�Well, my political capital is less than deep in the black. But I�ve never liked doing things the easy way,� Jack said. He let out a rather pained sigh. �More accurately I�ve never been given the chance to do things the easy way. But why start now, right?�
�Jack�� Elizabeth started only to be cut off by the General.
�I�m not hunting for pity, Elizabeth. That�s not who I am. It�ll be rough, for a while, but it�s not like I haven�t scraped by on charm and wit before,� Jack said, infusing his voice with a jocular tone that Elizabeth knew he just wasn�t feeling up for at that moment. �Tell Sheppard he�s pulled guinea pig duty. Someone�ll call you when his promotion becomes official.� he said before uttering a quick goodbye and hanging up.
As Elizabeth hung up the phone her eyes flicked to the clock on the wall. She was supposed to be in on a conference call with the President in Landry�s office in five minutes. Telling herself that she hadn�t chosen the time for the call, and that five minutes was not enough time to deal with how upset John was going to get over finding out he was going to be a guinea pig for the scientists at Area 51 instead of coming back to Colorado like he thought, Elizabeth left the office she�d been stuck in for the past few hours. She wasn�t avoiding the call, she told herself. She wasn�t avoiding it; she was waiting until she had the time to deal with whatever fallout there might be.
She knew she was lying to herself, though. If it was anyone else, anyone other than John Sheppard, she would have made the call, given the order, and gone to the conference call and be done with it.
With John it was different.
With John everything was different.
And Elizabeth was just starting to understand just how different everything was when it came to John.
After the initial flight, John got two more flights in before he was officially qualified on the 302�s. Normally training would be much more rigorous, both because it was a very new ride for John, and because it had been so long since he had actually flown a jet, but there was, really, nothing normal about the circumstances, so John figured it wasn�t so strange that everything was so accelerated.
General O�Neill, apparently, had done more than make a call to get John in a cockpit sooner rather than later. He�d also passed along the story of the helo and the drone, even going so far as to omit the fact that John hadn�t gone left when O�Neill said left, that he had gone right, pulled a fake-out on the drone, and then gone left. Apparently anyone who got flight recommendations from Jack O�Neill didn�t have to jump through as many hoops as were generally required to pass their quals. It was strange, a man John didn�t know, a man John got the distinct impression didn�t like him beyond the fact that he�d saved both their lives that one time, a man whose name always seemed to be uttered either with the kind of quiet reverence given to the truest of true heroes or with the kind of contempt that John wasn�t entirely unfamiliar with; it was strange that Jack O�Neill was doing so much to get John pushed through a process that was created to be un-push-through-able. And, while John wasn�t about to question it aloud, that didn�t mean he wasn�t questioning it silently, repeatedly, with increasing frequency.
John couldn�t help but wonder when the other shoe was going to drop.
All his life he�d been waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Mom�s sick; other shoe drops and she�s dead and John�s out of the house because his sisters are long gone and his father is an ass.
Married to Nancy; other shoe drops and she disappears when he needs her during his Article 32 hearing; and then the other-other shoe drops�because their marriage was so messed up it had three metaphorical feet that dropped footwear�he�s cleared, given only a black mark on his record that he can, conceivably, work off, and he comes home to celebrate with his wife and the furniture is gone, all but the wooden kitchen table, the wooden kitchen table that had a light shining down on it, illuminating the divorce papers, a sticky-note on top giving John her lawyer�s number, and asking him to find a lawyer himself, read everything over, and sign as soon as possible.
Fly to the middle of nowhere in Antarctica; other shoe drops and aliens exist, the test flight crash from a few months earlier was a massive battle with a thing that was half Ascended and half Goa�uld and completely intent upon destroying Earth since he knew he couldn�t take over without wiping everyone out and, oh yeah, someone is trying to kill him with an Ancient Drone they know nothing about and somehow activated.
Listen to some Scottish doctor ramble nervously about Stargates and Ancients and special genes that activate technology; other shoe drops, the �really quite slim� chance of him having the gene is a lot