Kiss and Tell
sequel to This Kiss by Setcheti
Disclaimer: Don’t own Stargate Atlantis or any of the characters thereof.
Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard stalked down the silver corridor like a man who meant business. Which he did. Big business. Bad business. Ass-kicking business.
Two days ago, Sheppard had gotten a message from Carson Beckett, the mission’s chief medical doctor, that the man needed to speak to him about something urgent. Beckett usually didn’t ask Sheppard for help – usually there wasn’t anything Sheppard could help him with – so getting a message like that had made the lieutenant colonel sit up and take notice. Especially since the message specified that they needed to meet on the Q.T.
He’d met with the doctor and gotten a couple of
surprises. First off, he hadn’t
realized that Beckett swung both ways.
Not that there was anything wrong with that, of course. The Air Force had done away with asking
and telling five years before the Atlantis mission ever left Earth, and the
Scottish doctor was a civilian anyway so what the
Sheppard’s second surprise had been finding out that not everyone on the mission apparently agreed with that. He hadn’t liked that one. And even more than he hadn’t liked it that said individuals been harassing someone, he’d been pretty unhappy that the someone hadn’t told him about it. Especially since he saw McKay just about every day.
The lieutenant colonel had dealt with that first. He’d gathered up the astrophysicist for a ‘mission briefing’, herded him into an empty room and then read him the riot act. Or at least he’d started to, but he’d had to stop when he realized that McKay seemed to think he was getting yelled at for being harassed, not for failing to tell his team leader – his friend! – about it. He’d also realized that McKay wasn’t looking him directly in the eye, and after thinking back a bit had come to the conclusion that McKay hadn’t looked him directly in the eye since the kissing incident.
If you could even rightly call it an incident, that was. Beckett hadn’t complained, obviously. And no one who was complaining had been directly involved, nor had any of them even been in the room and actually seen the kiss happen. Except for Dr. Weir, of course, and Sheppard was still trying to figure out how to address the fact that the mission’s civilian commander had apparently reprimanded McKay for what had happened. He was going to have to deal with that too, but Weir was at the bottom of Sheppard’s business list at the moment. He’d already sent a message to the Daedalus about the whole incident and what was happening because of it, and he just had to rely on them to kick it up the chain of command until it generated a response.
He’d also sent two of his own men up to the Daedalus along with the message, with instructions that they either had to stay there or go back to Earth. One of them had been trying pretty persistently to save McKay’s soul from the fires of sodomite hell, the other one had witnessed one of the more physical incidents instigated by one of the science staff and hadn’t done anything to stop it – hadn’t reported it either. Sheppard refused to keep either of them in the city, it was just too damned dangerous to have people around he couldn’t trust.
With that thought in mind, Sheppard really hoped the brass would decide to do something about Weir. On any given day he could think of several different things he’d like to do about Weir, but pretty much all of them would be considered illegal if he got caught. If he got caught. Sheppard was still working out acceptable risk on that one.
He was walking through the science section now, and people were getting out of his way. He saw one person pointing out the lab he was heading for, which Sheppard took as confirmation that either word had gotten around about the threats or that his quarry had a history that extended past the incident with McKay. He’d find out for sure later. For right now, though…the lieutenant colonel swung into the lab with a grin that was seriously frightening, enjoying the reaction it produced. “Hi Dr. Zelenka,” he addressed the startled Czech scientist. “You might want to go take a break or something, your lab partner there and I need to have a little chat.”