A/N: I'm back with a girl talk scene! I honestly wasn't sure I was even going to post this chapter (which somehow seems to keep getting longer and longer with every edit), but Sourlander gave me some much-needed encouragement. So thank you, friend!
Hope you enjoy!
If Emma had to picture the stereotypical botanist, Dr. Lacey Peters had to be an almost exact antithesis to that image. Outspoken, flirtatious, and overly passionate about the perfect way to make a cup of tea, only the Amazon forest in miniature taking over her quarters gave any indication of her profession. Nearly every surface in the room was decorated with some sort of potted plant – some more terrestrial-looking than others – including the coffee table in front of her.
Emma drained her glass of red wine and set it down. "Thanks again for letting me crash here tonight."
"Of course," Lacey said as she reached for the wine bottle to pour Emma some more, only to discover that it was empty. She got up from the small couch and headed to the kitchenette to fetch another bottle. "We were long overdue for a girls' night, anyway. Though you do eventually need to woman up, march up to that neighbor's door and tell them to can it so you can get some sleep." After a moment of jingling and jangling in the utensils drawer, she found the corkscrew, drove it into the neck of the new bottle and released the cork with a satisfying pop. A bacchian smirk spread across her face. "I love that sound."
Lacey filled Emma's glass nearly to the brim, accidentally dribbling a few drops of the dark red liquid onto the coffee table. "Whoops."
Emma stared at the drops of wine and felt the mental block she had fought all day to keep up begin to crumble. Her stomach lurched as she no longer saw wine, but the puddle of Ronon and Eva's blood on the floor outside the conference room. Up until that moment, she had managed to distract herself from worrying about where they were and what they were doing; the haze of the wine had helped even further, buoying the heavy weight in her chest and rounding the edges of her fear. But those three little droplets had brought reality back into sharp focus for her. While she drank, ate, and relaxed with her friend on this planet, somewhere across the galaxy on another, Ronon and her daughter could very well be bleeding out onto the floor of some distant Wraith research facility. Nothing more than drops of wine, lost in the mist.
The strength of concern she felt for Eva had long ceased to surprise her; she had experienced those maternal instincts before, and had almost immediately been able to identify and reference them. What did surprise her, though, was her preoccupation for Ronon. The mere thought of him being injured or captured sent a small tremor through her body and a chill through her heart.
They weren't together. She had to keep reminding herself of that. They hadn't kissed, hadn't made love, hadn't even held hands. Point blank, he had told her he wasn't interested. And yet this fear, this anxiety for his wellbeing…it was suffocating.
Lacey had come back from the kitchenette with a towel to wipe up the mess. Like that, the drops were gone. Like they never existed at all.
Emma cleared her throat. "Lace, are you…worried at all?" she asked.
"About what?" She poured herself another glass, too. "About the Wraith? Not a whole lot we can do in the botany department about that, unfortunately."
"I meant about Evan."
Lacey's eyes abruptly met hers before she let out a long sigh and sank onto a floor cushion across from her. "I suppose." She munched thoughtfully on a few pieces of popcorn. "But I also know that worrying won't change anything and will only make me miserable, so I'm trying not to think about it."
Emma stared into her wine glass and nodded.
"You're worried about the girl?" Lacey asked, folding her legs underneath her.
She nodded again.
"They're with the best of the best. Sheppard. Teyla. Ronon. And Evan's not so bad himself," she said with a small smile.
"You're right," Emma whispered. She brought the glass to her lips, but found that she couldn't make herself take a sip.
"Something wrong with the wine?" Lacey asked with a frown before grabbing her own glass and giving it a suspicious sniff.
"No." Emma forced herself to take a drink of it and swallowed hard. "It's fine."
"I will say, the quality of the stuff Zelenka has managed to sneak through keeps getting better and better."
A smile finally took over Emma's expression. "Probably because Woolsey has expensive taste."
Lacey leaned forward, holding her glass in both hands. "Do you really think he knows?"
Emma shrugged. "I don't think he would ever admit to knowing about it. But he has to know that his cigars and those bottles of Chateau Mouton come from somewhere."
"Chateau Mouton," Lacey imitated, overexaggerating Emma's French pronunciation. "You are so full of it."
More at ease, Emma took another sip of wine while Lacey grabbed a handful of popcorn.
"So, what's going on with you and Brett?"
The wine hit the back of her throat like vinegar and made her sputter. "What?"
"With you and Brett Hanson. I assume that's where you went after you stopped by here a few nights ago? To his place?"
She shook her head vigorously, still coughing. "No. Definitely not."
"Now, you know that I am not one to fall prey to the temptations of idle gossip…"
Emma shot her an accusatory glance, to which Lacey smiled enigmatically.
"But, from what I've heard, it sounds like you did not return to your own quarters that night."
"I didn't go anywhere near Captain Hanson's quarters," she said firmly.
"It's okay. You can tell me. You don't have to be embarrassed. He's rather good looking, seems smart –"
"There is nothing going on between Hanson and me!"
Lacey's wide-eyed stare back at her made her realize that she had perhaps shouted a bit too loudly.
"Sorry," she said in a lower voice. "Hanson and I used to work at the SGC together. He took me on one date in the Springs – to the Broadmoor, no less…"
Lacey made a face, shrugged, and shook her head with incomprehension.
"Fancy hotel," she explained. "Jacket required at dinner. Lake. Swans. A bit too much pressure for a first date. Made me feel like I owed him something by the end of it, you know?"
Her friend snorted into her wine glass.
"Anyway, it was enough to tell me I wasn't interested. He just…" she ran her finger along the rim of her glass, "he was just too similar to the other men I had dated in the past."
Lacey narrowed her eyes and stared long and hard at Emma. "So…you went straight back to your own place, then?"
Emma fixed her gaze on a tall fern behind Lacey's head. "Mmhmm."
"You are a terrible liar, Dr. Rogers." She raised herself to her knees and leaned across the coffee table. "Who did you sleep with? Tell me tell me tell me."
Emma brought her knees to her chest and fell back into the couch cushions. "I don't want to talk about it, okay?"
"What's the point of having a girls' night if we don't use it to talk about stuff like this? Honestly, if the Wraith really are on their way here, this could be our last chance!" She pouted. "Won't you grant a dying woman's wish?"
"You're being melodramatic and it won't work on me."
Lacey grabbed a few pieces of popcorn and threw one at her. "Tell me." She threw another. "Tell me." Another. "Tell me."
"No!" she laughed, fishing a soggy piece of popcorn out of her wine glass.
"Ew, don't eat that. Here," she held a napkin out to her and Emma dropped the drunken kernel onto the cloth. Lacey wiped her hands on her pants, reached to the bookshelf behind her, and fired up her tablet. "Fine. You won't tell? I'll guess."
"You can't be serious…"
"The more your face resembles a tomato, the closer I know I am to the truth." She read the first name off the screen. "Was it Dr. Adams?"
Emma stared blankly back at her.
"Dr. Archimedes?"
"The one who has a crush on Teyla?"
"The very same. Sergeant Arroyo? Dr. Baxter?"
"Are you really going to go through the entire directory?" Emma asked.
"Absolutely. Unless you want to put both of us out of our misery and just tell me."
"No thanks," Emma smirked.
"God help me if it's Zelenka," she muttered, taking a sip of wine.
Lacey made it all the way through the B and C last names, by which point Emma had fixed her gaze to a spot on the ceiling, feigning boredom.
"Captain Cui? Lieutenant Davidson?"
A rush of blood surged from her stomach, up through her chest, onto her neck, and pooled on her cheeks before Lacey even read his name.
"Ronon Dex? Dr. Di – wait. Ronon? Ronon Dex? Is it Ronon? Did you sleep with Ronon?"
"Oh, will you stop saying his name?" Emma said, finally braving her friend's face again.
Lacey released a high-pitched noise that bordered upon inhuman. "Oh, that makes perfect sense! Obvious, even." She glanced to the side. "Wow, I feel rather stupid for not thinking of it sooner, actually."
"It's nothing," Emma said.
"How was it?" Lacey asked, eager for more details. "He's a good kisser, isn't he?"
The heat on her face intensified. "I wouldn't know because I did not have sex with him."
Lacey waved the comment off. "That was one time. And so long ago. He got in, got out – literally," she said with a waggle of her eyebrows, "no feelings were exchanged." She pinched her thumb and index finger together. "An ideal transaction."
Emma didn't know how to reply and instead picked at her fingernails, waiting for the flush on her cheeks to dissipate. From very early on in her friendship with Lacey, she had known that she and Ronon had had a one-night stand a couple years ago, before Emma had even set foot on Atlantis. She hadn't given it much thought until recently, but now she felt guilty for the tight knot of jealousy starting to squeeze at her insides.
"I suspect that's not quite the case for you, though, is it?" Lacey's voice had become softer, gentler. "Do you have feelings for him?"
"I don't know," she mumbled.
"Again. Terrible liar."
"How can I not?" She shook her head, still fiddling with her cuticles. "And it's – it's not just Eva or anything she's told me about him…about us."
She took a deep breath and thought of the moment Ronon had tended to the knife wound on her neck in the middle of that rainy meadow. The surprising tenderness of his hand on the back of her head, the firmness of the other as he staunched the bleeding, the way he wouldn't stop looking at her. Had he felt then what she was feeling now? That same asphyxiating fear of loss?
She felt too vulnerable to look up at her friend as she spoke. "Have you ever had someone touch you or – or hold you and you just…know?" Her voice broke as the tears in her eyes obscured her vision.
It took less than a second for Lacey to be at her side on the couch, wrapping an arm around her. "You're scaring me a little, Emma," she said, trying to keep her tone humorous. "You're not usually like this."
"No. No, I'm not. It's…" she took in a ragged breath, "overwhelming. I've never felt this before."
Lacey squeezed her arm. "Well then, that's good, isn't it? Why are you crying?"
"Because he doesn't…" she paused to find a word that wouldn't make her sound like a middle school girl crying about a boy not liking her back, "reciprocate my feelings. He had a wife, I think, a long time ago, and he – he can't let her go."
Lacey looked down at her lap, brow furrowed. "Maybe he needs some help letting go. A little nudge?"
"It's not my job to fix him." The words she had repeated in therapy session after therapy session came out of her mouth like they had been programmed into her automatic speech interface. She had been down that route before, a couple times, and it never worked. It had taken her until twenty-five to fully learn that.
"You don't need to fix him," Lacey said. "No one can be fixed. Not completely. All you can do is love the broken man that he is."
Emma straightened and gave her a surprised glance. "Love him? I don't –"
"Darling, you know that I am not a romantic. Not in the slightest. Love at first sight? Rubbish. Soul mates? They don't exist. Kiss the frog and he'll turn into a prince? Dangerous logic at best. I don't believe in any of that. But what I do believe is that you, my friend, are in love."
"No – that's not – I'm not – we've only –" Lacey's accusation had rattled her so much, she couldn't form a coherent sentence. "Love isn't a one-way street," she finally said.
Lacey released a frustrated sigh. "How do you know he doesn't have feelings for you?"
"Because he told me! He flat out told me he wasn't interested in anything with me."
"And since when do we listen to what Ronon Dex says rather than what he does?"
It was like a cartoon anvil had been dropped on her head. She had a point.
"Unlike you, my dear, he is not the most linguistically gifted of all people."
Once again, she was right. Hadn't Ronon admitted to exactly that the night before? That he hadn't actually meant the regretful words he had said to Eva after their sparring match?
"So after you came here two nights ago, you did go to Ronon's quarters, didn't you?"
"Yes," Emma admitted.
"But you said you didn't have sex and it sounds like you haven't kissed, either, so what the hell did you end up doing?"
Emma shrugged her shoulders. "We just…slept."
"The whole night?"
She nodded. "And last night, too."
Lacey's eyes went wide as she pulled her head back. "You've spent two nights with him?"
"Well," she started, mad at herself for being unable to stifle the grin on her lips, "the first time was actually on our last mission together. I was freezing and –"
"And you asked him to huddle for warmth? That's the oldest trick in the book! He fell for that?"
"He didn't fall for it. I was legitimately cold! And it was probably warmer for him, too."
"I bet it was," Lacey muttered under her breath.
"Oh, stop." She dug an elbow into her friend's ribs.
"Okay. I'm sorry. So you have, quite literally, slept together three times."
"Yes."
"And does he hold you when you sleep?"
Southern belle she was not, but Lacey had an uncomfortably blunt way of speaking about romantic interactions that often made Emma flinch. "I don't see how that –"
"Does he?"
Emma nodded. "Not intentionally, I don't think, but…it happens."
"Forgive me for bringing this up again, but when the two of us had relations," Emma knew that Lacey was suddenly using more delicate vocabulary for her sake, "he left almost immediately after. He didn't hang around for a cuddle. Didn't sleep here." Emma suppressed the sudden impulse to look over at the bed. "He got out of dodge as quickly as he could. I would therefore venture to say that you have seen a side of him that no one else has."
"What are you saying, Lacey?"
"What I'm saying is that you're right. Love is a two-way street. And does Ronon love you? Probably not."
Emma didn't expect that to sting as much as it did, but it felt like someone had jabbed a toothpick into her heart.
"But I don't think his street is totally blocked off, either. To me it sounds like, one by one, he's lifting up his traffic cones so that you can pass."
Lacey's words almost knocked the wind out of her. Was that really what was happening? She always tried her best to take others' words at face value so as not to assign any false or imagined meaning to them, but was this situation with Ronon different?
She could almost hear her mother screaming at her from the back of her mind, telling her that a lady should never chase after a man. "If he's interested, there won't be any doubt in your mind," she'd always say. But there was doubt. She was riddled with it. Then again, maybe the rules for a young, still-healing widower were different…
She thought back over the past few weeks, to every "traffic cone" incident they had experienced together. When they were prisoners and in no position to bargain, he had looked a Wraith straight in the eyes and demanded her medication. He had nearly disobeyed his commanding officer's orders to take care of her when she was injured. He had held her so close in that hallway on the Alpha Site. He had stood up for her during meetings with Woolsey. He had listened to her talk about her family at dinner. He made sure she was safe after her asthma attack last night. And even today, he had come to seek her opinion on a matter of co-parenting.
Glancing over to Lacey, she realized that her friend was already looking back at her, one of her eyebrows raised high. "More wine?" she asked.
Emma gave her almost-empty glass a look of surprise and presented it to her. "Please."