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At first Jeannie wonders how they can stand him.

Rodney is a pompous ass. She's always known that. For the last four years she hasn't known anything else. She hasn't heard from him, hasn't seen him, talked to him. Worse, Maddie hasn't met him.

She doesn't know how to make it any clearer than she has- her family is important. And Rodney was the one who cut himself out of it over something as ridiculous as her decision to have a baby. Get married. Be happy. Something she would have thought a good brother would have wanted for her.

Though she did establish early on that Rodney was not a 'good' brother. Just a biological sibling.

She doesn't know why it surprises her that he has remained exactly as thoughtless, tactless and condescending as he was four years ago. She certainly doesn't know why it still has the power to make her so angry.

She takes her revenge by enlisting the help of innocent bystanders in bringing him down a peg or two. Not that Sheppard seems all that innocent.

And okay, the stories she picked to tell were a little humiliating. The bed wetting, the bullies- she knows exactly how to spin them. She does not, for example, say anything about how the underpants-at-lunch thing was the final stand-off in six months of Rodney refusing to play by the rules of being bullied. Which had resulted in a very baffled set of jocks and a kind of minor celebrity status for her big brother. One she had, though she was hardly going to tell anyone including Rodney, been a little in awe of.

The bed-wetting was just normal. Something that happens to children. It doesn't always mean there's an issue but maybe their father's insane expectations had something to do with it. What would she know? All she knows is that Rodney never talked to her before he literally stopped talking to her four years ago.

So when 'Rod' turns up it's almost like a mirror-image of everything that's wrong with her dumbass brother.

Rod gives credit where credit is due, for one thing, and not only scientifically.

He talks about family like it means the world to him. He compliments people; says 'please' and 'thank you'. He makes an effort to get to know them. He talks to people, not at them, and then listens when they answer.

She isn't surprised when half of Rodney's colleagues end up sitting around a table with them at breakfast. Rod likes people, and he makes it easy for people to like him.

She doesn't even care anymore when Rodney storms up and just looks at them with such obvious hurt. None of 'his team' seems to care about his whining either. They don't fall over themselves to make Rodney feel better about the whole thing. And they've got to know how he feels about this- Rodney has about as much hope of hiding his jealousy as a snowball in hell.

John takes Rod golfing. Teyla talks to him about Athosian culture. Ronon... actually, Jeannie's not sure what Ronon and Rod do together but they evidently enjoy it.

The point is that Rod makes people want to be around him. And Rodney doesn't.

She spends three weeks on a space ship with Rodney and then another three days with him in Atlantis and she already can't stand him. He's arrogant and petty and vindictive. He belittles everybody around him to the extent where she's not sure why the rest of the scientists haven't banded together to kill him.

She puts it down to Dr. Weir's obvious conscientious morality and possibly John Sheppard's skewed protectiveness over his team.

She can't possibly believe that it's because of anything Rodney's done to gain people's trust.

Until.

Well.

Rodney snaps at her about wanting credit with none of the blame. She's never given him any reason to assume that she doesn't accept blame for her part of it, but really, when it comes down to it, all she did was come up with a math proof. The real-world application was Rodney's idea, and Colonel Carters's. With some help from her, of course. A lot of help, actually. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears, though he wasn't around when she was in her bed shedding the latter, wishing she were back home with Caleb and Maddie.

But there's something about the way he says it that sparks a curiosity in her brain, hours later.

Rodney hasn't told her much about what it is they've seen out in Pegasus. He's mentioned 'adventures' and Teyla has told her a bit about the Wraith, but it occurs to her that the storytelling has been a one-way street. None of Rodney's team has told her any stories about Rodney. Laughed, yes, but not shared.

She sees the look on his face when it's all over, when Rod has gone through the channel and the ZMP is depleted. He looks... mostly stressed.

She feels a little over-heated too. Her heart is pounding and her mouth is dry. Rodney looks as battered as she feels.

And then he shakes himself, looks around, and starts snapping at people to run the data, to check the ZMP, to disconnect the machines.

The point is that everybody looks to Rodney. They don't move until he tells them to.

Radek's the one who starts to issue more practical 'you do this and you take that' orders, but Rodney's the one who gets the ball rolling.

Jeannie is not sure exactly what she thinks about it. All she knows is that Rodney has finally come down a peg or two, and he's done the right thing where Rod is concerned.

Then John Sheppard shows up at her door.

He hefts a laptop and says, "You should probably see this."

"What is it?"

"Something Rodney recorded last year."

She lets him in because it's the polite thing to do, and because John hasn't shown the least interest in ravishing her no matter how many times Rodney's glared at him suspiciously.

"Look," he says, "I don't like getting in the middle of family issues. But Rodney's... a member of my team."

She could have bet he hadn't been going to say that when he'd started the sentence. So she raises her eyebrows. He mistakes that for confusion.

"I need him to get his head out of his ass," John elaborates.

"It's a little late for that. It's been in there so long."

He actually cracks a grin. A proper one. And reaches up to scratch at his chin.

"Anyone ever tell you about the time he found an Ancient shield device?"

"No," she says, "Actually, no one's told told me anything about Meredith."

"Well, Meredith," John says ironically, and sits down in the chair beside the bed, "Found a shield device. Thing like a brooch; you put it on and it creates a personal shield around you. Well, we'd only been here a couple of days when he found one so he did the properly scientific thing; he activated it, put it on, and then told me to hurt him to test it. I got to shoot him. And throw him off a ledge. Someone punched him."

She snorts at the half-wistful look of glee on John's face.

"But the shield protected him so we couldn't touch him. Then we realised he couldn't get it off, and while he had it on, he couldn't eat or drink."

"His worst nightmare," Jeannie says.

"So he told us. Again and again. And again."

She smiles.

"Anyway, we had our people working on a rescue mission when something worse showed up. That happens a lot in Atlantis. This energy cloud got out and started burning people, terrorised everybody. We came up with a plan to try to get it back in containment but we had this little problem of high personal risk to whoever had to stand around and push the button. Someone pointed out that Rodney still had the shield on."

"He did it?" she asks, looking sceptical.

"No," John says, "I volunteered."

Jeannie sighs. She isn't sure why she thought Rodney might break the habit of a lifetime and actually do something for other people.

"We always thought the shield had a mental component to it. We just figured that Rodney unconsciously wanted that protection so bad, he wasn't ready to let go of it. We were right. The minute something like this came up, when the shield could have been useful, it dropped right off. That got him off the hook."

"I'm beginning to wonder why you're telling me this story. You said Mer is a member of your team. You're trying to help us talk to each other. You can't possibly be telling me this just to prove that he's a self-centred coward."

"True. And, no, I'm not. See, it didn't work. I stood there, ready to push the button or die, which also happens surprisingly often in this place, and the energy cloud took one look at the containment device and ran away. So we came up with another plan to send it through the damn Stargate. Teyla had some idea that it wanted to go home or something. I don't know. We just figured either we leave or it left, and we really wanted to stay. So we activated the Stargate, set a trap, and lured the cloud in."

"Was that Mer's idea? Did it work?"

"No. It wasn't, and it didn't. You should probably know that our Plan As through to Cs never really work the first time. We're not sure why but I think the stats people are crunching numbers. So there we are, right, and the creature's now feeding off the Stargate for energy."

She opens her mouth to ask questions about this suddenly interesting energy creature but something about John makes her shut it again and nod.

"And?"

"We couldn't get away and we couldn't stop it. Let me tell you, not one of my most treasured memories of Atlantis. This thing was bleeding our energy like you wouldn't believe. Then the next thing I know, Rodney put on the shield again and walked right into the middle of the energy cloud on the world's most stupid suicide mission. He got it through the Stargate and saved the day."

"So he eventually did the right thing," she says.

"Eventually counts, in this place," John replies, suddenly neither laconic or flippant, "That energy cloud thing drained the shield completely. If he'd waited around in it for a second longer, he'd be dead. Hell, we didn't even know if the shield could protect anyone against that thing. Rodney knew that. He went in anyway."

She feels an odd tingle down her spine. Like the old days, when her big brother was an ass and a jerk but had a reputation for standing up to bullies.

John doesn't say any more. He just flips open the laptop, clicks and taps around for a few seconds, and then puts it down on the bed in front of her.

It's Meredith. Looking tired and a little pale and a lot frightened, and he's telling her that he's sorry about some things, and he's telling her that family is important.

He also says that he's found family on Atlantis.

It's not quite the apology she was hoping for. For one thing, this is from a year ago and even after he clearly survived, even after his epiphany or whatever it was, he still never called her. Never once. Not for Christmas, not for her birthday. He never sent a two note message saying he was fine and alive and all this time, he could have been dead.

She gets what John is trying to tell her. She's not stupid and unlike her brother, she does just fine with people. She knows that he's trying to tell her that Rodney is accepted here, which is sometimes far more important than being liked, that he's important, that he does great things, brave things, and that maybe one of the things he does is going to get him killed.

A part of her is suddenly so glad that the three people who laughed at Rodney for his embarrassing childhood tics and traumas were not actually doing so out of spite. At least one person cares a little because John is right there, sitting comfortably in a chair beside her bed and showing her private recordings that Rodney made for her a year ago.

She's glad of that, at least.

"When did he record this?" she asks.

And John gives her a less than satisfactory answer but Meredith comes in at that point, so she's pretty sure she could just wheedle it out of her big brother instead.

Having him ask her if she is happy becomes one of the nicest moments of the past four years. Even if she intends to never ever tell him that.