Disclaimer: SGA does not belong to me of course and belongs to all the grand high Mucky Mucks that killed off my beloved Lizzie. No money was made from this and no copyright infringement is intended. Any similarity to any other story not my own is coincidence.
Title: A Girl in Need of a Tourniquet
Genre: SGA; Sparky angst; AU
Rating: NC-17; rated for language and sexual situations
Timeline: AU; sometime during Season 4, though be warned I haven't really watched it since they killed of Lizzie and put Sam in charge.
Author's Note: As people may or may not know, I tend to write fluff, even my smut is usually pretty fluffy; this is not that, this is another creature all together.
A Girl in Need of a Tourniquet
John watched Elizabeth pace, the nearly inaudible electric hum of cell bars serving as a baseline to the hollow sound of her steps.
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked carefully, and they could both hear the wary note in his voice.
Elizabeth paused, her green eyes shuttered and cold in a way that John had never seen before.
“I’m not really sure,” she finally admitted. She gave a wry laugh.
“It does feel a bit clichéd though, doesn’t it? The villain reveals all to the intrepid hero, giving him the way to finally defeat her.”
Elizabeth looked down. “Of course, that could be because I really do want you to stop me.”
“I think we both know that that’s not true,” John replied in a low voice.
She looked back to where John sat in the familiar Atlantean-like cell. The Colonel was the first to look away, unable to face the stranger he saw looking out of a friend’s eyes. Elizabeth began to pace again.
“It will work,” she said finally, still pacing before John’s cell.
“It could,” John conceded. “But at what price… how many lives?”
He offered her a glimpse of his eyes, open and compelling.
The Asuran leader gave a bitter sort of laugh, quite unlike the one that could sometimes have been heard gracing Atlantis’ corridors.
“That won’t work you know. The Elizabeth you knew is quite dead.”
“It was worth a shot.”
Again, a bitter laugh worked itself loose from Elizabeth.
“That’s my, John.”
She looked his way again, and the Colonel saw some emotion that he couldn’t quite identify flicker across her features briefly.
“You could help us,” she suggested after a moment. “Balance out the scales.”
“Keep the cost from being too high?”
“Exactly.”
After a moment of staring into John’s dark eyes, Elizabeth sighed.
“It was worth a shot,” she echoed.
“It was,” he agreed.
“We’ve made more dangerous alliances; darker ones than this,” she suggested carefully.
“Maybe, but you were on my side then.”
Again, some unnamable emotion flickered over Elizabeth’s features before her cool mask slipped back into place.
John eyed her slender form critically before letting his gaze linger on her face.
“You’re still not sleeping,” he commented, taking note of the darker shadows under her eyes.
Elizabeth waved the concern away; an old habit.
“Or eating properly.”
“I eat enough,” she replied; again an old habit, an old objection to his concern.
The Asuran leader narrowed her eyes a moment. “She is dead, John.”
The Colonel shrugged. “Obviously not as much as you’d like to think,” he replied, leaving the assertion as it stood between them.
This time, John could almost catch the emotion that momentarily changed her features back into the Elizabeth that he had been searching for.
“Obviously,” she said under her breath. She turned to go.
“What, that’s it? No evil gloating? Not even a maniacal chuckle or two?”
Elizabeth turned back, her eyebrow raised in a heartbreakingly familiar gesture.
It pulled a customary smirk from John before he could stop it. He felt it fall though when the Asuran leader suddenly stalked toward his cell. She stopped just short of the bars, the blue energy of them turning her eyes a stormy green.
“This will work, with or without your help, John. And it is the right thing to do, whether or not you agree with me.”
“Are you saying that to convince me, or yourself, ‘Lizabeth?”
She froze at the way he said her name, the first time that he had done so since his capture.
“If you think that trying to charm me, and calling me ‘Lizabeth is going to work Colonel…”
She trailed off as John rose and made his way to the bars, keeping his eyes locked with hers the whole time. She swallowed.
“That may have worked on her, but it’s not going to work on me,” she declared, even though her voice had gone quiet and uncertain.
“You are Elizabeth,” John asserted. “Nanites or no… you are Elizabeth Weir…”
He moved as close to her as the bars would allow.
“You are my ‘Lizabeth,” he insisted in a low voice, enunciating the words carefully and clearly.
“Is that what you told her?” Elizabeth asked. “The one you met that the Asurans created from me?”
John was taken aback by the question.
Elizabeth’s voice was deceptively soft. “It’s okay, John. I understand. It was worth a shot.”
She stepped back from the bars, and again turned to go, giving the Colonel a chance to recover himself.
“You are Elizabeth Weir. And I’m not leaving here without you,” he said with determination. “I came for you, and I’m not leaving without you.”
“Why?” she asked loudly enough for him to hear, though she didn’t turn her back from him.
“What?”
“Assuming that you can escape, which I’m sure you believe you can; why? Why would you take me with you? You can’t honestly believe that you can save me? Besides, what makes you believe I want to be saved?”
“You’re not sleeping and you’re not eating enough,” John replied.
Finally, she turned.
“What does that mean?”
He didn’t reply as Elizabeth walked back to his cell.
“This isn’t like before, John. You can’t just find me in a dream and wake me up. No one can save me now, not even myself.”
He shrugged.
“This is reality, John, and this reality has changed me. I’m not the same Elizabeth you knew.”
Again he shrugged. “We all change, ‘Lizabeth. I still…”
She waited for him to continue. He met her eyes, and for a long moment they held the fragile contact.
“I still love you,” he confessed finally.
Elizabeth took a few steps back, as if the emotion between them was suddenly taking up too much space for her comfort.
“That won’t work,” she replied without any real conviction.
“I’m not trying to trick you, ‘Lizabeth. I’m just trying to tell you something that I should have a long time ago.”
“I love you as much as you love me.” He said it like a simple statement of undeniable fact before pausing a moment, watching her.
Slowly, Elizabeth nodded and stepped forward.
John watched carefully as she reached along the wall, waving her hand over the control crystals. The bars were gone with a flash of icy blue light, only to reappear once Elizabeth was inside the cell.
John hesitated only a moment before he stepped forward. The coldly military part of his mind told him that what he was contemplating could be dangerous. He knew that she hadn’t been lying when she said that she wasn’t the Elizabeth that he had always known and loved. But then she closed the distance between them and John was nearly overwhelmed with the utter rightness of having her with him again after so long apart.
“John?”
He looked into her eyes, and it wasn’t quite the Elizabeth that he remembered, but he knew it was the Elizabeth he wanted.
“I have to do this.”
John kissed her with the naïve intention of simply punctuating his statement. It wasn’t until he had her pressed against the wall of the cell, her leg wrapped high around his waist, that he realized just how naïve that thought had been. All his simple intentions shattered against the force of inevitability that had them both breathless and panting by the time John murmured into the warm curve of her neck, “Oh… my… ‘Lizabeth… I’ve missed you…”
“I have to do this,” Elizabeth echoed after a moment.
She rocked her hips against his, holding him against her with the leg that she still had wrapped around his waist.
“God… I do love you…” John half moaned, rocking against her in response.
“Show me,” Elizabeth demanded, her hand slipping between the tight space between them and reaching for the buttons of his pants. “Fuck me.”
John brought his head back up, surprised to hear the hungry demand from her. He sought her eyes and Elizabeth met his gaze unflinchingly.
“Lizabeth…”
The sound of John’s zipper opening echoed against the cell walls in an erotic counterpoint to their still ragged breaths.
Elizabeth brought her lips to his ear. “Fuck me, John,” she whispered.
She moved her hand between them, reaching for the button of her own black leather pants. Her fingers tangled with John’s as he helped her.
“Fuck me…”
The Colonel’s hands slipped to Elizabeth’s waist, holding her as she wrapped her legs around him.
“Flesh…”
Her hand guided him as John entered her slowly.
“To my flesh…”
Elizabeth moaned as he began to thrust into her harder while she brought her lips to the hollow of his throat, kissing his pulse there.
“Blood to my blood… heart to my heart…”
She trailed kisses to the warm curve of his neck and bit there gently. It caused John to groan and thrust into Elizabeth even harder, rocking her against the cell wall.
“Oh God, yes… fuck me…” Elizabeth practically cried as the first tremors of an overwhelming orgasm started to shake her. Her eyes closed and her head fell back.
“No, Elizabeth, look at me…” John urged her. “Look at me.”
She brought her head back up slowly and met John’s eyes with her own pleasure dazed ones.
“Say it,” he requested.
“Fuck me, John…”
“No,” the Colonel corrected. “Say it.”
“I love you…” Elizabeth confessed in a soft whisper. “I love you… I love you… I love you, John,” she said each time John moved inside of her, repeating it like an undeniable mantra forced from her heart and to her lips.
And then there were no more words, just their ragged breaths and cries as the moment overtook them both.
Elizabeth was the first to speak, her lips warm against John’s skin where she had rested her head against the hot curve of his neck. “I have to do this…”
She pushed him away from herself, startling him. Her hands made short work of putting herself back to rights just before five Asurans entered the cell chamber. John fumbled with his own clothing as she spoke to the biomechaniods.
“You’ve made contact?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yes. We’ve sent a message to his people and directed them to the coordinates where they can find him. We included the codes that you provided to prove the authenticity of the transmission.”
“Good,” the Asuran leader said simply, as the blue cell bars flashed and disappeared. Elizabeth stepped out of the cell as the Asuran warriors stepped in to escort John out as well.
“Wait… Elizabeth…”
She avoided eye contact with the Colonel but directed her words to him all the same. “You can’t save me, John.”
“What just happened…”
“Was a moment stolen from another lifetime, and now, there’s nothing left to regret; to mourn in this one,” she interrupted.
She watched, but didn’t see as John was dragged, struggling, from the cell room by four of the guards. The fifth spoke to Elizabeth after the others had left.
“I thought that we need the Colonel. You said that we needed his genetic material in order to succeed; a strong natural ATA gene.”
Almost unconsciously, Elizabeth brushed her fingers briefly over her belly.
“He’s given us everything that we needed,” she assured the Asuran woman at her side before heading to the doorway. “Everything,” she murmured…
FIN