Just Don't Go
by Bil!

T – Angst – JS, EW – Oneshot

Summary: They are the leaders, after all. Everything is their responsibility, their fault, their crime. It's natural that they should turn to each other. John&Elizabeth friendship.

Season: One to three.

Spoilers: Lots. Season one through middle of season three, up to and including Common Ground.

Disclaimer: If they restrained their characters from taking over my brain I'd stop stealing their copyrighted material.

A/N: This is what happens when I wake up at four o'clock in the morning, with the bellbirds and tuis yelling their heads off, and can't get back to sleep. Well, this and overwhelming tiredness the next day. Blah.

This isn't meant to be shippy (but feel free if you're so inclined). It's mostly a reflection on the fact that although some seriously ghastly stuff happens on the show, everyone seems to get over it and go on with life. This story is unbetaed, so I hope it makes sense.

Lyrics from "All I Need" by Matchbox 20.

Just Don't Go

by Bil!

And that's all that I need
Someone else to cling to
Someone I can lean on
Until I don't need to
Just stay all through the night
And in the morning let me down
'Cause that's all I need right now

It starts in their first year in Atlantis, somewhere between a giant storm (and the shattering belief that he's failed her and she's dead) and an almost-suicide mission (with the sounds of battle in his ears and her horrified look on the insides of his eyelids).

It's supposed to be a straightforward mission, but even back then the people of Atlantis know better than to expect such a thing and so it's not really a surprise when he and five marines are captured.

That doesn't mean that John will ever forget the woman with vivid red hair and brown eyes that should have been warm who talks at him through a scarlet-painted smile while she breaks five men into blood-sodden chunks of flesh before blinding him so that all he has left to him is the dark with the image of his dead men seared across the shadows.

She sends him back to Atlantis, a warning, a punishment – except that he doesn't know who she is or what it was they did wrong. All he knows is that his men are dead and his eyes are dark and that the last image of the men who willingly followed him through the stargate is never going to leave him.

But he can't tell anyone that because that would be admitting defeat, that would be letting her win, making himself into something his people don't need him to be. Anyway, he hasn't the words. So he doesn't tell them. No, he lies on a bed in the infirmary with doctors fussing around him and instead he tells them exactly what happened and cracks a few lame jokes. He tries to say something fitting and semi-profound about the men he just watched die even though he knows that there aren't any words that can make it better. He wishes he could close his eyes against the dark and their dead, accusing faces.

When Beckett tells him that the blindness won't be permanent, no one knows how close he comes to crying. All he wants is his sight back so that he can find new images to paint on the insides of his eyelids.

He sends his teammates away to get some sleep, telling them he's all right because he doesn't know how to tell them anything else, and doesn't know if he's relieved or angry when they believe him and go. He doesn't try to sleep himself, though, knowing too well that letting his subconscious have free reign to deal with the images of the day is not a good idea. Not here in this open space with watching eyes around him.

Instead he waits until Beckett has left, until the duty doctor is at the other end of the infirmary, and then he leaves. Atlantis guides his steps even though he can see nothing but imploring, mutilated faces, for she is his city and she loves him.

The messhall is empty, so he stops there and sits at a table, staring into the blackness. The lights are on, he knows through his connection to his city, but he can see nothing but pain and fear on the faces of those he should have protected.

When he gets his sight back it will be better. When he can overwrite these images with new ones, when he's no longer lost and alone in the dark, everything will be okay again and he can go back to being what everyone needs and expects him to be.

The sound of the doors opening startles him, but his nerves are too deadened for him to jump. He doesn't need the soft footstep to know who it is, because there is only one person whose approach he wouldn't be warned of: Atlantis loves him, but the city respects her.

Elizabeth sits down in front of him, making more noise than usual so that he can follow her movements.

"Doctor Weir," he acknowledges, and doesn't wonder at the steadiness of his own voice. She is Dr Weir when he speaks, but she has always been Elizabeth in his head. It is a dichotomy he accepts but doesn't understand.

A long silence follows. John stares blankly in the direction he thinks she is and wonders what she wants. And whether he wants her to go away.

"I wish there was something I could do to help," she says quietly.

John has already turned down offers of help from Beckett, from his teammates, even from her. He doesn't know what's different this time. Maybe it's the way she acknowledges her impotence. Maybe it's just the hour of the morning or that he's sat too long in silence or that she's caught him at a weak moment.

"Just don't go," he says hoarsely, blindly reaching out across the table. "Don't leave me."

She catches his hands in hers. "I won't," she promises.

The dam breaks and he talks. Because here, in this moment, it's better to speak the forbidden words than to sit in silence. He has to set the darkness crawling with life, he has to fill the air with words, so that he can forget the things that fill his sightless eyes. So he tells her about how helpless he was against a force that outnumbered them at least five to one. About how he was gagged and bound and forced to watch the woman destroy his men as if they were paper targets and not living, breathing, screaming human beings. How he'd thought he was next and he'd almost welcomed the thought because living with the horror he'd just seen seemed impossible.

When he runs out of words Elizabeth starts to talk instead. She tells him about the agony of waiting, knowing that they were missing but not being able to do anything to help. About her guilt for her first moment of relief that he was the one to survive. About the pain of losing yet more good people to a command she was never trained to hold.

When she falters he finds more words and when he fails again she takes up the slack. Between them they talk the night away, until when dawn breaks he's able to see a fuzzy golden haze in a wash of pale blue.

They leave the messhall before the first people come in search of breakfast and she knows better than to offer to escort him back to the infirmary. Beckett's face is the first thing John can see clearly and he talks to his teammates with complete composure, fixing the image of them over the dead faces of the tortured marines until he can almost believe he never broke at all.

He doesn't see Elizabeth until mid-afternoon, when she comes to discuss a memorial service. Neither of them acknowledge that they spent the first six hours of the day sharing impossibly personal things. Even back then, John is sure they never will.

But that is only the first time.

They are the leaders, after all. Everything is their responsibility, their fault, their crime.

So the words "Don't go" come to mean something more than themselves. Those words mean nights sitting opposite each other in the messhall or standing together on a dark balcony or sitting side by side on the east pier. Those words mean curling up in opposite corners of a rec-room couch in front of a darkened screen or running together through the dim corridors of a sleeping city. They are a plea for understanding and a statement that there is someone who can. They are an admission of weakness and an affirmation of shared strength.

After that first time, words seldom pass between the two of them. They are just together.

After she watches herself die at age ten thousand and grieves for the loss of her expedition team even though they still live around her. After the first Wraith attack on the city when they've both thought each other dead and they've lost so many friends and they've found on going home that home isn't really where they want to be any more.

After he turns into a bug and she stays with him even as the memory of her terrified eyes and his hand around her throat tells him that she should run away. After he loses Ford again and finds that the loss represents all his losses and he should have been able to save this one. After he loses six months in a few hours and has to reconcile the difference, has to make himself believe his friends didn't betray him even though it certainly felt like it. After they try to kill each other with other people guiding their bodies and they shake in fear of what might have happened if Phoebus or Thalen had been just a little bit quicker.

After she thinks he is dead and Earth is doomed by her own actions while petty bureaucrats demand her attention. After the war between compassion and survival means that she is responsible for the betrayal and death of two hundred Wraith-turned-humans – no matter how he tries to take the blame for himself. After nanites force her to doubt herself and her reality so that she can't sleep for three days afterwards for fear she will find Atlantis is all a dream. After he finds a brother-soul in a life-sucking enemy and loses his way because if the world isn't black and white, if he's not sure who the enemy is, he doesn't know how to fight. After she refuses to negotiate with terrorists and thinks it means she has killed him.

Most of the time, John barely remembers these nights. He's happy in Atlantis, a place that is more home than any home has ever been. Most of the time he loves his job and his home and his friends, and he has no desire to let regrets weigh him down. Most of the time there is no doubt or darkness.

But then there comes a night when things are bleak and the weight of the universe suddenly crashes in, when someone says "Just don't go" and the overwhelming night is held at bay by the sound of another person's breathing and maybe the touch of a hand to let them both know they aren't alone. Because they aren't alone. John is surprised by how much that helps.

It's not about sex, which is pretty unusual as far as his experience at comfort from a woman goes; they don't touch more than hand on hand. But maybe, he thinks one horrible day when the bleakness has come and Elizabeth can't help him because she's the cause of it, maybe it was about love.

He's captured offworld. That's not anything new, so he's concerned but not panicking. But they put Elizabeth in his cell and Elizabeth should be on Atlantis so he doesn't understand what's happening. He's supposed to protect her, but he has no way to.

They think she is the weaker, so they torture her. And because he has always known that really he's the weaker one, he's just had way more practice hiding it, it nearly breaks him. But she orders him not to tell them what they want to know and he obeys. Because she is Elizabeth and he has to give her the same respect he wants her to give him. Because she followed his orders not so long ago and it's up to him to do the same for her.

And when they've dragged all but the last drop of life out of her and thrown her at him like a heap of garbage, he wants to fight them and kill them and hurt them, but she whispers "Don't go" and the only thing for him to do is hold her while she dies. He can't refuse her when she says "Don't go". That's the unwritten rule.

He repeats it back at her a thousand times because she's never failed him before, but this time she doesn't stay with him like she's supposed to, this time she doesn't shield him from the night.

He hates her, shouting "Don't go!" into her cold, deaf ears, but he doesn't let go of her because she asked him first and he has to hold on. That's the deal, that's how it works. When she asks, he doesn't go. He won't let go.

When the cell door opens again he doesn't care. Elizabeth's failed him and she's dead and there's not really anything left that they can do to him.

But when she says his name he looks up.

Elizabeth stands in the doorway with the light haloing around her like she's an angel and for a moment he can't breathe because this can't be real, she can't be standing in front of him alive and well. But her body is gone from the floor and she bends down and takes his hand and he can't doubt it, for all he saw her die.

She doesn't smile, because smiles are for normal times and not dark cells and impossible resurrections, but she looks down at him with the light behind her and she's alive and real.

"Don't go," he pleads uncertainly. Last time she didn't do it and she's never failed him before.

"I won't," she promises, kneeling beside him.

"You did."

"That was an illusion, created entirely in your head." She grips his hands in hers and there is dirt on her fingers, real and grubby and solid. "When I saw it on the screen I almost thought it was real too. I didn't realise you knew me so well."

To be honest, he doesn't really care about the details. He just needs one thing: "You won't leave me?"

"I won't leave you."

"Okay, then."

Tomorrow John will be strong and confident, unbroken by his experiences. Tomorrow he will be everything he needs to be.

Tonight, he just needs her to stay.

Fin