So I just wanted to state that you probably won't get an update soon because I am giving my thesis defense and moving in the following week, and I'm not certain of where this is going because it wouldn't leave my mind and I have a lot of more important things to do (like finish at least five other stories that I have started and not had the chance to finish, on top of graduating). I will try to update as soon as possible, but my life is going to be super busy. Feel free to review, it will help me remember to take the time to relax and type.

If I own either SGU or OUAT I wouldn't be searching for a job.


Rush hated sleeping. Nothing was accomplished, and he had far more important things to do, like making sure everyone lived, then to have a lay about. He had always slept very little and the more work he had the more he couldn't sleep. It had gotten worse after his wife's death, and steadily increased to the point where by the time his head hit his pillow he was practically leaping back out of bed. And that was before they had all been cryogenically frozen for three years.

Now he slept as little as possible, trying to keep as far away from unconsciousness. He had slept for three endless years, three endless years of dreaming. And that was the real reason that Rush refused to sleep because he didn't dream like the others. He didn't have nonsense drivel or fantasy floating around in his head, not usually. Whenever he slept memories danced behind his eyelids, and all of them were nightmares. Because what else would you consider more a nightmare than waking up and knowing that no matter what you do or how hard you try it will never undo the horrible events of the past. His wife Gloria, the people on Icarus, all the crew that had died by his hands (Franklin, Riley, Ginn, the list goes on), Lisa becoming blind, the loss of Ginn again, and Mandy, not just twice, but three times.

The last had been the most recent. They had only been out of their three year slumber for an hour at most when everything went wrong at once, and he had been utterly useless. Eli had been the one to figure out what was wrong, and eventually how to fix it, but it came at a very high price. In the three years that they had been sleeping the computer system had slowly been becoming corrupt, a virus that had been downloaded into Destiny's main hard-drive from the library computer on Novus. Amanda and Ginn had done their best to prevent it spread from inside the system, but in the end Eli had to either repair or delete all the corrupted files.

They were lucky that they had lost so little data that Destiny originally had, but they lost all of the files from Novus and Amanda, who had already had been corrupted beforehand. In the end, three days after waking up, Rush was the one that was able separate Ginn and Amanda, it had been in hopes that they could save both. Ginn had been fine and saved, but Amanda's data had been so corrupted that no amount of repair could have fixed her. She would have been a shadow of herself and Nicholas couldn't bear the thought of her living as fragmented thoughts, which was all that was left of her. He had finally after days of trying to recover her, any part of her, had deleted her from the system.

No one was able to look him in the eye for weeks. Colonel Young was the first, not that Rush cared, and Eli still couldn't look him in the eye, his guilt a heavy curtain while they were in the same room together. Rush didn't care what they thought of him, he was just tired of their pity, and angry at his inability to help sooner. Because it had taken him three days to collect himself after waking up, three wasted days where he could have, should have been able to save her. But he had been so far out of his mind, that he hadn't been able to do anything.

He couldn't help but feel guilty about it even though he had had no control over it. It had been difficult enough to wake up and think that you were someone else, admittedly they, he, had a similar personality to how Rush normally acted, but there had been differences. He had been quieter and less argumentative, but when forced to speak he had been brutal, ruthless, and cruel far beyond his usual callousness. He hadn't recognized anyone or anything and had used his fear to fuel his anger of not understanding what was happening.

The only thing he could think of was that it had been a different consciousness like with what had happened with Chloe, but he remembered what had happened, what he had been thinking and feeling, and more importantly learning. He had to admit, the man that he had been was ruthlessly smart, and could manipulate anyone after only knowing them for a few minutes.

But it had still caused him to lose Mandy, not that the person he had been cared all that much. So to assuage his guilt he had spent all of his waking moments that he wasn't working on necessary things, like faulty shielding that was slowly leaking oxygen, trying to get more control over Destiny, and in general saving everyone's lives, he had been going over the data read outs of the three days that he had been monitored. He knew Eli and Lt. Johansen were also trying to figure out what had caused him to become a whole different person, but neither one of them could find anything.

Rush had eventually moved on to the read outs of when he had been frozen for three years. They were unlike any of the other crew members, something that he would have been unsurprised about if it hadn't had such a dire cost. Eventually he had had to work with Eli and TJ to go over the read outs hoping that they could point out or show him something that he had missed.

They hadn't. All three of them had come up with the exact same results.

Rush had not been sleeping those three years, he had been remembering. And not only had he been remembering, he had been reliving someone's complete life from start to finish (One of the reasons why he had been so scared and angry was he remembered dying only to wake up on Destiny, younger than he should have been and without his family. He had thought that he had been cursed somehow).

A life that the data indicated was his and not someone else's, the brain waves and data patterns all identical to his own.

After finding that out Eli had wanted him to record what he had experienced on a damn kino, but there was no way in hell he was ever telling anyone who he had thought he had been. There was no way that the ideas and thoughts that he had had were his own. Which was the true reason why he avoided sleeping at all cost because every time he fell asleep he woke up a different person hoping to see bright blue eyes and a smile to greet him, ached at the missing smell of roses, and the lingering thoughts for hours that were not his own irritating while he worked. Because they were not his own, he refused to believe that they were.

And he would die before admitting that the man that he had thought he was, was a child's fairytale character. A darker more viscous version of a fairytale character, who only redeeming quality was the people he loved.

Now if he could only stop the high pitched giggling that echoed in the back of his mind or the random appearance of objects that he needed, everything could get back to normal and he could get more than a few moments of sleep every five days.

He didn't think that it would that easy though. It never was on Destiny.