Chapter Text
“Are you sure you want to come?”
John stood behind the two chairs in the Puddle Jumper, looking at the pilot’s chair. He didn’t look absolutely sure that he wanted to come. Anna hadn’t considered that he wouldn’t actually want to teach her, but no one else really seemed enthused about it.
Ronon volunteered to take the back seat, though. He slid into the chair. “Yeah. Why shouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know, actually. I’m concerned about you being a backseat driver,” John mumbled sarcastically. He waved his hand toward the pilot’s chair. “Alright, Anna. Lesson one. Turning on the Puddle Jumper.”
“Serious?” Ronon leaned forward, an annoyed expression on his face.
Anna smiled and jumped into the pilot’s chair. “Radek already taught me how to turn on the Jumper.”
“Radek.” Ronon considered that for a few seconds.
John nodded impatiently. “Radek Zelenka, the guy who doesn’t blow up solar systems, likes knives and pigeons, and doesn’t have the ATA gene?” John asked, emphasizing his final phrase. “That Radek?”
Anna smiled when the dark panel of controls in front of her lit up obediently. She glanced at John. “Yes. That one.”
John frowned. Maybe he was impressed or irritated. It was hard to tell.
“He says that most people with the gene have no idea how to use it,” Anna said.
“Alright, well." John's brow furrowed, as if deep in thought. As if confused. As if he didn't know whether he should be offended or should agree. "I’m pretty sure I know how to use it.”
“I think he was talking mostly about Doctor McKay…” Anna offered. Though, he might have been talking about Major Lorne. Or Reed. Or any number of exceptionally lucky individuals with the gene. “He told me that the gene doesn’t let me sense the ship, but lets the ship sense me.”
“Well, he’s got that right.” John pointed to Anna’s side of the Puddle Jumper. “See those handles, there? Those are the Puddle Jumper controls. Just… don’t strangle them, okay? Gentle.”
“And try to fly in a straight line,” Ronon offered. “I think Sheppard gets space-sick.”
Anna glanced back at him to see his self-satisfied smirk. “Inertial dampeners should take care of that.”
John sneered at the window in front him. “Look, sitting in a Jumper that McKay is flying is like a rite of passage. If you’ve done that, you can do anything. His flying is proof that inertial dampeners do their job.” John looked at Anna. “But you have to try to get us out of here without banging into the walls.”
Anna looked up toward the door in the center of the ceiling. “Is it hard?”
It was a stupid question, she realized after she’d already asked. John made a show of figuring out how to answer. “Piloting a spaceship… hard…? Hm.” His sarcasm was so thick, he probably could have choked on it.
Anna sighed and leaned back in her chair. “I mean, maybe, compared to learning how to shoot.”
“Not even comparable,” John answered. He tapped the little handle closest to him and said, “Alright, take the controls. Taking off is, actually, the easy part. It’s landing that’s hard. Which, if you know anything about piloting, is kind of weird.”
Anna didn’t know anything about piloting. Maybe that meant it was all going to be hard.
As soon as she coaxed the Puddle Jumper up off the floor, the ceiling above them opened. John was giving her step-by-step instructions about how to push, pull, and turn the controls to get the Puddle Jumper to hover over to the center of the room and then ascend smoothly through the hole in the ceiling.
It was so easy, it was like Anna wasn’t really doing it herself.
“Good,” John said. He glanced at her for a moment as the Puddle Jumper rose up out of the bay. “Now, just kind of hold us here…”
The entire ocean and the whole planet seemed to stretch out in front of her. Which was good, because there wasn’t a lot to crash into out there. This had to be easier than driving a car. Though, maybe, ten-thousand years ago if there were more Puddle Jumpers flying around, it was harder.
A map suddenly appeared overlaid on her screen. She was pretty sure she didn’t do that, so John must have. “Alright, you see where we are?”
A flashing arrow saying “you are here” couldn’t have been any clearer. A little dot blinked at her, suddenly sitting on a dotted line that led off over the map of the planet.
“And that’s where we want to be,” Sheppard finished. “The Jumper’s pretty good about responding to input in space, but it can get a little tricky in atmosphere. Try pulling up the sensors. And, uh, don’t move the controls.”
Anna was careful to not move the controls in her hands as she thought about pulling up the sensors. John told her what all the readings on the screen meant, and which ones she was worried about. Anna was actually more interested in the readings she wasn’t “worried about”—meaning, all the readings about the Jumper’s power systems, engines, weapons, all that cool stuff that kept the Jumper running… But as long as it was running, apparently, no one cared about it.
John was worried about things like temperature, wind speed and direction. The Puddle Jumper wasn’t the most aerodynamic craft in the world, because conserving fuel wasn’t much of a concern with its power source. They could fly the Jumpers for hours every day for thousands of years and still have plenty of energy left in reserve. Unfortunately, though, that made it a little trickier to fly in high wind and certain kinds of weather.
It didn’t take much more instruction before Anna was off on an only-slightly zig-zagging course toward the mainland. John was right, that once she relaxed and wasn’t gripping the controls like she was holding on for dear life, the Jumper was much easier to control. The last half of the trip covered a pretty smooth-looking course over the mainland’s untouched beaches and forests. Flying the Jumper was actually so easy that Anna got to get a good look at all the land flying by underneath her while she controlled it.
“Ready to land?” John asked. He grimaced, and then looked at her. “Relax.” He glanced back at Ronon. “Did you feel that? When she tensed up right then, the Jumper kind of shuddered?”
Ronon shrugged unhelpfully.
John sighed and looked back at Anna. “It did. So don’t do that.”
Anna made a concerted effort to loosen her grip on the controls and slow her heartbeat. Teyla taught her how to do that. It was part of some sort of training technique. “Okay, sorry. I’m ready.”
John pulled up a topographical map of the meadow below them. “You know basically how to read one of these, right?” John asked. Anna barely had time to nod, before John went on. “The jumper can land in pretty tight spaces, but for your first time, let’s just try to set her down not on a hill, okay? Tell me where you want to land.”
Anna let go of one of the controls to point.
“Hey, hey, hey, ten-and-two!” John snapped.
Anna didn’t know what that meant, but she snapped her hand back to the controls. Her heart rate went out of control again. So much for relaxing her grip.
“You don’t get to drive one-handed until you have your license, young lady,” John mumbled. “I mean, tell me by thinking it. Show me on the map. But not with your hand.”
Anna focused on the map where she thought was a good location to put the Jumper down. To her surprise, an area of the map pulsed and glowed. Words in Ancient popped up at the location, edged in blue.
John smiled and nodded. “Good choice. See, even Jumper Six agrees.” He motioned to the Ancient words and leaned back in his chair. “Alright. Parking is basically like taking off. Just backwards. Give it a shot.”
Anna carefully directed the Puddle Jumper to a seat in the meadow, John giving directions as she worked at it. They landed more-or-less gracefully on the bed of grass, and John leaned back in his chair.
Ronon stood up and went to the back of the Jumper while the door opened.
“Congratulations,” John said. “First flight and you didn’t crash. Time for lunch.” He picked up three sacks, pitched one at Ronon, and then put the second one on the console in front of Anna. With that, he walked out into the meadow outside.
Anna couldn’t believe how exhausted she felt. She carefully detached her hands from the controls and rubbed them together. They were all sweaty and gross. Picking up her bag, she went to go look at the gorgeous day outside with John and Ronon. Ronon sat on the edge of the ramp with his sandwich while John looked up at the sky a few paces away.
“How did I do?” Anna asked, joining John in the grass.
“Better than Rodney,” John offered.
Anna smiled, though she was well aware that wasn’t a huge compliment.
“Good enough to drive back, if you want,” John added. He raised his eyebrows at Anna.
“Sure.” Anna guessed she’d only stop sweating on the controls if she practiced a lot.
John nodded and took a bite of his sandwich. “Good.” Then he grimaced, as if remembering something horrifying. “I guess that means the next lesson is parallel parking…”
#
Why he’d been so angry lately. This was why. He could have just tossed this computer off the nearest balcony. That might actually help him feel better, but it wouldn’t help the problem. Unfortunately. He tossed his glasses onto the desk and scrubbed the lines from frowning concentration off his forehead.
“Já se už na to můžu vysrat…” *
“That bad?”
Radek snapped up from looking at his screen so fast, he could have strained his neck. “El—um…”
Elizabeth stepped into the lab. She looked incredibly amused. Radek hadn’t figured out what exactly made his being scared out of his skin so hysterical, but it was apparently the go-to source of entertainment for a lot of Atlantis’ residents.
He also hadn’t figured out how to address her, either. These days, he was giving Doctor Weir a sporting try, because she was being more distant than ever. He couldn’t say he was surprised. He was… well, he was Radek Zelenka. He decided just to leave it at that. Better to not go through the agonizing systematic comparison of himself to every other man on Atlantis.
Especially when she didn’t seem to be interested in any of them.
So, Doctor Weir it was.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You, uh—I was concentrating. Sorry. Did you need something, Doctor Weir?”
She shook her head at first and then shrugged. “I was looking for Rodney, but he’s not in his lab. I was going through the information they uploaded from the Aurora’s database and I had a couple of questions.”
“Oh.” Radek picked up at that. He knew near as much about it as Rodney did… maybe a little less, since Rodney wasn’t busy learning how to stab things a couple of days ago. Radek liked to think he was good at catch-up, though. “I might be able to help you. I was looking at that before I got distracted by… um, this.” He gestured helplessly at his computer screen and the lines of code that should have been working but weren’t.
Elizabeth squinted at it. “What is this?”
Radek glared at it. “It’s, uh… basically a glitch in the operating system.” He hoped that was vague enough for her to understand. “Our OS is usually pretty good, but, um, sometimes, under certain circumstances there are bugs that—um—I don’t mean to bore you.” He turned his eyes off his screen and to the tablet in Elizabeth’s hands. Then he glanced up to her eyes.
“No, no, no.” She was still smiling. “Not boring.”
“But what in the database did you have a question about?”
Elizabeth put her tablet on Radek’s table. She had seven different files open, each one talking about a completely different area of the Aurora and Ancient systems in general. Her reading this afternoon apparently ranged from power generation to sensors to Wraith data to battle plans. Radek knew he wouldn’t be much help with that last one.
“Wow…” he mumbled, flipping from one file to the next. “Uh, do you have a few hours?”
Elizabeth gave a small chuckle. “Oh, I wasn’t expecting a few hours,” she said. “Rodney usually just gives me the overview of what I’m missing and then I figure the rest out alone. I figure I should have at least a cursory knowledge of all of these things, in case they come up later, you know?”
A few hours. It was worth a try. He sighed and shrugged, handing it back. “I can probably help with some of these.”
Elizabeth took the tablet and cycled through her files and then shrugged. “But I do have a few hours… If you’re not busy.”
If he hadn’t been so surprised, he might have been pleased. “Uh, yeah, a few…” Anna was off with her first Puddle Jumper lesson. He’d been so bugged a few minutes ago, he’d forgotten to worry. Now he’d forgotten to worry for a completely different reason. “Tell me if it gets too boring.” He pulled up a few of the data files he remembered from her tablet on his screen and looked to her for some signal to continue. Or stop. Or anything, really.
She just shook her head. “Not boring.”