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5 THINGS JOHN SHEPPARD KEEPS IN HIS TAC VEST...
- A Spare Pair of Ray-Bans
John smuggled four (4) personal items with him when they left Earth on what was potentially a one-way mission: his Johnny Cash poster; his Hail Mary tape; a battered copy of War and Peace; and his favourite pair of Ray-Ban Aviator glasses with unpolarised, oversized lenses. The poster is an indulgence, and the tape and book are technically entertainment, but the shades are an essential piece of his kit, blocking not just the UV rays but also the simpering looks of opportunistic, horny women (and McKay can just shut up about it, because with the exception of Chaya, John really doesn't see it coming).
Any pilot worth their salt knows not to leave home without a good pair of shades, and his have seen him through thick and thin, self-sacrificing children and retroviruses, nuclear-powered villages and returning nemeses. They're a part of him, a barrier between his mind and the outside world, so when Ford eyes them longingly on Dagan, John's at a loss. He's reluctant to part with them, really doesn't want to be stuck in a situation when his gaze might give something important away, but Ford's nursing a hangover of the type that had him squinting even before they dialled the gate and John's been there, knows just how intrusive and uncomfortable bright sunlight can be after a night drinking away the horrors of the Pegasus galaxy.
So John silently takes them off and hands them over. Ford accepts them with a look of pure relief and slips them on to cover his tired eyes, perking up just a little at the comfort they bring. John tries not to panic every time Ford turns his head or nods or does anything remotely energetic and hopes like hell that he gets them back unscathed, but it turns out that being trapped underground with a smug Kolya and then double-crossed by a paranoid Allina is a great cure for object anxiety. When they get back to the city there are Wraith on the way so all thoughts of his aviators slip from his mind, right up until the moment that Ford flies his enzyme-addled self through the gate with them hanging from the front of his vest, and John loses his right-hand man and his security blanket all at once.
The introduction of the Daedalus' regular schedule means that he can replace the Ray-Bans with another pair, plus a spare for emergencies, but it can't fill the absence of a young Lieutenant and all the potential that was lost with him.
- One (1) Epi-pen
Rodney’s first off-world anaphylactic event is a fucking doozy. One moment he’s cheerfully pontificating to Ronon about the absolute gastric joy of cheese curds and gravy on French fries—while he alternates drinking from a ceramic flagon of almost-beer and biting into a cloth-wrapped pseudo-hamburger—the next Ronon is lowering him to the ground as he claws at the collar of his t-shirt with uncoordinated hands. John can hear the whistling and wheezing from twenty feet away, and even as he vaults the buffet table his heart is hammering in his chest to the beat of don’t die don’t die don’t die...
Teyla’s already gone, has long since pushed through the crowds in the marquee and started sprinting to the gate for assistance, and all John can do is hold Rodney’s head in his hands and wipe away the tears with his thumbs as Ronon digs the food out of his mouth with the fingers of one hand and jams Rodney’s singular epi-pen into his kicking leg with the other. They count it out together— ... nineteen, twenty, twenty-one... —but the single dose of epinephrine isn't enough. Instead of easing, the symptoms get worse with time. Rodney's throat starts to swell, as does his tongue which is soon protruding out from between his teeth, and by the time his lips turn blue, Ronon's already fingering the smallest of his knives and peering at Rodney's neck. Before John can make it an order, Ronon pushes the blade through the cartilage of Rodney's windpipe with pinpoint precision and a torrent of blood gushes up and out of the incision, spitting onto John's face and in his mouth. As it settles it starts pouring down Rodney's neck and over John's hands and wrists, making it hard to keep Rodney's head steady. Ronon slips a rolled-up tube of something into the snug hole and leans down to force his breath through it, heedless of the blood coating his mouth and chin and hands. Rodney's chest expands with each breath that Ronon shares, and then thankfully of its own volition, the air whooshing in and out through the makeshift tracheostomy as Rodney's diaphragm wakes itself up.
Before the medical jumper even arrives, John’s pushed through panic and into righteous anger—how dare the pencil pushers back on Earth mandate a limit on the number of epi-pens a susceptible individual can carry off-world—and as Rodney's finally wheeled out of surgery and into the recovery room he already has a plan of action, because doing nothing in the face of Rodney’s mortality is simply not an option. A few words into Ronon’s ear has the remarkably healthy Satedan ‘developing’ a delayed-onset wheeze while they sit and wait for Rodney to wake up, which leads to an allergy alert in his medical file and a Biro-signed prescription for his own epi-pen to be carried with him at all times.
Teyla actually has a genuine animal allergy on file, and in the weeks of Rodney’s recovery, she presents to the infirmary no less than seven times with shortness of breath following visits to the mainland, for which she is also prescribed an epi-pen. With two down and one to go, John debates pushing his luck and adding in his own ‘allergy’ as Rodney’s first post-anaphylaxis mission looms, but before he can do anything about it Carson approaches him and enquires, oh so casually, about his family’s medical history, and whether his aunt's sensitivity to Pomeranian dog fur runs in the family.
And so every member of AR-1 carries an epi-pen in their right breast pocket at all times. If the SGC or the IOA ever cotton on to the team’s deception, well, Elizabeth wasn’t crowned the foremost expert in intergalactic diplomacy for nothing.
- An ExtraPowerbar
For all Rodney’s emphatic insistence that he suffers terribly from hypoglycaemia, it’s actually Ronon that gets hit with the worst off-world sugar crash in the history of the SGC. To be fair, it’s brought on by a lengthy captivity and a bout of moderate torture, but still, it takes John by surprise when he and Teyla finally rescue him—whisking him away from the enemy-infested cave as fast as his sluggish, unsteady legs will carry him—and he starts pelting out something that sounds suspiciously like Satedan show tunes at the top of his voice. Teyla slaps a hand over his mouth, stemming the volume if not the enthusiasm, and John urges him on, the two of them exchanging worried glances over Ronon's shoulders at what awful, terrible thing could have snapped the mind of their friend. They hurry on, over twisted roots and under a dense canopy, until they come to a clearing large enough to house the cloaked jumper.
John guides Ronon up the invisible ramp by the kind of psychic spatial awareness that he has of all Atlantean tech, where Rodney is waiting to relieve him of his burden so he can fly them home. Ronon's singing becomes intermittent and slurred even as John slips into the pilot's chair and urges the jumper's hatch to close and the craft to lift up, up, up, his deep baritone fractured and tailing off at random moments, and then suddenly mid-flight to the 'gate it stops completely. John risks a backwards glance, spots Rodney shovelling a powerbar into Ronon's mouth and ordering him to chew it you halfwit...that’s it, that’s it, now swallow...great, that’s great Ronon...well done.
The urgency with which Rodney is feeding Ronon over, say, giving him pain relief doesn't make a whole load of sense to John, but Ronon seems to come back to himself more and more as the minutes tick past, and by the time they reach the 'gate, he's settled into an exhausted slump on the floor of the 'jumper, held tight between Rodney's legs—back to chest—with Rodney's hands reaching around to rub his stomach gently and Teyla checking him over for hidden hurts. The show tunes are all but forgotten until the next morning, when Ronon wakes from what Carson calls a very close call, praising Rodney's quick thinking and intervention. It turns out Rodney had given Ronon a Glucagon shot from his own personal stash in the 'jumper, but with the man's height and muscle mass, it simply wasn't enough sugar to stabilize him. Hence the force-feeding.
From then on, John makes sure to keep one power bar back from even Rodney’s most exigent pleading, only to be opened in cases of extremely low blood sugar symptoms.
- One (1) Tealight and an Extra Match
Teyla is shivering. Her body is lithe and lean, even with the lingering baby bump, and is simply not designed to retain heat. John can’t talk either—he barely has an ounce of fat on him and has always struggled to build more than the vaguest hint of bulk in any part of his body—but he’s not the one with a bleeding head wound, not the one who up until a couple of weeks ago was carrying a child.
This wasn't supposed to happen. The military and civilian engineers both assured John that this part of the city was structurally sound so, knowing that Teyla was suffering from a mild case of baby blues and the loss of all the things she is either physically unable or medically advised not to do until she's fully recovered from the atypical birth, John planned a brief team excursion to one of the outer towers. Just a short walk from one of the newly connected transporters into what used to be some kind of apiary, or maybe some kind of arboretum? Either way, there are burgeoning shoots in the newly lain dirt and the botanists cleared out the remains of the dead insects in the hope that a new pollinating hive from the mainland might choose to move in. It seemed peaceful, nothing but the earthy scent of damp, fertile soil and the delicate warmth of the sunlight seeping in through the windows, and Teyla looked relaxed and something approaching content even while Rodney and Ronon bickered over whether ten-thousand-year-old honey is still edible or not.
When the floor trembled under their feet, John reached for Teyla, and it's only the scant few seconds of sluggish tremors that gave him enough warning to pull her tight into his body to shield her from the inevitable fall. They landed in some kind of cellar, more of a crypt really, three feet by five and almost twenty feet below the arboretum, with just enough icy cold seawater in the bottom to cushion their fall as they splashed under the surface. John managed to find a high ledge by touch to lift Teyla onto, but she's soaking wet and it's cold as fuck down here and she's shivering and there isn't enough space on the ledge for him to climb up next to her and try to trap their rapidly escaping body heat between them. He tries not to fret about the stitches that he knows she has (birthing her child on a Wraith ship wasn't exactly in her delivery plan), but he's acutely aware of the potential for a serious infection if the water is as stagnant as it smells.
Teyla fumbles around in the dark, John can hear the slap of wet fabric on a hard surface, and then there's a spark, then another one, and out of nowhere shines a flame, flickering but strong, right in front of his face. It's a candle, a simple tealight, and in the glow he watches Teyla tuck her fire starter back into her sodden, cloth bag. The light is bright enough for John to assess her injuries, and though he is concerned to see the trickle of blood down the side of her face, he's gratified that the wound is small and already clotting. Ronon and Rodney are making a racket high above them and John calls out, reassures them that they're both okay but can someone please get them out of here before they freeze to death?
John clings onto the edge of the ledge, his legs unable to touch the ground without submerging completely, and does his best to keep Teyla awake and alert even as her head droops and her eyelids flicker shut from her exhaustion. The only saving grace is the heat from the candle, strong enough to rapidly warm up the stale air around them and thaw John’s bare arms and face despite the loss of feeling in his legs. Teyla is starting to dry off when Atlantis’ CSAR team finally rappels down to get them, her body no longer expending energy to try to keep her core temperature up, and as John’s clipped to Sergeant Bale’s harness he reaches out to grab the dwindling candle, which snuffs itself out into a puff of sooty smoke just as they breach the collapsed hole in the ceiling. Teyla smiles weakly at him as Bale lifts him onto a gurney, and John palms the warm metal remains of the tealight all the way to the infirmary.
(Lorne doesn’t bat an eyelid when John adds emergency tealights x 5000 to the bottom of the current requisition form the moment he’s released from Carson’s clutches.)
- His Lucky Coin
Whenever anyone asks John what brought him to the Pegasus Galaxy, his answer is always that it was the flip of a coin; that he told O’Neill he’d think about it, and he did, but he hadn’t made his mind up by morning so he left it to chance.
The truth is, the coin only confirmed the choice he’d already made, but if pressed he wouldn’t be able to explain his reasons because that would require a level of introspection that he’s not entirely comfortable with. He tells himself it was a gut feeling, lying to himself even as he recognises that his gut is only the tip of the iceberg.
Something Happened (with a capital H) between almost getting shot down by the drone in Antarctica and flying O'Neill back to McMurdo, and it isn't until after the fifth time that John marries Rodney in an off-world ceremony—when he slips his lucky coin into the breast pocket of Rodney's tac vest as a make-shift dowry payment and it ends up diverting a well-aimed Genii bullet away from Rodney's heart—that the cogs start to turn in his brain.
By the time Rodney is wheeled out of surgery, John really has made his mind up, and when Rodney's eyes flutter open and squint at him accusingly in the harsh light of the infirmary, John realises that the luck was his all along.
...AND ONE THING HE DOESN’T
“What do you mean you don’t have any condoms?” hisses Rodney into the sliver of warm air trapped between their faces.
“I’ve never needed them before!” whispers John. “And will you keep it down?! I don’t want to wake up Ronon and Teyla.”
“But...but...you—”
“Rodney, I swear to God, if you call me Kirk again I’m getting back into my own sleeping bag and going to sleep.”
“Okay, okay, I just...Chaya and Teer and Larrin and...and...whatshername, the one with the pearly white teeth?”
“Teeth? You mean Mara?”
“Yes! Her!”
John rolls his eyes.
“She only wanted me for my genes!” he whispers.
“Oh, right, yes, okay so no need for protection with her, but the rest—”
“I didn’t need protection with any of them.”
"Are you insane, Colonel? Do the words 'venereal disease' not mean anything to you? Not everything can be cured by a course of antibiotics. Syphilis and HIV and—"
“Rodney, you’re missing the point.”
“No, you’re missing the point. You can’t expect me to let you put your uncovered dick in my ass if you’ve been sticking it in—”
John covers Rodney's mouth with his hand, half in deference to the rest of AR-1 sleeping in a tent on the far side of the campfire, and half because he's about three words from smothering Rodney with the ergonomic, inflatable pillow that he bribed Novac to smuggle from Earth.
"I don't actually sleep with any of the women that throw themselves at me, Rodney."
“You don’t?”
“No. To be honest, I don’t usually realise what they want until they’re all over me.”
“But Mara...”
“She came into my room and took her robe off. I put it back on and sent her on her way.”
“Right, okay, that’s fair what with her being a sneaky sperm thief—and to think of what we could have asked for in return for your swimmers if we’d known—but Teer?”
“We literally just made out, and that’s only because it took you six Goddamn months to rescue me.”
“Fine, fine, we can let that one go, but you can’t tell me that you and Chaya didn’t—”
“That was...Rodney, I told you. That wasn’t sex, it was some kind of glowy mind meld.”
“Pfft. Sounds suspiciously—”
“Look, to be honest it really wasn’t all that great. It was like...I don’t know, sharing a high with someone? But the shitty kind of high you get when you’re fifteen and someone puts Italian herbs in a reefer and you all think it's pot so you writhe around on the floor laughing for a few minutes."
Rodney stares blankly at John for a moment, then rolls his eyes.
“Okay, well I can’t say I've ever experienced that on account of me not being an absolute moron, but fine. If you say it wasn’t sex, it wasn’t sex. But I won’t believe you if you try to tell me you didn’t peel Larrin out of that leather corset.”
It’s John’s turn to roll his eyes.
“She shot me,” he says.
“She what?!”
“She distracted me with a kiss and then she shot me with a Wraith stunner.”
“Right, but if she hadn’t shot you...”
“I’d probably have slept with her, yeah.” John slaps his hand over Rodney’s mouth again as he sucks in a breath. “But not without some kind of protection.”
“Which you don’t carry with you.”
“Which I don’t carry with me.”
“And what if she didn’t have any either?”
“Well, then we’d have...you know...with the hands maybe? I don’t know. I didn't really have time to think past first base what with me being unconscious.”
Rodney’s whole body deflates and he tilts into John.
"I can't believe you've never needed protection," he mumbles into John's neck.
“Except with you,” says John, rubbing Rodney’s back with the hand not trapped between them.
“Right, except with me. What does that mean, exactly?”
"Jesus, Rodney, do I really have to spell it out? I thought you were some kind of genius?”
“I am a genius. I’m just not very good with...you know...this.”
“Okay. This means that I...that we...”
The zip of their tent is ripped open and a small, cardboard box smacks John unceremoniously in the back of the head.
“This means that the two of you are gonna need those tonight,” grumbles Ronon, “and tomorrow night, and the night after that, and if you still don’t have a clue after that, then I’m gonna throw you both off the highest tower of Atlantis.”
“Sorry, buddy,” says John as Ronon zips their tent back up and storms back to his own. Rodney grabs the box from where it’s digging into John’s neck and peers at the label in the torchlight.
“So do you wanna?” he asks quietly.
“To be honest,” whispers John, “I’m not sure I can...uh...with Ronon listening.”
“I’m not listening!” yells Ronon from his tent.
“Huh. Okay, so, tomorrow?” asks Rodney, and his voice is casual and confident but the hand that’s gripping John’s t-shirt so hard it’s tugging on his neck tells a different story.
“Yeah,” says John, and he presses one last kiss to Rodney’s mouth. “Tomorrow.”