Two Sides

Author: Cheryl W.

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Chapter 2: What Jocks Do For Fun

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The bar hadn't seemed to change much since the last time John Sheppard graced it with his presence. Even the bartender was the same. "Tom, your brother going to make an appearance today or is he off romancing his latest lady of his dreams?" he asked of the bartender's back.

Swinging around in surprise, the sandy haired bartender with a medium build smiled widely at his newest patron. "As I live and breathe, John Sheppard. Danny's shift is starting at 3 but I know he'll be busting at the seams to see you. He thought aliens had kidnapped you."

"Only a few times…sometimes I went willingly," John retorting, telling the truth knowing it would never be believed.

Tom cracked up in laughter. "Good to hear humor from you again. So…things ok for you?" and the younger man had a way of looking way more concerned than John was prepared for.

And say an hour ago, John would have gladly repeated his declaration he had to the same question from his pilot buddies, but things had changed. Instead he conjured up a fake smile that he hoped Tom bought and lied, "Yeah, I'm good."

Before he learned if Tom bought his BS or not, another voice piped up from behind him and it wasn't a welcome blast from the past. "Well, we're all so happy for you, aren't we guys."

Without turning around, John drawled, "Hawkins, I'd say I missed you but I don't lie that well."

Coming to lean over Sheppard's back, Hawkins, a well built, dark haired Navy Seal, growled in John's ear. "You have some balls showing up here."

John turned around to face his antagonist. "You know, I hear that wherever I go," he replied back in that wry wit of his that tended to get him in more trouble than out of it.

"Still think you're a funny guy," Hawkins said in a tone clearly not agreeing with that assessment.

John shrugged. "Certain audiences find me hilarious."

The thought that anyone thought something even remotely good about John Sheppard only pissed the Navy Seal off more than he already was. He shoved John against the bar, snarled in his face, "It makes me sick that you're alive and three of my best friends are dead. And another kick in the gut is…I heard you got a promotion. What was that for?! Chicken shitting out of going into a hot zone and letting other guys die like you did with my team?!"

John said nothing, after all there wasn't much he could say. Hawkins' fellow Seals were dead because he had followed orders and didn't go for them. Whatever excuse he could make to Hawkins or his own conscience hadn't worked in three years it sure wasn't going to work now to assuage his guilt or Hawkins' grief and righteous anger.

Tom leaned over the bar, trying to bring reason into the tense situation. "Hawkins, don't start this crap all over again. It's been over three years…"

Lifting his blazing eyes up from Sheppard, Hawkins sank his look into the bartender. "It's been five since your brother's leg got messed up…he over that already?!"

Not wanting Hawkins' rage to be turned on Tom or Danny, John tried to go for the peacemaker shtick. "Alright, everyone's got their issues but I'll only here for today, to see Danny and then I'm gone again. Then you can go back to hating me from afar."

"You know what…that's not good enough," Hawkins seethed and John knew the punch was coming and didn't do a thing to block it. It clocked him on the right cheek and he stumbled back against the bar. Taking his time to straighten up, he was going to try again with the talking thing when Hawkins plowed a fist into his gut and followed it up with a roundhouse to his right eye that had John crashing to the floor.

That was too much for Tom to ignore and he came around the bar, bat in hand but Hawkins wasn't alone and one of his two Seal buddies punched Tom in the stomach, grabbed the bat from his lax hand and tossed it to Hawkins.

"Don't you dare pull this crap in my bar!" Tom shouted, straightening up but the other Seal happily got into the action and sent an uppercut into Tom's chin, sending the man tumbling back to the floor.

And that did it for John. "Tom's not part of this Hawkins," he growled before he surged off the floor and tackled Hawkins around the waist, sending them both careening back across the bar to topple two tables and scatter alcohol and patrons. John got in a nice one two combo on Hawkins' face before the Seal retaliated with a powerful blow to John's side.

Rolling out from under John, Hawkins grabbed John's shirt and yanked him off the ground and intended to land a nice roundhouse but John blocked the blow with his forearm, kneed Hawkins in the gut and shoved him back to land on another table. John was heading for Hawkins when the other two Seals grabbed him from behind, one landing a blow to his kidney and the other twisting his arm behind his back hard enough to strain tendons.

Climbing to his feet, Hawkins had that crazed adrenaline look in his eyes and John knew the man wasn't going to be satisfied no matter how far things went. "You can beat the crap out of me…even kill me but they aren't going to be less dead. Maybe there was something both of us could have done differently and saved one or all of them…but we don't know that. Will never know that."

But Hawkins wouldn't see logic. Stepping forward, he grabbed a fistful of John's hair and forced their eyes to hold. "What I know is I begged you to get me out there, to help them and you stood there and quoted procedure to me, told me there was nothing you could do, that you had your orders. But two months later, I heard you broke the hell out of procedure, went against orders to stand down and went after your best friend. To save someone who had gone off book himself. You picked who you broke the rules for. My friends just weren't worth your time, were they?!"

What Hawkins didn't get was John had disobeyed orders and gone after Holland because of what happened to Hawkins' teammates. He had been a good loyal little soldier and cooled his heels on the tarmac, waiting for someone halfway across the world to decide if three American lives were more valuable than some shaky treaty with an untrustworthy tribal leader that US forces wouldn't harm his villagers. Villagers that just might have even been the men who had attacked Hawkins' teammates.

And it didn't take minutes for them to piss away the odds of survival for the three Seal members but hours. They weren't allowed to make a move until the tribal leader gave his ok for them to be on his lands for a rescue mission. Five hours after the Seal's report of making hostile contact and needing an emergency evac, Sheppard got the green light to go after them. Except it wasn't soldiers he returned with but three corpses. And John hadn't been able to stop wondering if he had gone four and half hours before, when Hawkins had begged him to break from his orders and go for them, if he would have loaded live passengers into his Black Hawk and been sharing a round of drinks with them that night instead of planning their funerals.

But there were no do overs. He hadn't broken protocol for Hawkins' teammates and there wasn't a day that he didn't regret following those orders. So yeah, when Holland went down, when he was ordered to stand down until Washington gave the rescue mission a go, damn right he disobeyed orders. The kicker was…it didn't seem to make one bit of difference. He still only brought a corpse home.

At John's silence, Hawkins wrapped his hand around John's neck. "What no smart come backs, no more excuses?"

"They were good men, if this is how you think it best to honor their memories, who am I to buck the rational thinking of Navy Seals," John goaded because, to hell with it, he didn't need Hawkins to understand him, to forgive him, didn't deserve it anyways.

With an enraged shout, Hawkins plowed his fist into John's right eye, followed up with a left hook to his face and while John hung between his two Seal pals, Hawkins retrieved Tom's bat from the floor. "Those men had more honor than you'll ever know." Then he swung the bat, striking John's torso and John gave a groan of agony as he felt his rib crack under the blow. When the two Seals released him, Sheppard fell to the ground, didn't get a chance to try and protect himself when a combat boot came barreling toward his skull. Blinding pain exploded in his head and then everything went black as space.

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Not only could the man not bother to acknowledge them in the mess hall but apparently he was too good to even answer McKay's phone call. Ok, calls. So he had called two times…or four. The thing to take away from it was John didn't answer any of them. None, nada. Was stonewalling them in all forms of communication.

"He is still not answering?" Teyla asked, sneaking up behind Rodney at the Dairy Queen.

"What? No….I am…I wasn't calling anyone," Rodney lied, putting away his phone before turning to face Teyla.

"It is ok if you were calling John. I found myself wanting to contact him but do not have a cell phone so I am glad you made the call."

And Teyla's confession that she wanted to try and talk to John assuaged some of Rodney's shame. "Yeah, well he's not answering my calls, goes directly to voice mail." At her look, he explained, "You can leave a recorded message for him to listen to later…if it's not too much bother for him to listen to it, that is."

Ronon joined them at their outside table, licking a chocolate ice cream cone. "What are you talking about?"

"Nothing," McKay quickly replied but Teyla was being her honest self, "John."

"He wants to be with his friends, I get that," Ronon said in response, hiding his jealousy that Sheppard could choose to spend time with men who had not been at his side the last year like he had.

"How great could these so called friends be?!" Rodney snapped. "When we all did letters home, maybe thinking it was for the last time, Sheppard didn't send any of those losers a message. Fact is….the only message he sent anyone was to Colonel Sumner's family."

"He had no other family members or friends he wished to send a last message to?" Teyla asked, concerned at this information.

McKay shook his head. "Guess not."

"I think that's none of our business," Ronon bluntly stated even as he locked the information away hoping to one day get a true read on his friend.

"Oh yes, let's honor his privacy while he brushes us off to go do what jocks do for fun. Pilot jocks probably enjoy higher culture than we could ever aspire to," Rodney sarcastically drawled, feeling even greater foolishness for trying to call Sheppard, could just imagine how Sheppard was chuckling with his friends at his expense. Poor little geek actually thought I liked spending time with him, he envisioned John saying to his pilot friends when he saw it was Rodney calling.

Then the threesome fell into a quiet funk again.

"It is too bad that Carson could not be with us," Teyla tried again with happier conversation.

"At least Carson had a legitimate reason for blowing us off. Maybe after he's done discussing his medical breakthroughs with his voodoo colleagues he'll lower himself to join us for dinner," McKay said though he honestly did want the other man's company.

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When his phone trilled, Carson Beckett thought it was someone else's for a moment before he realized the sound was emanating from his pocket. Finding it weird to have a cellphone and not a radio attached to his ear, he pulled out the phone and saw the incoming call was from the major hospital in the area. With his medical discoveries being cloaked in government secrecy he wondered what the hospital could possibly want with him.

Excusing himself from the three doctors looking over his report on the retroviris, Carson stood to the side of the room and answered his phone. "Hello, Dr. Beckett speaking."

A woman's business tone returned his greeting. "Yes, Dr. Beckett, you were listed as next of kin to John Sheppard."

Suddenly Carson's gut dropped to the floor. No, it couldn't be…they were on leave, there were no Wraith or Genii, there shouldn't be anything or anyone intending to inflict harm on Colonel Sheppard. "What's happened? How is he?!"

"Mr. Sheppard was involved in an altercation and is presently unconscious. We are contacting you as his next of kin to determine if he has any prior health concerns or allergies we should be aware of."

The list of prior health concerns flickered through Carson's mind in quick procession but he could voice none of them. It was all classified, from the iratus bug bite, to the retrovirus, to the alien imprinting, then there was the number of times said Colonel had been stunned or knocked unconscious. It panicked him to think of anyone treating the man except for him, especially without knowledge of just how transformed the man's health had been by his time in Atlantis.

"Don't give him anything until I get there!" Beckett ordered like he would his subordinates on Atlantis' medical team.

The woman's tone turned prickly when she cuttingly retorted back, "Doctor we are merely looking for an update on his medical file, not a consultation."

"As his doctor and his next of kin, I order you to not bloody touch him until I get there. Is that clear?! Is it?!" Beckett sharply snapped, needed to know they wouldn't unknowingly do more harm than good for his friend.

"May I remind you that you are not licensed to practice medicine in our facility," the woman hauntingly shot back and Beckett had had enough.

"I work for the bloody government that can put you out of home and hearth so you will do as I ask or there will be hell to pay." And then, not waiting for the woman's comeback, Carson ended the call, turned to go and saw that his colleagues were all looking at him in stunned shock having overheard him when he raised his voice. "Sorry, gentlemen, family emergency," was all he offered as an excuse and then he was out the door, already figuring out where he could grab a taxi and how fast he could get to the hospital.

Minutes later as he sank into the taxi's backseat, he could finally turn to the one thought plaguing him. Was there anywhere in any galaxy that John Sheppard didn't manage to find trouble for himself?!

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Tbc

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Thanks so much for reading and I'm loving your comments!

Have a great day!

Cheryl W.