A/N: Hope last chapter didn't scare you off. We've got a huge tonal shift in this one. I really hope you all like this chapter!
CW for consensual sexual content.
Knowing the Wraith could arrive any day now was adding an understandable and not insignificant amount of stress to the baseline anxiety Emma was already experiencing. Worrying that your home would be attacked and likely infiltrated within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours made mere existing nearly impossible, but she was determined to not let it completely overwhelm her. So, she had filled her free time – which would otherwise be occupied with catastrophizing – with menial, mundane tasks. Today, it was laundry, which desperately needed to happen anyway. After spending so many evenings away from her own room and belongings, the dirty clothes had piled up to a point where she was close to having nothing clean to wear.
Furthermore, it was the 20th of the month, which meant that it was her night to brush up on Russian. She rifled through her books on tape collection, found War and Peace, popped the cassette into her stereo and hit play.
Just as she had settled into her small loveseat with her bin of newly-cleaned laundry to fold at her feet, and a strong vodka tonic sitting on the table next to her – she had to get into the Slavic spirit, after all – her doorbell rang. With a sigh, she stopped the book, rose from the sofa and made her way to the door, but something made her pause. She glanced over to her bedside clock. It was a bit late for a visitor.
"It's not the Captain," she mentally told herself as her pulse surged. "Intruders don't knock, they intrude. Intruders don't knock, they intrude."
Cursing Ancient doors for lacking peepholes, she perused the room for something large and heavy in case she needed to hit her caller over the head with it, until a quiet knock brought her search to an end.
"Emma?" a man called from the other side of the steel door.
Her heart skipped and, in her relief that it wasn't who she feared, she heaved her body into the chest of drawers she had moved in front of the door, and ran her hand over the sensor without a second thought. The doors opened to reveal a morose but handsome Satedan.
He was sure she wouldn't answer…if she was even in her quarters at all. She had made it clear that she didn't want to speak to him any more than their jobs required until he made up his mind about how he felt for her. Truthfully, he still hadn't made up his mind, but with the Wraith on the way, he couldn't leave things the way they were.
Ringing the chime hadn't worked, so he knocked gently and called her name. From the other side of the door, there was a heavy scraping sound, like furniture legs sliding against the floor.
So she was at home.
When the noise stopped, the doors slid open.
"Ronon," she said, short of breath, before hastily crossing her arms in front of her.
"Were you just moving furn…" he started, but momentarily found himself at a loss for words as he took in the sight of the woman in front of him. Her hair was down, a bit damp like she had recently bathed, falling softly onto bare shoulders left exposed by the thin straps of the short lilac nightdress she was wearing. "Furniture?"
He blinked hard and gave his head a rough shake. He had been expecting a thick Oxford sweatshirt or a loose MIT t-shirt, not lace and silk that clung to her every curve, leaving so little to his imagination.
"It…it sounded like you were moving furniture," he managed to finish.
That little bit of imagination remaining was running so wild, he forgot why he was saying what he was saying.
Emma scowled as she tracked his eyes with her own. "It's laundry day, okay?" With a disapproving click of her tongue, she turned her back to him and made her way to a laundry basket on the floor in front of her couch. "What do you want?" she barked as she fished out a long cardigan and slipped it on, holding the front closed around her as she turned back to face him.
"Can I come in?"
"Depends," she snapped. "You gonna keep lookin' at me like I'm a piece of steak and you're a huntin' dog that hasn't had its supper yet?"
Her accent apparently surfaced not only when she was drunk, but also when she was angry.
"I thought I asked you not to look at me like that anymore." Her tone had tempered, but the conviction was still there.
"I just came to talk." He stepped into her quarters and the doors shut behind him. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable. This," he gestured to what she was wearing, "caught me a little off guard."
"This isn't exactly my usual loungewear," she said dryly. "Give me a heads up before you visit next time, and I'll make sure to throw on a burlap sack so as not to tempt you."
"Emma, I've got a lot of things to apologize for tonight, but one thing I'm not gonna say sorry for is thinking you're beautiful."
She visibly bristled at the last word, like a cat about to hiss. "No," she whispered. "Get out." She advanced on him and pointed at the door.
"What?" he asked in astonishment.
"Get out of my room. I don't want you here."
He tried defending himself. "I said I was sorry. You can't get mad at me for –"
"I can get mad at you for whatever the hell I want. You don't get to come here, look at me like you are, and make me feel vulnerable to you in my own bedroom after the way you treated me a few nights ago!" she shouted. "After what we discussed the other day!"
"That's why I'm here," he interrupted. "To talk about the other night."
She folded her arms and raised her eyebrows expectantly.
Ronon took a deep breath. "I didn't do anything wrong. You and I both know I did the right thing by stopping us from making a drunken decision that one or both of us would regret the next day."
"Hell of a start to an apology," she said through gritted teeth.
He continued anyway. "Being honest with you about my…intentions was the honorable thing to do. We were both shitfaced, and knowing your feelings for me, and my feelings for you that night, would you have wanted that to be the first time we –" he rubbed his forehead and looked down at the floor, "our first time?"
He dared to look back at her and was relieved that her expression had softened slightly.
"Ronon, I'm not mad at you for stopping it. I'm glad you did," she conceded. "And I'm not mad at you for trying to be honest about your feelings for me – though for the record, I don't think you were," she pointed an accusatory finger at him. "I am mad because, after all that you said to me, after making it very clear that all you wanted me there for was for sex, you still expected me to stay the night with you."
"Emma, that's not – you were the one who kept coming to my quarters, who kept asking me to –"
"How do you think I would have felt had I stayed with you? How could you have expected me to sleep next to you, after what you said? How could you expect me to feel safe with you?"
"You know I would never –"
"I trusted you!" she yelled.
"And me being attracted to you betrayed that trust?" By this point he, too, had raised his voice. "That's not fair and you know it."
"Do you know why I actually asked if I could stay with you that first night I went to your quarters?"
"Because you couldn't sleep," he answered, glancing away from her dagger stare and shrugging. He didn't know what this had to do with their argument or why she was mad at him.
She shook her head. "Ronon," her voice lowered, as did her temper. "I haven't been entirely transparent with you, either."
Ronon paused and narrowed his eyes at her. "So you weren't having trouble sleeping?"
"I was," she confirmed. "When I first came to you, I hadn't slept in three days. But the Wraith, the mission, Eva, all those things I told you, those weren't the reasons I couldn't sleep. It was…" she took a deep breath, "it was an interaction I had with someone right before we left for M5R-233."
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. "What kind of…interaction?"
He thought back to the moment before they had stepped through the gate. She had been pale, disheveled, sweating. He had chalked it up to pre-mission nerves, but apparently he had been mistaken.
She shook her head, clearly reticent to talk about it. "A bad one."
"What happened?" he asked in as calm a tone as he could manage.
She stared at the floor and wrapped her arms even more tightly around herself. "I was on my way to the gate room when someone took me by surprise in one of the hallways and kind of…threw me up against the wall."
Ronon looked her up and down. She wasn't a tiny little thing like some of the other women on base, so whoever had thrown her around had to be someone of similar stature to himself.
"I had just come from the armory. I had all my gear on. I had my sidearm, I had a knife, I could have kicked him but I…froze. Just like I froze with you during that hand-to-hand lesson." Her eyes met his. "Anyway, he held me there and said some pretty terrible things and even threatened to break into my quarters. It really rattled me and I kept thinking…" she looked away and took a breath. "I kept thinking, 'What if he does find a way in here?'" Her voice faltered to a whisper.
All of a sudden, none of it mattered: their argument, the yelling, the confusion. All he needed now was to touch her, to somehow show her that he cared, but he knew that would be pressing his luck as well as her boundaries, so he settled for words instead.
"So you came to me."
She nodded. "Those two nights on M5R-233, we were in such an unpredictable situation but I was able to sleep in the goddamn wilderness on some Godforsaken planet – of all places – because you being there made me feel safe. My first night back in the city, I was so desperate for sleep and needed to feel that again."
"And the second night?"
Emma looked up at him, a significant look on her face. Ronon glanced over his shoulder at the oddly-placed chest of drawers near the door.
"He actually did it," Ronon breathed, looking back at her. "That's why you were a wreck when you came to me. He broke into your room." His eyes darted around her quarters, as if they would tell him the story of what happened.
"After you and I had dinner together that night," Emma said, very softly, "I came back here and I took a bath. When I came out of the bathroom, there was a vase of flowers on my desk," she gestured with her chin toward it, "that hadn't been there when I first arrived."
The anger that had been simmering low in his chest boiled over. "Who was it?" he growled.
"I don't want to tell you."
"Emma –"
"I already told Woolsey and he –"
"Wait a minute," Ronon said as something dawned upon him. "That first night… you said you hadn't slept for three days, which means you couldn't sleep when you were on the Alpha Site, either. That should have been far enough away from this asshole for you to get some rest unless…"
Emma's eyes were wide and unblinking.
"Unless he was on the Alpha Site with you."
Emma opened her mouth to speak, but no words came to her.
"It's that fucking marine," Ronon said, low. "Hanson. Damn it, I knew it! I knew I didn't like the way he acted around you. Why didn't you tell me?" He realized he was raising his voice again and had to remind himself to breathe.
"Because I was afraid if I told you, you'd go after him!" she shouted back. "Isn't that what you're thinking right now?"
She was right. He was already contemplating the various ways he could inflict pain on the bastard.
"I was afraid you'd go too far! And if you get kicked out of here then…then…" her gaze strayed from his, "who will I go to when I'm scared?" Her voice broke as tears came to her eyes.
The façade Emma always put up shattered and possibly for the first time, he saw all of her. This was a woman who tried with all her might to be brave and self-sufficient, admitting she needed him. He hated that she was going through this, that she was so terrified, but her admission fulfilled something very deep within his being. She needed him to protect her. And if that protection consisted of keeping her in his arms at night instead of beating the shit out of some asshole marine, then that's the form it would take – at least for now.
That was when he realized it. Just like she was afraid of losing him, he was afraid to lose her, too…like he had lost Melena. He had been through that horrific pain once before and he didn't think he could survive it again; if he never fell for her, though, wouldn't the pain be less? His heart ached as he stared at her, and he understood it was too late; the fall had already happened and it was delusion to believe otherwise. This was why he had come to her tonight.
Cautiously, he approached, slid one arm behind her back, and cradled the back of her head with his other hand. Without even a second's hesitation, she gave herself to him, gripping him tightly and releasing a flood of pent-up emotions within the safety of his embrace. The tears from her eyes disappeared into the fabric of his shirt as she quietly wept, her hands balled into tight fists against his back.
He knew he was all belts, buckles, and hard edges and maybe not the most comfortable to hold onto, but she was soft and smooth, and he needed her as much as she needed him in that moment, so he held her as close to him as he possibly could. A few minutes passed and when her crying began to subside, he brushed a few strands of hair sticking to her tearstained cheeks back behind her shoulders.
"You are such a liar, Ronon Dex," she whispered into the crook of his neck.
"What?" he asked, completely taken aback. He released her a bit so he could see her face.
Looking up at him, she clasped her arms around his neck. "You wouldn't have shared your bed with me, or have come to find me to talk tonight, and you definitely wouldn't be holding me like this if you didn't have real feelings for me," she declared.
She was right. He hadn't accepted it when he had first set foot at her door tonight, but now he knew. He hadn't come here just to set things straight between the two of them, but because, deep down, he wanted her back in his bed with him. He wanted her to be the one he fell asleep with every night and woke up next to every morning. He wanted to be her shelter, her safe place, her armor. To say he had real feelings for her was a gross understatement.
"Give me the truth, Ronon."
The truth? He didn't even know where to begin. He stared into her eyes, the emerald intensified by the redness of her swollen eyelids, stroked the side of her cheek with his thumb to wipe away a tear, and brought his lips to hers.
Startled at first by the kiss, she tipped back a fraction of an inch but soon enough leaned into him, lifting herself onto the tips of her toes to reach, lightly clutching the hair at the back of his neck. They kissed until her ankles gave out and she fell back onto the flats of her feet. He pulled away and steadied her in his arms.
"I'm…not so good with words," he confessed.
Out of breath, Emma peered up at him in astonishment. "I know," she whispered before kissing him again.
She stood on her tiptoes once more, so he linked both his arms under her backside, trying to lift her to him, but the silk of her slip made it difficult for him to get a secure grip, and he soon found his hands in direct contact with the naked flesh of her thighs and buttocks. As though he had picked up something too hot, he immediately dropped her to the floor and watched as the hem of her dress, which had ridden up to where her legs met her hips, fell back into place; he hadn't expected her to not be wearing anything underneath.
"Sorry," he promptly apologized, stepping away from her.
Burning red, Emma covered her face with both her hands. "I told you it was laundry day!" she laughed nervously, her voice muffled by her hands.
Ronon regarded her for a moment as he contemplated whether talking with her tonight would be enough. Cautiously, he closed the distance he had created between them and pried her hands away from her face, one at a time, to find a new place to rest on his arms. He looked down at her and her eyes danced back and forth, studying his, trying to read his next move. With one hand, he touched the small of her back and urged her toward him till their hips met; he drew his other hand, slowly, up the back of her leg and under her dress and lightly kneaded, her skin so smooth and warm. Her back arched slightly in response to his touch, the lower half of her body pressing more insistently against his.
Her breath came more quickly now, light little pulses in her chest.
"Too fast?" he asked.
She shook her head, her eyes still locked on his.
He removed his hands anyway, only to slip them under the collar of her long sweater, up and along her chest, over her shoulders, and down the back of her arms until it fell to the floor in a light grey puddle around her feet.
Standing there, she looked just like one of the risalki he had heard tales of as a child, freshly come to land from her watery abode in the rivers of his homeland. Deliberately, she reached behind her neck and gathered the hair that fell long and dark-red down the front of her chest and swept it to the side so he could appreciate a full look at her, one of the straps of her dress falling off her shoulder as she did. His eyes followed the fallen strap down to her breasts where the evidence of her desire for him was plainly visible through the thin, supple fabric. She didn't bother to pull the strap back up.
He wasn't sure how long he stood transfixed by her, but she didn't seem discomfited. She was a woman who knew, perhaps too well, what men wanted and, despite it all, was willing – dare he say eager, if he was reading the signs right – to give that to him.
Hastily, he unbuckled his holster and cast it to the side, pulled his own shirt over his head and threw it to the floor. He seized her by the hips and backed her up against a nearby wall, planting a swift kiss on her lips before moving to graze the side of her neck and collarbone. He vaguely felt her hands explore his chest but hardly noticed as he breathed her in; her hair was cool and damp, but her skin retained a dewy glow of warmth from recently bathing, and the scent of both was overwhelmingly…her. It was that sweet, lightly floral scent that packed a punch of camphor at the end, perfectly Emma.
Her fingernails dug into his bicep and she half-stifled a gasp of pleasure as he kissed her neck. At the sound of it, he sneaked a glance at her to see goosebumps had blossomed all along the skin of her neck and arms.
"Don't stop," she breathed, bringing her hand to the base of his head to nudge him back toward her.
He acquiesced, returning the attention of his mouth to her neck, as he reached for one of her legs to hook around his hip and pushed up her skirt. Provisionally, he felt between her thighs, lifting his gaze to get a glimpse of her reaction. Eyes closed, her head had tipped backward, and she brought a hand to her mouth to cover it. That alone was encouragement enough for him to keep stroking and teasing the outside of her until, impatient and yearning, she sighed his name.
It had been a long time since a woman had said his name with such longing and it roused something raging and animalistic within him. Appeasing her desire and his alike, he slipped a finger inside her and was surprised to feel how ready she already was for him.
That was it. Her cries for him, her wetness, her warmth…he needed it all. He needed to have her now.
With her quarters as tight as they were, the two of them were only a few steps from the bed. He guided both of her arms around his neck, braced his arms under her backside again and, with both of her legs now wrapped around him, carried her to it. He set her down and as he kicked off his boots, she yanked the covers to the foot of the bed and laid back against her pillows. He knelt on the mattress, parted her legs and took his spot between them.
When he looked down at her, he saw the hunger burning behind the green of her eyes, but the lingering redness upon her eyelids from her earlier breakdown gave him pause. He stopped his hands from going to his belt and instead ran his fingers through her hair, taking a moment to slow down and take her in.
She looked back and laid a hand on the side of his face. "You're," she swallowed and caught her breath, "you're sure you want this?"
He moved to caress the skin of her chest and shoulder, easing the already fallen strap farther down to bare one of her breasts. "I've wanted you for a long time."
Her breathing grew shallow as he did the same with the other strap, bowed his head, and took her nipple into his mouth. At first, her skin was cool compared to the heat of his tongue, but soon enough hot blood rushed to the area and stained her whole chest and neck a dark pomegranate red.
Neither of them were going to last like this much longer. She curved her body against his and lightly traced the muscles of his back as he brushed his lips along the valley between her breasts, up to her collarbone, her neck, and finally her ear. "I need you now, Emma."
Her hands flew to unbuckle his belt and unfasten his trousers, but just as she began to push them off his hips, her door chimed.
Instinctively, he looked to the door but she took his jaw roughly in her hand and wrenched his head back to face her. "Ignore it," she ordered, glaring at him.
He didn't think it was possible for him to want her more, but with polite and genteel Emma bossing him around, he somehow did. He smirked and rucked her skirt up to her waist, lowered himself down the length of the bed and kissed the sensitive skin of her inner thigh, slowly inching farther and farther up until…
The door chimed again. "Emma!" a frantic female voice called from the other side.
Ronon rose and took in the most enticing sight he had every laid eyes on. Emma's mouth was agape, her naked chest heaving up and down, her hand pressed to her forehead as she stared at the ceiling in both frustration and disbelief. He wanted to take her, then and there. He wanted to feel her, to fill her, to satisfy her.
"Emma!" The person had begun to bang on her door with open palms. "Mom!" she finally shouted. Emma's eyes locked with Ronon's and she furrowed her brow.
It was Eva, obviously, and both of them could tell something was wrong. He rolled off of her and began refastening his pants. Emma brought the straps of her slip back over her shoulders as she made her way to the door, picked up Ronon's shirt – which she tossed to him – and her cardigan from the floor, and slipped back into it before answering.
"Eva?"
Eva had both hands in her hair, pulling at it from the roots, lip visibly trembling. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly as though she were hyperventilating.
"Mom?" she cried, a tear falling down her cheek.
Without needing to hear a single word of explanation, Emma pulled Eva into her quarters. "Come here, sweetheart," she whispered and took the young girl into her arms, hugging her tightly.
Eva exploded into full-on, room-echoing sobs, her body quaking in Emma's grasp. Emma, wide-eyed with worry, looked back at Ronon still in the bed.
He shared in her concern. The first time he had met the girl, she had been seconds away from being killed by several Wraith but, aside from being cranky and delirious from malnutrition, had seemed mostly stable. If that close brush with a painful death wasn't enough to break her down then, he was afraid to know what had the power to do so now.
A/N: Thank you again to everyone for reading and reviewing. I appreciate you!
