fic: Shattered Balances by Tielan - PG-13
fic for 22nd April (bonus)
Title: Shattered Balances
Author: Tielan
Summary: In that moment of focus, before the Meld broke, she felt the others reach for her - an instinctive clutch for the originator, the Nightwing. The reach was instinctive, reckless, doomed. They, too, splintered, as the mind torn loose its ties of loyalty shattered in pain and rage and grief.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Stargate Atlantis characters aren't mine, but the rest of it is all my own imagination.
Notes: I'm not actually scheduled for the 22nd, but there's nothing listed for today, and I had this lying around from an attempt at a flashfic challenge, so I finished it up just to get it out of the way.
Shattered Balances
Teyla felt Ronon go mad through the Meld - the sudden, screaming pain in her mind, in her body, like a screeching noise that went on forever, like tearing tendons or breaking bone.
Ronon!
In that moment of focus, before the Meld broke, she felt the others reach for her - an instinctive clutch for the originator, the Nightwing. The reach was instinctive, reckless, doomed. They, too, splintered, as the mind torn loose its ties of loyalty shattered in pain and rage and grief, and went dark in her mind as the world went dark in her eyes.
When Teyla regained consciousness, she was sitting on the floor, propped up against the cupboards of her tiny kitchen, her head aching as though with a full-force migraine, her face wet with tears as her fingernails dug into the wooden boards beneath her. Somewhere, above her head, the phone was ringing with a steady insistence. Somewhere, further out in the tiny house, the cellphone Rodney had pushed upon her was playing a tinny tune, trying to get her attention.
She could barely move. Her breath came in gasping pants, dragging air into her starved lungs as she tried to concentrate through the pain. The reaction throbbed through her head, resonating in her flesh, buzzing in her bones as it shredded the world around her again and again in a cycle of agony.
Then there were hands on her shoulders, pulling her up in a firm grip. She found herself sitting on the wooden bench beside someone who slid his arm around her, put a glass of water in her hand, and pressed a salt-dipped fingertip between her lips.
The bitterness on her tongue jolted her out of the reaction cycle, grounding her with earth. She took a deep breath of air, and gulped down the water he'd given her. And when she turned to look John Sheppard in the eyes, she was suddenly aware of the heat of his arm against her back and the hot, hard flicker of fire beneath her breastbone.
It wasn't the Meld but it was enough to ground her, give her awareness - not only of herself but of the man who had already sensed her withdrawl and was matching it with his own - a careful balance.
Balance was important to a Nightwing.
"You okay?"
Teyla turned to look at John. "Yes."
When he stood, she felt the absence of him, even as he seated himself across from her at the table. "What happened?"
She met his gaze, the shadows that flickered in hazel eyes before she turned her gaze to the glass again. "You felt what happened," she murmured and beyond the distortion of the curving glass, saw his hands flex slightly in a denial that died a moment later.
"He was going to call me in when he found them." The reflection of daylight was a pale gleam against the ebony of his hair as John looked down at the table. Melena had been human, but her killers had been Shadowkin and so fell under Shadowkin law. "Guess he decided to take his own justice."
There were times it was unwise to forget that the Bloodkin were known for their intensity. In love and in hatred, they took no half-measures. In hindsight, they should never have allowed Ronon to seek out Melena's killers alone - even John's reckless heroism would have been better than no brake at all.
"Will you hunt him down?" Teyla knew the answer, even before he said it.
"We have to."
The phone began ringing again - a shrill peal in the silence, beating in time with the sudden throbbing in her temples. John turned, reached across to the bench, and picked it up. "She's okay. I'm with her." Whatever comment the person on the other end made, it narrowed his eyes. "How long?"
Teyla stared at the phone, concentrated a little and flexed the world around her, sensing rather than hearing Carson's accented tones on the other end of the phone.
"I'm still in Scotland, John. It'll take at least half a day to get to the Sateda Gate."
"Then we'll meet you there at sundown."
"Is she all right?"
John turned to look at her, and his expression shifted, softened. "Looks all right to me. Want to talk to her?"
A little embarrassed at the softening and the implied innuendo of the comment, Teyla held her hand out for the phone and he placed it in her hand and moved away. "Carson. Is all well?"
"Love, you're the one just had the casting rebound on you - I'm fine." A thread of humour wove into his tone, cool and soothing, a Seabirthed's gift of calm. "Trust me, I'm a doctor."
"You can take the time off?"
"I'll make the time." He hesitated. "You're sure you're okay?"
Teyla smiled, although she could still feel the raw edges of the broken Meld within her. They'd lived with it so long, they'd forgotten what it meant to be without it. "Yes. We will see you at the Gate."
When she hung up, John was on his cellphone in the next room. She listened to his conversation as she tidied up the spilled sugar with dustpan and brush. The physicality of the action helped, for all that she could have cleared it up with magic.
"You can leave that. Look, if Carson can make it from Scotland, then you can, too. Well, get Jeannie to drive you. I'm sure you'll survive. No, I'm not. Yes, she is." A moment later, John swung around the edge of the door, holding the cellphone out to her. "Rodney."
"I don't want to drive four hours across the country with my niece. Please tell me how to get out of it."
Teyla smiled. "You do not have to come, Rodney."
"If you're saying you don't want my help then my feelings are hurt. Look, I've thought a bit about this since the breaking - it kept my mind off the pain. If he went after them, then he would have needed either a tracker or a lot of Humankin information. This isn't something that you just find and do. And Ronon would have planned for this, fixation or not."
"You're saying that he would have used outside agencies?"
"He had connections there, remember? Anyway, I've got the names of a couple of agencies he mentioned and we might be able to contact them..."
Rodney's mind never stopped, a quicksilver fire that leaped from thought to thought as he expanded on his theories and ideas. Teyla could see him now, pacing the floor, the Fireborn aura of flickering scarlet and shimmering gold surrounding him as his thoughts flashed through theories like lightning to copper rods, and bit back a smile. Good as his ideas were, there would be time for them later.
"Are you getting ready to leave, Rodney?"
"Uh... I'm...getting around to it."
In the background someone made an exasperated noise and a muttered comment, and this time, Teyla didn't hide the smile in her voice. "Put Jeannie on the phone."
John was rummaging through her fridge, looking for something to snack upon. He lifted a bottle of the beer she kept for his visits and angled it questioningly. She nodded. He could have it.
"Teyla. God, is everything okay? Ronon?"
"We don't know. We felt the Meld go... Jeannie, I understand if you do not wish for Rodney to--"
"He's becoming a nuisance," said Jeannie with the good-natured bite of a woman driven to the point of endurance by an annoying older brother. "Honestly, if he tells Madison one more story about how her uncle is an awesomely intelligent and fearsome being..."
Teyla laughed. She couldn't help it. Rodney was Rodney and there was no-one in the lands - either Shadow or Human - quite like him. "Can you bring him the first leg of the journey here?"
"Yes. Do you need any help? Rodney told me about Melena. Was it Rogues?"
"We think so - the details were vague and John was unable to use his usual channels." Teyla hadn't been able to get any details about it either. Then again, her connections to the Humanlands were rarely official.
"That sucks," Jeannie's summary was pithy - where her brother used more words than necessary, Jeannie had learned to use considerably less. "Okay, I'll bring Rodney to the Gate. He can live with a little Dora."
In the background Rodney declared something unsavoury about a certain cartoon explorer and Jeannie shushed him with a language warning. Teyla hung up after extracting the promise to visit Jeannie and her husband and daughter when this was over.
"She hasn't told Caleb yet," John said as she returned his phone, careful not to let her fingers brush his. He leaned his hip against the bench and rested his beer on the edge, measuring how far it could rest off the edge.
"I did not think she would."
Greenish eyes glanced up, narrowed. "You don't think he's going to have an issue when his wife tells him that his daughter's not, strictly speaking, human?"
"She loves him."
"I'd think she'd want to tell him if she loved him," he said bitterly, pushing black hair out of his eyes.
Teyla looked up at him, unsure if she could explain this to John who was, after all, a man, and one whose emotional scars had resulted from a situation much like Jeannie's. The Humankin woman he had loved had chosen to reject who and what he was after nearly two years together, and it had left him reserved in ways that even the Meld could not mend. "It is different for Jeannie. Difficult."
Something flared in his eyes, then, and Teyla tried not to hold herself too still. Changelings noticed movement and its absence, and John was more attuned to her than most. But he only turned away muttering, "If she leaves it too long and Madison begins manifesting..."
"Then that is their business and not ours." Teyla hoped she didn't sound too severe. Yes, she hoped that it would not come to that for Jeannie and Caleb and Madison, but she could understand Jeannie's fears as John could not, blinded by his own painful history.
She crossed to her workroom, paused in the door. "Give me a moment."
A few spellparts would be necessary for this, little more. Anything else could be acquired out in Sateda; this was merely insurance.
Teyla picked out two small bags of mixed herbs, secreting them in her trouser pockets. John would want to travel light in the way of Changelings. The sooner they reached the Sateda Gate, the sooner they could make contact with those they knew among the Humankin, and the sooner they could find Ronon.
When she emerged from her workroom, John was sliding his fingers through the sandstones Ronon had carved for her - tiny stone cetaceans and molluscs no bigger than her little finger's length, made of a rock type no ancient mollusc had ever fossilised into. He picked one up, tossed it lightly into the air, caught it on the way down. "Got everything you need?"
"We can leave."
They went out the back of the house to the yard that looked up the hill. John paused at the edge of the path. "Are you still able to Change?"
She shrugged. "If not, I'll ride you."
Something gleamed in his eyes, like a Changeling's mischievous glint, but not quite. "Strangely enough, I don't have a problem with that."
It was the breaking of the Meld, Teyla was sure. The usual walls they built up between them, around them, had shattered. In the absence of the central Meld connection towards each other, they would try to re-establish those connections by any means. This was simply John's way of connecting back to her.
At least, she hoped it was.
John changed almost between steps. One moment, the sun shone down on a man walking through lengthening grass, the next moment, his form blurred and a wolf was bounding off through the fields.
Reminding herself that Changelings deliberately tried to make the Change seem simple, Teyla stepped off the edge of the path into the short grass, and took a slow deep breath. As she exhaled, she willed the Change upon herself. The possibility was there in all Shadowkin - the flexibility of mind and cell and magic that made up who they were, even without the assistance of a Meld - but the act of Change was more difficult than it had been before Ronon had shattered what they'd all become.
Previously, she'd felt the Change as a slow change from one form to another, now, it felt like squeezing her body into clothing that was one size too small.
In her mind, there was a 'pop', something like an orgasm - sudden relief after a build-up of tension. The sense of herself that said 'Teyla' settled into the mental container that held her form for this Change. After that, everything else slid into place, every bone, every muscle, every hair, every claw.
Her skin crawled a little with the Change, and she forced herself to ignore the sensation, refusing to give in to the instinct to scratch. As the Change completed, she shook herself, head to haunches. 'Feeling her fur' she called it - that first moment of complete being in a non-human form.
Sharp scent filled her nostrils and she lifted her muzzle and whuffed at the air. Someone had marked her yard as his territory, and she didn't have to look around for the culprit.
John barked at her, the question clear in his tone, Are we ready to go, yet?
In answer, Teyla stretched herself out, testing muscles of which she wasn't completely sure. John's restlessness stung the air as she checked herself all over, as he bounded back and forth in energetic encouragement. She tried not to let it distract her as she insured that everything was in place and in order.
Are you finished? This time, his bark was peremptory.
Teyla tilted her head, ears flicking forwards. I just wish to be sure.
Well, hurry up and be sure and let's get moving! John bounded forward and nipped lightly at her flanks; not quite teasing, neither a reprimand, something somewhere between the two. We've got a long way to go before sunset.
She nipped him back for a moment, taking pleasure in the moment of playfulness that was as much teasing as it was respect for the pack leader, accepting the shove that rolled her over in the grass as he mock-growled into her neck. Ronon's somewhere out there, losing his mind!
I have not forgotten. Teyla held herself still beneath paws and jaws, sensing the frustration in him, acceding to his need to be doing something - to find Rodney and Carson, to be active in getting to Ronon and finding out what he'd done. Something in her sighed, wishing that he had been able to accept the play for even a little while. She was not the only one hurting from the severance of the Meld - the others were dealing with raw edges, too. But that does not mean that we should also lose our perspective.
He let her up after a moment, stepping back and moving away so she could get up amidst the rustling grass and the midmorning sun. We won't. Then, softer, We can't.
Teyla rubbed her muzzle briefly against his; all the reassurance he would accept from her. Shall we go?
Yeah, let's.
They turned towards the west, the sun at their backs as lupine muscles sprang into action on an invisible signal, and they raced each other across the broad fields, headed for the nearest Gate to Sateda.
Behind them, the wind rustled the grasses.
- fin -
Title: Shattered Balances
Author: Tielan
Summary: In that moment of focus, before the Meld broke, she felt the others reach for her - an instinctive clutch for the originator, the Nightwing. The reach was instinctive, reckless, doomed. They, too, splintered, as the mind torn loose its ties of loyalty shattered in pain and rage and grief.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Stargate Atlantis characters aren't mine, but the rest of it is all my own imagination.
Notes: I'm not actually scheduled for the 22nd, but there's nothing listed for today, and I had this lying around from an attempt at a flashfic challenge, so I finished it up just to get it out of the way.
Shattered Balances
Teyla felt Ronon go mad through the Meld - the sudden, screaming pain in her mind, in her body, like a screeching noise that went on forever, like tearing tendons or breaking bone.
Ronon!
In that moment of focus, before the Meld broke, she felt the others reach for her - an instinctive clutch for the originator, the Nightwing. The reach was instinctive, reckless, doomed. They, too, splintered, as the mind torn loose its ties of loyalty shattered in pain and rage and grief, and went dark in her mind as the world went dark in her eyes.
When Teyla regained consciousness, she was sitting on the floor, propped up against the cupboards of her tiny kitchen, her head aching as though with a full-force migraine, her face wet with tears as her fingernails dug into the wooden boards beneath her. Somewhere, above her head, the phone was ringing with a steady insistence. Somewhere, further out in the tiny house, the cellphone Rodney had pushed upon her was playing a tinny tune, trying to get her attention.
She could barely move. Her breath came in gasping pants, dragging air into her starved lungs as she tried to concentrate through the pain. The reaction throbbed through her head, resonating in her flesh, buzzing in her bones as it shredded the world around her again and again in a cycle of agony.
Then there were hands on her shoulders, pulling her up in a firm grip. She found herself sitting on the wooden bench beside someone who slid his arm around her, put a glass of water in her hand, and pressed a salt-dipped fingertip between her lips.
The bitterness on her tongue jolted her out of the reaction cycle, grounding her with earth. She took a deep breath of air, and gulped down the water he'd given her. And when she turned to look John Sheppard in the eyes, she was suddenly aware of the heat of his arm against her back and the hot, hard flicker of fire beneath her breastbone.
It wasn't the Meld but it was enough to ground her, give her awareness - not only of herself but of the man who had already sensed her withdrawl and was matching it with his own - a careful balance.
Balance was important to a Nightwing.
"You okay?"
Teyla turned to look at John. "Yes."
When he stood, she felt the absence of him, even as he seated himself across from her at the table. "What happened?"
She met his gaze, the shadows that flickered in hazel eyes before she turned her gaze to the glass again. "You felt what happened," she murmured and beyond the distortion of the curving glass, saw his hands flex slightly in a denial that died a moment later.
"He was going to call me in when he found them." The reflection of daylight was a pale gleam against the ebony of his hair as John looked down at the table. Melena had been human, but her killers had been Shadowkin and so fell under Shadowkin law. "Guess he decided to take his own justice."
There were times it was unwise to forget that the Bloodkin were known for their intensity. In love and in hatred, they took no half-measures. In hindsight, they should never have allowed Ronon to seek out Melena's killers alone - even John's reckless heroism would have been better than no brake at all.
"Will you hunt him down?" Teyla knew the answer, even before he said it.
"We have to."
The phone began ringing again - a shrill peal in the silence, beating in time with the sudden throbbing in her temples. John turned, reached across to the bench, and picked it up. "She's okay. I'm with her." Whatever comment the person on the other end made, it narrowed his eyes. "How long?"
Teyla stared at the phone, concentrated a little and flexed the world around her, sensing rather than hearing Carson's accented tones on the other end of the phone.
"I'm still in Scotland, John. It'll take at least half a day to get to the Sateda Gate."
"Then we'll meet you there at sundown."
"Is she all right?"
John turned to look at her, and his expression shifted, softened. "Looks all right to me. Want to talk to her?"
A little embarrassed at the softening and the implied innuendo of the comment, Teyla held her hand out for the phone and he placed it in her hand and moved away. "Carson. Is all well?"
"Love, you're the one just had the casting rebound on you - I'm fine." A thread of humour wove into his tone, cool and soothing, a Seabirthed's gift of calm. "Trust me, I'm a doctor."
"You can take the time off?"
"I'll make the time." He hesitated. "You're sure you're okay?"
Teyla smiled, although she could still feel the raw edges of the broken Meld within her. They'd lived with it so long, they'd forgotten what it meant to be without it. "Yes. We will see you at the Gate."
When she hung up, John was on his cellphone in the next room. She listened to his conversation as she tidied up the spilled sugar with dustpan and brush. The physicality of the action helped, for all that she could have cleared it up with magic.
"You can leave that. Look, if Carson can make it from Scotland, then you can, too. Well, get Jeannie to drive you. I'm sure you'll survive. No, I'm not. Yes, she is." A moment later, John swung around the edge of the door, holding the cellphone out to her. "Rodney."
"I don't want to drive four hours across the country with my niece. Please tell me how to get out of it."
Teyla smiled. "You do not have to come, Rodney."
"If you're saying you don't want my help then my feelings are hurt. Look, I've thought a bit about this since the breaking - it kept my mind off the pain. If he went after them, then he would have needed either a tracker or a lot of Humankin information. This isn't something that you just find and do. And Ronon would have planned for this, fixation or not."
"You're saying that he would have used outside agencies?"
"He had connections there, remember? Anyway, I've got the names of a couple of agencies he mentioned and we might be able to contact them..."
Rodney's mind never stopped, a quicksilver fire that leaped from thought to thought as he expanded on his theories and ideas. Teyla could see him now, pacing the floor, the Fireborn aura of flickering scarlet and shimmering gold surrounding him as his thoughts flashed through theories like lightning to copper rods, and bit back a smile. Good as his ideas were, there would be time for them later.
"Are you getting ready to leave, Rodney?"
"Uh... I'm...getting around to it."
In the background someone made an exasperated noise and a muttered comment, and this time, Teyla didn't hide the smile in her voice. "Put Jeannie on the phone."
John was rummaging through her fridge, looking for something to snack upon. He lifted a bottle of the beer she kept for his visits and angled it questioningly. She nodded. He could have it.
"Teyla. God, is everything okay? Ronon?"
"We don't know. We felt the Meld go... Jeannie, I understand if you do not wish for Rodney to--"
"He's becoming a nuisance," said Jeannie with the good-natured bite of a woman driven to the point of endurance by an annoying older brother. "Honestly, if he tells Madison one more story about how her uncle is an awesomely intelligent and fearsome being..."
Teyla laughed. She couldn't help it. Rodney was Rodney and there was no-one in the lands - either Shadow or Human - quite like him. "Can you bring him the first leg of the journey here?"
"Yes. Do you need any help? Rodney told me about Melena. Was it Rogues?"
"We think so - the details were vague and John was unable to use his usual channels." Teyla hadn't been able to get any details about it either. Then again, her connections to the Humanlands were rarely official.
"That sucks," Jeannie's summary was pithy - where her brother used more words than necessary, Jeannie had learned to use considerably less. "Okay, I'll bring Rodney to the Gate. He can live with a little Dora."
In the background Rodney declared something unsavoury about a certain cartoon explorer and Jeannie shushed him with a language warning. Teyla hung up after extracting the promise to visit Jeannie and her husband and daughter when this was over.
"She hasn't told Caleb yet," John said as she returned his phone, careful not to let her fingers brush his. He leaned his hip against the bench and rested his beer on the edge, measuring how far it could rest off the edge.
"I did not think she would."
Greenish eyes glanced up, narrowed. "You don't think he's going to have an issue when his wife tells him that his daughter's not, strictly speaking, human?"
"She loves him."
"I'd think she'd want to tell him if she loved him," he said bitterly, pushing black hair out of his eyes.
Teyla looked up at him, unsure if she could explain this to John who was, after all, a man, and one whose emotional scars had resulted from a situation much like Jeannie's. The Humankin woman he had loved had chosen to reject who and what he was after nearly two years together, and it had left him reserved in ways that even the Meld could not mend. "It is different for Jeannie. Difficult."
Something flared in his eyes, then, and Teyla tried not to hold herself too still. Changelings noticed movement and its absence, and John was more attuned to her than most. But he only turned away muttering, "If she leaves it too long and Madison begins manifesting..."
"Then that is their business and not ours." Teyla hoped she didn't sound too severe. Yes, she hoped that it would not come to that for Jeannie and Caleb and Madison, but she could understand Jeannie's fears as John could not, blinded by his own painful history.
She crossed to her workroom, paused in the door. "Give me a moment."
A few spellparts would be necessary for this, little more. Anything else could be acquired out in Sateda; this was merely insurance.
Teyla picked out two small bags of mixed herbs, secreting them in her trouser pockets. John would want to travel light in the way of Changelings. The sooner they reached the Sateda Gate, the sooner they could make contact with those they knew among the Humankin, and the sooner they could find Ronon.
When she emerged from her workroom, John was sliding his fingers through the sandstones Ronon had carved for her - tiny stone cetaceans and molluscs no bigger than her little finger's length, made of a rock type no ancient mollusc had ever fossilised into. He picked one up, tossed it lightly into the air, caught it on the way down. "Got everything you need?"
"We can leave."
They went out the back of the house to the yard that looked up the hill. John paused at the edge of the path. "Are you still able to Change?"
She shrugged. "If not, I'll ride you."
Something gleamed in his eyes, like a Changeling's mischievous glint, but not quite. "Strangely enough, I don't have a problem with that."
It was the breaking of the Meld, Teyla was sure. The usual walls they built up between them, around them, had shattered. In the absence of the central Meld connection towards each other, they would try to re-establish those connections by any means. This was simply John's way of connecting back to her.
At least, she hoped it was.
John changed almost between steps. One moment, the sun shone down on a man walking through lengthening grass, the next moment, his form blurred and a wolf was bounding off through the fields.
Reminding herself that Changelings deliberately tried to make the Change seem simple, Teyla stepped off the edge of the path into the short grass, and took a slow deep breath. As she exhaled, she willed the Change upon herself. The possibility was there in all Shadowkin - the flexibility of mind and cell and magic that made up who they were, even without the assistance of a Meld - but the act of Change was more difficult than it had been before Ronon had shattered what they'd all become.
Previously, she'd felt the Change as a slow change from one form to another, now, it felt like squeezing her body into clothing that was one size too small.
In her mind, there was a 'pop', something like an orgasm - sudden relief after a build-up of tension. The sense of herself that said 'Teyla' settled into the mental container that held her form for this Change. After that, everything else slid into place, every bone, every muscle, every hair, every claw.
Her skin crawled a little with the Change, and she forced herself to ignore the sensation, refusing to give in to the instinct to scratch. As the Change completed, she shook herself, head to haunches. 'Feeling her fur' she called it - that first moment of complete being in a non-human form.
Sharp scent filled her nostrils and she lifted her muzzle and whuffed at the air. Someone had marked her yard as his territory, and she didn't have to look around for the culprit.
John barked at her, the question clear in his tone, Are we ready to go, yet?
In answer, Teyla stretched herself out, testing muscles of which she wasn't completely sure. John's restlessness stung the air as she checked herself all over, as he bounded back and forth in energetic encouragement. She tried not to let it distract her as she insured that everything was in place and in order.
Are you finished? This time, his bark was peremptory.
Teyla tilted her head, ears flicking forwards. I just wish to be sure.
Well, hurry up and be sure and let's get moving! John bounded forward and nipped lightly at her flanks; not quite teasing, neither a reprimand, something somewhere between the two. We've got a long way to go before sunset.
She nipped him back for a moment, taking pleasure in the moment of playfulness that was as much teasing as it was respect for the pack leader, accepting the shove that rolled her over in the grass as he mock-growled into her neck. Ronon's somewhere out there, losing his mind!
I have not forgotten. Teyla held herself still beneath paws and jaws, sensing the frustration in him, acceding to his need to be doing something - to find Rodney and Carson, to be active in getting to Ronon and finding out what he'd done. Something in her sighed, wishing that he had been able to accept the play for even a little while. She was not the only one hurting from the severance of the Meld - the others were dealing with raw edges, too. But that does not mean that we should also lose our perspective.
He let her up after a moment, stepping back and moving away so she could get up amidst the rustling grass and the midmorning sun. We won't. Then, softer, We can't.
Teyla rubbed her muzzle briefly against his; all the reassurance he would accept from her. Shall we go?
Yeah, let's.
They turned towards the west, the sun at their backs as lupine muscles sprang into action on an invisible signal, and they raced each other across the broad fields, headed for the nearest Gate to Sateda.
Behind them, the wind rustled the grasses.
- fin -