Notes: This story came to me after watching X-men 3. You neither have to know
that movie nor anything about the comic, really; this is not a crossover and generally you
won't find them running around in leather (except for Ronon) or yellow spandex in this story.
Warnings: (language, blood, mention of rape and terrorism, not so
nice stuff)
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me, I just took them out to play a bit.
ADDITIONAL WARNING: There will be terrorism, torture and medical experiments in
this story. Nothing graphic, but better not start reading at all if this makes you uneasy.
o-X-o
Minor differences
by Amarra
o-X-o
John Sheppard was born in 1971 on an Air Force base near Atlanta, a bit skinny, small and quiet, but mostly healthy. He never screamed or whined, got named after his father and was proudly shown off as a good baby boy on every occasion.
His parents said they loved him and, given that his father wasn't on a mission somewhere in one war or another and his mother was sober for a change, that was almost true.
They hadn't discovered the gene yet.
o-X-o
I remember sitting in the mess, or what passed for it, in the middle of an Oriental desert.
The air was hotter than the coffee they served there and the sand was everywhere, between my teeth, in my hair, in my pants and even in the engines of the birds.
The others read their mail or listened to the radio chirping in the background, we had no
mission that day. I had nothing to do but cool my hands on a mug of coffee and hang
around waiting for an emergency, staring outside where my helicopter was standing; the
large net with all the yellowish and sand brown stripes and patches thrown over the pulled back rotor blades and all vents sealed for the upcoming sandstorm.
Flight engineers were cursing about the weather, sand and deserts while cleaning out
engine parts; others complained about their buddies on the carriers who got the easy
share of the whole war effort. I somehow understood them, kinda like doing the
MedEvacs instead of flying jets. Not that I couldn't have done that, I mean, I had the
chance to.
They said I could fly anything with wings, probably even charm things without wings into
the air if I wanted to, but I had this certain problem with orders. Always had that problem, so I never counted on making it past Captain, and I think even that might have been the pulling of strings by my old man.
I didn't care. I just wanted to fly, no matter what.
I didn't really listen to the radio on that day either, so I couldn't really understand what
the blank looks a couple of weeks later were about, not exactly. Or the jokes about being
one of 'them' as they called every single member of my unit for a medical check-up. It was normal to some point; after all, we were in a different part of the world with all kinds of parasites in the water and scorpions crawling around, and I really couldn't know what
they meant by 'them', which brings me back to the blank looks of my commanding officer
as he called me into his tent. It was shortly after the medical appointment.
I can still feel the cold in his eyes as he passed me the orders for transfer and snarled
something I didn't quite catch.
The stares of the others should have given me an idea about what was going on, but I
guess I was blind to it, as so often. I simply don't see some things coming.
I remained clueless as they put me through more tests as soon as I was back home, thought it was normal, and they really didn't say a thing. Not until that day a month after the first check-up as I sat in a room full of other guys, Marines, Navy, Army… all kinds of grunts and me in the middle. It pretty much looked like a classroom to me till the General walked in, waved the greetings off, sat down and started this interesting lecture about a certain gene that we all had in common.
A gene that shouldn't be there.
But we were lucky; as members of the military we would be allowed to help with
correcting nature's mistakes. I didn't like how it sounded.
I guess I could have called myself lucky that my father had made it up to a well known
General, so they allowed me one call before I got transferred to yet another desert, an
icy one this time.
o-X-o
It wasn't a jet today, just an old, red Ford Sierra, parked in the shadow of a crippled
tree, and the dark sunglasses low on his nose obscured his eyes in the dim evening light.
Johnny cash was singing about big bad Johnny and John smiled.
There wasn't much to look at or be stealthy about in the upcoming night, which might
have been why Lorne lay in the seat beside him as though on a Sunday trip to the beach - not that they had a beach where they usually lived.
"You know Sir, this is the best mission we've had in a while."
For some odd reason John was enjoying the mission too, more than all others before.
Lorne pulled his baseball cap lower on his face as an elderly couple walked past the car,
their dog sniffing at the back of the parked vehicle till the fat lady pulled him roughly
after her down the sidewalk.
John's father had always kept him on a short, short leash, and when old General John
Sheppard Senior had pulled on Junior's strings, no struggling had ever helped.
"Yeah, it is…"
o-X-o
"John." He wasn't sure his father's voice had ever sounded that cold before.
"I don't like this; I really don't like this Sir."
John looked out into the hangar, remembering his former base and the fact that he
wouldn't be the one flying this time.
"Please, General Sir."
The phone let him feel the ice perfectly, even all the miles from Washington to this
hangar at the edge of the eternal ice.
"You are my son, you will not ruin what I worked for."
"But…"
His father could have gotten him out of there, he knew.
"Go."
Just…
"Yes… Sir."
…he didn't.
o-X-o
It was like walking into a wall as the doors of the transport helicopter opened, its engines
still running because once they stopped they would freeze over. Everything was white,
cold and glowing, even the sky. I had seen a lot of places in the eight years I was in the
Force, but never such a remote, lonely place as this.
And I had spent months in the desert.
The Colonel leading the base knew the lecture about the gene as well as the General
back in the States had, spinning out the speech of the faithful servant of big mother America while frostbite gnawed at my skin.
For a change, I actually saw the trouble with this guy coming.
I followed the other men and grabbed my bag, marched out of the cold into my future
housings to get yet another appointment for a physical exam. Not the last one either.
o-X-o
John checked the notes they had about their target once more, comparing the picture on
his scanner with the guy driving his car up the lane. He didn't look like someone who
wanted to help with the destruction of a minority; he seemed rather to be part of one himself.
John would have bullied such guys in high school, if he hadn't been the outsider and new
guy all the time.
o-X-o
Sumner wore the white standard snow gear, warmly snuggled into the thick layers of cotton. The guy honestly wasn't freezing, opposite to the twenty guys before him..
"Attention gentlemen, I am Colonel Marshall Sumner, and it's my pleasure to welcome
you to Antarctica…"
Sumner grinned, having fun with this whole ordeal.
"It's cold, it's dark, it's lonely and it's my kingdom..."
The only thing missing was the evil laughter now, but that would probably come later.
o-X-o
With time one or the other guy vanished, some went strange or lost it; men who had
faced down more than one gun or near death situation. It got stranger with each day,
with each exam, with each test they took me through.
Two months and endless tests into the ordeal I met a girl. She wasn't the only female
on the base, there were a lot of nurses too, but this really was a girl. Perhaps seven or eight, merely a kid who clung to a worn out teddy bear and was led around by the same
doctors who had probed me in places I really don't want to talk about.
She sat opposite me that evening, shivering because of the paper scrubs they had put her in, holding onto the bear as if it were a lifeline, and I tried to distract her by making funny faces. She actually giggled, shyly at first but warming up a bit as the minutes passed.
"I'm John," I said and she smiled.
"Marna…"
Later, I heard her crying and whimpering for mercy behind the curtain.
I guess it was at that moment, in scrubs with a shaved head, sitting on a stretcher opposite a closed curtain, that the reality of this place and why I was here hit home.
I was special, yet nothing more than a rat in a laboratory. And I was not alone.
o-X-o
And there was the cat again, the little tabby bastard, tail high in the air and jaw set
almost as arrogantly as his owner's. The guy bowed down, collected the nasty little
creature into his arms and cooed at him lovingly, complete with funny faces and crooked
lips.
Lorne changed his position, all muscles tensing for the attack. John was just as ready but
didn't show it, which many people mistook for being laid back and calm, though in truth he just didn't alter his mask so they couldn't tell the difference. Something he had learned whilst being in the lab..
"There we have him…" The younger man grinned at his CO, looking so much younger
than he was in reality. It reminded John terribly of himself ten years ago.
"Yeah, there he is."
They left the car, the lane half dark and deserted now.
o-X-o
She was sniffling into the bear, goose bumps all over her skin and the blonde hair cut
short. His own had been shaved off for the last brain scan, which made his ears look
even funnier than they already did.
She whimpered as one of the nurses passed the door to the hall.
"Hey…"
He made faces, frowned, did that trick with his jaw that made his pointy ears wiggle. He
had a girlfriend once, Mary something, she had adored his elf ears.
She giggled.
"I'm John…".
She looked around as if telling a secret, leaned forward and grinned.
"Marna…"
Then Dr. Abrahams walked in and she didn't smile anymore.
o-X-o
They called it the ATA gene, the Abrahams Trans-sectoral Abnormality, after Sir Gordon
Abrahams who discovered it. He was a British doctor of medicine who, prior to his breakthrough, was famous rather for his doubtful testing methods than his knowledge or skills. He isolated the gene in a couple of test subjects, injected it into some mice and waited for the results.
The flying mouse he brought forward seemingly did the trick for the military.
A mess which ruined thousands of people from one simple moment of scientific glory –
and wasn't that just reason enough to hate every single kind of science?
o-X-o
They had an easy game this time, which might have been why there were just the two of
them. No Bates or Markham as their backup and no fast cars or planes waiting
somewhere hidden to whisk them off to their home base.
Lorne took the stairs at the back of the house, John the front door. The target wasn't
only arrogant, petty, self centred and annoying but terribly paranoid as well; still, he
barely owned a real lock for his doors, at least none which Lorne hadn't opened with one
wink of his left eye.
Literally.
Once inside, military training took over; secure the place room for room and find the target, silently, stealthily and with deadly accuracy. A target which lay face down on the bed in blue shorts and a brown t-shirt, muttering into the pillows about his idiot job and all the minions who couldn't tell A from B even if it bit them in the ass.
John grinned and almost snorted at the colourful description of how exactly McKay would
kick his minions' asses, till the cat hissed and pounced on Lorne's leg.
McKay started screaming like a bloody girl as the two men moved into action.
o-X-o
Total isolation should enhance him.
No sound, no feeling, nothing to do for the mind.
Sensory deprivation should bring out the true potential of the gene where no other test could show what he was capable of. But there really wasn't much to it, at least not for John. He could neither heal people like the little girl, nor could he read what other people thought or felt, like the nice blonde civilian woman, Kate Heightmeyer, who came with the last flight.
He was a just a guy who could fly anything remotely airplane like, it went as far as that.
o-X-o
Marcus Lorne was the youngest member of our merry band of lab rats; he wasn't even in the army or anything prior to his arrival here. They had kidnapped him from home, caught him with a secret test in school, but Sumner made sure to put him through a fine training regime just as he did with most civilian members of the base.
That was how the world was now.
They tested children at birth, kids at school and all people as soon as they needed medical help of any kind. The gene didn't occur that often, carried on the X chromosome and in most cases ineffective. Those who couldn't use it were lucky; those who had some strange thing going on which could be tied to the gene ended up somewhere where nobody asked questions.
Lorne's younger sister Hannah had it too, stronger even than his. She had had a double set of infected chromosomes, like they called it, something which made the females so much more important than the male gene carriers. He told me one night, as he vomited his guts out from a scanning contrast medium, that she had cut open her wrists and killed herself as it got out that she had the double gene.
She didn't want to live in a lab.
He was glad she had done what he had been too scared to do, was even ashamed of
being still alive. Luckily his parents were already dead; he wouldn't have been able to live
on knowing his mother and father were somewhere in a lab too, especially since he thought himself to be too much of a coward to do something about it.
I tried to tell him that it wasn't worth committing suicide just because we had a gene the
others didn't. They weren't the ones to judge what was right or wrong, and one day they
would realise that as well.
Three days later I got a call. Thanks to my father's connections again.
My mother had committed suicide as it got out that she had been the one who passed on the gene to me, shot herself in the head with my father's gun.
I somehow could not believe she would have done that of her own free will, even when
downright drunk out of her mind.
o-X-o
A hour or more had past already and Lorne still shivered and cramped. He threw up anything he had and even more, it hurt to just watch it.
"Take deep breaths and try to calm down a bit…" Sheppard tried to sooth him, leaning him back against the cold tile floor of the bathroom but it probably not helped much. The pain went deeper, it wasn't just the contrast medium they had made him drink.
"I should have done it…" He whimpered. "Just should have done it like Hannah did…"
"Hannah? She is your sister, isn't she?" John remembered that faded picture Lorne kept in a secret place under his bed, a brown haired, cute girl of not more than perhaps 14 or 15 years of age.
"She cut her wrists open…" He sobbed, too tired and too hurt to move much even although the cramps came back. "I should have done that too…"
He whimpered and threw up all over John's pants.
o-X-o
(word count; 2.840)
