10. Buy into a Good Story

The campfire was wild and bright around them, Dr. Porter's face alive and youthful in the light. "He did, I saw it!" she exclaimed, her pale cheeks flushed against the shock of dark hair. Her eyes were alit and wide. "SGA-1 can do the impossible!"

Ronon snorted quietly as he exchanged a look with Sheppard, who rolled his eyes and cocked his head to keep watch.

"They always save us, don't they?" Dr. Porter asks fiercely. "No other team seems to be that good."

Next was a female snort, followed by the obvious sound of a gun being loaded and raised. "I can shoot; that means defense."

Ronon rolled his eyes and head, staring heavily at Sheppard, who only gave a shrug in response.

Cruz was still blustering, holding her P90 securely when she felt the metallic scrape against her temple.

"So shoot," Ronon growled simply.

Cruz held her hands up. "So I'm supposed to be prepared for someone in my own camp that was supposed to be keeping watch without knowing what got them to this position?"

Ronon turned, shifting his weapon to the front of her face. "Doesn't matter how they got there." He leaned in close, white teeth bared against the dancing flames of campfire. "What matters if you can take them out." He lifted his weapon, but still kept the barrel needled to Cruz's temple. "When needed."

"Ronon," Sheppard said in an almost warning.

Ronon took in Cruz's glittering stare, appreciating the resistance he hadn't seen in too long since becoming a runner, since losing Meyla, since Sateda. The stare held longer than either of them would have liked, one defiant and one pleading, though for different reasons and from different emotions, but coming from both of them.

When Ronon heard later that Cruz had died (shot down by natives in an off-world mission gone terribly wrong, along with Porter), he decided to simply hate everything a little bit more. He was brutal in training, merciless in showing the Satedan ways of fighting.

He couldn't fight how someone (somewhere, somehow) thought his story was worth telling.

Ronon preferred to rotate his weapons within his palms, a tactile feeling that allowed him to forget—

He ground his teeth, thinking of Porter and Cruz, and laid his opponent to the floor.

His was not a story to buy into.

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