Days of the Dead: The Third Day (Mineralium), by Sophonisba [amnesty 2008|comfort challenge]
-title- Days of the Dead: The Third Day (Mineralium)
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-ratings/warnings- Reference to canon pairings, including (or perhaps especially) Ronon/Melena. Implications, both of possible eventual pairings and of in-story speculation. Some crude physical humor. Spelling/orthographic variations denoting mishearings or misunderstandings. Noticeably part of my pet asymptotic-to-canon AU.
-timeframe- Shortly before "Aurora."
-spoilers- For "Sateda" and "Runner," obviously.
-characters- Ronon, Melena, Teyla, Miko, Sheppard, Elizabeth, Rodney, Lorne, a Heightmeyer cameo, and... others. ^_^
-notes- This is the third part of three, following this and this, and I'm not sure how much sense it would make on its own.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Also herein loosely referenced are characters and situations belonging to Disney, SquareEnix, Madeleine L'Engle, and Hagio Moto.
-word count- 5404
-summary- The first day is for letting go; the second for holding on; and the third for putting things in order, setting memories in their place and walking on with one's eyes forward.
The first day
The second day
and now:
Days of the Dead:
The Third Day (Mineralium)
In the dim small hours of the third Day of the Dead, Ronon's dreams led him to the main room of the apartment Melena had shared with him.
He could hear her laughter, warm and happy, drifting through the doorway, and the click of tiles.
So he went through the doorway, content and aware in some small part of his mind that it was odd that he should be so, and found himself on the beach of his childhood dreams.
Perhaps his experiences with real beaches, in the waking world, had given it more depth and realism; but the sky was still that perfect, impossible blue, and the waves echoed it in a deeper, wine-rich hue. The double-hulled boat at anchor out in the gentle waves now had passengers; he squinted for a moment and then recognized his father hoisting the sail, while his mother and stepmother sat by the tiller and all his brothers and sisters scrambled over the boat, calling to each other and drawing up the anchor. He cupped his hands to hail them, but then realized that the same breeze that brought their voices to him would throw his back in his teeth.
The young woman with the thick round eye-lenses was sitting under the tallest palm tree on the hillock again; today the redhead she seemed to be courting was sitting with her. Ronon thought once again that he really should find out who they were before he woke up, and then it slipped from his mind yet again as Melena said "Four-in-hand."
She was sitting at a table, feigning a frown as she played a hand of tiles, wearing something green and low-cut enough to show her wedding pendant. Next to her, Teyla was wearing that blue outfit of hers, and had added to some of the necklaces Ronon had seen before a string bearing four impressively large pieces of dark amber; one simply shaped, one intricately carved, one formed into a polished ring, and the last, lighter one with -- his feet carried him closer to the tiles table without any conscious decision on his part, and he saw that his teammate appeared to have a spider in her new pendant.
The other two tiles players were also women; their backs were towards him, but one was black-haired and the other blonde, and they were both wearing Atlantean-issue trousers and soft black tea shirts.
"So on your world," Melena was asking, "rather than a woman looking out from her doorstep and choosing one husband, preferably one married to one or more of her dear friends, she will choose several husbands and... what, visit them each in turn?"
"Not... precisely," Teyla answered. She, too, seemed to be speaking his native Satenaalo, although her voice somehow was still uniquely Teyla. "And in any case, those conjoined are expected to live together or at least right next to each other; that is why they are also called 'comrades,' because they share a chamber."
"But it is true that you have multiple husbands rather than multiple wives."
"It can be." Teyla turned a bracelet of knotted red-gold amber back and forth in her hand.
It still seemed strange to Ronon -- women, at least, tended to organize themselves in a trellis and then stay there, limiting the effects of their occasional rearrangements to internal matters; men, on the other hand, competed by nature, and he couldn't see how their wife wouldn't get tired of them competing over her and just walk off years before the change of life called her from their side.
Melena looked up and saw him and smiled, an honest smile, one without lingering care or worry or stress.
"Ronon," she said fondly and perhaps a little chidingly, "there are other people on the beach." She set her tiles down and waved to the courting couple -- who, in the way of dreams, had not aged since he last dreamed this place while his voice was breaking -- and then to two boys with improbable hair, farther down the beach, smiting each other with swords that appeared to be made out of the substance the Tellurians called "nerf" (perhaps, from the way the blows were landing, with a more solid if hollow core).
Ronon would have asked her what she meant by that, but as he moved he realized that he was wearing more than one marriage stud -- perhaps several more than one -- and then, looking down, that he happened to be naked. In addition to the gold stud Melena had picked out for him, he was adorned with amber, ivory, and one carved of the same sort of quiet, slick stone as the little turtle Elizabeth Weir sometimes had on her desk.
"So?" he said instead.
"I, for one," Teyla said calmly, switching a tile in and out as she looked him up and down in a manner that was both much as she had at first and full of a squadmate's proprietary interest, "have no complaint."
"Yes, but you and we do not count," Melena observed, lips curving with a private joke Ronon was sure she would let him in on when it was time.
"Rohn!" the black-haired woman announced, holding up a full course of tiles, and of course she was Dr. Kusanagi. He couldn't think how he had managed not to see it before. She, for her part, seemed to first notice him, jumping with a little squeak (but keeping her course of tiles intact in oddly steady hands).
"Round off," Melena announced, tossing her tiles back in. "Miko, you deal next."
"But surely it is Teyla-san?" Dr. Kusanagi said, adding hers to the central pile. She spoke Satenaalo with an odd, lilting accent that was -- well, cute. It heightened her occasional resemblance to a paika-mouse. (Although Ronon wasn't quite sure what that "sahn" tag meant; it wasn't something she customarily added to names, although he rather thought he had heard her do so on some occasion.) "Since it fell to you the last time..." She nervously fiddled with the pendant around her own neck, intricately carved in slick softly-colored stone.
"Not in tiles," Melena began, and then checked herself and laughed. "But it's silly of me to everlastingly go on with Satedan tiles when Ronon's the only one who knows how to play. We'll switch to sparrow-tiles then, shall we? Ronon, come around and learn the rules, so you can play with them."
"He can have my place," the fourth woman said, not in the voice of a grown woman, but in that of the little girl Ronon had met here on the dream-beach when he was young. For her sake he had gone adventuring in an ongoing series of dreams that had been sometimes fun, sometimes scary, and always worth the envy of Colwyn and Orula -- and sometimes Dyne and Hialea -- as he told his deeds there to his full and half brothers and sisters, and so it seemed unsurprising now that she should be here, grown as he himself had grown. "I'm going to go see what Dr. McKay is doing."
"Grousing," Teyla said, not quite laughing. The other three did laugh, as the honey-blonde rose to her feet; Ronon could not -- quite -- make her grown face clear, any more than he could quite remember her name, despite the fact that he remembered her vividly, her and --
"Is Aiden here, too?" he wondered aloud.
"First Lieutenant Ford is practicing knifework with Lieutenant Commander Sheppard," Dr. Kusanagi said. Looking up just in time to meet Ronon's eyes as he took the newly vacated seat, she squeaked, blushed, and clapped her hands to her mouth.
A paika-mouse.
Then the sense of her words struck him, and he blinked. "Forgot Ford's personal name was Aiden; I used to think nobody else was called that."
"Aiden is always Aiden," Teyla averred serenely.
"That's not quite what I meant," Ronon said, not quite sure what he meant by that. Looking about for some change of topic, his eye fell on the scrub-sash that Melena was unaccountably wearing with her civilian clothes, the bilingual message M * NUANI, TRAUMA woven into its fabric clearly displayed.
"What happened to that? The last time I saw you." He could clearly recall her in her crisp whites, sashless, haloed in light.
(Later, he would wonder that his dream-self had recalled as much without horror or grief.)
Melena shrugged. "It'd been sterilized, so I used it for extra bandaging when we ran short."
"Oh, of course."
Of course that had been it; he should have known.
Teyla began to deal out tiles, hands moving with the swift grace she brought to all their works. Her amber pendants clattered together as she leaned across the table to deal to Ronon's hand.
Behind them, the boys had left off their padded-swordplay. The one with Wraith-white hair pulled out a pipe that had somehow been concealed within his sword, and began -- hesitantly, with several missed notes -- to pick out the tune of "Recessional." The courting couple were leaning on each other's shoulders to listen; the boat's colored sail was a bright splash against the horizon.
"The high stars will remember, lest we forget," Melena quoted, a jewel-tile in one hand and a lit candle in the other; "do thou therefore remember as long as thou canst, that it be long and long before we add to their heavy burden."
"It hurts," Ronon said. He had no intention of arguing; it was not as if he did not know his duty. His voice was level and unemotional,
reporting status.
"Pain is also a way of reporting that tissue is coming back to life," Melena answered, sympathetic.
"If you stop when you start," the voice of his childhood dream-friend (what had her name been? He rather thought there had been an 'n' in it somewhere) called from well down the beach, "maybe it won't hurt, but the only thing you can be sure it won't do is get better."
"If you gain enlightenment," Dr. Kusanagi said tentatively, "pain becomes immaterial. So does joy, and so I never understood why anyone would want to." She examined her tiles. "I must be very unenlightened."
Melena and Teyla laughed, and Ronon outright guffawed. Dr. Kusanagi jumped a little when he did, and then glared ferociously down at her fingernails, dull heat flushing her cheeks.
"What?" the last member of their group shouted.
"Later!" Melena called through cupped hands. "When you've done with Dr. McKay, you can come and take my place!"
"Shouldn't I -- " Ronon offered.
Melena smiled at him, the slow warm knowing smile that had always preceded a demonstration of her relative wisdom. "Ronon," she said gently, "you have to eat the doughnuts."
And just like that, he woke up, a smile on his lips and Melena's voice in his ears and the memory of his dream in his mind; a good omen for the third and last Day of the Dead.
Ronon chose a slightly different route for his dawn run, finishing up in one of the water purification chambers and coming to a more sudden stop than he had planned.
"Thought there was a pile of salt here," he grunted, filling a glass bottle from the water faucet set conveniently by.
"Kusanagi figured out how to get it to make giant salt crystals instead," Sheppard panted, flapping an arm at what Ronon had taken for a carefully laid wall of glass spars. "A little more water's bound up in them, but... stack nice, don't they?"
"All right if I take one?"
"Oh, sure; it's not as if we're about to run short anytime soon -- and if we do, we'll have worse problems." Sheppard wiped his forehead with the hairy back of an arm. "Well, kitchen roster waits for no man; tell me why I haven't pulled command privilege and got you on my shift?"
"Yours wasn't shorthanded." Ronon didn't add that in many places, command staff and civilian authorities wouldn't have been caught dead sharing in the allegedly common tasks of survival, or that kitchen undercrews were carefully chosen to have an appropriate percentage of those who could do anything under supervision and those who should flat-out never be allowed to cook.
"Yeah, that." Sheppard grinned and left as Ronon turned a salt crystal over in his hands, getting a feel for its relative fragility.
The Marine acting as morning-clerk for the quartermaster gave the salt crystal in Ronon's arms a weird look, but he brought Ronon a flashlight and explained that its energy cells were rechargeable without mentioning it.
Dr. Weir, acquiring a white bottle of something that rattled, was not so circumspect.
"Ronon?" Her eyebrows crawled nearly to her hairline. "What is that?"
"Salt," Ronon shrugged. "What's that?"
"... these are calcium supplement pills." Dr. Weir fell into step beside him. "It's not as if we've had much in the way of milk products, so... "
"Can I have one?"
She blinked. "One pill or one bottle?"
"Pill."
"I don't think that would hurt anything... I have an open one in my quarters, if that's all right."
He shrugged and followed her, trying once more to understand the woman who had no title to go with her role. When Sheppard had first brought him back to her, naturally he had assumed that the former was her husband; fortunately, Ronon had kept his mouth shut during the short time necessary for him to realize that he was not only wrong but laughably so.
Then he had thought that she must be married to Dr. McKay. Leaving aside the relative smoothness of their working rapport, in Ronon's experience men as abrasive as McKay didn't get appointed to high position without the close influence of powerful, interested women, no matter how talented they might be. Eventually, though, he had listened enough to what McKay persisted in saying and to what he didn't say to gather that that theory was wrong, too.
After that, he had presumed until very recently that Dr. Weir's husband had died the first year; which, while it would explain several of her more puzzling behaviors, left room for the sort of problems nobody sane wanted in their government. As soon as the mourning period had ended, or possibly sooner, the hruknor would have begun circling: the sole governor of the nation-city would have been a matrimonial prize even if she'd been old, ugly, and shrewish, which Dr. Weir -- Ronon's eyes slid over her appraisingly for a moment -- emphatically was not. Given that most of the Tellurian Atlanteans valued monogamy, unless she had married Sheppard or McKay -- or perhaps Medic Beckett, now that Cadman's courtship had stumbled -- there would have been anger, jealousy, and hurt feelings if she had chosen within the city, suspicion and danger if she'd looked outside it, and her husband would have been seen as a back door into the city's government whether he wanted to or not.
Now it seemed, if he had understood correctly, that Tellus had sent an unmarried woman as a leader. While certainly some women remained single, Ronon expected -- it'd been generally understood -- that women of a certain rank would have a husband, even if they were his third or fourth wife, as a helpmeet and to avoid just such problems. Certainly the City of the Ancestors -- Atlantis -- didn't seem to have been divided by showing off for Dr. Weir, but all that could change if she implied that she was looking around for the long term. Or even the short term, given the limited pool.
Nearly all of the Tellurians in Atlantis respected her; several had told him that Dr. Weir was a talented diplomat and a proven peacebroker, which... Ronon was hesitant to name his new acquaintances liars without direct proof, but he had certainly not seen any of these vaunted skills for himself.
Actually, what he had seen had been enough to back up several of the whispers he happened to have heard. So far, he had pretended ignorance; his allegiance, inasmuch as it existed in Atlantis, was given to Sheppard, and to a lesser extent to his team, and now to --
"Dr. Kusanagi," he said absently, "is shy and fierce."
"She really isn't that shy," Dr. Weir said. "I think you unnerve her."
"I'm not an unnerving person." Except on purpose, but that was different.
Dr. Weir stopped and turned to face him. "I don't think you really appreciate how you appear to others."
Ronon waited for her to elaborate.
"You're tall, and impressively fit, and and good-looking in a-- an uncommon sort of way. And you move very quietly, so it seems to them that you've just appeared, which can be startling."
She strode off to her room without waiting for an answer, and he followed, wondering if that had been a subtle pass.
If it had been, it was either dangerously reckless or an impressive gesture of trust. Given Dr. Weir's situation, however, it might also be a declaration of support or outright allegiance; or, nearly as bad, something that would affect the view of her leadership. Even if it would not be so publicly, he did not want to deceive her (at least, no more than absolutely necessary).
If it had been.
By the time they reached her quarters, he had decided that unless she asked outright, he would fake oblivious goodwill. No matter how annoyed someone might be by it, they usually weren't insulted, and it would be infinitely better to annoy Dr. Weir by playing the blushing innocent than to answer a question she hadn't thought of asking and make her think him cheap or worse.
He hovered on her doorway's threshold but not actually within it while she disappeared into the washroom, ran water for a moment, and came out with something small in her cupped hand, imperfectly controlling her slight consternation at finding him blocking the exit.
"The turtle on the shelf. What's it made of?" Ronon freed a hand long enough to gesture before turning sideways and out of the doorway.
"This?" Dr. Weir lifted the carving for a moment and set it down near where it had been. "It's a stone we call 'jade,' and it's valued more for its real and perceived properties rather than for any rarity."
Ronon nodded, took the calcium tablet when she handed it to him, and left to go his own way while she headed towards the central rooms and her meeting with Teyla.
On the third Day of the Dead, Ronon finally went to the chapel and pulled back the curtain of the alcove given over to the dead, lifting one of the peaches there and offering it to the Atlantean dead and to the Satedan dead he carried with him before biting into it.
It was sweet and juicy, perhaps a little tart and hard but not enough to spoil the taste, and he licked up every drop of juice he could, cleaning the pit near-dry with his tongue.
Then he took up the plate of food left there and the jar of oilberry oil and likewise offered them before setting them to one side. He took up the large piece of metal foil he had torn from the kitchen's roll and laid it on the makeshift table in the alcove, and set on it the bottle of water, the long salt crystal, and the calcium tablet. Next to them, he carefully balanced the flashlight on its end and turned it on, letting it cast a circle of light on the ceiling.
Then he withdrew from his vest a stick to which he had tied a bright ribbon, one he had traded for with Marta the evening before. Solemnly, he waved the streamer back and forth over the table and through the cone of light five times before setting it down on the metal foil with a clatter.
By rights there should have been a bell. But the bell would only toll out the dead of the past year, and there had been none for all the long years since Sateda fell and any bell would have rung in unceasing clatter to mark not only one family's dead but all the families themselves.
And then he realized that, after all, there should have been a bell, and drew two of his knives. He held them loosely in one hand and rang them on each other with a snap of his wrist, once for each Atlantean who had died since he had come to the City.
Ronon checked his knives for dents or scrapes, sheathed them, and found room for the pot of oil on yesterday's plate. He picked it up and walked out of the chapel and down the hall to the transporter that would take him to the hall outside Dr. Weir's office.
She was not, certainly, who he would first have chosen, but she was the first person he had run into by chance rather than plan, and thus good luck for the setting-in-order of the Third Day.
As it turned out, she was standing just outside the door of her office when he came upon her, heaving a sigh as she raised her voice to one of the scientists.
"Daniel, our priority is and will remain Ancient artifacts and technology, as well as possible offense or defense against the Wraith. Unless you've found some reason to suggest the presence of one or both, or a trading partner or some other reason to invest time and talent, I can't authorize a follow-up mission to an essentially dead world."
"Elizabeth!" The other man threw his hands up and out in frustration, and Ronon deftly avoided them, forcing himself to meet the mismatched gaze behind the eye-lenses equanimitably and nod politely.
He didn't know Dr. Jackson well. The Tellurian-born had left a memorable first impression (raving madness tends to do that, particularly when the madman in question attempts to tear your head off and use it for a kickball because of a simple misunderstanding, with or without the added disruptor stun); he had insisted as soon as he was reliably lucid on apologizing to Ronon, but they hadn't run across each other much after that. While Ronon was adjusting to being on Sheppard's team, Dr. Jackson had been recovering from what the Wraith had unwittingly done to him; later, Ronon had found himself training the Marines while Dr. Jackson did... whatever his science department did. (Plenty of people were willing to tell Ronon what it was that Dr. Jackson did do, to the effect that he: did the same thing Ronon and his team did; dug up graves; translated anything, anytime, anywhere; commanded Marines in the field in his spare time; did the sort of internal and interdepartmental diplomatic fence-mending that was supposed to be Dr. Weir's specialty, except when his own argument was at stake; grubbed through abandoned dumps; and was entirely capable of suddenly turning into an Enlightened Ancestor and flying off to do whatever they did, having [maybe] done it once before [possibly] with coaching from one of his teammates.)
In short, he was a puzzle, and Ronon didn't particularly have time to poke at puzzles. Even without the extra one of why, in the City of the Ancestors full of Ancient artifacts, the Atlanteans could not remove the taint from his flat black eye. (Ronon had heard, once, that the emergency healing box could probably do it, but that they weren't using it because of the risk of "transference." Whatever that was supposed to mean. You'd think you'd be able to understand each other when you both spoke the same language perfectly.)
"I know that's your first priority," the main puzzle in question was saying now, "but until any of that actually turns up, we could be out working! You don't notice it as often because usually we don't get there until well after the question's moot, but in the early stages, time is critical. We're losing knowledge every day, and it would only take a little effort to get at least some of it -- many of us are field-certified for offworld, and we could monitor the ones who aren't, so it isn't as if we'd be monopolizing a squadron of Marines -- although if any of them wanted to come along to help with the heavy lifting, they'd be welcome -- and we'd be doing our jobs. You let the geologists play on the mainland."
"But..." Dr. Weir seemed almost bewildered by the outburst. "You have the Ancient databases, you have Atlantis, your translations are priceless, I know we haven't managed to find you a new offworld team yet but until we do you have your work... "
"For those of us who are linguists first and foremost," Dr. Jackson was almost gentle. "I'm a linguist too, but what I am, when you come right down to it, is an archaeologist. There was never enough time for it on SG-1. The living needed us, and that's fair. But here the living don't need us now. It could be weeks or months before the living do need us. And in the meantime, we could be doing what we can for the dead... "
"The dead?" Dr. Weir sounded startled.
"That's... I expect it's at least part of why we became archaeologists. To learn everything we can from the things left behind, because we couldn't stand the idea that a town or a nation or a world of people who were there, who lived and laughed and cried, could go down into the dark with no one to remember who they were. Or that they were."
"There are some pictures that Jack made," Staff Captain Jackson said over the radio. "Of my homeworld when it was there. If I die, you will have them, and some of my personal belongings."
When it was there...?
Maybe he should have talked to the woman, the way all three of his teammates had suggested.
"The Court of Law was in the eastern part of Ring City," Ronon said instead. "They used to carve the most important of the laws on stone plaques. Some of them might be there."
"Really?" Dr. Jackson said. "Do you suppose you could stop by Anthro and Linguistics today or tomorrow and write us some directions, or maybe even a map?"
"Today's good," Ronon shrugged.
"Thank you," Dr. Jackson said, giving the words their full weight and meaning before turning back to Dr. Weir. "Elizabeth. Please." A wry smile suddenly crept onto his face. "You don't want to have to deal with some of my people in the city when they're bored and resenting it."
"I don't want to be dealing with it now," Dr. Weir sighed. "How's Vanessa?"
"Still green," Dr. Jackson shrugged. "You will think about it?"
"I can't promise anything, and I don't think the IOA would go for it, but."
"'But' is all I ask for," Dr. Jackson smiled. "I have somewhere I should have been... three minutes ago, so." He hurried to the transporter.
"Ronon?" The patience in Dr. Weir's voice was tired, and he automatically straightened up a fraction more.
"Peach?"
Elizabeth Weir blinked at him and then smiled, reaching out to take the fruit from his hand. "Thank you, Ronon." Easy and facile, and yet sincere in her own way.
"Welcome," Ronon said, nodding before he went on his way.
When you must betray a man -- or a woman -- it costs nothing to be polite.
"You've been keeping to yourself the past few days," Lorne said at dinner, looking up as Ronon carried his tray past him. "Mind if I ask where you've been?"
"Just now, Anthro and Linguistics."
"What have you been doing there?" Dr. McKay demanded, utterly failing to move aside as Ronon set his tray in the small space on that side of the table and hooked a chair with his foot.
"Answered questions. Ate bread and fruit jerky. Learned a few things."
"'Things,' such as what?" Teyla asked, cutting the bread in her browned onion soup.
"Where they come from, men wear a ring on a finger -- this finger -- if they're married."
"Actually, women are usually the ones who wear wedding rings," Sheppard contradicted. "Sometimes men do too, but it's not as common."
"Where would you expect such a ring?" Teyla said.
"Women usually wore a pendant around their neck," Ronon told her and the others, "and sometimes men wore a ring on their kekele, but if it wasn't tight enough not to fall off it wasn't loose enough to be comfortable if you were doing anything other than pissing with it, so we usually wore studs."
"Studs?" Sheppard said, curiosity mixed with suspicion.
Ronon pulled the laces of his trousers loose and tugged his kekele out far enough for his teammates to see his wedding stud.
"Ah," Teyla said noncommittally.
"Uh..." Sheppard said.
"Agh!" McKay yelped. "Put that thing away! The only sausage at the dinner table should be the kind I put in my mouth!"
There was silence in the dining hall. A brooding silence. An almost-eager, fascinated silence.
"I meant," McKay snapped, "the kind I swallow."
The last time Ronon had heard a silence quite that profound, he had been in a limestone cavern with a hole worn into the roof.
"You'd better quit while you can, sir," Lorne suggested.
"I don't know," Sheppard said. "There's something morbidly fascinating about watching him dig himself deeper."
McKay used his eating utensil to fling an oilberry at Sheppard. It hit him in the middle of his forehead, bounced off, and rebounded off the end of his nose.
Sheppard threw a chunk of cheese at McKay, who ducked. The cheese landed in somebody's soup.
"FOOD FIGHT!" a young man yelled, and after a moment of stillness the air was suddenly full of flying edibles.
Ronon shrugged, scooped up his plastic soup bowl with one hand, and flung it as far down the dining hall as he could.
Deep in the night after the third Day of the Dead, Ronon, scrubbed clean after his part in scrubbing the dining hall clean, came into the chapel with a smile on his face.
His chosen side had, of course, won the food battle as much as anyone could have been said to have done so. Much of it was funny even in retrospect, although he still thought the most amusing part had been when Teyla and Kate Heightmeyer each solemnly picked up a slice of chocolate cream pie and carefully smeared it across the other's nose.
Even the face Dr. Weir had made as she came late into dinner had been priceless, although one she made after the yogurt landed in her ear might have been yet better.
Still, it was not... quite... the appropriate mood for the Last Midnight of the Dead, and so Ronon composed himself, knelt before the 'altar,' and sang "Recessional."
He poured some of the water out on the floor (it would manage, somehow; the floors of Atlantis were remarkably resistant to tracking in weather), capped the bottle, picked the flashlight up to light his way, and bundled the rest up in the metal foil.
The transporters ensured that he reached the end of the East Pier quickly. It was just as well, as one Specialist wasn't much of a procession.
The Specialist in question stared out at the dark water a long time.
"You'd have liked them," he said at last.
He picked up the salt crystal, altered his grip a little for better balance, and added "I do."
Then he threw the salt crystal out into the ocean, flung the calcium tablet after it, and upended the water bottle over the side.
He crumpled the metal foil into a ball, recapped the bottle, left them at the reclaiming station the Atlanteans had set up in the middle of a corridor, and went to bed.
At the middle-night beginning of the day after the Days of the Dead, Ronon dropped straight into a deep sleep, and awoke later out of a deep sleep; and if he slipped into dream any time between those two points, it was overwritten and forgotten long before he woke up.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-ratings/warnings- Reference to canon pairings, including (or perhaps especially) Ronon/Melena. Implications, both of possible eventual pairings and of in-story speculation. Some crude physical humor. Spelling/orthographic variations denoting mishearings or misunderstandings. Noticeably part of my pet asymptotic-to-canon AU.
-timeframe- Shortly before "Aurora."
-spoilers- For "Sateda" and "Runner," obviously.
-characters- Ronon, Melena, Teyla, Miko, Sheppard, Elizabeth, Rodney, Lorne, a Heightmeyer cameo, and... others. ^_^
-notes- This is the third part of three, following this and this, and I'm not sure how much sense it would make on its own.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Also herein loosely referenced are characters and situations belonging to Disney, SquareEnix, Madeleine L'Engle, and Hagio Moto.
-word count- 5404
-summary- The first day is for letting go; the second for holding on; and the third for putting things in order, setting memories in their place and walking on with one's eyes forward.
The first day
The second day
and now:
Days of the Dead:
The Third Day (Mineralium)
In the dim small hours of the third Day of the Dead, Ronon's dreams led him to the main room of the apartment Melena had shared with him.
He could hear her laughter, warm and happy, drifting through the doorway, and the click of tiles.
So he went through the doorway, content and aware in some small part of his mind that it was odd that he should be so, and found himself on the beach of his childhood dreams.
Perhaps his experiences with real beaches, in the waking world, had given it more depth and realism; but the sky was still that perfect, impossible blue, and the waves echoed it in a deeper, wine-rich hue. The double-hulled boat at anchor out in the gentle waves now had passengers; he squinted for a moment and then recognized his father hoisting the sail, while his mother and stepmother sat by the tiller and all his brothers and sisters scrambled over the boat, calling to each other and drawing up the anchor. He cupped his hands to hail them, but then realized that the same breeze that brought their voices to him would throw his back in his teeth.
The young woman with the thick round eye-lenses was sitting under the tallest palm tree on the hillock again; today the redhead she seemed to be courting was sitting with her. Ronon thought once again that he really should find out who they were before he woke up, and then it slipped from his mind yet again as Melena said "Four-in-hand."
She was sitting at a table, feigning a frown as she played a hand of tiles, wearing something green and low-cut enough to show her wedding pendant. Next to her, Teyla was wearing that blue outfit of hers, and had added to some of the necklaces Ronon had seen before a string bearing four impressively large pieces of dark amber; one simply shaped, one intricately carved, one formed into a polished ring, and the last, lighter one with -- his feet carried him closer to the tiles table without any conscious decision on his part, and he saw that his teammate appeared to have a spider in her new pendant.
The other two tiles players were also women; their backs were towards him, but one was black-haired and the other blonde, and they were both wearing Atlantean-issue trousers and soft black tea shirts.
"So on your world," Melena was asking, "rather than a woman looking out from her doorstep and choosing one husband, preferably one married to one or more of her dear friends, she will choose several husbands and... what, visit them each in turn?"
"Not... precisely," Teyla answered. She, too, seemed to be speaking his native Satenaalo, although her voice somehow was still uniquely Teyla. "And in any case, those conjoined are expected to live together or at least right next to each other; that is why they are also called 'comrades,' because they share a chamber."
"But it is true that you have multiple husbands rather than multiple wives."
"It can be." Teyla turned a bracelet of knotted red-gold amber back and forth in her hand.
It still seemed strange to Ronon -- women, at least, tended to organize themselves in a trellis and then stay there, limiting the effects of their occasional rearrangements to internal matters; men, on the other hand, competed by nature, and he couldn't see how their wife wouldn't get tired of them competing over her and just walk off years before the change of life called her from their side.
Melena looked up and saw him and smiled, an honest smile, one without lingering care or worry or stress.
"Ronon," she said fondly and perhaps a little chidingly, "there are other people on the beach." She set her tiles down and waved to the courting couple -- who, in the way of dreams, had not aged since he last dreamed this place while his voice was breaking -- and then to two boys with improbable hair, farther down the beach, smiting each other with swords that appeared to be made out of the substance the Tellurians called "nerf" (perhaps, from the way the blows were landing, with a more solid if hollow core).
Ronon would have asked her what she meant by that, but as he moved he realized that he was wearing more than one marriage stud -- perhaps several more than one -- and then, looking down, that he happened to be naked. In addition to the gold stud Melena had picked out for him, he was adorned with amber, ivory, and one carved of the same sort of quiet, slick stone as the little turtle Elizabeth Weir sometimes had on her desk.
"So?" he said instead.
"I, for one," Teyla said calmly, switching a tile in and out as she looked him up and down in a manner that was both much as she had at first and full of a squadmate's proprietary interest, "have no complaint."
"Yes, but you and we do not count," Melena observed, lips curving with a private joke Ronon was sure she would let him in on when it was time.
"Rohn!" the black-haired woman announced, holding up a full course of tiles, and of course she was Dr. Kusanagi. He couldn't think how he had managed not to see it before. She, for her part, seemed to first notice him, jumping with a little squeak (but keeping her course of tiles intact in oddly steady hands).
"Round off," Melena announced, tossing her tiles back in. "Miko, you deal next."
"But surely it is Teyla-san?" Dr. Kusanagi said, adding hers to the central pile. She spoke Satenaalo with an odd, lilting accent that was -- well, cute. It heightened her occasional resemblance to a paika-mouse. (Although Ronon wasn't quite sure what that "sahn" tag meant; it wasn't something she customarily added to names, although he rather thought he had heard her do so on some occasion.) "Since it fell to you the last time..." She nervously fiddled with the pendant around her own neck, intricately carved in slick softly-colored stone.
"Not in tiles," Melena began, and then checked herself and laughed. "But it's silly of me to everlastingly go on with Satedan tiles when Ronon's the only one who knows how to play. We'll switch to sparrow-tiles then, shall we? Ronon, come around and learn the rules, so you can play with them."
"He can have my place," the fourth woman said, not in the voice of a grown woman, but in that of the little girl Ronon had met here on the dream-beach when he was young. For her sake he had gone adventuring in an ongoing series of dreams that had been sometimes fun, sometimes scary, and always worth the envy of Colwyn and Orula -- and sometimes Dyne and Hialea -- as he told his deeds there to his full and half brothers and sisters, and so it seemed unsurprising now that she should be here, grown as he himself had grown. "I'm going to go see what Dr. McKay is doing."
"Grousing," Teyla said, not quite laughing. The other three did laugh, as the honey-blonde rose to her feet; Ronon could not -- quite -- make her grown face clear, any more than he could quite remember her name, despite the fact that he remembered her vividly, her and --
"Is Aiden here, too?" he wondered aloud.
"First Lieutenant Ford is practicing knifework with Lieutenant Commander Sheppard," Dr. Kusanagi said. Looking up just in time to meet Ronon's eyes as he took the newly vacated seat, she squeaked, blushed, and clapped her hands to her mouth.
A paika-mouse.
Then the sense of her words struck him, and he blinked. "Forgot Ford's personal name was Aiden; I used to think nobody else was called that."
"Aiden is always Aiden," Teyla averred serenely.
"That's not quite what I meant," Ronon said, not quite sure what he meant by that. Looking about for some change of topic, his eye fell on the scrub-sash that Melena was unaccountably wearing with her civilian clothes, the bilingual message M * NUANI, TRAUMA woven into its fabric clearly displayed.
"What happened to that? The last time I saw you." He could clearly recall her in her crisp whites, sashless, haloed in light.
(Later, he would wonder that his dream-self had recalled as much without horror or grief.)
Melena shrugged. "It'd been sterilized, so I used it for extra bandaging when we ran short."
"Oh, of course."
Of course that had been it; he should have known.
Teyla began to deal out tiles, hands moving with the swift grace she brought to all their works. Her amber pendants clattered together as she leaned across the table to deal to Ronon's hand.
Behind them, the boys had left off their padded-swordplay. The one with Wraith-white hair pulled out a pipe that had somehow been concealed within his sword, and began -- hesitantly, with several missed notes -- to pick out the tune of "Recessional." The courting couple were leaning on each other's shoulders to listen; the boat's colored sail was a bright splash against the horizon.
"The high stars will remember, lest we forget," Melena quoted, a jewel-tile in one hand and a lit candle in the other; "do thou therefore remember as long as thou canst, that it be long and long before we add to their heavy burden."
"It hurts," Ronon said. He had no intention of arguing; it was not as if he did not know his duty. His voice was level and unemotional,
reporting status.
"Pain is also a way of reporting that tissue is coming back to life," Melena answered, sympathetic.
"If you stop when you start," the voice of his childhood dream-friend (what had her name been? He rather thought there had been an 'n' in it somewhere) called from well down the beach, "maybe it won't hurt, but the only thing you can be sure it won't do is get better."
"If you gain enlightenment," Dr. Kusanagi said tentatively, "pain becomes immaterial. So does joy, and so I never understood why anyone would want to." She examined her tiles. "I must be very unenlightened."
Melena and Teyla laughed, and Ronon outright guffawed. Dr. Kusanagi jumped a little when he did, and then glared ferociously down at her fingernails, dull heat flushing her cheeks.
"What?" the last member of their group shouted.
"Later!" Melena called through cupped hands. "When you've done with Dr. McKay, you can come and take my place!"
"Shouldn't I -- " Ronon offered.
Melena smiled at him, the slow warm knowing smile that had always preceded a demonstration of her relative wisdom. "Ronon," she said gently, "you have to eat the doughnuts."
And just like that, he woke up, a smile on his lips and Melena's voice in his ears and the memory of his dream in his mind; a good omen for the third and last Day of the Dead.
Ronon chose a slightly different route for his dawn run, finishing up in one of the water purification chambers and coming to a more sudden stop than he had planned.
"Thought there was a pile of salt here," he grunted, filling a glass bottle from the water faucet set conveniently by.
"Kusanagi figured out how to get it to make giant salt crystals instead," Sheppard panted, flapping an arm at what Ronon had taken for a carefully laid wall of glass spars. "A little more water's bound up in them, but... stack nice, don't they?"
"All right if I take one?"
"Oh, sure; it's not as if we're about to run short anytime soon -- and if we do, we'll have worse problems." Sheppard wiped his forehead with the hairy back of an arm. "Well, kitchen roster waits for no man; tell me why I haven't pulled command privilege and got you on my shift?"
"Yours wasn't shorthanded." Ronon didn't add that in many places, command staff and civilian authorities wouldn't have been caught dead sharing in the allegedly common tasks of survival, or that kitchen undercrews were carefully chosen to have an appropriate percentage of those who could do anything under supervision and those who should flat-out never be allowed to cook.
"Yeah, that." Sheppard grinned and left as Ronon turned a salt crystal over in his hands, getting a feel for its relative fragility.
The Marine acting as morning-clerk for the quartermaster gave the salt crystal in Ronon's arms a weird look, but he brought Ronon a flashlight and explained that its energy cells were rechargeable without mentioning it.
Dr. Weir, acquiring a white bottle of something that rattled, was not so circumspect.
"Ronon?" Her eyebrows crawled nearly to her hairline. "What is that?"
"Salt," Ronon shrugged. "What's that?"
"... these are calcium supplement pills." Dr. Weir fell into step beside him. "It's not as if we've had much in the way of milk products, so... "
"Can I have one?"
She blinked. "One pill or one bottle?"
"Pill."
"I don't think that would hurt anything... I have an open one in my quarters, if that's all right."
He shrugged and followed her, trying once more to understand the woman who had no title to go with her role. When Sheppard had first brought him back to her, naturally he had assumed that the former was her husband; fortunately, Ronon had kept his mouth shut during the short time necessary for him to realize that he was not only wrong but laughably so.
Then he had thought that she must be married to Dr. McKay. Leaving aside the relative smoothness of their working rapport, in Ronon's experience men as abrasive as McKay didn't get appointed to high position without the close influence of powerful, interested women, no matter how talented they might be. Eventually, though, he had listened enough to what McKay persisted in saying and to what he didn't say to gather that that theory was wrong, too.
After that, he had presumed until very recently that Dr. Weir's husband had died the first year; which, while it would explain several of her more puzzling behaviors, left room for the sort of problems nobody sane wanted in their government. As soon as the mourning period had ended, or possibly sooner, the hruknor would have begun circling: the sole governor of the nation-city would have been a matrimonial prize even if she'd been old, ugly, and shrewish, which Dr. Weir -- Ronon's eyes slid over her appraisingly for a moment -- emphatically was not. Given that most of the Tellurian Atlanteans valued monogamy, unless she had married Sheppard or McKay -- or perhaps Medic Beckett, now that Cadman's courtship had stumbled -- there would have been anger, jealousy, and hurt feelings if she had chosen within the city, suspicion and danger if she'd looked outside it, and her husband would have been seen as a back door into the city's government whether he wanted to or not.
Now it seemed, if he had understood correctly, that Tellus had sent an unmarried woman as a leader. While certainly some women remained single, Ronon expected -- it'd been generally understood -- that women of a certain rank would have a husband, even if they were his third or fourth wife, as a helpmeet and to avoid just such problems. Certainly the City of the Ancestors -- Atlantis -- didn't seem to have been divided by showing off for Dr. Weir, but all that could change if she implied that she was looking around for the long term. Or even the short term, given the limited pool.
Nearly all of the Tellurians in Atlantis respected her; several had told him that Dr. Weir was a talented diplomat and a proven peacebroker, which... Ronon was hesitant to name his new acquaintances liars without direct proof, but he had certainly not seen any of these vaunted skills for himself.
Actually, what he had seen had been enough to back up several of the whispers he happened to have heard. So far, he had pretended ignorance; his allegiance, inasmuch as it existed in Atlantis, was given to Sheppard, and to a lesser extent to his team, and now to --
"Dr. Kusanagi," he said absently, "is shy and fierce."
"She really isn't that shy," Dr. Weir said. "I think you unnerve her."
"I'm not an unnerving person." Except on purpose, but that was different.
Dr. Weir stopped and turned to face him. "I don't think you really appreciate how you appear to others."
Ronon waited for her to elaborate.
"You're tall, and impressively fit, and and good-looking in a-- an uncommon sort of way. And you move very quietly, so it seems to them that you've just appeared, which can be startling."
She strode off to her room without waiting for an answer, and he followed, wondering if that had been a subtle pass.
If it had been, it was either dangerously reckless or an impressive gesture of trust. Given Dr. Weir's situation, however, it might also be a declaration of support or outright allegiance; or, nearly as bad, something that would affect the view of her leadership. Even if it would not be so publicly, he did not want to deceive her (at least, no more than absolutely necessary).
If it had been.
By the time they reached her quarters, he had decided that unless she asked outright, he would fake oblivious goodwill. No matter how annoyed someone might be by it, they usually weren't insulted, and it would be infinitely better to annoy Dr. Weir by playing the blushing innocent than to answer a question she hadn't thought of asking and make her think him cheap or worse.
He hovered on her doorway's threshold but not actually within it while she disappeared into the washroom, ran water for a moment, and came out with something small in her cupped hand, imperfectly controlling her slight consternation at finding him blocking the exit.
"The turtle on the shelf. What's it made of?" Ronon freed a hand long enough to gesture before turning sideways and out of the doorway.
"This?" Dr. Weir lifted the carving for a moment and set it down near where it had been. "It's a stone we call 'jade,' and it's valued more for its real and perceived properties rather than for any rarity."
Ronon nodded, took the calcium tablet when she handed it to him, and left to go his own way while she headed towards the central rooms and her meeting with Teyla.
On the third Day of the Dead, Ronon finally went to the chapel and pulled back the curtain of the alcove given over to the dead, lifting one of the peaches there and offering it to the Atlantean dead and to the Satedan dead he carried with him before biting into it.
It was sweet and juicy, perhaps a little tart and hard but not enough to spoil the taste, and he licked up every drop of juice he could, cleaning the pit near-dry with his tongue.
Then he took up the plate of food left there and the jar of oilberry oil and likewise offered them before setting them to one side. He took up the large piece of metal foil he had torn from the kitchen's roll and laid it on the makeshift table in the alcove, and set on it the bottle of water, the long salt crystal, and the calcium tablet. Next to them, he carefully balanced the flashlight on its end and turned it on, letting it cast a circle of light on the ceiling.
Then he withdrew from his vest a stick to which he had tied a bright ribbon, one he had traded for with Marta the evening before. Solemnly, he waved the streamer back and forth over the table and through the cone of light five times before setting it down on the metal foil with a clatter.
By rights there should have been a bell. But the bell would only toll out the dead of the past year, and there had been none for all the long years since Sateda fell and any bell would have rung in unceasing clatter to mark not only one family's dead but all the families themselves.
And then he realized that, after all, there should have been a bell, and drew two of his knives. He held them loosely in one hand and rang them on each other with a snap of his wrist, once for each Atlantean who had died since he had come to the City.
Ronon checked his knives for dents or scrapes, sheathed them, and found room for the pot of oil on yesterday's plate. He picked it up and walked out of the chapel and down the hall to the transporter that would take him to the hall outside Dr. Weir's office.
She was not, certainly, who he would first have chosen, but she was the first person he had run into by chance rather than plan, and thus good luck for the setting-in-order of the Third Day.
As it turned out, she was standing just outside the door of her office when he came upon her, heaving a sigh as she raised her voice to one of the scientists.
"Daniel, our priority is and will remain Ancient artifacts and technology, as well as possible offense or defense against the Wraith. Unless you've found some reason to suggest the presence of one or both, or a trading partner or some other reason to invest time and talent, I can't authorize a follow-up mission to an essentially dead world."
"Elizabeth!" The other man threw his hands up and out in frustration, and Ronon deftly avoided them, forcing himself to meet the mismatched gaze behind the eye-lenses equanimitably and nod politely.
He didn't know Dr. Jackson well. The Tellurian-born had left a memorable first impression (raving madness tends to do that, particularly when the madman in question attempts to tear your head off and use it for a kickball because of a simple misunderstanding, with or without the added disruptor stun); he had insisted as soon as he was reliably lucid on apologizing to Ronon, but they hadn't run across each other much after that. While Ronon was adjusting to being on Sheppard's team, Dr. Jackson had been recovering from what the Wraith had unwittingly done to him; later, Ronon had found himself training the Marines while Dr. Jackson did... whatever his science department did. (Plenty of people were willing to tell Ronon what it was that Dr. Jackson did do, to the effect that he: did the same thing Ronon and his team did; dug up graves; translated anything, anytime, anywhere; commanded Marines in the field in his spare time; did the sort of internal and interdepartmental diplomatic fence-mending that was supposed to be Dr. Weir's specialty, except when his own argument was at stake; grubbed through abandoned dumps; and was entirely capable of suddenly turning into an Enlightened Ancestor and flying off to do whatever they did, having [maybe] done it once before [possibly] with coaching from one of his teammates.)
In short, he was a puzzle, and Ronon didn't particularly have time to poke at puzzles. Even without the extra one of why, in the City of the Ancestors full of Ancient artifacts, the Atlanteans could not remove the taint from his flat black eye. (Ronon had heard, once, that the emergency healing box could probably do it, but that they weren't using it because of the risk of "transference." Whatever that was supposed to mean. You'd think you'd be able to understand each other when you both spoke the same language perfectly.)
"I know that's your first priority," the main puzzle in question was saying now, "but until any of that actually turns up, we could be out working! You don't notice it as often because usually we don't get there until well after the question's moot, but in the early stages, time is critical. We're losing knowledge every day, and it would only take a little effort to get at least some of it -- many of us are field-certified for offworld, and we could monitor the ones who aren't, so it isn't as if we'd be monopolizing a squadron of Marines -- although if any of them wanted to come along to help with the heavy lifting, they'd be welcome -- and we'd be doing our jobs. You let the geologists play on the mainland."
"But..." Dr. Weir seemed almost bewildered by the outburst. "You have the Ancient databases, you have Atlantis, your translations are priceless, I know we haven't managed to find you a new offworld team yet but until we do you have your work... "
"For those of us who are linguists first and foremost," Dr. Jackson was almost gentle. "I'm a linguist too, but what I am, when you come right down to it, is an archaeologist. There was never enough time for it on SG-1. The living needed us, and that's fair. But here the living don't need us now. It could be weeks or months before the living do need us. And in the meantime, we could be doing what we can for the dead... "
"The dead?" Dr. Weir sounded startled.
"That's... I expect it's at least part of why we became archaeologists. To learn everything we can from the things left behind, because we couldn't stand the idea that a town or a nation or a world of people who were there, who lived and laughed and cried, could go down into the dark with no one to remember who they were. Or that they were."
"There are some pictures that Jack made," Staff Captain Jackson said over the radio. "Of my homeworld when it was there. If I die, you will have them, and some of my personal belongings."
When it was there...?
Maybe he should have talked to the woman, the way all three of his teammates had suggested.
"The Court of Law was in the eastern part of Ring City," Ronon said instead. "They used to carve the most important of the laws on stone plaques. Some of them might be there."
"Really?" Dr. Jackson said. "Do you suppose you could stop by Anthro and Linguistics today or tomorrow and write us some directions, or maybe even a map?"
"Today's good," Ronon shrugged.
"Thank you," Dr. Jackson said, giving the words their full weight and meaning before turning back to Dr. Weir. "Elizabeth. Please." A wry smile suddenly crept onto his face. "You don't want to have to deal with some of my people in the city when they're bored and resenting it."
"I don't want to be dealing with it now," Dr. Weir sighed. "How's Vanessa?"
"Still green," Dr. Jackson shrugged. "You will think about it?"
"I can't promise anything, and I don't think the IOA would go for it, but."
"'But' is all I ask for," Dr. Jackson smiled. "I have somewhere I should have been... three minutes ago, so." He hurried to the transporter.
"Ronon?" The patience in Dr. Weir's voice was tired, and he automatically straightened up a fraction more.
"Peach?"
Elizabeth Weir blinked at him and then smiled, reaching out to take the fruit from his hand. "Thank you, Ronon." Easy and facile, and yet sincere in her own way.
"Welcome," Ronon said, nodding before he went on his way.
When you must betray a man -- or a woman -- it costs nothing to be polite.
"You've been keeping to yourself the past few days," Lorne said at dinner, looking up as Ronon carried his tray past him. "Mind if I ask where you've been?"
"Just now, Anthro and Linguistics."
"What have you been doing there?" Dr. McKay demanded, utterly failing to move aside as Ronon set his tray in the small space on that side of the table and hooked a chair with his foot.
"Answered questions. Ate bread and fruit jerky. Learned a few things."
"'Things,' such as what?" Teyla asked, cutting the bread in her browned onion soup.
"Where they come from, men wear a ring on a finger -- this finger -- if they're married."
"Actually, women are usually the ones who wear wedding rings," Sheppard contradicted. "Sometimes men do too, but it's not as common."
"Where would you expect such a ring?" Teyla said.
"Women usually wore a pendant around their neck," Ronon told her and the others, "and sometimes men wore a ring on their kekele, but if it wasn't tight enough not to fall off it wasn't loose enough to be comfortable if you were doing anything other than pissing with it, so we usually wore studs."
"Studs?" Sheppard said, curiosity mixed with suspicion.
Ronon pulled the laces of his trousers loose and tugged his kekele out far enough for his teammates to see his wedding stud.
"Ah," Teyla said noncommittally.
"Uh..." Sheppard said.
"Agh!" McKay yelped. "Put that thing away! The only sausage at the dinner table should be the kind I put in my mouth!"
There was silence in the dining hall. A brooding silence. An almost-eager, fascinated silence.
"I meant," McKay snapped, "the kind I swallow."
The last time Ronon had heard a silence quite that profound, he had been in a limestone cavern with a hole worn into the roof.
"You'd better quit while you can, sir," Lorne suggested.
"I don't know," Sheppard said. "There's something morbidly fascinating about watching him dig himself deeper."
McKay used his eating utensil to fling an oilberry at Sheppard. It hit him in the middle of his forehead, bounced off, and rebounded off the end of his nose.
Sheppard threw a chunk of cheese at McKay, who ducked. The cheese landed in somebody's soup.
"FOOD FIGHT!" a young man yelled, and after a moment of stillness the air was suddenly full of flying edibles.
Ronon shrugged, scooped up his plastic soup bowl with one hand, and flung it as far down the dining hall as he could.
Deep in the night after the third Day of the Dead, Ronon, scrubbed clean after his part in scrubbing the dining hall clean, came into the chapel with a smile on his face.
His chosen side had, of course, won the food battle as much as anyone could have been said to have done so. Much of it was funny even in retrospect, although he still thought the most amusing part had been when Teyla and Kate Heightmeyer each solemnly picked up a slice of chocolate cream pie and carefully smeared it across the other's nose.
Even the face Dr. Weir had made as she came late into dinner had been priceless, although one she made after the yogurt landed in her ear might have been yet better.
Still, it was not... quite... the appropriate mood for the Last Midnight of the Dead, and so Ronon composed himself, knelt before the 'altar,' and sang "Recessional."
He poured some of the water out on the floor (it would manage, somehow; the floors of Atlantis were remarkably resistant to tracking in weather), capped the bottle, picked the flashlight up to light his way, and bundled the rest up in the metal foil.
The transporters ensured that he reached the end of the East Pier quickly. It was just as well, as one Specialist wasn't much of a procession.
The Specialist in question stared out at the dark water a long time.
"You'd have liked them," he said at last.
He picked up the salt crystal, altered his grip a little for better balance, and added "I do."
Then he threw the salt crystal out into the ocean, flung the calcium tablet after it, and upended the water bottle over the side.
He crumpled the metal foil into a ball, recapped the bottle, left them at the reclaiming station the Atlanteans had set up in the middle of a corridor, and went to bed.
At the middle-night beginning of the day after the Days of the Dead, Ronon dropped straight into a deep sleep, and awoke later out of a deep sleep; and if he slipped into dream any time between those two points, it was overwritten and forgotten long before he woke up.