Cosecant, Beneath the Roses

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My rec table.

Claim: Stargate: Atlantis - John Sheppard
Title: Cosecant
Author: Domenika Marzione, aka miss_porcupine
Characters: John Sheppard, Jack O'Neill.
Prompt: 1. First Time.
Rating: PG.
Length: medium (6,220 words)
Brief summary: This is an examination of John's first command—Atlantis—through the eyes of Jack O'Neill back on Earth at the SGC, post-Siege. O'Neill is empathetic and sees everything; he fills us in on some of John's backstory while giving us a practical, military viewpoint for his actions, resolving (or at least confronting) a lot of the issues I have with John's command style and his issues with authority—especially when the authority is his own. I don't just accept this portrait and all its attendant conclusions, I believe it.

Sheppard, for his part, seemed almost eager to accept the blows. He had come home without his commanding officer or his own second in command; the data burst had contained his letters to all of the fallen Marines' next of kin and they hadn't been form letters. Sheppard had left the video message for Sumner's family (it had gone to his father). In the debriefs that had taken place since his return, he'd stubbornly refused to let them classify Lt. Aiden Ford as anything but MIA even though Drs. Beckett and Weir could not reasonably promise that they'd be able to capture Ford or cure him if they did. Sheppard had insisted that he could bring Ford back, but it had been clear that he stood alone in that regard even among the Marine representatives on Earth. He had spoken harshly, in fact, to the colonel who'd suggested classifying Ford as a deserter until it could be proven otherwise.

He'd gotten yelled at for that outburst, of course, and it had done nothing to ease concerns that Sheppard was too loose a cannon to be either in command of a distant outpost or (once again) only a bullet away from it. All through the three days of debriefings and hearings, Sheppard had been entirely too reckless for someone who had to know what sort of thin ice he skated upon -- and that concerned Jack more than anything in the reports he'd read. It was as if Sheppard were looking for someone to punish him so that he could stop doing it to himself. Yet another bit of himself that Jack recognized.

Link to the story: Cosecant

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Claim: Stargate: Atlantis - John Sheppard
Title: Beneath the Roses
Author: julad
Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Radek Zelenka.
Prompt: 17. Jealousy.
Rating: PG-13.
Length: medium (3,060 words)
Brief summary: This story was written for the enclosed-spaces challenge on sga_flashfic, and the spaces Julad describes here are all organic, extensions of personality and relationships. This is John on the outside looking in, and of course this is the way John would handle jealousy, or any other emotion that rears its head at him.

An hour later, the sun was up properly, but McKay and Zelenka still hadn't emerged. He wasn't angry, but he'd cleaned all his guns and sharpened all his knives, and he was starting to get bored. All this fuss because Rodney wouldn't read his email, because Zelenka hadn't told anybody else where he was going, because nobody had noticed the blackout and thought maybe it was important. It was no way to run a mission, even a civilian one. He paced the floor, outlining procedures in his head for this kind of situation, and then spun around and punched a wall.

Link to the story: Beneath the Roses