John thought about calling Elizabeth, but he didn�t know what to say to her; being in separate states for so long had left them with annoyingly little to talk about beyond smalltalk and work, which was best not spoken about over the phone, and, while he wouldn�t mind having one of the meaningless conversations about philosophy or who was hooking up with whom in which department�they always knew, or, at least, Elizabeth seemed to always know when a couple formed on Atlantis, and, for the most part, they didn�t care, except for once when the couple was on the same off-world team; they�d had to do some switching of teams then, but it hadn�t been anything major and no one had argued over the team-swapping. Elizabeth was, John had realized early on, very casual about dating under her command; they didn�t know how long they were going to be isolated from Earth, and it was foolhardy, she�d declared, to expect a thousand people to live their lives without sex or companionship or love. John actually longed to have one of their long talks about nothing and everything, usually over a cup of tea or a meal or a game of chess, where they both let the pressure of being in command fall away, at least for a little while. But there were only so many calls to each other they could make where they did that before some pencil-pusher or overly nosy pain in the ass looked at their cell records and asked a question to someone higher up about the true extent of the relationship between the two leaders of Atlantis.
John wasn�t a stupid man, nor was he an uninformed one. He�d heard all the rumours. He knew Elizabeth had to. And, sure, some of the cruder ones pissed him off, and he really hated it when people gossiped about Elizabeth or Teyla like they were whatever celebrity teen caught drinking or doing drugs or whatever, but, for the most part, the rumours were just a way for people to blow off steam, they all knew that, and he mostly ignored the gossipmongers. It was usually some distortion of the truth, the rumours that spread like freaking wildfire, but the distortion, while usually the fun part of gossip, was also the hurtful part, the part that left Teyla pouting and confused�the Athosian didn�t quite grasp the concept of gossip, her people being very open and honest about everything from health to sex to war to everything in between�and Elizabeth alternately fuming and laughing hysterically�depending on her mood, and who she heard the gossip from; if it was told right to her she usually laughed, if she overheard someone else talking about it she would usually fume, then find an isolated balcony (not theirs, theirs was too close to people, to her subordinates, and she was judged enough by them as it was) and let loose on the world, the universe, the people who talked about her like she was some drug addicted pop star, the Wraith (because her nice quiet scientific expedition had become the front line in a war that had been waging for tens of thousands of years and she wasn�t a General, she wasn�t meant to sent troops into battle; she was there to keep peace between the scientists and the military types sent to protect them, not to help turn the scientists into military types) and everything else, sometimes going back to her father�s death, sometimes just yelling about the most current hell she was going through, oftentimes switching languages with as much rapidity as she switched topics, Spanish, Japanese, Czech, two different regional Arabic dialects, fucking Goa�uld, Ancient, broken Italian, poorly accented French, swearing like a longshoreman the whole time.
Samantha, John knew, was going to spend most of her remaining time at the SGC in meetings with various SGC scientists, passing along her research, moving projects around to other labs, other departments, because, really, there wasn�t much that Sam didn�t take on, even though her degrees weren�t as all-encompassing as she might lead people to believe. Normally John wouldn�t care, would call her up, but it had been so long since they had been in the same place at the same time, and their lives were so insanely different than when they were flying missions in the Middle East, that he didn�t dare interrupt Sam while she was working. She�d been calling him pretty regularly, having promised to keep an eye on Elizabeth and Rodney for him, and to keep him as in the loop as possible on the more crucial details involved in the preparing to return to Pegasus with a whole new compliment of people.
He hated being away from the thick of things, even if the thick of things was, at the moment, as dull as bartering for funding and personnel and equipment, which, it seemed, had been all Sam had been able to report for the past few days. He felt like he should be there, be by Elizabeth�s side, while she did everything in her not inconsiderable powers to get Atlantis everything it could possible get in order to ensure that she didn�t have to fill that morbid death log of hers, that they wouldn�t have to make any more apology and condolence tapes; that they wouldn�t have to make any more floods of apology and condolence tapes like they had between the siege and leaving for Earth, after the first round of tapes had already been sent and the death count had been ratcheted up, not only by their own personnel, but by Colonel Everett�s people as well.
Still, he�d been in the Air Force for most of his life, and he�d been ordered to stay at Nellis until