Nekai was already shaking his head. “Absurd,” he declared. “There are no noncombatants. Not anymore.”
“There are thousands of them!” Ronon insisted. “There are whole worlds who want nothing to do with the Wraith. Who want nothing to do with any of us! They only want to be left alone. How can you even think of them as combatants?”
“They may say they’re not involved now,” Nekai answered, “but it never lasts. The Wraith show up and tell them ‘hand over the Runners or die,’ and they turn on us in a heartbeat. They truss us up and offer us as gifts before the Wraith say a word, in the hopes it’ll appease their masters.” His mouth twisted into an ugly grimace. “They’ve long since chosen sides, and they picked the Wraith. That makes them as bad as Wraith themselves.”
“Can you really blame them for trying to save their own lives and their own families?” Ronon asked. “Wouldn’t you, if you were in their shoes? That’s not the same as fighting you. They’re innocents who’re being used.”
“No one’s innocent,” Nekai insisted. “And everyone turns on you, sooner of later.” His eyes were stone-hard as they skewered Ronon with a sharp gaze. “You did.”
“You attacked us first.” Ronon pointed out. “We wouldn’t even be here otherwise. You lured us in with that shuttle decoy, and then damaged our ship so we had no choice but to land here. If you hadn’t we’d never have known you were out here.”
Nekai shook his head. “I’m not talking about here and how,” he said, dismissing his own recent actions with a wave of his hand — the same hand holding the pistol, Ronon noted as its barrel waved disconcertingly close to his face. “I’m talking about when you left. You turned on me!”
“You were wrong!” Ronon shouted down at him. “You slaughtered people who wanted nothing but to help. They were defenseless, and kind, and you butchered them!”
“It was my call!” Nekai shouted back. “I was in command. And you disobeyed.”
“They weren’t a threat.” Ronon insisted.
“I don’t care if you thought they were or not,” Nekai argued. “I gave you an order, and you didn’t carry it out. We were at war and you rebelled.”
“It wasn’t war!” Ronon bellowed. “They weren’t our enemy! They were just people, people you murdered. That doesn’t make you a soldier or a hunter — it makes you a killer!”
“And you were too good for that, I suppose!” Nekai screamed at him. His face was completely red now, and Ronon could see the veins bulging out on his forehead and along his neck.
“Yes, I was!” Ronon replied, his voice hoarse. “And I thought you were too. Too bad you proved me wrong.”
“I did what I had to do!” Nekai answered. “It was us or them, and I chose us.”
“So did I,” Ronon said, his anger starting to drain away. “I just wasn’t willing to turn into them in order to do it.” He saw his old mentor stiffen as the implication hit home. There could be no doubt which “them” Ronon had been referring to.
“You might as well have,” Nekai responded after a moment. “You walked away from us, from your team, from your friends. From me. You left us behind.”
“Only because you gave me no choice,” Ronon reminded him. “It was leave or die, as I recall. And I was in no mood to die.” He stared at the man in front of him, the man who had taught him so much, the man who had given him a reason to live. “But I never truly left.”
“Yes, you did.” Nekai’s answer was filled with bitterness. “And when you did, you went from being one of us to being one of them.”
“If that was true,” Ronon told him, “why didn’t I hunt you like the Wraith did? Why didn’t I try to find you and kill you? I could have — I knew how you thought, how you fought, how you hid. Even if you abandoned the base once I left” — he could tell by the way the other man looked away that they had — “I could have figured out where you’d gone or at least narrowed it down enough to locate you if I searched hard enough.” He’d begun swaying from the force of his exclamations, and now he stilled himself so those swings slowed and gentled and finally stopped, leaving him to lock gazes with his old friend. “But I never did,” he said. “In all those years, I never once came after you. I didn’t agree with what you were doing but I left you alone.”
“I left you alone, too,” Nekai replied quietly. “Do you think I didn’t know how dangerous you were? I probably should have gone after you and killed you, just in case you turned on us. But I didn’t. And I could have found you easily enough — I still had my tracking monitor, and you still had a device in your back.” He shook his head. “But I didn’t. I left you alone. I didn’t think you’d ever turn on me, on us. I kept tabs on you from time to time, but you never came after us so I never went after you either.” He looked down at the pistol in his hand, studying it as if it were new to him somehow. “When your device disappeared, I thought you were dead.”
“Or that I’d figured out you were lying about the devices and the explosives,” Ronon accused, “and I’d somehow managed to remove mine.” He tried to flex his hands, though his fingers were tingling and going numb. “You must have heard the rumors that I was still alive, or that some Runner was, anyway. I know you did. The others had.”
“I heard them,” Nekai admitted. “And a part of me wanted to believe them. I liked the idea that you might have escaped your fate, stopped Running, found a new life.” The scowl returned and his voice grew harsh once more. “But I had to think you were dead. And the others had to think that, too. If they thought there was a chance they could survive on their own — if they knew someone else had done it, that you’d done it — they’d have started considering leaving themselves. They’d stop thinking as a team and they’d become separate people again. I couldn’t risk that.” He glared up at Ronon. “And neither could they. None of them would have survived on their own.”
“Why not?” Ronon asked. “I did. For five years. Until I found friends.”
“Or masters,” Nekai sneered.
“Friends,” Ronon repeated sharply. “No one forced me to do anything. I chose to go with them.” He smiled, thinking back on all the adventures he’d had with Sheppard and Teyla and the rest — yes, even with Rodney. “They’ve helped me, Nekai. The way you did once, but without the paranoia and the secrecy. They forge alliances with others instead of seeing everyone as an enemy.”
“So now you do what they want, and consider yourself lucky,” Nekai retorted.
“No, I do what I want and our interests coincide,” Ronon corrected. “They understand that I have my own goals, and sometimes we clash but they’re always willing to help me in the end.” He studied the Retemite glowering up at him. “I killed the one who tagged me, Nekai. He caught me again, tagged me with another tracking device, and then dropped me on my own homeworld so he could hunt me. And I killed him. And a whole lot of others. But I didn’t do it alone. My friends came to find me, and they helped me.” He thought back to that final showdown with the Wraith commander, and how he would have died if Beckett hadn’t killed the Wraith with the Jumper’s guns. “I couldn’t have done it without them.”
“You could have done it with us,” Nekai suggested.
“Maybe so.”
“We were a good team, once.”
Ronon smiled, remembering. “We were a great team.”
“We could be again.” Nekai had been holding his pistol the entire time, but now he holstered it. “Come back with me,” he urged. “Come back to the V’rdai. It’s where you belong — tracking device or not, you’re still a Runner. You’re still a hunter. Come back and we can hunt together again!”
It was tempting. Ronon admired and trusted Sheppard, and liked Teyla — he even admired Rodney for his mind if nothing else. But they weren’t like him. They never had been. They couldn’t understand what he’d been through and they didn’t have the same sort of skills he did. Sheppard was pretty good in a fight, and Teyla could hold her own as well, but neither of them were hunters. To be with the V’rdai again meant living and working with the only people who really knew what it was like to be a Runner. And it meant being with other hunters, and being able to set traps and ambush prey together without a single word.