A/N: So this was a ton of fun to write. Hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

Thank you to everyone who reviewed the past few chapters. I'm happy to see you're still there and still liking it. And yes - I am a tease! I'm currently reveling in the tension between these two and probably will for a little while longer. :)

Enjoy! And let me know what you think.

(Content warning for brief (not very graphic) mentions of physical abuse and miscarriage.)

Maybe being so close to him in the transporter made her hyper-aware of his presence as they walked together through the city's halls, but she could have sworn he was staying much closer to her than he normally did. She didn't mind – the hallways felt cold in comparison to the rising trapped heat of the transporter, and the ambient warmth of his body near hers brought her some comfort – but if he got much closer, people were going to be spreading new rumors about her. Then again, perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad thing; a rumor about her and Ronon would be closer to the truth than any of the slander Hanson was already spewing.

They were walking quickly. Ronon's height and the mess hall's schedule necessitated it, but as they turned the last corner of their journey, Emma found herself on a would-be collision course with a "Wet Floor" sign. She dodged it quickly, causing Ronon to make the strangest jerking motion. He reached his hands out for her, immediately pulled them back, then tried to play the whole thing off like nothing had happened. After a moment of confusion, Emma finally understood why he was hovering so close. Afraid she might have another dizzy spell, he wanted to be there in case she lost her balance again. To him, her avoidance of the sign looked like a stumble, and he was there, ready to catch her if she fell.

And that's when she felt it – a pang in her heart. It was a new sensation, most of her feelings toward him tended to take root in her stomach (and lower, if she were being perfectly honest), but it wasn't completely unfamiliar. At once, she felt transported back to the planet they had last been on together. Scared and bleeding, he had been at her side, ready to ignore his commanding officer's orders just to stay by her. That had been the first time she had felt that little, exquisite pain, and now she was feeling it again.

It was good that he was close. The thought that she might be falling for him and, despite what he may have said, that he might have feelings for her, too, was enough to make her lightheaded once more.

They passed through the entrance of the mess hall and as Emma started heading toward one of the tables at the rear of the room, Ronon placed a light touch on her back, steered her away and ushered her onto a balcony. She looked over her shoulder at him and gave him a puzzled look.

"This is the last place they clean. They'll let us stay longer if we sit out here," he explained as he dropped his gym bag to the floor. "And I don't know about you, but I could use some fresh air after that transporter ride."

She smiled and nodded, set her things down on the table and turned to follow him.

He stopped in front of her and blocked her path. "Stay here," he instructed, pointing to a chair. "I'll grab something for you."

"You really don't –"

"What do you want?"

"Really, I'm perfectly capable of –"

"Look, I don't want you getting the vapors again with a full tray of food in your hands."

She felt a laugh bubble up inside her chest. "The vapors?"

A smile spread across his lips. "They've got enough to clean up in here without you dropping your dinner all over the floor."

"Fine." She crossed her arms and plopped into one of the chairs, staring defiantly back at him. "I'll just sit here on my fainting couch, loosening my corset and smelling the saltshaker till you return."

"Good," he said tersely as he turned to leave. He made it two steps before giving her a last glance. "Anything you don't like?"

"Tuna."

He nodded. "Try not to pass out. I'll be back."

And he was. Within a few minutes' time, he had returned with two heaping trays of food – far more than she could ever eat in one sitting. He set one in front of her and the other across from her, then pulled two bottles of sports drink from each of his back pockets.

Emma couldn't help but smile as he passed one of them to her. "Thank you."

"I uh…wasn't sure what you wanted, so I got everything," he said, rubbing his jaw with the back of his hand. "Well, except for the tuna salad sandwich."

In that moment she understood why Eva's mother, in her time and her reality, had chosen him.

"So Alan – Dr. Hirsch – and I had this great theory that appears to be substantiated. We found the ruby in a box of Janus' personal items in McKay's lab and so the three of us went to present it to Woolsey, but he completely shot us down," she said before taking a bite of her sandwich. She shook her head and looked down at her plate as she chewed.

"We should go," Ronon said.

She swallowed her bite prematurely. "But I'm not done."

He gave her a half smile. "I meant to the planet. We should go back and test your idea."

"You try convincing Woolsey," she muttered with a roll of her eyes.

"That was part of our bet."

"Your bet with Eva?"

He nodded. "If I won, she had to tell me why she was snooping in McKay's lab. If she won, I said I'd talk to Sheppard and get him to make her case to Woolsey."

"And do you think you could convince him?"

"Convince Sheppard?"

She nodded.

His half smile widened. "I think he might be more interested in that request if it came from you, rather than me."

She felt herself flush and deflected her gaze toward the ocean. "I'm sure that Colonel Sheppard is a very nice person. He's funny, smart, a competent leader, but I just find him a little too –"

"Arrogant?"

Her jaw fell slack and she met his eyes again. "I thought you two were friends!"

"We are. Which means I'm allowed to talk shit about him." He took a swig of his drink and leaned back in his chair.

"I was going to say insistent…sometimes bordering on pushy."

He set the bottle back on the table. "It's just because he likes you."

"Me and how many other women on this base?"

Shrugging a shoulder, he made a noise that was something between a laugh and a sound of agreement, but said no more.

Only a few bites of crust remained from her sandwich, so she moved to the orange on her tray. Peeling it helped to fill the lull in the conversation.

The night was cool and the breeze was persistent. They were entering the monsoon season in this part of the ocean, so the waves were rough and the salt in the air was heavy. Still, over the citrus of the orange in her hands and the brine in the wind, somehow his scent was the one that prevailed over the others. After waking up this morning with it clinging to her hair, her clothes, and even her own skin, she felt particularly sensitive to it.

"I just want to get Eva back to her time," she looked up at him, "to her parents."

Ronon scratched the back of his head. "I figured she missed them. But…I hadn't thought about it the other way around till you brought it up during the meeting yesterday."

"Losing a child is…" she shook her head and her voice fell to a whisper, "it's something no one should ever have to go through."

The expression on his face turned grave. There was no mischief in his eyes, no smirk on his lips, no teasing remark at the ready. "You know something about that?"

The sound of her heart pounding in her ears drowned everything else out. Yes, she knew plenty about that. She knew what it was like to carry a child to term, to give her life, to hold her for the first time in her arms, only for her to leave the hospital with empty hands, an empty womb, and an empty heart.

"My sister…" Why did she suddenly feel compelled to tell him everything? To confess the biggest secret of her life to him?

"Michelle?"

There it was again. That pang in her heart. He remembered her name.

"My sister and her husband had some struggles with fertility for a while. They have a daughter now, but it was…difficult for them. Michelle had four miscarriages, actually. I remember each of them."

Ronon had stopped eating, had stopped moving, and had focused every ounce of his attention on her. Perhaps the tradeoff for not being the best talker was that all of that energy went to listening instead.

"I went to check on her after the first one, and when I got to her house, I found her upstairs in the room that was supposed to be the nursery. It was still early, so they hadn't really bought anything like a crib or a changing table, they hadn't painted. There was really only one baby-related thing in there. It was this little shirt that she had bought with the intention of using it to announce the pregnancy to our parents. It said, 'Hi Grandma and Grandpa. See you in February!'"

Atop the table, his hand twitched, mere inches from hers.

"Michelle was alone, sitting on the floor, sobbing, and holding that tiny shirt to her chest. I couldn't get her to stop crying, couldn't get her to stand up, couldn't get her to let go of the damn shirt. And that wasn't even a child… not really."

"I'm sorry."

"It was a hard time for our family," she concluded.

Harder still was the next year, when Emma came home from her third year of college with two black eyes, a broken nose and an unwanted pregnancy, which prompted Michelle to accuse her of being ungrateful and flaunting it in her face.

"I didn't know you had a niece," he said.

She hoped she could pass the tears clouding her vision off as tears of compassion, rather than self-pity. "Her name is Allie. Allison Jane."

He stared at her for a moment, that unwavering, exacting stare that made her feel exposed, but never uneasy.

"I'll talk to Sheppard," he finally said, "see if he can convince Woolsey."

She managed a weak smiled and resumed picking apart her orange.

"So why didn't you eat today?" he asked.

She looked out at the ocean. "I was busy."

"You're always busy," he countered. "Hasn't stopped you from coming in here to grab a bite to eat before."

Sighing, she chanced a glance at him. "I may have been afraid of running into you here," she admitted.

That took him by surprise. "Me? Why?"

"Because of last night," she confessed. "I was embarrassed to see you today. I was so embarrassed about what I asked you to do for me. It's just…I was so fucking tired."

"Don't be embarrassed about that," he said, shaking his head. "I know what exhaustion can do to a person."

Still feeling sheepish, she shrugged off his reply.

"Is uh…is that why you left so early this morning?" His tone was casual, but she sensed something else she couldn't quite pinpoint behind it. "'Cause you were embarrassed?"

"I was afraid that someone would see me going back to my room and I figured the earlier I snuck back, the better." She rolled her eyes. "Not that it mattered. All these military types get up at the ass crack of dawn. Someone saw me anyway, and now, according to Alan, there are at least three different men claiming to have been the one with me last night."

"Who?"

Her eyes widened. His tone had instantaneously gone from casual and reassuring to aggressive and, maybe she was being delusional, but she thought she sensed a hint of jealousy, too.

"Why do you want to know?" she asked.

He smirked. "So that I know who to make my partner next time I teach a hand-to-hand class."

A small smile tugged at her lips and then she shook her head. "It's ok," she said softly. "It doesn't matter."

He shrugged and, over her shoulder, watched a mess hall employee wipe down the balcony tables. "Bring a change of clothes."

Emma choked on her orange and sputtered a bit. "What?"

"You could have brought a uniform to change into," he clarified.

That wasn't what he had said initially. His first statement wasn't a hypothetical, the use of the imperative implied there would be a next time. Didn't it? She had to tell herself to stop analyzing his speech patterns; he was her colleague, not a piece of Ancient text that needed deciphering.

"Well, I didn't want to make it look like I was moving in," she explained, trying to mask her exasperation. "I was already pushing it. Hell, I was lucky you didn't have some girl in there with you."

He stared at her for a long moment. "I don't bring women back to my place."

She raised an accusatory eyebrow. She had heard the stories, the whispers, the gossip.

"I go to theirs. It's easier to leave someone else's place than kick someone out."

That was definitely true. Hadn't she done just that this morning? Disappeared without a word, without a thank you?

"Besides," he fixed her with a long stare, "you're not the only one who gets rumors spread about them."

She narrowed her eyes with suspicion. "So if I knock on your door late one night and you're not there, then…"

"Then I'm probably sparring," he finished for her.

She sent him a wicked look. "Is that what the kids are calling it these days?"

Hiding a smile, he shook his head and threw a slice of red pepper at her, which she instinctively batted away, sending it flying into the ocean.

"Hey!"

The shout had come from the cleaning employee who pointed angrily to the nearest "Keep Our Ocean Clean" signs. Ronon and Emma looked wide-eyed at each other like two kids who had just gotten caught with their hands in a cookie jar.

"We should go," she said urgently.

He nodded in agreement, already picking up his things.

They brought their trays to the bussing station without delay and headed back to the center of the city.

"You taking the transporter?" he asked as they approached it.

"No, thank you. I think it's best if I take the scenic route tonight."

"Same. I should finally swing by the infirmary." He gingerly touched his split eyebrow, looked at the stain of blood on his finger, and grimaced.

"Good idea."

All at once, it hit her. Whether either of them had intended it, this had been a date, and now they were at the end of it. Usually, there was some sort of "I had a great time tonight," or an "I'll call you," sometimes a kiss, or even a "Do you want to come in?" Yet none of those seemed appropriate for the situation.

Thoughts racing, she swallowed whatever nervous energy was broiling inside of her and spoke. "Thank you for keeping me company."

"No problem." He shifted his bag from one shoulder to the other. "Need me to walk you back to your quarters?"

If the offer had come from any other man, she would have suspected him of trying to trick her into inviting him back to her place. But with Ronon, she knew the offer was sincere. All he wanted was to make sure she made it back safe.

Another heart pang.

"I think I'll be fine," she decided. "Besides, after hearing what you do with girls in their own quarters, I don't think you should," she teased.

He grinned and nodded. "Good night, Rogers."

"'Night," she smiled.