Ford sat in his car with a bunch of flowers. He could have gotten chocolates, but he decided flowers were better. This was his grandma. He felt slightly uncomfortable and pulled the flap with the mirror down. He sorted out his hair for nearly the tenth time and took a deep breath.

He left the car and headed for the front door. He hands were shaking. He'd killed wraith for crying out loud! Why was he so nervous? Because they thought he was dead. It hit him like a bullet. The door opened and a man in his mid twenties opened the door.

"Is there something I can do for you?" The man asked.

"Um, I must have the wrong house number."

"Wait a second, I've seen you before." He snapped his fingers and chuckled. "You're the one from the photos!"

"What?"

"She said you'd gone MIA, missing in action?"

"Yeah, I, uh, it's classified."

"I see." He face went sombre. "You should come in. She left some things for you."

Ford finally grasped what he was meaning. He couldn't believe it, he wouldn't. Then he felt a pain in his chest. It wasn't emotional, it was a real pain. He felt shooting pains in his arm. He went to his knees and clutched his head.

"Honey!" The man shouted into the house. "Call an ambulance!"

Fords eyes flashed open. The light blazed his vision and he instinctively closed them again. He blinked several times and got used to the light. He was in a medical room. There was a large window overlooking a park to his left and two other beds to his right, both empty. A small television sat in the right topmost corner of the room playing an ongoing static. A nurse entered and bashed the side with her hand. It turned off and she swore.

"Hey, I was watching that." He said sarcastically, but his voice remained a croak. He reassured it with a slight smile and the nurse smiled back. She left the room and the door shut.

The door slammed open and a man in a white suite walked in. He prowled across the room with such ungraceful posture, he wasn't sure if it was a man pretending to be a doctor or not.

"How did you survive?" He pointed a finger at Ford and rubbed it around. "You ruptured all the main arteries leading to your heart and you survived. This is either a miracle, or you've been upgraded somehow. You're not one of those, who did the news put it, replicaterers are you?"

"What?" Ford asked. "I ruptured all the main arteries?"

"Yes!" He cried. "How?" He continued. "How did you do it? Has the military been holding out on medicine? If they have the IPA will have a boot up their arse."

"It's IOA. And give 'em one from me as well." He looked around and saw a commotion from the door. The nurse that had been in here earlier was staring blandly at him.

"So you were with that spacegate command." He said.

"Stargate." He corrected. "And I never knew it was public knowledge."

"This war in another galaxy is all over the news." He said as he turned the television on. He flicked it to a news channel and saw the great city of towering buildings with many planes flying around them. No, not planes, cars.

"No one told me back to the future was on." He said out loud. He became serious. "I went MIA years ago."

The doctor tried to put words together and then came out with. "What's it like?"

"What's what like?"

"Going through the sungate-"

"Stargate." Ford corrected again. "It's Stargate, and it's like getting shot several times."

"So I assume these, phantoms took you?"

"Wraith, and no." He sighed. "I was in a battle with one of their hive ships and managed to survive by stealing one of their fighters. Then I spent the next few years trying to get back to command." He tried not to give too much away, he didn't know how much had been given already.

"Here's the latest story." The doctor turned the volume up.

"Half of the USSF's army vanishes." The newsreader, female, read from her script. "It has now been released that half of the ground forces fighting this unknown enemy in the so called 'Pegasus Galaxy' and gone missing. The IOA released a statement earlier today."

"We have been informed that half the army has gone missing." A man in a dark suite said. "We are not allowed to release information due to the wellbeing of our people."

"A British army also went missing some months ago-" The television went to static.

"Blasted thing!" He shouted in outrage. "Do you understand now? They told us about their games of putting us in danger. The IOA is better than all of them though. They have the guts to tell us."

"The IOA is responsible for most of the troubles we had." Ford complained. "We were following orders from our superiors and the IOA stuck their noses where they didn't belong."

"Arg!" He left the room, but stopped by the nurse.

She walked in and pretended to change his drip.

"My brother is with that army, he sent us a letter about what happened." She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. "I'll distract him. He wants to turn you over to the authorities."

She started to walk out then motioned him to follow.

"There's an elevator at the end of the hall." She pointed left. "Ground floor. They won't let you out if they notice you. You'll have to be sneaky."

"What's your name?" Ford asked as he looked down the corridor.

"Katie Mellor." Ford nearly fell over. "What? You know him?"

"Yeah, he's in an elite team at the moment."

"Go!" She urged quietly.

She looked over his charts and found his name. Aiden Ford. She wrote it down and left the room, acting nervous. She looked frantically from left to right.

"He's gone!" She shouted. "Doctor Nevins! He's gone!"

Doctor Nevins appeared from a storage room and ran passed her to the room. He peaked his head in and banged it against the wall.

She tried, failing happily, to suppress a smile.

"When I write the report I'm telling them that you let him escape." The doctor growled as he noticed her smile. "You'd loose your job and you would never, ever, be accepted in another medical facility in this galaxy!"

"I'm sure they'll need medics in Pegasus doctor." She turned around and walked off. She had planned to go into the armed forces anyway. With the recent losses, they were putting new recruits through training faster and shipping them off to Pegasus. A call to anyone with medical experience was urgently needed anyway, according to the websites she had been on.

She threw her scrub into the bin and washed her hands in the toilet. Her friends asked her where she was going, she didn't reply. It was more than likely she'd be killed, or go missing, in action.

Ford drove. He wasn't being chased or anything. But he drove like he was. If a police car saw him, he'd probably be stunned or 'pulsed', as someone had put it to him. He liked the fact the underground works here hadn't changed much. He met up with one of his contacts and got himself a car. It was an old one, there were still roads in place, but they were nearly empty. It was literally old people on here now. People who didn't get their new licence to fly in the sky-lanes. Half the time it was auto-piloted, according to his contact, though.

He didn't go in the sky though. He didn't know how the sky-lanes worked. From how long John had been away, he was probably oblivious to it all.

Ford smiled. He'd met John Mellor's sister. She was hot too. He wasn't surprised if she lost her job. He'd never talked about his life at home, they'd only met once actually. He came off as tough and aggressive at first. The he eased up and turned into someone very much like McKay, but without all the talking, and being smart. He was basically a cool McKay.

He turned into the street where he knew he had parked his car. It was still there. He stopped next to it and rummaged his pockets. His palm met his face. He was wearing completely different garments. His stuff was probably somewhere far away. He looked down the road both ways. When he knew the coast was clear, he elbowed the glass in. It was rental as well.

He was in a hurry though. The nearest Stargate was over a hundred miles away. He turned the car around and it hit something behind him. He looked and saw nothing. He went forward and walked over to the invisible thing. He felt around for a second, wondering if it was what he thought it was.

When he reached the other side he heard a hissing noise. It was like staring into a door, with no doorframe. He stepped in and looked around. The pilot area had a man with short black hair sitting in pilot's seat. He pointed to the seat and looked at Ford.

"You died." Sheppard said. "The chip we put in you went offline three weeks ago."

"Three weeks?" Ford asked in outrage. "I was out for three weeks?"

"What do you mean?" John asked as he turned in his seat. "You didn't turn it off?"

"I didn't know you put one in me." He countered.

"Mine's here." He pointed to the side of his neck. "They're standard in times of war." He closed the rear ramp and started to take off. "Earth's changed a lot since the last time I was here."

"How long ago was that?"

"Years." He admitted. "Four, years."

"So in four years they did all this?"

"To earth its been more like eight." John said. "They picked the time-dilation device from the asgard core. Building takes a matter of seconds now."

"Why don't we use that on the ships?"

"We are." John replied. "It's the resources we're having trouble with."

"Oh." Ford reclined in his seat. "So how'd you-"

"You haven't told me what happened yet." John insisted.

"I had a heart attack." Ford said. "My," He paused, "my family is gone." He stared John in the eye. "I don't have a life anymore. Thanks to years of being MIA I have no life here on Earth."

"You and everyone fighting the wraith, including me." He sat up and looked around. "You know in the matrix, when the robots took over?"

"Yeah." Ford said.

"Ever get the feeling it's just that?" He turned to Ford in his chair. "Just a hazy dream?"

"Dude, I've been a freak for the past few years," He smiled, "everything was hazy to me."

"We're now going over the Atlantic Ocean." He smiled. "The IOA decided to make Atlantis a drop off point for supplies that could fit through the gate." They passed into a cloud and everything went white for a few seconds. "You're going to be shocked." John smiled as the cloud passed and Fords mouth dropped.

Huge trains of supplies, led by puddle jumpers, were in a line headed towards a single gate located on the top of Atlantis. It looked out of place, but so did all the large tubes that seemed to run off from each of her piers and into the ocean below. She had not lost any of her glory, and Ford felt sorry for it.

He could see traffic filling the sky above it in two large columns that stretched out to the horizon. Each was moving in opposite direction to the other. John took them then waited right beside the open gate for the train to go through. When it had passed, he moved sideways quickly and headed straight in.

"A lot's happened while you were gone mate."