Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to need you to say that again.” Sitting at the end of the briefing table in the SGC, Jack O’Neill laid his pen down and knit his fingers together on top of the table. In all the time she had known him, Sam had never seen him take notes at a debriefing before, which told her he was truly thrown off-balance. She was too, but that had a lot more to do with the fact that the Wraith had almost gained a foothold on Earth and Atlantis had all but fallen out of the sky beside the Golden Gate Bridge, just managing to cloak itself in time, than with whatever was throwing Jack off. She glanced over at General Landry, who was sitting on Jack’s right side, and raised her eyebrows. Landry only shrugged. 

At the other end of the briefing table, Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard — separated from them by veritable acres of scuffed conference table but still closer to them than an entire galaxy away, which was an improvement from the usual state of things — blinked. “Say what again, sir? Exactly?” He cleared his throat. “All… All of it?” 

Sam flicked her eyes toward Jack again and gave the minutest shake of her head. While she loved to spend time with Jack at work, being locked in a briefing room, when she could be locked in an Ancient lab on Atlantis with Daniel, presumably arguing with McKay over something insignificant but entirely fascinating, was not her idea of a good time. It would be nice to be on Atlantis again, this time without the responsibility of the entire expedition resting on her shoulders. It would be even nicer to show Jack around and point out all the parts of the gate room that had been unceremoniously abused, blown up, or otherwise damaged by Sheppard or the rest of AR-1.

Jack made a vague motion with his hand. “Not all of it — just the part with Woolsey.” 

Sheppard’s brow furrowed. “Which part, sir?” 

Jack gave him a little, helpless look. “The part where it was his idea to activate the experimental wormhole drive and fly the city into battle.” 

“Oh, that.” Sheppard shrugged a little — an easy, unconscious movement. “Well, Earth needed help, and the Daedalus and Apollo weren’t going to get there fast enough, the chair had been destroyed, and the General Hammond wasn’t ready to be launched. So he figured there wasn’t really much else in the way of choices. Trust me,” he added, “Woolsey tries to weigh all the decisions before taking a plunge like that. But, like I said, there weren’t a whole lot of choices left and not a lot of time. So he made the best one in the time we had.” His mouth twitched into a faint, fond smile. “Woolsey’s good like that.” 

Landry managed to muffle his involuntary choke enough to disguise it as a cough. Absently, Jack reached over and pounded him on the back. “Woolsey,” said Jack slowly. “Richard Woolsey is good at making spontaneous, life-or-death choices?” 

Sheppard shrugged again. “Sure, sir.” 

Jack tried again. “Richard Woolsey?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Richard P. Woolsey?”

“Yes, sir.” 

“Richard P. Woolsey of the IOA?” 

“Yes, sir.” Sheppard was smiling by this point. Sam almost told him not to be such a smart-aleck, but she held herself back. After all, she wasn’t his commanding officer any longer. Theoretically, he could be as much of a smart-aleck as he wanted, and she didn’t have to say anything about it. 

“Doctor Richard —” Jack started again. 

Sam reached across Landry and laid a hand on Jack’s arm to stop him. “Thank you, Colonel Sheppard for going over things again. We’re just trying to get all the facts.” 

“I understand, ma’am. What other questions do you have?” Sheppard leaned back in his chair a little bit, drumming his fingers on his thighs. She knew that demeanor of his well — he wanted to get back to the city, desperately. No one on the Atlantis expedition did well with being separated. She had tried to explain it to Jack once, on one of their video calls early in her tenure as expedition leader. She had used phrases like “pack bonding” and “you know those shelter dogs that have to be adopted together?” Sometimes, she was still flabbergasted the Atlantis expedition even let her into their tight knit, concentric circles of trauma and shared experiences. There were a few circles — like the one AR-1 occupied, or the one that Sheppard and Rodney camped out in together — that she had never been given access to, but she at least had more than a passing familiarity with them, which was far more than most other people in two galaxies were given. 

“None,” said Jack, answering for her. “At least not right now.” 

“Perfect.” Groaning a little — he was still probably sore from his aborted suicide mission and battle aboard the Wraith hive, as well as from whatever other injuries he had from other missions that he had sweet-talked Dr. Keller into letting slide so he could get back to active duty — Sheppard stood up, pulling himself straight and snapping off a salute that did not in any way make up for his rumpled appearance or the general sense that he would like to be anywhere else than in the SGC, but Sam nonetheless appreciated the effort. “Permission to be dismissed, Generals, Colonel?” 

Jack stood up too, spreading his hands. “Why not? There’s a helo waiting to take you back to Atlantis.” 

“How mad is San Francisco, sir?” asked Sheppard. “About you quarantining the bay and evacuating the city?” 

“The Californian senators have had some choice words for me,” replied Jack with a grimace. “But we can’t have a cargo ship colliding with one of your piers, can we?” 

“No, sir, we can’t.” Sheppard’s smile widened. “We’ll be out of your hair soon, sir.” 

Jack nodded, though there wasn’t a lot of conviction behind the nod. If Sheppard noticed it — and usually, Sam found that he noticed most things about his commanding officers, possibly as an engrained survival instinct — he didn’t show it. 

Maybe Sheppard thought if he kept assuming Atlantis would head back to the Pegasus Galaxy (which the expedition, for all some of them probably hadn’t acknowledged it, thought of as their real home), the brass would relent and simply let Atlantis fly away again. 

As if the IOA would ever let Atlantis go when they had a chance to get their soft, greedy hands locked around its throat. 

On the way out of the briefing room, Sheppard turned around just long enough to say, “It’s good to be home.” 

Sam was not naive enough to think that Sheppard was referring to Earth when he said that. 

The moment the briefing room door shut behind Sheppard, Jack said, “If they take the city away from that kid, it’ll kill him.” 

Sam was also not naive enough to think that the IOA and Congress, when given a chance to exert greater control over the most historically uncontrollable off-shoot of the Stargate Program, would allow a man with a history of disobeying orders that extended far past a single black mark in Afghanistan to remain the military commander of the expedition. John Sheppard, for all that he was one of the primary reasons Atlantis was still intact and the expedition members were still alive, had always been — in the mind of most everyone with power — the guy put in charge until someone better was found. When Dr. Weir had been in charge of the city, she had been able to dig her heels in, leveraging her longstanding connections in both the IOA and Congress, and keep Sheppard around. Her influence extended into Sam’s own time as expedition leader, especially since even the IOA wasn’t stupid enough to replace Sheppard so soon after the city had lost Weir. With Woolsey, the IOA had hoped to make up for Sheppard’s presence in the city with someone who would look after their interests. 

It seemed that that particular ploy had failed. No one, certainly not any member of the IOA, had expected Woolsey to go native. 

“You’re wrong,” said Landry, in the voice of someone who had been on the receiving end of Sheppard’s particular brand of crazy. He — despite his attempts to ingratiate himself to Sheppard — existed, so far as Sam could tell, anyway, firmly in the category of commanding officers Sheppard did not respect. In fact, as far as Sam could tell, she and Jack were the sole inhabitants of the exceedingly narrow category of military superiors that Sheppard did respect. 

Jack slid one of his vague, amused looks Landry’s way. “Oh, am I?” 

“You are.” Landry gave him one of his pleasant yet biting looks in response. “If they take the city from him, Colonel Sheppard will kill them.” 

When Jack did not offer an immediate retort — when in fact he seemed to be considering Landry’s supposition — the sinking sensation in Sam’s stomach deepened. She wished she disagreed with Landry, but somehow she didn’t think the man who had treated the SGC and Earth like a prison he needed to break out of after the Replicators took over Atlantis and killed the last of the Ancients would have a measured response to bureaucrats telling him that he and his people couldn’t go back to Pegasus, where the expedition members had put down roots — some of them, Sam was sure, for the very first time in their lives. More than that, she doubted Sheppard would have a reasonable response to the IOA telling Teyla and Ronon that if they wanted to see their home galaxy or — in Teyla’s case — their family and people again, they would have to leave Atlantis and the expedition both and return to Pegasus through the Milky Way gate or by the Daedalus or Apollo (and all that assumed the IOA and Pentagon approved either the drain on Atlantis’s ZPMs to dial the Earth gate or the risk of sending their few and precious Asgard-class battleships into the war-torn Pegasus). 

Atlantis being prevented from returning to Pegasus wasn’t what anyone in the SGC, Congress, or indeed the American government at large would term as a hostile kidnapping, but Sam didn’t doubt that Atlantis would see it differently. They had allies back in Pegasus who were counting on their return. And if she had read between the lines of the carefully worded reports that arrived on her desk when she was in command of the city, some of the expedition members had literal families waiting for them. The archaeology, medical, and anthropology departments in particular had formed a close relationship with the Athosians, and Sam was willing to bet that several prominent members of all three departments found their loyalty split between Woolsey and Sheppard as their leaders and Teyla herself. 

Marrying into alien peoples was one of the things that ceased to be a problem when an existential threat like the Wraith came into play, Sam imagined — especially when an entire expedition of people had spent the better part of a year believing they would never return to Earth and then a further four years turning a wild galaxy into their home. 

What was Atlantis now, five years into their expedition — an expedition that had never been given an end-date and had initially been something of a suicide mission in and of itself? Sam wasn’t quite sure, but she could tell that the expedition, even Woolsey, felt that their continued association with and subordination to the SGC was closer to a favor they did Earth than an obligation they felt bound to fulfill. Honor meant a lot to people like Sheppard, but Sam didn’t doubt he would find it easy to cut ties if that honor was offended. 

Like it would be if some idiot who hadn’t bled, fought, or died for the city opened their mouth and said, “Actually, Atlantis is the property of the US government…” 

She looked over at Jack. “Do you think he’d do it?” 

“What?’ Jack raised his eyebrows into an expression that aped confusion. She had long ago learned to look past those. “Go Lizzie Borden on the IOA? If only.” 

“Jack.” Dropping professionalism for a moment, she kept looking at him. Kindly, Landry looked away. Their relationship no longer presented a problem in the eyes of the Air Force, but the Air Force still didn’t like to have it paraded around. “What will he do?” 

“You know him better than I do.” 

Sam supposed that was true, but her understanding of Sheppard only went about as far as his similarities to Jack, which were many and varied on the surface but disappeared the second you dove deeper. Despite not spending as much time with him, Jack certainly understood him more completely. 

He was always better at getting through to angry young soldiers than she was. People like Skaara were probably still alive solely because of Jack. Possibly Sheppard was too. Sam didn’t know for sure. 

“Sure,” she said, “but I’m asking you.” 

Jack sighed and pushed his hand through his hair, which was much whiter than it had been a decade ago but was still as close-cropped as ever. “I think he’ll do what he has to do to protect his people.” 

“And what do you think that’ll be?” 

Jack blew out a short breath. “God only knows.” 

# # # 

“And then — and then I activated the wormhole drive!” Woolsey, who had been pacing up and down his office, heedless of its floor to ceiling windows and proximity to the gate room — the technicians of which kept giving him funny looks across the gallery — sank into his desk chair. It was a different one than Elizabeth and Colonel Carter had had, with more lumbar support and leather upholstery, but John let it slide. Woolsey was a lot more than he appeared to be on the surface. “I activated the wormhole drive. An experimental piece of technology. I could have vaporized us all!” He pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “And do you know what the worst thing was?” 

John, sitting in the chair on the other side of the desk with one ankle braced across one knee — not military posture, but Woolsey wasn’t military — said, “That you didn’t hesitate for one second?” 

“Yes!” Woolsey threw up his hands and subsided into silence, one hand cupped over his eyes as he slumped back into his desk chair. “Colonel Sheppard,” he said after a long moment, “what happened to me?” 

John shoved a hand through his hair. “Mr. Woolsey, I couldn’t tell you.” 

Woolsey lowered his hand enough to direct a frown at John over the back of his palm. “Yes, you can.” 

“I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours, sir.” 

“Thirty-six,” retorted Woosley. 

“Okay, you win.” John sighed. “Mr. Woolsey, Atlantis does this to people. It just means you fit in.” 

“‘Fit in’,” snorted Woolsey. “I am nowhere near fitting in here, Colonel. I ‘fit in’ among Harvard alumni, or in the middle of a congressional hearing, or at a five star restaurant in DC, or in the offices of an overpriced law firm, or —” 

“Mr. Woolsey.” John pressed his lips together. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re a perfect fit for this place.” 

Woolsey snorted. “Oh, don’t patronize me.” 

“Sir —” 

“I know very well I was foisted upon —” 

“Sir, don’t you think we in Atlantis are fully capable of getting rid of commanding officers we don’t want?” 

Woolsey opened his mouth to give a curt response and then shut it, thinking things over. “How… How would you get rid of commanders you didn’t want?” 

John smiled at him. “Use your imagination, sir.” 

Woolsey looked vaguely nauseated, which was proof positive he was indeed using his imagination and it was providing such things as iratus bug retrovirus “accidents”, mishaps on off-world missions, weaponized nanites, and the ever popular “You know, General Landry, I couldn’t tell you how the Genii got a hold of him, but I’m pretty sure the radiation’s killed him by now.” 

“I see,” said Woolsey after a moment. “So you mean to say —” 

“We want you here, sir.” John smiled again. “We like you.” 

Doubt clouded Woolsey’s face. “You do?” He said it in the tone of someone who had, up until this moment, only been liked by the yorkie he lost in his divorce, and John had the feeling Woolsey hadn’t even been certain of the yorkie’s affection. It was tragic, in a way. John had never thought he would meet someone’s whose life before Atlantis sucked more than his own had, but then Woolsey had wandered into Atlantis, put on a suit and tie to unwind, and locked himself in his quarters with classical music each evening until Teyla, ever the rescuer, had dragged him into the city’s social life. And while Woolsey was perfectly at home in a board meeting or in the Whitehouse, he was like an unsocialized rescue dog at any other kind of communal function, but that hadn’t mattered to anyone on Atlantis — mostly because they were used to Rodney. 

“You’ve grown on us.” John kicked his boots up onto Woolsey’s desk, which was something he would have only done to tease Elizabeth and would never have done around Colonel Carter. Woolsey, however, was different. Respect toward Elizabeth came in the form of matching her needs on any given day — whether she needed the straitlaced Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard or the military reject with the sloppy presentation and distrust of authority — and respect toward Colonel Carter involved deciding that the brass on her shoulders actually counted. Respect toward Woolsey seemed to go hand in hand with casual affection, like Woolsey needed to be reassured that Atlantis wasn’t on the verge of mutiny (like they had been his first day). 

“I have?” 

John nodded. “Mmhm. Like a fungus.” 

Woolsey grimaced. “A fungus?” 

“A nice one.” John snapped his fingers and pointed at Woolsey. “Yeast. You’re like yeast.” 

Woolsey was starting to look truly lost. “Yeast?” 

“Sure.” John sketched a vague shape in the air. “You’re the little fungus in the middle of the bread that makes all the good stuff happen. Because of you, we rise.” 

“The yeast in bread dies in the oven.” 

“Well, don’t take it that far.” 

“So — so in this case, Atlantis is the bread and Pegasus in the oven, which means I’m the thing in the center that can’t take the heat —” 

“Mr. Woolsey.” 

“— So what you’re saying, actually, is that not only am I a fungus, I’m a doomed fungus —” 

“Mr. Woolsey.” 

“— and that Atlantis is my grave —” 

“Mr. Woolsey.” 

“— and worst of all, at the end of all this, someone — I assume the Wraith, in this particular analogy — eats Atlantis, and all of this ends up being for nothing —” 

“Mr. Woolsey.” John sits up straighter, letting his boots fall from the desk to the floor with a heavy clomp. “You’re overthinking this.” 

Woolsey gave him a timorous look. “Am I?” 

John flattened his lips into a sympathetic expression. “You are, sir.” He let a lopsided smile show next. “You did good, sir.” 

“I did?” 

“We’re alive, aren’t we?” 

A tentative smile crossed Woolsey’s face. “We are, aren’t we?” After a pause, he said, “It’s strange, though. I don’t feel as though we’re… Oh, this is going to sound silly.” 

“You don’t feel as though we’re home?” 

“How did you know?” 

John leaned back enough to peer out the side of Woolsey’s office, toward the big windows in the gate room gallery. The Golden Gate Bridge was just visible, cutting across the bay in the distance. Clouds piled up on the horizon, and San Francisco was a cluster of buildings deeper inside the bay. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t home. Not anymore. Home had more moons, to start with. “Because I don’t feel it either.” 

Woolsey followed John’s gaze to the bridge. “The lease on my apartment is up,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t renew it. I suppose I just thought I didn’t know when I’d be back, so what was the use of spending all that money to renew it?”

“Yeah.” John studiously avoided Woolsey’s gaze. “Atlantis is the first place I’ve called my own since, uh, 2001.” 

“The attack on the —” 

“Yeah.” John didn’t really want to talk about it. “I guess here still sort of counts as a military base, but you know.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t feel like it. Anyway.” He inhaled deeply and stood up. “Any word on when we can get back home?” 

Woolsey tipped his head back to look at him and shook his head. “The IOA is —” 

“Dragging their feet?” 

Woolsey laughed without humor. “Yes. I don’t know if —” 

“Whatever it is,” said John, not wanting to hear what he had already suspected after his meeting with O’Neill confirmed, “we’ll deal with it.” 

“We will.” 

“After all, Mr. Woolsey, you and me and my team took out a Wraith hiveship together. I think we can handle a bunch of bureaucrats, don’t you?” 

Woolsey gave John a look. “It’s not generally acceptable to set Ronon loose on —” 

“Then they should knuckle under, shouldn’t they?” 

Woolsey looked down at his desk to hide a smile. “I suppose they should. Until then…” 

“Best behavior, I know.” John gave Woolsey a lazy, two-fingered salute. “We’ll go out there and make some friends, sir.”

Woolsey nodded. “Thank you, Colonel Sheppard.” 

John paused in the doorway of Woolsey’s office. “No problem, sir.”

# # # 

Daniel Jackson had thought Teal’c was both a hard man to read and a hard man to get through to, but he was practically warm and friendly compared to Ronon Dex, who Daniel had only met in passing up until this point — and then only as the grim-faced man looming somewhere behind Rodney McKay’s right shoulder, daring Daniel to make a stupid move. Apparently, coming from Earth didn’t in any way mean “not a threat” to Ronon, and he had made that clear since the second Daniel set foot on Atlantis.

“So anyway,” Daniel said, clearing his throat, “since you and Teyla are the foremost experts on native Pegasus cultures, diplomats from the United Nations, read into the Stargate Program, wish to speak to you. They’ll meet you in a hotel in New York City, not far from the UN building.” 

Perched on the edge of the briefing room table on Atlantis — an ungodly stretch of mahogany — like some kind of looming bearded vulture (complete with the patented glare), Ronon kept looking at him. Teyla was nearby, looking far more relaxed, but Daniel didn’t doubt her outwardly calm exterior masked an outlook on the universe similar enough to Ronon’s for them to be all but inseparable on Atlantis. He had had to ask around to find them, and the answer to his questions had been a refrain of “Maybe with Ronon?” or “Maybe with Colonel Sheppard?”

Daniel shouldn’t have been surprised by that. After all, Teal’c and O’Neill, in SG1’s heyday, had been equally as inseparable, and some of the technicians in the SGC had started pretending that Sam’s last name was HaveyoucheckedwithDoctorJackson, largely because she was usually in his office, appropriating at least a quarter of his desk, or if she wasn’t there, because Daniel usually knew where she was. 

Teyla spoke for Ronon when it became clear (to Daniel, at least — he assumed Teyla had known from the start) that he wasn’t going to respond. “Yes, we understand. Mr. Woolsey already spoke to us about it.” 

“Oh. Oh, good!” Daniel tried for a smile, but it fell a bit flat. The last time he had been to Atlantis, he had felt mostly welcomed — by everyone except Rodney, of course, but he had expected that. However, it seemed that Atlantis in Pegasus was an entirely different animal than Atlantis in the Milky Way. 

It’s like they think they’re on enemy territory. “So a helo will come for you both tomorrow. At seven, and they’ll take you to the nearest military base, where you’ll meet me, and a plane will take us to New York City. We should arrive at the hotel around 11:00 a.m., Eastern time. Sound good?” 

Teyla smiled, and Daniel got the distinct sense that someone — Woolsey or maybe Sheppard — had told her to humor the poor Tau’ri. “Of course. Ronon and I are… eager to meet the leaders of your people.” 

“They’re not exactly leaders,” Daniel said. “They’re, uh…” He pushed up his glasses, trying to land on a comparison that would align with Teyla and Ronon’s experiences. “They’re kind of like the people you send through the gate to make connections with new people. Except they don’t usually go armed, and a lot of the time they get put up in a really nice hotel, and uh —” 

Teyla’s smile broadened. “Dr. Weir was a diplomat, Dr. Jackson,” she said. “Ronon and I are quite familiar.” 

Daniel thought about explaining to them that most diplomats weren’t like Weir, who, judging by reports, favored a more aggressive style of negotiations and put herself in the line of fire a lot more than anyone in the UN did, but he kept his mouth shut. “Ah. Sorry. So, tomorrow?” 

Teyla dipped her head. “Tomorrow.” 

Ronon just kept glaring. Yeah, Daniel was really going to enjoy being cooped up on a private jet with him for five hours tomorrow. 

# # # 

“I don’t like it,” said Rodney as he stood in the doorway of Sheppard’s apartment on Atlantis. 

Sheppard, predictably, didn’t pause to think over what Rodney was saying — had been saying, for the past hour. Instead, he kept hunting around for his battered copy of War and Peace. “It’s the SGC, Rodney,” he said as he dropped onto his stomach to peer under his bed. He looked sort of ridiculous like that, a long line of BDUs and truly gigantic combat boots stretched out on Atlantis’s coppery floor. “Not enemy territory. It’s not like General O’Neill called me up and said, ‘Hey, how do you feel about Moscow this time of year? How about Baghdad?’” 

“It’s not here.” 

“That’s how traveling to different places works.” Sheppard moved up onto his knees and twisted around to look at Rodney over his shoulder. “Have you seen my book?” 

“If I don’t tell you where it is, will you not go?” 

“I’m kind of trying to avoid court martial, so, no.” 

Grimacing, Rodney jerked his chin toward the little stack of plastic boxes acting as a shelving unit in the corner. “It’s in there.” 

Sheppard, whose military discipline did not extend to keeping his personal quarters clean, gave him a confused look. “Who put it away?” 

“Torren dropped his favorite teether here last time you babysat,” said Rodney. “Teyla let herself in to go find it, and she cleaned up.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “You know how she is.” 

“I get no respect on this base,” Sheppard muttered to himself, retrieving the many times creased, dropped, dog-eared, and (once) waterlogged book and stuffing it into the duffle bag he was packing. There wasn’t much in it, since he wasn’t supposed to be gone long. The SGC provided toiletries and the like, so from what Rodney could see, Sheppard was only bringing a spare pair of BDUs (his nice ones, which were only patched in a couple of places and had most of the insignias still intact), War and Peace, an MP3 player, and his ID, including his driver’s license and passport — two things that had been busy gathering dust almost since he set foot on Atlantis.  

“You shouldn’t go,” Rodney said as Sheppard zipped up is duffel bag and slung it over his shoulder. “I mean it — Earth is — it’s home, but — there’s so many different factions, and you know the IOA’s always had it out for you, and, and…” Rodney took a deep breath. “They’re not letting you bring an armed escort, which is how we always —” 

“This isn’t a foreign planet.” Sheppard stopped in front of Rodney and gave him one of his stupid smiles. Rodney hated those, largely because they usually preceded a disaster of some sort. “It’s —” 

“It’s not home,” Rodney snapped. Saying the words felt like pulling the pin out of a grenade, but he didn’t take them back. 

“I wasn’t going to say it was.” 

“It’s, it’s a nice place to visit, but it’s not…” Rodney shook his head. “I don’t like you going alone, is all.” 

“Well, Lorne’s visiting his family,” said Sheppard, “and I can’t exactly treat him like my own personal security blanket.” 

“You don’t like it either, do you? And then they’re sending me to comb through the wreckage of Area 51, and that with Ronon and Teyla flying out this morning —” 

“With Dr. Jackson.” 

Rodney snorted. “Yay.” 

Sheppard sighed. “No, I don’t like it either, Rodney. I’m not used to going anywhere without you guys, but when in Rome…” He shrugged. “We’re in Rome. We’re from Rome. I’m not sure what else you want me to do here.” 

“Tell General O’Neill to stuff it?” 

“Oh, great, and get transferred back to McMurdo once and for all?” Sheppard tried to smack the back of Rodney’s head; Rodney dodged. “Besides, this isn’t coming from O’Neill. It’s the high-ups — Congress, IOA. They want —” 

“They want you to admit this whole thing is your fault so they have an excuse to fire you,” Rodney said, because someone had to say it. “They’re doing the same thing to you they did to Sam — scapegoating you and pushing you out —” 

“Rodney.” Sheppard lifted his eyebrows. “It’s going to be okay.” 

“You know I hate that phrase. It’s usually a lie. Especially when you’re the one saying it.” 

“Listen, if I don’t come home in time, you can tell Ramirez and the other Marines they have my full permission to go up to the doors at Cheyenne Mountain and knock real loudly.” 

“And insistently,” added Rodney. 

“Sure.” Sheppard squeezed his shoulder. “It is going to be okay.” 

Rodney glowered at him. “Famous last words.” 

# # # 

The sunshine coming through the huge windows in the gate room and control room was the lovely gold of afternoon as Richard Woolsey stepped into the control gallery that overlooked the gate well. He had a cup of coffee in one hand, enjoying it for once not being a rationed substance. If they ran out, a supply helo could drop more off. In truth, they could send a cloaked puddle jumper into San Francisco to stop at the nearest Starbucks if they really wanted to. 

Richard wanted to be happy. He really, truly did. He loved California — though the carefree attitude of many San Franciscans had always grated on him. Frankly, it likely wouldn’t now that he had become acquainted with the even more carefree, casual attitude of the Atlantis expedition. 

He should be happy. 

But the sunlight was the wrong shade of yellow, and the sun had risen at the wrong time, and the faint gibbous moon in the sky was too small and too solitary to feel right. Back on Lantea II, the moons were huge and friendly, and there was usually more than one out during the day. Richard had gotten used to them. They were constants. 

Last night, the stars had been wrong too. 

He didn’t know how an ancient city in another galaxy could work its way into his heart so quickly. In many ways, it felt like Atlantis had chosen him, not the other way around. Still, he wasn’t interested in questioning it. If he looked at things to closely, they tended to go away. He didn’t want that to happen with Atlantis. 

Yet he wasn’t sure if he was going to be given a choice in the matter. 

“Chuck?” he said, watching the shifting panels of colored light on the floor in front of the gate, coming from the great stained glass window behind it. 

“Yes, Mr. Woolsey?” Chuck, omnipresent in the control room, looked up from his laptop, where he was taking an opportunity to run diagnostics on the gate after their stint in space. He had a cup of coffee near it, despite McKay and Zelenka’s mildly hypocritical moratorium on drinks — hot or otherwise — near the Ancient consoles. 

“It’s just struck me,” said Richard slowly, “that Congress and the IOA have managed, in one way or another, to scatter almost all my senior staff across the continental United States.” 

Chuck looked unsettled. “I know, sir.” 

Ah, Chuck — always prescient. Richard wasn’t surprised that he had noticed the danger signs too. Likely most of the control room technicians had. They were easy for outsiders to overlook, which was probably why the IOA hadn’t tried to steal Chuck, Amelia Banks, or any of the others at the same time as they had whisked away Sheppard and the others, but they were just about as essential as anyone on the senior staff. People like Chuck and Amelia had their fingers on the pulse of the city; they knew when the heart skipped a beat, as it had when Sheppard, Teyla, Ronon, McKay, and Jennifer Keller — following McKay to Nevada — had all left the city at once. 

“They were provided cell phones, yes?” asked Richard, even though he knew the answer. It helped to hear it again. 

“Yes, sir,” answered Chuck with a short nod. “And Amelia showed Ronon how to work his. Teyla already knew. They have the number of General Landry at the SGC, and we rigged up a number for Atlantis’s central communications system, so if they call us, it’ll come through here — just like comms do back home.” 

Back home. There was that phrase again. Chuck probably didn’t even notice using it. It was comforting, in a way, to know that Richard, Sheppard, and the others weren’t alone in feeling out of place on Earth. 

“Good.” Richard drummed his fingers on Chuck’s workstation. “See that you check in with all of them every two hours, please.” 

Chuck smiled a little. “Was already going to do that, sir.” 

Richard smiled back. “I can always count on you, Chuck.” 

# # # 

The moment Teyla set foot in the hotel room, she disliked it. It was opulent, which wasn’t exactly strange to her after an entire life spent traveling to all sorts of different worlds — some wealthy, some not — and after living in Atlantis for so long, but it was a strange sort of opulence: ostentatious and too… new. There was an impersonality to it that she wasn’t used to. Most rich communities in Pegasus relied on artisan work, making every place of luxury unique and beautiful, and Atlantis itself was delicate and lovely, unlike any other place she had ever been. 

In contrast to all that, the hotel room where she, Ronon, and Daniel were set to meet the Earth diplomats had no real personality that she could see. It made her skin crawl a little. 

“That’s strange,” said Daniel as he shut the hotel room door behind him and set his suitcase by it. “They should have beat us here.” 

Ronon twisted to frown at Daniel over his shoulder. “They dead?” 

Daniel’s eyes widened briefly, before he apparently remembered that being late for a meeting typically meant something very different in the Pegasus Galaxy. Teyla had lost count of the number of times representatives from communities in Pegasus missing a rendezvous had been the first sign that something terrible had happened to their world. “No,” said Daniel after a moment. “No, I’m sure they’re just running a bit behind. This is good — it’ll give you time to get settled.” 

Teyla couldn’t imagine getting settled in a place like this, but she set her satchel — the one Kanaan had made for her back when they were both on the cusp of adulthood — on one of the long couches that were set up in the middle of the main room in a box shape. There was an elegant coffee table — mahogany, she thought, like Woolsey’s briefing room table — in the center of the box, and beyond the farthest couch, a set of glass doors, hung with gauzy curtains, opened up onto a balcony that overlooked the bustling city — Manhattan, Daniel had called it. 

Ronon, endeavoring to look like a man of ill repute in spite of the fact that he had once been a commander back on Sateda, slouched over to the nearest couch and slumped onto it, spreading his arms over the back and letting his legs fall apart. Teyla raised an eyebrow at him as she sat down next to him — because the unspoken rule was that no member of the team should be out of arm’s reach of the rest when in foreign territory, unless absolutely necessary — and he raised his right back at her. Ronon did not and had never done well with orders from anyone who wasn’t John or Woolsey — or, in the past, Elizabeth and Colonel Carter. 

Leaving Ronon to his recalcitrance, Teyla asked “How long before the diplomats arrive?” 

“Uh…” Daniel seemed absorbed in peering around the room, rubbing at the back of his head distractedly. “I’m not sure. They should — we should have heard from their aides, if they were going to be late, actually. Maybe I missed the call?”

Something cold trickled down Teyla’s back. She glanced at Ronon, who straightened up and raised his eyebrows again, though this time to communicate something entirely different. Trying to dismiss the alarm bells ringing in her head, Teyla said, “Doctor, is it possible that something went wrong?” 

“Wrong?” Daniel paused in his circuit of the room to glance over at her. “N — no, Teyla, this isn’t like the Pegasus. The most likely explanation is they got held up at the UN, and no one bothered to —” 

The hotel door broke inward in a shower of splinters. A team of men in black body armor crowded through it. The first men through bore transparent shields with bright white letters stenciled across them, and the ones behind them carried heavy guns. 

The air filled with their shouts. “Hands up! Down on the ground!” 

Ronon was on his feet in the space between one breath and the next, lurching across the room to snatch hold of Daniel’s arm and drag him toward the couches. In the same moment, Teyla twisted toward her satchel. She didn’t have her gun, but her knife was stowed in a secret pocket with the satchel. If she could just — 

“Drop your weapon! Drop your weapon now!” 

Teyla swung back around in time to see Ronon pull out his gun, which he must have kept concealed on his person in spite of Daniel’s warnings not to, and step out in front of Daniel. Daniel grabbed Ronon’s shoulder from behind, and though he was not a small man, he looked laughably tiny behind Ronon. 

“Ronon,” he gasped out over the sound of the men shouting. “Ronon, these are the police! SWAT! They’re on our side — Ronon, do as they —” 

It was at that moment the entire world turned into smoke, noise, and fire. A concussive shockwave picked up the couch Teyla was on and hurled it forward. Teyla ended up crushed beneath it. Through the narrow gap between it and the floor, she saw the SWAT team fly backwards in a shower of splinters. Ronon and Daniel followed, with Ronon throwing himself atop Daniel at the same time as Daniel tried to shield him with his body. They landed just behind the couch that had its back to the shattered door. 

And then the explosion — it was an explosion — was over. All that was left was the ringing in Teyla’s ears, the crackling of flames, and the scream of the smoke alarms scattered about the hotel. In another second, the sprinkler system above her head, just barely familiar to her from the Biology Department’s greenhouse setup on Atlantis, activated, sending water running down. 

“Ronon!” Coughing, Teyla wormed out from beneath the couch, snatching up her satchel in the same movement. 

Keeping low to avoid the smoke, she crawled over to him and Daniel. They were tangled together in the faint shelter the back of the couch provided. Daniel wasn’t unconscious, but he was stunned, staring up at her with a wide-eyed, glazed look. There was a splinter of wall as thick as two of Teyla’s fingers embedded in his shoulder. It still had some of the room’s beautiful wallpaper — badly singed now — stuck to it. 

“Dr. Jackson. Doctor — Daniel!” She sat him up, carefully, and propped him against the couch. “Are you —” 

“Fine — I’m fine.” He blinked hard, one fumbling hand going to his shoulder. He seemed confused when his fingers came back red. His glasses sat askew on his face, the lens cracked. “Ro — Ronon.” 

“I know.” Breathing hard, Teyla sank to her knees next to Ronon. By some miracle, he was awake too, but one half of his face was a mask of scarlet as blood leaked from a split in his temple from when he had struck the floor. “Ronon! Ronon, look at me!” 

His brown eyes, a second ago rolling and disoriented, locked on her. Even through all the red, he was alert. Primed. A single word fell from his mouth. “Bomb.” 

Teyla snatched a look over her shoulder at what had once been the hotel room’s master bedroom. Most of the wall separating it from the rest of the suite was gone, and inside the bedroom was a mass of flames and debris. “I know.” 

“We have to move.” Swiping blood out of his eyes, Ronon rolled to his feet, pulling Teyla with him. In another swift movement, he yanked up Daniel and dumped him against Teyla. They both staggered until Daniel managed to get his footing back. 

As they stumbled toward the door, Ronon was in perpetual motion, grabbing the unconscious SWAT team members by their feet and dragging them out into the hall. Teyla didn’t ask what he was doing. It was obvious. The fire was spreading; if he left the men in the room, they would die. 

Outside in the hallway, Daniel left Teyla’s side and called the elevator at the end of the hall. “Put them in here,” he said. “I’ll send them to the lobby.” He glanced around at the hallway. “Lucky they cleared this out for security ahead of time. We’ve got the floor to ourselves.” 

“Yeah.” Ronon dumped the last man in the elevator; Daniel hit the button for the lobby and ducked out just before the door shut. “Lucky.” 

“I don’t know what happened,” Daniel said. Smoke was leaking into the hallway, growing thicker by the moment. “Why did SWAT — and the bomb — oh. Oh my —” 

“There you go.” Ronon clapped him on the shoulder. “You got there.” 

“Got where?” Teyla looked back and forth between them. “What are you —” 

“A bomb at what was supposed to be a meeting with high ranking officials from other countries? In a Manhattan hotel within spitting distance of Ground Zero?” Daniel’s expression had gone stiff. “Ground Zero as in —” 

“We know what it is,” Teyla said. It wasn’t a story any American on Atlantis had specifically told; it was something that she and Ronon had both absorbed in bits and pieces. 

“So, you see!” Daniel straightened his glasses. “The diplomats don’t show up, someone calls SWAT, and a bomb goes off with two leaders from a foreign galaxy involved? It’s a —” 

“Frame job,” finished Ronon. 

Teyla’s stomach dropped. “Why —” 

“They want to get rid of us,” said Ronon, heading toward the entrance to the stairs. Somewhere in the distance, Teyla heard shouting and screaming — people reacting to the explosion. “Sheppard’s at the SGC; what do you think happens to him if everyone there thinks you and I did this?” 

At the entrance to the stairwell, Daniel yanked down on the handle of a bright red box labeled Fire Alarm. Lights set high in the corners of the hallway and stairwell began to strobe, and the scream of an alarm filled the air. “That should get everyone out of here before the fire spreads too far.” 

“This way.” Ronon lurched down the stairs. “No time to wait for the elevator.” 

Teyla ran to keep up, making sure Daniel stayed between her and Ronon. Blood dripped from his fingertips, running down from the splinter in his arm, but he didn’t seem to feel the pain of it yet. “Do you even know where you’re going?” 

“I grew up in a city,” Ronon said shortly. “I’ll figure it out.” He crashed through a doorway that let out on the next floor. The hallway was crowded with people running for the various stairwell entrances, but he pushed through them, making a beeline for the nearest elevator. 

“You can’t use that during a fire!” a woman rushing by yelled. 

Ronon ignored her and shoved Teyla and Daniel both in the elevator, pushing in after them. He pushed the button for the lobby. The elevator was shiny and still unfamiliar to Teyla, even though she had used them at the SGC, but Ronon wasn’t fazed at all. Most of the time, it was easy to forget that Sateda had been an advanced planet, with cities comparable to places on Earth — John said Sateda’s now-ruined capital reminded him of Chicago or Detroit — but other times, the difference between her upbringing and Ronon’s became stark. The second the huge buildings of New York City had closed around her, irrational panic had climbed up Teyla’s throat, but beside her in the rental car that had been waiting for them when the plane landed, Ronon had relaxed. This — this strange metal forest, filled with entirely too many people — was like home to him. A place like it had been his home, for the first eighteen years of his life. 

“We have to warn John,” Teyla said the moment the elevator doors slid shut. She pulled the cell phone the SGC had given her out of the pocket of her pantsuit jacket — also given to her by the SGC, since her usual clothes would stand out in Manhattan. 

“No, wait!” Daniel snatched the phone from her hand. “If someone’s trying to frame you two, don’t you think they’ll be tracking our phones? You don’t think they’re going to be looking for us? SWAT came there to arrest the both of you — maybe me too. If you call Colonel Sheppard now, not only will they find us, they’ll have more reason to say he was involved in what just happened.” 

“Who’s they?” Teyla’s head was spinning. This wasn’t how Athos worked. This wasn’t how any planet in Pegasus worked. The closest comparison she could think of was the Genii, and the they when it came to the Genii was always perfectly clear. She knew who she could trust, and more importantly, who she couldn’t trust. 

“No idea,” said Daniel. “But I know we don’t want them to find you two.”

“We can’t just abandon Sheppard,” snapped Ronon. 

“We’re not,” Daniel said, pulling out his own phone and holding out his hand for Ronon’s. “He’s with Jack, remember? Whatever is going on stinks to high heaven, and Jack is a pro at sniffing out rats. He’ll take care of Colonel Sheppard. I swear, Ronon. You have to trust me.” 

Ronon still didn’t relinquish his phone. 

“And if you’re arrested, neither of you can help him,” added Daniel, holding Ronon’s gaze. 

That was enough. Ronon handed his phone over, and Daniel dropped all three of the phones on the elevator floor and stomped on them — hard. The casings and screens cracked beneath his heel. “Now,” said Daniel, “we need to find somewhere to lay low. If we can borrow a phone or maybe find a payphone, we can get in touch with Atlantis.” 

Ronon’s face was grim. “I can make us disappear.” 

# # #  

When Rodney received orders — orders, like he was a soldier, rather than a Canadian scientist who graced the American military and government with his help — to go to Nevada to try to see what could be salvaged from the wreckage of the Antarctica drone chair, he had thought it was a stupid outing. Now, in the blistering heat of the Nevadan desert, sheltering under a makeshift canopy his security team had put up and sifting through shattered control crystals and half-melted components, he knew it was stupid. 

He told Jennifer as much. He still didn’t understand why she had come along. The survivors — few that there had been — of the bombing had been evacuated days and days ago, so there wasn’t anything for her to do except sit in a lawnchair in denim shorts and a worn t-shirt that said Chippewa Falls High on it and read a copy of The Lancet. 

He supposed she wanted to be around him. That was still new; most of the time, the only other person who spent this much free time with him was Sheppard. 

“I don’t know what they expect me to do with this,” he said, waving a crystal shard at her. Before he had arrived, some unfortunate grunts had scoured the debris field and assembled as many chair components and crystals on a square of plastic tables under the canopy as possible, with a few monitors and tablets, modified to be compatible with Ancient technology, set up at intervals among them. For the past few hours, he had fruitlessly tried to make the crystals and components do anything except sit there and remind him that barely a two weeks ago, a Wraith hive ship had attacked Earth. 

Jennifer looked up from her medical journal. Her blonde hair was pulled back from her face in two braids, and there was a smudge of sunscreen on her nose. She was just as conscious about her UV exposure as he was. “They expect you to work your usual miracles, Rodney,” she said, with a deep fondness. 

“Yeah, well, I’m not Jesus.” He dropped the crystal back on the table. “I can’t bring back the dead. The only thing I could do with these is make them blow up more.” 

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” Absently, Jennifer turned a glossy page in The Lancet. 

Rodney twisted to look at her. “Resurrection? That seems more like a you thing, doesn’t it?” 

“Oh.” She looked up again. “No, I meant you’ll figure out how to get it working again.” 

“How is your confidence in me greater than my confidence in myself? That’s never happened before.” 

“It’s a gift.” 

Rodney was just about to disconsolately turn back to his work when someone from their security team — who hadn’t given him a name, so Rodney had mentally labeled him Deadshot because of the scar that cut across one of his eyes — pulled up in one of the two massive SUVs they had carted Rodney and Jennifer here in. The other SUV was farther away, at the edge of the debris field, and the six other guys — all in casual yet tactical outfits that screamed I’m a government agent trying to blend in — set to guard Rodney and Jennifer were spaced out around the canopy, alternating between watching the perimeter and watching Rodney himself. 

Rodney didn’t like any of them. Before working with the SGC, he hadn’t been a huge fan of the military, but years spent with airmen and Marines watching over him and occasionally hurling themselves headlong into danger to save him had changed that. But these seven men were different. They weren’t military. He wasn’t even certain what they were. All he knew was that unlike every soldier or even law enforcement agent he had ever encountered, they were utterly uninterested in him or Jennifer as people. 

It was the difference, he supposed, between showing up to work every day because you were a soldier who made an oath or because you were a cog in a convoluted, bureaucratic machine and seeking a paycheck. 

Deadshot climbed out of the SUV, bearing two paper bags with the Wendy’s logo plastered on their sides in faded yet somehow still gaudy red. “Got your food, Doctors,” he said in the gruff tone that had typified his every interaction with them. 

“Oh, yay.” Rodney couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his voice. “All praise to the US government, shelling out the real cash to get us gourmet meals.” 

“Rodney,” Jennifer said, getting to her feet and coming to rest her chin on his shoulder as Deadshot set the bags on the table, “be nice.” 

Deadshot opened the bags and tossed the containers of food within them on the table with more force than necessary. “Sorry, Doc. Not much to choose from out here on the other side of the middle of nowhere. ‘Scuse me for not wanting to drive all the way to Vegas.” 

“He means thank you,” said Jennifer as Deadshot walked away to stand just outside the canopy. “Doesn’t he?” She tipped her head toward Rodney. 

Rodney eyed the food — a burger and a salad for them both. “Sure.” 

“Come on.” Jennifer patted his shoulder and hopped up onto the cleared part of the table, picking up her burger first. “Take a break. You’re gonna get all hypoglycemic.” She picked up his salad and pulled off the plastic lid covering it. “Take this.” She passed him the fork taped to the top of the lid. “Hold my Lancet.” She passed him the medical journal, leaving him holding an unreasonably hefty magazine and his fork while she retrieved the plastic container with the salad dressing from one of the bags and poured the dressing on the salad. “Give me the fork.” 

“I can prepare my own food,” said Rodney, doing as she said. 

“Sure you can, sweetie,” she said off-handedly, stirring the dressing into the salad. “But you never do.” 

Rodney could have protested, but there wasn’t much point, since it was true. He opened his mouth to thank her — a habit he had been trying, with varying degrees of success, to get into — but Jennifer froze, a startled expression passing over her face, before he could. Putting aside a thank you for the moment, Rodney leaned closer to her. “Jennifer? You okay?” 

“There’s lemon on this.” Her voice sounded faraway, but she came back to herself as she pushed him away. “No — stay away, there’s enough on this to send you into anaphylactic shock. Did you bring your Epi-Pen?”  

It was Rodney’s turn to freeze. “No.” 

“Rodney.” 

“I’m not allergic to Pegasus-variety citrus! I got used to —” 

Jennifer held up a finger to silence him, leaning closer to the salad to examine it. “Gosh, it’s not just in the dressing. There’s lemon zest all over it, and —” she ran a finger around the outside of the container, rubbing it against her thumb before giving the two fingers an experimental sniff. “And all over the outside.” 

“The outside?” Rodney’s mouth went dry. He hurriedly rubbed the hand he had held the fork in on his pants, even though his fingers didn’t feel remotely wet and the telltale spiky, itchy feeling that spoke of an allergic reaction wasn’t spreading away from them. “If I had touched it —” 

“You’d be on the floor right now,” said Jennifer grimly, setting the salad down like it was a bomb and uncapping one of their water bottles. She poured it on her hands to clean them and dried them with one of the napkins. “With your airways closing over.” She curled both hands into fists. “Don’t touch anything. Those idiots. You read them the riot act, I read them the riot act, and now they — just wait here, I’m going to go kill —” 

“No. Wait.” Rodney grabbed her wrist before she could move. They were still facing away from Deadshot, who was making a show of watching the perimeter. Even so, every instinct Rodney had honed over the past five years in active combat told him that Deadshot was very interested in what Rodney and Jennifer were doing — however much he was trying to pretend he wasn’t. Lowering his voice, Rodney said, “There’s something off here.” 

Jennifer looked at him, eyebrows furrowing. “You mean —” 

“I mean nobody in the world puts that much lemon in a salad — or outside it — by accident.” 

“Rodney —” 

“I know I sound crazy. I know. But we don’t even know these guys, and —” 

“Hey, Doc.” Deadshot’s voice pulled him up short. Rodney jerked his head up and turned toward Deadshot, while Jennifer shifted to make sure her body was between him and the offending salad. “There a problem with the food?” 

Lie, lie, lie. “No, no problem,” said Rodney, endeavoring to sound irritated and distracted. He turned back to the chair components on the table. “Just trying to finish this before I settle in to eat.”

He had told Jennifer earlier that he could make the chair wreckage blow up more — or rather, again. It was true; there was just enough conductivity and connectivity left in the broken crystals and half-melted control matrix for him to funnel power into it all from his tablet and send it into a final overload. 

The explosion would be big. Big enough, theoretically, to kill or at least badly wound all seven of the men guarding them. 

Were they guarding them? Or preventing them from running away? 

Rodney swallowed hard. He would say five years in another galaxy, hunted by life-sucking aliens, had driven him crazy, but those same five years had taught him to trust his instincts. Currently, those instincts were screaming that something was very, very wrong.  

“It’s getting late, Doc,” said Deadshot, glancing toward the sun. It was indeed tracking toward the horizon, and the fact that there wasn’t a huge, purplish moon rising as it set kept throwing Rodney off. He missed Lantea II more than he expected. “You should eat with your girl.” 

If his tone hadn’t been more gregarious and casual than it had been up until this point, Rodney might have believed him. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, while Jennifer made a show of unwrapping her own burger — a judicious distance from him — and sinking her teeth into it. “I’m getting there. In a minute.” He didn’t have to tell her what he was doing; her eyes followed his movements as he interfaced his tablet with the largest control crystal fragment, which had once served as the heart of the chair. She had already guessed his plan. 

Several years in a foreign galaxy might just have driven Jennifer crazy too.

“Burger’s getting cold,” said Deadshot. He had shifted closer to them — somehow without taking a visible step forward. Rodney kept an eye on him in his peripherals. 

“He likes them cold,” said Jennifer, licking ketchup off her fingers. She had pulled out her friendliest voice, the one that masked the tremor in her words. “He’s a weird freak like that.” 

A faint smile twitched at Rodney’s lips for a split second as he twisted the last couple wires around the control crystal. A diagnostic, monitoring the conductivity and power level of the crystal popped up on his tablet screen. It was all ready, if he needed to put a second crater in Area 51. 

“Come on, Doc,” said Deadshot. “I drove all the way out. Least you could do is eat it.” 

Rodney turned around, hands behind him and poised to drain his tablet’s power into the control crystal. “I’m just not hungry yet.” 

Deadshot’s mouth was a hard line. “And when will you be hungry?” 

“I don’t know. Maybe when we’re back at the hotel.” Rodney felt Jennifer’s hand slid behind him as she sat on the table next to him and close around the handgun — hidden by the drape of his loose, short sleeved button down — that he had stuck in the waistband of his cargo pants before leaving Atlantis. He hadn’t been supposed to bring it, but the idea of leaving Atlantis unarmed had seemed so ludicrous that he hadn’t been able to stop himself. 

“In three hours?” asked Deadshot. 

“I had a big breakfast, okay?” 

Deadshot drummed his fingers against the butt of his gun as it hung at his hip and eyed the untouched salad beside Jennifer. “It was the lemon on the outside, right? Your doctor girlfriend figured it out.” He sucked air through his teeth and took a few steps forward. “I told Abrams that was overkill, but he said we had to make sure. Guess he didn’t bet on Blondie touching it first.” 

Well, that would have confirmed that the other six guys were in on it if the studious way all of them were suddenly looking away from the canopy hadn’t. Plausible deniability was the government’s specialty, after all.  

Jennifer pulled the gun out his waistband, keeping her hand hidden behind Rodney. Rodney set the tablet to flood the crystal with every scrap of power it had. Behind him, the crystal began to heat up. They had minutes, if they were lucky. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

Deadshot shook his head. “I wanted to do this the easy way, Doc. I did.” 

Then he lurched forward, and while Rodney had no idea if he meant to shove the salad down his throat, shoot him, or maybe bash his head into the corner of one of the tables, none of those things happened. Instead, two other things happened very, very quickly. 

Jennifer shot Deadshot in the head, just like Ronon had taught her (because, she told Rodney later, you never could tell when someone was wearing body armor), and Rodney grabbed her arm and took off for the closest SUV at a mad run. The other guys had already opened fire by the time they both crashed into the driver’s side door of the car, but thankfully, the SGC had sprung for the bulletproof kind of cars (It wouldn’t do for them to lose their top scientist, Rodney thought, with a scream of hysterical mental laughter). As the car shook under the onslaught and the remaining agents advanced, Rodney tore open the door — thankfully left unlocked by Deadshot — and slung Jennifer inside ahead of him before tumbling in after her and slamming the door shut, almost on his own calf. 

It was at that moment, hunkered low in the car as bullets peppered it, that he realized the car keys were with Deadshot, and they couldn’t go back outside, and there was no time anyway because the entire place was about to explode, and — 

And suddenly Jennifer lurched sideways, all but throwing herself across his lap, and pulled a bundle of wires out from under the steering wheel. Before Rodney even had time to process that his girlfriend was hotwiring an SUV, the engine was turning over and Jennifer was screaming, “Go, go, go!” in his ear. 

Rodney had never been a good driver, but for once, that didn’t matter. He threw the car into reverse and peeled away from the canopy in a wild, out-of-control shimmy. He spun the wheel, putting the car into a skid that spun them around, and threw the car into drive as dust made a cloud around them. Then it was simple: slam the accelerator all the way to the floor and pray.

The SUV exploded forward, slipping and sliding on the sand and pebbles beneath them. The hailstorm of gunfire faded away as they tore away from the canopy and agents. 

“You know,” Rodney gasped, gripping the wheel with white-knuckled hands, “if we weren’t about to die, that would have been the hottest thing you ever —” 

A titanic explosion cut him off and almost made him lose control of the car. A cloud of fire ballooned up behind them, painting the desert and inside of the car orange. The shockwave hit them next, tearing across the flat landscape and shattering the already cracked windows. 

Then it was over, and they were covered with glass but alive and driving toward the distant smudge that was Las Vegas. 

Shards of glass falling from her hair like ice, Jennifer dropped her arms from in front of her face and gave him a horrified look. “They tried to kill us. Rodney, the government just —” 

Rodney couldn’t think about that. He couldn’t think about any of it — and certainly he couldn’t think about the fact that Sheppard, Teyla, Ronon, Lorne, and a good chunk of the expedition were scattered about the country (and world) at the moment. All he could manage to say was, “We need to ditch this car. It’s too recognizable.” 

Jennifer gave him a mute nod. “Rodney, my —” 

He loved how fast her mind worked. There was no need to wait for her to catch up. “Your dad, I know. We can’t use our cell phones; we’ll use a payphone in the city. Tell him to catch a flight.” 

“But your sister —” 

“She’s in Disneyland — soon as she heard we were in San Francisco, she thought she could kill two birds with one stone. Family vacation, for once starring yours truly. I was supposed to meet her there after we wrapped this up.” He threw Jennifer an apologetic look. “I meant to surprise you. We can have your dad fly there, and we’ll meet at her hotel and pick up everyone at the same time. If someone in the government — if they’re really doing what I think they’re doing, they’ll come for Jeannie first and your dad second. This way, we can take all the cards out of their hands at once.” 

“Yeah.” Jennifer was pale. “Yeah, okay. What about Sheppard and the others?” 

Rodney twisted his hands on the steering wheel. Behind them, the explosion was dissipating into a mushroom cloud of smoke and dust; he could see it in the rearview mirror. “There’s nothing we can do for them, but I’m willing to bet whoever is doing this came after them too. And when we’re in a hostile situation in foreign territory, the protocol is get back to the city. So… so we just have to trust that they’ll head back to the city.” 

Jennifer gripped the handhold above her head. “You’re not big on trust, Rodney.” 

And definitely not after some unknown entity in the US government tried to murder him. “I know.” 

# # # 

At one point in his life, John had been used to military bases of all sorts — desert ones, frozen ones, tropical ones, underground ones. He had felt at home in them. Five years in Atlantis, however, had completely ruined him. The moment he set foot in the SGC and took the big elevator down through approximately seventy billion feet of concrete and steel, he felt a little flutter of claustrophobia in his gut. The feeling only deepened the longer he was there, until he was sitting in some briefing room (that was only separated from an interrogation room by the fact that the table in it had lots of seats around it that actually supported his back — or tried to, at least) and mentally screaming, Would it kill you guys to put in a freaking skylight? 

Trying to hide the fact that his mind was largely occupied by how much he missed stained glass windows, John folded his hands on the table in front of him and let his eyes rove about the room. It took every scrap of military discipline he had to not fidget. He didn’t have his service weapon on him, or else he would have started assembling and dissembling it as he sat in the too-bouncy chair at the foot of the briefing table. 

He wasn’t alone (if he had been, he would have fidgeted, or possibly started doing pushups to entertain himself). Close on his left side was Bates, now an agent for the IOA and there to liaise between them and John. It was good to see him again, though he was about as gregarious and cheerful as he had been back on Atlantis, which was to say not at all. On John’s right side, a bit further up the table, was O’Neill, Colonel Cameron Mitchell, and — for reasons John couldn’t fathom except that O’Neill and Mitchell liked having him around — Teal’c, who sat at the far end of the row and interrupted the friendly vagueness that served as both O’Neill’s and Mitchell’s resting expression. Teal’c could be best described as impassive, and though John had been sitting at the table for the better part of fifteen minutes, Teal’c hadn’t interacted with him beyond a single nod when he sat down. 

John never thought he would describe Ronon as “open” or “sociable”, but Teal’c was making him consider it. 

“They’re late,” said O’Neill, with a little quirk to his lips. 

John pressed his lips together. “I noticed, sir.” 

“They’re always late.” 

“Yes, sir.” The thing about O’Neill was he always seemed to be having some kind of joke with himself, and John only got what the joke was about half the time. From what he had seen, SG1 — even the newest members Mitchell and Val Mal Doran — always seemed to get the joke. If he was being fair, being on the outs of AR1 — or indeed, most of Atlantis — probably felt much the same. 

O’Neill looked back and forth between him and Bates. “So you two used to work together?” 

“I was his chief security officer, sir,” said Bates. Even though he wasn’t in the military any longer, he still maintained perfect military posture as he regarded O’Neill. That was Bates all over — perfect comportment until he was brawling with John’s Pegasus liaison in the hallway outside the gate room. 

Oh, yeah. That had been a fun day. 

O’Neill nodded slowly. “And you guys got along?” 

That was another fun thing about O’Neill: he was perceptive and didn’t know how to keep it to himself. “Oh, definitely, sir,” said John. 

Bates didn’t miss a beat. “We had slumber parties, sir.” 

“Braided each other’s hair,” added John, earning himself a snort from Bates and a raised eyebrow from Teal’c, which he took as a victory on two fronts. 

O’Neill opened his mouth to say something else — goodness only knew what — but the briefing room door opened before he could. John leaped to his feet to greet the IOA delegates, but it was Landry who walked in, flanked by several SFs. 

The grimness in his expression made John’s heart sink. Bracing his hands against the edge of the table, he said, “What happened with Atlantis?” 

“Nothing,” said Landry, but he had his fatherly tone, which John had only heard rarely (and definitely not when he was stealing a jumper and commandeering the gate to return to Atlantis against all orders). That meant something was wrong — horribly, horribly wrong. 

“Then what?” John didn’t bother tagging on a sir.

“There’s been an incident in Manhattan — at the hotel Teyla and Ronon were set to meet the diplomats at,” said Landry. “We just received word. Some unknown party called SWAT to say there was a hostage situation in the hotel, in the same room reserved for the meeting. SWAT responded, and —” 

“And what?” John could imagine a whole host of disasters. Even if there had been no hostage situation, Ronon and Teyla had no real idea of how SWAT worked or even what it was. He’d gotten around to explaining the police to them but not SWAT. All they would see if SWAT crashed into their hotel room was a group of heavily armed men, threatening them with guns. Neither of them would take that lying down. In Pegasus, if heavily armed men rushed you, they usually were out to kill you or ransom you off to the highest bidder.

Landry gave him a quelling look. “A bomb went off.” 

John’s knees went weak. Beside him, O’Neill had gone very, very still, and Mitchell was pale. Teal’c was expressionless, but John had a feeling that meant nothing. “A… what?” 

“A bomb went off in the hotel room. The joint terrorism task force and the FDNY are responding, but the fire has engulfed the entire floor. They have no idea who survived and who didn’t yet, but the call to SWAT included a description of the suspected terrorists. They match Teyla and Ronon perfectly.” 

John heard a strangled laugh fall from his mouth, but he didn’t remember the act of laughing. “Teyla. Teyla and Ronon. As terrorists. Oh —” 

“Daniel?” O’Neill turned a hard look on Landry, who only shook his head. 

“We have no idea, Jack,” he said. 

“Well, he’s obviously not dead,” said Mitchell, in a voice that was tinged just faintly with desperation. “That Jackson — like a cockroach. He’s fine.” He looked at O’Neill. “He’s fine, right?” 

Before O’Neill could say anything, John found his voice again. “Teyla and Ronon are not terrorists. Someone’s —” 

“There’s more,” said Landry. It was only then that John consciously realized what his hindbrain had already told him: that the SFs were positioned in such a way that they blocked the door. They were here to keep him in. 

O’Neill’s eyebrows climbed toward the ceiling. “More than my favorite archaeologist and our two favorite Pegasus natives getting blown up?” Notably, he didn’t add and accused of terrorism  to the last part. 

“There’s been an explosion in Nevada,” said Landry, keeping his eyes on John. “At the Area 51 blast zone, where Dr. McKay and Dr. Keller were. Best we can tell, Dr. McKay’s salvage attempts triggered a catastrophic overload in the remaining active chair components.” 

John tried to think around the sudden whining in his ears. “Bodies. Did they find their bodies?” 

“Son…” Landry looked pained. “They’re still… it’s bad.” 

Feeling far away from everything, John said, “They’re still trying to match body parts to people.” 

“The UN and IOA are demanding answers for the attack in New York,” Landry went on, like the world hadn’t just fundamentally changed. “They want you, Colonel. I have orders to detain you for questioning.” He cast a glance O’Neill’s way. “My hands are tied.” 

John was barely listening. Rodney and Keller, dead. Teyla and Ronon either dead or on the run in New York City, which was not, a mere eight years after 9/11, poised to have a measured response to an explosion in a Manhattan highrise. 

Dr. McKay’s salvage attempts triggered a catastrophic overload. John fought down another laugh. As if. If Rodney blew something up, it was on purpose, and he was far away. No. This wasn’t Rodney’s fault. He had been all but dragged to Area 51, and for what? In what universe did anyone think he could rebuild a chair that had been blown up, burned, and left to languish in a decimated desert facility for days? 

Like pieces of a puzzle falling into place, the whole picture became clear. 

Teyla and Ronon, accused of terrorism, which gave the IOA, Congress, and just about anyone who didn’t want a lieutenant colonel with a black mark and a history of thumbing his nose at all of them a chance to finally push him out (You’re telling us you didn’t know what your own Pegasus liaisons were planning, Colonel? Didn’t you say you spend every day with them? You’ll have to do better than that) and probably push out most of his senior staff while they were at it. In the end, it wouldn’t matter if the facts exonerated Teyla and Ronon. The IOA would swoop in and drag Atlantis into their fold, kicking and screaming.

With Rodney, the stick in everyone’s mud, out of the way and Keller gone, the IOA would have the perfect opportunity to reshape Atlantis in their image, just like they had always wanted to do. 

And whoever was behind all this — whether it was the IOA or the Trust or someone entirely unrelated with goals of their own — had just proved they would kill to get what they wanted. Maybe they had meant to kill Teyla and Ronon too. Probably they had. Two dead accused terrorists couldn’t advocate for themselves, which was much more convenient than two living ones who could. Even better if Daniel Jackson died in the explosion too, giving O’Neill a reason to not advocate for John or anyone on his staff. 

“Son?” Landry was still looking at him. “You have to come with us.” 

Five years ago, John might have listened. Five years ago, he would have been sure that the corruption couldn’t run so deep that he wouldn’t be safe in the middle of an Air Force base, headed by a general he had grudging respect for and frequented by another general he trusted. Five years ago, his first thought wouldn’t have been that his own government was the most likely culprit, at least in some way.

But in Pegasus, You have to come with us usually meant Let’s go somewhere quiet where no one will hear us kill you. 

They had killed Rodney and Keller. If they thought John was going to let them lock him in a little room while they either figured out how to quietly dispose of him or just how to ship him off to McMurdo while they stole Atlantis out from under Woolsey’s feet and threw Teyla and Ronon in Gitmo, they had another thing coming. 

Landry and O’Neill would probably fight it. 

They would definitely lose. 

Ignoring Landry, John turned to Bates and locked eyes with him as he moved his hand to the back of his waistband, where the bone knife Teyla had given him lived in a sheath above his belt. 

He didn’t say anything. Bates didn’t do so much as nod, but none of that mattered. Even in the motionless silence, John could hear Bates think, Well, I’ve been discharged from the military anyway. 

Once a Lantean, always a Lantean.

And if the war for Atlantis had followed him and Bates to Earth, then John knew exactly where both of them were going to be. 

In their city, with their people. 

Like always. 

“Kid,” said O’Neill, forgoing official terms of address. “Don’t do anything —” 

Bates lurched to his feet, caught up his chair, and hurled it at Landry and the SFs, who all ducked. It crashed against the wall behind them, and in the midst of the commotion, John vaulted over the corner of the table, yanking his knife from its sheath, and grabbed the person closest to him — O’Neill — and thrust the blade of his knife against his throat. 

In the frozen, breathless moment that followed, O’Neill finished, “— Stupid.”

As Landry and the SFs recovered themselves, Bates hurled himself across the table — his limp apparently didn’t hold him back that much — and caught Mitchell around the neck as he tried to jump to his feet. After a second of grappling, Bates had him in a headlock and was dragging him away from Teal’c and over to John. Mitchell probably would have twisted free if not for the fact that Bates had pulled out a knife of his own (a bone one, like John’s own, and why wasn’t John surprised that Bates had kept the knife Halling had given him during their first Athosian harvest festival on Lantea I?) and pressed the honed blade against Mitchell’s throat. 

Teal’c got to his feet, putting himself between John and Bates and the door, and did his best to imitate a solid wall. John didn’t like their chances of getting past him by force, and he really didn’t want someone to call his bluff and see if he actually would hurt O’Neill. 

If came down to hurting O’Neill and getting back to the city to protect his people and try to save the remnants of his team, John wasn’t actually sure just what he’d do, but he had an idea. Glancing over at Bates and seeing the look in his eyes, he figured there was no question about what Bates would do. He had always excelled at the us vs. them mentality, and John’s general feeling had always been that Atlantis, for all that Bates hadn’t been much for touchy feely expressions of devotion, had been the only posting where he had felt even a little bit at home. 

After all, everyone on Atlantis was just as a crazy as he was; they all just came in different shades of insanity. So it didn’t matter that Bates wasn’t the most likeable guy, since the expedition was populated largely with people who had been exceptional, yes, but just unlikeable enough that the SGC had figured that Earth wouldn’t implode if they never came home. 

“Colonel Sheppard.” Landry might not have been in combat in a couple decades, but he was a coiled spring nonetheless. The SFs had drawn their weapons. “What the —” 

“Let us through,” said John tightly. O’Neill was a big man — bigger than John by an inch or two, both in height and breadth — so he had to tip his head sideways to glare at Landry over O’Neill’s shoulder. “We’re going to the hangar, grabbing the jumper we lent you, and going home.” He cut a sideways look at Bates again. “And you’ll never see us again.” 

That would be essential, after this. 

Hell. Bates’s kid brother, and his parents — 

They’d just have to pick them up. 

“Son.” Landry held up his hands in a calming gesture. “I don’t know what you think is going on, but —” 

“Someone high-up killed McKay and Dr. Keller,” snapped John. “The same person or people pulled me out of Atlantis and framed Ronon and Teyla. They’re trying to get rid of Dr. Jackson too. Atlantis is in danger, so I’m getting back to it.” He jerked his chin to the SFs. “And you weren’t going to let me leave.” 

To Landry’s credit, he didn’t call John crazy. All he said was, “Okay. Okay, then. But you’re not going to get anywhere this way. It’s not too late, Colonel. Drop the weapon — both of you — and let’s talk about this. Let’s figure out what’s going on.” 

John already knew what was going on, and he knew what happened when he calmed down and tried to talk about things. The brass never sided with him, and people died. 

“I am going to get somewhere,” he said, in as calm a voice as he could muster. “I’m going to get to the hangar.” 

“Get out of his way, Hank.” It was O’Neill who spoke, sounding more at ease than John had expected. Of course, this was probably far from the first time he had had a knife held to his throat. “He’s not going to back down.” 

John was far less certain of that fact, but he didn’t object. 

“Jack —” Landry started. 

“Let him through, Hank,” said O’Neill. “He just lost his entire team, and he thinks it’s our fault. You might not understand the kind of mindset that puts a guy in, but I do. And the only way this has a happy ending is if you move.” He tilted his head toward Teal’c. “That means you too, buddy.” 

Teal’c gave him a look that conveyed heavy doubt. “I am not certain this is wise, O’Neill.” 

“When are you ever?” 

Teal’c inclined his head in response and — miracle of miracles — stepped aside, clearing some of John’s path to the door. Landry and the SFs took longer, but after a moment where O’Neill and Landry waged a war with their gazes, Landry retreated away from the door, drawing the SFs with him. 

“Thanks.” John said, and added, “Sir.” He didn’t know why he bothered. He was way past a dishonorable discharge now. He was way past court martial. At this point, they might just shoot him if they got a chance and call up Woolsey to say oops. “Bates, we’re pulling out. Come on.” 

Bates gave a short nod and started toward the door just behind John, pulling Mitchell with him. Mitchell seemed to be taking his cue from O’Neill and looked more worried and irritated than afraid. Great. John loved it when his hostages decided the inconvenience of their situation was greater than the danger. That put him in just an awesome position. 

Out in the hallway, it didn’t take long for some passing airman to see what was going on and sound the nearest alarm. Within seconds, klaxons blared throughout the base, and airmen and SFs rushed to the mouth of every corridor that branched off from John’s hallway. Soon, everywhere John looked was bristling with guns, behind which lurked anger or — in the cases of airmen who knew or had worked with John — confusion, swiftly devolving into betrayal. 

“Sir —” Bates started, taking in the dozens of guns on them, but O’Neill cut him off. 

“Everyone, stay calm,” he said. His voice was so relaxed he might as well have been on a fishing trip. “Just keep cool. Everything’s fine.” 

“Everything,” said Landry, following them down the hallway, “is not fine.” 

O’Neill gave a little shrug, though it was misshapen and cramped because of how he was pressed up against John. “Well, that’s your opinion.”

“General’s got it all under control,” said Mitchell in his folksy Southern accent, which John had never particularly minded in the past, but in this particular moment, all his New England born tendencies surged through his veins all at once, causing him to decide once and for all that if Colonel Foghorn Leghorn didn’t shut up, he was going to punch him. 

“Colonel Sheppard’s got it under control,” snapped Bates. 

Great, now John had Bates rushing to his defense like he was a damsel. That was exactly the look he wanted to cultivate as he held the guy with a direct line to the President of the United States hostage. 

“Just let us get to the hangar,” said John. “That’s all we want, okay? Me and Bates don’t want to be here any more than you want us to be here. So just let us go.” 

He and Bates retreated several more feet, heading in the direction of the gate room, which had a corridor near it that led to the hangar. Once they were there, they could take refuge in the jumper, throw up the cloak, and fly into open air. After that, they were home free. 

Well, no. After that, they were on the run from the most powerful government on the face of the earth, but that was fine because they happened to have a city that could fly. 

Which meant the city would be the next target. That was what John would do, if he had planned a quiet coup and gotten found out. He would cut off his prey’s escape routes. Push them into a corner. 

The kind of corner where his prey ended up taking the head of Homeworld Command hostage. 

Oh, this was a fun feeling John had been trying — with limited success — to avoid for the past five years: playing right into his enemies’ hands. At least these were human hands, with no feeding organ waiting for him. 

Then again, at least the Wraith were direct.

Halfway to the hangar, Carter and Vala pushed their way through the SFs in front of John and Bates. Vala almost ran right past Landry himself, but Carter caught her before she could. Her eyes were wide as she stared at John, and John’s stomach turned over. The need to explain seized him by the throat, and he said, “They killed McKay and Keller.” 

Carter’s eyes stretched wider. “Jack and Mitchell did?” 

“No — I —” John gave up. “Stay back, Colonel. I don’t want you involved in this.” 

“I don’t want you involved in this either,” called O’Neill. 

A look passed over Carter’s face. John couldn’t quite identify its meaning, but judging by the way O’Neill tensed and Teal’c raised one eyebrow, they both could. Beside Carter, Vala had her head tipped to one side, like she was thinking something over.

Apparently reading her expression too, Mitchell said, “Vala, don’t you —” 

Vala smiled. It was a very wide, slightly crazed thing, spreading across her face. “I heard we don’t know where Daniel is.” 

“We’ll find him —” 

“I’ll find him,” said Vala decisively, a split second before she danced past the SFs flanking her, ducked around Landry, and sidled up to Bates’s side, sending him a dazzling smile in the process. “I submit myself as a hostage.” She snapped out a salute that had far too much hopping in it. Her dark pigtails bounced on her shoulders.

“No,” said Mitchell. “Vala, that’s an —” 

“Sorry, can’t hear you!” Vala twirled a finger next to her ear. “The sound of me not being military is too loud.” 

John was just about to tell Vala that two hostages was enough, thanks very much — and even if he were accepting applicants, the woman who had, according to reports, once held Jackson and the entire Prometheus captive wasn’t his first choice — but O’Neill spoke before he could. “Sam,” he said in that slow, deliberate way of his. “I know what you’re thinking, and I’m giving you a direct —” 

“I’m not under your command any more, Jack.” Carter stepped over the invisible boundary line between John and Bates and the rest of the facility and walked up to John. Tipping her head back to look at him with her clear blue eyes, she said, “And you — I’m giving you one chance. Prove to me you haven’t gone crazy, or I’ll shoot you myself.” 

John noted she wasn’t armed, but he somehow didn’t think that would stop her. And there wasn’t any real part of him that could leave Samantha Carter behind in the SGC. 

Once a Lantean, always a Lantean. 

“Fine,” he said. “Don’t get in the way.” 

She raised one eyebrow. 

“Ma’am,” he added, as Teal’c shifted subtly toward them. John would have told him to stay back if he had thought it would have made the slightest bit of difference. At least Teal’c wasn’t armed, unless you counted his fiendish strength as a weapon — which John did. “Don’t get in the way, ma’am.” 

“That’s better.” 

“Jack.” Landry couldn’t have sounded less amused if he tried. “Control your team.” 

O’Neill gave another malformed shrug. “I got promoted, Hank. I don’t lead SG1 anymore.” He tilted his head toward Mitchell. “Mitchell?” 

Mitchell gave SG1 a helpless look. “I’ve learned not to fight losing battles, sir.” 

“Great,” said O’Neill. “Then I guess we’re all coming. Sound about right, Colonel Sheppard?” 

John had in fact been intending to ditch Mitchell and O’Neill the second he and Bates reached the jumper — it wasn’t like he enjoyed committing crimes — but SG1 might provide some nice leverage. He didn’t think the US government would attack Atlantis when the stars of the SGC were in it. 

He hoped. 

“Sure does, General,” he said. Then to Landry, he added, “Tell the governor of California he’s got about ten minutes to make sure there’s no civilians around or above San Francisco Bay.” 

Landry narrowed his eyes. “Why?” 

John retreated further up the hallway, pulling O’Neill with him. “Because Atlantis is dropping her cloak and raising the shield.”

Shaking his head, Landry said, “Son, you have no idea what’s going on.” 

That might be true, but the funny thing was, John wasn’t particularly interested in sitting handcuffed to a table in some windowless room (or maybe reclining six feet under, if Landry couldn’t keep him at the SGC) while everyone else hashed it out, especially not when Teyla and Ronon were in desperate need of an exfil. “Guess I don’t,” John said. “But you know what? You don’t either.” 

“It doesn’t have to be this way.” 

Strangely enough, John remembered the exact same phrase — with a bit more profanity — coming over his radio from his base commander, right as he was lifting off to go back behind enemy lines and rescue his buddy Charlie. “I don’t know,” he said, desperately hoping that all this turned out better than his attempt at saving Charlie’s life had. “I think it does.” 

# # # 

In his life, Richard had gotten a lot of phone calls that had made a pit open up in his stomach. There had been the time his aunt had called him to tell him his father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. There had been the time his wife had called him from her new boyfriend’s house in Miami to tell him she wanted a divorce. There had been the time the IOA had called him to tell him that everything was finalized and he would indeed be leaving Earth to command Atlantis. 

But it wasn’t often he got three phone calls in the span of as many minutes, each deepening the already yawning pit in his stomach by several magnitudes. 

The first came from Sheppard. When Chuck patched it through the comms system in the control room, Richard expected a routine check-in — with maybe a few choice words describing the members of the IOA who had debriefed him. 

What he got was instead several earthshaking updates that reshaped his entire world. 

“Teyla and Ronon are what?” He motioned frantically to Chuck, who correctly interpreted his gestures as orders to try to get a hold of Teyla and Ronon. Punching their numbers into the rudimentary interface they had cobbled together to connect Atlantean comms to Earth cell phones, Chuck waited, drumming his fingers on his desk as the call — 

Failed. It failed. It failed with big red block letters popping up across the screen, informing them that Teyla and Ronon were unreachable. 

And Mckay and Keller were dead.

Richard’s heart dropped into the pit in his stomach. 

“I’ll handle them,” said Sheppard, and there was a line of tension strung through his voice that Richard didn’t like at all. But it was also one that made him very, very glad Sheppard was on Atlantis’s side, rather than anyone else’s. “There’s a place I told Ronon to go, if he ever got in trouble on Earth.” 

Richard was about to ask when Sheppard thought Ronon would have opportunity to get in trouble on Earth, but then he remembered that this was Ronon they were talking about. 

And during his first extended stay on Earth, he had somehow managed to get both himself and Teyla accused of terrorism or at the very least attempted assasination, which rendered his question moot anyway. 

“You need to raise the shield, Mr. Woolsey. You need to raise it and not let anyone not from Atlantis in. I don’t care if the freaking President himself comes knocking. On my authority as military commander, I’m ordering you not to let him in.” 

Woolsey pressed his lips together. “John. Are you quite certain there’s no —” 

“They murdered McKay, sir,” snapped Sheppard over the commline. “And Keller. And they’re trying to get Teyla and Ronon killed. If there’s any other way to do this, I don’t want to find it.” 

“And do we know who they is?” 

“I have an idea, but I’d say wait for the next call. I’m willing to bet it’ll be from whomever is behind all this.” 

“Why?” 

“Because I think it’s the IOA, or at least someone inside it, and I think they’re trying to make Atlantis more theirs.” 

“Now why would you —” 

“Because whatever this is, they already started it, months ago.” 

“How?” 

“By assigning you as our commander.” 

Richard found that whatever else he had been going to say died in his throat. All he could manage was, “Oh.” 

“But we got lucky.” 

“We did?” 

“Yeah. You’re not what they thought.” 

Something deep inside Richard grew warm. “Ah. So —” 

“So when they call, you do what you do best.” 

“And what’s that?” 

“Tell them no, without ever saying the word.” 

Richard nodded sharply. He could do that. He would do that. “And what will you be doing?” 

“Getting our people. All of them. I need you to send out jumpers — everyone who can fly one needs to take one out and go out and pick up everyone who is on leave. And their families.” 

“Is that really necessary?” Three minutes ago, Richard’s biggest problem had been the fact that someone had left the coffeepot empty and that rain was forecast, which meant he would lose the California sunshine he had missed so much. 

“This whole thing is already going sideways for them,” said Sheppard. “They’re not getting what they want. And when that happens —” 

“They’ll escalate.” 

“And our people will be caught in the middle and maybe become leverage. Unless I grab them now.” 

“Colonel, Dr. McKay’s sister —” 

“Yeah, I know. I need you to send a couple Marines to pick her up.” 

“Already done.” Richard paused, looking out at the control room. All the technicians were sitting in stunned silence, except for Amelia, who was scrambling jumper teams over the citywide comm systems. Her face was fixed and furious. “Colonel?” Richard swallowed hard. “How bad do you think this is going to get?” 

There was a short silence before Sheppard said, “I think you’ll have to tell me that, sir. After you answer the next couple of phone calls.” 

Richard’s lips twitched. “Yes. Yes, I suppose I will. Bring our people home, Colonel.” 

“I will.” 

“And, John?” Richard swallowed hard. “I’m sorry about Dr. McKay and Dr. Keller. They… I’m sorry.” 

After another pause, Sheppard said, “Thank you, Mr. Woolsey. Sheppard out.” 

As soon as he hung up, Richard turned to Chuck. “Drop the cloak and raise the shield. Amelia, put the city on high alert. I’ll make an announcement in just —” 

Another call came in, interrupting him. This one was coming through Atlantis’s usual comm system, rather than the jury-rigged cell system. Chuck twisted to look at Richard. “It’s the SGC, sir. Video call.” 

Oh, why wasn’t Richard surprised. He wondered how quickly Landry had had to run to contact him before the IOA did. “Patch them through.” Moving to stand in front of the video screen off to the side of the control room he straightened his jacket and drew himself to his full height, trying to look like he hadn’t just lost two members of his senior staff — two friends — and been forced to raise the city’s shield in the one place in the entire universe where Atlantis was supposed to be safe. 

I guess you really can’t go home again, he thought. Then Landry popped up onto the screen, and he had no more time for thought. 

“Mr. Woolsey,” said Landry coolly. “I assume Colonel Sheppard has already contacted you.” 

Richard smiled and remained quiet, giving nothing away. 

Landry pursed his lips. “I’ll continue to assume he has. You need to understand that this situation is spinning out of control, and there’s very little I can do to protect Sheppard — or any of your people — unless you throw me a bone here. Whatever Sheppard told you, what happened to Rodney McKay and Jennifer Keller was a tragic accident. As for Teyla and Ronon, the solution to whatever the hell is going on with them is not Sheppard and Bates stealing a jumper and almost all of SG1!” 

Richard managed not to choke only by drawing on years of practice at maintaining impassivity. “I trust Colonel Sheppard’s judgment.” Internally, he shrieked, All of SG1? 

Landry scoffed. “So he didn’t tell you. Of course he didn’t. Richard, this is out of my hands. The President’s been contacted, and the chairman of the joint chiefs. Tell me you understand what that means.” 

Richard was usually the one on the other side of these calls, telling rogue members of the SGC or even Landry himself to come back to heel. This time, however, he was the dog who was off the leash, and he had no intention of letting the SGC or anyone catch him, at least not until Sheppard gave him the okay. “Atlantis is raising her shield,” he said, instead of properly answering Landry. “And we’re closing our airspace, except to authorized jumpers. Tell me you know what that means.” 

Landry mouthed a swear to himself before refocusing on Woolsey. “This is not the right call, Mr. Woolsey.” 

Richard hadn’t been sure he was making the right call since the moment he set foot through Atlantis’s gate and was — against all odds — enfolded into the feral codependent amalgamation of overwhelming personalities that was masquerading as an exploratory expedition. “It’s my call,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the gate room techs and the security detail. Amanda gave him a single nod, fists balled at her sides. 

This team, a mix of civilians and airmen who were most often assigned to the gate room, had survived more things than Richard could fully comprehend. Mostly recently, they had survived Michael’s brief occupation of the operations tower, which meant Woolsey had seen everyone in this room pushed hard enough to fall and then seen them rise. 

And he had discovered that there was no one in the whole world — in two whole galaxies — that he wanted at his back more. 

The thing he couldn’t get over but knew was true nonetheless was that these same people wanted him at their head. When he had been assigned to Atlantis, it had felt like some kind of curse, or maybe a nightmare made solid. Yet despite more near-death experiences and terrors than Woolsey was comfortable counting, it now seemed far closer to a gift, handed to him with the understanding that he would do whatever it took to protect it. 

And he would.

Turning back to Landry, he repeated, “It’s my call. And right now that’s all that matters.” 

Landry gave a hissing sigh. “This is a mistake.” 

Richard didn’t disagree. “Goodbye, General.” 

Chuck took that as cue to cut the call. About two seconds after the big screen in the gallery went dark, another call came in. This one was finally from the IOA. At a nod from Richard, Chuck answered it, all while Amelia continued to look ready to kill. 

Richard felt much the same, and the feeling only increased when James Coolidge appeared on the screen, looking as self-satisfied and superior as usual. 

“Mr. Woolsey,” he snapped, in a voice far too big for such a little man, “have you completely lost your mind? Not only have the two aliens you call friends gone crazy and attacked Manhattan, but your military commander just took all of SG1 hostage!” Coolidge shook his head. “You’re done, Woolsey. The Navy is on its way. Drop your shield and surrender. The IOA can salvage this. Play nice, and maybe I’ll even try to save you.” 

But not Sheppard, and not Teyla and Ronon. Heat flooded the space behind Richard’s ribs. He didn’t think he’d ever been quite this angry before. A lifetime in bureaucracy and politics, rubbing elbows with men just like Coolidge and worse, had taught Richard a thing or two, which meant he could tell two things just from looking at Coolidge. 

One, he had at least been partially involved in orchestrating what happened. 

Two, he was massively out of his depth — likely because Sheppard had never been meant to escape — and knew it. 

“I’m sorry, Mr. Coolidge,” he said curtly, clasping his hands behind his back. “We’re experiencing some interference. I didn’t hear you clearly.” Behind his back, he made a sign to Chuck, and Chuck cut the connection once again. 

As the screen went dark, Richard exhaled in a great gust of air, shoulders dropping. From behind him, Chuck said, “I take it we’re not dropping the shield, sir?” 

Amelia gave a harsh laugh at the very thought, and Richard said, “No. No, Chuck, we are not.” 

Another technician said, “Two destroyers, approaching from under the Golden Gate Bridge. Scanners are picking up military aircraft — bombers and fighter jets — coming toward us from over the mountains.” 

Richard had expected that. “Is the shield holding steady?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Good.” He lifted his chin. It had been such a nice day, up until ten minutes ago. “Make sure the rescue jumpers keep their cloaks up at all times and leave our airspace as quickly as possible. And Chuck?” He looked over his shoulder at him again. “Send Sergeant Markham down to the drone chair and tell him to arm it. Get whatever airmen we have to spare and have them man the railguns on the balconies as well.” 

Chuck’s brows drew together. “Sir, we wouldn’t —” 

“Fire on a US Navy destroyer?” Richard shivered a little. Whoever was on those ships and in the approaching aircraft had no idea what was going on; as far as they knew, they were defending their country from a city that had the potential to be one of the most powerful weapons on Earth. “No. But they don’t need to know that.” 

Chuck gave a tight nod. “On it, sir.” 

Richard turned to face front again, trying to steady his breathing. He could do this. He could hold down the fort while Sheppard led rescue efforts. 

And once everyone — everyone who was still alive — was back, well… 

Atlantis could leave. 

Atlantis would have to leave. 

“Hurry, Colonel Sheppard,” he whispered to himself, staring out at the gatewell. “Hurry.”