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This wasn't a good day.
Ronon had known it from the moment he'd woken, because he had woken slow, warm and indoors in a soft bed. He had been trying, half-dreaming, to remember whether he was in the Hall with his brothers and sisters of Kel's battalion, or in Melena's small student-doctor apartment with only the two of them, when he'd realised that no one else was breathing in the room and had flung himself to his feet in a moment of awful panic that he'd brought the Wraith hunters down on his family, on Melena.
But of course, he hadn't.
The rest of the morning had been like glass grinding inside his skull, all the sunlight streaming through Atlantis' bright-patterned windows stabbing at his eyes with its brightness, the clean optimistic cheer of the Earthers as they strolled briskly through their usurped palace like the relentless annoying jab of the tattooist's needle under his skin (one for being named a soldier, one for being selected a Specialist, one - forever unpaired - for Melena). Usually he saw these people and saw the tremendous advantage they had, tactically and emotionally, to know their own families were not at risk. Usually, he felt a little bad for the way he would use their naivete to help him eradicate the parasites that fed off his galaxy.
Today he hated them all for never knowing the fear of a Wraith attack, hated their perfect, spared little world for never facing a universe that would destroy it. Today he hated them all for having homes, for having families (for having wives), for having anything. Today he wanted them to receive a message from Earth that they had been attacked, that they were losing, that they could never go home again.
Today he hated himself for feeling those things (and for having lost, when they hadn't).
Today was not a good day for Sam to bring her friend to mentor him through some interview with an organisation he'd seen do nothing but attempt to hang he and his out to dry. Who were they, living on their perfect, untouched world, stealing the legacy of the Ancestors' City, pretending they had the right to sit in judgment of him? And who was Sam, taking the place of a woman Ronon had come to like and respect (and lose, said the glass in his skull), bringing her perfect specimen of an "indigenous" warrior to tell him how he must represent himself, when he was the Runner who'd escaped, the last warrior of Sateda?
Today was not a good day for anyone to sit with him as he ate breakfast, mechanically chewing, staring at nothing, allowing himself to intimidate the civilians into leaving him a table to himself because that was better than losing his temper but he had to eat (nothing, no hate nor grief nor illness, could ever make Ronon forget the pain of starvation). So he ate, and then he went and hit his students too hard (though he made sure, he did, that they were all Marines), and this man, this friend of Sam's - came to see him. Then he spoke in an urbane and cultured voice, condescending to help the savage the Earthers saw in Ronon, in an accent that reminded Ronon of home - and there were no words in Ronon's mind, no language left but fury and hate and violence. It wasn't a good impression. It wasn't a good day.
When the man himself came in and sat in front of him with no invitation, everything about him telling Ronon that here was someone he should like - on any other day - Ronon wished he would disappear, die. Because this man was more than just another person scraping against his raw skin like pumice, more than just another example that the Earthers thought he could barely manage to eat with utensils. No. This was a man who had helped his own people to throw off their slavery, kill their masters, begin to build up their worlds on their own strength. A man who had saved his people.
Today, Ronon hated Teal'c more than any human in this or any galaxy.
But he pulled the edges inside himself, gritted his teeth and made himself think in words, made himself remember he was also a man of Sateda - Sateda, that had been not just the fiercest and bravest, but also one of the most advanced and civilized of all the worlds in this galaxy. He told himself that he had studied the Four Classical Forms of Satedan poetry (grudgingly) and learned the three foremost Schools of Satedan art (willingly, if without inspiration). He made himself remember that he had even suffered interviews from petty bureaucrats of the Historians and Recorders. He tried, as an exercise of will, to laugh off the coming interview (lying, he was lying, this was not going to go well), to say he could play the game (any other day, he could).
He saw the transparent ploy Teal'c used, slandering the name of Sateda, slandering his name, and kept still, kept still. But it was hard, hard, hard, and then too hard, and everything shattered into the perfect simplicity of violence and movement, the distant pain of blows not blocked, the intoxication of strikes landed, the clean smell of sweat and blood and the world shrinking down to the dark eyes and balanced poise of his excellent opponent and the never-granted opportunity to give everything he was to an honourable foe.
He almost killed Sam when she stepped between them.
But he was still a man of Sateda, a soldier, so instead he let go and folded everything back into himself. And there was no more glass, no more scraping and stabbing at raw wounds. It was just dead, the dull rage that never went away like the smell and feel of old rotten blood, and nothing else.
When he stepped through the Gate, of course, there were Wraith to kill (there were always Wraith to kill), and the man he'd hated became a trusted partner at his back, a killer of great efficiency. And when his team came through to find them, Sheppard's harsh voice on the radio and the terror under Rodney's sharp protests (so afraid, yet always there despite it), he remembered again why he wasn't just the marks on his skin and the smell of old blood.