Regina

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Sometimes, Teyla dreams of entering another hive and taking the residing queen's place, of subduing the lesser officers with her mind, of ordering the drones to go to sleep.

The first months after her transformation, so many other things occur that it does not happen all that often. During the months she spends on Earth, they all but disappear, far removed as she is from any news of recent cullings. After Atlantis returns to Pegasus, however, they become more and more frequent.

She dreams of inspecting the prison cells, of counting the unfortunate souls vegetating inside the cobwebs. She dreams of convincing the Wraith it would enhance their ship's efficiency, of collecting all the food in a single storage crystal, of pocketing every last human her predecessor has enslaved.

In some dreams, when she makes her escape with the crystal tied close to her body, she traps the Wraith on the hive ship in an illusion, asleep, forever drifting through hyperspace. In others, a force of Lantean soldiers and her own people board the hive at her call and kill them. Sometimes, she finds a console and programs a course before she leaves, making the calculations as Rodney taught her, urging the hive to fly into a sun.

Once, the Teyla-that-dreamed arranged to meet up with another hive and made the two ships crash into one another, lighting up the emptiness of space with the explosion. It is a dream she never had again, for Teyla-that-was-awake realized that the other queen would have opened fire long before the collision.

It is not easy, going back to sleep after one of these dreams, especially when she awakes before exiting the hive. It takes her a long while to calm down, to reassure her frantically beating heart that if they were ever to plan such a thing again, they would make sure the Daedalus or the Apollo were in place, ready to transport her out of the hive at the last moment. While John and Ronon and Rodney would not be able to come with her, they would never send her into a hive all by herself again, and they would not give Todd another chance to surprise them. As much as he wishes to never think of his Wraith DNA again, and as much as she never wants Torren to lose both his parents... If it were the only way to ensure their success, if she needed to bring a second-in-command she could trust, Teyla knows she could turn to and then rely on Kanaan.

Still, sometimes she surfaces gasping with the knowledge that no-one has come, that her mental hold has slipped up, or that the Asgard transporter has malfunctioned. These endings leave her strugling, and it is not, as Jennifer believes when she tells her, because she dreamed her own death. It is not that which frightens her, for Teyla has long been prepared to die to ensure the safety of her people. She wishes to stay alive to see her son grow up, but if it became necessary, she would give her life gladly. It is not the thought that she might die - should she ever try to implement one of these dreams with her team - that shakes her to her core on those nights.

It is the tiny voice that says that if she were to exert that much control over a hive full of Wraith, she would truly be their queen, and for her betrayal, she would deserve to die with them.

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