Fic: Defense Mechanism, Part 1 (nc-17)
Woot! I finally write something again! It's been forever. IR, this is for you (when you get back)! I totally stole your prompt. ;)
Title: Defense Mechanism (complete)
Author: ED_84
Pairing/Characters: Sheppard/Weir, Carson, Caldwell, Lorne, Teyla, Rodney, Ronon
Summary: While John is still recovering in treatment from the Iratus bug retrovirus, another incident with Elizabeth leads to long-standing repercussions in their relationship.
Rating: um, yeah. NC-17.
Warnings: Conversion kink - as in reptilian!John. graphic sex. angst.
Spoilers: Conversion
Disclaimer: SGA does not belong to me
Author's Note: Many, many thanks to IRONY_ROCKS, who spent so much time helping me brainstorm and plot and write that she practically co-authored this fic! Your input was invaluable, and thank you for enabling. If it wasn't for you, I doubt I would have had the courage and motivation to attempt a fic of this nature and length. ;)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Elizabeth knew the crew was getting restless.
Sitting in her clear glass office, the palpable boredom down below in the gateroom was hard to miss. Chuck had once again started up that pool she pretended not to know about, the one that laid odds on the type and timing of the next disaster. If she’d been a betting woman, she’d have easily placed a twenty on something catastrophic occurring within a week. It was strange, but the Pegasus Galaxy never afforded them any peace for longer than seven days at a time.
The last four had been long and uneventful, but the last few weeks prior to that had inspired two unprecedented emergencies back-to-back. (Two weeks ago, Rodney had destroyed three-fifths of a solar system and then last week her military commander-slash-boyfriend had half-turned into an Iratus bug.) Elizabeth hoped the universe would dole back some good fortune to make it up to them. Boring days were underappreciated in Atlantis.
Elizabeth, for one, enjoyed them while they lasted.
Sighing heavily, she rummaged through the papers as her eyes gleamed over a dozen files that needed her attention, but there was a knot in the back of her neck and a dull ache forming above her right eye. She’d been using the relative peace and quiet of the last few days to catch up on her paperwork; every time Caldwell came in, she had to report back to the Air Force and the IOA about every miniscule thing to the point of anal-retentiveness. And this time, Caldwell’s visit coincided with John’s foray into the dark side, which only tripled the usual amount of paperwork.
Her eyes drifted to the corner of her glass desk, eying one particular file more than most. It was a medical report from Carson. John’s health was getting better day-by-day thanks to the limited supply of Iratus bug stem cells. Thankfully they had just enough to cure him, and though she knew he was recovering nicely from the retrovirus, the discoloration and hardening of his skin had yet to fade and it was hard for Elizabeth not to focus on that.
Try as she might, she couldn’t stop staring at the yellow color of his eyes and the bluish hint to his skin, which was, largely, why she was hiding out in her office even though there wasn’t much activity in the gateroom. It was unbecoming of a woman with her status, but Dr. Elizabeth Weir was shamefully using her office to avoid her military commander. More than that, she was avoiding the man that had been her lover for the better part of the last four months. It was beyond pathetic, and the height of it had been this morning, when she’d spotted him rounding a corner, then promptly reversed course and walked away, retreating to the sanctuary of her office walls - one of which was still brand new thanks to John’s over-aggressiveness from the previous week.
It was a tactical measure, she assured herself.
She hadn’t spoken to John in over two days, which was strange considering she’d been glued to his bedside during the worst of this ordeal. Unfortunately, while it had taken John days to mutate, it was taking weeks for him to regress back. His animistic instincts had lessened, of course (thank god), but he was still seen as enough of a threat to warrant armed guards. She hated subjecting him to that, but there were too many incidents for her to overlook. Besides, John had been the one to insist most on their necessity. She’d agreed, and they hadn’t spoken of it since. In fact, they’d barely spoken much of anything after that beyond her awkward efforts at small talk at his bedside.
She figured that since now, with the main threat to his life over, she could afford to distance herself from the situation a little. Most people would have had the sense to do that when John had been mutating and confrontational, but then again, most people weren’t sleeping with him either.
“Ma’am?” Chuck called. “The shifts are switching now. I’ll see you in the morning?”
She glanced at the watch, surprised to find the hour so late. “Of course, Chuck. Have a good night.”
He left quickly, and she cleared her throat, resigning herself to another few hours of paperwork before she’d give in to the luxury of sleep. The time passed slowly, and Elizabeth was working through her forth cup of coffee that day when a shadow fell across her face. She looked up, surprised to find John standing silently over her desk; his guard was stationed just outside her open doorway.
“Hey,” he greeted, forcing a smile.
The first thing she noticed was that his eyes were normal again.
The second thing she noticed was that his skin was not.
She snapped her gaze away, returning the greeting as she shuffled some papers together on her desk. It was ridiculous that now, after everything that had already happened, she turned flustered around him. Strangely, Elizabeth was becoming the type of person that handled the midst of emergencies better than their aftermaths. She blamed Atlantis for that.
“How’re you doing?” she asked, like they were discussing his recovery from the flu. “Feeling better? You look better.”
He nodded along, raising his right hand. “Got my hands back.”
Indeed, his hands were normal again, and Elizabeth had to force herself not to visibly catalogue what else was normal about him. She knew her staring made John feel awkward, but she just couldn’t help it.
He rocked on his heels a little, searching for something to fill the void between them. “Carson said I’d be good for full active duty in no-time.”
Elizabeth nodded, a little dubiously. Carson said a lot of things, but she was more willing to wait and see. John wouldn’t be clear for active duty for at least another week, possibly two, which she knew would drive him insane with boredom. He’d have to deal with it, though. At least he was able to move about and roam the halls again - with a guard, of course.
She glanced once to the guard, almost unconsciously, then immediately regretted the action when she saw John notice the gesture. His face fell, and she knew what he thought. But this wasn’t fear acting up - she wasn’t afraid of John or what he’d do. The animistic threat was gone, even if he still looked very much the same as he had days prior when he’d demolished his room and thrown her up against a wall.
She dropped her eyes down to the papers again. “How was your last check-up?”
“Isn’t that the report sitting on your desk?”
“Yes.”
“Then why ask?”
His tone was trying for light, but those who knew him well could tell he missed it by a mile. She didn’t need to glance up to see the frustration building in his shoulders. She was treating him like nothing more than a co-worker, and he always hated that, even before they started sleeping together. Elizabeth kept her head bent for another two seconds, regrouping, before lifting her gaze back up to meet his.
His hazel eyes - always so beautiful, but now seemingly more so against the contrast of the blue skin around them - were dark and guarded. She could still read him like an open book, though. She always could. John had no idea how to act around her, and for a man that was so cocky and arrogant-like, she knew that underneath that he had a wide foundation of shaky abandonment issues and inferiority complexes. She was pinging every one of them now, and she hated herself a little for that, for the distance she was erecting between them.
Her voice softened, almost despite herself. “I’ve got some work to catch up on. Why don’t I meet you for a late dinner afterwards? Maybe in two hours?”
A late dinner for them normally meant she’d spend the night at his place or he’d spend the night at hers. Normally, of course, didn’t apply when he had an armed escort and Caldwell had additional eyes watching John everywhere he went.
He nodded, and his voice rasped, either from the retrovirus or something else, she couldn’t say. “I’ll be in my room. Just come and get me.”
Two hours turned out to be three, but by the time Elizabeth left her office, she was still restless with agitation. Elizabeth couldn’t deny it: she felt unnerved in his presence. She couldn’t say precisely why either, which was perhaps the most frustrating thing about it.
Something had shifted, though. When she’d faced the possibility of losing John to that damn retrovirus, her own emotions had scared Elizabeth with their intensity. She didn’t want to examine her feelings too closely, but now she couldn’t stop and the dread of losing John had been far too real and far too chilling. She always knew he was more than just her second-in-command or a mere friend, but this was the first time Elizabeth had dealt with his near-death in such a real, up-close way since they’d first started sleeping together.
She’d broken protocol when he’d been infected. She could see it now, in hindsight. She’d let her emotions cloud her judgment, and John had run amuck across Atlantis because of it. While emotions and adrenaline had been running high, Elizabeth had blocked off the objective part of herself, the one that was supposed to be in charge when life-and-death decisions needed to be made. Instead of the leader, she’d been the friend and lover and had acted accordingly.
As much as it pained her to admit it, even only to herself, Caldwell’s insinuations had turned out right: her judgment when it came to John had been compromised.
Now what, though? Could she really put things back in Pandora’s box?
The decision that rested in front of her was daunting. In the aftermath of this latest disaster, Elizabeth was forced to reevaluate everything and the price of her emotions were tipping the scales in an unfavorable way. There was a reason she wasn’t supposed to sleep with her leading military commander, and they had never been more starkly apparent to her than they were now.
Hesitantly, she approached John’s door and nodded once at the guard stationed outside his room. He palmed open the door, and the entrance slid apart. Elizabeth suddenly flashed to the last time she’d been here, and she half-expected to find the room in a similar state of disarray and darkness. The room was neat and tidy, though. The Johnny Cash poster stared her down as she entered the room, and a moment after the door slid closed behind her, she spotted John sitting on his bed, the guitar held loosely in his hands. Even with the discoloration of his skin, the instrument made him seem more human, more himself.
It also made what she was about to do that much harder.
“John,” she began, “we need to talk.”
Those were words no man ever wanted to hear, and she watched John flinch upon hearing them. It was difficult for her to maintain course, but now that she was finally able to acknowledge the painful truth, she couldn’t afford to falter. John had always been able to talk her into doing something reckless - their relationship was a shining example of that - but this was one of those times where Elizabeth had to dig her heels in and hold her ground.
They needed to break up. It was for the betterment of Atlantis.
Time stretched a little as Elizabeth struggled to find the right words. She felt like she should have prepared a speech, something rational and eloquent, but the pain of the decision had left Elizabeth bereft of her normal composure.
John saved her the trouble. In a knowing voice that was just a touch soft, he tipped her a painful smile and said, “It was good while it lasted, huh?”
She nearly broke out into a sob, watching as he dropped his feet to the ground and placed the guitar at the edge of his bed. His eyes were guarded, but John Sheppard was no fool. He knew this had been coming; he’d probably been suspecting this before Elizabeth had even reached her own conclusions. He knew her scarily well.
“Yeah,” she agreed, voice timid. “It was.” She stepped forward, then stopped herself, maintaining the distance between them. “I’m sorry, John. I just can’t do this anymore.”
He nodded, glancing away. “Can’t say I blame you.”
It occurred to her, belatedly, that John might be misplacing her reasons for doing this. She had to explain, to clarify. She owed him that much. “I don’t… I don’t want you to blame anyone. This isn’t your fault, either. It’s just… we shouldn’t be together. It makes things too complicated.”
His eyes darkened. “Complicated?” he scoffed, and then he sighed, that painful smile returning. He was trying to make this easy on her, but the smile came out like a grimace, stretched too thin and forced too hard. “Do me a favor? Don’t pull out your diplomatic lines with me, Elizabeth. If I hear the words it’s not you, it’s me fall from your mouth, I swear I’m gonna-”
“John,” she stopped him. “This isn’t your fault.”
He snorted. “The bruising on your neck has finally gone away,” he noted, rather pointedly. “I don’t blame you for backing away, Elizabeth. It’s the smart thing to do. The right thing to do.”
“Is that why you think I’m doing this? Out of fear?”
He glanced away, face flushing with anger - but the anger wasn’t directed towards her. She could tell. He was a hard man to define, but if she had to categorize him on any one trait alone, it was how willing he was to put the lives of others before himself. She knew that his actions during the prior week had prickled some deep-seeded fear of losing control, of hurting those he’d loved the most. She’d seen him shy away from her more and more as the retrovirus had advanced, and it had pained her to see him take on such unwarranted shame.
John stood, jaw clenched, then planted himself in front of the small window in the corner so that his back was to her. “Just go, Elizabeth. It’s all right. I get it. I do.” He paused when she didn't budge, then repeatedly desperately, “Just get out.”
He was making this remarkable easy on her, especially since she had been bracing herself for a fight. A part of her wanted to take it, to let the silence speak for her and just leave, but then Elizabeth also knew that any misguided sense of self-loathing was only going to increase if he thought that fear was the reason she broke up with him.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she found herself saying, stepping forward. “This isn’t about what you did last week.”
He braced an arm against the wall, leaning a little against it and she saw his reflection through the window, how his face was pinched and tight. The hard tension lining his body was almost painful to look at. His nostrils flared, hands fisting, and she wasn’t sure how much of this was the retrovirus affecting him, and how much of this was… him.
“Get out, Elizabeth,” he said, this time more roughly.
Instead, she took another step forward. “John, look at me. This isn’t about what you did last week. I need you to understand that. This is about what I did-”
John flipped around, and before she could utter another word, he was across the room faster than humanly possible. It amazed her as it had any of the other times - these heightened reflexes of his. He took one step further, and despite herself, her heart skipped a beat and she struggled not to lose ground. She knew exactly what he was doing, so she squared her jaw and refused to show any hesitation.
“John,” she repeated, as evenly as she could, staring at the bluish scales that covered his face. “I’m not scared of you.”
“You should be scared,” he rasped in a dark warning. “You have any idea how thin my control is? How flimsy…” he trailed off, staring at her.
She recognized the look in his eyes, having been on the receiving end of it plenty of times before in his bedroom. In the midst of the anger and turmoil of the conversation, lust had managed to worm its way in. She knew the retrovirus was making things even more heated than normal. She’d come here to break up with him, but it suddenly occurred to her that this was the first time she’d been alone with him in nearly a week. John was responding to that in a primal way she hadn’t anticipated, but probably should have.
“John,” she began, then lost her voice.
He wasn’t the only one suffering from sex withdrawal, after all. John had always managed to affect Elizabeth on a baser level, something she'd fought tooth and nail her first year here. But this man was now her lover, and she wasn't ashamed of the attraction she felt for him, even in this state.
But this wasn’t what she’d come here for.
“I should leave,” she offered in a faint voice.
He stepped forward, and Elizabeth hit the wall behind her. “Yeah. You probably should.”
Neither budged an inch.
She should have taken the opportunity to flee, but the several seconds that followed stretched long and silent. Her legs felt paralyzed, suddenly unwilling to move. This was stupid - so foolish. He was so close; her head was swimming. Another step and she would be able to feel exactly what the new texture of his skin felt like, a curiosity that had been born and reborn many times over during the last week. She’d come here to end things with him, not to-
John kissed her, and not even a small part of Elizabeth resisted. His mouth opened roughly against hers and her energy immediately dissolved into thoughtless action because she’d never been able to resist this, resist him, and especially when he’d been dogged with his needs.
A familiar kick of lust worked through her body, but this was somehow different. Somehow more charged. He pressed her body against the wall, bodies conforming against the flat surface. Elizabeth grabbed a fistful of dark hair as an anchor because she needed one, his hands moving to lift her against the wall so that they were locked tight from the waist up. She gasped for breath, and he turned so singularly focused on kissing her senseless that she forgot entirely about the presence of the guard waiting outside in the hall or the reason she’d come here in the first place.
His nostrils flared, and abruptly, she wondered if his enhanced abilities allowed him to pick up the scent of her rising arousal.
“Fuck, Elizabeth,” he breathed, because clearly he had.
His skin felt rough, so different under her touch. It didn’t deter her. Her fingers brushed his neck, his jaw, then rose to thread through his hair again. She couldn’t breathe, and John wasn’t letting her, drawing her into kiss after kiss until she started to feel lightheaded. He only pulled away to duck his head lower, mouth closing over her exposed collarbone. Before she could anticipate it, his teeth sunk into her neck and she gasped, alarm surging with the sharp spike of desire.
He suckled, and she cried out, which was the wrong sound for her to make when there was a guard on the other side of the door. Belatedly she remembered herself and pushed against his chest, shoving him away moments before the door flew open. The guard entered just as Elizabeth brought her hand to her neck and came back with her fingers tinged with blood.
“Back away from her now!” The guard had his gun aimed at John, but neither registered that as they stared at the blood on her hands. “Ma’am?”
Breathing heavily, John’s eyes widened when clarity resettled in.
“It’s all right,” she said, but her words were overruled immediately by John’s rough bark, shouting, “Get Beckett! Now!”
It was through a similar bite that John had been infected.
Part 2
Title: Defense Mechanism (complete)
Author: ED_84
Pairing/Characters: Sheppard/Weir, Carson, Caldwell, Lorne, Teyla, Rodney, Ronon
Summary: While John is still recovering in treatment from the Iratus bug retrovirus, another incident with Elizabeth leads to long-standing repercussions in their relationship.
Rating: um, yeah. NC-17.
Warnings: Conversion kink - as in reptilian!John. graphic sex. angst.
Spoilers: Conversion
Disclaimer: SGA does not belong to me
Author's Note: Many, many thanks to IRONY_ROCKS, who spent so much time helping me brainstorm and plot and write that she practically co-authored this fic! Your input was invaluable, and thank you for enabling. If it wasn't for you, I doubt I would have had the courage and motivation to attempt a fic of this nature and length. ;)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Elizabeth knew the crew was getting restless.
Sitting in her clear glass office, the palpable boredom down below in the gateroom was hard to miss. Chuck had once again started up that pool she pretended not to know about, the one that laid odds on the type and timing of the next disaster. If she’d been a betting woman, she’d have easily placed a twenty on something catastrophic occurring within a week. It was strange, but the Pegasus Galaxy never afforded them any peace for longer than seven days at a time.
The last four had been long and uneventful, but the last few weeks prior to that had inspired two unprecedented emergencies back-to-back. (Two weeks ago, Rodney had destroyed three-fifths of a solar system and then last week her military commander-slash-boyfriend had half-turned into an Iratus bug.) Elizabeth hoped the universe would dole back some good fortune to make it up to them. Boring days were underappreciated in Atlantis.
Elizabeth, for one, enjoyed them while they lasted.
Sighing heavily, she rummaged through the papers as her eyes gleamed over a dozen files that needed her attention, but there was a knot in the back of her neck and a dull ache forming above her right eye. She’d been using the relative peace and quiet of the last few days to catch up on her paperwork; every time Caldwell came in, she had to report back to the Air Force and the IOA about every miniscule thing to the point of anal-retentiveness. And this time, Caldwell’s visit coincided with John’s foray into the dark side, which only tripled the usual amount of paperwork.
Her eyes drifted to the corner of her glass desk, eying one particular file more than most. It was a medical report from Carson. John’s health was getting better day-by-day thanks to the limited supply of Iratus bug stem cells. Thankfully they had just enough to cure him, and though she knew he was recovering nicely from the retrovirus, the discoloration and hardening of his skin had yet to fade and it was hard for Elizabeth not to focus on that.
Try as she might, she couldn’t stop staring at the yellow color of his eyes and the bluish hint to his skin, which was, largely, why she was hiding out in her office even though there wasn’t much activity in the gateroom. It was unbecoming of a woman with her status, but Dr. Elizabeth Weir was shamefully using her office to avoid her military commander. More than that, she was avoiding the man that had been her lover for the better part of the last four months. It was beyond pathetic, and the height of it had been this morning, when she’d spotted him rounding a corner, then promptly reversed course and walked away, retreating to the sanctuary of her office walls - one of which was still brand new thanks to John’s over-aggressiveness from the previous week.
It was a tactical measure, she assured herself.
She hadn’t spoken to John in over two days, which was strange considering she’d been glued to his bedside during the worst of this ordeal. Unfortunately, while it had taken John days to mutate, it was taking weeks for him to regress back. His animistic instincts had lessened, of course (thank god), but he was still seen as enough of a threat to warrant armed guards. She hated subjecting him to that, but there were too many incidents for her to overlook. Besides, John had been the one to insist most on their necessity. She’d agreed, and they hadn’t spoken of it since. In fact, they’d barely spoken much of anything after that beyond her awkward efforts at small talk at his bedside.
She figured that since now, with the main threat to his life over, she could afford to distance herself from the situation a little. Most people would have had the sense to do that when John had been mutating and confrontational, but then again, most people weren’t sleeping with him either.
“Ma’am?” Chuck called. “The shifts are switching now. I’ll see you in the morning?”
She glanced at the watch, surprised to find the hour so late. “Of course, Chuck. Have a good night.”
He left quickly, and she cleared her throat, resigning herself to another few hours of paperwork before she’d give in to the luxury of sleep. The time passed slowly, and Elizabeth was working through her forth cup of coffee that day when a shadow fell across her face. She looked up, surprised to find John standing silently over her desk; his guard was stationed just outside her open doorway.
“Hey,” he greeted, forcing a smile.
The first thing she noticed was that his eyes were normal again.
The second thing she noticed was that his skin was not.
She snapped her gaze away, returning the greeting as she shuffled some papers together on her desk. It was ridiculous that now, after everything that had already happened, she turned flustered around him. Strangely, Elizabeth was becoming the type of person that handled the midst of emergencies better than their aftermaths. She blamed Atlantis for that.
“How’re you doing?” she asked, like they were discussing his recovery from the flu. “Feeling better? You look better.”
He nodded along, raising his right hand. “Got my hands back.”
Indeed, his hands were normal again, and Elizabeth had to force herself not to visibly catalogue what else was normal about him. She knew her staring made John feel awkward, but she just couldn’t help it.
He rocked on his heels a little, searching for something to fill the void between them. “Carson said I’d be good for full active duty in no-time.”
Elizabeth nodded, a little dubiously. Carson said a lot of things, but she was more willing to wait and see. John wouldn’t be clear for active duty for at least another week, possibly two, which she knew would drive him insane with boredom. He’d have to deal with it, though. At least he was able to move about and roam the halls again - with a guard, of course.
She glanced once to the guard, almost unconsciously, then immediately regretted the action when she saw John notice the gesture. His face fell, and she knew what he thought. But this wasn’t fear acting up - she wasn’t afraid of John or what he’d do. The animistic threat was gone, even if he still looked very much the same as he had days prior when he’d demolished his room and thrown her up against a wall.
She dropped her eyes down to the papers again. “How was your last check-up?”
“Isn’t that the report sitting on your desk?”
“Yes.”
“Then why ask?”
His tone was trying for light, but those who knew him well could tell he missed it by a mile. She didn’t need to glance up to see the frustration building in his shoulders. She was treating him like nothing more than a co-worker, and he always hated that, even before they started sleeping together. Elizabeth kept her head bent for another two seconds, regrouping, before lifting her gaze back up to meet his.
His hazel eyes - always so beautiful, but now seemingly more so against the contrast of the blue skin around them - were dark and guarded. She could still read him like an open book, though. She always could. John had no idea how to act around her, and for a man that was so cocky and arrogant-like, she knew that underneath that he had a wide foundation of shaky abandonment issues and inferiority complexes. She was pinging every one of them now, and she hated herself a little for that, for the distance she was erecting between them.
Her voice softened, almost despite herself. “I’ve got some work to catch up on. Why don’t I meet you for a late dinner afterwards? Maybe in two hours?”
A late dinner for them normally meant she’d spend the night at his place or he’d spend the night at hers. Normally, of course, didn’t apply when he had an armed escort and Caldwell had additional eyes watching John everywhere he went.
He nodded, and his voice rasped, either from the retrovirus or something else, she couldn’t say. “I’ll be in my room. Just come and get me.”
Two hours turned out to be three, but by the time Elizabeth left her office, she was still restless with agitation. Elizabeth couldn’t deny it: she felt unnerved in his presence. She couldn’t say precisely why either, which was perhaps the most frustrating thing about it.
Something had shifted, though. When she’d faced the possibility of losing John to that damn retrovirus, her own emotions had scared Elizabeth with their intensity. She didn’t want to examine her feelings too closely, but now she couldn’t stop and the dread of losing John had been far too real and far too chilling. She always knew he was more than just her second-in-command or a mere friend, but this was the first time Elizabeth had dealt with his near-death in such a real, up-close way since they’d first started sleeping together.
She’d broken protocol when he’d been infected. She could see it now, in hindsight. She’d let her emotions cloud her judgment, and John had run amuck across Atlantis because of it. While emotions and adrenaline had been running high, Elizabeth had blocked off the objective part of herself, the one that was supposed to be in charge when life-and-death decisions needed to be made. Instead of the leader, she’d been the friend and lover and had acted accordingly.
As much as it pained her to admit it, even only to herself, Caldwell’s insinuations had turned out right: her judgment when it came to John had been compromised.
Now what, though? Could she really put things back in Pandora’s box?
The decision that rested in front of her was daunting. In the aftermath of this latest disaster, Elizabeth was forced to reevaluate everything and the price of her emotions were tipping the scales in an unfavorable way. There was a reason she wasn’t supposed to sleep with her leading military commander, and they had never been more starkly apparent to her than they were now.
Hesitantly, she approached John’s door and nodded once at the guard stationed outside his room. He palmed open the door, and the entrance slid apart. Elizabeth suddenly flashed to the last time she’d been here, and she half-expected to find the room in a similar state of disarray and darkness. The room was neat and tidy, though. The Johnny Cash poster stared her down as she entered the room, and a moment after the door slid closed behind her, she spotted John sitting on his bed, the guitar held loosely in his hands. Even with the discoloration of his skin, the instrument made him seem more human, more himself.
It also made what she was about to do that much harder.
“John,” she began, “we need to talk.”
Those were words no man ever wanted to hear, and she watched John flinch upon hearing them. It was difficult for her to maintain course, but now that she was finally able to acknowledge the painful truth, she couldn’t afford to falter. John had always been able to talk her into doing something reckless - their relationship was a shining example of that - but this was one of those times where Elizabeth had to dig her heels in and hold her ground.
They needed to break up. It was for the betterment of Atlantis.
Time stretched a little as Elizabeth struggled to find the right words. She felt like she should have prepared a speech, something rational and eloquent, but the pain of the decision had left Elizabeth bereft of her normal composure.
John saved her the trouble. In a knowing voice that was just a touch soft, he tipped her a painful smile and said, “It was good while it lasted, huh?”
She nearly broke out into a sob, watching as he dropped his feet to the ground and placed the guitar at the edge of his bed. His eyes were guarded, but John Sheppard was no fool. He knew this had been coming; he’d probably been suspecting this before Elizabeth had even reached her own conclusions. He knew her scarily well.
“Yeah,” she agreed, voice timid. “It was.” She stepped forward, then stopped herself, maintaining the distance between them. “I’m sorry, John. I just can’t do this anymore.”
He nodded, glancing away. “Can’t say I blame you.”
It occurred to her, belatedly, that John might be misplacing her reasons for doing this. She had to explain, to clarify. She owed him that much. “I don’t… I don’t want you to blame anyone. This isn’t your fault, either. It’s just… we shouldn’t be together. It makes things too complicated.”
His eyes darkened. “Complicated?” he scoffed, and then he sighed, that painful smile returning. He was trying to make this easy on her, but the smile came out like a grimace, stretched too thin and forced too hard. “Do me a favor? Don’t pull out your diplomatic lines with me, Elizabeth. If I hear the words it’s not you, it’s me fall from your mouth, I swear I’m gonna-”
“John,” she stopped him. “This isn’t your fault.”
He snorted. “The bruising on your neck has finally gone away,” he noted, rather pointedly. “I don’t blame you for backing away, Elizabeth. It’s the smart thing to do. The right thing to do.”
“Is that why you think I’m doing this? Out of fear?”
He glanced away, face flushing with anger - but the anger wasn’t directed towards her. She could tell. He was a hard man to define, but if she had to categorize him on any one trait alone, it was how willing he was to put the lives of others before himself. She knew that his actions during the prior week had prickled some deep-seeded fear of losing control, of hurting those he’d loved the most. She’d seen him shy away from her more and more as the retrovirus had advanced, and it had pained her to see him take on such unwarranted shame.
John stood, jaw clenched, then planted himself in front of the small window in the corner so that his back was to her. “Just go, Elizabeth. It’s all right. I get it. I do.” He paused when she didn't budge, then repeatedly desperately, “Just get out.”
He was making this remarkable easy on her, especially since she had been bracing herself for a fight. A part of her wanted to take it, to let the silence speak for her and just leave, but then Elizabeth also knew that any misguided sense of self-loathing was only going to increase if he thought that fear was the reason she broke up with him.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she found herself saying, stepping forward. “This isn’t about what you did last week.”
He braced an arm against the wall, leaning a little against it and she saw his reflection through the window, how his face was pinched and tight. The hard tension lining his body was almost painful to look at. His nostrils flared, hands fisting, and she wasn’t sure how much of this was the retrovirus affecting him, and how much of this was… him.
“Get out, Elizabeth,” he said, this time more roughly.
Instead, she took another step forward. “John, look at me. This isn’t about what you did last week. I need you to understand that. This is about what I did-”
John flipped around, and before she could utter another word, he was across the room faster than humanly possible. It amazed her as it had any of the other times - these heightened reflexes of his. He took one step further, and despite herself, her heart skipped a beat and she struggled not to lose ground. She knew exactly what he was doing, so she squared her jaw and refused to show any hesitation.
“John,” she repeated, as evenly as she could, staring at the bluish scales that covered his face. “I’m not scared of you.”
“You should be scared,” he rasped in a dark warning. “You have any idea how thin my control is? How flimsy…” he trailed off, staring at her.
She recognized the look in his eyes, having been on the receiving end of it plenty of times before in his bedroom. In the midst of the anger and turmoil of the conversation, lust had managed to worm its way in. She knew the retrovirus was making things even more heated than normal. She’d come here to break up with him, but it suddenly occurred to her that this was the first time she’d been alone with him in nearly a week. John was responding to that in a primal way she hadn’t anticipated, but probably should have.
“John,” she began, then lost her voice.
He wasn’t the only one suffering from sex withdrawal, after all. John had always managed to affect Elizabeth on a baser level, something she'd fought tooth and nail her first year here. But this man was now her lover, and she wasn't ashamed of the attraction she felt for him, even in this state.
But this wasn’t what she’d come here for.
“I should leave,” she offered in a faint voice.
He stepped forward, and Elizabeth hit the wall behind her. “Yeah. You probably should.”
Neither budged an inch.
She should have taken the opportunity to flee, but the several seconds that followed stretched long and silent. Her legs felt paralyzed, suddenly unwilling to move. This was stupid - so foolish. He was so close; her head was swimming. Another step and she would be able to feel exactly what the new texture of his skin felt like, a curiosity that had been born and reborn many times over during the last week. She’d come here to end things with him, not to-
John kissed her, and not even a small part of Elizabeth resisted. His mouth opened roughly against hers and her energy immediately dissolved into thoughtless action because she’d never been able to resist this, resist him, and especially when he’d been dogged with his needs.
A familiar kick of lust worked through her body, but this was somehow different. Somehow more charged. He pressed her body against the wall, bodies conforming against the flat surface. Elizabeth grabbed a fistful of dark hair as an anchor because she needed one, his hands moving to lift her against the wall so that they were locked tight from the waist up. She gasped for breath, and he turned so singularly focused on kissing her senseless that she forgot entirely about the presence of the guard waiting outside in the hall or the reason she’d come here in the first place.
His nostrils flared, and abruptly, she wondered if his enhanced abilities allowed him to pick up the scent of her rising arousal.
“Fuck, Elizabeth,” he breathed, because clearly he had.
His skin felt rough, so different under her touch. It didn’t deter her. Her fingers brushed his neck, his jaw, then rose to thread through his hair again. She couldn’t breathe, and John wasn’t letting her, drawing her into kiss after kiss until she started to feel lightheaded. He only pulled away to duck his head lower, mouth closing over her exposed collarbone. Before she could anticipate it, his teeth sunk into her neck and she gasped, alarm surging with the sharp spike of desire.
He suckled, and she cried out, which was the wrong sound for her to make when there was a guard on the other side of the door. Belatedly she remembered herself and pushed against his chest, shoving him away moments before the door flew open. The guard entered just as Elizabeth brought her hand to her neck and came back with her fingers tinged with blood.
“Back away from her now!” The guard had his gun aimed at John, but neither registered that as they stared at the blood on her hands. “Ma’am?”
Breathing heavily, John’s eyes widened when clarity resettled in.
“It’s all right,” she said, but her words were overruled immediately by John’s rough bark, shouting, “Get Beckett! Now!”
It was through a similar bite that John had been infected.
Part 2