Linnaeus Says So, by halotolerant, (Animal Challenge)
Title: Linnaeus Says So
Pairing: Rodney/Teyla aka McKeyla
Rating: hardish PG-13
Notes:
'Mr Gensen, who had hair so blonde it was almost blinding, nodded at Rodney: “They do say,” he said genially, “that the mulatto, such as your girl, are the best of the slave races'
- - -
There were traffic noises outside the window - Rodney still hadn’t really gotten used to that. Even after four months on this Earth he couldn’t learn to expect noise at night.
Traffic noises, bird noises. Other noises, too, let’s be honest. Her noises.
He’d gone to bed at ten, exhausted but with his presentation complete, and then just lain there listening, hour after hour, willing her to finish up and get some sleep herself.
There was no way he could go in there and tell her what to do. Not even slightly. Not the way things were.
At two in the morning he could still hear her. Odd how loud noises could seem at night. Rhythmical scrubbing, not fast or angry, just repetitive. Teyla was the kind of person, he had realised at the beginning of all this, who if the tin said ‘leave for three hours then scrub vigorously for 30 minutes with a wet brush’ would actually *do* that, instead of - oh, say, applying twice as much, leaving it half the time and then throwing on some water.
If cleaning products wouldn’t obey simple math then they shouldn’t be given to the genius-in-the-street. He’d told Mrs Sanderson so when the ceiling of the flat below caved in, back home, on Earth.
His Earth. The Earth.
Not this one.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh - the brush sounded like breathing.
He got up almost before he knew he was going to, knocking her collar control off its bedside stand with a thud, and padded across the hallway to the open-plan Kitchen/Lounge.
Teyla was on her knees, leaning forward to scrub at the tiles. In the whole room she had only left one light on, the angle-poise anchored near the stove. Its thin, white beam illuminated a few tiles at a time, terracotta gleaming, slick and wet and her dark shadow across it.
“You think you have to finish all of this? Tonight?” he asked, from the doorway.
She must have heard the door, or seen the corridor light creep into the room, either way she didn’t turn, didn’t flinch:
“They come tomorrow” she said, “and if this is not well-done they will expect to see the remedying of it. They must find nothing to raise suspicion about your character, not after what happened at Christmas, which I am sure they will have found out about.” She pressed harder on the floor, bubbles furiously welling up, “We have to get away from here, there is no room for error.”
“You could at least…” Rodney ran a hand through his hair - he had thought there was a silent agreement never to mention the events of last Christmas, memories were temporarily confusing him. “You could at least have asked me to help out.”
“You have to be alert tomorrow, not I. You must convince them to give you the access to the research facility.”
“Teyla, I…”
She turned her face round, craning her neck from her low position. Her skin was flushed and shiny with sweat, her hair escaping the kerchief and grazing the smooth plastic of her electric collar. She looked tired and pissed off.
“Go back to sleep” she said, “we both know that here this is my job.”
Despite her tone he took a step forward, but she raised the hand with the brush and scowled. “Do not think that just because it is night and the camera is off that we are safe! Do you not fear that the people over the road are watching us? We have no proper curtains, or have you failed to notice? What if some person over there sees you labouring alongside me and calls the police? If you make one mistake we shall never escape!”
Her tone was the anger of desperation, exasperation. Rodney felt a kind of chill running down his arms, an immobilising lowness, because he knew she was right and she was clever and she should not be cleaning his bloody kitchen floor.
And that, frankly, was more than he ever expected he’d say about another human being.
She had turned away from him, and was scrubbing again.
He padded back to his bedroom, to lie and stare at his ceiling, the scrubbing brush embarrassingly loud in the silence.
- - -
It was late in the next morning that Rodney walked across his spotless kitchen floor to get the sandwiches and salad. Behind him, his ‘guests’ were chatting happily about the future projects, which of *course* they would fund and grant access for, Doctor, gladly, never seen work like yours, absolutely amazing, so many applications.
His back was to them now, and he could bite his lip.
A click and then gentle whir signalled the start of the camera attached to the street-lamp outside. Every two and a half hours between six am and nine pm it came on for six minutes, and rotated slowly, filming with a very accurate infra-red the movements of the street. It spent approximately fifty-eight seconds ‘seeing’ this flat
Rodney called it, internally, evil R2D2.
Well, all it was going to get this time was him opening the expensive icebox (gotta love writing your own credit balance, particularly when this Earth had also gotten around to HDTV), and finding the sandwiches, half of them pastrami, half low-fat-mayo and egg with cress.
Perfect. And Teyla didn’t even know two-thirds of those words until four months ago. He thought of her now, battling through the grocery shopping, which he knew she hated more than anything else. If doing it himself had meant anything less than discovery it would have been a relief to help her, but it could not be.
“Doctor, this place is delightful, I heard from Sven down at the Animal Control Bureau that you had a handy little mule at work here, and I believe it now. All very…festive.”
“Sorry?” Rodney turned, holding the tray. He couldn’t really process what he’d heard. This was Mr Cowright. This man owned half the Institute for Modern Agricultural Research.
He got on with this man.
Mr Cowright smiled and gestured at the neat sofas and tables, the clean surfaces, the polished parquet visible either side of well-vacuumed rugs. The other visitor, a Mr Gensen, who had hair so blonde it was almost blinding, nodded at Rodney: “They do say,” he said, genially, “that the mulattos, such as your girl, are the best of the slave races, since they combine the Negro’s basic servility with a modicum of the white man’s intelligence. I have always had my doubts, however, as how much intelligence could possibly pass from a white father so foolish as to get a coon in pup?”
Rodney clenched and unclenched his fists, digging in his nails, focussing on not yelling, on the fact that right now she needed a solution way more than a knight in shining armour.
- - -
In the cramped, musty-smelling screen-room at the Animal Control Centre, Teyla spotted Ronon from the other side of a seating rank. Trying to keep her expression neutral she turned purposefully to the right and moved as if to her allotted seat, ending in the middle of row J, next to him.
The seats were rough laminate, splintering into the backs of the legs and hard on the spine. They were stained in ways that, over four months, she had grown familiar with. The patching on the left sides of rows B and C was her blood, the day in February she’d tried to step in to help a terrified woman - girl, really, ‘Lauren’ - who’d fallen asleep during the screening and was getting the worse for it. They smiled at each other, sometimes, now and Teyla longed to be able to get the girl for just a few hours, teach her some martial arts, or at least how to duck better and fake injuries from avoided blows.
Now a bored handler, cattle prod dangling half-obscenely from his belt, mounted the small stage in front of the projection-screen. He held the battered rule card out and read in a monotone:
No sideways eye movement.
No talking.
No exchanging of notes.
All physical contact is entirely forbidden.
It all washed over her in a familiar wave of outrage and exhaustion. She kept her eyes to the front, focussing into the middle distance like they’d been taught in Lesson One. You couldn’t let your neck slump, either, not in these collars.
At the same time, though, her hand found Ronon’s. No holding - that would have been impossible - just a gentle pressure, her little finger to his thumb. She could feel him resisting the urge to move it, to stroke.
“McKay?” he breathed out, almost silently, as the projector clanked.
She shook her head, almost imperceptibly, feeling a pang as if with betrayal that annoyed her.
He took his hand away and wiped at his mouth in frustration.
Thwack! She heard the sound just before the pain blossomed. It bolted down her arm and her shoulder rang with it like a bell still vibrating. The truncheon came down again, but stopped near her face:
“No talking!” said a voice that smelt like mustard and sugar-drinks and million other things that meant Earth.
She felt more than saw Ronon fight the urge to grab the handler. It would have been no use at all - at one press of the panic button on the wall the handler could activate every person’s collar in the room, and no one needed pain like that.
The film rolled: today “Your Master, Your Priority”. Previous episodes had included “Stupid Sambo Runs Away” and, a perennial favourite, “The Collar”.
McKay had asked, early on, what the films were about and she’d just searched for words for long minutes before retreating from the room, too humiliated to speak.
He hadn’t ever said anything else about it.
- - -
Teyla took the Chattels’ Bus (graffiti had rendered this ‘Cattle’s Bus’), back to the apartment from the stop outside the local AC Centre. The way to and from this bus stop was fenced in with barbed wire, as if the Authorities had realised that, however instructional their films might be intended to be, they were more likely to stir thoughts of escape than anything else.
She could see it around her. Subdued but seething, fifty-four other people restless in their chains, literal and otherwise. Some women huddled together and muttered about aches and pains, men postured and posed and knocked each other about. Lauren was sitting huddled in a corner of the filthy shelter, pawing constantly at a rash where her collar was rubbing, and wouldn’t make eye contact.
“How are you faring?” she could now ask Ronon, quietly.
Something indecipherable flitted across his face for a moment. “Good” he said, and folded his arms across his chest. He was so young, she forgot sometimes.
Ronon never said anything about Sheppard’s way of handling the situation, not today, not ever. Perhaps they were making it work, perhaps they fought daily, she couldn’t know. For certain if Ronon had been paired with McKay instead they’d have killed each other by now, and that - supposedly - should make her feel better about it’s consequence; that McKay was now her Master.
When her bus arrived it contained fifty-five or so passengers already, and she had to push just to get standing space. She usually watched from the window as Ronon’s figure disappeared around the corner, but even that was impossible today. The bus smelt of cheap meat, cheap plastic shoes and sharp alcohol. It was like the bars on the planet Geurdo, a place she’d visited in her early days as Leader of Athos and had had to fight her way out of.
She looked around. A long time ago, months before when she had first taken this ride she’d felt a wish to speak, to say “I have seen the stars. I have fought the demons and the men and I have won. Where I come from I was a leader and will be again, and no one called me anything but my name, except in praise of me.”
Now she felt blank. They taught you that. Blank and empty and nameless.
Inside herself she’d even tried to draw out the Wraith, the tiny part of her that was almost unkillable. Nothing. This was not Pegasus, this was Earth, and it seemed to drain her away.
The fact that this was not Earth, or at least, not the same Earth, not the expected one, was something McKay was continually anxious to impress on her. Often when the news was on (he watching from the armchair, meal on a tray and she respectful metres behind, on a stool) he would talk about what building or person or country existed on the ‘real’ Earth, (‘my’ Earth, he said, like a Lord) instead of the one shown.
She knew objectively that this was the case, but found it a little hard to care. She had to get away, soon. He must find a way, quickly, or something would tip over inside her and that little simmering Wraith-essence buried in her DNA would crawl out and take over.
Like when she was fifteen, father just dead, mocked by her peers, struggling to retain leadership and power. They’d made her feel so crazy that for a while she really had been, and before she had learnt better she’d killed, more than once.
She grimaced and took a deep breath. If she went back there, she wouldn’t be human any more, and they’d have won.
- - -
Rodney, having finished the floor as best he could (and she would notice, he just knew it, and she would clean again, and again), sat dejectedly in front of their huge TV.
No, *his* huge TV.
Call a spade a spade, why not?
See this? This was why he hated relationships…of, like, any kind. And Earth. And Americans. And people other than those whose job it was to feed him and/or obey his commands.
Except, hey, that was Teyla’s job now wasn’t it? And wasn’t that a barrel of laughs?
He could see Sheppard’s face in his mind’s eye, when they’d realised the four of them were stranded in this reality, and what that meant. Sheppard’s look at him, that weird blind faith that Rodney would, could, must find a way for them to get away again.
He always knew having a perfect track record would bite him in the ass one day.
Separating had seemed logical at the time. So Rodney had hacked into a childishly simple computer system and given them all the right documents and access to cash, and if one of them was questioned about, say, *not being from this galaxy or this reality*, then at least two others would be safe.
And now there was only silence from Sheppard and Ronon, and the situation with Teyla was reaching break-point.
Teyla Emmagen, he was fairly sure, had never *had* to clean anything. She was the Chief’s daughter, the Leader, the Ambassador. She was Xena of Atlantis, the girl so out of everyone’s league that (except for Sheppard and Ronon) people had begun to stop thinking of her as a girl at all.
And she was his slave.
He’d read a couple of books (okay, watched films) with that vague kind of concept and it had always, objectively, seemed fairly cool. In fact if someone had used the phrase ‘Alien Princess Slave’ to him a year ago he’d have been first in the queue to sign up. Problem was, ‘slaves’ in those stories had rather different…priorities. The sort of ‘Slave 4 U’ concept of a woman so overpowered by his personal magnetism that she’d do anything for him had seemed reasonable and attractive, but then there was this place.
A world where Abolition had never happened. Where the Confederacy had won the American Civil War and had respected Nazi racial policy so much as to allow the unrestrained takeover of Europe in the 40s. Here Africa was a farm to breed up stock, and children’s textbooks of Biology were prefaced with a ‘Tree of Existence’ showing the White Man (Homo sapiens) at the pinnacle, with the ‘Negro or Pan Negris’ alongside a Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) in the ‘High Apes’ branch. Later on little labelled diagrams explained why this was so - in this world Phrenology was the science of Kings.
Rodney had always lived by little labelled diagrams. By Science. He had always believed that in science there was truth, and in mathematics there were no lies. Where people were difficult, complex and ambiguous there was a pure clarity to science.
And here, in a world where science had become the only religion, he was issued a government-standard cattle-prod to control his property; a woman he’d never seen as anything but out of his reach.
It made his stomach hurt.
There was the sound of the door opening, and a seep of cold air from the corridor. Twisting in his chair he saw her, flushed pink with cold, wrapped in an old patched blue coat and with that hideous Gone-With-The-Wind headscarf.
He felt an urge to rise and hold his warm hands to her face, even for the seconds before she’d be offended by it.
“I back, Massa,” she said, pulling off her gloves by the finger-tips, “you wan’ anything befo’ supper?”
“That isn’t funny.”
“Do not you think so? Perhaps if you have had it taught to you ten times you will change your mind.”
“Teyla…”
“If you tell me” she said, through clenched teeth, “that you are sorry, I think I will scream. Just…just watch the TV. Do you want a drink? Coffee?”
“Coffee would be very nice” he said, helplessly.
“Coffee, then.” She wouldn’t meet his gaze, maybe was afraid to see what she had done.
- - -
Teyla moved around the kitchen unit with the fluid ease of familiarity. Sixteen long weeks in the apartment translated into one hell of a lot of cups of coffee (two spoons instant, one sugar-lump of Demerara, one Splenda and milk in before the water). She’d seen Rodney McKay work miracles on less, and for the first month or so tending to his needs had been…not easy, but bearable. She was giving him the time to figure out how to get them out of this nightmare, and she had scarcely begrudged it.
And the apartment wasn’t so bad a place to live. Rodney had bought it on sight, the first he’d (they’d) looked at, but she realised now that the accommodations for slave and master were excellent for the price. Its price had been brought down by the amount of time the camera spent looking at it - not that anyone had explicitly said as much.
For the cameras, and to speed his work she’d just…done her job that was a life-sentence, not an employment. She’d cleaned, cooked and tidied as best she could and taken the abuse in the street, the hideousness of the market-place, the film screenings and the bus rides. She’d let it mill around her, focussing on getting through the day, getting out of it all.
Towards the end of her father’s life she’d cared for him. She had no snobbery about chores.
Then, somehow, it had started going wrong. No miracle had come, only Rodney’s realisation that he needed access to one of the most prestigious Labs in the country, and the subsequent fabrication of a project to gain access with. And still she had worked, and still he had floundered for things to say to her, obviously embarrassed of his world and his skin.
And she didn’t know what to say. What to do. What to think. She just wanted to get away and he just kept…not letting her. Every day she saw humans being beaten, humiliated and enslaved and she was doing nothing. He was doing nothing.
She hated him.
No. She didn’t. It was worse than that. She hated the distance between them. She hated living in his pocket and feeling alone.
Here she stood in a kitchen that cost more than she did, stirring up a hot drink for her legal owner, a man she had just been starting to like and yet hardly knew.
She picked up the cup (‘Mammy Bea’s Fine Ground Coffee’ it said on the side, with a picture of a fat, ‘black’ woman in an apron) and carried it over to him, one hand underneath to catch the spills. She remembered when they got that cup, free with the coffee, two days after Christmas.
Which was best forgotten, really. She’d mentioned it the day before, more to scare him than anything else, and had been unprepared for what it would do to her own equilibrium.
Her skin prickled at the memory. She felt blood rise spear-sharp to her face. She’d been an idiot, then. Sentimental fool, unprepared for the consequences of her actions.
Rodney stood up to take the mug from her and smiled, hopefully: “I got the job, with Cowright and the others. Of course I always get the jobs I go for but they, um, they appreciated the apartment and I’m sure it helped, you know, made it very easy to say yes.”
Teyla let the words wash over her, expecting relief, motivation, happiness. But instead she felt like she was wearing thin enough to snap, like something had just jerked her tauter and tenser than ever.
He was so…unchanged. He was still, after all this time, inexpressibly Rodney McKay. His name hadn’t disappeared.
Bile welled up in her throat: “Oh, so shall I spend another few months expecting a breakthrough any day then?” she said, with a horrible overdone sarcasm that made her wince at her own cruelty; “I suppose you did not tell this man how dry your flow has been without others to stroke your ego?” She could feel her heart racing with anger - maybe not at him, but that only made it worse.
He flinched, and when he looked up again she wanted so much to say sorry, somehow, somehow that wouldn’t cede even an inch of ground.
“I *hate* this place” she said, loudly, instead, turning and kicking the chair so hard that the whole room shivered and flecks of his coffee spilt onto the carpet.
On moving to get her cleaning cloth she had to twist in astonished outrage as she realised he had grabbed her arm.
“You’re not cleaning anything else!” he half-shouted, exasperated, “You don’t deserve this, I tell you, I…”
“Do not tell me what to do” she hissed back, pushing against him to shove him away. He didn’t move.
“You’re not an animal, Teyla” he said, softly, “maybe you can stand pretending it but did it maybe occur to you that I can’t stand to watch?”
He was looking straight at her, blue eyes clear and piercing and close. Dangerous. Caring.
“Teyla. Teyla…” he said again, like he knew that name was what she needed to hear.
For a second, two, three, they were frozen. A pulse raced in his neck, he licked his lips, nervous. “Teyla.”
And she growled in deep, dark frustration before folding and collapsing somehow to the floor next to him, weeping and reaching out blindly for his arms. He drew her gently up and in, holding her close, patting awkwardly a while before relaxing, resting his weight into hers.
They clung with the desperation of people who are still angry with each other, and once the initial appetite for contact faded they drew back awkwardly, smearing the tears and mucus across their faces with the backs of their hands like children.
At some point the sun had set. The apartment was dark and thank goodness for it - the curtains were open and, seeing them, she gasped and ran to close them.
He was sitting on the floor, one hand toying with the edge of the carpet.
“I do want to, desperately want to, get you out of here” he said, looking at the floor. “I only wish I could.”
“It has to be soon” she replied, leaning back on the window frame for support. “They told us today at the centre…they, um….” She took a long, clear breath, rolled her eyes up and made herself tell him: “They have been giving us prior notice of the next compulsory breeding programme.”
- - -
“You should attend the hospital” she said, bandaging the hand he’d punched the wall with.
“I’m working tonight. Reverse engineering a wormhole isn’t impossible but the math takes one hell of a long time and I want to have as much done as possible before I hit the Lab.”
“…I could help” she said, finally, suddenly becoming aware that she was just sitting, holding his hand, maybe just because she couldn’t hold Ronon’s earlier.
Rodney smiled, causing her to realise that he almost never did: “You have to sleep sometime.”
She shrugged. “There is much coffee.”
- - -
Rodney awoke on the couch. This was not unusual.
What was, was the fact that he’d been covered with a blanket and his laptop taken off his stomach and placed on a table nearby. There was a glass of water by it. Sunlight streamed in the windows and felt delicious on his skin.
Teyla....he looked around the room at the diagrams and equations strewn over the floor - she was intelligent, he’d discovered over the past few days (or, more accurately, the camera-free nights), good even by Atlantis physics department standards, which, whilst lower than he felt they ought to be he was capable of realising were pretty damn fantastic on a global scale.
Maybe she was in the next room making his bed - he’d convinced her to go and sleep there at about four in the morning last night (or should that be this morning?), knowing that his mattress was softer and warmer than the chattel-grade she had.
It was something he’d long wanted to suggest, and only recently did it feel possible, and not somehow like an insult.
After all, she’d impressed him and he’d let it show, which was massively counter-intuitive for him even on a good day.
“You never told me you knew math” he’d said on the first night of figuring, bemusedly scanning her rows of equations.
“How did you believe I traded?”
“Not ‘I have three cows, you have five sheep’ math, *real* math.”
Teyla had ducked her head down, smiling at him - he’d *missed* that: “You need ‘real’ math to trade in Pegasus - if you intend to be any good at it, at least. You cannot simply dial something on the Gate and hope the planet has not become a volcanic wasteland since it gained an address. It is possible to predict the type of planet one will reach using equations such as these.”
He’d whistled and gone back to his own page for a while until he’d become aware she was motionless, staring at him.
“On your Earth…” she said, when he met her eyes, “On your Earth do they allow education of equal merit to people of all genders and…and ‘colours’?”
“Yes, of course” he’d said, without thinking, mind busy imagining the kind of indignities she must have seen in the populations she met here.
“Then why,” she had replied kindly, “are almost all the people in your team white men?”
Over the following nights Teyla had had more questions, and he’d found fewer and fewer answers. But, then, she’d started talking about her people, her ways, her homes. In the dark, in the safety of night and the drawn curtains and the steam from the coffee pot, they’d been finding their way back to the tentative beginnings of friendship they’d had on Atlantis just before all this happened.
They were going to get out of here, they were all going to get out of here and back to Atlantis, or at least to the right Earth and then…well, they’d heal, somehow. Try and forget this place, act like it hadn’t changed anything.
There was a thud from the bedroom, Teyla dropping something. He sat up, about to call out.
She ran into the room, clutching the remote from the bedroom TV. Her expression scared him and when he asked what the matter was she just gazed wide-eyed in shock for a second then tried to turn on the TV next to him, threw down the wrong remote, went to the set itself and switched it on before falling back to the floor as the picture came up.
Fox News. ‘Degenerates!’ screamed the headline at the top of the screen, and scrolling over the line at the bottom: ‘Sick Master/Slave Love Nest Discovered in Brooklyn’
The screen showed a crowd of handlers and police pulling apart two men. The taller, black man was evidently being repeatedly shocked through his collar and still he was straining away, trying to get to the other, who had been struck up the back of the head with a pistol butt and lay prone on the ground.
The camera zoomed in obscenely, catching the first drops of blood as they careered down Sheppard’s face.
- - -
“Oh this is just typical isn’t it? Trust them to have absolutely no control over themselves! It’s all those muscles, you know, too many pheromones!” Rodney paced up and down, gesticulating, practically frothing at the mouth. “Wormholes I can do, force fields I can do, what I cannot do is bloody well stage a prison break for those two idiots!”
She moved up to him, took a sideways glance at the camera and risked laying a hand on his arm. “I know. I am worried too. And, I admit, a little surprised.”
“What John Sheppard wants, John Sheppard usually gets. Except with you, I noticed.”
“And you. I noticed too.”
He ducked his head, blinked, coughed. “You’ve been proved right, of course. I mean that the surveillance must be damn good to catch them out, because, you know, they’re not idiots…not at all the ninja stuff anyway.”
Then his gaze came up, and suddenly they were very close. “They’ll - the authorities - I guess they really will know about Christmas.”
She swallowed, wondering when she’d become unable to look at his eyes without the bottom of her stomach disappearing. “You just…it was just one gift. Masters can bestow gifts on slaves, it does happen.”
“But then you said thank-you.”
“I was grateful.”
“I figured.”
“And I was still forgetting the camera, then. I suppose I am not so proficient at the ‘ninja stuff.” She took a breath, looking away from his smile, “And, you know, Masters do…take advantage. It is almost expected. They might see it like that.”
“Except that *you* kissed *me*.”
His breath was warm, near her mouth, nothing made sense, reality was gone, his eyes searched her face, she felt a twisting, tightening between her legs and everything unfurled in her mind like a comet trail, events from the moment they met right till this second that - it seemed now - could never lead anywhere else. It came to her with deep clarity that all this time she hadn’t been mad at him for being Master, or being who he was, or for any other reason. She hadn’t been mad that she’d had to be with him rather than Sheppard. She’d been mad because he hadn’t ever suggested he wanted to be around her. Just like back on Atlantis, hiding in his Labs, avoiding all non-scientists save Sheppard and women in general.
She hadn’t suspected that he’d been afraid of…well, of *this*.
She hadn’t realised until now that he felt she had power over him.
The moment held, maybe two, three seconds and then he frowned and stepped back, right back, holding up his hands as if in defeat:
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
Teyla wasn’t sure what he meant, not sure he knew either.
Trying to speak, she found her mouth was dry, swallowed and started again. Her skin still tingled, her breath coming oddly.
“We can run. We can hide.”
“How? Where?”
“There is an ‘underground railroad’. To Canada” she smiled a little. “Slaves often escape through it, and sometimes their sympathisers. We could get away, get some money, weapons…something, find some way to rescue them. You always find a way.”
“How on earth do you know about that?”
“Educational videos” she grinned widely now. “Amazing what you can learn when people are telling you what not to do.”
“I don’t suppose you know any specific contacts?”
“Making contacts is what I do, Rodney. Leave that part to me.”
“You know, you even talk more like you’re from Earth now!”
“From this Earth, you mean?”
He blinked and gave a little, bitter laugh: “Maybe there isn’t so much of a difference. You know, I never fit in, really, on Earth, back on that Earth. Atlantis felt like home straight away. And now this place…with you…it…” and he trailed off, blushing and looking away. “It didn’t sit well” he continued, “the thought of going to work in that Lab, sharing their jokes, their pastimes, their…punishments. The thought of just escaping, leaving all this here.” He took a deep breath, the kind that shakes the shoulders: “The thought of all those wrong textbooks just carrying on and printing and printing…”
His words broke across her understanding like sunshine and Teyla walked slowly across the floor to him, then reached out, took his hand and raised it to her lips and kissed it, as her people a million million light years and a shifted universe away did when they sealed a bargain that was unbreakable.
“We will save our friends” she said, a promise. “And then our acquaintances and then we will save this planet. We have done more with less before.”
Rodney smiled, so broadly, so wonderfully that she wanted to kiss properly right then and there. “But first” he said, “I am going to take you into the bedroom, and then I am going to get that collar off you.”
And he did.
- - -
(Inspired by the mock documentary 'CSA: Confederate States of America' and arguably a crossover, though you do not need to see that to understand this story)
Pairing: Rodney/Teyla aka McKeyla
Rating: hardish PG-13
Notes:
'Mr Gensen, who had hair so blonde it was almost blinding, nodded at Rodney: “They do say,” he said genially, “that the mulatto, such as your girl, are the best of the slave races'
- - -
There were traffic noises outside the window - Rodney still hadn’t really gotten used to that. Even after four months on this Earth he couldn’t learn to expect noise at night.
Traffic noises, bird noises. Other noises, too, let’s be honest. Her noises.
He’d gone to bed at ten, exhausted but with his presentation complete, and then just lain there listening, hour after hour, willing her to finish up and get some sleep herself.
There was no way he could go in there and tell her what to do. Not even slightly. Not the way things were.
At two in the morning he could still hear her. Odd how loud noises could seem at night. Rhythmical scrubbing, not fast or angry, just repetitive. Teyla was the kind of person, he had realised at the beginning of all this, who if the tin said ‘leave for three hours then scrub vigorously for 30 minutes with a wet brush’ would actually *do* that, instead of - oh, say, applying twice as much, leaving it half the time and then throwing on some water.
If cleaning products wouldn’t obey simple math then they shouldn’t be given to the genius-in-the-street. He’d told Mrs Sanderson so when the ceiling of the flat below caved in, back home, on Earth.
His Earth. The Earth.
Not this one.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh - the brush sounded like breathing.
He got up almost before he knew he was going to, knocking her collar control off its bedside stand with a thud, and padded across the hallway to the open-plan Kitchen/Lounge.
Teyla was on her knees, leaning forward to scrub at the tiles. In the whole room she had only left one light on, the angle-poise anchored near the stove. Its thin, white beam illuminated a few tiles at a time, terracotta gleaming, slick and wet and her dark shadow across it.
“You think you have to finish all of this? Tonight?” he asked, from the doorway.
She must have heard the door, or seen the corridor light creep into the room, either way she didn’t turn, didn’t flinch:
“They come tomorrow” she said, “and if this is not well-done they will expect to see the remedying of it. They must find nothing to raise suspicion about your character, not after what happened at Christmas, which I am sure they will have found out about.” She pressed harder on the floor, bubbles furiously welling up, “We have to get away from here, there is no room for error.”
“You could at least…” Rodney ran a hand through his hair - he had thought there was a silent agreement never to mention the events of last Christmas, memories were temporarily confusing him. “You could at least have asked me to help out.”
“You have to be alert tomorrow, not I. You must convince them to give you the access to the research facility.”
“Teyla, I…”
She turned her face round, craning her neck from her low position. Her skin was flushed and shiny with sweat, her hair escaping the kerchief and grazing the smooth plastic of her electric collar. She looked tired and pissed off.
“Go back to sleep” she said, “we both know that here this is my job.”
Despite her tone he took a step forward, but she raised the hand with the brush and scowled. “Do not think that just because it is night and the camera is off that we are safe! Do you not fear that the people over the road are watching us? We have no proper curtains, or have you failed to notice? What if some person over there sees you labouring alongside me and calls the police? If you make one mistake we shall never escape!”
Her tone was the anger of desperation, exasperation. Rodney felt a kind of chill running down his arms, an immobilising lowness, because he knew she was right and she was clever and she should not be cleaning his bloody kitchen floor.
And that, frankly, was more than he ever expected he’d say about another human being.
She had turned away from him, and was scrubbing again.
He padded back to his bedroom, to lie and stare at his ceiling, the scrubbing brush embarrassingly loud in the silence.
- - -
It was late in the next morning that Rodney walked across his spotless kitchen floor to get the sandwiches and salad. Behind him, his ‘guests’ were chatting happily about the future projects, which of *course* they would fund and grant access for, Doctor, gladly, never seen work like yours, absolutely amazing, so many applications.
His back was to them now, and he could bite his lip.
A click and then gentle whir signalled the start of the camera attached to the street-lamp outside. Every two and a half hours between six am and nine pm it came on for six minutes, and rotated slowly, filming with a very accurate infra-red the movements of the street. It spent approximately fifty-eight seconds ‘seeing’ this flat
Rodney called it, internally, evil R2D2.
Well, all it was going to get this time was him opening the expensive icebox (gotta love writing your own credit balance, particularly when this Earth had also gotten around to HDTV), and finding the sandwiches, half of them pastrami, half low-fat-mayo and egg with cress.
Perfect. And Teyla didn’t even know two-thirds of those words until four months ago. He thought of her now, battling through the grocery shopping, which he knew she hated more than anything else. If doing it himself had meant anything less than discovery it would have been a relief to help her, but it could not be.
“Doctor, this place is delightful, I heard from Sven down at the Animal Control Bureau that you had a handy little mule at work here, and I believe it now. All very…festive.”
“Sorry?” Rodney turned, holding the tray. He couldn’t really process what he’d heard. This was Mr Cowright. This man owned half the Institute for Modern Agricultural Research.
He got on with this man.
Mr Cowright smiled and gestured at the neat sofas and tables, the clean surfaces, the polished parquet visible either side of well-vacuumed rugs. The other visitor, a Mr Gensen, who had hair so blonde it was almost blinding, nodded at Rodney: “They do say,” he said, genially, “that the mulattos, such as your girl, are the best of the slave races, since they combine the Negro’s basic servility with a modicum of the white man’s intelligence. I have always had my doubts, however, as how much intelligence could possibly pass from a white father so foolish as to get a coon in pup?”
Rodney clenched and unclenched his fists, digging in his nails, focussing on not yelling, on the fact that right now she needed a solution way more than a knight in shining armour.
- - -
In the cramped, musty-smelling screen-room at the Animal Control Centre, Teyla spotted Ronon from the other side of a seating rank. Trying to keep her expression neutral she turned purposefully to the right and moved as if to her allotted seat, ending in the middle of row J, next to him.
The seats were rough laminate, splintering into the backs of the legs and hard on the spine. They were stained in ways that, over four months, she had grown familiar with. The patching on the left sides of rows B and C was her blood, the day in February she’d tried to step in to help a terrified woman - girl, really, ‘Lauren’ - who’d fallen asleep during the screening and was getting the worse for it. They smiled at each other, sometimes, now and Teyla longed to be able to get the girl for just a few hours, teach her some martial arts, or at least how to duck better and fake injuries from avoided blows.
Now a bored handler, cattle prod dangling half-obscenely from his belt, mounted the small stage in front of the projection-screen. He held the battered rule card out and read in a monotone:
No sideways eye movement.
No talking.
No exchanging of notes.
All physical contact is entirely forbidden.
It all washed over her in a familiar wave of outrage and exhaustion. She kept her eyes to the front, focussing into the middle distance like they’d been taught in Lesson One. You couldn’t let your neck slump, either, not in these collars.
At the same time, though, her hand found Ronon’s. No holding - that would have been impossible - just a gentle pressure, her little finger to his thumb. She could feel him resisting the urge to move it, to stroke.
“McKay?” he breathed out, almost silently, as the projector clanked.
She shook her head, almost imperceptibly, feeling a pang as if with betrayal that annoyed her.
He took his hand away and wiped at his mouth in frustration.
Thwack! She heard the sound just before the pain blossomed. It bolted down her arm and her shoulder rang with it like a bell still vibrating. The truncheon came down again, but stopped near her face:
“No talking!” said a voice that smelt like mustard and sugar-drinks and million other things that meant Earth.
She felt more than saw Ronon fight the urge to grab the handler. It would have been no use at all - at one press of the panic button on the wall the handler could activate every person’s collar in the room, and no one needed pain like that.
The film rolled: today “Your Master, Your Priority”. Previous episodes had included “Stupid Sambo Runs Away” and, a perennial favourite, “The Collar”.
McKay had asked, early on, what the films were about and she’d just searched for words for long minutes before retreating from the room, too humiliated to speak.
He hadn’t ever said anything else about it.
- - -
Teyla took the Chattels’ Bus (graffiti had rendered this ‘Cattle’s Bus’), back to the apartment from the stop outside the local AC Centre. The way to and from this bus stop was fenced in with barbed wire, as if the Authorities had realised that, however instructional their films might be intended to be, they were more likely to stir thoughts of escape than anything else.
She could see it around her. Subdued but seething, fifty-four other people restless in their chains, literal and otherwise. Some women huddled together and muttered about aches and pains, men postured and posed and knocked each other about. Lauren was sitting huddled in a corner of the filthy shelter, pawing constantly at a rash where her collar was rubbing, and wouldn’t make eye contact.
“How are you faring?” she could now ask Ronon, quietly.
Something indecipherable flitted across his face for a moment. “Good” he said, and folded his arms across his chest. He was so young, she forgot sometimes.
Ronon never said anything about Sheppard’s way of handling the situation, not today, not ever. Perhaps they were making it work, perhaps they fought daily, she couldn’t know. For certain if Ronon had been paired with McKay instead they’d have killed each other by now, and that - supposedly - should make her feel better about it’s consequence; that McKay was now her Master.
When her bus arrived it contained fifty-five or so passengers already, and she had to push just to get standing space. She usually watched from the window as Ronon’s figure disappeared around the corner, but even that was impossible today. The bus smelt of cheap meat, cheap plastic shoes and sharp alcohol. It was like the bars on the planet Geurdo, a place she’d visited in her early days as Leader of Athos and had had to fight her way out of.
She looked around. A long time ago, months before when she had first taken this ride she’d felt a wish to speak, to say “I have seen the stars. I have fought the demons and the men and I have won. Where I come from I was a leader and will be again, and no one called me anything but my name, except in praise of me.”
Now she felt blank. They taught you that. Blank and empty and nameless.
Inside herself she’d even tried to draw out the Wraith, the tiny part of her that was almost unkillable. Nothing. This was not Pegasus, this was Earth, and it seemed to drain her away.
The fact that this was not Earth, or at least, not the same Earth, not the expected one, was something McKay was continually anxious to impress on her. Often when the news was on (he watching from the armchair, meal on a tray and she respectful metres behind, on a stool) he would talk about what building or person or country existed on the ‘real’ Earth, (‘my’ Earth, he said, like a Lord) instead of the one shown.
She knew objectively that this was the case, but found it a little hard to care. She had to get away, soon. He must find a way, quickly, or something would tip over inside her and that little simmering Wraith-essence buried in her DNA would crawl out and take over.
Like when she was fifteen, father just dead, mocked by her peers, struggling to retain leadership and power. They’d made her feel so crazy that for a while she really had been, and before she had learnt better she’d killed, more than once.
She grimaced and took a deep breath. If she went back there, she wouldn’t be human any more, and they’d have won.
- - -
Rodney, having finished the floor as best he could (and she would notice, he just knew it, and she would clean again, and again), sat dejectedly in front of their huge TV.
No, *his* huge TV.
Call a spade a spade, why not?
See this? This was why he hated relationships…of, like, any kind. And Earth. And Americans. And people other than those whose job it was to feed him and/or obey his commands.
Except, hey, that was Teyla’s job now wasn’t it? And wasn’t that a barrel of laughs?
He could see Sheppard’s face in his mind’s eye, when they’d realised the four of them were stranded in this reality, and what that meant. Sheppard’s look at him, that weird blind faith that Rodney would, could, must find a way for them to get away again.
He always knew having a perfect track record would bite him in the ass one day.
Separating had seemed logical at the time. So Rodney had hacked into a childishly simple computer system and given them all the right documents and access to cash, and if one of them was questioned about, say, *not being from this galaxy or this reality*, then at least two others would be safe.
And now there was only silence from Sheppard and Ronon, and the situation with Teyla was reaching break-point.
Teyla Emmagen, he was fairly sure, had never *had* to clean anything. She was the Chief’s daughter, the Leader, the Ambassador. She was Xena of Atlantis, the girl so out of everyone’s league that (except for Sheppard and Ronon) people had begun to stop thinking of her as a girl at all.
And she was his slave.
He’d read a couple of books (okay, watched films) with that vague kind of concept and it had always, objectively, seemed fairly cool. In fact if someone had used the phrase ‘Alien Princess Slave’ to him a year ago he’d have been first in the queue to sign up. Problem was, ‘slaves’ in those stories had rather different…priorities. The sort of ‘Slave 4 U’ concept of a woman so overpowered by his personal magnetism that she’d do anything for him had seemed reasonable and attractive, but then there was this place.
A world where Abolition had never happened. Where the Confederacy had won the American Civil War and had respected Nazi racial policy so much as to allow the unrestrained takeover of Europe in the 40s. Here Africa was a farm to breed up stock, and children’s textbooks of Biology were prefaced with a ‘Tree of Existence’ showing the White Man (Homo sapiens) at the pinnacle, with the ‘Negro or Pan Negris’ alongside a Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) in the ‘High Apes’ branch. Later on little labelled diagrams explained why this was so - in this world Phrenology was the science of Kings.
Rodney had always lived by little labelled diagrams. By Science. He had always believed that in science there was truth, and in mathematics there were no lies. Where people were difficult, complex and ambiguous there was a pure clarity to science.
And here, in a world where science had become the only religion, he was issued a government-standard cattle-prod to control his property; a woman he’d never seen as anything but out of his reach.
It made his stomach hurt.
There was the sound of the door opening, and a seep of cold air from the corridor. Twisting in his chair he saw her, flushed pink with cold, wrapped in an old patched blue coat and with that hideous Gone-With-The-Wind headscarf.
He felt an urge to rise and hold his warm hands to her face, even for the seconds before she’d be offended by it.
“I back, Massa,” she said, pulling off her gloves by the finger-tips, “you wan’ anything befo’ supper?”
“That isn’t funny.”
“Do not you think so? Perhaps if you have had it taught to you ten times you will change your mind.”
“Teyla…”
“If you tell me” she said, through clenched teeth, “that you are sorry, I think I will scream. Just…just watch the TV. Do you want a drink? Coffee?”
“Coffee would be very nice” he said, helplessly.
“Coffee, then.” She wouldn’t meet his gaze, maybe was afraid to see what she had done.
- - -
Teyla moved around the kitchen unit with the fluid ease of familiarity. Sixteen long weeks in the apartment translated into one hell of a lot of cups of coffee (two spoons instant, one sugar-lump of Demerara, one Splenda and milk in before the water). She’d seen Rodney McKay work miracles on less, and for the first month or so tending to his needs had been…not easy, but bearable. She was giving him the time to figure out how to get them out of this nightmare, and she had scarcely begrudged it.
And the apartment wasn’t so bad a place to live. Rodney had bought it on sight, the first he’d (they’d) looked at, but she realised now that the accommodations for slave and master were excellent for the price. Its price had been brought down by the amount of time the camera spent looking at it - not that anyone had explicitly said as much.
For the cameras, and to speed his work she’d just…done her job that was a life-sentence, not an employment. She’d cleaned, cooked and tidied as best she could and taken the abuse in the street, the hideousness of the market-place, the film screenings and the bus rides. She’d let it mill around her, focussing on getting through the day, getting out of it all.
Towards the end of her father’s life she’d cared for him. She had no snobbery about chores.
Then, somehow, it had started going wrong. No miracle had come, only Rodney’s realisation that he needed access to one of the most prestigious Labs in the country, and the subsequent fabrication of a project to gain access with. And still she had worked, and still he had floundered for things to say to her, obviously embarrassed of his world and his skin.
And she didn’t know what to say. What to do. What to think. She just wanted to get away and he just kept…not letting her. Every day she saw humans being beaten, humiliated and enslaved and she was doing nothing. He was doing nothing.
She hated him.
No. She didn’t. It was worse than that. She hated the distance between them. She hated living in his pocket and feeling alone.
Here she stood in a kitchen that cost more than she did, stirring up a hot drink for her legal owner, a man she had just been starting to like and yet hardly knew.
She picked up the cup (‘Mammy Bea’s Fine Ground Coffee’ it said on the side, with a picture of a fat, ‘black’ woman in an apron) and carried it over to him, one hand underneath to catch the spills. She remembered when they got that cup, free with the coffee, two days after Christmas.
Which was best forgotten, really. She’d mentioned it the day before, more to scare him than anything else, and had been unprepared for what it would do to her own equilibrium.
Her skin prickled at the memory. She felt blood rise spear-sharp to her face. She’d been an idiot, then. Sentimental fool, unprepared for the consequences of her actions.
Rodney stood up to take the mug from her and smiled, hopefully: “I got the job, with Cowright and the others. Of course I always get the jobs I go for but they, um, they appreciated the apartment and I’m sure it helped, you know, made it very easy to say yes.”
Teyla let the words wash over her, expecting relief, motivation, happiness. But instead she felt like she was wearing thin enough to snap, like something had just jerked her tauter and tenser than ever.
He was so…unchanged. He was still, after all this time, inexpressibly Rodney McKay. His name hadn’t disappeared.
Bile welled up in her throat: “Oh, so shall I spend another few months expecting a breakthrough any day then?” she said, with a horrible overdone sarcasm that made her wince at her own cruelty; “I suppose you did not tell this man how dry your flow has been without others to stroke your ego?” She could feel her heart racing with anger - maybe not at him, but that only made it worse.
He flinched, and when he looked up again she wanted so much to say sorry, somehow, somehow that wouldn’t cede even an inch of ground.
“I *hate* this place” she said, loudly, instead, turning and kicking the chair so hard that the whole room shivered and flecks of his coffee spilt onto the carpet.
On moving to get her cleaning cloth she had to twist in astonished outrage as she realised he had grabbed her arm.
“You’re not cleaning anything else!” he half-shouted, exasperated, “You don’t deserve this, I tell you, I…”
“Do not tell me what to do” she hissed back, pushing against him to shove him away. He didn’t move.
“You’re not an animal, Teyla” he said, softly, “maybe you can stand pretending it but did it maybe occur to you that I can’t stand to watch?”
He was looking straight at her, blue eyes clear and piercing and close. Dangerous. Caring.
“Teyla. Teyla…” he said again, like he knew that name was what she needed to hear.
For a second, two, three, they were frozen. A pulse raced in his neck, he licked his lips, nervous. “Teyla.”
And she growled in deep, dark frustration before folding and collapsing somehow to the floor next to him, weeping and reaching out blindly for his arms. He drew her gently up and in, holding her close, patting awkwardly a while before relaxing, resting his weight into hers.
They clung with the desperation of people who are still angry with each other, and once the initial appetite for contact faded they drew back awkwardly, smearing the tears and mucus across their faces with the backs of their hands like children.
At some point the sun had set. The apartment was dark and thank goodness for it - the curtains were open and, seeing them, she gasped and ran to close them.
He was sitting on the floor, one hand toying with the edge of the carpet.
“I do want to, desperately want to, get you out of here” he said, looking at the floor. “I only wish I could.”
“It has to be soon” she replied, leaning back on the window frame for support. “They told us today at the centre…they, um….” She took a long, clear breath, rolled her eyes up and made herself tell him: “They have been giving us prior notice of the next compulsory breeding programme.”
- - -
“You should attend the hospital” she said, bandaging the hand he’d punched the wall with.
“I’m working tonight. Reverse engineering a wormhole isn’t impossible but the math takes one hell of a long time and I want to have as much done as possible before I hit the Lab.”
“…I could help” she said, finally, suddenly becoming aware that she was just sitting, holding his hand, maybe just because she couldn’t hold Ronon’s earlier.
Rodney smiled, causing her to realise that he almost never did: “You have to sleep sometime.”
She shrugged. “There is much coffee.”
- - -
Rodney awoke on the couch. This was not unusual.
What was, was the fact that he’d been covered with a blanket and his laptop taken off his stomach and placed on a table nearby. There was a glass of water by it. Sunlight streamed in the windows and felt delicious on his skin.
Teyla....he looked around the room at the diagrams and equations strewn over the floor - she was intelligent, he’d discovered over the past few days (or, more accurately, the camera-free nights), good even by Atlantis physics department standards, which, whilst lower than he felt they ought to be he was capable of realising were pretty damn fantastic on a global scale.
Maybe she was in the next room making his bed - he’d convinced her to go and sleep there at about four in the morning last night (or should that be this morning?), knowing that his mattress was softer and warmer than the chattel-grade she had.
It was something he’d long wanted to suggest, and only recently did it feel possible, and not somehow like an insult.
After all, she’d impressed him and he’d let it show, which was massively counter-intuitive for him even on a good day.
“You never told me you knew math” he’d said on the first night of figuring, bemusedly scanning her rows of equations.
“How did you believe I traded?”
“Not ‘I have three cows, you have five sheep’ math, *real* math.”
Teyla had ducked her head down, smiling at him - he’d *missed* that: “You need ‘real’ math to trade in Pegasus - if you intend to be any good at it, at least. You cannot simply dial something on the Gate and hope the planet has not become a volcanic wasteland since it gained an address. It is possible to predict the type of planet one will reach using equations such as these.”
He’d whistled and gone back to his own page for a while until he’d become aware she was motionless, staring at him.
“On your Earth…” she said, when he met her eyes, “On your Earth do they allow education of equal merit to people of all genders and…and ‘colours’?”
“Yes, of course” he’d said, without thinking, mind busy imagining the kind of indignities she must have seen in the populations she met here.
“Then why,” she had replied kindly, “are almost all the people in your team white men?”
Over the following nights Teyla had had more questions, and he’d found fewer and fewer answers. But, then, she’d started talking about her people, her ways, her homes. In the dark, in the safety of night and the drawn curtains and the steam from the coffee pot, they’d been finding their way back to the tentative beginnings of friendship they’d had on Atlantis just before all this happened.
They were going to get out of here, they were all going to get out of here and back to Atlantis, or at least to the right Earth and then…well, they’d heal, somehow. Try and forget this place, act like it hadn’t changed anything.
There was a thud from the bedroom, Teyla dropping something. He sat up, about to call out.
She ran into the room, clutching the remote from the bedroom TV. Her expression scared him and when he asked what the matter was she just gazed wide-eyed in shock for a second then tried to turn on the TV next to him, threw down the wrong remote, went to the set itself and switched it on before falling back to the floor as the picture came up.
Fox News. ‘Degenerates!’ screamed the headline at the top of the screen, and scrolling over the line at the bottom: ‘Sick Master/Slave Love Nest Discovered in Brooklyn’
The screen showed a crowd of handlers and police pulling apart two men. The taller, black man was evidently being repeatedly shocked through his collar and still he was straining away, trying to get to the other, who had been struck up the back of the head with a pistol butt and lay prone on the ground.
The camera zoomed in obscenely, catching the first drops of blood as they careered down Sheppard’s face.
- - -
“Oh this is just typical isn’t it? Trust them to have absolutely no control over themselves! It’s all those muscles, you know, too many pheromones!” Rodney paced up and down, gesticulating, practically frothing at the mouth. “Wormholes I can do, force fields I can do, what I cannot do is bloody well stage a prison break for those two idiots!”
She moved up to him, took a sideways glance at the camera and risked laying a hand on his arm. “I know. I am worried too. And, I admit, a little surprised.”
“What John Sheppard wants, John Sheppard usually gets. Except with you, I noticed.”
“And you. I noticed too.”
He ducked his head, blinked, coughed. “You’ve been proved right, of course. I mean that the surveillance must be damn good to catch them out, because, you know, they’re not idiots…not at all the ninja stuff anyway.”
Then his gaze came up, and suddenly they were very close. “They’ll - the authorities - I guess they really will know about Christmas.”
She swallowed, wondering when she’d become unable to look at his eyes without the bottom of her stomach disappearing. “You just…it was just one gift. Masters can bestow gifts on slaves, it does happen.”
“But then you said thank-you.”
“I was grateful.”
“I figured.”
“And I was still forgetting the camera, then. I suppose I am not so proficient at the ‘ninja stuff.” She took a breath, looking away from his smile, “And, you know, Masters do…take advantage. It is almost expected. They might see it like that.”
“Except that *you* kissed *me*.”
His breath was warm, near her mouth, nothing made sense, reality was gone, his eyes searched her face, she felt a twisting, tightening between her legs and everything unfurled in her mind like a comet trail, events from the moment they met right till this second that - it seemed now - could never lead anywhere else. It came to her with deep clarity that all this time she hadn’t been mad at him for being Master, or being who he was, or for any other reason. She hadn’t been mad that she’d had to be with him rather than Sheppard. She’d been mad because he hadn’t ever suggested he wanted to be around her. Just like back on Atlantis, hiding in his Labs, avoiding all non-scientists save Sheppard and women in general.
She hadn’t suspected that he’d been afraid of…well, of *this*.
She hadn’t realised until now that he felt she had power over him.
The moment held, maybe two, three seconds and then he frowned and stepped back, right back, holding up his hands as if in defeat:
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
Teyla wasn’t sure what he meant, not sure he knew either.
Trying to speak, she found her mouth was dry, swallowed and started again. Her skin still tingled, her breath coming oddly.
“We can run. We can hide.”
“How? Where?”
“There is an ‘underground railroad’. To Canada” she smiled a little. “Slaves often escape through it, and sometimes their sympathisers. We could get away, get some money, weapons…something, find some way to rescue them. You always find a way.”
“How on earth do you know about that?”
“Educational videos” she grinned widely now. “Amazing what you can learn when people are telling you what not to do.”
“I don’t suppose you know any specific contacts?”
“Making contacts is what I do, Rodney. Leave that part to me.”
“You know, you even talk more like you’re from Earth now!”
“From this Earth, you mean?”
He blinked and gave a little, bitter laugh: “Maybe there isn’t so much of a difference. You know, I never fit in, really, on Earth, back on that Earth. Atlantis felt like home straight away. And now this place…with you…it…” and he trailed off, blushing and looking away. “It didn’t sit well” he continued, “the thought of going to work in that Lab, sharing their jokes, their pastimes, their…punishments. The thought of just escaping, leaving all this here.” He took a deep breath, the kind that shakes the shoulders: “The thought of all those wrong textbooks just carrying on and printing and printing…”
His words broke across her understanding like sunshine and Teyla walked slowly across the floor to him, then reached out, took his hand and raised it to her lips and kissed it, as her people a million million light years and a shifted universe away did when they sealed a bargain that was unbreakable.
“We will save our friends” she said, a promise. “And then our acquaintances and then we will save this planet. We have done more with less before.”
Rodney smiled, so broadly, so wonderfully that she wanted to kiss properly right then and there. “But first” he said, “I am going to take you into the bedroom, and then I am going to get that collar off you.”
And he did.
- - -
(Inspired by the mock documentary 'CSA: Confederate States of America' and arguably a crossover, though you do not need to see that to understand this story)