a seat, Colonel, this isn't going to take but a moment."
"Just so long as I'm not turning into a bug again," John said, because he really couldn't think of many other reasons why a geneticist-their only one when Carson wasn't in the city-would contact him for a private conversation.
She laughed. "No, no, nothing of the sort-it's really nothing important, just a pet project of mine, but I thought you'd be interested in the results."
"Which are?"
She sat at her desk, sorting through the clutter to unearth a laptop. "Well, ever since Carson positively identified the ATA gene, I've made a habit of trying to catalogue all the various mutations of the allele indigenous to Earth-you know what I mean by allele, right?-and trying to cross-reference them geographically. Just an odd hobby, really, since after so many generations there's no way I'd be able to usefully track population movements, but there have been a few pleasant surprises."
"Like what?"
Higgs brought up a map on her laptop and twisted it so John could see, even though the colors and markings didn't make any sense to him. "Well, gene carriers of European descent tend to have the most diverse array of mutations, which makes sense if most of the Ancients settled in modern-day Greece and Italy-they were working from a larger gene pool to begin with. But the British Isles has an unusually high concentration of gene-carriers of a specific mutation class-the one you and Carson and General O'Neill belong to-particularly people with Celtic ancestry."
John smirked. "You implying that maybe Merlin did more than just build a grail when he was hanging around Camelot?"
"I never speak ill of the dead," Higgs said primly. "Though that allele is the most similar to the ones catalogued by the Ancients, which suggests either a drastically lower mutation rate than normal or, uh, more recent introduction. But that's not what I wanted to tell you."
He hoped not, because that would be a little anticlimactic, though out loud he said, "I dunno-it'd be kind of cool to tell people I'm descended from a wizard."
Higgs smiled and brought something else up on her screen but didn't turn it to John yet. "I can do you one better, actually. See, eventually I branched out from just the ATA to look at other co-occurring markers. Have you ever heard of mitochondria?"
After a moment's thought he ventured, "Isn't that what gives you the Force?"
"Not…exactly," she said with a slow blink. "Mitochondria are structures in human cells that have their own, separate DNA, outside the nucleus. They reproduce themselves by mitosis and they're passed along directly from mother to child in the egg cell, so in theory mitochondrial DNA can be used to determine heredity over fantastically long time spans-presuming, of course, that you're concerned only with the female line. Some researchers have used it to pinpoint the origins of our species, so I thought I'd roll the dice and cross-reference the database with the handful of mitochondrial samples we've collected from gene carriers. I mean the odds were really fantastically against me…"
"But I take it I was a hit?" John asked.
"A bull's eye," Higgs said. "To you from your mother from her mother and all the way back to the Ancients. One Ancient in particular, actually…" And she finally turned the screen around.
John briefly forgot how to breathe.
"Her name was 'Argantorota,' if you can pronounce it," Higgs continued obliviously. "Her file's not been completely translated, and I don't pretend to read Ancient well enough to do it myself, but she's the only match who's listed as evacuating to Earth-all the others I found died in the war or of natural causes. If you'd like to take a closer look at it yourself-"
"Please," John said, then cleared his throat. "I mean, yeah, I'd like that. Could you--?"
Higgs gave him the file on a thumb drive, but she was frowning. "Is everything all right, Colonel? You look a little…disturbed."
"Nah, I'm good," he assured her, and headed back to his office-no, better make that his quarters-to get a closer look at that picture.
-\--\--\-
"This the one you're looking for?" Dave asked, wiping a smudge of dust off his face.
"I think so." John took the heavy old scrapbook to the desk, the one he had never, ever, ever been allowed to sit at when he was a kid. He didn't sit at it now, just stood over it so he could open up the book, letting loose the smell of dust and crumbling paper. Dave peered over his shoulder, and it wasn't lost on John that this was possibly the most congenial four hours they'd spent with each other in the last twenty years, and that included the weekend after the funeral.
He'd only ever seen this scrapbook once, when he'd gone snooping in the inviolate sanctum of his father's study during a cocktail party downstairs. It was more or less like he remembered it, allowing for the differences in an eight-year-old's perception and the additional ravages of time: the yellow papers were yellower, the blurry ink was blurrier, a dried flower that had been taped to the front page had crumbled down to dust. Most of the letters and photographs weren't even secured in place, just tucked between pages, sometimes in stacks. John paged through carefully, checking every old picture for the one he remembered.
"Is that Dad?" Dave asked, choking on a laugh and pointing when John turned a page. The picture showed a group of hippies straight from Standard Casting, all tie-dye and fringe, and in the middle was a stocky man in a polo shirt with a neat moustache and a razor-straight part in his hair. As if to ensure nothing was left to the imagination, the note scribbled on the back said San Francisco New Years Eve 1965. Patrick Sheppard had caught little John snooping through these photos, but either generosity or alcohol had compelled him to climb right down on the floor and share some stories.
"His wild and crazy grad-school days," John said dryly, knowing he was close to the one he wanted. There were a few standard touristy shots of cable cars and the bridge, one out-of-focus action shot of a football game, and then the one he wanted, of Patrick-hair a little longer than the Christmas shot, shirt a little less buttoned, how wild and crazy-standing next to a slender young woman in a flowing skirt and yellow-tinted glasses. They were in a park, and she looked awkward, glancing at something off to the side of the camera, hands twined together in front of her; Patrick was grinning, one possessive hand on her hip, oblivious to her distraction.
The caption on the back said Rhoda and me without a date.
"So that's," Dave started to say, and then stopped.
"Yeah," John said. "My mother."
Mom had always meant Betty Sheppard, she of the June Cleaver wardrobe and lame puns and snickerdoodles, who had legally adopted John while pregnant with David. She had never treated her sons any differently from each other, and in truth she'd been the perfect buffer between John and Patrick, at least for a while. But at age eight John had already known, by some kind of osmosis, that there was Mom and there was his mother, the one who had given birth to him and then somehow disappeared. That night in the study was the first time he saw her, though, in this photo and one other.
Rhoda, Dad had said, taking that other picture in his hands with a sigh. Haven't thought of her in years. That's your real mom, you know.
John had an idea that real moms helped you with your math homework, but he'd nodded and said Yes, sir. And, studying her dark, elbow-length hair and narrow face, She's pretty.
That she was. Her name was Rhoda. Sometimes you look like her.
Where'd she go?
Hell if I know. Somewhere not in San Francisco.
Later, after breast cancer took Betty away, John had tried to throw that back in his father's face. You don't even know where my mother is! What kind of a husband is that?
And Patrick, stoney-eyed, had say, What makes you think we were married?
John had taken the other photo of Rhoda, a solo shot, and again in that photo she'd been staring away from the camera into some middle distance, a lock of dark hair tangled in her fingers where it had escaped from her colorful headband. That one had had a year on it, 1966, but he'd lost it somewhere along the line, like so much else. He set the surviving photo of Rhoda aside and kept searching through the scrapbook, checking every face in the crowd, looking for some other sign; he found a couple photos of himself as a bug-eyed infant (already working on his very first cowlick) but the arms and laps that formed the backgrounds were all anonymous. When he closed the scrapbook, Dave had picked up the photo and was studying it.
"You look just like her," he said, handing it back. "You want to tell me what brought this on?"
As an answer, he took the folded print-out from his pocket and smoothed out the creases on the edge of the desk. Argantorota, a young Lantean flight engineer turned civil defender turned evacuee, next to Rhoda the mystery hippie of 1966. The photo wasn't great quality, and the glasses got in the way, but it was easy to see that if you took those off and trimmed Rhoda's hair down to an androgynous shag and gave her one of those bland universal official-photo expressions…
Dave made a low whistling noise. "Jesus, John, who is that?" He pointed at the print-out. "She looks just like…but that's a recent photo, isn't it?" Ten thousand years recent, John thought, but David was noticing the digital quality, and there were no other identifying marks on it. "Is she some kind of relative?"
"I don't know," John said, which was sort of true. He couldn't be sure of it. It could be a crazy coincidence of time and space and DNA. "That's kind of why I'm here."
They spent the rest of the day going through more photo albums and old file folders, while Dave tried to tease a better answer out of John and made vague comments about gold-digging cousins who might only want him for the Sheppard money. They eventually found a copy of John's original birth certificate along with a bundle of papers related to the adoption: on this one, the MOTHER'S NAME field read "Rhoda Jones" and there was no hospital or attending doctor's stamp. John squinted at the faded type, making out the address for MOTHER'S PLACE OF RESIDENCE. "Unless I'm really wrong," he said, "this lists her address as Candlestick Park."
They Googled it. John wasn't wrong.
There were some extra letters with the adoption papers, signed affidavits that Rhoda Jones had pulled up stakes with no forwarding address, had willingly abandoned her child. John knew that it was the same year his father finished his MBA, but the degree was framed on the wall and the commencement photographs he'd have expected were absent-maybe Patrick hadn't attended. No more generic photos, either, and no more cards or letters; it was like an entire year got edited out, the hippies of 1966 jumping to business suits and Betty in 1968 with nothing but those shapshots of John in between. He didn't know whether to vent his frustration at the old man for dying too soon or at Higgs for finding this out too late, or maybe at himself for never finding a way to just ask.
-\--\--\-
He left the following morning, with the requisite number of awkward farewells, and flew to San Francisco. Even without the mysterious Rhoda Jones, it was a place with a lot of mixed-up feelings for him. College had been great, had been fucking fantastic, out from under the old man's thumb with an AFROTC scholarship that (almost) paid his way, but his memories of Travis AFB with Mitch and Dex and Nancy were still more bitter than sweet. He'd come back here, because it was his last residence of record, just before the expedition left-Elizabeth's unspoken bid to let the fearful turn back-and he'd been so out of his head that he'd flipped a coin, heads for Pegasus, tails to just find a badass car, cash out his bank account, and drive until he either hit something or got caught by the military police.
As soon as the plane landed he took the BART into the city and found the same hillside where he'd thought about how little he had to lose. This time he looked past the bridge, though, to the spot of open ocean where Atlantis had temporarily been parked. Those memories, those were the best: well, not the part where they'd all been terrified of being stuck on Earth forever, but the off hours when he took Teyla and Ronon to a Forty-Niners game, got McKay so drunk on Bud Lite that he almost started a fistfight with a Berkley professor over string theory, rescued Zelenka from some transvestites in the Castro when he'd gotten lost on a pizza run, and convinced Woolsey that Pegasus was something worth fighting for. Good times; good friends. Memories layered on memories, and the fact that he'd been born here had always seemed like trivia before.
When he left the park he just wandered. He avoided the touristy stuff on principle, kept clear of the bar he and Mitch and Dex had sworn they'd buy when they hit retirement, didn't go near the hotel where he and Nancy had honeymooned. Instead he went out to the Stick, just for the hell of it, and walked around the empty parking lot for a while. Then back into the city, to Haight-Ashbury, which clung to its past like a starlet gone to seed. He tried to imagine it as a sea of unwashed hippies, grafting together film clips and book descriptions in his mind, and then to put his father in the middle of it. What had Patrick Sheppard come here for when he wasn't at Stanford? He was a lifelong Republican, an MBA student, practically an old man at age 27. Was this his idea of a rebellion, a kind of contact high without the risk of long term side-effects? Or was there something more to the man than John had ever seen, something that withered and ossified back east until he became the stiff-necked dictator John had known?
They'd gleaned some addresses from the scrapbooks and affadavits, and John looked for them in a noncommittal way, but the city had swallowed some of them, or remade them into something else entirely-specialty boutiques or office blocks or parking lots. He ate dinner at the same restaurant where Keller had finished a margarita bigger than her own head on a bet, then got on a redeye back to Colorado Springs. The Daedalus was leaving the next morning and if John missed it, his next vacation would be a skiing trip in Hell.
-\--\--\-
His beam-up time was delayed because of a last-minute tune up of the something-or-other, and so rather than loiter in the gate room he found himself wandering the corridors beyond it with his backpack. Jackson's office wasn't a conscious goal, but John wasn't particularly surprised when he ended up there, slowing down as he passed the door so he could shoot a quick, casual glance inside.
At the same moment, Jackson came around the corner with a bowl of cereal in one hand and a book in the other. John easily sidestepped the potential collision, seconds before Jackson registered his presence. "Oh, hey, Colonel Sheppard, I didn't see you there."
"Obviously," he said.
Jackson tucked the book under his arm so he could adjust his glasses. "I didn't even know you were on Earth, actually. Is there something I can do for you?"
And John said, "Maybe."
With the door propped open just a sliver, he laid out the pictures. He explained the story, in as few words as possible, though for some reason it wasn't as hard as he'd thought it would be; maybe because Jackson had an academic detachment that made it clear, however intriguing the story, it wasn't really about John to him. He took notes on a legal pad and copied the file over from the thumb drive John had brought. And then he voiced the idea that John had been batting around in his head for ages.
"Why would an Ascended Ancient take on human form just long enough to have a child, and then leave him?"
"Maybe she wasn't Ascended," John said, because if he made it academic then he could talk, too. "Maybe it was time travel."
Jackson shrugged. "Could be. Either way, I suppose it wouldn't have been exactly difficult to blend in with the counterculture; we got by with a little cash and a pretty vague cover story."
"We?" John asked.
"Oh, yeah, I spent a couple weeks in 1969 once," Jackson said, and then without missing a beat, "The easiest thing to do, I suppose, is just disprove the whole theory-find Rhoda Jones."
John had never put much thought into the idea; once he'd buried the only mom he'd ever known he found it curiously hard to care about the other one. "Shouldn't be too difficult, since 'Jones' is only, what, the second most common name in America?"
But Jackson suddenly got a funny look in his eye, and he leapt to his bookshelf. "What was the Ancient's name again?" he asked.
"Argantorota," John said.
Jackson found whatever he wanted and started paging through it rapidly. "Jones," he said, "is Welsh."
"Really." Maybe it was all in John's head, then. Maybe he'd have to settle for being great-grandsomething to Merlin, no closer than Carson or O'Neill. He could do that.
"Here." Jackson suddenly jabbed a finger at the page. "I knew that name from somewhere. 'Argantorota' is a very early form of the name Arianrhod, the Welsh goddess of the moon and virginity." He grabbed a piece of chalk and wrote the two names on a corner of his chalkboard; then he underlined the rhod. "Now, that's a proto-Celtic borrowing from Ancient that means 'wheel,' whereas 'Rhoda' is a Classical Greek name that means 'rose,' but…"
"But they're close enough if you just landed in 1966," John said. "And she's the goddess of virginity?"
Jackson suddenly looked slightly nervous. "Well, in the texts…she's mostly known for the immaculate birth of twin sons named Dylan and Lleu. Dylan immediately turned into a fish and swam away, and Lleu was so ugly that Arianrhod put three curses on him and sent him away. The story goes on that Lleu eventually found a way around the curses through various deceptions…but in the end he got betrayed by his wife and turned into an eagle."
"An eagle?"
"Well, that part's a little complicated."
John just looked at his hands instead, and thought about why he'd come to Earth at all, when an email to Dave and a couple of drinks with an anthropologist could've netted him essentially the same results. Hell, if he wanted to know the truth he could've just gotten a blood test, laid out Higgs' claims to Keller and had the results in back in a couple of days. There wasn't any point in this…what was it, anyway? A pilgrimage? He'd come to Earth and spent more time flying above it than on the ground, he'd be stuck on the Daedalus for three weeks now with nothing new…
"You know," Jackson said suddenly, "if Arianrhod is your mother, that makes you about the closest thing to an Ancient there is on this plane."
"Except for the part where I'm totally not," John pointed out.
"Well, I'm sure from their perspective…but the point I was about to make was, in that case, as far as we know, you're basically second in line for ownership of Atlantis after a brain-damaged teenager."
John thought of Helia and her crew storming into the city, thought of Mara's father with his drone-chair throne, and imagined himself waving a scepter to banish people from his realm as he wished. It almost produced a distinctly unmanly giggle. "How do you even decide ownership of a flying city?" he asked.
"There are people at the Pentagon who stay awake at night thinking about exactly that sort of question," Jackson said ominously, and then John's watch beeped, and he realized it was time to go. As he gathered his things, Jackson added, "I'll, ah, I'll see if I can find out anything more for you-if you want me to."
"Sure," John said. "Knock yourself out. And…thanks."
-\--\--\-
The Daedalus got a databurst before they left the Milky Way, and in it were two emails for John. One was from Dave, who'd hired an expensive private investigator to track down Rhoda Jones (in the interest of protecting John from the alleged gold-digging relatives) and come up with nothing: no birth certificates, no marriage or drivers' licenses, no credit cards or rental contracts or bank accounts, no living witnesses among the names gleaned from the scrapbook and the adoption papers. Nothing but a signature on John's birth certificate and a photograph in the bottom of his bag. The other email was from Jackson, who'd done basically the same thing for free and come up with the same results. I couldn't even track down anyone from the city clerk's office who would've been present the day the birth certificate was issued, he added. Which of course neither proves nor disproves anything. If I think of something else, I'll let you know.
John wanted to thank them both for the effort (Jackson slightly more than Dave) but by then they were in the void between galaxies; nothing but emergency communication until they reached Pegasus and could dial a gate for a databurst in the other direction. He spent a little time getting to know the new personnel who were rotating into the city and a lot of time in his quarters, reading or playing computer golf or doing push-ups and sit-ups until his muscles burned. Christ, they needed to get Earth a ZPM.
John ate and worked and slept and passed the time.
At night, he dreamed.
-\--\--\-
He was sitting on the hill in Golden Gate Park, looking at the bridge; she sat next to him, dressed just like the photograph, with braided leather sandals and a flower in her hair. "You're a determined man, you know," she said. "A lot like your father."
"Don't know if I appreciate the comparison," he said slowly, taking in the distorted scenery. To one side, the city; to the other, the bridge; straight ahead, the other city, Atlantis, closer than she'd ever come to land in reality.
"Determined people," she said again, and inhaled from a hand-rolled cigarette. The smoke had no smell in this yellowed and fading space. "I never cared enough to be determined about things, myself."
"You were decorated in the war with the Wraith," he pointed out, not because it was important but because he was pretty sure he knew what this is now and it had always been his nature to needle the people pulling the strings.
She laughed a little, a smoker's laugh that made her sound a bit like Janis Joplin. "That was about duty. Going through the motions. You know how it is."
"And you know that I know."
"It's all right there in your head."
He looked over the bay and asked "Have you been watching me?
"Sometimes," she said.
"Is that why you're here now?"
She let the smoke trickle out of the corners of her mouth. "I'm here because you're owed an explanation."
He shifted around until he was facing her, but she stayed where she was, angled to him. "Well, I gotta admit I got over the whole abandonment thing a while back, but I'm still a bit hung up on this part where you're an alien."
"An alien." One side of her mouth quirked up. "You know, we always learned that the aliens of Earth were the pre-verbal apes in the grasslands."
He considered that a low blow and thus chose to ignore it. "I thought you guys were supposed to have a rule about interfering on this plane."
She huffed another smoker's laugh and ground out her cigarette in the dirt. "Interfering. That's a hard word to define. Am I interfering right now? Or is it only if I tell you something that change the course of a civilization? You have a free will; am I somehow responsible for all that you've made of yourself?"
"I…guess not," he said slowly. "But that doesn't explain what you were doing on Earth in the first place."
He wanted her to look at him; he wanted to see her eyes, even shielded by the yellow glasses. But she stayed looking over the water, out and away. "I did my duty. I did everything the Council asked of me. And when we evacuated, and there was nothing left to do…I made myself a sanctuary by the sea, and laid my burdens down. There was nothing for us on a world where most civilizations were still getting excited about wheels, after all."
"Until the Summer of Love drew you out again?" he asked, dubious.
She smiled softly now. "I don't supposed you can appreciate it from your position, but that time, that place…there was such hope in the world. Innocent, misguided, childish hope, but I think you know well what a drug that can be. Our plane can be beautiful and subtle and terrible all at once, but we have too long been a hunted kind for it to ever be a place of particular hope."
"And Patrick?" he asked.
The smiled turned a shade saucy, and she came the closest yet to meeting his eyes. "I hadn't held a corporeal form in thousands of years, and he had a certain…fire. Determination, if you don't mind. And it was always fun to surprise him."
"Like when you told him you were pregnant?" He looked away this time, over ocean. "'Cause I'm finding it a little hard to believe that a Stanford MBA and an Ancient would forget to use a condom."
"You try being pure energy for a few millennia and see what slips your mind," she said wearily. "Besides, I had helped strike down whole planets when one of our people broke the rules of interference…I didn't think I'd have so much trouble ending you."
He tried to cough to cover his reaction to that, even knowing she could read his thoughts. "Well. Wow. I, uh, I guess I need to get me one of those stickers that says 'Thank God my mom was pro-life.'"
"I could sense all the infinite possibilities of you," she said quietly. "And I respected that. Even if I was a little old for a first-time mother, I decided it was beyond even my wisdom to decide based on possibilities whether or not you deserved to live, and if the Others judged otherwise, so be it."
"So you did your duty," he said.
She nodded and lit another cigarette. "I did my duty."
"And when I was born?"
"I got you to your father, didn't I?" she said. "There was no way I could stay with you, not in the long-term, unless I gave up my memories of Atlantis and Ascension. The Others may look the other way for a year, but not a generation…and I don't think you'd have wanted to come with me."
"Not so much, no." He glanced up at the sky, but it was cloudless and faintly green, as yellowed as his father's photographs. "And I guess I didn't count as interference since, you know, planet still standing and all."
She gestured with her cigarette, drawing a smoky arc through the air. "Oh, if they'd objected, Earth would still be in one piece. We wouldn't."
He nodded, and they both fell silent, watching the twin cityscapes in a way they should never have been able to. After a while he got the impression that she was waiting for him to say something, but he'd become comfortable with silence, turning it into a kind of verbal game of chicken-how awkward can this get before one of us gives in to the need for noise? Lord knew he'd perfected the art of it on Nancy, but he was surprised to find that this time, he was the one who caved first. "Anything else?" he asked, picking at the dry grass.
"I suppose I should ask you that," she said. "If you want to know anything about me. About our people."
"I know my people fine, thanks," he said. "And if I want to know more about yours, I can read it in the database."
She raised and eyebrow at that, peering at him from the corner of her eye. "So you still consider yourself human?"
"Are you honestly saying that surprises you?" he asked, more than half curious himself. "I didn't even know your name until a couple days ago."
"But you've always felt a little different, haven't you?" she prodded. "Like you weren't quite in step with the world? Out of place?"
"Not always," he said. "Look. I figured out pretty early that family is what you make of it. And my family, my friends? Are human, not glowy…energy…thingies. They're the ones who have my back, they're the ones who know me, and they can look me in the face when they talk to me. I don't know what you wanted out of this for yourself, but I don't think you're getting it, because I've got my answers and I'm already on my way home."
That seemed to startle her, enough that she turned and looked, really looked at him for the first time. Her eyes were wide behind the yellow lenses, and he decided she really was as pretty as she'd seemed when he was eight. Then she laughed aloud, a little, and seemed to relax. "Home," she said. "Atlantis."
"Yeah," he said. "Atlantis."
She leaned in and placed a dry kiss on his cheek; then, barely leaning back, pulled a flower from her hair and slid it behind his ear. "Go home, then. And good luck."
-\--\--\-
He got back to Atlantis at an ungodly early hour, wide awake even though the Daedalus had been incrementally shifting its ship's day into synch with New Lantea's solar day. After he tossed his bag in his quarters, he grabbed his laptop and went down to the mess hall, knowing there would be a handful of early risers (or the truly ungodly night owls) also demanding coffee.
By the time Ronon showed up for breakfast, still sweating from a run, John had at least sorted his backlog of email into categories of "now," "later," "never," and "lorne." By the time Teyla, Kanaan and Torren arrived, he'd worked through "now" and forwarded "lorne," and got to tickle the baby's tummy and catch up on the last three weeks as measured in gossip and laughter. He'd just gotten Lorne's ritual passive-aggressive reply back when Rodney shuffled in, and he was the first one to say, "Hey, when did you get back?"
John checked his watch. "About three hours ago. Miss me?"
"Hmm, let's see, you go haring back to Earth with no warning for three weeks? Um, yeah?" Rodney bit into a danish and continued with his mouth full, "I thought you'd been recalled for a court martial or something."
"What are they gonna court martial me for?" John asked.
"I've actually been working on a list." He peered closely at John. "You're not dying, are you?"
"No," John said. "It was just a…family thing. No big deal"
"Everything okay?" Ronon asked.
John glanced around the table, at Ronon's heap of bacon and Teyla's smile and Rodney's vain attempts to slip Torren a Fruity Loop when his parents weren't looking, and then nodded. "Yeah. Everything's fine."