SGA: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Title: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: None of them are mine.
Notes: My spellchecker says Cthulhu is a misspelling and suggests Catholic as a correction. I am amused.
Summary: Five dreams John Sheppard never had about Atlantis. Plus one someone else didn't, either.


1. Dread the day when dreaming ends

John dreams of sleeping. Of slowing the beat of his heart and the breath of his lungs, closing his eyes and curling in on himself as he readies his body for the long hibernation to come.

John dreams of dreaming. Of drifting with the rhythm of tides and the passage of years, being twice disturbed by a pinprick before shifting position and sinking back into oblivion.

John dreams of waking. Of feeling the quickening of life and the stretching of senses, rising from his bed and feeling long-awaited sunlight and fresh air and kin...

Teyla is still troubled by her Wraith-visions when she asks John about his own nightmares. He has to explain to her that he never remembers his dreams.


2. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi

The woman in his dream may be the most beautiful thing John has ever seen.

She's not human, not exactly, or maybe not only- she has the form, the perfect human feeling and human figure and human tilt to her head, but she's made of burnished metal and stained glass polished to what he knows would be a mirror shine if only she hadn't been abandoned in the dark. Been trapped, imprisoned in some way he can't understand, and her incredible wings (delicate overlapping sheets of gold and copper that rub and rustle as she tries to move) are slowly crumpling and crippling under the pressure. She calls him by name (no face, no voice, but he hears her in his head and it's like being hit by the wind in that first moment between blowing the canopy and ejecting) and says he has to help her, she's running out of time and he's the only one that can help her. But he's stuck in Antarctica, she's too far away, and there's nothing he can do.


3. White Knight is talking backwards

All in all, the first time the ritual hallucinogens came up during trade negotiations was pretty much a letdown.

Ford had enough material to be a traveling storyteller, according to Teyla, and a truly ridiculous amount of it was about missions to places the SG teams referred to by names like P3X-LSD and That One With The Mushrooms. The accompanying ceremonial garments (or lack thereof- sometimes it was ceremonial bodypaint, and rumor had it that SG-1 was hiding matching ceremonial tattoos), ceremonial dancing, and ceremonial hangovers always featured prominently. The really good ones took it a step farther; once it took three days for SG-2 to sober up enough to find out that they'd pledged to join the local high priestess' harem.

Apparently the anthropologists were still debating that one when the Atlantis expedition left, something about trying to decide if "harem" was really the most accurate description. Ford didn't know the exact details because the whole discussion had gone underground after SG-2 started threatening to shoot the next person they heard theorizing about temple eunuchs.

So meeting the Ilendri and sharing their traditional welcoming feast was incredibly anticlimactic. (Mock turtle soup and pot brownies, McKay called it, which even Teyla had to admit was pretty accurate once they explained turtles and marijuana. They tried to explain Alice in Wonderland, too, but by then the brownies were kicking in and things got weird.) John woke up the next morning with a fuzzy head and a handful of equally fuzzy dreams, something about ponies grazing in the control room and flowering vines climbing up the gate. No white rabbits, though.

He really had been expecting more.


4. I do believe in faeries

He knows it's not real. He knows it's not real because they told him it wouldn't be, told him the Old Ones would test his merit while he slept. He traded Cthulhu jokes with McKay while they tried to activate the Ancient whatever-it-was, eventually gave up and conceded that they weren't going to get any closer to making the thing work while they were still conscious. He's pretty sure that's when reality stopped happening.

It's not real, but knowing that doesn't help. Knowing just means he has to concentrate that much harder, because whenever he loses his focus things start to... slip, and when things slip he begins to believe. Begins to believe in a reality that isn't real, that can't be real, because if he starts to think it might be real then it really will be. Belief shapes reality, so he he has to live in it if it's real, has to live in a world that would be perfect- he's too busy denying it to focus on the details, too busy reminding himself of what it isn't to see what it is. But he knows it's everything he could ever want, a place where no one's ever imagined things like wraith and all advanced technology comes with easily understood instruction manuals, a place he absolutely cannot let himself think about right now. If he thinks about it he'll believe it, and if he believes in it he'll make it real. If he makes it real he has to live in, and if he lives in it he'll never wake up.


5. An epic drama of adventure and exploration

If the city was sentient, he always imagined she - Atlantis is always female, in his head - would be a lot like his mother. She'd want her people to be happy, she'd be fiercely protective of them, and she'd have a great sense of humor. (Combining those last two, she'd stop them from activating anything truly dangerous but would sit back and laugh when they did something idiotic yet non-lethal.) In his really good daydreams she plays practical jokes with the transporter system and reprograms the Ancient-to-English translation software with lines from Monty Python's Hungarian phrasebook.

Today is not a daydream and his puddlejumper is not full of eels. Today Atlantis decided that their presence is jeopardizing its existence, that all the damage it received during the Genii and Wraith attacks can be attributed to human error. Today the quarantine protocols went into lockdown, sealing all the rooms; John was just returning from the mainland, but nothing he does can persuade the computer to open the jumper bay doors.

Today is a nightmare.



6. I know this is true

It's a gateroom, Jack recognizes that immediately, but it's nothing like the SGC. This place is wide open, full of steps and lights and stained-glass windows; even the gate is different. He realizes it's a dream just as he recognizes the brief glimpses the MALP gave them of Atlantis.

He doesn't recognize the voice that interrupts his thoughts: "I'm sorry, sir."

Turning, he sees that the gate has opened. The light from the event horizon is almost blinding, but it's not so bright that he can't see Major John Sheppard standing there in his dress blues. He recognizes this, too. Last time he had this conversation Daniel was asking him to pull the plug.

"You won't need to do that for us, sir," Sheppard tells him. "I'm sorry, but we won't be coming home."