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This story is completed
"But see, right off the bat, that's where you're wrong. It is that very familiarity can be the most disconcerting. I fully admit that I suffer more culture shock coming to your country from Canada than I did in all my work in the Congo. Deception is in the difference between the expected and the experienced. If we enter into an encounter with no expectations or bias . . ."
"That'd be an anthropologist's dream, eh?"
The first time she met John Sheppard, Teyla knew that there was something special about him. Her people called such a presence 'the mantle of destiny'. It was said that one day the signs of the Ring would appear sketched across the body of a chosen one like scars.
John had many scars before coming to Pegasus, but Teyla's first image of him is unblemished, marked by a bright smile, warm eyes, and the perfect uncertainty of a man who does not weigh out his actions against the scales of history. When she met him, John Sheppard was not yet a leader.
"And a common language does not include common cultural symbols. Even the language of gestures may be different. The swastika was a symbol of luck in Asia before it was one of anti-Semitism in the West."
"But a symbol is nothing without in its context, and in the contact zone, there are many opportunities for the building of a shared context. The history of the world is one of globalization; I see no reason why Pegasus should be any different."
"I don't see why he's being so stubborn about this," Rodney complains, between bites of mashed sweet-root.
"He's Sheppard," Ronon replies, not bothering to even finish chewing his own cut of meat before chipping in.
Rodney snorts. "Why, thank you, Conan, I completely failed to notice it, what with the one gray hair he found in the mirror yesterday and the accompanying freakout. Knowing Sheppard, he'll go silver and it'll end up like a gigantic reflective courting signal, drawing nubile young nearly-ascended women from the hills like moths."
"What's a moth?" Ronon asks.
Rodney studiously ignores him, turning to Teyla instead. "He's turning forty. On my birthday we were trapped in a cave, again, because he flirted with the head-chief's daughter and . . ."
"We remember, Rodney. We were there."
"They you understand that he owes me an excuse to eat chocolate cake . . . at the very least. He doesn't even have any wrinkles! It's hardly the end of the world."
Teyla sucks in a deep, frustrated breath. "Among my people, wrinkles are considered a mark of honor. Only those lucky enough to avoid at least one culling live to the age of forty."
"Oh," Rodney replies, bringing a forkful of meat down from his mouth, untouched. He doesn't meet her eyes for the rest of the day.
"But even within the flexible boundaries of the contact zone, there are limits. The people of Pegasus are used to trade, yes? The Athosians alone display the kind of open-minded trading culture typical of the great-plains tribes at the time of contact, and yet there are pillars of commonality, perhaps created on Earth by common geographical features – extractive cultures of the jungles, family structure and monogamy among farming peoples, the worship of rain gods in the world's deserts. The Wraith are the biggest environmental constant of all. In Pegasus, the very urbanity and technological progress that define modernity on Earth are simply a smorgasbord to the Wraith. The social contract, government as leviathan, mortality, marriage, divorce, ritual, none of it is untouched by the Wraith."
"We are all still human. Certainly you must believe that this is enough to unite us, even despite our differences?"
It doesn't happen as she expected it, marked by some great sign, like the day she met John and he recovered her necklace among the ruins. Her father's gift to her the day he knew that she would be the next great leader of her people, her hope -- long lost, but also a curse, as she later discovered.
It happens on an ordinary day. The city is quiet and John has returned from the lab, annoyed with Rodney over something or other. They have grown closer since returning with Ronon from Sateda. But John is still a conflicted man. Perhaps he will one day save them from the Wraith, but despite his destiny, he is awkward and fumbling, unable to express even the basic emotions of his humanity.
They are already a team, a family. Nothing that happens between them can change that; she can see that now.
His lips are firm on hers, though they are chapped, and his cheeks are rough from not having shaved. He pushes her up against the bureau, displacing rows of thick tallow candles, a row of the scents of worlds – for remembrances, a row of a rainbow of colors – for blessings, and in the back a row of thin white figures, carved in the Ancient language with her own knife – prayers.
John has taught her much about his world. He has meditated by her side but he has never asked her about the meaning of what she burns.
But that does not stop the need that flows through her, a sharp tightening in her belly as she spreads her legs around him, nibbling at the rough patch on his neck, only to hear him moan out her name like an incantation.
"Teyla," he pants, questing hands stilling against her belly. "I don't have a condom."
Even after forty years spent living in Grace, John Sheppard still knows nothing of prayer.
"Are we really going to let this devolve into the same old nature versus nurture debate?"
"Please. Even biologically, you have to recognize the differences. Darwin was able to influence the phenotypic expression of pigeons in fewer than twenty generations. A group of Russian scientists tamed a breed of wild fox in just a few. Surely, the Wraith . . ."
"Biology isn't the be-all, end-all of the unity our cultures are capable of. Surely, the hope of one day defeating the Wraith that our expedition represents can trump any docility the Wraith may have tried to breed."
Beneath the cool glow of the emergency lighting, Rodney's eyes are so blue. If, generations from now, they speak of him in legend, they will say that he had eyes like the universe-deep well of the Ancestors. You can draw emotions from Rodney's eyes like fish from the vast sea surrounding the city – strength, too. But now, there is sorrow . . . guilt, responsibility, determination . . . hope.
"How long?" Ronon's shout comes from over her shoulder, the red flash of his weapon like lightning before a storm.
Rodney bites his lower lip. "Twenty minutes."
Ronon grunts his acknowledgment.
"He cannot take twenty more minutes of this!" Teyla protests, gesturing to where John lays reclined in the control chair. Blood drips down from his nose, purple and macabre in the same light that lets hope shine so brightly in Rodney's eyes.
"Do you think I like this?" Rodney snaps even as John whimpers, arching up against the intricate stone surface of the chair. "Do you think I enjoy seeing my best friend bleed his brains out his nose? Trust me, Teyla, if there were any other way . . . if my gene was strong enough to take his place . . ."
Something sparks and Rodney is there, cursing as he rips crystals and wires up and out of the dais surrounding the chair.
It is then that she feels it, a deep sickness settling over her heart like a cloud. She resists the urge to clasp her chest, knowing that she will find no mark there. "Ronon! The Wraith!"
As she moves towards where Ronon has stationed himself at the room's one entrance, John begins to shudder, jerking up and off the chair as the counsels continue to spark.
"No, no more, please . . ." John is begging now, his eyes are bloodshot and unseeing as they drift open and closed. He struggles to push himself upright.
"Damnit!" Rodney shouts as the lights dim and the shimmering sound of drones being fired fades into ominous silence. He reaches into the pocket of his vest pulling out the small plastic ties they use on prisoners. His mouth is a tight crumpled line. "We have to restrain him."
Teyla gulps. "Rodney . . ."
"There's no other way!" he snaps. "He made me promise . . . no matter what . . ."
Teyla nods, sparing only a moment to look down at her belly, just beginning to show a hint of roundness – not that Rodney would have noticed. It must be foolish of her to believe that John will ever put anything above his desire to keep his people safe. They are teammates first; the role destiny has charged them with puts everything else second.
The thin strands of plastic are surprisingly strong, snapping on without out a sound. They have dug deep red groves into John's wrists in seconds.
Teyla barely has a moment to contemplate before Ronon is calling for her at the door. She feels the Wraith upon them like a wound.
"Go!" Rodney shouts, back elbow-deep in circuitry.
Rodney's twenty minutes pass in both an eternity between weapon's blasts and a heartbeat of adrenaline-fueled tailspin. Teyla blinks, letting Ronon pull her to her feet when the weapon's fire ceases, the tight nausea of the Wraith presence fading like all memories of pain.
Rodney is shaking so hard he's practically humming. "I'm sorry," he whispers over and over again, like a mantra, rubbing John's back as he lets him lean forward, resting his chin on Rodney's shoulder.
John's voice is rough, a harsh whisper. "It's okay. You did the right thing."
"I know," Rodney replies.
Teyla turns away, the shadow of disgust and tension returning, despite the victory. Despite needs and musts, she feels it deep in her gut: we should never have to hurt the ones we love.
"But there must be a moment of great disillusionment. Thanks to the television, the modern encounter is dampened by the knowledge that those in the global mainstream are no more perfect than those they encounter, if not less so. Imagine the great betrayal Montezuma must have felt when he realized that the Spaniards were conquerors, not gods, or the Inca emperors when they discovered that the white men were not allies in their civil war, but an imperial force of their own right."
"But, Jeff, we're not an imperial force."
"Yes, but there has not been a military force in all of history that has intervened for only the reasons stated to the occupied nation."
"Ha. And they say I'm a Marxist."
"Come on, Orlin. Show up." John is sitting beside her nervously. Normally Teyla would keep her silence, but she cannot believe the hypocrisy of it. One moment he is acting as though Orlin's family matters so little that he cannot even think to spare the time to save their lives and the next he pretends to care?
"What?"
"Not long ago, you would have blithely left him behind."
"Well, the situation has changed." He sounds defensive. Of course he does. Not once has Teyla ever heard him admit that he is wrong. Rodney either. Aiden told her once that it is a ‘guy thing,' but Teyla has never met men as arrogant as these. The sad part is that at first, she believed them.
"Earlier today Lieutenant Ford suggested we steal from a community of children."
"It's because they have a ZPM and we can bring them back."
"Only to face death on Atlantis."
"Look, Ford and I are military, we spent a lot of our lives learning how to survive."
Survive where? Doing what? She has seen John fly – like he was born to it. She knows how he defeated the Genii when Atlantis faced the great storm, but with the tools of necessity – hands and sticks and rocks, he could not face a child. And what is survival without necessity?
"I've spent my life surviving the Wraith."
"Part of that training is learning who you can save and who you can't." Elizabeth, too, speaks of this need. She calls it an analysis of benefits and costs. Perhaps because on Earth they have so many people they value each individual life less.
"And that decision is yours alone?"
"I said I'd wait for your friend if there was time. Now there's time. What more do you want from me?"
Hope, she thinks. John Sheppard arrived with the promise of a defeat of the Wraith. He came into the belly of a hive ship to save his people, a kind of loyalty in the face of fear that she had waited a long time to see in someone. Perhaps she was swayed by his charm, by his easy smile and perhaps by the arrogance of the Lanteans. She'd seen them perform miracles, but she was not expecting to find in them this doubt. John Sheppard was never meant to doubt that he could save them all.
So what did she expect? "Too much, I fear."
"But a nation is ultimately a cultural construction - values written on arbitrarily drawn geographical borders. What matters is the community, a nexus of shared values and identities. If immigrants can integrate into a nation where they were not born and grow to share in its cultural symbols and imagine themselves as part of a different community, then I don't see why, if faced with the same threat of the Wraith, we can't at least come to share in the unifying experience of this galaxy, if only in part."
John has been marked by the Wraith four times. The first is a rough patch on his neck, small ridges like a constellation of stars. Second is an ordinary-looking bullet wound on his bicep. The third is a swollen nebula of darkened skin on his forearm; the fourth, five pinpricks above his heart.
Earth has marked him twice more – large marks, not scrapes from a stumble or a burn from hot coffee. One is a jagged gash down his back, from the last rib almost to his hipbone – a piece of shrapnel. The other is hidden beneath his ubiquitous black wristband, a surgeons' mark from his youth. Rodney says that someone crushed the delicate bones of his wrist. That mark, John keeps a secret, though he wears the hurt like a badge.
One mark remains, but Teyla knows that she will not be the one to put it there. The seventh symbol, after all, is the most important one.
"I understand that people can voluntarily leave one set of imagined identities, but what of the culture that they leave behind? Are we not one of those new communities, drawn together on the borderlands by a common adversary? Are we Tauri? Are those that join us still who they once were? Is it even possible to be both? The literature has never provided me, at least, an adequate explanation."
"Symbols can grow to be shared. Take for example, the way the gods of the Tibetan and Chinese folkloric religions were integrated into Buddhism as meditation icons. Don't you believe that we can offer symbols and technology that can be rallied around? Change can be for the better, you know."
"Congratulations," Halling remarks, the first moment he sees her. They have shared a troubled relationship over the times they have known each other. Back when Sisura was alive, they would all three sit around the fire drinking the traditional tea and telling stories. Even after Jinto was born, they would stay up through the night simply enjoying each other's company.
Even though their relationship has been complicated since the Lanteans arrived, Teyla can tell that Halling's happiness for her is genuine. "I was beginning to wonder whether or not you intended to fulfill your debt to the next generation at all." There was a time, immediately after Teyla's people had relocated to the mainland, when she would have taken this as an insult, but now she just laughs. So many battles behind them and so little time to enjoy each other, she finds resentment and suspicion nothing but a waste.
"I am no longer the rebellious and doubtful girl I once was."
Halling chuckles. "You and Sisura . . . the young protestors. I remember when you told your father that you would move yourselves to Minaria and sell your secrets in a brothel before committing your loins to birthing of children that would come into a world under the threat of the Wraith."
"And yet it is many years later and the war is not yet won."
"But now it is worth it?"
Teyla smiles. "It has always been worth it. When I was young I simply rejected that which I thought was being forced upon me."
"Would it be too bold of me to enquire as to the identity of the father?"
"After all that has happened, do you truly believe that there are questions that remain too bold?"
"I would not ask how the child was conceived."
She laughs. "Freely."
"And the father?"
"John."
"Ah. From the very first day when you invited him to share our tea, I suspected. Though I had always hoped that you would choose one of our own."
"Initially, I think I found him exotic."
"And now?"
"And now, we are more alike than we are different."
"Ah." He pauses to stare out across the center square of the village – more solid buildings now on the world that the Ancestors chose for them, complete with a protective shield against the Wraith. Her people, too, have changed since the coming of the Lanteans. "Will you return to your people for the birthing?"
She thinks of the ceremony, streamers of clean white cloth, water flowing in apology, candles burning in prayer, and her people surrounding her. "Of course."
"But do they need our symbols? That's the question. Coming in here, saying that we can win a fight that the entire galaxy has lost . . . isn't that implicitly stating that we are better? We have the solutions and our culture, as frivolous as it might sometimes be, is better, if only because we never had the Wraith to knock us down when our technology advanced. Isn't that what we're saying?"
Elizabeth's hands are soft and steady as they stroke through Teyla's hair. She has always been too thin, almost fragile looking, but her lap is wide enough to cradle Teyla's head there. As the credits roll, Teyla finds herself sighing.
"Is it really like that?" The two young girls, both called Lindsay Lohan, seemed to have enjoyed themselves at the place called ‘camp.' It is difficult imagining children running through the woods without fear of the Wraith, even now that her people are protected by a shield.
"Well . . ." Elizabeth is matter-of-fact to a default when discussing Earth movies and their significance, unlike John and Rodney's fumbling metaphors and the bickering they usually devolve into. "It's a caricature. Step-mothers are not usually that bad, though I suppose they can be. And twins are rare, of course . . ."
"I meant the things the children did together . . . is that . . . typical?"
Elizabeth nods. "Yes. I suppose so. On Earth our children are pretty spoiled."
Teyla nods. "And school? All participate in fairs of science and ride Ferris wheels and read about the Wizard, Harry Potter?"
Elizabeth's chuckle is low and rich, free despite the rigid control of the diplomat. "I think you've been spending too much time with John and Rodney, but basically, yes. All children spend at least 13 years in school, where they learn mathematics, science, literature, history, and usually a foreign language, sports, technology and other things."
"And this is spoiled?"
"Let me put it this way - they are shielded from adult responsibilities for a long time. If they go to college, until they're about 22 years old."
Teyla gazes down at the thick swell in her belly. Yesterday, Ronon took the place of her guardian and painted it with the ritualistic symbols of the birthing. Rodney stood as witness. She thinks about all of John's scars, the number of times he has risked his life for the expedition. The number of times she has. She can deal with John's distance, the ex-Wife he has never taken the time to describe to her, the mantle of destiny they speak of in legends. She can accept the loss of her people, her first family, in order to join this fight, but like all mothers, she can feel the truth in her gut. She wants only the best for her child.
"I must ask something of you, Elizabeth," Teyla whispers, sitting up and clasping their hands together. "After this one request, I promise to never ask anything of you again . . ."
"Does it really matter? As long as we're helping people, then we're doing something right. How many anthropologists have sat back in their little bubble of ‘objectivity' thinking that they are preserving a culture when the people they are studying are suffering? What right to we have to say that cultures should stay uncontaminated, when the choice to ask for help and to receive those aspects of the other culture that are helpful remain part of individual free will, not in this intangible thing called ‘culture.'"
"So John is still refusing to speak to me?" Teyla asks as Ronon flops down beside her on the new cobblestone of the town square.
"Pretty much. He and McKay went on a survey mission."
"The woman he committed himself to . . . do you know why they did not bear children?"
"He had sex with someone else while they were together. Strange thing to break up over."
"Yes, but I see how it might be important. There are so many people on Earth, Ronon. You would not believe it. I could see how there might be a prohibition against procreating with each woman you come across."
"Sure. But they have ways to prevent pregnancy."
"I suppose so. But John agreed to conceive this child."
"So he thinks that he has a right to raise it."
"He has the right to be angry with me."
Ronon shrugs, slinging an arm around her shoulders. "You were right. I would have done the same."
"When I was a girl, I dreamed that my children would grow up free of the Wraith. I just thought that would be because we defeated them."
"It's not too late for that," Ronon says, almost casually. "You don't feel it?"
"What?"
"You, me, Sheppard, and McKay . . . that's what we were made to do?"
Teyla nods. She cannot argue with that.
"The universe is expanding. Cultures that stagnate die out. Successful civilizations expand. Technological progress moves forward. Curiosity is part of our biology. Does the exact effect of our presence here really matter? Isn't it somehow inevitable?"
FIN