Fic: Coda (part two)
Mar. 7th, 2008 01:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
so_jangtitle: Coda (part two) part one
rating: PG-13 (mature themes)
pairing: Elizabeth/John
notes: In music, D.S al Coda means you repeat and skip sections until you find the coda. This fic is a little odd, but it's part of that theme. Spoilers for "This Moral Coil", "Lifeline", "Adrift". For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dana_cz (if it's way more angsty than what you wanted, I'll write you another.)
"War and Peace" was written by Leo Tolstoy. I only quote him because he is fabulous.
"Do you think as she does?" Zelenka asked the replicant Elizabeth as he watched her frown at her computer terminal. "Do you have the same thoughts?"
Gamma twirled the stylus of her computer and reached for her coffee with her left hand. The room was packed with scientists, and though man of them kept sneaking a look at the replicant, she didn't seem fazed. Zelenka admired that about her.
"No, not entirely," she paused and kept her lips on her cup for a moment. "I think I have more in common with Rodney now that I've worked with him," she mused as she set the cup down. "For instance, I don't need to ingest nutrients, and this coffee will have no effect on my brain, but I feel better knowing it's there."
"What will happen to it?" Zelenka wondered as she set the cup aside and returned her hands to the keyboard.
"My nanites will break it down to the component atoms and use it for fuel," Gamma explained as she bit her lip in concentration. "So I suppose it's not a total waste of time."
"Doctor Weir likes coffee," Zelenka reminded her as he peered over her shoulder and tried not to think about how much she looked like Elizabeth.
"She does," Gamma nodded as she moved over and let him see what she was doing. The chair squeaked on the floor and had he not been so close, he wouldn't have heard it over the argument heating up the other side ofthe laboratory. "But I think it's Rodney's need for it that keeps me wanting it. I don't think Eliz- Doctor Weir- ever felt like her head was going to explode if she didn't get it."
Her eyes looked like Elizabeth's looked when Sheppard's team was late. "You care about her very much, don't you?" Zelenka asked as his hand hovered over her shoulder. He never would have touched the real Elizabeth. She lived in a world of her own, but this one seemed so lost, he couldn't help himself.
To his surprise and amazement, she smiled in the direction of the hand and turned her eyes back to her work without comment. "It was my idea to reprogram her nanites," she admitted without looking up from her computer. "It was my arrogance that got all of us into this impossible situation and if we hadn't agreed to contact Atlantis, my stubborn belief that I could control the nanites would have killed her. Still might really." Stopping her typing, Gamma turned to the sympathetic Czech and patted the hand on her shoulder.
"She's me, she's my mother and she's the most important thing in my very brief life," Gamma explained as she squeezed his hand before releasing it. "I don't know if I have the emotional context to deal with losing her, so I suppose an addiction to coffee I don't need to drink is the least of my problems."
She sounded sarcastic and vaguely like Rodney when he was trying desperately not to deal with something. The tiny exhausted smile was entirely Elizabeth and he couldn't help staring at her instead of her work.
"Do you think we should change the crystal orientation in the hibernation chamber or try and work with what we have?" Gamma asked him as she waited for his response. She hadn't seen him staring at her and Zelenka pretended to be thinking when she looked up.
"Which ones do you want to move?"
"Doctor Weir doesn't shoot like that," Ronon pointed out as he studied the paper target with a grin. "Unless she's possessed by an alien. Then she was a good shot."
"She still feels bad," Alpha reminded him as she shuddered inwardly. "I feel bad and I'm not her."
"I lived," Ronon reminded her as he crumpled up the paper target and tilted his head towards the gym. "Wanna try something else?"
"Sticks?" she asked with a grimace that remind him so much of John Ronon couldn't help grinning.
"Hey, least you can't bleed when I hit you," he nudged her shoulder and watched as her eyes started to shine with amusement. "You're not her," he decided as she watched her strip down a simple black sports bra in the gym.
"Oh?" Alpha asked running a hand through her hair. "I look a lot like her."
"That's the end of the resemblance," Ronon corrected as he tossed a stick over to her. "I don't think she'd be in here dressed like that."
"Doesn't really matter, does it?" Alpha asked as she swung the stick a few times over her head. "Not like I'll distract you or anything."
"You'd distract Sheppard," Ronon teased as he stretched his arms and rolled his neck in preparation.
"You distract Sheppard," Alpha retorted as she parried three blows and hit his chest hard enough to knock him back to the wall.
Ronon grinned wickedly and panted through the pain in his chest. "He's not used to people looking away from where they hit," he grunted as he met her again. This time his stick slammed hard into her back, knocking her to her knees with a solid, satisfying thud. The naked skin on her back flashed silver for a moment as it repaired itself.
"Almost seems like you're cheating," Ronon teased as he helped her up from the floor.
"I can shut them off," Alpha offered as she stopped in thought for a moment. "I think," she murmured as she closed her eyes. "Hit me," she asked as she stiffened.
Ronon obeyed, slamming the stick into her unprotected stomach.
This time an imprint of the stick remained on her flesh, as if he'd drawn it there with silver paint. Alpha looked down and shrugged. "Satisfied?"
Ronon nodded and missed her getting ready to smack him back, hard across the stomach.
"Even," Alpha explained winking as she blocked his retaliatory strike and their sticks cracked hard in air.
"Come here often?" Evan Lorne began lightly as he stopped on the balcony next to one of the Elizabeths. She had borrowed an Athosian shawl from Teyla and she seemed more comfortable than she had been in the meeting. The purple wrap hung lazily over her shoulders and she pulled it a little closer as she looked up.
"Part of me would say yes," Delta smiled and nodded to him. "The other part has never seen anything so beautiful."
"Which part are you listening to?" Evan continued as he smiled and realized she did not have the legendary barriers Elizabeth Weir believed were part of her position. She did have the same beautiful smile.
"My part," Delta answered cryptically as she reached for his hand. Surprised by her touch, Evan let her lift his hand from the railing. "Elizabeth knows you paint."
"We talked about it once," Even nodded calmly trying to come to terms with the idea. "You- she- was happy I had a hobby. Joked that she should consider getting one, someday. That was a couple years ago now. Still doesn't have one, does she?"
"Never really got around to it," Delta conceded softly as she pointed out at the water. "Unless this counts."
"It could," Evan offered optimistically. "You could always take up painting on your own."
Delta smiled at him and headed back into his quarters with a hand on his arm. "Only if someone teaches me."
"I'm going to die in here," Elizabeth whispered to him as he sat down next to the bed in the white quarantine room. "I should have died here." She added as she looked away from his eyes. "You never should have tried the nanites."
"Stop talking like that," John snapped much more harshly than he intended to. "Keller has a plan."
Moaning as she rolled away from him, Elizabeth curled into a ball on her side. "No more plans," she begged with an edge in her voice John had come to associate with the worst of her headaches. "No more far-flung attempts to save my life." She coughed and curled tighter in the bed. "Let me go." Her voice grew raspier as she had more trouble breathing.
Hurrying to the other side of the bed, John watched in horror as silvery pink fluid drained from her lips. There were bubbles in it as she continued to fight the fluid building up in her lungs. There were a stack of small white towels and basins by that side of the bed and grabbing one from the top, he held it against her lips until the spell passed.
Elizabeth caught one breath full enough to cough the piece of lung tissue out of her throat. John stared at it on the towel, pink and silver tissue flecked with blood. Dropping it to the floor didn't make it any less real. Elizabeth was literally falling apart from the inside out. Keller had mentioned putting her on dialysis soon if the modifications to the stasis tube would take any longer than a few hours.
Gasping for her next breath, Elizabeth let him lift her head back up to her pillow. "Can't go on like this," she pleaded as her chest gurgled with blood and fluid. "Please--"
"Keller is going to put you into stasis," John began as he rubbed the last of the bloody sputum from her lips. "We're going to speed up parts of your metabolism, put your body on autopilot--"
"No," she cut him off as she sobbed weakly. "Don't do this."
"What do you want us to do?" He whispered so softly he wasn't even sure he was speaking. "What will you let you do? Transfer the embryo- fetus, whatever you want to call it to Carter and grow up on Earth? This is you we're talking about. Not a thing or a creature."
"You," he repeated with the quiet commanding tone he'd developed in her absence. "You have a choice. You can die. You can give up and leave us again-"
"Stop it," she begged him as she closed her eyes. "How many times have you tried to sacrifice yourself for the city? Two? Four?"
Sitting down no longer seemed appropriate, leaving his chair gave him room to pace. "That was different."
"Different how?" she asked as her eyes popped back open. "You were the only one?"
"Damn right I was the only one," he corrected her. "Who would you have had me send? Rodney? Ford? Ford in the puddle jumper might have been good, that way he wouldn't have gotten his guts sucked out by the Wraith--"
"For god's sake John!" Elizabeth sat bolt upright in bed and her eyes burned with something he'd thought was long dead in her. "You can sacrifice yourself as many times as you want, but I refuse to go through with some kind of ridiculous plan and you try to guilt me?" Her coughing only sounded angry now. "I was supposed to die. I should be dead."
"You're not-" John interrupted her.
"You didn't ask me before you filled me full of these things!" she spat back as she pulled her knees up. When her legs wouldn't move, she dragged them up with her hands. "I was supposed to die--"
"Why is it so damn hard to ask you to live?"
"I would have died human," Elizabeth choked before she repeated herself. "I wouldn't have to live like this."
He couldn't face her when he said it. "You're dying, Elizabeth. You're not living like anything. If we do nothing, you die. If we transfer you to Carter, you might still die. You could even take her with you."
Shaking her head slowly, Elizabeth shoved herself back towards the wall. "Tell her no," she kept shaking her head. "John, don't let her risk it."
"Let us put you in stasis," he argued back finally turning to look at her. "If it doesn't work I will sit with you and watch you die. I can promise you that."
Elizabeth's hand shook as she pointed to the chair by her bed. "No nanites?"
"Nothing," he promised as he crossed his arms and moved towards the chair. "If this doesn't work, I promise you will die."
Smiling as she shut her eyes, Elizabeth leaned back against the wall and sighed. "I'll hold you to that John."
"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by
that Antichrist--I really believe he is Antichrist--" John paused and reached for his cup of water and took a sip. In front of him, Elizabeth glowed golden in the stasis tube. By the wall on his left was the gurney and Keller's medical equipment for when the released the stasis. John's watch ticked past oh-three hundred before he looked up from his book.
"After receiving this news late in the evening, when he was alone in his study, the old prince went for his walk as usual next morning, but he was silent with his steward, the gardener, and the architect, and though he looked very grim he said nothing to anyone," pausing to yawn and stand up, John left his chair and continued with chapter eight of 'War and Peace'.
"I know you've read this before," he reminded Elizabeth as he stared at her through the golden light separating them. "Sometimes it's just nice to have someone read to you. Since you can't argue with me, I'm going to keep going." Clearing his throat, he started with the next paragraph.
By oh-six hundred he was nearly asleep on his feet and Beta appeared with Rodney. "We heard you were reading," Beta began gruffly. "Rodney couldn't sleep, and I don't sleep so I thought we'd--"
Mutely, John handed over the book and retreated to the back of the room. When Rodney opened to the place he had bookmarked, John was already asleep.
Gamma was reading while Zelenka sat beside her and set out food for John. They had a thermos of coffee and it was still hot as he drank it greedily down.
"When Pierre had gone and the members of the household met together, they began to express their opinions of him as people always do after a new acquaintance has left, but as seldom happens, no one
said anything but what was good of him," Gamma finished as she reached the end of chapter fourteen and passed the book back to John. Zelenka had his hand on her back when they left, John caught out of the corner of his eye.
He was half-way through chapter nineteen when Ronon arrived with more food. The Satedan took the fat book in his hand and read with a gentle baritone that surprised John as he slipped away to shower and shave. Ronon was still reading when he came back. He ate dinner and listened to the many reasons Natasha could not marry her lover.
Ronon didn't even slip up on the complicated Russian names.
Alpha came in the night, preferring to sit her vigil when only John was there to see her. They spoke in whispers, sitting against the wall by Elizabeth's feet. "Colonel Carter has made it clear that we are to take one of the jumpers," Alpha whispered as she poured some of her beer into John's empty mug.
"Yeah," John agreed softly swirling the amber liquid. "I asked for one."
"We are leaving tomorrow," she added as she lifted 'War and Peace' up to her eyes and searched for chapter twenty-one. "We will not say goodbye."
John read twenty-two through twenty-six on his own. He was growing hoarse when Lorne and Delta arrived with breakfast and his next reprieve. Delta had paint on her hands and she smiled whenever Lorne caught her eye. When John fell asleep, Lorne was reading and Delta was serenely watching him with the kind of patience he adored and barely understood in Elizabeth.
When he woke up, it was only Teyla. "The first shots had not yet ceased to reverberate before others rang
out and yet more were heard mingling with and overtaking one another. Napoleon with his suite rode up to the Shevardino Redoubt where he dismounted. The game had begun," she finished reading and closed the book on chapter twenty-nine.
"I do not understand the way your people constantly refer to war as a game to be won or lost," she asked as she sat with him on the gurney Keller was saving for Elizabeth. "Do you not understand that war consists only of losses? Of death and destruction?"
"Maybe if we had fought the Wraith longer," John mused as he ran his hand through his hair. "We spent too much time just fighting each other. We never really noticed how important it was to see the big picture."
"It is an impressive story," Teyla nodded to the book as she passed it to his hands. "I think I shall have to read it from the beginning one day."
He hand brushed his shoulder as John began to read, "On returning to Gorki after having seen Prince Andrew, Pierre ordered his groom to get the horses ready and to call him early in the morning, and then immediately fell asleep behind a partition in a corner Boris had given up to him."
"I heard you were reading," Sam began as she slipped into the room behind him. John was pacing as he read aloud. He didn't even see the words anymore, and sometimes he worried that he'd gone over the same part. Elizabeth would have to tell him. If she remembered.
"Keeps me awake," John admitted as he set the book down for a moment and stretched his fingers.
Sam lifted it up and smiled at him softly. "She let me bring General O'Neill back," she offered as she stared at the golden light and the slowly changing curves of Elizabeth's body. "Her vitals are good, considering."
"I don't want her to die alone," John admitted as an excuse and a prayer as he stared at the worn pages of his book in her hands. "I don't care if I'm asleep when it happens. I just--"
"I have some time," Sam offered gently as she found a place with her eyes on the page. "I'll read and I'll wake you."
Keller, two nurses, Rodney and Sam were there when Sam's hand shook his shoulder. "Keller's bringing her out," she said anti-climatically. War and Peace lay on the chair, shoved into the corner and forgotten as Keller and the aides moved the bed in front of the stasis chamber.
Elizabeth's hair had grown more than a centimeter while she'd been in stasis and it was her curls John focused on as the golden field flicked off and she fell. Her legs weren't functioning. Keller was speaking and Sam and the aides were answering her questions. Elizabeth's eyes didn't move. None of her limbs moved and Keller only made a preliminary check of the host's vitals before she started checking the baby.
No one cared that John moved up to her head. It didn't matter that he was touching her hair because she couldn't feel it. He'd felt her hair once, when he'd carried her to the infirmary. It seemed softer now, more forgiving as it slipped from his fingers. The lines on her face and faded away and her skin seemed almost translucently white. Nearly seven months had passed for her cells while her brain had been locked in a trance. Was it gone? Was she already gone?
Keller rolled her arm to the side and began adding the IVs. One went into her elbow, and another into her left hand. One of the aides lifted Elizabeth's leg and started pulling back the sheet that covered her.
"We left her in as long as possible," Keller explained to Sam when she realized John wasn't listening to her. "We shouldn't have to do much more than remove the baby."
Elizabeth's eyelids twitched once and John stopped hearing the voice around him. "You didn't finish," she accused softly. "All that reading--" Elizabeth swallowed and her eyelids moved again. "And you didn't finish."
"Cliffhangers keep us coming back," John murmured just in case he was the only one who saw this. "Didn't you see 'Empire Strikes Back'?"
Laughing weakly, Elizabeth's head moved once from side to side. "No," she answered as if she could sense the disappointment on his face. "What happened?"
"Can't tell you unless you saw the first once," John sighed in mock exasperation. "Which you didn't, did you?"
"No--" Elizabeth replied with the hint of a smirk.
"A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away," John began as he felt someone push a chair in behind him. Sam slipped past him wordlessly and set 'War and Peace' in a corner of the room as she returned to Keller.
John saw the doctor lifting Elizabeth's legs out of he corner of his eye. "One of the best beginnings to a movie you'll ever see," he promised her as he mimed the credits appearing on a screen.
"You'll have to take me," Elizabeth whispered as her eyebrows twitched slightly. The only sign that she felt the contractions Keller had induced was a momentary tightening of the muscles in her neck.
"I'll hold you to that," John echoed her from earlier. Her lips twitched as she remembered.
"It starts with a princess," John explained as he watched in amazement as Elizabeth managed to move her hand. it feebly worked up towards her shoulder and he caught it before she lost the ability to move it any further. "And she's in trouble."
Sighing as she half-opened an eye, Elizabeth looked amused. "Aren't they always?"
"When you open your eyes you're upside down and the world is spread out beneath you like a blanket of blue and white," John explained as he tried to ignore the smell of blood behind his head. He'd asked Keller not to bother cauterizing anything unless she needed to see. It didn't matter to Elizabeth if she bled out or died later from slow brain failure. John had nearly bled out a few times and he preferred that way to go.
"All you hear is the engine because it's so loud it cancels out your breath," John leaned closer to her ear as he watched her screw her eyes shut against the pain. "You nearly forget you even have to breath, it's so beautiful and you're so small up there. Technically you're upside down because space is beneath you but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like you're part of that space and all of you is all around the Earth. you're bigger than the ice and the ocean and everything and if you just stay there. You'll get it. I mean really get it, you can feel it pulse through you like--"
John held her hand closer to his face and watched her knuckles tighten and go white against his hand. "Like nothing I've ever felt. You're everywhere at once and you don't feel the seat and the belts and the straps on your suit. You feel space and the fourteen Gs slamming your eyes back into their sockets when you loose the moment."
Her lips curled slightly into a smile and John realized how grey they'd gotten. Her hand relaxed and he wondered if it was over. Somewhere past the white skin of Elizabeth's leg, Keller and Sam were moving and Rodney had his eyes fixed so firmly to the stasis chamber that he wouldn't have seen Armageddon happen behind him.
"John?" Elizabeth's voice cut through his thoughts like a razor.
"Antarctica," he repeated her last request and kept going with his explanation. "That's a F-eighteen," he explained as he shook himself away from the flurry of movement that was Keller and the nurses. "A helicopter is more like a being able to fly were pure thought, you get up, down, left, right but you don't have to climb and dive like the a fighter. You can drop so low you churn up the snow like a tornado. Remember when you could make tornados in bottles with glitter when you were a kid? And you put the monopoly houses in there? So they worked better?"
"-She's gone," Sam's voice interrupted him as her hand touched his shoulder. "I'm sorry John," she finished as she pulled the sheet up over the ruin of Elizabeth's body.
The hand in his was slack now, limp and cooling. He hadn't seen her go, John realized as it hit him like a punch in the gut. Sam pulled the dead hand away and the hand on his shoulder tightened in comfort.
Keller's lips were set in a hard line as she crossed the room to him. "It'll take us a few minutes to reset the chamber, could you please?"
The baby was in her arms, wrapped in something white and pristine. He'd never seen an infant that small, John realized as Keller handed her over to him. Instead of crying, she still had Elizabeth's mind, Elizabeth's nanites had seen to that, the infant stared at him with incredibly deep blue eyes.
"Hey," John whispered sheepishly taking her away from the corpse. "I know this is weird, but it's going to be over soon. Few minutes of this, some time in the stasis pod and you'll be you and you'll be human and life will be back to normal."
The baby's face scrunched up and John wondered if all infants could manage that accusatory look.
"As normal as it gets around here?" he corrected and watched her face relax. He'd never held a baby who was still damp. By the time he saw them, they usually had hats and booties, but Elizabeth was just wrapped, naked, in the sheet in his arms.
"Puddler jumpers are the best," he dragged himself back to flying for want of anything better to say. "You get in that pilot seat," he began as her eyes bored into him. "You think and you move, it's that simple. No clumsy controls, no suit, no Gs or eyeballs flattening out. You just move."
Her tiny red lips parted and impossibly small fingers emerged at the edge of the white sheet. He nudged them with just one of his and they moved beneath his touch. Her fingers seemed almost too small to move, and John was glad her eyes were probably too untrained to see his face. Rubbing the dampness off with his shoulder, John slipped his finger into the palm of her hand and felt her fingers wrap around his.
"Puddler jumpers in deep space are like being truly free," John sighed and wished he was better and speaking. "You're out there and you feel like you could dance with everything else that's out there. It's when i really understand infinity. Not the mathematical one, but the real one. The one where forever really means- you know. You could chase down comets if you had to. Not that I would," he chided himself as he smiled down at her. "That would be a waste of valuable time and resources."
Her tongue moved inside her lips and John marveled that anything about Elizabeth could have begun so small and meekly. She nearly refused to let go when Sam came to collect her from his arms.
"It'll be a few days before she's herself again," Sam explained as she worked to detach the baby fingers from John's hand. "It's easier this time though, we can age all of her at the same rate."
Nodding stupidly, he watched the baby disappear as Sam walked away. Keller took her next and Rodney was doing something with the wall.
The body was in the corner, forgotten and cooling like a plane that would never need to fly again. John made himself walk away without looking at her. The real Elizabeth was being put into the stasis chamber and in a few days the whole thing would be over. She'd be cleared by the IOA, fill out more forms than she'd ever seen in her life and she'd be back.
He forced himself into the shower before he went to bed. John collapsed after the water had rinsed all the smells of that room off of his skin. Pulling on clean boxer shorts seemed like a formality, but, if there was an emergency, he'd be glad he had. That thought, however unimportant, was the last thing he knew before he fell asleep.
It was five days before he saw her. He'd known she was back. The mood in the cafeteria was lighter, Rodney was making jokes and eating with Teyla more enthusiastically than he had for months. Ronon still seemed amused Colonel Carter had been so quick to let the replicator Elizabeths disappear into the galaxy, he'd even started sitting at her table when they ate at the same time. Sam's stories of early SG-1 missions made his laugh carry across the room.
Elizabeth was released from the infirmary on Monday. By Wednesday she had passed every test the IOA had to offer and Friday morning he had to attend his first staff meeting with her sharing stewardship of the city with Colonel Carter. Sam had agreed that military and scientific decisions would rest with her primarily, while Elizabeth had the responsibilities of personnel, politics and relationships with foreign governments here in Pegasus.
According to Rodney is was amicable and Teyla seemed pleased by the situation as well. Ronon was himself but he took the batch of new recruits that had returned from Earth with Elizabeth to the gym with renewed vigor. Sam was making room for a second desk and the two masks he'd refused to send back to Earth, Calvin and Hobbes as he liked to think of them, were back on the wall behind what would be Elizabeth's desk.
Everything was normal.
Everything was good and happy and as it should be except that he'd scattered her ashes off the southern pier. He'd done it alone. Rodney, Teyla, Ronon- most of the city would have come with him if he had asked, but he'd done it alone. It had seemed foolish because Elizabeth was alive but he'd done it. The little metal case her ashes had been in was at the bottom of the ocean as well because he'd felt like throwing it. He'd thrown it so hard his arm still stung.
War and Peace was back in his quarters. John wasn't sure how it had gotten there, but he believed it was Sam. She had that way about her. He even thought he might eventually like it. He already respected her, he wasn't sure if he could have been as cool as she was when she lied to the IOA directly about the replicator clones of Elizabeth.
They were destroyed, at least, as far as anyone who wasn't part of a select group of personnel knew.
He couldn't read the book anymore. He'd tried to pick it up but something in the cover seemed to have become poisonous to him and John left it in the corner. Maybe it was better that way, he'd always thought finishing it would mean finishing his time in Atlantis and he wasn't ready for that yet.
When his quarters chimed, John had expected Rodney. He'd been reclusive and Rodney only let him get away with a few days of that before the scientist would come bother him until he found out what was eating at him. Teyla would be polite and wait for him to come to her. Ronon would just beat him up because bruises were therapy on Sateda. John was wondering if it was Sam when the door slid open.
Elizabeth's hair was long, curly and full of life as it hung radiately on her shoulders. She was in a green t-shirt, perhaps as testament to her new position, and her hands were clasped loosely in front of her. She had the same black trousers, the same shoes and the same rapt expression she used when she didn't know what to say. The past few months, the weirdness of having five Elizabeths when none of them were the right one, all of that could have blinked out of existence because she was there.
"May I come in?" she asked so gently her words seemed to float.
John nodded and took a step towards the center of the room. He had no chair to offer her, so unless she wanted to sit on the bed, they were going to stand.
"i wanted to thank you," Elizabeth opened neutrally as if he'd simply bailed her out of a difficult meeting. "You went to extraordinary lengths to save me and I--"
"You're welcome," John interrupted simply wondering if she'd leave it at that.
Elizabeth still stood there, like a ghost in his quarters. Both of them stood, breathing without looking at each other and he puzzled over the workings on her mind. Usually he was the one thanking her for saving his ass. On the rare occasions it was him, he was usually smug.
Except this time he didn't feel smug. John felt like hell and he was hoping she'd leave before she could feel it.
"How's being back?" John asked pathetically when it felt like the silence would hang until it choked them.
"Strange," Elizabeth admitted with a half smile that made his heart feel like bursting. "There are new faces here, new policies I have to get myself accustomed to but at the same time it feels like i never left. All that running and fighting with the Replicators was a dream I'm waking up from now that I'm home."
"But you did make it home," John reminded her as he stared into her face and speculated at how much she remembered.
"I should thank you again because you let me die," she continued clearly though her voice was starting to tremble. "I don't have all of my- her- memories of that moment, but i do remember a powerful sense of relief. She drew a great deal of strength from you. I probably owe my life to you for that."
"I was just talking--"
"Many of my memories are still jumbled," Elizabeth spoke over him with a new steadiness he envied. "Jen says they'll get better with time-"
"-You don't have too--"
She interrupted him nearly the moment he spoke. "Chasing comets," she blurted out. "I'd like to think she- I- whatever she is, I'd like to think she's there now. Where you said she could feel free. I hadn't realized what it was to be trapped until I was there, in that stasis chamber and I could feel myself dying in tiny pieces. I kept clinging to you and your promise that you'd let me go. I thought I could will myself out of there, that I could just let go."
"You didn't," John added when her words had faded out of the air.
"I didn't," she repeated as she stared down at her hands. Holding out one of her hands towards him, John stared at the skin and flesh wrapped around the bone and felt his heart catch. He didn't want to touch her because he was desperately afraid one touch would send her into oblivion again, like a phantom or a nightmare.
Forcing himself to lift his hand, his flesh melted into her palm. Elizabeth clung to him running her fingers over his until they stopped perfectly wrapped around his own. "I have this funny memory of your hands being so big I could only hold one finger."
Biting his lip, John dragged his eyes up from their entwined hands. "Elizabeth--"
"Thank you."
rating: PG-13 (mature themes)
pairing: Elizabeth/John
notes: In music, D.S al Coda means you repeat and skip sections until you find the coda. This fic is a little odd, but it's part of that theme. Spoilers for "This Moral Coil", "Lifeline", "Adrift". For
dana_cz (if it's way more angsty than what you wanted, I'll write you another.) "War and Peace" was written by Leo Tolstoy. I only quote him because he is fabulous.
"Do you think as she does?" Zelenka asked the replicant Elizabeth as he watched her frown at her computer terminal. "Do you have the same thoughts?"
Gamma twirled the stylus of her computer and reached for her coffee with her left hand. The room was packed with scientists, and though man of them kept sneaking a look at the replicant, she didn't seem fazed. Zelenka admired that about her.
"No, not entirely," she paused and kept her lips on her cup for a moment. "I think I have more in common with Rodney now that I've worked with him," she mused as she set the cup down. "For instance, I don't need to ingest nutrients, and this coffee will have no effect on my brain, but I feel better knowing it's there."
"What will happen to it?" Zelenka wondered as she set the cup aside and returned her hands to the keyboard.
"My nanites will break it down to the component atoms and use it for fuel," Gamma explained as she bit her lip in concentration. "So I suppose it's not a total waste of time."
"Doctor Weir likes coffee," Zelenka reminded her as he peered over her shoulder and tried not to think about how much she looked like Elizabeth.
"She does," Gamma nodded as she moved over and let him see what she was doing. The chair squeaked on the floor and had he not been so close, he wouldn't have heard it over the argument heating up the other side ofthe laboratory. "But I think it's Rodney's need for it that keeps me wanting it. I don't think Eliz- Doctor Weir- ever felt like her head was going to explode if she didn't get it."
Her eyes looked like Elizabeth's looked when Sheppard's team was late. "You care about her very much, don't you?" Zelenka asked as his hand hovered over her shoulder. He never would have touched the real Elizabeth. She lived in a world of her own, but this one seemed so lost, he couldn't help himself.
To his surprise and amazement, she smiled in the direction of the hand and turned her eyes back to her work without comment. "It was my idea to reprogram her nanites," she admitted without looking up from her computer. "It was my arrogance that got all of us into this impossible situation and if we hadn't agreed to contact Atlantis, my stubborn belief that I could control the nanites would have killed her. Still might really." Stopping her typing, Gamma turned to the sympathetic Czech and patted the hand on her shoulder.
"She's me, she's my mother and she's the most important thing in my very brief life," Gamma explained as she squeezed his hand before releasing it. "I don't know if I have the emotional context to deal with losing her, so I suppose an addiction to coffee I don't need to drink is the least of my problems."
She sounded sarcastic and vaguely like Rodney when he was trying desperately not to deal with something. The tiny exhausted smile was entirely Elizabeth and he couldn't help staring at her instead of her work.
"Do you think we should change the crystal orientation in the hibernation chamber or try and work with what we have?" Gamma asked him as she waited for his response. She hadn't seen him staring at her and Zelenka pretended to be thinking when she looked up.
"Which ones do you want to move?"
"Doctor Weir doesn't shoot like that," Ronon pointed out as he studied the paper target with a grin. "Unless she's possessed by an alien. Then she was a good shot."
"She still feels bad," Alpha reminded him as she shuddered inwardly. "I feel bad and I'm not her."
"I lived," Ronon reminded her as he crumpled up the paper target and tilted his head towards the gym. "Wanna try something else?"
"Sticks?" she asked with a grimace that remind him so much of John Ronon couldn't help grinning.
"Hey, least you can't bleed when I hit you," he nudged her shoulder and watched as her eyes started to shine with amusement. "You're not her," he decided as she watched her strip down a simple black sports bra in the gym.
"Oh?" Alpha asked running a hand through her hair. "I look a lot like her."
"That's the end of the resemblance," Ronon corrected as he tossed a stick over to her. "I don't think she'd be in here dressed like that."
"Doesn't really matter, does it?" Alpha asked as she swung the stick a few times over her head. "Not like I'll distract you or anything."
"You'd distract Sheppard," Ronon teased as he stretched his arms and rolled his neck in preparation.
"You distract Sheppard," Alpha retorted as she parried three blows and hit his chest hard enough to knock him back to the wall.
Ronon grinned wickedly and panted through the pain in his chest. "He's not used to people looking away from where they hit," he grunted as he met her again. This time his stick slammed hard into her back, knocking her to her knees with a solid, satisfying thud. The naked skin on her back flashed silver for a moment as it repaired itself.
"Almost seems like you're cheating," Ronon teased as he helped her up from the floor.
"I can shut them off," Alpha offered as she stopped in thought for a moment. "I think," she murmured as she closed her eyes. "Hit me," she asked as she stiffened.
Ronon obeyed, slamming the stick into her unprotected stomach.
This time an imprint of the stick remained on her flesh, as if he'd drawn it there with silver paint. Alpha looked down and shrugged. "Satisfied?"
Ronon nodded and missed her getting ready to smack him back, hard across the stomach.
"Even," Alpha explained winking as she blocked his retaliatory strike and their sticks cracked hard in air.
"Come here often?" Evan Lorne began lightly as he stopped on the balcony next to one of the Elizabeths. She had borrowed an Athosian shawl from Teyla and she seemed more comfortable than she had been in the meeting. The purple wrap hung lazily over her shoulders and she pulled it a little closer as she looked up.
"Part of me would say yes," Delta smiled and nodded to him. "The other part has never seen anything so beautiful."
"Which part are you listening to?" Evan continued as he smiled and realized she did not have the legendary barriers Elizabeth Weir believed were part of her position. She did have the same beautiful smile.
"My part," Delta answered cryptically as she reached for his hand. Surprised by her touch, Evan let her lift his hand from the railing. "Elizabeth knows you paint."
"We talked about it once," Even nodded calmly trying to come to terms with the idea. "You- she- was happy I had a hobby. Joked that she should consider getting one, someday. That was a couple years ago now. Still doesn't have one, does she?"
"Never really got around to it," Delta conceded softly as she pointed out at the water. "Unless this counts."
"It could," Evan offered optimistically. "You could always take up painting on your own."
Delta smiled at him and headed back into his quarters with a hand on his arm. "Only if someone teaches me."
"I'm going to die in here," Elizabeth whispered to him as he sat down next to the bed in the white quarantine room. "I should have died here." She added as she looked away from his eyes. "You never should have tried the nanites."
"Stop talking like that," John snapped much more harshly than he intended to. "Keller has a plan."
Moaning as she rolled away from him, Elizabeth curled into a ball on her side. "No more plans," she begged with an edge in her voice John had come to associate with the worst of her headaches. "No more far-flung attempts to save my life." She coughed and curled tighter in the bed. "Let me go." Her voice grew raspier as she had more trouble breathing.
Hurrying to the other side of the bed, John watched in horror as silvery pink fluid drained from her lips. There were bubbles in it as she continued to fight the fluid building up in her lungs. There were a stack of small white towels and basins by that side of the bed and grabbing one from the top, he held it against her lips until the spell passed.
Elizabeth caught one breath full enough to cough the piece of lung tissue out of her throat. John stared at it on the towel, pink and silver tissue flecked with blood. Dropping it to the floor didn't make it any less real. Elizabeth was literally falling apart from the inside out. Keller had mentioned putting her on dialysis soon if the modifications to the stasis tube would take any longer than a few hours.
Gasping for her next breath, Elizabeth let him lift her head back up to her pillow. "Can't go on like this," she pleaded as her chest gurgled with blood and fluid. "Please--"
"Keller is going to put you into stasis," John began as he rubbed the last of the bloody sputum from her lips. "We're going to speed up parts of your metabolism, put your body on autopilot--"
"No," she cut him off as she sobbed weakly. "Don't do this."
"What do you want us to do?" He whispered so softly he wasn't even sure he was speaking. "What will you let you do? Transfer the embryo- fetus, whatever you want to call it to Carter and grow up on Earth? This is you we're talking about. Not a thing or a creature."
"You," he repeated with the quiet commanding tone he'd developed in her absence. "You have a choice. You can die. You can give up and leave us again-"
"Stop it," she begged him as she closed her eyes. "How many times have you tried to sacrifice yourself for the city? Two? Four?"
Sitting down no longer seemed appropriate, leaving his chair gave him room to pace. "That was different."
"Different how?" she asked as her eyes popped back open. "You were the only one?"
"Damn right I was the only one," he corrected her. "Who would you have had me send? Rodney? Ford? Ford in the puddle jumper might have been good, that way he wouldn't have gotten his guts sucked out by the Wraith--"
"For god's sake John!" Elizabeth sat bolt upright in bed and her eyes burned with something he'd thought was long dead in her. "You can sacrifice yourself as many times as you want, but I refuse to go through with some kind of ridiculous plan and you try to guilt me?" Her coughing only sounded angry now. "I was supposed to die. I should be dead."
"You're not-" John interrupted her.
"You didn't ask me before you filled me full of these things!" she spat back as she pulled her knees up. When her legs wouldn't move, she dragged them up with her hands. "I was supposed to die--"
"Why is it so damn hard to ask you to live?"
"I would have died human," Elizabeth choked before she repeated herself. "I wouldn't have to live like this."
He couldn't face her when he said it. "You're dying, Elizabeth. You're not living like anything. If we do nothing, you die. If we transfer you to Carter, you might still die. You could even take her with you."
Shaking her head slowly, Elizabeth shoved herself back towards the wall. "Tell her no," she kept shaking her head. "John, don't let her risk it."
"Let us put you in stasis," he argued back finally turning to look at her. "If it doesn't work I will sit with you and watch you die. I can promise you that."
Elizabeth's hand shook as she pointed to the chair by her bed. "No nanites?"
"Nothing," he promised as he crossed his arms and moved towards the chair. "If this doesn't work, I promise you will die."
Smiling as she shut her eyes, Elizabeth leaned back against the wall and sighed. "I'll hold you to that John."
"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by
that Antichrist--I really believe he is Antichrist--" John paused and reached for his cup of water and took a sip. In front of him, Elizabeth glowed golden in the stasis tube. By the wall on his left was the gurney and Keller's medical equipment for when the released the stasis. John's watch ticked past oh-three hundred before he looked up from his book.
"After receiving this news late in the evening, when he was alone in his study, the old prince went for his walk as usual next morning, but he was silent with his steward, the gardener, and the architect, and though he looked very grim he said nothing to anyone," pausing to yawn and stand up, John left his chair and continued with chapter eight of 'War and Peace'.
"I know you've read this before," he reminded Elizabeth as he stared at her through the golden light separating them. "Sometimes it's just nice to have someone read to you. Since you can't argue with me, I'm going to keep going." Clearing his throat, he started with the next paragraph.
By oh-six hundred he was nearly asleep on his feet and Beta appeared with Rodney. "We heard you were reading," Beta began gruffly. "Rodney couldn't sleep, and I don't sleep so I thought we'd--"
Mutely, John handed over the book and retreated to the back of the room. When Rodney opened to the place he had bookmarked, John was already asleep.
Gamma was reading while Zelenka sat beside her and set out food for John. They had a thermos of coffee and it was still hot as he drank it greedily down.
"When Pierre had gone and the members of the household met together, they began to express their opinions of him as people always do after a new acquaintance has left, but as seldom happens, no one
said anything but what was good of him," Gamma finished as she reached the end of chapter fourteen and passed the book back to John. Zelenka had his hand on her back when they left, John caught out of the corner of his eye.
He was half-way through chapter nineteen when Ronon arrived with more food. The Satedan took the fat book in his hand and read with a gentle baritone that surprised John as he slipped away to shower and shave. Ronon was still reading when he came back. He ate dinner and listened to the many reasons Natasha could not marry her lover.
Ronon didn't even slip up on the complicated Russian names.
Alpha came in the night, preferring to sit her vigil when only John was there to see her. They spoke in whispers, sitting against the wall by Elizabeth's feet. "Colonel Carter has made it clear that we are to take one of the jumpers," Alpha whispered as she poured some of her beer into John's empty mug.
"Yeah," John agreed softly swirling the amber liquid. "I asked for one."
"We are leaving tomorrow," she added as she lifted 'War and Peace' up to her eyes and searched for chapter twenty-one. "We will not say goodbye."
John read twenty-two through twenty-six on his own. He was growing hoarse when Lorne and Delta arrived with breakfast and his next reprieve. Delta had paint on her hands and she smiled whenever Lorne caught her eye. When John fell asleep, Lorne was reading and Delta was serenely watching him with the kind of patience he adored and barely understood in Elizabeth.
When he woke up, it was only Teyla. "The first shots had not yet ceased to reverberate before others rang
out and yet more were heard mingling with and overtaking one another. Napoleon with his suite rode up to the Shevardino Redoubt where he dismounted. The game had begun," she finished reading and closed the book on chapter twenty-nine.
"I do not understand the way your people constantly refer to war as a game to be won or lost," she asked as she sat with him on the gurney Keller was saving for Elizabeth. "Do you not understand that war consists only of losses? Of death and destruction?"
"Maybe if we had fought the Wraith longer," John mused as he ran his hand through his hair. "We spent too much time just fighting each other. We never really noticed how important it was to see the big picture."
"It is an impressive story," Teyla nodded to the book as she passed it to his hands. "I think I shall have to read it from the beginning one day."
He hand brushed his shoulder as John began to read, "On returning to Gorki after having seen Prince Andrew, Pierre ordered his groom to get the horses ready and to call him early in the morning, and then immediately fell asleep behind a partition in a corner Boris had given up to him."
"I heard you were reading," Sam began as she slipped into the room behind him. John was pacing as he read aloud. He didn't even see the words anymore, and sometimes he worried that he'd gone over the same part. Elizabeth would have to tell him. If she remembered.
"Keeps me awake," John admitted as he set the book down for a moment and stretched his fingers.
Sam lifted it up and smiled at him softly. "She let me bring General O'Neill back," she offered as she stared at the golden light and the slowly changing curves of Elizabeth's body. "Her vitals are good, considering."
"I don't want her to die alone," John admitted as an excuse and a prayer as he stared at the worn pages of his book in her hands. "I don't care if I'm asleep when it happens. I just--"
"I have some time," Sam offered gently as she found a place with her eyes on the page. "I'll read and I'll wake you."
Keller, two nurses, Rodney and Sam were there when Sam's hand shook his shoulder. "Keller's bringing her out," she said anti-climatically. War and Peace lay on the chair, shoved into the corner and forgotten as Keller and the aides moved the bed in front of the stasis chamber.
Elizabeth's hair had grown more than a centimeter while she'd been in stasis and it was her curls John focused on as the golden field flicked off and she fell. Her legs weren't functioning. Keller was speaking and Sam and the aides were answering her questions. Elizabeth's eyes didn't move. None of her limbs moved and Keller only made a preliminary check of the host's vitals before she started checking the baby.
No one cared that John moved up to her head. It didn't matter that he was touching her hair because she couldn't feel it. He'd felt her hair once, when he'd carried her to the infirmary. It seemed softer now, more forgiving as it slipped from his fingers. The lines on her face and faded away and her skin seemed almost translucently white. Nearly seven months had passed for her cells while her brain had been locked in a trance. Was it gone? Was she already gone?
Keller rolled her arm to the side and began adding the IVs. One went into her elbow, and another into her left hand. One of the aides lifted Elizabeth's leg and started pulling back the sheet that covered her.
"We left her in as long as possible," Keller explained to Sam when she realized John wasn't listening to her. "We shouldn't have to do much more than remove the baby."
Elizabeth's eyelids twitched once and John stopped hearing the voice around him. "You didn't finish," she accused softly. "All that reading--" Elizabeth swallowed and her eyelids moved again. "And you didn't finish."
"Cliffhangers keep us coming back," John murmured just in case he was the only one who saw this. "Didn't you see 'Empire Strikes Back'?"
Laughing weakly, Elizabeth's head moved once from side to side. "No," she answered as if she could sense the disappointment on his face. "What happened?"
"Can't tell you unless you saw the first once," John sighed in mock exasperation. "Which you didn't, did you?"
"No--" Elizabeth replied with the hint of a smirk.
"A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away," John began as he felt someone push a chair in behind him. Sam slipped past him wordlessly and set 'War and Peace' in a corner of the room as she returned to Keller.
John saw the doctor lifting Elizabeth's legs out of he corner of his eye. "One of the best beginnings to a movie you'll ever see," he promised her as he mimed the credits appearing on a screen.
"You'll have to take me," Elizabeth whispered as her eyebrows twitched slightly. The only sign that she felt the contractions Keller had induced was a momentary tightening of the muscles in her neck.
"I'll hold you to that," John echoed her from earlier. Her lips twitched as she remembered.
"It starts with a princess," John explained as he watched in amazement as Elizabeth managed to move her hand. it feebly worked up towards her shoulder and he caught it before she lost the ability to move it any further. "And she's in trouble."
Sighing as she half-opened an eye, Elizabeth looked amused. "Aren't they always?"
"When you open your eyes you're upside down and the world is spread out beneath you like a blanket of blue and white," John explained as he tried to ignore the smell of blood behind his head. He'd asked Keller not to bother cauterizing anything unless she needed to see. It didn't matter to Elizabeth if she bled out or died later from slow brain failure. John had nearly bled out a few times and he preferred that way to go.
"All you hear is the engine because it's so loud it cancels out your breath," John leaned closer to her ear as he watched her screw her eyes shut against the pain. "You nearly forget you even have to breath, it's so beautiful and you're so small up there. Technically you're upside down because space is beneath you but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like you're part of that space and all of you is all around the Earth. you're bigger than the ice and the ocean and everything and if you just stay there. You'll get it. I mean really get it, you can feel it pulse through you like--"
John held her hand closer to his face and watched her knuckles tighten and go white against his hand. "Like nothing I've ever felt. You're everywhere at once and you don't feel the seat and the belts and the straps on your suit. You feel space and the fourteen Gs slamming your eyes back into their sockets when you loose the moment."
Her lips curled slightly into a smile and John realized how grey they'd gotten. Her hand relaxed and he wondered if it was over. Somewhere past the white skin of Elizabeth's leg, Keller and Sam were moving and Rodney had his eyes fixed so firmly to the stasis chamber that he wouldn't have seen Armageddon happen behind him.
"John?" Elizabeth's voice cut through his thoughts like a razor.
"Antarctica," he repeated her last request and kept going with his explanation. "That's a F-eighteen," he explained as he shook himself away from the flurry of movement that was Keller and the nurses. "A helicopter is more like a being able to fly were pure thought, you get up, down, left, right but you don't have to climb and dive like the a fighter. You can drop so low you churn up the snow like a tornado. Remember when you could make tornados in bottles with glitter when you were a kid? And you put the monopoly houses in there? So they worked better?"
"-She's gone," Sam's voice interrupted him as her hand touched his shoulder. "I'm sorry John," she finished as she pulled the sheet up over the ruin of Elizabeth's body.
The hand in his was slack now, limp and cooling. He hadn't seen her go, John realized as it hit him like a punch in the gut. Sam pulled the dead hand away and the hand on his shoulder tightened in comfort.
Keller's lips were set in a hard line as she crossed the room to him. "It'll take us a few minutes to reset the chamber, could you please?"
The baby was in her arms, wrapped in something white and pristine. He'd never seen an infant that small, John realized as Keller handed her over to him. Instead of crying, she still had Elizabeth's mind, Elizabeth's nanites had seen to that, the infant stared at him with incredibly deep blue eyes.
"Hey," John whispered sheepishly taking her away from the corpse. "I know this is weird, but it's going to be over soon. Few minutes of this, some time in the stasis pod and you'll be you and you'll be human and life will be back to normal."
The baby's face scrunched up and John wondered if all infants could manage that accusatory look.
"As normal as it gets around here?" he corrected and watched her face relax. He'd never held a baby who was still damp. By the time he saw them, they usually had hats and booties, but Elizabeth was just wrapped, naked, in the sheet in his arms.
"Puddler jumpers are the best," he dragged himself back to flying for want of anything better to say. "You get in that pilot seat," he began as her eyes bored into him. "You think and you move, it's that simple. No clumsy controls, no suit, no Gs or eyeballs flattening out. You just move."
Her tiny red lips parted and impossibly small fingers emerged at the edge of the white sheet. He nudged them with just one of his and they moved beneath his touch. Her fingers seemed almost too small to move, and John was glad her eyes were probably too untrained to see his face. Rubbing the dampness off with his shoulder, John slipped his finger into the palm of her hand and felt her fingers wrap around his.
"Puddler jumpers in deep space are like being truly free," John sighed and wished he was better and speaking. "You're out there and you feel like you could dance with everything else that's out there. It's when i really understand infinity. Not the mathematical one, but the real one. The one where forever really means- you know. You could chase down comets if you had to. Not that I would," he chided himself as he smiled down at her. "That would be a waste of valuable time and resources."
Her tongue moved inside her lips and John marveled that anything about Elizabeth could have begun so small and meekly. She nearly refused to let go when Sam came to collect her from his arms.
"It'll be a few days before she's herself again," Sam explained as she worked to detach the baby fingers from John's hand. "It's easier this time though, we can age all of her at the same rate."
Nodding stupidly, he watched the baby disappear as Sam walked away. Keller took her next and Rodney was doing something with the wall.
The body was in the corner, forgotten and cooling like a plane that would never need to fly again. John made himself walk away without looking at her. The real Elizabeth was being put into the stasis chamber and in a few days the whole thing would be over. She'd be cleared by the IOA, fill out more forms than she'd ever seen in her life and she'd be back.
He forced himself into the shower before he went to bed. John collapsed after the water had rinsed all the smells of that room off of his skin. Pulling on clean boxer shorts seemed like a formality, but, if there was an emergency, he'd be glad he had. That thought, however unimportant, was the last thing he knew before he fell asleep.
It was five days before he saw her. He'd known she was back. The mood in the cafeteria was lighter, Rodney was making jokes and eating with Teyla more enthusiastically than he had for months. Ronon still seemed amused Colonel Carter had been so quick to let the replicator Elizabeths disappear into the galaxy, he'd even started sitting at her table when they ate at the same time. Sam's stories of early SG-1 missions made his laugh carry across the room.
Elizabeth was released from the infirmary on Monday. By Wednesday she had passed every test the IOA had to offer and Friday morning he had to attend his first staff meeting with her sharing stewardship of the city with Colonel Carter. Sam had agreed that military and scientific decisions would rest with her primarily, while Elizabeth had the responsibilities of personnel, politics and relationships with foreign governments here in Pegasus.
According to Rodney is was amicable and Teyla seemed pleased by the situation as well. Ronon was himself but he took the batch of new recruits that had returned from Earth with Elizabeth to the gym with renewed vigor. Sam was making room for a second desk and the two masks he'd refused to send back to Earth, Calvin and Hobbes as he liked to think of them, were back on the wall behind what would be Elizabeth's desk.
Everything was normal.
Everything was good and happy and as it should be except that he'd scattered her ashes off the southern pier. He'd done it alone. Rodney, Teyla, Ronon- most of the city would have come with him if he had asked, but he'd done it alone. It had seemed foolish because Elizabeth was alive but he'd done it. The little metal case her ashes had been in was at the bottom of the ocean as well because he'd felt like throwing it. He'd thrown it so hard his arm still stung.
War and Peace was back in his quarters. John wasn't sure how it had gotten there, but he believed it was Sam. She had that way about her. He even thought he might eventually like it. He already respected her, he wasn't sure if he could have been as cool as she was when she lied to the IOA directly about the replicator clones of Elizabeth.
They were destroyed, at least, as far as anyone who wasn't part of a select group of personnel knew.
He couldn't read the book anymore. He'd tried to pick it up but something in the cover seemed to have become poisonous to him and John left it in the corner. Maybe it was better that way, he'd always thought finishing it would mean finishing his time in Atlantis and he wasn't ready for that yet.
When his quarters chimed, John had expected Rodney. He'd been reclusive and Rodney only let him get away with a few days of that before the scientist would come bother him until he found out what was eating at him. Teyla would be polite and wait for him to come to her. Ronon would just beat him up because bruises were therapy on Sateda. John was wondering if it was Sam when the door slid open.
Elizabeth's hair was long, curly and full of life as it hung radiately on her shoulders. She was in a green t-shirt, perhaps as testament to her new position, and her hands were clasped loosely in front of her. She had the same black trousers, the same shoes and the same rapt expression she used when she didn't know what to say. The past few months, the weirdness of having five Elizabeths when none of them were the right one, all of that could have blinked out of existence because she was there.
"May I come in?" she asked so gently her words seemed to float.
John nodded and took a step towards the center of the room. He had no chair to offer her, so unless she wanted to sit on the bed, they were going to stand.
"i wanted to thank you," Elizabeth opened neutrally as if he'd simply bailed her out of a difficult meeting. "You went to extraordinary lengths to save me and I--"
"You're welcome," John interrupted simply wondering if she'd leave it at that.
Elizabeth still stood there, like a ghost in his quarters. Both of them stood, breathing without looking at each other and he puzzled over the workings on her mind. Usually he was the one thanking her for saving his ass. On the rare occasions it was him, he was usually smug.
Except this time he didn't feel smug. John felt like hell and he was hoping she'd leave before she could feel it.
"How's being back?" John asked pathetically when it felt like the silence would hang until it choked them.
"Strange," Elizabeth admitted with a half smile that made his heart feel like bursting. "There are new faces here, new policies I have to get myself accustomed to but at the same time it feels like i never left. All that running and fighting with the Replicators was a dream I'm waking up from now that I'm home."
"But you did make it home," John reminded her as he stared into her face and speculated at how much she remembered.
"I should thank you again because you let me die," she continued clearly though her voice was starting to tremble. "I don't have all of my- her- memories of that moment, but i do remember a powerful sense of relief. She drew a great deal of strength from you. I probably owe my life to you for that."
"I was just talking--"
"Many of my memories are still jumbled," Elizabeth spoke over him with a new steadiness he envied. "Jen says they'll get better with time-"
"-You don't have too--"
She interrupted him nearly the moment he spoke. "Chasing comets," she blurted out. "I'd like to think she- I- whatever she is, I'd like to think she's there now. Where you said she could feel free. I hadn't realized what it was to be trapped until I was there, in that stasis chamber and I could feel myself dying in tiny pieces. I kept clinging to you and your promise that you'd let me go. I thought I could will myself out of there, that I could just let go."
"You didn't," John added when her words had faded out of the air.
"I didn't," she repeated as she stared down at her hands. Holding out one of her hands towards him, John stared at the skin and flesh wrapped around the bone and felt his heart catch. He didn't want to touch her because he was desperately afraid one touch would send her into oblivion again, like a phantom or a nightmare.
Forcing himself to lift his hand, his flesh melted into her palm. Elizabeth clung to him running her fingers over his until they stopped perfectly wrapped around his own. "I have this funny memory of your hands being so big I could only hold one finger."
Biting his lip, John dragged his eyes up from their entwined hands. "Elizabeth--"
"Thank you."
