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[1]
The Lantean day is twenty-seven hours and thirty-nine minutes long.
They have an abundance of technical geniuses on the expedition, so it doesn’t take long for one of them to code a fix for their networked laptops so they all show the right time and flip over to the next day when they should. The digital watches are a bigger pain in the ass, because they need to be updated individually and it’s nobody’s top priority, so that takes another two weeks.
For whatever reason, Doctor Weir and a few others keep wearing analog watches, even though it means they have to reset them every day. Something sentimental, John assumes—about the watches themselves, or the daily reminder that they’re on another planet, or some other thing he would never appreciate. He has never been a sentimental guy.
Physically, the time change puts all their circadian rhythms into a tilt-a-whirl, but after about a month in the Pegasus Galaxy, most of them stop walking into walls. John no longer gets up every day feeling like he has somehow both slept in too long and woken up at four in the morning. Pretty soon, he can’t remember how they ever got by with only twenty-four hours in a day.
That first month of confusion and everybody sleeping at weird hours is why it takes him a while to notice, but eventually he gets so annoyed at always having three or four emails in his inbox from Doctor Weir no matter when he boots up his laptop that he starts paying attention to the time stamps. Who the hell sends emails at 0200? Or at 2739, for that matter?
Once, in response to something that seems especially unworthy of anybody thinking about at planetary midnight (or ever, but that’s another problem), he just sends back:
Do you ever sleep?
She replies immediately, because she’s apparently an early bird as well as a night owl:
Rarely. Thoughts about Dr. Mendez’s proposal below?
He has no thoughts at all about the proposal below, something extremely long and dense that she probably actually read before forwarding along to him, but he wonders if he should… worry, or something, about the first bit. He doesn’t know her well, but this whole military commander business means that they are more or less partners in this wild adventure, so they have to watch out for each other. If she hasn’t adjusted to the galaxy jet-lag and is making decisions while running exhausted, that could be a problem for everyone.
He goes back and forth on it for the rest of the day, but she seems okay, so he decides to leave it alone.
[2]
A little time, a few narrowly-survived impossible-odds, and approximately seven thousand goddamn meetings later, he’s more likely to check in when that worry crosses his mind.
Not an open invitation to a heart-to-heart talk or anything, God forbid. More like a drive-by, “Hey, you good? The night crew says you’re bugging the crap out of them.”
He’s pretty dense about some things, but even he knows that it’s rarely a good idea to tell a woman “You look tired.” But it’s not like Elizabeth’s really—
—well, she is, of course she’s a woman, but not—
—anyway, he knows what he means.
She seems to take it in the spirit intended. “I’m all right.”
“Are you sure?” It’s dangerously close to heart-to-heart territory, but it comes out of his mouth anyway: “You know, I’m here if you ever need to…”
She looks as surprised to almost-hear it as he is to have almost-said it. “I’m fine,” she assures him. He breathes a silent sigh of relief. “This happens sometimes. You know me.”
He’s starting to. It feels like he does.
He wouldn’t mind knowing her a bit more.
[3]
It’s actually kind of… nice, sometimes, that she doesn’t sleep.
The Pegasus Galaxy is full of nightmare fuel, and while normally he can shake it off and go right back to being as cool and unbothered as ever, sometimes it sticks to him for a while. The Iratus retrovirus thing is the worst one yet, because his long recovery means he can’t do anything except lie around the infirmary for two weeks stocking up on too much drugged sleep and then a third week getting no sleep at all as his body tries to set itself right.
His cognitive functions and impulse control—such as it ever was—are pretty much back in place, so he’s no longer under guard. Carson gives him clearance to get up and walk around between vitals checks, but the prospect of too many people asking after his health is uncomfortable, so he does his wandering around the city at night.
Out of uniform, unarmed, uncertified for duty. Without that, he’s just John Sheppard, almost-human being, with some recent visceral memories of being very much not.
For all the times in his life when he felt like there was something awful in him, something he had to fight to keep under wraps, he never imagined that fear made so violently real. Inside and outside, inch by inch, he twisted into something cold and hard and alien until there was almost nothing left of him. It’s better, day by day, but no matter how many times Carson tells him to be patient, it’s hard to believe he’ll ever feel normal again.
At the time, he wasn’t nearly as scared as he should have been, but he’s plenty unnerved now… and physically uncomfortable, and bored. His eyes might look normal again, but it still hurts to look at a screen or read more than a few pages at a time. His team comes by when they can, but they have been divvied up for the duration onto other assignments. The nurses are too busy and tired of his whining to give him any more attention than medically necessary.
He’s so, so sick of his own company.
So it’s nice that, when his city-wide pacing takes him through the otherwise silent and empty mess hall, he finds Elizabeth there at a table with a book and a past-midnight snack.
She smiles at him the same way she always did before, like she knows exactly who he is and isn’t afraid of anything in him. “What are you doing awake at this hour?”
“You’re gonna talk?” He grabs an apple out of a bowl and crosses the room to join her. After sprawling in a chair and mostly-swallowing his first bite, he says, “Medical staff kicked me out again.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
He tugs the end of his long sleeves down when he notices they’ve ridden up enough to show some of the mottled blue skin that still covers most of his right arm. Her gaze flicks down when he does it, the action apparently drawing her attention, so he reaches for something to say.
“How is… everything?” She has been keeping him somewhat up to date whenever she comes to see him in the infirmary, but her visits are always brief before she’s called away again. He adds, hopefully, “Caldwell still driving you nuts?”
“Of course he is,” she kindly agrees. “But I think he’ll be just as glad to get away from me once you’re back in action.”
John doubts that, but he’s selfishly glad she’s not being overly welcoming. He gets an uncomfortable knot in his gut whenever the two of them start getting along, and it feels just close enough to jealousy that he never wants to examine it too closely. It’s probably better not to know whether the underlying reason is personal or professional.
“We all miss you,” she says, and the balance tips sharply into personal, because she says we but her face says I, and suddenly he’s remembering how she bravely, stupidly kept coming to see him while he turned into something horrible so that he wouldn’t be alone.
It’s overwhelming to realize how much that matters to him.
He clears his throat, bites into his apple, and talks through it. “You can order Carson to release me anytime.”
She wrinkles her nose, at his manners or his suggestion, and it’s so cute he wants to memorize it, to hang it front and center in his mind over the other memories he’s trying to forget. “I don’t think it works like that.”
He should get out of there, because he’s probably overdue in the infirmary, and because he really, really wants to stay sitting right here with her in the middle of the night for as long as possible, with no work to talk about and nobody around.
He can’t make himself leave. He feels like himself for the first time in weeks. As a compromise, he at least manages to look away from her face, down to the book she put aside as soon as she saw him. “What’s that about?”
She tells him. He even gets her to read some of it out loud. All in all, he keeps her there until the sky transitions from black to gray, and the repeated radio calls from the nurse on duty transition from reminders to threats.
“All right,” Elizabeth says, “I’ve kept you awake long enough,” as if it were her idea. As if she somehow got as much from this quiet night of human reconnection as he did. “They’re going to send out a search party if we don’t get you back to the infirmary.”
She walks him there.
[4]
Eventually, he starts worrying when she does sleep.
At some point, he picks up the habit of swinging through the control room at the end of the day to give everything a final check. It’s not specifically about her when he starts doing it, but it turns into a nice book-end: his first visit to the control room every day is for their 0800-ish coffee-check-in, and his last visit brings him by her office again to remind her that the day is over.
Usually, she wishes him well and goes back to whatever she’s doing, but if he times it right, sometimes she’ll call it a night and leave with him.
It becomes a bit of a game, testing strategies to boost his success rate. If he loiters in the control tower until he sees her stand up from her desk for a screen break, that’s an easy win, because her focus is already interrupted. The technicians get weird, though, when he hangs around too long without saying something, and part of winning the game is that no one can know he’s playing it.
“Just some fresh air,” is his second, indirect play if the suggestion of a hard stop fails. When the moon is out, lighting up the ocean, she can rarely resist a peek, and then he has her. Who would go back to spreadsheets after that? Especially when her other option is a dessert someone squirrelled away in the kitchen, or an even-better-view he scouted and has been keeping in his back pocket to show her?
So he notices whenever she has a run of leaving her office and signing off radio for bed before he gets there. It happens for a week after Kolya takes him prisoner and almost kills him, but she barely slept at all in the month leading up to it after her nanite coma, so she probably needs the rest. It happens again after they come back from Earth, but they’re all adjusting to the clock change again.
It happens after Carson dies. One week. Two.
John comes by earlier and earlier, but she’s already gone. He never sees her at dinner, either. He’s pretty shaken up too, and not too interested in general socializing, but he sets up a movie night with something she likes and invites her first thing in the morning.
“Thank you, but I’m pretty tired.” She looks it, too, despite all the early nights she’s theoretically getting. “I don’t think I’ll make it.”
“Come on,” he says, closer to a plea than he intends. Carson was the only one able to coax her out on Earth, and surely more deftly than John could ever manage. He takes aim at the biggest target: her sense of responsibility. “It’ll be good for everyone to see you there.”
It’s the wrong thing to say, because her expression closes off. “Aren’t you the one always telling me I should get more sleep?”
“Yes, but—” He cuts himself off, because the rest of the thought that popped into his head feels like jumping off a cliff.
Into the awkward silence he leaves, she promises, “I’ll try,” but she doesn’t show.
He can’t skip his own event, so he sits through the Bogie and Bacall picture he unsuccessfully chose as bait, but he cuts out when the rest of the group decides on a double feature. It’s weighing on him—her persistent absence, his failed invitation, and the permanent hole in their group that John can’t fill.
Carson cared about all of them and made sure they knew it. He wore his feelings on his sleeve; most of the time, John can’t find his with a map.
And when he can…
He stops at her door. There are no cracks around the edges to let him see whether a light is on inside, but he’s pretty sure she’s hiding instead of sleeping and he decides to risk it.
She’s not asleep, but she’s dressed for bed when she opens the door, loose clothes and no makeup. She looks so soft that his heart skips. “John?”
He blurts out what he didn’t say earlier. “I miss you.”
Her eyes open a little wider. After a moment, she takes a step to the side, inviting him in. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“I know.” It’s a squirmy feeling, talking about things he normally wouldn’t, but he took the first leap so he’s already falling. “But this nine-to-five thing you’re doing these days—”
She raises an eyebrow.
“—seven-to-seven? It’s messing up my average.”
“Your what?”
“The… thing.” Heat rises in his cheeks as he tosses the no-one-knows rule out the window. “When I come to your office at night and try to get you to leave with me.”
“It’s a game. I know.” The look she gives him is so fond that it softens the sharp spike of embarrassment at being caught out who-knows-how-long-ago and not realizing it. “You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
Softened or otherwise, there’s plenty of embarrassment left, now swirling around with the worry and loss and everything else that led him here. He misses her, and maybe it’s stupid to be so fixated on those few minutes at the end of the day when they see each other all the time anyway, but it’s suddenly important that she knows, “It’s not just a game.”
The affection in her face only increases until it feels like a physical bridge crossing the space between them. “I know that, too. I appreciate it.” There’s a little pink on her cheeks when she admits, “Sometimes I even wait for you.”
His heart is hammering, all those feelings he usually can’t find filling him up so fast that they need somewhere to go. If she already knows everything about his intentions, maybe before he realized them himself, this might not even be a surprise.
He steps close and kisses her, and when she kisses him back, he doesn’t stop.
[5]
He hasn’t slept in days, and it feels like weeks. Much longer, if he thinks about it, but she’s back in the city now, and he’s going to do everything he can to forget the awful months when she wasn’t.
The nights were the worst, restlessly waking up every two or three hours. His quarters were potently empty, reminding him of conversations and kisses and the messy ways they kept trying to fit good sex into the tiny expedition beds, fit a secret relationship into the even smaller spaces in their busy lives.
If his empty quarters hurt too much, with her unfinished book still on his nightstand, her thin analog watch resting next to his on his dresser, he’d get dressed and walk the city. That wasn’t much better. There are very few spaces in Atlantis where they never spent time together, for one reason or another, and in the harsh and possibly permanent light of its absence, he could clearly see how their love affair started long before he first kissed her.
He never told anyone about it, not before he left her on the Asuran homeworld, and definitely not after. When he proposed his first rescue mission, an objectively terrible and desperate plan, Sam told him he was “too close to this to think clearly.” He wasn’t going to pile on another reason for her to doubt him.
More than four months later, she finally gave him a go. That plan was only marginally less suicidal, but it was time-sensitive, and the window was closing fast. Sam probably only agreed because she knew he and his team would go anyway, come hell or court-martial, and they were a little less likely to die with backup.
The op fell apart exactly the way Sam predicted it would, and they survived by the skin of their teeth just like he predicted. In the final account, it’s not clear if John’s team rescued Elizabeth from the Asurans or she rescued them, but he really, really doesn’t care who gets the credit.
She’s home, that’s what matters. He wishes Keller and Sam would let her out of the secure observation room, but Elizabeth insisted on a thorough quarantine just as strenuously as they did.
He really hates that she said she needed to be analyzed, talking about the nanites keeping her alive, the nanites that let her stick her whole hand into a wall to unlock their prison cell at the Asuran outpost. Analyzed sounds far too much like something they’d do to a machine, to some alien computer they don’t care about, not a person they all missed so much that not a single thing felt right without her.
At 2700, exhausted and way too awake, John gets up and dressed. Maybe if he sees her again, watches her sleep for a few minutes through all the security cameras pointed at her…
When he gets there, she’s not asleep. She’s sitting up, her arms crossed over her knees, looking pale and lonely in her white scrubs, but alive and here.
John nods to the guard outside the door and then goes in without bothering to suit up first. He can resist touching her, but he can’t resist seeing her face-to-face with no plastic in between.
Out of everything he could say, everything he ached to be able to tell her for four months and for the thirty-some hours she has been back in his life, he just goes with, “It’s late.”
“I can’t sleep.”
His heart thuds, remembering her hand reaching out and dissolving a wall. “You can’t—”
Off whatever his expression must be, she quickly interrupts, “Oh, no, I can. I just can’t seem to do it tonight.”
He takes a deep breath and lets it out as casually as he can manage. “That’s just part of the Elizabeth Weir experience, right?”
The smile she gives him is small and scared.
It’s a lot harder not to touch her than he expected. Instead, trying to bridge the gap, he says, “Nothing has changed.”
She looks at him like he’s insane.
Even with all the cameras and microphones recording, he lets everything he’s feeling into his voice. She has to know, in spite of four months apart, in spite of whatever part of her needs to be analyzed, in spite of her being locked up in here under guard instead of in her office or in one of their beds, “Nothing has changed for me.”
Her eyes well up, and it’s such an intimately human expression that he’s sure that she’ll be all right. Not pretending-to-be-sure, but sure.
“I thought they would kill me. I didn’t realize that they’d just… put me away.” She swallows and wipes her eyes. “They don’t turn down their lights at night. There were no windows. I don’t even know how long I’ve been gone.”
“Four months, ten days,” he says without counting. He does a little math before he clarifies, “On this planet. Five months by Lantean time.” Even longer on Earth. He doesn’t know if her internal clock would have reset to a twenty-four hour rhythm without external cues. He feels sick just thinking about it.
Somehow, though, she looks relieved to have it in concrete terms. “Okay.” She picks at the edge of the infirmary blanket over her lap. “Nights must be awfully long here.”
They are, longer than the days, though they’re getting shorter now. Atlantis was right near the equator on Lantea, but he crash-landed the city here closer to one of the poles. With so much darkness every day, he feels tired all the time.
Maybe that will change now.
Not yet, though. “I’ll bring us both some books,” he says, emphasizing the both. “A few movies.” Ironically, the first one he thinks of is The Big Sleep.
As long as she’s in here, he’s going to keep her insomnia company. What’s another few long days awake?
He skips the books and film noir tonight, though. He leaves the room just long enough to get each of them a snack, pulls up a chair, and catches her up on what she missed.
[6]
He rolls over, reaches out, and wakes up when his arm drops over the edge of the bed into empty air.
The first few times that happened, it used to jolt him wide awake with a sudden sharp panic, a flash of thinking it was all a wishful dream—everything, from Elizabeth’s return to Atlantis months ago right up through falling asleep together in their shared bed.
The bed itself is nothing fancy, or even comfortable—two military-issue cots strapped together, with a blanket pretending to mask the crack between mattresses—but he feels grateful every time he gets into it.
It’s the symbolism as much as the actual object. Dragging his mattress through the halls was as good as sending out a press release. Their bed means they aren’t sneaking around anymore, that they decided together that discretion and any consequences to their careers were less important than spending every night together.
It’s rarely the whole night, though. She has the habit of getting up for a while in the middle of it, and he has the related habit of unconsciously searching for her missing body heat until he nearly rolls off her side of the bed.
He blinks until he’s alert enough to lift up his head and look for her. She’s standing at the window, like she often is, having whatever silent conversation she has with the city when she and Atlantis are the only ones awake.
Both moons are out tonight, brightening the sky. That’s probably what woke her, but they light her so beautifully that he’s glad she turned down his suggestion of drapes.
After a while, she yawns, and he feels himself dropping off again, and that’s his cue. “Hey.” They’ve had the conversation enough times that he doesn’t bother with a preamble. “Get back in here.”
She turns around and gives him a gentle smile. “I’m not tired enough.”
“Well, I am.” He’s getting really good at holding her just the right way, so that his warmth and the weight of his arm will let her settle down for a while no matter how restless she is. She told him once that she sleeps better with him than she did with any other lover, and that only fueled his quest to perfect the technique.
She relents easily, crossing the room as he shuffles back onto his side of the bed to make space. Once she slides under the sheet, he curls around her, nuzzles the strap of her tank top aside, and kisses her shoulder.
Sometimes that’s his first move in the direction of midnight sex, but he’s genuinely exhausted from yesterday’s mission and just wants to be close to her. Her better-than-with-anyone-else sleep confession didn’t include a comparison to how well or poorly she does alone, but in the hours when they’re together and she settles into his arms, safe and relaxed and trusting… he has never slept so well in his life.
“Go to sleep,” she says when he kisses her shoulder a second time. “You need it.”
“You first,” he mumbles into her soft, soft skin.
They drift off together.
[end]