New Fic: Burn Clear and Steadfast
Title: Burn Clear and Steadfast
Author:
wojelah
Fandom: SGA, Weir/Sumner - AU
Rating: PG-13 for language
Spoilers: for The Long Goodbye
Author's Notes: This is entirely
smittywing 's fault, since she wrote One To Let Go and then posited the timeline where Sumner didn't die. And then she had a crappy, crappy day. This is the result. (You can - and should - read all of her things, collected here.)
omglawdork yet again stood duty as the world's finest beta. The title's cribbed from Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie.
Summary: She shakes her head and splashes water on her face, telling herself she's imagining the weight of another mind on her own, focusing on each movement as proof that she's master of her own skin. She tugs her pants back on and heads out to the mess. It's mid-afternoon - it should be mostly empty, but not vacant, and maybe that will help. She could go find Mack. She isn't going to.... In the end, it doesn't matter, because he finds her.
When Elizabeth wakes up, she gets about a two-minute reprieve before the bubble bursts. Two minutes watching the vague neutral blur resolve itself into the ceiling, letting the abstract concepts of "firm" and "soft" resolve into the concrete practicality of bed and blankets. Two minutes alone in her own head, without recognizing the significance of her isolation. Two minutes, after which memory and sense come back with a vengeance, and she's very much aware that someone else has been running and jumping and fighting and screaming in her body without respect for its limitations.
She marks through the obligatory conversation with John, even though they'd both rather be far, far away. And Elizabeth, at least, wants to be alone, where she can fume at the lingering fuzziness that's making it hard to think straight. She should have remembered about Ronon before John brought it up. "How is he?"
Sheppard tips his head back. "He's fine. Teyla and Rodney just went to see him in post-op."
She sinks back in relief, then sits bolt upright. "Colonel Sumner?" Her voice is steady, but her hands are clenched in the covers. John raises an eyebrow, and she wonders again exactly how much he's guessed. Enough, she thinks. If it were anyone but John - even Rodney or Teyla - she'd worry. Sheppard, though - they're a pair, in a way that even she and Mack aren't, and it all boils down to Atlantis, in the end - what the city is, to both of them.
John's about to answer, but Caldwell's entrance cuts him off. "Sumner's fine," Caldwell says, and she's never seen him look so ill at ease. "He just knocked himself hard against the pod when Phebus took him out - he has a mild concussion, needed some stitches. Doctor Beckett's taken him off active duty for a week, which is, by no small coincidence, how long I have before the Daedalus ships back out. Any longer than that, he'd be climbing the walls. He is already."
She manages a smile. "Thank you, Colonel, for keeping a potentially explosive situation under control. I - we - would've been in a great deal of trouble without you."
"Well," and his answering smile is mostly genuine. "Maybe there's still hope for me yet."
Sheppard glances at her, and the other shoe drops. "Oh God, no! Don't believe anything she might have said."
"I'm kidding," Caldwell says, and she relaxes minutely. "Don't give it another thought. Well, if you'll excuse me, I'm sure you'll both agree that the paperwork on this is going to be a nightmare - especially that kiss."
The only thing that makes her utter mortification manageable is the fact that the look on John's face is a near match for the one on her own. Sheppard's first to recover. "Yes, sir!"
"Well. Try not to kill each other while I'm gone," Caldwell quips, and heads out.
After ten minutes of excruciating silence, Carson bustles over, distracting her with his chatter and a battery of tests, after which he clears them to leave, admonishing them to stay calm and quiet for the rest of the day. As Elizabeth walks gingerly back to her quarters, she's in no mood to argue. Frankly, she doesn't even have the energy to go looking for Mack. She just wants to curl up in a ball and sleep for a week.
***
Sleeping for a week, had apparently been wishful thinking, Elizabeth thinks four hours later, her sheets twisted around her legs and her eyes gritty. For all her haste to get out of the infirmary, she'd gotten back to her quarters and found herself too much alone with her own thoughts. She's distracted, confused - she feels, she thinks, like a child in Peter Pan, whose carefully folded, ordered thoughts have been flung about the room, making sleep impossible. Unfortunately, she has neither mother nor night-light readily to hand, she thinks, lips twisting in something that isn't really a smile.
She pads into the bathroom and stares at herself in the mirror while she snags a brush through her hair. Five minutes later, she realizes she's fugued out, staring at her hands like they belong to someone else, feeling the ache where they'd wrapped with unaccustomed familiarity around a gun. She shakes her head and splashes water on her face, telling herself she's imagining the weight of another mind on her own, focusing on each movement as proof that she's master of her own skin. She tugs her pants back on and heads out to the mess. It's mid-afternoon - it should be mostly empty, but not vacant, and maybe that will help. She could go find Mack. She isn't going to.
In the end, it doesn't matter, because he finds her. Elizabeth's sitting out on what Sgt. Broszoski, his Savannah accent thick as honey, calls the veranda. Since he's six foot two and built like a tank - and, more importantly, in charge of the mess - the name has stuck. She's tucked in a corner, sitting in the sunshine, letting her head fill with the sound of the ocean and clanking flatware, trying to bake some feeling back into her skin. Mack walks out through the open door, and her own muscles twinge in sympathy as she watches him move. He squints against the light, which reflects off the gauze padding his temple. He doesn't see her till she offers up a quiet "Hey."
He turns sharply, and she reconsiders whether the set of his shoulders is from pain. "Elizabeth." Not pain, then. Or even mostly pain. She hasn't heard that tone since - well, possibly since before they even made it to Atlantis, before they reached a working detente.
"Mack?" she queries, getting - slowly - to her feet.
"Don't let me disturb you," he says, clipped, and leaves. His back is ramrod straight, and she wonders what it's costing him. She feels a surge of irritation, tries not to think that it's not fair, that he's not the one who nearly tore the city down around their ears because some alien in dire need of anger management training hijacked his brain. She bites it back, though - although she's not running after him. For one thing, she isn't capable of it. She does however, know the newest transporter shortcut, the one Rodney hasn't yet made public knowledge, and she'll bet her poker night ante she knows where he's going. Which is how she comes to be leaning against the wall next to his quarters when he comes striding - stiffly - down the hall.
Elizabeth doesn't give him the opening to ignore her. She isn't a top negotiator for nothing, even if Pegasus mostly calls on a rather different skill set. "I wasn't disturbed," she says calmly. Mack says nothing, just opens the door, but she can see the muscle in his cheek twitch. She slips inside before he can think to shut her out. Physically, at any rate.
Elizabeth has a pretty good idea of what's going on behind his silence. He's had to hand over control of his city during a crisis - and had to cede it to Caldwell, of all people. That can't sit well. More than that: Mack's more protective of his people than he lets on, and this one caught them all off-guard - they're only lucky the casualties weren't worse. And, if she's going to be brutally honest about it, she was stupid, and he expects better of her than that. She knows it, and she knows it runs both ways. Right now, though, it makes her both a valid target and, given the opportunity, a convenient outlet. She also knows Mack Sumner doesn't vent unless provoked; that he'll stand there, in front of the window, unzipping the neck of his expedition shirt and pulling it over his head, and say nothing. And say nothing, and say nothing, anger informing the line of his spine, until the problem's run its course and he's worked out his preferred solution. Elizabeth, however, has her own agenda, and if she ever wants to sleep again, she doesn't have time for Mack to get over it.
She crosses her arms, leans back against the door again, admires his silhouette against the afternoon light streaming in through the stained glass. They've played a waiting game a lot like this before. This time, though, she's waiting on her own courage, not his patience. Finally, pitching her voice to carry, she says, "I told Phebus to stun you."
"I beg your pardon?" he says, turning his head.
"Down in the lab. When she and Thalen first escaped. I gave her the idea to stun you." Those first few minutes had been overhelming - Phebus had torn through her memories like ripping pages out of a book, and the link had gone both ways. From the first, Elizabeth had known what the other woman was planning, even as Phebus was convincing them to open the other pod. It had been terrifying, but Atlantis was her city, and these were her people, and Elizabeth was good at chess for a reason. Teyla, Ronon - and, yes, Steven - were well away from the labs - safe, for the moment. John was about to face the same problems she was. Rodney, Carson, and Mack were in immediate danger. Phebus, she figured, wouldn't see McKay and Beckett as any kind of threat. John - she couldn't worry about John just yet. At the very least, she knew, he'd still be there, and thinking as furiously as she. That left Mack, and Phebus knew exactly how dangerous Mack could be, and wasn't, as far as Elizabeth could tell, interested in letting him stay around to complicate matters. Elizabeth couldn't lie, not inside her own head, but she'd be damned if this lunatic was going to go after Mack. So instead she offered up misinformation, carefully planted and provided with as much reluctance as she could manufacture. Just enough to suggest that letting Mack live - letting him fight it out for alpha male with Caldwell - could only hamper their ability to respond. Phebus took the bait. Mack took the blow to the head as he collapsed, and Phebus was off and running before Elizabeth could see more than his head hitting the pod and the suggestion of blood. When they'd finally stunned Phebus, the last thing Elizabeth remembered was wondering about Mack.
Trying to sleep this afternoon, she could only see her hands, wrapped around a gun - and yes, in the end, it had been a stunner, but the subconscious has its tricks - wrapped around a gun and pointing at Mack. Firing, as laughter that doesn't belong to her ricochets inside her head.
The man in question finally swings away from the window, bringing her back to the present. She swallows. "Factor that in, at any rate, when you review the situation. She knew everything I knew, Mack. She knew what kind of a threat you posed. She had every intention of killing you. I just... suggested she might do better pitting you and Caldwell against each other. I'm... sorry about the concussion," she fumbles, "I didn't figure that in."
With the light behind him, she can't see his face, but she's had her say, at least. "Get some sleep, Mack. I'll see you in the morning." She straightens, turns around to open the door. The idea of the walk back to her quarters makes her whole body hurt, and Mack hasn't said a word. Usually by this point in the conversation she's made some kind of progress.
She's lost in thought as she leaves, and doesn't hear him come up behind her, gasps when he forcibly turns her around and pulls her close, burying his head in the crook of her shoulder. They stand together, each propping up the other, and she feels her muscles start to relax in the warmth of his body, feels Phebus' laughter recede with the sound of every breath he takes. "Elizabeth," he says, stepping back, reeling her back in through the door and closing it. "Elizabeth," he says again, and his voice is sandpaper rough. "Stay put."
Author:
wojelah
Fandom: SGA, Weir/Sumner - AU
Rating: PG-13 for language
Spoilers: for The Long Goodbye
Author's Notes: This is entirely
smittywing 's fault, since she wrote One To Let Go and then posited the timeline where Sumner didn't die. And then she had a crappy, crappy day. This is the result. (You can - and should - read all of her things, collected here.)
omglawdork yet again stood duty as the world's finest beta. The title's cribbed from Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie.
Summary: She shakes her head and splashes water on her face, telling herself she's imagining the weight of another mind on her own, focusing on each movement as proof that she's master of her own skin. She tugs her pants back on and heads out to the mess. It's mid-afternoon - it should be mostly empty, but not vacant, and maybe that will help. She could go find Mack. She isn't going to.... In the end, it doesn't matter, because he finds her.
When Elizabeth wakes up, she gets about a two-minute reprieve before the bubble bursts. Two minutes watching the vague neutral blur resolve itself into the ceiling, letting the abstract concepts of "firm" and "soft" resolve into the concrete practicality of bed and blankets. Two minutes alone in her own head, without recognizing the significance of her isolation. Two minutes, after which memory and sense come back with a vengeance, and she's very much aware that someone else has been running and jumping and fighting and screaming in her body without respect for its limitations.
She marks through the obligatory conversation with John, even though they'd both rather be far, far away. And Elizabeth, at least, wants to be alone, where she can fume at the lingering fuzziness that's making it hard to think straight. She should have remembered about Ronon before John brought it up. "How is he?"
Sheppard tips his head back. "He's fine. Teyla and Rodney just went to see him in post-op."
She sinks back in relief, then sits bolt upright. "Colonel Sumner?" Her voice is steady, but her hands are clenched in the covers. John raises an eyebrow, and she wonders again exactly how much he's guessed. Enough, she thinks. If it were anyone but John - even Rodney or Teyla - she'd worry. Sheppard, though - they're a pair, in a way that even she and Mack aren't, and it all boils down to Atlantis, in the end - what the city is, to both of them.
John's about to answer, but Caldwell's entrance cuts him off. "Sumner's fine," Caldwell says, and she's never seen him look so ill at ease. "He just knocked himself hard against the pod when Phebus took him out - he has a mild concussion, needed some stitches. Doctor Beckett's taken him off active duty for a week, which is, by no small coincidence, how long I have before the Daedalus ships back out. Any longer than that, he'd be climbing the walls. He is already."
She manages a smile. "Thank you, Colonel, for keeping a potentially explosive situation under control. I - we - would've been in a great deal of trouble without you."
"Well," and his answering smile is mostly genuine. "Maybe there's still hope for me yet."
Sheppard glances at her, and the other shoe drops. "Oh God, no! Don't believe anything she might have said."
"I'm kidding," Caldwell says, and she relaxes minutely. "Don't give it another thought. Well, if you'll excuse me, I'm sure you'll both agree that the paperwork on this is going to be a nightmare - especially that kiss."
The only thing that makes her utter mortification manageable is the fact that the look on John's face is a near match for the one on her own. Sheppard's first to recover. "Yes, sir!"
"Well. Try not to kill each other while I'm gone," Caldwell quips, and heads out.
After ten minutes of excruciating silence, Carson bustles over, distracting her with his chatter and a battery of tests, after which he clears them to leave, admonishing them to stay calm and quiet for the rest of the day. As Elizabeth walks gingerly back to her quarters, she's in no mood to argue. Frankly, she doesn't even have the energy to go looking for Mack. She just wants to curl up in a ball and sleep for a week.
***
Sleeping for a week, had apparently been wishful thinking, Elizabeth thinks four hours later, her sheets twisted around her legs and her eyes gritty. For all her haste to get out of the infirmary, she'd gotten back to her quarters and found herself too much alone with her own thoughts. She's distracted, confused - she feels, she thinks, like a child in Peter Pan, whose carefully folded, ordered thoughts have been flung about the room, making sleep impossible. Unfortunately, she has neither mother nor night-light readily to hand, she thinks, lips twisting in something that isn't really a smile.
She pads into the bathroom and stares at herself in the mirror while she snags a brush through her hair. Five minutes later, she realizes she's fugued out, staring at her hands like they belong to someone else, feeling the ache where they'd wrapped with unaccustomed familiarity around a gun. She shakes her head and splashes water on her face, telling herself she's imagining the weight of another mind on her own, focusing on each movement as proof that she's master of her own skin. She tugs her pants back on and heads out to the mess. It's mid-afternoon - it should be mostly empty, but not vacant, and maybe that will help. She could go find Mack. She isn't going to.
In the end, it doesn't matter, because he finds her. Elizabeth's sitting out on what Sgt. Broszoski, his Savannah accent thick as honey, calls the veranda. Since he's six foot two and built like a tank - and, more importantly, in charge of the mess - the name has stuck. She's tucked in a corner, sitting in the sunshine, letting her head fill with the sound of the ocean and clanking flatware, trying to bake some feeling back into her skin. Mack walks out through the open door, and her own muscles twinge in sympathy as she watches him move. He squints against the light, which reflects off the gauze padding his temple. He doesn't see her till she offers up a quiet "Hey."
He turns sharply, and she reconsiders whether the set of his shoulders is from pain. "Elizabeth." Not pain, then. Or even mostly pain. She hasn't heard that tone since - well, possibly since before they even made it to Atlantis, before they reached a working detente.
"Mack?" she queries, getting - slowly - to her feet.
"Don't let me disturb you," he says, clipped, and leaves. His back is ramrod straight, and she wonders what it's costing him. She feels a surge of irritation, tries not to think that it's not fair, that he's not the one who nearly tore the city down around their ears because some alien in dire need of anger management training hijacked his brain. She bites it back, though - although she's not running after him. For one thing, she isn't capable of it. She does however, know the newest transporter shortcut, the one Rodney hasn't yet made public knowledge, and she'll bet her poker night ante she knows where he's going. Which is how she comes to be leaning against the wall next to his quarters when he comes striding - stiffly - down the hall.
Elizabeth doesn't give him the opening to ignore her. She isn't a top negotiator for nothing, even if Pegasus mostly calls on a rather different skill set. "I wasn't disturbed," she says calmly. Mack says nothing, just opens the door, but she can see the muscle in his cheek twitch. She slips inside before he can think to shut her out. Physically, at any rate.
Elizabeth has a pretty good idea of what's going on behind his silence. He's had to hand over control of his city during a crisis - and had to cede it to Caldwell, of all people. That can't sit well. More than that: Mack's more protective of his people than he lets on, and this one caught them all off-guard - they're only lucky the casualties weren't worse. And, if she's going to be brutally honest about it, she was stupid, and he expects better of her than that. She knows it, and she knows it runs both ways. Right now, though, it makes her both a valid target and, given the opportunity, a convenient outlet. She also knows Mack Sumner doesn't vent unless provoked; that he'll stand there, in front of the window, unzipping the neck of his expedition shirt and pulling it over his head, and say nothing. And say nothing, and say nothing, anger informing the line of his spine, until the problem's run its course and he's worked out his preferred solution. Elizabeth, however, has her own agenda, and if she ever wants to sleep again, she doesn't have time for Mack to get over it.
She crosses her arms, leans back against the door again, admires his silhouette against the afternoon light streaming in through the stained glass. They've played a waiting game a lot like this before. This time, though, she's waiting on her own courage, not his patience. Finally, pitching her voice to carry, she says, "I told Phebus to stun you."
"I beg your pardon?" he says, turning his head.
"Down in the lab. When she and Thalen first escaped. I gave her the idea to stun you." Those first few minutes had been overhelming - Phebus had torn through her memories like ripping pages out of a book, and the link had gone both ways. From the first, Elizabeth had known what the other woman was planning, even as Phebus was convincing them to open the other pod. It had been terrifying, but Atlantis was her city, and these were her people, and Elizabeth was good at chess for a reason. Teyla, Ronon - and, yes, Steven - were well away from the labs - safe, for the moment. John was about to face the same problems she was. Rodney, Carson, and Mack were in immediate danger. Phebus, she figured, wouldn't see McKay and Beckett as any kind of threat. John - she couldn't worry about John just yet. At the very least, she knew, he'd still be there, and thinking as furiously as she. That left Mack, and Phebus knew exactly how dangerous Mack could be, and wasn't, as far as Elizabeth could tell, interested in letting him stay around to complicate matters. Elizabeth couldn't lie, not inside her own head, but she'd be damned if this lunatic was going to go after Mack. So instead she offered up misinformation, carefully planted and provided with as much reluctance as she could manufacture. Just enough to suggest that letting Mack live - letting him fight it out for alpha male with Caldwell - could only hamper their ability to respond. Phebus took the bait. Mack took the blow to the head as he collapsed, and Phebus was off and running before Elizabeth could see more than his head hitting the pod and the suggestion of blood. When they'd finally stunned Phebus, the last thing Elizabeth remembered was wondering about Mack.
Trying to sleep this afternoon, she could only see her hands, wrapped around a gun - and yes, in the end, it had been a stunner, but the subconscious has its tricks - wrapped around a gun and pointing at Mack. Firing, as laughter that doesn't belong to her ricochets inside her head.
The man in question finally swings away from the window, bringing her back to the present. She swallows. "Factor that in, at any rate, when you review the situation. She knew everything I knew, Mack. She knew what kind of a threat you posed. She had every intention of killing you. I just... suggested she might do better pitting you and Caldwell against each other. I'm... sorry about the concussion," she fumbles, "I didn't figure that in."
With the light behind him, she can't see his face, but she's had her say, at least. "Get some sleep, Mack. I'll see you in the morning." She straightens, turns around to open the door. The idea of the walk back to her quarters makes her whole body hurt, and Mack hasn't said a word. Usually by this point in the conversation she's made some kind of progress.
She's lost in thought as she leaves, and doesn't hear him come up behind her, gasps when he forcibly turns her around and pulls her close, burying his head in the crook of her shoulder. They stand together, each propping up the other, and she feels her muscles start to relax in the warmth of his body, feels Phebus' laughter recede with the sound of every breath he takes. "Elizabeth," he says, stepping back, reeling her back in through the door and closing it. "Elizabeth," he says again, and his voice is sandpaper rough. "Stay put."