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Of which there are three. Again.
Originally posted at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sg1_five_things
Five things Jack left in Colorado
1. John Sheppard. Not that Sheppard’s in Colorado when Jack leaves, but Colorado’s the closest he can get. Not that Sheppard is a thing, either, but there’s something about him, something that feels familiar, connected, to Jack, even when they’re still in Antarctica and he’s trying to persuade Sheppard to join the SGC. Maybe that’s all it is, Sheppard’s uncertainty when Jack’s not sure he wants the post he’s being offered either. Maybe it’s flying, the gene, the black mark, that he looks at Sheppard and sees himself, if he’d lived his life a little differently.
He’s pretty sure it’s not.
2. The stargate. Or, not the gate, but what’s on the other side. He’s no fool, he knows he’s getting to the point where he’s too old to keep going on missions, but with the gate right there, down the corridor from his office, there were a lot more chances for someone to come by and say, “Hey, General, don’t suppose we could borrow you to come explore this planet, never before seen by anyone from Earth, could we?”
That doesn’t tend to happen in Washington.
3. The keys to his cabin. It’s really been his only in name (and on the title deeds) for years now, somewhere he hardly ever goes alone. He’s not going to travel all the way from Washington just to go stare at a pond, so there’s no point taking the keys. He leaves them with Landry, figures Mitchell will get the team back, and the cabin will go on belonging to them.
He can always stop by and pick them up, if he wants to. The team and the keys.
4. His favourite pen. He doesn’t realize until he’s been in his new place a couple of weeks, finally finished unpacking all the boxes. When he does, he has a vague memory of knocking it behind the fridge when he was leaving in a hurry one morning, and never remembering to retrieve it. Someone else has moved in by then, and he doesn’t contemplate calling and asking them to send it on for very long.
It takes him six months to find another he likes as much.
5. Colonel Mitchell. Another one who’s not a thing, and Jack’s not sure what it says about him that he seems to be collecting wayward Air Force officers, but there it is, and at least he’s not collecting stray cats. He knows he shouldn’t worry about Mitchell, but he can’t quite stop it. Maybe it comes from having watched him struggle in a hospital bed for months, thinking for weeks that he was going to die, or be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It’s nothing like the connection he feels to Sheppard, but it’s just as unshakable.
It makes him glad for Daniel, who doesn’t shut up about the guy for months.
(And one thing he didn’t: His team. Not SG1 as they are now, not even SG1 as they were while he was frozen in stasis, but his team, Carter and Daniel and Teal’c, who survived some of the roughest and best years of his life right along with him. It sounds hokey, like something out of a coming of age film for teenagers, but it’s still true: he’ll never leave them behind, and they’ll never leave him, no matter how many different galaxies they all end up in.)
Five back-stories of minor characters no-one ever told
1. Carolyn Lam didn’t want to be a doctor when she was growing up. She wanted to be an astronaut, and walk on the moon. Didn’t matter that the last person to do that did it before she was even born. Didn’t matter that no woman ever did. Didn’t matter that, by the time she was old enough to start reading about it, NASA had stopped talking about sending anyone else to the moon.
None of it mattered. Carolyn’s mom had a recording of the first moon landing, which she’d play sometimes, when Carolyn’s dad was supposed to have come home and hadn’t. “See, Caro? If we can put a man on the moon, we can do anything.”
“I’m going to be the first woman to walk on the moon,” she told her science teacher when she was twelve. He didn’t laugh, which, to Carolyn, made him wonderful.
When she turned sixteen, she decided she wanted nothing more to do with her father, after he didn’t make it home for birthday. She dropped AP Physics for AP Biology, tore up the paperwork she had about getting into the Air Force, and decided she was going to be a doctor instead.
She never regrets it. She’d rather be the woman saving the lives of the people exploring the galaxy than the woman sitting at a computer in a bunker somewhere, waiting for a mission that’ll never come.
*
2. Anne Teldy applied to UC Berkeley because it had a reputation for being liberal. Lots of other reasons as well, like the way that women were in the majority, and that it was on the other side of the country to her family, and that some of its most famous alumni were women. And that she could do ROTC there, which would make her parents happy, or as happy as they could be when she was going to college, instead of enlisting.
She didn’t really expect to get in, and couldn’t stop smiling when the acceptance letter came.
Berkeley wasn’t like anywhere she’d ever been. She ended up living in an all-female hall, which was just really strange after growing up the only girl, with four brothers. What was even stranger was that she *fit*, there, with women who wanted to talk about ideas and the world, the future and their futures, and what it would mean to be a woman at the end of the century. Not about boys, or clothes, or make-up, all the things Anne didn’t really care about.
She slept with four different women, that first year, told her friends, and no-one cared. Didn’t tell her parents, but they were on the other side of the country, didn’t have to know.
Six months into her sophomore year, she went on a date with Maxine King. They were still going on dates two years later, and no-one said the world girlfriend, but it was implied. Maxine found the paperwork confirming Anne’s acceptance into the marine corps one evening while Anne was at the library, wasting her time trying to find a book that had been mis-shelved.
“You should write them soon,” Maxine said when Anne got home. “Let them know you’re not going.”
“I am going, though,” Anne said, mystified.
She thought, later, after Maxine left in a cloud of tears and screaming injunctions for Anne not to follow her, that maybe someone should have said the word girlfriend, then they might have talked it out some time in the last two years, how being a marine was what Anne wanted, more than anything else. More than Maxine, in the end.
*
3. Katie Brown took her first tae know do class in college, because her best friend wanted to go but not on her own. Katie figured she’d give it a couple of weeks, until Sarah got to know some people and then stop going.
When Sarah gave it up for ballroom dancing, after three weeks, Katie kept going back. They were learning simple, basic stuff, balance and holds and nothing dangerous, not really, but she felt five inches taller every time she walked out of the class. Taller, and stronger; not tougher, not like she was going to be taking on any attackers any time soon, but strong, like every time she went back, a little bit more steel was added to her spine, or iron to her core or something. Something that made her start asking questions in labs, made her accept a couple of dates, and then turn both of them down when they asked for another, because she knew right then that she wasn’t interested and there was no point in pretending she was. No need to pretend she was.
She kept it up through college, through her PhD. Took it up again when she got her first job. Took some exams, got her black belt. Kept going back, helping the new students. It still felt like getting a tiny bit more inner strength at every class after ten years.
When the Air Force recruiters turned up at her office, asked her if she’d sign a confidentiality agreement and listen to a proposal, she said yes. Five years after that, when Dr Weir asked her to go to Atlantis as the head of the botany department, she said yes to that as well, and made sure to meet all the female marines on the Daedalus ride out, all the people who’d been born with what she was still developing.
*
Laura Cadman got recruited to the SGC the day she graduated OCS, a man and a woman in uniform pulling her aside and asking if she’d be interested in a job where she got to be on the ground, at the front of the fight, not in back sending reports. It sounded too good to be true, but Laura said yes anyway. Like hell was she going to get shuttled off into something boring because she was a girl, and if these people wanted her right out of college, they had to want her for something good.
In her first year with SG17, they got taken captive five times, put on trial for witchcraft twice and thrown in a river to nearly drown three times. They won the ‘most visits to the infirmary’ stakes three months in a row, got told off twice for setting off too many explosions off world, and ended up married to farm animals an unprecedented twelve times.
Laura loved every second of it.
*
Amelia Banks decided when she was eighteen that she was going to do something amazing with her life. Something more than getting her degree and getting a mid-level office job, or teaching kickboxing, which her mom suggested every time she mentioned she was taking a class. Her mom asked if Amelia missed her (which she did) and if she missed home (which she didn’t, except for sometimes when she wished she didn’t have to cook dinner, or forgot to buy washing powder when she needed to do laundry). Amelia didn’t say that, once she graduated, she wasn’t going back home to live. She loved her mom, loved that being alone had made the two of them so close, but her hometown was tiny, and no-one was going to look for her there for anything other than getting married and having kids.
She withdrew her application to join the army two days before the closing date for that round, not sure she was making the right decision even while she made the phone call. Soldiers got to travel, went to places where people needed help and tried to make their lives better. Amelia just wasn’t sure that she wanted the amazing thing she did with her life to be with a gun in her hands.
A week later, she went to a talk about volunteering with the Peace Corps.
Five years later, when she gets accepted for a job with such a vague job description that she knows it has to be something classified, and hopefully really good, she’s not sure if it’s the five months she spent setting up computer networks in Armenia for the Peace Corps, or the fact that she was already in the army’s database somewhere that gets her the job.
She doesn’t really care which it was, because Atlantis is pretty much the most amazing thing in history.
Four things that made Teyla decide to leave Atlantis (and the one thing that made her stay) (spoilers up to SGA early season 5)
Her decision to leave is cumulative, made over a year, small steps that she does not realise she is making until she reaches the end of the path. It begins with the explosion, with the deaths of Dr Hewston and of Carson. With the week after, when she is alone in Atlantis, her team gone to Earth with Carson’s body, and she craves the comfort of the three of them, the ease with which Ronon offers touch, Rodney’s constant words, John’s brittle distance, the way it allows her to touch him when otherwise she cannot. She has nightmares, of a disaster on Earth, of a trap to keep them there, of one of them not returning. The nightmares are nothing but dreams, gone before they can truly scare her. What scares her is the loss she feels in the dreams, stronger than any before, for the loss of her parents, of Charin. Of that, she is terrified.
*
The loss of Elizabeth feels too soon after losing Carson. They do not commemorate her loss in the city as they did his, John rigid in his refusal to accept that she is gone, fallen to one of their greatest enemies. It is a heroic fall, by one of her closest friends, of which Teyla should be proud. She tries to be, very hard, but every thought of Elizabeth brings tears to her eyes, her heart aching for their loss.
“Do you not feel it also?” she asks John, trying to make him see.
He barely lifts his head from his computer, only enough for her to see his tired eyes. Teyla thinks she would have been better not to ask, that he will not wish to speak of it, but John is like her, saw Elizabeth as someone like him, as Teyla did, the two of them the only two who did, recognizing their leadership in Elizabeth’s. She wishes, desperately, to share that loss with someone.
“She’s not dead,” John says.
When Colonel Carter arrives, it is as though Elizabeth was never there. Teyla cannot help wondering if she – if any of them – would be so easily forgotten, so easily replaced. She wonders, troubled, at a people who can forget their own stories so easily, what it means for them to be so untouched by their own past, in a galaxy that can never escape its own.
*
They do not think John dead for so very long, when he is shot at and disappears on the way to the research station, and indeed, it is not the thought of his death that troubles Teyla. She has learned that John is not so easily killed as they might think.
What troubles her is the way that Rodney says, “I’m sorry, but sometimes there is just nothing we can do,” as though they have searched for months, not hours. As though it is not *John* who is taken from them. It is not even that she finds Rodney’s words uncaring. It is, instead, that he will give up so easily, abandon hope so swiftly for his often-stated best friend.
Even when Rodney tracks John’s call for help back to Larrin and the travellers, evidence that he has not abandoned the search as he said, Teyla cannot shake the sense of unease. She has never before doubted that her team would come for her, through any adversity, no matter what it took. It is a great discomfort to learn that perhaps she was wrong in that faith.
*
Teyla fights every day, for the first weeks after her people disappear, against the urge to leave Atlantis, to go and find them. It is John who keeps her there, the confidence in his voice when he says, every day, “We’ll find them,” just as Teyla is at the point where she feels most strongly that she must leave. She does not know how it is that he always times it so perfectly, when he has frequently claimed to be so bad with people, but he does. She thinks that this may be the one thing that keeps her in the city. Or, perhaps, one of two things, her child inside her demanding protection.
And it is these two things which drive her, finally, to the decision to leave: John’s betrayed face, his anger when she tells him that she is pregnant. Ronon tells her that he is only scared, that it is fear which makes him so distant, and Teyla does not have words to make him see that it is not even this which drives her decision. She longs for Elizabeth, for Kate, for someone who would understand how it feels to be told by the man she respects and cares for more than anyone else, even the father of her child, that the fact of her pregnancy – of her motherhood, eventually – will always mark her as different from the other three. Outside of them, unable to decide her role for herself.
She will not leave until her people have been found, but then, when they find a new home, she will go with them.
*
It is John who tells her of his trip into the future, of the terrible world Rodney’s hologram detailed for him. They are alone in the infirmary, John still unable to walk after his surgery, the lights dimmed for the evening, Torren sleeping in Teyla’s arms as she listens to halting words of her friends’ heroic, tragic deaths, carried forward for 48,000 years and placed in the memory of something that will go on forever, though the people in that world do not. Of Rodney, alone and lonely, working for years to find a way to bring John back to them, to save Jennifer from dying of illness, John from dying alone and abandoned, Teyla from Michael’s hand, Ronon and Sam from giving their lives against the Wraith. Of her team, who came for her, when she was fated to die without them. Secrets he swears her to keeping, things he has told no-one else, and will not.
“It was for you,” John says at the end, looking away as Teyla has become accustomed to him doing. “Rodney – the hologram – said it was because he lost Dr Keller, but it was you first. We can’t do without you, Teyla.”
He is nothing like the man who cast her out of the team without a thought, as though her pregnancy made her worthless as a fighter. He is only, once more, her best friend, shaping a place for her in a city they both call home. She knows he will never say, but she knows, anyway, that when she wishes to return to the team, she will do so, on the same terms as always.
There is so much still to decide, with Kanaan, with Torren, but she knows, in that moment, that she will remain on Atlantis, and make her choices there.
Originally posted at
sg1_five_thingsFive things Jack left in Colorado
1. John Sheppard. Not that Sheppard’s in Colorado when Jack leaves, but Colorado’s the closest he can get. Not that Sheppard is a thing, either, but there’s something about him, something that feels familiar, connected, to Jack, even when they’re still in Antarctica and he’s trying to persuade Sheppard to join the SGC. Maybe that’s all it is, Sheppard’s uncertainty when Jack’s not sure he wants the post he’s being offered either. Maybe it’s flying, the gene, the black mark, that he looks at Sheppard and sees himself, if he’d lived his life a little differently.
He’s pretty sure it’s not.
2. The stargate. Or, not the gate, but what’s on the other side. He’s no fool, he knows he’s getting to the point where he’s too old to keep going on missions, but with the gate right there, down the corridor from his office, there were a lot more chances for someone to come by and say, “Hey, General, don’t suppose we could borrow you to come explore this planet, never before seen by anyone from Earth, could we?”
That doesn’t tend to happen in Washington.
3. The keys to his cabin. It’s really been his only in name (and on the title deeds) for years now, somewhere he hardly ever goes alone. He’s not going to travel all the way from Washington just to go stare at a pond, so there’s no point taking the keys. He leaves them with Landry, figures Mitchell will get the team back, and the cabin will go on belonging to them.
He can always stop by and pick them up, if he wants to. The team and the keys.
4. His favourite pen. He doesn’t realize until he’s been in his new place a couple of weeks, finally finished unpacking all the boxes. When he does, he has a vague memory of knocking it behind the fridge when he was leaving in a hurry one morning, and never remembering to retrieve it. Someone else has moved in by then, and he doesn’t contemplate calling and asking them to send it on for very long.
It takes him six months to find another he likes as much.
5. Colonel Mitchell. Another one who’s not a thing, and Jack’s not sure what it says about him that he seems to be collecting wayward Air Force officers, but there it is, and at least he’s not collecting stray cats. He knows he shouldn’t worry about Mitchell, but he can’t quite stop it. Maybe it comes from having watched him struggle in a hospital bed for months, thinking for weeks that he was going to die, or be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It’s nothing like the connection he feels to Sheppard, but it’s just as unshakable.
It makes him glad for Daniel, who doesn’t shut up about the guy for months.
(And one thing he didn’t: His team. Not SG1 as they are now, not even SG1 as they were while he was frozen in stasis, but his team, Carter and Daniel and Teal’c, who survived some of the roughest and best years of his life right along with him. It sounds hokey, like something out of a coming of age film for teenagers, but it’s still true: he’ll never leave them behind, and they’ll never leave him, no matter how many different galaxies they all end up in.)
Five back-stories of minor characters no-one ever told
1. Carolyn Lam didn’t want to be a doctor when she was growing up. She wanted to be an astronaut, and walk on the moon. Didn’t matter that the last person to do that did it before she was even born. Didn’t matter that no woman ever did. Didn’t matter that, by the time she was old enough to start reading about it, NASA had stopped talking about sending anyone else to the moon.
None of it mattered. Carolyn’s mom had a recording of the first moon landing, which she’d play sometimes, when Carolyn’s dad was supposed to have come home and hadn’t. “See, Caro? If we can put a man on the moon, we can do anything.”
“I’m going to be the first woman to walk on the moon,” she told her science teacher when she was twelve. He didn’t laugh, which, to Carolyn, made him wonderful.
When she turned sixteen, she decided she wanted nothing more to do with her father, after he didn’t make it home for birthday. She dropped AP Physics for AP Biology, tore up the paperwork she had about getting into the Air Force, and decided she was going to be a doctor instead.
She never regrets it. She’d rather be the woman saving the lives of the people exploring the galaxy than the woman sitting at a computer in a bunker somewhere, waiting for a mission that’ll never come.
*
2. Anne Teldy applied to UC Berkeley because it had a reputation for being liberal. Lots of other reasons as well, like the way that women were in the majority, and that it was on the other side of the country to her family, and that some of its most famous alumni were women. And that she could do ROTC there, which would make her parents happy, or as happy as they could be when she was going to college, instead of enlisting.
She didn’t really expect to get in, and couldn’t stop smiling when the acceptance letter came.
Berkeley wasn’t like anywhere she’d ever been. She ended up living in an all-female hall, which was just really strange after growing up the only girl, with four brothers. What was even stranger was that she *fit*, there, with women who wanted to talk about ideas and the world, the future and their futures, and what it would mean to be a woman at the end of the century. Not about boys, or clothes, or make-up, all the things Anne didn’t really care about.
She slept with four different women, that first year, told her friends, and no-one cared. Didn’t tell her parents, but they were on the other side of the country, didn’t have to know.
Six months into her sophomore year, she went on a date with Maxine King. They were still going on dates two years later, and no-one said the world girlfriend, but it was implied. Maxine found the paperwork confirming Anne’s acceptance into the marine corps one evening while Anne was at the library, wasting her time trying to find a book that had been mis-shelved.
“You should write them soon,” Maxine said when Anne got home. “Let them know you’re not going.”
“I am going, though,” Anne said, mystified.
She thought, later, after Maxine left in a cloud of tears and screaming injunctions for Anne not to follow her, that maybe someone should have said the word girlfriend, then they might have talked it out some time in the last two years, how being a marine was what Anne wanted, more than anything else. More than Maxine, in the end.
*
3. Katie Brown took her first tae know do class in college, because her best friend wanted to go but not on her own. Katie figured she’d give it a couple of weeks, until Sarah got to know some people and then stop going.
When Sarah gave it up for ballroom dancing, after three weeks, Katie kept going back. They were learning simple, basic stuff, balance and holds and nothing dangerous, not really, but she felt five inches taller every time she walked out of the class. Taller, and stronger; not tougher, not like she was going to be taking on any attackers any time soon, but strong, like every time she went back, a little bit more steel was added to her spine, or iron to her core or something. Something that made her start asking questions in labs, made her accept a couple of dates, and then turn both of them down when they asked for another, because she knew right then that she wasn’t interested and there was no point in pretending she was. No need to pretend she was.
She kept it up through college, through her PhD. Took it up again when she got her first job. Took some exams, got her black belt. Kept going back, helping the new students. It still felt like getting a tiny bit more inner strength at every class after ten years.
When the Air Force recruiters turned up at her office, asked her if she’d sign a confidentiality agreement and listen to a proposal, she said yes. Five years after that, when Dr Weir asked her to go to Atlantis as the head of the botany department, she said yes to that as well, and made sure to meet all the female marines on the Daedalus ride out, all the people who’d been born with what she was still developing.
*
Laura Cadman got recruited to the SGC the day she graduated OCS, a man and a woman in uniform pulling her aside and asking if she’d be interested in a job where she got to be on the ground, at the front of the fight, not in back sending reports. It sounded too good to be true, but Laura said yes anyway. Like hell was she going to get shuttled off into something boring because she was a girl, and if these people wanted her right out of college, they had to want her for something good.
In her first year with SG17, they got taken captive five times, put on trial for witchcraft twice and thrown in a river to nearly drown three times. They won the ‘most visits to the infirmary’ stakes three months in a row, got told off twice for setting off too many explosions off world, and ended up married to farm animals an unprecedented twelve times.
Laura loved every second of it.
*
Amelia Banks decided when she was eighteen that she was going to do something amazing with her life. Something more than getting her degree and getting a mid-level office job, or teaching kickboxing, which her mom suggested every time she mentioned she was taking a class. Her mom asked if Amelia missed her (which she did) and if she missed home (which she didn’t, except for sometimes when she wished she didn’t have to cook dinner, or forgot to buy washing powder when she needed to do laundry). Amelia didn’t say that, once she graduated, she wasn’t going back home to live. She loved her mom, loved that being alone had made the two of them so close, but her hometown was tiny, and no-one was going to look for her there for anything other than getting married and having kids.
She withdrew her application to join the army two days before the closing date for that round, not sure she was making the right decision even while she made the phone call. Soldiers got to travel, went to places where people needed help and tried to make their lives better. Amelia just wasn’t sure that she wanted the amazing thing she did with her life to be with a gun in her hands.
A week later, she went to a talk about volunteering with the Peace Corps.
Five years later, when she gets accepted for a job with such a vague job description that she knows it has to be something classified, and hopefully really good, she’s not sure if it’s the five months she spent setting up computer networks in Armenia for the Peace Corps, or the fact that she was already in the army’s database somewhere that gets her the job.
She doesn’t really care which it was, because Atlantis is pretty much the most amazing thing in history.
Four things that made Teyla decide to leave Atlantis (and the one thing that made her stay) (spoilers up to SGA early season 5)
Her decision to leave is cumulative, made over a year, small steps that she does not realise she is making until she reaches the end of the path. It begins with the explosion, with the deaths of Dr Hewston and of Carson. With the week after, when she is alone in Atlantis, her team gone to Earth with Carson’s body, and she craves the comfort of the three of them, the ease with which Ronon offers touch, Rodney’s constant words, John’s brittle distance, the way it allows her to touch him when otherwise she cannot. She has nightmares, of a disaster on Earth, of a trap to keep them there, of one of them not returning. The nightmares are nothing but dreams, gone before they can truly scare her. What scares her is the loss she feels in the dreams, stronger than any before, for the loss of her parents, of Charin. Of that, she is terrified.
*
The loss of Elizabeth feels too soon after losing Carson. They do not commemorate her loss in the city as they did his, John rigid in his refusal to accept that she is gone, fallen to one of their greatest enemies. It is a heroic fall, by one of her closest friends, of which Teyla should be proud. She tries to be, very hard, but every thought of Elizabeth brings tears to her eyes, her heart aching for their loss.
“Do you not feel it also?” she asks John, trying to make him see.
He barely lifts his head from his computer, only enough for her to see his tired eyes. Teyla thinks she would have been better not to ask, that he will not wish to speak of it, but John is like her, saw Elizabeth as someone like him, as Teyla did, the two of them the only two who did, recognizing their leadership in Elizabeth’s. She wishes, desperately, to share that loss with someone.
“She’s not dead,” John says.
When Colonel Carter arrives, it is as though Elizabeth was never there. Teyla cannot help wondering if she – if any of them – would be so easily forgotten, so easily replaced. She wonders, troubled, at a people who can forget their own stories so easily, what it means for them to be so untouched by their own past, in a galaxy that can never escape its own.
*
They do not think John dead for so very long, when he is shot at and disappears on the way to the research station, and indeed, it is not the thought of his death that troubles Teyla. She has learned that John is not so easily killed as they might think.
What troubles her is the way that Rodney says, “I’m sorry, but sometimes there is just nothing we can do,” as though they have searched for months, not hours. As though it is not *John* who is taken from them. It is not even that she finds Rodney’s words uncaring. It is, instead, that he will give up so easily, abandon hope so swiftly for his often-stated best friend.
Even when Rodney tracks John’s call for help back to Larrin and the travellers, evidence that he has not abandoned the search as he said, Teyla cannot shake the sense of unease. She has never before doubted that her team would come for her, through any adversity, no matter what it took. It is a great discomfort to learn that perhaps she was wrong in that faith.
*
Teyla fights every day, for the first weeks after her people disappear, against the urge to leave Atlantis, to go and find them. It is John who keeps her there, the confidence in his voice when he says, every day, “We’ll find them,” just as Teyla is at the point where she feels most strongly that she must leave. She does not know how it is that he always times it so perfectly, when he has frequently claimed to be so bad with people, but he does. She thinks that this may be the one thing that keeps her in the city. Or, perhaps, one of two things, her child inside her demanding protection.
And it is these two things which drive her, finally, to the decision to leave: John’s betrayed face, his anger when she tells him that she is pregnant. Ronon tells her that he is only scared, that it is fear which makes him so distant, and Teyla does not have words to make him see that it is not even this which drives her decision. She longs for Elizabeth, for Kate, for someone who would understand how it feels to be told by the man she respects and cares for more than anyone else, even the father of her child, that the fact of her pregnancy – of her motherhood, eventually – will always mark her as different from the other three. Outside of them, unable to decide her role for herself.
She will not leave until her people have been found, but then, when they find a new home, she will go with them.
*
It is John who tells her of his trip into the future, of the terrible world Rodney’s hologram detailed for him. They are alone in the infirmary, John still unable to walk after his surgery, the lights dimmed for the evening, Torren sleeping in Teyla’s arms as she listens to halting words of her friends’ heroic, tragic deaths, carried forward for 48,000 years and placed in the memory of something that will go on forever, though the people in that world do not. Of Rodney, alone and lonely, working for years to find a way to bring John back to them, to save Jennifer from dying of illness, John from dying alone and abandoned, Teyla from Michael’s hand, Ronon and Sam from giving their lives against the Wraith. Of her team, who came for her, when she was fated to die without them. Secrets he swears her to keeping, things he has told no-one else, and will not.
“It was for you,” John says at the end, looking away as Teyla has become accustomed to him doing. “Rodney – the hologram – said it was because he lost Dr Keller, but it was you first. We can’t do without you, Teyla.”
He is nothing like the man who cast her out of the team without a thought, as though her pregnancy made her worthless as a fighter. He is only, once more, her best friend, shaping a place for her in a city they both call home. She knows he will never say, but she knows, anyway, that when she wishes to return to the team, she will do so, on the same terms as always.
There is so much still to decide, with Kanaan, with Torren, but she knows, in that moment, that she will remain on Atlantis, and make her choices there.
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Fantastic job with all five, but particularly Carolyn -- she gets so little love in fandom, despite being in more eps than the rest of the SGA minor female characters combined.
Yeah, I love Carolyn, even if we do know hardly anything about her.
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You write her, and her relationship with John and the team, so well.
See me grinning over here - I love their friendship, and that they're quite happy *being* platonic friends.
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I love how Jack feels connected enough to both John and Cam that he thinks about them as people he's leaving behind.
I think he thinks of them as almost his legacy in the program, since he's kind of responsible for both of them being there.
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John, her best friend, shaping a place for her in a city they both call home, with their unspoken understanding and how she's chosen to make her choices, to stay with her team
I have so much love for John and Teyla's friendship, how they love each other so much, but they're friends, they don't want to sleep together at all.