Adaptations
Oct. 15th, 2022 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stringertheoryTitle: Adaptations
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Ronon Dex, Kate Heightmeyer
Word Count: 4727
Categories: gen, introspection, character study
Spoilers: Set between “Runner” (2.3) and “Sateda” (3.4). Spoilers for the same.
Warnings: none
Summary: In the wake of coming to Atlantis, Ronon adapts.
Ronon kept running.
He didn’t have to, not anymore. Nothing was chasing him. But if he stayed still for too long his chest started to ache like he’d been running anyway, and the only thing that made it better was to move. So he ran.
Atlantis might have been a city, but it still had plenty of space to roam. Even so, he mostly stayed near where the Lanteans had set up their base of operations, making circuits of the area they’d reclaimed thus far via the hallways that marked its outer limits. Sheppard joined him, sometimes. Ronon thought it was his way of bonding, same as letting Ronon beat him up in the gym now and then. Sheppard was a doer, too.
Sometimes Sheppard would try to hold a conversation while they jogged through the city, but most of the time he stayed quiet. He’d let Ronon lead the way, following a silent half-step behind at his side, and they would run. He’d hang in as long as his pride outlasted his lungs, then he’d fall back while Ronon continued on alone.
When Ronon was particularly restless, when the tightness under his skin felt too much like being watched, he ventured into the unoccupied areas of the city. McKay had told him they were dangerous, that they were unexplored and could have damage. But danger had never bothered him before, and Ronon wasn’t entirely sure what would scare him now. So he headed into the dimly lit or darkened corridors, splashing through puddles and dodging around debris, ignoring all the rooms he passed. He liked the isolation of the empty parts of the city, the way the quiet felt deeper, the way the air seemed more still, the way the shadowy corners felt like possibilities.
He would run until his chest stopped aching and everything burned instead, and then he’d stop. Sometimes it was a short run; rarely, he would have to give up before he was satisfied. Either way, he kept running.
He wasn’t being chased, not anymore. But he still had to run.
-000000-
Weir made him see Heightmeyer.
“Everyone gets assessed,” she told him. “It’s protocol.”
He believed her, but he also sensed the sideways slant of her words and knew that he wasn’t going to get just the standard assessment. It wasn’t surprising—he was a stray that had been brought into her city, and she needed to know who he was and whether he could be trusted. But it didn’t worry him, either. The doc could find whatever she wanted to; if he couldn’t stay in Atlantis, he’d leave. He’d be fine.
Heightmeyer wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d had to talk to psychs before in the military—not often, but regularly enough; Sateda had its own protocols. Those docs had been aloof and efficient. They’d gotten through what needed getting through and moved on, no wasted time or emotion. But Heightmeyer wanted to talk. About everything.
“Were you more talkative?” she asked him during their fourth session. “Before, when you were around people to talk to?”
She hadn’t mentioned Sateda, not yet. She would talk about “before” like it was as much a place as a time, but she didn’t name it.
She was waiting for his answer, watching him with a curious expression, head tilted slightly. Ronon never felt completely comfortable under her gaze. She always looked like she knew too much.
“No,” he shortly replied. She was still watching him. “Not really.”
“Never have much to say?”
“Not much to say.” There wasn’t. What was he supposed to talk about? And why? Sateda was gone and he was alone in the galaxy and talking wouldn’t change that. Talking never changed much, in his experience.
Heightmeyer just continued to look at him, like she was searching for something. He refused to shift under her scrutiny, staring back instead. After a minute, she slowly nodded.
“Or do people just not ask the right questions?”
He thought about that question a lot after the session was over. Would he talk more if someone asked the right thing? Was there a question that would act like a key and unlock his words?
He really hadn’t ever been someone who talked a lot, but he’d talked more, before. Not like McKay, who talked more than any other two people he’d ever met put together, but he’d talked. He’d shared jokes and told stories and sang songs.
But he wasn’t that man anymore. He’d gotten used to being quiet, to being alone. He had never been one to talk to himself (something else McKay did that he did not understand), so all his years Running had been almost completely silent. Whatever need or desire he’d once had to talk just wasn’t there anymore.
Still, he knew he couldn’t get by with grunted responses forever, so he tried. Maybe he’d get the right question someday.
-000000-
It took four months before he could leave his room without his blaster.
When he’d first arrived, he hadn’t been allowed to keep the gun on him. Sheppard told him it was protocol, that no one but the security teams walked around the city armed when they weren’t under attack. But Ronon knew that was only half of it. He’d abducted Sheppard and Teyla, strung McKay up in a tree, and held Teyla at gunpoint while Beckett cut him open. They might have been able to trust him enough after that to bring him home with them, but they didn’t trust him all the way yet. He didn’t take it personally. Instead, he’d just added more knives to his arsenal.
They’d given him back the blaster pretty quickly, all things considered. And no one had said anything when he kept it with him all the time. He wondered if they knew.
It wasn’t that he felt unsafe in Atlantis. Not really. And there were plenty of other weapons that he could—and did—keep on his person. But being without his gun had felt like he was missing a limb. It was the only thing he had left of Sateda, of his life before, and the constant ache of its absence felt suspiciously like grief. He knew that wasn’t normal, either. So he adapted.
He hadn’t missed the look Sheppard gave him the first time he emerged from his room without the blaster strapped to his thigh, a look cut from the corner of Sheppard’s eye like he didn’t want Ronon to notice that he’d noticed. McKay, on the other hand, had blurted out a comment about Ronon having finally decided that he didn’t need to kill them all. Ronon’s hand—reminded of the absence—had twitched in the empty space by his leg where the gun would have been, and Ronon had scowled at McKay until he muttered something about the labs and scurried off.
Being able to wander the city weaponless—or, at least, gun-less—without constantly being aware of that emptiness took time. With effort and practice, he was able to leave the blaster behind when the team was city-side without feeling the constant need to go back for it. He even went running without it, though sprinting through Atlantis’ corridors without its familiar weight against his thigh or back had left him feeling sick at first. But it got easier with every slap of his feet against the floors of the hallways, and eventually it didn’t hurt anymore.
-000000-
He was starting to like Heightmeyer, and he didn’t like that he was liking her.
You weren’t supposed to like psychs. Back on Sateda, they were the one group in the military that didn’t mingle with the rest. It was said it was so they could remain objective and impartial in their assessments, but Ronon suspected it was because they didn’t feel comfortable around all the people they had to question.
The Satedan psychs had always seemed intrusive to him. Maybe it was the nature of their job, but they always came across as impatient and demanding. Even their silences had been tense, full of unspoken insistence that had made Ronon’s skin crawl. He’d always done his best to get through sessions with them as quickly as possible.
But Heightmeyer was different. She was patient, and her silences felt more like the natural pauses in a conversation, like she was just waiting for him to decide where they would go next. And like she would be perfectly happy regardless of how far that was.
“What’s been bothering you lately?”
She liked that question. She asked it a lot. Usually Ronon didn’t have anything for her, because almost everything bothered him and he didn’t think it would be good to admit that. So unless he had something really specific or new, something he wanted to have explained, he always said the same thing.
“Nothing.”
“Is it me?”
She’d made tea for the day’s session. Ronon didn’t necessarily like tea—he didn’t hate it, he just wouldn’t ever choose it if there were other options—but he did like having something to do with his hands. It meant he had something to look at other than Heightmeyer. He was pretty sure she had figured that out, too. Which was why she’d made the tea. He wanted to be angry about it, about her seeing him so clearly, but he found he didn’t actually care.
He gave her a look without raising his head from its focus on the cup in his hand. “No.”
“So what?”
“Nothing’s bothering me.”
Heightmeyer was studying him with an unreadable expression, and Ronon forced himself not to look away. She did this sometimes, like she was trying to see inside him, as if everything she wanted to know would be written just beneath his skin. After a few minutes, she gave him a soft smile.
“You know, you can lie to me. But that still tells me things.”
He liked that about her, too. That she could be blunt on top of being patient and accepting. It made him trust her more, knowing that she would be straight with him when it mattered. She reminded him of Teyla in that way.
“Does it tell you enough?” he asked, actually curious.
“It will,” she replied. “Eventually.”
Maybe that would be it. Maybe if he lied enough, she’d figure him out without him having to admit anything at all. He thought about trying that, to see how long he could get away with it. But then, inexplicably, he felt guilty.
He liked Heightmeyer too much. She was going to make him be honest without even trying to, and that meant he’d wind up having to be honest with himself. He’d just have to find a way to survive it.
-000000-
There were changes he’d had to make, once he decided to stay in Atlantis.
He adapted quickly to the basic stuff: using a fork, sleeping in a bed, giving more than single word responses. He’d lived savage for a long time, but he remembered a more civilized life. He remembered not being hunted, even if those memories hurt more than all of his Running.
Some days he wondered whether it would have been easier to stay half-feral. He could’ve tamped down on the violence, maybe, but all the rest of it wasn’t strictly necessary. He didn’t have to pretty up his ways. He didn’t have to remember when things were different.
But living in Atlantis asked more of him, so he adapted.
If sometimes he forgot to grab a utensil while he was in the food line, usually Sheppard or Teyla or McKay had an extra. They always said it was by mistake or that they’d planned to use it themselves, but they lied. Sheppard did it with a crooked smile. Teyla did it with kind eyes. McKay did it with grumpiness. But it was still a lie, and he knew what it meant.
So far no one knew that half the time he slept on the floor in his room. The bed was nice, if a bit short—the Ancients had to have been tiny—but it was almost too nice. Some nights it worked out fine; he’d flop down and be asleep in the space between one breath and the next, same as always. Other nights it was like the bed itself was keeping him awake. On those nights, he’d throw a pillow on the floor and lay out beside the bed, sleeping in the pool of light that came in through one of his windows. When he did, he slept fine, but he knew it wasn’t how things were supposed to be.
He tried talking more, where it mattered. He was surprised to realize he still had all his words. They were the least used of the things he’d taken with him, Running, but somehow they’d survived. So he tried to make better use of them when it made sense to.
-000000-
“Have you been having nightmares?”
That was a new one, and Ronon looked up at Heightmeyer, his attention pulled from the little toy she’d handed him when he sat down. Her face was calm and open, no sign of subterfuge, but he was still wary.
“Doesn’t everybody?”
She quirked her lips. “Depends on the nightmare.”
He jerked one shoulder noncommittally. “I dream about Running,” he easily admitted.
“I suspect you’ll have those dreams for the rest of your life.” It was said kindly, if bluntly.
“Yeah, probably.”
He’d dreamed enough about Running while he was still Running that he wasn’t entirely sure that everything he remembered from that time had actually happened. Some of the scenarios he thought he’d lived through might have just been nightmares. Some of the planets he thought he’d visited might have just been dreams. He wasn’t sure he wanted to try to figure out which were real and which weren’t. He knew it didn’t matter.
“Anything more recent?” Heightmeyer asked. “Nightmares about things that have happened since you came to Atlantis?”
He wanted to give her something, so he pondered the question for a minute before answering. “Had a few about being turned into a bug. After Sheppard.”
“I think a lot of us did.”
“Honestly, those were worse than the Running ones.”
Being killed by a Wraith was a normal nightmare; he’d had that kind for most of his life. He suspected most people in Pegasus did. But being turned into a bug—going the way Sheppard almost had—was horrifying on a level he’d been surprised to discover he hadn’t already known. He could have happily lived the rest of his life without knowing about the Iratus bugs, but he guessed it was just another thing that wanted to kill him. He was sure there’d be more.
Heightmeyer was nodding. “Being elementally changed, losing who you are—that’s a common nightmare scenario for people. The cause being an Iratus bug retrovirus is definitely Atlantis-specific, though.”
She said it with that same soft smile she always used, but there was something tired in her eyes. He wondered how many other Atlantis-specific nightmares she’d had to counsel people about. He wondered which ones she had herself. He slouched deeper into his seat.
“It was just gross,” he countered, feeling too seen again. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, but he knew she didn’t believe him.
-000000-
He was pretty sure he was supposed to feel more than he did.
Physically, he was fine. He hurt the same way everybody else did when he got hit or stabbed or shot. The pain still registered, and that was why he sought it out. Because it made him feel something.
When he sparred, he didn’t hold back. He needed to feel contact being made, whether his or someone else’s. He needed the sharp pressure in his knuckles, the bruising ache in his body. It let him know he was alive. Thankfully there were enough willing participants under Sheppard’s command that he could get in enough fighting between missions to keep from going crazy.
He tried, sometimes, to feel anything other than what he was used to. Anger, he had. Plenty of it. Annoyance, impatience, boredom: those all worked just fine. But there were supposed to be more. He just wasn’t sure he could still produce them.
He felt happiness, sometimes. At least, he thought that’s what it was. Maybe it was closer to satisfaction, more burning than warm, but a good feeling just the same. And he was pretty sure he still had contentedness, if the way he felt after a good meal was that. Sheppard had called him smug after a sparring session and McKay had called him hostile after Ronon had aggressively defended the last remaining piece of cake when he’d managed to grab it at dinner, so he guessed he still had those, too.
He might have had a taste of sadness—when they’d almost lost Sheppard, when they’d almost lost McKay—but he couldn’t be sure. It had definitely felt different than the others, but it had been so fleeting he’d barely registered that it had happened before it was gone. At least he’d felt something.
But there should be more.
Nobody else seemed to notice, though, so his limited emotions couldn’t be that bad. There might be something broken in him, but he seemed to still work just fine. So he didn’t look at it too closely, and when he started thinking too much, he found a fight.
-000000-
“Tell me about Sateda.”
It was the first time Heightmeyer had asked. She’d talked around his past before, but that was as close as she went. In fact, it was the one thing she hadn’t been direct about, and Ronon had come to believe that she wouldn’t ever ask, that they’d always just talk circles around it. He supposed he should have known better.
He wasn’t sure he could do this, have a casual, open conversation about Sateda. He barely even let himself think about his home; how could he talk about it like this? Being explicitly asked about it like it was still around?
“It’s gone,” he replied, the bluntness a push.
Heightmeyer just watched him with a gentle but firm expression. “Tell me about something that’s gone,” she pushed back. “Anything: a book or a store or a tree. Tell me something, Ronon.”
Kind and pointed again. She was waiting patiently for his response, and he fought the urge to storm out of the office. He could do this. He’d mentioned things to others before, without prompting. Those comments might have been more reflexive than intentional, but they hadn’t broken him. He could talk about something else.
He thought carefully, letting himself near the edges of the life he once lived.
“There’s a kind of plant on Sateda that only flowers one day a year, and it’s always the exact same day.” It had been his mother’s birthday.
“What color are the flowers?”
“Purple.” They had been her favorite flowers. “They’re huge, the size of a man’s palm. When they bloom, the scent from them covers miles. Everyone winds up smelling like them.” Sateda probably still smelled like them, sweet and lightly spicy, once a year; the Wraith didn’t cull plants.
Heightmeyer didn’t say anything, and Ronon looked up to find her surveying him with knowing eyes.
“You have to let yourself heal,” she quietly said.
Ronon looked away sharply. “I’m fine.”
“You lost everything,” she gently reminded him. “Seven years running for your life, becoming a survivor, a predator. No time for grief, no time to mourn, until that wound is so thickly scabbed over that you believe it’s actually healed. But it isn’t.”
But it isn’t.
Her words followed him around for days. He’d told himself that he was fine, as fine as anyone could be in his situation, but maybe he’d been wrong. In his darker moments, he’d wondered about it, even if he never would have admitted that to anyone, not even Heightmeyer.
But it isn’t.
Maybe something inside him was broken, and it hadn’t healed. He didn’t know if he could let it. And he didn’t know what to do about that.
-000000-
He had to get used to being touched again.
For seven years, the only type of physical contact he’d had with anyone was of the violent kind. He’d had to fight for his life every day; if his hand made contact with anyone else, it was in a fist. He was used to that, and he used that. It was normal for him.
But once he was back around people, he kept getting touched. It wasn’t unusual, nothing he didn’t see happening to anyone else, it was just new. There were all these little moments of contact that nobody else really seemed to think much about, but every single one overwhelmed him. It felt like his senses had been turned up to their limits and even the slightest touch was enough to send him spinning. He couldn’t figure out whether he liked it or not at first; the sensation was too big to look past.
Someone would put a hand on his arm as they talked to him, or his shoulder would brush someone else’s while they were sitting side by side at the same table. For reasons he didn’t understand, Sheppard’s Marines kept shaking his hand after training sessions, and some tiny woman from one of the science labs had squeezed herself onto the sofa next to him during one of the Atlantis movie nights. With a surprising show of strength, she’d wedged herself between him and the sofa’s arm so that she was flush against him from shoulder to knee, pushing him over against Teyla on his opposite side in the process. He’d been confused more than annoyed, since he was sure that the way the woman was sitting couldn’t be comfortable for her. But she’d ignored him entirely in favor of the giant bag of pretzels in her lap and the action movie on the screen. Meanwhile, he’d sat there with his whole body humming, squished between the two people on either side of him.
Eventually he adapted. He stopped having to hold his breath at the doc’s gentle, confident touches as he sewed him back together or bandaged him up. Sheppard’s hand on his back after they’d gotten through kicking each other’s asses in the gym didn’t startle him anymore. And when Teyla hugged him, as she often did, he didn’t freeze. He hugged back.
He even got used to McKay using him as a body pillow every time they had to share accommodations off-world. At first he’d acted annoyed by it, to cover up how shaken he was by the contact. But it wasn’t too long before the familiar situation of waking up with McKay sprawled across him, snoring contentedly, became comforting rather than unsettling. And though he still shoved McKay off of him once he did wake up, Ronon liked to think it was an affectionate shove, now.
The fact that he no longer immediately woke up as soon as McKay rolled onto him was telling in itself, that he somehow knew even in his sleep that he was safe, even when somebody else was there.
-000000-
He sought out Heightmeyer as soon as he could, knowing he needed to talk with her, that he needed to tell her.
“I went to Sateda.”
He blurted it out even before he fully sat down, feeling breathless despite the fact that he hadn’t been running. Heightmeyer nodded, watching him closely as he lowered himself into his chair.
“So I heard,” she said. “Tell me about it.”
She would have heard, by now. News traveled like a wildfire through Atlantis, and Beckett had kept him in the infirmary for days; Ronon had only just been released.
“They tried to make me a Runner again,” he said, rushing through the words that needed to get out of him. “They put another tracker in me and took me back there and set me loose. I made them pay. I got revenge.”
“Do you feel better?”
It was her tone more than her words that brought him up short. He stared, unseeing, at the floor for a full minute as he assessed himself. Then he answered truthfully.
“I feel different.”
How he felt now wasn’t better than how he’d felt before, not really. He felt better than he had when the Wraith had captured him and taken him back to Sateda, of course. But if he looked back on how he’d felt since coming to Atlantis, he wouldn’t say that right now was better.
It had felt good to kill the Wraith on Sateda, but it always felt good to kill Wraith, whatever the circumstances. Being captured, implanted, and hunted again hadn’t changed that, hadn’t made that need for vengeance any greater or smaller. Neither had killing those responsible. He still felt the same fire of revenge burning deep in his gut, and he figured he always would. But he did feel different.
“How so?” Heightmeyer asked, almost as if she could hear his thoughts. Sometimes he was convinced she could.
“I—” He paused, not sure if he could explain. “I remembered.”
Heightmeyer didn’t encourage him to continue, didn’t ask anything else. She just waited. He took a breath.
“On Sateda, actually being there, I remembered things. Things I’d buried. Things I’d been running from.”
“You had to grieve.”
He glanced up, then, catching sight of the sympathy and understanding in her eyes. He turned to look out the window instead.
“I watched a lot of people die. A lot of people I cared about. Being there, it was like I went through it all over again.” He’d lived those days twice, when no one should have to live through them once. He supposed that was a kind of grieving. “Then I was alone. And being tracked. Again. I was gonna die, but I was going to take all the Wraith with me that I could.”
“But?”
“But then the others showed up.”
He hadn’t been alone, in the end.
Once he’d woken up in the back of the jumper, he’d found Beckett already working on his wounds, the destroyed tracker on the floor by McKay’s feet. Standing the entire time, McKay had explained how they’d found him with the tracker, his voice a familiar rapid-fire tumble. Sheppard and Teyla had been affectionately bickering over how they’d cleared the building of Wraith, Sheppard pausing at one point to compliment the doc on his drone-firing skills. Ronon had taken that moment to thank Beckett again, watching in amusement as the man had flushed and brusquely replied that you couldn’t leave a doctor in charge of a weapon and expect that he would just sit back and watch someone die. His hands had remained steady in their bandaging job, Ronon’s blood on the fingertips of the gloves.
“And?” Heightmeyer asked, looking like she already knew the answer.
“And they brought me home.”
And that was what felt different. He’d gotten used to being in Atlantis, to his teammates and the rest of the expedition. He’d adapted and settled in as best he could, but he had never really thought beyond the current day, never let himself think in future terms. He figured that was one of the last leftovers from Running, taking one day at a time. It meant he never had expectations, but it also meant he never made any true ties. Because he hadn’t let himself let go.
It had taken being back on Sateda, his blood in its dirt, for him to be able to. The rage inside him had needed somewhere tangible to go, somewhere more meaningful than fighting for his life in foreign fields. Exacting a kind of revenge in the land of his greatest loss had been enough. He thought he would have felt the same way even if he’d died there, but instead he’d been saved by his friends, by the people who were rapidly becoming his family. And they’d taken him home.
“Home?” Heightmeyer asked, that soft smile edging toward a grin and her eyes still seeing more than Ronon could know he was showing.
He smiled back. “Home.”
-000000-
Ronon kept running. But this time, he was running toward something.
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Ronon Dex, Kate Heightmeyer
Word Count: 4727
Categories: gen, introspection, character study
Spoilers: Set between “Runner” (2.3) and “Sateda” (3.4). Spoilers for the same.
Warnings: none
Summary: In the wake of coming to Atlantis, Ronon adapts.
Ronon kept running.
He didn’t have to, not anymore. Nothing was chasing him. But if he stayed still for too long his chest started to ache like he’d been running anyway, and the only thing that made it better was to move. So he ran.
Atlantis might have been a city, but it still had plenty of space to roam. Even so, he mostly stayed near where the Lanteans had set up their base of operations, making circuits of the area they’d reclaimed thus far via the hallways that marked its outer limits. Sheppard joined him, sometimes. Ronon thought it was his way of bonding, same as letting Ronon beat him up in the gym now and then. Sheppard was a doer, too.
Sometimes Sheppard would try to hold a conversation while they jogged through the city, but most of the time he stayed quiet. He’d let Ronon lead the way, following a silent half-step behind at his side, and they would run. He’d hang in as long as his pride outlasted his lungs, then he’d fall back while Ronon continued on alone.
When Ronon was particularly restless, when the tightness under his skin felt too much like being watched, he ventured into the unoccupied areas of the city. McKay had told him they were dangerous, that they were unexplored and could have damage. But danger had never bothered him before, and Ronon wasn’t entirely sure what would scare him now. So he headed into the dimly lit or darkened corridors, splashing through puddles and dodging around debris, ignoring all the rooms he passed. He liked the isolation of the empty parts of the city, the way the quiet felt deeper, the way the air seemed more still, the way the shadowy corners felt like possibilities.
He would run until his chest stopped aching and everything burned instead, and then he’d stop. Sometimes it was a short run; rarely, he would have to give up before he was satisfied. Either way, he kept running.
He wasn’t being chased, not anymore. But he still had to run.
-000000-
Weir made him see Heightmeyer.
“Everyone gets assessed,” she told him. “It’s protocol.”
He believed her, but he also sensed the sideways slant of her words and knew that he wasn’t going to get just the standard assessment. It wasn’t surprising—he was a stray that had been brought into her city, and she needed to know who he was and whether he could be trusted. But it didn’t worry him, either. The doc could find whatever she wanted to; if he couldn’t stay in Atlantis, he’d leave. He’d be fine.
Heightmeyer wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d had to talk to psychs before in the military—not often, but regularly enough; Sateda had its own protocols. Those docs had been aloof and efficient. They’d gotten through what needed getting through and moved on, no wasted time or emotion. But Heightmeyer wanted to talk. About everything.
“Were you more talkative?” she asked him during their fourth session. “Before, when you were around people to talk to?”
She hadn’t mentioned Sateda, not yet. She would talk about “before” like it was as much a place as a time, but she didn’t name it.
She was waiting for his answer, watching him with a curious expression, head tilted slightly. Ronon never felt completely comfortable under her gaze. She always looked like she knew too much.
“No,” he shortly replied. She was still watching him. “Not really.”
“Never have much to say?”
“Not much to say.” There wasn’t. What was he supposed to talk about? And why? Sateda was gone and he was alone in the galaxy and talking wouldn’t change that. Talking never changed much, in his experience.
Heightmeyer just continued to look at him, like she was searching for something. He refused to shift under her scrutiny, staring back instead. After a minute, she slowly nodded.
“Or do people just not ask the right questions?”
He thought about that question a lot after the session was over. Would he talk more if someone asked the right thing? Was there a question that would act like a key and unlock his words?
He really hadn’t ever been someone who talked a lot, but he’d talked more, before. Not like McKay, who talked more than any other two people he’d ever met put together, but he’d talked. He’d shared jokes and told stories and sang songs.
But he wasn’t that man anymore. He’d gotten used to being quiet, to being alone. He had never been one to talk to himself (something else McKay did that he did not understand), so all his years Running had been almost completely silent. Whatever need or desire he’d once had to talk just wasn’t there anymore.
Still, he knew he couldn’t get by with grunted responses forever, so he tried. Maybe he’d get the right question someday.
-000000-
It took four months before he could leave his room without his blaster.
When he’d first arrived, he hadn’t been allowed to keep the gun on him. Sheppard told him it was protocol, that no one but the security teams walked around the city armed when they weren’t under attack. But Ronon knew that was only half of it. He’d abducted Sheppard and Teyla, strung McKay up in a tree, and held Teyla at gunpoint while Beckett cut him open. They might have been able to trust him enough after that to bring him home with them, but they didn’t trust him all the way yet. He didn’t take it personally. Instead, he’d just added more knives to his arsenal.
They’d given him back the blaster pretty quickly, all things considered. And no one had said anything when he kept it with him all the time. He wondered if they knew.
It wasn’t that he felt unsafe in Atlantis. Not really. And there were plenty of other weapons that he could—and did—keep on his person. But being without his gun had felt like he was missing a limb. It was the only thing he had left of Sateda, of his life before, and the constant ache of its absence felt suspiciously like grief. He knew that wasn’t normal, either. So he adapted.
He hadn’t missed the look Sheppard gave him the first time he emerged from his room without the blaster strapped to his thigh, a look cut from the corner of Sheppard’s eye like he didn’t want Ronon to notice that he’d noticed. McKay, on the other hand, had blurted out a comment about Ronon having finally decided that he didn’t need to kill them all. Ronon’s hand—reminded of the absence—had twitched in the empty space by his leg where the gun would have been, and Ronon had scowled at McKay until he muttered something about the labs and scurried off.
Being able to wander the city weaponless—or, at least, gun-less—without constantly being aware of that emptiness took time. With effort and practice, he was able to leave the blaster behind when the team was city-side without feeling the constant need to go back for it. He even went running without it, though sprinting through Atlantis’ corridors without its familiar weight against his thigh or back had left him feeling sick at first. But it got easier with every slap of his feet against the floors of the hallways, and eventually it didn’t hurt anymore.
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He was starting to like Heightmeyer, and he didn’t like that he was liking her.
You weren’t supposed to like psychs. Back on Sateda, they were the one group in the military that didn’t mingle with the rest. It was said it was so they could remain objective and impartial in their assessments, but Ronon suspected it was because they didn’t feel comfortable around all the people they had to question.
The Satedan psychs had always seemed intrusive to him. Maybe it was the nature of their job, but they always came across as impatient and demanding. Even their silences had been tense, full of unspoken insistence that had made Ronon’s skin crawl. He’d always done his best to get through sessions with them as quickly as possible.
But Heightmeyer was different. She was patient, and her silences felt more like the natural pauses in a conversation, like she was just waiting for him to decide where they would go next. And like she would be perfectly happy regardless of how far that was.
“What’s been bothering you lately?”
She liked that question. She asked it a lot. Usually Ronon didn’t have anything for her, because almost everything bothered him and he didn’t think it would be good to admit that. So unless he had something really specific or new, something he wanted to have explained, he always said the same thing.
“Nothing.”
“Is it me?”
She’d made tea for the day’s session. Ronon didn’t necessarily like tea—he didn’t hate it, he just wouldn’t ever choose it if there were other options—but he did like having something to do with his hands. It meant he had something to look at other than Heightmeyer. He was pretty sure she had figured that out, too. Which was why she’d made the tea. He wanted to be angry about it, about her seeing him so clearly, but he found he didn’t actually care.
He gave her a look without raising his head from its focus on the cup in his hand. “No.”
“So what?”
“Nothing’s bothering me.”
Heightmeyer was studying him with an unreadable expression, and Ronon forced himself not to look away. She did this sometimes, like she was trying to see inside him, as if everything she wanted to know would be written just beneath his skin. After a few minutes, she gave him a soft smile.
“You know, you can lie to me. But that still tells me things.”
He liked that about her, too. That she could be blunt on top of being patient and accepting. It made him trust her more, knowing that she would be straight with him when it mattered. She reminded him of Teyla in that way.
“Does it tell you enough?” he asked, actually curious.
“It will,” she replied. “Eventually.”
Maybe that would be it. Maybe if he lied enough, she’d figure him out without him having to admit anything at all. He thought about trying that, to see how long he could get away with it. But then, inexplicably, he felt guilty.
He liked Heightmeyer too much. She was going to make him be honest without even trying to, and that meant he’d wind up having to be honest with himself. He’d just have to find a way to survive it.
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There were changes he’d had to make, once he decided to stay in Atlantis.
He adapted quickly to the basic stuff: using a fork, sleeping in a bed, giving more than single word responses. He’d lived savage for a long time, but he remembered a more civilized life. He remembered not being hunted, even if those memories hurt more than all of his Running.
Some days he wondered whether it would have been easier to stay half-feral. He could’ve tamped down on the violence, maybe, but all the rest of it wasn’t strictly necessary. He didn’t have to pretty up his ways. He didn’t have to remember when things were different.
But living in Atlantis asked more of him, so he adapted.
If sometimes he forgot to grab a utensil while he was in the food line, usually Sheppard or Teyla or McKay had an extra. They always said it was by mistake or that they’d planned to use it themselves, but they lied. Sheppard did it with a crooked smile. Teyla did it with kind eyes. McKay did it with grumpiness. But it was still a lie, and he knew what it meant.
So far no one knew that half the time he slept on the floor in his room. The bed was nice, if a bit short—the Ancients had to have been tiny—but it was almost too nice. Some nights it worked out fine; he’d flop down and be asleep in the space between one breath and the next, same as always. Other nights it was like the bed itself was keeping him awake. On those nights, he’d throw a pillow on the floor and lay out beside the bed, sleeping in the pool of light that came in through one of his windows. When he did, he slept fine, but he knew it wasn’t how things were supposed to be.
He tried talking more, where it mattered. He was surprised to realize he still had all his words. They were the least used of the things he’d taken with him, Running, but somehow they’d survived. So he tried to make better use of them when it made sense to.
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“Have you been having nightmares?”
That was a new one, and Ronon looked up at Heightmeyer, his attention pulled from the little toy she’d handed him when he sat down. Her face was calm and open, no sign of subterfuge, but he was still wary.
“Doesn’t everybody?”
She quirked her lips. “Depends on the nightmare.”
He jerked one shoulder noncommittally. “I dream about Running,” he easily admitted.
“I suspect you’ll have those dreams for the rest of your life.” It was said kindly, if bluntly.
“Yeah, probably.”
He’d dreamed enough about Running while he was still Running that he wasn’t entirely sure that everything he remembered from that time had actually happened. Some of the scenarios he thought he’d lived through might have just been nightmares. Some of the planets he thought he’d visited might have just been dreams. He wasn’t sure he wanted to try to figure out which were real and which weren’t. He knew it didn’t matter.
“Anything more recent?” Heightmeyer asked. “Nightmares about things that have happened since you came to Atlantis?”
He wanted to give her something, so he pondered the question for a minute before answering. “Had a few about being turned into a bug. After Sheppard.”
“I think a lot of us did.”
“Honestly, those were worse than the Running ones.”
Being killed by a Wraith was a normal nightmare; he’d had that kind for most of his life. He suspected most people in Pegasus did. But being turned into a bug—going the way Sheppard almost had—was horrifying on a level he’d been surprised to discover he hadn’t already known. He could have happily lived the rest of his life without knowing about the Iratus bugs, but he guessed it was just another thing that wanted to kill him. He was sure there’d be more.
Heightmeyer was nodding. “Being elementally changed, losing who you are—that’s a common nightmare scenario for people. The cause being an Iratus bug retrovirus is definitely Atlantis-specific, though.”
She said it with that same soft smile she always used, but there was something tired in her eyes. He wondered how many other Atlantis-specific nightmares she’d had to counsel people about. He wondered which ones she had herself. He slouched deeper into his seat.
“It was just gross,” he countered, feeling too seen again. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, but he knew she didn’t believe him.
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He was pretty sure he was supposed to feel more than he did.
Physically, he was fine. He hurt the same way everybody else did when he got hit or stabbed or shot. The pain still registered, and that was why he sought it out. Because it made him feel something.
When he sparred, he didn’t hold back. He needed to feel contact being made, whether his or someone else’s. He needed the sharp pressure in his knuckles, the bruising ache in his body. It let him know he was alive. Thankfully there were enough willing participants under Sheppard’s command that he could get in enough fighting between missions to keep from going crazy.
He tried, sometimes, to feel anything other than what he was used to. Anger, he had. Plenty of it. Annoyance, impatience, boredom: those all worked just fine. But there were supposed to be more. He just wasn’t sure he could still produce them.
He felt happiness, sometimes. At least, he thought that’s what it was. Maybe it was closer to satisfaction, more burning than warm, but a good feeling just the same. And he was pretty sure he still had contentedness, if the way he felt after a good meal was that. Sheppard had called him smug after a sparring session and McKay had called him hostile after Ronon had aggressively defended the last remaining piece of cake when he’d managed to grab it at dinner, so he guessed he still had those, too.
He might have had a taste of sadness—when they’d almost lost Sheppard, when they’d almost lost McKay—but he couldn’t be sure. It had definitely felt different than the others, but it had been so fleeting he’d barely registered that it had happened before it was gone. At least he’d felt something.
But there should be more.
Nobody else seemed to notice, though, so his limited emotions couldn’t be that bad. There might be something broken in him, but he seemed to still work just fine. So he didn’t look at it too closely, and when he started thinking too much, he found a fight.
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“Tell me about Sateda.”
It was the first time Heightmeyer had asked. She’d talked around his past before, but that was as close as she went. In fact, it was the one thing she hadn’t been direct about, and Ronon had come to believe that she wouldn’t ever ask, that they’d always just talk circles around it. He supposed he should have known better.
He wasn’t sure he could do this, have a casual, open conversation about Sateda. He barely even let himself think about his home; how could he talk about it like this? Being explicitly asked about it like it was still around?
“It’s gone,” he replied, the bluntness a push.
Heightmeyer just watched him with a gentle but firm expression. “Tell me about something that’s gone,” she pushed back. “Anything: a book or a store or a tree. Tell me something, Ronon.”
Kind and pointed again. She was waiting patiently for his response, and he fought the urge to storm out of the office. He could do this. He’d mentioned things to others before, without prompting. Those comments might have been more reflexive than intentional, but they hadn’t broken him. He could talk about something else.
He thought carefully, letting himself near the edges of the life he once lived.
“There’s a kind of plant on Sateda that only flowers one day a year, and it’s always the exact same day.” It had been his mother’s birthday.
“What color are the flowers?”
“Purple.” They had been her favorite flowers. “They’re huge, the size of a man’s palm. When they bloom, the scent from them covers miles. Everyone winds up smelling like them.” Sateda probably still smelled like them, sweet and lightly spicy, once a year; the Wraith didn’t cull plants.
Heightmeyer didn’t say anything, and Ronon looked up to find her surveying him with knowing eyes.
“You have to let yourself heal,” she quietly said.
Ronon looked away sharply. “I’m fine.”
“You lost everything,” she gently reminded him. “Seven years running for your life, becoming a survivor, a predator. No time for grief, no time to mourn, until that wound is so thickly scabbed over that you believe it’s actually healed. But it isn’t.”
But it isn’t.
Her words followed him around for days. He’d told himself that he was fine, as fine as anyone could be in his situation, but maybe he’d been wrong. In his darker moments, he’d wondered about it, even if he never would have admitted that to anyone, not even Heightmeyer.
But it isn’t.
Maybe something inside him was broken, and it hadn’t healed. He didn’t know if he could let it. And he didn’t know what to do about that.
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He had to get used to being touched again.
For seven years, the only type of physical contact he’d had with anyone was of the violent kind. He’d had to fight for his life every day; if his hand made contact with anyone else, it was in a fist. He was used to that, and he used that. It was normal for him.
But once he was back around people, he kept getting touched. It wasn’t unusual, nothing he didn’t see happening to anyone else, it was just new. There were all these little moments of contact that nobody else really seemed to think much about, but every single one overwhelmed him. It felt like his senses had been turned up to their limits and even the slightest touch was enough to send him spinning. He couldn’t figure out whether he liked it or not at first; the sensation was too big to look past.
Someone would put a hand on his arm as they talked to him, or his shoulder would brush someone else’s while they were sitting side by side at the same table. For reasons he didn’t understand, Sheppard’s Marines kept shaking his hand after training sessions, and some tiny woman from one of the science labs had squeezed herself onto the sofa next to him during one of the Atlantis movie nights. With a surprising show of strength, she’d wedged herself between him and the sofa’s arm so that she was flush against him from shoulder to knee, pushing him over against Teyla on his opposite side in the process. He’d been confused more than annoyed, since he was sure that the way the woman was sitting couldn’t be comfortable for her. But she’d ignored him entirely in favor of the giant bag of pretzels in her lap and the action movie on the screen. Meanwhile, he’d sat there with his whole body humming, squished between the two people on either side of him.
Eventually he adapted. He stopped having to hold his breath at the doc’s gentle, confident touches as he sewed him back together or bandaged him up. Sheppard’s hand on his back after they’d gotten through kicking each other’s asses in the gym didn’t startle him anymore. And when Teyla hugged him, as she often did, he didn’t freeze. He hugged back.
He even got used to McKay using him as a body pillow every time they had to share accommodations off-world. At first he’d acted annoyed by it, to cover up how shaken he was by the contact. But it wasn’t too long before the familiar situation of waking up with McKay sprawled across him, snoring contentedly, became comforting rather than unsettling. And though he still shoved McKay off of him once he did wake up, Ronon liked to think it was an affectionate shove, now.
The fact that he no longer immediately woke up as soon as McKay rolled onto him was telling in itself, that he somehow knew even in his sleep that he was safe, even when somebody else was there.
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He sought out Heightmeyer as soon as he could, knowing he needed to talk with her, that he needed to tell her.
“I went to Sateda.”
He blurted it out even before he fully sat down, feeling breathless despite the fact that he hadn’t been running. Heightmeyer nodded, watching him closely as he lowered himself into his chair.
“So I heard,” she said. “Tell me about it.”
She would have heard, by now. News traveled like a wildfire through Atlantis, and Beckett had kept him in the infirmary for days; Ronon had only just been released.
“They tried to make me a Runner again,” he said, rushing through the words that needed to get out of him. “They put another tracker in me and took me back there and set me loose. I made them pay. I got revenge.”
“Do you feel better?”
It was her tone more than her words that brought him up short. He stared, unseeing, at the floor for a full minute as he assessed himself. Then he answered truthfully.
“I feel different.”
How he felt now wasn’t better than how he’d felt before, not really. He felt better than he had when the Wraith had captured him and taken him back to Sateda, of course. But if he looked back on how he’d felt since coming to Atlantis, he wouldn’t say that right now was better.
It had felt good to kill the Wraith on Sateda, but it always felt good to kill Wraith, whatever the circumstances. Being captured, implanted, and hunted again hadn’t changed that, hadn’t made that need for vengeance any greater or smaller. Neither had killing those responsible. He still felt the same fire of revenge burning deep in his gut, and he figured he always would. But he did feel different.
“How so?” Heightmeyer asked, almost as if she could hear his thoughts. Sometimes he was convinced she could.
“I—” He paused, not sure if he could explain. “I remembered.”
Heightmeyer didn’t encourage him to continue, didn’t ask anything else. She just waited. He took a breath.
“On Sateda, actually being there, I remembered things. Things I’d buried. Things I’d been running from.”
“You had to grieve.”
He glanced up, then, catching sight of the sympathy and understanding in her eyes. He turned to look out the window instead.
“I watched a lot of people die. A lot of people I cared about. Being there, it was like I went through it all over again.” He’d lived those days twice, when no one should have to live through them once. He supposed that was a kind of grieving. “Then I was alone. And being tracked. Again. I was gonna die, but I was going to take all the Wraith with me that I could.”
“But?”
“But then the others showed up.”
He hadn’t been alone, in the end.
Once he’d woken up in the back of the jumper, he’d found Beckett already working on his wounds, the destroyed tracker on the floor by McKay’s feet. Standing the entire time, McKay had explained how they’d found him with the tracker, his voice a familiar rapid-fire tumble. Sheppard and Teyla had been affectionately bickering over how they’d cleared the building of Wraith, Sheppard pausing at one point to compliment the doc on his drone-firing skills. Ronon had taken that moment to thank Beckett again, watching in amusement as the man had flushed and brusquely replied that you couldn’t leave a doctor in charge of a weapon and expect that he would just sit back and watch someone die. His hands had remained steady in their bandaging job, Ronon’s blood on the fingertips of the gloves.
“And?” Heightmeyer asked, looking like she already knew the answer.
“And they brought me home.”
And that was what felt different. He’d gotten used to being in Atlantis, to his teammates and the rest of the expedition. He’d adapted and settled in as best he could, but he had never really thought beyond the current day, never let himself think in future terms. He figured that was one of the last leftovers from Running, taking one day at a time. It meant he never had expectations, but it also meant he never made any true ties. Because he hadn’t let himself let go.
It had taken being back on Sateda, his blood in its dirt, for him to be able to. The rage inside him had needed somewhere tangible to go, somewhere more meaningful than fighting for his life in foreign fields. Exacting a kind of revenge in the land of his greatest loss had been enough. He thought he would have felt the same way even if he’d died there, but instead he’d been saved by his friends, by the people who were rapidly becoming his family. And they’d taken him home.
“Home?” Heightmeyer asked, that soft smile edging toward a grin and her eyes still seeing more than Ronon could know he was showing.
He smiled back. “Home.”
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Ronon kept running. But this time, he was running toward something.