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He’s thirty-four years old, and it takes going to Antarctica to get Zeus off John’s back about flying. There are no olive trees or Mediterranean heat there: nothing Greek, or Roman, for that matter, about the place. Nothing that would appeal to the sky god. Just an endless icy void.
He gets the job at McMurdo after Clarisse puts him forward for it. Leading an army of armed, scared teenagers to fight Titans apparently bumps John up to at least working pilot. He says yes because Grover says he should. On his first week there, though, John’s already figured out why Grover said that: there aren’t any monsters that find the Antarctic circle interesting, either. Distracting him is going pretty well, for once, and he’d be fine with that if he knew what was happening from the beginning.
As it was, he wakes up on the morning that he’s supposed to leave with a blessing from the Hermes cabin on his bedside table: a passport with the name ‘John Sheppard’ in a manila folder along with the Cliff’s Notes on this guy’s life. His life. John — not Percy, now — puts a shaky hand through spiky black hair and commits it all to memory. John Sheppard didn’t grow up a juvenile delinquent, nor did he get kicked out of every single school he ever got sent to. Or, actually, he did.
Nice touch, John thinks.
No-one knows John Sheppard at Antarctica. John can count on two hands the people who know Percy Jackson, really, and most of them are still working at Camp Half Blood. A second chance. His green-blue eyes blur when he reads Connor’s write-up on Sheppard’s ‘reassignment’ to McMurdo — how he’d launched himself on a mission to save his teammate, failed, and returned with a black mark on his service record and half a man.
John closes the folder, rubs his eyes with the base of his palm.
Some things find themselves too close to home, he thinks.
So he goes. He gets six hours to enjoy the blistering cold before he has to pick up a Colonel guy called O’Neill in a helicopter that’s not really built for this kind of weather and head for… nowhere he knows about, really. Or is supposed to know. John’s becoming more and more familiar with the gossip surrounding the outpost. They’re worse than the kids at the Apollo Cabin, really.
His demigod-wired battle sense kicks in before he even sees the hypersonic missiles coming for them. They go dangerously close to the ground, but they miss the projectiles, and that’s the main thing. O’Neill looks like he’s going to throw up, but there’s something in his eye that tells John to follow him. That, and the guy tells him to do so. John opens his mouth to object. Then he remembers that ‘John Sheppard’ is probably supposed to be concerned about being booted from the Navy and shuts the hell up.
He starts to snark the moment they walk in the door, anyway, because once he was the kid that mouthed off to Hades.
For his part, O’Neill tells him not to touch anything before the man disappears. The reason for this is that the outpost is not doing Normal Navy Things, and John, for Grover, mourns ‘Operation Keep Percy Jackson out of Trouble’. The outpost is buzzing about something called the Ancients, and some Scottish guy is bragging about the fact that he launched the missles from the weird looking chair in the corner.
He’s suddenly hit with a strange wave of nostalgia. John hasn’t felt this in over twenty years: stumbling, wrong-footed and lost, into a world he knows nothing about but everybody else already does. Last time he did this, he woke up to Annabeth grilling him about Zeus’ Lightning Bolt.
John blames the fact that he actually sits on the weird chair on the nostalgia, anyway. And then it lights up.
Rodney McKay rushes over, asks him to imagine his place in the universe. John does him one better. Gaia’s earth cracks open, the Argonauts return home, Luke and Kronos stand together in one body, Echo watches Narcissus, Persephone falls for Hades, his mother is swiped through by the Minotaur into falling golden light. Every part of him that’s half-god wakes up as if being shocked to attention.
Every hair on his body is raised; his back aches with the promise of the River Styx, a rope around his entire body dragging him back to the mortal world. He feels like he can touch Mount Olympus with one hand and the Underworld with the other — not godly, but through the web of myth he grew up surrounded by. He sees celestial gold, bronze weaponry clashing in the sky, Chiron’s outstretched hand.
He smells fields and fields of strawberries, further and more than Camp Half-Blood has ever had, can taste blue cherry cola on his tongue. Fire and ash and water and light. Annabeth, before she became Olympus’ architect and walked into godhood and legend.
All of it materialises into an extensive map of the stars and the earth and every nearby planet, everything, engrained into John’s mind the moment he was born. Most of it he doesn’t recognise. No matter. He can’t exactly tell them the reason why he’s so strong in the Force, or whatever — that everyone else is descended from the Ancients, and John’s essentially the original recipe one god removed.
He loses the job, in the end. The one that involves flying General O’Neill around, at least. John packs his bag and heads to Colorado Springs via New York to say goodbye to his Mom and Paul and Andy, because he can feel that this is going to be a long one for the time being. He records a message for Tyson then throws the tape in the Hudson with a sand dollar. And when John steps through the Stargate, he can feel it.
He’s surrounded by water. It feels like coming home.