John was waiting for a lot of shoes to drop at that particular moment.
Being the military commander of Atlantis; it was only a matter of time before he got that job ripped away from him.
Living on Atlantis itself; with so much progress being made on the ATA gene therapy, and the fact that more and more people had been discovered to have the gene, even within the SGC itself, it could be decided that someone with his record wasn�t wanted on such an important mission any longer.
Someone going out of their way to get him pushed through training and qualifications when other forces were trying to keep him in Nevada, for whatever reason, for weeks before his training was due to begin; he didn�t know what potential other shoe could drop there, but he knew that one was going to, and he really hoped he was prepared for when it did.
John found himself approaching everything tactically, something he rarely did unless he was off-world or in the middle of something like the Genii incursion during the storm. It was driving him completely insane.
For once he just wanted the other shoe to drop already.
Landry was late, dealing with another SG team down in the science labs according to Walter, so Elizabeth had settled herself in one of the briefing room chairs to wait. The SGC had never been her home base, not really; even when she�d been in charge she had never felt all that comfortable within the depths of the mountain. There was far too much cement and steel and re-circulated air and not enough daylight and freedom for her liking. Before she arrived on Atlantis, though, Elizabeth had never really had a true home base, not her childhood home, not the boarding school campus, not her townhouse in DC or the two-storey fixer-upper with the great garden she�d purchased when she moved to Colorado. Part of that, Elizabeth knew, was due to the fact that, until Atlantis, she had never really spent a lot of time in one place, other than the boarding school, but that hadn�t been what anyone would consider a home; she spent so much of her life travelling, staying in hotels or on military bases or tents or whatever was necessary for that particular job, sleeping on planes and carrying her life with her in a laptop case and a carry-on rolling suitcase, she had never stayed in one place long enough to really feel like she could call it home. And, like everywhere else before Atlantis, the SGC felt just as strange, as unwelcoming, as any hotel, motel, military base, tent, freezing alcove in the middle of Antarctica, ever did. Except it didn�t, because the SGC was familiar in a way that, excluding Atlantis, nowhere else had ever been.
The SGC was familiar, at least in the way that she understood how everything worked. She knew the protocols for teams leaving, for teams arriving. She knew the sound of the Iris closing and Walter�s voice announcing whose IDC was coming through, or which chevron was engaged or locked. She knew the hum of the fluorescents and the steady clomp-clomp-clomp of military issue boots on painted cement. She knew the way the files in storage were sorted and how to pull up more recent reports on the computer. She knew the combo to the safe in Landry�s office, since it hadn�t been replaced since General West had sat there, so she knew that at least six people knew the combo as well�General West, General Hammond, both retired, General Bauer, dishonerably discharged after the reckless order he�d given that had nearly destroyed the SGC and would have eventually destroyed the entire planet, Elizabeth herself, Jack, and now Landry�and she knew the way her wrist and fingers would twist and turn, three to the right to 46, two to the left to 92, then straight to 3, before the safe clicked and her hand moved to the handle. She knew that Walter was alarmingly efficient, and that everyone loved the short bespeckled airman, enough so that he was constantly finding himself being promoted to a higher rank. She knew that each SG team was a family in and of itself, and that all the SG teams, together, were a big extended family. She knew that the main elevator�s number �26� button no longer actually had the numerals on it, as it was the level with the Stargate on it, and it was the button that was most often pressed with more pressure than was strictly required. She knew that the briefing room table was a few heavy file boxes and a bad day away from disintegrating completely, and that the carpet carried blood and coffee and mud and god-knew-what-else stains from over eight years of off-world missions and briefings and debriefings. She knew that the third bed from the main doors of the Infirmary had a light over it that drove every patient crazy and therefore was rarely utilized. She knew that the microphone in the observation room overlooking Isolation 6 was constantly getting stuck on VOX, and that down on the bottom-most level of the SGC there was a room with eighty bunk beds, sans mattresses, that had been moved down there when all the bunker rooms (that had been outfitted with the metal bunk beds for visitors and exhausted SGC personnel in the early days) had been transformed into VIP suites and office spaces once the Program survived its first few shut-down attempts. She knew that in what had once been Jack�s office, when he was still leader of SG-1, there was a �Goa�uld family tree�, with a line through the names of all the System Lords they had killed, and she knew that the name �Apohpis� was written and crossed out multiple times, each with increasing frustration evident in the re-writing, and that, the final copy of the name had a big smiley face and a bunch of stars beside it, along with the words �for sure this time� in Jack�s chickenscratch�and she knew, since she had stopped in there since getting back to Earth, to see Jack�s old office and to, she had ?to admit, see the mural, that it was still there, though there were newnames on the �family