"Ready?" Elizabeth leans over his shoulder and closes his laptop.
He looks up at her, blinking a few times to clear his head of the year-end reports and endless inventories they've both been wrestling all week. This is her job again, of course, but he was in command for almost half of this Earth-calendar year so there is still plenty of paperwork that he's responsible for organizing. He remembers now why he was more than happy to give this desk and this office back to her. "I didn't hear you come in."
"You're slipping in your old age," she teases, draping her arms over his shoulders and kissing his neck. She smells of perfume -- something she only wears on special occasions when they're this far away from any convenient source. The artificial scent reminds him of Earth. "Come on," she continues. "You can finish this in the morning."
He catches her hands in his and studies them, tracing her long, slim fingers. He doesn't think he's ever seen her wear rings. "All done with the decorations?"
"Mmm. The tree looks great this year. Peter brought a glass star back from Earth with us."
"He was thinking about Christmas that long ago?" Everyone recalled to Earth during the politically-motivated "restructuring" who still wanted to return has been back for six months. It has taken almost that long to recover from the prior months of bad ideas and "special personnel" assigned from Earth. The repeated Wraith attacks haven't made that job any easier.
The personal recovery took a long time, too.
He never wants to go through that again.
Elizabeth slips her hands free. "I got you something, too."
"On Earth?"
It's her desk, so he isn't surprised when she pushes one of his knees aside and reaches into a drawer for something. She hands the package to him before sitting on the edge of the desk.
"I probably shouldn't have waited," she says. She has always been more patient than him.
He shakes it, studying the outside for clues. It's book-sized and wrapped in plain paper. "Not Dostoyevsky."
He finished most of War and Peace while she was gone. She told him no one reads the whole thing, that the boys in her college literature seminars always skimmed the peace sections to get back to the war, and the girls the opposite. She once quoted memorized passages to him in the original Russian, foreign syllables learned fifteen years ago rolling easily off her tongue even as she apologized for her accent, and all he could do was stare at her.
"Not Dostoyevsky," she agrees, "though I did think about it."
He tears off the paper and feels five years old again, staring at the cover of a new and updated book of sports statistics for all the years he missed. He's lost in the pages for a few minutes, picking out familiar names and teams amid the overwhelming rush.
"And..." her voice and hands interrupt him as she digs in the wrapping for something he missed and emerges with a data storage device. "All the best games. You can watch them before you read the book if you want to be surprised. I had my dad look them up for me." She's smiling almost as widely as he is, and laughs when his eyes drift back down to the open pages of passing yards and new league records. "I'm never going to see you again, am I?"
"This is..." He tugs one of her hands and she willingly bends forward for a brief kiss before pulling away. He can't stop staring at her. He feels like he's seeing more than Elizabeth right now, like she's showing him a whole possible future without even realizing it. "You're incredible," he says.
She smiles softly under the compliment and squeezes his hand back. His heart pounds, the way it used to do every time she touched him, before her presence in his life and his bed became something common that he can rely on.
"Should we go?" He sets his gifts and the wrapping paper to one side.
"Sure. We should get there before the punch is all gone."
John has to hug her first, once they're both standing, and when he breathes in, he can pick out the clean smell of her skin through her perfume. He likes that better.
"Are you going to show a Christmas football game tomorrow?" Elizabeth asks. "A new Atlantis tradition?"
"Maybe," he says, taking her hand to lead her downstairs.
All through the party he doesn't let go.
---