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John Sheppard hates to fly. He’s hated it since he was 15, his father crash-landing just north of Edwards Air Force Base and his mother fainting on the kitchen floor. It’s terribly inefficient as a means of propulsion (the fuel to payload ratios are completely insane) and the process is distasteful (taking off your shoes in public should never be required), not to mention the service near negligent (only offering nut-based products to a captive audience).

So when the Pentagon emails him that he’s meant to catch the commuter from Albuquerque to Denver, he responds back with a few choice elements of l33tspeak that takes the recipient approximately 17 minutes to decipher. He knows that because his office door is being rocked off its hinges approximately 21 minutes later by the oh-so-helpful airman that sits at the front desk and he’s being manhandled into the waiting car with a tersely worded, “Cooperate, please, Dr. Sheppard.” All 29 minutes after the initial email was sent.

If he has to say one thing, he’ll say this: the American military is efficient.

Except when it comes to fuel/payload ratios. And a bunch of other things, including mass food preparation and keeping fresh coffee in the pot. But when it comes to coercing civilians into doing their bidding? Right up there with the Six Sigmas.

*

He lands in Denver and demands lunch. They feed him breakfast instead, after he interrogates the waitress, demanding to know if peanuts, peanut butter, or any derivative thereof came within a 5-foot radius of his eggs and toast. She makes the mistake of pointing out that the jelly packets sit next to the peanut butter ones, and he ends up having a near coronary over the fact.

“I’m deathly allergic to peanuts, you know,” he tells the airman who hustles him out of the restaurant and into yet another waiting car. “I could die.”

“Right,” one of the airmen replies. “Sir,” he adds, a beat to long later to be considered anything but a hiccup of respect. “We thank you for your cooperation.”

John opens his mouth to start in on the lack of respect in the armed forces, about he’s not cooperating, he’s being coerced, damn it, but then the driver takes off down the highway and it’s all he could do to hold on for dear life.

*

Lt. Col. Samantha Carter is exactly what he expected – lazy, complacent, and entirely too militarized to recognize true science when she saw it. “You work for the military, John,” his mother pointed out to him once after another rant regarding the flag she proudly displayed on top of the china cabinet in her living room, the fabric carefully folded and preserved 20 years ago, a parting gift from a government that took his father and nearly destroyed his family. “I’m a contractor, Mom,” he said. “A civilian contractor. I make my own rules.”

He remembers changing the subject by poking at the stew she was making, telling her it smelled suspicious, and demanding to know if she’d lost her mind and forgotten he was allergic. To nuts and all nut products. Deathly. She shooed him out of her kitchen and set him on her ancient desktop, asked him to reinstall AOL instead of "that Linux thing." He only calls her a heathen once – mostly because dinner does smell good.

Sam, though, with her perfectly placed halo of hair and her tight little tops and her smartly laced boots and her smug little grin and yes, yes, fine, maybe she was right, but seriously, seriously, he only made one pass at her, and maybe he insulted her intelligence that one time -- okay, twice – but, really, did she have to get him traded? To the Russians? For a player to be named later?! Seriously. The Russians didn’t even have a ‘gate! Or football! Or homogenized cheese!

It wasn’t all that bad until six months in, when he found himself watching the Patriots get spanked via a pilfered satellite connection and realized he was translating the players’ names into Cyrillic and that the smell of cabbage was actually appetizing. He turned the game off with half a quarter to go, fell into the dining room and played pinochle with the botanists until he couldn’t remember how to say, “Another round,” in English. He woke up mostly naked with Maxime from the chem. labs, and seriously, he totally didn’t see that one coming.

*

The Pentagon emails him again, tells him to get on a plane back to Denver.

This time he meets the airman at the door.

He’s learned something about efficiency in the past months.

He’s also learned that he really misses homogenized cheese. And that there is just no way to let Russian women down easy.

*

Carter needs his help again, not that he’s surprised, but he is surprised that she mostly listens and actually takes his advice. He’s off his game, though, high on the real coffee and real cheese, and oh my God, are those Rolos?! and so he doesn’t even notice he’s not correcting her mistakes until she gives him a soft smile, her eyelashes casting a smudge of a shadow on her cheeks as she leans toward her computer screen. He realizes then that O’Neill is going to blow up or something, unless they do this and so he says so, and then she does it again, the smile, the tilt of her chin, and she even thanks him.

He barely notices that O’Neill makes it back in one piece. If he thought about it more, he’d probably be pretty pissed. Because, you know, pilots = stupid, and intergalactic pilots = intergalactically stupid.

He leaves the next day, with the press of Carter’s lips on his cheek fueling a month’s worth of jack-off material. Which he completes in the shower, of course. Because he’s nothing if not efficient.

*

He keeps getting bounced around, sent to far reaches of the planet to solve problems that everyone thought couldn’t be solved. He goes in, he comes out, he gets to add more people to his “How Did You Survive This Long and Not Die as a Direct Result of Your Own Stupidity?” mental list. He calls it "The List" for short.

But it’s not until he tells Dr. Thomas King (three PhD’s, but two from state schools) to go fuck himself (“Oh, wait, you can’t! BECAUSE YOU COULDN’T FIND YOUR DICK WITH THE HUBBLE!!”) at NewSpace 2002, and finds himself on a puddlejumper over the Pacific Ocean, somewhere south of New Zealand, that he thinks maybe he’s gone too far. “You just can’t cooperate, can you?” some stiff in a uniform yelled at him over the wireless, another in a long line of mis-managers that think they know what they’re doing, and really don’t know much beyond pitch and yaw.

But, then there’s the chair, and the sunsets, and the fact that he’s needed for more than his brain – there’s something tangled up his DNA that makes his skin, his body, his whole, more valuable than the sum of his parts. He doesn’t even hold it over Radek that long – just long enough to watch Radek’s glasses slide down his nose until they clatter on to the table. (“Well, that was fun.” “I think I hate you.” “I know I hate you. Come look at this equation for me, I think Simpson is hacking into my files and changing things as I sleep.” “You don’t sleep, John. You walk around like zombie.” “What can I say, I’m a multi-tasker.”)

He tells himself he didn’t see it coming when Miko corners him in the storage closet, thrusts her cold hands between the hems of his many layered shirts, but he totally did. He so did. He broke his favorite pair of reading glasses when he jumped away, careening into a stack of canned peaches, but her embarrassment earned him perfectly made coffee for a month. Which was so much more efficient than a single blowjob. Mostly.

*

There’s a sudden flurry of ridiculous excitement when he they finally get it all to work, when he finally gets the SGC to fork over the ZPM. Dr. Jackson stares longingly, and John can’t help but preen with glee when he shows O’Neill the map of the galaxy, a grin on his lips and a groan from the peanut (shudder) gallery when he drawls, “oh, did I do that?” for maximum effect. There’s plenty of uniforms, a couple who try to talk to him seriously, beyond grunts and pointing, and one specifically that tried to look at his data pad and question his math, but he was so, so happy to just get out, get away, get there, that he just signed all the papers and just smiled when the airmen who took his papers said, “Thank you for your cooperation.”

*

And then there was Atlantis: Lost City of Legend. Filled with dead plants and random bouts of Ancient-level stupidity, including, but not limited to:

1) A virus that almost killed him. (John would never say it, but he would have pissed himself if they hadn’t have run out of coffee in the mess that morning)

2) A really mad energy creature that completely broke the laws of thermodynamics and ate matter like it was popcorn. Oh, and it almost killed him. (But, but! He found this box of personal energy shield thingies and then McKay shot him in the leg and it didn’t hurt and it was kind of fun. Until the bullet ricocheted and took out the frame his first PhD was sitting in and then McKay wouldn’t stop laughing. But! Didn't die!)

3) A bunch of technology that only responded to certain people with certain genes, which, hello, was kind of cool on Earth, when there was only one chair and, like, not much to do with it except plot out courses to other galaxies, but here? Heck, even the doors were ATA-specific. John had to spend an hour every afternoon touching things for people. It was a total waste of his brilliance, and when he complained, Elizabeth just asked him very nicely to cooperate and help out the expedition. And then asked him very not nicely to take McKay’s order to join the first contact team, because if he wants to be a chief, then he ought to learn how to lead.

4) McKay. Well, McKay didn’t come with the dead plants and the random retroviruses and the touchy technology, but he came with the project, and he wasn’t bad, but seriously, the guy had to stop trying to correct John’s math. Even if he was right that one time. (“You’re accounting for Manning’s Coefficient more than once.” “What?! No I am most certainly not!” “No, you’re not, I just wanted to see all of you blow up. It’s right there!” “Major, get out of my lab!”)

*

Rod’s kind of like Sam in a way – all military bluster and government-education pedigree. But he is Canadian, so at least he’s nicer about it. Most times. Sometimes, when there’s nothing to run for his life from, John sits in the labs with Radek and wonders aloud why people waste their lives for the uniform. Radek tells him he has “daddy issues, you should watch more Oprah,” and sure, fine, whatever, John can see that – can see himself being totally pissed off that his father went off and killed himself and killed any love John may have had, could have had, for the sky, but really, he’s in Atlantis, surrounded by water on all sides, and what could be cooler than that? He may be completely uncoordinated, but for some reason he can surf, and it was the only thing that kept him from getting the shit kicked out of him at 3.4 high schools.

And he almost likes flying now, because no one else can do it better than he can -- and he only bitches about it because it’s expected. Plus, the fact that McKay can barely keep a straight line (“Oh, what was that, you designed planes for the SGC? How come you can’t get this little thing here to go where you want it?” “Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning!” “At least I got up in my own bed. Kirk.” "Oh, come on, that's not fair!")

But for the most part, John cooperates, or at least he tries, and it’s not always that McKay almost kills them – it’s just when there are natives involved and the natives happen to be women. Or small children. Or really anything that attaches itself to McKay’s BDUs and won’t let go. Then there's usually imminent death that John has to save them all from, but the outcome is usually worth it.

*

There’s a couple of things he wishes he could take back – Sumner on the desert planet, holding a gun to his head for one, telling him he's "changed"; Aiden on the space station, telling him to "get out of here!", blown to bits in a blink of an eye – but on the whole it’s been good. Terrifying. But good.

Oh, and there was that whole thing with the planet and the weapon and John really doesn’t like thinking about it, because then he remembers that the men who died there died because of him and he wishes he could blame Rod for it more, but he can’t, because Rod tried to stop him, so he just doesn’t think about it. Much. In the middle of the night. When it’s too dark to sneak out to the secret breakpoint just off the South Pier.

So, yeah, mostly, it’s been good. Cool.

*

And then there’s this whole hole-in-the-fabric-of-space thing, and he’d be more mad that Radek discovered it first if it wasn’t truly terrifying, and McKay’s all, “We have to do something,” and Sheppard does the first thing that comes to mind, doesn’t even think about it, not really, and tells him, in a mess of start-stops, communication digressed to frantic hand-waving and the sloshing of coffee all over the steps of the ‘gate room. He’s not sure how he ended up at the controls of the ‘jumper, one of the shields in Rodney’s hands, as they shout at each other about how to configure the damned thing (“You’re going to blow me up before I even get there!” “If you get there! Stop yelling so I can drive this damn thing, damn it! There’s a very large singularity to our left, and I’d rather not parallel park in it, thank you very much!!”). They draw straws, mostly because Elizabeth makes them, and John’s totally fine with losing until Rod winks out of existence and he’s left in the ‘jumper alone.

*

It’s almost a day later when Rod shows up, floating in space for a split second before Hermiod gets off his alien ass and teleports him onto the floor of the ‘gate room. John’s down the steps and on his knees next to Rod, Carson yelling above them, Elizabeth holding back tears from the balcony. Rod grabs at John, fingers twisted in his too loose tee shirt, shakes him closer until John’s glasses slide down the bridge of his nose, and crushes him into a hug.

“You should have seen it, John, you should have seen it.”

Rod then promptly passes out, which John is only gleeful over later -- when he finds out it was just Rod’s blood sugar acting up and not, like, a sign of, "oh, I don't know, death." (“All that inter-dimensional travel has got to be hard on the electrolytes,” Carson says, with all seriousness. John adds his name to The List.) When Rod wakes up in the infirmary, asking after the space-time continuum like it’s his kid, Teyla quietly shushes him, and hands him a handful of cashews and forces him to eat, ignoring John's "hardy-har-har," when she shakes the can in his direction.

John dances at the edges of the room, his eyes barely tracking the outline of Rod in the bed, his glasses useless in his pocket after the crush of bodies to get to the infirmary. “So, what was it like?” he finally asks.

“Fine. Different.” There’s a calculated silence. “It wasn’t here.”

John thinks about that for a second, tugs at the hem of his tee shirt, and waits until Ronon and Teyla slip out the door before he launches into all the ways Rod’s rescue plan could have gone wrong (including the fact that he can’t believe he trusted “of all people,” Radek, "any dimension’s Radek!"), how Ronon ate all of the science team’s chocolate while Rod was gone (“Do you know how hard it was to get the kind that’s not made in a factory that uses nuts! I totally blame Simpson. I think she thinks she has a chance with Ronon or something.”), and how everyone is stupid except for him (“Radek was okay while you were gone, but if you tell him, I’ll kill you.”), and he thought maybe, maybe he would have done anything to switch places with him, but then he might be dead and he really can’t handle his own self, not like he could handle another one, and seriously, seriously, “Look, I’m not good at, actually, I’m terrible at expressing, I don’t know what you’d call it,” “Feelings?” “Sure, okay, the point is – I don’t really have good, uh…” “Social skills.” “Fine, geez, Rod, shut up, I’m trying to tell you that you guys are the closest thing I have to a family, so I just want you to shut up and pretend we never had this conversation.” “Did Ronon really eat all the chocolate?” “Yes.” "Not cool." "I know."

*

Rod comes around more often, and John lets him. He tells himself that he doesn’t really mind it when Rod deigns to use his brain near John’s whiteboards, as long as he puts the dry erase markers back where he found them. And he doesn’t mind giving Rod flying lessons in return for someone else checking Kavanaugh’s atrocious math – and doesn’t mind getting his ass kicked by Teyla at sticks because he can see Rod hitting the floor thanks to Ronon a few steps away. Plus, Rod’s one personal item (an overweight copy of Crime and Punishment) turned out to be a false book stuffed full of DVRs detailing the entire run of Dr. Who. It took an entire bottle of Athosian wine (Rod had traded Halling the last of his hair gel) and the episode with the walking Stonehenge dudes, but John finally told Rod why he was so mad about him wrecking his degree way back then (“You remember? With the personal force field? And the gun? And the bang bang bang!” “I think I would have remembered if there was banging.” “Oh, seriously, what is wrong with you?”) -- because John had burns of his favorite X-Files episodes carefully stashed in the back of the frame, and the bullet totally ruined the disc that has the one where Scully gets a tattoo (“She takes her top off in that one, doesn’t she?” “Yep.” “I’d have yelled at me, too.”).

But it’s cool, it’s good, it’s different, but kind of awesome, and he acts like he’s not completely freaked out when Teyla comes to talk to him about Halling being a dick, or when Rod actually comes to the MENSA meeting once a month and only makes fun of the people John makes fun of, or when he actually takes Ronon down when they’re sparring. Once. Just the once. But, still. It’s efficient, yeah, being friends with your coworkers, with your teammates and if that makes him push a little farther, think a little harder, fly a little faster, well, then, that’s all right.

And cool. Definitely cool.