Mouse doesn't sleep well that night, but it's not because of Frazier. It's because he falls asleep thinking about car bombs. He's grateful he doesn't dream about the convoy, but what he does dream isn't that much better.

They've only been deployed a few weeks. They trained for this, but there's no such thing as being ready for war and the sand stings their eyes, steals the moisture from their lips and Mouse can already tell that he will never love the beach the same way when he goes home. It's not their first firefight – that was weeks ago, when he and Jay locked eyes beneath their helmets, boiling in the sun, nodded, and slid along walls as long as they could, silent desert ghosts, before they came upon the first enemy soldiers and the thunder of gunshots fractured the heat, and Mouse killed a man for the first time, and then the second time, and the third, and so did Jay, and they cleared the area, took their prisoners back and their captain said, "Well done soldiers," and they went back to their tent, the one he and Jay shared and he dropped to his cot and stared at his hands, and Jay did the same and they were silent, so silent, but Mouse could still hear the echoing of the gun, and the thump of bodies hitting the ground and for a second he thought there was an earthquake before he realized it was just that he was shaking – no, it's not their first firefight. But it's the first time they lose a man, the first time Mouse sees one of his brothers, one of his unit, die. And he dies bloody, and brutal. They're clearing a village – all the intel says it's empty, but they come in in stealth, in the evening just before dark, but it's dim enough that there are shadows for cover and they split once they enter the village, alpha team to the right, beta to the left. Jay and Mouse are on alpha team, Drew leading the way, Hollingsworth and Rev behind them, clearing the small huts that line the dirt streets. Mouse and Jay clear a hut, coming back out and moving to catch up with Drew, who's a little ways ahead, towards another hut.

There's no warning, no 'oh shit' moment, time doesn't stop, it's not like the movies, Drew doesn't look back in freezeframe horror, knowing what's about to happen. There's nothing like that. It's just Mouse and Jay still 20 feet away in the silent drawing night and then the world splits and there's a wave of heat kissing Mouse's face and dirt flying and smoke and he's on the ground tasting sand, sand, sand, and his ears ringing, ringing, ringing, and he's coughing and struggling to his feet, Jay doing the same, guns up, ready for a fight but they can't see anything in the smoke until a gust of wind blows some of it away and he and Jay are staggering forward and there's a crater in the ground where Drew was supposed to be, a crater and a field of debris and Mouse nearly steps on a finger in the sand he can't catch his breath and the sand is stained red red red and Jay is stumbling back, grasping at Mouse's arm and they're standing in a ring of human debris and Mouse turns and vomits in the sand as his hearing starts to return and Jay's breathing ragged and close and hitching and Mouse knows that he's crying and Hollingsworth and Rev come charging over, stunned to silence, when the first shot cracks through the sky, plowing into the sand near their feet, and they snap back into formation, ducking for cover and it's not their first firefight but Mouse has never felt so angry, so sick, and they kill them all, guns and grenades, and they leave the village a smoldering graveyard in the dark because there's nothing left of Drew to bring back with them, and it's the first time Jay and Mouse end up sleeping in the same bed because Mouse wakes from his nightmare first, scrambling out of his cot to vomit in the garbage can and Jay jerks awake with a shout, crying and trembling and they end up huddled trying to hold the other together in the dark.

Mouse jerks awake, sweat-soaked and instantly chilled. He rolls to sit on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily and shivering, running a hand through damp hair. It's not light out yet, his alarm clock reading 5 AM in bright red neon, but he knows from the sick feeling in his stomach and the tightness in his chest that there's no going back to sleep tonight. He showers, rinsing the nightmare sweat, the gritty feeling of sand, off his skin, and slips into clean clothes. He curls up on his old couch with blankets and his laptop to go back to working on his program, but he can't focus – it's too quiet. He taps anxiously on the edge of the keyboard, listening to the rattling clunk of the heater – why do I bother with that piece of crap, it doesn't do a damn thing – before sighing and snapping the laptop shut. He packs up his things and heads out, swapping the chill of his apartment for the chill of the outside air, but when he shudders, it's less because of the cold and more because of the shadows and the shape of the leaves on the pavement.

He walks up to his car, keys in hand – and stops. He stands, the strap of his bag digging lightly into his shoulder, the weight of it a lot like his rifle, and stares down at the keys in his hand, the handle of the door. It takes several deep breaths before he can bring himself to stick the key in the door and get in the car, and he feels jittery the whole drive.

It's not Platt at the desk when he arrives; he's pretty sure this woman's name is Donovan, Andrea Donovan. He's seen her before. This isn't the first time he's come into the district at unusual hours, unable to sleep. He nods to her as he passes.

"Hey!" He checks back over his shoulder, and finds that, yes, she is talking to him. He turns. "You're the Intelligence tech guy, right?" He adjusts his bag on his shoulder.

"That's me."

She nods to herself.

"You got a new piece of equipment delivered? Some fancy board or something, came in a few hours ago, it's up in Intelligence."

"Oh, thanks."

He scans in and heads up to find the digital board standing in the middle of the room. He'd forgotten about it actually. It's a new piece of tech that the districts were thinking about investing in, and Mouse had put in a request for a trial one for Intelligence weeks ago. And now here it is. Perfect timing really, because it gives him something to do while waiting for the rest of the team to come in.

By the time 8 o'clock rolls around, Mouse has the 'Intelli-board,' as he'd decided to call it, up and running, and has started gathering and inputting all the information he can for their case. The sun is up, casting rays of light through the shades on the windows and he can hear the growing bustle of the district floating up the stairs. The team will be coming in soon.

It happens all at once; one moment it's just him and the dust motes, and then there's the metallic clank of the gate and Erin is emerging, nodding at Mouse on her way by. She drops her stuff at her desk, heading straight for the coffee, and then Jay breezes past, tossing out a greeting and disappearing momentarily into the back halls, followed by Alvin who is the first to notice the Intelli-board.

He was right – it is a shitshow. Everyone is on edge, riled up because Voight is, and because an attack on one of their people is an attack on all of them. It's a long hard day, Mouse feeling the effect of his disrupted sleep as it drags on, but he'd learned long ago how to push through it. Sleep was a luxury in the sands.

He hears Molly's being tossed around at the end, but with no case to focus on now, Mouse lets himself feel his exhaustion. He meets Jay's eyes across the room, just a quick check – Okay? Okay. – before packing up and slipping down the stairs and out into the dimming light. At home, he clicks on the tv to the news, pulling open the fridge to stare inside. He needs to go grocery shopping – not tonight, but soon. For now though, he just wants something easy, something fast, settling on a stir-fry, tossing in whatever vegetables he has and the last of his frozen shrimp along with the rest of the package of glass noodles he'd bought. He'd never made stir-fry before a few weeks ago, but he was trying to be more adventurous so he'd found the recipe online and bought the ingredients on a whim. The whim turned out well - leading to a few more tentative steps forward in cooking, and stir-fry being added to his repertoire of easy good food – a much better result than the first whim of maybe the drugs will help or why not this little hacking job that led to… well. That led to an ugly place he didn't like, a person he didn't like.

After dinner, he considers working on his program some more, but doubts he'd make any progress, tired like this. Instead he flicks aimlessly through the channels on the tv, landing on a rerun of Mythbusters. It was one of his favorite shows as a kid – his dad would have it playing often while he worked, fiddling with some gadget or other while Mouse curled up on the ratty couch in the workshop, watching and breathing in the smell of the soldering iron and electrical tape. Mouse had liked to imagine that one day his dad would end up working on the show, making all the funky devices they needed to set up their experiments. Those were the parts of his dad that Mouse liked to remember – the callous- and burn-speckled hands with long pianist fingers, the ones just like Mouse's; the way his blue eyes, just a shade darker than the ones Mouse got from his mother, were so focused when he stared down at the tiny metal bits he was transforming from useless pieces into a congruent whole; the way he'd ruffle Mouse's hair absentmindedly when he passed; and the way he laughed, loud and full and free at his wife's wry humour.

It was always so hard to reconcile these parts to the man he'd become when the Parkinson's had set in, and those steady hands stopped being steady and he laughed sharp and cold and hard, if at all. Mouse wondered if his hands were steady when he poured out the pills and swallowed them, so that darkness would swallow him.

The Mythbuster's episode is a duct tape special, and Mouse is kind of relieved that it's a rare episode where they don't blow anything up. There's a few bottles of beer, cold and fresh in his fridge, but Mouse leaves them there. When he starts to drift off, missing bits of the show, he flicks it off and heads to bed.

When the phone rings in the middle of the night, Mouse is groggy and confused. He'd been dreaming about the flight home when he and Jay were discharged, the sick pit in his stomach of certainty that something was going to happen because they couldn't really be going home, and the sick pit in his stomach because something had happened. But as his dreams go, this one isn't so bad.

He knows that Jay was feeling fine at the end of the night although sometimes things change unexpectedly. But it's not Jay on the other line when he answers with a grumbled "hello?" and it's not Voight to say they caught a crime scene.

"Mouse," Erin sighs. "Sorry, I know it's late, actually it's the middle of the night, but I just needed to check in." Mouse thinks he must still be half asleep because he's not really getting it.

"M'not at Jay's Erin," he mumbles, propping himself up on one arm.

"What? I know." Mouse furrows his brows.

"Then, what…?"

"I meant – Mouse I meant I needed to check with you," she says, caught somewhere between sounding like he should have known, obviously, and sudden timidity. Mouse sits up a little more fully, lips parting, and the line is silent, stretching between them for a moment. He frowns in confusion.

"Oh. Um, well, I'm okay."

"Good, I'm – that's good." She pauses and Mouse thinks that might be the end of this odd moment and she'll leave him completely bewildered when she blurts out, "It's just that when Frazier had that gun on you it scared the shit out of me." This catches Mouse quite off guard, and he doesn't know what to say – this must be how she felt, weeks ago in Jay's little kitchen. But like he did then, she goes on. "It's just I never really got a chance to check in after because this whole thing with Voight and Beckett, and I mean I know that you were a soldier, like Jay, and that means you've…"

"Seen a lot of shit," Mouse offers when she hesitates.

"Yeah. And so obviously you can handle yourself like we can, but… I'm used to Jay or Antonio or Voight being in danger, and it doesn't make it less scary, but I'm prepared, you know? I expect it. And knowing that they can protect themselves is realer somehow. But that's not you, to me. You're Mouse, you work behind the scenes, and I've never considered… I wasn't prepared for… for the possibility of losing you." Mouse is a lot more awake now, but he's still struggling to figure out where she's coming from exactly.

"Because of what it would do to Jay, and because of Nadia," he says, half to her, half to himself.

"Mouse, no. I mean, yes obviously, but no, Mouse. Because of you. Because I was terrified of losing you." Are you in love with him? Yes. Are you? Yes. He lets that sink in a little, and she's quiet on the other end of the line.

"Do you want to talk about the dreams?" he asks finally.

"How did you…?" She's taken aback, confused, but he can tell he's right.

"It's the middle of the night, Erin. It's not that hard to figure out, and I'm kind of used to it." There's a moment's pause.

"I'm not sure I could even explain it if I tried," she says quietly.

"Okay. Did you want to talk about anything else?"

"No, I think… I think I got what I needed. Goodnight Mouse."

"Goodnight. And Erin?" He pauses to make sure she's still on the line.

"Yeah?"

"Call any time."

"Okay."

AN: Review, review, review! Pretty please, you'll make this essay/exam stressed student very very happy.