Kiss This

sequel to Kiss and Tell by Setcheti

 

 

Disclaimer:  Don’t own Stargate Atlantis or any of the characters thereof. 

 

Elizabeth Weir was sitting in her office, thinking.

 

Mostly, she was thinking about how much she hated most of her senior personnel.  How could she have known that Dr. Beckett, mild-mannered Dr. Beckett, was bisexual?  For that matter, how could she have known that Dr. McKay…well, she still wasn’t sure what McKay was.  Or what he had been before the Incident of two weeks ago, anyway, since it was pretty obvious what he was now.

 

The Incident.  It had all started with that.  She’d been shocked when it had happened, and she’d reprimanded McKay for it immediately after to make sure no one could accuse her of letting him get away with anything – he got away with enough already.  If Beckett had complained and she hadn’t done anything about it, her career would have been over.

 

Approaching Beckett about it before reprimanding McKay had never occurred to her.  Neither had apologizing to McKay afterwards.  Why would she have?  He had, in effect, sexually assaulted another member of the mission – and it wasn’t like he’d tried to defend himself or offer any excuses when she’d torn into him, either.  She hadn’t done anything wrong.

 

But according to the SGC, she had.  Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard had apparently complained right up the chain of command, and the message Elizabeth was holding in her hand right now was the result.  General O’Neill was ‘concerned’ about her mishandling of the incident, which had apparently resulted in consequences among the rest of the mission personnel that she hadn’t been aware of.  Two soldiers sent back to Earth and several members of the science staff disciplined for harassment, mostly because of unchecked gossip running through the city – gossip O’Neill insisted she was responsible for putting the brakes on as the mission’s civilian commander.

 

Which she still was.  For now.  But O’Neill, again, was ‘concerned’, so he was sending out two civilian advisors to join the mission, ostensibly to help her.  They were going to be staying on indefinitely…and only O’Neill and Elizabeth knew that they actually had the authority to overrule her if they chose to – or as O’Neill had put it, ‘if they found it necessary’.  He’d warned her not to make it necessary, and suggested that she rely on the expertise of the two retired officers and try to learn something from them.

 

They’d be arriving in a month, maybe less – they were apparently ‘tying up some loose ends’ on Earth and would be there when they got there.  Wonderful.  And Weir had the feeling that if she ‘screwed up’ again in the general’s eyes, they’d be arriving to replace her.

 

So, she wasn’t going to screw up.  Not that she thought she had in the first place, but Elizabeth was going to be very, very careful from now on.  Sheppard wanted her gone, she knew that, and so did the commander of the Daedalus.  Beckett might have a stake in it now too, since he’d apparently hooked up with McKay – she was still trying to wrap her mind around that, it was the last thing she’d expected.  And she couldn’t believe it had grown out of just that one kiss.  That didn’t make any sense.

 

Had the two of them been involved before the Incident?  She dropped the much-crumpled message on her desk and stared at it.  It didn’t seem likely, but it was possible.  There wasn’t any way to find out without asking Beckett or McKay directly, though, and that probably wouldn’t be a good idea.  Their sex lives weren’t any of her business, and the fraternization rules didn’t apply to either of them because they both headed different departments.  Unless…

 

Elizabeth smiled, and smoothed out the message as best she could.  Two highly decorated ex-military officers, retired since before the Air Force’s anti-discrimination policies had caught up with the standard military prejudice against homosexuals.  So if she confided in them that she didn’t think two department heads dating each other was a good idea…well, things might happen.  She might not be able to talk to O’Neill and get him to listen, but she was pretty sure that anything his two buddies had to say was going to get his attention – and get results.  Maybe this wasn’t going to be such a bad situation after all.

 

Or at least not for Elizabeth Weir, anyway.