Title: Dirtied Fluffy White Tails
Summary: AU. Where Major Sheppard comes to the Atlantis expedition a year after they first went through.
Characters: Sheppard, Teyla, Lorne, McKay... Everyone...
Pairing: John/Teyla
Rating: T

Notes: This is not as crack!tastic as the title suggests. It is, in fact, an extension of a wee one-shot I did before Christmas called 'Mad Romance', in which Lorne is the commanding officer, Sheppard and Teyla got married in Vegas and no one knew about it. This is the story of how that all came to be. Needless to say, it is AU.

---

Colonel Evan Lorne strode into the briefing room with a curt nod to the civilian leader of the expedition, Doctor Elizabeth Weir. Already seated around the table, Doctors McKay and Beckett were quietly bickering while his second, Teyla Emmagan of the Athosians, looked on impassively, a small smirk playing at the corner of her mouth. There were a few yellows he recognised from his trips to the infirmary but couldn't name but he nodded in greeting anyway and took his seat perpendicular to Weir.

"What's up?" Lorne asked when it seemed everyone was content to let the meeting go by and Beckett and McKay immediately started and pulled their tablets towards them, clearing their throats. Lorne smirked slightly in amusement and met Teyla's amused eyes.

"We, ah..." McKay trailed off in an uncharacteristic lack of words and turned to Beckett beside him, who similarly shrugged and tapped a few buttons on his screen.

"When we opened up one of the Ancient labs," one of the blues – the Czech, Lorne was sure – began and McKay turned to him with a sharp glare that effectively silenced the scientist.

"Yes, yes. Since the Midlorians were oh-so-kind enough to let us take back our Zed-PM's, we've been able to fully power up the city. There's still some water damage on lower floors and on the east pier but for the most part, the labs seem to be in good condition even though we have no idea what half of them do but I guess-"

"The point, McKay?" Lorne interrupted, gesturing with his hands for McKay to hurry up. The scientist paused to glare at him before pointedly stabbing his finger into the tablet in front of him and pulling up a map of the city on the centre console. The image zoomed in on one of the labs on the south-east pier where there was a blinking dot flashing at him. Lorne stared at it as lines of Ancient flickered up and down the page waiting for someone to translate. When no one did, he pointed to the image. "What is it?"

"That," Beckett said excitedly as he too pointed at the flashing dot, "is a device that measures the Ancient gene."

Lorne frowned and turned to Elizabeth who had the ghost of a smile on her lips and Lorne got the distinct impression that this wasn't the first time she was hearing about this.

Lorne glanced around at the gaggle of yellows who had started to hum in appreciation, their quiet chatter a low din in the background. Lorne shook his head, gesturing upwards with open palms and a shrug of his shoulders.

"What does that mean?"

"It means-" McKay started, his tone slicing and Lorne glared at him before Weir cut in.

"It means that, with this device, we will be able to scan entire planets to see if anyone has a discernable Ancient gene level."

Lorne felt his eyebrows lift as his eyes flickered to Beckett, who looked mildly relieved. Since coming to Atlantis almost a year ago, the expedition had been hounded with one problem after the other: they'd barely had enough juice left in the ZPMs to get them onto the surface of the water and the one they had brought with them just wasn't enough. And now that they had a full contingent of both ZPMs and drones, there was no one capable enough to interact with the city through the chair. They had all tried it and it seemed as though Beckett was the only one who could make the city do anything other than thrum with some sort of sentient presence that seemed to flow through the very walls. If they now had a device that could pinpoint people who had sufficiently high count of whatever it was that made up the Ancient gene then it could, potentially solve all of their problems.

"What are we talking about here?"

McKay grinned manically for a second before turning back to his tablet.

"We're working with Hermiiod to interface it with the Asgard technology on the Daedalus and try and transport it back to Earth. But," he went on, holding his finger in the air, "we've managed to condense the technology so that we can get one into a Jumper and do sweeps of some of our allies' planets."

Lorne didn't entirely like the idea of any of their supposed 'allies' being their only direct link to the city but he supposed that it could be worth a shot; but if it turned out that any of the Genii were gene holders, Kolya was definitely not coming back to the city with them.

"All right," Lorne said with a nod and pressed his palms flat onto the table. "What you've got sounds good. Get me a report and I'll read more about it before I sign off but, from what you've said, it sounds good."

Beckett beamed across the room at him as the canaries in the back started twittering again. Lorne rolled his eyes slightly and turned to Elizabeth who was smiling at him.

"Thank you," she said with a smile and Lorne nodded, remembering the truce they had come to only weeks before.

"The logic is sound and the opportunities it presents are too good to pass up. I just hope they can get it back to Earth 'cause I'd feel a hell of a lot better with one of our guys in the chair than someone we're not sure we can trust."

"Who's to say that if there is someone on Earth with high enough levels, he or she will be military?"

--

Major John Sheppard really didn't mind his job. He didn't even mind the locale all that much; he was far enough away from home base that he could keep pretty much to himself and pretty much whatever he wanted and he'd paid off one of the quacks he piloted about to rig up a satellite receiver so he could get some cable channels (granted, some of them were the UK and sometimes even Spain but beggars can't be choosers). He got to pilot out over the glaciers of the Antarctic in his very own helicopter and he sometimes took one of their jeeps out to go penguin watching.

It was certainly better than Afghanistan and at least in the Antarctic, no one was trying to shoot him. He could easily keep reminding the good old USAF of the black mark on his record if it meant he got to stay in this post until his retirement.

"You Major John Sheppard?"

Sheppard glanced around the small hangar bay as though looking for someone then turned to look down from the wings of his chopper to the General who had addressed him. He was flanked by a woman in dress blues and a huge guy in a trench coat and hat. He studied the three of them for a few seconds longer before straightening from his crouched position and brushing himself down.

"Yep, that's me."

The General moved his lips in an imitation of a smile and took his sunglasses off. Sheppard instantly felt at ease at that barrier being taken away. He glanced to the two people flanking him and the General shifted his body to follow his gaze, glancing out the corner of his eye to the people on either side of him.

"That's Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter," he said and indicated the woman on his left. "And this is Teal'c," he said indicating the behemoth on his right. The man lifted his head a moment and smiled before tilting it down in a bow. Sheppard clumsily returned to gesture and then stared pointedly at the General. "Oh, right. I'm General Jack O'Neill and you need to come with us."

"Wh-" there was a flash of white and Sheppard felt a tingling all over his body before it was suddenly gone again. He shivered and shook his shoulders before instantly freezing. His hand moved to his sidearm automatically drawing the weapon from the holster. "What the hell?"

The woman stepped forward, holding her hand out and O'Neill seemed quite content to let her take over.

"You can lower your weapon, Major." Sheppard declined the offer and continued to stare at the three of them. "You've just been transported to one of Earth's inter-galactic Aurora class space ships."

"Space ship? Right," he scoffed and lifted his gun a notch higher.

"Turn around," the woman said and he hesitated a moment, glancing to the General who nodded. He tilted his head slightly, catching a strange glow from behind him. He turned further and his arms dropped to his sides, the gun falling from his suddenly loose fingers. He was staring at Earth, probably from as far out as the moon. His feet carried him to the large window and he stared at the sight below him before a strange distortion in the blank canvas of space drew his eye. He watched as threads of light opened up in front of him in the black void before a huge ass ship materialised before his very eyes before disappearing just as quickly as it came. "That's the Daedalus, one of our battle cruisers – or F304's."

"Is that... Are... What?"

"There's a lot to explain but what you need to know is that you are what we've been looking for for the last year and a half."

--

He'd been cooped up on the Daedalus for eighteen days and, from what they had told him, they would be dropping out of hyperspace (hyperspace he thought incredulously) in a matter of hours. During his stay on the ship, he'd watched hours upon endless hours of video about the Stargate and the Atlantis expedition and what it was that made him so damn important. If he was being honest with himself, he was still waiting to wake up in his bunk in Antarctica, having suffered some serious hallucinations due to loneliness or something he ate.

But then, he reasoned, surely his mind wasn't so cruel as to create up a being as Doctor Rodney McKay whose incessant prattle had made Sheppard lock himself in his room for two days straight just so the scientist would shut up for two minutes. He'd wanted to run test after test after test before the woman – Weir, he recalled – had told him to wait until they got home.

Home.

He couldn't believe that these people referred to an alien city in another galaxy as their home. At the very least, it made him stop questioning his own sanity and question theirs instead.

"Major Sheppard," a disembodied voice called over the intercom system and he shivered at the reminder of the... the... thing he'd met that called itself Hermiiod. He could barely believe that the thing could stay upright on its tiny tooth pick legs let alone be the brains of the galaxy like they all claimed it was. At least the thing was more intelligent than McKay and couldn't seem to stop itself from reminding the Canadian of that fact, much to McKay's displeasure. "If could come to the database room, we would be most obliged."

Sheppard groaned and rolled from his bunk. Apparently it was too much to want the next few hours to contemplate his new life.

--

As soon as the white tingles disintegrated, Sheppard felt a strange power thrum through his muscles. He tried to take a step but faltered slightly, his head and vision pulsing with the strange beat vibrating through his body.

"Can you feel that?" A voice said from somewhere, possibly miles away, at his side. "The city must sense the presence of the such a strong gene carrier."

The last coherent thing he remembers was the feel of strong feminine hands holding his head up off the ground.

--

He woke in the infirmary, dazed and disoriented. His fingers tingled merrily and he stretched them assessing the damage. There was none and when he sat up his head pulsed for a moment and he pushed the heel of his hand against his forehead to still the vibrations coursing through him. It took a few moments but the thrumming in his body eventually relented and he blinked his eyes open. The room was bright but empty save for his bed; there were no windows, one door and a huge machine set up at the side of his bed with a distinctly human monitor attached to it. It seemed they were off.

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind when the monitor flickered to life and the machine hummed and began to glow. He skittered away from it, eyes wide, as he felt a gentle tingling at the base of his skull in the milliseconds before the door to his room opened. He turned to stare wide eyed at the group of people who walked in, not feeling unlike an animal in the zoo.

"The machines respond to thought," one of them said, his accent Scottish. Sheppard stared at him. "Hello, I'm Doctor Beckett but you can call me Carson."

"Hey..." he responded dubiously, looking around at the others. He groaned when his eyes alighted on McKay and the Marine – Lorne, the commanding officer – chuckled at McKay's incredulous 'what?'. "What the hell happened?" He asked as he stared at the only other person he didn't know.

"You caused quite the stir," Lorne replied with a smirk, his tone amused. "Seems the city got a little excited by your presence."

Sheppard snorted and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose in a wearied gesture.

"I read about that... The in-flight brochure is severely lacking in sufficient information."

Lorne smirked and huffed out a laugh.

"In the Air Force's defence, the City has never responded that way. You're a paradox."

"We can only assume that because the three Zed-PMs are up and running that the electro-magnetic flow through the city and the gene-"

"McKay," Sheppard interrupted, closing his eyes. "Shut up."

McKay huffed and the others tried to hide their laughs behind coughs and smirks.

"You and I are going to get along just fine, Major," Lorne said with a smile that Sheppard easily returned.