Supporting Character, Week 1: You Don't Have to be Crazy to Work Here (but it helps)
Title: You Don't Have to be Crazy to Work Here (but it helps)
Author: friendshipper
Genre: Supporting Character Appreciation Day
Prompt: "Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go." --e.e. cummings
Word Count: 2100
Rating: PG
Warnings: offhand reference to AU character death
Summary: The other Jeannie -- "Jean, call me Jean" -- smiled at them beatifically from the end of the conference table. Jeannie kept trying not to look at her, but it was extremely difficult, especially since the other Jeannie McKay was wearing not just a black leather jacket, but black leather pants as well.
Notes: AU of "McKay & Mrs. Miller" (actually, since both universes are AUs, it's also an AU of an AU ...)
"All lights are green. The McKay-Carter Module is ready to power up in five, four --"
"I thought it was the Carter-McKay Module," Sheppard said, with a sideways smile.
"Well, certainly Samantha helped," Jeannie said, glaring at him. The nerve of him, spoiling her big moment -- some people and their egos ... She patted her bun to make sure that every hair was in place; true, there were no cameras, but it wouldn't do to look unprofessional on an occasion like this. And great, now she'd lost count ... "Initiating power-up," she said sharply, and pressed the button.
A soft hum and a warm amber glow filled the lab.
"Containment field is holding," Jeannie said, her annoyance evaporating in the tingle of victory. "Power generation is steady."
Dex looked up from his terminal. "No sign of exotic particles."
A few subdued cheers broke out around the room. Sheppard reached out a hand in what looked like an aborted attempt to pat Jeannie on the shoulder, then apparently thought better of it, to her relief. "Nice work, Doc. Now what?"
"Hold at five percent," Jeannie said briskly. "Contact me if any problems come up. I'm going to grab a bite." She'd been working nonstop for two days on the final preparations; now that the adrenaline rush was wearing off, she could feel exhaustion creeping in. She snapped her fingers at Dex. "Keep an eye on things down here."
Dex nodded, came around the end of the terminal and tripped over a power cord. There was a moment of collective flailing from Dex and the rest of her scientists before they determined that nothing important had been unplugged. Honestly, Jeannie thought as she left the lab, the man was a walking disaster. Good thing he had a brain, because she certainly didn't keep him around the lab for his ability to walk across a room without running into things.
She collected a tray in the cafeteria and then went back to her quarters, as was her habit. She'd barely had a chance to sit down at her desk when the door chimed. "Now what?" Jeannie demanded, stomping over to answer it.
Lt. Colonel Mehra slouched against the doorframe. When Jeannie stared at her, the head of Atlantis's military held up two long-necked bottles of beer.
"I don't drink," Jeannie said. "Not with you, anyway, and I think you know why. What are you doing here?"
"Come on, Doc -- I think you can make an exception this once, don't you?" Mehra waggled the bottles invitingly. "Unlimited power might just be the way to solve our Wraith problem once and for all. I'd say this calls for a team celebration." She slung an arm around Jeannie's shoulders; Jeannie went stiff as a board. After the last of Mehra's "team celebrations", she'd woken up in her quarters wearing Teyla's pants. She still didn't want to imagine how that might have happened. That was when she'd sworn off alcohol in general, and alcohol with the Colonel in specific.
"Why are you being nice to me?"
Mehra grinned. "I'm nice to everyone."
Before Jeannie could point out what a total lie that was, the PA system announced: "Dr. McKay, please report to the power generation lab immediately."
"Okay, now what?" Jeannie glared at the ceiling. "They can't have broken it already, can they?"
******
"That's really weird," Sheppard said.
"You can stop saying that anytime."
"So that's what you'd look like with your hair down."
"And in black leather, yes, now shut up ... Mr. Sheppard," she added, belatedly, since, as the head of the expedition, he was technically her boss.
"You guys do know she can hear you, right?" Mehra pointed out laconically, leaning back in her chair and polishing her gun.
The other Jeannie -- "Jean, call me Jean" -- smiled at them beatifically from the end of the conference table. Jeannie kept trying not to look at her, but it was extremely difficult, especially since the other Jeannie McKay was wearing not just a black leather jacket, but black leather pants as well. Those cannot be comfortable, Jeannie consoled herself.
Sheppard cleared his throat and shifted to business mode. "You've shut down the machine?"
"Yes," Jeannie sighed. "But it's only a temporary solution."
"The particles are still being generated," Jean piped up. "In my space-time, we estimate that we only have a week to a week-and-a-half before the rift reaches the city. We need to find some way to shut down the bridge on your end."
"We could blow it up," Mehra said cheerfully. Jean looked intrigued.
"That's your answer to everything, isn't it?" Jeannie snapped.
"Guys," Dex said, over the top of his glasses. "Stop fighting; it isn't getting us anywhere. As we always said on Sateda, violence never solved anything."
******
Jeannie's day didn't really get any better from there.
When Mehra showed up at her quarters with two bottles of beer, again, Jeannie grabbed one from her and chugged half of it. "Whoa," she said, staggering.
Mehra caught her and steered her to her bed. "Uh, take it easy. You okay?"
"No," Jeannie moaned, slumping. "We're stuck with a --" She paused, because all the words she could think of to describe Jean McKay were both inadequate and, well -- insulting to herself in a backwards kind of way. There was just no good way to describe Jean's alarming and annoying level of competence at everything. "-- disturbingly hot version of me," she finished weakly. "Who is, I think, beating Sheppard at golf on the East Pier even as we speak." Her voice rose in a despairing wail. "I do not golf!"
"One of you does, apparently," Mehra pointed out. "At least Sheppard's found someone to play that stultifying game with him." She shuddered.
"Dex likes it."
"Only because he enjoys calculating the trajectories of the balls," Mehra said. "He's terrible at the game itself."
Of course, that wasn't saying much; there were few physical skills that Ronon Dex wasn't terrible at. If Dex was a typical Satedan, Jeannie could see why they'd lost the war to the Wraith -- but none of this had any bearing on her current problem. "Did you know that on her Atlantis, her brother's still alive?"
Mehra's teasing smile dropped away. "Oh," she said. "So that's why you're -- I'm sorry, McKay."
Jeannie flapped a hand impatiently. "Meredith died when I was four. All I remember was that he'd steal my toys and take them apart." She flopped back on the bed woefully, and stared at the ceiling. She could feel that her bun had come partly undone, but she was too depressed to care. "But on her Atlantis, they're the best of friends, and he apparently has four obnoxiously beautiful children. She keeps showing the pictures to any sucker who'll hold still long enough."
The bed sank a bit as Mehra sat down next to her. "Have you heard her tell the story about her youngest niece's third birthday party? I laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair."
"Suckers like you, it would seem," Jeannie said sullenly, addressing the ceiling rather than her traitorous team leader. "And she's an expert in all forms of Athosian martial arts, as well as Satedan mathematics and epic poetry. And she can beat Sheppard at golf. Where does she find time for it all?"
"I'll be damned," Mehra mused. "You're jealous."
Jeannie's eyes snapped open. "What? Of myself? That's ridiculous! Why are you even here, anyway? Out!"
"But I brought beer."
"Out!"
******
Jeannie hated to admit it, but while two heads being better than one was still a common misconception, her other self turned out to be kind of, maybe, a little bit useful at finding a solution to the current problem. Of course, Jean's solution would drain their ZPM, which just figured.
"So, rather than creating a new, more powerful energy source, capable of blowing the Wraith out of the sky," Sheppard said, gazing at the two of them, "we'll be sacrificing the one we already have. That's about the size of it, right, Docs?" Supposedly, Sheppard was ex-military, and when his voice got quiet like that, Jeannie could believe it.
"I hate it as much as you do --" Jean began.
"Since I'm the one who has to make sure this city isn't destroyed by all the many, many people who want to kill us, Doc, I very much doubt that ..."
"-- but we don't have a choice," Jeannie pushed forward when she could get a word in edgewise. "The alternative is that we allow the fabric of the space-time continuum to unravel, and I really think the IOA would be more upset about that."
"Point," Sheppard conceded.
******
The end result was worse in one way that even the worst predictions that she and Dex had come up with -- they drained the ZPM utterly. But they also managed to send back Jean, so Jeannie figured it was, in some sense, a draw.
To her confusion, Sheppard didn't seem upset about the ZPM being drained; he just patted her shoulder (for real, this time), said something about not leaving people behind, and sent her off to the cafeteria to get something to eat. One of the things Jeannie liked about Sheppard was that he'd never been a touchy-feely person, so apparently Jean had infected him with some sort of alternate-universe, personality-altering disease. She fled gratefully before he could start hugging her or, God forbid, infect her with it too.
The rest of her team were eating at a table overlooking the rippling waves. Jeannie started to duck out with her tray as usual, but, damn it, Mehra had already seen her and was waving. And now Teyla made a polite little "come over" wave as well, so Jeannie skulked in their direction. Mehra pushed out a chair for her with one foot.
Jeannie arranged her tray in front of her in the usual manner -- cold food on the left, hot food on the right, all utensils in their proper places -- before she realized that the conversation hadn't resumed. She looked up. Everyone was looking at her.
"What?"
"Nothing," Mehra said. "We were all just wondering how you'd look with your hair down -- ow!" Teyla had kicked her.
Then Dex asked her a question about anomalies at the upper end of the exotic particle frequency curve, and finally there was something to talk about. Mehra and Teyla got bored and started talking about knives. Eventually Teyla had to leave for an appointment to beat up some Marines, and she and Dex excused themselves.
"Apparently," Mehra said as she watched them walk away, in Dex's case colliding wtih a couple of chairs and a smaller scientist, "in Jean's reality, Ronon dresses in leather, can bench-press a large Marine and knows a dozen ways to kill a man with a spoon."
Jeannie blinked. "Wow."
"Yeah."
"Weird."
"Yeah," Mehra said. "Definitely another dimension, all right."
"Our Ronon could probably kill himself with a spoon," Jeannie said. "If he tripped and fell on it the wrong way."
Mehra snorted a small laugh.
"So," Jeannie said. "Uh. What about you?"
"Me?" Mehra looked up over the top of her coffee cup. "What about me?"
"Who are you, in the universe where everyone's ludicrously buff and badass?" Jeannie frankly couldn't imagine how her team leader could get any more badass -- read: violent -- than she already was. "Are you some kind of superhero or something?"
"I'm not there," Mehra said.
Jeannie frowned at her. "What?"
Mehra rolled her shoulders in a brief shrug. "Yeah. Jean never heard of anybody named Dusty Mehra. Sheppard's apparently in charge of their military, and there's some guy named Woolsey running their city."
"Huh," Jeannie said, and pushed the shreds of her salad around her plate. Come to think of it, she'd seen everyone else hanging out with Jean except for Mehra, at least not one-on-one -- she'd seen Jean stick-fighting with Teyla, poring over equations with Dex, and, of course, golfing with Sheppard, but Mehra ...
"You doing anything later tonight?" Mehra said, breaking into her thoughts.
Jeannie looked up, startled and wary. "Why?"
"I still have beer from the last Apollo run, which we keep getting interrupted before we can drink," Mehra said, with another little shrug. "I wouldn't mind toasting Jean's absence, and Teyla says she won't drink with me anymore after the thing with the pants. Want to meet me out on the pier later?"
Jeannie opened her mouth to say no. There was every reason to say no. This definitely had the makings of another "Teyla's pants" incident written all over it, and besides, Sheppard might have overlooked draining the ZPM, but draining the ZPM and then getting too hung over to work the next day couldn't be good for her career.
Dusty looked hopeful.
Jeannie felt her resistance crumbling. "All right, one beer," she said. "On the pier."
Author: friendshipper
Genre: Supporting Character Appreciation Day
Prompt: "Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go." --e.e. cummings
Word Count: 2100
Rating: PG
Warnings: offhand reference to AU character death
Summary: The other Jeannie -- "Jean, call me Jean" -- smiled at them beatifically from the end of the conference table. Jeannie kept trying not to look at her, but it was extremely difficult, especially since the other Jeannie McKay was wearing not just a black leather jacket, but black leather pants as well.
Notes: AU of "McKay & Mrs. Miller" (actually, since both universes are AUs, it's also an AU of an AU ...)
"All lights are green. The McKay-Carter Module is ready to power up in five, four --"
"I thought it was the Carter-McKay Module," Sheppard said, with a sideways smile.
"Well, certainly Samantha helped," Jeannie said, glaring at him. The nerve of him, spoiling her big moment -- some people and their egos ... She patted her bun to make sure that every hair was in place; true, there were no cameras, but it wouldn't do to look unprofessional on an occasion like this. And great, now she'd lost count ... "Initiating power-up," she said sharply, and pressed the button.
A soft hum and a warm amber glow filled the lab.
"Containment field is holding," Jeannie said, her annoyance evaporating in the tingle of victory. "Power generation is steady."
Dex looked up from his terminal. "No sign of exotic particles."
A few subdued cheers broke out around the room. Sheppard reached out a hand in what looked like an aborted attempt to pat Jeannie on the shoulder, then apparently thought better of it, to her relief. "Nice work, Doc. Now what?"
"Hold at five percent," Jeannie said briskly. "Contact me if any problems come up. I'm going to grab a bite." She'd been working nonstop for two days on the final preparations; now that the adrenaline rush was wearing off, she could feel exhaustion creeping in. She snapped her fingers at Dex. "Keep an eye on things down here."
Dex nodded, came around the end of the terminal and tripped over a power cord. There was a moment of collective flailing from Dex and the rest of her scientists before they determined that nothing important had been unplugged. Honestly, Jeannie thought as she left the lab, the man was a walking disaster. Good thing he had a brain, because she certainly didn't keep him around the lab for his ability to walk across a room without running into things.
She collected a tray in the cafeteria and then went back to her quarters, as was her habit. She'd barely had a chance to sit down at her desk when the door chimed. "Now what?" Jeannie demanded, stomping over to answer it.
Lt. Colonel Mehra slouched against the doorframe. When Jeannie stared at her, the head of Atlantis's military held up two long-necked bottles of beer.
"I don't drink," Jeannie said. "Not with you, anyway, and I think you know why. What are you doing here?"
"Come on, Doc -- I think you can make an exception this once, don't you?" Mehra waggled the bottles invitingly. "Unlimited power might just be the way to solve our Wraith problem once and for all. I'd say this calls for a team celebration." She slung an arm around Jeannie's shoulders; Jeannie went stiff as a board. After the last of Mehra's "team celebrations", she'd woken up in her quarters wearing Teyla's pants. She still didn't want to imagine how that might have happened. That was when she'd sworn off alcohol in general, and alcohol with the Colonel in specific.
"Why are you being nice to me?"
Mehra grinned. "I'm nice to everyone."
Before Jeannie could point out what a total lie that was, the PA system announced: "Dr. McKay, please report to the power generation lab immediately."
"Okay, now what?" Jeannie glared at the ceiling. "They can't have broken it already, can they?"
******
"That's really weird," Sheppard said.
"You can stop saying that anytime."
"So that's what you'd look like with your hair down."
"And in black leather, yes, now shut up ... Mr. Sheppard," she added, belatedly, since, as the head of the expedition, he was technically her boss.
"You guys do know she can hear you, right?" Mehra pointed out laconically, leaning back in her chair and polishing her gun.
The other Jeannie -- "Jean, call me Jean" -- smiled at them beatifically from the end of the conference table. Jeannie kept trying not to look at her, but it was extremely difficult, especially since the other Jeannie McKay was wearing not just a black leather jacket, but black leather pants as well. Those cannot be comfortable, Jeannie consoled herself.
Sheppard cleared his throat and shifted to business mode. "You've shut down the machine?"
"Yes," Jeannie sighed. "But it's only a temporary solution."
"The particles are still being generated," Jean piped up. "In my space-time, we estimate that we only have a week to a week-and-a-half before the rift reaches the city. We need to find some way to shut down the bridge on your end."
"We could blow it up," Mehra said cheerfully. Jean looked intrigued.
"That's your answer to everything, isn't it?" Jeannie snapped.
"Guys," Dex said, over the top of his glasses. "Stop fighting; it isn't getting us anywhere. As we always said on Sateda, violence never solved anything."
******
Jeannie's day didn't really get any better from there.
When Mehra showed up at her quarters with two bottles of beer, again, Jeannie grabbed one from her and chugged half of it. "Whoa," she said, staggering.
Mehra caught her and steered her to her bed. "Uh, take it easy. You okay?"
"No," Jeannie moaned, slumping. "We're stuck with a --" She paused, because all the words she could think of to describe Jean McKay were both inadequate and, well -- insulting to herself in a backwards kind of way. There was just no good way to describe Jean's alarming and annoying level of competence at everything. "-- disturbingly hot version of me," she finished weakly. "Who is, I think, beating Sheppard at golf on the East Pier even as we speak." Her voice rose in a despairing wail. "I do not golf!"
"One of you does, apparently," Mehra pointed out. "At least Sheppard's found someone to play that stultifying game with him." She shuddered.
"Dex likes it."
"Only because he enjoys calculating the trajectories of the balls," Mehra said. "He's terrible at the game itself."
Of course, that wasn't saying much; there were few physical skills that Ronon Dex wasn't terrible at. If Dex was a typical Satedan, Jeannie could see why they'd lost the war to the Wraith -- but none of this had any bearing on her current problem. "Did you know that on her Atlantis, her brother's still alive?"
Mehra's teasing smile dropped away. "Oh," she said. "So that's why you're -- I'm sorry, McKay."
Jeannie flapped a hand impatiently. "Meredith died when I was four. All I remember was that he'd steal my toys and take them apart." She flopped back on the bed woefully, and stared at the ceiling. She could feel that her bun had come partly undone, but she was too depressed to care. "But on her Atlantis, they're the best of friends, and he apparently has four obnoxiously beautiful children. She keeps showing the pictures to any sucker who'll hold still long enough."
The bed sank a bit as Mehra sat down next to her. "Have you heard her tell the story about her youngest niece's third birthday party? I laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair."
"Suckers like you, it would seem," Jeannie said sullenly, addressing the ceiling rather than her traitorous team leader. "And she's an expert in all forms of Athosian martial arts, as well as Satedan mathematics and epic poetry. And she can beat Sheppard at golf. Where does she find time for it all?"
"I'll be damned," Mehra mused. "You're jealous."
Jeannie's eyes snapped open. "What? Of myself? That's ridiculous! Why are you even here, anyway? Out!"
"But I brought beer."
"Out!"
******
Jeannie hated to admit it, but while two heads being better than one was still a common misconception, her other self turned out to be kind of, maybe, a little bit useful at finding a solution to the current problem. Of course, Jean's solution would drain their ZPM, which just figured.
"So, rather than creating a new, more powerful energy source, capable of blowing the Wraith out of the sky," Sheppard said, gazing at the two of them, "we'll be sacrificing the one we already have. That's about the size of it, right, Docs?" Supposedly, Sheppard was ex-military, and when his voice got quiet like that, Jeannie could believe it.
"I hate it as much as you do --" Jean began.
"Since I'm the one who has to make sure this city isn't destroyed by all the many, many people who want to kill us, Doc, I very much doubt that ..."
"-- but we don't have a choice," Jeannie pushed forward when she could get a word in edgewise. "The alternative is that we allow the fabric of the space-time continuum to unravel, and I really think the IOA would be more upset about that."
"Point," Sheppard conceded.
******
The end result was worse in one way that even the worst predictions that she and Dex had come up with -- they drained the ZPM utterly. But they also managed to send back Jean, so Jeannie figured it was, in some sense, a draw.
To her confusion, Sheppard didn't seem upset about the ZPM being drained; he just patted her shoulder (for real, this time), said something about not leaving people behind, and sent her off to the cafeteria to get something to eat. One of the things Jeannie liked about Sheppard was that he'd never been a touchy-feely person, so apparently Jean had infected him with some sort of alternate-universe, personality-altering disease. She fled gratefully before he could start hugging her or, God forbid, infect her with it too.
The rest of her team were eating at a table overlooking the rippling waves. Jeannie started to duck out with her tray as usual, but, damn it, Mehra had already seen her and was waving. And now Teyla made a polite little "come over" wave as well, so Jeannie skulked in their direction. Mehra pushed out a chair for her with one foot.
Jeannie arranged her tray in front of her in the usual manner -- cold food on the left, hot food on the right, all utensils in their proper places -- before she realized that the conversation hadn't resumed. She looked up. Everyone was looking at her.
"What?"
"Nothing," Mehra said. "We were all just wondering how you'd look with your hair down -- ow!" Teyla had kicked her.
Then Dex asked her a question about anomalies at the upper end of the exotic particle frequency curve, and finally there was something to talk about. Mehra and Teyla got bored and started talking about knives. Eventually Teyla had to leave for an appointment to beat up some Marines, and she and Dex excused themselves.
"Apparently," Mehra said as she watched them walk away, in Dex's case colliding wtih a couple of chairs and a smaller scientist, "in Jean's reality, Ronon dresses in leather, can bench-press a large Marine and knows a dozen ways to kill a man with a spoon."
Jeannie blinked. "Wow."
"Yeah."
"Weird."
"Yeah," Mehra said. "Definitely another dimension, all right."
"Our Ronon could probably kill himself with a spoon," Jeannie said. "If he tripped and fell on it the wrong way."
Mehra snorted a small laugh.
"So," Jeannie said. "Uh. What about you?"
"Me?" Mehra looked up over the top of her coffee cup. "What about me?"
"Who are you, in the universe where everyone's ludicrously buff and badass?" Jeannie frankly couldn't imagine how her team leader could get any more badass -- read: violent -- than she already was. "Are you some kind of superhero or something?"
"I'm not there," Mehra said.
Jeannie frowned at her. "What?"
Mehra rolled her shoulders in a brief shrug. "Yeah. Jean never heard of anybody named Dusty Mehra. Sheppard's apparently in charge of their military, and there's some guy named Woolsey running their city."
"Huh," Jeannie said, and pushed the shreds of her salad around her plate. Come to think of it, she'd seen everyone else hanging out with Jean except for Mehra, at least not one-on-one -- she'd seen Jean stick-fighting with Teyla, poring over equations with Dex, and, of course, golfing with Sheppard, but Mehra ...
"You doing anything later tonight?" Mehra said, breaking into her thoughts.
Jeannie looked up, startled and wary. "Why?"
"I still have beer from the last Apollo run, which we keep getting interrupted before we can drink," Mehra said, with another little shrug. "I wouldn't mind toasting Jean's absence, and Teyla says she won't drink with me anymore after the thing with the pants. Want to meet me out on the pier later?"
Jeannie opened her mouth to say no. There was every reason to say no. This definitely had the makings of another "Teyla's pants" incident written all over it, and besides, Sheppard might have overlooked draining the ZPM, but draining the ZPM and then getting too hung over to work the next day couldn't be good for her career.
Dusty looked hopeful.
Jeannie felt her resistance crumbling. "All right, one beer," she said. "On the pier."