The first thing Cam thinks, when it becomes clear that Jackson's missing and won't be back anytime soon, is: O'Neill's going to kill me.

But a day goes by, and then another, and after a few weeks it becomes nothing but a soft background fear, running unnoticed in the pauses and spaces between all their search and rescue attempts. It's there when they're combing half the galaxy for some sign of what might have happened to Jackson, it's there when Landry orders them back to work on some weapon against the Ori, it's there when Cam closes the door to Landry's office behind him and spends forty-five minutes trying to argue Landry into keeping them on the search. It's there when Sam gets gut-shot, and it's there when he's trying, frantically, to keep her alive long enough to get her to the doctors and get her and all of Thilana's people to safety, and it's there when they get Sam home and Vala brings out the Goa'uld healing device to get Sam out of bed and back into fighting trim faster than the sixteen weeks of recovery time Dr. Lam's predicting.

By the time Sam disappears from an isolation lab in the middle of a phase-generator experiment and just never comes back to visible again, it's almost a relief when Vala, pale and uncertain, comes to relieve Cam's watch in the empty room where they're hoping Sam still is, with O'Neill standing behind her. "I brought a guest," Vala says, forcing a smile.

General O'Neill isn't smiling. He's looking around himself with the air of someone who's been there, done that, and still doesn't want to understand it. He's in faded jeans and flannel, but he wears them like they're his Class As anyway. Cam leaps to his feet, remembering only a fraction of a second too late that O'Neill doesn't like when people remind him of his rank. "Sir," he says, and stops before he blurts out I'm sorry I lost them both for you.

Jackson's been gone for two months. (Two months, twelve days, and fourteen hours.) Sam's been gone for four days. Vala is watching him with knowing eyes, and he wonders -- again, still -- how much she knows and how much she only suspects.

"At ease, Mitchell," O'Neill says, with only a hint of annoyance.

"Sir," Cam repeats, and settles himself down to perfect parade rest. He can feel O'Neill's eyes flick over him. There's a band of braided leather underneath Cam's boot, around his ankle, that belongs to Jackson and always will. He knows O'Neill knows it's there. O'Neill didn't come when Jackson disappeared. He's here now.

I'm sorry, Vala's tiny wince seems to say. She's got a hand in the crook of O'Neill's elbow, like she's trying to claim him as her own. (One good con artist recognizes another, Jackson had said, watching O'Neill and Vala with their heads together talking in low voices when they'd first met, and then hadn't explained.) Eight months ago Cam would have seen her as trying to make a pass, trying to ingratiate herself; now he thinks she's trying to distract O'Neill's attention away from Cam and onto herself. He and she have never talked about it, but there's always been a hint of connection there: two strangers to the party, weighed against bonds that had been forged in hell. But Cam's a big boy; he can stand on his own two feet.

"This where it happened?" O'Neill asks, which is a stupid fucking question. They wouldn't be holding vigil over the wrong room. But Vala nods anyway, and O'Neill says, to empty air, "I'll take care of things, Carter. Don't worry about it."

Some guys can make talking to imaginary friends or invisible teammates look natural. Cam's not one of them. He's not surprised that O'Neill is. "Mitchell, with me," O'Neill says, and turns on his heel to stride out.

Vala offers to join them with nothing more than a flick of her eyes and a flutter of one hand, but Cam shakes his head and follows alone. He's lost two of O'Neill's team, and they're always going to be O'Neill's team, and Cam's not sure if it hurts so badly because he knows he fucked up somehow or because the two who are missing are the two he (loves) needs the most.

He's expecting an inquest, an inquisition, but all O'Neill does is say, his voice surprisingly mild, "What's it take for a guy to get an invitation to dinner around here, Mitchell?"

"Um," Cam says, and then kicks himself for sounding like an idiot. "I'm on until nineteen hundred, sir."

"You're clear," O'Neill says. "I had a conversation with Hank."

Cam closes his eyes and accepts his fate. If O'Neill wants to get him off the base and make sure nobody ever finds the body, well, there's not much Cam can do to stop him. "In that case, sir," he says.

"Why, I'd love to," O'Neill says. "I'll drive."

And O'Neill leads him down to the changing room, and O'Neill stands in the hallway outside while Cam puts on his civvies, and O'Neill walks him up through the maze of checkpoints and sign-outs necessary to get out of the Mountain, nodding to everyone they pass who wants a moment of O'Neill's time. O'Neill leads him across the parking lot to the SUV in visitor's parking, and O'Neill climbs into the driver's seat and waits while Cam gets himself situated in the passenger's seat, and the whole damn time Cam is waiting for the other shoe to drop.

When it doesn't happen, when the car's halfway down 115 and O'Neill hasn't said a word, Cam says, "We're doing everything we can to get them back."

He could kick himself for the inanity of it, because of course O'Neill would know they're (he's) doing everything possible, but O'Neill doesn't even take his eyes off the road. "I know you are," he says.

Cam blinks. There's no recrimination in O'Neill's tone, no accusations. O'Neill doesn't sound worried, or nervous, or even tired. He just sounds calm, like this is any day ever.

Cam wonders, suddenly, if O'Neill knows he's sleeping with Sam. He knows O'Neill knows he's sleeping with Jackson. From all Cam can tell of the man, O'Neill has only ever wanted three things out of him: that Cam take care of Jackson, that Cam do the job, and that Cam keep his personal life from getting in the way of doing it. He wonders if O'Neill resents the fact that Cam also has the three things O'Neill's always wanted: Jackson, Sam, and SG-1. If O'Neill looks at him and only sees that Cam has everything O'Neill's ever given up.

The late-summer sunshine stabs through the windshield and pierces Cam's eyes, and he wishes he hadn't lost his last pair of sunglasses last week. He wishes he'd brought Vala along with them, because Vala is excellent at translating silences. He wishes he'd been the one to tell O'Neill that Jackson was missing, rather than leaving it for Sam to do. He wishes he knew where they're going, or why O'Neill is here, or what he's supposed to be doing or saying to make this even close to right.

He's almost not surprised when he recognizes the neighborhood they're in. O'Neill parks on the street in front of Sam's house and strides up the walkway without waiting to see if Cam follows. By the time Cam gets his brain in gear and gets up the walkway himself, O'Neill has unlocked the door with a key he doesn't need to search his keyring to find, and Cam stands in the foyer and feels like an idiot waiting to see what O'Neill's doing.

"You can't let Teal'c take care of this kind of thing," O'Neill says, almost conversationally. "He always forgets the water mains."

"Sir?" Cam asks -- he's going to think that's the only word you know.

O'Neill makes a little gesture towards Sam's utility room. "Carter and I got stuck on a Goa'uld mothership for three weeks once. Teal'c and Daniel took care of closing up the houses. They forgot about the water. Came home to find everything had frozen; I had to replace half the pipes. Cost me a fortune."

Cam blinks, twice, and a few pieces fall into place. He came home from his little vacation with the Sodan last year to find his apartment's refrigerator and freezer standing open and empty, unplugged. The air hadn't smelled musty. The heat had been off. He'd assumed someone from the SGC had contacted his landlord, and building maintenance had sent someone in once a week to air the place out a bit. Now he knows he was wrong.

"So don't forget the water," O'Neill says, as though he's imparting some vital piece of intel, and heads into the utility room to shut off the water mains. His voice trails back to reach Cam's ears. "This time of year, you can get away with just shutting it off; you don't have to drain the pipes. Another month, though, and you'll have to come back over and clear the lines. Don't forget the refrigerator and the dishwasher."

"I won't," Cam says, so quietly he knows O'Neill can't hear him, and fights the urge to lean against the wall and close his eyes. Sam hasn't been gone long at all. The house still smells like her. If he turns his head, he could see the living room couch where they'd had sex last week, wild and tender all at once, Sam digging her nails into the skin of his ass to pull him more tightly inside her.

He doesn't turn his head. Instead he follows O'Neill as the man walks through Sam's house, closing windows here, turning down the heat there. "Water the plants every three or four days," O'Neill says, and "once a week, open all the windows and leave them open for an hour or so," O'Neill says, and "turn on the water, flush all the toilets, let the kitchen sink run for five minutes or so," O'Neill says, and Cam follows along behind and listens to O'Neill tell him all the ways to prepare for Sam to be gone for months and still come home to a house that's waiting for her to return. He wonders what kind of a bond someone must have to fly halfway across the country just to close up a house himself instead of leaving someone closer to do it, and as soon as the thought occurs to him, he lets it go, because he knows damn well what kind of a bond they have and he's upset at himself for not thinking of it first.

O'Neill doesn't seem to be holding it against him, though. He's downright chatty, full of tips and instructions, and Cam feels like his head's stuffed through with orders masquerading as advice. At least O'Neill is keeping it all business. He hasn't said a word about Jackson, about that night months ago when he saw Cam kneeling and needy, about choices Cam might have made or had made for him. He hasn't said a word about the pieces of Cam's clothing scattered on Sam's bedroom floor.

They wind up in Sam's kitchen, Cam holding the trash bag while O'Neill goes through the contents of her refrigerator and throws out anything that will spoil. There isn't much, but watching the process, Cam realizes why Sam never keeps any food in her house; he wonders how many cartons of eggs and milk have had to be thrown out over the years for her to have just stopped buying them. He wonders how long it'll take him to learn the lesson too. He's almost started to relax against the surreality of it all, almost filed the evening's activity under "SG-1, weird behavior of," when O'Neill says, out of the blue, "The only way you probably could have stopped him would have been to shoot him."

Him. Jackson. And suddenly it all comes crashing down on Cam -- every last fucking minute of the past two months (twelve days and sixteen hours) of waiting and wondering and hoping -- and he looks down (because he can't look at O'Neill) and sees that his hands are shaking against the dark plastic.

"We left him for dead," Cam says, and something about the way he hears himself say it makes him realize that he's been waiting for penance and absolution.

"It's Daniel," O'Neill says. "He's got a way of surprising you sometimes."

Something in Cam's chest hurts. He realizes it's the knowledge that no matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries, O'Neill is always going to have gotten there first and probably done it better. It's the knowledge that there are parts of Jackson, of Sam, that Cam will never see, no matter how much of himself he offers up in return. It's the knowledge that O'Neill can leave, but he'll never be gone, and Cam is never going to understand more about O'Neill than what he already knows now.

He wonders why O'Neill went to Washington. He wonders what O'Neill and Jackson do (did) on those weekends Jackson goes (went) to visit. He knows he'll never get more of an answer than his best educated guess.

"I wouldn't have stopped him," Cam says. If I'd been there. If I'd known. It's the piece he hadn't even managed to confess to Sam before she'd disappeared, before she'd left him too. He knows he would have stood there watching and let Jackson stick his head into the repository -- knowing what it would do to him, knowing it had nearly destroyed O'Neill's brain not once but twice, knowing it had taken the Asgard to save him both times, knowing there'd be no hope for a similar escape clause for Jackson. He knows if he'd been in that cave when Jackson got the idea, he would have registered no more than a token protest.

He's just not sure if it would have been because it was the right thing to do, the best thing to do, or because he's conditioned to listen when Jackson tells him what's going to happen.

Cam's been waiting for penance and for absolution, and he can't think of any way he could possibly receive either. Maybe what happened to Sam is his punishment. Maybe that day in that cave, he told whoever's watching over them that he was willing to sacrifice something he loves in exchange for an advantage they need, and the universe is going to keep trying to take him up on it until someday it succeeds in making him sacrifice everything.

"Good," O'Neill says. He's not looking at Cam; he's looking at the inside of Sam's refrigerator, empty by now, containing nothing worth the level of attention O'Neill is providing to it. "Means you're not making the same mistakes I did. Make your own instead."

There's nothing Cam could possibly say to that, so he doesn't even try. O'Neill stares at the refrigerator wall for another minute longer, and Cam wonders what he's really seeing. By the time he shakes it off and turns back to Cam, though, his face is carefully neutral again. Not even a hint of old ghosts. Looking at it, though, Cam knows beyond all shade of a doubt that the Air Force and its regulations isn't the only reason O'Neill and Jackson aren't together. Maybe never will be. There are other reasons, and they're damn good ones. And just because it took seeing O'Neill alone, just because Cam's never going to know what those reasons are, doesn't mean that they aren't carved so deep on O'Neill's heart he'll never be able to get rid of the scars.

They stand there, looking at each other, and Cam thinks that after ten years of commanding SG-1, he's going to look like this too, this careful blend of tired and determined O'Neill carries so naturally that it looks as though it's always been there. He wonders how many houses O'Neill has had to close up in order to wear that face like a second skin. He wonders at what point O'Neill fell in love with Jackson, and whether or not O'Neill knows Jackson's in love with him in return, and suddenly Cam pities him and envies him Jackson's love in equal measure.

Either Cam's getting worse at concealing what he's thinking, or O'Neill is frighteningly able to read minds -- maybe both -- because O'Neill's eyes chill over for a second. Then they return to the mask of blank and genial O'Neill likes to wear for the people who haven't earned the right to see what lies behind it. "Come on," O'Neill says, taking the trash bag from Cam's hands and knotting its handles. "Past my dinnertime. You can buy me a beer."

"Sir," Cam says. No, that's not right. "Jack."

He waits until O'Neill looks at him, really looks at him, the kind of look that months ago would have left him nervous and awkward. It doesn't, now. Maybe he'll never be able to measure how far he's come until he's staring it in the face like this. He doesn't know how to say it right, so he'll say it the way he thinks O'Neill will understand. "I'll come back on Friday to water the plants." It works. He sees the knowledge creeping into O'Neill's face, that what he's really saying is I love them too.

O'Neill lets Cam lock the door behind them when they leave.

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