Fic: The Field Trip (a Grandview story) Rated G
Title: The field trip
Series: Grandview
Rating: G
Word count: 2,644
Disclaimer: Sadly, neither Stargate Atlantis nor her characters belong to me. If they did the show would never have been canceled.
Summary: Nathan picked up a rectangle and looked at it with his brow furrowed in a purely John Sheppard fashion before looking up at Rodney and asking “yellow?”
Rodney hit the snooze button and tried for another fifteen minutes, but Nathan’s cries through the baby monitor weren’t going to let that happen.
“You get ready,” John said as he sat up, “I’ll get Nathan dressed.”
Rodney grumbled as he turned off the alarm clock and got off the bed. Taking Nathan on his field trip had seemed like such a good parent thing to do last night, but this morning it was hard to get the images of a museum full of screaming kids and their idiot parents out of his mind. He was fairly sure that any parent smart enough to send their kid to Brilliant minds was far from an idiot, but he couldn’t say anything about the other kids whose parents were taking them to the museum today, or the kids from other daycares or schools that were taking the same field trip at the same time.
Rodney showered and dressed in jeans and a green long sleeved pull over. He went into the nursery and found Nathan crawling around the floor still in his pajamas and John sitting on the rocking chair.
“I thought you said you were going to get him ready,” Rodney said.
“I tried. He decided sometime during the night that it would be a good idea to not like me.”
“What?” Rodney asked confused.
“Watch,” John said and got off the chair. “Come on Nath,” he said and bent to pick up Nathan.
“No! No duhduh bad!” the boy shrieked and began batting his hands in John’s direction.
“See,” John said, and Rodney could tell that he was just on this side of tears.
Rodney sighed and walked over to John. “He doesn’t hate you,” he told him and ran his hand gently up and down John’s back. “He’s just having one of those days. He’s almost 15 months old; he was bound to have a bad day eventually.”
“But it makes me feel bad. He doesn’t even want me to touch him; it was all I could do to get him out of the bed.”
“I know, but it’ll be fine,” Rodney said as he gently led John toward the door. “I’ll take him on his field trip, he’ll have a good time and by the time we get home, he’ll have forgotten whatever it is that’s bothering him right now. You go lie down and get some rest. Don’t take this wrong, but you look terrible, go to bed.”
“It’s so nice to have a loving husband that tells you when you look like shit.” John spat and left the room.
Rodney followed him, closing the door to Nathan’s room behind him and found John lying on the bed wrapped up in the blanket.
“One of those days?” Rodney asked.
“Rodney, just go get Nathan ready, you don’t want to be late,” John replied without turning to face him.
“You’ll be alright here alone today?”
This time John did turn. “Yes, Rodney, I’ll be fine don’t call Ronon or Sam or anyone else. I’m just going to lie here and sleep, then I might fix a grilled cheese sandwich later and maybe I’ll drink some juice. Should I call you every half hour just to let you know I’m alive?”
Rodney inhaled deeply and remembered Carson telling him to let John’s moods pass and to be supportive, but that was easier said than done.
“Only if you think that’s necessary, although I trust you to not do anything that would cause your untimely death, not to mention the death of our unborn child.”
Once again, Rodney’s natural instinct for snarky remarks won over his ability to be supportive. That was something he was going to have to get a handle on, at least for the duration of John’s moody months.
John glared daggers at Rodney, “Go get our son ready for his field trip,” he ground out through clenched teeth.
Rodney sighed, rubbed his forehead and thought about apologizing for a split second before he realized that saying another word, no matter what the word was, would make things worse. Instead, he nodded and left the room.
~*~
Rodney carried Nathan in one arm and pulled the stroller along behind him with the other and the diaper bag was draped over one shoulder. He followed the line of other parents, teachers and children into the museum.
The director signed in the group and brought field trip stickers to all the teachers and parents. Rodney stuck one of the stickers on his shirt and the other on Nathan’s back.
“Why’d you put it on his back?” One of the other parents asked him.
“So he can’t rip it off and eat it,” Rodney replied in a tone that hopefully told the woman that she should have already known that.
“Oh that’s genius,” She replied happily and immediately took the sticker off the front of her daughter’s shirt and stuck it on the back.
“Of course it is,” Rodney replied as the woman started spreading the idea around to the other parents. The sound of peeling stickers and patting on backs was nearly loud enough to give Rodney a headache and his hope that Brilliant Minds parents were a smarter bunch had gone out the door.
The director of Brilliant minds had told them that each age group could go their own way, there was no reason to have an entire school going to the same places, she also asked that the parents stay with their child’s class as part of being a volunteer parent was to assist the teachers with the class and not just their child, and that they were all to meet in the cafeteria at noon for lunch.
Rodney quickly realized that the children in Nathan’s class were quickly gaining ground on their parents’ intelligence.
The woman who had decided that Rodney was a genius for no other reason than because he stuck Nathan’s field trip sticker on his back rather than his chest, had decided that the two of them were best friends and was a constant buzzing in his ear. He was doing his best to be polite, he thought of it as an exercise in being supportive, but the woman had questions about everything they passed, which wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she was the kind of person who had a personal story to go hand in hand with Rodney’s answers to her questions. She asked about dinosaur bones, and although that wasn’t one of Rodney’s specialties, he knew something of everything, and the woman went into the story of her seven year old son finding the skeleton of some dead animal in the back yard of the house they just moved into.
Rodney had never been happier to hear his cell phone ring.
“Excuse me,” he said and flipped the phone open. “Sheppard,” he said.
“It’s me, Rodney.”
“Oh, John, how you feeling?”
“Better, don’t you check your caller ID?”
“Not this time, I just needed to get the phone to my head. I didn’t care who it was.”
“Having fun on the field trip?”
“Oh loads. Nathan, along with half the class, is asleep. Taking a bunch of one year olds to the museum was a stupid idea. This isn’t about them; it’s about the teachers wanting to get out of that building. Not that I blame them, but that’s what weekends are for.”
“Learning anything?”
“You’re so funny. No I’m not learning anything besides how stupid the rest of the world is. And the children that are learning from these exhibits are learning the wrong thing. I don’t think I’ve seen one exhibit that had it completely right.”
“You didn’t complain this much when you and I took Nathan to the museum.”
“That’s because I wasn’t paying attention. I was watching you and him. You had on those-”
“Rodney, you’re in the presence of children and innocent ears, let’s keep it at a G rating.”
Rodney chuckled. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said this morning, about you and the baby.”
“Don’t apologize, Rodney, I was an ass. I deserved it.”
“No, but I will agree to you being an-”
“Rodney!”
“I wasn’t going to say it.”
“Sure. Look, I just wanted to call and check in. Have a good time.”
“Alright.”
“See you when you get home.”
“Okay.”
Rodney hung up the phone and stuck it in his pocket.
“Was that your wife?” The woman asked.
Rodney had thought that every parent in the building knew that he and John were married, that Nathan had two fathers.
“No, that was my husband.”
The woman’s eyes grew to the size of saucers. “Oh right,” she said, “I forgot about Nathan’s parents being both men. Not that I have a problem with that, it’s just that… well you’re such a catch.”
“Yup,” Rodney replied, cutting her off before she finished tying her own noose. “And John caught me.”
He pushed Nathan’s stroller a bit faster, getting away from the annoying woman while she was apparently dumbfounded.
Everything seemed a bit less annoying now that he’d been able to apologize to John. Having left the house with his last words being nasty had been preying on Rodney’s mind and he hadn’t even realized it until he’d smoothed things over. He also realized, now that he didn’t have to think about John being mad at him, or having his feelings hurt all day long, that most of the Brilliant Minds parents were actually rather intelligent.
After lunch, they made their way to the planetarium. This had been the part Rodney had been dreading since he’d gotten back full use of his brain after the phone call. This was about space, about stars and planets and galaxies and these were major parts of Rodney’s field of expertise. He didn’t want to be the parent that stood up in front of the class and corrected the lecturer, even though Nathan’s class was a room full of one year olds.
Rodney sighed as he walked through the door and took the next seat in the second row. He sat in the chair with Nathan on his lap and did his best to ignore the guy standing in the middle of the room with the red light pointer. He thought back to all the nights that he and John lay on a blanket in the backyard with Nathan either between them or lying on one of their chests as they pointed to the different constellations and told him their names.
~ “See Nathan,” Rodney had said once, “That’s Ursa Major, the Great Bear. And that over there is her son, Ursa Minor, the lesser bear.”
“And that guy there,” John added, “is named Orion, the Hunter. He also happens to be the guy that helped Uncle Daniel figure out the Stargate, so we give him two thumbs up when we see him, because without him, there would be no you.” ~
“Tancer.”
Rodney was pulled out of his mind by Nathan’s voice.
“Dada, tancer.” Nathan insisted and pointed up.
“Who said that?” The instructor asked, and Rodney sat forward.
“Nathan Sheppard, boy genius,” Nathan’s teacher spoke and pointed in their direction.
“He knows the constellations?” The guy asked.
“He knows everything,” Rodney said.
“Okay Nathan Sheppard, what about this one?” He pushed a button and the image on the ceiling shifted to another constellation.
Nathan looked up at the ceiling and was silent for a moment before throwing his arms up with his thumbs stuck up and confidently saying “Ryan.”
“Kid’s good.” The guy said.
“Of course he is,” Rodney stated proudly and kissed the top of Nathan’s head.
After the planetarium, they went over to the play area to let the kids play for the last hour of their field trip.
Rodney let Nathan take the lead and followed him wherever he wanted to go. Nathan went over to the sorting box and pulled all the blocks to him.
Rodney sat beside him and watched.
Nathan picked up an orange square and threw it into the orange box “Orange,” he stated before picking up a red circle and doing the same to it, saying its color.
Nathan picked up a rectangle and looked at it with his brow furrowed in a purely John Sheppard fashion before looking up at Rodney and asking “yellow?”
Rodney smiled and nodded “Mmm hmm,” and watched as Nathan threw it into the yellow bin.
“You and your husband have done an amazing job with Nathan.” The annoying woman said and Rodney looked up at her.
“Thank you. We knew from day one that he was going to be smart and we decided we wouldn’t let his mind go to waste.”
“Well it hasn’t. What do you and your husband do?”
“I work for the government and John’s in the air force.”
“ To have a kid as smart as Nathan you have to be pretty brilliant.”
Rodney nodded, “we are. I’m an astrophysicist and John majored in applied mathematics.”
“And he’s in the military? No offence but, what a waste of a brilliant mind.”
“No, he loves to fly. Trust me, he’s not being wasted.” Rodney smiled and turned back to Nathan who was having trouble with another yellow shape.
“We’re going to have to work on yellow buddy,” he said.
~*~
It had been two months since Rodney had walked into a house that smelled of cooking food, but today the kitchen was alive with the sounds and smells of the old John.
There were steaks sizzling on the stove, carrots boiling on the back burner and mashed potatoes and gravy sitting covered on the counter. The iced tea machine had just finished brewing a pitcher of the decaffeinated tea John had switched to for the pregnancy and the coffee pot had just finished brewing a pot of fresh coffee, no doubt made perfectly the way Rodney liked it.
Nathan was snoring on Rodney’s shoulder as he carried him into the dining room and laid him in the playpen.
He returned to the kitchen and pulled John to him.
“Feeling better?” He asked and kissed John on the mouth.
“Much better. I haven’t felt this good in weeks! I’m not even the least bit nauseated, but I’m not going to talk about it anymore than that because I don’t want to jinx it. How’d the field trip go?”
“Oh, Nathan blew them all away with his sheer genius in the planetarium.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah, and you’ll be glad to know that he gave Orion two thumbs up.”
John nodded and turned around and Rodney wondered what he’d said.
“So he thought of me while he was on the field trip,” John said and Rodney could tell that once again, John was just on this side of tears. Carson had said he had some emotional things to look forward to, but Rodney had no idea it would be this crazy.
“Of course he did, John, he adores you.”
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him not wanting anything to do with me this morning. I have no idea what happened.”
“John,” Rodney said and pulled him a little tighter, feeling the slight belly pressing against his, “he’s a baby. Babies do weird unexplainable things. Don’t let that get to you. It doesn’t matter how he acts, at the end of the day, I’m the bath daddy and the story daddy, but you’re the daddy he wants to tuck him in, you’re the daddy he wants to play with before bed. You’re his hero, John, don’t let his weird moments make you forget that you’re the thing he loves most in the world.”
Rodney smiled and kissed John’s wet cheeks, he pulled away and patted John’s belly.
John sighed and wiped away the tears left on his cheeks. “Thanks, Rodney,” he said.
TBC…