13. Chrysalis

The poker crew usually, mostly, only talked about poker. There were the crude jokes (Cadman) and the bad jokes (Ford) and every once in a while Chuck would give them the amusing scuttlebutt of an off-world team returning home in ignoble glory, sliding through the gate covered in mud or tribal paint or worse. All in all, though, it was not quite the hot bed of gossip John had assumed it would be, although as a gambler he had to respect a group of people who played poker just that seriously.

Still, his run-in with Lorne that afternoon was grating on his nerves. Or maybe it was just the fact that his body was finally at the point where it wasn’t always throbbing in pain and so John could think clearly for a change. Either way, he was ready to play a different game.

“So who’s Hedy?” John threw it out on the table like a bet.

The room went quiet for a moment, but Chuck folded with a sigh, laying his cards down. “Dr. Hedy Abdeljilil, McKay’s husband.”

John had seen the ring but never asked, because he told himself he didn’t care. Now he wondered how much more stupid he could have been. “Husband?”

Chuck bristled. “We’re Canadian. We can do that.”

John gave him a disinterested shrug. “Just meant I was surprised anyone married the bastard.”

The tension broke with laughter, people amused at McKay’s expense. John wondered why they were all so protective of a jackass they didn’t even like.

Chuck gave John a studied look, clearly thinking about three moves ahead in the conversation. John glared back, but Chuck only returned it with a sly smirk before shaking his head. “Hedy’s dead. Don’t ask about him anymore.”
Sgt. Bucci upped his bet, sliding in to cut the conversation off in way that John knew was on purpose. John rolled with it, knowing when he had tapped out an informant for everything he was going to give. As if to prove the point, Chuck made his apologies and bowed out of the game for the night.

Given that he was a detective by trade and a nosey bastard by nature, John realized he had been letting a lot slide in regards to his current situation. Namely, in regards to McKay.

He hadn’t focused on it much, between being shot to death by an alien then living in a base hospital for a month before being thrown through the stargate to Atlantis like so much Earth garbage sent out to sea. And, of course, being erased . McKay had killed John Sheppard as surely as putting a bullet through his brain, more thoroughly than any dishonorable discharge could have ever done. John thought he died when he crash landed his chopper ten yards from where Anne’s body was already starting to decay, but he did not really know what being dead meant until McKay brought it to him on a silver platter.

So maybe John had been chewing on his bitterness a little too hard to look at the big picture.

He had few facts and no allies. The silver-fox Dr. Weir, spooky and unreadable and mysterious and coddled by the expedition staff more thoroughly than any head of state John had ever met, had given John carte blanche to Atlantis with her blessing and high expectations. On the other hand, McKay had locked down John’s security access so tightly John felt lucky that his laptop actually showed the correct time. Everyone else sort of fit somewhere between those two extremes, but on the whole nobody had tried to reach out to John for anything other than their winnings.

Except Atlantis.

She buzzed with an electrical, jazzy happiness when John contacted Her, his fingers sliding along the walls as he meandered back to his apartment later that night. Lonely and addled by Her lack of power (John had figured out that much, whether he wanted to or not), Her responses to his questions about Hedy and the expedition and McKay were vague. Finally She started flashing a shadow of an image in his mind, over and over like a beacon: the Command Chair.

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