After a moment’s pause, he felt it was incredibly important to say, "I don’t actually even believe in marriage."

"What, that it exists?" Ronon said, raising his eyebrows.

"No, that it– What’s the point of legally binding someone to be with you if they don’t want to be with you? How fulfilling can extorting the services of your ostensible loved one possibly be?"

Ronon’s eyebrows went up the next degree. "How’d we get to extortion?"

"You know," Rodney said, making a singularly inexpressive gesture in the air. "When you get to that point where it’s – over, where for all intents and purposes it’s over, but you end up staying because you’re married, and there’s a mortgage and a dog and it’s too much trouble to figure out whose DVDs are whose and how to split up the dinette set. Why do people even want that, why do they want to go to sleep every night next to someone who’d just as soon be somewhere else, if they hadn’t made it too much bother to go? Why can’t people just stay together of their own free will? And then you’d know for sure that they want to stay, until they go, and then you’d know that, too. It just seems more honest that way. Doesn’t it seem more honest?"

Ronon didn’t answer right away. In fact, he didn’t answer at all, but after a minute he said, "Is it going to be like this for long? I’m just wondering."

"Like what?"

"Like.... Okay, it’s been six months– "

"Three."

"– and you don’t trust me. That’s fine. Whatever. But I’m guessing when it’s been a year you won’t trust me, so okay. When does that stop being how things are? Two years, ten years? You gonna die of old age still thinking any minute I’m going to get sick of feeding you mashed carrots and walk out on you?"

He didn’t know what to say to that. Two years, ten years, old age? How in the hell was he supposed to know how things would be then, when he’d never even thought about.... He’d never had any idea Ronon was thinking about it, certainly. "You’re making plans to feed me mashed carrots?" he said in a small voice.

Ronon shrugged. "I like feeding you," he said indulgently. "You said don’t stop; I said I don’t want to stop. What else do you want me to say?"

"But how can you– ? You can’t really know. You can’t know how you’ll feel in the future, nobody knows the future. It’s inherently impossible to promise anyone you’ll – feel any one way about them forever, so all you can do is promise to owe them forever, and that’s not what– That’s what I don’t understand. I don’t understand that part. Why you’d want to hold that over somebody, why you’d want them under terms like that."

"I guess it doesn’t really make sense," Ronon said casually, as if that part didn’t matter very much, as if that weren’t

It was easy to put his hand in Ronon’s. He had a feeling that two days ago, it would have been impossible. Rodney looked down at their hands and thought that Ronon was right, that there was no way to make sense out of something like this, absolutely none. It felt good, though, warm against his scabbed-over palm, not quite pain. "Everybody

"Everyone except you, right?" Ronon said, but he said it fondly.

Rodney almost couldn’t hear himself at all now, over the dull roar of blood in his ears, the low-grade rebellion of his nervous system, but he was fairly sure that he said, "No, including me. At the time I said it...it felt like something I could do."

"You could do it. If you wanted to, you could."