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“I can fly anything,” Sheppard said with that cocky smirk of his that Ronon found annoying and endearing all at once.
He eyed the contraption warily. They’d seen these inflatable vehicles occasionally floating on the distant horizon, and they knew the people of Nogard used these contraptions, but so far any attempts to discover the people’s secrets had been met with polite but impervious walls. Meanwhile, they couldn’t say for sure that the natives of this world had intended them to be separated from one another, but Teyla and Rodney had been carried away downstream on a riverboat bound for the coast, leaving John and Ronon ashore and unable to reach them. Officials had politely but implacably informed them there wouldn’t be another boat for three of the planet’s long days.
After hours of calm indifference to their need to be reunited with their team, after repeated attempts to divert them into looking at the Ancient outpost the Nogardians felt sure John would be able to use his gene to help them with, Sheppard had finally snapped.
“Ronon,” he'd said quietly, “how’d you feel about committing acts of larceny?”
Ronon had merely grinned in response, because action was needed; the larceny part was incidental.
Still, he didn’t share Sheppard’s confidence about this mode of transport. They had no idea how this thing worked, just that it was a curiously organic-looking inflated sphere, coloured a greenish purple, tree-height, webbed over with ropes, a human-sized tub suspended beneath. The thing was tethered in a clearing to the south of the main city, bobbing and swaying in a gentle breeze.
They crossed the open space as quickly as they could and climbed into the tub, hunkering down to hide from any pursuit.
“Sheppard, not so sure 'bout this…”
Ronon knew John was one of those people who got away with things that mightn’t go so well for others, but he had a creepy feeling about this vehicle, about the vast and slightly pulsating flesh-like stuff inflated over his head.
“Well, we’ve got company, so looks like we don’t have much choice,” Sheppard retorted, indicating a group of Nogardians running across the open space, shouting and waving in a far more animated way than Ronon had ever seen from these people.
Ronon had decided some time ago to give his trust to John, and his loyalty, so he reached for the tether ropes and swiftly unhitched them, sending the vehicle floating upwards surprisingly fast. And there they floated, high above the city and the river, bobbing on the air currents.
John looked around him in confusion at the lack of any form of steering mechanism.
“I, um…”
And that was when the thing above them gave a deep, unearthly, and unmistakably menacing growl.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Sheppard said, his voice strained.
Oh, that so wasn’t as cute as he thought it was, the pretending to be a character in his favourite Star Wars film, pretending Ronon was the (inhuman!) sidekick. In Ronon’s story, Sheppard was the sidekick, but it was sweet that this scrawny little guy had delusions of being the big hero. Ronon indulged his little fantasy, let him call him Chewie, and secretly thought John was more Luke Skywalker than Han Solo—diminutive, naturally talented, but way too naive for his own good.
The growl repeated, and Ronon’s nervous system began to take notice, the hairs standing up along his arms, gut muscles clenching. Underneath the growl, there came a slithering sound. Creeping around the fleshy expanse above them came huge tentacles, the width of his thigh at their widest and tapering to a point with filaments at the end, feeling their way like fingers.
The tentacles were making straight for John.
Ronon was not a stupid man. Clearly, their vehicle was alive and even more clearly attacking it was not the smartest thing to do, given they were thousands of feet up and at its mercy. This beast had a relationship with humans, but what that relationship was and how it was navigated couldn’t be guessed at as yet.
One tentacle wound around John’s waist, securing him. Ronon wanted to growl himself, wanted to protest that John was his and for the beast to keep its filthy tentacles off.
Oh. Perhaps John was less sidekick to share adventures with, and more love interest to be rescued.
Well, Leia was pretty badass, he was sure Sheppard wouldn’t mind taking her role.
“Er, Ronon, little help here, buddy?”
Sheppard kept his voice light, but his eyes were edged with panic as he pulled ineffectually at the tightening tentacle. Ronon stepped up close, putting his arms around Sheppard as he tried to prize the thing free. Sheppard’s hot, fast breath gusted against his neck.
A second tentacle slithered fast around Ronon’s waist, binding him against Sheppard, too tight for him to even move, their bodies pressed way too close for propriety, even though Sheppard’s raised P-90 acted as chaperone between them. Smaller tentacles wrapped around Sheppard’s wrists, pulling his hands off his weapon and away from his body.
Sheppard squirmed against him, and damn, if Ronon’s growing fear wasn’t now tinged with something else entirely.
“Um, this is, um…”
He’d never heard Sheppard sound so nervous, and he had an inkling it wasn’t just the tentacle monster’s tight, but not in fact deadly, embrace.
“You okay there, Sheppard?”
“Ronon, I think under the, um, intimate circumstances, you could call me John.”
Ronon looked down into Shep—John’s eyes. His face was always so mercurial, so hard to read as one expression teased its presence and then vanished behind another, but maybe… yeah, maybe the complicated feelings Ronon had been trying to make sense of were reflected back at him.
But then something like shutters came down and John was a soldier again.
“Think you can reach my P-90 trigger and fire it? Cos it might just take that thing out at this angle.”
“That’s a stupid idea. We’re a mile up and we don’t even know yet if it’s a threat to our lives.”
These Earthers had all the strategy of a battering ram sometimes, Ronon reflected.
“Reckon it’d fall slow. We could throw ourselves free before it crashes.”
“If it doesn’t squeeze us in half in its death throes. Which it obviously could and noticeably hasn’t.”
“I don’t. Like. Being. Powerless.” John admitted.
Well, they had that in common.
“And I don’t like half-assed plans that could get you killed,” he growled back.
“Ronon—”
But at that moment something came into view from above the buoyant part of this beast; two huge eyes, unfathomably dark, standing proud from a triangular, upside-down head, with a wide mouth and jagged, dripping teeth. The head moved nearer, twisting to right itself on a long, agile neck, until it was right behind John, its foul, heated breath blasting Ronon’s face.
Well, thief, what have you to say for yourself?
The creature’s words appeared in his mind, accompanied by nausea and a pain above his right temple.
If you hurt him—
I will not harm your mate, thief. But what am I to do with you?
He's not my—
I care not, the voice chided.
Help us find our friends, that’s all we want.
Ronon felt the creature probing his mind and the pain of it drove spears through his skull. He cried out.
“Ronon? What’s wrong, buddy?”
“Don’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“The creature. It’s in my head.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
Oh thief. I can see how you sorrow for your lost nestmates. But I cannot cross my masters.
Ronon felt something then like a punch to his heart, a sudden flash of fear that Teyla and Rodney would be used to control… something, the thought was lost as soon as it came, and it hadn’t come from him.
What do they do to you, creature? he asked, suddenly strangely concerned for this monster.
They take our young. To keep us docile.
Fuck.
I’m sorry.
And this is why I cannot aid you, the creature said.
“So, here’s the thing,” Ronon said to John, his lips intimately close to the curiously pointed tips of John’s ear. “I think maybe the Nogardians are worse than they seem. I think you need to hear what this creature has to say.”
“Well, not like I’m going anywhere,” John said, his breath huffing into Ronon’s neck.
“So, here’s what I think should happen,” Ronon said aloud, directing his thoughts at the creature simultaneously. “You tell us what you think they’re gonna do to our friends, and you tell us where they keep your young captive, and we’ll see if we can help you in exchange for you helping us.”
“Slow down, Ronon, wanna bring me up to speed?”
Ronon told John what the creature had informed him so far.
“Well, okay, so what makes this monst—creature—think Teyla and Rodney are captives?”
Ronon spoke the creature’s words to John as he heard them in his head.
“They do everything this way… appearing benevolent, peaceful… you do not realise they have control until it is too late… they raise us to see them as benefactors… but we never forget they made us their slaves.”
“And what will they do to our friends?” John ground out.
“Nothing bad,” Ronon related, “if you cooperate. If you don’t—”
His mind filled with a memory that was not his own. The creature was young, very young, small and scared. They had tethered it in a public place, stroking reassuring hands over it that were no comfort at all. A crowd watched, a sea of round, passive faces, as a surgeon raised her scalpel.
“Settle down, now,” she had said, “this is for your own good.”
Ronon screamed as he felt the agony of the blade cutting through the creature’s tentacle via their mental link. The creature's appendages were unimaginably sensitive and they gave it no sedative, no anaesthetic. Just left it silently screaming inside its own head, shutting off from the mental link it could make with some humans if they let it. All the while speaking soft, soothing words that belied the horror and the violence of what they were doing.
So alone, so hurt.
When he came back to himself, the creature was waving three healed stumps in front of John’s eyes, and Ronon's head was on John's shoulder, tears welling freely from his eyes.
“Ronon? Buddy? What happened?”
“I felt what they did to the creature. John, it doesn’t even know why they did it.”
“To prove their absolute control,” John said, his face stony.
“We have to free them.”
“Yeah.”
I will help you free your friends, the creature said, but you will need to return with comrades to help us, and I sense you do not trust your… companion… to keep his promise.
No, Ronon mused, that’s not quite it—I trust John but not his people, or not all of them, and he isn’t always able to follow his own conscience. He must do what they tell him.
They have a hold over him? Do they have his young?
Nothing so simple. Earthers are complicated. But if John says he’ll come back and help, he’ll find a way. I’m sure of that.
---
The riverboat was dark except for the lights on the prow. The creature—whose name was Yltileenur and who preferred they/them pronouns—hovered in the darkness above the boat and lowered John and Ronon down with tentacles wrapped carefully around them. They crept around the sleeping vessel, trying to find Teyla and Rodney without alerting anyone to their presence. If they could extract their team quietly and get back to the gate without trouble, it would make it that much easier to mount a rescue operation for Yltileenur’s captive brethren.
They snuck down a faintly lit corridor, John leading, even though Ronon knew he was the better choice for stealth after seven years of being somebody’s prey. When they reached a blind corner, Sheppard found a knife at his throat before he had a chance to react. Ronon would never have made such a mistake. He braced for a fight, but then grinned as Rodney’s face appeared from behind the diminutive assailant, and he realised he’d know those graceful arms anywhere.
“Teyla, Rodney,” he said, something in his heart unclenching to see his team reunited.
Teyla released John.
“I am sorry, Colonel, we were attempting to free ourselves. Something is not right here.”
“No shit. Come on, guys, we have a ride waiting.”
They crept back to the upper deck—well, he and Teyla crept, and Sheppard made minimal noise, and Rodney kind of clomped, with Ronon wincing the whole time—but nobody came after them.
“Now McKay, don’t freak out, but our ride is kind of a sky-kraken dirigible dragon-thing,” John warned, as tentacles snaked out of the darkness above and wrapped themselves around the team. “Their name is Yltileenur and they’re just a big friendly pussycat really.”
McKay was hyperventilating and making small whimpering noises as his feet left the ground, but he managed not to scream. Ronon thought it strange to bring someone into the field who wasn’t a soldier, but Rodney managed to be brave through his fear more often than not.
“Oh god I’m gonna be eaten by mutant calamari!” he shrieked, as Yltileenur’s admittedly terrifying face came into view.
And, sometimes his fear just got the better of him.
Our way is clear, friend. I will take you directly to the gate.
---
“Colonel, you will brief me!” Elizabeth ordered as John assembled marines in the jumper bay.
“Absolutely, but this is a time-critical mission, and it is a military matter, Elizabeth," John said, all wound-tight underneath and calm on top. "I’m following through on a field decision that was necessary to free our people.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth to protest, but John held his hand up, somewhat apologetically.
“Okay everyone, this is the situation." He raised his voice so everyone present would hear. "In order to rescue Teyla and Rodney from a hostile power, I made an agreement to free the captive children of an enslaved species. If we go in quickly, with the element of surprise and the assistance of the sizeable adults, there should be zero casualties.”
“Colonel, this is surely something diplomacy—”
“No. Diplomacy is when you want to get along with the people doing the enslaving,” Ronon cut in. “Our ally is Yltileenur and their people. We owe them.”
“Ronon is right,” Teyla said smoothly. “If we do not take sides in this, we allow it to continue, it is that simple.”
“And we break our agreement,” John insisted, “that was my right to make as a commander in the field dealing with my team's captivity and endangerment.”
“This is the right thing to do Elizabeth,” Rodney gave Weir his best wounded look and maybe that swayed her more than anything.
“Okay. You have a go,” she said.
As if John wasn’t gonna go anyway.
---
It turned out the species were (ironically) named minys. Ronon would never forget the sight of the terrifying, furious creatures tearing down the compound where their children had been imprisoned, while the Earthers rounded up the humans and kept them out of harm’s way. Nor would he forget the ecstatic twining of tentacles as the so-small creatures bobbed out to meet their families, snuggling joyfully with the huge adults.
He looked across at John, whose eyes were suspiciously shiny. There was nobody around, so he slung an arm around John’s shoulder, pressed a kiss into his temple. John melted against him gratifyingly. Maybe not a princess to rescue, then. Maybe a stray to take care of. He had the strongest sense that for all Sheppard projected self-containment, the man was in desperate need of being loved. And, well, by Ronon’s reading Han Solo was the ultimate stray, so maybe he was John's Chewie after all.
Afterwards, they held the stargate while the minys passed through to an abandoned planet that would be safe for them, at least for now. Watching the adults deflate and elongate themselves to fit through the gate was highly entertaining. The babies bobbed and streaked up and down impatiently as the adults made their slow progress through.
“This is an affront to our culture!” the Nogardian minister said to John when the delegation finally approached. “You are not of Pegasus, you cannot possibly understand our ways. Judging us this way is, is bigotry.”
Ronon could see John taking that in, almost buying it.
“So, let me get this straight,” Rodney interjected. “It’s your culture to tell other people they must suppress this other Pegasus culture, ignore what they want and need, and allow you to continue to maim and enslave them.”
“These are violent beasts and we have tamed them! They are useful now because of our care—we improved them! We teach their children! They would be nothing without us!”
“That we will see,” Teyla said. “For they have elected to be without you, and it is clear they are sentient creatures, able to make their own decisions.”
“Sentient maybe, but we are better.”
“Ah yes, supremacy, how very human of you,” Rodney said. “Mutilating children certainly gives you the moral high ground, you must be so proud.”
“Again, Doctor McKay, you are speaking about what you do not know, these are the ways of our culture.”
“Your culture isn’t so unfamiliar to me, actually," Rodney said haughtily.
John held up his hand.
“I think this negotiation isn’t going anywhere. Our treaty is with the minys, who aided us when our people were taken prisoner.”
“That was a misunderstanding!”
“Oh really, so that’s why they locked us up and prevented us from getting off the damn boat, huh?” Rodney said, indignant.
“Or indeed why they brought us aboard the boat while failing to inform us it would set sail,” Teyla added, looking unimpressed.
“Look, if you’d like to establish diplomatic relations with us—or the minys—in the future, I’m sure we can figure it out, but regardless of what’s happened, we made a treaty, and we’re honouring it, and that’s an end to it,” John said emphatically.
The delegation gave up in disgust and returned to the city.
It took three dials before all of the minys were through. Yltileenur was last, with two tiny offspring clinging to their trailing tentacles. As they reached the stargate, their neck looped round and stretched out to bring their still terrifying face close to Ronon’s.
You have my people’s eternal gratitude, Ronon Dex.
You freed Rodney and Teyla. We’re even, Ronon thought back easily.
I hope you and your mate, will be blessed with happiness and long life.
He’s not my—
Whatever you define him as, he is yours, and you are his, you hold each other precious, and I wish you joy.
Well, that Ronon couldn't argue with. He looked down at a smiling John and shoulder bumped him. John pressed back.
Yeah, Ronon was keeping this one.