Author: RowenaR

Rating: T

Category: Action/Adventure, Drama

Disclaimer: Stargate belongs to Gekko and… all those other people making money with it. Anyway, I don't. Honestly. So – I don't own, you don't sue. Deal?

Summary: All Laura Cadman and Evan Lorne wanted were six weeks of leave on Earth... but when does it ever go easy for them?

A/N: Alright, here we go with the promised long story. Be warned that plot development will probably be pretty slow for the first seven or eight chapters... but I do know what I'm doing, trust me on this. Also be very grateful to mac for breaking her beta-cation and beta the first 13 chapters of this at break-neck speed to give me an enormous buffer for possible outbreaks of writer's block or pesky RL events (right now I'm planning to move from my current home town to 400km away Berlin at the end of January...). Yay mac for being a workalholic! :D

Anyway, as always: Not a native speaker, so please excuse any weird grammatical constructions, run-ons and typos. Feedback will earn you a cookie, flames will roast my marshmellows.

A Little Place Like Kokomo

"Everybody knows a little place like Kokomo
Now if you wanna go to get away from it all
Go down to Kokomo."

The Beach Boys, "Kokomo"

Prologue

"Hey, are you done yet?" he calls at her with an impatient edge to his voice. She just rolls her eyes and unpacks a part of her duffle again. She's supposed to spend six weeks on a planet she hasn't been to for over a year, and she intends on doing quite some shopping. But she also has to bring a few items home… she hates packing and unpacking. She always feels like she is forgetting some very vital things, like her ID or her toothbrush or something like that.

"It's only six weeks, you know. You don't have to pack up our whole quarters." Evan leans against the doorframe with arms crossed in front of his chest, in civvies and looking very sexy.

She grumbles something like "Shut up," and throws her hairbrush at him. Honestly, if he wouldn't stand there and distract her, she could have been done a lot earlier.

Startled, he manages to just catch the hairbrush and waves it at her disapprovingly. "You have an alarming tendency to throw hazardous material at your CO, Captain. But at least it wasn't something x-rated today." She feels herself coloring again. He just had to bring that up, right? It's been nearly a year since that, and he still can't let it go. But what is worse: She can't get over it.

"Go on talking like that and you won't get anything x-rated in the next six weeks." Ha! Score! Or maybe not, because the only thing he does is leave the doorframe, grab her from behind and spin her around.

"Then maybe we should use the time left here for something x-rated," and he kisses her. Why is it that he always has these notions at the most inappropriate moments? She'd love to… but there's still a duffel to pack and he'd been the impatient one.

So she breaks the kiss and mumbles against his lips, "Do you want me to get done with packing or not?" The only response it provokes is another kiss, though this time gentler and shorter than the last.

"Good point. But do hurry up a little. Would be just our luck if they have some mission for one of us incoming the minute we want to gate to Earth." So true. In fact, she still can't believe their leave hasn't been cancelled yet. Usually, this would be the perfect occasion for fate to ruin their fun again.

"Then stop distracting me. You'll have six weeks to distract me, you know." He grins and kisses her forehead, like he always does when he wants a frown to vanish from her face and as always it works. Finally he leaves her to her packing again, claiming he has to go over some last minute 2IC stuff with Sheppard – more like backbiting about women and packing. She makes a face at the thought.

As nice as she finds the change from purely business to a kind of easy comradeship and even friendship in the relationship between Atlantis' CO and 2IC, she can't help wishing back the old days when they would try to gang up on her far less. She wonders how much Evan really talks about the two of them to Sheppard and what they talk about. She simply can't imagine those two talking about that stuff the same manner she talks about it with Teyla, Maureen or any other of the Atlantis women she's friends with.

She pauses. For some reason it's that moment she realizes how much her life has changed since she came back here… no, scratch that. Since Evan knocked on her door back on Earth, so many months ago. After Carson's death… she'd had times where she'd seriously doubted she'd fall in love again in the next five years at least. Then her transfer back to Earth, her work with the SGC – after Pegasus Galaxy, there simply had been no wish for her to ever go back to some normal posting, now that she knew what was out there and what she could do there – her getting used to the fact that her work simply didn't leave her much opportunity for a life outside of it… but always accompanied by Evan and his letters and e-mails.

When Evan's first real letter had arrived at her apartment, she'd been a little surprised. Sure, he had asked her for her address, but she'd never thought he would send real letters, handwritten even. She'd liked that immensely, so she had responded in the same way. Sometimes they'd exchanged a few short e-mails, mainly for telling each other when they wouldn't be available for an extended period of time, but the letters were the really interesting things. Over the course of time, they both had started to cultivate the habit of writing their letters more like diaries, to pass the time until the Daedalus would be in orbit at their respective postings again to take their mail.

Usually, the letters had mainly consisted of anecdotes, observations, rants and some gossip. Nothing particularly deep or heart-revealing. But over time they had both learned how to read between the lines. It had been that which laid the foundation for a friendship that had made it possible that he immediately came to call on her the first moment he could, to tell her about Carson.

And it had – as she had realized a while back – laid the foundation for her taking him up on his offer to come back to Atlantis. Yes, of course, the prospect of seeing Carson again had been part of her motivation as well… but if she'd known there would be no one else waiting for her here, she would have never made that call.

And if she hadn't… "Daydreaming, Captain?" She snaps out of her reverie. Evan's standing in the doorway again, eyebrows up, arms crossed again. Not quite ready to tell him about her musings, she just puts a strand of her hair out of her face and shakes her head.

"Just… never mind." He comes a few steps into the room, a little concerned frown on his face.

"Laura… is everything okay? You're not having second thoughts or something, right?" Sometimes she still wonders how a man like Evan – seasoned soldier, strong, determined – can be so easily unsettled by just a remark or a look from her. Moved by a sudden wave of affection she puts the piece of clothing she's been holding into the duffle and walks over to him. Putting her hands on his chest, she gives him a little reassuring kiss and smiles at him.

"I'm a Marine. We don't back down from anyone or anything. We don't even know how to spell second thoughts." That, of course, is not quite right. She did have doubts about accompanying him to San Francisco to meet his family, and she did have doubts about him accompanying her to visit her family. It all had seemed to make it so… official, even though they'd both appeared in the other one's last video message to their respective families – a rather… giddy and giggly affair, at least from where she was standing. But then she had discovered when taking a closer look at it, "official" wasn't so terrifying anymore. In fact, "official" started to sound quite nice, ever since they'd had a factual blessing from Woolsey and Sheppard. And San Francisco in summer… had started to sound quite nice as well.

"Some people might want to point out that Marines don't know how to spell anything, you know." He grins a little smugly. She just sticks out her tongue at him and goes back to her bag. Really, that's what you get for being nice.

"Pffft. A – N – Y – T – H – I – N – G. So there." He walks over to her bed and plunks down on it, putting his feet up and his arms behind his head.

"I really thank the powers that be that they have blessed me with you. Beautiful and smart. What more does a man want?" Another item – one of her t-shirts – lands squarely in his face. "Well, obedient and quiet, maybe." She grabs the t-shirt from his hands and stuffs it into her duffle bag which she then zips closed and dumps on the floor. Then she places her hands left and right of him and leans down.

"You can try and pretend you don't like it, but let's just say it like it is… you wouldn't want me any other way." His arms shoot up from behind his head and his hands grip her hips and drag her down to the bed beside him.

"Damn right," he growls and starts kissing her, to which she responds eagerly. She's half over him, when there's a suddenly a voice coming over their headsets.

"Major Lorne, Captain Cadman, please come in." They groan and roll their eyes in unison. Control Room. Please don't let this be some emergency "We need you to gear up; just this one mission, then you're free to go."-thing, she thinks.

"Lorne here, go ahead." She hopes that the impatient edge in his voice carried through the com system to Chuck in the control room.

"Just wanted to remind you that you've got fifteen minutes to go until the scheduled dial-up." That… they are so going to pay for that. She can already hear the smirk in Chuck's voice and the faint sniggering from the rest of the Control Room shift… and was that Sheppard in the background? She's already tapped her headset, but Evan puts his hand over her mouth.

"Thanks, Chuck. And if I were you, I would exclude Colonel Sheppard from the betting pool since he had an unfair advantage over the rest of you." He rolls his eyes and takes back his hand from her mouth. In response she can't help jumping him and softly biting his neck and he has quite a hard time biting back a chuckle. Serves him right for trying to shut her up like that.

"We'll consider it, Major. Control Room out." With that, he resorts to his favorite countermeasure and starts to tickle her.

"15 minutes, Major!" is all she can gasp and comes dangerously close to falling off the bed. He catches her in time and finally stops tickling her.

"Alright, ceasefire." She grins, and he gets up. Following suit, she gets up as well, grabs her duffel and together, they head out of her quarters to meet the rest of Evan's team at the 'Gate, all of them determined not to come back for the next six Earth weeks.