Getting The Job Done
Ronon knew what was afoot the instant Sheppard brought the man into the lab where the Wraith sat on a chair, his back pressed up against the wall.
The civilian's face convulsed once as he looked on the face of his fate, green and white and alien beyond his imagining. There was terror there, overlaying the grief, and horror at what he confronted - his death.
This planet had lived soft, safely tucked away from their predators in this galaxy, far from the terror and death and endless hunt of the Wraith in Pegasus.
All humans feared death, from the mudhut Paningi who sang their Songs of Ancestry by circular pools of water in the hope that the Ancestors would hear them and succor them, to the 'Travellers', who flitted from planet to planet and scavenged what technology they could for their own purposes and sought only to survive. But only the Lanteans avoided it so fastidiously, boxed it away, segregated it from sight.
To give the man his due, he mastered his expression after a long, silent moment when no marine moved, looked the Wraith in the eye and held out his hand.
"I guess it won't matter to you," he said. "But my name is Henry Wallace, and this is my penance."
Ronon had seen men ready to die before. They'd usually been military - or people pushed to the edge, defending their loved ones.
The Wraith looked to Sheppard once, then took Wallace's hand.
The marines hoisted their weapons, but Sheppard waved them down.
It was over in seconds.
Then the Wraith was rising to its feet, hissing in pleasure and renewed energy.
"Now," said Sheppard. "Get the job done."
He turned away and his eye caught Ronon's, a gaze that was almost defiant in its flatness.
It went against the grain to approve the giving of life to the Wraith. But Ronon reflected it a was a bitter justice - the sacrifice of a life to save a life. And if there was revulsion on the faces of the marines as they looked on John, Ronon wasn't revolted.
He understood.
--
Ronon returned from the locker rooms and the pleasure of the hot showers to find John flopped back on his bed.
He tilted his head. "You okay?"
The hand across John's forehead lifted. "Do I look okay?"
"Nope."
"There you go then."
The bite didn't surprise him. He was used to John's moods. It had been a stressful three months, starting with the move from the original Lantean planet, incorporating Weir's loss and Carter's replacement of her, the disappearance of Teyla's people, and now the disappearance of the McKays.
Usually, Teyla would be there to help take the burdens off. Right now, she had other things on her mind, a preoccupation that no-one else in the expedition seemed to have noticed. Ronon had his own conclusions on that score, but who asks him?
He tossed his jacket on the chair and lay down beside John, imitating the pose. Feet on the floor, body on the bed, lying back. "How's Jeannie doing?"
"Docs say she'll be right as rain in a few days. She's going home tonight, though."
"McKay's going with her."
"Yeah."
There was a lot of meaning in that answer: uncertainty, tension, anger.
McKay wouldn't quite meet John's eyes when he and Jeannie met them for dinner. It took a certain kind of mindset to kill another human; and a mindset one step further to kill in cold blood. John didn't just kill another human being in cold blood, he ushered the man to his death.
Ronon understood where Rodney couldn't. He was trained to it, like John. Maybe not as far, or as extensively, but Pegasus was different to Earth. Life was more expendable, although the taking of life was always regrettable.
They weren't Wraith after all.
He rolled onto his side and John's hand came down on the bed, close enough to touch.
"You did what you had to."
John turned his head to look into Ronon's face, the grim steadiness of someone who'd made hard decisions before and wouldn make them again. It wasn't an expression that many people would recognise, but Ronon did.
And it's why he did what he did.
He leaned over, brushing his lips across John's mouth. The other man's jaw went momentarily slack, and his hand brushed the side of Ronon's throat, uncertain. But when Ronon kissed him again, John suddenly had his fingers clenched in Ronon's hair, and his mouth was moving with swift hunger across Ronon's lips.
"You're okay with here?" Ronon slid his hands between John's thighs to make sure there was no doubt. He knew the rules of the Earth military - learned them in the first weeks in Atlantis. They were pretty restrictive. In Sateda, life was considered too short to dick about with sexualities and the matter of release. You got the job done and that was that.
"Yeah." John's jaw clenched. "Get it done."
Ronon got the job done.
- fin -