There is a saying among Teyla's people, one which she has heard many times, which says a bad beginning makes a bad ending. She can still hear her father's voice repeating those words, kind yet firm. Most of her recent experience belies this sentiment, especially when it comes to the people of Atlantis. And yet, she cannot help but cling to her father's old advice, one of the few things she has left of him, when it comes to Ronon Dex.

On their initial meeting, she awoke slowly from the numbness of the stun weapon, to find herself bound on the floor of a cave, stripped of her weapons. Ronon, a large shape framed against the brightness of the cave mouth, announced his intention to kill her and Colonel Sheppard. An inauspicious meeting, to be sure.

As far as Teyla can tell, Ronon himself is not one to pay heed to signs and auspices, though. He approaches her often, appreciation in his eyes and an easy smile on his lips. He asks no questions that she cannot answer, makes no demands. Yet his intentions are clear.

He appears at her door one day and knocks respectfully. Looking up from her book, she smiles as the door opens. She cannot help being happy to see him, although she knows that she will soon have to find a way to let him know his efforts are in vain. It is not a conversation to which she is looking forward.

He smiles slowly, and there is no denying that he is beautiful, but it is an unselfconscious beauty. Light gleams off of his thick muscles and his long hair falls past his shoulders, framing his face. Ronon's full attention is a bit daunting, focused as it is, but Teyla does not look away.

"You busy?" he asks.

She marks her page and closes the book. "Not at all," she answers, although she knows that this is not the way that an honorable woman dissuades a suitor.

"Want to spar?" he asks. She nods, thinking wryly that he already knows her too well. She is not a scholar like Doctor McKay, to enjoy sitting still and thinking, and the offer of physical activity is not one she can turn down. Ronon himself is an appealing part of the offer as well, but she tries not to think about that.

They walk side-by-side to the exercise room, and although she keeps her eyes turned firmly forward, she can feel him at her side. He is impossible to ignore, looming large in her mind, and she feels her skin warm at his nearness.

When they reach their destination, she pauses to remove her boots and tie back her hair. The sticks are stored in a corner of the room, and she chooses two pairs and turns to find Ronon watching her, his dark eyes filled with a desire that has nothing to do with sparring.

Teyla sighs inwardly, wishing for a moment that circumstances were different, that they were different. Were she free to pursue her own desires… but she is not. She is a warrior, a protector, and a representative of her people, not a young girl seeking a mate as a butterfly seeks flowers.

And so she ignores the look in Ronon's eyes, or pretends to as best she can, and simply hands him a pair of sticks.

On most days, his larger size and greater strength are enough to overcome her superior experience, but today she is careful and makes sure to win. Today, for some reason, she does not want to be pinned to the mat beneath him. She worries that she might embrace that sort of defeat at his hands, although it is not her usual way.

After that, she is more cautious around him. She smiles, and speaks pleasantly, but she tries to avoid being alone with him. She tells herself that she does not wish to give him the wrong idea. Certainly she is not avoiding temptation. She is well beyond the age where her body is out of her control, and if she chooses not to be alone with another member of her team, well, that is her right.

The next time she is alone with him, they are on the Ancient warship the Colonel calls Aurora. It is overwhelmingly quiet, and the empty halls echo with their footsteps, thousands of lives hovering in extended stasis all around them but not so much as a single breath to break the silence.

Now would be the perfect time to tell him that he is wasting his intense gazes on her. Instead, she too is quiet. If he wonders why she's been ignoring him, he does not ask. But the look that was in his eyes is still there, and when she glances up and sees him watching her, she feels as though her Atlantis-issue uniform does not cover her bare skin.

After that is Aiden's planet, and the enzyme which sings in her blood in a way that is both exhilarating and terrifying. She feels as though she can do anything, and the part of her mind that tells her 'no' is quieted. It is fortunate, then, that Aiden's men have them under a very close guard and so she is not permitted to do the things that she tells herself later she never wanted. She does not walk on quiet feet through the halls, and she does not enter Ronon's bed-chamber, and she does not trace his warm skin with her hands or taste the skin of his neck beneath the tattoo. All she does is lie awake and think of what it would be like to do those things, how he would react.

After, they are alone again, in a holding cell on a Wraith hive ship. It would be a time for grand declarations of feeling except that all she can feel is terror, helplessness, and the sickening drain of the enzyme leaving her body. Ronon is there through it all, strong and angry and capable, and when she wakes she finds he had given her his coat for a pillow. It is an unlooked-for kindness, an insignificant thing in the face of certain death, but something deep inside her begins to warm.

She pushes it away once they have returned to the City of the Ancestors, buries it deep and tries to pay no attention to this... this thing growing inside her that refuses to go away.

Leaders do not have the luxury of emotions, she tells herself. And she has been a leader of her people since her seventeenth summer, when she put aside the ways of a girl and assumed her responsibilities. It was never a problem before, and it shall not be one now.

Ronon smiles at her in the hallway and she returns the gesture automatically. She is still smiling when she reaches Doctor Weir's office, and it startles her to realize it.

Colonel Sheppard turns almost entirely into a bug, and the team is told to say goodbye. It is not a good death, not an honorable one, and Teyla does not know what they will do without him, but she goes anyway. Instead of farewells, though, there is a preposterous mission, as there so often is with these people, back to the darkened, crawling cave, and Ronon shoots the Colonel twice, in order to save him. It works.

Teyla finds herself lying awake, unable to sleep, her mind chasing an uneven circle from hive cell to sparring room to bug cave and back to the cave where she met Ronon for the first time, and around again in a never-ending loop. She remembers watching him raise his gun calmly and shoot Kell in the chest, remembers his simple acceptance and the way he challenged Kell's bodyguards. She thinks about what he did for the Colonel, and the value of a teammate who is willing to shoot you in the back for your own good. Maybe it wasn't such a bad beginning, she thinks, if it brought Ronon to them. After that, she forces herself to stop thinking and simply sleep.

Idle thoughts do no good, and she has a job to do -- many jobs to do. Still, her idle thoughts are occupying her mind more and more, and to push them aside requires more and more force as the weeks pass. At the end of each day, her shoulders ache as if from physical labor, and in the morning when she wakes, she never feels fully rested.

It is difficult, but she manages to maintain control for many days, until a routine mission for technology repair turns into an emergency evacuation. Teyla is in the tunnel leading to the base when the earth begins to shake; she sees the walls cave in, blocking their path to safety.

The planet's volcano is beginning to erupt, and it is already difficult to breathe when Ronon returns from the village with the last family. It is not long before they have all collapsed on the floor of the rough structure. Teyla leans back against Ronon, grateful for his warmth against her back. Nearby, the family they stayed to save is drifting off, falling asleep curled together like puppies.

She is tired, exhausted, and what little strength she has is devoted to breathing. Without her will to hold them in place, the objections she's been clinging to begin to slip away. The reasons for her resistance now seem weak and ridiculous. The world is growing dim at the edges, and she struggles for the right words…

A moment later, they are aboard the Daedalus. Teyla is gasping for clean air and reaching desperately for Ronon. Her hands find his, and she turns to face him, tilting her forehead. Needing no explanation, he meets her halfway, touching his head to hers, and she can feel his breath on her face.

"Ronon," she said, wanting to explain, to talk, to say something.

"Teyla," he answers, his voice rough. He brings one hand up to her jaw, and tilts her face up. Slowly, giving her plenty of time to pull away, he brings his lips to hers.

"A bad beginning makes a bad ending." -Euripedes

"Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did." -Lillian Hellman