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I.
While he's detoxing, Ronon hangs out in the workout room, fighting anyone who will join him on the mat. If he works out until he can barely move, he can blame his trembling muscles on exercise instead of on the Wraith enzyme slowly breaking down inside him.
Teyla's there a lot, too. Every time he enters the training room, she's practicing kata. She and Sheppard fight with sticks twice as often as they used to. At first she's visibly weakened, but he can see her improving. She'll be able to kick Sheppard's ass again soon.
When he's not sparring, Ronon runs. Sheppard falls in with him early one morning, and they run together without a word. His presence is comforting and goading. Because he's there Ronon pushes himself farther, faster. Neither of them mentions the days when Sheppard could outrun him, but the memory spurs Ronon on.
The hardest part is realigning how he thinks of himself. Not just strength -- the enzyme gave him power, but with discipline he can equal that on his own. No: the enzyme clouded his thinking. Made it seem okay, good even, that he was borrowing strength from the creatures that decimated Sateda. That chased him, for sport, for seven long years. While he was under the influence, it seemed only fair that he gain something from his worst enemies.
Now that his head and his body have cleared, the thought that there was Wraith essence in him makes him sick. While he runs, and spars, and runs again, he reminds himself of where he comes from, and who he is.
Sometimes Ronon wakes up with adrenaline already pumping, a bitter taste in the back of his throat. Old habit. Seven years of running can really mess a guy up. But more and more often, he knows exactly where he is before consciousness fully rises. His quarters in the City of the Ancients. Surrounded by his things: weapons, clothing, a small carving of a bird made by one of the Athosian boys.
He wouldn't call these his people. Especially now that he knows some of his people did survive. But Sheppard and Teyla and McKay are a kind of kin.
II.
Teyla underwent a week-long cleansing before taking the reins of leadership. She relinquished meat and dairy, and each night drank teas brewed to give her visions. This has always been Athosian custom, and for Teyla it was fruitful.
Detoxifying from the poison of the Wraith enzyme is not so pleasant. The low aching pain and the night sweats pass after a few days, but afterwards her body refuses to obey her commands.
Being on the enzyme brought her a heightened sense of physicality. Her body thrummed, rising to the challenge of sparring as though she were invincible. It makes this inevitable period of brittle weakness that much worse.
Teyla stretches in her quarters before going to the practice room, willing her muscles to regain their flexibility. And she fights until she can disarm Colonel Sheppard in seven moves, and then five, and then two.
One day she follows Ronon to lunch. She suspects he relishes dining alone -- Atlantis can feel too close, especially now that the Daedalus regularly replenishes the ranks -- but he does not protest.
"I think the ill effects of the enzyme have worn off," she says, after a short while.
"Seems that way." Ronon continues eating.
"Had you ever experienced anything like it?"
"Some of our regiments used stims."
"To enhance capability in battle," she says, understanding.
He shrugs. "Never tried it. I'd rather use my own reflexes."
"As would I." It is truth -- or it should have been -- but after a moment she feels compelled to continue. "Though I do...miss... the strength."
His grin warms her in ways she prefers not to examine too closely. "Gotta train more," he offers. "Spar someone who outweighs you."
"Is that an offer?"
He doesn't respond, but she knows his smile means yes.
Teyla had not considered herself an outsider. Though the Terrans in Atlantis share a homeworld, she is at home in this galaxy in a way they are not, and she had told herself that this made them equal.
Not until Ronon Dex joined their number did she realize how solitary she'd still felt. In the weeks following their time on the Hive ship, she is surprised to discover how much loneliness she'd been carrying, and how easy it is to let it go.
III.
"Can we...talk?"
Rodney looks up from his laptop, startled. Sheppard is standing over his lunch table.
Tamping down his panic reflex -- those words have never boded well, not in any context Rodney can think of -- Rodney shuts the laptop and gestures to the chair opposite his.
There's a moment of silence. "If it's about Zelenka's theory on what went wrong this morning, I have a perfectly legitimate explanation for the explosion, and I can assure you my calculations were correct. The thing we didn't take into account --"
"It's about the Wraith enzyme."
"Oh." That shuts him up.
Sheppard's mouth tightens. "Yeah."
It doesn't take long for the silence to get annoying. Running with Ronon every day is obviously making Sheppard even more laconic than he was before. "Is there something in particular you wanted to say about it?"
"Are you -- okay?"
Not what Rodney expected. "Huh? I'm fine. No ill effects. Everything's back to normal."
"Good."
"It's been days -- weeks, actually -- so if I may ask, why are you asking about this now?"
Sheppard shrugs a little. "We've never talked about it, and I thought maybe we should. Elizabeth said you were pretty hyped-up when you came through the gate."
"We don't talk about most things." That earns him a sharp look, but Rodney doesn't really care. "Anyway, my memory's a little patchy; I don't know anything about it that you haven't already been told."
"Carson said it was a lot to detox from."
"I'm fine, Colonel." Irritation creeps into his voice.
"If you say so."
Something about Sheppard's dubious tone spurs Rodney to open his mouth again. "It was awful. Is that what you want to hear? I hope I never experience anything like it again in my life. I don't even remember most of it, but I know I screamed things at Carson I -- " He swallows hard, but the lump in his throat remains. He swigs the rest of his coffee, which helps. "As long as I never come within a hundred meters of that enzyme again, I'll be just fine."
"Okay," Sheppard says, and this time it sounds like he means it.
"Anything else?" Rodney reaches for his laptop to open it again.
"Thank you," Sheppard says, putting his hand on Rodney's for a moment.
His hand feels warm long after Sheppard's gone. "You're...welcome," he says, eventually, to the empty air.
IV.
The thing with Ford shakes everybody up. Physically, emotionally, you name it. Just seeing Ford would have been weird enough, even without the part where they tried to infiltrate a Hive ship. By the end of that mission John feels like hell, and he knows the rest of his team feels worse. It takes a few weeks before they're able to work together again the way they used to.
Actually, they don't work like they used to. They're better now.
The change is in Ronon and Rodney, mostly. They'd mistrusted each other. Not exactly surprising. But they have something new in common now. Even Teyla seems more comfortable, like she doesn't have as much to prove.
For John's part, the leftover anger he'd been nursing at Rodney since Doranda is gone. Burned away. When Carson tells him what detox did to Rodney's body -- how he begged for a coma or for death -- John wants to punch the wall of the infirmary hard enough to do damage.
Instead he returns to the workout room, and manages a rare victory with the sticks even though Teyla's back in fighting trim.
The hard part about this job isn't deploying teams, making decisions, even submitting budgets to Elizabeth so she can argue for them with SGC. The hard part is putting his own team at risk -- knowing that every time they go out there something godawful could happen. Wounds. Explosions. Kidnapping.
It's a bad sign when a CO starts dreaming about his team. The good dreams -- which he prefers not to analyze too closely when he wakes up -- or the bad ones, the fiery-death or sucked-dry-by-Wraith ones, which don't need any analysis anyway.
But there's no better team in two galaxies. He'd bet everything he has on that, everything he is. Actually, he already does.
"You come out here a lot." Ronon, looming behind him.
John shrugs, leans on the railing, looks out at the nighttime sea. "I like it. Were there oceans on Sateda?"
"Not like this."
"Not like this," John echoes, thinking of all the ways his life up 'til now failed to prepare him for anything about Atlantis.
Somehow, though, that's okay. With every breath of Atlantean air, John exhales the person he used to think he'd be, and inhales the beginnings of something new.