Another update with some short Ronon POV and a bit more context.

First, I mention Eva's mother in this chapter. Now before anyone gets too excited, speculating or hoping that I paired Ronon with their favorite character from the series, I will let you know that I have paired him with the OC I created for my other two SGA fics on this site - Emma Rogers. There's not really any need to go read those two stories (but if you want to, please do!) in order to understand this one, though they do/will flow together. I will also try my best to explain anything relevant from those fics in this one.

Second, if you find that Eva's not exactly your cup of tea right now, she's not really supposed to be. In my mind, there was no way that the daughter of Ronon Dex wasn't going to be a rebel with a short temper. I also loved toying with the concept of Ronon wanting a son (he's the last of his name, after all, and would understandably want someone to carry that on), then getting a daughter instead, but choosing to raise her like a son anyway. Obviously there would be some issues with that as she gets older, which leads us...here!

Thanks, everyone!

Two Months Earlier

Eva roared with fury as she failed once more to land a hit and instead fell hard onto the sparring mat. Neck muscles tense and breathing heavy, she lay flat on her back with Ronon's bantos rod pressed across her throat.

"You need to maintain eye contact," he chastised as he extended a hand to help her back up.

Bright hazel eyes identical to his own glared back at him with such ferocity, it caught him off guard. He wondered if that was the way he looked whenever he was angry. No wonder people avoided him.

"I was," she snarled, refusing his assistance and getting up on her own. She turned her back to him and crossed the gym to grab a bottle of water.

"Then we'll keep practicing," he declared.

"No," she argued. She made her way back toward him. "You need to change the way you teach me," she spat, then shoved the bantos rod to his chest.

"Eva – " he started.

"No!" she interrupted. "Your techniques and your strategies are all predicated upon principles of brute force and superior size!" she shouted.

He raised his eyebrows; the times Eva used polysyllabic words were generally few and far between. He supposed she was more like her mother than he thought.

"You think you're such an expert. You think you know what you're doing because you fight Wraith and you've trained marines and—and airmen, and entire task forces but you know what?!" she screeched. "I'm not some 6-foot tall man! I don't weigh 210 pounds of pure muscle!" Quick and shallow breaths pulsed in her chest. "I'm small," she continued. "In a battle of size and strength, I will always lose!"

It pained him to admit it, but she had a point. His daughter took after him in so many ways, but in terms of physical build, they were polar opposites. At sixteen she hardly reached the height of his shoulders and though her frame was lean and sturdy, it was slight like her mother's. In all honesty, he had never consistently trained someone as small as her.

"I'm sick of losing!" she yelled, holding back tears of rage. "So you either need to start teaching me to turn my size into an advantage, or I won't spar with you anymore!" She stormed out of the room. If the pneumatic door hadn't closed automatically behind her, she surely would have slammed it.

He flung both sets of bantos rods to the floor and exhaled forcefully. He wiped his damp brow with the back of his hand. This whole teenage thing was getting old: the lying, the mood swings, the defiance. It all made him miss the little girl she used to be; the one who would climb onto his lap and fall asleep during long puddle jumper rides, who begged him for a pet rabbit until he finally gave in, who sat still for six hours straight while he twisted her hair into dreadlocks only to find her on the floor of the bathroom cutting them out with his straight-edge razor three weeks later. This teenage girl bullshit even made him miss her toddler tantrums – and as a hot-blooded half-Satedan, could she throw a tantrum.

But she wasn't that little girl anymore. And that was precisely what worried him.

From the moment he met his wife, he noticed the way men looked at her. Truth be told, the jealousy that festered in the pit of his chest whenever he caught some airman, marine, or scientist's eyes lingering too long on her was what made him initially realize he was falling for her. Years later, despite their marriage and the child they had raised together, those unwanted looks never stopped. He was never able to accept it, but he eventually learned to ignore it. His wife was a grown woman, after all... and he trusted her.

What he could never ignore, though, was when those lustful eyes turned their gaze toward his daughter. He noticed it for the first time when she was twelve.

Twelve.

How he hadn't murdered anyone yet was beyond him.

He and Eva had always sparred together. As soon as she could stand on two legs, he brought her to the gym with him; he figured any individual born in a galaxy still threatened by the Wraith needed to know how to adequately defend him- or herself. But the first time he caught a grown man's eyes feast on her childish frame as she walked past, he knew that no amount of regular training would be enough for her. From that day forward, he knew that going easy on her would do her no favors.

He couldn't afford to have her stop sparring with him.

Just once. Just once she wished she could get the upper hand and show him what it felt like to be tossed around like a ragdoll. But no. He wanted her to fail. He wanted her to fail so that he could feel secure in his status as the macho specialist in all things combat. No, sir. He couldn't have a little girl like her whoop his ass. Definitely not. He couldn't even give her that small victory. And Ancestors forbid he actually listen to her and take some criticism. He treated her like a child in every other aspect of her life. Why should the sparring room be any different? It made no sense.

She wanted desperately to hit something – or preferably someone – but with her father likely still loitering in the gym, that left both sparring and boxing out of the question. Shooting something would have to do.

She paced through the city's corridors, still fuming as sweat continued to bead across her brow and down her back from getting her ass handed to her. Before long, she was at the entrance of the firing range.

"Daddy, look!" the familiar and excited voice of a young girl beckoned from inside.

What was it, Take Your Child to the Firing Range Day?

She debated whether it was even worth it. It was summer; she had already taken her final exams, which meant no one could force her to interact one-room schoolhouse-style with any children on base for the next two months. Maybe she should just bottle up the anger, store it for her next sparring session with her father, and find a private balcony where she could gaze morosely at the ocean for the next two hours like a normal teenager.

Or she could shoot something.

She sighed, braced herself for the social interaction, and walked in. The second she entered, a young Airforce recruit stood up to block her path. "Whoa. You can't be in here," he informed her.

She shook her head. "I come in here all the time," she argued.

"Yeah. With your father. Minors under 18 must be accompanied at all times by an adult in the firing range." He gestured over to where Colonel Lorne was demonstrating how to fire an Ancient stunner weapon to two of his older daughters, as if that were proof. Well they needed supervision, sure. They were the go to the mainland and pick flowers, learn every Athosian ritual chant by heart, show off all the pretty clothes they got from Earth kind of girls. They wouldn't know the difference between a P90 and a Beretta pistol if one shot 'em in the leg.

Before she yelled at the sergeant and hit him with a "Do you know who you're talking to?" something her mother always said echoed in her mind. You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

She shrugged one shoulder and flipped her long ponytail to the side. "You're an adult, aren't you airman?" she asked, looking up at him from under thick, dark lashes.

He squinted down at her.

She lowered her voice and took a step toward him, close enough that she could smell the tobacco on his breath. "You could stand behind me, show me where to put my hands…" she tilted her head and lightly touched his wrist, "how to cock the gun…"

He crossed his arms and pursed his lips. "Nice try."

She let out a primal growl. Vinegar it was.

"Fine," she shrugged. "Then I guess I'll have to tell my dad who I got that pack of cigarettes from last week."

"What cigarettes?"

"The ones hiding under my bed," she revealed. "You smoke, don't you, airman?"

He glared at her.

"If my parents were to…somehow find those…" she looked up to the ceiling and innocently scratched the back of her head, "I'd have to tell them who I got them from…and how." She brought her eyes back to his and let him have a moment with his imagination.

"Miss Dex –"

"And you know my father," she continued. "He's more of an act first ask questions later kind of guy."

He stared at her for a long moment. "Full protective gear," he finally conceded. "You make one tiny error, one minor lapse in firearm safety and I will call security to get you out of here faster than you can say Smith and Wesson. No machine guns. Handguns only."

She licked her lips, then winked. "Deal." She headed to the back of the range and grabbed a pair of plastic goggles, some earplugs, and a set of noise-cancelling earmuffs.

"Good job, Liv," Lorne complimented his eldest daughter with a pat on the back.

Eva looked over her shoulder and saw, from the still smoldering singe marks on the bottom corner of the paper, that Olivia had managed to just barely graze the target with a stun blast. She scoffed but had the decency to quickly disguise it as a cough.

Olivia glanced back at the sound and locked eyes with Eva. "Not really," she shrugged. "I barely made it onto the target. I'm not as good as Eva. I bet she could shoot it like right in the head."

Lorne and his younger daughter, Charlotte, turned to face her, as well.

"Eva," he greeted with a smile. "I was just showing the girls some self-defense." He narrowed his eyes with suspicion. "Where's your dad?"

"He's on his way," Eva lied with a smile.

"Here, you're really good at shooting," Olivia said, extending the handle of the stunner within Eva's reach. "Why don't you give it a go and show us how to do it?"

Eva gritted her teeth. "You know I don't have the gene to use those, Olivia," she replied, trying to keep her tone anywhere north of murderous.

"Oh crap, that's right. I completely forgot. I'm so sorry," she apologized with would-be innocence.

"Liv, can I try now?" Charlotte requested.

Olivia handed the stunner to her younger sister. "Be careful."

Lorne crouched a bit to get closer to Charlotte's level and Eva turned back to the wall of firearms to pick her weapon of choice.

"Now all you have to do is aim where you want the blast to go," Lorne explained. "Concentrate hard. This doesn't have a trigger so when you're ready, think 'shoot.'"

One of the new MP7s caught her eye. She wished she could try it out, but the guard had stipulated "handguns only." The Heckler and Koch 9mm would have to do for the day.

The sound of a stun blast whirred behind her.

"Look!" Charlotte exclaimed. "I did it! I shot it! Eva did you see? I did it!"

"Cool," Eva commented, rolling her eyes and stuffing the orange foam plugs into her ears. Sweet silence. Honestly, the reprieve the earplugs offered from the chattering of the other girls was almost worth more to her than any protection against potential hearing damage.

Mindful to employ every piece of gun safety she knew, she put on her glasses, and checked the gun to make sure it was unloaded. She then grabbed some ammunition and found a spot on the range. After verifying that no one was behind the paper target, she carefully loaded her gun, took her stance, aimed, and fired a round straight into the center of the target. She fired another. Then another. They all landed dead center – bullseye.

She continued shooting, unloading, and reloading for several minutes, every shot as accurate as the last, every minor frustration exploding with each discharged shell.

Movement from the corner of her eye caught her attention. She lowered her gun and pointed it downrange, then glanced over to see Olivia and Charlotte jumping up and down with enthusiasm, hive fiving each other. Eva rolled her eyes again and brought her finger over the trigger. Suddenly, pain seared through her hand and her bullet subsequently missed its target.

"Son of a –" she hissed, then set the gun down in front of her. She examined her hand to discover the webbing between her thumb and index finger had been torn apart by the slide of the gun. Thick blood gushed from the open laceration. She peered back into the slide of the pistol, her stomach lurching once she saw the piece of ragged skin lodged inside it. "Airman," she called.

Within a second, the officer was at her side.

She pulled the earmuffs off her head with her uninjured left hand. "I got a slide cut," she admitted, voice firm. She looked just over his shoulder to avoid his disapproving gaze. "My hand is too slippery from the blood; I can't unload or clean the gun safely," she informed him.

"Dammit," he snapped. "This is exactly why –"

"I know," she retorted, holding her hand up high to reduce the flow of blood. "It was a mistake."

The airman didn't bother to utter another word. He merely pointed to the door and glared at her.

She curled her lip, pulled her safety glasses off, and yanked out her earplugs, throwing them to the floor. "I'm gone."

Thanks everyone! I hope you enjoyed this chapter. I've loved your reviews, follows, and favorites so far. Keep 'em coming! :D