His Faith
by Bil!

K+ - Angst – Ronan, Elizabeth – Oneshot
Summary: Ronan runs, because that is what he knows. But there is nowhere he can run to to escape her loss. Episode addition for Lifeline.
Season: 4
Spoilers: Lifeline, Sateda.
Disclaimer: Meum non est.

A/N: Myself, I don't believe this is how Ronan sees her on the show... but it's how he could see her in some other universe. A potentiality, if you will.

There is nowhere to run. Ronan spent seven years running before he found a place here in Atlantis where he could stop... and now he wants to run, to run and run and run, but there's nowhere to go. The hole haunts every hall and corridor, his home aches with the lack of a presence that was ingrained in the walls themselves and now has been torn away.

The very city mourns the loss, its doors opening unwillingly and its computers running sluggishly while a subliminal wail of despair teases at the edges of his awareness when he tries to sleep. Atlantis knows as well as he that she was the centre of all things, the pivot upon which all turned, and without her to keep them stable they are wobbling out of control. Their axis is gone and their world is shaking; Atlantis trembles and no one can ease the city's fear. She is gone.

Weir is gone.

Ronan sees the knowledge in every face he passes, the dulled looks of shock and disbelief. Her personality ruled this city with a grip as firm as any despot's, as secure as any mother's, and now it is gone. Now there's only an empty, echoing gap in their existence that nags at him, begging to be filled when the only one who can fill it is lost in a world of machines, and no matter how hard he tries he can't run fast enough to escape it. Defeated, Ronan turns away from the others and hides himself in his quarters where at least there is only the city's grief to add to his own.

His world has shifted again. Again. He's so tired of the world shifting around him, changing so that he can't keep up, and here in Atlantis he'd thought he'd found one thing that wouldn't, couldn't change. Fool that he was to think it, but she'd made the impossible possible. Ronan came to Atlantis for the sake of Teyla and Sheppard, but in the end he chose to stay because Weir was something he couldn't understand, something he could believe in. She's something greater than the mere mundane and he's been seeking something like that his entire life.

What would they say, the people around him, if they knew that the hero he looks up to before all others is a woman incapable of defeating him in a fair fight even if he was an inch from death? Except that Ronan knows she could defeat him even were he in full health, because she fights in ways he doesn't understand with weapons he doesn't understand – but with a stubborn strength of will he understands completely. She's something more, but no one else sees her quite as he does.

Truthfully, he knows what his friends would say if he told them how he sees Weir. They'd tell him he's made her into something she's not, that she's just a person, just as fragile and fallible as anyone else... and he's dimly aware that it's true. But to him she's not 'just' anything: she's a hope. Hope that things will get better, that enemies can be destroyed, that he can win despite a universe determined not to let him. Because she's weak and fragile and human, all those things, and yet she's infinitely strong.

She is the ocean. The ocean, deep and dark so that he never sees beyond the surface even though he knows that there is more to her sitting safely inside her where he can never touch it. She is the ocean, cradling his new home protectively in her hands, gentle and fierce and indestructible. You can't break the ocean, because it slides around you, it moves with you until you leave it alone and then it quietly returns to how it was, unchanged no matter what you do to it. You can't fight the ocean, because it moves so slowly yet so surely and there is nothing you can do that can stop its ebb and flow. You can't defend yourself against the ocean, because it is older, deeper, stronger than you can ever be, with power beyond any you can wield.

She is the ocean.

He didn't understand that when he first came to Atlantis; he saw only her words, saw only the way her mouth moved and her body didn't. He thought not a fighter and dismissed her because he thought that only a fighter can fight, didn't understand that there are other ways to do battle. It wasn't the first time he's been wrong about her and it won't be the last, because she is something Ronan knows he will never be able to understand. He doesn't need to understand, though; he just needs to believe.

She is the centre of all things, because Atlantis is the centre of his world and she is the heart of Atlantis. Atlantis stands, firm and indestructible despite every attempt to bring it down, and so she stands, defended by the same glory that defends gods because she is in some way more than mortal. Gods don't die. She won't die.

She isn't dead.

Ronan knows this with the absolute certainty of a true devotee in his god, because he has a faith in her that surpasses any other he has ever held. She is the ocean, and he believes in her.

He'd never been on an ocean before he came to Atlantis. He'd been to the shore, his feet secure on the land while he looked at the waves, but that had told him nothing because he'd been separate from it, not a part of it, and he hadn't understood the mingled longing and fear in the voices of the sailors around him. He'd never sailed on an ocean, never lived on one, surrounded by it, completely in its power, aware of its might, knowing its unstoppable force and powerful beauty. But now he understands what the ocean is.

It is her. When she's sad her breath comes soft and sharp, like the whisper of waves lapping on quiet seas. When she's kind her compassion is cool and soothing like water slipping silkily around an aching body. When she's angry she is more than angry, she is furious, and her eyes flash like lightning and her voice is loud with the trumpets of waves stirred up by storm winds, while the power of her can be subdued by nothing, by no one, because she is elemental, she is the strength of the storm.

And when she laughs her eyes dance like sunlight sparkling on the waves with the hidden depths beneath them.

Sitting alone in his room with Atlantis's grief cocooning his own, Ronan sees again unbidden the snapshot memory of Weir on the Replicator Homeworld, holding off Oberoth himself, with the great strength of the ocean flowing through her to fight a battle it couldn't help but win because no one can defeat the ocean. And she with her eyes flashing like the angry ocean as she ordered them to leave, shouting at Sheppard as he stood frozen in helpless horror – and Ronan would have been frozen too, except that she'd given that order and he couldn't disobey her. He's never chosen to fight the ocean.

And now she's gone.

She's gone and all he's doing is sitting here uselessly, going on with his life. He's not out there searching for her, he's not mounting a rescue, he's just sitting here. He left her behind. They lost her, they left her behind and they don't know if they can ever recover that fatal misstep. They don't know if she'll come back to them. The others say she will but in their eyes Ronan sees fear. They don't think she will.

They think she's lost, like Sateda, like his wife, like his friends. Like the ruins of his homeworld piling up around him with mocking taunts of all that has been taken away from him.

Lost.

When the door doesn't open instantly to let him out, Ronan punches it with desperate fury. It doesn't make the door open any faster, but it alleviates some small degree of helpless frustration before he dives out into the hallway and starts to run. Even when there's nowhere to go his instinct is still to run because he spent seven years running and even now he's not sure how to stop. Running is what he knows.

So he runs.

He runs and he runs through the aching hallways of a trembling city, trying to escape from something that can't be escaped. But he stays away from the balconies, away from the open air, because he can't stand to see the ocean. Not without her there, not until she's back and filling the gaps in her city, not until she's back and setting his world once again securely on its axis. She'll come back, he knows it; she'll come back and make everything right again. She will.

At some point Sheppard joins him, running to escape his own demons. Ronan spares him a glance, then accepts his presence without comment. This loss, one too many, one too close, has the other man half-broken with a frantic fear in the back of his eyes. Sheppard has none of Ronan's faith because this comes too near to his soul and cuts too raw. Weir is too real to him, when to Ronan she's something more, more than real, more than human. Ronan has faith. She gave him a place in her city when he was a lost man on the run, she gave him a centre to his world, a point of stability and security, and he returns it by giving her a place in his universe, by giving her his faith. He knows she's alive.

She's too much the ocean to die.

He blinks back the memory of the stricken look in Teyla's eyes, the disbelieving confusion on McKay's face, and runs faster. Weir's dreams, Weir's ideals, have shaped Atlantis, her personality has been beaten into the very walls, and her loss tears at the heart of them, all the more brutal and damaging for being unexpected. It's the same shock and uncertainty they felt when they lost Beckett because she was supposed to be safe, she was supposed to be protected. She stays on Atlantis while they go out into the line of fire and she is supposed to be safe, so why is it she's gone when they're still here? It's too impossible – they saved Atlantis, they brought her back to life... so why is she gone?

She'll come back, though; Ronan knows she will.

But the others don't have his faith. Sheppard running beside him, pushing desperately beyond his strength as if it will let him forget, doesn't have Ronan's faith, has nothing but the gaping loss of the one who bound them all together. Ronan looks at him again and opens his mouth, but closes it without saying anything. He doesn't have any words for him, so he doesn't give him any. There's nothing he can offer: she is the one who knows words, the one who can shape them to her own will with the implacable power of the ocean shaping its coastline. Ronan is a poor substitute for that.

So he doesn't speak, he just runs. He runs, and every footfall is one of the words he can't find, every pounding footstep is a prayer to the goddess of the ocean, to the soul of Atlantis, to the Ancestors themselves. A fervent, wordless prayer for the safe return of the one he has faith in.

Ronan runs, because it's the only way he knows how to pray.

She'll come back.

She has to.

Fin