[fanfic] Guises in Four Seasons: Spring
This is the Teyla standalone chapter from a longer work; it has been modified from a version earlier posted to sga_flashfic.
-title- Guises in Four Seasons: Spring
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-ratings/warnings- Mostly gen, although references to pairings past, present, and wishful thinking (of all sorts). Some strong language. Characters holding controversial opinions. Takes place in the asymptotic-to-canon AU I've written in a few times before; the alternity shows through rather a bit here.
-category- Vignette; some pathos
-spoilers- Through "The Tower."
-characters- John, Teyla
-disclaimer- I own no part of Stargate: Atlantis. Nor of the various works of science fiction and fantasy referenced therein. The Responsibility, as I've mentioned before, was inspired by the Responsibility in Diane Duane's Tale of the Five. I mention two characters borrowed from the animated (fake-)Godzilla television series and translated to Pegasus, because, quite honestly, I think they'd fit in better here.
Earlier chapters (in which Teyla is not present)
Guises in Four Seasons: Spring
The clack and whirr of sticks in motion fills the small training room.
Bantoi, Teyla calls them, but John cannot seem to think of them as anything but sticks -- a flaw shared, he knows, by half the military and much of natural sciences. Usually the sticks (bantoi) are not so much an extension of Teyla's own body as she an extension of theirs, but today John is very nearly landing blow after blow, Teyla shifting just too late to evade or deflect them smoothly.
"Something's eating you," John remarks unnecessarily.
Teyla bows out, jerkily, and lays her sticks against the wall. "Geron took Tallit on a trading mission," she tells him, thin-lipped, as he copies her. "She sensed Wraith."
"Are they all right?" John asks automatically, because anything else he can think to ask is either banal or far too personal.
"Oh, they are well," Teyla says bitterly. "Tallit warned them in plenty of time, and they all of them escaped in good order. But Tallit is scared, and Geron is angry, never mind that I warned him when Doctors Weir and Beckett explained matters to me, never mind that she has endured this before when they came to besiege us."
"Oh." Which is nowhere near enough or far too much, but Teyla barely notices, caught up in her own pain and her own regret.
"If I had known -- if Charin had only told me -- I do not think I would have been so quick to fulfill the Responsibility, but Tallit is made and I cannot wish her unmade; I am her leader and she under my care."
"Children may or may not be a blessing, but to fail them is sure damnation," John quotes under his breath.
"What?"
"Sometimes I think your system is better, where you know ahead of time whether you're going to be a parent or just around and nobody expects you to be the one you didn't choose."
Teyla casts him a startled glance. "You said, when I first mentioned that I had long since fulfilled the Responsibility of Reproduction to another household, that you had done as much yourself."
John looks at the room's light-source. Very interesting work, that.
"John?"
"Deb thought that a kid would hold us together," he finally says, because this is his team and this is Teyla and this is only private to anyone who has neither the desire nor the inclination to trace what is, in the end, a matter of public record on Ear-- Tellus. "And maybe our genes will be together as long as his line is alive -- although from what Carson was saying that once, after a few generations one or the other of us would probably be bred out if it lasts that long -- but the kid was the thing that made it impossible for us to be Deb-and-John any more. Her second husband adopted Jesse and raised him, and I was... the guy who visited him every now and then, and then less often; the excuse for one fit of teenage rebellion, and the guy who endowed a trust fund for his higher education." He shrugs. "He graduated a few years ago. I was in Antarctica."
And, given his track record with Jen, it was probably just as well... Jesse had been doing well the last time they'd had an increasingly awkward conversation, and he was singularly fortunate in his friends. Possibly it was genetic. John rather hoped it was, as it would be a better legacy than anything else he might have encoded in his blood.
"To fulfill it with a lover is different than to get it out of the way in fair bargain, especially if your lover wishes to keep the resulting child." Teyla tilts her head, looking up at him thoughtfully. "Or... had you wished to be a father?"
John winces inwardly, and chooses to explain the simpler half of the answer. "We'd settled it would be her responsibility not to get inconveniently pregnant; she decided it had become convenient, and I didn't notice until she was."
Teyla's wince is visible. John remembers that she answered "The Ancestors have blessed your fortune!" when Elizabeth had commented that unplanned pregnancies had been the one issue she'd never had to make a command decision on, and thinks that she's probably seen it before and had to deal with the fallout. Probably with more grace than Colonel Lemoyne; it is Teyla, after all.
At last she sinks gracefully to a near-lotus and pats the floor beside her. John pulls himself up a bit of floor some distance away, drawing his knees up half-between them as she says "There are several among my people who would be happy to help you fulfill your Responsibility or have you fulfill theirs, should you wish it."
John manages, somehow, not to laugh. "The military kind of frowns on that." Which is true enough. "And I thought you were there when Carson gave the presentation on lowered fertility rates in people with active ATA genes."
"He said something about clusters and about Hernandes effects. I understood little of it."
Yeah, he's been there. "The stronger the gene, especially if you had it naturally instead of artificially, the more your body acts like an Ancient's." He's fairly sure that a gene can't actually be stronger -- his third or fourth memory of Carson Beckett is of the Scot happily humming "maximized ATA sequence, full of dominants, the sequence activation gene must be somewhere near here" and opening his mouth in startlement when John wondered "wouldn't the on-switch be submissive?" -- but people seem to say it a lot, and it's not as if he's a master of genetics jargon.
Teyla nods.
"The Isabels found some biomedical texts on Ancient reproduction, and Biro and Kumar and Tatopoulos verified them... "
"I remember that," Teyla says. "Randor told me that his household had discovered the Ancestors to be shapeshifters, adjusting themselves to be more pleasing to their lovers and bear their children."
"Speaking of, how is he doing these days?"
"Randor is proud to be an equally acknowledged codemonkey as the Earthborn, and ambitious to become... Lord King God Hacker? Some such phrase?"
"That ought to make Pellegrom happy." The surviving sysadmin had been complaining about the SGC's inability to send replacements without their own sciences to pursue since the Siege. If the teenaged Athosian the Isabels had adopted had learned enough of programming to be able to do whatever the computer equivalent of the paperwork Lorne handled for John might be, it would make more than just Katinka Pellegrom happy. He'd have to remember to suggest it.
"It may be so... she too was among the doctors speaking of the Hernandes shapeshifting very excitedly, although they kept referring not only to your stories of bird wives but to a left hand, shapeshifting curses, and a thing called 'peoplepotion.'"
"The left hand is from a well-known story about people who did that sort of thing as regularly and as quickly as, well, as you bleed -- " John's brain catches up with his mouth and floods his cheeks with oxygen-rich blood -- "but I have no notion what 'people potion' might be." He studies the lacing of his left shoe. The loops aren't quite even. Can't have that. "Anyway, of course the Ancients didn't change that fast, or as drastically as some of the stories of curses would have it, but if there was enough ambient energy and they were breathing in someone else's pheromones long enough, longer if they weren't in either love or long-term non-immediate peril, they'd kem-- become cross-fertile with that someone and more the sort of person the someone else would want to be cross-fertile with."
Teyla looks at him attentively. "And this lowers birthrates?"
"No, no, the point is that the Ancients were only and ever fertile then, when humans in general are fertile just about all the damn time."
Her eyes widen for a moment before sympathy wells up in them. "And those of you who are like the Ancestors in other ways are in this way also?"
"According to the incredibly embarrassing survey of Tatopoulos's that I wound up having to stand over people and get answers for, most of the natural gene-bearers have family histories of fertility problems -- you wouldn't believe how many people seem to take potential sterility as a mark of personal failure."
"Those who are unable to fulfill the Responsibility through no fault of their own are to be pitied, not censured," Teyla agrees with quiet indignation.
John whacks himself on the side of the head. "Tatopoulos believed that he couldn't get a girl pregnant the first time up until grad school. The women in Miko's family are known for not being able to get pregnant unless their husbands sleep by their side every night or nearly so. Carson swears his parents grew more beautiful in each others' eyes as the years went by, but that it went in widening cycles and his mother had problems carrying to term. My mother thought she was barren until my father knocked her up." Although he'd chosen not to put it down on the survey and raise more questions, he finds himself adding "My father's people -- not the whole of the American populace, but the people living in the place where I was born -- all knew about it. Mostly they saw it as one more reason to feel superior to the people who weren't fortunate enough to be them." One of his more irritating cousins' voice is still sharp in his memory, declaiming Our family may be fecund, but at least we're not breeding indiscriminately like them. "Sha`re hadn't actually realized it was an Ancients-in-general thing but was reasonably certain that it changed to compensate for the Pill -- I'd kind of thought that myself, that was what I'd first thought had happened to Deb, it wasn't as if we hadn't had years... "
"Were you very much attached?" The sympathy is back.
"It just seemed like the thing to do at the time." This seems a bit much like blowing Teyla off once it's out, and John manages "I'm, uh, closer to any of you than I ever was with her" before deciding that it's really kind of, well, not the sort of thing you just come out and say, not to mention horribly easy to misconstrue.
Even if it is true; he'd drifted into a relationship with Deb the same way he'd drifted into Teer and Ilona and Patrick, making the moves the other expected when the other expected them because it seemed the sanest way to build the life that he seemed to have drawn, never investing enough that he found it hard to leave if the situation changed (Teer left for her dream, although he'd have asked her to come with; Ilona had expected him to go to the war, would have thought less of him if he hadn't, and then moved on when he'd gone; Patrick had thrown him out, unable to handle the idea of being tied to a man, and if they'd been the only two people involved he'd never have so much as thought of looking back), and putting them out of his mind once he'd left (except for the attention necessary for "the one parenting my son"). There'd been no drifting involved with his team: Ford had sought him out, Ronon had required actual work to cultivate, Teyla had just made herself omnipresent and left him the choice of bashing his head against a brick wall or rearranging his life to fit around her, Rodney had done all of the above (sometimes at the same time). They are wonderful and they are infuriating and they are his, more so than the people of Atlantis or even its leaders are.
"There is danger and to spare here," Teyla gently lets his revelation be, "and we have endured much radiation, and live cheek-by-ear with one another, even in Atlantis and more so on missions. Might you, then...?"
"Oh, I have a plan for that."
"A plan?" Her voice is wary; possibly his face gave something away.
"Yeah. If I wake up one morning with a distinct resemblance to Lieutenant Colonel Carter -- or Sergeant Kaur, I suppose, these days -- I'm going to strangle Rodney. If it's to Lieutenant Cadman, I'll strangle Ronon."
"I note," Teyla said with cheerful serenity, "that you do not threaten me."
"I don't know who to prepare to blame you for."
"Doctor McKay. Ronon. Kate. Sora. Aiden..."
"Teyla..."
"Doctor Beckett. Doctor Tatopoulos. Doctor Parrish. Sergeant Alvarez. Major Lorne... "
"Teyla!"
"Sergeant Stackhouse. Nomar. Cylin. Buan. Doctor Zelenka. Doctor Weir..."
"TEYLA!"
"Or yourself, of course, but you would hardly wish to strangle me for that."
"I'm not going to say it," John told Teyla's sticks. "Seriously. Not. I gather you're feeling better?"
"Mostly. I would not mind so much that Geron is irritated with me," Teyla accepts his change of subject, "if I had not respected him before ever I suggested that I might provide the child he wanted. Sometimes, if he is angry, I think he forgets that I am a leader grown, or that Tallit will soon have seen nine T-years."
"Nine what?" John asks.
"Nine annu," she repeats. "Most of the people of Pegasus think of the anns as some arbitrary measure of time of the Ancestors, but it seems to be, exactly or nearly so, the length of a year of this world."
"Which is just about exactly the length of an Earth year," he reminded her. "Why we think they chose this world to park Atlantis. Nine, huh?"
"Nearly." She smiles, the Gioconda smile that sometimes graces her face. "How old is Deb's son?"
"Oh, about Ford's age," he says absently. "Where does the time go...? Teyla? Teyla!"
Teyla manages, with great effort, to raise her jaw and shut her mouth.
"It's just me. I'm the same person I was five minutes ago. It's not that surprising, is it?"
"No," Teyla says gently. She pauses for a moment. "I was... startled."
"You, uh, don't need to bring it up, probably," John says. "It's not as if any of you are at all likely to meet him if you haven't before, and the spit-takes aren't worth it, especially if it's likely to interfere with the team."
"Would it?"
"You tell me."
"Ronon must know better, but he seems to think that we are all the same age really."
"I've noticed that -- and so does Rodney, with even less excuse. We've finally got Ronon working smoothly with the rest of us, and half of Rodney's and my rapport in the field is based on the fact that his hindbrain is convinced that I'm closer to his age than, say, however old he seems to think Elizabeth is -- "
"Half of your rapport in the field," Teyla corrected, "is based on the fact that each of your 'hindbrains' is convinced that it is of an age with Wex." She paused for a moment. "Well, perhaps with Lumy."
John cracked up, flinging up a hand as if to acknowledge the touch of a stick (bantos).
"At any rate," he finally wheezed, "encouraging him to think too closely about simple arithmetic might distract him from his higher astronomy. And what about you? Will you...?"
"I shall manage," Teyla reassured him. "It is not as great a shock as when I came to realize that Doctor Weir was of an age with my father."
"Oh. Yeah. I keep forgetting how short unassisted human lifespans are."
"I... I am not naive enough to hope that they will all have a Ring Ceremony performed for them. But if, should they reach perhaps Doctor McKay's age, Lumy and Wex and Jinto and Daran and Kerel and Eyving and Tallit achieve it with nearly as much health as he enjoys, I will... I will be able to face the Ancestors and tell them that I have repaid every gift they have given me, and with interest."
"They're starting later, but Rodney could be in better shape if he felt he had time in the day to try, so it's hardly impossible." John examined Teyla thoughtfully. "How old are you, for that matter?"
"In..." Teyla thought for a while, fingers flying in taps across her palms and their own joints as if working an invisible abacus... "seventeen or eighteen days, I shall have seen twenty-three annu."
"Shit," John breathes.
"John...?"
"No, it's just... my turn for mental disconnect... except for Randy, I think you're the youngest person in the city."
Teyla blinks.
John blinks back.
"No wonder I have yet to be defeated with bantoi," she says at last, rising to her feet.
"Them's fighting words, lady," John grins, rolling to his. "Want to eat them?"
"Bring it," Teyla says solemnly in English, raising her sticks, her eyes alight with her Gioconda smile.
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin, features a race of aliens who are neuter except during "kemmer"; I can't actually remember whether they change any more than to grow sexual characteristics.
The "people potion" is from Dragon Half, and is a MacGuffin that can change other sentients into humans.
-title- Guises in Four Seasons: Spring
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-ratings/warnings- Mostly gen, although references to pairings past, present, and wishful thinking (of all sorts). Some strong language. Characters holding controversial opinions. Takes place in the asymptotic-to-canon AU I've written in a few times before; the alternity shows through rather a bit here.
-category- Vignette; some pathos
-spoilers- Through "The Tower."
-characters- John, Teyla
-disclaimer- I own no part of Stargate: Atlantis. Nor of the various works of science fiction and fantasy referenced therein. The Responsibility, as I've mentioned before, was inspired by the Responsibility in Diane Duane's Tale of the Five. I mention two characters borrowed from the animated (fake-)Godzilla television series and translated to Pegasus, because, quite honestly, I think they'd fit in better here.
Earlier chapters (in which Teyla is not present)
Guises in Four Seasons: Spring
The clack and whirr of sticks in motion fills the small training room.
Bantoi, Teyla calls them, but John cannot seem to think of them as anything but sticks -- a flaw shared, he knows, by half the military and much of natural sciences. Usually the sticks (bantoi) are not so much an extension of Teyla's own body as she an extension of theirs, but today John is very nearly landing blow after blow, Teyla shifting just too late to evade or deflect them smoothly.
"Something's eating you," John remarks unnecessarily.
Teyla bows out, jerkily, and lays her sticks against the wall. "Geron took Tallit on a trading mission," she tells him, thin-lipped, as he copies her. "She sensed Wraith."
"Are they all right?" John asks automatically, because anything else he can think to ask is either banal or far too personal.
"Oh, they are well," Teyla says bitterly. "Tallit warned them in plenty of time, and they all of them escaped in good order. But Tallit is scared, and Geron is angry, never mind that I warned him when Doctors Weir and Beckett explained matters to me, never mind that she has endured this before when they came to besiege us."
"Oh." Which is nowhere near enough or far too much, but Teyla barely notices, caught up in her own pain and her own regret.
"If I had known -- if Charin had only told me -- I do not think I would have been so quick to fulfill the Responsibility, but Tallit is made and I cannot wish her unmade; I am her leader and she under my care."
"Children may or may not be a blessing, but to fail them is sure damnation," John quotes under his breath.
"What?"
"Sometimes I think your system is better, where you know ahead of time whether you're going to be a parent or just around and nobody expects you to be the one you didn't choose."
Teyla casts him a startled glance. "You said, when I first mentioned that I had long since fulfilled the Responsibility of Reproduction to another household, that you had done as much yourself."
John looks at the room's light-source. Very interesting work, that.
"John?"
"Deb thought that a kid would hold us together," he finally says, because this is his team and this is Teyla and this is only private to anyone who has neither the desire nor the inclination to trace what is, in the end, a matter of public record on Ear-- Tellus. "And maybe our genes will be together as long as his line is alive -- although from what Carson was saying that once, after a few generations one or the other of us would probably be bred out if it lasts that long -- but the kid was the thing that made it impossible for us to be Deb-and-John any more. Her second husband adopted Jesse and raised him, and I was... the guy who visited him every now and then, and then less often; the excuse for one fit of teenage rebellion, and the guy who endowed a trust fund for his higher education." He shrugs. "He graduated a few years ago. I was in Antarctica."
And, given his track record with Jen, it was probably just as well... Jesse had been doing well the last time they'd had an increasingly awkward conversation, and he was singularly fortunate in his friends. Possibly it was genetic. John rather hoped it was, as it would be a better legacy than anything else he might have encoded in his blood.
"To fulfill it with a lover is different than to get it out of the way in fair bargain, especially if your lover wishes to keep the resulting child." Teyla tilts her head, looking up at him thoughtfully. "Or... had you wished to be a father?"
John winces inwardly, and chooses to explain the simpler half of the answer. "We'd settled it would be her responsibility not to get inconveniently pregnant; she decided it had become convenient, and I didn't notice until she was."
Teyla's wince is visible. John remembers that she answered "The Ancestors have blessed your fortune!" when Elizabeth had commented that unplanned pregnancies had been the one issue she'd never had to make a command decision on, and thinks that she's probably seen it before and had to deal with the fallout. Probably with more grace than Colonel Lemoyne; it is Teyla, after all.
At last she sinks gracefully to a near-lotus and pats the floor beside her. John pulls himself up a bit of floor some distance away, drawing his knees up half-between them as she says "There are several among my people who would be happy to help you fulfill your Responsibility or have you fulfill theirs, should you wish it."
John manages, somehow, not to laugh. "The military kind of frowns on that." Which is true enough. "And I thought you were there when Carson gave the presentation on lowered fertility rates in people with active ATA genes."
"He said something about clusters and about Hernandes effects. I understood little of it."
Yeah, he's been there. "The stronger the gene, especially if you had it naturally instead of artificially, the more your body acts like an Ancient's." He's fairly sure that a gene can't actually be stronger -- his third or fourth memory of Carson Beckett is of the Scot happily humming "maximized ATA sequence, full of dominants, the sequence activation gene must be somewhere near here" and opening his mouth in startlement when John wondered "wouldn't the on-switch be submissive?" -- but people seem to say it a lot, and it's not as if he's a master of genetics jargon.
Teyla nods.
"The Isabels found some biomedical texts on Ancient reproduction, and Biro and Kumar and Tatopoulos verified them... "
"I remember that," Teyla says. "Randor told me that his household had discovered the Ancestors to be shapeshifters, adjusting themselves to be more pleasing to their lovers and bear their children."
"Speaking of, how is he doing these days?"
"Randor is proud to be an equally acknowledged codemonkey as the Earthborn, and ambitious to become... Lord King God Hacker? Some such phrase?"
"That ought to make Pellegrom happy." The surviving sysadmin had been complaining about the SGC's inability to send replacements without their own sciences to pursue since the Siege. If the teenaged Athosian the Isabels had adopted had learned enough of programming to be able to do whatever the computer equivalent of the paperwork Lorne handled for John might be, it would make more than just Katinka Pellegrom happy. He'd have to remember to suggest it.
"It may be so... she too was among the doctors speaking of the Hernandes shapeshifting very excitedly, although they kept referring not only to your stories of bird wives but to a left hand, shapeshifting curses, and a thing called 'peoplepotion.'"
"The left hand is from a well-known story about people who did that sort of thing as regularly and as quickly as, well, as you bleed -- " John's brain catches up with his mouth and floods his cheeks with oxygen-rich blood -- "but I have no notion what 'people potion' might be." He studies the lacing of his left shoe. The loops aren't quite even. Can't have that. "Anyway, of course the Ancients didn't change that fast, or as drastically as some of the stories of curses would have it, but if there was enough ambient energy and they were breathing in someone else's pheromones long enough, longer if they weren't in either love or long-term non-immediate peril, they'd kem-- become cross-fertile with that someone and more the sort of person the someone else would want to be cross-fertile with."
Teyla looks at him attentively. "And this lowers birthrates?"
"No, no, the point is that the Ancients were only and ever fertile then, when humans in general are fertile just about all the damn time."
Her eyes widen for a moment before sympathy wells up in them. "And those of you who are like the Ancestors in other ways are in this way also?"
"According to the incredibly embarrassing survey of Tatopoulos's that I wound up having to stand over people and get answers for, most of the natural gene-bearers have family histories of fertility problems -- you wouldn't believe how many people seem to take potential sterility as a mark of personal failure."
"Those who are unable to fulfill the Responsibility through no fault of their own are to be pitied, not censured," Teyla agrees with quiet indignation.
John whacks himself on the side of the head. "Tatopoulos believed that he couldn't get a girl pregnant the first time up until grad school. The women in Miko's family are known for not being able to get pregnant unless their husbands sleep by their side every night or nearly so. Carson swears his parents grew more beautiful in each others' eyes as the years went by, but that it went in widening cycles and his mother had problems carrying to term. My mother thought she was barren until my father knocked her up." Although he'd chosen not to put it down on the survey and raise more questions, he finds himself adding "My father's people -- not the whole of the American populace, but the people living in the place where I was born -- all knew about it. Mostly they saw it as one more reason to feel superior to the people who weren't fortunate enough to be them." One of his more irritating cousins' voice is still sharp in his memory, declaiming Our family may be fecund, but at least we're not breeding indiscriminately like them. "Sha`re hadn't actually realized it was an Ancients-in-general thing but was reasonably certain that it changed to compensate for the Pill -- I'd kind of thought that myself, that was what I'd first thought had happened to Deb, it wasn't as if we hadn't had years... "
"Were you very much attached?" The sympathy is back.
"It just seemed like the thing to do at the time." This seems a bit much like blowing Teyla off once it's out, and John manages "I'm, uh, closer to any of you than I ever was with her" before deciding that it's really kind of, well, not the sort of thing you just come out and say, not to mention horribly easy to misconstrue.
Even if it is true; he'd drifted into a relationship with Deb the same way he'd drifted into Teer and Ilona and Patrick, making the moves the other expected when the other expected them because it seemed the sanest way to build the life that he seemed to have drawn, never investing enough that he found it hard to leave if the situation changed (Teer left for her dream, although he'd have asked her to come with; Ilona had expected him to go to the war, would have thought less of him if he hadn't, and then moved on when he'd gone; Patrick had thrown him out, unable to handle the idea of being tied to a man, and if they'd been the only two people involved he'd never have so much as thought of looking back), and putting them out of his mind once he'd left (except for the attention necessary for "the one parenting my son"). There'd been no drifting involved with his team: Ford had sought him out, Ronon had required actual work to cultivate, Teyla had just made herself omnipresent and left him the choice of bashing his head against a brick wall or rearranging his life to fit around her, Rodney had done all of the above (sometimes at the same time). They are wonderful and they are infuriating and they are his, more so than the people of Atlantis or even its leaders are.
"There is danger and to spare here," Teyla gently lets his revelation be, "and we have endured much radiation, and live cheek-by-ear with one another, even in Atlantis and more so on missions. Might you, then...?"
"Oh, I have a plan for that."
"A plan?" Her voice is wary; possibly his face gave something away.
"Yeah. If I wake up one morning with a distinct resemblance to Lieutenant Colonel Carter -- or Sergeant Kaur, I suppose, these days -- I'm going to strangle Rodney. If it's to Lieutenant Cadman, I'll strangle Ronon."
"I note," Teyla said with cheerful serenity, "that you do not threaten me."
"I don't know who to prepare to blame you for."
"Doctor McKay. Ronon. Kate. Sora. Aiden..."
"Teyla..."
"Doctor Beckett. Doctor Tatopoulos. Doctor Parrish. Sergeant Alvarez. Major Lorne... "
"Teyla!"
"Sergeant Stackhouse. Nomar. Cylin. Buan. Doctor Zelenka. Doctor Weir..."
"TEYLA!"
"Or yourself, of course, but you would hardly wish to strangle me for that."
"I'm not going to say it," John told Teyla's sticks. "Seriously. Not. I gather you're feeling better?"
"Mostly. I would not mind so much that Geron is irritated with me," Teyla accepts his change of subject, "if I had not respected him before ever I suggested that I might provide the child he wanted. Sometimes, if he is angry, I think he forgets that I am a leader grown, or that Tallit will soon have seen nine T-years."
"Nine what?" John asks.
"Nine annu," she repeats. "Most of the people of Pegasus think of the anns as some arbitrary measure of time of the Ancestors, but it seems to be, exactly or nearly so, the length of a year of this world."
"Which is just about exactly the length of an Earth year," he reminded her. "Why we think they chose this world to park Atlantis. Nine, huh?"
"Nearly." She smiles, the Gioconda smile that sometimes graces her face. "How old is Deb's son?"
"Oh, about Ford's age," he says absently. "Where does the time go...? Teyla? Teyla!"
Teyla manages, with great effort, to raise her jaw and shut her mouth.
"It's just me. I'm the same person I was five minutes ago. It's not that surprising, is it?"
"No," Teyla says gently. She pauses for a moment. "I was... startled."
"You, uh, don't need to bring it up, probably," John says. "It's not as if any of you are at all likely to meet him if you haven't before, and the spit-takes aren't worth it, especially if it's likely to interfere with the team."
"Would it?"
"You tell me."
"Ronon must know better, but he seems to think that we are all the same age really."
"I've noticed that -- and so does Rodney, with even less excuse. We've finally got Ronon working smoothly with the rest of us, and half of Rodney's and my rapport in the field is based on the fact that his hindbrain is convinced that I'm closer to his age than, say, however old he seems to think Elizabeth is -- "
"Half of your rapport in the field," Teyla corrected, "is based on the fact that each of your 'hindbrains' is convinced that it is of an age with Wex." She paused for a moment. "Well, perhaps with Lumy."
John cracked up, flinging up a hand as if to acknowledge the touch of a stick (bantos).
"At any rate," he finally wheezed, "encouraging him to think too closely about simple arithmetic might distract him from his higher astronomy. And what about you? Will you...?"
"I shall manage," Teyla reassured him. "It is not as great a shock as when I came to realize that Doctor Weir was of an age with my father."
"Oh. Yeah. I keep forgetting how short unassisted human lifespans are."
"I... I am not naive enough to hope that they will all have a Ring Ceremony performed for them. But if, should they reach perhaps Doctor McKay's age, Lumy and Wex and Jinto and Daran and Kerel and Eyving and Tallit achieve it with nearly as much health as he enjoys, I will... I will be able to face the Ancestors and tell them that I have repaid every gift they have given me, and with interest."
"They're starting later, but Rodney could be in better shape if he felt he had time in the day to try, so it's hardly impossible." John examined Teyla thoughtfully. "How old are you, for that matter?"
"In..." Teyla thought for a while, fingers flying in taps across her palms and their own joints as if working an invisible abacus... "seventeen or eighteen days, I shall have seen twenty-three annu."
"Shit," John breathes.
"John...?"
"No, it's just... my turn for mental disconnect... except for Randy, I think you're the youngest person in the city."
Teyla blinks.
John blinks back.
"No wonder I have yet to be defeated with bantoi," she says at last, rising to her feet.
"Them's fighting words, lady," John grins, rolling to his. "Want to eat them?"
"Bring it," Teyla says solemnly in English, raising her sticks, her eyes alight with her Gioconda smile.
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin, features a race of aliens who are neuter except during "kemmer"; I can't actually remember whether they change any more than to grow sexual characteristics.
The "people potion" is from Dragon Half, and is a MacGuffin that can change other sentients into humans.