Her breath was hot next to his ear, a sigh of soft satisfaction, while he kissed her neck. He could feel the muscles of her torso tense and then relax as his hand traced the lines of her ribs and waist down to the flare of her hips. She had never seemed more like his than she did in that moment, eclipsed by his own sheer size and weight on top of her.
"Ronon?"
Yet there was a hidden strength to her. He had always known it. He felt it in her thighs, wrapped tightly around him, grounding him to her like an anchor. They had moved like waves in a harbor, back and forth, rising and falling with one another…
"Chewie?"
Reality snapped back into focus and Ronon turned to look at Sheppard.
"What?" His voice was thin, mouth suddenly parched.
Sheppard's eyes dropped to his almost untouched plate of breakfast and he frowned. "You, uh…ready to go?"
"Yeah."
They both got up from the table, bussed their plates and headed toward the briefing room.
They had been so close. She had been so close. He had felt her, tasted her, and now he wanted more. He needed more.
"You feelin' okay?" Sheppard asked.
"Fine," Ronon grunted.
"Sure you're not getting a bug or something? You hardly touched your food this morning."
"I said I'm fine."
"Just figured I'd ask. There might be something going around." He spun a finger around in the air. "Rogers is apparently out for the day."
"What?" Ronon stopped in his tracks and made eye contact with Sheppard. "She's sick?"
Sheppard shrugged. "That's what McKay said."
"McKay? The hell does he know about anything?"
"Quite a bit, I'd say, but don't tell him you heard it from me."
Ronon sent an impatient glare Sheppard's way, indicating he wasn't in a joking spirit.
The colonel took the hint and resumed the conversation. "Katie was the one who told him about Rogers. Apparently, she spent the night at Dr. Peters' place for some reason. As far as I know, she's still there." Sheppard furrowed his brow. "Why? Have you been around her? Do you think she got you sick?"
"She didn't get me sick," Ronon said sharply. He took a deep, steadying breath. "'Cause she's not sick."
"Look, I don't think Rogers has taken a sick day since she got here. I doubt she'd call in unless she was really –"
"She's not sick, she's hungover."
"Hungover? How do you –" This time Sheppard cut himself off as realization dawned upon him.
"I'm the one who got her drunk last night."
"Oh no," Sheppard whispered under his breath.
Ronon turned his back to Sheppard and thrust his hands through his hair, closing his eyes to block out his surroundings. He hadn't come out of the evening of drinking completely unscathed, either, and a dull, throbbing ache was starting to take up residence in his temples.
"If she was drinking with you last night then she's definitely sick today."
"Fuck," he hissed.
"What was she doing last night drinking with you, anyway?"
Ronon spun to face him again. "What do you think we were doing?"
"Oh!" Sheppard's eyes widened with surprise. "I knew it!" He directed an accusatory finger at Ronon. "I knew you two were cavorting with one another. But wait…Katie Brown said she spent the night at Dr. Peters'."
"Wherever it was, it wasn't with me," Ronon said through gritted teeth. He was painfully aware of that.
Sheppard glanced at his watch. "Look, you can give me the details later –"
"Like hell."
"—but we've got one minute until our briefing starts. You can check on her after that."
"Pretty sure I'm the last person she wants to see right now. If she wanted someone to check on her, she wouldn't be hiding in a place that's not her own quarters."
Sheppard tilted his head in conciliation.
They resumed their walk to the briefing room. Ronon took a deep breath and tried to clear his head. He had, quite literally, pushed Emma away and now he needed to face the fallout.
"Not a word about this," Ronon said, turning to Sheppard, "to anyone."
Sheppard opened his mouth to say something.
"Not even Teyla."
He sighed. "Fine. Your secret is safe with me. Still…even if you think she doesn't want to see you, I think you should check on – "
"What secret?"
Sheppard jumped, bringing a hand to his heart, and Ronon's stomach flipped over on itself as he laid eyes on Eva.
Over the weeks, he had grown accustomed to her presence; up until this morning, however, the connection between them had been somewhat detached, theoretical even, a mere blip in space and time. But now – perhaps because of how close he had been with her mother the night before – that connection instantly felt all the more real. Maybe it was the looming effects of the impending hangover and not her sudden appearance, but nonetheless his head was left spinning.
"Where the hell did you come from?" Sheppard asked as he caught his breath.
"What secret?" she prodded.
"Nothing," Ronon said, shrugging her off as they entered the briefing room.
Eva rolled her eyes, plopped into a chair and huffed as she crossed her arms over her chest. Ronon and Sheppard took the last few seats available, given that Woolsey, Teyla, and McKay were already there.
"Good morning, everyone," Woolsey began. "Dr. Beckett tells me that he and the patient are on their way so we should be able to begin shortly."
Eva looked around the table and furrowed her brow. "Where's Emma?" she asked.
"Dr. Rogers is not a member of Recon-1 –"
Eva opened her mouth to protest, but Woolsey stayed her with a raised hand.
"But I did invite her to attend given her," he cleared his throat, "rather personal interest in the matter."
Ronon couldn't help but bury his eyes in his lap.
"Unfortunately, she has taken ill today. Ah," he said, standing up, "there they are."
Eva's surprised gaze sought Ronon's, hopeful that he would have more information about Emma's sudden illness, but he quelled her visual inquiry with a minute shake of the head.
Ronon was grateful for the incoming distraction and turned to see Dr. Beckett wheeling Janus into the briefing room. A large bag of orange liquid was suspended from a pole attached to the wheelchair, which fed into a tube injected into the back of the Ancient's hand.
"Welcome. I'm happy to see you are feeling strong enough to meet with us here. How are you this morning?" Woolsey asked.
"Fatigued…but well," Janus nodded. "Much better than I have felt in a long, long time."
Woolsey sat as Dr. Beckett did and opened his leather-bound dossier to take notes. "Now, the purpose of this meeting – for as long as you can tolerate it – is to discuss what you know of the Wraith cruiser heading toward our city. We are hoping to gain as much intel as possible about it so that we may most adequately defend ourselves should it arrive."
Janus merely nodded in comprehension.
"Let's start at the most basic. What powers this cruiser?"
"It is difficult to explain," Janus began.
"Try us," McKay dryly said.
"I believe it would be best described as an organic," he gestured vaguely with his hand, as if trying to grasp the name from the air, "potentia."
"You mean a zero-point module? An organic zero-point module?" McKay asked, eyes practically bugging out of their sockets.
"Zero-point module?" Janus echoed.
"Yeah," McKay answered. "Ancient power source that can supply tremendous amounts of energy. Sort of a poky cylinder…about yea big," he held his hands about a foot apart. "Red, orange, and yellow crystals. Creates a pocket of subspace time then extracts energy from said pocket until it reaches maximum entropy?"
"Precisely."
Stunned silence ensued.
"The – the cruiser has a ZPM on board?" Woolsey clarified.
"In a manner of speaking," Janus answered. "Of my own design."
"And this ZPM powers the hyperdrive, clearly."
"Correct," Janus confirmed. "It operates at 1.75 times the speed of a regular cruiser hyperdrive."
More silence befell the room until Teyla spoke up. "Does the ship possess shield capabilities?"
The Ancient shook his head. "Not like Lantean shields. The cruiser relies on the regenerative capabilities of the hull to protect itself. Though I did optimize the regeneration systems to work more expediently."
"What about sensors?" Sheppard asked.
A muscle at the edge of Janus' mouth twitched. "Specialized…and extremely sensitive. As you may recall, it can detect Lantean signals even when under the guise of a cloak."
"Also your doing?" Sheppard's tone had turned bitter.
"Of course," he replied calmly. "I also incorporated beaming technology and changed the interface so that the sensors would target not only organic matter, but inorganic as well."
Eva scratched at her forehead and looked down into her lap.
"What about weapons?" Ronon asked.
"I did not modify any of the ship's weaponry systems, as the cruiser was not intended to be a warship."
"Usually, cruisers escort hive ships during cullings or assaults on worlds," Teyla chimed in. "They are ancillary vessels. I take it this ship is not affiliated with any hive or queen?"
This time the corner of Janus' mouth turned upward. "A most complicated question. My commander was once the trusted advisor of a Wraith queen, but after several centuries, he found his interests did not align with those of his kind. He was interested in science outside their typical scope, in research and experiments he believed would ultimately lead to Wraith supremacy across the galaxy."
"A sort of kindred spirit?" Sheppard suggested.
Janus began to reply but McKay interrupted.
"Your primary purpose was research and development, then."
"Correct, Dr. McKay. My commander's queen found his ideas too radical… too extreme. They parted ways and, though she refused to offer official support, she did graciously provide him with his ship and a small crew before distancing herself from him and his ideas."
"And you were part of that crew?" Ronon asked.
"I was a gift," he said, with a distant tinge of acrimony. "You see, in my reality, I was culled."
"The Wraith culled Atlantis?" Teyla asked, clearly surprised.
Janus smiled and shook his head. "No. Atlantis did not fall to the Wraith during my time there. I was culled while visiting my temple."
"On M5R-233?" Woolsey asked. "The last known location of the cruiser?"
"Indeed. I had been working on one of my experiments in my laboratory there and…committed a grave error. I ended up calling the Wraith to my location, unbeknownst to me."
"Sounds like a recurring thing for you," Sheppard said.
"For years, I had protected those people and that planet from the Wraith, and I ended up bringing them to their doorstep." His gaze dropped.
"Why didn't they feed on you?" Ronon asked. If you were culled and not fed upon, it was because you had been chosen to be a runner. Janus had conveniently escaped both fates.
"They sensed I was Lantean – the only Lantean out of all the people they culled. They figured I had to be significant, but they did not know how or why. They had taken their fill and then some with the people of that planet, so it was not too much of an inconvenience to spare me – at least temporarily."
"So you were given to this commander and became a Wraith worshipper?" Ronon supplied.
Janus eyed him, silent, an unreadable emotion behind his cool, blue gaze. "Perhaps you do not know what it is like to be under the influence of Wraith enzyme." Those blue eyes drifted lazily, almost rolled, toward the bag suspended above him. "To have your life ripped from you, then returned in an instant in a flood of memory and sensation, over and over again…for centuries."
Ronon did know what it was like, though had only known it for a few short days.
"It becomes all you know, all you crave, all you can imagine. You have known such obsession before, have you not?"
Once again, Ronon had. Though the most recent memory of such a feeling wasn't at all related to Wraith enzyme.
"You would do anything to feel that rush, to revisit the life you once had."
"Did you?" McKay asked, softly.
"Did I what?"
"Try to revisit your old life? I mean…you figured out how to jump through time."
"No. The most important rule of meddling with time is to not meddle with time."
"Now there's a paradox for you," Sheppard muttered under his breath.
"Our use of time travel was purely utilitarian. We visited our research sites to see how our experiments would progress on the macro scale. We made sure that these sites were on remote, uninhabited worlds, unequipped with Stargates, that would therefore have little impact on the rest of the galaxy and vice-versa. We made our visits quick and infrequent, interfering with the subjects on the planets as little as possible. Of course, avoiding time paradoxes altogether is impossible," his eyes met Eva's, "but there is a difference between the ripples of a pebble dropped in an ocean and those of a boulder crashing into a pond."
"How big of a jump in time can your cruiser make?" Woolsey asked.
"That depends. The size of the jump – whether through time or reality – all depends on how long the potentia has had to regenerate. Even when nearly depleted, jumps of a few days are still possible; a fully charged potentia, though, can power jumps of a few hundred years. Anything greater than that would require a more substantial power source."
"Like a fully-leaded ZPM," McKay supplied.
"What one sacrifices in power, one gains in reliability when dealing with organic technology."
"You were similarly limited across realities?" Woolsey asked.
"Yes. Both by necessity and power limitations." His eyes drifted to a ray of sunshine filtering through the stained glass and onto a spot just near the foot of Ronon's chair. "Imagine the multiverse as the spectrum of light. There is an infinite number of – for lack of a better term – color possibilities within the spectrum. Differences between each hue range from almost imperceptible to wildly distinct. Red appears distinctly different than yellow, distinctly different from blue. It's as though my potentia restricts us to colors from within a certain shade of the spectrum."
"What's this reality, then?" Sheppard asked. "Rhapsody in Blue?"
"This was ultimately a benefit to our experiments as the number of variables was limited between similar realities." He turned to look at Eva. "This would explain why your reality is not so different than this one."
"So…the multiverse is like an infinite box of crayons?" Eva ventured. "My reality is cornflower blue and this one is, what, more of a periwinkle?"
"Something like that," he said, a smile behind his eyes.
"How did you find me?" she asked, leaning forward in her seat. "How did you find my home – my Atlantis? Coincidence?"
"It would have to be the coincidence of several lifetimes for me to find you the way I did." He paused and the whole room stared expectantly back at him.
"Why me?" Eva whispered.
"I've often wondered that myself. Atlantis, in your time and your reality, is actually located on Lantea." His eyes locked onto Woolsey's. "Don't think I didn't realize we're not currently on Lantea," he added with a tone expressing both amusement and deception.
"We call it New Lantea," Woolsey explained. "We needed to abandon Lantea nearly two years ago due to an attack from the Asurans."
"I thought I had long forgotten its location," Janus continued, "but perhaps, deep down, I was trying to go home. I am truly sorry that we crossed paths and that you were captured."
Eva looked down at the table and Ronon could see her muscles tense. An apology was a nice gesture, but that was all it was; it wouldn't cure her or make anything better. The damage had already been done.
"If the ship can travel through time," Sheppard began, "why didn't the crew onboard just reverse things once they realized you were gone? Or why don't they jump through time to get here faster? Or better yet – jump to the future to see if trying to recapture you is going to be successful?"
At that, Janus did break into a full smile. "Because…the time and reality mechanism can only be controlled by me. No one should manipulate time the way we have, but if someone was going to do it, it was going to be me and me alone."
"It needs the Ancient gene to activate?"
Janus shook his head. "More than that. It requires my DNA specifically."
"I don't buy it," Sheppard said once Dr. Beckett had removed Janus from the room. After a while, the Ancient had grown weary from so much talking.
"Which part?" Woolsey had removed his glasses, closed his eyes, and was pinching the bridge of his nose.
"Well, a lot of it, truth be told. Like when you asked him how he found you," he directed his attention to Eva. "He said he just missed home?" Sheppard narrowed his eyes in suspicion.
Eva shrugged.
"And despite the effects of the Wraith enzyme, he managed to remember all of his research and even expand upon it, yet he also claims to have forgotten Lantea's location? Something's not adding up." He shook his head and grimaced.
Teyla nodded. "I have to agree with John. It is likely the Wraith knew the location of Lantea. They would have known where they were going. They would not have allowed him to map a course to Lantea unless there were some other, mutually beneficial motive to go there."
"Maybe there was research he wanted – here in the city."
"See, now that I believe," Sheppard said, pointing at McKay.
"Something illicit?" Teyla wondered aloud.
McKay shook his head. "He conducted most of his forbidden research in his satellite lab on M5R-233. It had to have been something more run-of-the-mill, maybe something related to ZPMs?"
"That research is still here, then…in the city," Ronon said.
"You were in a Puddle Jumper when you got beamed into the Cruiser, weren't you?" McKay asked Eva.
She nodded. "The whole thing was beamed aboard."
"It was a Puddle Jumper retrofitted with a time traveling device that got Janus' research banned by the Lantean Council," he explained. "Maybe that's all he wanted – a Jumper."
"No reason to think the two wouldn't be mutually exclusive." Sheppard touched the radio at his ear. "Hanson, come in, this is Sheppard."
Ronon's eyes darted toward the colonel.
"Captain, I need you to increase security presence at the Jumper Bay and – " he paused and gestured to McKay.
"East pier, lower level of the tallest tower – it was damaged by the flood."
Sheppard relayed the information to Hanson. "Understood, Captain. I'll send you a memo pinpointing the exact location."
"Prudent thinking, Colonel," Mr. Woolsey said before taking a deep breath. "Meeting adjourned."
A/N: Thanks for reading and reviewing! :)