Rodney knew he should have gone with John to M5X-185. Okay, so that's a lie. John had said: "We're going back to M5X-185. The Minarkans are having some sort of ceremony thing, and Elizabeth thinks it will strengthen our diplomatic ties." And Rodney had said: "The goat planet? Yes, well, I'd love to, but I'm kind of busy revolutionizing modern physics this morning." And John had said, "Okay," and Rodney had sputtered, "Well, fine," and turned back to typing up important physics things.
But, in retrospect, looking at John lying pale and drawn and guilty in the infirmary, Rodney knew that it had been an intensely bad idea.
"Okay, what happened? Did Ronon shoot you again? Was there an orgy? Oh my God, there was a goat orgy, wasn't there? And now you've got an alien goat STD!"
John cupped a protective hand around his belly. "I'm pregnant," he said.
And then Rodney passed out from manly falling over and smacking his head on the wall.
Jumping back a step:
"Are you sure I can't just take the morning after pill or something?" John asked, frowning at the seventh glass of water Carson had handed him. He wondered if he was in shock.
Beckett put down the scary ass syringes he was rummaging through, and stared at John. "I think it's a little late to be delaying ovulation, son. I don't even know if you could properly be said to be ovulating. Actually, those tests would be fasci—"
"No," John said firmly.
"Right," Carson said briskly. "Well, I've just got all the test results, and there are some things we should, er, discuss. You should call Rodney in. Do you want tea?"
"What – no – why would I call Rodney in?" He and Rodney sucked at incognito.
Carson gave John a pitying look. "John, no one should go through this alone. I know Rodney might be have difficulty accepting this, but he loves you in his own way, and I'm sure he'll want to support you.
John buried his face in his pillow. Life sucked hard.
In the end, it was even worse than John could've imagined.
"Now, I could've accepted random impregnation by an Ancient device, I've seen what happens when those run amok, but – BUT –" Rodney jabbed John in the shoulder.
"Ow. Pregnant here."
Rodney rolled his eyes. "But I cannot accept that RONON is your BABY DADDY."
No, seriously. Life sucked dick.
Here's how it went down:
Halfway through the Minalkan's ceremony – a totally normal one involving minimal goats and a lot of something that sounded like reggae, there wasn't even ritual blood-letting this time – Ronon had come and dragged John away from this scarily buxom Minalkan girl who John was mostly convinced had been seconds away from slipping him a roofie and having her wicked way with him.
"The chieftain's son was showing me where the lovers go to copulate," Ronon said, grabbing a couple of the crab-cake things. "I think he's hot for me."
"Ya think?"
Ronon ignored John and popped five or six cakes. "Turns out there's some sort of Ancient machine up there. They don't know what it does."
"What's it look like?"
Ronon grinned. "Like a really big gun."
John and Ronon climbed the hill, and, sure enough, there was a what appeared to be a FUCKING AWESOME gun. And then John touched it, and then came the blinding orange light, the wave of nausea, and the almost-concussion.
And then John threw up.
This is how Rodney saw things:
Rodney walked faster, but John kept. Following. Him.
"I'm sorry, Rodney, but how do you not get that this was totally an accident?"
"I'm sorry you and your boyfriend forgot to use condoms," Rodney yelled, biting viciously into a PowerBar. Oh God, the Colonel was making him eat his pain. He so did not need this.
John grabbed Rodney's arm. "Look, Rodney. Ancient technology, bright orange light, nausea, goats…" John ticked off on his fingers. "So not my fault."
"Yes, and what part of Big Ancient Fertility Uzi doesn't sound like you made it up?" Rodney snapped. He jerked his arm away form John and stormed into the mess.
"How long have you been schtupping my boyfriend?"
Rodney almost shoved Ronon, but then Ronon grinned ferally at him and Rodney reconsidered. He was totally building a robot to kick Ronon's ass, though.
"You shouldn't speak Yiddish, McKay," Ronon said, sucking some sort-of-Fettuccine-Alfredo off his fingers. "You're such a goy."
Rodney sputtered.
"Have you met Rebecca?" Ronon asked John, grabbing the petite brunette next to him by the shoulders, and shaking her affectionately. "I'm converting for our wedding."
Rodney snapped his jaw shut with a click. "I'm going to build some deathbots now." He swiveled around and stormed off, stealing Ronon's pudding as he left.
"Hi Rebecca," John said. "Looks like you're going to be a stepmom."
What John told his son:
When Jonah was six, he clambered up onto John's lap and asked John why he and Jonah's daddy aren't together. "Does it mean you don't love me, Mom?"
John vows to kill Rodney for teaching Jonah how to say "mom" – really, how petty is he? – and to never let Jonah watch weepy chick flick divorce movies with Katie Brown again, and says, "Hey, Maverick. Want to fly the puddlejumper?"
When Rodney stopped being (such) an asshole:
Rodney crawled into bed with John in the middle of the night, lying down with his head near John's belly.
"Your alien lovechild just kicked me in the ear," Rodney murmured.
"Yeah, well, you deserved it. You've been a jackass," John mumbled, petting Rodney's hair sleepily.
Rodney curled around John. "I forgive you for sleeping with Ronon."
"Thanks, that means a lot." John kissed Rodney's forehead. "Now go to sleep before I kill you."
When the baby came:
By the time the baby came, Rodney and John had been sleeping together again for eight and a half months, but it was the first time in the pregnancy that Rodney looked at Ronon without muttering about deathbots.
It helped that Rodney and Rebecca – a chemist with a taste for bad kung fu movies and a really scary knife collection – had become BFF sometime around month five, and she didn't seem to think that Ronon had stolen John's flower. She was teaching Rodney to knit, or something. John really didn't get it.
Ronon had insisted on helping deliver the baby. "This is something for two parents to share," he said, putting a big, warm hand on John's humongous stomach (and, really, how much would John not miss that?).
The last thing John remembers before Carson gave him what must have been the BEST EPIDURAL EVER was Ronon saying, "Besides. On Sateda, I was a midwife."
John still isn't sure which one of them came up with the name Jonah.
Bringing up Baby:
The biggest surprise about having a baby wasn't the late nights (Rodney never slept anyway), or the diaper changing/feeding/burping/etc. (Ronon proved to be almost scarily competent), or even the general wonder of being a parent (though, dude, even Rodney was amazed at how excellent it was). It was that Kavanaugh turned out to be disgustingly good with babies. Jonah would coo when he came in the room.
"He calls him JoJo," Rodney hissed at John over his third pudding cup, one day when Jonah was nine months old.
John paused in his attempt to get Jonah to eat the almost-strained-prunes by making airplane noises (he was reenacting Top Gun, to piss off Rodney). "That's just not right," he said. Jonah smeared almost-prune in John's hair.
"You're right, Mav. Prunes suck."
"Oh, please, he's a baby, not your wingman –"
When Jonah was nine, John got shot for the sixteenth time. In the face.
"Really, Rodney, it just grazed me," John protested as Rodney ripped off his bandages. "And ow."
"Don't think I'm not shallow enough to divorce you if you lose your nose. I am completely that shallow."
"I don't think the marriage ceremony on P7S-995 was actually legally binding –"
"You know what? I quit." Rodney slammed down the antiseptic and bandages. "I quit. You're almost fifty –"
"Forty-seven!"
"We have a nine-year-old. We've got three ZPMs. We've got younger, faster people on this mission. Let's go to Earth and become ridiculously wealthy and not die before our son wins the Nobel Prize. Who will raise Jonah with if you die, asshole?"
John rebandaged his nose. "Um, Ronon and Rachel?" He screwed up his face. "Elizabeth, Teyla, Carson, Kavanaugh –"
Rodney grabbed John's hand, but didn't look at him. "Yeah, well, I quit."
Jonah's first year on Earth:
When Jonah's mom and Rodney moved Jonah to Colorado Springs, Jonah stopped talking to Rodney for five months, three weeks, and four days. (He felt kind of bad for John, separated from the city that loved him, so sometimes he'd watch Back to the Future with him.)
Jonah told his classmates he was Canadian. (He'd spent every spring break since he was four with his Aunt Jeannie and Uncle Caleb and his cousins Madison and Kelly. Madison and Kelly had taught him about Scrabble and Tim Horton's, and he'd taught them to stick fight, until that time they accidentally broke Kelly's nose and Uncle Caleb had made them write essays about how playing with big, heavy sticks was stupid.) They thought his dreadlocks were awesome.
Most days after school, Jonah would take the bus to SGC, where Rodney still worked, and he would walk past Rodney's office and make a point of telling Samantha Carter how much he missed home really loudly and of letting her buy him hot chocolate from the mess hall. He especially like talking to Daniel Jackson when he was around, because a) Rodney hated it and b) Daniel Jackson was really, really interesting.
They all go back to Pegasus when they can. ("It's not like we can claim full custody, Rodney. They're as much his parents as we are and, oh yeah, our best friends." "Yeah, well you're still not getting shot at. And, what, you thought I forgot that Ronon's virile alien sperm knocked you up?" "...That is so not how it happened.") At Christmas, they stay for three weeks, and Ronon and Rebecca take Jonah to a bazaar on M8Z-189, where they buy him a knife the size of his forearm. Jonah buys Rodney a straw hat and makes him a card that says, "Merry Christmas (you big jerk)", but later he falls asleep on Rodney's lap and Rodney strokes his hair, forgetting how much he hates Jonah's dreadlocks.
Jonah has three daddies:
Jonah had four parents to begin with, so he was already kind of ahead of the crowd, but really, growing up the only child of Atlantis, he had closer to fifty.
Laura Cadman would let him paint her nails and would tell him stories about Rodney that he totally didn't believe. She also taught him how to play poker, and would let him sit in on the girl's poker night until he was fourteen and developed a really stupid crush on one of the women from Botany and started losing all Cadman's money.
He would sit for hours with Elizabeth Weir just soaking up all of her stories about Earth, and all the places she traveled. She even let him read her undergraduate thesis, once, the one only her thesis advisor and father had read, because he just was so interested. She and the linguists recruited him hard, and then laughed when Ronon and Rodney would argue over whether Jonah would be an OBGYN or the next great concert pianist, because, really, Jonah's dads are blind. John took notes for Jonah on the people on every planet he visited while he was still on active duty, so Elizabeth thought he got it. (His mission reports had improved radically when his six year old fell in love with anthropology. Elizabeth would have made fun of him for it, but she was afraid it would stop.)
Teyla taught Jonah to stick fight, and used to sing him Athosian lullabies at night, because she knew that none of his parents could sing. When Jonah moved to Earth, in between summer breaks, when he would spend three months on Atlantis, he would write Teyla letters everyday, like his diary.
Zalenka helped Rodney launch his Get Jonah Interested in Physics campaign, except usually it would end up that Zalenka built robots and toy cars and models of the galaxy for Jonah, and Jonah would take naps under Zalenka's desk, or, later, flirt with the lab technician.
Everybody pitched in for the only bar mitzvah that Atlantis has ever seen.
Even Atlantis was parental. Who knew Atlantis baby-proofed?
Jonah now:
Jonah at nineteen is tall and grey-eyed and skinny, awkwardly white like John. He has dreadlocks down to his waist and thick-lensed glasses. (He cracks up when he sees Lois and Clark's son in Superman Returns. "At least I don't have asthma, too," he says. Mixing alien genes doesn't always work so hot, unsurprisingly.) His pants hang off his bony hips, and when its sunny out he practices Athosian stick fighting on the quad.
When he told Rodney he was going to Oberlin, Rodney said, "Please tell me you mean the conservatory." Ever since Jonah declared his major (Anthropology, with a minor in Comparative American Studies), Rodney has called him every night to tell him he disapproves of his life decisions and to make sure Jonah's eating properly. "You're skinnier than your mother," Rodney snaps. "It must be all the Tofurkey they're feeding you at that hippi—" And then John takes the phone from him and says, "You know, you can stop calling me mom any day now," and asks him if he's made it to any Ohio State football games yet. (He hasn't, but he and John will go over Parent's Visiting Weekend. Rodney will go to concerts at the Conservatory and destroy the self-esteem of four-fifths of the organ department.)
This summer, Jonah has an internship at an archaeological site that Daniel Jackson helped him get, but he's still going through the Wormhole in May to help with the Athosian harvest and to spend time with his dad and Rebecca. At his hippie school in Ohio, he's really good at pretending that he totally doesn't spend all summer tasering his dad and shooting things with progressively bigger and bigger guns. It's really not any harder than pretending he doesn't come from an alien galaxy. But sometimes in his cinderblock dorm room he misses how the walls light up at home.
