[nano] Stained Glass Masquerade
Jan. 5th, 2008 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesade[*kills Semagic Dead*]
It was a miracle that she was able to get away to see him, even for only a day and a half. Sheppard wanted her to interrogate Michael on the subject of any and all experiments which might require live human subjects, although he didn't use that word. His meaning was clear, and his desperation was certainly shared by Teyla herself. But talking to Michael for even five minutes convinced her that he knew nothing outside of what he himself had been attempting to do. And they both shied away from that topic as soon as they could.
His fingers combed through her hair with frantic precision; she almost thought he was trembling. "I said you would make a formidable Queen," he murmured, but only to make light of what had happened, and to put some separation between them. Their emotions were both too jumbled.
"We will not be able to meet like this for very much longer, or at least, not as often…" She trailed off. It hadn't been often at all, it had been… she didn't know what it had been. Sporadic. A series of stolen moments, something that she had come to crave and treasure in a way that made her head spin to think about it too long.
Michael nodded. Neither of them, perhaps, had been expecting it to last. "The Replicators? Or…" His people. The Wraith. Neither term seemed to fit but at least she knew what he meant and he didn't have to say it.
"Both. Atlantis is under siege again, but indirectly, and from two fronts. It puts a strain on our resources and … it makes it hard to get away."
She didn't pull her head from his shoulder but she felt him smile. Was glad she didn't see the sadness in it, that they were separated enough for the moment that she didn't have to feel it. Everything seemed to be moving so much faster now. Seemed to be, all of them, hurrying to grasp at the edges of something that was slipping away. Sanity, perhaps. Security. Something necessary.
"I will tell you what I can of our first battle with the Replicators, but I am afraid it likely will be of less use than you hope," he said after a little while of clinging and quietly shutting out the rest of the world. "It may give you an idea of what sorts of tactics would be employed against them."
"And what sorts of tactics we ourselves might employ, yes." She nodded. "Thank you, I would be grateful to hear."
It was depressingly little, as he had warned. Not only because his skills in science were more limited to the biological and chemical than the technological and mathematical, but also because they were different. The Replicators were no longer restricted by their core programming built by Ancients, neglectful and whimsical as they had been. And they kept changing.
He talked until she was drifting and almost falling asleep, leaning against him, both of them shifting only to keep their limbs from aching. A great deal of the information was repeated, so that she would remember, she thought.
"It is possible to defeat them," he reminded her, sensing the tone of her thoughts as she drifted. Once they had stopped talking tactics they had fallen back into the sort of mental dialogue which covered topics not related to either current affairs or the Atlantis team. Mostly this involved little anecdotes from times more pleasant than lately. "It has been accomplished before, it's not as hopeless as it seems."
She leaned back far enough to smile ruefully up at him. "Do I seem so hopeless to you?"
"You seem," he kissed her forehead, smiling softly back. "As though you have been fighting a long battle and taken many losses, which you have. You seem as though you are losing strength or energy, which you are. It happens, in a long conflict."
In the times between coming here, resting, and her time spent on Atlantis she had forgotten sometimes how matter of fact he could be about things she only lightly thought about. Pointing out things that hadn't even occurred to her, so common were they in her every day life, and then pointing out that they were common and perfectly acceptable. Reminding her, or explaining, perhaps, that there were things that should be and were affecting her no matter that they seemed not to have caught up with her yet.
And she truly was tired. And he was a respite, a welcome source of support and relief that would be denied to her shortly, and for a long time. She realized she was clinging and made herself hold on less tightly.
"So many of our people have died. Were injured when we left the planet, have been killed or terrorized on other worlds in the expedition parties. And now we have awakened a second enemy, and was not the struggle to protect ourselves enough, before?" Somehow it was easier to ay this to him without seeming as though she was crying like a child, whining. Perhaps because something in his manner or in the way his thoughts touched hers encouraged it. "We have lost so much. Some of us have lost our homes two and three times over, and my people…"
And now Michael. Her need to cling to him, to keep him in her life bled through and peeled away the few of his defenses that he had built up against his own loneliness and need. When she was gone he would have, literally, no one. And she would still have John and Ronon and McKay and her friends on Atlantis.
"I'm sorry…"
They sighed, settled closer together. It wasn't her fault, there was no blame for being upset at the unfairness of life. It wasn't, after all, a contest on who had it worst. Because he had fewer people to care for also meant he had less to lose. It was a different sort of unfairness, which made her smile a little.
"Because both of us have been abused at the hands of whatever guides the universe, we should start comparing our suffering?"
It was lighthearted teasing, and it worked well enough to ease them away from the depression they were dragging each other into. Some sort of trickster god, perhaps, a creature that enjoyed playing games of chance and putting them into increasingly ridiculous and dangerous circumstances.
If there was some other force or creature that guided their actions and circumstances, that neither the Wraith nor the Athosians had thought of, they were surely either having a good laugh right about now or staring at the two of them in shock, Teyla decided. No one could have forseen this. She had been treated to a fifteen minute rambling explanation of a well-known Earth story from John Sheppard because of this. Something about two feuding households and young love. It had ended badly, and it wasn't as though Wraith and Human were likely to forge any kind of a truce because of two aberrant members of their people. Still…
It made them laugh. It made thing seem a little less hopeless, at least for that night. It made things better, at least for that short time, and made it more possible to forget for a little while that they were likely to get much, much worse.
It turned out that they had less time than anyone had thought.
Sheppard scrubbed the mission, which up till that point had been a refreshingly calm search and explore, when they called back to Atlantis and received only a distracted and harried-sounding response. Nervous about what they might encounter, they made their way back.
The flurry of activity was reassuring in that it didn't seem to involve any wounded or dead personnel, but not so much in that it implied a sudden and pressing problem.
"What happened?"
Carter spared Sheppard a look of mild relief as she walked past. "Good, you're back. We've got a Wraith Hive ship in orbit, and…"
"A what?" Teyla couldn't quite believe what she was hearing, although exactly which part was unbelievable was up for debate. On the one hand, a Wraith Hive ship in orbit above a planet they had no reason to believe housed anything remarkable at all was unbelievable. On the other hand, that a Wraith Hive ship was in orbit and hadn't descended upon them yet was almost equally unbelievable. Unless…
"Is the cloak up?"
That would be the unless. And they were rushing over to the command center and Teyla was still trying to wrap her mind around the fact that there was a Wraith Hive ship in orbit around the planet. The new planet. That the Wraith didn't even know was Atlantis' new home yet.
One Wraith, of course, did. And she realized that as soon as she could feel John Sheppard's stare boring a hole between her shoulderblades.
"The cloak is up and they haven't done anything yet. They may just be on a sweep of the planet looking for a civilization that used to be here, maybe on the continent. We haven't seen any darts flying over the city, but…"
Which was a relief. And was partially helped and explained by the ruins in which Michael was living, not that Teyla could say that. Or perhaps…
"When I returned to the crash site, I did see structures which seemed to indicate that there had been some form of sentient life here, many ages ago. There were only a few walls left, but…" she let it trail off there, hoping that they could infer something useful from that very vague statement. A series of small walls. Sheppard gave her another strange look, but didn't say anything to contradict her.
Carter nodded slightly, seeming to give it consideration. "Right now the plan is to just hold tight under the cloak and wait until they move on. They're…"
"Colonel Carter!"
Nearly every member of the team (Ronon being the exception) had the 'now what' look on their face as they turned to face the young man, a soldier, by the uniform. Teyla was sure she was wearing a similar expression to John's weary exasperation; Rodney's look was unmistakeable.
"Colonel Carter, they've launched Darts. Dozens of them, they're sweeping over the continent."
Sheppard sighed. Teyla considered it a near-miraculous act of restraint that he didn't look at her at all when he said it, but at Colonel Carter. As though he wasn't thinking what she was sure he was thinking. "I guess they really are looking for something."
And she could well imagine what, or who. But she did not want to, would not believe that Michael had called them there deliberately, and she couldn't say so to Sheppard or Carter out loud. They moved on to the conference room as people started to settle around them, still looking up at the ceilings nervously at every out-of-place whine or bump, as though they could see through the structure to what might be passing overhead. Teyla resisted the impulse to join them, several times.
Surely Michael wouldn't have called them there deliberately, both out of practicality and considering his treatment by the Wraith the last time, and as a kindness to her. And yet.
She paused on the threshold of the conference room on the strength of that particular and yet. Loneliness could be a powerful motivator. She had felt his loneliness more than once, felt how he had held it back and it had still eclipsed her own grief upon losing her people. She well knew that loneliness, homesickness could be a powerful motivator. And wasn't it possible that Michael, who was older than she knew despite her possibly self-deluding willingness to see them as around the same age, felt it so acutely that he could be driven to extreme measures by it? Was it possible?
Teyla shook her head slightly to herself as she joined the rest of her team in the conference room. Of course Michael had nothing to do with the Wraith ship overhead; if she did not believe that, how could she hope to convince John or Colonel Carter of that?
She would have to fly back out there, tell Michael of what was going on, ask him what he thought might have happened. And she would have to do so either once the Darts had left or under cover of a cloaked jumper. And somehow, and this was the hard part, she would have to convince Sheppard that it was both possible and the right thing to do. Outside of the conference room, because Ronon would undoubtedly have something to say on the matter.
It was a miracle that she was able to get away to see him, even for only a day and a half. Sheppard wanted her to interrogate Michael on the subject of any and all experiments which might require live human subjects, although he didn't use that word. His meaning was clear, and his desperation was certainly shared by Teyla herself. But talking to Michael for even five minutes convinced her that he knew nothing outside of what he himself had been attempting to do. And they both shied away from that topic as soon as they could.
His fingers combed through her hair with frantic precision; she almost thought he was trembling. "I said you would make a formidable Queen," he murmured, but only to make light of what had happened, and to put some separation between them. Their emotions were both too jumbled.
"We will not be able to meet like this for very much longer, or at least, not as often…" She trailed off. It hadn't been often at all, it had been… she didn't know what it had been. Sporadic. A series of stolen moments, something that she had come to crave and treasure in a way that made her head spin to think about it too long.
Michael nodded. Neither of them, perhaps, had been expecting it to last. "The Replicators? Or…" His people. The Wraith. Neither term seemed to fit but at least she knew what he meant and he didn't have to say it.
"Both. Atlantis is under siege again, but indirectly, and from two fronts. It puts a strain on our resources and … it makes it hard to get away."
She didn't pull her head from his shoulder but she felt him smile. Was glad she didn't see the sadness in it, that they were separated enough for the moment that she didn't have to feel it. Everything seemed to be moving so much faster now. Seemed to be, all of them, hurrying to grasp at the edges of something that was slipping away. Sanity, perhaps. Security. Something necessary.
"I will tell you what I can of our first battle with the Replicators, but I am afraid it likely will be of less use than you hope," he said after a little while of clinging and quietly shutting out the rest of the world. "It may give you an idea of what sorts of tactics would be employed against them."
"And what sorts of tactics we ourselves might employ, yes." She nodded. "Thank you, I would be grateful to hear."
It was depressingly little, as he had warned. Not only because his skills in science were more limited to the biological and chemical than the technological and mathematical, but also because they were different. The Replicators were no longer restricted by their core programming built by Ancients, neglectful and whimsical as they had been. And they kept changing.
He talked until she was drifting and almost falling asleep, leaning against him, both of them shifting only to keep their limbs from aching. A great deal of the information was repeated, so that she would remember, she thought.
"It is possible to defeat them," he reminded her, sensing the tone of her thoughts as she drifted. Once they had stopped talking tactics they had fallen back into the sort of mental dialogue which covered topics not related to either current affairs or the Atlantis team. Mostly this involved little anecdotes from times more pleasant than lately. "It has been accomplished before, it's not as hopeless as it seems."
She leaned back far enough to smile ruefully up at him. "Do I seem so hopeless to you?"
"You seem," he kissed her forehead, smiling softly back. "As though you have been fighting a long battle and taken many losses, which you have. You seem as though you are losing strength or energy, which you are. It happens, in a long conflict."
In the times between coming here, resting, and her time spent on Atlantis she had forgotten sometimes how matter of fact he could be about things she only lightly thought about. Pointing out things that hadn't even occurred to her, so common were they in her every day life, and then pointing out that they were common and perfectly acceptable. Reminding her, or explaining, perhaps, that there were things that should be and were affecting her no matter that they seemed not to have caught up with her yet.
And she truly was tired. And he was a respite, a welcome source of support and relief that would be denied to her shortly, and for a long time. She realized she was clinging and made herself hold on less tightly.
"So many of our people have died. Were injured when we left the planet, have been killed or terrorized on other worlds in the expedition parties. And now we have awakened a second enemy, and was not the struggle to protect ourselves enough, before?" Somehow it was easier to ay this to him without seeming as though she was crying like a child, whining. Perhaps because something in his manner or in the way his thoughts touched hers encouraged it. "We have lost so much. Some of us have lost our homes two and three times over, and my people…"
And now Michael. Her need to cling to him, to keep him in her life bled through and peeled away the few of his defenses that he had built up against his own loneliness and need. When she was gone he would have, literally, no one. And she would still have John and Ronon and McKay and her friends on Atlantis.
"I'm sorry…"
They sighed, settled closer together. It wasn't her fault, there was no blame for being upset at the unfairness of life. It wasn't, after all, a contest on who had it worst. Because he had fewer people to care for also meant he had less to lose. It was a different sort of unfairness, which made her smile a little.
"Because both of us have been abused at the hands of whatever guides the universe, we should start comparing our suffering?"
It was lighthearted teasing, and it worked well enough to ease them away from the depression they were dragging each other into. Some sort of trickster god, perhaps, a creature that enjoyed playing games of chance and putting them into increasingly ridiculous and dangerous circumstances.
If there was some other force or creature that guided their actions and circumstances, that neither the Wraith nor the Athosians had thought of, they were surely either having a good laugh right about now or staring at the two of them in shock, Teyla decided. No one could have forseen this. She had been treated to a fifteen minute rambling explanation of a well-known Earth story from John Sheppard because of this. Something about two feuding households and young love. It had ended badly, and it wasn't as though Wraith and Human were likely to forge any kind of a truce because of two aberrant members of their people. Still…
It made them laugh. It made thing seem a little less hopeless, at least for that night. It made things better, at least for that short time, and made it more possible to forget for a little while that they were likely to get much, much worse.
It turned out that they had less time than anyone had thought.
Sheppard scrubbed the mission, which up till that point had been a refreshingly calm search and explore, when they called back to Atlantis and received only a distracted and harried-sounding response. Nervous about what they might encounter, they made their way back.
The flurry of activity was reassuring in that it didn't seem to involve any wounded or dead personnel, but not so much in that it implied a sudden and pressing problem.
"What happened?"
Carter spared Sheppard a look of mild relief as she walked past. "Good, you're back. We've got a Wraith Hive ship in orbit, and…"
"A what?" Teyla couldn't quite believe what she was hearing, although exactly which part was unbelievable was up for debate. On the one hand, a Wraith Hive ship in orbit above a planet they had no reason to believe housed anything remarkable at all was unbelievable. On the other hand, that a Wraith Hive ship was in orbit and hadn't descended upon them yet was almost equally unbelievable. Unless…
"Is the cloak up?"
That would be the unless. And they were rushing over to the command center and Teyla was still trying to wrap her mind around the fact that there was a Wraith Hive ship in orbit around the planet. The new planet. That the Wraith didn't even know was Atlantis' new home yet.
One Wraith, of course, did. And she realized that as soon as she could feel John Sheppard's stare boring a hole between her shoulderblades.
"The cloak is up and they haven't done anything yet. They may just be on a sweep of the planet looking for a civilization that used to be here, maybe on the continent. We haven't seen any darts flying over the city, but…"
Which was a relief. And was partially helped and explained by the ruins in which Michael was living, not that Teyla could say that. Or perhaps…
"When I returned to the crash site, I did see structures which seemed to indicate that there had been some form of sentient life here, many ages ago. There were only a few walls left, but…" she let it trail off there, hoping that they could infer something useful from that very vague statement. A series of small walls. Sheppard gave her another strange look, but didn't say anything to contradict her.
Carter nodded slightly, seeming to give it consideration. "Right now the plan is to just hold tight under the cloak and wait until they move on. They're…"
"Colonel Carter!"
Nearly every member of the team (Ronon being the exception) had the 'now what' look on their face as they turned to face the young man, a soldier, by the uniform. Teyla was sure she was wearing a similar expression to John's weary exasperation; Rodney's look was unmistakeable.
"Colonel Carter, they've launched Darts. Dozens of them, they're sweeping over the continent."
Sheppard sighed. Teyla considered it a near-miraculous act of restraint that he didn't look at her at all when he said it, but at Colonel Carter. As though he wasn't thinking what she was sure he was thinking. "I guess they really are looking for something."
And she could well imagine what, or who. But she did not want to, would not believe that Michael had called them there deliberately, and she couldn't say so to Sheppard or Carter out loud. They moved on to the conference room as people started to settle around them, still looking up at the ceilings nervously at every out-of-place whine or bump, as though they could see through the structure to what might be passing overhead. Teyla resisted the impulse to join them, several times.
Surely Michael wouldn't have called them there deliberately, both out of practicality and considering his treatment by the Wraith the last time, and as a kindness to her. And yet.
She paused on the threshold of the conference room on the strength of that particular and yet. Loneliness could be a powerful motivator. She had felt his loneliness more than once, felt how he had held it back and it had still eclipsed her own grief upon losing her people. She well knew that loneliness, homesickness could be a powerful motivator. And wasn't it possible that Michael, who was older than she knew despite her possibly self-deluding willingness to see them as around the same age, felt it so acutely that he could be driven to extreme measures by it? Was it possible?
Teyla shook her head slightly to herself as she joined the rest of her team in the conference room. Of course Michael had nothing to do with the Wraith ship overhead; if she did not believe that, how could she hope to convince John or Colonel Carter of that?
She would have to fly back out there, tell Michael of what was going on, ask him what he thought might have happened. And she would have to do so either once the Darts had left or under cover of a cloaked jumper. And somehow, and this was the hard part, she would have to convince Sheppard that it was both possible and the right thing to do. Outside of the conference room, because Ronon would undoubtedly have something to say on the matter.