Breakdown

***

1. Elizabeth would like nothing more than to completely and utterly obliviate the day after her senior prom from her long-term memory. In one of the biggest cliche's of her life, she'd lost her virginity in a room of the hotel where the dance had been held. It hadn't been fun, but he'd held her afterwards and that had been worth it.

They woke up the next morning to the sound of pounding on the door. When she opens it - still slightly tipsy from the smuggled beer - her brother is standing there, eyes wild.

It's still humiliating to think about.

2. Elizabeth wants to forget the day of her father's funeral. It's a bright, sunny day in October. One of those beautiful fall days where the air is crisp and clean, like an apple, and it's almost warm enough to go without a jacket. A last hurrah for summer's ghost that would, at any other time, make you smile and want to go stare at trees.

She remembers the scratchy feel of wollen gloves on her hands and the way her face felt dry and tight. She'd been cried out by the time they'd lowered his coffin into the ground. She wants to forget the hollow feeling in her chest because it was the first time she'd ever, ever felt that.

3. There are three weeks in her late twenties that Elizabeth wants to never remember. Ever. She'd been in Kosovo in a UN Peacekeeping task force that had gotten 'misplaced' in the Balkans. During that period of time that it was made clear to her just how brutal people could be to each other. Men, women, children. The cruelty and death blur in her mind into one long nightmare.

She'd gladly strike that time from her memory except for the part where she knows it's important that she lived that time. So she copes with the details.

But if she could forget just one thing, it would be the night she spent curled around a little girl who'd been brutally raped by an entire genocide squad after watching the execution of her mother, sisters, younger brother, and most of her cousins. Trying to use the frail shelter of her body to give the girl some measure of safety, all the while knowing that there's nothing she could do to make it better.

She'll remember that girl screaming - feverish and stil bleeding - until the day she dies.

4. There was a day in Antarctica when all the generators failed at once. It was one of those freak things that happens at every government installation. Theoretically, the new shiny bases are the ones with the best funding, and this one had intesely high security and a supremely competant staff. Of course all the generators failed the day before the larger shipment of extra winter clothing was due to arrive.

It had been a nightmare of administrative proportions. She'd had nearly eighty people stuck in sub-zero temperatures and fifteen different 'geniuses' working on getting everything going. It had been Rodney McKay's first day and it had just been icing on the cake that he'd managed to alienate most of the civil engineering staff in one fell rant.

Mostly she just remembers the cold and the yelling and ending the whole thing curled up in her room trying not to cry.

5. Four days of no sleep accented by the sky falling. Sending men and women off to die. Watching John Sheppard actively try to commit suicide to just buy them that much more time. Watching Lieutenant Ford fall, motionless, in the infirmary. Knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she and everyone she cares about is going to die. She wants to forget it.

Mostly because she realizes, face turned up towards her adopted sky, that this is the reality Teyla and Ronon and every person she meets in this galaxy has been living with for thousands of years.

Somehow, the nuclear arms race doesn't seem so bad now.

-fin-

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