Fic: La Familia
Mar. 6th, 2007 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneTitle: La Familia (A Puddlejumpers Story)
Rating: PG
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard, Weir/Zelenka
Length: ~2300 words
Summary: They're done with scandal; then Teyla gets pregnant and won't tell anyone who the father is.
A/N: A rather embarrassingly late birthday present for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wychwood, the fabulous co-author of this 'verse. It may be cheating a little, but here's a happy ending for you. (With many thanks to siriaeve for looking it over.)
La Familia
They're done with scandal; then Teyla gets pregnant and won't tell anyone who the father is.
"Well, at least I'm well out of it," says John, tilting his head back and squinting into the sun. Two days later there's a story in the Enquirer about how Shep is cheating on Rodney and got Teyla knocked up. A week after that, it's the Weekly World News, and Rodney's the philanderer. He tries to be flattered.
Teyla smiles serenely at them for a minute, then rushes into the bathroom to throw up.
Luckily, there's less than a month left in the tour. Lorne spends a lot of time running around trying to find the only jar of dill pickles in South America. Elizabeth is on the phone, constantly, and while that's not so unusual, it's enough to make Rodney and Radek take up their late-night poker matches again. Now John usually comes in before Elizabeth does and goads Rodney into dealing him in. The game's better with three (though not as good as with four); besides, John has lately become an easy mark. Smiling and leaning forward, "All in," he'll say.
"You're bluffing," says Rodney.
"Bluffing!" says Radek.
And John will pout and sigh and watch his chips get swept away. "Have you been playing me all these years?" he asks Rodney.
"No." Rodney grins, touches his elbow. "No."
(Later that night, lying in bed, "Have you noticed how big Teyla's breasts are getting?" Rodney asks.
John gives his shoulder a gentle punch. "Hey! We're gay now; you're not supposed to notice that."
Rodney slides his knee between John's thighs. "You're gay now," he says; "I'm consistently bisexual."
"That wasn't what we agreed," John grumbles, trying to roll Rodney over. But Rodney for once takes full advantage of his extra weight and pins John down, spreading himself above him like a wave. John gentles, arching up into the offered kiss—and the next, and the next.
"No," says Rodney, hands on John's naked chest. "We agreed to be honest."
John's grin is pure Shep. "So you're going to tell everyone about your hairline."
Rodney blushes. "Now that is privileged information!"
John laughs and they roll. Through the wall, Elizabeth can hear it, their laughter and the headboard knocking. She raises an eyebrow over her laptop screen, and Radek grins back, and shuts it.)
After the tour, they go back to L.A., ostensibly all to their own houses for break time, time away from each other. Instead they end up congregating at John and Rodney's new place near Venice Beach. They have a semi-private strip of sand that Lorne makes more private via his inability to go entirely off duty and his apparent masochistic love of chasing away stray dogs and the occasional Teva-clad small child. Ronon and John spend a great deal of time surfing, Ronon sliding easily down the crest of each wave and John frequently wiping out before emerging from the spray sputtering and laughing while Rodney peeks out from between the gaps in his fingers. When John isn't recklessly endangering his life, Rodney debates music theory with a sunbathing Teyla until she gets sick of him and pretends to fall asleep. Then he brings a weather-beaten and sandy acoustic down from the house and fools around on it, making up songs or playing something tropical, a traditional Hawaiian piece that Ronon taught him or a cheesy Elvis number that John will sing along to like this is their own version of Clambake. Elizabeth used to bring her Blackberry, until Radek threatened to throw it into the ocean.
After a while, Teyla stops wearing a bikini and instead dons an airy white cotton sundress and a big floppy hat. Ronon and Lorne fall all over themselves to set up umbrellas for her or to bring her drinks with tiny umbrellas in them, which she and Elizabeth make no effort to hide finding hilarious. John puts too much gas on the grill and nearly sets his hair on fire. Sam stops by and brings Rodney a "housewarming gift" that makes him turn bright red and refuse to show anybody else. Ronon sprains his elbow, missing a wave break for once, but he can still move his fingers and can still play, so he's sanguine. Radek adorns the beach with fairy lights and they all lie in the sand, staring up at the stars and feeling the world spin.
The summer passes.
In September, they'd planned to go back into the studio. Teyla says she's up for it, so they decamp to a space above Sunset Boulevard. One afternoon, during a break, John catches her standing by the window, looking out.
"Hey," he says.
"Hello, John."
They stand in silence for a while.
Eventually, Teyla extends one delicate finger. John has always loved her hands: the palms are unusually rough, and her nails are by necessity always close-cropped. She can twirl a drumstick between her fingers like a magician a shiny silver coin.
"Look," she says, pointing. John bends his neck and sees that she's indicating the Strip, the familiar shape of Mel's Diner. "Remember the summer when I worked there?"
"You wore a very short skirt," says John, who has decided that Rodney's right about the whole "Gay now!" thing. Who has suddenly become so much more comfortable with all of this.
Teyla smiles her little Mona Lisa smile. John knows what she's thinking. He's thought it, too. I thought I'd be down there forever.
"You were beautiful," he tells her. He looks at her, hand on the rounded curve of her belly. "You're beautiful."
She touches his cheek, cool palm and then quick press of soft, warm lips. Her smile as she turns away says everything and hides nothing, and John walks back to the microphone stand humming to himself and smiling still.
Teyla goes to visit her grandmother in Echo Park; she goes alone and brings with her a small, flowering plant in a clay pot.
"Thank you, dear," says her grandmother, setting the gift down on the windowsill, turning it toward the light. They sit at opposite ends of the modest kitchen table in wooden chairs that creak gently beneath their weight. Teyla's grandmother pours sweet tea into glasses topped with lemon slices that Teyla almost rejects until she realizes that she probably isn't going to see Rodney today. There is warm banana bread on a china plate. Above their heads is a portrait of the Holy Mother in a silver frame; Teyla bought it herself, in Mexico City.
"Do you want to tell me about it?" Teyla's grandmother asks as they sip their tea.
"No," says Teyla plainly. "I came to see you."
Later, while her grandmother is resting, Teyla pulls down the set of steps that leads up to the trap door opening onto the attic. This is harder than it would normally be. But the box of photos is just where she expected, and Teyla brings it over to the small square of light near the single window and spreads her skirts.
Teyla doesn't remember her mother. When she died, Teyla's father stopped talking about her; never a talkative man, he grew positively taciturn. Teyla once smashed a plate on purpose, a piece of her parents' wedding china, just to see if she could get a reaction. Her father had only sighed, bent his back, swept up the broken pieces. It's the first time Teyla can remember wanting to hit someone.
In school she got in fights. There's one fight in particular that she remembers, although she's learned her own stoicism now and she'll never tell. A couple of older boys were hassling one of the first graders; Teyla, a first grader herself, snuck up and elbowed one of them in the nose. On the ground with his lunch sack torn open and the cupcake his mother had baked him smushed, John Sheppard had stared up at her with wide eyes. After that, they would nod to each other in the halls, but they were never friends.
Then John's mother died and Shep was born. Teyla, by that time, had learned to hit other things; Shep cornered her outside the music room, smiling down over the rims of his sunglasses, and asked her to join his band.
"Why me?" she asked him.
"Well," said Shep casually. "You already have a drum kit, right?"
Kavanagh had a car, which, as he pointed out, meant that they wouldn't have to transport the kit on the bus. Aiden was apparently Shep's friend, although Teyla had never known them to hang out. But he was always on time, and he always brought snacks.
There's a picture of them here, impossibly young. Teyla traces a finger over their faces: she with her hair ridiculously long, as she'd never wear it today; John the only thing black and white in a color photo; Kavanagh wearing the same sour expression he's making in the headshot that appears next to his weekly New York Post column, where he repeatedly savages them; and Aiden, poor Aiden, smiling and innocent, frozen forever in time. Teyla stares at the photo for a long while, then puts it away. It looks wrong, without Rodney, without Ronon. Without Elizabeth and Radek and Lorne and all the rest, it's incomplete.
Her hands sift through the images like they move through the sand down behind John and Rodney's house, searching for shells and slivers of beach glass, worn smooth by the waves. Sometimes she'll hold them up to the light and see the world through a filter, shifting shades of blue and amber and gold.
In the photograph, her mother wears a yellow dress, just shy of transparent. Teyla thinks the photo was taken at a wedding: there's a blurred outline of a man in a light summer suit, and an arching arbor of roses, stretching above her mother's head. Maybe she was a bridesmaid; that could explain the flower in her hair. She's smiling in the picture, though her face is tilted somewhat to the right. She's staring at something, just beyond the camera, and she likes what she sees. Her hand rests on her belly.
Teyla holds the photograph in her own lap for a long time. Then she tucks it inside her blouse and walks, slowly and carefully, down the stairs.
In the months and weeks and days leading up to the birth, the rumors never stop. Teyla is pregnant by all her bandmates, by assorted roadies, by her arresting officer from that incident a while back (Teyla does still send him a Christmas card), by the crown prince of Monaco, by Kavanagh (Teyla suspects he floated that possibility himself), by aliens, by God, by Bono, and by Elvis. When she finally packs up her bag and proceeds sedately to the hospital (Elizabeth drives), the media holds its breath. What will the baby look like? Will the father be revealed by the name?
Charis Mercedes Emmagan is born at 3:55 a.m. on December 8th. Within an hour, suggestions have been made regarding various Greek millionaires, as well as a matador or two.
Her bandmates gather around her bed like the three wisemen, bearing gifts of gold (chocolate) coins, a bottle of frankincense aromatherapy oil, and a stuffed bear from the hospital gift shop. "Someone," says Rodney, "was supposed to bring myrrh, and someone forgot."
"What?" says John. When Rodney's back is turned, he winks at her.
Teyla looks at all three of them gathered at her bedside and feels like she's just woken up to discover that Kansas and Oz are one and the same. She cradles Charis against her breast and listens to their chatter—the good-natured bickering, the bits of pantomime they carry out for her benefit and out of habit: Ronon elbowing Rodney; John teasing Elizabeth; Radek muttering at all of them in Czech; Lorne rolling his eyes. Teyla is exhausted, but she doesn't want to close her eyes; she doesn't want to ever give this up, this feeling of peace and contentment and belonging, of warmth. And, she realizes, stroking her daughter's soft head—she doesn't have to. This is hers: theirs, now. They've circled the world a dozen times to find home right back where they began.
Teyla's eyelids are drooping, but she feels a greater sense of peace than she has in years, since before her mother died. A true peace, not one achieved through careful meditation and rigorous self-control. Like a great weight has been lifted.
She feels Charis' steady little heartbeat—her child, her own—and she smiles, feels her hands relax. "John," she says, "John—" He bends low. "Would you like to hold her?"
His face goes pale, and for the first time in a while he looks like he's wishing for his sunglasses. But when Teyla smiles up at him, like she'd once smiled down with palm extended, John nods and takes the baby carefully from her hands, into his arms. He cradles her gently against the crook of his shoulder, his mouth forming a small circle of surprise and awe. A strange innocence crosses over his face. "She...she's beautiful, Teyla," he says, swallowing, turning: "Rodney...look..."
Rodney similarly loses color, but with a fair dose of the determination and bravery not enough people give him credit for, he reaches out, touches Charis' little scrunched up arm, her tiny reaching fingers. Her eyes are open, watching them all with the same sense of wonder Teyla herself feels, and Teyla's heart almost stops when her daughter's hand moves, batting once, twice against Rodney's outstretched finger before closing tightly around it.
"Oh!" says Rodney, "oh," and Teyla listens to John's breathy little chuckle, to Elizabeth's coo, to the slight creak of the chair as Ronon settles in beside her and takes her hand in his. The baby gurgles and her friends huddle and whisper around her. Teyla closes her eyes and lets it wash over her, the world's most perfect music.
Rating: PG
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard, Weir/Zelenka
Length: ~2300 words
Summary: They're done with scandal; then Teyla gets pregnant and won't tell anyone who the father is.
A/N: A rather embarrassingly late birthday present for
wychwood, the fabulous co-author of this 'verse. It may be cheating a little, but here's a happy ending for you. (With many thanks to siriaeve for looking it over.)La Familia
They're done with scandal; then Teyla gets pregnant and won't tell anyone who the father is.
"Well, at least I'm well out of it," says John, tilting his head back and squinting into the sun. Two days later there's a story in the Enquirer about how Shep is cheating on Rodney and got Teyla knocked up. A week after that, it's the Weekly World News, and Rodney's the philanderer. He tries to be flattered.
Teyla smiles serenely at them for a minute, then rushes into the bathroom to throw up.
Luckily, there's less than a month left in the tour. Lorne spends a lot of time running around trying to find the only jar of dill pickles in South America. Elizabeth is on the phone, constantly, and while that's not so unusual, it's enough to make Rodney and Radek take up their late-night poker matches again. Now John usually comes in before Elizabeth does and goads Rodney into dealing him in. The game's better with three (though not as good as with four); besides, John has lately become an easy mark. Smiling and leaning forward, "All in," he'll say.
"You're bluffing," says Rodney.
"Bluffing!" says Radek.
And John will pout and sigh and watch his chips get swept away. "Have you been playing me all these years?" he asks Rodney.
"No." Rodney grins, touches his elbow. "No."
(Later that night, lying in bed, "Have you noticed how big Teyla's breasts are getting?" Rodney asks.
John gives his shoulder a gentle punch. "Hey! We're gay now; you're not supposed to notice that."
Rodney slides his knee between John's thighs. "You're gay now," he says; "I'm consistently bisexual."
"That wasn't what we agreed," John grumbles, trying to roll Rodney over. But Rodney for once takes full advantage of his extra weight and pins John down, spreading himself above him like a wave. John gentles, arching up into the offered kiss—and the next, and the next.
"No," says Rodney, hands on John's naked chest. "We agreed to be honest."
John's grin is pure Shep. "So you're going to tell everyone about your hairline."
Rodney blushes. "Now that is privileged information!"
John laughs and they roll. Through the wall, Elizabeth can hear it, their laughter and the headboard knocking. She raises an eyebrow over her laptop screen, and Radek grins back, and shuts it.)
After the tour, they go back to L.A., ostensibly all to their own houses for break time, time away from each other. Instead they end up congregating at John and Rodney's new place near Venice Beach. They have a semi-private strip of sand that Lorne makes more private via his inability to go entirely off duty and his apparent masochistic love of chasing away stray dogs and the occasional Teva-clad small child. Ronon and John spend a great deal of time surfing, Ronon sliding easily down the crest of each wave and John frequently wiping out before emerging from the spray sputtering and laughing while Rodney peeks out from between the gaps in his fingers. When John isn't recklessly endangering his life, Rodney debates music theory with a sunbathing Teyla until she gets sick of him and pretends to fall asleep. Then he brings a weather-beaten and sandy acoustic down from the house and fools around on it, making up songs or playing something tropical, a traditional Hawaiian piece that Ronon taught him or a cheesy Elvis number that John will sing along to like this is their own version of Clambake. Elizabeth used to bring her Blackberry, until Radek threatened to throw it into the ocean.
After a while, Teyla stops wearing a bikini and instead dons an airy white cotton sundress and a big floppy hat. Ronon and Lorne fall all over themselves to set up umbrellas for her or to bring her drinks with tiny umbrellas in them, which she and Elizabeth make no effort to hide finding hilarious. John puts too much gas on the grill and nearly sets his hair on fire. Sam stops by and brings Rodney a "housewarming gift" that makes him turn bright red and refuse to show anybody else. Ronon sprains his elbow, missing a wave break for once, but he can still move his fingers and can still play, so he's sanguine. Radek adorns the beach with fairy lights and they all lie in the sand, staring up at the stars and feeling the world spin.
The summer passes.
In September, they'd planned to go back into the studio. Teyla says she's up for it, so they decamp to a space above Sunset Boulevard. One afternoon, during a break, John catches her standing by the window, looking out.
"Hey," he says.
"Hello, John."
They stand in silence for a while.
Eventually, Teyla extends one delicate finger. John has always loved her hands: the palms are unusually rough, and her nails are by necessity always close-cropped. She can twirl a drumstick between her fingers like a magician a shiny silver coin.
"Look," she says, pointing. John bends his neck and sees that she's indicating the Strip, the familiar shape of Mel's Diner. "Remember the summer when I worked there?"
"You wore a very short skirt," says John, who has decided that Rodney's right about the whole "Gay now!" thing. Who has suddenly become so much more comfortable with all of this.
Teyla smiles her little Mona Lisa smile. John knows what she's thinking. He's thought it, too. I thought I'd be down there forever.
"You were beautiful," he tells her. He looks at her, hand on the rounded curve of her belly. "You're beautiful."
She touches his cheek, cool palm and then quick press of soft, warm lips. Her smile as she turns away says everything and hides nothing, and John walks back to the microphone stand humming to himself and smiling still.
Teyla goes to visit her grandmother in Echo Park; she goes alone and brings with her a small, flowering plant in a clay pot.
"Thank you, dear," says her grandmother, setting the gift down on the windowsill, turning it toward the light. They sit at opposite ends of the modest kitchen table in wooden chairs that creak gently beneath their weight. Teyla's grandmother pours sweet tea into glasses topped with lemon slices that Teyla almost rejects until she realizes that she probably isn't going to see Rodney today. There is warm banana bread on a china plate. Above their heads is a portrait of the Holy Mother in a silver frame; Teyla bought it herself, in Mexico City.
"Do you want to tell me about it?" Teyla's grandmother asks as they sip their tea.
"No," says Teyla plainly. "I came to see you."
Later, while her grandmother is resting, Teyla pulls down the set of steps that leads up to the trap door opening onto the attic. This is harder than it would normally be. But the box of photos is just where she expected, and Teyla brings it over to the small square of light near the single window and spreads her skirts.
Teyla doesn't remember her mother. When she died, Teyla's father stopped talking about her; never a talkative man, he grew positively taciturn. Teyla once smashed a plate on purpose, a piece of her parents' wedding china, just to see if she could get a reaction. Her father had only sighed, bent his back, swept up the broken pieces. It's the first time Teyla can remember wanting to hit someone.
In school she got in fights. There's one fight in particular that she remembers, although she's learned her own stoicism now and she'll never tell. A couple of older boys were hassling one of the first graders; Teyla, a first grader herself, snuck up and elbowed one of them in the nose. On the ground with his lunch sack torn open and the cupcake his mother had baked him smushed, John Sheppard had stared up at her with wide eyes. After that, they would nod to each other in the halls, but they were never friends.
Then John's mother died and Shep was born. Teyla, by that time, had learned to hit other things; Shep cornered her outside the music room, smiling down over the rims of his sunglasses, and asked her to join his band.
"Why me?" she asked him.
"Well," said Shep casually. "You already have a drum kit, right?"
Kavanagh had a car, which, as he pointed out, meant that they wouldn't have to transport the kit on the bus. Aiden was apparently Shep's friend, although Teyla had never known them to hang out. But he was always on time, and he always brought snacks.
There's a picture of them here, impossibly young. Teyla traces a finger over their faces: she with her hair ridiculously long, as she'd never wear it today; John the only thing black and white in a color photo; Kavanagh wearing the same sour expression he's making in the headshot that appears next to his weekly New York Post column, where he repeatedly savages them; and Aiden, poor Aiden, smiling and innocent, frozen forever in time. Teyla stares at the photo for a long while, then puts it away. It looks wrong, without Rodney, without Ronon. Without Elizabeth and Radek and Lorne and all the rest, it's incomplete.
Her hands sift through the images like they move through the sand down behind John and Rodney's house, searching for shells and slivers of beach glass, worn smooth by the waves. Sometimes she'll hold them up to the light and see the world through a filter, shifting shades of blue and amber and gold.
In the photograph, her mother wears a yellow dress, just shy of transparent. Teyla thinks the photo was taken at a wedding: there's a blurred outline of a man in a light summer suit, and an arching arbor of roses, stretching above her mother's head. Maybe she was a bridesmaid; that could explain the flower in her hair. She's smiling in the picture, though her face is tilted somewhat to the right. She's staring at something, just beyond the camera, and she likes what she sees. Her hand rests on her belly.
Teyla holds the photograph in her own lap for a long time. Then she tucks it inside her blouse and walks, slowly and carefully, down the stairs.
In the months and weeks and days leading up to the birth, the rumors never stop. Teyla is pregnant by all her bandmates, by assorted roadies, by her arresting officer from that incident a while back (Teyla does still send him a Christmas card), by the crown prince of Monaco, by Kavanagh (Teyla suspects he floated that possibility himself), by aliens, by God, by Bono, and by Elvis. When she finally packs up her bag and proceeds sedately to the hospital (Elizabeth drives), the media holds its breath. What will the baby look like? Will the father be revealed by the name?
Charis Mercedes Emmagan is born at 3:55 a.m. on December 8th. Within an hour, suggestions have been made regarding various Greek millionaires, as well as a matador or two.
Her bandmates gather around her bed like the three wisemen, bearing gifts of gold (chocolate) coins, a bottle of frankincense aromatherapy oil, and a stuffed bear from the hospital gift shop. "Someone," says Rodney, "was supposed to bring myrrh, and someone forgot."
"What?" says John. When Rodney's back is turned, he winks at her.
Teyla looks at all three of them gathered at her bedside and feels like she's just woken up to discover that Kansas and Oz are one and the same. She cradles Charis against her breast and listens to their chatter—the good-natured bickering, the bits of pantomime they carry out for her benefit and out of habit: Ronon elbowing Rodney; John teasing Elizabeth; Radek muttering at all of them in Czech; Lorne rolling his eyes. Teyla is exhausted, but she doesn't want to close her eyes; she doesn't want to ever give this up, this feeling of peace and contentment and belonging, of warmth. And, she realizes, stroking her daughter's soft head—she doesn't have to. This is hers: theirs, now. They've circled the world a dozen times to find home right back where they began.
Teyla's eyelids are drooping, but she feels a greater sense of peace than she has in years, since before her mother died. A true peace, not one achieved through careful meditation and rigorous self-control. Like a great weight has been lifted.
She feels Charis' steady little heartbeat—her child, her own—and she smiles, feels her hands relax. "John," she says, "John—" He bends low. "Would you like to hold her?"
His face goes pale, and for the first time in a while he looks like he's wishing for his sunglasses. But when Teyla smiles up at him, like she'd once smiled down with palm extended, John nods and takes the baby carefully from her hands, into his arms. He cradles her gently against the crook of his shoulder, his mouth forming a small circle of surprise and awe. A strange innocence crosses over his face. "She...she's beautiful, Teyla," he says, swallowing, turning: "Rodney...look..."
Rodney similarly loses color, but with a fair dose of the determination and bravery not enough people give him credit for, he reaches out, touches Charis' little scrunched up arm, her tiny reaching fingers. Her eyes are open, watching them all with the same sense of wonder Teyla herself feels, and Teyla's heart almost stops when her daughter's hand moves, batting once, twice against Rodney's outstretched finger before closing tightly around it.
"Oh!" says Rodney, "oh," and Teyla listens to John's breathy little chuckle, to Elizabeth's coo, to the slight creak of the chair as Ronon settles in beside her and takes her hand in his. The baby gurgles and her friends huddle and whisper around her. Teyla closes her eyes and lets it wash over her, the world's most perfect music.
