I realized I'd fallen in love with Daniel in a single flashpoint second of revelation over beer and lies. Trying to say with my eyes what I couldn't say with my lips, and knowing Daniel was only hearing the words designed to drive him away. I'd looked up, intending to say something sparse and cutting -- get him away, get him out, before I said something I shouldn't and blew it all to hell -- and I saw Daniel frowning back at me with this little faint line creasing his forehead, and I caught my breath and tumbled headfirst into realization. Even now I've got to wonder, if that damn undercover mission hadn't happened right in the middle of that damn awful year, would things have been different?

But in my heart of hearts I know better. Daniel's openhearted and generous and caring, and I came close to saying something more than a few times. Nothing overt, nothing specific. Just a few hints here and there. And every time I came up against the boundaries of the conversation I'd rehearsed a thousand ways to Sunday, I just choked. Couldn't do it. Couldn't even start it. Not even when he was dying, not even when he was already dead.

Daniel's straight, you see. Told you that a few times before. And he's openhearted and openminded, and he would have listened straight through, and he would have said something about being flattered and something about being honored and something about how he loved me too. Just not like that. And from that point on, nothing would have ever been the same again, and I wasn't in love enough with honesty to want to buy it at the cost of the little bits I could have.

Then I woke up one Tuesday morning and found that I was fifteen years old again. Surprise. Congratulations, O'Neill: you get a do-over. And all it costs you is your life, your name, your history, and all your old scars. Cheap at twice the price, right?

Sgt. Browning up in Records let me pick my own new name. "Something you can train yourself to answer to quickly," he'd suggested. I hadn't wanted to tell him that I'd been building backup identities longer than he'd been in the service, even; those were O'Neill's memories, not mine. Even by then I'd been making the distinction. Bobby meant well, and he was doing his best not to treat me like a freak; it helped that he'd been with the SGC since day one, and knew this was far from the freakiest thing that had ever happened.

And that's how I became Jonathan Daniel Nielson. Emancipated minor, SGC "orphan", recipient of a modest but livable sum of money per month from the Air Force out of the SGC's Blanche Dubois fund. Carter had been the one to name it, of all people, back before I'd found out where she'd been keeping her sense of humor. Teal'c had gotten it immediately; Daniel and I had needed an explanation. Well, I was back to depending on the kindness of strangers, and I wasn't above benefitting from the budget I'd spent -- O'Neill had spent -- seven years trying to protect.

I lasted four weeks in the Colorado Springs public school system, and two of them were just because it took Bobby a little while to fake up my "school records" well enough to show that I'd already filled all their graduation requirements despite my alleged age. Let me tell you, it's tough as hell to keep your dates of birth straight when you've technically got three of 'em: the one you've been rattling off for fifty-three years, the one you and Bobby came up with because it sounded good, and the one where you actually got taken out of the vat you were grown in.

If Loki used a vat to grow me. Not sure. Not particularly interested in finding out, either.

I let O'Neill think I was going to stay put. I knew me well enough to know that if I'd known I was planning on making a run for it, I'd've done something to stop me. Does thinking about this shit make your head hurt as much as it makes my head hurt? Yeah, don't think about it too hard; you'll have an aneurism. Let him think I was going to crawl off into a corner and lick my wounds; I did my best to make him believe it. Didn't tell him about the offer Hammond had made, to keep me on as a consultant. Didn't take the offer, either. Clean breaks are the best.

Didn't tell him about the offer Thor had made, to bring me along with him and let me keep being useful to the Asgard, let me stay Out There instead of stuck on Earth. That would have given him apoplexy. I wasn't interested in spending the rest of my new life on an Asgard cruiser any more than I was interested in staying tethered to the SGC. O'Neill was there to do the things that needed doing. I had a chance at the shiny brass ring: new life. New chances. New mistakes, instead of being defined by the old ones.

Maybe you don't realize how much of an appeal that was to a man who'd spent thirty-five years being bound by the next logical thing. Daniel once called me a product of my environment. He hadn't meant it as a compliment; we'd been toe-to-toe and yelling at the time. Bitch of it was, I knew what he meant; I'd just never been able to change it. Or hadn't wanted to change it. Too much work, too little reward. Too many things to make the old way of doing things easier. If I was going to change, I needed to do it on my own terms.

Yeah, I know I'm making it sound easy. Gimme a little bit of revisionist history, okay? I think I've earned it. Truth is, it was harder than anything I've ever done before, and I've done a damn lot of hard things in my life. I threw a bunch of changes of clothing into a beat-up old duffel bag and stuck out my thumb on the side of the road, and I started a journey to figure out where Jack O'Neill ended and JD Nielson began. And it took me places I never thought I'd end up going, from a Buddhist temple up in the Pacific Northwest to a little soup kitchen in Wichita, Kansas to a tattoo parlor on the Block up in Baltimore, and the one thing all my answers had in common and the one thing it took me forever to be able to face was that I'd spent my life defining myself by what other people needed from me, and when you took all that away, I couldn't tell you what was left.

Sounds simple. Obvious, even, if you knew me, I guess. I'd heard it thrown in my face enough damn times; none of it was new. I'd just never wanted to face it before. Never had enough reason to. And I'd told myself I was leaving to find out who I was, but I came to realize that before I could figure out who I was, I had to spend a lot of time figuring out who I wasn't, or who I was once upon a time and didn't want to be anymore, and that part was what took me a couple of months and some damn long hard work.

And the final answer wound up being that I didn't want to be Jack O'Neill anymore.

Yeah, I know it sounds like sour grapes. But if there's any one person in this universe who understands Jack O'Neill, it's me. He made a bunch of choices really early on, and he spent years and years watching those choices fossilize and trap him in place. He's not a bad guy. He's doing the best he can do with a hell of a burden, and he's carrying a hell of a lot of weight because nobody else will and someone needs to remember, and all he's really trying to do is serve a whole bunch of complicated truths. But maybe it's the distance that comes from not having your old life anymore, and maybe it's the distance that comes from being able to realize you aren't as vested in the comfortable lies we all tell ourselves as you used to be. Either way. All I know is, Jack O'Neill is desperately, quietly, fundamentally unhappy, and he'd rather die than admit it, even to himself.

'Course, I could be lying to you about that part. I'm not, as it happens. But I could be.

Anyway.

Took me a few months to realize just how much of an opportunity I really had going for me. I mean, how many people get to reinvent their lives with no trace of the old one left behind? I was on a beach in Atlantic City, sitting on the sand and watching the sun rise, when I made myself a promise. I wasn't going to hate the poor bastard for having all the things I'd had to give up. I loved Daniel, and I loved Carter, and I loved Teal'c, and I loved the joy of knowing what I was doing every day of my life was keeping my country, my planet, safe. But the price of having all those things to love was the weight of having to serve them, and I was happy to let O'Neill carry that weight for us both.

He'd take care of it. I knew he would. He wouldn't know what to do with himself if he didn't. I wouldn't have known what to do with myself if I hadn't woken up one morning to find that the choice had been taken out of my hands. And I could have followed in his footsteps, but even as I'd been realizing what had been done to me, I'd been seeing the tiny little glimmer of hope, of opportunity, lurking underneath. I'll never stop missing the good parts of living O'Neill's life -- and there were a whole damn lot of good parts of O'Neill's life -- but I don't think I'll ever start missing the bad ones.

I said, O'Neill said, to Daniel once, about a tragedy I don't particularly want to explain: I'll never forgive myself, but I can forget sometimes. And that was true at the time I said it. Maybe that's the biggest difference between me and O'Neill. Couldn't tell you how, couldn't tell you when, but somewhere along the line, I learned to forgive myself. Forgive him. For all of it.

Once I had that in place, everything else started to get easier.

See, the thing is -- I've known it for a while -- you can have one or the other: forgiveness, or forgetting. O'Neill tried forgetting, and it worked for him. For a little while. On and off. Until something reminded him, and a thousand unforgiven loose ends rose up to strangle him. Me, I thought I'd try the other way, and I knew -- couldn't tell you how, but I knew -- that the cost of forgiveness is memory.

So I put O'Neill's stories, our stories, under my skin, where nobody can see them but me and the people I let look. They're a map of old scars, a reminder of everything I promised myself I'd leave behind. I don't think there's another living soul who'd be able to read them all, just me and him. Daniel would be able to understand the words, but not what they stand for. And I'll carry them there until O'Neill's long turned to dust and I'm the only one of us who's left to remember. Call it the price I'm accepting in order to get the things I never knew I wanted.

I'll tell you someday, if you want. What each of them are. What each of them mean. Not now. It'd take too long, and just because I've accepted them doesn't mean it isn't still too soon to talk about them.

Too soon to talk about a lot of it. Just figuring out how to talk to myself about it took a hell of a lot of time, and just because I said I was going to leave O'Neill's bad habits behind doesn't mean it's easy.

And no, I didn't plan on you. On finding you. I didn't ask Carter to find you and Carter didn't ask me to keep tabs on you. I didn't lie to you; I never have. I came here for the exact reason I said: I needed someone to be the front, the face, for what I was planning on doing after I was done pulling out bits and pieces of my soul and facing old buried shit in the light of day. I didn't come here because you needed me or I needed you, not you specifically. I asked Carter to find me someone who'd left the program because I needed someone who had the cred to approach the powers that be, and I wanted to work with someone I didn't have to pretend around.

Turns out that person was you. Turns out you were another thing I never knew I wanted, and it took me a damn long time to be able to see that for what it was. A chance. You'd probably call it a blessing. I call it fucking terrifying.

Don't look at me like that. Yeah, I said terrifying. I don't think you know how much you scare someone who spent fifty-odd years skating by on comfortable self-delusion. I don't think you've got a self-delusional bone in your body, and you've got this thing going where you won't let anyone around you get away with it either. I made some choices about how I was going to handle things this time around, and I made some promises -- to myself, to the world around me, to whatever there is beyond what we can see, whatever name you want to put on it -- about never lying to myself again. And you call me on them. Every day, every minute, you look me in the eye and you hold me to all those promises you barely even know about. Because it's who you are.

I realized I'd fallen in love with Daniel while I was in the middle of lying to him. Kind of ironic, really, that I realized I was falling in love with you because you make me be the truth.

Couldn't tell you when I realized. A week ago, maybe two. Maybe longer. Maybe it was watching you face down your family and refuse to take the easy way out. Maybe it was realizing that we can fight like cats and dogs and still be okay again after. Maybe it was a little bit of everything all adding up all at once. Scares me to death, you know. It's this big needy pit in my chest, and I don't exactly have the best track record with things like these. You don't believe in the easy way out. And I don't want to believe in the easy way out, because I've done all this damn work already, but it's a long hard road still to go, and I'm going to be walking it for the rest of my life. Old habits die hard, right?

Two years of learning how to be honest with myself, bit by bit, piece by piece, and standing next to you it's like I don't get a minute to breathe, because I have to do it all the damn time. Not because of anything you do or anything you say. It's nothing you can change. It's nothing I'd want you to change, because it's so natural for you it's what made me fall for you. Everything inside me is still all stirred up and in progress and I've never, never been able to open my mouth and actually say this kind of shit, so you'd better realize what it means.

What we've got here, you and I, is exactly the kind of thing I would have run screaming from, when I was O'Neill. And it's exactly what I've spent the last two years preparing for, even though I didn't know it at the time. And I'd be terrified of losing it, of losing you, except for some damn reason I have this crazy suspicion that you can actually understand.

I don't want to hurt you. I don't ever want to hurt you. I'm going to, just like you're going to hurt me. Happened already, and I'm sorry for it. And I'll keep being sorry for it, and I'll keep working at it, and I'll keep making mistakes with you and I hope I'll keep learning from them. We're not perfect, and we're never going to be. We've both got a lot of old scars.

But I'm me now. Not him, me, and the mistakes are going to be mine. Not his. I'm going to backslide, and I'm going to drive you up the fucking wall. But I'm trying, and I'm never going to give up. You need me to talk more; I can do that. I'll remember to do that. Not gonna come easy, but for you I'll try. For us. Because there is an us, and it might scare me senseless, but you know what? I'm starting to think you might be exactly what I need.

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