World Apart
A/N: A very short drabble(and my first). A John Sheppard character study of sorts.
The waves crashed against the pier and the wind sifted through his hair. No matter how many times he sat out here and felt the rolling beat of Atlantis he couldn't help but think that this planet was still slumbering. Quiet in the way few other planets he'd visited had felt. As if the hundreds of years of being under the Ancients control and the billions years after of nothing had some how shaped it into a planet that felt unconnected from the galaxy around it.
He had felt the awakening of Atlantis the moment he had set foot in this place but no matter how many systems they brought online with new discoveries and new power, there was still something in the air. A hushed quality that made this place half real, made him want to rush back everytime he left just to make sure it wasn't just a dream.
This place had too many memories, to many ghosts but all he could feel were the billions of years of nothing. Like the planet itself fell asleep half way through mourning and couldn't wake up because it might just be a dream.
John had never encountered anything like this place, this planet and its city. And maybe that was why it felt so unreal. The only place where the feeling had been similar was the empty skys of Anarctica, where the inside of the cockpit felt like the only real world in all the emptyness. Space was like that, this was like space. And it was a feeling that fit with the world inside him.
For so long he'd existed in a place cut off from the outside and out here in this nothingness the borders were fading, dissolving because there was no longer a difference between the outside and the in. Like a drop of oil that had been drifting through water for so long had finally been put back into the oil it had originated from.
The surface tension was beginning to ease; he could feel it inside him, a comfort and a feeling of home that was scaring him more than anything ever had in his life. Part of him wanted those barriers back, part of him was frantically trying to rebuild them but another part, the part that embraced the empty world around and inside him was looking over the edge with glee and preparing to jump.
They shared a common place, the planet and him, both waiting for the right moment when they could wake up without the fear of it all being a dream. And the longer he sat out here and felt the waves crashing against the pier, felt the wind through his hair, the more he came to believe that maybe, just maybe, he was ready to wake up.