damnfinecup | (no subject)

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in-game,
jill

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Dale made sure he and Jill stopped by the kitchen for coffee before setting out on their way for their long-planned outing in the falling snow. It was more for his own sake, and the sake of the weather, than for Jill's, but it was always the gentlemanly thing to do to offer refreshment to one's partner for the day.

"Can I get you anything?" he asked her, his scarf hanging loosely around his neck, only to be tied the moment before they went outside. "These aren't really travel mugs, but they'll do in a pinch."

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"Well, I hope it wouldn't be too traumatic, for either of you," he said, venturing a smile. "Is that the David you mentioned earlier, or is that someone else entirely?"

"No, that's David," she said, her voice a little dry. David, who kept showing up at the most inappropriate moments. "Possibly the most arrogant man I've ever met. With the exception of Rodney McKay."

"Jill," said Dale with a smile, "I wish I could introduce you to Albert Rosenfield. But that's neither here nor there. I can understand perfectly why you might have mixed feelings about his potential arrival."

Mixed feeling was a bit of an understatement, but Jill just nodded her agreement, still smiling faintly. "He saved my life. I guess I should, at the very least, appear grateful for that before I slap him should he ever arrive."

"It would probably go over better that way," said Dale, looking up at the sky for a moment and letting the snowflakes melt on his cheeks. "It's been a long time since I've enjoyed weather like this."

"How long?" Jill asked curiously. She'd heard from Chris that it had snowed once before, but she had no idea how long ago that had been. How long any of these people had really been on the island.

"Long before I came to the island," said Dale. "Experienced it? Yes. Enjoyed it? Well, that's another thing entirely, isn't it."

"The last time I think I actually enjoyed this weather was earlier in the week." During the disaster of a snowball fight. "But before here? Norway, probably."

"Not Canada?" said Dale curiously. "And just what was it that you found so enjoyable about the weather earlier this week?"

"Not Canada, no," Jill said, because she hadn't spent much time outside in Toronto. Her mouth turned up fainting and she said, "Snowball fight. I hadn't had a real one since I was a kid."

"Snowball fight?" repeated Dale with a grin. "Now there's something I haven't done in a while. Though I bet I can still pack a mean snowball."

"I won," Jill said smugly, although she'd only really won because she'd ended up destroying Radek's shelter by falling on it. "You better not throw any at me," she warned a moment later, raising her eyebrows as she looked over at Dale.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Dale assured her, raising his un-coffee-laden hand in a gesture of innocence. "Clearly it's already been done. I prefer originality."

"So you don't favour the 'punch the girl in the arm and run away' trick?" Jill teased, her mouth turning up into a smile. All in all, she didn't mind that trick. Which probably said something about her.

"I don't find that one's worked very well for me since middle school," said Dale, with a regretful shake of his head. "It's a bit of a shame; things were much simpler back then."

"I don't remember things ever being simple," Jill told him with a quiet laugh, thinking back to the way things had been. Had it really ever been simple?

"Everything before puberty was simpler," said Dale. "We hadn't learned to play ridiculously complicated games yet, when it came to the opposite sex."

"For a lot of my life, I think I would have welcomed the games," Jill said honestly. "It would have been better, somehow, than burying myself in my work and coming up to find I was thirty-five and as alone as I'd been when I was fifteen."

"They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence," said Dale thoughtfully. "If you'd played all those games as a teenager, and never devoted yourself to your field of study, you might be standing here with me today regretting that you'd never made anything of your life."

Jill laughed quietly at that, because in the end, she hadn't made much of her life anyway. She was on an island with no way of continuing her work on diabetes and no way to rebuild her name after the hep C disaster. "Well, it all amounts to the same now, doesn't it?" she asked.

"Well, I suppose that's a matter of perspective," said Dale. "All of our experiences in life add up to make us who we are. Would you have given up any of that history?"

"Some of it, yes," she said. Maybe that was sad or a testament to some of the things she'd done wrong, but it was the truth.

"Even if it means you might be a completely different person now?" Dale asked her. "It's difficult to predict the cascading effect each small change might have."

"Maybe I wouldn't be here, maybe there would have been no bomb, maybe there would have been no David." Oddly enough, the only thing from that last that sounded appealing was the lack of a bomb.

"Maybe you'd be in prison, maybe you'd be an astronaut, maybe you'd be a mother of three," said Dale.