Reminder:
"This is spoken English."
"This is spoken Czech."
This is a thought.

Previously: It turns out that Doctor Weir might have… feelings? Meanwhile, Anna is enjoying working with Rodney! Maybe "enjoying" is too strong a word…

Chapter 84. Discreet.

It was later than Anna realized. She checked the clock on her tablet and then looked at the door, like maybe it had something to do with Radek's being so late. After dinner, he went back to his lab to just do "one thing" or another. As usual, that was that.

She sighed and pushed the tablet away. If he worked late like this every night, it would explain his frequent sleeping in these days, but he didn't. He was never out this late, one of those people that went to bed at a very reasonable hour unless something unreasonable had happened during the day to necessitate his staying up.

Anna diverted her thoughts to the huge chunk of ZPM-looking crystal sitting under her desk in her room. She wanted to sneak down to the geology lab tonight to run some of her own tests on it, find out if the crystal was at all analogous to the ZPM itself. If it was, she might just be in the ZPM-making business. Assuming she could find the room for it. They had chip-making rooms, robot-making rooms, and virus-making rooms. Anna didn't guess the Ancients would leave out a room for making their power source.

How much power did it take to make their power source?

She would have to figure that out later. She first had to know if she even could make the thing. Figure out the financing of her little project. But something told her a couple of hours of solar power wasn't going to cover constructing a pocket of subspace.

It was eleven o'clock when the door slid open and Radek stepped inside. His eyes fell over the room, one fixture at a time, before landing on Anna. He glanced from her seat on the floor, to the couch, then back again. She'd missed her regular station on the floor since her ankle put her on the couch for so long.

"Hi?" she said.

"Hi. Sorry I'm so late."

It wasn't a big deal, but she felt like she said that a lot, so she just shrugged.

Radek walked into the room and looked around, finally seizing one of the books he left out this morning. He picked it up, ran his fingers down the spine, and turned it over. Was it just her, or was Radek acting strange…? Or maybe it was just Radek being Radek… It was really hard to tell sometimes.

"Is anything wrong?"

Radek glanced up, looking slightly in a panic. "Am I acting like something is wrong?"

Anna shrugged. She didn't mean for her interrogation to turn against her so suddenly.

"I don't think anything is wrong." He discarded his book, right back where he'd found it, and walked around to take a seat on the couch.

"Okay." Anna supposed she'd just take his word for it. "Hey," she said, and he looked at her with some sort of intense interest. "Can I ask you a question?"

A bit dubious about his answer, he shifted his eyes from one side of the room to the other before finally settling his gaze on her again. "Uh… sure?"

"Just about ZPMs," she said, wondering what in the world he thought she was about to ask about.

"Oh, okay, yes."

Maybe she should have seen his sudden enthusiasm coming. After all, he liked nothing better than ZPMs and other technical aspects of Atlantis, right? Anna always knew that if she really wanted to get his attention, she was just a question about power junctions away.

"I understand that it extracts vacuum energy from an artificial region of subspace until it reaches maximum entropy," Anna started. Maybe the words I understand were a little too strong for this situation. On the other hand, she wasn't really concerned about what it did.

Still, he watched her with a growing smile.

"But how are they made?"

Radek half-chuckled as he blew the air out of his lungs and rounded the couch. "Well, that's… we aren't really sure," he said finally as he sank down on the couch. "Why would you want to know how to make them—you don't even know what zero point energy is, do you?"

Anna shook her head, but didn't get the chance to explain herself.

"I'm not even sure I could explain it before… uh…" He looked around, apparently for a clock. Finding none, he finished, "Well, before I'll want to go to sleep."

"Well… I don't think understanding how it works is really all that important." Anna walked over to the couch and sat on the other side.

He looked at her like she'd grown a third nostril. "How is that not important?"

"I don't think we have to understand everything about it before we know how to make one. It might make it easier, but…" She waited, maybe for Radek to give her something like an affirmative. He never did, so she asked, "What are they made of?"

"Wait… what?" He sighed and shook his head. "I'm not sure, but—"

"I just don't think it's necessary to understand everything one-hundred percent in order to use it," Anna explained. "I mean, look at us. We're in this ten-thousand year old city and we're pretty happy to have the showers working."

Radek just stared.

"You're telling me the people making the earliest transmitters understood what radio waves were?"

He chuckled at that, but didn't seem convinced. Anna wasn't really convinced, either. "There's a bit of a difference between radio waves and zero point energy, but I guess you make a point," he allowed.

"We don't have to know what the picture looks like before we start putting the puzzle pieces together."

"That sounds dangerous."

Naturally, that would be his objection. Anna smirked. "You're the one who decided to go to another galaxy. I think you don't get to be concerned about danger. Not about this, anyway."

He seemed to find that funny. At least he wasn't mad about her cavalier manner of courting potential danger. Just wait until he learned she was sneaking down to the geology lab to use a bunch of machines she'd never used without supervision before.

"Alright, yes, I think that if we could find a very detailed schematic and the necessary equipment to make a ZPM… we could turn it on," Radek allowed finally. "But ZPM crystals are like the diamonds of the Pegasus galaxy."

"Very valuable," Anna said quietly.

Radek paused for a moment, as though trying to find the connection between what he'd said and what Anna said. "Yes, but I was talking about the molecular organization."

Anna blushed a little. It wouldn't be very much like Radek to make that kind of comparison, now that she thought about it. She stayed quiet, thinking about the crystal in her room. If it was a ZPM crystal, like she thought, she'd rather surprise him. But she didn't suppose she'd be able to tell if a molecule was highly structured just by looking at it…

No, probably not.

She had to analyze it first.

Radek suddenly stood. "I'm going to bed. Unless you had more questions?"

Anna paused, and shook her head. She smiled up at him. "No. I can ask you any other questions I have tomorrow. It's not really that important."

He nodded and disappeared into his room. As soon as the door shut, Anna jumped up and skipped to her room. Tonight, she'd find out if she'd found anything valuable. She probably hadn't. But she'd find out.

#

Was he seriously doing this? Going to the control room just to see her? It would be fine if he didn't even talk to her. He just wanted to see her. He was behaving like a child, and he had no idea why. It had been a long time since he'd felt like this, felt anything at all like this. It had been a long time since he thought someone else felt like that about him, too.

That reasoning wasn't good enough.

"Hey, Doctor Z," Chuck spoke up as soon as Radek entered the control room. "Could you take a look at this? If you're not busy…"

Radek nodded, relieved that his time wouldn't be wasted on this extracurricular excursion to the central tower. It wouldn't be wasted… not really. He glanced up toward Elizabeth's office. She was standing behind her desk, talking to Colonel Sheppard. She had that pleasant smile, uniquely hers, and the radiance of the mid-morning sun falling into her office from the windows across the 'gate room.

Radek went to Chuck's console. "I'm not busy," he said. "What is it?"

"I don't know…" Chuck sounded mildly concerned. "I've been getting some strange energy spikes since yesterday. Not a lot, and just here and there. At first, I thought I was just seeing things." He pulled up a screen tracking power consumption across the city, along with an overview of running systems and security features. "See, there."

Radek squinted at the screen as a couple of junctions on one of the far piers spiked into the red for half a second before falling back down to normal. "That's odd," he allowed.

"Wait here a few minutes and it'll happen again somewhere else," Chuck said. He looked up to watch Radek watching the screen.

"This is overall power consumption?" Radek didn't know why he asked the question, since he knew very well what he was looking at. But, on the other hand, this was a weird malfunction. "That's really odd."

"Isn't it?" Chuck leaned back in his chair and watched another junction in a completely unrelated part of the city jump.

It was much easier to focus on the blaring red at intervals… But Radek was willing to bet the problem had more to do with the sudden power drop off at adjacent nodes. In other words, for split seconds at random, some of Atlantis's systems would cut their power usage, shuffling along more power than usual to its neighbors and causing a spike.

"Yeah. Very odd." Radek straightened, tapping the back of Chuck's chair. "Thanks. I'll look into it."

By the time he'd finished talking to Chuck, Colonel Sheppard was coming out of Elizabeth's office. He looked none the worse for wear for everything he'd been through lately. In fact, he looked downright chipper.

As the colonel walked past them, he nodded back toward Elizabeth. "If you have anything you want to ask her for, today is apparently the day. She's in a really good mood."

Elizabeth had taken a seat and was hard at work on her tablet. Maybe. She could have been playing Solitaire. But Colonel Sheppard was right. Not that he thought she ever looked less than sunny, she did look a bit more pleased than usual.

"She is?" Radek asked.

Colonel Sheppard cast a look back. "Yeah. You'd think we didn't just discover a deranged cult of Wraith-worshippers a couple of weeks ago."

Knowing that, yeah, there wasn't a lot to be happy with. Still, Radek smiled, heading toward the office. "I'd better go see her, then." He didn't have any favors to ask, but he could come up with some… Maybe she'd be amenable to dinner.

Probably not.

He walked into her office, closing the door behind him. When he looked back to her desk, she was smiling at him. Even if he had known what he was going to say when he walked in, he would have forgotten it all.

"Hello, Radek," she said pleasantly. "I was hoping to see you this morning."

"I was hoping to see you, too." He approached her desk and put his tablet down. There was nothing on it, and she seemed to know that because she didn't look at it. "And I came up with a pretty good excuse for it, but I've forgotten what it was."

Elizabeth looked amused as she motioned to the chair for him to sit. "That's fine." The look on her face became slightly more serious. "We need to talk about last night."

"Last night…" Radek nodded tentatively. "Do you…?"

She wished it hadn't happened? She discovered she'd made a mistake. She had, of course. The universe realized it didn't treat Radek Zelenka this way.

"We need to be discreet," she said softly. "At least until we can figure out how to handle what follows."

Oh. Yes. Discreet. Thank god.

"Of course, yeah." He nodded enthusiastically. "Um, but what after that? It's not as if we can keep it secret forever."

For one thing, he didn't want to. He was fortunate he was mostly alone in the lab today, or else his uncharacteristic good mood after a meeting with Rodney about power conversion rates might have given everything away. Besides, he had Anna to think about. Last night he'd been saved by ZPMs, but what about next time? He had to tell her soon, assuming that this might last more than a few weeks. Assuming this was something real.

Radek was convinced it was, but Elizabeth might need time to figure it out. Elizabeth being Elizabeth, after all. He didn't understand her, but he was willing—maybe eager, actually—to make a good study of it. Show any social scientist how it was actually done.

"You're right," Elizabeth said. She sounded a little disappointed at that. Radek tried not to feel slightly insulted. "Part of me wants to get past the shock as soon as possible. I don't envy you Rodney's reaction." She smiled a little bit. Probably imagining Rodney's astonishment.

Radek hadn't considered what that might look like. It didn't much matter. The way Elizabeth felt about him proved that he wasn't always the backup, the understudy, the substitute that stepped in when the genuine article wasn't available. Sometimes he was worth consideration on his own merit, not comparative to Rodney or anybody else.

Even leaving off the selfish pride, happiness was enough. Was this happiness?

Whatever it was, it felt good.

Elizabeth sighed and explained, "Even though I'm not a military commander, I know I'll be open to ridicule from the IOA. I try to hold myself to high standards so they would never have anything to complain about."

"Maybe they don't," Radek said quietly. Radek had already decided that was a bad thing, even if Elizabeth hadn't. "You aren't military, and I'm not your direct subordinate, anyway."

"That's true. But I wouldn't be having this conversation with Rodney." She tried not to laugh.

Radek was more disturbed than he figured he had reason to be. "I'll leave the decision to you," Radek said. "I don't want to make you uncomfortable. And I can handle Rodney. I've been handing Rodney for a year and a half."

Except Anna. What was he going to tell Anna?

Nothing. Not yet. Not until he was sure Elizabeth was sure. She was having second thoughts, and all because everyone on Atlantis answered to her in one way or another. All because everyone on Atlantis looked up to her and she chose to hold herself to impossibly standards because of it.

"Alright," Elizabeth nodded, like she agreed with that wholeheartedly. "You haven't come up with a legitimate reason to be here, then?" She smiled mischievously.

Radek wished he could find an excuse. Some excuse besides… "I suppose a kiss is out of the question."

She laughed, like that was the last thing she expected him to say. "Yes. For now."

"Then, no. I don't have a legitimate reason."

"What a shame." Elizabeth leaned back in her chair with her tablet. "Back to mission reviews."

Her fingers danced on the tablet's screen. Suddenly, they stopped and she adopted a serious expression, her brow furrowing lightly as she concentrated on her screen. She put one finger over her lips, her eyes sliding back and forth as she read.

She suddenly looked up when she realized he hadn't left yet. She smiled, but didn't say anything. Didn't even move.

He was still trying to come up with a reason to be here, a reason to stay longer. It was useless. He slid his tablet off the desk. "But I should tell Anna soon."

She nodded. "I suppose…"

She didn't sound absolutely convinced of that. Maybe she was having second thoughts. Maybe he should wait until she was over that. It might turn out to be nothing. It might have been just one night.

But it wasn't. It wasn't nothing.

Thank yous & etc.

MissMeow1968 - Yes, I don't dwell on it too much after the initial thing that grows from it. I hope everyone will bear with me for that part. Thanks for reading and reviewing, once again!

Next time: Why does he keep walking into things like this?