A/N: It's Christmas time again in the Looking Glass universe!
029. I have forgotten much that I thought I knew, and learned again much that I had forgotten.
Ben Krieg stood in the cargo bay, handing out packages at mail call like a gleeful Santa Claus in uniform. Later that week, he would actually be Santa Claus; one of these packages was for him, and it contained a Santa costume complete with a long white beard that he planned to wear at the holiday party.
Once the people who'd known they were getting mail had collected their goodies and left, he started looking through the packages left behind. One very large crate was for Commander Sutton, probably containing the mats and equipment she'd asked him to order. She was turning one of the old science labs into a sparring gym with Captain Bridger's blessing, and Ben knew that Brody was looking forward to it almost as much as Sutton was. The boat's gym was fine if you wanted to run on a treadmill or lift weights, but there wasn't enough room for people to really go all out while sparring.
One box and one mid-sized crate were for Lucas. Ben knew what was in the box; it was the Christmas present he'd helped Lucas find for Sutton. He had no idea why Lucas had chosen that particular gift, although he assumed there was some in-joke that he was missing, and he was curious to see how Sutton would react when she opened it. The mid-sized crate was a mystery to him, but the return address was ISD headquarters. Knowing Lucas, it was probably computer parts.
He wasn't going to mess with either crate. Sutton had said she'd have Sigma Team come by and shift her crate to the new gym later that day, and Ben would just give Lucas a heads up that whatever he'd ordered had arrived. He did take the box, on the off chance that Sutton might open it on her partner's behalf and ruin her holiday surprise. Grabbing packages labeled to several other members of the bridge crew, Ben headed out of the cargo bay, intent on distributing the boxes and spreading a little holiday cheer around the boat.
Lucas ducked into the cargo bay, glancing around to make sure no one else was there. It was deserted, which wasn't really a surprise given that it was the middle of second shift. The on-duty crew members were at their stations and everyone else was probably in the mess hall.
He found the crate Jack had sent him right where Ben told him it would be. He hefted it with a grunt at how heavy it was, turned to leave, and nearly dropped the damned thing on his foot when he found Sophie and half of Sigma Team standing behind him.
"Careful," Sophie scolded him, grabbing the other side of the crate and helping him steady it. "Jeez, what did you order? Rocks?"
"It's just some stuff I asked Pearson to send from headquarters," he disclaimed. It was technically true; he'd had Jack add in several spare computer parts and repair tools specifically so that when Sophie asked what was in the crate, he'd be able to tell her the truth. Lying to his partner was always a chancy proposition.
"It weighs a freaking ton," she said, shifting her grip on the crate. "Come on, I'll help you get it back to the lab."
Lucas hesitated. He had no real reason to decline the offer, and she would definitely be suspicious if he did, but he couldn't have her in the room when he opened the crate.
"What about the stuff for the gym?" he asked, and she shrugged.
"Chief Young, I assume the five of you can handle getting that crate to our new gym."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I'll help Wolenczak move this and then I'll meet you down there." She glanced up at Lucas, and he could swear he already saw a little suspicion in her eyes. "Fair enough?"
"Yeah, of course," he replied, keeping his tone light. "Thanks, Sophie."
Once the crate was deposited on the floor of the lab, Sophie brushed off her hands and looked expectantly at him.
"Aren't you going to open it?"
"Yes," he said slowly. "Wouldn't you rather go help Sigma Team set up the gym?"
"Actually, I would, but now I'm curious as to what's in here."
He sighed, deciding to give her as much of the truth as it took to convince her without tipping his hand.
"It's not just computer parts in there, Sophie."
"I had a feeling."
"Which is why you need to go down to the gym and give me some time to hide this stuff."
She stared at him for a long moment, and then an indulgent smile flitted across her face.
"There are Christmas presents in here, aren't there? That's why you don't want me around when you open it."
"You caught me." It had the benefit of being the truth, although not exactly in the way Sophie was thinking.
The kiss took him by surprise, her lips soft on his.
"I'm going down to the gym," she murmured, running a hand down his chest before stepping back. "I'll be there for at least a couple of hours. I promise."
"Thank you."
She gave him a warm backwards glance and then she was gone, the door sealing shut behind her. He waited until he heard the outer door close also and then knelt down next to the crate. It took a few minutes to get through the security tape and release the clamps, but eventually he got the lid off. Inside, he found the tools he'd asked for - a magnetic spanner, a miniature soldering iron, and several specialized pairs of pliers for working with sensitive electronics. The extra motherboards and silicon wafers were in a sealed box next to them. He pulled all of that out and put it on his workbench, then returned to the crate for the one thing he'd really wanted.
The metal footlocker slid easily out of the crate. It appeared to be unopened, the lock on the front without any signs of tampering. He'd told Jack that he needed the footlocker from the closet of his apartment because it contained stuff that belonged to the old seaQuest crew, things that he wanted to give back to them. Jack, with his typical disinterest in anything that wasn't directly related to intelligence work, had probably tossed the footlocker into the crate without a second thought. He had no reason to believe Lucas was telling him anything other than the truth.
It wasn't really a lie, Lucas decided as he opened the footlocker to reveal the stockpile of gifts he'd purchased for the seaQuest crew over the ten years they'd been missing. He'd always intended these things for his former shipmates. He'd just never thought they'd have the opportunity to receive them.
Now he just had to figure out how he would get the gifts to them without any of them figuring out who they were from - and without Sophie catching him at it.
The holiday party was in full swing by the time Sophie and Lucas arrived. Most of the off-duty crew members were there; the party would go on for a full 24 hours, with people free to drop in whenever they were able, so that none of the duty shifts would be short-changed.
"Do you suppose anyone's spiked the punch yet?" Sophie murmured to Lucas, who choked on a laugh.
"I don't think anyone would dare while Bridger and Ford are both here."
"Well, that's unfortunate," she sighed. "You want a glass anyway?"
"Sure. Thanks, Sophie."
He took a seat at a nearby table and watched as she moved across the room, exchanging polite greetings with Katie and Jim. Lucas suspected that Brody had developed a crush on his partner, and doubted whether anyone had told him that Lucas and Sophie were involved. It wasn't exactly a secret, but it wasn't something they brought up in casual conversation either. If the Macs' psychic pulse weapon hadn't put his memories on display for half the bridge crew to see, he doubted whether anyone aboard would know about their relationship.
"Merry Christmas, Lucas."
He looked up, smiling. "Merry Christmas, Captain. Would you like to join me?"
"I would," Bridger replied cheerfully, taking the seat next to Lucas. "I think Ben has outdone himself this year."
"It hardly even looks like the mess hall," Lucas agreed, looking around at the extravagant decorations.
"Your partner seems like she's in a good mood."
"I'm not sure why," Lucas admitted. "She's not usually a big fan of holidays. I figured she'd avoid this party like the plague, but she volunteered to come."
In the weeks since the prison break, Bridger had made it a point to try and get to know Lucas's partner. Even if he hadn't known that Lucas was in love with her, it was obvious that her opinion mattered a great deal to him. He'd been trying to get close to Lucas again, to understand what the young man had been through for the ten years that the seaQuest crew was missing, but it was like there was a vast gulf between them. Spending time with Sophie, who knew this Lucas better than anyone, helped him gain some insight into what Lucas's life was like now.
She was also an interesting woman in her own right. She was a brilliant strategist with a wealth of knowledge about the ongoing war, and after spending just a few coffee breaks with her he'd learned all manner of interesting things about Bourne, Stassi, the Macronesian military, and the history of the current conflict. Bridger got the feeling that she knew his main motivation in continuing to seek her out and that she'd initially been humoring him by participating in their discussions, but he also felt like she'd been slowly warming to him, and in turn he'd noticed that Lucas had been a little less standoffish recently.
"Maybe she was looking forward to seeing Lieutenant Krieg in costume."
"He's definitely a sight to behold," Lucas opined, glancing over to where Ben was holding court, passing out presents from the large red sack over his shoulder. "I don't think the beard is all that flattering, though."
"It has a certain charm," Sophie said dryly from behind Lucas, setting three glasses of punch down on the table. "Captain," she greeted Bridger, indicating one of the glasses, and Bridger took it with a nod.
"Thank you, Commander."
Sophie sat down across from Bridger. She'd seen the captain join Lucas at the table and had brought back the third cup of punch as a tacit approval of his presence. Of all of the seaQuest crew, Bridger was one of the few who didn't seem to have his head buried in the sand. Oh, she knew that he'd only been friendly to her at first because of her relationship with Lucas, but when she talked to him about the war, he listened. Eventually, he'd started asking questions: thoughtful, intelligent questions that showed a thorough grasp of strategy and tactics and gave her further evidence that he was every bit as shrewd as he seemed on first impression. If he weren't quite so morally inflexible, he might have done well in their division.
"Is Lieutenant Krieg wearing the costume for any particular reason, or just…ambiance?"
Lucas snickered. "Both. He's handing out gifts to the crew."
"What gifts?"
"Oh, he collected everyone's presents who wanted to participate, and he's just passing them out to the recipients."
"What's the point of that?"
Lucas rolled his eyes. "It's fun, Sophie. That way Santa gets to give people their presents." It was also a good way to get his anonymous gifts to the seaQuest crew without anyone figuring out who they were from. He'd tucked his gifts into the bottom of the giant bag late last night, managing to avoid being spotted by anyone. Sophie's gift was also in there, although he'd added that one in an above-board manner, simply handing it to Ben earlier today.
"Speak of the devil," Sophie muttered, and Lucas realized that Ben was heading over to their table.
"Commander Sutton!" Grinning, Ben dug into his sack of presents and withdrew a brightly wrapped box. "Santa heard that you were a good girl this year."
"Santa was sadly misinformed," she replied dryly, but took the box he offered her. A quick glance at the tag showed it was from Wolenczak, who was watching her intently. She couldn't imagine what he would have gotten for her that he'd be comfortable giving her in front of the seaQuest crew. Weaponry would probably upset them, alcohol wasn't permitted on the boat, and anything of a more personal nature would definitely be something he'd give her in the guaranteed privacy of his lab.
She discarded the wrapping paper to find what looked like a large white shoebox. Lucas kept his eyes on Sophie and was rewarded when she lifted the lid and saw the contents of the box. A dazzling smile stole across her face, and she looked up at him and burst into peals of laughter.
He grinned, her joy infectious, and several members of the crew watched in bemusement to see the usually humorless Commander Sutton dissolved into helpless giggles.
Ben was grinning too, unable to resist in the face of Sutton's reaction. He'd had his doubts about the plush lobster Lucas had picked out for his partner, but the stuffed animal had clearly been the right choice.
"So, you like him?"
"I love him," she declared, lifting the stuffed toy out of the box. It was bright red in color and was fairly realistic except for the fixed smile on its face. "My first lobster."
"The first of many," Lucas told her. Ben and Bridger exchanged amused looks; neither one of them knew what the deal with the lobsters was, but seeing either Lucas or Sophie this happy was rare.
"I'm naming him Pinchy," she said solemnly, laughter still sparkling in her eyes. "Thank you, Lucas."
"Just holding up my end of the deal," he replied, and then seemed to remember that they weren't alone. "Ben helped me find it. I wasn't sure he could get it here in time for Christmas."
"Of course I got it here," Ben said, affronted. "I'm Santa Claus! I have Christmas magic!"
Sophie's expression said she was only letting that slide because she liked the lobster. Ben spotted another crew member across the room he had a gift for and excused himself hurriedly.
"Let me see it," Lucas said, reaching out a hand toward Sophie, who slapped him away.
"He's a him, not an it, and get your own."
"You don't share well."
"You're just figuring that out now?" She rolled her eyes and produced a small wrapped box from her pocket. "Here. Play with this instead."
"For me?" He grinned, taking the gift. Sophie didn't usually go in for this sort of thing, and he hadn't actually expected her to buy him a present. "You didn't want to send it via Santa Claus?"
"Chain of custody," she replied cryptically, and Lucas raised his eyebrows.
"What did you get me? Explosives?"
"If you want explosives, all you have to do is make nice with Graham. No, this is a little harder to get your hands on than a block of C4."
Bridger was watching the exchange with an expression that was equal parts amusement and disbelief. The Lucas he'd known would have been horrified at the idea of getting explosives as a Christmas present. Now he didn't even sound particularly surprised by it.
The Lucas he'd known - but that was the issue, wasn't it? The Lucas he'd known had been a teenager, an exceptionally bright, sensitive kid with the entire world at his fingertips, whose biggest problems had been beating his friends at computer games and trying to understand the mysteries of girls. In the ten years that seaQuest had been gone, Lucas had grown up. He was still exceptionally bright, but his priorities had changed drastically, and his friends now were the kinds of people who gave explosives as gifts.
Lucas tore the wrapping paper off of the little box and gaped at the contents. Bridger leaned over his shoulder to see -
"Wire?"
The clear plastic box, with an official-looking label on the bottom, contained a spool that held about twenty feet of dull, silver-hued wire.
"It's not just wire," Lucas said, his tone indicating that the suggestion was blasphemy of the highest order. "This is villerium wire. This - they said this wasn't even possible. Villerium is the best semiconduction medium that's ever been discovered, but the chemical structure of the villerium alloy was too unstable and too expensive to make very much of it. It's never been available on the market. Even the military doesn't have it, outside of a couple of highly classified R&D labs." He looked up at Sophie, giving her a brilliant smile that made him look slightly unhinged. "Do you know what I can do with this?"
"No idea," she admitted. "But you've got that mad scientist look on your face, so I'm betting you've got hundreds of them. Pinchy would like it if you used some of it to upgrade the range on the comsets."
"Pinchy can consider it done. Sophie, how did you get this? I mean, this is -" He gestured vaguely, still in shock. "People would kill to get their hands on this."
"Tell me about it," she replied, deadpan, and waved off both men's disconcerted expressions at her response. "Don't worry about it. Just keep that stuff in your lab, will you? It's safer that way."
"Are you kidding? Now that I've got this, good luck getting me to ever leave the lab again!"
They were interrupted by Ben's reappearance at their table, grinning conspiratorially. "Hey, I just found an anonymous gift for Commander Ford in my bag. Any bets on who it's from?"
Ben, Sophie and Bridger all chuckled. None of them noticed that Lucas had gone a little pale.
"I can't imagine that Commander Ford is the kind of guy who would appreciate the mystery of an anonymous gift," Sophie offered, and Bridger nodded.
"What if he has a secret admirer?" Ben said, his grin widening. "Oh, I'm never going to let him live this down. You guys want to come watch him open it?"
Sophie glanced over at Lucas, who'd plastered an apologetic expression on his face.
"I'm sorry, Ben, but I've got some stuff I need to get done tonight. The party was great, though."
"Heading back to your lab to experiment with your present?" Bridger asked knowingly.
"You caught me," he admitted, ignoring the nudge of Sophie's foot against his ankle. She knew he was lying. The only question was whether she would call him on it in front of the others.
"I actually do have some things to get done tonight," Sophie said, giving Ben and Bridger a smile. "Don't worry, I'll make sure he doesn't forget to eat and sleep while he's playing with his new toy."
That gave Lucas the opening he needed to start some good-natured bickering with his partner, which they maintained as they left the party and headed back to the lab. Once they arrived, she dropped the act, setting her lobster down on the desk before tuning to him.
"You want to tell me what that was really about?"
He considered playing dumb, but there was no point.
"No," he admitted. "I do want to go down to the moonpool, though. I have a present for Darwin."
Lucas waited for Sophie to pursue it, to try and push him into telling her what was going on. Instead, she looked over at her lobster for a long moment, then sighed.
"Tell Darwin I said hi."
He took the reprieve she was offering, grabbing his duffle bag and ducking out of the room before she could change her mind.
The moonpool was abandoned at this late hour, the lights dimmed to simulate nighttime. Lucas dropped his duffle by the side of the pool and used the vocorder to call Darwin in from his swim through the boat. He arrived at full speed, surfacing and spraying Lucas enthusiastically.
"Lucas!"
"Hey, Darwin," he said, wiping the water from his face with amusement. "Happy to see me?"
"Lucas swim!"
"Not just yet, Darwin," he told the dolphin. "Is the concept of 'gift' in the vocorder database?"
"Gift," Darwin repeated obediently. "Something given, nothing expected in return."
"Right, exactly."
"Christmas has gifts!"
"You know about Christmas, too, huh?"
"Tim tells Darwin. Birthday has gifts. Christmas has gifts."
"They're called holidays, Darwin. Christmas and birthdays are holidays." He smiled. "It's Christmas today, Darwin, and I have a gift for you."
"Gift for Darwin! Darwin likes gifts."
Lucas dug into the duffle, producing the slim blue apparatus he'd been working on, off and on, for nearly ten years.
"See this, Darwin?" He set the waterproof device down on the side of the moonpool. "The vocorder I made for you, the one you're using, was the prototype. The rough draft. It was my first attempt at translating your speech. This one here is the final product."
"Better?" Darwin asked, and Lucas nodded.
"Better. I fixed every bug in the program, expanded the vocabulary database to three times its original size, and finally figured out how to make it self-adapting. Now, if you use a word the vocorder doesn't know, it'll analyze the context of the word to try and make a translation, and it'll add that word to the database so it recognizes it in the future."
"Smart vocorder," Darwin opined. "Smart Lucas!"
Lucas grinned. "Well, I've been working on it forever, but I haven't tested it yet. Wanna see if it works?"
Darwin nodded emphatically in agreement, a behavior he'd picked up from Bridger long ago. Lucas disconnected the old yellow vocorder from the moonpool speakers, plugged in the new one, and crossed his fingers.
"Okay, Darwin, say something."
"Something!"
Lucas laughed shakily. It worked. Only time would tell if it would perform as impeccably as he hoped it would, but at least it didn't have any fatal flaws he'd missed.
"You made a new vocorder?"
He turned to find Ben Krieg leaning against the far wall.
"It's the finished product," Lucas replied. "The first one was never supposed to be the final one. Shouldn't you be wearing a Santa suit?"
Ben glanced down at his uniform. "I handed it off to Morrison from Engineering; let him take a turn passing out gifts. The guy's a nut for anything that has to do with Christmas."
"And you decided to come to the moonpool as a break from spreading good cheer?"
"I was looking for you," Ben admitted. "I hate to admit it, but it took me a while to figure it out."
"Figure what out?"
Ben came over to where Lucas was standing, taking a seat on the side of the moonpool.
"Hey, Darwin, would you mind if Lucas and I talked in private?"
Lucas frowned, dividing his attention between Ben and the dolphin. He was suspicious about why Ben wanted to talk to him without Darwin there, and he also wanted to see if the new vocorder could translate the concept of privacy.
Darwin bobbed in the water, watching Ben and Lucas with an inarguably amused expression.
"Mating private. Ben Lucas mate?"
Both men choked. Lucas was the first to recover, reaching into the pool to splash Darwin for what he was positive was an intentional joke.
"Very funny, Darwin. The new vocorder can apparently translate your sense of humor."
"Ben Lucas talk. Darwin swim through ship. Not listen to talking. Talking private."
"Thanks, Darwin."
"Thank you, Lucas. Good gift!"
With that, Darwin took off back through the aquatubes. Both Lucas and Ben were familiar with Darwin's aforementioned sense of humor, and both of them moved fast enough to avoid getting caught in the spray of water he sent toward them with his tail fluke as he departed.
"What's so secret that you couldn't talk about it in front of Darwin?"
Ben smiled at Lucas, but the expression didn't reach his eyes.
"I didn't put it together at first. I was handing out the gifts, and a bunch of them didn't have the sender's name on them. All anonymous, all with the same wrapping paper. The vids I got were right up my alley, but they could have been from anyone. Ditto for the shoe polishing kit that Ford got. And the ballet picture…plenty of people know Ford likes the ballet. My first real clue was the necklace."
Lucas was standing between Ben and the hatch, and the light from the hallway cast his face into shadow. Even if he'd been standing directly under the fluorescent bulb, Ben doubted whether he'd have been able to read the younger man's expression. Over the past ten years, Lucas had developed one hell of a poker face.
"The necklace?"
"The one you bought for Katie. I've dabbled in the jewelry business over the years; I know the good stuff when I see it, and I know what something like that costs. There are only a couple of people aboard who'd lay out that kind of money just to make Katie smile. Since one of them is me, and I didn't buy it, I was pretty sure it was you. What really clinched it for me, though, was the sextant you got for Bridger."
The sextant had been an antique, made in the 1800s. Lucas was sure that after a couple hundred years it was probably inaccurate, the arc bent out of alignment after centuries of use, but it was beautifully crafted and it suited Bridger's little collection of nautical memorabilia.
"He loved it, by the way. Everyone loved the gifts you got them. I don't know why you didn't want to take credit for them - or why you didn't stay to see us open them."
Lucas was silent for so long that Ben wondered if he was going to deny being the anonymous benefactor, to try and pretend that he hadn't been the thoughtful mind behind the selection of all of those presents that were so uniquely suited to their recipients.
"I couldn't stay," he said finally, and Ben released a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "I wasn't sure I'd be able to keep up the lie. I would've given myself away."
"Why not give yourself away?" Ben demanded. "Those gifts were perfect, Lucas. We were thrilled to get them. Why wouldn't you want to tell us they were from you?"
"It's complicated, Ben."
"Try me."
"You were gone for ten years. For all of you, it was just lost time, but for me…I woke up one morning, and just like that, the life I knew was over. Everyone I cared about was gone." Lucas inspected the new vocorder, the sleek casing and its sophisticated electronic innards so much more advanced than the bulky prototype next to it. As different from its predecessor as he was from the boy that Ben and the rest of them had known. "I lost everything. If I'd had to accept that, to let go of my whole life, I probably would have lost my mind, too. So instead I let myself believe that maybe one day you'd come back and things would be okay again. For ten years, I spent my down time working on the new vocorder, even though I knew Darwin would never use it. Secretly, of course, because if anyone had known what I was doing they would've thought I really had lost my mind. And every year I went out and bought Christmas gifts I knew none of you would ever open, because the alternative was letting you go. Admitting that you were all gone." He shook his head. "I just couldn't do it."
"Lucas -"
"I wanted to give you the gifts. I wanted you to have them, but I couldn't watch you open them. I - it was too much. I've spent the last ten years dreaming that one day I'd be able to give them to you. I wasn't sure I could handle the reality of it."
"I'm sorry, Lucas." Ben's expression was filled with self-recrimination. "I'm so sorry."
"It's not your fault, Ben. You didn't disappear on purpose. But now you're back, and you're all exactly the way I remember you, and I'm…not."
"We shouldn't have expected you to be. Ten years is a long time, Lucas."
"Not for you." His lips twisted in a pained grimace. "When any of you look at me, you expect to see the person I was ten years ago. The real irony is that I haven't been that kid since the day the seaQuest disappeared. Losing you was the catalyst for who I eventually became, but because of it, none of you know me anymore."
"We'd like to," Ben offered tentatively. "I know you've been through a lot, and I'm not saying I can understand everything that's happened since I've been gone, but I'm always going to be your friend, Lucas. No matter how much changes, that's going to stay the same."
"I appreciate that, Ben."
"You know I'm not the only one who feels that way. Katie and Tim and Miguel, Ford and Brody and Bridger…we'd all like to get to know you as the person you are now."
"Do the others know?" Lucas asked suddenly. "About the gifts?"
"I'm not sure. I didn't discuss it with anyone. I think Katie suspects…and I think Bridger knows."
Lucas couldn't say he was surprised. They were the three who'd known him best, and therefore the most likely to see his touch in the gifts he'd selected.
"I won't tell them, if that's what you're worried about."
"I know." He did know. Ben could be slick when he needed to be, but he'd never betray a confidence. "Ben?"
"Yeah, Lucas?"
"Don't…" Lucas struggled with himself for a long moment. "Don't tell Sophie about this, all right?"
"Aw, kid," Ben murmured, sympathetic. "Sophie knows."
"How - you told her?"
"Nope. But she's a smart woman, Lucas, and she loves you. If you've been buying those gifts for the last ten years, she's noticed."
"She never caught me at it. She's never even hinted that she knew."
"Probably because she knew you didn't want her to know." At Lucas's expression, Ben shrugged. "Women," he added, as though that was all the explanation necessary.
Lucas let himself into the lab, exhausted. Sophie was sprawled across the bed, fast asleep, with the lobster tucked under her arm. Lucas smiled at the scene, contemplating his partner's sleeping form. He couldn't get Ben's parting words out of his head. He'd never breathed a word of his gift-buying activities to Sophie, had never let her catch him with so much as a scrap of wrapping paper or ribbon. Still, she was the inimitable Sophie Sutton, and she had an uncanny ability to know things she shouldn't. Surely she'd had surveillance on him for a while, at least in the beginning of their partnership. It wasn't unreasonable that she might have seen something that clued her in to his holiday hobby.
He'd always been certain that if she found out, she would either throw a fit or sign him up for a psych eval. Now he wondered if she'd known all along. Maybe she'd decided to leave it alone because she realized how much he needed the ritual, the reminder of the people he'd lost.
Most of the people who knew Sophie would be surprised that he would even consider the possibility that she'd let something like that slide. He was beginning to realize that most of the people who thought they knew her didn't really know her at all.
He went about his nightly routine as usual; any attempt at stealth or trying to do things quietly was far more likely to wake her up than his normal noise level was. Regardless, she was awake by the time he climbed into bed, and she snuggled close to him as he pulled her into his arms.
"Was Pinchy keeping you company?"
Her head was resting against his chest, so he couldn't see her expression, but he could hear the smile in her voice.
"He's the best present anyone ever gave me."
"Does that count the XE-9 I got you?" he asked, to cover up the way his heart stuttered at her words. She raised herself up on one elbow to meet his gaze, green eyes suspiciously bright in the dim light.
"I could've bought the nine for myself," she told him softly. "But the lobster? The life he represents? I only have that because of you, Lucas."
He pulled her down for a tender kiss, brushing an errant tear from her cheek with his thumb.
"I love you, Sophie," he said, running his hand through the messy tumble of her hair. "I love you, and I swear I'll catch you a million lobsters if that's what it takes to make you as happy as you were tonight."
She grinned and captured his mouth again, this time in a searing kiss that left him gasping for breath.
"Make love to me, Lucas."
He started to pull her closer, then paused, making a face.
"What?"
"The lobster is watching us. It's weird."
He was rewarded with another peal of laughter as Sophie grabbed the lobster, put him on the desk, and yanked off her nightshirt, dropping it on top of the stuffed animal.
"There. He's all covered up now, so he can't offend your delicate sensibilities."
"I appreciate it, but I think you're forgetting something."
"I have forgotten much that I thought I knew, and learned again much that I had forgotten," she informed him loftily, and he snickered.
"I was talking about your shirt."
"I didn't forget it. I took it off on purpose. It's all a part of my nefarious plan to seduce you."
He smiled because she was smiling, and because it was funny, and because now she was mostly naked and moving toward him with that look in her eyes that told him he wouldn't be getting much sleep tonight. He realized in that instant that Sophie must have known about his gifts to the crew. She'd probably known all along, and she'd let him have his secret for the same reason she'd been sleeping with the lobster held to her chest.
Sophie had always believed that you did whatever you had to in order to make it though the night. If you needed a stiff drink, or a good sparring match, or time alone to tinker in your lab, that was fine. If you needed to buy gifts for dead shipmates who would never open them, or you needed to sleep with the furry red symbol of a promise for a better life tucked into your arms, so be it.
"Not tonight," he murmured against her skin, not realizing he'd spoken aloud.
"What?" she asked, breathless, and he nuzzled her shoulder.
"I need you tonight," he told her softly. "Nothing else. Just you."
Her fingers found his, sliding deftly between his to lace their hands together.
"I'm here," she promised, and he smiled into the darkness.
"Merry Christmas, Sophie."
"Merry Christmas, Lucas."