Title: A Break From Atlantis
Author: La
Rating: Teen, I guess
Pairings: Sheppard/Weir pretty much, although, as always, it's more hinted at than obvious.
Summary: When Elizabeth needs a break from Atlantis, a trip for some offworld translation seems just the answer.
Spoilers: Season two up through Epiphany. Mild specific ones for The Hive, Epiphany, Duet, Trinity... I think that's it.

Author's Note: It's been pointed out to me that on the show, Elizabeth actually talks about her poker experience, and it's not as extensive as I made it in this fic. Sorry if that jars some people - in the future if I write any fics like this I'll take that into consideration. :)

John Sheppard was nervous. He hadn't said anything, but she could tell by the way his shoulders tensed with each sound, the white-knuckled grip with which he held his P-90. He kept casting not-so-subtle glances first at the knife strapped to her leg, then at her hand which wasn't holding said knife. The look he shot at her after that was a little upset. He'd insisted that she be armed, and when she refused a gun, he'd simply handed her a knife. He'd even attempted to give her a little advice on how to use it. It might have been amusing, had Elizabeth been in a better mood.

She supposed she couldn't blame him. Fully half the times she went through the gate, things seemed to go wrong, and one or more members of his team would come back injured. In her defense, though, the percentage of bad missions which included her was nowhere near as high as the percentage of missions that went wrong when she wasn't with them. Hell, the last time she went off-world it was to save his ass.

When Elizabeth had first seen Rodney's tape of the writing carved in the stone walls of a building suspected to house a ZPM and recognized it as yet another derivative of Ancient, she'd insisted on coming through to translate it herself. It did make sense for her to do so. The carvings had been so weathered by the elements that it was difficult to make out what was a sign of wear and what was an actual symbol. She would need to see the writing in person, look for tell-tale grooves to indicate which were intentional carvings. And she was the most skilled linguist they had.

Elizabeth laughed to herself. As much as she tried to defend her decision to come along and make John nervous, the truth was she just needed to get away from Atlantis – or rather, away from certain people on Atlantis. And not the usual culprits, either. Caldwell was still more than a week away on the Daedalus, Kavanagh was actually quiet and content for once, ensconced in his lab with some bit of Atlantis technology, and even Hanna Sorenson, their resident prankster, hadn't been up to any tricks lately.

No, she'd need to escape from them. The ladies of girls' poker night. Heightmeyer, Brown, Cadman, that physicist whose name always escaped her... all of them.

Although she'd known about the games for quite some time, Elizabeth had never joined in them before last night. She was a hell of a poker player (courtesy of her college roommate) but she was afraid that if she joined in, it would put a damper on the event. She was their leader, their boss, and she knew it would be hard for them to open up in front of her.

She'd wanted to join, though. Atlantis was home, now, but there were times she really missed some things from Earth. Here she had little female companionship. None of the other women in the city could really understand her, the pressures she felt, the decisions she had to make. No, the only ones she really felt close to on Atlantis were Rodney and John, and Rodney, despite his overblown ego, sarcastic comments, and genius abilities could never understand the responsibilities that weighed down on her. And although she loved talking to John (a little too much, maybe?), he just wasn't a woman. Thank God, a little voice in her added.

She though about trying to establish a deeper friendship with Teyla, who was a leader in her own right, but somehow in the process of living from crisis to crisis, opportunities never seemed to arise.

When Heightmeyer approached her, Elizabeth had been pleasantly surprised. She realized later that the psychologist had probably recognized how isolated Elizabeth felt, and was trying to alleviate some of that feeling. Elizabeth immediately accepted the invitation to join the game, and that evening had abandoned her usual chess to join them in one of the lounges.

It had started out well enough. Cadman had begun with a reminder that no talk of work was allowed. That sounded well and good, but somewhere around the third beer, Elizabeth realized that this meant they were all sharing stories from their past. By her fourth beer, she'd admitted to her ill conceived relationship with a member of a biker gang. Around beer number six, she vaguely recalled mentioning something about being interested in someone in the city.

Oh yeah. Elizabeth really didn't handle drinking very well.

She knew she hadn't revealed who captured her interest – if she had, she wouldn't have need to escape like this. It seemed that joining the game and revealing personal information meant you were instantly best friends with some of the women. Heightmeyer and the physicist weren't too bad – they both seemed to realize her embarrassment – but a number of the other women had taken to teasing her, trying to pry out this one last secret. She felt like she was back in high school.

It was exactly what she was afraid of. How could they take her seriously as a leader when every time they looked at her they would be thinking about her confessions? She needed to figure out how to reestablish some distance, but she couldn't do it on Atlantis. This trip through the gate seemed to be the perfect solution.

She was brought out of her musings as they approached the walls of a large stone structure. There was a door cut into one of the walls, and Rodney immediately approached it.

"The writing covers this." He cast a frown over his shoulder. "Colonel Sheppard wouldn't let me open it until we knew what it said."

"If you recall, Rodney, the last time we did not read the writing on the wall before passing through a doorway, Colonel Sheppard was trapped there for six months," Teyla said.

Elizabeth had to smile at Teyla's unintentional use of the Earth idiom. She was pretty sure John wanted to smile as well, but he was too busy being paranoid. Shaking her head slightly she moved to join Rodney.

She observed the writing for several minutes, running her fingers lightly over the door to feel the carvings. She used touch to tell her which were actual symbols and which were weather marks.

"Well?" Rodney asked impatiently.

Reigning in her frustration, she turned to him. "Rodney, translating an unknown language without a key, even one that is clearly a derivative of a known language, takes time."

"But don't you recognize any symbols? There is a power source in this building that we..."

"Rodney!" Elizabeth cut him off. "Yes, I recognize a few symbols. Here we have door, and here passage or path. And here we have fire. But I can't immediately put them together. I need to puzzle out the declensions – is it a door of fire? A path of fire? Is fire unrelated to them except by its placement on the wall? Are we being warned that if we open the door there will be fire? Did they create this building because of a fire? We don't know, and going off all cock-eyed is not going to help us here!"

She realized they were all staring at her, Rodney with the same look he'd had after she chewed him out for his destruction of half – oh, pardon her, five-sixths – of a solar system, Teyla with concern, Ronon with something between awe and humor, and John... well, John was still being Mr. Paranoid and had his eyes fixed outward, but she could see a smile ghosting across his lips.

She took a deep breath. She was more stressed than she'd realized. "The point is," she continued in a calmer tone, "that I am going to need more time."

John spoke up. Finally! He'd been silent since issuing his commands when they first arrived on planet. "In that case, figure out what's actually carved, write it down, and then let's get back to Atlantis. You can work on it there."

"No!" she cried out, more harshly than she'd meant to. But she was relishing this time away from the city, away from the problems that awaited her there. She didn't want to return just yet.

John finally turned his attention away from their surroundings to look at her, concern etching his features. He knew her well enough to see through her, and she knew he saw her need for a reprieve from Atlantis. "Take your time copying it, and when you're done we'll head back to the city."

She recognized it for the compromise it was – she would use the time she was copying down the text to unwind, and then she would let John ease his mind by spending the hours or days it would take to translate it on Atlantis. Logically, she knew it was best. She was the leader of Atlantis, and she really shouldn't be away from the city that much.

Several hours later, she was nearing the completion of her transcript when she came across a section that was so worn, she could barely begin to tell which marks were carvings and which were not. Running her fingers over them, she couldn't help but attempt a bit of translation as she examined them. Keeping her voice low so the others wouldn't hear her talking to herself, she muttered, "Instrument or control, something, that has to be a weather mark... that's either a weather mark or these people had a need to write their own Kama Sutra on this door... what about this?" She peered at one of the marks, unable to determine its origin.

"Rodney?" she called without looking back.

The scientist looked up from his tablet. "Yes?"

"Can you come over here and help me figure out which of these marks are intentional? It's the last section, and it's giving me some trouble."

Rodney looked torn between continuing what she was sure he would term "vitally important calculations" and helping to hurry the transcription, so she could get to the translation that much sooner and let him in to get the ZPM. Making his decision, he joined her at the wall.

"Well this is clearly a carved mark, but this..." As he spoke he traced his fingers over one of the markings. He yelped slightly when the marking glowed faintly blue. "Oh that's interesting."

Elizabeth nodded. "I've done that before, and it didn't happen – must be the Ancient gene."

"Yes, well..."

Their speculations were cut off by Teyla's frantic shout. "Colonel Sheppard!"

Whirling around, Elizabeth caught a flash of blue in her peripheral vision before she focused on John who was... halfway in the ground?

John had been quietly watching their surroundings when he heard Rodney's cry, and a split second later he was falling. The ground beneath him seemed to have just... opened up. The drop was short, and by the time he'd processed what was happening, he had stopped. The hole was deep enough that he was below ground to his shoulders, and he wouldn't have been concerned if it weren't for the fact that it seemed to be, well, closing up around him.

Ronon and Teyla immediately dropped their weapons and ran to pull him out.

Elizabeth stared, horrified. Remembering the bit of blue she'd seen as she turned, she looked for it again. There – over on the other wall, was that a control panel? She started sprinting for it.

"Uh, guys?" John said, nervously. "Faster would be better." Elizabeth glanced back and realized the closing hole was beginning to compress his body. She wouldn't make it in time! Remembering something Ronon had told her about their time on the hive ship, she stopped and grabbed for her knife. Taking a half-second to steady herself, she hefted its weight in her hand, then sent it flying through the air to her target.

The blade pierced the panel. There was a crackle of energy, and then the panel went dead. Risking a look behind her, Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief. The area around John was widening, and Ronon and Teyla were soon able to pull him out.

"What happened?" he asked as soon as he was free.

"Um..." Rodney cleared his throat. "I seem to have accidentally activated something. Good thing Elizabeth had that knife."

The rest of the team turned to look at her. "Your knife?" John questioned.

Ronon let out a low whistle, and nodded toward the control panel. "Nice throw," he said.

Elizabeth smiled at the compliment. "Thank you."

John stared at her. "You threw that? You?" At her nod, he added, "I'm thinking you didn't need those lessons this morning."

"No, not really. But it was a good refresher."

"Where did you learn to do that?" Rodney asked, glad attention was focused on her and not on the fact that he'd inadvertently put John in danger.

"My rebellious phase," she said, recalling her confessions of poker night. "I was trying to impress an old boyfriend. He liked knives."

No one seemed to want to reply to that, although John looked both curious and disturbed, and after a moment he gave a small cough.

"Did you get everything you need? Because I'd really like to get out of this place, now."

Grateful to be back on a safe topic, Elizabeth jogged back to the door. "I've just got to get this section here..." She hastily scribbled down what she thought were the symbols, reluctant to have anyone touch them again to be sure. "Done!"

It took Elizabeth a few days to finish the translation, mostly due to constant interruptions by her other duties. Then, too, there were the few hours she'd spent tracking down her tormentors from girls' poker night and blackmailing them into leaving her alone. Well, it wasn't really blackmail so much as "you quit teasing me about this, and I won't tease you about that." Thankfully she'd begun to remember some of the things they'd confessed to during the course of the game, and it gave her enough fodder to keep them quiet for a while. She still didn't have the distance she felt she needed, but that would come with time.

Rodney's near constant interruptions hadn't helped much either, but she'd finally finished. She called Sheppard's team into her office to share her findings.

"So when can we go get the ZPM?" Rodney asked almost as soon as he entered the room.

"I don't think we can, Rodney," she said.

"What? Why not? Elizabeth, you know how valuable this could be."

"Yes, I do. But I value you – all of you – more."

John tilted his head questioningly. "What did the door say?"

"Basically, it was a warning. It seems as though not everyone in this galaxy was happy with the Ancients. This group resented them for some reason – the door doesn't say – and as a result hid their ZPM inside the structure. The door warns of various booby traps for any Ancients that might try to access it – fire, pits, spikes, shocks. None of them pleasant. It's all very oblique. It almost seems as if they wanted to put enough on the door to taunt the Ancients into trying to open it – the section you activated, Rodney, tells us that there is a control panel for the entire building – but not enough for them to actually deactivate the traps."

"So no ZPM," Rodney said, looking disappointed, although she could see that he understood.

"No, I'm afraid not. We have no way of knowing how many traps there are, and I'm not going to risk the lives of our teams trying to disable them all."

Fortunately, no one seemed to have any complaints about the situation. In fact, as they were leaving, she heard Rodney telling Teyla about a possible ZPM one of the other teams had come across. The team filtered out of her office until only John was left.

Elizabeth sighed and dropped back in her chair. All was right on Atlantis. Kavanagh had begun complaining again, just this morning Hanna Sorenson and unknown accomplices had contrived to completely reverse two of the conference rooms, and Caldwell would be landing in just a few days. She'd solved the gossip problem with Heightmeyer and the others, and now she was just grateful that her main confidant was a man. He wouldn't bother her about gossip and confessions.

"So," John said.

She smiled at him. "So," she replied.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "There's just one thing I don't understand."

Raising an eyebrow, she gestured for him to continue.

He frowned slightly. "About this boyfriend of yours, and knives..."

Growling, she threw the stylus for her tablet at him, and stalked from the office.