Title: Family Matters
Author: La
Rating: Teen and up, I suppose. First chapter's pretty innocuous, though.
Pairing: John/Elizabeth
Summary: When John makes an effort to mend bridges with his family, he is forced to confront his fears from the past and his dreams for the future.
Spoilers: Follows on from my fic "Letters from Milky Way" and won't make sense if you've not read that first. Thus far no spoilers, but there may be later on.
Author's Note: Just playing with them some more. I can't decide if I'm heading towards being nice to John, or mean to him, so we'll just see. Constructive criticsm, high praise, and feedback always appreciated. ;)

Disclaimer: Atlantis characters aren't mine - I'm just playing. I do own Kathy, Hanna, and David, though.

John took a deep breath, studying the door in front of him. He raised a hand to knock, but dropped it back to his side.

This was ridiculous. He shouldn't be this nervous standing in front of a suburban house on a sunny Saturday in California. He could face down an angry Caldwell, an irate Rodney, a ravenous Wraith, and, most terrifying, a disappointed Elizabeth all before breakfast, but it had taken him a good fifteen minutes to get himself out of the car and onto the front stoop and now he was afraid to knock.

He shook his head at himself. He didn't need to worry. Hadn't Kathy said she'd love to see him? Hadn't their letters shown that things were better between them? He didn't need to be afraid of a bit of awkwardness. He wasn't going to chicken out, not this close.

His hand was raised to knock when he heard the honk of a car horn behind him. He turned to see a car pulling into the driveway. The driver paused briefly to wait for the garage door to finish rising, and through the tinted window, John could make out a woman with long, wavy hair, the rest of her features hidden behind dark glasses.

Inside the garage a car door slammed, and then there were footsteps and then she was in front of him, saying, "John?"

He didn't reply at first, taking in the sight of her. She was older. Of course she is, you idiot, he told himself. It had been twenty years after all. But despite the faint lines at the corners of her eyes and a few worry lines on her forehead she was still instantly recognizable as his big sister.

She'd broken out in a grin when she first saw him, but the smile was starting to fade in the face of his silence. Recollecting himself, he scuffed one foot on the cement walkway and said, "Hello, Kathy."

"Johnny!" And she wrapped her arms around him in a hug. Taking his arm she started drawing him to the garage. "You're here! I can't believe you're really here!"

"I, uh, was recalled for a bit and got some downtime..." he started to explain.

"Help me get all these groceries into the house and I'll make us some coffee and then we can talk. How long can you stay? The kids should be home before too long, and Eric'll be back for dinner, and I'd love for you to meet them."

John looked down into her face, seeing excitement there but also a hint of worry. Worry that he wouldn't like her family, that he wouldn't want to meet them, or what? Smiling to put her at ease, he allowed himself to be drawn into her house.

They'd put the groceries away in comfortable silence, with Kathy pointing him in the right direction for each item. He'd accidentally grabbed a box of tampons from one of the bags and had dropped it quickly on the kitchen floor, earning a dirty, amused look from his sister. It reminded him of the first time he stumbled across her "feminine products" in their bathroom growing up, and he had to grin back at her. For the time being, at least, it was as if twenty-plus years of tension and history had simply melted away.

When the bags were all emptied and folded, Kathy started a pot of coffee and pointed him in the direction of the family room. He wandered the room, stopping to look at the pictures hanging on the wall. One was obviously a few years old, and showed Kathy with a toddler and a baby, a tall man with slightly thinning hair standing behind her.

Kathy came up beside him. "That's Hanna," she said, pointing to the baby. "And David," she gestured to the toddler.

"They look cute," he said, turning his attention to her husband. "And he looks... nice." What did one say when one was looking at the picture of the man one's sister had married years before? Everything in her letters indicated that they'd been happy over the last 14 years.

She smiled. "He is."

John moved on to another photograph, this one several years older. His sister was beautiful in her wedding gown, and even he, as oblivious as he could be, could tell that her groom was head-over-heels crazy about her. He felt an unexpected pang, looking at it.

"Kath... I'm sor... I should... I wish I'd been there when you got married."

Kathy pulled him to a chair and forced him into it. "You're here, now. We can't keep rehashing the past, Johnny. What's important is where we are now."

He glanced to one side, licking his lips but not saying anything. The silence was just becoming uncomfortable when a timer dinged in the kitchen.

"Coffee's ready," Kathy stated the obvious, standing. "How do you take yours?"

John told her, and watched as she left the room to fix it. He leaned back in the chair, tilting his head against the back. He thought of all the questions he wanted to ask her, questions about their father, about her, and about how she felt towards him. But he didn't want to drag up issues that she'd rather not talk about, so he settled instead on one that had been burning in the back of his mind since her second letter to him.

Kathy came back into the room, handing him a mug and settling on the loveseat that was catty-corner to his own chair. He took a sip, smiled in appreciation, and turned to ask her his question.

"So, how exactly did David manage to lock himself in your neighbor's freezer?"

By the time they reached their third cup each, they were both laughing. Kathy had a seemingly endless number of amusing stories about her kids and her coworkers, and John tried his best to match her by recounting his adventures with various Air Force buddies over the years. She was winning, but John assured himself that was only because some of his best stories were related to classified operations.

The front door banged open, and two sets of footsteps made a beeline for the kitchen. Kathy surged to her feet mid-story, raising her voice. "Door!"

One set of footsteps returned to the front entrance and John heard the creak and snick of the door shutting and latching. Kathy spoke again. "Shoes!"

The other set of footsteps returned to the entrance, and John heard the thud of shoes hitting the floor.

Apparently satisfied, Kathy called out to her wayward children. "Come on in here! There's someone I want you to meet."

The children that appeared at the entrance to the room were dirty and disheveled from a day of weekend play, but John could instantly see their resemblance to his sister.

David came into the room first. From Kathy's letters, John knew he was ten and a huge football fan. Hanna hung back a little, tilting her head to one side so her ponytail swung free, studying him with a single minded intensity that reminded him of himself when he was younger. With her dark hair and eyes, she was clearly Kathy's daughter, but he also thought he saw something of his own mother in her. Her outfit—pink socks, ripped jeans, a t-shirt proclaiming something about being a queen, and a dirty baseball cap and glove—upheld what he'd learned in Kathy's letters—eight-years-old, and unable to decide if she wanted to be a princess or tomboy.

Kathy reached out and put an arm around each child. "Kids, this is my brother, John. Your Uncle John."

David looked at her quizzically. "The one in the Air Force?" he asked. At Kathy's nod, he looked back at John, eyes bright. "Cool! Do you have a gun? Have you ever had to kill someone? Can you fly a plane?"

John opened and shut his mouth a few times, unsure of how to reply. He'd had no problem handling Jinto's hero worship, but somehow it seemed different coming from his own nephew.

He was saved by a soft voice at his side. "Uncle John? Can you come outside and toss a baseball for me?"

Hanna had migrated from her mother's side to his, and she curled her hand into his. Looking from her eyes to those of her brother, he marveled at their instant acceptance of him.

John grinned. "Sure. If it's okay with your mom, why don't we go play some ball and I'll answer some of your questions, David."

Kathy nodded and both kids left in search of their shoes.

They played until the light started to go. Both kids had fired a never-ending stream of questions, which John answered as best he could. David had a wry wit and seemed to enjoy trying to put his uncle and sister off-balance. At first John had worried about Hanna's seemingly quiet acceptance of her brother's teasing, but he soon learned that she liked to save up her responses until she could loose one well-timed zinger that would surprise David into silence.

John led them both back into the house when the fading light made it hard to see the ball and an argument about whether David's aim or Hanna's swinging was to blame for her latest "strike" seemed about to break out.

Kathy was in the kitchen, stirring a pot of pasta. "You cook?" John asked, incredulously, dropping into a chair.

She mock-glared at him. "Shut up. And, no, I usually don't. Eric does, but he had a meeting this evening, so I'm stuck doing it."

"Your kids are fun. But they asked the damnedest questions," John remarked, thinking back to one David had asked him.

"Oh, no. David asked you about aliens, didn't he?"

John shot her a surprised look. "Yeah."

"Eric's been watching old episodes of the X-Files, and now David's convinced that the military and the government are hiding aliens. Last birthday all he wanted was a trip to Area 51. Or Roswell, if we couldn't swing Nevada. He said as a last resort he'd take a trip to Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson. I don't even know where the last one is!"

"Well, he's got a good imagination," John said uncomfortably, wondering how his sister would take the news that her ten-year-old son was actually sort of on the right track.

"Yes, he does." Kathy tasted the pasta, nodded to herself, and moved to a cabinet. Handing John a stack of plates, she directed him to set the table. "You looked good out there with them."

"They're good kids," he replied.

"You ever think about having your own?"

"Kath... you know something about what my life is like. Not exactly ideal conditions for parenthood."

"Not now, no. But maybe someday?"

John just shook his head. It wasn't that he hadn't thought about kids – he liked them well enough and would like to have some someday. But that had always been a vague "someday" far in the future. And if the formless idea of his future family had started taking on shape in his mind – the shape of a little girl with wavy brown hair and green eyes and her tall, strong mother with her angular and beautiful face, her own hazel eyes smiling at him – well, his sister didn't need to know that.

"Not soon," he said. "And besides I don't even know if El—" he cut himself, off, horrified. He hadn't meant to say that! He hadn't even known he was thinking it.

Predictably, his sister picked up on it. "El? El-who? Johnny, do you have a girlfriend?" Her voice held a teasing note, but he could tell that she really was curious.

He was saved by the ringing of his cell phone. Frowning, he fished it out of his pocket glanced down at the SGC issued phone, finding only the generic outgoing call number for Cheyenne Mountain on the caller ID. He smiled apologetically to Kathy and flipped it open.

"Sheppard."

"John?" Elizabeth's voice was a welcome sound, even though it had only been a day since he'd last heard it.

"Hi," he said, knowing he was grinning stupidly but unable to help it. At least he'd had enough sense not to say her name in front of his sister.

"How is it going?" She sounded concerned – not terribly so, but enough that he knew she'd been thinking about him.

He'd told her yesterday of his plans to visit his sister. She'd thought it was a wonderful idea, but had been worried about how he would handle the sudden reintroduction to his past.

"It's fine," he assured her before telling her a bit about his day.

She asked a few more questions for reassurance, but John knew they weren't the ones that were really pressing on her. Finally, she came to it.

"When are you going to visit his grave?" He couldn't see her, but he knew her eyes would be soft and worried, a small frown line forming between her brows. Unconsciously, he started to raise a hand to smooth it away, stopping when he realized he was standing in Kathy's dining room and not with Elizabeth at the SGC.

"Tomorrow."

"Are you... will you...?" He frowned. Elizabeth was never at loss for words.

"Elizabeth?" he said, only realizing he'd spoken her name when he heard Kathy's indrawn breath as she placed silverware on the table behind him.

"Are you okay going alone? Would you... would you like some company?"

Touched, John smiled. "You'd come?"

"Of course!" she said.

"I'd like that."

Elizabeth told him that she'd already arranged for a car from the SGC – just in case – and that she'd start driving up tonight, stopping along the way for the night and meeting him at his hotel tomorrow.

He was telling her his room number when Kathy interrupted. "Johnny, I don't mean to eavesdrop, but you don't have to stay at a hotel. Stay here with us tonight."

"Elizabeth, can you hold on a second?" he said, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. "Are you sure?" he asked his sister.

She nodded and he turned back to the phone. "Change of plans. Meet me at my sister's house instead. Got something to write down directions?"

When he hung up, his sister was waiting for him in the kitchen. She looked up from the glass she was filling with water and gave him a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. "So, Elizabeth? Tell me about her."

John licked his lips nervously and glanced around the room for an escape.