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sga_flashficPlease refer to headers and whatnot in part one
He got his first leave four months after he enlisted, but he got off the train before he made it all the way home. “There’s another one in six hours,” he told Soren. “When you get to Gario, if there’s – anyone waiting at the station for me, can you tell them? That I took a later train?”
Soren gave him a strange look, but then shrugged and said, “Stay out of trouble, will you?”
“I will,” Ronon promised.
“That was a joke,” Soren said, cuffing the back of his head. “A little trouble would do you good. See you in two weeks.”
Ronon didn’t get in trouble – Soren was right, he never got in trouble. Instead, he went shopping. He drew credit from his Infantry account and bought three pair of pants and three new vests, one of which had red embroidery and cost as much as the other five items combined. He bought two clean shirts, because the dirt was never, ever going to come out of the ones he already owned – two shirts with complicated lacing up the wrists like you could never wear when you usually had less than a minute after they threw you out of bed to be dressed and ready for inspections. He paid a boy to shine his boots, but the leather was cracked and worn, and he had to give up and buy a new pair of those, too, stiff and black and glossy. He changed clothes in the restroom of the train station, jamming his old things to the very bottom of the pack, and then he spent almost an hour combing out his hair (which hadn’t been touched in weeks except to tie it behind his neck when he got out of the shower) and oiling it carefully.
When he was finished, he watched himself in the mirror while he scrubbed his hands clean, including the dirt sunk into his cuticles. He thought he looked all right – a little tired around the eyes, but otherwise okay. He looked like someone who wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen outside a training camp that was slowly sinking under the early spring mud.
Nobody was waiting for him at the train station, and he spent even more money that he wasn’t sure he should part with on a cab home, because it wasn’t too far to walk, but it was too far to walk in boots that weren’t broken in yet.
The lights went on inside his house as soon as the cab pulled up, and by the time Ronon had tipped the driver and gotten his things out, they had all come to the porch – his father, his Gran, Melena. He hugged them in that order – his father fierce but silent, his Gran pretending she wasn’t weeping, and then Melena. He picked her up by the waist and swung her around in circles, and when he put her down she ran her hands over his arms in the crisp, never-washed shirt with a gleam in her eyes that almost made him nervous and said, “You look so wonderful. You’ve never looked so....”
Nervously, he glanced over his shoulder at his family. “It’s just the work,” he said. “It’s a lot of work.” He’d gained eighteen pounds since he left home, from added muscle and a steady diet of doughy biscuits and salty gravy. He thought it suited his tall, rawboned body, particularly now that he owned clothes that were made to fit and not just ripped out and resewn at the seams. Melena looked like she agreed.
She stayed for tea and an abbreviated conversation, but it was already late, and soon enough Gran said, “You made the girl wait half the day for you, and now you’re putting her to sleep. Walk her up the hill, now, and you come on back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ronon said.
It felt like old times, holding her arm in his while he walked her up to the gates of her enclave, not wanting to shatter the night silence with talk. He could almost believe he was just himself again, and she was the girl up the hill who babysat for his sisters, the one who was way too good for him but that he could still never stop thinking about. At the gates, he put his hands on her ribs and kissed her, the slow and thorough I-missed-you-so-much kiss he’d been planning almost since they parted. She slid her hands over his shoulders and leaned backwards, until she had him pinning her against the brick column. He braced one hand beside her and traced the backs of his fingers down her face, smiling down into her shining eyes.
“I think I like the beard,” she said thoughtfully, rubbing the tip of it between her fingers. “It makes you look a little dangerous.”
“I am dangerous,” he said gravely. “That’s my job now.”
“You’ll always be the music teacher’s son to me.”
She said it fondly, but Ronon still wasn’t quite sure how to respond. “You don’t – see me differently now?” he said. “I thought you might...think I’d changed.”
Melena looked him up and down carefully. “I think you’ve changed,” she admitted. “That’s not a bad thing, is it? I’ve...I’m sure I’ve changed, too. But that doesn’t mean...we have to change. And the things we want – if you really want something, with your whole heart, then that doesn’t change, does it?”
“What did you have in mind?” he teased softly, blowing into her ear.
She slapped his chest playfully, then nibbled his neck, which came conveniently to the level of her lips. “I want to be a doctor,” she said. “I want you to come up to my actual house instead of dropping me off here like you’re the staff, and more than I previously even thought possible, I want to take you to bed.”
“That’s not a great idea,” he said. “My grandmother is definitely going to wait up until I’m back.”
“It’s just slightly possible that I want it more than I want your Gran not to tell the whole district that I’m a cheap whore,” she said with a wry little smile. “But that might just be the influence of this new body of yours.”
“It’s my same body,” he pointed out.
“It really isn’t. Also, the other thing I really want – I want you to ask– “
“Melena, will you marry me?”
He didn’t go inside the gates, but she kept him there kissing her against the column for a long time anyway, so that Gran muttered bitterly at him when he did finally come home, his brand new shirt wrinkled and untucked and his vest half unlaced. Ronon kissed the thin, cool skin of her cheek and said, “It’s okay, Gran. We’re getting married.”
“Oh, and of course you don’t think that makes it worse,” she said, throwing up her hands. “At least if you just tumbled her and had it out, you could both lie about it later.”
“Have you always been this much of a romantic?” Ronon asked dryly. It kind of made him scared to wonder what his grandfather, who died long before he was born, had been like.
“At least you’re a soldier now,” she said blandly, returning to her knitting. “I suppose you don’t have to be better quality than the other men if you know how to shoot them.”
“There aren’t any other men, Gran.”
“Oh, on the whole planet, there aren’t any other men? Or do you just think you’re the best of all of them?”
Ronon grinned at her and said, “Tonight I sort of do, yeah.”
*
Both of Ronon’s first tattoos were hand-tapped, of course – electric needles were for civilians looking for a quick thrill before they sobered up; everything about Infantry life required more commitment than that. But he’d paid to have them done. Only a few regiments employed their own inksmiths anymore, and hardly anyone studied the craft except professionals.
“Where’d you learn how to do this?” Ronon asked suspiciously when Rakai tied the sleeve around his arm and unrolled his bundled tools, eight perfectly smooth sharpened tindia wingbones of different widths, as perfect and outdated a set as you might see in a museum, behind the glass.
Rakai shrugged. “We all had to pick up a trick or two along the way. Fix things, make things, kill things – whatever needs to be done to make a living.”
“Does the pattern have significance?” Teyla asked, and Ronon could hear the stiff disapproval she was trying to hide, but he figured that to anyone else, it just sounded like Teyla’s regular stiffness.
“No,” Ronon said shortly. “It’s just traditional.”
Tyre looked at him oddly, then turned to Teyla and said, “A hundred years ago, there was a mercenary company called the Vandal Hurricanes, and they used to wear these marks.”
“They were bad guys,” Ronon said.
“Those were desperate times,” Tyre said with a little shrug. “They rose to power shortly after the last great culling on Sateda, and they doubled in size over a single year. They sacked three cities and effectively brought down what was left of the Satedan government. People lived in more fear of the Vandal Hurricanes than they did of the Wraith, for a little while.”
Teyla frowned. “Then are these not marks of shame?”
Ara and Rakai and Tyre grinned at each other. Ronon kept his eyes down on the table, watching the tip of the bone needle as Rakai rolled it back and forth carelessly on his ink blotter. “Nobody thought they could be stopped, least of all by the Infantry, who had taken heavy losses in the culling. We were scattered, cut off from each other, wounded and hungry, no paychecks coming in. But we did it. We broke their backs in three separate battles, then cut their heads off at Aruta Hill. The three Markes who led the Aruta Hill engagement all took on these tattoos as a sign of everything they won from the Vandal Hurricanes – their power, the fear they inspired in those who would oppose them, their ucuso.”
“Their luck,” Ronon translated before Teyla could ask. “Their...destiny.”
“And now members of the Satedan Infantry wear them to commemorate this great victory,” Teyla said.
“Well, not now,” Ara said with a laugh. “Now members of the Satedan Infantry wear dirt and worms.”
Teyla blinked, not sure how to respond to...the way that Ara could be, sometimes. “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Tyre said. “It’s known as the Hand of Victory, and in our time, the only soldiers who would have the balls to wear these signs were those who had fought in a remarkable battle, one they should never have been able to win, but did – veterans of Aga 12, the siege of Yojoa, that sort of thing. The Marke Hartoren took on the Hand of Victory after he led the raid on the hive ship during the Keperye culling.” His hand came down on Ronon’s neck for a moment, and Ronon could feel his eyes, satisfied and affectionate. “And our Ronon’s no idle braggart, so if that’s the tattoo he wants, it means he’s won a battle that would put Aruta Hill and Aga 12 in the dark. Maybe he’ll tell us about it sometime.”
Ronon smiled a little with the corner of his mouth. “Not much to tell,” he said. Nothing they didn’t already know, anyway.
It felt like one battle, like one huge, endless event – seven years, gone like a bad dream, and nothing left of it now but a handful of pale scars that didn’t even stand out among those he’d earned before and since. There really wasn’t anything to tell; he didn’t have war stories from his Running years, mostly because even in his own memory, everything was indistinct – choppy and disorienting images and the utter blackness of far too many nights on lonely planets with a fire so small he could spread his arms out and not be able to see the tips of his fingers. Those years had sharpened his every sense to the limits of his capabilities, but on those rare occasions when he tried to remember anything, it felt like he’d spent the whole thing stone blind.
But he’d sure as hell be able to see it from now on.
*
Soren let slip about his promotion two days before it was official, just to Ronon and twenty or thirty of their closest, drunkest friends in a bar in Aboru Valley. For a moment Ronon was surprised, because Soren had gone almost eight years in his current rank, which put him long past overdue and into the category of un-promotable. But then Ronon was sorry he’d thought it; he should have had more faith in Soren.
Ronon grabbed him, kissed him hard on the cheek, and said, “You’re fucking taking me with you, though.”
“Sure, sure, yeah!” Soren laughed, rosy and happy. “I’ll give you a commission, why the fuck not? If I don’t, someone else will by the end of the year. I’ll make you my second lieutenant, how’s that for you?”
“Second lieutenant?” Ronon said, pretending to be insulted. “After I kissed you and everything? What do I have to do to make first?”
Soren laughed so hard he snorted and coughed on his beer. He wiped his face on his sleeve and said, “Fuck, if I got you on your back, they’d probably make me a Marke.”
Unit 344 wasn’t a prestige posting, and truthfully if it hadn’t been a matter of staying with the commander he knew, Ronon would probably have held out for something a little more strategic for his first officer’s commission. “I feel like I’m doing this for friendship,” he wrote in his letter to Melena, which he sent clipped to a photo of himself in his full commissioned uniform; the Infantry didn’t crack open the bank for enlisted men, who had to supply their own clothes, with epaulets attached to the shoulders that displayed their hiring date and deployment information. Ronon had burned his the minute he signed his name to the commission paperwork. “Should I be more worried about my career? Would you pick a hospital because of other doctors you knew who worked there?”
She wrote him back and said, “Why would you go to a regiment where you’d have to prove yourself all over again? Soren knows what you can do, and he trusts you. Also, I feel like ‘better posting’ when you say it means more dangerous, so you know I have to disapprove. Actually, if you could get demoted to floor mopping, I’d be extra, extra happy for you. But of course, you have to go and be good at this. (It helps a little that you look so sexy in the uniform. Yes, I am willing to compromise my principles for prurient reasons. Everything is really stressful here right now, and I wish you were here. I’d clarify that further, but I still think my mother might be reading all of these before they go out. Ha, that should make me want to go into more detail, shouldn’t it? It would serve her right if I did.)”
Second lieutenant meant that Ronon was in charge of most of the unit’s day-to-day business, from work rosters to evaluations to discipline, and in a further worrisome development in terms of his career as a whole, he enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than he thought he would enjoy being first lieutenant. That position was held by a woman who’d come up in the 344th. Her name was Morika, and she was almost six feet tall, with large green eyes and golden skin and dreadlocks, beautiful enough to be Ronon’s number one concern when it came to keeping order in the unit. She handled most of Soren’s administrative concerns, payroll and supply and communications with the rest of the regiment – all the boring stuff. Ronon had been with the unit for two months before he ever saw Morika fight, which she did exactly the way she did everything else, with quiet grace and economy. They never really talked, except in staff meetings.
The worst thing about being an officer was that he got less leave now than he used to – only two days’ less in raw terms, but he wasn’t allowed to take it over Regency Day or anywhere within a week of Consecration. Being in camp over the holidays was about as depressing as anything Ronon could think of, and even being allowed to transreceive home almost made everything worse. He said I love you so many times that his throat was sore by the end, and the food in the mess hall was more unpalatable than ever – how could they even ruin sugar-nut pie, how was that even humanly possible?
He knew he wasn’t going to be able to settle in for the night, so he took advantage of his rank to stay up past curfew and get some target practice. But when he got to the practice hall, the lights were already on and Morika was there, walking on her hands on the balance beam. Ronon leaned in the doorway and watched her flip off the end, and the little start she gave when she noticed him there was maybe the first time he’d ever seen Morika look surprised by anything. “Sorry,” he said.
She wiped her hands on her thighs and said, “I thought you’d sneak out for a drink with the rest of them tonight.”
“Just because I don’t plan to penalize anyone for it doesn’t mean I can come right out and act like I approve. You really think I’m that bad at my job?” He said it as casually as he could, but he found there was a tight feeling in his chest when he thought about that. He didn’t know Morika well in a personal way, but they’d been working together for several months, and he’d been sort of assuming that she thought he was doing a good job. He thought he was doing a good job, and Soren didn’t have any complaints, so why would Morika?
Morika shrugged. “I think you work pretty hard to make them think you’re one of them.”
“I am one of them,” Ronon said. “Yeah, I’m commissioned now, but I’m Infantry first, just like we all are.” She raised an eyebrow and looked him up and down, surveying Ronon’s clothes, which were just his ordinary off-duty civilian clothes, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a sturdy, unpatterned red vest, leather boots instead of the indestructible, synthetic, twenty pound monstrosities that regs required. She was barefoot, but still in her uniform pants and the fitted, sleeveless shirt that belonged under her uniform jacket. “Oh, come on,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You can’t tell some deep thing about my loyalties by what fucking shirt I’m wearing. Cut me some slack, it’s Consecration Eve.”
“Yeah, it is,” she said. “Blessed Consecration.”
“Yeah, you, too,” he said, not mustering up much seasonal cheer.
He set up the targets and loaded his gun, unwilling to look back over his shoulder to see if she was still there or not, until she finally said, “Hey,” and he had an excuse to turn around. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking amused. “There’s nothing wrong with your shirt.”
“I know there’s not,” he said.
“I’m just jealous, all right?” He tilted his head in puzzlement, and she said, “You’re prettier than me.” Ronon narrowed his eyes and glared, and Morika laughed, a bubbling, soft, low laugh that Ronon would never have been able to imagine coming from someone so serious. “Oh, come on, don’t sulk about it,” she said. “I just mean – it’s awkward, sometimes – to be pretty. For me, I mean. If I were to walk around camp with my hair oiled and my nails perfect and wearing my off-duty skirts, nobody would know what the hell to make of me, but who cares if you do it; that’s just how you are.”
“I think there’d be some confusion if I went around in a skirt, too,” he said.
“That wasn’t the point.”
He knew that, but instead he said, “So what is your point? If I were a real soldier, I’d cut my hair short?”
“There wasn’t any point. I’m just making conversation.”
“Well, you’re not very good at it.” And he shouldn’t have felt any need to defend himself, but still for some reason he couldn’t keep himself from saying, “I tried to stop doing anything to my hair, but it turned – just, it wasn’t working.”
“So cut it off,” she said.
“That’s not gonna work, either,” he said with a shy smile. “My girl would kill me if I did. I like yours, though. Is that hard to do?”
“You know,” Morika said, “somehow I never imagined that I’d spend my first Consecration as an officer getting drunk and doing my second lieutenant’s hair.”
“Are you drunk?” Because if she was, that was especially impressive work on the balance bar.
“Not yet,” she said. “So come on.”
*
Inaula was famous for two things: cheese and leather, and conveniently, Ronon’s team contained two people who cared about one and two who cared about the other.
“I thought you were lactose intolerant,” Sheppard said to McKay while they were synchronizing their watches – oddly, Ronon thought, since the two of them were the only ones wearing watches, and they were going to stay together. It seemed to be just one of those things they had to do whenever they went through the Ring. Maybe it was for luck or something.
“No,” McKay said disdainfully. “I am very much pro-lactose. Oh, do you think they have anything that tastes like gruyere? I’ve been wanting to try my hand at fondue for my next date with Katie, except that every time I request– “
“So, let me get this straight. There’s an irritating but non-life threatening medical problem you don’t have?”
“Look, Restless Leg Syndrome is a real condition, a neurological condition. It’s related to Parkinson’s!”
“Well, at least we agree that it’s all in your brain.”
Ronon jerked his head in Teyla’s direction. She raised an eyebrow, nodded once, and followed him without a word. “You’d be mad at me if I choked McKay to death on a wheel of cheese, wouldn’t you?” Ronon said when they were out of earshot.
“Rodney is a very important member of our team,” Teyla said primly. Then she cast a sly, sidelong glance up at Ronon and said, “I might also ask, how confident are you that if Rodney’s services were not available, you would not inherit the task of keeping the Colonel entertained on missions? Because it is not a risk I am willing to take, myself.”
“Good point,” Ronon said, grinning down at her. “I wasn’t thinking about the human shield angle. We better keep him.”
Ronon was the one shopping for something in particular – he had a coat that he liked, but it turned out to be not as warm as he thought it was going to be when he bought it, and he really needed one for harsher climates – but nothing appealed to him for some reason, and it was Teyla who seemed to want to try on everything in every store.
No, not everything, Ronon realized with a kind of wistful amusement: only the fanciest things, creamy-soft skirts that swayed when she walked, shirts with patterns cut out of the back, narrow, high-heeled boots with glossy patterns in shell and snakeskin laid into the sides, and one...top thing that hooked up the front and did things to her body that made the back of Ronon’s neck sweat. When she showed it to him, standing forward and sideways and putting her arms behind her back to show him from every angle, Ronon just made a gruff, dubious noise and shook his head slightly. “No?” she said, sounding disappointed.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” he said, feeling guilty now. But honestly, she could not wear that home; it was a matter of his own survival, and Ronon was always willing to fight dirty for that. “I like the other one better. With the chain on the back.”
They bought iced cruim at a stand on the corner and sat down at the base of the obelisk commemorating some Inaulan lawgiver. “Can I ask you something?” Ronon asked, and then clarified, “Without making you mad.”
Teyla took a long drink of her cruim and said, “I do not think I will be mad. Although I may choose not to answer your question.”
Yeah, there was a pretty good chance of that. But still, he had to ask. “Who are you sleeping with?”
She froze in the act of lifting the cup, for only a second. Then she took another drink, probably just to stall, and said, “What makes you think...there is anyone?”
He shrugged. “You just...it seems like it. Seems to me like it. You’ve just been – really happy lately. The way you walk, the way your – your eyes look. I mean...I’ve known you for a while.”
“Yes,” she said, looking down at the grass. “I suppose you have.”
“So...who is he? I won’t say anything to him. Or anyone else.”
“He is...a friend,” she said, in a tone that clearly meant he was one hell of a lot more than that. Ronon thought he’d prepared himself for that, but apparently he’d still been holding out hope that it was just some...tension-release thing or something, because he could feel it right between his ribs when he had to put away that hope for good.
“Someone I know?” he asked, even though it wasn’t really a question. Teyla didn’t have any friends he hadn’t at least met in passing.
“Do you remember a man named Kannan?”
Ronon did, more or less. He was a quiet guy, tall and lean and dark-haired, who talked in a soft voice and made Teyla laugh; he’d been around a fair bit, during the weeks that Ronon lived among the Athosians, when the Ancients had kicked everyone out of the city. “You love him?” Ronon asked.
She whipped around to look at him, glaring, but before he could apologize, her face softened and she said, “He makes me happy. More than that...I cannot say. I think it is only love once it has stood the test of time.”
“Well...good,” Ronon made himself say, trying hard not to think about love and time and moving on, which he was completely failing to do on not one but two different fronts now. “It’s good that you’re happy.”
In the early evening, they found a store that specialized in coats, and Teyla lost her heart to a soft, flowing black one with a high waist. Ronon nodded as she turned in it and then said, “Hey, the – other thing, with the hooks? I.... That one was pretty. You looked good in it. If you wanted that one, you should go back and get it.”
“I think I prefer the coat,” she said. “It is much more practical.”
“Oh,” he said with a hesitant grin. “I didn’t know that was the look you were going for.”
She wasn’t as supportive of the coat that Ronon fell in love with, which was made with patches of textured leather in different shades of matte black and dark red and had a slightly high collar and a yoke around the shoulders that was lined with just a little bit of gray fur. “Hm,” she said, fingering the fur trim.
“You better get used to it,” he said, “because I’m keeping it.”
“I suppose I prefer...simplicity,” she said, testing the stitching with her fingernail.
“You like the boring ones,” Ronon interpreted, with just the hint of a dangerous little smile.
She raised her eyebrows at him, then let her hands drift down the front of the coat, over his chest. “A garment like this is an investment. It is one thing to want it, and another to be sure you can live with it over the years to come.”
“Practical,” he said wryly.
“I find that my practical decisions have, in the past, repaid me more reliably than my...more extravagant ambitions.”
He knew exactly what she meant. Extravagant ambitions – that shit would break your heart.
*
The invasion of Tanoa was hard, cold, filthy, agonizing work, the unhappy marriage of cramped, complicated ground tactics and sheer gore. By the fifth week, Ronon felt like he’d been living down under the dirt embankments for half his life, and his soldiers were starting to panic. He could hear them whispering when they thought he wasn’t near enough to hear – there weren’t enough reinforcements coming in, there wasn’t enough food, they’d been left to die here, in the sleet and rain and mud of mining-rich but miserable Tanoa.
The bodies of the dead were stacked up in tents behind the security line, but they’d been cut off from the Ring for ten days, and nobody was about to give in and bury the dead on Tanoa. That would be the same as saying that none of them were ever going home again.
Ronon did his best to keep everyone focused and busy, to keep the same rules and habits for his unit that they lived under back in their own home camp. He tried to do the same thing for himself, but Tanoa was huge and harsh and ugly – just looking out across the wind-blasted landscape seemed to drain the life out of him, and he found himself becoming terse and bitter, fair but not kind to his own troops, too antisocial to join his counterparts in the makeshift officers’ pavilion. Soren and Morika would go there in the evening, eat their dinners from tables instead of tin plates balanced on their knees, but Ronon couldn’t make conversation and didn’t want to heat enough water to clean himself up anyway. He spent most nights writing long letters to Melena, uncorking his anger and grief – the names of the dead, what was left of them after the bombs, crawling on their stomachs from place to place with no natural cover, firing so many times that his fingers kept twitching even when there wasn’t a gun in his hand, the stench of waste and rotten food scraps that got into everything, how he loved her, how he wished he could see her just one more time. Afterwards, he burned the letters. Even if there had been anyone to take them home for him, he wouldn’t have wanted her to read them.
His last engagement in the regular Infantry was as part of a hand-picked team on Tanoa, Ronon and Morika and about thirty other low-ranked officers and veteran enlisted from eight different units. The Marke Gamant deployed them to break a Tanoan supply line where the train was scheduled to switch tracks, according to Special Forces intelligence – a small force, moving fast, while the Tanoans were distracted by their grim deadlock. Ronon would’ve been happy to go even if it were all but a suicide mission, just because they had hardly gotten anywhere since they dug in on Tanoa. But the raid was being led by Kell Crudin, who was the Special Forces equivalent of a regiment commander and had a reputation for being cagey and critical, the absolute last person who would get himself into a doomed mission, so Ronon had a certain amount of hope.
At first it went exceptionally well; the overmatched Tanoan security force got taken totally by surprise and surrendered right away, but someone managed to signal reinforcements, and an hour later it was the Satedans who got caught flat-footed. It was just a lightly armed foot patrol, fifty or so strong, but they came in like a lightning bolt and fought like monsters, close and ugly. Ronon had his gun in his left hand, but he was too penned in to do much of anything with it, so he did what he could do, hacking desperately on every side with his sword, trying to drive them back so that Morika and the other snipers on the roof could get clear shots at them.
He took a few of them down, but then someone slammed him from the side when he raised his sword again, and they both went down to the ground and rolled. Ronon lost his sword and got slashed by a wide, serrated knife, in at his collarbone and straight down like he was being sawed apart at the shoulder. He swung his gun and smashed it across the Tanoan’s cheek, which bought him a moment’s disorientation, and he kicked the man off of him, but he managed to grab for Ronon’s gun and pull it out of his hand as he went. Ronon rolled for his sword, and it was agonizing to pick it up with his damaged arm, but he wasn’t thinking about pain at that particular moment. The soldier aimed Ronon’s own gun at him, and Ronon swung hard at his legs, then once more as he screamed and started to pitch forward, so that he landed across the edge of Ronon’s blade. He jerked it upwards with all his strength, peeling skin and muscle until he was soaked in blood and his sword was caught on the bones of the dying man’s ribcage.
Vaguely, Ronon could hear people yelling his name, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t even think. Other people’s hands heaved the corpse off of him, intestines spilling out on the sparse, frosted grass and the grainy dirt, and other hands pushed him up, put pressure on his shoulder, touched his hair, repeated generic words in worried tones. “‘M all right,” he muttered. He tried to put his good hand on the ground to help himself get up, but his muscles were shaking and he couldn’t make his arm straighten out and bear his weight.
“I’ve got him,” someone said, fitting broad shoulders under Ronon’s arm and levering him unsteadily to his feet. “Everyone back off – get back to work!”
He didn’t really recognize the man who got him inside for a minute, and then only by his sleek black uniform, unmarked by any rank or deployment insignia, a Special Forces uniform – Crudin. He got Ronon into the office of some railroad employee, set him by the hearth and cut the blood-wet jacket and shirt off of him. “Yeah,” he said gently, exposing the wound on his shoulder for a moment, wiping blood away before covering it again. “That’s going to scar.”
“I’m okay,” Ronon said thickly. “Where’s – who did we lose? Is Morika okay? I need to– “ He was still shaking, his teeth clicking together every time he tried to talk.
“Hush,” Crudin said, lifting a flask of something strong to Ronon’s lips. The rim of the flask tasted metallic, copper like the tang of blood, and he gagged a little but managed to swallow the alcohol. Crudin’s put his arm around Ronon’s back, pressing harder on the bandage, and grumbled, “Fucking Infantry. The run me in circles for two years, then almost get you cut up like butcher’s meat. Fuck them, I’m done waiting. You’re mine, I’m taking you.” He ran a hand over Ronon’s hair, then settled it warm and heavy against the skin of Ronon’s good shoulder. “I’ve got you,” he said quietly, with a horrible, unraveling kind of gentleness.
It all crashed down on Ronon at once – the pain in his shoulder, the body tearing apart on top of him, his face, his screams, the smell – and he vomited on the stones of the railroad office hearth, then started to cry and couldn’t seem to stop. Kell just kept on stroking his hair and his arm and murmuring, “I know. I know,” until Ronon slipped into something like sleep, slumping into his arms.
*
They got the Ring back not long after that, so Ronon only spent a few nights in field surgery, then they moved him straight through to Honor Ford, a comfortable room with a view of the Longwash outside his window and the hard, rust-colored skyline of Yendikai behind him and out of sight. His father came to see him, but had to go home almost right away, because Gran’s health wasn’t good enough to leave her alone for much time at once.
Melena stayed until he was discharged, which was just over a week. “I’ve applied for a position here,” she said, sitting on his bed and watching him without offering to help as he dressed himself laboriously with his arm immobilized against his body.
“Infantry doesn’t pay that well,” he said.
“No, but this way I won’t have to take any time off work the next time you end up here.” Ronon gave her a sharp look, and she shrugged and said, “I know, it’s not funny. If I don’t laugh at it anyway, I might fall apart, okay? The truth is – I think I’d like doing this. I don’t know, I feel...protective now of all these soldiers. It’s almost like they’re all a little – piece of you, somehow. I think maybe I won’t miss you so much if I’m here,” she said in a very small voice, looking down at the carpet.
Ronon put his good hand under her chin and lifted her face up toward him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this scares you.”
“I’m not good at being helpless. And I hate the way you...won’t really talk to me. You haven’t said anything about Tanoa since you got back – how this happened, or – or anything. I thought we told each other everything?”
Not this. Even if he knew the words for it, he’d rather die than say them. “It was just...combat,” he said. “People get hurt. But I’m okay now. I’ve been thinking...we should go ahead and do it. You’re finished with school, I have a commission. There’s no reason to keep waiting. Maybe this spring....” She nodded, but she didn’t seem that enthusiastic. “Don’t get too excited, now,” Ronon said dryly. “It’s just a wedding.”
“I know,” she said, smiling gamely. “I am excited. I’m just – tired.”
“Can you – help me, here?” he said when he’d managed the tunic but not the jacket on his uniform, and she jumped up right away.
Even with three good hands, though, it was tricky work to unhook his sling and get his sleeve over his arm without moving it too much, and Ronon had to bite his tongue on several noises of pain. Melena didn’t miss them, though, and she said, “Just forget the jacket. I’m not going to risk your arm for it.”
“Kell Crudin is an important man,” Ronon said impatiently. “I’m not going to meet him looking like some new recruit.” Melena rolled her eyes, but she did keep at the project, until between the two of them, they managed. She buttoned his jacket for him from the top down, and before she did the last buttons, she slipped her hand inside to touch the bottom edge of his scar, over his pectoral muscle. He kissed her temple gently.
“Does this hurt?” she asked.
“No, Doctor,” he said. “But I’d appreciate if you didn’t press any harder than that on it.” She gave him a mischievous little smile and turned her hand, brushing the scar with the backs of her fingers, then tracing over his nipple with the tips. He pulled her closer with his good arm and kissed her, but he had to stop when she kept going down his stomach. He pushed her hand away from the hooks on his waistband and said, “No, forget it, you’re not sending me off to a meeting with the highest-ranked officer in Special Forces – like that.”
“I just wanted to see how much better you were feeling,” she said lightly.
“Better,” he growled, and the playfulness turned bright and hot in her eyes. She pulled him down to kiss her again, sliding her tongue over his lips and her fingernails over his first few vertebrae.
The walk across the courtyard from the Hope Ford hospital facilities to the command offices helped him pull himself together a little after that, and by the time he was in Kell’s office, he could salute with his off-hand and go to rest with his mind on nothing but what came next. Whatever that was.
Kell didn’t waste any time. He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and said, “I’m having you transferred to Special Forces.”
Ronon raised an eyebrow. Special Forces was connected to the Infantry but not exactly a part of it – they didn’t use the same ranks or insignia, weren’t wholly inside the chain of command, and the Infantry couldn’t just bump you into Special Forces like it was just another regiment. They needed his permission. “I wouldn’t make a good spy, sir.”
“I never thought you would. I don’t need spies at the moment, but let me tell you what I do need.” He pushed a large sheet of paper across his desk, and Ronon took a step closer and bent down to read it – or try to read it. It was a star chart, but alongside each symbol that designated a Ring was a line of code, usually more than one line, letters and numbers that meant nothing to Ronon. He looked back up and waited for Kell to explain. “I have a department under me made up of statisticians and mathematicians. Ostensibly they’re code-breakers, but I’ve had them working on this project on the side for three years now. This is a list of every known major culling in the last fifteen years, and you’d be amazed how many patterns emerge from the data. I’m going to tell you what no government in the galaxy wants to tell anyone, for fear of mass panic: I know where the Wraith are going next, and I know when they’re coming here. It won’t be less than two and a half years from now, and it won’t be more than three.”
Ronon nodded shortly, his mouth too dry to speak. Wraith. He’d thought about it, of course – everyone thought about it. He’d even known it would probably be in his lifetime, but – three years? That was nothing, that was barely more time than the lifetime he’d already spent in the Infantry – a third the amount of time he’d been in love with Melena. He didn’t want to know that. Who would want to know for sure? He had to get married now, he had to try to start his life, always wondering in the back of his mind if either or both of them would be dead two years later? Fuck Kell Crudin for telling him this. He didn’t want to know.
When he didn’t ask any questions, Kell finally gave up waiting and said, “This isn’t some kind of morbid hobby of mine, Lieutenant Dex. I intend to do something about it.”
“Do something?” The words almost didn’t make sense, plain and simple as they were. “You can’t...fight the Wraith.”
“Do you believe that?”
He’d never heard anything different. When the Wraith came, you ran. Got underground if you could. Prayed. Maybe he’d been wrong, what he thought before about Kell Crudin and suicide missions.... “I don’t know,” he said.
“When I’m finished with them,” Kell said, “the Satedan Special Forces will be something the galaxy has never seen: a force of the finest soldiers on any world, specifically trained and armed to do nothing but kill Wraith. I think you in particular should grab hold of this opportunity with both hands.”
“Me in particular?”
“You’re not going to make it in the Infantry, son,” Kell said, not unkindly.
It still hit Ronon like a fist. Nobody had ever said that to him – they’d said he was the best, that he could author his own career, that he’d be a Marke someday. Since the day he signed with the recruiting sergeants, nobody had ever said he was going to fail at this. “I have the strongest task and service record of anyone in the Infantry at my rank,” Ronon said tightly.
“Oh, I know. And it’s bullshit to compare you to your rank, because you ought to be about three steps higher than you are anyway – you would be, if you didn’t insist on yoking yourself to that lazy drunkard Sincha. But that won’t matter if you crack apart on us, and at the rate you’re going, I give you a couple more years. You’ll be back here on a distress suspension before the Wraith arrive, odds favor.”
Ronon didn’t know whether he was more ashamed or angry, but either way it took him a minute to rally and say, “I’m sorry – sorry about what happened on Tanoa, but it won’t happen again. I don’t know why.... I’ve been in combat before, I don’t know why– “
“Oh, love of the Ancestors!” Kell said, harsh and impatient. “What do you mean, you don’t know why? You fell apart because it was fucking horrifying – it was horrifying just watching it! Listen to me, Ronon,” he said, pulling himself back under control. “I know your career; I know you. You’re a good man, trusted by the people who outrank you, idolized by the ones under you. You don’t get in fights, you don’t whore around, you have brains and compassion and self-respect. You didn’t join the Infantry to raise some hell before you die, you did it for your future – to make a difference, to take care of your family – your grandmother, your fiancee, your children someday. I have kids myself, you know – three of them. Married to the same woman twelve years now, and I love her more every day. Men like you and me, Ronon, we’re the exception rather than the rule in the Infantry. We’re just not like them.”
Why do you find it so fucking difficult to fit in with your own unit? Ronon licked his lips and said, “I’m...not. Different. I do my job the best I can, just like everyone else in the Infantry.”
“You are different,” Kell said. “You’re better. You’re a better soldier, and you’re a better man. If you’re lucky, Infantry life is going to get you killed. If you’re not lucky, you’ll wind up with so much blood on your conscience that you won’t be able to live with yourself. You already have nightmares, don’t you? Your hands shake sometimes, when you think about Tanoa? You can’t talk about it – you flinch when you touch someone, because you expect to feel blood under your hand?”
Ronon tried hard not to look away, but he finally had to – just to the side, just a little bit, and just for a moment. He switched his eyes back to Kell and said, “I’m not a coward.”
“It’s not about courage,” Kell said. “You have too damned much of that. The problem is, you’re not stupid enough to stop thinking about the kill, and you’re not crazy enough to develop a taste for it. Usually people like you serve a year or two in the field and then get shunted into admin postings, but you have the bad fucking luck to be the best combat soldier in three regiments, and they will never let you go. How many more can you look in the eye while you run them through, Ronon? How many more years of this can you fit into your nightmares?”
He didn’t know the answer to that. It felt like those were questions he’d been trying to ask himself ever since his first days on Tanoa and just never knew the right words for. All he knew was that there was almost nothing in the world that mattered to him more than being in the Infantry – and that he’d rather be dead than go back to Tanoa now.
“I can give you the Wraith, Ronon,” Kell said in a strange, soft voice, almost a whisper of awe. “No more throwing your heart and soul away on – on miserable, petty land-grabs and mineral rights disputes. You’re the best combat soldier – the best warrior – hell, of your whole generation, maybe, and only a madman would say you were born for nothing more than this. I can give you the Wraith. I can teach you how to use everything you were born with to do the only thing that’s worth doing. This is your choice, son. You joined the Infantry because you wanted your life to have a purpose, didn’t you?” Ronon nodded. “Well, I’m giving you a choice of purposes. You can spend your life butchering men and women you’ve never met and don’t give a damn about, at this year’s Tanoa and next year’s and the one after that, for as long as you can bear it without putting your gun in your own mouth, or you can let me get you ready to save the fucking world. You’re smiling,” Kell noted after a short pause.
“Just...you’re a hell of a salesman, sir.” There was real relief on Kell’s face, victory and gratitude both, and Ronon felt a flutter of pleasure in his stomach. It was – flattering. To be wanted the way Kell so obviously wanted him to say yes. “One thing, though,” Ronon said, mostly to see if he could get away with it. Kell raised an eyebrow and waited. “I want to bring Morika Oth with me.”
Kell looked at him for a minute, then bowed his head in agreement. “Congratulations, Specialist Dex,” he said. “Welcome to the first and last great war of our age.”
(con't in 3/3)
He got his first leave four months after he enlisted, but he got off the train before he made it all the way home. “There’s another one in six hours,” he told Soren. “When you get to Gario, if there’s – anyone waiting at the station for me, can you tell them? That I took a later train?”
Soren gave him a strange look, but then shrugged and said, “Stay out of trouble, will you?”
“I will,” Ronon promised.
“That was a joke,” Soren said, cuffing the back of his head. “A little trouble would do you good. See you in two weeks.”
Ronon didn’t get in trouble – Soren was right, he never got in trouble. Instead, he went shopping. He drew credit from his Infantry account and bought three pair of pants and three new vests, one of which had red embroidery and cost as much as the other five items combined. He bought two clean shirts, because the dirt was never, ever going to come out of the ones he already owned – two shirts with complicated lacing up the wrists like you could never wear when you usually had less than a minute after they threw you out of bed to be dressed and ready for inspections. He paid a boy to shine his boots, but the leather was cracked and worn, and he had to give up and buy a new pair of those, too, stiff and black and glossy. He changed clothes in the restroom of the train station, jamming his old things to the very bottom of the pack, and then he spent almost an hour combing out his hair (which hadn’t been touched in weeks except to tie it behind his neck when he got out of the shower) and oiling it carefully.
When he was finished, he watched himself in the mirror while he scrubbed his hands clean, including the dirt sunk into his cuticles. He thought he looked all right – a little tired around the eyes, but otherwise okay. He looked like someone who wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen outside a training camp that was slowly sinking under the early spring mud.
Nobody was waiting for him at the train station, and he spent even more money that he wasn’t sure he should part with on a cab home, because it wasn’t too far to walk, but it was too far to walk in boots that weren’t broken in yet.
The lights went on inside his house as soon as the cab pulled up, and by the time Ronon had tipped the driver and gotten his things out, they had all come to the porch – his father, his Gran, Melena. He hugged them in that order – his father fierce but silent, his Gran pretending she wasn’t weeping, and then Melena. He picked her up by the waist and swung her around in circles, and when he put her down she ran her hands over his arms in the crisp, never-washed shirt with a gleam in her eyes that almost made him nervous and said, “You look so wonderful. You’ve never looked so....”
Nervously, he glanced over his shoulder at his family. “It’s just the work,” he said. “It’s a lot of work.” He’d gained eighteen pounds since he left home, from added muscle and a steady diet of doughy biscuits and salty gravy. He thought it suited his tall, rawboned body, particularly now that he owned clothes that were made to fit and not just ripped out and resewn at the seams. Melena looked like she agreed.
She stayed for tea and an abbreviated conversation, but it was already late, and soon enough Gran said, “You made the girl wait half the day for you, and now you’re putting her to sleep. Walk her up the hill, now, and you come on back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ronon said.
It felt like old times, holding her arm in his while he walked her up to the gates of her enclave, not wanting to shatter the night silence with talk. He could almost believe he was just himself again, and she was the girl up the hill who babysat for his sisters, the one who was way too good for him but that he could still never stop thinking about. At the gates, he put his hands on her ribs and kissed her, the slow and thorough I-missed-you-so-much kiss he’d been planning almost since they parted. She slid her hands over his shoulders and leaned backwards, until she had him pinning her against the brick column. He braced one hand beside her and traced the backs of his fingers down her face, smiling down into her shining eyes.
“I think I like the beard,” she said thoughtfully, rubbing the tip of it between her fingers. “It makes you look a little dangerous.”
“I am dangerous,” he said gravely. “That’s my job now.”
“You’ll always be the music teacher’s son to me.”
She said it fondly, but Ronon still wasn’t quite sure how to respond. “You don’t – see me differently now?” he said. “I thought you might...think I’d changed.”
Melena looked him up and down carefully. “I think you’ve changed,” she admitted. “That’s not a bad thing, is it? I’ve...I’m sure I’ve changed, too. But that doesn’t mean...we have to change. And the things we want – if you really want something, with your whole heart, then that doesn’t change, does it?”
“What did you have in mind?” he teased softly, blowing into her ear.
She slapped his chest playfully, then nibbled his neck, which came conveniently to the level of her lips. “I want to be a doctor,” she said. “I want you to come up to my actual house instead of dropping me off here like you’re the staff, and more than I previously even thought possible, I want to take you to bed.”
“That’s not a great idea,” he said. “My grandmother is definitely going to wait up until I’m back.”
“It’s just slightly possible that I want it more than I want your Gran not to tell the whole district that I’m a cheap whore,” she said with a wry little smile. “But that might just be the influence of this new body of yours.”
“It’s my same body,” he pointed out.
“It really isn’t. Also, the other thing I really want – I want you to ask– “
“Melena, will you marry me?”
He didn’t go inside the gates, but she kept him there kissing her against the column for a long time anyway, so that Gran muttered bitterly at him when he did finally come home, his brand new shirt wrinkled and untucked and his vest half unlaced. Ronon kissed the thin, cool skin of her cheek and said, “It’s okay, Gran. We’re getting married.”
“Oh, and of course you don’t think that makes it worse,” she said, throwing up her hands. “At least if you just tumbled her and had it out, you could both lie about it later.”
“Have you always been this much of a romantic?” Ronon asked dryly. It kind of made him scared to wonder what his grandfather, who died long before he was born, had been like.
“At least you’re a soldier now,” she said blandly, returning to her knitting. “I suppose you don’t have to be better quality than the other men if you know how to shoot them.”
“There aren’t any other men, Gran.”
“Oh, on the whole planet, there aren’t any other men? Or do you just think you’re the best of all of them?”
Ronon grinned at her and said, “Tonight I sort of do, yeah.”
*
Both of Ronon’s first tattoos were hand-tapped, of course – electric needles were for civilians looking for a quick thrill before they sobered up; everything about Infantry life required more commitment than that. But he’d paid to have them done. Only a few regiments employed their own inksmiths anymore, and hardly anyone studied the craft except professionals.
“Where’d you learn how to do this?” Ronon asked suspiciously when Rakai tied the sleeve around his arm and unrolled his bundled tools, eight perfectly smooth sharpened tindia wingbones of different widths, as perfect and outdated a set as you might see in a museum, behind the glass.
Rakai shrugged. “We all had to pick up a trick or two along the way. Fix things, make things, kill things – whatever needs to be done to make a living.”
“Does the pattern have significance?” Teyla asked, and Ronon could hear the stiff disapproval she was trying to hide, but he figured that to anyone else, it just sounded like Teyla’s regular stiffness.
“No,” Ronon said shortly. “It’s just traditional.”
Tyre looked at him oddly, then turned to Teyla and said, “A hundred years ago, there was a mercenary company called the Vandal Hurricanes, and they used to wear these marks.”
“They were bad guys,” Ronon said.
“Those were desperate times,” Tyre said with a little shrug. “They rose to power shortly after the last great culling on Sateda, and they doubled in size over a single year. They sacked three cities and effectively brought down what was left of the Satedan government. People lived in more fear of the Vandal Hurricanes than they did of the Wraith, for a little while.”
Teyla frowned. “Then are these not marks of shame?”
Ara and Rakai and Tyre grinned at each other. Ronon kept his eyes down on the table, watching the tip of the bone needle as Rakai rolled it back and forth carelessly on his ink blotter. “Nobody thought they could be stopped, least of all by the Infantry, who had taken heavy losses in the culling. We were scattered, cut off from each other, wounded and hungry, no paychecks coming in. But we did it. We broke their backs in three separate battles, then cut their heads off at Aruta Hill. The three Markes who led the Aruta Hill engagement all took on these tattoos as a sign of everything they won from the Vandal Hurricanes – their power, the fear they inspired in those who would oppose them, their ucuso.”
“Their luck,” Ronon translated before Teyla could ask. “Their...destiny.”
“And now members of the Satedan Infantry wear them to commemorate this great victory,” Teyla said.
“Well, not now,” Ara said with a laugh. “Now members of the Satedan Infantry wear dirt and worms.”
Teyla blinked, not sure how to respond to...the way that Ara could be, sometimes. “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Tyre said. “It’s known as the Hand of Victory, and in our time, the only soldiers who would have the balls to wear these signs were those who had fought in a remarkable battle, one they should never have been able to win, but did – veterans of Aga 12, the siege of Yojoa, that sort of thing. The Marke Hartoren took on the Hand of Victory after he led the raid on the hive ship during the Keperye culling.” His hand came down on Ronon’s neck for a moment, and Ronon could feel his eyes, satisfied and affectionate. “And our Ronon’s no idle braggart, so if that’s the tattoo he wants, it means he’s won a battle that would put Aruta Hill and Aga 12 in the dark. Maybe he’ll tell us about it sometime.”
Ronon smiled a little with the corner of his mouth. “Not much to tell,” he said. Nothing they didn’t already know, anyway.
It felt like one battle, like one huge, endless event – seven years, gone like a bad dream, and nothing left of it now but a handful of pale scars that didn’t even stand out among those he’d earned before and since. There really wasn’t anything to tell; he didn’t have war stories from his Running years, mostly because even in his own memory, everything was indistinct – choppy and disorienting images and the utter blackness of far too many nights on lonely planets with a fire so small he could spread his arms out and not be able to see the tips of his fingers. Those years had sharpened his every sense to the limits of his capabilities, but on those rare occasions when he tried to remember anything, it felt like he’d spent the whole thing stone blind.
But he’d sure as hell be able to see it from now on.
*
Soren let slip about his promotion two days before it was official, just to Ronon and twenty or thirty of their closest, drunkest friends in a bar in Aboru Valley. For a moment Ronon was surprised, because Soren had gone almost eight years in his current rank, which put him long past overdue and into the category of un-promotable. But then Ronon was sorry he’d thought it; he should have had more faith in Soren.
Ronon grabbed him, kissed him hard on the cheek, and said, “You’re fucking taking me with you, though.”
“Sure, sure, yeah!” Soren laughed, rosy and happy. “I’ll give you a commission, why the fuck not? If I don’t, someone else will by the end of the year. I’ll make you my second lieutenant, how’s that for you?”
“Second lieutenant?” Ronon said, pretending to be insulted. “After I kissed you and everything? What do I have to do to make first?”
Soren laughed so hard he snorted and coughed on his beer. He wiped his face on his sleeve and said, “Fuck, if I got you on your back, they’d probably make me a Marke.”
Unit 344 wasn’t a prestige posting, and truthfully if it hadn’t been a matter of staying with the commander he knew, Ronon would probably have held out for something a little more strategic for his first officer’s commission. “I feel like I’m doing this for friendship,” he wrote in his letter to Melena, which he sent clipped to a photo of himself in his full commissioned uniform; the Infantry didn’t crack open the bank for enlisted men, who had to supply their own clothes, with epaulets attached to the shoulders that displayed their hiring date and deployment information. Ronon had burned his the minute he signed his name to the commission paperwork. “Should I be more worried about my career? Would you pick a hospital because of other doctors you knew who worked there?”
She wrote him back and said, “Why would you go to a regiment where you’d have to prove yourself all over again? Soren knows what you can do, and he trusts you. Also, I feel like ‘better posting’ when you say it means more dangerous, so you know I have to disapprove. Actually, if you could get demoted to floor mopping, I’d be extra, extra happy for you. But of course, you have to go and be good at this. (It helps a little that you look so sexy in the uniform. Yes, I am willing to compromise my principles for prurient reasons. Everything is really stressful here right now, and I wish you were here. I’d clarify that further, but I still think my mother might be reading all of these before they go out. Ha, that should make me want to go into more detail, shouldn’t it? It would serve her right if I did.)”
Second lieutenant meant that Ronon was in charge of most of the unit’s day-to-day business, from work rosters to evaluations to discipline, and in a further worrisome development in terms of his career as a whole, he enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than he thought he would enjoy being first lieutenant. That position was held by a woman who’d come up in the 344th. Her name was Morika, and she was almost six feet tall, with large green eyes and golden skin and dreadlocks, beautiful enough to be Ronon’s number one concern when it came to keeping order in the unit. She handled most of Soren’s administrative concerns, payroll and supply and communications with the rest of the regiment – all the boring stuff. Ronon had been with the unit for two months before he ever saw Morika fight, which she did exactly the way she did everything else, with quiet grace and economy. They never really talked, except in staff meetings.
The worst thing about being an officer was that he got less leave now than he used to – only two days’ less in raw terms, but he wasn’t allowed to take it over Regency Day or anywhere within a week of Consecration. Being in camp over the holidays was about as depressing as anything Ronon could think of, and even being allowed to transreceive home almost made everything worse. He said I love you so many times that his throat was sore by the end, and the food in the mess hall was more unpalatable than ever – how could they even ruin sugar-nut pie, how was that even humanly possible?
He knew he wasn’t going to be able to settle in for the night, so he took advantage of his rank to stay up past curfew and get some target practice. But when he got to the practice hall, the lights were already on and Morika was there, walking on her hands on the balance beam. Ronon leaned in the doorway and watched her flip off the end, and the little start she gave when she noticed him there was maybe the first time he’d ever seen Morika look surprised by anything. “Sorry,” he said.
She wiped her hands on her thighs and said, “I thought you’d sneak out for a drink with the rest of them tonight.”
“Just because I don’t plan to penalize anyone for it doesn’t mean I can come right out and act like I approve. You really think I’m that bad at my job?” He said it as casually as he could, but he found there was a tight feeling in his chest when he thought about that. He didn’t know Morika well in a personal way, but they’d been working together for several months, and he’d been sort of assuming that she thought he was doing a good job. He thought he was doing a good job, and Soren didn’t have any complaints, so why would Morika?
Morika shrugged. “I think you work pretty hard to make them think you’re one of them.”
“I am one of them,” Ronon said. “Yeah, I’m commissioned now, but I’m Infantry first, just like we all are.” She raised an eyebrow and looked him up and down, surveying Ronon’s clothes, which were just his ordinary off-duty civilian clothes, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a sturdy, unpatterned red vest, leather boots instead of the indestructible, synthetic, twenty pound monstrosities that regs required. She was barefoot, but still in her uniform pants and the fitted, sleeveless shirt that belonged under her uniform jacket. “Oh, come on,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You can’t tell some deep thing about my loyalties by what fucking shirt I’m wearing. Cut me some slack, it’s Consecration Eve.”
“Yeah, it is,” she said. “Blessed Consecration.”
“Yeah, you, too,” he said, not mustering up much seasonal cheer.
He set up the targets and loaded his gun, unwilling to look back over his shoulder to see if she was still there or not, until she finally said, “Hey,” and he had an excuse to turn around. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking amused. “There’s nothing wrong with your shirt.”
“I know there’s not,” he said.
“I’m just jealous, all right?” He tilted his head in puzzlement, and she said, “You’re prettier than me.” Ronon narrowed his eyes and glared, and Morika laughed, a bubbling, soft, low laugh that Ronon would never have been able to imagine coming from someone so serious. “Oh, come on, don’t sulk about it,” she said. “I just mean – it’s awkward, sometimes – to be pretty. For me, I mean. If I were to walk around camp with my hair oiled and my nails perfect and wearing my off-duty skirts, nobody would know what the hell to make of me, but who cares if you do it; that’s just how you are.”
“I think there’d be some confusion if I went around in a skirt, too,” he said.
“That wasn’t the point.”
He knew that, but instead he said, “So what is your point? If I were a real soldier, I’d cut my hair short?”
“There wasn’t any point. I’m just making conversation.”
“Well, you’re not very good at it.” And he shouldn’t have felt any need to defend himself, but still for some reason he couldn’t keep himself from saying, “I tried to stop doing anything to my hair, but it turned – just, it wasn’t working.”
“So cut it off,” she said.
“That’s not gonna work, either,” he said with a shy smile. “My girl would kill me if I did. I like yours, though. Is that hard to do?”
“You know,” Morika said, “somehow I never imagined that I’d spend my first Consecration as an officer getting drunk and doing my second lieutenant’s hair.”
“Are you drunk?” Because if she was, that was especially impressive work on the balance bar.
“Not yet,” she said. “So come on.”
*
Inaula was famous for two things: cheese and leather, and conveniently, Ronon’s team contained two people who cared about one and two who cared about the other.
“I thought you were lactose intolerant,” Sheppard said to McKay while they were synchronizing their watches – oddly, Ronon thought, since the two of them were the only ones wearing watches, and they were going to stay together. It seemed to be just one of those things they had to do whenever they went through the Ring. Maybe it was for luck or something.
“No,” McKay said disdainfully. “I am very much pro-lactose. Oh, do you think they have anything that tastes like gruyere? I’ve been wanting to try my hand at fondue for my next date with Katie, except that every time I request– “
“So, let me get this straight. There’s an irritating but non-life threatening medical problem you don’t have?”
“Look, Restless Leg Syndrome is a real condition, a neurological condition. It’s related to Parkinson’s!”
“Well, at least we agree that it’s all in your brain.”
Ronon jerked his head in Teyla’s direction. She raised an eyebrow, nodded once, and followed him without a word. “You’d be mad at me if I choked McKay to death on a wheel of cheese, wouldn’t you?” Ronon said when they were out of earshot.
“Rodney is a very important member of our team,” Teyla said primly. Then she cast a sly, sidelong glance up at Ronon and said, “I might also ask, how confident are you that if Rodney’s services were not available, you would not inherit the task of keeping the Colonel entertained on missions? Because it is not a risk I am willing to take, myself.”
“Good point,” Ronon said, grinning down at her. “I wasn’t thinking about the human shield angle. We better keep him.”
Ronon was the one shopping for something in particular – he had a coat that he liked, but it turned out to be not as warm as he thought it was going to be when he bought it, and he really needed one for harsher climates – but nothing appealed to him for some reason, and it was Teyla who seemed to want to try on everything in every store.
No, not everything, Ronon realized with a kind of wistful amusement: only the fanciest things, creamy-soft skirts that swayed when she walked, shirts with patterns cut out of the back, narrow, high-heeled boots with glossy patterns in shell and snakeskin laid into the sides, and one...top thing that hooked up the front and did things to her body that made the back of Ronon’s neck sweat. When she showed it to him, standing forward and sideways and putting her arms behind her back to show him from every angle, Ronon just made a gruff, dubious noise and shook his head slightly. “No?” she said, sounding disappointed.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” he said, feeling guilty now. But honestly, she could not wear that home; it was a matter of his own survival, and Ronon was always willing to fight dirty for that. “I like the other one better. With the chain on the back.”
They bought iced cruim at a stand on the corner and sat down at the base of the obelisk commemorating some Inaulan lawgiver. “Can I ask you something?” Ronon asked, and then clarified, “Without making you mad.”
Teyla took a long drink of her cruim and said, “I do not think I will be mad. Although I may choose not to answer your question.”
Yeah, there was a pretty good chance of that. But still, he had to ask. “Who are you sleeping with?”
She froze in the act of lifting the cup, for only a second. Then she took another drink, probably just to stall, and said, “What makes you think...there is anyone?”
He shrugged. “You just...it seems like it. Seems to me like it. You’ve just been – really happy lately. The way you walk, the way your – your eyes look. I mean...I’ve known you for a while.”
“Yes,” she said, looking down at the grass. “I suppose you have.”
“So...who is he? I won’t say anything to him. Or anyone else.”
“He is...a friend,” she said, in a tone that clearly meant he was one hell of a lot more than that. Ronon thought he’d prepared himself for that, but apparently he’d still been holding out hope that it was just some...tension-release thing or something, because he could feel it right between his ribs when he had to put away that hope for good.
“Someone I know?” he asked, even though it wasn’t really a question. Teyla didn’t have any friends he hadn’t at least met in passing.
“Do you remember a man named Kannan?”
Ronon did, more or less. He was a quiet guy, tall and lean and dark-haired, who talked in a soft voice and made Teyla laugh; he’d been around a fair bit, during the weeks that Ronon lived among the Athosians, when the Ancients had kicked everyone out of the city. “You love him?” Ronon asked.
She whipped around to look at him, glaring, but before he could apologize, her face softened and she said, “He makes me happy. More than that...I cannot say. I think it is only love once it has stood the test of time.”
“Well...good,” Ronon made himself say, trying hard not to think about love and time and moving on, which he was completely failing to do on not one but two different fronts now. “It’s good that you’re happy.”
In the early evening, they found a store that specialized in coats, and Teyla lost her heart to a soft, flowing black one with a high waist. Ronon nodded as she turned in it and then said, “Hey, the – other thing, with the hooks? I.... That one was pretty. You looked good in it. If you wanted that one, you should go back and get it.”
“I think I prefer the coat,” she said. “It is much more practical.”
“Oh,” he said with a hesitant grin. “I didn’t know that was the look you were going for.”
She wasn’t as supportive of the coat that Ronon fell in love with, which was made with patches of textured leather in different shades of matte black and dark red and had a slightly high collar and a yoke around the shoulders that was lined with just a little bit of gray fur. “Hm,” she said, fingering the fur trim.
“You better get used to it,” he said, “because I’m keeping it.”
“I suppose I prefer...simplicity,” she said, testing the stitching with her fingernail.
“You like the boring ones,” Ronon interpreted, with just the hint of a dangerous little smile.
She raised her eyebrows at him, then let her hands drift down the front of the coat, over his chest. “A garment like this is an investment. It is one thing to want it, and another to be sure you can live with it over the years to come.”
“Practical,” he said wryly.
“I find that my practical decisions have, in the past, repaid me more reliably than my...more extravagant ambitions.”
He knew exactly what she meant. Extravagant ambitions – that shit would break your heart.
*
The invasion of Tanoa was hard, cold, filthy, agonizing work, the unhappy marriage of cramped, complicated ground tactics and sheer gore. By the fifth week, Ronon felt like he’d been living down under the dirt embankments for half his life, and his soldiers were starting to panic. He could hear them whispering when they thought he wasn’t near enough to hear – there weren’t enough reinforcements coming in, there wasn’t enough food, they’d been left to die here, in the sleet and rain and mud of mining-rich but miserable Tanoa.
The bodies of the dead were stacked up in tents behind the security line, but they’d been cut off from the Ring for ten days, and nobody was about to give in and bury the dead on Tanoa. That would be the same as saying that none of them were ever going home again.
Ronon did his best to keep everyone focused and busy, to keep the same rules and habits for his unit that they lived under back in their own home camp. He tried to do the same thing for himself, but Tanoa was huge and harsh and ugly – just looking out across the wind-blasted landscape seemed to drain the life out of him, and he found himself becoming terse and bitter, fair but not kind to his own troops, too antisocial to join his counterparts in the makeshift officers’ pavilion. Soren and Morika would go there in the evening, eat their dinners from tables instead of tin plates balanced on their knees, but Ronon couldn’t make conversation and didn’t want to heat enough water to clean himself up anyway. He spent most nights writing long letters to Melena, uncorking his anger and grief – the names of the dead, what was left of them after the bombs, crawling on their stomachs from place to place with no natural cover, firing so many times that his fingers kept twitching even when there wasn’t a gun in his hand, the stench of waste and rotten food scraps that got into everything, how he loved her, how he wished he could see her just one more time. Afterwards, he burned the letters. Even if there had been anyone to take them home for him, he wouldn’t have wanted her to read them.
His last engagement in the regular Infantry was as part of a hand-picked team on Tanoa, Ronon and Morika and about thirty other low-ranked officers and veteran enlisted from eight different units. The Marke Gamant deployed them to break a Tanoan supply line where the train was scheduled to switch tracks, according to Special Forces intelligence – a small force, moving fast, while the Tanoans were distracted by their grim deadlock. Ronon would’ve been happy to go even if it were all but a suicide mission, just because they had hardly gotten anywhere since they dug in on Tanoa. But the raid was being led by Kell Crudin, who was the Special Forces equivalent of a regiment commander and had a reputation for being cagey and critical, the absolute last person who would get himself into a doomed mission, so Ronon had a certain amount of hope.
At first it went exceptionally well; the overmatched Tanoan security force got taken totally by surprise and surrendered right away, but someone managed to signal reinforcements, and an hour later it was the Satedans who got caught flat-footed. It was just a lightly armed foot patrol, fifty or so strong, but they came in like a lightning bolt and fought like monsters, close and ugly. Ronon had his gun in his left hand, but he was too penned in to do much of anything with it, so he did what he could do, hacking desperately on every side with his sword, trying to drive them back so that Morika and the other snipers on the roof could get clear shots at them.
He took a few of them down, but then someone slammed him from the side when he raised his sword again, and they both went down to the ground and rolled. Ronon lost his sword and got slashed by a wide, serrated knife, in at his collarbone and straight down like he was being sawed apart at the shoulder. He swung his gun and smashed it across the Tanoan’s cheek, which bought him a moment’s disorientation, and he kicked the man off of him, but he managed to grab for Ronon’s gun and pull it out of his hand as he went. Ronon rolled for his sword, and it was agonizing to pick it up with his damaged arm, but he wasn’t thinking about pain at that particular moment. The soldier aimed Ronon’s own gun at him, and Ronon swung hard at his legs, then once more as he screamed and started to pitch forward, so that he landed across the edge of Ronon’s blade. He jerked it upwards with all his strength, peeling skin and muscle until he was soaked in blood and his sword was caught on the bones of the dying man’s ribcage.
Vaguely, Ronon could hear people yelling his name, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t even think. Other people’s hands heaved the corpse off of him, intestines spilling out on the sparse, frosted grass and the grainy dirt, and other hands pushed him up, put pressure on his shoulder, touched his hair, repeated generic words in worried tones. “‘M all right,” he muttered. He tried to put his good hand on the ground to help himself get up, but his muscles were shaking and he couldn’t make his arm straighten out and bear his weight.
“I’ve got him,” someone said, fitting broad shoulders under Ronon’s arm and levering him unsteadily to his feet. “Everyone back off – get back to work!”
He didn’t really recognize the man who got him inside for a minute, and then only by his sleek black uniform, unmarked by any rank or deployment insignia, a Special Forces uniform – Crudin. He got Ronon into the office of some railroad employee, set him by the hearth and cut the blood-wet jacket and shirt off of him. “Yeah,” he said gently, exposing the wound on his shoulder for a moment, wiping blood away before covering it again. “That’s going to scar.”
“I’m okay,” Ronon said thickly. “Where’s – who did we lose? Is Morika okay? I need to– “ He was still shaking, his teeth clicking together every time he tried to talk.
“Hush,” Crudin said, lifting a flask of something strong to Ronon’s lips. The rim of the flask tasted metallic, copper like the tang of blood, and he gagged a little but managed to swallow the alcohol. Crudin’s put his arm around Ronon’s back, pressing harder on the bandage, and grumbled, “Fucking Infantry. The run me in circles for two years, then almost get you cut up like butcher’s meat. Fuck them, I’m done waiting. You’re mine, I’m taking you.” He ran a hand over Ronon’s hair, then settled it warm and heavy against the skin of Ronon’s good shoulder. “I’ve got you,” he said quietly, with a horrible, unraveling kind of gentleness.
It all crashed down on Ronon at once – the pain in his shoulder, the body tearing apart on top of him, his face, his screams, the smell – and he vomited on the stones of the railroad office hearth, then started to cry and couldn’t seem to stop. Kell just kept on stroking his hair and his arm and murmuring, “I know. I know,” until Ronon slipped into something like sleep, slumping into his arms.
*
They got the Ring back not long after that, so Ronon only spent a few nights in field surgery, then they moved him straight through to Honor Ford, a comfortable room with a view of the Longwash outside his window and the hard, rust-colored skyline of Yendikai behind him and out of sight. His father came to see him, but had to go home almost right away, because Gran’s health wasn’t good enough to leave her alone for much time at once.
Melena stayed until he was discharged, which was just over a week. “I’ve applied for a position here,” she said, sitting on his bed and watching him without offering to help as he dressed himself laboriously with his arm immobilized against his body.
“Infantry doesn’t pay that well,” he said.
“No, but this way I won’t have to take any time off work the next time you end up here.” Ronon gave her a sharp look, and she shrugged and said, “I know, it’s not funny. If I don’t laugh at it anyway, I might fall apart, okay? The truth is – I think I’d like doing this. I don’t know, I feel...protective now of all these soldiers. It’s almost like they’re all a little – piece of you, somehow. I think maybe I won’t miss you so much if I’m here,” she said in a very small voice, looking down at the carpet.
Ronon put his good hand under her chin and lifted her face up toward him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this scares you.”
“I’m not good at being helpless. And I hate the way you...won’t really talk to me. You haven’t said anything about Tanoa since you got back – how this happened, or – or anything. I thought we told each other everything?”
Not this. Even if he knew the words for it, he’d rather die than say them. “It was just...combat,” he said. “People get hurt. But I’m okay now. I’ve been thinking...we should go ahead and do it. You’re finished with school, I have a commission. There’s no reason to keep waiting. Maybe this spring....” She nodded, but she didn’t seem that enthusiastic. “Don’t get too excited, now,” Ronon said dryly. “It’s just a wedding.”
“I know,” she said, smiling gamely. “I am excited. I’m just – tired.”
“Can you – help me, here?” he said when he’d managed the tunic but not the jacket on his uniform, and she jumped up right away.
Even with three good hands, though, it was tricky work to unhook his sling and get his sleeve over his arm without moving it too much, and Ronon had to bite his tongue on several noises of pain. Melena didn’t miss them, though, and she said, “Just forget the jacket. I’m not going to risk your arm for it.”
“Kell Crudin is an important man,” Ronon said impatiently. “I’m not going to meet him looking like some new recruit.” Melena rolled her eyes, but she did keep at the project, until between the two of them, they managed. She buttoned his jacket for him from the top down, and before she did the last buttons, she slipped her hand inside to touch the bottom edge of his scar, over his pectoral muscle. He kissed her temple gently.
“Does this hurt?” she asked.
“No, Doctor,” he said. “But I’d appreciate if you didn’t press any harder than that on it.” She gave him a mischievous little smile and turned her hand, brushing the scar with the backs of her fingers, then tracing over his nipple with the tips. He pulled her closer with his good arm and kissed her, but he had to stop when she kept going down his stomach. He pushed her hand away from the hooks on his waistband and said, “No, forget it, you’re not sending me off to a meeting with the highest-ranked officer in Special Forces – like that.”
“I just wanted to see how much better you were feeling,” she said lightly.
“Better,” he growled, and the playfulness turned bright and hot in her eyes. She pulled him down to kiss her again, sliding her tongue over his lips and her fingernails over his first few vertebrae.
The walk across the courtyard from the Hope Ford hospital facilities to the command offices helped him pull himself together a little after that, and by the time he was in Kell’s office, he could salute with his off-hand and go to rest with his mind on nothing but what came next. Whatever that was.
Kell didn’t waste any time. He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and said, “I’m having you transferred to Special Forces.”
Ronon raised an eyebrow. Special Forces was connected to the Infantry but not exactly a part of it – they didn’t use the same ranks or insignia, weren’t wholly inside the chain of command, and the Infantry couldn’t just bump you into Special Forces like it was just another regiment. They needed his permission. “I wouldn’t make a good spy, sir.”
“I never thought you would. I don’t need spies at the moment, but let me tell you what I do need.” He pushed a large sheet of paper across his desk, and Ronon took a step closer and bent down to read it – or try to read it. It was a star chart, but alongside each symbol that designated a Ring was a line of code, usually more than one line, letters and numbers that meant nothing to Ronon. He looked back up and waited for Kell to explain. “I have a department under me made up of statisticians and mathematicians. Ostensibly they’re code-breakers, but I’ve had them working on this project on the side for three years now. This is a list of every known major culling in the last fifteen years, and you’d be amazed how many patterns emerge from the data. I’m going to tell you what no government in the galaxy wants to tell anyone, for fear of mass panic: I know where the Wraith are going next, and I know when they’re coming here. It won’t be less than two and a half years from now, and it won’t be more than three.”
Ronon nodded shortly, his mouth too dry to speak. Wraith. He’d thought about it, of course – everyone thought about it. He’d even known it would probably be in his lifetime, but – three years? That was nothing, that was barely more time than the lifetime he’d already spent in the Infantry – a third the amount of time he’d been in love with Melena. He didn’t want to know that. Who would want to know for sure? He had to get married now, he had to try to start his life, always wondering in the back of his mind if either or both of them would be dead two years later? Fuck Kell Crudin for telling him this. He didn’t want to know.
When he didn’t ask any questions, Kell finally gave up waiting and said, “This isn’t some kind of morbid hobby of mine, Lieutenant Dex. I intend to do something about it.”
“Do something?” The words almost didn’t make sense, plain and simple as they were. “You can’t...fight the Wraith.”
“Do you believe that?”
He’d never heard anything different. When the Wraith came, you ran. Got underground if you could. Prayed. Maybe he’d been wrong, what he thought before about Kell Crudin and suicide missions.... “I don’t know,” he said.
“When I’m finished with them,” Kell said, “the Satedan Special Forces will be something the galaxy has never seen: a force of the finest soldiers on any world, specifically trained and armed to do nothing but kill Wraith. I think you in particular should grab hold of this opportunity with both hands.”
“Me in particular?”
“You’re not going to make it in the Infantry, son,” Kell said, not unkindly.
It still hit Ronon like a fist. Nobody had ever said that to him – they’d said he was the best, that he could author his own career, that he’d be a Marke someday. Since the day he signed with the recruiting sergeants, nobody had ever said he was going to fail at this. “I have the strongest task and service record of anyone in the Infantry at my rank,” Ronon said tightly.
“Oh, I know. And it’s bullshit to compare you to your rank, because you ought to be about three steps higher than you are anyway – you would be, if you didn’t insist on yoking yourself to that lazy drunkard Sincha. But that won’t matter if you crack apart on us, and at the rate you’re going, I give you a couple more years. You’ll be back here on a distress suspension before the Wraith arrive, odds favor.”
Ronon didn’t know whether he was more ashamed or angry, but either way it took him a minute to rally and say, “I’m sorry – sorry about what happened on Tanoa, but it won’t happen again. I don’t know why.... I’ve been in combat before, I don’t know why– “
“Oh, love of the Ancestors!” Kell said, harsh and impatient. “What do you mean, you don’t know why? You fell apart because it was fucking horrifying – it was horrifying just watching it! Listen to me, Ronon,” he said, pulling himself back under control. “I know your career; I know you. You’re a good man, trusted by the people who outrank you, idolized by the ones under you. You don’t get in fights, you don’t whore around, you have brains and compassion and self-respect. You didn’t join the Infantry to raise some hell before you die, you did it for your future – to make a difference, to take care of your family – your grandmother, your fiancee, your children someday. I have kids myself, you know – three of them. Married to the same woman twelve years now, and I love her more every day. Men like you and me, Ronon, we’re the exception rather than the rule in the Infantry. We’re just not like them.”
Why do you find it so fucking difficult to fit in with your own unit? Ronon licked his lips and said, “I’m...not. Different. I do my job the best I can, just like everyone else in the Infantry.”
“You are different,” Kell said. “You’re better. You’re a better soldier, and you’re a better man. If you’re lucky, Infantry life is going to get you killed. If you’re not lucky, you’ll wind up with so much blood on your conscience that you won’t be able to live with yourself. You already have nightmares, don’t you? Your hands shake sometimes, when you think about Tanoa? You can’t talk about it – you flinch when you touch someone, because you expect to feel blood under your hand?”
Ronon tried hard not to look away, but he finally had to – just to the side, just a little bit, and just for a moment. He switched his eyes back to Kell and said, “I’m not a coward.”
“It’s not about courage,” Kell said. “You have too damned much of that. The problem is, you’re not stupid enough to stop thinking about the kill, and you’re not crazy enough to develop a taste for it. Usually people like you serve a year or two in the field and then get shunted into admin postings, but you have the bad fucking luck to be the best combat soldier in three regiments, and they will never let you go. How many more can you look in the eye while you run them through, Ronon? How many more years of this can you fit into your nightmares?”
He didn’t know the answer to that. It felt like those were questions he’d been trying to ask himself ever since his first days on Tanoa and just never knew the right words for. All he knew was that there was almost nothing in the world that mattered to him more than being in the Infantry – and that he’d rather be dead than go back to Tanoa now.
“I can give you the Wraith, Ronon,” Kell said in a strange, soft voice, almost a whisper of awe. “No more throwing your heart and soul away on – on miserable, petty land-grabs and mineral rights disputes. You’re the best combat soldier – the best warrior – hell, of your whole generation, maybe, and only a madman would say you were born for nothing more than this. I can give you the Wraith. I can teach you how to use everything you were born with to do the only thing that’s worth doing. This is your choice, son. You joined the Infantry because you wanted your life to have a purpose, didn’t you?” Ronon nodded. “Well, I’m giving you a choice of purposes. You can spend your life butchering men and women you’ve never met and don’t give a damn about, at this year’s Tanoa and next year’s and the one after that, for as long as you can bear it without putting your gun in your own mouth, or you can let me get you ready to save the fucking world. You’re smiling,” Kell noted after a short pause.
“Just...you’re a hell of a salesman, sir.” There was real relief on Kell’s face, victory and gratitude both, and Ronon felt a flutter of pleasure in his stomach. It was – flattering. To be wanted the way Kell so obviously wanted him to say yes. “One thing, though,” Ronon said, mostly to see if he could get away with it. Kell raised an eyebrow and waited. “I want to bring Morika Oth with me.”
Kell looked at him for a minute, then bowed his head in agreement. “Congratulations, Specialist Dex,” he said. “Welcome to the first and last great war of our age.”
(con't in 3/3)