I'll hold your hands, they're just like ice, Beautiful what's your hurry?
When he kisses her, she doesn’t see fireworks and starlight and moonlit-romance. She sees lazy nights, a potential of a child with curling brown hair and curious eyes, and as she presses a trembling palm to his cheek, she knows that maybe, just maybe, this will go better than the alternatives; better than what she had convinced herself that she wanted (another bad habit of hers, over-thinking). No tantrums, no power plays, no condescension-just peace.
~
John is annoyed, Rodney is sulking, and Teyla is statuesque-as in still like a statue, not too tall to be conventionally pretty, but we’ll say this just to be polite-and Jennifer concedes that there is a definite possibility that her brain is melting.
Woolsey is saying something, and she stops tapping her pen on the table long enough to zero in on him. He is speaking in a tone of voice that flickers between amused and distressed, “I thought you told me this morning that the situation was going fine, Lt. Colonel.”
No name, Jennifer duly notes as she catches her thumb nail under her front teeth and begins to half-heartedly gnaw. Bad sign. She realizes what she is doing, and smothers the urge to blush.
“With all due respect, it was going fine,” says John. “Until the locals decided to go Sylvester Stalone on us and try to hack Dr. Keller into little bits.” He musses his hair with his hand and sighs. “Then communications were down and we couldn’t call for back up.”
“Where does Ronon come into this?” asks Woolsey.
“As in the getting-shot part of the evening?” says John, not really deflecting Woolsey's curiosity at all. He dutifully tones down the sarcasm, attempts to return to professionalism (a losing battle). “He’d be doing better if you let the doc out of the de-brief and go do her doctor-ly things. Like healing him.”
Rodney snorts at this. Loudly.
“Is that what we’re calling tonsil hockey these days?” he mutters to himself, and as Woolsey dismisses her with a tired wave to return to the infirmary, Jennifer really, really hopes that no one else heard that.
~
“Keller,” he is saying between harried, rushed breaths, “stop. Please. Just stop.”
She knows that he isn’t usually vocal in his expression of feeling and that the note of care in his voice is probably a sign of delusions or possibly blood loss, so she continues to swallow the knot in her throat and press her slick fingers against his chest. “Stop talking,” she orders him.
“Stop panicking,” he says.
“You just got shot,” she says, and as he doesn’t really have a comeback, he doesn’t reply. For once, Jennifer is glad that she has chewed her fingernails to the point of nonexistence, because she doesn’t know if once the adrenaline stops she’ll be able to stand having his blood under her nails. The permanence of the thought-his blood staining her hands, how awfully Shakespearean is that? Professor McNamara from Freshman Lit would be so proud-makes her shake like she hasn’t since her first surgery during her intern ER rotation.
She hazards a look into his eyes as she stills her fingers and begins to wrap the gauze around his chest, and there is a faint crease around his mouth, the hint of either a laugh or a frown, and she almost reaches to smooth it away before remembering that her hands are sticky to the elbow with his blood.
“Sheppard,” she says over her shoulder, “fly faster.” Then she pulls the top off the syringe with her teeth, finds a vein, and pumps Ronon’s limp, paling body with a painkiller.
“I’m going as fast as I can, doc,” half-yells John.
“I know soccer moms that are faster than this,” she snaps, and although Ronon is almost out of it entirely, he reaches for her hand and brushes his fingers with hers, interlacing them. He doesn’t seem to mind the blood.
She doesn’t miss the way Rodney’s jaw clenches. She wonders if he will be an issue, before deciding that Rodney’s personal feelings aren’t really her main concern right now. She’ll worry about him later.
~
The blasts whizzing over and around her head are almost disturbing in their perfection. They are separated by evenly-spaced breaks, during which Lorgun refills his blaster and then aims and starts again. Jennifer’s heart begins to follow the beat-blastblastblast-pause-blastblastblast-pause-blastblastblast-pause-when Ronon drops in next to her and says “What’s up, doc?” without a hint of irony.
“Now is not the time,” she says. “Shouldn’t you be shooting him right now?”
“Nah, Sheppard’s probably got it covered,” he says. “Are you ever going to kiss me again?” And Jennifer’s mother (and Natalie, her college roommate) would be very disappointed to hear that the only thought echoing through Jennifer’s mind is he really is rather blunt, isn’t he? and not something more appropriate like take me now, although her stomach does drop a bit.
“Gunfight,” she says pointedly.
“No time like the present,” he replies.
“You’re spending too much time with Sheppard,” she reproves, and then jerks a thumb over her shoulder towards Lorgun and his hiding place. “Are you or are you not concerned about the man trying to kill us?”
The blastblastblast-pause in the background changes to blastblast-pausepause-blastblast-pausepause and Ronon shrugs. “Sounds like Sheppard and Teyla are doing their part of the plan,” he says.
“I highly doubt my kissing you is part of the plan,” she says, even though her stomach drops even farther, to somewhere in the vicinity of her kneecaps. She wonders what exactly about Atlantis promotes highly unstable men to seek equally unstable relationships (two of the come to mind immediately, and one is currently propositioning her). Professionalism seems like a distant dream, back when she had to walk three blocks to get good coffee and was allowed to (attempt to) cook for herself on occasion.
“You weren’t there, how do you know?” he says, and the blastblast-pausepause becomes blastBLASTBLAST and Ronon swears in something that is probably Satedian, although knowing the Marines it could just as easily be guttural English, and Lorgun’s tight, hard face appears over the top of their hiding spot.
In the space of three seconds, he shoots Jennifer, is blocked by Ronon, and is lying on the ground with a very large, wickedly curve knife growing out of his larynx. Any more details about the situation are lost as Ronon’s grunts and slumps momentarily against Jennifer. That is when, in a moment so clear it cuts her eyes like glass, she notices the blood.
~
Jennifer eyes the villager with the knife and immediately she knows where this is coming from.
“Muriah,” she tries, but the woman cuts her off, making a silencing motion with the hand holding the really freaking big knife.
“You compromised your purity,” says the woman in a very calm, almost lethargic voice. “We cannot allow you to touch our sick.” Jennifer eyes the knife and thinks of twelve pithy responses of various severity, and dismisses them all as far too likely to get her stabbed.
“I understand your concerns,” she begins in a calm voice, holding up both hands and displaying her palms (the Marine who taught her seminar on interacting with unknown peoples in potentially hazardous circumstances explained that it was to present a vulnerability; the exposed wrists. The last thing Keller wants to show Muriah is weakness, but her training takes over). “I know what you think you saw, but I should probably explain-”
“We cannot allow the unpure,” repeats Muriah. “Please forgive me, Dr. Keller, but you and Ronon are unbound.”
Jennifer allows the irony to wash over her for a second. “No, we’re not, er, bonded.”
Muriah nods knowingly, as though this were all to be expected. Jennifer feels the urge to bite her fingernails overwhelm her so suddenly that she almost does it, feels the phantom limb folding into her chest and the calming jerk on her pinkie. It is the presence of Muriah, holding the knife almost gingerly, that keeps her from completing the motion.
“Lorgun told me that your impurity will harm my father,” says Muriah. “He says I must kill you to save my father from blasphemy.” Her eyes are slightly turned down in the corners, and she looks achingly pale as she argues her reasons for wanting-no, needing to slit Jennifer's throat.
Jennifer swallows and hates herself for her momentarily weakness, the desire to overanalyze the situation swamping her mind and halting her actions. She thanks God and various other deities when the cool snap of logic and training takes over. She takes a casual step to the left, and Muriah doesn’t know enough about hostage situations to be wary. Jennifer feels a bit of guilt when she leans forward, bracing herself on the examining table, and her left hands closes on a syringe.
“I know that you saw Ronon and I kissing, but we certainly weren’t doing anything impure,” she tells Muriah as she inches her way to the other side of the table, closer to danger, hoping that logic will save her (and Muriah) from doing what she is about to do. “We didn’t get any farther, Muriah, I swear. Just-just one kiss.”
Muriah’s eyes are wide and dreamy, pale blue touched by silver towards the pupil, and Jennifer knows that Lorgun has fed her something to make her so pliable, and that there will be no reasoning with the woman. “I can’t be sure,” Muriah says, drifting closer. She blinks at Jennifer slowly, and grips the knife a little tighter. “I have to save my father.”
I know, thinks Jennifer, and then she grips the syringe and lunges forward, deflecting the blade with an open-handed blow to the wrist and sliding the syringe into Muriah’s neck like sifting through water. I’m sorry. She catches Muriah’s slumped body, drapes it across the examining table, and leaves before the woman (girl, really) has any hope of awakening.
When she tells John that they have to leave, now, he almost doesn’t get it. He’s caught somewhere between surprise and alarm, and settles for a burst of unamused laughter as he leaves to gather the rest of the team. “Just, stay hidden,” he tells her, and covers the lower half of his face with his hand. “My god, Keller . . .”
~
“All right,” she says. “You win.”
In the second that she says this, he is looking at her with an odd look on his face. “I win?” he says, his voice lifting towards the end of the sentence.
“There’s no one else,” she sighs, and she half-turns away, lifting her fingers to her mouth. “This is a very bad idea, Ron-”
He grips the back of her neck and slants his mouth over hers, his knuckles brushing down the line of her throat and over her collarbone. He does this with an ease that suggests much study of that area of her body, and Jennifer runs her hand down the bare arm that is locked around her neck, shivering at the sensation of the hairs on his arm on the bare flesh of her fingertips.
“You shouldn’t bite your nails,” he tells her, more breathes into the long patch of skin running behind her ear, and then she is kissing him again, harder, wishing that this wasn’t going to end as horribly as she knows it will. She and Ronon are too different for this to go well. (She and Rodney are the logical choice, and when someone thinks as much as she does, logical choices invariably win out over lust and longing.)
But when he licks her lower lip and her hands find the cool, smooth skin of his hip, she desperately wishes for another ending.
~
“Keller,” calls John as he enters the hut masquerading as a base of operations. “We’re sending Woolsey a status update. Do you need anything for the old man?”
She glances at her watch, checking the man’s pulse, and shakes her head absently. “It’s just a case of the flu, Col. Sheppard. I want to keep him under surveillance for the next couple of hours, maybe even overnight, but he’ll recover just fine.”
She adds this last bit for the benefit of the man’s daughter, a slim, nervous woman named Muriah. Muriah smiles tremulously, and nods with a small jerk. “I am glad,” she says. “I will tell Lorgun.” She slips out of the door, and John follows her a half-second later, to meet up with Teyla and use the jumper’s communication systems to contact Woolsey.
Jennifer takes the man’s hands between her own, and tells him soothingly, “You’ll be fine.” She doesn’t know how much he hears through the fever, and she sighs a bit to herself, remembering back when the flu was the most severe illness she ever dealt with. She slides off the cot to stand, and moves to her bag perched on the sturdy bit of furniture she has claimed as an examining table.
“I’ll need to examine the other villagers,” she muses for the benefit of Rodney and Ronon, who returned with John after meeting with Lorgun and the elders and have yet to find something better to do with their time. “Do you think you can find a way to make that happen?”
She directs her gaze at Rodney. He pretends not to notice.
“Dr. McKay?” she hints.
“All right, Keller, yes, I will drop the very important business that I am doing right now to rush off and do some inane task that you could just as easily complete yourself.” He slams his console shut and glares at the old man lying on the cot. He mutters something about hypochondriacs.
“Mr. Pot? Mr. Kettle on line one,” replies Jennifer drily, and Rodney sniffs at that. She remembers for a moment his obsession with Sam Carter, and how differently he acted around someone (he no doubt considers) more secure, intelligent, capable than herself. And then he leaves as well, trailing bits of electrical wire from the console under his arm. She and Ronon are suddenly alone, and she hates that there is a combination of thrill and apprehension trickling her spine.
Ronon doesn’t like her anymore, she knows that, she told him herself that there was someone else, and even if it was a stupid contrivance, a way to get rid of a relationship moving too far, too fast, she has no right to expect anything from him, not yet, not ever-
“Keller,” he says. “What are you doing?”
She looks at him blankly, and then at her hands, which are torn under and around the nails from her teeth-her dad always told her it was a bad habit, but she never could quite-“Oh,” she says. “Right.” She drops her hands from her mouth and smoothes the tortured skin almost absently. She hazards a look at him, and cannot suppress her dry “I see you’re talking to me now?”
He freezes, then grunts and shifts so his arms are crossed and his eyes are locked somewhere decidedly not on her. She sighs and rolls her eyes. “Oh, never mind. Forgive me.”
Ronon’s mouth flattens into a line, and the creases between his brows deepen. She watches him patiently, waiting for a sign that his recrimination is lessening, or even that he is tired of playing the silent game, but the only change is the flicker of a muscle in his jaw.
Finally, she sighs. “All right,” she says tiredly. “You win.”
~
The man that meets them where they land the jumper (“My god,” growls John, “I hate it when the Gate leads to the middle of blank space.” “Erosion,” says Rodney knowledgably) is polite, if not effusive. He tells them that his name is Lorgun, and that he is the head of the council of elders. He shakes John and Teyla’s hand, accepts Jennifer’s offer of possible medical assistance, and leads them towards his village at a sedate, even pace.
“We get visitors occasionally,” he tells John. “Not often, but we are left relatively unscathed by the cullings in exchange. How long do you think you will be staying?”
“We only wish to establish an alliance between your people and our own,” explains Teyla, shoulder-to-shoulder with John, her slight frame caught between his and Lorgun’s.
“Do you speak for the Atlanteans or the Athosians?” queries Lorgun politely.
“Both,” says Teyla gravely. “Col. Sheppard is here to speak for the people of Atlantis.” John bobs his head at this, but is otherwise content to let Teyla lead the conversation for the moment. Rodney, Ronon, and Jennifer trail behind in one big, long happy train, and Jennifer keeps her eyes on the path stretching towards the village, knowing that there is probably a painful metaphor that could describe this situation.
Caught between two testosterone-riddled competitors (one, perhaps, more testosterone-riddled than the other), Jennifer swallows her sigh and picks at what is left of her right thumb nail with her front teeth.
~
Sometime between the “Jennifer Keller, please report to Woolsey’s office” and the “Jennifer, I really don’t think this is going to work,” she knows, she knows, that this is going to be one of Those Days. She is right, of course, because she is Jennifer Keller and she’s generally right about these things.
She settles the trial with Lily Matheson as best as she can, assuring the anesthesiologist that Jennifer really does need her running the night shift, and that of course Matheson is respected by her colleagues (not a full truth, per se, but enough of one that her father wouldn’t be completely disapproving), and that takes about forty minutes more than it should.
Woolsey is not amused.
“Dr. Keller,” he says, looking severe. She has to fight the urge to gnaw on her cuticles. “Off world mission, three days. Basic recon with Sheppard’s unit, bring standard field kit. You have ten minutes to make it to the Gate room.”
Jennifer tries not to swear, because her father taught her better than that. She waits until the door swishes shut behind her to kick the paneling and then sets off at a very brisk sprint towards the infirmary.
“Sorry,” she says as she skids into the Gate room, only slightly out of breath. “Er, bit of a personnel crisis.” John and Teyla nod, but Ronon is very obviously not looking at her, his gaze over her shoulder and slightly to the left. Rodney beams and then the piece of machinery he’s toying with begins to beep alarmingly and he redirects his attention.
“We ready?” asks John, maybe noticing that Ronon’s tensed in his usual way, and Jennifer hooks her thumbs in the straps of her pack and nods.
“Let’s just get this over with,” she says.
~
Happy holidays, Krissie! I hope you enjoyed it. (Prompt? What prompt?)
~
John is annoyed, Rodney is sulking, and Teyla is statuesque-as in still like a statue, not too tall to be conventionally pretty, but we’ll say this just to be polite-and Jennifer concedes that there is a definite possibility that her brain is melting.
Woolsey is saying something, and she stops tapping her pen on the table long enough to zero in on him. He is speaking in a tone of voice that flickers between amused and distressed, “I thought you told me this morning that the situation was going fine, Lt. Colonel.”
No name, Jennifer duly notes as she catches her thumb nail under her front teeth and begins to half-heartedly gnaw. Bad sign. She realizes what she is doing, and smothers the urge to blush.
“With all due respect, it was going fine,” says John. “Until the locals decided to go Sylvester Stalone on us and try to hack Dr. Keller into little bits.” He musses his hair with his hand and sighs. “Then communications were down and we couldn’t call for back up.”
“Where does Ronon come into this?” asks Woolsey.
“As in the getting-shot part of the evening?” says John, not really deflecting Woolsey's curiosity at all. He dutifully tones down the sarcasm, attempts to return to professionalism (a losing battle). “He’d be doing better if you let the doc out of the de-brief and go do her doctor-ly things. Like healing him.”
Rodney snorts at this. Loudly.
“Is that what we’re calling tonsil hockey these days?” he mutters to himself, and as Woolsey dismisses her with a tired wave to return to the infirmary, Jennifer really, really hopes that no one else heard that.
~
“Keller,” he is saying between harried, rushed breaths, “stop. Please. Just stop.”
She knows that he isn’t usually vocal in his expression of feeling and that the note of care in his voice is probably a sign of delusions or possibly blood loss, so she continues to swallow the knot in her throat and press her slick fingers against his chest. “Stop talking,” she orders him.
“Stop panicking,” he says.
“You just got shot,” she says, and as he doesn’t really have a comeback, he doesn’t reply. For once, Jennifer is glad that she has chewed her fingernails to the point of nonexistence, because she doesn’t know if once the adrenaline stops she’ll be able to stand having his blood under her nails. The permanence of the thought-his blood staining her hands, how awfully Shakespearean is that? Professor McNamara from Freshman Lit would be so proud-makes her shake like she hasn’t since her first surgery during her intern ER rotation.
She hazards a look into his eyes as she stills her fingers and begins to wrap the gauze around his chest, and there is a faint crease around his mouth, the hint of either a laugh or a frown, and she almost reaches to smooth it away before remembering that her hands are sticky to the elbow with his blood.
“Sheppard,” she says over her shoulder, “fly faster.” Then she pulls the top off the syringe with her teeth, finds a vein, and pumps Ronon’s limp, paling body with a painkiller.
“I’m going as fast as I can, doc,” half-yells John.
“I know soccer moms that are faster than this,” she snaps, and although Ronon is almost out of it entirely, he reaches for her hand and brushes his fingers with hers, interlacing them. He doesn’t seem to mind the blood.
She doesn’t miss the way Rodney’s jaw clenches. She wonders if he will be an issue, before deciding that Rodney’s personal feelings aren’t really her main concern right now. She’ll worry about him later.
~
The blasts whizzing over and around her head are almost disturbing in their perfection. They are separated by evenly-spaced breaks, during which Lorgun refills his blaster and then aims and starts again. Jennifer’s heart begins to follow the beat-blastblastblast-pause-blastblastblast-pause-blastblastblast-pause-when Ronon drops in next to her and says “What’s up, doc?” without a hint of irony.
“Now is not the time,” she says. “Shouldn’t you be shooting him right now?”
“Nah, Sheppard’s probably got it covered,” he says. “Are you ever going to kiss me again?” And Jennifer’s mother (and Natalie, her college roommate) would be very disappointed to hear that the only thought echoing through Jennifer’s mind is he really is rather blunt, isn’t he? and not something more appropriate like take me now, although her stomach does drop a bit.
“Gunfight,” she says pointedly.
“No time like the present,” he replies.
“You’re spending too much time with Sheppard,” she reproves, and then jerks a thumb over her shoulder towards Lorgun and his hiding place. “Are you or are you not concerned about the man trying to kill us?”
The blastblastblast-pause in the background changes to blastblast-pausepause-blastblast-pausepause and Ronon shrugs. “Sounds like Sheppard and Teyla are doing their part of the plan,” he says.
“I highly doubt my kissing you is part of the plan,” she says, even though her stomach drops even farther, to somewhere in the vicinity of her kneecaps. She wonders what exactly about Atlantis promotes highly unstable men to seek equally unstable relationships (two of the come to mind immediately, and one is currently propositioning her). Professionalism seems like a distant dream, back when she had to walk three blocks to get good coffee and was allowed to (attempt to) cook for herself on occasion.
“You weren’t there, how do you know?” he says, and the blastblast-pausepause becomes blastBLASTBLAST and Ronon swears in something that is probably Satedian, although knowing the Marines it could just as easily be guttural English, and Lorgun’s tight, hard face appears over the top of their hiding spot.
In the space of three seconds, he shoots Jennifer, is blocked by Ronon, and is lying on the ground with a very large, wickedly curve knife growing out of his larynx. Any more details about the situation are lost as Ronon’s grunts and slumps momentarily against Jennifer. That is when, in a moment so clear it cuts her eyes like glass, she notices the blood.
~
Jennifer eyes the villager with the knife and immediately she knows where this is coming from.
“Muriah,” she tries, but the woman cuts her off, making a silencing motion with the hand holding the really freaking big knife.
“You compromised your purity,” says the woman in a very calm, almost lethargic voice. “We cannot allow you to touch our sick.” Jennifer eyes the knife and thinks of twelve pithy responses of various severity, and dismisses them all as far too likely to get her stabbed.
“I understand your concerns,” she begins in a calm voice, holding up both hands and displaying her palms (the Marine who taught her seminar on interacting with unknown peoples in potentially hazardous circumstances explained that it was to present a vulnerability; the exposed wrists. The last thing Keller wants to show Muriah is weakness, but her training takes over). “I know what you think you saw, but I should probably explain-”
“We cannot allow the unpure,” repeats Muriah. “Please forgive me, Dr. Keller, but you and Ronon are unbound.”
Jennifer allows the irony to wash over her for a second. “No, we’re not, er, bonded.”
Muriah nods knowingly, as though this were all to be expected. Jennifer feels the urge to bite her fingernails overwhelm her so suddenly that she almost does it, feels the phantom limb folding into her chest and the calming jerk on her pinkie. It is the presence of Muriah, holding the knife almost gingerly, that keeps her from completing the motion.
“Lorgun told me that your impurity will harm my father,” says Muriah. “He says I must kill you to save my father from blasphemy.” Her eyes are slightly turned down in the corners, and she looks achingly pale as she argues her reasons for wanting-no, needing to slit Jennifer's throat.
Jennifer swallows and hates herself for her momentarily weakness, the desire to overanalyze the situation swamping her mind and halting her actions. She thanks God and various other deities when the cool snap of logic and training takes over. She takes a casual step to the left, and Muriah doesn’t know enough about hostage situations to be wary. Jennifer feels a bit of guilt when she leans forward, bracing herself on the examining table, and her left hands closes on a syringe.
“I know that you saw Ronon and I kissing, but we certainly weren’t doing anything impure,” she tells Muriah as she inches her way to the other side of the table, closer to danger, hoping that logic will save her (and Muriah) from doing what she is about to do. “We didn’t get any farther, Muriah, I swear. Just-just one kiss.”
Muriah’s eyes are wide and dreamy, pale blue touched by silver towards the pupil, and Jennifer knows that Lorgun has fed her something to make her so pliable, and that there will be no reasoning with the woman. “I can’t be sure,” Muriah says, drifting closer. She blinks at Jennifer slowly, and grips the knife a little tighter. “I have to save my father.”
I know, thinks Jennifer, and then she grips the syringe and lunges forward, deflecting the blade with an open-handed blow to the wrist and sliding the syringe into Muriah’s neck like sifting through water. I’m sorry. She catches Muriah’s slumped body, drapes it across the examining table, and leaves before the woman (girl, really) has any hope of awakening.
When she tells John that they have to leave, now, he almost doesn’t get it. He’s caught somewhere between surprise and alarm, and settles for a burst of unamused laughter as he leaves to gather the rest of the team. “Just, stay hidden,” he tells her, and covers the lower half of his face with his hand. “My god, Keller . . .”
~
“All right,” she says. “You win.”
In the second that she says this, he is looking at her with an odd look on his face. “I win?” he says, his voice lifting towards the end of the sentence.
“There’s no one else,” she sighs, and she half-turns away, lifting her fingers to her mouth. “This is a very bad idea, Ron-”
He grips the back of her neck and slants his mouth over hers, his knuckles brushing down the line of her throat and over her collarbone. He does this with an ease that suggests much study of that area of her body, and Jennifer runs her hand down the bare arm that is locked around her neck, shivering at the sensation of the hairs on his arm on the bare flesh of her fingertips.
“You shouldn’t bite your nails,” he tells her, more breathes into the long patch of skin running behind her ear, and then she is kissing him again, harder, wishing that this wasn’t going to end as horribly as she knows it will. She and Ronon are too different for this to go well. (She and Rodney are the logical choice, and when someone thinks as much as she does, logical choices invariably win out over lust and longing.)
But when he licks her lower lip and her hands find the cool, smooth skin of his hip, she desperately wishes for another ending.
~
“Keller,” calls John as he enters the hut masquerading as a base of operations. “We’re sending Woolsey a status update. Do you need anything for the old man?”
She glances at her watch, checking the man’s pulse, and shakes her head absently. “It’s just a case of the flu, Col. Sheppard. I want to keep him under surveillance for the next couple of hours, maybe even overnight, but he’ll recover just fine.”
She adds this last bit for the benefit of the man’s daughter, a slim, nervous woman named Muriah. Muriah smiles tremulously, and nods with a small jerk. “I am glad,” she says. “I will tell Lorgun.” She slips out of the door, and John follows her a half-second later, to meet up with Teyla and use the jumper’s communication systems to contact Woolsey.
Jennifer takes the man’s hands between her own, and tells him soothingly, “You’ll be fine.” She doesn’t know how much he hears through the fever, and she sighs a bit to herself, remembering back when the flu was the most severe illness she ever dealt with. She slides off the cot to stand, and moves to her bag perched on the sturdy bit of furniture she has claimed as an examining table.
“I’ll need to examine the other villagers,” she muses for the benefit of Rodney and Ronon, who returned with John after meeting with Lorgun and the elders and have yet to find something better to do with their time. “Do you think you can find a way to make that happen?”
She directs her gaze at Rodney. He pretends not to notice.
“Dr. McKay?” she hints.
“All right, Keller, yes, I will drop the very important business that I am doing right now to rush off and do some inane task that you could just as easily complete yourself.” He slams his console shut and glares at the old man lying on the cot. He mutters something about hypochondriacs.
“Mr. Pot? Mr. Kettle on line one,” replies Jennifer drily, and Rodney sniffs at that. She remembers for a moment his obsession with Sam Carter, and how differently he acted around someone (he no doubt considers) more secure, intelligent, capable than herself. And then he leaves as well, trailing bits of electrical wire from the console under his arm. She and Ronon are suddenly alone, and she hates that there is a combination of thrill and apprehension trickling her spine.
Ronon doesn’t like her anymore, she knows that, she told him herself that there was someone else, and even if it was a stupid contrivance, a way to get rid of a relationship moving too far, too fast, she has no right to expect anything from him, not yet, not ever-
“Keller,” he says. “What are you doing?”
She looks at him blankly, and then at her hands, which are torn under and around the nails from her teeth-her dad always told her it was a bad habit, but she never could quite-“Oh,” she says. “Right.” She drops her hands from her mouth and smoothes the tortured skin almost absently. She hazards a look at him, and cannot suppress her dry “I see you’re talking to me now?”
He freezes, then grunts and shifts so his arms are crossed and his eyes are locked somewhere decidedly not on her. She sighs and rolls her eyes. “Oh, never mind. Forgive me.”
Ronon’s mouth flattens into a line, and the creases between his brows deepen. She watches him patiently, waiting for a sign that his recrimination is lessening, or even that he is tired of playing the silent game, but the only change is the flicker of a muscle in his jaw.
Finally, she sighs. “All right,” she says tiredly. “You win.”
~
The man that meets them where they land the jumper (“My god,” growls John, “I hate it when the Gate leads to the middle of blank space.” “Erosion,” says Rodney knowledgably) is polite, if not effusive. He tells them that his name is Lorgun, and that he is the head of the council of elders. He shakes John and Teyla’s hand, accepts Jennifer’s offer of possible medical assistance, and leads them towards his village at a sedate, even pace.
“We get visitors occasionally,” he tells John. “Not often, but we are left relatively unscathed by the cullings in exchange. How long do you think you will be staying?”
“We only wish to establish an alliance between your people and our own,” explains Teyla, shoulder-to-shoulder with John, her slight frame caught between his and Lorgun’s.
“Do you speak for the Atlanteans or the Athosians?” queries Lorgun politely.
“Both,” says Teyla gravely. “Col. Sheppard is here to speak for the people of Atlantis.” John bobs his head at this, but is otherwise content to let Teyla lead the conversation for the moment. Rodney, Ronon, and Jennifer trail behind in one big, long happy train, and Jennifer keeps her eyes on the path stretching towards the village, knowing that there is probably a painful metaphor that could describe this situation.
Caught between two testosterone-riddled competitors (one, perhaps, more testosterone-riddled than the other), Jennifer swallows her sigh and picks at what is left of her right thumb nail with her front teeth.
~
Sometime between the “Jennifer Keller, please report to Woolsey’s office” and the “Jennifer, I really don’t think this is going to work,” she knows, she knows, that this is going to be one of Those Days. She is right, of course, because she is Jennifer Keller and she’s generally right about these things.
She settles the trial with Lily Matheson as best as she can, assuring the anesthesiologist that Jennifer really does need her running the night shift, and that of course Matheson is respected by her colleagues (not a full truth, per se, but enough of one that her father wouldn’t be completely disapproving), and that takes about forty minutes more than it should.
Woolsey is not amused.
“Dr. Keller,” he says, looking severe. She has to fight the urge to gnaw on her cuticles. “Off world mission, three days. Basic recon with Sheppard’s unit, bring standard field kit. You have ten minutes to make it to the Gate room.”
Jennifer tries not to swear, because her father taught her better than that. She waits until the door swishes shut behind her to kick the paneling and then sets off at a very brisk sprint towards the infirmary.
“Sorry,” she says as she skids into the Gate room, only slightly out of breath. “Er, bit of a personnel crisis.” John and Teyla nod, but Ronon is very obviously not looking at her, his gaze over her shoulder and slightly to the left. Rodney beams and then the piece of machinery he’s toying with begins to beep alarmingly and he redirects his attention.
“We ready?” asks John, maybe noticing that Ronon’s tensed in his usual way, and Jennifer hooks her thumbs in the straps of her pack and nods.
“Let’s just get this over with,” she says.
~
Happy holidays, Krissie! I hope you enjoyed it. (Prompt? What prompt?)