Disclaimer: I own nothing. Stargate: Atlantis belongs to SciFi et al; the title is derived from the Vienna Teng song Harbor.
Setting/Spoilers: Mostly only for season one, though there are passing allusions (of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it in the most literal sense) to season three's The Game and The Tao of Rodney.
Notes: This is the longest thing I've ever written, and it was entirely a labor of love. This follows a fairly episodic pattern, but the emphasis here is Elizabeth's development with regard to Atlantis. The sections surrounding Before I Sleep and its ramifications were written first, and unsurprisingly are not only my favorite, but decided the theme of the whole thing.
Credit and huge kudos to thinofsubstance, who, despite not being part of the SGA fandom, translated the French for me. Thank you a million times over - I don't know what I'd do without you.
I am you, you are me. You are the waves, I am the ocean. Know this, and be free: be divine.
- Sri Sathya Sai Baba
Her first night on Atlantis was one she would remember all her life.
There was something about the city that spoke to her, that whispered in her mind and crawled under her skin, that recognized her giddiness and wonder and responded to it. Elizabeth rationalized that it was probably her own mind playing tricks on her. Something in the way these unfamiliar stars scattered like hardened dust across the sprawling sky, or the way these ocean waves crashed on city piers.
Elizabeth had never been one to be swept up in emotion, or to let intuition to carry her too far, but this sensation, this indelible feeling, this consciousness of standing on the edge of the universe, free falling with arms outstretched into an expanse of the unknown, wasn't something she could easily counterintuit. The alienisms of Atlantis seemed at once to sweep her up to encompass and include her. There was an undefined whole here she was suddenly a part of; there was a feeling of not-quite realism here that she couldn't quite negotiate.
"Hey," Major Sheppard said, coming to stand beside her. "You leave the party, and suddenly you're in demand."
"Isn't that always the way?" she replied, but didn't move; and he glanced at her uncertainly. She smiled in the dark.
"Can you believe this place?" he asked, gesturing around to the unlit portions of the massive city that stretched out before them, ghostlike, as if from someone's half-remembered memory. In the distance, she could see the faint reflections of the light from the control tower on glass a mile away, small as a candle flame in the distance.
"No," Elizabeth said softly, and leaned down further on the railing. "No, I can't."
How are we so lucky? she wondered idly. It struck her she could still be teaching political science at Georgetown with blonde hair and a terrible misconception of the bigger picture. She couldn't even imagine how that life might have continued; not here, not in this moment.
For now she relished in the fact that though the universe might swallow her whole without a second thought, it wouldn't.
"You know, it's the weirdest feeling walking down those halls," the Major said. "It's almost like…" and he paused for words, looking as lost without them as Elizabeth felt.
But she understood the feeling of being sensed and responded to with lights and a gentle hum, at once eerie and welcoming; the exhilaration of rising from the bottom of the sea to the ocean's surface; the thrum of city life, an inexplicable awakening beneath her feet and a stirring in the air around her. She might not have the gene that bonded her to the city, but still, she understood.
"A welcoming committee?" Elizabeth supplied, partly hiding a grin, only half jokingly.
For the moment, it was easy to forget that they needed power they didn't have, that there was a new war, that within a few months in Atlantis their supplies would run dry. Come morning, Elizabeth promised herself. Come morning, and reality could rush back, in whatever form it took here.
Everyone tripped over boxes and crates in the long metal-and-glass halls they were all too tired to clean out after being awake almost fifty-two hours. Elizabeth figured that as they had been granted another day (and a lot more than that), full-on organization could wait until morning, but no later.
Living quarters had been found and designated earlier that day, essentially busywork Elizabeth had assigned before the city's rising to the scientists and military who hadn't been able to help with power management or distribution. She was directed by a young redheaded botanist to a room where she found her things had been unceremoniously dropped; and after she had gone through all five changes of clothes, she took out makeshift sleepwear and cuddled up on a still-bare mattress, the sound of the ocean filtering in through her windows, a constant whenever she came out of her half-sleep through the night.
By the fifth night, she'd opened the window to let it in, lulled to sleep by sea breeze, sea tang, and sea sounds.
oOo
Reality came in deadly awareness of the situation they'd gotten themselves into mixed with an awe of where she was that would not go away – nor, Elizabeth admitted, did she want it to. It was a combination that struck at every chord of humanity and potential in her, and in those first days, she did her best to rise to the occasion, beating down the voice that said she was in too far over her head.
Selfishly, the self-fulfillment was a by-product she didn't ever want to give up. Gazing over the control room their second week in, she couldn't imagine herself anywhere else.
She wondered if this was a bad sign if and when they were ever able to return to Earth.
(In later days, she would quietly drop the when in her thoughts, though she kept it on when speaking out loud. Her expedition had become its own entity, with or without Atlantis; though the thought of losing Atlantis – particularly on her watch – weighed on her soul, until it became an almost physical manifestation that crushed her chest and prevented her from sleeping.)
She hadn't prepared herself for the possibility of full out war when she'd begun assembling her team, each interview reflecting the original scientific or sociological intentions of the expedition, each person she'd barely and briefly gotten to know as nervous and excited as she.
No one, in fact, she reflected, had prepared for the possibility of war but the military contingent. It was a grim prospect, after all: a scientific team turned to soldiers.
"Major Sheppard," Elizabeth greeted her new military commander their first week as he hesitated at the door to her office, glancing warily at the notes and files scattered across her desk. Division of teams, assignment by skill and personality, decisions made with room for error. It was a risky business, given what they'd gotten themselves into.
"Shall we begin?" she asked, motioning toward her desk.
For this to work, we work together, the gesture said, and he hoped she understood her language. I stand with you, if you stand with me.
"Planning on a late night, huh?" Sheppard inquired somewhat ruefully, looking as though he wanted to be anywhere but here.
Elizabeth had always dealt the power in the past, sitting squarely in the middle of the situation, but removed from the game. Never before had that power, that risk, sat so heavily on her shoulders. She'd known Marshall Sumner well enough to know she could trust him to maintain his own arena. John Sheppard, however, was a wildcard she hadn't counted on taking his place. It was a new game, and he was unfamiliar with the rules, had no feel for this fragile balance that had to be maintained.
You have no idea, she wanted to respond.
oOo
"Sounds right up your alley," then-Colonel O'Neill had remarked on her heading up what would become the Atlantis expedition, sitting in the office that for the moment was still hers.
She'd paused in her packing, smiling a smile that was half a grimace as she took in her surroundings. "Yeah, well, much more so than this job," she replied.
The air outside was even more pungent with heat. Inhaling deeply, Elizabeth wondered just how that would pan out.
oOo
"Really?"
She held a folder containing the profiles of three of four of Major Sheppard's candidates for his front line team, including his own. The fourth was conspicuously absent.
The Major scowled slightly. "Is there a problem?"
"You seem rather limited here," Elizabeth said delicately, though in a tone that brooked no warning. "These are your only selections?"
He shrugged. "I figured it would be a good idea to model the teams after the SGC's example, seems tried and true. Ford has experience in this area already. McKay's the most brilliant scientist out here – but don't tell him I said that."
"I would never dream of it," she replied dryly; because really. Rodney was a good man and a brilliant scientist, but to tell him so was out of the question.
"Teyla knows this galaxy," Sheppard argued without her having even said anything. "I know, I know; we don't know anything about her, she could be in collaboration with the Wraith, she could be an evil horrible plant who set a trap we walked straight into."
"Not quite," Elizabeth acknowledged shortly, suppressing a small smile. "But go on."
"She knows worlds and she knows people – besides her obvious intel, she's a huge asset to have as a mediator, which we will need on a front line team." He shifted uncomfortably. "No offense to you, or anything, ma'am."
"None taken," she assured him, grinning slightly, and sipping at her coffee ration over yet another late night with this man.
Teyla was an enigma to her. She was a woman of faith, apparently, a leader, a teacher and a guide. She couldn't have been more than her late twenties, though there was a charisma to her that invariably drew people in, Elizabeth included.
Granted, she'd met stranger people in the bowels of former Soviet Europe and South America. She'd met men with charisma so strong it led their people to kill without a second thought; who had asked about her family and exchanged anecdotes of their own, and ordered men to commit genocide hours later.
But Teyla was another story, her indomitable strength coupled with a good heart and solid mind. She'd seen and experienced things that could have broken her, and had refused to be broken; and perhaps, Elizabeth reflected, this was the source of the pull.
A few nights after her people left for the mainland, Elizabeth could make out her form standing on the balcony outside the control room.
"Mind if I join you?" she asked, not quite stepping out into the open air or feeling the wind she could see gently whipping Teyla's hair about. It looked like an ever-changing cloud, an aura of some unnamed power straight out of a mythology Elizabeth wasn't aware of.
The woman herself turned, the ends of that hair trailing across her face. She gently reached up and brushed them away as she smiled.
"Dr. Weir! Of course, please," Teyla said, gesturing beside her.
Elizabeth joined her, slowly relaxing into a natural pose.
"I can hardly believe that I am standing here," Teyla confided softly, almost conspiratorially. "The city of the ancestors has been so long in only our stories and tradition. It wasn't truly believed it would – or even could – be discovered again, after so much time had passed."
"I know what you mean," Elizabeth sighed. Was it her own wonder, the stress lifting slowly off her shoulders in this moment? She hardly knew. "I feel like I almost have to tiptoe through the less active hallways of the city."
Teyla sighed in turn, but if anything, it was at added stresses.
"You're missing your people," Elizabeth said.
The other woman nodded. "Yes," she breathed out.
Elizabeth stilled, a contrast to the ocean below in perpetual motion.
"I wish that they could know the city," Teyla continued wistfully. "As I will. It will not be the same."
"Do you? Truly wish it, I mean," Elizabeth questioned. Teyla tilted her head in question.
"Your people are of strong faith – being told that the Ancients, the Ancestors," Elizabeth corrected herself, "were human is one thing. Believing it is another."
Teyla inhaled, slowly, closing her eyes. "I confess I myself…"
But she trailed off, and stared despondently out to sea.
"You're doing this for your people," Elizabeth said again.
She felt in that moment as though she understood Teyla better than anyone in the city.
oOo
Despite Elizabeth's conviction that she would never fall out of love with Atlantis, it wasn't home.
Home was her own cooking and a comfortable townhouse; home was a man waiting for her at the end of the day and a dog trotting gleefully over to have her ears scratched. Home was a political game she'd played long enough to know the rules and adapt quickly as they changed with the grid.
How many treaties had she brokered and discussions had she mediated over these very sorts of moral crimes? A person's rights were not something to be looked over lightly; and though it was a Wraith, not a human, she'd sentenced to use as a lab rat, it didn't make the decision any easier for her.
oOo
Overall, there were very few perks that came with her job – if her job couldn't be considered a perk in and of itself. Cut off from Earth as they were, there was still the requisite paperwork and tedium that came with any administration position.
However, the one upside of being cut off from Earth it would seem was that, being no review paperwork at all from her own higher-ups, there was less work to be done then there might have been otherwise; and, in between worrying over the facts that they were defenseless and their food was running out and working out possible allies with Teyla, her inner linguist thrilled to the small amount of extra time.
This was the city of the Ancients, and all around her lay their writing, like abandoned keys to their culture. What had started as a little quest for her own personal edification – there were linguists more qualified in the city whose job it was to be doing this, after all – ended up as a citywide endeavor. Major Sheppard had started calling her down personally every time his team ran into graffiti. Elizabeth almost didn't know whether to think he was just trying to get her to take some time off, or if it was an inside joke she was unaware of.
Though the language resembled Latin, she was hardly fluent in it. She was still struggling with the notation in some places, but it was… it was relaxing, she decided. It reminded her of high school and college, derivation and conjugation and declension charts in four different languages across the board.
"You can read that?" Rodney asked, coming in and staring over her desk at the screen of her computer.
"In the way you read an uncompleted Mad Libs, yes," she replied, thinking back to blank tables neatly labeled Case: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Ablative, Accusative, Vocative. "It's coming along. What's going on?"
"Sheppard's offered the Genii our C4 in exchange for food," he said bluntly.
She felt another headache coming on, and steeled herself for an argument with her military commander about not becoming a society of arms dealers.
Twenty four hours after that she wished it had been that simple. They'd hardly needed another enemy on their hands.
"Do the Hoffans count as enemies?" had been Sheppard's next question, in light of the situation, a bad attempt at not-quite humor to deflect the attention away from the facts of the day.
Yes, on moral grounds, she thought. No, on the grounds that we're not going to attack them, or they us, simply because they disagree with us.
Elizabeth didn't want to go there, didn't want to start putting everything in terms of morality to anyone but herself. There was a dangerous line to walk between one's own justifications and the correct decision.
"Yes," she said simply, and dismissed the debriefing.
oOo
Some days Elizabeth let herself wonder, without any mental reservations, if she'd ever be able to go home.
These days depression washed over her like a wave, and were usually brought on by the beginning of a migraine. The loneliness ate at her, sometimes. She missed Simon. She missed Sedge. She missed the feeling of home surrounding her, indefinable and intangible but nevertheless a comfort around her shoulders in place of the weight of the world. Breathe, breathe, she told herself, an old joke between her and Simon, nearly collapsing onto the balustrade on the balcony outside her office.
She breathed in the salty tang of the ocean, and tasted melancholy. There was solace, there, in the dying rays of the sun reflecting off the deep, calm sea; and the vastness of it all made her feel insignificant by comparison.
oOo
"Dr. Weir?"
Elizabeth tapped her headpiece. "Yes, Dr. Zelenka?"
"You speak several languages, no?"
Elizabeth paused. "Just five. Why, may I ask?"
"There is some miscommunication in lab which I was hoping you might resolve, if French is one," his thick accent filtered through her ear. "There also may or may not be certain scientist who refuses to admit his wrong."
Rodney, her mind supplied, and she sighed.
"I'll be there in a few minutes," she said.
"We will wait," Zelenka assured her. "Though sooner may be better than later."
Ten minutes later, she found that Zelenka had not been exaggerating the situation, the dulcet tones of one of McKay's science teams reaching her ears as she walked down the hall.
"Imbécile! Le prochain fois, dites que vous voulez dire, pas que vous pensez!"
"Ah, Dr. Weir," Dr. Zelenka spotted her and hurried over.
She blinked at the scene in front of her. "Care to enlighten me, doctor?"
"Oh, oh, so now I'm a raving imbecile now, is that it?" Rodney's was yelling.
Zelenka winced. "Drs. Amyot and Hebert are natives of France and often speak own language when together. Dr. McKay often wants things done when first says, not when first affirms, and Amyot took thoughts spoken aloud to be command when Dr. McKay reviewed notes. There is added complication that Hebert took notes, and is not so familiar with English language as Amyot or native speakers. Amyot made corrections Dr. McKay indicated, but did not apparently want. Thus a problem."
Elizabeth sighed again, and nodded gratefully. "Thank you, Dr. Zelenka. Dr. McKay, Dr. Amyot," she called more loudly, inserting herself between the two. "Stop! Arrêtez-vous, s'il vous plait!"
Both quieted. Dr. Amyot looked at her curiously, still angry.
"Thank you," she said. "Dr. Amyot,pouvez-vous m'expliquer la situation s'il vous plaît?"
"Elizabeth!"
"Rodney," she warned. "Dr. Amyot, s'il vous plaît, reprenez."
She supposed she shouldn't have been amused as she was, listening to Dr. Amyot present her side of the story and watching Rodney out of her peripheral vision; but honestly. If this was to be an international coalition – and she was determined it would remain one, no matter if both civilian and military were headed by Americans – then some leeway would have to be granted, particularly where linguistics came into the picture. After negotiating her way through nuclear proliferation and ethnic cleansing, this was admittedly a breeze.
However.
Her mind briefly toyed with the idea of cultural relations classes before dismissing it. There was enough culture shock being in an alien galaxy, working with alien tools, and examining alien life. Perhaps she would simply have to do some rearranging within the departments? At least within the science department, as Rodney – she should have known – had no sense of these things, and the problems they presented. Internationality, by nature, tended to breed miscommunication and unnecessary resentment.
If this was the proverbial tip of the iceberg, it was damn lucky she'd worked with the UN for seven years before this.
"… et comme cet arrogant bâtard nous avait dit depuis le début, nous anticipions tout de ses besoins."
Elizabeth hid a smile, glad that Rodney, while simmering on the edge of the conversation, evidently couldn't understand it. Thank God he'd come from British, and not French, Canada.
"Peut-être vous adouciriez la manière que vous parlez à propos de votre chef de département," she suggested softly, smiling reassuringly.
The other doctor nodded grudgingly, and accordingly backed down.
"Dr. McKay, was there any harm done?" Elizabeth asked, facing him, arms crossed.
"Days worth of data was lost," Rodney began.
"Serious damage," she interrupted, clarifying. "Has this mistake harmed anyone physically, has it interrupted our plans for defense, seeing as we're unguarded if the Wraith arrive?"
"What plans?" he muttered sulkily.
"I'll take that as a no," she decided aloud with a firm glance in his direction. "And since you've brought up our lack of protection, perhaps you could get a start on that?"
Rodney muttered something unintelligible. Elizabeth supposed she shouldn't technically be letting him get away with it.
"Which you can start in on as soon as we've done some housecleaning. Dr. McKay, I expect you in my office tomorrow morning at 0900. We can't afford mistakes like this," she stressed, "whosever fault it was. We simply got lucky, this time. Thank you all."
oOo
"So it's basically putting together who works with who understands who?" Major Sheppard summarized over lunch when she briefed him on the need to rearrange.
Elizabeth took a minute to wrap her mind around the sentence. "Yes. I think."
He tried, and didn't succeed in sneaking off before she could ask him to figure out who was multilingual in the military.
War and peace, her mind lazily made the allegory. She couldn't quite keep all her amusement from showing – then, she wasn't trying all that hard – when she found him reading Tolstoy a few days later.
oOo
"… a meeting requested by Drs. Lorkowski and Arroyo at 2000, followed by a debriefing with Lieutenant Ramirez's team," Peter was saying.
It took most of Elizabeth's willpower to hold onto Peter's words. Disoriented as she was just hours after returning through the gate, she couldn't allow herself to take a day – or the rest of the night – off; and as always, there was business to attend to.
"Is that all?" Elizabeth asked, wryly.
Peter smiled. "Yes."
"Who is it that Ramirez is meeting again tomorrow?" she asked. "The Cladarans, was it?"
He nodded and walked with her from her office. "According to Teyla and some of the Athosians, their society is based in agriculture, and well known for its pottery and skills with glass."
"Right. We're sure this time?"
"As we can be."
"Good, then. Goodnight, Peter."
It was a formality, and everyone who heard it knew so. It wasn't uncommon for her to work until the small hours of the morning, and it hadn't been since high school. If her body had protested at one point in her life, it had long since adjusted.
Elizabeth stopped short suddenly, gaze drawn to one of the long windows. "Lieutenant?"
Ford turned from the view and offered her a wave. "Ma'am."
"What are you still doing up?"
He shrugged. "Couldn't sleep, ma'am."
She folded her arms and drew up next to him. "You can see all the way to the east pier from here," she remarked, "when the light's right, at least. It's hard to imagine how big this place is until you're looking from one of the piers to another."
"I wonder if we'll ever get out there?" he wondered aloud.
Elizabeth was silent a moment and turned to face him. "Are you doing alright, Ford?"
He shook his head to himself: not a negative, but not a positive either. "I just can't believe it was all some sick hallucination. Earth, I mean. I mean, it all seemed so real until the end."
"Hey," she said forcefully. "We're gonna get back, okay? In two galaxies, there will be at least one ZPM. Whether it's us or home that finds it first is, right now, thankfully irrelevant."
He nodded, and she couldn't tell if he'd believed her. "Yes, ma'am."
Elizabeth didn't know if she herself believed it.
oOo
She'd gone into the ocean once as a girl, on vacation with her family on the coast of North Carolina. She'd spent half the day being tossed around by breakers and swimming through the swells further on out. She'd gone to sleep that night surrounded by almost pitch black and the unshakable sense that she was still floating, moving, riding on the edge of a current; and that night her sleep had naturally been light and uneasy.
Tonight, Elizabeth felt as though she were drifting under someone else's power, suspended between two unrealities. She woke after falling into bed just five hours before, having gotten even less sleep.
oOo
There came a day when Elizabeth realized that her office had ceased to retain its former Spartan austerity.
There was already a fair number of artifacts adorning her desk at the time, mainly taken from excavations of culled societies, and a few from the fragile tendrils of trade they'd managed to establish in the time they'd had since arriving in Atlantis. She was beginning a three piece terracotta collection behind her desk when she'd first noticed.
"Dr. Weir?" Teyla's voice came from behind her. When Elizabeth turned around, she found that the younger woman wore a somewhat amused expression.
There was a particularly pretty piece brought by Teyla herself, crafted by the Athosians in honor of their new alliance: four women sitting in a circle with joined hands, reminiscent of a Circle of Friends. Rodney even once came with a triptych he'd bartered something away for – Elizabeth prayed that something hadn't been anything valuable, relying on Rodney's common sense and the fact that nothing had disappeared from inventory – depicting one Renaissance-like settlement's Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde. There was a modicum of comfort in knowing that such stories were in fact universal, and she supposed in retrospect she shouldn't have been surprised that Rodney would be the one to understand this. Even Major Sheppard had been known to come in on occasion with a particularly pretty shell or bead.
And damn it, a simple I had a random thought of you today, pocketed and forgotten until seeing her in person, shouldn't have meant so much.
She was metamorphosing slowly into someone with whom she wasn't quite acquainted. She stretched in her new skin, flexing muscles familiar and unknown.
I had a thought of you today, the artwork and pottery behind her desk said, collected over half a year via several of her archaeological teams, and the random was suitably dropped quietly into the night.
She'd set her triptych in her personal quarters, as it was more of a personal gift. She attempted to root her slightly harassed vegetation, and hung her ceremonial masks with help from Peter and Chuck, who all the while laughed at her for it in good fun. She let them because they understood, and because she'd never get them hung without their help.
There was a free spun terror at the thought that she wasn't supposed to get too close to her people. She'd never dared approach Teyla's knowing looks, the wisdom in her eyes incongruously surrounded by youth and flowing hair, making Elizabeth feel impossibly old and naïve.
"Pottery of the Cladarans," Teyla only said now, ever observant, still smiling as she sat casually in one of her chairs.
Elizabeth was suddenly quite tempted to quote the end of Casablanca.
oOo
Some days Elizabeth wondered what the hell she had been thinking in agreeing to come to another galaxy to head an expedition of supergeniuses.
It wasn't the babysitting aspect that got to her – though she did wish the scientists would act like the multiple doctorates they were – it was the fact that she had volunteered for what was looking more and more like a suicide mission all the time. She mulled it over when she allowed herself the luxury; yes, she had known full well it would likely be a one-way trip from the get-go, since Daniel Jackson had figured that Atlantis was in another galaxy and they would be relying on the power of a nearly-depleted ZPM to get there. She'd known there was no guaranteed ticket back home, and that knowledge had scared her half to death even at the time.
But they'd been ready to go for months before that, she'd been ready, eager if not desperate to meet a place of legends in reality, to bring back a piece of history for all of mankind. Write a new epic with her at the forefront of it all.
She closed her eyes to the sound of the waves below and the feel of moonlight on her face, reopening them to Atlantis, dark and unlit in the distance.
It had been a one way ticket to a probable death far, far from home, and she'd elected to bring the world's best and brightest.
Today had marked the six month mark; and with power running low and food levels questionable, Elizabeth was beginning to seriously question, if only to herself, whether they would make it back home.
oOo
Sheppard and Teyla came returned half an hour after they'd left without having gone to the mainland at all; and though she'd known Sheppard's cheeky weather forecasting would nag at her until he explained it, she almost would have preferred ignorance.
She supposed, in retrospect, she should have seen it coming. Her knee had ached so badly she'd been reduced to practically limping just yesterday – practically a nonoccurrence since the initial surgery and recovery. Today, thankfully, it was slightly less noticeable.
"What's wrong with your leg?" Rodney asked in his usual brusque manner as Elizabeth entered his lab. Zelenka rolled his eyes at McKay's bad manners.
"Old knee injury," she brushed it off, because she wasn't about to tell him the cap had nearly been shattered in a brief hostage situation just outside Kisangani during a summer she'd spent as a translator for a group of Doctors Without Borders.
"Listen, Rodney," she said quietly. He didn't look up. "I know you're working on this as quickly as you can, and I appreciate that. But we cannot let this city fall."
He paused to look at her, a little incredulously. "Elizabeth, you know I can't promise you anything. Far be it from me to say anything is impossible, especially if I happen to be working on it, but even so. Our resources are shot. This whole thing is going to have to be incredibly organic, and considering that while I still know the city better than anyone else here, that isn't saying much."
"He's right," Zelenka chipped in. "We are last ones to want the city to sink, but past offering assurances…" he shrugged. "I am sorry. We will have a plan."
But assurances weren't enough; and Elizabeth walked the halls back to her office dissatisfied, with the fate of Atlantis hanging over her head, feeling the potential loss of it like a phantom pain.
oOo
Kolya did not frighten her.
It wasn't a lie that served as a mantra; it was simply a cold, hard fact. She'd been up against much worse and survived. She'd dealt with more terrifying men and stared them down. He had a gun and the control room (maybe; from what she'd gleaned Sheppard had managed something there); and the most terrifying prospect was the idea that Atlantis would fall due to his stubborn idiocy.
Still, stranded out here on the furthest grounding station from the center of the city, the wind was so strong and the waves so high and tumultuous that Elizabeth couldn't help wondering which would be the one to break over the railing and drag her out with it. She found the mere concept of warmth eluding her.
When Rodney moved even closer, putting his arm around her, she burrowed into him and made herself as small as she could.
"Hey, I wager we'll get out of this yet," Rodney said as loudly as he dared, his Canadian turn of phrase betraying his nerves, if his darting eyes hadn't already done the trick.
"Maybe," she replied, making no effort to control her violently chattering teeth with Kolya too far away to hear. "I haven't lost all faith in you just yet."
"That was a joke, right?"
She rolled her eyes. "You're a mad poet among mad scientists, Rodney."
He paused. "I'm not quite sure what that means, but I'll take it on good faith that you aren't abusing me."
"Good," she replied. "We'll get out of this yet."
(It wouldn't be until years later that Rodney told her, offhandedly, about his relegated, but not forgotten, dream of being a pianist: an artist molding his craft, effortlessly and beautifully.
"A poet among scientists, Rodney," she would assure him with a small smile; and unbeknownst to her at the time, it would turn up in a five hundred page book he would write for her when he believed he was dying.)
"Thank you for looking out for my knee, before…" was all she elected to say now. "It was very noble of you."
"Ah, well," he replied. "I made Sheppard actually do the noble deed, all I did was mention it."
If it wasn't so cold, if her cheeks weren't numb, she would have grinned at him. "Better him than us, I think?"
"Considering where we are now, I wasn't going to say it."
A half hour later there was a gun at her head and arms around her torso dragging her backward toward the gate, and she didn't have time to think.
oOo
"Elizabeth," she became of Sheppard saying, probably not for the first time.
She looked up from where she sat in the control room just to thank God it wasn't all over.
oOo
Peter was like a godsend in the hours after the storm subsided, one of the first to arrive once she'd contacted Menaria and given the go-ahead for everyone to return, and the last – except for her – to leave the control room that night.
"Are you sure you're alright, Dr. Weir?" he asked one more time. "All we can do short of sending teams out to evaluate the damage in person is being done now."
It was a not so subtle hint to go to bed. She felt her lips quirk ruefully, and acceded. She could use a hot shower and about a year of sleep.
"Nothing like a shared near-death experience – on so many levels – to promote communication between coworkers, mmm?" Rodney said of the whole thing. It was probably the most any of them had unofficially talked of the whole incident amongst themselves.
To some degree, Elizabeth had to agree with him; though at this point she was willing to take whatever was dropped into their laps. She'd read the SGC mission reports – it had taken her the entire weekend, in fact, high on adrenaline supplemented by caffeine – and while she wasn't willing to trust her life to fate, she wasn't about to overlook whatever boons it granted her.
No one asked, really; but the changes didn't go unnoticed. Titles were dropped and bonds were forged. She'd gotten several surprised looks in passing the first time she'd addressed John by name over the radio. Teyla was often found around the infirmary on a light day, chatting as amicably with Carson as she did with any of her other teammates.There were a dozen new pools about each of them with any and all of the others. Elizabeth knew better than to subscribe to gossip, and she knew better than to try to stamp it out, but she'd never liked being its subject.
If they were being honest, Elizabeth mused, surveying the damage visible from the control tower, the truth was they'd all been leaning this way a good while in any case.
"Dr. Weir," Sheppard greeted her, joining her outside.
"Elizabeth is fine, out here," she replied. "Never have made an effort to feel very magisterial out here, anyway."
"Alright," he'd said, a little awkwardly. "Elizabeth, then." After a moment he added, "Call me John."
"John, then," she responded in kind, and smiled a little.
(Years later, he would tell her that for two hours, he'd believed she was dead. That would be the extent of the line of conversation, but many things regarding those few days would become much clearer to her.)
She'd read his profile, of course; several times over, in fact, just minutes after he'd sat in the chair in Antarctica, knowing instinctively she'd need him to pull this off. She knew he'd been married and was now divorced, knew there was a black mark on his military record because he'd attempted to save the life of one man against orders, knew his height and age and weight.
Elizabeth also knew that John Sheppard was an extremely private man, and as far as she knew, he hadn't shared any of it with anyone in the expedition, including his team – height, age, and weight included. It was knowledge privy to Dr. Weir in her office, but still off limits to Elizabeth on her balcony, with the solid weight of the man himself just two feet away; and it was something she'd be damned if she didn't respect.
I stand with you if you stand with me. A common theme by now in their relationship.
"We'll need to do something about the flooding on the north and east piers," she said in the silence.
"I'll put together a team to check it out tomorrow," he replied.
Tomorrow came and he was back to a frosty Dr. Weir, once again undermining her authority without thinking the situation through. Trapped in the control room with the city under quarantine with Dr. Peterson delusional and spreading the virus to the mess, Elizabeth wished, not for the first time, that she'd heeded Jack O'Neill's warning.
Communication between co-workers, her ass.
oOo
Her first birthday on Atlantis, she'd been stealing a moment of quiet reverie to herself, unnoticed, on the balcony outside her office. Life is quick, she'd thought, carpe diem's and memento mori's spinning in quick succession in her mind until she needed a breath of air away from the constant threat of attack and the paperwork she knew it was likely no one would ever see.
But there, there: the beauty of the sun on rippling water, of stained light through colored windows; rebirth by spray of sea water and brush of sea breeze. She'd breathed in. She'd felt no older.
"There you are," came John's voice from behind her.
"Oh, hey. Just stealing a breath of fresh air," she said, offering a smile, not able to make herself feel guilty for taking a moment to herself today. "Thought you were off exploring the city?"
"About to," he replied, preoccupied with something in his pack that immediately had Elizabeth's interest.
"Got this on the mainland," he was saying. "The Athosians made it."
He handed it to her.
"Happy birthday."
Elizabeth's gaze flew up at that. Despite everything, she couldn't help smiling at his hopeful look. Disgruntled as she was that someone had managed to find out, she couldn't help being touched that someone had cared to find out at all.
The clay jar she unwrapped looked more like an urn than anything; but she wasn't about to voice that thought.
"It's beautiful," she said instead, and unable to help herself, fixed him with a glare she was afraid was rather ruined by the way the corners of her lips involuntarily tugged upward. "How'd you find out?"
John Sheppard was not a terribly romantic man, and Elizabeth could appreciate this, even if she had to go several steps to unravel her gift, or what was behind it: an apologymasked in audacity and wrapped in a birthday wish. Men, she thought affectionately, for the first time in years. It was fortunate for the both of them that their now-easy friendship, however hard-won on both their parts, suited them well.
"Mum's the word," was all he said aloud as he left, grinning in his flyboy charmer way.
Here on Atlantis, cut off from Earth and its wars and summarily embroiled in new ones, Elizabeth tended to appreciate the small things more than gifts she'd previously gotten at the prescribed times of the year. Birthdays, holidays, anniversaries; bequests that appeared according to the calendar like clockwork, with nearly as little thought, eventually coming to rest on a ledge in her mind, sitting stale and forgotten next to the overwhelming scope of the movements and horrors she witnessed.
What, after all, did one get for a woman with two PhDs, who had drawn up twelve ceasefires and treatises, who had walked through wars she couldn't name for the sake of national security?
She smiled and sighed, working for a good hour and a half before she was called down to a lower section of the city.
oOo
Time measured in anything other than fear, wonder, and the passing daylight had quietly slipped away since their arrival, straying ahead to run through the halls like a common currency. With a twenty-eight hour day on Atlantis, and more work than most of the expedition could keep track of, Earth time slowly faded away.
Yet the old months were kept and significant dates remembered, voraciously clung to in the face of their own mortality. Every birthday, every anniversary, any cause for a party was resoundingly celebrated en masse in the commissary as landmarks of both time and mortality. At the time, and in the setting in which they found themselves, such juxtapositions seemed only natural.
(It amused her to know they thought she had no idea about the underground market going around the city, just as she supposedly had no idea about the betting pools. She could have surmised both on her own – and had, actually – though Rodney had confirmed it some several weeks earlier, to his own chagrin.)
John's gift was a beautiful gesture, but one that for the day went unappreciated: a portent whispering well-worn lines of self and death to her until she could hardly breathe. She'd stroked her own hair, held her own hand, and watched herself die. Everything else seemed superfluous in comparison, the heavy weight of her sacrifice settling about her shoulders like a standard.
The body was cremated at her wish, and the ashes fittingly placed in the urn that until now had waited empty, thoughtfully, on her desk.
"Are you intending to scatter them?" Peter asked when he brought them to her.
Elizabeth hesitated for a moment. "Not for a while, yet," though it was exactly what she intended to do, and she suspected he knew that from the way he nodded back at her, and left her in respectful silence.
The morning after her first birthday on Atlantis, she scattered her own ashes to the sea and the rising sun in a fit of sentimental symbolism that, for once, she did not begrudge herself. They fluttered in the breeze, trailing around spires and piers, suspended in water and light and air; and a sense of becoming filled Elizabeth's senses as they settled on the water and the city. There, there: the beauty of the sun on water, tinted by stained glass windows and the blood of her people.
She felt the weight of ten thousand years, and sagged with it. Breathe, she reminded herself, and did.
oOo
"I'm going to have to deal with the Chem labs soon," Elizabeth sighed over her dinner. "Their productivity has plummeted these last few weeks."
"It's not like they have that much to do," Rodney argued, sitting down next to her. "Especially with their impending deaths hanging over their heads."
"That's not the point here, Rodney, and you know it," she said, picking cautiously at the unfamiliar parts of her soup. "We have to keep up a work schedule, some regimented sort of order to keep everything from falling to pieces. Besides, what else are they going to do? Play a computer game for our last weeks?"
Rodney shifted uncomfortably next to her; John, just arriving at the table, sent him a glare.
"What?" Elizabeth asked sharply, more amused that they thought she was blind to their antics.
"Chem lab 3 made a trade with my physicists for World of Warcraft," Rodney said quickly, taking a bite out of his sandwich and speaking around it. "What?" he asked, muffled, at her glance. "It's not my fault if they don't know how to balance work and pleasure."
That, and chemists had a long history of not-quite animosity toward physicists; she was sure.
"Look," Rodney continued after swallowing. "I've already had a talk with Dr. Bauer. He's not listening to me."
She sighed again to Teyla's sympathetic look. "Looks like I'll be making a trip down to the Chem labs," she said dryly.
oOo
The meeting with Dr. Bauer didn't go nearly as well as she'd hoped.
In fact, Elizabeth might have gone so far as to say they had another Kavanaugh on their hands, despite the fact that whenever she'd met with Bauer in the past, he'd been nothing if not kind, respectful, and hardworking. A little high-strung perhaps, but that came with the territory.
If asked if she believed Robert Bauer would ever hurl whispered obscenities at her back as she was leaving an already tense discussion – in German, granted, but it was surprising what one picked up at the UN – she would have said no.
"Excuse me?" Elizabeth asked, angrily.
"Of course, Dr. Weir," Bauer replied.
She'd dismissed his tech crew after that one, called Rodney down for witness rather than backup, and thrown diplomacy out the proverbial window.
"What is up with you today, Bauer?" she heard Rodney asking him as she finally left. "You aren't insubordinate to her, you think she has a problem stomping out subordinates who are? Pull it together. We're all in this hole, not just you."
Coming from Rodney, it was a nice sentiment tacked onto the end of a very unpleasant meeting; and it lightened her mood. Rodney's loyalty wasn't easy to win, and was more often between the lines or unspoken than not.
And on the whole, the encounter had a good effect where her authority was concerned, at least.
"The loop?" Zelenka repeated her the next day. "You are the loop."
There was something akin to puppy love in there, and she was afraid it made her grin a little silly. It was a nice, though unintentional, distraction from the inevitable worry lodged in the pit of her stomach with both Rodney and John fifteen hours away at best, and no contact as of yet.
Her mind was already assembling a preemptive rescue team as she replied, "Isn't that a nice thing to say." She'd known she'd always liked Radek.
oOo
"Hey."
Elizabeth looked up to find John sauntering into her office, cradling a stainless steel mug of what she assumed was Athosian tea. The coffee rations had run out weeks ago (though she supposed there were always those who had searched, smuggled, or seized their own personal stashes), and their own tea reserves were running almost as dry. The Athosian brews were indeed a bit of an acquired taste, but no more so than Earl Grey, which was – to use a bad pun – not her cup of tea.
"Hey," she replied. "Is that for me?" she asked hopefully.
"You're lucky it is," John replied, sitting on the edge of her desk and offering her the mug, which she accepted gratefully. "Don't let Beckett get wind of the fact that you've got that throat."
Elizabeth sipped at her tea, relaxing as soon as it soothed its way down her throat. "It can hardly matter," she said. "We're down to almost no antibiotics after the Genii attack. It's not like he can do anything."
"You know that, and I know that," John said, "but it won't stop him from threatening you with mandatory rest. Trust me, I've done this."
"I'm sick," Elizabeth protested, "not tired."
"Which is why I brought you tea," he replied calmly. "Some are almost as caffeinated as coffee, you know."
It was a step beyond his presence beside her in the control center and trust in already-proven abilities that, whatever the ramifications on the other and the city itself, remained professional. Truthfully, that line had been crossed the moment she'd admitted to him that no, she wasn't alright, cold and drenched and terrified out of her mind.
Elizabeth sighed. "There's too much to do… Three hive ships on the way, no feasible plans as of yet, an entire city we've barely begun to discover…"
"Keep on this line, and I will send you to the doc," John warned quietly, and no one in the control room bothered to look up. "You're no good to anyone, let alone the city, sick and most likely sleep deprived."
She wanted to protest again, but his look silenced her. I know you, it said, and don't think I don't get it. She glanced out the window a little ruefully, avoiding her clay pot, interior still coated in silt and ashes of a former life. It was a constant reminder of duty and sacrifice, a birthday present marking the concept of full circle.
Ab urbe condita, her mind reminded her, reaching from its depths for Livy long since put aside: From the foundation of the city. One more marker of time, mortality. Ten thousand years before, she had made a decision to give her life to the city, and she was finding she could give no less now.
Breathe; from the foundation of the city; I rise
The very fact that this didn't scare her was enough to do the job.
"Okay," she said briskly, back to herself, and smiled briefly. "Thank you."
oOo
Two weeks, her thoughts pounded dully in her head as she lay awake one night. Two weeks before their annihilation.
The sound of the breaking waves below filtered through her open window; and slowly, the breaths she wasn't conscious of taking fell in sync.
Two weeks, she thought, and didn't sleep that night.
oOo
Elizabeth had never been more keenly aware of her death than in the weeks before the arrival of the first hive ships. Time seemed to pass at an unimaginable speed, an acceleration in a downward spiral toward the end of everything.
She didn't intend to let them hit rock bottom; but neither did she expect to see Earth or her family again. When Rodney came up with a lucrative idea to send back most of their intel, she grabbed at it. When she was informed they had a second longer than they absolutely needed, she asked Ford to record personal messages to the families they would likely never see again.
Ford gave her a knowing look on the way out of the briefing room, but it wasn't derision or condescension.
She was on edge, as always, with Sheppard and Teyla doing recon and hours overdue. With the list of all the people she'd lost in front of her, her fingers skimmed each name as she made countless speeches about honor and duty to their families. As much as she understood what she was trying to convey, it wasn't personal, and she ached to do it.
She watched with a blank face when the gate connected for just 1.3 seconds, a desperate cry for help cut short. She trusted Rodney that the SGC had received the message; she only hoped it would be enough. Duty, honor – their last stand would be one of preclusion.
It wasn't about them anymore.
John and Teyla came back with a handful of survivors from the culled world and somber faces.
"How bad is it?" she asked quietly.
John held her gaze evenly. "Bad."
It was an understatement, she soon came to realize, as her filled her in on tactics.
oOo
There had been no way to tell what would come of Teyla having regular nightmares and sleepless nights. Just three days after John had first referred her to Kate Heightmeyer, Teyla was laid up in the infirmary. Elizabeth didn't even want to think about how these attempts to connect with the Wraith might have damaged her. John's assurances that Teyla was one of the strongest people he'd ever known rang true to Elizabeth, but it didn't mean anything.
Three days. They had less than a week.
"Dr. Weir," Teyla welcomed her warmly when she arrived in the sick bay, already in the process of being discharged. "I feel I must apologize for my actions…"
But Elizabeth was already waving a hand at her words, sitting down wearily. "I was wrong to ask you to do such a thing. Psychological warfare is all very well and good, but I should have taken into consideration the effect it would have on you. I'm so sorry, Teyla."
"My friend, you have no reason to apologize. I would do it again." Teyla's eyes were serious above her stark white scrubs.
In spite of the day and all its revelations, Elizabeth felt her lips turn upward. "And neither do you," she returned.
Teyla nodded, satisfied. "Is there a plan?"
"Dr. Grodin has found what he believes is a satellite abandoned by the Ancients," Elizabeth began. "Rodney, being Rodney, thinks he can fix it. There's a full briefing in two hours."
"I will attend," Teyla assured her.
But by the end of the next day, their satellite had destroyed only one enemy ship, and Peter Grodin had died in order to make it happen.
oOo
In the fifteen hours after the destruction of the satellite and before reinforcements arrived from Earth, Elizabeth stood on her balcony alone, and imagined she was breathing in her ashes along with the city's. She imagined Peter's remains among the debris of the satellite. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, her mind whispered, and she felt herself nodding at the thought. Full circle; a constancy of the universe.
It smelled like smoke and her eyes watered at it all, but she didn't return inside for a half hour.
oOo
There were times Elizabeth couldn't help the feeling that she had made a terrible mistake that went beyond rectification. It was one she would feel it many more times in her life, particularly through the Atlantis expedition. Though she didn't feel exactly this, waiting tense in her office for any word at all, she felt something close, that in light of the day, barred explanation.
"You're a pragmatist," Steven Caldwell would tell her much later. She would be slumped in her chair by his hospital bed, cradling a cup of coffee to her chest, having given the order for Kavanaugh to be tortured the day before.
"You measured what needed to be done, and you did it."
Elizabeth would wonder what that meant for her idealism, which had managed somehow to survive prison camps and burned villages rank with the smell of burned and burning skin. This, she would reflect, had been the beginning of the end; leading a war with her military commander because there was no other choice. War came by mistake, not because of ideology or belief or any other factor. War had come and she'd done the best she could facing that fact.
That had been before the days of the storm and the siege, watching military teach scientists and a tech crew to handle guns, to throw grenades, to fly jumpers and ride nukes.
With less than an hour left on the clock and the Daedalus nowhere to be seen, Elizabeth tried to make peace with the fact that not one of them would survive to make it home. Those letters, those videos – she was glad she'd had them made, a long string of a succession of goodbyes before their last hurrah.
She exhaled slowly in the stillness.
oOo
A month later she stood in this very office, still hers, datapad in hand.
"Still, it must have been pleasant to return to Earth - to reunite with your friends and loved ones," Teyla was saying, sensing something in her.
Elizabeth thought of Simon with another, still-nameless woman, and of Sedge staying with her mother; and shook her head imperceptibly.
She remembered not half a year ago the prospect of returning home had been the sole objective, the opportunity they hadn't been expecting; and yet, none of them wanted to be the one to step through the gate, to risk the chance that they wouldn't be able to return. John had said something about life-sucking aliens not being in the equation.
"Regardless," Elizabeth remembered saying, War and Peace lying between them.
Regardless, her thoughts echoed her. So much of her work, her very life was in this place. Never had she felt so invested in one project, one mission. She remembered her arrival, a full year before, staring wide-eyed out of a window at hundreds of feet of water that, even after the shields' collapse, had refused to crash in on them. Those drowning depths…
Dr. Zelenka was asking something, and Teyla kindly tried to ward him off for her.
"Can this not wait? Dr. Weir has only just arrived."
"I'm sorry," Radek apologized quickly, and withdrew his outstretched file, but she stopped him, with a smile directed at Teyla.
"No, it's fine, really," Elizabeth said. "Let's get back to work."
Teyla gave her a glance that worried for her own good, and left with Radek.
From the foundation of the city, her mind reminded her again, the waves outside lapping on the piers: slow, steady, soothing.
Breathe.
It was good to be home.