4.

He was skimming the baked earth - desolate and pock-marked like some twisted vision of post-apocalyptic doom, the remnants of homes and businesses strewn about like discarded candy wrappers. Sometimes he could spot the twisted metal of a downed huey or a bomber in the rubble, sometimes the crimson splatter of 'human costs' painting the landscape like modern art. It was days like this that dulled even the glorious freedom of flying to a pallid compensation - a token like the gold coins laid on ancient people's eyes after death, the one thing he could cling to in this purgatory.

Then his radio crackled, voices coming through, harsh but urgent - like the voice of God, or better yet, that devil sitting on his left shoulder. They ordered an airstrike, even when he could see the dusty khaki of friendlies, painted in blood, but moving. From up here it looked like a movie, one of those nature documentaries of ants scurrying within the overwhelming chaos of the jungle floor. No one ever reacted in horror when they saw a lizard snatch up an ant.

For a second he saw a great city sinking into the sea, but as soon as it had appeared, it was gone.

He blinked and he was on the ground, nestled behind a wall of crumbling rubble, but far from safe. He could see the fighter jets swooping above his head. And he wished, more than any time in his life, that he were up in one. He could feel the searing pain in his right arm - he was sure he'd broken it in the crash. He held his nine-mil tight in his left, clutched protectively to his chest, to halt the bloodflow from the gash on his forearm. His breaths came in shallow gasps and his vision blurred, both from the blood trickling down in his eyes and what he recognized as the hazy wonder of a concussion.

His distraught mind could just make out a figure in the shadowy window of one of the few remaining buildings - dark almond-shaped eyes boring into him. He saw neither pity nor condemnation, just a silent plea - as though he, this one wounded soldier, could make this horrible nightmare go away. Those eyes were the thing the generals didn't see when they looked at troop movements on their nifty little battle screens, moving them about like a computer game. For a second he imagined he was above it all again, flying over a landscape of neon colored dots, inching slowly forward to places whose names he neither cared about nor could pronounce.

More movement snapped him back to reality. An enemy soldier was entering the building where he had seen the eyes. The uniform was ragged and the features stained with drying blood and soot, but the eyes were dark and dangerous. Then he heard a woman's muffled scream.

He levered himself up, ignoring the throbbing in his head and the pain in his leg - at least it wasn't broken. Limping from pile to pile of rubble, like a frog jumping lily pads, he made it to the doorway, panting from the effort. The soldier stood with his back to him, pants dropped down to his knees. A woman was kneeling before him, but it was not the girl with the pleading chocolate eyes. Her eyes were a brilliant teal, deep like the sea and so wise beyond her years. She was wearing all white, her pale cheeks barely darker than the unstained fabric that flowed around her like a halo. She did not belong in a war zone.

He did not hesitate - six shots, the entire clip. But instead of collapsing forward, pinning the shrieking woman to the ground, the way he had remembered it, the soldier hunched forward just slightly, wounds healing themselves.

And when the soldier turned, he saw not a man with a twisted smile revealing his scraggly teeth, but a Wraith - unnatural white hair and pinched features and an unnaturally wide grin with needle-teeth. He did not even have it in him to scream as the creature advanced.

And when it laid a large, almost claw-like, hand on his chest, sucking not just the future from him, but all happy memories of the past, it left him with the image of those pleading eyes, row after row of them, extending into the darkness, the image of great billowing clouds of smoke and fire rising like bubbles in a blue sea . . . his only salvation were those brilliant teal eyes, the last thing he saw before . . .

John Sheppard shot straight up upon waking, strangled by a thick knot of sweat-drenched covers. In his panic to get rid of them, he tumbled off the bed, hitting the floor with a dull thud. When he finally extricated himself from his tenacious enemy, he rushed to the far corner of the room and crouched there, disoriented and afraid, taking in deep breaths, so close to sobs.

Slowly, reality came back to him. He was no longer in the Balkans, he was trillions of miles away in another galaxy. That battlefield could have long calmed - though he doubted it. He was safe on Atlantis - the Wraith could not get him here, at least not without a fight.

John was no stranger to bad dreams. There were days when he saw those soldiers he couldn't save flash through his mind like the drawings on the inside ring of a carousel. And now Colonel Sumner was added to his little menagerie of horrors - the life fading from him as though it we so insignificant as to be born off on the breeze. He had never felt words so poignantly: Out, out brief candle . . . full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Good old Bill, always knew how to make you feel it.

He rubbed the place on his chest where the hand had been. It was tender, but not painful. He must gave been gripping it tight to himself. He took a couple more deep breaths - a technique one of his few girlfriends had taught him, called pranayama breathing. Air in through one nostril, out the other. Air in through the nose and out the mouth. Air cycling through him, bringing in the warm light of the prana energy that rode on molecules of oxygen like rodeo-masters. The warmth could cleanse away the thick cobweb of dreams . . . heal the pain. He thought of Dharma, and how she used to sit across from him on her meditation cushion, letting him follow her breath. But even she had left him, not because she was forced to wake almost nightly to his shouts and phantasmagoric struggles, not because he had been so frightened once when she shook him back to reality that he gave her a black eye, but because he could never tell her why. He did not want to burden her with the weight of his memories. They were his burden alone.

John stood on shaking feet and wandered to the bathroom to find a glass of water. It was only then, looking at strange jars of unidentified and long-outdated substances, that he realized that he was once again not in his own room. He wandered out onto the balcony, seeing the bright glint of the sun peaking over the horizon and casting shadows by the vaulting silver turrets of the ancient city. He wondered briefly how he would find his way back without using a transporter. "I'll improvise," he mumbled.



It was several hours later, when John was finally in his own quarters, dressed and ready, that he heard the warning klaxons for an unscheduled off-world activation. His headache had returned with a vengeance, and seemed to throb with the blaring of the alarm. But that didn't stop him from running full-tilt for the command center.

McKay and Weir were already there. McKay with his arm in a completely unnecessary sling, which only seemed to get in his way as he raised his arm to type on his laptop anyway. Weir was leaned over what, as far as he could tell, was the operations station, while Dr. Grodin frantically punched keys, trying to get a transmission to clear up.

"Atlantis base, this is Research team Alpha . . ." John could barely make out Lieutenant Parker's voice. ". . . Wraith ships . . . refuge in cave networks . . . remote link to MALP . . . not spotted . . . immediate backup. Repeat, requesting immediate back up."

Grodin punched a few buttons and the transmission finally cleared.

"Lieutenant Parker, can you hear me?" Weir asked, brows furrowed in concern.

"Go ahead Atalantis base."

"What is your location?"

"Five clicks south/southwest of the research site." Not a definite location if the enemy was monitoring - good girl. John liked Lieutenant Parker. She was well qualified in field armaments and tactics, though a little wet-behind-the-ears. The bonus was, she spoke fluent Latin, Russian, and German. He had seriously considered her for his team, but had settled on Ford instead. That was why Parker was out babysitting the scientists . . . that, and the fact that she seemed to have a much higher tolerance for technobabble than most soldiers.

"Are you all all right?"

Parker sounded slightly panicked, but she seemed to be controlling it. "For the moment. We’ve tracked only one Wraith scout ship, but it's only a matter of time before they find us. They must have seen the MALP by the gate."

John decided now was the time to cut in. "We’re on our way. Do not contact us again, unless you have no choice. The Wraith could spot our gate address on the DHD."

"Affirmative, Sir. Parker out." Just before the gate shut down they heard a muffled protest and Parker's harsh retort, "Can it, Kavanagh."

Weir looked up to face him with a muffled sigh. "You really think it's wise to go after them? The Wraith don't know their location. We would only be drawing attention." She was thinking like a civilian, a bureaucrat - not that he blamed her. They could sit here all day weighing risks, but in the end you just had to go with you gut instinct, and his was telling him to 'damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.'

"She said that it was only a matter of time." He chose to leave out what it was a matter of time till. Again, he didn't want to burden someone else with his own nightmares. "And with Kavanagh out there, they'll just put base security at risk." Another one of her decisions he didn't agree with. He had heard about what happened when he had that bug attached to his neck. Kavanagh was a security risk, and a man who needed a sharp kick in the ass, in John's humble opinion, but Weir had acted like a civilian yet again. She overlooked the problem because she knew he was the only man other than McKay who could figure out the strange energy readings they detected from the ruins (Talk about a rock and a hard place - loud annoying and stubborn or pompous annoying and stubborn). That, and they all wanted him out of their hair. John had felt sorry for Parker when Weir made the assignment. He decided, despite his eardrum's protest, he preferred McKay's endless babbling to Kavanagh's permanent sneer.

Weir nodded, but McKay interrupted. "It couldn't be a worse time . . . one of the Naquadah reactors is acting up . . . we can't use the transporters . . . we've got our own security system hunting us down . . . I had a fricking needle in my shoulder . . . I knew sending research teams out when we still haven't gotten our problems here under control was a bad idea . . . all we need is four horsemen and a swarm of locusts."

"Yeah, Armageddon, disaster, blah, blah . . ." John rolled his eyes. "We're shipping out."

"Are you kidding? Do you have any idea . . . if the transporters are guarded, what do you think they did to the gate?"

Something welled up from his subconscious like water bubbling from the bottom of a hot spring. "The gate's not protected . . . the refugees . . ." he mumbled, deep in thought.

"The what? Whatever. My point is, Major, that we can't risk opening the gate . . . you don't know . . . wait, refugees?"

John realized his mistake and quickly backpedaled. "I have no idea what you're talking about, Rodney. My point is: I'm willing to take that risk. You don't have to come. In fact . . . I'm thinking it would be better if you didn't." I already have a cave full of bumbling scientists to deal with.

"Hold on, Major." The rich commanding tones of Weir's voice made him stop dead in his tracks. "You're still not cleared for gate travel."

"Excuse me?!"

"Doctor Beckett told me this morning that you've been having headaches. He's still going over you scans."

Come on, Elizabeth, not you too? "They're headaches! There are people out there who could die."

They stood staring each other down for several seconds. He had never noticed her eyes were grey before. Grey, almost blue. He concentrated on showing her the need. He was nothing - a grunt . . . a talented one, but still a soldier, a replaceable part. He had replaced Colonel Sumner, after all. If he could save those people . . . scientists with valuable information that could be used to stop the Wraith and save billions . . . well, his life was nothing compared to that, let alone suffering a few migraines. Besides, every life was worth saving. Everyone contributed somehow to the complex beauty of the whole. Everyone, smiled and encouraged, came up with small brilliances, loved and were loved, created and destroyed. It wasn't just duty and friendship that made them say 'leave no man behind.'

Despite her resolute calm -her unflappable ability to win a battle of wills- she knew he was right, because she turned away. "Fine, but be careful."

"I always am." He smiled his shit-eating grin, though they both knew he was dead serious. With that he pressed the button for citywide announcement. "Ford, Teyla, Markhem, Bulter . . . jumper bay . . . as soon as humanly possible."



Minutes later they were dropping down to face the wide stone circle of the gate. Ford was trying to look calm, staring straight ahead, but John spotted that he had his fingers crossed beneath the co-pilot's console. But John was sure nothing would happen to them if they went through the gate. He still couldn't explain why.

Now, as they dove toward the shimmering pool of light, he found himself mesmerized by its aqua depths. He saw clearly in his mindscape, a pair of eyes: teal and radiant, promising as much wonder and adventure as the gate itself.

He had never seen eyes like that. Well, once there was this waitress outside Edwards. She had translucent blue eyes, like the air on a clear day, speeding out of the flat nothingness of the cracked salt beds and past the angry waters of the Kern into the sparse ridges of the high desert, screaming vertically up the Needles, brushing up against sudden-death and vaulting into the cloudless sky, blinded by the midday sun.

He couldn't remember anything about her except her eyes - not the warmth of her touch, not her name. But he glimpsed her soul there, knew that once upon a lifetime he could have loved her if he just let himself.

With that thought, they jetted forward into the next adventure, John feeling the exhilarating twists of gate travel, as though the jumper were his body - his armor.