Title: Silk & Steel

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis

Rating: G

Spoilers: Doesn't really reference any canon aside from Runner & Sateda, but up to the fourth season finale to be safe. Summary: Ronon reflects on his world, past and present.
Disclaimer: If SGA belonged to me, this would be in a script.
Note: This started as three separate stories that merged into one. I think this is my best one yet. I did guessimate Ronon's age, because I don't think they ever came out and said. Jason Momoa's 29, so I added on two years to that. I don't know if I have another SGA fic in me, although there are a few plot bunnies hopping around in my head. Comment if you liked.

Before the Wraith came, Sateda looked much like any other planet capable of supporting human life. Skies, forests, dirt, water. Ordinary as a list, but he still missed his homeworld. Not a day went by that he didn't feel the loss. It had been one thing to believe he was in exile, to think his people were forbidden to him. It was another to know that a once great race had been reduced to a handful of refugees.

He was grateful, though, that life had brought him to Atlantis, grateful for the chance to engage the Wraith, to prevent them from decimating another civilization. Still, it was difficult at times. The Earth people working in Atlantis nearly equaled a fourth of the Satedan population, as it was before the culling. Nearly all of them had family back on their planet, parents, siblings, an unbroken family tree. Evolving safe from the Wraith, they were able to expand themselves to their fullest potential. They devoted themselves to their paths, striving to challenge themselves and to accomplish the best they could in their chosen profession.

In the Pegasus Galaxy, survival took precedence over all indulgences. He'd been 22 when he was culled. If the Wraith had never come, he would have had a handful of children by now. Rodney was near 40 and had never been married, had no offspring to leave behind. The Earth people always felt they had the luxury of time. There would be time later, they said. There was an optimism that they cloaked themselves in that the future would always exist. He guessed he'd still had a bit of that hope left, the fateful day when he took John and Teyla hostage.

He had believed his hope of a family, of a genetic legacy, died with Melana. Certainly nothing in the seven long years he spent running convinced him otherwise. Now, though, he listened to the Marines he trained banter about the women they were interested in. He observed Rodney's relationship with Katie Brown and Carson's fizzled affair with Lt. Cadman. The problem, he was finding, was that the Earth people had no set courtship rituals. It varied from person to person, based on the level of attractiveness and the type of relationship sought. It came back to the time thing again, the idea that if this pairing doesn't work, there's still time to find someone new. Time to get know each other, time to decide if this is right, if it's real. From what he could tell, Satedan and Athosians customs were much simpler. You grew up with everyone in your village, so you had a pretty good idea if you liked someone or not. Then it was just a matter of seeing if the interest was reciprocated. He supposed all three cultures did have some things in common: the desire for a mate, the search for a connection.

Even before the Siege, he'd been a tracker and a hunter. He learned from his grandfather, how to observe his environment, to read what was hidden. His Runner years, though, only honed those skills. Once he came to Atlantis, he found those skills transferred to people as well. The Earth people had such a dislike of silence; they would keep speaking, just to keep it at bay. Despite what many thought of him, he was patient. He could sit through one of Rodney's long rambles, just as long as he could crouch in the brush, waiting for game. If you waited long enough, something would come along to make it all worthwhile.

The first time he laid eyes on Dr. Jennifer Keller, he was standing in the gate room and she'd just arrived. The team was all geared up, waiting for John to finish talking to the handful of new marines that had also beamed down from the Daedalus. Rodney was blathering on about some obscure topic and Teyla was making polite noises. Bored and restless, he scanned the fresh blood. Her hair caught his gaze first; it was golden blonde, almost the exact shade of Melana's. The civilian was petite, clad in the usual grey uniform that hugged the few curves she had. She stood a little apart from the group, glancing around the room as if she was alone. She looked this way and that, her eyes wide, and paying absolutely no attention to the other people in the vicinity. Definitely a civilian, probably no self-preservation instinct to speak of. Carson approached her, and she turned to face him. The movement allowed him to see the flag on her uniform was the same as John's, but he suspected that's where the similarities ended. From this angle, he could also see her hands twisting on the straps of her backpack and her body language was tense, even in the face of Carson's welcoming charm. She was a doctor, then, and probably just as inept with warfare as Carson. He grunted, dismissing her from his mind. Weak and useless. Probably would be gone before the first month was out.

He got his first clue he was wrong two weeks later. The team entered the mess hall after returning from a mission and she'd been walking past. Rodney, his disdain for lesser mortals well-known, greeted her by name. He learned her first name through conversation with Carson, who brought her up occasionally. Apparently her arrival took a bit of the burden off of him. She was a skilled surgeon and adapted quite easily to the Ancestral technology. Pleasant, kind, and reliable, she was apparently just a wonderful bundle of joy and light for the infirmary.

His first contact with her came when a mission with Lorne went bad. He'd taken a bit of shrapnel to his back and one of the marines was wounded dangerously close to his femoral artery. Carson had taken the marine and the next thing he knew, Dr. Keller was pulling him to a bed. He broke her hold easily, but she pointed at the bed and told him to sit. Then she turned away gathering supplies, as if not even questioning that she'd be obeyed. He sat. She never fussed over him, just assessed the situation and dealt with it. She didn't even ask if he wanted topical anesthesia, suggesting she'd read up on him and respected his opinion. Aside from one curt reminder not to move, she didn't babble at him. When she was finished, she told him he was grounded for three days. He growled, but the look on her face dared him to argue with her. This was the same woman who dropped her eyes when she saw him in the corridors? He dropped his chin. Taking the half nod as an assent, she nodded in return and then disappeared into the chaos, her lab coat swirling behind her.

After that, he preferred for her to tend him. He figured that was fine with the rest of the staff, as they tended to give him a wide berth. The third time, she asked him a question about a mission, and he answered it with a complete sentence. He began to be comfortable with her. When she started smiling tentatively at him when they ran into each other, he smiled back. After a while, she stopped being the person who reminded him of Melana and became, simply, Jen. He called her 'Doc' to her face, although she was always Jen in his mind. Deep, deep within himself, he'd admit to like the way the names sounded together. Ronon and Jen. They sounded like they belonged together. After the lockdown, he began to realize that he might be a bit obsessed. He found himself looking for her, thinking about her when he shouldn't be. All his vaunted tracking skills became devoted to trying to figure her out.

Her voice had a rhythmic cadence that was different from the others who wore her flag. To him, everyone on the Atlantis expedition had an accent, but her voice stood out. When she was off-duty and relaxed, her vowels got shorter and she had a tendency to emphasize the middle of her words. He was relatively sure that there was no one else in the galaxy who spoke as she did. When she was in the infirmary, running the show, her tone was strong and confident. She had faith in her medical skills. Yet if she was sitting with his team in the mess, she was quiet and soft. He was fascinated by the contrast. Sometimes he would purposely push her past her comfort zone, just to watch her drop her eyes, teeth sinking into her bottom lip, as a light flush stained her cheeks. She was silk and steel in one small petite body.

Her hands were also unique. Long and slender fingers, in perfect proportion with her palms. Delicate wrists that seemed too fragile for the burden of saving lives. They were surgeon hands, he was told. She wielded them with gentle experience. The fleeting brushes of her gloved fingertips as she sewed him up time after time fed some unnamed need within him. She used those hands to soothe a child, or set a broken leg. Outside the infirmary, she had a habit of wrapping her arms around her torso. It was almost like she was holding herself back from the world. He remembered what she told him, about not being able to experience the same rites of passages as her peers. He thought she felt disconnected, an observer only in the social realm. He was able to relate to this after seven years of avoiding human contact, only being able to catch glimpses as lives went on without him. She was as much alien as he.

She did have the same unshakable sense of loyalty that the others did. He'd never forget the way he felt when his team came to rescue after the Wraith brought him to the ruins of Sateda. He knew that if she'd been there then, she would've been in that jumper, her horrible luck off-world aside. She also possessed an iron-clad sense of right and wrong. He knew she would have also been against the Wraith retrovirus, although her motivation would have been more ethical in nature. Yet she was also an excellent shot and she'd approached her sparring classes with an intensity that surprised him. Her vocation may have been healing, but she would commit violence to protect the helpless. He figured it was that realization that sunk him. The capacity for violence mixed with the desire to protect seemed too big for her to carry, but she managed it.

Before the Wraith came, he loved and he'd thought it would be his only. Now, here he was, having lost all that he was, facing a future that was nothing but uncertain. He didn't know if he could survive the loss a second time. Once his world consisted of skies, forests, dirt, water. Now it was a city constructed of materials he didn't know how to pronounce and a small blonde woman who was the strength of steel wrapped in the softness of silk.