kittydesade: (fandom - sga)
Jaguar ([personal profile] kittydesade) wrote2007-10-25 05:42 pm

[fic] A Certain Point of View

Title: A Certain Point of View
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Characters: Michael Kenmore, Teyla
Word Count: 3,952 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Teyla and Michael meet, quite by accident, after the events of Vengeance. Michael discovers that he is not as alone as he thinks. Written for [livejournal.com profile] age, spoilers for season four.
Author's Note: This is a first draft and written mostly with Dragon, so there may be odd typos here and there.

It was the first uninhabited planet they had come across in some time, and Teyla welcomed the chance for a bit of shore leave that did not involve responsibility, Ronon, or the folk on Atlantis.

As much as she loved them, and she did love them dearly as comrades at arms and friends, there were times when they were just so different. With ideas and senses of things and concepts that didn't match hers in small ways, little moments of dissonance. Their treatment of the Wraith. Their approach to certain problems.

And Ronan. For all that he was closer to her in some ways than the Terrans, there was a single-mindedness to him that was exhausting.

Here on planet whatever-its-number-was, there was nothing but her and the grass and the trees and the open air. She could breathe, and she let her head fall back and the wind pick up strands of her hair and enjoyed the few moments' peace. So much so that she did not hear the quiet footfalls of boots breaking grass behind her.



So quickly, things turned upside down. So quickly; he had been out foraging for food for his food, and just taking the air. And then she was there, and his breath caught, and he didn't know what to do. He approached, not quite sure what it was that had brought her here, but determined to find out one way or another. It had been easier than he thought, to take her down, to bring her to his shelter. Lair. Whatever it was called. She hadn't been on guard, hadn't been expecting any kind of attack. Too easy.

And now she was here, in his most opulent cell, and he was sitting crosslegged across from her waiting for her to wake up.

Sitting inside the barrier wasn't the best of ideas. He knew that, his sense of self-preservation cried out to be heard, but he ignored it. Some things were more important than self-preservation.

Like knowing why.

He uncurled his hands from the fists he had made as she started to stir. Took a couple of deep breaths. He wouldn't get the answers he wanted by threatening her, he knew that. Knew her well enough to know that violence was not what would speak to her. If he sat there, calm and reasonable, she might actually talk to him. Then again, she and the rest of the Atlanteans had already proved that they had a very different idea of what was reasonable. And there he was, back to anger again.

She woke up. Her eyes opened, her hands moved underneath her to push herself up to a sitting position. Somewhere in between waking up and sitting up she realized where she was and who she was with, and her eyes widened. She didn't say anything, though. For some reason he hadn't expected the silence. Or that he would be the one to have to break it.

"You are safe," he said, when he couldn't think of anything else to start off with. That it was only temporary, he thought, went without saying.

She moved a little ways back from him. "Michael." There was a moment of hesitation. "Where are your soldiers?"

"You should know," he said almost immediately, and with a predictable amount of bitterness. "You made me unwelcome among my own kind, and then cast me out of your home, twice. And then you and Colonel Sheppard destroyed the only means I had left with which to defend myself when you turned the replicators against us."

"You destroyed an entire colony." Teyla rose to her feet, didn't jerk, didn't scramble backwards. The smooth and graceful movement betrayed nothing of the worry or fear she might be feeling. If indeed she felt any fear at all.

"I did what was necessary to survive. Your people turned an entire ship into humans and you were perfectly content to do so to more than that. And leave them out as food for the rest of the Wraith." He hadn't meant for that to come out as a snarl, not even at the end, but it did. The sight of the hive queen feeding off the creature that had once been one of her people, knowing that it could have easily been him, knowing that it could so easily be done. It still twisted him up inside.

She just looked at him. "And we did what was necessary for our survival." They had been over this before.

"You did what you thought seemed best," he admitted, for the first time, at least to her. "And yet you still refuse to acknowledge responsibility for what you did."

That seemed to sting her. She gave him a look that was hurt, and surprised to be so. "We admit that it was our fault that you are as you are now. But what you've chosen to do, that is your decision, that is on your conscience."

"Conscience," he sneered. "That is a human concept."

"Not so human that you do not understand it," she retorted.

They stared at each other for a moment, and he wondered why her words bothered him so. Why he felt as though he wanted to turn and leave, or at least shift his stance where he stood. Fidget, as he hadn't in... well, a very long time.

"What would you have done, had the experiment worked? What would you have done with Michael Kenmore?"

Caught off guard, it took her a few moments to come up with some sort of response. And even then, her answer was unsatisfactory. "I don't know," she said quietly.

He started to pace, despite his irritated resolve to remain calm in front of her. "How could you not know? You must have had a plan, some sort of idea what would happen to me," he corrected himself. "To Michael Kenmore, once the experiment succeeded."

She shook her head at him, slowly, but it didn't look as though she was negating the statement. Rather, it looked as though she had taken note of the way he said it, which was not what he had wanted.

"I don't know. Beckett was unsure if the retrovirus would even succeed. If Colonel Sheppard and Dr. Weir had a plan, they did not inform me of what that plan might be."

He stood up against the wall, in the corner, though he didn't realize that, and watched her. If what she said was true, and he did believe that she hadn't lied to him beyond the first and biggest lie, then everything she had done and everything about the way she had treated him had been real. And he wasn't sure what to make of that. Wasn't sure how he felt about it, and hated the fact that he felt anything at all about it. About her.

"You said you did this to me," he gestured up and down at himself. "You said this was to make my life better. Do you still believe that?" She didn't answer. "Why?"

"We thought," she said, clearly struggling to get the words out even if he couldn't tell why, "if the retrovirus worked... it would be a better solution..."

He didn't give her chance to finish. "Than what?" he roared, advancing on her. "Than open, honest warfare? Than letting your precious military take its chances in ship to ship combat? You claim that being human is so much better than being Wraith, but the only thing I have ever seen of humans is duplicity and callous disregard."

She didn't back down physically, but she couldn't argue that. She wanted to, he saw it in her face and her stance, but she couldn't come up with the words.

He wanted her to argue. He wanted her to give him, what? A reason? The answer? Perhaps, he decided, simply some reason to believe that, even if their claim that being human was the better thing to be was false, that there was some worthiness in being human. That these qualities, these impulses and desires and yearnings that he felt weren't, as the Wraith had said, weakness.

She wasn't arguing. She wasn't answering any of his questions; it was useless. He turned to go, his face frozen in a wordless snarl.

"Michael."

"What."

"Why do you still answer to your human name?"

He turned, and very deliberately closed the cell door before he answered her. "I know you are addressing me, would you prefer I ignored you?" That was deliberately snide, angry. He was back to being so very angry again. And hurt, if he was honest with himself. Which he wasn't.

"You might," she said, as calm as if they had been having a normal conversation. "If you objected to being called Michael, it would be a way of registering your discontent."

Michael's face twisted. "You sound like that doctor," he muttered.

"Dr. Heightmeyer." Teyla looked down when she said the name, her voice thicker, softer. Michael frowned.

"Yes. And why do you say her name like that?"

"She is dead." Teyla lifted her head to look at him, challenging him to make something of her grief. "She died after an assault from an alien entity. It took over her dreams and frightened her literally to death."

He didn't know how he felt about that. No, he knew that he didn't feel much of anything about that, it was Teyla's grief that affected him. All these feelings, human emotions. They were exhausting.

"I am sorry," he said, finally, to get it out there. To get out of him.

Teyla looked surprised by that. "Thank you."



He brought in food, later, bringing it in himself and setting it down in front of her as though she were a guest, or at least only under house arrest instead of in a cell used to keep experimental animals. She thanked him, as though he were a friend and not her jailer. It twisted him up again, the pretense of it, the lie. He could, at least, think of a reason why she would be so calm.

"Is Colonel Sheppard on his way?" Neutral tone, calm, no rancor. It was to be expected, when one of their own was kidnapped.

"Not for a little while. I was supposed to be enjoying a week of shore leave."

Her voice was the same, he noted. The same quiet and even tone he used, not taking out an argument with him. Merely stating a fact. The fact that he had her all to himself for several days without anyone being the wiser. It was strange to think about.

He wondered, then, he realized, why he was thinking about letting her out. He wanted to offer her the freedom of the grounds in exchange for her promise not to go running to the Atlanteans and tell them where he was and what he was doing. Not, really, that he knew he was doing at the moment. Surviving. Experiments had taken a backseat to survival.

And since survival had to be at the utmost now, he didn't invite her to roam free. He didn't let her out; he knew what would happen if she escaped. The same thing, he thought with a smile, that had happened when he had escaped.

"Why are you smiling?"

He hadn't, actually, realized that he had been, but he did think about what it looked like from her point of view. "I was thinking, of the kindness you showed me when I was your captive, and how I repaid you then. I was wondering," he straightened a little. "If you would respond the same way."

She frowned at him for a moment. Not perplexed, he thought, as to his meaning but rather to why he would say such a thing. "What kind would you show me?" she said, slow and wary.

"I could let you out, under my supervision, to see the grounds. I suspect you might like that better than staying within these four walls." He gestured around, not that it was a terribly unpleasant cell to be in. But he knew very well how much even the most pleasant prisons could chafe at the mind.

Teyla seemed to be giving it some thought, but shook her head after a moment. "You are most likely correct, I would probably respond in the same way."

Trying to escape. It had always been the first thing on his mind, both times he'd found himself a prisoner of the humans. He couldn't imagine it wasn't on her mind now. Especially if she was right, and Colonel Sheppard wouldn't come looking for her immediately.

"Then you understand why I can't let you go."

She nodded. "I understand."

He felt almost regretful about that. "I'm afraid this is the best we have to offer," he changed the subject, stepping backwards to lean up against the wall.

Teyla even smiled a little. "I'm sure it's more than adequate."

There they were again, playing at normal. They had played at normal when they first met, although he hadn't known what the game was. And now they were doing it again. Pretending that everything was fine, that there was nothing awkward or hostile between them. And there might not have been. He wasn't sure.

"What would you have done if the experiment worked?" He asked again, this time with a different tone to his words. She started to answer, and he shook his head. "Not the Atlanteans, not your team. You."

Teyla frowned at him, eyes a little wide. He wondered what that meant. "I don't know." Her voice was soft, when the words finally came. "You were confused. Scared. It was hard to believe that you were the enemy we had been afraid of for so long."

"But that wasn't the only thing, was it?" His voice, even though he hadn't meant for it to happen, had sunk into the tone of a hypnotic not-quite-whisper. He leaned in a little closer. "It was more than that, wasn't it? Tell me, please."

The 'please' startled them both.

"It was..." he couldn't tell if she was struggling against his influence or struggling against her own conscience. "It was wrong. It was wrong of us to do that, to change the... to create another food source and look the other way while you fed..."

"No!" His fist pounded the wall, making her jump. "No, that wasn't it!"

Her eyes widened further, but she didn't retreat. She looked at him, wary, as if trying to decide whether or not the outburst would continue. When it didn't, she took another breath, tried to continue.

"We had no right to do that to you. We were only trying to survive," she added, a plea for his understanding, and it was too much. She saw it was too much the instant the words left her lips and winced away from his anger.

"And yet you still deny me any chance for my own survival, and call me evil! You took me away from everything I had known, from a life that you felt had no value, that you decided was worthless, and halfheartedly gave me this half-life in exchange, and even took that away." It hadn't quite yet dawned on him what he was saying.

Teyla had realized. She took a step closer, startling him into silence for a moment it his gaze dropped to her open hands, spread in front of her.

"You ruined my life," he said quietly. "No matter how little value you placed on it, it was still my life, a life that you took from me without regard for my free will. And how is that any different from what you say we do to you, except that our need is more direct. We need to feed to survive. It is the only way, for us. We need to feed, but you didn't need to turn me into this."

"I'm sorry," she said softly, her hands sliding over his. They stood at not quite arm's-length, watching each other. There was an ocean of pain and history between them, an ocean on another planet. It occurred to both of them, in their own ways and idioms, that they both wished it could have been different.



He took her, blindfolded, from the cell. If it no longer mattered where he took her within the complex, and it didn't, it wasn't as though she could find her way there by the internal architecture, then it was more in the nature of a pleasant surprise than any sort of security measure. He didn't look too closely at that.

When he took the blindfold off she did gasp, simply at the sight of it. The part of him that he refused to acknowledge those days, the part of him that was more human than Wraith, could understand. The forest was vast and swept out to the base of the mountains, which looked blue and gold-edged in the early morning light. There was absolutely no reason for him to bring her here.

"It's beautiful," she whispered, and then turned around as she realized. "Thank you."

The thank you disturbed him more than his own actions. He shook his head, turned his gaze outward instead of to her. And he didn't say anything for a little while, uncertain of how it would turn out when he did.

"There is no point to keeping you here," he said, when he had settled again. "And no point to staying, myself. Your Colonel Sheppard will be coming for you soon when you do not report in. If I see him again," he looked over at her. "I will kill him."

"I know."

They stared at each other. There was a presence between them, an awareness of some feeling or some knowledge that he didn't know the name of it, but he could feel it. All that they had done to each other, and all that they could do. For the first time, he acknowledged that she had power over him, if only to himself. A kind of power that was unknown to the wraith, and yet seemed to him to pervade the Atlantis colony.

"What is this? he asked, without specifying what he meant.

"This..." she hesitated, he thought, not because she didn't know what it was but because she didn't want to use the first two or three words that came into her head. Perhaps they weren't right, or perhaps she didn't want to have to explain.

It reminded him of how much he had learned of human lives in a few short days, and how much he still had left to learn.

"This is feeling."

"I know." More patient than he might have been, but he knew what feeling was. "What is this?"

"I don't know."

Her voice came out in a whisper, and he stepped closer to her, and she let him. His hand came up to her shoulder, to her cheek, some sort of mockery or bridge-point between what he was now and what he had been, both extremes. Now neither. And pulled by impulses from both sides.

"I hate you." And he did, for bringing him to this. But he didn't, at the same time.

She covered his hand with hers and moved it a little away from her face, but when their hands dropped she didn't pull back any further. "You could come back with me," she suggested to the ground. "Dr. Keller..."

"What happened to Dr. Beckett?"

She didn't have to answer; he saw it in her face. And she looked away, and he made her look back at him with his free hand, intensity verging on hypnotic.

"Dr. Beckett died performing surgery removing an explosive device from a member of the Atlantis team. The surgery was successful," she added, defiant and defensive. "But he was not able to secure the device before it detonated. Dr. Weir... "

His face twisted, angry and scowling. "Dr. Weir?"

"She was lost on the replicator planet."

He wasn't sure what to make of that. Two people so instrumental in turning him into what he was now, dead. Gone. Beyond any and all retribution he could vent upon them. Two large and festering knots of anger without anywhere to go. His hand clenched tight into a fist, and it wasn't until she made some soft little noise that he realized she was still holding his hand.

Michael turned away. She stepped in even closer to him, behind him, still not letting go and reaching up to curl her free hand around his shoulder.

"I am sorry for what we did to you. I know you can have no idea what it costs, what it means for me to say this, but I also know that we can have no idea, we can never know what we took from you."

"We are not animals," he told her, only half looking around. But she was the only person he could even imagine having this conversation with, and it was a conversation perhaps he had desperately needed to have. "We are not... the Wraith are not the unthinking ravenous beasts out of your nightmares. I had a name before Colonel Sheppard called me Michael, I had a life, I had a home. I did have a family, although it was not one you would recognize."

"I know."

"Now, I do not know if they would even recognize me, let alone welcomed me back. No hive that has ever taken me in has treated me as anything greater than a pet or a plaything. And your people would rather kill me that accept the fruits of their scientific labors."

"I told McKay as much, when we were in your underground laboratory. He suggested, although I do not think he believed it, that you might have been one of their greatest scientists. You were, weren't you."

He did turn, then, staring at her with open incredulity. They were closer in that moment than they had ever been, standing nose to nose and understanding each other in ways that didn't make him quite as comfortable as they had previously. He took a breath, let it out.

She barely felt it when he injected her with a sedative. Her eyes widened, hurt and betrayed. But he lowered her to the ground with a tenderness he never would have shown when she was awake, taking off his coat and laying it over her in case they didn't arrive by nightfall.

"I was," he admitted to her unconscious form. "Not anymore."





It was an uninhabited planet once again, John had told her, although he believed her when she said she had briefly been held captive by Michael. The structure held signs of recent habituation, although by the time she had woken up and dialed Atlantis any and all traces of recent activity were gone. Michael had left no trace of what he had been doing or where he might've gone. She hadn't expected he would.

Sheppard had hovered over her until she said she was all right, she just wanted to be alone on the balcony for a little while. Resting her arms on the ledge, looking out at the view Michael had shown her.

For all the violence in him and all the anger, all the things he could have done to her (and probably wanted to, she admitted) he had done none of that. He hadn't even held her for more than 48 hours, according to the Atlantis team that had come looking for her. Teyla didn't even try to explain it to Sheppard, to Ronon. As much as she loved them, she knew they would never understand.