[for Jill]

[t_emmagen]

It had been two weeks nearly since Dave had vanished. She had not thought to count the days, but it struck her that morning, in the Psychology office, just how long it had been. It was not like other times; Rodney and Aiden and Beth she had all missed, but she had accepted. For some reason this seemed different to her. She was no longer able to

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[jill_langston]

Although they didn't have an appointment scheduled, as Jill left the lab, she decided to stop by the psychology office to see if Teyla was around at all. Rapping lightly on the door with her knuckles, she was glad that her bruise had nearly faded, leaving just a light purple smudge under her eye.

"Hey," she said with a small smile, leaning against the door. "You busy?"

[t_emmagen]

"Nothing I cannot take a break from," she looked up at Jill with a smile, closing the folder she had open and pushing it away. "I have been looking at the same page for I do not know how long, and have not made sense of any of it."

[jill_langston]

"Distracted?" Jill asked sympathetically, coming into the room and taking a seat across from Teyla, one of her legs tucked under her. It seemed too often than something happened on the island that distracted people from what they might otherwise be doing.

[t_emmagen]

"Yes," she had been for days now. Too long, especially when there were so many other things to be attended to. Perhaps that was the problem, that being here reminded her of all the disappearances. "I keep finding myself thinking on those that have gone."

[jill_langston]

"Ah," Jill answered, understanding that better than she wanted to. Ash was just the most recent in a long list of people who had disappeared and she frowned faintly as she thought about him. "That never gets any easier, does it? And yet it doesn't stop up from loving people."

[t_emmagen]

The list seemed never ending, for all that the rate of attrition was kinder here than it had been among her people. "It does not," she said quietly, not looking away from the other woman as she considered it, "and yet here more than before I find myself not expecting it. Each loss seems more difficult to bear."

[jill_langston]

"We're allowed to get comfortable here," Jill pointed out, because she knew enough about Atlantis to understand how dangerous it had been at times. "And once we get comfortable it's hard to see it changing. But then it does. It always does."

It made her wonder what the hell she thought she was going to accomplish with Rodney. Just more pain, probably, when one of them disappeared.

[t_emmagen]

"It gets worse," she said after a moment. "Each time, it seems worse than the one before."

Or perhaps it was just the quickness of it. Beth, Dylan, Catherine, Dave. "Or maybe it is just that so many people I have known have gone now."

[jill_langston]

"Someone recent?" Jill asked, wondering if there had been someone besides Catherine recently. Her own list seemed to expand more and more every month, after so long of feeling like she was one of the lucky ones who'd avoided it.

But then Radek had been gone. Then Rodney. Then David. Somehow everything had seemed to hurt less after David.

[t_emmagen]

"Dave. A friend of mine," she did not talk a great deal about her involvements, and with Dave she had spoken even less, respecting his desire for privacy. "We were close."

[jill_langston]

"I'm sorry," Jill said quietly, frowning faintly. She hadn't spoken with anyone about Ash disappearing, only because she still felt the sting of his initial deception, but Teyla had never judged her before.

"Ash Morgan's gone. I'm not sure that we were friends, but I was friends with the man he was pretending to be."

[t_emmagen]

"There is nothing to be sorry for," she says, meaning her words. "He was never happy here."

Except with her, she thought, especially at the end. In those moments, it was like he forgot the battle raging in his head.

"The man he was pretending to be?" She said it curiously, not quite understanding.

[jill_langston]

"He was a con artist," Jill explained. "When I met him months ago, he told me his name was Roger May and I believed him. I liked him. Well, I liked Roger. A few weeks ago I found a police file on the bulletin board in the Compound for a con artist named Ash Morgan."

With a shrug, she said, "In the end, he was a liar. He lied to me."

[t_emmagen]

"It does not mean that he was still not your friend," she said simply, trying to imagine such a thing, "though it would be a difficult thing to discover."

Really, what was to stop any here from doing the same? From pretending to be someone else, someone without a past. "Perhaps he wanted a fresh start?"

[jill_langston]

"No. He did it because he could," Jill answered. "Ash told me as much. He and Roger were very different people and Ash pretended to be Roger because he could. Because it was what he was used to doing. Conning people."

[t_emmagen]

It made it a very different thing, she thought, though it was not what she said, considering it for a moment or two. "It could be a hard habit to break. It in no way excuses it, but here, in such a situation, instincts will often make us do what we are most comfortable with."