Grit stung at John’s cheek, whipped up by the sea wind. The rest of SG-17 were picking their way along the shoreline, collecting samples for all the geologists who were apparently too important to go offworld.

 

In the pockets of his vest John was carrying four clips for his P-90, a compass (Doctor Who was right: all planets have a North), two powerbars, a first aid kit including pressure bandages, and an epipen he’d picked up without thinking. He wouldn’t need any of it. This planet was uninhabited, and didn’t even have a name past the ID code allocated by Stargate Command.

 

John tasted salt in the air, similar but inferior to another ocean, a familiar ocean he’d viewed over his own balcony just weeks ago. Most of his men had gone on leave the minute they hit Earth, so there wasn’t a single face he recognised at Cheyenne Mountain. It was almost like being in Antarctica again.

 

*      *      *

 

Throughout his entire life, Rodney had been planning his career down to the last detail, culminating in a well-deserved Nobel Prize. The Stargate programme had been a weird twist, but it had slotted into the plan easily enough, despite the fact that he wasn’t allowed to publish any of his findings. He’d jumped at the chance to go to the lost city of the Ancients, to actually lead the research team (which, hello, was the whole point of the expedition, no matter what some people appeared to think). He’d never really considered the possibility that they’d never get back, so it’d been a surprise when Sheppard had started talking about Earth like it was history. He didn’t like or even know a hell of a lot of the people here, but without noticing he’d become something like blood-brothers with them all, no longer strangers in a strange land but citizens of the tiny and haphazard state of Atlantis.

 

The first time it really hit him had been about three months into the original mission, crouching in a muddy ditch on Planet Asswipe, the Pegasus Galaxy. He’d left his not so comfortable but nevertheless secure and useful post in Siberia so he could land this cushy job studying awesome extraterrestrial technology, surrounded by worshipful subordinates. Instead he got to fix ten-thousand-year-old toilets, blow up alien warships, take part in insane rituals involving chanting and/or nudity, and the only person who had any respect for him was Miko.

 

So, he was sort of entitled a freakout.

 

Sheppard hadn’t even turned to look at him, just smacked him around the head with the hand not holding his Beretta, and given him some meaningless Officer School soundbite like, “You’re here now,” and that had been it. Crises happened on such a regular basis that that freakout had just blended in with all the others, and by the time they regained contact with Earth Rodney didn’t even have to think about whether to sign on again. He couldn’t exactly leave everyone to fend for themselves, after all: Elizabeth still believed in the essentially good and moral nature of the human spirit, and Sheppard had the self-preservation instincts of a blonde chick in a ‘70s horror flick. The place would probably collapse without him. 

 

Rodney had left home at sixteen. Not in a teenage delinquent way but more because it was getting increasingly difficult to get a ride to college due to his parents being in the throes of Divorce Drama. He was the youngest student on campus, but it didn’t matter because the only person he spoke to was his Advanced Chemistry lab partner, who was named Clarisse but was unexpectedly from Birmingham (not the one in Alabama). She was ostensibly on the same course as him, but was taking zillions of bizarre electives like South American Feminist Poetry and Intro Aeronautic Engineering, which mainly consisted of building paper aeroplanes and attempting to fly them through the bio lab windows. He ended up dating her, and she was the one who started the trend of women dumping him because he was Rodney McKay. (“Why do you have to be so, so, so you?” was the most popular phrase in Rodney’s Inexplicably Crazy Girlfriend vocabulary.)

 

Rodney was more comfortable at college than he was living with his family, and even when he moved overseas he never really got homesick. There wasn’t a lot to miss.

 

This was why it came as such a shock when he found himself missing Atlantis, not just as some vague pang of wishful thinking but something that was almost grief. It was always possible to keep in touch with the others (not Teyla, not Ronon; they were the ones he dreamt about most nights), but he’d been unprepared for this longing for the city itself, where there was always something that needed his help. At Area 51 every door required a key-card, and if he woke up at three in the morning with nothing to do, he couldn’t just start improving on the central heating until Zelenka or Sheppard turned up and made him go back to bed. He’d be walking along some anonymous corridor on the way to his new lab when suddenly he’d remember the hallways of Atlantis, filled with clear light and sharp angles, the walls smooth and cool to the touch. Area 51 was made from clapboard and grey-white pebbledash, and wasn’t going to sink if he went on a coffee break for too long.

 

On the third day after he got the all clear from Cheyenne Mountain, Rodney had been flown to Nevada by some humourless Secret Service guys wearing Men In Black suits and dark glasses. He spent the entire trip panicking and clutching onto the armrests after he repeatedly forgot that he couldn’t call up the helicopter’s diagnostic system with his mind, freaked out by the fact that he could hear the engine. It had to be a thousand times worse for Sheppard, wherever he was.

 

Area 51 hadn’t changed much from the last time he’d worked there, the same old low-slung grey buildings squatting behind a ring of electrified fence in the middle of nowhere. He got one of the good apartments this time and fell asleep in air-conditioned, self-medicated comfort, surrounded on all sides by the desert. He couldn’t feel farther from the sea.

 

*      *      *

 

Simply put, Elizabeth Weir’s job was to deal with people, and there were so many times when she didn’t like her job. Times when the Pegasus Galaxy, as physically far from everything familiar as it was possible to be, reminded her of every war-zone she’d ever had to visit. Times when she was forced to watch people she trusted and respected die without meaning or reason. Times when she was betrayed by those she thought she could count on. The enemy’s (and she hadn’t signed up for an enemy, none of them had) only desire was to see them dead, and as a diplomat this inability to bargain was often impossible to understand.

 

There were so many things she loved about Atlantis, though. As a child she’d lived by the seas, grown up beside it and on it and in it. Nowadays when she couldn’t sleep she’d disable the forceshield around her window, letting in the sound and the smell. At first it had reminded her of home and lying safe between her parents on stormy nights, but after a time she began to think that yes, perhaps this was home. She’d spent so much time travelling, home had become wherever Simon was. She’d almost forgotten what this felt like.

 

She had seen the sun set over the ocean a thousand times now, dyeing water and sky every colour in the rainbow in succession. On some winter days the snow was tinged a pale rose pink from the rock salt it picked up on the mainland. During the first summer heatwave the marine biologists had discovered that the algae that clung to the underside of the piers glowed once it got to a certain temperature, and Elizabeth got a tank of it in her quarters, emanating soft blue light in the evenings. When the sun reached a certain height in the sky the prisms at the top of the third accommodation tower and the control tower strung beams of light between them for a few minutes, apparently for no reason other than it was beautiful. (“Just like in Dark Crystal!” John had said excitedly when they first saw it, and then snapped his mouth shut, embarrassed.)

 

Spring and fall were less noticeable at sea, but after the first year the Athosian settlement had really started to flourish. Each year Elizabeth joined Katie Brown and Dr Mendelo on a few jumper rides to the mainland in order to see the first green shoots of the tava bean crop, or to walk though drifts of oval, purple leaves from the trees that grew all along the Eastern coast. The Athosian harvest festival became as popular as Christmas, mainly because it seemed so often that panic and disaster were their way of life. Also, John and Rodney drunk on Dr Parrish’s Indeterminate Fungus Hooch (the name added to the sense of danger) were a sight to see.

 

General Landry had been right when he’d told her no one was well enough qualified for this, but the truth was that the job changed you. The job had changed Elizabeth, leaving her shaped to fit only Atlantis. She would never feel the physical attachment she knew John and some of the other gene-carriers felt for the city, but she also knew that protecting Atlantis was all she was able to do, now.

 

The fact that she’d been paid to do all this made it worse when she had to leave, which was why she hadn’t so much as touched the millions of government dollars she’d accumulated in her absence. Instead, she rented a tiny apartment using her old savings account, and lived on a diet of take-out and instant coffee from the local mini-mart. Rodney alone had left at least twenty messages on her phone, but she deleted all of them, something she hadn’t even done when she was breaking up with her first boyfriend. These were people she’d seen every day for the past twenty-eight months, and apart from Carson, none of them had any family. It was no wonder they’d bonded, as Woolsey called it. The only person at the Mountain who’d understood was Jack O’Neill, and he had eight years of SG-1 under his belt. In their own way, SG-1 were as independent from Earth as Atlantis had ever been.

 

*      *      *

 

John was pretty sure that he’d used to be a normal guy, but nothing about this life was normal. He’d thought nowhere could be as isolated as McMurdo, but Atlantis really was, even if that was one of the things he liked about it. He now knew more about Athosian culture than he did about most Earth religions, and had taken part in more weird alien ceremonies than he cared to count, including spiritual unions with his entire gate team, Carson and one of the marines, and one time when he’d had to wash Ronon in milk.

 

Atlantis was practically a hippy commune, with everyone operating on a barter system. On military bases people traded porn and chocolate and cigarettes and DVDs, but on Atlantis, people traded everything. Elizabeth was teaching Ronon tai chi in exchange for lessons in Satedan cookery. Sergeant Mendez had a lucrative business as a tattoo artist. Cadman had cornered the market in that addictive Athosian sugar cane after she taught some of Jinto’s friends how to make fireworks. The tech guy who was always at the gym had what seemed like every R-rated anime movie ever made, and loaned them out on a swap-shop system.

 

On Earth, John got confused typing in his pin-code at the mall, despite the fact that he could dial home blind on any DHD (and had, on occasion). It seemed far too easy to be able to just pay for stuff and walk out without having to threaten and cajole and negotiate for everything.

 

He found he’d forgotten about things like streetlamps, door handles, telephones. TV was easy because it was one of those things you did when you were asleep anyway, but he’d stopped watching it when he caught a late-night Friends rerun and remembered Ford, still in the Pegasus Galaxy, last seen on P4X-1901.

 

Despite the fact that he’d left without so much as a goodbye, Rodney called the moment John got his own phone. The conversation had gone something like this.

 

“Sheppard.”

 

“Um, it’s me. So, d’you think Teyla – ?”

 

And then John had hung up, because Teyla – he just didn’t want to talk about it.

 

After that Rodney started calling about a million times a day so he could tell John about his new assistants (“I swear, one of them put ‘cheerleader’ in the 'relevent skills' section of her CV. Her CV! How the hell did she get hired by the US military?”), why his new assistants sucked (“All they do is follow me around and obey orders. They’re a bunch of freakish CalTech-graduate automata! I'd tell them to go screw themselves, but I'm scared they'd actually do it!”), why he’d fired three of his new assistants (“Sheppard, I’m losing the will to live. You were a better lab assistant than this, and you hit on every single woman in my employ.”) and how he was bored and decided to visit the only gay bar in Nevada (“There was a moose head on the wall. A moose. In Reno. How the fuck do you find a moose in the Black Rock Desert?” “Hey, Rodney, I shot a moose in – ” “Don’t even. Sam Carter has turned every woman in Area 51 against me with scurrilous lies, and the only gay bar within driving distance has a fucking moose head on the wall. I am never going to get laid.” John thought that the likelihood of Rodney ever picking anyone up in a bar was minimal, and said so. Rodney had hung up on John, that time.)

 

John didn’t really mind all the calls because a) he was bored, b) if Rodney was rambling on it meant no one was trying to get John to talk about his feelings, and c) he secretly found it reassuring that Rodney could still rant about how much the world hated him, even though they were on the wrong world.

 

Also, he could hang up on Rodney any time he wanted, which was a step up from the conversations they usually had.

 

The cafeteria at the Cheyenne Mountain complex was like high school, with the marines at one end, chowing down on meat-based whatever, and the scientists swigging coffee at the other. John kind of got where Rodney had been coming from with his whole “the armed forces are a gaggle of apes” schtick now, because compared John’s people, these guys were every dumb marine grunt who’d told him flying was for the fags. (He might be a little biased.)

 

Also, SG-1 were… cliquey. John could relate to that because he knew if he spent ten years with Rodney and Ronon and Teyla, his social skills might atrophy a little as well, but the weird thing was that everyone here seemed to think that SG-1 were rockstars or something. Not that he had an ego about this or anything, but he’d saved a world on several occasions, and he’d never got anything resembling this kind of reception. When he’d had to wear a sarong on the planet with all the ducks, Lorne had posted photographs, and McKay kept insulting him no matter how many times John saved his ass. He'd thought that was normal, but clearly he hadn't received the respect due to a proper CO.

 

Plus, it was completely impossible to get a date; after nearly three years he was almost starting to consider switching sides in desperation, despite the fact that his only role-model for that was McKay, who was the worst bisexual ever. (“There are rules,” John had said when McKay first suggested it. “Oh my God,” said Rodney. “If I had a dollar for every time I heard that. It’s a conspiracy. Is it a conspiracy? It’s totally a conspiracy.”)

 

The problem was that everyone was his subordinate or McKay’s subordinate or the medical staff, who all avoided him like the plague because they caught every one of McKay’s post-mission rants and were under the impression that he was some kind of intergalactic manwhore who hit on every temple priestess and chieftain’s daughter they bumped into. Which was so not true. And the Athosian women were out of the question because they all thought the military guys from Earth were unclean, or something. He’d tried to get Teyla to explain but she hadn’t managed a satisfactory answer between all the giggling.

 

Anyway, SG-1 weren’t such a big deal. Daniel Jackson walked into stuff all the time, and John had seen Vala steal jello from Stores and then accidentally dip her hair in it while she was eating. Teyla would never do that. That scary Teal’c dude might be, like, three hundred years old or something, but Ronon could track Wraith just by looking at the way twigs snapped, and General O’Neill was plainly batshit crazy. Team Sheppard could totally take them.

 

*      *      *

 

It’s the first time she’s seen them without Teyla and Ronon since they all got back. It had been the sense of failure that had led Elizabeth to spend six weeks moping around in sweatpants, but she knew that splitting up the team had hit John particularly hard. He seems a lot less dangerous now the others are around.

 

Rodney’s explaining something, looking alternately excited and irritated. John’s just gazing out across the city, gripping the balcony rail and probably not listening to a word that’s being said. There’s that foot of air between them that wasn’t there when she saw them on Earth, space that John always puts between them and Rodney probably doesn’t even notice.

 

“Good evening, gentlemen.”

 

Sheppard half-turns. “Elizabeth.” Up close, she can see that he’s holding so tight onto the rail that his knuckles are white. It’s the way he’d clutched at Teyla when they found her in that cave, a week after Lorne had pronounced her MIA.

 

“The last person’s officially moved back in,” she says. “No one elected to stay back on Earth.”

 

Rodney looks outraged. “Who would?” he says and then shoots an awkward glance at Sheppard, who ignores him like he always does, and gives them both one of his multipurpose smirks.

 

“Someone missed Rodney,” he says, changing the subject. “One of the nice Athosian ladies gave him a necklace.”

 

Rodney scowls. “I don’t know who she is!”

 

“You don’t know who most of your own staff are,” Elizabeth points out, suppressing a smile. Rodney’s in charge of the repairs and he’s managed to call every single one of the new techs by the wrong name, including some names that aren’t even on the roster.

 

“Well, I think it’s sweet,” says Sheppard innocently, all Southern charm and blatant insincerity. Rodney glowers.

 

“You’re just jealous I’m the one getting all the attention, for once,” he says defiantly. “Clearly Athosian women have more refined taste.”

 

“Rodney. You don’t know who she is.” They are fully capable of continuing like this for hours. It’s almost relaxing.

 

Elizabeth settles between them, leaning over the rail. Back on Earth it’s December, but here the air is just starting to get crisp. They’ll have rain in a couple of weeks, which means they can give the desalinisation tanks a rest. She should ask Radek where to reroute the excess power; she heard the anthropologists were working on deciphering a new hologram library. Maybe the Ancients had novels.

 

The sea is calm for this time of year, the waves not even capped with white. “Come on, it’s weird,” John is saying. “You always get birds at sea. That’s why you get seagulls on movie soundtracks when it’s meant to be the beach, to prove they’re not just in a sandbox in some studio back-lot.”

 

“No, it makes sense. I mean, it’s not like we leave a lot of food out. They’re probably all on the mainland.”

 

John rolls his eyes. “Seabirds, Rodney. They eat fish.”

 

“What, suddenly you’re an ornithologist? Anyway, all we have here are whales and Dr Thingy’s weird squiggly plankton.”

 

“Wow, McKay, those three PhDs are really shining through.” He’s smiling lazily, letting McKay wind himself up because that’s entertainment, for John. He’s probably angling for the Soft Sciences Rant, which they’ve all heard already but is nevertheless different each time.

 

“Oh, like you’re one to talk, Colonel. Were you always this irritating?”

 

They don’t change.