Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Same as previously stated and won't change.

Thanks to those that reviewed…not 100 sure where I want to take this story, but I hope you'll be patience and stay with me. If you have any suggestions or directions you think would be good, let me be acquainted with.

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They say that in war there are casualties. This is a fact that cannot be changed no matter how much you wish and plead…No matter how much you get down on your knees and pray to whatever benevolent (or malevolent) being sits on their holy chair laughing at all of us pitiful grunts fumbling around looking for our heads when they're stuffed so far up our asses that it'll take that a pair of proverbial pliers to pull them back out. This is the reality and it's not going to change the moment I open my eyes. If anything, that will only make it all the more real. But I cannot pretend to sleep for the rest of my life (however short that may be as it seems all our days are significantly numbered since entering this godforsaken galaxy).

The Major cracked one sorrow ridden eye open and then the next, ever so slowly as to allow himself time to quickly seal them again should it become necessary. Sorrow and grievance were the only words that came to mind to describe the scene in front of him. He watched as Beckett wiped a blood stained glove across his glistening brow, oblivious to the crimson streak left in the wake of this unconscious act. He watched as a nurse retreated to the distant corner in order to let her tears be released. He watched as other nurses (where did they all come from Sheppard mused) began the terrible task of erasing the evidence of the man's passing. They went about clearing away the polluted objects that failed their skilled hands and tried their hardest to instill a sense of peace in a place where it had long ago fled.

Time passed in a blur that was all too fast and yet way too slow and through it all Sheppard watched from his front row seat, unmoving and unnoticed. The dirty materials were thrown away, the machines turned off and returned to their various homes around the infirmary, the nurses dispersed and Doctor Beckett retired to his office to mourn in solitude. The body was covered and if it weren't for the fact that the crisp white sheet extended past the customary point of the shoulders of the individual and on over their head, one might have been able to fool them self into believing that he really was just sleeping a temporary sleep and not an eternal sleep.

But such dreams were for the naive and as much as the Major wished at that moment that he could be so naive as to believe that this had all been some sad twisted joke, he couldn't. There was too much ill achieved knowledge that weighed down on him and crushed his fragile fantasy.

The scene and the feelings that had risen to the surface as a result were forcing their way into his conciseness and demanding to be heard, analyzed and dealt with. But he couldn't…wouldn't…deal with them now. It was just too hard, the pain too fresh. So he did the only thing that he could, bottled the emotions up, capped them tight and filed them as far down in the cabinet of his sub-conscience as he could, where he wouldn't have to deal with them. They would be in good company there, at home with the rest of his true feelings and sour memories. All the things that plagued his tortured soul lived on these shelves and would until the day Sheppard chose to bring them out and examine them so as to rid himself of their tainted stain upon his soul. But that day was not today, and not any day that he could foresee in the near future.

This is what he thought as he slipped silently from the confines of the infirmary, which had become a morgue, to the now deserted hallway out front, and began to walk. To where he wasn't quite sure and at the moment he didn't really care. He may have looked like death warmed over, but his heart still beat stubbornly inside his chest and he decided this was reason enough to leave, or so he rationalized. So what if it was an irrational rationalization.

The problem with bottling and storing emotions is that eventually the shelves will break and the bottles will come crashing down only to crack into a thousand tiny pieces, allowing for their fermented poisons to leak out, all the more potent for having been stored.

TBC