By the Hours (Stargate Atlantis) ficlette
Apr. 17th, 2011 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mhalachaiWho: John Sheppard
What: 290 words
When: Early season One
Why: For the Summaries for Dummies III, prompt was "By the Clock, SGA" from
viridian_magpie. Tweaked slightly...Disclaimer: SGA isn't mine; this was written for creativity's sake alone.
Summary: John Sheppard doesn't need a watch in Atlantis.
Atlantis is messing with him.
He came from the Antarctic, he's used to a screwed-up perception of time. Entire days of darkness; daylight stretching frozen over the horizon. He lived an entire lifetime in the year he was at McMurdo and he only ever considered it normal.
He's been on special ops where he's been awake for more than forty-eight hours straight and it's all just part of the job.
When he's in the pilot seat, an hour-long mission can be over in a minute, or can be the longest thing he's ever done.
Point is, for John Sheppard, it's all part of the job.
But Atlantis takes things to a whole new level of fucked up.
In this alien city on the edge of a strange galaxy, he can see time as it passes him by; moments moving through the abandoned corridors, hours sliding down the walls. Days blend into weeks before he can see the slow shift of years; dripping slow as honey through the spiral pillars and towers that make Atlantis.
He mentions it to Teyla once, when they are off-world and John has to look at his watch to see how long they've been gone. She gives him a now-familiar look of concern and confusion, as if she hasn't quite understood what he means, and John quickly changes the subject before she can ask.
If Beckett or any of the others with the Ancient gene see it, John can't get them to admit it. So that leaves him alone in Atlantis, time slipping and eddying past him like ghosts in the corridors.
Sometimes, he thinks the city is trying to drive him mad.
Other days, he knows.
