Fic: Nos da cariad by miera
Title: Nos da cariad
Summary: AU of season 5; Elizabeth has been back on Earth for two years when John comes to bring her home. But their friendship will be tested first by a secret she has kept from everyone.
Pairings: gen, Elizabeth & John friendship
Main characters: Weir, Sheppard
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Spoilers: Through late Season 5.
Beta: grav_ity
Disclaimer: Not mine, we only wish they were.
Author's Notes: This is for seramercury whose prompt was 1. There are many fics where John is sent back to Earth what about Elizabeth? Angst. Lots of angst. It's not quite that angsty, more like implying angst in the past. The story was inspired by the events of S4 and 5 and the song "Nos da cariad" by David Gray, in particular the last verse of the song: Hold on to St. Christopher, the sky is murderous red/ Go to sleep my one true love, our glory lies ahead. While there is a whole lot of subtext in this story, it is about the canon relationship between Elizabeth and John which was so stupidly and cruelly tossed aside by the show after 3 years.
Elizabeth hated shopping on weekends. The stores were so crowded and the parking lots were like some sort of demolition derby. Just getting out of Alameda was a nightmare, and the malls were insane. Once she was done buying necessities, she decided to reward herself and hit her favorite coffee place in Berkeley on the way home.
She parked at a meter well down the street from the coffee shop, away from some of the crowds. She sauntered through the bookstore, but she had a stack of things at home to read and she finally had told herself she couldn't buy any more new books until she got through at least half of those.
It was late afternoon, the darkness coming earlier now that fall was here. But Elizabeth enjoyed the walk and the window shopping. For so many months after accepting the job and the life that the SGC had ordered her into, every time she went out she'd been hyperaware of the car that followed her every place. Now it was gone and she no longer felt quite so under the microscope.
She had no doubt she was still being watched, but at least she no longer had to see it happening.
She blamed her own carelessness when she got grabbed. She was passing by an alley between two buildings when a hand shot out and yanked her off the sidewalk. She was propelled forward so that she was pressed up against the cinder block wall, her assailant's hand covering her mouth and her arm twisted behind her back.
Great, she thought to herself. This was patently unfair. Hadn't she been through enough in her life? Nearly dying, the infection by alien nanites, losing her job and her friends and her home, all that just wasn't enough for the universe, now she was going to get mugged?
Grimly it occurred to her this guy might intend worse than mugging. Well, he'd be in for a nasty surprise. Teyla had taught her too well, and the nanites had made her stronger than anyone really knew. She didn't struggle hard against the man holding her, but she did shift her feet to a ready stance.
A voice drawling in her ear made her freeze. "Don't even think about it, Elizabeth. And don't scream. You'll only draw attention."
The hands let her go and Elizabeth whipped around to see a tall, lanky man with very familiar, messy black hair. He had a thin beard and there were some hints of gray in his hair she didn't remember, and the ratty jeans, black t-shirt and leather jacket looked like they'd seen better days, but he was perhaps the most wonderful thing Elizabeth had ever seen in her life.
"John?"
He reached for her hand and Elizabeth grabbed onto him tightly, her mind spinning. Before she could voice any of the thousand questions, he glanced anxiously towards the street. "I can explain everything later, but we need to get out of here before anyone notices you're missing."
He looked at her in silent question and even though it'd been over two years, Elizabeth didn't hesitate. She nodded and let him lead her down the alley, away from the street, and away from her exile.
***
John was driving a battered old Impala, not a rental car, and he took her to a small one-bedroom apartment up in one of the cheaper neighborhoods in the East Bay area. The place was fairly barren, just enough furniture to make it look inhabited. Or was it actually inhabited? John hadn't spoken during the drive here, and Elizabeth hadn't asked questions.
How long had he been on Earth? When had he come back? He evidently knew she was being watched, and had known where to find her, but how? She had no idea which question she wanted to ask first.
John swept the apartment quickly, holding something that looked like a life signs detector, while she stood uneasily in the middle of the living room. "It's all clear. Nobody's been in here since I left to come get you."
She nodded automatically, staring at him. The kitchen light wasn't exactly flattering, but even so, he looked tired. There were circles under his eyes and he looked thinner than he should.
But he was still John. She'd know him anywhere, his voice, his smell, his shape. Three years of standing next to him on a daily basis, it was impossible not to recognize him.
She drank in the sight of him. "It's really you."
His face relaxed a little, a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth. "Yeah, Elizabeth, it's me."
She was hugging him before she realized she wanted to. John was the first person she'd seen from Atlantis, from any part of her old life, in almost two years. They wouldn't even let her talk to Jack or Daniel anymore. She couldn't help clinging to John as her body trembled.
John held on just as hard, which shocked her. She remembered full well how awkward and uncomfortable he was with any display of affection. But then, it'd been two years for him too. Elizabeth had no idea what the SGC had told him about her in that time, but it looked like life hadn't been a walk in the park for him.
"I'm sorry," he said into her ear, and she'd forgotten the effect of that particular tone of his voice. It was one he only used when someone he cared deeply about had been hurt or in danger, when his emotions were spilling over his control. "I'm sorry it took me so long to get to you."
"It's okay," she soothed him, although a tiny part of her refuted that idea.
John seemed to agree with the tiny part. "No, it's not." He let go of her only to put his hands on her shoulders. "I knew something was wrong. After you went back to the SGC so they could deal with the nanite thing, I knew it was wrong that you wouldn't ever send anyone a message, not even Teyla. But the Asurans came after us for stealing the ZPM and I thought..." His grip on her arms became painful but she didn't move. Remorse was plainly written across his face. "I was afraid they'd find out about you, try to take you away from us. I thought you'd be safer on Earth where they couldn't find you."
"What's their status now?" she asked, somewhat surprised at her own question.
John's eyes lit up and for a second he looked almost gleeful. "We destroyed them. Rodney and Sam managed to trick them into all drawing together in one place and we blew them up."
She gaped. "All of them?"
He nodded. "All of 'em. They're gone." His hands slid down her arms, fingers brushing against hers briefly, like he wanted to hold on, before letting go. "It's safe now, Elizabeth. You can come home."
***
They sat at the tiny kitchen table and John gave her some sparing details. He'd been on Earth for almost three months, searching for her. Someone was giving him help, but John hedged on names. That made Elizabeth uneasy, but she was so discombobulated by all of this, she told herself not to jump to any conclusions.
He'd finally tracked her to San Francisco, and then spent several weeks observing her, learning the pattern of her movements so he could find a way to get in touch with her without alerting her guards. When her watchdogs had disappeared two weeks ago, he'd thought they'd spotted him so he backed off until he was sure they were gone.
Elizabeth wasn't stupid. She worried what kind of rules he'd broken coming here on his own, and who had helped him. How much trouble had he gotten himself into for this? Not that she wasn't grateful, but it wasn't like she could do much to protect him now. It would be the height of irony for him to come get her only to get tossed out of the Stargate program for doing it.
John kept checking his watch and finally he said, "I'm cutting all this kind of close, but Elizabeth, if we're going to go, we need to go soon." He evidently saw the questions on her face, because he explained, "We need to drive somewhere, and it's going to take some time. I can fill you in on everything while we go, but if we're going to make it back to Atlantis, we should go now."
Back to Atlantis.
It was what she wanted more than anything, more even than telling her mother she was alive and okay. It all seemed to good to be true. For a moment Elizabeth was afraid. What if this was all a trap? A trick to find out whether she really had resigned herself to her fate?
Worse, what if none of this was real to begin with?
It's John, she argued with herself. You're absolutely certain of that. You trust him.
"Elizabeth?"
He was looking at her worriedly from across the table, and when she gaped and nothing came out, he came over and crouched down next to her chair.
He was different, she admitted to herself. Harder, more serious, more intent if that was even possible. Even without specifics she could read two years of grief and struggle in his eyes and his face. But something else was there, something she hadn't ever been able to put into words. Her friendship with John had been one of the deepest relationships of her life, something she could never explain to anyone who hadn't been through the kinds of things they'd been through together.
"We don't leave our people behind, you know that." He swallowed, looking anxious, his voice growing rougher with emotion. "I won't force you to go, not against your will, but... we need you back, Elizabeth."
They stared at each other in silence for a long minute.
Her life here had never been a life. It was a prison. On a large scale, but she was constrained and confined and supervised constantly. There were plenty of days when she wondered why she should bother getting out of bed, if this was the rest of her existence. In the back of her mind had always been a hope of getting back in the door with Stargate Command somehow, at least getting in touch with her people again. It had been, at best, a futile and desperate fantasy.
There was nothing for her here. "Let's go."
***
There was snow in the Sierras.
John guided the Impala up the steady incline away from San Francisco along I-80, almost the same path the railroad had once taken to cross into the interior of the continent from the coast. Behind them, the sunset illuminated the western sky and faded slowly while Elizabeth watched it in the rearview mirror. But the light hadn't faded entirely before she saw the snow-covered tops of the mountains ahead.
John had loaned her a worn-looking baseball cap and his jacket. The temperature would get colder through the night and she hadn't exactly had time to go home and pack. Not that she needed to worry so much about hypothermia any more, but she found it strangely comforting to be wearing John's things.
She could smell him on the jacket, along with the unique tang of leather and human sweat. She concentrated on John's scent, and memories flashed through her head in quick succession, almost too many to count. John rescuing her from Kolya during the storm, the look on his face when she sent him on the suicide run to blow up the hive ship during the siege, watching the yellow overtake his eyes when he'd been infected by the retrovirus and then waiting anxiously for it to fade again. The beard he'd grown during his six month exile - it had been fuller and neater than the one he was sporting now.
Watching the Wraith feed on him. Watching him age and wither away in front of her eyes and not being able to do anything to stop it. The last time she'd seen him, he was watching her walk through the gate to Earth, surrounded by a Marine guard and not knowing it would be two years before they saw each other again.
She remembered the sound of his voice, too, on her answering machine during their last sojourn on Earth, petulant and worried and not quite able to hide the frustration he'd been feeling, or chiding her from the other side of her desk or walking at her side through the corridors in Atlantis when he tried to convince her of something.
There was almost too much to remember, too many images and sounds to isolate into discrete moments. He'd been her strongest link to the city, the person she spent the most time with for three straight years. It was no wonder when the nanites first infected her body, John was the one who reached her, who brought her back.
She felt her breathing quicken slightly, a slight buzzing in her mind that had become familiar by now. She breathed out slowly, trying to calm down.
"I can practically hear the questions, you know," John drawled from the driver's seat.
She flashed him an apologetic smile. He had one hand on the wheel, the other propped up on the door and covering his chin.
She was going to have to explain some things to him before they left the planet. She owed him that much.
She wasn't sure where to start, so she settled for the obvious. "Why now?" She had the advantage of being able to watch him while his eyes had to stay on the road. Even in the fading light she couldn't miss the flinch.
"We wanted to bring you back sooner," he said. "Everyone kept asking about you. But the Asurans were all over us for a while, and nobody at the SGC would give me straight answers."
Elizabeth's mind flashed back to the endless days in the isolation room, the tests, the injections, and the slow feeling of losing her mind as all sense of time and reality faded. The drone of it had been punctuated only by visits from Jack or Daniel, reminding her that a world did exist outside the cement walls. Then even those visits ended.
"Rodney was saying that we needed to do something to get to you, because the fact that the SGC wouldn't say anything and you not trying to contact us meant they couldn't get the nanites out of you and wouldn't tell us." She looked out the window at the mountains, not speaking. "We'd gotten rid of the Asurans, so it would be safe to bring you back so Rodney and Radek could help you."
Elizabeth wondered to herself if John's narrative had anything to do with Colonel Davis suddenly coming into her cell that one day, with a stack of paperwork offering her a new identity and a new life on Earth, monitored by the government but out in the open air, at least. Had the SGC known the Atlantis senior staff were growing restless? Was that why she'd suddenly been sprung from her captivity? She would probably never know. "What happened?"
"Sam tried. I was there when she called Earth, when she asked Landry about you. He stonewalled, and she was going to call in some favors and find out while she was back on Earth for a review."
He paused for a second and she braced herself. "And?"
"The IOA fired her and replaced her with Woolsey."
"What?" she yelped so loudly they both jumped. Richard Woolsey was in charge of Atlantis? Mr. By The Book, the man who probably slept in a suit and tie, who turned into a gibbering mess at the first sign of an alien, was put in charge of her city?
"Yeah," John sighed. He put both hands on the wheel. "To be fair, he didn't do too bad, at least not after Pegasus knocked the sharp stick out of his ass." Elizabeth snorted back a laugh, a habit she was fairly sure she'd picked up from Rodney. John grinned, the mischievous little kid one. "He's not you, though."
"I can just imagine." Riding herd on John and Rodney and all the other department heads required an entire skill set Woolsey didn't have. She simply couldn't picture the man who wanted every form filled out neatly in triplicate managing to get them all to abide by his methods.
She tugged the cuffs of the jacket down over her palms, almost afraid to find out more. "Did he tell you where I was?"
"No," John said. "That was partly how things really started to go sour. I kept asking, Rodney kept asking, and Woolsey at first just kept giving us the party line about you being in treatment and that he was sure you were getting the best possible care, blah blah blah. But eventually Woolsey got suspicious himself and started asking the SGC for information and then the powers that be decided to replace him too."
She gaped, though really she shouldn't be surprised Woolsey didn't last long. "Okay, wait, who's in charge now?"
John spat the name out like a curse. "Shen."
Elizabeth nearly growled. If she had a personal nemesis in the IOA it was Ambassador Shen, the woman who'd demanded Elizabeth come back to Earth for a review in the middle of an intergalactic crisis. Shen was a creature of pure ambition and Elizabeth didn't want to think how Atlantis was faring under the leadership of a woman whose only interest in life was her own career.
"That was a couple months ago. Rodney and I were already talking about trying to find a way to get back to Earth and find out what was going on. Just before that happened, Dr. Jackson came to Atlantis." John looked away from the highway, and the fury in his eyes was palpable. "He had a message from General O'Neill. There was no other way for them to get word to us, not with the IOA in charge and Landry siding with them. He told me what they'd done to you."
There wasn't much to say to that. She could read in his body language the guilt and the anger. It warmed her, made her feel that maybe not everything in her universe had changed since they moment Rodney reactivated the nanites. But she couldn't speak any soothing platitudes to make John feel better. She went through months of hell wishing for him and Ronon and Teyla to burst through the door and get her out of a prison cell and they never came.
John looked back toward the road, muttering more to himself than to her, "I should've come back sooner." The self-disgust she heard in his voice made her heart ache. She had given up on him, and she should've known better.
Without thinking about it, she reached over and pried one of his hands off the steering wheel and wrapped her fingers around his. "You came, that's what matters."
He squeezed her hand for a moment, and their eyes caught. It was as though the last two years hadn't happened, like they'd never been separated, and she could read so much in his eyes in that split second it made her breath catch.
The corner of his mouth went up in a smirk so familiar she wanted to laugh out loud. "Don't thank me yet. We've still got to get back, get rid of Shen and figure out how to keep Caldwell from coming and arresting us both."
She chuckled. "No impending Wraith attack to deal with on top of it? No invasion? Or strange alien virus?" John grinned more widely and she waved a hand dismissively. "Piece of cake."
***
They stopped at a department store before beginning the long climb over the mountains and into Nevada. John was buying water and packaged food, apparently to supplement the supplies he'd loaded into the trunk of the car before they left. He suddenly detoured into the women's clothing. He looked at her in embarrassment and suggested she probably needed to pick up some extra clothes.
She'd been so thrown off balance by his abrupt appearance, the thought hadn't even occurred to her until he mentioned it. Elizabeth grabbed a few shirts and a couple pairs of sweatpants, then paused. John was trailing after her with the cart and for a second it was too surreal, him wandering around a department store shopping with her like this. It was like they'd been dropped into some sort of alternate reality.
Elizabeth had wondered more than once in the last two years if there was a reality out there where she escaped the nanite infestation entirely, or at least one where she didn't end up with more than a mild concussion when the city left Lantea. There was some combination of choices, she was sure, that in some reality had kept Elizabeth Weir safe and in Atlantis. Unfortunately that didn't change the reality she had to live in.
She waited for John to catch up and lowered her voice. "Um, how long is it going to be?" She was thinking of how much time she had to fill before she'd be able to wash clothes.
John looked back at her meaningfully. "Eighteen days."
He didn't say anything else, but he didn't have to. She understood then how they were getting back.
She just nodded and headed to the "Intimates" section. No way was she surviving for almost three weeks in a small space ship without enough clean underwear.
***
By the time they were through the Donner Pass it was well past nightfall. Despite the chill outside, Elizabeth left the window cracked open a little. The cold mountain air was refreshing and cleaned the lingering smell of fast food from the interior of the car.
She put her feet up on the dashboard, remembering trips from when she was younger, during the summer time with the radio blasting. John raised his eyebrows at her snuggling down into the seat with her feet propped up but she cut off any remark he was about to make with a question. "What exactly happened with the Asurans?"
John scrubbed his hand across his face and she heard the faint rasp of his beard against his skin before he straightened in the seat. "You remember the Wraith kill code?"
She nodded. Hard to forget that. Rodney had been urging them to try and upload it to the Asurans when they stole the ZPM, but John had determined they needed to return to Atlantis as fast as possible, and Elizabeth and Ronon had both sided with him. Given how much trouble Rodney had getting the new ZPM to interface with the jumper before they made the jump back to the city - the Asurans had been zeroing in on them by the time they finally escaped - it was a good thing John's instinctive need to protect Atlantis had won out. They'd barely gotten to Atlantis in time to install the ZPM so John could land the city safely on the surface. Elizabeth went cold all over when she thought about what could've happened if they'd taken any longer to get back.
"They eventually found us on the new planet," John explained. "They came with ships that time, instead of the beam weapon. Sam and Rodney modified the ARG weapon and did something with the drones to make it work. We managed to beat them off."
He shifted in his seat, one of his tells for when he was holding something back, and she raised an eyebrow expectantly. "And?"
"And... I kind of snuck up there in another jumper and Rodney and Zelenka got us past their shields. We got inside and uploaded the code and got out."
Elizabeth thought that over for a moment. Knowing John, not to mention Rodney and Radek, she had no doubt it had been a great deal more harrowing than he was making it out to be. She could almost envision the bickering between the two scientists while John and Ronon rolled their eyes.
Her heart ached so badly with homesickness that for a moment she couldn't speak. John glanced at her, but Elizabeth avoided his gaze by taking a sip of water.
When she'd regained some equilibrium, she asked, "Did it work?" That had been the sticking point before. Rodney knew he could deliver the code but he had no idea if it would actually work and cause the Asurans to revert to their original purpose of attacking the Wraith.
John's expression went dark and Elizabeth felt dread coil through her belly. "Yeah, it worked. A little too well." She didn't say anything, just waited. "The Asurans started annihilating human worlds to destroy the Wraith's food source."
"Oh my God." The exclamation was automatic. She wasn't really all that shocked.
"Yeah. You were right, as usual," John said with a bitter twist in his voice.
When they'd been debating this, back in the conference room in Atlantis years ago, when Rodney first had the idea, she'd gone quiet for so long Teyla had finally asked her what was bothering her. Elizabeth had laced her fingers together and spoken slowly. "I'm less afraid of what we think will happen than the unforeseen consequences." There had been a heavy silence in the room for a minute before they moved on to a new topic.
They should have learned their lesson about unleashing forces they didn't understand in the Pegasus galaxy.
Some tiny portion of her brain pointed out that only a crazy person would want to go back to that life. "They're gone now, though?"
"Yeah, they're gone. It's back to life sucking alien vampires and the occasional creepy human bad guys," he said with a wry expression.
She smiled back and wrapped her arms around herself, bundling his jacket up under her chin. "So what else has been going on?"
John began to fill her in on two years of lost gossip, some of it shocking, some of it wonderfully mundane. Elizabeth listened with half an ear, part of her simply soaking in the sound of his voice.
***
They couldn't stop driving or they'd risk missing the window, but John was yawning heavily around 1am. Elizabeth insisted she could drive for a while. They switched off just before they crossed into Utah, and John chuckled as he stretched out in the passenger seat. "Every time I drive out here, I feel like I'm in a car commercial."
The salt flats were outside, ghostly and pale in the night, looking more alien than Earth had a right to look. She grinned. "Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt?"
"Exactly." He yawned again. "But don't speed. Last thing we need is to get a ticket."
"Yes, sir."
He rolled his eyes at that and leaned his head back against the seat. He drifted to sleep within a minute. Elizabeth wondered when the last time he'd slept was. A memory surfaced, something she hadn't recalled for a long time. John had trouble sleeping around people. He'd told her that once when they'd been sitting in her office, both of them too tired to keep working and also too tired to bother getting up to go to bed. Elizabeth had confessed more than one thing she never would have thought she'd admit in those hours when exhaustion had played merry hell with her filters.
John had to trust people in order to sleep around them. Or be so zonked he couldn't stay conscious.
She glanced over at him now, his arms folded across his chest loosely and his face relaxing as he fell more deeply asleep. He looked younger when he slept, she noticed.
She was tired herself, but with a small amount of concentration she could push it back and stay alert. She turned her eyes back to the interstate stretching out endlessly before her and felt her heart sink.
John's trust wasn't that easy to win. Elizabeth knew that from experience. But once it was given? It couldn't be broken.
She hoped.
***
John woke up well after dawn, Elizabeth having not had the heart to wake him as the night faded. She didn't argue when he wanted to drive again and she let herself doze for a bit in the passenger's seat. Late in the morning they went through Denver and just after lunch, they pulled up to a place Elizabeth hadn't ever expected to see again.
Jack's cabin appeared unoccupied at the moment, which was probably for the best. She didn't ask if Jack or Daniel actually knew what they were up to. It was safer for them to not know details at this point. John drove the Impala out under the trees, away from where it could be seen easily from the building or the driveway.
He climbed out of the car and moved off into the trees cautiously. He pulled something out of his pocket and there was a low humming before the puddle jumper decloaked in front of them.
John grinned at her. "Good thing I remembered where I parked."
She rolled her eyes. It was more important that nobody had stumbled onto the jumper in the course of the last few months. If it had been located, the entirety of the SGC would've been looking for invaders and John's mission could've been compromised.
There was still a long way to go. She helped John load the supplies from the car into the jumper. At some point this evening, the Daedalus was scheduled to leave Earth for Atlantis. She and John would be in a cloaked jumper in low orbit before that. John would pilot the jumper in stealth mode and attach it to the ship's hull. There was a particular location Rodney had identified where the jumper wouldn't register with the ship's systems while in hyperspace. Three weeks from now, they'd be back.
John would separate the jumper and they'd wait until Daedalus was gone. Then they could get to the city.
There were a thousand and one things that could go wrong along the way, for all that it was a relatively simple plan (for being one of John and Rodney's plans, anyway). Even a tiny problem could leave them in danger, caught or dead. But none of that was why Elizabeth hesitated after John finished obscuring the car under branches and stepped into the back of the jumper.
He caught the tension in her body immediately. "Elizabeth?"
"How much time do we have?"
He glanced at his watch. "Not much."
She nodded, looking around at the trees and the sunshine. John had activated the cloak when he stepped inside, and it was strange knowing she could see out into the woods but nobody could see them. She took a deep breath, enjoying the pine smell, just in case she was about to spend a month or so cooped up in a tiny space ship. But that depended on what happened in the next five minutes. "I need to talk to you about something, before we go."
She sat down on the bench, willing her body to relax and her breathing to stay normal, and John settled across from her, looking uncertain. Elizabeth clasped her hands and tried not to fidget. "John, there's something you need to understand about my condition."
He eyed her with a shrewd expression. "The nanites are still in you, aren't they. They're still active."
She wasn't surprised he'd figured that out. "Yes. The SGC thought they had deactivated them but the nanites fooled their equipment."
John shifted uneasily. "Elizabeth, how do you know they're, you know, there?"
She closed her eyes momentarily. "I can feel them." She shook her head. "It's hard to explain."
"Try me," he said, a hint of frustration in his voice.
She huffed out a breath. "While I was in the isolation room at the SGC, I started to feel like someone was looking over my shoulder sometimes. I thought it was a side effect of being cooped up under constant observation, paranoia. But when I was moved to a different holding area, it was still there." She bit her lip. "It's not something that happens on a conscious level. It's not there all the time. If I concentrate I can sense them, like a shadow you catch out of the corner of your eye."
John was watching her, clearly not sure what to think about all this. She waved her hands. "I'm not explaining this well."
He leaned forward, a hand on her knee. "Elizabeth, unless you're worried you're going to snap and try to kill me in my sleep while we're stuck in here, it doesn't matter. Once we get back, Rodney and Radek can do their voodoo and..."
Elizabeth stared back as she watched comprehension dawn on his face. Even though she'd been mentally preparing for it, when he pulled away she flinched.
"You don't want us to remove them," he said flatly, staring at her in shock.
"No, I don't."
There was a long, painful silence, filled only with chirping birds and buzzing insects. Elizabeth waited for John to speak but finally she couldn't just sit there while he looked at her blankly.
"There was a time I would've done anything to get rid of them. You know that. I didn't want this to happen." John's eyes clouded with pain and she knew he was remembering when she woke up in Atlantis and found out what Rodney had done. "But that was two years ago. The nanites are part of me now. I'm not the same person I was before."
He shot up from his seat, shaking his head as if to deny it. Elizabeth rose as well. "I've changed, John. I'm stronger, faster than an ordinary person. I can see and smell and hear better than you. It's not a huge difference, but it is there. I can't pretend it's not. I've been pretending for over a year and I can't keep doing that. I'll go insane." She swallowed. "Even if Rodney was to find a way to remove them, I can't wipe out the last two years."
John stepped closer, his expression frantic. "Elizabeth, it's too dangerous. What if they take you over?"
"That won't happen."
"How do you know that?" he yelled. She could see how scared he was - not for himself but for her - and she reached for him instinctively before she realized he might interpret it as a threat. She snatched her hand back.
"For one thing, the Asurans aren't out there any more. Also the nanites in my body have evolved. I'm not sure they'd respond to any attempts to control them now." John looked baffled and she shrugged. "It's another thing I can't explain clearly, but they must have adapted somehow to evade the SGC experiments. That I can sense them at all now suggests they're changing."
"Elizabeth, if these things are evolving, they could evolve until they are able to take control of your body. You could be a threat to the city."
She didn't look away. "Yes, that's a possibility. That's why I'm telling you this now. You need to consider that risk before you take me back to Atlantis."
"I can't leave you here," he protested immediately.
"Yes, you can," she shot back. "To protect the city, you can. You would." Elizabeth ignored the way her heart twisted at the thought of coming so close to going home and then losing it again. "I'm too biased to make this decision, John. I believe that I'm not a threat to Atlantis, but I'm leaving it up to you to make that call. Because I trust you."
It wasn't entirely fair, she knew, to have come this far and then left him only a few minutes to decide such a thing. Especially since she knew John's loyalty to her would be a big factor, and asking him to overlook their history and their relationship when they'd finally just been reunited was cruel.
She might have given up on him coming for her, but she still had faith in him. John would do whatever was necessary to protect the city, no matter the personal cost. Whatever else had changed in the last two years, she was sure of that.
She could see John weighing his options. Elizabeth did her best to keep her emotions in check. She had a feeling if she looked too desperate or pleading, John might not hold up against it. Finally, he nodded slightly. "We're going. Together. McKay can check you out once we're back and everything is settled down. Until then, I'll figure out what kind of security precautions we need and-"
"Whatever you say, Colonel," she interrupted. Her heart felt like it was expanding in her chest from sheer relief and she couldn't keep back the grin.
John grinned back but this his face went serious. He reached up and his fingertips rested against her cheek. She leaned into the touch unconsciously. "You haven't changed as much as you think, Elizabeth." His voice had dropped and it made a shiver go up her spine, as it always did.
She raised an eyebrow at him. John stared at her, his fingers stroking her skin for a moment, giving her goose bumps. "The Elizabeth Weir I knew put the safety of Atlantis above everything, including her own life," he said slowly, looking into her eyes. "If you're still willing to do that, then you're still our Elizabeth. That's all that matters."
Her eyes welled up. She might have enhanced senses and reflexes due to the nanites, but she couldn't stop herself from starting to cry at John's acceptance of who and what she was now. It was a feeling she had thought she'd never have again, belonging somewhere. A tear slipped down her face and John brushed it away with his thumb. Elizabeth wrapped her arms around his neck and he held her while she fought to keep from breaking down into hysterical sobbing. They had three weeks cooped up in here. She could have her breakdown later.
John stroked her back soothingly, but he shifted uneasily in her embrace. "Um, Elizabeth?"
She let go and stepped back. "I know. We're on a schedule."
He bounced a little on his feet. "Don't want to miss our ride."
She took one last look at the woods and closed the rear hatch as John settled himself in the pilot's chair. She joined him, watching as he brought the puddle jumper to full power and they lifted off from the ground. Jack's cabin began to shrink beneath them and she leaned back in the chair. John had that peculiarly contented expression he only got when he was flying.
"Well, if we miss the Daedalus, we could always hide in Jack's cabin for a few more months," she pointed out.
John glanced at her. "No way. If we get stuck, we're going to Vegas."
Elizabeth laughed. The jumper broke the atmosphere and moved away from Earth. John maneuvered the ship along a path marked by the HUD and there were two ships hovering in distant orbit above the planet. She recognized the utilitarian lines of the Daedalus and her heart sped up in her chest.
She concentrated for a moment, and her heart rate slowed back to normal.
John looked over. "Ready?"
She nodded. "Let's go home."
Summary: AU of season 5; Elizabeth has been back on Earth for two years when John comes to bring her home. But their friendship will be tested first by a secret she has kept from everyone.
Pairings: gen, Elizabeth & John friendship
Main characters: Weir, Sheppard
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Spoilers: Through late Season 5.
Beta: grav_ity
Disclaimer: Not mine, we only wish they were.
Author's Notes: This is for seramercury whose prompt was 1. There are many fics where John is sent back to Earth what about Elizabeth? Angst. Lots of angst. It's not quite that angsty, more like implying angst in the past. The story was inspired by the events of S4 and 5 and the song "Nos da cariad" by David Gray, in particular the last verse of the song: Hold on to St. Christopher, the sky is murderous red/ Go to sleep my one true love, our glory lies ahead. While there is a whole lot of subtext in this story, it is about the canon relationship between Elizabeth and John which was so stupidly and cruelly tossed aside by the show after 3 years.
Elizabeth hated shopping on weekends. The stores were so crowded and the parking lots were like some sort of demolition derby. Just getting out of Alameda was a nightmare, and the malls were insane. Once she was done buying necessities, she decided to reward herself and hit her favorite coffee place in Berkeley on the way home.
She parked at a meter well down the street from the coffee shop, away from some of the crowds. She sauntered through the bookstore, but she had a stack of things at home to read and she finally had told herself she couldn't buy any more new books until she got through at least half of those.
It was late afternoon, the darkness coming earlier now that fall was here. But Elizabeth enjoyed the walk and the window shopping. For so many months after accepting the job and the life that the SGC had ordered her into, every time she went out she'd been hyperaware of the car that followed her every place. Now it was gone and she no longer felt quite so under the microscope.
She had no doubt she was still being watched, but at least she no longer had to see it happening.
She blamed her own carelessness when she got grabbed. She was passing by an alley between two buildings when a hand shot out and yanked her off the sidewalk. She was propelled forward so that she was pressed up against the cinder block wall, her assailant's hand covering her mouth and her arm twisted behind her back.
Great, she thought to herself. This was patently unfair. Hadn't she been through enough in her life? Nearly dying, the infection by alien nanites, losing her job and her friends and her home, all that just wasn't enough for the universe, now she was going to get mugged?
Grimly it occurred to her this guy might intend worse than mugging. Well, he'd be in for a nasty surprise. Teyla had taught her too well, and the nanites had made her stronger than anyone really knew. She didn't struggle hard against the man holding her, but she did shift her feet to a ready stance.
A voice drawling in her ear made her freeze. "Don't even think about it, Elizabeth. And don't scream. You'll only draw attention."
The hands let her go and Elizabeth whipped around to see a tall, lanky man with very familiar, messy black hair. He had a thin beard and there were some hints of gray in his hair she didn't remember, and the ratty jeans, black t-shirt and leather jacket looked like they'd seen better days, but he was perhaps the most wonderful thing Elizabeth had ever seen in her life.
"John?"
He reached for her hand and Elizabeth grabbed onto him tightly, her mind spinning. Before she could voice any of the thousand questions, he glanced anxiously towards the street. "I can explain everything later, but we need to get out of here before anyone notices you're missing."
He looked at her in silent question and even though it'd been over two years, Elizabeth didn't hesitate. She nodded and let him lead her down the alley, away from the street, and away from her exile.
***
John was driving a battered old Impala, not a rental car, and he took her to a small one-bedroom apartment up in one of the cheaper neighborhoods in the East Bay area. The place was fairly barren, just enough furniture to make it look inhabited. Or was it actually inhabited? John hadn't spoken during the drive here, and Elizabeth hadn't asked questions.
How long had he been on Earth? When had he come back? He evidently knew she was being watched, and had known where to find her, but how? She had no idea which question she wanted to ask first.
John swept the apartment quickly, holding something that looked like a life signs detector, while she stood uneasily in the middle of the living room. "It's all clear. Nobody's been in here since I left to come get you."
She nodded automatically, staring at him. The kitchen light wasn't exactly flattering, but even so, he looked tired. There were circles under his eyes and he looked thinner than he should.
But he was still John. She'd know him anywhere, his voice, his smell, his shape. Three years of standing next to him on a daily basis, it was impossible not to recognize him.
She drank in the sight of him. "It's really you."
His face relaxed a little, a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth. "Yeah, Elizabeth, it's me."
She was hugging him before she realized she wanted to. John was the first person she'd seen from Atlantis, from any part of her old life, in almost two years. They wouldn't even let her talk to Jack or Daniel anymore. She couldn't help clinging to John as her body trembled.
John held on just as hard, which shocked her. She remembered full well how awkward and uncomfortable he was with any display of affection. But then, it'd been two years for him too. Elizabeth had no idea what the SGC had told him about her in that time, but it looked like life hadn't been a walk in the park for him.
"I'm sorry," he said into her ear, and she'd forgotten the effect of that particular tone of his voice. It was one he only used when someone he cared deeply about had been hurt or in danger, when his emotions were spilling over his control. "I'm sorry it took me so long to get to you."
"It's okay," she soothed him, although a tiny part of her refuted that idea.
John seemed to agree with the tiny part. "No, it's not." He let go of her only to put his hands on her shoulders. "I knew something was wrong. After you went back to the SGC so they could deal with the nanite thing, I knew it was wrong that you wouldn't ever send anyone a message, not even Teyla. But the Asurans came after us for stealing the ZPM and I thought..." His grip on her arms became painful but she didn't move. Remorse was plainly written across his face. "I was afraid they'd find out about you, try to take you away from us. I thought you'd be safer on Earth where they couldn't find you."
"What's their status now?" she asked, somewhat surprised at her own question.
John's eyes lit up and for a second he looked almost gleeful. "We destroyed them. Rodney and Sam managed to trick them into all drawing together in one place and we blew them up."
She gaped. "All of them?"
He nodded. "All of 'em. They're gone." His hands slid down her arms, fingers brushing against hers briefly, like he wanted to hold on, before letting go. "It's safe now, Elizabeth. You can come home."
***
They sat at the tiny kitchen table and John gave her some sparing details. He'd been on Earth for almost three months, searching for her. Someone was giving him help, but John hedged on names. That made Elizabeth uneasy, but she was so discombobulated by all of this, she told herself not to jump to any conclusions.
He'd finally tracked her to San Francisco, and then spent several weeks observing her, learning the pattern of her movements so he could find a way to get in touch with her without alerting her guards. When her watchdogs had disappeared two weeks ago, he'd thought they'd spotted him so he backed off until he was sure they were gone.
Elizabeth wasn't stupid. She worried what kind of rules he'd broken coming here on his own, and who had helped him. How much trouble had he gotten himself into for this? Not that she wasn't grateful, but it wasn't like she could do much to protect him now. It would be the height of irony for him to come get her only to get tossed out of the Stargate program for doing it.
John kept checking his watch and finally he said, "I'm cutting all this kind of close, but Elizabeth, if we're going to go, we need to go soon." He evidently saw the questions on her face, because he explained, "We need to drive somewhere, and it's going to take some time. I can fill you in on everything while we go, but if we're going to make it back to Atlantis, we should go now."
Back to Atlantis.
It was what she wanted more than anything, more even than telling her mother she was alive and okay. It all seemed to good to be true. For a moment Elizabeth was afraid. What if this was all a trap? A trick to find out whether she really had resigned herself to her fate?
Worse, what if none of this was real to begin with?
It's John, she argued with herself. You're absolutely certain of that. You trust him.
"Elizabeth?"
He was looking at her worriedly from across the table, and when she gaped and nothing came out, he came over and crouched down next to her chair.
He was different, she admitted to herself. Harder, more serious, more intent if that was even possible. Even without specifics she could read two years of grief and struggle in his eyes and his face. But something else was there, something she hadn't ever been able to put into words. Her friendship with John had been one of the deepest relationships of her life, something she could never explain to anyone who hadn't been through the kinds of things they'd been through together.
"We don't leave our people behind, you know that." He swallowed, looking anxious, his voice growing rougher with emotion. "I won't force you to go, not against your will, but... we need you back, Elizabeth."
They stared at each other in silence for a long minute.
Her life here had never been a life. It was a prison. On a large scale, but she was constrained and confined and supervised constantly. There were plenty of days when she wondered why she should bother getting out of bed, if this was the rest of her existence. In the back of her mind had always been a hope of getting back in the door with Stargate Command somehow, at least getting in touch with her people again. It had been, at best, a futile and desperate fantasy.
There was nothing for her here. "Let's go."
***
There was snow in the Sierras.
John guided the Impala up the steady incline away from San Francisco along I-80, almost the same path the railroad had once taken to cross into the interior of the continent from the coast. Behind them, the sunset illuminated the western sky and faded slowly while Elizabeth watched it in the rearview mirror. But the light hadn't faded entirely before she saw the snow-covered tops of the mountains ahead.
John had loaned her a worn-looking baseball cap and his jacket. The temperature would get colder through the night and she hadn't exactly had time to go home and pack. Not that she needed to worry so much about hypothermia any more, but she found it strangely comforting to be wearing John's things.
She could smell him on the jacket, along with the unique tang of leather and human sweat. She concentrated on John's scent, and memories flashed through her head in quick succession, almost too many to count. John rescuing her from Kolya during the storm, the look on his face when she sent him on the suicide run to blow up the hive ship during the siege, watching the yellow overtake his eyes when he'd been infected by the retrovirus and then waiting anxiously for it to fade again. The beard he'd grown during his six month exile - it had been fuller and neater than the one he was sporting now.
Watching the Wraith feed on him. Watching him age and wither away in front of her eyes and not being able to do anything to stop it. The last time she'd seen him, he was watching her walk through the gate to Earth, surrounded by a Marine guard and not knowing it would be two years before they saw each other again.
She remembered the sound of his voice, too, on her answering machine during their last sojourn on Earth, petulant and worried and not quite able to hide the frustration he'd been feeling, or chiding her from the other side of her desk or walking at her side through the corridors in Atlantis when he tried to convince her of something.
There was almost too much to remember, too many images and sounds to isolate into discrete moments. He'd been her strongest link to the city, the person she spent the most time with for three straight years. It was no wonder when the nanites first infected her body, John was the one who reached her, who brought her back.
She felt her breathing quicken slightly, a slight buzzing in her mind that had become familiar by now. She breathed out slowly, trying to calm down.
"I can practically hear the questions, you know," John drawled from the driver's seat.
She flashed him an apologetic smile. He had one hand on the wheel, the other propped up on the door and covering his chin.
She was going to have to explain some things to him before they left the planet. She owed him that much.
She wasn't sure where to start, so she settled for the obvious. "Why now?" She had the advantage of being able to watch him while his eyes had to stay on the road. Even in the fading light she couldn't miss the flinch.
"We wanted to bring you back sooner," he said. "Everyone kept asking about you. But the Asurans were all over us for a while, and nobody at the SGC would give me straight answers."
Elizabeth's mind flashed back to the endless days in the isolation room, the tests, the injections, and the slow feeling of losing her mind as all sense of time and reality faded. The drone of it had been punctuated only by visits from Jack or Daniel, reminding her that a world did exist outside the cement walls. Then even those visits ended.
"Rodney was saying that we needed to do something to get to you, because the fact that the SGC wouldn't say anything and you not trying to contact us meant they couldn't get the nanites out of you and wouldn't tell us." She looked out the window at the mountains, not speaking. "We'd gotten rid of the Asurans, so it would be safe to bring you back so Rodney and Radek could help you."
Elizabeth wondered to herself if John's narrative had anything to do with Colonel Davis suddenly coming into her cell that one day, with a stack of paperwork offering her a new identity and a new life on Earth, monitored by the government but out in the open air, at least. Had the SGC known the Atlantis senior staff were growing restless? Was that why she'd suddenly been sprung from her captivity? She would probably never know. "What happened?"
"Sam tried. I was there when she called Earth, when she asked Landry about you. He stonewalled, and she was going to call in some favors and find out while she was back on Earth for a review."
He paused for a second and she braced herself. "And?"
"The IOA fired her and replaced her with Woolsey."
"What?" she yelped so loudly they both jumped. Richard Woolsey was in charge of Atlantis? Mr. By The Book, the man who probably slept in a suit and tie, who turned into a gibbering mess at the first sign of an alien, was put in charge of her city?
"Yeah," John sighed. He put both hands on the wheel. "To be fair, he didn't do too bad, at least not after Pegasus knocked the sharp stick out of his ass." Elizabeth snorted back a laugh, a habit she was fairly sure she'd picked up from Rodney. John grinned, the mischievous little kid one. "He's not you, though."
"I can just imagine." Riding herd on John and Rodney and all the other department heads required an entire skill set Woolsey didn't have. She simply couldn't picture the man who wanted every form filled out neatly in triplicate managing to get them all to abide by his methods.
She tugged the cuffs of the jacket down over her palms, almost afraid to find out more. "Did he tell you where I was?"
"No," John said. "That was partly how things really started to go sour. I kept asking, Rodney kept asking, and Woolsey at first just kept giving us the party line about you being in treatment and that he was sure you were getting the best possible care, blah blah blah. But eventually Woolsey got suspicious himself and started asking the SGC for information and then the powers that be decided to replace him too."
She gaped, though really she shouldn't be surprised Woolsey didn't last long. "Okay, wait, who's in charge now?"
John spat the name out like a curse. "Shen."
Elizabeth nearly growled. If she had a personal nemesis in the IOA it was Ambassador Shen, the woman who'd demanded Elizabeth come back to Earth for a review in the middle of an intergalactic crisis. Shen was a creature of pure ambition and Elizabeth didn't want to think how Atlantis was faring under the leadership of a woman whose only interest in life was her own career.
"That was a couple months ago. Rodney and I were already talking about trying to find a way to get back to Earth and find out what was going on. Just before that happened, Dr. Jackson came to Atlantis." John looked away from the highway, and the fury in his eyes was palpable. "He had a message from General O'Neill. There was no other way for them to get word to us, not with the IOA in charge and Landry siding with them. He told me what they'd done to you."
There wasn't much to say to that. She could read in his body language the guilt and the anger. It warmed her, made her feel that maybe not everything in her universe had changed since they moment Rodney reactivated the nanites. But she couldn't speak any soothing platitudes to make John feel better. She went through months of hell wishing for him and Ronon and Teyla to burst through the door and get her out of a prison cell and they never came.
John looked back toward the road, muttering more to himself than to her, "I should've come back sooner." The self-disgust she heard in his voice made her heart ache. She had given up on him, and she should've known better.
Without thinking about it, she reached over and pried one of his hands off the steering wheel and wrapped her fingers around his. "You came, that's what matters."
He squeezed her hand for a moment, and their eyes caught. It was as though the last two years hadn't happened, like they'd never been separated, and she could read so much in his eyes in that split second it made her breath catch.
The corner of his mouth went up in a smirk so familiar she wanted to laugh out loud. "Don't thank me yet. We've still got to get back, get rid of Shen and figure out how to keep Caldwell from coming and arresting us both."
She chuckled. "No impending Wraith attack to deal with on top of it? No invasion? Or strange alien virus?" John grinned more widely and she waved a hand dismissively. "Piece of cake."
***
They stopped at a department store before beginning the long climb over the mountains and into Nevada. John was buying water and packaged food, apparently to supplement the supplies he'd loaded into the trunk of the car before they left. He suddenly detoured into the women's clothing. He looked at her in embarrassment and suggested she probably needed to pick up some extra clothes.
She'd been so thrown off balance by his abrupt appearance, the thought hadn't even occurred to her until he mentioned it. Elizabeth grabbed a few shirts and a couple pairs of sweatpants, then paused. John was trailing after her with the cart and for a second it was too surreal, him wandering around a department store shopping with her like this. It was like they'd been dropped into some sort of alternate reality.
Elizabeth had wondered more than once in the last two years if there was a reality out there where she escaped the nanite infestation entirely, or at least one where she didn't end up with more than a mild concussion when the city left Lantea. There was some combination of choices, she was sure, that in some reality had kept Elizabeth Weir safe and in Atlantis. Unfortunately that didn't change the reality she had to live in.
She waited for John to catch up and lowered her voice. "Um, how long is it going to be?" She was thinking of how much time she had to fill before she'd be able to wash clothes.
John looked back at her meaningfully. "Eighteen days."
He didn't say anything else, but he didn't have to. She understood then how they were getting back.
She just nodded and headed to the "Intimates" section. No way was she surviving for almost three weeks in a small space ship without enough clean underwear.
***
By the time they were through the Donner Pass it was well past nightfall. Despite the chill outside, Elizabeth left the window cracked open a little. The cold mountain air was refreshing and cleaned the lingering smell of fast food from the interior of the car.
She put her feet up on the dashboard, remembering trips from when she was younger, during the summer time with the radio blasting. John raised his eyebrows at her snuggling down into the seat with her feet propped up but she cut off any remark he was about to make with a question. "What exactly happened with the Asurans?"
John scrubbed his hand across his face and she heard the faint rasp of his beard against his skin before he straightened in the seat. "You remember the Wraith kill code?"
She nodded. Hard to forget that. Rodney had been urging them to try and upload it to the Asurans when they stole the ZPM, but John had determined they needed to return to Atlantis as fast as possible, and Elizabeth and Ronon had both sided with him. Given how much trouble Rodney had getting the new ZPM to interface with the jumper before they made the jump back to the city - the Asurans had been zeroing in on them by the time they finally escaped - it was a good thing John's instinctive need to protect Atlantis had won out. They'd barely gotten to Atlantis in time to install the ZPM so John could land the city safely on the surface. Elizabeth went cold all over when she thought about what could've happened if they'd taken any longer to get back.
"They eventually found us on the new planet," John explained. "They came with ships that time, instead of the beam weapon. Sam and Rodney modified the ARG weapon and did something with the drones to make it work. We managed to beat them off."
He shifted in his seat, one of his tells for when he was holding something back, and she raised an eyebrow expectantly. "And?"
"And... I kind of snuck up there in another jumper and Rodney and Zelenka got us past their shields. We got inside and uploaded the code and got out."
Elizabeth thought that over for a moment. Knowing John, not to mention Rodney and Radek, she had no doubt it had been a great deal more harrowing than he was making it out to be. She could almost envision the bickering between the two scientists while John and Ronon rolled their eyes.
Her heart ached so badly with homesickness that for a moment she couldn't speak. John glanced at her, but Elizabeth avoided his gaze by taking a sip of water.
When she'd regained some equilibrium, she asked, "Did it work?" That had been the sticking point before. Rodney knew he could deliver the code but he had no idea if it would actually work and cause the Asurans to revert to their original purpose of attacking the Wraith.
John's expression went dark and Elizabeth felt dread coil through her belly. "Yeah, it worked. A little too well." She didn't say anything, just waited. "The Asurans started annihilating human worlds to destroy the Wraith's food source."
"Oh my God." The exclamation was automatic. She wasn't really all that shocked.
"Yeah. You were right, as usual," John said with a bitter twist in his voice.
When they'd been debating this, back in the conference room in Atlantis years ago, when Rodney first had the idea, she'd gone quiet for so long Teyla had finally asked her what was bothering her. Elizabeth had laced her fingers together and spoken slowly. "I'm less afraid of what we think will happen than the unforeseen consequences." There had been a heavy silence in the room for a minute before they moved on to a new topic.
They should have learned their lesson about unleashing forces they didn't understand in the Pegasus galaxy.
Some tiny portion of her brain pointed out that only a crazy person would want to go back to that life. "They're gone now, though?"
"Yeah, they're gone. It's back to life sucking alien vampires and the occasional creepy human bad guys," he said with a wry expression.
She smiled back and wrapped her arms around herself, bundling his jacket up under her chin. "So what else has been going on?"
John began to fill her in on two years of lost gossip, some of it shocking, some of it wonderfully mundane. Elizabeth listened with half an ear, part of her simply soaking in the sound of his voice.
***
They couldn't stop driving or they'd risk missing the window, but John was yawning heavily around 1am. Elizabeth insisted she could drive for a while. They switched off just before they crossed into Utah, and John chuckled as he stretched out in the passenger seat. "Every time I drive out here, I feel like I'm in a car commercial."
The salt flats were outside, ghostly and pale in the night, looking more alien than Earth had a right to look. She grinned. "Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt?"
"Exactly." He yawned again. "But don't speed. Last thing we need is to get a ticket."
"Yes, sir."
He rolled his eyes at that and leaned his head back against the seat. He drifted to sleep within a minute. Elizabeth wondered when the last time he'd slept was. A memory surfaced, something she hadn't recalled for a long time. John had trouble sleeping around people. He'd told her that once when they'd been sitting in her office, both of them too tired to keep working and also too tired to bother getting up to go to bed. Elizabeth had confessed more than one thing she never would have thought she'd admit in those hours when exhaustion had played merry hell with her filters.
John had to trust people in order to sleep around them. Or be so zonked he couldn't stay conscious.
She glanced over at him now, his arms folded across his chest loosely and his face relaxing as he fell more deeply asleep. He looked younger when he slept, she noticed.
She was tired herself, but with a small amount of concentration she could push it back and stay alert. She turned her eyes back to the interstate stretching out endlessly before her and felt her heart sink.
John's trust wasn't that easy to win. Elizabeth knew that from experience. But once it was given? It couldn't be broken.
She hoped.
***
John woke up well after dawn, Elizabeth having not had the heart to wake him as the night faded. She didn't argue when he wanted to drive again and she let herself doze for a bit in the passenger's seat. Late in the morning they went through Denver and just after lunch, they pulled up to a place Elizabeth hadn't ever expected to see again.
Jack's cabin appeared unoccupied at the moment, which was probably for the best. She didn't ask if Jack or Daniel actually knew what they were up to. It was safer for them to not know details at this point. John drove the Impala out under the trees, away from where it could be seen easily from the building or the driveway.
He climbed out of the car and moved off into the trees cautiously. He pulled something out of his pocket and there was a low humming before the puddle jumper decloaked in front of them.
John grinned at her. "Good thing I remembered where I parked."
She rolled her eyes. It was more important that nobody had stumbled onto the jumper in the course of the last few months. If it had been located, the entirety of the SGC would've been looking for invaders and John's mission could've been compromised.
There was still a long way to go. She helped John load the supplies from the car into the jumper. At some point this evening, the Daedalus was scheduled to leave Earth for Atlantis. She and John would be in a cloaked jumper in low orbit before that. John would pilot the jumper in stealth mode and attach it to the ship's hull. There was a particular location Rodney had identified where the jumper wouldn't register with the ship's systems while in hyperspace. Three weeks from now, they'd be back.
John would separate the jumper and they'd wait until Daedalus was gone. Then they could get to the city.
There were a thousand and one things that could go wrong along the way, for all that it was a relatively simple plan (for being one of John and Rodney's plans, anyway). Even a tiny problem could leave them in danger, caught or dead. But none of that was why Elizabeth hesitated after John finished obscuring the car under branches and stepped into the back of the jumper.
He caught the tension in her body immediately. "Elizabeth?"
"How much time do we have?"
He glanced at his watch. "Not much."
She nodded, looking around at the trees and the sunshine. John had activated the cloak when he stepped inside, and it was strange knowing she could see out into the woods but nobody could see them. She took a deep breath, enjoying the pine smell, just in case she was about to spend a month or so cooped up in a tiny space ship. But that depended on what happened in the next five minutes. "I need to talk to you about something, before we go."
She sat down on the bench, willing her body to relax and her breathing to stay normal, and John settled across from her, looking uncertain. Elizabeth clasped her hands and tried not to fidget. "John, there's something you need to understand about my condition."
He eyed her with a shrewd expression. "The nanites are still in you, aren't they. They're still active."
She wasn't surprised he'd figured that out. "Yes. The SGC thought they had deactivated them but the nanites fooled their equipment."
John shifted uneasily. "Elizabeth, how do you know they're, you know, there?"
She closed her eyes momentarily. "I can feel them." She shook her head. "It's hard to explain."
"Try me," he said, a hint of frustration in his voice.
She huffed out a breath. "While I was in the isolation room at the SGC, I started to feel like someone was looking over my shoulder sometimes. I thought it was a side effect of being cooped up under constant observation, paranoia. But when I was moved to a different holding area, it was still there." She bit her lip. "It's not something that happens on a conscious level. It's not there all the time. If I concentrate I can sense them, like a shadow you catch out of the corner of your eye."
John was watching her, clearly not sure what to think about all this. She waved her hands. "I'm not explaining this well."
He leaned forward, a hand on her knee. "Elizabeth, unless you're worried you're going to snap and try to kill me in my sleep while we're stuck in here, it doesn't matter. Once we get back, Rodney and Radek can do their voodoo and..."
Elizabeth stared back as she watched comprehension dawn on his face. Even though she'd been mentally preparing for it, when he pulled away she flinched.
"You don't want us to remove them," he said flatly, staring at her in shock.
"No, I don't."
There was a long, painful silence, filled only with chirping birds and buzzing insects. Elizabeth waited for John to speak but finally she couldn't just sit there while he looked at her blankly.
"There was a time I would've done anything to get rid of them. You know that. I didn't want this to happen." John's eyes clouded with pain and she knew he was remembering when she woke up in Atlantis and found out what Rodney had done. "But that was two years ago. The nanites are part of me now. I'm not the same person I was before."
He shot up from his seat, shaking his head as if to deny it. Elizabeth rose as well. "I've changed, John. I'm stronger, faster than an ordinary person. I can see and smell and hear better than you. It's not a huge difference, but it is there. I can't pretend it's not. I've been pretending for over a year and I can't keep doing that. I'll go insane." She swallowed. "Even if Rodney was to find a way to remove them, I can't wipe out the last two years."
John stepped closer, his expression frantic. "Elizabeth, it's too dangerous. What if they take you over?"
"That won't happen."
"How do you know that?" he yelled. She could see how scared he was - not for himself but for her - and she reached for him instinctively before she realized he might interpret it as a threat. She snatched her hand back.
"For one thing, the Asurans aren't out there any more. Also the nanites in my body have evolved. I'm not sure they'd respond to any attempts to control them now." John looked baffled and she shrugged. "It's another thing I can't explain clearly, but they must have adapted somehow to evade the SGC experiments. That I can sense them at all now suggests they're changing."
"Elizabeth, if these things are evolving, they could evolve until they are able to take control of your body. You could be a threat to the city."
She didn't look away. "Yes, that's a possibility. That's why I'm telling you this now. You need to consider that risk before you take me back to Atlantis."
"I can't leave you here," he protested immediately.
"Yes, you can," she shot back. "To protect the city, you can. You would." Elizabeth ignored the way her heart twisted at the thought of coming so close to going home and then losing it again. "I'm too biased to make this decision, John. I believe that I'm not a threat to Atlantis, but I'm leaving it up to you to make that call. Because I trust you."
It wasn't entirely fair, she knew, to have come this far and then left him only a few minutes to decide such a thing. Especially since she knew John's loyalty to her would be a big factor, and asking him to overlook their history and their relationship when they'd finally just been reunited was cruel.
She might have given up on him coming for her, but she still had faith in him. John would do whatever was necessary to protect the city, no matter the personal cost. Whatever else had changed in the last two years, she was sure of that.
She could see John weighing his options. Elizabeth did her best to keep her emotions in check. She had a feeling if she looked too desperate or pleading, John might not hold up against it. Finally, he nodded slightly. "We're going. Together. McKay can check you out once we're back and everything is settled down. Until then, I'll figure out what kind of security precautions we need and-"
"Whatever you say, Colonel," she interrupted. Her heart felt like it was expanding in her chest from sheer relief and she couldn't keep back the grin.
John grinned back but this his face went serious. He reached up and his fingertips rested against her cheek. She leaned into the touch unconsciously. "You haven't changed as much as you think, Elizabeth." His voice had dropped and it made a shiver go up her spine, as it always did.
She raised an eyebrow at him. John stared at her, his fingers stroking her skin for a moment, giving her goose bumps. "The Elizabeth Weir I knew put the safety of Atlantis above everything, including her own life," he said slowly, looking into her eyes. "If you're still willing to do that, then you're still our Elizabeth. That's all that matters."
Her eyes welled up. She might have enhanced senses and reflexes due to the nanites, but she couldn't stop herself from starting to cry at John's acceptance of who and what she was now. It was a feeling she had thought she'd never have again, belonging somewhere. A tear slipped down her face and John brushed it away with his thumb. Elizabeth wrapped her arms around his neck and he held her while she fought to keep from breaking down into hysterical sobbing. They had three weeks cooped up in here. She could have her breakdown later.
John stroked her back soothingly, but he shifted uneasily in her embrace. "Um, Elizabeth?"
She let go and stepped back. "I know. We're on a schedule."
He bounced a little on his feet. "Don't want to miss our ride."
She took one last look at the woods and closed the rear hatch as John settled himself in the pilot's chair. She joined him, watching as he brought the puddle jumper to full power and they lifted off from the ground. Jack's cabin began to shrink beneath them and she leaned back in the chair. John had that peculiarly contented expression he only got when he was flying.
"Well, if we miss the Daedalus, we could always hide in Jack's cabin for a few more months," she pointed out.
John glanced at her. "No way. If we get stuck, we're going to Vegas."
Elizabeth laughed. The jumper broke the atmosphere and moved away from Earth. John maneuvered the ship along a path marked by the HUD and there were two ships hovering in distant orbit above the planet. She recognized the utilitarian lines of the Daedalus and her heart sped up in her chest.
She concentrated for a moment, and her heart rate slowed back to normal.
John looked over. "Ready?"
She nodded. "Let's go home."