Go Forth, by Frostfire--Darkness challenge
Title: Go Forth
Author: Frostfire
Rating: R
Summary: Generations under the Wraith make life a little different. 664 words.

Here, in the firelight, in the forest, she dances. Her people around her, making music and feeding the fire, and she whirls with sticks held loosely and lightly in her palms, spinning and ready against the opponent who does not come from the sky tonight, but has in the past and will in the future.

This is the battle that they will never win. That the ancestors could not win. The Athosians possess not the hubris that would allow them to believe they could prevail where the ancients and their wonders did not.

They will not win. They will die, over and over and over, screaming their lives away under the hand of ghouls that haunt the night. But before they die, they live, and while they live, they celebrate that it remains so.

She dances.

Under her feet are needles and old leaves, comforting—this world is not so unlike their home, after all, for all that Teyla spends her time in the magical city of the ancestors, where bare feet encounter only hard floors and slick surfaces. Here she can feel the earth under her soles, as she can feel the firelight glowing off her bare skin—and around her, the eyes fix on her, the children in awe, and the adults in hunger. She is the leader of their people, touched by the ancestors to sense the enemy and guard against it, chosen by the elders to travel to other worlds and speak to foreigners—she is their chosen warrior, and her body and her dancing shows it to be so. The most fit of them all. The most desirable.

She has seen Major Sheppard look at her in these clothes, which she wears to fight with the sticks, at the exposed thigh and stomach, breasts high and firm and held tightly by the top. When she first stepped into the practice room so clothed, his eyes went wide. Desirable, even to someone who has never known the Wraith, never known the driving need to choose the fittest, the fastest, the strongest, so that their children may survive the next culling.

She will choose someone tonight, sure as she feels the sweat trickling down her back and the fire rising in her blood. She spins, one foot kicking up, and again, and a higher kick, and again, until very little is left to the imagination of the watchers.

They do not need it. They have seen it all before.

When her breath comes in gasps and the dance has taken her over until she would not sense a Wraith were it standing in the circle around her, she undoes the clasps to her shirt, and unfastens the skirt, until she spins naked, glowing in the firelight, strength and fertility proven to all who watch.

Major Sheppard asked once why the Athosians had so young a leader. In fighting the Wraith, she explained, one needs not only wisdom, but strength. Proof to the old ones that a new generation rises strong, and the Wraith have not taken all this time.

The drums are growing louder. She stamps, kicks, spins, and comes to a halt next to Lycos, who watches her, gasping for air almost as deeply as she is.

Behind her, Mara spins out into the firelight, and Teyla pulls Lycos out into the dark of the trees, tripping him onto the forest floor and landing over him, feet and hands to either side. She waits, impatient, while he fumbles with his trousers, and lowers herself onto him, slowly. His head goes back, sweat standing out on his forehead.

“Teyla,” he gasps. “Teyla. Have mercy.”

She bites his exposed collarbone, and he yells, the cry echoing back to the firelight where Mara dances, blending in with the music. The woods will be full of young men screaming pleasure tonight, while the women show the Athosian people that they may not be able to prevail against the Wraith, but they will stay alive.