SGA: Heteronormativity... (het, PG-13) 2/4
Title: Heteronormativity, Gender Construction, and Nonverbal Signalling in Intercultural Communication: A Comedy
Author: mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through season 4
Warnings: Mensa AU, but not related to my Major Zelenka fics in any way, shape or form.
Summary: In which Teyla may be plotting something, Keller may be delusional, Ronon may be cheating and John may in fact be the girl. No pudding cups or Marines were injured in the production of this fanfic.
Heteronormativity, Gender Construction and Nonverbal Signaling in Intercultural Communication: A Comedy
By Mad Maudlin
"Any dizziness?" Keller asked, shining a penlight in his eyes.
"No," John said. "Can I talk to Carson now?"
"Carson is not on call right now," she said. "Do you remember everything leading up to the accident?"
"Yes," John said. "Teyla wants to feed me to death and the puddle jumper was trying to defend me. Seriously, is Carson avoiding me or something?"
"No, Carson is sleeping after working a double shift last night, and we're not talking about Teyla right now." Keller started prodding the goose egg on John's forehead, which hurt, so he yelled at her. "Okay, so a fair amount of tenderness. Your eyes are a little abnormally dilated, too."
John shrugged. "I drank a lot of tavajava before the mission."
"Tavawhat?" Keller asked.
"Tava-java," John said, and decided to explain it on account of how she was new and probably still innocent. "It's Athosian tea mixed with coffee. When you heat it up there's this chemical reaction and it comes out like something between Red Bull and Dexadrine, only delicious. I like mine with lots of sugar."
Keller started making the googly eyes again, but she didn't say anything, just drew some blood and put him under a scanner. By this point Ronon and Teyla and Rod had already left, since none of them had whacked their skulls into the dashboard during the crash, which John thought was a little unfair since the subconscious urge that had clearly driven the incident was to get Teyla as far away from him as possible. Though maybe technically it had worked, since Teyla was known to hate the infirmary and avoid it religiously. Of course, so did John, so that really wasn't a solution in the long-term.
And in the end, Keller did say, "Okay, it doesn't look like you've got a concussion, but if you start to experience any blurred vision, headaches, ringing in the ears-"
"-yeah, yeah, come back if my brain starts to leak out my ears, I know this one," John said, and quickly put his glasses back on. "So can I go now?"
"Well, medically you're free and clear-whoa whoa whoa!" She caught him by the sleeve as he tried to bound past her to the conference room, where Rod and Ronon were undoubtedly telling vicious lies about the cause of the crash. He probably could've shaken her off and kept going, except for how she was kinda tiny, and he wasn't entirely sure he wouldn't end up flinging her into the wall. "Where's the fire?" she asked.
"You said I could go," John said. "So I'm going. Unless you somehow meant I can't go, in which case I'll stay until you fix whatever's wrong with me, but you also ought to work on your communication skills."
"There's nothing wrong with you, but-" she kept a grip on his wrist when he tried to flee again. "But I did want to talk to you about, um, something else, if you have a minute."
Something else? John racked his brains for something non-medical that a doctor could want to talk to him about. "This isn't about sperm donation, is it?" he asked.
"No," Keller said. "Why would you-you know, never mind, I don't think I want to know."
"People have asked," John pointed out. "I've got this super ATA gene and somehow that gets some women hot. They ask Carson, too."
"Well, that's not what I wanted to ask about," Keller said. "Look, can we sit?"
John, reluctantly, sat back on the bed. Keller pulled a little stool out from under and perched on it. Another thought occurred to him. "Are you going to try to refer me to Heightmeyer about this Teyla thing?" he asked. "Because she was totally staring at me this time and the food thing is getting creepy and also I've memorized all the answers to most of the standard personality tests-"
"John? John." Keller patted him on the hand with a strained smile. "If you think Teyla is stalking you or something, I believe you. But I actually wanted to talk about me for a minute or two."
"Oh. Really?" Though he couldn't think of anything she'd have to say if it wasn't about a sperm donation or making out with him, seeing as, well, she was new, and he was…him. It wasn't like they had a real solid basis for a relationship or anything.
She nodded. "Yeah. Well, actually, sort of more about Ronon than me."
"Oh. He's not actually all that scary and I think he spreads the rumors about the ferrets himself just to sound tougher," John explained. "He really did kill his boss, but there were extenuating circumstances for that, so I don't think we can hold that against him."
And the googly eyes were back. "I, uh, actually hadn't heard of…either of those things," Keller said.
"Really?" John asked. "'Cause those are pretty much the core facts about Ronon. Oh, and his wife's Melena, she's a ninja too."
"That I knew, actually," she said, squirming. "That, um, actually, is part the, uh, situation, I wanted to talk about."
John had one minute to blink in non-comprehension before the horrible truth dawned on him. He thrust a finger in Keller's face. "Home wrecker!"
"No!" She blurted. "There has been no home wrecking!"
"I can see it in your guilty face!"
"Oh, my god, do I look guilty?" She grabbed a bedpan off a shelf and tried to catch her reflection in it.
"You are so guilty," John said, folding his arms across his chest. "Harlot."
"I didn't do anything!" she protested. "I don't even talk to him anymore! The last time he tried to hit on me I pretended to stick myself with a dirty needle and made Angela finish his stitches!"
"Wait, he's hitting on you?" John asked. "How is he hitting on you? He's married!"
"I know!" she wailed. "That's what I'm trying to talk about!"
John rubbed his eyes and adjusted his glasses. "So back up a sec. He's hitting on you and you're guilty about it?"
"Well, I have to work with Melena!" she said. "Like every shift! I thought he was hanging around all the time to see her, and then I thought maybe he was having an affair with Angela until I realized she was, you know, and then I'm almost positive he's been hitting on me the last few times he's been in here."
"Dude, Ronon wouldn't do that," John said. "They have like the only healthy relationship in this city, and I'm counting Rod and Katie the botanist in that, because they've been dating for like a year but they still don't kiss with tongue."
"That's what I thought," Keller said. "That they're happy together, not, you know, I didn't even know that about Rod. So now I'm worried that I might be seeing things or overreacting or something. Maybe a teeny tiny touch of wishful thinking, since he's, you know. Mmm."
John didn't know what exactly the inarticulate grunting signified, but the accompanying hand gesture was pretty unambiguous. "You're guilty because you might be imagining that he's hitting on you?"
"I know!" She sighed. "I'm such a Catholic."
He waited a few minutes for her to elaborate on what this had to do with him, exactly, but she just sat staring into space with a guilt-ridden pout. "Look," he said, "I really don't want to know anything about your fantasy life, and if you don't want to talk to Heightmeyer I think you can prescribe your own psychotropic drugs…"
"Actually, I'd need the paperwork countersigned by another MD," she said. "But really I just…are you sure there's nothing up with him and Melena? Him or Melena?"
"Totally sure," John said. "I'm happy to report that you're totally delusional."
"Okay. Thanks." She took a deep breath and then exhaled. "I, uh, I only asked you because I obviously can't ask them directly and Rod's so…you know, and I'm a little bit scared of Teyla."
"You should be," he said. "She's plotting against me."
"Of course she is," Keller said mechanically. Then, "Wait, is she?"
John threw his hands in the air. "You know what? I don't even know anymore. Maybe I'm delusional, too."
"If you were delusional, would you notice if Ronon was having marital problems?" Keller asked anxiously.
John shook a finger at her. "None of that. He's not hitting on you."
"And Teyla's not out to get you," she said.
"So we agree we're both delusional?" John asked.
Keller frowned. "I thought we were agreeing that we're sane."
John grabbed his jacket off the end of the bed and snapped, "Why not go mad?" as he fled the infirmary. At this rate he might as well just take up knitting.
-\--\--\-
Stargate Control worried about Teyla, and originally John thought it was about the part where she'd been a Runner for half her life, or maybe the part where the Wraith could read her mind sometimes (although she could also read their minds and when she did it was totally cool). It was only later that he found out from Rod, and not on purpose, that they doubted her loyalty. "You have to admit she doesn't have a lot of friends in the city," Rod said reluctantly, with a little frown.
"She's got me!" John blurted. "I mean us! You know, the team! And she hangs out with Sora a lot too,"
"I know, you know, Elizabeth knows…" Rod squirmed a little, like it physically pained him to take the SGC's part in this but he just couldn't get the stick out of his ass. "What they see on paperwork is that she's a consultant with no official duties besides going offworld with us and beating up Marines. She barely even talks to her own people, and Sora is…"
"A dirty cheating defector?" John said. "Because, you know, so is Teal'c, and he gets his own damn gate team."
"I'm just saying, it looks bad to them," Rod muttered. "We're taking care of it, though. Elizabeth's, uh, writing a letter."
Teyla wouldn't sit still long enough to take any of the Mensa tests (and Heightmeyer said they were all culturally biased anyway) so John tried to get her to join the RPG club, or maybe the four-man SCA chapter they had going, or even teach her chess so she could help his quest to kick Zelenka's ass at it. He even spent a day and a half on a complicated 3-D model of the city's social network, which showed exactly how many people were not actually terrified of Teyla, even if not all of them would actively call her a friend. Teyla didn't want to come to any of the clubs, though, and while she sometimes came to movie nights she didn't always stay for the whole film.
And it didn't matter anyway, 'cause Elizabeth wrote her letter, and it wasn't too long after that when Cadman and Melena showed up; all they really had in common with Teyla and Sora was the fact that they were totally terrifying, and female, but that seemed to be enough to create the Sisterhood of the Traveling Explosives, and somehow that made the SGC calm down. Mehra showed up later but fit right in, and John pretended that he didn't mind at all when Teyla hung out with them instead of the team.
-\--\--\-
Thus burdened with the knowledge that either Keller or Ronon had gone batshit insane, John settled down and devised a three-pronged strategy for dealing with the situation.
1) Defend flying abilities against all detractors.
"I told you all I was itchy."
"John, you hit the stargate," Rod said distinctly.
"I didn't see the stargate."
"You didn't see three tons of superconducting naqadah with a wormhole in the middle?"
"I had an eyelash in my eye."
2) Evaluate Keller's sanity
"So how's things?" John asked Ronon.
Ronon looked up from his tray (spaghetti bolognese, Pegasus style, which was to say the noodles were scarlet and the sauce was lavender but it tasted exactly the same). Then he snorted gently and looked back down.
"Not that I'm, you know, worried," John said, and chased his own meatballs around the tray. "Because you're totally capable of handling all your problems and sometimes other people's problems too. At least when it involves bigass ray guns. And what problem can't be solved by a well-timed discharge of high-energy plasma?"
Ronon finished his spaghetti and started munching on some whole Cubanito peppers that the botany staff had transferred to the kitchens in a box marked Mostly Harmless.
"But if you were, you know, having a problem, the non-shootable kind of problem, I hope you'd talk to…uh…Rod, about it. Yeah, talk to Rod. 'Cause he's smart about that kind of thing." John caught a meatball and choked it down; it tasted like salmon with the texture of a superball. "By which I mean things that aren't fixed by shooting. Which actually covers a lot of problems, and I'm not saying that Rod is necessarily smarter than me about any of them, except, uh, when he is. Some of the time. But you should definitely talk to him about stuff. If you need to talk instead of shooting things. And I'm not saying you do."
Ronon finished his peppers, picked up his tray and walked away.
John waved at him. "Glad we had this little discussion."
3) Ignore Teyla
"John."
"Teyla."
"It is time for dinner."
"I already ate."
"I see."
"So, yeah, bye."
"Goodbye, John."
"…Eldon, go get me an MRE. Anything that comes with chocolate. Now."
-\--\--\-
This strategy actually worked for a while, since they didn't have any missions and Rod didn't insist on any emotional bonding type activities (which he sometimes did, because for some reason he thought that regularly almost dying together didn't make them good enough friends as it was) and really, outside of those sorts of things or meals, John and Teyla didn't see a whole lot of each other. He worked in the labs and she, well, beat people up. Rod usually made an effort to go hang out with Teyla and Ronon when he wasn't doing science, but John usually didn't see the point since they really didn't really care about physics or video games or Mensa and he wasn't really into guns or fistfights. That just left mealtimes, and John could avoid those by reluctantly switching to an all-MRE diet, which he did. (At least the entrees and desserts. And sometimes the candy portion. Sometimes there were chocolate-covered espresso beans.)
Of course, as a consequence he didn't really interact with anybody but Abdirova and Eldon for a while, except for the department meeting where Rod made an announcement about eating in the labs that John actively ignored. Rod also tried to talk to him afterwards, but John made sure to slip Zelenka an anonymous note accusing Optican of intellectual dishonesty, and the resulting kerfluffle covered his escape.
But he figured out later, while interpolating the data, that the meeting was really just a warning shot past his head, so to speak. Because the day afterwards, he woke up to somebody pounding on the door of his room, apparently with hammers. It was only eight o'clock, and he was so addled from a tava crash that it didn't occur to him to that, in real emergency, somebody would just call him on the radio. (Or page him on the citywide speakers. They'd had to do that once, but in his defense, he'd been turning into a bug at the time.)
So, sleepy and incoherent, John stumbled to the door without his glasses on and opened it. Cadman, Mehra and Sora were standing on the other side, and they didn't have hammers, they had an aluminum baseball bat.
"Hi, Shep," Cadman said. "We need to talk."
They shoved their way into the room before he had fully registered the probability of his imminent demise. Sora was holding the bat, and braced her hands on the knob like a cane; Mehra had her arms folded and was glowering, but Cadman's thumbs were hooked into her pockets and she was smiling wide and calmly, like a shark. They came forward until John backpedaled into his bed and fell into a sit. "Please don't kill me," he blurted, because that seemed like the logical end to this situation.
"Oh, don't worry, we aren't going to kill you," Cadman said. "Unless you make us angry. You're not going to make us angry, are you, Shep?"
"I wasn't planning on it, no," he said quickly.
"Well, then, this ought to be quick," Cadman said. "There's just one simple question you've got to answer for us, Shep, then we can all go home happy. Do you have a problem with Teyla?"
Because it was eight o'clock in the morning and John hadn't been caffeinated yet, he said, "Huh?" Then he yelped, because Sora suddenly swung the bat up and smacked it into her palm. "I don't have a problem with Teyla!"
"That's funny," Cadman said. "That's real funny. Don't you think that's funny, girls?"
"Funny ha-ha or funny uh-oh, ma'am?" Mehra asked.
"The kind of funny that I don't believe, Sergeant." Cadman took a step forward, and John flinched. "I don't think you believe it, either. Do you, Shep?"
"She started it!" John protested.
Mehra sighed. "Permission to give this man a wedgie, ma'am?"
"Denied." Instead, Cadman crouched in front of John, still smiling. "See, Shep, we're all out of high school around these parts. We can all act like grown-ups. Do you think you're acting like a grownup lately?"
John may have been outnumbered and wearing Spiderman boxer shorts, but he wasn't going to stand for being called immature. "I think Teyla's the one acting like a goddamn crazy person," he said with as much pride as he could muster.
Cadman hissed, and Mehra cracked her knuckles. Loudly. "Shep, that's low," she said. "That's really, really low coming from the man who claims he crashed a gateship 'cause he was itchy."
"I was," he said firmly, and then managed a near-suicidal verbal sortie. "And if Teyla's plotting to kill me or something, she ought to know I'm on to her and she should damn well do it herself instead of sending you."
He expected to be beaten with a baseball bat for that, or possibly just shot. He did not expect Cadman, Mehra and Sora to break into hysterical laughter, and he certainly didn't expect two out of three of them to lose their footing entirely and fall to the ground clutching their sides, and he was pretty sure if someone had suggested he'd see Mehra actually wiping tears from her eyes in any context ever, he'd have called base security. So when they did all fall down laughing, he was understandably paralyzed for a few minutes, and had to go fetch his glasses before he was absolutely certain it was laughter and not some kind of screaming seizure.
"You can stop that now," he told them.
"Any time," he added.
"Seriously," he said, "I'm gonna call Major Lorne in about thirty seconds."
Cadman eventually climbed up, using the end of John's bed as a brace, and then threw an arm around his shoulders still giggling. "Shep," she said. "Shep. Listen. You are an idiot."
"Ten seconds," he told her. "Nine. Eight."
"You're an idiot," she said, "and if you hurt her feelings you know we really are going to kill you." Then she helped Sora up, and all three of them left, dragging the bat along the ground behind them.
John considered calling Lorne anyway to report them, because he was pretty sure Cadman wasn't acting like an officer and a gentlewoman, and it might've been breaking Sora's parole in some way to have the bat. He got as far as picking up his radio, but in the end he didn't say anything. After all, who the hell was going to believe him?
-\--\--\-
John got to his lab that morning (to the extent that "morning" was defined as "before noon") to discover it was slightly on fire; Eldon was sitting on John's desk sucking on his fingers while Abdirova tried to beat out the flames engulfing a tablet computer with her jacket. John did not scream, of which he was very proud; instead, he fetched the nearest fire extinguisher, put out the tablet, sprayed some foam on Eldon and Abdirova in revenge, and then dragged them both to Rod's lab and made them sit outside with their hands folded in their laps and a couple of hastily-constructed dunce caps on their heads. "You are going to sit out here and think about what you've done," he told them with admirable calm, "and I am going to clean up your mess, and then flip some coins in order to decide whether I'm going to use you as test subjects in a teleportation study."
He had just about finished scraping the melted plastic off the table, too, when Rod barged into the lab and cuffed him on the back of the head. He didn't do it hard, but John was understandably protective of his brain cells and didn't appreciate even the mildest threat to them. "Ow! What's that for?"
"That was because I'm pretty sure you've taken leave of your senses entirely," Rod said. John realized belatedly that Rod was scowling, probably angrier than he'd seen him in a while. Uh-oh. "In case it even occurred to you to worry about them, I sent Eldon and Gulmira to the infirmary, and they're both fine, and I'm not going to write you up for completely disregarding accident reporting protocols because you're obviously not guilty by reason of insanity. Instead, you and I are going to go have a well-balanced lunch, in public, around people you do not have the authority to terrorize, and when I'm satisfied that you've regained all your faculties, you're going to apologize to your staff and promise not to experiment on them."
"I wasn't serious," John muttered, feeling about six years old.
"The fact that we couldn't tell that is part of what worries me," Rod said, and hauled John upstairs by the sleeve. "You've been hiding down here for God only knows how many days, and even Colonel Sumner has been asking if you're entirely mentally stable. You've always been a workaholic, John, but this is getting kind of insane."
"I'm not the crazy one!" John protested. "It's everybody else who's gone nuts! Or at least the women. Women and Eldon. You think they're something in the water around here? Or maybe their menstrual cycles are lining up. I've read about that, you know. My mom took me to live in this commune in Sweden one summer and it totally happens."
Rod sighed at he yanked John into the nearest transporter. "If you're still convinced Teyla is plotting against you-"
"Not plotting. Not necessarily plotting," John said. "But she's still trying to feed me and since I'm no match for her ninja powers, well, I have to make excuses. Did you think I was working down there? I'm not working, I'm hiding from her."
"You," Rod said, "are probably the most mentally defective man I've ever met. I say that as a friend, of course."
"It's not just Teyla!" John said. "That hot new Keller doctor went nuts too, she admitted it to me. And Cadman and her thugs broke into my room this morning and threatened me with a bat."
Rod stared at him for a moment, which reminded John why he didn't report Cadman originally. Then they were up to the mess hall level, and lunch was in full swing, and damn it, Sex and Guns and Ammo and the City were camped out all at one table, giggling with one another. "See?" John hissed to Rod, trying to point at them without drawing their attention. "Something is totally up with that shit."
"Sit," Rod said. "Now. Because God help me, if you aren't going to let Teyla feed you a well-balanced meal, then I'm going to do it, and if I have to I'm going to use Ronon and a tube."
John sat down and started shredding napkins while Rod loaded up two trays and brought them over. He noticed that, in addition to Teyla and Cadman's coven in one corner, Keller and Melena and Ronon were sharing a table, over by the windows. They seemed to be having a good time, or at least the Dexes were, though Keller was looking kind of googly-eyed and sweaty. John couldn't tell if it had something to do with the way Melena was smiling and laughing and touching Keller's arm a lot, or the way Ronon was kind of semi-not-totally-obviously bumping his leg on hers under the table, or both. Because Ronon was totally bumping his leg against Keller's under the table. And smiling at her a lot. Huh.
Rod returned with a tray full of mixed green (and purple) salad, a fruit cup, and space turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomato but no mayonnaise. "Here," he said. "Vitamins. You need them."
"Is Ronon hitting on the doctor?" John asked him.
"Don't be absurd." Rod also put a carton of milk on John's tray, then tucked into his own sandwich. "And I'm not kidding here. I'll tell Carson what kind of crap you've been eating and he'll put you on a diet."
"I've been eating MREs," John said, and examined the salad. No dressing. "Are you telling me the United States military isn't feeding us a balanced diet?"
Rod just gave John a Look. "Which parts of the MRE have you been eating, exactly? 'Cause Eldon tells me I can find an entire drawer full of wheat snack bread and dried fruit in your lab bench."
John decided that Eldon deserved swift vengeance. "I eat the good parts," he muttered.
"You need things other than caffeine and sugar in your diet. Things like fiber." Rod had a salad too, but he was putting ranch dressing on his. Hypocritical bastard. "Seriously, it's no wonder that Teyla's trying to feed you constantly, which I still don't believe is true, by the way, but if it was I wouldn't blame her."
"She totally is," John protested. "And Cadman told me her feelings are hurt. When she threatened me with the bat. Which totally happened."
Rod just asked, "Have you ever considered taking up knitting?"
John just shook his head, and looked out the windows, which meant looking at Ronon. Who was now actively rubbing his leg against Keller's, and Keller looked like she was going to bazooka barf all over Melena any second, because of course Melena couldn't see the footsie and was for some reason playing with Keller's hair and chattering away. "Do you see that?" John asked.
"See what?"
"That! Over there! Look!"
But of course that got the attention of half the cafeteria, including both Dexes, who stopped what they were doing to look at John in confusion. Keller looked at him desperate, goofy eyes, and the coven even looked around, probably for something to shoot (except for Teyla, who started staring at John, of course). Rod made John drop his pointing finger and physical put the fork back in his hand. "John, seriously. You know I can lock you out of your lab? Ground you from the team? Force you into sessions with Heightmeyer?"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah…" John forced down a bite of his salad but he spitefully refused to enjoy it. "I'm telling you, I'm not any crazier than I normally am. It's all of them who are crazy and adulterous and weird."
"Really." Rod took a sip of today's fruit juice, which was green today. "Which one am I?"
"The not helping one," John said, and dug morosely into the salad.
-\--\--\-
It wasn't like John wasn't used to people insulting him, really. One of his earliest memories involved his father looking at the dismantled remains of a gas-powered lawn mower in the living room, and then stiffly sending him outside to play with Dave, who at that time was still working on the distinctions between horse turds and Play-Doh. John wasn't supposed to overhear the resulting three-way screaming match, but it was kind of hard not to, and he was more relieved than anything when his mom took him home that night before dinner. Instead of sitting in the big cold dining room with his dad and Dave and Betty, he got to eat Dairy Queen and watch cartoons all night, and within three days they had moved to Ecuador in a short-lived attempt to become llama farmers.
The point was, when your conscious existence started out with your own father calling you brain-damaged and disavowing your paternity…well, you probably ended up a lot like John. He accepted that people were going to insult him from time to time. He actually kind of liked it. Because that gave him a chance to, if not exactly prove them wrong, then at least prove them worthless, because what did it matter if he was funny-looking and skinny and antisocial and unathletic if he was also way smarter than you? And yeah, it created trouble with people like roommates and thesis advisors and girlfriends, but by the time he got his Ph.D. John had accepted that anybody who couldn't prove themselves his intellectual peer or gracefully accept their inferiority was not worth having around. It meant he got a lot more work done, and if he wanted to interact with people he could log into Warcraft or something.
When Rod recruited him for the Stargate project, John had observed his goofy smile and his J. Crew sweaters and his social skills and decided preemptively to destroy him. Instead he found himself drawn into a kind of insane fraternity where people complimented his coding and finished his movie quotes and he could wear the same shirt for a week sometimes without anybody saying a word. He even got invited to a goddamn barbecue, and when he started disassembling Bill Lee's propane grill Rod and Kavenaugh were right there beside him, fighting over the wrenches, and in the end they bought KFC for themselves and the Colorado Springs fire department and it was kind of awesome.
Eventually John admitted he was developing actual friendships, and the resulting cognitive dissonance was almost physically painful. He sometimes suspected it was the reason he'd signed up for Atlantis-it was that or try to figure out what you did with people when they weren't plotting how to dispose of your body. Three years on, though, Rod was still there, and Teyla and Ronon and other people like that, and it was just a little frustrating that John couldn't figure out why.
-\--\--\-
Rod practically followed John around the city for a few days, governing his food intake and putting an unspoken limit on his tavajava consumption, and yeah, John apologized to Abdirova and Eldon and even treated the latter to a long talk (not a rant, a talk) about why we unplug our equipment and take out the batteries before we try to service it. John knew, because Rod made it painfully clear, that the alternative would be to formally involve people in positions of authority, and while John had the strength of his convictions behind him, he had no desire to try to defend said convictions to Elizabeth or Heightmeyer, or, God forbid, Sumner.
At least Teyla stayed away with Rod around, or maybe she'd decided to change tactics after sending out her henchwomen to threaten him. John gave up on convincing anybody that that had actually happened (seriously, why could the subcutaneous transmitters not synchronize with the life signs detectors?) but it did provide him with food for thought, because if he really had hurt Teyla's feelings somehow, that would explain why she was engaged in a food-related plot. Except he couldn't think of anything that would even remotely possibly have hurt Teyla's feelings in the past couple of weeks…especially since on any given day it was sometimes hard to tell she had feelings at all. The only real interesting thing that had even happened since like February was when he got kidnapped by Travelers, and that was totally not his fault, he had tried to explain before about the animal magnetism thing, and anyway Teyla hadn't even needed to rescue him so he couldn't imagine why she'd be put out about it.
Maybe her feelings were hurt because he'd been hiding from her? Rod seemed to think the food plot was benevolent, so that might make sense, except there was no reason for her to start feeding him now, as opposed to, say, when he met her. At least Ronon's behavior fit cause and effect-if hot new doctor, then adultery-and he told Keller as much when Rod's hovering drove him to such desperate straits that he faked a dizzy spell for an excuse to go hide in the infirmary for a while.
"This is what he's put me to," he told her while munching on the glucose tablets Melena had given him. (They tasted like Pez, basically, and how could he turn down free medicinal Pez?) "I'm willingly in the infirmary. And I still don't know why Teyla is feeding me."
"People don't always behave based on obvious cause and effect," Keller told him. "It's not like we're pigeons in Skinner boxes."
"We should be," John said firmly. "Life would totally be easier that way. I would maybe know what's going on sometimes then."
She patted on him on the hand. "I could go for some comprehension here too, you know. Are you sure you saw what I felt back in the mess?"
"Totally," John said. "I never realized Ronon was such a manwhore."
"So that means I'm not delusional," Keller said.
"Except that would mean Teyla isn't stalking me," John said. "So that would mean I am delusional, and then-"
Keller put a hand up. "Stop right there. I don't want you blowing up like some kind of Star Trek robot."
"What, NOMAD?" She just blinked at him. "The one where Captain Pike was all, 'You are imperfect!' And then NOMAD was like, 'ERROR ERROR ERROR'-"
"Sure," Keller said, interrupting him in midst of an illustrative gesture. "That's the one I meant. Do you think maybe there's something we're missing here?"
"Um, well, duh," John said. "Ignoring stuff about people is kind of how I operate."
Keller sighed. "What I meant is, maybe we could both use an outsider's perspective on this. Or, well, really what I could use is an insider's perspective since I don't know how you go about approaching someone like Ronon about something like this-"
"What, and I do?" John said. "Dude, if Rod didn't think I'd snapped I'd just get him to do all the talking-to-people shit. He's good at that."
"Really?" Keller asked.
"What, you thought we kept him around for his looks?"
"No, no," she said, shaking her head a little. "It's just…isn't he a little…creepy?"
John blinked at her. "Creepy?"
"Yeah," she said. "Like…I don't know, like a human Ken doll, only, you know, not hot. That smile… maybe I'm being paranoid."
He leaned forward on the gurney. "Wait a second. Are you telling me you didn't bring up the whole sexual harassment thing with Rod because he gives you the creeps? More so than talking to me?"
"A little bit?" she said weakly.
John fought down a smirk. "Dude, I'm so telling him that once, you know, he'd actually believe me."
"So my point is," Keller said, rubbing her hands on her pants in a vaguely nervous gesture. "My point is that maybe I can figure out what's going on with Teyla, and maybe you can help me figure out what's up with Ronon and Melena?"
"What, like, talk to them?" John asked, blinking.
"Well, yeah," Keller said. "People do that sometimes."
"Can we back up the part where I don't talk to people real well?" John asked.
"No, see, this'll work," Keller said, and leaned forward eagerly. "You can talk to Melena for me, find out if she knows about Ronon and maybe what the deal is there, and I can, um…talk to Teyla for you…you know…somehow."
John raised his hand. "Question. Why don't you talk to Melena?"
"I can't," Keller stammered, "I just…I work with her!"
"Exactly," John said. "And I work with Ronon. So wouldn't it kind of make sense for me to talk to him and-"
"No!" Keller blurted. "I can't, I just, I don't want him to know that I'm noticing anything!"
"Like the way he was humping your leg in the mess?" John asked. "'Cause if you didn't actually notice that then his next step might be to just pee on you and drag you back to his quarters by the hair."
"Melena was right there!" Keller protested. "She was right there and she didn't notice anything and I can't say anything when she's right there or…or…"
"She'll go ninja on your ass?" John offered.
Her eyes went googly. "I was gonna say she'd stop speaking to me or something," she wailed. "Where do you find these people?"
"A lot of them followed us home from work," John said. "Though Rod's been here from the beginning, and you are seriously the first person who thinks he's creepy at all. Which is awesome, just in case you were wondering."
"Yeah, fine, sure, whatever," Keller said. "Look, my point is, I can't talk to Melena or Ronon and you can but not to Ronon because he'll figure out I know. But I can…maybe…somehow…talk to Teyla a little bit. I mean, she comes in here sometimes, right? For stitches and stuff? So I'll talk to her and maybe figure out if there's anything up with her that you ought to know."
"Good luck," John said. "I've known her three years and she doesn't talk to me."
"Well, we can try," Keller said, sounding a bit desperate. "Don't you think it's at least worth a try?"
"Sure," John said. "I'll slip a note in Melena's locker between classes tomorrow and ask her if Ronon likes you and to circle 'y' for yes and 'n' for no."
"You know what," Keller said, "maybe I should've just talked to Rod about this."
"You mean Dr. Ken Doll?" And when Keller actually shuddered a bit, John just gave up and smirked at her. "He'd smile at you, you know. Smiling plastic Ken Doll. With a receding hairline."
Keller stood up with a little huff and a downward twist of her mouth. "You're not actually sick, you know. You can leave at any time."
He could, but then he'd have to deal with Rod hovering and nagging him about his mental state and fiber intake. Or he could loiter here and eat Pez and bother Keller. No contest, really. "I'm good, thanks," he said, and stretched out on the gurney.
Keller suddenly got a malicious sparkle in her eye. "So I'll just file the admission paperwork for…hm…let's say three-day stay? And a few rounds of blood tests so we can figure out the cause of your dizzy spells?"
So maybe Rod wasn't so bad. But John stole some more of the medical Pez anyway on his way out.
-\--\--\-
Markham and Ford had been friends, kind of, for certain values of friends. They were Marines, so they were kind of morally obligated to insult John and not care about the consequences, but they also protected him from monsters and angry villagers and once a really persistent blue bee the size of a ping-pong ball. Markham even let John fly the jumpers sometimes without telling Sumner about it, back in the days when Sumner worried about things like training and certification.
They didn't get a lot of the three-day slog assignments, but when they did, there was a certain tent situation. Namely, they didn't have room to carry more than two tents, and each tent only comfortably held two people, even little people like Teyla. Ford tried to suggest once that Teyla should get her own tent and the men would take turns sleeping outside, but she just stared at him blankly until he seemed about to start sweating blood. So instead they experimented, with the following results:
1. Markham moved around in his sleep a lot; Teyla took very poorly to being startled.
2. Ford talked in his sleep sometimes, and this made John inexplicably nervous.
3. John's snoring, according to Markham, resembled the mating call of an exotic bison.
4. Ford talked in his sleep sometimes, and Teyla could take very, very poorly to being startled.
There was an obvious conclusion to the testing sequence, and it involved leaving the Marines to twitch and mutter at one another all night long. This was despite John's general discomfort with the idea of sharing Teyla's tent, which he whined about to both Rod and Sumner (who was on the knitting by then) without discernable effect. "I'm pretty sure it's against somebody's regulations about something," he said.
Ford had elbowed him in the ribs. "What's the matter, John? Afraid she's gonna eat you or something?"
Truthfully, John wasn't sure whether he was more afraid that Teyla would outright kill him or that something awkward and inappropriate might happen on accident, like, maybe somehow he'd wake up with his hand down her top or something. Not that this seemed likely at the time or, you know, ever, but it was the sort of thing that just seemed to happen to him sometimes (see the Great Sleeping Bag Disaster of his first-ever SCA war as a case in point), and so he worried about it right up to the first time they actually split the tent. It was a snowy around that gate, and John had burrowed fully dressed into his sleeping bag with a couple blankets and about four pairs of socks, counting the ones on his hands. Teyla just lay down on top of hers with a blanket and her long, scary coat, and in the morning she looked the same, laying still and breathing quietly, like one of those fairy tale princesses, or maybe a movie vampire. John had rolled over in his sleeping bag and found himself just kind of watching her, in the murky light filtering through the walls of the tent-watching at least to the limits of his uncorrected vision-because for some reason it seemed like there was a difference between Teyla's normal stillness and silence and Teyla sleeping, even if it wasn't visually obvious. The difference between waiting and rest.
Then she suddenly sat up, rolled her shoulders and reached for her pack. John, whose brain was not actually functioning on all cylinders pre-coffee, may have made a yelping noise. Teyla just raised an eyebrow at him. "How long you been awake?" he asked thickly.
"I have just awoken," she said, and continued looking in her bag.
"You just sit right up and go?"
She paused to give him another eyebrow, like she didn't know of any other way. And otherwise, John didn't embarrass himself at all-certain less than Markham, who'd ended up partially on top of Ford, but because they were Marines they just called each other cocksuckers and a good laugh was had by all.
"It makes sense, actually," Markham had said cheerfully. "Men in one tent, women in the other."
John had spluttered indignantly for a good thirty seconds.
"Well, honorary woman," Markham said. "I don't think you get full man credit if you can't kill your own bees."
"Tentacles!" was all John had managed to say to that.
"Yeah, whatever."
So they'd been friends, but weird Marine friends who cast aspersions on John's manhood a lot. Still, friends, and he missed them after they were gone.
-\--\--\-
When John returned to his lab, he expected to find Eldon and Abdirova setting up for the next simulation. He also expected to find Rod loitering about in some corner, mixing up John's Sharpie collection and hogging the last of the good tavajava on some pretext of not-actually-babysitting-a-grown-man. He didn't exactly expect anything else to be on fire, exploding or emitting exotic radiation, but this was Atlantis, so you could never be too careful.
John did not expect to find Teyla sitting on a stool, sharpening a knife with a piece of pale stone. Eldon and Abdirova didn't seem alarmed by this behavior; in fact, Abdirova was giving a rambling, dumbed-down (and thus highly inaccurate) explanation of the simulation as she and Eldon mounted the test crystals in the racks. Well, Abdirova mounted while Eldon held things for her; they were still operating under John's dictum that Eldon was not allowed near open flames, edged instruments or power tools. Teyla, for her part, seems like she could be on another planet for all she cared, scraping the knife on the stone with a steady rhythm that bordered on the hypnotic, but after John spent several minutes standing in the door staring at her, she looked up to say, "Hello."
"Hi," John said, and then couldn't think of anything else to follow that up with, since running to find Rod while yelling see? see? see? would not exactly be smooth and What the crap are you doing in my lab? might provoke her. After all, she was holding a knife.
Abdirova seemed oblivious to the threat, if there was one. She even smiled at John. "Hello, Dr. Sheppard!" she said brightly. "I am telling Teyla about our research."
"Teyla doesn't care," John said automatically. "Now get to work."
"I care," Teyla protested. "I find it…stimulating."
Okay, so either he was delusional or Teyla was. Or maybe she was a pod person. Or possessed by the Wraith again, though that tended to involve more active sabotage and throwing Marines into walls and less stalking John and small talk. "Did you even understand any of that?" he asked, genuinely curious.
"If I understand Gulmira correctly," Teyla said, slowly and carefully, "you have synthesized these crystals in order to observe the…interstitial properties of the…energy matrix? In order to calculate the precise…precise geometry of the resulting sub…subspace…"
"Subspace inversion field," John said. He was fairly certain that was the longest string of words that he'd ever heard Teyla produce in one sitting, and he wouldn't bet that she actually knew the meaning of half of them, but that wasn't important because Teyla was talking to him.
"Yes," she said with a serene nod.
"It's just, you know, probably the first step to making our own ZPMs," he added. "So it's kind of important that way."
Teyla nodded again.
John folded his arms over his chest and reminded himself to be cool about this, cool and not crazy, because he really, really couldn't afford to be sent back to Earth in a straightjacket. It'd set this project back by, like, months. "So, you know, if you need me for something, or, you know, just wanted to say hi, that's cool, but we're kind of busy in here and probably should be working instead of just talking about working. You know, things to do, galaxies to redeem, Nobel prizes to win and all."
"May I watch?" Teyla asked.
"Um," John managed to say, even though Abdirova always told him not to.
Teyla stared at him as she waited for an answer, face as calm and closed as it ever was.
"We're basically plugging some shiny rocks into a wall socket to see what happens," John said.
Teyla stared.
"By which I mean there's not a whole lot to actually watch, you know, since the computers do most of the data collection and after that it's just math and unless we've really screwed up, and by 'we' I mean 'those two,' there really isn't anything to actually watch, and if they did screw up then we might possibly blow up this pier, so…" She was still looking at him, and he realized that he going in the direction crazy again. And the point was to be cool about this. So as of right now, he was Johnny fucking Cash. "You know what? It's your spare time. Eldon, what did I tell you about power tools?"
He ended up mounting all the remaining crystals himself, but it turned out Eldon had procured fresh tavajava, which redeemed him enough that John let him load the racks into the bubble chamber. Then it was just a matter of hooking them up to a naqadah generator and counting what kinds of which particles came out and then doing the math. And John was cool. So, so, totally cool. If he'd been any cooler, he'd have given somebody frostbite. Except for when Abdirova tapped him on the shoulder and he threw his tavajava at her. But mostly? So cool.
Teyla stayed in the labs for hours and sharpened that knife down to what John suspected was a monofilament edge. She didn't interrupt or ask questions, and when she left, John decided he'd discovered a new winning strategy.
-\--\--\-
John sometimes half-suspected that if you asked Teyla and Cadman's coven why they were so inexplicably ninja badass, they would confess some kind of conspiracy to overthrow the patriarchy, or perhaps a simple, sociopathic love of blood. Okay, so they wouldn't actually say say that, because you don't admit that kind of thing, but it could've been true. What they'd actually say-had said, actually, as he gathered over the years from various overheard conversations and out-of-context comments and reports he wasn't technically supposed to be reading-would be something like this:
Cadman: "I'm a Marine, so I don't get to be a girl. I couldn't even get front-line assignments outside the SGC…. I gotta be twice as good as any other officer at everything I do to even get the time of day from some guys, and I'm never gonna catch a break on anything. It's either be the best or go home. Besides, explosions can be fun."
Melena: "My people don't always give much credit to doctors and nurses. I've met plenty of patients who'd would rather die from an 'honorable' injury than live with a disability, or even admit they're in pain. Plenty of people would call us weak because we recognize the frailty of the human body and try to protect it. Healing is my vocation, though, and Ancestors help anybody who tries to stop me-even the patients themselves."
Mehra: "Well, my daddy was a Marine, and so was his daddy, and his daddy before him was in the Army, and I've got two uncles and four brothers and a shitload of cousins in one service or another. My grandma was a WAC, too, and my momma was a nurse in a field hospital in Vietnam…uh, what was the question again?"
Sora: "My people were great, once. We had an empire of a hundred worlds and Genia was a center of art and learning and wealth and strength. The Wraith took that all away…. It's the duty of every Genii to remember our shame and work for the restoration of the empire. In the execution of this duty there is neither woman nor man, elder nor younger, artist or scholar or merchant-we are all soldiers for the glorious cause. And it's my cause now to avenge every Genii life Cowen has wasted in his miserable, cowardly rule, starting with my father's."
Teyla: "I had no choice."
Part One
Part Three
Part Four
Author: mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through season 4
Warnings: Mensa AU, but not related to my Major Zelenka fics in any way, shape or form.
Summary: In which Teyla may be plotting something, Keller may be delusional, Ronon may be cheating and John may in fact be the girl. No pudding cups or Marines were injured in the production of this fanfic.
Heteronormativity, Gender Construction and Nonverbal Signaling in Intercultural Communication: A Comedy
By Mad Maudlin
"Any dizziness?" Keller asked, shining a penlight in his eyes.
"No," John said. "Can I talk to Carson now?"
"Carson is not on call right now," she said. "Do you remember everything leading up to the accident?"
"Yes," John said. "Teyla wants to feed me to death and the puddle jumper was trying to defend me. Seriously, is Carson avoiding me or something?"
"No, Carson is sleeping after working a double shift last night, and we're not talking about Teyla right now." Keller started prodding the goose egg on John's forehead, which hurt, so he yelled at her. "Okay, so a fair amount of tenderness. Your eyes are a little abnormally dilated, too."
John shrugged. "I drank a lot of tavajava before the mission."
"Tavawhat?" Keller asked.
"Tava-java," John said, and decided to explain it on account of how she was new and probably still innocent. "It's Athosian tea mixed with coffee. When you heat it up there's this chemical reaction and it comes out like something between Red Bull and Dexadrine, only delicious. I like mine with lots of sugar."
Keller started making the googly eyes again, but she didn't say anything, just drew some blood and put him under a scanner. By this point Ronon and Teyla and Rod had already left, since none of them had whacked their skulls into the dashboard during the crash, which John thought was a little unfair since the subconscious urge that had clearly driven the incident was to get Teyla as far away from him as possible. Though maybe technically it had worked, since Teyla was known to hate the infirmary and avoid it religiously. Of course, so did John, so that really wasn't a solution in the long-term.
And in the end, Keller did say, "Okay, it doesn't look like you've got a concussion, but if you start to experience any blurred vision, headaches, ringing in the ears-"
"-yeah, yeah, come back if my brain starts to leak out my ears, I know this one," John said, and quickly put his glasses back on. "So can I go now?"
"Well, medically you're free and clear-whoa whoa whoa!" She caught him by the sleeve as he tried to bound past her to the conference room, where Rod and Ronon were undoubtedly telling vicious lies about the cause of the crash. He probably could've shaken her off and kept going, except for how she was kinda tiny, and he wasn't entirely sure he wouldn't end up flinging her into the wall. "Where's the fire?" she asked.
"You said I could go," John said. "So I'm going. Unless you somehow meant I can't go, in which case I'll stay until you fix whatever's wrong with me, but you also ought to work on your communication skills."
"There's nothing wrong with you, but-" she kept a grip on his wrist when he tried to flee again. "But I did want to talk to you about, um, something else, if you have a minute."
Something else? John racked his brains for something non-medical that a doctor could want to talk to him about. "This isn't about sperm donation, is it?" he asked.
"No," Keller said. "Why would you-you know, never mind, I don't think I want to know."
"People have asked," John pointed out. "I've got this super ATA gene and somehow that gets some women hot. They ask Carson, too."
"Well, that's not what I wanted to ask about," Keller said. "Look, can we sit?"
John, reluctantly, sat back on the bed. Keller pulled a little stool out from under and perched on it. Another thought occurred to him. "Are you going to try to refer me to Heightmeyer about this Teyla thing?" he asked. "Because she was totally staring at me this time and the food thing is getting creepy and also I've memorized all the answers to most of the standard personality tests-"
"John? John." Keller patted him on the hand with a strained smile. "If you think Teyla is stalking you or something, I believe you. But I actually wanted to talk about me for a minute or two."
"Oh. Really?" Though he couldn't think of anything she'd have to say if it wasn't about a sperm donation or making out with him, seeing as, well, she was new, and he was…him. It wasn't like they had a real solid basis for a relationship or anything.
She nodded. "Yeah. Well, actually, sort of more about Ronon than me."
"Oh. He's not actually all that scary and I think he spreads the rumors about the ferrets himself just to sound tougher," John explained. "He really did kill his boss, but there were extenuating circumstances for that, so I don't think we can hold that against him."
And the googly eyes were back. "I, uh, actually hadn't heard of…either of those things," Keller said.
"Really?" John asked. "'Cause those are pretty much the core facts about Ronon. Oh, and his wife's Melena, she's a ninja too."
"That I knew, actually," she said, squirming. "That, um, actually, is part the, uh, situation, I wanted to talk about."
John had one minute to blink in non-comprehension before the horrible truth dawned on him. He thrust a finger in Keller's face. "Home wrecker!"
"No!" She blurted. "There has been no home wrecking!"
"I can see it in your guilty face!"
"Oh, my god, do I look guilty?" She grabbed a bedpan off a shelf and tried to catch her reflection in it.
"You are so guilty," John said, folding his arms across his chest. "Harlot."
"I didn't do anything!" she protested. "I don't even talk to him anymore! The last time he tried to hit on me I pretended to stick myself with a dirty needle and made Angela finish his stitches!"
"Wait, he's hitting on you?" John asked. "How is he hitting on you? He's married!"
"I know!" she wailed. "That's what I'm trying to talk about!"
John rubbed his eyes and adjusted his glasses. "So back up a sec. He's hitting on you and you're guilty about it?"
"Well, I have to work with Melena!" she said. "Like every shift! I thought he was hanging around all the time to see her, and then I thought maybe he was having an affair with Angela until I realized she was, you know, and then I'm almost positive he's been hitting on me the last few times he's been in here."
"Dude, Ronon wouldn't do that," John said. "They have like the only healthy relationship in this city, and I'm counting Rod and Katie the botanist in that, because they've been dating for like a year but they still don't kiss with tongue."
"That's what I thought," Keller said. "That they're happy together, not, you know, I didn't even know that about Rod. So now I'm worried that I might be seeing things or overreacting or something. Maybe a teeny tiny touch of wishful thinking, since he's, you know. Mmm."
John didn't know what exactly the inarticulate grunting signified, but the accompanying hand gesture was pretty unambiguous. "You're guilty because you might be imagining that he's hitting on you?"
"I know!" She sighed. "I'm such a Catholic."
He waited a few minutes for her to elaborate on what this had to do with him, exactly, but she just sat staring into space with a guilt-ridden pout. "Look," he said, "I really don't want to know anything about your fantasy life, and if you don't want to talk to Heightmeyer I think you can prescribe your own psychotropic drugs…"
"Actually, I'd need the paperwork countersigned by another MD," she said. "But really I just…are you sure there's nothing up with him and Melena? Him or Melena?"
"Totally sure," John said. "I'm happy to report that you're totally delusional."
"Okay. Thanks." She took a deep breath and then exhaled. "I, uh, I only asked you because I obviously can't ask them directly and Rod's so…you know, and I'm a little bit scared of Teyla."
"You should be," he said. "She's plotting against me."
"Of course she is," Keller said mechanically. Then, "Wait, is she?"
John threw his hands in the air. "You know what? I don't even know anymore. Maybe I'm delusional, too."
"If you were delusional, would you notice if Ronon was having marital problems?" Keller asked anxiously.
John shook a finger at her. "None of that. He's not hitting on you."
"And Teyla's not out to get you," she said.
"So we agree we're both delusional?" John asked.
Keller frowned. "I thought we were agreeing that we're sane."
John grabbed his jacket off the end of the bed and snapped, "Why not go mad?" as he fled the infirmary. At this rate he might as well just take up knitting.
-\--\--\-
Stargate Control worried about Teyla, and originally John thought it was about the part where she'd been a Runner for half her life, or maybe the part where the Wraith could read her mind sometimes (although she could also read their minds and when she did it was totally cool). It was only later that he found out from Rod, and not on purpose, that they doubted her loyalty. "You have to admit she doesn't have a lot of friends in the city," Rod said reluctantly, with a little frown.
"She's got me!" John blurted. "I mean us! You know, the team! And she hangs out with Sora a lot too,"
"I know, you know, Elizabeth knows…" Rod squirmed a little, like it physically pained him to take the SGC's part in this but he just couldn't get the stick out of his ass. "What they see on paperwork is that she's a consultant with no official duties besides going offworld with us and beating up Marines. She barely even talks to her own people, and Sora is…"
"A dirty cheating defector?" John said. "Because, you know, so is Teal'c, and he gets his own damn gate team."
"I'm just saying, it looks bad to them," Rod muttered. "We're taking care of it, though. Elizabeth's, uh, writing a letter."
Teyla wouldn't sit still long enough to take any of the Mensa tests (and Heightmeyer said they were all culturally biased anyway) so John tried to get her to join the RPG club, or maybe the four-man SCA chapter they had going, or even teach her chess so she could help his quest to kick Zelenka's ass at it. He even spent a day and a half on a complicated 3-D model of the city's social network, which showed exactly how many people were not actually terrified of Teyla, even if not all of them would actively call her a friend. Teyla didn't want to come to any of the clubs, though, and while she sometimes came to movie nights she didn't always stay for the whole film.
And it didn't matter anyway, 'cause Elizabeth wrote her letter, and it wasn't too long after that when Cadman and Melena showed up; all they really had in common with Teyla and Sora was the fact that they were totally terrifying, and female, but that seemed to be enough to create the Sisterhood of the Traveling Explosives, and somehow that made the SGC calm down. Mehra showed up later but fit right in, and John pretended that he didn't mind at all when Teyla hung out with them instead of the team.
-\--\--\-
Thus burdened with the knowledge that either Keller or Ronon had gone batshit insane, John settled down and devised a three-pronged strategy for dealing with the situation.
1) Defend flying abilities against all detractors.
"I told you all I was itchy."
"John, you hit the stargate," Rod said distinctly.
"I didn't see the stargate."
"You didn't see three tons of superconducting naqadah with a wormhole in the middle?"
"I had an eyelash in my eye."
2) Evaluate Keller's sanity
"So how's things?" John asked Ronon.
Ronon looked up from his tray (spaghetti bolognese, Pegasus style, which was to say the noodles were scarlet and the sauce was lavender but it tasted exactly the same). Then he snorted gently and looked back down.
"Not that I'm, you know, worried," John said, and chased his own meatballs around the tray. "Because you're totally capable of handling all your problems and sometimes other people's problems too. At least when it involves bigass ray guns. And what problem can't be solved by a well-timed discharge of high-energy plasma?"
Ronon finished his spaghetti and started munching on some whole Cubanito peppers that the botany staff had transferred to the kitchens in a box marked Mostly Harmless.
"But if you were, you know, having a problem, the non-shootable kind of problem, I hope you'd talk to…uh…Rod, about it. Yeah, talk to Rod. 'Cause he's smart about that kind of thing." John caught a meatball and choked it down; it tasted like salmon with the texture of a superball. "By which I mean things that aren't fixed by shooting. Which actually covers a lot of problems, and I'm not saying that Rod is necessarily smarter than me about any of them, except, uh, when he is. Some of the time. But you should definitely talk to him about stuff. If you need to talk instead of shooting things. And I'm not saying you do."
Ronon finished his peppers, picked up his tray and walked away.
John waved at him. "Glad we had this little discussion."
3) Ignore Teyla
"John."
"Teyla."
"It is time for dinner."
"I already ate."
"I see."
"So, yeah, bye."
"Goodbye, John."
"…Eldon, go get me an MRE. Anything that comes with chocolate. Now."
-\--\--\-
This strategy actually worked for a while, since they didn't have any missions and Rod didn't insist on any emotional bonding type activities (which he sometimes did, because for some reason he thought that regularly almost dying together didn't make them good enough friends as it was) and really, outside of those sorts of things or meals, John and Teyla didn't see a whole lot of each other. He worked in the labs and she, well, beat people up. Rod usually made an effort to go hang out with Teyla and Ronon when he wasn't doing science, but John usually didn't see the point since they really didn't really care about physics or video games or Mensa and he wasn't really into guns or fistfights. That just left mealtimes, and John could avoid those by reluctantly switching to an all-MRE diet, which he did. (At least the entrees and desserts. And sometimes the candy portion. Sometimes there were chocolate-covered espresso beans.)
Of course, as a consequence he didn't really interact with anybody but Abdirova and Eldon for a while, except for the department meeting where Rod made an announcement about eating in the labs that John actively ignored. Rod also tried to talk to him afterwards, but John made sure to slip Zelenka an anonymous note accusing Optican of intellectual dishonesty, and the resulting kerfluffle covered his escape.
But he figured out later, while interpolating the data, that the meeting was really just a warning shot past his head, so to speak. Because the day afterwards, he woke up to somebody pounding on the door of his room, apparently with hammers. It was only eight o'clock, and he was so addled from a tava crash that it didn't occur to him to that, in real emergency, somebody would just call him on the radio. (Or page him on the citywide speakers. They'd had to do that once, but in his defense, he'd been turning into a bug at the time.)
So, sleepy and incoherent, John stumbled to the door without his glasses on and opened it. Cadman, Mehra and Sora were standing on the other side, and they didn't have hammers, they had an aluminum baseball bat.
"Hi, Shep," Cadman said. "We need to talk."
They shoved their way into the room before he had fully registered the probability of his imminent demise. Sora was holding the bat, and braced her hands on the knob like a cane; Mehra had her arms folded and was glowering, but Cadman's thumbs were hooked into her pockets and she was smiling wide and calmly, like a shark. They came forward until John backpedaled into his bed and fell into a sit. "Please don't kill me," he blurted, because that seemed like the logical end to this situation.
"Oh, don't worry, we aren't going to kill you," Cadman said. "Unless you make us angry. You're not going to make us angry, are you, Shep?"
"I wasn't planning on it, no," he said quickly.
"Well, then, this ought to be quick," Cadman said. "There's just one simple question you've got to answer for us, Shep, then we can all go home happy. Do you have a problem with Teyla?"
Because it was eight o'clock in the morning and John hadn't been caffeinated yet, he said, "Huh?" Then he yelped, because Sora suddenly swung the bat up and smacked it into her palm. "I don't have a problem with Teyla!"
"That's funny," Cadman said. "That's real funny. Don't you think that's funny, girls?"
"Funny ha-ha or funny uh-oh, ma'am?" Mehra asked.
"The kind of funny that I don't believe, Sergeant." Cadman took a step forward, and John flinched. "I don't think you believe it, either. Do you, Shep?"
"She started it!" John protested.
Mehra sighed. "Permission to give this man a wedgie, ma'am?"
"Denied." Instead, Cadman crouched in front of John, still smiling. "See, Shep, we're all out of high school around these parts. We can all act like grown-ups. Do you think you're acting like a grownup lately?"
John may have been outnumbered and wearing Spiderman boxer shorts, but he wasn't going to stand for being called immature. "I think Teyla's the one acting like a goddamn crazy person," he said with as much pride as he could muster.
Cadman hissed, and Mehra cracked her knuckles. Loudly. "Shep, that's low," she said. "That's really, really low coming from the man who claims he crashed a gateship 'cause he was itchy."
"I was," he said firmly, and then managed a near-suicidal verbal sortie. "And if Teyla's plotting to kill me or something, she ought to know I'm on to her and she should damn well do it herself instead of sending you."
He expected to be beaten with a baseball bat for that, or possibly just shot. He did not expect Cadman, Mehra and Sora to break into hysterical laughter, and he certainly didn't expect two out of three of them to lose their footing entirely and fall to the ground clutching their sides, and he was pretty sure if someone had suggested he'd see Mehra actually wiping tears from her eyes in any context ever, he'd have called base security. So when they did all fall down laughing, he was understandably paralyzed for a few minutes, and had to go fetch his glasses before he was absolutely certain it was laughter and not some kind of screaming seizure.
"You can stop that now," he told them.
"Any time," he added.
"Seriously," he said, "I'm gonna call Major Lorne in about thirty seconds."
Cadman eventually climbed up, using the end of John's bed as a brace, and then threw an arm around his shoulders still giggling. "Shep," she said. "Shep. Listen. You are an idiot."
"Ten seconds," he told her. "Nine. Eight."
"You're an idiot," she said, "and if you hurt her feelings you know we really are going to kill you." Then she helped Sora up, and all three of them left, dragging the bat along the ground behind them.
John considered calling Lorne anyway to report them, because he was pretty sure Cadman wasn't acting like an officer and a gentlewoman, and it might've been breaking Sora's parole in some way to have the bat. He got as far as picking up his radio, but in the end he didn't say anything. After all, who the hell was going to believe him?
-\--\--\-
John got to his lab that morning (to the extent that "morning" was defined as "before noon") to discover it was slightly on fire; Eldon was sitting on John's desk sucking on his fingers while Abdirova tried to beat out the flames engulfing a tablet computer with her jacket. John did not scream, of which he was very proud; instead, he fetched the nearest fire extinguisher, put out the tablet, sprayed some foam on Eldon and Abdirova in revenge, and then dragged them both to Rod's lab and made them sit outside with their hands folded in their laps and a couple of hastily-constructed dunce caps on their heads. "You are going to sit out here and think about what you've done," he told them with admirable calm, "and I am going to clean up your mess, and then flip some coins in order to decide whether I'm going to use you as test subjects in a teleportation study."
He had just about finished scraping the melted plastic off the table, too, when Rod barged into the lab and cuffed him on the back of the head. He didn't do it hard, but John was understandably protective of his brain cells and didn't appreciate even the mildest threat to them. "Ow! What's that for?"
"That was because I'm pretty sure you've taken leave of your senses entirely," Rod said. John realized belatedly that Rod was scowling, probably angrier than he'd seen him in a while. Uh-oh. "In case it even occurred to you to worry about them, I sent Eldon and Gulmira to the infirmary, and they're both fine, and I'm not going to write you up for completely disregarding accident reporting protocols because you're obviously not guilty by reason of insanity. Instead, you and I are going to go have a well-balanced lunch, in public, around people you do not have the authority to terrorize, and when I'm satisfied that you've regained all your faculties, you're going to apologize to your staff and promise not to experiment on them."
"I wasn't serious," John muttered, feeling about six years old.
"The fact that we couldn't tell that is part of what worries me," Rod said, and hauled John upstairs by the sleeve. "You've been hiding down here for God only knows how many days, and even Colonel Sumner has been asking if you're entirely mentally stable. You've always been a workaholic, John, but this is getting kind of insane."
"I'm not the crazy one!" John protested. "It's everybody else who's gone nuts! Or at least the women. Women and Eldon. You think they're something in the water around here? Or maybe their menstrual cycles are lining up. I've read about that, you know. My mom took me to live in this commune in Sweden one summer and it totally happens."
Rod sighed at he yanked John into the nearest transporter. "If you're still convinced Teyla is plotting against you-"
"Not plotting. Not necessarily plotting," John said. "But she's still trying to feed me and since I'm no match for her ninja powers, well, I have to make excuses. Did you think I was working down there? I'm not working, I'm hiding from her."
"You," Rod said, "are probably the most mentally defective man I've ever met. I say that as a friend, of course."
"It's not just Teyla!" John said. "That hot new Keller doctor went nuts too, she admitted it to me. And Cadman and her thugs broke into my room this morning and threatened me with a bat."
Rod stared at him for a moment, which reminded John why he didn't report Cadman originally. Then they were up to the mess hall level, and lunch was in full swing, and damn it, Sex and Guns and Ammo and the City were camped out all at one table, giggling with one another. "See?" John hissed to Rod, trying to point at them without drawing their attention. "Something is totally up with that shit."
"Sit," Rod said. "Now. Because God help me, if you aren't going to let Teyla feed you a well-balanced meal, then I'm going to do it, and if I have to I'm going to use Ronon and a tube."
John sat down and started shredding napkins while Rod loaded up two trays and brought them over. He noticed that, in addition to Teyla and Cadman's coven in one corner, Keller and Melena and Ronon were sharing a table, over by the windows. They seemed to be having a good time, or at least the Dexes were, though Keller was looking kind of googly-eyed and sweaty. John couldn't tell if it had something to do with the way Melena was smiling and laughing and touching Keller's arm a lot, or the way Ronon was kind of semi-not-totally-obviously bumping his leg on hers under the table, or both. Because Ronon was totally bumping his leg against Keller's under the table. And smiling at her a lot. Huh.
Rod returned with a tray full of mixed green (and purple) salad, a fruit cup, and space turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomato but no mayonnaise. "Here," he said. "Vitamins. You need them."
"Is Ronon hitting on the doctor?" John asked him.
"Don't be absurd." Rod also put a carton of milk on John's tray, then tucked into his own sandwich. "And I'm not kidding here. I'll tell Carson what kind of crap you've been eating and he'll put you on a diet."
"I've been eating MREs," John said, and examined the salad. No dressing. "Are you telling me the United States military isn't feeding us a balanced diet?"
Rod just gave John a Look. "Which parts of the MRE have you been eating, exactly? 'Cause Eldon tells me I can find an entire drawer full of wheat snack bread and dried fruit in your lab bench."
John decided that Eldon deserved swift vengeance. "I eat the good parts," he muttered.
"You need things other than caffeine and sugar in your diet. Things like fiber." Rod had a salad too, but he was putting ranch dressing on his. Hypocritical bastard. "Seriously, it's no wonder that Teyla's trying to feed you constantly, which I still don't believe is true, by the way, but if it was I wouldn't blame her."
"She totally is," John protested. "And Cadman told me her feelings are hurt. When she threatened me with the bat. Which totally happened."
Rod just asked, "Have you ever considered taking up knitting?"
John just shook his head, and looked out the windows, which meant looking at Ronon. Who was now actively rubbing his leg against Keller's, and Keller looked like she was going to bazooka barf all over Melena any second, because of course Melena couldn't see the footsie and was for some reason playing with Keller's hair and chattering away. "Do you see that?" John asked.
"See what?"
"That! Over there! Look!"
But of course that got the attention of half the cafeteria, including both Dexes, who stopped what they were doing to look at John in confusion. Keller looked at him desperate, goofy eyes, and the coven even looked around, probably for something to shoot (except for Teyla, who started staring at John, of course). Rod made John drop his pointing finger and physical put the fork back in his hand. "John, seriously. You know I can lock you out of your lab? Ground you from the team? Force you into sessions with Heightmeyer?"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah…" John forced down a bite of his salad but he spitefully refused to enjoy it. "I'm telling you, I'm not any crazier than I normally am. It's all of them who are crazy and adulterous and weird."
"Really." Rod took a sip of today's fruit juice, which was green today. "Which one am I?"
"The not helping one," John said, and dug morosely into the salad.
-\--\--\-
It wasn't like John wasn't used to people insulting him, really. One of his earliest memories involved his father looking at the dismantled remains of a gas-powered lawn mower in the living room, and then stiffly sending him outside to play with Dave, who at that time was still working on the distinctions between horse turds and Play-Doh. John wasn't supposed to overhear the resulting three-way screaming match, but it was kind of hard not to, and he was more relieved than anything when his mom took him home that night before dinner. Instead of sitting in the big cold dining room with his dad and Dave and Betty, he got to eat Dairy Queen and watch cartoons all night, and within three days they had moved to Ecuador in a short-lived attempt to become llama farmers.
The point was, when your conscious existence started out with your own father calling you brain-damaged and disavowing your paternity…well, you probably ended up a lot like John. He accepted that people were going to insult him from time to time. He actually kind of liked it. Because that gave him a chance to, if not exactly prove them wrong, then at least prove them worthless, because what did it matter if he was funny-looking and skinny and antisocial and unathletic if he was also way smarter than you? And yeah, it created trouble with people like roommates and thesis advisors and girlfriends, but by the time he got his Ph.D. John had accepted that anybody who couldn't prove themselves his intellectual peer or gracefully accept their inferiority was not worth having around. It meant he got a lot more work done, and if he wanted to interact with people he could log into Warcraft or something.
When Rod recruited him for the Stargate project, John had observed his goofy smile and his J. Crew sweaters and his social skills and decided preemptively to destroy him. Instead he found himself drawn into a kind of insane fraternity where people complimented his coding and finished his movie quotes and he could wear the same shirt for a week sometimes without anybody saying a word. He even got invited to a goddamn barbecue, and when he started disassembling Bill Lee's propane grill Rod and Kavenaugh were right there beside him, fighting over the wrenches, and in the end they bought KFC for themselves and the Colorado Springs fire department and it was kind of awesome.
Eventually John admitted he was developing actual friendships, and the resulting cognitive dissonance was almost physically painful. He sometimes suspected it was the reason he'd signed up for Atlantis-it was that or try to figure out what you did with people when they weren't plotting how to dispose of your body. Three years on, though, Rod was still there, and Teyla and Ronon and other people like that, and it was just a little frustrating that John couldn't figure out why.
-\--\--\-
Rod practically followed John around the city for a few days, governing his food intake and putting an unspoken limit on his tavajava consumption, and yeah, John apologized to Abdirova and Eldon and even treated the latter to a long talk (not a rant, a talk) about why we unplug our equipment and take out the batteries before we try to service it. John knew, because Rod made it painfully clear, that the alternative would be to formally involve people in positions of authority, and while John had the strength of his convictions behind him, he had no desire to try to defend said convictions to Elizabeth or Heightmeyer, or, God forbid, Sumner.
At least Teyla stayed away with Rod around, or maybe she'd decided to change tactics after sending out her henchwomen to threaten him. John gave up on convincing anybody that that had actually happened (seriously, why could the subcutaneous transmitters not synchronize with the life signs detectors?) but it did provide him with food for thought, because if he really had hurt Teyla's feelings somehow, that would explain why she was engaged in a food-related plot. Except he couldn't think of anything that would even remotely possibly have hurt Teyla's feelings in the past couple of weeks…especially since on any given day it was sometimes hard to tell she had feelings at all. The only real interesting thing that had even happened since like February was when he got kidnapped by Travelers, and that was totally not his fault, he had tried to explain before about the animal magnetism thing, and anyway Teyla hadn't even needed to rescue him so he couldn't imagine why she'd be put out about it.
Maybe her feelings were hurt because he'd been hiding from her? Rod seemed to think the food plot was benevolent, so that might make sense, except there was no reason for her to start feeding him now, as opposed to, say, when he met her. At least Ronon's behavior fit cause and effect-if hot new doctor, then adultery-and he told Keller as much when Rod's hovering drove him to such desperate straits that he faked a dizzy spell for an excuse to go hide in the infirmary for a while.
"This is what he's put me to," he told her while munching on the glucose tablets Melena had given him. (They tasted like Pez, basically, and how could he turn down free medicinal Pez?) "I'm willingly in the infirmary. And I still don't know why Teyla is feeding me."
"People don't always behave based on obvious cause and effect," Keller told him. "It's not like we're pigeons in Skinner boxes."
"We should be," John said firmly. "Life would totally be easier that way. I would maybe know what's going on sometimes then."
She patted on him on the hand. "I could go for some comprehension here too, you know. Are you sure you saw what I felt back in the mess?"
"Totally," John said. "I never realized Ronon was such a manwhore."
"So that means I'm not delusional," Keller said.
"Except that would mean Teyla isn't stalking me," John said. "So that would mean I am delusional, and then-"
Keller put a hand up. "Stop right there. I don't want you blowing up like some kind of Star Trek robot."
"What, NOMAD?" She just blinked at him. "The one where Captain Pike was all, 'You are imperfect!' And then NOMAD was like, 'ERROR ERROR ERROR'-"
"Sure," Keller said, interrupting him in midst of an illustrative gesture. "That's the one I meant. Do you think maybe there's something we're missing here?"
"Um, well, duh," John said. "Ignoring stuff about people is kind of how I operate."
Keller sighed. "What I meant is, maybe we could both use an outsider's perspective on this. Or, well, really what I could use is an insider's perspective since I don't know how you go about approaching someone like Ronon about something like this-"
"What, and I do?" John said. "Dude, if Rod didn't think I'd snapped I'd just get him to do all the talking-to-people shit. He's good at that."
"Really?" Keller asked.
"What, you thought we kept him around for his looks?"
"No, no," she said, shaking her head a little. "It's just…isn't he a little…creepy?"
John blinked at her. "Creepy?"
"Yeah," she said. "Like…I don't know, like a human Ken doll, only, you know, not hot. That smile… maybe I'm being paranoid."
He leaned forward on the gurney. "Wait a second. Are you telling me you didn't bring up the whole sexual harassment thing with Rod because he gives you the creeps? More so than talking to me?"
"A little bit?" she said weakly.
John fought down a smirk. "Dude, I'm so telling him that once, you know, he'd actually believe me."
"So my point is," Keller said, rubbing her hands on her pants in a vaguely nervous gesture. "My point is that maybe I can figure out what's going on with Teyla, and maybe you can help me figure out what's up with Ronon and Melena?"
"What, like, talk to them?" John asked, blinking.
"Well, yeah," Keller said. "People do that sometimes."
"Can we back up the part where I don't talk to people real well?" John asked.
"No, see, this'll work," Keller said, and leaned forward eagerly. "You can talk to Melena for me, find out if she knows about Ronon and maybe what the deal is there, and I can, um…talk to Teyla for you…you know…somehow."
John raised his hand. "Question. Why don't you talk to Melena?"
"I can't," Keller stammered, "I just…I work with her!"
"Exactly," John said. "And I work with Ronon. So wouldn't it kind of make sense for me to talk to him and-"
"No!" Keller blurted. "I can't, I just, I don't want him to know that I'm noticing anything!"
"Like the way he was humping your leg in the mess?" John asked. "'Cause if you didn't actually notice that then his next step might be to just pee on you and drag you back to his quarters by the hair."
"Melena was right there!" Keller protested. "She was right there and she didn't notice anything and I can't say anything when she's right there or…or…"
"She'll go ninja on your ass?" John offered.
Her eyes went googly. "I was gonna say she'd stop speaking to me or something," she wailed. "Where do you find these people?"
"A lot of them followed us home from work," John said. "Though Rod's been here from the beginning, and you are seriously the first person who thinks he's creepy at all. Which is awesome, just in case you were wondering."
"Yeah, fine, sure, whatever," Keller said. "Look, my point is, I can't talk to Melena or Ronon and you can but not to Ronon because he'll figure out I know. But I can…maybe…somehow…talk to Teyla a little bit. I mean, she comes in here sometimes, right? For stitches and stuff? So I'll talk to her and maybe figure out if there's anything up with her that you ought to know."
"Good luck," John said. "I've known her three years and she doesn't talk to me."
"Well, we can try," Keller said, sounding a bit desperate. "Don't you think it's at least worth a try?"
"Sure," John said. "I'll slip a note in Melena's locker between classes tomorrow and ask her if Ronon likes you and to circle 'y' for yes and 'n' for no."
"You know what," Keller said, "maybe I should've just talked to Rod about this."
"You mean Dr. Ken Doll?" And when Keller actually shuddered a bit, John just gave up and smirked at her. "He'd smile at you, you know. Smiling plastic Ken Doll. With a receding hairline."
Keller stood up with a little huff and a downward twist of her mouth. "You're not actually sick, you know. You can leave at any time."
He could, but then he'd have to deal with Rod hovering and nagging him about his mental state and fiber intake. Or he could loiter here and eat Pez and bother Keller. No contest, really. "I'm good, thanks," he said, and stretched out on the gurney.
Keller suddenly got a malicious sparkle in her eye. "So I'll just file the admission paperwork for…hm…let's say three-day stay? And a few rounds of blood tests so we can figure out the cause of your dizzy spells?"
So maybe Rod wasn't so bad. But John stole some more of the medical Pez anyway on his way out.
-\--\--\-
Markham and Ford had been friends, kind of, for certain values of friends. They were Marines, so they were kind of morally obligated to insult John and not care about the consequences, but they also protected him from monsters and angry villagers and once a really persistent blue bee the size of a ping-pong ball. Markham even let John fly the jumpers sometimes without telling Sumner about it, back in the days when Sumner worried about things like training and certification.
They didn't get a lot of the three-day slog assignments, but when they did, there was a certain tent situation. Namely, they didn't have room to carry more than two tents, and each tent only comfortably held two people, even little people like Teyla. Ford tried to suggest once that Teyla should get her own tent and the men would take turns sleeping outside, but she just stared at him blankly until he seemed about to start sweating blood. So instead they experimented, with the following results:
1. Markham moved around in his sleep a lot; Teyla took very poorly to being startled.
2. Ford talked in his sleep sometimes, and this made John inexplicably nervous.
3. John's snoring, according to Markham, resembled the mating call of an exotic bison.
4. Ford talked in his sleep sometimes, and Teyla could take very, very poorly to being startled.
There was an obvious conclusion to the testing sequence, and it involved leaving the Marines to twitch and mutter at one another all night long. This was despite John's general discomfort with the idea of sharing Teyla's tent, which he whined about to both Rod and Sumner (who was on the knitting by then) without discernable effect. "I'm pretty sure it's against somebody's regulations about something," he said.
Ford had elbowed him in the ribs. "What's the matter, John? Afraid she's gonna eat you or something?"
Truthfully, John wasn't sure whether he was more afraid that Teyla would outright kill him or that something awkward and inappropriate might happen on accident, like, maybe somehow he'd wake up with his hand down her top or something. Not that this seemed likely at the time or, you know, ever, but it was the sort of thing that just seemed to happen to him sometimes (see the Great Sleeping Bag Disaster of his first-ever SCA war as a case in point), and so he worried about it right up to the first time they actually split the tent. It was a snowy around that gate, and John had burrowed fully dressed into his sleeping bag with a couple blankets and about four pairs of socks, counting the ones on his hands. Teyla just lay down on top of hers with a blanket and her long, scary coat, and in the morning she looked the same, laying still and breathing quietly, like one of those fairy tale princesses, or maybe a movie vampire. John had rolled over in his sleeping bag and found himself just kind of watching her, in the murky light filtering through the walls of the tent-watching at least to the limits of his uncorrected vision-because for some reason it seemed like there was a difference between Teyla's normal stillness and silence and Teyla sleeping, even if it wasn't visually obvious. The difference between waiting and rest.
Then she suddenly sat up, rolled her shoulders and reached for her pack. John, whose brain was not actually functioning on all cylinders pre-coffee, may have made a yelping noise. Teyla just raised an eyebrow at him. "How long you been awake?" he asked thickly.
"I have just awoken," she said, and continued looking in her bag.
"You just sit right up and go?"
She paused to give him another eyebrow, like she didn't know of any other way. And otherwise, John didn't embarrass himself at all-certain less than Markham, who'd ended up partially on top of Ford, but because they were Marines they just called each other cocksuckers and a good laugh was had by all.
"It makes sense, actually," Markham had said cheerfully. "Men in one tent, women in the other."
John had spluttered indignantly for a good thirty seconds.
"Well, honorary woman," Markham said. "I don't think you get full man credit if you can't kill your own bees."
"Tentacles!" was all John had managed to say to that.
"Yeah, whatever."
So they'd been friends, but weird Marine friends who cast aspersions on John's manhood a lot. Still, friends, and he missed them after they were gone.
-\--\--\-
When John returned to his lab, he expected to find Eldon and Abdirova setting up for the next simulation. He also expected to find Rod loitering about in some corner, mixing up John's Sharpie collection and hogging the last of the good tavajava on some pretext of not-actually-babysitting-a-grown-man. He didn't exactly expect anything else to be on fire, exploding or emitting exotic radiation, but this was Atlantis, so you could never be too careful.
John did not expect to find Teyla sitting on a stool, sharpening a knife with a piece of pale stone. Eldon and Abdirova didn't seem alarmed by this behavior; in fact, Abdirova was giving a rambling, dumbed-down (and thus highly inaccurate) explanation of the simulation as she and Eldon mounted the test crystals in the racks. Well, Abdirova mounted while Eldon held things for her; they were still operating under John's dictum that Eldon was not allowed near open flames, edged instruments or power tools. Teyla, for her part, seems like she could be on another planet for all she cared, scraping the knife on the stone with a steady rhythm that bordered on the hypnotic, but after John spent several minutes standing in the door staring at her, she looked up to say, "Hello."
"Hi," John said, and then couldn't think of anything else to follow that up with, since running to find Rod while yelling see? see? see? would not exactly be smooth and What the crap are you doing in my lab? might provoke her. After all, she was holding a knife.
Abdirova seemed oblivious to the threat, if there was one. She even smiled at John. "Hello, Dr. Sheppard!" she said brightly. "I am telling Teyla about our research."
"Teyla doesn't care," John said automatically. "Now get to work."
"I care," Teyla protested. "I find it…stimulating."
Okay, so either he was delusional or Teyla was. Or maybe she was a pod person. Or possessed by the Wraith again, though that tended to involve more active sabotage and throwing Marines into walls and less stalking John and small talk. "Did you even understand any of that?" he asked, genuinely curious.
"If I understand Gulmira correctly," Teyla said, slowly and carefully, "you have synthesized these crystals in order to observe the…interstitial properties of the…energy matrix? In order to calculate the precise…precise geometry of the resulting sub…subspace…"
"Subspace inversion field," John said. He was fairly certain that was the longest string of words that he'd ever heard Teyla produce in one sitting, and he wouldn't bet that she actually knew the meaning of half of them, but that wasn't important because Teyla was talking to him.
"Yes," she said with a serene nod.
"It's just, you know, probably the first step to making our own ZPMs," he added. "So it's kind of important that way."
Teyla nodded again.
John folded his arms over his chest and reminded himself to be cool about this, cool and not crazy, because he really, really couldn't afford to be sent back to Earth in a straightjacket. It'd set this project back by, like, months. "So, you know, if you need me for something, or, you know, just wanted to say hi, that's cool, but we're kind of busy in here and probably should be working instead of just talking about working. You know, things to do, galaxies to redeem, Nobel prizes to win and all."
"May I watch?" Teyla asked.
"Um," John managed to say, even though Abdirova always told him not to.
Teyla stared at him as she waited for an answer, face as calm and closed as it ever was.
"We're basically plugging some shiny rocks into a wall socket to see what happens," John said.
Teyla stared.
"By which I mean there's not a whole lot to actually watch, you know, since the computers do most of the data collection and after that it's just math and unless we've really screwed up, and by 'we' I mean 'those two,' there really isn't anything to actually watch, and if they did screw up then we might possibly blow up this pier, so…" She was still looking at him, and he realized that he going in the direction crazy again. And the point was to be cool about this. So as of right now, he was Johnny fucking Cash. "You know what? It's your spare time. Eldon, what did I tell you about power tools?"
He ended up mounting all the remaining crystals himself, but it turned out Eldon had procured fresh tavajava, which redeemed him enough that John let him load the racks into the bubble chamber. Then it was just a matter of hooking them up to a naqadah generator and counting what kinds of which particles came out and then doing the math. And John was cool. So, so, totally cool. If he'd been any cooler, he'd have given somebody frostbite. Except for when Abdirova tapped him on the shoulder and he threw his tavajava at her. But mostly? So cool.
Teyla stayed in the labs for hours and sharpened that knife down to what John suspected was a monofilament edge. She didn't interrupt or ask questions, and when she left, John decided he'd discovered a new winning strategy.
-\--\--\-
John sometimes half-suspected that if you asked Teyla and Cadman's coven why they were so inexplicably ninja badass, they would confess some kind of conspiracy to overthrow the patriarchy, or perhaps a simple, sociopathic love of blood. Okay, so they wouldn't actually say say that, because you don't admit that kind of thing, but it could've been true. What they'd actually say-had said, actually, as he gathered over the years from various overheard conversations and out-of-context comments and reports he wasn't technically supposed to be reading-would be something like this:
Cadman: "I'm a Marine, so I don't get to be a girl. I couldn't even get front-line assignments outside the SGC…. I gotta be twice as good as any other officer at everything I do to even get the time of day from some guys, and I'm never gonna catch a break on anything. It's either be the best or go home. Besides, explosions can be fun."
Melena: "My people don't always give much credit to doctors and nurses. I've met plenty of patients who'd would rather die from an 'honorable' injury than live with a disability, or even admit they're in pain. Plenty of people would call us weak because we recognize the frailty of the human body and try to protect it. Healing is my vocation, though, and Ancestors help anybody who tries to stop me-even the patients themselves."
Mehra: "Well, my daddy was a Marine, and so was his daddy, and his daddy before him was in the Army, and I've got two uncles and four brothers and a shitload of cousins in one service or another. My grandma was a WAC, too, and my momma was a nurse in a field hospital in Vietnam…uh, what was the question again?"
Sora: "My people were great, once. We had an empire of a hundred worlds and Genia was a center of art and learning and wealth and strength. The Wraith took that all away…. It's the duty of every Genii to remember our shame and work for the restoration of the empire. In the execution of this duty there is neither woman nor man, elder nor younger, artist or scholar or merchant-we are all soldiers for the glorious cause. And it's my cause now to avenge every Genii life Cowen has wasted in his miserable, cowardly rule, starting with my father's."
Teyla: "I had no choice."
Part One
Part Three
Part Four