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In the markets of Sateda, a handful of coins slipped to you by your amma would buy you one of the puzzles called rakshin, a plaything for children—small glass spheres, each made up of dozens of smaller rings that caught the light in a cascade of colour when you held them up towards the sun. Turn them this way and that and different patterns would appear, bright shapes suspended within the glass that would catch the eye while you searched for the right combination of rings to solve the puzzle and reveal the image that lay at the rakshin's heart.
Ronon had half a dozen of them, bought and traded for in the school playground; even once he'd outgrown them, he kept them in the small chest that stood in the corner of his room, tucked away safely beneath layers of clean bed-clothes and fresh linen. They were dulled with age when he found them again as he packed for the academy, but their curves still caught the early morning light. They'd still held enough magic at their heart to make him want to twist them between his fingers, and he'd sat there in the corner of his room, cross-legged, wondering how he could look at them so that they would make sense.
No one makes rakshin any more, the method of their making lost with Sateda, and Ronon would be surprised if any delicate curves of glass had survived his people's last burning. The streets he'd run along to make it to the gate had been carpeted with thin shards of shattered window panes, and Ronon has common sense enough to know that rakshin don't exist anymore outside of the memory he carries of them. Yet more and more, he finds himself cupping his palm around the imaginary, smooth weight of them when he looks at Weir.
And he looks at her often. Not just when she's talking in meetings, or when it's his duty, on one of her rare trips off-world, but at odd, ordinary moments. Studying her, looking for what he needs to know her, is like trying to catch glimpses of her through a cool curve of clouded glass. When he sees her sitting in the mess hall late at night, cup of coffee steaming at her elbow and teeth worrying at her lower lip as she works at deciphering a piece of Ancient prose; the arc of her spine underneath bright cloth; on his morning run, when he catches sight of her from the height of a balcony or the tip of the pier—her straight, spare form striding out along the path she mostly takes for her walks, arms swinging and dark hair haloing her head; the angles her hands make when she steeples her fingers; the way her smile and the arch of her eyebrows can mean any one of a dozen things, all at once.
When he first got to Atlantis, he'd thought he understood her straight away: looking at the way she seemed to struggle to keep things back, arms wrapped tight around her body in the gate room as if they could hold back all her anger and her fear; the fine lines around her eyes; her determination, like a fierce living thing all of its own. But Ronon had been looking at her through flawed glass, or maybe just with eyes dulled by seven years of Running. The more he tilts his head, considers her from different angles, the more patterns he sees in her, the more things reflected back at him. Everything he saw in those first few weeks is there in her, yes; but all of that is layered on top of something more, like the spheres of glass around the true molten heart of a rakshin.
He thinks about her, sometimes, when he runs.
***
Weir likes to ask him questions. Part of it is just her doing her job, and he can't begrudge her that; he came to Atlantis after seven years of Running, seven years of Wraith filth working its way deeper and deeper into him so that even the touch of his fingers on his own skin made him flinch, and all because of the betrayal of a man he'd been proud to call family. Ronon's learned the hard way that you have to distrust your own people before you can allow yourself to trust them, and so he sits quietly with her, and he tells her what she wants to know about him, about what he's had to do to others to keep one step ahead of the Wraith, about Sateda, about the stories his people told before fear closed their throats for good.
He doesn't tell her about his parents, or Melena, or the six sisters whose bones must have blanched back into the reddish soil of the countryside by now; but once, when she slides a plate full of strange, sweet Earth pastries to him across the table in the mess, and asks him if they had anything like them on Sateda, he surprises himself by telling her about his Aunt Mikshi.
It's a memory he's tried not to think about for nearly a decade, and calling it up now is like seeing what used to be his life through a looking-glass, all of it receded and distant and sharper than it should be. Ronon keeps his eyes on the table, on Weir's neat, still hands, while he speaks.
He tells her about the quiet tick of the clock in Mikshi's sun-warm kitchen; the murmur from the audio in the corner that she always had tuned to the state weather channel; her square, flour-whitened hands pounding away at dough she would shape into kepa and deven tarts and loaves of wetri bread. He tells her how Mikshi would turn a blind eye to him eating preserves straight from the jar, and spit on a handkerchief to wipe his face with afterwards, declaring that having him to stay was like having a Thernan nomad invade her orderly space. How he would grin up at her, and call her Mikshi-la, and tug on one of her braids; how his aunt's long-suffering sigh and the smile that tugged always at the corner of her mouth was like looking at love's gleam made bearable by everyday wrinkles and a dusting of flour.
When his words run out, Weir is as silent as he is for a long time. He doesn't know if he's said too much for an Earther to be comfortable; can't quite remember if he'd said too much for a Satedan to be comfortable either. It's been a while since he spoke so much. He shuffles his feet awkwardly under the table, and looks up, surprised, when she puts a hand on his forearm, right where the leather bracer meets the soft skin of his elbow, and says quietly, "Thank you, Ronon."
For the first time since he stepped into the city, the smile she gives him has no awkwardness lingering in its corners, no threat of teeth should he cross a line of which he's not aware. He smiles back at her, tentatively; and later, after she's gathered up her empty lunch tray and gone back to her office, he's surprised to realise that he hadn't flinched at her touch, though no one has reached out to him with that kind of deliberation in so long.
In the dark of his bed that night, he strokes two fingers softly over that one patch of skin, and something confused and painful twists inside his chest. He thinks, he's been looking back at his life on Sateda like it was something dead and gone, a relic he could only look at from the far side of cracked glass; but those words on his tongue, that soft touch on his arm, have made it all real again, alive in the spaces between his memories, and in the marrow of his bones, as if her asking him to speak had been the same as permission to finally stop Running.
Ronon is thankful for this. He is thankful; and he closes his eyes, and he lets his body go lax under the covers, and he remembers.
***
Old folks used to say that the rakshin weren't just children's playthings; that when their parents' parents were young, they'd have been scolded for trying to play with a symbol of the Unity. Mother Nerin tried to impress that on Ronon once, when she caught him sitting in the communal courtyard, dust on the knees of his good trousers while he used two of his rakshin to play dekton with some of the neighbouring children.
"If you had respect, lad," she tells him, leaning heavily on the walking stick she's needed ever since her days in the Second Peninsular War, and favouring them with her best glare, "you'd put that up where you can keep it safe. They're not toys."
"Then why did we buy them from the toymaker?" Conerr asks, with the edge of insolence in his voice that simultaneously thrills Ronon's eight-year-old heart, and terrifies him.
"Perhaps because he's as big an idiot as you are," Nerin says, eyes growing wide with the force of her scorn. "Just like everyone who's forgotten what we used to be." She stoops over with a pained grunt and plucks the rakshin out of the dirt, dusting them off on the heavy cloth of her coat before she deposits them carefully into Ronon's hands. "They'll tell you they're a puzzle all right," she says, looking directly at Ronon when she speaks, "but they don't tell you what game you're playing any more. They don't tell you why the Ancestors kept them sacred."
She rests one hand heavily on Ronon's head for a moment, ruffling his baby fine curls, before she limps back across the courtyard towards the small rooms she rents from Harbin the Lender. Mother Nerin never comes near them much after that, and Ronon and his family move on to live in a bigger place on the outskirts of town not long after; she was a presence in his life only during the long, dusty summer of the drought, but she taught him just enough about what he held in his hands to make him understand that the clarity of glass could contain something special; that at the heart of each rakshin was not an image to be sought but a truth to be known; and that the cool, clear glass itself was just as important, a weight that the world gathers around itself to let us see more clearly.
***
A lot of the Earth folks aren't so good with questions, and more of them are worse with answers. Ask McKay to pass along the platter of pancakes at breakfast, and you'll get a ten minute diatribe while the food goes cold in front of him; ask Sheppard where he learned that particular throw while you're sparring, and he'll look shifty and rub the back of his neck while mumbling something about places called Stanford and Fraternity. Teyla thinks it's funny, that there are cultures out there so devoted to the fine art of speaking in order to say nothing; Ronon finds it frustrating.
With Weir, though, Ronon gets the feeling he could ask her questions and get real answers in return; she wants the truth from him, and he's pretty sure that she'd want no more and no less than that from herself. Some times, he gets close to asking her, on the long, warm evenings when they sit together on the mess hall's balcony, drinking some of the Athosian stout tea and sharing a tin of rena nuts. He even opens his mouth a couple of times, feels the shape of words that could be spoken on his tongue; only problem is, he's not quite sure what to ask her. How to ask her.
He could follow her lead: ask her questions about her childhood in North Dakota; ask her why she wears red, the colour of marriage, so much, though she hasn't pledged herself to anyone; ask her about the songs she hums to herself sometimes, melodies that rise and fall in time with her breathing. Why she does what she does each day. What she saw in him that made her let him stay.
What he wants to ask is this: what are the qualities that glass can have, which lets it fracture but not break. Ronon never quite gets around to asking her, but her silence next to him, the warmth of her against his side, is companionable and telling enough for him.
***
Trade negotiations on Lerna take place inside the Hall of the Ancestors. The room's name makes McKay's eyes light up, and Sheppard's grip tighten instinctively on his P90, but it turns out that the place's only connection with the Ancients is its name. It holds no weapons stronger than politicians' tongues, its walls don't light up at Sheppard's touch, and its construction is like nothing Ronon's ever seen of the Ancients'—over-lapping plates of clear glass that curl around one another, spiralling upwards, drawing the eye to the place far overhead where the glass seems to merge with the slate grey sky of Lerna in winter.
"That is impressive," McKay breathes, head craned backwards at the same angle as Sheppard's and Teyla's, as if he could take all of it in at once.
"It must have taken much skill," Teyla agrees. "To achieve that height alone is—"
"Exactly," McKay cuts her off, "and extra surprising given that they've not exactly grasped the fact that sewage is not supposed to flow above ground. You'd think they—" He shuts up with a yelp when Teyla smacks him smartly on the arm.
Teyla doesn't look amused by McKay's words, which have earned raised eyebrows from two of the Lernai matriarchs standing nearby. Sheppard's ignoring them both rather pointedly, affecting a look of boredom, but Ronon can feel a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth—trust McKay to rile up a couple of aristocrats about plumbing.
Ronon glances over to see a matching expression on Weir's face. She sees him looking at her, and she lets her smile grow for just a moment—mischief caught in the fine lines around her mouth when she shows him that she shares his amusement, the same affectionate indulgence he grants McKay sometimes—before her face smoothes out into something pleasant and not quite like her. She tugs a little at the bottom of the neatly tailored dark jacket she insists on wearing to negotiations like these and strides forward, her voice clear and measured as she goes through the formal greetings that Ronon and Teyla had taught her to use with each of the ten matriarchs in turn.
The space where Weir stands is right at the centre of the hall, beneath the tallest part of the structure, where shards of refracted light illuminate her and help to carry her voice as she speaks. She clasps her hands in a gesture that speaks partly of supplication, but more of poise, of control; Ronon frowns at her while she speaks, because there's something familiar here, something he's known before, though he doesn't think he's ever had to stand through an exchange about how mutually beneficial a cultural exchange of antibiotics for foodstuffs could be. It nags at him until he looks down and finds that his palm has curved unconsciously in mid-air, as if around an imaginary sphere of glass.
Sheppard looks over at him curiously, but Ronon just looks at Weir and smiles—he's realised where they both are. The pale white marble floor underneath their feet; the glass walls springing up into a paler sky; Elizabeth glowing at the heart of it all, straight-backed and full of purpose: she's standing at the centre of a rakshin, and Ronon's seeing right through it, right at the reflection of his own heart.
He understands what he sees.
***
When they walk back to Atlantis two days later, McKay's chattering with delight about records he'd found in the Lernai archives and Elizabeth's quietly flushed with successful trade and the euphoria that comes with having bested an opponent in the field. The city in the afternoon is buzzing with activity, light streaming through the high windows to shatter in stained-glass colour against his face and in her hair.
Teyla and Sheppard head for the locker room and McKay makes a soldier's march for the labs, but when Elizabeth nods at him amiably before heading back to her suite to change in time for the afternoon's meeting, Ronon follows her. She turns to look at him when he walks through her door; her brow furrows a little, but she meets him head on. And Ronon finds that cupping her face in his hands is like curving his palms around cool glass; the way she moves against him is like a slow uncoiling of spheres; and when she opens her mouth to kiss him back, her tongue sliding hot against his, it's like the heated core of a rakshin, the light within him coming free.