FanFic100: #047 Heart
She knows she shouldn’t fret. It’s his job, and she knew what she signed up for when she let a flyboy into her life. It doesn’t only mean having to deal with exuberant egos, loads of plane techno babble but also sometimes the realization that you will always only be second in his life, always surpassed by the love for big buckets of steel and glass. Not that Evan is one of those flyboys.
No, her competition is much more immaterial. Dedication, commitment, sense of duty. And yeah, well, to a slight extent the thrill of speed. Dammit, no fretting, she admonishes herself. After all, those four things are what drew her to Evan in the first place, even the more hidden inclination for everything fast - when she had finally discovered that, that is. And those four things are what still draw her to Evan, but… all of that doesn’t make it any easier to bear that every time he goes off on some F-302 mission all she can do is sit around and wait for him to come back.
It hasn’t been easy in the past because she hates feeling like the damsel of the castle having to watch her knight ride off to his adventure while she has to stay behind and mind the hearth. She became a Marine because she always wanted to be the knight, not the damsel and suddenly she found herself in the exact same position she never wanted to be in. Normally she could always deal with it, distract herself, sneak on the roster so that she got more off-world missions than usually… but that was before he… well… just before.
She has slipped into the control room again to see if there is any news on the Daedalus but its status is still unchanged - in combat above one of their allied planets, unable to tell them about casualties, because their communication array is still out. As she observes the silent business in the control room, the thing she doesn’t want to remember comes back to her.
A few hours earlier, they had gotten a distress call from an allied planet about some Hive attacking, and because the Daedalus had been in the system, they had sent her off. For some reason, they had been short on pilots, so every available Atlantis pilot had been commissioned to the Daedalus. When he told her he would lead the contingent, she’d wanted to plead with him not to go, because - and yes, she knows how stupid that sounds - she had a very bad feeling about this, but like always she’d simply swallowed and put on her game face, joking around and making believe to be a little jealous of the F-302 he would be flying.
And then, when he’d been almost out of their quarters, he’d turned around again, walked up to her and given her a very thorough kiss, as if… as if he had the same bad feeling she could feel deep inside of her. He’d kissed her and… trying to sound casual, he’d simply said, “By the way… marry me, Dynamite?”
It had come so out of the blue that she’d been speechless, just for once in her life. Before her mind had remembered how to form words again, he’d given her a lop-sided grin and exited the room, not waiting for her answer.
Now, a few hours later, she suspects it was his way of avoiding having to deal with a possible rejection right before a difficult mission, but she wishes he wouldn’t have asked that at all. Because, dammit, now she knows how she would have answered… how she will answer it. Ignoring the feeling of dread deep in the pit of her stomach, she tells herself he will come back, that he’s not one of those dots on the screen that flickered and then disappeared but one of those that are steadily blinking and moving.
Everyone in the control room is concentrating on the big screen, and their faces tell her that it’s not looking good. She feels fear putting its clamps around her heart and fights a silent battle against a future without Evan already unfolding in her mind. She will not succumb to Doomsday scenarios in her head that won’t come true anyway. She will… “Lorne here… lost my… going down…” Oh God. Ohgodohgodohgod. Right now, she hates Fate and the universe and their perverse crappy sense of humor.
The tension in the control room has erupted into busy commotion, because suddenly the Daedalus’ communication array is online and at least partially broadcasting again. Status reports are flooding the stations, tactics are exchanged, orders are issued… but she doesn’t really register all of that. The fear that she could fight back successfully until now has her in its grip and hits her hard enough that she slides down the wall in her back and sits down on the floor, hugging her knees and trying to make herself invisible. The last thing she wants now is someone registering that she is here and trying to be sympathetic.
She just refuses to acknowledge anything else than that he is still alive and kicking some Wraith ass. Until they have shown her any different proof, she believes he’ll make it back, like he always does so she can give him her answer.
On the screen the battle rages on, but the connection to the Daedalus is still shaky and they only get bits and pieces… and so she sits there on the floor, trying to catch his voice again, holding on to the hope that his flyboy ego is simply too big to get blown out of the sky without seeing if his rather unusual proposal worked in his favor.
~*~
TBC in Found a Key to Every Door.