Chapter Text
The psych eval is mandatory, which makes sense, even though they already went through extensive testing and shit before getting punted through the gate to Atlantis. Or at least John’s assuming everyone else did. Mostly he just smiled a lot and talked around the questions and carefully didn’t mention his mother, her tendency to eat peanut butter and lemon sandwiches and tell him very strange stories as if they were history, and just why he might be so compatible with the nice alien technology.
But they’ve been in Atlantis for almost a month now, and all almost died a couple times (because John knows only one possible future—and has done his best to make sure none of it will happen, even the bits that make him wish he won’t wake up when he dreams them in the short hours of the night) and cracks are beginning to show, here and there. Dr. Kusanagi (Miko, who folds a thousand paper cranes out of scrap and finishes them two days before the Wraith attack) broke down over pudding in the mess hall a couple days ago, and everyone’s still on edge from that, awkwardly uncertain of how to deal with the slowly-coming realization that there really might not be any going back.
Well. John knows that if they can survive long enough, they should have a ride home within a year, but every time he’s seriously considered telling Elizabeth or Rodney or Ford, they do something to remind him that they aren’t yet the people he remembers, and might never be. He finds himself hiding more often than he probably should, wandering the empty corridors and taking some small comfort that Atlantis is herself, as she always has been and always was. That, and becoming . . . not friends with Sumner, because there are too many ghosts in the way, in addition to rank and absolutely no interests in common other than the desire to keep the expedition—their people—alive. A better word might be allies, or colleagues. Collaborators and co-conspirators.
Anchor and drifting ship, perhaps.
Sometimes it feels like Sumner’s the only other living person in Atlantis, and all the rest of them are just warped and fading memories.