(no subject)

[kwayera.livejournal.com]

Title: Facts
Author: kwayera for the swficathon
Rating: PG
Spoilers: General S1. No S2.
Summary: The team bring something interesting back through the 'gate.
Notes: Written for lilwitchy, who wanted the complete works of Charles Dickens, a cat and a sword - I, um, tried. Beta'd by my buddy kettle, who usually doesn't touch fandom, sadly.


“Good night, dear lass, good night!”

She went, with her neat figure and her sober womanly step, down the dark street, and he stood looking after her until she turned into one of the small houses. There was not a flutter of her coarse shawl, perhaps, but had its interest in this man’s eyes; not a tone of her voice but had its echo in his innermost heart.

When she was lost to his view, her pursued his homeward way, glancing up sometimes at the sky, where the clouds were sailing fast and wildly…


Elizabeth Weir, somewhat of a diplomatic heroine of her own time and sometimes more severe than her old English lecturer, had one secret that she kept from absolutely everyone in Atlantis: her great, mysterious love of dear old “Darles Chickens”. It was not something she was ashamed of – it was far too hard to escape from the university library without encountering at least one Official Classic Author whose writings became somewhat of an addiction – and it was not something that she was inclined to explain: it simply was. Well, it wasn’t really a secret, per se; merely an aspect of her personality that she neither explained nor really acknowledged. No one questioned her when she holed up in her office for hours on end, greedily devouring the sometimes questionable opinions of Thomas Gradgrind and slowly eating away her own stomach with quantities of increasingly more toxic coffee; mostly because she did it when they were off-world, and, well, if that was how she dealt with the worry, no one would begrudge her.

Which was why, as she headed back from the head with her nose buried in a tattered volume and unerring steps – she no longer really needed to look where she was going, her feet knew the route so well – she only received the occasional bemused glance. Engrossed, she crossed to her office, patted the open doorjamb on her way through and fell into her seat, reclining with a grateful sigh and an awkward sideways twist of her head to relieve a crick in her neck. She slipped her boots off, happily uncaring if anyone noticed, and settled back, her hand reaching out and patting her desk for the cup of coffee she had left there.

“Your lips move when you read, you know.”

She yelped in girlish surprise, the sound as sudden and unexpected as the voice that had startled her, and sat bolt upright, dropping her heavy tome straight onto her naked foot. She swore loudly as she jumped up and hopped around on one foot, rubbing the other with one hand. He snickered loudly from where he sat, and when she felt that she had hopped enough to express her righteous agony, she flopped ungracefully back into her seat, glaring, and slammed the closed book rather loudly on the table.

“You’re a bastard, Major,” she said indignantly when he only graduated from sniggering to outright laughter, ignoring his comment for what it was. (In fact, yes, she did know that her lips moved with the flow of words on a page – Simon had never failed to comment on it.) “I lost my page!” It came out rather embarrassingly like a whine, and she crossed her arms across her chest, flicking her Gaze of Death alternatively at him and said book. He waited. “I didn’t hear you and the team return,” she said guiltily after he had lapsed into silence. He shrugged. Smiled again. Tilted his chair back, swung his feet up to rest them on the edge of her desk, and pretended to not see the lines of irritation creasing on her forehead. They’d been growing deeper of late, as the threat of the Wraith drew closer and closer and a lack of an answer – what to do, what to do – made itself more and more persistent, a bee sting in the back of her skull; on occasion, when the monster on his shoulder (which was, oddly, pink in his imagination, rather than lucifer red – too cheeky an antithesis of a conscience to be that honourable primary shade) whispered that he could massage away the lines with the rough tips of his fingers, he only barely suppressed the inclination with a wicked grin.

Her shoulders twitched at his lack of response, and Weir, uncomfortable, elaborated, the sudden expanse of silence a crevasse of awkwardness. “How was the trip?” she said pointedly, flattening her hands before her on her desk.

Sheppard shrugged again– popular motion, that – and tilted his chair back even further, stretching his arms into the air and then lacing his fingers behind his head. He didn’t answer yet, refusing to shed light on why his smile only grew wider, brighter; knowing him so well, Weir was briefly alarmed. “What?” she said, rather sharply, her irritation growing with each moment of stubborn silence.

“Rodney brought back a pe-et,” he said finally with a grimace, in a ridiculous singsong voice. “The good Doctors have been crossing swords like professional fencers over it for, oh, about twenty minutes now.” He grinned at her bemused expression – she was sitting rather still, trying, no doubt, to figure out exactly what he meant by ‘pet’ – and abruptly changed the subject by leaning forward and snatching the book from the table. “What are you reading, anyway?” he said as he flipped open to a random page and read aloud, ignoring her sudden vivid protests. “She went, with her neat figure and her sober womanly step, down the dark street, and he stood looking after her until she turned into one of the small houses. There was not a flutter of her coarse shawl, perhaps, but had its interest in this man’s eyes; not a tone of her voice but had its echo in his innermost heart. When she was lost to his view, her pursued his homeward way, glancing up sometimes at the sky, where the clouds were sailing fast and wildly… what is this, some kind of romance? I didn’t know you would stoop so low, Elizabeth!” he crowed, triumphantly, leaping agilely out of his seat as she shouted and reached for him.

“Nuh-uh,” he said childishly, using his greater height to keep the book out of reach, and she couldn’t help but laugh herself as she stood up on tip-toe, trying to reclaim the book.

“It’s not a romance!” she protested with a distinctly amused tone in her voice, “it’s about the triumph of humanitarianism over Utilitarianism and the laissez faire in the mid nineteenth century. It’s a classic,” she finished, somewhat embarrassed, as she gave up and sank back to her seat, reaching beneath her desk to wrest her boots back onto her feet.. “I have all of Charles Dickens’ writings. I didn’t manage to bring them all over here – I only managed to sneak this one, Hard Times, as well as Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and Nicholas Nickleby.”

Sheppard wrinkled his nose at the book and set it back on the table.

“I brought along some other classics as well – if you like classic Russian texts like War and Peace – how far along in that are you, anyway?” she interrupted herself, and continued only when the grimace on Sheppard’s face confirmed her suspicions, “well, if you ever finish it, I also brought along Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Idiot and – hey, wait a minute, did you say Doctor McKay brought back a pet?”

Sheppard grinned, despite the fact that his formerly successful distraction had now become a un-distraction, and rose from his chair.

“Yeah, pet. Looks kinda like a cat, actually,” he confirmed, and his hands rose defensively as she raised a lethally questioning eyebrow. “You’ll just have to see it to believe it. The Doc’s got it in quarantine; hence the impromptu verbal sabre slashes.”

He strolled casually around her desk, and Weir followed him with her eyes, somewhat suspiciously. He walked with an easy, feline grace, utterly confident in his balance and poise – something to do with the muscle control that came with skill in hand-to-hand combat, she thought. She reached out, grasped the hand that he proffered to her and pulled herself upright – at the same moment that he pulled her upright. Their combined levered forces all but launched her out of her chair and sent her careening with a yelp into his chest. He stepped back, startled by the sudden feel of her body pressed intimately against his own, but he was able to hold them upright – barely. She looked up at him with her hands gripping his shoulders, and her eyes glowed a strange serpentine underneath the brightness of the artificial lighting and the brilliancy of her own presence.

It could have been awkward, with stilted laughs and flickering gazes, space forced between them by their own consciences; it could have been searing, as it would have been so easy for him to lean down and press his lips against hers, too easy for her to stretch up on her tip-toes and do the same, so easy for their tongues to dance and their hands to roam, forgotten. But it was neither, because they – silently, eerily in synchrony, similitude in the turn of thought and curve of smile – did not let themselves become awkward or searing.

Their earlier, easy amusement with each other was gone, momentarily forgotten in the haze of a mere moment in time that had been slowed by the will of restrained touch and blue eyes meeting green; replaced by a vibrating intensity that, for the sheer intensity of those frozen seconds, enthralled them as much as it shocked them.

And then it was over, her hands sliding down from his shoulders and his from their warm resting place just above her hips; her hair falling loosely into her eyes as she looked down and stepped away. They shared a small, tender, long-suffering smile, and shared memories flashed in their eyes – so many moments ending the same way, moments of laughter followed by a sudden, surging declination, the abyss that separated them momentarily bridged by something warm and alive, something dancing like sunlight upon the Atlantean waves; of longing denied and defied by their own strong senses of duty, of what was right; and the moment fading with the ascendancy of their conviction; of her fire and his steel – and they let it go, let them go again, to the scent of the sea lingering in the air.

“Let’s go see this ‘cat’ of Rodney’s,” she said softly, a trace of passion lingering in the lilt of her voice. She touched him lightly on the hand, turned away and strode out the door. He followed with a nod, and their steps echoed in tandem as they made their way down the corridor.


*


“Well, I thought it looked like a cat,” muttered McKay, somewhat petulantly. “So it has six legs. And no ears. And fangs as big as my thumb. So what?” He continued to stroke the animal – alien, rather – even as it growled menacingly under its breath, restrained as it was on an examination table with a needle sticking out of one of it’s ‘arms’.

Sheppard, Weir, Teyla and Beckett all exchanged looks that were remarkably identical in their exasperation.

“I don’ think yeh can tame it,” Beckett said as he labelled the warm phials of blood – a disturbing dark purple colour – that he had collected from the creature. “But we’ll know more after I’ve analysed these samples.” He glanced at Weir, bemusement flashing fleetingly across his face. “He really shouldn’t have brought it back with him, Doctor. I don’t know if it’s carrying any diseases of viruses. I’m not sure if we’ll find out unless something happens, either, which I suppose is a mixed blessing.”

McKay looked wholly unperturbed, even rather excited, which was decidedly at odds with the feelings of the rest of the people in the room. Sheppard was teetering between amusement and alarm, as was Teyla. Beckett was both curious and irritated, and Weir?

Weir was mostly just exasperated.

She’d rolled her eyes further skyward than she ever thought she could roll them, counted slowly to ten, and then to twenty for good measure. “Rodney,” she said in a deceptively calm, mellow voice, “just because you left your cat behind on Earth, doesn’t mean you can replace it.” She eyed the thing for a moment. “Carson, the moment you determine the presence or lack thereof of pathogens it might have brought through the gate, tell me. In the meantime, Rodney, you -” she grinned wolfishly for a frightening second – “can work on taming the damn thing, if you plan on keeping it. I suggest clipping its claws, first.”

McKay and Beckett exchanged looks. McKay, in a voice decidedly more nervous than it had previously been, muttered, “sure. Okay.”

Weir nodded once, flashed a look at Sheppard, and sauntered away.

There was a rather dramatic, odd silence left in her wake, and Sheppard felt it was his divine duty to exorcise it. He strolled haughtily up to the stretcher where the cat-thing lay struggling; their eyes met (blue with, inexplicably, a rather soft shade of pink – kind of like setting-sun pink, Sheppard thought, somewhat romantically), and the alien growled long and low, it’s claws extending and puncturing the soft fabric it lay upon in an obscene kneading motion, the audible popping sound echoing throughout the infirmary. Teyla instinctively backed away. Sheppard, however, was not that intuitive, and continued to approach the beast, ignoring its menacing moans when he reached out and touched its black side.

“Hey, this thing’s fur is actually pretty soft. And – yow!” He bit himself off mid-sentence as said ‘thing’ somehow managed to contort its restrained body to swipe at his hand with its razor talons. Sheppard jumped away with a curse, his hand dripping blood and a murderous look set on his face. He didn’t notice McKay and Teyla wince behind him, or Beckett sigh and gather up bandages and antiseptic – he just eyed the thing and it eyed him back, haughtily. “I hereby name you Sabre, after the evil cat I had growing up. Use it well, Darth,” he addressed the cat-thing, shaking his aching hand before allowing Beckett to dress it.

“Sabre Darth?” Teyla questioned as he left the infirmary, his footsteps strangely in time with the growls of the cat-thing.

“I think it’s Darth Sabre, actually, and it’s probably less confusing for you if you don’t ask,” McKay said quickly – well, quicker with usual. Beckett made a noise of agreement as he stood with his hands on his hips, contemplating the creature.

“Hmm.”


*

He really didn’t like cats. If he was honest with himself, Sheppard was really more of a dog person – but not those ratty little yappy dogs, no. He liked the big, noble dogs, ones that actually have brains as well as brawn.

As he strolled down the corridor, his bandaged hand throbbing unnoticed in his jacket pocket, he remembered another dog person who probably had her nose back in her Charles Dickens novel again (and if he was really honest with himself, he could admit to reading old Darles on occasion – not that he’d ever admit that to Weir, after teasing her about her reading choice so thoroughly), and who probably wouldn’t mind a break.

Or lunch.

Or both.



-end-