Days of the Dead: The First Day (Animaliorum), by Sophonisba [animal, vegetable, or mineral]
-title- Days of the Dead: The First Day (Animaliorum)
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-ratings/warnings- Mostly gen; mention of past Ronon/Melena.
-timeframe- Shortly before "Aurora."
-spoilers- For "Sateda," obviously.
-characters- Ronon, Sheppard, Melena, OCs, a few cameos
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Feel free to borrow any of the OCs you like. One of Ronon's lines was inspired by Terry Pratchett.
-word count- 2558
-summary- Ronon had found out where the ritual room was in Atlantis well before the summer had begun.
Days of the Dead: The First Day (Animaliorum)
Ronon had found out where the ritual room was in Atlantis well before the summer had begun. (They called it by names from their own language, or maybe languages: chapel was the most common one, and he still wasn't that sure what it meant in any but the most general sense.) It was a round room from which many little closets extended, Athosian curtains hanging at the entrance to each one.
"Some of us prefer religious images, and some find them offensive," Ensign Sa'id, the ship-priest the Tellurians had brought with them from the Mother-earth, explained when asked, "and so by opening and drawing curtains we may make ourselves comfortable."
Ronon talked to the ensign sometimes, who was old for a junior officer -- maybe the oldest man in Atlantis, when the star-ferry Daedalus was away -- and knew how to listen to speech and to silence. Ensign Sa'id had been a priest/teacher/whatever-else-imam-meant before The God inspired him to go and be a priest to the navy of Sheppard's alliance, the high command of which, with awesome logic, had sent him to be ship-priest to an outpost without ships or sailors. (There had been a darkly humorous joke, in Sateda's last days, that the higher the command the less it understood those who took its orders and their needs; the Tellurians in Atlantis were the first people Ronon had met who believed it, held it as self-evident as the fact that the Wraith would knock down any towers that stood up, and then asked "Okay, so how can we get things done?")
In one of those talks, the ensign had assured Ronon that he was welcome to use the chapel whenever he pleased, and he had nodded, not bothering to mention that he had already explored the room. Some of the alcoves held brightly dressed dolls, and some were painted with strange abstruse designs that might almost be a peculiar form of writing, and some held cabinets: one of that last also contained pictures made with the devices of the Atlanteans, pictures that Ronon had eventually discovered to be of their slain comrades.
He wished, dully, that now that the high summer and the Days of the Dead were almost upon them that he had been able to bring images out of the ruins of Sateda, despite the fact that he had long since accepted that anything more than he could carry was, if not worthless, certainly neither essential nor overly desirable.
But he was no longer a boy, and he did not need images to remember or honor the people that were his, and if the dead Atlanteans had been anything like the living ones he had met, they would not have wished to give over the hard-won space they were willing to temporarily lend.
On the eve of the first Day of the Dead, Ronon went to the mess hall to see what they might have suitable for the next day. It turned out they had dried meat (that would "keep forever," according to Annemarie Szujewska, who apparently made it her duty to find food for people), honey, and some of the little cheeses they had brought back from Amara.
In the mess hall proper, some of the Marines were trying to explain Columbian taboos to Eldon. They had worked their way through something called "no fraternization" (which made no sense: for one thing, it had nothing to do with brotherly anything, and for another, being chosen to sleep with your commanding officer was generally a good thing -- as long as nobody was stupid about it and the officer was accepting in the remote chance that she just didn't do anything for you or you had a wife that disapproved -- and if it did cause problems, they could be dealt with then) and were now working on something called "don't ask, tell, pursue, or something-Ronon-hadn't-caught."
It was apparently a taboo confined to the military of one particular entity, given the way half the non-Marines in the room were explaining that it was seriously the stupidest thing since touch-writing-for-blind-people on consoles one drove up to (an opinion the Marines were letting it be understood they shared, in their best ours-not-to-call-the-wisdom-of-the-high-command-in-question way).
Ronon was just wondering whether that perhaps explained Caldwell's bad mood -- the man was certainly old enough to start liking guys, and to have to live with "look but don't touch" after working his ass off up to undergeneral, even if the Tellurians had been commissioning male officers for at least a generation more than Sateda had, would put anybody off their food -- when Sheppard drawled from a corner of the room, "Really, they should just apply it to everyone."
"Excuse me, sir?"
"If keeping your private affairs, well, private is supposed to be a test of levelheadedness or non-blackmailability or whether your career matters enough to you, they should just test across the board and be done with it, and if it isn't, fair's still fair."
Major Lorne half-turned around in his seat and blinked at Sheppard. "So you'd be willing to give up all chances of getting laid in safety, sir?"
"In order to fly? Uh, yeah." Sheppard was giving his executive officer the same puzzled "I don't get your deeply weird alien customs" look that Teyla tended to kick him for offworld, and a piece of the mental puzzle that Ronon had been constructing ever since he came to the City of the Ancestors turned around and fit neatly into place, joining two assembled segments and making sense of the man he'd yoked his fortune to.
Of course Sheppard would have joined one of the warrior-monastic orders of unattached men, had they had such on the Mother-earth. (For a moment Ronon wondered whether they did, and then realized that they could not, not now, or Sheppard would be one of them instead of a commander of the Columbian "Air Force," which confusingly enough had nothing or very little to do with airships.) Of course he would have found some cause he held higher than himself and given himself over to it utterly. Of course he would have risen among their ranks. And no wonder he sometimes seemed a little womanish; in communities without women, men sometimes did, contrary to natural expectation.
"Oh, hey, Ronon." Sheppard met his eyes, seizing on the chance to change topics. "It's team movie night, don't forget."
"I'll be there," Ronon assured him, and, after stowing his edible goods in his room, was the second teammember there. The movie was largely about the aerostats Sheppard and McKay called "jet-planes," and Ronon entertained the idea of asking McKay if he could build an aerostat that didn't require the Ancestors' gene to fly before thinking better of bringing something like that up this dozenight of all dozenights.
(He still hoped to eventually, though; while he had never much been interested in Sateda's airships, anything Sheppard valued so highly must have something to it.)
Ronon dreamed that night of Sheppard, the front part of his head shaved like a monk and the back part grown and matted into locks that had been plaited with feather-shaped knives into a warrior-monk's battle braid. The monastic version of his team leader was moving a heavy cavalry sword through exercises in tierce, in the shadows of several Tellurian aerostats.
"That's Dedicate Sheppard, my captain," Ronon told Colwyn and Dyne, who were, puzzlingly, both eight again, despite the three long Satedan years that lay between them. "He was seconded to the Specialists from the Aviator Brotherhood."
"Are they all Specialists in the City of the Ancestors?" Dyne asked.
"Lots of them are civilians," Ronon pointed out, taking in the mess hall full of civilians with a wave of his hand. Dr. Weir nodded at him. "And some of the ones from other polities are just soldiers -- " he wasn't up to explaining the way that the Mother-earth apparently contained a score of, a hundred worlds on its surface, the fractures of anarchy not healing but rather enshrining themselves in tradition -- "but the core of the military they sent are like Specialists, only they call themselves 'Marines.'"
On his other side, a pale man in a dark blue uniform, shifting dizzily between Ronon's father's age and withered decrepitude, nodded firmly, little colored tabs glinting on his chest.
"But you're better than they are, right?" Colwyn demanded eagerly.
Ronon snorted. "I have more experience with not dying, 'sall." More experience probably than anyone in the City, and that and the Dex size and build gave him a significant advantage in any simple spar -- too many of the Marines and others were very young, had never known what it was to depend on their skills for their lives again and again for all their practicing.
"More than almost anyone in the City," the man in the blue uniform corrected him before stepping forward and telling an oblivious Sheppard, "I was wrong about you." He added something in another language, Ronon thought a Tellurian one; Sheppard parried an invisible opponent, not seeing the other man's odd Columbian salute, and then Colwyn and Dyne pulled Ronon into a game of herb basket on the sloping field below the market town he'd been born in.
Kalani Zar threw the ball up and called to the eager players, not the name of an herb nor yet a vegetable, but "Corn dog!"
On the first Day of the Dead, Ronon went to the chapel and pulled back the curtain of the alcove with the pictures of the Atlantean dead. He set the low bench thing he'd borrowed from an empty room before them, to serve as an altartop, and laid a plate of preservative-laden beef jerky and little Amaran cheeses and a pot of honey on it, and set next to them the little jug of honey-mead he had brought back from Belka.
Then he knelt before it and called his dead to mind, his squadmates and neighbors, his uncles and aunts, his father and mother and stepmother, Colwyn and Orula and Dyne and Hialea and little Malili his siblings, and Melena, always Melena.
Melena had been his first woman, and it seemed incredible that she had not been his first everything, that there had been a part of his life Before Running that had also been before Melena, that he had had a first friend and a first crush and a first roommate that were not her.
They had been friends first: he had noticed in the back of his mind that Melena was hardly ugly, but he had been panting after someone and she had been seeing someone, and then seeing another someone, and then the man who had been so desperately, utterly, and completely wrong for her that he had felt forced to point as much out -- it had dissolved into a terrible shouting match, the day before his tour of duty began.
And then he'd come back, and everything had fallen into place perfectly, and he had been at once desperate for more, more, more and determined that he could wait for their wedding day, he could.
("Did everyone else know? That we were -- that you'd choose me, in the end?" he'd asked her once, in between kisses, in the scant privacy his family had granted them at their engagement party.
"Well, there are -- any number of people who, who don't care a thing about Ronon and Melena and their lives, at least if it doesn't affect them," Melena had panted, arching her back and twisting out of his hold to breathe. "But, ah, but yes, most of us knew; we were waiting for you to figure it out."
"I'm sorry," he'd said, deeply sincere, "that I tried your patience..."
"Oh, no." Melena'd laughed, warm and gentle. "Some things just take as long as they take to grow, and forcing them would cripple or kill them.")
And thoughts of Melena brought, as they always did, the memory of her end, his pleading with her to go, her refusal to save herself at another's expense, and --
No, never mind that.
But still it welled up, and here, on the first of the Days of the Dead, he clawed it back desperately, barely able to take the firemaker Teyla had lent him and light the pale yellow candle he had bargained out of Sergeant Stackhouse (low in its tall heavy-based glass, ensuring that it would not easily be knocked over and likely put itself out if so) before pouring it into the fire with a shout that nearly put it out again, seeing a burning hell rather than his own little candleflame for far too long.
Ronon was just getting up again, drained and supremely, vastly weary, when someone came into the room behind him. He turned quickly.
"Don't mind me," Sheppard said, shrugging and spreading his hands.
"It's all right," Ronon told him, checking to make sure that the plate and candle were still stable. "I was just finishing." He tapped one of the pictures, over to the side, and added "This guy was in my dream last night, only sometimes he was a lot older."
"What was he doing?" Sheppard came closer, peering at the picture and then stiffening a very little.
"Telling you he was wrong about you, and -- " Ronon tried to reproduce the sounds in the dream, although he was fairly sure he'd messed up somewhere -- "only you weren't listening."
Sheppard repeated the phrase, changing it a little to something that sounded more correct. "Like that?"
"Yeah." Ronon looked at the other man for a moment before adding "What's that mean?"
"'Thank the Nameless God for that,' sort of," Sheppard told him absently. "...that's Colonel Sumner."
"Who?"
"He was the first of us to be attacked by a Wraith, back when we didn't know what they were." Sheppard looked at the plate of food and added "So, uh, this is for... "
"It's the first Day of the Dead," Ronon told him, leading the way out. With Sheppard safely trailing behind him, he suddenly added for some reason "The candle's for my wife. I couldn't save her."
Sheppard grunted a little in understanding, and the two of them left the chapel together.
When Ronon came back late in the evening with a cup of milk, having been delayed by Stackhouse's extra practice (AR-3's mission had been moved up to tomorrow, and so Stackhouse had wanted to get his session in before that), his bench thing had been joined by a box, on top of which three more candles burned at the bottom of tall glasses: one the same color as Melena's, one a sort of mottled brown, and one wider one striped in a way that on Sateda and Belsa and Manaria would have meant "I stand for many."
Ronon quietly added prayers for the unknown dead as well, pouring milk onto their candles after he had used it to put out Melena's; there was just enough. He left the other three candleglasses at the alcove's entrance when he left with his.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-ratings/warnings- Mostly gen; mention of past Ronon/Melena.
-timeframe- Shortly before "Aurora."
-spoilers- For "Sateda," obviously.
-characters- Ronon, Sheppard, Melena, OCs, a few cameos
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Feel free to borrow any of the OCs you like. One of Ronon's lines was inspired by Terry Pratchett.
-word count- 2558
-summary- Ronon had found out where the ritual room was in Atlantis well before the summer had begun.
Days of the Dead: The First Day (Animaliorum)
Ronon had found out where the ritual room was in Atlantis well before the summer had begun. (They called it by names from their own language, or maybe languages: chapel was the most common one, and he still wasn't that sure what it meant in any but the most general sense.) It was a round room from which many little closets extended, Athosian curtains hanging at the entrance to each one.
"Some of us prefer religious images, and some find them offensive," Ensign Sa'id, the ship-priest the Tellurians had brought with them from the Mother-earth, explained when asked, "and so by opening and drawing curtains we may make ourselves comfortable."
Ronon talked to the ensign sometimes, who was old for a junior officer -- maybe the oldest man in Atlantis, when the star-ferry Daedalus was away -- and knew how to listen to speech and to silence. Ensign Sa'id had been a priest/teacher/whatever-else-imam-meant before The God inspired him to go and be a priest to the navy of Sheppard's alliance, the high command of which, with awesome logic, had sent him to be ship-priest to an outpost without ships or sailors. (There had been a darkly humorous joke, in Sateda's last days, that the higher the command the less it understood those who took its orders and their needs; the Tellurians in Atlantis were the first people Ronon had met who believed it, held it as self-evident as the fact that the Wraith would knock down any towers that stood up, and then asked "Okay, so how can we get things done?")
In one of those talks, the ensign had assured Ronon that he was welcome to use the chapel whenever he pleased, and he had nodded, not bothering to mention that he had already explored the room. Some of the alcoves held brightly dressed dolls, and some were painted with strange abstruse designs that might almost be a peculiar form of writing, and some held cabinets: one of that last also contained pictures made with the devices of the Atlanteans, pictures that Ronon had eventually discovered to be of their slain comrades.
He wished, dully, that now that the high summer and the Days of the Dead were almost upon them that he had been able to bring images out of the ruins of Sateda, despite the fact that he had long since accepted that anything more than he could carry was, if not worthless, certainly neither essential nor overly desirable.
But he was no longer a boy, and he did not need images to remember or honor the people that were his, and if the dead Atlanteans had been anything like the living ones he had met, they would not have wished to give over the hard-won space they were willing to temporarily lend.
On the eve of the first Day of the Dead, Ronon went to the mess hall to see what they might have suitable for the next day. It turned out they had dried meat (that would "keep forever," according to Annemarie Szujewska, who apparently made it her duty to find food for people), honey, and some of the little cheeses they had brought back from Amara.
In the mess hall proper, some of the Marines were trying to explain Columbian taboos to Eldon. They had worked their way through something called "no fraternization" (which made no sense: for one thing, it had nothing to do with brotherly anything, and for another, being chosen to sleep with your commanding officer was generally a good thing -- as long as nobody was stupid about it and the officer was accepting in the remote chance that she just didn't do anything for you or you had a wife that disapproved -- and if it did cause problems, they could be dealt with then) and were now working on something called "don't ask, tell, pursue, or something-Ronon-hadn't-caught."
It was apparently a taboo confined to the military of one particular entity, given the way half the non-Marines in the room were explaining that it was seriously the stupidest thing since touch-writing-for-blind-people on consoles one drove up to (an opinion the Marines were letting it be understood they shared, in their best ours-not-to-call-the-wisdom-of-the-high-command-in-question way).
Ronon was just wondering whether that perhaps explained Caldwell's bad mood -- the man was certainly old enough to start liking guys, and to have to live with "look but don't touch" after working his ass off up to undergeneral, even if the Tellurians had been commissioning male officers for at least a generation more than Sateda had, would put anybody off their food -- when Sheppard drawled from a corner of the room, "Really, they should just apply it to everyone."
"Excuse me, sir?"
"If keeping your private affairs, well, private is supposed to be a test of levelheadedness or non-blackmailability or whether your career matters enough to you, they should just test across the board and be done with it, and if it isn't, fair's still fair."
Major Lorne half-turned around in his seat and blinked at Sheppard. "So you'd be willing to give up all chances of getting laid in safety, sir?"
"In order to fly? Uh, yeah." Sheppard was giving his executive officer the same puzzled "I don't get your deeply weird alien customs" look that Teyla tended to kick him for offworld, and a piece of the mental puzzle that Ronon had been constructing ever since he came to the City of the Ancestors turned around and fit neatly into place, joining two assembled segments and making sense of the man he'd yoked his fortune to.
Of course Sheppard would have joined one of the warrior-monastic orders of unattached men, had they had such on the Mother-earth. (For a moment Ronon wondered whether they did, and then realized that they could not, not now, or Sheppard would be one of them instead of a commander of the Columbian "Air Force," which confusingly enough had nothing or very little to do with airships.) Of course he would have found some cause he held higher than himself and given himself over to it utterly. Of course he would have risen among their ranks. And no wonder he sometimes seemed a little womanish; in communities without women, men sometimes did, contrary to natural expectation.
"Oh, hey, Ronon." Sheppard met his eyes, seizing on the chance to change topics. "It's team movie night, don't forget."
"I'll be there," Ronon assured him, and, after stowing his edible goods in his room, was the second teammember there. The movie was largely about the aerostats Sheppard and McKay called "jet-planes," and Ronon entertained the idea of asking McKay if he could build an aerostat that didn't require the Ancestors' gene to fly before thinking better of bringing something like that up this dozenight of all dozenights.
(He still hoped to eventually, though; while he had never much been interested in Sateda's airships, anything Sheppard valued so highly must have something to it.)
Ronon dreamed that night of Sheppard, the front part of his head shaved like a monk and the back part grown and matted into locks that had been plaited with feather-shaped knives into a warrior-monk's battle braid. The monastic version of his team leader was moving a heavy cavalry sword through exercises in tierce, in the shadows of several Tellurian aerostats.
"That's Dedicate Sheppard, my captain," Ronon told Colwyn and Dyne, who were, puzzlingly, both eight again, despite the three long Satedan years that lay between them. "He was seconded to the Specialists from the Aviator Brotherhood."
"Are they all Specialists in the City of the Ancestors?" Dyne asked.
"Lots of them are civilians," Ronon pointed out, taking in the mess hall full of civilians with a wave of his hand. Dr. Weir nodded at him. "And some of the ones from other polities are just soldiers -- " he wasn't up to explaining the way that the Mother-earth apparently contained a score of, a hundred worlds on its surface, the fractures of anarchy not healing but rather enshrining themselves in tradition -- "but the core of the military they sent are like Specialists, only they call themselves 'Marines.'"
On his other side, a pale man in a dark blue uniform, shifting dizzily between Ronon's father's age and withered decrepitude, nodded firmly, little colored tabs glinting on his chest.
"But you're better than they are, right?" Colwyn demanded eagerly.
Ronon snorted. "I have more experience with not dying, 'sall." More experience probably than anyone in the City, and that and the Dex size and build gave him a significant advantage in any simple spar -- too many of the Marines and others were very young, had never known what it was to depend on their skills for their lives again and again for all their practicing.
"More than almost anyone in the City," the man in the blue uniform corrected him before stepping forward and telling an oblivious Sheppard, "I was wrong about you." He added something in another language, Ronon thought a Tellurian one; Sheppard parried an invisible opponent, not seeing the other man's odd Columbian salute, and then Colwyn and Dyne pulled Ronon into a game of herb basket on the sloping field below the market town he'd been born in.
Kalani Zar threw the ball up and called to the eager players, not the name of an herb nor yet a vegetable, but "Corn dog!"
On the first Day of the Dead, Ronon went to the chapel and pulled back the curtain of the alcove with the pictures of the Atlantean dead. He set the low bench thing he'd borrowed from an empty room before them, to serve as an altartop, and laid a plate of preservative-laden beef jerky and little Amaran cheeses and a pot of honey on it, and set next to them the little jug of honey-mead he had brought back from Belka.
Then he knelt before it and called his dead to mind, his squadmates and neighbors, his uncles and aunts, his father and mother and stepmother, Colwyn and Orula and Dyne and Hialea and little Malili his siblings, and Melena, always Melena.
Melena had been his first woman, and it seemed incredible that she had not been his first everything, that there had been a part of his life Before Running that had also been before Melena, that he had had a first friend and a first crush and a first roommate that were not her.
They had been friends first: he had noticed in the back of his mind that Melena was hardly ugly, but he had been panting after someone and she had been seeing someone, and then seeing another someone, and then the man who had been so desperately, utterly, and completely wrong for her that he had felt forced to point as much out -- it had dissolved into a terrible shouting match, the day before his tour of duty began.
And then he'd come back, and everything had fallen into place perfectly, and he had been at once desperate for more, more, more and determined that he could wait for their wedding day, he could.
("Did everyone else know? That we were -- that you'd choose me, in the end?" he'd asked her once, in between kisses, in the scant privacy his family had granted them at their engagement party.
"Well, there are -- any number of people who, who don't care a thing about Ronon and Melena and their lives, at least if it doesn't affect them," Melena had panted, arching her back and twisting out of his hold to breathe. "But, ah, but yes, most of us knew; we were waiting for you to figure it out."
"I'm sorry," he'd said, deeply sincere, "that I tried your patience..."
"Oh, no." Melena'd laughed, warm and gentle. "Some things just take as long as they take to grow, and forcing them would cripple or kill them.")
And thoughts of Melena brought, as they always did, the memory of her end, his pleading with her to go, her refusal to save herself at another's expense, and --
No, never mind that.
But still it welled up, and here, on the first of the Days of the Dead, he clawed it back desperately, barely able to take the firemaker Teyla had lent him and light the pale yellow candle he had bargained out of Sergeant Stackhouse (low in its tall heavy-based glass, ensuring that it would not easily be knocked over and likely put itself out if so) before pouring it into the fire with a shout that nearly put it out again, seeing a burning hell rather than his own little candleflame for far too long.
Ronon was just getting up again, drained and supremely, vastly weary, when someone came into the room behind him. He turned quickly.
"Don't mind me," Sheppard said, shrugging and spreading his hands.
"It's all right," Ronon told him, checking to make sure that the plate and candle were still stable. "I was just finishing." He tapped one of the pictures, over to the side, and added "This guy was in my dream last night, only sometimes he was a lot older."
"What was he doing?" Sheppard came closer, peering at the picture and then stiffening a very little.
"Telling you he was wrong about you, and -- " Ronon tried to reproduce the sounds in the dream, although he was fairly sure he'd messed up somewhere -- "only you weren't listening."
Sheppard repeated the phrase, changing it a little to something that sounded more correct. "Like that?"
"Yeah." Ronon looked at the other man for a moment before adding "What's that mean?"
"'Thank the Nameless God for that,' sort of," Sheppard told him absently. "...that's Colonel Sumner."
"Who?"
"He was the first of us to be attacked by a Wraith, back when we didn't know what they were." Sheppard looked at the plate of food and added "So, uh, this is for... "
"It's the first Day of the Dead," Ronon told him, leading the way out. With Sheppard safely trailing behind him, he suddenly added for some reason "The candle's for my wife. I couldn't save her."
Sheppard grunted a little in understanding, and the two of them left the chapel together.
When Ronon came back late in the evening with a cup of milk, having been delayed by Stackhouse's extra practice (AR-3's mission had been moved up to tomorrow, and so Stackhouse had wanted to get his session in before that), his bench thing had been joined by a box, on top of which three more candles burned at the bottom of tall glasses: one the same color as Melena's, one a sort of mottled brown, and one wider one striped in a way that on Sateda and Belsa and Manaria would have meant "I stand for many."
Ronon quietly added prayers for the unknown dead as well, pouring milk onto their candles after he had used it to put out Melena's; there was just enough. He left the other three candleglasses at the alcove's entrance when he left with his.