.fic: Ariadne - Teyla, team (R)
Ariadne, hard R (implied Teyla/Carson, pre-McKay/Sheppard; ~5,300)
atlantisbasics fic for wojelah, who wanted something about Teyla and how the rest of the team views her. This came out a bit more as how Teyla views her team, but I hope you like it :>
Notes: This fic contains brief mentions of implied rape/non-consensual sex. They are, however, very fleeting (mostly alluded to and not described in detail). To talk about them more kind of gives away the rest of the story, though the circumstances come out in the first few paragraphs--but I thought I'd issue the warning in case.
ARIADNE
She sees them, their implacable march across the galaxy: ship upon ship upon ship, cruisers, escorts, the Hives with their Queens, so many they blot out the stars. How useless your struggles, the Queen whispers as the ships multiply and the Wraith control the galaxy again.
No. She’s seen this before, felt the blood-hot-ice-cold satisfaction of a Wraith contemplating the destruction of the Ancestors and, now, those from Earth who have taken back Atlantis. How many times have we defeated you? How many times have we beaten you back in the three years you’ve been awake?
The Ancients did not fall in a day, or a year, but fall they did. She can feel the Queen circling her mind, can see her circling around the chamber, her dress a sweep of white in the gloom and the harsh green lights the Wraith favor. When the Queen turns her head, her teeth flash, yellowish-green.
The Queen’s anger is a hot knife against her mind, anger because she should have broken long before now, gift or no, because time runs short and the Lanteans will doubtless come to rescue her. And then the Queen stands before her again, long hair, cruel mouth and eyes that catch the light and glow. Her right hand flexes, the feeding hand; on it, she wears metal jewelry, or it would be jewelry if the Wraith know of such things.
I have shown you your future, the Queen says, and her voice echoes coldly across her bones. Do you wish to know your present, Teyla Emmagan? Do you wish to know your friends?
* * *
She wears the Queen’s blood on her face, a token of something she wishes she could call victory. The report from Colonel Sheppard’s P90 still echoes; Teyla can feel her heart try to keep pace with it, though much of the rest of her is slow, drugged.
When Rodney reaches to help her up, she tries not to recoil from him. She tenses under his hand, but he only looks to ask her if she’s okay - and, being Rodney, he is easily distracted by the danger of their situation - and as soon as she can stand without danger of falling over, she tugs at him to let go, takes her own weapon from Ronon.
“Let’s get out of here,” Colonel Sheppard says, and for the first time in their acquaintance, she realizes how tall he is.
* * *
“You’re okay, Teyla?” Elizabeth now. She clasps her hands politely before her, the way a child might when she is about to sing, and this is reassuring. Carson is somewhere in the infirmary, running the usual post-mission tests; she can hear the beep of his computer and his occasional comments to himself, soft and rumbling, and safely far away.
“I am fine, Elizabeth.” Teyla plucks off the thermometer clipped over her thumb. “It was… nothing I have not endured before.”
The lie is a fine one; she has been in the Wraiths’ mind and has had them be in hers, and they have showed to her the future that awaits. But they have not shown her -
“Teyla?” Elizabeth again, her hand cool on Teyla’s arm and her face creased in concern. She has a kind face, Teyla thinks, trying desperately to ground herself. It’s easy to forget that, that Elizabeth is kind. “You don’t look well. Should I call Carson?”
She shakes her head, whispers something. Please do not, I am fine, I am fine, trying to make her voice louder than the Queen’s.
Do you see what beasts they are, these creatures, your friends? This is what walks beside you day by day: filth, perversity, hiding what they think of you, what they would do to you. Do you think these… these things deserve your loyalty? Your… love? And the cold voice had stumbled as though on an unfamiliar word.
Elizabeth is saying something, Carson’s name, and Teyla shakes her head. They are lies, she tells herself again, the one thing she has told herself even as the Queen showed her… Lies. They are lies.
“Do you need a sedative, love?” Carson now, appearing as if by magic, already reaching for the syringe.
“No,” she makes herself say, pulling her arm against her body. All of her aches with a pain deeper than her bones and she would escape it if she could, but the blankness that clear liquid offers would make her helpless. “Please, Carson, I am merely tired.” From somewhere she conjures up a smile. “Even if you are used to it, having the Wraith in your mind is not pleasant, nor easily endured.”
Both Carson and Elizabeth seem taken in by this, Carson enough that he releases her to her quarters. Were this John or Rodney (she forces the names to come, and herself not to shudder at them), he would have chained them to their beds, not trusting them to refrain from going off on some escapade while half-healed. The measure of his trust in her warms her suddenly - but then, the Queen had left Carson alone; he remains much the same as he has always been.
Teyla leaves the infirmary as quickly as she can, wanting her quarters, the smell of her own blankets, the incense her people make. The scents center her, the soft fabrics under her body tell her she is back in her people’s tents, in the days before the Wraith awoke, before - before -
“Hey, Teyla.”
Colonel Sheppard, with Rodney at his side, Ronon looming behind them both. She freezes; the three of them stare at her.
The Colonel presses her against the wall, eyes alien and ravenous, and his lips are on hers - cruel, hot, nothing of love or friendship in his mouth, only blood and deep satisfaction at having her against the wall, pressed up against him - and he wants, he wants that again.
They are lies. Teyla makes herself stand where she is and acknowledge them. Colonel Sheppard - John, he is John - wears his off-duty clothes and so does Rodney, Earth clothes they fondly refer to as “jeans and a t-shirt.” They do this, so routine the familiarity disorients her.
“Listen, we understand if you want to skip out,” John says, hands tucked in his pockets. He rocks back and forth on his heels, a movement he’s picked up from Rodney. “You’ve had kind of a sucky day.”
“It’s movie night,” Ronon says, scandalized at the break of tradition.
“And it’s your turn to pick,” Rodney adds, glancing anxiously at Sheppard. “If you don’t, the choice defaults to him, and he’s going to pick Back to the Future. Again.” John shrugs innocently, though it's likely he's planned on picking the movie merely for the sake of annoying Rodney; Teyla finds a smile for that, though it is difficult.
As in the infirmary, she excuses herself as quickly as she can, begging Rodney’s forgiveness, and slips past them. Her heart lurches as her path takes her between John and the corridor wall, and her arm brushes against his.
Back in her quarters, she curls deep into her blankets, the ones Charin had woven herself. She strokes the fabric, so soft, the dyes the heavy, familiar dyes of home, her fingers following the patterns of angles and straight lines that her people have always found beautiful.
I never learned to weave, Charin, she tells her dead friend, and for the first time, regrets never having learned.
* * *
They’re watching her, she knows, all three of them. Elizabeth and Carson have sensed that something’s wrong, but they stay away - team is team, and the four of them are, perhaps, something else altogether.
John doesn’t say anything to her when she cancels their practice two days later - she suspects he’s too relieved to question her. She tries to meditate with Ronon the day after that, but she finds she has to escape him and she can’t, stillness of mind elusive and she can’t make herself close her eyes. Against her eyelids, she sees years of frustration, anger, hopelessness, loss - all of these things breeding like a black cancer, reaching through him, reaching for her, her restraint, her grace, everything he envies.
“You must excuse me,” she says, jumping up. “I - I forgot something I must do.”
It’s easier avoiding Rodney, who spends much of his time in the labs and avoids her gym like the plague, and in a way this is the bitterest irony because of the three, she’s the least afraid of him. She and John, twined together as he watches, and John reaches out to draw him in - and yet a coldness overlays everything, a control that rides under Rodney’s chaotic exterior.
They watch her, all three of them, as the fourth night after their mission she takes dinner alone. Rodney asks, Teyla, do you want to sit down? and Ronon is clear in moving over to let her take the place next to him, but she shakes her head.
“A headache,” she says, and almost laughs when they shut down and look awkward. It’s a code word, Elizabeth had explained one day, for “women’s things” that Earth men find uncomfortable. A reminder, she tells herself. John and Rodney and Ronon are men - she finds it strange to think that, when they are team so much of the time.
They are men, the Wraith Queen hisses. Control, power, domination echo through the word, into her blood, her bones, the fabric of her brain, and she turns and runs.
* * *
“You’re back so soon?” Halling remains sitting, his legs folded in the formal meditation pose, though his tone is one of teasing censure. “What brings you to the tents again?”
“I… I don’t know.” Teyla sits down opposite him, the ground winter-hard under the rugs. “I needed to get away, I suppose.”
“Ah.” Halling looks at her shrewdly but doesn’t say anything else; he only reaches for the teapot and another cup. He pours and the rich scent of the tea fills the air; the cup, when she takes it, warms her palms.
She sips and holds the liquid in her mouth, savoring the bitterness of it against her tongue. John, Rodney, and Ronon usually drink the tea only under duress and out of politeness, or if they remember to bring sugar - odd, considering how much the three of them love coffee, a bitter drink which Teyla finds revolting.
Another difference between her and the three of them. So many rifts opening up now, chasms she feels she cannot leap across. They stand at one end of a maze, a terrible labyrinth of memory, and she is at the other, needing to reach them and fearing to step forward.
It is not a memory if it is not true; you cannot know a lie, for you cannot know what does not exist. A lie is something that does not exist; therefore you cannot know it, and it cannot be true.
“Your friends did not come with you?”
“Are you going to speak in questions all day?” Teyla demands. The tea loses some of its savor and she swallows it, sighing as it heats a path down her throat.
“Not unless you need me to,” Halling says. He takes a sip of his own tea. “How is the city?”
“Much as it always is.” She studies him, although she knows he’s aware of it. Tall, tall enough for her to crane her head back uncomfortably to meet him in the eye, the leather jacket giving his shoulders a breadth they don’t need, long and tangled hair and a sharp-boned face that should make him fierce-looking (and often does), but the eyes on her are gentle. “I… I did not come to talk of the city, Halling. I didn’t come to talk at all.”
Halling nods.
“I have never been made to feel… less, because I am a woman,” she says, half to herself and half to him. “Less… powerful, less capable.”
“Why should you be?” Halling sets his cup down and folds his hands, resting them on crossed ankles.
And that, she supposes, is the question. She knows the truth of her people: not many of them remain, and they have lingered on the brink of extinction since the days of Teyla’s greatmothers. They do not - they cannot - afford for anyone of their people, man or woman, to feel less, to do less. Women and men hunt, women and men fight, women and men tend the vegetables and the children.
I am Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Tegan, she thinks, and that is the deepest truth she knows.
You cannot take that truth from me, she tells the memory of the Queen in her head. And because you cannot deceive me out of that, you will not deceive me out of anything else.
* * *
When she returns to the city, she finds her resolution much harder to put into practice. Elizabeth has called a mission for the following day, one for trade and science. The Kanarans are offering Ancient control crystals from their treasure hoard, in exchange for badly-needed antibiotics. Rodney and Carson are coming along, Rodney to make sure the crystals are what the Kanarans say they are, and Carson to explain the drugs.
She stays with Carson as they walk through the gate, though the P90 in her hand gives her a measure of comfort. The weight of it rests easily in her arms, easier than it’s ever done before, and John sends her to stay “on our six” as he says, so she has all four of them in sight: distracted Rodney, silent Ronon, Carson who is anxious as he always is on offworld trips, Colonel Sheppard who is a shadow on the forest path.
They aren’t right, she knows, more than her own abstraction and unease. Rodney’s more anxious and snappish than usual, impatient with the slow pace John insists they keep, trading barbs with John that are more heartfelt than their usual squabbling. Ronon, not occupied with insults, is looking at her over his shoulder, sensing that their team isn’t quite right.
“You owe me a meditation lesson,” he says when Teyla frowns at him. She does not answer; he shrugs and looks forward again, but she knows he still watches her.
The Kanarans greet them politely enough and show Rodney and John to the treasury. John heels Rodney closely, mouth helpless under Rodney’s, yielding - she shakes off the memory, the tingle of dread that comes from wondering if what the Queen had shown her is truth after all.
“You okay?” Ronon asks.
“I’m fine.” She takes a step to the side under the pretense of examining the wares of a market stall. Ronon follows her.
“You don’t look fine. You’ve been acting weird all week.”
Teyla turns, pushes back the fear at having him so close, they are lies, and tells him she is fine, perfectly well if a little tired with her trips between the city and the settlement. Ronon steps back, raising his hands in capitulation - she makes herself not flinch - and gives in, okay, okay, geez. You still have a headache?
Rodney comes back not ten minutes later, dark-faced and furious, walking at a clip that has even John, with his long, loping stride, hustling to keep up.
“Broken, every single one of them,” he fumes, shoving past her as though he doesn’t see her. Very likely he doesn’t. “And not just broken, completely broken beyond all hope of repair - and don’t say it, Sheppard, I am not omnipotent.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” John says mildly.
“You weren’t?” Rodney blinks, temporarily derailed from his fury. “Whatever. The point is, the crystals are completely, totally, and in all other ways useless, and there’s absolutely no reason we should a.) stay here any longer, and b.) give them that medicine.”
“Rodney,” Carson begins. Rodney glares him into silence.
“Surely,” the Kanaran leader says, stepping up to them, “alternative arrangements can be made?”
This is where she should step in, smooth down what Rodney’s tongue has stirred up, and so she does, frowning Rodney into silence - he goes, angry and reluctant, but he goes - and asks the Kanarans what else they have.
Somehow, between the negotiating and the leaving, they offend the Kanarans. She doesn’t know how, if in her distraction she’d said something, or if the Kanarans had finally taken offense at Rodney’s disparagement of their intelligence and evolutionary progress, but they’re running now, and Ronon has a bruise on one arm. Blood slashes her own cheek after a branch whips back to catch her nearly in the eye.
“Almost there!” Colonel Sheppard shouts, twisting to cover their retreat. Gunfire drowns out the sound of their running feet, the confused cries of the Kanarans, her heart’s harsh beat. “Teyla!”
She sees it from the corner of her eye, a spear, an arrow, something swift and pointed, and before she can think to turn aside, Colonel Sheppard pulls her down and away, arm heavy atop her, pushing her into the soft rot of the forest floor.
For a moment all she knows is heat and weight and the not-memory, poisonous even now, of his mouth on hers, something darker than want pulsing along the images.
“You okay?” Sheppard pulls her to her feet; she yanks her hand free and runs, though pain rackets up her ankle, the burn of a sprain.
* * *
Back in the infirmary on Atlantis, Colonel Sheppard tries to hover after Carson discharges him.
“Please go away,” she says, turning her face from him.
She’s never done this to him before - she’s scolded him, teased him, laughed with and at him, but she’s never offered him this rejection. She feels his surprise, the hurt, though the heavy sigh that shakes her body is not regret, but relief when he finally leaves. Carson appears a few minutes later after she regains herself.
“Not that I don’t enjoy seeing your face, love, but it’d be nice if you could go somewhere else of an evening,” Carson says as he wraps her ankle. His lips wear the kind smile she’s always loved, and his hand on her foot, careful of the sprain, is gentle.
“I’m sorry, Carson,” she says, surprised to find she can smile despite the heaviness of the memory of John’s arm on her body, his scent - sweat, soap, dirt - still sharp in her nostrils. “I will try to be… more absent.”
“See that you do.” He tapes the bandage in place and nods with satisfaction. “You’ll want to stay off that for a couple of days…” A pause, awkwardness thick in it. “But instead of being absent, maybe, we could meet somewhere else? The mess hall two evenings from now? Jennifer has the night shift then.”
A date is what the Lanteans call it, but as Elizabeth and Laura and others have explained, there are a thousand different, bewildering ways to interpret such an invitation. From John, Rodney, or Ronon, an invitation to a drink is from a friend to a friend, or was - or still is, she doesn’t know, and she doesn’t know with Carson either.
She accepts in the end, because it’s the graceful thing to do and she can’t come up with an excuse.
* * *
Two days after the Kanarans they’re still watching. She feels it, an increasingly insistent pressure that won’t be put off much longer. The thought makes her ill as she limps through Atlantis’s corridors back to her quarters to prepare for her date (or not-date) with Carson.
It’s Rodney, of all people, who breaks down the first wall of her strange maze. In typical Rodney fashion, he’s charging along at full speed, thoughts flying light years ahead. She can almost sense the storm of him around the corner but not soon enough. His weight is sudden, solid against her chest, graceless as he nearly tangles himself in her crutches and threatens to worsen her sprain.
“Teyla!” He reaches to steady her, but backs off when she draws away. “Are you okay?”
She hates that question. “I’m fine, Rodney.”
He’s studies her like he studies Ancient technology, his computer, John when he thinks nobody’s looking. “You’re not okay,” he says at the end of some silent diagnostic. “You’re not! What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I’m merely - ”
“Tired and you have a headache,” Rodney says. He pauses. “Um, you don’t still have a headache, do you?”
“No, Rodney, I do not.” The laugh that escapes her is genuinely tired; she wonders if she can put Carson off. If anyone would understand, it’s him. “What, other than nearly breaking your fall, can I do for you?”
“I - ” His mouth thins into the uncomfortable, unhappy line that occupies it whenever he wants to say something but, for once, isn’t entirely sure he should, or isn’t confident enough to say it. “It’s just you’ve been looking, well, kind of off since we got you out of that Hive, and Sheppard and Ronon and I were… Well, we were kind of wondering.”
“I am…” Teyla considers lying for a minute, or insisting on exhaustion, but Rodney only stands there, fingers twitching in silent agitation, and looks at her, and he really would be relieved if she released him.
Rodney is… Rodney, over and underneath it all. For all his complexities and eccentricities, Rodney hides little, except for that which she and few others have seen: his generosity, an awkward sort of care at odds with his skill in almost everything else, bravery that surpasses even John and Ronon’s - surpasses because Rodney is terrified most of the time, but goes and fights with them anyway.
I am Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Tegan, she tells herself. The one thing the Wraith Queen cannot take away from her - and she cannot, Teyla realizes, take Rodney either.
“Come with me?” she asks, gesturing in the direction of her quarters. “If you have a minute?”
“Oh, oh - of course. Sure. Always a minute.” The smile he gives her is quick, like most of Rodney’s smiles are, the unexpectedly happy one that never fails to provoke a smile from her. He falls into step beside her, clearly trying to keep to her slow pace.
Fear shivers through Teyla momentarily as they step into her quarters, her bed an ominous softness and the ghosts of the three of them - her, Rodney, John - overlaid upon it. She lights a few candles, breathing in the scent of home and forests.
“Sheppard borrowed some of those,” Rodney says. He’s trying not to move around, though she can see he wants to, spurred on by the nervous energy that never quite bleeds out of him. “You know, when I - almost Ascended?” He makes it a question at the end, as though she's forgotten.
“He did… He was very embarrassed to ask, but thought asking the women on the expedition would result in… uncomfortable questions.” A good memory, John shifting and red-faced, asking to borrow her meditation candles. To help Rodney meditate - he’d been absolutely clear on that.
“So.” Rodney drags in a deep breath. “Did you want to talk?”
“Not particularly, but I feel I must.”
“Because we have Kate for that, you know.”
“I don’t want to talk to her.” Kate will tell her what she’s told herself, or turn the Wraith queen’s lies into clinical words that cannot touch the deeper wound in Teyla’s heart. “I would - I would talk to you, Rodney, if I could.” She abandons her crutches and steps closer to the window; he follows her, and the windows swing silently open.
The late afternoon sun is kind on her skin and turns Rodney’s hair to tawny gold, and makes him look young all of a sudden when he tilts his face up into it.
“In the Hive ship,” she says, “the Wraith queen tried to interrogate me - worse, to break me. She knew I am the one who can track their movements.” It feels good to talk about her in the past tense, although her words bring back the Queen’s blood on her face, the sudden, crushing fear of being surrounded by her teammates, filth, beasts, perversity ringing in her mind.
Down to her bones it had sunk, feeding on natural human suspicion, so no matter how many times she told herself these are lies, that the Wraith can make you see things that are not there, phantasms, there were the thoughts: the Wraith can read minds, and the Queen had read the minds of her friends and dug out all that which lies buried beneath civilization, which never offers itself to the sunlight and lives only in darkness, hidden away from everyone else.
“Never before have I thought such things of you - that you would want to... to force or control us, or want us to be powerless in the way the Queen showed me,” Teyla says, reaching out hesitantly to touch Rodney’s arm. He’s staring at her, wide-eyed and hurt and silent, something else like sorrow there, that she recognizes. Under her hand, his arm is warm and firm. “And I never would have, had the Queen not forced herself into my mind.”
“It’s, ah, it’s okay.” Rodney’s hand is over hers, large and capable and a bit rough now from his gun. “I know you wouldn't.”
“Still, I need to say it. They are cruel words, however untrue they are.”
Rodney turns a bit red and fidgets, mutters something about you were actually part right about me… just not the way the Queen was showing you, and not with, well, not with you and please please please don’t tell anyone. Especially not - well, you know. Him. Sheppard.
“I won’t,” Teyla assures him, "but you should tell him, one day."
"Yes, well..." A quick gesture waves Teyla's suggestion off into unimportance, but his smile at her promise is brief and relieved before he sobers again.
“Listen, uh… I’m still not good at the whole heart-to-heart thing,” he says after a moment, “but I wanted to say, that is… I wanted to say you’re important to us, you’re the only person on this team with common sense, other than me, and we’ve been worried, and Sheppard actually wanted to talk about it, he was that worried. And you shouldn’t - you shouldn’t have to apologize for anything, Teyla. Nothing at all, and I can’t blame you for not wanting to talk to us. Not that I know what it’s like, because I guess enlightenment only goes so far, but - that is to say, we need you around.”
The words pick up speed near the end, as though Rodney’s worried that if he stops he’ll never be able to say them again, and when he finishes he’s red-faced and breathless and so awkward Teyla has to turn him gently to face her, to calm him with one of her listen to me looks (which all three of them heed), and touch his forehead to hers.
The ritual gesture is soothing - for him, Teyla suspects, as much as herself, and no small part of her falls loose in relief when there’s no shudder of fear, adrenaline, the need to run, at feeling his forehead warm against her own, and his large hands cupping her shoulders as though handling the most delicate machinery.
“We have a sort of make-up movie night tonight,” Rodney says after a moment. “I told Sheppard he’d have a month of cold showers if we watched that God-awful movie again, and there was some… um, philosophical discussion about that, and we decided since you weren’t around to pick the movie like you were supposed to be, we’d put it off.”
“I should come then,” she says, and Rodney’s relief, his smile, is bright and brilliant as the sun.
* * *
Teyla reschedules with Carson for the following night, anxious that she’s hurt his feelings and wondering how this will complicate things - because, Laura had assured her during one of her rants on “men in general”, it will complicate things. But she needs the time with her team, with her friends - with John, Rodney, and Ronon - before she can deal with the complexities of a cup of tea in the mess hall.
“Hey, Teyla,” John says when the doors to the movie room slide open. He’s in his off-duty clothes again, loose jeans and a button-down shirt that make him look so much like the boy she knows he is under responsibility. His smile is the one she likes best, the hesitant one that’s too subdued to be anything other than real.
“John,” she says, and she can see the reservation in him, please go away hovering as unpleasantly as the memories from the Hive ship.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I am not, but I am becoming so,” she tells him, watches his brow furrow as he works out the answer.
“You know,” and his voice is low, confidential, the same one she remembers hearing almost three years ago, when he’d spoken of Ferris wheels and football and fast things, “McKay’s been intolerable for the past few days… We kind of need you around.” He sidles a bit closer, still far enough away for comfort; she takes two more steps closer to him, enough for him to touch her if he wants. “It’s not just that…” John, like Rodney, doesn’t talk like this; like his planes, he twists and evades whatever might be painful. “I miss you kicking my ass and keeping us from having the natives put spears in us, and did you know Rodney drew blood when Ronon tried to take his fries yesterday?”
“It’s true,” Ronon says. “The bastard.”
“Hey!”
“We’ve had a pretty good two years together,” John continues, serious now, “and I’d really - I’d hate to think the Wraith can destroy that.”
He’d nearly died trying to save her from being trapped in that Ark with those poor souls. She wonders how the Queen had managed to efface that memory, the knowledge that John sees her as his friend, a necessary part of his life, necessary enough to risk everything to save her.
“I refuse to,” she says, because it’s true, and his words coalesce all the jagged facets of her struggle: the Wraith have done this. And the conviction of what is true and real: these are her friends, who worry, and who are. Flawed, but no more and no less than any other man or woman in the universe, and she feels with them as she has felt around her people: warmth, comfort in a rough and unexpected way, family that runs through the blood.
“So you coming back?” John asks.
“I am,” Teyla says, and feels halfway back already.
John doesn’t say anything, only ducks his head, the shy, boyish gesture she once thought was feigned but now knows is real - more avoidance, an anxiety in the face of love and friendship and connection.
“Can we start the movie, or are we going to gossip and do each other’s hair?” Rodney snaps from the couch. “What’d you bring, Teyla?”
“Jurassic Park,” she tells him, which earns a groan from Rodney and the beginnings of a rant on the complete butchery of chaos theory perpetrated by Crichton, an interested look from John, and curiosity from Ronon.
She tosses the DVD case to Rodney, who scowls mutinously before turning to set up the machine, and perches on one arm of the sofa. Ronon sprawls beside her, John next to him and then Rodney, who complains about Sheppard stealing his seat (you got out, I got in, McKay) but then is mollified and shyly pleased when John hands him a Snickers bar.
“You going to give me that meditation lesson?” Ronon asks as the previews start and John thinks the lights down. “Because you’re the best cure for insomnia I’ve ever found.”
He falls asleep in her meditation sessions despite threats of punishment; he watches over her when she can’t take her own troubles elsewhere. And when they fight her blood exults, because he never holds back but treats her as his equal - a warrior, a comrade, the first friend very nearly in seven years of running.
His reward: she smacks his shoulder and he taps her firmly on the knee, grinning at her outrage, and she walks the rest of the way through the maze with unerring steps.
-end-
atlantisbasics fic for wojelah, who wanted something about Teyla and how the rest of the team views her. This came out a bit more as how Teyla views her team, but I hope you like it :>
Notes: This fic contains brief mentions of implied rape/non-consensual sex. They are, however, very fleeting (mostly alluded to and not described in detail). To talk about them more kind of gives away the rest of the story, though the circumstances come out in the first few paragraphs--but I thought I'd issue the warning in case.
ARIADNE
She sees them, their implacable march across the galaxy: ship upon ship upon ship, cruisers, escorts, the Hives with their Queens, so many they blot out the stars. How useless your struggles, the Queen whispers as the ships multiply and the Wraith control the galaxy again.
No. She’s seen this before, felt the blood-hot-ice-cold satisfaction of a Wraith contemplating the destruction of the Ancestors and, now, those from Earth who have taken back Atlantis. How many times have we defeated you? How many times have we beaten you back in the three years you’ve been awake?
The Ancients did not fall in a day, or a year, but fall they did. She can feel the Queen circling her mind, can see her circling around the chamber, her dress a sweep of white in the gloom and the harsh green lights the Wraith favor. When the Queen turns her head, her teeth flash, yellowish-green.
The Queen’s anger is a hot knife against her mind, anger because she should have broken long before now, gift or no, because time runs short and the Lanteans will doubtless come to rescue her. And then the Queen stands before her again, long hair, cruel mouth and eyes that catch the light and glow. Her right hand flexes, the feeding hand; on it, she wears metal jewelry, or it would be jewelry if the Wraith know of such things.
I have shown you your future, the Queen says, and her voice echoes coldly across her bones. Do you wish to know your present, Teyla Emmagan? Do you wish to know your friends?
* * *
She wears the Queen’s blood on her face, a token of something she wishes she could call victory. The report from Colonel Sheppard’s P90 still echoes; Teyla can feel her heart try to keep pace with it, though much of the rest of her is slow, drugged.
When Rodney reaches to help her up, she tries not to recoil from him. She tenses under his hand, but he only looks to ask her if she’s okay - and, being Rodney, he is easily distracted by the danger of their situation - and as soon as she can stand without danger of falling over, she tugs at him to let go, takes her own weapon from Ronon.
“Let’s get out of here,” Colonel Sheppard says, and for the first time in their acquaintance, she realizes how tall he is.
* * *
“You’re okay, Teyla?” Elizabeth now. She clasps her hands politely before her, the way a child might when she is about to sing, and this is reassuring. Carson is somewhere in the infirmary, running the usual post-mission tests; she can hear the beep of his computer and his occasional comments to himself, soft and rumbling, and safely far away.
“I am fine, Elizabeth.” Teyla plucks off the thermometer clipped over her thumb. “It was… nothing I have not endured before.”
The lie is a fine one; she has been in the Wraiths’ mind and has had them be in hers, and they have showed to her the future that awaits. But they have not shown her -
“Teyla?” Elizabeth again, her hand cool on Teyla’s arm and her face creased in concern. She has a kind face, Teyla thinks, trying desperately to ground herself. It’s easy to forget that, that Elizabeth is kind. “You don’t look well. Should I call Carson?”
She shakes her head, whispers something. Please do not, I am fine, I am fine, trying to make her voice louder than the Queen’s.
Do you see what beasts they are, these creatures, your friends? This is what walks beside you day by day: filth, perversity, hiding what they think of you, what they would do to you. Do you think these… these things deserve your loyalty? Your… love? And the cold voice had stumbled as though on an unfamiliar word.
Elizabeth is saying something, Carson’s name, and Teyla shakes her head. They are lies, she tells herself again, the one thing she has told herself even as the Queen showed her… Lies. They are lies.
“Do you need a sedative, love?” Carson now, appearing as if by magic, already reaching for the syringe.
“No,” she makes herself say, pulling her arm against her body. All of her aches with a pain deeper than her bones and she would escape it if she could, but the blankness that clear liquid offers would make her helpless. “Please, Carson, I am merely tired.” From somewhere she conjures up a smile. “Even if you are used to it, having the Wraith in your mind is not pleasant, nor easily endured.”
Both Carson and Elizabeth seem taken in by this, Carson enough that he releases her to her quarters. Were this John or Rodney (she forces the names to come, and herself not to shudder at them), he would have chained them to their beds, not trusting them to refrain from going off on some escapade while half-healed. The measure of his trust in her warms her suddenly - but then, the Queen had left Carson alone; he remains much the same as he has always been.
Teyla leaves the infirmary as quickly as she can, wanting her quarters, the smell of her own blankets, the incense her people make. The scents center her, the soft fabrics under her body tell her she is back in her people’s tents, in the days before the Wraith awoke, before - before -
“Hey, Teyla.”
Colonel Sheppard, with Rodney at his side, Ronon looming behind them both. She freezes; the three of them stare at her.
The Colonel presses her against the wall, eyes alien and ravenous, and his lips are on hers - cruel, hot, nothing of love or friendship in his mouth, only blood and deep satisfaction at having her against the wall, pressed up against him - and he wants, he wants that again.
They are lies. Teyla makes herself stand where she is and acknowledge them. Colonel Sheppard - John, he is John - wears his off-duty clothes and so does Rodney, Earth clothes they fondly refer to as “jeans and a t-shirt.” They do this, so routine the familiarity disorients her.
“Listen, we understand if you want to skip out,” John says, hands tucked in his pockets. He rocks back and forth on his heels, a movement he’s picked up from Rodney. “You’ve had kind of a sucky day.”
“It’s movie night,” Ronon says, scandalized at the break of tradition.
“And it’s your turn to pick,” Rodney adds, glancing anxiously at Sheppard. “If you don’t, the choice defaults to him, and he’s going to pick Back to the Future. Again.” John shrugs innocently, though it's likely he's planned on picking the movie merely for the sake of annoying Rodney; Teyla finds a smile for that, though it is difficult.
As in the infirmary, she excuses herself as quickly as she can, begging Rodney’s forgiveness, and slips past them. Her heart lurches as her path takes her between John and the corridor wall, and her arm brushes against his.
Back in her quarters, she curls deep into her blankets, the ones Charin had woven herself. She strokes the fabric, so soft, the dyes the heavy, familiar dyes of home, her fingers following the patterns of angles and straight lines that her people have always found beautiful.
I never learned to weave, Charin, she tells her dead friend, and for the first time, regrets never having learned.
* * *
They’re watching her, she knows, all three of them. Elizabeth and Carson have sensed that something’s wrong, but they stay away - team is team, and the four of them are, perhaps, something else altogether.
John doesn’t say anything to her when she cancels their practice two days later - she suspects he’s too relieved to question her. She tries to meditate with Ronon the day after that, but she finds she has to escape him and she can’t, stillness of mind elusive and she can’t make herself close her eyes. Against her eyelids, she sees years of frustration, anger, hopelessness, loss - all of these things breeding like a black cancer, reaching through him, reaching for her, her restraint, her grace, everything he envies.
“You must excuse me,” she says, jumping up. “I - I forgot something I must do.”
It’s easier avoiding Rodney, who spends much of his time in the labs and avoids her gym like the plague, and in a way this is the bitterest irony because of the three, she’s the least afraid of him. She and John, twined together as he watches, and John reaches out to draw him in - and yet a coldness overlays everything, a control that rides under Rodney’s chaotic exterior.
They watch her, all three of them, as the fourth night after their mission she takes dinner alone. Rodney asks, Teyla, do you want to sit down? and Ronon is clear in moving over to let her take the place next to him, but she shakes her head.
“A headache,” she says, and almost laughs when they shut down and look awkward. It’s a code word, Elizabeth had explained one day, for “women’s things” that Earth men find uncomfortable. A reminder, she tells herself. John and Rodney and Ronon are men - she finds it strange to think that, when they are team so much of the time.
They are men, the Wraith Queen hisses. Control, power, domination echo through the word, into her blood, her bones, the fabric of her brain, and she turns and runs.
* * *
“You’re back so soon?” Halling remains sitting, his legs folded in the formal meditation pose, though his tone is one of teasing censure. “What brings you to the tents again?”
“I… I don’t know.” Teyla sits down opposite him, the ground winter-hard under the rugs. “I needed to get away, I suppose.”
“Ah.” Halling looks at her shrewdly but doesn’t say anything else; he only reaches for the teapot and another cup. He pours and the rich scent of the tea fills the air; the cup, when she takes it, warms her palms.
She sips and holds the liquid in her mouth, savoring the bitterness of it against her tongue. John, Rodney, and Ronon usually drink the tea only under duress and out of politeness, or if they remember to bring sugar - odd, considering how much the three of them love coffee, a bitter drink which Teyla finds revolting.
Another difference between her and the three of them. So many rifts opening up now, chasms she feels she cannot leap across. They stand at one end of a maze, a terrible labyrinth of memory, and she is at the other, needing to reach them and fearing to step forward.
It is not a memory if it is not true; you cannot know a lie, for you cannot know what does not exist. A lie is something that does not exist; therefore you cannot know it, and it cannot be true.
“Your friends did not come with you?”
“Are you going to speak in questions all day?” Teyla demands. The tea loses some of its savor and she swallows it, sighing as it heats a path down her throat.
“Not unless you need me to,” Halling says. He takes a sip of his own tea. “How is the city?”
“Much as it always is.” She studies him, although she knows he’s aware of it. Tall, tall enough for her to crane her head back uncomfortably to meet him in the eye, the leather jacket giving his shoulders a breadth they don’t need, long and tangled hair and a sharp-boned face that should make him fierce-looking (and often does), but the eyes on her are gentle. “I… I did not come to talk of the city, Halling. I didn’t come to talk at all.”
Halling nods.
“I have never been made to feel… less, because I am a woman,” she says, half to herself and half to him. “Less… powerful, less capable.”
“Why should you be?” Halling sets his cup down and folds his hands, resting them on crossed ankles.
And that, she supposes, is the question. She knows the truth of her people: not many of them remain, and they have lingered on the brink of extinction since the days of Teyla’s greatmothers. They do not - they cannot - afford for anyone of their people, man or woman, to feel less, to do less. Women and men hunt, women and men fight, women and men tend the vegetables and the children.
I am Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Tegan, she thinks, and that is the deepest truth she knows.
You cannot take that truth from me, she tells the memory of the Queen in her head. And because you cannot deceive me out of that, you will not deceive me out of anything else.
* * *
When she returns to the city, she finds her resolution much harder to put into practice. Elizabeth has called a mission for the following day, one for trade and science. The Kanarans are offering Ancient control crystals from their treasure hoard, in exchange for badly-needed antibiotics. Rodney and Carson are coming along, Rodney to make sure the crystals are what the Kanarans say they are, and Carson to explain the drugs.
She stays with Carson as they walk through the gate, though the P90 in her hand gives her a measure of comfort. The weight of it rests easily in her arms, easier than it’s ever done before, and John sends her to stay “on our six” as he says, so she has all four of them in sight: distracted Rodney, silent Ronon, Carson who is anxious as he always is on offworld trips, Colonel Sheppard who is a shadow on the forest path.
They aren’t right, she knows, more than her own abstraction and unease. Rodney’s more anxious and snappish than usual, impatient with the slow pace John insists they keep, trading barbs with John that are more heartfelt than their usual squabbling. Ronon, not occupied with insults, is looking at her over his shoulder, sensing that their team isn’t quite right.
“You owe me a meditation lesson,” he says when Teyla frowns at him. She does not answer; he shrugs and looks forward again, but she knows he still watches her.
The Kanarans greet them politely enough and show Rodney and John to the treasury. John heels Rodney closely, mouth helpless under Rodney’s, yielding - she shakes off the memory, the tingle of dread that comes from wondering if what the Queen had shown her is truth after all.
“You okay?” Ronon asks.
“I’m fine.” She takes a step to the side under the pretense of examining the wares of a market stall. Ronon follows her.
“You don’t look fine. You’ve been acting weird all week.”
Teyla turns, pushes back the fear at having him so close, they are lies, and tells him she is fine, perfectly well if a little tired with her trips between the city and the settlement. Ronon steps back, raising his hands in capitulation - she makes herself not flinch - and gives in, okay, okay, geez. You still have a headache?
Rodney comes back not ten minutes later, dark-faced and furious, walking at a clip that has even John, with his long, loping stride, hustling to keep up.
“Broken, every single one of them,” he fumes, shoving past her as though he doesn’t see her. Very likely he doesn’t. “And not just broken, completely broken beyond all hope of repair - and don’t say it, Sheppard, I am not omnipotent.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” John says mildly.
“You weren’t?” Rodney blinks, temporarily derailed from his fury. “Whatever. The point is, the crystals are completely, totally, and in all other ways useless, and there’s absolutely no reason we should a.) stay here any longer, and b.) give them that medicine.”
“Rodney,” Carson begins. Rodney glares him into silence.
“Surely,” the Kanaran leader says, stepping up to them, “alternative arrangements can be made?”
This is where she should step in, smooth down what Rodney’s tongue has stirred up, and so she does, frowning Rodney into silence - he goes, angry and reluctant, but he goes - and asks the Kanarans what else they have.
Somehow, between the negotiating and the leaving, they offend the Kanarans. She doesn’t know how, if in her distraction she’d said something, or if the Kanarans had finally taken offense at Rodney’s disparagement of their intelligence and evolutionary progress, but they’re running now, and Ronon has a bruise on one arm. Blood slashes her own cheek after a branch whips back to catch her nearly in the eye.
“Almost there!” Colonel Sheppard shouts, twisting to cover their retreat. Gunfire drowns out the sound of their running feet, the confused cries of the Kanarans, her heart’s harsh beat. “Teyla!”
She sees it from the corner of her eye, a spear, an arrow, something swift and pointed, and before she can think to turn aside, Colonel Sheppard pulls her down and away, arm heavy atop her, pushing her into the soft rot of the forest floor.
For a moment all she knows is heat and weight and the not-memory, poisonous even now, of his mouth on hers, something darker than want pulsing along the images.
“You okay?” Sheppard pulls her to her feet; she yanks her hand free and runs, though pain rackets up her ankle, the burn of a sprain.
* * *
Back in the infirmary on Atlantis, Colonel Sheppard tries to hover after Carson discharges him.
“Please go away,” she says, turning her face from him.
She’s never done this to him before - she’s scolded him, teased him, laughed with and at him, but she’s never offered him this rejection. She feels his surprise, the hurt, though the heavy sigh that shakes her body is not regret, but relief when he finally leaves. Carson appears a few minutes later after she regains herself.
“Not that I don’t enjoy seeing your face, love, but it’d be nice if you could go somewhere else of an evening,” Carson says as he wraps her ankle. His lips wear the kind smile she’s always loved, and his hand on her foot, careful of the sprain, is gentle.
“I’m sorry, Carson,” she says, surprised to find she can smile despite the heaviness of the memory of John’s arm on her body, his scent - sweat, soap, dirt - still sharp in her nostrils. “I will try to be… more absent.”
“See that you do.” He tapes the bandage in place and nods with satisfaction. “You’ll want to stay off that for a couple of days…” A pause, awkwardness thick in it. “But instead of being absent, maybe, we could meet somewhere else? The mess hall two evenings from now? Jennifer has the night shift then.”
A date is what the Lanteans call it, but as Elizabeth and Laura and others have explained, there are a thousand different, bewildering ways to interpret such an invitation. From John, Rodney, or Ronon, an invitation to a drink is from a friend to a friend, or was - or still is, she doesn’t know, and she doesn’t know with Carson either.
She accepts in the end, because it’s the graceful thing to do and she can’t come up with an excuse.
* * *
Two days after the Kanarans they’re still watching. She feels it, an increasingly insistent pressure that won’t be put off much longer. The thought makes her ill as she limps through Atlantis’s corridors back to her quarters to prepare for her date (or not-date) with Carson.
It’s Rodney, of all people, who breaks down the first wall of her strange maze. In typical Rodney fashion, he’s charging along at full speed, thoughts flying light years ahead. She can almost sense the storm of him around the corner but not soon enough. His weight is sudden, solid against her chest, graceless as he nearly tangles himself in her crutches and threatens to worsen her sprain.
“Teyla!” He reaches to steady her, but backs off when she draws away. “Are you okay?”
She hates that question. “I’m fine, Rodney.”
He’s studies her like he studies Ancient technology, his computer, John when he thinks nobody’s looking. “You’re not okay,” he says at the end of some silent diagnostic. “You’re not! What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I’m merely - ”
“Tired and you have a headache,” Rodney says. He pauses. “Um, you don’t still have a headache, do you?”
“No, Rodney, I do not.” The laugh that escapes her is genuinely tired; she wonders if she can put Carson off. If anyone would understand, it’s him. “What, other than nearly breaking your fall, can I do for you?”
“I - ” His mouth thins into the uncomfortable, unhappy line that occupies it whenever he wants to say something but, for once, isn’t entirely sure he should, or isn’t confident enough to say it. “It’s just you’ve been looking, well, kind of off since we got you out of that Hive, and Sheppard and Ronon and I were… Well, we were kind of wondering.”
“I am…” Teyla considers lying for a minute, or insisting on exhaustion, but Rodney only stands there, fingers twitching in silent agitation, and looks at her, and he really would be relieved if she released him.
Rodney is… Rodney, over and underneath it all. For all his complexities and eccentricities, Rodney hides little, except for that which she and few others have seen: his generosity, an awkward sort of care at odds with his skill in almost everything else, bravery that surpasses even John and Ronon’s - surpasses because Rodney is terrified most of the time, but goes and fights with them anyway.
I am Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Tegan, she tells herself. The one thing the Wraith Queen cannot take away from her - and she cannot, Teyla realizes, take Rodney either.
“Come with me?” she asks, gesturing in the direction of her quarters. “If you have a minute?”
“Oh, oh - of course. Sure. Always a minute.” The smile he gives her is quick, like most of Rodney’s smiles are, the unexpectedly happy one that never fails to provoke a smile from her. He falls into step beside her, clearly trying to keep to her slow pace.
Fear shivers through Teyla momentarily as they step into her quarters, her bed an ominous softness and the ghosts of the three of them - her, Rodney, John - overlaid upon it. She lights a few candles, breathing in the scent of home and forests.
“Sheppard borrowed some of those,” Rodney says. He’s trying not to move around, though she can see he wants to, spurred on by the nervous energy that never quite bleeds out of him. “You know, when I - almost Ascended?” He makes it a question at the end, as though she's forgotten.
“He did… He was very embarrassed to ask, but thought asking the women on the expedition would result in… uncomfortable questions.” A good memory, John shifting and red-faced, asking to borrow her meditation candles. To help Rodney meditate - he’d been absolutely clear on that.
“So.” Rodney drags in a deep breath. “Did you want to talk?”
“Not particularly, but I feel I must.”
“Because we have Kate for that, you know.”
“I don’t want to talk to her.” Kate will tell her what she’s told herself, or turn the Wraith queen’s lies into clinical words that cannot touch the deeper wound in Teyla’s heart. “I would - I would talk to you, Rodney, if I could.” She abandons her crutches and steps closer to the window; he follows her, and the windows swing silently open.
The late afternoon sun is kind on her skin and turns Rodney’s hair to tawny gold, and makes him look young all of a sudden when he tilts his face up into it.
“In the Hive ship,” she says, “the Wraith queen tried to interrogate me - worse, to break me. She knew I am the one who can track their movements.” It feels good to talk about her in the past tense, although her words bring back the Queen’s blood on her face, the sudden, crushing fear of being surrounded by her teammates, filth, beasts, perversity ringing in her mind.
Down to her bones it had sunk, feeding on natural human suspicion, so no matter how many times she told herself these are lies, that the Wraith can make you see things that are not there, phantasms, there were the thoughts: the Wraith can read minds, and the Queen had read the minds of her friends and dug out all that which lies buried beneath civilization, which never offers itself to the sunlight and lives only in darkness, hidden away from everyone else.
“Never before have I thought such things of you - that you would want to... to force or control us, or want us to be powerless in the way the Queen showed me,” Teyla says, reaching out hesitantly to touch Rodney’s arm. He’s staring at her, wide-eyed and hurt and silent, something else like sorrow there, that she recognizes. Under her hand, his arm is warm and firm. “And I never would have, had the Queen not forced herself into my mind.”
“It’s, ah, it’s okay.” Rodney’s hand is over hers, large and capable and a bit rough now from his gun. “I know you wouldn't.”
“Still, I need to say it. They are cruel words, however untrue they are.”
Rodney turns a bit red and fidgets, mutters something about you were actually part right about me… just not the way the Queen was showing you, and not with, well, not with you and please please please don’t tell anyone. Especially not - well, you know. Him. Sheppard.
“I won’t,” Teyla assures him, "but you should tell him, one day."
"Yes, well..." A quick gesture waves Teyla's suggestion off into unimportance, but his smile at her promise is brief and relieved before he sobers again.
“Listen, uh… I’m still not good at the whole heart-to-heart thing,” he says after a moment, “but I wanted to say, that is… I wanted to say you’re important to us, you’re the only person on this team with common sense, other than me, and we’ve been worried, and Sheppard actually wanted to talk about it, he was that worried. And you shouldn’t - you shouldn’t have to apologize for anything, Teyla. Nothing at all, and I can’t blame you for not wanting to talk to us. Not that I know what it’s like, because I guess enlightenment only goes so far, but - that is to say, we need you around.”
The words pick up speed near the end, as though Rodney’s worried that if he stops he’ll never be able to say them again, and when he finishes he’s red-faced and breathless and so awkward Teyla has to turn him gently to face her, to calm him with one of her listen to me looks (which all three of them heed), and touch his forehead to hers.
The ritual gesture is soothing - for him, Teyla suspects, as much as herself, and no small part of her falls loose in relief when there’s no shudder of fear, adrenaline, the need to run, at feeling his forehead warm against her own, and his large hands cupping her shoulders as though handling the most delicate machinery.
“We have a sort of make-up movie night tonight,” Rodney says after a moment. “I told Sheppard he’d have a month of cold showers if we watched that God-awful movie again, and there was some… um, philosophical discussion about that, and we decided since you weren’t around to pick the movie like you were supposed to be, we’d put it off.”
“I should come then,” she says, and Rodney’s relief, his smile, is bright and brilliant as the sun.
* * *
Teyla reschedules with Carson for the following night, anxious that she’s hurt his feelings and wondering how this will complicate things - because, Laura had assured her during one of her rants on “men in general”, it will complicate things. But she needs the time with her team, with her friends - with John, Rodney, and Ronon - before she can deal with the complexities of a cup of tea in the mess hall.
“Hey, Teyla,” John says when the doors to the movie room slide open. He’s in his off-duty clothes again, loose jeans and a button-down shirt that make him look so much like the boy she knows he is under responsibility. His smile is the one she likes best, the hesitant one that’s too subdued to be anything other than real.
“John,” she says, and she can see the reservation in him, please go away hovering as unpleasantly as the memories from the Hive ship.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I am not, but I am becoming so,” she tells him, watches his brow furrow as he works out the answer.
“You know,” and his voice is low, confidential, the same one she remembers hearing almost three years ago, when he’d spoken of Ferris wheels and football and fast things, “McKay’s been intolerable for the past few days… We kind of need you around.” He sidles a bit closer, still far enough away for comfort; she takes two more steps closer to him, enough for him to touch her if he wants. “It’s not just that…” John, like Rodney, doesn’t talk like this; like his planes, he twists and evades whatever might be painful. “I miss you kicking my ass and keeping us from having the natives put spears in us, and did you know Rodney drew blood when Ronon tried to take his fries yesterday?”
“It’s true,” Ronon says. “The bastard.”
“Hey!”
“We’ve had a pretty good two years together,” John continues, serious now, “and I’d really - I’d hate to think the Wraith can destroy that.”
He’d nearly died trying to save her from being trapped in that Ark with those poor souls. She wonders how the Queen had managed to efface that memory, the knowledge that John sees her as his friend, a necessary part of his life, necessary enough to risk everything to save her.
“I refuse to,” she says, because it’s true, and his words coalesce all the jagged facets of her struggle: the Wraith have done this. And the conviction of what is true and real: these are her friends, who worry, and who are. Flawed, but no more and no less than any other man or woman in the universe, and she feels with them as she has felt around her people: warmth, comfort in a rough and unexpected way, family that runs through the blood.
“So you coming back?” John asks.
“I am,” Teyla says, and feels halfway back already.
John doesn’t say anything, only ducks his head, the shy, boyish gesture she once thought was feigned but now knows is real - more avoidance, an anxiety in the face of love and friendship and connection.
“Can we start the movie, or are we going to gossip and do each other’s hair?” Rodney snaps from the couch. “What’d you bring, Teyla?”
“Jurassic Park,” she tells him, which earns a groan from Rodney and the beginnings of a rant on the complete butchery of chaos theory perpetrated by Crichton, an interested look from John, and curiosity from Ronon.
She tosses the DVD case to Rodney, who scowls mutinously before turning to set up the machine, and perches on one arm of the sofa. Ronon sprawls beside her, John next to him and then Rodney, who complains about Sheppard stealing his seat (you got out, I got in, McKay) but then is mollified and shyly pleased when John hands him a Snickers bar.
“You going to give me that meditation lesson?” Ronon asks as the previews start and John thinks the lights down. “Because you’re the best cure for insomnia I’ve ever found.”
He falls asleep in her meditation sessions despite threats of punishment; he watches over her when she can’t take her own troubles elsewhere. And when they fight her blood exults, because he never holds back but treats her as his equal - a warrior, a comrade, the first friend very nearly in seven years of running.
His reward: she smacks his shoulder and he taps her firmly on the knee, grinning at her outrage, and she walks the rest of the way through the maze with unerring steps.
-end-