Fic: Godforsaken II: Home (SGA/Bruno and Boots)
TITLE: GODFORSAKEN II: HOME
FANDOM: SGA/Bruno and Boots
Rated G, ~2600 words.
Sequel to Godforsaken
Notes: All of the good parts are due to cincodemaygirl's beta. All of the bad parts are where I didn't listen to her. This has been sitting on my computer untouched for, I swear, a year and a half, and I just need to let it go.
GODFORSAKEN II: HOME
Winnipeg in winter isn't quite Antarctica, but it's still damn cold--sometimes windy enough to whisk John's breath away, sometimes bright and brittle and unmoving. John jogs in the morning, as the sun is just rising, when the air curls freezing tendrils into his lungs and the only thing on his mind is the thin clear perfect air in his throat.
Back inside, it's push-ups (twice as many as he could do on the Daedalus), then a few sit-ups that still give him vertigo, and a wonderful warm shower with one stray spray that gets him in the eye.
He plays prime/not prime with Rodney and Risk with Bruno ("It's your own fault for playing with someone who's taken actual military strategy classes," Rodney says when Bruno loses). There's a minor shouting match one evening over a game of Scrabble and whether it should be favor or favour, and while they're squabbling Jeannie uses her last seven tiles to spell IMBECILE, landing on the triple word score and silencing them both.
Bruno grins and tacks an S onto the end.
***
Christmas is nice, there's no other word for it. They sit on the floor around the Christmas tree, eating crumb cake and opening presents.
Bruno's dad sent him hockey equipment, a bulky, ill-wrapped mass in the corner, and Jeannie gives Bruno new skates. The adults' presents are all food--tradition, Rodney said in the car, and John was only too happy to get out of Doctor McKay's Wild Ride and walk around the gourmet grocery store tossing boxes of hideously expensive chocolates and bottles of ice wine into their cart.
"We should get Elizabeth something," John said, and that was another hour spent picking out delicate cookies and--"You think Ronon wouldn't enjoy ten pounds of potatoes?" Rodney said.
John, against his better judgment, gives Rodney a pound of chocolate-covered coffee beans, and receives in his turn some sort of ugly fruit that squirts John in the eye when he tries to open it.
Rodney gives Bruno a laptop and then monopolizes it for the afternoon, installing software and tuning it like a car until it does things that John's sure aren't in the manual.
John plays poker with Bruno while Rodney's typing and muttering, "Okay, if I just create a relay here . . . . " They talk about civil disobedience and revolutions, and Jeannie cuts in every so often to say things like, "Bruno, if you fill your school swimming pool with tea I'm disowning you."
It's the kind of Christmas John never had; the house is bright and warm and sparkling, and John's brain feels clearer than it has in a while. He and Rodney and Bruno, in a terribly Disney-movie moment, go out into the backyard and throw a football around until they get too cold to really catch properly, and the ball ricochets off Rodney's outstretched mittens and bonks him in the face. Which is okay, too, because then they get to go back inside to the wonderful smell of oatmeal cookies and hot chocolate and convince Rodney that his nose isn't really broken.
***
A couple of days after Christmas, Jeannie makes soup out of what's left of the turkey.
John's sitting at the kitchen table with a crossword when she tells him to make himself useful and plunks a knife and some vegetables down in front of him. He looks up, surprised. He hasn't touched anything sharper than a pencil in a month.
"Small enough to fit on a spoon," she says.
"What? He's not--" Rodney starts to say, and Jeannie cuts him off, gesturing with an enormous wooden spoon.
"If he can do crossword puzzles and make snowballs," she says, and John hides a grin, because she totally wasn't supposed to see the snowball fight, "he has enough fine motor skills to chop celery without severing an artery."
John knows that usually he'd be bristling at other people presuming to tell him what he could and couldn't do with a four-inch knife, but this isn't a sterile white infirmary and his hands did pretty much stop shaking a day or two ago. So he just smirks at Rodney--she likes me best!--and slices very carefully.
***
So it turns out that Jeannie's an elementary school teacher, and her term starts before Bruno's. Bruno usually takes the train back to school, but Rodney's not going to pass up an opportunity to terrorize John with his driving.
"Sure, we can drive him," Rodney says. "Nothing but time."
John tries not to think about how they have nothing but time here on Earth, when life on Atlantis always seems to go at double-speed. He wonders what's happening back in the Pegasus galaxy, if he'd get any word from the SGC if something terrible went down.
"I'm going for a run," John tells Rodney the next morning. "Come on, you might even be able to keep up."
***
Rodney on the open road is slightly less terrifying than Rodney driving in the city, so John can relax enough to talk to Bruno, who tells him how the Hall relieved themselves of a teacher a couple of years ago.
"Piece of cake," Bruno says. "My plans never fail. Okay, except for that time they thought we were terrorists, but that worked out okay in the end, so who cares?"
John is torn between being very, very afraid of Bruno, and trying to recruit him. He settles for telling edited stories of Atlantis.
***
"Oh, my God, again?" Rodney whines, and moves into the turn lane for the rest stop, decelerating hard.
"I just need to stretch my legs," John says. "Five minutes."
"Every time you get out for five minutes it costs us ten, you realize that, right?" Rodney pulls with his customary flair into a parking space next to a salt-stained Ford Taurus.
"I'm sorry, Rodney," John says with bright false sincerity, and gets out of the car, leaving the door open as long as possible out of spite. "I certainly didn't mean to inconvenience you by getting shot in the ass with a poison arrow."
The rest stop is glittering with ice, and if he slips and breaks something he'll never hear the end of it, so John doesn't venture far, taking careful steps. The cold air feels good after hours in a hot car with McKay, who has the heat cranked up high. Bruno fell asleep in the backseat a little while ago, snoring like Rodney does when they're offworld.
***
"Scrimmage?"
"Still alive. Can you believe it? We get held up by her and her shotgun at least every couple of months."
"Oh, right, but usually you can duck into the--"
"No, she's got bionic vision or something. And I don't want to--"
"Die in the woods! Couple of years?"
"Soon, yeah."
John can tell they're getting closer because of the way Bruno starts to almost bounce in his seat.
John knows how he feels. They pass what he knows are lakes and rivers, but he still feels landlocked--bound by solid earth around him and the too-low roof above him. The world should be flat and wide, buildings should soar and glitter. John's preferred method of transportation is beautiful dull gunmetal gray and seats a dozen, and John sits on the left unless he's lying down.
"Can I--" John starts, and Rodney cuts him off, not unkindly, with, "No," just like the six million other times John asked to drive.
John huffs softly and goes back to watching out the window for the rest stop signs. A soft snore comes from the backseat and Rodney says quietly, "Look, you'll be back flying before you know it. And you can do barrel rolls until I puke."
***
"Actually a poison arrow?"
"Yup," John says. He fishes it out of his pocket and hands it to Bruno.
"You brought it--! What am I saying, of course you brought that through Customs," Rodney says. "What if they'd stopped you?"
John frowns. "It's not that sharp." It wasn't, really, and didn't go all that deep. Just enough that he feels twinges sometimes.
"Cool," Bruno says, and hands it back.
John considers it, the short white stone point, flared at the bottom like a fish tail. "Yeah, it is, isn't it?"
"I didn't even know you'd kept it," Rodney says, and reaches over to grab it from John's fingers, holding it up at the top of the steering wheel to look at while he drives.
"Yeah," John says again. "I figured, what the hell."
***
They swing around a curve and there's a sharp intake of breath from Rodney, a swelling-with-pride deep breath from Bruno as the school comes into sight. John knows the sound: he hears it every time he flies back from the mainland and his city appears on the edge of the horizon.
"So," John says casually. "There it is."
"Yeah," Bruno says, proud. "That's the Hall."
***
They all haul Bruno's stuff to his dorm room, and try to figure out where the hockey pads go while they say hi to Bruno's roommate--Boots, né Melvin P. O'Neal, and wow, John doesn't blame the kid, because he's always been grateful to just be John.
"I feel like I know you already," John jokes as he shakes Boots' hand, and Boots just grins.
It was a lot of stories about Boots, but sometime around the twentieth story John realized that all of his own best stories involve Rodney, so.
Almost immediately Bruno is outlining his Plan. The Plan, and John knows it deserves the capital letters, was scribbled in Bruno's notebook and typed on Bruno's laptop and--most importantly--lives in all its glory in Bruno's head, the product of long talks about strategy with John and brilliance from Rodney and all of Bruno's teenaged passion, ready and waiting to be implemented upon, John thinks, the probably-not-unsuspecting denizens of Macdonald Hall.
John kind of wishes he could be there to see what happens.
A skinny kid with huge birth-control glasses appears in the doorway, and Bruno breaks his monologue mid-finger-snap-point and says, "Hey, Elmer."
"Hello, Bruno, Melvin; I trust your midwinter holidays were satisfactory?" Elmer looks over and notices John and Rodney for the first time--actually, he only has eyes for Rodney. "Oh, my God," the kid says, "Rodney McKay," and promptly keels over in a dead faint.
A normal human being would be embarrassed by this, but it's Rodney, and therefore normal does not apply.
Rodney peers down at him, smug. "Oh, that takes me back. As long as he's breathing he'll be fine."
"This happen often?" John says dryly.
"Well, not as often as it used to, sadly, but no, it's not unheard of."
***
John gets the grand tour, crunching over the salted sidewalks with Rodney and Bruno and Boots and, orbiting Rodney like a satellite, Elmer.
It's . . . well, Macdonald Hall is normal. John had somehow expected it to be larger than life, but the modest buildings hugging the ground and the cracker-box dormitories all spell school to him, just a regular place save for the people in it.
Rodney points out his old dorm room and where he hid the green-eyed robot; Bruno and Boots walk him past the headmaster's office where they'd each been held totally unfairly for detention a record number of times.
They're walking down a hallway of classrooms when they come on a wall covered in plaques and Rodney's eyes light up and he gets a slightly shy smile on his face. John hadn't thought Rodney could do shy, but the place-memory must be getting to him, because it's like Rodney's twelve again and this is his first big moment, pride just beginning to bubble up.
Rodney's got a good half-dozen little brass rectangles up there, yearly science awards with his name engraved on them. There are a couple of larger ones, too, big national-award plates with RODNEY MCKAY in huge letters.
There's also a picture. John says, "Aw. Look at you," and Rodney says indignantly, "It was the Eighties."
John grins, and Rodney smiles back sweetly and dope-slaps the back of John's head.
***
"I'd tell you to stay out of trouble," Rodney says, "but it would probably be useless in the short term and counterproductive in the long term, so I'll simply say good luck." He hugs Bruno, a little stiffly.
"Good luck with the Plan," John says. He wants to say, the Hall's lucky to have you the way we're lucky to have your uncle. He settles for shaking Bruno's hand.
"Good luck with the . . . not getting shot again," says Bruno.
"You know, I've been telling him that for years, and does he listen?" Rodney says.
As they're heading for the car, Elmer comes running after them like it's the last scene in a Sandra Bullock movie and thrusts a scientific journal and a pen at Rodney.
He makes incoherent squeaking noises, and Rodney takes the pen and opens the journal to the article inside that bears his name.
Rodney signs it REACH FOR THE M-CLASS SUPERGIANTS, and Elmer receives it back like he's holding a holy relic.
As the kid walks away, barely touching the ground, John slips on his sunglasses against the glare of the snow and says, "We should probably go before he offers you a kidney or something."
"Bite me, Colonel," Rodney says, and they get into the car and head for home.
***
It takes a couple of days of wheedling, but eventually enough people are sick enough of John and Rodney to let them get on the Daedalus when it next leaves. Either that or John's better than he thought at convincing people that he really is ready to return to Atlantis, even if not to active duty right away.
John wins fourteen Snickers bars from Rodney, target shooting. As they leave the armory, Rodney points out that that's still better than he usually does against John, and ponders at length whether he's gotten so much better or if it's John's "weakened mental and physical state."
John hits him in the arm as they reach the elevator. "Muscle spasm," he says innocently. "Damn this neurotoxin."
He meets with the base doctors and physical therapists and this one guy who pastes electrodes all over John's head and makes him do logic puzzles. At the end of it they pronounce him good, or good enough. Carson will still have to clear him for active duty when he gets back, and knowing Carson, Heightmeyer will get to have a crack at him too, but that's fine, that's perfect, that's better than Earth.
***
Here they are, they're here, they're back to Atlantis, the ocean is glittering below them and somewhere down there is John's city hidden in a bubble.
"Colonel," Hermiod says. "We are ready to beam you down."
John starts, and moves away from where he'd been gaping out the window like a little boy at the airport to the middle of the room, joining Rodney, who's holding a touchpad and looking as excited to be back as John feels. He takes a deep breath.
Rodney gives the signal to Hermiod, but before anything happens, John says, "Rodney," and when he looks over: "Thanks," John says, simply.
Rodney nods at him and smiles, the sincere smile that he hardly ever lets show, and it's the last thing John sees before the ship dissolves around him and reforms as the sweeping blues and green-grays of the gate room.
And finally, he's back, feeling better than he has since before the arrow, and he can feel Atlantis rush up to meet him, excitement and love, welcoming him with open arms.
Elizabeth comes to them, bright and vibrant like a kite in the sky. "Colonel Sheppard, Doctor McKay," she says, her eyes sparkling. "Welcome home."
FANDOM: SGA/Bruno and Boots
Rated G, ~2600 words.
Sequel to Godforsaken
Notes: All of the good parts are due to cincodemaygirl's beta. All of the bad parts are where I didn't listen to her. This has been sitting on my computer untouched for, I swear, a year and a half, and I just need to let it go.
GODFORSAKEN II: HOME
Winnipeg in winter isn't quite Antarctica, but it's still damn cold--sometimes windy enough to whisk John's breath away, sometimes bright and brittle and unmoving. John jogs in the morning, as the sun is just rising, when the air curls freezing tendrils into his lungs and the only thing on his mind is the thin clear perfect air in his throat.
Back inside, it's push-ups (twice as many as he could do on the Daedalus), then a few sit-ups that still give him vertigo, and a wonderful warm shower with one stray spray that gets him in the eye.
He plays prime/not prime with Rodney and Risk with Bruno ("It's your own fault for playing with someone who's taken actual military strategy classes," Rodney says when Bruno loses). There's a minor shouting match one evening over a game of Scrabble and whether it should be favor or favour, and while they're squabbling Jeannie uses her last seven tiles to spell IMBECILE, landing on the triple word score and silencing them both.
Bruno grins and tacks an S onto the end.
***
Christmas is nice, there's no other word for it. They sit on the floor around the Christmas tree, eating crumb cake and opening presents.
Bruno's dad sent him hockey equipment, a bulky, ill-wrapped mass in the corner, and Jeannie gives Bruno new skates. The adults' presents are all food--tradition, Rodney said in the car, and John was only too happy to get out of Doctor McKay's Wild Ride and walk around the gourmet grocery store tossing boxes of hideously expensive chocolates and bottles of ice wine into their cart.
"We should get Elizabeth something," John said, and that was another hour spent picking out delicate cookies and--"You think Ronon wouldn't enjoy ten pounds of potatoes?" Rodney said.
John, against his better judgment, gives Rodney a pound of chocolate-covered coffee beans, and receives in his turn some sort of ugly fruit that squirts John in the eye when he tries to open it.
Rodney gives Bruno a laptop and then monopolizes it for the afternoon, installing software and tuning it like a car until it does things that John's sure aren't in the manual.
John plays poker with Bruno while Rodney's typing and muttering, "Okay, if I just create a relay here . . . . " They talk about civil disobedience and revolutions, and Jeannie cuts in every so often to say things like, "Bruno, if you fill your school swimming pool with tea I'm disowning you."
It's the kind of Christmas John never had; the house is bright and warm and sparkling, and John's brain feels clearer than it has in a while. He and Rodney and Bruno, in a terribly Disney-movie moment, go out into the backyard and throw a football around until they get too cold to really catch properly, and the ball ricochets off Rodney's outstretched mittens and bonks him in the face. Which is okay, too, because then they get to go back inside to the wonderful smell of oatmeal cookies and hot chocolate and convince Rodney that his nose isn't really broken.
***
A couple of days after Christmas, Jeannie makes soup out of what's left of the turkey.
John's sitting at the kitchen table with a crossword when she tells him to make himself useful and plunks a knife and some vegetables down in front of him. He looks up, surprised. He hasn't touched anything sharper than a pencil in a month.
"Small enough to fit on a spoon," she says.
"What? He's not--" Rodney starts to say, and Jeannie cuts him off, gesturing with an enormous wooden spoon.
"If he can do crossword puzzles and make snowballs," she says, and John hides a grin, because she totally wasn't supposed to see the snowball fight, "he has enough fine motor skills to chop celery without severing an artery."
John knows that usually he'd be bristling at other people presuming to tell him what he could and couldn't do with a four-inch knife, but this isn't a sterile white infirmary and his hands did pretty much stop shaking a day or two ago. So he just smirks at Rodney--she likes me best!--and slices very carefully.
***
So it turns out that Jeannie's an elementary school teacher, and her term starts before Bruno's. Bruno usually takes the train back to school, but Rodney's not going to pass up an opportunity to terrorize John with his driving.
"Sure, we can drive him," Rodney says. "Nothing but time."
John tries not to think about how they have nothing but time here on Earth, when life on Atlantis always seems to go at double-speed. He wonders what's happening back in the Pegasus galaxy, if he'd get any word from the SGC if something terrible went down.
"I'm going for a run," John tells Rodney the next morning. "Come on, you might even be able to keep up."
***
Rodney on the open road is slightly less terrifying than Rodney driving in the city, so John can relax enough to talk to Bruno, who tells him how the Hall relieved themselves of a teacher a couple of years ago.
"Piece of cake," Bruno says. "My plans never fail. Okay, except for that time they thought we were terrorists, but that worked out okay in the end, so who cares?"
John is torn between being very, very afraid of Bruno, and trying to recruit him. He settles for telling edited stories of Atlantis.
***
"Oh, my God, again?" Rodney whines, and moves into the turn lane for the rest stop, decelerating hard.
"I just need to stretch my legs," John says. "Five minutes."
"Every time you get out for five minutes it costs us ten, you realize that, right?" Rodney pulls with his customary flair into a parking space next to a salt-stained Ford Taurus.
"I'm sorry, Rodney," John says with bright false sincerity, and gets out of the car, leaving the door open as long as possible out of spite. "I certainly didn't mean to inconvenience you by getting shot in the ass with a poison arrow."
The rest stop is glittering with ice, and if he slips and breaks something he'll never hear the end of it, so John doesn't venture far, taking careful steps. The cold air feels good after hours in a hot car with McKay, who has the heat cranked up high. Bruno fell asleep in the backseat a little while ago, snoring like Rodney does when they're offworld.
***
"Scrimmage?"
"Still alive. Can you believe it? We get held up by her and her shotgun at least every couple of months."
"Oh, right, but usually you can duck into the--"
"No, she's got bionic vision or something. And I don't want to--"
"Die in the woods! Couple of years?"
"Soon, yeah."
John can tell they're getting closer because of the way Bruno starts to almost bounce in his seat.
John knows how he feels. They pass what he knows are lakes and rivers, but he still feels landlocked--bound by solid earth around him and the too-low roof above him. The world should be flat and wide, buildings should soar and glitter. John's preferred method of transportation is beautiful dull gunmetal gray and seats a dozen, and John sits on the left unless he's lying down.
"Can I--" John starts, and Rodney cuts him off, not unkindly, with, "No," just like the six million other times John asked to drive.
John huffs softly and goes back to watching out the window for the rest stop signs. A soft snore comes from the backseat and Rodney says quietly, "Look, you'll be back flying before you know it. And you can do barrel rolls until I puke."
***
"Actually a poison arrow?"
"Yup," John says. He fishes it out of his pocket and hands it to Bruno.
"You brought it--! What am I saying, of course you brought that through Customs," Rodney says. "What if they'd stopped you?"
John frowns. "It's not that sharp." It wasn't, really, and didn't go all that deep. Just enough that he feels twinges sometimes.
"Cool," Bruno says, and hands it back.
John considers it, the short white stone point, flared at the bottom like a fish tail. "Yeah, it is, isn't it?"
"I didn't even know you'd kept it," Rodney says, and reaches over to grab it from John's fingers, holding it up at the top of the steering wheel to look at while he drives.
"Yeah," John says again. "I figured, what the hell."
***
They swing around a curve and there's a sharp intake of breath from Rodney, a swelling-with-pride deep breath from Bruno as the school comes into sight. John knows the sound: he hears it every time he flies back from the mainland and his city appears on the edge of the horizon.
"So," John says casually. "There it is."
"Yeah," Bruno says, proud. "That's the Hall."
***
They all haul Bruno's stuff to his dorm room, and try to figure out where the hockey pads go while they say hi to Bruno's roommate--Boots, né Melvin P. O'Neal, and wow, John doesn't blame the kid, because he's always been grateful to just be John.
"I feel like I know you already," John jokes as he shakes Boots' hand, and Boots just grins.
It was a lot of stories about Boots, but sometime around the twentieth story John realized that all of his own best stories involve Rodney, so.
Almost immediately Bruno is outlining his Plan. The Plan, and John knows it deserves the capital letters, was scribbled in Bruno's notebook and typed on Bruno's laptop and--most importantly--lives in all its glory in Bruno's head, the product of long talks about strategy with John and brilliance from Rodney and all of Bruno's teenaged passion, ready and waiting to be implemented upon, John thinks, the probably-not-unsuspecting denizens of Macdonald Hall.
John kind of wishes he could be there to see what happens.
A skinny kid with huge birth-control glasses appears in the doorway, and Bruno breaks his monologue mid-finger-snap-point and says, "Hey, Elmer."
"Hello, Bruno, Melvin; I trust your midwinter holidays were satisfactory?" Elmer looks over and notices John and Rodney for the first time--actually, he only has eyes for Rodney. "Oh, my God," the kid says, "Rodney McKay," and promptly keels over in a dead faint.
A normal human being would be embarrassed by this, but it's Rodney, and therefore normal does not apply.
Rodney peers down at him, smug. "Oh, that takes me back. As long as he's breathing he'll be fine."
"This happen often?" John says dryly.
"Well, not as often as it used to, sadly, but no, it's not unheard of."
***
John gets the grand tour, crunching over the salted sidewalks with Rodney and Bruno and Boots and, orbiting Rodney like a satellite, Elmer.
It's . . . well, Macdonald Hall is normal. John had somehow expected it to be larger than life, but the modest buildings hugging the ground and the cracker-box dormitories all spell school to him, just a regular place save for the people in it.
Rodney points out his old dorm room and where he hid the green-eyed robot; Bruno and Boots walk him past the headmaster's office where they'd each been held totally unfairly for detention a record number of times.
They're walking down a hallway of classrooms when they come on a wall covered in plaques and Rodney's eyes light up and he gets a slightly shy smile on his face. John hadn't thought Rodney could do shy, but the place-memory must be getting to him, because it's like Rodney's twelve again and this is his first big moment, pride just beginning to bubble up.
Rodney's got a good half-dozen little brass rectangles up there, yearly science awards with his name engraved on them. There are a couple of larger ones, too, big national-award plates with RODNEY MCKAY in huge letters.
There's also a picture. John says, "Aw. Look at you," and Rodney says indignantly, "It was the Eighties."
John grins, and Rodney smiles back sweetly and dope-slaps the back of John's head.
***
"I'd tell you to stay out of trouble," Rodney says, "but it would probably be useless in the short term and counterproductive in the long term, so I'll simply say good luck." He hugs Bruno, a little stiffly.
"Good luck with the Plan," John says. He wants to say, the Hall's lucky to have you the way we're lucky to have your uncle. He settles for shaking Bruno's hand.
"Good luck with the . . . not getting shot again," says Bruno.
"You know, I've been telling him that for years, and does he listen?" Rodney says.
As they're heading for the car, Elmer comes running after them like it's the last scene in a Sandra Bullock movie and thrusts a scientific journal and a pen at Rodney.
He makes incoherent squeaking noises, and Rodney takes the pen and opens the journal to the article inside that bears his name.
Rodney signs it REACH FOR THE M-CLASS SUPERGIANTS, and Elmer receives it back like he's holding a holy relic.
As the kid walks away, barely touching the ground, John slips on his sunglasses against the glare of the snow and says, "We should probably go before he offers you a kidney or something."
"Bite me, Colonel," Rodney says, and they get into the car and head for home.
***
It takes a couple of days of wheedling, but eventually enough people are sick enough of John and Rodney to let them get on the Daedalus when it next leaves. Either that or John's better than he thought at convincing people that he really is ready to return to Atlantis, even if not to active duty right away.
John wins fourteen Snickers bars from Rodney, target shooting. As they leave the armory, Rodney points out that that's still better than he usually does against John, and ponders at length whether he's gotten so much better or if it's John's "weakened mental and physical state."
John hits him in the arm as they reach the elevator. "Muscle spasm," he says innocently. "Damn this neurotoxin."
He meets with the base doctors and physical therapists and this one guy who pastes electrodes all over John's head and makes him do logic puzzles. At the end of it they pronounce him good, or good enough. Carson will still have to clear him for active duty when he gets back, and knowing Carson, Heightmeyer will get to have a crack at him too, but that's fine, that's perfect, that's better than Earth.
***
Here they are, they're here, they're back to Atlantis, the ocean is glittering below them and somewhere down there is John's city hidden in a bubble.
"Colonel," Hermiod says. "We are ready to beam you down."
John starts, and moves away from where he'd been gaping out the window like a little boy at the airport to the middle of the room, joining Rodney, who's holding a touchpad and looking as excited to be back as John feels. He takes a deep breath.
Rodney gives the signal to Hermiod, but before anything happens, John says, "Rodney," and when he looks over: "Thanks," John says, simply.
Rodney nods at him and smiles, the sincere smile that he hardly ever lets show, and it's the last thing John sees before the ship dissolves around him and reforms as the sweeping blues and green-grays of the gate room.
And finally, he's back, feeling better than he has since before the arrow, and he can feel Atlantis rush up to meet him, excitement and love, welcoming him with open arms.
Elizabeth comes to them, bright and vibrant like a kite in the sky. "Colonel Sheppard, Doctor McKay," she says, her eyes sparkling. "Welcome home."