Disclaimer: Terra Nova is not mine.
Boylan
It was not the mysterious dead body that made him execute a change in careers. Maybe it should have been. It might mean that he was just a little bit on the far side of crazy that it was not. Nate had asked him for his help. That was all there was to it. In those days, that was all that was required. It was one of those quirks that came of having served at each other's sides and had each other's backs on so many occasions - favors asked were favors granted. You did not deny help to someone that had been through the things together that he and Nate had. He had helped him bury the body. He had not asked any questions. It had seemed the thing to do at the time. Even now, years and lifetimes of choices later, he cannot say whether or not that level of camaraderie being gone from his life is something that he will ever get used to not having. He supposes that it does not matter.
You cannot change the past. He knows that better than he knows anything else. The fact that he knows that it does you no good to dwell on what might or could or would leaves him better off than most of the people around him so far as he can figure. He did Nate his favor. He helped out his mate. The body was never found, and no one else was the wiser for it. He knows it was no one from the colony. There were too few of them in those days for everyone to not know everyone else. That there was some sort of a scheme going on in the background was not a difficult thing to deduce, but he did not trouble himself about it.
Nate got cooler around him in the aftermath, but the truth was that Nate was cooler to most everyone about in the time after his son first went missing. Tom kept doing his job. The colony went on as planned. Life continued.
He was four yards away when Casey lost his legs. It could oh so easily have been him confined to that chair. It could have been him buried in that collection of graves out on the edge of the colony. It could have easily been Casey in one of those graves. It could have been anyone in one of those graves. Any of them could end up under the ground at any point in time. That was nothing new to him as a general concept. He was a soldier. He always knew that it was a possibility - a strong one given some of the places that he had been deployed. He was very familiar with his own mortality. The problem was that they had all gotten caught up in the wonder of the rift and the possibilities that it afforded. It might have been just him, but somewhere in the process of being chosen to come to this place and escape from the slow death that all of the powers that be were insisting was coming for them back at home he had let his thinking get twisted that they were really escaping. They were not.
You cannot escape from being human. Everyone has a countdown clock. It does not matter what world you are inhabiting. All the things that humans do, the choices that they make, the whims of chance that ended with someone standing in one spot while someone else was standing in the one that turned out to be the wrong place to stand that day was going to be with them no matter where it was that they went.
That was the day that he started counting down the time. Everyone had a termination date for their enlistment, of course, but it never seemed to occur to anyone here that they would do anything other than renew their commitments. He was the first (aside from Casey, of course, who had already been honorably discharged due to his medical circumstances). Tom was the first to leave of his own volition.
Nate had never forgiven him for it. He did not think that he ever would.
It was of little matter. He had his bar, and he had a life here - one that he could never have had back on the other side of the portal. If nothing else, he owed Nate something for that. That did not change the fact that he had served the time that he had promised to serve, and he had no intention of serving any longer. He could say that with confidence now, but the truth was that even with the countdown in the back of his head that had started after he had found his hands covered in Casey's blood as he tried to help him hold on until the medic could get to him he still might not have walked away when the time came if it had not been for the families that started coming through the portal after the Third.
The spouses and children of those who had volunteered for the First and Second when no one was sure that this was not really a suicide mission had started coming in on the Fourth. He had no one coming. There was no one to bring. He could look around and see those who were doing this for their families. He could pick out which ones were here because they were idealists who wanted to make something better. He could pick out the research fanatics and those who would have followed Nate wherever he went simply because it was Nate. He realized that he fit into none of those categories. Everyone had their reasons - everyone except him. He might have had some in the beginning, but whatever they were they were long gone.
That realization in the days as he came to the end of his obligations set his path forward. He did not know his own why. That might not matter to anyone else, but it mattered to him.