Interlude 2: Athosian Tea

He must have stood there for close to a half-hour, dithering and starting to leave and turning back again, when the door opened. Teyla stood blinking in the light of the hallway, wearing a loose flowing shirt with a robe pulled over it. "Come in, Rodney," was all she said, before turning back to the dimly lit interior of her quarters.

He followed her inside, very awkwardly. He'd never actually been in Teyla's quarters, and certainly not at two in the morning. "How'd you know I was there?"

A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth, the first smile that Rodney could remember seeing on her face in days. "I could hear you."

"I was quiet." He hit the button to close the door, then had to stop himself from lunging to open it again. He was in Teyla's quarters. At night. With the door shut. Hopefully nobody had seen him. He'd never live it down.

Her smile only deepened a bit. But it was a genuine smile, and it even reached her eyes. "Sit down. I will make us tea."

"What? I was quiet!" Still feeling monumentally awkward, he sat down on a low, backless wicker chair beside her bed, and cast nervous glances around. He felt like an intruder, but couldn't help being curious. Teyla's quarters were so different from anywhere else on Atlantis that they might as well be on another planet. Draperies of dark, rich fabric covered the walls, and the only light came from a candle on her bedside table, casting the corners of the room into shadow. It was very much like being in some kind of primitive hut; the sense of the exotic was heightened further by a faint, spicy scent on the air -- some kind of incense? The few technological touches in the room -- a laptop on a wicker table in the corner, an electric teakettle which she had just plugged in -- looked as out of place as a Maori tribesman at a Fortune 500 board meeting.

"I can see that Ronon and I have much to teach you about stealth, Rodney." Teyla poured hot water into two cups and spooned a dark substance from a small, clay pot. The musky scent of the tea mingled with the spicier undertones of incense or whatever it was that she used to make her quarters smell this way.

Rodney accepted the handleless cup from her, with a certain amount of relief that at last his hands had something to do other than fidget in his lap. "Okay, so, uh."

"Indeed." Teyla seated herself on the bed and tucked her feet up under her. Even her bed was different; while the same standard model as everyone else's, it was covered with colorful swatches of fabric and what he supposed were probably hand-knit afghans. The effect was to soften the hard, square lines of the bed, making it blend into the organic look of the room.

Rodney didn't know if he'd ever been so acutely aware of being a foreigner before, not even in Russia where he didn't speak the language and most people hated his guts. It was all too easy, sometimes, to forget that this galaxy was Teyla's place, while he and the rest of the Earth-born Atlanteans were the aliens here.

"Is the tea to your liking?"

"It's fine," he said, automatically, and then realized that he hadn't even taken a drink. Feeling sheepish, he sipped at it. It was, well, tea, although ... he paused. There was something familiar about it. The taste was almost coffee-like. In fact ...

"Hey, this is more of that hazelnut-coffee stuff I bought for Jeannie months ago, isn't it?"

Teyla nodded, looking pleased. "I purchased a small amount before we left the trading planet. You seemed to like the smell and it is very much like that coffee drink that your people so enjoy. I thought that it would be suitable to keep on hand for entertaining people of Earth."

The tea was a mediocre coffee substitute, at best, but Rodney's brain-mouth disconnect didn't seem to be as bad as usual tonight and he managed to keep from saying so. The thoughtfulness of the gesture startled him. But then, Teyla was usually thoughtful; he just wasn't used to having that kind of consideration pointed in his direction, and wasn't sure if he liked it. To cover all this, he took another sip and decided that the tea wasn't really that bad. It would have been nice to have had some of this during the coffee rationing that first year. He wondered if it contained caffeine.

Teyla seemed content to sit in silence, drinking tea. Rodney didn't do silence well. He wondered what she'd been doing in here, while he hovered out in the corridor. Meditating? Trying to sleep? Throwing darts at a picture of Corlan's face? The one thing he was pretty sure she hadn't been doing was sleeping. Teyla had had dark rings under her eyes for days.

"I'm sorry," he blurted.

Teyla looked at him, startled. "About what?"

"What do you mean, about what? I'm sorry Corlan turned out to be a gigantic space gigolo with wives on two planets."

"Three."

"What?"

Teyla's eyes had gone very dark and shuttered, black holes in the candlelight. "Three wives. I learned of the third on our last trip offworld. It seems that his exploits are ... quite well known among the denizens of many planets."

Self-loathing wasn't something he'd ever thought he would hear from Teyla, but it came through loud and clear. And this was why he hated dealing with people: you couldn't fix them. He desperately wanted to trace her circuits, find the broken part and replace it. But you just couldn't do that with people, and he hated it. Desperation made him say something stupid.

"When I was at university, there was this ... teacher."

He couldn't believe he was talking about this. He'd never spoken of it to anyone. Not even Sheppard. Hell ... especially not Sheppard.

"Her name was Peggy Lipowitz. She was -- I mean, like ... wow. Definitely did not look old enough to be teaching advanced theoretical physics. Legs up to her neck. Short blond hair." And was that where his obsession with blondes came from? He'd never really thought about it in that light before.

Teyla listened quietly, not speaking, her eyes unreadable. He didn't look at her directly, instead watching her reactions out of the corner of his eye.

"All the guys in class, of course ... you know. Peggy would be ... And the thing was, she liked me. She always noticed when I asked a question. She called me by name. She smiled at me." And women hadn't smiled at Rodney in grad school, not many of them -- a slightly pudgy geek, too smart to be interested in most of the people around him, and not shy about letting them know it. He wondered how pathetic all this must sound to Teyla, a woman who surely had had no shortage of flattering attention from the opposite sex over the years. But he was too far along to stop.

"So, I'll skip all the preliminaries, you probably don't care anyway, but one afternoon after class I stayed behind to talk about one of my papers, and she --"

She'd asked him to coffee, and then just smiled patiently while he promptly flubbed it up, stammering through first a rejection of her offer and then, as he realized that she'd really meant it, an equally mangled acceptance. He knew his social skills were lousy, generally in proportion to how much he wanted to impress somebody.

"Okay, I'll skip that part too, but we got something to eat and we went back to her place and we ... yeah. I guess you can fill in the blanks. And, wow." He waved a hand in the air, feeling the blood rush into his face all the way up to his hairline. He couldn't even look at Teyla out of the corner of his eye now; he focused on the opposite wall, where she had pinned photos of various worlds. Having discovered the joys of the expedition's digital cameras, Teyla was turning into quite the accomplished amateur photographer. Oh look, there's that ruin on M5G-891, he thought, trying to divorce his brain from the mind-boggling embarrassment of what his mouth was doing at the moment.

"What I mean is, she was really good, and I --" Wasn't a virgin, of course, but his sexual experience up to that point had been decidedly lacking. He'd never had a serious girlfriend, just a few fumbling encounters in dorm rooms and backseats.

Peggy Lipowitz had blown his mind. The obvious fact that she had to have gotten that experience from somewhere hadn't even occurred to him.

"So, to make a long and fairly humiliating story short, we had a few more, uh, coffee dates" -- about a month of them, actually -- "and it was getting towards the end of the semester, and I thought maybe I'd ..."

Oh God, he couldn't actually tell her this. Could he?

"I bought a ring," he said, staring into the cooling tea in the cup framed by his hands. "She'd told me she loved me, you see. Every time, when we ... did it, she said she loved me, and I'd never heard a woman say that before, not to me. I figured this was it, this was serious, this was the big one. Even though she still acted just the same in class, I didn't mind that, because I'm not big on PDAs either. Uh, that's public displays of affection in case you don't know. I just thought she was kind of reserved. And we'd never had a real date, just the coffee dates and the afternoons at her house, but I thought -- well, I didn't think, I don't know what I thought. So I bought this ring, and I went -- I mean, I talked to --"

Eric Hartman, fellow physics student. Probably the closest friend he'd had at the time. They had been friends for two years. That friendship came crashing down on a cold November night.

"... someone whose name I can't remember, one of the other students. Told him what I was planning to do. And he ..."

Laughed. At first. And then he'd realized that Rodney was serious, and the pity in his eyes was far, far worse than the amusement. Rodney could handle being laughed at. It was pity that he couldn't take.

"... he told me that it wasn't just me. She'd been with half the guys in the class."

Including Eric.

"Peggy Lipowitz was a sex addict. She was married, too. And would you believe, all that time, she'd been wearing her wedding ring? And I never ... never noticed it. Maybe I didn't want to."

He didn't dare look at Teyla now. Didn't want to see pity in her eyes, the same pity that had been in Eric's the last time Rodney ever spoke to him. "I flunked the class. Just quit attending classes. It was the only class in my field that I ever got anything but an A in. Took it next semester with another professor. Saw Peggy Lipowitz around campus sometimes. Never talked to her." And delayed his graduation by a year because there was a class he needed that happened to be taught exclusively by Peggy; he'd had to wait until she went on sabbatical and he could take it with someone else. He'd taken the extra time to go ahead and earn the credits for a Masters in mathematics as well as astrophysics and engineering. Like he'd planned it that way the whole time.

"It was all a long time ago, and I'm totally over it, of course," he told the wall, with a nervous little laugh to help cover up the way that it still ripped his heart out of his chest to think about it. Hurt would have been bad enough, but this was mostly anger -- at Peggy for being a screwed-up addict; at Eric for being a lousy excuse for a friend; at himself for being so stupid and smitten that he ignored every warning sign, and Lord knows there had been plenty.

A warm hand closed over his. He looked down, startled, and only then realized that his hands were shaking, sloshing the leftover tea in the cup. The hand guided his own, leading him to set the cup down on the bedside table before releasing him.

She still had not spoken, but his eyes were drawn to her face with "gawking at a train wreck" fascination. As much as he dreaded seeing the sympathy which was sure to be there, he figured that it was probably better to get it over with.

But she didn't look sympathetic, didn't really look much of anything. The only thing he saw in her eyes was a strange, distant sadness. He didn't think it was directed at him.

"I am hungry," Teyla said. "Are you?"

This was so totally not what he was expecting her to say that he just stared at her until his brain eventually caught up with the idea that yes, he had been asked a question and was probably supposed to say something.

"Sure," he said.

"Then let us find something to eat." Teyla stood and slipped off her robe, causing Rodney to jump -- but she was fully clothed underneath it, in a shirt and a pair of loose pants, so presumably she had not been sleeping after all. She picked up her Atlantis uniform jacket from the foot of the bed and slung it around her shoulders. "Shall we see what the cafeteria has to offer us? Unless, of course, you would prefer to sleep."

"Not really sleepy," he admitted. Especially not now.

Teyla preceded him to the door of her quarters, but at the door she turned around, startling him, and took him quickly by the shoulders in a very brief Athosian bow.

He'd always assumed that the little forehead-touch thing was simply the Athosian version of a handshake, their own "Aloha." But seeing the warmth in her eyes, he thought that perhaps it had other meanings as well. Like Thanks or maybe just I'm glad you're here.