Fic: Lost to the Tide (SGA oneshot)
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Rating: All ages, I guess?
Summary: Just a oneshot I'm posting... for reasons. The SGA crew is forced to return to Earth.
Notes: I've only seen glimpses of SGA, not enough to be writing about it. BUT I AM, SO THERE.
Sometimes Rodney still dreams of towering spires and silver flashing lights and the seas roiling and thunder crashing and camouflage cloth sliding against his arms.
He smiles, but now the smile is hollow and empty, and sometimes he screams into his pillow at night and doesn’t know why. But of course he does.
The Atlantis project was shut down. All the soldiers and scientists were sent home to their respective planets. Not even so much as a ‘thank you’ from the US government for their work fighting the never-ending war against the Wraith, protecting all humanity from getting their lives sucked away by evil alien creatures.
Not even acknowledgement in the scientific community! His nondisclosure agreement still held strong, no matter how much Rodney had tried to verbally assault anyone that might tweak things in his favor.
So, after five and a half years of living in another galaxy, Rodney had to go back to a planet that had no idea there was life in the stars. He had to go back to idiots who didn’t realize wormhole physics were a living, working reality. He had to reacquaint himself with a keyboard again - he had been so used to activating advanced technology with his brain. It felt like an infinitely huge step backward to go back to iPods and jet airplanes and blue ray television.
And then there was the PTSD that had manifested itself sometime on the spaceship ride home. Without the city’s constant comforting buzzing in the back of their brains, more than half the ex-Atlantians had found themselves shaking with violent flashbacks or waking up silently screaming.
No well-respected scientist back on Earth wanted anything to do with Rodney McKay, PhD PhD PhD, with or without the flashback episodes. They all remembered his old reputation for being a self-centered brat, but Rodney himself knew he had changed. It came from being the head of the science division, saving lives and being brought low by alternate versions of yourself and almost turning into an alien bug and temporarily ascending into a higher plane of existence. He had a family now, to protect and care for even though they were scattering to the far corners of the Earth.
Zelenka was going back to Russia. Sheppard was getting reassigned to a different Air Force base somewhere in Antarctica again. Even Sam Carter was going back to the Stargates on Earth...
Rodney sometimes stares at the stars in the sky, on nights when the lights aren’t so bright from the city. He knows logically that the planet that Atlantis was on can’t be seen from Earth (it’s in another galaxy entirely), but he still searches in vain to glimpse it anyway. And all across the world, scientists and soldiers alike are staring at that same sky, or dreaming about silver towers and the roar of the ocean and the constant blaring of klaxons.
Atlantis was their home. You can take the people out of the city, but Atlantis sings in their blood and their hearts and they belong together.