All The King's Men

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John sat back on the pier, let the sunlight bathe him, and thought about taking off his shirt. His scars were still raw pink in pale flesh, and he'd been thinking a tan might help make them less obvious. Of course, he wasn't entirely comfortable displaying them out in the open long enough to get the requisite tan, especially in the mixed company he presently found himself.

When he'd suggested a picnic to Teyla, he'd been expecting her, Rodney, Ronon, and Torran.

That's what it would have been, once upon a time.

Oh, the times they are a-changin'...

"Why do I feel like I'm in the middle of the Atlantis picnic day?" John asked Rodney in an undertone as Amelia Banks scooped Torran up to take him down the stairs to the swimming area where Ronon was already cutting through the water, sleek as a seal.

Rodney glanced back to where Keller was laying out the contents of the picnic basket - the fatuous glance of a man wrapped around a certain woman's finger and surprisingly unbothered by it. "I don't know where you got such an idea from. At all."

He snorted softly, amused to find Rodney so domesticated. But he hid his laugh behind the lip of his beer bottle as Keller demanded Rodney's help to sort through this stuff. "I'm not going to do it myself."

"Can't you get Teyla-- Okay, okay!"

John sat back on the pier as Rodney went to help lay out lunch. The sun was warm on his legs and the breeze was full of salt and sea, a respite and a change from the inside of the city and the recent rainy weather they'd been having. The seasons had turned and they were moving into summer.

He felt whole again - or on his way to it. Maybe not clean, but as clean as he'd ever be after what he'd been through. And they were working with him - not on him, but with him - to sort out any lingering problems that might arise.

He was grateful for that - for them.

There was a flutter of light-coloured material in the corner of his eye, and Teyla dropped down to the pier beside him with a can of soda, the layers of her white skirt bunching around the slim brown of her upper calves. "They are arguing over whether the tzatziki has lemon juice in it."

John shrugged. "Feed some to Rodney and have the epi-pen ready?"

"I heard that!"

Teyla was grinning when he looked back at her, but her eyes were on her son, floating happily out in the water with Amelia coaxing him to swim towards her, and Ronon flicking seawater at her.

"So," John said in conversation. "Woolsey said I'm due to go to Earth so the IOA can run me through their psych evaluations."

"You seem more confident about it than the last time it was mentioned."

"Now, see, the key word in that sentence is seem," John told her. That had been a bad moment, and one which had Woolsey peering anxiously at him and asking if he was all right. And then John had shaken himself out of it. "But I think I'll be okay. See, I've had a couple of friends work some of the issues out with me for the last couple of months..." He glanced at her beneath his lashes, waiting for the answering grin to leap on her lips, broad and wide. "Thanks."

She brushed it off. "We left you behind."

"Don't play the guilt card, Teyla. You came back for me, too." His memories of that night-time slog through rain and mud were blurred, but he remembered the shape of her shoulders under his arm, the feeling that safety was close - that he had a protector who'd die before she let him be taken again.

"You would have done the same for us."

John found it strange to realise that, as much as he hid himself from others through misdirection and projection of a confident shell, in her own way, Teyla hid herself from him by deflecting praise or concern along other lines of reason and practicality.

He'd never noticed that before.

"Thanks," he repeated, looking full into her face.

Teyla looked back, and something of his seriousness communicated itself to her, because she gave a small, almost nervous smile, and simply said, "You are welcome, John."

They sat there on the pier, listening to the laughter of the others, and John contemplated the broad horizon before him - a galaxy of possibilities, with his team beside him, and the city of Atlantis always waiting for him to come home.

- fin -

FINAL NOTES: I know that there's a lot of desire from the John!whumpers to see exactly what happened to John, but sometimes I think that less is more - your imaginations can pain more vividly, more brutally, than my mere words. Ultimately, at the request of my assignment, the focus of the story was to be on John and his recovery from what was done to him. I hope that I succeeded in this.

As always, thank you so much for reading, and especially thank you to those who've been letting me know that you enjoyed this story along the way! I hope you'll leave feedback, whether praise or concrit.