First night challenge: Grounded, by Julad

Challenge: First Night In Atlantis
Title: Grounded
Category: Gen, essentially. A little dark.
Author: julad
Notes: This is like, version six, and the story just keeps slipping further out of my grasp, but time's up. :(
Summary: Sheppard, torn.

Grounded

* * * * *

It's not so much that everything feels alien; it's that he does. He stepped through a portal to another galaxy today, rose to the surface of an ocean in a city lost to legend, staged a rescue mission in a colony of human-eating demons, and shot his commander in the heart. When all that was done, he drank champagne on a high-rise balcony, and was anointed ranking military officer of the entire mission. There's an alien in his own skin. He suspects that right now, it's mostly the champagne that's doing his head in. Champagne brings out a terrible nostalgia in him, bon voyage parties and graduations and cousins' weddings, arid bubbles of what has been and what will be. He feels like he needs the starch of his dress uniform to keep his limbs in place.

He patrols the silent halls of the city, ignoring the erratic beat of his heart, because there are far too many reasons why he won't sleep tonight. In the dark, it's just like any other bunker or palace or government building, and he nods to the other patrolmen as they pass. They're Marines, but they have the habits he knows: look straight ahead as footsteps draw closer, make eye contact at three steps apart, nod at two steps apart, eyes forward again as they pass. It's a shadow of what used to be, and as it echoes with other memories, his heartbeat trips unsteadily. It doesn't matter. If he walks long enough, his heart will fall into the rhythm of his feet.


* * * * *

The third time he walks past the door to the control room balcony, he changes route and pushes open the doors.

Dr Weir is still there, hours after the party, leaning on the railing, staring at a thousand priceless miles of ocean view.

"John, hi," she says softly, turning to him. The night wind wrestles with her hair. She runs a hand through it and smiles wryly. "Do you think anyone is sleeping tonight?"

John shrugs. "You'd be surprised." The corridors where the scientists were bunked down had echoed with snores. He knows from experience that the soldiers not on duty will be lying on strange beds behind closed doors, blankets up to their chests, arms by their sides. Even if they can't sleep, they know how to rest their bodies.

"I know I should be in bed, but--" She stands up and squares her shoulders. "I've been going through all of our contingency plans. None of them is adequate to an enemy like the Wraith."

"Uh, okay. I'm new to this whole," he waves his hand vaguely. "Stargate thing. What exactly did we plan for?"

She turns back to face the ocean. "Alliances. Trade. Plague. Starvation. Slavery. Death. We have enemies back home; you were briefed on that, surely."

"Yeah, but to be honest, they sounded like a bunch of looney tunes."

"They're deadly," Weir says, and her voice is deadly too. "We're at war, Major, with an enemy that could still defeat us. I believed the risk of this mission was worth it, well worth it, and I still do. The things we could learn, John, and the allies we could make! We must see this through, Wraith or no Wraith."

John looks at her. "But?"

"But I know what my orders would be, if somebody were here to give them."

He can feel a tiny smile on his lips. "I can't see anybody else here."

She smiles too, but grimly. "Right. They sent me."

"So what's the problem, then?"

"Did you ever hear a poem called The Lorelei? </i>Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin.</i>"

John can only mangle Spanish and murder French. He shakes his head.

"It's about a siren. She sings and a boatman falls under her spell. He just keeps staring up and up at her, until he runs his boat onto rocks and drowns."

"I've met women like that," he says. "They're usually not so great once you get to know them."

She frowns. "Exactly. The first thing we've done here is repeat history, too obsessed with the lure of another galaxy to see the consequences for the rest of humanity."

"As I see it," John tells her, "there's no point second-guessing ourselves, because we don't have a lot of options right now. Until we have more intel and viable alternatives, that means doing what you came here to do, and to hell with the Wraith."

After a minute, she looks at him. "That's exactly what I don't like about this situation. What kind of a spell are we under, that we hit rocks and keep listening to the siren song?"

John frowns. "So we take precautions. We prepare for the worst. We blow the gate if the Wraith get anywhere near it."

She lets out a long breath. "That's all we can do now, isn't it? It will have to be good enough."

He nods, and half stands to attention as she heads back inside.


* * * * *

Hours later, his heart has finally slowed to match the steady pacing of his feet. The champagne bubbles are gone, replaced by a vague ache in his skull and an acid taste on his tongue. The weight of his boots, tightly laced, and the steel caps against his toenails, are the breadth of his existence. Well-earned fatigue is the depth of it. It's a familiar feeling, and he's settled back in his own skin, at the end of a long, strange day and a longer night.

It's still dark outside, but according to his watch, it's four thirty in the morning. Sleep now is pointless, so he turns from his patrol and heads for the makeshift mess hall. McKay is there, and already well-caffeinated, if the cheery greeting is any indication. "Here, you need this," he chirps, and shoves a mug into John's hand. John drinks and grimaces - he's had coffee the world over and this stuff would beat up the Turkish stuff and take its lunch money.

"Sorry, it probably needs sugar," McKay says, and shakes half a jar in.

"So much about your personality suddenly makes sense," John tells him. McKay beams in the half-lit gloom; apparently in his state, this is a compliment. It's hard to keep from smiling back.

"I'm heading up to the control room; come and touch things for me," McKay says, and takes his elbow. "I had an idea about how to activate the sensor systems at a lower power consumption rate." John manages to grab a bottle of water before he's dragged back into the corridors. His eyes are getting gritty, and there are blisters on his heels that will need attention after the morning briefing. McKay is talking nonstop, about genes and Zed PMs, naquadah, wormholes, big bang theory, scary life-sucking aliens, felt-tip pens, model trains, Canadian Idol, spam filters, some Senator he met who couldn't understand the difference between-- John has no idea either. In the control room, McKay propels him toward the crystal things and starts lecturing him on touching only what he's told to touch.

John is holding a mug of potentially fatal coffee in one hand, and a bottle of water in the other. He can't touch anything at all.

"Hold it," he says, slowly and clearly, because time obviously runs faster three feet away, where McKay is. "I need a few minutes. I am going to drink these," he lifts them, "out there," he gestures to the balcony, "and then come back to help you."

"Oh, sure," McKay says happily, and follows him out, still talking.

John sits down on the ground, takes his boots off, and stretches out his legs. Belatedly, he's realising that for the last eight hours he should have been resting his body. McKay drops down next to him with a loud groan. John closes his eyes, drinks the water, and doesn't listen to a word McKay is saying. When he's finished the bottle, he tucks it into his belt and sips at the coffee, planning to make it last through to the end of the briefing.

On tuning back in, he finds McKay naming the constellations above. So far there's the Taco, the Candy Cane, the Pancakes With Maple Syrup, the Bacon and Egg McMuffin, and the Three Buffalo Wings.

"That could be the Banana," John offers, pointing out a line of five stars low on the horizon.

"The *Banana*?" McKay snorts. "That's a Kielbasa if ever I saw one." John bites his tongue until he notices McKay smirking. Okay then, John finds himself thinking. He and McKay are going to get along just fine.

"Sure," he agrees easily. "The Kielbasa it is." It's now a little past five. Meeting at six, crystal things to touch before then. He puts the coffee aside and starts sliding his feet back into his boots.

McKay hauls himself up and looks out at the dark ocean around them. "God, it's *incredible*!" he says suddenly. "I never dreamed we'd actually find it, you know."

John raises an eyebrow at him. "Atlantis?

"Do you have any idea at all how amazing this is? The Ancient database alone could hold--"

"Uh, wait a second. Weren't you the one who said it was here?"

"Of course I was. I'm the only man alive who's even remotely capable of doing the necessary calculations. But even with someone as brilliant as myself handling it, it was conjecture based on untested theories based on fragments of data. We could have landed anywhere in the universe, some backwater planet with no--"

"And you went through the gate anyway?"

McKay rolls his eyes at the apparent stupidity of this question. "Well, yes, Major. I wasn't going to let some second-rate hack take credit, if by some miracle we had found the Ancient city that could cross entire galaxies." He claps his hands together and rubs them with glee. "And it turns out we had, so I'll be able to write--"

"Do you know the story about the Lorelei?" John asks him.

"What?" McKay says, and then, "oh, yes," in that way that seems to mean he's had several thousand thoughts about it and already moved on. Then he turns around and looks up, at the city glimmering dark and wet under an alien cosmos. "I always thought that would be the perfect way to die," he says. "Obsessed with something so wonderful that you didn't even notice the end coming." He smiles dreamily, still staring upward, something like rapture in his eyes.

John watches with a sinking feeling in his gut until McKay shakes himself free of it.

"And of course, it would beat asphyxiating from anaphylactic shock or getting hit by a bus. Actually, I had a colleague who choked to death on a piece of lobster shell; seafood just hasn't tasted the same since that dinner party. And physicists often get leukaemia, you know, from the radiation that..."

John tightens his laces one last time, ties them, and stands up. He's stone cold sober, now.

All he ever wanted to do was fly. He used to stand in his backyard as a boy, staring up and up until his neck ached and his eyes were creased from squinting. He set himself a path and walked every goddamn step of it until he was airborne. Nothing had ever mattered to him, except flying. He'd wanted nothing but his hands on the flight controls, dancing through the tensions between gravity, inertia, aerodynamics, speed.

He'd flown himself right into hell, a smoking landscape of bombed out villages and severed limbs by the side of the road, orders that hurt to follow and hurt more to disobey. The boy he used to be was relentlessly, mission after mission, war after war, scrubbed clean of all passion, all imagination. Now there are wonders all around him, singing. He wants to give in to them.

McKay has him by the elbow and is propelling him down the stairs toward the control room. John flexes his fingers, longing to feel the city come alive under his hands. Instead, he concentrates on the heavy feeling of his feet on the ground.