Chapter Text
The unicorn danced with her. The damned unicorn, Ben thought. Dear god, every being in Andromeda had met his girl, except him. For the first time in his life, Ben felt jealousy as he heard Sheppard and Colin’s voices in the video. While they were getting to know this extraordinary woman, he was reeling from a disastrous showing in his final simulation of his officer’s testing.
He had steeled himself, as he always did by chanting his old mantra. It’s not real. It’s just a simulation. Just follow your training. It’s the logical thing to do.
It had worked until the Cornellian pirate scenario. Ben captained a ship alongside a Gorchan vessel. The two allies faced a Cornellian ship with prisoners from a planet with a known plague. The Gorchans intended to destroy the Cornellian ship and save potentially millions of innocent souls. All Ben had to do was get out of the way.
Until the leader held up a sobbing young girl, threatening to kill her if he didn’t step down and allow them to leave. Ben knew his orders. Just follow protocol. Follow your orders, he should have told himself. Instead his first thought was, “What would Elizabeth do?”. Then his mind had raced through a dozen possible scenarios to save the girl and he had nearly allowed the Cornellians to escape.
When the simulated pirate shot the little girl just before his ship exploded, Ben felt sick. He knew the best way to handle impossible, traumatic experiences was to simulate worst case scenarios beforehand in a controlled environment but he knew he had turned green and his bio sensors must have been off the chart.
In his post-test interview, he faced his father and Admiral O’Neal, an old family friend, and two instructors from the Academy. They had grilled him about that hesitation. He explained the scenarios he had run through his mind and apologized for not following orders immediately. He promised that it would not happen again.
One of the instructors had cautioned him, “We know these scenarios are terrible. We pray you never face an incident like this but the reason we practice is so that you know the correct response when the time comes and you don’t have time to think. You simply react appropriately.”
He had noted an odd look between the two admirals and wondered what they thought as they had years of captaining experience between them. They had been silent though and Ben felt like an untried rookie.
He sipped a healthy drought of aged brandy and looked at the photos of his cousins with Kaitlyn Harrison. They looked like they did in pictures with Cicely, his youngest sister. Besides frustration, he felt a bit pleased. He was happy that his family adored her. He just couldn’t believe he was the last one to meet her.
“Someday,” he promised her. “Someday I swear we will meet.”