Malicious Compliance – 4 – Hazel

Reading Time:
21 Minutes

Ten:

After living on Atlantis, John Sheppard was rather used to the unexpected, unbelievable and fucked up.  Yet, the first day in his childhood home had been weird to the point of surreal.  He’d gotten through breakfast by yawning a lot and focusing on Eliza, not a difficult task since the day before had been long and exhausting for both of them and neither had slept well the night before.

Considering how he’d been sleeping since he’d first boarded the Daedalus he was half convinced he was suffering some sort of withdrawal from the lack of ancient tech.  Or maybe just the lack of Rodney.  At least once a night he woke, his arms reaching for his lover and his mind reaching for the city.

John looked more closely at his daughter, watching her fuss and squirm as she fed, and wondered if she was having the same problem being away from the city.  He sighed as she smacked at the bottle until he pulled it away.  Even weeks after the change, she was still adjusting to the Earth versions of things he’d previously gotten from the Athosians.

“Not hungry?” Patrick asked.

John shrugged, then positioned her on his shoulder and hoped that this time the mess would stay confined to the burp cloth.  “I think she’s still a bit unsettled.  Things were very different on base so the change on top of all the travel…” he shrugged again.

His father nodded and they both watched her settle back down on the blanket, her hand reaching out to inspect her surroundings.  Eliza squealed when her hand touched the grass, just as she had when they’d first set up the picnic Patrick had surprised them with upon his early return from the office.  Neither man said anything for nearly ten minutes while Eliza turned her attention to the nearest bush where a few butterflies were flitting from one flower to the next.

“What is it you need, John?”

The sudden question had him looking over at his father even as he absently placed a plastic ring of baby keys in Eliza’s grasping fingers.

Patrick was staring at him calmly.  “As much as I’d like to think having a baby has made you want family back in your life after all these years, you got your stubborn streak from me.  So I know that after how we left things that you wouldn’t have gotten back in touch if you weren’t getting more out of it than just seeing us.”

A part of him wanted to deny it.  His shoulders stiffened automatically with the instinctive need to defend himself.  For a moment, he even felt a bit guilty for the rather mercenary approach he’d taken to his relationship with his dad.  The alternative, however, wasn’t worth even considering.

John let out a breath, consciously relaxing his hands where they had clenched into fists.   “The situation at my former base is… complicated.  I was transferred out as much for my conflicts with the civilian leadership as for Eliza’s arrival, though that was the excuse they ultimately used to remove me from my command.  I have very good reason to believe that the full circumstances on base were not being relayed accurately up the chain and I think,” he swallowed, briefly tickling the little girl’s feet just to hear her laugh, “I want to think that if the brass were fully aware of our situation there that things would be different.

“But accomplishing that would require me to meet directly with someone I don’t have the juice to get a meeting with myself and going through the proper chain of command would probably make things worse instead of better since the general I report to is almost certainly part of the problem.”

Silence fell between them, only Eliza’s nonsense prattle filling the space until he saw his father nod out of the corner of his eye.  “Give me the name of whoever you need to speak with and I’ll have Grey set it up.”

John blinked.  He’d constructed his plans around the idea that his father would have the connections to get him a meeting at Homeworld, but hearing the man so quickly and easily just agree to it without any explanation or argument was still rather jarring.  At the least, he’d expected a few snide remarks about how much he’d resisted even the hint of his father’s interference or assistance in his career for so many years.  A dig about needing his help now.  But there was nothing.

The sense of relief was so heavy he had to brace himself on one hand to keep from slumping back onto the blanket.

A hand on his shoulder made John flinch.  “John?”

He straightened quickly, drawing a deep breath before turning to his dad.  “Thank you.”  John cleared his throat.  “I can’t explain how… important this is.  I know I’ve-”

Patrick squeezed his shoulder, then withdrew the hand.  “That you asked at all tells me everything I need to know, son.”

John had to look away, his eyes straying to a ladybug perched on the trunk of the tree just past the edge of their blanket.

“So consider it done.  Besides, you have even more important concerns in the meantime.”  His father grinned and nodded his head towards Eliza.

John turned, then lurched forward.  “No!  Leaves aren’t for eating, ‘Liza.”

Patrick just laughed, offering no help whatsoever in wrestling the crushed pieces of dried leaf out of the baby’s grip.

Eliza giggled in response, waving her leafy fist at them both.

—-

Eliza babbled softly, the rhythm of her sounds oddly in time with his own voice as John quietly read aloud to her.  That she had seemed to recognize his voice from the day she’d come out of the ancient machine hadn’t been a complete shock since the city had tapped into his radio channel, but there had been times that John sincerely wondered what else the machine might have done.  At least he assumed it was the machine, but for all he knew the odd synchronicity between them had more to do with their shared ATA gene.  The tech had a mental component, after all.

It took a moment after there was a sudden change in Eliza’s baby sounds for John to realize that in his mental wanderings, he’d stopped reading.  He smiled down at her then refocused on the book.  “Sorry, sweetheart.  Where was I?”

She shook her tiny fist at him as if in reproach and he couldn’t help but smile even as he read on.  The late night reading had become a bit of a routine in the last week or so, since his first meeting with General O’Neill.  That night, she’d been restless and he’d blamed it on the fact that he’d been gone for hours and left her with father.  Yet when his dad disappeared into some work-related emergency for days afterwards, and he’d had to bring Eliza to his second meeting with the Director of Homeworld Security, she had been even fussier that evening.

John had blamed it on the fact that he’d let her sleep too much at the meeting so she wouldn’t be exposed to the anger O’Neill was radiating when they discussed the accuracy of the reports he’d seen from the city.  Only, he’d made sure not to let her oversleep that day and she was just as unhappily awake as she had been the last time.  He bounced her a little with one arm as he held open the book with his other hand.  Eliza burbled in response.

At the end of another chapter, he glanced at the small antique clock on the table beside his chair.  After 1:00.  “You’ve got to go to sleep at some point, sweetheart.  To save my voice if nothing else.  If I can’t talk who will read to you?  Huh?”

Eliza kicked out, fist shaking at him again.  He sighed and cleared his throat.  They were only a few sentences into the next chapter when his father quietly entered.  It was the first time he’d actually seen his father since he’d returned from the first meeting.  He was actually tempted to ask if whatever issue there had been at Sheppard Industries had been cleared up but he’d learned years before not to ask about the company since it always led to a fight with his dad about the fact that he refused to work there.

“Everything okay?”

John nodded tiredly.  “She’s just a little unwilling to go to sleep.”  He slipped a bookmark in and set the paperback on the table, readjusting the baby so he could pat her back.

Patrick nodded.  “You’re reading to her?”

John stood and started to walk slowly around the library, as much to let him move as to soothe the baby.  “I thought since it used to work for me, it might work for her too.”  They both fell silent for several minutes, Eliza’s fussy gurgles the only sound in the room.  When he turned to continue pacing, Patrick was staring at the book.

“Pride and Prejudice.”  The words were quiet enough that John wasn’t even sure if his father was talking to him or just reading the titled to himself.

He rubbed a few slow circles on Eliza’s back, patted it a few times, bounced a little in place, swayed side to side.  Rubbed, patted, bounced, swayed.  The pattern repeated five times before anyone spoke again.  John thought about saying it had been his mom’s favorite.  Or that it was what she often read to him.  But his father already knew that.

He thought about saying nothing at all, looked over at the mostly closed door and wondered if he could just say he needed to put her to bed and slip out.  Instead, he swallowed hard and stepped onto a conversational path he had been avoiding since he arrived.

“We used to debate which version of the name was the best.”  He didn’t have to clarify who the other half of we was.  His mother’s memory was a tangible weight in the room as they both looked down at her favorite novel.  “Elizabeth, Lizzy, or Eliza.  I said it was silly to have multiple nicknames and I Lizzy sounded too childish for the heroine of a story.  And mom-” he cleared his throat, “mom said that three names was fun and that if she had a daughter she’d have named them Eliza.”

The small catch in his father’s breath was too loud in the silence that followed.  “I assume you’ll be going back to your base at some point.”

He blinked.  O’Neill, working under the impression that John had insisted on the transfer back to Earth had been irritated with him at first, but the multiple meeting they’d had discussing the situation on Atlantis once Landry had been booted from the mountain had made it clear that the General actually liked him.  It was odd to have a superior officer appear to look up to him for his black mark but while he’d been Earth-side he’d taken the opportunity to read as many after-action reports as he could and it was clear that no man left behind was taken extremely seriously at the SGC.

So it was safe to say that he’d be going back to the city before too long.  If only to end the flood of reports McKay had filed detailing every single difficulty and several serious problems that had arisen in the absence of a very strong ATA gene on the city.

“The official transfer looks to be about two weeks out.”

Patrick nodded his head, looked away, then met his gaze.  “You should take it with you.”  His father reached out towards the dog-eared paperback, then clasped his hands behind his back.  “You should take a few books.  After all, it’s about as remote a posting as possible and book stores are probably hard to find in Pegasus.”

The words seemed to echo in his head for a few seconds and all he could do was close his eyes and exhale heavily.  He’d had absolutely no plan to involve his father with the SGC, but he had resolved to put up the consequences of asking his father to interfere even so remotely in his career if it meant he could stay on they city.  Really, he only had himself to blame.

It had been a single favor, a meeting arranged.  But deep down, he’d known that Patrick Sheppard would take it too far.  It was why he had always been so adamant about keeping him out of his career before.  So this should not have been a shock.  Even so, it took a minute for him to respond.

“You got read in.”

Patrick raised one brow.  “You bet your ass I did.”

Eliza made a snuffling noise against his neck.  They both looked down at the baby.

“You better put her down before she wakes back up.”

All John could do was nod.  Neither said anything when they parted at the stairs, but as he lay his daughter carefully into the travel bassinet, he whispered into the quiet room.  “Your grandpa better not end up taking over the entire SGC.”  Eliza shifted slightly in her sleep.  “Yeah, you’re right.  If it gets us back on Atlantis, it’d still be worth it, won’t it sweetheart?”

Eleven:

John shook his head, staring up at the ceiling of his tiny bunk on board the Daedalus.  Sometimes, he really hated being right.  Or mostly right, since Patrick Sheppard had not in fact taken over the SGC.  But he had stuck not only his foot, but his whole damn leg into the Stargate program.  Namely the Atlantis expedition.

“Civilian Administrator of Atlantis,” he muttered under his breath.  “Fuck me.”  John glanced quickly over to make sure Eliza hadn’t woken up, then went back to staring at nothing.  He was determined to relax at least a little, before Novak arrived to watch her so he could return to report reviews with his father.

Only a few minutes later, there was a knock on his door that had him jumping to his feet to answer with a glance at the baby.  When he pulled it open his father was clearing raising his hand to knock again.  “She’s asleep,” he quickly whispered.

Patrick winced, stepping back so John could come half into the hallway.  “Sorry.  I thought that Lieutenant was watching her.”

“Not for a few more minutes.”

His father nodded again, glancing up and down the hallway as if she’d magically appear at the mention of her name.  “I’ll set up in the conference room, then.  Maybe grab a tray from the mess on the way.”

“Okay.  I’ll join you in a bit then.”  As he stepped back into the room, Patrick leaned, craning his neck a little as he tried to get a glance at Eliza before he left.  John sighed.  “She’s sleeping.  You’ll see her at dinner.”

Patrick straightened and held up both hands in wordless surrender and finally left.  Closing the door as quietly as possible, John went back to his bunk and started carefully gathering his laptop, a half-filled notebook, a few pens and other miscellaneous things they somehow needed to go over electronic reports.  Another, softer knock, came a few minutes later.

“Hey.  She’s still asleep but will probably be up in the next ten or fifteen minutes.”

Novak smiled and slipped into the room, holding up a bag with what looked like knitting needles sticking out of the top.  “Not a problem, Colonel Sheppard.  I’ve brought a few things to do.  Should I wake her if she sleeps longer than that?”

He lifted his own bag and nodded.  “Please.  She’s having enough trouble sleeping at night, I don’t think an overlong nap will help with that.  You know where her books and toys are, but feel free to take her for a walk if you want.  I’ll be back around 1700.”

“Yes, sir.  We’ll see you then.”

John nodded, but hesitated as he always did when he was forced to leave her with someone.  Novak laughed softly but didn’t say anything.  He sighed and closed the door carefully behind himself before heading to the room he and his father had been using to talk through the reports since they’d boarded the ship over a week before.

He paused before going in.  Having spent the morning scanning reports from the Atlantis medical staff and the CMO in particular, he knew exactly what was on the schedule for review that afternoon.  He wasn’t looking forward to it.  With a breath, he squared his shoulders and went in.

“Carson Beckett,” his father said the moment he was through the door.

John made a point of going over and sitting at the table, putting his bag down and getting everything out before answering.  “Technically speaking, medical research is considered part of the sciences and is under the control of the CSO.”  He opened his laptop and looked up at his father.  “In practice, medical is more or less separate from the other departments.  Carson has been sending more reports and research proposals to Weir than to McKay.  Rodney has been complaining for almost a year but Weir and Beckett keep putting him off and running end roads around him.

“Before we made contact with Earth, the constant emergencies and the realities of being on a gate team had Rodney so busy he didn’t realize the discrepancy between the reports he was receiving from Medical and the reports being filed.  It wasn’t until he saw a reference to the Hoffan drug in an unrelated report from Biology that we realized Beckett was still researching it even though not a single thing had been sent to him about it.”

Patrick hummed, typed for a few seconds and then looked back at him.  “When was that?”

“About two months before we got back in contact with Earth.  He claimed that it was still so early in the process that there wasn’t anything to report and he hadn’t thought he needed to submit a new proposal to continue ongoing research.”

“And after contact with reestablished with the SGC?”

“Weir claimed that the research was an IOA project and they had given permissions and because of that it was under her supervision only.  McKay has been fighting about it with both her and the IOA for months.  He tried going to the SGC but Landry said it was a civilian project under the auspice of the IOA and he wasn’t going to interfere and cause a problem just because the CSO felt left out.”

The look on his father’s face pretty much said thank fuck that asshole is gone.  John couldn’t agree more.  Landry had done a lot of shady shit to stay on the IOA’s good side and from what O’Neill had implied it was going to take a long while for the new General at the mountain to clean up the mess.  But thankfully that wasn’t his problem.  Carson, on the other hand was.

“Did you read the report about the new research related to the Hoffan drug?”

John rubbed his eyes and let out a breath.  “The Michael project.  Yeah.  What a clusterfuck.”

“I agree.  I’ll be meeting with Dr. Beckett myself and unless he has a really good reason not to boot his ass from the city, he’ll be replaced on the next Daedalus run.  I’ve already discussed a replacement with Dr. Lam but I’d like to talk to,” he looked at his computer screen, “Dr. Biro before I make my final selection.”

“Good.  It will probably save McKay a good hour or two a week if he doesn’t have to fill complaints every time he turns around.”

“Based on the last dozen he’d started using cut and paste in most of them.  But he’s lucky he went to the trouble because when shit hits the fan on the Beckett issue back on Earth not much should splash back on him even though he was technically in charge of the medical research at the time.”

John huffed.  “Well, his love of complaining had to be helpful at some point, I guess.  I wonder what he’ll focus on instead.  We might want to warn the mess hall since a good quarter of his attention is on food fifty percent of the time.”

He wasn’t sure what the raised brow his father directed at him was about, so he made a few notes and brought up the other reports they’d planned to go over.  He repeated that process three more times in the next couple hours as they worked through various aspects of city and operational security.

“I want the Alpha site selection complete before any teams go off world again.”

John nodded.  “Already arranged.  I sent instructions through to Lorne in the last databurst but we’ll have to see what Ellis has actually allowed when we get there.”

“We certainly will.  Technically he’s still in command so you don’t actually have the authority to give Major Lorne orders until you return and retake the military command.”

“That’s my expectation as well.  I did however ask for a mission schedule that reflects the Alpha site priority that he may have been able to start without Ellis interfering.  Like you said, we’ll see.”

“Okay.”  Patrick moved aside his notepad and folded his hands on the table.  “Tell me about the two Pegasus natives that were on the city.”

“Teyla Emmagan and Ronon Dex.  Teyla was originally the leader of the Athosian people-”

His father waved his hand.  “Not what’s in the files.  You’ve lived with them, went into the field with them.  Tell me what you think.”

John leaned back in his chair.  “Teyla knows and is known by the people of many worlds in Pegasus.  She’s been essential in or trade efforts.  And a complete warrior princess.  Ronon’s a badass and far more observant than people think.”

He probably spent too long talking about both of his teammates but his father didn’t interrupt.  Just listened to tales of off world missions and personal anecdotes about both of his favorite aliens.  When he finally stopped with a sigh, Patrick was still listening attentively.

“They both left the city shortly after you arrived on Earth, correct?”

“There wasn’t much detail in the official reports but McKay emailed me privately.  Or as privately as is possible in the SGC.  Weir started pushing for the expedition to be more and more insular as soon as it looked like the power issues on the city might be resolved.  She thought Atlantis could support itself and that all our resources and time should be spent on the database and the city itself.”

“O’Neill gave me a thorough debrief on her and her actions on the city when I was given the position.  Atlantis has a lot to explore for sure but Homeworld wants us to expand the defensive and offensive value of our foothold in Pegasus.  The Wraith aren’t the type of enemy you can ignore.  They’ll come for Earth eventually if we just sit back and wait.”

John nodded.  “When it became clear that Weir was not going to be isolating the city, Teyla and Ronon left and went to New Athos.  They haven’t been back in touch with anyone on the city that I know of but they gave Rodney the impression that they wanted to try to recruit other culling survivors and search for Runners.  They only stuck around on the city in the first place because we were fighting the Wraith.”

“I assume you want to get them to come back.”

“It is my opinion as the military commander of Atlantis that Teyla and Ronon are essential members of my team and provide vital aid to our military efforts in Pegasus.  When we get back I’m going to send a message to New Athos.  As soon as the Alpha site it set up.”  John met his father’s gaze head on, determined that Patrick understood he wasn’t asking for permission.

Patrick leaned back, his hands resting lightly in his lap and nodded.  “Very well.  Since our relations with the native people of Pegasus can also be considered a civilian matter, please keep me informed.”

There was silence for just a few seconds.  The alarm he’d set on his watch broke the mostly amicable stalemate and John started gathering his things.  “I told Novak I’d be back by 1700 hours.”

“Of course.  Let’s go over any ideas you have about offensive strategies for the city tomorrow.  And I’d like to review the power situation since they’ve connected the city to the geothermal platform.”

John paused, then cleared his throat.  “I’ll review the various reports from engineering tonight.  Are you eating in the officer’s mess tonight?”

“I am.  Are you bringing Eliza to dinner?”

John rolled his shoulders and picked up his bag.  “Yeah.  I’ll need to feed her first so it’ll be a bit, but we should see you there.”

His father agreed and John left the conference room, the weight of his computer bag dragging at his now tense shoulders.

—

He was tense to the point of achy by the time he coaxed Eliza to sleep after an overstimulating meal with her grandpa.  John started calmly reading through the updates from Zelenka and McKay about the work they’d been doing on the hydro plant as well as the progress they’d made with the wind turbines on the city and their plans for solar panels.  He stayed calm as he went over the list of city systems that they had been able to power so far and what they expected in the near future.

Then he got to the series of reports regarding the geothermal platform.  John had to keep reminding himself that Eliza was sleeping a few feet away so as not to curse the blue streak he truly wanted to.  The initial report had come in the databurst the day before his father had been appointed as the new civilian administrator for the city so he was in the mountain when John first saw it.

Thankfully, Jackson had been there as well to go over the history of the ancients and the city with Patrick so the fit the archeologist had thrown at the news had distracted people from the fact that John had completely lost his cool when he’d learned that Rodney had shot and killed a Wraith queen on the platform not long after they’d boarded it to plan needed repairs.

The part Jackson had been the most up in arms about had been that Ellis had actually lectured Rodney for having ‘played with a firearm on the city without authorization’ because he’d been taking lessons from Cadman at the range since John had left the city.  John had been a bit more freaked out that not only had Rodney been on the platform with a handful of scientists and no military because Ellis decided on-planet activity didn’t require military assistance; he had also run into a fucking Wraith queen with nothing but a side arm and a lot of dumb luck.

Because for all that John seriously needed to make use of Cadman for civilian training if she could teach McKay to manage a head shot in the heat of the moment, Rodney had only done so because he’d accidentally spotted her when she was trying to get into the room all the other scientists were in bickering about what needed to be fixed first.

That Rodney and the other scientists had been put in the situation in the first place was galling.  That Rodney and the others would have absolutely been killed if not for freak timing and a good but surely lucky shot was infuriating.  That Rodney had been in that position and John hadn’t been there to protect him, however, was so enraging and painful that it made him literally sick to his stomach.

He closed the computer before finishing the last set of reports.  He’d read them all at least four times already so a review wasn’t really necessary anyway.  Rubbing his face with both hands, he took several deep breaths and got ready for bed.  He was going to need a lot of sleep to stay level headed when he discussed it all with his father the next day.

Before he went to sleep, he stared into the darkened room and whispered.  “Nine more days.”