Eureka was in the throes of its longest recorded Indian summer when a black Maserati GranSport with a Nero Incrociata grille and 19" polished rims roared into town, slowing to a purring stop in front of Cafe Diem. It was low to the ground and the engine was making continuously sweet, rolling noises, idling on Eureka's
specially-designed non-heat-retaining asphalt.

And when Rodney McKay tumbled awkwardly out of the passenger side door, rushing into the diner to order up the largest coffee Vincent made -- it was basically a beer stein with a lid -- nobody was surprised.

"Welcome back," Jack said sarcastically.

Rodney turned six shades of red and snatched the coffee out of Vincent's numb fingers and muttered, "I don't want to talk about it," before scrambling out of the cafe again and back into the car.

In the year and a half since McKay and John had coasted out of town in John's Mustang there had been three minor crises involving guided missiles (all confined thankfully to one week), an incident with some faulty cloning, and that one time somebody accidentally discovered the world strongest epoxy in one of the chemistry classes at the high school and everybody was literally stuck for nearly a day. All in all, new day, same shenanigans in Eureka, which made Rodney and John's return the biggest news since Nathan Stark got covered in inhibition-reducing cologne and spent about an hour hitting on Jack through the wall of a containment chamber while Fargo had looked on in horrified fascination.

"Here to forage for gossip for the township?" Rodney said instead of "hello" when he opened the door to the house. At Jack's raised brow, he mumbled, "Come in."

"It's good seeing you, too, McKay," Jack said sweetly, and under his breath, he asked, "How's his leg?"

Rodney's expression cleared and his mouth twitched in an expression that was almost pleasant. "It's good. He's doing good."

"I can hear you guys, you know," John said from where he was hunched over the kitchen counter, eyes focused intently on an opened file, flanked on either side by a small mountain of paperwork. He looked up and grinned. "Jack -- long time no see."

"John," Jack said. "Nice car."

"Isn't it?" John practically purred, like his Maserati, and looked meaningfully at Rodney, who took the opportunity to mutter, "Oh, God," under his breath and beat it out of the kitchen, presumably to contemplate his shame at having a kept man and hide in the basement.

Their third day in Eureka, John invited Jack over for the BC game and they spent most of the night becoming more and more riotously drunk -- until they were reduced to slumping on the floor of the living room pointing dimly at the television.

"This is horrible," Jack slurred during the fourth quarter.

"I know," John mourned. "McKay's going to kill me when he gets back from his date."

It took almost a full minute for the sentence to parse, but when it did, Jack said, "What?" and John's only response was to pass out where he lay on the rug, face half-mashed into the universal remote so that the television started streaming madcap through hundreds and hundreds of channels.

Jack woke up the next morning to an utterly furious Zoe, holding a spray bottle filled with water between his eyes.

"Gah!" he shouted, rolling off of his bed and landing with a painful thump while she looked on impassively.

"About time," she snapped. "I swear to God, Dad. I have never been so embarrassed in my life!."

Jack rubbed at his temples. "What happened?" he asked miserably, trying to gather up an ability to recall anything other than the seemingly endless supply of Molson's at McKay's house, and how John had always had one to pass over to Jack as soon as his was empty.

"I'll tell you what happened!" Zoe shouted, totally disregarding Jack's pounding head. "Dr. McKay had to practically carry you into the house! SARAH thought you were dying! She spent most of the night waking me up to report your breathalizer results!" Zoe narrowed her eyes. "Zero point nine eight, by the way, if you're interested."

Jack stared at the ceiling for a long moment. "And let us use this as a perfect opportunity to discuss why alcohol is not your friend," he tried.

"Oh my God," Zoe muttered. "Forget it. I'm going to school."

Jo was about as sympathetic as Zoe, which meant not at all, and she'd taken special care to turn up the sound on Jack's walkie-talkie before he reached the office, so the first 911 of the day was nearly enough to make Jack crawl under his desk and pray for sweet death.

Jack gave himself the rest of the afternoon off barring any explosions with a blast radius of more than a city block, and put his head down on the counter at Vincent's cafe while Vince made soothing, clucking noises and poured him coffee.

"You two are a hazard," Jack heard Vincent say, and glanced up blearily to see John slumped over next to him on the counter.

"I haven't felt this awful since my first leave," John muttered into a pile of napkins under his face.

Jack mumbled something into his arm and the entire evening came crashing back into his brain, which left him vulnerable to blurting out, "Wait -- did you say McKay was on a date last night?"

"God," John moaned into the counter. "Don't remind me. He nearly throttled me on the living room floor when he got back." A beat. "Like it's my fault Sam Carter won't sleep with him." John, oblivious to the fact that activity had all but screeched to a halt in the cafe, made another pitiful noise into the napkins and said, "Vincent, can I have that coffee with cream and cyanide?"

Jack had spent a least a decade in a house where he was outnumbered by women, so he had some idea of the type of disdain you could attract if you wronged the sisterhood -- but nothing could have really prepared him for the level of unabashed, pruient interest that hit the fan the next day.

Beverly, the Baker twins, Deacon, Allison, and Vincent were huddled together whispering furiously and every once in a while Jack overheard something like, "bastard!" and "I'd kill him."

"Should you guys even be talking about this?" Jack asked desperately. He felt somewhat responsible, having been coerced by Vincent's threat of being denied coffee henceforth at Diem into telling the whole and unvarnished truth. He may have perhaps said some unflattering things of an editorial nature about McKay buying John's silence and suffering with increasingly sexy cars, which to be honest, Jack wouldn't be averse to.

Beverly and the Baker twins executed a perfect about face to narrow their eyes at him, and Jack muttered and turned back to his lunch plate, saying under his breath, "I'm just saying..."

"Small towns live on gossip, Jack," Allison said, grinning.

"Yes," Jack said wryly. "I am beginning to see that."

The situation continued to deteriorate until Jack found himself in the grocery store one night on the way home only to overhear Rodney McKay making a series of deeply baffled noises as Beverly dropped completely unsubtle hints about the destructive nature of infidelity.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Rodney demanded, nearing stratospheric fury.

Beverly sighed at him. "I'm just saying, Dr. McKay, that affairs are usually a sign of some more deeply-seated issue, and that you'll feel far more fulfilled by talking with John about it than by -- "

"Oh my God," Rodney said in horror, and Jack could practically hear the widening of his eyes. "You think -- Colonel Sheppard and I -- oh my God."

Despite the fact that their entrances and exits always made a big splash, the McKays -- oh God, Jack thought to himself miserably, I have to stop calling them that -- were usually quiet and kept to themselves. Which made the call from the next house over all the more frightening.

The fact that the shouting was loud enough to be heard from the next house over must have been very disturbing -- but Jack bet that it was nothing compared to standing on the front porch with Jo and listening to every word, crystal clear through the ancient clapboard walls.

"Do you know what this entire fucking town -- !"

"Well maybe you should stop cheating on me -- !"

Jack and Jo winced at one another.

"I'll flip you for it," Jack offered.

"Not a chance in hell," Jo said.

Jack sighed and knocked on the door, not at all subtly praying nobody would answer. He got his wish, but it came with an abundance of crashing noises from inside, which was the point where he and Jo looked one another with a sigh and tried the knob -- the door coming open easily.

"Oh my God! Oh my God!" Rodney was shrieking, audibly higher pitched than before and clearly unaware that the law had been called. "Are you even hearing what you're saying out loud? Have you completely forgotten what Don't Ask Don't Tell is?"

Jo and Jack shared a look and followed the voices into the kitchen, where Jack could see a shattered coffee mug on the floor -- always a good sign, he thought morosely.

"Maybe you should say something," Jack told Jo, who only glared back. "What?" he hissed.

"Are you completely oblivious?" John yelled from the other room. "I live with you! We own real estate! You try to throw away my favorite pants! The only person in the entire God damned military industrial complex that doesn't think we're together is you!"

Jo glared at Jack meaningfully, mouthing hugely, DO SOMETHING.

Jack mouthed back, OH MY GOD, WHAT?

And Jo gave the long-suffering sort of sigh that meant she hated him, and said, loudly but firmly, "Dr. McKay? Colonel Sheppard?"

There was a long, awkward pause before they heard Rodney clear his throat and say, "Yes?"

Jo punched Jack in the arm. "Ow! Uh -- sorry to interrupt, but we got a call in from your neighbors about the noise." He winced at the continued, overwhelmingly uncomfortable silence. "Uh -- everything -- everything all right in there?"

And finally John poked his head out of the kitchen doorway and sighed, looking at once embarrassed and relieved for the break in hostilities. "Yeah, we're fine." He offered up a tight, rueful smile. "Sorry about the noise complaints."

"It's fine," Jack said soothingly, because the broken mug was still on the floor, and this -- like so many fights with his ex-wife had gone -- could still get ugly real fast.

Then Rodney stuck his head out of the doorway, face red and blotchy and eyes feverish.

"Okay, I have to ask," he said too quickly. "Do you think we're you know, together?" He flicked his fingers between John and himself for just a second before John rolled his eyes and muttered, "Oh, Jesus" and turned to leave. "What?" Rodney called after him. "What?"

"We should probably go," Jack said, trying not to fling himself back out the door.

"But yes," Jo said, looking at Rodney intensely with a glare all the women in town must have practiced together because it looked exactly like Allison's and Beverly's and even Kim's. "We did," she added dangerously.

Rodney got even more red, if possible. "I see," he squeaked.

"Yeah we're leaving," Jack said, grabbing Jo by the arm and hauling her out of the house, because he saw the direction this entire situation was going and it was headed toward a whole different kind of noise complaint.

By the next morning, news of the evening's fight had travelled far and wide throughout Eureka, and even those not privy to the innermost and juiciest gossip were whispering about trouble in paradise. Jack was keeping his mouth resolutely shut on the entire affair, and Jo seemed to have blocked it out entirely. But despite his best efforts, Jack didn't manage to keep all of the information routed away from Zoe, who returned from school nearly effervescent with excitement, babbling about her plans for her romantic approach to a vulnerable but still loving John.

(Jack sometimes wondered if letting her live here was the best idea, since the closest approximation Zoe now had to a mother figure was SARAH, who had a disturbing possessiveness about her.)

"I'm pretty sure it's not going to work out, Zo," Jack tried a few days later.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Dad -- this could be the love of my life," she told him severely.

"He's like, three decades older than you!" Jack protested. "He's like my age! Do you want to be dating somebody my age? He could be your dad!"

"Okay, ew," Zoe snapped. "Love knows no age, Dad."

"Yeah, whatever," Jack muttered under his breath, cupping his hands around his second coffee of the morning, and when Zoe flounced out of the house, Jack turned to the walls and said, "I swear to God, SARAH -- isn't there anything we can do about her?"

"I'm not certain this would be the most preferable avenue," SARAH replied harmonically, "but I am fully fitted with the capability to provide electroshock therapy."

And then it was like John and Rodney disappeared for a solid week: no shadow of them in the cafe or the grocery store, the gas station or the movie rental place, the tiny, revolving library that had gotten used to the way John burned through trashy John Grisham and French tragedy.

"Do you think they're...you know, splitting up?" Taggart asked, sounding overly concerned.

"They really shouldn't give up so easily," Kim said, smiling slyly over the table at Deacon.

"Please -- based on the empirical evidence, McKay's been stepping out for years," Vincent said, frowning. "There's trying and then there's doormat."

They all turned to stare at Jack, who'd been trying to hide behind his newspaper.

"What do you think?" Vincent asked him intensely.

Jack wanted to say, Honestly guys? I think that McKay finally got a clue and they've spent this past week doing things that I absolutely positively never want to think about ever. Out loud, he said, "You know, I couldn't say," and they all turned away, disgusted.

On the next Saturday, when the Longhorns were gearing up to defend their championship title, John called and said, "Hey, wanna come up and watch the game?"

Jack tried to telegraph his wariness over the phone. "Sure," he said, "if you two are done fighting."

John laughed and it was light and warm over the line. "I think we got it out of our systems," he said mischievously.

"Oh my God," Jack said in agony. "Please tell me you didn't get it out of your systems anywhere I have to sit on if I go over to watch the game."

The muffled hysterics on the phone weren't comforting, nor was the distant sound of Rodney's voice yelling, "Hey! Hey! Who are you laughing with? Is it the sheriff? I thought I told him eyes front and center! Are you inviting him over? You're totally inviting him over. Oh my God, I hate you so much."

Jack sat on the floor for the Longhorns game, and John rolled his eyes copiously but they both eventually spent most of the game bonding over how much they (a) hated the Longhorns and (b) discussing seriously a suicide pact if they won both the football and basketball NCAA championships.

At halftime, McKay wandered into the room, completely distracted by what looked like an incomprehensible academic journal and hefting a toolbox. He paused just long enough to flash John a totally besotted look -- whipped, Jack thought, totally, totally whipped -- and glare at Jack -- crazy, Jack thought, totally, totally crazy, too -- and went out back toward the helipad.

"What's he doing?" Jack asked as the back door swung shut.

John shrugged, eyes focused on the projection screen. "I find it's safer not to ask. There're a limited number of laws of physics he can break while stuck on Earth."

Jack's jaw clenched. "Please stop talking about aliens."

John smirked at him. "Fine, fine," he acquiesced, and they both turned back to the game.

The following day, when Jack got no fewer than ten hysterical calls from Fargo, claiming Rodney had come out of thin air, Jack put his own call in to John, who answered gleefully, "The helicopter now goes invisible."

"God," Jack had said in disgust, and hung up on him.

"Let me guess: new car?" Jo asked from across the room, smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

Rolling his eyes, Jack said, "Invisible helicopter."

And when Jo muttered, "McKay is so whipped," Jack started laughing and just couldn't stop.