Author's Note: Apologies that it's taken me so long to get this series wrapped off. Tomorrow I'll be posting the final segment of "Gone, but not Forgotten," and the Gen Arc of the Bridges Universe will be completed. Thanks so much for your patience. This segment focuses on former-Captain David Kleinman, one of the conn officer/pilots assigned to the Daedalus who has appeared in both season 2 and season 3 of SGA. He's a secondary character, not an OMC.

Warnings: In this segment, the topic of substance abuse comes up, as does psychological trauma.

V. David Kleinman

The day his assignment to the U.S.A.F Apollo came through, Captain-now-Major David Kleinman should have been thrilled. Not only was he going to be the primary pilot on the newest X-303 in the fleet, but he got a promotion in the bargain. Everything a rising young officer could want.

The problem was, Dave knew exactly who (and what) had paid for his promotion, and it didn't sit well. He didn't like the feeling that he was being bought off, trading silence for a chance at starting over because the colonel had put in a few good words on his way out the door. It was only marginally more tolerable after the fifth of Jack he bought to celebrate, but at least the hangover the next morning kept him from thinking for a while. He understood about following orders, and how responsibility to the decisions made following the replicator attack of Atlantis had lain with General Landry and General O'Neill. The chain of command existed for a reason, and questioning it in the midst of a tactical nightmare was a good way of getting a lot of your friends killed. That being said, it hadn't been General Landry's finger on the missile controls when they'd arrived in orbit above Atlantis. The general hadn't been the one who nearly obliterated a city housing thousands of civilians, most of whom were fucking refugees. Dave had heard the communication from Weir, the explanation and offer for peaceful settlement. And then he'd attempted to beam a nuclear bomb into the city, because those were his orders and they had no way of knowing if she was the real Dr. Weir or a Replicator version.

The attempt hadn't succeeded, but that didn't make the fact that he'd pushed the button any less real, or the intended consequences any less horrifying after he'd learned exactly how many people were in the city.

When you worked with the Stargate program, whether you were a member of a gate team, serving on one of the space-capable vessels, or stationed off-world, there were certain survival skills you picked up. The most important was that anything you walked away from could have been worse, and Dave knew it was true. Space was not the kind and gentle mistress Star Trek made her out to be, and he'd lost friends to everything from the routine to the bizarre - accidental or intentional, dead was still dead. Four years with the program, and he'd walked away from a lot. He'd flown X-302's and 303's, watched friends turn into fireballs and be tossed about their frail cockpits like stringless marionettes, and participated in more rescue missions than he could count. Some had been more successful than others, and everyone grew wise when it came to the art of ignorance. Often, it was better not to number the dead; leave that to the bureaucrats and the brass.

It was easy to say that he'd seen it all, shrugged it all off, and that he'd grown the thicker skin so endemic to the ranks of the SGC. That's what he told the shrinks, and it seemed to work well enough to keep him flying. With Atlantis going rogue, everyone had bigger problems than a pilot with a solid track record and no indications of instability. As long as his problems, such as they were, didn't interfere with his job, no one cared. What was one more questionable incident in a history of many?

The problem came when his lingering fixation did begin to interfere. It was stupid, really, because the bomb had never been dropped. Nobody had died, that day in Pegasus, and they'd spent a week rendering humanitarian aid to the newly established "Alliance" before returning to Earth with the bad news. Even if the attack had worked, it wouldn't have been the first time he'd been instrumental in tactical action. He wasn't the formal tactical officer, but everyone who worked the bridge of an X-303 was cross-trained. That might well have been what bothered him the most - that he couldn't figure out why the incident had bothered him so much, but bother him it did.

Dave appreciated Colonel Caldwell's consideration, putting in a recommendation that Dave be given the first pilot's berth on the Apollo. The new ship was just different enough that, for a time, he was able to put Atlantis behind him. Two months into his tour with the Apollo, however, he woke in a cold sweat with mushroom clouds behind his eyes. The CMO hadn't even asked for details, passing over a packet of sleeping pills and a request that Dave keep him apprised of any changes. They worked, and again Dave told himself that it was ridiculous and he just needed to move on.

Unfortunately, the sleeping pills only worked for so long, and their effect was limited. Even once he stopped dropping off immediately, they still got him there within the hour. The problem was that he couldn't sleep away all of his downtime, and the traditional passtimes didn't hold the appeal they once had. Everything gave him a little too much time to think, or was too hard to focus on. He'd sit down to play a few hands in the officer's lounge and lose track of what they were playing, distracted by an attempt to calculate just how much force one of the transparent "windows" could hold up to before buckling. Or he'd forget who'd bet what, who was still playing, even occasionally when a hand had ended. It didn't take long for the casual invites to poker night to dry up, crewmates very carefully not concerned about him because as he liked to point out, he was fine.

He just couldn't seem to keep himself occupied. He had already increased his time in the gym; that had been his first step in attempting to deal with the dreams and insomnia. Running was a dangerous time waster, because it allowed his thoughts to drift. They never drifted anywhere pleasant, and there was only so hard he could push himself. Weights were some better, requiring concentration and inconsistent exertion, but when the sleeplessness was at its worst he couldn't risk an accident with the free weights. After he accidentally nailed Sergeant Rodriguez sparring, even that was touch and go. That was the problem with being on a new ship - back on the Daedalus, he'd had friends. On the Apollo it was everyone for him or herself, those bonds hadn't formed yet, and everyone was giving Dave a wide berth on the social front due to the rumors about that last trip to Atlantis. Caldwell's report or not, there were a lot of whispers about who had done what during that week in Pegasus, and the handful of Daedalus crewmen who'd transferred all faced a cold shoulder from those coming out of the SGC who thought they'd been playing hooky when it came to the fight against the Ori. Late at night, Dave considered tracking down one of the others who'd come over from the Daedalus, but he always chickened out. The last thing he needed was someone confirming that he really was fucked in the head.

By the time his six-month leave came around, Dave was jittery whenever he wasn't at his post. He tried working out more, took to doing laps of the primary passenger deck in the middle of the night when the insomnia got to be too bad, even joined the hand-to-hand classes the marines held for the sheer amusement of knocking Air Force guys down a few pegs. He even cut down on the coffee, scaling back to two cups a day, and then just the one cup. Nothing worked for long. The only solution seemed to be time at the helm, somewhere he knew that people were watching and cared what he did, and there was only so much of that he could wrangle - even pulling rank only landed so many shifts. He knew why the shift limits were in place, and objectively he could agree that they made sense, but he needed the distraction, the focus.

It was bad enough that one of the first things he did on leave was something he'd sworn not to do - see a shrink. He was smart about it, waiting until he'd gotten to San Francisco and checked into his hotel before making use of one of the computers in the lobby to track down someone who fit his needs. Most importantly, he needed a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. He had two weeks, that wasn't enough time to do the "talk about your feelings" crap. He didn't need to talk, he just needed the damn tension to go away. If he talked to Major Wilson, he's be grounded before he got ten words into the conversation, and that was the last thing he needed. What he needed was a stranger, someone he could explain the basic problem to and get something to make it better, just to hold him over until whatever it was worked through his system and he was back to normal.

Explaining his situation, walking that fine line between giving just enough information to get what he needed without sharing enough to cause problems, was more difficult than he'd expected. By the time he returned to the SGC, he had a three month supply of Xanax, with a follow-up appointment scheduled with Dr. Menaster which he had to attend before he could get a refill (and which he had no intention of needing).

Good intentions or not, Dave was back three months later. The Xanax helped, had been helping before he'd ever gone back to the SGC, but it didn't do enough. He was fine, when he was at the helm. He was decent - not fine, but not dysfunctional - when he was helping out down in Engineering, learning to do progressively more complicated maintenance on the ship he had once piloted without thought to the complexity of its upkeep. But despite the complaints of the non-comms, there wasn't always something that needed doing, and he couldn't tolerate the free time. Nominally, he was fourth in the chain of command in case of emergency; functionally, he would be commanding this ship right around the time it crashed into the scrap heap. While he could possibly have pushed to sit the third watch more often than his current twice a week, there was a limit to how much attention he wanted to draw to himself.

The problem with not actually being able to tell Dr. Menaster anything that wasn't buried four coats of semi-matte gloss was that it meant that the man made absolutely useless suggestions. The most glaring example being the thought that Dave should consider a change of career; Dave had laughed in his face (and promptly apologized). He could certainly put in for a transfer when his tour on the Apollo ended, but what good could it possibly do? The only place he wasn't having problems was when he was haunting the bridge, whatever the fuck was wrong with him could only get worse if he got himself grounded. Added to that was the fact that if not him, then who? The program needed people like him, people who'd seen just what the brass was capable of and what the universe could throw at you. People who were already just that little bit broken, because there was no point making someone else live through the things he'd seen if he could still do the job. And Caldwell had fallen on his sword for them, making sure to get anyone who needed off the Daedalus out before the disciplinary board had grounded his ass like a hunk of enriched uranium. Dave couldn't just throw that kind of sacrifice away, whether or not it had been the honorable thing for a CO to do - the mess hadn't been Caldwell's fault, either.

In short, there was no way to explain his situation to a civilian, so he didn't bother to try. If things had been different, he might have taken the advice and sought a change of scenery. As it was, he picked up a second prescription to go with the first and caught the next flight back to Colorado Springs. It wasn't an ideal situation, but there was something to be said for the best of bad options. He was still functional, and he'd keep doing whatever he had to in order to stay functional until they grounded him. It was the least he could do, after all; his father had always told him to pay his debts.

~ Finis ~