A/N: Firstly, I must apologize to my loyal readers. I made the discovery rather belatedly that I am relatively poor at writing epilogues. I have lost count of the amount of hours I have spent working on the following few short paragraphs – most of which I am still less than happy with. However, for the sake of rounding off a story that I had a lot of fun writing I will go ahead and post the final section to Ronon and Sara's journey. The POV is solely Sara's, but I have done my best to give Ronon voice in it also.
Thank you to those of you who are still reading! If the epilogue does not scare you away, I still have a sequel in mind that I may work on in the future.
Sara POV
Almost seven months after I first discovered I was pregnant I gave birth in the Tarus hospital to our baby daughter. We named her Natara Sateda – Natara for no other reason than we both liked the sound of it, and Sateda in memory of a heritage that we one day planned to tell her about. Right from the start Natara was the image of her father in tiny feminine form. Her eyes were the exact same shade of green, and her olive skin promised to turn a similar deep brown when exposed to the sun. My heart was lost to her immediately – as was Ronon's. He showered his daughter with such uninhibited adoration that even I was taken by surprise. There was something about seeing my gruff, 6tf 4" warrior lover cradle his tiny daughter, and laugh softly as she curled her toes or waved her arms, that never failed to bring a lump to my chest. He would gaze down at her with a mixture of pride and awe, while beneath it all burned such a fierce protectiveness that I knew if I needed to close my eyes and take a rest then I could do so and no harm would come to her. Perhaps it was because of this that I healed so quickly from the birth. Whatever the reason, we resumed our lovemaking earlier than expected and the passion that burned between us was stronger than ever.
Erik continued to lead Tarus in the war against the wraith. The men from Earth proved to be useful additions to our military numbers and due to their presence we were able to bring about a number of wraith fatalities in a relatively short amount of time. My brother became a father again when, five months before Natara was born, Isobel gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Unlike her dark haired mother and older brother, Summer – named after my own mother and the woman who had raised Erik as he own – inherited the Thorn blond hair and fair skin. Erik could not have been more smitten.
Marcus did not run short of feminine attention. With his good looks and position in the Tarus military, his name was associated with a number of attractive women on Tarus – and a couple on Atlantis as well. Sadly, none of them seemed to hold his interest for long. I suspected he still had feelings for me, but if I was right then he did well to hide them as he kept to his word and did not mention them to me again.
The existence of the portal between Tarus and Atlantis was kept secret from non-military personal. To aid security, travel between the two worlds was restricted to a select few people from either side. Due to the large number of ZPMs available, trips were not limited to necessity only and Colonel Sheppard – or John as I had begun to call him – often arrived in the morning to work out with Ronon, and if Ronon was nowhere to be found then the chances were good he was somewhere on Atlantis with John and his team.
I still woke to the occasional nightmare of the time I spent being hunted by the wraith. I would curl myself into Ronon's sleeping form next to me and wait for my heart rate to return to normal and the clamminess to leave my skin. Sometimes, if my distress was loud enough to have disturbed him, he would turn to me and we would make love together in the darkness. Although I guessed his own years in exile to be darker and more harrowing than my own, he did not appear to suffer the lingering side effects that I did. I asked him once how he managed so well, and he rolled over in bed and kissed me gently on the lips. I remember the past, he told me, but you and Natara give me reason not to live in it. After everything we had been through it seemed like a good way to look at things. Furthermore, it made me realize that as much as I was his – heart, mind and body – somewhere along the way he had also become mine. He was my lover, my companion, my protector and the father of my daughter. As long as I was with him, I could let go of the past and look forward to the time that he, Natara and I had yet to spend together.