John could have saved them all a lot of time if Arthur would just give a little bit more detail in his text messages. Well he could have saved himself from a eight hour flight at least with a snotty kid kicking the back of his seat and the snap of bitter Russian winter. He could have still been in Cairo watching political climate heat up and waiting for the highest bidder in an intellectual shit-storm.
But no, Arthur is professional, which means paranoid, so it isn't till he's there, breath puffing out frozen in a warehouse with no fucking heat, that he finds out their target is Rodney McKay. Rodney with the too-bright blue eyes, with the acidic wit, Rodney who had looked at John and seen right through him, seen all the imperfections, read case files and had -wanted- John. Wanted all the broken bits and the gene, and John knew better, he knew Rodney wanted something from John that was more then the gene too, something he'd seen in that alternate universe's John he'd spoken of.
Arthur wouldn't let him wriggle out of it either, John was going to do shit work, behind the scenes shit if he had to, but he was there for the long-haul, because he'd already been paid, and Arthur didn't have time to find another team member he could trust to get work done, even if it was the crap work. So John was freezing in front of a tiny meat-house heater, that did pretty much nothing to warm him, and was writing a preliminary profile of McKay for Eames.
John was pretty sure Eames was insane also. "Darling do you think I should wear this tie or the one from yesterday to the interview?" Eames is holding up two ties, one is plain black with small silver accents, the other has little pink apples all over it, John tries not to look amused, but most of the time he has a permanent look of bemusement, so he pretty much immediately fails.
"Mr. Eames. I am working." Arthur doesn't bother looking up, is tapping up a storm on the keyboard, and John is pretty much thanking god, because the apples would have been it, Eames would be dead, and then -he- would have to learn how to forge, which Arthur had been trying to teach him with successive failure rates since the beginning. John tries to look busy, because of course Eames targets him next for amusement. "Sheppard, want to go for a ride?" The question is surprising, Eames lounges against John's desk, Eames has perfect posture, he isn't slouching, Arthur slouches and balances chairs, Eames doesn't, John is still trying to figure out how this fits in with everything, because really it -should- be the other way around.
"He's working too." Arthur warns, finally looking up briefly to give a glare and he looks so hard-pressed. "Not the apples Mr. Eames." Arthur doesn't miss a beat, and doesn't show emotion, but there is a lightening of the tension in Arthur's shoulders that tells John a bit more about the kid then he probably ought to have known, and also made him take back his theory that Eames is insane.
"Lunch Arthur." Eames drawls out turning to look at the Point-man, and John watches a small exchange, however silent. Watches a twitch at the corner of Arthur's thin-pressed lips, watches a softening in dark brown eyes. "Bring me something back." Arthur turns back to his work, and John is already standing. He's sick of looking up words on the internet for Arthur's fucking checklist of psychosis.
The heater in the car works much better filling the small space with dense heat. John did not like the cold, they were going to send him to Antarctica before they'd decided to just kick him, he might have quit right there. He's from SoCal, rides the waves, bakes in the heat and loves it, and this cold is fucking miserable. He states as much, Eames is silent, driving the car, and it breaks the silence. Eames laughs softly, the way he holds the steering wheel is practiced ease, but so is everything Eames does, it's all a show, and John is willing to bet Eames had been a different kind of intelligence gatherer at one point. "You do get used to it eventually, it can be pleasant." Eames is just driving, John figures this out when they pass by the usual eat-spot that served some kind of curry crap that Arthur ate like it was mana from heaven. John cannot imagine the cold as pleasant, just numbing, how it would work into his bones, dull his ability to think, bog him down in so much silence.
Maybe that would have been good after the mess he'd made of his career, after he lost everything in sand and came up gasping. McKay had pegged him, had read between the lines that not even the board who had stamped his discharge papers had seen. John wasn't stupid enough to think that McKay hadn't looked up the medic either. The scientist had given him that last layer of self-protection, changed the gender because if he hadn't John would have lost it.
He doesn't want to do this job, doesn't want to steal from the man who had offered him so much, but he would, because this was who he was now. Never let anyone get too close, never place loyalty for too long. Maybe one day he'd be taking on Arthur or Eames, this was who he was now. Loosing so much to the sand.
"Tell me about McKay." Eames orders, it sounds like a simple amiable request, but John knows better. He tells what he's managed to compile from memories, and then afterward. The mistress, the wedding wing, the smugness, and that emptiness, the desperation thinly veiled. Even as he's saying it all, he can feel himself loosing a bit more. Feels hollow by the time they are pulling into the restaurant parking lot.
He couldn't be what McKay had wanted him to be, never could have been.