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�Tell me about Earth,� I said, recalling some vague allusion to how things were back there during Holo-Rodney�s account of his plea to General Lorne�I could see it in my head, the young Major aged and promoted, running the SGC where he had served on an SG team member for several years before coming to Atlantis; despite his dry wit, which I enjoy but some people, especially our superior officers it seems, either don�t get or don�t want to put up with, Evan definitely has what it takes to get his stars�and I figured that, if the fact that every single one of my friends, the people I considered to be family, had been killed, either by the enemy or in battle or by other more insidious means, couldn�t push me through (though the thought of all the people I loved dying the way Holo-Rodney said they had was doing a damned good job of pushing me forward thus far) an update on my home planet, my home galaxy, might be the right trigger.
Holo-Rodney frowned. �Why?� he asked, genuine confused. Whether it was because he was a hologram and Rodney hadn�t programmed him to deal with the question I�d asked or because Rodney, himself, wouldn�t have understood why I was making the request in the first place I wasn�t sure, but it didn�t really matter either way. I explained my anger-equals-adrenaline theory to him and he nodded, though he still didn�t look entirely convinced that it would work. �You�ve never shown much curiosity for the state of affairs on Earth before,� Holo-Rodney commented, confirming my suspicion that he wasn�t convinced.
What he said was true. I�d never really kept tabs on Earth�s conflicts other than skimming through the massive overviews that were sent to me once a month on updates in military protocols due to SG teams encountering a certain situation or whatever, sometimes picking up one of the old SG team files, mostly SG-1�s as they proved to be the most interesting especially after spending a year working with Colonel Carter as my boss, to read over, using them more as mental prep than anything else. I only really read them while stuck in the Infirmary, but I always ended up spending a few hours trying to figure out what I would have done if my team had been in SG-1�s place.
I did keep up to date with politics�or I used to; Elizabeth liked to read data-copies of The New York Times, Economist, Newsweek, and something called Campaigns and Elections before she went to sleep, which inevitably led to her reading aloud while I tried to sleep�she was always more of a night-owl than me, even after we got together, but we made a deal that she wouldn�t work in bed and I would bring her breakfast in bed when I woke her the next morning, because, like many night-owl�s, she wasn�t a morning person like I happen to be. It took a while to work out a routine, but we had it down pat and were talking about moving, together, into bigger quarters; somewhere with room for my golf clubs and Johnny Cash poster�which, I�d been told several times, would not be hanging over our bed because it creeped Elizabeth right out�and Elizabeth�s books and clothes and shoes (you would think that, considering the fact that hiking boots and running shoes were pretty much all she wore, other than the battered pink bunny slippers she liked to wear around her room, she wouldn�t have more than, what, two, maybe three pairs of shoes? Not my Elizabeth. In her closet she had eight shoeboxes, which each held a pair of shoes and the space under her bed was filled, two high, four deep, from the head to the foot of the bed, with yet more shoes in shoeboxes) and seemingly random trinkets that had been rotated off of her desk and taken to her quarters.
Somehow my mental tangent had taken over me, because when I shook myself out of it�memories of Elizabeth and the achingly brief time we had together is still hard to think about�I realized that I had stopped walking or acknowledging Holo-Rodney in any way for who knows how long. I sent a prayer up to Elizabeth�since learning that she had been killed the only thing that has gotten me through the day was the belief that she Ascended, that she is living among the beings she revered so�that Holo-Rodney wouldn�t ask me what made me stop because I really didn�t want to explain the shoeboxes. It had been hard enough explaining everything to Colonel Carter�though she had told me I could call her Sam, that she was on Atlantis as a scientist and a leader with command experience and not a Colonel in the Air Force and therefore could be called by her first name by at least the base�s military commander (plus, she had confessed, it felt a little creepy, only Rodney calling her by her first name, since all the other scientist were calling her �Colonel� as well) I couldn�t get past the idea of being that familiar with a superior officer�when she helped me clean out Elizabeth�s room. I�d had to come clean to her, then, about my relationship with Elizabeth, about how it had started not long after the disastrous events of our IOA-and-Heightmeyer imposed �day of rest� that had ended with a Gatrium full of closed metal caskets with flags draped over them, waiting to be taken back to Earth and given to their families along with a lie about how their loved one died and why. Colonel Carter had been surprisingly cool with it, sounding almost envious when she pointed out that, since Elizabeth was a civilian and I was military there was no way the IOA could pull out the UCMJ on us; there�s nothing in that thing about relationships with military personnel and civilian contractors, which is what Elizabeth�s job description was for those not privy to the highly classified nature of our jobs. It wasn�t until Teal�c came to help Ronan prep for his inquisition with the IOA that I was let in on the indefinable �thing� that Colonel Carter and General O�Neill have had since, basically, the day they met and never had the chance to act on, making complete sense of the hints of jealousy I�d noted when she was assuring me that Elizabeth and