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vain_gloriousAuthor:
vain_glorious Rating: PG-13, gen
Summary: Sequel to "This is to me how to leave matters unresolved", likely utterly nonsensical on its own. Sheppard returns to what's as close to home as he can get on earth.
Disclaimer: So not mine.
Author's Note:
Teyla moved around the kitchen, finding him silverware. She paused, a bowl in one hand and a plate in the other. “We have cereal and frozen waffles,” she said, sounding almost apologetic. “And many different kinds of Hot Pockets.” She frowned. “I do not like those.”
“Rodney’s a gourmet?” he cracked, and Teyla made a face. “Cereal’s good.” He followed her eyes to the top of the fridge. “Hey, you have fun packs!”
Teyla looked embarrassed, but she brought over the package of tiny, multi-colored boxes anyway. “Rodney thought it was a good way to expose me to the diversity of your breakfast foods,” she said. “I did not realize they are for children. They’re very…sugary.”
He took the bowl from her. “That’s why they’re good,” he said, ripping open two different kinds and upending the bags.
She brought him some milk, face unconvinced, and helped herself to something that looked like raw oats and was probably disgustingly healthy. As she climbed up on to the stool beside him, he had a flash of how bizarre this was: eating cereal with Teyla in Rodney’s kitchen in freaking
“Rodney not up yet?” he asked, trying to ignore the feeling.
“It is a little early for him. We heard you moving around,” she said. “He told me to come downstairs and -” she looked amused “- knock you unconscious.”
“He hasn’t had his coffee yet,” Sheppard said, forgivingly. “That’s mean even for him.”
Teyla gave a small shrug and took a bite of her cereal.
“Jet lag,” he explained. “I wasn’t snooping; I was looking for my bag in all the rooms except the kitchen. By the way, I like what you’ve done with the place.”
“I have not been here very long,” Teyla reminded him. “Rodney furnished it.”
“Oh, right.” He paused. “How long have you been here, Teyla?”
“About six months,” she said, but looking at him like she knew that wasn’t the question he really wanted to ask.
The sugar in Sheppard’s cereal was scraping the roof of his mouth. He swallowed, ran his tongue over it.
“How long were you locked up for?”
“I was at the SGC for around the same amount of time,” she said, and Sheppard could feel his jaw clench again.
He did the math in his head: Teyla and Ronon had probably been taken prisoner right about the time he deployed to
“I –”
“You have already apologized,” Teyla interrupted. “I said I do not blame you.”
“I haven’t apologized for going dark after I left Atlantis,” Sheppard said. “I pretended like it never existed. Things might have been different if I’d stayed in touch. I do have a friend or two in high places.” He had one, sort of, maybe if he counted General O’Neill’s friends he would have a total of two.
Teyla shook her head. “I am not angry with you.”
“You should be. McKay is.”
“Then you should apologize to him.”
“I did,” Sheppard said, putting down his spoon. “When he found me. I got the impression he was holding back on the yelling until after he got me to come home.”
“We missed you,” she said. And Sheppard decided to focus on how she wasn’t disputing that McKay was totally still fully loaded. “Regardless of the events that followed, we would have liked to have known you were well.”
McKay would have been yelling, calling him names, probably frothing at the mouth. He would have infinitely preferred that to Teyla’s simple honesty. It wouldn’t have hurt as much.
“You are well?” Teyla asked, and the question was probably genuine but she could have been checking that she was allowed to make him feel like crap. Or she was just changing the subject because she was nice like that.
“Yeah,” he said. He gave a hand wave to the bullet wound and the leg cast. “Other than the part where I myself can’t fly, yes. The ‘Gate stuff resolved itself.”
“Good,” Teyla said, and then she was poking him in the trache scar on his throat with her index finger. “What is this is from?”
“They cut a hole for a breathing tube,” he said. “I was out of it for a while.”
She nodded, and he hoped it didn’t sound like he was still justifying pulling the vanishing act.
To an extent, it was true. But after a month in
And now he was realizing that he did have an e-mail address, presumably the same one Rodney had been trying to contact him with, and that sucked.
~
McKay came downstairs, reaching the kitchen at the exact moment the coffee timer dinged. The face Teyla made implied that the timing was typical, and Sheppard would have liked to sprint across the kitchen to beat him to the pot just to disrupt the routine, but he didn’t think he could accomplish it without knocking the stool over and taking McKay out with his crutches.
“Hey,” Sheppard said.
“How was the Special Olympics triathlon this morning?” McKay snapped, sweeping past him.
“The triathlon has swimming and biking, too,” Sheppard said.
He looked twice and realized McKay was holding the little calico cat he’d seen earlier. It got tucked under his arm as he poured himself coffee.
“Your cat attacked me,” he said.
“Ohh,” said McKay, which sounded like it was to the cat and also sounded distinctly like praise. He looked up and found Teyla. “You kicked Bitey out of the bedroom?”
“His name is Bitey?” Sheppard asked.
Teyla didn’t even look up from her breakfast. “Sleeping with animals is unclean.”
“It is not,” McKay huffed. “Bitey bathes more often than you do!”
“I do not bathe by licking myself,” Teyla answered. To Sheppard, “I call it Asperasa. Rodney calls it Bitey.”
“Asperasa?”
“Biter,” she said. “In Athosian. It is not inaccurate.”
Before the conversation could get worse – and before Teyla and Rodney could act any more freakishly married – Sheppard hopped off of his stool and scooped up his bag. He asked where he could get a shower and was directed upstairs – Rodney said Teyla had clogged the one downstairs with her hair. Solicitously, Teyla asked if he could handle bathing by himself. And of course he could, because the alternative was not happening. They let him manage the stairs with his crutches and his duffle, while clutching the garbage bag he was going to tie around his cast. Rodney probably wouldn’t have minded if he’d fallen and broken something else, but Teyla seemed to understand that he would have to break another limb before he would let them treat him like an invalid.
The upstairs confirmed the theory he was working on. One of the two smaller bedrooms was empty, save for two enormous cardboard boxes on the bare floor. He didn’t need to wonder why – scribbled on the box side turned toward the door was ‘DEX’ in big black letters. Sheppard blinked at it for a few seconds, then swung himself out of the doorway. The second smaller bedroom was also mostly empty but evidently in use – Teyla’s banta sticks were lined up against the wall and the floor was covered in thin gym mats. The master bedroom was bizarrely both messy and tidy, and androgynous enough to convince him that Teyla wasn’t sleeping anywhere else. Which, okay, he probably didn’t have the right to be as annoyed about that as he actually was.
Teyla’s side of the large dresser – and Sheppard judged it to be her half because the other side was a tangled mass of men’s socks and few piles of thick academic journals – drew his eye. Elizabeth Weir’s silver pocket watch was curled around itself, the chain dangling slightly over the edge. Unthinking, Sheppard reached out and pushed it back. When he touched it, the links slipped down, revealing a tiny skull-shaped carved wooden bead tucked next to the watch face. Teyla’s mementos of lost friends next to Rodney’s dirty socks, and Sheppard found he was gritting his teeth so hard his face began hurt.
Sheppard went into the master bathroom, stripped down and shoved his leg into the garbage bag. He might have wanted to turn the water to as hot as he could bear, but it took all his concentration to adjust the faucets and stay standing. In fact, he probably could have used some help showering, but he did his best through a combination of standing on one leg and occasionally sitting on the side of the tub. When he was done, he mopped up the small flood he’d created. He dried off, found some clean clothes, and dressed.
When he opened the door, McKay was sitting on the bed. He was drinking from a giant mug of coffee and when Sheppard swung himself through the doorway, he offered up a second mug.
“Thanks,” Sheppard said, but he had to sit down next to McKay before he could take it.
Rodney nodded, and he didn’t even say if Teyla had sent him up in case Sheppard needed rescuing.
“So,” Sheppard said after a second. “You and Teyla, huh?”
McKay was silent, twisting his mouth to the side. Then, he grunted and said, “No. And I was really hoping to keep up the illusion for a little bit longer, because it would have totally driven you crazy.”
“Safer?” Sheppard asked, and from the expression on McKay’s face he had a feeling he wasn’t going to like the explanation.
“The night Ronon escaped, a SWAT team broke into the house looking for him,” McKay said. “Because apparently, if I were to rescue my friend from the fascists holding him prisoner, the first place I would bring him is my house, where everyone knows I live. Morons.”
“What happened?”
“I wasn’t actually home,” McKay admitted. “There was an emergency at work, so I wasn’t here. So I don’t know why they thought he was here, since I wasn’t, and even if I was so mentally disabled as to decide to do that, it would have taken me six hours to get him here, anyway.”
“Rodney!”
“Hrmmph.” McKay made a vague, almost silly punching gesture with his free hand. “Teyla took out like half of them, and then they tazored her into submission. There was more…bad.” He waved his hand. “Bottom line, we determined that we’re probably being spied on and little things like not sharing a bedroom might be what makes them decide our marriage is a sham and they can lock her back up.”
McKay made a twisted face and looked at Sheppard.
“Oh,” he said, since it was no longer funny and back to being horrible. He took a sip of the coffee, still steaming hot.
“Yeah,” McKay. “Everything sucks, but at least I get to sleep with Teyla. In a literal sense.”
“You have a plan?” Sheppard asked, after a few minutes of mutual silence, coffee-drinking, and stewing.
“I wasn’t sure you were going to come,” McKay snapped back.
That meant no.
“Why wouldn’t Ronon come to you?” he asked, and it was unintentionally just as brutal as McKay’s retort. “Or Teyla,” he added, trying to soften it.
He half-expected McKay to go off again, but the man just took another sip of coffee and exhaled. Sheppard remembered that this wasn’t days old to him; McKay and Teyla had been handling it for months. McKay had been handling this alone for even longer.
“Teyla thinks he knows it isn’t safe. They don’t know where he is, but they know where we are.”
“Okay,” Sheppard said. That was reasonable. But all three of them were smart enough to figure out ways around surveillance. If Ronon wasn’t making the effort, it wasn’t because he thought he’d get caught.
“I think it’s probably because I lied to him about every single thing that happened starting from when the mission got recalled,” McKay continued tone absolutely flat. “First I told him they weren’t going to do that. Then I told him he’d be free to go. Then I told him the IOA wasn’t going to put him in a cage. Then I told him I could get him out. Then I told him I’d come back after I got Teyla out.” McKay shifted his weight, agitated. “Providing he even bothered to believe me after they dragged him and Teyla back to the Daedalus in chains, there’s a pretty good chance he no longer trusts me at all.” He glared at Sheppard. “I know I’m not the world’s greatest communicator and after a while I couldn’t see him anymore because they had him in solitary confinement.”
Sheppard seized up at that, moving so abruptly he knocked one of his crutches to the floor.
“Yeah,” McKay said. “I know. He never got to see Teyla. I have no idea what he thinks happened, but he has every reason to think that I either helped or didn’t try hard enough to stop it.” He huffed angrily through his nose, and he kind of sounded like he believed that last part.
Sheppard didn’t say anything. What he was thinking had probably occurred to McKay a long time ago. The one person who could have stood up to the IOA with both authority and political agility was the same person memorialized on the top of the dresser.
“We’ll find him, Rodney,” he said, and then he tried to break the terrible silence. “And I’ll tell him you’re sleeping with Teyla and he will kick your ass.”
Rodney scowled, immediately. “I touched her once, in my sleep. She punched me in the kidneys so hard I thought I was going to go into renal failure.”
“I was startled,” Teyla said, defensively. Sheppard looked up to find her standing in the doorway.
“Good for you,” he told her.
Teyla crossed the floor, coming to sit on the corner of the bed. She took Sheppard’s crutch and leaned it against her lap. “We are ready?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Sheppard said. "We're ready."
