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Signing the contract is easy, just writing his name on a dozen pages.
Telling Mrs McDouglas next door of his absence and if she can check his house sometimes is easy as well, and he gets some homemade cookie for it.
So, is filling a demand to forward his mail to the military base he’ll be living at and leaving from soon enough.
But the easiest is to tell nothing to the 118. After all, it’s been four months since their last contact, so telling them at this point would just be like telling random people on the bus. They’re just colleagues. Maybe even strangers now.
Either way, it’s easy not to text any of them and to get the house ready to be empty for a year.
He turns the water off and creates a basic mode for his central AC and heating system so it keeps running every day. It would suck if it broke down once he got home because it had been stopped for twelve months.
He empties his fridge, which admittedly isn’t a big feat since he hasn’t been eating all that well in the past year anyway, and he fills all his cupboards with little bags of lavenders and other plants to avoid insects and stale smells to set too much.
The next morning, he leaves his car in his garage and goes to the airport with an Uber.
Leaving Los Angeles is easy. He made sure of it when he blasted his life almost a year ago after all.
The flight to Atlanta and then to Dothan is as uneventful as it gets, with the only thing being the too-long layover in Atlanta. He keeps busy around the airport, walking around before buying a book, some mystery story that he solves three chapters in and that he knows Athena would absolutely wreck if it ever happened in real life back home, but it keeps him distracted until his second domestic flight is called.
It doesn’t take him too long to find his bag once he lands and then get into an Uber once again.
Getting processed once he arrives on site takes almost as long as the entire flight there, but the windows in the registry office are so big that he can see choppers flying around. He hears people shouting through them, and they even vibrate each time a jet passes overhead. It relaxes him in ways he hasn’t anticipated.
Or maybe he should have, after all he just signed for a year, after training, of orders and of not needing to think for too long, which should be relaxing enough. Maybe his body is just anticipating it. His thoughts have not been a great place to be in for the past year, anyway. He won’t miss them much once the exhaustion of training and operations set and keeps his head empty, or so he hopes.
Still, when she gives him the file for next of kin and emergency contact, he doesn’t hesitate long.
They haven’t dated in almost a year, haven’t talked in months, but still, he’d rather his house and everything he owns goes to Evan than to anyone else the administration could find as a natural next of kin. There is no way in hell that Thomas Kinard Sr. would get one more thing out of his son.
He gives back the paper and after the secretary scans it and saves it in his file or wherever it is that they keep this kind of stuff, he finally gets the key to his own room. A small luxury he gets thanks to his pilot status and the fact that he’s here with a public servant contract and not as a private citizen, thank god for small mercies. The room isn’t that big: a single bed, a nightstand and a cupboard, with a small bathroom attached to it. More than enough for the six weeks of training he’ll spend here before his one-year contract actually starts, and he’s shipped somewhere else.
Failing back in line, following orders is easier than it should be. Not that it’s all that surprising. He’s been following his father's orders until he was 18, before following any of his superiors’ orders during the five years he spent in the army, and then years of Gerrard didn’t help either. Harbor hasn’t been too stuck up with orders; of course people obey the captain there but giving ideas or opinions is appreciated, encouraged even, if it can help save even just one more life.
Screaming “yes, sir” becomes natural again in the time he spends at Fort Rucker. It might be helped by the dozens of people around him screaming it as well.
It’s even easy to say no to the puppy-eyed boy, barely a man, that tries to offer himself to him four weeks in. He has short hair, too short for Tommy to run his fingers through, and his leg - to-chest ratio is not what he’s been craving for months. But the boy takes it gracefully, and sticks around when Tommy gets his meals in the mess hall.
But he lied to himself. He thought that training would exhaust him, which it does, but he thought his brain would leave him in peace. He thought that the trip to Jordan would get him so focused and worried that his brain would only handle what’s in front of it, but as he drops his bag on a cot bed in the middle of the desert, he has to face the fact that Evan is still very much there. That for all that his body is exhausted, that his brain just makes him move forward, scream “yes sirs” and whatnot, he still can’t even free himself from these two blue eyes, even a year later.
Well, fuck easy then.