Not the same underground complex he had brought her to the first time, but one close to it. A little further from the crash site, a little more well-maintained. She looked around, memorizing the way there. Fixing in her mind a way back, should she need to find her way out of here on her own. Although she didn't think Michael would do that, not this time. Not to her.

There were no laboratories here, or at least if there were he wasn't taking her past any of them. There wasn't much of anything. There were rooms, store-rooms, what looked like a bedroom that had been fixed up out of an office, what looked as though it had at one time been a conference or gathering room of some kind. No dining room, which she noted as strange at first and then realized why. And tried not to think about that.

He took her to what seemed to be a greenhouse extending from a cave at the other end of the small underground complex. She wasn't sure why. A compromise, perhaps? Perhaps as far from the place where he was living as they could get and still be in the same general area. Perhaps it had some significance she did not yet know of, she didn't know. She wanted to know. Nerves made her edgy inside, although she was managing quite well at keeping herself still and calm on the outside.

"You wanted to talk," he said, not looking at her, sitting on a stone bench. "What did you have to say?"

A-ha. And now that they were here she didn't know what she wanted to say. Perhaps to start with the question. "Why did you save my life?"

That earned her a look of disgust. Not starting off on the right footing, then. "Contrary to what you might believe, Wraith are not creatures only made to kill and feed. We do know of mercy and compassion."

Back to their earlier conversation. Which she had brought up, asking for a chance to prove her friendship. Well, she had earned that comment. "Even after what we did to you?" she asked in turn, acknowledging that he had a right to be angry. Which she had done, at least to herself, a long time ago. But she did not remember having said so to him, and perhaps it was more than time.

His turn to be startled. He tilted his head at her, as if trying to figure out whether or not she meant that. She did.

"I have never ..." he started to say, then stopped and seemed to be choosing his words more carefully. "I do not mean you harm. I do not mean you harm." With a different inflection, giving it a different meaning.

She did not bring up the part where he had strapped her to a table and attempted to feed her to an Iratus bug.

"The last time we met, I did not believe I had a choice. What I did was for the same reasons you did what you believed you had to do, before that. To protect our secrets, our homes... we have done..."

"Terrible things," she suggested, lumping both of their actions into the category.

"Yes."

There was silence for a moment there, awkward and yet easier to bear. They had both acknowledged the weight of what they had done to each other, that they had done wrongs to each other. In a way they had also both put aside anything that had happened before their first meeting, face to face. Anything that Michael might have done as a Wraith to the Athosians, anything that she in her rebellion might have done to his hive, that was put aside as non-existant.

"I did not mean you harm, either," she said suddenly, needing him to know. To understand. Perhaps not to understand but to know what it was like. "After I came to know you, I found it difficult to lie to you. I did not... was no longer convinced that we were doing the right thing."

Which was still the wrong thing to say. His eyes narrowed at the reminder of what had been done to him, a look crossing his face that somehow seemed more human than Wraith.

"After we left... after we bombarded the planet, I did ..."

His look was not making it easier to say. She turned away, pacing a slow circle until she came around facing the other way, her back to him. One hand came up over her shoulder.

"We did not know of any other way to prevent the knowledge of Atlantis from reaching the rest of the Wraith. We thought that the only thing to do, to survive, was to destroy you, and the rest." There was a brief pause there. She had never become so close to the other humanized Wraith as she had to Michael. The lie had been different, for one thing, and she had learned her lesson the first time. "Afterwards, I... believed you were dead." And she did not know how else to explain herself, and telling someone who was standing right behind you that you had mourned and performed rites for them seemed simply odd. She hoped he understood from what she had said, what that meant.

"Why?" His voice was much closer, and more inquisitive now. His voice, she realized after a moment, was right behind her.

She didn't turn around. "I never wanted to be your enemy, Michael. I grieved for you because I did not want to see you dead..." And she did turn, then, eyeing him. "That is not a feeling I am accustomed to, grieving over a Wraith."

Michael smiled. It wasn't a very happy smile. "Thanks to you, I am no longer a Wraith."

"Thanks to your people, I am no longer entirely human," she snapped back.

And they both stopped. It was the first time in... at least the first time that she could remember since discovering what had been done to her that she had so plainly acknowledged what she was. Not something she usually talked about, not even with Sheppard or Ronon. Reminding Beckett of it would have put her up for research for his retrovirus. Reminding Ronon of it might have made things uncomfortable between them. She had never really known what Sheppard had thought, but still had not felt comfortable discussing it with him. Not given Sheppard's own experience with the Iratus bug.

And it put a kind of symmetry between them. For the first time since he had been human, since he had believed himself one of the Atlantis team, they looked at each other with little more than a weary, wary camaraderie. She even almost found herself smiling.

Strange, to think that Michael could make her smile.

"You tried to use me for your experiments," she said then, pointing a finger at him. But not accusatory, almost playful, and tired. There was no point in bringing it up for an argument, but she did want it known that she would not forgive that type of behavior again. "Does that make us even?"

"It does not make us even," he snapped, camaraderie gone. "You still have a life, a..."

"Not. Anymore."

She was almost out the door when he stopped, one arm across the doorway to bar her exit. "What are you talking about?"

"My people," she ground out, "Were taken. By your people."

It was almost surprising that he managed to keep his calm, with what should have been an insult. Or perhaps it was only her fury that wanted him to feel that she was making a target of him. "They are not my people any longer. And I am sorry," he added, meeting her incredulous stare with his own quiet sympathy. From a Wraith. It added to the sense of unreality about the whole mess. "I am sorry that your people were taken. I ..." His head tilted to one side, birdlike, almost, she thought. "I would not want you to feel alone. Not like that."

His words echoed almost the way they had in the tent, and not in the same way. There was no compulsion, only a sense of bitter and wrenching loneliness that Teyla knew was not her own, and yet was so familiar that it shocked her and made the hurt worse. A little. And in some way it made it easier to bear.

Michael turned and went past her, out the doorway and down the hall. She stared at him until he was almost out of sight before she remembered that he was lost without him, and followed.

He had a stash of MREs. She didn't ask where he had gotten them from. There were too many to be from the Jumper, if it had even had a store of food against some sort of emergency. She thought it had, but there were still too many of those packets, piled up almost to the ceiling in one corner of what seemed to have been a kitchen.

Not that he would have any use for a kitchen. Hyper-aware of their fragile truce, she did not ask how he was surviving.

"There's a kind of symmetry at work, here," he said, with a tiny smile. "From the way I remember your expression it's not what you would prefer to eat, but..."

"It is better than what I brought," she admitted. Trail rations and she had hoped to do some hunting or foraging, but hot meals with some regularity had been beyond what she had counted as a reasonable expectation. "Thank you."

She ate. He watched her while she ate, not intrusive or intently, as if simply enjoying the sight of her. Enjoying her presence, someone else he could talk to and share ... time with. Share time with, not anything else. What parts of his life would he want to share with her, anyway? Teyla shook her head and found Michael looking at her with a question in the tilt of his head.

"I do not know what to talk about." She took another couple of bites and pushed it aside. She had almost meant to say she didn't know what she was doing here, but didn't want him to hear that.

That actually brought a little chuckle. Strange to hear him laugh; the last time she had heard that sound had been... long ago, or at least it seemed so. The brief alliance with the Wraith.

It had sounded, now that she thought of it, a little like it had when he had been human. And thinking of that made her shiver, look down into the soup and set her spoon carefully down, pushing it away.

"Something wrong?" His voice was neutral. Impossible to tell whether he was offended or concerned or whatever emotions may have been there.

Teyla shook her head. "Nothing... wrong. I was thinking..." She brought herself to look up at him again. "I was realizing how little I know about you. The longest time we have spent together was when you believed you were human, one of the Atlantis team."

It still seemed to upset him, almost automatically. But his expression smoothed out after a moment as he made a visible effort to calm down. "You were never interested in me as I am, before," he said after a moment. "You gave me a choice, death, or the death of all that I am. You never asked. Not," he added. "As careful as you were when I was human."

This wasn't going to go over well, but she felt she had to at least put it out there. "I was comparing the way you sound, your voice, now, to what I remembered of when you were human. I have never heard you so at ease as I did when you were human... it seemed odd, to me."

"Because being human is so much better than being a Wraith?" The bitterness was back again.

"That is not what I meant," she told him, reproving and guilty all at once. "Because you are still... you. I had expected you to be different as Wraith than you were as human. I had expected ..."

"A monster? A creature ruled entirely by the instinct to feed and kill?" Michael raised a brow, but she hurried on.

"Perhaps humans and Wraith could find a way to co-exist peacefully. There is a part of us in you, there is a part of you in at least some of us..."

He shook his head. "Neither of our people would agree to so much as entertain the idea. The Wraith are not in the habit of making deals with their food. Predator and prey cannot co-exist, Teyla..." His voice softened, his shoulders relaxed. "You engineered an alliance, and I admire that you tried. But you engineered an alliance based on good faith provided by me, faith that was misplaced."

"Michael..."

"Your people relied upon my good faith, and I relied upon the good faith of my people who, now, because of what you have done to me, see me as unclean. Less than ..." Something. Whatever it was he meant to say he didn't finish, and looked down at the table between them.

Teyla moved around it and put her hand on her arm, confusion dissipating. The words might not have been there but the concept seemed to have been clarified for her. Not human, nor Wraith, she couldn't quite tell which he was anymore for her, but he was still Michael. Or whatever his name had been before they had turned him into something else.

"You are not less than," she told him, although she wasn't sure how much that would mean, coming from her. "You are a survivor. You are..."

If it had been McKay she would have reminded him of all the discoveries he had made, all the times he had pulled them out of danger at the last minute. If it had been Sheppard she would have reminded him of the same, but she didn't know what to tell Michael. Commending him for the experiment with the Super-Wraith, as Sheppard and the others called them, would have rang false and sounded forced. And she didn't know what else to say.

So. Perhaps it was time to change that.

"Tell me?" She took a step back, her hand sliding down his arm and curling her fingers around his, just a little. It still felt awkward. Slightly wrong, and just a bit nerve-wracking. But her eyes never left his, and she did not want to make things any worse than they were. "Tell me about yourself. Please."

He followed. After a moment of looking at her in something that seemed almost like shock, he led the way to a small lounge or sitting room of some kind. Gently, he freed his hand from hers, although whether for her comfort or for his she couldn't tell. They sat at almost the same time, a little stiff, but leaning towards each other.

"What do you want to know?" he asked finally, and his voice sounded strange.

"Whatever you want to tell me."

His eyes dropped to the floor. After a long moment of thought he took a breath, chest heaving as though it were labored or difficult, and began.

The first night Teyla was out there all Sheppard could think of was that she was out there on her own, in the middle of a jungle where something had clearly happened to her. Something that had upset her, enough to go back out there and try and confront whatever it was. Which, in turn, upset him. Which kept him awake at night and found him wandering through the halls looking for a distraction.

Ronon was a distraction. "Couldn't sleep?"

"Yeah," Sheppard's mouth twisted in one of his grins that wasn't quite a grin. "Thought I'd try and walk it off."

"You and Teyla have a fight or something?"

Maybe Ronon wasn't a distraction he wanted. "No, Teyla and I didn't have a fight. I just couldn't sleep, that's all."

"Sure." Ronon grinned a little. "Want to go a couple rounds?"

"No." Pause. "Was Teyla acting weird to you just before she left?"

Ronon paused in mid-step and turned, looking at him. "She almost died and lost one of her closest friends, one of the only people she has left. How should she be acting?"

Put that way, Sheppard could feel his cheeks heating a little. Maybe it was just him. Maybe he was just being an idiot, as usual. "Nothing. Never mind."

Ronon frowned at the man's back as he turned and headed towards his room again. "You think something's wrong?"

John waved to his friend over his shoulder. "See you in the morning."

The first night Teyla was out there all by herself she felt more odd about moving Michael from his bed than anything else. Apparently the laws of hospitality among the Wraith were similar to those among most human cultures; either that or he had thought that she would be more comfortable with the courtesy. It was hard to tell his motivations, even with all that she had learned about him and as much as they had slowly come to be more at ease with each other.

It had been strange, too, to hear about the life of a Wraith as fact and from their perspective rather than as speculation from McKay and Zelenka. Sooner than she had thought, within minutes even, she had found herself entranced by his stories and what he told her. Little things, nothing (she noted that he had been very careful of that) current or of strategic value, but memories of everyday things. The sorts of things that must have seemed trivial to him at the time.

Little things that were no longer trivial because he could never have them again, and Teyla suddenly realized that she knew what he meant by that, how he felt. She rolled over and curled up on her side, fighting against the tears that still sometimes came.

How strange it was, the little things that they remembered when they couldn't have them any longer. A conversation between friends, or the things done in the hours of leisure, when there remained no more duties for a period of time. He had told her of friends he had had and she had been struck in at least one instance of how similar they seemed, not so much to the erratic Dr. McKay, but how she thought Zelenka seemed with his co-workers.

He had spoken of family in a way that made it seem as though there was so much he could not bring himself to talk about yet. She wondered what he hadn't been saying, had realized then although somehow it had not occurred to her before that, how much older he must be. Dr. Beckett had speculated that the Wraith might live a long time, but it had never before been a practicality for her. Michael might very well have seen generations of humans go by. Several times her lifespan over. He hadn't said anything to that effect, though.

What would that have been like, or meant, had he stayed in human form? Thousands of years of life and experience and suddenly compacted into a human form that might only have a human lifespan? Did he think of that? A thousand and one questions and they had both retired to their beds and she wasn't sure she would remember this in the morning.

Perhaps that was better, this way. Perhaps there were some topics that they shouldn't touch on, or at least not yet. Family, lifespan, touchy subjects like that. Whenever it occurred to her next would be soon enough to talk about it.

She was just sliding into sleep when she heard it, and not even so much heard it as felt it shiver through her body and screaming in her mind. Immediately she was up and out of bed, racing down the hall.

The first night Teyla was there in his temporary dwelling was strange to him. To have her just down the hall, his own bed hastily crafted out of what bedding remained (and there was plenty of it), and yet knowing this place was not his own for at least a short time... It was all strange. Almost too strange.

He sat on the bed rather than stretching out or laying down, staring at the wall opposite. It was still amazing to him, perhaps too good to be true, that she had come out simply to talk to him. That she had listened at all, to anything he had said. Why now, when she hadn't seemed to before?

Or, perhaps that was unfair. Of all of them, she had been the only one to try to talk to him as though he was a person who might want some sort of say in what happened to him. As though he deserved respect, whether or not she had been able to let him live free at the time. Which begged the question, why was she doing so now? Why hadn't she told Atlantis about him? He hadn't truly expected that she would keep his secret.

And now he had given her a great many more secrets to keep. Hard to say whether or not she would, but. They had come this far.

His eyes were just closing when he heard the clatter in what sounded like the kitchen, bounding off the bed and heading for the room. His eyes widened in shock, betrayal.

"Sheppard."

"Michael." Sheppard smiled. Not at all nice. "Good to see you again, Lieutenant."

It was something in the way he said it. He found himself looking down at his hands, stumbling back in horror as the pale pink flesh of human hands spread out under his incredulous stare. The light shifted downward, darkened.

"What's the matter, Lieutenant?" He looked up again. The Queen, his Queen, was staring at him as he had seen her stare at hundreds of human prisoners before her. Impassive, uncaring. Interested only for as long as it took to achieve the desired effect. "You look as though you've seen a ghost."

"Don't you recognize me?" He flexed his hands, trying to will himself back to what he had been. It wasn't working. "Don't..." Words. Words were so inadequate, and yet when he reached he couldn't feel anything. Couldn't find anyone. Locked inside his own skull, a prisoner of his own altered body, of what they had done to him. Someone laid a hand on his shoulder.

"Don't! Don't touch me!" He knocked the person away, far too aware of what his people did to humans under their control. In front of him, she laughed. She laughed. "Don't touch..."

Two things she noted that she would never have thought of, and wasn't sure she had wanted to know. Three things. Firstly, that Wraith needed to sleep on any sort of similar schedule to humans, although that might have simply been the human part of Michael asserting itself more aggressively after the retrovirus. Secondly, that Wraith could have nightmares at all, although again, that might simply have been his unique state.

Thirdly, that being so near to a telepathic shriek could hurt so very much.

She tried to shake him awake again. There was very little thrashing and flailing, although his mouth was open in a soundless, wordless scream. Inside his mind, at least as much as she got through the waves of terror and grief crashing through her, it was certainly worth screaming over. There was loneliness. There was fear, the known turning against him and becoming threatening and vicious. Betrayal, and heartache, and she was reminded of the entity that had taken the form of Sheppard and wreaked so much havoc on Atlantis.

Which, in turn, reminded her of the solution. Or a solution, a possible solution and perhaps it would at least enable her to get some sleep that night. She focused on the selfish part to avoid thinking about other possible motives and other feelings.

"I wish..." she started, but didn't know how she would finish the sentence.

No need for special equipment here; she closed her eyes and allowed herself to be sucked into his nightmares.

It was easy to see why he was afraid. And it was Michael, the Michael she had first come to know, human and in the t-shirt and fatigues he had mostly worn on Atlantis, looking around with wide and frightened eyes. In the Queen's room, on a hive ship, the Queen approaching him with her hand out as if to feed. She put her hand on his shoulder, dodged easily as he tried to knock her away. The Queen gave her an irritated look but otherwise seemed to be ignoring her. And still heading for Michael.

Teyla interposed herself between the two of them. "Stop."

"T-Teyla?" And then, in her mind: What are you doing here?

The Queen did stop, too. And then started to advance again. Teyla wasn't sure what to say or do, to defeat the Queen, to enable Michael to defeat her himself to wake up. To speak to him; would he even know or be convinced that he was dreaming?

You are dreaming, Michael. This is a nightmare. You need to wake up. The Queen moved forward to sweep her out of the way, but Teyla wasn't so easily pushed aside. She was, however, a little startled by how easily the Queen was knocked back. Michael, you are dreaming! Wake up!

The world around them began to waver. Teyla felt her head resting on the surface of what seemed to be an uncomfortable bed, and yet she still felt her body standing on the floor of the Wraith ship. It was disconcerting, at the very least. And yet.

"Michael." She turned halfway, keeping an eye on the Queen as she put her hands on his shoulders and forced him to look at her. "Michael, you are dreaming. You must wake up."

"Teyla..." He looked so sad. So terrified. "What's happening to me?"

You are dreaming. This is all a dream, a nightmare. "We ..."

Pain. The Queen's hand on her back, that familiar roar. She was feeding.

Teyla found herself digging her fingers into Michael's shoulders as her legs gave out from under her and she tried to remind herself that it was only a dream. A very painful, terrifying dream. Michael's dream. Wake up, please.

Go to the top! For you have reached the bottom.

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