five people john sheppard slept with after atlantis

1.

Three day leave after the final debriefing, after taking Rodney to the airport, when he started drinking at the bar and didn't stop until he woke up in her bed, hungover and with no idea where he was, reaching for his radio. She had blond hair; the clock radio beside her bed was tuned to a pop music station. Britney Spears made him cringe even more than the headache. He didn't remember the sex, but a quick check of the garbage can in the bathroom revealed a used condom, so at least they were both safe.

She was probably a decade older than she'd looked the night before, but then, his reflection in the mirror didn't look like any prize. He brushed his teeth with her toothpaste and his finger, found his clothes, and shook her awake enough to say good-bye.

Sometime during the cab ride to the airport to recover his car, he realized he couldn't quite remember her name. Cheryl? Sherry? Sharon?

2.

Vala came into his temporary quarters the second week after they were thrown out of Atlantis. John was stretched out on his bed, staring blankly at the gray ceiling. There were a lot of promises floating around – that they had done well, that there would be positions for them wherever they wanted, and John didn't believe a word of it. They'd all been sent to Atlantis because no one had wanted them or someone had wanted to be rid of them; happy to have them back did not describe Stargate Command.

Elizabeth was still in shock the last time he saw her. John had had the rug jerked out from under him before. He knew the feeling of freefall, knew he might as well go limp and wait to hit the ground. McKay did too – Siberia was nearly as cold as Antarctica – that was why he was dealing in his own way, already off at Area 51 and working with the Goa'uld technology they had stashed there. Like John, he was pretending that half of him hadn't been ripped away and left behind in Pegasus. The thought of Teyla and Ronon tossed out of Atlantis to some planet where the Wraith might show up any fucking day –

He really hated the fucking Ancients.

Vala had big, very sharp eyes beneath the ditzy gold-digger act, and a face like a hawk. John thought she probably cultivated the act to keep everyone from noticing the bird-bright fierceness underneath it. He knew about masks and acts, knew saying 'There may be surfing in our future' and other phrases playing to the flyboy airhead stereotype. Knew misleading people made it so much easier to keep them at a distance. Mock them, make sure they're not worth respecting and therefore much easier to give up.

He watched wordlessly as she locked the door behind her and walked – stalked – over to the bed: first one knee on the bed, then the other as she straddled him. They had looked each other over in Atlantis, but there was no time for more there, gates to harvest – there was an idea that ended up biting them on the ass not once but twice – black holes to nuke, playing twenty questions with Ascendeds pretending to be holograms. Now all John had was time. Now they were both strangers washed up in a place that wasn't theirs.

Technically, Vala wasn't human – not Earth-human – but John could give a shit; he had his own idea of what made someone human, and a hell of a lot of the natives of this planet didn't cut it anyway. Her hair was dark and cool and slid between his fingers, her mouth was wet, and she did things with her tongue that had him all the way hard in seconds. Her hands opened his belt before he could even get his on her breasts, and from then on it was pretty much a blur. She was long and angular and pale, intent on making it good for herself. Stronger than she looked, she left bruises, and John didn't care, his hands moving over her skin, rough and urgent, too. She bit and tied him in knots, hot, tight, and wet pulling him in until he couldn't remember his name, couldn't remember anyone or anything else, not even what he'd lost. When she finally let him come, it was like all those knots coming undone, and he unraveled into a boneless sprawl, fucked-out and half-asleep before she was dressed and out the door.

3.

He slept with Jonas Quinn in a fuck-and-go room over a bar in a mining town on the third moon out from PX8-868, somewhere on the outskirts of the Lucian Alliance. Downstairs smelled of spilled beer and burned grease from the kitchen. Upstairs, the walls were so thin you could hear someone breathe on the other side. Seemed like most of the SG teams were known and wanted faces in the Alliance – Cam Mitchell was 'shoot on sight' – and his was new. To the Milky Way – back in Pegasus the Genii had plastered it all over, along with that bounty.

The SGC was exchanging information, new weapons designs, for some Ori equipment the Langaran Resistance had picked up, so they sent John to make contact. He had the gene, and some bright brain back at the SGC thought maybe the Langarans couldn't make the captured technology work because, well, they didn't.

Quinn's hand on his ass as they headed up the stairs was part of the act, just in case anyone was watching, but it stopped being an act about the time the door on the room closed. Quinn had one hand on the back of his neck and the other down his pants. All John could do was shiver and go with it.

They didn't even get the cover off the narrow bed, not until they'd finished jerking each other off and were lying side by side, sweating and fighting the need to just fall asleep.

Quinn asked about people back at the SGC, most them people John didn't or barely knew, and that was funny, so John had to explain he'd been in Atlantis until recently. Or maybe not so funny, John reflected, as the shadows stretched over the rough wood floor. He and Quinn had a lot in common: they'd both been sent somewhere alien and made it their home, made the people there family, only to get kicked out when the original owners showed up. Sent back to a place that should have been home but never could be again.

John could feel the Ori tech in the pack Quinn had dropped on the floor. It made him homesick.

4.

He flew in to DC to attend a funeral, of all things, wore his dress uniform, shocked his dad's buddies when they saw he'd made lieutenant colonel. Afterward, he changed into civvies in his hotel room and headed down to the bar for a drink. He'd definitely been drinking too much since coming back to Earth, but he wasn't flying anymore – not even, especially, the jumper – and the alcohol blurred his senses enough that he didn't miss that almost subliminal sense of power and response he had had in Atlantis. There was no one but McKay or Beckett who would even have a clue – well, maybe Lorne – if he said the entire world felt like it was behind a pane of glass, like he'd been shot up with Novocaine. They'd send him to shrink or call it PTSD, but it wasn't. More like withdrawal, except it wasn't that either.

Exile, really, and there was no point to letting anyone know how bitter he really was.

One drink was followed by a second, and the woman at the bar next to him mentioned going upstairs. She looked just a little too much like Elizabeth, though, which even with two whiskeys sloshing through his veins would be just wrong, so he said he had to meet someone somewhere and got out.

He hailed a cab and just said 'take me somewhere fun,' which was and wasn't a mistake. The club was not his scene, but the girl with the black pigtails – who reminded him of Vala for an instant, so he smiled at her – smiled at him, came over, and told him he looked terribly out of place. He was. Out of place, on the wrong planet, in the wrong galaxy even, but he just gave her a lopsided smile and said yeah, he got lost.

Abby – her name was Abby Sciuto, and she was memorable enough he wouldn't forget her – was smart, made him laugh despite himself, and had a take-no-prisoners attitude. He traced all her tattoos with his tongue when they went back to her apartment and her lipstick smeared bright red on his cock.

Sometime around four in the morning she got a call from work. Said she had to go into the lab, so John courteously dressed and left along with her. Told her he was glad he met her and headed back to his hotel.

On the flight back to Colorado, he thought about the spider web tattoo on her neck and imagined telling Ronon about it, even introducing them, until the landing announcement jolted him awake and he remembered Ronon was in another galaxy.

5.

He had three drinks at the airport bar, waiting for McKay's flight to arrive. The third one was completely the airline's fault, since the flight was so damn late. He ended up handing McKay his keys and taking his laptop case in exchange. McKay gave him a suspicious look, then one of disbelief, muttering something about being drunk at three in the afternoon. John just nodded.

"I need a good hotel," Rodney said once they were in the car. John leaned his head against the passenger door window and shook his head. The sun was shining, but he couldn't remember what season it was in Colorado. His last mission had been to someplace so muddy and wet he'd privately called it the Planet of Ooze.

"You can stay with me," he said.

McKay laughed, that snorting, nasal laugh that John had unconsciously missed. "On what, your couch? With my back problems? Are you insane or just really drunk? Do you even have a couch?"

John frowned. He didn't have a couch. He had a recliner with a built-in beer rest. "Okay, my bed."

Rodney paused with his hand on the keys sitting in the ignition. He turned and looked at John. John looked back.

He'd seen this coming years ago and started running, making sure McKay could never quite catch up, but now every reason he'd had to tell himself
no seemed meaningless.

"Hunh," McKay mumbled. He turned the key and the engine caught immediately. "Okay."

John slumped down lower in his seat and relaxed for the first time since he'd come back.

"Think you can tell me how to get back to your place without getting us lost?" McKay asked.

"If I try really hard," he drawled back.