Fic: "Pray For Rain" (SGA)
I did manage to finish this last night and I suppose that means it's time to post it. ::flails:: I haven't posted fic in a month! What if I do it wrong?
Anyway. ::end flail::
For meret, whom I promised a drabble several months ago. So this is your drabble plus interest. :) And also for mona1347, who got things bouncing around in my brain with an offhand remark somewhere or other. ::high-fives you both::
Nonspecific AU; I would say it takes off from somewhere in s3, but it doesn't really matter where you mentally place it.
Ronon-John-Elizabeth; indirect sideways-glance-style Ronon/John/Elizabeth.
Thanks to poisontaster and romanticalgirl for beta's at various points and handholding through much flailing and whining.
Sheppard hasn't talked for days.
That doesn't bother Ronon, not really-even after living on Atlantis for as long as he did, he still carries silence deep enough within him that it doesn't bother him from without. But Weir needs to be talked to. Words were her tools, before, and she needs them now if she's going to remember who she is. She needs them to fight for that, in her way. Ronon doesn't have any to give her; they're not the way he fights.
If McKay were here, he would be talking without pause--complaining and correcting and bitching and insulting everyone until Weir had to snap out of her silence and stillness long enough to keep them from killing him. If Teyla were here, she'd sit down with Weir and say a few quiet things--only a handful of words, but the right ones, because Teyla hadn't been the leader of the Athosians without reason--and Weir might cry a little, but she would stand up and make them start planning.
But instead, there's Ronon, who doesn't know anything about using words in her way, who hasn't had to since Sateda was destroyed. And there's Sheppard, who seems to have lost anything he ever had to say. He'll walk a perimeter and forage for food and check the tripwire alarms they set around the Stargate, but it's all in eerie silence, and when he sits down by the campfire, he stares into it the same way that Weir does. Like they've been hollowed out. Like Atlantis kept everything they had inside them, when they left.
It's like they're ghosts. Shadows. He can understand why Weir is this way, after what happened, but he doesn't know about Sheppard. If Ronon wanted to follow a ghost, he has plenty to choose from, ones that will lead him east to hell and west to paradise. But he's not dead yet, and neither are they.
You can lose a place and keep going, he wants to tell them. You can lose people and keep going. Believe me. You can lose everything--and you haven't; believe that, too--and keep going, as long as you hold on to who you are.
But even before he gave words up in favor of survival, he wasn't good enough with them to say all that. So he checks the fire and makes sure Weir is awake and goes out to take the watch from Sheppard.
He'll give them a little longer to remember who they are, and then he'll do what he can to remind them. He can run alone again, but not unless he has to. Not until he's absolutely sure that it won't do any good to fight.
**
They all talked about how the city was asleep, how they woke it up when they came through the Stargate from Earth.
Nobody ever thought about what that really meant, what it meant for something the size of the city, the age of the city, to sleep. Or to wake.
"To continue the metaphor," McKay explained, when things were going to hell all around them, "we brought the city out of REM sleep. But it was still dozing."
"And now it's completely awake?" Sheppard asked.
"It's awake, and it's figured out that we're not Ancients, and it's very unhappy about it."
Sheppard said something about finding the biggest cup of coffee in the universe, but his voice was hollow and nobody laughed. They were all watching Dr. Weir, held immobile in the shaft of light that split the control room, frozen and glassy-eyed like a bug in amber until Atlantis was done with her.
**
Ronon tries to find the commander in Sheppard, the leader. He knows that side best, has placed his trust in it, relied on it when he swore never to rely on anything again.
He swore he would never be betrayed again, not after Kell, but Sheppard betrays him now. He's lost what Ronon relied on, the part of him that leads; lost it or deliberately cast it away. Ronon doesn't know for certain; all he knows is that if he kneels to Sheppard, if he bares his neck, if he holds out a hand to be helped to his feet, Sheppard turns away.
Figuratively speaking, of course. This filthy mudball of a Gamma Site is no place for symbol or ritual.
So he tries to find Sheppard the soldier, to draw out the comrade-in-arms, the man who leaves no man behind. And here it's not that he finds nothing, but that he hits a wall--Ronon and Weir are both conscious and breathing, their hearts beat and they blink and as long as they have food, water, and shelter, Sheppard seems to think that's the extent of his obligations.
And maybe he's right. It's not as if there's a rescue coming, or a home base to return to anymore.
**
The city's rejection was abrupt and absolute. Whatever it found in its forced communion with Weir, it didn't like, and everything in the city either went dark and cold as stone or lit up in parts of the spectrum that human eyes couldn't bear to see.
They thought it was worth a try--Sheppard and McKay thought it was worth a try and nobody was left to say otherwise--for Sheppard to touch an interface point, to use his strong Ancient gene to try to change the city's mind.
Ronon and Teyla both were silent as Sheppard's eyes widened and his back arched and Atlantis looked into his mind. They could have warned the Earth people, had they been asked, that the gifts of the Ancestors were fickle and apt to be taken away, and that faith in the Ancestors themselves was best kept as a dream.
**
He sits by the fire with Weir, watching her polite, precise movements as she eats, her eyes wide and blank as a child's. He wonders if Atlantis forcing its way into her mind felt like the Wraith tracker forcing its way into his body.
He doesn't have the words to call her back. In the army, on Sateda, when another fighter went into his head that way to protect himself from horror or pain, his comrades talked him out with gentle things, familiar things, words from home and myth and childhood.
Ronon doesn't have those for Earth. He knows about football and Ferris wheels, movies and greasy food, physics journals and helicopters. He doesn't think any of those things go deeply enough into Weir to draw her out again.
Her hair has fallen down over her face. He reaches out and guides the heavy dark strands back behind her ear. His fingers brush her skin and she turns her head at the contact, the curve of her cheek settling against his palm. Her skin is cool to the touch, so he keeps his hand still, hoping she will borrow some of his warmth. For a moment he thinks he sees something flicker deep in her eyes, some spark of self that he can fan to life if he knows what to say.
"Dr. Weir," he says, and she frowns, the faintest lines across her forehead and curve of her lips. "You're safe. We're safe here."
She shakes her head, her expression more of puzzlement than denial, and the motion breaks the contact between them. He lets his hand fall to his lap and watches her as she looks around the shelter and then into the fire, her eyes empty again.
"Elizabeth." The name comes to his lips, he thinks, a moment too late. That might have been a word that the spark of her could catch on to, but he missed the chance.
He leaves her by the fire and goes to find Sheppard. He'll make Sheppard wake up and help her. He'll get them both back, or die trying, and Ronon Dex is not ready to die.
**
Whatever Sheppard told Atlantis, or whatever the city took from his mind, it wasn't quite enough. Not enough for what McKay and Sheppard had been hoping, at least. More charity than the city seemed inclined to show before, which was enough for pretty much everyone else.
It was enough for Atlantis to let them run instead of smothering them like rats inside the walls. The gate swirled and flickered, dialing itself again and again at unpredictable intervals, two or three people diving through each wormhole and praying to whatever they believed in that they'd find ground on the other side, not stars.
That was enough for Ronon. A chance. A chance to run, to fight, to survive. To last until another day and fight again.
He didn't know how he ended up dragging Weir and Sheppard through the gate-- he thinks Teyla pushed Weir's unresponsive form toward him, and his hand closed around Sheppard's wrist and yanked him forward essentially of its own will. But he saw the look on Sheppard's face just before they fell into the blue light, and for the first time he could think of, the other man wasn't hard to read.
It doesn't want him either, anymore.
**
If there is no leader in Sheppard now, and there is no soldier, Ronon will find the fighter. Deeper down than the level of comrade-in-arms, unbound by loyalty or belief, the raw and pure need to survive.
If that is gone, then Sheppard is already broken and already dead. Ronon doesn't believe that yet.
The first blow is simple and, despite himself, half-pulled: a stiff-arm strike to the center of Sheppard's chest. It knocks him flat and sprawling, and Ronon stands over him, glaring down, making every line of his body a challenge for Sheppard to stand. For a horrible moment, he thinks Sheppard won't, that he'll surrender and it will all be over before it has a chance to begin.
But Sheppard's face contorts into a snarl and his leg lashes out, his boot connecting solidly with Ronon's knee and sending him tumbling to the dirt as well.
If Ronon hadn't give up on gods and Ancestors years ago, he would have thanked them now. As it is, he's too busy trying to keep Sheppard's hands off his throat.
It ends with Sheppard on his back and Ronon kneeling over him, pinning Sheppard's wrists to the ground. Their faces are inches apart, both breathing hard, and for a moment a shudder runs up Ronon's spine--this is wrong, for him to take this. Sheppard should have the victory, to make him commander again.
Except Sheppard gave that away, released it when Atlantis left his mind, and Ronon won this fight pure and simple.
Sheppard is staring up at him with wariness and acceptance at once, and a shred of something else--dark amusement--that Ronon thought he'd never see again. It means that his plan worked, that Sheppard is back, only different.
Ronon eases off him, getting to his feet and wincing at the painful stretch of bruises. "Sheppard," he says, then stops. Names. He missed his chance before. Not again.
"John," he says instead, and he knows by the twitch of Sheppard's mouth that it was right. "Good to have you back."
**
They got lucky. He knew that, just pure dumb luck that the Gate spit them out at an address already set up for evacuation, with a shelter and supplies ready and waiting.
The medical kit wasn’t much good, because there was nothing wrong with either of them but shock of the heart and the mind, and the only thing for that was time.
The emergency rations, though, those were good to have. Tided them over for the first day or two until Ronon felt all right about leaving the two of them behind to go gathering. A water purifier. Blankets. A heater for the tiny shelter space and a fire pit all set up for when it ran out of power.
All the necessities of home, if not the comforts. Not bad for refugees.
**
Sheppard sits with his arm loosely, awkwardly, around Weir's shoulders, as if he's holding something made of glass or hot to the touch. He speaks softly in her ear, and Ronon hopes those are the words she needs, the healing words that he doesn't know.
If there is any such thing as healing now, which he finds that he doubts. Weir's face is still like a doll's, her body stiff under the curve of Sheppard's arm, unsoftened by the touch.
Ronon watches them and remembers how they came to life on Atlantis, how their pure wonder at the sleeping city gave it magic the Ancestors never dreamed of and gave themselves something they didn't bring through the Gate with them.
They gave their hearts to that city on the water, and it kept those when it cast their bodies out. Another crime to lay at the Ancestors' feet, the Ancestors who would never notice or care.
Days pass, and he watches them. He eats and sleeps and gathers food and checks the Gate, and so does Sheppard, and together they look after Weir. Somewhere in those passing days, between when her breath catches in her throat and she cries, the glassy doll-face cracking into tears and sobs, and when Sheppard looks up at the stars and smiles, the barest curve of his lips but there...somewhere, Ronon loses Weir and Sheppard and finds Elizabeth and John.
**
He mourned the people they lost, scattered across every gate address in the city's memory without hope of being found again. The Wraith will catch them all, or the Genii, or chance, or time.
He grieved for Sateda too deeply to mourn another place. Losing Atlantis was, frankly, nothing to him.
They were grieving it, though, he could see. As deeply as, or maybe even deeper than, they would grieve for their Earth if it came to that.
He didn't think they even realized that, and he prayed to things he didn't believe in anymore that they would never have to.
**
He ran alone for too long to feel lonely now, he tells himself, walking a slow perimeter around the camp and watching the stars peek between shredded clouds. The low sound of the others talking is simply a change after a renewal of silence, that’s why it unsettles him. Nothing more.
Elizabeth does not speak like Dr. Weir, now; her words are fractured, racing, dodging splinters and gaps where things are hurt or gone. She pulls herself together more every day, and he sees it, sees her arranging pieces around a center she hasn’t lost after all. That’s good. The center is where the heart is, where the heat and gravity come from, where the strength lies. Healing from the core will make her whole again, whole and new.
John touches her with the same respectful not-quite-affection he showed his P-90. He smoothes her hair and rubs her shoulders and holds her in a precise, capable manner with all the warmth those words imply. Ronon knows that on Earth, healing wounded hearts and minds is a job kept off to the side and in one person. On Atlantis it was Dr. Heightmeyer who spoke to the soldiers who had seen too much, not Elizabeth, not John, not their comrades.
It was different on Sateda, but Ronon has seen enough worlds to know that there is no one true way. Still, he sees how Elizabeth doesn’t lean into John’s touch, and he thinks that John’s hands are probably cold.
John is different now too, though it’s harder to tell; maybe he only speaks less because there are fewer people to speak to. Ronon thinks the core of John, his center, is off-balance and bleeding out, after Atlantis. It’s only a hunch, though. He can’t say for sure.
Who knows, maybe he’s wrong about all of it. Maybe they’re all bleeding out and just don’t know it. Maybe even he is, from some wound he learned to ignore.
**
He knew that broken people could be fixed. Given time and space and safety, the mind would work to repair itself as much as it could, just like the body. The heart and the spirit did the same, though their scar tissue was thicker and twisted more as it healed.
They had time--forever, in fact. They seemed to have space as well--all the empty, mud-slick space they could ever desire. And as for safety...well, if you didn't count the demons they all hauled around in their back pockets, there hadn't been a sign of threat since they fell through the Stargate.
Ronon counted the demons. He didn't think he had a choice.
**
"This rock's empty," John says, ducking his head against the rain and wrapping his arms tightly around himself. "We haven't seen one living thing the whole time we've been here. Come inside."
There's the barest shade of an order under the indifference, and for a heartbeat Ronon thinks he should push back, reassert that he's taken command here since the other man tossed it away. But command of two protecting one--what does that even mean? Why do you still think of everything as fighting? some part of him asks.
Because I don't know what else to do.
"Come inside," John repeats, and he reaches out this time, closing his hand around Ronon's forearm. Ronon jerks at the touch; John's hand is hot as a brand against his skin, sending fire along his nerves. He was a mile off before, thinking that John's hands were cold.
They feel warm because you're soaked through and freezing to death, Dex, the runner in him thinks. Go inside, gather your strength, fight again tomorrow.
This endless aching passive fight, just to eat and breathe and keep the ghosts who share the shelter alive.
He nods and follows John inside, not allowing himself to speak for fear his teeth will chatter and give him away. Inside, the fire is low and bright. Elizabeth is beside it, not staring absently into the coals anymore but scratching something into the dirt with a stick and frowning to herself.
She looks up when they come in and drops the stick, scrambling to her feet. "Oh, thank God. I thought you two were going to stay out there and drown." She darts around the shelter, adding more wood to the fire, digging food from storage places, her words quick and disjointed like flying things. "Sit down, Ronon. You're freezing--John, get a blanket--"
"I'm fine," Ronon says, but she shakes her head. Even though she doesn't look directly at anything--her eyes darting around the shelter like she's searching for something, something, the something she lost--her jaw sets in the old way. He hasn't seen that since Atlantis, and it silences him. He doesn't want to scare it away.
John hands him a blanket and sits on the opposite side of the fire, running his hands through his hair to sluice off the water. "Nothing out there but the rain."
Elizabeth moves back to Ronon's side and presses some of the hoarded rations into his hand. "Here, Ronon, eat this--God, you're frozen through--"
She touches his face when she says it, a gesture of concern without thought or intent. Her hands are warm, as warm as John's felt outside, and he can't help it. He leans into the touch, wanting to draw it into him.
She stills and something flickers in her eyes, the moment of realization that she used to shield away from everyone behind her diplomatic shields and now is exposed. "Oh," she say softly. "We left you out in the cold, didn't we?"
**
The first night, he watched them sleep and caught himself promising that he wouldn't let anything happen to them.
That was something else he'd given up in those seven years of running: making promises that couldn't be kept. When had the Atlanteans given that back to him, and why did he allow it?
Apparently it wasn't the kind of thing you could let go twice. Or maybe it just wasn't a promise that meant anything anymore, now, here. He wouldn't let anything happen to them--what was left to happen anyway?
**
They don't know the right things to say to him, either. They're not of Sateda, don't have the words and symbols in their blood, don't know what would invoke warmth and comfort there.
But there are things older than words, lower and deeper in the body and the mind, that Ronon knows can cross cultures and planets and now he finds bridging galaxies.
Bringing him in from the cold--this is home and there is the hearth. The two of them are guide and guardian, perhaps, or watcher and wanderer; the names and shades of meaning bend and flex and melt like wax in the glow of the fire and the impossible heat of hands sliding over his skin.
This is, of course, a dream; an unreality. Or maybe it's more than reality, a place where the laws and rules of nature grow sharper and stronger. Water runs downhill, metal seeks magnets, light moves at a constant and broken edges reach for one another to form a whole.
Broken edges, broken hearts and minds, broken people. He hasn't thought of himself as broken in a long time. He wouldn't think it now except for the way he finds himself shaking inside at each tentative brush of a touch, like sharp places are being crossed with sandpaper.
Elizabeth's every touch is open and entire, offering in full and waiting to be returned in kind. John waits to be met halfway, but every time he isn't disappointed the next comes more quickly, and Ronon thinks he can see the cracked and overlapping shells slip away one by one, commander and comrade and fighter, to bare the last jagged edges guarding the heart of the man.
Or perhaps it is no more and no less than comfort, the cold part of his mind says quietly, no more and no less than three people alone at the end of the universe with nothing else left to hold on to in the dark.
Does it matter? he asks himself.
The runner in him doesn't have an answer. What it does have is a deep and iron-cold ability to be patient, wait and see.
There's nowhere left to run now anyway. This is the shelter, the fragile human shelter at the end of the line, patched together from broken pieces and careful touches and halting promises to stay and try, whispered in the dark.
**
He believes, down in the part of him that was a child raised in faith, that if they wait long enough the seasons will turn and flowers will bloom in the mud. It's a law of the universe, constant across all places and peoples, that life comes around again. All that's asked of them is to survive, endure, live and breathe and run and turn to fight again, and they'll see spring. The sun will come back and turn the world sere and brown and warm, until again in good time they turn their faces to the sky and pray for rain.
Anyway. ::end flail::
For meret, whom I promised a drabble several months ago. So this is your drabble plus interest. :) And also for mona1347, who got things bouncing around in my brain with an offhand remark somewhere or other. ::high-fives you both::
Nonspecific AU; I would say it takes off from somewhere in s3, but it doesn't really matter where you mentally place it.
Ronon-John-Elizabeth; indirect sideways-glance-style Ronon/John/Elizabeth.
Thanks to poisontaster and romanticalgirl for beta's at various points and handholding through much flailing and whining.
Sheppard hasn't talked for days.
That doesn't bother Ronon, not really-even after living on Atlantis for as long as he did, he still carries silence deep enough within him that it doesn't bother him from without. But Weir needs to be talked to. Words were her tools, before, and she needs them now if she's going to remember who she is. She needs them to fight for that, in her way. Ronon doesn't have any to give her; they're not the way he fights.
If McKay were here, he would be talking without pause--complaining and correcting and bitching and insulting everyone until Weir had to snap out of her silence and stillness long enough to keep them from killing him. If Teyla were here, she'd sit down with Weir and say a few quiet things--only a handful of words, but the right ones, because Teyla hadn't been the leader of the Athosians without reason--and Weir might cry a little, but she would stand up and make them start planning.
But instead, there's Ronon, who doesn't know anything about using words in her way, who hasn't had to since Sateda was destroyed. And there's Sheppard, who seems to have lost anything he ever had to say. He'll walk a perimeter and forage for food and check the tripwire alarms they set around the Stargate, but it's all in eerie silence, and when he sits down by the campfire, he stares into it the same way that Weir does. Like they've been hollowed out. Like Atlantis kept everything they had inside them, when they left.
It's like they're ghosts. Shadows. He can understand why Weir is this way, after what happened, but he doesn't know about Sheppard. If Ronon wanted to follow a ghost, he has plenty to choose from, ones that will lead him east to hell and west to paradise. But he's not dead yet, and neither are they.
You can lose a place and keep going, he wants to tell them. You can lose people and keep going. Believe me. You can lose everything--and you haven't; believe that, too--and keep going, as long as you hold on to who you are.
But even before he gave words up in favor of survival, he wasn't good enough with them to say all that. So he checks the fire and makes sure Weir is awake and goes out to take the watch from Sheppard.
He'll give them a little longer to remember who they are, and then he'll do what he can to remind them. He can run alone again, but not unless he has to. Not until he's absolutely sure that it won't do any good to fight.
**
They all talked about how the city was asleep, how they woke it up when they came through the Stargate from Earth.
Nobody ever thought about what that really meant, what it meant for something the size of the city, the age of the city, to sleep. Or to wake.
"To continue the metaphor," McKay explained, when things were going to hell all around them, "we brought the city out of REM sleep. But it was still dozing."
"And now it's completely awake?" Sheppard asked.
"It's awake, and it's figured out that we're not Ancients, and it's very unhappy about it."
Sheppard said something about finding the biggest cup of coffee in the universe, but his voice was hollow and nobody laughed. They were all watching Dr. Weir, held immobile in the shaft of light that split the control room, frozen and glassy-eyed like a bug in amber until Atlantis was done with her.
**
Ronon tries to find the commander in Sheppard, the leader. He knows that side best, has placed his trust in it, relied on it when he swore never to rely on anything again.
He swore he would never be betrayed again, not after Kell, but Sheppard betrays him now. He's lost what Ronon relied on, the part of him that leads; lost it or deliberately cast it away. Ronon doesn't know for certain; all he knows is that if he kneels to Sheppard, if he bares his neck, if he holds out a hand to be helped to his feet, Sheppard turns away.
Figuratively speaking, of course. This filthy mudball of a Gamma Site is no place for symbol or ritual.
So he tries to find Sheppard the soldier, to draw out the comrade-in-arms, the man who leaves no man behind. And here it's not that he finds nothing, but that he hits a wall--Ronon and Weir are both conscious and breathing, their hearts beat and they blink and as long as they have food, water, and shelter, Sheppard seems to think that's the extent of his obligations.
And maybe he's right. It's not as if there's a rescue coming, or a home base to return to anymore.
**
The city's rejection was abrupt and absolute. Whatever it found in its forced communion with Weir, it didn't like, and everything in the city either went dark and cold as stone or lit up in parts of the spectrum that human eyes couldn't bear to see.
They thought it was worth a try--Sheppard and McKay thought it was worth a try and nobody was left to say otherwise--for Sheppard to touch an interface point, to use his strong Ancient gene to try to change the city's mind.
Ronon and Teyla both were silent as Sheppard's eyes widened and his back arched and Atlantis looked into his mind. They could have warned the Earth people, had they been asked, that the gifts of the Ancestors were fickle and apt to be taken away, and that faith in the Ancestors themselves was best kept as a dream.
**
He sits by the fire with Weir, watching her polite, precise movements as she eats, her eyes wide and blank as a child's. He wonders if Atlantis forcing its way into her mind felt like the Wraith tracker forcing its way into his body.
He doesn't have the words to call her back. In the army, on Sateda, when another fighter went into his head that way to protect himself from horror or pain, his comrades talked him out with gentle things, familiar things, words from home and myth and childhood.
Ronon doesn't have those for Earth. He knows about football and Ferris wheels, movies and greasy food, physics journals and helicopters. He doesn't think any of those things go deeply enough into Weir to draw her out again.
Her hair has fallen down over her face. He reaches out and guides the heavy dark strands back behind her ear. His fingers brush her skin and she turns her head at the contact, the curve of her cheek settling against his palm. Her skin is cool to the touch, so he keeps his hand still, hoping she will borrow some of his warmth. For a moment he thinks he sees something flicker deep in her eyes, some spark of self that he can fan to life if he knows what to say.
"Dr. Weir," he says, and she frowns, the faintest lines across her forehead and curve of her lips. "You're safe. We're safe here."
She shakes her head, her expression more of puzzlement than denial, and the motion breaks the contact between them. He lets his hand fall to his lap and watches her as she looks around the shelter and then into the fire, her eyes empty again.
"Elizabeth." The name comes to his lips, he thinks, a moment too late. That might have been a word that the spark of her could catch on to, but he missed the chance.
He leaves her by the fire and goes to find Sheppard. He'll make Sheppard wake up and help her. He'll get them both back, or die trying, and Ronon Dex is not ready to die.
**
Whatever Sheppard told Atlantis, or whatever the city took from his mind, it wasn't quite enough. Not enough for what McKay and Sheppard had been hoping, at least. More charity than the city seemed inclined to show before, which was enough for pretty much everyone else.
It was enough for Atlantis to let them run instead of smothering them like rats inside the walls. The gate swirled and flickered, dialing itself again and again at unpredictable intervals, two or three people diving through each wormhole and praying to whatever they believed in that they'd find ground on the other side, not stars.
That was enough for Ronon. A chance. A chance to run, to fight, to survive. To last until another day and fight again.
He didn't know how he ended up dragging Weir and Sheppard through the gate-- he thinks Teyla pushed Weir's unresponsive form toward him, and his hand closed around Sheppard's wrist and yanked him forward essentially of its own will. But he saw the look on Sheppard's face just before they fell into the blue light, and for the first time he could think of, the other man wasn't hard to read.
It doesn't want him either, anymore.
**
If there is no leader in Sheppard now, and there is no soldier, Ronon will find the fighter. Deeper down than the level of comrade-in-arms, unbound by loyalty or belief, the raw and pure need to survive.
If that is gone, then Sheppard is already broken and already dead. Ronon doesn't believe that yet.
The first blow is simple and, despite himself, half-pulled: a stiff-arm strike to the center of Sheppard's chest. It knocks him flat and sprawling, and Ronon stands over him, glaring down, making every line of his body a challenge for Sheppard to stand. For a horrible moment, he thinks Sheppard won't, that he'll surrender and it will all be over before it has a chance to begin.
But Sheppard's face contorts into a snarl and his leg lashes out, his boot connecting solidly with Ronon's knee and sending him tumbling to the dirt as well.
If Ronon hadn't give up on gods and Ancestors years ago, he would have thanked them now. As it is, he's too busy trying to keep Sheppard's hands off his throat.
It ends with Sheppard on his back and Ronon kneeling over him, pinning Sheppard's wrists to the ground. Their faces are inches apart, both breathing hard, and for a moment a shudder runs up Ronon's spine--this is wrong, for him to take this. Sheppard should have the victory, to make him commander again.
Except Sheppard gave that away, released it when Atlantis left his mind, and Ronon won this fight pure and simple.
Sheppard is staring up at him with wariness and acceptance at once, and a shred of something else--dark amusement--that Ronon thought he'd never see again. It means that his plan worked, that Sheppard is back, only different.
Ronon eases off him, getting to his feet and wincing at the painful stretch of bruises. "Sheppard," he says, then stops. Names. He missed his chance before. Not again.
"John," he says instead, and he knows by the twitch of Sheppard's mouth that it was right. "Good to have you back."
**
They got lucky. He knew that, just pure dumb luck that the Gate spit them out at an address already set up for evacuation, with a shelter and supplies ready and waiting.
The medical kit wasn’t much good, because there was nothing wrong with either of them but shock of the heart and the mind, and the only thing for that was time.
The emergency rations, though, those were good to have. Tided them over for the first day or two until Ronon felt all right about leaving the two of them behind to go gathering. A water purifier. Blankets. A heater for the tiny shelter space and a fire pit all set up for when it ran out of power.
All the necessities of home, if not the comforts. Not bad for refugees.
**
Sheppard sits with his arm loosely, awkwardly, around Weir's shoulders, as if he's holding something made of glass or hot to the touch. He speaks softly in her ear, and Ronon hopes those are the words she needs, the healing words that he doesn't know.
If there is any such thing as healing now, which he finds that he doubts. Weir's face is still like a doll's, her body stiff under the curve of Sheppard's arm, unsoftened by the touch.
Ronon watches them and remembers how they came to life on Atlantis, how their pure wonder at the sleeping city gave it magic the Ancestors never dreamed of and gave themselves something they didn't bring through the Gate with them.
They gave their hearts to that city on the water, and it kept those when it cast their bodies out. Another crime to lay at the Ancestors' feet, the Ancestors who would never notice or care.
Days pass, and he watches them. He eats and sleeps and gathers food and checks the Gate, and so does Sheppard, and together they look after Weir. Somewhere in those passing days, between when her breath catches in her throat and she cries, the glassy doll-face cracking into tears and sobs, and when Sheppard looks up at the stars and smiles, the barest curve of his lips but there...somewhere, Ronon loses Weir and Sheppard and finds Elizabeth and John.
**
He mourned the people they lost, scattered across every gate address in the city's memory without hope of being found again. The Wraith will catch them all, or the Genii, or chance, or time.
He grieved for Sateda too deeply to mourn another place. Losing Atlantis was, frankly, nothing to him.
They were grieving it, though, he could see. As deeply as, or maybe even deeper than, they would grieve for their Earth if it came to that.
He didn't think they even realized that, and he prayed to things he didn't believe in anymore that they would never have to.
**
He ran alone for too long to feel lonely now, he tells himself, walking a slow perimeter around the camp and watching the stars peek between shredded clouds. The low sound of the others talking is simply a change after a renewal of silence, that’s why it unsettles him. Nothing more.
Elizabeth does not speak like Dr. Weir, now; her words are fractured, racing, dodging splinters and gaps where things are hurt or gone. She pulls herself together more every day, and he sees it, sees her arranging pieces around a center she hasn’t lost after all. That’s good. The center is where the heart is, where the heat and gravity come from, where the strength lies. Healing from the core will make her whole again, whole and new.
John touches her with the same respectful not-quite-affection he showed his P-90. He smoothes her hair and rubs her shoulders and holds her in a precise, capable manner with all the warmth those words imply. Ronon knows that on Earth, healing wounded hearts and minds is a job kept off to the side and in one person. On Atlantis it was Dr. Heightmeyer who spoke to the soldiers who had seen too much, not Elizabeth, not John, not their comrades.
It was different on Sateda, but Ronon has seen enough worlds to know that there is no one true way. Still, he sees how Elizabeth doesn’t lean into John’s touch, and he thinks that John’s hands are probably cold.
John is different now too, though it’s harder to tell; maybe he only speaks less because there are fewer people to speak to. Ronon thinks the core of John, his center, is off-balance and bleeding out, after Atlantis. It’s only a hunch, though. He can’t say for sure.
Who knows, maybe he’s wrong about all of it. Maybe they’re all bleeding out and just don’t know it. Maybe even he is, from some wound he learned to ignore.
**
He knew that broken people could be fixed. Given time and space and safety, the mind would work to repair itself as much as it could, just like the body. The heart and the spirit did the same, though their scar tissue was thicker and twisted more as it healed.
They had time--forever, in fact. They seemed to have space as well--all the empty, mud-slick space they could ever desire. And as for safety...well, if you didn't count the demons they all hauled around in their back pockets, there hadn't been a sign of threat since they fell through the Stargate.
Ronon counted the demons. He didn't think he had a choice.
**
"This rock's empty," John says, ducking his head against the rain and wrapping his arms tightly around himself. "We haven't seen one living thing the whole time we've been here. Come inside."
There's the barest shade of an order under the indifference, and for a heartbeat Ronon thinks he should push back, reassert that he's taken command here since the other man tossed it away. But command of two protecting one--what does that even mean? Why do you still think of everything as fighting? some part of him asks.
Because I don't know what else to do.
"Come inside," John repeats, and he reaches out this time, closing his hand around Ronon's forearm. Ronon jerks at the touch; John's hand is hot as a brand against his skin, sending fire along his nerves. He was a mile off before, thinking that John's hands were cold.
They feel warm because you're soaked through and freezing to death, Dex, the runner in him thinks. Go inside, gather your strength, fight again tomorrow.
This endless aching passive fight, just to eat and breathe and keep the ghosts who share the shelter alive.
He nods and follows John inside, not allowing himself to speak for fear his teeth will chatter and give him away. Inside, the fire is low and bright. Elizabeth is beside it, not staring absently into the coals anymore but scratching something into the dirt with a stick and frowning to herself.
She looks up when they come in and drops the stick, scrambling to her feet. "Oh, thank God. I thought you two were going to stay out there and drown." She darts around the shelter, adding more wood to the fire, digging food from storage places, her words quick and disjointed like flying things. "Sit down, Ronon. You're freezing--John, get a blanket--"
"I'm fine," Ronon says, but she shakes her head. Even though she doesn't look directly at anything--her eyes darting around the shelter like she's searching for something, something, the something she lost--her jaw sets in the old way. He hasn't seen that since Atlantis, and it silences him. He doesn't want to scare it away.
John hands him a blanket and sits on the opposite side of the fire, running his hands through his hair to sluice off the water. "Nothing out there but the rain."
Elizabeth moves back to Ronon's side and presses some of the hoarded rations into his hand. "Here, Ronon, eat this--God, you're frozen through--"
She touches his face when she says it, a gesture of concern without thought or intent. Her hands are warm, as warm as John's felt outside, and he can't help it. He leans into the touch, wanting to draw it into him.
She stills and something flickers in her eyes, the moment of realization that she used to shield away from everyone behind her diplomatic shields and now is exposed. "Oh," she say softly. "We left you out in the cold, didn't we?"
**
The first night, he watched them sleep and caught himself promising that he wouldn't let anything happen to them.
That was something else he'd given up in those seven years of running: making promises that couldn't be kept. When had the Atlanteans given that back to him, and why did he allow it?
Apparently it wasn't the kind of thing you could let go twice. Or maybe it just wasn't a promise that meant anything anymore, now, here. He wouldn't let anything happen to them--what was left to happen anyway?
**
They don't know the right things to say to him, either. They're not of Sateda, don't have the words and symbols in their blood, don't know what would invoke warmth and comfort there.
But there are things older than words, lower and deeper in the body and the mind, that Ronon knows can cross cultures and planets and now he finds bridging galaxies.
Bringing him in from the cold--this is home and there is the hearth. The two of them are guide and guardian, perhaps, or watcher and wanderer; the names and shades of meaning bend and flex and melt like wax in the glow of the fire and the impossible heat of hands sliding over his skin.
This is, of course, a dream; an unreality. Or maybe it's more than reality, a place where the laws and rules of nature grow sharper and stronger. Water runs downhill, metal seeks magnets, light moves at a constant and broken edges reach for one another to form a whole.
Broken edges, broken hearts and minds, broken people. He hasn't thought of himself as broken in a long time. He wouldn't think it now except for the way he finds himself shaking inside at each tentative brush of a touch, like sharp places are being crossed with sandpaper.
Elizabeth's every touch is open and entire, offering in full and waiting to be returned in kind. John waits to be met halfway, but every time he isn't disappointed the next comes more quickly, and Ronon thinks he can see the cracked and overlapping shells slip away one by one, commander and comrade and fighter, to bare the last jagged edges guarding the heart of the man.
Or perhaps it is no more and no less than comfort, the cold part of his mind says quietly, no more and no less than three people alone at the end of the universe with nothing else left to hold on to in the dark.
Does it matter? he asks himself.
The runner in him doesn't have an answer. What it does have is a deep and iron-cold ability to be patient, wait and see.
There's nowhere left to run now anyway. This is the shelter, the fragile human shelter at the end of the line, patched together from broken pieces and careful touches and halting promises to stay and try, whispered in the dark.
**
He believes, down in the part of him that was a child raised in faith, that if they wait long enough the seasons will turn and flowers will bloom in the mud. It's a law of the universe, constant across all places and peoples, that life comes around again. All that's asked of them is to survive, endure, live and breathe and run and turn to fight again, and they'll see spring. The sun will come back and turn the world sere and brown and warm, until again in good time they turn their faces to the sky and pray for rain.