NOTES: Written for someone who gave me the prompt 'John takes Teyla on a vacation.'

Concerning

John found Teyla on the deck out the back of her 'tent' at sunset, staring out across the flat, red land with unseeing eyes.

"Teyla?" He paused, uncertain of his welcome, but when she turned, her mouth curved up at the corner, softening her features, and he took that as an invitation.

"Is it dinnertime?"

"Not quite yet. Another hour to go..." John padded across the deck in his bare feet and sat down beside her, dangling his feet off the deck edge, over the pool below them. "Ronon said something about going for a run. Rodney's swathed in netting and working on a report."

She nodded and looked back out over the view. "It is lovely here. Peaceful."

"Yeah, well, we need some peace for a while." He stared down at the reflection of the sky off the water - the deepening shadows meant the water acted as a mirror, and the vivid blue and white and pink and gold and purple of the sunset gleamed back at him from the sky.

"I begin to wonder if my son..." She got that far before stopping, her voice thick and choked. John lifted his head, panic pulsing beneath his breastbone.

"Teyla. You couldn't have done anything..." Of all the clichéd platitudes, John had ever had to make or listen to, he thought that one was the worst. It implied helplessness - something he hated. If he could do something, take action, make something better, he would.

This time, like Teyla, he couldn't do anything. Her son had been marked for death by Michael from the moment the Wraith-hybrid had become aware of his existence. And nothing John or Teyla could have done would have changed that.

He'd had to accept it as truth, even if the failure bit deep.

And the thought that really gnawed at him in the moments of regret was whether he should have tried harder. If it would have made a difference if a part of him hadn't resented the child and the claim it made on Teyla. He didn't think so, but he wasn't sure, and the uncertainty was the hardest part.

"Perhaps not," Teyla murmured, lifting her face to be washed by scarlet sunlight in the last, fading rays of the fiery sun. "That does not stop the questions."

John watched her for a moment, then looked away. He wasn't any good at this; too afraid of failing to give what was needed - too afraid of failing to be what she needed. But he took a risk and reached out to cover her hand with his, squeezing her fingers.

Teyla's head turned towards him, and he saw both grief and gladness in her eyes.

And she didn't let his fingers go until Rodney came asking about dinner.

--

Dinner was quiet. Teyla seemed to be in a good humour, and the candlelight hid the shadows in her eyes. Rodney complained about the kangaroo steak's rawness until Ronon speared it and began dragging it over to his own plate, at which point a fight of cutlery ensued.

John rolled his eyes as they argued, and the steak dripped juices off Rodney's plate and onto the tablecloth. It wasn't a fancy restaurant - they were on a desert retreat in the middle of the Australian outback - and they were tucked into a corner of the retreat's eating space, but he knew there were standards of behaviour even in such far-flung outposts as this.

Of course, when Teyla leaned past the candles with the tongs from the vegetable dish and neatly tugged the steak off Rodney's fork, John nearly spat his beer in a choke.

"You can't possibly be hungry for that," Rodney objected as Teyla sliced off a strip of the meat and chewed it thoughtfully.

"Why not?"

"Well, because you had the starter already and you've eaten most of your entrée..."

"Perhaps I am eating for two again," she said with what John thought was creditable serenity, given that an hour ago, she'd been tensely tearless.

John didn't manage to be quite as serene when two heads turned towards him with narrow, accusing gazes. "What? Don't look at me!"

Up went Ronon's eyebrow, before he broke into a grin and sat back in his chair before reaching for the beer. "Who else can we look at?"

"That aspect of my life does not concern you," Teyla interrupted. "Any of you," she added, looking around the table, from John to Rodney to Ronon. "At all."

John thought he managed okay for the rest of the night, considering how much that pronouncement hurt. It helped that they turned to teasing Ronon about his relationship with Dr. Keller. Teyla certainly seemed to know quite a bit of the gossip about it, although there were things she said were held in confidence and which she would not reveal out of deference to Jennifer.

But much later, when Rodney snored comfortably behind them in the hammock strung up in the overhang and Ronon had gone back to his own 'tent' to sleep, John came to stand at the edge of the deck as Teyla stepped down into the pool. Water lapped around her calves, a slow ripple of liquid washing up over her skin, but not reaching the hems she held above the water.

"A bit late for swimming," he murmured, glancing up at the stars overhead.

There was a rustle of material, and John's gaze was dragged down, to the slim, dark figure that tossed her dress to the stairs and slid deeper into the water, the fine bones of her shoulders framing the line of her back above the curve of her buttocks.

"Night is the best time in the water," Teyla murmured, "The darkness hides what the water does not conceal."

John swallowed hard and thought that the water wasn't going to conceal much, even in the darkness. It was only a half-moon overhead, but even that was bright enough to cast a silvery light over the wet curves in the pool below him as Teyla looked up at him, her eyes shadowed beneath her brow. "Are you coming in, John?"

He stared at her like a man in a dream, waiting to wake up.

I'm not ready for this.

When will you be ready, then?

I don't know. Not now.

If you wait too long, do you think she'll still be there? Remember how it felt to hear her say she was pregnant? Remember how her son felt beneath your hand - another man's child?

I'm not ready for this.

And if you're not ready now, when will you be? She's giving you a choice, John. You step up and make it work, or you walk away and never know.

Teyla was still watching him with a careful reserve in her eyes.

John shucked out of his shirt, tossed it aside; shed his trousers and kicked them away. Then he walked into the smooth, enveloping silk of the water and Teyla's waiting arms.

Don't ask questions and you won't get answers you don't want to hear.

"You said your love life didn't concern us," he murmured in the moment before their lips met.

John briefly wondered if Kanan of Athos had felt this trembling fear the first time he kissed Teyla. Then their mouths met in delicate burning heat, and tender ferocity, and it didn't matter. Nothing mattered compared to the feel of her arms around his neck, her waist in his hands, and her body pressed against him as she took as fiercely as he gave.

And when she drew her mouth away from him, he could hardly bear to let her go, afraid that she might vanish like morning mist.

"It does now."

- fin -