Roo'verse "Compromises" deleted scenes
These are a few scenes/snippets that I deleted from Compromises. Most were deleted because even though they are informative and give details that readers are probably curious about, they were too long and too tangential to the meat of the story being told.
Daniel and Jack’s Registration ceremony:
Dalila’s Registration had taken place in their backyard with only Sam, Teal’c, O’Neill’s cousin, and the guild representative scowling disapprovingly at the fact that the General hadn’t bothered to change out of his Homer Simpson pajama pants for the occasion. Daniel related later that, like John, the General had been reluctant to invest in paternity wear and those were the only pants that fit. When Cam acted surprised that Daniel hadn’t insisted on a least some formality, he had shrugged and said that if his husband could keep saving the world while carrying Daniel’s child at age 55, the least he could do was let him conduct the ceremony in comfort.
Daniel explains more about the history/biological implications of triumvirate marriages:
“Triumvirate marriages started as a hedge against fertility problems,” Daniel said, already in full lecture-mode. “The rules of inheritance were clear enough so that experts could normally figure out what combinations were possible, based on a full pedigree, but there was no real way to know whether a nobleman was an imperial or a royal or if a woman had the genes to carry. In some incredibly rare cases, inheritance could even produce someone who wasn’t a carrier at all. There were basically four objectives for getting married: having children, passing down the family name, some political alliance or trade, and love. The question of heirs was a very important one, considering that there are several combinations that are essentially infertile: two imperials, an imperial and a woman, and two male plebians or two females, though that was taboo at the time.”
“When was this?” O’Neill asked, sitting down to wrap an arm around Daniel. “I slept through most of Manners, Tradition and Breeding and definitely through almost all of Guild History.”
“Of course you did. Even though polygamous social structures were present in many ancient cultures, especially those with high rates of the Z-gene, the triumvirate marriage tradition as we know it today began in Hellenic times. It began due to a confluence of the different marriage objectives. The most desirable match from a lineage standpoint is to be an imperial who marries a royal or a noblewoman who marries a royal, because your name will get passed down and no plebians are involved. But in trying to achieve this, you are rolling the dice on being able to produce children at all, because if your partner is an imperial, you are infertile as a couple. Early Guilds, like John’s Guild, dealt with this by not recognizing a marriage until the couple proves their fertility. But this made it difficult to use marriage as a tool for building alliances or gaining resources because it does no good to have an alliance hinge on a couple’s fertility. There is also the question of love - what to do if two people fall in love and turn out to be infertile? Often simply trying for a child produced feelings of love that would be immediately ripped away if the couple proved to be infertile. Triumvirate marriages solve all these problems. In infertile couples, the secundus introduces fertility and in loveless marriages, the secundus helps the couple remain together. Back before genetic testing it was sometimes even common for two siblings, most likely genetic half-siblings, to marry the same person in order to keep any reproductive options in the family.”
Cam couldn’t keep the grimace off his face. Maybe John was right when he teased Cam about his closed-minded pleb values, but he couldn’t imagine being in a marriage with his brother or not getting jealous if his brother were also having sex with his spouse. Daniel made a good point about why triumvirate marriages were biologically necessary, but Cam couldn’t imagine how all those noblemen over the centuries dealt with their jealousy.
“Now, with genetic testing available,” Daniel continued, “the practice is on the decline, but still very much accepted in Guild society. Now it is mostly used for purposes of facilitating arranged marriages or in cases of accidental gestation, like in your case, Cam. Until recently a carrier had only three options: bind the pouch, killing the neonate, marry the child’s father and maybe take a secundus later, or marry someone else, thus denying all parental rights to the child’s donor. Only after the Progressive Era have Guilds been forced by many governments to abide by the custody rules applied to plebians. But in the more traditional guilds not marrying the donor is still considered scandalous. Before genetic tests, a carrier could and often did marry someone who was not the biological donor and assert that they were for the registry. After families started doing genetic mapping of their pedigrees, scholars found that around 15% of donors listed on the Guild registry were incorrect and thus made gene testing a requirement for registry. This has lead to a lot of marriage that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred but are enforced for child-rearing purposes and usually ends in the taking of a secundus. In fact, many Guild scholars predict an announcement of a guiding principle from the International Congress of Noble Society suggesting that Guilds make an exception to the covet of affinity, allowing no-penalty divorce for originating members of a marriage if all of that pair’s children are of age.”
Jack tells the story behind his marriage to Sara and Frank (cut for length and because it’s OOC for Jack to be this open and talk this much):
“I wouldn’t have been allowed to marry Sara if I didn’t invite Frank into the marriage, and even though I was never in love with him, he gave me Charlie. I never could have predicted that he and Sara would still be together twenty years later and I’d be the one remarried, but the point is that it worked for us.”
Of course that wasn’t the whole, uncomplicated truth. Daniel had drunkenly related it to Cam one night when he was agonizing over his decision to come back to SG1 and leave O’Neill at home with their recently pouch-weaned baby. O’Neill’s situation had been a far cry from Cam’s. O’Neill had been in love with Sara, but the recent advent of chromosome testing disqualified them from marriage under the rules of his guild. O’Neill had been contemplating leaving the guild for Sara when he had been sent on a special ops mission to Iraq where he met and became close to Major Frank Cromwell. After O’Neill was injured behind enemy lines, Cromwell went back against orders to rescue him, only to be captured himself. After their captors used rape as a humiliation technique against Cromwell, they knew it was only a matter of time before they used it on O’Neill, so they started having sex in hopes that the child conceived would be Frank’s and not their enemy’s. After they escaped, O’Neill asked Cromwell to be his secundus, regardless of whether the child he ended up carrying was his.
O’Neill had loved his family - he got the woman he loved and the man who had supported him in his darkest hour. After Charlie died, Jack had pulled away from his family while their shared grief drew Sara and Cromwell closer. Daniel had met Jack as a bitter, closed-off man who thought he had nothing to lose.
A year later, Daniel’s wife was captured by Apophis, Jack was divorced, and Sara and Cromwell were expecting their first child together. It had taken years for both men to overcome their losses and finally get together. With their jobs, they hadn’t considered kids. But after Jack was promoted to lead the SGC, they decided the give it a chance. Their daughter, Dalila, was jokingly referred to by Daniel and Sam as Jack’s little midlife crisis, but it was clear to everyone that she was the light of their lives. Cam tried not to feel resentful as Daniel scooped his sleeping daughter out of Jack’s lap, giving his husband a kiss as he disappeared momentarily to tuck her into bed.
Once Daniel was out of the room, Jack continued, “Look, Frank and Sara and I were in the same situation you’re in now. I was in love with Sara, but having Frank’s kid. The two of them met in a hospital room in Fairfield when I was already two months into gestating Charlie. Frank knew going into our marriage that I didn’t love him the way I loved Sara. Sara still insists that Frank went back for me because he was already starting to want me and that he agreed to the marriage because he was in love with me. Frank and I have never talked about it - talking was never our thing . . . fishing, yes, talking, no. But I know he didn’t join us for Sara and he didn’t do it because he and I were playing out some great love story. He joined us because he wanted to be part of our family and because we were all open minded. It was hard work, but we grew to love each other and we grew into a family. So far as I know, Frank and Sara never even slept together until after Charlie died.”
“You never told me that before,” Daniel grumbled. But it didn’t stop him from practically curling up in O’Neill’s lap on a couch that was more than big enough for separate seating.
“Like I said before, I’m not good at talking.”
“No, you’re great at talking. Not so great at actually saying anything,” Daniel replied tartly.
“It’s not a time in my life I enjoy revisiting, even though most of our marriage was happy.”
“Well, I’m grateful for any perspective you can give me, Sir.”
“Drop the ‘sir,’ Mitchell, and let me impart my lesson to you, young grasshopper.”
Cam nodded, though he had no intention of agreeing to drop the formality with the Head of Homeworld security. O’Neill would always be Cam’s boss first and Daniel’s eccentric husband second.
“You’d never know it now, but Sara and Frank didn’t always get along. In fact, in the beginning they got along like a bag full of system lords. Even though Sara had agreed to look for a secundus so that we could get married, I think she thought we’d rifle through a catalogue together or maybe adopt one at a kennel or something. Sara barely approved of my military career as it was, so adding another black ops guy would’ve been the last choice she would have made. Plus, Frank was the donor of my kid and I’d just spent months in a windowless prison cell with him - those were things that I would never share with Sara and I think she was jealous . . . not jealous of the fact that Frank got the priviledge of seeing me raped and tortured, but of how close it made us. At least she realized that at the time, Frank was the only man I would even let touch me, so the catalogue of secunduses was out.”
“You know, most guilds actually have matching services which could be considered like a catalogue of sorts . . .”
“Missing the point as usual, Danny-boy,” O’Neill punctuated his teasing with a poke to Daniel’s ribs. “The point is that Sara resented Frank and even though Frank didn’t resent Sara, he had his own issues: namely a monumental case of PTSD, mostly centered around watching me get tortured and not knowing if my baby was his or one of our captors. To say he was overprotective would be the like calling an aircraft carrier a boat. And that’s not even factoring in his fear that once things returned to normal, I’d return to Sara and start excluding him from my life and the baby’s. In a lot of ways, Frank was more shaken by our capture than I was - he never went into the field again. But even though Frank was more fucked up, I wasn’t in a great position to mediate between the two of them, so they’d fight all these petty little wars about who would sleep with me in the master bedroom each night, who forgot to take out the trash, whether we should get a dog or a cat. I’d come home to hear them screaming at each other about the best way to wash the dishes and just retreat to the backyard, wishing that I wasn’t knocked up so that I could at least drink away the headache they were giving me.
“I thought it would get better once the baby transferred, but finding out that the baby was his only made Frank more overprotective and then what they were fighting about was me and whether I should be allowed to go do the grocery shopping, or which multivitamin would produce healthier milk, and if Frank penetrating me was too rough for a carrying man. I was literally ready to wake up one day to find that Sara had bashed Frank’s head in with a car seat. In fact, I was about ready to bash both their heads in with a car seat. Eventually I managed to prove to both of them that I wasn’t going to leave one for the other, but by then they’d progressed from unhappiness with the situation into outright hating each other.”
Cam grimaced, ready to acknowledge that even though he probably never would have wanted to marry Rodney McKay, or even chosen him as a friend, most of his truly ugly feelings towards the man were jealousy over John and anger at the situation - not something that McKay had actually done to Cam. “So what changed?”
O’Neill smiled, though it was bittersweet. “What happened was that Charlie emerged and we were all too focused on him to keep fighting. We had to coordinate our schedules to match the amount of time he wanted to spend outside of the pouch and take turns doing diaper changes and getting errands done. We were in the process of moving to Virginia for Frank and my next posting and it didn’t matter who I was going to spend the night with when one or all of us were too exhausted to care. I went back to work the second Charlie could spend enough time out of the pouch to let me, while Sara and Frank were at home - Sara because she was looking for a job, and Frank because the shrinks still hadn’t cleared him for active duty. And somehow, one day when I came home they were curled up on the couch with Charlie, watching one of those period dramas I hate. They’d found some common ground and made a truce. We bought an Imperial sized bed and never looked back.”
“What do you think finally made them get together?” Cam asked, curious. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting to bed Rodney McKay, even though he was physically attractive enough.
O’Neill shrugged. “People change. I think they had been thinking about it for a while, but they were both too scared to rock the boat when we were happy the way we were. After Charlie,” he sighed. “After that there was nothing to lose.”
Daniel placed a comforting kiss on the general’s cheek, hugging his husband to him.
A snippet about future Atlantis:
After the defeat of the Wraith, Cam’s role had shifted as well. There were now only two teams dedicated to exploration and first contact. Instead, each department organized their own teams of experts to go off world according to the requests of the local people. Most of Cam’s job was to organize military escorts for the teams and manage security of the City itself and several outposts and mining operations. There was also an extraction team and a special ops group as well as a team of military training experts that consulted like the other departmental teams. Cam was also much more heavily involved in what had always been the bread and butter of the Air Force - fighter planes and military intelligence, both of which were made much easier by cloaking technology (and sometimes body-switching stones). With so many aspects of the military mission, Cam now had a cadre of Majors and Lieutenant Colonels heading up separate segments of military operations. Cam himself rarely went offworld unless it was onboard the Bellerophon and he found that he was okay with that, even though John made fun of his lack of a “hands on approach.” Privately, Cam wasn’t sure how well either John or the city would have survived much more of John’s hands being on it.
A snippet written by the lovely busaikko about John’s feelings on the whole thing. I don’t entirely share her interpretation, but I do love the voices in this fic, especially Jennifer:
"So hey," John said, and gave Jennifer a grin and a rakish waggle of one eyebrow. "I hear congratulations are in order."
Jennifer made a face. "Which one of my husbands leaked the news?"
John raised his hands, palms out. "I don't give up my sources," he said. "Especially since I know both of them can kick my ass any given day."
"Well." Jennifer sighed. "Just don't spread it around. We're past 15 weeks, but still..."
John nodded easily, and that was when Jennifer remembered that he'd lost his first child. She knew her embarrassment showed on her face - she had a terrible poker face - and she caught John's brief grimace before his expression smoothed, pretending he didn't know what she was thinking.
"Can I ask you a question?" she asked, abrupt, and crossed her arms, curling her fingers around her elbows. She was always cold these days; something hormonal, she was fairly sure. She tipped her head at the balcony and the golden spill of sunwarmth there, and John followed her out, light on his feet and wary.
John joined her at the railing, looking down over the city's spires. "I probably won't be much help," he said apologetically. "Oh, unless you need some good elastic socks. And extra-large hoodies, I've got a box of those still in the closet somewhere." He rolled his eyes in self-mockery. "Hand-me-downs I can do, not so good with advice. Or whatever."
"My mother emailed me a bunch of books," Jennifer said. John looked relieved. "No, but what I, I wanted to ask you - are you still in love with Cam?"
John went very still, from the inside out, like a deer sensing a threat. He looked at Jennifer sidelong, curled the corner of his mouth up in what was not in any way a smile, and said, "I never was."
Jennifer blinked. She was used to Cam's personal brand of bullshit, and the sparse framework of Ronon's speech, but John had a way of... flustering her.
John made a face, blowing out air and anger, obviously trying to put words to something that he didn't know how to express. Finally he said, "If I'd loved him, he wouldn't have left me all those years ago, so it's better for everyone that..." He shrugged, shaking tension from his shoulders. "It was a fucked up situation, and I fucked it up worse."
Jennifer was teetering on the edge of an understanding that made her feel like the stable net of all the relationships around her was suddenly mutable and strange.
"I've also got some baby-name books," John added, face brightening. "And hey, if you need a crib or diapers or whatever. I probably owe you a few years' worth of babysitting."
Jennifer grabbed the offer like a safety line. "Can I get you to put that in writing?" she asked, teasing weakly. John chuckled, and warned her against drinking coffee, and Jennifer bumped shoulders with him, because that had been her advice to him, years ago.
Over dinner that night, she took advantage of Cam having to work late to ask Ronon if he knew that John was still in love with Cam.
"Doesn't change anything," Ronon said, leaning back in his chair and eyeing her as if hoping that this didn't turn into a long discussion of feelings.
Jennifer stuck her tongue out. "Why am I the last person to know?" She narrowed her eyes at him. "And did you tell John about - " her cheeks heated - "you know. Our baby."
Ronon shrugged. "I was happy. He guessed. Was I supposed to lie?"
Jennifer sighed. "He's a friend, it's okay, but tell everyone else to come ask me."
She saw Ronon sort that away in his mental rules the Earth people live by file, and wondered what people did on Sateda to celebrate pregnancy and childbirth, and whether Ronon would mind being asked.
"Does Cam know how John feels?" she asked, still worrying the problem in her head.
"Doesn't matter," Ronon said, patiently, like it was obvious. "Cam's with us, Sheppard's with McKay, that's not changing."
Jennifer felt a sudden horrible flood of tears, and scrubbed them away with the backs of her hands.
"I'm reading a book," Ronon said, alert and knowledgeable. "Hormones."
Jennifer glared. "You get to say that once. After that, I get violent with the bantos rods." She sighed. "But John's happy?" She hated that she sounded doubtful. She saw evidence of John's happiness every day.
"Yeah," Ronon told her. Jennifer wondered if he was saying that because this was one of the times when he thought he was supposed to lie, of if it was the truth, or if the truth made any difference at all. "We all are," he added, a reassurance and a warning, and Jennifer nodded.
"I'm tired," she said, and got up, holding out a hand. "Come hold me?"
Ronon didn't even bother answering, just wrapped her up in warmth and love, keeping her safe until she fell asleep. In the morning when she woke the secret's sharp edges were already wearing away, like it was something she could hold onto for a very long time.
Daniel and Jack’s Registration ceremony:
Dalila’s Registration had taken place in their backyard with only Sam, Teal’c, O’Neill’s cousin, and the guild representative scowling disapprovingly at the fact that the General hadn’t bothered to change out of his Homer Simpson pajama pants for the occasion. Daniel related later that, like John, the General had been reluctant to invest in paternity wear and those were the only pants that fit. When Cam acted surprised that Daniel hadn’t insisted on a least some formality, he had shrugged and said that if his husband could keep saving the world while carrying Daniel’s child at age 55, the least he could do was let him conduct the ceremony in comfort.
Daniel explains more about the history/biological implications of triumvirate marriages:
“Triumvirate marriages started as a hedge against fertility problems,” Daniel said, already in full lecture-mode. “The rules of inheritance were clear enough so that experts could normally figure out what combinations were possible, based on a full pedigree, but there was no real way to know whether a nobleman was an imperial or a royal or if a woman had the genes to carry. In some incredibly rare cases, inheritance could even produce someone who wasn’t a carrier at all. There were basically four objectives for getting married: having children, passing down the family name, some political alliance or trade, and love. The question of heirs was a very important one, considering that there are several combinations that are essentially infertile: two imperials, an imperial and a woman, and two male plebians or two females, though that was taboo at the time.”
“When was this?” O’Neill asked, sitting down to wrap an arm around Daniel. “I slept through most of Manners, Tradition and Breeding and definitely through almost all of Guild History.”
“Of course you did. Even though polygamous social structures were present in many ancient cultures, especially those with high rates of the Z-gene, the triumvirate marriage tradition as we know it today began in Hellenic times. It began due to a confluence of the different marriage objectives. The most desirable match from a lineage standpoint is to be an imperial who marries a royal or a noblewoman who marries a royal, because your name will get passed down and no plebians are involved. But in trying to achieve this, you are rolling the dice on being able to produce children at all, because if your partner is an imperial, you are infertile as a couple. Early Guilds, like John’s Guild, dealt with this by not recognizing a marriage until the couple proves their fertility. But this made it difficult to use marriage as a tool for building alliances or gaining resources because it does no good to have an alliance hinge on a couple’s fertility. There is also the question of love - what to do if two people fall in love and turn out to be infertile? Often simply trying for a child produced feelings of love that would be immediately ripped away if the couple proved to be infertile. Triumvirate marriages solve all these problems. In infertile couples, the secundus introduces fertility and in loveless marriages, the secundus helps the couple remain together. Back before genetic testing it was sometimes even common for two siblings, most likely genetic half-siblings, to marry the same person in order to keep any reproductive options in the family.”
Cam couldn’t keep the grimace off his face. Maybe John was right when he teased Cam about his closed-minded pleb values, but he couldn’t imagine being in a marriage with his brother or not getting jealous if his brother were also having sex with his spouse. Daniel made a good point about why triumvirate marriages were biologically necessary, but Cam couldn’t imagine how all those noblemen over the centuries dealt with their jealousy.
“Now, with genetic testing available,” Daniel continued, “the practice is on the decline, but still very much accepted in Guild society. Now it is mostly used for purposes of facilitating arranged marriages or in cases of accidental gestation, like in your case, Cam. Until recently a carrier had only three options: bind the pouch, killing the neonate, marry the child’s father and maybe take a secundus later, or marry someone else, thus denying all parental rights to the child’s donor. Only after the Progressive Era have Guilds been forced by many governments to abide by the custody rules applied to plebians. But in the more traditional guilds not marrying the donor is still considered scandalous. Before genetic tests, a carrier could and often did marry someone who was not the biological donor and assert that they were for the registry. After families started doing genetic mapping of their pedigrees, scholars found that around 15% of donors listed on the Guild registry were incorrect and thus made gene testing a requirement for registry. This has lead to a lot of marriage that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred but are enforced for child-rearing purposes and usually ends in the taking of a secundus. In fact, many Guild scholars predict an announcement of a guiding principle from the International Congress of Noble Society suggesting that Guilds make an exception to the covet of affinity, allowing no-penalty divorce for originating members of a marriage if all of that pair’s children are of age.”
Jack tells the story behind his marriage to Sara and Frank (cut for length and because it’s OOC for Jack to be this open and talk this much):
“I wouldn’t have been allowed to marry Sara if I didn’t invite Frank into the marriage, and even though I was never in love with him, he gave me Charlie. I never could have predicted that he and Sara would still be together twenty years later and I’d be the one remarried, but the point is that it worked for us.”
Of course that wasn’t the whole, uncomplicated truth. Daniel had drunkenly related it to Cam one night when he was agonizing over his decision to come back to SG1 and leave O’Neill at home with their recently pouch-weaned baby. O’Neill’s situation had been a far cry from Cam’s. O’Neill had been in love with Sara, but the recent advent of chromosome testing disqualified them from marriage under the rules of his guild. O’Neill had been contemplating leaving the guild for Sara when he had been sent on a special ops mission to Iraq where he met and became close to Major Frank Cromwell. After O’Neill was injured behind enemy lines, Cromwell went back against orders to rescue him, only to be captured himself. After their captors used rape as a humiliation technique against Cromwell, they knew it was only a matter of time before they used it on O’Neill, so they started having sex in hopes that the child conceived would be Frank’s and not their enemy’s. After they escaped, O’Neill asked Cromwell to be his secundus, regardless of whether the child he ended up carrying was his.
O’Neill had loved his family - he got the woman he loved and the man who had supported him in his darkest hour. After Charlie died, Jack had pulled away from his family while their shared grief drew Sara and Cromwell closer. Daniel had met Jack as a bitter, closed-off man who thought he had nothing to lose.
A year later, Daniel’s wife was captured by Apophis, Jack was divorced, and Sara and Cromwell were expecting their first child together. It had taken years for both men to overcome their losses and finally get together. With their jobs, they hadn’t considered kids. But after Jack was promoted to lead the SGC, they decided the give it a chance. Their daughter, Dalila, was jokingly referred to by Daniel and Sam as Jack’s little midlife crisis, but it was clear to everyone that she was the light of their lives. Cam tried not to feel resentful as Daniel scooped his sleeping daughter out of Jack’s lap, giving his husband a kiss as he disappeared momentarily to tuck her into bed.
Once Daniel was out of the room, Jack continued, “Look, Frank and Sara and I were in the same situation you’re in now. I was in love with Sara, but having Frank’s kid. The two of them met in a hospital room in Fairfield when I was already two months into gestating Charlie. Frank knew going into our marriage that I didn’t love him the way I loved Sara. Sara still insists that Frank went back for me because he was already starting to want me and that he agreed to the marriage because he was in love with me. Frank and I have never talked about it - talking was never our thing . . . fishing, yes, talking, no. But I know he didn’t join us for Sara and he didn’t do it because he and I were playing out some great love story. He joined us because he wanted to be part of our family and because we were all open minded. It was hard work, but we grew to love each other and we grew into a family. So far as I know, Frank and Sara never even slept together until after Charlie died.”
“You never told me that before,” Daniel grumbled. But it didn’t stop him from practically curling up in O’Neill’s lap on a couch that was more than big enough for separate seating.
“Like I said before, I’m not good at talking.”
“No, you’re great at talking. Not so great at actually saying anything,” Daniel replied tartly.
“It’s not a time in my life I enjoy revisiting, even though most of our marriage was happy.”
“Well, I’m grateful for any perspective you can give me, Sir.”
“Drop the ‘sir,’ Mitchell, and let me impart my lesson to you, young grasshopper.”
Cam nodded, though he had no intention of agreeing to drop the formality with the Head of Homeworld security. O’Neill would always be Cam’s boss first and Daniel’s eccentric husband second.
“You’d never know it now, but Sara and Frank didn’t always get along. In fact, in the beginning they got along like a bag full of system lords. Even though Sara had agreed to look for a secundus so that we could get married, I think she thought we’d rifle through a catalogue together or maybe adopt one at a kennel or something. Sara barely approved of my military career as it was, so adding another black ops guy would’ve been the last choice she would have made. Plus, Frank was the donor of my kid and I’d just spent months in a windowless prison cell with him - those were things that I would never share with Sara and I think she was jealous . . . not jealous of the fact that Frank got the priviledge of seeing me raped and tortured, but of how close it made us. At least she realized that at the time, Frank was the only man I would even let touch me, so the catalogue of secunduses was out.”
“You know, most guilds actually have matching services which could be considered like a catalogue of sorts . . .”
“Missing the point as usual, Danny-boy,” O’Neill punctuated his teasing with a poke to Daniel’s ribs. “The point is that Sara resented Frank and even though Frank didn’t resent Sara, he had his own issues: namely a monumental case of PTSD, mostly centered around watching me get tortured and not knowing if my baby was his or one of our captors. To say he was overprotective would be the like calling an aircraft carrier a boat. And that’s not even factoring in his fear that once things returned to normal, I’d return to Sara and start excluding him from my life and the baby’s. In a lot of ways, Frank was more shaken by our capture than I was - he never went into the field again. But even though Frank was more fucked up, I wasn’t in a great position to mediate between the two of them, so they’d fight all these petty little wars about who would sleep with me in the master bedroom each night, who forgot to take out the trash, whether we should get a dog or a cat. I’d come home to hear them screaming at each other about the best way to wash the dishes and just retreat to the backyard, wishing that I wasn’t knocked up so that I could at least drink away the headache they were giving me.
“I thought it would get better once the baby transferred, but finding out that the baby was his only made Frank more overprotective and then what they were fighting about was me and whether I should be allowed to go do the grocery shopping, or which multivitamin would produce healthier milk, and if Frank penetrating me was too rough for a carrying man. I was literally ready to wake up one day to find that Sara had bashed Frank’s head in with a car seat. In fact, I was about ready to bash both their heads in with a car seat. Eventually I managed to prove to both of them that I wasn’t going to leave one for the other, but by then they’d progressed from unhappiness with the situation into outright hating each other.”
Cam grimaced, ready to acknowledge that even though he probably never would have wanted to marry Rodney McKay, or even chosen him as a friend, most of his truly ugly feelings towards the man were jealousy over John and anger at the situation - not something that McKay had actually done to Cam. “So what changed?”
O’Neill smiled, though it was bittersweet. “What happened was that Charlie emerged and we were all too focused on him to keep fighting. We had to coordinate our schedules to match the amount of time he wanted to spend outside of the pouch and take turns doing diaper changes and getting errands done. We were in the process of moving to Virginia for Frank and my next posting and it didn’t matter who I was going to spend the night with when one or all of us were too exhausted to care. I went back to work the second Charlie could spend enough time out of the pouch to let me, while Sara and Frank were at home - Sara because she was looking for a job, and Frank because the shrinks still hadn’t cleared him for active duty. And somehow, one day when I came home they were curled up on the couch with Charlie, watching one of those period dramas I hate. They’d found some common ground and made a truce. We bought an Imperial sized bed and never looked back.”
“What do you think finally made them get together?” Cam asked, curious. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting to bed Rodney McKay, even though he was physically attractive enough.
O’Neill shrugged. “People change. I think they had been thinking about it for a while, but they were both too scared to rock the boat when we were happy the way we were. After Charlie,” he sighed. “After that there was nothing to lose.”
Daniel placed a comforting kiss on the general’s cheek, hugging his husband to him.
A snippet about future Atlantis:
After the defeat of the Wraith, Cam’s role had shifted as well. There were now only two teams dedicated to exploration and first contact. Instead, each department organized their own teams of experts to go off world according to the requests of the local people. Most of Cam’s job was to organize military escorts for the teams and manage security of the City itself and several outposts and mining operations. There was also an extraction team and a special ops group as well as a team of military training experts that consulted like the other departmental teams. Cam was also much more heavily involved in what had always been the bread and butter of the Air Force - fighter planes and military intelligence, both of which were made much easier by cloaking technology (and sometimes body-switching stones). With so many aspects of the military mission, Cam now had a cadre of Majors and Lieutenant Colonels heading up separate segments of military operations. Cam himself rarely went offworld unless it was onboard the Bellerophon and he found that he was okay with that, even though John made fun of his lack of a “hands on approach.” Privately, Cam wasn’t sure how well either John or the city would have survived much more of John’s hands being on it.
A snippet written by the lovely busaikko about John’s feelings on the whole thing. I don’t entirely share her interpretation, but I do love the voices in this fic, especially Jennifer:
"So hey," John said, and gave Jennifer a grin and a rakish waggle of one eyebrow. "I hear congratulations are in order."
Jennifer made a face. "Which one of my husbands leaked the news?"
John raised his hands, palms out. "I don't give up my sources," he said. "Especially since I know both of them can kick my ass any given day."
"Well." Jennifer sighed. "Just don't spread it around. We're past 15 weeks, but still..."
John nodded easily, and that was when Jennifer remembered that he'd lost his first child. She knew her embarrassment showed on her face - she had a terrible poker face - and she caught John's brief grimace before his expression smoothed, pretending he didn't know what she was thinking.
"Can I ask you a question?" she asked, abrupt, and crossed her arms, curling her fingers around her elbows. She was always cold these days; something hormonal, she was fairly sure. She tipped her head at the balcony and the golden spill of sunwarmth there, and John followed her out, light on his feet and wary.
John joined her at the railing, looking down over the city's spires. "I probably won't be much help," he said apologetically. "Oh, unless you need some good elastic socks. And extra-large hoodies, I've got a box of those still in the closet somewhere." He rolled his eyes in self-mockery. "Hand-me-downs I can do, not so good with advice. Or whatever."
"My mother emailed me a bunch of books," Jennifer said. John looked relieved. "No, but what I, I wanted to ask you - are you still in love with Cam?"
John went very still, from the inside out, like a deer sensing a threat. He looked at Jennifer sidelong, curled the corner of his mouth up in what was not in any way a smile, and said, "I never was."
Jennifer blinked. She was used to Cam's personal brand of bullshit, and the sparse framework of Ronon's speech, but John had a way of... flustering her.
John made a face, blowing out air and anger, obviously trying to put words to something that he didn't know how to express. Finally he said, "If I'd loved him, he wouldn't have left me all those years ago, so it's better for everyone that..." He shrugged, shaking tension from his shoulders. "It was a fucked up situation, and I fucked it up worse."
Jennifer was teetering on the edge of an understanding that made her feel like the stable net of all the relationships around her was suddenly mutable and strange.
"I've also got some baby-name books," John added, face brightening. "And hey, if you need a crib or diapers or whatever. I probably owe you a few years' worth of babysitting."
Jennifer grabbed the offer like a safety line. "Can I get you to put that in writing?" she asked, teasing weakly. John chuckled, and warned her against drinking coffee, and Jennifer bumped shoulders with him, because that had been her advice to him, years ago.
Over dinner that night, she took advantage of Cam having to work late to ask Ronon if he knew that John was still in love with Cam.
"Doesn't change anything," Ronon said, leaning back in his chair and eyeing her as if hoping that this didn't turn into a long discussion of feelings.
Jennifer stuck her tongue out. "Why am I the last person to know?" She narrowed her eyes at him. "And did you tell John about - " her cheeks heated - "you know. Our baby."
Ronon shrugged. "I was happy. He guessed. Was I supposed to lie?"
Jennifer sighed. "He's a friend, it's okay, but tell everyone else to come ask me."
She saw Ronon sort that away in his mental rules the Earth people live by file, and wondered what people did on Sateda to celebrate pregnancy and childbirth, and whether Ronon would mind being asked.
"Does Cam know how John feels?" she asked, still worrying the problem in her head.
"Doesn't matter," Ronon said, patiently, like it was obvious. "Cam's with us, Sheppard's with McKay, that's not changing."
Jennifer felt a sudden horrible flood of tears, and scrubbed them away with the backs of her hands.
"I'm reading a book," Ronon said, alert and knowledgeable. "Hormones."
Jennifer glared. "You get to say that once. After that, I get violent with the bantos rods." She sighed. "But John's happy?" She hated that she sounded doubtful. She saw evidence of John's happiness every day.
"Yeah," Ronon told her. Jennifer wondered if he was saying that because this was one of the times when he thought he was supposed to lie, of if it was the truth, or if the truth made any difference at all. "We all are," he added, a reassurance and a warning, and Jennifer nodded.
"I'm tired," she said, and got up, holding out a hand. "Come hold me?"
Ronon didn't even bother answering, just wrapped her up in warmth and love, keeping her safe until she fell asleep. In the morning when she woke the secret's sharp edges were already wearing away, like it was something she could hold onto for a very long time.