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Five people John Sheppard included in his will, and what he left to them.
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Participation is open to all. If this is your own prompt, you're free to write to it (please do!). Post your list as a comment to this post, adding additional comments if you exceed the character limit. It's OK to post as Anonymous, then come out later or not as you choose. Responses will be screened until midday U.S. Pacific time July 7 to see what people come up with independently. You can still respond to the prompt after the unveiling, but July 7 is the official due date.
General info and a place to ask questions: the comm 'welcome' post.
Technical-support questions: tech help.
Suggestions: the suggestion box.
To supply a new prompt: the open call for prompts.
Subject-line spoiler warnings for Season 5 SGA eps and Continuum, thanks!
July 7 is the official deadline. If you're posting a response after the unveiling announcement on July 7, please copy the link to your comment, click on the 'set 48' tag, and reply to the post 'Set 48 Responses Unscreened' with the link to your new comment-response. That helps people find and read and comment on responses that weren't there when they cruised through right after the reveal. Pimp the link in your journal, too, if you want to let your flist know you've posted something new.
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Part 1/2
In this will, he left his guitar to Teyla. He'd rarely played it since coming to Atlantis, and wasn't even sure why he'd brought it except that he'd had it for more than twenty years and had dragged it across every continent on Earth, and so discarding it now was kind of unthinkable. He thought Teyla might appreciate it, even though she wouldn't have any memories associating it with him. He'd been to enough Athosian celebrations to know how important music was to them, and he'd seen Teyla slip out to watch Sergeant Mazer strum his way through "Stairway to Heaven" on quiet nights on Atlantis. He thought she might even learn to play it.
2. Ronon got a soapstone carving of a horse that John had received as a gift from Nancy early in their relationship and kept around for sentimental reasons. He'd originally left Ronon his surfboard, thinking that he'd take the Satedan out and teach him one day. And then that day came, and it ended as disastrously as Ronon's attempts to teach John those ridiculous Satedan fighting games that invariably left him hoping on one foot with both hands tied behind his back. So he changed it over to the horse, which Ronon tended to gravitate toward whenever he was in John’s quarters. He'd turn it over and over in his hands while he talked to John, and John suspected that it reminded Ronon of home, or childhood, or something else precious. He also left Ronon his collection of action movies, not sure that Ronon would remain on Atlantis long enough to watch them once John was gone.
3. The other will had been drawn up by the family lawyers, and now sat in their offices. Occasionally, when he was back on Earth, he'd pay them a visit and have it updated, because he wasn't quite as careless about money as his brother thought.
The first provision of the that will left all of his shares in the family company to his brother and any children his brother might have, because he also wasn't as careless about family as his brother thought, and he really didn't want the company his father and grandfather had built up to fall into strange hands. He just didn't want to have to run it himself.
4. The formal will also left a good chunk of his money--tied up in a trust fund until John was 25, but now his to control, because his father had never expected this kind of rebellion when he set it up--to Rodney. When John watched Rodney bitch about yet another ridiculous IOA or Air Force decision, he knew, as if he could see straight through to the other man's core, that one day Rodney was going to walk away from the whole program, his previously boundless enthusiasm crushed and left for dead by politics and expediency and morally questionable decisions. And when Rodney left, John didn't want him forced to take another position where politics might rule his life. As he saw it, what he was really giving Rodney was freedom.
(He'd made similar provisions for Elizabeth in his will, for similar reasons. He'd almost changed it the last time he was on Earth, but then decided to leave the money in trust for her, just in case.)
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Re: Part 1/2
And number four. *thinky noises* I always assumed he had no financial stake in his family's business at all. But if he did- yeah. Of course he would.
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Re: Part 1/2
I tend to think John has some money and shares. I think his parents would have taken steps to make sure he was taken care of while he was still young, and there wasn't any way to rescind that, even if their fight was bad enough that he wanted to.
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Part 2/2
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Cam is certainly pretty enough to be a kept man! :-)
And something still waiting for Elizabeth, since this is scifi and you never know...
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Re: Part 2/2
Ronon has always struck me as John's man; that is who he spends his free time with, after all. I think he *might* stay if he thought Atlantis was close to wiping out the wraith, but otherwise...I'm not sure he would.
Cam is *definitely* pretty enough to be a kept man, but it might be a waste of his many other skills. :D
I think John would retain that small shred of hope that Elizabeth would return...
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Five items in John Sheppard's will (1/3)
He knows that he looks just as perfectly comfortable in these ridiculous surroundings as she does, and hates himself a little for letting himself be held even this much in his father's world. But he signs on the damn dotted line, because he said "I Do," and this is how this sort of thing is done in the world she comes from (the world he comes from too, as much as he wants to pretend he didn't).
It's not her fault if he's marrying her in some last-ditch effort to not end up cut off from his family forever. He even loves her. As much as he's ever going to love a woman, maybe, certainly as much as he's ever going to love someone still so firmly in that society he hates, at the very least as much as he's ever going to love someone who doesn't feel the same urge he does to get out, to get away, to fly. He damn well does love her, and he chose to say "I Do," and none of it is her fault, and this is the first step to doing the best by her he can.
(The best he can turns out to be not very good. He leaves her in his will, though, because she didn't deserve any of this shit.)
2. The thing about Antarctica is it's quiet. McMurdo itself is a sprawling mass of ugly metal buildings constantly thrumming with the noise of electrical generators and heavy machinery and aircraft. It all sounds soft as a whisper after anti-aircraft fire and RPGs and artillery. He worries about frostbite instead of shrapnel and the freezing air can burn your lungs, but he’ll take it over the gagging, soup-thick smoke of a burning oil rig any day. And flying a helicopter may be about the loudest occupation ever invented, but somehow, when he looks down and sees all that endless emptiness spread out underneath him, he can feel the quiet bypass his overloaded ears and seep right down into his bones.
He sends off for the papers, and on one of his days off he hikes up Observation Hill and fills them out to give a sum to the World Wildlife Fund, earmarked specially for Antarctic preservation. It feels a bit silly, but there's nothing wrong with a gesture.
After all, the Air Force has made it plain that he'll be flying garbage and mail duty on the forgotten continent until he's physically too old to fly, or until he gives up and resigns his commission. John's spent what feels like an entire lifetime running, and this is about as far away as it's possible to get. He thinks maybe this is where he's gonna stop running. Can't get any farther, after all.
(It turns out that you can get a lot farther. But somewhere along the line it becomes running to instead of running from, and John's shocked to wake up one day and realize that he doesn't want to get away anymore at all. But he leaves Antarctica in his will just because it amuses him to remember that it once seemed like an end, instead of the beginning.)
Apparently, I write too wordy for comment fic. I'll have to learn to shorten these, no?
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Re: Five items in John Sheppard's will (1/3)
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Five Items in John Sheppard's Will (2/3)
A little later, he stumbles out of Rodney's quarters at 0200 sweaty and flushed and well-fucked, and literally runs into a Marine patrol. He spends the next three days (when he's not cursing himself for forgetting to check the life-signs detector) on adrenaline-fueled pins and needles, waiting for the talk, bracing for the insubordination, wondering if he's going to have to resign when he can no longer command effectively. But at some point it becomes obvious that everyone knows and no one cares. Colonel Carter knows, too, within weeks of her arrival, and he's left scratching his head and wondering when the Air Force started deliberately overlooking his misdeeds, when he became surrounded by people who would cover for him.
It's a strange an unsettling feeling, and it makes him realize how very lucky he really is. He leaves a big chunk of change to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund, dedicated to fighting "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and helping military personnel negatively affected by it.
(When that policy is changed right after the election of 2016, John cuts them a big check in his own name and uses their legal help to get a lot of boring legal paperwork done for him and Rodney. But he leaves that in his will, though the organization's name and mission changes a bit. It's a good reminder, kind of like the Antarctica thing.)
4. Teyla isn't in his will. It's not a slight, he just doesn't have a lot of the type of worldly possessions she would value. But her cultural exchange work is important to her, and it's not getting the support it should from the American diplomacy corps, or the IOA, for that matter. So he endows a little scholarship for college graduates to come teach math and physics in Athosian schools, and for Athosian young adults to study in Earth-based universities.
He doesn't wait till he dies to set it up, though. Teyla talks constantly about the bright young minds of New Athos and the desperate necessity of getting her people's next great leaders an education that the powers of Earth will recognize as legitimate. She's read her history books, and absorbed the lesson of what happens to people deemed technologically or scientifically inferior. No reason to wait on anything so desperately important.
So he sets it up as soon as the idea occurs to him, though of course another sum will go to it from his will as well. Doesn't name it after himself or anything. God knows, after hearing about the McKay Astrophysics Research Institution or the McKay Grant for Extraordinary Scientific Potential or the McKay.... well, he's not going down that road.
(Interestingly, the fourth recipient of the Emmagen Scholarship actually studies at the McKay Astrophysics Research Institution, and publishes a paper that proves Rodney's theory of naquadah's interaction with a forming wormhole to be woefully incomplete. This enrages Rodney so much that he throws his back out flinging the journal against the wall. Teyla just asks coolly what his intention was in founding the institute, if he did not wish he work to be expanded upon? John figures it was worth not waiting till he died just to see that.)
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Five Items in John Sheppard's Will (3/3)
It gets John to thinking about what will happen to him if the IOA pulls out of Atlantis all together. No Sateda to defend, no more Wraith to defeat, nowhere other than Atlantis that he's called home- he doesn't doubt for a moment that Ronon will survive and thrive absolutely anywhere he choses to go, but he wants the guy to have options. Ronon's stayed with them after the elimination of the Wraith threat, and that pretty much means that he's thrown in with Earth-based humanity for the long haul, but John doesn't have any misconceptions about just how badly it might go for an alien on Earth if mass xenophobia breaks out.
It's tricky leaving anything to Ronon, given that he doesn't actually exist in anything but the most classified layers of bureaucracy, but he manages. At least the guy'll have a car and some cash (and a really sweet surfboard) if he ever decides to transplant himself for good.
(Ronon never does transplant, and he never really decides whether he would, if the IOA did pull out of Atlantis completely. But he uses the money to buy a little beach house and stashes the surfboard and a small armory there, and it becomes a hideaway for Lanteans - former expedition members, and current members on leave, and aliens who do make the leap - where they can talk freely and smell the salt. Ronon drops by every six months or so, and is astonished at how many ways John gave him a home.)
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In all seriousness, these are great and they really pound at my heart and make me think thinky thoughts.
Good stuff. KEEP WRITING. :)
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Of course any Lantean hideaway would have to be on the water! And John's money, via Ronon... *chokes up* Oh, that's nice.
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5 people John Sheppard included in his will, and what he left to them (some John/Cam)
1. To Rodney, his surf board:
Yeah, I know – you hate the outdoors, you have sensitive skin that burns easily, you don’t like the water and, oh, by the way, surfing is a stupid pass-time that will most likely get you killed. Though, hey, you’ll be in good company, with the last one.
Try it, you might like it; wouldn’t be the first time that happened to you in Pegasus. Ronon knows how to surf, get him to teach you. And Teyla knows a good planet for something like board wax, make sure she takes you.
You’re so much better at physical stuff now than you were when we got here. You’ll pick it up easily. It’s fun. It’s like flying.
2. To Teyla, his Hail Mary video:
I don’t know if we even still have a video player in Atlantis, but talk to Rodney and Zelenka. They can probably put one together in an afternoon. I know you never really got the point of football (fair’s fair; I never really got the point of that Athosian kids’ game with the twelve different-colored balls). Ronon did, mostly, maybe he can explain it better than me. There’s got to be something similar somewhere in Pegasus.
I just – it makes me think of you. And Rodney and Ford and Elizabeth, when we first got here, and everything was It’s a good memory, is all, and we never have enough of those.
3. To Ronon, his sudoku books:
You remember telling me you wished you knew more about science, when the Replicators attacked us on the old planet? That’s more Rodney’s area than mine, so this is the closest I can get. They’re a bit like strategy puzzles, in an abstract kind of way. I’m pretty sure Teyla sneaks the ones I’m half-done with, I’m not sure why. She’ll probably tell you. I just get the innocent face.
It seems like the thing to do would be to leave you my weapon, but yours is much cooler. Though you’re welcome to the P-90 if you want it.
It’s been a pleasure. Don’t leave the city just because I’m gone.
4. To Teyla’s son, his skateboard:
Your mom’s going to hate me for this, but trust me, it’ll be worth it. Every kid should have a chance to bruise his knees falling off a skateboard; it’s not my fault that your galaxy hasn’t invented them yet. You could make a killing as the first skateboard retailer in Pegasus. Maybe learn to ride one first though. Go to Lorne, he knows how, even if he doesn’t seem like he would. Must have had a misspent youth.
I don’t know if you’ll remember me; I don’t know how old you’ll be now. But you were the first child to grow up in Atlantis for ten thousand years. I don’t know what that makes you, really, but we always thought it made you amazing. I’m sorry I’m not around to see what you’ll do next, but I bet it makes everyone proud.
Not that you need to do anything for that. We were always proud of you, right from the start, and we always loved you. Nothing will ever change that.
5. To Cameron Mitchell, nothing but this:
I’m really sorry. I don’t know what happened, but believe me, I’m sorry. McKay promised he’d tell you in person, but he doesn’t have this note. I hope it helped.
Did I ever tell you I sometimes thought about what would happen, later? When we were both done saving the world, or trying to. I guess there’s no point telling you now, but I never imagined that you wouldn’t be there. I never imagined that I wouldn’t be there either, which just goes to show how wrong I can be.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I pretty much thought I’d be with you forever, and it hurts to think that now I’m not. And I’m sorry for hurting you by leaving. I didn’t mean that to happen.
And in case it’s not completely fucking obvious, or I never said, which is honestly kind of likely: I love you.
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Re: 5 people John Sheppard included in his will, and what he left to them (some John/Cam)
You made me all sniffly. Curse you. The bit about Teyla's son was really, really good- sweet but also very John.
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Re: 5 people John Sheppard included in his will, and what he left to them (some John/Cam)
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Re: 5 people John Sheppard included in his will, and what he left to them (some John/Cam)
More John/Cam love! I can see that I'm going to have to branch out in my fanfic reading. ;-)
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Re: 5 people John Sheppard included in his will, and what he left to them (some John/Cam)
I don't think we've ever seen an Ancient child.
No, although they must have existed. Even so, the Ancients left 10,000 years ago, so there's been a long gap :)