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�I�ve missed you, too, girl,� Elizabeth said, smiling at the warm welcome she was getting from her pooch. The welcome she was getting from Simon was nonexistent, after all. He was still just staring at her with a rather dopey look of confusion on his face.
Once Sedge had satisfied herself that Elizabeth smelled and tasted the same as she had the last time they had seen each other she let her paws fall from Elizabeth�s shoulders and lay down with her head resting on Elizabeth�s left shoe, not caring that she was half inside and half outside of the house, just basking in the joy of having her owner home after so very long.
�Hello, Simon,� Elizabeth said softly, internally cringing at the memory of greeting the mist-Simon the same generic way when they had thought they had found a way home several months earlier.
�Elizabeth,� Simon said at last, his shocked tone exactly the same as the tone that mist-Simon had used in response to her generic greeting.
The whole sense of d�j� vu was getting to be a little much for Elizabeth, but she didn�t know what to do to make it go away, what to do to change the bizarro holding pattern they seemed to be stuck in.
Simon blinked several times in quick succession, as if he wasn�t quite sure that Elizabeth wasn�t just a trick of light or something. Then he stepped forward, careful not to tread on Sedge who was content to stay exactly where she was for the time being, and pulled Elizabeth into a rather stiff embrace that she returned weakly.
Thoughts, unbidden and unwanted, floated through Elizabeth�s mind as she and Simon shared a thoroughly awkward hug. Thoughts of another hug she had experienced recently. Thoughts of John. Thoughts of the gentle scent of the fabric softener used on Atlantis. Thoughts of the manly musk of sweat, hard earned both by terror and exertion, tickling her nose as she fought the urge to bury her face in the curve of John�s neck. Thoughts of how, in that moment, despite the fact that they were in the middle of what looked to be their last battle, knowing that he was still alive, still there to fight, was enough to get Elizabeth through the next disaster that was thrown at her.
Forcing the traitorous John-thoughts to the back of her mind�she had yet to find a way to banish any John-thoughts completely�Elizabeth allowed Simon to lead her into the house, Sedge happily circling Elizabeth as the three of them headed for the living room.
As Elizabeth sat down on the couch she couldn�t help but silently go over everything that had changed in the room in the eleven months she had been gone.
The walls were a dull beige, not the pale �Lovebird�s Feather� blue that she had spent an entire Saturday carefully applying to the walls of the room, and the new colour made Elizabeth think of hospital waiting rooms. The couch wasn�t her couch, wasn�t the one that she had had shipped from DC, wasn�t the one she had spent two weeks trying to decide on when she was setting up her place in DC nearly three years earlier. The television that she had simply had sitting on a small storage unit beside the phone was now sitting inside a truly hideous entertainment unit that took up nearly half of the room�which was why she had never even considered an entertainment centre for the rather small living room area. The phone wasn�t the same one that she remembered, but she didn�t think that was strange since the phone that she had had hadn�t worked all that well and she had planned on replacing it herself before she was reassigned to Antarctica. The pictures that she had had around the room were no longer there, most replaced with pictures of Simon�s family and paintings of dull geometric-shapes in primary colours that she had always found incredibly boring and, quite honestly, a waste of money and wall space. The bookcase, that covered the entire back wall of the room, was no longer holding her beloved books, her collection of first editions that her father had collected for her over the years, her favourite novels by Austen, Chekhov, Milton, Hardy, Kafka, Twain, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Gogels and Welty were missing from their places of honour, and the three different translations of the collected works of the mysterious Homer were also absent; instead the shelves were lined with thin paperbacks with virgin, unbroken spines and a few hardcovers that Elizabeth vaguely recognized from before she left, as well as the all-too-familiar medical texts and journals that Simon always seemed to be collecting but that she never, in all honesty, saw him actually read.
Elizabeth hoped that her belongings were simply boxed up and put away somewhere. That Simon had decided, after she left that first video to him, that he would try to make the house more his own, but that he would keep her belongings because she would come back to him.