“We’ll get him back,” John said.
“How?” Jeannie’s hands were white-knuckled on her mug.
“I don’t know,” John said. “But we don’t leave our people behind.”
“Right.” For a second, Jeannie looked as though she wanted to spit, but then, with an effort, she uncurled her fingers. “All right, then, I’ll do it. But — you’ll keep me informed.”
That was directed at Keller, who nodded. “Of course.”
Woolsey cleared his throat. “Thank you. Colonel Caldwell, I assume you have seen the damage to the General Hammond, and I’m sure Colonel Carter will want to fill you in on the details.”
Carter nodded helpfully, though John suspected that was the last thing she actually wanted to do.
“Dr. Zelenka, did you have anything you wanted to add?” Woolsey went on.
“Nothing that cannot wait until Mrs. Miller is settled,” Zelenka said. “Except to say that I am sorry to have you here under these circumstances.”
“Thank you,” Jeannie said, in a muffled voice.
“I’m sure we all share those sentiments,” Woolsey said. He tapped his papers together. “You all have copies of the detailed reports on the attempted rescue, and we will meet later to go over any questions. But for now, I believe we should concentrate on getting Mrs. Miller and the rest of our new personnel squared away.”
That was as abrupt as dismissal as John had ever heard from Woolsey, but he doubted the little bureaucrat was any more eager than the rest of them to sit around and go over the details of precisely how they had failed. He stood aside to let Woolsey escort Jeannie out, followed by Carter and Zelenka, and then by the doctors, Keller looking even less pleased than before. He started to follow them, but Caldwell said, “Sheppard.”
“Sir?” John paused in the doorway, trying to look respectful.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Caldwell said. “She deserves better than that.”
“We’ll get him back,” John said, and there was something in his voice that made Caldwell look away.
“So, you and Meredith,” Jeannie said. Jennifer wished she had some idea whether that was welcome to the family or what are your intentions toward my brother and wasn’t sure what to do with either one.
They’d wound up the last people at the dinner table, after Teyla, Ronon, and Sheppard had all exchanged awkwardly obvious let’s let them talk looks and taken themselves off — Teyla to put Torren to bed, Sheppard apparently to help, and Ronon to do whatever it was Ronon did with his evenings. Find someone to inflict bodily harm on in the gym, probably.
She was sure they meant well, but she’d been strongly tempted to make her own excuses at the same time. Only the fact that she would have felt guilty leaving Jeannie alone at the table under the circumstances kept her in her seat, poking at the remains of her salad. The mess hall was getting quiet, the cooks starting to close down the serving line to leave packaged sandwiches and fruit the only options for late-comers.
“We’ve been dating,” Jennifer said.
“He told me,” Jeannie said. “I’m lucky I knew that much, he’s not much with the personal news. It was months before I figured out that he’d stopped dating, what was her name, Katie?”
“Katie Brown,” Jennifer said. “They just didn’t… I mean, she was a perfectly nice person, it just wasn’t working out.”
“Believe me, I’m not surprised,” Jeannie said. “Meredith can be a little hard to take.”
“I don’t find him — we’ve always gotten along surprisingly well, considering that Rodney is… a little intense.”
“Intense,” Jeannie said, shaking her head and smiling. “That would be my brother.” Her eyes were sharp, and it dawned on Jennifer that her smile was not necessarily a friendly one. “I wish you’d told me that you were seeing each other when I was here before.”
“We weren’t,” Jennifer said. “We were just friends. It was after that that we…” She hesitated, not finding the words to describe hearing Rodney tell her how he felt at the same time that she was watching his painful decline, wondering what it meant that he was saying it now. Probably that he wasn’t worried about the suspense of wondering what her reaction would be, because it hadn’t seemed like it was going to matter. She wasn’t sure he even remembered what he’d said the next day.
“Oh,” Jeannie said. “So when you were being all… that was just being friends.”
“He was my patient,” Jennifer said.
“And he’s my brother,” Jeannie said. “But it seemed like you would have been happier if I hadn’t been around to have opinions.”
“I really didn’t mean it to seem that way,” Jennifer said. “I was… pretty upset at the time.”
Jeannie seemed to be considering her for a while, and then her smile softened. “I can see that you would be. I don’t think I could deal with your job. Be a doctor and have to treat all my friends when they got hurt, or taken over by little alien robots, or infected by weird brain parasites.”
“It’s not always like that,” Jennifer said. “Sometimes it’s just headaches and sprained ankles all day. It does get stressful, though. We lose a lot of people.”
She could see Jeannie’s expression change at the words, her eyes shadowing in a way that was all too familiar to Jennifer, and she wished she’d thought before she spoke them.
“So,” Jeannie said in the tone of someone determined to change the subject. “You and Meredith. Is this serious, or what? Because I really think Meredith needs to be thinking about moving toward… I’m not saying you need to get married right away, but I think it would be good for him at this point in his life to get that settled.”
“Umm. Wow.” Jennifer glanced around the mess hall as if it were likely that she’d spot a medical emergency that required her immediate attention. “I think we’re, you know, taking steps that lead in a certain direction.”
“Are you living together? I’m not trying to be a prude or anything. I’m just wondering if you’ve survived living in close quarters with Meredith for long enough to know what it’s like.”
“We were, on Earth,” Jennifer said. “And we’ve been sharing quarters here, although that’s more… you know, it’s kind of more like being roommates in a dorm than anything else. It’s not like you can really spend a lot of time alone together, unless you want to eat all your meals out of the microwave and never leave your quarters.”
“It is kind of like that,” Jeannie said. “I think Meredith’s achieved his dream of going back to grad school and staying there.”
“You think that’s his dream?”
“I really don’t know,” Jeannie said. “He didn’t speak to me for several years, so maybe I’m not the best authority here. I know he liked college and hated living at home. And I don’t just mean high school. I mean, okay, who doesn’t hate high school, but if you could move away from home when you were ten years old, Meredith would have.”
“It doesn’t seem like he was a very happy kid.”
Jeannie breathed a laugh. “I think that’s the understatement of the century. Mom and Dad were kind of seriously dysfunctional, and Meredith always took that very hard. He’s a lot more sensitive than you’d think.”
“I’m not sure sensitive is the word I’d apply to Rodney.”
“I mean, not in the sense that he knows what to say to people, or that he notices how they feel unless they’re right up in his face. But he cares about things more than he likes people to think.”