So I figured since I needed a muse boost I'd try my hand at this meme. It's not set in my Evan/John 'verse or in canon...it's just a reflection piece.
SGA Fall Meme: So I ask you, f-list -what are the Stargate Atlantis characters up to in your world?
Fic: Sometimes It Hurts Instead
Author: Lil Jei
Fandom: SGA
Character: John Sheppard
Wd Ct: 542
Rating: PG 13
Warning/Author’s Note: SGA Fall Meme. Character Deaths Inside.
Disclaimer: The show and characters aren’t mine.
Summary: The end comes for John.
John couldn't help the sigh that came from his withered lips. His death had been a long time coming. But it hadn't happened soon enough. He didn’t die in Afghanistan, in Antarctica, or in Atlantis…he had come close a lot of times but still death hadn’t taken him. Now though, he wished it had. He had never envisioned this end in his life. Old, alone, and in a military run facility, only guarded by the military due to his gene and the secrets he guarded.
For the first few years after Atlantis he’d been too exhausted to worry about anything. Then he’d started living again. He had left the Air Force and gone home to his brother, and they’d let him. He knew that in the end as long as he kept his mouth shut he’d be fine. Once or twice a month he’d shut himself up in his house and sit in his basement bunker and play light switch, but that was it. He knew when the military defeated the Ori and then the Wraith; he wasn’t that out of the loop. But he couldn’t do much more than listen to Rodney bitch and switch things on for them.
He’d been left with massive PTSD and depression and no one wanted to deal with him anymore than they had to. His brother and Rodney had been the only ones to stay in his life. He’d pushed them all away too much and they ended up staying away. He would attend their funerals whenever Rodney came for him. He was a well established hermit who stayed away from pretty much anyone he could. For ten years he suffered through nightmares, night terrors, and daymares. He also spent that time running the books for his family’s company, helping Rodney, and seeing his shrink 4-5 times a week. That was his life for so long that he regretted it now.
John hadn’t realized how isolated and remote he had become until he had to attend Evan Lorne’s and Cameron Mitchell’s funerals all in the same day. They both had stayed in the service and in some backwoods country and in nameless war they lost their lives trying to save some civilians. John was the only one of the retired officers around him that found irony in that. They died heroes though and it had shook him up. The three of them had remained email buddies after Atlantis’s landing and their loss hit John hard.
It hit him so hard that he literally “woke up.” He stopped being a hermit, sought out old friends, and started making his way into the world once more. And he’d been happy for a long time, nearly 20 years or so. It wasn’t until Rodney died from a heart attack that he shut down again. And he’d stayed that way to this very day. Here he was staring out into the night waiting for death to come finally. He’d tired of living years ago and now being hooked up to oxygen and tethered to a bed pan made him want it even more. He could feel his breath coming faster, his heart beating louder, and his body was shaking…he felt it as, as, as he became nothing at all.