(Untitled)

[jill_langston]

The snow had been charming and distracting for the first day or so and the fireplace had been even more so, but now Jill was starting to get tired of it. All her life, she'd had poor circulation and the frigid weather certainly wasn't helping. She was cold, even though she'd been in the Compound for nearly a half hour already. Her things were in

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[real_buzzkill]

"Don't worry, I'll spare you the kissing," Wilson said, seeing Jill glaring at the mistletoe. "Professional courtesy, you know."

He needed to light the menorah, though. It sat discreetly out of the way on a table, a hunk of driftwood with holes carved into the top and bits of wax dripped on the sides from past years.

[jill_langston]

"Do you think if I tore it down it would magically reappear?" she asked, still glaring up at it, although she moved out of the way when she saw James arrive. Standing in the doorway was a surefire way to get herself either pushed out of the way or kissed and so she returned to her coffee before offering a smile.

"Thank you for the professional courtesy," she added.

[real_buzzkill]

"Knowing this place, it probably would. You can always get what you don't want." He'd already made the mistake of kissing somebody under the mistletoe when that person didn't want to be kissed. Not going to repeat that one. No way.

"At least it's warm in here," he said as he walked toward the fireplace with a candle in hand. "Are you enjoying the weather? I think it's kind of nice, but it seems to get colder every day."

[jill_langston]

"I hate it," Jill admitted with a soft laugh, taking a sip of her coffee as she moved closer to the fireplace as well, just for the warmth that emanated from it. "I spent two years in Norway living in shitty conditions and then I spent two years in Canada before this place. I would prefer the sun and the sand all year round, personally. Where were you from before here?" she asked curiously.

Bob seemed to love the snow, but Bob had lived in Toronto for quite a bit longer than she had.

[real_buzzkill]

"Born and raised in New Jersey," he told her. "Very suburban conditions. Then I went to med school in Montreal. I fell in love with the place, but specialists do better in the States, so I went home and had been working at Princeton for a long time." How different his life would have been if he'd stayed in Canada....

"What were you doing in Norway? I knew a physicist who spent some time there working on the space program, but he never did say what he was working on. Top secret, I guess."

[jill_langston]

"Montreal is beautiful," Jill agreed, although she'd only spent a short amount of time there after moving to Canada. The city had been so old, though, so beautiful and different from any place she'd been before.

"I was waiting for a sample of the Spanish Flu," she admitted with a fond smile. "It took us that long just to get permission for the dig."

[real_buzzkill]

"Wow." Wilson was genuinely impressed. "That's dangerous stuff. There were a couple of weird viruses shortly before i came here, and that flu was in the news again. I mean, outside medical circles. Endless debate about the possibility of reviving the virus, probably related to what you were working on. Did you find it?"

The media had never been clear, which was the norm for non-medical reporters dealing with that kind of subject.

[jill_langston]

"I didn't find it, no," Jill admitted, shaking her head. "Unfortunately for most of Denver, my boss found it a few months later up in Canada and someone else managed to get the location of the body out of him."

If he'd done it legally in the first place, none of that would have happened, but Jill didn't think she could still be angry about that.

"It's possible to sequence it and create a vaccine for it, which we found out the easy way. It's also possible to revive it, which we found out the hard way."

[real_buzzkill]

"Science is amazing," Wilson marveled. "With the right equipment and some ingenuity, you can achieve almost anything, except possibly a happy love life." He smiled a little. "The people who can put that in a vaccine will make a fortune overnight. Inoculate us all from heartbreak."

[jill_langston]

"Well, that would certainly make one rich," Jill replied with a soft laugh, although a small part of her thought that heart break was really one of the few things most people had in common. It was comforting in a strange way. "And here I thought that I'd make my millions doing something silly like curing disease."

[real_buzzkill]

"Love isn't a disease, though. It hurts when it ends, whatever the reason, and we have to find a way to go on, to live our lives." Wilson might have been reminding himself of that.

"In a life without financial rewards, I guess we just have to appreciate each day and enjoy the good ones when they come." Wow, that sounded like a platitude. 'Sorry. I just finished a round of therapy, so I'm full of cliches these days."

[jill_langston]

"Giving therapy or receiving it?" Jill asked, casting James a bit of a grin before she sat down on the couch, taking her coffee with her. She couldn't recall seeing him in the psych office at any point, but she'd taken to going there to see Teyla, so it was possible that she'd missed him.

[real_buzzkill]

Wilson gave a short laugh. "I'm not a therapist, though I've done some informal grief counseling as part of my practice. Sometimes terminal patients won't take the time to get to know yet another doctor."

How strange it was to be talking about this with somebody he didn't know that well, though he liked Jill and respected her.

"I was fine with being here until... somebody I loved disappeared, and it hit harder than I expected, so I got some help."

[jill_langston]

"Ah," Jill answered, giving a small nod at that, knowing all too well how that felt. Losing three of them one right after the other was something else entirely, something she couldn't really talk about.

"Has it been helping?" she asked. There were things she'd tell Teyla and then things she wasn't sure she could say just yet.

[real_buzzkill]

"I don't miss the ones who left any less, None of them came from my home world, and I know they don't remember me, and the last one who left hurt the most." Wilson smiled thoughtfully. "At some point, you have to help yourself. Therapy brought me to a state where I can do that, so yeah. It helped."

[jill_langston]

"That's good to hear," Jill said honestly. It meant there was some kind of hope, at least, even if she couldn't necessarily see it now. Even if her way of dealing with her losses as of this moment weren't exactly healthy.

"I guess I just have to wait to get to that point, don't I?" she asked, giving a wry smile.