Title: Y is for Yunnan (Pure Gold)
Author: magistrate
Rating: T
Genre: Character study / Alphabet Soup
Beta: I would have had time to find a beta for this if I hadn't spent most of the month forgetting how to write fiction.
Continuity: References Heroes and Lockdown.
Summary: Evans and Siler have a late-night chat. Or lack of same.
Disclaimer: This is not intended to be a factual statement on the tea preferences of fictional characters, nor an implication of ownership over anything SG-1. Yunnan tea may not be called Yunnan tea in all translations. Navigability of rivers varies with terrain. Questions, comments and clay pots can be left in replies or directed to magistrata(at)gmail(dot)com. Thanks for reading!

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Siler showed up on the stoop at some ungodly hour, after three but before six, right in the wobble time when the night was moribund and the morning inbound with injuries but neither one could hurry up and get where they were going. He didn't knock, or anything, which was just about normal for him, and Evans just finished the last line on her word processor, closed the computer, and went to the side door to greet him.

"Coffee?" she asked. Then she thought better of it, and said "My niece sent me tea."

Siler shrugged. "Nothing against tea."

"Right then."

Evans turned and walked into the kitchen, and after a moment Siler followed; she heard the side door close, then his feet on the linoleum, strange and familiar.

She hadn't really questioned these unexpected visits when they started – which was months ago, now, after a long run of days when the maintenance staff was in an upset (because nothing worked right when cameras were around, and there were more things in the SGC that couldn't be fixed as easily as equipment failures) and the Infirmary staff was in a fugue (because even with their lives always narrowly circumscribed by death, losing one of their own still meant something; every death still meant something), and she had a suspicion that the sparse back-and-forth between them, which would read as terse to anyone else, was just about as close to the expected warm banter of friendship as Siler really got. And she suspected that he'd rightly suspected the same thing about her.

Communication wasn't as necessary when understanding was already there.

She pulled down the tea leaves and started the water; pulled down the clay teapot from its spot on a cupboard shelf otherwise bare. Behind her, she could hear Siler installing himself on the couch in the livingroom.

Where he sat, for a moment.

Then he got up, wandered into the kitchen, and lingered there, by the doorway.

Evans exhaled, then turned to look at him. "Something you need, Sly?"

He stood for a moment, coming as close to a fidget as he ever did, then broke one of the cardinal rules and said, "Wondered if you wanted to talk about it."

Evans jerked back as if slapped.

They didn't talk about work, these nights; they talked about hockey, or politics, or storms in the Gulf of Mexico, or whose cousins were married and popping out kids and whose cousins were in jail and would never clean up their acts so why bother waiting for them to do it, and sometimes they talked about whether or not it was all worth it, and that was the closest they came: it. And invariably, the answer was:

"To be honest, I'm not sure what I could compare it to."

"Don't know where I'd be without it."

Except this it was different, specific. Out-of-bounds.

"I'm fine." The reply came more curt than she had intended. Of course, she'd already had her moment of panic back at the SGC; maybe she'd just already exhausted all the words she felt like spending on that.

Not that she'd spent that many there, all told.

And as though to further counter that theory, the next words shot out of her without her intention: "Do you?"

There was a moment of silence.

Siler grimaced, as though whatever process had been going on in the back of his brain finally output a signal to his face. "No," he admitted, and then shrugged, as through in apology. Then, after a moment, the night making liars of them both, he said "That wasn't even the closest we've come."

To being taken over, being blown off the face of the earth, to whatever. It was true. It was a few long days of monotony interrupted by a stretch of complete chaos, bodies usurped left and right and one of her patients walking out to his death, and then it was over. It wasn't like the Stargate had blown up, or even tried to.

Siler sighed, and Evans could all but hear the words that he wanted to slot onto the breath. They were gone, though, maybe misplaced under a pile of specs and wrenches and leather gloves with too many scorch marks for comfort. She heard the water behind her start to bubble, turned off the burner before the kettle could whistle, grabbed the tea and, with quick precision, measured out a dose to fit the pot.

Siler wandered in. "What is that?"

"Yunnan Dianhong Pure Gold," she said. "Or something like that."

"Hm," Siler said, and watched her pour the water in to steep.

Silence again, and not the usual kind. The usual kind was comfortable; they'd said what they needed to, and after that, they just existed, and shared the experience and evidence of their own existence. A reminder that they and their worlds didn't terminate at the edge of Cheyenne Mountain, and that there was a home to come home to and a friend to visit so long as the Earth was still there.

This silence, though, was full of jostling intentions to speak, uncertainties of what to say. Evans resented that.

Three minutes passed, Evans counting out the time in her head, and she pulled the tea strainer out of the pot and fit the lid on. She grabbed mugs and made to go back into the livingroom, but paused, and gave Siler a critical look, up and down.

"I feel like this is the sort of thing that changes relationships," she said, and the corner of her mouth quirked up despite itself. "The kind of relationships people like us get, anyway. Talking about work when we're not at work. And you know how these things go - I don't know what our friendship will look like, after all that happens."

Maybe better, maybe worse. Maybe there'd be nothing there at all. It was the gamble you always had to take when those lines of intimacy got re-drawn, even if these were the sorts of lines normal, non-SGC people probably didn't think were lines at all. Talking about work? What kind of a taboo was that?

An SGC one, she thought, but the heat was beginning to bleed through the clay and sting her hands, so she went into the livingroom, cleared a spot on the coffeetable, and set the teapot down.

"I guess maybe I could talk," she admitted, but it felt sour in her mouth; she poured herself enough tea to cover the bottom of the mug, and let the steam carry a sweeter scent up to her. "I just don't know if I want all that coming home with me." She shrugged. "Your choice."

Even if it wasn't a choice she was happy with him making.

She had gotten used to these meetings, these little atypical grasps at normalcy, sometime when she hadn't been paying attention. It was nice to pretend that their lives were normal, now and again; that even if the things they say under the mountain were the most important things any of them had ever seen, the things they did the most important things anyone had ever done, that there was something outside of it which merited occasional attention. That there was somewhere left to get away to.

So she sat, waiting for all of that to break, until Siler cleared his throat and peered at the teapot. "Yunnan's in China, isn't it?"

It caught her by surprise, and she started laughing.

"Yeah. It's in China, Sly. Where my niece is. I've told you about my niece, haven't I?"

"A few times, yeah," Siler said, and she thought – she thought – there was something of a smile at the corner of his lips.

Evans reached over and poured the tea into his mug. "She saw the words 'mountainous terrain' and 'unnavigable rivers' in an article somewhere and apparently took it as a challenge. But that's my family, for you; no Evans has ever done things the easy way..."