"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Rodney said.
"Try me."
Rodney shook his head. The stars were very bright. The auroras that had concealed them were gone with the tilting of the world on its axis, gone to come again next year. "It was Elizabeth," he said finally. "Elizabeth Weir. She was there with me on the jumper. I know it can't really have been her. I know that. But it was. Elizabeth was there." Rodney put his hands in his pockets. "She said she'd be there until the end, that she wouldn't leave no matter what. I remember…." He took a deep breath. "I remember the radiation alarms going off and the shield failing and then…. I woke up in the Hammond's infirmary. That's all I know." He shrugged. "You don't believe me."
"Actually I do." Sam's eyes glittered in the dim light. "When Daniel was Ascended, something a lot like that happened. But he got in a lot of trouble. The other Ascended beings kicked him out. They dropped him off on some random planet not even remembering who he was. Because he helped us. Because he interfered."
Rodney took a long, cool breath of sea air and something in his chest loosened, something he didn't know he'd held for far too long. "You think it was Elizabeth?"
"I do."
"And you think she could be out there somewhere?"
"She could be," Sam said. "Or maybe she didn't get caught. But if she did, yeah. She's out there somewhere."
Rodney took another breath, longer and deeper. "We could find her," he said.
"We could. We never leave a man behind." Sam put his arm awkwardly around his shoulder and Rodney twisted to look at her skeptically.
"You did not just hug me."
"No." Sam stepped back. "I didn't."
"Because if you did, I'm never going to let you forget it."
"It was a friendly hug!"
"Now I know how you really feel about me."
"I feel like I want to squash you like a bug!" Sam said, but she was laughing.
"Come on now. You know it's always been me!" Rodney was grinning.
"In a pig's eye. If it had been up to me, the Wraith could have kept you!"
"Yeah, sure," Rodney laughed, and then his stomach sank. Jennifer had come out of the nearest building and was walking toward them, her hair in a ponytail and the dark leathers of her field clothes making her look already far away.
If Sam could have dematerialized she would have. "I've got some stuff to do," she said quickly, stepping away as Teyla also turned, her hand falling from Todd's arm. "Teyla? All set?"
"I believe that I am," Teyla said serenely, coming to join them.
"Jennifer," Rodney said.
"Rodney."
"Then let's go check out that thing we were talking about earlier," Sam said to Teyla. "You know, the thing I wanted you to look at."
"I believe I do," Teyla said, and shook her head at Rodney as she followed Sam toward the door.
Todd still stood on the ramp, turned toward them, impassive beneath the faint bluish running lights of the cruiser.
And now there weren't any words, not any good enough. "Jennifer," he said again, and then fell silent. He wanted to tell her that she was crazy for doing this. He wanted to promise her that if she would just stay he wouldn't ask her to marry him again, that he would take things as slowly as she wanted. But there weren't any words.
She looked up at him, her eyes searching his face as though she were looking for something, or maybe she wanted to remember it. "I'll be fine," she said.
"Sure," he said. "You'll do great."
"I need to do this, Rodney."
"I can see that. If the retrovirus works, if people will accept it — well, people and Wraith, I suppose I should say…"
"I think you mean people. Humans and Wraith."
"People," Rodney said. "If they do, you'll be saving a lot of lives."
"Well, I'm going to try," Jennifer said. She looked ridiculously young and slight in her black leathers, not like Teyla, not scary. But not like a girl either. Just a lot like Alabaster.
"It's just…." He couldn't quite finish the thought. "I thought you wanted to go back to Earth," he said. "I thought you wanted to get married and live in a suburb or maybe in the country somewhere and practice medicine and…. I thought you were the one who didn't want to come back to Pegasus. I thought you wanted…." He waved his hands at all the things he couldn't name. "Strawberries. You keep saying you miss strawberries and there aren't any in Pegasus. And daylilies. You know. Those yellow flowers. Or the red ones."
"Poppies," Jennifer said. "They have those here. I've seen them."
"I haven't," Rodney said.
"When do you ever look at the plants?"
"When they're trying to eat me," Rodney said. "But that's beside the point. You don't even like it here. And there are leeches. You hate leeches. And it's a long way from your dad, and you don't even have email, and…."
She put her hand on his arm. "Rodney."
"Yes?"
"I want to do this." Her eyes were very clear. "When I get back… maybe then I'll want to go home and have all those things. In their time. But right now it's time for me to do this."
"I can't wait forever," he said quietly. "Don't get me wrong, I'm not old, but I'm not getting any younger. I was hoping we could get married here in Atlantis, maybe even — well, after all, Teyla has Torren, and how much more trouble would having one more child in the city be? Woolsey let me keep the cat." He couldn't ask the question, but he hoped she heard it anyway.
"You take care of Newton, all right?" It wasn't an answer, or maybe it was. They had never been very good at finding words. "I'm doing what I need to do. You should do what you need to do."
"I will," he said.
"You always do."
There wasn't any answer to that. And so he smiled at her like a sturdy adventurer ought to. "Take care of yourself," he said, and gave her a sketchy salute. "And if you need anything, just whistle."
"I'll remember that," Jennifer said. She pulled herself up, shoulders squared, and gave him a little smile.
And then she turned and walked across the tarmac toward the cruiser, toward the dark figure at the foot of the ramp. He loomed over her, bending to speak, and then she went past him up the ramp, her head high and her back straight, Todd following after. Jennifer didn't look back. The ramp retracted and the docking port irised closed, blue lights winking out. Wind gusted as the cruiser’s thrusters came online.
Sam and Teyla were still standing in the doorway to the building, whatever pretend errand of Sam's forgotten, and Rodney hurried out of the landing zone as the cruiser's engines rose in a rising whine, the wind swirling around him.
Teyla put her hand on his arm, steel presence comforting as sunlight. "She will be all right," Teyla said.
"I know." He'd thought this was the story of how he turned himself into a hero and got the girl and they lived happily ever after. And maybe that story hadn't really been about the girl at all, but only about becoming a person he could be proud of when he looked in the mirror. He had done that, and sometimes it took him by surprise to realize it.
Teyla looked up at him. "Do you wish you were going with her?
"On a Wraith ship?" But there was some part of him that ached for that still, and wondered if walking aboard the cruiser would have felt like coming home. I'm already home, he told himself, and knew that for him that was true. "Don't be silly," he said briskly. "Besides, do you have any idea how much work I have to do?"
There was only a little lump in his throat as he watched the cruiser Eternal lift into the darkness and vanish over the storm tossed sea, a darkness against the stars which swiftly disappeared.
It was a day of rest, and the captain of the Hammond was going fishing.