A somewhat disturbing banging was coming from an open crawlspace, and one booted foot stuck out from the hole. "Damn them. If I could figure out who did it, I would skin them alive!" Jesa growled angrily. The air was cold, very, very cold - cold enough to freeze humanoids with only a minute of exposure. The reason she was in the crawlspace is that somehow, someone had decided the Isannah was an ample playground of spare parts. Jesa didn't even want to know what else was probably missing. Right now she was just trying to get this one fusion reactor online, having checked all the connections backwards on this deck from the bridge's systems. It seemed they had only taken things that required requisitioning. Made sense, only the very energy-conscious would have gone and stripped a part that they could have just replicated from Engineering.

Buck, of course, had taken the prudent method and was using an environmental suit once Jesa had determined life support was completely offline. Suddenly a slight hum of systems coming online began to fill the room and Jesa crawled back out. They were on Deck 2, directly below the bridge, it was the closest reactor and Jesa didn't even want to touch the MARA until she had time to go over it or have someone else do it. Standing back at the console she ran her fingertips over the controls until the internal lights came off of emergency power, resuming the normal level of illumination. Immediately the air temperature surrounding Jesa began to climb. She figured it would be a good ten minutes before it would be adequate for Buck to shed the suit. There was a decent amount of residual oxygen in the air though, so at least that wouldn't be a worry.

There was an open comm.-link between Jesa's badge and his suit. "It'll probably be about ten minutes," she said with a nod.

"Have I ever told you how much I hate these suits? I mean really hate?" Buck's teeth chattered. He wasn't cold - the suit was keeping him warm - but he felt cold, and very very lonely inside the thing. It reminded him of his zero-G training. And that was something he did not want to be reminded of with a transparent aluminum plate three inches in front of his mouth.

Jesa paused, "Actually, no, I don't think you have before." She smiled gently at him. It was easy for her. All she had to do was alter her body chemistry and composition a bit and she could survive anywhere, even comfortably. However, she did have to lower her body temperature to keep the sheer difference from bothering her.

"Ah - o-one of these tete-a-tete's w-we should probably have had before n-now, then." He sighed and forced a grin. "Still, I'm here with y-you, so it's not all b-bad."

He looked around. He knew this place - this was his home - it had been for so very long... Ironically, he felt safe here. He held out a gloved hand to Jesa. "It's nice to be back, isn't it? She was never meant to rot in a Starbase hangar as a 'piece of sector history', was she." He smiled, his expression softening.

Jesa smiled. It was true that she felt a great deal of connection with this ship, and even while complaining about what poor condition they had left her in, she had no intention of abandoning her. The Isannah was her home, and she would do her best to keep her alive and kicking for as long as possible. She smiled and took his hand, squeezing gently. "It is good to be back. Come on; let's head up to the bridge. I want to take a look around."

Buck saluted, grinning, lopsidedly. "Aye, Captain." He followed her, somewhat clumsily in the suit. He was probably more anxious than she was to see her sat in the Big Chair once again. He had sat in it, once, in the Deladrel System. It didn't seem right to him - he wasn't meant for Command, he knew - he had been born to serve. 'Just like Dad,' he mused, as they headed up to the Command Deck.

Turbolifts still weren't online so they climbed through the Jeffries Tube access. She, of course, went first, and waited at the landing for him to make it up the level before opening the door. The door connected to the hallway between the conference room and the bridge. It was a very familiar hallway. The door slid open before her and Jesa was almost afraid to look onto the bridge itself. Taking a breath (purely for emotional reasons, as she had stopped breathing regularly to slow the transfer of heat out of her body) she stepped through.

Half of the panels in the room were strewn about or haphazardly stacked near exits. Isolinear chips were scattered below several of the open panels, but at least the consoles were all lit. 'Okay,' Jesa's rational self thought as she surveyed the scene before her. 'So it's a mess. I can live with that.' Unfortunately it was her emotional self that spoke, "Did someone decide it would be fun to let MONKEYS in here?!"

Buck was aghast. He had, somewhere in his mind, envisioned the Bridge of the Isannah as being some kind a cobweb-ridden, antiquated shadow of its former self - and that all it would need to retrieve its vital energy was for the lights to be turned on and Jesa to sit in her chair again and everything would be right... No, it would need a team of Engineers, and at least three days of hard graft, to get her even remotely ready for launch.

'I guess I am a silly romantic', he thought to himself, then turned to Jesa and laid a suit-encased arm around her shoulders. "We'll fix it. It's all fixable. Her plaque's still there, her consoles are still there. Her heart," Buck's arm lowered and a gloved finger gently prodded Jesa's sternum, "is still here..."

Jesa chuckled slightly, "I know. It looked a lot worse than this during the refit - trust me." That had been the period where Buck had just come back from his own unpleasant journey of self-discovery and Jesa had buried herself in her work. It was mostly self-appointed work, but it helped her feel useful, at least. Besides, a Captain should know what was going on in the innards of her ship. "I'm mostly annoyed that they showed her no respect whatsoever."

She stopped herself from sighing and turned to the engineering panel. A few moments later she realized what she was doing and chuckled. "A part of me wants to dive right in and start fixing her, but I guess that can wait," she said. The room felt warm to her and she checked the internal temperature and oxygen levels. They were slightly low, but adequate. "Should be fine for you now - if you want to get out of that suit."

Buck smiled and reached for his collar catch. It unlocked with a snap-hiss and he slid the helmet off his head. The rest of the suit came off much more naturally - though he remembered a little too late that he had not been showered this morning. The suit would need a good cleaning. He instinctively went to peck Jesa on the cheek, only to pull his mouth away as his lips brushed her skin.

He looked back to her, realizing how odd his actions must appear. "C-cooold!" he managed, grinning.

"Oh!" Jesa said, and focused on raising her body temperature. "I'm sorry, I forgot about it." She waited about thirty seconds then reached out and touched his hand. "Better?"

Buck smiled, gripping her hand. "Much." He looked around them. "She's a tough old bird, Jesa - always has been. She'll fly again, and that's the main thing. If the Old Izzie had anything to say on the matter, I'm sure she'd not give a flying f--leet," he caught his linguistic snafu just in time, "about the opinions or otherwise of those who don't give her the respect she deserves."

As if in answer, the reactor spun up to a point where the automated systems could bring back main lighting on the bridge, rather than just the emergency systems that had sufficed thus far. Isannah's wall and ceiling-mounted lights flickered into life with a vibrant hum, two of them exploding in a shower of sparks as they did so. Buck grinned - the Old Girl had as fine a sense of the dramatic as he did. He turned back to Jesa, his crystalline eyes shimmering.

"Ugh," Jesa sounded, looking at the two blown lights. "Yes, very much work to be done here." She suddenly was speculating on just when they were going to get crew.

Buck sighed. Compared to him - and evidently, the Ship Herself - Jesa didn't have a romantic bone in her body. Of course, from a medical perspective, she didn't have any bones in her body - at least, not in the strictest sense. "It'll get done. Now, for heaven's sake dust the cobwebs off that chair, sit in it, and enter your command codes - it's not every day a Captain's own ship welcomes her home." He smiled, solemnly, pulling away from her and pointing at the chair.

"I don't know," Jesa said uncertainly. "Are you sure something else mightn't explode if I do that?" There was a twinkle in her eye as she looked at him. She started to move away, making motions to go pull off another panel. "Maybe I should go back into the crawlspace an - "

Buck reached forward and pulled her shoulders, spinning her around to face him. "Don't make me order you to do it."

Jesa chuckled softly and smiled at him.

He looked deep into her eyes, a fire burning in his, and he kissed her with that same fire, cupping his hands behind the back of her head. She kissed him back, thinking that this was definitely something she was only going to be able to do on the bridge once.

At that instant three more of the aging light panels in their vicinity exploded - showering sparks around about them. She ignored everything else and kissed him back until the secondary explosions happened, then Jerked away from him, landing in the Captain's chair and tapping furiously to deactivate the internal lighting. Obviously there was a power regulator broken somewhere and if she didn't shut it down, the rest of them were going to explode. And that she didn't need. Of course it plunged the both of them into near-total darkness, only the backlit consoles giving off some faint light.

"Oh, this is good," Jesa intoned in the near-absolute darkness. She had intended on regally lowering herself into the chair and thinking about the significance of her reassuming this seat, and perhaps muse on all the times they had come through. But instead here she was, sitting in the dark, thinking that the engineering crew couldn't arrive fast enough and fighting the urge to start working her way over the Isannah from top to bottom.

Buck laughed, hopping into the XO's chair. It wasn't his, and never would be, but he sure as hell wasn't congratulating his wife from the Counselor's seat. He coughed, primly, and extended a hand. "Welcome back, Captain Callen."

It was just absurd. The whole freaking thing was absurd. Then again, so was their life if one looked at it from a 'normal' perspective. Finally she just chuckled and took his hand, having little trouble seeing it even though it was dark, "Thank you. Thank you very much, Doctor Gear."

Buck grinned, squeezing her hand with his, broadcasting his irrational feelings of joy and elation directly into her mind, along with a single sentence: 'It is good to be home, darling...'

Jesa smiled, slipping her hands into Buck's and squeezing, gently. "Me too..."