Chapter Text
“You did good, John.”
It’s probably true—but that’s not why Elizabeth says it. In one long day, he left his home planet for the first time, landed in the middle of a galactic war, and shot his commanding officer in the heart. She’s about to lay the safety of their expedition team on his unprepared shoulders, and he needs to hear that he did something right.
He doesn’t believe her. He deflects first with self-recrimination, and then with a joke, and she’ll soon grow familiar with both of those parts of him.
Sumner warned her about him. He’s unreliable, he said. A soldier who doesn’t follow orders can destabilize a unit—or get people killed. His record says he can’t be trusted with something like this.
She’s sure John has heard those same words, or others like them, dozens of times in his life, because she can see them on his face now.
She has no choice but to trust him. She knows, somehow, that she can.
*
John isn’t good at taking compliments. She gathers plenty of evidence to back that up, because she makes a conscious effort to encourage him whenever she can.
Her management style has always been more carrot than stick, but it’s more than that with John. He’s out of his depth—they both are. She needs him to know he has her full confidence, even on days when that confidence is somewhat aspirational. Perhaps especially then.
She needs to feel confident, in general, so she makes a special point to notice everything that goes right in a galaxy where many things are going wrong, and to offer praise where it’s due.
Rodney eats it up. Carson blushes, a deep stammering red that she finds entirely endearing. When she told Lieutenant Ford that he did an excellent job keeping her and a handful of civilian scientists safe on a tour of the city, he stood taller for a week.
John presents a strange conundrum. He bounds into her office after every successful mission, bragging about the parts that went well and quickly skimming over everything else, seemingly begging for a Good job, Major—and when she gives it to him, he can’t look her in the eye.
When he brushes off the validation he seems to crave, she feels a fierce, protective fondness for him. She wants to strangle him at least one day a week, but even then, she likes him. He’s funny, and good-hearted, and she trusts his skills and his intentions, if not his methods. It bothers her that the Air Force has him pegged so wrong.
She spends more than her fair share of time trying to find the right sequence of words that will make him believe that.
*
She finds them, eventually, though she doesn’t say them to him. She tells General Landry exactly how essential John Sheppard is to Atlantis, and threatens to make it the President’s problem.
Two days later, Landry calls her into his office and says, “You made a very convincing case, Doctor.” She knows from his tone that her victory cost her, that she burned some goodwill with him and the military leadership of the Stargate program. After Sheppard saved her life—saved all of their lives—she’d burn a lot more than that.
Landry sounds a lot friendlier when he gives the news to John, and Elizabeth loves the look on John’s face—surprised at first, a little baffled, and then… proud. She tries to memorize his expression, hopes it can replace the one that’s haunting her nightmares. She keeps waking up in the middle of the night, feeling like she’s back in the control room, remembering John’s eyes as he waited for her permission to fly a suicide mission. She told him to go, and thought she’d never see him again. She has never in her life been happier to be wrong.
Weeks later, she pins a silver leaf to his shoulder. “Colonel.” Here, where he can’t escape, she whispers: “Well done.”
His eyes slide closed, and he shivers.
*
She thinks about that moment for a long time, more than she should—her hand on his shoulder, the look on his face. She’s seen that look before.
She plays back all the times he’s dodged her praise and wonders if it isn’t that he doesn’t like compliments, but that he likes them too much.
*
She’s not trying to tease him, but she has a theory and it needs to be tested. John is looser around her after his promotion, more secure in himself, and she thinks that will make him less likely to bolt right out of the room when she says something complimentary.
The mission debrief is over. The story they told was a harrowing near-miss, a nick-of-time escape from a deadly orbital security system. The puddle-jumper would’ve been destroyed with all souls lost if John hadn’t cracked the code at the last minute with a near-miraculous stroke of intuition.
The two of them are the only ones still at the table. The rest of John’s team has already filed out, and he’s hanging around while she collects her tablet. He’s been doing that lately, loitering in her company.
“That was good thinking,” she says. “Brilliant thinking, really.”
John shrugs. The tips of his ears go pink. “I was lucky.”
“You were smart,” she corrects, and watches the rise and fall of his chest. “Tell me, who else would’ve made the connection between the glyphs on the surface and the constellations—with stellar drift?”
“I don’t know. You. Glyphs are your thing.” He shifts in his chair, and she presses her lips together to keep from smiling. He’s not looking at her anyway. “It’s not a big deal—Rodney would’ve gotten it eventually.”
“So you solved it faster than our resident genius? You saved their lives.” His hand is near her on the conference table, and she rests hers on top of it. “Take that in, please. You did a good job out there.”
“Elizabeth—”
It catches her off-guard, his tone of voice, raw and wanting.
For a moment, neither of them says a thing.
Then he mutters, “Thanks,” and bolts out of the room.
*
Not long after, they fall into bed for the first time.
She chides herself for thinking the first time, because it should never have happened at all, and she certainly shouldn’t treat it like it’s going to be a repeat occurrence.
The truth is, they were doped up on a fresh batch of alien wine that Lorne’s team brought back through the Stargate, and it was no ordinary wine.
The truth is that while everyone who drank it was affected, and more than a few of them paired off before the evening was done, Elizabeth knew better. Even drunk and dazed, she knew she should walk away and sleep it off, but when she stared at him, all she could think was this is the perfect excuse. He touched her, and she didn’t want to turn away.
“I’m very drunk,” he said into the side of her neck, his breath hot on her skin, “and I want you so much.”
She wanted him too, so much, so they stumbled to her quarters and undressed each other in a haze of altered sensation.
She remembers very little of what happened next, only bits and pieces—the feel of soft hair under her hands, the shape of his mouth, the sound he made when she said you feel so, so good, John.
It all ended in the infirmary, where she woke up shaking and violently ill. She learns later that she fell so deeply unconscious that John called for a medical team. In the chaos of a dozen bad reactions to the alien wine and more than a little avoiding each other, a week goes by before they have a minute alone.
They can’t. She knows they can’t, and she doesn’t want to say it out loud, so when John asks, “Do we need to talk about this?” with a look on his face like he’d rather throw himself off a balcony, she lets them both off the hook.
*
Things go back to normal, mostly. For a few weeks they tiptoe around each other, seeing each other only in meetings, until one morning she gets to her office and he’s already there, lounging with a cup of coffee in hand. When he hands her a coffee of her own, like nothing has changed between them, she breathes a sigh of relief.
“Thank you for this,” she says, after fifteen minutes of talking about nothing. “I missed you.”
“Really?” He smiles down at his hands.
She feels a sharp desire to put her arms around him. “Yes, really.” It’s only now that he’s here and they seem to be okay that she realizes how worried she was that they’d damaged their friendship. “Let’s not do that again.”
He looks at her with an impish smirk. “Which part?”
Heat rushes to her cheeks. Her body feels like it’s humming, just watching him drink coffee, but she knows they have to be responsible. “All of it, unfortunately.”
A drunk one-time thing is just that—anything more…
“Unfortunately?” His smug look makes it no easier for her to keep her hands to herself.
“Definitely,” she stresses, and then, with a sigh, “You know that, John.”
His smirk falls away, leaving a quiet look of disappointment. She feels an echoing pang in her chest. “Yeah, I do.”
He offers to take her empty coffee mug when he goes. When their fingers touch, it’s electric, and for five minutes after he leaves her office, she can’t think of anything else.
She wonders how long their best intentions will last.