“So, sit down and let’s talk about this. We’re both in this together. I just want us to make decisions as a team, not have you tell me what to do.”
Ronon looked reluctant, but he did come to sit down on one of the other boxes, his back to the wall so that he had a clear view of the trap door above. “It’s my call,” he said. “We’re in the field, and you’re a civilian.”
“I’m a civilian, sure, but I think I may be better at handling the Wraith than you are.”
“I can handle the Wraith.”
“Kill them, sure,” Jennifer said. “I’ll be the first to say you’re awfully good at that. But I think right now what we need to do is talk to Todd, and try to get him on our side about this — ”
Ronon shook his head sharply. “He’ll never be on our side. They’re Wraith. We’re food to them.”
“Maybe most of them think that way, but I don’t think Todd thinks of all of us as food,” Jennifer said. “Teyla’s not just food to him, because he still sort of thinks of her as a Wraith queen. And Sheppard… actually, I have no idea what goes on there, but maybe Todd thinks Sheppard is, I don’t know, our version of him.”
“Sheppard’s nothing like a Wraith,” Ronon said.
“We have to find the ways that we are like them,” Jennifer said. “The ways they are like us. Because we need their help right now, and to get them to help us, we have to talk to them. Like we’re all people.”
Ronon let out a breath in the darkness. “They’re not people.”
“Then let me do the talking,” Jennifer said. “I can do this. Just… let’s work together, here. Let’s talk about what to do, and we can decide together. Don’t just tell me what you’ve decided we’re going to do.”
“Like you do?”
Jennifer frowned. “What?”
Ronon shook his head. “We’ve talked enough.” He looked a little calmer, but he still didn’t look very happy with her.
“I don’t think so,” Jennifer said. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s what you do,” Ronon said. “You’re the doctor, so you tell people what’s going to happen. When McKay had that brain parasite — ”
Jennifer remembered those days all too well, how it had felt to watch Rodney slowly deteriorate before her eyes and not be able to stop it, to make anything better for him, no matter how hard she tried. Ronon had wanted to take him to the Shrine of Talus, a folk remedy to give him one more day with his mind intact. She hadn’t believed there was anything more to it than wishful thinking until it was nearly too late. To give up her search for a cure to take him to a magic shrine —
“I was trying to save his life,” Jennifer said.
“We told you what would work, and you wouldn’t listen to us. To me.”
Jennifer felt her cheeks heat, and was suddenly grateful that he couldn’t see her face. She searched for the right words. There were right words, words she’d learned for dealing with difficult patients, difficult people. She’d been told often enough not to let them push her around because she was young and pretty and looked harmless. I’m the doctor, she told herself.
“You didn’t think yourself that there was any chance of saving Rodney’s life,” she said.
“You’re the doctor. It took you, what, fifteen minutes to figure out how the place worked once we got there?”
“I am the doctor,” Jennifer said. “I made the call based on my experience and my judgment.” She was tempted for a moment to add it’s hard enough for me to trust either one.
“If I were a doctor, would it have mattered?”
“Of course it — ”
“If it had been Melena telling you, or any of the doctors from Sateda, would you have believed it then? She didn’t know exactly how it worked either. But she knew it did work. Everybody knew that.”
“Sometimes the things everybody knows are wrong,” Jennifer said. “Folk remedies can be dangerous. At best, they’re usually harmless, and that’s when they don’t involve taking a critically ill patient to a planet full of Wraith. It’s magical thinking, a way for people to feel better when they can’t really do anything to make a situation better. Like sleeping with the lights on when you’re scared.” That was probably not a very useful way to put it, she realized. “Not that I expect you — ”
“When you saw it, you didn’t think it was magic,” Ronon said. “You thought there had to be some reason for it, some scientific thing you didn’t understand.”
“That’s right,” Jennifer agreed, but cautiously. Ronon’s tone suggested there was a catch somewhere in that question, like the questions in med school that sounded simple and ended with congratulations, you’ve just killed your patient.
“But you didn’t believe it when I said I’d seen it.”
That would be the catch, then. Jennifer hunted for words. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” she said finally.
“You don’t trust me,” Ronon said. “You’re like McKay that way, at least the way McKay used to be. You won’t do what people tell you because you think they don’t know what they’re talking about. You won’t ask people what they want to do because you think if you do what anyone else wants you to, you’ll get hurt.”
“I am not like Rodney,” Jennifer said.
“You think?”
There was a long silence after that. It was too quiet in the underground space. That was probably good, though. It was probably too soon for the other Wraith to have left, so footsteps above them wouldn’t mean anything good. She wasn’t sure whether they’d even be able to hear footsteps through the thick earth ceiling above them. Ronon would probably know.
“If that’s what you think, then why…” Jennifer began. It took her a minute to figure out how she wanted to finish that sentence, but Ronon waited while she did. She got the feeling he would have waited much longer if he’d needed to. “Why are we still friends? If we, you know, are.”
“I can live with that stuff,” Ronon said. “In a friend.”
“Right,” Jennifer said. She smoothed back her hair, feeling it trying to work its way out of its ponytail. Teyla always managed to come through these kinds of situations looking neatly put together. Jennifer always suspected she looked like anything but a professional.
“The thing is, I’m not Carson,” she said finally. “He has enough experience that if he says he has no idea what to do, people are just going to think it must be a tough problem. If I say that, they’re going to think I’m not ready for this job. If I ask other people what to do — if I act like I’m not in control of a situation that’s gotten scary — then I don’t think anybody’s going to take me seriously.”
She stopped, struck by how well the words applied to more than just herself. She glanced over at Ronon, wishing she could see his face better in the dark. “You get that, right?” she said tentatively. “How maybe it might seem like a good idea to just tell people what to do, so they won’t doubt that you know what you’re doing? And maybe so you won’t look scared.”
“Maybe so,” Ronon said after a while.
“But, you know, maybe I could do a better job of listening to people who might actually have useful ideas about how we could get out of the bad situation,” she said. “You think?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Is that a deal?” Jennifer asked. She held out her hand hesitantly, not sure if it was even the right gesture to make, but after a moment Ronon clasped her arm, squeezing hard before he let go.