SGA: Heteronormativity... (het, PG-13) 1/4
Title: Heteronormativity, Gender Construction, and Nonverbal Signalling in Intercultural Communication: A Comedy
Author: mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through season 4
Warnings: Mensa AU, but not related to my Major Zelenka fics in any way, shape or form.
Summary: In which Teyla may be plotting something, Keller may be delusional, Ronon may be cheating and John may in fact be the girl. No pudding cups or Marines were injured in the production of this fanfic.
A/N: This was the FIC THAT WILL NOT END written for vipersweb at sga_santa. Special thanks go out to calcitrix, my beta; marginaliana, my idea-off-bouncer; and lofro, who is many things, but most relevantly here, my source for all things Mobile Suit Gundam-related. All my information about MRE menus is from MREinfo.com.
Heteronormativity, Gender Construction and Nonverbal Signaling in Intercultural Communication: A Comedy
By Mad Maudlin
It started with pudding, or more precisely, it started with Eldon nearly crashing half the computers in John's lab, so by the time he got to the cafeteria for lunch there was just one pudding cup left on the tray at the end of the buffet line. John had his eye on that pudding cup all the way from the door, so when Sergeant Mehra snatched it away just inches ahead of him, he seriously debated snatching it back right off her tray. Then he remembered that this was Dusty Mehra he was looking at, and decided he wanted to live.
Rod and Ronon were still hanging around, doing something ridiculously complicated with a stash of plastic knives that John knew better than to ask about. Instead he thumped down his tray next to Rod and asked, "Remind me again why it's a threat to base security to give Eldon his own damn computers to break?"
"You let him try to run another simulation?" Rod asked, while carefully pulling a knife out of the stack by the tip.
"You're saying 'let' like I had a choice in the matter," John muttered while he added mayo to his sandwich. "He did something with a spreadsheet while I was programming the crystal extruder and the next thing I know I'm losing half my data from the past week. Probably picked up some kind of virus from that fucker Zelenka and his pigeon porn."
Ronon extracted two knives from the pile while Rod graciously ignored yet another slur against Zelenka. Instead he said, "I can bring it up again at the next staff meeting, but I doubt Sumner's going to change his mind."
"He changed his mind about Ronon and Melena," John pointed out, and then dug into his sandwich. Mmm, space turkey. "Eldon's been here as long as they have, and they could totally kill us all in our sleep. Well, I mean, so could Eldon, only he'd be doing it on accident, instead of by being all scary and ninja-like."
"We've got jobs," Ronon pointed out. "Eldon just hangs around your lab doing math all day."
"And if he could do it right, this would not be a problem," John pointed out. Then he noticed a pudding cup on Ronon's tray, sitting untouched among the debris of the meal, including one cup that had already been scraped clean. "Hey, can I have your extra pudding cup?"
"No," Ronon said, and pulled another knife from the stack.
"Why not?"
"It's mine."
"You're not eating it."
"I'll eat it later."
"But I want to eat it now."
"Why's that matter?"
"It's efficient allocation of resources." John reached out for the pudding cup, but Ronon showed off those scary fast reflexes and lunged at John's hand with a plastic knife. Jesus, they were all out to get him today.
The stack of knives still on the table was jostled by the motion, and Rod snapped his fingers. "You moved them," he said. "That's a forfeit, right?"
"He was taking my pudding," Ronon said, but he still put all his knives back in the middle of the table. "I'm giving you that one."
Rod smiled and added his supply of knives to the pile. John watched them jumble all the knives together. "What is this, Satedan pick-up sticks?"
"More or less," Rod said. "Obviously you're supposed to use real knives, but we compromised since I'm a beginner."
"Not as much fun without the bleeding, though," Ronon added.
John decided he was not even gonna touch that one, so he went back to his original theme of himself. "I don't know why Eldon can't go fuck with Zelenka or Miko or somebody once and while. Why's he always coming to me?"
Rod rolled his eyes. "Well, seeing as you're his direct supervisor-a position for which you volunteered, I remind you."
That was in fact news to John, and he shook his finger at Rod. "That's slander. I did no such thing."
"Yes, you did, John, it was part of the deal we made so Sumner wouldn't send him back to Olesia." Rod tried to ease a knife out of the stack with his pinky, but ended up knocking two more onto the floor. Ronon smirked at him.
John shook his head and started picking the purple beans out of his vegetable medley. "Lies. I don't remember any of that. Besides, we didn't know he was stupid back then."
Teyla suddenly appeared. She had a knack for doing that, actually, and it wasn't something John was ever going to get used to. He actually kind of suspected she was sometimes violating the laws of physics to do it. "Good afternoon," she said, dropped her tray, and handed John a pudding cup.
John blinked at it, then craned his neck to peer across the room. There were still no more pudding cups on the tray at the end of the buffet line; actually, a couple of the kitchen staff were starting to snuff out the sterno cans and cart off the hot entrees. "How and why did you get this pudding cup?" he demanded.
"Sergeant Mehra had two," Teyla said. "You had none."
"You stole Mehra's pudding?" John asked.
"No," Teyla said. "She gave it to me."
"Did you have to, you know, threaten her or anything?"
Rod sighed loudly. "Not everyone on the base subsists on caffeine and processed sugar, John."
"I just want to know if the Mehra and her coven are gonna put a horse's head in my bed over this," John said defensively. "Or Teyla's," he added, because that would be bad too, but less likely, because they liked her.
"She was quite willing to part with it," Teyla said. "And you value food from Earth highly."
John glanced at Mehra in what he was pretty sure was a stealthy and surreptitious fashion, but Mehra didn't seem to be bleeding anywhere; she was laughing at something Cadman was talking about. And there was no sense in wasting a perfectly good pudding cup. He hid it in his pocket, just in case. "Thanks," he told Teyla.
One corner of her mouth rose just a bit, the closest she usually got to a smile. "You are most welcome."
That was the start.
-\-\-\-\-
Teyla was the first alien John ever met, excluding Teal'c, who didn't entirely count because he was pretty much domesticated by the time he and John crossed paths. Teyla, not so much, as evidenced by the knife she put to his throat in the ruins on what turned out to be Old Athos. John had only been off Earth for about twelve hours and when faced with the first serious threat to his life, it had seemed completely logical to say, "Please don't hurt me, I haven't beat Half-Life 2 yet."
"Who are you?" Teyla asked, though at the time she hadn't been Teyla, just a voice connected to the cold metal pressed against his Adam's apple.
"John Sheppard."
"Where did you come from?"
"That's actually kind of a complicated ques-"
"What are you doing here?"
"Looking for friends," John had blurted, "seen any around?"
And somehow that made Teyla lower the knife.
Well, either that or the sound of Ford getting caught in one of her booby-traps. There was a lot more running and jumping and shooting before the whole mess got sorted out, and by the time they got Carson out to Old Athos to remove the tracking chip the city had risen anyway and ZPMs didn't matter quite so much anymore. John didn't even get points for originality, because it turned out that Athosians were basically everywhere in this galaxy, though not all of them were on the run from space vampires. Rod had gone with Colonel Sumner and found like a million Athosians on some other planet and come back with candy, so John figured his very first offworld was a total bust.
Except at some point afterwards, while he was looking for the mess hall, he found Teyla standing still and silent on a balcony overlooking the sea. She was holding a knife but not pointing it at him, and he decided that was a positive sign. He also decided, at length, not to run away screaming. Instead, he said, "Hi."
Teyla had blinked at him. "Hello."
"We, uh, we didn't really get to know each other back there, did we? Back on your planet, I mean. With the running and shooting and knives and all. I mean. Um." John offered her his hand. "Hi. Dr. John Sheppard. I like football, Ferris wheels and anything with an explosive yield over two hundred kilotons."
And somehow that made Teyla smile, just a little bit.
-\--\--\-
It was only later that John recognized the significance of the pudding, after he had enough data points to project the trend backwards. First there was pudding, and then there was peanut butter, on a three-day standard recon to Planet Fireswamp. "I'm serious," John said after the third flame geyser. "Any of you falls into quicksand, I'm heading back to the gate."
"You do know there's no such thing as ROUSes, right?" Rod asked, looking somewhat pained.
"No such thing as vampires, either," John said.
"What's an ROUS?" Ronon asked.
They answered in stereo: "Rodents of Unusual Size."
"They make good eating?"
There wasn't any quicksand, though, just a hideous smell coming off what Rod theorized was the local version of the Corpse Lily. ("Please don't make us drag one of those things back, dude. It's not going to get you to second base with Katie.") No ROUSes, either, but towards evening on the second day as John prepared to launch into his rant on MREs: Malicious Government Behavior Experiment, Teyla suddenly handed him a jar of peanut butter without saying a word.
"What the hell is this?" he asked her.
"Is it not a food of your people?" Teyla asked.
"No, I know, it-how and why do you have a jar of peanut butter out here?" John demanded, while Rod grabbed for the jar to examine it.
"Lieutenant Cadman received it as a gift. She dislikes it. She gave it to me." Teyla broke open her own MRE and started heating up the entrée packet as if she normally carried peanut butter around swamps.
"Have you had this the whole time we were here?" Rod asked. He unscrewed the lid and sniffed over the seal. "Hey, still fresh."
"Gimme," John said, snatching at it. "Mine."
"Teyla's, technically, and I think it she meant it to be shared with the whole team," Rod said, twisting around to keep the jar out of John's reach. "God, what are you, like two?"
"She gave it to me!" John jumped to his feet, because at least he was taller than Rod, but Rod just hugged the jar to his chest and hunched over and dammit, John was never any good at basketball.
"She gave it all of us!" Rod insisted..
Teyla said, "I gave it to John."
"See?" John said, while Rod froze. He managed to grab the jar back. "My peanut butter!"
"You carried a jar of that stuff around just for Sheppard for two days?" Ronon asked.
Teyla raised her chin and gave everything in the area, including the nearby flame geyser, her I-can-dismember-a-Wraith-with-a-spoon look. "He often complains about food," she said.
"Oh, so this is a new way to make him shut up?" Rod said, though he still seemed a little disappointed that he didn't get any peanut butter. "Should have thought of that one years ago."
"Maybe if you weren't such a dick I'd share my peanut butter," John said. "Ronon, would you like some peanut butter?"
"Hell, no," Ronon said. "That stuff gives me the shits."
John offered the jar to Teyla, but she just shook her head, which meant all the more peanut butter for him. He unwrapped the single slice of wheat snack bread in his MRE and tried to apply as much peanut butter to it as possible with his spork and fingers. That seemed to cure Rod of any peanut butter envy, and it gave John something new to complain about when, come morning, the peanut-y residue on his fingers had attracted a vast new menagerie of insects, all of which apparently had poisonous bites.
Carson let him keep his peanut butter in the infirmary, though. And the hot new doctor named Keller brought him extra pudding.
-\--\--\-
It was probably about the third time that they nearly woke up the Wraith that the Athosian council decided to adopt the expedition, sort of like how John's math teachers used to make him sit next to the slow kids. They didn't come out and say it, but they basically meant, "You guys are really nice and all and we like hanging out with you, but you are also basically retarded and should not be wandering around this galaxy without adult supervision."
Elizabeth took the offer in the spirit intended and made Rod the expedition's rep on the council, since he'd already done the leg work of sucking up to the first colony they'd encountered. In practice, all it meant was that the Athosians had diplomatic authority to apologize profusely on behalf of Atlantis recon teams and sometimes even acted as guides for them, like Teyla was already doing for John's team. (Okay, technically Ford's team, but since John was the only one doing anything useful on it he thought of it as his. Ford and Markham were just bodyguards. Teyla was….Teyla.)
Colonel Sumner threw a shit fit, of course, because Sumner was like that before he started up with the knitting. He didn't even want Teyla hanging around, even though she totally saved John's team's asses like four times a week. "It's because you threaten his manhood," John told her over lunch.
Teyla looked confused by that, but Ford snorted at him. "John, dude, Teyla's like a foot shorter than the Colonel. I don't think he's threatened by her."
"He is," John insisted. "He's watched her at asskicking practice. He doesn't like it that he could totally get beat up by a tiny girl."
"Teyla's not a girl, though," Markham said. "Well, I mean, you know what I mean. She's badass. You're badass," he told Teyla directly. "And I don't think you're that tiny, you know, compared to some people. The Japanese chick in your lab, John, she's like three feet tall, right?"
Teyla didn't really say much. She never did.
-\--\--\-
One of the things the expedition had picked up from hanging around Athosians so long was a tendol feast, which basically amounted to everyone getting together every couple of weeks to say "Yay! Not yet dead!" (or "Yay! Only mostly dead!" depending on what kind of month they'd had.) The Atlantean version involved fewer prayers to the Ancestors and more loud music, but roughly the same amount of ruus wine, at least measured on a per capita basis. "Please," John told Eldon. "Don't wait up for me. I'll be down to the feast in a minute."
"Are you sure?" Eldon asked. "It's really no trouble…"
"Eldon," John said, "they are going to start drinking without you."
He still wavered. "Are you still angry about the simulation data?"
"Of course I am," John said, "but that's got nothing to do with me sending you to the feast. I'm your supervisor, right?"
"Right," Eldon said warily.
"So you know I've always got your best interests in mind," John said. "Now please go get drunk. Toast the Ancestors or the glory of Olesia or whatever the hell it is you do. Bye."
As soon as Eldon was out the door, John shut it, locked it and pulled out all the control crystals for good measure. He had at least four, maybe five glorious hours of lab time before the monkeys on the night shift started leaving the feast and coming round to fling poo at him. He loaded up his coffee machine with a fresh blend of tavajava, fished his stash of Doritos out of the false-bottom drawer in his desk, and opened up the simulation data that Eldon had managed not to delete with his damned virus. (Zelenka swore it had nothing to do with him and Eldon must've got it from Simpson. John swore that Zelenka was a pervy pigeon fancier and not to be trusted.)
Two hours later he was covered in synthetic cheese powder and riding the crest of a tava-caffeine high when Teyla suddenly appeared. In the process of switching his brain over from third-order differentials that modeled subspace field geometry to RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! he managed to tip his stool over completely. He may have even screamed a little bit.
Teyla peered over the edge of the desk at him. "I am sorry to startle you."
"I-you-how and why did you get in here?" John asked, and tried to get untangled from the stool without accidentally unplugging anything critical.
"You were not at the feast," Teyla said. "When your door was unresponsive, I activated the emergency release."
Right. He'd actually taught her how to do that. And it made more sense than his initial feverish thoughts about teleportation. He got to his feet, and saw that Teyla was carrying a tray from the cafeteria balanced on one hip, with a covered plate and cup that smelled an awful lot like ruus wine even from across the room. "Is that for me?"
"You were not at the feast," she said again, and looked at the clutter on his desk. "Where may I place it?
John hastily moved a couple of laptops around put some hard copy data on the stool. "You, uh, you didn't have to-I already ate, you know. MRE."
"You do not like MREs," Teyla said.
"It was the chicken fajita kind," John said. "I like chicken fajita."
She uncovered the plate, though, and there were a lot of things John liked better than chicken fajita MRE under there, like the glazed indigo carrots, and the green banana things that actually tasted kind of like a persimmon, and refried tava beans, and those fried starchy things that the one Russian chef on the expedition had started making last year, and Satedan dumplings, and splot. Then she looked at him, like she was waiting for him to admit the superiority of tendol feast food to MREs.
"The MRE came with chocolate pudding," John pointed out.
"We have no more pudding," Teyla said, and her mouth may have turned down just a bit at one corner.
"I'm just saying." John poked the splot, which was still warm but starting to get a little soggy. Then he looked at the wine. "Um, just so you know, I also had like five cups of tavajava already tonight so I probably shouldn't combine that with alcohol. Remember what happened to Kavenaugh and stuff?"
"I do." Teyla took the wine off the tray but left the plate.
John looked around the room for something else to say, but there was nothing to comment on except Teyla and the food and his less-than-perfectly-accurate field geometry model. He couldn't even sit down without sitting on the papers on the stool, and somehow it felt weird to take the paper off the stool in order to sit down. Especially because Teyla was still standing. And she'd brought him food. Just, him, food. No food for herself. Maybe she was going back to the feast later? Maybe she expected him to offer her food? He didn't have any food except Dorito crumbs and she didn't like Doritos, they'd had that conversation like six times already before.
"Thanks," he finally said.
And for some reason, Teyla nodded, and one corner of her mouth turned up just a little bit in a tiny smile. Then she left the lab. By the time John sat down (on his papers) to eat the food, the splot was cold.
-\--\--\-
After the Genii invasion, Colonel Sumner warmed up to Teyla some. Well, actually, after the Genii invasion they found Sumner sitting in the gate room with three mangled corpses, two P-90s and about a thousand rounds of ammunition, and he didn't speak to anybody for thirty-six hours, and the only people who knew what had happened there were Teyla and Elizabeth and Rod, only Elizabeth and Rod not really, and Teyla wasn't telling. After that Sumner relaxed a lot, though, and took up knitting, and stopped making Sergeant Bates follow Teyla around the city. Sumner also quit going offworld, so Rod somehow inherited command of Recon Team 1 (the first proof that Sumner had either relaxed a whole hell of a lot or been replaced by a pod person).
After the Wraith invasion, Rod didn't have much of a Recon Team 1 left, and John and Teyla didn't make much of a Recon 3 by themselves, so it kind of made sense to, you know, consolidate. The folks at Stargate Control were so busy arguing over whether or not Weir and Sumner deserved psychiatric help and/or a trial for war crimes that they didn't notice a gate team consisting of two civilians and a space alien until it was too late. By then it was equal parts civilians and space aliens, though, 'cause their first mission out as a team they met this nice couple on the lam from their government for the alleged murder of some kind of corrupt general. It only seemed decent to let them stick around, you know?
It took some time and patience and a spot of life-saving, but Sumner eventually made Ronon an independent contractor of some kind, and also knit him a balaclava. Definitely loosened up by then.
-\--\--\-
The day after the tendol feast things started exploding again, of course, and John didn't get to eat much again for about two days, so in hindsight he was pretty glad for the tray. But it still bothered him enough that in the infirmary, during the post-crisis wind-down, he decided he needed to gather more information.
Luckily, the hot new doctor named Keller was doing his stitches, so once he was sure he wasn't going to pull anything important, he said, "So can I ask you a personal question?"
She looked at him and made big goofy eyes that weren't really reassuring on a person with a needle embedded in his flesh at that moment. "What, uh, well, that depends on what kind of personal question it is?"
"Well, you're a woman, right?"
Keller's eyebrows went up and she nodded and went back to making stitches. "Yeah, yeah, last time I checked I was."
"So why would you bring somebody food?"
She laughed a little nervously. "Dr. Sheppard, if this is about the pudding cups, I can assure you that was just a friendly gesture, nothing more."
It took him a minute to remember what she was talking about. "What? Oh, no, I'm not talking about you. Though I did appreciate the pudding. And it's not like you aren't hot and all, so in another context I'd totally do you. I'm talking about Teyla."
The big goofy eyes were back. "Oh," Keller said. "Well, thanks for, uh, clearing that up. What about Teyla do you mean?"
"She brought me food after the tendol feast," John explained. "I just can't figure out why. And since, you know, she's a woman, and you're a woman, I thought maybe…"
"…that every woman is exactly alike and I could translate for you?" she suggested.
"Yeah," John said. "I mean, no, but yeah. Basic idea's the same."
Keller shrugged a little. "Well, you know, Teyla and I don't exactly…we aren't…that is, she's, uh…"
"Kinda scary?" John suggested.
"Yeah," Keller said. "So I don't really…you probably know more about how she thinks than I do, I mean, you're on her team and all."
"I don't know how anybody thinks, though," John said. "I don't really do, you know, people stuff. I do math."
"Oh." Keller finished the stitches and swabbed the wound with another smear of antibiotic ointment. "Well, I mean, if you want some outside perspective, maybe you could ask some of her other friends?"
"Yeah, maybe," John muttered, but he didn't really want to talk to any of them either, because they were all almost as scary as Teyla. Cadman and Mehra plus Melena and Sora were like Sex and the City, only if you replaced "sex" with "guns and artillery." Well, Melena not so much, because she generally used her ninja powers only for good, and plus she was a nurse and all so he assumed there was something like a Hippocratic oath involved. And Teyla was on his team and she hadn't killed him yet, so there was that level of trust. But the others could totally break him in half and he wasn't getting anywhere near them.
Keller bandaged his hand up and told him not to tear the stitches, and then Melena came over to finish checking him out so he could leave the infirmary. Reminding himself about the Hippocratic Oath, John asked her, "Can I ask you a question?"
"Of course," Melena said.
"Why would Teyla bring me extra food??"
She smiled at him, showing lots of teeth. "Maybe she's trying to fatten you up."
"Right," John said, "of course. Silly me, that's obvious. Can I leave now?"
Because Teyla had been on his team for like three years. So he could totally trust her. Right?
-\--\--\-
When Melena let him go, John went back to his quarters, stripped down to his boxers, went through his secret MRE stash to find the vegetarian lasagna entrée (it came with peanut butter; he'd already demolished his jar), and took his pain pills. Then he shut off his radio and locked his door and slept for fourteen hours. When he woke up, there was a tray of cold toast and mushy cereal and bananasimmons on the floor next to his bed, along with a quart of lukewarm milk and a note in angular all-caps handwriting:
JOHN
YOU MUST EAT
TEYLA
"Oh, shit," he said. And checked the door locks again.
-\--\--\-
It wasn't like the expedition went out of their way to find new aliens to adopt. It was more like the aliens kept following them home from school and Elizabeth was too nice to make them leave. (So she pitched it as enhancing their native knowledge base and a responsibility to share the legacy of the Ancients with the people of Pegasus and blah blah blah. Really she was a totally softie.) Teyla and Halling and the other Athosians came as guides and got to stay. When the Genii woke the Wraith, Sora Tyrus and Ladon Radim defected. Eldon saved John's team's ass and they had a sort of obligation. Ronon and Melena got to stay because it meant the Satedan senate could keep covering up the truth about General Kel without having to execute anyone unjustly. Jace and Garil had got their brains fried by Ford and Ford's happy juice, so it only seemed fair to let them hang around, too. Et cetera.
Sumner drew the line at letting any old alien in, but the other Athosian colonies were always willing to adopt the stragglers. The ones who had useful skills and reasonable table manners and no major health problems, though-they got to stay. And sometimes two out of three was okay too. "It's only we fair we hold 'em to the same standards as the Marines, after all," John had once opined, which caused Sumner to stop knitting and glare at him over the top of his needles, but whatever. They had like twenty different Earth nations in the city, what did it matter if you added a couple alien ones?
-\--\--\-
"Do you think Teyla's trying to kill me?" John whispered to Rod. He had to whisper because they were back in the mess hall during the quasiweekly Stitch 'n' Bitch, and Sumner got downright indignant at people who interrupted him during intarsia.
Rod looked at him over the rim of his coffee cup and raised one eyebrow. "Are you speaking literally or using some kind of metaphor?"
"I just," John said, and gestured his helpless lack of articulation. "She keeps feeding me."
"Well, she's probably noticed you weigh about as much as a balled-up newspaper."
"Shut up." John glanced furtively around the mess to make sure Teyla wasn't about to come over. Like he'd be able to see her coming with her ninja skills. "She broke into my room, Rod."
"Broke in?"
"Well, I locked the doors and windows!" John said. "Maybe she came in through the vents or something. I'm pretty sure she couldn't have gotten the tray in through the pipes but I don't think we can rule anything out."
"Uh huh." Rod set his coffee down and steepled his fingers, kind of like Mr. Burns. "And why did she break into your room, John?"
"She brought me breakfast," he said. "And she brought me dinner after the feast and you remember she had that peanut butter for me in the fire swamp and oh my god how long has she been planning this?"
"Planning what?"
"To kill me!" he hissed. "Rod, dude, you could've been in Mensa, please try to keep up with the conversation!"
"Oh, believe me, I am," Rod said. "But I'm a little hung up on why you seem to think giving you food is a prerequisite for killing you."
"She's fattening me up," John said. "Melena said so."
"And Melena knows this how?"
"Well, they're friends, right?" John said. "So maybe they're in on it together."
"Or maybe," Rod suggested, "she was joking."
"Teyla?"
"Melena."
John thought for a moment. "That too. But that doesn't explain why Teyla keeps bringing me food."
"But you think a plot to kill you totally explains it."
"Well, yeah!" John said. "I mean, so she lulls me into a false sense of security with food, and then she starts to poison me real slow, and I'm like, 'Huh, I'm dying, that's weird,' and everyone else is like, 'Oh, no!' but nobody suspects her because she's Teyla and she always brings me food."
"Wow," Rod said. "I have to admit it, John, you seem to have got this one cracked. Well done."
John had come to recognize that tone of voice in Rod. "You know, ever since you went to that alternate universe, you've kind of been an asshole, you know? I could be dying here. It could've already started." Though he'd thrown the breakfast food in the rec room trash can just in case.
Rod sighed. "John, look at it this way. Knowing who Teyla is, and what she's capable of, does it really seem like she'd need an elaborate poisoning plot if she really wanted to kill you? She could just as easily drop you off a cliff while we're offworld. She would've done it already if she really wanted to."
This was true. "But that still doesn't explain the food!"
Rod shrugged. "Maybe she's just trying to show you she cares? I mean, you could stand to eat a few more actual meals now and again."
"So why doesn't she just say that?" John asked. "If it were true, which it totally isn't, because I've got a normal BMI and I only ever passed out the once and Carson said that was blood sugar."
"Well, she's not exactly a verbally expressive person," Rod said. "Nor are you, despite how much you actually talk. Maybe it's a show-don't-tell sort of thing."
John took Rod's discarded coffee spoon and started toying with it. "I am so an expressive person," he said. "Remember when you came back from the alternate universe and we thought you were dead but you weren't?"
"You mean when you threatened to punch me in the balls if I ever did anything like that again?" Rod asked.
"Yeah," John said. "It'd be a punch of caring. You know, the way a friend cares for another friend."
Rod opened his mouth, but didn't seem able to produce any words, and after a few moments he shut it again.
But the more he thought about it, the more John decided that Rod was probably right-Teyla could've killed him like six hundred ways over the years and he couldn't think of anything he'd done recently that might make her snap, except for the whole part where he got kidnapped by Travelers for a little while, but that wasn't his fault. (Nobody ever believed him that sexy aliens just kidnapped him sometimes and he couldn't help his raw animal magnetism.) So maybe there was something else going on and Teyla was just feeding him for positive, friendly, reasons. Reasons that she was not explaining and which weren't obvious to anybody but herself. That could be it.
"You sure she's not trying to kill me?" he asked Rod, but his heart wasn't really in it.
"If she is, it'd be a murder of caring," Rod assured him. "And if it bothers you so much, maybe you should say something to her about it."
"Maybe." He gave Rod his spoon back. "Will you keep an eye her for me anyway? In case she starts doing anything suspicious and murderous and stuff?"
"I promise I won't let the big bad Teyla get you, John," Rod said. "That's what teams are for."
"Thanks." John stole a sip of Rod's coffee (and grimaced-how the man could drink coffee with lemon it in was beyond him) and stood up. "I'm gonna go, you know, take the padlocks off my air vents now."
Across the room, Sumner called out, "If you two ladies are done having your little heart-to-heart, some of us are trying to concentrate over here." He waved one knitting needle vaguely at them, and the many-colored strands of yarn hanging off the back flopped and twisted madly.
Being a true teammate, Rod took his coffee and went over to the knitting circle, saying, "Actually, Colonel, Jeannie sent me a pattern for an Icelandic yoked sweater that she thought you might be interested in…" and John was able to make his escape.
-\--\--\-
But afterwards he wasn't so sure. Because Rod made sense, and John generally trusted Rod to take the lead on the subjects requiring social skills, since, you know, he had them. But away from Rod's level certainty, John still found himself looking over his shoulder and around corners for any surprise Teylas with food, and when he found a whole box of Twinkies on his desk the following morning he may have gotten slightly hysterical before Dr. Abdirova owned up to leaving them there on accident. He made her work with Eldon the rest of the day anyway and completely ignored the new simulation data generated overnight in favor of trying to patch the subcutaneous transmitters into the life signs detectors so he could tell if Teyla was coming to get him.
But of course she waited until he gave up on that and was working on his field geometry model, because she was a ninja like that. And also possibly psychic. At least Eldon finally justified his existence by saying "Oh, hi, Teyla!" and spoiling her attempt at sudden appearing. It wasn't enough time for John to gracefully hide in the kneehole of his desk or anything, but it at least gave him some warning.
"Hello, Eldon," Teyla said. "Hello, John."
"Hi," John said, and he was cool and sounded totally normal and wasn't scared of his teammate at all. "You, uh, hi. What's up?"
"Dinner begins soon," Teyla said, and here John had been hoping she wasn't going to feed him this time since she wasn't actually carrying anything.
He looked around the lab for an excuse, but it was just him and Eldon and Abdirova inside, and Abdirova had perked up at the mention of food like she was hungry or something. (Maybe she was. John didn't remember if she'd left at lunchtime or not 'cause he'd been so busy with the life signs detectors.) "Oh, uh, yeah," he said lamely. "It does. That's, um, great."
Teyla stared at him for a second, like she was waiting for more, and John hunched over his laptop and stared at the table of data he was working on. Totally cool. Like a goddamn cucumber, he was. "Will you go to dinner?" she asked.
"Nah, not really hungry," John said, because he was totally cool like that. "Lots of work to catch up on, too."
"Oh," Teyla said, and John let himself glance over the top of the laptop screen at her. Her mouth might've been turned down a little at one corner and there was a sort of crease between her eyebrows, but he wasn't sure what that meant.
"Thanks for, um, telling me, though," John blurt. "That it's dinner time. That's good to know. And stuff." Shit, not cool, not cool. "Um, Eldon, you hungry?"
Eldon, intellectual giant that he was, said "Huh?"
"Hungry," John said, "food, dinner. Teyla, I think you should take Eldon to dinner, he's delicious. I mean he's hungry. Dinner is delicious and Eldon is here. And hungry."
Now Teyla was frowning at him full bore. Shit. "You will not join us?"
"Nope, busy busy." He hid behind the laptop screen again. "Mission tomorrow and stuff, gotta stay on top of these things."
"If you're sure," Teyla said, and he nodded and didn't look away from the screen until he heard the lab doors open and shut again. And then he looked up real slowly, just in case she was pulling some kind of ninja fakeout. But there was just Abdirova, on the other side of the lab, looking at John with a confused face. All right.
"Dr. Sheppard?" Abdirova asked weakly. "May I go to dinner also?"
"Are you kidding?" John asked. "I'm not going to finish this by myself before midnight. Get to work."
"I did not eat lunch, Dr. Sheppard," she whined.
"So go get an MRE out of the supply closet downstairs," he snapped. "In fact, get one for me, too, I'm starving. Not the vegetarian kind, either, unless it's the veggie lasagna. No sloppy joe mix either."
She brought him back spaghetti with meatballs, and he ate the candy first with about three cups of industrial-strength tavajava. They didn't finish the new simulation before midnight, but John was too buzzed to care about that, or Teyla, or anything else.
-\--\--\-
The people who came to the expedition after the Wraith invasion-Miko Kusinagi called them "Nisei," Rod called them "second wave," John called them "carpetbaggers"-they were a little different. They thought Sumner's knitting was funny and they were unreasonably terrified of Teyla and some of them even refused to drink tavajava just because it caused heart palpitations and double vision sometimes. The worst cases, the ones who patronized the Athosians and complained too much about the food and never came to tendol feasts, ended up getting sent right back home again pretty quick. The others eventually adapted, and sometimes it was hard to remember they were carpetbaggers at all.
Major Lorne was one of those, the ones who fit in; he didn't bat an eye to find out that his CO had a yarn habit or the first contact team had no formal military presence or that half the scientists insisted on using what they claimed was the old Ancient calendar since it matched Lantea's solar year better than the one from Earth. He did barge into a Mensa meeting once uninvited, and John had to explain to him at length and great volume that no, Mensa was not the same as RPG club (a lot of the same members, yeah, but RPG club met Thursdays, it was all on the city wiki, jeez)-but later, when John found out that Lorne could draw, he developed a tactical ingratiation/bartering scheme to obtain art for all his D&D characters, and they kind of, sort of, maybe got to be friends. At least, Lorne threw in a cartoon of John in the HEV suit from Half-Life, but he also seemed to think John was gay.
"It's just that all of your PCs are female," he explained while John spluttered and choked. "All of them."
"What's the matter with that?" John asked. "Guys play women all the time. Joss Whedon writes tons of women."
"What's Joss Whedon got to do with anything?" Lorne asked.
John waved the sketches at him, the heavy art paper crackling. "It's a homage! To Joss Whedon, I mean. Because there's a lack of well-rounded female characters in the media and in RPGs and what the hell does that have to do with being gay? Are you implying that Joss Whedon is gay?"
"I'm not talking about Joss Whedon, okay?" Lorne asked. "It just seemed odd to me…I mean, isn't one of those characters, the half-elf, didn't she start out a man and then that belt thing made her a woman?"
"Yeah," John said. "It was actually a major plot point in our Ptolus campaign."
"And isn't she a wizard with ranks in crossbow?"
"Yeah…"
"You said she's got dark hair and green eyes?"
"Yes, that's on her character sheet, I can show-"
"And her name's Jo-Hannon?"
John folded his arms across his chest. "I fail to see where you're going with this."
But Lorne dropped the subject and instead they argued about what character classes all the recon team members were. They agreed that John would be a wizard and Rod would be a cleric or a bard or something else where Charisma actually mattered, those were easy. But Lorne insisted that Ronon was a ranger and Teyla was a barbarian. "No," John told him. "Ronon is totally the barbarian. Even his wife gets grossed out when he eats."
"So what's Teyla?" Lorne asked.
John thought about. "I think she's like one-half paladin and one-half druid or something. Maybe she's got levels in ranger, too. And she'd be like a half-halfing, half-elf, kind of thing."
"So, basically, a total munchkin?" Lorne sounded skeptical about that.
"I was gonna say Mary Sue, actually," John said. "But the main thing is, she's on our side, and therefore she's awesome."
-\--\--\-
The mission briefing went pretty normally, since it was another standard reconnaissance-Elizabeth reminded them to check in if they found anything and Sumner reminded them not to die and when it turned out they were authorizing a jumper, John immediately said, "Dibs."
Rod rolled his eyes at him. "John, it was your turn to fly anyway."
"You were gonna steal it. I saw that look in your eye."
"I have a look in my eye?"
"A stealing-my-turn-to-fly-the-jumper-look."
"You know, just when I think you can't possibly be any more paranoid…."
"It's not paranoia if you're actually trying to take my turn, though."
Sumner asked, "You ladies need to go settle this in the gym?"
They did not. It took fifteen minutes to gear up and another ten before the hangar crew released them a jumper (official designation: Gateship 9; John's designation: Serenity) but none of that mattered once John got into the pilot's seat. Serenity blinked for him, just like she always did, and while Rod and Ronon and Teyla stowed supplies for the mission in the rear compartment, John once again took a moment to thank whatever kinky ancestor of his had decided to do it with an alien, because there wasn't a video game in the world that compared to this.
"Gateship nine, this is Control Room, are you ready to start your preflight?" somebody asked over the radio.
"Control Room, this is Serenity, could you hold on a sec?" John asked. "I'm having a moment here."
Rod huffed and opened up the radio link in the rear. "Control room, this is Gateship Nine, we're ready to start preflight checks."
"Copy that, Gateship Nine…uh, can we verify who's flying that thing? Doctor Sheppard or Doctor McKay?"
"Doctor Sheppard is piloting and prepared to suppress any attempts at mutiny with extreme prejudice," John announced loudly, and quickly started running through the preflight diagnostics. But he froze when Teyla sat down in the copilot's chair, her gun laid across her lap.
Rod, obviously not sensing the imminent ninja danger, leaned against the back of the chair. "You calling shotgun, Teyla?"
"I do not have a shotgun," she said.
"No, I mean…you know what, whatever, I can run the sensor grid from back here." He unfolded the second jump seat, cattycorner from John. "It's not like you don't know how to dial a DHD."
"Weapons," John blurted, because Teyla was kind of staring at him. "Teyla can't operate the drones."
Rod huffed. "Remember the briefing we just had, John? No signs of active civilization or large land animals from the MALP or the UAV."
"Like that means anything," John pointed out. "Remember Evil Fog Planet?"
"How do we shoot fog?" Ronon said.
Rod just shrugged. "You've fired drones in mid-flight before, or I can route weapons back here, or we can, you know, switch places if anything tries to jump out and grab us. Teyla, that work for you?"
"It does," she said. And she was definitely staring.
John squirmed and accidentally brought up the targeting sensors on the HUD for a second. "I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable with this arrangement," he said loudly, and tried to indicate Teyla and her starey staring stare in some subtle fashion.
"You mean with Teyla?" Ronon asked, sounding confused.
Rod sighed. "John, seriously, paranoid. Everything will be fine."
"Gateship Nine, this is Control Room, you are cleared to launch."
The moon they were surveying had extensive ruins and scenic valleys and a lavender gas giant that filled most of the sky with its gibbous eye, and John didn't get to enjoy any of it. Because Teyla was definitely watching him. Not, like, looming-staring, or anything-he caught her looking at the scenery a few times-but more often than not she was looking at him, sometimes right on, sometimes kind of sideways out of the corner of her eyes. Rod and Ronon didn't seem to notice anything funky about it, which just confirmed to John that Teyla was a superninja. They did, however, notice when John kept veering off-course, suddenly dropping altitude, or accidentally activating the cloak, because it turned out there was a trick willing yourself invisible while flying a mind-reading spaceship and John hadn't figured it out yet.
"Jesus, John, I fly better than this," Rod finally concluded. "You think we should call this one and go home?"
"I'm fine," John said, because dammit, he didn't get to fly the jumpers hardly ever and he liked these missions and if Teyla really was plotting against him this might be his last chance ever to do it. And also he totally flew better than Rod and always would. He just needed to be cool about this. "Serenity's just being a little squirmy because I'm, uh, itchy today."
"Itchy?" Ronon asked.
"Yeah," John said. "Accidentally grabbed scented soap from the supply closet the other day. I have allergies, you know."
"So you can't fly straight because you're too itchy," Ronon repeated skeptically.
Rod said, "You'd be surprised how sensitive the controls are," and John decided that whenever they got pudding in the mess again, he was scoring Rod an extra cup just for that. "If you're sure you can get us home in one piece…"
"Oh, yeah. Totally. Single pieces of puddlejumper are my specialty." He caught Teyla's eye in the reflection off the windshield for a moment and then resolutely looked away, far away, at a really nice cliff face instead. The jumper tried to veer into it.
They called it anyway about half an hour later, because there weren't any energy readings anywhere in the ruins and it was so far from the gate and such bad terrain and also a three-week solar eclipse was about to start, so they'd have to file this one for a dedicated science team to scavenge later on. (John wondered if he could get Eldon assigned to it somehow.) John managed to keep not looking at Teyla, and thus not acknowledge the staring, and he decided that there had to be some corollary to the Uncertainty Principle that allowed her to be not staring at him unless he was actually watching her stare at him. At all other points in time she was simultaneously staring and not staring, like Schrödinger's half-dead cat. And John could deal with half-dead cats and half-staring Teylas way more easily than the full versions, or at least easily enough that he could fly straight.
At least until they were on final approach to the stargate, because after she dialed and the puddle bloomed, Teyla spoke for the first time all mission. And she said, "I believe we will be back in time for lunch."
That made the crash entirely her fault.
-\--\--\-
Back in the beginning of the expedition, they'd run into one those planets that apparently happened in every galaxy. The men were large and hairy, the women habitually wore quilted burkas, and Recon 3 nearly got burned at the stake long before anyone noticed that Teyla had boobs.
When they did, though (after the argument about how John had to take charge because he was the only one with facial hair, to the extent that his side burns and a soul patch counted as such compared to the full-on Ted Kaczynski beards of the locals, and after the argument over whether Ford with his freshly-shaved head was allowed to speak at all) the leader of the village-John was pretty sure his name was Ook or something equally monosyllabic-started waving around a sort of combination cutlass/scythe. "This one is a mere female!" he bellowed. "How dare you show such disdain for the ancient customs of our Most Honorable and Masculine Moose Lodge, where our fathers and forefathers have gotten shitfaced on fermented cat milk for ten generations and held pissing contests out the window before engaging in the usual homoerotic bonding rites of the Ancestors? Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! I curse you forever with back zits and thinning facial hair!"
Okay, so he'd actually only gotten to the word "disdain" before Teyla pulled his weapon out of his hand and beat him with it. (John had tried to add the rest to his mission report on the grounds that it was reasonable extrapolation, but it had been separately nixed by Ford, Rod and Elizabeth.) Once it was clear Ook was down for the count, she carefully set the weapon aside and spoke her only words all mission: "I am no mere female." That wasn't the only time she'd muscled her way into somebody's frat house, but it was the first and most impressive, and John quoted her at every opportunity for about a week and a half until Markham threatened to use him for target practice.
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Author: mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through season 4
Warnings: Mensa AU, but not related to my Major Zelenka fics in any way, shape or form.
Summary: In which Teyla may be plotting something, Keller may be delusional, Ronon may be cheating and John may in fact be the girl. No pudding cups or Marines were injured in the production of this fanfic.
A/N: This was the FIC THAT WILL NOT END written for vipersweb at sga_santa. Special thanks go out to calcitrix, my beta; marginaliana, my idea-off-bouncer; and lofro, who is many things, but most relevantly here, my source for all things Mobile Suit Gundam-related. All my information about MRE menus is from MREinfo.com.
Heteronormativity, Gender Construction and Nonverbal Signaling in Intercultural Communication: A Comedy
By Mad Maudlin
It started with pudding, or more precisely, it started with Eldon nearly crashing half the computers in John's lab, so by the time he got to the cafeteria for lunch there was just one pudding cup left on the tray at the end of the buffet line. John had his eye on that pudding cup all the way from the door, so when Sergeant Mehra snatched it away just inches ahead of him, he seriously debated snatching it back right off her tray. Then he remembered that this was Dusty Mehra he was looking at, and decided he wanted to live.
Rod and Ronon were still hanging around, doing something ridiculously complicated with a stash of plastic knives that John knew better than to ask about. Instead he thumped down his tray next to Rod and asked, "Remind me again why it's a threat to base security to give Eldon his own damn computers to break?"
"You let him try to run another simulation?" Rod asked, while carefully pulling a knife out of the stack by the tip.
"You're saying 'let' like I had a choice in the matter," John muttered while he added mayo to his sandwich. "He did something with a spreadsheet while I was programming the crystal extruder and the next thing I know I'm losing half my data from the past week. Probably picked up some kind of virus from that fucker Zelenka and his pigeon porn."
Ronon extracted two knives from the pile while Rod graciously ignored yet another slur against Zelenka. Instead he said, "I can bring it up again at the next staff meeting, but I doubt Sumner's going to change his mind."
"He changed his mind about Ronon and Melena," John pointed out, and then dug into his sandwich. Mmm, space turkey. "Eldon's been here as long as they have, and they could totally kill us all in our sleep. Well, I mean, so could Eldon, only he'd be doing it on accident, instead of by being all scary and ninja-like."
"We've got jobs," Ronon pointed out. "Eldon just hangs around your lab doing math all day."
"And if he could do it right, this would not be a problem," John pointed out. Then he noticed a pudding cup on Ronon's tray, sitting untouched among the debris of the meal, including one cup that had already been scraped clean. "Hey, can I have your extra pudding cup?"
"No," Ronon said, and pulled another knife from the stack.
"Why not?"
"It's mine."
"You're not eating it."
"I'll eat it later."
"But I want to eat it now."
"Why's that matter?"
"It's efficient allocation of resources." John reached out for the pudding cup, but Ronon showed off those scary fast reflexes and lunged at John's hand with a plastic knife. Jesus, they were all out to get him today.
The stack of knives still on the table was jostled by the motion, and Rod snapped his fingers. "You moved them," he said. "That's a forfeit, right?"
"He was taking my pudding," Ronon said, but he still put all his knives back in the middle of the table. "I'm giving you that one."
Rod smiled and added his supply of knives to the pile. John watched them jumble all the knives together. "What is this, Satedan pick-up sticks?"
"More or less," Rod said. "Obviously you're supposed to use real knives, but we compromised since I'm a beginner."
"Not as much fun without the bleeding, though," Ronon added.
John decided he was not even gonna touch that one, so he went back to his original theme of himself. "I don't know why Eldon can't go fuck with Zelenka or Miko or somebody once and while. Why's he always coming to me?"
Rod rolled his eyes. "Well, seeing as you're his direct supervisor-a position for which you volunteered, I remind you."
That was in fact news to John, and he shook his finger at Rod. "That's slander. I did no such thing."
"Yes, you did, John, it was part of the deal we made so Sumner wouldn't send him back to Olesia." Rod tried to ease a knife out of the stack with his pinky, but ended up knocking two more onto the floor. Ronon smirked at him.
John shook his head and started picking the purple beans out of his vegetable medley. "Lies. I don't remember any of that. Besides, we didn't know he was stupid back then."
Teyla suddenly appeared. She had a knack for doing that, actually, and it wasn't something John was ever going to get used to. He actually kind of suspected she was sometimes violating the laws of physics to do it. "Good afternoon," she said, dropped her tray, and handed John a pudding cup.
John blinked at it, then craned his neck to peer across the room. There were still no more pudding cups on the tray at the end of the buffet line; actually, a couple of the kitchen staff were starting to snuff out the sterno cans and cart off the hot entrees. "How and why did you get this pudding cup?" he demanded.
"Sergeant Mehra had two," Teyla said. "You had none."
"You stole Mehra's pudding?" John asked.
"No," Teyla said. "She gave it to me."
"Did you have to, you know, threaten her or anything?"
Rod sighed loudly. "Not everyone on the base subsists on caffeine and processed sugar, John."
"I just want to know if the Mehra and her coven are gonna put a horse's head in my bed over this," John said defensively. "Or Teyla's," he added, because that would be bad too, but less likely, because they liked her.
"She was quite willing to part with it," Teyla said. "And you value food from Earth highly."
John glanced at Mehra in what he was pretty sure was a stealthy and surreptitious fashion, but Mehra didn't seem to be bleeding anywhere; she was laughing at something Cadman was talking about. And there was no sense in wasting a perfectly good pudding cup. He hid it in his pocket, just in case. "Thanks," he told Teyla.
One corner of her mouth rose just a bit, the closest she usually got to a smile. "You are most welcome."
That was the start.
-\-\-\-\-
Teyla was the first alien John ever met, excluding Teal'c, who didn't entirely count because he was pretty much domesticated by the time he and John crossed paths. Teyla, not so much, as evidenced by the knife she put to his throat in the ruins on what turned out to be Old Athos. John had only been off Earth for about twelve hours and when faced with the first serious threat to his life, it had seemed completely logical to say, "Please don't hurt me, I haven't beat Half-Life 2 yet."
"Who are you?" Teyla asked, though at the time she hadn't been Teyla, just a voice connected to the cold metal pressed against his Adam's apple.
"John Sheppard."
"Where did you come from?"
"That's actually kind of a complicated ques-"
"What are you doing here?"
"Looking for friends," John had blurted, "seen any around?"
And somehow that made Teyla lower the knife.
Well, either that or the sound of Ford getting caught in one of her booby-traps. There was a lot more running and jumping and shooting before the whole mess got sorted out, and by the time they got Carson out to Old Athos to remove the tracking chip the city had risen anyway and ZPMs didn't matter quite so much anymore. John didn't even get points for originality, because it turned out that Athosians were basically everywhere in this galaxy, though not all of them were on the run from space vampires. Rod had gone with Colonel Sumner and found like a million Athosians on some other planet and come back with candy, so John figured his very first offworld was a total bust.
Except at some point afterwards, while he was looking for the mess hall, he found Teyla standing still and silent on a balcony overlooking the sea. She was holding a knife but not pointing it at him, and he decided that was a positive sign. He also decided, at length, not to run away screaming. Instead, he said, "Hi."
Teyla had blinked at him. "Hello."
"We, uh, we didn't really get to know each other back there, did we? Back on your planet, I mean. With the running and shooting and knives and all. I mean. Um." John offered her his hand. "Hi. Dr. John Sheppard. I like football, Ferris wheels and anything with an explosive yield over two hundred kilotons."
And somehow that made Teyla smile, just a little bit.
-\--\--\-
It was only later that John recognized the significance of the pudding, after he had enough data points to project the trend backwards. First there was pudding, and then there was peanut butter, on a three-day standard recon to Planet Fireswamp. "I'm serious," John said after the third flame geyser. "Any of you falls into quicksand, I'm heading back to the gate."
"You do know there's no such thing as ROUSes, right?" Rod asked, looking somewhat pained.
"No such thing as vampires, either," John said.
"What's an ROUS?" Ronon asked.
They answered in stereo: "Rodents of Unusual Size."
"They make good eating?"
There wasn't any quicksand, though, just a hideous smell coming off what Rod theorized was the local version of the Corpse Lily. ("Please don't make us drag one of those things back, dude. It's not going to get you to second base with Katie.") No ROUSes, either, but towards evening on the second day as John prepared to launch into his rant on MREs: Malicious Government Behavior Experiment, Teyla suddenly handed him a jar of peanut butter without saying a word.
"What the hell is this?" he asked her.
"Is it not a food of your people?" Teyla asked.
"No, I know, it-how and why do you have a jar of peanut butter out here?" John demanded, while Rod grabbed for the jar to examine it.
"Lieutenant Cadman received it as a gift. She dislikes it. She gave it to me." Teyla broke open her own MRE and started heating up the entrée packet as if she normally carried peanut butter around swamps.
"Have you had this the whole time we were here?" Rod asked. He unscrewed the lid and sniffed over the seal. "Hey, still fresh."
"Gimme," John said, snatching at it. "Mine."
"Teyla's, technically, and I think it she meant it to be shared with the whole team," Rod said, twisting around to keep the jar out of John's reach. "God, what are you, like two?"
"She gave it to me!" John jumped to his feet, because at least he was taller than Rod, but Rod just hugged the jar to his chest and hunched over and dammit, John was never any good at basketball.
"She gave it all of us!" Rod insisted..
Teyla said, "I gave it to John."
"See?" John said, while Rod froze. He managed to grab the jar back. "My peanut butter!"
"You carried a jar of that stuff around just for Sheppard for two days?" Ronon asked.
Teyla raised her chin and gave everything in the area, including the nearby flame geyser, her I-can-dismember-a-Wraith-with-a-spoon look. "He often complains about food," she said.
"Oh, so this is a new way to make him shut up?" Rod said, though he still seemed a little disappointed that he didn't get any peanut butter. "Should have thought of that one years ago."
"Maybe if you weren't such a dick I'd share my peanut butter," John said. "Ronon, would you like some peanut butter?"
"Hell, no," Ronon said. "That stuff gives me the shits."
John offered the jar to Teyla, but she just shook her head, which meant all the more peanut butter for him. He unwrapped the single slice of wheat snack bread in his MRE and tried to apply as much peanut butter to it as possible with his spork and fingers. That seemed to cure Rod of any peanut butter envy, and it gave John something new to complain about when, come morning, the peanut-y residue on his fingers had attracted a vast new menagerie of insects, all of which apparently had poisonous bites.
Carson let him keep his peanut butter in the infirmary, though. And the hot new doctor named Keller brought him extra pudding.
-\--\--\-
It was probably about the third time that they nearly woke up the Wraith that the Athosian council decided to adopt the expedition, sort of like how John's math teachers used to make him sit next to the slow kids. They didn't come out and say it, but they basically meant, "You guys are really nice and all and we like hanging out with you, but you are also basically retarded and should not be wandering around this galaxy without adult supervision."
Elizabeth took the offer in the spirit intended and made Rod the expedition's rep on the council, since he'd already done the leg work of sucking up to the first colony they'd encountered. In practice, all it meant was that the Athosians had diplomatic authority to apologize profusely on behalf of Atlantis recon teams and sometimes even acted as guides for them, like Teyla was already doing for John's team. (Okay, technically Ford's team, but since John was the only one doing anything useful on it he thought of it as his. Ford and Markham were just bodyguards. Teyla was….Teyla.)
Colonel Sumner threw a shit fit, of course, because Sumner was like that before he started up with the knitting. He didn't even want Teyla hanging around, even though she totally saved John's team's asses like four times a week. "It's because you threaten his manhood," John told her over lunch.
Teyla looked confused by that, but Ford snorted at him. "John, dude, Teyla's like a foot shorter than the Colonel. I don't think he's threatened by her."
"He is," John insisted. "He's watched her at asskicking practice. He doesn't like it that he could totally get beat up by a tiny girl."
"Teyla's not a girl, though," Markham said. "Well, I mean, you know what I mean. She's badass. You're badass," he told Teyla directly. "And I don't think you're that tiny, you know, compared to some people. The Japanese chick in your lab, John, she's like three feet tall, right?"
Teyla didn't really say much. She never did.
-\--\--\-
One of the things the expedition had picked up from hanging around Athosians so long was a tendol feast, which basically amounted to everyone getting together every couple of weeks to say "Yay! Not yet dead!" (or "Yay! Only mostly dead!" depending on what kind of month they'd had.) The Atlantean version involved fewer prayers to the Ancestors and more loud music, but roughly the same amount of ruus wine, at least measured on a per capita basis. "Please," John told Eldon. "Don't wait up for me. I'll be down to the feast in a minute."
"Are you sure?" Eldon asked. "It's really no trouble…"
"Eldon," John said, "they are going to start drinking without you."
He still wavered. "Are you still angry about the simulation data?"
"Of course I am," John said, "but that's got nothing to do with me sending you to the feast. I'm your supervisor, right?"
"Right," Eldon said warily.
"So you know I've always got your best interests in mind," John said. "Now please go get drunk. Toast the Ancestors or the glory of Olesia or whatever the hell it is you do. Bye."
As soon as Eldon was out the door, John shut it, locked it and pulled out all the control crystals for good measure. He had at least four, maybe five glorious hours of lab time before the monkeys on the night shift started leaving the feast and coming round to fling poo at him. He loaded up his coffee machine with a fresh blend of tavajava, fished his stash of Doritos out of the false-bottom drawer in his desk, and opened up the simulation data that Eldon had managed not to delete with his damned virus. (Zelenka swore it had nothing to do with him and Eldon must've got it from Simpson. John swore that Zelenka was a pervy pigeon fancier and not to be trusted.)
Two hours later he was covered in synthetic cheese powder and riding the crest of a tava-caffeine high when Teyla suddenly appeared. In the process of switching his brain over from third-order differentials that modeled subspace field geometry to RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! he managed to tip his stool over completely. He may have even screamed a little bit.
Teyla peered over the edge of the desk at him. "I am sorry to startle you."
"I-you-how and why did you get in here?" John asked, and tried to get untangled from the stool without accidentally unplugging anything critical.
"You were not at the feast," Teyla said. "When your door was unresponsive, I activated the emergency release."
Right. He'd actually taught her how to do that. And it made more sense than his initial feverish thoughts about teleportation. He got to his feet, and saw that Teyla was carrying a tray from the cafeteria balanced on one hip, with a covered plate and cup that smelled an awful lot like ruus wine even from across the room. "Is that for me?"
"You were not at the feast," she said again, and looked at the clutter on his desk. "Where may I place it?
John hastily moved a couple of laptops around put some hard copy data on the stool. "You, uh, you didn't have to-I already ate, you know. MRE."
"You do not like MREs," Teyla said.
"It was the chicken fajita kind," John said. "I like chicken fajita."
She uncovered the plate, though, and there were a lot of things John liked better than chicken fajita MRE under there, like the glazed indigo carrots, and the green banana things that actually tasted kind of like a persimmon, and refried tava beans, and those fried starchy things that the one Russian chef on the expedition had started making last year, and Satedan dumplings, and splot. Then she looked at him, like she was waiting for him to admit the superiority of tendol feast food to MREs.
"The MRE came with chocolate pudding," John pointed out.
"We have no more pudding," Teyla said, and her mouth may have turned down just a bit at one corner.
"I'm just saying." John poked the splot, which was still warm but starting to get a little soggy. Then he looked at the wine. "Um, just so you know, I also had like five cups of tavajava already tonight so I probably shouldn't combine that with alcohol. Remember what happened to Kavenaugh and stuff?"
"I do." Teyla took the wine off the tray but left the plate.
John looked around the room for something else to say, but there was nothing to comment on except Teyla and the food and his less-than-perfectly-accurate field geometry model. He couldn't even sit down without sitting on the papers on the stool, and somehow it felt weird to take the paper off the stool in order to sit down. Especially because Teyla was still standing. And she'd brought him food. Just, him, food. No food for herself. Maybe she was going back to the feast later? Maybe she expected him to offer her food? He didn't have any food except Dorito crumbs and she didn't like Doritos, they'd had that conversation like six times already before.
"Thanks," he finally said.
And for some reason, Teyla nodded, and one corner of her mouth turned up just a little bit in a tiny smile. Then she left the lab. By the time John sat down (on his papers) to eat the food, the splot was cold.
-\--\--\-
After the Genii invasion, Colonel Sumner warmed up to Teyla some. Well, actually, after the Genii invasion they found Sumner sitting in the gate room with three mangled corpses, two P-90s and about a thousand rounds of ammunition, and he didn't speak to anybody for thirty-six hours, and the only people who knew what had happened there were Teyla and Elizabeth and Rod, only Elizabeth and Rod not really, and Teyla wasn't telling. After that Sumner relaxed a lot, though, and took up knitting, and stopped making Sergeant Bates follow Teyla around the city. Sumner also quit going offworld, so Rod somehow inherited command of Recon Team 1 (the first proof that Sumner had either relaxed a whole hell of a lot or been replaced by a pod person).
After the Wraith invasion, Rod didn't have much of a Recon Team 1 left, and John and Teyla didn't make much of a Recon 3 by themselves, so it kind of made sense to, you know, consolidate. The folks at Stargate Control were so busy arguing over whether or not Weir and Sumner deserved psychiatric help and/or a trial for war crimes that they didn't notice a gate team consisting of two civilians and a space alien until it was too late. By then it was equal parts civilians and space aliens, though, 'cause their first mission out as a team they met this nice couple on the lam from their government for the alleged murder of some kind of corrupt general. It only seemed decent to let them stick around, you know?
It took some time and patience and a spot of life-saving, but Sumner eventually made Ronon an independent contractor of some kind, and also knit him a balaclava. Definitely loosened up by then.
-\--\--\-
The day after the tendol feast things started exploding again, of course, and John didn't get to eat much again for about two days, so in hindsight he was pretty glad for the tray. But it still bothered him enough that in the infirmary, during the post-crisis wind-down, he decided he needed to gather more information.
Luckily, the hot new doctor named Keller was doing his stitches, so once he was sure he wasn't going to pull anything important, he said, "So can I ask you a personal question?"
She looked at him and made big goofy eyes that weren't really reassuring on a person with a needle embedded in his flesh at that moment. "What, uh, well, that depends on what kind of personal question it is?"
"Well, you're a woman, right?"
Keller's eyebrows went up and she nodded and went back to making stitches. "Yeah, yeah, last time I checked I was."
"So why would you bring somebody food?"
She laughed a little nervously. "Dr. Sheppard, if this is about the pudding cups, I can assure you that was just a friendly gesture, nothing more."
It took him a minute to remember what she was talking about. "What? Oh, no, I'm not talking about you. Though I did appreciate the pudding. And it's not like you aren't hot and all, so in another context I'd totally do you. I'm talking about Teyla."
The big goofy eyes were back. "Oh," Keller said. "Well, thanks for, uh, clearing that up. What about Teyla do you mean?"
"She brought me food after the tendol feast," John explained. "I just can't figure out why. And since, you know, she's a woman, and you're a woman, I thought maybe…"
"…that every woman is exactly alike and I could translate for you?" she suggested.
"Yeah," John said. "I mean, no, but yeah. Basic idea's the same."
Keller shrugged a little. "Well, you know, Teyla and I don't exactly…we aren't…that is, she's, uh…"
"Kinda scary?" John suggested.
"Yeah," Keller said. "So I don't really…you probably know more about how she thinks than I do, I mean, you're on her team and all."
"I don't know how anybody thinks, though," John said. "I don't really do, you know, people stuff. I do math."
"Oh." Keller finished the stitches and swabbed the wound with another smear of antibiotic ointment. "Well, I mean, if you want some outside perspective, maybe you could ask some of her other friends?"
"Yeah, maybe," John muttered, but he didn't really want to talk to any of them either, because they were all almost as scary as Teyla. Cadman and Mehra plus Melena and Sora were like Sex and the City, only if you replaced "sex" with "guns and artillery." Well, Melena not so much, because she generally used her ninja powers only for good, and plus she was a nurse and all so he assumed there was something like a Hippocratic oath involved. And Teyla was on his team and she hadn't killed him yet, so there was that level of trust. But the others could totally break him in half and he wasn't getting anywhere near them.
Keller bandaged his hand up and told him not to tear the stitches, and then Melena came over to finish checking him out so he could leave the infirmary. Reminding himself about the Hippocratic Oath, John asked her, "Can I ask you a question?"
"Of course," Melena said.
"Why would Teyla bring me extra food??"
She smiled at him, showing lots of teeth. "Maybe she's trying to fatten you up."
"Right," John said, "of course. Silly me, that's obvious. Can I leave now?"
Because Teyla had been on his team for like three years. So he could totally trust her. Right?
-\--\--\-
When Melena let him go, John went back to his quarters, stripped down to his boxers, went through his secret MRE stash to find the vegetarian lasagna entrée (it came with peanut butter; he'd already demolished his jar), and took his pain pills. Then he shut off his radio and locked his door and slept for fourteen hours. When he woke up, there was a tray of cold toast and mushy cereal and bananasimmons on the floor next to his bed, along with a quart of lukewarm milk and a note in angular all-caps handwriting:
JOHN
YOU MUST EAT
TEYLA
"Oh, shit," he said. And checked the door locks again.
-\--\--\-
It wasn't like the expedition went out of their way to find new aliens to adopt. It was more like the aliens kept following them home from school and Elizabeth was too nice to make them leave. (So she pitched it as enhancing their native knowledge base and a responsibility to share the legacy of the Ancients with the people of Pegasus and blah blah blah. Really she was a totally softie.) Teyla and Halling and the other Athosians came as guides and got to stay. When the Genii woke the Wraith, Sora Tyrus and Ladon Radim defected. Eldon saved John's team's ass and they had a sort of obligation. Ronon and Melena got to stay because it meant the Satedan senate could keep covering up the truth about General Kel without having to execute anyone unjustly. Jace and Garil had got their brains fried by Ford and Ford's happy juice, so it only seemed fair to let them hang around, too. Et cetera.
Sumner drew the line at letting any old alien in, but the other Athosian colonies were always willing to adopt the stragglers. The ones who had useful skills and reasonable table manners and no major health problems, though-they got to stay. And sometimes two out of three was okay too. "It's only we fair we hold 'em to the same standards as the Marines, after all," John had once opined, which caused Sumner to stop knitting and glare at him over the top of his needles, but whatever. They had like twenty different Earth nations in the city, what did it matter if you added a couple alien ones?
-\--\--\-
"Do you think Teyla's trying to kill me?" John whispered to Rod. He had to whisper because they were back in the mess hall during the quasiweekly Stitch 'n' Bitch, and Sumner got downright indignant at people who interrupted him during intarsia.
Rod looked at him over the rim of his coffee cup and raised one eyebrow. "Are you speaking literally or using some kind of metaphor?"
"I just," John said, and gestured his helpless lack of articulation. "She keeps feeding me."
"Well, she's probably noticed you weigh about as much as a balled-up newspaper."
"Shut up." John glanced furtively around the mess to make sure Teyla wasn't about to come over. Like he'd be able to see her coming with her ninja skills. "She broke into my room, Rod."
"Broke in?"
"Well, I locked the doors and windows!" John said. "Maybe she came in through the vents or something. I'm pretty sure she couldn't have gotten the tray in through the pipes but I don't think we can rule anything out."
"Uh huh." Rod set his coffee down and steepled his fingers, kind of like Mr. Burns. "And why did she break into your room, John?"
"She brought me breakfast," he said. "And she brought me dinner after the feast and you remember she had that peanut butter for me in the fire swamp and oh my god how long has she been planning this?"
"Planning what?"
"To kill me!" he hissed. "Rod, dude, you could've been in Mensa, please try to keep up with the conversation!"
"Oh, believe me, I am," Rod said. "But I'm a little hung up on why you seem to think giving you food is a prerequisite for killing you."
"She's fattening me up," John said. "Melena said so."
"And Melena knows this how?"
"Well, they're friends, right?" John said. "So maybe they're in on it together."
"Or maybe," Rod suggested, "she was joking."
"Teyla?"
"Melena."
John thought for a moment. "That too. But that doesn't explain why Teyla keeps bringing me food."
"But you think a plot to kill you totally explains it."
"Well, yeah!" John said. "I mean, so she lulls me into a false sense of security with food, and then she starts to poison me real slow, and I'm like, 'Huh, I'm dying, that's weird,' and everyone else is like, 'Oh, no!' but nobody suspects her because she's Teyla and she always brings me food."
"Wow," Rod said. "I have to admit it, John, you seem to have got this one cracked. Well done."
John had come to recognize that tone of voice in Rod. "You know, ever since you went to that alternate universe, you've kind of been an asshole, you know? I could be dying here. It could've already started." Though he'd thrown the breakfast food in the rec room trash can just in case.
Rod sighed. "John, look at it this way. Knowing who Teyla is, and what she's capable of, does it really seem like she'd need an elaborate poisoning plot if she really wanted to kill you? She could just as easily drop you off a cliff while we're offworld. She would've done it already if she really wanted to."
This was true. "But that still doesn't explain the food!"
Rod shrugged. "Maybe she's just trying to show you she cares? I mean, you could stand to eat a few more actual meals now and again."
"So why doesn't she just say that?" John asked. "If it were true, which it totally isn't, because I've got a normal BMI and I only ever passed out the once and Carson said that was blood sugar."
"Well, she's not exactly a verbally expressive person," Rod said. "Nor are you, despite how much you actually talk. Maybe it's a show-don't-tell sort of thing."
John took Rod's discarded coffee spoon and started toying with it. "I am so an expressive person," he said. "Remember when you came back from the alternate universe and we thought you were dead but you weren't?"
"You mean when you threatened to punch me in the balls if I ever did anything like that again?" Rod asked.
"Yeah," John said. "It'd be a punch of caring. You know, the way a friend cares for another friend."
Rod opened his mouth, but didn't seem able to produce any words, and after a few moments he shut it again.
But the more he thought about it, the more John decided that Rod was probably right-Teyla could've killed him like six hundred ways over the years and he couldn't think of anything he'd done recently that might make her snap, except for the whole part where he got kidnapped by Travelers for a little while, but that wasn't his fault. (Nobody ever believed him that sexy aliens just kidnapped him sometimes and he couldn't help his raw animal magnetism.) So maybe there was something else going on and Teyla was just feeding him for positive, friendly, reasons. Reasons that she was not explaining and which weren't obvious to anybody but herself. That could be it.
"You sure she's not trying to kill me?" he asked Rod, but his heart wasn't really in it.
"If she is, it'd be a murder of caring," Rod assured him. "And if it bothers you so much, maybe you should say something to her about it."
"Maybe." He gave Rod his spoon back. "Will you keep an eye her for me anyway? In case she starts doing anything suspicious and murderous and stuff?"
"I promise I won't let the big bad Teyla get you, John," Rod said. "That's what teams are for."
"Thanks." John stole a sip of Rod's coffee (and grimaced-how the man could drink coffee with lemon it in was beyond him) and stood up. "I'm gonna go, you know, take the padlocks off my air vents now."
Across the room, Sumner called out, "If you two ladies are done having your little heart-to-heart, some of us are trying to concentrate over here." He waved one knitting needle vaguely at them, and the many-colored strands of yarn hanging off the back flopped and twisted madly.
Being a true teammate, Rod took his coffee and went over to the knitting circle, saying, "Actually, Colonel, Jeannie sent me a pattern for an Icelandic yoked sweater that she thought you might be interested in…" and John was able to make his escape.
-\--\--\-
But afterwards he wasn't so sure. Because Rod made sense, and John generally trusted Rod to take the lead on the subjects requiring social skills, since, you know, he had them. But away from Rod's level certainty, John still found himself looking over his shoulder and around corners for any surprise Teylas with food, and when he found a whole box of Twinkies on his desk the following morning he may have gotten slightly hysterical before Dr. Abdirova owned up to leaving them there on accident. He made her work with Eldon the rest of the day anyway and completely ignored the new simulation data generated overnight in favor of trying to patch the subcutaneous transmitters into the life signs detectors so he could tell if Teyla was coming to get him.
But of course she waited until he gave up on that and was working on his field geometry model, because she was a ninja like that. And also possibly psychic. At least Eldon finally justified his existence by saying "Oh, hi, Teyla!" and spoiling her attempt at sudden appearing. It wasn't enough time for John to gracefully hide in the kneehole of his desk or anything, but it at least gave him some warning.
"Hello, Eldon," Teyla said. "Hello, John."
"Hi," John said, and he was cool and sounded totally normal and wasn't scared of his teammate at all. "You, uh, hi. What's up?"
"Dinner begins soon," Teyla said, and here John had been hoping she wasn't going to feed him this time since she wasn't actually carrying anything.
He looked around the lab for an excuse, but it was just him and Eldon and Abdirova inside, and Abdirova had perked up at the mention of food like she was hungry or something. (Maybe she was. John didn't remember if she'd left at lunchtime or not 'cause he'd been so busy with the life signs detectors.) "Oh, uh, yeah," he said lamely. "It does. That's, um, great."
Teyla stared at him for a second, like she was waiting for more, and John hunched over his laptop and stared at the table of data he was working on. Totally cool. Like a goddamn cucumber, he was. "Will you go to dinner?" she asked.
"Nah, not really hungry," John said, because he was totally cool like that. "Lots of work to catch up on, too."
"Oh," Teyla said, and John let himself glance over the top of the laptop screen at her. Her mouth might've been turned down a little at one corner and there was a sort of crease between her eyebrows, but he wasn't sure what that meant.
"Thanks for, um, telling me, though," John blurt. "That it's dinner time. That's good to know. And stuff." Shit, not cool, not cool. "Um, Eldon, you hungry?"
Eldon, intellectual giant that he was, said "Huh?"
"Hungry," John said, "food, dinner. Teyla, I think you should take Eldon to dinner, he's delicious. I mean he's hungry. Dinner is delicious and Eldon is here. And hungry."
Now Teyla was frowning at him full bore. Shit. "You will not join us?"
"Nope, busy busy." He hid behind the laptop screen again. "Mission tomorrow and stuff, gotta stay on top of these things."
"If you're sure," Teyla said, and he nodded and didn't look away from the screen until he heard the lab doors open and shut again. And then he looked up real slowly, just in case she was pulling some kind of ninja fakeout. But there was just Abdirova, on the other side of the lab, looking at John with a confused face. All right.
"Dr. Sheppard?" Abdirova asked weakly. "May I go to dinner also?"
"Are you kidding?" John asked. "I'm not going to finish this by myself before midnight. Get to work."
"I did not eat lunch, Dr. Sheppard," she whined.
"So go get an MRE out of the supply closet downstairs," he snapped. "In fact, get one for me, too, I'm starving. Not the vegetarian kind, either, unless it's the veggie lasagna. No sloppy joe mix either."
She brought him back spaghetti with meatballs, and he ate the candy first with about three cups of industrial-strength tavajava. They didn't finish the new simulation before midnight, but John was too buzzed to care about that, or Teyla, or anything else.
-\--\--\-
The people who came to the expedition after the Wraith invasion-Miko Kusinagi called them "Nisei," Rod called them "second wave," John called them "carpetbaggers"-they were a little different. They thought Sumner's knitting was funny and they were unreasonably terrified of Teyla and some of them even refused to drink tavajava just because it caused heart palpitations and double vision sometimes. The worst cases, the ones who patronized the Athosians and complained too much about the food and never came to tendol feasts, ended up getting sent right back home again pretty quick. The others eventually adapted, and sometimes it was hard to remember they were carpetbaggers at all.
Major Lorne was one of those, the ones who fit in; he didn't bat an eye to find out that his CO had a yarn habit or the first contact team had no formal military presence or that half the scientists insisted on using what they claimed was the old Ancient calendar since it matched Lantea's solar year better than the one from Earth. He did barge into a Mensa meeting once uninvited, and John had to explain to him at length and great volume that no, Mensa was not the same as RPG club (a lot of the same members, yeah, but RPG club met Thursdays, it was all on the city wiki, jeez)-but later, when John found out that Lorne could draw, he developed a tactical ingratiation/bartering scheme to obtain art for all his D&D characters, and they kind of, sort of, maybe got to be friends. At least, Lorne threw in a cartoon of John in the HEV suit from Half-Life, but he also seemed to think John was gay.
"It's just that all of your PCs are female," he explained while John spluttered and choked. "All of them."
"What's the matter with that?" John asked. "Guys play women all the time. Joss Whedon writes tons of women."
"What's Joss Whedon got to do with anything?" Lorne asked.
John waved the sketches at him, the heavy art paper crackling. "It's a homage! To Joss Whedon, I mean. Because there's a lack of well-rounded female characters in the media and in RPGs and what the hell does that have to do with being gay? Are you implying that Joss Whedon is gay?"
"I'm not talking about Joss Whedon, okay?" Lorne asked. "It just seemed odd to me…I mean, isn't one of those characters, the half-elf, didn't she start out a man and then that belt thing made her a woman?"
"Yeah," John said. "It was actually a major plot point in our Ptolus campaign."
"And isn't she a wizard with ranks in crossbow?"
"Yeah…"
"You said she's got dark hair and green eyes?"
"Yes, that's on her character sheet, I can show-"
"And her name's Jo-Hannon?"
John folded his arms across his chest. "I fail to see where you're going with this."
But Lorne dropped the subject and instead they argued about what character classes all the recon team members were. They agreed that John would be a wizard and Rod would be a cleric or a bard or something else where Charisma actually mattered, those were easy. But Lorne insisted that Ronon was a ranger and Teyla was a barbarian. "No," John told him. "Ronon is totally the barbarian. Even his wife gets grossed out when he eats."
"So what's Teyla?" Lorne asked.
John thought about. "I think she's like one-half paladin and one-half druid or something. Maybe she's got levels in ranger, too. And she'd be like a half-halfing, half-elf, kind of thing."
"So, basically, a total munchkin?" Lorne sounded skeptical about that.
"I was gonna say Mary Sue, actually," John said. "But the main thing is, she's on our side, and therefore she's awesome."
-\--\--\-
The mission briefing went pretty normally, since it was another standard reconnaissance-Elizabeth reminded them to check in if they found anything and Sumner reminded them not to die and when it turned out they were authorizing a jumper, John immediately said, "Dibs."
Rod rolled his eyes at him. "John, it was your turn to fly anyway."
"You were gonna steal it. I saw that look in your eye."
"I have a look in my eye?"
"A stealing-my-turn-to-fly-the-jumper-look."
"You know, just when I think you can't possibly be any more paranoid…."
"It's not paranoia if you're actually trying to take my turn, though."
Sumner asked, "You ladies need to go settle this in the gym?"
They did not. It took fifteen minutes to gear up and another ten before the hangar crew released them a jumper (official designation: Gateship 9; John's designation: Serenity) but none of that mattered once John got into the pilot's seat. Serenity blinked for him, just like she always did, and while Rod and Ronon and Teyla stowed supplies for the mission in the rear compartment, John once again took a moment to thank whatever kinky ancestor of his had decided to do it with an alien, because there wasn't a video game in the world that compared to this.
"Gateship nine, this is Control Room, are you ready to start your preflight?" somebody asked over the radio.
"Control Room, this is Serenity, could you hold on a sec?" John asked. "I'm having a moment here."
Rod huffed and opened up the radio link in the rear. "Control room, this is Gateship Nine, we're ready to start preflight checks."
"Copy that, Gateship Nine…uh, can we verify who's flying that thing? Doctor Sheppard or Doctor McKay?"
"Doctor Sheppard is piloting and prepared to suppress any attempts at mutiny with extreme prejudice," John announced loudly, and quickly started running through the preflight diagnostics. But he froze when Teyla sat down in the copilot's chair, her gun laid across her lap.
Rod, obviously not sensing the imminent ninja danger, leaned against the back of the chair. "You calling shotgun, Teyla?"
"I do not have a shotgun," she said.
"No, I mean…you know what, whatever, I can run the sensor grid from back here." He unfolded the second jump seat, cattycorner from John. "It's not like you don't know how to dial a DHD."
"Weapons," John blurted, because Teyla was kind of staring at him. "Teyla can't operate the drones."
Rod huffed. "Remember the briefing we just had, John? No signs of active civilization or large land animals from the MALP or the UAV."
"Like that means anything," John pointed out. "Remember Evil Fog Planet?"
"How do we shoot fog?" Ronon said.
Rod just shrugged. "You've fired drones in mid-flight before, or I can route weapons back here, or we can, you know, switch places if anything tries to jump out and grab us. Teyla, that work for you?"
"It does," she said. And she was definitely staring.
John squirmed and accidentally brought up the targeting sensors on the HUD for a second. "I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable with this arrangement," he said loudly, and tried to indicate Teyla and her starey staring stare in some subtle fashion.
"You mean with Teyla?" Ronon asked, sounding confused.
Rod sighed. "John, seriously, paranoid. Everything will be fine."
"Gateship Nine, this is Control Room, you are cleared to launch."
The moon they were surveying had extensive ruins and scenic valleys and a lavender gas giant that filled most of the sky with its gibbous eye, and John didn't get to enjoy any of it. Because Teyla was definitely watching him. Not, like, looming-staring, or anything-he caught her looking at the scenery a few times-but more often than not she was looking at him, sometimes right on, sometimes kind of sideways out of the corner of her eyes. Rod and Ronon didn't seem to notice anything funky about it, which just confirmed to John that Teyla was a superninja. They did, however, notice when John kept veering off-course, suddenly dropping altitude, or accidentally activating the cloak, because it turned out there was a trick willing yourself invisible while flying a mind-reading spaceship and John hadn't figured it out yet.
"Jesus, John, I fly better than this," Rod finally concluded. "You think we should call this one and go home?"
"I'm fine," John said, because dammit, he didn't get to fly the jumpers hardly ever and he liked these missions and if Teyla really was plotting against him this might be his last chance ever to do it. And also he totally flew better than Rod and always would. He just needed to be cool about this. "Serenity's just being a little squirmy because I'm, uh, itchy today."
"Itchy?" Ronon asked.
"Yeah," John said. "Accidentally grabbed scented soap from the supply closet the other day. I have allergies, you know."
"So you can't fly straight because you're too itchy," Ronon repeated skeptically.
Rod said, "You'd be surprised how sensitive the controls are," and John decided that whenever they got pudding in the mess again, he was scoring Rod an extra cup just for that. "If you're sure you can get us home in one piece…"
"Oh, yeah. Totally. Single pieces of puddlejumper are my specialty." He caught Teyla's eye in the reflection off the windshield for a moment and then resolutely looked away, far away, at a really nice cliff face instead. The jumper tried to veer into it.
They called it anyway about half an hour later, because there weren't any energy readings anywhere in the ruins and it was so far from the gate and such bad terrain and also a three-week solar eclipse was about to start, so they'd have to file this one for a dedicated science team to scavenge later on. (John wondered if he could get Eldon assigned to it somehow.) John managed to keep not looking at Teyla, and thus not acknowledge the staring, and he decided that there had to be some corollary to the Uncertainty Principle that allowed her to be not staring at him unless he was actually watching her stare at him. At all other points in time she was simultaneously staring and not staring, like Schrödinger's half-dead cat. And John could deal with half-dead cats and half-staring Teylas way more easily than the full versions, or at least easily enough that he could fly straight.
At least until they were on final approach to the stargate, because after she dialed and the puddle bloomed, Teyla spoke for the first time all mission. And she said, "I believe we will be back in time for lunch."
That made the crash entirely her fault.
-\--\--\-
Back in the beginning of the expedition, they'd run into one those planets that apparently happened in every galaxy. The men were large and hairy, the women habitually wore quilted burkas, and Recon 3 nearly got burned at the stake long before anyone noticed that Teyla had boobs.
When they did, though (after the argument about how John had to take charge because he was the only one with facial hair, to the extent that his side burns and a soul patch counted as such compared to the full-on Ted Kaczynski beards of the locals, and after the argument over whether Ford with his freshly-shaved head was allowed to speak at all) the leader of the village-John was pretty sure his name was Ook or something equally monosyllabic-started waving around a sort of combination cutlass/scythe. "This one is a mere female!" he bellowed. "How dare you show such disdain for the ancient customs of our Most Honorable and Masculine Moose Lodge, where our fathers and forefathers have gotten shitfaced on fermented cat milk for ten generations and held pissing contests out the window before engaging in the usual homoerotic bonding rites of the Ancestors? Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! I curse you forever with back zits and thinning facial hair!"
Okay, so he'd actually only gotten to the word "disdain" before Teyla pulled his weapon out of his hand and beat him with it. (John had tried to add the rest to his mission report on the grounds that it was reasonable extrapolation, but it had been separately nixed by Ford, Rod and Elizabeth.) Once it was clear Ook was down for the count, she carefully set the weapon aside and spoke her only words all mission: "I am no mere female." That wasn't the only time she'd muscled her way into somebody's frat house, but it was the first and most impressive, and John quoted her at every opportunity for about a week and a half until Markham threatened to use him for target practice.
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four