"Another day, another dollar," Sheppard commented to himself before raising his water bottle again.
Ronon went for the head-on approach. "Would it have been hard? Leaving this behind?"
In mid-drink, Sheppard stopped and glanced over at him. His expression was guarded as he lowered the bottle. "You heard," he said unnecessarily.
"It wasn't much of a secret." A lot of the enlisted had been worried about who might come in to take their commanding officer's place. The rumors had mostly died down by the time Ronon had gotten back from 418 and out of Beckett's clutches, but he'd heard them anyway, and he wanted an explanation. "You really were going to give up and walk away?"
"Try not to take it personally." Sheppard's voice gained a defensive edge. "I wasn't ditching you, seeing as I had cause to think you were dead at the time."
"Is that the reason you did it?" Ronon wanted to know.
"It's not the whole reason, but yeah."
"What's the whole reason?"
The Colonel seemed to realize that he wouldn't get out of the conversation easily. His shoulders slumped a little. "I thought that you and Teyla were dead because I'd been so fixated on finding us a shiny new weapon that I let our guard down. The whole fiasco started with me." Leaning forward on the railing again, he cast a sideways glance at his teammate. "Not to wander off-topic or anything, but I don't really get why you're not pissed about that."
Starting to shrug, Ronon once more had to stop himself Force of habit. "You made a judgment call. The raiders messed it up. I don't expect you to be able to predict the future." He took a drink of his own water. "Plus, I'm not dead."
"Through some weird stroke of luck, no, you're not." Sheppard shook his head, his gaze hard. "That doesn't change the fact that I chose wrong, and I've chosen wrong before. It didn't start on this expedition, but I've had to make a hell of a lot more tough decisions here, and I'm not sure how long I can keep making them when the wrong ones cost good people's lives."
Sometimes Ronon managed to forget that, even though they ate meals and watched football together, even though they relied on each other's instincts without hesitation, he and John Sheppard weren't really peers. The other man had been in his military a lot longer and bore scars from a galaxy Ronon had never seen. Still, although Ronon didn't have the same burden of rank, he'd had experiences the Earth expedition couldn't imagine, and he was sure he knew more of conflict than almost any Marine who'd ever stepped through the gate.
"That's what command is," he said bluntly. "Losses are a part of war-any kind of war."
Sheppard spun toward him, his eyes flashing with pain masked as outrage. "You think I don't know that?"
Ronon had never seen that kind of emotion from his team leader before. It didn't deter him. "I think we both know it too well. But you need to give everyone else around here some credit for understanding it, too."
Some of Sheppard's anger-fueled energy dissipated, and he returned to staring out at the sun-streaked atrium.
"It's not that I think other people blame me," he said after a long silence. "Even I don't always blame me. It's just…" He let his head hang down over his bent arms. "The Asurans are going to keep hitting us, and sooner or later they're going to come for Atlantis. There's no getting around that. Maybe Colonel Carter and the rest of the SGC will have figured out a better disrupter weapon by then, but that's in no way a guarantee. Someday we're going to be minding our own business and those things are just going to show up, in a cityship or in a nanovi- rus or in some way we haven't even thought of yet. Hell, maybe the Wraith will beat them to it, for all I know."
"We'll fight them."
"Yeah, we will." The Colonel scrubbed a tired hand over his face. "But people will keep dying, no matter what I do."
There wasn't much Ronon could do to counter that statement. He thought for a few moments, watching the stretched light beams on the floor waver with the passing of a cloud. Finally he decided to go with the only reassurance that came to mind.
"When I joined the Satedan military," he began, "my whole recruit class thought our first field commander could do no wrong. He knew so much, and he never hesitated to act when needed. We would have followed him anywhere.
"One day we were assigned to sweep an area for Wraith monitoring devices, and someone triggered a trap. Ten of us were caught away from the rest of the division with Darts inbound. We could have tried to dig in and take cover where we were, or we could have tried to cover the distance back to the main fortified position before the Darts arrived. The commander ordered us to head for the fortification. Only six of us made it.
"He had to make a choice, and half my squad paid for it. After that, we knew he wasn't perfect. But we didn't admire him any less. We followed him because he made smart decisions, but also because he had the courage to make decisions even when he couldn't be sure of the outcome-and even when he knew the outcome would be terrible. It was a difficult duty and we respected him for doing it well."
Ronon drained the last of his water before speaking again. "Now I follow you, and I've never been sorry for it. You can't ask the ones you've lost, but I bet none of your men here regret it, either."
Without waiting for a response, he turned and headed down the sloped walkway, leaving Sheppard alone to think. He didn't know whether or not he'd done anything to help, but he'd said everything he had to say.
Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard,
I've thought about writing this letter a number of times over the past year Had I managed to force myself to do it at any of those times, it would have looked quite a bit different than this. I guess I could have written one at each of the so-called five stages of grief, although it took me a while to accept that grief was what I felt. After all, Aiden wasn't dead.
We watched the news religiously for the first two or three months, sure we'd eventually hear something about him. We couldn 't understand why no one ever mentioned his name. Hadn't he paid the same price as the other servicemen who'd been lost? I remembered what you'd said about how highly classified his assignment had been, but the injustice of it all still bothered me terribly.
When you sent his belongings home, I was furious with you. I was certain you'd given up on him after you'd promised to do everything you could to keep looking. After a few more months with no word, though, I started to realize that 'missing in action'wasn't the hope we'd thought it was. I still can 't fully believe that he's dead that would be betraying him, somehow but I'm beginning to accept that he won 't be walking through the door tomorrow, or the next day, and I can leave the house without worrying that the phone will ring with urgent news.
I spent a lot of time placing blame at first. I had plenty to go around. I blamed the government and the military, and of course you know I blamed you. Right to your face I accused you of abusing Aiden's faith in your leadership. I've come to believe it was shortsighted to say that without any understanding of the events that led to Aiden's loss. It wasn't fair to you, but mostly it wasn t fair to Aiden, because it belittled his judgment. And I realized that he was the one I'd really been trying to blame. I was angry at him for leaving us, for hurting his grandparents, without any explanation of how or why.
I don't ever want to feel like that anymore. I love my cousin, and I'm proud of him, no matter where he is. I have to believe that what he chose to fight for what all of you choose to fight for is right, even if I can 't always see the reasons. Aiden lived for the Marine Corps and for the people he served with. He trusted you, and so I do, too.