A/N: I'm BACK BABY! Sorry I disappeared for like 6 months. I was just really stuck on this fic and was starting to get overwhelmed. Writing was starting to feel like a job on top of my real job, rather than an enjoyable hobby.

But I'm back! And I think I've found direction for the fic. I'm also trying to put less pressure on it being perfect.

So if you're still here, thank you for staying with me, staying supportive, and being patient. :) Hope you enjoy - it's a longer one. (At least for me, it is.)

It may also help to go back and read the previous chapter if you're feeling a little foggy on where we left off, because this chapter is an immediate continuation of that last one.

Though there were many things Ronon would never understand about Earth culture, he had to admit that they knew one thing particularly well: food. The smell of bacon, eggs, and maple syrup grew stronger as he approached the mess hall, eventually overpowering the scent of lavender that he was starting to worry had taken up permanent residence in his nostrils.

Maybe he would run into Rogers at breakfast this morning, though a part of him wished he wouldn't; her departure from his quarters not an hour earlier had been awkward to say the least.

She had awakened much later than him – not surprising, given how little she had apparently slept over the past few days – forty-five minutes to be precise, and he had counted each of them, from the moment the first rays of sunlight had passed through his window telling his body it was time to rise. For three quarters of an hour, he had tried his best to lie perfectly still so as not to wake her prematurely and cause her to lose the sleep she so desperately needed. This proved beyond difficult, however, not only because his bed wasn't really intended for two, but also because she was sleeping directly on his chest.

That part was surprising to him. After waking up in the middle of the night, drenched in the cold sweat of nostalgic longing turned nightmare, he had been careful to keep his distance from her as they fell back to sleep. After all, he remembered how that dream had begun, with not only the idea of Melena in his mind, but with the very real feel of her soft and warm in his hands, before it had been hijacked by memories of the Wraith. Of course, it hadn't been Melena's body he had reached for in his dream, but Emma's.

He had assumed that sleeping back to back, completely turned away from one another, would have discouraged any further contact between them, but the night must have been cold for there she slept, one of her legs draped over his, the humid heat from between her thighs radiating against his hip. Her hand clutched at the fabric of his shirt and her breasts were pressed against his torso, her head tucked between his neck and his shoulder. And though she clung to him like iron to a lodestone, her embrace didn't go unrequited. Upon awakening, he discovered that one of his hands had found its way around her thigh while the other, less wanton in its placement, softly cradled her head. It had been over a decade since he'd woken up in such an intimate position with a woman. Likewise, he knew she would be mortified if she woke up like this, practically half on top of him, and he had debated shifting her away but…there was something deeply reassuring about feeling her body so heavy and trusting against his. And so he lay there, listening to her breathe, feeling her muscles occasionally twitch or her eyelashes brush softly against his neck as her eyes fluttered with dreams.

Because she needed the sleep, he waited as long as he could, until the last possible second, before the pressures of the day finally closed in on him. He had things to do and, undoubtedly, so did she. Moreover, if both of them were late or missing from their posts…he didn't want to think about what kind of trouble that would cause her. As much as he didn't want to, he knew he needed to wake her up. He released an exaggerated cough and the sound, combined with the sudden rise of his chest, did the trick.

Her first waking seconds had been a mixture of dreamy disorientation and, dare he say it, contentment, if the soft smile she let slip as she opened her eyes to him were any indication. The smile disappeared as soon as it formed, though, and the rest of her stay evaporated within seconds. She practically leapt out of the bed, asking if she could change clothes in his bathroom, the automatic door already sliding shut. It took her less than a minute to dress and she was at the door to the hallway before he had even gotten all the way up.

"You're not gonna avoid me again today, are you?" he asked, seated on the edge of the bed as she lifted her hand over the door sensor.

He meant for the question to break the sudden waking tension between them, but based on the way she looked at him over her shoulder, it seemed as though it had had the opposite effect.

"Of course not."

He supposed this would be the first test of whether she meant it or not.

As he filled up his tray with nearly every breakfast item available, he began to come to terms with the fact that maybe there was a greater part of him that actually would like to see her here. He glanced about the room, registering the number of people, the tables both taken and empty, the accessibility of the exits until he saw Sheppard, as agreed, sitting at one of the far tables, drinking a cup of coffee, and solving a Sudoku puzzle. Wading through the morning breakfast rush, he took the seat opposite him.

Sheppard raised his mug in greeting. "Mornin.'"

"Hey." He unrolled the utensils from the napkin and, as was their usual custom, began eating in companionable silence as Sheppard continued to work on his puzzle.

From where he sat, he had a comprehensive view of the mess hall. There was a group of scientists all from the same place on Earth huddled together at a table near them, lively discussing something polarizing in their own language. Across the room, several marines had pushed two tables together and were apparently on their second or third helpings of breakfast, judging by the growing stack of dirty plates accumulating in the center. Captain Hanson was one of them, rising from his spot at the head of the table and laughing with the two men who flanked him. Lieutenant Williams, he noticed, sat at the opposite end, as far from his commanding officer as possible. McKay was near the buffet, pointing wildly at the fruit salad and arguing with one of the cooks. But there was no sign of Rogers.

Avoidance it was going to be, then.

"Hey Sheppard?"

"Hm?" he replied, eyes still glued to his puzzle.

"I've been thinking…"

"Rather uncharacteristic of you," Sheppard murmured, finally looking up.

Ronon raised an eyebrow at him and cleared his throat. "We need to go back to that planet with Janus' lab."

"Woolsey denied the request already."

"Ask him again."

"He's not going to change his mind."

"So change it for him."

Sheppard let out a sigh and set his puzzle book on the table.

"And what would you –"

"Those idiots," McKay hissed as he dropped his tray with a clatter onto the table. "This is the fifth time I've had to talk to them about putting grapefruit in the fruit salad."

"It's labeled pretty clearly, Rodney," Sheppard argued. "In capital letters. You can read, can't you?

"Ha ha. Of course I can read." He yanked the chair out and sat. "It's the principle of the matter. You don't ruin perfectly good produce by throwing citrus in along with it!"

Sheppard shrugged. "It's a preservative – keeps the apples from turning brown."

"It's psychotic, is what it is." He shoved the edge of his napkin into the collar of his shirt. "And you know what? They didn't even have a proper alternative made for me. This," he held up a banana, "this is what they gave me instead. Can you believe that?"

Ronon shared a mischievous look with Sheppard.

"You wanted a bigger one?" Ronon asked.

McKay dropped the banana onto the table and waggled an admonishing finger at them. "Children. You two are nothing but overgrown children."

"Here, Rodney. Take my apple," Sheppard said. "You can make your own fruit salad."

"Take mine, too." Ronon set his apple on McKay's tray.

"And we'll just…put that there," Sheppard placed one of the apples at the base of the banana, "and that right there," he added the other apple next to the first one.

Ronon snorted at the rude shape Sheppard had created.

"Bon appetit," he said, smiling at McKay.

"And this, my son, is why your mother does not allow you to play with your food."

Sheppard jumped so violently at the sound of Teyla's voice that he bumped the edge of table, which sent one of the apples rolling across the floor. Torren closely followed its path with wide and clear eyes.

"Teyla!" Sheppard pulled a chair out for her. "Wasn't expecting you this morning."

"Clearly," she said shortly. She refused the seat, but there was still a genial glimmer in her eyes. She shifted Torren from her hip to both hands and turned to Ronon. "Do you mind?"

"What?" he sputtered, alarmed.

"I have yet to take anything for breakfast," she leaned forward and deposited the child into Ronon's lap, "and would enjoy the use of both of my arms as I go through the line. Try not to be too much of a negative influence on his young, impressionable mind." She directed her last sentence specifically to the colonel.

She walked away and Ronon flinched preemptively, expecting the boy to start wailing, but instead he looked him straight in the eyes and tugged on his beard. Was this the first time he had ever held Torren? Dr. Beckett held the kid all the time, Sheppard had done it a few times, even McKay had once before…though only once as it hadn't ended well. Hell, even Woolsey would hold the kid occasionally. For whatever reason, though, Ronon had never been compelled to hold the kid, never felt the desire to do so. It wasn't that he didn't like Torren; after all, he was half Teyla and he was pretty damn fond of her. He supposed he had never asked to hold the baby out of a fear of hurting him; Torren was so small, so fragile and Ronon was anything but. But now, as he struggled to find the best way to balance the boy on his knee, he wondered if he had never held him because, deep down, he figured he didn't need the practice. Fatherhood was a chapter that had been ripped out of the book of his life. Or so he had thought.

Torren's eyes were a deep brown, almost black color, but as he stared back at them, all he could picture were Eva's. He wondered if they had always been the color they were now, the same color as his own, or if they slowly changed over the years. Was she born with that intense gaze of hers, or was it something she had learned? Something she had learned from him?

The boy seized of Ronon's dreadlocks in his tiny fist and put the bead that surrounded it into his mouth.

"Whoa!" Ronon exclaimed, extracting his hair from Torren's gums. "No no no."

Torren's brown-black eyes glossed over and his lower lip started to tremble. He glanced from side to side, the realization that his mother had left suddenly dawning upon him.

"Hey, there," Ronon said in as soft a voice as he could manage as he started to bounce his knee up and down. "She's coming back. Don't…do that. Don't cry."

He tried his best to pacify the increasingly agitated child until Teyla returned, just in time to prevent a total meltdown, with a plate full of food.

"Thank you, Ronon," she said as she took Torren from him and sat him in her lap.

The tradeoff left him feeling a bit strange; Torren had been much heavier and much warmer than he thought he would have been and his absence made Ronon almost feel off balance. Torren, on the other hand, couldn't have been happier with the return to normalcy. The second he was back in his mother's arms, his face lit up, his tears disappeared, and he was smiling up at her.

There was a deep ache from within his chest as he watched their interaction and thought this time not of Eva the girl, but of her namesake, his own mother. He hadn't been much older than Torren when she was taken. And how old had she been? He had never asked, never wanted to know how many decades the Wraith had stolen from her.

Had she been younger than Teyla? Definitely. Most Satedans had their children at an early age and Ronon was her firstborn. Had she been younger than he was now? Most likely. The memories of her face were foggy, idealized through time and longing, blurred by his own early age at the time of her death. Nevertheless, he couldn't recall a single line on her face nor any grey in her hair. Her eyes had that brightness of youth and her skin glowed with the clarity of new motherhood. Realistically, she had probably been in her early to mid-twenties, closer in age to someone like… Dr. Rogers.

"You been talkin' with Ronon this morning, McKay?"

Ronon was stirred from his thoughts at the mention of his name.

McKay gave him a contemptuous look. "Oh yes. Ronon and I had a lovely chat over coffee as we watched the sunrise together on the East Pier this morning."

Ronon crossed his arms over his chest and raised his eyebrows at Sheppard.

"So that's why you were late this morning," Sheppard speculated. "And here I thought you had just slept in."

"Please," McKay said through a large bite of banana. "Ronon doesn't sleep in." He gave a half shrug. "Probably had some girl with him last night and couldn't get her to leave."

Every once in a while, McKay could be eerily prophetic with his offhand comments and this particular instance sent a little flare of panic through Ronon's gut. "What do you mean has McKay been talking to me?"

"We've been here for ten minutes, I haven't even finished my coffee or my puzzle, and yet both of you have asked me to talk to Woolsey to get us the go-ahead to return to M5R-233. So either you've both been talking to Rogers or you've been talking to each other. Because as far as I knew, she was the one spearheading that campaign."

"Actually, it was Eva." Ronon heard his words as they came out of his mouth. A bit too loud. A bit too fast. He cleared his throat, leaned back in his chair and tried to act cool, but he knew the others had sensed his unnecessary defensiveness. "I sparred with her last night. She uh…she made some good arguments about going back there."

"Finally wore you down, huh?" Sheppard asked, playing along, but there was a glint of mischief in his eye.

Ronon shrugged. "It's time for her to go home."

"For what it is worth, I too, believe a return mission would be beneficial," Teyla said.

"Look, guys, I got nothing for it or against it. A mission's a mission. Even a risky one. But you really think Woolsey will listen to me?"

"You are the chief ranking military officer of this expedition," Teyla said.

Sheppard rubbed his chin. "Yeah. I was kinda hoping you wouldn't remind me of that."

"Perhaps if we approach him as a team, as a united front, he will reconsider."

"I don't know Teyla –"

"Reconnaissance 1 and Dr. Beckett to the conference room immediately. Colonel Sheppard, Dr. McKay, Teyla, Ronon, and Dr. Beckett to the conference room."

They all looked at each other in surprise as the announcement finished.

"Guess we'll find out sooner rather than later," said McKay as Sheppard stood up and drained his coffee cup.

Ronon made moves to follow, but noticed Teyla had remained seated. He glanced at her face, to the full plate of food in front of her, then to Torren.

"I shall have to meet you there," she said. "I must call Kanaan."

"Just bring him," Ronon said, nodding to Torren.

"He has yet to finish his breakfast –"

"Hang on." He strode over to the buffet line and caught the eye of one of the young female workers. "Hey," he said in greeting. "You got a box?"

"Yeah. Yes. Of course," she said, spinning on her heel and standing on the tips of her toes to reach the top of the tall stack of cardboard boxes.

"Thanks," he said, adding a smile for good measure.

The woman blushed and let out a squeaky, "No worries," in response.

Back at the table, he slid the contents of Teyla's plate into the box and pocketed a roll up of utensils from the empty table nearby.

Teyla raised a chiding eyebrow at him.

"What? I'll bring 'em back."

She smiled up at him, secured Torren to her hip and followed McKay and Sheppard to the conference room.

A/N: Thank you again! Let me know what you think!