gategrrl

But femslash Pegasus B type fic...don't read if you don't like woman to woman lurv.

Warning: Weir/Carter femslash. One or two Bad Words.

Written in Stone

By Gategrrl

Elizabeth stared into the carved lozenge shaped stone resting in her palm. A faint spiral wound its way from one end to the other, and deeply carved creatures played their way up and down the lines. Her thumb rubbed over the smooth, lightly blue tinted surface layered over the carving. Within the pit of the stone, she could see another shape. She clenched her fingers around the stone and moved on from her distracted musings. She clicked her recorder on and began dictating her notes of recent findings on Ancient technologies and culture, her decisions on which leads to follow, and which ones she'd leave for future investigation after they found a ZPM to reach home. More than once she gripped the stone harder when a particular name cropped up, usually in conjunction with Rodney's. With Rodney around, as self-centered as he could be at times, her name would crop up as the Brilliant Scientific Mind. She'd seen Rodney's tape home. Ford hadn't felt authorized enough to edit Rodney's hour-long tape down. Elizabeth was professional enough to not let her personal feelings interfere too much with her reports. It was, after all, what she did: divorce her feelings when she didn't need them. Even so the curved edges of the stone left deep imprints on her palm.

She carried the stone with her in a jacket pocket when Ford and Rodney and a smattering of armed soldiers accompanied them to a new find.

"Whatcha got in your pocket?" Rodney glanced at the movement underneath the blue material. They were walking to a location on another branch of the city, Arm 3, where some preliminary exploration had been on-going. "Golden Key to the city?"

"What? No, no," said Elizabeth. She lifted the stone out of the dark folds of her jacket and held it up to the clear white sunlight shining through the overhead skylights. The light glimmered through it, causing it to sparkle. The animals on it appeared to move.

Rodney frowned, puzzled. He held his hand out. "May I? We've been finding these here and there. They're not rare, but not too common either. Where did you find it?"

He held it up to the light, turning it this way and that, tossed it up in the air, catching it with an eye-hand coordination Elizabeth didn't trust. This was a man who tripped over power cords in his own lab. She held her hand out and flicked her fingers in a "give it back to me" gesture. He ignored it. "Interesting stone, Elizabeth. The interior appears to be hollow. The others we've found like this one are solid, have denser coloration, and don't have nearly as many carvings on the lower layer."

"It was in the room I chose. It was in a drawer set into the wall." She snatched it out of his hand. The stone glinted, and for a fleeting second, she thought the hollow solidified into yellow, turning the blue tone green. Trick of the light, she thought, and stuffed it back in her pocket. Rodney nodded, looked about the cathedralesque room they passed through, and changed the subject. She knew better, though. Most likely he'd bring it up with Daniel.

Rodney continued talking, but his topic switched to the technology found at the new location, and the cool new doohickeys (oye, she thought, O'Neill is rubbing off on me) and Goldberg devices and miracle energies generated by said devices…along with Ford, she zoned out on the tech-talk, and soothed herself by rubbing the stone. It had a pleasant warm feeling now, and it anchored her in this strange milieu. Her mind drifted along little explored channels until they arrived in Arm 3, site 42. Her attention was monopolized by Daniel, Rodney and his team. Jack O'Neill glowered over in the corner, never far from Daniel, and with a frown reserved for the astrophysicist. They were so obvious. She sighed inwardly as Zelenka enthusiastically gestured about the newest thingamabob. Daniel said a few words in Czech, and she replied to Zelenka's answer in the same language, and the presentation went on.

During a break in the meeting, she leaned up against a worktable near Jack, and crossed her arms in unconscious imitation of his stance.

"That's a lot to take in," he said.

"Right now, as fascinating as this all is, I'd like to catch up on sleep, and finish the last report I started. Which is now outmoded by this discovery." She dragged a deep breath in and exhaled with a smile.

"Ah, the burden of command. Everything in triplicate, and done yesterday."

"Hurry up and wait," she responded.

"No time like the present," he countered.

"Time waits for no man."

"Is that a rock in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?"

"What?" She laughed, jerked out of the back and forth with the unexpected question.

Jack motioned with a small wave. "You've got a lot of hand action going on there."

She rolled her eyes. "It's a worry stone I found. Here, want to take a look?"

Jack shrugged and took the stone. His fingertips touched hers when she placed it on his palm. "Warm. Fits in the palm. Nice color, look at that."

They stared at the interior, which filled up with a mild yellow light. It reminded her of lemonade on her grandmother's porch.

"Huh," he said.

"Huh what?"

He shook his head with a wet-dog fierceness. "Nothing. Just reminds me of Carter. You know."

Elizabeth blinked. "General Carter, you mean."

Jack's scarred eyebrow raised a trifle. "Don't know why I thought of her. Must be all the doohickeys and machines and stuff the science nerds are uncovering."

She plucked the stone off of Jack's hand. He didn't protest or react to the stone's removal, or her rudeness in doing so. "Look at the color. Her hair is about as bright as this color. I wonder where it comes from."

"Clairol?"

The last thing she wanted right now was a bitch-session with Jack. He wasn't thrilled with General Carter, she knew that much. The reports said she'd gone and Okayed a snake in his head when he was dying from an Ancient illness. He would have preferred pop-sickledom over what happened afterward. Or straight-out death. And there was the other stuff as well.

The stone felt heavier in her jacket, and radiated heat of its own. Or maybe that was her imagination. It must be residual heat from her hands - she hadn't taken her hand off it all day, she realized.

"Never mind," she said. Then Jack turned his head and ignored her.

Daniel made his way over, and he took over the conversation and steered it away from dangerous waters. All unknowing, of course. Jack lightened up. Daniel translated the scientists' lingo and the Ancient technical scrawls with an ease she wished she had. Words washed around her, until she felt her brain drowning. A hand on Daniel's arm stopped him, and she asked for his report, and the scientists' reports, on her desk in two days, when she'd be ready for her own evaluation of the find for future development.

Daniel nodded, moved over to Rodney, and the enthusiastic team of guys (and they were, with a few exceptions) conferred amongst themselves. Jack smiled with something near approval, but closer to commiseration. With a few hand-signals, he collected a team of armed soldiers for Elizabeth's trip back to the main base area. Four hours from start to finish, she thought, and all it's gotten me is a glaze on my eyes a ceramic artist would be proud of.

Back in her office, she closed her eyes and let the complex puzzle of words sluice through her mind, and drain out in a large exhalation caught on her dictation recorder. The notes finished, the report ninety percent done (from that previous find now rendered obsolete from the current one), she rested her head on her hands, bent over on the desk as if it were her mother's chest and maternal comfort existed in this far away place.

The stone felt soft in her hand as it lay under her head, and she felt a soothing constant presence in her mind. She stroked it with her thumb. Its smoothness went directly to her brain now without the intercession of her sense of touch. Her inner eye blinked slowly and relaxed as her outer eyes blinked in the dimming aquamarine light reflected from the ocean. The waters surrounding Atlantis darkened to a midnight blue.

Through a mental slate, Elizabeth heard a soft clatter of shoes on her office floor. It must be Sheppard with a report from his gate mission. But it was a day early for that, wasn't it? Her head felt solid and gravity held it against her hands, but she opened her left eye with a narrow slit. It was dark, and the walls flickered with dark inky reflections. Moonlight glinted off of waves outside her window, and a mist of salty sea air tickled her nose through the narrow opening in the window.

A hand ruffled through her short dark hair. She sighed. Her body felt numb. If it was Teyla she was being especially quiet.

A feminine voice spoke in a low tone next to her ear. "General Carter reporting in, Dr. Weir."

Elizabeth's response was electric. She sat up, heart beating like a fish caught in a net. Her words-in-trade blocked her throat, and her jaw muscles flexed with aborted sentences. Sam Carter lounged on the chair in front of the desk in an unmilitary pose. She glowed. Oh, not the glow of an Ascended but from a bluish light that lit her up like a dark star's corona. In her hand, the stone was still, but it felt like it was turning inside.

"Who are you?" she asked the Sam look-alike. There was no way it was the real woman.

Sam inspected Elizabeth with bluer than blue eyes and an easy, slight smile that tipped the corners of her mouth.

"What are you?"

"Let me show you, shall I?" Sam leaned forward in her seat and placed her elbows on the armrests.

Elizabeth's dry lips opened enough for her tongue to moisten them. Sam smiled openly at her.

"No, tell me what it is you are."

The Sam Carter she knew back at the SGC appeared then, with a slight bow of her head. "I'm here because you were thinking of me. What you're holding in your hand is a memorial stone. I am in this stone."

Elizabeth blinked. She opened her fingers with a slight movement. A slice of the stone's rippling interior peeked through. She snapped her fingers together, blocking out the yellow fairy-light within. "I wasn't thinking of you, and I don't have the Ancient gene. I couldn't have activated it."

Perhaps that wasn't exactly true. The gene therapy hadn't taken hold with her; but now Elizabeth realized perhaps there was enough...just enough...to impress memories upon a stone designed to hold them.

"You missed me enough to program the stone," said Sam.

Elizabeth let the implications absorb into her mind. Then: "Why would I want to memorialize you? You're still alive."

Carter pushed off the chair and stepped over to the window. "I am what others see me as. Those who know me, form me."

She turned around, and, as the first time Elizabeth had seen her, her breath whooshed into her lungs as blue eyes connected with her own brown.

"Words cannot express, Elizabeth," Sam said. Her pink lips and lightly kohl-lined eyes were the only features Elizabeth could see, aside from the bright blond hair.

Elizabeth exhaled as Sam drew closer, and stilled her body when the other woman - phantasm? - traced a line up her bare arm, over the tight red fabric of her T-shirt, and on up through the hair on the nape of her neck.

"Um, this isn't what I had in mind, General," said Elizabeth. "This isn't how I see you."

She was lying. Past the irritation with the woman's overbearing scientific arrogance and linear mind, Elizabeth had felt a tsunami of electricity travel her spine whenever she was with General Carter.

"Not completely, Elizabeth," said Sam.

Elizabeth stilled her breathing when Sam's hand skimmed over her breast, making the nipple stand out hard. "I love Simon," she said as she felt herself loosen up and shifted with the dampening in her crotch.

"But you want me."

Elizabeth's need to use her words to forestall the phantasm Sam, who was so real and solid, and so much more than she seemed to be as a real person - her words were useless. Sam's lips on hers obliterated the need, and the approaching storm of passion lifted her onto the desk. Sam lifted her shirt up and licked a line of sensitive skin up to and around her nipples, massaging breasts and slipping her pants down before she grasped how thorough Sam's explorations were.

Hands experienced with working on fine instrumentation adjusted Elizabeth's responses. Every whimper elicited another, with the other woman's scientific approach of systematically coaxing the most sensation out of Elizabeth's touch starved body. It was more sensation than she remembered Simon bringing out. She pulled Sam forward, and locked her mouth around the woman's own nipple, enjoying the texture and playing with it, and then the other, while she felt pressure from Sam's thigh rubbing and ramming into her crotch until she was waterfall slick.

The broad pressure dropped when Sam moved down, and the heat pointed itself into a narrow line, with those adjusting fingers curving just right, hitting that bundle of nerves with steady pressure, and in moments, Elizabeth moaned. When her shivering stopped, she opened her eyes. Expecting Sam to be gone, she was surprised to see her at the end of the desk, shirt pushed up, bra tight around her ribcage (like herself, she knew) and flushed from the encounter.

Elizabeth breathed hard. Sam grinned, her hand still moving inside Elizabeth. The next orgasm hit her hard, leaving her legs limp and boneless, hanging over the edge of the desk. She rolled over a wheel on an axel, and pressed herself up off the surface. She got as far as leaning up on her elbows. Sam's other hand dropped onto her rump and traced whorls on her skin. Elizabeth squirmed.

"You needed this," said Sam.

"What are you? Some kind of domin--" Elizabeth stopped. "Or --" and a thought crossed over her mind, and her head hit the desktop. "Oh no. Who sees you like this? Jack? Did you and he -?" She couldn't finish the picture in her mind.

"Here's your answer," said Sam.

Elizabeth gasped with the new sensation.

"Rhymes with Rodney," Sam said, her finger moving in time to her words. "But I think fucking you is so much nicer."

"Uh," said Elizabeth.

Her hand tightened convulsively on the hotly glowing stone, her knuckles whitened, her skin tight. She let it go. It dropped onto a stack of papers. The pressure in her bottom ended, and she heard a small sigh of air as the stone's lemonade interior faded to a pale eggshell cream.

Elizabeth lay there on her stomach for a moment, gathering her wits. She pulled up her pants and adjusted her waistband. Then she pulled her bra and shirt down. She found herself enjoying the sensation of her sensitized nipples against the fabric of her shirt, and decided to remove her bra. She sighed with relief. There was one personal restriction gone.

There was a knock on the door. She tucked it into a drawer with a quick slam.

"Here's the report you wanted on PSX-385, ma'am."

"Yes, thank you," said Elizabeth. She reached over the desk and nodded with a smile.

Renford nodded back with a small smile. "You've been here all night, Dr. Weir?"

Elizabeth glanced out the window and realized that the sky had lightened, and the waters were a sunny blue again.

"Must've fallen asleep," she said. "Thank you for the report."

Renford left. The door closed behind her. Elizabeth opened a drawer in the desk and carefully swept the stone into it with the report. It landed on her bra. She decided not to retrieve it. Later. After she thought through what had happened.

She decided to look through the personnel files. There must be someone else in Atlantis besides Rodney who knew General Carter (and didn't see her as an emission playtoy).

But first, sleep. She opened the drawer one last time before heading out. Her hand reached out hung in the air. She jerked it back. A cool breeze blew through the window making her tingle. Or was that the stone, heating up into a bright yellow?

Elizabeth left her office. But locked the drawer.

This fic is friends' locked until I post it up on pegasus_b . Does anyone know if you need to be a member to post there?