Title: When, not if
Author: Samantha Carter
Email: Everybody can read
Category: Sheppard/Weir angst
Warnings: Season 1 and 2, The storm, The eye, The siege, The intruder, Condemned, Epiphany, The long goodbye
Disclaimer: Not mine
Summary: She didn't know that it wasn't a matter of "if", but more of "when".
Half of my life is gone, and I have let
The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
The aspiration of my youth, to build
Some tower of song with lofty parapet.
Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret
Of restless passions that would not be stilled,
But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;
Though, half - way up the hill, I see the past
Lying beneath me with its sound and sights, -
A city in the twilight dim and vast,
With smoking roofs, soft bells, and greaming lights, -
And hear above me can the autumnal blast
The laia ract of death far thundering from the heights.
Eventually Elizabeth understood, she didn't have any idea when she agreed to lead the expedition. She didn't know that it wasn't a matter of "if", but more of "when".
But she learned.
Sometime during the whole thing with the Genii she knew, maybe it was the moment Kolya used her as a shield and John was pointing at them (him) with his P90 that she knew.
She had been always reticent to the idea, since she was a child, since she saw one of those take a person's life, she hadn't known the man, but she saw what the gun had done to him and in that precise moment Elizabeth Weir hated guns.
That was why she had become a diplomat, a negotiator. At the beginning, as anyone, she thought she could erase them from the face of the earth, or any other solar system for that matter; soon she discovered she would have to choose which fights to win and which ones to loose, even if it meant just to get rid of some of them.
Once, during a negotiation, one of the military men told her that she should try to learn how to use one. She found the idea revolting, and she could never find a motive to do so.
This galaxy had changed her, it had changed everybody, but she felt the change now as a second skin.
When she found herself dry again, with a warm cup of coffee in her hands and under the covers of her bed she kinda got the idea...if she knew how to use one maybe next time; hopefully it wouldn't be a next time; she could defend herself and not wait to be rescued by her military commander, but... she wasn't ready.
Not until the siege
Everybody in the city were worried protecting the city, protecting each other, and she felt useless in that area, she couldn't even defend herself if a wraith came out of nowhere and attack her. The others didn't need to be worried about her. Not John.
Not when he decided to flight a jumper inside a hive ship.
So, after everything ended, they went back to Earth and she had a really, really long time to think about it. She even asked Doctor Jackson how was it to be an archeologist one day and hold a P90 the next; he answered that he had learnt to defend himself. The others were worried about him all the time.
Elizabeth waited until they were back in Atlantis. One day she got as closed as tell John she would like to watch the weaponry training with Ronon; at the end she couldn't do it, and she knew why.
...she couldn't show herself like this to John.
She got used to go to bed even later to what she was used to, or to wake up when the skeleton crew were still the only ones in the control room.
She got familiar with guns, touch them, hold them, point it them at something, fire them. Surprisingly it only took her a couple of months.
Nobody notice the missing handgun, or the little bump in her ankle, not even when she went to negotiate the retrieval of John's team from that prisoner camp, or when he got trapped in that energy field.
Then, Phoebus took advantage and put her directly behind the gun, not to protect herself of anybody else, but to hurt.
She couldn't hold the dam thing in almost a month, afraid of hurting someone else.
Some months later they went to a really pacific planet, the natives wanted to talk directly with their leaders, John had stayed with her the whole time, but he was the first to find himself without any means to defend himself, or her when they were attacked, and she understood when she had to shoot the guard pointing at John.
She fired before she had time to process what was happening.
The loud bang of the gun echoed in her ears, and she felt it slipping from her hands.
John looked at her
She knew it was a question of "when", not "if", but she never though it would be a question of "who"
The end