Part II, Chapter 3
Sheppard comes by a couple of days after Teyla.
"How's it going?" he says, knowing full well that Ronon rarely speaks to anyone and leaves his quarters only to fetch food at the mess or else work out by himself while most of the city sleeps.
"I'm good."
The room is mostly bare, but Sheppard seems to take great interest in the walls and floor. He reaches into his pocket and hands Ronon a piece of paper. "Did you write this?"
In Cobel's script is the warning to leave Vis and not come back. "No," he says, "Someone on the farm wrote it."
Even if he doesn't believe him, Sheppard looks like he wants to. The Colonel tucks the note back into his pocket.
"So, what happened? With the drug and everything."
"The tube…"
"I'm talking about before that, before they pumped you full of it."
Ronon is speechless at the Colonel's question.
John's gaze doesn't waver. "Yeah, I've blindsided you."
Yes, he has. Ronon hasn't told Beckett anything about taking pods. Before his withdrawal overtook him, he explained about the tube. He wasn't lying; just not telling the entire truth about hiding pods under his bed and imagining fields of yellow fruits as he ran towards the farmstead.
"How did you know?"
Sheppard shrugs. "Teyla suggested it."
Teyla and Rodney's dream disk helped place Ronon on the path to recovery. Some parts of it heal him better than others, and one part—"How could you?"—should have been given more attention.
Ronon looks Sheppard in the eye, perhaps the most difficult thing to do right now. "That planet where you and Teyla got shot, the one with the Wraith and the people, I was looking for Happy. Thought I saw some fruits growing in the woods. That's why I wasn't there when the shooting started."
John stands leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, listening.
"I don't know how it got so big, wanting it. Just one day it was everything. When I saw the farm on the Ruined Planet, I needed it a lot. Made me take off like that. Disobeyed your order to stop."
Ronon rubs his chest where the needle hit his sternum. He feels a little bump where the scar is.
"So you allowed the Visans to capture you there?"
"No. Civilians lived on the farm. The Master's Second took me in the city, in Sardu."
Sheppard stops for a moment, putting the pieces together in his mind. "Why did you go to Sardu?"
Thinking about his long walk on the road with fantasies of bathing in Happy as his inspiration, Ronon lowers his head. "They said if I took plant seeds to some people in the city, I'd get some Happy in return. They don't allow seeds there. The Second caught me." His arms twitch recalling how easily he fell.
Sheppard comes closer, less relaxed, more demanding. "Have you always used it?"
A fair enough question. After all, Ronon hasn't been a part of Sheppard's team all that long and certainly hasn't shared much about himself in the interim.
"No. Never until after the Wraith enzyme. Then a guy on a planet we went to gave me one. The Second. It was him."
Talking about all of this is both humiliating and liberating.
Standing there quietly, Sheppard waits, but there isn't any more to tell.
"Okay," he says at last, "eventually you have to come out of your room. There's a meeting with Elizabeth and Carson at eleven hundred hours. About the Master guy and the Wraith. Y'know, 'Happy' stuff." He makes finger quotes in the air, which lightens the mood some.
"I'm staying here. You go talk." It's not nightfall, yet. Too many people around.
Sheppard doesn't leave. "Consider it a formal debriefing. Nobody wants to go back to the Ruined Planet to get more pods for the drunk lady. You probably have enough information so we can forget about her."
Remembering the plastic stick separating his jaws and the feel of a pod shoved between his teeth, Ronon says, "Told Carson I didn't want any."
"You kept them to give to her?"
"Not sure."
"You might be dead now if we hadn't given them to you."
It would be disrespectful in the utmost to tell Sheppard they ought to have let him perish. Especially when they worked so hard and sacrificed the pods, which they could have saved and given to the woman.
Ronon shakes his head, unable to say the things he's thinking.
"Look, Ronon, we didn't know why you left. Caldwell wanted to haul you back in handcuffs."
Ronon feels from the Dream Machine how much McKay depends on him, Teyla's frank despair believing that he was dead. And now here's Sheppard, trying to trust him again.
"Okay," John says, noncommittally, trying to read through all of the defensive layers Ronon's put up around himself. "When this all blows over, I still want you on my team—if you're willing."
"Why?"
Pointing to the headset, the extensions on which are beginning to fray from daily use, Sheppard asks, "What's McKay's machine told you?"
Ronon thinks about what he's seen and heard and felt from the playback and realizes that Sheppard is the headset. And McKay and Teyla and Elizabeth and everyone else who has shown up in the dreams he's been feeding himself. They're so close, they are solid, unlike the abstract Divine One, and Ronon can have them anytime he needs them, these people who have planted themselves in his soul.
OoOoOoO
A few weeks later, they come through the wormhole to a place called Faladis. Teyla knows it as a simple agricultural outpost, part of a series of cooperating planets that might be willing to trade. The gate is located in the center of a small town that lies tucked under heavy forest in a pleasant valley.
Farm animals wander about, foraging as they can from shrubs and weedy, overgrown gardens around crude shelters made of fabric and boards. Aside from the sound of stalks breaking as animals bite them, the town is silent.
"Hello?" Sheppard calls.
"Strange," says McKay, looking around nervously. "I thought you said this place was thriving."
"It is," Teyla replies. "Or was."
"Not much happening today," Ronon says. Approaching one of the tents, he pulls back the opening flap. "Sheppard."
Inside the tent, two toddlers lie on a single, unmade bed, staring enraptured at the ceiling. At a table sit a man and a woman, each bearing the same stuporous expressions as the children. These people live rough, for Ronon sees no finery in their home, not a pillow on the bulky straw mattress or cloth coverlet for their rickety table.
The central cooking pit has gone cold; the uncovered children tremble, goosebumps prominent on their skinny arms. Teyla finds blankets and tucks them around the children, as Sheppard approaches the adults.
"Hey," he says, nudging the man. "Wake up!"
The man smiles up at Sheppard. "Ilda, we have guests!"
The woman blinks alert.
"Oh!" she says. "Welcome!"
She rises and shuffles to a cloth sack lying nearby. "You must be hungry, having come from…wherever you came from."
From the sack she pulls a half-dozen spongelike wafers, beige and blue and green, and places them on a wooden plate.
For a moment, the team looks at Ronon.
"I'm okay," he says, stepping back from the generous woman and her plate.
"Where did you get those?" McKay asks, pointing to the wafers.
"Traders bring them from their world. Please, eat!" She sets down the plate and sits at the table.
"Your children are cold," Teyla tells her. "Why did you not cover them?"
"The…children…" The woman looks over at the little ones lying on the bed. "I must have forgotten."
"It's that stuff," Ronon says, indicating the food.
"The food is fine," the man says. "We trade livestock for it."
"Oh, yeah?" McKay gives up looking for energy readings and places the monitor in his pocket. "Well, your meal tickets are running all over town."
"No. They're in the pens."
"See for yourself." McKay lifts the tent flap. Several animals prowling about scurry at the sudden movement.
The man hardly reacts. "So they got out. Here, I will put them back." He leaves the tent and whistles and claps his hands to no effect. Instead, dozens of animals trot off into the forest.
"The others will help," he says.
Ronon follows the man to each tent, watches him shake the people living there, all of whom are dumbfounded by Happy.
"Arnos! Farva! The pens have broken! We must bring in the animals!"
But no one pays him much attention, lost as they are in their bliss. Ronon spies bags of wafers with every family. Children smile up at him with rotting teeth, their clothing smelly and stiff with grime.
Ilda has started the fire going in her tent. She hums pleasantly as Ronon returns. He keeps away from her, from her tempting plate, as do the rest of the team, who rouse the children and help the woman bring wood to the fire. Ronon remembers how Zin hummed as she fed her infant and wonders what became of them.
Having failed at acquiring help with the animals, the man returns. "Perhaps they will come back on their own," he says, fanning himself from just these lackluster efforts.
"I wouldn't," Ronon says.
"You don't know how it is," he tells them. "For generations we have sold our livestock for other foods. But soldiers came, slaughtered our beasts. The forest grows nothing but creeping vines and plain trees."
"Soldiers?" Sheppard tenses, his hands tightening on his weapon, a wordless signal to Ronon, to his team, that this bucolic settlement may hold unseen dangers.
"Months ago they came through the Ancestor's circle with guns and, oh, it was a terrible day!" His pleasant expression crumbles at the memories.
"What did they look like?" Ronon asks. "Their uniforms."
"Plain. The color of sand. Why do you ask this? They look our livelihood from us! The few beasts we have left will not grow into herds for a very long time."
He looks at the plate Ilda has prepared. No one on Sheppard's team wants to get too close to it or to the sack of wafers on the floor.
"Where did you buy those?" Teyla asks, standing well away from the odd nourishment.
The man's face broadens with delight. "They were sent to us by the Visans, as a charity. A spice merchant arranged it. We know him from the markets."
Ilda walks dazedly from the fire pit to the children, carrying with her a metal pan with warm water in it. Dipping a ratty cloth into the water, she gently rubs down her childrens' faces and hands, giving them a loving but ineffectual bath.
"Are you certain you do not wish to eat?" she says, gesturing towards the wafers bulging in their sack.
Ronon turns away. He puts the image of the wafers out of his mind and breathes deeply.
Sheppard comes to his side. "We're leaving. How you doing?"
"Fine." He can't believe their first offworld visit since making it back to Atlantis has him running into the very thing he's trying to get over. "Not too bad," he adds, truthfully, feeling much lighter now that the weight of his secret has lifted.
After a brief goodbye, they walk away from the tent and its occupants.
Teyla approaches the Colonel. "These people are helpless. We cannot just leave them."
Sheppard looks around at the huts and the animals creeping out of the woods. "Well, I don't know how to raise goats—or whatever those things are. I'll suggest another team be sent out here to patch things up, get their gardens going again."
McKay has been quiet throughout, except to grumble at the repeated offerings of wafers. Now he walks beside Ronon, uncomfortably striking up conversation.
"I don't suppose you were looking for fashion tips back there, asking about uniforms."
"The Master's people wear sand-colored uniforms."
"So they killed off the animals and gave these villagers Happy instead?"
"Yeah. The Second dresses up for markets as a spice merchant. He came here after the soldiers to get everyone up on the wafers."
"Even if their gardens grow for them again, when their herds are full, these people will still want the drug," Teyla says, spreading her arms wide to indicate the entire village.
Ronon looks back at the rugged huts. The couple smiles and waves from their doorway.
"Bye, now," says Sheppard. "Take care of your kids."
Ilda still holds the plate with wafers on it. The man takes one and eats it. His wife does the same.
TBC