Chapter Text
Officially, this is what they know about Ronon Dex: born in Sri Lanka, 1980, to parents Janice Whittaker, American citizen, and Taraki Dex, Tamil Tiger. Janice dies, 1993, of untreated Malaria; Taraki dies, 1996, during government campaign to retake city of Kilinochchic. Ronon arrives in California, 1997, awarded B.S. in Physics and Electrical Engineering from UC-Berkley, 2000, M.S. in Chemistry from Caltech, 2004. Published works in journals Advanced Synthesis & Catalysis, Analytical Chemistry, Chemical Society Reviews, and Nature.
Unofficially, this is what they know about Ronon Dex: there's a guy in Pasadena that people say can make explosives out of thin air.
--
Sheppard hears of Dex from someone who knows someone who knows someone, and Rodney hears about him when Sheppard drops a manila envelope in his lap and says, "I need you to go get somebody."
Rodney sees the words Analytic Chemistry sticking out of the top of the folder and says, "Oh no, not again," before looking up at Sheppard, who is -- grinning.
"No, see," Sheppard says, and Rodney can't get over the sight of him smiling, he almost doesn't even hear him say, "You're gonna like this one. There's a picture."
Rodney usually argues with Sheppard on principle, but he pages through through Dex's file anyway and is surprised to feel himself smiling back. It's just so incredibly rare that somebody fits all of their criteria: smart, dangerous, and batshit crazy.
"Fine," Rodney says, and Sheppard smiles at him again -- that crazy, dangerous smile -- and says, "Awesome."
Rodney's on a plane within the hour.
--
Besides the constant threat of a horrible, painful, messy death, what Rodney hates the most about the job is recruiting. Logically, Rodney understands that they need new talent, and that they're not really putting out ads in the Thrifty Nickel. Rodney even understands why it has to be him, that he's the only one left that looks even remotely respectable in public anymore - he has all his original body parts, walks without a limp, and has no scars where anybody can see. They tried sending Zelenka out once, to pick up a new geologist, but the guy'd freaked out and ran for the door the moment Zelenka had rolled up his sleeves.
Still, being the most respectable-looking member of his peer group is sort of like being the smartest Spice Girl - it isn’t actually saying much. Rodney still looks to the outside eye like he's shuffled out of a half-way house: second-hand clothes, bags under his eyes, and about four days growth of beard. He draws wary looks as he passes through airport security, open looks of suspicion when he hands over a passport for a Mr. Roger Ingram, travelling from Colorado to Pasadena on a bereavement fare.
When he is inevitably pulled out of line and searched, Rodney stutters out, "My aunt Beverly, it was so sudden," and tries to look convincingly distraught, sweating profusely and cursing Sheppard's inability to fabricate a decent cover story. They eventually wave him through with reluctance, thankfully forgoing the strip search, and he sprints through the terminal clutching his boots just to make the last call on his flight.
The thing they don't tell you about living under a mountain is that it puts you of sync with the rest of the world, and Rodney's forgotten how to deal with what used to be everyday things, like airports. The hurry-up-and-wait aspects of flying, which used to just be annoying, now make him nervous and edgy and uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough, actually, that one of the stewardesses gives him a reassuring smile and slips him a tiny plastic twist-top bottle of vodka with his cranberry juice.
Rodney swallows a couple Dramamine dry, downs the vodka in one go, and wakes up in California.
--
Flying into John Wayne is obviously Sheppard's idea of a joke, but Rodney figures having to deal with a car rental agency is punishment for something he's done wrong in a past life.
Sheppard last words to him before he'd left the mountain were, "We need a new Jeep." Rodney'd selected the largest, ugliest SUV on the website when he was making the reservation, but the girl behind the counter's opening offer is a Plymouth Caravan. Which means that Rodney has to negotiate. Oh god.
Ten minutes of arguing and smiling and using phrases like real southern California experience later, he's holding the keys to a god damn Hummer, and Sheppard can bite him.
He tries to practice his sales pitch on the drive from Santa Ana to Pasadena, but as he's dodging between convertibles and weaving around semi-trucks his carefully scripted speech quickly degrades into growling and cursing at everyone else on the road.
He pulls off at a gas station before he reaches the campus, shaves in the bathroom with a disposable razor and splashes water on his face, watching himself in the mirror and trying to remember what he'd looked like, four years and fifty pounds ago. The last time he'd been in Pasadena, he'd been giving a lecture on theoretical wormhole physics.
The students had lost him about twenty minutes in, the slowest staring absently at the pictures in his slides, the more dedicated taking down pages and pages of notes and falling further and further behind with every word. As the talk wore on and on, his heart started beating faster, his palms started sweating, his breath came in shorter and shorter pants. He kept talking, but the whole time it felt like he was reaching out for something that kept getting farther away. The moment he reached the last slide, the one that said, "Questions?" and the room fell deathly silent, he realized for the first time in his life that he was in the wrong place.
He'd lingered on for a few minutes after the talk had ended, shaking hands with the chair of the department, fielding frantic questions from wide-eyed undergraduates, but he'd felt panicked and trapped the whole time. It was like someone had pulled the ground out from beneath his feet, his life no longer felt like it belonged to him.
He'd made some excuse to someone about needing to make a phone call, and stumbled out into the hallway, hyperventilating. His whole field of vision had narrowed down to about four square inches, black spots crowding in along the edges, when a a strange man with dark hair and a darker look in his eyes had grabbed his arm and said, "Do you have a minute?"
At the time, he would have said yes to almost anything.
--
Once Rodney gets to the Caltech campus, Dex is an easy man to find. The description: 6'6", dreadlocks, scary eyes, doesn't fit very many people in the chemistry department, even in California.
He asks the first starry-eyed girl he finds and gets a sort of wistful, "Oh, you mean Ronon?" She gives him a brief look, sizing him up as competition, and he feels indignant when she makes a sort of dismissive gesture towards him and says, "his office is in Beckman."
Dex doesn't have the kind of office typically reserved for graduate students, who are usually herded into concrete boxes in basements or converted storage rooms. Rodney's own graduate career had been spent in an office smaller than his car, crammed in with three other grads who only spoke English under great duress. They'd had a leg up on the other grads in the department, though, in that they'd had a window, tinged yellow with old dirt, and a lovely view of the backs of ugly buildings. Dex's office is on the top floor of his building, with wide, clean windows overlooking a flowered courtyard and a reflecting pool.
Dex looks up from his computer before Rodney even has a chance to knock on his half-opened door. "You're not one of my students," he says.
Rodney gives two seconds of thought to his cover story, that he's a recruiter for some pharmaceutical company, looking at this year's Ph.D.s, but he can't go through with it. Instead, he says to Dex what what Sheppard said to him, four years and a lifetime ago, "Do you have a minute?"
Dex raises one eyebrow and looks briefly at his computer screen before turning his chair towards Rodney and saying, "I've got all the time in the world."
Rodney steps into Dex's office, closing the door behind him.
--
The last time Rodney was in Pasadena, John Sheppard had said to him, "What if I told your work wasn't nearly as theoretical as you thought it was?"
Rodney had shaken his head and thought, great, another crackpot, until Sheppard had pulled something out of his pocket, a small green device that looked remarkably like his Great Aunt Eleanor's emerald brooch. Sheppard had smirked at him, the device had lit up without him visibly doing anything, and then he'd sort of shimmered all over the same green color of the device and said, "Hit me."
Rodney had thought, great, a crackpot with dreams of being beaten up by an astrophysicist, but he'd said, "What?"
Sheppard had said, "Hit me," again.
Rodney had been having a bad day, and Sheppard had looked so goddamn smug, Rodney didn't hesitate twice, and pulled back and socked Sheppard in the jaw. Or, well, Rodney had tried to sock Sheppard in the jaw, but his fist hadn't connected, and had in fact bounced off of Sheppard's glowing green shell.
Rodney had said, "What?" And, "Ow." And, "How did you?" And, "Why did?" And finally he'd asked the most important question, the one Sheppard was willing to answer, "Who the hell are you?"
Sheppard had said, "I'm a guy offering you a job."
--
Dex takes things pretty well, all told. Most people panic at the revelation that they aren't alone in the universe. Dex just stares at the personal shield Rodney holds in his outstretched hand and says, "Huh."
Rodney says, "Alien technology, all the secrets of the universe, and all you say is, 'huh?'"
Dex looks up at him and says, "Cool."
--
It was just strange luck that he hadn't gone through to Atlantis, him and Sheppard both. They'd both been on this list - John for his ATA gene, Rodney for his absolute brilliance and cool head in difficult situations. They'd both been packed and ready and cooling their heels in Antarctica, ferrying supplies and equipment back from the outpost to McMurdo so everything could get shipped to Colorado in time to go through with the first wave.
They'd been flying the same route they'd done a dozen times before, pretending like they hadn't run out of things to talk about, when their helicopter had hit an ugly tailwind and gone lurching out of Sheppard's control. Rodney had been too scared to be angry, too sure he was going to die to even yell at Sheppard for getting them killed, and he'd just grabbed for something to hold on to as they went down sideways into a wall of ice. Sheppard's arm had had a bruise the shape of Rodney's hand for three weeks.
Rodney had still been in surgery when the expedition was cleared for the mission, been drinking Jell-o through a straw when they went through the wormhole. He'd been angry and resentful and spent hours playing chess with Sheppard and sulking, imagining how fantastic everything in the Pegasus galaxy was. He'd been desperate to go, tried everything he could think to find a way to get there, until they learned what happened to that expedition, until people started to disappear.
--
Dex doesn't bother going home for his things. Rodney appreciates that. Most people don't know what to take with them, and end up trying to pack their whole lives into whatever shitty rental car Rodney picks them up in. When Rodney had picked up Simpson, he'd spent three hours talking her out of bringing her grandmother's sewing machine. Dex, though, just grabs an old rucksack from the corner of his office and says, "Lead the way."
Pasadena to Colorado Springs is a fifteen hour drive, with long stretches winding through the desert and fifteen hours is a long time to spend in a car with a man you barely know. Dex isn't very good company for the first hundred miles, just sits staring out the window, his huge frame wedged against the passenger side door, his long legs braced against the dashboard.
When they hit Barstow, Rodney pulls off to disable the LoJack on the Hummer. Dex spends the half-hour it takes making phone calls to various friends and colleagues, trying to wrap up loose ends without letting on that anything's wrong.
Usually, Rodney has to talk people through this part of the process, has to stop them from calling their loved ones one last time. It's better for everyone involved, if it looks like you just disappeared. So many people disappear every day now, it doesn't arise suspicion anymore. Suddenly closing out your bank account and giving away your things, that looks suspicious.
Dex is something else, though. He doesn't sound panicked or scared or anything. He says, I'll get back to you on that next week, like there's going to be a next week, and, Talk to you later, instead of, Goodbye.
Rodney doesn’t ask, but if Dex can't read what Rodney's thinking off his face, he's not the same person Rodney read about in that file. Dex shrugs and says, "It was something my father taught me." Rodney expects him to say more, but that seems to be it for now.
Rodney understands, though he wouldn't have four years ago. Dex hands over his cell phone, doesn't flinch when Rodney pulls out the SIM card and snaps it in half, doesn't blink when Rodney throws everything under the treads of the Hummer. The sun's setting over the desert, all the heat bleeding out into the night, Rodney's getting cold just standing still. There's a safe house in Las Vegas, another manifestation of Sheppard's demented sense of humor; if they get back on the road now, they'll be there by 10:30.
Rodney says, "Come on."
Dex takes one last look out west, towards California and what Rodney imagines was a pretty nice life. He says, "My father always said, 'Every time you say goodbye is the last time you say goodbye.'"
Dex says, "They know how I feel," and gets back into the car.
--
If Rodney had been paying attention to the news in January 2004, he would have probably believed that there was an earthquake in Alaska that ruptured an oil pipeline. That was the official story, the one Elizabeth had come up with and that they'd fed to the news.
It's not even that much of a lie. There was an earthquake, the pipeline did rupture - because of the god-damn spaceship that landed in the middle of Denali National Park.
--
The safe house is a one-bedroom apartment in Spring Valley with a warped linoleum floor that always smells like wet dog. Sleeping on the couch always hurts Rodney's back, and when he tells Dex this, Dex says, "We'll share the bed," like it isn't a big deal.
Katie Brown had shyly suggested the same thing. Rodney had slept on the couch.
Rodney says, "Uh," and Dex shrugs, pulls the covers back, and says, "Which side do you want?"
It's a double bed, and Rodney knows from long experience that it sags in the middle, and sometime around three in the morning it's not going to matter which side he started out on. He tries to think of something to say that won't end up with him sleeping on the couch when Dex heaves his shirt up over his head and pulls down his pants in one fluid motion and Rodney briefly loses the ability to swallow.
Dex sits on the bed and turns out the lights and says, "Chill, McKay."
Rodney trips over his pants trying to get them off in the dark.
--
Up until maybe 2007 Rodney still published.
[Plot exposition explaining the infiltration of the Wraith hive, the collapse of the SGC, how Sheppard became the leader of a rag-tag group of resistance fighters based out of Cheyenne Mountain.]
--
Rodney wakes up to the sound of Johnny Cash, which means Sheppard has changed the ringtones on his phone again. Rodney has a quick, mean thought that maybe Ronon and Sheppard will get along and become friends and Sheppard will finally leave him the fuck alone every once in a while, when a deep voice nearby says, "Is that Ring of Fire?"
Through the haze of irritation at Sheppard, Rodney realizes that he's tangled up in six foot six of Ronon Dex.
--
Rodney takes Ronon down into the base, introduces him to Sheppard and then Zelenka and then the chemistry labs. Ronon disappears into a cloud of lab coats and bad hair and Rodney thinks -- well, that's that. He doesn't really see the chemists unless there's an absolute emergency, so he's surprised when Ronon shows up on his doorstep that night.
"Not enough beds," he says, "Sheppard put me in here."
Rodney blinks.
"He says thanks for the Humvee."
--
"You could have just said," Katie Brown says, out of nowhere.
"Could have said what?"
Rodney respects that the botanists provide useful functions -- they provide, for one thing, breathable air, he likes breathable air -- he just doesn't respect them, on the whole, as people. He doesn't know where they got the idea that they can talk to him.
"That you were gay, jeeze!"
He also doesn't respect people who say things like jeeze without irony.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
[A series of scenes in which it is apparent that the entire base thinks that Ronon & Rodney are banging.]
--
Rodney says, "I'm not your boyfriend. I don't know how you people all got that idea into your head, but it's not true."
Ronon spits toothpaste into the drain, turns the water on, and says, "Sure." He cups his hands under the tap, splashes water on his face and shakes the drops out of his hair. He says, "Are you coming to bed? Or are you recalibrating that thing."
Ronon switches off the light in the bathroom, strips his shirt off over his head and gets under the covers in an easy, practiced kind of movement. Rodney's been living in the same room for years, and he still stubs his toe against the corner of the bed-frame more times than not.
Rodney says, "I'm really not," but he's starting to feel like a record stuck in a skip.
"Yeah," Ronon says, punching his pillow and turning over, "Not up too late?"
Rodney nods. He turns the lights off on the way out.
--
Rodney and Sheppard have unofficial status meetings over lunch on Tuesdays. Rodney runs down the list of new ways they've found to blow shit up, Sheppard talks about what they're going to try to blow up next. It takes about twenty minutes to get through actual information and then Sheppard spends the rest of the hour they've set aside catching Rodney up on base gossip, whether or not Rodney wants to hear it.
This time, Sheppard says, "I can't believe you're not sleeping with him." Rodney doesn't quite choke on his food, but Sheppard pounds him on the back hard enough to bruise, anyway.
Rodney hisses, "You did this," and Sheppard doesn't even bother to deny it. "Did we really not have enough beds?"
Sheppard leans back, looks smug, and says, "No."
--
Forgive him for not noticing, it's been a long god-damn night, but Rodney only realizes something is wrong when all of a sudden no one will meet his eyes. He finally looks down at his watch -- Christ, when did it get this late? -- and remembers in a rush that Ronon's team was supposed to be back six hours ago.
The radio clicks -- one, two, three times in a row, fast -- and Bruce makes an involuntary glance in Rodney's direction before thumbing it on, the signal heavy with static. Rodney can't make it out exactly, all he can hear are the words "heavy casualties" and "confirmed fatalities" and it's like the oxygen has been sucked out of the room, everyone trying not to look at him.
Zelenka carefully puts down the ancient artifact he's been examining and the dull thunk it makes hitting the counter-top spurs Rodney into motion. Rodney drops what he's holding, some sort of clipboard, a coffee cup, he doesn't even hear them hit the ground, and he yells, "He's not my fucking boyfriend!" Simpson jumps.
Rodney turns on his heel, walks towards the door, unseeing, and then -- Ronon's there. He's got a bandage on his upper arm which has bled through a dark crimson, and his shirt, his favorite shirt, the one Sheppard got him with Che Guevara on the front, is ripped.
Rodney touches the ragged edge where the shoulder of the shirt is supposed to meet the sleeve that isn't there anymore, and says, stupidly, "Your shirt."
Ronon touches Rodney's face and Rodney puts his hand on Ronon's chest, feeling his heartbeat, feeling Ronon solid and warm and alive under his hands.
"You're an asshole," Ronon says, and kisses him.
--
[Ronon gets assigned to some scary dangerous mission! Rodney reacts to this.]
Mostly, people said yes when Rodney asked.
Rodney hated asking. The first time one of his recruits had died, he'd spent a week throwing up. Any time he'd maybe thought he was going to keep something down, he saw Grodin's face, not how he'd been at the end, burned beyond all recognition, but how he'd looked the day Rodney met him, happy and hopeful until Rodney had started talking.
Rodney says, "When we first met, I thought we were going to lose, but I didn't, uh -- I didn't actually care all that much. It didn't matter, I didn't really have anything left that was worth fighting for."
Ronon picks up his rucksack and walks to the door. He says, "You know how I feel about you," and Rodney does.