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Elastic wears out. Gussets fail. And it's not like they they can get any more from Earth. So the women of Atlantis try to invent something new, because many of them are highly qualified engineers, and Milky Way ingenuity ought to count for something. Then they all give up and just do it the local way.
“Also,” Elizabeth says, blurrily. “This place is hard on panties. You’re not supposed to laugh when I say things like that.”
“Of course not,” Teyla says contritely. “Do go on.”
“It’s all the running around and being shit-scared,” Elizabeth says. “Teyla, how do you go to the bathroom in a hurry?”
“Practice. Lift your hips.”
Elizabeth does it, her heels digging into the mattress. This is comfortable; it feels comfortable. She’s flat on her back on the bed, mostly naked, while Teyla smooths out a long, thin, brilliantly soft piece of fabric. It’s one piece, she says, so it will suit all women, and any men who wish to wear it although there aren’t many. She’s winding it around Elizabeth’s hips, between her legs and thighs. The caress of it is inevitably distracting, or that might just be Teyla’s hands in general.
Teyla kisses her, while she’s thinking about it, and runs those warm hands over her breasts. “You will have other elastic failures soon,” she says, fingers circling around Elizabeth’s nipples. “From what I have seen in the women’s locker room, it is a greater degree of elastic.”
“Bras, you mean?” Elizabeth asks, her breath hitching as Teyla shifts, leans down and puts her mouth where her fingers were. The long line of cloth is still immaculate. “What do you wear?”
“You have seen,” Teyla says, amused. “What did you call it?”
“A bandeau?” Elizabeth says, having taken some time to dredge the word from her memory, the first time she saw what Teyla has on under her clothes. It wasn’t one she’d heard much, back on Earth, outside of the lingerie catalogues someone like her would never have had time for.
She’d have liked to, though. She likes pretty things. And having someone to show them to.
“Yes,” Teyla says. “It is made of fabric, and tied.”
She touches her own breasts for a minute, to punctuate the point, and Elizabeth thinks about the ties. Those double bows, that would come undone with one tug, haunted her dreams for a while. The beautifully-appointed wonderfully-lit Ancient locker rooms have a lot to answer for.
Teyla sits back. Her halter top and shorts are perfectly nice, neat. Elizabeth is not, with the marks of Teyla’s mouth on her skin and the graceful Athosian cloth darkened over her cunt. “That is it,” Teyla says, putting one hand on each of Elizabeth’s hips, and then following the lien of fabric through to her inner thighs, then up toward her cunt. “We shall— what do your people say? Christen it.”
Nobody in the history of her people has ever used that word for this, Elizabeth thinks dizzily. “Don’t smash a bottle against my prow,” she says, to Teyla’s obvious and adorable confusion. But then she tenses, pushes away her urge to surrender to whatever Teyla wants to do to her. She’s still the commander of this expedition and there’s a piece of work for her to do.
“And you can do this for all women?” she asks.
“All that want it,” Teyla says, stroking Elizabeth’s clit through the Athosian cloth.
“Even women with different parts?” Elizabeth asks. A job to do. Always, a job to do. She’s arching up into the touch.
“The style of tie is sometimes different for them. It can be adjusted if it needs to be.””
“And men?”
“Again. If they want it, with adjustments.”
“And no elastic.” Elizabeth wants to undress Teyla, desperately. She wants to get that inelastic top off her, and take those shorts off her, and take in her beautiful, gleaming brown skin, and then she wants to undo two sets of knots and not be the leader of the Atlantis expedition.
“No elastic.” Teyla undoes her own hard work. She pushes her hand underneath the damp cloth that isn’t a gusset and unties the knot, so within a moment Elizabeth is naked on Teyla’s bed with Teyla’s fingers inside her. Maybe this is why her entire command have wrecked their panties, she thinks, as she pushes upwards while Teyla, with one hand on her stomach, holds her gently down. They’ve all been fucking quietly in the corners of their gorgeous and objectively enormously romantic city.
“Shhhh,” Teyla says, as though she can hear the continuing monologue inside Elizabeth’s head. “Come, darling.”
Athosians don’t use endearments like that, says the monologue inside Elizabeth’s head; that’s for her; that’s a gift like non-gusset underwear and a love like the rise of water. Then Teyla curls her fingers inside Elizabeth’s body and reaches a thumb towards her clit, the gentlest of touch. But it drops her over the edge, and Elizabeth is gasping and shuddering, flat on her back. And all the voices do shut up, for a while. Teyla kisses her again, and her sink into it is Elizabeth’s willing surrender.
Afterwards, when she’s still naked and flat but thinking again, she says, again: “Going to the bathroom in a hurry.”
“We will have a demonstration of how it is done,” Teyla says, lying beside Elizabeth and stroking her hair. “On Dr McKay. With his clothes on.”
“We will?” Elizabeth says, stirred out of happy torpor. “Why?”
“To encourage maximum attendance.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth says. She thinks about it. “Yes. Okay. You’re smart.”
“I know,” Teyla says, amused. Elizabeth is still thinking.
“It’s nice,” she says, at last. “To have something of yours against my skin.”
“I thought that,” Teyla says. For the first time this evening, she sounds unsure of herself. She’s not without her vulnerabilities, Elizabeth knows; not without worries and her own fragile skin. “That you should have us, me, right against the softest parts of you. It is as though…”
“What?”
“You might stay, after all.”
Elizabeth nods. Pretty soon she’ll be in the last of her elastic and the commander of the Atlantis expedition. But for now only softness, and the chance of a homeland, and a single piece of cloth.