Playing Softly on the Radio (Stargate Atlantis) PG-13

[mhalachai]

Playing Softly on the Radio
A Stargate Atlantis story
by mhalachaiswords

Summary: Sometimes, John thinks he can still smell the blood.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Sony and MGM own all things Stargate Atlantis. I but borrow.
Word count:: 1,430
Characters: John Sheppard, Dave Sheppard
Setting: Set in the way-back machine. John is four.
Spoilers: Characters from SGA Season 4's Outcast (John's family) and a mention of Teyla's baby (season 5)
Warning: Child abuse, non-main-character death.
Note: On my continued quest to try and figure out John Sheppard's particular brand of crazy aloofness.



John's memory may be patchy on most of his childhood, but a few things still stand out. Falling off the stable roof and breaking his arm when he was very small. His friend Billy's birthday party and the bright blue icing on the cake. When his parents brought his brother Dave home from the hospital for the first time, and how wrinkly and pink and screamy Dave was.

His mother's death.

For weeks after Mommy came home with the new baby, she'd been tired and grumpy. She didn't want to see John's artwork from school, or read with him, or even to see him at all. She screamed at him when he was too loud and she wouldn't let him anywhere near the baby, even though John knew he was big enough to hold Dave for just a few minutes. After all, he was nearly five.

The one time John tried to pick Dave up out of his bassinet, Mommy caught him and slapped him across the face so hard he cried out in pain. Just as quickly, she pulled him to her chest and hugged him so tight he couldn't breath, then shook him by the shoulders until he broke away and ran down the hall and down the stairs and across the yard to hide in the stables until Daddy came home.

John didn't know what happened to his mommy, but he missed the way things used to be.

On the day it happened, he was late leaving school. His teacher took the kindergarten class outside to look at the bugs in the field, and John had been so excited when he found an earthworm that he'd tripped into the mud and gotten his uniform dirty. His teacher had helped John clean up as best he could, but nothing could mask the muddy marks on his trousers and his shirt. Mrs. Murphy the housekeeper came to pick John up at school, rolling her eyes at his muddy clothes, but that was okay because she liked John and let him lick the spoon whenever she made cookies. John told her all about the worm he'd found and the ladybug that Suzie held on her pinky and the bumblebee that Eric hadn't been able to catch, no matter how hard he tried. He didn't tell her that he had made Dave a picture of the worm and had hidden it in his bag so Mommy wouldn't find it and tear it up like she had done the picture of the horses John had drawn for Dave the previous week.

When they got home, Mrs. Murphy took John to his room and helped him change into clean clothing. Mrs. Murphy took John's uniform to the laundry room and John climbed the stairs to Mommy's room, because even if Mommy didn't want to see him any other time of the day, she always demanded that John come see her when he got home from school.

One day, John thought hotly, he wouldn't come home from school at all and then Mommy would miss him, and on that day he wouldn't be sad, not even a little.

As John approached the room, he could hear Dave crying through the door. His footsteps slowed. Whenever Dave cried, Mommy tried to blame it on John, even when John hasn't around. But by now, John knew there was no point in trying to delay whatever Mommy would do. Slowly, he pushed on the door until it opened.

The room smelled like copper pennies in the sun. Mommy lay still on the bed, one hand extended as she stared up at the ceiling, not even blinking. Red liquid covered the bed all around her, and the wall beside the bed, and Dave's bassinet and the white carpet and the drapes and everything, even the handgun lying on the table on the other side of the room.

John touched Mommy's hand, but she didn't move. Her skin was cold under his fingers. Then John went over to Dave's bassinet. Thick red drops covered his brother's face and his hands and his little yellow pajamas, smearing around as Dave wiggled and cried because he was only a little baby.

John looked at Mommy, then at Dave, then back at Mommy again. She hadn't moved from the place on the bed, and John didn't know how she could be sleeping with her eyes open.

Dave sounded so unhappy that John couldn't stand it any longer. He reached into the bassinet and picked Dave up, careful to hold his head like Daddy always did, until Dave was draped over John's shoulder. There were drops of red all over the bassinet, over the pillow and the mattress. Maybe Dave didn't like being wet, John thought as he walked back across the room holding Dave.

Mommy didn't move.

Out in the hall, Dave stopped crying. "I'll keep you safe," John said to his little brother, who gripped and clung to him like a baby monkey. "That's what big brothers do, Daddy says."

John walked carefully down the stairs, holding Dave tight the whole time. He walked into the kitchen and stopped by the table where Mrs. Murphy and the chauffer looked up, startled at his entrance, and announced, "Something's wrong with Mommy."

Mrs. Murphy shrieked and grabbed Dave away from John, while the chauffer ran out of the kitchen towards Mommy's room, and more people came in at the screaming, and John couldn't find anyone to listen to him that Dave didn't like being wet.

After a few minutes, when Mrs. Murphy had stripped Dave down to his diaper and looked him all over and rewrapped him in a kitchen towel, John sat in a chair and held Dave in his lap and told Dave the story about the worm and the ladybug. Strange people came into the house and no one remembered about John's dinner but John didn't mind because Dave fell asleep in his arms and that was okay, because John was the big brother and it was his job to protect Dave.

Daddy came in with a big man who said he was a police man, and he let John hold his police badge while the doctor looked closely at Dave. The police man asked John if he had moved anything in the room and John said yes, he moved Dave downstairs because Dave was crying. Then the police man asked John if he touched the gun, and John very indignantly said no, because Daddy had always said that only adults should touch guns, and that John was never to touch any of the guns in the house or in the stables because it wasn't safe.

Then the police man looked at John's hands and his arms and patted his head and said that John was a brave boy, but all John wanted was Dave back.

Even later still, Daddy came back into the kitchen and sat John down and told him that Mommy was dead. The room was still full of people and John thought he heard someone say that Mommy shot herself before someone shushed the voice.

Later that night, lying in a makeshift bed in the servants quarters with Dave asleep in the portable cradle, John stared at the darkness and wondered, if Mommy used the handgun to shoot herself, who had put the handgun on the far table and who had put Dave back into his bassinet.

No one else ever asked those questions, and after a few months and for years to come, John forgot what he was supposed to remember about his mother's death.

~~~

The first time John babysat Torren when it rained on Atlantis, he turned away from the bassinet for just a moment to get something and when he turned back, the lightning through the glass cast shadows like blood spatter on the baby. John had to sit on the ground with his head between his knees and count to a hundred before he could risk lifting Torren out of the cradle with shaking hands to tell him a story about worms and ladybugs and all the wonderful things in the sunshine that a little boy would see.

After Teyla returned with smiles for her little boy, John went back to his quarters and moved the bedside table opposite the door. He placed his loaded sidearm on the table and stared at it as the winter storm buffeted the city.

When John rubbed his hand over his face, he imagined he could feel his mother's blood on his skin.

end

Comments

[hsifyppah.livejournal.com]

Grim! I like the idea of John's kryptonite being tiny wee babies.

[mhalachaiswords.livejournal.com]

SGA lends itself to grim backstory. Or maybe that's just me as a writer.

on a lighter note, John versus the baby is always a fun way to throw him out of his comfort zone.

[emony2.livejournal.com]

Oh. This - this is right even if it hurts.

[mhalachaiswords.livejournal.com]

It's one of those things that could make sense... poor John.

[firefox1490.livejournal.com]

Oh poor John.

[morgie.livejournal.com]

Damn... Just... damn...

[lillian13.livejournal.com]

Oh, John.

This makes...so much sense.

[tygermama.livejournal.com]

oh, John

I just... *wibble*flails*

[mhalachaiswords.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That was my reaction after writing this.

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

Whoa! That's... plausible. Very scarily plausible.

I've had a subscription to Ellery Queen magazine for about 25 years now, so it's second nature that when I read the text, I tried to suss out a clue as to who the murderer might have been. I don't think you are presenting one here, which, of course, is not necessary, as that is not the point of the story. We're solving the mystery of John, not his mother's murder. I do feel that John's mother was going through a terrible post-partum depression that, given the era she lived and died in, was not being treated. If the concept was even around back then, it wasn't being applied to actual, suffering new mothers. Tragedy all around that lives on in John, truly a brave and good older brother.

[mhalachaiswords.livejournal.com]

That was exactly what I was thinking when I wrote this. John was seeing his mother with a severe deep post-partum depression, experiencing the repercussions in the way a four-year-old would. Adding to that the mystery that only John could see - while his mother was depressed enough to commit suicide, she couldn't have done so. Whatever happened in the background, John would know the adults didn't really see what had happened, but subconsciously he would know, and that would impact him greatly as he grew up.

As for the mystery, I wanted to give out more clues, but you're right in that this isn't the mystery of her death, and a four-year-old, no matter how astute, would not logically see the clues presented. So it stays as a tragic story instead of a mystery.

[sqweakie.livejournal.com]

Oh...
I can't say anything else at this point...

[ianthe-echo.livejournal.com]

Oh, poor John.

[cissasghost.livejournal.com]

This is very well-done (no big surprise there); you do a good job of writing child-voice without making it gooey or improbably perceptive.

[califmole.livejournal.com]

Wonderfully chilling.

[lyuells.livejournal.com]

Wait, so who did it? And why? o_O

Nice story, I like the imperfect narrator in kid!John.

[jujuberry136.livejournal.com]

Wow. Poor John, this just makes too much sense. And of course John as a child would realize things were not quite right with his mother's "suicide" (a subconscious reason perhaps for mistrusting authorities?)

[mhalachaiswords.livejournal.com]

I suspect that John's entire past is littered with reasons not to trust the Man. This idea about his mother stuck me as he has such fundamental problems relating to women as "other"*, more than just "ew girl cooties"

*other than being just another person to interact with - whenever Elizabeth or Teyla got emotional, John got that deer in the headlights look of "oh god help now what?"

[lukita.livejournal.com]

omg omg omg D: John

[ccmom.livejournal.com]

Wow amazing! Of course I'm curious to know what really happened. Are you going to write more of this or leave it as it is?

Nicely done.

[mhalachaiswords.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'm probably not going to write any more of this, but I think it can be nicely applied as back story to any SGA I've written (well, except the Harry Potter!John Sheppard, but otherwise pretty close)

[scrollgirl.livejournal.com]

Chilling. I love 5-year-old John's POV and the way he's being such a good big brother to Dave :)

[khyrra.livejournal.com]

Wow. That punches you in the face, right there. Poor John! I'm really wondering what really happened to his mother.

[rhianona]

wow. This is very... evocative. Very tragic and it makes you wonder. Nice use of Torren to cap it off.

[houses7177.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. Made me think all sorts of thinky thoughts. WHich is good.

[mhalachaiswords.livejournal.com]

This little snippet has wormed its way into all my John Sheppard!backstory, in any 'verse. It could fit his character very well, as unfortunate as that is.