Sabine Bauer - Mirror, mirror

Who was she?

The second time round, opening his eyes wasn't quite as agonizing. Or perhaps he was getting used to it. He blinked, trying to focus, and eventually the blurred shape hovering over him lost its fuzzy edges. And yes, she was old. Ancient-no pun intended. The fingers holding the mug were liver-spotted, thick jointed and gnarled with arthritis. Snowy, sloppily braided hair tumbled over a bony shoulder, and the face was withered and scored with wrinkles. Her eyes were white, irises barely distinguishable from the sclera. He doubted that it was glaucoma or any age-related disease-if she'd been taking care of him on her own, she was far too deft to have lost her sight recently-but she definitely was blind. And if you looked past the age and the sightless eyes, there was something else… family resemblance? Though why Teyla had never mentioned it was beyond him.

"I think I know your… granddaughter?"

"I guess I must look that old to you." There was nothing amused in her laughter, just irony and a deep sadness, bordering on despair. "I have no granddaughter, Colonel. I am Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Tagan."

"I'm flattered about the promotion, but if you were Teyla, you'd know that I never made it past major," he said slowly, getting a hazy idea that it would be pointless. The woman — whoever she was — was easily old enough to suffer some degree of senile dementia.

"Major Sheppard?" Straightening up, she cocked her head as if to listen to an inner voice. "I suppose that was a possibility," she murmured to herself. "I don't know what I expected. Not to find him this young, for sure. It might even mean that I'm not the original either." Without warning, she burst into laughter again. "To think, all these years I have never even considered… It just goes to show how much we all want to be unique."

Oh yeah.

Nuts.

Of course there also was a better-than-average chance that he was too dazed to follow.

"What the hell happened?" There. He'd finally said it.

"I was hoping you could tell me, Major. All I know is that Wex's men found you on the beach. Although… Were you flying a jumper?"

The jumper.

That explained everything. For the first time in his short but compellingly checkered career, Major John Sheppard had gone in. Well and truly gone in, not just plopped down a tail rotor short of a helicopter. He'd bumped his head, and that really did explain everything.

"Maybe you should get Carson, Teyla. I'm feeling a little… weird."

"Dr. Beckett is not here," she said gently. "You are not delusional, Major. Try to remember what happened. It is important."

— Why?"

"Because, if you remember, you will believe what you are seeing. You will believe me."

John wasn't entirely sure he wanted to. He had yet to discover a part of his body that didn't hurt, he might be losing his mind, and he desperately wanted to go back to sleep and wake up a few hours later to find that this was one of those scaryweird dreams he'd been having.

"Were you flying a jumper?" she asked again.

Outside, a herd of small, fleecy clouds is racing past the view port, and just for the heck of it, and because he can, he flips the puddle jumper into inverted flight Nothing wrong with jazzing up a routine coastal survey, is there? Admittedly, with the inertial dampeners being a notch or three beyond state-of-the-art, it's nowhere near as much of a kick as it should be, but it'll do.

"Oh yes, it'll do, " he whispers, grinning like a five-year old.

Flying isn't a job. It's a necessity. Something changes when he's flying. Maybe it's about being happy, but he doesn't care to analyze it. Too easy to analyze things to death. Never far behind the elation lurks the memory, mercifully distant now, of the run-up to his abortive court-martial. He's never admitted it out loud, but worse than anything was knowing that he'd lose flight status upon conviction. Sure, there was always crop-dusting, but it would have been a poor substitute for driving a PaveLow through a war zone. And even that doesn't come close to driving a juniper Most fun you can have with your clothes on.

He comes out of inverted flight and chases the little ship into a vertical climb, only easing up when he's about to leave the atmosphere and go orbital. Once, just once, he'd like to do that with McKay, just to see what

The jolt is so violent, he is flung from the pilot's chair and against the navigation console. His first, dizzy thought is that this can't be happening inertial dampeners being a notch or three beyond state-of-the-art then he helplessly slides into a vortex of images, past, present, future, fanning into endless permutations of the same events.

He stands behind Rodney, fretting, promising himself never to become a flight instructor Only one of him will not regret that thought later all others have lost both McKay and Brendan Gaul to a marooned Wraith, and most never live to tell the tale.

He lies in the rear that goddamn bug stuck to his neck, feeding. Dozens of him don't make it, because their teams can't bring themselves to kill him.

He sits in the pilot seat, more alone than he's ever been in his life, on collision course with a hive ship, with Elizabeth Weir and Radek Zelenka by his side, chased by countless darts, fire and death blossoming all around, again and again and

He is Ikaros, flying too close to the sun and falling, wings aflame, torn apart into a myriad selves, falling and burning and

The visions shrivel as suffocating heat triggers some internal alarm. It explodes into shrieks stall warning? and he puts a hand on the console to shove himself to his feet, flinches away, almost screaming, his palm blistered by hot metal. He struggles upright somehow, knows what he'll be seeing even before he looks out the view port: the jumper is in uncontrolled reentry, systems fried, shields failing, a ball of fame hurtling toward the surface. No flying skill in this galaxy or any other could stop the inevitable, and all that's left for him to do is stand and watch and try to ignore the fact that he can barely breathe anymore.

Falling toward a coastline now, a coastline that should be familiar and isn't, in some subtly distorted kind of way. It's been twisted out of shape like one of Dali c clocks by the same thing that's warping everything else around him. Reality has become a cakewalk, and so he latches on to the one immutable fact that leaps out at him. If his trajectory remains stable and it will, because there's not enough wind-shear to affect the parameters of speed and mass and gravity he'll come down right on top of a village that's popped up in a place where there's never been a village before. Athosian? Has to be, though it hardly matters. What matters is that there are people, men, women, children, all of them bodies to be.

"Not gonna happen, " he croaks. `Not gonna happen. "

The mind-ship interface no longer works, he knows that. If it did, the jumper would have responded to his simple desire not to be pulverized on impact. He stumbles into the pilot's seat, briefly flexes his hands. It'll be a whole new way of becoming part of your ship, he thinks grimly as his fingers close around the manual controls. The first few seconds are excruciating, then he feels nothing, because the nerves have been burned along with his skin.

Sluggishly, the jumper responds, and coastline and village drift starboard and out of sight. All that's ahead now is open water and maybe, just maybe… A sudden image forms in his mind, summer camp for inner city kids, a lake in the forest, and he's twelve, barefoot at a pebbled shore, learning how to skip stones. It's all about speed and angle. Shaped like a broken-off bread stick, the ship has all the superior gliding capacity of a tank but at this point he has nothing to lose by trying. He extends the drive pods, bartering reduced drag for stability, forces up the nose of the jumper and fattens the path of descent.