Prompt 65.05

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Four things that made Teyla decide to leave Atlantis (and the one thing that made her stay).


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Part One (Spoilers up to early SGA season 5)

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

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.

*