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Perimeter
by Hth
part 5 of Alpha Centauri
rating: R. pairing: answer unclear.
Note: Quotes are drawn from the episode "Aurora," although there are no episode spoilers herein, and also from the rest of the Alpha Centauri series. Please don't start with this story; you won't like it if you haven't read the others. You may not like it anyway, but at least this way I stand a chance.
Contract (Alpha Centauri 1)
Contraband (Alpha Centauri 2)
Conscience (Alpha Centauri 3)
Contagious (bonus track: Alpha Centauri 3.5)
Prime (Alpha Centauri 4)
Perimeter (Alpha Centauri 5)
by Hth
The day after Ronon ended the thing that had barely started at all, Rodney came to his room and stood there fuming and incoherent. He talked for at least three minutes in what appeared to be unconnected sentence fragments, but Ronon got the general drift, which was that he was selfish and obstinate and wrong, wrong, wrong which was why Rodney didn’t miss him and didn’t want him back and might possibly never forgive him and hoped they were able to keep working together without letting this get in the way.
“Are you done?” Ronon finally said. Rodney’s face was sort of red and he really did look angry as hell. Ronon kind of felt sorry for him.
“I hate you,” he said.
“You’ll get over it.”
Sheppard didn’t come by.
The day after that, Ronon shared a transporter with a woman in a white medical coat who couldn’t quite look at him and blushed every time he looked over at her. It made him think of that other woman he’d met by a transporter, the one he’d been sort of attracted to. The first transporter woman was prettier than the second one, but he hadn’t been ready then.
He probably wasn’t ready now, but it was too late for that.
The trouble was, Ronon had no idea how to...what to say to an Atlantean woman. On Sateda, it could take months of careful groundwork to get a citizen into your bed – not that Ronon had ever had the patience for that, but at least he knew how it was done. Atlantean women weren’t like that, he hadn’t been able to help noticing, but on the other hand, you could hardly treat them like bondslaves or prostitutes. It seemed like an impossible dilemma, or at least like one he’d need some guidance to solve. Who he’d go to for guidance, Ronon certainly didn’t know.
She looked over her shoulder at him when she got off the transporter on the medlab level, smiling shyly and pushing up her glasses. Ronon leaned back against the wall, but when the doors slipped shut he realized he’d forgotten to smile back at her. He should’ve gotten that part right, at least.
He couldn’t linger in the cafeteria over dinner; it was just too much work, pretending not to be aware of Sheppard and Rodney sitting side-by-side two tables over. He wondered if they were having any trouble ignoring him, but they looked lost in conversation with each other and with Weir and Dr. Beckett. He stopped eating as soon as he wasn’t hungry anymore and went straight from there to the medlab.
The transporter woman wasn’t there, but he asked another doctor – “Brown hair, glasses, this tall?” He didn’t remember anything else about her, though. White coat. That wouldn’t help.
“Dr. Norris?” the other doctor said, and since Ronon didn’t know if that was right or wrong, he didn’t say anything. “Did you – she’s probably – I could take a message for her?”
“No,” Ronon said. “I have a thing. That she dropped on, on the transporter. I’ll give it to her when....”
“She lives right underneath here, on the four corridor, all the way down.”
“Oh,” Ronon said. He hadn’t expected.... He wasn’t sure why. Everybody else probably knew where everyone lived around here. Ronon would probably know, if he’d bothered.
That was sloppy. It wasn’t like him, not to have a grasp of his surroundings.
The four corridor had seven doors on each side, and he had no idea which of the rooms he passed had someone living in them and which of them still stood empty. The more Ronon thought about it, the stranger it seemed. What had he been thinking, hiding himself away, ignoring all of these people just because he was – frightened of them? Being frightened of something was the best reason to know where it was at all times. Maybe he was more damaged than he’d thought he was.
Well, he had to stop, that was all. He had to open his eyes.
By the time he got to Dr. Norris’s quarters, he’d almost convinced himself that he had something she’d dropped on the transporter. When she opened the door and he remembered that he didn’t have the slightest believable reason to be there, he was stuck in place. Dr. Norris pulled off her glasses, then put them back on, her mouth open slightly like she’d forgotten that she didn’t know what to say, either. “I’m not bothering you, am I?” Ronon said.
“N-no. No, you’re not. I’m...Madeline Norris.”
“I’m– “
“I know who you are,” she said, and smiled at him, a warm smile of real humor. Maybe that shouldn’t have surprised Ronon – that people he didn’t know knew who he was. But it did.
“I like your smile,” he said, and that was true. She was nothing compared to the original transporter woman, except where the smile was concerned. “Sorry I didn’t smile back. Before.”
*
Atlantis is a small world. Smaller than it looks from the outside, once you realize how much of the city is uninhabited – all that empty steel and plastic, rayed out from the breathing center of two hundred human beings.
It doesn’t take long to explore, once he starts.
Madeline was an expert in laser surgery, and now she heads the team of researchers that takes apart Ancient lasers and tries to figure out how they work. She doesn’t go offworld. She doesn’t have many friends. She’s bored and homesick for her sister and her sister’s kids. She’s afraid of the Wraith. She loves her work, but it’s not enough, and she regrets agreeing to come here.
She needs Ronon because he makes this life seem more exciting. She compares him to characters in books he’s never read and movies he’s never seen. She calls what they do an affair. She calls him her gorgeous warrior from another planet, and he doesn’t bother to remind her that she’s from another planet, too. She asks him to tell her stories, and he tells her all about the missions he’s been on since he came here, but not about real war or the Wraith.
She isn’t in love with him.
It’s ridiculous how handsome you are (Rodney said to him, like it was his fault). It really is overkill, you understand that, don’t you?
*
Sgt. Marisol Gonzales has wanted to fuck him ever since he got here. Either because of that, or because she’s small and she’s had to learn to be mean, she hits harder than any of the other women Ronon spars with – twice as hard as Teyla, who only taps to show that she got in past your guard, keeping score. Marisol punches like she’s trying to take his head off.
He pushed her against the wall, her sweat-damp skin squealing against the mirror behind her, and he grinned and said, “What are you so mad at me for?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sure you deserve it for something.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you really want?” he said.
They’re rough with each other, but at the end she always lets go and turns soft against him and lets him do whatever he likes. He thinks she goes somewhere else in her head when she gets close to an orgasm. Or else she decides she’s made her point and she can let go.
Marisol needs Ronon because he doesn’t outrank her and he doesn’t work with her and he’s not competing with her for promotions. She’s been a fighter all her life – she has five older brothers, and Ronon used to have three, so he knows what that means. She needs someone she doesn’t have to hold her ground against – someone who isn’t keeping score. She needs not to fight, just sometimes.
Ronon understands that. There’s only so long you can go with nothing but fighting on your mind before something in you doesn’t work right anymore.
She isn’t in love with him.
You are going to fuck me hard (Sheppard told him). I like hard, hard is not a problem for me at all.
*
Ronon’s strike-squad was grounded for weeks, because Dr. Beckett said fighting off the Wraith virus had depleted Sheppard’s immune system and he wasn’t safe for offworld travel. It gave Ronon lots of time to get his bearings, to finally put faces with names and learn people’s habits.
Rodney and Sheppard almost always ate dinner together. Sometimes it was the only time Rodney came out of his lab all day long. He went right back in when dinner was over. They didn’t eat alone, but they were still together.
Ronon mostly ate alone, and mostly in his room. People had stopped telling him he couldn’t take food out of the cafeteria by then.
“Sit down,” Sheppard said. Ronon had learned by then that Sheppard’s cheerful voice *was* how he gave orders, so he put down his tray, next to Sheppard and across from Teyla, and sat. Sheppard put one arm around his shoulders, the other around Rodney’s shoulders, and jostled them both. “Now, this is more like it,” he said. “Just because nobody’s shot at us for a couple of weeks doesn’t mean we can’t all act like we’re still friends.”
Ronon picked at his vegetables. Overcooked.
“You should really leave him alone, Colonel,” Rodney said. He had his shoulders hunched forward and his elbows on the table, like someone might come along any minute and try to pull his tray out from under him. “I’m sure he has better places to be, even if he’s too military to tell you so.”
“Better places to be?” Sheppard said, in a voice that suggested the words barely made sense to him. “Like where?”
“Maybe he wants to eat with his girlfriend,” Rodney said with his mouth full.
“Who?” Ronon asked.
Rodney snorted and slammed his glass of tea down on the table. “I’m sorry, my mistake, that was very imprecise of me. Maybe he wants to eat with one of his many girlfriends.”
“McKay,” Sheppard said under his breath – a short, warning tone. When neither of them looked over to meet his eyes, Sheppard sighed and let his arms drop from their shoulders. “We need to get offworld,” he said, returning to his own dinner. “This is the only unit I ever served with that gets less grouchy when there’s mortal danger in the air.”
“Do you find me...grouchy?” Teyla asked.
Sheppard attempted a smile for her, but even out of the corner of his eye, Ronon could see that it didn’t quite mask his frustration. “Nope. You and I are our usual loveable selves.”
*
Laura says she just wants to check him out, see if any of the rumors are true, but she comes back more than once, so he suspects it’s not just curiosity. She doesn’t tell him what rumors she’s been hearing, or if they check out against the evidence or not.
She talks a lot. She’ll be talking along about something, and then right in the middle of a sentence she’ll change her mind and do a complete about-face, saying exactly the opposite. Her voice is a little bit grating, but it grows on him, inexplicably.
He isn’t Laura Cadman’s usual type. She likes shy men, men she thinks are undiscovered treasures. Well, maybe he is Laura Cadman’s usual type; maybe she thinks he’s shy, because he doesn’t say that much. He lets her run their fucks; he lets her run everything. Why not? It makes her happy.
Sometimes he gets tired just listening to her chatter and chatter, making plans and repeating gossip and arguing with herself – just noise, all the time; he doesn’t even think she’s listening to herself. Then he presses her down and kisses her neck and runs his hands honey-slow over her skin. He likes to feel her relax under his touch. It’s not quite tending, but it feels a little bit the same.
She needs Ronon because he handles her like she’s treasure, because he slows her down when everyone else around her just goes faster trying to keep up with her. He spends almost ten minutes just kissing the inside of her right thigh, and she digs her fingers into the sheets and sights, speechless for once in her life. If she’s thinking of Dr. Beckett, well, why shouldn’t she? People should be as happy as they can be. Philosophy seems to be slipping through Ronon’s fingers as the years go by, leaving him with these little sand-grains of meaning, rough and plain, stuck to his skin. People should be as happy as they can be. People should be happy, if they can be.
She isn’t in love with him.
Do all that stuff (Sheppard told him, when he was flying on morphine). Make him happy, it’s good for him.
*
He still dreams about Kel. Less, now, about pulling the trigger and shooting Kel through the chest, and more about the years before that.
In his dreams, he’s his old self, his sixteen-year-old self, but he’s in Atlantis. Kel looks younger, just like Ronon does – younger than he ever was when Ronon knew him. He runs his fingernails along Ronon’s scalp while Ronon sucks him off, just like he always did, and Ronon wakes up with his dick hard and his chest burning like he’s having a heart attack.
Ronon saw his father die of a heart attack when he was seven years old, and he’s always felt like it happened to him, too, like he knows exactly what kind of feeling makes you grab your chest like that, knocks a strong man down off his feet. He used to wake up with night terrors, convinced it was happening to him. His brothers were worried he was growing up to be a coward, so they sent him into the Infantry to become a man.
He hadn’t had the heart-attack dreams in more than ten years. They only started again after he killed Kel. It seems strange to him that the Wraith didn’t bring them on. One of them touched his chest. It tried to stop his heart. He remembers that, but it always feels like it happened to someone else – like that was the thing he only saw, when the heart attack he did see was always the one he could feel.
Strange.
He dreams of Kel, and it’s a strange knot of sex and death, the trigger and his fingers and his heart.
The memories seem the clearest in those hours at night’s end, when he’s woken up shocked and in pain from those tangled dreams. He lies in bed and remembers things that really happened – because it wasn’t *all* a dream. Some of it happened. There was a Kel, and there was a Sateda, and Ronon was that sixteen-year-old. He needs to stay sure of that.
He remembers the rug that Kel – always a lover of fine things – bought from offworld traders and kept spread over the tarp in his bivouac. It was dark and jewel-toned, with intricate geometric patterns that tricked the eye, and stained with mud and blood after years of campaigning, but still deep and soft under Ronon’s knees. He remembers that Kel used to drink sherry from a narrow-fluted glass while Ronon sucked him.
He remembers the taste of sherry in his mouth, mingling with the taste of come, when Kel urged him onto his back on the bed, his hard, strong fingers opening up Ronon’s clothes while they kissed in faint, startling bursts, like the flashing lights of distant artillery. “I spoil you,” Kel would purr into his mouth, trailing his fingers down Ronon’s chest. “I just can’t help myself.”
Kel needed him because....
Ronon never did know. He never claimed to understand how Kel thought, what he planned. He believes that Kel did want more from him than simply...use. He could have had that only, and he asked for more.
Ronon was so young then. It never once occurred to him not to just give whatever a man like that asked.
Kel loved him. Maybe. At least, that’s how Ronon remembers it. He remembers that whether he was top or bottom, Kel always made sure Ronon was the one who came first. He remembers how slowly Kel’s fingers traced the edges of his body, an idle pleasure. He remembers that Kel could always see it in his eyes when he was exhausted and afraid, and that instead of reminding Ronon of his duty, he’d give him a kiss instead.
What’s love, really? Kel held every door open for him, and Ronon walked straight in and was never afraid.
Yeah, I don’t know what that means (Sheppard told him). But I’m pretty sure you have my permission.
*
Mitch is the one Ronon knows he should stop sleeping with. It’s not right, when he knows Mitch hates it as much as he wants it – hates the fact that he wants it. He’s a mathematician. He’s only twenty-two, and he’s a young twenty-two. Ronon thinks that this boy, a genius, a doctor of numbers, this boy who comes to his room with shaking hands and red-stained eyes and often can’t bring himself to say a word, is what Ronon’s brothers feared he would become.
He wishes he knew what to say to this boy. He wishes he knew if letting him suck Ronon’s dick is really giving him what he needs.
He’ll be handsome, when he’s older. He has wide, sharp cheekbones he hasn’t grown into yet, and his skin breaks out, and he carries his unhappiness in front of him, where no one can miss it. But he has thick, dark eyelashes and a graceful, predatory way of walking, like those sharp hipbones of his protect some kind of inner core of satisfaction, of pride, that he can’t reach down into yet. He hasn’t found the way. Ronon tells himself maybe he’s helping, but the truth is he just doesn’t know.
They only use their mouths on each other, although sometimes Ronon will palm those hipbones and feel a little shudder of want, an aching flutter of something trying to find its way through the confusion and the embarrassment. Then Mitch slides away, and Ronon thinks it would be wrong to chase him. The way Ronon has gotten around not knowing how to ask Atlanteans to sleep with him is, he doesn’t. He only sleeps with the ones who ask him.
He thinks it should excite him a little, the rawness of it, the thrill of semi-anonymity in a place where there are no strangers anymore. With Mitch there are no obligations, no gifts of self or speech asked or given. He remembers being excited by that kind of thing, once. Now he looks down at the dark, downy curl of Mitch’s hair and thinks of the way Sheppard’s mouth looked sliding easily, familiarly over Rodney’s cock, his intimate, inquisitive fingers, the crow’s-feet at his eyes when he flashed smiling glances upward. Mitch keeps his eyes closed. He sucks cock like he loves to do it, but Sheppard does it like he....
Like he just can’t help himself.
Mitch needs him because he’s warm and alive and a man, and because he knows they’ll never talk about this. Someday, Ronon thinks Mitch will have a lover, and they’ll lie in bed and tell stories about their pasts, and Mitch will talk about him then, and laugh ruefully over how difficult it all seemed, how far beyond him it was to imagine asking for more. Everyone has his younger self to look back on, with pity or with envy, or both.
He’s not in love with Ronon.
I’ve never liked anyone this much this soon (Rodney said). And not that many people like it when I like them, so thank you.
*
The Laganese required potential allies to spend a night being watched by their oracular birds atop a high mountain aerie. It took Sheppard about fifteen minutes to get his fingers bitten.
“Let this be a lesson to you,” Rodney said primly as he double-wrapped the bandages, turning Sheppard’s hand into a cloven hoof. “Alien wildlife is not to be mocked.”
“A,” Sheppard said, “they’re not wildlife; the Laganese breed them domestically. B, I wasn’t mocking, I was being friendly.”
“They are considered sacred vessels containing the wisdom of former generations of Laganese healers and diviners,” Teyla said. “It might not be wise to treat them as house-pets.”
“Also,” Rodney said, “how many of these incidents will it take for you to start considering the possibility that you’re not as charming as you think you are?”
When Ronon got up from the fire at twilight and began to pick his way through the rough, low-lying shrubbery cluttering the upward path, Sheppard said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“See what’s up there.” The path was narrow, but if he put his hand on the rock face, he’d be all right. His eyesight was good in the dark.
“Nothing’s up there,” Sheppard said. “Other than bitchy birds, and massive, deadly rock slides yet-to-be.”
“Something’s there,” Ronon said. “They said people come up here to leave offerings for the birds?”
“So?” Sheppard said.
Ronon shrugged. “A person doesn’t come this far up a mountain and then not go all the way to the top. There must be a way.”
Sheppard came with him, keeping his good hand to the mountain and using his bandaged hand to knock aside the brambles and hardy mountain scrub that kept catching on the sleeve of Ronon’s coat. The path curved around and upward, but Ronon guessed the ledge that the Laganese had set their camp on was no more than fifty feet from the summit, as the sacred vessel flies.
“Not bad,” Sheppard said when they found the lookout point, but his voice wasn’t flippant at all. The stars were huge at the top of the mountain, and the fires of the Laganese settlements were warm and bright underneath them, and in between there was nothing but shadow and shade and the throaty cooing of the narrowly built grey-feathered birds all around them. “Which way are we facing, west? Too bad we missed sunset.”
“Southwest,” Ronon said. “More south than west.”
“Christ, do you think you could be a little less romantic?” Sheppard said bitterly. “You’re kinda embarrassing me.”
“Do you want a blowjob?” Ronon’s voice was flat and expressionless; it was only half a joke, because for all he knew, that was what Sheppard considered romantic.
“Do you give a fuck what I want?” Sheppard snapped back, and Ronon didn’t really have an answer for that, so he didn’t say anything. They just stood there looking at the stars, until he noticed Sheppard shifting from side to side uncomfortably, hunched into himself against the sluggish, chill wind. Of course he’d left his jacket down at the main plateau. Ronon took his coat off and held it out toward him, and Sheppard reached for it automatically, then stopped.
“Go on,” Ronon said. “I’m not cold.”
The coat was big on Sheppard – not just too long, but too bulky on his thin frame. He didn’t look like himself; it was like putting leather on one of these birds, wings and delicate wishbones hidden under someone else’s skin. “You know Rodney misses you,” Sheppard said. It sounded awkward, as if he’d memorized a set of foreign words, tutored by someone who didn’t speak the language either. Maybe that was exactly what happened.
“He said that?”
“Well...you know Rodney. I’m paraphrasing.”
“I give too much of a fuck what you want,” Ronon said abruptly. “There was a time when all I would’ve wanted would be to give you whatever you want.”
“I don’t know what you think I’m going to make you do, once I have you under my evil sway – assuming I, in fact, had an evil sway to put you under.”
“You do know.”
“Look, I’m sorry, okay? I thought you understood it was...totally up to you. I thought you wanted to sleep with us, but if I somehow accidentally manipulated you or made you feel obligated– “
“It’s not about that.”
“Well, then, would you do me the very great honor of telling me what the fuck it is about? Just on the off-chance that me understanding what the hell is going on here would help me get my team back together.”
“Don’t make this about the team.”
“Of course it’s about the team!”
“I do my job.”
“This isn’t the kind of job where you can just clock in and out! I need a little bit more from you than that.”
Sheppard was in front of him now instead of behind him; Ronon wasn’t sure which of them had moved, but he suspected it might be him, since he seemed to be further from the mountain’s edge than he was before, the stars behind him and Sheppard and the stone in front of him. He wrapped his hands in the lapels of his coat and leaned his weight into Sheppard, pushing him against the rocks. “Is this my job?” he said, the words catching in his throat and turning into a growl. “Is this what you need?”
“Yeah,” Sheppard breathed. “Yeah, this is it,” and pulled him down by the neck to kiss him hard.
When he was on his knees, Sheppard reached down to touch his face, the heel of his hand resting under Ronon’s chin. “I’m not your old commander,” he said, and his voice was warm, Colonel Sheppard’s we’re-all-friends-here tone, but his eyes brooked no arguments. “And I’m not your dad, and I’m not your tenth-grade boyfriend, or whoever the hell else you’re afraid I am. I’m not anybody.”
Ronon pressed a still kiss with open mouth against Sheppard’s groin, breathing in the smell of skin and semen and leather. “I know who you are, John.”
His moans were in the same low register as the cooing of the flocking Laganese birds, the same slightly anxious cadences. “Also,” he said, his fingers pecking against Ronon’s skull for attention, “also, I don’t want you doing that thing to me, that thing where you service me like I need an oil change. That freaks me out. This is just us, okay? Agreed?”
“Sure,” Ronon said, palming his own cock as he licked at the tip of Sheppard’s.
He brought himself off in perfect time with Sheppard. He knelt up, pressing his forehead into Sheppard’s solar plexus, his wet mouth against the tender skin of Sheppard’s belly while he caught his breath. Sheppard’s hands traveled over his hair, his gentleness spoiled by the clumsy way they trembled. “I can’t help myself,” Ronon murmured, his lips drawing come and spit against skin as his hands traced the lean muscle and soft hair of Sheppard’s thighs. “I spoil you....”
“You make me insane,” Sheppard said, and Ronon wasn’t sure from the tone of his voice if it was a compliment or not.
*
The Laganese consulted their birds in the morning, and Ronon was half afraid the ugly alien pigeons would report back about what they saw on the south face. He wondered what kind of fraternization regs the Laganese believed in.
Apparently the birds were sanguine, though, and the Laganese led Ronon and his team down to a sandy lakeshore with a waterfall and left them alone to bathe. It wasn’t entirely clear if bathing was a part of the ritual or not, and Ronon didn’t particularly care; after a long, cold night at high altitudes, the spring-heated lake was a religious experience as far as he was concerned.
Sheppard and Rodney splashed like otters while they bickered about...one of those incomprehensible things they argued about. Whether men made of bats were science fiction or not? Ronon didn’t intend to get involved, but when Rodney said that comic books couldn’t be science fiction, Sheppard made an indignant noise that implied the point was too stupid to debate, and Ronon heard himself saying, “That book you gave me was funny.”
“What book?” Rodney asked scornfully, as if Ronon were inventing some incident just to interfere. His face changed suddenly as he remembered, and he looked Ronon over with something like awe. “You really read that?”
“Yeah, I read it. Wasn’t that the point of loaning it to me?”
“I didn’t think you’d get very far. But that’s not – that’s not what we were talking about. I mean, a comic book is not a – a comic. book, a comedic book, it doesn’t have anything to do with comedy. You really thought Hitchhiker was funny?”
Ronon shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable under Rodney’s look. He normally only approved of Ronon in private. “I didn’t understand all of it. But parts of it were really good.”
“There are sequels,” Rodney said, his voice suddenly timid. “You should – I’ll loan you the next one.”
“Don’t worry,” Sheppard said, “you’re not actually supposed to understand it.”
“I imagine you’re quite comfortable with that sort of thing,” Rodney said, rounding on Sheppard. “Being released from the pesky demands of rationality keeps your pretty head from getting all muddled up with the fine distinctions between, oh, say, the DC universe and science.” And then they were off again. Ronon swam back to shore, where Teyla was sunning herself in a patch of scrub grass.
She turned her head toward him, her face resting on the backs of her folded hands, and looked at him with one eye. Belatedly, Ronon wondered if it was impolite to sit down next to her wearing nothing but his wet underwear, but she seemed as unperturbed as ever, and honestly he didn’t think he could get into his pants before he’d dried off even if he wanted to. The Laganese apparently didn’t believe in towels.
After she’d absorbed whatever inscrutable thing Teyla looked for in people, she turned her face back toward the lake, slit-eyed against the light flashing off the water’s surface. Ronon didn’t look at all, just rolled a ball of wet sand carefully between his thumb and forefinger.
“I have always believed,” Teyla said at last, “that a community is a kind of circle.” She stretched out her arm and drew one in the sand in front of her, about the size of Ronon’s fist and perfectly even. “A circle drawn to include all the members of that community. Did you have occasion to study geometry when you were a child?”
“A little bit,” he said. He didn’t remember much about geometry except that he hadn’t enjoyed it. He hadn’t enjoyed any of his lessons; it was hard to sit so still for so long, but impossible to imagine defying the authority of his Masters. An unbearable tension, impossible to resolve in his body or mind. He’d been relieved when his oldest brother told him he was to be given to the Infantry instead.
“A circle is the sum of all points that are a single, given distance from one point.” She made a crescent-shaped dent in the sand with her fingernail, in the circle’s center. “Without the center, a circle has no meaning. When I learned that, I thought to myself, well, that is the purpose of wise leadership: to establish the circle’s center. I meditated on that for many years. I felt that it was my duty to understand this idea, and to be a fixed thing by which my people could recognize their place within the body of the whole.”
Ronon looked at her with a new sort of appreciation. He’d always figured Teyla for one of those people who liked to discuss every little thing – who didn’t understand what real leadership meant. She always received orders, whether from Colonel Sheppard or Dr. Weir, with a detached tranquility that seemed to imply that obedience wasn’t much of a bother to her, so she would obey.
“But after a certain number of years,” Teyla said, her voice lowering soothingly, as if she were breaking bad news to him, “I realized that the centerpoint is the beginning of a circle, but not the essence of it. A circle is the sum of all points a given distance from the center.” She smoothed her hand across the empty space inside the circle, blurring its lines, obscuring the moon-shaped center of it. “A circle is comprised of an infinite number of points, but what unifies it is the radius – the distance maintained from the center. To occupy a point closer to the center, or farther away, breaks the circle. And I began to realize that if a community is a circle, then everything that is not the center must always be apart from it. A circle has no meaning if this is not so. It ceases to exist.”
“The meaning of life is math?” Ronon said. “You sound like McKay now.”
“Dr. McKay has his own wisdom; I have learned much from him. I consider him a friend, as well.”
“Are you ever lonely?” It probably wasn’t the thing to ask; Ronon didn’t think he’d like it very much if someone put the same question to him.
“No,” she said, and smiled softly at him. “I was lonely when I believed I was a single point at the center. At the circumference, I am one of an uncountable number. I have never been less lonely than I am in Atlantis. But it does depend on holding the place I am given, and there is an art to that.”
*
Atlantis is a small world, smaller than it looks from the outside. Ronon gets bored with running up and down the levels of the center towers and starts going for long runs, out on the piers, around the vacant wingtips of the city.
It can take hours, keeping to the far perimeter. His heartbeat fits inside the sound of the tides, a ratio of twenty-to-one. Ronon has the time. He’s not sleeping much these days anyway.
Colonel Sheppard has already invested an incredible amount of time and energy (Weir said), trying to make you an integral part of his team.
You have no idea, Ronon didn’t say. Atlantis is too small for secrets (you almost have to try *not* to learn what you have no business knowing, in a place this size), but Ronon understands now what you can and can’t say out loud.
He won’t betray his taskmaster, even one who breaks his heart. Oh, he’ll shoot and kill the one who loved him, but John Sheppard, who doesn’t have a clue how this radius they preserve between them is eating away at who and what Ronon thought he was – John, he’ll protect at any cost.
He goes further and further to the outer edge every day, and when he’s built the longest circuit he can, he starts doing two laps instead of one. Sheppard doesn’t run with him anymore, so he doesn’t have to worry about anyone keeping up.
Three laps takes all night long, and he has to rest up a few times along the way, but he can do it. Ronon thinks he’s in the same shape he was when he was a Runner, and he’s quietly proud of that. Atlantis is the kind of place that can make you soft if you let it, and he wasn’t brought here to get soft. He was brought here because the Atlanteans admire his ability to endure.
It’s important to Ronon that he holds the place he’s been given.
Atlantis needs him because he is fucking unkillable.
Three laps takes all night long, and he can’t do any more, but it’s somehow not enough, either. He
begins to layer them inside each other, like the nested orbits in solar system diagrams – the first run goes all the way around the outside of the city, and he starts in the late afternoon, when there’s only one sun in the sky and the heat coming off Atlantis’s shimmering body armor isn’t too unbearable. The second run skirts the mirrored walls. The third is inside. He can do four laps that way, five before long. He spirals them inward, each not quite as far out as the last, until it’s deep into the night watch and he’s back to his own tower, back to the animate center of the city where he supposedly lives.
Sometimes he crashes up against his own door, amazed he can’t see the trail of his footprints in blood, amazed his heart can take this, amazed there’s enough air in the world, and still a part of him wishes he didn’t have to stop.
He tells himself he runs now by choice. This is his choice. The difference between a Runner and a man is....
The platitudes fall away by the third lap, though. The real difference between a Runner and a man is that a Runner has problems he really *can* outrun. A man has duties, responsibilities. And those are always with you.
See, the thing is, Colonel Sheppard and I have sort of gotten into this habit of saving each other’s lives (Rodney said), and it’s my turn. It can be your turn next.
*
After the Aurora (a mission that sounded thrilling on paper, but was actually didn’t involve anything more strenuous than counting on Ronon’s part), they all toasted to the dead with a sweet white wine that fizzed like grape soda. Sheppard and Rodney left together, and Ronon went running.
Out to the end of each pier, out as far as you could go without falling into the ocean. The Ronons were a family of farmers from a landlocked province; he’d seen the ocean a few times before coming to Atlantis, mostly while flying over it on his way to a new deployment. He’d never felt like he was looking at something familiar when he stood at the edge of it.
Out to the boundary, the ocean, and then in, and in, and in again. He passed Sheppard’s room every night on the innermost ring, sometime around 0100. He only stopped there one time, the night after the Aurora, and Sheppard wasn’t even inside.
The door opened, though. Sheppard never kept it locked, or else the door locks recognized Ronon as someone who belonged inside. He wasn’t, really, someone who belonged inside, but the door opened, and it was hard not to step in. The ligaments in his right knee were killing him, anyway; he only wanted to sit down for a minute.
Sheppard’s quarters looked more like someone’s real home than almost anywhere else Ronon had been in Atlantis. Most of the scientists had quarters that seemed like auxiliary labs, and the soldiers kept a stark kind of order that would have made Kel roll his eyes at their lack of style. Sheppard didn’t have much style, either, but his quarters were comfortably cluttered with evidence of his real life, from the picture of his musician and the guitar that Ronon had never seen him play leaning underneath it, to the different sizes and shapes of balls for different games kicked out of the way underneath the desk he never used, to the jumble of empty DVD boxes and unmarked discs scattered carelessly around his computer monitor. He’d been in Atlantis for more than a year, and you could feel the way the room had gotten to know him in that time.
Ronon sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed his knee. This late at night, he couldn’t imagine where Sheppard would be except in McKay’s quarters. It was impossible not to think about that, but Ronon’s energy reserves were so depleted that he didn’t feel anything as the thoughts passed through his mind – not desire, not sadness, not anger – nothing except a grim kind of peace. They were together, and he was here. People should be as happy as they can be.
Ronon hadn’t been really happy for a long time.
He laid down on his back and pulled his knee up toward his chest, trying to gauge how badly hurt it was. Not very, he didn’t think. The pain would wear off.
He didn’t plan to stay where he hadn’t been invited and didn’t belong, but once he was lying down he was suddenly tired, and Sheppard’s mattress was softer than most in Atlantis – trust Sheppard to steal the best one for himself, and then to keep it even once he was sleeping with a man who insisted it was a medical necessity to sleep on something roughly the consistency of petrified wood. Ronon didn’t have back problems, though, and he liked this mattress a lot.
*
He went to sleep on his side but wakes up on his back, in the dark. He knows John’s hands, though, pulling the blankets over him, and the mint of his aftershave, and even the spot where his eyelashes end at the corner of his eye, which is the only part of John that he can really see as it hovers near his own eyes. He smells like something else besides aftershave and hair gel, too – salt sweat, salt water, hot melted butter – all of that and none of it, the smell of Rodney’s skin. Ronon shivers.
John stretches out alongside him, his arm across Ronon’s chest. When Ronon tries to sit up, John rolls against him, dead weight over half his body. Ronon makes a small grunt of protest and gets his elbow under him, tries to sit up again. John gets heavier.
He opens his mouth to say stop, to say let me go, and John touches his lips, sliding the tips of his fingers inside his mouth. Ronon closes his eyes. If it’s this dark, does it count? If you can’t prove it was ever real, can it turn against you?
John makes a little sound, not much more than a breath, and runs his hand softly over Ronon’s face. Two of his fingers are damp, two dry, and his thumb raking almost audibly against the crisp hair of Ronon’s beard.
One last time, Ronon tries to shake himself loose. He outweighs John; he knows he’s stronger. John’s got the better position, though, and Ronon’s got twenty years of learning how to give way and trust, warring with just seven years of chaos. At the bottom of it all, he’s still more Ronon Dex than he is a Runner, and this is a battle he can’t commit himself to.
His breathing nestles up against John’s without effort, the only two sounds Ronon can hear; he may not think much of the Ancients’ taste in beds, but at least the frames don’t squeak. John touches him over and over, his face and his chest underneath his clothes, a soothing touch that makes Ronon think of sleep as much as sex. More than sex.
More than sex, he just needs something he can rest against.
I don’t need this (Rodney said). I don’t need two of you.
*
He woke up sense by sense. First, the smell of coffee. Second, the thick pillow underneath him and the blanket pulled almost up to his nose. Third, the soft keyboard sounds and rustling of paper, and a grumble that expressed a world of long-suffering without any discernable words.
He rolled over in bed and blinked several times at the auxiliary lab that had colonized John’s quarters. How was it possible that even Rodney McKay’s implacable willpower could turn someone else’s space into his own office in just a few hours, with the help of not much more than a laptop and twenty file folders? Ronon watched John move a few things out of the way so he could situate his own laptop more securely on the table, and then watched Rodney huff impatiently and move the same papers right back.
It was after 1000; they could conceivably have been at this game for five or six hours by now, knowing Rodney’s hours. Ronon found that idea strangely endearing.
They noticed him at the same time. “Hey,” John said throatily. Rodney only looked at him for a moment, then got up to pour a cup of coffee from the machine on John’s desk (which didn’t belong to John, and wasn’t there last night) and bring it over to Ronon.
“Thanks,” Ronon said, shoving the blanket off and sitting up to take the hot coffee from Rodney’s hands. He continued to wait expectantly, until Rodney rolled his eyes and produced half a raisin bagel wrapped in a paper napkin.
Taking the opportunity to talk while Ronon had his mouth full of something that took work to chew, Rodney said, “Well, if you hadn’t slept half the day away, we might have been able to sort some things out. Unfortunately, I now have approximately one hundred and four stupid meetings and, I believe, two that might turn out to make a difference in anyone’s life. I’m sorry,” he said, a little more softly. “I wanted.... This has been a bad week for me.”
“It’s okay,” Ronon said. He’d come to count on Rodney being unavailable; it made him easier to avoid. He touched Rodney’s hand, and when he didn’t pull it back, he squeezed Rodney’s fingers and then let go. He glanced down to where their knees were almost touching and didn’t lift his eyes until Rodney touched his fingertips to his hairline.
“I want to be sure about this,” Rodney said. “I think I have a grasp on the situation, but I have a tendency to misread people, and you’re sort of – well, let’s just say you’re expressive in a special way, just for that extra little bit of fun challenge. It’s not us, is it? Us meaning you and me. I mean, whatever the problem is.... That is – I mean – if it were just the two of us....”
“It’s not.”
“I know that. I didn’t mean to imply that it – was – or that it could be, or ever – would be. But on a purely hypothetical basis.... The problem here isn’t between....”
After a silence, Ronon said, “Was that the end of your sentence?”
“Oh, now look who’s witty. That’s wonderful. What I’m saying is, all other things being equal – temporarily, hypothetically – is there anything that’s...that’s wrong between us? Because I don’t think there is. I could be wrong. This isn’t really my field, you know. But...is there? You can answer now,” Rodney said after another silence. “I know, that probably went by a bit quickly. Shall I try again? With fewer technical terms this time. ‘Hypothetically,’ by the way, means ‘let’s pretend.’ Now, taking subject of you and I and hypothetically removing all the external variables, do any of the many deep-seated psychological and emotional problems plaguing this relationship, and by that I’m referring to your psychological and emotional problems, just to be clear – do any of them have to do with me directly?”
“Well, you’re a lot older than me.” It was one thing to be attracted to Rodney’s condescending shit, but it was something else to let him know that.
Rodney’s face went through a couple different varieties of shock, before settling on that loftily wounded look he wore when he thought people were taking cheap shots at him. “And on that note,” he said over his shoulder at Sheppard, “I’ll turn this over to your skillful and experienced diplomacy. Try not to get bitten. Which is sort of a metaphor for...don’t screw this up, all right?”
Sheppard rolled his eyes, but allowed Rodney to peck his lips with a kiss as he gathered up his computer and an apparently random selection of files. “Well, I got such a good lead-in,” he said. “Be a shame to waste it.”
Rodney paused at the door and looked back with an irritated frown that Ronon thought was what passed for regret on Rodney’s face. “I really wanted to have time this morning, but...you’ve looked so tired lately, I thought....”
“Thanks,” Ronon said again. He didn’t think it was a very good sign that Rodney was leaving without kissing him, but at least Rodney worried about his well-being, and that was something. That was as much as Ronon should probably be letting himself want.
When they were alone together, Sheppard pulled his chair closer to the bed and propped his feet up, crossed at the ankles. His arms were crossed over his chest, too, his whole body wrapped up in stubborn knots, and Ronon knew he wouldn’t be able to get out of this just by keeping his mouth shut. “We can do this up-front, can’t we?” Sheppard said. Ronon shrugged, unsure whether or not he completely understood the figure of speech. He thought it just meant be honest, but sometimes there was more packed into the way Atlanteans used their words than Ronon could unravel very quickly. “Good. We’ll skip the what-do-you-want part, because I know what you want, you want the same thing McKay wants.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t skip this part,” Ronon said, “if you only know what two out of three of us want.”
Sheppard smiled a little tightly. “I don’t count.”
“You don’t count.”
He wondered if Sheppard even realized he was kicking at the edge of the bed with his heel like a small boy chafing under adult injustice. “No, I’m the fucking CO around here, right? I get to make sure we do the smart thing. You can brood and Rodney can bitch, but my job is to give the fucking orders. See? I’m better at this gig than you think I am.”
“I never said you weren’t good at it.”
“Right, because I’m an idiot, and I can’t tell that you think I do a shit job with my team. Hell, maybe you’re right; I love you guys a lot, but collectively speaking, we’re not the best advertisement for my managerial style.”
“So you’re trying out a new style,” Ronon said, setting his empty coffee cup aside. “You plan on giving me an order now?”
It took Sheppard a minute to answer; maybe that was more up-front than he’d been imagining. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I guess that’s what I plan on doing.”
“Let’s hear it,” Ronon said, even though he knew, more or less, what Sheppard was going to say.
Sheppard took a deep breath and said, “Get over this.”
He waited for a minute, and then said, “That’s it?” Usually Sheppard’s orders came with a lot more elaboration.
“Look, I don’t know what else to say to you! Yes, I’m attracted to you, you know I am. And I like you, I feel like I can relax around you, and in my experience it’s not all that common to find people you can just be around, and be – yourself, be comfortable. Is there a part of me that wishes I could be with you? Obviously, but I’m with Rodney, I plan to be with Rodney for a while, and the fact that you and Rodney are fucking in love with each other is kind of a complicating factor, but I’m not.... Okay, I have, in the past, had kind of a martyr complex, and maybe I did technically say at one point that I didn’t want to be possessive and make him unhappy, but the thing is.... The thing is, I had him first and I don’t feel like bowing out, on account of this theory I have that factors in a whole lot of sucky things about Atlantis and balances them out with a couple of key constants, which basically consist of Puddlejumpers and Rodney. I can’t...I can’t let him go. I used to think I could if I had to, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“I never expected you to.” Any more than he ever expected Rodney to let Sheppard go.
“I know the two of you have this idea in your heads that we all could– “ He broke off and scrubbed his hands through his hair, then down over his face, and said, “Look, I have to do my job here. I have to tell you, it can’t happen that way. It’s not going to.”
He’d known that, too. It wasn’t so much an idea in his head as it was...just this quiet need in his chest. It wasn’t the first need Ronon had ever had that wasn’t going to be met.
“For all kinds of reasons,” Sheppard said, as if he were answering somebody’s question. Maybe this was a speech he’d prepared for Rodney, who would no doubt have had a few questions by this point. “First of all, it’s ludicrous to say it wouldn’t affect the team, because I think we’ve proven none of us are all that mature. It would totally affect the team. It’s also against– I admit I have a lot more wiggle room here than I would at any other posting, but you can’t keep something like this a secret, and I really, really don’t think I can stretch ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ to encompass setting up a big, queer harem on base. Plus, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s fraternization whether the two of you are military or not. Spirit of the law, it’s completely fraternization. And anyway, it just – it just doesn’t work. People keep trying it, because on paper, hey, it sounds great, but these things never really work out. Someone gets jealous and someone feels left out and everybody gets hurt and people take sides. It would never work, and knowing the three of us and our people skills, we’d all end up hating each other. It’s not worth it. We’re just not going to get ourselves into that situation, because....”
“I know,” he said.
Sheppard cleared his throat roughly and said, “Good, maybe you can explain it to McKay, then. I told him it was impossible, but you know how he is.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, hm,” Sheppard said, looking up at the ceiling. “Let me see if I can remember it exactly.” His voice shifted into Rodney’s clipped, fussy tones as he said, “It was something like, ‘John, maybe you can explain to me why it is that when I tell you something is impossible, you tell me to stop whining and do it anyway, but when you tell me something is impossible, I’m supposed to, what? Believe you have the first clue what you’re talking about?’”
“You’re pretty good at that,” Ronon said.
“Thanks. I’ve been practicing. Rodney is – he’s a romantic. You know, he’d deny it, but there’s a certain kind of romantic you can only be when you’ve never been in love before, and he’s just rotten with it. I guess he has to get it knocked out of him eventually, but you understand I’m not trying to rush the process.”
“I’ll get over this,” Ronon said. “But....”
“But what?”
It was easier to say while he was looking down at the blanket lying twisted over his leg, and not at Sheppard. “It would be easier to do if you would...stop touching me?”
Sheppard leaned heavily back in his chair, as if his skeleton had suddenly powered down to minimum levels. “I’m sorry. I know.”
“I’m doing my best to...keep the right distance. You can call it brooding, but – it’s the best I know how to....”
“I know. I know. It’s not your fault, I know. It’s really mine. I’m the one who started all this. I just thought it was – at that point it didn’t seem so – serious. I didn’t know it would turn all serious like this. Now you don’t feel like you can be within a mile of either one of us, and I can’t seem to keep my fucking hands off of you, and Rodney’s– He’s completely miserable. You realize he’s miserable, right?”
“Yeah,” Ronon said, because miserable Rodney wasn’t any more or less snappish and difficult than regular Rodney, but he could tell the difference anyway, somehow.
“And I know it seems like there’s a simple solution, but it’s – it’s not simple, and it’s frankly not even a solution, it just creates new problems. And I don’t have the luxury.... It’s my team at stake. That’s where my first responsibility has to be, I don’t have any choice about that. Anything else would be bad for all of us, it would be bad for Atlantis, it would be...it would be....”
“Dishonorable?” Ronon suggested.
Sheppard leaned toward him, and for a moment Ronon thought he was going to perform that salute that the Athosians used. “Sorry about this in advance,” he said roughly, and laced his fingers together behind Ronon’s neck, resting his forehead in the crook.
“It’s okay,” Ronon said softly, and touched Sheppard’s back.
He shivered a few times, and once his breath hitched suspiciously, but mostly Sheppard just stayed like that, with Ronon stroking his back, until he seemed to be himself again. When he pushed away, Ronon touched the side of his face lightly with his thumb. “I hate being the responsible one,” Sheppard said.
“Too close or too far away,” Ronon said, “and it just...doesn’t work. I think...you’re actually...the best commander I ever had. If it makes you feel any better.” Sheppard didn’t say anything to that, but Ronon could see in his eyes that it meant something to him. “I don’t think McKay’s going to be happy with how we solved this,” he said.
“Too bad. He said himself, if it was just the two of you, there wouldn’t be a problem to solve. This is because of me, and all I can do is.... This is the best I can do.”
“I think,” Ronon said slowly, “if it was just any two of us, there wouldn’t be a problem to solve. Right?”
Sheppard started to say something, then stopped. He put his hands on either side of Ronon’s face and said, “This is the last time I’m going to kiss you, all right? I swear I’ll stop, I just...need you to....” Ronon closed his eyes and let John have whatever kind of kiss he wanted to take.
He went with long and wet and unsettlingly gentle, and when he pulled away, their mouths making a soft, desperate sound, Ronon stood up, resisting the urge to wipe his mouth on the back of his hand. It wouldn’t have helped; he didn’t know how long he’d be able to feel that touch, but he knew he couldn’t make it go away just by wanting it to. If he could do things like that, it would never have come to this stage at all.
“If you want,” Ronon said at the door, “you can tell Rodney that you asked me. I mean – asked me to – you know what I mean. You can just...tell him I said no. Then he’ll be mad at me instead of you, and I don’t see that much of him anymore anyway.”
That was supposed to help, but from the look that crossed John’s face, something about what he’d said was more hurtful than saying nothing at all. This really wasn’t Ronon’s field, either. “Thanks for the offer,” John said, a little sourly, “but in the interest of accountability, I should really stick with acting like I’m in charge around here, rather than finding other people to take the blame for me.”
“Okay. You’re...you’re doing the right thing. All of it. I mean.... I think you are.”
John smiled, but it didn’t look very natural. “This is what honor feels like, huh?”
“Usually.”
“Getting laid is better.”
Ronon couldn’t help smiling. “Usually.”
That night he didn’t run, just walked all the way out to the end of the long pier, the one farthest away from the geographic center of the city – although as he watched a jumper come in from the mainland, he found it hard to accept the idea that the Gate wasn’t the centerpoint of Atlantis. He wondered if McKay knew some kind of convoluted math that would explain how the center of a circle could be in a different place from where it looked like it was. Ever since Rodney told him about imaginary numbers and what he called non-Euclidian geometry, Ronon wouldn’t put much past him. He did have a flair for the impossible, Rodney McKay.
When he turned back toward the city, there were lights in the windows of the inner towers.
by Hth
part 5 of Alpha Centauri
rating: R. pairing: answer unclear.
Note: Quotes are drawn from the episode "Aurora," although there are no episode spoilers herein, and also from the rest of the Alpha Centauri series. Please don't start with this story; you won't like it if you haven't read the others. You may not like it anyway, but at least this way I stand a chance.
Contract (Alpha Centauri 1)
Contraband (Alpha Centauri 2)
Conscience (Alpha Centauri 3)
Contagious (bonus track: Alpha Centauri 3.5)
Prime (Alpha Centauri 4)
Perimeter (Alpha Centauri 5)
by Hth
The day after Ronon ended the thing that had barely started at all, Rodney came to his room and stood there fuming and incoherent. He talked for at least three minutes in what appeared to be unconnected sentence fragments, but Ronon got the general drift, which was that he was selfish and obstinate and wrong, wrong, wrong which was why Rodney didn’t miss him and didn’t want him back and might possibly never forgive him and hoped they were able to keep working together without letting this get in the way.
“Are you done?” Ronon finally said. Rodney’s face was sort of red and he really did look angry as hell. Ronon kind of felt sorry for him.
“I hate you,” he said.
“You’ll get over it.”
Sheppard didn’t come by.
The day after that, Ronon shared a transporter with a woman in a white medical coat who couldn’t quite look at him and blushed every time he looked over at her. It made him think of that other woman he’d met by a transporter, the one he’d been sort of attracted to. The first transporter woman was prettier than the second one, but he hadn’t been ready then.
He probably wasn’t ready now, but it was too late for that.
The trouble was, Ronon had no idea how to...what to say to an Atlantean woman. On Sateda, it could take months of careful groundwork to get a citizen into your bed – not that Ronon had ever had the patience for that, but at least he knew how it was done. Atlantean women weren’t like that, he hadn’t been able to help noticing, but on the other hand, you could hardly treat them like bondslaves or prostitutes. It seemed like an impossible dilemma, or at least like one he’d need some guidance to solve. Who he’d go to for guidance, Ronon certainly didn’t know.
She looked over her shoulder at him when she got off the transporter on the medlab level, smiling shyly and pushing up her glasses. Ronon leaned back against the wall, but when the doors slipped shut he realized he’d forgotten to smile back at her. He should’ve gotten that part right, at least.
He couldn’t linger in the cafeteria over dinner; it was just too much work, pretending not to be aware of Sheppard and Rodney sitting side-by-side two tables over. He wondered if they were having any trouble ignoring him, but they looked lost in conversation with each other and with Weir and Dr. Beckett. He stopped eating as soon as he wasn’t hungry anymore and went straight from there to the medlab.
The transporter woman wasn’t there, but he asked another doctor – “Brown hair, glasses, this tall?” He didn’t remember anything else about her, though. White coat. That wouldn’t help.
“Dr. Norris?” the other doctor said, and since Ronon didn’t know if that was right or wrong, he didn’t say anything. “Did you – she’s probably – I could take a message for her?”
“No,” Ronon said. “I have a thing. That she dropped on, on the transporter. I’ll give it to her when....”
“She lives right underneath here, on the four corridor, all the way down.”
“Oh,” Ronon said. He hadn’t expected.... He wasn’t sure why. Everybody else probably knew where everyone lived around here. Ronon would probably know, if he’d bothered.
That was sloppy. It wasn’t like him, not to have a grasp of his surroundings.
The four corridor had seven doors on each side, and he had no idea which of the rooms he passed had someone living in them and which of them still stood empty. The more Ronon thought about it, the stranger it seemed. What had he been thinking, hiding himself away, ignoring all of these people just because he was – frightened of them? Being frightened of something was the best reason to know where it was at all times. Maybe he was more damaged than he’d thought he was.
Well, he had to stop, that was all. He had to open his eyes.
By the time he got to Dr. Norris’s quarters, he’d almost convinced himself that he had something she’d dropped on the transporter. When she opened the door and he remembered that he didn’t have the slightest believable reason to be there, he was stuck in place. Dr. Norris pulled off her glasses, then put them back on, her mouth open slightly like she’d forgotten that she didn’t know what to say, either. “I’m not bothering you, am I?” Ronon said.
“N-no. No, you’re not. I’m...Madeline Norris.”
“I’m– “
“I know who you are,” she said, and smiled at him, a warm smile of real humor. Maybe that shouldn’t have surprised Ronon – that people he didn’t know knew who he was. But it did.
“I like your smile,” he said, and that was true. She was nothing compared to the original transporter woman, except where the smile was concerned. “Sorry I didn’t smile back. Before.”
*
Atlantis is a small world. Smaller than it looks from the outside, once you realize how much of the city is uninhabited – all that empty steel and plastic, rayed out from the breathing center of two hundred human beings.
It doesn’t take long to explore, once he starts.
Madeline was an expert in laser surgery, and now she heads the team of researchers that takes apart Ancient lasers and tries to figure out how they work. She doesn’t go offworld. She doesn’t have many friends. She’s bored and homesick for her sister and her sister’s kids. She’s afraid of the Wraith. She loves her work, but it’s not enough, and she regrets agreeing to come here.
She needs Ronon because he makes this life seem more exciting. She compares him to characters in books he’s never read and movies he’s never seen. She calls what they do an affair. She calls him her gorgeous warrior from another planet, and he doesn’t bother to remind her that she’s from another planet, too. She asks him to tell her stories, and he tells her all about the missions he’s been on since he came here, but not about real war or the Wraith.
She isn’t in love with him.
It’s ridiculous how handsome you are (Rodney said to him, like it was his fault). It really is overkill, you understand that, don’t you?
*
Sgt. Marisol Gonzales has wanted to fuck him ever since he got here. Either because of that, or because she’s small and she’s had to learn to be mean, she hits harder than any of the other women Ronon spars with – twice as hard as Teyla, who only taps to show that she got in past your guard, keeping score. Marisol punches like she’s trying to take his head off.
He pushed her against the wall, her sweat-damp skin squealing against the mirror behind her, and he grinned and said, “What are you so mad at me for?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sure you deserve it for something.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you really want?” he said.
They’re rough with each other, but at the end she always lets go and turns soft against him and lets him do whatever he likes. He thinks she goes somewhere else in her head when she gets close to an orgasm. Or else she decides she’s made her point and she can let go.
Marisol needs Ronon because he doesn’t outrank her and he doesn’t work with her and he’s not competing with her for promotions. She’s been a fighter all her life – she has five older brothers, and Ronon used to have three, so he knows what that means. She needs someone she doesn’t have to hold her ground against – someone who isn’t keeping score. She needs not to fight, just sometimes.
Ronon understands that. There’s only so long you can go with nothing but fighting on your mind before something in you doesn’t work right anymore.
She isn’t in love with him.
You are going to fuck me hard (Sheppard told him). I like hard, hard is not a problem for me at all.
*
Ronon’s strike-squad was grounded for weeks, because Dr. Beckett said fighting off the Wraith virus had depleted Sheppard’s immune system and he wasn’t safe for offworld travel. It gave Ronon lots of time to get his bearings, to finally put faces with names and learn people’s habits.
Rodney and Sheppard almost always ate dinner together. Sometimes it was the only time Rodney came out of his lab all day long. He went right back in when dinner was over. They didn’t eat alone, but they were still together.
Ronon mostly ate alone, and mostly in his room. People had stopped telling him he couldn’t take food out of the cafeteria by then.
“Sit down,” Sheppard said. Ronon had learned by then that Sheppard’s cheerful voice *was* how he gave orders, so he put down his tray, next to Sheppard and across from Teyla, and sat. Sheppard put one arm around his shoulders, the other around Rodney’s shoulders, and jostled them both. “Now, this is more like it,” he said. “Just because nobody’s shot at us for a couple of weeks doesn’t mean we can’t all act like we’re still friends.”
Ronon picked at his vegetables. Overcooked.
“You should really leave him alone, Colonel,” Rodney said. He had his shoulders hunched forward and his elbows on the table, like someone might come along any minute and try to pull his tray out from under him. “I’m sure he has better places to be, even if he’s too military to tell you so.”
“Better places to be?” Sheppard said, in a voice that suggested the words barely made sense to him. “Like where?”
“Maybe he wants to eat with his girlfriend,” Rodney said with his mouth full.
“Who?” Ronon asked.
Rodney snorted and slammed his glass of tea down on the table. “I’m sorry, my mistake, that was very imprecise of me. Maybe he wants to eat with one of his many girlfriends.”
“McKay,” Sheppard said under his breath – a short, warning tone. When neither of them looked over to meet his eyes, Sheppard sighed and let his arms drop from their shoulders. “We need to get offworld,” he said, returning to his own dinner. “This is the only unit I ever served with that gets less grouchy when there’s mortal danger in the air.”
“Do you find me...grouchy?” Teyla asked.
Sheppard attempted a smile for her, but even out of the corner of his eye, Ronon could see that it didn’t quite mask his frustration. “Nope. You and I are our usual loveable selves.”
*
Laura says she just wants to check him out, see if any of the rumors are true, but she comes back more than once, so he suspects it’s not just curiosity. She doesn’t tell him what rumors she’s been hearing, or if they check out against the evidence or not.
She talks a lot. She’ll be talking along about something, and then right in the middle of a sentence she’ll change her mind and do a complete about-face, saying exactly the opposite. Her voice is a little bit grating, but it grows on him, inexplicably.
He isn’t Laura Cadman’s usual type. She likes shy men, men she thinks are undiscovered treasures. Well, maybe he is Laura Cadman’s usual type; maybe she thinks he’s shy, because he doesn’t say that much. He lets her run their fucks; he lets her run everything. Why not? It makes her happy.
Sometimes he gets tired just listening to her chatter and chatter, making plans and repeating gossip and arguing with herself – just noise, all the time; he doesn’t even think she’s listening to herself. Then he presses her down and kisses her neck and runs his hands honey-slow over her skin. He likes to feel her relax under his touch. It’s not quite tending, but it feels a little bit the same.
She needs Ronon because he handles her like she’s treasure, because he slows her down when everyone else around her just goes faster trying to keep up with her. He spends almost ten minutes just kissing the inside of her right thigh, and she digs her fingers into the sheets and sights, speechless for once in her life. If she’s thinking of Dr. Beckett, well, why shouldn’t she? People should be as happy as they can be. Philosophy seems to be slipping through Ronon’s fingers as the years go by, leaving him with these little sand-grains of meaning, rough and plain, stuck to his skin. People should be as happy as they can be. People should be happy, if they can be.
She isn’t in love with him.
Do all that stuff (Sheppard told him, when he was flying on morphine). Make him happy, it’s good for him.
*
He still dreams about Kel. Less, now, about pulling the trigger and shooting Kel through the chest, and more about the years before that.
In his dreams, he’s his old self, his sixteen-year-old self, but he’s in Atlantis. Kel looks younger, just like Ronon does – younger than he ever was when Ronon knew him. He runs his fingernails along Ronon’s scalp while Ronon sucks him off, just like he always did, and Ronon wakes up with his dick hard and his chest burning like he’s having a heart attack.
Ronon saw his father die of a heart attack when he was seven years old, and he’s always felt like it happened to him, too, like he knows exactly what kind of feeling makes you grab your chest like that, knocks a strong man down off his feet. He used to wake up with night terrors, convinced it was happening to him. His brothers were worried he was growing up to be a coward, so they sent him into the Infantry to become a man.
He hadn’t had the heart-attack dreams in more than ten years. They only started again after he killed Kel. It seems strange to him that the Wraith didn’t bring them on. One of them touched his chest. It tried to stop his heart. He remembers that, but it always feels like it happened to someone else – like that was the thing he only saw, when the heart attack he did see was always the one he could feel.
Strange.
He dreams of Kel, and it’s a strange knot of sex and death, the trigger and his fingers and his heart.
The memories seem the clearest in those hours at night’s end, when he’s woken up shocked and in pain from those tangled dreams. He lies in bed and remembers things that really happened – because it wasn’t *all* a dream. Some of it happened. There was a Kel, and there was a Sateda, and Ronon was that sixteen-year-old. He needs to stay sure of that.
He remembers the rug that Kel – always a lover of fine things – bought from offworld traders and kept spread over the tarp in his bivouac. It was dark and jewel-toned, with intricate geometric patterns that tricked the eye, and stained with mud and blood after years of campaigning, but still deep and soft under Ronon’s knees. He remembers that Kel used to drink sherry from a narrow-fluted glass while Ronon sucked him.
He remembers the taste of sherry in his mouth, mingling with the taste of come, when Kel urged him onto his back on the bed, his hard, strong fingers opening up Ronon’s clothes while they kissed in faint, startling bursts, like the flashing lights of distant artillery. “I spoil you,” Kel would purr into his mouth, trailing his fingers down Ronon’s chest. “I just can’t help myself.”
Kel needed him because....
Ronon never did know. He never claimed to understand how Kel thought, what he planned. He believes that Kel did want more from him than simply...use. He could have had that only, and he asked for more.
Ronon was so young then. It never once occurred to him not to just give whatever a man like that asked.
Kel loved him. Maybe. At least, that’s how Ronon remembers it. He remembers that whether he was top or bottom, Kel always made sure Ronon was the one who came first. He remembers how slowly Kel’s fingers traced the edges of his body, an idle pleasure. He remembers that Kel could always see it in his eyes when he was exhausted and afraid, and that instead of reminding Ronon of his duty, he’d give him a kiss instead.
What’s love, really? Kel held every door open for him, and Ronon walked straight in and was never afraid.
Yeah, I don’t know what that means (Sheppard told him). But I’m pretty sure you have my permission.
*
Mitch is the one Ronon knows he should stop sleeping with. It’s not right, when he knows Mitch hates it as much as he wants it – hates the fact that he wants it. He’s a mathematician. He’s only twenty-two, and he’s a young twenty-two. Ronon thinks that this boy, a genius, a doctor of numbers, this boy who comes to his room with shaking hands and red-stained eyes and often can’t bring himself to say a word, is what Ronon’s brothers feared he would become.
He wishes he knew what to say to this boy. He wishes he knew if letting him suck Ronon’s dick is really giving him what he needs.
He’ll be handsome, when he’s older. He has wide, sharp cheekbones he hasn’t grown into yet, and his skin breaks out, and he carries his unhappiness in front of him, where no one can miss it. But he has thick, dark eyelashes and a graceful, predatory way of walking, like those sharp hipbones of his protect some kind of inner core of satisfaction, of pride, that he can’t reach down into yet. He hasn’t found the way. Ronon tells himself maybe he’s helping, but the truth is he just doesn’t know.
They only use their mouths on each other, although sometimes Ronon will palm those hipbones and feel a little shudder of want, an aching flutter of something trying to find its way through the confusion and the embarrassment. Then Mitch slides away, and Ronon thinks it would be wrong to chase him. The way Ronon has gotten around not knowing how to ask Atlanteans to sleep with him is, he doesn’t. He only sleeps with the ones who ask him.
He thinks it should excite him a little, the rawness of it, the thrill of semi-anonymity in a place where there are no strangers anymore. With Mitch there are no obligations, no gifts of self or speech asked or given. He remembers being excited by that kind of thing, once. Now he looks down at the dark, downy curl of Mitch’s hair and thinks of the way Sheppard’s mouth looked sliding easily, familiarly over Rodney’s cock, his intimate, inquisitive fingers, the crow’s-feet at his eyes when he flashed smiling glances upward. Mitch keeps his eyes closed. He sucks cock like he loves to do it, but Sheppard does it like he....
Like he just can’t help himself.
Mitch needs him because he’s warm and alive and a man, and because he knows they’ll never talk about this. Someday, Ronon thinks Mitch will have a lover, and they’ll lie in bed and tell stories about their pasts, and Mitch will talk about him then, and laugh ruefully over how difficult it all seemed, how far beyond him it was to imagine asking for more. Everyone has his younger self to look back on, with pity or with envy, or both.
He’s not in love with Ronon.
I’ve never liked anyone this much this soon (Rodney said). And not that many people like it when I like them, so thank you.
*
The Laganese required potential allies to spend a night being watched by their oracular birds atop a high mountain aerie. It took Sheppard about fifteen minutes to get his fingers bitten.
“Let this be a lesson to you,” Rodney said primly as he double-wrapped the bandages, turning Sheppard’s hand into a cloven hoof. “Alien wildlife is not to be mocked.”
“A,” Sheppard said, “they’re not wildlife; the Laganese breed them domestically. B, I wasn’t mocking, I was being friendly.”
“They are considered sacred vessels containing the wisdom of former generations of Laganese healers and diviners,” Teyla said. “It might not be wise to treat them as house-pets.”
“Also,” Rodney said, “how many of these incidents will it take for you to start considering the possibility that you’re not as charming as you think you are?”
When Ronon got up from the fire at twilight and began to pick his way through the rough, low-lying shrubbery cluttering the upward path, Sheppard said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“See what’s up there.” The path was narrow, but if he put his hand on the rock face, he’d be all right. His eyesight was good in the dark.
“Nothing’s up there,” Sheppard said. “Other than bitchy birds, and massive, deadly rock slides yet-to-be.”
“Something’s there,” Ronon said. “They said people come up here to leave offerings for the birds?”
“So?” Sheppard said.
Ronon shrugged. “A person doesn’t come this far up a mountain and then not go all the way to the top. There must be a way.”
Sheppard came with him, keeping his good hand to the mountain and using his bandaged hand to knock aside the brambles and hardy mountain scrub that kept catching on the sleeve of Ronon’s coat. The path curved around and upward, but Ronon guessed the ledge that the Laganese had set their camp on was no more than fifty feet from the summit, as the sacred vessel flies.
“Not bad,” Sheppard said when they found the lookout point, but his voice wasn’t flippant at all. The stars were huge at the top of the mountain, and the fires of the Laganese settlements were warm and bright underneath them, and in between there was nothing but shadow and shade and the throaty cooing of the narrowly built grey-feathered birds all around them. “Which way are we facing, west? Too bad we missed sunset.”
“Southwest,” Ronon said. “More south than west.”
“Christ, do you think you could be a little less romantic?” Sheppard said bitterly. “You’re kinda embarrassing me.”
“Do you want a blowjob?” Ronon’s voice was flat and expressionless; it was only half a joke, because for all he knew, that was what Sheppard considered romantic.
“Do you give a fuck what I want?” Sheppard snapped back, and Ronon didn’t really have an answer for that, so he didn’t say anything. They just stood there looking at the stars, until he noticed Sheppard shifting from side to side uncomfortably, hunched into himself against the sluggish, chill wind. Of course he’d left his jacket down at the main plateau. Ronon took his coat off and held it out toward him, and Sheppard reached for it automatically, then stopped.
“Go on,” Ronon said. “I’m not cold.”
The coat was big on Sheppard – not just too long, but too bulky on his thin frame. He didn’t look like himself; it was like putting leather on one of these birds, wings and delicate wishbones hidden under someone else’s skin. “You know Rodney misses you,” Sheppard said. It sounded awkward, as if he’d memorized a set of foreign words, tutored by someone who didn’t speak the language either. Maybe that was exactly what happened.
“He said that?”
“Well...you know Rodney. I’m paraphrasing.”
“I give too much of a fuck what you want,” Ronon said abruptly. “There was a time when all I would’ve wanted would be to give you whatever you want.”
“I don’t know what you think I’m going to make you do, once I have you under my evil sway – assuming I, in fact, had an evil sway to put you under.”
“You do know.”
“Look, I’m sorry, okay? I thought you understood it was...totally up to you. I thought you wanted to sleep with us, but if I somehow accidentally manipulated you or made you feel obligated– “
“It’s not about that.”
“Well, then, would you do me the very great honor of telling me what the fuck it is about? Just on the off-chance that me understanding what the hell is going on here would help me get my team back together.”
“Don’t make this about the team.”
“Of course it’s about the team!”
“I do my job.”
“This isn’t the kind of job where you can just clock in and out! I need a little bit more from you than that.”
Sheppard was in front of him now instead of behind him; Ronon wasn’t sure which of them had moved, but he suspected it might be him, since he seemed to be further from the mountain’s edge than he was before, the stars behind him and Sheppard and the stone in front of him. He wrapped his hands in the lapels of his coat and leaned his weight into Sheppard, pushing him against the rocks. “Is this my job?” he said, the words catching in his throat and turning into a growl. “Is this what you need?”
“Yeah,” Sheppard breathed. “Yeah, this is it,” and pulled him down by the neck to kiss him hard.
When he was on his knees, Sheppard reached down to touch his face, the heel of his hand resting under Ronon’s chin. “I’m not your old commander,” he said, and his voice was warm, Colonel Sheppard’s we’re-all-friends-here tone, but his eyes brooked no arguments. “And I’m not your dad, and I’m not your tenth-grade boyfriend, or whoever the hell else you’re afraid I am. I’m not anybody.”
Ronon pressed a still kiss with open mouth against Sheppard’s groin, breathing in the smell of skin and semen and leather. “I know who you are, John.”
His moans were in the same low register as the cooing of the flocking Laganese birds, the same slightly anxious cadences. “Also,” he said, his fingers pecking against Ronon’s skull for attention, “also, I don’t want you doing that thing to me, that thing where you service me like I need an oil change. That freaks me out. This is just us, okay? Agreed?”
“Sure,” Ronon said, palming his own cock as he licked at the tip of Sheppard’s.
He brought himself off in perfect time with Sheppard. He knelt up, pressing his forehead into Sheppard’s solar plexus, his wet mouth against the tender skin of Sheppard’s belly while he caught his breath. Sheppard’s hands traveled over his hair, his gentleness spoiled by the clumsy way they trembled. “I can’t help myself,” Ronon murmured, his lips drawing come and spit against skin as his hands traced the lean muscle and soft hair of Sheppard’s thighs. “I spoil you....”
“You make me insane,” Sheppard said, and Ronon wasn’t sure from the tone of his voice if it was a compliment or not.
*
The Laganese consulted their birds in the morning, and Ronon was half afraid the ugly alien pigeons would report back about what they saw on the south face. He wondered what kind of fraternization regs the Laganese believed in.
Apparently the birds were sanguine, though, and the Laganese led Ronon and his team down to a sandy lakeshore with a waterfall and left them alone to bathe. It wasn’t entirely clear if bathing was a part of the ritual or not, and Ronon didn’t particularly care; after a long, cold night at high altitudes, the spring-heated lake was a religious experience as far as he was concerned.
Sheppard and Rodney splashed like otters while they bickered about...one of those incomprehensible things they argued about. Whether men made of bats were science fiction or not? Ronon didn’t intend to get involved, but when Rodney said that comic books couldn’t be science fiction, Sheppard made an indignant noise that implied the point was too stupid to debate, and Ronon heard himself saying, “That book you gave me was funny.”
“What book?” Rodney asked scornfully, as if Ronon were inventing some incident just to interfere. His face changed suddenly as he remembered, and he looked Ronon over with something like awe. “You really read that?”
“Yeah, I read it. Wasn’t that the point of loaning it to me?”
“I didn’t think you’d get very far. But that’s not – that’s not what we were talking about. I mean, a comic book is not a – a comic. book, a comedic book, it doesn’t have anything to do with comedy. You really thought Hitchhiker was funny?”
Ronon shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable under Rodney’s look. He normally only approved of Ronon in private. “I didn’t understand all of it. But parts of it were really good.”
“There are sequels,” Rodney said, his voice suddenly timid. “You should – I’ll loan you the next one.”
“Don’t worry,” Sheppard said, “you’re not actually supposed to understand it.”
“I imagine you’re quite comfortable with that sort of thing,” Rodney said, rounding on Sheppard. “Being released from the pesky demands of rationality keeps your pretty head from getting all muddled up with the fine distinctions between, oh, say, the DC universe and science.” And then they were off again. Ronon swam back to shore, where Teyla was sunning herself in a patch of scrub grass.
She turned her head toward him, her face resting on the backs of her folded hands, and looked at him with one eye. Belatedly, Ronon wondered if it was impolite to sit down next to her wearing nothing but his wet underwear, but she seemed as unperturbed as ever, and honestly he didn’t think he could get into his pants before he’d dried off even if he wanted to. The Laganese apparently didn’t believe in towels.
After she’d absorbed whatever inscrutable thing Teyla looked for in people, she turned her face back toward the lake, slit-eyed against the light flashing off the water’s surface. Ronon didn’t look at all, just rolled a ball of wet sand carefully between his thumb and forefinger.
“I have always believed,” Teyla said at last, “that a community is a kind of circle.” She stretched out her arm and drew one in the sand in front of her, about the size of Ronon’s fist and perfectly even. “A circle drawn to include all the members of that community. Did you have occasion to study geometry when you were a child?”
“A little bit,” he said. He didn’t remember much about geometry except that he hadn’t enjoyed it. He hadn’t enjoyed any of his lessons; it was hard to sit so still for so long, but impossible to imagine defying the authority of his Masters. An unbearable tension, impossible to resolve in his body or mind. He’d been relieved when his oldest brother told him he was to be given to the Infantry instead.
“A circle is the sum of all points that are a single, given distance from one point.” She made a crescent-shaped dent in the sand with her fingernail, in the circle’s center. “Without the center, a circle has no meaning. When I learned that, I thought to myself, well, that is the purpose of wise leadership: to establish the circle’s center. I meditated on that for many years. I felt that it was my duty to understand this idea, and to be a fixed thing by which my people could recognize their place within the body of the whole.”
Ronon looked at her with a new sort of appreciation. He’d always figured Teyla for one of those people who liked to discuss every little thing – who didn’t understand what real leadership meant. She always received orders, whether from Colonel Sheppard or Dr. Weir, with a detached tranquility that seemed to imply that obedience wasn’t much of a bother to her, so she would obey.
“But after a certain number of years,” Teyla said, her voice lowering soothingly, as if she were breaking bad news to him, “I realized that the centerpoint is the beginning of a circle, but not the essence of it. A circle is the sum of all points a given distance from the center.” She smoothed her hand across the empty space inside the circle, blurring its lines, obscuring the moon-shaped center of it. “A circle is comprised of an infinite number of points, but what unifies it is the radius – the distance maintained from the center. To occupy a point closer to the center, or farther away, breaks the circle. And I began to realize that if a community is a circle, then everything that is not the center must always be apart from it. A circle has no meaning if this is not so. It ceases to exist.”
“The meaning of life is math?” Ronon said. “You sound like McKay now.”
“Dr. McKay has his own wisdom; I have learned much from him. I consider him a friend, as well.”
“Are you ever lonely?” It probably wasn’t the thing to ask; Ronon didn’t think he’d like it very much if someone put the same question to him.
“No,” she said, and smiled softly at him. “I was lonely when I believed I was a single point at the center. At the circumference, I am one of an uncountable number. I have never been less lonely than I am in Atlantis. But it does depend on holding the place I am given, and there is an art to that.”
*
Atlantis is a small world, smaller than it looks from the outside. Ronon gets bored with running up and down the levels of the center towers and starts going for long runs, out on the piers, around the vacant wingtips of the city.
It can take hours, keeping to the far perimeter. His heartbeat fits inside the sound of the tides, a ratio of twenty-to-one. Ronon has the time. He’s not sleeping much these days anyway.
Colonel Sheppard has already invested an incredible amount of time and energy (Weir said), trying to make you an integral part of his team.
You have no idea, Ronon didn’t say. Atlantis is too small for secrets (you almost have to try *not* to learn what you have no business knowing, in a place this size), but Ronon understands now what you can and can’t say out loud.
He won’t betray his taskmaster, even one who breaks his heart. Oh, he’ll shoot and kill the one who loved him, but John Sheppard, who doesn’t have a clue how this radius they preserve between them is eating away at who and what Ronon thought he was – John, he’ll protect at any cost.
He goes further and further to the outer edge every day, and when he’s built the longest circuit he can, he starts doing two laps instead of one. Sheppard doesn’t run with him anymore, so he doesn’t have to worry about anyone keeping up.
Three laps takes all night long, and he has to rest up a few times along the way, but he can do it. Ronon thinks he’s in the same shape he was when he was a Runner, and he’s quietly proud of that. Atlantis is the kind of place that can make you soft if you let it, and he wasn’t brought here to get soft. He was brought here because the Atlanteans admire his ability to endure.
It’s important to Ronon that he holds the place he’s been given.
Atlantis needs him because he is fucking unkillable.
Three laps takes all night long, and he can’t do any more, but it’s somehow not enough, either. He
begins to layer them inside each other, like the nested orbits in solar system diagrams – the first run goes all the way around the outside of the city, and he starts in the late afternoon, when there’s only one sun in the sky and the heat coming off Atlantis’s shimmering body armor isn’t too unbearable. The second run skirts the mirrored walls. The third is inside. He can do four laps that way, five before long. He spirals them inward, each not quite as far out as the last, until it’s deep into the night watch and he’s back to his own tower, back to the animate center of the city where he supposedly lives.
Sometimes he crashes up against his own door, amazed he can’t see the trail of his footprints in blood, amazed his heart can take this, amazed there’s enough air in the world, and still a part of him wishes he didn’t have to stop.
He tells himself he runs now by choice. This is his choice. The difference between a Runner and a man is....
The platitudes fall away by the third lap, though. The real difference between a Runner and a man is that a Runner has problems he really *can* outrun. A man has duties, responsibilities. And those are always with you.
See, the thing is, Colonel Sheppard and I have sort of gotten into this habit of saving each other’s lives (Rodney said), and it’s my turn. It can be your turn next.
*
After the Aurora (a mission that sounded thrilling on paper, but was actually didn’t involve anything more strenuous than counting on Ronon’s part), they all toasted to the dead with a sweet white wine that fizzed like grape soda. Sheppard and Rodney left together, and Ronon went running.
Out to the end of each pier, out as far as you could go without falling into the ocean. The Ronons were a family of farmers from a landlocked province; he’d seen the ocean a few times before coming to Atlantis, mostly while flying over it on his way to a new deployment. He’d never felt like he was looking at something familiar when he stood at the edge of it.
Out to the boundary, the ocean, and then in, and in, and in again. He passed Sheppard’s room every night on the innermost ring, sometime around 0100. He only stopped there one time, the night after the Aurora, and Sheppard wasn’t even inside.
The door opened, though. Sheppard never kept it locked, or else the door locks recognized Ronon as someone who belonged inside. He wasn’t, really, someone who belonged inside, but the door opened, and it was hard not to step in. The ligaments in his right knee were killing him, anyway; he only wanted to sit down for a minute.
Sheppard’s quarters looked more like someone’s real home than almost anywhere else Ronon had been in Atlantis. Most of the scientists had quarters that seemed like auxiliary labs, and the soldiers kept a stark kind of order that would have made Kel roll his eyes at their lack of style. Sheppard didn’t have much style, either, but his quarters were comfortably cluttered with evidence of his real life, from the picture of his musician and the guitar that Ronon had never seen him play leaning underneath it, to the different sizes and shapes of balls for different games kicked out of the way underneath the desk he never used, to the jumble of empty DVD boxes and unmarked discs scattered carelessly around his computer monitor. He’d been in Atlantis for more than a year, and you could feel the way the room had gotten to know him in that time.
Ronon sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed his knee. This late at night, he couldn’t imagine where Sheppard would be except in McKay’s quarters. It was impossible not to think about that, but Ronon’s energy reserves were so depleted that he didn’t feel anything as the thoughts passed through his mind – not desire, not sadness, not anger – nothing except a grim kind of peace. They were together, and he was here. People should be as happy as they can be.
Ronon hadn’t been really happy for a long time.
He laid down on his back and pulled his knee up toward his chest, trying to gauge how badly hurt it was. Not very, he didn’t think. The pain would wear off.
He didn’t plan to stay where he hadn’t been invited and didn’t belong, but once he was lying down he was suddenly tired, and Sheppard’s mattress was softer than most in Atlantis – trust Sheppard to steal the best one for himself, and then to keep it even once he was sleeping with a man who insisted it was a medical necessity to sleep on something roughly the consistency of petrified wood. Ronon didn’t have back problems, though, and he liked this mattress a lot.
*
He went to sleep on his side but wakes up on his back, in the dark. He knows John’s hands, though, pulling the blankets over him, and the mint of his aftershave, and even the spot where his eyelashes end at the corner of his eye, which is the only part of John that he can really see as it hovers near his own eyes. He smells like something else besides aftershave and hair gel, too – salt sweat, salt water, hot melted butter – all of that and none of it, the smell of Rodney’s skin. Ronon shivers.
John stretches out alongside him, his arm across Ronon’s chest. When Ronon tries to sit up, John rolls against him, dead weight over half his body. Ronon makes a small grunt of protest and gets his elbow under him, tries to sit up again. John gets heavier.
He opens his mouth to say stop, to say let me go, and John touches his lips, sliding the tips of his fingers inside his mouth. Ronon closes his eyes. If it’s this dark, does it count? If you can’t prove it was ever real, can it turn against you?
John makes a little sound, not much more than a breath, and runs his hand softly over Ronon’s face. Two of his fingers are damp, two dry, and his thumb raking almost audibly against the crisp hair of Ronon’s beard.
One last time, Ronon tries to shake himself loose. He outweighs John; he knows he’s stronger. John’s got the better position, though, and Ronon’s got twenty years of learning how to give way and trust, warring with just seven years of chaos. At the bottom of it all, he’s still more Ronon Dex than he is a Runner, and this is a battle he can’t commit himself to.
His breathing nestles up against John’s without effort, the only two sounds Ronon can hear; he may not think much of the Ancients’ taste in beds, but at least the frames don’t squeak. John touches him over and over, his face and his chest underneath his clothes, a soothing touch that makes Ronon think of sleep as much as sex. More than sex.
More than sex, he just needs something he can rest against.
I don’t need this (Rodney said). I don’t need two of you.
*
He woke up sense by sense. First, the smell of coffee. Second, the thick pillow underneath him and the blanket pulled almost up to his nose. Third, the soft keyboard sounds and rustling of paper, and a grumble that expressed a world of long-suffering without any discernable words.
He rolled over in bed and blinked several times at the auxiliary lab that had colonized John’s quarters. How was it possible that even Rodney McKay’s implacable willpower could turn someone else’s space into his own office in just a few hours, with the help of not much more than a laptop and twenty file folders? Ronon watched John move a few things out of the way so he could situate his own laptop more securely on the table, and then watched Rodney huff impatiently and move the same papers right back.
It was after 1000; they could conceivably have been at this game for five or six hours by now, knowing Rodney’s hours. Ronon found that idea strangely endearing.
They noticed him at the same time. “Hey,” John said throatily. Rodney only looked at him for a moment, then got up to pour a cup of coffee from the machine on John’s desk (which didn’t belong to John, and wasn’t there last night) and bring it over to Ronon.
“Thanks,” Ronon said, shoving the blanket off and sitting up to take the hot coffee from Rodney’s hands. He continued to wait expectantly, until Rodney rolled his eyes and produced half a raisin bagel wrapped in a paper napkin.
Taking the opportunity to talk while Ronon had his mouth full of something that took work to chew, Rodney said, “Well, if you hadn’t slept half the day away, we might have been able to sort some things out. Unfortunately, I now have approximately one hundred and four stupid meetings and, I believe, two that might turn out to make a difference in anyone’s life. I’m sorry,” he said, a little more softly. “I wanted.... This has been a bad week for me.”
“It’s okay,” Ronon said. He’d come to count on Rodney being unavailable; it made him easier to avoid. He touched Rodney’s hand, and when he didn’t pull it back, he squeezed Rodney’s fingers and then let go. He glanced down to where their knees were almost touching and didn’t lift his eyes until Rodney touched his fingertips to his hairline.
“I want to be sure about this,” Rodney said. “I think I have a grasp on the situation, but I have a tendency to misread people, and you’re sort of – well, let’s just say you’re expressive in a special way, just for that extra little bit of fun challenge. It’s not us, is it? Us meaning you and me. I mean, whatever the problem is.... That is – I mean – if it were just the two of us....”
“It’s not.”
“I know that. I didn’t mean to imply that it – was – or that it could be, or ever – would be. But on a purely hypothetical basis.... The problem here isn’t between....”
After a silence, Ronon said, “Was that the end of your sentence?”
“Oh, now look who’s witty. That’s wonderful. What I’m saying is, all other things being equal – temporarily, hypothetically – is there anything that’s...that’s wrong between us? Because I don’t think there is. I could be wrong. This isn’t really my field, you know. But...is there? You can answer now,” Rodney said after another silence. “I know, that probably went by a bit quickly. Shall I try again? With fewer technical terms this time. ‘Hypothetically,’ by the way, means ‘let’s pretend.’ Now, taking subject of you and I and hypothetically removing all the external variables, do any of the many deep-seated psychological and emotional problems plaguing this relationship, and by that I’m referring to your psychological and emotional problems, just to be clear – do any of them have to do with me directly?”
“Well, you’re a lot older than me.” It was one thing to be attracted to Rodney’s condescending shit, but it was something else to let him know that.
Rodney’s face went through a couple different varieties of shock, before settling on that loftily wounded look he wore when he thought people were taking cheap shots at him. “And on that note,” he said over his shoulder at Sheppard, “I’ll turn this over to your skillful and experienced diplomacy. Try not to get bitten. Which is sort of a metaphor for...don’t screw this up, all right?”
Sheppard rolled his eyes, but allowed Rodney to peck his lips with a kiss as he gathered up his computer and an apparently random selection of files. “Well, I got such a good lead-in,” he said. “Be a shame to waste it.”
Rodney paused at the door and looked back with an irritated frown that Ronon thought was what passed for regret on Rodney’s face. “I really wanted to have time this morning, but...you’ve looked so tired lately, I thought....”
“Thanks,” Ronon said again. He didn’t think it was a very good sign that Rodney was leaving without kissing him, but at least Rodney worried about his well-being, and that was something. That was as much as Ronon should probably be letting himself want.
When they were alone together, Sheppard pulled his chair closer to the bed and propped his feet up, crossed at the ankles. His arms were crossed over his chest, too, his whole body wrapped up in stubborn knots, and Ronon knew he wouldn’t be able to get out of this just by keeping his mouth shut. “We can do this up-front, can’t we?” Sheppard said. Ronon shrugged, unsure whether or not he completely understood the figure of speech. He thought it just meant be honest, but sometimes there was more packed into the way Atlanteans used their words than Ronon could unravel very quickly. “Good. We’ll skip the what-do-you-want part, because I know what you want, you want the same thing McKay wants.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t skip this part,” Ronon said, “if you only know what two out of three of us want.”
Sheppard smiled a little tightly. “I don’t count.”
“You don’t count.”
He wondered if Sheppard even realized he was kicking at the edge of the bed with his heel like a small boy chafing under adult injustice. “No, I’m the fucking CO around here, right? I get to make sure we do the smart thing. You can brood and Rodney can bitch, but my job is to give the fucking orders. See? I’m better at this gig than you think I am.”
“I never said you weren’t good at it.”
“Right, because I’m an idiot, and I can’t tell that you think I do a shit job with my team. Hell, maybe you’re right; I love you guys a lot, but collectively speaking, we’re not the best advertisement for my managerial style.”
“So you’re trying out a new style,” Ronon said, setting his empty coffee cup aside. “You plan on giving me an order now?”
It took Sheppard a minute to answer; maybe that was more up-front than he’d been imagining. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I guess that’s what I plan on doing.”
“Let’s hear it,” Ronon said, even though he knew, more or less, what Sheppard was going to say.
Sheppard took a deep breath and said, “Get over this.”
He waited for a minute, and then said, “That’s it?” Usually Sheppard’s orders came with a lot more elaboration.
“Look, I don’t know what else to say to you! Yes, I’m attracted to you, you know I am. And I like you, I feel like I can relax around you, and in my experience it’s not all that common to find people you can just be around, and be – yourself, be comfortable. Is there a part of me that wishes I could be with you? Obviously, but I’m with Rodney, I plan to be with Rodney for a while, and the fact that you and Rodney are fucking in love with each other is kind of a complicating factor, but I’m not.... Okay, I have, in the past, had kind of a martyr complex, and maybe I did technically say at one point that I didn’t want to be possessive and make him unhappy, but the thing is.... The thing is, I had him first and I don’t feel like bowing out, on account of this theory I have that factors in a whole lot of sucky things about Atlantis and balances them out with a couple of key constants, which basically consist of Puddlejumpers and Rodney. I can’t...I can’t let him go. I used to think I could if I had to, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“I never expected you to.” Any more than he ever expected Rodney to let Sheppard go.
“I know the two of you have this idea in your heads that we all could– “ He broke off and scrubbed his hands through his hair, then down over his face, and said, “Look, I have to do my job here. I have to tell you, it can’t happen that way. It’s not going to.”
He’d known that, too. It wasn’t so much an idea in his head as it was...just this quiet need in his chest. It wasn’t the first need Ronon had ever had that wasn’t going to be met.
“For all kinds of reasons,” Sheppard said, as if he were answering somebody’s question. Maybe this was a speech he’d prepared for Rodney, who would no doubt have had a few questions by this point. “First of all, it’s ludicrous to say it wouldn’t affect the team, because I think we’ve proven none of us are all that mature. It would totally affect the team. It’s also against– I admit I have a lot more wiggle room here than I would at any other posting, but you can’t keep something like this a secret, and I really, really don’t think I can stretch ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ to encompass setting up a big, queer harem on base. Plus, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s fraternization whether the two of you are military or not. Spirit of the law, it’s completely fraternization. And anyway, it just – it just doesn’t work. People keep trying it, because on paper, hey, it sounds great, but these things never really work out. Someone gets jealous and someone feels left out and everybody gets hurt and people take sides. It would never work, and knowing the three of us and our people skills, we’d all end up hating each other. It’s not worth it. We’re just not going to get ourselves into that situation, because....”
“I know,” he said.
Sheppard cleared his throat roughly and said, “Good, maybe you can explain it to McKay, then. I told him it was impossible, but you know how he is.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, hm,” Sheppard said, looking up at the ceiling. “Let me see if I can remember it exactly.” His voice shifted into Rodney’s clipped, fussy tones as he said, “It was something like, ‘John, maybe you can explain to me why it is that when I tell you something is impossible, you tell me to stop whining and do it anyway, but when you tell me something is impossible, I’m supposed to, what? Believe you have the first clue what you’re talking about?’”
“You’re pretty good at that,” Ronon said.
“Thanks. I’ve been practicing. Rodney is – he’s a romantic. You know, he’d deny it, but there’s a certain kind of romantic you can only be when you’ve never been in love before, and he’s just rotten with it. I guess he has to get it knocked out of him eventually, but you understand I’m not trying to rush the process.”
“I’ll get over this,” Ronon said. “But....”
“But what?”
It was easier to say while he was looking down at the blanket lying twisted over his leg, and not at Sheppard. “It would be easier to do if you would...stop touching me?”
Sheppard leaned heavily back in his chair, as if his skeleton had suddenly powered down to minimum levels. “I’m sorry. I know.”
“I’m doing my best to...keep the right distance. You can call it brooding, but – it’s the best I know how to....”
“I know. I know. It’s not your fault, I know. It’s really mine. I’m the one who started all this. I just thought it was – at that point it didn’t seem so – serious. I didn’t know it would turn all serious like this. Now you don’t feel like you can be within a mile of either one of us, and I can’t seem to keep my fucking hands off of you, and Rodney’s– He’s completely miserable. You realize he’s miserable, right?”
“Yeah,” Ronon said, because miserable Rodney wasn’t any more or less snappish and difficult than regular Rodney, but he could tell the difference anyway, somehow.
“And I know it seems like there’s a simple solution, but it’s – it’s not simple, and it’s frankly not even a solution, it just creates new problems. And I don’t have the luxury.... It’s my team at stake. That’s where my first responsibility has to be, I don’t have any choice about that. Anything else would be bad for all of us, it would be bad for Atlantis, it would be...it would be....”
“Dishonorable?” Ronon suggested.
Sheppard leaned toward him, and for a moment Ronon thought he was going to perform that salute that the Athosians used. “Sorry about this in advance,” he said roughly, and laced his fingers together behind Ronon’s neck, resting his forehead in the crook.
“It’s okay,” Ronon said softly, and touched Sheppard’s back.
He shivered a few times, and once his breath hitched suspiciously, but mostly Sheppard just stayed like that, with Ronon stroking his back, until he seemed to be himself again. When he pushed away, Ronon touched the side of his face lightly with his thumb. “I hate being the responsible one,” Sheppard said.
“Too close or too far away,” Ronon said, “and it just...doesn’t work. I think...you’re actually...the best commander I ever had. If it makes you feel any better.” Sheppard didn’t say anything to that, but Ronon could see in his eyes that it meant something to him. “I don’t think McKay’s going to be happy with how we solved this,” he said.
“Too bad. He said himself, if it was just the two of you, there wouldn’t be a problem to solve. This is because of me, and all I can do is.... This is the best I can do.”
“I think,” Ronon said slowly, “if it was just any two of us, there wouldn’t be a problem to solve. Right?”
Sheppard started to say something, then stopped. He put his hands on either side of Ronon’s face and said, “This is the last time I’m going to kiss you, all right? I swear I’ll stop, I just...need you to....” Ronon closed his eyes and let John have whatever kind of kiss he wanted to take.
He went with long and wet and unsettlingly gentle, and when he pulled away, their mouths making a soft, desperate sound, Ronon stood up, resisting the urge to wipe his mouth on the back of his hand. It wouldn’t have helped; he didn’t know how long he’d be able to feel that touch, but he knew he couldn’t make it go away just by wanting it to. If he could do things like that, it would never have come to this stage at all.
“If you want,” Ronon said at the door, “you can tell Rodney that you asked me. I mean – asked me to – you know what I mean. You can just...tell him I said no. Then he’ll be mad at me instead of you, and I don’t see that much of him anymore anyway.”
That was supposed to help, but from the look that crossed John’s face, something about what he’d said was more hurtful than saying nothing at all. This really wasn’t Ronon’s field, either. “Thanks for the offer,” John said, a little sourly, “but in the interest of accountability, I should really stick with acting like I’m in charge around here, rather than finding other people to take the blame for me.”
“Okay. You’re...you’re doing the right thing. All of it. I mean.... I think you are.”
John smiled, but it didn’t look very natural. “This is what honor feels like, huh?”
“Usually.”
“Getting laid is better.”
Ronon couldn’t help smiling. “Usually.”
That night he didn’t run, just walked all the way out to the end of the long pier, the one farthest away from the geographic center of the city – although as he watched a jumper come in from the mainland, he found it hard to accept the idea that the Gate wasn’t the centerpoint of Atlantis. He wondered if McKay knew some kind of convoluted math that would explain how the center of a circle could be in a different place from where it looked like it was. Ever since Rodney told him about imaginary numbers and what he called non-Euclidian geometry, Ronon wouldn’t put much past him. He did have a flair for the impossible, Rodney McKay.
When he turned back toward the city, there were lights in the windows of the inner towers.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 04:17 pm (UTC)From:It wasn’t so much an idea in his head as it was...just this quiet need in his chest.
I am going to go KILL BABIES now so I can WRITE LIKE THAT. *flail!*
more later, when I am composed again!
no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 04:52 pm (UTC)From:This was great, beautifully written, and it was all so very Ronon that I could see him reacting exactly like this. I was just going along, though, thinking, okay, okay, and then I hit the part where Sheppard mentioned Rodney and Ronon being fucking in love with each other and all of a sudden my heart clenched, because the way you have this set up, it truly is a no win situation. (As much as I would, of course, like for it to be a win-win-win situation *right now*.) I feel so badly for all of them.
But! I am very glad that this is still a WIP, so that I can cling to the hope that things will eventually turn out okay. And happy. And that there will be lots more Rodney/Ronon still to come. *g*
no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 05:06 pm (UTC)From:They are all in love with each other. At least, that's how it reads to me, and I don't think that's just because that's how I want it to read. I don't see WHY it wouldn't work. They are making each other more unhappy holding out than they ever could with the complications of giving in, I think.
But maybe that is just me.
*cries a little*
no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 05:13 pm (UTC)From:that was deliciously painful and I loved the layout, the quotes worked in some weird and surprising way to give a feeling for what Ronon is feeling, how he processes things, to create a sort of mood, without actually saying anything - lovely!
John makes no sense though! the logic is seriously strange and, well, illogical and I'm crossing my fingers that he'll get over it and there shall be happiness
I adore, adore, adore how we're getting the idea of exactly how Ronon feels about John and why and how it's being so gradually revealed with perfect continuity throughout the series, the tie in with his past, fighting himself, it's... perfect.
In this one particularly I loved Ronon and Rodney and they both rung very true to me but John kind of confused me, not only because I'm for them getting together (though of course I am) but it seemed weird given what he was like in Conscience and the others.
*shrug* Any of my complaints, hopes and speculations aside I'm breathlessly waiting for the next one no matter where you decide to take this.
it's a beautiful fic
no subject
Date: 2005-10-28 09:59 am (UTC)From:I, too, am confused about John. He was a lot more...um...arrogant and unattached in the other parts. I need Rodney loving! Rodney deserves the love of everyone including Zelenka, but I think this is complicated enough. Great job. I wait patiently for more.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 05:14 pm (UTC)From:This is so incredibly beautiful. Every word, perfect... I love this story so freakin' much, and I'm just going to be over here in the corner crying until you post the next part.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 05:24 pm (UTC)From:This whole series has just been beautiful.
But hurty.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 06:24 pm (UTC)From:uh... in a good way.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 06:40 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 06:55 pm (UTC)From:Don't make me beg.
*cries*
Okay, please. Please?
no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 07:43 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 08:10 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 08:13 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 10:12 pm (UTC)From:::loves::
Rodney can find the impossible way for all three to be together and be happy and oh god there's less than a 33.33% chance of that happening isn't there...
no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 10:21 pm (UTC)From:Beautifully painful.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 12:49 am (UTC)From:I know people are going to take sides (Rodney/Ronon, Rodney/John, John/Ronon, or a big ole threesome), but the beauty of this series is in its realism. It wouldn't work out perfectly between them in the real world, and the emotional turmoil they're going through is totally believable.
I'm a John/Rodney shipper, so perhaps I'm biased, but I love the depth of John's caring when he realises that what he and Rodney have together is something new and unique for them both and worth fighting for.
but there’s a certain kind of romantic you can only be when you’ve never been in love before, and he’s just rotten with it. I guess he has to get it knocked out of him eventually, but you understand I’m not trying to rush the process.
I feel for poor Ronon, but I love what's happened so far. Excellent job, and I can't wait for the new season so you get inspired again.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 01:03 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 06:33 am (UTC)From:I'm invested in them all being together, and they're just being *stupid*. Don't they know that Rodney's always right about these things? Honestly - total stupid-heads!
You are totally ripping my heart out of my chest with this, and I'm alternatively loving it and cursing your name. Usually at the same time. Wonderful series - thank you so much.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 06:36 am (UTC)From:his simultaneous perceptive insight and refusal to be self-aware are wonderfully played out; his pain and seeming refusal to acknowledge it...i especially love the flashbacks/thoughts/memories of his various trysts with other Atlanteans, all showing his passivity, aware of other's needs yet not quite of his own when every section ends with John or Rodney...
And John would be such a bastard in his selfishness if he didn't hurt as well, and rodney's just so pitiful and yet being in Ronon's mind I can't help but resent them a bit for choosing to try to be happy at his expense...
I want to reread and yet I think I need a bit happiness in between...maybe I'll read their little possible not-future where they're all happy together in your verse that isn't...
thank you for yet another part of an amazing and amazingly told series!!!
no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 08:03 am (UTC)From:I do not normally sign up for pain. I want you to know this. And I'm trying to rise above my gut reaction, which is to whimper and insist that it *could so* work out, because you are the author, and you are actually in charge of this whole thing, so I'll just whimper in private and sign on for more sweet pain.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 08:10 am (UTC)From:I friended you (which I hope you don't mind) because I was terrified that you would write more Alpha Centauri and I would miss it. Anyway, I just wanted you to know how much I adore this and I wanted to thank you for writing it. THANK YOU!
no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 09:18 am (UTC)From:Anyway, I love how painful and complicated this is. I love that John, who's generally all about the self-sacrificing, isn't willing to give Rodney up. I love that Rodney, who wants everyone to think he's a pessimistic cynic, is the one who's got the starry-eyed solution and John is the cynic here. I love that Ronon's just kind of bewlidered and lost, and *young*.
I honestly don't know who I'm rooting for here, because I am a confirmed McShep shipper and I want them together ALWAYS, but I also adore this Rodney/Ronon beyond all reason, plus John and Ronon! I want them happy, but I'm also not sure I want the result to be a happy healthy threesome in the end. *sigh* Luckily, I trust you to make me love it no matter what happens in the end.
I can't wait for more!
no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 09:36 am (UTC)From:I think John's speech, his decision, is totally on target; it's exactly what John would and *should* be saying, and man, I just love that Ronon knows it. On the show (IMO, anyway), Ronon always comes across as a voice of quiet wisdom, the kind of wisdom one learns through life and experience, and the fact that he knows John is doing the right thing makes it so much more poignant. It's all so terribly real, and honest, and you've captured the true dilemma so well.
I also wanted to add that I am a total John/Rodney WHORE, I really am, but you're making me want *Ronon* to be the one who gets what he wants here, which just shows me how skillfully you've rendered them all. It's normally pretty hard to make me unsympathetic to John in any circumstance - I tend to cut that pretty boy a LOT of slack - and I'm not really *un*sympathetic to him here, not completely, but I find myself trusting Ronon more. You're doing it very unobtrusively, but you're accomplishing it nonetheless. *g*
And I also wanted to mention: John admitting his feelings for Rodney via a "you can't have him" speech to Ronon is just so --WOW, so well done. So real to life. And his line about how Rodney and Ronon are "fucking in love with each other" -- I can't tell you how perfect that is, how totally heartrending, with all of its implications.
So, so well done. Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 12:37 pm (UTC)From:I don't like sad stories. I don't read WIPs as a general rule (you and
I wonder if I'm just not smart enough to get all the nuances going on in this, because I don't quite get John here. A comment above applauded the realism of the decision. I say fuck realism! If I want realism, I'll watch the news! (wait, bad example...). I want escapism. I want a world where John/Ronon/Rodney isn't just possible, it's unquestioned.
I cherish the on-Earth tidbit you posted, the maybe-not-future, because I believed every word of it. It rang true.
I'm going to hang on to that until you pick up the thread again.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 05:25 pm (UTC)From:part of what appeals to me about threesomes is the working out how it all fits together and the way you've developed the separate relationships, and acknowledged the issues, makes this such a good story!
thank you and looking forward to more!
no subject
Date: 2005-10-27 07:17 pm (UTC)From:wow.
Every time you post a new piece, I go back & savour all the other parts first, & guh, twas good.
Ronon half expecting the birds to dob them in was hilarious, & John was frustratingly contradictory, & damnit, why can't they just be a happy OT3? 2 people breaking regs is ok, 3 is impossible? John, WTF! Stop touching Ronon & feeling excluded at the same time!
I live in hope of happy OT3, that the breakup is just the obstacle before the payout.
Oh, & I liked the description of Rodney as a romantic who's never really been in love before.