Title: Soldier
Author: Trill
Fandom: SGA
Character(s): Sheppard
Rating: PG
Words: 397
Summary: You don't mean to be this way. Sheppard
Disclaimer: Still don't own anyone.

Notes: Written as an exercise in second person. And to tick off my brother, but that's another story. Why does no spell checker recognize Kosovo as a word?

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You don't mean to be this way. It's the one thing people just don't understand about you, why you can't let them in.

You have before, and it nearly killed you, didn't it? Left you bleeding orange sand red with two dead friends just the other side of the line.

None of them knew a father who said you weren't a man until you heard the bombs falling, and how dare you pretend anything different.

The first time you find yourself sleeping in a foreign desert, you understand him a little better. He had his wars-Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War that ended after he died. But this isn't your war, and neither is Kosovo or Afghanistan, much as you thought it was at the time.

Then you're sent to the bottom of the world so they can age you out of the service. No one gets promoted ferrying pompous scientists to a places that don't exist, do they? It makes you glad that you're father's dead, you couldn't stand to see the satisfaction he would have gotten to be proven right.

Antarctica is the last place you expect to almost be shot down, let alone by a… squid? Something else not to ask about, to joke about later with Ellison.

Just like that 'meteor shower' in January.

But then something different happens.

This general is just a little crazier than the other people down here, a little less concerned with regulations. You're covered with snow and freezing so he temporarily ups your security clearance and for the first time, you're allowed to venture into the place that doesn't exist.

Ten minutes after that, you sit in a chair, the whole damn room lights up, and the assholes you've been flying back and forth for the last three months notice you for the first time.

Two weeks after that you're part of the thing that doesn't exist.

In a way, you guess it means that you yourself don't exist anymore. The thought is oddly comforting.

A few weeks and several thousand light years later, once things have settled down, you figure the odds. From what the crazy doctor told you, it's literally a million to one that you'd be who and what you are.

A million to one, and you're in another galaxy, fighting near-invulnerable life-suckers that you woke up.

Oh, you found your war all right.