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There’s a thing about him: John was never very good at baseball.
He could field just fine. He had a good throwing arm and decent aim, but none of that helped him at the plate.
“It’s your timing,” his little league coach said, the season John quit.
Dave was a great hitter, and that just made it worse. John’s little brother was a full year too young for the team, but because their father’s company sponsored it, the coach let him on. He hit a home run in his very first game.
Golf, John was good at. There was no risk of swinging behind the ball when the ball didn’t move.
He gave up piano lessons for the same reason. His mother insisted that both her boys learn to play. Dave whined and complained because he wanted to be out playing baseball instead, but John hated it for another reason. It should have been just like math—whole-notes and half-notes and quarter-notes with tails on them. John was great at math, and it didn’t help him at all.
“You have to work on your timing, John.”
His teacher used to slap her hand against the wood of the piano in rhythm, trying to give him a framework, and John knew everyone in that wing of the house could hear him missing the beat.
So he quit, like he quit most things he wasn’t good at in his life—being a son, being a husband.
McKay plays piano, or he used to. He says he was pretty good at it. It’s unlikely that John will ever be able to verify the claim.
That has been happening more and more since they found out about the Wraith hive ships coming to obliterate them: people dropping personal facts about themselves into conversations. Ford was raised by his grandparents, and his grandma makes peach-jalapeño pies. Stackhouse is an Eagle Scout. The silver pocket watch on Elizabeth’s desk belonged to her father.
It makes John uncomfortable—not knowing these things about people, per se, but the unspoken motivation behind it. There’s no reason John should care that McKay has a sister and that he once considered a career as a professional musician, but McKay tells him anyway. It feels like being handed an envelope with a last will and testament inside, a silent just in case. If they all die together when the Wraith ships arrive, the members of the Atlantis expedition don’t want to do it as strangers.
John doesn’t reciprocate in the moment, not to McKay and not to anyone else, even after he figures out what’s behind the collection of personal confessions he’s now carrying around. Carson always wanted to see the Grand Canyon but never got around to it. Peter Grodin left his collection of twenty-five rare orchids with his mother. Doc Heightmeyer took ballet for seven years. Elizabeth did too.
It’s not that John necessarily wants to separate himself from the others. He doesn’t want to die a stranger either, there’s just nothing about his past that he wants any of them to know.
The timing problem that plagued his after-school activities disappeared the first time John went to a shooting range. With a target and a deadly weapon in his hand, the distracting chatter in his mind went stone quiet. It was the same the first time he flew a plane, and that calm focus only increased with the difficulty of the scenario. It was such a compelling feeling that he didn’t quit, not even when it became clear that he would never be a model Air Force officer.
It balanced out, from his perspective. He sucked at following orders, but he was very good at the rest of it. From a helicopter, he could hit a moving target with nothing but a two-second line of sight. He can thread the needle of a spinning orbital Stargate with a puddle-jumper at two hundred k.p.h. without even scratching the paint.
This is the best version of him—a leader, with Elizabeth’s trust and the respect of his people. His whole messy past of failures and false starts is in another galaxy. He is as close as he has ever been to feeling at home in his own skin.
It’s a shame he probably won’t get to live in it for much longer.
*
The night Elizabeth tells him about the ballet thing—tells Heightmeyer, really, but he’s eating at the same mess hall table—he follows her back to her office. They revisit the list of fallback planets they’ve already discarded, hoping they missed a diamond in the rough. Could they live with near-hourly earthquakes? How long could they last without edible animal life?
When his eyes cross at the letters and numbers in front of him, he watches her instead. What must she have looked like, a little girl with a ballet bun and a frilly tutu? She must have had freckles; she gets them when she spends time in the sun. They popped out on her cheeks and above her collarbone on the day they all went to help the Athosians plant crops at the settlement. She had her hair half-pulled back in a paintbrush-short ponytail, and he remembers how her curls sprang loose when she took the elastic out. How soft they looked, even with bits of dirt in them.
“… John?”
Caught. “Ballet, huh?”
She rolls her eyes. He can still see a freckle or two, in stark contrast to how pale she is from lack of sleep. “I was no good, I promise.”
He can’t imagine her being terrible at anything, not for long. “But you stuck with it for seven years?”
“My friends were all there.” She gives him a little shrug, with a twist of her lips. “And there’s always the hope, right?”
Hope—that they’ll live out the week. That one day, they’ll get to harvest those crops they planted together.
He feels the blank space she’s leaving in the conversation.
The secret he offers into it isn’t his. “You know McKay used to play the piano?”
“Yes. He told me.”
Oh. “He’s telling everyone, I guess.”
“I suppose we’re all thinking about the roads not taken.”
If John had said no, when his coin flipped heads down. If he’d followed orders in Afghanistan and never been exiled to Antarctica in the first place. If he’d stayed home, become a business magnate like his father, like his brother. If he’d never met her.
He turns to the next page in the list. “So. M43-891.”
“-891,” she echoes. He hears the disappointment in her voice, but it goes away quickly as they continue on, planet by useless planet.
He should say something, he decides, too late. Tell her about flipping that coin—she’ll like that, knowing that her sales pitch in Antarctica was convincing enough to override random chance. If she asks the right follow-up questions, he might even figure out how to say that he doesn’t regret it, no matter the outcome. That he’d rather die as this John Sheppard, the one she helped draw out of him, than any version he might have become in the Milky Way.
He missed his chance, though. They’re talking business, and then Zelenka comes in with an update on the self-destruct program, and the next day there’s the Ancient satellite and there’s no space for anything else.
His timing, and all.
*
He’s going to die.
That’s an inherent risk in his career, and one he always understood. The first time he put on a uniform, he accepted the chance that he would die in one—by bullet, he figured, or roadside IED, or a chopper crashed in the sand.
There’s no chance left to it, though. He knows how it will happen. By the Ancient radar tracking his path to the Wraith hive ship, he knows when.
“If this works, somebody might have to do it again.”
“Understood,” Elizabeth says over the radio. He thinks he’ll never be able to hear her voice again without remembering how it sounded when she told him to go.
It’s another beat before he realizes that he’ll never get to hear her voice again at all.
Normally, with a target in his sights, his mind is blank of everything else—but this time, it’s different. It’s not fear he feels, it’s regret, that there’s no time left to share any of the stupid things everyone else has been telling each other for two weeks. He knows exactly how this ends, in less than a minute, and she is never going to know.
He flipped a coin, and it came up tails.
He stared at her freckles in the Athosian fields and wanted, so badly, to know how her hair would feel between his fingers.
He never hit a home run, not once. He always swung the bat too late.
The radio is silent, and it feels unbearably important that she’s still there, listening. The Wraith ship is large in his field of view, and he can’t manage a single word, not even the obvious one: Goodbye.
His mind goes quiet.
*
Colonel Caldwell, it turns out, has great timing.
*
John learns more personal facts in the days after their unlikely victory, but none directly from the people themselves. The stories get traded around the communal wake, once the bodies are counted and prepared for their journey back to Earth through the wormhole. Captain Leonard lived in eighteen countries. Doctor Carpenter used to raise show rabbits. Lieutenant Farris got scouted by the Mets in college, but joined the Air Force instead.
Elizabeth has a boyfriend.
He learns that one from Carson, a week after they get back to Earth. Elizabeth has a boyfriend, and she put his name on Carson’s list to consider for new personnel. Elizabeth has a boyfriend, and John didn’t know.
It’s not like it would have mattered if he did know. The feelings slowly kindling inside him started without his conscious permission. She was already off-limits, because she was effectively his commanding officer, and they were holding a city together with four hands. So, she had a boyfriend the whole time on a planet none of them expected to ever see again—if John had known his name, would that really have stopped him from falling for her?
Simon Wallace. Doctor Simon Wallace.
He feels an entirely unearned sense of relief when he looks over the Daedalus passenger manifest and that name isn’t on it.
Still, it bothers him that he didn’t know. She still hasn’t told him she went home to someone—but why would she, when he has never told her a single thing about himself?
He circles around that for a week, cooped up on a spaceship. The Daedalus hyperdrive engine has a low thrum that reverberates throughout the featureless hallways, so different than the silence of a puddle-jumper in space. Whenever things get too quiet, it feels like part of him is still there.
*
Elizabeth has staked out one of the few windows on the ship, so it’s never hard to find her. It has become something of an evening ritual: he pours himself a cup of disgusting, hours-old decaf, sits across from her, and doesn’t say anything. Sometimes other members of the expedition or the Daedalus crew fill the other tables with conversation, but tonight they’re alone.
She’s reading something. Every minute or so, her finger taps against the screen of her tablet, moving to the next page.
“I really suck at baseball.”
She raises an eyebrow and looks up.
“As a kid, I mean.”
Elizabeth sets her tablet aside. Her expression says this should be good.
That’s all he has planned, but with her full attention on him, he realizes that if he ever wants to know, this is the time to ask. “You didn’t tell me you have a boyfriend.”
She winces. “Past tense.”
“Oh.” He keeps his face as neutral as he can. In the quiet stretch before she speaks again, he notices that her gold necklace is gone. Once, in a long and boring meeting, he remembers wanting to trace his finger along the chain.
“He didn’t want this.”
John can’t imagine that, can’t think of a single thing on all of planet Earth that a man could prize over Elizabeth saying come, make love with me in another galaxy. “He’s crazy.”
She smiles, and oh, that does things to him. “Or sane.”
“Overrated.” With that, he raps his knuckles on the table and stands up. His coffee cup is empty, and he’s already past his usual tolerance for personal sharing.
He feels lighter, though, having said something. Maybe, in a few days or weeks, he’ll say something else.
She wishes him goodnight, and there’s a little more depth in her smile. When he almost died, when she told him to go, it cracked something open between them. He doesn’t want it to close.
Not dying as strangers—not living as strangers—has its appeal.
There’s no rush, though. They have eleven more days on this ship. Atlantis is out of the line of fire, for now. They could have months, even years, before the Wraith come looking for them again.
He has plenty of time.