Archive of Our Own

One of the biggest downsides of Stargate travel was the jet lag. Going to other planets was great, but when each planet and moon had a different light/dark cycle that didn’t coordinate with the 27 hour rotation of New Lantea, departures and arrivals ended up being at random points in the day. Even after his seven years of experience on off world teams and all the tricks he had picked up, there were still times Evan got hit with the inability to stay awake after returning from a planet with an odd cycle.

M65-Y26 had been worse than usual, its two hours of semi-darkness to sixteen hours of light throwing Evan’s entire team into a zombie-like state by their third day there. No one slept well for the entire five day trip, making them all short-tempered and more than ready to go home by the end of it. Not to mention, the lack of sleep had given Evan a migraine that refused to go away.

It hadn’t helped that the locals lived off of some kind of caffeinated tea that seemed to reduce their sleep needs to only a few hours a night. There had always been someone around demanding the Lanteans’ attention, and as much as Evan had tried to explain to them that they required more than three hours of sleep, the Bellinians had just seemed flummoxed and offered them more of the tea.

Thankfully, after an extended mission such as that, teams were always given some mandatory down time. Evan usually forced himself to stay awake until it was close to his usual bedtime in the city to try and counteract the jet lag, but as he dialed the gate home this time, he swore he was going straight to bed to sleep for an entire week.

By the time his team stepped back into Atlantis, they were practically kissing the ground. They dropped off their gear, hurried through their post-mission exams, and then Evan told his teammates that he didn’t want to see or speak to any of them for at least a week. Maybe ever. They had all gotten quite enough of each other the past five days.

He must have been more zoned-out than he thought because he didn’t even see Ronon until he ran straight into the him on the way to his quarters.

“Sorry,” he apologized immediately, rubbing his shoulder where he’d clipped the man. Ronon was solid; it hurt. “Wasn’t looking where I was going.”

Ronon looked tired and distracted himself, and was sporting a fresh bandage on his head. He waved a hand dismissively. “You just get back?”

Evan nodded. “Yep. Five days of fun on Bellinish.”

Ronon grimaced sympathetically. He had been there before, and probably would have been again had Sheppard not pawned the unappealing mission off on Evan’s team. “They give you the rissa tea?”

“So much rissa tea,” Evan groaned. He started to walk away, not in the mood to chat and figuring Ronon would understand. “I’m off to sleep. See you around.”

When he got back to his quarters, he considered sleeping first and then showering, he was that tired, but he forced himself to clean up and put on fresh clothes. He would feel better when he woke up if he was clean. As soon as his head hit the pillow, he was out.

He didn’t know how it had happened. They had protocols in place to stop this after the last time the Replicators took over Atlantis. But somehow, they had gotten back in, and not just that, but they’d fooled everyone into thinking they weren’t Replicators at all. Even now, they were trying to trick the crowd that had gathered.

But Evan would not be fooled. He could clearly see that the man standing before him was not in fact John Sheppard, but a human-form Replicator imitating his commanding officer. His grip tightened on his gun.

“Put down the gun, Major,” Repli-Sheppard said, an evil glint in his eye. He knew he had the trust of the people around him. Had somehow tricked them into believing he was the real Sheppard. “Let’s talk this out.”

Evan wasn’t falling for that. “Someone get an ARG,” he ordered. “Now. Shoot him with it!”

Kate Heightmeyer spoke in a calming tone, trying to talk him down. “Major, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on,” she said. He didn’t need talked down, he needed them to listen to him.

“Just do it!” Evan demanded. Why couldn’t they see it? Maybe he sounded too desperate. Maybe if he reasoned with them, they would see he wasn’t crazy. “I mean, what’s the harm? If he’s human, it won’t hurt him, right?”

“John, what is he talking about?” Teyla asked quietly, and Repli-Sheppard smirked.

“Don’t talk to him,” Evan told her incredulously as the grin spread on Repli-Sheppard’s face. “Colonel Sheppard is a Replicator.”

Everyone in the crowd looked confused, looked at him like he’d lost it. Just like when he had tried to help that alien entity a couple months ago. Dammit, he knew they didn’t respect him anymore.

“They don’t believe you,” Repli-Sheppard sang mockingly, the smile still playing at his lips. “They think you’ve really snapped this time. Major Looney, at it again.”

Evan hesitated for a second, eyes flicking to the crowd. What if they were right? What if he had lost it? No. He tightened his grip on his gun and scowled. Repli-Sheppard was just messing with his mind. He wasn’t going to let it push his buttons. He would wait for the ARG and then they would see.

Sheppard continued, this time speaking to the crowd for the sake of his deception, his mouth still curled into the cruel grin. “Lorne, I don’t know what’s gotten into you-”

“Me?” Evan interrupted. He’d had enough of this thing trying to sweet talk his friends. “Nononono, it’s not me,” he argued.

Colonel Carter appeared, hurrying down the stairs to join the stand off. Good. She had more experience with Replicators than any of them, surely she would help. “Major,” she said calmly, but her eyes were wide. “How about you lower your weapon?”

Damn it! Repli-Sheppard had gotten to her, too. “He’s a Replicator,” Evan said desperately, praying she would listen to him. But she had that same look as everyone else, like he was insane. Of course, she’d never trusted him after the last incident. She’d just been waiting right along with the rest of them until he screwed up again so she could get rid of him once and for all.

No. Focus. He pushed aside his own insecurities; this wasn’t the time. Right now, he had to eliminate the threat, protect Atlantis. Prove he was still an asset to the team. “What, you don’t believe me?” He flipped the safety off on his gun, deciding he’d had enough of their pitying looks. He wasn’t crazy. “I’ll shoot him. You’ll see.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Repli-Sheppard said, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “That won’t be necessary. I’ve got my hands up in a very non-threatening way.” He was good; Evan almost bought that it was the real Colonel Sheppard for a minute. His finger hovered over the trigger.

“Call for an ARG,” Carter said quietly. Finally!

Repli-Sheppard’s face fell, just for a second. “What you believe him?”

“Of course not,” Carter scoffed, as if Evan wasn’t even there. “But it won’t hurt you, and it might help him to lower his gun.”

Repli-Sheppard glanced at her with a conspiratorial grin, and Evan’s heart sank. They were in on it together.

“You’re one of them, too,” Evan accused, suddenly realizing that this was a lot bigger than he had initially thought. He swung his gun over to her. If Carter had been compromised, who else? And how was he going to stop them if no one believed him?

“Don’t just stand there,” he implored to the people standing around watching. Why would no one help him? Was he really that untrustworthy? “Shoot them, shoot both of them!” No one moved.

Fine. He would do it himself.

Swinging back toward Repli-Sheppard, his finger tightened on the trigger, but before he could fire he was suddenly enveloped with a painful bolt of electricity. All he could think as he hit the ground was that Atlantis was doomed.

Evan expected that he might wake up at some odd hour of the night after crashing in the middle of the afternoon, but he didn’t expect to wake up in an entirely different bed. He panicked for a second, completely disoriented, and tried to sit up, but his body wouldn’t obey. His head was pounding and he felt tingly pins and needles all over. The after-effects of a stunner.

“What the...?” he mumbled, looking around and quickly identifying the isolation room. What was he doing here?

“Major Lorne?” a voice said over the speaker.

He looked up at the observation window and saw Doctor Keller flanked by Kate Heightmeyer, Colonel Carter, and Colonel Sheppard. “How are you feeling?” Keller asked.

“Confused,” he said with a frown, managing to leverage his still uncooperative body into a sitting position.“What happened? Last thing I remember, I was going to bed.”

Kate gave him a sympathetic smile. “It seems there’s some kind of bad dream bug going around.”

What? Bad dreams? What was she talking about, and what did that have to do with him being stunned? And why was he in the isolation room and not the infirmary?

Kate continued. “Evan, it says in your file that you used to sleepwalk?”

That was a little out of left field, but he didn’t like what it implied. Had he done something in his sleep? He used to sleepwalk all the time as a kid, had even walked straight out the front door once and gotten locked out of the house in the middle of the night. Luckily he hadn’t hurt himself, had just woken up terrified and confused in the neighbor’s yard and spent the rest of the night sitting on the front porch. That was the craziest thing he’d ever done, but his mom had still been very relieved when he finally outgrew it.

He suddenly felt very self conscious with all of them watching him, and made himself get up so he could sit at the small table in the room. As his feet hit the floor, he realized he wasn’t wearing any socks or shoes, and was, in fact, still wearing the sweats he’d gone to bed in. “Yeah...?” he confirmed suspiciously as he sat, his legs still half asleep. Would they just spit it out already?

“It seems that you had a dream that Colonel Sheppard was a replicator,” Kate explained gently.

Dreamed that Sheppard... What? Evan frowned. He didn’t remember that at all, but then again, he didn’t often remember his dreams. But how had she known that? Clearly he’d done something to merit being stunned, and if he’d been sleepwalking... Oh shit. Had he hurt someone?

“No one was injured,” Sheppard reassured quickly, reading his panicked expression. “You just kinda, uh, threatened to shoot me.”

Oh, God. Evan pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, trying to relieve some of the pounding in his skull. This was just great, he’d held a gun on his CO. Again.

“We think that whatever caused this has to do with a crystal that Colonel Sheppard encountered off world,” Kate said. “It’s not your fault.”

He scrubbed a hand over his face and mumbled, “Yeah, I guess.” Didn’t make him feel all that much better. This was the second time in two months now that Evan had nearly shot Sheppard.

Sheppard quirked a smile at him, apparently unbothered by the whole thing. “Hey, you’re not under arrest this time,” he said brightly. So he had noticed the similarities to other recent events. “Just... quarantined, in case the entity is still in you. That counts for something, right?”

Oh good, so the thing might still be controlling him? Wonderful. Evan forced himself to push away the brooding thoughts, No one needed that right now. They needed him to be helpful. “I’m just glad no one was hurt,” he sighed. And if the thing was still in him, that meant it was contained. Focus on the positives.

“And you don’t remember anything?” Kate asked again.

He shook his head in frustration. “No. Honestly, I haven’t had a sleepwalking incident since I was, like, ten.” He remembered this being the worst thing about it, though. Not knowing what he’d been doing, worrying that he’d embarrassed himself, having to have someone else relate his actions to him. Being completely out of control of himself. It made his skin crawl.

They were discussing something up in the observation room, but they’d turned the mic off so he couldn’t hear. He crossed his arms on the table and dropped his head onto them, wishing he’d been able to at least get one good night’s sleep after Bellinish. Wasn’t like he was going to be able to go back to sleep now.

“Sit tight, Major,” he heard Sheppard say after a few minutes. “We’ll get this figured out.”

He wondered if his migraine would ever go away.

No one had brought him anything to do, and he was too worried he would sleepwalk again to go back to sleep, even though he was still exhausted and jet-lagged from his mission and apparently hadn’t slept earlier, so Evan spent the next few hours switching between pacing, staring at the wall, and trying not to work himself up over the incident. They’d told him they were going to go back to the planet and get a sample of the crystal entity, try to figure out how to isolate it. Until then, he was just going to have to wait.

As much as he was trying not to imagine worst-case scenarios, his mind couldn’t help but fill in what he’d done while sleepwalking, and being as sleep-deprived as he was wasn’t helping matters. Images of him putting a hole through Sheppard’s head kept creeping up on him. It had to have been a close call if they’d resorted to knocking him out with a stunner. And just when he’d been starting to get over what happened the last time.

He was generally not one to spend too much time in his own head, preferring to deal with problems quickly and move on. His mom said he’d always been very attuned to his feelings, able to sort through them and know exactly what to do with them, but he wasn’t so sure that was the case. He just couldn’t ignore things like other people, and would much rather confront the issue and get it over with than let it fester. Sometimes, it was a messy process, but better to make a small mess earlier rather than let it grow into a giant mess later.

The problem now was that there wasn’t anything he could do. He wasn’t even entirely sure why it was nagging at him so badly. Logically, he knew that alien entities were a thing and he shouldn’t feel guilty about something he didn’t even remember doing and had no control over, but it bugged the hell out of him. He tried to convince himself it wasn’t as bad as his imagination was making it out to be, but it was a hard sell.

It certainly wasn’t helping that he was running on fumes and still hadn’t kicked the headache from hell. He should probably just ask for something, but part of him felt he deserved a little punishment for once again going off the deep end.

His team stopped by after a few hours, Lieutenant Kennel having woken the other two when he heard about the stand off. They filled him in on more of the story, which everyone knew by now, the downside to living on a small secluded base like Atlantis. Evidently, he had drawn an entire crowd with the stand-off, demanded an ARG, and even accused Carter of being in on the conspiracy when she had tried to help. They’d tried to talk him down, but he’d argued and they’d been forced to take him down with the stunner when he made a move to shoot Sheppard.

Knowing what had actually transpired made him feel a lot worse.

His team tried to cheer him up, teasing him about the sleepwalking and making plans to ensure he didn’t wander off in the middle of the night on future missions (more than one of these involved him wearing a cow bell). He rolled his eyes at their jokes, but appreciated their attempts to lighten his mood.

Eventually, Radek showed up with a scanner, explaining that they had figured out how to tell if the entity was still in him. Evan held his breath while the scientist scanned him, not sure if he hoped the thing was gone or hoped it was still around. Maybe then he could blame it for his foul mood. But a moment later, Radek declared him entity-free and he was allowed to go.

Doctor Keller ordered him to get some sleep, which he laughed darkly at. She offered him a sleep-aid, but he refused, knowing one of the side effects was sleepwalking, which was exactly what he didn’t want to do. He promised he was tired enough that he wouldn’t need it anyway, and thankfully, she didn’t push it.

He had just gotten back to his quarters when there was a buzz at the door. He really wasn’t in the mood for company, but he opened it nonetheless to find Kate.

“Hey,” he greeted, relieved it was her and not, well, anyone else. He liked Kate.

“I heard they let you out,” she explained, “and I thought I’d come check in with you.”

“Thought we were all supposed to be quarantined,” he said. Carter had called for all non-essential personnel to stay in their quarters until they figured out how to contain the entity.

She shrugged. “They said the entity can travel through the city’s systems, so it doesn’t really matter where we are.” That was a pleasant thought. “Plus, I’m considered essential,” she added with a smile.

“Well, in that case,” he said, stepping aside so she could come in.

He was dead exhausted, but since the last alien encounter he’d had, the one where he went a little crazy and painted his entire room like some insane abstract masterpiece, he and Kate had become pretty good friends. He could put off his nap a few more minutes for her.

“So is this an official visit then?” he asked as she settled into a chair.

She smiled. “I suppose technically you could say that, but I really just wanted to see if you’re okay after what happened earlier.”

He dropped into the chair across from her and sighed. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’m probably too tired to be very objective right now.”

“You were on Bellinish this week?” she asked.

“Five magical days,” he answered sarcastically.

That got a laugh from her. “I won’t keep you long, then,” she promised. “But I know it was probably a little upsetting, what happened today.”

“What makes you say that?” he snarked. It came out more bitter than he had intended.

She didn’t seem offended, thankfully. “Whatever this entity is, it seems to be feeding off of fear,” she said slowly. “And I noticed something. About your dream, that is.”

Oh good, he was going to get psychoanalyzed. He wasn’t sure he was up to it right now, but he bit back the sarcastic retort. She was just trying to help. Had helped him immensely in the past. He shouldn’t push her away. “What’s that?”

“Well, the dream was obviously about the Replicators invading Atlantis again,” she started. “But I don’t think that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“I don’t like Replicators, Kate,” he offered.

“No, I know,” she said quickly. “But it wasn’t just Colonel Sheppard in your dream. You knew the rest of us were there, and you seemed very upset that no one was listening to you.”

As soon as she said it, he knew it was true, even though he hadn’t actually thought about it before this moment. Ever since the other incident, he had felt the self-doubt creeping in, the uncertainty that he should be trusted to make command decisions. He was afraid that no one took him seriously anymore.

“Do you think no one trusts you?” she asked point blank, after he didn’t say anything for a minute.

He sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair. He really shouldn’t be having this conversation when he was so tired. It was like being drunk. He felt a little too honest, his emotions a little too close to the surface. But he did trust Kate, so he pressed on.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “The whole thing with the alien and the paintings... It’s not something I’m proud of.”

She looked taken aback. “You saved the city, Evan.”

“Maybe, but I also attacked Captain Kennedy and almost shot Colonel Sheppard,” he retorted.

“You weren’t fully yourself,” she reminded him, leaning forward.

“But I knew what I was doing.”

She shook her head. “The alien was rewiring your brain, and you didn’t actually hurt anyone.” He shot her a scowl; he had given Kennedy a minor concussion. “You didn’t hurt anyone badly,” she amended. She sighed. “And no one blamed you for that either.”

Officially, they hadn’t. There had been an investigation, and it had been decided that his actions had been heavily influenced by the alien presence. And it helped that he had not only solved a catastrophic problem Atlantis had been experiencing at the time, but also saved an alien entity in the process.

“Alien influence or not, I’ve been screwing up a lot lately,” he mumbled, staring at the floor. Now he knew he was being melodramatic, but he was too tired to stop himself.

Kate opened her mouth with a comeback, but stopped and rethought what she was going to say. “You know, when that alien was talking to you and you couldn’t explain what was going on, do you know why I stayed and helped you instead of calling Doctor Keller? Even though I probably should have called her?”

He shrugged, not looking at her.

“It’s because I trust you, Evan.” He glanced up and saw her earnest expression. “I trust that you have this city’s best interests in mind. I’ve seen how hard you work to protect everyone here. I know you’re a good person, and you’re smart, and you know what you’re doing. And I know everyone else here feels the same way about you. Especially Colonel Sheppard. We trust you. You wouldn’t be here if we didn’t.”

He blushed a little at the compliment, and meekly bit back his knee-jerk reaction to disagree with her. She had chastised him for disregarding the nice things she’d said about him in the past, and he’d been working on accepting compliments more gracefully. He wasn’t sure if he believed her, but it was nice to hear she felt that way.

“So stop beating yourself up, okay?” she added.

He met her eyes and gave her a small smile. “Okay, Kate. I’ll try.”

She stood up and he walked her to the door. “Now, get some sleep,” she ordered before leaving. “You look like hell.”

That got a chuckle. “Thanks,” he said, half jokingly but half sincerely. “I’ll see you around.”

“Goodnight, Evan.”

Before he got in bed, he put on some socks, just in case. Finally laying down, he thought it would be hard to fall asleep after the day’s events, but he drifted off within minutes.

“Evan!”

Kate watched in terror as the major disappeared off the balcony, her outstretched hand once again too late to catch him. Running to the railing, she grabbed onto it and desperately searched below, her heart in her throat as she looked for a sign of where he had gone. Fifteen floors up, there was no way he would have survived the fall.

It was all her fault; why hadn’t she stopped him? And now he was gone forever. Sobs broke from her chest. If only she had stopped him...

Suddenly, she found herself standing on the edge of the balcony railing. How had she gotten up here? In front of her, the ground fell away, and she swayed, terrified at the height. Was this how Evan had felt in the moments before he fell?

She grasped for anything to help her balance as she turned around and tried to force herself to step down from the railing, but she couldn’t do it. She was frozen in terror. “Help!” she cried out, desperate for someone to save her.

Teyla appeared, standing in front of her. “Teyla, help me!” she repeated, reaching toward her friend.

But before she could reach her, Colonel Sheppard stepped between them, an evil glint in his eyes. He held Teyla back as Kate lost her balance and toppled backwards. Down, down, down for eternity...

Evan was jolted awake by another buzz at the door. Wondering what he had ever done to these people that made them want him to never sleep again, he groaned and glanced at his clock, surprised to see it was already 0800. He’d slept like the dead, apparently. Rolling out of bed to answer the door, he was surprised to see Sheppard on the other side, and tried to pull himself together enough to stand at attention.

“Sir,” he greeted, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

Sheppard didn’t seem to notice or care that Evan was still wearing the same sweats as yesterday and that his hair was doing a good impression of the colonel’s own. In fact, Sheppard was fidgety, didn’t meet his eyes. “Hey.” Something was wrong.

“You need something, sir?” Evan asked nervously when he didn’t continue. He was still on stand-down after the last mission, so it had to be something serious. Sheppard never bothered people on their days off.

Sheppard took a deep breath and finally looked at him. His face was pinched, sad. “I came by to let you know... Kate Heightmeyer died in her sleep last night.”

What? Evan felt like someone had punched him in the gut.

“Carter’s going to make a city-wide announcement later, but I thought you should hear it in person,” Sheppard continued. “I know you were friends.”

Was this really happening? He had just talked to her. How...? “The entity?” he choked out.

Sheppard nodded and looked at the floor again. “We think so.” A dark look crossed his face, and Evan guessed he was feeling guilty. He’d been the one to bring whatever it was to Atlantis, after all.

Well, shit. Had Evan transferred the thing to her? They said it wasn’t just through touch anymore, but was it a coincidence that he had likely been the last person she saw yesterday?

“Is there anything...?” He wanted to help, to stop this son of a bitch before it did any more damage.

Sheppard shook his head. “No, just stay put. Get some sleep, if you can. McKay and Zelenka are working on a way to track it, but until then there’s not much we can do.”

Evan didn’t like it, but he knew Sheppard was right. This wasn’t a thing they could shoot and be done with. It would take people smarter than him to figure out how to get rid of it.

“Well, if you do need me, you know where to find me,” he offered.

Sheppard nodded again, and then bit his lip. “Thanks, Lorne,” he said. “And, uh, I’m sorry.” He reached out and patted Evan’s shoulder once in an awkwardly sincere gesture before turning and heading out.

Evan watched him go, still in shock over the news but also a little bit amused by his CO. Had Sheppard gotten the impression that he and Kate were more than just friends or something? Huh.

He walked back into his quarters and sank into the chair he had sat in the night before, letting the news of Kate’s death wash over him. Losing friends was nothing new to him, they had lost plenty of good people here in Atlantis, and before that, back on Earth. It was the unfortunate nature of the job. It was never easy, but it always stung more when it was a civilian, even those who knew the risks of working in a dangerous place like this. He was a soldier, he’d signed up to lay his life down for his country and his world, but people like Kate shouldn’t have to make that sacrifice. Especially in the city, where it was supposed to be safe.

And yeah, if he was honest with himself, maybe he had liked Kate as a little bit more than just a friend. She had been there for him through a pretty rough ordeal, and she seemed to enjoy his company. It wasn’t that unusual that he’d developed a bit of a crush. Not that anything would have ever happened. They worked together, and besides that, he was her patient. But he had enjoyed seeing her around the city, eating meals together in the mess hall sometimes. She had been a really good friend, and now...

Dammit, it wasn’t fair. He got up and started pacing, the anger building. What a stupid way to die. Killed by a bad dream monster? And it was probably his fault, too. He’d probably been the one she’d gotten it from. Except, Radek had cleared him, so that didn’t really make sense. But what if he’d missed it somehow? What if Evan had just stayed in the isolation room, and then he would have contained the damn thing, and then...

He’d be the one dead right now.

Well, better him than Kate. He deserved it a lot more than she did.

He sat back down with a huff and let the anger drain out of his body. No, she wouldn’t want him to do this. She’d tell him he had survivor’s guilt and then say something incredibly insightful to help him work through his issues and feel better. Like she had last night.

He sighed and put his face in his hands. Wishing things had gone differently didn’t change anything, and feeling sorry for himself certainly wouldn’t help either. Bad things happened to good people, that’s just how this shithole of a universe worked. And he would deal with it because he had to.

He got up and went back to his bed, flopping down heavily and staring at the ceiling. He wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep now, he knew, but he didn’t want to be up either.

His eyes traced over the remnants of the mosaic on the ceiling that he’d made a couple months ago when the other alien entity had talked to him. He had tried to clean off the paint, but it was a grueling process and he could only scrub for so long before his arms and back ached, so he’d been doing it in small chunks. About half of it was still there. He couldn’t see it the same way he had then, when the alien was screwing with his hormones and throwing his brain chemistry all out of whack, but he remembered the memory he’d associated with this one and still had a faded impression of what it had made him feel when he painted it.

He remembered thinking about his cousin when he looked at it. Jake had been his best friend growing up. Their families lived close to each other, and Jake was only a year older, so they did everything together. They had gone to the same school, hung out with the same group of friends, started a garage band together. And then, out of nowhere, Jake committed suicide his senior year of high school. No one had known he was depressed, not even Evan, who had been as close as a brother to him.

The loss had hit Evan hard, and he’d basically shut down. His mom had put him into counseling, which he’d fought. He had just wanted to run away, go somewhere else, and when he finally graduated, the Air Force had been his ticket out. His mom couldn’t afford to send him away to school otherwise. He’d been considering it anyway, his uncle had been in the military and Evan had always wanted to learn to fly, but Jake’s death pushed him to make the leap.

When he’d finally gotten away, he had gotten some perspective. Had been able to get a breath of fresh air and realize that him being happy wasn’t betraying Jake. He’d made new friends, and the Air Force had given him something bigger than himself to focus on. It wasn’t that he forgot about or replaced Jake’s place in his life, he just wasn’t so lost and lonely anymore.

That’s what this painting had reminded him of; that feeling of complete loss and loneliness, but also of hope that it wouldn’t always be that way. That there would be a rainbow after the storm.

Right now, it felt like a damn slap in the face.

His room suddenly felt very claustrophobic. He needed to move, to go somewhere else. He wanted to help; he felt so useless. But, of course, they hadn’t asked for his help, and if he left his room he’d probably be put under arrest again and dragged right back in here for disobeying orders to stay put. Or they’d put him in the brig. That’s probably what they did with repeat offenders.

And there he went again with the self-pity.

God, he kind of hated himself.

No, he would be a good soldier and follow orders. Stay here and wait until they told him what to do. But he wasn’t looking at that damn mural anymore.

Gathering up his cleaning supplies, he started scrubbing.