Oh my god. You have no idea how much I love this. Ironically, not so much for your Sheppard (although, duh, he's beautiful) as for your Antarctica and your parallel lines of the desert and the ice. There's something quiet and contained here, just waiting to burst out in splendor, and we're at the cusp and you captured that perfectly. I mean, your first paragraph - it's a thing of beauty. I love the sense of purity. I was thinking about this recently, see, when I was writing a fic that had a section on Antarctica, and I didn't get into it much there, but the way you describe it and what it says to John - I had something like this in my head, only you, you wrote it, and the promise in its frozen moment makes me so happy. Also, I'm friending you. :-)