It Breathes by Koanju (First Night Challenge)

Title: It Breathes
Author: Koanju
Rating: PG
Summary: In the walls, there are ghosts. In the mind, there are whispers. Gen, Sheppard, Atlantis
Notes: This came out a little different than I was intending. I think it's the lack of sleep. It's tangentially related to Prime/Not Prime, a longer fic saeva and I are co-writing.



In high school, people thought Johnny Sheppard was kind of stupid. He didn't talk in class, he didn't hang out with the cool people, even though he was pretty handsome, he wouldn't be caught dead inside the auditorium, carburators bored him, and even though he loved the game, Johnny didn't play football.

Too much chance he could fuck up his chances to enlist. One wrong hit and your knee was shot for life. Sure, you might be able to walk well enough no one would notice, but the minute you were pulling Gs or trying to haul someone off the ground into a chopper? You were fucked.

So he didn't play sports, he didn't show his grades to anyone, he didn't go to the parties, and he always said "thank you" and "please" and never did anything that might distress the sisters. By the time he was a senior, the really malicious ones said he was stupid and a faggot and gonna die like all the rest.

Johnny let them. He didn't care. Listening to them talk was like listening to the whispering of ghosts. It didn't matter.

This. This place. General O'Neill had been right. It was so much bigger than he was. It mattered. It whispered and talked and mattered and even though he wasn't Johnny Sheppard, he was just John, and he could fly anything with blades and an engine and play a mean game of chess while doing it...

Atlantis.

He'd waited for very last to get his assigned quarters. There was something creepy about the way the doors just opened when he barely knew which way he was going or the lights coming on by themselves. The fucking city breathed and down to the very marrow of his bones, he knew it was talking to them. To him.

He just couldn't figure out what it was trying to say.

He didn't want to spend the night alone, listening to those whispers. The sounds, the fragments of the past trapped, had started sounding less like the boys in his high school and more like the boys in the home at night, when the loneliness caught up to them, or the dreams of Before.

This place was creepy. And it felt more like home than Antarctica did and he'd loved Antarctica.

"Just shut up," John muttered, outside the door to his rooms. His home, possibly for the rest of his natural life, quieted and the lights dimmed. But the doors opened and invited him in.