Elizabeth's room was a few floors down in the main spire, just around the corner from a transporter. After seeing how much the short trek took out of her, John knew that the location wasn't a coincidence.

"Get some rest," he quietly told her as he pulled a blanket over her small form. She caught his hand before he could walk away from her bed.

"Promise me you'll still be here."

John took a deep breath and nodded. "I may not still be in the room, but I'm not leaving the city." And that was good enough. Elizabeth's eyes closed, and he could almost immediately see her body relax into sleep.

He sat in a chair by the window to watch her. It was hard for him to imagine all the things she must have gone through without him. It had been confusing enough to suddenly get thrown into this whole new reality, but Elizabeth had had to live with it for eighteen years, raising two children alone in another galaxy.

John looked up at the sound of the door opening, and saw Abbie and Jonathan in the doorway. After checking to make sure Elizabeth was still asleep, he got up and joined them in the hall.

"Is Mom okay?" Jonathan asked him.

"She said she was tired. Fell asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow."

Abbie sighed. "We should have brought you to her instead of the other way around. Mom's too stubborn for her own good."

John smiled. "I guess some things really don't change." Silence fell for a long moment. "How sick is she?" he finally got up the courage to ask, and noticed as Jonathan took his sister's hand.

"It's called Hodgkin's Disease," he explained. "Or, at least, that was what started it. The medical team tried everything they could. We even went back to Earth, saw doctors all over the planet. It was just…too late."

"She wanted to be in Atlantis," Abbie added. "So the Columbia brought us back a couple weeks ago. Carson's given her days, maybe a week. I guess that…maybe the anomaly in the Stargate had some sense of timing in bringing you here."

John shook his head. "Timing would have been dumping me out eighteen years ago."

Jonathan and Abbie assured John that Elizabeth would likely sleep the rest of the afternoon, so the three of them went to find food in the mess hall. "Have you grown up here your whole lives?" John asked the twins as they found a table by the window and sat down.

Abbie nodded. "Mom didn't exactly tell anyone at S.G.C. about us when she found out. And by the time they DID find out, there wasn't a doctor on either side of the gate that thought Stargate travel OR a month on the Daedalus was a good idea. So we were born here."

"Within two years, Atlantis went from having no kids to having a lot," Jonathan cut in. "Some people went back to Earth. Mom stayed. Me, Abbie, Tagan, and Mac are the oldest New 'Lanteans. We make up AG-14."

John raised an eyebrow. "You're on a team?"

"Tagan's mom taught us to fight when we were little," Abbie explained. "And his dad taught us to shoot. Probably way earlier than he should have, but we didn't mind at the time."

"And then SHE taught herself to fly when we were twelve," Jonathan pointed out, giving his sister a Look.

"Everyone needs a hobby," Abbie shot back. "After the third time I 'borrowed' a jumper, the Colonel convinced Mom to let us have some responsibilities around the city. I think he was trying to keep us out of trouble."

"Did it work?" John asked. The twins grinned. "I didn't think so."

They were still in the mess hall, talking, when Mackenzie Beckett approached a couple hours later to let them know that the science team was about to brief Colonel Garrett. As soon as Mac had entered the room, John had known who she was – she really was her mother's spitting image.

Abbie went to check on Elizabeth, so Jonathan followed his father through the city to the conference room. Most things in Atlantis LOOKED the same, but John barely recognized any of the people. He almost felt guilty for feeling out of place and wishing he could go home to his own time; the people here hadn't seen him in almost twenty years, and he wanted to leave them again.

"Welcome, Colonel," Garrett told him as he came into the conference room. "Let's get started." John took a seat on one side of the room, with Jonathan beside him. The science team, which included Mac and Zelenka along with a bunch of other people John didn't know, displayed their analyses of the data that had been collected from the gate the day that John had disappeared.

"At the time, we believed that the Stargate was still trying to transmit Colonel Sheppard to Atlantis when the gate shut down," Zelenka reported, and John realized that his accent had faded considerably over the years, "And the weapons fire from the Talbyns was what caused it to overload. Given what we know now, we feel it was more likely that the weapons fire created the distortion of space-time that allowed the Colonel to be sent to the future. This distortion drew considerably greater amounts of power than normal gate activity until, in essence, a circuit breaker was thrown."

"Without the gate's failsafe," Mac added, "It's possible that our power supplies would have been drained entirely, and Colonel Sheppard would have been sent hundreds, if not thousands of years into the future."

"Good thing the Ancients had fuses," John muttered.

"Is it possible to improve the failsafe systems so that it would be impossible for this sort of thing to happen again in the future?" Garrett asked.

"We're working on it," one of scientists replied.

"Question number two is: is there a way to send me back?" John asked. A few of the science team members shared looks.

"We are uncertain," Zelenka told him. "Even if we could create another distortion, it may be near impossible to control the power flow to the gate. We could come up weeks short or years long. And the failsafe mechanisms on the gate would have to be disengaged in order for us to make an attempt, which could lead to a catastrophic overload, should something go wrong."

"But…you have to try, right?"

Zelenka looked to Garrett, who, after a moment's hesitation, nodded. "Look into the feasibility of trying to recreate the event that brought the Colonel here. We'll discuss it once you have calculations done. Dismissed."

TBC...