sga_flashfic | “Wanted Man” (Missing Person/s Challenge), by _inbetween

John vignette. Alliteration alert. Notes at the end.

Wanted Man

<^>

All his life, John had never felt particularly rooted anywhere. Give him a few days, and he’d be equally at home in a desert or a snowfield, his small sphere of privacy neatly slotting into any new surroundings.

As the sun sank over this deserted beach at the edge of an ocean so similar to the one surrounding Atlantis, lazy waves lapping at John’s toes, Earth's reassuring weight under his bare feet, his history here - insignificant as it might have been – suddenly hit him, and yet he felt light as the cool air brushing through his hair.

There’d been doodling at the margins of books and dreaming of riding his first motor bike while not paying attention to Miss Coulder; perching on rickety wooden chairs and drinking golden micro brew in Kaiserslautern; riding 20 ft waves in Waimea; sitting in darkened cinemas all over the world to drift into space with the warm bodies of anonymous equals around him ... the scratched desks might still bear John’s name, the greasy Gasthaus would still serve beer, and if no wave at The Bay could ever be the same and no sagging chairs were shaped by his butt-print, that didn’t matter – he had been there, and it was part of him.

He breathed in deeply, breathed out slowly, surrounded by silence and the soft sounds of the sea, so similar to the blood rushing through his veins. The last rays of a dying sun were its most brilliant, and though John knew the fiery glow would be gone from his piece of the sky any minute now, as if switched off by an impatient hand, he felt suspended in time.

Tomorrow they'd return to Atlantis, where John would run on adrenalin, play it by ear most of the time, with occasional boredom as an integral part of life on the edge of a wormhole. He'd go back to pioneering and exploring, risking and saving lives, being shit scared and occasionally dizzy with relief. Tomorrow, he’d go back to being responsible and fighting for way too many people, for the billions living on this old planet, too.

But right now, John was just a small shadow at the rim of a large silver mirror, an insignificant grain of sand, a visitor with no responsibilities or duties, and that was cool.

<^>

I’ve had this vision of John’s state/feeling in my head for a while now, not even prompted by any stories about “home”, and it slowly (but in TCM) bloomed into this loose companion piece to Whole. Thanks to

enname for betaing an even shorter version of this :) Written for

monanotlisa(’s pic prompt).