Days of the Dead: The Second Day (Plantarum), by Sophonisba [first aid challenge]

[saphanibaal]

-title- Days of the Dead: The Second Day (Plantarum)
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-ratings/warnings- Non-explicit het sex; reference to large difference in ages therein; some past Ronon/Melena. Spelling/orthographic variations denoting mishearings or misunderstandings. Part of my pet asymptotic-to-canon AU.
-timeframe- Shortly before "Aurora."
-spoilers- For "Sateda" and "Runner," obviously. And, in a way, for "Critical Mass."
-characters- Ronon, Miko, Rodney, Teyla, Charin, a few cameos, and my OC chaplain
-notes- I started this, obviously enough, for the last challenge. (Fortunately, it developed so as to fit this one as well.) It is a direct sequel to my entry in the last challenge, and I'm not sure how much sense it would make on its own.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Nor are any of the other sources herein referenced; they belong to David Shore et al., David Gerrold, Aoyama Gosho, Gordon Korman, Hasbro, Alan Alexander Milne, and Anita Loos. (Have I forgotten anyone?) Ensign Sa'id's story is very, very loosely based on one I heard as office gossip.
-word count- 7968
-summary- The first day is for letting go. The second day is for holding on. And for letting out anything that still festers.


Days of the Dead:
The Second Day (Plantarum)

On the second Day of the Dead, Ronon went to the chapel and pulled back the curtain of the alcove given over to the dead, noticing that the candleglasses and their box had been taken away. He carefully lifted the jug of honey-mead from the makeshift altar, presented it to the pictures of the Atlantean dead and to his mental pictures of his own, and drank it, quietly, savoring the sharp sweetness, breathing deeply so that it would not rush too quickly to his head.

He equally carefully lifted the plate of food from the altar, likewise presented it to the dead he had brought with him and the dead that had awaited him there, set it out in the center of the main room of the chapel, and set the plate for the second day in its place, with bread and dried fruit jerky and two of the peaches that the man working the food line had said really needed one more day to be fully ripe. He set a pot of oilberry oil next to the plate, and turned back to the room roper, wishing he had a lesser-torch.

Dr. Kusanagi entered in a way suggesting that she'd opened the door with her elbow, juggling a long thin packet, two eating-sticks, a bowl heaped high with white rice grains, a low pottery dish, and a small plastic device.

"Oh, I am in your way, forgive me," she said at once.

"No, no, go ahead," Ronon told her.

"Oh, no, I am intruding, it is not even a matsuri... "

"You're here, aren't you? Go on," Ronon told her firmly. "Do your thing."

"It is just that it went well, and there is never enough time, and I wished to share with them..." Dr. Kusanagi shook her head and cautiously approached the open alcove. "May I, perhaps, also place these on the table of the fallen?"

"Yeah, sure."

She set the rice bowl next to the pot of oil and firmly thrust the eating-sticks upright into it.

"Are they supposed to stick up like that?" Ronon wondered.

"Well, that is, for food for the fallen, yes."

On its other side, at the end of the bench, Dr. Kusanagi set the little dish down. She opened her packet, drew out a thin stick coated with some sort of dust for much of its length, laid it across the small pottery dish, opened the plastic rectangle, and began to spin the little wheel thus revealed, once managing to generate a small flame that immediately died.

"Do you have any more of those sticks?" Ronon rumbled, coming closer.

She nodded mutely and fumbled one out. He laid it next to hers, gently took the firestarter from her hand, and lit the ends she pointed to before handing it back. A musky, sweet-spicy scent came from the burning coating.

Dr. Kusanagi took a small triptych of photographs out of her jacket pocket, opened the doors of the middle cabinet, behind the makeshift altar, and set the triptych on the cabinet's shelf in front of the other pictures. She put her hands together and knelt attentively before the altar-bench, and Ronon sank next to her and copied her, gaze sliding to her out of the corner of his eyes.

He rose when she did and turned back to the room in general, in time to see Ensign Sa'id come in, look at the plate in the middle of the floor, and stop.

"May I ask what...?" Sa'id asked, eyes crinkling in the way Ronon's father's had when he was amused by his children's antics and determined not to show it.

"Shared food with the dead," Ronon explained gruffly. "Now I'm supposed to share it with the living. If..."

The ensign looked thoughtfully at the plate of food on the floor. "I think I can eat that, if you're asking."

"Please," Ronon managed through a suddenly thick throat -- he must have breathed in some of the smoke from the incense wands. He looked tentatively at Kusanagi, and she smiled a little nervously at him and sat down by the plate. Properly, they ought to have been sharing the honey-mead as well, but that was water over the lock.

"Oh, hey, is that food?" McKay asked, suddenly sticking his head in the chapel. "Hello there, Miko."

"Doctor McKay!" Teyla hissed from somewhere behind him.

"Come in," Ronon told them, amused and surprisingly grateful for their presence. "We were just about to start."

"Are there, uh, any expectations involved with this?" McKay asked as he sat. "Because, uh, usually you don't, but here, and this, and... "

"We sit and eat and tell stories about people who died," Ronon shrugged. "Relax. What are you doing down here, anyway? Thought you were usually in your labs this time of day."

"I set up something, and it's going," McKay explained, "so I went to stretch my legs and maybe see about a snack while it grinds, and here you are on the way."

"It's going?" Ronon repeated.

"It is like a grain cooker," Kusanagi explained softly. "You put in the grain and the water and set it cooking, and then come back when it has become grain." She frowned. "When it has become food." Shook her head. "You put in the kome-grain and water and come back when it has become gohan."

"Why do you have a different word for uncooked-rice and cooked-rice, anyway?" McKay demanded, dropping to his haunches.

Kusanagi stared at her knees.

"Why do you have different words for living cow and cow meat?" Ronon asked him.

"I-- what-- Gatespeech has different words for cattle and beef!"

"Satenaalo didn't."

"Was that your language?" Ensign Sa'id asked.

Ronon nodded.

Teyla gracefully lowered herself to sit in what more or less completed an irregular circle around the plate of first-Day food, after a sharp glance at McKay got him to move over.

Ronon drew one of his knives and began cutting up the beef and cheeses. With a slight grimace for the inevitable bellyache, he dipped a piece of cheese into the honey and ate it. Sa'id, eyes on him, carefully reached out and took a piece of cheese himself, likewise brushing it gently across the honey's surface and nibbling tentatively at it. McKay helped himself to some beef and cheese together, making an abortive gesture in the direction of the honey-pot before clearly thinking better of it.

"Toran -- my brother, the son of my grandfather's daughter," Teyla began suddenly, eyes sliding sideways to her Tellurian teammate, "was... not quite curious in the same way you are, but one day he talked Orin, who was our foster brother, and Halling into helping him bend a spiny-tree over and tie it down."

"To see how long it took the branches to start growing the other way?" Sa'id wondered.

"I do not know what they were thinking."

"Wait, Orin?" McKay said suddenly. "Not the one out there -- "

"Yes, 'the one out there.'" Teyla helped herself, abrupt almost beyond grace, to a piece of cheese, not bothering to dip it. "The tree had been tied down for two days, and then the Wraith came."

"I had thought they were sleeping," Kusanagi said. She held a hand out, and Sa'id put a strip of jerky in it.

"They weren't all sleeping," Ronon told her flatly. The Wraith never all slept at once; even if Sateda hadn't been proof of that, there were surely enough incidences to make it obvious.

"They were -- it was only two Wraith, on foot," Teyla said equally flatly, "for some reason."

"Scouting exercise?" Ronon wondered.

"I do not know. But there were only a hunting party of us there near the Ring, at that time, and so the Wraith attacked. I ran into the tent, to get the cleaver, and they killed Anteia, who was Jinto's mother.

"When I came out, they were fighting; Kanaan and Cylin were holding one of them off, but the other one had Orin. And so I ran at the spiny-tree, and cut the rope when I grasped it, and came flying and somehow or another I managed to cut the Wraith's arm apart at the elbow and knock it down, away from Orin, and Halling put his bantos in its eye and held it down so it could not bite me while I chopped through its neck.

"And then the other Wraith ran away while Astrylla was prying the hand off of Orin, so we all fled to the caves in case the Wraith came back in force, but they did not."

"Unauthorized scouting practice," Ronon deduced.

"Orin was... very ill, raving, and of course very much weaker, and Toran was frightened. Some people fear large animals, or small spaces, or varnak beetles, or that sickness will take them and that they will not be able to breathe; for Toran, it was always the Wraith, even before that." Teyla looked out across the circle, eyes staring far into the distance.

"What became of him?" Sa'id asked gently.

"When... when we were culled, the Wraith came and took Toran, and then they came and took Colonel Sumner, and then John Sheppard and Aiden came and rescued us."

McKay awkwardly patted Teyla's shoulder, tentatively, holding himself ready in case she suddenly leapt for his throat.

"I am sorry. I did not mean to -- "

"You talk about them," Ronon told her. "Doesn't always have to be good."

Ensign Sa'id promptly began to tell about the courtship of his parents, which made little sense and left less of an impression on Ronon. McKay apparently found it fascinating, though, as he was nodding thoughtfully while dipping shreds of jerky in the honey and routinely eating them.

Ronon tried doing so. It was a bit too sweet or perhaps a bit too salty -- less of one or the other would have been good -- but at least it was food, and he had learned food's value too well to waste it.

"...so then, for their -- " the imam hesitated, and then said something that sounded like 'hanimuun' -- "they decided to go camping, and a few days into it Pops got -- really sick. Some people who were doing a hiking trip past their campground had a radio, so they were able to call the Forestry Service and get someone to fly him to the hospital."

It sounded familiar enough, although of course --

"In an air plane?" Ronon asked.

"A spiralwing, actually."

"What is a spiralwing?"

"Oh, come on," McKay snorted. "There were a few in that movie -- not the last one, the one week before last -- black sort of teardrop things, with the long flat spokes on top that went rattle-rattle-rattle..."

"I believe you should ask Colonel Sheppard about spiralwings," Teyla said helpfully. "He will be happy to speak of them all the morning."

Ronon grunted in agreeing acknowledgment, hoping that it would be more informative than the time he had asked Sheppard about the purpose of the footboards-with-wheels.

Sa'id waited for them to finish before continuing his story. "And so my father spent the early days of his marriage in the hospital, getting sicker and sicker and put on life support while they tried to work out what was wrong with him."

"They did not know?" Teyla asked politely.

"They were baffled. They could see what Pops's symptoms were, but they didn't add up to something the doctors recognized."

"That's why the big hospitals have people who do nothing all day but figure out what their patients have got, even if it turns them into tin-plated dictators with delusions of godhood," McKay snorted.

"Doctor Beckett is, perhaps, not quite... " Dr. Kusanagi began hesitantly.

"Oh, not Carson. Carson's all right, and it's not like we've got a huge medical department anyway. I was thinking of that, that miktalar back in the eastern U-S -- someone hadn't been careful enough about ingredients, and then there were complications, and I would up being prodded by a sadistic overbearing excuse for a pathologist who thought he knew better than everyone else. And nearly made me entertain the possibility of, of additional methods of sensing that would present as mild clairvoyance or receptive telepathy -- which might explain a little of it, I know I'd be annoyed if I had to hear other people being stupid inside my head as well -- but that's hardly an excuse for him treating me as some particularly brain-damaged lower primate just because I wasn't familiar with all the literature and ramifications of his specialty."

"Relation of yours?" Ronon wondered, noting the unnatural stiffness of his other three listeners and the slight facial tension suggesting that Teyla was actively restraining herself from speaking.

"... actually, it turned out that he sort of would be if that side of my family hadn't utterly disowned the whole root and branch even before they made it to Canada. Which would be barely closer than Sam Carter and Daniel Jackson turned out to be, so it's not as if it would have counted even if we hadn't -- although it was sort of relevant to what was causing the complications, which is the only reason it came up, as I'm not surprised they cut all ties and if they hadn't I'd have cast their asshole descendant off myself."

"You didn't act like you had Columbian ancestors before."

McKay stared at Ronon and threw up his hands, sending one piece of meat jerky flying nearly into Teyla's lap. (It would have, but she easily caught it and popped it into her mouth.) "I'm pretty sure I don't have any of the first wave of colonists in my family tree; most of my ancestors came to Canada in the eighteen-hundreds or so from several places, including but by no means limited to our large southern neighbor, and excuse me for feeling that, if you were born somewhere and your parents were born there and your family's lived there for nearly two hundred annu in some cases, your picture's in the dictionary under 'native citizen.'"

"The man's got a point," Ensign Sa'id observed.

Teyla swallowed her honeyed jerky. "So I believe, as well."

"You had said that your father remained in the hospital?" Dr. Kusanagi prompted gently.

"And was getting worse and worse, for all they could do," the imam took up the thread of his story. "Meanwhile my mother went back in to work -- which Aunt Edna was just disgusted by, but Ma couldn't be at the hospital all the time, and she was worried about money, and she and Pops had decided that she'd keep on working even after she got married anyway."

"Why not?" Ronon blinked.

"People tended to be stupid about that kind of thing back then," the ensign explained without explaining. "The place where my mother worked made drugs and other chemicals, and when she mentioned Pops's situation to her coworkers, one of them had heard of something, and so Ma went back to the doctors and mentioned it, and it turned out that Pops had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever without the spots."

"I gather this is rare?" Teyla asked.

"Very. The doctors said that if Ma hadn't found out about it and told them when she did, Pops probably wouldn't have made it. Aunt Edna still wasn't reconciled to Ma working, but my other aunts and uncles pretty much stopped complaining after that, especially since Ma quit her job when she had me."

"And your... father went to work?" Ronon wondered. It wasn't as if he hadn't heard of people who did things exactly backward, but it still felt sort of weird.

"Well, he'd been working all along, except for the time it took him to get better from that and the other thing. Pops was a good, solid worker, and a good man; I wouldn't say he and Ma ever really understood my choices, but I never doubted that they were there whenever I'd put out a hand, either."

"My uncle, my mother's brother, was a magic-user," Kusanagi said when it was clear that the imam had finished.

"There's no such thing as magic, Miko-kun," McKay said at once.

"Not -- " Kusanagi said, eyes fierce; Ronon had a sudden mental image of a scolding paika-mouse. She picked up one of the pieces of cheese, drew a folded cloth from her pocket and draped it over the cheese in her hand, and wriggled her other hand above it before pulling the cloth off to reveal a hand cupped around a button.

Sa'id clapped.

"Oh," McKay said. "A, uh, uh, prestidigitator."

"But where did the cheese go?" Teyla peered at the button in Kusanagi's hand, fascinated.

Kusanagi leaned her other hand behind Ronon's neck. He felt the slight difference in weight and stiffened carefully as she withdrew it and brought it back before the others, cheese wedge in her palm and Ronon's second-smallest knife between her fingers.

Sa'id and McKay clapped.

"It worked," Kusanagi said, startled. Heat flushed her cheeks, and she darted a nervous glance at Ronon. "I, that is, I should not have been so forward, it was very bad of me... "

"A lightfingers," Ronon observed. "I haven't seen a lightfingers perform since I made Second Class." He took his knife from her unresisting hand and slid it back into place in his hair.

"So that's how you managed it with the crystals!" McKay said triumphantly.

"Did your uncle also escape from a locked chest?" Ronon asked at the same time.

"Yes, and he made things float, and showed the doll that calculated with an abacus -- it is a very old doll that he inherited from his master in the art, and it was very much more impressive before semiconductors were invented. And my uncle would put a fireball into his hat and take out a korunetto -- "

"A what?"

"It's a kind of brass horn," McKay explained.

"And then he would blow the korunetto but no sound would come out, so my uncle would reach into its bell and pull out a handkerchief, tied to another handkerchief, and so on for very many handkerchiefs until they were tied to a baseball shirt, and then he would blow it again and there would be no sound but a false snake would jump out, and then he would blow it again and suddenly there would be the music of a very large band that he was leading, and also it would rain chocolates on the audience. My uncle was a very good magic-user."

Her people had never known the Wraith, so --

"Was it an accident?" Ronon asked.

"My uncle always checked his equipment, again and again," Kusanagi said softly, voice climbing to an even higher pitch than normal.

"So he was what, as paranoid as you are?" McKay asked.

"The police said -- the police said that there was no proof that anyone had interfered with the machine, no matter how much we all knew that he would have seen that the gauges were not displaying rightly, and that we were making an unseemly fuss, not fitting to be associated with his reputation."

At least Dr. McKay could tell when he had put both feet into it; he jerked his chin up, blue eyes blazing, determined to carry off his misstep highhandedly.

Teyla laid a hand on his arm, moving, as she always moved, to smooth things over, to keep words that could not be taken back from being voiced.

"It -- it killed my grandmother, his mother," Kusanagi went on. "It broke her health, and she -- faded, like a flower in a vase. Not... not just that she had outlived her son, but that they would not listen, or that they listened and then told us to go home and keep to inside matters, or that they listened and understood and said that there was no proof of it, so that we would just have to endure."

"Who did it?" Ronon asked.

"I do not know," Kusanagi said, softly, wretchedly.

And it was one more tie when he was only just settling in under a few of them, and a promise for the future when he had only even promised Sheppard "for now" --

-- and his father and mother had raised him to respect a lady, and to serve with honor, and to uphold the right.

"When you find out," Ronon told her, "I'll come help you kill him."

"... thank you?"

He dipped a shred of jerky in the honey and ate it thoughtfully, the combination of flavors less noticeable than they had been. "These aren't really that bad."

"I should hope not," McKay proclaimed, seizing on the topic. "You're the one that brought them."

"It's what you had that would work." And certainly McKay had eaten his share and more of them; the food was disappearing quickly, and ideally the memories should be shared before the food was gone.

"Our dried cow-meat was a little different," Ronon began.

"Beef," McKay sighed. "Do you do this to torment me?"

"Is it working?"

While McKay sputtered and the women covered their smiles with their hands, shoulders quivering, Ronon went on "My wife didn't like it much, but she would be sure to get dried beef strips for me."

Melena tossed the bag at him and said "Here."

Ronon looked at the label and grinned.

And then she tossed the scented candle at him and said "You will light this when you use the washroom tonight, and every night until those are through with you."

"And if I don't?"

"You may, of course, sleep in the barracks and use their facilities."

"We were friends," he added, shutting his eyes, unwilling to see the others, "for a long time. And then we had a bad fight, before I was sent out the first time."

Ronon sat there, in silence, listening to Sa'id and Kusanagi and Teyla fall silent and McKay start chewing two pieces of cheese at once, before Ensign Sa'id said "And then you came back."

"And then I came back, and we made up, and talked until the rump of the night.

"And then the next day, after I'd sweated it off, I was eating in the mess, and she came up and smiled. And everything just... "

He'd always known she was nice to look at. It seemed as though he'd always known that she was the best friend he'd ever had.

And then Melena held her hand out and smiled, a slow, warm, knowing smile, and he'd dropped his hand-roll and forgotten to chew, buried knowledge finally pushing its way to the surface and combining into a pulse of "this one, this woman, here, now, always, mine." Only the knowledge that men did not ask women to marry them kept him from falling on his knees before her and begging her to please, please, take pity on him, choose him for her husband despite his single state, let him love and honor and obey her first and foremost of all.

"Well, finally," Melena said gently, and pulled him up. She slipped her arm into his and led him out of the mess hall, to the raucous cheers of his fellow Specialists.

"It was... good. Not just the respect a married man gets, or the part where other women are always more interested in a man at least one woman thought worth marrying, but all of it. Her."

"At least one woman? How many wives could you have had?" McKay snorted.

"A man can accept as many women as he can help support themselves in peace," Ronon said automatically. "Themselves in peace. The helping, not so much. Specialists got paid well, even beyond what my wife was making, but I never met anyone she liked well enough."

Not, perhaps, quite true, but the women Melena would have pulled in harness with hadn't wanted him for anything more than a night or two, and the women who'd have kept him set her teeth on edge, to say nothing of the captain he'd served (and serviced) who'd had a husband already...

"She used to say that she hoped she'd be able to let me accept at least two more offers so we could get up a good game of tiles, but -- "

But it had never worked out that way, and failing one woman was bitter enough; if he had accepted the hands of women he cared for half, a third as much as Melena, he did not know if he could have borne to survive failing two or three.

"Ronon," Teyla said, very gently. "Since we have heard -- since what we have heard -- could she perhaps possibly have survived?"

"No," Ronon said flatly. No, he did not want to remember it, he did not want to envision it -- he realized that he was shaking his head when one of his locks struck himself near his closed eyelid, and he held himself still with an effort, jerking one arm up in the silence to point at the teammate who had even stopped chewing.

"What, uh, me?" McKay said, swallowing hastily.

Ronon opened his eyes and scooped up the last of the cheese, quickly, tossing all but two wedges into his mouth at once -- he hadn't remembered the honey-mead as being so strong, and a bellyache was worth it to stave off an aching head, overheated eyeballs, and any further exercise of his already overloosened tongue.

"You have been eating his milk and honey," Ensign Sa'id said wryly. "It's not that much to ask in return."

"Well, I, uh, um."

"Doctor McKay," Teyla said firmly.

"Well, yes, but... " McKay clearly thought better of what he had been going to say and tried again. "Obviously, it's not like having to go through some offworld ceremony or something, since you're, uh. On my team. And it's not as if I have anything against the idea of doing something you want to do, even if it's... uh... well, when it's important to you, it's just that..."

"That you're being more than a little arrogant again," the imam said, tone and face softening the words.

"McKay's default, isn't it?" Ronon said. "Bet you were ordering people around from your father's baby-apron."

"I'll have you know I was a very quiet and well-behaved baby, actually," McKay said. "Not like my cousin Boots, who was a real tyrant when he was young -- that's why we called him Boots, because of the way he let people know he thought he was the center of the universe."

"What does that have to do with boots?" Teyla wondered before Ronon could.

"There was a famous, uh, megalomaniac autocrat called that once, on our world. Go down to Anthro and Linguistics and ask one of the Isabels about him; she'll be more than happy to talk your ear off on the subject. But yeah, when we were little, everyone knew that Boots was much more demanding than I was."

"They don't know it now?" Ronon wondered, trying to picture a yet more imperious and autocratic Dr. McKay.

"Well... I'm not sure whether he actually mellowed out -- probably from the long exposure, even before the three of them moved into a house together one of them had been his roommate since forever and the other one was just across the road for the same expanse of the year -- or whether it just looks like it because of whom he's standing between; honestly, standing between Cathy and Bruno would make anyone look more moderate. Or sane."

Ronon could, he thought, understand that; walking into a village with Sheppard and McKay when the latter two were doing their backtalk-thing was an excellent way to play down his own presence, and several not-precisely-friendly communities had outright discounted Teyla until they'd lived to regret it.

"Anyway, uh. To get back to the subject of dead people, Boots is my cousin on my mother's side, and our mutual grandmother's name was Margaret, which is a really popular name in Canada: I have a first cousin and a second cousin and some former classmates from here and there called Margaret -- or various short forms, to make it easy to tell apart -- and my mother was thinking of calling me Margaret if I'd been a girl."

"Short forms?" Dr. Kusanagi said. "No, never mind..."

Teyla was nodding. "Among my people, we have an Astrylla and a Starly, who are Astralalas."

"Starly is -- wait, if Astralala means what I think it does -- " McKay snorted, muffled. He coughed rather too loudly and took the last shred of beef, dipping it very carefully into the honey-pot.

"What?" Teyla demanded, letting her voice sharpen.

"It's a Tellurian thing. Complicated. I'll explain later -- or wait, I think someone brought the show I'm thinking of, I'll have to check the server. So my grandmother was very -- she acted very Marie Wilson-ish. Uh, Marilyn Monroe before there was a Marilyn -- this doesn't actually mean anything to the rest of you, does it?"

"No," Ronon said.

"She bobbed her blonde hair," McKay ran a finger around his head to signify length, "and she acted as if she saved all her intelligence for three things and the other one was jewelry."

"So, like a female melilot?" Ronon wondered. Beside him, Dr. Kusanagi said "burikko" softly to herself.

"A what?"

"What you said Sheppard was acting like last week."

"Oh. Well. It's not like he's blonde -- or curvy -- or, well, female -- but I suppose that's close enough. M-- my grandmother, now, was on the stage under the name of Margot van Doren."

"What does 'under the name of' mean?" Teyla wondered.

McKay smiled suddenly. "The name was over her dressing-room door in peeling gold letters, and she lived under it."

This was apparently funny, as both Ensign Sa'id and Dr. Kusanagi chuckled.

"We kind of had a family joke that she'd been the model for Lorelei Lee, only not in her hearing, because she'd get angry and demand to know how old we thought she was: Grandma Margot was already refusing to admit her age, and implying that she'd been running around early enough to inspire a book that came out when she was practically still losing teeth went over like, like challenging someone's experiment methods.

"Anyway, Margot was fairly successful offstage, not so much on, and she was married for a while, which ate up most of her savings. So when World War II came around -- that was the one in the movie last night, team -- she ended up working in a factory that made medical supplies."

"Like my mother?" Ensign Sa'id asked.

"No, more like stretchers and so forth. So, uh, my grandfather was inspecting the factory -- the Army decided to put his master's in engineering to use before his medical doctorate, and as it turned out he never did get overseas... "

"Your grandfather was a medic?" Teyla said, a small smile on her lips.

"Well, yes, that's how I know how much of the profession is dead-chicken-waving and otherwise making things up as you go along. So -- he was Rodney too, or I suppose it'd be more accurate to say that I'm Rodney too, and he was Rodney prime. Or, technically, Benjamin Rodney Ingram the Third -- the Ingram side of the family isn't very imaginative when it comes to names, my sister's named after Mom's Aunt Jean and my Uncle Damien is Benjamin Rodney Ingram the Fourth. So he was inspecting the place, and Margot wasn't exactly dressed for optimum safety; on the other hand, it was as hot as all get-out in there, and she could really work it. So she stayed after work, and he said "You've got It. I'm interested. How about it, baby?'

"And she said 'I was beginning to think all the men in Eastern Ontario had gone blind. Any time, big boy,' and then they conceived my Aunt Eunice on top of the extruder." McKay paused for a moment. "There might have been something in between that I'm not recalling. Anyway, they got married before my aunt was born, and after, uh, after he died, Grandma Margot raised Aunt Eunice and Mom and Uncle Damien on her own."

"How did he die?" the imam asked gently.

Ronon stiffened on his teammate's behalf for a moment before realizing that, on a world where the Wraith did not go, early deaths must be unusual. Hadn't he himself asked as much of McKay's assistant-or-whatever? Although -- McKay'd just said it was during a war, hadn't he? In most wars, people were killed as well as just counting points, at least in the ones Sateda had had the times that it re-unified itself.

"He was allergic to lemons too," McKay said, very nearly offhand. "It's funny the way that sort of thing goes. Mom's mildly allergic to lemons -- they just make her sick to her stomach, and after a while she stopped using lemon dish soap, thank goodness -- and Aunt Eunice is allergic to shellfish, which is apparently a common thing to be all over both galaxies, but, ah, but my grandfather was severely allergic to lemons: they stopped at a restaurant for lunch when my mother was twelve; the unbelievably stupid, brain-damaged, lethally incompetent cook didn't bother to wash the knife before making his lunch; and my grandfather choked and fell out of his chair, clawing at his neck, and strangled on his own throat, convulsing on the floor before an ambulance could get there. My mother remembers it vividly." His voice had grown slow and soft, and his eyes were not focused on any of them. "Seriously, autoinjectors are one of mankind's greatest inventions, right up there behind normal syringes and antibiotics.

"So it was just Grandma Margot, and by this and that and her Marie Wilson impression she wound up getting all three of them at least their baccalaureate and safely married. Then Grandma Margot retired to Latin America, where it's cheap to live if you have a reasonable amount of money to start with."

"Where in...?" Dr. Kusanagi wondered.

Dr. McKay shrugged. "It wasn't on the equator, it wasn't far south enough for winter to get cold again, and it wasn't Guatemala, is all I know. Maybe it was a couple of places -- she used to fly up to see us, and I vaguely remember we flew down to see her once or twice, and when I was in grade four she died suddenly and peacefully, at a ripe old age, in bed with a pair of Guatemalan gigolos."

Dr. Kusanagi looked like she was trying not to laugh. Neither Ensign Sa'id nor Teyla bothered.

"Good way to go," Ronon said thoughtfully, wondering whether McKay had got the gender wrong on 'gigolo' by accident or whether his grandmother had been like Ronon's own father -- although his father had always claimed that he hadn't made the changeover because he still wanted and needed Ronon's mother specifically, not women in general.

"I've always thought so," McKay agreed.

Ronon pulled the knife with cheese residue out again, cut the last piece in half (wondering what had become of the penultimate one; he'd thought there'd been two), and passed one morsel to McKay before popping the other into his mouth.

"And that finishes it," Ronon said around the bit of cheese, tucking it into his cheek as he stood up. "Thanks."

"Oh, no, my pleasure," the ensign said, carefully rising to his feet. "I don't get the chance to talk about my parents that often any more."

"However I may be of service," Dr. Kusanagi agreed.

"It was... comforting, perhaps, to speak of Toran," Teyla said thoughtfully, helping Ronon pick up the plate and honey-pot.

"I've sat through worse," Dr. McKay pronounced with the air of one doing a great favor, rising to his own feet with some slight assistance from Teyla. "I think it's about time to check on my thing again."

"I meant to ask," Ronon said suddenly, remembering. "What's a miktalar? I've heard some of the others say something that sounded like it might be it..."

"It's... " McKay stopped halfway to the doorway of the chapel. "It's from -- Goa'uld-speak, I suppose you'd say." He pronounced the compound carefully, precisely. "I think the gould say it a little differently... "

Dr. Kusanagi nodded, thoughtfully, looking as if she had found a guess of hers to be correct.

"... I expect some of the people we got from the SGC picked it up and say it the way they do, but I don't see any reason why I should have to match my pronunciation to theirs, especially considering the many and varied ways in which they SUCK. And not in any of the good ways."

"So what does it mean?" Ronon said.

"It doesn't really translate well -- you'd have to go bother Anthro and Linguistics -- but all you need to know to use it is that it's more than sufficiently insultingly biological." McKay smiled at him a little nervously, waving his hands, and then suddenly looked more intently at the watch he had strapped onto his wrist. "Sigh. At this rate, even if the part I left grinding's ready, I'm going to be busy with this the rest of the day. See you later. Or not."

He did not, quite, hurry out of the door.

Ronon looked at the plate and honey-pot in his hands, and then at the alcove where the second day's plate remained next to Dr. Kusanagi's rice grain and the stick incense.

"Will you deal with my lighted stick when you take care of yours?" he asked.

Dr. Kusanagi jumped a little -- he would have patted her on the shoulder, had he had a free hand and had he not thought that that might unnerve her further -- and nodded vigourously, making rapid noises of agreement.

"Thanks," Ronon said, and left the chapel, falling into step with Teyla in the corridor.

"Is there some other ceremony you wish to hold today?" she asked eventually, stepping into the transporter with him.

"Not till tomorrow. What are you doing?"

"I was planning -- hoping," Teyla corrected herself, "if someone would fly me, to go to the mainland: I have heard that Charin is not well." And I am worried, she did not need to add.

"I'll go with you. If you find someone," Ronon told her.

"Thank you," Teyla said, stopping him before leaving the transporter and pulling him into the odd forehead-touching her people practiced, leaving him uncertain what to do with his full hands.

It wasn't as if it was anything special on his part: he had no particular plans after returning his used dishware, and he liked Charin.

'Owed Charin' might be more accurate.

Charin Emmagan had been his first woman After Running. After he'd found that Sateda -- that Ring City, that surely would have been first to be reclaimed, as it had always been in the past -- was... not, Ronon knew that he had been no sort of company, that most of the Atlanteans had walked widely around him, wary as they might be of a lean and scarred hrukkit.

And then Sheppard and Teyla had invited him to come with them to visit the latter's people on the mainland and help with the hunting, and he had been only too glad to come and lose himself in something mindless. It was after the hunt, while people milled around -- too close, once again too close, and many of them eyeing him with wariness deriving not from fear but from honor (as if there had been anything honorable or moral about surviving; survival just was, and owed at least as much to rage and stubbornness as any inner strength) -- that he had once again grown uneasy, and wondered whether it might not be better to slip off into the trees then, perhaps to stay there.

Teyla greeted the old woman, Charin, as though she were a relation; Ronon would have melted away then and there, but the older woman looked him in the eye for a nearly-shattering moment and then gestured to the corner of the blanket farthest away from where she sat.

"Your legs may feel better for some rest, young man," she said, gently, softly. "Teyla, I think Cylin wants to speak to you; now that we have our food, we will be quite all right."

And, except for requests to pass this or that, or the occasional comment as she drew another Athosian's attention from Ronon to her, Charin didn't speak to him again for most of the evening, letting him be silent, letting him be.

As the fires were put out, and most of those still speaking gathered around the central fire, Charin turned to him and asked, "Will you help me up? It is not as easy as it was, ten annu ago."

Even had he not been raised to respect and honor a lady, Ronon still owed her for the measure of quietness he had had during supper, and he slipped an arm behind her, lifting her smoothly to her feet.

She looked up at him -- perhaps another of those too-penetrating looks; the firelight turned Charin's hair as warm as Teyla's and left face in shadow -- and asked, thoughtfully, "Would you care to affirm life with me?"

Ronon hoped that between the firelight and the longsightedness of age, he did not embarrass her with his initial startlement; surely Charin Emmagan was old enough to be asking a woman as much?

And then the tents and the tools that he had seen the Athosians using rushed back to mind, and that mind, which had been floating somewhere all the evening, began to work again. This was their standard of living. Seven years of not much better, even when he had been in superb physical condition to begin with, had left their marks on him, marks Dr. Beckett had warned him would come to light ten or twenty or thirty annu down the line even with the best of care henceforth: Charin, who had only been made free of the care of Atlantis this year --

Charin might not even have come to the drying up of her flows, much less the change of view.

And he had been raised to respect and honor a lady, and he had survived, even after all that --

"Yes. If you would. Please," he stammered, for all the worlds as if he were a virgin on his last growth spurt.

Charin turned in his arm, and slipped one of her own around him, and led him to her tent.

"We used," Ronon told Teyla now, "after the sharing-meal itself, to visit each other and talk about people we remembered. If you and Charin want to talk about things you remember -- or, really, about anything -- I'd listen."

He'd been awkward, clumsy as the first-- clumsier than he'd been the first time, and despite the fact that he'd thought he'd have to work at it to get his blood to wake up and remember the rhythm of the shared dance, he'd finished far too quickly. Ronon buried his face in the crook of his elbow, and fought the horrible desire to claw the blanket and howl.

"When you have been at a task for a long time," Charin said beside his other shoulder, voice quiet but matter-of-fact, without a trace of pity, "it is hard to remember how not to keep doing it."

"I'm sorry," Ronon told her.

"Do not apologize," Charin said, gently but firmly. "Do better."

She slid her hands along his back, soothing, like a mother; and then she stroked him, not like a mother at all; and Ronon remembered that he had known the means and little tricks of this once, and set about using them for the lady's pleasure. Charin caught her breath, nothing like a laugh at all and audibly joyous, and in return proved that, although she was not (could not be) as old as she looked, she had not spent what years she had lived in ignorance. They defied the Wraith, who could not take this from them; and they endured the Wraith, taking what had been left them for the Wraith's reasons and making it their own; and at long last, they did not think of the Wraith at all, as it should be.

In the morning, Ronon woke at first light, borrowed Charin's soap-root and teki-leaf cleaning rinse, and went down to the creek. He washed himself and all of his hair, thoroughly, and redressed his locks in proper order. Then he walked, naked, back to her tent, carrying a basket of water with him. He reblackened the knives he used for stealth, and polished the ones he used for clean cutting until he could see his face in them.

Charin woke again, for good this time, washed herself with the water Ronon had brought, and showed him how to oil his leathers properly.

When Ronon had finished, he reclothed himself, and put his knives away one by one, and then knelt by where Charin sat. He copied the Athosian brace of foreheads as best he could, and then embraced her Satedan-fashion, before standing up and walking out into the encampment. Others were going about their business; Teyla was standing over Colonel Sheppard where he had fallen asleep in his clothes by the embers of the last fire, clearly debating whether and how best to wake him.

Ronon felt the corners of his lips tugging up: he stood here, among allies, in as much safety as there ever was in the thousand worlds. He knew, now, that he was no longer a Runner; that in some ways, he would always be a Specialist; and that, whether he chose to go or to stay, in the City of the Ancestors or here in this encampment, he was (still) Ronon Dex, yeoman of Sateda.

"I like Charin," he finished, not really sure how to say what he wanted to, or whether it wouldn't take up half the rest of the day anyway.

In the evening, when Major Lorne clapped outside Charin's tent and told them that they must be going -- Teyla had a meeting with Dr. Weir the next morning, and despite the puddlejumpers' speed, the Atlanteans had some prejudice against flying to and from the mainland before the sun had climbed well into the sky -- Ronon was the first to approach her for a brace of farewell.

He took her too-thin shoulders in his hands, wishing that he could lend her his strength as once she had lent him hers, and stooped so that she could more easily return the grasp, leaning his forehead against hers.

Then he slid his hands up to cup her face, and kissed her, deeply and with infinite respect.

Charin smiled at him, laughing as she had been wise enough not to do when they affirmed life together, and feinted a blow at his shoulder.

Teyla looked at them in utter and visible startlement for a moment, and then beamed at him. As Ronon turned for the door, he could hear her whispering to her kinswoman, soft voice wicked and amused.

"Do I want to know what that's about?" Lorne asked, looking at the two women bracing under Ronon's arm as he came out.

"I think it's a female thing," Ronon confided.

"So probably not, then."

Teyla, still smiling, let Ronon have the front seat in the jumper, and he watched the colors of the sunset fade from the sky all the way back to the City Atlantis.