Thank you very much to all the reviewers so far ... I'm posting two chapters today (the ones that were finished at my LJ) and the next chapter, where things really get rolling, should be up in a couple of days! The spelling of Weir's name has been fixed -- the trouble I always have with her name is that my maiden name was Wier (with the i before e) so I tend to spell her name that way as well ...

Chapter Two: Plan

Over the next couple of days, it only grew worse. She made several attempts to corner both John and Rodney to talk to them, but they were always busy with something else. Rodney practically seemed to be living in the labs, and she wondered if John had given up sleeping as well, because it seemed that every time she passed the gateroom, he was preparing for some sort of offworld training mission, and every time she went by the exercise rooms, he was drilling recruits, frequently in the company of Ronon. His new best friend, she thought, and then was startled at herself for such a petty thought. Of course it was a good thing that John was taking an active interest in integrating Ronon into life in Atlantis. It was just ... it seemed as if he hadn't really been talking to anyone else. And talking to Ronon wasn't really talking, was it? If you wanted the company of other people but you didn't want any sort of awkward conversation along with it, Ronon was definitely your man.

John had not showed up for one of their sparring sessions since the incident on Duranda. Oh, he was polite about it, and he always had a good excuse. But she suspected that he was avoiding her because he knew she'd try to get him to talk about what was bothering him. And he is quite right, she thought as she worked out by herself, snapping the sticks back and forth with well-practiced moves.

She thought about perhaps approaching John through Ronon, but she still was not comfortable enough with Ronon to do that. He is no Ford, she thought, and then, once again, berated herself for the unworthy thought. But ... it was just so true.

We are coming apart. It was late evening and Teyla walked the halls, passing small knots of people. The whispering about McKay had stopped, as far as she could tell, and she wondered if Elizabeth had realized it had gone far enough and put a stop to it. Still, there seemed to be a subtle tension in the air ... or maybe it was only her own worries, leading her to see everything around her through a false lens.

We are coming apart. We were a team, a family. Then one of us was taken away, like sawing off a leg from a chair. We picked up the pieces, we learned how to balance our chair with only three legs. And the lynchpins of our team have always been John and Rodney anyway. She'd never quite realized that before, but it had the ring of truth. And we found another to join us, but now ... I do not trust Ronon, not as I once did, and John and Rodney do not trust each other, and we are falling apart.

She came around a corner, and, to her shock, saw the very people she'd been thinking about heading in her direction at a rapid clip -- well, two of them, anyway. It was also very obvious that Sheppard was trying to escape, with McKay in hot pursuit.

"Colonel -- Colonel, wait a minute, I have something to -- Colonel!"

They had not seen her, and she watched as Sheppard was suddenly balked by a group of gate technicians entering the hallway from one of the other halls. He swung around, arms crossed, as McKay skidded to a stop.

"What?" Sheppard demanded.

McKay stabbed a finger at him. "I need you in the lab, and don't think you're slipping away this time! I need to show you something one of the other exploratory teams brought back --"

"You mean you want me to activate something with my gene."

Teyla saw McKay draw back. "You're not the only person in the entire city with the gene, you know," he said haughtily.

"I'm aware of that. I'm also busy. If you're finished --"

McKay's voice dropped so that Teyla, at the end of the corridor, had trouble hearing him. She felt suddenly guilty for eavesdropping, but it was the first time she'd seen the two of them together since Duranda, and she hoped it was a good sign.

"... just wanted to get you to look at it, that's all," McKay was saying, and Teyla could see that he was looking at Sheppard hopefully. "It's a weapon, and you're the local expert on ... you know, alien armaments," he finished in a rush. "All you have to do is come and look at it."

"I'm busy at the moment, McKay."

Sheppard turned away, heading off down the hall, and Teyla saw McKay's shoulders slump slightly, then stiffen as he raised his head, the sorrow and regret draining out of him to be replaced by anger. "How the hell am I supposed to earn your trust back when you won't even talk to me, you goddamn asshole?" he demanded of Sheppard's back.

Sheppard might have hesitated a little at that, but at that moment he very nearly ran into Kate Heightmeyer as she rounded a turn. Teyla found herself suppressing an urge to duck behind a pillar so that Heightmeyer wouldn't see her. Although Teyla understood and appreciated the necessity of the woman's occupation, ever since her sessions with Heightmeyer she'd had to resist the impulse to hide whenever she saw her coming. She suspected that she was not the only one on Atlantis who felt that way.

"Colonel Sheppard!" Heightmeyer greeted him. "Are we still on for tomorrow's session?"

Sheppard snapped his fingers. "Sorry. I meant to send you an email. I've gotta cancel again. Got an offworld mission. Very last minute."

Heightmeyer's smile became somewhat fixed. "I see. How about Tuesday? Fourteen hundred hours?"

"Tuesday's great." Sheppard's false smile was back, and Teyla had to suppress a smile of her own, recognizing the same stalling maneuver he had been using on her lately. When Tuesday rolled around, she had no doubt that he'd have somewhere he would urgently need to be.

Looking around Sheppard, Heightmeyer fixated on McKay, who appeared to be making an effort to blend into the corridor. "Dr. McKay! Glad to see you, too. Our appointment on --"

"Sorry, can't, just got a shipment of new fuses from the Daedalus, and I'll be busy all day tomorrow overseeing the installation," McKay said in a single breath.

For an instant, Teyla saw him catch Sheppard's eye in a moment of shared annoyance. A smile had begun to flicker on Sheppard's lips, but it closed down almost immediately, and McKay looked away.

Heightmeyer heaved a sigh, looking back and forth between them. "You two do realize that Dr. Weir has ordered you to see me, you understand? It's not something you have an option about."

"I've been busy," Sheppard said. McKay simply waved his hand in the air, a dismissive gesture.

Heightmeyer pointed at Sheppard. "Tuesday," she said, and pointing at McKay, "Wednesday. And if I haven't seen both of you by then, I'm reporting it to Elizabeth."

She quite possibly reported it sooner, because the following day, Teyla was informed that the offworld trip Sheppard had mentioned to Heightmeyer -- a simple scouting mission to an uninhabited world -- was to include his regular team members as well as the newly-arrived scientists and soldiers from the Daedalus that he'd been planning on taking on a shakedown mission. The full group assembled in the gateroom without the usual pre-mission chatter. Teyla noticed that Rodney still had the same spaced-out, unslept look that she'd noticed in the lab. And he and John were both avoiding each other's eyes.

The most charitable thing that Teyla could say about that offworld mission was that it was ... uncomfortable. It should have been very simple, maybe even fun ... a vacation compared to some of what they'd been through lately. The Stargate was located on a pleasant-looking beach on some temperate ocean shore, near the ruins of an old village. No one had lived there in centuries. They poked around in the ruins and found a few curious sculptures to take back for the anthropology geeks to pore over. Rodney discovered some Ancient artifacts of unknown purpose that appeared to have been used as worship objects on a village shrine. There were odd little birds and rodents everywhere, and Teyla took pictures for the biologists while she walked the perimeter of the village and got a few rock samples for the geologists. One of the new scientists slipped on a rock and twisted her ankle, while another had a panic attack at the trip through the Stargate and had to be calmed down. All in all, it was just a standard exploratory trip, with no Wraith or hostile locals or dangerous wildlife ... a little boring, a little interesting, and an opportunity to visit a world where none of her people had ever been.

And it was one of the more painful experiences of her life. Sheppard and McKay started off by ignoring each other, which lasted until Sheppard accidentally dropped one of the artifacts he was helping the scientists load in a metal specimen case. It was completely unharmed -- it had lain in the weather for centuries, after all -- but Rodney whipped around like an attack dog and snapped out a comment about clumsy soldiers keeping their hands to themselves. Sheppard shot back a retort concerning useless scientists who can't handle their own specimens without help. At least they were talking for a change, Teyla thought, but over the next couple of hours, the bickering quickly became nonstop, and it was utterly lacking the friendly edge to their usual banter. Interspersed with the arguments would be several-minute interludes of stony silence during which they glared daggers at each other or else feigned to completely ignore one another; this would last until one of them couldn't contain himself and burst out with a cutting comment that led to another foray in what was rapidly becoming all-out verbal warfare.

By the time they returned to Atlantis, Teyla's nerves were worn to a frazzle. The only bright spot in the unrelenting gloom was that she and Ronon seemed to be getting along much better. At any rate, they kept sending each other long-suffering looks as the bickering faded in and out, and once she caught him with a little sympathetic smile curving his lips, and she smiled back. She wasn't sure if she quite trusted him enough to open her heart to him again, but things were improving.

John and Rodney, on the other hand...

As a leader, she had settled similar disputes among her own people, many times. But the Athosians were much more open about such things than her new, adopted clan. She had never met such closed-off, emotionally repressed people as the Atlanteans seemed to be. Perhaps for us, it comes of us Athosians being such a small people, she thought. Earth has many, many thousands. Perhaps they have to shut themselves up inside their skins in order to survive touching so many others.

She had thought, in her early days on Atlantis, that the Atlanteans viewed other people not as family and friends, but as fellow combatants in a great social game ... a game whose rules she did not understand or care to understand. She had thought it a very sad existence indeed. However, she had quickly come to understand that despite their outward behavior, these Earth people did indeed feel things as deeply as her own people -- maybe even more so, she sometimes thought, because for whatever reason, they felt as if they had to keep their emotions bottled up inside, rather than speaking to each other frankly as Athosians did.

She found herself searching her memory for all the different times that she had mediated disputes between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, hunting partners, trading partners. The trouble was, most people on Athos had understood how distrust could poison a relationship and had sought her services before it got too bad. They all knew that a people divided could not stand against the Wraith. Other people, throughout the histories of different worlds, had not been so wise or fortunate, and they had fallen to internal strife and been taken easily by the Wraith. The Athosians were survivors. Teyla remembered how offended she had been, in her early days on Atlantis, at the Atlanteans' quick willingness to suspect her people of treachery and betrayal. Only later did she realize that they it was not just because her people were outsiders -- Earth people also feared and distrusted each other so very easily.

What a strange, frightening world Earth must be, to breed such suspicion in its children.

Still, the Athosians were human and fallible just as the Earth people were, and Teyla could remember a few times that her mediation had not solved the problem. As she went through her evening workout routine, her mind was as busy as a woodrat in a river, going over the details of those difficult cases. Unfortunately, most of those that she could remember ended in tragedy, with the injured parties bearing their grievances to their graves ... or, worse, one of them dead and the other left to carry their burden of guilt alone, a burden compounded a hundredfold because they would never be able to put right in death what they had failed to put right in life.

Alone in her exercise room, Teyla worked herself until her muscles burned and her skin felt slippery with sweat in the afternoon sun. She had invited John, yet again, for a workout session when they'd returned from the planet, but he'd just nodded and grunted before slamming a fist against the wall and going off who knew where. Probably to blow off steam by flying around in one of the jumpers. She'd heard secondhand from one of the gate techs that he'd been doing that a lot lately ... taking the jumpers up alone. Getting back his feel for aerial maneuvers, or so he claimed. Avoiding his problems back in Atlantis, Teyla thought grimly.

With the fighting sticks slippery in her wet palms, she went again and again through the forms that she had learned as a girl: the ones to kill and the ones to maim and the ones to disarm without killing. Conversation among the Atlanteans was, indeed, much like fighting, she thought, but a fight in which you hoped not to hurt the other person. You had to choose each move so very carefully, calculate the exact amount of force to score a light hit without doing any permanent harm. It was so much easier, so much simpler among her people.

Back, forth. Back, forth, up, down. She moved with practiced ease, her breathing harsh in the warm air, and she thought of John and Rodney, avoiding each other, their light verbal sparring turned to harsh blows meant to hurt and maim. She thought of people she had known who descended into that dark valley and came back out of it. She thought of those who had not.

And, suddenly, she remembered a success story that had happened entirely by accident. It involved a man and his brother back on Athos who had come to blows over a woman. Ultimately the woman jilted both and chose a third, but the damage was done. The brothers, once so close, had sworn to never speak again until their dying day. Their family had tried in vain to reconcile them before appealing to Teyla, who had also tried without success. They simply would not speak to each other. Until, quite by chance ...

Teyla realized that she had frozen in the middle of one of her katas. Frowning, and smiling a little, she laid her sticks down carefully on the floor and went to get a towel from the bench along the wall. Wiping her face, she thought over her plan. It might work. It could work. She would need Zelenka's help, of course. The trick would be getting Elizabeth to go along with it.