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Chapter Text

Panthalassa: SGA, R

Atlantis, Lantea, eight years after the war ends -

The worst part is, they all look like him. In the hallways, in the nursery, in the schoolrooms and the mess hall, the children are scrawny, pointy-eared, pointy-chinned, with messy brown hair and green-brown eyes. They even talk a little like him, in their light, high children's voices; there is a drawl to their words, and a smooth quickness to their movements. Rodney watches two of the children sitting on the balcony outside the school lab, disassembling one of the old tablet computers with a set of tiny screwdrivers and a magnifying glass. He sees the tilt of their heads, their casual preteen slouch over the materials. He sees the way the city's force field curves protectively around the balcony, ready to catch them if they fall. He watches them work for a moment, and then he goes back to his own lab, and yells at Radek and makes one of the assistants cry. Then he goes to the whiteboard and writes out the equations for the power consumption of the cloak on a jumper, longhand, over and over, until he feels better.

So, they won the war. He wakes up hearing the dull thud of energy weapons against the city shield in the night; it is only the throb of the air conditioning, and he rolls onto his back, counts slowly backwards through the primes, and tries to sleep again. They won the war, and the military let Atlantis go, let the Athosians claim Lantea and the scientists claim the city. Of course, there had been a price. We can't leave the Gate to Earth undefended, they'd said. The therapy is a stopgap. The only true ATA carrier is dead in battle. How can you possibly keep the Gate safe without the gene?

They - the Armed Services, Rodney figures, or Stargate Command, or a government office with an inscrutable acronym - asked for colonists to volunteer to bear children with the ATA gene. They hadn't mentioned whose ATA gene. They didn't mention that they were going to throw in the whole gamete for free.

Rodney wonders, quite frequently, how it happened. Was it standard military procedure? Had they asked the good Colonel to do his duty with a specimen cup, or had they reconstructed his DNA from some other sample, drawn blood, preserved hair? Had Sheppard ever known what they had planned if he didn't come back?

The first children were born seven years ago. All but three of them tested positive for ATA. Rodney is never sure how much the original volunteers knew. At first, people commented that the babies looked like each other. Later, people stopped commenting. It was hard not to see John in them, but Rodney had tried. He had tried not to know, and he had failed, and he had been furious. Many people had been angry, but quietly. Within the bounds - Rodney thinks sarcastically - of good taste. He was sure then that the program would end immediately. The number of volunteers dropped; some scientists moved to the mainland, away from the Ancient city and the stolen Ancient gene. But, every year, a few more ATA babies are born. There are probably forty or fifty of them, running around Atlantis, getting into everything, getting in the way. People are accustomed to the idea now, and they are indulged - spoiled - by their father's city and by an aging team who is inclined to remember a certain lopsided grin more charitably as the years pass.

Rodney just barely tolerates them. They give him the heebie-jeebies; his skin crawls and his throat tightens and he has to turn and walk away. They are just children, and he can't blame them for their origins, but Rodney never liked children to start with - they are small and impulsive and often show sickeningly poor judgment - and it's unbearably eerie being surrounded by tiny Sheppards, like overactive, high-pitched ghosts.

They aren't the only children on Atlantis, of course. Normal human reproduction still works, he notes irritably, and marines and scientists have paired off left and right, reproducing at a modest replacement rate that Rodney nonetheless finds terrifying. And not all of the ATAs are in the city; as many are being raised as Athosians, coming to the city only on trade days, or for school during the long, fallow dry season. There are even orphans, the children of unlucky marines, living in a nursery run by a motherly Athosian woman down on the third level. Rodney knows that Radek and Ronan both spend time down there babysitting and helping the older kids with projects. He's caught Elizabeth before in a chair in the nursery, a Sheppard baby on her shoulder. "Great, John." he mutters as he passes in the hallway. He has never gotten out of the habit of talking to Sheppard, though he does it quietly, and tries not to let Heightmeyer catch him. "That's just fantastic. Even Ronon's having your babies. I don't know why I wasn't expecting it." Rodney is an old hand at dispersing real uneasiness through a constant, low-level stream of complaints, like letting water little by little out of a dam. John always listened to his ranting with amusement, especially when they were spurious. He tries not to calculate exactly when Sheppard became John in his head.

Rodney spends all day and half the nights in the labs, and eats in the mess after the children are asleep. He's finally given in to the nagging of the woman who replaced Carson - Carson, why doesn't Carson have dozens of posthumous babies running around? Surely Carson's bodily fluids, with their precious gene, are on file somewhere - and started going to the gym, though he does it at three in the morning, because he would have to kill anyone who sees him using an exercycle. He discovers, guiltily, that the good doctor is right. Thirty minutes of indignity means his blood sugar stays even and he feels a little better at the end of the day. He towels his hair dry in front of the mirror in the locker room - a job that takes less time than it used to - and examines his face under the flat, bright lights. Maybe he's a little wrinkled around the eyes, and his stubble comes in gray in patches. But he still wakes up at four in the morning with equations running bright from his brain to his fingertips, waiting for paper. He still thinks faster and harder and better than anyone else, which makes him not just important but necessary. He tells himself that that it’s enough when his bones ache in the first damp air of storms over the city. He tells himself that that it’s enough when he wakes up at two in the morning and lies in the dark, heart stuttering, hearing the low distant thud of energy weapons against the shield in the innocuous hum of the air conditioning. That is another reason he comes to the gym at three in the morning; he lurches awake, bitter with adrenaline, in the cold dark, and he can't go back to sleep.

It's better now. It is better, he tells himself determinedly. The city is bright and open and alive, and it belongs to the Atlanteans and to the children. Rodney can feel pleased about that even as he avoids them as best he can, because his work comes first and he doesn't like children and no matter how used he gets to the idea their hazel eyes and drawling voices make his chest hurt.

Laura Cadman lives in an apartment one floor up and two halls over from Rodney. She has slumped gracefully into her thirties, trading the jogging - hard on the knees, she says - for yoga and the all-salad meal plan for stroganoff and fajita night in the cafeteria. She is strong, a good shot, still mean as hell, but her chin has gone round and her waist has gone convex. Her hair is sensible and short.

When Rodney crosses paths with her - after several years of instinctual avoidance - attraction hits him like gravity gone wrong. She smiles at him, sideways. Laura Cadman is, he imagines, used to putting that gobsmacked look on people's faces. It has been years since he's felt gobsmacked, though. It's been years since he felt anything but tired.

He doesn't know exactly how he ends up flat on his back in her bed, his feet dangling over the precipice at the edge, Laura's strong, round hands careful on his body, her hair faded and bright in the sunlight off the ocean. He barely has the presence of mind to get one hand between them, and the other hand to her cheek, to the curve of the mouth that she presses against his palm as she comes, and then as the world whites out he feels his whole face turn grateful.

"I'm going to have a baby," she says, some months later. They are lying in his bed, the force field dropped to let in the wind from the ocean.

He sits bolt upright, his hands reflexively clutching the sheet to his waist. She turns over, sees his face, and smiles.

"Relax. It's not yours," she says, sitting up, her breasts low and heavy over the curve of her stomach, her hair mussed, her mouth wet. God, Laura Cadman is a beautiful woman, he thinks, and then, registering her words, he thinks, what?

Giving him a moment to think is a mistake on her part. "You aren't!" he says, scrabbling backwards, the sheet tightening in his hands. "Not you too!"

She sighs and turns, toeing her BDUs up from the floor. Part of his mind reels, while another part watches in simple disappointment as she combs her fingers through her hair and buttons up her shirt. Shoes will be next, and then she'll be gone again. He is aware that he is not the most sensitive of individuals, when it comes to interpersonal matters, but he can at least recognize certain universal laws. Laura's shoes on Laura’s feet equal Laura walking out, usually because of what she insists is calling him on his bullshit and he maintains is her bowing to his superior logic. There are reasons they haven't moved in together, and those reasons will remain constant, parallel to the arrow of time. He has no illusions about that.

"I'm not getting any younger, Rodney," she says, rooting through in the mess on the floor, finding one sock but not the other. "And you're not going to make an honest woman of me - which would be a complete trainwreck - and, you know, I want a baby, and there are babies on offer." She sits down in his desk chair to put her socks on, infuriatingly casual. "So I made the appointment."

Rodney feels like his heart is stopping, again. Again, again. "When?" he grates out, voice shaky, but she looks up at him and pauses, one hand in the laces of her shoes.

"You'd try to stop me, wouldn't you?" she says, her voice strange. "I never figured you for the controlling type, Rodney. At least not of people." Her face is shuttered. It is also, Rodney realizes, sad, and some uncomfortably perceptive part of him wrenches.

--

He should go to Heightmeyer. He knows this. He is not entirely without self-awareness, whatever the general population and his personnel files might say. He should, but instead he stomps around the lab until Radek kicks him out and then he nearly blows up a puddlejumper control panel right before he finds a way to double the underwater shield life by varying the ionization. It's been years since puddlejumpers made him think of Colonel Sheppard, but it's right here today, like John's body left the driver's seat warm, like he's electrifying the air around the control panels.

He hasn't talked to John much in the last few months, or only silently, his mouth forming the words in the middle of the night. So when he slams the panel shut, snapping, "Goddamn you, Sheppard, knocking up my girlfriend from beyond the grave," he's startled to feel how thoroughly he imagines John there, how he can feel imaginary- John jump at the noise, retreat from Rodney's irritation. Always withdrawing, that was John Sheppard, sure enough. He feels like if he turns, he'll see him, laconic, trying to conceal the hurt in his eyes. Still thirty-five years old. He slams the panel cover shut and gathers his tools, stomping out of the jumper bay. He takes a very complicated route home that avoids the school, the nursery, and the family quarters.

Laura Cadman has never been at all afraid of him - brains and brawn win out over just brains, he knows that - and so it only takes a day or two for a full-blown shouting match to erupt between them, luckily in his quarters, where the gossip will be limited to the people who happen to be walking by in the halls. When they're not actually fighting, he quite admires her style. She's a munitions expert. She knows what hits home. She calls him an emotionally-stunted agent of the patriarchy; it doesn't bother him, so it must not be true. It isn't his country turning Atlantis into an ATA breeding camp, so she can't call him unpatriotic. He accuses her of helping to create a Pegasus-dominating master race, and violating John Sheppard's rights from beyond the grave, but it's when she says, dirt-calm, worn out, "If what you want to do is forget him, I don't know why you stayed here," that he flinches, and that's the end of it. Either she feels bad, or she's won, or she feels bad for having won; he's already lobbed all his ready insults, but she's silent after her last attack. He feels his body start to sag, and she leaves quietly.

It wasn't that good a shot, he tells himself, lying on the bed. The sun has started to set and his room is all blue shadow. He's tired, so tired, and everyone will have gone home from the lab now anyway. He shivers a little in the cold from the vents but doesn't bother to turn down the air conditioning; he can't seem to move at all. It's just that, right now, he's tired. He imagines her coming back, saying, I had no right to question your loyalty to John. She would never call him John. Rodney never called him John, not to his face, not while he was alive. He imagines leaving. The wormhole still opens to Earth twice a year for news and medical supplies. It will open again in five weeks. He thinks about going back to Earth, working at some podunk State U, learning to drive a car and buy groceries, wearing colors besides blue and tan and black, forgetting how to read Ancient. Every time he imagines himself on Earth, he's in Colorado Springs, or McMurdo, or living near an air force base somewhere on the East Coast with the planes rattling his windows five hundred times a day. He always imagines himself somewhere John Sheppard has been.

It is cold, and dark, but he doesn't get up, or get under the covers, and finally he falls asleep. In the night he feels a thin warmth, like a cat denting the mattress, like another heart beating next to his. When he wakes in the morning, teeth chattering, back stiff, the covers are undisturbed around him, and the door hasn't been opened.

--

He waits another eight or nine hours before he goes to her quarters, and he actually has the temerity to bring her flowers. They're from the hydroponics lab, and he has to bring them back, in their pot, as soon as he's done with them.

He apologizes. She's clearly never seen him apologize to anyone over anything, and it's only when he's sitting in her most comfortable chair with her blanket around his shoulders and a mug of tea in his hands that he realizes that it really might be a sign that he's cracking. "I mean what I said about the government conspiracy," he adds, blowing on the tea, and she folds her arms, too worried to take umbrage. Then he is silent, which makes her face turn pinched again. She looks like she's about five minutes away from taking his temperature.

"I went to the infirmary today," she finally says.

He looks at her.

"It'll be a week or two before they know if it took."

There is a moment of silence.

"Look, Rodney. It's my kid too. You know that, right?"

The steam is curling off the surface of the tea and he takes a sip even though it burns his mouth. He can hear the hiss of the ventilation, not at all like the thud of weapons, not at all like the whine of darts. She has the force field low enough that he can hear the ocean. She's changed quarters sometime in the last ten years, and these are cluttered, lived-in, settled, with books on the shelves and rugs on the floor. She still has the picture of her parents by her bed, though. He wonders if they're still living, and if they'll find out about their grandchild. He wonders when he started to think about things like that.

"Look." he says, setting the mug down. "It's not that I'm in favor of this plan, because I am not. I don't like it. I cannot even begin to speculate on the poor planning involved in having hundreds of little ATA carriers running around like emotionally immature, technology-activating chimpanzees, and I'm sure the moral and political implications are incomprehensibly unfortunate. Leaving aside, for the moment, the immense emotional and physical upheaval that gestation and delivery inflicts on the female body, which is something I don't understand why you would ever, ever, ever want to go through. But you're determined to do it, and your half of the genetic contribution isn't entirely unfortunate, and I'm also not willing to start in with the implications of saying that you aren't capable of making moral decisions about your own body. So. That said. Congratulations."

A smile is beginning to quirk her mouth.

"And also." He looks down into his mug. "You know exactly how useless I am with children and with people in general and I would not be my own first choice for the whole supportive friend thing. But. Taking that into account - I'm, you know. Here for you. And all that."

He tries not to take it personally when she laughs so hard she bends at the middle, but then she stands up and takes the mug out of his hands and moves his hands to her hips, puts her fingers in his spiky pattern-bald hair. She has always been gentle with him, but this is the first time he feels like he should be gentle with her, like he should feel protective towards someone who could kill him ten ways with her bare hands. He draws his mouth down across the round of her belly, feeling her breath, her heart beating under his fingers, and he thinks: so, having a kid. It can't be that bad.

--

Laura Charin Cadman is born on the twelfth day of the second month of the tenth year of the Atlantis Colony, at about three in the morning.

"You named her after yourself, how generous,” Rodney says, his entire body curled protectively around Laura Senior as he sits on the edge of her infirmary bed

"I could have named her Meredith," Cadman replies, but there is no real force in her words as she stares, exhausted, delighted, at her wrinkled, slimy, red-faced daughter. It's just a baby, Rodney reminds himself. Just a baby, exactly like any other baby, except that she's Laura's, and Laura's alone. When Laura hands him the little squirming bundle he is surprised at his lack of unease, at how she fits into the crook of his elbow. Her eyes are blurry and blue. They focus on him, and something he has never put a name to changes, small and easy as exhaling.

Teyla comes to the naming ceremony, which is held out on the balcony, where all the Athosian receptions are held. She has one child in hand and another in a sling across her back, and there is gray starting in her hair. Wherever she goes, now, she's in a crowd of Athosians, but she catches Rodney aside to embrace him, Earth-style, formally, before going to give her gifts to mother and baby.

"It is a good thing you do." she murmurs in his ear. "I hope you are very happy." When Laura tells Teyla the names she's chosen, tears spring to her eyes. From then on, everyone calls the baby Charin.

Charin's eyes are very blue, and her hair stays pale as she grows bigger; this is a relief to Rodney. He still worries about the ATA bearers constantly, but his worries have shifted their orbit and formed a solar system of anxiety with Charin at the middle. He worries now about Pegasus politics, about kidnappings, about diplomatic marriages. Some of the ATAs among the Athosians are already engaged to people they've never met in other settlements. It might be culturally appropriate, it might be genetically advantageous, but that doesn't mean he has to like it. Laura agrees; it might be safest if no one takes Charin for a Sheppard at first glance. But, it's there if you look for it, in the shape of her face, and she is perfectly capable of making the lights flash or the emergency klaxon go off when she's unhappy. He lives with it.

He and Laura never move in together, and they formally break up when Charin is about eighteen months old. By that point, though, Charin is so used to him that everyone agrees he should keep coming around. He's surprised at how much she takes to him, and finds her an engaging audience for his more eccentric cosmological ramblings. He's never really minded getting up at two in the morning and going upstairs because Charin is making the hall's water go on and off and Laura has radioed him with misery in her voice. He walks with her out on the balcony, addressing his lectures on the curvature of space time and the basic incompatibility of Earth cacao and Athosian soil to the baby's tiny, fuzzy head. Many nights she falls asleep on his shoulder, lulled by his muttered monologues, which he's learned to deliver softly, like nursery rhymes. Sometimes he sits on the bench on the balcony in the still summer air, after she falls asleep, just feeling her warm and heavy against his shoulder. He wonders if this warm, stuttering feeling in his chest is something he should see a cardiologist about.

He still talks to John, but what he says is different now, even after Cadman finally snaps and takes back her spare toothbrush and tells him never again. It’s something he's been expecting for some time now - ever since the toothbrush first appeared in his bathroom, to be honest, because really - Laura Cadman. But she's a good mother, he'll give her that, and he says so when they meet in the cautious demilitarized zone between their quarters, where she hands over a sleepy toddler and a diaper bag with a series of stern admonitions about childproofing.

He sets up the spare crib in an alcove in his quarters. He doesn't mind the lack of privacy. Seeing Laura naked on a regular basis for a year and a half was much more luck than he'd expected from his fourth decade and he will be completely unsurprised if the next bout of good fortune is well into his fifth. He tells John this, especially when it's Laura's night to have Charin and he lays in the dark alone. He's a little mopey, maybe, but basically content. "She looks like you," he says into the air, "but not the way I expected. Her eyes are Laura's, and she doesn't have the elf-ears, but I think she's built like you. She might have your feet." He turns over, cheek into the pillow, meditatively. "I never saw your feet that often." He imagines that he feels the air around him turn amused, and he thumps the pillow. "I didn't want to see your feet, Major. Colonel. I'm just interested in which of the less-important of your genes you've bequeathed to our daughter." He hears the words, and adds, "My and Laura's daughter. It would be nice if you were here to teach her your bad habits, but you're not, so she'll have to make do with mine."

--

Charin is three when it happens. He feels almost like he's been waiting for it, ever since Laura went off maternity leave and back off-world. It isn't anyone's fault, just a goddamn stupid accident, and he walks into Heightmeyer's office and puts his head down on his knees and stays there for the next eight hours, sobbing into the chair like his body is trying to shudder itself into pieces.

Heightmeyer finally calls Ronon, of all people, who sits with him, arms around his shoulders, as he sits awake all night wishing the time machine had been built, wishing he could get back, make it unhappen, go back to living two floors apart and fighting because he knew Laura, he knew her and she knew him, and he feels like part of his body is bleeding out into the soil of PX-5871. It was quick, Elizabeth says, her hands on his face, and he sees in her eyes that her heart is breaking too, that it gets no easier for any of them. He remembers when John went missing after the last battle. It had been horrible, it had been like trying to breathe underwater, for months, for years, but this is a different pain, unexpected, and total. Laura had left Charin in the nursery overnight, because she was off-world and Rodney was supposed to be on call in the lab for some work involving the hybrid ZPMs. When Rodney wakes up, the first thing that seizes him is that he hasn't gone to Charin, that she doesn't know.

They stand together at her graveside, the physicist and the little girl. Laura had asked to be buried on the mainland, in the town's graveyard. Rodney had never understood before exactly how Atlantean she had become, to ask to stay here, even in the end. Ronon and Teyla stand with him, and Radek, and the Marines all around him, but the only thing Rodney feels is Charin's hand in his. The air around him is empty, the faces shuttered. He has always told himself it's the fate of geniuses to live alone with their thoughts, but he's never felt as alone as this.

"We have to talk about Charin," Elizabeth says over her desk. It has been three weeks. Rodney started sleeping in Cadman's quarters the third night, so that Charin could sleep in her own bed with her own toys and her mother's things around her. He has spent most of his days sitting in the corner of the daycare working on his tablet, trying not to check on her every thirty seconds. Even now, he's only left her in the daycare alone because Ronon is with her. He knows that it would be better for Charin if he let her carry on normally. He's trying.

"I've been talking to Heightmeyer," Rodney replies, defensive. "I have pamphlets about the stages of grief in children. I even read them." All of them, several times over, and then threw them across the room.

Elizabeth folds her hands. Her hair is mostly gray now, and her face is lined. "It's not that. Rodney, I'm sorry, this is a terrible time for it, but there are some things you should know about Charin's legal custody."

It is clear from her tone that she doesn't just mean signing some papers. "What?" He feels the blood drain out of his face. "What do you mean? Did Laura name someone else?"

"No, her wishes were very clear." Elizabeth looks down at her hands, and Rodney realizes she's trying not to meet his eyes. "Rodney, if I'd known you'd get involved, I would have told you this a long time ago."

"What is it?" He feels the starting edge of fear; his mouth goes bitter.

She sighs. "It isn't that you aren't Charin's legal guardian. We could get around that." She is meeting his eyes now; her face is diplomatic, sympathetic, blank. "It's that as an ATA carrier conceived in Atlantis, she is, and always has been, in the custody of the U.S. military."

Rodney is on his feet. "What?" he shouts.

"I'm sorry. You should have known years ago. All the ATA parents were told." She is grave, unmoved by his anger. Rodney sees suddenly the shadows under her eyes, the web of wrinkles around her mouth. He sees her in the clarity of panic.

"The government has rights over Charin," he replies flatly, unbelieving. "They could call her back to Earth, shut her up in Area 51, and I'd never see her again."

Elizabeth reaches a hand towards him. "You need to be calm. That's not going to happen."

"It could!" Rodney can feel his face reddening. His voice shakes a little. "It isn't bad enough that they make an orphan of her, she'll go back to Earth to be their lab rat? What would they even do with her? Breeding programs? Technology experiments? Raise her in a lab somewhere in Nevada?"

"Rodney!" Elizabeth's voice cuts across his panic like a slap. He stares at her. "I won't let that happen." She looks back at the papers on her desk. "I am the liaison between Atlantis and Earth," she continues, "And Earth has been quite reasonable about this. Eight times before I've argued that these children are best served by staying on Atlantis, and I've won every time. Charin is staying here." She has risen out of her seat as she says this, and she straightens her jacket and folds her arms, challenging.

"What if you don't win?" Rodney says, feeling all the emotional bruises of the last two weeks rising again on his face.

Elizabeth turns towards the window, turns back towards him. "Rodney." The door shuts. "If that happens, and you want to fight it, we will block the gate. We will disable the gate. And then we'll see if the Asgard will let Earth use their ship to come kidnap a baby from its home." The corners of her mouth quirk up in something nothing like a smile. "I've planned that out eight times, Rodney. It hasn't happened yet. But you have to know." Her gaze is sharp. "Whether you raise Charin yourself or not, you have to know."

There is a miserable silence, and then he nods. He rises, clumsily, and turns to leave. He wants badly to be out of this office, heavy with plans and politics, to go see his daughter, go be a small man mourning his own losses. Then he turns back.

"Elizabeth." She meets his eyes. "Why did you let them do this? Not just -" he waves his hands around his face - "this, but all of it. With the genes. I think I deserve for you to tell me."

The sun is setting behind her, now, and she has only half-turned to look at him. "Are you sure you want to hear it?"

He nods.

She turns away again. "I worked in international politics for fifteen years, Rodney. I worked at the U.N. during some of the bloodiest years in Earth's history."

He is silent. He knows this part.

"I love this galaxy." She is looking towards the mainland, he realizes; in her mind, she's probably looking much further than that. "I love this city. And I've seen what that gene can do."

"It can make machines work, Elizabeth," he says. "It's a random mutation, nothing more."

"The ATA gene is a weapon," she replies, without changing her tone. "Combined with Ancient technology it is the most potent weapon known to humankind, and the United States military has it. Believe me, Rodney. No matter what they say about the ATA program, somewhere on the other side of that gate they are creating more children with the gene. Why do you think Carson destroyed all the materials in his file? He knew what an ATA carrier could do. He didn't want to become part of a weapon."

"And it's okay if John does." Rodney's voice cracks shamefully. "It's okay if his children are weapons. You didn't even ask him."

Elizabeth turns. It is dark now; her face is dark, haloed in orange. He can't make out her expression. "Colonel Sheppard was a soldier," she says. "And he loved this city. When Stargate Command suggested it, I had to make the decision. I'm not claiming it was right."

"And when they come through that gate some day -"

The evening lights have started to come up, and he can see when she smiles. It is not a nice smile. "Rodney, in twenty years, they can send whatever the hell they want through that gate. It won't matter. We'll be ready."

He stands shakily, and walks out.

--

He doesn't think about what Elizabeth has said. That's the only way to go on with it, he realized years ago, in those first suffocating months after they lost John. It galls his sense of intellectual integrity, but he forces himself. He sits with Charin, and reads to her, and goes to the lab, and he is so subdued that Radek hovers, worried.

Rodney goes out and walks on the pier in the wind. "I shouldn't talk to you," he says into the air. "I don't talk to Laura, and she's gone, too." It has been a month and a half now. When John's jumper went down, Rodney was holding his crazy conversations within the week. "I don't know what to do." He leans against a pylon, scrubbing his face with his hands. "I didn't sign up for this, John. I don't think that I can do it. Maybe she should go back to Earth. I have no way of knowing she won't be better off there. I don't know if Elizabeth's right. I don't know if Elizabeth's crazy."

Suddenly he feels it, that change in pressure that he imagines as John listening to him. As John listening to him, and the air around him chiming with no, no, no.

"Why, John?" He has forgotten, a long time ago, to feel crazy over these conversations, but it occurs to him again, sharply. "I... I love her, yes, but how is that enough? I don't even like children. I don't even like your children. And I liked you alright." He hears anger in his voice, but he is just so tired again. He learned during the war that grief feels like exhaustion. It feels like never wanting to get up again. But here it is, the reason he is here talking to the air and the city and his dead friend, because he feels that warmth growing along his back, that sense of presence, that sense that there is a hand on his shoulder. He closes his eyes, leans into it. Feels John, for a moment, like a warm wind against his face. You can do this, he understands suddenly from the sound of the wind in the dusk on the ocean. You can do this. For me, you'll do this.

--

He starts in on the project of forcing life back to normal. He avoids Elizabeth. He gets Charin up in the morning, and puts her shoes and socks on and makes her brush her teeth, and takes her to the nursery, then goes to his lab and works. He works as well as he ever has; it's walking and talking and breathing that exhaust him. He is more paranoid than he used to be; every communication from Earth makes him jumpy. But the fear passes with the mourning, slowly. It has been a year when he discovers that he can look at Elizabeth in the hall again. It is around the same time that he realizes that all of his possessions have migrated into Laura's apartment, and that he can run his hand over her books, start to give away her clothes, without his heart going still in his chest.

Charin gets older fast, too fast. She takes her first steps in the lab, a little late, lurching after Radek as he rolls his desk chair from work-station to work-station. No one who hears the story will believe Rodney when he insists he only set her down for a second, and it wasn't the lab with the dangerous materials in it, and what do they take him for, anyway? Miko puts up a baby fence in the corner, which Charin climbs readily. She goes from the nursery to the preschool in the north tower. She starts real school down the hall from their apartment.

Suddenly, he is middle-aged in earnest. Without noticing, he's become someone who meets with teachers and nags about homework and falls asleep on the couch at two in the afternoon with a book on his face. He talks to Radek, and Charin. He talks to his memory of John. He works, and is content, and then, some days, he is happy.

Chapter Text

It is one of the ATA kids that finds it. Of course it would be, McKay grumbles to Radek – the one who he spends his time with, these days; two men on the same end of middle age bitching about the kids tearing through the halls and messing with the mainframe. If he had had dozens of children, Rodney says, one of them would have found it, because his kids would have been far smarter and far less inclined to waste their time surfing. "Or to spend time outside at all," Radek adds. "Your children would have been cloistered in front of their computers. It is a genetic trait, I am sure of this."

Charin has recently taken up snowboarding, a hobby Rodney does not endorse at all, especially for an eleven-year-old, especially when it involves going off with a bunch of the other eleven-year-olds in a puddlejumper piloted by a teenage half-sibling with the gene for flying no doubt bolstered by the gene for reckless stupidity. He never lets Charin go unless the Marines go with them, which Charin finds unspeakably lame.

"You think this is bad," Radek says, unsympathetic, "wait until those Athosian boys start coming to your door." The daughter Radek adopted is seventeen years old, and the daughter born to his wife is fourteen, and he often shows up in the mess with the look of a hunted man. "Boys, boys, boys, all they say, all the time, everything is hair and clothes and boys. I thought we moved to a different galaxy to escape that sort of thing."

The table next to theirs is occupied by a particularly sulky, pimply band of teenage boys, some of them with obvious shaving wounds, about half of them with that recognizable, hopelessly vertical hair. Rodney wonders if there is an age when it will start to look cool, or if the hair had only been made bearable by John Sheppard's personality. "I think it's more hormones than gender roles," Rodney says. "They look like they're suffering something similar. And thank you for reminding me that puberty is coming towards my family with the force and deadliness of an out of control train, Zelenka, I feel so much better."

"So what is it, anyway?" Radek is going over the numbers on his pad. As the population has grown, and grown obviously smarter, they've both been letting go of projects, until sometimes they don't know about something until after it blows up. All part of the learning experience, Rodney says, and tries not to reflect on how the mind-numbing exhaustion of parenting has mellowed him. He knows he's changed; it's just that what Heightmeyer calls emotional maturity sounds to him like losing his edge. It helps, he admits very rarely, to have a bunch of people around with the natural gene. Somehow, experiments in the city turn out a lot better when Atlantis likes the people doing them.

"Some sort of homing beacon," Rodney answers, shrugging. "Sunken Ancient something, out in the ocean. Obviously, I wasn't going to go check it out."

"The water still is as your kryptonite." Radek makes a mocking face. "It gives me the heebie-jeebies too, I will admit."

"So Selena Dex and Jinto Emmagan went out to look for it." Their parents have sent them over from the mainland, partially so that they can learn to use Ancient technology and partially, Rodney figures, because the village was way too small to safely contain them.

"If they have not caused eight catastrophes before sundown I will be surprised. Possibly disappointed," Radek answers.

He and Radek sit for a while, pull out the chess board, mess around - they've known all each other's tricks for two decades, now, so it is difficult to play seriously - looking up only when the lights come on as the sun sets out the window. They do this every afternoon: meet in the mess hall around four, play chess, grumble. It is a ritual Rodney regards with satisfaction. In another hour, Charin will come home, glowing with excitement and preteen adrenaline, hugging Rodney gingerly around her new falling-down-the-mountain bruises. When she's just back from one of these expeditions she reminds Rodney painfully-proudly of Laura and John both, all grace and nerves, like she's about to take flight.

Later, Radek's wife will come in from the infirmary and the Zelenka teenagers might join them. They'll eat dinner together in the mess while the ocean turns to dusk outside. It's the rhythm his days have fallen into, and he is surprised at how much he likes it.

He is just thinking that Charin should be in any minute when he feels the air go cold and startled, and all over the mess the air crackles with radios coming on.

--

"He's WHERE?" Rodney hasn't gotten himself into a good arm-flapping rage in years, but this one promises to be a doozy.

"He is WHAT?" Radek is right behind him, clutching his head in either excitement or fury.

Elizabeth is in the control room, eyes flashing, teenage trainees and lower-ranked soldiers scuttling out of her way like shorebirds in front of a tidal wave. "What is going on?" she says, without raising her voice at all, and the room falls silent.

"We, um." It's the Biro girl, the one who's so good with the sensor array, but she's not good at facing Elizabeth in full form, and her hands are shaking a little on the console. "It's Selena Dex and Jinto Emmagan. They went out looking for that homing beacon."

"Yes?" Elizabeth is worried now. "Are they alright?"

Rodney shivers unexpectedly, his hands busy over the console.

"They're fine, they -" Rachel Biro is a lean girl with hazel eyes, pointy ears and big hair. She looks helplessly from one of them to another, and goes completely silent, her words stopped in her throat. "They found-"

Dr. McNab, whose screen is full of ocean currents and pressure variables, takes over for her. "They found a puddlejumper," she says, hands still and dignified over the keyboard. "Intact."

"One of ours?"

"Yes." Eileen McNab is an elegant woman, well into middle-age - as they all are - with the wrinkles of a lifelong tan and neat black hair in a bun at the base of her neck. "There may be a survivor."

"May be? There is!" Rodney has pushed up through the circle of onlookers, and he's wielding a tablet, though it's uncertain that anyone can see it with the way he's waving it around. "There is one life sign, it's human, it's faint -"

"Oh my god." Elizabeth has made the connection, it shows on her face, she sinks suddenly into the console chair. "Oh my god."

Rodney might be terrified of the ocean but he goes anyway, with Dr. Keller, who is literally bouncing on the edge of her seat with excitement. Rodney is piloting, even though one of the ATA kids could do it better. "I just don't think -" he'd said to Elizabeth, and then, "If it's really -" He is not used to being at a loss for words.

Elizabeth says "Understood" and lets him pick his team himself. It's all first-generation Atlanteans.

It's because of his equations that Selena and Jinto can sit for hours underwater, their shield safely covering both jumpers. He tries to focus on the scientific pride of that and not on the implacable weight and cold of the water around them, or the thought of years, years in the cold water in the dark.

"Still three life signs." Lt. Miller says, eyes fixed on the instruments. "One of them is very weak." Two orderlies are beside Dr. Keller, checking over their equipment. The jumper passes through the shield and sets down on the ocean floor and the Keller is yelling "Go! Go!" and he sees Selena and Jinto waving at them through the jumper window. Before he can turn, before he knows what to do, the medics are back, with a body in a bag, though not a body bag. Keller is yelling "Back to Atlantis! Now!" and Rodney has to get the ship moving, has to get into the atmosphere and going fast before he passes the helm to Miller and turns around, terrified.

John's hair is long and streaked with gray, and he is horribly thin and ghastly pale. He has a hellacious beard, and some sort of Ancient device is ticking away over his mouth and nose. There is a slow, long pulse sounding from Keller's instruments, less a beep than a repeating tone, a note held in the underwater dark.

--

He stays unconscious, and he stays in quarantine. Dr. Keller delivers daily updates to the senior staff, in Elizabeth's office, and then Elizabeth turns around and rebroadcasts the same information through the city, because the gossip is out of control.

"Look, okay," Dr. Keller says, shuffling her papers. "It turns out that some of the jumpers have equipment that is capable of putting a person into a weak form of suspended animation until help arrives." The diagrams mean nothing to Rodney, but he watches the screen raptly anyway. "What the mask does is introduce something very similar to sodium hydroxide, but less toxic, into the bloodstream. It slows heart function and respiration, just enough that the air in the jumper lasted for -" She pauses. "For sixteen years. Meanwhile, the jumper temperature lowered enough to... well. To refrigerate and not to freeze."

"Can he be revived?" Elizabeth asks, leaning forward.

"I think so." Dr. Keller shuffles her papers again. "Maybe. They did similar experiments on rats and frogs, on Earth. It's very crude compared to the suspended animation units on the Aurora and in the city. There could be nerve damage. There could be all kinds of complications from the gas."

"There could be rioting," Heightmeyer says.

There is a moment of silence, and then they all turn towards her.

"What?" Elizabeth asks.

Heightmeyer puts her head in her hands. "Look. I am as glad as everyone else that Major Sheppard is back with us. But we have to consider how people are going to feel about this." She looks up. "I know it's not something that we like to bring up. But there are one hundred and twenty-seven people on Atlantis that look a lot like John Sheppard."

None of the senior staff are second-generation, but Rodney thinks that's still a pretty poor excuse to look surprised.

"We need to consider the possible implications. Before they get out of control." Heightmeyer's mouth is tight.

Anias, that's her daughter's name, Rodney remembers suddenly. Anias Sheppard Heightmeyer. After John.

--

Rodney worried for years what he would say when Charin asked where babies came from. He was sure she'd learn the basic facts from the school science curriculum, of course, but those basics weren't her basics. "The government stole your dead biological father's genes to create a superior fighting force," is not the sort of story that inspires confidence and security in children.

As happens with these things, the world forced his hand. He came home one day to find Charin crying on the sofa. She was six, and was supposed to be playing with the other children in the plaza, under the watchful eye of an Athosian teacher; clearly she'd learned to use the city's sensors well enough to sneak away. He sat beside her, flummoxed.

"Anias says I'm not an ATA because my hair is blond." she said tearfully.

He sighed. "Definition by exclusion, yes, how well I remember those magical days of childhood." And then he got out his notebook and started explaining Mendel's square to her, and it was only when she was nodding over his careful diagrams that he realized that they were having The Talk.

"Look," he said, when he had whiled away all the time he could defining "phenotype" and she still hadn't lost interest. "We were having a war, right? And none of us could really use the technology here except John Sheppard."

"Your friend." she said. "You talk to him sometimes."

"I talk to myself sometimes." He felt that this was an important distinction to establish for Charin. "He was the only one with the ATA gene. Besides Carson, but for various reasons he's not relevant to this explanation."

Charin nodded.

"I mean, we had the gene therapy, but that was sort of a stopgap. It didn't work as well. Are you with me?"

She nodded again. These were ideas she'd grown up surrounded by. Everyone went in for the gene therapy every couple of years; everyone talked about the ATA gene.

"So after we won the war, and we became our own colony, the government on Earth decided that we should have the gene, so that if there was another war we could defend the Gate. So that nothing bad could go from here to Earth. So, they said they'd help any woman who wanted to have a baby with the ATA gene."

Charin had settled into his side, now, like he was telling an old and familiar story. She liked his stories; earlier that week he'd been telling her the life of Marie Curie, though he'd left out the bad ending.

"This is the part where I tell you first that I love you a whole lot and I'm glad I have you, okay?" She nodded.

"What they didn't really tell people is that the way they were going to make babies with the ATA gene was by making John Sheppard the babies' biological father. You understand biological father, right?"

"The one with the sperm," she said. "Where half the baby is."

He put his arm around her shoulders, feeling quite pleased with the school for sparing him that part. "Yes, that's where the genes are. Usually. So that's what your mother did when she really wanted a baby. She went to the infirmary and they gave her the genes. Which were really my friend's genes. Do you understand?"

"So he's my father," she said. Rodney had been suppressing a dull sense of panic throughout this conversation, but Charin evinced nothing but curiosity. "But not like you're my father."

"No, I'm your father because we're family and I love you and take care of you," Rodney answered. "But John was your biological father, which is why you look like him sometimes. And why you have the ATA gene. And also why that rat Anias is your half-sister, whether you get along or not."

"Eww." Charin wrinkled her nose. "I don't want to be her sister."

"All the ATA kids." he said. "They're all your brothers and sisters. Or more like your tribe. Or your nation."

--

Rodney has to walk through a candlelight vigil every evening when he goes to check on Sheppard, and he can only look at him through the observation window. "It's a very clean atmospheric mix," Keller explains to him. "We don't know what he should be breathing." Rodney can't tease her about voodoo when what's going on is actual voodoo, pure guesswork, and his hand tightens against the glass of the window.

Keller has John hooked up to nutrient drips and heaven knows what else. "He's too thin," Rodney says, looking in at him, and Keller nods. "It would have helped if he'd had some bulk to start with," she says. "You would have done better."

He makes a face at her; she's trying to cheer him up. Nothing cheers him up like a good self-conscious rant, but he looks through the window again and it really doesn't seem important.

"He looks old." He turns to her. "Shouldn't he be the same age?"

"He's probably biologically younger than he should be, yes." Keller says. "But he's been under some pretty serious strain. And aging didn't stop entirely. Like I said. Very basic suspended animation."

"He would have died down there eventually."

"From every test we've done, he would have died within the next two years."

They are silent for a bit. Outside, there is a hum of voices, and the low beat of an Athosian drum.

--

Charin turns twelve while John is in the infirmary, hooked up to an IV drip and looking like a corpse. She and Rodney don't feel very celebratory. Selena and Jinto take her over to the mainland to run around in the woods and catch tetanus, Rodney is sure, and while he's waiting and mentally listing horrible things that could befall her he visits the mess hall cooks and begs some favors. Charin likes Athosian foods - tava pudding, which is like thick sweet grits, and a heavy, spicy soup made of dried mushrooms, and various other things that Rodney hadn't even tried until six years ago, when the last MRE ran out.

They have dinner in their living room. They usually eat three meals a day in the mess, every day they're in the city - they always have, everyone always has - so it's different to eat in the quiet, listening to the ocean through the window. Rodney always puts up Laura's picture on Charin's birthday, because every year Charin looks more like her.

This year, Charin has something on her mind. She gets that look on her face midway through Rodney's day in review - Rachel Biro managed to turn all the console displays upside down and, for all he knows, is still in HQ trying to fix it - and Rodney grinds to an early halt, because it's best to let his daughter say whatever is on her mind before she has too much time to think up supporting arguments. It doesn't pay to let her strategize. That way lies only shouting matches and the word "grounded", and it's tough to ground a kid when the city likes her better than him.

"I want to see him." she says as soon as he's stopped talking.

"What?" Rodney sits straight up. "No. Absolutely not. It’s senior staff only, and it will stay that way until Dr. Keller changes it."

"You're senior staff. You can get me in." Charin's face has gone mulish. Rodney always knew he and Laura would raise the most stubborn child in the galaxy.

"There's nothing to see. It's just a bunch of wires hooked up to a sleeping man who deserves his privacy."

"He's my father," she says. "Isn't he? Sort of?"

Rodney still doesn't like to bring that up too often. "He's everyone's father! That's why it's restricted!"

"I don't want to bang drums and chant. I just want to see him." There is something quiet and sad under the stubbornness, and Rodney wants to reach out to her, suddenly, to hold her like he did when she was little. "You know. In case he…"

Dies. Rodney realizes, in case he dies. He knows that Charin barely remembers her mother. Rodney knows more about Laura Cadman than anyone else on this world, having shared a brain with her once, and he wishes he could give some of that to his daughter, help her know her mother even a little.

"Okay." he says finally. He told Cadman, he warned her he would be bad at the parenting thing. "Okay. I don't know how, though. You have to help me figure that out."

---

It is four in the morning, three or four days later, and the night shift nurses are all in the main part of the infirmary, away from the isolation rooms. All the kids wear Athosian clothes, but Charin is a tall girl, and Rodney's found a uniform that fits her. It's science blue, and was probably Miko's years and years ago. It's a good thing the uniforms never, ever wear out. With her hair up Charin looks like Laura when Rodney first met her, when she was just a cute girl with a beret and a submachine gun. Rodney misses Laura suddenly, painfully. She probably wouldn't know what to do any better than he does, but she'd fake it better.

"Just walk like you're supposed to be here." Rodney hisses at Charin. She raises an eyebrow at him. She is already more confident than Rodney feels. Rodney doesn't blame genetics as much as he blames Charin's long summers on the mainland with Teyla's children. It's that damn Athosian calm.

The door hisses open and the head nurse looks up, registers Rodney's face and Charin's uniform, and looks back down. "No change," he says, waving them in.

Charin looks at Rodney, and Rodney tries to smile back as they pass into the antechamber. And then Charin is straining not to run, straining not to press her hands to the window where John lies in state, his beard and hair trimmed back by the nurses, white scrubs on, his feet sticking out from under the blanket. He's gained a little weight, Rodney thinks blankly, and then Charin grabs his hand, grabs it tight, crushing it.

"He has my feet," she whispers, leaning into his side suddenly like she did when she was five years old. "Rodney - Dad, we have the same feet."

Rodney thinks of all the years he's maneuvered shoes and socks on and off of Charin's feet, her baby feet with the round soles, the way her arches and heels emerged as she learned to walk. She has big feet, with high arches. He sees John's arches, his long toes, his hairy ankles sticking out from under the hospital blanket. His arm goes tight around Charin's narrow shoulders.

They are silent for a moment, and he feels his heart start up with the breaking again. It's been breaking on and off for twenty years, he thinks, a little irritated. It's been a constant seismic disturbance, and he really wants it to hold still. He wants everything to hold still, for five minutes, just once.

No such luck. "I have to go in there," Charin says, turning to him.

"No!" Rodney hisses. "Charin, you can't, I know you want to but you can't, he's in there for a reason -"

He stops, staring at her. It must be the light. Her eyes are brown. Charin has blue eyes, but they've darkened, they're spinning brown-green as he watches. "Charin!" He presses his hand to her face. "Charin, are you alright?"

The air is buzzing around them. She looks at him, her little girl face and those old, old brown eyes, and then she turns, pushes him away, and is into the isolation bulkhead before he can catch her. He jumps through the closing doors, and there is a sudden hiss - the city is speeding up the air cycling for her. His ears pop and then he's standing beside Charin who is standing beside John. Her face is sad and protective over John, and then she reaches out and touches the Ancient device over his mouth and closes her eyes, and Rodney sees the lights go from yellow to blue right before every alarm in the place goes off.

They are shoved out of the way by doctors, nurses and Keller, who is wearing her pajama bottoms under her lab coat, but it is Keller who registers their presence and turns to them and hisses, "What did you do?"

Charin bursts into tears, and Rodney grabs her by the arm and pulls her back out of the crush of people before they trample her. "I'm sorry," she sobs, "I'm sorry, it was on the wrong setting, I knew it was on the wrong setting, I didn't mean to hurt him, it just has to be switched on for him to wake up, he put it on the sleep setting and so I had wake him up-" Rodney wraps his arms around her, her head scrunched up in his jacket, and glares at Keller, but Keller has no time for him at all.

"Oh my god." she says, staring at Charin. "It takes the natural gene to make the mask revive him, why didn't we think of that? Stephens, you, he's waking up, he needs to be on oxygen, what's his bp?" This over her shoulder, "You two, out of here, now."

Rodney doesn't want to go, but he also doesn't want his daughter to see a man die before she's even a teenager, so he scoops her up in his arms and takes her to Keller's office. She's much too tall for him to carry her, but he does it anyway. When he sets her down she's still crying, a little weakly, but where her eyes aren't red they're blue, and her face is hers again, not something else looking through her at him. He knows Keller keeps dried fruit bars in her desk, and he fishes one out for her, and one for himself, and they sit against the wall and eat them, miserable. "You should have said something to me so we could be ready," he finally says to her. "But I think it was the right thing to do, Charin. I think you had the right idea."

The drumming is still going on in the hallway outside. It's redoubled, in fact; people must have seen Keller running through the halls, and guessed that the situation's changed. Rodney doesn't know what to think. He feels cold, and his heart is racing, but when he touches his hand to his pulse it's normal, and he feels like there's a fuss around him, like he's crowded, but it's just Charin leaning her blond head against his arm. She'll be sleepy in a few minutes, he thinks, because it's a good five hours past her bedtime, and this whole meeting-the-father-you-never-knew, possessed-by-some-sort-of-Ancient-impulse thing must be downright exhausting. He hopes she hurries up and goes to sleep, because he can feel the tension in her body, how frightened and guilty she is, and he still, after twelve years, doesn't know how to make that go away.

"Shh," he says, "it'll be okay. Look, they'll take care of him. They have to. It's their job. He's going to get better now." He doesn't believe a word of it, and he's sure she can hear that in his voice, but at least Dr. Rodney McKay PhD., PhD., trying and failing to be a comforting paternal figure is a familiar sort of background noise, and her head droops.

He listens to the drumming in the hallway, and he waits.

--

Keller comes and wakes them - Rodney is at least half-drowsing, and too old to be sleeping on floors, and has to kind of limp his way up the wall. Her face is quiet, relieved. He knows as soon as he sees her, and he shakes Charin awake.

"You can come and see him now," Keller says. Charin sits bolt upright. "But he's very weak. He'll be very weak for a long time, Charin," she says, directly, to the girl. "You understand that, right? He might not know you're there at all, and he won't be able to say anything to you. Do you understand me?"

Charin nods.

"Okay. Come with me."

John isn't in the isolation room. The new room he's in doesn't have an airlock, though he has tubes around his face that are probably supposed to be doing the same thing. His eyes are closed, but the monitor by his side is beeping cheerfully, regularly, in a way that Rodney feels down to his bones.

His eyes open.

Rodney walks towards him, and then realizes that Charin is frozen, stock still behind him. He turns towards her; turns again. He goes to John.

"Hey," he says. "Can you even hear me?"

A deliberate blink, and John’s mouth twitches. If Rodney took a twenty-year nap, he wouldn't feel very chatty either. He reaches out, carefully, and touches John's arm on one of the few patches that hasn’t got tubes in it or monitors on it.

John's skin is cold and clammy under his hand and a sudden shock of joy goes through him, through both of them, he is sure of it, because John's eyes are bright and the corners of his mouth twitch up, and then Rodney is embracing what he can embrace, which isn't much, maybe a shoulder and a half around the machinery, and he says, "Oh my god, you're alive," in a sort of squeaky high-pitched girl-voice, and in his head he can hear John laughing at him, and then it recedes and it's John in front of him, he can feel John laughing at him, even though his face barely moves.

"What the fuck?" he says, not very eloquently, and apparently parental profanity is what it takes to jolt Charin, because she comes forward to stand beside him and Sheppard's eyes go to her.

"Um." Rodney takes his daughter's hand. "This is Charin. This is sort of hard to explain. She's my - well, your - and also. Um. Our daughter."

John's face lights up, and Rodney thinks, boy, is he in for a surprise.

--

"You did what?" Sheppard rasps, incredulous, face creasing. His face is visible again - the first thing he did when he could communicate was make one of the nurses shave off the Rip van Winkle beard - and something in that IV must be helping, because his cheeks are filling out a little. They tried solid food two days ago, and apparently getting someone's stomach working after a twenty-year hiatus from life is unexpectedly and unpleasantly complicated. While John alternately vomited and cursed weakly at the nurses, Rodney spent the day with unexplained indigestion - unexplained, at least, until he stopped by the infirmary to visit in the evening. This weird empathy thing, he tells himself. I have to look into that at some point.

But he hasn't mentioned it to Keller, who has all kinds of Ancient medical devices she's dying to try out. She is irrepressibly optimistic, all the time, about John's prospects. "He won't be thirty-five again," she said at the last briefing, "but we can get him up to a really healthy forty-eight. I know we can. I just have to figure out what some of these machines do." Rodney would rather have Carson's good old-fashioned pessimism. He really misses Carson at times like this. Still, it makes sense, Rodney supposes, that the Ancients would have equipment to deal the consequences of suspended animation. They sure seemed to have used it more than they should have.

"Believe me, it wasn't me," Rodney replies. "But you were MIA. You have to understand, Atlantis is sort of an independent settlement now."

"Shit. I wondered why no one had any flags on their uniforms." John's voice is weak, but it is John's voice, and it still feels like a hallucination to Rodney. He's been sitting by John's bed all day, and part of the night, for the past two weeks. John mostly sleeps; Rodney mostly pretends to work on his laptop. "And so...

"And so the only terms under which they'd let us be was if we agreed to have lots of ATA carriers ready to defend the Gate," Rodney replies. "There's some sort of complicated military logic going on. Anyway-" his hands circles in the air, and John's eyes are tracking them, he realizes suddenly- "Apparently your genes were, um. The only ones on file."

"They didn't tell me they were going to do that!" John is too weak to sound really outraged, but he is working up to it, Rodney can tell. "They did not say that was what that sample was for!"

"Yeah, I wondered about that." Rodney says. "Well, sorry. You should probably have asked. Because there are-"

He says a number.

John's eyes nearly bug out of his head.

"A HUNDRED?"

"One hundred and twenty-seven," Rodney replies. "And actually, three more Athosian women have requested the um, treatment, since you were found."

"No! No no no no no!" John snaps, his face gray. "No way in hell."

"Well, they figured since you were alive now, they might wait and ask you," Rodney says, weakly.

"And your kid? So she's mine, but she's yours?" John is looking tired. This is the most he's talked since he woke up. "And who else's?"

"Laura's." Rodney doesn't want to tell this story, but apparently it's full speed ahead. "Cadman's."

"Rodney, you devil. Where is she?" Then John sees it on his face. "Oh. I'm sorry. I should have known that."

"What?" Rodney frowns. "You couldn't have. And it was a long time ago, and we weren't together, but yes, it sucked. Differently than losing you, but it sucked."

John closes his eyes. "Yeah. Yeah, it does."

--

"So sometimes when I was asleep I dreamed."

John is sitting up, and he's breathing entirely on his own. Today he had some juice. Rodney is sitting on the end of his bed. Now that John's awake all the time it's a little awkward, but Rodney's still in the infirmary every day. He keeps pausing, in the middle of conversations, and feeling twenty years stretching between them. Looking at John makes him feel old.

Charin has been sent back to school, against her protests, but Rodney has left the lab to Radek and the students. The throng outside in the hall is louder, and quite excited, and Rodney is feeling very uncomfortable about the fervor that's building out there. He hasn't told John about it, though. Enough for one day to sit up and drink some juice.

"That would make sense," Rodney says. "Like on the Aurora."

"No, not like on the Aurora," John answers. "That was a dream between a lot of people plugged into the same ship. I dreamed about people, but it wasn't people who were plugged in."

"So maybe it was just dreams." But Rodney is smarter than that, and then he's off the bed and pulling his tablet out of his bag, booting up with impatient hands. "The homing beacon, it wasn't -"

"I don't think it was a homing beacon," John replies, and Rodney has already confirmed that, is scrolling through the bits and fizzes and static interference and there it is, a clear, steady, tiny stream of signal, from the deep west ocean to the tower of Atlantis and back. "I think-"

"You were talking to the city," Rodney finishes for him. "The city was talking to you."

"And it kept getting easier, because the city kept finding more people it could talk to. Well, I guess I know who those were," John says. Rodney feels bad for him, really bad for him. Maybe when he's better he'll want to go off-world, away from his embarrassing posthumous progeny.

"What did you see?" Rodney asks, sitting back down on the edge of the bed, rubbing John's calf absentmindedly. Plenty of contact, Keller said, it would help restore circulation and proper sensory input. Rodney had the feeling that Keller would have liked to follow that up with a brisk course of acupuncture, and scoffed at her, but then John is alive and here and it really seems like a good plan.

"It was only sometimes," John answers. "And it was more sense than see. It was easier to see people with the natural gene, I guess, but I didn't know who they were. So I mostly hung around Elizabeth, and the science team." John colors again. "I used to follow you around, actually."

"That was inconsiderate of you. I thought I was going crazy," Rodney says, trying to sound angry, but it's just funny now, and he laughs, his hand warm on John's, both of them alive in the city. Then he snaps his fingers.

"That's why I can feel your headache! You're broadcasting through the city!" He pulls up the tablet again. "You're broadcasting to me through the city. I can turn it off if you want-"

John stops him. John stops him without saying anything, and then looks shamefaced.

"Why?" Rodney replies, out loud. "I mean, I don't mind, but you're probably going to want your privacy at some point, and last Thursday when you threw up all day it wasn't that great."

"I know, I know." John doesn't look at him. "Look, let me try to dial it down myself, okay? I just -"

There is a pause.

"It was all there was, when I was in the jumper." He glances at Rodney, and then away again.

Rodney pauses, then turns off the tablet. "Okay," he says. "Look, John. It's okay."

--

John has to be told eventually that there are two hundred people camped out in the hallway sending him positive chi.

"I'm not paying child support," he answers. "I'm sorry, but some of them are eighteen now, they have to fend for themselves."

"I think it's a little worse than that," Rodney replies. "I think you may be the tribal patriarch."

"No." Sheppard looks a little shocked. "I don't want to be tribal patriarch. Make someone else be tribal patriarch."

"Our father who art four thousand meters under the ocean," Rodney intones, "Major Sheppard be thy name-"

"That's disrespectful." John answers. His mouth is quirked up in one corner, but his eyes are a little panicked. When the nurse is done fussing with his various wires and tubes, he covers his face with his hands, shaking his head. "I didn't ask for this." He sighs. "This is really creepy, McKay, this is really, really creepy."

"I know," Rodney answers, sitting down on the edge of the bed. "At first I was really furious for you. For a long time, really. And I got the serious creeps about the whole thing."

"But Charin."

Rodney looks right back at John, not even trying to defend himself. "That was not my decision," he answers. "But I would not give her up for anything. Though it was a blow to my ego that no one wanted to carry on my own doubtlessly superior genes. Just because the military thinks you're so special -"

John smirks. Rodney can feel the panic under the smirk - the weird empathy bit has faded, but it isn't gone - and covers John's hand with his. "I'm sorry," he says finally. "We thought you were dead, but I don't think that made it okay. I love my daughter, but I am sorry."

John nods. They sit quietly for a while.

When Rodney gets up to go, John clears his throat. "Look," he says. "I don't know about this. I don't know why it's right or wrong. And I don't know about the other hundred and twenty-six. But with you and Laura-" he pauses. "Rodney. It's okay."

---

John graduates to physical therapy, and Rodney goes with him on his first slow wheelchair trip through the corridors. He stops in HQ, in the mess hall. He does not make eye contact with any of the young people, who stop what they are doing and follow in his wake, until he turns around and looks at them and they scatter. He visits his old quarters - "Does anyone here play the guitar? Do any of them want my guitar? I was never that good. Why is this still here?" But he's heading inexorably towards Rodney's quarters, and Rodney has to correct him one floor up and two halls over.

"Oh," Sheppard says. "Because of Charin. Of course." John has been nervous around Charin, and Charin is nervous around him.

"She's at school," Rodney adds. "Some of them still go, apparently, instead of hanging around in the hallway all day."

"You make her go, don't you?"

"You'd be surprised out how stupid most of these kids aren't," Rodney answers, keying open the door to his quarters. "Actually, given their inheritance, you might be shocked."

"I'm going to pretend you meant that some sort of nice way," John says, and then wheels himself in. "Wow. This is a nice place."

"It's a wreck" Rodney corrects, scooping up a pile of Charin's books and stacking them on one end of the coffee table. "Can I get you anything? We have a teakettle."

"You still all eat in the mess, huh?" Sheppard is turning slow circles, looking at the skylights halfway up the arched wall.

Rodney pauses. "Yes. Huh. I hadn't thought about that. I guess we just got used to it after the MREs ran out."

"I'll have some water," Sheppard adds, pushing himself over to the bookshelf. "Your books or Charin's?"

"Actually a lot of them were Laura's," Rodney answers, rinsing out one of their two glasses in the little sink. "The Austen especially. Do you need a straw?"

Sheppard gives him a dirty look.

"It's a legitimate question. You were supposed to let someone push you and instead you've been shoving that thing like it's a speed racer." Rodney returns dirty look for dirty look.

There is a pause.

Sheppard snickers. "You missed me. Admit it."

Rodney huffs. "Straw it is." He thunks a plastic straw - salvaged from the mess hall back in the earth years and probably ungodly unsanitary - into the glass of water. "I'll even stand there and hold it for you, how about that?" It is observation, not empathy, that tells him John's arms are starting to shake with the unaccustomed strain.

John narrows his eyes but acquiesces, Rodney sitting on the edge of the coffee table, John bending his head over the glass.

"Thanks," John says finally. "So."

The light reflecting through the window from the water is pale on John's face, and he looks very old to Rodney, suddenly. "Were you scared?" Rodney blurts. The words have been hanging in his mouth for days. He wakes at night imagining John underwater, imagining John realizing - how barely in time had it been? - that no one was coming for him. He wakes at night imagining the weight of two miles of water.

John looks at him, and yes, there are wrinkles around his eyes, now, but they are the same, familiar shade of hazel, and Rodney feels again that sharp pang of relief – no, not of relief, of completely unexpected joy. "Yes," John says simply. "When I was awake. When I was asleep -"

Rodney doesn't realize he's leaning forward until his hands are beside John's face, his lips pressed to John's forehead, a gentle kiss, with no desire in it, just that sharp, sharp joy.

"When I was asleep, I was here. With you." John smiles into Rodney's shirt. "Well, you all. But mostly you."

--

John comes upstairs with him after therapy every day, a few hours before Charin comes home, and goes back to the infirmary at night to sleep under the watchful eye of machinery. They sit that afternoon, many afternoons, side by side under the skylights of Rodney's living room. John tells him his faint underwater dreams of the city. The city he describes is faint light seen through cameras and faint pressure of feet and hands felt through the panels of walls and floor, the smells of the people and place broken down into chemical names, a digital jangle of sound.

"It was beautiful," John says. "After a few years. They didn't feel like years." And always, though John doesn't talk about it much, Rodney hears in his voice the faint empathic communication between the gene carriers and the city, between them and John.

"Feelings, mostly," he adds. He has made the transfer from the wheelchair to Rodney's couch, and is laying, a little worn out, against the cushions; Rodney is, for reasons that he hasn't really thought through, rubbing John's feet. "Sometimes commands to the city. I could tell when something big was going on."

"Oh," Rodney answers.

"Sometimes I could ask the city to do something and it would do it. Sometimes. Things happened very slowly, for me."

Rodney nods, running his thumbs along John's narrow, high arches.

"So what was happening with you?" John asks, quirking an eyebrow. "How many times did you save the world?"

"Only twice a year, since the war," Rodney replies. "Things have been pretty quiet. Except for the kids. The kids are always causing trouble."

"Is that Charin's snowboard?" John asks.

Rodney huffs. "Ronon makes them. It's awful. Anything that puts her in direct conflict with gravity, she loves."

John laughs, a quick, hard burst of amusement. "That's my girl."

"She really is," Rodney says, looking away. "More than some of the others. Well, her mother was a Marine. And there was me."

John quirks an eyebrow. "She's yours, Rodney. She is what you taught her."

Rodney smiles thinly, and doesn't look up.

--

At first Charin sits facing away from them and does her homework when John's in the apartment. Rodney sits with John's feet on his lap and they talk about Earth, and people who've gone back to it, and about those four years they spent as teammates in the middle of a new, frightening galaxy. At first they talk without acknowledging Charin, and slowly she turns towards them and starts to listen.

"It was all new, that's what you have to understand," Rodney says once Charin's book is closed and they've given up all pretense of talking just to each other. "None of us knew how to talk or act or what to eat or what time of day was what, and we were all homesick -"

"And there was your dad, in the middle of it all, absolutely convinced that he could fix it with his brain," John adds, laughing. "Always bitching up a storm and waving his arms and tearing his hair out and then thirty seconds before the planet exploded he saved everyone. And he did it every time."

"Not all of us can be good at shooting things, Major," Rodney teases, grinning at John. "I'm still as likely to drop my P-90."

"My mom could shoot, right?" Charin askes, face glowing, and John replies, "She was an amazing shot."

"And she saved my life at least twice," Rodney adds, and looks at his daughter, sitting there with a recent, weird haircut and her big boots and her thick books open around her and thinks, at least three times.

--

John is up and walking by month three, and walking steadily by month four, and on month five he tries to jog and has to go back to the infirmary for a week. Keller finally tells him he can go anywhere he wants as long as he does it slowly. "I'm giving you your walking papers," she says. "As long as you're not staying alone."

John looks confused.

"He's coming home with me," Rodney says, standing. "Do you have any stuff you need from here?"

"I can't -"

"You can have the couch, I can have the couch, I don't care. You can't stay alone, you heard the woman. At least up there you can avoid the worshipful hordes." Though, in fairness, the worshipful hordes have died down of late, reduced mainly to women from the mainland who are just now free to visit since the spring planting is in the ground.

"Rodney," John says once they're out in the hallway, John steady on his legs, carrying the bag with no difficulty, "Look."

Oh no, Rodney thinks. There's going to be a Talk. He backs away a little.

"Look, we were friends for four years. Some of the best years of my life. But that was twenty years ago. You have a kid, you have stuff to do. You're not responsible for me."

Rodney blinks. "Of course I am."

"What?"

"Of course I am. Who else would be? Unless you really don't want to stay with us." Rodney is more annoyed than distressed, and he wonders why John looks so confused.

"No, no -" Sheppard stops. "Fine. Okay. Lead on."

--

"He's staying here with us?" Charin hisses at him in the hallway.

"What? I thought you liked him."

"He can't live with us! That's weird! He's my father!"

"Plenty of people live with their fathers. I'm your father. You live with me."

"Yes, but we don't look alike. He has my feet. It's creepy."

Rodney looks down at his daughter, who is clutching her tablet defensively across her middle, her back hunched as if to protect the computer with her body. "Yes, you and I are nothing alike at all." He sighs. "Don't get all weird, it's just until Dr. Keller says he's well enough to be on his own, you'll hardly even notice him. He'll probably sleep all the time."

"Actually I've slept plenty for a few years," John remarks from behind them. They turn as one, identically embarrassed, and John scruffs at his hair self-consciously - the right length again, finally, it's taken him a few tries. "But apparently I'm still not allowed to surf, so I'm thinking I'll play a lot of minesweeper." He passes between them and into the apartment.

"You aren't giving him my room!" Charin hisses.

"He'll sleep on the couch. It's a good couch," Rodney answers.

--

It's two or three in the morning - low tide, Rodney realizes, is always at two or three in the morning - when John comes shuffling into his room.

"Do you mind?" he whispers, like he knows Rodney would be awake. He probably does, Rodney realizes. John probably knows that Rodney is always awake now. "It's cold out there."

"Yeah," Rodney murmers, scooting over. "I imagine."

"I always dream about the ocean." John lays down a little ungracefully beside him. His back is probably stiff from the couch. "Dreaming about the ocean used to be such a nice idea."

"Not for me," Rodney answers. "It's dark down there." He pulls the blanket over them both, and they lay face-to-face, John's hands between them. Rodney laces their fingers together, their palms warm against each other's.

Soon, they are asleep.