Then he came to Atlantis.
Immediately he�d found a family in his team. Teyla was the calming mother figure� who could, and had on pretty much every occasion, kick his ass all the way back to the Milky way. Rodney was the quirky adopted brother type, not really belonging (in the field) but there anyway, because John wanted him there, and Elizabeth had given him that enigmatic smile of hers and said something about how she was going to order that John and Rodney be on the same team anyway so it was good he�d put McKay�s name on the list of people he wanted on his team. And Ford� Ford was the hyperactive puppy, so eager to get right in the middle of the mess, sometimes creating them on his own, sometimes getting blamed for them, sometimes just walking right into a situation that, despite his enthusiasm, he was too green to fully appreciate; Ford was a green puppy with a scary amount of knowledge on explosives�he liked to blow things up, John had never seen him happier than the day he�d ordered Ford to blow the stump on the Genii homeworld with some of the extra C-4 he knew the young Lieutenant carried with him in his vest. And, of course, Elizabeth was the boss, not really a part of the official team, but she had quickly become a part of the team anyway, though her roll was more passive, her job consisting of sitting at home worrying about her people, then writing about it, then reading about it, then hearing about it, then repeating ad nausium. Then there were the others. Carson, who was, John refused to admit aloud, like his grandmother, all concern and anticdotes and strange sayings that meant nothing to John but evidently had meaning somewhere in the mish-mash of words, despite the fact that they often left John feeling like he had been thrust into a Boggle bowl, or a particularly sadistic book of Mad Libs. Radek, who was like the eccentric cousin no one really understood, who was amusing in a harmless sort of way, and often underestimated, falling into the shadow of the rest of the family�mostly Rodney, in Radek�s case�and, while not quite happy with his lot in the clan, never unhappy enough to try to do anything about it. And, like any family, there were the more distant relatives, people like Miko Kusanagi, and Kate Heightmeyer, and poor Peter Grodin, and Bates and the rest of the military contingent, and the scientists, and the people who didn�t fall into either category, the ones who had come as floaters, who worked in the kitchens or the laundry or did odd jobs that never would have gotten done if left up to either the military or scientific contingents of the expedition. John knew all their names, knew all their faces, and if he couldn�t link the name and the face together he figured that was okay, because, really, he didn�t know the names of his nieces and nephews�he�d heard that Patty had been pregnant when he left for Atlantis, and he knew Angela had two kids, though he had been so far removed from the lives of his two older sisters by the time his divorce had been finalized, two years before his transfer to McMurdo following his almost-Court-Marshal, that he didn�t know if there were more than the three he knew of, or if three was it, or if Patty had lost the baby, as she had the two before it, the first to a horrible car accident that nearly cost the lives of three, Patty and her husband, Ben, as well as their unborn son, the second to a traumatic stillbirth, a girl that time, at three days shy of her due date, both before John had graduated from the Academy.
John had been the surprise baby, years after his sisters were born, entering their teens, and his mother had fallen into a pattern of depression and alcohol and suppressed anger, while his father had fallen to a pattern of alcohol and expressed rage, leaving baby John to be, largely, raised by his sisters, his sisters who, he knew, loved him dearly, but didn�t understand why he lived his life the way he did. Why he didn�t trust that God was looking out for him, even though he found it hard to believe in a God who would allow so much suffering and pain and war and death fill one rather small world. Why he chose to join the Air Force instead of using his brain and aptitude for math and sciences (biology and physics were his strong suits, but he had never loved them, had never loved math, until he realized that, physics and math would get him into the cockpit of a fighter jet, or a helicopter, where he could make a difference in the world so full of hate and pain and death, even the tiniest difference, because the world was too screwed up for him not to at least try) to do something worthy, like become a doctor or an accountant, something with a big pay cheque and low danger and, still help people, help the world a little bit, if that was what he wanted out of his career. Patty and Angela never understood him, John knew, and that was okay, at least while he was married to Nancy, because they had adored Nancy, especially when she was trying to convince him to leave the Air Force, and if he was married to a woman like Nancy, a nice, normal girl who worked in a bank and loved spending time with her sisters in law, then there was still hope for their brother. But then he�d gone to Afghanistan, and done more good, he believed, than he really had before, and he�d tried to not leave his people behind, and he had managed to bring the body home, which was more than would have been done if he hadn�t defied orders, and when he was transferred back Stateside for the Article 32 hearing, a precursor to a General Court Marshal. His Article 32 hearing had come though saying that, yes, he had disobeyed orders, but that, considering the fact that John found Captain Holland alive but that he hadn�t survived the trip home. He�s survived until they got a helo�an old Russian piece of crap that took John a minute to figure out, as everything was labelled in faded and scratched Cyrillic, which he had no clue how to read, though he figured out how to get the tub in the air and to the base, though it was slow going, the engine almost died three times on him, and all his attention was focused on getting back to the base, which led to Holland bleeding out in the back on the helo mere miles from the base. The Judge his Article 32 had been heard by, and the JAG prosecutor had both agreed that, yes, he had defied orders, but that, if his