sga_flashfic | 'We Came To Learn The Sea' by Cherry Ice

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Title: We Came To Learn The Sea
Author:

cherryice
PG, gen.
Life is a learning experience.

The sea around Atlantis is always wrong -- subtly, wonderfully, insidiously wrong. Something about the colour, about the taste at the back of your throat, about the way it feels on your face when you sit cross-legged at the end of the east pier. You grew up by the ocean, by the mountain, in the concrete jungle.

Your earliest memory is Colorado, winter. Snow on the pines, in the air (brilliant against the night sky), down the back of your boots. Your mother was laughing, snowflakes caught in dark curls; father with his arms wrapped around her and eyes bright with joy. The mountains were a solid presence at your back, all three sets of footprints already almost erased by the wind. Erased, like you'd never been there.

(Maybe it's not your first memory, but it's the first clear one. Everything before it is voices raised in anger; you can still feel each flake settle on your skin, the burn of cold air in your lungs.)

Mountains, sea, sand. When you were six, you used to sneak out at night and sleep in the tree house where raised voices couldn't reach you, leaves whispering hushlittlebaby all around. The third time they found you out there (they were frantic the first time, mother in tears and father's hands shaking; they didn't fight for two weeks), they sent you to live with your grandparents. Your grandmother met you at the train station in Indiana, wrapped her arms around you so tightly you could hardly breathe. She smelled like lilac and powder, and you were trying to tell her that you weren't a baby when you realized you were crying.

Your mother stayed in Colorado, your father moved to Florida, and you remained in Indiana. (He's playing third base for the Peewee baseball team, you heard your grandfather say, telephone pinned to one shoulder as he cleared the table. Wouldn't want to pull him now.) Your mother called at least twice a week, read you a bedtime story until you fell asleep. Grandfather's shadow at the door, grandma's cool lips against your forehead and the hiss of the long-distance connection -- you think back now, and it fills you with warmth.

Warmth, filled, fleeting, you fall. Atlantis air (not-quite-right) cutting through your clothes, cooling the burns on your face.

Summers at the beach, Florida; hot air and smog and sun, bungee jumping and cotton candy at the amusement parks. Winters and Easters in Colorado; wind burn and frostbite and snowboarding (sun in your face and freefalling). Running home from school after track practice; grandfather in the yard and grandmother in the kitchen, everything all scent of fresh-baked break and newly-mown grass. Lighting-flash scent of the Stargate, gunpowder, zat-blast, blood.

This is going to kill your grandfather.

1995 was a bad year. You watched him shrink, so that every time he put on his funeral suit it hung a little more loosely on him. Your father in January (car accident), your mother in August (stroke), your uncle in September (long walk off a short short pier). October, you got suspended from school for fighting; November, they found the case of beer beneath your bed.

You have a Wraith attached to your chest, and the look on your grandparents' faces (quiet, crumpled, like they didn't have the energy to deal with it) is still the worst thing you've seen.

Silver and cold, rush of air. Above you, you can still see the flames licking from the edge of the city, and the ocean reaches up. You are twenty-five, and you always thought that if your life flashed before your eyes it would be like gate travel, a rush.

(Hush,hush,hush, the air and waves are whispering, and you cannot hear the battle.)

You should be grateful, for all the things you've seen and the places you've been, but all you see is snow in the night and everyone you've ever lost.

Falling, you are falling, and the ocean reaches up to swallow you whole.

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celli

This is gorgeous and sad.

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