A/N: This one isn't a drabble. I couldn't bear to shrink it to fit.
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
He'd seen her doodling on the sheet of paper throughout the meeting, though he was fairly certain he was the only one close enough to know she hadn't simply been taking notes. Not that he could blame her. The Korlan ambassador was boring enough to have tried the patience of a saint, and despite all she'd done, Shepherd was certain Colonel Carter was merely mortal. And over the course of the last few months, as he'd seen more and more glimpses of the woman behind the myth - as it were - he'd become ever more convinced of that. Though he had to admit, despite her questionable sense of humor, he preferred this strangely changed Carter to the far more subdued and distant woman he'd first met years earlier during his initial F-302 training.
It wasn't until they were standing up to leave the room, though, the meeting finally completed, that Shepherd got a glimpse of the paper itself. It was just about the last thing in the world he would have expected her to have been drawing: two stick figures, holding 'hands' with a heart over them, and the initials in the heart…
Carter pulled the stack of papers she'd been holding to her chest, cutting off his view. He glanced up quickly to find her looking at him, a slow blush spreading across her features.
Sometimes, the simplest and most obvious explanations really were best. "Homesick?" he asked with a smile.
She smiled back at him, her sudden embarrassment at being caught replaced by something he thought might have been gratitude. "A little," she admitted.
"Aren't we all?" he replied and, gathering up his own papers, turned to follow the rest of his team out the door.
He never did find out whose initials had been in the heart. Not that it really mattered. He probably wouldn't have known the guy anyway.