When he was a child he would have found it hard to imagine that not everyone celebrated Halloween. It was one of those staples of American culture - both to believe that every child around the world stays up late December 24th waiting for Santa Claus and that children should be bribed out of lighting a bag full of dogshit on your front porch with chocolate and candy apples. But that was back when the world was his mother and his father and his best friend Jake who lived across the street, and maybe those kids at school and the lady that always smiled at him when his mom dragged him to the beauty salon with her.

Then the world kept getting bigger. His father got transferred to the base in Korea and he played with little Asian children that went to the international school because they dreamed of someday going to Harvard or John Hopkins, and he tried to get them to play Batman and Robin and GI Joe and race their bikes across the barren concrete of the airstrip, waving to the pilots and following the ground crew around, begging them to let him sit in the cockpit just once. But some of them insisted that GI Joe was supposed to be the bad guy and come October 31st, none of them came to class dressed up. When he asked his mother why she could only tell him that they were 'different' with that piercing yet far-off look in her eyes that she seemed to get when she talked was talking about going into the city -which she didn't do much- or speaking about 'that* Mrs. Lewis and her overactive libido.' He remembered thinking that he didn't know Mrs. Lewis had a son.

And then, when he had learned beautiful and exotic words like Yangnom and Shipjangseng and sharp fearful insults like 'gook' and 'commie' and 'yellow,' his world was broadened yet again. There was a world outside the quiet isolation of the base - the pilots who took him in like a little brother and teased him and ruffled his shaggy brown hair and the mechanics who talked about machinery and philosophy while he sat on an upturned washbucket handing them tools. Or the marines and the army grunts who marched by him, sneering stupidly at the curves and sweeps of equations that they lived by everyday but would never understand. And the friends he never went home with -the ones that brought the harsh edge to his mothers bright green eyes and the strained smile to her brightly painted lips- they took him out into the real world, where they didn't celebrate Halloween. Where there were monsters in the bright neon lighting that beckoned to wayward travelers like a beacon in the darkness, and in the women with painted faces and dainty legs bound against the night in tattered leggings and spiky heels.

And he remembered the Octobers trolling the grimy uneven streets of Seoul, trying to look inconspicuous, surrounded by friends, the air choked with the smoke of early industrial pollution, the streets stinking with the smell of meat drying in the little stands that seemed to spring up out of nowhere and the smell of sewage-ducts not quite covered. He remembered dodging the mopeds and bicycles that weaved in and out of traffic and the hulking green of military transports that parted them like the red sea.

And then there were the sunny falls of Los Angeles where the changes were measured in the changes in fashion -people sweating it out in flimsy scarves and sweaters and boots- not in the falling of leaves. He'd relish in the cool breeze of the air blowing in off the cool Pacific Coast, waiting tables in that little cafe in West Hollywood, sometimes telling people that he really was an actor-hopeful, just so he didn't have to explain why he was there.

And there were Octobers in the frosty bite of winter in Colorado Springs, sitting on a picnic blanket on the yellowing grass with his latest blonde waif of a woman, looking over the plain, sun setting and sending a chill down his spine. Sometimes they would try to cuddle up to him. Sometimes they would be distanced by his own far-off stare.

Then there were all those timeless Octobers spent in countries and places where Halloween was nothing but a vague childhood memory: walking down the Costernera, drinking tea and trying not to look American between flying military 'consultation' missions against the ELN and FARC; surfing in the translucent waters of the Tasman Sea, nothing but the wind in his hair and the cool spray of ocean and the sweltering heat of the Australian fall; Antarctica, the cold turning his nose and fingers red even as the perpetual daylight bounced of the blinding white of the melt.

And there were those Octobers that were buried as much as timeless. The simmering resentment of the first wave of retaliation in Afghanistan: the hatred fading into fear and sometimes quiet questions of 'why?' as the bombs kept falling, the barren solitude of the rocky terrain alive with fighting when the only month anyone spoke of was September.

And then there were years before, watching queues of refugees twisting their way toward borders, not marked in the solid black lines of safety he expected to find after looking at so many maps. And the monsters were so much closer there - the twisted smiles of soldiers with genocide in their eyes, faces of victims twisted and burned charcoal black, arms and legs of children thick as twigs and as fragile, craters lined with body parts. And then there were the bombings, and the landmines exploding like fireworks, shrapnel cutting through limbs and faces and hearts like a flock of birds flying through the pale beauty of a cloudless blue sky.

And so many Octobers spent among people who had too many monsters of their own to ever celebrate them. But now, here he was, a galaxy away from the land of the free and the home of the brave, orange and black cloth clashing horribly with the stained glass of the Gateroom, amoung people from all those places around the world where the holiday was forgotten humming in the excitement of celebrating it for the first time. John Sheppard wished he could reclaim that innocence.

He remembered Octobers spent stuck in the mess of smog and honking horns that was Vancouver Island during tourist season, too comfortable in the worn cloth seat of his crummy old Volkswagen with the heat turned on full blast to get out an yell at the other idiots stuck on the Malahat. Someone needed to tell them, after all. Not that it was his job. He always had more important things to do - more important places to go.

But now that he'd escaped the claustrophobia of the winter traffic of British Colombia, to another galaxy even, filled with strange and wonderful things all begging for his considerable attention, he found himself standing on a balcony while the city hummed in the background, watching the warm wind skimming off the near-Mediterranean sea blow through soft brown hair, fascinated by the lean form folded over the balcony, gazing into the aquamarine wonder of the ocean.

He remembered cold Octobers walking through Harvard Square with his head down and his feet wet from stumbling in the puddles, popping caffeine pills and staring at his fellow students like the enemies he knew they were. He would sit in the courtyard of Lowell House, ignoring the brilliant reds and golds of the trees the same way he ignored the jackass students ringing the giant bells on Sunday afternoons. In those days he could not be bothered with beauty. Now he wondered what he would do without it.

And then that fall in Vienna, strolling down Thaliastrasse sometimes visiting the prostitutes in the first district - maybe just sitting beside them in the warmth of a cafÈ somewhere, talking about the night and the feeling of being used for some part of your body - in his case, his brain. And he would pay for their cocoa -because coffee stained their teeth, and that would get them demoted to Hutteldorfer Strasse- and maybe they would fuck. And he would always leave them a little something extra, so they would take their delicate little hands out of their muffs and wave the next time he came strolling down the street, unable to sleep and in need of release.

And he remembered the cool desert nights of fall in New Mexico, staring across the dull gold of the desert - flat for miles and miles outside the barbed wire of the complex, the stars shinning clearer than even the crisp cloudless nights of the far north. He remembered their weapons tests and glider launches stealthy in the darkness without a human presence for miles, staring at readouts and monitor using a red flashlight, so he could still see the equipment, and perhaps marvel at the vast humbling beauty that was the cathedral of the night sky.

Then there were those nights and days in Russia, trying to explain to stoic men in huge fur-lined coats that smoking was bad for his asthma. And the days where he holed himself up in his lab or his room because, when it came down to it, he would just never understand Russians, and wasn't sure he cared to. At night he'd dream of the day when they'd call him back to Colorado or to the startling warmth of the desert, not because he minded the biting chill of the Siberian frontier -he was a Canadian at heart, after all- but because he actually found himself missing the limited warmth of people who actually had a chance* of understanding him.

And then that day came, and they sent him to Antarctica, where he spent the fall getting to know an infuriating Scotsman and a dark-skinned Englishman with a very British sense of patience, a Czech who's name he could never remember, but often came far too close to beating him to the punch-line for his liking, and a blunt and petite blonde who would take on men twice her size in intellectual debate. And while he might hesitate to call them friends, he recognized that he was finally among a group of people with whom he could communicate without dumbing-down every sentence.

And now he was here with them in this strange land, celebrating a holiday that seemed almost vain, considering that they now lived in a world where monsters like Vampires and Zombies truly did exist. And only here in this world teetering on the brink of fantasy, could Rodney McKay feel true warmth.

After a long moment of just staring, Rodney stepped up behind John, unable to believe that he was out here on the balcony watching the sunset when there was still so much to be done inside - so much he doubted it could be done in a lifetime.

He stroked a hand up a black-fleece-covered back and John shivered, but did not shift his gaze from the horizon. He sighed, and Rodney could see sadness in the corners of his bright green eyes.

They had been here for a year, and the fight was just getting harder. Even John Sheppard, the man who had seen so much, was beginning to fray and crack under the pressure, Rodney could see it in the creases in his forehead, in the shadows beneath his eyes.

And John knew that as much as Rodney prided himself on independence, on the freedom of the mind in any circumstances, he longed for many of the comforts of home. Neither of them had left anyone special, but there was a certain charm of the soil of your own planet, or the precise pattern of waves emitted by its unique magnetic field, as Rodney had once hypothesized. They were getting used to living under the dagger than hung over their heads here, and the memories of Earth seemed farther and farther away.

But it did not matter, because, as Rodney reached out to enfold his lover in a desperate but tender embrace, both of them knew that -of all the places they'd been, of all the Octobers- this was the first one spent at home in another person's arms.