[SGA fic] Hero for a New Age (Ronon Dex, Rodney McKay) (2/2)

Part One




Ronon went to Lorne one day and challenged him to a game of Sonic the Hedgehog. After a few rounds, he said, "Can you show me how to draw people so they look like people?"

"You're asking the wrong guy," Lorne told him. "I'm more of a painter. Cities, landscapes, sometimes a nice bowl of fruit." His hedgehog did an awesome double flip and snatched up treasure. He hit the pause button and looked sideways at Ronon. "Got a project or something?"

Ronon pulled the piece of paper he'd been using from his pocket and unfolded it. "Here," he said, passing it over.

Lorne studied it carefully and didn't even laugh at Ronon's stick figures. "Well," he said. "I can give you a few ideas." He hopped to his feet, brushing off his pants, and found a pad. He flipped through a few pages and sat back down next to Ronon. "The human body," he said, "is pretty much just a bunch of shapes. Circles, squares, triangles. Watch." He drew a vertical slash on the page, crossed it 2/3 of the way up, and added another horizontal line near the bottom. Then he drew an oval, taller than it was wide, above the top cross. He drew another cross in the oval and placed eyes, nose, and a mouth in different quadrants. Then he squared off the shoulders, rounded out the arms, and sketched triangles between the arms and the body until the figure was standing akimbo.

"That looks pretty easy," Ronon said as Lorne sketched in legs. It made him think of other stories he’d heard when he was young. One of the stories an old soldier, Kraden Mar, told to the boys who gathered around the skewer shop. Ronon remembered sitting in the shadow of the cooling pipes, picking chunks of hot meat off a stick and listening to Kraden talk about his time fighting the Wraith. He remembered one story, about a soldier named Garen Mikoran whose unit had been ambushed and dismembered. Garen had survived long enough to leave a warning, written in the blood of his squadron. And in his own blood, he told the story of his friends and comrades, leaving heroic missives to be carried home to their loved ones. Kraden had been part of the unit that found them.

"Give it a try," Lorne invited, pushing the pad over to Ronon.

Ronon used to draw gameboards in the streets, his name in wet concrete, troop movements in the dirt. He drew people rarely, X's and O's substituting for Satedans and Wraith in tactical exercises.

Drawing people turned out to be harder than it looked.

"It takes practice," Lorne said mildly when Ronon crumpled up the third piece of paper. "It doesn't have to be perfect."

But it had to at least be good.

---

"May I join you?"

Ronon looked up from trying to draw his first unit commander, Marke Hartoren, gutting twelve enemy soldiers with his bare hands, and saw Teyla standing next to his table.

"Yeah," he said immediately and waited until she had settled. "You know you don't have to ask."

"You looked preoccupied," she said and ate a forkful of fruit. "Is this part of your lessons with Rodney?"

"Kinda," Ronon said, turning his picture so she could see. "He's been showing me the stories about Batman. I figure I could show him some of the stories I heard growing up."

Teyla looked at the picture of Marke Hartoren and raised an eyebrow. "That is very thoughtful of you," she said.

"Sorry." Ronon grinned and turned the picture back to his side of the table. Somehow, worrying about all the little details made it less visceral than it probably looked.

Teyla smiled back. "I think it is nice that you and Rodney have found a common interest."

"Yeah," Ronon said after taking a mouthful of eggs. "I don't really get it, though. I mean, Batman's life sucks."

"How so?" Teyla asked.

"See, his parents died when he was a kid, so he spends his whole life trying to make up for not saving them. Fight crime and save people and stuff." Ronon leaned forward. "Which is cool, but he has all these sidekicks and friends and stuff and he just keeps driving them away. What's up with that?"

"Hm," Teyla said thoughtfully. "Batman must have loved his parents very much. Perhaps he pushes people away to keep from losing someone he loves again."

"Seriously?" Ronon asked. That sounded pretty stupid to him. But it explained a hell of a lot about McKay.

"I think," Teyla said, "Batman was a very lonely little boy when his parents died."

"Yeah," Ronon said. "Look at this." He had pulled up an issue called JLA: Incarnations #2 on his laptop when he first sat down. There was a scene of a little boy, dark hair combed flat, looking through the schoolyard fence at the other children.

Teyla reached out and touched the screen with her fingertips, as if trying to comfort the boy by combing his hair into disorder. "This is Batman?" she asked. "How did Rodney put it? Misunderstood and unappreciated?"

"Yeah," Ronon said. He took another bite of his sandwich and looked at the boy on the screen. "I told him we weren't going anywhere."

Teyla glanced up and gave him a wide smile that let him know he'd done good. Then she glanced back to the computer and scrolled to the next page of the book. "You enjoy these stories," she said hesitantly.

Ronon shrugged. "They're stories about heroes," he said. "Superheroes, McKay calls them."

"John thinks he is like Mister Fantastic. And Rodney sees himself in Batman. If that is so, who am I?" Teyla looked tentative, her slim fingers dancing over the arrow keys.

Ronon grinned. "McKay thinks you're Black Canary," he said. "But I say Martian Manhunter."

Teyla looked up and blinked. "A...Martian," she said. "Who hunts men?"

"Nah," Ronon said. "I was kind of disappointed too. Pretty much he just goes around and talks to people. But he's patient. Kind. Invisible."

Teyla slapped the back of his hand, so fast he didn't have time to pull his arm away. "I am not invisible," she told him, laughing.

"Neither is he, mostly," Ronon said. "Only when he wants to be. Also he can read minds. And he tells Batman when he's being a jerk."

"Are there other Martians?" Teyla asked. "Does he have a family?"

Ronon shook his head quickly. "His family died," he said. "He's the last of his kind."

Teyla raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything.

"Superman's the last of his kind, too," Ronon said quickly. “I'm going to try to get McKay to rig me up some heat vision so I can melt steel like Superman."

Teyla smiled. "I wish you the best of luck," she said. She glanced down at the picture of Marke Hartoren and averted her eyes. "And I hope that Rodney enjoys your stories."

---

Two days later, Sheppard was in the lab calculating pressure differentials for Ronon and Rodney - they were trying to increase the velocity of the drones when the jumper was underwater - when he solved the key to the tower on PXG-572. They were discussing the pros and cons of various Batman villains when Sheppard picked up the puzzle and said, “What is this? An Ancient Rubik’s Cube?”

Before Rodney could say, “Don’t touch that!” he had turned several of the little blocks and the entire thing started to hum and glow. Under his hands, the pieces joined, fusing into a smooth, solid shape with a hiss and a puff of vapor.

“What happened?” Rodney demanded as Sheppard said,


“Did I do that?”

“Oh my God! You fixed it! We can go back now!” Rodney shouted. “ I’ve got to find Sam. Pack your bag. We’re going back to PXG-572!”

Sheppard looked at Ronon as Rodney flew out of the room. “Which one was PXG-572?”

---

“I thought we already determined that there was nothing on this planet,” Sheppard complained, once he realized just which planet PXG-572 actually was. He stomped viciously on the knee-high grass and cursed under his breath.

“Yes, except that you leaped to a hasty and ultimately incorrect conclusion,” Rodney said. “And what happens when you assume?”

“I know it has something to do with you being an ass,” Sheppard said as the tower came in to sight.

“Just for that,” Rodney said, “I won’t let you turn the key.”

He didn’t, either, pushing the form into the recess himself. The door creaked open and Sheppard threw himself in the way of Rodney’s headlong rush into its depths.

“Let’s try not to get killed in the first five seconds,” Sheppard said, looking even less pleased than before. “Hernandez, Kragan, hang out up here. Keep an eye out for crazy Genii ex-pats, half-human Wraith, Lucius Lavin, the usual.”

“The resonance imaging indicated that this area is riddled with pockets,” Rodney said. “Sort of like if you’ve ever watched Meerkat Manor? Looks like that. If it’s not a weapons cache, it could be a lab or - “

“I don’t think we have ever found anything good underground,” Sheppard said.

“Stop being such a pessimist,” Rodney argued back. “We found the Orion underground.”

Sheppard perked up considerably.

Ronon took point as they entered the tower. It was dark but he could see pretty well in the dark and he swept his gun back and forth, keeping his vision shifting constantly. The tunnel sloped down steeply and curved to the left, but it had good traction and looked bare in the beam of Sheppard’s Maglite.

“Door,” Sheppard said, playing the light over the smooth edges.

Ronon eased closer and the door opened with a breeze of musty air and a faint sigh. Like the doors on Atlantis, but hidden away in the dark. He came in right and high and found nothing but more darkness.

“Wraith,” Teyla said.

Ronon pulled his sidearm up, ready to fire, but no ghastly white face appeared.

“I feel it,” she said. “But - it’s not like a Wraith. It’s...it’s empty. Feral.” Ronon couldn’t see her shudder but he felt the tension in the air ratchet upward.

“Air’s filthy with them,” he agreed. It wasn’t like being on a Wraith ship, with its underlying scent of flesh and rot. It was more subtle, more dirty. Something older. Something wrong.

“Are they here now?” Sheppard asked, walking the perimeter of the room. His flashlight played over the walls and picked out three more doors set into the wall, one across the entrance, two on the perpendicular walls.

“Yes,” Teyla said, as Ronon said,

“No.”

“Not helpful,” Sheppard said, pausing at the far side of the room to touch the edges of the door. “I think someone locked these doors. I can probably - “

His next words were lost in the terrific crash of the ceiling falling in.

Ronon grabbed the nearest person, who happened to be McKay, and pushed him down and toward the wall. He fired, red light searing through the dark room. He hit something, he heard it screech, and he heard the P90 on semi-automatic punching holes through flesh. Sheppard’s Maglite was on the floor, still sending a beam of light across a pile of rubble, and Ronon could still see the tiny yellow light mounted on his rifle.

It took him a moment to realize the popping in his ear was the radio and then he heard Sheppard’s voice yelling, “Get out of here! Get the hell out of here! We’ll be right behind you.”

Ronon trusted Sheppard and Teyla to get themselves to safety, and when the next thing he heard was a door pop open behind him, he grabbed McKay’s vest and stumbled into the dark hallway, firing over his shoulder as he went.

“Here, here, here’s a door,” McKay said behind him, barely audible over the noise and confusion. Ronon kept up the cover fire until McKay dragged into backward into a room and slammed the door behind them. “Hold on. I think maybe I have - Oh, here we, yes.” A thin beam of light and then suddenly the lights came on overhead. “Excellent,” Rodney said, sounding pleased.

Ronon tapped his radio. “Sheppard? Teyla?” The signal screeched in his ear and he yanked the piece out to keep from being deafened. “What the hell was that thing?” he asked, shaking his head to pop his ears.

“Oh,” Rodney said. “Oh. This is so not good.”

“What?” Ronon demanded as something hit the door. He threw himself against it on instinct.

“It’s okay, I jammed it,” Rodney said. “But this. This is bad. Sheppard was right, we never find anything good underground.”

Ronon looked around the room. He knew hospitals. And this place looked like a twisted, unclean version of the worst medical facility he’d ever seen. “What is this?” he demanded, revulsion coiling in his gut.

McKay looked pained. “I think we found another of Michael’s labs.”

---

“Where are Sheppard and Teyla?” Ronon demanded half an hour later, as the creature heaved against the door again. “Can’t you fix the radios?”

“No,” Rodney snapped. “It’s interference from the cave-in. If you haven’t noticed, we’re kind of way underground, here.”

Ronon paced the ugly lab, listening to Michael’s hybrid horror bang itself relentlessly against the door. “We can’t just sit here until it breaks through.”

“Well, what do you want to do?” Rodney demanded. “There is the door. There is a Wraith-Human hybrid with apparently a bug brain and who knows what kind of horrifying body out there waiting to eat us. Our best bet is to wait for Sheppard and Teyla or one of the nice Marines upstairs to come kill it and let us out.”

“We can blow the door,” Ronon said. “The explosion should bring the ceiling down on that...thing.”

“Yeah, if we wanted to cut off our only exit,” Rodney said. “Do you know how long it would take Sheppard to dig us out? We’d run out of air before he got anywhere near the door. Being smothered to death with my own carbon dioxide is not on my top ten ways to die.”

“Don’t worry,” Ronon muttered. “I’d kill you first.”

“Thanks for the pep talk,” Rodney snapped. He slumped over. “At least it would be faster. And clean. I probably wouldn’t be regurgitated later.”

“Too bad we don’t have a shaped charge,” Ronon said. “We could direct the explosion down the hall so we could still get in the door.”

"Oh my God, that’s brilliant. Teaching you demolitions was clearly one of my more ingenius ideas," Rodney said.

“But we don’t have any,” Ronon said.

Rodney snapped his fingers twice. "We’ll just make our own. How much C4 are you carrying?"

"None," Ronon said.

Rodney blinked. "I just made you the base explosives expert and you're not even carrying around a wad of C4? Doesn't Sheppard always have C4 on him?"

"Yeah," Ronon said. "So I don't."

"Well that's - that's just ridiculous," Rodney said.

"What about you?" Ronon asked. Those vests sure had enough pockets. "Don't you have any in there?"

"Well, excuse me," Rodney said. "But I'm not terribly keen at having explosive material attached to my body."

"I gotta tell you the story of Rofort Mear," Ronon said. "That guy didn't go anywhere without an explosive vest. Always said that if they took him, he was taking them right back." Ronon chuckled fondly. "My squad used to pull the wires on his vest when he got torred off his head, so he wouldn't end up blowing up a pub in the middle of a brawl."

"I find the tales of your war buddies both hilarious and horrifying," McKay said. “Also, is ‘torred’ a word?”

“Satedan,” Ronon explained, applying him to the left door. “What happens when you drink too much ale.”

It came from Ancestors, because traveling by the Ring of the Ancestors was a little like trying to walk back to your quarters after a particularly celebratory night. Except that it only lasted 3 seconds and took you to other planets instead of lasting what seemed like hours, just to cross a quad. Ronon had explained it to Elizabeth once, when they were eating in the mess. He was still recovering from the stomach wound Phoebus had inflicted, and Elizabeth still felt guilty and was trying to make it up to him the best way she knew how.

Now, with her gone, he wished he’d spent more time telling her things she wanted to know, instead of teasing her by explaining Satedan drinking songs and curses. She had suffered both the songs and his silence gamely and pursued her annoying but well-meant attempts to be sensitive to a culture that had been dead seven years.

"You know," McKay said morosely. "With as often as I find myself staring down the dark maw of death, you would think I would actually get around to doing some of the things I regret not doing before I die."

Ronon took a minute to try to figure that sentence out and then said, "Like what?"

"Derive the unified theory of the universe. Win the Nobel Prize. Figure out how to make ZPMs. See the end of The Sixth Sense." McKay lapsed into silence. "At least I did make up with Jeanie."

"Yeah," Ronon said. "Because she figured out how to make that dimensional bridge thing. With fingerpaints."

"What? What do you mean with fingerpaints? And I totally would have gotten around to calling her. Eventually. I'm just a very busy man."

"She said so when she was here. She got the idea when she was playing with her kid, so she worked out the whole thing in fingerpaints." Ronon remembered that story clearly from Jeanie's visit to Atlantis. He'd had to go look up fingerpaints on the Earth computers because Sateda had nothing like them, but they sounded cool. Messy, but Ronon didn't have a problem with messy.

"How did I not know that?" McKay asked.

Ronon shrugged. "Did you ask her?"

McKay scowled and then went quiet for a few minutes. Ronon listened to the sound of Michael's bug-thing crashing against the door, which wasn't going to hold for long.

"Do you have any sisters?" McKay asked out of nowhere. "Or brothers?"

"Six brothers," Ronon said. "All dead now." His oldest brother died taking a munitions depot during the Battle of Yampala Ridge. Sampar had been like a father to Ronon after their own father died and taught him to shoot and fight. Another brother had died in a culling when Ronon was too young to remember. One brother, one they didn’t talk about, had died in a training accident. Another brother had died at Khatiner Gorge. The others were lost when Sateda fell. Ronon picked up the nearest bottle and looked at the label. "Doesn't any of this stuff blow up?"

"Really?" McKay asked. "Older than you? Or younger?" He started picking up things, too, and looking at the labels.

"Older," Ronon said.

"So you're the seventh son," McKay said like that meant anything.

"Yeah, so?"

"Well, that's supposed to be lucky," McKay said. "In all the old Earth tales - which we've established often have a footing with Ancient activity - the seventh son escaped the stricture of primogeniture and pretty much got to be free to go on pointless quests and win fair maidens who just happen to have kingdoms of their own - hey, GTN." He peered into the shaded bottle and then glanced up at Ronon. “Glyceryl trinitrate. Nitroglycerin. I don’t know how diluted it is, but if we use enough of them, we should be able to get a pretty decent bang for our buck.”

“Now you’re talking,” Ronon said. “We still don’t have a blasting cap, though.”

“We don’t need one,” Rodney said, flipping his laptop over and prying open one of the panels on the back. “Sam and I were experimenting with using naquadah to improve the compatibility of our technology with the Ancient equipment. It didn’t really go much of anywhere, but somehow - we haven’t quite figured out how just yet, it’s entirely improbable - it makes the computers run faster. Give me a knife.”

Ronon pulled his favorite dagger off his belt and offered it, handle-first, to McKay.

Rodney just looked at it and then looked up at Ronon. “That won’t even fit inside the casing,” he said ungratefully. “Don’t you have anything smaller? Like, in your hair or something?”

As it turned out, Ronon did have a slender, balis blade in his hair and passed it over reluctantly. His mother had worn it in her own hair until he went off to training and then she’d tucked it in among his things. “I want that back,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” McKay said. “Handy though it might be, I lack the convenient natural storage capability.” He scraped a bit of naquadah from inside his computer and transferred it to the inside of a metallic Power Bar wrapper. Then he passed the balis back to Ronon and twisted the corner of the wrapper around the smudge of naquadah. Ronon wiped the blade on the edge of his shirt and slid it back into his hair. He could feel it, warm from McKay’s hand, against his scalp.

"We need a casing," he said. Michael had left glass jars and beakers all over, but Ronon didn't like the idea of using glass to house the bomb. It was inclined to shatter and go flying off all over.

"I have beef stew," Rodney said, shrugging off his pack.

"Seriously?" Ronon asked.

"In case I got hungry," Rodney said, pulling out a can that said Dinty Moore, and a small can opener.

"You don't pack C-4 but you pack beef stew?" Ronon asked.

"I'll share." Rodney offered the open can and even though it was cold, it looked nice and meaty so Ronon took a handful and ate it from his palm. McKay winced but did the same and as soon as the can was reasonably empty, Ronon wiped it out with some rags that were just lying around.

“Your watch has a timing mechanism,” he said.

McKay sighed deeply. “I like this watch!”

“I bet you like breathing better,” Ronon said.

McKay just scowled and stripped the watch off his wrist. Ronon popped the back off and removed the tiny arrangement of wires and timer that would finish the detonator. He handed it to McKay and let him push the wires through the wrapper so they wouldn’t touch.

Ronon curled a piece of aluminum - or other thin, malleable silvery metal that Michael was keeping around the lab - into a cone, using a stun blast from his gun to heat the metal, and then the butt to pound it into shape around the leg of a chair. It wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t pretty, but as long as it got the job done, Ronon wasn’t going to complain.

Rodney shook powdered nitroglycerine between two pieces of damp paper. Then he rolled the paper in a loose cone and pushed it into the empty stew can and then pressed Ronon’s cone in on top of it.

Ronon pressed the detonator into the nose of the cone and Rodney used one of the lab stools to set it up facing the door and angled to the left. Ronon waited until they were both a good ten yards away and then aimed down his arm, thinking of his oldest brother’s voice in his ear when he was first learning to shoot. He didn’t need to think about it quite so much anymore. He sighted on the detonator and shot, the energy from his gun flashing red as it hit the metal construct and activated the detonator.

He and Rodney took cover as the five-second timer ran down and waited.

The charge punched through the door and a high-pitched howl told Ronon that the copper core had hit Michael’s beast, too. The sound of falling rock followed and the howl cut off abruptly.

Ronon and Rodney looked at each other as the noise died down.

“Cool,” Ronon said, grinning so hard his cheeks hurt. This science stuff was definitely a win.

“Yeah, yeah, let’s just make sure we didn’t seal our own doom,” Rodney said hurriedly.

The door stuck when he tried to open it, damaged by the makeshift ordnance. Ronon gave him a hand, getting an elbow between the two halves and forcing the right side of the door into its recess.

“Air!” McKay crowed. “Sweet, sweet air!”

They hadn’t been anywhere near running out of air, but Ronon took a deep breath of fresh air - well, fresher than what was in the room; it was still a little stale. The passage to their left was a landslide of dusty rubble but to the right, the way was clear.

Ronon’s radio beeped and then crackled. “McKay? Ronon?”

“Yes, yes, we’re here,” McKay said, getting to his earpiece first.

“Are you okay?” Sheppard asked in between static pops. “We heard an explosion. Sounded like the whole place was caving in.”

“Yeah, that was all us,” Rodney said. “We couldn’t wait for you to get around to breaking us out.”

“Well, thanks for saving us the time and trouble,” Sheppard said sarcastically. “Ronon with you?”

Ronon grinned and tapped his radio. “I’m here. Teyla with you?”

“I am here and well,” Teyla said calmly and Ronon thought she really did sound like Martian Manhunter, stately and calm, full of grace. “We are on the surface. Will you be able to join us or shall we retrieve you?”

“Haha, very funny,” Rodney said, but Ronon answered,

“We’ll be right up,” and turned off his radio. “C’mon,” he said, slinging an arm around Rodney’s shoulder. “Let’s go home.”

---

“Uh, hi.” Ronon shifted his weight, feeling as awkward and new as the day he reported to Marke Hartoren’s unit, body stripped lean from training and mind overflowing with tales of his new commander’s skills and wit.

“Hi,” Rodney said, clearly puzzled. Ronon never went to his quarters - he always sought out Rodney in his lab or the mess. But this was personal business. “Were we supposed to...am I late for something?”

“Nah,” Ronon said. “I have a present for you.”

“Really? A present?” Rodney said immediately. “For me? I mean, do you want to come in?”

“Yeah,” Ronon said because it would suck less than doing it in the hall. Also, it felt pretty awesome to make McKay’s face light up like that. Usually it only did that when someone found a ZPM or the mess served lasagna.

Rodney backed away from the door and shifted away to let Ronon enter the room. It didn’t really look much different from Rodney’s lab, a computer on every flat surface and random Ancient devices in pieces everywhere. There were pictures on the wall, though, of Rodney and Rodney with important-looking people, and Rodney with pieces of paper, and even one of Rodney with a giant telescope.

On the night table stood a tiny picture, not in a frame but propped up against the coffee mug, of Jeanie and Madison and Jeanie’s husband. Ronon remembered her saying his name was Kaleb, but Rodney just called him, “The English Major.” Ronon had asked if he was in the military - a perfectly valid question since Lorne was also a major, but Rodney had just said, “As if that would be any better,” and grumbled about an alternate timeline where Jeanie was the chief scientist on Atlantis and ended up marrying Sheppard.

Ronon had learned not to ask about The English Major.

He was still looking around when he noticed that Rodney was waiting - not exactly patiently but with his mouth shut at least.

“I made these,” he said, bringing the stack of comics from behind his back and offering them to Rodney. “The art isn’t very good - Lorne helped but they’re not good like that Sadowski guy, or Michael Lark. Or the guy who does the covers on Wonder Woman. He’s pretty good.”

“Wow,” Rodney said, already paging through the top one as he sat down at his desk. “You did these? All of these?” He put the top one aside and started looking at the others. “Oh hey, Rofort Mear? This is the guy who used to start brawls, right?”

Actually, all Ronon’s friends used to start brawls - and Ronon had started one or two himself - but he knew Rodney had remembered some part of what he’d said. Which, for Rodney, was actually pretty impressive.

“The art isn’t so bad. Oh, hey, guts. That’s disgusting.” Rodney flipped through on one Ronon’s favorite Marke Hartorsen stories - he hadn’t been able to choose just one so there were five Marke Hartorsen books. “You did these all yourself? You and Lorne? For me?”

Ronon shrugged. “You showed me all your stories. There aren’t any more Satedan books. I looked when I went back. The libraries all burned.”

“Oh.” Rodney looked up from his perusal. “That - that really sucks. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Anyway. I made new ones.”

“Great can we, can you stay? We can read them together. I mean, it sucks that we can’t use the big screen but, you know, they’re really better when you can hold them in your hand, you know?” Rodney’s smile was hopeful and earnest, and most of all, real, and Ronon felt that maybe he’d opened the fence and invited 10-year-old Bruce Wayne into the schoolyard to play.

The End

---

The talking characters belong to SGA. The referenced characters belong to DC or Marvel Comics. Joe Murray owns my favorite comic book store. Unfortunately, he was not a scientist. He was an English Major.