Title: Empathy
Summary: In the beginning, she'd thought it was empathy. Post 'Michael'
Characters: Teyla
Pairing: Teyla/Michael
Rating: K+-T
There was few people she'd admit it to and those she would were not with her on Atlantis. The night was her companion, her confidante and she knew that it must stay that way; the others would not understand for she was certain that she did not truly understand it herself.
Usually, she awoke startled and panting from dreams that left her charged and needy – a need to be moving that even a sparring session in the gym with Ronon could not satiate. He was good, a strong challenge but not like he had been.
In the beginning, she had been sure that it was empathy she was feeling; a desire to believe that, despite what they had done to him, he was still human inside. She knew that he was Wraith but despite what they had done to him – perhaps especially because of they'd done to him, what they'd changed him into – they shared something unique.
A human skin, covering tendrils of Wraith below.
In the first few days, she'd feared him; feared that he would sense her and know that she was different, like him and she'd been right; he had sensed her – but not in the way she had thought he would. He had been drawn to her, like she had been to him. Sheppard and Weir had asked her to speak with him, to befriend him but she had resisted their attempts, even when the Colonel had shown up at her room door a bag of popcorn in hand. Still, she had resisted.
It had been days after that, in a dream, that she'd seen his face in her mind, heard his voice calling to her through thin strands of a connection that she had failed to feel forming. She'd resisted the pull, thrust up her walls. That was the first night she'd spent running through the halls, trying to expel her excess energy.
She hadn't been able to resist the next night and had found herself in the security control room, watching him as he slept fitfully. She knew what he was feeling; she'd been there too.
She'd felt a similar connection to another being in her life; the creature that Colonel Sheppard had turned into but that had never been as strong as this. This one spanned the space of a galaxy, with many light years of vacant space between them – and she was sure that it was stronger now than when she'd first experienced it.
She'd come to realise that it was not empathy but desire that pooled in the deepest recesses of her gut, pulling her into dreams, filling her with energy like she had never experienced before. She felt buoyed when she rose in the mornings, more than a little desperate for his touch. And she hated it. Because he was a Wraith.
But there was something human about him, just like there was something Wraith about her.
In her dreams, she welcomed his touch in a way that she knew she would not in reality. She called his name in a voice she knew was not her own. She let him mark her in a way that she had allowed no other man.
But it wasn't Teyla doing that. It was the other part of her. The part that hid beneath layers of skin, blended with the very cells that made her human and it called out to him as he called out to her. In the daylight hours, she never thought of him except for the few moments when she awoke from her slumber. During the daylight hours, she was Teyla Emmagan.
But at night, she was his.
She knows that if the retro-virus had worked, if he'd stayed human they'd have been friends. She knows that she'd have overcome her prejudices because that is who she is.
She wonders if maybe there would have been more than that because Teyla had been attracted to Michael, the human beneath his layers of Wraith.
And in those quiet moments of hovering between rest and wakefulness, she almost wishes that he was still in Atlantis.