Chapter Text
Ronon cut him down from the truss, but he took a moment first to stand still while the wave of dizziness faded, so when he took his knife out McKay was talking again, high-pitched and fast.
That made him dizzy, too, more than the blood down his back and the flesh-space the tracker had left behind. One sentence out of McKay was more than Ronon had had in a month.
He didn’t know how they were understanding him. He hadn’t spoken to another person in a year at least, just mumbling to himself to remind himself that he could still do it, and his tongue felt wrong in his mouth. Thick and stupid. Vowels warped, everything rasping and dry, barely approximating the words he’d meant to say, but they all nodded and answered as though it was clear and easy as anything.
He thinks it’s the work of the Ring, thinks whatever means he can understand whatever language they’re speaking means they can understand him.
When he pulled at the cord—he remembers it, the bend of his spine as he stopped thrashing—McKay went, suddenly, relaxed, and let Ronon saw through the loop. “Oh,” he said, “Oh, thanks, really, I was starting to get lightheaded, you know you can die from hanging upside-down like that for too long?”
“Yeah,” Ronon had said, or maybe he’d just snarled like an animal and McKay had heard a noise of agreement that made sense to him.
McKay thanked him again for grabbing him by the red plastic suit and lowering him back down to the ground so he could stand up, instead of just dropping him on his head. He was pathetically grateful, actually, as though he had expected to be dropped, or to be left there in the snare while his people went back through the Ring. He talked as though he thought he had to appease Ronon, placate him, so Ronon grabbed him by the neck of the suit and hauled him upright to make him stop. The back of his neck was wet with sweat, and Ronon hadn’t meant to touch it.
There was nothing to run from, and the future was the blood-filled empty flesh-space nestled down next to his spine, the future was the absence of tracker, was the hole, so he just followed McKay as he walked back to the ship by the Ring. It made as much sense as doing anything else.
There was chatter over the radios, hissing out of McKay’s pocket and the thing on his ear. He caught Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard’s name, Teyla Emmagan’s, his own—he was surprised to recognise it—and someone talked about McKay but not to him. Ronon absorbed the way they used and didn’t use the titles they’d introduced themselves with but otherwise didn’t take it in. Something came through that made McKay throw his hands around like he was trying to signal a sailboat from shore, and he slipped on scree and slid backwards, too close to Ronon. Ronon sniffed his neck. It smelled like plastic and sweat and something sweet.
“Why do you smell like that,” he said, and will attribute it to blood loss later.
“What? Terror? Oh! That’s my sunscreen.” He stopped talking for a moment while he felt out a route up the ridge he’d fallen down, arms out like he was struggling with his balance, then started up again. “This planet has dangerously high levels of solar radiation, and I don’t want skin cancer. I made it myself, it’s got a cocoa butter base. It’s good for—good for your skin.”
Another flinching moment when McKay turned back to look at him, as though he’d said something he expected to be mocked. Ronon nodded. “Stops it burning?”
“Exactly,” McKay said, and then abruptly leaned closer with a frown; Ronon jerked back, but he just waved at Ronon’s face. “Is that why—the mud?”
“Yeah,” Ronon said. “Ochre dust. Mix it with oil.” It works better than other pigments. Zinc oxide dust is best if you can get it, but he never could. He didn’t say that. His throat hurt.
“That’s actually pretty clever,” McKay said, looking satisfied for some reason. “Of course, this stuff’s waterproof. But it’s nice to see that someone cares about melanoma and their lifetime radiation exposure.”
He kept talking. Ronon mostly listened to the noise of it, but did learn about Marie Skłodowska-Curie dying of aplastic anaemia, by accident.
The light came in sideways in slices through the trees, and blurred orange like overexposure. Brighter the closer they got to the edges of the forest. Sheppard’s people were humming around their ship like insects. He stopped.
“Are you coming back with us?” McKay asked, turning back, full in the midday sun.
There were more of them than Ronon had thought, standing close to each other, all dressed the same. As he watched, Sheppard and Emmagan walked out of the tree cover on the other side of the clearing, Sheppard talking urgently into his radio. Emmagan clapped him absentmindedly on the shoulder before ducking into the shadow of the ship.
There’s lots of them. It would be worse than last time.
“Well, suit yourself,” McKay said, mouth twisting downward. He turned away again and clumped away down the bracken slope, peeling off his red suit. Ronon found himself on his toes, about to move, forward or backwards or just away. Bracing to run.
Another radio burst; McKay stopped. His shoulders moved around. When he turned around for the third time his eyes were moving as though he’d expected Ronon to have left, but he hadn’t. “Uh,” McKay said. “Before you go—Carson wants to have another look at your shoulder, he says. That’s Doctor Beckett.”
Ronon started down the hillock.
They sat on the ground in the shadow of the ship, metal radiating heat behind them, and Beckett fussed over the incision. Ronon rooted his fingers in the sun-bleached grass and heard the roots creak to avoid crawling out of his skin at the feeling of someone working behind him, touching him where he can’t see it. He thought he could feel the individual ridges of fingerprints, but Beckett was wearing gloves.
The ground troops—he didn’t know what they’d call themselves but he knew what they were—didn’t want him inside the ship.
With his jacket off he could feel the blood flake and pull at his skin.
McKay came back out of the cave-mouth of the ship, less sweaty, stripped out of the red suit and dressed the same as the others. He was chewing on something. “Gonna be okay?” he said with his mouth full, directed at either Ronon or Beckett, unclarified.
Ronon nodded. Beckett talked and talked and talked and Ronon tried to follow it, but kept thinking about the fact that he could feel the movement of air on the inside of the wound. Kept thinking about the hole.
Something metallic waved in front of his face; when he looked up McKay said, “Want some?”
He took it just to find out what it was. Brown inside the foil, with the imprints of McKay’s weirdly small neat teeth. “Sunscreen?” he said.
“Hah, no—but it’s made of the same plant. That’s why it smells the same.”
“Going to give it another go with the antiseptic,” Beckett warned him, and Ronon breathed into the wash of cold-stinging. He took a bite, put his tongue on the overlapping teeth marks, and realised several minutes later that he’d closed his eyes.
When Sheppard’s people had finished packing up, McKay stood up and tried not to look like he was watching Ronon to see if he’d follow.
The grunt guys weren’t talking to each other with Ronon there, and the people whose names he knew were mostly in the cockpit flying the thing. So he held onto the netting with two fingers and stared past all of them. It didn’t put anyone at ease but it was better than anything else. He thought about the fucked-up guy for most of the flight.
He could tell the guy was out of his head the way Sheppard had said he’d be. Some kind of stimulant. The way he moved, his reaction times. If it were just him, Ronon would just have put him down, nice and gentle, and from the way he’d been talking it would have been a mercy. But it wasn’t just him.
When he’d first heard them—mostly yelling from McKay—it had taken him a long time to understand what was going on and then another long time to get his body to understand that when someone’s unarmed and being threatened for no good reason you do what you can to stop them getting shot. Then it had understood, all at once, and he’d just flung himself at the guy, Ford, stupid and frantic. Like: be a person. Try to help someone. Like: this is the only chance you’ve got.
He should’ve just put him down.
They took him to the City of the Ancestors. He knew that when he was young he’d had some idea of what it would look like, a fairy-tale idea, but couldn’t remember what it was. They took him to the City of the Ancestors and put him in a room. It had windows and it had armed guards on the door.
He spent a lot of time in the shower, washing everything he’d brought with him in the endless stream of clean clear water. Looking at his own hands in the water.
What if they do find a way back to Sateda, he’d thought.
Afterwards he slept for about three hours. He’d wanted to do it in the cupboard, not out in the open, but he knew things would go further sideways if they thought he was crazy, so he’d pushed the bed into the corner and took all the fabric off it, slept with his pack under his head. Woken up. He watched the guards for a while, sideways with his back to the wall, and got up and put all the fabric back and put the bed-frame where it was.
There was something unnatural about them, the way they stood by the door and watched him in silence. It wasn’t, vague memories insisted, the way that people behaved. Wasn’t the way people should behave around each other.
What would he know.
The city was outside the window, and at night there were lights in it. Are still lights in it. There was more city than he’d thought, and less of it had lights in. Far away there were footsteps on metal.
“Going for a walk,” he said.
The guards didn’t react as though he’d bitten through his tongue and spat it at them, though that’s what it had felt like to say it. It didn’t take long to fall back out of practice with speaking.
They argued a little, muttered into radios when that didn’t work, and Ronon leaned on things and stared at them, mostly because it was what they’d done before.
He was too aware of the sound of his feet on the floor, and tried to soften his tread. The guards thumped and thudded. The City of the Ancients was, it turned out, bolted together, built in sections. Halfway repaired. Full of glass.
Some corridors saw heavy use, worn into the floors; others were roped off, and still others weren’t marked as out of use but clearly were, tasted of stale air. The dark outside clearly hadn’t put the place to sleep, and people passed him, veering away or peering curiously at him or, best of all, talking to each other or reading little things in their hands and not noticing him at all. All in uniforms of various kinds. Either the whole planet had a very homogenous culture or the whole place he had access to was some kind of military installation.
Ronon walked for some time, slow and steady so as not to spook the guards, and built a map of the place in his head, the places people were coming from and were going. He stopped to look at a panel of glass, angles and shapes and colours; touched it to feel the cold-smooth of it, and it juddered and retracted into the walls. He smelled salt.
There was ocean here. Huge, black in the light, with wind coming off it.
