Spoilers for Epiphany
Stargate:Atlantis belongs to someone else.
Illumination
by Brat Farrar
As much as he missed his team, his old-new home and the people that filled it, he needed the sky more than he could ever explain—at times he felt crippled without it, lamed, a bird caged. He would stand from time to time with his head tipped back, eyes closed so he couldn’t see how far away the clouds were, and daydream of flight. Teer asked him once if he was meditating when he did so, and he said yes, because it was more truth than lie.
Working in the fields was comforting at first, something to keep busy with, an echo back to his childhood. But after a week or two, he began to chafe at having to do it the slow, back-breaking way. He longed for a tractor or a team of horses, for efficiency and speed and the satisfaction of a job finished—at least temporarily.
He tried once to explain this to Teer, but she had only stared at him, puzzled that he would want to change the way things were done.
It should have felt like home, all fields and blue sky and peace—except for that thrice-damned beast-thing—but it didn’t. And that wore on him almost as much as his abandonment by his team, his people, those he thought he could trust.
Only later, once it turned out he could trust them, did he realize why the sanctuary hadn’t feel like home—the trappings were there, but the essentials were missing. For all of the easy kindness of the people there, and despite Teer’s pretty words, there was neither love nor friendship. Nothing to bind him to them, and in the end it was almost a relief to see them go.
On the trip back to Atlantis, he listened to the chatter of those around him, watching Teyla’s occasional brilliant smile and the way Rodney punctuated his endless phrases with his hands, and wondered how he ever could have doubted these people. These as opposed to those; his people, his in a way Teer had never understood. He belonged to them and they to him, even if he was still figuring out what exactly that meant.
