Fic: Celestial Navigation
Title: Celestial Navigation
Author: Melyanna
Summary: Root canal, rumor, and John Sheppard.
Notes: Written for athenaktt as a very, very late backup piece for the auficathon. (She requested some fluff involving John cooking.) This follows Lizzie's Really, Really, REALLY Bad Day by caroly_214, and steals liberally from a West Wing episode of the same title. Many thanks to lamichelle for the beta.
Enjoy. :)
John had only one class on Tuesdays during this semester, and after Elizabeth’s truly terrifying Monday, he was glad about this. He rather suspected that she might need someone to scream at, after dealing with plumbing disasters, a sick puppy, getting into an accident, the trustees, the faculty, sorority girls, and. . . well, him being stupid.
He’d started to make up for it the night before, and he had plans to continue that during the day - lunch at her favorite restaurant, her desk drawer chocolate stash replenished, and then maybe even dinner, if her schedule allowed. Of course, there wasn’t much chance of a middle ground. This was going to go very well, or very badly.
To his surprise, when he walked in at eleven that morning, Peter wasn’t there. The door to Elizabeth’s actual office was locked, meaning she’d left for class after Peter had gone wherever he was. Accordingly, he plopped down in a chair in the outer office and started looking around for something to keep him occupied. Briefly he thought about heading back to his office, but as it was only the second day of the semester, it wasn’t like he had a heck of a lot to do there either.
Six minutes had passed when the door creaked open and Peter Grodin came in, looking unsteady on his feet. John jumped up to take the stack of mail he was carrying in. “Peter,” he said, “you okay?”
“I had a dentist appointment,” Peter said, though he sounded a bit stuffy. His cheeks were puffed out, too.
“Ah,” John said, nodding. “Novacane?”
“I had woot canaw.”
John blinked, and then he barely controlled the urge to laugh hysterically. “You had what?”
“Woot canaw.”
“Sorry, man, you’re going to have to speak up!”
“Woot canaw!” Then Peter laid his hand against his cheek. “Oww. . .”
John cleared his throat. “Sorry, I heard you the first time.”
Peter glared, and then started rummaging through a drawer. “I need to weave Doctow Weiw a note.”
“Why?”
The man stared at him, stunned. “I can’t wowk wike this! I can’t say hewwo wight. I can’t even say Ewizabef wight!”
John snorted ungraciously and was met with a death glare. “I’m going home,” Peter declared. “But this is the wowst day possibuh fow this to happen. She’s got a tewwibuh aftewnoon ahead of hew.”
“Well,” John replied, trying to get some composure, “why don’t you go home, and I’ll guard the gate today?”
Peter blinked several times. “No,” he said. “No. That’s a vewy bad idea.”
“Oh, come on,” John said. “I have a doctorate in applied mathematics. I fly small planes for fun! How hard can it be?”
“It’s youw funewaw.”
Peter spent the next several minutes bombarding John with instructions, but the math professor found it difficult to concentrate when he kept hearing words like “appwopwiate” or “pwesiding.” But when Peter asked if there was anything he’d missed, John just shooed him home.
When he answered the phone for the first time, he knew he was in trouble.
Elizabeth’s knee was stiff and achey again by the time Paul Davis had walked her to the law building. He offered to go with her up to her office, but she smiled and shrugged it off, saying she’d take the elevator. His concern was sweet, but there were times when she just wanted to move on with life and forget how bad her Monday had been.
She came into her office a few minutes later, and was surprised at what she saw. “John?” she said, seeing him behind Peter’s desk. “What are you doing? Is Peter still at the dentist?”
He looked up from the computer. “Nope,” he replied. “Peter had emergency root canal. He went home.”
“And you are. . .”
“Adorable?”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “John.”
“I’m filling in for Peter,” he explained. “He said you were going to have a rough day.”
“And you thought you were up to the challenge?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Why is everyone assuming that I can’t do this?”
“Because occasionally you have the attention span of my puppy.”
“Well, that’s true.” He sighed dramatically and held out some slips of paper. “You have four messages.”
Curious, Elizabeth walked up to the desk and took them. “Well, I applaud the effort,” she said, “but I can’t read any of these.”
“My handwriting is not that bad.”
“I have evidence to the contrary, John,” she said. “Who’s coming here with a stick of dynamite?”
John snatched the paper back. “It says. . . Huh, that does kind of look like it says the student newspaper editor is coming here with a stick of dynamite.”
“Which means?”
“She’s coming here with a story and some photographs.”
“When?”
John glanced at his watch. “Any minute now.”
Right on cue, the door opened up, and a young woman with dark hair came in. “Doctor Weir?” she said. “I’m Colleen Trask, from the newspaper.”
“Come on in,” Elizabeth replied.
As the two women came into the inner office, Colleen asked, “Was that Doctor Sheppard at Peter’s desk?”
“Yes, we’re having a faculty swap day,” Elizabeth joked. “Peter Grodin is teaching John’s upper-level statistics class today.”
“Really?” said Colleen.
“No, thank God.”
By the end of the day, John had managed not to set Peter’s desk on fire, which he supposed was an achievement of some kind. He’d even handled the arrival of a federal judge pretty well. He’d stood up, shaken the man’s hand, and opened Elizabeth’s door to tell her that the judge had arrived. (At that point, he hadn’t figured out how to use the intercom on the phones. When he did, he started buzzing Elizabeth just to chat, which annoyed her nicely.)
However, at the very end of the day, he’d gotten a strange call from Paul Davis, asking about a rumor that Elizabeth was going to leave the school soon. John was quite surprised by this, as he was usually pretty on top of the rumors in the school. “Well,” Paul had said, “supposedly she was meeting with Judge Torino from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. He’s retiring next week, and rumor has it she’s been tapped to take his job.”
Uh oh. That was probably his fault. He’d been talking with someone during Elizabeth’s meeting with Torino and mentioned the meeting, but had failed to clarify that she was asking him to give a lecture at the law school later in the semester. The rumor mill being what it was, that had apparently gotten twisted around in a hurry.
This was going to be fun.
Janet Fraiser walked Elizabeth to her car that evening, after John had skipped out early. That was rather unusual for him, but Elizabeth figured he had realized how insane Peter’s job was. But as she and Janet walked out to the parking lot, Janet kept asking her if she had something she wanted to talk about. It was all rather puzzling, but Elizabeth figured it had to do with the horrible day she’d had the day before.
She had a quiet drive home, thankfully, in the car she’d rented while her own was in the shop. But when she got to her driveway, she was startled to see that a black Jeep was already parked there. If she wasn’t mistaken, that was John’s car.
There was activity in the house, and her front door was unlocked. “John Sheppard,” she said loudly as she came in, “that better be you.”
She heard a metallic clanging, and then John stepped out of the kitchen. “Oh, good, you’re home,” he said, and retreated just as quickly as he’d appeared.
“John, what are you doing here?” she asked, following him. He’d made a mess of her kitchen, but whatever he was cooking smelled delicious.
“Cooking dinner for you,” he replied. “I think you had a hard day.”
“Not as hard as yesterday,” she commented, coming up to the stove to see an elaborate stir-fry in a pan. “This looks wonderful, John. I didn’t know you could cook.”
“I’m kind of hit-and-miss in the kitchen,” he explained, looking a little sheepish. “The first attempt is in the garbage.”
She laughed softly. “So what’s the occasion?”
“A preemptive apology.” John was busying himself with stirring the food.
Elizabeth paused. “For what?”
“You may hear a rumor tomorrow that you’re going to be a federal judge.”
He still wouldn’t look at her, so she leaned against the cabinets to get a better look at his face. “John,” she said, “what did you do?”
“I was talking to someone today and told them you were in a meeting with Judge Torino,” he explained. “I didn’t tell them why, and later I got a call from Paul Davis asking about you taking Torino’s seat.”
“Oh, good grief,” Elizabeth said. “Of all the idiotic rumors. . .”
“I’m sorry,” John offered.
“It’s not your fault,” she replied. “Not entirely, anyway. I’m just so tired of the gossip at school.”
She enjoyed dinner less than she should have, all things considered. But after a truly horrendous first day of the semester, she really didn’t need to be worried about people asking her how long she was going to be sticking around at Langford.
John, the good man that he was, seemed to realize this. He didn’t take offense at how unenthusiastic she was about the dinner he’d cooked her, and he cleaned up the kitchen by himself. Then, after all that was taken care of, he asked her to go for a ride with him.
After asking him where they’d go repeatedly and getting no answer, Elizabeth changed into more comfortable clothes and put on her warmest coat. Then they were driving out of town, into the surrounding farmland, into the stark beauty of Nebraska winter at night.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked him.
“Sure I do,” he said. He pointed at a star ahead of them. “That’s the North Star.”
Elizabeth smiled wryly. “Celestial navigation?”
John shrugged. “I’m just guessing.”
He stopped the Jeep after a while and they got out. Elizabeth’s gaze was drawn skyward, to the stars that dotted the clear night sky. It was a beautiful sight.
John, meanwhile, got a blanket out of the back seat and spread it over the hood of the car. “Have a seat,” he said, getting up there himself.
She followed him, and for a long time they just stared up at the sky. “There’s better stargazing out here away from town,” he explained. “And it’s better in winter than in summer.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. The atmosphere’s less dense now. There’s less air obstructing the view.”
His hand had landed on top of hers at some point. She didn’t notice it when it happened, but she didn’t mind. Instead, she laced her fingers through his. His hand was warm.
“John,” she said, softly, “do you ever wonder what’s out there?”
He turned an amused look on her. “I wouldn’t have figured you for an alien conspiracy woman, Elizabeth,” he replied.
She shook her head. “I just. . . Sometimes I get the feeling that if I’d done something different in my life, I’d be out there.”
John pulled his hand out of hers and put his arm around her. “You could never be an astronaut, Elizabeth,” he said. “You hate math too much.”
She elbowed him in the ribs. “You couldn’t either,” she said. “Too much of a maverick.”
“I guess we’re Earth-bound, then.” He ran his hand up and down her arm. “I’ve felt the same way sometimes.”
Elizabeth leaned against him. “I love what I do,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I just feel like there’s something bigger. I can’t explain it.”
“I know,” John replied. “I can’t either.”
They stayed out in the bitter cold for a long time, watching the stars and talking. John didn’t have to tell her why he’d brought her out there. It had separated her from all the chaos that surrounded her life, and she could feel all the stress melting away.
Eventually, they had to return to the real world, and John wished her a good night. Elizabeth had a lot of work she needed to do at some point soon, but she got a full night of sleep instead. As she lay in bed and drifted off, she thought of John, and wondered what she would do without him.
Author: Melyanna
Summary: Root canal, rumor, and John Sheppard.
Notes: Written for athenaktt as a very, very late backup piece for the auficathon. (She requested some fluff involving John cooking.) This follows Lizzie's Really, Really, REALLY Bad Day by caroly_214, and steals liberally from a West Wing episode of the same title. Many thanks to lamichelle for the beta.
Enjoy. :)
John had only one class on Tuesdays during this semester, and after Elizabeth’s truly terrifying Monday, he was glad about this. He rather suspected that she might need someone to scream at, after dealing with plumbing disasters, a sick puppy, getting into an accident, the trustees, the faculty, sorority girls, and. . . well, him being stupid.
He’d started to make up for it the night before, and he had plans to continue that during the day - lunch at her favorite restaurant, her desk drawer chocolate stash replenished, and then maybe even dinner, if her schedule allowed. Of course, there wasn’t much chance of a middle ground. This was going to go very well, or very badly.
To his surprise, when he walked in at eleven that morning, Peter wasn’t there. The door to Elizabeth’s actual office was locked, meaning she’d left for class after Peter had gone wherever he was. Accordingly, he plopped down in a chair in the outer office and started looking around for something to keep him occupied. Briefly he thought about heading back to his office, but as it was only the second day of the semester, it wasn’t like he had a heck of a lot to do there either.
Six minutes had passed when the door creaked open and Peter Grodin came in, looking unsteady on his feet. John jumped up to take the stack of mail he was carrying in. “Peter,” he said, “you okay?”
“I had a dentist appointment,” Peter said, though he sounded a bit stuffy. His cheeks were puffed out, too.
“Ah,” John said, nodding. “Novacane?”
“I had woot canaw.”
John blinked, and then he barely controlled the urge to laugh hysterically. “You had what?”
“Woot canaw.”
“Sorry, man, you’re going to have to speak up!”
“Woot canaw!” Then Peter laid his hand against his cheek. “Oww. . .”
John cleared his throat. “Sorry, I heard you the first time.”
Peter glared, and then started rummaging through a drawer. “I need to weave Doctow Weiw a note.”
“Why?”
The man stared at him, stunned. “I can’t wowk wike this! I can’t say hewwo wight. I can’t even say Ewizabef wight!”
John snorted ungraciously and was met with a death glare. “I’m going home,” Peter declared. “But this is the wowst day possibuh fow this to happen. She’s got a tewwibuh aftewnoon ahead of hew.”
“Well,” John replied, trying to get some composure, “why don’t you go home, and I’ll guard the gate today?”
Peter blinked several times. “No,” he said. “No. That’s a vewy bad idea.”
“Oh, come on,” John said. “I have a doctorate in applied mathematics. I fly small planes for fun! How hard can it be?”
“It’s youw funewaw.”
Peter spent the next several minutes bombarding John with instructions, but the math professor found it difficult to concentrate when he kept hearing words like “appwopwiate” or “pwesiding.” But when Peter asked if there was anything he’d missed, John just shooed him home.
When he answered the phone for the first time, he knew he was in trouble.
Elizabeth’s knee was stiff and achey again by the time Paul Davis had walked her to the law building. He offered to go with her up to her office, but she smiled and shrugged it off, saying she’d take the elevator. His concern was sweet, but there were times when she just wanted to move on with life and forget how bad her Monday had been.
She came into her office a few minutes later, and was surprised at what she saw. “John?” she said, seeing him behind Peter’s desk. “What are you doing? Is Peter still at the dentist?”
He looked up from the computer. “Nope,” he replied. “Peter had emergency root canal. He went home.”
“And you are. . .”
“Adorable?”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “John.”
“I’m filling in for Peter,” he explained. “He said you were going to have a rough day.”
“And you thought you were up to the challenge?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Why is everyone assuming that I can’t do this?”
“Because occasionally you have the attention span of my puppy.”
“Well, that’s true.” He sighed dramatically and held out some slips of paper. “You have four messages.”
Curious, Elizabeth walked up to the desk and took them. “Well, I applaud the effort,” she said, “but I can’t read any of these.”
“My handwriting is not that bad.”
“I have evidence to the contrary, John,” she said. “Who’s coming here with a stick of dynamite?”
John snatched the paper back. “It says. . . Huh, that does kind of look like it says the student newspaper editor is coming here with a stick of dynamite.”
“Which means?”
“She’s coming here with a story and some photographs.”
“When?”
John glanced at his watch. “Any minute now.”
Right on cue, the door opened up, and a young woman with dark hair came in. “Doctor Weir?” she said. “I’m Colleen Trask, from the newspaper.”
“Come on in,” Elizabeth replied.
As the two women came into the inner office, Colleen asked, “Was that Doctor Sheppard at Peter’s desk?”
“Yes, we’re having a faculty swap day,” Elizabeth joked. “Peter Grodin is teaching John’s upper-level statistics class today.”
“Really?” said Colleen.
“No, thank God.”
By the end of the day, John had managed not to set Peter’s desk on fire, which he supposed was an achievement of some kind. He’d even handled the arrival of a federal judge pretty well. He’d stood up, shaken the man’s hand, and opened Elizabeth’s door to tell her that the judge had arrived. (At that point, he hadn’t figured out how to use the intercom on the phones. When he did, he started buzzing Elizabeth just to chat, which annoyed her nicely.)
However, at the very end of the day, he’d gotten a strange call from Paul Davis, asking about a rumor that Elizabeth was going to leave the school soon. John was quite surprised by this, as he was usually pretty on top of the rumors in the school. “Well,” Paul had said, “supposedly she was meeting with Judge Torino from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. He’s retiring next week, and rumor has it she’s been tapped to take his job.”
Uh oh. That was probably his fault. He’d been talking with someone during Elizabeth’s meeting with Torino and mentioned the meeting, but had failed to clarify that she was asking him to give a lecture at the law school later in the semester. The rumor mill being what it was, that had apparently gotten twisted around in a hurry.
This was going to be fun.
Janet Fraiser walked Elizabeth to her car that evening, after John had skipped out early. That was rather unusual for him, but Elizabeth figured he had realized how insane Peter’s job was. But as she and Janet walked out to the parking lot, Janet kept asking her if she had something she wanted to talk about. It was all rather puzzling, but Elizabeth figured it had to do with the horrible day she’d had the day before.
She had a quiet drive home, thankfully, in the car she’d rented while her own was in the shop. But when she got to her driveway, she was startled to see that a black Jeep was already parked there. If she wasn’t mistaken, that was John’s car.
There was activity in the house, and her front door was unlocked. “John Sheppard,” she said loudly as she came in, “that better be you.”
She heard a metallic clanging, and then John stepped out of the kitchen. “Oh, good, you’re home,” he said, and retreated just as quickly as he’d appeared.
“John, what are you doing here?” she asked, following him. He’d made a mess of her kitchen, but whatever he was cooking smelled delicious.
“Cooking dinner for you,” he replied. “I think you had a hard day.”
“Not as hard as yesterday,” she commented, coming up to the stove to see an elaborate stir-fry in a pan. “This looks wonderful, John. I didn’t know you could cook.”
“I’m kind of hit-and-miss in the kitchen,” he explained, looking a little sheepish. “The first attempt is in the garbage.”
She laughed softly. “So what’s the occasion?”
“A preemptive apology.” John was busying himself with stirring the food.
Elizabeth paused. “For what?”
“You may hear a rumor tomorrow that you’re going to be a federal judge.”
He still wouldn’t look at her, so she leaned against the cabinets to get a better look at his face. “John,” she said, “what did you do?”
“I was talking to someone today and told them you were in a meeting with Judge Torino,” he explained. “I didn’t tell them why, and later I got a call from Paul Davis asking about you taking Torino’s seat.”
“Oh, good grief,” Elizabeth said. “Of all the idiotic rumors. . .”
“I’m sorry,” John offered.
“It’s not your fault,” she replied. “Not entirely, anyway. I’m just so tired of the gossip at school.”
She enjoyed dinner less than she should have, all things considered. But after a truly horrendous first day of the semester, she really didn’t need to be worried about people asking her how long she was going to be sticking around at Langford.
John, the good man that he was, seemed to realize this. He didn’t take offense at how unenthusiastic she was about the dinner he’d cooked her, and he cleaned up the kitchen by himself. Then, after all that was taken care of, he asked her to go for a ride with him.
After asking him where they’d go repeatedly and getting no answer, Elizabeth changed into more comfortable clothes and put on her warmest coat. Then they were driving out of town, into the surrounding farmland, into the stark beauty of Nebraska winter at night.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked him.
“Sure I do,” he said. He pointed at a star ahead of them. “That’s the North Star.”
Elizabeth smiled wryly. “Celestial navigation?”
John shrugged. “I’m just guessing.”
He stopped the Jeep after a while and they got out. Elizabeth’s gaze was drawn skyward, to the stars that dotted the clear night sky. It was a beautiful sight.
John, meanwhile, got a blanket out of the back seat and spread it over the hood of the car. “Have a seat,” he said, getting up there himself.
She followed him, and for a long time they just stared up at the sky. “There’s better stargazing out here away from town,” he explained. “And it’s better in winter than in summer.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. The atmosphere’s less dense now. There’s less air obstructing the view.”
His hand had landed on top of hers at some point. She didn’t notice it when it happened, but she didn’t mind. Instead, she laced her fingers through his. His hand was warm.
“John,” she said, softly, “do you ever wonder what’s out there?”
He turned an amused look on her. “I wouldn’t have figured you for an alien conspiracy woman, Elizabeth,” he replied.
She shook her head. “I just. . . Sometimes I get the feeling that if I’d done something different in my life, I’d be out there.”
John pulled his hand out of hers and put his arm around her. “You could never be an astronaut, Elizabeth,” he said. “You hate math too much.”
She elbowed him in the ribs. “You couldn’t either,” she said. “Too much of a maverick.”
“I guess we’re Earth-bound, then.” He ran his hand up and down her arm. “I’ve felt the same way sometimes.”
Elizabeth leaned against him. “I love what I do,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I just feel like there’s something bigger. I can’t explain it.”
“I know,” John replied. “I can’t either.”
They stayed out in the bitter cold for a long time, watching the stars and talking. John didn’t have to tell her why he’d brought her out there. It had separated her from all the chaos that surrounded her life, and she could feel all the stress melting away.
Eventually, they had to return to the real world, and John wished her a good night. Elizabeth had a lot of work she needed to do at some point soon, but she got a full night of sleep instead. As she lay in bed and drifted off, she thought of John, and wondered what she would do without him.