I'm sending this on anon because it's kind of embarrassing. I am/was closely following your Devil You Know series and kind of had it in my head that whenever John had Rodney marked I'd get a similar tattoo. Like I said, embarrassing. But I had to ask, are you planning to write that far? Not to pry into your process, I've just become terribly curious. Thank you.
Wow, I’m really flattered. :)
I hadn’t actually thought about what the tattoo was going to be until now. but after thinking it over, I have a couple of ideas. The simpler one would be something in Ancient along the line of “belongs to/belonging to John Shepperd of Atlantis” or “Commander Sheppard of Atlantis.” Basically some kind of heightened language that sounds a little better than “property of.”
The more complicated one would be some sort of Mirror-verse variant of the Pegasus logo, because I think John would keep that as the Lantean symbol even after they broke with Earth. I just don’t know what the difference would be between the regular and mirror logo would be. I like the idea that the Pegasus itself would be more menacing or that the V it’s coming out of is a pair of swords. And, of course, the tattoo would have John’s initials on it somewhere. :)
I have no idea if this is helpful at all, but that’s what came to mind. I really do want to write more in that universe, but I hesitate to make any promises because I don’t want to disappoint people if it never happens.
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popkin16 asked me about the Devil You Know series and I just started rambling. Like, a long ramble.
It all started with the Sweet Charity Auction in 2009 (late 2008?) when Saldemonium won the bidding on me. She gave me a few prompts including a request for a dark AU where John keeps Rodney as a pet and one for young!Rodney in drag. So I kind of combined them in my head, and the very first scene that came to mind was the harem scene late in Make the Devil Feel Surprise. Of course when I finally got there, John's misogyny prevented me from putting Rodney in actual drag. But after I started messing with the whole idea, that year's SGA Big Bang started up and I asked Sal if she'd mind waiting past the deadline for a longer fic. She didn't. :)
The plot...well, plots are hard for me. The overall arc of the series is actually the progression of John and Rodney's relationship, but there needed to be more than that if I was actually going to write Big Bang length stories. So I came up with the idea that Rodney was going to have to make a choice between saving John or not. And this is actually really problematical because I have issues with "and then he fell in love with his abuser," and this is pretty much a textbook case. I did my best to make Rodney Not a Very Nice Person from the get go, so at least he's not a total victim. In a way, it would have been kind of awesome for Rodney to make sure John didn't survive the coup but, no, that wasn't going to happen.
There's a vague spoiler here--not much of one, just where the third novella is headed, which is really kind of obvious, I think. Also, since I can't do nesting cut tags, there's also a tiny future timestamp ficlet that's got a major character death in it. I'll leave some space or something.
Once I'd written the first one, I realized that the failed coup could easily lead to the State worrying about John and his cult of personality being too powerful, particularly without Elizabeth to balance him some. At that point, I had the overall plot arc of the whole series--John and Rodney's relationship taking place and changing against the backdrop of the State forcing John into a corner so he had no choice but to secede.
That the third and probably (because who knows, I might write more than that) final novella will complete that process isn't really much of a spoiler. It'll be the most complicated and probably the longest one because there's a lot of stuff to work out. I have it partially plotted out and I'm still poking at it and trying to fit bits and pieces in. I also really do want to get out of John and Rodney's POV every once in a while so I'm hoping to do some shorter pieces, including at least a couple from Ronon's POV because he sees and notices more than a lot of people think he does.
So that's pretty much it, although I could probably ramble even further. :)
As for a timestamp...God, I wish I knew where the one I wrote a couple years ago was because while the gist of it is the same as what I'm writing here, it was better. It's essentially the epilogue to the entire series. I'm not sure if I'll actually put it at the end of the last major story or not because it's so many years after the series. If I do it'll be expanded
Anyway, this is at least 15-20 years after the start of the series and contains a major character death.
So it's about 15, maybe as many as 20, years later. John's been horribly injured; he'll never walk again and he's going to need to be on some kind of medical support for the rest of his life. Everyone's there around his bedside in the infirmary with Rodney's standing at the foot of his bed. Rodney's silent while John and Keller and some of the other medical staff argue about how much time John has and how much of a life he can have like this.
Finally John looks at Rodney and says, "do it, boy. You promised."
John hasn't called Rodney "boy" for at least a decade, either in public or in private and Rodney knows what it means and knows that it's as close as John can come to expressing how he feels.
He stares into John's eyes for a long moment and then says the only thing he can say. "Yes, Sir. I did."
And then Rodney pulls his gun out and shoots John clean in the chest--a perfect shot just like John taught him to do all those years ago. He looks at the body for another moment, then turns on his heel and walks out, his eyes dry.
And no one says anything or stops him.
There's no announcement or declaration or vote or anything, but the next morning, when Rodney steps out of their quarters, John's bodyguards are standing outside the door and Namin's waiting with them.
The guards salute, Namin says, "good morning, Commander" and Rodney just nods and walks toward John's office.
