Growing Pains
Title: Growing Pains, Part 1/? [A late entry for the sga_flashfic dating challenge, since I'm apparently incapable of making deadlines]
Pairing: McShep
Warnings: AU, Kid!fic, and probably a bit saccharine, but not Mpreg. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Rating: G in this bit (R, eventually, if everyone cooperates)
Words: ~2500, give or take some words
Rodney McKay hated storytime. The children's librarian in Colorado Springs had a high, squeaky voice that rasped his nerves like sandpaper. The children's section of the library was thoroughly depressing -- all fluorescent lights and cartoon murals and tiny embarrassing plastic chairs. Not that the chairs mattered, since he never got to sit in them; Maggie always insisted that he sit on the floor, where she could use him as her own personal armchair. Except he was pretty sure that armchairs didn't mind pointy little elbows to the ribs.
"Are you sure you want to go?" he asked hopefully for the tenth time, as she dragged him by the hand towards the children's section of the library. "We could find another book, we could find ten other books --"
"I told you," she said impatiently. "Today the story is about dinosaurs. And pirates."
"Dinosaurs and pirates? Since when do you like dinosaurs and pirates?" Rodney asked, honestly baffled. Last week it had been astronauts; the week before, ballerinas. (Truthfully, he'd pushed the astronauts in the hopes that his daughter would drop the ballerina fixation. God, the recitals, not to mention the inevitable anorexia and heartbreak.)
"Since Courtney told me about them," she said -- which was bizarre, because he was pretty sure they didn't know anyone named Courtney -- and broke into a run at the sight of the storytime rug. Why there had to be a storytime rug, he had no idea, but it was round and braided out of God-knew-what and dusty. Everyone had to be sitting within its borders before the story could begin. And dammit, it was nearly already full.
"Sorry, sorry," he muttered, squeezing into the last available space, wincing as his knees audibly creaked. The dark-haired guy next to him looked lazily amused, and Rodney rolled his eyes. They couldn't all be weekend warriors. He looked around for Maggie and spotted her legs, sticking out of the reading cubby that doubled as Winnie-the-Pooh's house. "Maggie, c'mon," he called, because the children's librarian was settling down into her storytelling seat on the storytelling rug and putting on her storytelling hat. Maybe that was the problem; he read Maggie plenty of stories, but never in an enormous felt jester hat. "Pirates and dinosaurs, remember?"
"Dinosaurs and pirates," she corrected, her voice muffled as she squirmed backwards out of the cubby, her overalls rucking up at the knee.
"Right, of course. Who's that?" he asked, because the parenting books said that you were supposed to ask your children questions about their friends, and he didn't recognize the little girl that had followed Maggie out of the cubby. She looked a bit younger, and her red-orange hair clashed violently with her San Francisco Giants t-shirt.
"Courtney," the dark-haired guy said, and patted the space in front of him. Courtney popped her thumb into her mouth and frowned around it, scuffing her purple sneaker against the carpet. Rodney glanced back and forth between the girl and the man, looking for a family resemblance; they had the same pointed chin and ears, he saw, although their coloring was so different.
Maggie ended the standoff by grabbing Courtney's hand and towing her along behind her, a dinghy caught in the wake of the McKay will. She pushed Courtney towards her father and plopped into Rodney's lap, an awkward bundle of arms and legs.
"Courtney can sit next to us, right?" she asked, her blue eyes hopeful.
"Sure," Rodney said, watching Courtney's father coax her into his lap. She pulled on his sleeve plaintively and pointed to the cubby; he shook his head and gestured towards the librarian, who was giving them all a dirty look.
Rodney rested his chin on Maggie's head -- both comfortable and convenient, he'd found, since it tended to keep her from squirming too much. She was totally engrossed in the story, though, which was something improbable about a little boy who ended up the captain of a pirate ship crewed by dinosaurs. He entertained himself by glancing over occasionally at Courtney and her father. It bothered him that he had no idea how Maggie had met Courtney. In his experience, a five-year-old just didn't have that big of a social circle. He sent Maggie to the Montessori preschool just off base -- maybe Courtney was a new student there. Her father might be military, he supposed, although that hair was certainly non-regulation. Maybe her mother was in the service. The pirate/dinosaur mystery was solved, at least; Courtney was even more engrossed than Maggie, her mouth hanging open with delight. Her father caught Rodney looking and gave Rodney a sly smile and a "kids -- what can you do?" sort of shrug. Rodney just tried to look like he hadn't been looking.
When the story ended Courtney bolted out of her father's lap and back to the cubby. Maggie looked beseechingly at Rodney. "Yes, go," he said, and Maggie whooped and dashed after her.
"Ten minutes, tops!" he shouted after her, and turned to Courtney's dad. "Rodney McKay," he said, extending a hand.
"John Sheppard." He had callused hands and a nice firm grip. "And that must be the famous Maggie."
"Infamous, according to her teacher." Rodney stepped aside for some idiot with a double stroller and glanced over at the cubby; he could just see the girls curled up inside, whispering together. "Are you, ah, new in town?"
Sheppard stretched languidly, shoving his hands into the pockets of his worn jeans. "We moved here two weeks ago -- I just got reassigned to a project in the Mountain."
"Really?" Rodney brightened. "I work there too -- but oh, you probably can't talk about it."
Sheppard smiled. "Nope."
But there turned out to be a lot of things they could talk about -- the terrible Colorado traffic, and the imagination-quashing tragedy that was Dora the Explorer, and how a three-foot child could get on top of a six-foot refrigerator. Sheppard was an easy conversationalist, mostly listening to Rodney vent about the abysmal state of Colorado's educational system, but what he did say suggested that he was bright. Maybe he was another scientist. Rodney was so caught up in the joy of speaking to another adult, one who knew what it was like to find grass stains in the most unlikely places, that he completely forgot the time.
"Daddy?" Maggie pulled on his pants leg. "Don't we have go feed Baxter?"
He glanced at his watch -- it was almost five. "You're right," he said, and swung her up onto his hip with the ease of long practice. Sheppard looked at him curiously. "Baxter is our cat," he explained. "And he's kind of touchy, so if you don't feed him right on time, he likes to --"
"I can imagine," Sheppard interrupted, crouching down to tie Courtney's shoe. She took advantage of the height difference to whisper something in his ear, her little fingers wound in his dark hair. "Well, I don't know," he said. "We'll have to ask Maggie's dad."
"Ask Maggie's dad what?" Rodney asked, shifting Maggie's weight a little. She wrapped her arms around his neck like a monkey, and Rodney had to shift her weight again so he could breathe. Sheppard grinned up at them. "Courtney would like to know," he said, "if Maggie would like to come to our house to play."
"Yes!" Maggie said immediately. "Daddy, can I?"
"Sure," he said, thinking rapidly. He knew he was a suspicious bastard, but he didn't really know Sheppard, other than that he was desperately good looking and had a daughter who could apparently tolerate Maggie's blunt-force approach to friendship. Sheppard could be the sort of parent who left his swimming pool unsecured, or gave little children lemonade. "Or you could come to our house," he said instead. "You could meet Baxter."
Sheppard shrugged. "Hey, that works too." He stood, brushing off the knees of his jeans; Courtney wrapped her arms around his leg, and he brushed a hand absently over her head. "Tuesday afternoon sound good?"
"Sure, we should be around."
Sheppard gave him a brilliant grin. "Then it's a playdate."
***
Rodney found himself oddly distracted at work on Monday. The night before, Maggie had chattered endlessly about Courtney, and how she had lived in Korea, and had ridden a pony twice, and had three pairs of purple shoes.
"And she doesn't have a mommy either," she said blithely, using both hands to spin spaghetti onto her fork.
Rodney blinked. "Doesn't have a -- we've talked about this. Everybody had a mother once." Yours is just holed up in Bali somewhere, smoking pot and sketching water plants, he thought viciously.
Maggie shrugged. "Her mommy blows things up."
"Don't talk with your mouth full," Rodney had chided, because there was no way he'd heard that right.
"Rodney? Rodney. Rodney."
"Yes, what?" he snapped at Zelenka.
The other scientist looked unperturbed. "You have been staring at console for five minutes now. Has it told you its secrets yet?"
Rodney rolled his eyes. "No, of course not."
"Because it hates you," Zelenka said smugly, and Rodney took a deep breath and reminded himself that it was bad form to throttle one's subordinates, and that Carter might actually carry through on her threat to make him work alone in a padded room.
"Yes, it hates me," he said crisply. "It also hates you, Carter, Kavanaugh, and everyone else without the appropriate genetic quirk. Where is O'Neill, anyway? How are we supposed to get any work done without the magic touch of the Chosen One?"
Zelenka flipped through a couple of sheets on his clipboard. "He is... offworld," he said after a moment. "Negotiating a peace deal. He is expected to be gone for some time."
"Well, that's just great," Rodney sighed, and balanced his tablet against the console. It burst into a cacophony of flashing lights and sound, an atonal, alien buzzing that Rodney could feel in his teeth, and he yelped and scrambled away.
Zelenka peered warily over a lab table, his hands clapped protectively over his ears. "What the --"
"I don't know!" Rodney shouted over the din. He should have been more freaked out that he didn't know, he realized vaguely, but it was also such a relief to see that the technology still had some life in it, that they weren't just exhuming its bones. He was almost giddy with it. "Someone with the gene must have walked by the lab!"
Zelenka frowned. "O'Neill has walked by the lab many times!"
"We have to find them!" Rodney yelled, and grabbed a random Ancient object off the "we think it's harmless" shelf. He darted past the still-shrieking console, grabbed Zelenka by the sleeve of his lab coat, and dragged him, protesting, into the hallway.
He looked wildly from side to side -- the hallway to the left was empty, but to the right he spotted two figures in uniform, just rounding the corner. He sprinted after them, skidding on the linoleum and nearly colliding with the shorter of the two.
"Here, touch this," he said breathlessly, and shoved the Ancient object at the airman. The baby-faced man blinked, but brushed a hand over the device -- God bless military conditioning. Rodney was distantly aware of Zelenka next to him, panting slightly, but all his attention was focused on the purple sphere in his hand, which remained maddeningly inert.
"Okay, it's not you," he decided abruptly, and turned the other man.
John Sheppard blinked. "McKay?" he asked, even as he touched a tenative finger to the sphere. It lit up, casting a warm purple glow across Sheppard's startled face, the hallway, Zelenka's crazed Muppet hair, the other nameless airman.
"You have been sent to me by God," Rodney said happily. Sheppard looked alarmed. Zelenka muttered something rapturous in Czech. And the purple sphere made a happy sound and burst messily in Rodney's hand, spraying him and everyone nearby with a jubilantly purple slime. It smelled like lilacs.
***
"But sir," Sheppard said again, trying to catch General Landry's attention. "My assignment --"
The General tapped a finger against the dossier on his desk. "I'm aware of your assignment, Major Sheppard. To work with our xenoaeronautics division on the hybrid battlecruisers --"
"We have dozens of aeronautical engineers," Rodney interrupted, planting both hands on Landry's desk. Landry gave him a look that suggested that he did not appreciate having lilac-scented alien purple slime dripped on his desk blotter, and Rodney snatched his hands away. "What we don't have, at least not consistently, is someone like him."
Sheppard looked mulish, and Rodney could finally see a clear resemblance to his daughter. "You don't even know what I am. I don't even know what I am."
"You have alien DNA," Rodney said bluntly, and rolled his eyes at Sheppard's horrified expression. "Don't look like that -- do you know what I'd do for your genes?"
"I'm afraid to ask," Sheppard said, his face still pale.
"Don't be afraid of me, be afraid of Carson," Rodney informed him. "Because he's going to come after you with a needle the size of --"
"Gentlemen!" General Landry interrupted. "What Dr. Beckett will do is neither here nor there, although I agree," he said to Sheppard, "that he's probably going to want a blood sample." Sheppard nodded uneasily. "What we need to determine now is where your talents will be put to best use."
It was all Rodney could do not to shout "dibs!" "His contribution to the Ancient Tech labs will be invaluable," he said instead. "He's already shown the ability to activate the equipment, regardless of his proximity to it --"
Sheppard leaned forward. "With all due respect, sir, I only uprooted my daughter and moved halfway across the country to work with spaceships --"
"Colorado isn't halfway across the country from California," Rodney objected, and Sheppard shot him a glare that could etch glass. Rodney just shrugged -- he'd hacked Sheppard's file, what there was of it, as part of his routine background check of Maggie's friends and their families.
"You both make excellent points," Landry said evenly, in the way that always made Rodney suspect that what he really wanted was a large glass of scotch. "But I have to look at the reality that we're behind schedule on the Daedaelus class cruisers --"
"But --" Rodney squawked.
"While also weighing the fact that the Ancient Tech lab is hindered by Colonel O'Neill's regrettable tendency to be kidnapped, sucked into other dimensions, or start interplanetary wars," Landry finished. "So Major Sheppard, I'm going to suggest that you spend half your time working with xenoaeronautics, and half with Dr. McKay in Ancient Tech." He leaned back in his chair, looking grimly satisfied. "Any questions?"
TBC
Pairing: McShep
Warnings: AU, Kid!fic, and probably a bit saccharine, but not Mpreg. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Rating: G in this bit (R, eventually, if everyone cooperates)
Words: ~2500, give or take some words
Rodney McKay hated storytime. The children's librarian in Colorado Springs had a high, squeaky voice that rasped his nerves like sandpaper. The children's section of the library was thoroughly depressing -- all fluorescent lights and cartoon murals and tiny embarrassing plastic chairs. Not that the chairs mattered, since he never got to sit in them; Maggie always insisted that he sit on the floor, where she could use him as her own personal armchair. Except he was pretty sure that armchairs didn't mind pointy little elbows to the ribs.
"Are you sure you want to go?" he asked hopefully for the tenth time, as she dragged him by the hand towards the children's section of the library. "We could find another book, we could find ten other books --"
"I told you," she said impatiently. "Today the story is about dinosaurs. And pirates."
"Dinosaurs and pirates? Since when do you like dinosaurs and pirates?" Rodney asked, honestly baffled. Last week it had been astronauts; the week before, ballerinas. (Truthfully, he'd pushed the astronauts in the hopes that his daughter would drop the ballerina fixation. God, the recitals, not to mention the inevitable anorexia and heartbreak.)
"Since Courtney told me about them," she said -- which was bizarre, because he was pretty sure they didn't know anyone named Courtney -- and broke into a run at the sight of the storytime rug. Why there had to be a storytime rug, he had no idea, but it was round and braided out of God-knew-what and dusty. Everyone had to be sitting within its borders before the story could begin. And dammit, it was nearly already full.
"Sorry, sorry," he muttered, squeezing into the last available space, wincing as his knees audibly creaked. The dark-haired guy next to him looked lazily amused, and Rodney rolled his eyes. They couldn't all be weekend warriors. He looked around for Maggie and spotted her legs, sticking out of the reading cubby that doubled as Winnie-the-Pooh's house. "Maggie, c'mon," he called, because the children's librarian was settling down into her storytelling seat on the storytelling rug and putting on her storytelling hat. Maybe that was the problem; he read Maggie plenty of stories, but never in an enormous felt jester hat. "Pirates and dinosaurs, remember?"
"Dinosaurs and pirates," she corrected, her voice muffled as she squirmed backwards out of the cubby, her overalls rucking up at the knee.
"Right, of course. Who's that?" he asked, because the parenting books said that you were supposed to ask your children questions about their friends, and he didn't recognize the little girl that had followed Maggie out of the cubby. She looked a bit younger, and her red-orange hair clashed violently with her San Francisco Giants t-shirt.
"Courtney," the dark-haired guy said, and patted the space in front of him. Courtney popped her thumb into her mouth and frowned around it, scuffing her purple sneaker against the carpet. Rodney glanced back and forth between the girl and the man, looking for a family resemblance; they had the same pointed chin and ears, he saw, although their coloring was so different.
Maggie ended the standoff by grabbing Courtney's hand and towing her along behind her, a dinghy caught in the wake of the McKay will. She pushed Courtney towards her father and plopped into Rodney's lap, an awkward bundle of arms and legs.
"Courtney can sit next to us, right?" she asked, her blue eyes hopeful.
"Sure," Rodney said, watching Courtney's father coax her into his lap. She pulled on his sleeve plaintively and pointed to the cubby; he shook his head and gestured towards the librarian, who was giving them all a dirty look.
Rodney rested his chin on Maggie's head -- both comfortable and convenient, he'd found, since it tended to keep her from squirming too much. She was totally engrossed in the story, though, which was something improbable about a little boy who ended up the captain of a pirate ship crewed by dinosaurs. He entertained himself by glancing over occasionally at Courtney and her father. It bothered him that he had no idea how Maggie had met Courtney. In his experience, a five-year-old just didn't have that big of a social circle. He sent Maggie to the Montessori preschool just off base -- maybe Courtney was a new student there. Her father might be military, he supposed, although that hair was certainly non-regulation. Maybe her mother was in the service. The pirate/dinosaur mystery was solved, at least; Courtney was even more engrossed than Maggie, her mouth hanging open with delight. Her father caught Rodney looking and gave Rodney a sly smile and a "kids -- what can you do?" sort of shrug. Rodney just tried to look like he hadn't been looking.
When the story ended Courtney bolted out of her father's lap and back to the cubby. Maggie looked beseechingly at Rodney. "Yes, go," he said, and Maggie whooped and dashed after her.
"Ten minutes, tops!" he shouted after her, and turned to Courtney's dad. "Rodney McKay," he said, extending a hand.
"John Sheppard." He had callused hands and a nice firm grip. "And that must be the famous Maggie."
"Infamous, according to her teacher." Rodney stepped aside for some idiot with a double stroller and glanced over at the cubby; he could just see the girls curled up inside, whispering together. "Are you, ah, new in town?"
Sheppard stretched languidly, shoving his hands into the pockets of his worn jeans. "We moved here two weeks ago -- I just got reassigned to a project in the Mountain."
"Really?" Rodney brightened. "I work there too -- but oh, you probably can't talk about it."
Sheppard smiled. "Nope."
But there turned out to be a lot of things they could talk about -- the terrible Colorado traffic, and the imagination-quashing tragedy that was Dora the Explorer, and how a three-foot child could get on top of a six-foot refrigerator. Sheppard was an easy conversationalist, mostly listening to Rodney vent about the abysmal state of Colorado's educational system, but what he did say suggested that he was bright. Maybe he was another scientist. Rodney was so caught up in the joy of speaking to another adult, one who knew what it was like to find grass stains in the most unlikely places, that he completely forgot the time.
"Daddy?" Maggie pulled on his pants leg. "Don't we have go feed Baxter?"
He glanced at his watch -- it was almost five. "You're right," he said, and swung her up onto his hip with the ease of long practice. Sheppard looked at him curiously. "Baxter is our cat," he explained. "And he's kind of touchy, so if you don't feed him right on time, he likes to --"
"I can imagine," Sheppard interrupted, crouching down to tie Courtney's shoe. She took advantage of the height difference to whisper something in his ear, her little fingers wound in his dark hair. "Well, I don't know," he said. "We'll have to ask Maggie's dad."
"Ask Maggie's dad what?" Rodney asked, shifting Maggie's weight a little. She wrapped her arms around his neck like a monkey, and Rodney had to shift her weight again so he could breathe. Sheppard grinned up at them. "Courtney would like to know," he said, "if Maggie would like to come to our house to play."
"Yes!" Maggie said immediately. "Daddy, can I?"
"Sure," he said, thinking rapidly. He knew he was a suspicious bastard, but he didn't really know Sheppard, other than that he was desperately good looking and had a daughter who could apparently tolerate Maggie's blunt-force approach to friendship. Sheppard could be the sort of parent who left his swimming pool unsecured, or gave little children lemonade. "Or you could come to our house," he said instead. "You could meet Baxter."
Sheppard shrugged. "Hey, that works too." He stood, brushing off the knees of his jeans; Courtney wrapped her arms around his leg, and he brushed a hand absently over her head. "Tuesday afternoon sound good?"
"Sure, we should be around."
Sheppard gave him a brilliant grin. "Then it's a playdate."
***
Rodney found himself oddly distracted at work on Monday. The night before, Maggie had chattered endlessly about Courtney, and how she had lived in Korea, and had ridden a pony twice, and had three pairs of purple shoes.
"And she doesn't have a mommy either," she said blithely, using both hands to spin spaghetti onto her fork.
Rodney blinked. "Doesn't have a -- we've talked about this. Everybody had a mother once." Yours is just holed up in Bali somewhere, smoking pot and sketching water plants, he thought viciously.
Maggie shrugged. "Her mommy blows things up."
"Don't talk with your mouth full," Rodney had chided, because there was no way he'd heard that right.
"Rodney? Rodney. Rodney."
"Yes, what?" he snapped at Zelenka.
The other scientist looked unperturbed. "You have been staring at console for five minutes now. Has it told you its secrets yet?"
Rodney rolled his eyes. "No, of course not."
"Because it hates you," Zelenka said smugly, and Rodney took a deep breath and reminded himself that it was bad form to throttle one's subordinates, and that Carter might actually carry through on her threat to make him work alone in a padded room.
"Yes, it hates me," he said crisply. "It also hates you, Carter, Kavanaugh, and everyone else without the appropriate genetic quirk. Where is O'Neill, anyway? How are we supposed to get any work done without the magic touch of the Chosen One?"
Zelenka flipped through a couple of sheets on his clipboard. "He is... offworld," he said after a moment. "Negotiating a peace deal. He is expected to be gone for some time."
"Well, that's just great," Rodney sighed, and balanced his tablet against the console. It burst into a cacophony of flashing lights and sound, an atonal, alien buzzing that Rodney could feel in his teeth, and he yelped and scrambled away.
Zelenka peered warily over a lab table, his hands clapped protectively over his ears. "What the --"
"I don't know!" Rodney shouted over the din. He should have been more freaked out that he didn't know, he realized vaguely, but it was also such a relief to see that the technology still had some life in it, that they weren't just exhuming its bones. He was almost giddy with it. "Someone with the gene must have walked by the lab!"
Zelenka frowned. "O'Neill has walked by the lab many times!"
"We have to find them!" Rodney yelled, and grabbed a random Ancient object off the "we think it's harmless" shelf. He darted past the still-shrieking console, grabbed Zelenka by the sleeve of his lab coat, and dragged him, protesting, into the hallway.
He looked wildly from side to side -- the hallway to the left was empty, but to the right he spotted two figures in uniform, just rounding the corner. He sprinted after them, skidding on the linoleum and nearly colliding with the shorter of the two.
"Here, touch this," he said breathlessly, and shoved the Ancient object at the airman. The baby-faced man blinked, but brushed a hand over the device -- God bless military conditioning. Rodney was distantly aware of Zelenka next to him, panting slightly, but all his attention was focused on the purple sphere in his hand, which remained maddeningly inert.
"Okay, it's not you," he decided abruptly, and turned the other man.
John Sheppard blinked. "McKay?" he asked, even as he touched a tenative finger to the sphere. It lit up, casting a warm purple glow across Sheppard's startled face, the hallway, Zelenka's crazed Muppet hair, the other nameless airman.
"You have been sent to me by God," Rodney said happily. Sheppard looked alarmed. Zelenka muttered something rapturous in Czech. And the purple sphere made a happy sound and burst messily in Rodney's hand, spraying him and everyone nearby with a jubilantly purple slime. It smelled like lilacs.
***
"But sir," Sheppard said again, trying to catch General Landry's attention. "My assignment --"
The General tapped a finger against the dossier on his desk. "I'm aware of your assignment, Major Sheppard. To work with our xenoaeronautics division on the hybrid battlecruisers --"
"We have dozens of aeronautical engineers," Rodney interrupted, planting both hands on Landry's desk. Landry gave him a look that suggested that he did not appreciate having lilac-scented alien purple slime dripped on his desk blotter, and Rodney snatched his hands away. "What we don't have, at least not consistently, is someone like him."
Sheppard looked mulish, and Rodney could finally see a clear resemblance to his daughter. "You don't even know what I am. I don't even know what I am."
"You have alien DNA," Rodney said bluntly, and rolled his eyes at Sheppard's horrified expression. "Don't look like that -- do you know what I'd do for your genes?"
"I'm afraid to ask," Sheppard said, his face still pale.
"Don't be afraid of me, be afraid of Carson," Rodney informed him. "Because he's going to come after you with a needle the size of --"
"Gentlemen!" General Landry interrupted. "What Dr. Beckett will do is neither here nor there, although I agree," he said to Sheppard, "that he's probably going to want a blood sample." Sheppard nodded uneasily. "What we need to determine now is where your talents will be put to best use."
It was all Rodney could do not to shout "dibs!" "His contribution to the Ancient Tech labs will be invaluable," he said instead. "He's already shown the ability to activate the equipment, regardless of his proximity to it --"
Sheppard leaned forward. "With all due respect, sir, I only uprooted my daughter and moved halfway across the country to work with spaceships --"
"Colorado isn't halfway across the country from California," Rodney objected, and Sheppard shot him a glare that could etch glass. Rodney just shrugged -- he'd hacked Sheppard's file, what there was of it, as part of his routine background check of Maggie's friends and their families.
"You both make excellent points," Landry said evenly, in the way that always made Rodney suspect that what he really wanted was a large glass of scotch. "But I have to look at the reality that we're behind schedule on the Daedaelus class cruisers --"
"But --" Rodney squawked.
"While also weighing the fact that the Ancient Tech lab is hindered by Colonel O'Neill's regrettable tendency to be kidnapped, sucked into other dimensions, or start interplanetary wars," Landry finished. "So Major Sheppard, I'm going to suggest that you spend half your time working with xenoaeronautics, and half with Dr. McKay in Ancient Tech." He leaned back in his chair, looking grimly satisfied. "Any questions?"
TBC