Chapter Text
John has barely made it three steps into the gate room when Teyla’s voice cuts through, loud and clear and angry.
He’d been cut off from Ronon and Rodney on the run back to the gate after they’d encountered a group of Wraith on the planet they’d been investigating after finding an unusual note in the ancient database about it, and only now had he been able to dial back to Atlantis.
The other two men are waiting anxiously to the side of the gate, just out of the blast radius. He searches for them immediately, checking to make sure they’re both there in one piece. There is a whole group of people gathered around the steps and halls of the gate room clearly waiting for his return, and he takes a moment to glance up at Carter standing at the top railing like she normally is. He nods up at her as he crosses into the room. Then Teyla’s voice resounds, and she storms a path through the crowd in a mass of brown leather and flowy organza fabric.
“Colonel Sheppard, may I have a word with you? Privately, please?” she asks, marching up to the team before John can so much as lay a hand on either of the others. John looks up at her as he tries to unhook his P90, brows furrowed in confusion. His chest immediately tightens at the hardness in her eyes and the straight line of her mouth. He’s gotten very good at reading Teyla’s poker face over the years, so it’s disconcerting to look at her and see an open glare returning his gaze.
“Everything okay?” he asks, carefully, already knowing that if it were she wouldn’t be cornering him here in the gateroom, the very moment he’s through the gate.
“No, everything is not okay,” she breathes out cooly. Her voice is a forced calm, the kind she uses in hostage negotiations and particularly unpleasant diplomatic missions, not the kind of voice she uses to talk to her team, and certainly not the voice she uses to talk to him.
John blinks, distinctly wrong-footed by the whole situation, unsure of how to proceed. “Okay,” he says, feeling anything but. “Let’s go talk.” And he lifts his chin to indicate a conference room down the hall.
He barely finishes speaking before Teyla turns on her heel, the heft of her belly whipping around and proceeding her through the doorway to the hall off the side of the room. John doesn’t move, he just stares after her for a moment, a feeling of intense foreboding under his breastbone, like when he’s just disobeyed a direct order and is being brought into his CO’s office to be chewed out for insubordination.
“Someone’s in trouble,” Rodney jests, his voice sing-song, eyebrows raised as he peers over at John, looking too smug for someone struggling out of his tack vest like he is. John pointedly does not offer to help him like he normally would.
Instead, John shoots Rodney a hard look. “How can I be in trouble? I haven’t done anything,” he says, still not moving to follow Teyla. “I think,” he adds. He thinks that’s true, mostly. He can’t think of anything specific he’s done that would make her angry, but his hackles are raised now. He can count the number of times Teyla has looked at anybody like that on only one hand.
“Well, someone did something,” Ronon grumbles, eyeing Teyla's path down the hallway. “Maybe she just needs to talk to you about someone else.”
“Yeah,” John breathes, distracted. His already racing heart speeds up. Anxiety cuts a deep path around his gut, like something big and dreadful setting up shop right in the center of him, a big dark mass settling in to stay a long while.
“I wouldn’t keep her waiting if I were you,” Rodney comments, unhelpfully.
John reups his annoyed look. “Here, take this back to the locker for me, will you?” he asks, handing his P90 over to Ronon.
Then he squares his shoulders and forces himself to move from his spot, a lot more anxious now than he’d been during the entire mission, including the five minutes he’d had to wait in hiding before he could follow his team through the gate.
Teyla is waiting for him in a small conference room off of the main control room hall, pacing in frustration when he dares to darken the doorstep.
“What’s going on?” He hears himself ask. His body tightens in anticipation.
“John,” she starts, and the body-tense tight anger that he’d seen in the gateroom shifts to something darker, more intense. “I do not think I can handle this any longer,” she says, turning big shining eyes on him.
John’s heart strains, his body immediately snapping into even sharper attention.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, dread coming up the back of his throat. His eyes snap down to her belly, to the place where her hands are rubbing anxious fists over the swell of her. “Is it the baby? Should I get Keller?” He can’t help but ask, mind always at least half focused on the fact that they’re not alone in the room.
“No,” she answers, strained like she’s holding herself back from snapping. “The baby is fine. I, however, am very upset.” She looks at him pointedly, her chest heaving behind a begrudging breath. “With you.”
John blinks, feels himself take a shuffling step back under the scrutiny of her gaze, entirely unsure how to respond to the directness of the statement, feeling the dark foreboding something magnify and mutate into something worse than he hasn’t had the chance to anticipate.
“Okay,” he answers, sucking in a breath, accepting his fate, because he’s sure there’s some reason, sure he’s done something to cause this. Then he has a thought. “Is this about me taking you out of the field again? Because I don’t think your argument’s getting any stronger the further into the pregnancy you get.”
Teyla's eyes flash, that bright flashing anger from the gateroom coming back again, and John can barely keep from wincing under the glare she levels across the room.
“It is not about my presence on the team,” she says, “or in the field, but rather the lack of sense you exhibit when you are in the field!”
John’s forehead creases, his face falling into a frown. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks.
Across the room, Teyla’s taut posture tightens further. She pulls herself in, arms folding on top of her protruding stomach protectively. “Myself, Dr. McKay, Ronon, Colonel Carter, and everyone else in that room just stood there for five minutes without knowing whether you were alive or dead,” she breathes out. “We stood and waited for nearly 60 seconds after Ronon and Dr. McKay came through for you. Why did you not join them?”
John just stares at her, taken so far aback that he doesn’t even know how to answer. “I– you’re mad at me because I didn’t come back when the rest of the team did?” he asks, sure that he’s not following. He frowns in deep confusion.
Teyla nods, harshly. “I am. Why did you not come through the gate with Ronon and Dr. McKay?” she presses.
“I was holding off the Wrath, Teyla, it’s not like I decided not to come back for fun!” He says, still utterly confused as to what is happening.
“Ah, I see,” Teyla inclines her head in faux understanding, “And cover could not be provided near the gate? You felt it critically necessary to provide cover in a position from which you could not access the gate yourself?”
John just gapes at her, several moving pieces getting caught in creative knots inside his head. “Teyla, what’s happening right now?” he asks, because he’s at a complete loss. “Are you upset with me because you disagree with a command decision I made that might have put the base or the team at risk?” Teyla has never done this before. Never insisted on a conversation this intensely and never made him explain his reasoning in the field. He likes to believe it’s because she’s never needed to. The two of them are normally in lockstep, especially out in the field. This line of questioning is clearly pointed towards something he cannot decode.
“No, I would never question that. You would never put any of us at risk unnecessarily.” She shakes her head then, seriously, jaw set. “You would only ever sacrifice your own safety.”
There is a long and expextant pause between them, and then John nods. “Okay. So what’s got you so worked up?” he asks.
“That is why I am mad!” she huffs, clearly trying to keep herself calm and just as clearly losing the battle. “You do not seem to regard your life and safety with as much priority as you do anyone else on this base. I have witnessed it for many years now. And I have grown tired of this process of waiting for you to eventually die, not at the hands of an enemy but because of your own insistence on it!”
The words hit John in quick successive blows. The deep foreboding he’s been feeling sinks down onto him like hot metal through plastic, there is an edge of panic that cannot fully materialize in his chest, because this is nowhere near whatever he’s been expecting. What might have been expected was a problem with one of his men, or a rehashing of their old argument about her position on the team, not this. Not this horrific conversation that he cannot outrun even 3 billion light years away from earth. He feels winded, struck by the whiplash of going from being in the woods taking heavy fire from Wraith, to being here, in a conference room fighting an entirely different battle.
He has flashes through his mind then, the looks on the faces of other people, the other women that he’s had to endure this same conversation with. He feels the same dread that seized him those times too, at twelve and seventeen and then again at twenty-six, the same dread that has followed him through his entire life, that has ruined countless relationships. He’d thought that when Nancy finally served him with divorce papers and Holland had breathed his last shuddering breath, spraying the sun-bleached Afghani sand with his blood, that this could be the only silver lining of it all. He’d be done, finally, with this endless conversation, done with this endless, inescapable game of inevitable failure and even more inevitable loss. The best part, possibly the only good part, of losing everyone he’d ever loved would be that he wouldn’t have anyone left to hurt or disappoint.
And then, when he had nothing left, he sat down in a seat and thought of where he was in the universe. He met a horribly demanding man with a smart-slanted mouth and big blue eyes, and an even bigger brain. He met a woman whose friendship had felt like a more meaningful accomplishment to him than any rank he’d ever been awarded. He’d met a man whose trust and faith in him winded him. And he had hoped, because he’d never actually had anything like this, like them before, that he could outrun this – the other part of loving and being loved by people. He’d thought if ever there was a place that he could go where he would not face it, it'd be here.
But, like a fox cornering a rabbit, it found him.
“I never assume any more risk than any other military commander would if they were in my position,” he argues back, almost by rote, his chest heaving the words out.
Something darker than anger crosses over Teyla’s face at the words. “John. Please do not insult my expertise,” she says, “I have spent many years now studying the ways of your people. I have read many of the same reports from the Stargate Command that you have, and I have not found any examples of this kind of behavior in any other gate teams. It is not a matter of your position in command, it is you who does this.”
Her voice carries the same measured surety that her actions command in the field, and he suddenly hates it. He hates what it feels like to be on the other end of it – like he can’t argue with her, like what she says is an immutable fact. It dawns on him that there is a horrible difference between all the times he’s been cornered and drawn into this conversation in the past and now. Teyla knows him in a way that none of the people in his past have known him. She is not just his friend, but also his teammate, and he has trusted her with more of his responsibilities and processes than anyone before her. She’s fought alongside him, offered him advice on his command decisions, and she has helped him with paperwork when he’s stuck in the infirmary longer than he cares to be. There is virtually no part of his life that she isn’t privy to the nitty gritty of.
He’d like to lie to himself and say that he’d had no choice but to delegate and collaborate when they’d gotten to Atlantis, but in truth, he didn’t invite her into his work for any reason other than the fact that he trusted her. Still trusts her. Somehow, her knowing him so intimately does not make him feel better. Instead, it makes him feel like all of his usual arguments – his half-hearted attempts at convincing whoever he’s arguing with that they don’t understand his orders, they aren’t on the inside of his job, or they don’t have the information he does – are all stripped away. It makes him feel like there is absolutely nothing he can do to cushion the blow of his disappointment this time. And still, he clings to his only defense, his only hope of Teyla understanding.
“Exactly,” He says, trying to sound reasonable. “You know exactly how dangerous pegasus is in comparison. You know how desperate the exhibition has been in the past!” He pauses for a second and breathes. “I’ve not always been conventional but I’ve done what needs to be done to keep us safe.”
“Oh,” Teyla starts, “Is that what you were doing when you exposed yourself to the nanites that had taken over Elisabeth’s body and mind last year? Or when you crash-landed the space station Dr. McKay discovered? Or, perhaps, that is what you were doing just a few months ago when you scaled several stories of this tower without any safety precautions taken?”
“As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I was doing all of those times,” John answers, placing his hand on his hips, getting into a defensive posture. He slides into the role that he always slides into when he’s cornered like this. “That’s my job, Teyla.”
“I see. And if any of the rest of us had tried to do the same, you’d let us?” She raises her eyebrows at him, a quiet smugness in her tone that he can’t remember ever having heard from her before. “I curiously do not recall this attitude towards Ronon when we encountered the villagers who had traded on his bounty with the Wraith, or with Dr. McKay when he was prepared to lay down his life for his sister, nor for myself when I assured you that I felt prepared to be in the field, regardless of my pregnancy.”
John feels himself react as if outside of his body, unable to hold it back. He feels his eyes narrow and his jaw set, hears his frustration in his own voice. “Those times were different. It’s not anyone else’s job to do that, it’s mine. I do the risky things so none you have to!” He nearly shouts, “That’s what being a leader means, Teyla. You know that better than anybody. We keep our people safe even if it means we put ourselves at risk in the process.”
There’s a beat of still silence where John’s mind catches up to his body, where he hears what he just said and realizes how it might sound, and the panic that’s been coursing through him surges up even further because he’s done the thing he knew was inevitable. He’s fucked it all up by complete accident, shoved forward by the momentum of his previous fuck ups as if by muscle-memory, a vicious cycle that he’s sure won’t die until he does. He watches the heaviness of his attitude, of his words settle squarely on him as Teyla’s expression deflates.
She draws herself in further, taking a step back from where she’d been angrily leaning in closer, and she breathes out, low and bereft of her previous venom. In its place, there is something much worse, something that doesn’t fit with Teyla at all. Her face is sad and scared. “I can no longer afford to think of leadership in such a way,” she says, “I cannot leave my son alone in this world.”
“I would never let that happen,” he responds without even having to think, because he absolutely wouldn’t. She has to know that. He suddenly feels desperate for her to understand.
Her eyebrows raise again. “That is what you told me mere hours before you made the decision to scale several stories of this tower in open air, an action which easily could have cost you your life. How can you prevent such a thing from happening if you are no longer alive?”
There is no meaningful answer that John can give her. He has no idea how to even begin to explain the complicated set of circumstances that led to his admittedly poor decision to climb up to the control center from the science lab. It would require him to admit things that he’s spent years, a lifetime, forcing himself to never admit. It’s just another thing that he cannot explain, another way that he’s failed someone.
He pauses, his breath is drawn back in a sort of suspended silence for a long, long moment. Teyla’s entire body language is wrong, her face and breathing, and the usually graceful hum of her presence is twisted, sharp, and distant. Something dangerous is in her where something familiar and comforting used to be. He suddenly feels like a Little Red Riding Hood startled by her grandmother’s great big teeth, wondering how quickly he can retreat. But the Big Bad Wolf, like the fox, like the failure he can’t escape, has come for him, and he is trapped.
“I—“ John starts, trying to find some combination of words to salvage the interaction, a joke to crack that will ease the tension, draw them away from this impossible question for which he has no answer. He hesitates. The panic from before is still there, still surging through him in untenable waves. It is still causing flashes of memory in his mind, all of them painting the same picture. His mother’s funeral portrait, a pair of platform heels discarded in his backseat after his prom date decided to walk home in a fit of anger, Nancy’s pressed little black dress bunching in unflattering wrinkles on the other side of the conference room table in the lawyer’s office, Holland’s blood staining the right leg of John’s desert camos. Disappointment. Absence. Loss.
He looks at Teyla’s face and silently adds it to his list.
“Colonel Sheppard,” his radio crackles in his ear. It’s Carter, so he has no choice but to respond.
“Yeah,” John answers, and finally lets his eyes drop, taking a deep breath, shifting his stance.
“Can you come to my office? Rodney says you’ve got information about what the Wraith were doing on M46-7991.”
“Yeah,” he repeats. Then looks up at Teyla again, asking something he doesn’t have words for. Maybe for understanding, or for a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Across the room, she gathers herself. Her arms drop down to her sides. Her expression settles. “Go,” she tells him. It feels for a moment like mercy, right up until she follows it up with, “I believe we are done here anyway.”
And then she walks away – a movement more fluid than it should be, considering her condition and the wreckage in her wake.
John watches her go, feeling like a cornered rabbit still, unsure whether she is referring to their conversation or their whole friendship.