Work Text:
1. Paper
He hesitates, pen poised over the highlighted line. Non-disclosure. Next of kin. Hazard waiver.
“If you’re having second thoughts...”
He has known her for less than an hour put together, between Antarctica and the voicemails she’s been leaving him and right now, in a small, nondescript N.O.R.A.D. office. The interesting stuff is below them, deep underground.
“I’m not having second thoughts,” John says, though of course he is. Even asleep, his dreams have been like chopped-up pieces of the conversation they had in Antarctica, alien threats looming everywhere and a feeling like he’s running to catch the last train. Like if he misses it, he’ll never get to where he needs to be.
“You should,” she says. “Any sane person would. I did. But this is important, Major.”
She said that before, when she explained the Stargate and the lost city of Atlantis and an alien war that he knew nothing about. It’s important. He’s important, as though he did anything on purpose except touch something he shouldn’t.
They were under metric tons of ice, and he said This is crazy and Trust me, I’m not the man you want, and finally No, find somebody else, and then he fled to the surface. Frozen wind and open sky and no expectations, and he could breathe.
He’s going to sign the papers, of course he is. He wouldn’t have come to Colorado if he hadn’t decided, but there’s a hesitation still twisting in him, trying to talk him out of it. Antarctica might be a punitive assignment, but at least he gets to fly. “What convinced you?”
“The President,” Weir says, with a smile that lives more in her eyes than her mouth. “You only get me.”
Of the two, she’s probably the better choice to get to him. The President can order him anywhere he wants, but he would never waste kind words trying to convince him.
I know it sounds crazy, Major, but everything I’m saying is true.
You’re exactly the man we want.
Just promise me you’ll think about it, okay?
He has. Her voice has dogged his dreams as much as the wild Stargate story she told him. The last time anyone really needed him was a year ago, and Holland didn’t make it out alive. He can’t even remember the last time someone wanted him.
While she watches, he signs his life away. When he slides the stack of paper across the desk, it’s like a heavy weight leaves with them, all the not-even-caring he’s been doing about his life in Antarctica lifting off his back.
“Welcome aboard,” she says, reaching out her hand.
2. Cotton
He should’ve let Lorne take this one after all.
That’s usually how it goes: John picks the highest-risk, most exciting missions off the top of the stack, the ones most likely to benefit from the unique skills of his hand-picked team, and then assigns the rest to whichever team leader seems to most enjoy doing... whatever the thing is that John doesn’t want to do.
Under normal circumstances, John would have passed this mission to Paloma off without a second thought. It’s not that he considers ferrying Elizabeth to some ceremonial grain re-negotiation beneath him. As a qualified, experienced military commander—now with Lieutenant Colonel leaves to prove it—everything that happens on Atlantis is at least partly his responsibility, and having a diverse food supply that doesn’t rely on the Daedalus is important.
It’s just deeply uninteresting.
Lorne is great at uninteresting things, and John usually lets him be great at it without interfering, but this was his only shot at getting through the Stargate until Carson lets him off the leash. What’s more “light duty”—John argued—than this? His role in this ceremony is literally to sit still and say nothing while Elizabeth talks to a guy about the price of wheat for however long that takes.
Hours, it turns out.
He thought he was bored on Atlantis. Nobody’s even arguing, they’re just silently meditating on each clause of a document that everyone already agrees with before agreeing extra hard in formal language. There’s no way to speed things along, either, because the Paloma moral code equates patience with trust-worthiness. Urgency is seen as a sign of deception. So is restlessness.
On the table between them are samples—from the Paloma, seeds and grains and a few kinds of fruit; from Atlantis, refined salt and spices and medical supplies—and every time he fidgets too close to any of them Elizabeth hits his foot with hers. It started as gentle taps. She’s kicking him now.
She mouths, syllable by syllable, Will you sit still? in a way that silently conveys she’d be yelling at him if she weren’t also required to sit in silence for five minutes between every sentence that anyone says out loud.
He’s having flashbacks to spending half of third grade in the hallway, and the look on Elizabeth’s face isn’t helping. She also said Lorne should have been the one to do this.
He tries. He really tries.
She kicks him again, getting awfully close to the wound on his leg that put him in this predicament in the first place.
The ordeal finally, finally ends, thank God, when the sun goes down. Everyone in the room returns to life, moving and talking, lighting lamps, clasping hands like normal people celebrating a successful business deal. When Elizabeth reaches across the table to shake on the deal, the magistrate who’d been meditating like a silent statue all day gives a booming laugh. Then turns her hand over to kiss it—palm up.
There’s nothing salacious about the way he does it, and Elizabeth doesn’t react like it’s unwelcome, but it’s an uncomfortable way to seal an agreement. John would never do anything that intimate to someone he wasn’t… intimate with.
“You can move again,” Elizabeth tells him, though he’s already doing so, stretching out his injured leg, trying to get blood back into it before he stands. “That was absolute torture for you, wasn’t it?”
“Never again,” he swears.
“If you didn’t say that, I would.” She picks up the bit of cloth he kept toying with and shakes one end of it at him, a little threatening. It’s just a strip of gauze bandage, not nearly as tempting a prize now as it seemed before, and something he has seen far too much of lately. “I wanted to tie your hands to the chair once or twice.”
She’d be justified, though he doesn’t say so. He uses the table to help him stand and winces as he works the pins and needles out. “What’s next?”
“Dinner, music, some drinking.” She reaches out to steady him, hand at his elbow. “And dancing—though probably not with you, with that leg.”
Small mercies, at least. “Does Lorne dance with you?”
She smiles. “Does that bother you?”
It’s just not something he ever thought about before. “Why would that bother me?” Whenever he pictured Lorne babysitting Elizabeth’s off-world negotiations, he assumed most of it was bored suffering and bland alien food, not…
Why would that bother him?
Elizabeth loosens her grip on his arm but doesn’t let go all the way. “Are you okay to walk? The central hall isn’t far.”
“I’m fine.”
“Good. You should keep this,” Elizabeth says, tucking the strip of gauze into his vest. “There’s more meditating before dinner.”
3. Leather
John learned his lesson on Paloma—and learns it again five or six more times—but there are still some trade missions he won’t delegate. There are good reasons: people who will only meet if Teyla is there to vouch for them, planets with very valuable technology for Rodney to examine, or ones where the natives are both armed and prickly enough that John considers it potentially hostile territory.
M98-7J1—the so-called Great Kingdom of Maluk—is all three. The technology half-buried under the royal fortress is very, very valuable, according to Rodney, and John is really starting to wish it wasn’t, because he’d like to delete the planet from the database and never mention this week again.
He travels through the Stargate, face already burning. Elizabeth is in the control room when he arrives and waves him toward her office, so there’s no putting it off to collect himself.
She closes the door at least, shutting out the nosy ears of the control team. “What is it this time?”
He groans. “Please don’t make me say it.”
On balance, she looks slightly more amused than uncomfortable. He’s pretty sure that’s at his expense. “No more phallic gifts, I hope.”
John can’t look at her anymore, let alone unbox the latest offering—not a hyper-realistic… sculpture… this time, though today’s gift manages to bother John even more. He scrubs his hand over his eyes hard enough to hurt. “Can I please shoot him?”
To John’s great chagrin, the Kingdom of Maluk only makes alliances the old-fashioned way: merging royal bloodlines. John isn’t a target this time around, because the king is a widower who only has sons. Teyla is also in the clear, because an Athosian already contributed to the Maluk gene pool a hundred years ago.
By choice, Teyla was quick to add. She didn’t specify if it was a loving, life-long marriage type situation, or the other, more transactional option the King has put on the table.
“Don’t shoot him just yet,” Elizabeth says. “You told me yourself they’re already becoming more amenable to Rodney’s requests to look over what they have.”
Rodney’s having a great time doing it, too, which makes John even more annoyed with him. He’s the one who told the King’s aide that their leader is an unmarried woman without children, without stopping to think about why anyone would ask a question like that in the first place.
“That’s just because the King still thinks you’re going to—” John fills in the blank with a frustrated noise. He has been wanting to scream for days.
It would be embarrassing enough to tell Elizabeth about this situation once, let alone every day for a week while the King’s offers get ever more… specific. She won’t have to stay there forever, only long enough to provide one healthy prince or princess, and then she can leave the kid there like royal human collateral and live wherever she wants. She doesn’t have to move in right away, either—if she prefers to just visit once a month until a pregnancy “takes root,” that’s also allowed.
The king isn’t put off by Elizabeth’s refusals, or even that she refuses to come and turn him down in person. If anything, the challenge seems to interest him more. The longer Elizabeth plays hard to get, the greater a prize the guy expects to win. It’s starting to feel like a sick game that John really, really wishes he weren’t playing.
“I think he knows by now that’s not going to happen. Yes, this is ridiculous, but some of it must be for show—” She keeps talking, a little louder and faster as John vigorously shakes his head. “—and it’s giving us time to build trust and show them the value we actually offer as allies. By going through the motions and accepting all his…” It’s her turn to trail off.
“Sex toys?”
She’s blushing now, too, and that’s problematically attractive when he’s got bejeweled leather handcuffs in his pack. Perfectly sized, according to the King’s personal aide—John’s go-between counterpart—and not for Elizabeth to wear. King Maluk likes things freaky. Apparently, powerful men eager to relinquish that in the bedroom is a kink that crosses galaxies.
It’s just a coincidence, and one John is shoving as far out of his mind as he can. It’s not just that he’s had fantasies like that himself, the damning part is that he has only ever had them about her. The first time, he blamed it on the pressures of Atlantis and the rocky stress of their initial partnership, because plenty of women have yelled at him in his life, and he never wanted any one of them to tie him up afterward until he bent to her will.
She doesn’t yell at him much anymore, which is probably for the best—in more ways than one. And if that were the last fantasy he had about her, it would make weeks like this much less confusing.
She’s entirely uninterested in Maluk, of course, and there’s no chance she’ll soften to his request, but all this talk about how available she is makes him jealous, and he really doesn’t want to be.
There’s a guy who’s interested in her, one of the new tech nerds. John shouldn’t even know about it, and he definitely shouldn’t care. Teyla told him, unprompted, as though he should do something with that information besides chew on it and feel weird whenever he sees Mike Branton in her office.
It won’t be King Maluk, but someday it might be someone, and he just has to live with that, because their respective roles give him no other choice.
“All right,” she says, cringing, “let me see it.”
He digs the cuffs out and tosses them on the desk between them with as little regal ceremony as possible.
“Wow.” She picks them up, and maybe she doesn’t even realize what they are at first, because she’s so busy studying the pattern of gold-set jewels on the cuffs that it takes her a minute to notice the tie between them. “Are these--?” She looks at her own wrists, maybe checking the size, and that’s a whole new fantasy John doesn’t need.
“Yeah. Exactly.”
She looks up, more alarmed than he expects. “You’re not supposed to bring me through the Stargate in chains, are you?”
“Oh! No.” That would be much worse—as barbaric in concept as this whole thing is, the King has never threatened her, only tried to impress her with his wealth and supposed prowess. “No, those are—”
“I got it. Never mind.”
“—for you,” John finishes, because she didn’t interrupt him in time. When she glances down at her wrists again, some force makes him correct himself out loud: “For him, actually.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “Oh.”
He’s so embarrassed that the heat is starting to feel like something else entirely, and he jumps up from the chair as fast as he can. “I should—I’m going to go. Away. Let you write your next rejection letter. Call me when you’re done.”
He heads straight for the shower and turns the water cold.
4. Fruit or flowers
If asked, John would always say he’s among the luckiest members of the expedition—let alone the entire human race—because he gets to go through the Stargate. Yes, Atlantis is wondrous, and yes, the nerds all seem to enjoy spending all day toiling away in their various windowless labs, but still, they only get to see one alien planet day in and day out, and he gets to visit two or three a week.
He’s more self-conscious about that lately, because so few people are going off-world, and because Atlantis is trapped in the black, frozen deep.
John has stopped complaining, especially to anyone on Zelenka’s team, because nobody wants to hear it—not just because everyone’s working so hard to make sure everything essential stays powered and they all stay alive, but because the numbers say that John is wrong. The shield holding back the water takes almost all of their resources, but they’ve reserved enough power for life support. It’s not black or frozen inside. The lights are on, and every thermostat in the inhabited section of the city says it’s as warm as it was before.
Away from the windows, in the rooms and corridors within the city, there should be no way to tell that they’re at the bottom of the ocean, but John is sure he can feel it all the time—a dark, cold pressure that never lets up.
Whether that’s ancient-genetic or psychological, no one knows, and it’s no one’s priority to figure it out.
They’re only powering up the Stargate for fifteen minutes a day, and John is one of the very few lucky ones who get to travel through it. The first time he went to Paloma, years ago at Elizabeth’s side, sitting through the all-day trade ritual felt like torture. Now, with sun streaming through the alien windows and none of the walls creaking around him—Zelenka says he’s imagining that sound, too—John will happily meditate over the price of fruit as long as they want. All week, if they’d let him.
His team even gets to sleep under the stars, camping next to their puddle-jumper full of supplies, waiting for the next Stargate window.
It feels selfish, how much they’re enjoying it—roasting fresh food over a campfire, breathing real air, teasing Teyla about how she’s going to New Athos in the morning to spend time with her boyfriend. They’ve only been underwater for a month, but it feels like forever. Their hopes are still pinned on the Daedalus, but they should have been here already, if they left Earth right away after Atlantis failed to check in.
John doesn’t want to abandon the city any more than anyone else does—power concerns aside, it’s the safest, most defensible place for them to be. The Wraith had ten thousand years to try and reach the city on the ocean floor the first time and never managed to do it. As for the Asurans, if they come around again... well, John just tries to picture how fast his laptop would short out if he dropped it in the ocean and hopes for the best.
Atlantis is home, the only one that matters to him, but it’s still hard to go back through the Stargate, knowing what’s waiting.
“We’ll be heroes for this,” Rodney says, mouth full of the sweet orange-ish fruit with a hard shell that’s impossible to eat without making a mess. Ever since Carson waved away Rodney’s food allergies with an Ancient gadget, he’s obsessed with everything citrus. It’s a good reminder, at least, that miracles do happen.
“Doesn’t matter,” Ronon says. “It’s not a ZPM.”
John leaves them to their argument and takes a walk around. It’s late summer on Paloma, everything rich and overflowing. They traded for food and necessities only, but the orange-y fruit comes packed on clipped vines so it stays fresh, and some of them have flowers still attached. John set aside the best one he saw. Elizabeth won’t leave the city in a crisis, but she deserves this too, as much of it as he can carry home in a container.
He closes his eyes and pictures her face, how will feel to watch the stress lines soften when she sees what he brought her, the this-should-go-to-the-kitchen, they-already-have-plenty back-and-forth they’ll do, the warm thank-you she’ll give him once she agrees to just enjoy it. He used to take off fast after bringing her anything nice through the Stargate, because he can only take her gratitude for so long before it makes his chest feel weird, and after that, only a few hours in a jumper can set him right.
More and more… he wants to stick around and see what happens next. He misses her smile almost as much as the open air above the ocean.
He’d never have admitted that, even alone to himself, before they sank the city. Everything feels different now, more precious, more raw. Like they’re all huddling together in a boarded house through a hurricane—except the boarded house is three city spires wide, and the hurricane may never stop.
Their return plays out almost like they expect. Rodney gets his hero’s welcome in the form of a few cheers and claps on the back as the jumper is unpacked. John holds onto his prize until Elizabeth clocks out for the evening and brings it to her quarters.
“Not much of a view in here anymore,” she says when she invites him in. The light-less black outside is extra eerie with how many windows she has. If it were him, he’d probably move to other quarters. “How was the sunshine?”
“Nice,” he admits.
“I bet. What’s behind your back?”
It’s only then that he realizes how much it looks like he’s bringing her flowers, like bringing her flowers, instead of—well. There’s nothing he can do about it now except hand the whole branch over to her, fruit and flowers combined. “I thought I’d save you one before the marines eat them all.”
He was right—exactly right—about how it feels when her frown melts, a little crack of light shining through the worry. “This belongs in the kitchen.”
“They have enough.”
“Thank you.” She closes her eyes while she breathes in the strong scent of the blossoms. “Can you stay? Split it with me, at least.”
The impulse—the habit—to leave when she looks at him like that is there, but the impulse to stay is stronger. There’s nowhere for him to fly off to anyway.
She lays a towel out on her dresser before cracking open the fruit, and they both get sticky dividing up the pieces. There’s nowhere to sit, probably because she never spends time anywhere except her office, so when she takes her portion of fruit to the bed, he sits on the floor, resting his back against her nightstand.
“You know-” She stops to lick away a trail of juice running down her wrist. “We met exactly four years ago today.”
“Really?” She’s much better at keeping track of the Earth calendar than he is—he might have missed his own birthday last year if she didn’t remind him—but it feels even more theoretical when the sun never rises. He doesn’t even remember what day it is right now. “How do you know?”
“I was looking through my computer last week and found the letter I wrote to General Hammond right after you and General O’Neill left the chair outpost.”
“Not about me.” It was one of the most fateful days of his life, but John’s personal destiny isn’t why General O’Neill came to Antarctica to meet with her.
“No. Well...” She chews for a moment, thoughtful. “I suppose it was, in a way. I told him I found what I needed.”
The ache in his chest is too strong for him to pretend that he doesn’t know what it is. He hasn’t seen her smile in a month, and it’s so full of the affection he craves from her that it’s making his hands shake.
He closes his eyes, trying to get a grip. He shouldn’t have come to her quarters, not when he has spent so long keeping what he wants and what she needs from him in the right order. If he knew for sure she’d turn him down, that would be one thing, but he can’t count on that—because sometimes she looks at him the same way, like she’s tempted to draw closer and see what happens. They can’t both afford to falter at once.
“Hey—are you okay?” After a pause, she says, “Tell me,” with so much care that it burns.
He takes a long breath and opens his eyes. The sprig of flowers from the vine is next to her on the bed, somewhere to look that isn’t right at her. He tells the truth: “I’m trying not to do something stupid.”
She tries to lighten the mood, and that makes it worse. “Stupid worked out pretty well for you four years ago.”
“Don’t tease me,” he says, even though she isn’t, not in the way he means, not on purpose.
She leans down to touch his arm, fingers sticky on the bare skin where his t-shirt ends, the most dangerous lifeline anyone has ever thrown him. When he takes it, her hand stays loose in his, warm and fragrant from the fruit they shared.
He kisses the center of her palm.
Maybe that’ll be enough—for her to finally know, for her to make the better choice for both of them. She’s so good at handling people, at handling him, that she can probably do it without breaking his heart.
Instead, she slips off the bed to kneel in front of him, taking both his hands between hers. “This is stupid.”
Like this, he can’t feel the pressure of the water. Maybe he won’t, as long as she’s touching him. “I know.”
He leans in, and she meets him halfway.
5. Wood
When the city rises for the second time, their brief affair comes to an end—the sexual part, anyway. There’s no mess to it, no fights. They weren’t the only ones to make strange choices in the two months they spent underwater, and in the light of day—now that day has light again—most people and things settle back into place.
On the surface, so do they. It’s all too easy to fall into old rhythms, going through the Stargate, flying whenever he can, golfing off the pier. With his missions and her regular meetings, their mealtimes rarely ever aligned. Elizabeth’s quarters are in a hallway he has no other reason to pass through.
He sees her when he used to: briefings, passing in the hallway, when he pops by the control tower to check in with her for two or three minutes before one of them has to do something else.
It’s a weird thing, longing for a different version of someone who’s right in front of him, when—if he had to choose—he’d pick this Elizabeth without question: clear-eyed, confident, free from the crushing, constant worry that the wrong wire will blow and their people will drown. Especially like this, with the ocean breeze in her hair.
He doesn’t know if she’d choose the same version of him. “You were different down there,” she says, after she asked him how he’s doing, and instead of saying the mission was rough and he’s tired and doubting they’re even making a dent against the Wraith anymore, he told her he’s late for target practice. “You can still talk to me, you know.”
“We’re talking right now.”
“All right.” She holds her hands up like it’s the end of an argument they didn’t have. “I’ll ask Carson how you are.”
“A few bruises. Ten stitches. You want me to complain to you about that?”
“I said all right. Don’t let me keep you.”
Her dismissal twists in his gut, but he was trying to bail out of the conversation anyway, and he has never won a fight with a woman who wants him to be more honest with her.
He almost makes it to the control room door before she says: “Wait, I’m sorry. I’m still working this out.”
“Yeah.” Knowing she’s struggling too makes him feel worse.
He’s completely following her lead on this, because she asked him what he wanted to do, and he didn’t know. He still doesn’t. Every time he starts to think about it, he feels like he’s turning inside out, and he trusts her far more than he trusts himself right now. Elizabeth isn’t right about everything, but she’s usually right about him.
“I know you don’t like talking about… anything…” A sweeping accusation, but he can’t really defend himself when he just made up an appointment to avoid answering a question. “… but this has to be an exception. If it stops working, you need to tell me. Our relationship is too important.”
He almost asks, To you? Or to everyone else?, but he already knows the answer is both, and it doesn’t really matter which of those comes first.
“It’ll work,” he promises. They just need to get their bearings. They did this for four years, and the other thing for four weeks. “Like riding a bike.”
She pinches her lips together, failing to hold in a smile. “Not having sex is like riding a bike?” She laughs out loud, something she rarely does, something she never did at all when they were underwater and trying to hold each other together. He wishes he could somehow have both.
“I got that backward, huh?”
She smiles like she loves him. He wants to hold onto it. To build on it, someday, if he can ever figure out how.
“All right,” she says again, kindly this time. “Go shoot something, or whatever you need to go do. Just take it easy, okay?”
--
There’s a bracelet in his room, one he’s not going to give her.
He picked it up at a market three weeks after they started sleeping together, while he was bored and snooping around the trinket stalls while Carson and Teyla buttered up the tonic merchant they were really there to see.
It comes in three pieces that kept falling apart when he fit them together, until the vendor selling them showed him how it works. It’s a bit of a trick, only locking into place when it’s worn; the warmth and pressure from the arm inside is what holds it together. It has to fit skin-tight to work, just above the wrist.
“For someone?”
It’s all too new and undefined for him to say yes, even to a random old lady on another planet, so John focuses on the physics of it. The carved wood isn’t flexible, at least not when it’s cold, relying too precisely on the size of somebody’s wrist to be bought as a surprise.
“That is the puzzle,” the lady said. “If it fits, she is the one.”
He bought it. He could have given it to her. It’s cheap and not showy, not so different than the dozen other puzzle toys and brain teasers he bought at the same stall for everyone to enjoy. It wouldn’t have to be a big deal—it’s not like would have to tell her what the lady said when she was trying to make a sale.
He’s not superstitious enough to believe something like that anyway, whether it fit or not. There are a hundred worse things about him that would ruin a relationship before how bad he is at guessing sizes. Nancy used to try and help him before anniversaries and birthdays by writing down all her measurements on a little card, and he still managed to screw it up.
Still, he buys it, and he doesn’t leave it in the common room with the other puzzles, not even after the city rises and he and Elizabeth call it off. He puts it in a drawer with the other Pegasus keepsakes he’s picked up over the years, because he doesn’t have a reason to look at it all the time, but he’s not ready to let it go.
--
Months pass, all of them hard, but not usually because they are or aren’t… whatever they are or aren’t.
If her resolve ever wavers, it’s when things are at their worst—when someone dies, when the odds are bleak, when he’s injured. She hovers, rehashes the almosts and what-ifs of whatever didn’t kill him this time, comes to check on him in his quarters way too late at night.
He’d be as bad or worse if she were the one in the infirmary. Even before they… well, before… he could never think clearly when she was hurt, but it’s been a lucky year so far that way. His weak moments come at the opposite end of the spectrum, when things are easy, when they’re enjoying each other’s company, when the stakes feel low enough that dangerous questions pop into his head: What could it hurt?
Would it hurt more than it does now?
He likes their new normal, once he gets used to it. They’re not lovers, with all the pressures to get things right that go along with that. They’re not exes, exactly, because there’s no acrimony or guilt for having gotten it wrong.
They’re better friends than they were, more likely to spend time together, more willing to share things about themselves. That’s why he ends up sitting with her in a quiet lounge near the living quarters—never in their quarters—watching her open a package from Earth.
A few months ago, her mother sold the family home and moved to Florida. There’s a storage unit somewhere in Maryland with all the stately furniture Elizabeth couldn’t convince her not to save for her. This is a box of things Mrs. Weir decided she needed to have with her right away, “wherever you are.”
It’s less banged-up than some of the care packages people get after the Air Force goons are done searching it. There’s even a sheet of tissue paper between the outer packaging and what looks like another box inside.
When she pulls the paper back, her eyes go misty. The box is a dark wood, worn around the hinges. She closes her eyes, cracks open the lid, and breathes in. Even where he’s sitting, he can smell the lingering scent of old cigars.
“Your dad’s?” John guesses, and not entirely out of a sexist assumption that Elizabeth’s mom wouldn’t be the one to have her own humidor. Elizabeth only looks like that—sad and adoring together—when she mentions her father.
“Yeah.” Her voice is a bit rough, and the threat of strong emotion is normally John’s cue to exit, but he’s trying to be better about that. These quiet—even intimate—evenings are rare in their busy lives, and he can’t stand to waste one. “He always had it on his desk. It was an anniversary gift.” There are two dates embossed in gold on the top, five years apart. “I don’t know why she gave it to him. My mother hated that he smoked.”
For good reason, in the end, given how he died. “Maybe she wanted him to have to think about that whenever he took one.”
Elizabeth chuckles, tracing her fingers over the gold word below the two dates—Forever. “Maybe.” She opens the lid all the way. Inside, John can see a stack of yellowing envelopes, a stuffed animal no bigger than her hand, and lots of bundles of tissue paper. As she unwraps them, he realizes it’s a jewelry collection—each piece probably more valuable than John would have trusted to an Air Force checkpoint.
It reminds him of the bracelet in pieces in his junk drawer. The first time they kissed was four years after they met. It’ll be five years next month.
She must care about anniversaries, or she wouldn’t have mentioned it the first time. He should mark it somehow, shouldn’t he? Or maybe that’s an extra reason why he shouldn’t, when they’re getting so good at this. It’s selfish to want more.
His cheap little bracelet feels like both too important a gesture and not enough. If it doesn’t fit her, it’s just useless scraps of wood, not worth the space it would take up in her new cigar-flavored fine jewelry box. If it does…
He still has some time to think about it.
--
Time almost runs out.
John’s lucky streak of Elizabeth staying whole and safe and healthy comes to a sharp end on a planet called Chipaka. John’s not even there, because it was a polite, harmless, routine trade meeting with polite, harmless people, the kind of thing he could only make worse with his presence. The first he hears about it is on the radio, the emergency call for medical teams.
He sprints for the control room, and it’s chaos when he gets there. The Wraith are attacking the planet, a whole hive ship, and wounded are pouring through the Stargate, including her. She was injured so badly, she comes through the Stargate carried and unconscious, blood streaming from her mouth and all over her uniform. The rest of the team is still dug in on the planet, and John has no choice but to leave Elizabeth in Carson’s hands and get in a jumper to rescue his men.
It's twelve hours before he gets back, dog-fighting with darts to draw fire while the Chipaka escape through the Stargate—the wounded to Atlantis, the healthy to other friendly planets. John can’t afford to be scared, so he isn’t, shutting his mind up the way he does when he’s flying something with teeth. The civilian casualty count is high, but John and six other jumper pilots are lucky, and in the end, his men on the ground get out with only minor injuries. The main and secondary infirmaries are packed, spilling into the hallways, but Elizabeth’s is the only familiar face in intensive care.
She’s fresh out of surgery, so John showers before he goes to see her. She has been cleaned up too since he last saw her, and white-pale even with a bag of someone else’s blood strung up on an IV pole above her. It could even be his—they share a blood type, something he thinks about every two months when it’s his turn to give blood.
“She’s okay?” Carson’s still in surgery, but Keller is overseeing post-op and critical patients. He’s glad it’s someone he trusts.
“She will be.” Without being asked, she promises, “I’ll call you the minute she comes around.”
“Good.” He shifts from foot to foot, knowing he should go, because there’s nothing he can do, and he should really be out of the way while he’s not doing it. “Thanks.”
--
Keller calls him at 0400. He just got to sleep, having spent the night overseeing security and overflow housing and finding an understandably terrified child who took off from the triage bay and ended up way outside the expedition living area.
He stumbles back into the pile of clothes he left on the floor and goes to the ICU.
“You look awful,” Elizabeth greets him. Her eyes have the dreamy, heavy lids of IV morphine.
“You should talk.” He perches on the edge of her bed, and somehow his hand ends up entwined with hers, fingers through fingers. Her thumb runs over his pulse point, back and forth.
“What’d I miss? They won’t tell me.”
He fills her in quickly: he fought, they won, and the Chipaka still lost—though most of them are alive, here and elsewhere.
“Tha’s good.” Her head drops back against the pillow. She keeps trying to lift it up again and stay awake, an unnecessary struggle.
“Shh.” He leans over, kissing her forehead as a gentle weight to encourage her to stay in place. Her hand relaxes out of his, back to sleep.
It doesn’t even occur to him how public a display of affection that was until he stands up and other people exist again.
Not Carson, at least, who would definitely make it his business forever, but Keller and Nurse Ito are both in the room, and they look at each other before back at him.
Ito gives him a little reassuring shake of her head, a promise of silence from someone who has probably kept quiet about a lot of things in this room. It’s Jennifer who cuts him off at the pass before he can make it out.
“It’s okay, you know,” she says—quietly, at least, too low to rouse other patients. “You don’t always have to hide it.”
“There’s nothing to hide. Not…” he speaks even lower. Jennifer was there with the rest of them when the city was underwater. “You know. Anymore.” While John and Elizabeth were never romantic in public, he spent too much time in her quarters for anyone living in that hallway not to at least guess.
“Okay,” Jennifer says, and pats his arm. “We’ll see you later.”
--
He has avoided her quarters for a year. It looks very different with daylight outside, the late rays a sunny day shining in.
“Forgive me if I don’t get up.” Elizabeth is in bed, propped up on far more pillows than she used to own.
“How did you convince Carson to let you out?” He asks it casually, as though his life didn’t flash before his eyes when he came to check on her and found an empty bed.
“Annoyed, more than convinced. Come in.”
“That’s impressive.” John’s very good at annoying people, and even he can’t usually get out of step-down after major surgery unless the fate of the city is at stake.
“I can’t sleep in the infirmary, and—well, I may as well negotiate something this week.”
There’s still nowhere normal to sit in her quarters. He invites himself into the wheelchair next to her bed. “What were the terms?”
“I can be here, but I can’t work. Nurse visit every four hours. And this,” she adds, pointing to the Ancient vitals monitor on her neck. “How is it out there?”
“Hmm. That sounds like work to me.” He starts poking around the dinner tray on her nightstand. She ate some of it—that’s a good sign.
“Hearing about work isn’t the same as work.”
He decides not to budge. “Boring day. We don’t even miss you.”
“I’m sure.”
There’s half an orange on the tray—an orange from Earth—and he starts to pick the bits of pith off it to have something to do with his hands. He needs to work up to it.
He hands her a slice. “Do you know what day it is?”
“Hmm.” She concentrates around the fruit. “Monday, I think.”
“Wednesday.”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
It’s less pressure, at least, than if she was already thinking about it. “I got you something. A while ago.”
“Oh?”
He digs the pieces out of his pocket and puts them on the bed. “It’s a bracelet. I know—it doesn’t look like it.”
“You broke it?”
“No! It’s a—I’m not sure if it’ll work.”
She sits quietly, waiting for him to figure himself out. When he doesn’t say anything else, she holds out her hand.
The back of it is bruised deep purple from the IV, and when he stretches out her fingers, there are blood-stains on her nails. When he debriefed Lorne’s team, he learned that she stopped breathing when she got hit. They resuscitated her in the field.
The bruising stops below her wrist. He wraps his thumb and finger around where the bracelet will go, testing with faint pressure to make sure she’s not hurt under the skin, drawing out the process. He never gets to touch her anymore.
Finally, he assembles the puzzle, notching them into place. The third one slides in with a click. When he lets go, it stays on.
He breathes a sigh of relief.
She examines it, turning her hand, flexing her fingers. It stays in place, like it was always one solid piece. “Good guess on the size.”
Maybe he’s superstitious after all. “You told me to tell you—” He hesitates, but can’t make himself stop. She looks curious and far too trusting when he’s about to blow this all up. “You told me to tell you when this doesn’t work anymore.”
She closes her eyes, and just for a moment, he sees a perfect echo of everything he’s been wrestling with etched into her face. She squeezes his hand. “I got hurt,” she says. “It scared you. This will pass.”
“It hasn’t yet.” It’s already been a year. And if he’s honest, this started long before that.
“So what, then?” She lets go of his hand to touch his face. It’s an awkward reach for her, from where she’s propped against all the borrowed infirmary pillows, so he moves to sit on the edge of the bed, closer. “I was scared, too, but we can’t change our whole lives for that.”
“Does it have to change our whole lives?” He doesn’t know what it would take to satisfy the ache he feels around her—it might not be much. They’re so wound around each other already. He just doesn’t want to buy her something again and need a year and a near-death experience to give it to her. He wants to touch her—not always, maybe not in front of people—but when it matters. He wants to kiss her with the sun shining in.
“Okay. I’m listening.” She was always willing to do that—it’s him who hasn’t been ready to talk. “What are you thinking?”
“How long until your next medical check?”
She raises an eyebrow. “I just had major surgery.”
“Not that.” He can still make her smile, and he takes that as proof that she is—that they are—on the mend.
“Ito was here about an hour before you. We’ve got some time.”
“Okay. Good.” Like he did the other night, so relieved she was alive, he leans over to kiss her forehead. She tilts her face up, asking.
He never stopped thinking about it, and it’s so much better than he remembers.
“Will you stay?” she asks. “Just for a while. I’ll need to sleep soon.”
“Yeah.” He settles in, holding her hand. “I’ll stay.”