Promises Kept
I feel safe. In this place where any day could be your last. I know about this well, I have seen so many of the sick and the injured die only the lucky live, but right now I feel like everything will is perfect. I am right where I want to be.
Before you I felt fear. Fear that I wasn't good enough to be here. Fear that everyone would see how weak I am. Fear that every time I step through the Stargate I will never step back. More than all of that I fear that you don't care for me the way I care for you.
When I first came to Atlantis I heard about you from other, from the people I work with. How could I not? You are part of the best team on base. When I saw you, spoke to you for the first time you blew me away. Everything they said about you and more was true. I saw it all because you let me in.
It wasn't easy, especially at first, for either of us. You have been hurt so badly before, and it has been hard for you to let anyone in me included. I have always felt like I was on the outside, away from others for one reason or another. Maybe that is why we are so good together. We have both been looking in from the outside at times.
When I was taken captive I thought I was done for. While I was forced to march though the wilderness trying to convince Kiryk that I could take out his tracking device, because I knew someone who had once been like him. I tried to convince him that he could be free from being hunted by the Wraith. The whole time just under all that all I could think about was you. I wanted to see you at least one more time.
When I saw you then after all of that I knew I knew I had to tell you everything. I couldn't take the risk that one of us would not make it out of the next problem and not know that you had a place in my heart. It strikes me as odd that we could spend so much time trapped together and still not know much about you. Granted there was a lot on our minds at the time but when it was all over I felt that with anyone else there the whole thing would have been much more stressful. Now though I think that we can find out everything. Maybe there will never be enough time for us to find out everything we want to know no matter how long.
It doesn't matter though if we only have a few more days, months, or even years together. I promise to you that I will make the most out of whatever time we have together. I love you. I love you with every bit of me, my heart and my soul. They are all yours for the rest of my life.
--
He found this letter stuffed into a drawer like Jennifer had hastily put it there. The drawer had a number of other pages just miscellaneous notes and letters from her father. He could remember one night about a month or so ago he had woke to find her missing from her spot on the bed. She was sitting at the desk, bathed in the soft light from the desk lamp, she was writing and when he said her name she opened a drawer and pushed whatever she was working on into a drawer. Was this what she had been writing? He might never know the answer now.
She had joked with him once about never leaving Atlantis because it seemed like only bad things happened when ever she did leave. She never thought about the more normal dangers of her own world. She had gone home for a visit. He was supposed to follow a few days later she said she wanted to talk to her father before they met. He was told she had been out shopping, and on her way home she swerved to avoid hitting a dog and lost control of her car. She lost control and hit a truck head on. The people in the truck were fine just some cuts but she died almost instantly. Others tried to tell him it was a blessing that she died so fast that she didn't suffer. He felt differently he thought a blessing would be to have her in his arms.
He kept the paper safely tucked away, and he pulls it out every now and then and reread each precious word written in her beautiful hand. While he read he would allow him self to remember the time they had together, a time that ended far too early for his likening a lifetime would have been too short. Often he would go to the South Pier and that is where he thought most about her. The ocean so very like her at times it appeared calm and then the storms that churned, she never thought she was like the ocean but he saw it even if she didn't.
He was there one evening when his team-mates found him. They didn't know if he was aware of them or not but they choose to say nothing. They all knew how deeply he cared for the Dr. and none of them wanted to interrupt. So they quietly turned and headed back the way they came. It was Teyla, however that was the last to leave and as she did she could have sworn she heard him speak it was whispered and broken but she heard it nonetheless.
"I love you Jennifer and you kept your promise."
