Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Spoilers/Setting: Most of season four, up to and including Missing.
Notes: Begun because Rachel Luttrell's performance in Doppelganger was amazing; expanded once I realized what exactly the writers had put Teyla through this season. Feedback of any kind is love - I have no experience writing the Teyla-voice.
It fell to her to explain to Elizabeth what had been done to her.
John was still nearly too angry to speak, and not trusting himself to try, had left for the moment. Rodney, too, had left again for the observation room above, where she had last seen him staring blankly at his computer screen, the ramifications of his work realized in the fear of the woman below. Therefore it was Teyla who suited herself in hazmat, knowing Elizabeth needed neither anger nor guilt, and did not deserve silence.
She took her hand gently, feeling Elizabeth's eyes on her. It was a wonderful thing to see her alive and well, even knowing what she now was. "We were certain you would not survive this time," Teyla said softly. "The damage was much too extensive."
"Then how exactly was it that I survived?" Elizabeth demanded, and closed her eyes, apologizing the next minute.
Her eyes searched for some familiarity in the room, possessing all of the cold and none of the warmth in its disquieting shade of blue. Carson, she could see Elizabeth wanted to say, for some warmth, some assurance, for it had not been so long ago that Carson would have come. Here instead was Dr. Keller with a scanner, and Elizabeth was luminous in the blues she radiated and reflected. Her eyes determinedly held John's or Rodney's above in the observation room, and just as resolutely looked away. Teyla put a tentative hand as near her leg as she dared, and was glad when she was not brushed away.
"They care for you very much, Elizabeth," she said quietly.
I know, I know, she imagined Elizabeth's response in the silence. It's just difficult to reconcile it all in my mind.
But these were not the words of the Elizabeth who sat before her, who steadfastly held her silence and did not meet her eyes.
It was not difficult to see the moment when reality began to mesh with fantasy in Elizabeth's mind, Elizabeth herself fast disappearing but for sheer determination. It held her head high, kept her stride purposeful, surrounded as she was by four SFs and the confusion of the members of the expedition she had once led. Surreality washed visibly over her, as a sense of finality she did not attempt to describe filled her eyes.
"Elizabeth?" Teyla said softly before her team left, touching her shoulder in blessing.
She only turned and nodded again, tightly, eyes whirling with possibility and the knowledge that this was not where or who she was meant to be.
You have no idea what I went through the last time, Elizabeth's voice echoed in Teyla's mind at her team's return, Ronon's hand soft on her shoulder, the jumper empty behind him. Green eyes wide with a terror not unfounded burned into her memory, attempting to make her understand.
"She knew," John said, once, much later, eyes dark, even as Ronon prepared to leave the city. "Before we even left. You could see it in her eyes."
Teyla was seated across from him in the mess hall, then, suffocating under the same blanket of hopelessness that plagued them all. Inactivity, just for a moment, was a blessing under the weight of their lethargy.
None of us wanted to lose you, Elizabeth.
She had once happened upon Elizabeth in her office late at night, unable to sleep and in need of a tangible presence.
"Elizabeth," she had greeted, to the woman's guilty jump and grin.
"Did Carson send you?" she had asked somewhat sheepishly, waving Teyla into a seat.
"No," Teyla replied, smiling. "Though this time I will not reprimand you for not having retired at," she chanced a glance at her watch. "0200 hours. I would be quite in enough trouble as it was for not resting myself."
Unnoticed before, music of a sort Teyla had not yet heard reverberated through the small room, mutated and indistinct. Elizabeth made to turn it off; but Teyla had stopped her, inquisitive.
One or the other of them had produced chocolate, Elizabeth finally taking a break in the small hours of the morning to explain the concept of a madrigal, a requiem, renaissance. Elizabeth had spoken of composers name Tallis and Byrd, of a once-great queen in the history of her world for whom an entire era was named: Elizabethan. History and etymology twined together in the woman seated before her, and Teyla was once more convinced of the power in a name.
Rebirth, Elizabeth had told her, was the actual meaning of the word renaissance; the period in her history encompassing the birth of an age often described as golden At that moment Teyla had felt the meaning of the word in her bones, the consonants whispering in her mind and flowing through her veins. The rise, the fall, melodies interweaving and intertwining until one was indistinguishable from the others. This was more that mere music, but the embodiment of life itself.
Sleep came late that night, nearer to daylight than sunset.
Tonight, Carson was not here, and nor was Elizabeth, her once-vibrant office bare as if symbolic of her death. Elizabeth herself seemed to hover as a specter in the office that was once hers, as Teyla, haunted, was the one to strip it bare in under an hour, with all the care that was due her memory.
She found herself in front of Kate's door late that night.
Kate appeared, sleepy-eyed but alert. "Teyla?"
Ashamed of her restlessness, Teyla forced herself not to fidget, to hold her head high. "I believe you own a CD player, Kate?" she asked. "May I borrow it for the night, if it is not inconvenient?"
She wanted to talk perhaps less than anything in the world, and she blessed Kate a thousand times over after her initial confusion for retreating into her quarters, and returning with the desired object. Teyla bid her goodnight quietly. Kate let her go with a gentle brush to the shoulder.
In her own quarters, Teyla stretched familiarly, tensions soothed and aching muscles relieved, though the greater pain was not absolved. In a state of half meditation, she let a symphony of polyphony rise and break over her, dragging her sorrow with its rise, nearly banishing it with the fall.
Embrace the silence, she had many times before instructed.
Here the silence was full of things unconquered, and Teyla was quite sure that she was not yet ready for such an embrace; though here, a gradual acceptance flowed. Miserere mei¸ the words said, disembodied though powerful; two, three voices continuing on after one faded. Though she did not know what meaning they held, she felt their power, and their comfort. She sank gratefully into it, an immersion she could not put into words.
One time long ago, she remembered Elizabeth telling her of this language; Latin, if she recalled correctly, a derivation of the Ancient tongue, and the mother of many languages on Earth. The words themselves held power, a history none of them could even begin to comprehend. She remembered Elizabeth early in their first year in the city, taking the rare time to pore over texts and datapads, computers, symbols, letters, of this galaxy and her own; eyes excited as those of a child. It had diminished over time, much like all of their own spirits.
Down the hall, she knew John slept poorly, if at all; that Rodney was awake and distracted in his lab; that Ronon ran the halls of Atlantis until rest forced its hand; that Kate had cried herself to sleep in her own room; that many others mourned the loss of a woman who, to them, had become hope personified, a symbol of the city itself, office light shining like a beacon night and day.
Tonight, sleep would not come. In the corner, a candle reached the end of its wick, and Teyla could not bring herself to light another in its place.
It was a truly awful thing to see Ronon begin to pack the belongings he had accumulated during his stay on Atlantis, knowing that it had both nothing and everything to do with the now constant barrage of change, of loss, this never ending downward spiral they had both hoped to leave behind.
He had taken down the painting of the warriors shrouded in red that had hung above his bed: a stark contrast to John's Johnny Cash poster, and the darkest of Major Lorne's works. Its absence spoke of a disregard of his own personal history, just as newly acquired by Rodney, it spoke of a willingness to forget. Not for the first time, Teyla felt a bitter resentment toward these Satedans. Something was not right.
"Weir would have let me go," he said sullenly to Teyla as she watched him pack, though both she and Ronon knew perfectly well that Elizabeth would have done nothing of the sort.
This is the one place you may still legitimately call your home! she wanted to yell at him. Here you have friends, here you have made family! Would you let go of it all so lightly?
In her own mind, it was unthinkable for either of them, even with her own people a mere gating away. She could not understand, she could see he wanted to argue, though he did not. Her people, her people, she wanted to exclaim in frustration. Her people were hardly her own, any longer; a thought that had long resided in the back of her mind, and never one that she want to examine further. As always, she pushed it away.
Your people are your family, Charin had whispered on her deathbed. They need your strength.
Ronon looked at her expectantly. She left the room, angrily, and did not return.
Her team was falling apart before her eyes.
"You brought my painting back," he later observed plainly, as was his way.
"Rodney felt that you should have it back," she replied, smiling. In truth, he was busy falling over his own feet in his attempts to please Colonel Carter. It might have disgusted her had she not known why it was that he did it; why John alternatively brooded and acted as though nothing was wrong; why Ronon had come so close to leaving the city; why no one mentioned Elizabeth's or Carson's names in the strained silences aside from Dr. Keller with her tentative expressions. Loss compounded loss. The silence stretched them all thin with things left unsaid.
Where he re-hung it, the painting threw Ronon's room into contrasts of blue and red, soothing and clashing, proactive and reactive. She looked on, the satisfaction she derived from its placement meager, but sustaining.
"It shines," Teyla had said once in wonder, surprised after looking in a mirror at her lips.
Kate had laughed. "It's called lip gloss. More subtle than lipstick of lipliner, but still enough to give you a little color or shine."
Teyla had fallen in love, enamored of her shining lips reflected in the mirror. She had denied the eye cosmetics, along with the skin toned creams and powders other women of her own skin tone delighted in ("It's not as if you need them, with skin like that, anyway," Kate had assured her), but had taken a small jar of lip gloss spared by Kate herself. The other cosmetics, which while in moderation were not garish, were to Teyla's thinking a bit overmuch; and while Teyla had enjoyed what Kate had called 'girls' night in', she carefully washed her face of the products once she was in her own quarters. Many women had begun to apply for such products when the Daedalus began making regular rounds, though just as many did not.
"Do all women of you world wear such cosmetics?" she had inquired of Dr. Weir soon after the siege. She had looked up, startled for a moment by the question, and blushed a little with her grin.
"It depends on the culture," the other woman had answered. "Regarding American culture, definitely. At this point there's more of a stigma on not wearing makeup if you happen to be a woman in my county."
"And yet, you do not," Teyla ventured carefully.
Elizabeth smiled. "Well, who had time for it here, really? And who's looking?" She grew a bit more serious. "I take enough time to brush my eyelashes with mascara in the morning, but other than that..."
The question of who was looking certainly did seem to be a large factor in this practice. In the beginning, Major Sheppard had commented with a mere look. Rodney had not at all.
She'd smacked her lips, then; uncharacteristically, perhaps, but to illustrate a point that men in general did not seem to understand. It was amusing for her own sake, if nothing else. She'd laughed at the expression on Rodney's face in pure joy of being alive. It had been a much needed counterpoint to the loss of Aiden.
Today, the flavor was chocolate, the color a subtle gold-flecked brown, and light on her lips, the taste grew sour.
"Kate," she called for the third time at her friend's bedside, gently, this time using her hands to shake her, yet somehow knowing even then the futility of it all. She would have reported for duty had nothing been amiss, would have woken long before now, and not left Teyla pacing her office on the far west side of the city; would have reached for her earpiece upon discovering that she had overslept if she had done so, and radioed Teyla where she waited, worried.
Kate's head merely lolled under her gentle hands, and Teyla grew suddenly cold in a room that she had always seen as nothing by warm and receptive, glowing bathed in the light of the candles she had given Kate. They stood now, unlighted, and to the side.
She felt cold to the touch, but not stiff, and Teyla could not bear to stand any closer, drawing herself and her composure up, standing tall a foot away from the bed.
"Dr. Keller?" she asked again over radio for the second time in as many weeks. Her voice sounded small to her, and she knew not whether this was due to the effect of her own perception or reality itself. She closed her eyes and wished for Carson, his understanding and silent strength; one sympathetic hand traded for another. It was selfish, futile, in more ways than one; and Teyla forced her thoughts away.
Dr. Keller arrived a moment later, seemingly unsure and reluctant, scanner firmly in hand. Teyla had not moved in the interim.
"She did not report for duty and I cannot wake her up," she said in a soft monotone that threatened to break under the stress of her grief; and it occurred to her that perhaps it was this that Dr. Keller feared.
Her wide eyes, stark with shock and a diluted fear rather than Carson's empathy confirmed what Teyla had known all along. The gentle easing from sleep, the brush of a hand on her shoulder; serious eyes from which she could not escape. She continued to stare at her, silently, until it was said aloud, and made true.
"She's dead."
With those words Teyla could neither find it in her to leave or to stay. She stayed because it required less energy, less thought, and offered less opportunity to break down as she had wanted to since the day she had woken to find that Caron was dead. Unnerved, Dr. Keller eventually left. Teyla did not follow suit until Colonel Carter's unfamiliar hand, though gentle, led her out of the room and her eyes away from her friend's body, dehumanized to the stature of an anonymous body in an anonymous bag.
"We are not hooking up!" Teyla said, once, eyes wide and hair once again long and restored to its former soft waves. "It's just dinner!"
Anachronism had plagued her, then, and refused to let go. She spoke the vernacular of the expedition members as easily as she never had. John once again mutated before her eyes, and attacked her as a Wraith would, in a tent she had once, many years ago, called home. Ronon stood by casually, while outside her father was taken.
It was enough to fear that life itself was the nightmare, a place of futurism and deceit, but for the hollow feeling of reality that ached, somewhere deep within her.
Would that the basest of her fears was others' suspicion of a relationship of hers; that she could return to the pettiness of youth that for her had never existed, vanishing in the year she came of age to the sound of clashing Bantos staves and the screaming of darts, of harvesting and resettlement, continuous and unceasing.
There was to be a memorial. She suspected John had give Colonel Carter her name as one of Kate's friends, for the Colonel had approached her, asking her to give the eulogy in lieu of Dr. Weir.
She agreed without hesitation, preparing it in a way that Colonel Carter could not understand, filling it with all the emotion that hers, by right, could not have had. Her words upon Kate's death had been kind, but impersonal, subjected to an empathy both personal and detached that Teyla, at least, could not bear.
She stepped away form the center of the room when it was over, standing near the crowd but not becoming a part of it, the place she might have stood marked now only by a chasm of emptiness. Elizabeth, coming to stand next to her at Carson's memorial: her eyes, her stance, haunted, dejected. Teyla sighed.
Perhaps her own eyes then had reflected and unconscious understanding, the memory of dozens of friends and family lost, and dead. Teyla had been raised to believe that there was not much difference between the two.
And perhaps it was this difference that led her to believe there was a memorial missing, a seemingly irreverent and blatant refusal to acknowledge the deeds of one woman's life that angered Teyla, much as it had at the loss of Aiden Ford. Because there was no tangible evidence of a body or a death, did this take away Aiden's, Elizabeth's rights to remembrance?
And perhaps it was merely the difference in mentality between the people of Athos and of Earth, who held no memorial for those that were lost, and not yet dead. But the lost had always refused to hold their peace, and screaming in Teyla's mind, demanded remembrance. Willingly, she had always granted it, her mind host to a hundred kin and countrymen lost to enemies far and near, human, Wraith, and Replicator alike, viewed from the eyes of a seven year old girl to a thirty year old woman.
She had hoped, when she had come to Atlantis... she sighed, and left the thought unfinished. Kate's death in its heavy futility sometimes seemed to Teyla to overshadow her life, even knowing that the hollowness of her death was not transferable to her life.
Kate's body brushed past her, concealed in her coffin. Teyla thought perhaps she should be glad instead that she had no suffered at the hands of the Wraith; or of the Replicators. Her heart grew heavier.
"That really was beautiful, Teyla," Rodney said afterward, shaking her from herself, eyes for once serious and still. She briefly laid a hand over his, and smiled with all the melancholy she felt.
A week after Kate's memorial, Teyla found herself in the commissary next to a full window. Idly she watched the waves she knew would crash upon the piers of the city, unseen; watched the subtle shifts of light and shadow upon the water, never assured because of its continuous movement. It was a constant game of guess and conjecture.
For nothing was certain. The sun rose slowly, reluctantly. Teyla watched in silence, the solemnity absolute, the comfort meager, but no less welcome. She basked in it: soft oranges and blinding yellows to the darker reds caught in the delicacy of the clouds far above; the invisible washes of waves that were not yet waves, but mere currents. The potential was hollow; the action awful.
"Teyla, is it?"
She raised her head slowly to see Katie Brown, who she was sure knew her name for a fact. She blinked, and nodded.
"Yes."
The hesitation and uncertainty shone through her eyes as certainly as the sun, which cast her in shade and silhouettes. Her profile held a tray of food much like that which sat before Teyla herself.
"May I sit with you? I've come to breakfast somewhat earlier than usual because of an early meeting," Katie explained quickly.
Teyla thought idly that her hair reminded her of Kate's after she had decided that her natural blonde no longer suited her. Highlights glinted in Katie's hair with her movement in remembrance, a reminder of what was here and now, rather than long past and irretrievable.
"Certainly, though I must warn you, I'm not very good company at the moment," Teyla said, gesturing to the seat across from here, where Katie gratefully took her seat.
The same warning coming instead from a sardonic Elizabeth in that first year, deep in thought and cradling a cup of coffee or tea, rang in her mind. Facing the sunrise in the commissary, the reds had illuminated her face and the colors she wore.
It is not the conversation which makes good company, Teyla had assured her with a smile, but the understanding between those involved. Elizabeth had returned it, and vulnerable, had turned back to face the rising sun with Teyla, all the unspoken insecurities flowing in between.
"And you are Katie Brown, are you not?" Teyla conceded by way of politeness; for though there was not yet such an understanding here, there was no need for overt rudeness.
Later in the day, seeing Katie deep in conversation with Rodney, she realized it was probably his doing that Katie had come to rise early and sit with her. Once she would have taken it as an insult, though time had since them caused many changes.
I have enough trouble earning the respect of your people without them thinking that I am crazy! she had exclaimed once, years ago, to then-Major Sheppard who was then the only person she felt she was able to trust, what with paranoia and guilt pushing her mind to extremes in those days immediately preceding the siege. Frequent clashes with Dr. Weir over protocol for her own people, unwelcome brushes with the darker workings of her own mind. Hypertensity had prevailed. She couldn't have been the only one during that time sleeping little or not at all.
And you are?
Kate. Heightmeyer.
Early morning sunlight and the crashing of the waves. The wind blew in synchrony, over her face, through Kate's blond hair. An understanding that, if at first unwelcome, was present and undeniable. Vulnerability, which while easy to understand and accept in others, had always been difficult to show.
Strange how the memory just goes when we're tired, her voice tentatively echoed across three years.
Stranger still how hers refused to, Teyla thought, eyelids dropping though the last rays of the day's light pierced insistently through. Her stomach roiled in response.
Teyla had been born and raised on Athos, and known season wherever they traveled: winters and summers harsh and mild, unbearably cold and unbearably hot. Living for three years in a place affected little by seasonal change (Rodney had explained it as axial tilt, she thought) had disabused her of the memory of the chill, the sweltering heat.
Here the seasons changed with time, and it seemed as though time marked itself more pointedly. Autumn, she believed the season was when they first arrived, gave way to the chill winds of winter. She had forgotten the thrill of a shiver, of cold seeping into her skin but not quite to her bones; and alone on a little-used balcony overlooking nothing but the sea itself, the wind whipped around her as she closed her eyes. There was a joyous freedom in the rush, and a sorrow in the sound of it all: the quiet rustling of hair and clothes, the soft whistling of the indefinable between building and tower and pier.
The rush of air, the thrust of her blade; a dance of deadly accuracy, fed by her raging desperation.
My people! She had cried. Where are my people?
Her blood on the side of her face; a Bola Kai's on her hands. Adrenaline mingled with sweat, and she growled to taste it. Flesh and blood – it was the only way she knew she was alive, bone connecting with bone, blood swelling around her burst vessels, internal and long unnoticed.
You were born to a higher purpose, had said Charin. To be the leader of our people.
The struggle within her did not abate, and Teyla suspected it never would, questions hounding her in retrospect concerning her ever having left her people at all. It was the right thing to do, she had argued to herself many times over the years. It was right to form such an alliance, to be at the forefront of the fight.
She told herself that their fate would have been the same had she been with them during the attacks, that had she not made and fought for the ties to the Atlantean people their fate would have been worse; one of starvation and destitution, of constant flight over unknown territory. It did not ease her guilt, or her worry.
Her child, her people; oh, that her child would never know this struggle!
The impossibility of it all surged within her and gave way to furious tears she had not allowed herself since she herself was a child. Her people, her people! The wind sang its lament with her.
Who are you?
Pride had overtaken defiance in her response. I am Athosian, she had replied, strongly.
A backhand, a leer. The thrust of her blade. It did not satiate her anger.
A hundred cries wanting remembrance took up residence in her mind; and wearily, leaning against the rail, she allowed it, slowly, slowly, identifying each by name.
Her people were abstract and undefined in their words, laying just over the horizon now so obscured by the mists; they were solidified in their intangibility and disappearance, sands and vapor that slipped through her fingers at her definition.
It was a protest. I am one of you, she cried, and no one heard, her own place among them having been long filled in her absence.
Renaissance, one of them whispered. Compassionate eyes, Kate's or Carson's or Elizabeth's, looked on her in concern. Charin gazed at her from the center of a ring of stones where she lay on a bier, motherly and at peace.
The rise, the fall; Miserere mei, cried a voice. There was little comfort in the truth, though she clung to it.
She dreams in the silence, she thinks, and cannot recall when reality began to blur with subconscious. Someone offers her popcorn in the backseat of a jumper. She accepts the offering, silent in the wonder that had so often overcome her in her first few days in the city. Sacred ground; peace will be found, supplements her mind, for it is a natural conclusion, and one she does not doubt, stepping so lightly and in such wonder.
It gives rise to her faith.
And because she is asked to, she sings, in ceremonial dress, standing tall in the back of a jumper. Her people wait for her, here, at this midway point they never seem to move from, mainland and Atlantis equidistant. The wind existent only outside the ship catches in her dress, blows around her. Teyla relishes it. Abruptly, she finds herself again in uniform, tac vest over her heart, Charin's abandoned grave before her: a marker, a testimony to life. The irony makes her chest ache.
Your people are your family, Charin's specter says again.
Then I am truly alone, Teyla states despondently, but Charin merely smiles sadly, and is gone.
Her people look to her; but the moment has passed, and she politely refuses to sing. Teyla shrugs it off, standing alien among family.
I'm pregnant, she whispers in lieu of song, celebration overshadowing lament if only for a moment, but no one hears, dissolute mist in the darkness.
She woke to Dr. Keller's concerned face above her. "Teyla?" she asked, worriedly.
There was fear in the other woman's eyes, as much for her as of her. Her people, her people; actions necessary and therefore unregrettable. Her anger was deserved. There was no more to it.
She found herself standing at a crossroads, the wind brushing her face, tangling her hair. Her people looked at her expectantly. Her lover rose from the darkness. Carson exclaimed over his happiness for her, Kate looking on in both approval and concern. She mouthed words Teyla could not hear, though she tried.
But then the wind washed over her face as a caress, even as a warmth spread through her body, and she was lost to anything else.
Circle renews, whispered Charin; Renaissance, whispered Elizabeth. Teyla's hand fell instinctively over her belly for the first time.
"Come," she said, drawing herself up, decision and action thrumming through her, familiar and mutated. She relished it. "Someone will be looking for us, by now."
Jennifer joined her, and Teyla did not look back.