abicierum (3/3), by thekatcameback & doublehelix20 (R)
Title: abicierum (part three of three)
Authors: thekatcameback & doublehelix20
Rating: A vague R.
Pairings: Sheppard/McKay and O'Neill/Jackson. Spoiler: Also, reference to previous O'Neill/McKay. Twice. In a sexy way.
Spoilers: Vaguely to the end of season four of SGA.
Disclaimer: These characters are owned by neither author, but used solely for entertainment purposes on the internet. Furthermore, one of the authors (guess which) is an actual biologist who studies actual genetics and knows full well that, physiology aside, two paternal genomes wouldn't play nice in the same embryo. Shhh. (Author b argues astutely that historically speaking, stranger things have happened.....?)
Word Count: 15 691 with a bunch of hazy question marks by thekatcameback.
Summary: Rodney McKay is brilliant enough to do this math: One night plus four months, times n for the weight gain, equals one fetus. And onward. Abicierum-- to give up, not to surrender.
Thank you to CJ for the editing and helpfully pointing out things like, "Someone should remind him about Alien." And also to the Sims3, not to lessen the experience, but.... McKay/O'Neill is better than what Rodney McKay the sim thinks is romantic? And also, from thekatcameback, thank you to her lovely coauthor. Because god knows this wouldn't happen without you, man. End acceptance speech.
Previously on abicierum: Part I and Part II
The pace of Rodney's life on the trip doesn't seem to slow once they return to Atlantis. He has a folder on his desktop, nestled between shortcuts to primary systems and complex equations, entitled "personal keep out zelenka," tracks every record of O'Neill and Carson, and makes a picture of Carson gnawing at the arm of a teddy bear his screensaver. He saves the universe frequently and makes time to send video messages to Carson detailing his successes. His family sized, newly-claimed room is gradually rearranged with Johnny Cash between his diplomas on the wall and an awkward team shot taken by an enterprising photographer at one of the many Washington memorials given a place of honor above his desk. They're all there, all eating (even Teyla, although she manages to make even scarfing cotton candy look graceful), and for some reason, Carson is balanced between Jackson, who's trying to dab at his hands with a cloth, and John, who has both arms around Carson's middle like he's trying to pull him back from an accident rather than cradle a child. Rodney looks at the picture every time he goes out, and then again before bed each night.
John calls it a family photo, and is only partially kidding.
Carson is set to turn one on June 17. Rodney books his vacation nine months in advance, three weeks (although the length of time away from Atlantis makes him feel a little sick, he wants to take Carson to see Jeannie and possibly to Disneyland) in June. Defensively, he adds, "It's not like I don't have several years of time off saved up, thank you very much."
No one is arguing, technically. "We will be fine without you, Rodney," Zelenka offers. Rodney has his bags packed a month in advance, and two days before he's busy pouring over a map of Disneyland, trying to figure out the best way to go on the Star Wars ride at dusk without missing the magical fantasy land parade. His comm clicks to life.
"No, no, no, no, no," Rodney says, feels a pang that it sounds like Carson's last recording. But-- it's a spike in the energy recording around MX-968, a planet they'd previously visited with no abnormalities to speak of. It is dangerously distant from the hub of Atlantis-friendly planets. "I have one day," he says. "And then it can wait."
MX-968 doesn't wait, just imprisons them and leaves them in an eerie, dense silence. Rodney is certain that there's an abundance of pollen in the air, spends his time hacking miserably into a fistful of Kleenex and trying to jury-rig the sheets from the bed into a pulley system. When Sheppard's watch bleeps twice, interrupting what is almost a brilliant idea, Rodney snaps, "Great, now we're stuck here forever."
John silences the alarm. "Twenty-one-twelve," he offers. "Happy birthday, Carson."
And Rodney hadn't exactly forgotten, because that would make him something close to the worst parent in the entire galaxy, but at the same time he definitely had. There's the comfort of knowing that Carson probably doesn't entirely understand what's happened, and that O'Neill and Jackson probably know exactly what command knows. When Sergeant Dreger comes barging in, guns blazing to save the day and earn herself a place in Sheppard's military-soft-core-porn group, he doesn't even look up.
Technically, it's because his blood sugar had crashed that he spent the remainder of the week (even when his health returned, because Keller "didn't like how he looked," what kind of medical evaluation was that?) in the sickbay. He gets a message from O'Neill that's just a picture of Carson on the Dumbo ride, throws a fit, and buries himself in his work for three weeks.
"Would you ever forget your kid's birthday?" he asks Reider over their joint rewiring effort.
"Nope," Reider says. Rodney transfers him to data entry and sends seven large, harmless Ancient toys from a conveniently located nursery on the next Daedalus trip. He reschedules for January, even though the cold will be miserable and John will probably whine. It isn't the same.
Carson is fifteen months old, walking steadily, speaking in full sentences, throwing tantrums that always remind Jack of McKay, and being generally demanding every minute of every day when Jack decides he needs to meet with Landry and the department heads. It's coming up on budget meetings, and he likes to make everyone justify their spending to him before he has to go do it in committee.
The fact that Daniel's been off-world for nearly three weeks, and that his and Carson's trip will coincide with SG-1's return is entirely by accident.
There's a problem, of course, and the team is a couple days late, so Jack holds his meetings, drags them out, hangs around and makes the 'Gate teams nervous, annoys Landry, starts to teach Carson to swim, but finally SG-1 has cleared up their cultural misunderstanding and is on the way home.
Jack takes Carson down to Daniel's office to wait out debriefings and medical checkups, amusing him with monster stories, stifling laughter as the boy acts out all the gruesome deaths by writhing on the floor. Jack's pretty sure he should be worried about the kid's love of all things gory, but Rodney isn't, so he doesn't let it bother him. Daniel comes in during a particularly dramatic act, letting his bag slip to the floor and tossing his hat on top of it, and Jack is pretty sure he's not misreading the fond expression on Daniel's face.
Carson notices when he's done not-breathing, and he bounces to his feet, squealing, "Dan-i-yel!" and runs into Daniel's legs.
"Oof," Daniel says eloquently, ruffling Carson's hair and raising his eyebrows as Jack rises and wanders over, sliding his arms over Daniel's shoulders and kissing him with the kid still sandwiched between them.
He doesn't say anything, no welcome home, not how he much missed Daniel, but he doesn't really have to. Neither of them notice Carson squirming away, and when Jack laces his fingers into Daniel's hair and closes his eyes, he misses the toddler wobbling into the hallway.
Daniel's tugging Jack closer, kissing him with purpose, and it's only because they have to actually breathe that he breaks away and realizes. "Shit, Cars," he mutters, moving to check the other side of Daniel's desk, and then the hallway.
He's there, of course, and Jack breathes out a sigh of relief and starts to collect the boy, scold him for wandering off, but the instant he registers what Carson's doing, he can't do anything but freeze. It's just a pile of equipment dumped outside a lab door, and it's just a zat, shiny and alluring to a toddler, but Jack can't see that. All he can see is Charlie's lifeless body, all he can hear is that echoing gunshot
Daniel spares Jack a worried glance, but he doesn't pause to check on him, just scoops up Carson and gently extracts the weapon from his small hand. "Not a toy, buddy," he admonishes, and Carson forgets the gun in favor of tickling. "Jack--" Daniel starts, shifting the child to his hip, but O'Neill doesn't seem to hear him. He just whirls, and while his pace isn't all that fast, he's fleeing nonetheless.
"Daddy?" Carson asks doubtfully, and Daniel presses an absent kiss to his head.
"He's just feeling sick. It's ok," Daniel adds, though he suspects it isn't. Still, he forces a smile for the boy and bounces him. "Want to go to see Teal'c?"
Daniel finds Jack in the SG-1 locker room some time later, having settled Carson with the rest of the team eating pudding in the commissary. "It's ok," he starts cautiously. "It was just..." But he trails off, because it really was a close thing, and there's no way to pretend otherwise, even if Carson could only have stunned himself with the weapon.
"It was me," Jack says dully, staring down at his hands. He's shaking, has already thrown up twice. "I wasn't watching him. I wasn't paying enough attention, just like--"
Daniel kneels, covering Jack's cold, clammy hands with his own, and leans forward. "He's a toddler, Jack. It was just a couple seconds, he wandered off, you didn't do anything wrong. And he's fine."
Jack just shakes his head slowly, and Daniel feels a chilling sort of fear as he pulls away and stands. "This isn't...I can't..." but he doesn't have a choice. He can't send Carson to Rodney, after all, can't bear the thought of his son living on Atlantis, with their fucking man-eating space vampires. He's the only home Carson has, and still the safest.
"It's ok, Jack, it's going to be fine," Daniel pleads, because he can feel where this is going. He was the distraction, after all.
"We can't do this anymore," Jack says anyway, and his voice is firm. "I have to focus on him. You're..." His eyes meet Daniel's, and his words are deliberate, calculated, "in the way."
He leaves, because he doesn't want to see Daniel's reaction, but it doesn't matter because Daniel's too gutted to speak anyway.
Jack tells himself over and over that he had to do it, that it was the only way to keep all his attention on Carson, and he goes about their routine like everything's fine. He still sends McKay a daily picture, and if Rodney notices the conspicuous absence of mentions of Daniel, well, he doesn't say anything. At night, he watches Carson sleep, eyes steady on the comforting rise and fall of the boy's chest, and he starts leaving his weapons at work, even if it's against protocol.
The truck pulls up early on a Saturday morning two and a half weeks later. Jack's sitting on his front step with coffee, watching Carson toss leaves in the air, delighted, while the dog leaps and twists in the air in pursuit. He's trying not to think very hard, trying not to fall asleep sitting up, and paying very little attention to the traffic on the street.
So he blinks in somewhat dumbfounded disbelief when Daniel sits down next to him, and a parade of movers starts inching by them with boxes. "Um," is his eloquent greeting.
"You were right," Daniel says briskly. He looks calm, but his words are bumping into one another, and Jack can tell he's nervous. "We couldn't do that anymore."
"But."
"Shut up, Jack. It wasn't fair for me to try to be in two places at once. It was distracting. You couldn't count on me." He rubs his hands together, blows on them. "So! Now you can."
"Daniel," Jack sighs, starting to shake his head, but Daniel interrupts again, staring out at Carson and speaking quickly.
"Don't, Jack. Don't tell me no. I love him, and you, I'm staying." He glances over, and there's a brief slip in his mask of bravado, a definite vulnerability, and he adds, more softly, "If you'll let me."
Jack's still, quiet, for a long moment, but he couldn't tell Daniel no again even if he wanted to. Slowly, about when Daniel's first starting to shiver in the crisp fall air, Jack slides an arm around his shoulders and hands over his coffee cup.
Daniel huffs out a breath in relief, leaning into Jack's side and closing his eyes, inhaling the steam from the coffee, and he warns, "I have to be in Colorado two weekends a month."
"I might need to find a bigger place," Jack muses.
John and Teyla are out on some diplomatic mission, and Rodney is fighting with Zelenka over the placement of power crystals in what appears to be an Ancient musical device that seems like the perfect gift for Carson's second birthday. All children like banging on things that make noise, he thinks, and all parents who don't have to live with their children deserve to give them gifts that make noise.
"If you would only pay attention to me, Rodney, the colour--" Zelenka protests. Their comms crackle to life, and Rodney doesn't even pay attention, just jabs it until he can respond.
"McKay."
"Doctor McKay, Teyla and Colonel Sheppard have failed to report in," Jonson says.
"Of course they haven't. They're probably out drinking and making eyes at each other while I slave over the happiness of my flesh and blood. Contact me when it's an emergency." It's fourteen hours later when Jonson comes back to say yes, it may be an emergency. Rodney gets to the gateroom at a run, grimacing and trying to ease his gun out of the holder. Ronon is already there, tall and strapping and angry, and Rodney snaps, "If this is a communication error, I am going to banish you all from-- from everything. Ever."
The plaza where the ceremonial feast was supposed to be held is empty. Perfectly laid out, of course, with bejeweled goblets and stuffed alien animals and fruit that's just barely starting to blemish under the blinding sunlight. Ronon has his gun out and murder in his eyes. Rodney wipes a hand through his hair and gasps.
The first thing he does when the nausea ebbs from his stomach is pull out his scanners and radio for backup and bite his cheek hard enough that he tastes copper. There's an energy reading that's so low that he wouldn't even have noticed it if John and Teyla weren't gone, and there's a series of adapters in the narrow temple. Rodney feels like he's on a treasure hunt, finds the panel he needs and tries to wire himself in. There's a crackle and a burst of light and Rodney yelps, "But--"
The panel is in front of him, unresponsive. Rodney punches the ground and squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, then gently feels around the edges for the catch and glares into the wiring like it's personally insulted his family. They set up camp and he forces himself into twenty hour days, taking the time where he should have in the first place. He sleeps when he has to sleep, stares blearily at his notes and writes the same equations time after time. One week in, he takes a day to sleep, wakes every hour expecting to feel Sheppard next to him, and within another three days thinks he has it solved.
His team steps back and Ronon is at his shoulder, stretching up to set the final crystal in place. And there's a flicker, and life signs blip back into existence on his detector. It's possible that he dashes out, heart pounding and fully prepared to strangle Sheppard seventeen different ways. The crowd is gradually dissipating, mostly looking confused. He looks, finds Teyla, grins.
"Rodney," Teyla says and the calm resignation in her voice makes him want to punch her-- or at least something that belongs to her but isn't of great value. "I am sorry."
"Where is he?" Rodney snaps, the faintest sense of panic beginning in his stomach. He looks around again, like maybe this just slipped his notice.
"John informed me that he had to go," Teyla murmurs. Rodney's vision tunnels. "When he sensed that his presence was causing the source to gain power, he departed swiftly to disengage the primary focus of the satellites. He was too late to prevent our stasis, but I fear that the results would have been much more damaging, had he not acted with such speed and bravery."
Rodney says the first thing that comes into his mind, insanely, "He couldn't have waited for me? He had to go flinging his life away without a how-do-you-do to me? I could have--"
"You woulda said not to," Ronon points out. Rodney wants to punch him too. "Sheppard did what he had to do to save these people.”
"Of course I would have said not to! Who in their right mind says yes, let's go out in a silent space bang? Who else would make self-sacrifice the primary mode of attack disengagement? I would have said-- He has-- He was--!" Rodney thinks, he has a life here, he has a kid, pretty much, he's got responsibilities that don't involve throwing his life away on the first righteous cause that flickered into the periphery of his vision.
"I am so sorry," Teyla says, he can see her lip tremble and her eyes soften. He doesn't care for her sympathy either.
His head is whirring with the probabilities. They creep upwards -- The integrity of the jumper hull being maintained throughout the damage by plasma beams, 198788 to 1 against. John not being fatally injured in the turbulence of a landing with a damaged jumper, 4676665 to 1 against. The jumper making it to land, that one's better-- 471 to 1, but the possibility that that land isn't the Sahara's bitter, ugly twin sister-- 219983 to 1-- doesn't leave Rodney comforted. The planet's chemistry makes the probability of locating his subdermal tracker, if it's still functional (27 to 1), a near impossibility- 99278909 to 1.
"Two point five eight two times ten to the twenty ninth," he says aloud. "If we had known. That first day." Every day since increases the odds astronomically, until even Rodney can't stomach the math.
"It's Sheppard," Ronon says gruffly. He means, he'll make it somehow. Rodney doesn't think so. He collects his data pad, shoulders his bag, and heads back to the gate without another word.
When he spends the night in his-- their, stupid room, it's not really sleeping. He stares at the wall, and then at the light, and then at a mixed pile of dirty laundry. He paces, then takes a shower, then considers beating his head against the desk. Halfway through a revision of a proof he's done several thousand times, it hits him. Sheppard is dead.
Rodney curls up in bed and sleeps for seventeen hours, for the first time in what is possibly his entire life. He wakes up in a haze and walks straight to his lab without changing, cuts the process tree for any form of communication on his laptop, and resolutely edits the proposals of his exploratory science teams for another three hours. Keller comes to find him for lunch, her tiny hand on his shoulder and her eyes too-wide with shock. "Jump off a bridge," Rodney snaps when she comments on how long it's been since he's eaten.
In the privacy of his too-large room, Rodney recalculates every factor he can imagine. Maybe Sheppard and his luck-- but every day that he falls asleep alone, the hope grows dimmer. Sheppard is lost with no final indications of wraith kidnapping or supernova abnormality to give Rodney that-- that factor. That saving grace one percent that John wiggles himself into every time he sets foot on an alien planet. Rodney rewires the heating system in the residential quarters to be more precise, then reorganizes the solar panels for higher effectiveness. He tries to golf, once, and reorganizes his desk for the first time since he claimed it.
He takes savage bites of power bars, feeling his throat and stomach burn at the effort it takes to keep them down. Teyla stops by once, just standing in the doorway with her haunted eyes, and Rodney takes to finding areas of the city that are more difficult to locate. After two weeks, he turns on his email and filters the results to only top secret/priority. There's one there from Sheppard, nearly a month old now, a tag-you're-it with a link to their game of battleship. Rodney chokes and deletes it, presses delete five more times so that every message around it is gone too. Unbidden, his inbox opens a message from O'Neill.
daniel always finds a way to get back.
Rodney checks himself into a private room in the med bay because he's pretty sure the statement has driven him insane. He can't stand waiting for John and breathing John. "Maybe you should go to see your son," Keller says and Rodney sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.
"Rodney," the voice drawls through his subconscious and Rodney feels his face twist, another nightmare. He reaches up, scratches at his nose and feels callused fingertips take his palm and steer him away. "Rodney, wake up."
"This isn't funny," Rodney says. He sees John before he's opened his eyes, but then the sleep bleariness has ebbed and John's stupid grin is in place. "Are you a clone?" he asks, voice trembling so violently that it sounds steady to his own ears. "Or a replicator? Are you-- are you--"
John leans forward to rest their heads together, exhales against Rodney's upper lip. "I'm just really tired," he says which is the most trivial, insensitive, perfect, Sheppardish thing that Rodney has heard in years. John looks him in the eye and says, "But I'm okay."
Rodney snaps, "Explain to me later, you oaf," and stretches his hands as wide as they'll go, feeling Sheppard for any injury or imperfection or sign that he can't trust again. John climbs up next to him, stretches and rests one arm behind his head while leaving the other laced through Rodney's.
"I'm out there risking my life and you decide to hog the medical concern by dibsing a private room?" he teases, staring up at the ceiling.
"I thought of nearly a trillion ways I would like to kill you," Rodney replies, twists to rest his forehead against John's shoulder. "But my health has never been better, suddenly. Miraculous rebound. I can feel my flesh healing."
"I missed you too," John says with too much casualness. Rodney squeezes hard enough that John's joints pop.
"If you ever do that again, I'm lighting your poster on fire. We have-- things, here. For us." John nods and looks at him with some intense-- affectionate, stupid thing that makes Rodney's heart clench. "Because I won't be okay," he adds threateningly, voice cracking. Carson is twenty-five months and three days old, right this moment, Rodney remembers. John has hand-drawn their kid a birthday card by the end of the day, and Rodney hopes that Carson somehow understands it.
The damn dog gets hit by a car a week before Christmas. It's nobody's fault; he jumped the fence and ran in front of a UPS truck. The driver was very apologetic, carrying the poor thing's lifeless body to the front door practically in tears. Jack's a little more upset than he would've expected, and Carson is inconsolable.
"Rodney will be here in two days," Jack reminds him desperately, trying to extract sharp fingernails from his neck and pull his damp shirt away from his skin. Daniel relieves him eventually, stroking Carson's hair and explaining life and death and other philosophical bullshit that Jack has to leave the room for.
He sends Rodney an email. 911. the fucking mutt ran in front of a truck. you better bring good presents. Then he gives Carson some benadryl and puts him to bed.
The next morning Jack has a memo in his inbox detailing Atlantis' lockdown, and that they're going to be in quarantine for at least a couple weeks, maybe longer. i hate you so fucking much, Jack sends to Rodney. Naturally, there's no reply.
Daniel goes and buys an entire store's worth of extra presents to mark from Rodney, John, Teyla and Ronon. Jack gives in and buys a damn puppy. "Why this one?" Daniel sighs, poking at a fuzzy paw late on Christmas Eve, once Carson's asleep.
"I don't know," Jack replies. He takes in the creature's floppy ears and oddly-tufted hair, strokes a finger over the soft back, smiles as the puppy yawns and resettles, too-long tail curving around its body. He's cute, but it's going to be a pain in the ass to house-train and obedience-train another one. "He kind of reminded me of you."
Daniel gives an offended huff, but Jack can tell he doesn't mean it.
Christmas morning is a quiet affair. Teal'c gets snowed in back in Colorado Springs, and if Jack were a sappy kind of guy, he'd probably admit to enjoying having just him and Daniel and Carson. They eat cinnamon rolls and drink hot chocolate, and for a couple hours, Carson forgets how upset he is over the dog and Rodney not being there and squeals with delight at all the new toys. He starts to get sad once the sugar rush ends and the wrapping paper's picked up, and Jack figures it's time to bring out his secret weapon.
"What's his kingdom, Daniel?" Carson asks, once the new puppy's settled in his lap and enduring with good grace Carson's sloppy petting.
"Animalia, just like you."
"What's his phylum?"
"Chordata," Daniel tells the boy, walking his fingers up Carson's backbone, "because he has a spinal cord too."
Jack goes to clean up breakfast while Daniel and Carson continue their exploration of the mutt's Linnaean classification. When he returns, Carson has settled on a name. "It's Mammal, Daddy!" He seems pleased.
Jack sends Rodney pictures later that night, Carson with his stocking, Carson and the tree, Carson and the puppy. He types, he missed you. After a moment of consideration, he changes he to we and hits send.
Rodney owes O'Neill more thank yous than he could ever bring himself to form, he's perfectly aware of that. In thirty six months of Carson's existence, the only momentous occasion that Rodney has directly participated in was the birth, which he was unconscious for. He knows that Carson was upset on his first birthday, and on his second-- and on those Christmases, no matter how little Rodney had to do with the evasion, and it's not that he wouldn't want to be there-- But he's no father, most of the time, and O'Neill definitely is.
He takes his time to work up on the nerve. On their seventh visit to earth, stuck on a patio and nursing a crappy beer, Rodney looks at O'Neill in the dim light and finds that his throat has yet to knot itself up and save him the embarrassment of the admission. "You're--" he starts, fully prepared to compliment Jack's prowess with child rearing, and then stops and starts again. "We did a pretty good job with this."
Jack's watching through the window as Daniel and Sheppard try to decide if Carson and Mammal are playing tug-of-war or trying to bite each other. "It's only been three years," he murmurs, glancing over at McKay, and back in time to see Ronon scoop up the dog and Teal'c the boy. He's happy enough for family visits, for getting a night or three off from baths and bedtimes and answering why, why, why (even though he usually passes Carson off to Daniel at about the second 'why'). And in an entire life of evasion and an entire relationship with Daniel of never saying what they mean, Jack knows exactly what McKay can't quite admit. "We've got a long way to go."
“It’s all downhill from here,” Rodney says flippantly, fully aware that he won’t have to do the heavy lifting on this one. “He’s an easy kid to get along with.”
"Those are not your genes," Jack points out with a smirk, and wonders exactly how things are going to go the first day Carson has to draw his family in preschool. He might need a big piece of paper.
“You still aren’t funny,” Rodney responds, clears his throat nosily. “Thanks, Jack.”
Jack has a dozen flippant responses, but it's Carson's birthday tomorrow, and it's not really the time. "I...didn't think I'd get a second chance," he says instead, staring at the label on his beer.
“Hey, I’m no spring chicken,” Rodney says, feeling like the statement sums up his fears over the last few years-that it might happen again and he’s not sure he wants to actually deal with a child, while simultaneously sort of wanting his gene pool out there. He catches up to what O’Neill says, coughs. “Oh. Well- Glad I could- um.”
Jack snorts, gets over his moment. "Become spontaneously pregnant? I've told Cars he's magic, I hope that's ok." He leaves out the part where Carson has begun requesting a sibling. That seems like a bit too much for either one of them to begin to address.
“I’ll explain how it actually works later. I have a baby book, back at Atlantis.” Rodney shrugs. “Magic isn't real. He’s just an excellent combination of biological factors and timing.”
Jack likes the idea of Rodney being responsible for all the uncomfortable conversations. "Or something," he agrees, and sighs. "You should go tell him goodnight."
Rodney nods, claps a hand on O’Neill’s shoulder on the way past. “Have to prepare myself for that messy party, too.” Carson leaves off the fighting to hug his legs and Rodney says, “Hey, kneecaps.”
Carson says, “I want a dinosaur, Rodney. An Albertasaurous.”
“No. We’ll see,” Rodney says, but glares at the rest of the guys because one of them is responsible. “It’s bedtime.” He lifts Carson carefully, wheezing his protest at his son’s new weight, lets the boy messily kiss his cheek. “Maybe Ronon will tell you a scary story before you fall asleep. Come on.”
"No wraith!" Jack calls out futilely from the patio. "Or dinosaurs!" he adds, less futilely, but only because Rodney's not a geneticist. Daniel wanders out as Rodney's team troops after him for joint bedtime, or something, and ignores Rodney's vacated chair in favor of Jack's lap. Jack tries to find fault with this arrangement, and fails. "Did you break the news yet?" Jack asks, and Daniel looks shifty. "Mm, didn't think so." No matter how annoying it is that his son and Daniel have a secret code (and it's really annoying), Jack enjoys the Rodney-subversion that goes along with a polyglot child.
Rodney takes the best spot on the bed, John sits on the floor, and Teyla and Ronon find perches near Carson’s feet. “Tell me about the time that Teyla outsmarted a Wraith and cooked him for dinner,” Carson says promptly, seated upright without the least interest in sleeping. Rodney sighs resignedly, somewhere between Carson’s advanced reading skills and Rodney’s-willingness to let Ronon exaggerate, the stories of Atlantis have taken on a life of their own that borders on the Grimm.
“How about I tell you about the time that I met Sheppard and McKay?” Ronon offers instead. Carson looks placated and sits back.
”But don’t leave out the dialogue,” he commands imperiously as he folds his arms around Rodney. He falls asleep mid-sentence during the operation scene, so Rodney knows he must be tired, finds himself smoothing down the soft hair in confusion.
“Here we are,” he mutters. Teyla squeezes his leg and smiles up at him. “Huh.”
It's funny, Jack thinks, as Daniel slips off for more beer with a kiss, how all of this just sort of happened. He didn't ask for this tie to McKay, didn't plan to be raising a preschooler with a veritable village now and again and practically on his own now and again, but mostly with Daniel, who teaches Carson Greek and Ancient and takes care of him when he's sick and Jack's stuck in meetings with the joint chiefs. But it's not like he's sorry. He looks up when Daniel comes back, and he surprises himself when he says, "We should take Cars to Atlantis next year."
"Are you expecting an argument?" Daniel asks incredulously, straddling Jack's lap, hands lacing into his hair. "I'm dying to go there." It's a terrible choice of words, Jack thinks, considering the survival rate of the Atlantis expedition. Then again, it's not like Daniel can die. The thought comforts Jack all the time.
"I love you," Jack says, before can think about it. He's said it to Carson a million times, but never to Daniel, and it's stupid.
Daniel rolls his eyes. "You're an idiot." But Jack thinks he looks happy.
When Rodney has been disentangled gently from Carson, he brushes his teeth and washes his face and crawls into bed in his boxers and a t-shirt. John settles behind him and Rodney can feel his own mind racing, ignores the sleepy hum as John artlessly drapes an arm over Rodney’s waist. “O’Neill tells Carson that he was made by magic,” he says abruptly, fortunately not so loud that Teyla and Ronon come in.
“Yes, Rodney, and I’m sure you and science are very upset,” John drawls into his shoulder.
“No,” Rodney says, can hear the shock in his own voice. He’s in bed with Sheppard, of all people, three years later and with the faintest scar on his stomach and his best friends near him and his own son absorbing the world around them. “Don't quote me on this, but I think he might not be wrong."
end
Authors: thekatcameback & doublehelix20
Rating: A vague R.
Pairings: Sheppard/McKay and O'Neill/Jackson. Spoiler: Also, reference to previous O'Neill/McKay. Twice. In a sexy way.
Spoilers: Vaguely to the end of season four of SGA.
Disclaimer: These characters are owned by neither author, but used solely for entertainment purposes on the internet. Furthermore, one of the authors (guess which) is an actual biologist who studies actual genetics and knows full well that, physiology aside, two paternal genomes wouldn't play nice in the same embryo. Shhh. (Author b argues astutely that historically speaking, stranger things have happened.....?)
Word Count: 15 691 with a bunch of hazy question marks by thekatcameback.
Summary: Rodney McKay is brilliant enough to do this math: One night plus four months, times n for the weight gain, equals one fetus. And onward. Abicierum-- to give up, not to surrender.
Thank you to CJ for the editing and helpfully pointing out things like, "Someone should remind him about Alien." And also to the Sims3, not to lessen the experience, but.... McKay/O'Neill is better than what Rodney McKay the sim thinks is romantic? And also, from thekatcameback, thank you to her lovely coauthor. Because god knows this wouldn't happen without you, man. End acceptance speech.
Previously on abicierum: Part I and Part II
The pace of Rodney's life on the trip doesn't seem to slow once they return to Atlantis. He has a folder on his desktop, nestled between shortcuts to primary systems and complex equations, entitled "personal keep out zelenka," tracks every record of O'Neill and Carson, and makes a picture of Carson gnawing at the arm of a teddy bear his screensaver. He saves the universe frequently and makes time to send video messages to Carson detailing his successes. His family sized, newly-claimed room is gradually rearranged with Johnny Cash between his diplomas on the wall and an awkward team shot taken by an enterprising photographer at one of the many Washington memorials given a place of honor above his desk. They're all there, all eating (even Teyla, although she manages to make even scarfing cotton candy look graceful), and for some reason, Carson is balanced between Jackson, who's trying to dab at his hands with a cloth, and John, who has both arms around Carson's middle like he's trying to pull him back from an accident rather than cradle a child. Rodney looks at the picture every time he goes out, and then again before bed each night.
John calls it a family photo, and is only partially kidding.
Carson is set to turn one on June 17. Rodney books his vacation nine months in advance, three weeks (although the length of time away from Atlantis makes him feel a little sick, he wants to take Carson to see Jeannie and possibly to Disneyland) in June. Defensively, he adds, "It's not like I don't have several years of time off saved up, thank you very much."
No one is arguing, technically. "We will be fine without you, Rodney," Zelenka offers. Rodney has his bags packed a month in advance, and two days before he's busy pouring over a map of Disneyland, trying to figure out the best way to go on the Star Wars ride at dusk without missing the magical fantasy land parade. His comm clicks to life.
"No, no, no, no, no," Rodney says, feels a pang that it sounds like Carson's last recording. But-- it's a spike in the energy recording around MX-968, a planet they'd previously visited with no abnormalities to speak of. It is dangerously distant from the hub of Atlantis-friendly planets. "I have one day," he says. "And then it can wait."
MX-968 doesn't wait, just imprisons them and leaves them in an eerie, dense silence. Rodney is certain that there's an abundance of pollen in the air, spends his time hacking miserably into a fistful of Kleenex and trying to jury-rig the sheets from the bed into a pulley system. When Sheppard's watch bleeps twice, interrupting what is almost a brilliant idea, Rodney snaps, "Great, now we're stuck here forever."
John silences the alarm. "Twenty-one-twelve," he offers. "Happy birthday, Carson."
And Rodney hadn't exactly forgotten, because that would make him something close to the worst parent in the entire galaxy, but at the same time he definitely had. There's the comfort of knowing that Carson probably doesn't entirely understand what's happened, and that O'Neill and Jackson probably know exactly what command knows. When Sergeant Dreger comes barging in, guns blazing to save the day and earn herself a place in Sheppard's military-soft-core-porn group, he doesn't even look up.
Technically, it's because his blood sugar had crashed that he spent the remainder of the week (even when his health returned, because Keller "didn't like how he looked," what kind of medical evaluation was that?) in the sickbay. He gets a message from O'Neill that's just a picture of Carson on the Dumbo ride, throws a fit, and buries himself in his work for three weeks.
"Would you ever forget your kid's birthday?" he asks Reider over their joint rewiring effort.
"Nope," Reider says. Rodney transfers him to data entry and sends seven large, harmless Ancient toys from a conveniently located nursery on the next Daedalus trip. He reschedules for January, even though the cold will be miserable and John will probably whine. It isn't the same.
Carson is fifteen months old, walking steadily, speaking in full sentences, throwing tantrums that always remind Jack of McKay, and being generally demanding every minute of every day when Jack decides he needs to meet with Landry and the department heads. It's coming up on budget meetings, and he likes to make everyone justify their spending to him before he has to go do it in committee.
The fact that Daniel's been off-world for nearly three weeks, and that his and Carson's trip will coincide with SG-1's return is entirely by accident.
There's a problem, of course, and the team is a couple days late, so Jack holds his meetings, drags them out, hangs around and makes the 'Gate teams nervous, annoys Landry, starts to teach Carson to swim, but finally SG-1 has cleared up their cultural misunderstanding and is on the way home.
Jack takes Carson down to Daniel's office to wait out debriefings and medical checkups, amusing him with monster stories, stifling laughter as the boy acts out all the gruesome deaths by writhing on the floor. Jack's pretty sure he should be worried about the kid's love of all things gory, but Rodney isn't, so he doesn't let it bother him. Daniel comes in during a particularly dramatic act, letting his bag slip to the floor and tossing his hat on top of it, and Jack is pretty sure he's not misreading the fond expression on Daniel's face.
Carson notices when he's done not-breathing, and he bounces to his feet, squealing, "Dan-i-yel!" and runs into Daniel's legs.
"Oof," Daniel says eloquently, ruffling Carson's hair and raising his eyebrows as Jack rises and wanders over, sliding his arms over Daniel's shoulders and kissing him with the kid still sandwiched between them.
He doesn't say anything, no welcome home, not how he much missed Daniel, but he doesn't really have to. Neither of them notice Carson squirming away, and when Jack laces his fingers into Daniel's hair and closes his eyes, he misses the toddler wobbling into the hallway.
Daniel's tugging Jack closer, kissing him with purpose, and it's only because they have to actually breathe that he breaks away and realizes. "Shit, Cars," he mutters, moving to check the other side of Daniel's desk, and then the hallway.
He's there, of course, and Jack breathes out a sigh of relief and starts to collect the boy, scold him for wandering off, but the instant he registers what Carson's doing, he can't do anything but freeze. It's just a pile of equipment dumped outside a lab door, and it's just a zat, shiny and alluring to a toddler, but Jack can't see that. All he can see is Charlie's lifeless body, all he can hear is that echoing gunshot
Daniel spares Jack a worried glance, but he doesn't pause to check on him, just scoops up Carson and gently extracts the weapon from his small hand. "Not a toy, buddy," he admonishes, and Carson forgets the gun in favor of tickling. "Jack--" Daniel starts, shifting the child to his hip, but O'Neill doesn't seem to hear him. He just whirls, and while his pace isn't all that fast, he's fleeing nonetheless.
"Daddy?" Carson asks doubtfully, and Daniel presses an absent kiss to his head.
"He's just feeling sick. It's ok," Daniel adds, though he suspects it isn't. Still, he forces a smile for the boy and bounces him. "Want to go to see Teal'c?"
Daniel finds Jack in the SG-1 locker room some time later, having settled Carson with the rest of the team eating pudding in the commissary. "It's ok," he starts cautiously. "It was just..." But he trails off, because it really was a close thing, and there's no way to pretend otherwise, even if Carson could only have stunned himself with the weapon.
"It was me," Jack says dully, staring down at his hands. He's shaking, has already thrown up twice. "I wasn't watching him. I wasn't paying enough attention, just like--"
Daniel kneels, covering Jack's cold, clammy hands with his own, and leans forward. "He's a toddler, Jack. It was just a couple seconds, he wandered off, you didn't do anything wrong. And he's fine."
Jack just shakes his head slowly, and Daniel feels a chilling sort of fear as he pulls away and stands. "This isn't...I can't..." but he doesn't have a choice. He can't send Carson to Rodney, after all, can't bear the thought of his son living on Atlantis, with their fucking man-eating space vampires. He's the only home Carson has, and still the safest.
"It's ok, Jack, it's going to be fine," Daniel pleads, because he can feel where this is going. He was the distraction, after all.
"We can't do this anymore," Jack says anyway, and his voice is firm. "I have to focus on him. You're..." His eyes meet Daniel's, and his words are deliberate, calculated, "in the way."
He leaves, because he doesn't want to see Daniel's reaction, but it doesn't matter because Daniel's too gutted to speak anyway.
Jack tells himself over and over that he had to do it, that it was the only way to keep all his attention on Carson, and he goes about their routine like everything's fine. He still sends McKay a daily picture, and if Rodney notices the conspicuous absence of mentions of Daniel, well, he doesn't say anything. At night, he watches Carson sleep, eyes steady on the comforting rise and fall of the boy's chest, and he starts leaving his weapons at work, even if it's against protocol.
The truck pulls up early on a Saturday morning two and a half weeks later. Jack's sitting on his front step with coffee, watching Carson toss leaves in the air, delighted, while the dog leaps and twists in the air in pursuit. He's trying not to think very hard, trying not to fall asleep sitting up, and paying very little attention to the traffic on the street.
So he blinks in somewhat dumbfounded disbelief when Daniel sits down next to him, and a parade of movers starts inching by them with boxes. "Um," is his eloquent greeting.
"You were right," Daniel says briskly. He looks calm, but his words are bumping into one another, and Jack can tell he's nervous. "We couldn't do that anymore."
"But."
"Shut up, Jack. It wasn't fair for me to try to be in two places at once. It was distracting. You couldn't count on me." He rubs his hands together, blows on them. "So! Now you can."
"Daniel," Jack sighs, starting to shake his head, but Daniel interrupts again, staring out at Carson and speaking quickly.
"Don't, Jack. Don't tell me no. I love him, and you, I'm staying." He glances over, and there's a brief slip in his mask of bravado, a definite vulnerability, and he adds, more softly, "If you'll let me."
Jack's still, quiet, for a long moment, but he couldn't tell Daniel no again even if he wanted to. Slowly, about when Daniel's first starting to shiver in the crisp fall air, Jack slides an arm around his shoulders and hands over his coffee cup.
Daniel huffs out a breath in relief, leaning into Jack's side and closing his eyes, inhaling the steam from the coffee, and he warns, "I have to be in Colorado two weekends a month."
"I might need to find a bigger place," Jack muses.
John and Teyla are out on some diplomatic mission, and Rodney is fighting with Zelenka over the placement of power crystals in what appears to be an Ancient musical device that seems like the perfect gift for Carson's second birthday. All children like banging on things that make noise, he thinks, and all parents who don't have to live with their children deserve to give them gifts that make noise.
"If you would only pay attention to me, Rodney, the colour--" Zelenka protests. Their comms crackle to life, and Rodney doesn't even pay attention, just jabs it until he can respond.
"McKay."
"Doctor McKay, Teyla and Colonel Sheppard have failed to report in," Jonson says.
"Of course they haven't. They're probably out drinking and making eyes at each other while I slave over the happiness of my flesh and blood. Contact me when it's an emergency." It's fourteen hours later when Jonson comes back to say yes, it may be an emergency. Rodney gets to the gateroom at a run, grimacing and trying to ease his gun out of the holder. Ronon is already there, tall and strapping and angry, and Rodney snaps, "If this is a communication error, I am going to banish you all from-- from everything. Ever."
The plaza where the ceremonial feast was supposed to be held is empty. Perfectly laid out, of course, with bejeweled goblets and stuffed alien animals and fruit that's just barely starting to blemish under the blinding sunlight. Ronon has his gun out and murder in his eyes. Rodney wipes a hand through his hair and gasps.
The first thing he does when the nausea ebbs from his stomach is pull out his scanners and radio for backup and bite his cheek hard enough that he tastes copper. There's an energy reading that's so low that he wouldn't even have noticed it if John and Teyla weren't gone, and there's a series of adapters in the narrow temple. Rodney feels like he's on a treasure hunt, finds the panel he needs and tries to wire himself in. There's a crackle and a burst of light and Rodney yelps, "But--"
The panel is in front of him, unresponsive. Rodney punches the ground and squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, then gently feels around the edges for the catch and glares into the wiring like it's personally insulted his family. They set up camp and he forces himself into twenty hour days, taking the time where he should have in the first place. He sleeps when he has to sleep, stares blearily at his notes and writes the same equations time after time. One week in, he takes a day to sleep, wakes every hour expecting to feel Sheppard next to him, and within another three days thinks he has it solved.
His team steps back and Ronon is at his shoulder, stretching up to set the final crystal in place. And there's a flicker, and life signs blip back into existence on his detector. It's possible that he dashes out, heart pounding and fully prepared to strangle Sheppard seventeen different ways. The crowd is gradually dissipating, mostly looking confused. He looks, finds Teyla, grins.
"Rodney," Teyla says and the calm resignation in her voice makes him want to punch her-- or at least something that belongs to her but isn't of great value. "I am sorry."
"Where is he?" Rodney snaps, the faintest sense of panic beginning in his stomach. He looks around again, like maybe this just slipped his notice.
"John informed me that he had to go," Teyla murmurs. Rodney's vision tunnels. "When he sensed that his presence was causing the source to gain power, he departed swiftly to disengage the primary focus of the satellites. He was too late to prevent our stasis, but I fear that the results would have been much more damaging, had he not acted with such speed and bravery."
Rodney says the first thing that comes into his mind, insanely, "He couldn't have waited for me? He had to go flinging his life away without a how-do-you-do to me? I could have--"
"You woulda said not to," Ronon points out. Rodney wants to punch him too. "Sheppard did what he had to do to save these people.”
"Of course I would have said not to! Who in their right mind says yes, let's go out in a silent space bang? Who else would make self-sacrifice the primary mode of attack disengagement? I would have said-- He has-- He was--!" Rodney thinks, he has a life here, he has a kid, pretty much, he's got responsibilities that don't involve throwing his life away on the first righteous cause that flickered into the periphery of his vision.
"I am so sorry," Teyla says, he can see her lip tremble and her eyes soften. He doesn't care for her sympathy either.
His head is whirring with the probabilities. They creep upwards -- The integrity of the jumper hull being maintained throughout the damage by plasma beams, 198788 to 1 against. John not being fatally injured in the turbulence of a landing with a damaged jumper, 4676665 to 1 against. The jumper making it to land, that one's better-- 471 to 1, but the possibility that that land isn't the Sahara's bitter, ugly twin sister-- 219983 to 1-- doesn't leave Rodney comforted. The planet's chemistry makes the probability of locating his subdermal tracker, if it's still functional (27 to 1), a near impossibility- 99278909 to 1.
"Two point five eight two times ten to the twenty ninth," he says aloud. "If we had known. That first day." Every day since increases the odds astronomically, until even Rodney can't stomach the math.
"It's Sheppard," Ronon says gruffly. He means, he'll make it somehow. Rodney doesn't think so. He collects his data pad, shoulders his bag, and heads back to the gate without another word.
When he spends the night in his-- their, stupid room, it's not really sleeping. He stares at the wall, and then at the light, and then at a mixed pile of dirty laundry. He paces, then takes a shower, then considers beating his head against the desk. Halfway through a revision of a proof he's done several thousand times, it hits him. Sheppard is dead.
Rodney curls up in bed and sleeps for seventeen hours, for the first time in what is possibly his entire life. He wakes up in a haze and walks straight to his lab without changing, cuts the process tree for any form of communication on his laptop, and resolutely edits the proposals of his exploratory science teams for another three hours. Keller comes to find him for lunch, her tiny hand on his shoulder and her eyes too-wide with shock. "Jump off a bridge," Rodney snaps when she comments on how long it's been since he's eaten.
In the privacy of his too-large room, Rodney recalculates every factor he can imagine. Maybe Sheppard and his luck-- but every day that he falls asleep alone, the hope grows dimmer. Sheppard is lost with no final indications of wraith kidnapping or supernova abnormality to give Rodney that-- that factor. That saving grace one percent that John wiggles himself into every time he sets foot on an alien planet. Rodney rewires the heating system in the residential quarters to be more precise, then reorganizes the solar panels for higher effectiveness. He tries to golf, once, and reorganizes his desk for the first time since he claimed it.
He takes savage bites of power bars, feeling his throat and stomach burn at the effort it takes to keep them down. Teyla stops by once, just standing in the doorway with her haunted eyes, and Rodney takes to finding areas of the city that are more difficult to locate. After two weeks, he turns on his email and filters the results to only top secret/priority. There's one there from Sheppard, nearly a month old now, a tag-you're-it with a link to their game of battleship. Rodney chokes and deletes it, presses delete five more times so that every message around it is gone too. Unbidden, his inbox opens a message from O'Neill.
daniel always finds a way to get back.
Rodney checks himself into a private room in the med bay because he's pretty sure the statement has driven him insane. He can't stand waiting for John and breathing John. "Maybe you should go to see your son," Keller says and Rodney sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.
"Rodney," the voice drawls through his subconscious and Rodney feels his face twist, another nightmare. He reaches up, scratches at his nose and feels callused fingertips take his palm and steer him away. "Rodney, wake up."
"This isn't funny," Rodney says. He sees John before he's opened his eyes, but then the sleep bleariness has ebbed and John's stupid grin is in place. "Are you a clone?" he asks, voice trembling so violently that it sounds steady to his own ears. "Or a replicator? Are you-- are you--"
John leans forward to rest their heads together, exhales against Rodney's upper lip. "I'm just really tired," he says which is the most trivial, insensitive, perfect, Sheppardish thing that Rodney has heard in years. John looks him in the eye and says, "But I'm okay."
Rodney snaps, "Explain to me later, you oaf," and stretches his hands as wide as they'll go, feeling Sheppard for any injury or imperfection or sign that he can't trust again. John climbs up next to him, stretches and rests one arm behind his head while leaving the other laced through Rodney's.
"I'm out there risking my life and you decide to hog the medical concern by dibsing a private room?" he teases, staring up at the ceiling.
"I thought of nearly a trillion ways I would like to kill you," Rodney replies, twists to rest his forehead against John's shoulder. "But my health has never been better, suddenly. Miraculous rebound. I can feel my flesh healing."
"I missed you too," John says with too much casualness. Rodney squeezes hard enough that John's joints pop.
"If you ever do that again, I'm lighting your poster on fire. We have-- things, here. For us." John nods and looks at him with some intense-- affectionate, stupid thing that makes Rodney's heart clench. "Because I won't be okay," he adds threateningly, voice cracking. Carson is twenty-five months and three days old, right this moment, Rodney remembers. John has hand-drawn their kid a birthday card by the end of the day, and Rodney hopes that Carson somehow understands it.
The damn dog gets hit by a car a week before Christmas. It's nobody's fault; he jumped the fence and ran in front of a UPS truck. The driver was very apologetic, carrying the poor thing's lifeless body to the front door practically in tears. Jack's a little more upset than he would've expected, and Carson is inconsolable.
"Rodney will be here in two days," Jack reminds him desperately, trying to extract sharp fingernails from his neck and pull his damp shirt away from his skin. Daniel relieves him eventually, stroking Carson's hair and explaining life and death and other philosophical bullshit that Jack has to leave the room for.
He sends Rodney an email. 911. the fucking mutt ran in front of a truck. you better bring good presents. Then he gives Carson some benadryl and puts him to bed.
The next morning Jack has a memo in his inbox detailing Atlantis' lockdown, and that they're going to be in quarantine for at least a couple weeks, maybe longer. i hate you so fucking much, Jack sends to Rodney. Naturally, there's no reply.
Daniel goes and buys an entire store's worth of extra presents to mark from Rodney, John, Teyla and Ronon. Jack gives in and buys a damn puppy. "Why this one?" Daniel sighs, poking at a fuzzy paw late on Christmas Eve, once Carson's asleep.
"I don't know," Jack replies. He takes in the creature's floppy ears and oddly-tufted hair, strokes a finger over the soft back, smiles as the puppy yawns and resettles, too-long tail curving around its body. He's cute, but it's going to be a pain in the ass to house-train and obedience-train another one. "He kind of reminded me of you."
Daniel gives an offended huff, but Jack can tell he doesn't mean it.
Christmas morning is a quiet affair. Teal'c gets snowed in back in Colorado Springs, and if Jack were a sappy kind of guy, he'd probably admit to enjoying having just him and Daniel and Carson. They eat cinnamon rolls and drink hot chocolate, and for a couple hours, Carson forgets how upset he is over the dog and Rodney not being there and squeals with delight at all the new toys. He starts to get sad once the sugar rush ends and the wrapping paper's picked up, and Jack figures it's time to bring out his secret weapon.
"What's his kingdom, Daniel?" Carson asks, once the new puppy's settled in his lap and enduring with good grace Carson's sloppy petting.
"Animalia, just like you."
"What's his phylum?"
"Chordata," Daniel tells the boy, walking his fingers up Carson's backbone, "because he has a spinal cord too."
Jack goes to clean up breakfast while Daniel and Carson continue their exploration of the mutt's Linnaean classification. When he returns, Carson has settled on a name. "It's Mammal, Daddy!" He seems pleased.
Jack sends Rodney pictures later that night, Carson with his stocking, Carson and the tree, Carson and the puppy. He types, he missed you. After a moment of consideration, he changes he to we and hits send.
Rodney owes O'Neill more thank yous than he could ever bring himself to form, he's perfectly aware of that. In thirty six months of Carson's existence, the only momentous occasion that Rodney has directly participated in was the birth, which he was unconscious for. He knows that Carson was upset on his first birthday, and on his second-- and on those Christmases, no matter how little Rodney had to do with the evasion, and it's not that he wouldn't want to be there-- But he's no father, most of the time, and O'Neill definitely is.
He takes his time to work up on the nerve. On their seventh visit to earth, stuck on a patio and nursing a crappy beer, Rodney looks at O'Neill in the dim light and finds that his throat has yet to knot itself up and save him the embarrassment of the admission. "You're--" he starts, fully prepared to compliment Jack's prowess with child rearing, and then stops and starts again. "We did a pretty good job with this."
Jack's watching through the window as Daniel and Sheppard try to decide if Carson and Mammal are playing tug-of-war or trying to bite each other. "It's only been three years," he murmurs, glancing over at McKay, and back in time to see Ronon scoop up the dog and Teal'c the boy. He's happy enough for family visits, for getting a night or three off from baths and bedtimes and answering why, why, why (even though he usually passes Carson off to Daniel at about the second 'why'). And in an entire life of evasion and an entire relationship with Daniel of never saying what they mean, Jack knows exactly what McKay can't quite admit. "We've got a long way to go."
“It’s all downhill from here,” Rodney says flippantly, fully aware that he won’t have to do the heavy lifting on this one. “He’s an easy kid to get along with.”
"Those are not your genes," Jack points out with a smirk, and wonders exactly how things are going to go the first day Carson has to draw his family in preschool. He might need a big piece of paper.
“You still aren’t funny,” Rodney responds, clears his throat nosily. “Thanks, Jack.”
Jack has a dozen flippant responses, but it's Carson's birthday tomorrow, and it's not really the time. "I...didn't think I'd get a second chance," he says instead, staring at the label on his beer.
“Hey, I’m no spring chicken,” Rodney says, feeling like the statement sums up his fears over the last few years-that it might happen again and he’s not sure he wants to actually deal with a child, while simultaneously sort of wanting his gene pool out there. He catches up to what O’Neill says, coughs. “Oh. Well- Glad I could- um.”
Jack snorts, gets over his moment. "Become spontaneously pregnant? I've told Cars he's magic, I hope that's ok." He leaves out the part where Carson has begun requesting a sibling. That seems like a bit too much for either one of them to begin to address.
“I’ll explain how it actually works later. I have a baby book, back at Atlantis.” Rodney shrugs. “Magic isn't real. He’s just an excellent combination of biological factors and timing.”
Jack likes the idea of Rodney being responsible for all the uncomfortable conversations. "Or something," he agrees, and sighs. "You should go tell him goodnight."
Rodney nods, claps a hand on O’Neill’s shoulder on the way past. “Have to prepare myself for that messy party, too.” Carson leaves off the fighting to hug his legs and Rodney says, “Hey, kneecaps.”
Carson says, “I want a dinosaur, Rodney. An Albertasaurous.”
“No. We’ll see,” Rodney says, but glares at the rest of the guys because one of them is responsible. “It’s bedtime.” He lifts Carson carefully, wheezing his protest at his son’s new weight, lets the boy messily kiss his cheek. “Maybe Ronon will tell you a scary story before you fall asleep. Come on.”
"No wraith!" Jack calls out futilely from the patio. "Or dinosaurs!" he adds, less futilely, but only because Rodney's not a geneticist. Daniel wanders out as Rodney's team troops after him for joint bedtime, or something, and ignores Rodney's vacated chair in favor of Jack's lap. Jack tries to find fault with this arrangement, and fails. "Did you break the news yet?" Jack asks, and Daniel looks shifty. "Mm, didn't think so." No matter how annoying it is that his son and Daniel have a secret code (and it's really annoying), Jack enjoys the Rodney-subversion that goes along with a polyglot child.
Rodney takes the best spot on the bed, John sits on the floor, and Teyla and Ronon find perches near Carson’s feet. “Tell me about the time that Teyla outsmarted a Wraith and cooked him for dinner,” Carson says promptly, seated upright without the least interest in sleeping. Rodney sighs resignedly, somewhere between Carson’s advanced reading skills and Rodney’s-willingness to let Ronon exaggerate, the stories of Atlantis have taken on a life of their own that borders on the Grimm.
“How about I tell you about the time that I met Sheppard and McKay?” Ronon offers instead. Carson looks placated and sits back.
”But don’t leave out the dialogue,” he commands imperiously as he folds his arms around Rodney. He falls asleep mid-sentence during the operation scene, so Rodney knows he must be tired, finds himself smoothing down the soft hair in confusion.
“Here we are,” he mutters. Teyla squeezes his leg and smiles up at him. “Huh.”
It's funny, Jack thinks, as Daniel slips off for more beer with a kiss, how all of this just sort of happened. He didn't ask for this tie to McKay, didn't plan to be raising a preschooler with a veritable village now and again and practically on his own now and again, but mostly with Daniel, who teaches Carson Greek and Ancient and takes care of him when he's sick and Jack's stuck in meetings with the joint chiefs. But it's not like he's sorry. He looks up when Daniel comes back, and he surprises himself when he says, "We should take Cars to Atlantis next year."
"Are you expecting an argument?" Daniel asks incredulously, straddling Jack's lap, hands lacing into his hair. "I'm dying to go there." It's a terrible choice of words, Jack thinks, considering the survival rate of the Atlantis expedition. Then again, it's not like Daniel can die. The thought comforts Jack all the time.
"I love you," Jack says, before can think about it. He's said it to Carson a million times, but never to Daniel, and it's stupid.
Daniel rolls his eyes. "You're an idiot." But Jack thinks he looks happy.
When Rodney has been disentangled gently from Carson, he brushes his teeth and washes his face and crawls into bed in his boxers and a t-shirt. John settles behind him and Rodney can feel his own mind racing, ignores the sleepy hum as John artlessly drapes an arm over Rodney’s waist. “O’Neill tells Carson that he was made by magic,” he says abruptly, fortunately not so loud that Teyla and Ronon come in.
“Yes, Rodney, and I’m sure you and science are very upset,” John drawls into his shoulder.
“No,” Rodney says, can hear the shock in his own voice. He’s in bed with Sheppard, of all people, three years later and with the faintest scar on his stomach and his best friends near him and his own son absorbing the world around them. “Don't quote me on this, but I think he might not be wrong."
end