Back to Business as Usual by Ceitie [Fall 2008 Fic Exchange]
Challenge: Fall 2008 Fic Exchange
Title: Back to Business as Usual
Author: ceitie
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2180
Characters: Teyla, John
Genre: H/C, humour
Disclaimer: Yeah, I don't own 'em, more's the pity.
Spoilers: For season five up to The Daedalus Variations
Writing for: jadesfire2808
Assignment: Anything with John or Rodney doing the comforting, rather than the hurting, and exercising their usual wonderful interpersonal skills [/irony]
Author's Notes: Ack, I'm ridiculously late. I apologize sincerely to my recipient.
Summary: And now she appeared to be in a hole.
Teyla opened her eyes and looked up at the sky. There were clouds moving across it, shifting masses of gray that tumbled into each other, leaving only small spots of blue in between. For a few dazed moments she tracked their progress, blinking against the pain pounding at her temples, and grimaced when one of the remaining patches of sky was crowded out of existence by a swooping cloud.
“Tyrants,” she said, glaring at the clouds. Or she tried to, but for some reason her throat was terribly dry and she only managed to wheeze.
Teyla frowned, confused, and started to reach up to touch her throat. As she lifted her hand, she felt the rough scrape of jagged and dusty stones, and the memory of the past hour slammed back into her like a fist.
She and her teammates had been preparing to leave the village of Ress, having failed to collect any new information about Michael’s whereabouts, when a band of raiders had come through the gate. The team had ended up in the middle of a shootout between the raiders and another armed group who called themselves the village militia, although Teyla suspected that ‘criminal gang’ would be a more fitting description.
They had split up, Ronon and Rodney staying behind to provide a distraction while Teyla and John attempted to circle around the village in order to catch the raiders in the crossfire. The last thing that she remembered was running through the scrubby forest that surrounded the village, when suddenly there had been a loud series of cracking noises and the ground had fallen away beneath her.
And now she appeared to be in a hole. Quite a deep hole, with crumbling walls made out of rock and clay and cracked wooden timbers rising up on either side of her. Teyla shivered violently; it was early winter on this part of the planet, gray and chill, and the dampness rising from the rock and clay beneath her only made her colder. She tried to push herself up into a sitting position amongst the tumble of stones, only to groan and fall back, the combination of intense dizziness and a stabbing pain in her right leg forcing her to rethink the wisdom of sitting up.
“Teyla? Teyla, is that you? Answer me, dammit!” John sounded almost frantic, and - nearby.
Teyla looked around muzzily. She was surrounded by rock walls, and couldn’t see any worried faces looking down from the edge of the hole. “John?” Her voice came out in a croak, and she coughed hard and tried again. “John?”
She reached for her radio, but it had fallen out of her ear. She started to fumble for the backup radio that she kept in her vest, but then John’s voice rang out again. This time she managed to track its source: the other side of the tall pile of rocks on her left.
“Teyla, thank fucking Christ. Are you okay?”
“I -” She touched the side of her head gingerly; she could feel a lump forming, but it only left a small smear of blood on her hand. “I may have a concussion. And my right knee is injured, I am not sure if I will be able to stand.”
“Okay, that’s not too bad,” John said, relief evident in his voice.
“Well, it will perhaps be a problem when I wish to get out of this hole,” Teyla said dryly.
“Hey, I just spent the last five minutes yelling your name and not getting an answer, so -” Teyla could almost see John’s shrug. “A bum knee and a concussion is getting off light, considering that we just fell into a mine shaft.”
Teyla frowned, hearing the worry that John could not quite hide. “I’m sorry, I did not realize that I had been unconscious for so long.” A thought occurred to her, much later than it should have, and she cursed the slowness of her aching head. “John, how are you? Are you injured?”
“No, I’m fine,” John said, a little too quickly.
Teyla sighed, and started shifting the small stones off of her torso and legs while still trying to move as little as possible. “As Rodney is not here to say it, I must ask: do you mean ‘ordinary person’ fine, or simply ‘John Sheppard’ fine?”
She heard John snort from the other side of the pile of rocks. “You and Rodney are spending too much time together.”
“He is very good with Torren,” Teyla said placidly, which was, somewhat surprisingly, true. “In fact, just the other day Rodney was helping me care for him, and telling me once again about the noble history of the name ‘Rodney.’”
“I bet he was.”
There was a clattering noise, like tumbling stones, and John let out a quiet grunt. His next words were strained and faint, as if he had moved away from the rocks that separated them . “Uh, I radioed Ronon, and he said that he and McKay are pretty well stuck in the village for the time being. The damn raiders aren’t exactly going down easy, although the militia’s decided to be a little more cooperative now. Ronon’s gonna try to get out here with the packs as soon as possible, but - we might be in for a wait.”
Teyla stilled, flexing her cold fingers around the stone in her hand. “I see.” She wriggled her toes experimentally, and yes, her feet were already beginning to numb with cold.
She heard another clacking, clattering noise, followed by a quiet thud, and she turned her head towards it. “John. What are you doing?”
She heard him sigh. “Trying to climb out of this damn hole,” he said, and his voice got louder towards the end of the sentence; he was walking back towards her.
“I will assume that you are not having much success?” Teyla asked, and bent her left leg carefully. Like most of the rest of her body, it was sore and scraped, but she thought that it would hold her weight.
“The clay keeps breaking away whenever I try to get a grip on it, and the rocks aren’t all that solid either. This must have been one crappy mine shaft,” John said, “if that’s what it was.”
Teyla considered this as she moved her hands into position on either side of her body. “Perhaps it was a place to hide from the Wraith.” She took a deep breath, let it out, and then pushed herself up into a sitting position, leaning back hard against the wall when the world began to tilt and spin.
She must have made some kind of noise, because John asked sharply, “Teyla? What was that? You okay?”
Bending her head, Teyla closed her eyes and breathed through her nose for a few moments. When she had pushed away some of the nausea and shoved the fiery throbbing in her knee to the back of her mind, she answered, “I am well. I am trying to get up.” She was relieved by the steadiness of her voice.
“What? Why? I thought you said your knee -”
“It is too cold to lie still, since we don’t know when Rodney and Ronon will be able to come to our aid,” Teyla said, opening her eyes carefully. This time the ground and walls of the hole stayed level and unmoving, and she let out a small sigh of relief.
John was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Yeah, you’re right. Do what you have to do.”
Before she could stop herself, Teyla snapped, “I am so pleased to have your permission.”
There was another silence, and Teyla gritted her teeth. She knew that it was not fair to take out her pain and frustration on John, so she spoke again quickly, making her voice as neutral as she could. “You did not answer my question, earlier. Are you truly fine?”
“Teyla -” John said, and stopped. Finally he said, sounding unusually subdued, “My wrist’s a little sore. I probably landed on it. It’s not doing much for my climbing skills, but otherwise, I’m okay.”
“Good,” Teyla said. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, and wished for just one moment of respite from her body’s insistent aches. She didn’t get it, so instead she started to climb to her feet, or at least to her one good foot.
She had managed to pull herself into a crouch, hands gripping the rock wall to keep from tipping over, bad leg stuck out awkwardly in front of her, when John said, quiet and intense, “Teyla. Stop moving. There’s someone out there.”
Teyla froze, listening hard. After a moment, she heard what John had: the soft crackling sounds of someone moving carefully through the underbrush of a forest. She moved her head slowly, resting it against the wall behind her, and lifted her P-90 with one hand, keeping her grip on the wall with the other. She tried to ignore the way her good leg was already starting to shake with strain. Ronon and Rodney would have radioed before coming to find them, so the person in the forest was either a villager, perhaps part of the militia, or a raider. If one of the raiders came upon them, trapped in this hole, that would be - very bad.
The sounds of movement eventually began to grow softer, rather than louder, and Teyla eased herself back down into a sitting position, nearly gasping aloud with relief as her muscles relaxed. She closed her eyes and breathed, just for a moment.
When she opened her eyes again, the hole was darker and filled with shadows, and she had to blink a few times before her sight adjusted to the dim light. She was cold as well, shivering hard, and she tried to pull her jacket closer around her. Her hands were stiff and awkward, and she couldn’t quite - she looked down at herself in confusion. Oh. Her vest was in the way. Of course.
Teyla suddenly became aware that there was a hand wrapped around her left ankle, above her boot, and she jerked in surprise.
“Teyla!” John said, and the hand’s grip tightened and shook her ankle slightly. “Teyla, are you awake? Talk to me, please -”
“I am awake, I am fine, John,” Teyla said, her words stuttering out around her chattering teeth.
“Right, good, sure,” John said. “Don’t do that again, okay?”
“I will try not to,” she said as reassuringly as she could, which wasn’t very. She buried her hands in her armpits and clamped her teeth together, trying to stop the chattering. Her eyelids were already beginning to grow heavy, however. “That is your hand, I hope?”
“Yeah, I found a crack in this rock pile; I was shaking you, pinching you, trying to get you to wake up.”
“Ah,” Teyla said, and made an effort at speaking lightly. “Then if I have bruises there when we get back, I will know who to blame.”
“Sounds fair. So much for having an easy first mission back, huh?” John said, his tone striving for casual and not quite making it.
“At least this time you have not been impaled on anything,” Teyla said, and smiled faintly when John laughed.
“Besides,” she continued, “it’s not truly my first mission back. We went to find Ronon together, and - when we were trapped on the false Daedalus.”
“Yeah, the Daedalus,” John said slowly. His fingers squeezed her leg. She wondered if the memory of four dead bodies, so painfully familiar, was running through his mind as well. His next words confirmed it. “You know we’re going to get out of here, right? Ronon and McKay will be along anytime now, for sure.”
“Yes, of course, John,” she said, and put every grain of her trust in him, as her friend and their leader, into her voice. She didn’t know if it would be enough to hide the fear that had gathered in her belly, the image of Torren, alone and hungry and crying, that was now always present at the back of her mind when they were in danger.
Her eyes slowly closed, and she drifted, listening to the sound of John’s voice without really hearing his words. His grip on her ankle never faltered, and when she opened her eyes, she blinked up into Ronon’s face, welcome and dear and dark with concern. She could hear John and Rodney’s voices somewhere in the distance, and she caught sight of the two of them standing at the edge of the hole, looking down at her. Rodney was trying to wrap an emergency blanket around John’s shoulders and John was half-heartedly fending him off.
When John saw her looking up at them, he broke off whatever it was that he was saying to Rodney and called down, “Hey! Told you so!” Rodney rolled his eyes and Ronon snorted, reaching over to wrap a comforting leather-clad arm around her shoulders.
Teyla smiled up at them all. “Let us go home.”
Title: Back to Business as Usual
Author: ceitie
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2180
Characters: Teyla, John
Genre: H/C, humour
Disclaimer: Yeah, I don't own 'em, more's the pity.
Spoilers: For season five up to The Daedalus Variations
Writing for: jadesfire2808
Assignment: Anything with John or Rodney doing the comforting, rather than the hurting, and exercising their usual wonderful interpersonal skills [/irony]
Author's Notes: Ack, I'm ridiculously late. I apologize sincerely to my recipient.
Summary: And now she appeared to be in a hole.
Teyla opened her eyes and looked up at the sky. There were clouds moving across it, shifting masses of gray that tumbled into each other, leaving only small spots of blue in between. For a few dazed moments she tracked their progress, blinking against the pain pounding at her temples, and grimaced when one of the remaining patches of sky was crowded out of existence by a swooping cloud.
“Tyrants,” she said, glaring at the clouds. Or she tried to, but for some reason her throat was terribly dry and she only managed to wheeze.
Teyla frowned, confused, and started to reach up to touch her throat. As she lifted her hand, she felt the rough scrape of jagged and dusty stones, and the memory of the past hour slammed back into her like a fist.
She and her teammates had been preparing to leave the village of Ress, having failed to collect any new information about Michael’s whereabouts, when a band of raiders had come through the gate. The team had ended up in the middle of a shootout between the raiders and another armed group who called themselves the village militia, although Teyla suspected that ‘criminal gang’ would be a more fitting description.
They had split up, Ronon and Rodney staying behind to provide a distraction while Teyla and John attempted to circle around the village in order to catch the raiders in the crossfire. The last thing that she remembered was running through the scrubby forest that surrounded the village, when suddenly there had been a loud series of cracking noises and the ground had fallen away beneath her.
And now she appeared to be in a hole. Quite a deep hole, with crumbling walls made out of rock and clay and cracked wooden timbers rising up on either side of her. Teyla shivered violently; it was early winter on this part of the planet, gray and chill, and the dampness rising from the rock and clay beneath her only made her colder. She tried to push herself up into a sitting position amongst the tumble of stones, only to groan and fall back, the combination of intense dizziness and a stabbing pain in her right leg forcing her to rethink the wisdom of sitting up.
“Teyla? Teyla, is that you? Answer me, dammit!” John sounded almost frantic, and - nearby.
Teyla looked around muzzily. She was surrounded by rock walls, and couldn’t see any worried faces looking down from the edge of the hole. “John?” Her voice came out in a croak, and she coughed hard and tried again. “John?”
She reached for her radio, but it had fallen out of her ear. She started to fumble for the backup radio that she kept in her vest, but then John’s voice rang out again. This time she managed to track its source: the other side of the tall pile of rocks on her left.
“Teyla, thank fucking Christ. Are you okay?”
“I -” She touched the side of her head gingerly; she could feel a lump forming, but it only left a small smear of blood on her hand. “I may have a concussion. And my right knee is injured, I am not sure if I will be able to stand.”
“Okay, that’s not too bad,” John said, relief evident in his voice.
“Well, it will perhaps be a problem when I wish to get out of this hole,” Teyla said dryly.
“Hey, I just spent the last five minutes yelling your name and not getting an answer, so -” Teyla could almost see John’s shrug. “A bum knee and a concussion is getting off light, considering that we just fell into a mine shaft.”
Teyla frowned, hearing the worry that John could not quite hide. “I’m sorry, I did not realize that I had been unconscious for so long.” A thought occurred to her, much later than it should have, and she cursed the slowness of her aching head. “John, how are you? Are you injured?”
“No, I’m fine,” John said, a little too quickly.
Teyla sighed, and started shifting the small stones off of her torso and legs while still trying to move as little as possible. “As Rodney is not here to say it, I must ask: do you mean ‘ordinary person’ fine, or simply ‘John Sheppard’ fine?”
She heard John snort from the other side of the pile of rocks. “You and Rodney are spending too much time together.”
“He is very good with Torren,” Teyla said placidly, which was, somewhat surprisingly, true. “In fact, just the other day Rodney was helping me care for him, and telling me once again about the noble history of the name ‘Rodney.’”
“I bet he was.”
There was a clattering noise, like tumbling stones, and John let out a quiet grunt. His next words were strained and faint, as if he had moved away from the rocks that separated them . “Uh, I radioed Ronon, and he said that he and McKay are pretty well stuck in the village for the time being. The damn raiders aren’t exactly going down easy, although the militia’s decided to be a little more cooperative now. Ronon’s gonna try to get out here with the packs as soon as possible, but - we might be in for a wait.”
Teyla stilled, flexing her cold fingers around the stone in her hand. “I see.” She wriggled her toes experimentally, and yes, her feet were already beginning to numb with cold.
She heard another clacking, clattering noise, followed by a quiet thud, and she turned her head towards it. “John. What are you doing?”
She heard him sigh. “Trying to climb out of this damn hole,” he said, and his voice got louder towards the end of the sentence; he was walking back towards her.
“I will assume that you are not having much success?” Teyla asked, and bent her left leg carefully. Like most of the rest of her body, it was sore and scraped, but she thought that it would hold her weight.
“The clay keeps breaking away whenever I try to get a grip on it, and the rocks aren’t all that solid either. This must have been one crappy mine shaft,” John said, “if that’s what it was.”
Teyla considered this as she moved her hands into position on either side of her body. “Perhaps it was a place to hide from the Wraith.” She took a deep breath, let it out, and then pushed herself up into a sitting position, leaning back hard against the wall when the world began to tilt and spin.
She must have made some kind of noise, because John asked sharply, “Teyla? What was that? You okay?”
Bending her head, Teyla closed her eyes and breathed through her nose for a few moments. When she had pushed away some of the nausea and shoved the fiery throbbing in her knee to the back of her mind, she answered, “I am well. I am trying to get up.” She was relieved by the steadiness of her voice.
“What? Why? I thought you said your knee -”
“It is too cold to lie still, since we don’t know when Rodney and Ronon will be able to come to our aid,” Teyla said, opening her eyes carefully. This time the ground and walls of the hole stayed level and unmoving, and she let out a small sigh of relief.
John was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Yeah, you’re right. Do what you have to do.”
Before she could stop herself, Teyla snapped, “I am so pleased to have your permission.”
There was another silence, and Teyla gritted her teeth. She knew that it was not fair to take out her pain and frustration on John, so she spoke again quickly, making her voice as neutral as she could. “You did not answer my question, earlier. Are you truly fine?”
“Teyla -” John said, and stopped. Finally he said, sounding unusually subdued, “My wrist’s a little sore. I probably landed on it. It’s not doing much for my climbing skills, but otherwise, I’m okay.”
“Good,” Teyla said. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, and wished for just one moment of respite from her body’s insistent aches. She didn’t get it, so instead she started to climb to her feet, or at least to her one good foot.
She had managed to pull herself into a crouch, hands gripping the rock wall to keep from tipping over, bad leg stuck out awkwardly in front of her, when John said, quiet and intense, “Teyla. Stop moving. There’s someone out there.”
Teyla froze, listening hard. After a moment, she heard what John had: the soft crackling sounds of someone moving carefully through the underbrush of a forest. She moved her head slowly, resting it against the wall behind her, and lifted her P-90 with one hand, keeping her grip on the wall with the other. She tried to ignore the way her good leg was already starting to shake with strain. Ronon and Rodney would have radioed before coming to find them, so the person in the forest was either a villager, perhaps part of the militia, or a raider. If one of the raiders came upon them, trapped in this hole, that would be - very bad.
The sounds of movement eventually began to grow softer, rather than louder, and Teyla eased herself back down into a sitting position, nearly gasping aloud with relief as her muscles relaxed. She closed her eyes and breathed, just for a moment.
When she opened her eyes again, the hole was darker and filled with shadows, and she had to blink a few times before her sight adjusted to the dim light. She was cold as well, shivering hard, and she tried to pull her jacket closer around her. Her hands were stiff and awkward, and she couldn’t quite - she looked down at herself in confusion. Oh. Her vest was in the way. Of course.
Teyla suddenly became aware that there was a hand wrapped around her left ankle, above her boot, and she jerked in surprise.
“Teyla!” John said, and the hand’s grip tightened and shook her ankle slightly. “Teyla, are you awake? Talk to me, please -”
“I am awake, I am fine, John,” Teyla said, her words stuttering out around her chattering teeth.
“Right, good, sure,” John said. “Don’t do that again, okay?”
“I will try not to,” she said as reassuringly as she could, which wasn’t very. She buried her hands in her armpits and clamped her teeth together, trying to stop the chattering. Her eyelids were already beginning to grow heavy, however. “That is your hand, I hope?”
“Yeah, I found a crack in this rock pile; I was shaking you, pinching you, trying to get you to wake up.”
“Ah,” Teyla said, and made an effort at speaking lightly. “Then if I have bruises there when we get back, I will know who to blame.”
“Sounds fair. So much for having an easy first mission back, huh?” John said, his tone striving for casual and not quite making it.
“At least this time you have not been impaled on anything,” Teyla said, and smiled faintly when John laughed.
“Besides,” she continued, “it’s not truly my first mission back. We went to find Ronon together, and - when we were trapped on the false Daedalus.”
“Yeah, the Daedalus,” John said slowly. His fingers squeezed her leg. She wondered if the memory of four dead bodies, so painfully familiar, was running through his mind as well. His next words confirmed it. “You know we’re going to get out of here, right? Ronon and McKay will be along anytime now, for sure.”
“Yes, of course, John,” she said, and put every grain of her trust in him, as her friend and their leader, into her voice. She didn’t know if it would be enough to hide the fear that had gathered in her belly, the image of Torren, alone and hungry and crying, that was now always present at the back of her mind when they were in danger.
Her eyes slowly closed, and she drifted, listening to the sound of John’s voice without really hearing his words. His grip on her ankle never faltered, and when she opened her eyes, she blinked up into Ronon’s face, welcome and dear and dark with concern. She could hear John and Rodney’s voices somewhere in the distance, and she caught sight of the two of them standing at the edge of the hole, looking down at her. Rodney was trying to wrap an emergency blanket around John’s shoulders and John was half-heartedly fending him off.
When John saw her looking up at them, he broke off whatever it was that he was saying to Rodney and called down, “Hey! Told you so!” Rodney rolled his eyes and Ronon snorted, reaching over to wrap a comforting leather-clad arm around her shoulders.
Teyla smiled up at them all. “Let us go home.”