Author: alastria7

Title: Moral Support

Characters: Weir, Lorne

Rating: T

Disclaimer: All things Stargate Atlantis owned by MGM TV and Double Secret Production, in association with Gekko

Films and the Sci-Fi Channel. No infringement of copyright is intended and no money earned.

Synopsis: John Sheppard is undergoing a transformation by the Iratus bug, but who's there for Elizabeth?

Moral Support

Jewel upon jewel glistened in the ocean's relentless dance of muted urgency, but Elizabeth Weir's exhausted brain only half-registered the majesty of it as she stared down into the waves from her position on the East Pier. Her brain had long since crawled into a safe haven somewhere towards the rear of reason, there to curl up and pretend that all was well; her tired eyes only pale messengers that someone might be alive and living behind them.

It would be a kind of sacrilege, it could be argued, to be normal while John Sheppard lay dying in the infirmary, his body a prisoner of the spreading Iratus bug, threatening to re-write his DNA to the point of non-existence.

How could a life-form be so stupid as to insist it live at the cost of the death of its host, therefore threatening its own life? Such short-sightedness was baffling, to say the least. If only she, Elizabeth, could reason with the invader in John's system; if only she could try to...

"Ma'am?"

Dr Weir started; her thoughts thrown into chaos, ending in a full stop as her body told her it was not currently her best friend - thoughtlessly she'd abused it by the pose she had been striking for some unspecified and seemingly endless time, leaning over the balcony, and it screamed at her now as she straightened herself up and looked around. She knew the voice. "Evan. Hey." What point in hiding her grief? She didn't bother. Major Lorne knew the score.

"You were here over an hour ago, when I passed. You're still here."

She nodded her agreement and turned around, leaning over the balcony once more. Staring back down at the ocean, her old friend by now, she saw nothing of it.

He knew why she was out here. "Any news?"

"Nothing," she told the waves. "Teyla, Ronon and McKay are with him. Becket said he'd call me if... if there was any change." To Elizabeth, 'change' could only mean the colonel's impending death and she lapsed into a painful silence, her mind's eye relentlessly replaying the vision of John Sheppard, or what had been John Sheppard, in the infirmary; his eyes golden with a cruel black streak slashed down each one, more lizard-like than human, and his poor skin mutating. Not what she wanted to see. It took some effort but she dragged herself away from the memory and turned back to her visitor. She frowned. "Did you want something, Major?"

"Yeah." His expression was almost shy. "I want to be here, for you... I mean, with your permission, Ma'am."

She was outwardly unresponsive, apparently just staring at him, but inside it was tumultuous.

Looking into her eyes, he saw it all at once, like a many-faceted piece of music coming together as a whole. Her appearance was a shock. He might have expected it, but he was unprepared for the depth of hurt he saw in her. But there was something else, another side to the woman he thought he knew – she was like a lighthouse, usually, shining the way for her team and keeping them safe, but right now he saw fear, exhausted fear, washed up and out of control, as if her lighthouse beacon had suddenly darkened and a ship was perilously close to the rocks, a ship holding someone she cared about, deeply, and all she could do was watch.

He had learned all that from a few seconds of eye-contact with her, but she hadn't rejected him, so his mission was still intact. Growing bolder, Lorne increased his volume and stepped a little nearer to her. "You shouldn't be alone at a time like this, unless you'd prefer it, of course."

She sniffed, a small unconscious sign; she wondered if it had managed to relay to him that his concern had touched her. Because it had. "Big leader, Evan..." she began in explanation, before turning her head away from him to resume her sightless search of the ocean once more. "It doesn't always do to show those I lead the extent of my feelings. That's why I came out here."

"Think maybe you could show me?"

Her eyes met his. "Excuse me?" she asked in disbelief, as she straightened to face him.

OK. Forward. "Look, you're my boss, so if you tell me I'm out of line here, I'll go... but you look like you could use a hug."

She looked down at his hand on her shoulder and stood before him biting her lower lip. It was clear she would offer no resistance. Her eyes attempted to shut out the day, the memories, the pain, by closing tightly, ejecting the tears they'd held onto in channels down her cheeks, followed by a fresh onslaught as he pulled her close. Gratefully, she clutched at Evan's jacket with her fists, like a person might cling in rescue to their rescuer; and buried herself deep in his strength.

It went through him, her pain. But, worse, he could do nothing to ease it, other than what he was doing right now; he had to be content with that and so he let her cry, rocking her slightly, both arms wrapped tightly around her. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to make it right, have her smile, but all he could do was to slide one hand up to cradle her head, stroking it occasionally until she found a strained version of peace. Then her voice reached him from somewhere in the chest of his jacket.

"He's dying, Evan. He's dying in there, and there isn't a damn thing I can do about it." She allowed fresh sobs before adding quietly, "I let him down."

With his chin against her hair he objected firmly, "Everything's been done that could possibly have be done, you know that." The next words were hard for him to say, but he knew them to be true. "He knows you'd walk through fire for him."

"I would," she agreed. Pulling back, her swollen eyes squinting as she re-introduced them to the stabbing light, she sniffed and rubbed her nose with her hand. "For any of them," she added, thinking of his team. "We're family now."

"I noticed that, soon after I arrived. And I've seen the way you worry about them all but, you know something? Whenever you've been challenged somehow, either in Atlantis or elsewhere, they all give you the same love, the same respect and care, the same concern. It goes both ways. I thought you should know that."

She drew breath to respond but was interrupted by a message through the communicator and she stood back fully from Lorne, frowning at him. She tapped the radio attached to her ear while she scanned his pale grey eyes, afraid to let go of them lest she fall.

It was the doctor.

Becket had a plan - she was to meet with him immediately - there was no time to lose.

That they knew.

"Come with me?" she asked of the major beseechingly. It was not an order; not a request, really - more a cry from the heart for a solid base from which to come in all this uncertainty.

They exchanged a brief look. "Let's go," he urged, and they took off at speed towards the nearest transporter.

Lorne liked his commanding officer well enough. The colonel was efficient and his sharp brain liked to think outside the box, a trait Top Brass were often quite allergic to. Yet here, in Atlantis, Elizabeth was all the Top Brass that mattered, and John's ways mostly suited her style of leadership, he knew. Sheppard got the job done and Elizabeth admired his style. She liked him.

The question in the gallant major's heart right now was, "Exactly how much does she like him?" If the show of despair he had just witnessed from her was any testament, she liked him a lot.

So, okay, she would never he his.

With that thought, he almost stopped running. "What?" he demanded of his mind.

"Oh, you didn't know?" his mind taunted back at him.

"Know what?"

"My, aren't we the dumb one today, pal? You're in love with her!"

"Oh, c'mon... what? In love? With Dr Weir? Elizabeth?"

But he didn't fight back. His mind had been to university. It knew a thing or two. And it was right.

"But you got here too late, kiddo; she loves Johnny boy," it taunted again.

He saw the smiling, excited hope that was sweeping through and animating Weir's face – Elizabeth's face – as they ran into the transporter together and she touched the panel on the back wall. There was a possibility that John might be helped and she was beginning to glow with the hope of it. Her expression warmed the part of him that had just accepted his feelings for her and, in that same moment, he let go, deferring to Colonel Sheppard in the matter of her heart.

He smiled back.

Weir and Lorne, together with Rodney, Teyla and Ronon, listened intently to Carson Becket excitedly outlining his idea. Although the previous and most dangerous mission for the harvesting of the Iratus bug eggs had ended in disaster, with the death of two good men, Dr Becket seemed intent on sending a near-dying Sheppard out on the same mission... to try again.

It made sense. Sheppard was more Iratus insect than he was human being by now anyway, the doctor explained; the bugs guarding the eggs would treat him as kin and leave him alone to walk freely amongst them. It would be all right.

Carson assured that the colonel's deteriorating state of mind, and the violence that had frequently accompanied it, could be halted by an injection, one which would keep him lucid for a ridiculously short space of time... although hopefully long enough for him to achieve his objective. Should it not prove long enough, it would no longer matter, as John would no longer be John - unrecognisable, lost to them, decaying to death – so what did they really have to lose?

The plan was an outside chance, they all knew that. Lorne watched more of Elizabeth's hope surface, to be fought in plain sight by her fear that the bugs might overwhelm John and kill him anyway, but in the end she did the only thing she could possibly do. She authorised the mission.

Oh, it would work. But none of them knew that yet.

In the weeks following the drama, the details of John Sheppard's miraculous escape from death and his remarkable recovery had spread to all corners of the City of the Ancients. To many people present, on that floating world, it had hit a place deep within them, a place they had no wish to visit, a place where they didn't want to consider the possibility that their life could expire, here, tucked away in another galaxy, on a world so very far away from the Earth they grew up on and loved. But it came candy-covered because somehow, against the odds, the colonel had survived.

Lorne hadn't seen any more of Elizabeth Weir, outside of briefings and business, since that day. He'd naturally assumed what more than half of the expedition had assumed by now – that Elizabeth and John were close, maybe already lovers but certainly an item. In fact he knew it, for hadn't he seen it written all over her face that day on the East Pier? Hadn't she been totally distraught at John's condition, and wasn't it more than clear that she cared deeply for the man?

To ease his frustration, he'd terrorised the punch-bag in the gym to the point where, had it been human, it might have begged for mercy. He ran, often jogging his brain into oblivion – a nice place, he decided, where he found no mind-pictures of Elizabeth and John, together, no ability to think at all in fact, just one foot in front of the other, endlessly. And, of course, sleep worked well. There he could splash about in the ocean with her; he could drag her through the surf, laughing, and could fall in a crumpled heap on the sand with her, tussle, make out...

But the stark reality was that her happiness, presumably at John's continued existence, was clear for him, for everyone, to see. Elizabeth seemed lit from within as she bounded through her days and, from afar, he did his best to be happy for her.

But it hurt.

They had met briefly a week ago. She had come into the mess hall and made a bee-line right for him, her hand resting lightly upon his back as she'd asked him to be sure to present a report to her. The report wasn't that important, he knew, but he hadn't allowed his mind to make anything of it. He'd made eye contact with her briefly before she'd left and, for a second, wondered if there was a fire behind those blue/grey pools, fire for him, and then he'd dismissed it as his wild, hopeful imaginings. She was John's, after all. He had been mistaken.

After that he hadn't exactly gone out of his way to avoid her... well, maybe he had, but it seemed that the best bandage for his hurt right now was not to let their paths cross too much outside of the missions and their general work on Atlantis. Face to face, he wasn't sure he could hide from her what was in his heart - and he was doing quite well with the whole avoidance thing until one evening.

As he lay on the bed, reading in his room, there came a knock at his door. Casually dressed in loose training gear, he ran a hand over his 'designer stubble' chin and slid off the bed, crossing the room to open the door personally. Elizabeth Weir stood there, smiling awkwardly at him, but his temporarily surprised brain gave no signal to his body that he should move aside, to allow her entry into his room.

"May I come in?" she asked with some humour, her head cocked to one side and a raised brow threatening.

"I'm guessing I couldn't stop you," he announced, smiling, coming to life. He stood back and allowed her to pass.

"You mind?" she asked, indicating the bed.

He went to it and ran an arm across the rumpled cover, smoothing it out, depositing his book onto the nearby table. "No. Go right ahead."

She sat and smiled at him while he took the chair, and she sat there, gathering her words before she spoke, drawing strength, as she had done before, from the depths of his pale grey eyes. "Evan, it's taken me longer than I would have liked to say this. I wanted to thank you for that day, on the pier, when you came to me." She raised her brows and allowed a quizzical expression. "Although you know I have to kill you now, I suppose?" she joked.

He suppressed a grin, going instead with her quizzical lead. "I'm not promising to hold still while you try," he warned. "But you might like to enlighten me as to why it's so important that I die - if you want to, that is." He was enjoying himself.

"Uh huh. You've seen me vulnerable, Major. You might talk so, I'm sorry, I just can't let you live. I hope you understand," she added sweetly.

He leaned back easily, comforted beyond reason by her gentle bantering. "In that case, I regret to inform you, Ma'am, that I have to kill you too."

"Oh?"

His brain deceived him; for a few wondrous moments he believed she might actually be flirting with him. "Look," he responded happily, looking around the room for effect, almost as one would on stage, checking that no one could hear, "It isn't exactly the he-man-thing, is it," he teased, "to go around showing as much concern for a woman as I did? If this ever leaks..." he looked around again, "if it ever gets out that I've got a soft side to me - me, a toughie from the Air Force – well, I'm telling you, my men are going to..."

"Umm," she interrupted, nodding. "I see your point." She grinned again. "Tell you what - my silence for yours. Does that work for you? Do we have a deal?"

His teeth revealed themselves beautifully through a wide smile. "Can I trust you?"

Stifling a wider grin, she attempted to promote a frown for good measure as she countered, "I don't know, can you?"

He clicked his teeth and shook his head a few times, looking away from her.

"Rat," she teased, allowing the easy silence that followed between them to lengthen before asking seriously, "I've been meaning to ask you... why did you come to me that day?"

"Damsel in distress. You on the pier... I saw you twice in the same hour. You were a mess."

"Thanks!"

"I thought maybe you could use the support."

"Major, I heard at least a half a dozen personnel slow their steps and then walk on by. Plenty saw. No one else came to me. But you did."

The gentleness of her voice was taking him somewhere he knew he would derive no benefit from visiting as his brain stalled further indulgence by reminding him abruptly that she 'belonged' to another. He changed the subject. "So how's the colonel now?" Of course he knew exactly how Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard was. John was his commanding officer and he saw him daily. But he needed to steer her away.

She searched his face suspiciously, narrowing her eyes. "He's fine. But then you know that."

"He's lucky to have you."

She drew in a deep breath, bringing her chin down, staring at her lap before levelling her gaze at him. "He has me... as a friend, Major. A friend. Nothing more."

Evan was no fool. He knew what he was being told. That, and the predatory look of determination in her eyes as she pushed an unspoken point home. "But everyone thought..." he began, set to argue the Sheppard Influence over her love life.

"Well, they're wrong."

"You've been so happy since his recovery," he argued still. "Everyone's noticed."

She tilted her head back a little and gazed at him. "You want to know why?" He didn't speak and she continued, "That day, the day we were all certain John was dying? He was my trusted friend and confidant, a work colleague who offered total commitment and support, someone I depended on, the finest... and I was losing him. I was falling apart, Evan, and then you were there; the only person I really wanted to see out on that pier that day - and you came through for me."

His brain couldn't own it. "I'm not sure I understand."

"I've been so 'obviously' happy since then, not only because John survived, but because I keep remembering how you held me that day; how your strength filled me, and how that made me feel. You gave me a safe place to explore my emotions without concern for our ranks or anything other than the moment." She got up and walked around the room, talking without looking at him. "Evan, I've noticed you, ever since you came to Atlantis, in fact, and it might be my turn to be out of line, but I've come here tonight to ask if there's any chance that," she stopped walking and stared at him, "you might have feelings for me?"

He let out a gasp; his head fell back as his eyes searched the ceiling. Then he gave way to laughter and when he looked back at her, she was on her knees beside him. "All along I thought it was you and John;" he revealed, ignoring her question, "that I had no..."

"Is that a yes?" she interrupted firmly, her hand on his knee. She titled her head to one side, awaiting his answer.

"I think it could be a yes," he affirmed with mock caution. He covered her small pale hand with his, completely enveloping it, and then he scooped her up as he rose from his seat, his arms around her waist, pulling her into an impromptu whirl of noisy celebration around the room, a celebration which slowed as they both stared expectantly at each other. He needed to ask, "Are you sure?"

She half-shook her head and grinned. "Leader material, Evan. Have to be sure, about almost everything, before I make any decisions around here." She nodded. "I'm sure." She rested her hands on either side of his face. "Are you?"

"Ask me on our tenth anniversary," he suggested, before taking up what he saw as the great privilege of being able to kiss her at last.

End

alastria7