Atonement (This is not happening challenge)

Author: linaerys
Title: Atonement
Rating: R for sex
Paring: Weir/Zelenka
Word Count: ~2000
Summary: On the way back to Earth after "Allies", Elizabeth contemplates her mistakes. For the “this is not happening” challenge.
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me, nor to I derive any profit from them.
Spoilers: Through the end of S2
Feedback: Positive or negative, is always appreciated.


“You are lonely,” says Radek one night as they chase the Hive ships across the eternity of black space between the Pegasus Galaxy and the Milky Way. Whoever named it that, thinks Elizabeth, never intended to see it from the outside: a spill of white milk across the matte night, spilled milk over which there is no use crying. Not yet, anyway.

Caldwell tried the same thing a few days previous. He blustered and bullied and said “you’re lonely” and “we both are”. “I could help, you know” and “I heard about Simon”. Caldwell wants to cast himself as another father figure in Elizabeth’s pantheon, but she has finally outgrown that.

Zelenka says it like a question, but he is right. Elizabeth looks out at the strange visual distortions of hyperspace travel, the ragged edges of the rent in space-time that Daedalus makes as it travels through. She tries and fails to fix her eyes on one spot—the patterns distort like clouds in a high wind. If she looks too long, she’ll see faces in those clouds, here one minute, ripped apart the next.

“Yes,” she says. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“Of course not . . . Elizabeth,” he says. She can hear him tasting the liberty of her first name like an unfamiliar dish.

“You can stay,” she says, because his tension is a question, and a reproach. She never meant to make him scared of her. “I won’t be much company, though.”

She wishes she could look out on a field of stars instead of these stomach-churning patterns. She wants to see something as false and safe as a starry night sky.

Radek is silent and a little hesitant next to her. Elizabeth tries to picture him looking relaxed and fails at that too. Sometimes he looks nervous, sometimes concentration deepens the two lines between his eyebrows, but if his forehead is ever smooth, Elizabeth has not seen it.

The observation room is a small convex bowl on the top of the Daedalus. The human crew filled it with cushions and perhaps use it as a trysting spot. She tries to imagine who might come here, if Kavanaugh brings a woman up here, but that way lie thoughts she would rather not contemplate. Elizabeth’s face twists into a half-hearted smile as she imagines Radek’s blush and stammer if she mentioned her ideas about this room. She won’t do that to him. If any knives aboard the ship need twisting, well, she knows where to find Colonel Caldwell.

“You’re lonely,” Caldwell said. “It’s hard being on—at the top.” Elizabeth knows enough about reading men to know what that slip means.

She gave him a look, faintly disgusted, faintly incredulous. “Not for you,” she said.

“Oh, it’s very lonely for me.” And she looked at him for a long moment. Did he misunderstand her deliberately, or is he really so obtuse?

“Being alone and being lonely isn’t the same thing,” she said. He took her upturned face as an invitation, and kissed her. She hesitated for just a moment before pushing him off, because he wasn’t entirely wrong—she wanted to hold someone, almost anyone, but not him.

Now, days later, her lips still feel stained by the unwanted contact. Caldwell’s eyes glittered like the diamonds she never wanted from Simon, jewels he never offered, as hard and unyielding. She thought she could see slivers of the Goa’uld consciousness still in them.

No, it is just Caldwell, too long accustomed to taking what he wants, made dangerous when she denied him the Atlantis command. Elizabeth knows that he would conquer her as a way of conquering Atlantis, and the thought disgusts her. Caldwell doesn’t know how to give. If she thought giving in might get Caldwell on her side, allow her to keep Atlantis, she would do it. What is whoring herself a little compared to the other things she’s done for Atlantis? Caldwell isn’t offering that, though.

She is here on Daedalus as penance. As the Hives stream toward Earth, the Daedalus carries all of the intelligence they’ve gathered back as well. SGC will take Atlantis from her, no matter what now, so the least she can do is help protect Earth, or die trying. She understands what John must have felt when he volunteered to fly the bomb onto the Hive ship—pure and calm and resigned. Narrow choices have their own cold comfort.

Radek shifts on the cushions next to her, and she wonders if he will say something, or if he needs to get back to their makeshift labs and sort through the shreds of Wraith technical information that remain.

Elizabeth feels long-banked anger simmering beneath her skin. She covered it for years with iron control, unshakeable composure, using it only when she needed its vibrant energy. Caldwell allowed her here on Daedalus because of the force of her personality. It’s all that stood between him and Atlantis, all that she has to offer. It used to be enough.

She wonders what it would be like, to give Radek what he wants, tonight. Would he be as gentle as he looks, treat her as a precious gift? Would he be awkward, or knowledgeable? She never looked at him that way before. Ronon, yes, and were he here now, she might seek him out, drug herself with hard, bruising sex. He could give her a moment when none of this is happening, but he is lost to her, a victim of her latest mistake. Caldwell would be punishing as well, but he wants to plant a flag in her, to lay claim to her in someone’s name. Ronon would just take her hard because that’s what men and women do when they have no words left.

She looks over at Radek and catches his eyes sliding away from her face. “Why did you come here?” she asks.

“It is not your fault,” he says. He pushes his glasses up his nose. His lower lip has a sensual curve she’s never noticed before.

“Yes, it is,” she says quietly. That’s what Carson told her, after they lost Michael.

“This was wrong,” Carson said.

“You agreed to it,” she reminded him, because the choice was already made.

“Experimenting on prisoners is wrong, Elizabeth.” She narrowed her eyes at the use of her given name—she prefers less familiarity when taking a scolding.

“You wouldn’t say that if it worked,” she said.

“It did work, and I am saying that.”

“What’s done is done, Carson.”

“Believing that is a luxury I don’t have! They should take away my license for this.”

“They aren’t human, Carson, they are a disease. A sentient disease, but a disease all the same.” She marshaled her arguments, not just for Carson, but for anyone else who came to ask. She met his eyes until he dropped them back down to her desk.

“I’ve heard arguments like that before, Dr. Weir,” said Carson as he left.

And later, he was too kind to say, “They’re human enough when you want something from them.”

Elizabeth half wishes she had stayed on Atlantis—she feels a tether tying her back there, which stretches out between here and Pegasus. The thought of Earth makes her feel thin and tired.

Radek puts his hand up to the back of his neck, in a gesture that reminds her of John, although they share nothing else, either in looks or demeanor. Hermiod told her John could have been sucked into the hyperspace bubble the Hive ship created, that he might be bouncing along in its wake. Should she hope that he survives, and boards the Wraith ship? So Rodney can to watch him die? Perhaps they are both gone, together again in the cold arms of death.

Elizabeth remembers—she spent too long watching John not to notice how he and Rodney echoed each other’s movements, so she felt little surprise when she stumbled onto more concrete proof: John’s perfect lips on Rodney’s neck as they stood on a balcony Elizabeth thought Atlantis had shown to her alone.

She is jealous. Not that Rodney gets to touch what she never will, but that each of them can mourn the other. Historians may pick over her bones, but no one will leave flowers on her grave.

Except perhaps Zelenka. He still looks at her expectantly. “If you want to talk,” he says. “People have told me I am a good listener.”

“That’s in short supply around here,” says Elizabeth with a quirk of her lips. “I don’t want to talk right now.” There are a thousand facile things she could do, to prompt him—gamesmanship, to make him say what she wants to hear.

“What, then, do you want?” he asks.

“Right now? I want to be held,” she says, opting for truth, and watches as gleeful incredulity flashes across his face, before his mask of careful regard comes back. No, not a mask, Zelenka is not one for masks—he just wants to show her what he thinks she wants to see.

“By me, Elizabeth?”

She could tell him a lie he won’t believe, or a truth he doesn’t want to hear, but instead she stands up, and says, “Come with me.”

He follows her to her tiny quarters. She sits down on the bed, and he stands over her. Is he happy to have the advantage of height, for once? She can’t tell. He touches her face, gently, so gently, and she likes the view of herself she sees reflected in his eyes.

He kisses her just as carefully, not as though she might break, but as though he wants to do everything perfectly, if he only gets the one chance. She takes off her shirt but leaves her bra on, and he touches her like he’s trying to memorize her, tracing his fingers along the lines of the lace on her skin. She reaches up and takes off his glasses. She expects maybe he’ll push her back down on the bed now that he has her full invitation. There must be a limit to his care.

Instead he sits down next to her, and touches her neck as he tastes her lips again. Despite herself, the cautious exploration excites her. Elizabeth tries to remember the last time with Simon, to compare that last to this first, but there was nothing to distinguish that time from the time before. They had a routine, which achieved results, but was routine all the same.

So she touches him back. His chin has light stubble, always, as if he forgets to shave often enough. His lower lip is as soft as it looks, and she tugs it gently between her teeth.

“Oh, ‘Lizabeth,” he whispers as she pulls him down on top of her. She puts his hands where she wants them: on her hips, under the waistband of her trousers. He says things in Czech against her skin; she doesn’t want to know what they mean.

She removes her underwear, and tugs at his shirt. He has, at least, that male obliviousness that keeps him from being bashful about being naked. She guides his hand between her legs, and his fingers are gentle there too, touching and pushing into her slowly, as if he has days to finish this. Another time, she might want urgency, or playful sex, but now, suspended above space and time, in the void between galaxies, this feels right.

He kisses her stomach, her hip bones, and then between her legs. He is skilled here too, either from experience, or because infinite attentiveness is what the job always needed. Her orgasm is sweet like candy, and makes her skin tingle.

Elizabeth sits up and tugs on his hip. She wants him inside her, him, now, and not anyone else.

“Are you sure?” Radek asks, and the question breaks something in her chest.

“Yes,” she says, looking up at him. She tries to look softly, not challenging, but he still can’t hold her gaze very long.

Gentle is not the word for this, now, say instead deliberate. She puts her legs around his waist and rocks up to meet him. His final rhythm is slower than she imagined it would be, and he buries his face in her neck when comes.

They fit into the tiny shower together, and even now that the sex is done, still he touches her like something cherished, so she lets him hold her when she cries. Her tears run into the drain with the Daedalus’s lukewarm, recycled water. She will shower in those tears tomorrow, and every day until they reach Earth.