Sicktember Day 19: Addiction
Word Count: 592
Author: aquietwritingcorner/realitybreakgirl
Rating: G/K
Characters: Neil
Warning:
Summary: Neil has an addiction. Two, actually. They both are useful in different ways.
Notes:
Addiction
If you were to ask him if he knew, Neil would readily admit that he had an addiction to cigarettes. He was far from the only soldier to have it, and far from the only soldier at Briggs to have it. Some people thought it was odd, considering he was medical-adjacent, that he would allow himself to have such an addition. He knew the risks. He could tell the affect it had on his body. He knew that General Armstrong didn't approve. As long as he didn't smoke on duty, though, and endanger the others through the light of cigarette, she wasn't going to make him quit.
Neil found it preferable to other addictions that he could have.
It was no surprise to anyone that Neil was a bit of an adrenaline junkie. Oh, it wasn't in the usual sense of how people thought about adrenaline junkies. He wasn't running into battle or jumping off of the fort or doing anything like that get his adrenaline high. No, his adrenaline came from his inventions.
Neil love to build things and tinker with them. He loved to try to make things work. He had grand ideas, sometimes crazy idea, and he wanted to try them all. There was a thrill he got when he was putting together his ideas, when he was slapping stuff together to see if it worked, and when he set it in motion. That was the biggest thrill of all—seeing if what he had made worked or if it didn't.
He had been this way since he was a boy, always taking things apart and putting them together. It had driven his parents mad. Eventually, his father had stuck him in his shop and just let him go. More than one of his creations had ended badly, and to be honest, Neil wasn't completely sure how he was still alive—both because of the results of his tinkering, and because he was pretty sure that his mother wanted to kill him herself a time or two.
Still, he had gained skill, knowledge, and confidence, and he had studied hard. He had joined the military in the hopes that he could put what he knew to good use, and, eventually, earn his way to playing with some of the bigger toys, putting into action some of his bigger ideas.
It honestly wasn't a bad plan and had tempered his addiction to it a bit. But he had gotten ancy at the academy, without something to experiment on. One night his roommate had offered him a cigarette, and Neil had found, to his surprise, that it helped him. He quickly realized and understood that he was basically trading out one addiction for another, but he counted it worth it in the long run.
It had gotten him through the academy, into his first few postings. And while he was good at what he did, the unfortunate end a lot of his experiments had landed him at Briggs instead.
But that was honestly alright with Neil. Because here he could experiment. In fact, General Armstrong encouraged it. Neil finally felt like he had found a place that he could thrive. If that meant that he kept up this addiction to cigarettes, and he didn't fall back into his addiction of experimentation, then so be it. Some tradeoffs were worth it.
He lit up a cigarette and bent over the plans on his table. This upgrade to Buccaneer's arm was going to awesome and useful—He couldn't wait to try it out!