Amnesty Challenge: Grey, by The Moonmoth

Title: Grey
Author: The Moonmoth
Challenge: Season One Amnesty (38 Minutes)
Summary: Like a ghost, like a soul, like a sympathy.
Words: ~600
Characters: Emmagan
Notes: I've been wanting to try something for the 38 minutes challenge since I first heard about it, way back before I even joined the community. I write incredibly slowly, so this was a real challenge for me. This took 34 mins. plus a little time to edit and generally make coherent. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.

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Grey
by The Moonmoth

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My home is gone, Teyla thinks, and tries to absorb the enormity of it. She feels grey, like the wind, like the city, like the roiling waves she stares out over. Her home has been gone for some time now, in fact, but every now and then a familiar scent will reach her on the wind and she aches, and the thought comes to her again, my home is gone.

And she reaches out to hold onto the railing, because this is her reality now, and she feels the thrum of Atlantis through it, through her hands and up her arms and into her body, and she begins to think that this, too, is becoming familiar. This, too, is becoming home. It is an uncomfortable feeling. Her confusion, when she allows it of herself, is great.

She misses the children. There is something about life in its infancy that reminds her of the people she lives with here. The wide-eyed wonder, and everything new and exciting. This place, it was like magic to them. She tried to make them understand -- the Atlantians had nothing that they themselves could not one day have, perhaps once did have, but it was hard for them when the doors opened with a touch, and rooms disappeared to reappear across the city; when many of the people surrounding them could turn the lights on and off simply by thinking about it. And it was hard for her, trying to explain how all this was possible, when she herself struggled to understand.

But the children are all gone now, making new homes on the mainland, and the atmosphere here just gets darker and more desperate. The magic has left with the children, she thinks, and she can’t decide whether that is a good thing or not.

The place of her birth is gone, and home now should be where her people are. And yet, it is not. She is trapped between worlds, like the wind between the sky and the sea, between the trunks of the trees, howling and twisting and all the time uncomprehending, and trying simply to stay alive, to keep her people alive, and she thinks of her father, lucky to die of nothing more than old age, and wonders if she will one day join him in the ground, in the stories on the lips of her successors, or if her fate awaits her elsewhere, in the cold unforgiveness of the stars.

The wind whips through her hair and she holds the railing tighter, feeling the gentle vibrations move up through her body, the flow of life in Atlantis’ veins. It is true, she does not have the gene, but her people were born of the earth of this galaxy, their lives woven into its story, and this place, this city of their ancestors, is a part of that story too. So no, she does not have the gene, but that does not mean she can’t feel the city, feel Atlantis, like a ghost, like a soul. Like a sympathy. That indistinct presence at the back of her dreams; that far distant cry carried to her on the wind at night. Fight.

Her village is gone, her people are gone; Atlantis is becoming home, the people, family. And always, she will fight.