Fourteen Years (1/2), by Hth
Flashfics aren't supposed to be too long for a single lj post, are they? Um.
Title: Fourteen Years (1/2)
Author: Hth
Characters: Ronon. Ronon. Some other people. Ronon.
Ratings: MESBS&H for moderately explicit sex, both slash and het. A- for angst-ish.
Words: 12,304. I know, right?!?
Summary:
Fourteen Years
by Hth
The first year he was a Runner, he was angry all the time. He had been a good person, a good soldier, a good friend, not rich and not important in the grand scheme of things, but a man who appreciated his life, who paid all his debts and remembered the less fortunate, who knew how to lead, how to follow, and how to have fun, all when the time was right.
It was just so fucking unfair.
They turned him loose with nothing, not even his own clothing - just one of those dark coats they wore, too tight through the chest and hard to run in. They had ships and guns and they regenerated and could bring a man down with a brush of their fingers, and they put him on the ground with a coat that didn’t fit and a device in his back that transmitted his location, and it was so clear that he was going to die that he wasn’t even afraid. He was just pissed off.
He just wanted to hurt them worse than they expected him to, and that made him dangerous.
He was twenty years old and a good soldier. By the end of the first year, he’d killed six Wraith and left three too injured to pursue him, and he didn’t know who he was anymore. He would lie in the dark, sheltered by whatever thicket or abandoned building he could find, and he would close his eyes and try to feel the pulse of the tracking device, calling out steadily and silently to his enemies. Come on, he would murmur along with it, sometimes out loud just to hear the sound of a human voice, sometimes only in his own head. Come on. Come get me, motherfuckers. I’m right here.
They always came. He didn’t care; he wanted them to. Every time he took one on - and two, then, and three and four as they learned to be wary of him - every time, he felt the red thrill of it, of how they’d put everything they had into making him weak, and he was giving them something to be afraid of.
None of it slaked him, though. Not for the first year. All he felt was angry, even in the middle of the fight, even standing over their corpses. No matter how many of them he killed, nothing gave him any rest from the knowledge that he’d had everything that, at twenty years old, he thought he could ever want, and he’d lost it all for no reason that he could see.
The first and last thing the Wraith took from him was his faith in a world that had rules. That was the thing that really kept him angry.
*
The first year he was on Atlantis, he couldn’t relax. He was impulsive and sloppy; he made mistakes. He lost his temper a lot.
He didn’t know what he was so angry about all the time. He had a pretty good situation on Atlantis; he wasn’t unhappy with the arrangement. He was supposed to be grateful to them, and for the most part he was. He was supposed to pay them back in what he’d learned about hunting and being hunted, and for the most part he did.
He just couldn’t settle in. He found himself losing control of his temper at all the wrong moments - not just on missions when his orders were to blend in and keep himself to himself, but also over stupid, small things. People jostling him in the mess hall. His clothes coming back from the laundry smelling like nothing he recognized, after he’d said he didn’t want anybody but him handling his things.
He started having nightmares, which he hadn’t had for a long, long time. It was the video feed, he was pretty sure. Those pictures of his city in ruins, but more importantly all the things he couldn’t see in it. The orphanage where he grew up. The field where he won his age group’s bagara tournament when he was twelve. The stand where you could buy fresh deep-fried nyan rolls in front of the Reservoir Authority building. He woke up night after night from dreams of walking through empty streets, the buildings intact but all the people missing, and around every corner, the startling absence of exactly what he most wanted to see there.
It had been a long time since Ronon had let himself hope for anything. Then it happened so fast - so much that it almost overwhelmed him, and then it was gone. After all the years of knowing that he would never go home again, it wasn’t until he came to Atlantis that he really knew.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault - no one on Atlantis, anyway. But he was still angry, and he didn’t know how to stop feeling that way, or where to direct it now that his enemies weren’t dogging his every step.
When the Wraith began coming into Atlantis - first that mutated lab animal, then the hive queen and her drones - it was almost a relief. He knew what to do about Wraith. Their mere existence justified his rage.
The rest of the time, when he had peace and comfort and honest work, even friendship, and he still couldn’t shake his anger, he just wondered what was wrong with him.
*
The second year he was a Runner passed in a kind of blur. Two years felt, at that time, impossibly long, like no matter how far he stretched, he couldn’t touch the past or the future. Like there had never been anything but this.
Fear began to creep in, against his will. He needed his courage against the Wraith; it was the only real weapon he had. So he preserved his hate for the fights, but in between, he let his fear run its course.
He became obsessed with the idea that he would die not by violence, but by starvation. He’d gone through a survival course in basic training, but that was utterly different from surviving. He was afraid to eat anything that he didn’t recognize, and he rarely stayed on one planet long enough to recognize much of anything. Then when he did find a safe source of food - a stream running so rich with fish coming to spawn that he could scoop up fistfuls of them, a patch of weeds with bulbous sweet roots, an unguarded nest of eggs - he devoured it, terrified to let one plant, one berry, one fucking insect escape through his fingers, because what if there wasn’t more? Every meal, in his own mind, was nearly his last.
The Wraith became only a hazy distraction from the real work of running. He moved from Ring to Ring, planet to planet, thinking about nothing but the undefined importance of covering ground and the driving need to find something to eat. He thought about food constantly. He searched the bodies of dead Wraith for miliary rations, forgetting that they didn’t eat food, and then he threw up and dissolved into blind panic over wasted calories.
He was hungry all the time. He couldn’t remember what it felt like to eat for pleasure, to be satisfied, to take comfort in food. Eating was no pleasure to him, but a desperate, crushing necessity, outweighing anything and everything else in his mind.
Without that obsession, he might have had to consider his future: how long did he expect to be doing this, and how could he get away, and was it even possible, and how could he keep going if it was not?
In the second year, he wasn’t ready to ask himself those questions. Instead, he stayed on the move and dedicated himself to the intensely present, ground-level task of finding his next meal.
*
The second year he was on Atlantis, he began to tell them things about himself. He began to remember things he hadn’t remembered in years.
One thing he couldn’t remember was when his birthday was, but that was nothing new. “We were refugees,” he told them when they asked. “There was an earthquake in Garripre Province when I was a baby. I don’t know, I got out somehow, but I guess my parents must have died or something. I grew up in a state orphanage; a lot of us from Garripre did.”
His teammates looked around at each other, faces drawn in the firelight, unhappy and silent. “It’s okay,” he said. “Actually, it was nice. It was a nice place. But most of us there were either refugees or we’d been abandoned, and nobody knew our birthdays, so we had two big parties a year, one in winter for the boys, summer for the girls. We’d get the day off from chores and school and play games all day, and then there was a big dinner. We didn’t have to clean our plates before dessert, so of course we didn’t eat anything but dessert.” He felt something unfamiliar about his face, and it took him a strangely long time to realize it was because he was smiling as he watched the crackling flames.
He remembered that not doing chores was the only hard part of those days. He felt uneasy, watching other people do his work for him - thin-armed, sad-eyed new girls dragging mop water up the stairs, his Nurses with their broad laps and sweet smiles and the purple Department of Charitable Works seal embroidered in satiny thread on their plain-spun sleeves, pulling weeds out of the kitchen garden in the back. He always tried to help when no one was looking.
They offered him money to enter engineering school when he was sixteen, but he’d already taken so much. He joined the Infantry instead, and every single one of his Nurses cried while they hugged him goodbye. He wasn’t afraid of hard work, and Sateda was his family, so that had to come first.
In the winter, Atlantis had a string of significant victories against the Wraith, which made everyone walk around all the time with jaunty steps and sparkling eyes like they had a secret. That explained why he didn’t notice some of them did have a secret until he went to dinner and met a burst of confetti and applause and bad music, and a table laid out with meat and desserts under a banner with his name on it. “Happy birthday,” Sheppard said, slugging him in the arm.
“Why?” he asked, dazed.
Sheppard shrugged. “Why not? Everybody’s itching for a party anyway.”
He’d never minded sharing his birthdays before - actually, it was good, because no matter how many people had come and gone since the year before, the boys who shared his birthday with him every year had that connection to him; it made them all brothers, in a way - but he found himself both embarrassed and pleased to have one all to himself.
Some people danced to music piped in over the PA; some played video games on the big display that usually only came out of storage on movie nights. Most people still kept their distance from Ronon; he didn’t blame them for that. But they smiled at him, or waved, and he’d never felt so visible in Atlantis before, so on display. He felt hot and prickly and awkward and happy.
He didn’t dance and he didn’t shoot things, but he did eat - nothing but dessert. He had baklava and bread pudding and pecan pie and chocolate cake and flan, some of everything they put out, and then threw up in one of the kitchen sinks.
“That’s it for you, young man,” Sheppard said, wiping his face for him with a wet cloth. “From now on, it’s back to early bedtimes and cleaning your plate before flan.”
“Fuck you,” Ronon said with a wan little smile, and Sheppard smirked back at him and didn’t go away while Ronon cleaned the sink. He just leaned on the counter, not watching Ronon work but waiting for him to be done, for them to go back to the party together.
*
The third year he was a Runner, he got cocky. He’d survived this long; he hadn’t been sure he’d make it three days when he started, but here he was. He felt a little less angry; he gave up the sense that his life should have been something other than this, which helped.
This was his life. In the third year, he stopped thinking of himself as a soldier or a prisoner and started thinking of himself as a Runner. The Wraith became an opponent to defeat, just like they were playing bagara with him. Ronon held two years’ worth of city-wide bagara championships, and he was fucking good at this game, too.
He started doing dangerous things, just to see if he could. He’d acquired a sword, and he taught himself to spin eye-catching shapes with it, drawing his enemies closer to it, pulling their attention to the flashing blade and delaying his strike until the last possible second. He was stronger and faster than he ever had been, and he could use surprise to his advantage, feinting in one direction and then carrying his body all the way around, spinning it like his sword, to come in from the other side.
Almost more than killing them, he loved seeing their startled looks when he showed them what he could really do.
He was vaguely amazed by his own body, by the things he’d never known he could do with it. He’d always been tall and graceful, but he watched himself put layers of lean muscle between his skin and bones, watched himself climb and roll and jump and swim and fight as easily as he could walk, and sometimes when he caught his reflection in a still pond or ran his hand under his shirt in the dark and felt the ridges of muscle there, he wondered if he could have been this all along, any time he wanted, or if his life had to bring him here to turn him into this.
He wondered how long other people lasted - other Runners. Not as long as him, he bet.
When he passed other humans in his travels, they drew away from him instinctively. Hard-eyed, armed, tall and strong and shining darkly with his pride - no one had to be told he was someone to avoid if you didn’t want trouble. Nobody out here, in these remote and sparsely settled worlds, wanted any trouble.
He hadn’t yet forgotten how to be around people, in the third year, but he had a hard time remembering why he used to want to.
*
The third year he was on Atlantis, a dozen high-ranking officers and politicians from Earth came through the gate to look the place over. Ronon didn’t know what the stakes were, but everyone who usually knew what was going on looked terrified, so he stayed on his best behavior, standing up straight and looking gravely interested in their conversations with Sheppard and Weir. He even saluted when he was introduced.
None of them spoke to him directly, except a grey-haired man who looked as slouchy and bored as Ronon was trying hard not to look, who gave him a long once-over and said, “Cool coat.”
The relief in the air was so strong Ronon could feel it against his skin when they finally left, and he knew Atlantis had dodged some grim fate, although he still didn’t know quite what and was frankly glad he hadn’t known enough to get nervous. The only thing that was different afterwards was that they took away part of Sheppard’s rank, which Ronon was upset about at first, until he realized that, counter-intuitively, that meant a promotion.
“Colonel Sheppard,” Sheppard kept saying gleefully. “Colonel Sheppard,” which Ronon didn’t understand, because that was already what everyone called him, but he wasn’t going to say anything.
McKay was. “I don’t know what it is that thrills you so much about saying that,” he said. “That’s exactly what we’ve all been calling you for three years.”
“Yes,” Sheppard said almost primly, “but the Lieutenant was implied.”
There wasn’t a real party, just the four of them and Weir, who celebrated having Atlantis to themselves again by retiring quietly to Sheppard’s quarters to get drunk. Before long, Teyla fell asleep like she always did on hard liquor, and Rodney started to list gently up against Sheppard’s back, muttering dreamy complaints about who knew what, and Weir stood up unsteadily with a quirk to her mouth and said, “In the interest of professionalism, it would be good to call it a night at this point.”
“We don’t need no stinking professionalism,” Sheppard said, his s’s only a little bit slurred. “I am the greatest military hero the Pegasus galaxy has ever known. I’m Alexander the Great. I’m Napoleon.”
“Napoleon Dynamite, maybe,” Rodney said, managing to sound pretty scornful for somebody who was busily fitting his fingers against the shape of Sheppard’s ribs.
“Hail, Caesar,” Weir said, “and goodnight.”
She seemed lucid enough but she wobbled when she walked, so Ronon took her arm and helped her to her quarters.
When he got back, McKay was in the bathroom and Sheppard was sprawled out sideways across his bed, his eyes drunkenly bright and his smile radiant and real like Sheppard’s smiles almost never were. “I always told myself it doesn’t matter, you know?” he said, to either Ronon or the ceiling. “What kind of life you lead, how significant it is, who you are as a person - I mean, none of that should depend on...medals or titles or, or.... It’s all so political anyway, it doesn’t even mean necessarily that you’re good at this, let alone that you’re - how you judge yourself, it shouldn’t.... It does, though. I don’t know, maybe it’s bred into you somehow. Doesn’t matter what you tell yourself. It still matters. What they think of the job I’m.... What they think of me.”
“You have a right to be proud,” Ronon said. “I’m...proud to work for you.”
He thought he might mean something other than that - or, not other than that, but that and more. In spite of the fact that all the important Earth generals had pretended like he wasn’t even there (except the slouchy grey-haired one who liked his coat), Ronon was a soldier serving directly under the city’s commander. He was good at that - not just at fighting and killing, but at working for someone, working with people, doing a job for some reason bigger than himself. He hadn’t been good at it when he first arrived, but by the third year he was, and he was all the more proud of what he’d become because of where he came from.
He didn’t need anyone to think he was special, or notice him at all. He was one of Colonel Sheppard’s men and a soldier of Atlantis.
*
The fourth year he was a Runner, everything started to fall apart. He’d been doing it for too long; he’d reached the limits of his internal capacity for the work, if not his external limits. Anger couldn’t keep him on his feet anymore, or fear, or even vanity.
There were days when he couldn’t run at all, couldn’t even get up. He just sat huddled in the shelter of a thicket or a cliff wall, his knees pulled up to his chest, feeling nothing except exhaustion. He’d stopped thinking in words. He only knew the shape and weight of too much.
Why was he even running, anyway? They knew where he was. They could come for him as easily in one place as in ten.
He caught a cold that spring. The Wraith broke his arm in two places. He stopped being able to think about home; he wasn’t even sure the places and people he remembered were real, if he’d ever been to those places or been known by anyone at all.
He stopped having nightmares about the culling and the bombing. What had made him think that was such a disaster, anyway? So he’d watched a lot of people die; everyone died.
Truthfully, he was jealous of the dead.
One day he found a clean, cold lake, and he stripped down and swam out to clean himself off. As he kicked his feet steadily to keep himself afloat, he realized he couldn’t say why he was doing it, why he’d want to float instead of sink or live instead of die. Why he didn’t do the one thing he really could do to take control of his situation and just stop moving.
He tried it. He sank three times, but every time his body took over without his consent, lungs burning, limbs twitching, finally clawing for the surface in a panic. You’d think letting yourself go under would be an easy way to die, but he couldn’t seem to manage it. He finally gave up completely and swam for shore. When he pulled himself onto the grassy bank, leaden with despair and the absence of hope, all he could do was cry, while bugs marched peacefully over his fingers and a hundred thousand worlds turned peacefully on without caring what happened to him next. There was nothing left to miss and no one to miss him, and he coveted the quiet of death, the release from all demands and all responsibility, so much that he hated the ones who already had it, the lucky ones.
The Wraith didn’t come that day or the day after, but they did come again, and he still couldn’t go under. He fought as if it were a curse laid on him, some terrible compulsion, and he won over and over when he wanted to lose. Whatever survival instincts he had were locked in the muscle and bone of his body, and apparently that was where it counted, because he came to the surface every time.
*
The fourth year he was on Atlantis, they retired his team. First-contact was over with every inhabited world that they’d been able to locate, and there were new people arriving all the time in the city, eager to take up the job of maintaining those contacts.
Ronon turned thirty that year, and he was the youngest of them by a fair amount. Teyla married an exiled Ixilaran prince and got pregnant. McKay’s work had been partially declassified, and he was busily translating five years of experimental data into papers and principles. Sheppard was teaching younger men and women how to do things in a Puddlejumper that it probably wasn’t built to do, and Ronon was teaching them how not to get hit.
He thought he missed the excitement but not the travel, or maybe the travel but not the excitement. He couldn’t puzzle the whole thing out, but he definitely missed some parts of it and not others.
By no one’s suggestion and everyone’s agreement, the four of them still came together often for no reason except the comfort and security of familiar company. More territory had been opened in Atlantis, including larger living quarters in what came to be known popularly as “the suburbs.” Teyla and her husband lived at that end of the city now, and McKay, too. Sheppard and Ronon kept their smaller quarters closer to the heart of the city’s life. They most often met at McKay’s, a suite apartment with a living room and an office and a small kitchen that felt almost like a whole house to itself.
They spent their time talking, or not talking. They teased Teyla about her strange cravings for things like sweet-and-sour kiniluks drenched in cherry syrup. Ronon taught them how to fry nyan rolls. They often watched movies when it was up to McKay to choose, or recordings of football games brought over on the Daedalus (or, more and more often, the Prometheus as the Air Force worked the kinks out of its own hyperdrive technology) if it was up to Sheppard. Ronon liked both, for the most part.
Sheppard would often stay the night after the rest of them had gone home, but no one ever talked about that. No one said anything at all about that. Very rarely they would kiss, and Teyla smiled on indulgently, but Ronon had to turn away, feeling leaden and helpless and weary. He didn’t think anyone noticed, and he was grateful for that.
It didn’t matter if he was watching or not, though; he was always stuck later with the image in his mind. Sheppard’s hand, with that weird, soft bracer around his wrist, petting idly up and down McKay’s hip. McKay’s hand cradling the back of his head, his fingers sunk into thick hair. Sheppard’s hair was starred with silver now, a fact that McKay never lost his delight in mocking.
Rodney McKay was a good man, a good friend, someone Ronon would (and had) risk everything to protect. Ronon knew it was wrong to be jealous of him, but he’d always had...so much of Sheppard. They spoke the same language, understood each other’s jokes, tolerated each other’s foibles, held secret conversations with their eyes, even fought each other as equals, knowing instinctively how far to push and what kind of jab was too sharp to risk
There had never been very much left over for anyone else.
“Do you never consider it yourself?” Teyla asked him quietly as he walked her home one night. “Marrying, or taking a lover?”
Ronon looked down and shrugged, afraid to meet her eyes. Teyla was always the first to see signs of pain, and he wasn’t ready to be diagnosed yet, or ever. “I’m pretty hard to get along with,” he said. The occasional sex he’d had had always been off-world, happy and grateful local girls who were as excited as he was by the prospect of a brief, intense tryst that would have no impact on their real lives. Since he stopped going off-world, he was sort of at loose ends.
“If Rodney manages, I think there is hope for you yet,” she said lightly, and he knew he was supposed to laugh at that, but he couldn’t. He almost couldn’t breathe.
There was knowing that Sheppard and McKay were lovers - had been so for at least two years, at Ronon’s best guess, although he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that it had been longer - and something else to know it. Something else to see it.
He’d been happier before, when he could honestly tell himself he wasn’t sure exactly what it was that he envied McKay for having.
(cont. in 2/2)
Title: Fourteen Years (1/2)
Author: Hth
Characters: Ronon. Ronon. Some other people. Ronon.
Ratings: MESBS&H for moderately explicit sex, both slash and het. A- for angst-ish.
Words: 12,304. I know, right?!?
Summary:
Fourteen Years
by Hth
The first year he was a Runner, he was angry all the time. He had been a good person, a good soldier, a good friend, not rich and not important in the grand scheme of things, but a man who appreciated his life, who paid all his debts and remembered the less fortunate, who knew how to lead, how to follow, and how to have fun, all when the time was right.
It was just so fucking unfair.
They turned him loose with nothing, not even his own clothing - just one of those dark coats they wore, too tight through the chest and hard to run in. They had ships and guns and they regenerated and could bring a man down with a brush of their fingers, and they put him on the ground with a coat that didn’t fit and a device in his back that transmitted his location, and it was so clear that he was going to die that he wasn’t even afraid. He was just pissed off.
He just wanted to hurt them worse than they expected him to, and that made him dangerous.
He was twenty years old and a good soldier. By the end of the first year, he’d killed six Wraith and left three too injured to pursue him, and he didn’t know who he was anymore. He would lie in the dark, sheltered by whatever thicket or abandoned building he could find, and he would close his eyes and try to feel the pulse of the tracking device, calling out steadily and silently to his enemies. Come on, he would murmur along with it, sometimes out loud just to hear the sound of a human voice, sometimes only in his own head. Come on. Come get me, motherfuckers. I’m right here.
They always came. He didn’t care; he wanted them to. Every time he took one on - and two, then, and three and four as they learned to be wary of him - every time, he felt the red thrill of it, of how they’d put everything they had into making him weak, and he was giving them something to be afraid of.
None of it slaked him, though. Not for the first year. All he felt was angry, even in the middle of the fight, even standing over their corpses. No matter how many of them he killed, nothing gave him any rest from the knowledge that he’d had everything that, at twenty years old, he thought he could ever want, and he’d lost it all for no reason that he could see.
The first and last thing the Wraith took from him was his faith in a world that had rules. That was the thing that really kept him angry.
*
The first year he was on Atlantis, he couldn’t relax. He was impulsive and sloppy; he made mistakes. He lost his temper a lot.
He didn’t know what he was so angry about all the time. He had a pretty good situation on Atlantis; he wasn’t unhappy with the arrangement. He was supposed to be grateful to them, and for the most part he was. He was supposed to pay them back in what he’d learned about hunting and being hunted, and for the most part he did.
He just couldn’t settle in. He found himself losing control of his temper at all the wrong moments - not just on missions when his orders were to blend in and keep himself to himself, but also over stupid, small things. People jostling him in the mess hall. His clothes coming back from the laundry smelling like nothing he recognized, after he’d said he didn’t want anybody but him handling his things.
He started having nightmares, which he hadn’t had for a long, long time. It was the video feed, he was pretty sure. Those pictures of his city in ruins, but more importantly all the things he couldn’t see in it. The orphanage where he grew up. The field where he won his age group’s bagara tournament when he was twelve. The stand where you could buy fresh deep-fried nyan rolls in front of the Reservoir Authority building. He woke up night after night from dreams of walking through empty streets, the buildings intact but all the people missing, and around every corner, the startling absence of exactly what he most wanted to see there.
It had been a long time since Ronon had let himself hope for anything. Then it happened so fast - so much that it almost overwhelmed him, and then it was gone. After all the years of knowing that he would never go home again, it wasn’t until he came to Atlantis that he really knew.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault - no one on Atlantis, anyway. But he was still angry, and he didn’t know how to stop feeling that way, or where to direct it now that his enemies weren’t dogging his every step.
When the Wraith began coming into Atlantis - first that mutated lab animal, then the hive queen and her drones - it was almost a relief. He knew what to do about Wraith. Their mere existence justified his rage.
The rest of the time, when he had peace and comfort and honest work, even friendship, and he still couldn’t shake his anger, he just wondered what was wrong with him.
*
The second year he was a Runner passed in a kind of blur. Two years felt, at that time, impossibly long, like no matter how far he stretched, he couldn’t touch the past or the future. Like there had never been anything but this.
Fear began to creep in, against his will. He needed his courage against the Wraith; it was the only real weapon he had. So he preserved his hate for the fights, but in between, he let his fear run its course.
He became obsessed with the idea that he would die not by violence, but by starvation. He’d gone through a survival course in basic training, but that was utterly different from surviving. He was afraid to eat anything that he didn’t recognize, and he rarely stayed on one planet long enough to recognize much of anything. Then when he did find a safe source of food - a stream running so rich with fish coming to spawn that he could scoop up fistfuls of them, a patch of weeds with bulbous sweet roots, an unguarded nest of eggs - he devoured it, terrified to let one plant, one berry, one fucking insect escape through his fingers, because what if there wasn’t more? Every meal, in his own mind, was nearly his last.
The Wraith became only a hazy distraction from the real work of running. He moved from Ring to Ring, planet to planet, thinking about nothing but the undefined importance of covering ground and the driving need to find something to eat. He thought about food constantly. He searched the bodies of dead Wraith for miliary rations, forgetting that they didn’t eat food, and then he threw up and dissolved into blind panic over wasted calories.
He was hungry all the time. He couldn’t remember what it felt like to eat for pleasure, to be satisfied, to take comfort in food. Eating was no pleasure to him, but a desperate, crushing necessity, outweighing anything and everything else in his mind.
Without that obsession, he might have had to consider his future: how long did he expect to be doing this, and how could he get away, and was it even possible, and how could he keep going if it was not?
In the second year, he wasn’t ready to ask himself those questions. Instead, he stayed on the move and dedicated himself to the intensely present, ground-level task of finding his next meal.
*
The second year he was on Atlantis, he began to tell them things about himself. He began to remember things he hadn’t remembered in years.
One thing he couldn’t remember was when his birthday was, but that was nothing new. “We were refugees,” he told them when they asked. “There was an earthquake in Garripre Province when I was a baby. I don’t know, I got out somehow, but I guess my parents must have died or something. I grew up in a state orphanage; a lot of us from Garripre did.”
His teammates looked around at each other, faces drawn in the firelight, unhappy and silent. “It’s okay,” he said. “Actually, it was nice. It was a nice place. But most of us there were either refugees or we’d been abandoned, and nobody knew our birthdays, so we had two big parties a year, one in winter for the boys, summer for the girls. We’d get the day off from chores and school and play games all day, and then there was a big dinner. We didn’t have to clean our plates before dessert, so of course we didn’t eat anything but dessert.” He felt something unfamiliar about his face, and it took him a strangely long time to realize it was because he was smiling as he watched the crackling flames.
He remembered that not doing chores was the only hard part of those days. He felt uneasy, watching other people do his work for him - thin-armed, sad-eyed new girls dragging mop water up the stairs, his Nurses with their broad laps and sweet smiles and the purple Department of Charitable Works seal embroidered in satiny thread on their plain-spun sleeves, pulling weeds out of the kitchen garden in the back. He always tried to help when no one was looking.
They offered him money to enter engineering school when he was sixteen, but he’d already taken so much. He joined the Infantry instead, and every single one of his Nurses cried while they hugged him goodbye. He wasn’t afraid of hard work, and Sateda was his family, so that had to come first.
In the winter, Atlantis had a string of significant victories against the Wraith, which made everyone walk around all the time with jaunty steps and sparkling eyes like they had a secret. That explained why he didn’t notice some of them did have a secret until he went to dinner and met a burst of confetti and applause and bad music, and a table laid out with meat and desserts under a banner with his name on it. “Happy birthday,” Sheppard said, slugging him in the arm.
“Why?” he asked, dazed.
Sheppard shrugged. “Why not? Everybody’s itching for a party anyway.”
He’d never minded sharing his birthdays before - actually, it was good, because no matter how many people had come and gone since the year before, the boys who shared his birthday with him every year had that connection to him; it made them all brothers, in a way - but he found himself both embarrassed and pleased to have one all to himself.
Some people danced to music piped in over the PA; some played video games on the big display that usually only came out of storage on movie nights. Most people still kept their distance from Ronon; he didn’t blame them for that. But they smiled at him, or waved, and he’d never felt so visible in Atlantis before, so on display. He felt hot and prickly and awkward and happy.
He didn’t dance and he didn’t shoot things, but he did eat - nothing but dessert. He had baklava and bread pudding and pecan pie and chocolate cake and flan, some of everything they put out, and then threw up in one of the kitchen sinks.
“That’s it for you, young man,” Sheppard said, wiping his face for him with a wet cloth. “From now on, it’s back to early bedtimes and cleaning your plate before flan.”
“Fuck you,” Ronon said with a wan little smile, and Sheppard smirked back at him and didn’t go away while Ronon cleaned the sink. He just leaned on the counter, not watching Ronon work but waiting for him to be done, for them to go back to the party together.
*
The third year he was a Runner, he got cocky. He’d survived this long; he hadn’t been sure he’d make it three days when he started, but here he was. He felt a little less angry; he gave up the sense that his life should have been something other than this, which helped.
This was his life. In the third year, he stopped thinking of himself as a soldier or a prisoner and started thinking of himself as a Runner. The Wraith became an opponent to defeat, just like they were playing bagara with him. Ronon held two years’ worth of city-wide bagara championships, and he was fucking good at this game, too.
He started doing dangerous things, just to see if he could. He’d acquired a sword, and he taught himself to spin eye-catching shapes with it, drawing his enemies closer to it, pulling their attention to the flashing blade and delaying his strike until the last possible second. He was stronger and faster than he ever had been, and he could use surprise to his advantage, feinting in one direction and then carrying his body all the way around, spinning it like his sword, to come in from the other side.
Almost more than killing them, he loved seeing their startled looks when he showed them what he could really do.
He was vaguely amazed by his own body, by the things he’d never known he could do with it. He’d always been tall and graceful, but he watched himself put layers of lean muscle between his skin and bones, watched himself climb and roll and jump and swim and fight as easily as he could walk, and sometimes when he caught his reflection in a still pond or ran his hand under his shirt in the dark and felt the ridges of muscle there, he wondered if he could have been this all along, any time he wanted, or if his life had to bring him here to turn him into this.
He wondered how long other people lasted - other Runners. Not as long as him, he bet.
When he passed other humans in his travels, they drew away from him instinctively. Hard-eyed, armed, tall and strong and shining darkly with his pride - no one had to be told he was someone to avoid if you didn’t want trouble. Nobody out here, in these remote and sparsely settled worlds, wanted any trouble.
He hadn’t yet forgotten how to be around people, in the third year, but he had a hard time remembering why he used to want to.
*
The third year he was on Atlantis, a dozen high-ranking officers and politicians from Earth came through the gate to look the place over. Ronon didn’t know what the stakes were, but everyone who usually knew what was going on looked terrified, so he stayed on his best behavior, standing up straight and looking gravely interested in their conversations with Sheppard and Weir. He even saluted when he was introduced.
None of them spoke to him directly, except a grey-haired man who looked as slouchy and bored as Ronon was trying hard not to look, who gave him a long once-over and said, “Cool coat.”
The relief in the air was so strong Ronon could feel it against his skin when they finally left, and he knew Atlantis had dodged some grim fate, although he still didn’t know quite what and was frankly glad he hadn’t known enough to get nervous. The only thing that was different afterwards was that they took away part of Sheppard’s rank, which Ronon was upset about at first, until he realized that, counter-intuitively, that meant a promotion.
“Colonel Sheppard,” Sheppard kept saying gleefully. “Colonel Sheppard,” which Ronon didn’t understand, because that was already what everyone called him, but he wasn’t going to say anything.
McKay was. “I don’t know what it is that thrills you so much about saying that,” he said. “That’s exactly what we’ve all been calling you for three years.”
“Yes,” Sheppard said almost primly, “but the Lieutenant was implied.”
There wasn’t a real party, just the four of them and Weir, who celebrated having Atlantis to themselves again by retiring quietly to Sheppard’s quarters to get drunk. Before long, Teyla fell asleep like she always did on hard liquor, and Rodney started to list gently up against Sheppard’s back, muttering dreamy complaints about who knew what, and Weir stood up unsteadily with a quirk to her mouth and said, “In the interest of professionalism, it would be good to call it a night at this point.”
“We don’t need no stinking professionalism,” Sheppard said, his s’s only a little bit slurred. “I am the greatest military hero the Pegasus galaxy has ever known. I’m Alexander the Great. I’m Napoleon.”
“Napoleon Dynamite, maybe,” Rodney said, managing to sound pretty scornful for somebody who was busily fitting his fingers against the shape of Sheppard’s ribs.
“Hail, Caesar,” Weir said, “and goodnight.”
She seemed lucid enough but she wobbled when she walked, so Ronon took her arm and helped her to her quarters.
When he got back, McKay was in the bathroom and Sheppard was sprawled out sideways across his bed, his eyes drunkenly bright and his smile radiant and real like Sheppard’s smiles almost never were. “I always told myself it doesn’t matter, you know?” he said, to either Ronon or the ceiling. “What kind of life you lead, how significant it is, who you are as a person - I mean, none of that should depend on...medals or titles or, or.... It’s all so political anyway, it doesn’t even mean necessarily that you’re good at this, let alone that you’re - how you judge yourself, it shouldn’t.... It does, though. I don’t know, maybe it’s bred into you somehow. Doesn’t matter what you tell yourself. It still matters. What they think of the job I’m.... What they think of me.”
“You have a right to be proud,” Ronon said. “I’m...proud to work for you.”
He thought he might mean something other than that - or, not other than that, but that and more. In spite of the fact that all the important Earth generals had pretended like he wasn’t even there (except the slouchy grey-haired one who liked his coat), Ronon was a soldier serving directly under the city’s commander. He was good at that - not just at fighting and killing, but at working for someone, working with people, doing a job for some reason bigger than himself. He hadn’t been good at it when he first arrived, but by the third year he was, and he was all the more proud of what he’d become because of where he came from.
He didn’t need anyone to think he was special, or notice him at all. He was one of Colonel Sheppard’s men and a soldier of Atlantis.
*
The fourth year he was a Runner, everything started to fall apart. He’d been doing it for too long; he’d reached the limits of his internal capacity for the work, if not his external limits. Anger couldn’t keep him on his feet anymore, or fear, or even vanity.
There were days when he couldn’t run at all, couldn’t even get up. He just sat huddled in the shelter of a thicket or a cliff wall, his knees pulled up to his chest, feeling nothing except exhaustion. He’d stopped thinking in words. He only knew the shape and weight of too much.
Why was he even running, anyway? They knew where he was. They could come for him as easily in one place as in ten.
He caught a cold that spring. The Wraith broke his arm in two places. He stopped being able to think about home; he wasn’t even sure the places and people he remembered were real, if he’d ever been to those places or been known by anyone at all.
He stopped having nightmares about the culling and the bombing. What had made him think that was such a disaster, anyway? So he’d watched a lot of people die; everyone died.
Truthfully, he was jealous of the dead.
One day he found a clean, cold lake, and he stripped down and swam out to clean himself off. As he kicked his feet steadily to keep himself afloat, he realized he couldn’t say why he was doing it, why he’d want to float instead of sink or live instead of die. Why he didn’t do the one thing he really could do to take control of his situation and just stop moving.
He tried it. He sank three times, but every time his body took over without his consent, lungs burning, limbs twitching, finally clawing for the surface in a panic. You’d think letting yourself go under would be an easy way to die, but he couldn’t seem to manage it. He finally gave up completely and swam for shore. When he pulled himself onto the grassy bank, leaden with despair and the absence of hope, all he could do was cry, while bugs marched peacefully over his fingers and a hundred thousand worlds turned peacefully on without caring what happened to him next. There was nothing left to miss and no one to miss him, and he coveted the quiet of death, the release from all demands and all responsibility, so much that he hated the ones who already had it, the lucky ones.
The Wraith didn’t come that day or the day after, but they did come again, and he still couldn’t go under. He fought as if it were a curse laid on him, some terrible compulsion, and he won over and over when he wanted to lose. Whatever survival instincts he had were locked in the muscle and bone of his body, and apparently that was where it counted, because he came to the surface every time.
*
The fourth year he was on Atlantis, they retired his team. First-contact was over with every inhabited world that they’d been able to locate, and there were new people arriving all the time in the city, eager to take up the job of maintaining those contacts.
Ronon turned thirty that year, and he was the youngest of them by a fair amount. Teyla married an exiled Ixilaran prince and got pregnant. McKay’s work had been partially declassified, and he was busily translating five years of experimental data into papers and principles. Sheppard was teaching younger men and women how to do things in a Puddlejumper that it probably wasn’t built to do, and Ronon was teaching them how not to get hit.
He thought he missed the excitement but not the travel, or maybe the travel but not the excitement. He couldn’t puzzle the whole thing out, but he definitely missed some parts of it and not others.
By no one’s suggestion and everyone’s agreement, the four of them still came together often for no reason except the comfort and security of familiar company. More territory had been opened in Atlantis, including larger living quarters in what came to be known popularly as “the suburbs.” Teyla and her husband lived at that end of the city now, and McKay, too. Sheppard and Ronon kept their smaller quarters closer to the heart of the city’s life. They most often met at McKay’s, a suite apartment with a living room and an office and a small kitchen that felt almost like a whole house to itself.
They spent their time talking, or not talking. They teased Teyla about her strange cravings for things like sweet-and-sour kiniluks drenched in cherry syrup. Ronon taught them how to fry nyan rolls. They often watched movies when it was up to McKay to choose, or recordings of football games brought over on the Daedalus (or, more and more often, the Prometheus as the Air Force worked the kinks out of its own hyperdrive technology) if it was up to Sheppard. Ronon liked both, for the most part.
Sheppard would often stay the night after the rest of them had gone home, but no one ever talked about that. No one said anything at all about that. Very rarely they would kiss, and Teyla smiled on indulgently, but Ronon had to turn away, feeling leaden and helpless and weary. He didn’t think anyone noticed, and he was grateful for that.
It didn’t matter if he was watching or not, though; he was always stuck later with the image in his mind. Sheppard’s hand, with that weird, soft bracer around his wrist, petting idly up and down McKay’s hip. McKay’s hand cradling the back of his head, his fingers sunk into thick hair. Sheppard’s hair was starred with silver now, a fact that McKay never lost his delight in mocking.
Rodney McKay was a good man, a good friend, someone Ronon would (and had) risk everything to protect. Ronon knew it was wrong to be jealous of him, but he’d always had...so much of Sheppard. They spoke the same language, understood each other’s jokes, tolerated each other’s foibles, held secret conversations with their eyes, even fought each other as equals, knowing instinctively how far to push and what kind of jab was too sharp to risk
There had never been very much left over for anyone else.
“Do you never consider it yourself?” Teyla asked him quietly as he walked her home one night. “Marrying, or taking a lover?”
Ronon looked down and shrugged, afraid to meet her eyes. Teyla was always the first to see signs of pain, and he wasn’t ready to be diagnosed yet, or ever. “I’m pretty hard to get along with,” he said. The occasional sex he’d had had always been off-world, happy and grateful local girls who were as excited as he was by the prospect of a brief, intense tryst that would have no impact on their real lives. Since he stopped going off-world, he was sort of at loose ends.
“If Rodney manages, I think there is hope for you yet,” she said lightly, and he knew he was supposed to laugh at that, but he couldn’t. He almost couldn’t breathe.
There was knowing that Sheppard and McKay were lovers - had been so for at least two years, at Ronon’s best guess, although he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that it had been longer - and something else to know it. Something else to see it.
He’d been happier before, when he could honestly tell himself he wasn’t sure exactly what it was that he envied McKay for having.
(cont. in 2/2)