11. Shell Game

When Sheppard arrived, the city came alive as a welcome present to its prodigal son, opening up formerly dead zones and making havoc with the rigged naquadah generators (which were still their primary means of life support since they had to reserve the battered old ZedPM for contacting Earth and powering the shield during any Wraith attacks).

The prodigal son, however, ignored it.

Mer wanted to strangle him.

That, of course, would have been counterproductive to Mer’s plans, but he did fantasize about it sometimes. Such as, when some almost-mission-critical system broke for no damn good reason in the middle of the night and flooded floors 29 through 36 in the central tower—the floors containing most of the living quarters of the expedition, including Mer’s—with raw sewage.

Sheppard, naturally, lived on the 40th floor. He had a balcony. He didn’t smell like shit for three days.

(And the Marines, fuck their black mercenary hearts, had goddamn galoshes. Mer vowed to strip the credit rating of every single one of those bastards as soon as he could justify the bandwidth during the dial back to Earth. Sam would catch it, of course, but she found Mer’s vengeful wrath endearing so would probably let it sail. Mer was not above using her affection to his advantage.)

Mer knew that Sheppard had something to do with the rash of systems breakdowns, but it was also pretty clear that Sheppard was usually surprised by them. In fact every time he found out about a new problem, he always looked put out. In his more paranoid moments, Mer suspected John of trying to set off Atlantis’ self-destruct sequence with his mind and getting angry when all that happened was a flood of crap.

In his less paranoid moments, he was still convinced it was all Sheppard’s fault.

Either way, bad or worse (because in Pegasus, there was never “good or bad” simply because nothing good ever happened), Mer knew he was going to have to put Sheppard in the chair. No one else would do it.

Carson despised the thing, so trying to use him to initialize and “drive” the command chair was pointless. Lorne was much better about it but he was the military commander of the base and, as a bonus, hated Mer’s guts, so unsurprisingly Lorne never could fit Mer’s research into his schedule. Not that such a thing ever stopped Mer before, but he was tired of their passive-aggressive cat fighting. He just wanted someone, anyone (but particularly Sheppard) to get in the fucking chair already.

The last person who sat in the chair was dead, not that it had anything to do with the chair, but it was symbolic for most people. Mer took enough incredibly lame literary criticism courses as an undergrad to know what that meant. He knew what everyone was thinking, adding one and one together to get seventy-three: Sheppard was some kind of replacement.

Mer didn’t think so, but everyone else apparently did. He had managed to keep Sheppard out of the usual ebb and flow of the Atlantis community gossip mill by sheer dint of will. He monopolized him during the day and was actually relieved when Sheppard joined the poker playing crew because those idiots never talked about anything but poker. But he knew it would not be long before Sheppard got bored, and Mer knew first-hand what it meant when a smart bastard got bored. He’d brought down every bank on the Western seaboard when he was nineteen because it was spring break and his dissertation advisor had locked him out of the labs.

The fact was that Mer did not give a rat’s ass what anyone else thought he was doing with Sheppard. What mattered was what Sheppard thought Mer was doing with him, and Mer knew that if Sheppard got the wrong story from the wrong person, he’d find a way to really screw up all Mer’s plans out of spite.

Not that Mer’s plans were all too definite at that point, but the crux of them was former detective, former USAF major, former pilot John Sheppard. He had Sheppard at his mercy, and Sheppard was as recovered from his injuries as he was going to get. Sheppard might fight him every step of the way, but Mer knew it was time to start breaking him down.

It was the only way Mer could think of to build him back up.

#