Teyla frowned at the floor. “I was, but I was told Dr. Weir wanted to see me today.”
John was starting to get an inkling of what this might be about. Though one office wall was transparent, Teyla had come from the direction where the curve of the gallery blocked a full view of the room until the last instant; she obviously hadn’t expected to see John here, and Elizabeth had just as obviously lured her back to the city hoping she would. He pushed to his feet so he could face her, perching on the edge of the desk and folding his arms. “Okay. Would you like to tell me what’s wrong?”
Teyla lifted her chin, saying stiffly, “I thought perhaps you would need time… I did not know how these things were done among your people.”
John sighed. “So you went to the mainland to make it easier for me to be incredibly unfair and fire you for the exact same thing that happened to half the Marines and a dozen or so scientists and techs, who are all back on duty now including Kavanagh, who nearly cracked Ford’s skull?”
Distracted, she asked warily, “Why is it called ‘fire’?”
“It’s a figure of speech.” John shook his head. “Look, that wasn’t you.”
Her voice hardened. “That was me. I could feel myself doing it.” Then she shook her head, her expression turning rueful. “And I did not think you would ‘fire’ me. But… I cannot ask you to trust me if I do not feel I can trust myself.” She gestured a little wearily. “I thought I might want to fire me.”
“But Dorane didn’t give you a choice; none of what happened was your idea.” John noticed Bates again, watching them with a line of suspicion between his brows, as if hoping to catch them at something, like making out in the glass-walled office in full view of half the operations staff. He obviously thinks being on my ’gate team is a lot more fun than it actually is. And Teyla had probably reported in detail what Dorane had made her do, which Bates would file away as material to use against her eventually. John had never been able to convince Teyla that selectively leaving items out of your mission reports in order to make life easier for your team leader was not the same thing as lying. “You didn’t have any control over what you were doing.”
“To my people, leaving a companion in that kind of danger—” Teyla’s lips thinned with disgust. “It is as bad as abandoning someone to the Wraith.”
“My people aren’t real thrilled about that either,” John pointed out.
“And it was my hand that gave you the poison that almost killed you. If I could not prevent myself from doing that—”
“Look, at one point I went nuts and ran off and left McKay alone in the repository. He was just lucky the Koan weren’t around.” John could tell he wasn’t going to be able to talk her through this. It was something she was going to have to get through on her own. “I’m not going to argue with you, because you’re too stubborn and we’d be here all day. You’re not fired and that’s final.” He pushed off the desk, straightening up. “Now come here and do the head-butt thing with me.”
“It is not called the head-butt thing,” she said, but her voice roughened and she stepped forward. The Athosian embrace had different shades of meaning John hadn’t entirely figured out yet, though respect was one of them and mutual forgiveness another, as well as expressing simple relief that you were both still alive. He had also never gotten the hang of who put whose hands on the other person’s shoulders and in what order and who bent their head to touch foreheads first. He managed to fumble the process enough that Teyla actually snorted in amusement.
John led her outside the office after that, so Elizabeth could have it back and Bates could get on with his life. Teyla asked, “Did Dr. Weir really want to see me or was this a trick?”
Rodney was standing at the gallery railing, looking over the ’gate room with the air of a minor tyrant overseeing his domain. John said, loud enough for him to hear, “Elizabeth probably wants you to guilt McKay into not using this to drive Kavanagh over the edge.”
Getting the hint, Teyla widened her eyes innocently at Rodney. “Surely Dr. McKay would not do that.”
“Surely Dr. McKay would.”
Rodney gave them a superior smile. “It’s amusing when you plot against me. Oh, I want to show you something.” He headed off toward the rear of the gallery.
John hesitated. Teyla had been trying to avoid what had happened to her by avoiding him, and John had just realized he was avoiding something too. But realizing it wasn’t enough to make him stop doing it, and he followed Rodney and Teyla over to a laptop set up on one of the consoles.
Rodney sat down and typed rapidly, bringing up a video program. “Zelenka managed to pull this off the memory core while he was reconstructing the data.”
Teyla took one of the other seats, scooting over to see the screen, and John leaned on the back of Rodney’s chair.
A video clip started to play, and Rodney tipped the screen back so John could see it. “It’s too badly damaged to be significant and we have much better visual images of actual Ancients. The best ones, aside from the photos of the Ancient woman they found frozen in Antarctica, are probably the holographic recordings we’ve found here. But this is interesting for one key factor.”
John frowned at the screen, not sure what he was looking for. He recognized the poorly lit underground corridor leading toward Dorane’s shielded lab area. Then three people came into view, a woman with two men flanking her. They were dressed in black and between that, the bad lighting, and the fact that the image hadn’t been meant to display in this format, it was hard to make out much detail. The man closest to the camera looked directly at it and Rodney hit a keystroke, freezing the picture. John started to say, “So what’s the key factor we’re — What the hell?” The image was grainy but John could see that the man looked like him. For an instant the resemblance was uncanny, then he realized part of that was the light and shadow. It was still a little spooky.
Rodney said, “Because of the poor quality of the image, the resemblance seems closer than it actually is. Fortunately he looks directly at the recording device so I was able to do a point by point comparison with the photo in your personnel file—”
“Oh, well, good to know that’s not actually me.” John dropped into the chair next to Rodney and stared at him, incredulous and indignant. “It’s not like you could take my word for it that I’m not a ten thousand year old Ancient who thought it would be fun to hang out here playing tag with the Wraith and watching you guys scramble for answers. And how many times have I asked you to stay out of my personnel file?”
“I did not think it was actually you,” McKay said witheringly. Under John’s suspicious scrutiny, he admitted reluctantly, “Well, not after the first few minutes or so.”
John put his head down on the console, Kavanagh and McKay, with Dr. Heightmeyer and the hand puppets. I am so going to find a way to arrange that.
“Your resemblance to him is obviously a genetic throwback, like the gene itself. But the point is,” Rodney continued blithely, “that it explains a lot.”
“It does not,” John muttered.
“It does.” Teyla sat up straight, staring at Rodney in startled comprehension. “When Dorane first woke from the stasis container, he looked at the Major, and said, ‘you’re human.’”
“Exactly,” Rodney told her. “We thought he was reacting in surprise at seeing us, but he must have been talking specifically to the Major.” He turned to John. “Even though he was tracking our movements, that must have been the first time he got a good look at you. He may have thought, just for an instant, that he was looking at the man from this recording. Or that you were an Ascendant. According to Dr. Jackson’s experiences, they can appear in their original corporeal forms. Then he realized you were human.”
“It must have brought back the memories of his battle with the Ancestors,” Teyla said thoughtfully.