Disclaimer: I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc.
Setting/Spoilers: Very vaguely for both the Pilot and Season 4's Outcast.
Notes: I can't lie, there was very little about S4 that I truly liked - meeting John's family, and especially Nancy, was something I really did. (And an aside for that particular ep: Oh, Bates.) This was originally meant to be structured very differently, with a lot less implied about John's views, both past and present, on Elizabeth. So read it as you will. And also, John/math? Love. Hopefully I did not butcher this. Concrit is, as ever, adored.
i.
When he'd first met her, Nancy was struggling to get on the fast track at the DOD. He was a career military man, a Captain in the Air Force sent overseas for reasons he couldn't disclose, and for an undetermined amount of time, often with less than a week's notice.
That, John remembered very clearly, Nancy had hated. He'd learned to take it quietly.
But that was the end, when things were bad. He tried not to think about it, but in all honesty, if he thought about her at all it was hard not to.
At the outset, they'd both liked the idea that they were working to better the defenses of their country, military and civilian, from the outside in and the inside out. A kind of copasetic balance, he'd supposed, and known that had appealed to his wife. Their passion for the work, and by proxy each other, had really been all they'd ever had in common.
At the time, it hadn't mattered.
He listened to her idealism and frustration. He didn't talk. When she sent him the divorce papers, he thought that was where he'd gone wrong.
Afghanistan had segued into Antarctica, two separate periods of his life so immaculately separate from each other he'd never noticed the transition (divorce, near dishonorable discharge; solitude, settling) until he'd looked back on it much later.
ii.
He'd met Elizabeth Weir outside McMurdo base five years later, in an icy hole in the middle of nowhere, and recognized something familiar in her eyes, though he couldn't pin a name on it. It made him think of drawn-out arguments and make-up sex. Bad endings. Something told him not to get pulled in.
He flipped a coin a few days after she had offered him a place on her expedition. The coins never lie, he remembered his Statistics professor saying, a copper-plated penny catching the light of the fluorescents overheard in midair, a small glint fifty seats away where he'd been sitting in an Academy classroom.
His professor had caught it, relying on ungovernable, inalienable constants of a neat mathematical world to determine something so small as the direction of their lesson plan that class period. Always a fair toss, he'd grinned.
Something about it had always appealed to John, a mathematics person all his life whose true love was Trigonometry and Calculus, non-Euclidean Geometry a balance between the solid and the abstract; and sitting today on a hill outside DC, he pulled out a nickel.
Heads, he decided, he'd go to Atlantis. Tails, he'd stay in Antarctica.
He caught it midair, and turned it over on the back of his hand, covering it with the palm of his other so that he couldn't see just yet.
He hesitated.
No such thing as fate, he reminded himself; mathematical constants and realities running round in his head. Probability was the rule of the game, staunch outcomes and nonoutcomes that would drive him crazy until the day he died.
He thought about Nancy, then, for some inexplicable reason, bantering into the night, smiling easy friendship and love over a dinner and a beer. He stood decisively and walked away, the nickel sliding into the grass, lost until – or if – someone else stumbled across it.
iii.
"What did make you decide to tag along on our merry mission, in the end?" Elizabeth asked him lightly, years later, breaking a quiet moment full of not-quite silence and not-quite solitude on the balcony outside the control room. The thundering waves below were like a murmur, a soothing breath – inhale, exhale – and John couldn't imagine any other outcome.
Instinct, he thought briefly, but that wasn't right. Gut feeling, he amended his thought, remembering Elizabeth of three years ago: a walking contraction of effortless self-control and giddiness, steely reserve and high-minded idealism, utter girlishness and weary age.
"Flipped a coin," John replied nonchalantly, nudging her shoulder with his own.
"Really?" He could tell she didn't believe him.
"Always a fair toss," he said, grinning slightly.