Warhead On Legs

I, er. Totally forgot to finish posting this towards the end of Nano and the chaos that has swallowed my life these past few days. I shall endeavor to finish posting it over the course of the week! So I dont' overwhelm everyone by twelve posts of large chunks of story at once.



Teyla did make it to the botanist's camp before nightfall, although it was a near thing. Major Lorne had a talk with her about security, wandering off, and all that sort of thing until she reminded him that she was a grown woman who could look after herself, and who had indeed been doing so since before the Atlantis team had shown up. Chastened, he smiled and reminded her that they worried about her, and left her to find her dinner from among the limited recipes of MREs.

It was, at least, a little more palatable with the supplements of some nuts and plants she had found. She hadn't had time to dry anything, not with all the walking she had done, but she had gathered what she could on the way back. There was a plant that was usually crushed for sweet breath or sweetening the medicines they sometimes used which Katie Brown proclaimed to be like mint "only spicier," and there were a number of nuts with flavors ranging from sweet to tart. It cheered up an otherwise bland meal, and she received a number of compliments on her gathering skills, if not her cooking.

That, she had left up to one of the botanists, a Dr. Irrizary, with a wry smile and a deprecating remark about her cooking skills. Food poisoning, yes, was a way to liven up the meal, but not quite what she had intended.

She was sitting at the center of the tents, turning her knife over and over in her hands when Katie Brown walked up. Watching the light distort her reflection on the metal, absorbed in her thoughts to the point that she didn't notice the young woman cough politely, not until she put her hand on Teyla's shoulder.

"Oh! I'm sorry…" Katie was now two steps back and a little wide-eyed. Teyla put the knife away, sheepish.

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There were two missions after that. They didn't talk outside of what was necessary for the mission, at least until Ronon suggested that they have sex and get it over with. Not quite in those words, perhaps, but the implication was there. After that Sheppard seemed to relax, and Teyla took a breath and kept up her side of whatever light conversation they were having at the time.

Afterwards, though, on the balcony outside of the offices, she found him leaning against the railing and staring out at the water.

"John…" she came up next to him, and felt it stabbing at her inside when he flinched away.

"Teyla."

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He liked to spend time out of doors, Teyla realized. Even if most of it was looking up at the sky as though it would welcome him back again. Welcome him home, she thought. Three days spent in his company and although they had talked, mostly about her and life on Atlantis, there was a feeling of immense loneliness about him that never quite went away.

He didn't seem willing to talk about it, though, and she wasn't going to force the issue. Instead she talked around it, finding little things that she hoped would alleviate it, if only so that it would be less of a pressure on her mind. There were no more nightmares. She wasn't even sure he slept at night, but in the very late hours of the evening when she was lying there trying to go to sleep she was so lonely and so empty she wanted to cry, and she knew it had to come from outside of her. And there was no one else but Michael.

Little things. It started with the little things.

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He had a stash of MREs. She didn't ask where he had gotten them from. There were too many to be from the Jumper, if it had even had a store of food against some sort of emergency. She thought it had, but there were still too many of those packets, piled up almost to the ceiling in one corner of what seemed to have been a kitchen.

Not that he would have any use for a kitchen. Hyper-aware of their fragile truce, she did not ask how he was surviving.

"There's a kind of symmetry at work, here," he said, with a tiny smile. "From the way I remember your expression it's not what you would prefer to eat, but…"

"It is better than what I brought," she admitted. Trail rations and she had hoped to do some hunting or foraging, but hot meals with some regularity had been beyond what she had counted as a reasonable expectation. "Thank you."

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They stopped just outside of the coordinates of the first known encounter with the magnetic field, setting down in a clearing in the woods. Teyla picked up her pack without a word, moving slowly as she went towards the Jumper bay doors, but still moving.

"Hey…" John was leaning against the inner hull, frowning, some sort of expression on his face that suggested nervousness but that she still couldn't entirely read. "Are you sure you'll be all right for a week out there?"

Out there with Michael. That was the tricky part; she had spent longer days than simply a week in the woods by herself with little ill effect. But Michael was unpredictable and she still didn't know how he felt towards her. He hadn't killed her or fed on her when he could have, though, and that was something.

"I will be fine," she assured him, smiling. And then: "I need to do this, John."

"All right. Gimme a call if you need me."

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When Teyla woke at last, she did not at first know where she was. The world seemed fogged over in a haze of pain and her body did not work the way it should. She tried to move, and found herself restrained. Restrained and tucked into bed.

"Hello?" Restrained was one thing, but tucked into bed implied that it was for her own good, and given the white hot jagged edge of pain that pressed against her chest and she tried to struggle against the restraints, she was inclined to both believe that her unseen captor at her best interests at heart and to agree with him. A broken collarbone, a broken rib, something.

In bits and pieces, her memory of the last few hours returned. Or at least, what she thought with the last few hours. The shuttle's survey team with two scientists and another Athosian, a magnetic anomaly that had disabled the Jumper's systems, the impending crash. The pilot warning them to brace themselves for impact. Darkness.

Suddenly it became imperative that she get out of bed. "Hello?" she called, a little more urgently. "Is anyone there?"

There was someone there. She knew someone was there, she heard the person's footsteps approaching her. But she didn't see who it was, not when they came up behind her and injected her with a sedative. In minutes she was unconscious again.
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Also known as, fanfic to write after Nano:

1. Michael (or some other humanized Wraith), for whatever reason, is frantically attempting to save someone's life via CPR. This person has... whatever, drowned, been electrocuted, what have you. CPR is not working. Michael, in a futile and not-entirely-stable attempt to revive the person, attempts to do that reverse life sucking thing that Wraith apparently can do. Only, being humanised or at least mostly humanised... can't. Person dies.

2. (Alternatively, Michael or some other humanised Wraith zigs instead of zags and actually winds up life-sucking the person rather than bringing them back to life, and the stress of it causes the person to expire. Or they reverse the life-sucky in mid... life-sucky.)

3. Sheppard/Kaylee

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She met with Dr. Heightmeyer.

"Do you not wonder where he gets his qualities from," she asked. "Which are learned from what he sees and how we treat them, and which he takes from how he was treated in his Wraith life."

Dr. Heightmeyer shook her head slightly. "I've never thought about it," she admitted. "He's assimilated quite well, actually. It's remarkable to look at him and think he was a Wraith at all."

"That is exactly what I mean, is there not any part of him that might be Wraith still? Perhaps his distress at not knowing his family, could that not come from the Wraith being a hive presence around him, and the loss of that presence."

It didn't look as though that had occurred to her. Dr. Heightmeyer frowned, and for a moment Teyla was heartened, until she saw the professional mask drop into place. Treating Teyla as a case to be talked out, not as though she was actually offering input or suggestions or just trying to talk out the thoughts that had been troubling her.

Teyla supposed, as she walked away from the doctor's office, that it was to be expected. She and Heightmeyer were certainly friendly, but they weren't exactly friends.

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Word Count: 2,477

Sheppard didn't look happy about Heightmeyer's decision to turn Michael loose from the infirmary. Under the circumstances, Teyla could understand. Although their brief meeting had gone rather well by what she had envisioned, that didn't mean he wouldn't suddenly regain his memories and run loose through Atlantis. And she didn't know what he'd do then.

Still. "Do you want me to introduce him to his quarters?" It was, she realized afterwards, a strange way of putting it. Everything about this was strange; she was introducing an amnesiac former Wraith to his new identity as Lt. Michael Kenmore.

Sheppard thought about that for a moment. "Might as well, you seemed to get along with him pretty well." Not, it seemed, that Sheppard was happy about that.

Teyla nodded. "He is a stranger in what should be his home, it is not hard to imagine what he must be feeling right now." That was the wrong thing to say. Sheppard stiffened.

"He's an amnesiac Wraith. There's not much there to feel sorry for."

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