Christmas in Atlantis, redux
The original Christmas in Atlantis.
"Can I get a white one?" Nancy asked as the corpsmen held out shiny garlands of various colors for her to choose between. She'd understood without being told that 'none of the above' was not an option.
Hospitalmen Stohr and Freese looked thoughtfully into the big cardboard boxes they were carrying, then looked into the one the other was carrying.
"If you take a white one, ma'am, you have to take the fugly ornaments," Freese warned. "We have a whole bag of ones that don't go with anything else."
Nancy cocked an eyebrow. She'd seen what passed muster down in Little Tripoli. "How fugly is fugly?"
Stohr shifted the box in his hands so that he could reach in and pull out an example. It was....
"What is that?" Nancy asked, leaning forward to get a better look. "Oh, god. What's Santa doing to that present? And why does he look so happy about it?"
Stohr held it up. "Maybe he likes Justin Timberlake?"
"Maybe this Santa's Air Force," Freese said with a shrug.
Nancy beamed. "I'll take a white one."
Rodney had considered banning Christmas decorations from the start -- it was a waste of resources and (especially) energy, it would take people away from the work they had been transported at massive expense to perform, it was an affront to the triumph of science over superstition, and a half-dozen other very good reasons.
But he lost that battle before a shot (or an email) was fired because Zelenka managed to construct a project out of it for his Engineering section, turning the entire enterprise into a useful study of luminescence, energy transfer, and a dozen other basic concepts of Ancient tech that they did not have a masterful grasp on yet.
"You do realize that you're violating the separation of church and state here," Rodney told him after seeing Simpson's small chain of peach-colored lights above her bench.
"Survival is a universal hope," Radek replied with a shrug. "Feldman's building himself a menorah. If it works out, we'll be able to make flashlights without further depleting our pitiful supply of D batteries. "
Radek turned out to be right. Nobody did complain -- not even Kavanagh, who still railed long and loud about the marines putting up decorations in the commissary and how Lieutenant Ford had told him to just deal with it when he'd tried to register an official protest. It ended up a very modest display -- the experimental nature of the project meant that a healthy portion of the ideas didn't work -- but even Rodney had to admit that Engineering was the nicest place to be in the Science Division. Botany had put up some pictures of poinsettias in their coffee room, but that was pretty much it as far as any displays of holiday spirit went. Which normally wouldn't have bothered anyone -- everyone in Science was of the sort of personality to resent having to take Christmas off from work -- but this year, cut off from home and left only with the Wraith and their meager allies, small chains of peach-colored lights were more welcome than they might otherwise have been.
Which did not mean that Rodney did not gripe about Williams' display being an open invitation to epilepsy. He wouldn't want anyone thinking he'd gone soft.
"Hey, have you seen Reilly?" Biro asked.
Jen looked up from where she was applying glitter glue to ganged-together tourniquets. "He went down to Little Tripoli to scam some supplies from the marines," she answered. "Why?"
"I need someone tall to hang something for me," Biro explained, gesturing over her shoulder in the general direction of her lab. "And I can't find Mike."
Abelard was on nights this week. "You could try Yoni -- I know he's around."
"You're a mean one, Mister Grinch," Biro sang softly, as if that were an explanation.
"He's got his own version of holiday cheer," Jen replied primly. "His space isn't the one that's not being decorated out of spite."
That would be Yee, who had cited everything from the Little Red Book to the US Constitution as to why she was under no obligation to contribute to the unit holiday activities, be it allowing the marines and corpsmen to decorate outside of her lab or participating in the Secret Santa or, well, pretty much anything else. All she'd had to do was say 'no thanks', but instead there'd been a week of protests and continued put-upon expressions and Jen was really close to telling her to stow it in a very official capacity.
Louise gave her a very skeptical look, but nodded and went away. Jen didn't hear anything else about it -- like, say, Biro crying -- and soon got distracted by Reilly returning with an armload of lights and three nutcracker soldiers (which was more or less what he'd been sent down to mooch) and a whole lot of other stuff that was not going up at all if Jen had any say in the matter. Which she probably didn't because the corpsmen were crazy and the marines would help them.
She'd forgotten all about Biro's decorating until late in the afternoon, when there was an undignified male squeak and then a lot of laughing. Jen bolted out of her office, prepared to look stern at whoever was playing practical jokes... until she saw that the squeakee was Hospitalman Fletcher. And the laughers were pretty much everyone else.
"That's dirty pool, ma'am," Fletcher accused, pointing up at the ceiling in the corner with the supply cabinets. Jen looked up to see a bunch of mistletoe, then down to where Lori Grebner was busy re-applying her lipstick. Which happened to match the marks on Fletcher's cheek.
"Are you complaining about getting kissed by a girl, Petty Officer Fletcher?" Jen asked mildly.
"The Navy's still all about rum, sodomy, and the lash," Reilly said, shaking his head in disappointment. "It's why the real men join the Marines."
Fletcher was about to wipe away the lipstick with a paper towel, but stopped and glared at Reilly.
After the show was over, Jen went to Yoni's lab, since while everyone had known that the mistletoe was Biro's, nobody seemed to realize who her accomplice had been.
"Wouldn't have pegged you for that kind of mischief," she said as she entered.
Yoni looked up at her with wary confusion. Like he might have done something, but wasn't sure if he was getting called out for it or if this was something else that was just falling to him by reputation. She made a mental note to find out what he'd also done that wasn't this. "What are you talking about?"
"The mistletoe-and-Grebner speed trap in front of the supply area?" she prompted. Lori's office had a direct view of the space; all she had to do was pick her targets.
The wariness faded, but the confusion remained. He gave her one of those looks. "This sounds like something I would do?"
"This sounds like something you did do," Jen told him, ready to enjoy this. "What did you think Biro gave you to put up?"
Yoni blinked. "Holly. A bough of holly? Fa-la-la?"
"I am totally making you sit through Botany's field course," she sighed. "Major Lorne takes you off-world and you can't tell the difference between mistletoe and holly?"
Yoni made an annoyed noise. "The marines go to Mass on Sundays; they're not going to eat either one. Those may be two of the only items I don't have to worry about them ingesting."
"You still have to worry about it's external applications," Jen assured. "That could have been you poking around for printer paper."
The look of sheer terror she got back was fabulous.
"Brush up on your botany," she told him. "Before Louise tells anyone that you helped her."
Because after that, all bets were off -- Lori would definitely misuse the information and, being Nancy's friend, she knew she had some protection from the worst of Yoni's ire. Also, Lori knew that Yoni would probably make Fletcher's reaction seem mature.
"And watch where you're walking," she added as she left. "I haven't actually banned the mistletoe from reappearing."
One of the first things that Nancy had noticed on what would become semi-regular visits to Carson's lab was that he had a toy shelf. A single small shelf, attached to the wall in a manner that precluded anything heavy being placed on it, with a row of small figures and gadgets and silly things that seemed perfectly appropriate once you got to know the man. She took to asking about them, since they all seemed to have a tale attached and Carson was a fabulous storyteller.
It was maybe appropriate that they got to the reindeer in early December. She was about to ask why he hadn't put it front and center -- they were all starting to get into the decorating spirit -- but then she got her answer when she heard the rattling and turned it around.
"It shits jelly beans?!?"
Carson gave her a mischievous smile. "Aye. And chocolate-covered raisins, too, if they're small. Chocolate-covered coffee beans give it constipation, sadly."
It turned out that the reindeer was something Carson had acquired during his time working in Colorado Springs before moving down to Antarctica, an item he'd picked up in a Wal-Mart out of appreciation of the sheer ridiculousness of it. He'd packed it for Antarctica by accident, but once there he'd put it up in his lab because it had seemed appropriate there, too. It was also how he'd met Yoni, more or less, since Yoni had come in to borrow something and seen the reindeer.
"Nobody'd heard him laugh like that, ever," Carson said a little proudly. "He bought me a sack of black jelly beans on his next trip up to Christchurch."
And, from there, apparently, a friendship had been born.
There was some disagreement about the reindeer's name -- Carson thought he should be Donner ("After the reindeer or after the cannibals?" Nancy asked warily) and Yoni had apparently decided to call it Shmuli -- but Yoni had always made sure the reindeer was fully loaded for Christmas. It had been easy enough in Antarctica and then in Colorado as they prepped for Atlantis, but it hadn't stopped once they were in another galaxy.
"He gave me a box of Raisinets last year," Carson went on. "Lord knows how he'd kept them hidden -- or how he'd not eaten them himself. We were pretty well through all of those kinds of creature comforts by December."
The reindeer stayed half-hidden on the shelf now, Carson explained, because he felt it was inappropriate for the CMO of a major installation to prominently display. "But that doesn't mean he won't come out when Yoni gets 'round to keeping him fed."
Nancy'd meant to get around to checking back, but she never did.
More than a year later, after Carson's death, while they'd all gone through the professional material, she was one of the few people Yoni would tolerate helping him box up Carson's personal effects. The toy shelf was already clear by the time she arrived with Mike, but the items were all in an open box on the counter.
"McKay can look through it when he gets back," Yoni explained, not looking at her. Or either of them, but she'd more or less gotten used to that over the last week. "I'm sure a few of them mean something to him."
The reindeer wasn't there, Nancy noticed, but she didn't say anything. Instead, she asked to have a crack at the box once McKay was finished, since she thought there was one or two that would make good reminders of Carson for her, too.
The next time she was in Yoni's lab, she looked for the reindeer, but he was nowhere to be seen. Probably in Yoni's quarters, or maybe here in a place where it was less obvious to see. Yoni was Acting CMO and even if he weren't the fanatically private type who'd hide anything that anyone could realize had sentimental value, he'd keep it out of direct sight for the same professional reasons Carson had now that more people were traipsing into his space on a regular basis.
By the time Christmas rolled around again, however, Jen was fairly entrenched in her role and Yoni was pretty much back to normal (for him). But normal for him was still Yoni, so Nancy had to fight the urge to do something like hug him when she saw the reindeer on the ledge where he put the 'tchotchkes' his nieces and nephews sent him along with the beautiful, delicate menorah the Athosians had made for him. Which meant that her planning had paid off.
During his next off-world mission with Major Lorne's team, she slipped into his lab and left a small white paper sack full of black jelly beans on the lid of his closed laptop.
"Can I get a white one?" Nancy asked as the corpsmen held out shiny garlands of various colors for her to choose between. She'd understood without being told that 'none of the above' was not an option.
Hospitalmen Stohr and Freese looked thoughtfully into the big cardboard boxes they were carrying, then looked into the one the other was carrying.
"If you take a white one, ma'am, you have to take the fugly ornaments," Freese warned. "We have a whole bag of ones that don't go with anything else."
Nancy cocked an eyebrow. She'd seen what passed muster down in Little Tripoli. "How fugly is fugly?"
Stohr shifted the box in his hands so that he could reach in and pull out an example. It was....
"What is that?" Nancy asked, leaning forward to get a better look. "Oh, god. What's Santa doing to that present? And why does he look so happy about it?"
Stohr held it up. "Maybe he likes Justin Timberlake?"
"Maybe this Santa's Air Force," Freese said with a shrug.
Nancy beamed. "I'll take a white one."
Rodney had considered banning Christmas decorations from the start -- it was a waste of resources and (especially) energy, it would take people away from the work they had been transported at massive expense to perform, it was an affront to the triumph of science over superstition, and a half-dozen other very good reasons.
But he lost that battle before a shot (or an email) was fired because Zelenka managed to construct a project out of it for his Engineering section, turning the entire enterprise into a useful study of luminescence, energy transfer, and a dozen other basic concepts of Ancient tech that they did not have a masterful grasp on yet.
"You do realize that you're violating the separation of church and state here," Rodney told him after seeing Simpson's small chain of peach-colored lights above her bench.
"Survival is a universal hope," Radek replied with a shrug. "Feldman's building himself a menorah. If it works out, we'll be able to make flashlights without further depleting our pitiful supply of D batteries. "
Radek turned out to be right. Nobody did complain -- not even Kavanagh, who still railed long and loud about the marines putting up decorations in the commissary and how Lieutenant Ford had told him to just deal with it when he'd tried to register an official protest. It ended up a very modest display -- the experimental nature of the project meant that a healthy portion of the ideas didn't work -- but even Rodney had to admit that Engineering was the nicest place to be in the Science Division. Botany had put up some pictures of poinsettias in their coffee room, but that was pretty much it as far as any displays of holiday spirit went. Which normally wouldn't have bothered anyone -- everyone in Science was of the sort of personality to resent having to take Christmas off from work -- but this year, cut off from home and left only with the Wraith and their meager allies, small chains of peach-colored lights were more welcome than they might otherwise have been.
Which did not mean that Rodney did not gripe about Williams' display being an open invitation to epilepsy. He wouldn't want anyone thinking he'd gone soft.
"Hey, have you seen Reilly?" Biro asked.
Jen looked up from where she was applying glitter glue to ganged-together tourniquets. "He went down to Little Tripoli to scam some supplies from the marines," she answered. "Why?"
"I need someone tall to hang something for me," Biro explained, gesturing over her shoulder in the general direction of her lab. "And I can't find Mike."
Abelard was on nights this week. "You could try Yoni -- I know he's around."
"You're a mean one, Mister Grinch," Biro sang softly, as if that were an explanation.
"He's got his own version of holiday cheer," Jen replied primly. "His space isn't the one that's not being decorated out of spite."
That would be Yee, who had cited everything from the Little Red Book to the US Constitution as to why she was under no obligation to contribute to the unit holiday activities, be it allowing the marines and corpsmen to decorate outside of her lab or participating in the Secret Santa or, well, pretty much anything else. All she'd had to do was say 'no thanks', but instead there'd been a week of protests and continued put-upon expressions and Jen was really close to telling her to stow it in a very official capacity.
Louise gave her a very skeptical look, but nodded and went away. Jen didn't hear anything else about it -- like, say, Biro crying -- and soon got distracted by Reilly returning with an armload of lights and three nutcracker soldiers (which was more or less what he'd been sent down to mooch) and a whole lot of other stuff that was not going up at all if Jen had any say in the matter. Which she probably didn't because the corpsmen were crazy and the marines would help them.
She'd forgotten all about Biro's decorating until late in the afternoon, when there was an undignified male squeak and then a lot of laughing. Jen bolted out of her office, prepared to look stern at whoever was playing practical jokes... until she saw that the squeakee was Hospitalman Fletcher. And the laughers were pretty much everyone else.
"That's dirty pool, ma'am," Fletcher accused, pointing up at the ceiling in the corner with the supply cabinets. Jen looked up to see a bunch of mistletoe, then down to where Lori Grebner was busy re-applying her lipstick. Which happened to match the marks on Fletcher's cheek.
"Are you complaining about getting kissed by a girl, Petty Officer Fletcher?" Jen asked mildly.
"The Navy's still all about rum, sodomy, and the lash," Reilly said, shaking his head in disappointment. "It's why the real men join the Marines."
Fletcher was about to wipe away the lipstick with a paper towel, but stopped and glared at Reilly.
After the show was over, Jen went to Yoni's lab, since while everyone had known that the mistletoe was Biro's, nobody seemed to realize who her accomplice had been.
"Wouldn't have pegged you for that kind of mischief," she said as she entered.
Yoni looked up at her with wary confusion. Like he might have done something, but wasn't sure if he was getting called out for it or if this was something else that was just falling to him by reputation. She made a mental note to find out what he'd also done that wasn't this. "What are you talking about?"
"The mistletoe-and-Grebner speed trap in front of the supply area?" she prompted. Lori's office had a direct view of the space; all she had to do was pick her targets.
The wariness faded, but the confusion remained. He gave her one of those looks. "This sounds like something I would do?"
"This sounds like something you did do," Jen told him, ready to enjoy this. "What did you think Biro gave you to put up?"
Yoni blinked. "Holly. A bough of holly? Fa-la-la?"
"I am totally making you sit through Botany's field course," she sighed. "Major Lorne takes you off-world and you can't tell the difference between mistletoe and holly?"
Yoni made an annoyed noise. "The marines go to Mass on Sundays; they're not going to eat either one. Those may be two of the only items I don't have to worry about them ingesting."
"You still have to worry about it's external applications," Jen assured. "That could have been you poking around for printer paper."
The look of sheer terror she got back was fabulous.
"Brush up on your botany," she told him. "Before Louise tells anyone that you helped her."
Because after that, all bets were off -- Lori would definitely misuse the information and, being Nancy's friend, she knew she had some protection from the worst of Yoni's ire. Also, Lori knew that Yoni would probably make Fletcher's reaction seem mature.
"And watch where you're walking," she added as she left. "I haven't actually banned the mistletoe from reappearing."
One of the first things that Nancy had noticed on what would become semi-regular visits to Carson's lab was that he had a toy shelf. A single small shelf, attached to the wall in a manner that precluded anything heavy being placed on it, with a row of small figures and gadgets and silly things that seemed perfectly appropriate once you got to know the man. She took to asking about them, since they all seemed to have a tale attached and Carson was a fabulous storyteller.
It was maybe appropriate that they got to the reindeer in early December. She was about to ask why he hadn't put it front and center -- they were all starting to get into the decorating spirit -- but then she got her answer when she heard the rattling and turned it around.
"It shits jelly beans?!?"
Carson gave her a mischievous smile. "Aye. And chocolate-covered raisins, too, if they're small. Chocolate-covered coffee beans give it constipation, sadly."
It turned out that the reindeer was something Carson had acquired during his time working in Colorado Springs before moving down to Antarctica, an item he'd picked up in a Wal-Mart out of appreciation of the sheer ridiculousness of it. He'd packed it for Antarctica by accident, but once there he'd put it up in his lab because it had seemed appropriate there, too. It was also how he'd met Yoni, more or less, since Yoni had come in to borrow something and seen the reindeer.
"Nobody'd heard him laugh like that, ever," Carson said a little proudly. "He bought me a sack of black jelly beans on his next trip up to Christchurch."
And, from there, apparently, a friendship had been born.
There was some disagreement about the reindeer's name -- Carson thought he should be Donner ("After the reindeer or after the cannibals?" Nancy asked warily) and Yoni had apparently decided to call it Shmuli -- but Yoni had always made sure the reindeer was fully loaded for Christmas. It had been easy enough in Antarctica and then in Colorado as they prepped for Atlantis, but it hadn't stopped once they were in another galaxy.
"He gave me a box of Raisinets last year," Carson went on. "Lord knows how he'd kept them hidden -- or how he'd not eaten them himself. We were pretty well through all of those kinds of creature comforts by December."
The reindeer stayed half-hidden on the shelf now, Carson explained, because he felt it was inappropriate for the CMO of a major installation to prominently display. "But that doesn't mean he won't come out when Yoni gets 'round to keeping him fed."
Nancy'd meant to get around to checking back, but she never did.
More than a year later, after Carson's death, while they'd all gone through the professional material, she was one of the few people Yoni would tolerate helping him box up Carson's personal effects. The toy shelf was already clear by the time she arrived with Mike, but the items were all in an open box on the counter.
"McKay can look through it when he gets back," Yoni explained, not looking at her. Or either of them, but she'd more or less gotten used to that over the last week. "I'm sure a few of them mean something to him."
The reindeer wasn't there, Nancy noticed, but she didn't say anything. Instead, she asked to have a crack at the box once McKay was finished, since she thought there was one or two that would make good reminders of Carson for her, too.
The next time she was in Yoni's lab, she looked for the reindeer, but he was nowhere to be seen. Probably in Yoni's quarters, or maybe here in a place where it was less obvious to see. Yoni was Acting CMO and even if he weren't the fanatically private type who'd hide anything that anyone could realize had sentimental value, he'd keep it out of direct sight for the same professional reasons Carson had now that more people were traipsing into his space on a regular basis.
By the time Christmas rolled around again, however, Jen was fairly entrenched in her role and Yoni was pretty much back to normal (for him). But normal for him was still Yoni, so Nancy had to fight the urge to do something like hug him when she saw the reindeer on the ledge where he put the 'tchotchkes' his nieces and nephews sent him along with the beautiful, delicate menorah the Athosians had made for him. Which meant that her planning had paid off.
During his next off-world mission with Major Lorne's team, she slipped into his lab and left a small white paper sack full of black jelly beans on the lid of his closed laptop.