An Exercise in Futility Pt 3

[marguerite_krux]

Summary: Elizabeth catches up with Shep, and he can't put off that confrontation he was dreading. Cue drama.
Rating: Still fairly tame and non-childhood-trama-causing.
Disclaimer: If SGA were mine, I wouldn't need fic to make up for the lack of Weir.

A/N: Disclaimer- I decided to go for a Hot Zone mood in these flashbacks. Lizzie and Shep can't be best friends every hour of the day, after all.

 

Exercise in Futility Pt 3

Facing the Facts

Elizabeth had been working herself to the ground on Atlantis’ most recent round of negotiations with an alien race, the most promising so far at that, and he’d jeopardized it. While John really believed that something in the drinks had messed with his head and convinced him that drawing his gun on a foreign dignitary was a good idea, even if he had no real intention of using it on anyone, he certainly hadn’t spent the whole evening prior to that major faux pas being the model guest, making polite conversation and buttering up the Ciaran leader to sign Elizabeth’s treaty.

Slightly ashamed of himself, John acknowledged that he’d taken one look at the guy and the way he was looking at Elizabeth, and developed an instant loathing for him, which led to some subtle needling whenever he felt he could get away with it and even when he knew he was reaching the line. Some weird unexpected biochemical reaction to the local drink may have been what caused him to finally cross that line but he hadn’t been helplessly dragged all the way up to it in the first place, no, that had been willful on his part. And it was only through Elizabeth’s impressive skill when it came smoothing over the whole thing that there had been no major fallout. Between the Atlantis expedition and the Ciaran people, that is. The same could not be said for Atlantis’ leader and her military commander.

--

“You do not accompany me here to trade negotiations in order to cause interplanetary conflicts, John,” she spoke in a low tone that nearly trembled with raw anger. After convincing the Ciaran leader- a benevolent, fair-minded man indeed, to put up with all this fuss- that John's response was the unfortunate outcome of one too many drinks combined with the healthy paranoia that served most people well in the Pegasus galaxy, she had excused herself and the instigator of this mess from the table. “The one group of people that have so far refrained from attacking us or selling us out to the Wraith or Genii and you pull a stunt like that. What the hell was that about? You’re lucky he didn’t have you arrested.”

“It was something in the drinks, Elizabeth,” he said, concentrating carefully on getting the right words out. Unfortunately, he was so absorbed in this endeavor that he failed to notice the pillar looming ahead, shrouded in the gloomy shadows of the dusk, and almost walked right into it. At the last moment, he saw it and stumbled to the side, knocking into Elizabeth, and he had to grab her arm to keep her from hitting the ground. Needless to say, it did little to improve his standing in her eyes.

“I’ll say it was the drinks,” she said harshly. “Listen,” she went on, then halted suddenly, transparently at a loss for words. For all her competence at finding the words to defuse the situation at the table, to elicit sympathy and understanding, to smoothly prompt Birat into magnanimously waving aside the matter and his armed entourage to relax again, she couldn’t find a way to put this to rest between them.

Elizabeth pulled her arm out of his grasp. “John.” She sighed and pressed her lips together like she was trying not to say something she was going to regret.

--

He’d winced at that simple utterance. He hated it when she said his name like that, so disappointed and frustrated. He hated that pause when she was torn between saying something fake and diplomatic and reassuring rather than what she was really thinking and feeling, and he hated himself for the contradiction in shying away from her expectations while also wanting nothing but the real honest-to-god truth from her.

The problem was that he cared so much about what she thought of him that when he screwed up, it would make him feel a hundred times the failure that people in his past had labeled him. So even when he knew he was in the wrong, it was just easier to deny the problem and ignore his part in it rather than admit it and face up to her hurt and anger.

Give him something tangible to fix, a sacrifice to make, whatever it took and he could do it. He’d kill himself ten times over to save the city, to save their people, to save her. But put Elizabeth in front of him, refusing to meet his eyes, arms folded and stiffly holding herself apart from him, radiating rigid formality and cold aloofness…and he wanted to bluster and prevaricate and just get the hell away from her before he completely destroyed the image of the man she thought he was, the man he knew he wasn’t but wanted to be- for her.

And that was different, she was different, she made him different. Because whenever he’d come up against disapproving authority figures, he stuck to the established pattern of either rebelliously proving them right for unfairly hating him because they were such assholes they didn’t deserve anything else from him, or striving to make good because he wanted to prove them wrong, to rub it in their faces and make them acknowledge that he was worth something after all.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted to succeed just to make his superior happy. That wasn’t in the John Sheppard ‘Guide to Dealing with the Chain of Command’. The fact that he reacted so personally to matters concerning her…rattled him. It left him stranded without any bearings in a land littered with misleading, confusing signposts. It short-circuited the function marked ‘rational thinking’ in his brain.

--

“What?” he snapped, when the silence drew out too much longer. “What do you want me to say, Elizabeth? What am I supposed to do?” Just like before, his realization that he’d done wrong made him itch beneath his skin, uncomfortable, restless, touchy. He didn’t want to face her like this, knowing he’d let her down.

She looked up at last, eyes remote and icy. “You’ve done enough. Go back to Atlantis, get checked out by Carson.” He started to protest but she looked past him at the figure that had emerged from the hall after them. “Ronon, please escort Colonel Sheppard back to the city. Send Major Lorne in to replace him at the proceedings here.” When he nodded in assent, Elizabeth took a step closer to John, lowered her voice so that the other man wouldn’t hear. “Figure out your limits because I don’t ever want to see you act like this again.”

He’d embarrassed her. He was her second-in-command; he ran the city on her behalf during military crises. He represented Atlantis as much as she did and he’d embarrassed her with this behavior. The appropriate words formed in his mind, traveled so slowly to his vocal chords, struggling sluggishly to be given voice. “Elizabeth,” he still sounded irritated, he sounded confrontational when this was supposed to be an olive branch to bridge the gaping chasm between them. “I’m s-”

“Go.” She held his gaze for a moment longer, her eyes piercing his, giving visual emphasis to that single harshly uttered syllable. Then Elizabeth turned and walked back to the hall, heels clicking irritably as she left him behind.

“Man, she’s pissed,” Ronon said, clapping a hand on his shoulder sympathetically.

“Yeah,” he said numbly, watching her leave.

--

He’d handled it all wrong. Yesterday, and this morning, in trying to avoid her. But maybe now he recognized where he kept going wrong with her, maybe he could change the way this played out.

So he reined in his instinctive defensiveness and mildly replied, “I admit I may not have been…exactly…gracious and warm and open to him, but really, Elizabeth, the part where I pulled my gun out was not entirely my fault.” It may have been the outshoot of his dislike and hostility towards the man, given form by weakened inhibitions, but not a willed conscious decision. That had to count in his defense, right?

“Oh, no,” she snapped, “You can’t always play the alien influence card for any reckless or careless act you commit. What kind of example would that set for the people under your command?”

“It wouldn’t exactly be the worst example if it happens to be true. You sure weren’t averse to using the alien influence excuse to explain that kiss,” he shot back, making sure to put special emphasis on the last two words. As expected, the reminder of the incident took the wind out of her sails as she automatically recalled their very first, very public, and regrettably very forced kiss. Funny how hostile spirits who hijacked other people’s bodies didn’t care to observe the rules of decency and decorum in front of those people’s colleagues. The angst-laden mantra ‘think of the paperwork’, which punctuated pretty much every alien related incident, had been worked overtime on that particular occasion.

Invoking the confusion and awkwardness of that incident diluted a little of Elizabeth’s anger as his reasoning got through her prickly shell, though in a few moments, she regrouped and tried a different angle of approach. “So, you’re seriously telling me that out of everyone present at the Ciaran gathering, you would be the first to react, no, overreact like that? Come on, Ronon would be the first on my list of likely suspects,” she grimaced, “The man threw me into a wall, after all.”

Yeah, but Ronon wouldn’t care if another guy was checking you out, John thought, then shoved away that mess of emotions and responded in his buddy’s defense, “That wasn't on purpose. He and Teyla decided to forego the usual bashing of each other with sticks and engage in this strange Pegasus version of tag, with a strong emphasis on sneak attacks…” he shrugged lightly.

Despite the seemingly casual way in which he referred to the incident, mainly because Elizabeth had made it clear at the time that she held no grudges against Ronon and it wasn’t that big a deal, John had to carefully moderate his tone not to express the fear and panic that had swamped him when he first heard that Elizabeth had been taken to the infirmary after a confrontation with the newest member of Atlantis, a man he had vouched for personally.

~end part 3~ yes, I know it's a weird place to cut off, but the next chapter would be lopsided if I didn't stop here. Has to be done. ~end~