�Can you feel that? That�s Atlantis pulsing with energy. Priming herself for battle.�
Not so long ago, less than half an hour earlier, really, with Holo-Rodney.
�I�m not talking to you, Sheppard.�
�Great. My Jiminy Cricket�s gone crazy. Who the hell are you talking to?�
�Atlantis. She wants to shut me off,� I said.
I thought about those moments, and a hundred others, for a second. Elizabeth always treated Atlantis like a living thing, and everything I�d experienced since arriving made Elizabeth�s belief less of a romanticism and more of a potential possibility. Atlantis had always felt like more than a bunch of metal and glass and slightly creepy water-logged labs that held secrets it would probably take several lifetimes to uncover. When I was on Earth everything felt less real, less alive, less welcoming and comfortable than I felt on Atlantis. There were, I knew, a lot of people who thought that things like that were crazy, that it was insane to think a city, even a city that could fly between galaxies and was intuitive to it�s inhabitant�s desires like opening doors and turning on lights and, usually, regulating temperature, could be alive was cause for a psych eval at the very least. Even with everything we all see and do daily�we live in another galaxy in a City that can double as an interstellar, intergalactic even, spacecraft�there are still sceptics on Atlantis. From time to time, I confess, I�ve been one of them, though on the whole I�m fairly open minded.
Still, what I was considering doing? Maybe volunteering for a psych eval with the new shrink wouldn�t be the worst move.
There weren�t exactly a lot of other options, though. Even if I could climb up to the nearest balcony (and why hadn�t I noticed that it seemed a lot closer to the ground than it should have; that would have saved me from a lot of digging) I doubted I�d be able to get any further than over the rail, and that was if I was lucky. Going by my luck thus far I doubted I�d even make it to the rail.
Sucking up my pride�and thanking whatever deity would listen, despite my rather atheistic point of view on life, that no one was around; first time I�d been thankful that I was quite possibly the last man alive�I took a deep breath and started talking.
�I don�t know if you can hear me, or if I�ve completely lost my mind or what, but� if you can hear me� if you can understand me�� I trailed off, unsure of exactly how to word my plea.
The only sound I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears. I�d never been good at the talking thing. Got a scary monster to fight? A Hive ship to go kamikaze on? A MENSA math problem to solve at the last second? I�m your guy. Talking? Not so much. That was Elizabeth�s thing. Teyla�s, too. Colonel Carter wasn�t half bad, though she had confessed to me that she still kept waiting for Doctor Jackson to jump in when it came time for diplomacy or speech making. Rodney, if you keep him on track and off his own ego, could do the talking thing when called upon, though diplomacy is not something anyone would associate with Rodney McKay. Ronan� well, with him and his �less is more� attitude toward non-grunting vocalization, I often seem like the chatty guy. The trust is that me and words have never really seen eye to eye. I�m a numbers guy.
Still, Elizabeth and Teyla and Colonel Carter and Doc Jackson and Rodney and Ronan were all long gone. And, while I couldn�t save every one of my friends�my heart clenched painfully at the thought of being unable, yet again, to save Elizabeth�I could save most of them.
So I tried again.
�I�ve never been good at leaps of faith; Elizabeth hated that about me. But I�m gonna take a huge leap here and assume that you can hear me, and I�m going to ignore the creepy flipside to that particular coin,� I said as loudly as I could, which, to be fair, wasn�t all that loud. I�d lost my handkerchief somewhere along the way and there was about a pound of sand in my mouth and throat, on top of everything else. �You know what�s happening here. You know how far up shit creek I am right now. If you have any way to open this door for me� well, you�ll be saved from this fiery end, too, and the people you once protected will have another chance to life. To stop the Wraith. To stop Michael. But you have to help me get this door open. Before the window closes and history repeats itself.�
I paused to attempt to locate some saliva to moisten my tongue, though I wasn�t exactly successful.
Whether Atlantis heard me, or Holo-Rodney had more control over the City�s power while not visible, or whatever other factors I couldn�t even begin to consider came into play, that door started making a god-awful grinding noise and the sand in front of the doorway started sliding down into the corridor, just like I�d hoped it would. It felt like it took forever for the door to open enough that enough sand had fallen through that there was room for me to slip through what was supposed to be the top right corner of the door, though it wasn�t so much a matter of slipping through the hole�like, say, climbing through a window�as it was shutting my eyes and covering my ears and allowing gravity and the sliding sand