4. Invested

It wasn’t until Sheppard’s fifth week in hospital that Mer asked about the ATA gene tests. He assumed they had been done back when Sheppard was shedding blood like a broken tap, but no, not a single moron thought to check. Admittedly, it had been a hunch on Mer’s part based on a few off-hand comments the alternate Col. John Sheppard made during his far-too-short visit, but still, he expected it to be SOP.

Carson ran him to ground the day they actually did the tests, after Mer spent the morning yelling at everyone about the fact they had not been done yet. Sure enough, Sheppard was an off-the-chart ATA carrier, as strong as Gen. O’Neill.

Mer knew for a fact that he was the luckiest man on Earth, mostly because Major Daniel Jackson was back home in Atlantis. Now, that son of a bitch had luck out of his ass, but he was off-planet and Mer was at Area 51 with his very own ATA gene carrier, so he won. Carson even thought that he might be able to refine his nascent ATA gene retro-virus treatment based on something voodoo or another in Johns serum or semen or whatever. Mer was a latent carrier and the promise of being able to initialize Ancient artifacts himself, without relying on Col. Lorne or God-forbid Carson, nearly made him dizzy.

In the meantime, he had Sheppard.

Point of fact, he had Sheppard by the balls, and they both knew it. Sheppard was playing it quiet and cool, never asking about the bag of money that Mer had destroyed, or the piece of shit car that Mer had destroyed, or his identity, which Mer had also destroyed.

Not that Mer was telling Sheppard that last part just yet.

It was part of Mer’s plan to remake the man, give him the second chance that apparently no one else thought he deserved. Sheppard’s records all the way back to Phillips Exeter (Phillips Exeter, Mer thought without bitterness, but with some awe) showed that Sheppard was broken, somehow, and Mer suspected it had to do with the death of his ten year old brother when Sheppard was twelve. He was never in trouble before he was twelve, despite his mother’s early death. He never ran away or flunked classes or got into fights before then. From that point on, though, Sheppard was a handful of trouble who lived on the edge of being thrown out of Exeter, out of the Air Force Academy, out of the Air Force…until he finally crossed that line and got an honorable discharge for his troubles.

What struck Mer most through all of that was how Sheppard never really pushed it until Afghanistan. Sheppard played fast and loose but always right below the bar, as if he was daring someone to call him on it. Sheppard did not really give a fuck about the Wraith until Mer called him on it, for that matter.

It was obvious to him that Sheppard wanted to care, he just couldn’t figure out how or why. Then he fell in love in a war zone, and found someone worth giving it all up for, only to have her die before he ever got a chance to save her. Sheppard threw his career away, however lackluster it was, on a corpse.

Then he tried to throw his life away saving the world.

Sheppard just gazed at him impassively when Mer told him how every person on earth, all six billion of them, owed John Sheppard their lives. He blinked once then shrugged, and asked Mer to turn off the TV because he wanted a nap.

Mer watched him sleep, knowing that turning the USS Sheppard around mid-stream was going to be a bitch of a job. Most people were already dead-set against the plan, including C³ —Carter, Caldwell and Cam. O’Neill pretended he didn’t care, while extending Mer’s official leave time from Atlantis to “indefinite”. Carson kept giving Mer knowing looks while standing protectively over his charge.

Mer wasn’t fooling himself into thinking he could turn his broken loser of a light switch into the dashing Colonel John Sheppard, USAF. But he wondered with an air of scientific detachment how far he could push it. Not that Mer was invested in the man. Not in any way that really mattered.

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