sga_flashfic | Deserving of Faith, by the Azure Cascade (Return Challenge) (Reply)

Title: Deserving of Faith

Author: The Azure Cascade

Spoilers: "Return" the first.

Rating: G

Summary: For the Return challenge. Teyla and her faith.

Deserving of Faith

Teyla had never been very religious. She was not like Halling in that way -- his daily prayers, his reverence for ceremony and tradition were traits she had never shared. As leader of her people, she had stood in the Sun Circles, sung the funeral rites, and blessed the first hunt of each new adult, and she understood the importance of such rituals, but she never burned teleth incense in her own hut (favored by the Ancestors or not, she hated the smell).

Yet (and it was a distinction she would never have made, or even understood, before Atlantis), for all that she was not religious, Teyla had been spiritual. Her faith in the Ancestors had been quiet, and personal, and profound. She had felt their guidance in her daily meditation, found comfort in their gaze, and believed that they were the hope and light that even the Wraith could not erase. She saw their blessing in the spring rain and the laughter of children at play; no world so beautiful could live and breathe without the touch of some benevolent hand, and that knowledge, that faith had sustained her when her father breathed his last, when the hunting was bad, and when slave raiders game through the gate (she does not know when she started thinking of it as "the gate", but no other name for it comes readily to her lips these days).

Even when the Lanteans came, her faith was not shaken. The Wraith rose, but the Wraith had always been and always would be. Nor did ascension bother her, once they had explained it. That the Ancestors had once been human, had made mistakes, even terrible mistakes, even the mistake that was the Wraith, did not disturb her. They were ancestors, after all, not gods, wise but not without error, and she could see little difference between "becoming a creature of energy" and "moving on from life to a higher plane."

No, it was not the "what" of the Ancestors that broke her faith. It was the "who." It was deceitful, manipulative Chaya, and her punishment by the other Ancestors for her decision to protect her charges. It was the village that stole months of John's life, letting him believe he'd been abandoned so that he would serve their selfish ends. It was the riddles and deceptions that brought SG-1 to Atlantis. It was the story told by the Replicators, of a living weapon made, judged wanting, and destroyed without thought.

It has been six weeks, as the Lanteans measure time, since the Ancestors came to Atlantis and drove her friends out, and finally, her people have begun to mutter, some angry or impatient, but most simply confused. Halling reassures them again and again, with firm conviction and unyielding calm, that the Ancestors are only recuperating. That if the people of Pegasus are only patient, the time will come, the Ancestors will rise, and the Wraith will die.

Teyla knows better.

The Ancestors will remain, deep in their shielded city, hidden from the Wraith at the cost of Lantean lives. They will seek no contact. They will not open their gate. They will not walk from world to world to face the orphans of the plague they created. They will not shelter the displaced, heal the maimed, or free those taken as runners or slaves. They have power the Lanteans could only dream of, and a thousand times the share of responsibility for the galaxy's predation by the Wraith, but they will remain in Atlantis, where they alone are safe.

Teyla has never been very religious. And any spirituality she had (and just as much as driving away her friends, this is something for which she will never forgive them), the Ancestors had taken away. All Teyla has now, after her time among the Lanteans, is a tiny seed of stubborn faith; she clings to the belief, as her people once did, that someday soon, the true heirs of Atlantis will come home, and lead her galaxy to victory against the Wraith.