[fanfic] A Civil Contract

This is a slightly revised version of a story earlier posted to sga_flashfic.

-title- A Civil Contract
-summary- A gen take on one (and a half) of the oldest stock romance plots ever; the words one says may not be those one's listener hears.
-rating/warnings- Um... G to PG, I guess, depending on where you draw the line. Gen, although can be read as pre-anythingyou'dlike. Cultural misunderstandings.
-category- Missing scene set before or during the beginning of "Hide and Seek."
-spoilers- "Rising," "Hide and Seek," mention of a people encountered during the first season.
-characters- Sheppard, Teyla
-disclaimer- If I owned them, I'd treat them right. It's fairly obvious from the passive contrapositive that ~p is true. The First Law of Trade is paraphrased from something the Witchwoman of the Worlds says in CLAMP's Interholic tankoubon #1.
-notes- A bit of personal spackle for the first season, including my assumption as to why everyone in the Pegasus Galaxy can understand each other.


A Civil Contract
by Sophonisba


John Sheppard was examining a corridor of central tower living quarters in a leisurely sort of way, running the water to check for blockages, lying on the beds to test for quality, and peering out the windows with an eye towards choosing a room for himself -- he rather thought that the corridor in question would provide more useful and certainly more comfortable military quarters than the current bivouac next to the public restrooms near the gateroom, in what the anthropologists speculated might once have been a conference room or ballroom -- when he left yet another bedroom and nearly walked right into Teyla Emmagan.

"Sorry about that," he greeted her, remembering at the last moment to use the language that had been in all their heads since they walked through the Stargate, already nearly as familiar to him as English. "Are your people settling in all right?"

"It is... very different," she said. "We are conscious of the debts we owe you, and are grateful."

"Hey, it was our fault in the first place," John said easily. "Properly, we owe you for telling us about the Wraith, and the peanut thing really was our lack of foresight."

Teyla nodded, but John doubted that she was convinced.

"Can I help you with something?" he asked instead.

"I wondered whether there were green growing things in the City," she said. "My people have some reputation as gardeners."

"So far, all we've found have been those very, very long-dead plants. How's Wex doing?"

"He, too, nearly ran me over this morning," she said fondly, "playing with his friends."

"Kids," he smiled. "It's too bad we can't keep bouncing back that easily long enough to really appreciate it.

"I'm glad I ran into you," John went on as they walked down the hall. "There was something I've been wanting to ask you."

Teyla tilted her head slightly in his direction.

"The reasons we came to meet your people still hold. I'd like you -- " he fumbled for a moment, the Weir-had-assured-him-it-wasn't-exactly-Ancient language failing in one-to-one correspondence of idioms -- "to be among my team."

Teyla stopped and looked at him for a long moment. "Who else is in it?"

"I was planning to ask Dr. McKay." He had been turning the idea over since Weir first mentioned the idea of team -- McKay, while undeniably an arrogant SOB, was also undeniably good at what he did, and he'd not only helped John get his people back but given him back flight, without finding either unusual. Besides, John could be sort of an arrogant SOB himself. "And if you agree, I was hoping you'd help give me an idea of who else you could work with."

They walked on in silence, he giving her space to think. As they neared the stairs, she turned to him and nodded.

~*~

Teyla Emmagan had spent a night and a day and a night in the City of the Ancestors, and at least half of her felt that that was enough for a lifetime. The Silver City was majestic, beautiful, and deeply, undeniably, utterly alien.

More than that, their new friends were already more at home in it than she feared her people would ever be. While the people of "Urth," which appeared to be one of their names for the Mother-world of the Ancestors beneath the Begetter Sun, had already adopted the Ring-speech for ease in speaking one to another, they used it to speak of wizardry so arcane that only the Ring's gift allowed Teyla to know what thaumaturgy "meteorology" and "vaccination" and "cybernetics" might be as casually as she would speak of fire-kindlers or weeding a garden, and to confidently predict that in the city they might find, lying about, such simple matters as the ability to transmute materials according to the Gem of Natural Wisdom without the fires of a sun.

They had rescued her people and given them a home among themselves. They had tested her people for the shellfish-sickness against the foods brought from the Mother-earth; tested, moreover, without the need for one person to gingerly taste as others stood by ready to breathe for him or cut into his throat if necessary. They had promised that, as soon as they grew the illnesses from some sort of bread-starter they had brought with them, they would inoculate her people against any common illnesses the Urth-born might unwittingly be carrying.

She had promised the friendship of the Athosians without waiting to be asked; she felt, now, from her observations of Elizabeth Weir and Major Sheppard and several of the wizards entitled "Doctor," that the Tellurians never would ask recompense.

It was true enough that to set a fair price on what these second indwellers of the City of the Ancestors had done for her people the third might be enough to baffle master traders. But that did not invalidate the First Law of Trade, first among the copy-headings she had learned to write from: the purchase must be equal to the price, and the price to the purchase, else both giver and receiver are shamed and untold harm done to both.

She would not have her people known as cheaters and deceivers among all the worlds of the Ring; but she could not bear for them to dwindle upon the Urth-born largesse, and become no more than servants to vaunting Atlanteans, forgetting their houses and their inner tongue and their name to cling to such living as remained to them.

And so she was walking the tower, looking for some garden perhaps, some way in which her people might begin to contribute and to regain their pride even before the Urth-born finally opened the Ring, when she was nearly knocked over by Major Sheppard.

"Sorry about that," he greeted her, in the hasty contractions that were doubtless as much a legacy of his born-tongue as her phrasing echoed that of scarce-preserved Athoio. "Are your people settling in all right?"

"It is... very different," she settled on. "We are conscious of the debts we owe you, and are grateful."

Major Sheppard denied any debt, but she knew better. To ignore an imbalance was not to erase it from existence, as he should know; had she not heard Doctor McKay shouting about that very thing (as applied to the maker-of-fresh-water) the day before?

"Can I help you with something?" he asked.

"I wondered whether there were green growing things in the City. My people have some reputation as gardeners."

"So far, all we've found have been those very, very long-dead plants," he shrugged. He looked at her more directly. "How's Wex doing?"

"He, too, nearly ran me over this morning," she said fondly, "playing with his friends." As she had hoped against the elders' grim predictions: few of them had ever seen someone have the shellfish-sickness that badly and live. The Tellurians believed that it had been the boyish running about after the banquet that had made him take so much more ill than the others, and she had stopped three people wearing the yellow swathes of medicine's badge on their jackets to make sure that further activity would not cause a relapse.

"Kids," the Major smiled. "It's too bad we can't keep bouncing back that easily long enough to really appreciate it."

She had heard as much, many times, during her life, even from people her own age. Perhaps when she was his age, she too would feel herself slower to recover than she had been.

"I'm glad I ran into you," he went on as they walked down the hall. "There was something I've been wanting to ask you."

Teyla tilted her head slightly in his direction.

"The reasons we came to meet your people still hold. I'd like you -- " he paused, ever so slightly -- "to be among my conjoined."

Oh. And oh, this she had never thought of -- not even to hope that a union between her people and one of his, or his people and one of hers, might strengthen their alliance with a bond -- but of course. Of course.

The people are not the leader, but the leader is the people. This morning was a morning for copy-headings, it seemed. This, perhaps, she could do. This could bind her people to the Urth-born without guilt or shame. His use of the more poetic term might well mean that his people did not have Houses as hers had Houses; certainly few enough of the thousand worlds did; but his using it at all meant that it should be enough to satisfy the minds of her people.

Major Sheppard, from what she had seen and heard, held the same place among his people as Halling did among hers; the peril-commander, the voice to listen to in times of natural or Wraith disaster, when lives depended on obeying orders instantly. More, she owed him a personal debt as well as a popular one; he had tracked the Wraith through the Ring and come into a hive after his people and herself with them, and for that alone his name would have been sung around the fires of Athos.

And yet -- a House is more than two, the warning ran, reminding the young that they took or were taken on as a whole family, for better or for worse. "Who else is in it?"

"I was planning to ask Doctor McKay." What -- a new conjoining, then. Not a subsumation, not in any way. "And if you agree, I was hoping you'd help give me an idea of who' else you could share burdens with."

She had thought, once or twice, of taking the Major as a casual bedmate. Now she was glad that she had not; one cannot casually lie with a comrade, and a new House is delicate enough to weave without placing undue strain on one or more of its warps.

Doctor McKay. The wizard; the chief of the wizards of Atlantis, who managed them much as Shirrin Norriten had managed her House until her death three Athosian years before. Norriten still remembered her with reverence and terror, and Teyla had heard one of them telling her children that if they kept misbehaving, Great-Grandmother Shirrin would march back from the land of the dead and scold them herself.

He treated the Athosians much as they had treated strangers who came through their gate: without direct hostility, but every word and gesture betokening a way which it would be better for others not to infringe upon. He was ecstatic over arcane matters, depressed the exuberance of the other wizards with what appeared to be awful sarcasm, and loudly proclaimed the superiority of natural Wisdom to any other sort of Wisdom that might be. He looked on the hallways and chambers of the Silver City with the welling happiness of a boy in love. When Wex had dashed back into the slowly emptying gathering room in pursuit of Jinto and suddenly collapsed that first night, it had been Doctor McKay who half-gathered the boy into his arms, shouted for the medicine-people, and proceeded to harangue them in his own tongue to do what they obviously knew how to do better than he did.

Major Sheppard might be a peril-commander and second only to Elizabeth Weir, but Doctor McKay, if she interpreted the comments and body language of the Tellurian Atlanteans, was no less great. The Mother-earth, she thought, had sent few but master wizards; much as she was angered by the Genii proverb Who shall command a wizard, a woman, or the winter rain?, legend suggested the first part was accurate, and that anyone who could persuade so much as two adept wizards to wish to go in the direction he was traveling must be a force to be reckoned with.

Oh. No one who heard of this -- no one -- would think the Athosians to have sold themselves cheaply. No matter whom else they chose, this new House could not help but be ranked only behind Weir in Atlantis. Perhaps one of the tribe of medicine might do, or perhaps -- though she did not understand some of the whispers, she could see the disquiet that many of the militia held for their new commander -- another military man, to bind Major Sheppard more firmly into his new position. Perhaps even that one with the white smile flashing in the dark face, who had come into the Hive after him and together brought them nearly all out alive.

Even if her new familial duties meant that her people would have to choose a new leader from among themselves here in this new place, they would consider it fair, knowing that they had given their best in marriage to the two heroes who had invaded a Wraith Hive and the Chief Wizard of a debate of master wizards for a bride-price worthy of such men, and could claim kinship benefits thereof. The two of them were nearing the stairs now; she turned and nodded.

~*~

"I would be honored."