Fic + Art: A Denouement after Salamanders, Emmagan/Keller
Title: A Denouement after Salamanders
Artist: ileliberte
Author: pentapus
Notes: Teyla/Keller, PG, sometime after "Missing". For artword.
Summary: Jennifer doesn't always get the idea that Sheppard likes her.
**
“Yee-ah, so,” Sheppard drawls, “we aren’t sending you on anymore missions with Teyla.”
Jennifer puts the hand Ben isn’t stitching up over her eyes. The portable lamp tints her eyelids pink, almost like daylight except for the background of chirping night bugs. Her knee bounces restlessly. “It was a vacation.”
There are Marines circling in the dark Wisconsin night. They’ve almost finished bringing in the bodies--Jennifer expects they’ll save her one to autopsy. She hasn’t seen Teyla since the other woman was wrist deep in a rib cage, ripping out a bizarre six-chambered heart. If Jennifer’s lucky, Teyla won’t blame her for the fact that Teyla had to take down five monsters hand-to-hand while wearing blue jeans.
“Last time, the plan involved a goodwill lollipop distribution,” Sheppard says, mild.
Jennifer squints at him, thinks he isn’t as calm as he looks. Sheppard catches her looking and waggles his eyebrows, his lips an even line, like he’s daring her to call him on it. Jennifer doesn’t always get the idea that he likes her very much.
She looks at Ben’s dark hair instead, bent over her arm. She hasn’t been on this side of a suture since before medical school, and the urge to offer suggestions is disorienting. She gets as far as, “Hey, um,” before she stops herself.
“Maybe if you stopped moving,” Ben says.
Jennifer, whose heart is still going a mile a minute, bursts out laughing accidentally. “Ok, yeah, probably sometime early next year.”
Ben sighs. From out of the gloom, two Marines toss another twisted body into the circle of lamplight. It lands with a wet squish.
**
Sheppard stays with Jennifer after Ben finishes stitching her up. Pretty much everyone and their mother noticed they way she stood up and sat right back down again a few shades paler. Now she’s double-fisting gatorade and a powerbar while Marines report to Sheppard in jargon she doesn’t know. She feels way too much like a kid trailing her dad around the office.
“You’ve been hanging out with Teyla lately,” Sheppard says out of the blue and leaves it hanging awkwardly.
“She, uh, mentioned me?” Jennifer says. (Ouch. Maybe the Colonel isn’t losing the subtlety race after all.) Along the horizon, she can catch glimpses of the lake through the trees, the horizon starting to brighten in anticipation of morning.
“Well, you seem to be checking off a bingo card with my team,” Sheppard says casually. The part of his face around his eyes is totally expressionless. “So, I figured: next logical step.”
Jennifer shrinks. She makes an awkward, shrugging smile. There’s a touch of asshole malice showing under Sheppard’s grin, and she’d--she knows she’d call Rodney on it in a second. She’d have a thing or two to say to Ronon, too, or a door to slam. To Sheppard--she can't get out a word. He's the archetypal mother-in-law; a total stranger she hadn’t realized was part of the package and who comes with a quiet, territorial mean streak.
Abruptly, Sheppard breaks eye contact, and his eyes crinkle to match the smile. Jennifer’s legs go a little weak-kneed with relief. “Also,” he admits, “she suggested flip-cup as an Atlantean greeting ceremony at the last harvest festival.”
“Best harvest festival I ever had,” someone puts in. There’s a Marine--Lieutenant Patel, Jennifer knows him--waiting a polite few feet away, friendly but straight-backed. He’s got a hawkish nose and a profile to die for.
“Good to know somebody remembers it.” Sheppard looks pained, though he’s got to be kidding. Jennifer’s his doctor, and she knows he doesn’t drink except on base. “What’s up, Lieutenant?”
“We’d like to confirm we’ve got all the attackers accounted for, if Dr. Keller feels well enough,” Patel says. On a humanitarian mission right after Jennifer was promoted to CMO, he’d introduced himself as ‘Leff-tenant’ Patel and snuck her a chocolate egg with a toy hidden in it. Jennifer wonders again how she got from jailbait valedictorian to the Pegasus galaxy with a boy in every port--okay, a lot of boys in one port.
She wonders why Teyla hasn’t gotten back yet.
“I’m good,” she says, imitating the gung-ho snap-point with her powerbar and gatorade, and hops to her feet hands-free.
The bodies smell as strangely as she remembers, like sugar cereal and yeast. They’ve also been laid out not four feet away from her the entire time Ben was stitching her up, so she doesn’t really need to re-adjust. Three of them are lying side-by-side, over 7 feet tall, the fourth tossed more haphazardly across the middle.
“So,” Ben says, “Darwin or the creationists?”
“Didn’t quite follow the relevance there,” says Sheppard.
“Evolution or intelligent design,” Jennifer says. “Which one brought these guys to life? Though I mean, one isn’t science, so, ha ha, funny, pretend we said biological engineering.”
Sheppard makes a skeptical ‘clok’ with his tongue, and says, “Righto. Any guesses?”
She studies the creature’s dead face, nearly featureless except for the wide expanse of teeth. Long, curving, dense, they look a bit like baleen in cases at museums. The back of her hand twinges through the numbness, and Jennifer feels the need to transfer her powerbar to the crook of her elbow.
“Nothing based on biological evidence.” Jennifer shrugs. “They’re difficult to kill except by removing vital organs, they’re on Earth, and they look like the same cellular based life found in candy bar and horsefeathers.”
“Not to change the subject,” Ben says. “But am I going to look Teyla over? Or do barehanded monster battles leave her feeling rosy?”
Jennifer giggles and ok, that was an accident too, but she’s thinking she wants to look Teyla over. She’s okay nodding and running on cue--even when a seven foot salamander monster has just punched Teyla across a campsite in Wisconsin--but once the monsters have all been properly eviscerated and the med kits are out, they’re in Jennifer’s home court and she’s prepared to exercise her authority.
“She’s uninjured,” Sheppard says, “I said I’d let her get away with waiting--” then he stops because he sees the look on Jennifer’s face, and the look is that Teyla was lying a lot. “Son of a bitch. Are we done here?” He jerks a hand down at the frog bodies.
Jennifer winces. “Well, the only other thing I’d point out is that I was pretty certain there were five.”
“Jesus.” Sheppard barely glances at Patel, but the Lieutenant’s off like a hound loosed after a pheasant. Another hand wave and there are three Marines playing escort to the doctors. Sheppard shouts at somebody, “Teyla is off the search! I want her back here now.”
**
“All five are dead,” Teyla says in a perfectly even voice. Behind her Lake Michigan stretches out like an oddly calm sea, reflecting the beginnings of a fiery dawn.
In the time since Jennifer (and Sheppard) have seen her, bruises have blossomed along the side of her face. She’s pulled the zip of the black Northface fleece Jennifer lent her up to her neck. As she speaks, she’s snapping a thick, dry stick into successive three inch pieces, apparently just to give her hands something to do. The blunt violence of her fingers next to her cool face is almost--Sheppardian.
Sheppard on the other hand looks like Jennifer could name every individual muscle in his neck. Then again, Jennifer’s his doctor. She’s seen how he handles his team and mortal peril--i.e., not well.
“We’ve got four bodies, Teyla,” he says. “Also, hey, is that ketchup on your coat or are you dying to see me?”
“The body is in the lake. The heart--” Teyla’s eyes make a slow, significant circuit of the woods and settle back on Sheppard’s.
At some point, she ripped Jennifer’s jeans across one knee from seam to seam. The jeans are a new pair. They show off the curve of Teyla’s leg, hug her calves--and aren’t as flexible as a slit Athosian skirt. Jennifer knows Teyla had been worried about that, had suggested once, leaning back against a rough-barked tree in the dark, that Jennifer be at peace with her ancestors. Immediately after, she’d grimaced like it had been an unintended slip.
Sheppard cracks. His shoulders go down. He shakes his head, gives a huffing laugh. “Christ. The single sentence sum-up of this mission is going to put you up there with web facts about Chuck Norris.”
Teyla’s head turns minutely; her forehead creases. Jennifer can probably count all the muscles in her neck too if she’ll just put the zipper down a bit.
“There were monsters and barehanded heart removal.” Sheppard looks sympathetic. “It’s out of my hands.”
“Actually a surgical scalpel and a bone saw,” Jennifer says, “and that part was me.”
Sheppard stares at her. Jennifer blinks. “Oh, jesus,” she says, and the world goes a little fuzzy around her, “that part was me.”
She comes back with her good arm around Teyla’s shoulders, and Teyla’s stick-snapping hands cradling her ribcage, buttressing Jennifer with her body. The two inches in height she has on the other woman suddenly seem significant. Teyla reeks of dirt, blood, and sweat--and yeasty monster fruit loops--but Jennifer’s got her nose against Teyla’s hair and she gets a whiff of her strong woodsy shampoo.
“Flaky short term memory, doc?” Sheppard says. He’s holding her gatorade bottle, leaves and dirt stuck to it along one side, which she doesn’t remember dropping.
“You are alright?” Teyla says urgently, searching Jennifer’s face, her expression not cold at all. “John--where is Dr. Adams?”
Sheppard winds up for another significant twitch in Lt. Patel’s direction.
“No, no,” Jennifer says, “I mean, yes, someone has to wrap Teyla’s ribs, but--I’m fine. I guess I was thinking of it like surgery at the time.” Jennifer rubs at her face self-consciously. “Ok, that probably makes it creepier.”
“You were very deft,” Teyla says wryly, but she’s smiling a little now, and up close, her neck looks like a normal person’s.
Her heart’s still going pretty fast against Jennifer’s side though.
Reds and oranges are unfolding across the sky behind them in the most brilliant sunrise Jennifer’s seen in any galaxy. Chicago pollution probably, Jennifer thinks, maybe a touch of Gary. Teyla turns to watch, Jennifer’s arm around her.
**
“The Colonel was pretty worried about you,” Jennifer says, recovering from her ‘mild case of shock, yeah, duh, Ben, thanks’ in a Daedalus infirmary cot. Wide, thick windows look out onto a familiar Terran skyscape. Sunlight illuminates the Asgard grays that make up the spaceship’s floor and walls. It’s not yet 9:00 a.m.
“Oh?” Teyla is pale in the next bed, drooping and looking every bit as beat up as she is, slowly turning the color of berry jam all over.
“He looked worried anyway,” Jennifer says lightly, since the right word is actually terrified and me too, “even before the cursing made it more obvious.”
“Many people find John difficult to read,” Teyla says vaguely, her eyes are half-closed.
“That’s just because they’ve never had a heart monitor hooked up to him at the same time,” Jennifer says and rolls out of bed. She’s Teyla’s doctor. She knows that Teyla’s right side is in the best shape and also that Teyla is 5’4” and 140 lbs; she doesn’t take up a lot of space.
Teyla laughs, a rich, clear sound. Her torso moves where Jennifer’s crawling under the blanket and pressing up against her, hard muscle except for the parts that aren’t. Jennifer’s stomach tightens.
She’s always liked guys who looked like they could throw her across the room, and it’s suddenly apparent that the preference comes without a gender bias. Any second now, Jennifer’s grandmother is going to pop out of a doorway and say, “It’s just a phase, Jenny-penny,” with more understanding than Jennifer really wanted to know about her grandma’s love life.
Softly, Teyla’s hand moves over Jennifer’s hair, bloody dangerous knuckles bandaged neat and white. Jennifer rests her cheek against a spot clear of bruises just above the swell of Teyla’s breast. She remembers the team bingo card Sheppard thinks she’s got, but Jennifer figures she’ll never win anything on it. She’s not really on the look out for anymore squares after this one.
Original APOD prompt.
Artist: ileliberte
Author: pentapus
Notes: Teyla/Keller, PG, sometime after "Missing". For artword.
Summary: Jennifer doesn't always get the idea that Sheppard likes her.
**
“Yee-ah, so,” Sheppard drawls, “we aren’t sending you on anymore missions with Teyla.”
Jennifer puts the hand Ben isn’t stitching up over her eyes. The portable lamp tints her eyelids pink, almost like daylight except for the background of chirping night bugs. Her knee bounces restlessly. “It was a vacation.”
There are Marines circling in the dark Wisconsin night. They’ve almost finished bringing in the bodies--Jennifer expects they’ll save her one to autopsy. She hasn’t seen Teyla since the other woman was wrist deep in a rib cage, ripping out a bizarre six-chambered heart. If Jennifer’s lucky, Teyla won’t blame her for the fact that Teyla had to take down five monsters hand-to-hand while wearing blue jeans.
“Last time, the plan involved a goodwill lollipop distribution,” Sheppard says, mild.
Jennifer squints at him, thinks he isn’t as calm as he looks. Sheppard catches her looking and waggles his eyebrows, his lips an even line, like he’s daring her to call him on it. Jennifer doesn’t always get the idea that he likes her very much.
She looks at Ben’s dark hair instead, bent over her arm. She hasn’t been on this side of a suture since before medical school, and the urge to offer suggestions is disorienting. She gets as far as, “Hey, um,” before she stops herself.
“Maybe if you stopped moving,” Ben says.
Jennifer, whose heart is still going a mile a minute, bursts out laughing accidentally. “Ok, yeah, probably sometime early next year.”
Ben sighs. From out of the gloom, two Marines toss another twisted body into the circle of lamplight. It lands with a wet squish.
**
Sheppard stays with Jennifer after Ben finishes stitching her up. Pretty much everyone and their mother noticed they way she stood up and sat right back down again a few shades paler. Now she’s double-fisting gatorade and a powerbar while Marines report to Sheppard in jargon she doesn’t know. She feels way too much like a kid trailing her dad around the office.
“You’ve been hanging out with Teyla lately,” Sheppard says out of the blue and leaves it hanging awkwardly.
“She, uh, mentioned me?” Jennifer says. (Ouch. Maybe the Colonel isn’t losing the subtlety race after all.) Along the horizon, she can catch glimpses of the lake through the trees, the horizon starting to brighten in anticipation of morning.
“Well, you seem to be checking off a bingo card with my team,” Sheppard says casually. The part of his face around his eyes is totally expressionless. “So, I figured: next logical step.”
Jennifer shrinks. She makes an awkward, shrugging smile. There’s a touch of asshole malice showing under Sheppard’s grin, and she’d--she knows she’d call Rodney on it in a second. She’d have a thing or two to say to Ronon, too, or a door to slam. To Sheppard--she can't get out a word. He's the archetypal mother-in-law; a total stranger she hadn’t realized was part of the package and who comes with a quiet, territorial mean streak.
Abruptly, Sheppard breaks eye contact, and his eyes crinkle to match the smile. Jennifer’s legs go a little weak-kneed with relief. “Also,” he admits, “she suggested flip-cup as an Atlantean greeting ceremony at the last harvest festival.”
“Best harvest festival I ever had,” someone puts in. There’s a Marine--Lieutenant Patel, Jennifer knows him--waiting a polite few feet away, friendly but straight-backed. He’s got a hawkish nose and a profile to die for.
“Good to know somebody remembers it.” Sheppard looks pained, though he’s got to be kidding. Jennifer’s his doctor, and she knows he doesn’t drink except on base. “What’s up, Lieutenant?”
“We’d like to confirm we’ve got all the attackers accounted for, if Dr. Keller feels well enough,” Patel says. On a humanitarian mission right after Jennifer was promoted to CMO, he’d introduced himself as ‘Leff-tenant’ Patel and snuck her a chocolate egg with a toy hidden in it. Jennifer wonders again how she got from jailbait valedictorian to the Pegasus galaxy with a boy in every port--okay, a lot of boys in one port.
She wonders why Teyla hasn’t gotten back yet.
“I’m good,” she says, imitating the gung-ho snap-point with her powerbar and gatorade, and hops to her feet hands-free.
The bodies smell as strangely as she remembers, like sugar cereal and yeast. They’ve also been laid out not four feet away from her the entire time Ben was stitching her up, so she doesn’t really need to re-adjust. Three of them are lying side-by-side, over 7 feet tall, the fourth tossed more haphazardly across the middle.
“So,” Ben says, “Darwin or the creationists?”
“Didn’t quite follow the relevance there,” says Sheppard.
“Evolution or intelligent design,” Jennifer says. “Which one brought these guys to life? Though I mean, one isn’t science, so, ha ha, funny, pretend we said biological engineering.”
Sheppard makes a skeptical ‘clok’ with his tongue, and says, “Righto. Any guesses?”
She studies the creature’s dead face, nearly featureless except for the wide expanse of teeth. Long, curving, dense, they look a bit like baleen in cases at museums. The back of her hand twinges through the numbness, and Jennifer feels the need to transfer her powerbar to the crook of her elbow.
“Nothing based on biological evidence.” Jennifer shrugs. “They’re difficult to kill except by removing vital organs, they’re on Earth, and they look like the same cellular based life found in candy bar and horsefeathers.”
“Not to change the subject,” Ben says. “But am I going to look Teyla over? Or do barehanded monster battles leave her feeling rosy?”
Jennifer giggles and ok, that was an accident too, but she’s thinking she wants to look Teyla over. She’s okay nodding and running on cue--even when a seven foot salamander monster has just punched Teyla across a campsite in Wisconsin--but once the monsters have all been properly eviscerated and the med kits are out, they’re in Jennifer’s home court and she’s prepared to exercise her authority.
“She’s uninjured,” Sheppard says, “I said I’d let her get away with waiting--” then he stops because he sees the look on Jennifer’s face, and the look is that Teyla was lying a lot. “Son of a bitch. Are we done here?” He jerks a hand down at the frog bodies.
Jennifer winces. “Well, the only other thing I’d point out is that I was pretty certain there were five.”
“Jesus.” Sheppard barely glances at Patel, but the Lieutenant’s off like a hound loosed after a pheasant. Another hand wave and there are three Marines playing escort to the doctors. Sheppard shouts at somebody, “Teyla is off the search! I want her back here now.”
**
“All five are dead,” Teyla says in a perfectly even voice. Behind her Lake Michigan stretches out like an oddly calm sea, reflecting the beginnings of a fiery dawn.
In the time since Jennifer (and Sheppard) have seen her, bruises have blossomed along the side of her face. She’s pulled the zip of the black Northface fleece Jennifer lent her up to her neck. As she speaks, she’s snapping a thick, dry stick into successive three inch pieces, apparently just to give her hands something to do. The blunt violence of her fingers next to her cool face is almost--Sheppardian.
Sheppard on the other hand looks like Jennifer could name every individual muscle in his neck. Then again, Jennifer’s his doctor. She’s seen how he handles his team and mortal peril--i.e., not well.
“We’ve got four bodies, Teyla,” he says. “Also, hey, is that ketchup on your coat or are you dying to see me?”
“The body is in the lake. The heart--” Teyla’s eyes make a slow, significant circuit of the woods and settle back on Sheppard’s.
At some point, she ripped Jennifer’s jeans across one knee from seam to seam. The jeans are a new pair. They show off the curve of Teyla’s leg, hug her calves--and aren’t as flexible as a slit Athosian skirt. Jennifer knows Teyla had been worried about that, had suggested once, leaning back against a rough-barked tree in the dark, that Jennifer be at peace with her ancestors. Immediately after, she’d grimaced like it had been an unintended slip.
Sheppard cracks. His shoulders go down. He shakes his head, gives a huffing laugh. “Christ. The single sentence sum-up of this mission is going to put you up there with web facts about Chuck Norris.”
Teyla’s head turns minutely; her forehead creases. Jennifer can probably count all the muscles in her neck too if she’ll just put the zipper down a bit.
“There were monsters and barehanded heart removal.” Sheppard looks sympathetic. “It’s out of my hands.”
“Actually a surgical scalpel and a bone saw,” Jennifer says, “and that part was me.”
Sheppard stares at her. Jennifer blinks. “Oh, jesus,” she says, and the world goes a little fuzzy around her, “that part was me.”
She comes back with her good arm around Teyla’s shoulders, and Teyla’s stick-snapping hands cradling her ribcage, buttressing Jennifer with her body. The two inches in height she has on the other woman suddenly seem significant. Teyla reeks of dirt, blood, and sweat--and yeasty monster fruit loops--but Jennifer’s got her nose against Teyla’s hair and she gets a whiff of her strong woodsy shampoo.
“Flaky short term memory, doc?” Sheppard says. He’s holding her gatorade bottle, leaves and dirt stuck to it along one side, which she doesn’t remember dropping.
“You are alright?” Teyla says urgently, searching Jennifer’s face, her expression not cold at all. “John--where is Dr. Adams?”
Sheppard winds up for another significant twitch in Lt. Patel’s direction.
“No, no,” Jennifer says, “I mean, yes, someone has to wrap Teyla’s ribs, but--I’m fine. I guess I was thinking of it like surgery at the time.” Jennifer rubs at her face self-consciously. “Ok, that probably makes it creepier.”
“You were very deft,” Teyla says wryly, but she’s smiling a little now, and up close, her neck looks like a normal person’s.
Her heart’s still going pretty fast against Jennifer’s side though.
Reds and oranges are unfolding across the sky behind them in the most brilliant sunrise Jennifer’s seen in any galaxy. Chicago pollution probably, Jennifer thinks, maybe a touch of Gary. Teyla turns to watch, Jennifer’s arm around her.
**
“The Colonel was pretty worried about you,” Jennifer says, recovering from her ‘mild case of shock, yeah, duh, Ben, thanks’ in a Daedalus infirmary cot. Wide, thick windows look out onto a familiar Terran skyscape. Sunlight illuminates the Asgard grays that make up the spaceship’s floor and walls. It’s not yet 9:00 a.m.
“Oh?” Teyla is pale in the next bed, drooping and looking every bit as beat up as she is, slowly turning the color of berry jam all over.
“He looked worried anyway,” Jennifer says lightly, since the right word is actually terrified and me too, “even before the cursing made it more obvious.”
“Many people find John difficult to read,” Teyla says vaguely, her eyes are half-closed.
“That’s just because they’ve never had a heart monitor hooked up to him at the same time,” Jennifer says and rolls out of bed. She’s Teyla’s doctor. She knows that Teyla’s right side is in the best shape and also that Teyla is 5’4” and 140 lbs; she doesn’t take up a lot of space.
Teyla laughs, a rich, clear sound. Her torso moves where Jennifer’s crawling under the blanket and pressing up against her, hard muscle except for the parts that aren’t. Jennifer’s stomach tightens.
She’s always liked guys who looked like they could throw her across the room, and it’s suddenly apparent that the preference comes without a gender bias. Any second now, Jennifer’s grandmother is going to pop out of a doorway and say, “It’s just a phase, Jenny-penny,” with more understanding than Jennifer really wanted to know about her grandma’s love life.
Softly, Teyla’s hand moves over Jennifer’s hair, bloody dangerous knuckles bandaged neat and white. Jennifer rests her cheek against a spot clear of bruises just above the swell of Teyla’s breast. She remembers the team bingo card Sheppard thinks she’s got, but Jennifer figures she’ll never win anything on it. She’s not really on the look out for anymore squares after this one.
Original APOD prompt.