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Spencer wasn't trying to look.
People here were private, yeah, and he was trying not to push New Guy status too much. But he couldn't help but notice--and at the beginning of August Mary got the pictures from her wedding back and he walked into the locker room at the end of the day and his CO was rolling stickytack to add another picture to the inside of his locker door. The five of them: Mary in her dress and veil and tiara and the rest of the team on either side of her, Jacob in a very nice suit and the other three in their Blues, all of them grinning at the camera.
And he wasn't trying to look but Benton caught him at it anyway and said, "You're my fourth team." Which was kind of permission.
Some of the pictures (top-right) were Benton's wife and children.
The faces in the other pictures were explained by the posed team portraits. "First one," Benton said, pointing. "I was Kovacek's second-in-command. Almeida and Greene. Stan's in Washington now. Almeida cracked; Greene died of wounds received." His hand moved down. "So I got a brand-new team. Grogan, Tarkman, and Winters."
"We were cadets together, sir," Spencer said quietly. I didn't hear he'd died.
"Saved my life when we were attacked by Jaffa on Latona. Tarkman and Winters died. Good officers. She had a three-year old." There was no mistaking Benton's face--the pain and the loss, there. "Carl stayed on with me for the next team. That's when I picked up Paul." Sure enough, there Maricelli was, in the next group shot. "Took Paul three months to figure out Carl was hiding a heroin addiction. I didn't spot a damn thing. That's when we were with Jensen and Martin. Jensen tried to strike a deal with the Trust; he's in Leavenworth right now. Besigye came in to pinch-hit, hit his twenty and retired. Martin's on Atlantis. We picked up Jake and Mary within a month of each other, and they're so tight because they got thrown into the madhouse together."
Spencer felt a little cold, like he did at funerals; he'd just listened to a litany of those gone before and the names had fallen off the Major's lips like rain. Death was so common here, and the hidden, private losses hit him, suddenly, and the unfairness that they died and were broken and nobody knew why.
"We're ahead of the curve right now," Benton said quietly, like the mathematical calculations of time were a cause for optimism. "Paul's been with me four years now, Jake and Mary two." He picked up the wedding photograph, by the edges, and pressed it into place at the bottom of the group shots.
And then Spencer was a part of it, his name written on the bottom of a long scroll of a hard duty and a hard truth. He had utterly sufficient warning of how hard it was going to be on him and it was a measure of him as an officer and a man whether he picked it up. But at the same time--it was not a test designed to be passed. You gave what you had (like Cam) and when it got too much for you, you set it down again.
Best and hardest job anybody'd ever given him.
Then Benton closed the door, quietly, and locked it up again.