It was getting harder and harder to see him, regularly. There was the fear of discovery by the Wraith, the problem of the Replicators, the Wraith and the Replicators making war against each other and human settlements on all worlds getting caught in the cross-fire. Teyla never questioned whether they had done the right thing by re-activating that portion of the Replicator base code or not, but there were times when she wondered whether there was any good outcome to be gained from any of this, for any of them.

She gave Michael what news she could of what was going on in the galaxy outside and, true to her promise, helped him try to find a more permanent solution to his needs. It was Ellia all over again, she thought. Except perhaps the retrovirus had made it possible for Michael's dietary need to be changed more easily? Without changing the whole of him, all that made him Michael? She was conscious of it, every time she watched him work at the lab equipment they had borrowed or plundered. What he had said when confronted with the option of retrovirus or death. The death of self had disturbed him more than the death of his body. Not exactly a position she wanted to disagree with.

Teyla was finding it harder and harder to hide such sentiments. Finding it harder and harder to hide the changes that she was noticing within herself. Not the least of which her skill with her gift, which was growing by leaps and bounds.

"Doesn't look like there's much left..." McKay wrinkled his nose in fastidious disapproval, as if by pulling back from it and disapproving of it he could make it go away. She heard the tension in his voice anyway.

"Yeah, well. Let's check it out anyway, there might be survivors."

She wanted to tell him that there were no survivors, or where they were if by some miracle some had managed to hide, but contacting human minds was still beyond her, for the moment.

Ronon grunted his opinion of the likelihood of anyone surviving the attack, which didn't seem to be high. Teyla privately agreed with his assessment, but had other things on her mind at the time. Such as...

"There are Wraith nearby."

It was a common enough statement coming from her, and got everyone's attention. But it became a distraction when she went on to give more detail than she ever had before.

"Four of them. Three drones and..." She took off at a run. "He has found survivors. He is looking for something among them..."

McKay and Ronon stared at her; Ronon recovered first and chased after her, though he didn't ask why she was running or how she knew. Sheppard was pulling up alongside her and just following her lead, shaking his head.

He more than likely guessed by what route she had gained her newfound skill, and if he wasn't happy about the source he could not argue with the results.

Teyla shouted, something incomprehensible and instinctive, but the real attack was neither by voice nor by P-90 but straight from her mind. A shriek of defiance and fury and if Michael had winced at the volume of her contact before he would have been deafened by it now. Which was, of course, the point. The leader dropped, and all the drones turned to point their weapons at her. And she stopped.

If she had been on her own then, she realized, she would have been dead. Not a tactic to use when she was without backup.

Ronon's pistol knocked down one, then two. Sheppard's gun sounded next to her, dropping the third drone, and when she didn't hear a second P90 join the chorus she assumed Rodney was hanging back and letting the fighters work. It was with both relief and surprise that she realized it was his voice she heard next.

"Come on, come on, this way, let's let the big guys..." something. She couldn't make out the rest of what he said. The other Wraith, a scientist it seemed to her, was pulling to his feet.

Michael had told her, more than once, that she would make a formidable Queen.

[Sit. DOWN.]

The Wraith sat abruptly on the ground, looking both shocked and ridiculous.

"Teyla..." There was a clatter around her. She refocused her gaze, saw John keeping Ronon from shooting the Wraith. "What are you doing?"

"I believe I can learn what he was doing here, why he was attempting to capture prisoners rather than simply ... cull and leave. If you would give me a little time..."

And now everyone was staring at her. Sheppard with somewhat more intensity than Ronon, which was impressive. "Are you sure? You remember what happened last time..."

"I have been ..." Practicing. She didn't want to say that, not in front of the others, not when she would have to explain what she meant. "I am sure, yes."

"You're not staying here alone with that thing."

She opened her mouth to contradict Ronon when Sheppard interrupted. "No, she's not. I'll stay with her and shoot him if he so much as twitches, you and McKay get those people out of here, just in case the Wraith come back."

Teyla still didn't look around. She didn't have to, not to hear Ronon growling under his breath, not to know that her friend did not like that plan at all. "Sheppard..."

"Ronon. Do as I say, all right? Get to the Jumper, get everyone on board. McKay can come pick us up if any Wraith decide this guy's been taking too long and come looking for him."

It sounded like a weak excuse, even to her. She was a little surprised when Ronon followed McKay back to the jumper with no audible protest and only a couple of backward glances. Sheppard came up alongside her just as her command was starting to wear off, or as the Wraith was starting to decide that he might be able to ignore her, or whatever it was. She still wasn't entirely sure how this would work.

[Stay there.]

He looked surprised, again. He also looked angry.

"Teyla..." Sheppard's voice was low, tense. "Not to bother you or anything, but are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"I am sure..." she started, and then forgot to finish her sentence as she switched from vocal to mental speech. [What were you doing here? Tell me.] She made it echo, the way Michael had. She made it a command with no option of refusal. She was Queen here, and as far as he was concerned he had no other. If she was frightened of that sort of thinking she did not let herself dwell on it.

Fortunately Sheppard took her half-sentence for a whole one, and left her alone. Teyla took another breath and increased the pressure on the Wraith scientist's mind. And the volume on her words. [Tell. Me.]

He told her. He didn't have a choice. She didn't leave him one.

By the end of it she turned away and made some sort of gesture to John that could have meant anything, but which Sheppard took for a request to shoot the bastard. His word, not hers. She was shaking, sweating, feeling a little sick to her stomach at what she had done and at what the Wraith had been planning to do to his human captives.

"We should go..." she said, grateful for the hand up as Sheppard assisted her to her feet and practically hovered the whole way back to the Jumper. "Colonel Carter will want to hear about this."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they try this already?" Carter frowned, leaning forward and looking more at Teyla than at anyone else. "And..."

"My ancestors were given the ability to sense the Wraith, yes." Teyla shook her head. "I believe it is because of the war with the Replicators. They are reaching for any and all weapons that might be used, including making the feeding process more efficient and more ..."

"Streamlined?"

Everyone looked at Rodney.

"What?"

Carter sighed, eyeing Ronon, who was shifting in his seat. "Was that scientist the only one performing these experiments?"

Teyla shook her head slightly, worried, and impatient. And trying not to show the impatience, when even Sheppard and Carter would not understand why. "I do not know. It is possible that the Wraith have become more unified, given a common enemy, and that they are working together on this and other experiments."

"That's a cheerful thought," Sheppard shook his head. "I don't know how we're going to find out, though."

No one looked at Teyla. No one looked at Rodney, either, although he immediately started griping about having to fix all the impossible problems. Far from being the mild annoyance that it usually was, it actually made Teyla smile a little.

"Well, think on it and let me know," Carter said, which seemed so far to be code for 'we'll have a meeting in a day or so, be ready with ideas.'

Teyla had ideas. She had a number of them; the only problem was that very few of them had anything to do with finding out more about what experiments the Wraith might be conducting, and what defenses they might be bringing to bear against the Replicators. More to do with how she would get in touch with Michael and how they might be able to turn this experiment to their advantage.

Which bothered her, when she stopped to think about it. Almost as much as what she had done to the Wraith scientist. And what was she turning into, that she was thinking these thoughts and making these sorts of decisions? Someone who put herself ahead of the welfare of ...

Teyla shook her head, stalking down the hall more quickly, towards the gym. If nothing else she could work herself into exhaustion and thereby ensure that she would sleep that night. If nothing else.

It was a miracle that she was able to get away to see him, even for only a day and a half. Sheppard wanted her to interrogate Michael on the subject of any and all experiments which might require live human subjects, although he didn't use that word. His meaning was clear, and his desperation was certainly shared by Teyla herself. But talking to Michael for even five minutes convinced her that he knew nothing outside of what he himself had been attempting to do. And they both shied away from that topic as soon as they could.

His fingers combed through her hair with frantic precision; she almost thought he was trembling. "I said you would make a formidable Queen," he murmured, but only to make light of what had happened, and to put some separation between them. Their emotions were both too jumbled.

"We will not be able to meet like this for very much longer, or at least, not as often..." She trailed off. It hadn't been often at all, it had been... she didn't know what it had been. Sporadic. A series of stolen moments, something that she had come to crave and treasure in a way that made her head spin to think about it too long.

Michael nodded. Neither of them, perhaps, had been expecting it to last. "The Replicators? Or..." His people. The Wraith. Neither term seemed to fit but at least she knew what he meant and he didn't have to say it.

"Both. Atlantis is under siege again, but indirectly, and from two fronts. It puts a strain on our resources and ... it makes it hard to get away."

She didn't pull her head from his shoulder but she felt him smile. Was glad she didn't see the sadness in it, that they were separated enough for the moment that she didn't have to feel it. Everything seemed to be moving so much faster now. Seemed to be, all of them, hurrying to grasp at the edges of something that was slipping away. Sanity, perhaps. Security. Something necessary.

"I will tell you what I can of our first battle with the Replicators, but I am afraid it likely will be of less use than you hope," he said after a little while of clinging and quietly shutting out the rest of the world. "It may give you an idea of what sorts of tactics would be employed against them."

"And what sorts of tactics we ourselves might employ, yes." She nodded. "Thank you, I would be grateful to hear."

It was depressingly little, as he had warned. Not only because his skills in science were more limited to the biological and chemical than the technological and mathematical, but also because they were different. The Replicators were no longer restricted by their core programming built by Ancients, neglectful and whimsical as they had been. And they kept changing.

He talked until she was drifting and almost falling asleep, leaning against him, both of them shifting only to keep their limbs from aching. A great deal of the information was repeated, so that she would remember, she thought.

"It is possible to defeat them," he reminded her, sensing the tone of her thoughts as she drifted. Once they had stopped talking tactics they had fallen back into the sort of mental dialogue which covered topics not related to either current affairs or the Atlantis team. Mostly this involved little anecdotes from times more pleasant than lately. "It has been accomplished before, it's not as hopeless as it seems."

She leaned back far enough to smile ruefully up at him. "Do I seem so hopeless to you?"

"You seem," he kissed her forehead, smiling softly back. "As though you have been fighting a long battle and taken many losses, which you have. You seem as though you are losing strength or energy, which you are. It happens, in a long conflict."

In the times between coming here, resting, and her time spent on Atlantis she had forgotten sometimes how matter of fact he could be about things she only lightly thought about. Pointing out things that hadn't even occurred to her, so common were they in her every day life, and then pointing out that they were common and perfectly acceptable. Reminding her, or explaining, perhaps, that there were things that should be and were affecting her no matter that they seemed not to have caught up with her yet.

And she truly was tired. And he was a respite, a welcome source of support and relief that would be denied to her shortly, and for a long time. She realized she was clinging and made herself hold on less tightly.

"So many of our people have died. Were injured when we left the planet, have been killed or terrorized on other worlds in the expedition parties. And now we have awakened a second enemy, and was not the struggle to protect ourselves enough, before?" Somehow it was easier to ay this to him without seeming as though she was crying like a child, whining. Perhaps because something in his manner or in the way his thoughts touched hers encouraged it. "We have lost so much. Some of us have lost our homes two and three times over, and my people..."

And now Michael. Her need to cling to him, to keep him in her life bled through and peeled away the few of his defenses that he had built up against his own loneliness and need. When she was gone he would have, literally, no one. And she would still have John and Ronon and McKay and her friends on Atlantis.

"I'm sorry..."

They sighed, settled closer together. It wasn't her fault, there was no blame for being upset at the unfairness of life. It wasn't, after all, a contest on who had it worst. Because he had fewer people to care for also meant he had less to lose. It was a different sort of unfairness, which made her smile a little.

"Because both of us have been abused at the hands of whatever guides the universe, we should start comparing our suffering?"

It was lighthearted teasing, and it worked well enough to ease them away from the depression they were dragging each other into. Some sort of trickster god, perhaps, a creature that enjoyed playing games of chance and putting them into increasingly ridiculous and dangerous circumstances.

If there was some other force or creature that guided their actions and circumstances, that neither the Wraith nor the Athosians had thought of, they were surely either having a good laugh right about now or staring at the two of them in shock, Teyla decided. No one could have forseen this. She had been treated to a fifteen minute rambling explanation of a well-known Earth story from John Sheppard because of this. Something about two feuding households and young love. It had ended badly, and it wasn't as though Wraith and Human were likely to forge any kind of a truce because of two aberrant members of their people. Still...

It made them laugh. It made thing seem a little less hopeless, at least for that night. It made things better, at least for that short time, and made it more possible to forget for a little while that they were likely to get much, much worse.

It turned out that they had less time than anyone had thought.

Sheppard scrubbed the mission, which up till that point had been a refreshingly calm search and explore, when they called back to Atlantis and received only a distracted and harried-sounding response. Nervous about what they might encounter, they made their way back.

The flurry of activity was reassuring in that it didn't seem to involve any wounded or dead personnel, but not so much in that it implied a sudden and pressing problem.

"What happened?"

Carter spared Sheppard a look of mild relief as she walked past. "Good, you're back. We've got a Wraith Hive ship in orbit, and..."

"A what?" Teyla couldn't quite believe what she was hearing, although exactly which part was unbelievable was up for debate. On the one hand, a Wraith Hive ship in orbit above a planet they had no reason to believe housed anything remarkable at all was unbelievable. On the other hand, that a Wraith Hive ship was in orbit and hadn't descended upon them yet was almost equally unbelievable. Unless...

"Is the cloak up?"

That would be the unless. And they were rushing over to the command center and Teyla was still trying to wrap her mind around the fact that there was a Wraith Hive ship in orbit around the planet. The new planet. That the Wraith didn't even know was Atlantis' new home yet.

One Wraith, of course, did. And she realized that as soon as she could feel John Sheppard's stare boring a hole between her shoulderblades.

"The cloak is up and they haven't done anything yet. They may just be on a sweep of the planet looking for a civilization that used to be here, maybe on the continent. We haven't seen any darts flying over the city, but..."

Which was a relief. And was partially helped and explained by the ruins in which Michael was living, not that Teyla could say that. Or perhaps...

"When I returned to the crash site, I did see structures which seemed to indicate that there had been some form of sentient life here, many ages ago. There were only a few walls left, but..." she let it trail off there, hoping that they could infer something useful from that very vague statement. A series of small walls. Sheppard gave her another strange look, but didn't say anything to contradict her.

Carter nodded slightly, seeming to give it consideration. "Right now the plan is to just hold tight under the cloak and wait until they move on. They're..."

"Colonel Carter!"

Nearly every member of the team (Ronon being the exception) had the 'now what' look on their face as they turned to face the young man, a soldier, by the uniform. Teyla was sure she was wearing a similar expression to John's weary exasperation; Rodney's look was unmistakeable.

"Colonel Carter, they've launched Darts. Dozens of them, they're sweeping over the continent."

Sheppard sighed. Teyla considered it a near-miraculous act of restraint that he didn't look at her at all when he said it, but at Colonel Carter. As though he wasn't thinking what she was sure he was thinking. "I guess they really are looking for something."

And she could well imagine what, or who. But she did not want to, would not believe that Michael had called them there deliberately, and she couldn't say so to Sheppard or Carter out loud. They moved on to the conference room as people started to settle around them, still looking up at the ceilings nervously at every out-of-place whine or bump, as though they could see through the structure to what might be passing overhead. Teyla resisted the impulse to join them, several times.

Surely Michael wouldn't have called them there deliberately, both out of practicality and considering his treatment by the Wraith the last time, and as a kindness to her. And yet.

She paused on the threshold of the conference room on the strength of that particular and yet. Loneliness could be a powerful motivator. She had felt his loneliness more than once, felt how he had held it back and it had still eclipsed her own grief upon losing her people. She well knew that loneliness, homesickness could be a powerful motivator. And wasn't it possible that Michael, who was older than she knew despite her possibly self-deluding willingness to see them as around the same age, felt it so acutely that he could be driven to extreme measures by it? Was it possible?

Teyla shook her head slightly to herself as she joined the rest of her team in the conference room. Of course Michael had nothing to do with the Wraith ship overhead; if she did not believe that, how could she hope to convince John or Colonel Carter of that?

She would have to fly back out there, tell Michael of what was going on, ask him what he thought might have happened. And she would have to do so either once the Darts had left or under cover of a cloaked jumper. And somehow, and this was the hard part, she would have to convince Sheppard that it was both possible and the right thing to do. Outside of the conference room, because Ronon would undoubtedly have something to say on the matter.

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

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