"You have got to be kidding me." Elizabeth's dress is already soaked through as she pushes him out of the way to try the door herself. "How could it have locked?"
John sputters a bit in the rain and tries to pry off the casing from the control panel to the side of the door. "It's never done this before! The rain must've short-circuited something." This isn't much of a rainstorm, really -- not even worth canceling the annual Christmas festivities -- but it's the only excuse he can come up with on short notice. Unless McKay's still mad at him for letting Teyla's almost-two-year-old son play hide-and-seek with the new personal cloaking shield last week, but really, if anyone can be blamed for what happened, it's the Ancients for faulty craftsmanship. Besides, he thinks that having Teyla come after him was punishment enough.
Elizabeth raises a disbelieving eyebrow, peering over his shoulder. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
"What? Of course!" John insists, right before a dramatic spark shoots out from the center crystal and fries the control panel with a disturbing sizzle.
When he turns around, Elizabeth is bent over the bottles of alien wine they had come out here looking for. For a second he thinks she's hurt or furious until she looks up and pushes her hair out of her eyes.
"I can't believe we're stuck out here," she gasps out, laughing almost hysterically.
"They'll come find us," John points out, huddling closer to her. She's in a sleeveless dress for the holiday, and while their situation might be hilarious, it's also pretty cold. "They'll run out of alcohol eventually."
"I can't believe you stashed it out here." He can tell she's rolling her eyes without even looking.
"Would you have found it?"
"Well, now I know," she points out, leaning against the wall to the side of the nonfunctional door. "You'll have to find a new secret hiding place." She's starting to shiver, and he maneuvers himself between her and the wall to wrap his arms around her. "A drier one, maybe?"
John laughs into her rain soaked hair. "Well, if they forget about us, at least we'll finally get our honeymoon." Not that a railed-in pier on the far side of the city is much of a place for a honeymoon, but they've been married over a month and still haven't gotten the chance to escape for more than a day at a time. At least this has an ocean view, as depressing as that view is during a downpour.
"Not a chance." Elizabeth reaches down and picks up one of the bottles from his hidden stash. "Toast?"
Between the two of them and a random bit of scrap metal that is in no way an actual corkscrew, they manage to get it open. The alcohol is sour-tasting and not particularly good when not disguised in Ford's mystery punch, but it's warming and worth it for the hilarious visual of his completely bedraggled wife drinking straight from the bottle on a rainy pier, three hundred billion light years from her long-abandoned university tenure track.
"To Christmas?" he asks her.
She nods, takes a shot, and makes a face. She cuddles closer to him, and he yelps when a stream of water from her hair pours down the front of his shirt collar.
"To Christmas," she agrees. "And at least it isn't snow."
---