Letters
by Jules
Teyla stands just inside the door, hands at her sides. She waits for her eyes adjust to the dim light and takes in the room. Not just clean, but tidy, which has always surprised her. It smells like the scrubbed sterile air of Atlantis, but it smells like him, too. And the idea that his scent will eventually fade leaves a hollow in the pit of her stomach.
It is strange to be here alone. She knows she has always been welcome
anytime
but this is not her place and these are not her things and it seems wrong to disturb them. Leaving them alone, though…that feels too much like she is visiting a shrine. Or a tomb. Her eyes drift to the bed. To the sheet that dips slightly in the middle of the mattress, taking the shape of the body that usually occupies it. The one they may never recover. Just gone. Like so many people she has known.
She makes a slow circuit of the room. Hands hover over each object and descend to touch a few. She runs her fingers over the handles of the fighting clubs she gave him. Thinks of him sprawled flat on his backside and her lips twitch into a short-lived smile. She spins a fat rubber wheel, rolls the football beneath her palm.
Toys for the big kid.
She wonders if it will all be packed up and sent back to Earth like the possessions of the other fallen members of the expedition. If there is even anyone there to receive it. He has always talked of things he left behind, but rarely of people. And when he says "home", he means Atlantis. Says. Said.
The hollow in her stomach becomes an ache. Grows to fill her chest. She glances at the desk. At the collection of fake insects and objects bearing the likeness of a creature called Spider-man. A joke, he'd explained to her.
I hate bugs.
So they gave you…bugs.
Exactly.
She smiles, tight-lipped and unsteady. The Atlanteans have a sense of humor about the oddest things. John has tried to explain. Has said that sometimes they need to laugh at the absurdity of their situation. To her, little of it seems absurd. But he has often assured her that a good percentage of what he has seen in the Pegasus galaxy can be charitably called
extremely fucked up
extraordinarily unusual.
Teyla blows out a breath and makes her way to the desk. Sits gingerly on the chair and pauses with her fingers on the drawer for a long moment. She considers leaving it closed and fleeing the room. Instead she pulls it open and takes out the small stack of envelopes pushed up against the back of the drawer. Names on each of them in neat block print. Elizabeth. Rodney. Ronon.
The last one is for her. The only one she can deliver, because the others have all gone. She has made her pleas and prayers to the Ancestors for their safe return but she expects nothing. Her time on Atlantis has slowly wrung the superstition from her, but part of her fears that tampering the way they have has brought this upon them. That perhaps allowing the Wraith to enter the city unchallenged has angered its old masters. And sometimes there is no appeasing them or making it right. She tried to bargain with them when her father was taken. If only the Ancestors would return him, she would gladly take his place. But they did not take her, and in the end she had nothing else to offer.
She replaces the other envelopes in the drawer and stares at the one that bears her name. For all the time she has spent with John Sheppard, Teyla cannot imagine his final words to her. The knowledge that he would never know her response might have made him bold. She smiles. Bolder. The day they met, he smiled at her as if he was going to ask her for a dance. Or better. It was amusing and endearing and she chuckles softly to herself, because that is likely not what he was hoping for.
Even absent, he has made her smile. And laugh. And he never did ask her for anything but her trust and her patience.
Patience.
She smoothes her fingers over the letters of her name. He had told her to come here if something happened. To read these words and not to feel bad because
hopefully there'll be a blaze of glory involved
he was lucky it had not happened sooner. Something they had in common, outliving their expectations. Before she came to this place, Teyla had not considered that those taken by the Wraith could ever return. Gone was Gone. The lost were mourned and missed and the living moved on without them.
But they have come back. More than once. And so now hope exists where before there was none. She turns the envelope over in her hands, blinks the sting out of her eyes and gently tucks it back in the drawer beside the others.
Perhaps she will read it later.
-End-