![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
hth-the-first.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
sga_flashficTitle: Steadfast, Loyal, and True
Author: Hth
Rating: R for semi-explicit het. Yeah, I dunno either.
Characters: Ronon, Melena, Teyla, assorted Satedans, assorted other people
S4 spoilers: Reunion, Missing, The Seer, Miller's Crossing
Notes: So...when you say "flashfic," you mean right about 22,000 words, right? Good, I thought so.
Also, many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
linabean, who had many useful suggestions about Ronon and his fashion sense. Errr, hopefully she wasn't planning on using any of those herself....
Steadfast, Loyal, and True
by Hth
The recruiting sergeants came through Ronon’s town when he was a month short of sixteen, but it didn’t bother him to lie on his application, putting his birthday a few weeks into his past instead of his future. They gave him two days to put his life in order and be at the pick-up site and told him not to bring anything but a shaving kit and one change of clothes – something sturdy, nothing fancy. Beyond that, he didn’t know what to expect, and he didn’t ask.
He sat on his father’s bed and told him what he’d done; there were weeks like this one, ever since the sickness that killed Ronon’s mother and both his sisters, when his father was barely out of bed at all. He didn’t say anything for a long time, until Ronon started to wonder if he were really awake, even though his eyes were open. But finally he said, “Will you need anything?”
“No,” Ronon said softly. “No, nothing. You don’t have to worry about me anymore. Just...take care of Gran.”
His Gran only snorted when he told her. “You won’t last a month,” she said, and waved a wooden spoon under his nose. “It’s not easy to go from the apron strings straight into the Infantry, you know. Your mother always spoiled you sick. I suppose you want to be some kind of hero now. I thought you had your heart set on going on to university?”
“No,” Ronon said to the kitchen floor.
“Good,” she said. “You have your mother’s airs. They’ll knock that out of you in the Infantry, you watch. They won’t suffer any nonsense from you, no matter how far above yourself you think you are. I doubt I’ll recognize you when you come back.” She sounded pretty pleased about that.
Ronon kissed her dry cheek and said, “Be nice to Dad, will you? He misses her.”
“Of course I will,” she snapped. “I’m his mother, and I spoil him sick, too. We can’t help it.”
He raked the leaves in the front yard that evening, and he lingered over the job until well after nightfall, hoping to see Melena walking home from classes, which happened later and later as the years passed and her studies forced her to spend longer hours in the library. This was her second year at university, the year when half of all students washed out – not that Melena ever would, but she had to keep long hours to make sure her scores stayed as high as they used to with no effort at all.
She never seemed stressed, though. She smiled the same girlish smile as always as she shrugged her book satchel high on her shoulder and put her feet up on his front gate and let him pull it all the way in and then push it out so that the metal hinges squealed as she swung. When it slowed down again, Ronon pulled it shut and latched it; she was as tall as him when she stood on the bottom of the gate, and when he covered her hands with his on the top, nothing but the slats of wood separating them, it was easy to kiss her.
“What, just one?” she said when he tried to pull away, leaning across the gate and closing her arms around his neck.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “I’m leaving in two days. I joined the Infantry.”
Melena blinked. “In...in two days? What about your graduation boards? They’re only in the spring, and– “
“I won’t pass them,” he said. “I can’t.”
“I can help,” she said. “I’ll tutor you.”
“You don’t have time for that. I don’t need it anyway, I’m not – what does somebody like me need it for?”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said stubbornly, even though she did know. She would never admit it, that was all. “Someone like you – I don’t know what that means.”
“I’d never get through university– “
“You don’t have to, that’s not why. You should get your degree because you deserve it, you’ve earned it. You’re smart and you’ve worked so hard– “
“I’m bad at tests.”
“I can help you with the tests!”
“Stop it!” he said, louder than he meant. He’d never yelled at Melena before, and her mouth snapped shut with surprise. He rubbed his fingers over the backs of her hands and said, “Sorry, I just...think we need to talk about...this. About us. You have your future all planned out, and I.... This is a future I can have. I need one, too, I can’t just....”
She frowned, but she couldn’t look angry enough. She mainly just looked hurt. “I planned for you to be there,” she said quietly. “But you’re leaving in two days and you didn’t even talk to me before you did it, so things aren’t going quite like I planned.”
“I can’t end up like my father.” That was the one thing he was sure of, the thing he’d realized that made everything else fall into place behind it and make sense. “Ever since Mom died, he’s just – lost. You say you’re planning for us, but you can’t plan everything, and....” He couldn’t stop his voice from cracking a little as he said, “Do you think my mom would be proud of him? If she could see him now?”
Melena put her hands on his face and kissed him, quick and hard. “Ask me,” she said.
They’d been through this before. “No.”
“You’re so stubborn. Why won’t you just ask me?”
“Because you’ll say yes,” he said. He put his head down on her shoulder, smiling into her neck. “You’re my best friend. I’d do anything for you, I’d die for you, but I wouldn’t – be the right one for you. I’m just – it would be – the wrong choice.”
Her hand settled over the back of his neck, her nails stroking delicately against his skin. “You’ve always loved me more than anyone I know,” she said.
“I think you used to call it following you around like a starving puppy. As in, ‘quit following me around like a starving puppy.’”
She laughed softly into his hair. “But I don’t say that to you anymore, do I?”
“No,” he admitted. “Not for a while.”
“Don’t go. I’ll miss you too much. I need you here.” He didn’t know what to say to that; any answer at all seemed to go against his nature, or at least to go against what he hoped his nature was. “Never mind,” she said with a sigh. “This isn’t the sort of thing you’d do on a whim. So if you did it at all, it must be...really important to you.”
“You’ll be proud of me,” he promised. “When I see you again, you won’t even recognize me.”
“Yes, I will,” she said, and he hoped she was talking about the first thing, but suspected she meant the other. “Ask me,” she demanded again. When he couldn’t, she sighed, touched his cheek, and climbed off the gate to continue home.
It wasn’t til the day after next, the day he was supposed to leave for training, that he opened the back door to let the dogs outside and saw her, looking almost ghostly with her pale skin and her white shawl in the first morning light. “Sandwiches,” she said hoarsely, pressing a small bag into his hands. “For the train.” Then suddenly she was holding him tightly, ruining the sandwiches between them. “Ask me,” she said into his chest, soft and desperate. “Ask me.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and brought her inside for tea and muffins, then held one of her hands across the table while she ate with the other one. “You know we can’t marry each other,” he said.
“I don’t either, know that. You can say it over and over until the end of time, but that won’t somehow make it true.”
“Your parents hate me.” Grinning slightly, he added, “And my grandmother’s not too crazy about you, either.”
Melena rolled her eyes, but she was serious when she said, “Your mother loved me, though.”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “She did. I remember she never wanted anyone but you to take care of the girls when she and my dad went somewhere. She wouldn’t even let me watch them.”
“Well, you were bad at it,” Melena pointed out reasonably. “That time Jolia shaved the– “
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I was bad at it.”
“I remember you lurking at the top of the stairs, watching us,” Melena said, smiling at him. “I thought you were shy.”
“I was shy. Around you I was.”
She wrapped both her hands over one of his and said, “I don’t think you ever knew how much I hated to leave. All those times you walked me back up the hill, and you never realized, I envied you so much. I know things are hard here for you now, but I still think you’re the luckiest person I ever met. The way your parents loved each other, the way they loved you and Jolia and Nessa– Nobody in my family even likes anybody else – they only like me when my scores come in at the end of the year– “
“That’s not true,” Ronon said automatically.
She didn’t seem to hear him at all. “What am I even doing this for?” she asked, with a note of quiet hysteria in her voice. “I’m working so hard, I thought I was doing all this for us, but you won’t even say you want it, and now you’re leaving, and who gives a shit if I pass my boards at first-tier and get a titled position and buy a house in Yendikai, what the fuck does it mean if you’re not going to be there with me?”
He leaned over the small table and put his lips against her fingers. “You should...do all that for yourself,” he said in a small voice. “You – it’s like you said. You should have those things because you deserve them, not for....”
“Are you not even going to tell me that you love me?”
Ronon smiled at the little snap in her voice, but it faded as he said, “I just...don’t think that would make anything – any easier. I have to go, and I could be gone a long time. Nothing I say is gonna change that now.”
She freed one hand and wiped at her eyes, and when she had steadied her breathing and composed herself, she reached out and touched his hair. “Your hair’s a mess,” she said.
“I can’t seem to get it right,” he admitted. “Mom used to....”
“Let me do it,” she said.
He sat on the floor of the bathroom with Melena sitting on the edge of the tub behind him while she oiled his curls, twisting each of them carefully around her fingers to hold their shape. Her own hair fell forward and picked up some of the fragrant oils, and then when she leaned over and nuzzled behind his ear, so that when he pulled her to the floor to kiss her, her lips tasted the same way that the whole room smelled. She ran her slick fingers over his chest, then tangled them with his fingers, so that he was leaving marks everywhere, too, slick wet marks on her neck, on the inside of her wrist, and his fingers were too slippery to work the tiny hooks down the front of her blouse. She pushed his hands away, then kissed him while her slick hand worked inside his pants, which he thought he should ask if she was sure about, but he couldn’t speak, or think, or do anything but add more wet marks to her blouse, sucking on her breasts through the material.
“There, now,” she said after, touching up his curls with her fingertips and dropping kisses on his collarbone. “You look better.”
*
He’d been in the training camp for over two months when the next wave of recruits arrived. “They’re over-recruiting,” Andan said in a grim tone as they watched the train pull in from their windbreak under the laundry shelter. “What are we getting ready for?”
Wraith. Nobody said it, but it had to be. There hadn’t been Wraith on Sateda in Ronon’s lifetime, but that didn’t mean safety. It meant the time was coming.
Vendis snorted and spat his wad of chewing-leaf on the concrete floor. “They’ll tell us when they tell us. In the meantime, what I want to know is, where are they going to put these new fools?”
Ronon used the edge of his boot to kick the sticky green ball off the edge of the concrete slab and onto the dead grass outside the shelter. “At least we’re not the new fools anymore,” he said.
Vendis laughed and thumped him on the back of the head with his open palm. “Think you’re a veteran now, Puppy?” Ronon threw his hand off and glared. Vendis was all right, closer to a friend than most people here, but Ronon still wasn’t going to let him get away with that. He’d set the high scores for the training unit in every task so far; he wasn’t their fucking little brother.
Ronon blew on his hands and rubbed them together as he watched the new recruits emerge blinking into the winter sunlight from the train, shading their eyes to get a good look around the rough camp. Most of the people joining these days were farmers, displaced by plague and two seasons of unreasonable chill blighting the crops; maybe to them it didn’t look so bad, but Ronon could still remember the strange twist of his stomach, when it was him emerging from the dark train car and getting his first look around at all the bleak, squat, colorless buildings without windows, the practice fields segmented off with metal rails and ditches dug into the sandy dirt, the smoke from the kitchens hanging over everything all the time. It was nothing at all like where Ronon came from.
The door to the officers’ hall hit the outside of the building with a clatter, drawing everyone’s attention toward it, but it was the Marke Hartoren that kept them looking. Even Ronon watched – he could never help watching. It wasn’t just the Marke’s reputation – Ronon hadn’t known enough to match the man to the name when he first saw him, but that hadn’t mattered. He was taller than any man Ronon had ever seen, elongated even further by his severe black clothing and sharply pointed beard so that he looked like some lean, diving bird of prey, but even that wasn’t the main thing. It was the way he moved. Never too fast, never too slow, as elegant as a woman but with nothing feminine about him. Ronon didn’t know whether it was admiration or dread that made him unable to look away whenever the Marke appeared to survey the trainees.
He knew he wanted whatever Hartoren had, though: that control of himself, that certainty. Even with his name at the top of every task list that went up, Ronon still felt vaguely displaced, awkward in some unrecognizable way, as if soon someone would catch him playing soldier and be angry.
He lost half a bar standing there, watching the new recruits meet the Marke, the training captain, the camp legate – time that he’d meant to spend finishing his letter to Melena, before he had to use it finishing his laundry in time for supper inspections – and he still couldn’t quite make himself believe his own words. He still felt like the new fool.
Supper was a headache; they’d been overcrowded before there were fifty new recruits, and everywhere Ronon turned, someone was behind him or jammed into him or standing where he wanted to step. Their combined noise echoed off the tin walls of the mess hall until he almost wanted an evening shift on stick drills, in spite of the raw spots on his hands that were threatening to become torn blisters any day now. But he was scheduled for the obstacle course, which was worse: the ropes and bars were just as rough on his hands, and without even the chance to work out his irritability by taking a swing at someone. He didn’t care enough about his time to keep him distracted; he was a minute fifteen ahead of whoever had second place, not close enough to make him struggle for it.
He showered afterward, and even handling the harsh lye soap as gingerly as he could, there were still streaks of blood from his cracked hands in the lather. He brushed his teeth, watching himself in the small, dingy mirror over the sink, wondering how anybody ever managed to shave with so distorted a reflection. Ronon had stopped shaving weeks ago, and he was just now getting out of the dirty and stubbled stage, into something that looked passably like a beard. He thought it made him look older, a little. He ran his fingers through his hair, which was a frizzy mess and he’d given up on it; soon it would be long enough to tie back, and that was all he cared about now.
Somebody jostled him from behind, slamming Ronon’s groin against the edge of the sink, and he swung around and shoved back immediately. “Hey!” Vendis yelled, scrabbling against the wall to keep his footing on the wet floor. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” Ronon muttered. “Just – everybody’s in my way. Sorry.”
“Oh, well, so very sorry myself, Your Excellency,” Vendis said, his mouth twisting. “They seem to have lost your reservations for the private suite.”
“I’m sorry,” Ronon said again, because he really did like Vendis better than most people around here. “That was my fault.” Vendis snorted, but his face settled back into his normal aloof but tolerant expression, so no harm done.
It was a cold walk with wet hair back to his barracks, but inside it was almost too hot, with the stove in the corner coughing up smoke and five extra people now living on cots in the middle of the floor. That’s where they were putting the new recruits, then, just casting aside pretense and making them live literally underfoot. It was so disorienting, and annoying, that it took Ronon a second to realize that there were strangers poking around in his alcove, where he never, ever left the curtain drawn back like that.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
One of the recruits raised his hands and said, “No harm meant, son.” He had what Ronon thought were prison tattoos on his palms.
“I’m not your son,” Ronon snapped. “I don’t even know you. Go away.”
“Now, nobody likes a growly puppy,” Andan said, and Ronon should’ve known he was involved in this somehow. Andan seemed to spend more effort looking for small ways to get under Ronon’s skin than he did on any task their trainers assigned.
Another of the new recruits, one closer to Ronon’s own age, gave him an apologetic smile and said, “We’re getting to know people, that’s all. And we keep hearing you lead the unit in everything.”
“If you want to see if it’s true, go look at the task lists,” Ronon said, jerking the curtain closed. “There’s nothing here for you to know.”
“Andan wanted us to see the picture of your lady doctor,” the tattooed man said, showing crooked teeth when he smiled. “She’s a doctor, yeah?”
Ronon clenched and released his fingers to help manage the tension that was taking over his body. “She will be,” he said shortly. “Stay out of my things.”
He turned around before he realized how close Andan had moved, so that suddenly he had those bushy eyebrows and those hard grey eyes just an inch below his own eye-level. It wasn’t really until that moment, until seeing Andan’s eyes right then, that Ronon realized how much the older man disliked him – not just enjoyed patronizing and irritating him, but honestly disliked him. Ronon couldn’t think what he’d ever done to earn that, not that it really mattered now. “I was doing you a favor, boy,” Andan said, jolly and false.
“Don’t,” Ronon advised – meaning favors in general, and also meaning this, whatever this was that Andan seemed willing to push him into tonight.
Ignoring that, Andan leaned closer and said conspiratorially, “Best if they know it’s a phase, you see? It’s all right, you’re not the first. You’ll marry your lady doctor and forget all about it eventually.”
Probably he shouldn’t have cared, but– “Forget what?”
Andan shrugged. “Your little...devotion to the Marke.” For a second there was utter, pure silence, a silence like Ronon hadn’t heard since he boarded the damn train two months ago – the sound of every man in the barracks waiting on Ronon’s reaction. He didn’t move; he didn’t know what to do. Nothing would make it unsaid, and nothing would make people forget. Damn Andan, anyway. He hadn’t been content to stick Ronon with that stupid nickname, he absolutely had to pin this on him for the rest of his career. Damn him.
It was Andan’s victory and he knew it; the rumor would be outside these walls in minutes, and by this time tomorrow it would have mutated and the whole camp would be saying – would believe – Reckless with his win, Andan half-turned, playing to his audience now, and added lightly, “Sixteen’s the age to try new things, though, isn’t it? Be good for you and your lady doctor both, I’d say, to try a few new flavors before you stick yourselves with each other for life. You could have a go at spreading your legs for a man while you’re here...and so could she.”
Ronon had never hit anyone in anger in his whole life, but that didn’t mean it was hard. It was surprisingly easy; he was still untrained enough that it was something new to realize that strength and speed measured by tests and tasks would translate into actually being able to fight. He knocked Andan to the floor with one punch, and he didn’t stop until three men pried him loose – not recruits, either, but military police.
They dragged him into the courtyard and forced him to his knees with the butts of their rifles, then lashed him by his wrists to the railing of the main field and left him there, and he didn’t feel any of it, didn’t feel anything but the bright heat of his anger.
But he was there for a long time, and he was damp and cold, and his arms started to hurt and he could feel the blood drying stiff on the palm of his hand – his own reopened blisters – and on the outside, too – Andan’s blood. Slowly, he became aware of the mud soaking through the knees of his pants, and the heavy ropes of wire sinking into the thin skin inside his wrists. The pain in his arms crawled further down his back and up his neck, and it got harder and harder to hold his head up, so that he was staring down at the dirt, utterly alone with the pain and resentment and humiliation and fury, and the fear of what came next.
He thought he might still be hanging there by breakfast for everyone to stare at, but it was still dark out when he heard the crunch of boots and saw the traveling beam of a flashlight pass over his face. He didn’t look up, though, struck by the weird feeling that he still had time to make this not real. All he saw were boots at first, until his visitor grew impatient and set his knee under Ronon’s chin, pushing his head up until Ronon was looking blearily up at the Marke in all his tightly leashed severity.
“Let him up,” the Marke said to his accompanying soldiers. “Bring him to my office once he’s cleaned off.”
The MP’s walked him back to the showers to rinse off and put on fresh pants, then disinfected and bandaged his wrists, all without speaking a word. Ronon didn’t say anything, either. He wouldn’t apologize. He wouldn’t apologize, not even if the Marke himself ordered it; he’d rather be discharged, or go to prison.
The Marke’s office was drafty because of a half-opened window; the Marke stood beside it to smoke, dropping his ashes in the dead grass outside. The MP’s left Ronon there, and the Marke gestured vaguely for him to sit in the chair across the desk – vague gestures were all Ronon could make out in the dim lamplight of the room. He put his sore hands cautiously on the arms of the chair and waited until the Marke had finished his cigar and thrown the butt outside. “So I’m curious,” the Marke said, his gravelly voice strangely cheerful. “Your mother, your girl, or your ass?” Ronon spent a shocked second trying to decipher the question, until the Marke snorted slightly and said, “The third one, then. It’s always one of the three.”
“Second,” Ronon said quickly. “It was...the second.”
The Marke nodded slowly. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s just, you don’t know how boring this job can get, and nobody ever brings me any decent gossip. Aren’t you going to ask how he’s doing?” It hadn’t really occurred to Ronon, actually. He shrugged, and the Marke made a soft, thoughtful noise. “You can hold a grudge, can’t you, boy?” he said, not quite a criticism. “Some men would be satisfied after that much. You broke his nose, which is nothing, that’ll heal. But you tore his retina, too. He probably won’t see out of his left eye again. Still angry?”
Ronon took the question seriously and didn’t rush his answer. “Yes,” he finally said. “Kind of.”
“You’re at the head of your unit,” the Marke said, and even under these circumstances, it helped Ronon sit up a little straighter, knowing that Hartoren himself knew Ronon by his actions. In all those years he’d listened to the wireless reports of the Marke Hartoren’s latest heroic deeds, Ronon had never imagined Hartoren would someday hear anything at all about him. “Not just recruits – enlisted men, too,” he continued. “You’re faster and stronger than two-thirds of them, you shoot straighter than nine-tenths, and I’ll be damned if I know anyone I’d put up against you in any task that required pure endurance – or sheer, stubborn bloody-mindedness, which might be the same head in a different hat. Every officer in the Infantry is watching to see where your career goes, Mr. Dex, and the fascinating thing is that I honestly don’t think you know it. So let’s rule out excessive ego right off; I find it unsettling how little attention you draw to your brief but remarkable service record. Which leaves the question open: why do you think you find it so fucking difficult to fit in with your own unit?”
Strangely, Ronon didn’t think it had ever occurred to him to ask himself so simple a question as why. “Because I’m the youngest,” he hazarded. “It hurts their pride to always rank under me.”
“Maybe,” the Marke said. “But I think there’s more to it than that. These men that you serve with now, they’re coming here more and more because there’s nothing left for them in the real world. They’ve lost families in the plagues, they’ve lost family farms, they can’t find work. These men aren’t the future of Sateda, Ronon: you are. These are just people trying to slip loose from their pasts. Their clocks are almost stopped in so many ways, and here you are, everything they aren’t: young and talented and rich, ready to start your life, all eyes on you. All their lives they’ve failed to be you, and it doesn’t matter that they just now met you. They know it.”
“I’m not rich,” Ronon said softly, thinking of his Gran. Your mother’s airs. “My father is a security guard for a residential enclave; my mother gave music lessons. I grew up around rich people, but I....” He stopped, wondering in a dull panic why he momentarily thought the Marke Hartoren would give a damn about his father.
But he sounded at least a little interested when he said, “Huh. Well, you have that look about you – the way you talk, the way you’re fussy about your clothes. Your girl’s in university, isn’t she?”
“Her parents can’t stand me,” Ronon admitted, and the Marke laughed out loud, an easy laugh that Ronon would never have imagined coming out of the cool, silent man that he was in public. Ronon didn’t know if Hartoren was married or not, but he didn’t think so. That seemed strange to Ronon; he was such a great man, famous and powerful, magnetic in front of a crowd and yet startlingly funny and kind in person. Ronon couldn’t imagine that there was ever a woman the Marke might have wanted who wouldn’t be glad to have him. “I didn’t know you– You know how I dress?” Ronon blurted.
The Marke moved away from the window and sat down, leaning closer to Ronon with his forearms braced on the desk. “Do you think I’m joking when I say we’ve all been watching you?” he said. “I know of three other Markes who’d snatch you up like chicken thieves if I turned a moment’s blind eye, and that’s not even to mention Special Forces. Kell Crudin would slice my throat for a chance at you, that duplicitous bastard. Even if I wanted to obey the letter of the law, you wouldn’t lose your career over this, Ronon; as fast as I discharged you, someone would be right there to offer you a place in a different regiment. Not that I plan to discharge you.”
“So...what happens now? Nothing?”
“Not nothing. It’s in my power to pull you out from the other recruits and assign someone to supervise you directly. Generally it’s a punishment, but you’re something of a special case. You’ll work hard for Soren, damn hard, but then you do that anyway.”
“Soren,” he repeated quietly. For one moment...stupid, but he thought.... Hartoren already talked about him like he was a personal project, and Ronon didn’t know how long it would take him to get over the shock of that. But of course, he was the Marke, and he had more important things to do.
“Soren Sincha. He’ll push you hard, but he’ll treat you fairly; he’s a good man. And you’re already damn near as much a soldier as he is.” The Marke stood up and reached across the desk, and after a moment’s hesitation, Ronon stood up too and gripped his arm. “You’re going to be an officer,” he said quietly, his thin, severe face utterly changed by the small, knowing smile. “I’ll be very much surprised if you aren’t going to be a Marke. And trust me when I tell you, half of that job is acting the way they expect you to act. Soren’s an old friend of mine; he’ll get you dirty, he’ll get you drunk, he’ll make you laugh til you cry, and when he’s done with you, you’ll be able to shout an order and men will line up to die without a second thought. Ancestors protect your soul.”
The Marke let him go with a bar and a half to sleep before breakfast inspections, and when Ronon entered his barracks, he could tell from the breathing and rustling that not everyone was asleep – probably still strung too tightly after the evening’s excitement. Knowing he was being watched, Ronon walked to his alcove with his best imitation of Hartoren’s patient gait; rushing would only imply that he was embarrassed or guilty.
He laid down and pulled the curtain closed with his sore, bandaged hand. He wasn’t sure how to present himself to Soren Sincha – what to wear, what to say, how not to come across like...himself. He resolved to say as little as possible for as long as he could. Watch and learn – that was what he was being sent to do, anyhow. He had a mostly full beard and cuts on his knuckles from the hard skull of a man he’d half blinded. That would have to be enough to start with.
You won’t even recognize me, he heard himself say, confident and hopeful. As if it were so easy to change. As if it would happen just because he wanted it to.
*
It took Ronon a while to get hold of his knife and cut himself out of the Wraith pod, and since he certainly wasn’t going to listen to McKay any more than he absolutely had to while doing it, that gave him a fair amount of time to think about life.
The unexpected conclusion he came to was that being on a hive ship (it was Ronon’s third time) wasn’t so different from anything else – or maybe, rather, that people dealt with finding themselves on a hive ship pretty much the same way they dealt with everything else. McKay, for example, got very negative very quickly, and then distracted himself from his own feelings by obsessing over stupid little details. Just, in general, McKay did that; he was always himself, even in a place like that.
What Ronon did was prioritize. He always liked to keep a list in his head of mission objectives, in order of importance, and he reassessed regularly, even though the funny thing was that the list hardly ever changed. Maybe he’d sort of imagined that at a really, really big moment things would shift around, but he couldn’t figure out how to make this moment all that much bigger, and nothing actually even budged. He guessed he was always himself, too.
The first thing on the list was to live. A good landing is one you can walk away from, Sheppard liked to say, and Ronon appreciated that about Sheppard – the way he had good, strong priorities, ones that fit in well with Ronon’s. That was why they got along so well. Sheppard himself was thing number two on Ronon’s list – not just Sheppard, but collectively, all the people Ronon cared about. So Sheppard mainly, who was Ronon’s superior and his friend both, but also McKay, because it wasn’t like they could find another one like him anywhere, and Teyla, who was...special in a lot of ways. Occasionally other people would strike him as important like that, as the second-most-important thing in the world, but only very occasionally. Mostly them.
Third was to kill as many Wraith as possible. That was pretty straightforward and hardly ever changed, even though it could get complicated sometimes, weighing that one against the first two, pinning down the exact meaning of “as possible” in any given situation. His fourth objective was – well, he found it hard to put into words, but he knew it when he saw it. It was to do something good – something right. He knew he was no hero – if he were a hero, it would be higher on the list than number four – but it was important to him not to give up on that part completely.
On the hive ship, it all sifted out very neatly. First, get off the ship, and second, bring McKay along, too. Third, cause as much damage as he could in the process, and fourth, save Earth. He’d never been to Earth, but he felt something for it anyway – a world that produced M&Ms, e-mail, and John Sheppard had to be someplace pretty special – and even if he’d never heard of the place.... The Wraith would almost definitely decide to make McKay watch, and there were just some pictures that nobody should ever have to look at. Probably they’d bring him to a screen in some dark room somewhere, and he’d stand in front of it and look at things he could almost recognize, that he could almost remember from back when it was his home and not just blackened ruins, and something somewhere was still alive.
Ronon wasn’t a hero, and it ranked several places behind saving his own life, but still, he wouldn’t wish the things he’d seen on any human being. Earth would fight back, like Sateda fought back, and one Sateda was enough. More than enough.
That mission ended well, though, and even a long, hungry flight home didn’t bother Ronon much, even though he was too keyed up to sleep (keyed up, not disturbed by being surrounded by the eerie, inert bodies of ex-Wraith, not freaked out, whatever the fuck that meant) and he kept checking up on Sheppard and McKay for no good reason. He was tired and thirsty and hungry by the time they reached Atlantis, but it was fine, everything was okay. Everything was good.
Dr. Weir brought sandwiches and thermoses of soup to the de-briefing, and Ronon ate all of his share and some of Sheppard’s while Sheppard had to give the preliminary; McKay tried to sneak the last of the chicken salad, but he got distracted by the meeting at the last second and Ronon, who was pretty much never distracted by meetings in any way, swapped it with one of the egg salad sandwiches. The look on McKay’s face when he bit into it would have been funny, if Ronon had more energy to be amused.
Everybody agreed that the situation was stable but delicate, and that “Michael” was a little bit of a problem, but not one they couldn’t sit on until morning, and that was that. He was on his way to bed when Teyla caught up to him in the hall and said crisply, “Ronon, may I have one more moment of your time?”
“What for?” he asked, because it wasn’t like he was in charge of anything, and anything he knew, other, more important people knew, too. People who’d either had more sleep than he had over the past three days, or got paid a lot more than he did.
Instead of answering she said, “Only a moment, to clear up some small confusion on my part.” She gestured toward one of the small conference rooms they never used; it seemed situated to be used by the engineering department, but McKay made engineering hold their meetings in the main lab complex with everybody else so that he could eavesdrop. Ronon considered arguing, but Teyla was a stubborn person, and he figured the argument itself would take longer than just answering her questions.
“Please sit,” she said gravely as she followed him into the conference room. Instead of pulling out a chair, Ronon sat on the edge of the table and started to say, How long did you say this would take?, but he didn’t make it that far. Before he could get his tongue around the first word, Teyla had her hands behind his neck and her knees on the conference table. He automatically put a hand on her back to steady her, but that didn’t really mean he was catching up, or that he was ready for it when she kissed him.
She kissed him for a long time, which was good, because he wasn’t catching up very fast.
When he finally did, he pulled his head back, looking blank and dumb at the beautiful woman kneeling astride his lap with her ass in his hands and her tongue slyly licking the taste of him off her lips. “Did you...really want to ask me a question?” he said helplessly.
“No,” Teyla said. “But I did want you to sit. You are very, very tall.”
That made him grin, and she smiled brilliantly back at him, and that woke him up enough to take her face between his hands and kiss her back, hard and juicy and hungry. He was so hungry for this; he couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it before. There were so many things that...that he’d never allowed on the list at all, that he hadn’t given himself permission to want.
She pushed him down flat on the table and followed his mouth. He tweaked her ponytail playfully with one hand and let his other hand go back to cupping her ass, and she was – she was unbelievable, she was astonishing, strong and delicate, sweetly curved and muscular, bold and somehow gentle, the way she was stroking his chest, the way she kissed the corner of his mouth. Ask me, he thought, ask me, and he wasn’t sixteen anymore, so he said, “You want to come with me to my room?”
“Yes,” she murmured, her lips opening against his, her tongue pressing in for just a second. She ran her fingers from behind his ear down his neck, making him shiver, and said in a rough, unfamiliar voice, “It is too soon to lose you, I think my heart could not – that I could not bear it. I know you have endured much, and you are not always willing to be – to be open – with people, and that is why I have not....”
“I didn’t know,” he said faintly. “When...?”
He could feel her smile broadly against his mouth. “Long enough ago. More than long enough.”
Ronon sat back up, bringing Teyla with him so that she was seated firmly in his lap, her strong hands and her searching lips on his face. He slid to his feet, and she stayed wrapped around him for a moment before unwrapping her legs and getting their support underneath her. He kept his arms around her a little longer, just in case.
It felt strange, walking down the hall beside Teyla as if nothing were happening, as if nothing had changed. He was so conscious of her, of the unusual warmth coming off her skin, the twitch of muscles in her neck, her jacket brushing his arm. In the transporter, she put her hand around his and looked up at him with dark, liquid eyes, and he couldn’t look away.
Once they were safely inside his room, Ronon grabbed her around the waist and lifted her onto her toes; she anchored her arms around his neck as they kissed, then finally surrendered and let him pick her up again and walk backwards to fall on his bed. She threw off her jacket and then stripped his shirt off, and he felt his stomach contract as her hand smoothed over the broad surgery scar on his belly. He blew on her hair so that he could get to her ear and nibble it without taking in a mouthful of hair, too, and he could feel her pulse. He cupped her heavy breasts and ran his thumbs over the smooth skin above her shirt, and she made a low, luxurious humming sound and pressed further into his hands as he set up a slow, massaging rhythm.
She was one of the only people he cared about, and the most beautiful woman on the planet, too. There was no reason not to want this – and he did want it; he was heated and shuddering and sensitized from just this, and just imagining – how she’d feel, riding him, every inch of her sweat-slick skin under his fingers, the perfect, close fit between them that would be just like the way they pushed and pulled each other in the training room, only a million times more....
He wanted it completely, and he could have it. No reason not to. No reason at all.
He closed his eyes and groaned, turning his face away. “Ronon?” Teyla murmured, scattering delicate little kisses on his face. “What is it?”
He let his eyes flutter open, his gaze settling on her kiss-swollen mouth, and he couldn’t lie to her, or even shut her out. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, almost without a voice.
With the way she was lying across him, she had to be aware of all the ways he didn’t mean that. After a moment’s silence, she slipped sideways, tucking herself against his side with one leg wrapped across him. They both still had their boots on. “You know, I think, that you can say anything to me,” she said, propping her head up so she could see his face. She smiled a little sadly and said, “I know you have a good and decent soul, and nothing will outweigh that in my eyes.”
He took a breath and said, “I just think...that if it was right...it would be easier than this? It would feel....” Like something that was permitted. Like something he deserved.... “I don’t know. Easier than this. I want to, but....”
She settled her fingertips in the hollow of his throat; he thought it should make him nervous, but it didn’t. “Are you a virgin?” she asked gently.
Before he could think what the right thing to say was, some combination of trust and exhaustion took over, and he heard himself say with thoughtless honesty, “No, married.” He was furious with himself the second he said it, but from her face, she seemed to understand what he meant. His story wasn’t so unusual, after all, at least in broad strokes. “Widowed,” he amended softly.
Teyla snuggled closer under his arm and rested her head on his shoulder. “Tell me about her.”
That was.... He hadn’t been expecting that. “You don’t want to hear about....” he tried weakly.
She smoothed her fingers over his stomach and said, “I know you have your scars. I am not afraid to see them.
(con't in 2/3)
Author: Hth
Rating: R for semi-explicit het. Yeah, I dunno either.
Characters: Ronon, Melena, Teyla, assorted Satedans, assorted other people
S4 spoilers: Reunion, Missing, The Seer, Miller's Crossing
Notes: So...when you say "flashfic," you mean right about 22,000 words, right? Good, I thought so.
Also, many thanks to
linabean, who had many useful suggestions about Ronon and his fashion sense. Errr, hopefully she wasn't planning on using any of those herself....Steadfast, Loyal, and True
by Hth
The recruiting sergeants came through Ronon’s town when he was a month short of sixteen, but it didn’t bother him to lie on his application, putting his birthday a few weeks into his past instead of his future. They gave him two days to put his life in order and be at the pick-up site and told him not to bring anything but a shaving kit and one change of clothes – something sturdy, nothing fancy. Beyond that, he didn’t know what to expect, and he didn’t ask.
He sat on his father’s bed and told him what he’d done; there were weeks like this one, ever since the sickness that killed Ronon’s mother and both his sisters, when his father was barely out of bed at all. He didn’t say anything for a long time, until Ronon started to wonder if he were really awake, even though his eyes were open. But finally he said, “Will you need anything?”
“No,” Ronon said softly. “No, nothing. You don’t have to worry about me anymore. Just...take care of Gran.”
His Gran only snorted when he told her. “You won’t last a month,” she said, and waved a wooden spoon under his nose. “It’s not easy to go from the apron strings straight into the Infantry, you know. Your mother always spoiled you sick. I suppose you want to be some kind of hero now. I thought you had your heart set on going on to university?”
“No,” Ronon said to the kitchen floor.
“Good,” she said. “You have your mother’s airs. They’ll knock that out of you in the Infantry, you watch. They won’t suffer any nonsense from you, no matter how far above yourself you think you are. I doubt I’ll recognize you when you come back.” She sounded pretty pleased about that.
Ronon kissed her dry cheek and said, “Be nice to Dad, will you? He misses her.”
“Of course I will,” she snapped. “I’m his mother, and I spoil him sick, too. We can’t help it.”
He raked the leaves in the front yard that evening, and he lingered over the job until well after nightfall, hoping to see Melena walking home from classes, which happened later and later as the years passed and her studies forced her to spend longer hours in the library. This was her second year at university, the year when half of all students washed out – not that Melena ever would, but she had to keep long hours to make sure her scores stayed as high as they used to with no effort at all.
She never seemed stressed, though. She smiled the same girlish smile as always as she shrugged her book satchel high on her shoulder and put her feet up on his front gate and let him pull it all the way in and then push it out so that the metal hinges squealed as she swung. When it slowed down again, Ronon pulled it shut and latched it; she was as tall as him when she stood on the bottom of the gate, and when he covered her hands with his on the top, nothing but the slats of wood separating them, it was easy to kiss her.
“What, just one?” she said when he tried to pull away, leaning across the gate and closing her arms around his neck.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “I’m leaving in two days. I joined the Infantry.”
Melena blinked. “In...in two days? What about your graduation boards? They’re only in the spring, and– “
“I won’t pass them,” he said. “I can’t.”
“I can help,” she said. “I’ll tutor you.”
“You don’t have time for that. I don’t need it anyway, I’m not – what does somebody like me need it for?”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said stubbornly, even though she did know. She would never admit it, that was all. “Someone like you – I don’t know what that means.”
“I’d never get through university– “
“You don’t have to, that’s not why. You should get your degree because you deserve it, you’ve earned it. You’re smart and you’ve worked so hard– “
“I’m bad at tests.”
“I can help you with the tests!”
“Stop it!” he said, louder than he meant. He’d never yelled at Melena before, and her mouth snapped shut with surprise. He rubbed his fingers over the backs of her hands and said, “Sorry, I just...think we need to talk about...this. About us. You have your future all planned out, and I.... This is a future I can have. I need one, too, I can’t just....”
She frowned, but she couldn’t look angry enough. She mainly just looked hurt. “I planned for you to be there,” she said quietly. “But you’re leaving in two days and you didn’t even talk to me before you did it, so things aren’t going quite like I planned.”
“I can’t end up like my father.” That was the one thing he was sure of, the thing he’d realized that made everything else fall into place behind it and make sense. “Ever since Mom died, he’s just – lost. You say you’re planning for us, but you can’t plan everything, and....” He couldn’t stop his voice from cracking a little as he said, “Do you think my mom would be proud of him? If she could see him now?”
Melena put her hands on his face and kissed him, quick and hard. “Ask me,” she said.
They’d been through this before. “No.”
“You’re so stubborn. Why won’t you just ask me?”
“Because you’ll say yes,” he said. He put his head down on her shoulder, smiling into her neck. “You’re my best friend. I’d do anything for you, I’d die for you, but I wouldn’t – be the right one for you. I’m just – it would be – the wrong choice.”
Her hand settled over the back of his neck, her nails stroking delicately against his skin. “You’ve always loved me more than anyone I know,” she said.
“I think you used to call it following you around like a starving puppy. As in, ‘quit following me around like a starving puppy.’”
She laughed softly into his hair. “But I don’t say that to you anymore, do I?”
“No,” he admitted. “Not for a while.”
“Don’t go. I’ll miss you too much. I need you here.” He didn’t know what to say to that; any answer at all seemed to go against his nature, or at least to go against what he hoped his nature was. “Never mind,” she said with a sigh. “This isn’t the sort of thing you’d do on a whim. So if you did it at all, it must be...really important to you.”
“You’ll be proud of me,” he promised. “When I see you again, you won’t even recognize me.”
“Yes, I will,” she said, and he hoped she was talking about the first thing, but suspected she meant the other. “Ask me,” she demanded again. When he couldn’t, she sighed, touched his cheek, and climbed off the gate to continue home.
It wasn’t til the day after next, the day he was supposed to leave for training, that he opened the back door to let the dogs outside and saw her, looking almost ghostly with her pale skin and her white shawl in the first morning light. “Sandwiches,” she said hoarsely, pressing a small bag into his hands. “For the train.” Then suddenly she was holding him tightly, ruining the sandwiches between them. “Ask me,” she said into his chest, soft and desperate. “Ask me.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and brought her inside for tea and muffins, then held one of her hands across the table while she ate with the other one. “You know we can’t marry each other,” he said.
“I don’t either, know that. You can say it over and over until the end of time, but that won’t somehow make it true.”
“Your parents hate me.” Grinning slightly, he added, “And my grandmother’s not too crazy about you, either.”
Melena rolled her eyes, but she was serious when she said, “Your mother loved me, though.”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “She did. I remember she never wanted anyone but you to take care of the girls when she and my dad went somewhere. She wouldn’t even let me watch them.”
“Well, you were bad at it,” Melena pointed out reasonably. “That time Jolia shaved the– “
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I was bad at it.”
“I remember you lurking at the top of the stairs, watching us,” Melena said, smiling at him. “I thought you were shy.”
“I was shy. Around you I was.”
She wrapped both her hands over one of his and said, “I don’t think you ever knew how much I hated to leave. All those times you walked me back up the hill, and you never realized, I envied you so much. I know things are hard here for you now, but I still think you’re the luckiest person I ever met. The way your parents loved each other, the way they loved you and Jolia and Nessa– Nobody in my family even likes anybody else – they only like me when my scores come in at the end of the year– “
“That’s not true,” Ronon said automatically.
She didn’t seem to hear him at all. “What am I even doing this for?” she asked, with a note of quiet hysteria in her voice. “I’m working so hard, I thought I was doing all this for us, but you won’t even say you want it, and now you’re leaving, and who gives a shit if I pass my boards at first-tier and get a titled position and buy a house in Yendikai, what the fuck does it mean if you’re not going to be there with me?”
He leaned over the small table and put his lips against her fingers. “You should...do all that for yourself,” he said in a small voice. “You – it’s like you said. You should have those things because you deserve them, not for....”
“Are you not even going to tell me that you love me?”
Ronon smiled at the little snap in her voice, but it faded as he said, “I just...don’t think that would make anything – any easier. I have to go, and I could be gone a long time. Nothing I say is gonna change that now.”
She freed one hand and wiped at her eyes, and when she had steadied her breathing and composed herself, she reached out and touched his hair. “Your hair’s a mess,” she said.
“I can’t seem to get it right,” he admitted. “Mom used to....”
“Let me do it,” she said.
He sat on the floor of the bathroom with Melena sitting on the edge of the tub behind him while she oiled his curls, twisting each of them carefully around her fingers to hold their shape. Her own hair fell forward and picked up some of the fragrant oils, and then when she leaned over and nuzzled behind his ear, so that when he pulled her to the floor to kiss her, her lips tasted the same way that the whole room smelled. She ran her slick fingers over his chest, then tangled them with his fingers, so that he was leaving marks everywhere, too, slick wet marks on her neck, on the inside of her wrist, and his fingers were too slippery to work the tiny hooks down the front of her blouse. She pushed his hands away, then kissed him while her slick hand worked inside his pants, which he thought he should ask if she was sure about, but he couldn’t speak, or think, or do anything but add more wet marks to her blouse, sucking on her breasts through the material.
“There, now,” she said after, touching up his curls with her fingertips and dropping kisses on his collarbone. “You look better.”
*
He’d been in the training camp for over two months when the next wave of recruits arrived. “They’re over-recruiting,” Andan said in a grim tone as they watched the train pull in from their windbreak under the laundry shelter. “What are we getting ready for?”
Wraith. Nobody said it, but it had to be. There hadn’t been Wraith on Sateda in Ronon’s lifetime, but that didn’t mean safety. It meant the time was coming.
Vendis snorted and spat his wad of chewing-leaf on the concrete floor. “They’ll tell us when they tell us. In the meantime, what I want to know is, where are they going to put these new fools?”
Ronon used the edge of his boot to kick the sticky green ball off the edge of the concrete slab and onto the dead grass outside the shelter. “At least we’re not the new fools anymore,” he said.
Vendis laughed and thumped him on the back of the head with his open palm. “Think you’re a veteran now, Puppy?” Ronon threw his hand off and glared. Vendis was all right, closer to a friend than most people here, but Ronon still wasn’t going to let him get away with that. He’d set the high scores for the training unit in every task so far; he wasn’t their fucking little brother.
Ronon blew on his hands and rubbed them together as he watched the new recruits emerge blinking into the winter sunlight from the train, shading their eyes to get a good look around the rough camp. Most of the people joining these days were farmers, displaced by plague and two seasons of unreasonable chill blighting the crops; maybe to them it didn’t look so bad, but Ronon could still remember the strange twist of his stomach, when it was him emerging from the dark train car and getting his first look around at all the bleak, squat, colorless buildings without windows, the practice fields segmented off with metal rails and ditches dug into the sandy dirt, the smoke from the kitchens hanging over everything all the time. It was nothing at all like where Ronon came from.
The door to the officers’ hall hit the outside of the building with a clatter, drawing everyone’s attention toward it, but it was the Marke Hartoren that kept them looking. Even Ronon watched – he could never help watching. It wasn’t just the Marke’s reputation – Ronon hadn’t known enough to match the man to the name when he first saw him, but that hadn’t mattered. He was taller than any man Ronon had ever seen, elongated even further by his severe black clothing and sharply pointed beard so that he looked like some lean, diving bird of prey, but even that wasn’t the main thing. It was the way he moved. Never too fast, never too slow, as elegant as a woman but with nothing feminine about him. Ronon didn’t know whether it was admiration or dread that made him unable to look away whenever the Marke appeared to survey the trainees.
He knew he wanted whatever Hartoren had, though: that control of himself, that certainty. Even with his name at the top of every task list that went up, Ronon still felt vaguely displaced, awkward in some unrecognizable way, as if soon someone would catch him playing soldier and be angry.
He lost half a bar standing there, watching the new recruits meet the Marke, the training captain, the camp legate – time that he’d meant to spend finishing his letter to Melena, before he had to use it finishing his laundry in time for supper inspections – and he still couldn’t quite make himself believe his own words. He still felt like the new fool.
Supper was a headache; they’d been overcrowded before there were fifty new recruits, and everywhere Ronon turned, someone was behind him or jammed into him or standing where he wanted to step. Their combined noise echoed off the tin walls of the mess hall until he almost wanted an evening shift on stick drills, in spite of the raw spots on his hands that were threatening to become torn blisters any day now. But he was scheduled for the obstacle course, which was worse: the ropes and bars were just as rough on his hands, and without even the chance to work out his irritability by taking a swing at someone. He didn’t care enough about his time to keep him distracted; he was a minute fifteen ahead of whoever had second place, not close enough to make him struggle for it.
He showered afterward, and even handling the harsh lye soap as gingerly as he could, there were still streaks of blood from his cracked hands in the lather. He brushed his teeth, watching himself in the small, dingy mirror over the sink, wondering how anybody ever managed to shave with so distorted a reflection. Ronon had stopped shaving weeks ago, and he was just now getting out of the dirty and stubbled stage, into something that looked passably like a beard. He thought it made him look older, a little. He ran his fingers through his hair, which was a frizzy mess and he’d given up on it; soon it would be long enough to tie back, and that was all he cared about now.
Somebody jostled him from behind, slamming Ronon’s groin against the edge of the sink, and he swung around and shoved back immediately. “Hey!” Vendis yelled, scrabbling against the wall to keep his footing on the wet floor. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” Ronon muttered. “Just – everybody’s in my way. Sorry.”
“Oh, well, so very sorry myself, Your Excellency,” Vendis said, his mouth twisting. “They seem to have lost your reservations for the private suite.”
“I’m sorry,” Ronon said again, because he really did like Vendis better than most people around here. “That was my fault.” Vendis snorted, but his face settled back into his normal aloof but tolerant expression, so no harm done.
It was a cold walk with wet hair back to his barracks, but inside it was almost too hot, with the stove in the corner coughing up smoke and five extra people now living on cots in the middle of the floor. That’s where they were putting the new recruits, then, just casting aside pretense and making them live literally underfoot. It was so disorienting, and annoying, that it took Ronon a second to realize that there were strangers poking around in his alcove, where he never, ever left the curtain drawn back like that.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
One of the recruits raised his hands and said, “No harm meant, son.” He had what Ronon thought were prison tattoos on his palms.
“I’m not your son,” Ronon snapped. “I don’t even know you. Go away.”
“Now, nobody likes a growly puppy,” Andan said, and Ronon should’ve known he was involved in this somehow. Andan seemed to spend more effort looking for small ways to get under Ronon’s skin than he did on any task their trainers assigned.
Another of the new recruits, one closer to Ronon’s own age, gave him an apologetic smile and said, “We’re getting to know people, that’s all. And we keep hearing you lead the unit in everything.”
“If you want to see if it’s true, go look at the task lists,” Ronon said, jerking the curtain closed. “There’s nothing here for you to know.”
“Andan wanted us to see the picture of your lady doctor,” the tattooed man said, showing crooked teeth when he smiled. “She’s a doctor, yeah?”
Ronon clenched and released his fingers to help manage the tension that was taking over his body. “She will be,” he said shortly. “Stay out of my things.”
He turned around before he realized how close Andan had moved, so that suddenly he had those bushy eyebrows and those hard grey eyes just an inch below his own eye-level. It wasn’t really until that moment, until seeing Andan’s eyes right then, that Ronon realized how much the older man disliked him – not just enjoyed patronizing and irritating him, but honestly disliked him. Ronon couldn’t think what he’d ever done to earn that, not that it really mattered now. “I was doing you a favor, boy,” Andan said, jolly and false.
“Don’t,” Ronon advised – meaning favors in general, and also meaning this, whatever this was that Andan seemed willing to push him into tonight.
Ignoring that, Andan leaned closer and said conspiratorially, “Best if they know it’s a phase, you see? It’s all right, you’re not the first. You’ll marry your lady doctor and forget all about it eventually.”
Probably he shouldn’t have cared, but– “Forget what?”
Andan shrugged. “Your little...devotion to the Marke.” For a second there was utter, pure silence, a silence like Ronon hadn’t heard since he boarded the damn train two months ago – the sound of every man in the barracks waiting on Ronon’s reaction. He didn’t move; he didn’t know what to do. Nothing would make it unsaid, and nothing would make people forget. Damn Andan, anyway. He hadn’t been content to stick Ronon with that stupid nickname, he absolutely had to pin this on him for the rest of his career. Damn him.
It was Andan’s victory and he knew it; the rumor would be outside these walls in minutes, and by this time tomorrow it would have mutated and the whole camp would be saying – would believe – Reckless with his win, Andan half-turned, playing to his audience now, and added lightly, “Sixteen’s the age to try new things, though, isn’t it? Be good for you and your lady doctor both, I’d say, to try a few new flavors before you stick yourselves with each other for life. You could have a go at spreading your legs for a man while you’re here...and so could she.”
Ronon had never hit anyone in anger in his whole life, but that didn’t mean it was hard. It was surprisingly easy; he was still untrained enough that it was something new to realize that strength and speed measured by tests and tasks would translate into actually being able to fight. He knocked Andan to the floor with one punch, and he didn’t stop until three men pried him loose – not recruits, either, but military police.
They dragged him into the courtyard and forced him to his knees with the butts of their rifles, then lashed him by his wrists to the railing of the main field and left him there, and he didn’t feel any of it, didn’t feel anything but the bright heat of his anger.
But he was there for a long time, and he was damp and cold, and his arms started to hurt and he could feel the blood drying stiff on the palm of his hand – his own reopened blisters – and on the outside, too – Andan’s blood. Slowly, he became aware of the mud soaking through the knees of his pants, and the heavy ropes of wire sinking into the thin skin inside his wrists. The pain in his arms crawled further down his back and up his neck, and it got harder and harder to hold his head up, so that he was staring down at the dirt, utterly alone with the pain and resentment and humiliation and fury, and the fear of what came next.
He thought he might still be hanging there by breakfast for everyone to stare at, but it was still dark out when he heard the crunch of boots and saw the traveling beam of a flashlight pass over his face. He didn’t look up, though, struck by the weird feeling that he still had time to make this not real. All he saw were boots at first, until his visitor grew impatient and set his knee under Ronon’s chin, pushing his head up until Ronon was looking blearily up at the Marke in all his tightly leashed severity.
“Let him up,” the Marke said to his accompanying soldiers. “Bring him to my office once he’s cleaned off.”
The MP’s walked him back to the showers to rinse off and put on fresh pants, then disinfected and bandaged his wrists, all without speaking a word. Ronon didn’t say anything, either. He wouldn’t apologize. He wouldn’t apologize, not even if the Marke himself ordered it; he’d rather be discharged, or go to prison.
The Marke’s office was drafty because of a half-opened window; the Marke stood beside it to smoke, dropping his ashes in the dead grass outside. The MP’s left Ronon there, and the Marke gestured vaguely for him to sit in the chair across the desk – vague gestures were all Ronon could make out in the dim lamplight of the room. He put his sore hands cautiously on the arms of the chair and waited until the Marke had finished his cigar and thrown the butt outside. “So I’m curious,” the Marke said, his gravelly voice strangely cheerful. “Your mother, your girl, or your ass?” Ronon spent a shocked second trying to decipher the question, until the Marke snorted slightly and said, “The third one, then. It’s always one of the three.”
“Second,” Ronon said quickly. “It was...the second.”
The Marke nodded slowly. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s just, you don’t know how boring this job can get, and nobody ever brings me any decent gossip. Aren’t you going to ask how he’s doing?” It hadn’t really occurred to Ronon, actually. He shrugged, and the Marke made a soft, thoughtful noise. “You can hold a grudge, can’t you, boy?” he said, not quite a criticism. “Some men would be satisfied after that much. You broke his nose, which is nothing, that’ll heal. But you tore his retina, too. He probably won’t see out of his left eye again. Still angry?”
Ronon took the question seriously and didn’t rush his answer. “Yes,” he finally said. “Kind of.”
“You’re at the head of your unit,” the Marke said, and even under these circumstances, it helped Ronon sit up a little straighter, knowing that Hartoren himself knew Ronon by his actions. In all those years he’d listened to the wireless reports of the Marke Hartoren’s latest heroic deeds, Ronon had never imagined Hartoren would someday hear anything at all about him. “Not just recruits – enlisted men, too,” he continued. “You’re faster and stronger than two-thirds of them, you shoot straighter than nine-tenths, and I’ll be damned if I know anyone I’d put up against you in any task that required pure endurance – or sheer, stubborn bloody-mindedness, which might be the same head in a different hat. Every officer in the Infantry is watching to see where your career goes, Mr. Dex, and the fascinating thing is that I honestly don’t think you know it. So let’s rule out excessive ego right off; I find it unsettling how little attention you draw to your brief but remarkable service record. Which leaves the question open: why do you think you find it so fucking difficult to fit in with your own unit?”
Strangely, Ronon didn’t think it had ever occurred to him to ask himself so simple a question as why. “Because I’m the youngest,” he hazarded. “It hurts their pride to always rank under me.”
“Maybe,” the Marke said. “But I think there’s more to it than that. These men that you serve with now, they’re coming here more and more because there’s nothing left for them in the real world. They’ve lost families in the plagues, they’ve lost family farms, they can’t find work. These men aren’t the future of Sateda, Ronon: you are. These are just people trying to slip loose from their pasts. Their clocks are almost stopped in so many ways, and here you are, everything they aren’t: young and talented and rich, ready to start your life, all eyes on you. All their lives they’ve failed to be you, and it doesn’t matter that they just now met you. They know it.”
“I’m not rich,” Ronon said softly, thinking of his Gran. Your mother’s airs. “My father is a security guard for a residential enclave; my mother gave music lessons. I grew up around rich people, but I....” He stopped, wondering in a dull panic why he momentarily thought the Marke Hartoren would give a damn about his father.
But he sounded at least a little interested when he said, “Huh. Well, you have that look about you – the way you talk, the way you’re fussy about your clothes. Your girl’s in university, isn’t she?”
“Her parents can’t stand me,” Ronon admitted, and the Marke laughed out loud, an easy laugh that Ronon would never have imagined coming out of the cool, silent man that he was in public. Ronon didn’t know if Hartoren was married or not, but he didn’t think so. That seemed strange to Ronon; he was such a great man, famous and powerful, magnetic in front of a crowd and yet startlingly funny and kind in person. Ronon couldn’t imagine that there was ever a woman the Marke might have wanted who wouldn’t be glad to have him. “I didn’t know you– You know how I dress?” Ronon blurted.
The Marke moved away from the window and sat down, leaning closer to Ronon with his forearms braced on the desk. “Do you think I’m joking when I say we’ve all been watching you?” he said. “I know of three other Markes who’d snatch you up like chicken thieves if I turned a moment’s blind eye, and that’s not even to mention Special Forces. Kell Crudin would slice my throat for a chance at you, that duplicitous bastard. Even if I wanted to obey the letter of the law, you wouldn’t lose your career over this, Ronon; as fast as I discharged you, someone would be right there to offer you a place in a different regiment. Not that I plan to discharge you.”
“So...what happens now? Nothing?”
“Not nothing. It’s in my power to pull you out from the other recruits and assign someone to supervise you directly. Generally it’s a punishment, but you’re something of a special case. You’ll work hard for Soren, damn hard, but then you do that anyway.”
“Soren,” he repeated quietly. For one moment...stupid, but he thought.... Hartoren already talked about him like he was a personal project, and Ronon didn’t know how long it would take him to get over the shock of that. But of course, he was the Marke, and he had more important things to do.
“Soren Sincha. He’ll push you hard, but he’ll treat you fairly; he’s a good man. And you’re already damn near as much a soldier as he is.” The Marke stood up and reached across the desk, and after a moment’s hesitation, Ronon stood up too and gripped his arm. “You’re going to be an officer,” he said quietly, his thin, severe face utterly changed by the small, knowing smile. “I’ll be very much surprised if you aren’t going to be a Marke. And trust me when I tell you, half of that job is acting the way they expect you to act. Soren’s an old friend of mine; he’ll get you dirty, he’ll get you drunk, he’ll make you laugh til you cry, and when he’s done with you, you’ll be able to shout an order and men will line up to die without a second thought. Ancestors protect your soul.”
The Marke let him go with a bar and a half to sleep before breakfast inspections, and when Ronon entered his barracks, he could tell from the breathing and rustling that not everyone was asleep – probably still strung too tightly after the evening’s excitement. Knowing he was being watched, Ronon walked to his alcove with his best imitation of Hartoren’s patient gait; rushing would only imply that he was embarrassed or guilty.
He laid down and pulled the curtain closed with his sore, bandaged hand. He wasn’t sure how to present himself to Soren Sincha – what to wear, what to say, how not to come across like...himself. He resolved to say as little as possible for as long as he could. Watch and learn – that was what he was being sent to do, anyhow. He had a mostly full beard and cuts on his knuckles from the hard skull of a man he’d half blinded. That would have to be enough to start with.
You won’t even recognize me, he heard himself say, confident and hopeful. As if it were so easy to change. As if it would happen just because he wanted it to.
*
It took Ronon a while to get hold of his knife and cut himself out of the Wraith pod, and since he certainly wasn’t going to listen to McKay any more than he absolutely had to while doing it, that gave him a fair amount of time to think about life.
The unexpected conclusion he came to was that being on a hive ship (it was Ronon’s third time) wasn’t so different from anything else – or maybe, rather, that people dealt with finding themselves on a hive ship pretty much the same way they dealt with everything else. McKay, for example, got very negative very quickly, and then distracted himself from his own feelings by obsessing over stupid little details. Just, in general, McKay did that; he was always himself, even in a place like that.
What Ronon did was prioritize. He always liked to keep a list in his head of mission objectives, in order of importance, and he reassessed regularly, even though the funny thing was that the list hardly ever changed. Maybe he’d sort of imagined that at a really, really big moment things would shift around, but he couldn’t figure out how to make this moment all that much bigger, and nothing actually even budged. He guessed he was always himself, too.
The first thing on the list was to live. A good landing is one you can walk away from, Sheppard liked to say, and Ronon appreciated that about Sheppard – the way he had good, strong priorities, ones that fit in well with Ronon’s. That was why they got along so well. Sheppard himself was thing number two on Ronon’s list – not just Sheppard, but collectively, all the people Ronon cared about. So Sheppard mainly, who was Ronon’s superior and his friend both, but also McKay, because it wasn’t like they could find another one like him anywhere, and Teyla, who was...special in a lot of ways. Occasionally other people would strike him as important like that, as the second-most-important thing in the world, but only very occasionally. Mostly them.
Third was to kill as many Wraith as possible. That was pretty straightforward and hardly ever changed, even though it could get complicated sometimes, weighing that one against the first two, pinning down the exact meaning of “as possible” in any given situation. His fourth objective was – well, he found it hard to put into words, but he knew it when he saw it. It was to do something good – something right. He knew he was no hero – if he were a hero, it would be higher on the list than number four – but it was important to him not to give up on that part completely.
On the hive ship, it all sifted out very neatly. First, get off the ship, and second, bring McKay along, too. Third, cause as much damage as he could in the process, and fourth, save Earth. He’d never been to Earth, but he felt something for it anyway – a world that produced M&Ms, e-mail, and John Sheppard had to be someplace pretty special – and even if he’d never heard of the place.... The Wraith would almost definitely decide to make McKay watch, and there were just some pictures that nobody should ever have to look at. Probably they’d bring him to a screen in some dark room somewhere, and he’d stand in front of it and look at things he could almost recognize, that he could almost remember from back when it was his home and not just blackened ruins, and something somewhere was still alive.
Ronon wasn’t a hero, and it ranked several places behind saving his own life, but still, he wouldn’t wish the things he’d seen on any human being. Earth would fight back, like Sateda fought back, and one Sateda was enough. More than enough.
That mission ended well, though, and even a long, hungry flight home didn’t bother Ronon much, even though he was too keyed up to sleep (keyed up, not disturbed by being surrounded by the eerie, inert bodies of ex-Wraith, not freaked out, whatever the fuck that meant) and he kept checking up on Sheppard and McKay for no good reason. He was tired and thirsty and hungry by the time they reached Atlantis, but it was fine, everything was okay. Everything was good.
Dr. Weir brought sandwiches and thermoses of soup to the de-briefing, and Ronon ate all of his share and some of Sheppard’s while Sheppard had to give the preliminary; McKay tried to sneak the last of the chicken salad, but he got distracted by the meeting at the last second and Ronon, who was pretty much never distracted by meetings in any way, swapped it with one of the egg salad sandwiches. The look on McKay’s face when he bit into it would have been funny, if Ronon had more energy to be amused.
Everybody agreed that the situation was stable but delicate, and that “Michael” was a little bit of a problem, but not one they couldn’t sit on until morning, and that was that. He was on his way to bed when Teyla caught up to him in the hall and said crisply, “Ronon, may I have one more moment of your time?”
“What for?” he asked, because it wasn’t like he was in charge of anything, and anything he knew, other, more important people knew, too. People who’d either had more sleep than he had over the past three days, or got paid a lot more than he did.
Instead of answering she said, “Only a moment, to clear up some small confusion on my part.” She gestured toward one of the small conference rooms they never used; it seemed situated to be used by the engineering department, but McKay made engineering hold their meetings in the main lab complex with everybody else so that he could eavesdrop. Ronon considered arguing, but Teyla was a stubborn person, and he figured the argument itself would take longer than just answering her questions.
“Please sit,” she said gravely as she followed him into the conference room. Instead of pulling out a chair, Ronon sat on the edge of the table and started to say, How long did you say this would take?, but he didn’t make it that far. Before he could get his tongue around the first word, Teyla had her hands behind his neck and her knees on the conference table. He automatically put a hand on her back to steady her, but that didn’t really mean he was catching up, or that he was ready for it when she kissed him.
She kissed him for a long time, which was good, because he wasn’t catching up very fast.
When he finally did, he pulled his head back, looking blank and dumb at the beautiful woman kneeling astride his lap with her ass in his hands and her tongue slyly licking the taste of him off her lips. “Did you...really want to ask me a question?” he said helplessly.
“No,” Teyla said. “But I did want you to sit. You are very, very tall.”
That made him grin, and she smiled brilliantly back at him, and that woke him up enough to take her face between his hands and kiss her back, hard and juicy and hungry. He was so hungry for this; he couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it before. There were so many things that...that he’d never allowed on the list at all, that he hadn’t given himself permission to want.
She pushed him down flat on the table and followed his mouth. He tweaked her ponytail playfully with one hand and let his other hand go back to cupping her ass, and she was – she was unbelievable, she was astonishing, strong and delicate, sweetly curved and muscular, bold and somehow gentle, the way she was stroking his chest, the way she kissed the corner of his mouth. Ask me, he thought, ask me, and he wasn’t sixteen anymore, so he said, “You want to come with me to my room?”
“Yes,” she murmured, her lips opening against his, her tongue pressing in for just a second. She ran her fingers from behind his ear down his neck, making him shiver, and said in a rough, unfamiliar voice, “It is too soon to lose you, I think my heart could not – that I could not bear it. I know you have endured much, and you are not always willing to be – to be open – with people, and that is why I have not....”
“I didn’t know,” he said faintly. “When...?”
He could feel her smile broadly against his mouth. “Long enough ago. More than long enough.”
Ronon sat back up, bringing Teyla with him so that she was seated firmly in his lap, her strong hands and her searching lips on his face. He slid to his feet, and she stayed wrapped around him for a moment before unwrapping her legs and getting their support underneath her. He kept his arms around her a little longer, just in case.
It felt strange, walking down the hall beside Teyla as if nothing were happening, as if nothing had changed. He was so conscious of her, of the unusual warmth coming off her skin, the twitch of muscles in her neck, her jacket brushing his arm. In the transporter, she put her hand around his and looked up at him with dark, liquid eyes, and he couldn’t look away.
Once they were safely inside his room, Ronon grabbed her around the waist and lifted her onto her toes; she anchored her arms around his neck as they kissed, then finally surrendered and let him pick her up again and walk backwards to fall on his bed. She threw off her jacket and then stripped his shirt off, and he felt his stomach contract as her hand smoothed over the broad surgery scar on his belly. He blew on her hair so that he could get to her ear and nibble it without taking in a mouthful of hair, too, and he could feel her pulse. He cupped her heavy breasts and ran his thumbs over the smooth skin above her shirt, and she made a low, luxurious humming sound and pressed further into his hands as he set up a slow, massaging rhythm.
She was one of the only people he cared about, and the most beautiful woman on the planet, too. There was no reason not to want this – and he did want it; he was heated and shuddering and sensitized from just this, and just imagining – how she’d feel, riding him, every inch of her sweat-slick skin under his fingers, the perfect, close fit between them that would be just like the way they pushed and pulled each other in the training room, only a million times more....
He wanted it completely, and he could have it. No reason not to. No reason at all.
He closed his eyes and groaned, turning his face away. “Ronon?” Teyla murmured, scattering delicate little kisses on his face. “What is it?”
He let his eyes flutter open, his gaze settling on her kiss-swollen mouth, and he couldn’t lie to her, or even shut her out. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, almost without a voice.
With the way she was lying across him, she had to be aware of all the ways he didn’t mean that. After a moment’s silence, she slipped sideways, tucking herself against his side with one leg wrapped across him. They both still had their boots on. “You know, I think, that you can say anything to me,” she said, propping her head up so she could see his face. She smiled a little sadly and said, “I know you have a good and decent soul, and nothing will outweigh that in my eyes.”
He took a breath and said, “I just think...that if it was right...it would be easier than this? It would feel....” Like something that was permitted. Like something he deserved.... “I don’t know. Easier than this. I want to, but....”
She settled her fingertips in the hollow of his throat; he thought it should make him nervous, but it didn’t. “Are you a virgin?” she asked gently.
Before he could think what the right thing to say was, some combination of trust and exhaustion took over, and he heard himself say with thoughtless honesty, “No, married.” He was furious with himself the second he said it, but from her face, she seemed to understand what he meant. His story wasn’t so unusual, after all, at least in broad strokes. “Widowed,” he amended softly.
Teyla snuggled closer under his arm and rested her head on his shoulder. “Tell me about her.”
That was.... He hadn’t been expecting that. “You don’t want to hear about....” he tried weakly.
She smoothed her fingers over his stomach and said, “I know you have your scars. I am not afraid to see them.
(con't in 2/3)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-17 06:37 am (UTC)Terrifyingly, this is JUST WHAT I MEAN!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-17 06:46 am (UTC)1/2
Date: 2007-12-17 08:56 pm (UTC)Oh, I love Ronon so much, and I love seeing him in love, and I love getting this backstory for him. You do such a good job of making him so *young*, while still clearly the person we know a decade-ish later, with the distinctive sweetness, competitiveness, desire for good leadership, pride, pragmatism and banked anger that can just explode.
I like entertaining lots of different ideas of what his family would have been like, but this is a great version you have here, and I love how it helps us understand Ronon's decision to sign up and how he sees his future with Melena.
Aw, I just love seeing Ronon/Melena. The scene with Melena doing his hair for him is wonderful--I love how impressionistic it is. But what I especially like is their conversations at the gate--I feel like it very skillfully has that same dynamic we saw in "Sateda," where they've fundamentally got different priorities, but still love each other and are listening to each other.
Oh, and I love his feeling like he can't/shouldn't say he loves her, because he thinks it'll just make things harder. Nearly-16!Ronon is already so practical while still being so heartfelt; it reminds me of how Ronon tried to comfort Rodney in "Sunday."
You describe the training camp so well--it's just really easy to see everything happening and understand how it's affecting Ronon. And I love seeing how driven Ronon is to grow up and figure out how to make something of himself. Again, it's really so endearing to see how young he is--how he can't figure out what his feelings about the Marque mean, how he's having to realize that some people are just going to be dicks to him because of who he is and not because he's done anything wrong, how other people are going to be really impressed by him being himself.
Ronon didn’t think it had ever occurred to him to ask himself so simple a question as why.
Right, of course he doesn't wonder why. He doesn't see how the reason would change who he is or what he's going to do, so what's the point?
I love working in the canon on Soren. (It isn't Solen, though?) This whole backstory makes perfect sense of the relationships canon dumped out during his his military service.
He resolved to say as little as possible for as long as he could. Watch and learn – that was what he was being sent to do, anyhow.
This is so perfect, because we've already seen how much of our Ronon is in this young Ronon, and this makes it clear how he's starting to become even more like our Ronon.
maybe, rather, that people dealt with finding themselves on a hive ship pretty much the same way they dealt with everything else.
This is great, because it just rings so true for human nature in general, and I love that Ronon notices it. He's not going to make any sweeping conclusions about human psychology based on it, but he'll keep it in mind when similar situations come up. Also, yeah, you lay out perfectly what Rodney and what Ronon do on a hiveship.
This is a great way to characterize Ronon's priorities--and it's exactly true, what you say about Ronon and John having a lot in common here. (When I look at how Ronon starts to fit in on Atlantis, I think it's clear it goes along with his coming to believe that, first, John isn't afraid to fight [he'd had his doubts], and, then, that John and a lot of other people on Atlantis share his outlook on absolute loyalty to those you've designated as friends. [And, in contrast to what you have here, I think that loyalty includes: you'll definitely die for your friends if that's what you have to do to protect them--but I do think that's not something Ronon would have on a list of priorities, per se--he certainly wants to avoid it--and it's definitely not what he'd be thinking about when he's focusing on escape. I think it's just a measure both he and John take for granted as available to them if necessary.])
2/2
Date: 2007-12-17 08:57 pm (UTC)Heh, of course Ronon wouldn't allow the characterization of himself as freaked out--that sounds like something Rodney would be! He's just a little irritable because there's not enough to eat on this ship, is all, and Sheppard and McKay keep wandering away out of his sightline--their restlessness makes *him* restless. That's what the issue is.
Ronon, who was pretty much never distracted by meetings in any way
Fantastic. Also, I can't feel bad about someone swiping Rodney's food. He'd have done it himself if he could just focus the way Ronon does.
because it wasn’t like he was in charge of anything, and anything he knew, other, more important people knew, too. People who’d either had more sleep than he had over the past three days, or got paid a lot more than he did.
I do love Ronon's pragmatism. How 'bout he get left alone to get some sleep, since answering these questions isn't really his job? (I wonder how much he *does* get paid. I assume he's a consultant, and they tend to be paid pretty well. And I feel like Earth does have a lot more wealth than what most anyone in Pegasus would be accustomed to--I wonder how much attention he pays to who gets paid what and whether he feels shorted in any of it. Really, I was kind of assuming his exact salary would feel fairly meaningless to him, unless Atlantis has set up a good system of converting Earth money into Pegasus currency. I like to think they have, but I have no idea how currencies in general work in Pegasus.)
but McKay made engineering hold their meetings in the main lab complex with everybody else so that he could eavesdrop.
Ha, of course he did.
Oh, Ronon/Teyla! When I think of Teyla wanting Ronon this way (I like entertaining lots of version of Teyla in my head, too), I think it makes perfect sense for her to do it like this. And, yes, I love that he'd be in awe of her and would also tweak her ponytail, because that's how they already are on screen--just, here, we have wonderful, extra hotness.
He kept his arms around her a little longer, just in case.
Ronon! Oh, he's such a sweetheart.
And I love how you write their walk down the corridor--I think some of what Ronon's feeling would be true for anyone who's suddenly become aware of new sexual possibilities with an old friend, but I think it also conveys just how long it's been for Ronon to be experiencing this sort of thrill at all.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, almost without a voice.
Oh, and Teyla's just such a good person. I'm so glad Ronon has her.