John hasn't seen Kieran in three days.
He's not stupid. He'd be avoiding him too. There's a knot of disappointment coiling when Carson and Elizabeth said that she didn't stop in once while he was unconscious. And not once while he regained consciousness.
She always has something to do and finds plenty of hiding spaces to do it.
The biggest gut punch came when he was eating lunch with the team. Kieran arrived in the cafeteria, made eye contact, froze, and firmly turned on her heel and left without even grabbing any food. All in the space of a second.
His face fucking burns with something. It's not exactly embarrassment. Or humiliation.
It's no secret that Kieran has been avoiding John since Carson cleared him for duty. He sees the side-eyes as he walks past. Some of them are sympathetic, some of them accusatory.
The sympathy makes his stomach clench, but the accusations hurt worse. Already three days in and he's been marked as a shit father in some people's minds.
That's what burns. Three days in, and he already screwed things up. Three days in, and he's living with the reminder that he's a failure. He doesn't need one, what with Teyla's scorching gaze flame-broiling his insides.
He never had the best relationship with his parents, but he crossed that bridge going to Stanford, and then he burned the rest of it to ash dating Mayumi.
He'll do right by her. He will. He has to.
Kieran's back in therapy sooner than she expected. Considering the circumstances, Dr. Heightmeyer probably would've dragged Kieran back herself if she hadn't insisted on getting another appointment penciled in as soon as possible.
"Yesterday really sucked." Kieran breathes shakily. "I thought I was going to—lose him. And I didn't know I cared."
"You haven't known him for very long." Kate sets down two mugs of tea on the coffee table. Kieran's is sweetened with a generous amount of honey. She looks tired, and Kieran wonders if that's normal for her post-crisis du jour. It's warm, and she taps her fingertips against it absently. "It snuck up on you, but it doesn't make it any less valid."
"Now that I have something to compare it to, I'm not sure what's worse: waking up to someone dead or watching it happen in real time."
"Does one really have to be worse than the other?"
"Why can't one be better?" She's known her mom her whole life. John's just . . . he's a placeholder until she turns eighteen. Atlantis is just a temporary stop until she can go back to Earth. She has unfinished business, after all.
Losing her mom should hurt more. It should. In spite of everything.
So why does it all just feel the same?!
"Is there something about the idea of John dying that bothers you so much?"
"John said that it was my fault mom died that night," Kieran blurts. She bites off the words, spitting them out like hot coals.
"It wasn't your fault."
Of course you'd say that!
And of course she said it out loud. Kieran had slapped her hands down on the coffee table, sloshing tea on the surface. It doesn't matter how good Dr. Heightmeyer is. Kieran saw the flinch.
Kieran pulls back immediately, flattening against the back of the couch, hunching her shoulders, drawing her knees up to her chin. "Sorry."
"Your mother's death wasn't your fault," Dr. Heightmeyer repeats slowly. "Were you the one that pulled the trigger?"
"Of course not," Kieran scoffs. "I could've prevented it. I should've done more to prevent it."
"What could you have done?" Dr. Heightmeyer asks. "You were ambushed in your home, a safe place. You were attacked with alien technology that is designed to render someone unconscious. And none of that is your fault."
Kieran is silent for a moment. The way Dr. Heightmeyer is staring makes her feel heavy, pinned down like a speared butterfly. She wants to run but she can't.
You can be the most prepared person in the world and still lose. Preparedness mitigates risk, but will always lose to luck.
It's depressing family wisdom, and she hears it in her mother's voice.
She just wishes it made things hurt less.
"None of that is your fault," Dr. Heightmeyer repeats. "And even if John was under the influence of . . . his condition, that doesn't make it acceptable. Ever." She reaches to her desk behind her, passing Kieran a plain black notebook with a ribbon bookmark. "I want you to start journaling. Just for you. You can put things that you want to talk about next session, but I'm never ever going to ask if I can read through it. It's for your eyes only. But I am going to assign you homework."
Kieran balks. "Therapy homework?"
"It happens more than you think. I just want you to whenever you have thoughts like that, write down what you could have done. Remember that you're not obligated to share everything, but I would like to work through one with you. Can you do that?"
Kieran swallows. "Uh—yeah, sure. As long as you're okay with a lot of stuff very quickly, doc."
"Patient confidentiality," Dr. Heightmeyer reminds her with an uncomfortably knowing smile.
Right. Of course.
If John wasn't so focused on trying to track down his daughter, he'd probably think about things like how the hell a presumably regular teenage girl was able to go toe-to-toe on him while he was bugged out, or why she's so goddamned hard to find. She's like a shadow, gone to the wind.
Unfortunately for John, he's tunnel-visioned on his screw-up, so any thoughts like that are shoved to the back burner indefinitely.
He's getting desperate. He's not sure who she hangs out with besides Sora and Jonas. Sora probably isn't going to tell him anything useful and Jonas is going to give him looks full of so much unearned sympathetic cheer. The guilt would eat John alive.
As if it's not now but that's not the point.
The point is he's found himself at his XO's office, knocking on the door frame. He's just there to ask a favor.
"Colonel." Lorne painstakingly sounds out every syllable, which is subordinate speak for Are you stupid. "Are you ordering me to help corner your daughter so you can apologize to her?"
Well when he says it like that.
"Never mind, Lorne."
Spinning his wheels isn't getting him anywhere. At this rate, wandering aimlessly around the city is going to give him trench foot or gangrene or whatever. Elizabeth had, at some point, said he could either work on his paperwork or go see Dr. Heightmeyer. John responded by saying she should be more sympathetic to second-in-commands recovering from grisly bug mutations.
He was already planning on making an appointment with Dr. Heightmeyer. He needs professional help. For many, many reasons.
Part of him wonders what Kieran said in her session. Dr. Heightmeyer looks . . . professionally distant in a way that she tries not to be. Not overtly. The caffeine is leaving his system, but lights bouncing off the cream-colored couch and metal walls feel too bright, the cup of tea just a bit too hot in his palms.
Dr. Heightmeyer had said that the topic of conversation was up to him, but considering recent events and life changes, maybe he should consider talking about Kieran's mother.
Yeah. No sweat.
He definitely didn't shove everything about their relationship into a box after they broke up and then proceeded to do his best not to think about it for almost two decades. Tried—and failed miserably. Over. And over.
"Mayumi and I met in college." His mouth is dry. Why is his mouth dry? Sipping his tea seems to do the trick, but it's over-steeped. He swallows the acrid, bitter taste and moves on. It stays. "We uh—we were lab partners in chem. I asked her out because I thought it would piss off my parents."
Dr. Heightmeyer's eyebrows climb to her hairline, but thankfully she doesn't say anything. Right. Therapy. No judgement zone.
"That makes it sound worse than it was," John says quickly. "I asked her to be my fake girlfriend to piss off my parents. And then it turned into something real. And then she broke it off just a bit after graduation. No explanation. Just an 'it's not you, it's me.'" John laughs hollowly. "Four years together, and then she just—she walked away. She threw it away. She had a kid all this time and didn't want me to stick around. I'm not an idiot. She could've at least told me to my face she thought I wouldn't be a good father."
His fingers creak around ceramic. It's hot enough that he's numb. He's angry. He's over it. He's devastated. He's—
He's not even sure why everything came out in a rush. Was he really holding back that much? It's been almost twenty years—
"Oh fuck." John says.
His memories are coming back to him post-buggification. Only his memories when he was lucid enough. He doesn't remember going through the gate, getting through the cave, getting the Iratus eggs. He definitely doesn't remember taking out a chunk of his own security and tearing through the underbelly like a bat out of hell until Ronon stunned him. It's probably for the best.
The sparring match.
It's been coming back to him less in a rush and more like an incomplete puzzle. Teyla's looks, equal parts stern and disappointed. The careful way Atlantis and her people seem to hide Kieran away. The one time he gets a look at her she about-faced so hard he's not sure if she ate lunch that day.
The last piece clicks into place.
"It's no wonder Mayumi died on your watch."
"Fuck." John says once more, with feeling.
John wants to invent a time machine and kick his own ass.
No. Too much work. Finding a solar flare crossing the event horizon of a wormhole. If SG-1 accidentally time traveled back to 1969, he can go back a day.
"God. I guess I'm a shit dad after all."
"You have a lot of unprocessed emotions that have been building up for the past seventeen years," Dr. Heightmeyer says. "But that was completely inappropriate."
"No. No yeah. That was—" John's face is in his hands. He wants to fix this. And jump out of a window. "I messed up. She doesn't want anything to do with me."
Dr. Heightmeyer purses her lips, but she doesn't say anything to contradict him. Great. "You have your work cut out for you. If she doesn't want to hear you out, I'm not sure that there's anything you could do to make her listen."
John grimaces. "That sounds like shooting myself in the foot. And the mouth."
"What we can do is work out what to say together. And work through your feelings at the same time."
It's going to suck. He's never really been a feelings guy. He'd rather get a root canal. Or shot. But he hurt someone—his daughter—with more concentrated precision than a surgical strike. If he has to pull out his own teeth to make things right, he will.
It takes another agonizing day or two, but finds her. He doesn't know whether he was just really lucky or she finally let herself be found or some combination of the two.
"Go away." She doesn't even look up from whatever she's working on. Pre-calc from the looks of it.
"I—um, I wanted to talk."
Kieran springs off her stool, body coiled like a skittish colt and just as ready to bolt. He doesn't like the look in her eye either. She'll either trample him or reduce him down to his constituent atoms to escape if she needs to. It's calculating, like she's personally doing a split-second cost-benefit analysis of weighing the urge to make him sing soprano for a week versus leaving Atlantis' chief military officer intact.
The moments from his sparring match with her are practically fresh—he was still totally lucid and mostly human at that point. There's a part of him that thinks maybe Kieran really could've kicked his ass if he wasn't hopped up on . . . turning into a bug-Wraith. Or maybe that level of terrifying is a side effect of being faced with the wrath of a teenage girl. He'd rather face down a Wraith or two.
John wishes he had the foresight to have a witness.
Way to go John! He rehearsed in the mirror for this and everything, only to freeze up like he was on-stage performing stand-up . . . or something. And Kieran is staring at him.
Great job, John. Maybe he should've workshopped this more with Elizabeth or Teyla. Or Jonas, even.
It's Kieran who breaks the silence first.
"I wasn't on speaking terms with Mom when she died." Her fists are clenched at her sides, shoulders so tense they're practically touching her ears.
That alone takes the wind out of John's sails. It practically punches the wind out of him. He's never been good with feelings and heart-to-hearts. He has the emotional intelligence of a rock on a good day. He should say something.
Like what, exactly?
"I mean, we were starting to talk again," Kieran continues. She's looking right at him. No—she's looking past him, like she's far away but with an intensity that roots John to the spot. "But she—she did something that really just—just broke my trust in her. It happened last year. And I was so angry."
Kieran shakes her head, and all that intensity that was staring past him is drilling into him instead. It's unsettling. He can't figure out why, but it looks out of place and familiar all at the same time.
The more Kieran talks, the more John's blood freezes in his veins, shards piercing his heart. The more she talks, the more that pit of dread keeps growing.
What happened?
"And I'm angry at you." Kieran crosses her arms, clutching herself in a white-knuckled grip. "At what you said. I was getting ready to say goodbye to another parent with the cold shoulder. I was getting ready for it. Because I figured, you know? My life has already gone to shit already." She laughs, but it's hollow. Empty. Angry. "So why the hell not?"
John finally settles his nerves and gathers his courage to speak. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry," he says lamely. "I never should have said that to you. It never should've even crossed my mind."
Sure, maybe he could've blamed part of his mental state on his . . . rapidly changing condition at the time. But he remembers what he said. He remembers the look on his face. It was before he was put on any inhibitor, which means he's lucid enough to remember saying it. Which means that, despite everything and despite what people have been telling him, it was his fault. And it's his responsibility to fix his screw-up.
Kieran shrugs. "Look. You can say what you want. I don't really care about that. Most of the adults in my life have said something and disappointed me later. You aren't the first."
John can read between the lines, and he doesn't like the picture he's seeing. "Maybe I'm not the first to majorly screw up, but I want to be the first—or one of the first—to make it right. Just . . . please give me a chance to."
Kieran stares blankly at him again, and it's like an arrow piercing his heart.
"Okay," she says after an eternity. "Sure. Why not?"
"'Why not?'" John echoes. It's not a rousing endorsement like he was hoping for, but it sure is something.
"You asked," Kieran says flatly. "No one else has really done that before. Or stuck around."
"Oh." John swallows. "Thanks."
"Yeah." Kieran gives him a meaningful, piercing look. "Just don't mess it up or whatever, I guess."
"I'm still down for that jumper joyride if you are." John hopes he's not overstepping his bounds. He extended an olive branch and hopes it's strong enough. He'll keep trying, if he has to. Hell, he'll build an olive bridge.
It's unfair to Kieran, seeing Mayumi's eyes in her eyes or seeing her face when she's turned at just the right angle. He can't help it. He has to fix things, because he can't stand it if he only sees her face twisted with hatred at him.
He doesn't know how to fix things. He's only burned bridges.
John swallows. "If you don't want to, or that's too much that's totally fine too. Totally fair."
Kieran mulls it over, head tilted and tapping her fingers on the counter. "Are you free right now?"
John had seemed pretty sincere during his apology. There was a part of Kieran that wanted to take his apology and throw it back in his face. Dig her heels in. Twist the knife a bit more.
It's an angry part of Kieran, but it's been simmering. Now all she feels is tired.
She tries not to think about saying yes to the jumper joyride like a mistake. She was looking forward to it, sure, but that was before yesterday's mess.
Was it really all just yesterday?
It doesn't feel like it all happened in a day. More like a week.
Even with John's apology in mind, she's still not sure how she feels about spending time with John one-on-one. Even if it's bonding time. John can fly the jumper. She can't. John is her exit strategy. She tries not to doubt that John would turn around as soon as he she gives the word. Or that he'd turn around and leave her.
It's all in her head, she reminds herself. Which is the issue.
But John extended an olive branch. That should be enough for Kieran to take a leap of faith. It should.
God, doubt is such a bitch.
But John does meet her in the jumper bay when he said he would. He's carrying a picnic basket. Points for foresight. Either of them getting hangry would defeat the purpose.
"Alright. I'm off the clock until we get back. Or unless something so catastrophic happens Lorne can't handle it." John grins "Ready?"
The jumper makes it out of the tower without anything catastrophic happening. Nothing in their jumper breaks or malfunctions and the central tower doesn't explode behind them as they fly into the afternoon sun.
So far so good.
The silence in the jumper isn't completely uncomfortable. Nothing beyond the awkward silence of an elevator ride with strangers, anyway.
John's got a death grip on the controls, and every time they make eye contact out of the corner of their eyes they flit apart just as fast.
"Can I try?" Kieran blurts.
John startles a bit. She doesn't feel the jumper jerk a bit so much as see it in the HUD, but John rights the jumper. "What?"
"I meant flying the jumper. Can I try?"
"Oh—sure."
As soon as John gets out of the pilot's chair, the dashboard lights die. The Ancients have the foresight to not have an automatic shut off when the pilot's chair is empty though, so they don't plummet into the Lantean ocean.
The dashboard lights up a bright light as soon as Kieran sits down. She feels a pleasant hum in the back of her mind. If there was any doubt that she possessed the Ancient gene, this is confirmation.
"Okay," Kieran says. "So what now?"
"Have you ever driven a car?"
"Uh. A couple times. A year ago. I never got my license."
"Okay," John says. "This is nothing like that."
"O—oh. Informative."
John snorts. "With a car you feel the road. You feel the resistance of the wheel. You don't have that here. And you're not just driving on one plane. It's not just left, right, forward, back—you'll go up and down too."
"Right."
"So I'm going to have you fly the rest of the way to the mainland." The path John was flying lights up on the HUD. Kieran's veering off to the right a bit, but she tilts the controls back to the left a little. "Nice! You're a natural."
Kieran can't help but grin. Piece of cake.
She's flying a spaceship. She's flying a spaceship!
They make it to the coastline of some landmass with only gentle poking and prodding from John. Reminders to adjust the controls and watch to make sure that they're not going too high or low for now.
"Landing's going to be the hard part," John says. "It's hard to have a good gauge of vertical distance. It's not a plane so there's no landing gear or real braking system to worry about. Just think about going down—slowly."
"Slowly," Kieran repeats. "Piece of cake. No problemo."
The jumper goes down slowly—at first. It feels like it takes forever until—
WHUMP. Even if Kieran doesn't feel the sharp drop she sees the sand fly up in a poof around the jumper and feels a whine in the back of her head where there was a pleasant hum.
" . . . Whoops?"
John winces. "You only dropped about a foot. A jumper can take more than that. I probably should've told you that you'd feel the ground."
"That would've been helpful, yeah."
"At least you know for next time." John lowers the ramp, picnic basket already in hand. "But not bad for a first flight, kiddo."
Kieran's only been to the beach a couple of times. Most of the time she and her mom went to the mountains, and they always ended up in the small-town Kieran's grandparents lived in during the summer.
The sand looks soft, crunching underneath her sneakers like powdered sugar. She can smell the salt in the air, hear the rush of the ocean meeting land. The setting sun is starting to paint everything with a lens of faint gold.
It's nice. It's perfect picnic weather.
"Alright!" John grins. He's already set out a couple of blankets and spread out the food. "Ready to dig in?"
Talking like this about everything and nothing is easier than she thought it would be. It's basically twenty questions. John likes Ferris wheels and anything that goes faster than two-hundred miles an hour. Kieran has strong opinions about spy and heist movies and she likes snowboarding and hikes.
"I'm more of a surfer," John says. "When I was living in California."
"Surfing kind of freaks me out. I'd rather eat snow than wipe out in the water. Or eat sand."
"Been there done that. To each their own."
They lapse into a comfortable silence, but Kieran still has questions. Uncomfortable questions.
"Um . . ." It's that hallmark of every strong start. "Can I ask you about . . ."
"Your mom?" John finishes. "Sure. There's some stuff I'm not ready to talk about but. I can tell you the story about how we met."
It was their first semester at Stanford. They had a couple classes together, calculus and chemistry. They were lab partners. Eventually, they started hanging out regularly. Just study sessions in coffee shops. Then he asked her out.
"She had no idea what my name was," John says.
Kieran spit-takes into the sand. "What? How? It's been a couple months!"
John chuckles to himself. He has his elbows propped up on his knees, not exactly giving himself a hug but. Something like it maybe.
"I don't know," he says. "But she felt really bad about it. Her face was super red and she offered to buy me a coffee. So we just made it a date."
"Oh my god." The smile on Kieran's face is so wide it's painful in the best way. "She never told me."
"It's only a little embarrassing. I'm uh, I'm a little surprised she didn't talk about me a lot."
"That's not true," Kieran blurts. "She talked about you all the time!"
"She did?" John blinks, a little dumbstruck.
"Never by name. She never said anything about what you looked like really. Just that you weren't Japanese. Just facts and things. Without any identifying information."
"She didn't." John repeats mechanically.
"I'm sorry."
"It's not like it's your fault."
There's a bitter edge in his tone, and she winces. She knows he's not mad at her but . . . yeah. Mom said that she cut it off abruptly. That would hurt anyone.
"I'm going to say something, and it's going to sound . . . weird."
" . . . Okay?"
"I think Mom broke up with you because she loved you too much."
John blinks. "What? Like if you love something, set it free?"
"Kind of, yeah." Kieran wrings her hands nervously. "Our family—the Amamiyas—we're a lot. There's a lot of baggage."
"The Sheppards were never a walk in the park either."
"No I mean—" A frustrated noise rips out of Kieran, somewhere between a growl and a whine. "I mean baggage baggage."
"Did she just . . . not trust me? To help her? To take care of you?"
Kieran shakes her head. "No. She did. She knew you would. She said you would. She said you would've dropped everything if she gave you the word."
"Then why—"
"That's why. Because you would! She said you were the best goddamn thing that ever happened to her so she couldn't—" Kieran breaks off, something like a sob working its way up her throat. "She said something about how you wanted to be free of your family, so she didn't want to tie you down to hers."
John is silent. Silent for a long time. Kieran pretends not to see the quick swipe of his thumb across his eyes.
"I loved your mom. So much," John says quietly. "No one ever hurt me like she did. I don't think anyone could."
She doesn't know what to say to that. "I'm sorry."
"I wish she trusted me."
"I think she wanted you safe."
John looks at her sharply. "Safe?"
"It's hard to explain. It's really, really hard to explain."
John is silent. Kieran can't blame him. What can you say to that, really?
"I'm not saying I agreed with what she did," Kieran says tiredly. "She just—like I said—I was still mad at her when she died. It was a disagreement."
"I'm sorry."
"I'm not sure it matters."
"Of course it matters."
"Maybe."
Kieran stares into the horizon. The sky's gone from a soft gold to a burning amber.
Who knew they would be bonding over complicated feelings about Kieran's mom.
"I wish I could tell you everything." Kieran smiles sardonically. "Amamiya family secrets are a hell of a beast."
"Maybe one day."
"Sure. If you can wait that long."
If you can handle it.
Mom thought he could. And Kieran will trust her judgement. It's not a question of if, but when.
I hope everyone has a happy holiday season!