Title: In Knowing, We Ache
Summary: There are things that Kanaan knows without ever being told.
Characters: Kanaan, Teyla & John
Pairing: Teyla/Kanaan, Teyla/John
Rating: K
Notes: For Lost City Found prompt battle. I took my own prompt of Emmagan/Kanaan & Emmagan/Sheppard UST – Understanding and came up with this.

There are things that Kanaan knows without ever being told. Like the fact that the sky shifts between seasons, the harvest is ready when the fields are gold, that those of Atlantis are powerful beyond any humans he has known.

That his wife loves and is loved by someone who is not himself.

He has no doubt that those words have never been uttered between the two. He has no doubt that she has been loyal to him. He has no doubt, either, in her love for him.

He also does not doubt this knowledge.

Some things can only be learned through seeing, experiencing – not hearing and being told. And he has seen this; he has experienced it when she flees their bed in the middle of the night when her old team returns, injured from missions. He knows from the way he used to hover by her bedside in the infirmary in those first years. He knows it in the way they sip from one another's drinks in the morning at breakfast and in the way they move against one another, dancing, fluid - familiar.

He knows this, though she has never told him of it.

It's easy for him to believe that she does not want him; that she is content to stay with him and her son, happy even to live the life that she had once dreamed of. But when his hand falls to her back, her hand; his fingers brushing her arm, their knees bumping under the table it becomes difficult for Kanaan to ignore.

But he does, because she does not know. Of this, he is certain.

When she speaks of John Sheppard, it is with warm comfort, of friendship and loyalty. It is true and honest and he truly believes that she has forgotten she has loved – does love – the man she knows from Earth. But when she speaks to John Sheppard, she comes to life; they breathe together, they live together and he is sure that they would die together, for each other – for their city.

But he accepts it because he knows that, while she may love another, she does not want him. Not yet, at least. She wants to be with him, wants to love him – her husband - and Kanaan knows that she does. But each day it takes more convincing to believe it, each day he has to tell himself more often that she wants him.

He can feel the change and he knows she does not mean to harm him; that she, like Sheppard, is almost oblivious to it, to the shift in their relationship even as they spend long lonely afternoons on balconies, in gyms – at peace.

If Kanaan had been stronger, less in love with her, he'd have left already. But he's not, so he stays.

Because while he has her, while she returns to him at night - it is enough.

And for now, it has to be.