HP/SGA: Different Kinds of Magic
Title: Different Kinds of Magic
Prompt: 01.Beginnings
Claim: John Sheppard, Stargate Atlantis
Fandoms: Stargate Atlantis, Harry Potter
Words: 747
Disclaimer: Everything you recognize belongs to someone else.

This story has been remixed: Different Kinds of Magic (alla Clark's Third), by zvi_likes_tv



Cover by liviapenn

John knows he's not much of a wizard. Hell, he doesn't even own a wand; his mother taught him how to use a pocketknife as an athame if he needed to cast spells, but she refused to buy something so obviously magical. A purchase like that, she told him, was exactly the way to get noticed. And Emily Sheppard did not want to be noticed.

She never told him the whole story, but John managed to piece a lot of it together. Most of her family got themselves killed fighting some evil overlord during World War Two, and she starting hearing rumors of another one just after she graduated from magic school. Within six months she'd met, married, and moved in with James Sheppard, an Air Force officer stationed in Germany. (John's always half-wondered if there was a love potion involved, but he was never stupid enough to ask.) When he was reassigned to California ten weeks later, she was thrilled.

John never went to magic school. The day before his eleventh birthday he got to drink some foul potion and sit very still while his mother did a lot of chanting: he spent the next two weeks reminding his teachers that he wasn't really absent, winning every game of dodgeball by default, and listening to his father complain about engine intakes being damaged by stupid birds that weren't even supposed to be flying during the day. Eventually it wore off, though, and that was when the lessons began.

Whatever a normal magical education is, John's pretty sure he didn't get one. He doesn't know anything about wizarding history or culture, but he does know seven different ways to alter someone's memory. He knows every potion that can be brewed in a Muggle kitchen, but he wouldn't recognize a flobberworm if it jumped up and bit him. He knows all about the Unforgivables, knows the moral issues and practical applications, but he's never heard the term "Dark Arts" in his life.

In eighth grade he spent every free moment he had buried in transfiguration books. Eventually he realized that, A, there was no way to guarantee his animagus form would have wings and, B, he was crap at transfiguration anyway. When he confronted his mother about the waste of time she pointed out (correctly) that he would have kept trying even if she had told him it wouldn't work. This way, at least, he had some supervision when he accidentally turned his hair into feathers.

The next day she patted him on the head (it never quite went back to the way it was before) and handed him a new book. Arithmancy, she suggested, might work out a little better.

He stopped using magic after high school. The Air Force Academy kept him too busy, and even if he'd wanted to there was never enough privacy. He got out of the habit, the same way he lost touch with his old classmates, and casting spells just faded into one more thing he didn't really think about all that much.

Which wasn't to say that he never did anything. There were a couple truly spectacular pranks at the academy that were never solved, and a good warming charm went a long way toward helping him appreciate Antarctica. But for the most part he was living a perfectly normal life, and magic was something that he just didn't need.

Then one day while he's on chauffeur duty there's this chair, and thinking about where he is in the universe is like remembering the first time he flew and the solar systems appears like a kestrel coalescing from silver light. When they arrive in Atlantis he's got no time to think about any of it, not with power failures and cullings and rescues and Wraith. But then all that's over, the party's winding down, and suddenly the thoughts are overwhelming. He's just inherited military command of the entire expedition, adopted a tribe of natives, and woken the most fearsome enemy in two galaxies. It's not exactly what he was expecting to have to handle.

There's salt in the MRE condiment packs, oil in his gun cleaning kit, and Teyla won't mind loaning him a couple candles. It's been a while since his mother walked him through the ritual enchantment of his old Swiss Army knife, but he's pretty sure he remembers enough to give his SGC-issue KaBar a whole new definition of "multipurpose." He'll take any advantage he can get.