.fic: Negotiating Shadows - Teyla, team (PG)
Tag to 4.11 "Be All My Sins Remembered," so spoilers for that (obviously).
Teyla-centric, with generous side of team and dash of McKay/Sheppard if you would like.
Teyla doesn't quite relax when Jennifer tells her all is well; if anything, she tenses when she's asked to come back in a few more days for tests. ("Just to be sure," Jennifer says quickly, "but you're scheduled for another checkup anyway.") Ronon sits a close yet respectful distance away, and doesn't say anything when Teyla pulls her clothes to rights, and whatever he thinks when she runs a quick hand over her belly, he doesn't say it, either.
"He's from Earth," is the first thing Ronon says on the way back to her quarters.
"Still." John's words have stunned her worse than the Wraith ever could. Something shifts inside her whenever she thinks of them, of John's low and furious voice. "He would not let me explain."
"He's worried." Fortunately for him, Ronon says it like fact, not like an excuse.
"The women of Athos..." Teyla shakes her head, uncertain as to why she's explaining this to Ronon, who knows. Ronon only shrugs and tells her he gets it, and his effortless acceptance soothes something sharp and aching inside her.
* * *
When she tells Rodney once she manages to corral him in his quarters, Rodney looks like he might pass out, and for a moment she fears she'll have to carry him to the infirmary herself. But he pulls himself back together with alarming speed (something he's learned here, she thinks), and after two minutes of incoherence and excited chatter is bent over his laptop, pulling up... things from the database.
"You should have as much information as possible," is what Rodney says when he hands her the small memory key. "Do you have an obstetrician you can trust? Because that's really key, I understand, and there's all sorts of stuff in there on new dietary requirements, and how they'll change as your pregnancy progresses. And iron. Iron's important."
"Rodney..." Teyla sighs. She taps the key against her palm.
He collapses into one of his awkward silences, fidgeting like the boy she strongly suspects he can be sometimes, not looking at her (or her stomach, which he'd glance at every few seconds until she threatened to hit him), or the laptop, or even the hands that hover indecisively.
"When my sister was pregnant with Madison?" He does look at her now, eyes bright with anxiety and what she's learned to recognize as guilt. "When she was pregnant, I wasn't around. Granted, I was doing important work, very very important work, but I... I made a point not to be around. And that was, um, not to put too fine a point on it... that was a mistake. A really, really huge colossal mistake."
"Yes, it was," Teyla tells him, but she says it kindly. "You are not that person anymore, though, Rodney."
"So I don't... I don't want to do the same thing now." The words fall over themselves in Rodney's haste to speak them. He gestures at the memory key in her hand. "I mean, this is--that is to say, this is all I know how to do, because I'm terrible at human stuff or interacting normally with people, I know, and I think only Sheppard is as socially dysfunctional as I am, but I'll try. Really hard. I swear."
For her answer she puts her arms around Rodney, letting his shoulders take her weight for a moment. He tenses under her and a startled breath wafts past her ear, but then anxious hands settle on her back, and after a moment she feels his smile low on the side of her neck.
* * *
Ronon brings her food and indulges her during meditation, and does her the courtesy of answering her blow for blow when they spar. He also claims that Ronon means "the very strong, very smart one who kills many Wraith" in Old Satedan. Rodney stops emailing her with articles on how to raise a child. (Must women really be educated in such things? she wonders, and when she asks this, Jennifer, Samantha, and some others look uncomfortable.) He does, however, ask her how she's doing a thousand times a day, and when she catches him tinkering with spare crystals and braided Athosian leather, he mumbles something about a "mobile" and flees.
John circles her warily for days.
It wears on her past Ronon and Rodney's ability to comfort or shield her from it. This is not her pregnancy (well, it is in a way, because clearly John is "making a federal case of it," as Rodney says); it is a friend who looks at her as though she is a stranger, as though she has become the child growing inside her, something unknown and dangerous.
She overhears Rodney trying to talk to him about it; she turns to leave just before John explodes with She's on my team and she lied to me. She didn't lie to you, Sheppard, she just didn't tell you, Rodney snaps, and John comes back with, I'm supposed to protect her (She knew what she was doing, and she knew the risks, God, Sheppard, please stop being an idiot) Oh, she knew what she was doing? Like FRAN or what-the-hell-ever knew what she was doing?
"That's not the same thing at all, and go to hell," Rodney grates, a bleakness in his voice Teyla's rarely heard in him. He stalks out past her, where she's hidden in a corner at the intersection of four corridors. Allergies Rodney would call the liquid brightness in his eyes.
John emerges a moment later, dark and more dark and edged in shadow, face desolate.
For a heartbeat, she thinks of letting him be, that he has his reasons, and ones she can understand. And she does, but she has her reasons too.
"John," she says.
He starts violently, his gun half-out of the holster before he registers Teyla and slides it back.
"You did not keep our standing appointment yesterday," she says him, and isn't remotely tempted to smile when he needs a confused minute to work it out.
"We're not sparring from now on." The shadows make him flat and dangerous, and she thinks that this man in front of her right now is the man most others fear.
"We are." Teyla pulls his bantos from her bag and tosses them to him; John catches them reflexively, but stares at them as though Teyla's just tossed him a pair of Wraith arms. "You will meet me in the gym after you have changed."
She says it with enough force that the words make their future inevitable. John doesn't nod, or say anything to give his agreement, but he still shows up fifteen minutes later in t-shirt and workout pants. He needs about two seconds for his eyes to gravitate toward her belly, the delicate outward curve that pushes at her tunic.
"You are not fighting the child," she says dryly, "so please look at me."
He jerks his gaze up and though it's plain he very much wants to look down again, he doesn't.
"We will begin with the forms," Teyla tells him. They start the slow movements, stance flowing into stance as she recites each one, John off his form and distracted.
"The basic attacks now," she murmurs, and the pressure of his bantos against hers is hesitant, the power in his arms and upper body throttled back. She frowns. "You would not knock a five-year-old off balance like this."
"Yeah, well." John jumps back when she swings at his knees, bantos crossed to block her. She takes him through the defensive positions, rolls her eyes when he balks at reversing so she has to defend.
"Do it," she growls.
John looks at her as though she's about to explode and begins a careful first attack. And a second, the third as slowly as he'd done when he'd been even more of a novice than he is now. He is fighting the child, Teyla realizes, or a hybrid of Teyla-and-stranger, made of glass that might break.
She lashes out, bantos flickering one-two, a crack across his right wrist with one, the other hooking behind his left knee while the pain distracts him. John hits the mat before the first curse is even out of his mouth, and she pins him, not with bantos crossed over his chest or her foot planted on top of him, but with a glare that has him suddenly, satisfyingly still.
"You will listen to me now." She forces her breath to stay even, though most of what breaks it is anger and confusion, not the weight of the child in her. "You will lie there and you will listen."
"Teyla--"
"My people are gone." The words still hurt to say, even as she vows, silently, I will find you. "You are my community now--you are my people."
"You're mine too," John says before she can glare him into silence.
"On Athos, men and women share the work. Women hunt and defend the settlements alongside men, and men tend the children and make sure the tents are in repair. We do this because there are so few of us, and because there are so few, every man and woman is valued the same, is given the same rights. Do you think that before you came I did not know what it is to go into battle, or to face what the four of us now face together? Do you think me so sheltered, or so foolish that I would willingly endanger myself and others for no purpose?"
He wisely keeps silent.
"Athosian women do not sequester themselves. They cannot, when every hand is needed." She stares down at him, willing the words into his brain, past the reticent green of his eyes. "And you and Ronon and Rodney... As I have said, you are my family now, and for you to want to shut me out..."
I will not cry, she tells herself fiercely. I will not, and that was what had hurt, because she knows John hates to see any of his team in peril if he can prevent it, that what "team" means for him goes far beyond what "football teams" or "hockey teams" are, or any of the other descriptions the Lanteans' dictionaries give her.
To cut her out of that would be to cut out her heart; the closest parallel she can find is for a family to separate itself from one of its members. This has never been done in living memory; the last had been when someone had revealed a settlement's location to the Wraith, over three hundred years ago, a punishment reserved for the deepest betrayal.
She tells him this, what it means (you as good as named me traitor, John) and she watches the stubbornness fade from him, leaching slowly from taut muscle. The silence stretches between them, elastic as life, with its own contrariness as Teyla watches John slide through ashamed, apologetic, angry, determined, disregard, mistrust (when it comes to this sort of change, she knows), settling for a moment on desperation.
"I'd never... I'd never do that, Teyla." His throat works as he swallows past some difficulty. "I would never."
"Intentionally," she amends. "I understand why you reacted the way you did--I did not like it--but I do understand. And," she pauses, watching his face settle into wariness, "I will propose a compromise with you. I will continue my work negotiating with other planets and I will continue to look for my people. Military missions... Those, although I do not like to see the three of you go off alone--"
"We'll have Marines along with us," John interrupts.
"--which is the same as going off alone. I will stay behind."
John hesitates, and Teyla's seriously considering hitting him just to make a point, even though striking a downed opponent (or student, in this case) is impolite, when he finally goes boneless and thumps his head back on the mat and sighs, "Okay."
"Good." Teyla steps back. "You may get up now."
He hauls himself to his feet, wincing theatrically and rubbing the back of his knee, murmuring aggrieved things Teyla's sure she's meant to hear. He's picked up some habits from Rodney. Teyla considers telling him that on Athos it is believed spouses become like each other over the years (she has heard that this is said on Earth as well), but what she does instead is take John by the wrist--the one she'd struck--and place his hand firm on her belly. His calluses brush roughly over skin and muscle just now learning to be tender.
John goes almost as grey as Rodney and his breath freezes so she thinks he'll pass out, which Rodney at least managed to avoid doing.
"You did not break me," she says. "The Wraith did not. They will not. But what will break me is if I do not have your friendship."
John nods, far past words now and looking really desperate. She lets him go, half-expecting him to launch out of the room, but he stays, still confused, sad, almost.
"You owe Rodney an apology." Teyla replaces her bantos in their rack by the wall.
John's forehead wrinkles unhappily. "I know."
"Good." She looks at him, standing almost in the center of the room, arms loose at his sides. His gaze follows her as she collects her things, but he doesn't move.
"Teyla," he says as she stands on the threshold. "I'm... I'm sorry."
"No you're not," she says calmly, sees him flinch, adds more kindly, "but I accept your apology."
"Team meeting tomorrow." He has his hands in his pockets now, as awkward as any boy, an endless contradiction. "You should be there."
"I will be," she promises, and walks through the open door.
-end-
Notes: I really really REALLY want to see Rodney's reaction on-screen (I PASSIONATELY WANT IT WRITERS IF YOU ARE OUT THERE). Also, when Teyla comes out with The Announcement, I was torn between "oh, John is being so protective and so John here" and wanting Teyla to deck him for being a control freak. (Yes, I'd definitely be concerned about neurological damage due to stunners, especially when it comes to an unborn baby, but you do not get to yell at the pregnant woman, John. Believe me, you can be nowhere near as freaked out or worried about it as she is.)
Also, I really love Ronon. And how awesome is it that Ronon can be a girl's name too?
Now I really REALLY need to go to bed, because I am meeting a dogeared tomorrow! Well, in ten hours.
Teyla-centric, with generous side of team and dash of McKay/Sheppard if you would like.
Teyla doesn't quite relax when Jennifer tells her all is well; if anything, she tenses when she's asked to come back in a few more days for tests. ("Just to be sure," Jennifer says quickly, "but you're scheduled for another checkup anyway.") Ronon sits a close yet respectful distance away, and doesn't say anything when Teyla pulls her clothes to rights, and whatever he thinks when she runs a quick hand over her belly, he doesn't say it, either.
"He's from Earth," is the first thing Ronon says on the way back to her quarters.
"Still." John's words have stunned her worse than the Wraith ever could. Something shifts inside her whenever she thinks of them, of John's low and furious voice. "He would not let me explain."
"He's worried." Fortunately for him, Ronon says it like fact, not like an excuse.
"The women of Athos..." Teyla shakes her head, uncertain as to why she's explaining this to Ronon, who knows. Ronon only shrugs and tells her he gets it, and his effortless acceptance soothes something sharp and aching inside her.
* * *
When she tells Rodney once she manages to corral him in his quarters, Rodney looks like he might pass out, and for a moment she fears she'll have to carry him to the infirmary herself. But he pulls himself back together with alarming speed (something he's learned here, she thinks), and after two minutes of incoherence and excited chatter is bent over his laptop, pulling up... things from the database.
"You should have as much information as possible," is what Rodney says when he hands her the small memory key. "Do you have an obstetrician you can trust? Because that's really key, I understand, and there's all sorts of stuff in there on new dietary requirements, and how they'll change as your pregnancy progresses. And iron. Iron's important."
"Rodney..." Teyla sighs. She taps the key against her palm.
He collapses into one of his awkward silences, fidgeting like the boy she strongly suspects he can be sometimes, not looking at her (or her stomach, which he'd glance at every few seconds until she threatened to hit him), or the laptop, or even the hands that hover indecisively.
"When my sister was pregnant with Madison?" He does look at her now, eyes bright with anxiety and what she's learned to recognize as guilt. "When she was pregnant, I wasn't around. Granted, I was doing important work, very very important work, but I... I made a point not to be around. And that was, um, not to put too fine a point on it... that was a mistake. A really, really huge colossal mistake."
"Yes, it was," Teyla tells him, but she says it kindly. "You are not that person anymore, though, Rodney."
"So I don't... I don't want to do the same thing now." The words fall over themselves in Rodney's haste to speak them. He gestures at the memory key in her hand. "I mean, this is--that is to say, this is all I know how to do, because I'm terrible at human stuff or interacting normally with people, I know, and I think only Sheppard is as socially dysfunctional as I am, but I'll try. Really hard. I swear."
For her answer she puts her arms around Rodney, letting his shoulders take her weight for a moment. He tenses under her and a startled breath wafts past her ear, but then anxious hands settle on her back, and after a moment she feels his smile low on the side of her neck.
* * *
Ronon brings her food and indulges her during meditation, and does her the courtesy of answering her blow for blow when they spar. He also claims that Ronon means "the very strong, very smart one who kills many Wraith" in Old Satedan. Rodney stops emailing her with articles on how to raise a child. (Must women really be educated in such things? she wonders, and when she asks this, Jennifer, Samantha, and some others look uncomfortable.) He does, however, ask her how she's doing a thousand times a day, and when she catches him tinkering with spare crystals and braided Athosian leather, he mumbles something about a "mobile" and flees.
John circles her warily for days.
It wears on her past Ronon and Rodney's ability to comfort or shield her from it. This is not her pregnancy (well, it is in a way, because clearly John is "making a federal case of it," as Rodney says); it is a friend who looks at her as though she is a stranger, as though she has become the child growing inside her, something unknown and dangerous.
She overhears Rodney trying to talk to him about it; she turns to leave just before John explodes with She's on my team and she lied to me. She didn't lie to you, Sheppard, she just didn't tell you, Rodney snaps, and John comes back with, I'm supposed to protect her (She knew what she was doing, and she knew the risks, God, Sheppard, please stop being an idiot) Oh, she knew what she was doing? Like FRAN or what-the-hell-ever knew what she was doing?
"That's not the same thing at all, and go to hell," Rodney grates, a bleakness in his voice Teyla's rarely heard in him. He stalks out past her, where she's hidden in a corner at the intersection of four corridors. Allergies Rodney would call the liquid brightness in his eyes.
John emerges a moment later, dark and more dark and edged in shadow, face desolate.
For a heartbeat, she thinks of letting him be, that he has his reasons, and ones she can understand. And she does, but she has her reasons too.
"John," she says.
He starts violently, his gun half-out of the holster before he registers Teyla and slides it back.
"You did not keep our standing appointment yesterday," she says him, and isn't remotely tempted to smile when he needs a confused minute to work it out.
"We're not sparring from now on." The shadows make him flat and dangerous, and she thinks that this man in front of her right now is the man most others fear.
"We are." Teyla pulls his bantos from her bag and tosses them to him; John catches them reflexively, but stares at them as though Teyla's just tossed him a pair of Wraith arms. "You will meet me in the gym after you have changed."
She says it with enough force that the words make their future inevitable. John doesn't nod, or say anything to give his agreement, but he still shows up fifteen minutes later in t-shirt and workout pants. He needs about two seconds for his eyes to gravitate toward her belly, the delicate outward curve that pushes at her tunic.
"You are not fighting the child," she says dryly, "so please look at me."
He jerks his gaze up and though it's plain he very much wants to look down again, he doesn't.
"We will begin with the forms," Teyla tells him. They start the slow movements, stance flowing into stance as she recites each one, John off his form and distracted.
"The basic attacks now," she murmurs, and the pressure of his bantos against hers is hesitant, the power in his arms and upper body throttled back. She frowns. "You would not knock a five-year-old off balance like this."
"Yeah, well." John jumps back when she swings at his knees, bantos crossed to block her. She takes him through the defensive positions, rolls her eyes when he balks at reversing so she has to defend.
"Do it," she growls.
John looks at her as though she's about to explode and begins a careful first attack. And a second, the third as slowly as he'd done when he'd been even more of a novice than he is now. He is fighting the child, Teyla realizes, or a hybrid of Teyla-and-stranger, made of glass that might break.
She lashes out, bantos flickering one-two, a crack across his right wrist with one, the other hooking behind his left knee while the pain distracts him. John hits the mat before the first curse is even out of his mouth, and she pins him, not with bantos crossed over his chest or her foot planted on top of him, but with a glare that has him suddenly, satisfyingly still.
"You will listen to me now." She forces her breath to stay even, though most of what breaks it is anger and confusion, not the weight of the child in her. "You will lie there and you will listen."
"Teyla--"
"My people are gone." The words still hurt to say, even as she vows, silently, I will find you. "You are my community now--you are my people."
"You're mine too," John says before she can glare him into silence.
"On Athos, men and women share the work. Women hunt and defend the settlements alongside men, and men tend the children and make sure the tents are in repair. We do this because there are so few of us, and because there are so few, every man and woman is valued the same, is given the same rights. Do you think that before you came I did not know what it is to go into battle, or to face what the four of us now face together? Do you think me so sheltered, or so foolish that I would willingly endanger myself and others for no purpose?"
He wisely keeps silent.
"Athosian women do not sequester themselves. They cannot, when every hand is needed." She stares down at him, willing the words into his brain, past the reticent green of his eyes. "And you and Ronon and Rodney... As I have said, you are my family now, and for you to want to shut me out..."
I will not cry, she tells herself fiercely. I will not, and that was what had hurt, because she knows John hates to see any of his team in peril if he can prevent it, that what "team" means for him goes far beyond what "football teams" or "hockey teams" are, or any of the other descriptions the Lanteans' dictionaries give her.
To cut her out of that would be to cut out her heart; the closest parallel she can find is for a family to separate itself from one of its members. This has never been done in living memory; the last had been when someone had revealed a settlement's location to the Wraith, over three hundred years ago, a punishment reserved for the deepest betrayal.
She tells him this, what it means (you as good as named me traitor, John) and she watches the stubbornness fade from him, leaching slowly from taut muscle. The silence stretches between them, elastic as life, with its own contrariness as Teyla watches John slide through ashamed, apologetic, angry, determined, disregard, mistrust (when it comes to this sort of change, she knows), settling for a moment on desperation.
"I'd never... I'd never do that, Teyla." His throat works as he swallows past some difficulty. "I would never."
"Intentionally," she amends. "I understand why you reacted the way you did--I did not like it--but I do understand. And," she pauses, watching his face settle into wariness, "I will propose a compromise with you. I will continue my work negotiating with other planets and I will continue to look for my people. Military missions... Those, although I do not like to see the three of you go off alone--"
"We'll have Marines along with us," John interrupts.
"--which is the same as going off alone. I will stay behind."
John hesitates, and Teyla's seriously considering hitting him just to make a point, even though striking a downed opponent (or student, in this case) is impolite, when he finally goes boneless and thumps his head back on the mat and sighs, "Okay."
"Good." Teyla steps back. "You may get up now."
He hauls himself to his feet, wincing theatrically and rubbing the back of his knee, murmuring aggrieved things Teyla's sure she's meant to hear. He's picked up some habits from Rodney. Teyla considers telling him that on Athos it is believed spouses become like each other over the years (she has heard that this is said on Earth as well), but what she does instead is take John by the wrist--the one she'd struck--and place his hand firm on her belly. His calluses brush roughly over skin and muscle just now learning to be tender.
John goes almost as grey as Rodney and his breath freezes so she thinks he'll pass out, which Rodney at least managed to avoid doing.
"You did not break me," she says. "The Wraith did not. They will not. But what will break me is if I do not have your friendship."
John nods, far past words now and looking really desperate. She lets him go, half-expecting him to launch out of the room, but he stays, still confused, sad, almost.
"You owe Rodney an apology." Teyla replaces her bantos in their rack by the wall.
John's forehead wrinkles unhappily. "I know."
"Good." She looks at him, standing almost in the center of the room, arms loose at his sides. His gaze follows her as she collects her things, but he doesn't move.
"Teyla," he says as she stands on the threshold. "I'm... I'm sorry."
"No you're not," she says calmly, sees him flinch, adds more kindly, "but I accept your apology."
"Team meeting tomorrow." He has his hands in his pockets now, as awkward as any boy, an endless contradiction. "You should be there."
"I will be," she promises, and walks through the open door.
-end-
Notes: I really really REALLY want to see Rodney's reaction on-screen (I PASSIONATELY WANT IT WRITERS IF YOU ARE OUT THERE). Also, when Teyla comes out with The Announcement, I was torn between "oh, John is being so protective and so John here" and wanting Teyla to deck him for being a control freak. (Yes, I'd definitely be concerned about neurological damage due to stunners, especially when it comes to an unborn baby, but you do not get to yell at the pregnant woman, John. Believe me, you can be nowhere near as freaked out or worried about it as she is.)
Also, I really love Ronon. And how awesome is it that Ronon can be a girl's name too?
Now I really REALLY need to go to bed, because I am meeting a dogeared tomorrow! Well, in ten hours.