AN: This story is for the swficathon on lj and is written for brookeormian, who requested a tentative, secret and rather new relationship thrown for a loop by a pregnancy scare, though not to be all happy happy, joy joy at the prospect.
I did kind of steal some elements from the Star Trek DS9 episode “The Darkness and the Light”, but it was kind of an accident. I am pretty much incapable of writing fluff at the moment.
Disclaimer: Not mine at all.
Spoilers: Up to current episodes.
Rating: PG-13 for mentions of sex and where babies come from.
Warning: The warnings will spoil the story. If you really need to know, they’re at the end.
Summary: John’s fourth date was nothing at all like he expected.
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Fourth Date
John had a very clear idea in his head of what the Atlantis-style third date should be. It would involve candles from the Athosian village apiary…and probably some kind of wine. And using the transporter to go to the most isolated spot the city had to offer, and then pretending it was some kind of French restaurant, even though all the food was from the mess and he was carrying it in a picnic basket.
He hadn’t exactly planned to have sex with Elizabeth Weir that night, but it had felt very right at the time. Of course, this threw his fourth date plans (movie, moonshine and some carefully hoarded chocolate) for a bit of a loop, because he didn’t know exactly how to follow the previous play. It turned out he needn’t have worried. John’s fourth date was nothing at all like he expected.
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“What did you have planned for tonight?” Elizabeth asked from the other side of the room.
Calling it a room, John reflected, might be a little generous. It had three walls, a ceiling and a set of rather impressive metal bars further reinforced by the force field he had no intention of voluntarily touching again. There was a hole in the floor in the corner he was pretty sure was supposed to be a toilet, and the only light came from a tiny slit across the top of the outward facing wall.
“I had a movie and some chocolate.” He admitted. There was no point in not telling her, and it had been a good plan until it all went to hell. “We were going to watch it in my room.”
“Were you going to seduce me again afterwards?”
“I didn’t – ” he began to protest and then stopped because Elizabeth was laughing and he didn’t want to ruin the moment.
The mission had gone horribly wrong from almost the first moment. The planet itself had seemed fair enough; about on par with Earth technology, democratic government, lovely landscaping in the capital city; but once the locals found out who they were, things had gone south quite rapidly.
It turned out that this planet had been the favourite testing ground of the Asurans. The Lantean Replicators had wreaked havoc here for generations, testing biological weapons as well as conventional explosives. The fact that all such activity had ceased approximately two thousand years previous did not alter the populace’s feelings towards their former oppressors, nor their reaction upon finding out that Lanteans walked among them. Teyla and Ronon had been allowed to leave, being of non-Lantean origin, but nothing Elizabeth could say would convince their captors that she and John were innocent.
So it was that instead of sitting down next to Elizabeth and watching the latest imported movie from Earth while trying to figure out a way to put his arm around her that didn’t involve the “yawn and stretch” manouever, they were in prison on a planet John couldn’t remember the name of for a crime they had not committed. Their trial had been that morning. They had not been in attendance, but had been informed later that they had been found guilty and would be executed in three days, after a series of tests were performed on them. John didn’t like the sound of “tests”, but three days was time, and time might bring a rescue.
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They dragged Elizabeth away first. She would have walked, if they had let her, but their hosts seemed determined to make their last few days as miserable as possible. She had only just started growing her hair out, and now it was used to pull her out of the cell and down the corridor while she scrambled to get her feet underneath her. John had yelled, as he always did under such circumstances, that he was the military man in charge, and he should go first, but all it had got him was a punch in the stomach and a bloody nose.
They came for him before she was back, and he learned what “tests” really meant. There were conventional blood tests and some sort of lymph extraction, biology had never been his strong point, and then there were injections and then there was a lot of punching and something involving a stout piece of leather. HeHeHeHe He tried very hard not to think about Elizabeth, the face he had only just begun to touch, the slender arms and legs he had only recently been allowed to see in the flesh…he clamped down on his mind and refused to allow himself to think any further.
When they rolled him back into his cell, she was already in it. He was a mess of blood and bruises, but she was…not. Instead, she sat in the corner of the room, knees pulled up to her chin, dreadfully pale with wide eyes and a haunted look on her face. He dragged himself towards her, and when he moved, she finally seemed to see him and snap back into reality.
“John!” she crossed the room to him and took his head in her lap, “Oh, John…I am so sorry.”
“This is hardly your fault, Elizabeth.” Even now, he desperately clung to himself, to the way that John Sheppard faced adversity. “McKay had bronchitis and there was Ancient writing from the MALP and you volunteered to come with us to get a closer look and decipher it.”
“They’re not going to kill me, John.” She sounded dead already.
“That’s….good. Isn’t it?” He was terribly confused.
“They don’t murder the innocent. I have been found guilty but the baby – ” She stammered and his world turned on end, “Our baby is…innocent.”
The world was spinning too fast. He couldn’t make sense of it because it was all happening to quickly. He latched on to one fact he knew to be true.
“But you have that implant thing…” He was a bit sketchy on the details, but he knew that most female members of the SGC and associated expeditions were given birth control.
“Nothing is ever perfect, John.” Elizabeth’s voice was gentle, but still lifeless, and he was not sure how that was possible. “They scanned me and then told me that I was carrying a baby and that they wouldn’t execute me until after it could be safely delivered. They would give it to good parents, they promised, and they would never tell it that I existed.”
“How…exactly…is that a…comfort?” The world was spinning slower now which, John realized probably had as much to do with Elizabeth holding her uniform jacket to his head wound than it did his sudden understanding of the facts.
“It’s not.”
And there it was. A nine month extension of her life, for the sake of the life she bore, with no thought given to anything beyond the killing of the guilty and the sparing of the innocent.
“Teyla and Ronon will come.” John had to believe that. He always believed that. “Caldwell was scheduled to get back with the Daedelus four hours after we left Atlantis. They could already be on their way.”
“They’ll come.” Elizabeth agreed.
The slot at the bottom of their cell slid open. Two plates came through. One was covered with oatmeal’s bastard Pegasus Galaxy cousin and the other had a piece of meat and some fruit. They split both dinners, even when the guards rattled the bars and screamed at John that the meat was for the innocent.
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The bells rang out two days later as the sun came up, calling one and all to the main square. John noticed that the music was in fifths instead of eighths and wondered why he had never bothered learning to play any Chinese stringed instrument after mastering the guitar. There was a bag on his head and his hands were tied together and he couldn’t see or feel anything, but there was nothing wrong with his ears.
He heard the tromp of boots as they lined what he assumed was the firing squad up in front of him. He heard the crowd hush in expectation. He heard his charges read aloud, and he heard the shouts and curses of the crowd as they called for his death. He smiled, though no one could see it, because he had been to the Pegasus Galaxy and he had saved the world and he had finally fallen quietly in love with Elizabeth Weir only to find out that she had fallen quietly in love with him. He had had that much.
He heard the hum as the energy began to build up.
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Elizabeth Weir materialized on the bridge of the Daedelus and looked around her at the relieved faces of her crew. She started to say something, to answer their questions and ask her own, but shock caught up with her and she fainted into Teyla’s arms before she could say anything at all.
When she woke, hours later, it was to Carson’s soft voiced encouragements.
“The baby!” She exclaimed, not caring who was around to hear her.
“Hush, love.” Carson said, gently pushing her head back down upon the pillow. “What baby?”
“The aliens. They scanned me and said that….that I was pregnant. That’s why they didn’t kill me.” The word “kill” floated around in her head for a few moments, and then her eyes widened. “John. Where’s John?”
“Elizabeth, calm down! There is no baby. I would have picked it up on my scans. They probably didn’t take into account your physiological and chemical differences when they tested you.” Carson paused, surprise and pity and compassion shining in his face, “There’s…no baby, Elizabeth.”
“Where is Colonel Sheppard?”
“We couldn’t find him on our scans.” Carson said quietly. “There was a massive energy discharge right next to the prison as we beamed you out. Elizabeth, what happened down there?”
Elizabeth looked down at her flat stomach and wished for a fifth date.
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finis
Warning: Er…and also some torture. And character death. Sorry!
GravityNotIncluded, October 29, 2006