Between Sleep and Awake
By AngelQueen

“Teyla?” She struggles not to scream in frustration as she feels herself talking, but it is not her saying the words. She pushes ineffectually at Phoebus’ overwhelming presence, failing yet again to dislodge her from her mind.

“Yes?”

“Kill him.”

Something within her freezes and she is suddenly even more terrified than she already has been. No. This is not happening. She will wake up any moment and find it is all a dream. She will be in her quarters, lying tangled in her sheets. John will be asleep in his quarters, safe and sound from the demons that plague her mind during the night.

“Kill him now!”

She sees the anguish on Teyla’s face, the utter devastation, which only increases when she hears Colonel Caldwell tell her that Phoebus has the power to kill practically the entire expedition.

She watches as Teyla raises her weapon, pointing it at John. He does not look at her, however, turning his face towards the camera.

“Elizabeth! Help me! Fight her! Elizabeth!” John shouts frantically, his voice thick with barely-suppressed fear.

She loses all control then. She starts shrieking within the confines of her own mind, battering fiercely at the walls Phoebus has placed around her consciousness. She can feel malevolent spirit struggling to push her down further, tightening the walls around her, but she doesn’t even pause to consider it.

She won’t let this happen. ‘TEYLA!! DON’T SHOOT HIM!! TEYLA!’

“ELIZABETH!”

The Athosian woman opens fire, raining down a storm of bullets on his vulnerable body.

“TEYLA!! NO!”

But it is too late. Phoebus is suddenly gone, perhaps having released her now that her nemesis is gone as well.

But it does not matter. John is gone as well.

She leans against the table, trembling violently as tears pour down her face. She stares at his bloodstained form with a sick fascination.

He’s gone. She killed him.

“You made me kill him,” she hears Teyla breathe. “You were not strong enough. You failed. And he is now gone because of it. How could you? The one time he called out to you for help, you turned away. How could you, Elizabeth?!”

She shakes her head, trying to deny it. But she is not even strong enough to do that. Teyla is right. She wasn’t strong enough. And now he was gone. Gone before she could tell him… Gone…

No… no…


“NO!”

Elizabeth Weir shot up from the bed, both sweat and tear-soaked. She looked around violently, frantic to know her true surroundings. The familiar shadows extending throughout the place confirmed that she was indeed in her room, and nowhere near that damned lab.

It hadn’t happened. John wasn’t dead.

But the feeling of horror and agony did not subside with the return of that truth to her mind. She sat shivering in her bed, breathing heavily and knowing that she wouldn’t be able to sleep again anytime soon. Nor did she want to, after that nightmare.

Untangling her limbs from her twisted sheet, Elizabeth slipped from the bed and moved into her bathroom. When she stepped up to the sink, intent on splashing herself with some cold water to cool her heated skin, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She winced. Her hair was a mess, to be sure, but it was the dark circles around her eyes that caught her attention. Well, that and the haunted expression on her face that did not appear to be fading.

After drying her face with a towel, she leaned wearily against the sink. It hadn’t really sunk in just what Phoebus had tried to do using her body as the instrument until after she’d left the infirmary. Before then, she and John had just joked uneasily about it, studiously avoiding all mention of… certain aspects of the experience. She had apologized profusely to Ronon, but he had been surprisingly amiable about the whole thing, merely asking her how she had heard him and Teyla coming so often during their hunt for her.

She still did not understand that man. She doubted she ever would.

After nearly three days of lying in that infirmary bed, Carson had finally consented to let her and John out, provided that they both went directly to their quarters and did not try to jump back into their work. With the threat of having an escort to keep them away from the control room, they’d both agreed and left in separate directions.

Ever since then, Elizabeth had abided by Carson’s wishes and stayed away from work. She actually spent a great deal of her time reading and trying to relax. Only, the latter was usually when she would suddenly feel the urge to leap off her bed, if only to make sure – yet again – that she still had control of her facilities.

The nights hadn’t been much better. Nightmares were her constant companion when the sun set in the distance. And they weren’t just about Phoebus and her hellish vendetta against Thalan. She saw Carson unable to revive John after removing that damned bug from his neck, Koyla shooting John before he could get his own shot off, and so many other horrible situations that she didn’t want to examine too closely.

Elizabeth shook her head, pushing herself away from the sink and out of the bathroom. She hadn’t left her room in two days. She had to get out.

Throwing on the outfit she’d worn earlier that day, she quietly slipped out of her room and through the halls. She hadn’t any particular destination in mind, but it wasn’t too surprising that she found herself moving towards the control room. The graveyard shift was on duty, so she might be able to slip by without them noticing her presence.

Just as she had predicted, Elizabeth was able to walk quietly up to her office with a minimum of sound. If the people on duty noticed her appearance in the control room, they said nothing of it to her, nor did they seem ready to call the infirmary and tell the doctor on duty that Dr. Weir had broken her restraining orders.

When she entered her office, she didn’t even bother turning on her lights. Moving past her desk, she walked towards the balcony. The door slid shut behind her and she was now alone in the dark. Staring at the railing, she couldn’t help but shiver slightly.

How many times had they both stood there, both totally secure and comfortable in each other’s company? It was certainly often enough that she had come to regard it as an unusual week if it did not occur at least once or twice. So many times he’d join her with some smart remark, usually at Rodney’s expense, and he’d look all the more pleased with himself when he earned a small smile or laugh for his efforts. So often she’d bring him out here just to have a few moments of quiet to share with him. Such a small amount of time, and yet it did them both a world of good. It was times like all of those that bolstered her in the most exhaustive times.

But now… now she felt tainted, as though she shouldn’t be here to disrupt the peaceful atmosphere the two of them had created together.

Biting her lip, Elizabeth walked silently to a shadowed area opposite the door. If someone came looking for her, they wouldn’t be able to see her easily, especially when she slid down the wall, her knees drawn up to her chest. Resting her chin on her knees, she turned and stared dully out at the dark, rolling waves of the ocean.

She silently cursed Phoebus, damning her for so royally demolishing the clear-cut lines that defined her life. She had barely been keeping them together in the first place, given all that had happened in the past several months, but the wrathful alien had finished them off. Now she sat adrift in a mind of chaos, her thoughts and feelings concerning John now warring with the guilt of not being able to stop Phoebus’ thankfully brief reign of terror on Atlantis. Memories of feeling his lips were just below the surface of her conscious thoughts, just waiting for a moment to spring forth into her mind’s eye, only to see them coupled with feeling herself tell Teyla to shoot him. Phoebus had failed in getting her revenge on Thalan, but she had still wrought enough pain to last a lifetime.

In time, Elizabeth might have slipped off into a light fitful doze had the door to the balcony not opened. She twisted her head towards the door, but did not stand, even as she recognized the form of the person from the faint light out in the control room.

John.

He moved out of her office and towards the railing of the balcony, his gaze directed outwards, much as her own had just been. She didn’t think that he’d noticed her presence until he broke the silence.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Elizabeth didn’t move from her position against the wall, but she replied softly, “No. You?”

“No. Nightmares.”

“I know what you mean.” She hadn’t meant to reply to his admission, but her own just slipped out. She watched him, his back still to her, waiting to see if he’d say anything further.

“He kept apologizing to me.”

“Thalan?”

“Yeah. He kept saying that he was sorry that Phoebus had dragged you and me into all of this, sorry that there wasn’t any other way for him to keep us alive but to kill both you and Phoebus. That’s why he only stunned Teyla and the others he came across. He said he was making my losses as few as possible.”

How nice of him, she thought bitterly. Phoebus certainly hadn’t been that generous. She’d nearly killed Ronon. She didn’t even bother to hesitate.

Not to mention she kept repeating gleefully that she was going to get to see death enter Thalan’s eyes, that she would see the bitter look of defeat flash across his dying face. And she was so quick to point out that it was such a handsome, strong face. The alien woman just kept saying that anyone who got in her way of completing her mission got what they deserved. John didn’t have to agree to take on Thalan’s spirit, but he had. That made him fair game by her demented reasoning.

“How are we supposed to sleep with all of this in our minds,” she asked rhetorically. “How do we close our eyes, knowing that it’s all there, waiting for us?” She bit her lip and looked down.

There was no answer, but surprisingly, she heard him move away from the railing and closer to her. She looked up to see him kneeling down in front of her, his dark, intense eyes locking with hers.

“What do you see when you sleep, Elizabeth?”

It was amazingly easy to just blurt everything out to him, far more so than she ever expected it to be. She told him of the nightmare that had awoken her that very night, of how the entire incident had brought other terrible memories back to the surface to haunt her dreams. She told him about how she tried so hard to stop Phoebus but she just wouldn’t listen! The woman was mad.

During her rant, John had moved his body so that he was sitting beside her, also leaning against the wall. When she finally paused, he reached out slowly and pulled her closer to him. Surprised, she didn’t resist and allowed herself the luxury of leaning against him, her loose curls mingling just slightly with his own messy hair.

“You told Caldwell that it wasn’t his fault for what he did while he was under the control of the Goa’uld,” he said at last. “Humans can’t fight back against that sort of possession. Now put your money where your mouth is, Elizabeth. It was not you that pulled the trigger against Ronon. It wasn’t you that was trying to kill Thalan. You aren’t a homicidal maniac willing to kill over a hundred people just to kill the enemy in a war that no one even remembers anymore.”

All of this had been told to her by several different people. Caldwell, Carson, even Kate Heightmeyer, who had come to visit her once she had settled back into her quarters. All of them had told her the same things. But still her feelings of guilt had persisted, making her feel that if she had just tried a little bit harder, none of this would have happened.

But when he said it, it just made more sense to her than when the others had sprouted the same thing. It entered her mind and actually stayed there, instead of being swept away by the currents. John Sheppard’s words carried more weight with her than the combined words of three others, one a professional psychologist. Did the ironies never end?

They sat together for a long time, never moving, no longer speaking. She later vaguely recalling the sun beginning to rise, but given how refreshed she felt later, Elizabeth knew she must have slept at some point in time.

There was still much more for them both to resolve. The kiss that Phoebus instigated with Thalan had brought feelings to the foreground in both of them, something that had to be addressed for both their sakes. But she no longer felt as though she was going to suffocate or be crushed beneath the weight of her own thoughts.

She felt as though she was slowly putting things back together, even though she knew that the new picture would be much different than the old one.

And she was all right with that.

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