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Box of Sunshine (SGA, team gen)
Box of Sunshine ~ team gen, 1700 wds
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penknife at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fandom_stocking. Originally posted here at fandom_stocking.
John's team vanished while he was stretching his legs -- or at least, stretching his legs was why he'd told Teyla he was taking a break from the trade negotiations with the Lehari, though the reality was closer to "walking the perimeter with a P90". From Teyla's rueful little smile, she knew exactly what he was doing. On the other hand, once he'd answered a few questions from the Lehari on the matter of trading for weapons, his part in the negotiations was basically done. And John did not intend to get ambushed by high-tech Amish again.
Near as he could tell, though, the Lehari were exactly what they appeared to be: a bucolic farming people with fields of grain and draft animals that looked like big shaggy goats with curling horns. Still, when he came back to the pavilion in the town square where they'd been conducting negotiations and found that his entire team had vanished, his first thought was: Oh shit, I knew it.
Then Teyla appeared around the corner of a barn and waved at him. "John, come here! You will like this."
She didn't look like she was being coerced. In fact, she looked ... delighted, her eyes sparkling and cheeks flushed with happiness. Not that this really meant a whole lot -- Lucius Lavin came instantly to mind, and John kept his hand on his P90 as he walked around the corner of the barn into the shade. Here he found the rest of his team clustered around what turned out to be a large wooden box of puppies.
John had never seen puppies this young. They were really just little balls of fur with small useless legs, more like beanie babies than live animals -- except beanie babies didn't bump into each other, squeak, and flail around. Their eyes were still shut, their little blind heads questing about as they rolled over each other. There were six of them -- four in the box, one in Ronon's hands and one crawling around on Rodney's lap.
It was pretty much the most adorable thing that John had ever seen.
A farmer who was, John presumed, the puppies' owner was sitting on a bale of hay next to the box, with one hand on the head of a skinny, nervous-looking dog that kept eyeing the humans as if she wanted to take a bite out of them.
"Excellent hunters," the farmer was saying as Teyla and John joined the others at the box. "Champion bloodlines. We can include a breeding pair in the trade deal."
Every puppy was a different color, and the mother had a distinct eau de mutt about her as well. John figured she'd gotten herself knocked up by a neighbor dog and the guy was just trying to cash in on it, and he could see that Teyla was equally skeptical. However, he had to admit that the little furballs were pretty neat.
"Here, John," Teyla said, and put a reddish one into his hands. It filled his palm with its warm, soft weight; they really were very much like living bean bags.
"Uh, hi," John said to it. The puppy squirmed a bit, nestled its blunt muzzle between two of his fingers and appeared to fall asleep.
John looked around at his team. Ronon's puppy was a little more advanced than the others -- its eyes were already cracking open to show slivers of milky blue -- and had latched onto one of his dreads, gumming it enthusiastically. Teyla had another one cupped in her hands, resting against her cheek. Rodney's one puppy had now become two puppies, nestled together in a fold of his BDUs. This left one puppy all alone in the box; it began to squeak sadly, and the mother bristled, so John picked it up along with the one he already held. Now he had a double handful of puppies. They rolled together into the center of his cupped palms and flailed their useless little legs, but they didn't seem to be exactly minding the experience. At least, the sad one wasn't squeaking anymore.
"A breeding pair?" Rodney said hopefully, and John roused himself out of a puppy-induced bliss coma enough to think Oh crap.
"Come on, guys," he said. "We can't take a puppy back to Atlantis."
"Why not?" Rodney challenged.
"Yeah," Ronon said. "We always had dogs at our base. Good for morale."
"Having a pet would be good for Torren," Teyla put in.
John felt the situation sliding rapidly out of his puppy-filled hands. He tried to imagine Woolsey's face if they came back through the gate with a box of puppies. "We just ... can't, okay? We're in the middle of a war with space vampires; puppies aren't exactly -- Look, who's going to walk a dog when we're offworld or captured on a hiveship or turning into a bug, okay? They'd be happier here."
Now his entire team was looking at him like he'd taken away their puppy, which, okay, was pretty much what he'd just done. Also, the farmer was giving them an odd look of his own. John hoped he hadn't just blown their negotiations with excessive honesty. "Uh, turning into a bug -- that's a metaphor," he explained weakly. "It's not like we get captured or something weird happens more than once in a -- Teyla, give me some help here."
"They are far too young to be away from their mother," Teyla said, looking down softly at her own puppy, and put it gently back in the box. John relaxed a bit. "So we must come back in six weeks or so," she added.
"To visit the puppies," John stressed hastily. "To visit."
******
The rest of the trade negotiations went smoothly, but on the walk back to the gate, John had to deal with a depressed and sulky team.
"Oh, come on," he said for the gazillionth time. "It's not that they aren't cute as hell. It's just -- we live in a war zone, guys."
They were walking through a field of grass that seemed to go on and on to the horizon, golden in the sun. There was something timeless about this place -- about a lot of the Pegasus Galaxy, really. Life didn't move fast; it just rolled slowly from one culling to the next.
"It is not that you are wrong, John," Teyla said wistfully. "It is just ..." She trailed off.
"I miss my cat," Rodney said.
"I miss my keldat," Ronon echoed.
"What's a keldat?" John asked, fully expecting it to be six feet tall with poisonous fangs, but Ronon held out his hands about a foot apart.
"Little furry thing, about so big. Had one when I was a kid."
"Like a cat?" Rodney asked. "You've seen cats in movies, right? They don't seem to have any here in Pegasus."
"Sort of," Ronon said. His eyes were distant. "Striped fur, six legs. These can swim though. Can cats swim?"
"Er, not most of them," Rodney admitted.
"I do not know of such animals," Teyla said.
"Don't think they lived anywhere but Sateda." He looked away from the others. "Probably they're all gone now."
John suddenly felt like the world's biggest heel, making him give up the puppy.
"My first pet was a hunting hawk," Teyla said, causing all three of the men to look at her in varying degrees of surprise. "I captured her before she was fledged, and raised her to hunt with me." A nostalgic smile touched her lips. "She was beautiful, her eyes so fierce and wild. I kept her for two years and finally let her go."
"I had a dog when I was a kid," Rodney said. "A golden retriever, the classic pet dog of every kid's childhood. Which is probably why Dad bought us that kind of dog instead of some other kind."
John had heard this story already, on the recording that Rodney had made for his sister, but he listened anyway without interrupting as Rodney talked about the dog running away. This time around, John noticed, the story was terser and less loaded with recriminations against his parents for letting it happen.
It was odd to get hit, sometimes, with these reminders of how much they'd all changed in the last five years. Mostly, life just went on, and then all of a sudden it would haul back and slap him in the face with one of those reminders. Sometimes it was something dark -- the way the list of names of the dead kept growing; the double-take he would sometimes do when he walked past the office that used to be Elizabeth's and saw Sam or Woolsey there instead.
But sometimes it happened in bright sunlight, and it was Rodney telling a story to his teammates with an occasional self-deprecating laugh, rather than talking to a tape recorder with a bitter twist to his mouth. It was Ronon's wistful smile when he spoke of Sateda, not gray despair or hot, sharp-edged fury. Or perhaps it was just the fact that he spoke of it at all, rather than hiding it between a wall made of seven years' grief and anger.
"Did you have any pets, John?" Teyla asked. Her tone was gentle, and he knew she wouldn't push it if he just shrugged off the question and left them to their reminiscing while he listened contentedly, staying outside the circle of their memories and wistful laughter.
But instead he said, "Yeah, Dave and I had a hamster once. Whole hamster family, actually."
"Dave?" Rodney asked immediately, his eyebrows going way up. Ronon said nothing, of course, just glanced at John with his eyes deep and solemn, like he wanted to make sure John was up to this.
"My brother," John said.
And, as they walked across the field in the sun, he told them about that summer: the unexpectedly pregnant hamster Mom bought them, who subsequently had her litter in a little box lined with one of Dave's T-shirts. It was one of the last times that he and his brother had done something together that they'd both enjoyed -- taking care of those baby hamsters, enjoying the sweetness of a shared secret.
Something like this, maybe.
~
For
penknife at fandom_stocking. Originally posted here at fandom_stocking.John's team vanished while he was stretching his legs -- or at least, stretching his legs was why he'd told Teyla he was taking a break from the trade negotiations with the Lehari, though the reality was closer to "walking the perimeter with a P90". From Teyla's rueful little smile, she knew exactly what he was doing. On the other hand, once he'd answered a few questions from the Lehari on the matter of trading for weapons, his part in the negotiations was basically done. And John did not intend to get ambushed by high-tech Amish again.
Near as he could tell, though, the Lehari were exactly what they appeared to be: a bucolic farming people with fields of grain and draft animals that looked like big shaggy goats with curling horns. Still, when he came back to the pavilion in the town square where they'd been conducting negotiations and found that his entire team had vanished, his first thought was: Oh shit, I knew it.
Then Teyla appeared around the corner of a barn and waved at him. "John, come here! You will like this."
She didn't look like she was being coerced. In fact, she looked ... delighted, her eyes sparkling and cheeks flushed with happiness. Not that this really meant a whole lot -- Lucius Lavin came instantly to mind, and John kept his hand on his P90 as he walked around the corner of the barn into the shade. Here he found the rest of his team clustered around what turned out to be a large wooden box of puppies.
John had never seen puppies this young. They were really just little balls of fur with small useless legs, more like beanie babies than live animals -- except beanie babies didn't bump into each other, squeak, and flail around. Their eyes were still shut, their little blind heads questing about as they rolled over each other. There were six of them -- four in the box, one in Ronon's hands and one crawling around on Rodney's lap.
It was pretty much the most adorable thing that John had ever seen.
A farmer who was, John presumed, the puppies' owner was sitting on a bale of hay next to the box, with one hand on the head of a skinny, nervous-looking dog that kept eyeing the humans as if she wanted to take a bite out of them.
"Excellent hunters," the farmer was saying as Teyla and John joined the others at the box. "Champion bloodlines. We can include a breeding pair in the trade deal."
Every puppy was a different color, and the mother had a distinct eau de mutt about her as well. John figured she'd gotten herself knocked up by a neighbor dog and the guy was just trying to cash in on it, and he could see that Teyla was equally skeptical. However, he had to admit that the little furballs were pretty neat.
"Here, John," Teyla said, and put a reddish one into his hands. It filled his palm with its warm, soft weight; they really were very much like living bean bags.
"Uh, hi," John said to it. The puppy squirmed a bit, nestled its blunt muzzle between two of his fingers and appeared to fall asleep.
John looked around at his team. Ronon's puppy was a little more advanced than the others -- its eyes were already cracking open to show slivers of milky blue -- and had latched onto one of his dreads, gumming it enthusiastically. Teyla had another one cupped in her hands, resting against her cheek. Rodney's one puppy had now become two puppies, nestled together in a fold of his BDUs. This left one puppy all alone in the box; it began to squeak sadly, and the mother bristled, so John picked it up along with the one he already held. Now he had a double handful of puppies. They rolled together into the center of his cupped palms and flailed their useless little legs, but they didn't seem to be exactly minding the experience. At least, the sad one wasn't squeaking anymore.
"A breeding pair?" Rodney said hopefully, and John roused himself out of a puppy-induced bliss coma enough to think Oh crap.
"Come on, guys," he said. "We can't take a puppy back to Atlantis."
"Why not?" Rodney challenged.
"Yeah," Ronon said. "We always had dogs at our base. Good for morale."
"Having a pet would be good for Torren," Teyla put in.
John felt the situation sliding rapidly out of his puppy-filled hands. He tried to imagine Woolsey's face if they came back through the gate with a box of puppies. "We just ... can't, okay? We're in the middle of a war with space vampires; puppies aren't exactly -- Look, who's going to walk a dog when we're offworld or captured on a hiveship or turning into a bug, okay? They'd be happier here."
Now his entire team was looking at him like he'd taken away their puppy, which, okay, was pretty much what he'd just done. Also, the farmer was giving them an odd look of his own. John hoped he hadn't just blown their negotiations with excessive honesty. "Uh, turning into a bug -- that's a metaphor," he explained weakly. "It's not like we get captured or something weird happens more than once in a -- Teyla, give me some help here."
"They are far too young to be away from their mother," Teyla said, looking down softly at her own puppy, and put it gently back in the box. John relaxed a bit. "So we must come back in six weeks or so," she added.
"To visit the puppies," John stressed hastily. "To visit."
******
The rest of the trade negotiations went smoothly, but on the walk back to the gate, John had to deal with a depressed and sulky team.
"Oh, come on," he said for the gazillionth time. "It's not that they aren't cute as hell. It's just -- we live in a war zone, guys."
They were walking through a field of grass that seemed to go on and on to the horizon, golden in the sun. There was something timeless about this place -- about a lot of the Pegasus Galaxy, really. Life didn't move fast; it just rolled slowly from one culling to the next.
"It is not that you are wrong, John," Teyla said wistfully. "It is just ..." She trailed off.
"I miss my cat," Rodney said.
"I miss my keldat," Ronon echoed.
"What's a keldat?" John asked, fully expecting it to be six feet tall with poisonous fangs, but Ronon held out his hands about a foot apart.
"Little furry thing, about so big. Had one when I was a kid."
"Like a cat?" Rodney asked. "You've seen cats in movies, right? They don't seem to have any here in Pegasus."
"Sort of," Ronon said. His eyes were distant. "Striped fur, six legs. These can swim though. Can cats swim?"
"Er, not most of them," Rodney admitted.
"I do not know of such animals," Teyla said.
"Don't think they lived anywhere but Sateda." He looked away from the others. "Probably they're all gone now."
John suddenly felt like the world's biggest heel, making him give up the puppy.
"My first pet was a hunting hawk," Teyla said, causing all three of the men to look at her in varying degrees of surprise. "I captured her before she was fledged, and raised her to hunt with me." A nostalgic smile touched her lips. "She was beautiful, her eyes so fierce and wild. I kept her for two years and finally let her go."
"I had a dog when I was a kid," Rodney said. "A golden retriever, the classic pet dog of every kid's childhood. Which is probably why Dad bought us that kind of dog instead of some other kind."
John had heard this story already, on the recording that Rodney had made for his sister, but he listened anyway without interrupting as Rodney talked about the dog running away. This time around, John noticed, the story was terser and less loaded with recriminations against his parents for letting it happen.
It was odd to get hit, sometimes, with these reminders of how much they'd all changed in the last five years. Mostly, life just went on, and then all of a sudden it would haul back and slap him in the face with one of those reminders. Sometimes it was something dark -- the way the list of names of the dead kept growing; the double-take he would sometimes do when he walked past the office that used to be Elizabeth's and saw Sam or Woolsey there instead.
But sometimes it happened in bright sunlight, and it was Rodney telling a story to his teammates with an occasional self-deprecating laugh, rather than talking to a tape recorder with a bitter twist to his mouth. It was Ronon's wistful smile when he spoke of Sateda, not gray despair or hot, sharp-edged fury. Or perhaps it was just the fact that he spoke of it at all, rather than hiding it between a wall made of seven years' grief and anger.
"Did you have any pets, John?" Teyla asked. Her tone was gentle, and he knew she wouldn't push it if he just shrugged off the question and left them to their reminiscing while he listened contentedly, staying outside the circle of their memories and wistful laughter.
But instead he said, "Yeah, Dave and I had a hamster once. Whole hamster family, actually."
"Dave?" Rodney asked immediately, his eyebrows going way up. Ronon said nothing, of course, just glanced at John with his eyes deep and solemn, like he wanted to make sure John was up to this.
"My brother," John said.
And, as they walked across the field in the sun, he told them about that summer: the unexpectedly pregnant hamster Mom bought them, who subsequently had her litter in a little box lined with one of Dave's T-shirts. It was one of the last times that he and his brother had done something together that they'd both enjoyed -- taking care of those baby hamsters, enjoying the sweetness of a shared secret.
Something like this, maybe.
~
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Puppies + team = WIN.
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Like a big box of alien puppies. :-D
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