He lasts five weeks with the Riveras. Thirty-five days, to be precise, counting from the time that Hammond had explained they found someone to take him in and his other self had dropped him at the front steps of the Pueblo County High School.
He's known Ray Rivera (Captain, retired, medical discharge after a Goa'uld staff weapon had set him on fire and necessitated the rearrangement of some of his internal organs) for years. Ray'd been on SG-7. Good man. Program's full of 'em. He's pretty sure Ray thinks he's some alien orphan, brought to Earth in an act of mercy. He knows Ray can't look past the boy's face he's wearing to see the true face underneath; he knows nobody briefed Ray as to who (what) Ray and Nancy were sheltering.
The Riveras have a fourteen-year-old daughter named Jessica. She makes cow's eyes at him, lurking around the bedroom he's been given, dropping hints and flirtatious smiles, offering to show him around and make him feel welcome. Looking at her -- at the round soft shape of her face, still a child's; at the baby fat she hasn't yet managed to shed -- he can see the shape of this assumed life spreading out in front of him. The pretense he's contemplating. The twist and pull of needing to learn this culture, as alien as any culture Daniel ever dragged him into (kicking and screaming and grumping the whole way: a pretense for him to watch Daniel behind lowered lashes, watch the beauty of Daniel alight with discovery), builds and rises until he feels like he wants to choke with it.
It only takes him three days to realize that trying to force himself into this life would kill him, and he uses the other thirty-two days to plan his escape.
He packs light. They'd supplied him with everything a fifteen-year-old could or might need: clothing, laptop, one of those little gizmos that play music files, loaded with stuff his unseen benefactor carefully chose to get him up to speed on what your average Millennial's tastes are supposed to be. He's not sure who took care of the shopping. The clothes are ever-so-slightly too big for him, mostly around the waist and shoulders. He suspects that's a clue, that whoever did the shopping was expecting him to grow into the height and breadth he used to carry. Probably will. Won't be for a while, though. He thinks he remembers having been a late bloomer.
In the end, he culls it down to a single canvas backpack, surplus military issue he'd picked up on a trip into town, and when the weight settles across his shoulders, he feels the relaxing of something he hadn't even realized had been tense and knotted.
He leaves on a Monday, slipping out at 0430, before Ray or Nancy or Jessica wakes up. He slides out of the house on cat feet, soft and ghostly, shutting the front door behind him with the softest of clicks. Shoves the key back through the mail slot, with a note wrapped around it; it says thanks for the way-station. It'll make Ray wonder, but wonder is better than worry, and he's pretty sure General Hammond and the other guy won't come down too hard on Ray for losing him. He's pretty sure the other guy saw this coming anyway.
There's a Greyhound pickup eleven miles from the house, and it doesn't take him long to walk it, not at all. This body feels wrong -- awkward and gangly and ill-fitting, all elbows and legs and arms -- but it's going to have to become familiar, and it's got benefits he only barely remembers. The knees aren't busted and the scars don't pull and tug at him anymore and his lungs seem so vast inside his chest. Almost makes up for the downsides: the sea of chemicals in his bloodstream that shriek and shout at him, the lightning-quick emotional shifts that tell him go, do, take. Nature versus fucking nurture and biology isn't destiny, but his brain's in this body now, this teenager's miasma of hormones and impulses and --
Fucking hell, this is going to be miserable.
He grits his teeth and sets one foot after another, his eyes on his feet and his senses extended to the road around him, listening for cars, listening for any sign of pursuit. Takes him a while to realize the sun's coming up. Kinda pretty when he looks at it, all grey and purple and golden. He's crossed the galaxy a hundred times over and watched the sun rise on planets whose stars' light won't reach this solar system until long after humanity's gone -- dead or destroyed or just moved on -- and yet, it's been a long damn time since he stopped to take a look around his own backyard. Some kind of lesson there, maybe. It's a metaphor or a simile or some shit like that.
He waits until the clock in his head ticks over to 0545 before he pulls out the pre-paid cellphone he bought at the mall this weekend while Nancy was trying to talk Jessica out of some clothing disaster or another. Forty miles north, he knows, the other guy's sitting up in his bed (my bed, whispers the voice; my bed, my bedroom, my house, my life) and getting ready to start the day. Monday mornings are for paperwork. Unless there's a galaxy to be saving.
The other guy answers on the second ring, brisk and impatient. (Unfamiliar number on the caller ID, first thing in the morning, before coffee; he knows how much it makes him cranky, because up until six goddamn weeks ago, it made him cranky, and that way lies madness so he won't let himself think it.) "O'Neill," he says, and the undertone says fuck off and let me get back to whatever I was doing. He wonders if that's how he sounds to everyone else, if other callers can hear the thinly-veiled hostility, the currents of exhaustion that threaten to drag a listener under.
It's odd, hearing his own voice from outside his own head. Higher and thinner than he's used to. He'd be tempted to chalk it up to the shitty cell phone connection, except he remembers standing next to the other guy, each of them staring at the other, and the sound then had been just as wrong as it is now.
"It's me," he says, looking down at his feet, looking down at the grit and the gravel dotting the shoulder of Highway 50 in the early morning gloom. He doesn't need to identify himself. "Didn't wake you, did I?"
Useless question, and they both know it. He hasn't slept a minute past 0530 in years, and the fifteen minutes between waking up and getting out of bed is for steeling himself to face the day. There's a minute of quiet. "No," the other guy finally says. "I was up."
Unspoken, the statement: thought you said we shouldn't keep in touch. And they shouldn't; he knows that much, knows that if he's going to have any chance at all at pulling this off he's going to have to make the break quick and clean. It's why he's doing this. But he owes the other guy the courtesy of an explanation, because he knows damn well the other guy's the reason why he was in position to make this move in the first place. The other guy doesn't want to think about him, but doesn't want to cage him, either, and it was a choice between high school and a dark room somewhere where the NID boys had sway and the other guy wouldn't wish that fate on his worst enemy.
Okay. Maybe his worst enemy. But he's not the other guy's worst enemy, not with the other contenders there are for that title, and there might be a day when cordial relations between the two of them might make or break him.
So: "Taking a little bit of a sightseeing tour," he says. "Thought you might appreciate the heads up. The whole high school thing isn't working out for me."
There's a bit of a pause, and it's crazy, it's fucking crazy, to be able to hear himself (his other self) thinking, the tick-tock-tick of cards flipping over and doors opening and shutting. When the other guy speaks again, there's anger there, but under the anger is a hint of understanding, and he hears an echo of rueful acceptance beneath that. They'd both known the plan was a long shot, but the other guy had wanted to believe it would work -- believe he could be shuffled away quietly, integrated into a new life and a new worldview, off somewhere where he wouldn't be an endless embarrassment. Perpetual thorn in the side. So he'd put on his sunglasses and lied to the other guy's face, and they'd both known it for a lie the minute he'd pasted on that smile and tried to play normal, because there's nothing normal about this at all.
Weird, thinking there's someone out there, on the other end of the phone, someone who knows him so thoroughly and intimately to understand all the things he's not saying. Harder than he would have expected, even already, to consider how fucking crazy the other guy must find it. They've been different people for no more than six weeks already, and he can't tell if those six weeks feel like six hours or six fucking years.
"Heading anywhere in particular?" the other guy asks. "Or just running away from home?"
It punches him in the stomach, that careless thoughtless "home", because the room Ray and Nancy had given him had never been, would never have been, home. Slap in the fucking face. The other guy is sitting up in his bed, in his home, in his fucking life, and he's the one trudging down Highway 50 in foreign-feeling sneakers that are barely broken in and he's never going to see his home again.
But he reins in his temper, because it's not going to do him any good to scream and the anger won't get him anywhere. "I thought east," he says. "Maybe head back to Chicago for a while. Don't know yet. I won't keep in touch. Don't look for me."
"Wasn't planning on it," the other guy says, sharp and defensive.
He can tell the other guy has no idea what he said to provoke the anger. He wouldn't have known himself, six weeks ago, and realizing that is another punch in the stomach, because Daniel's been after him for years to look at things from the other point of view, put yourself in someone else's shoes for a change, Jack, and that almost makes him laugh, because he's in someone else's shoes now and he's walked a hell of a lot more than a mile in them.
Road to Damascus. Or maybe just to Pueblo.
He can also tell the other guy can hear the anger, simmering underneath the calm words, the fury that's been building and ebbing and building again for the past few weeks (every time he thinks about what he's lost, about what he has to build again). He can feel the other guy's bemusement, can understand the other guy's bemusement (what the fuck did I say, why the fuck is he so angry), and for a minute it's double vision, like he's standing on both sides of the phone, looking at both sides of the story. Only a second. Blink and it's gone.
Christ, he feels like he's going crazy, like he's being pulled in two different directions, like what was is facing down what might be.
Like he's two separate people.
It feels like his eyes opening, like he's been struck with a blinding brilliant light. (Why dost thou persecute me?) How many people ever get to really see what they look like to someone else? How many people ever have that grinding screech of the five-car pileup, the re-focusing of perception until self becomes other and all of the thoughtless careless things you say and do suddenly come through loud and clear?
Christ, I'm an asshole, he thinks, sudden and pointed, and hard on the heels of that thought, an emphatic rejection: not me, him. And he has reason to be.
It's the first time he can remember thinking of the other guy as other, not some twisted version of self, and he stops walking and stares at the sunrise and breathes, slowly and carefully.
"Don't fuck things up for me," the other guy says, and the man's gotta be missing the fact that he's undergoing the personal revelation prime time special, but it's all right, because he wouldn't have expected the other guy to be able to pick up on it. "Don't fuck things up for any of us."
"I won't," he says, absently, still caught by the weight and enormity of what he's struggling with. A Jeep passes by, slows when the driver sees him. He lifts a hand to wave, making sure to make it nothing to see here, move along and not hey, can you stop and give me a hand.
"Good." The other guy's voice sharpens again, takes on the cadence of this is how it will be, and why hasn't he ever noticed it before, that stubborn implacable dictation? Like wishing makes it so, like speaking the future will make that future come into being, and he's never realized, would never have realized, until this moment. "I'm going to hang up now, and you're going to do whatever you're going to do, and when they come and ask me if I have any idea where you might have gone, I'm going to tell them I have no fucking clue. I'm sure they'll trip-wire your records. I'll undo what I can, but stay off the grid as much as possible."
It's a generous gift, and one he hadn't been expecting. He'd planned on dropping out entirely, disappearing into the vast and varied realm of the invisible underclass, until he could find a small town with poor recordkeeping and locate a birth certificate for a child roughly his age whose death had gone unrecorded. Pick up the new identity, establish an unassailable trail. Without the resources of the SGC, without Sgt. Browning and his cheerful genius at forgery, it would have been a slower process. Having the other guy at the other end flexing talents he knows damn well that others don't know the other guy has will help.
"Sounds good," he says, because he's pretty fucking sure the other guy won't take thank you and he's not quite sure he wants to say it. "Good luck. With all of it."
The other guy just sounds tired now. "Yeah. Go away. Don't get yourself killed."
The problem with cell phones is that when the person on the other end hangs up, there isn't a dial tone buzzing in your ear to remind you. Just an electric click, and a different-sounding hiss, and then the sound of silence.
He flips the phone closed, shoves it in the back pocket of his jeans. Almost misses, the first try. All of his height is in his torso right now -- his arms and his legs won't catch up for a while -- and things aren't where he remembers them being. Dawn's giving way to early morning, the greys and indigos lightening into sky-blue. He shoves his hands into his front pockets, balls them up against the knobs of his hipbones, and lets himself think.
Jonathan Nielson. (Ó Néill, son of Niall, from Ulster to here in sixteen centuries of history.) His mother had called him Johnny for the first nine years of his life, until he'd insisted that Johnny was a baby's name. He'd told Ray and Nancy to call him Jonathan, and every time they'd called his name, he'd had a moment of blankness before he'd realized they were calling for him.
He can't be Jack. Not anymore. Living undercover means picking a name that's close to yours but not yours, because you have to be able to train yourself to answer to it but if you use your own you keep forgetting you're supposed to be someone else. And this is the greatest undercover gig he's ever undertaken; deep cover, wide cover, with no end in sight.
He can't be Jack anymore, and Jonathan is an uncomfortably-familiar stranger, echoes of teachers and superior officers reading his name from sheets of paper and looking up to see who answered the call. He isn't a Jon, or a Johnny, or a Jay. But he picked two names for Bobby Browning to write down on the papers, Jonathan Daniel, memory and reminder, and he thinks maybe he can learn to be JD.
He repeats the name to himself as he walks, over and over, using all the old tricks he'd learned to train himself to respond to someone else's name, and with every step he wonders how long it'll take him to find out who JD is.
He's been on the road for four months when he wanders into the soup kitchen and homeless shelter in Wichita, Kansas, and the Methodist preacher who runs the place takes one look at him and purses his lips.
Not the first time it's happened. His papers say he's fifteen and he looks fifteen, dammit -- looks younger, even, in the right light and at the right times -- or he'd have had Bobby Browning make him legal. Should have pushed harder for it anyway. But at the time they'd created his paper trail, they'd still thought he would be staying with the Riveras, and the question of documentation had been less of an issue. He'd put his foot down on the driver's license -- refused to accept a Colorado ID, since in Colorado the record-keeping and restrictions for any driver under the age of 21 are fucking ridiculous -- so they'd gone for a New Mexico license there; it was the closest state that licenses fifteen-year-olds. His ID is legit; Bobby has friends in a lot of places. But even though he has a certified copy of court-ordered emanicipation (and God only knows how Bobby had managed to lay his hands on that), and it's been enough to keep him out of the hands of Social Services so far, he's had a few close calls.
Whatever the other guy's done to clear the tripwires on his records is holding up so far. At least enough that showing his ID to the cops when he's stopped hasn't called down the hounds of hell on his doors. But he doesn't want to risk it, so shelters and hostels and (once or twice when he hasn't been able to find anywhere else to stay) the occasional abandoned building or under-construction development it is. He's got another three years minimum before he stops turning heads and raising suspicion everywhere he goes.
The pastor doesn't push, just watches him as he eats and listens to the volunteers rattling off information on all the assistance programs the shelter offers. When they're done, he returns his tray, pitches in with the washing-up, keeping an eye on his backpack stowed in the corner. He's managed to hang on to it this far; the only thing of value in it is the laptop, but he'd fucking hate to lose it. The Internet is a miraculous thing; it's been his best lifeline into the cultural cues and frames of reference he's supposed to have grown up with. By now, he's pretty confident in his ability to fake it in front of any native son of that country for at least a little while, and any little wobbles and hitches can be chalked up to differing life experience, but it's been a hard four months of lessoning and he still has to vamp and fill until he can look things up more often than he's comfortable with. Without the database of notes he's keeping for himself, he'd be sunk.
Eventually, the pastor sidles up next him, the way you might approach a feral kitten, and wordlessly starts taking the pots and pans to dry as he finishes scrubbing each of them. Almost makes him laugh. Isn't the first time some shelter director or generous-hearted adult has tried to suss out his story, see if he needs help. If he really were the runaway teenager he looks to be, he supposes he might even find it helpful.
Still, he takes pity on the guy. "Nice place you got here," he says, and after a minute he remembers to back it up with the body language he's been trying so fucking hard to consciously train himself into: calm, competent, assured. No hint of bravado; no hint of posturing or play-acting. It's a performance he's built through hours of study -- watching the other teens he encounters in shelters and malls, watching himself in mirrors and reflected through others' eyes -- and it still feels like he's constantly on stage. He watches the pastor out of the corner of his eye, looking for all the subtle cues of how the man is receiving his act, and after a minute, the pastor relaxes a little: barely visible, completely subconscious.
"We're fond of it," the pastor says. "I'm James."
Jack nearly leaps to his lips, but he chokes it back before he can open his mouth, because stammering when you give someone your name makes adults stop and take another look at you. "JD," he says. "And I'll save you some prying: I haven't run away and I'm not in any kind of trouble. Just taking a road trip, needed somewhere to stop for a day or so."
"We can do that," James says, free and easy, and he glances over at the man again to find he's smiling. James looks to be in his late sixties or so, thinning grey hair, lean and angular face. Dressed in jeans and a plain grey t-shirt, with calluses on his hands that say he's no stranger to hard work. "Always room for someone to wash dishes."
He's intending to only stay for a day or two -- been a while since he could pick up any under-the-table work, and he doesn't want to risk tapping the accounts the SGC set up for him, so his cash-on-hand is running a little low and it's been a while since he had regular hot meals and hot showers -- but a week later, he looks up and realizes that he's got no plans to leave.
James doesn't quite believe him that he hasn't run away, he can tell, but the man doesn't push and he doesn't pry, just keeps the conversation light and pleasant: talking about the shelter, about James's life, about the congregation. No preaching. No lectures. Just a line of communication, a voice in the wilderness, the first tiny steps towards trust and openness. After a few days, he pulls out his paperwork, hands it over, just to ease James's mind. He's been trying to avoid showing his ID and his own personal Emancipation Proclamation as much as possible until he has no other choice, because he's been keeping the other guy's advice in mind: stay off the grid, and you can't get much more off-the-grid than the temporary migrant life he's been living. But he can tell that James has been worrying, and he owes the man some peace of mind.
James takes it with the same calm assurance and lack of questioning he takes everything else. It's a good sign. Means he's getting better at avoiding suspicion. Maybe he'll have a chance of getting through this after all.
A week later or so, he's out in the backyard of the shelter, cutting boards for the shed he's offered to repair, when James wanders out with two bottles of water and hands one over as soon as he shuts down the table saw. "Nice work," James says, squinting against the sun. "Where'd you learn construction?"
On a summer crew in Chicago in 1968, he doesn't say. "My dad," he says instead. "Before he died."
Took him a while, but he's got a story he thinks will hold water. Pieced it together from a bunch of sources. Mother died when he was twelve, father KIA in Iraq last year, and rather than accept the guardianship of his uncle, he'd sued for emancipation under economic self-sufficiency and won. Took his GED, gathered up the important things, and gone on a voyage of discovery. He tells himself the details every night before he goes to sleep, and he figures sooner or later he'll know his own invented history as easily as he knows his own real past.
"Got some other projects around the place that could use doing," James says, after a few minutes of watching him work. "Can't pay much, but I can throw in room and board."
He pauses to adjust his safety goggles, gives himself room to think. "On the books or off them?" he finally asks. This is as good a place as any to stop; the housing is barracks-style, but he doesn't mind living in barracks; the food is tolerable and he doubts the work will be strenuous. He could use a little time to rest up.
James's look is knowing. "Which do you need it to be?"
He sighs. "Let me get back to you on that," he says, finally, and turns back to his work. He can feel James's eyes on his back as he bends his head and measures the next board.
That evening, just after dinner as the sun's going down, he unearths the cell phone from the bottom of his backpack and wanders out into the backyard. He doesn't have the number programmed in -- he doesn't have any numbers programmed in, in case he loses the phone or has it stolen, and he's careful enough (paranoid enough) to clear out the phone's memory after every call he makes -- but it would take him longer than four months to forget it.
The other guy answers on the second ring, and he's surprised at how much relief he feels, hearing the voice, knowing the other guy's there and not offworld. Or dead. He's been trying so fucking hard not to think about what's going on, about the fight against Anubis, about the Program and its goals, that he hasn't even let himself wonder whether everyone's all right or not. "O'Neill," the other guy says, a hint of blur in his voice, like the phone has woken him from a sound sleep. Must just be back from offworld, or recovering from an injury, or something to destroy his sleep schedule.
That's one part he doesn't miss.
"It's me," he says, sitting down on a spare milk crate and craning his neck to look up at the stars. He doesn't need to identify himself. "Didn't wake you, did I?"
"Yeah," the other guy says. He can hear rustling on the other side of the phone, the sound of the other guy sitting up, running a hand through his hair. "Hang on. Gimme a minute."
A pause, a thunk -- the other guy putting the phone down -- and it's more than a single minute before the voice comes back to the other end of the line. He uses the time to imagine a bedroom five hundred miles away, a house he still sometimes dreams about. "Back," the other guy finally says, through a stifled yawn. "Sorry. What do you want?"
There's aggression there, what the hell do you want and I thought you said you'd go the fuck away, and he grits his teeth against it. Get this over with quick and fast. "If I take a job on the books, am I going to have spooks on my doorstep as soon as someone files a W-4 on me?"
A pause, fractional and still. "Maybe. Probably. Not a good idea either way."
He closes his eyes. The answer he'd been expecting, but that doesn't make it any easier to hear. He's got two sets of choices: either play their game or make his own, and he knows damn fucking well that if he plays their game, he'll be playing with their rules and without the years and years of favors and leverage he'd built up to call on. As Jack O'Neill, he could spit in the faces of anyone who was trying to use him for their own purposes and never much worry about how the shit would fall, but as JD Nielson he knows better than to think that there aren't people who know exactly who and what he is, no matter how deeply they tried to bury it.
All it would take would be one slip, one fuckup, and he'd find himself in that dark room being interviewed over and over again by people who are supposed to be on the same side as him, people who wanted to know everything he could give them about the SGC. And it's a risk he'd decided to take, when he'd walked away from the Riveras that grey and misty Monday morning; if he'd stayed, if he'd sucked it up and smiled pretty, he would have been protected. People to miss him. People to check up on him. The SGC would have heard if he went missing, and he knows Hammond would have beaten the bushes for him even if nobody else would have.
But the price of safety and security would have been a slow and suffocating death, forced into the molds of what he appeared to be, and nothing could have taken away what he knew. Hammond had said to him, one unguarded moment, that he'd picked the Riveras because Ray was in the same position, sidelined from the fight but still knowing, and it had been a kind and generous gesture that had been completely overwritten by the fact that he couldn't say a word about who he really is, couldn't have sauntered up to Ray and teased him about the time SG-1 had been forced to rescue Rivera and the rest of his team from the killer tomato plants on P4F-72G.
Clean breaks are always best, when you have to make a break at all.
So he sits on the milk-crate, feeling the patterns of plastic underneath the seat of his jeans, and he doesn't ask the other guy any more questions, doesn't ask about Carter or Teal'c (or Daniel, Daniel, oh, God, he misses them all but he misses Daniel like he'd miss his own right hand). "Okay," he says, short and clipped. "Good to know. Thanks. Go back to sleep."
He hangs up the phone before the other guy can say anything else, and there's a part of him that hopes the other guy will hit redial, brief him on what's going on and what he's missed, and there's a part of him that hopes for anything but.
The phone doesn't buzz again. He holds it in his hands, props his elbows up on his knees and slumps where he sits, and it doesn't matter how far he's gone inside his own head, he can still hear the sound of footsteps when they finally come up behind him.
"Bad news?" Pastor James asks, sounding just as mild and unconcerned as he always does, as he drags up another milk-crate to sit down a few feet away.
He's weary enough, distracted enough, that he forgets (for that one instant) to watch the rhythms of his voice, the body-language he presents. "Yeah, what else is fucking new," he says, and then catches himself. "Sorry."
"Heard the words before," James says. "You told me, a week ago, that you weren't in any trouble. That still true?"
He laughs. Hollow and aching, oh-so-bitter, and then he shoves the phone back in his pocket and scrubs his hands over his face. Summons the nonverbal lies he tells to everyone he meets and plasters them back across his skin. "Yeah," he says. "Just ... trying to figure out what I'm going to do next."
"Lotta people a hell of a lot older than you are still trying to figure out the answer to that question, too," James says, and then stands. "Come on. Got a pot of coffee on in the kitchen, and we can sit down and figure out the answer to the question I asked you this afternoon."
Minute of silence, and he knows he could -- knows he should -- get the hell out of here before he gets too dependent on the help, before he starts spinning himself the what-ifs. But hell, this is the first place he's found in months where he can stop and fucking breathe, the first person he's found in months who's willing to look past the fact that he doesn't even have to fucking shave regularly, and he doesn't think James is just biding his time before making a phone call to Social Services and calling down a whole mess of problems to clean up.
Stay a little while, maybe. Figure out what he's going to do next. Figure out what he can do next, what options he has, what doors haven't been shut against him already. Something will present itself. Sooner or later. And if this doesn't work out, he can always move on.
Eventually James gets a little too close, dispenses a bit of (well-meaning) advice at precisely the wrong time: even if you're not a runaway, you're still running away from something, and sooner or later it's all going to catch up to you. And he's out the door and on the road before he even realizes he's moving, and when his brain catches up to his feet and legs, he realizes he's only proving James's point.
Almost makes him stop and slink back to Wichita with his tail between his legs and his hat in his hand, but instead he sits down on the grass in St. Louis and actually thinks, thinks it through from beginning to end, the way he hasn't been thinking about any of this. And the more he thinks about it, the more he considers his situation and works out his options, the more he becomes aware of the critical, glaring error he has made, is making, will be making unless he gets his fucking ass in gear and fixes it: somewhere between then and now, he's apparently turned off his brain.
Six months, give or take, since the day someone told him he wasn't allowed to be who he is anymore. And he's rechristened himself and learned every word of the history he's invented, the history that explains the too-adult eyes in the too-young face -- not excuses them but explains them, those times when he slips and forgets how to lie without saying a word, when he forgets the constant vigilance he's learned he has to keep -- but in all that time, there's been a voice in the back of his head saying if you're good enough, if you're patient enough, eventually this pretense will end.
His government took him and taught him a whole host of things he's not supposed to acknowledge he knows, a whole host of skills that civilized men aren't supposed to admit to, and then they dumped him onto the front lines of wars that never existed on paper anywhere anyone could see and left him to live or die by those skills. And it may have been fifteen years since the last time he spent living a life behind enemy lines, where one slip could bring disaster or worse, but those lessons never fade. Daniel had once called him a Cold Warrior without a war to fight anymore, and it hadn't been a compliment, but it had been the truth: he's trained for undercover, for search-and-rescue, to build a life and an identity and step into that life and make it breathe.
He's been drawing on those skills non-stop since he'd pulled the Riveras' front door shut behind him: research, documentation, play-acting. Learn the language; learn the presentation; learn the proper responses that will deflect suspicion and let you complete your mission unmolested. Tell the lies, to others and to yourself, as often as you need to, until they become your temporary truth, and sooner or later the mission will be over and you can go back home and step into the life you put on pause.
He sits cross-legged on the grass, feeling the early-winter sunshine against his face cutting through the chill, and struggles against the knowledge that this time, the lies won't ever come to an end.
A part of him -- now, still, always -- knows he is running, and has been since the very beginning, but he's realizing now that it's the familiar form of retreat. Step away. Bide your time. Be patient. Sooner or later you'll get your reward and your homecoming, except there is no reward, not for him, not anymore; his mind and his memory is Jack O'Neill, but his body belongs to this miracle of science, this adolescent frame with its easy competence and its physical skills his kinesthetic memory long-since lost to the mists of time. The other guy has his life, and all he's been left with are these scraps and pieces with which to fasten a weapon and stage a coup.
Like the snakes, in a way. Come knocking in the middle of the night, and when you wake up, you find that you don't even own your own skin.
He's always been good at self-delusion -- it's always been a survival trait with the life he leads, or led, or is leading even now -- but there's a point past which even self-delusion won't play, and the flashpoint moment of revelation bubbles over, each new piece a bullet to the brain. He's been running on autopilot, playing out the game the way they programmed into him, year after year: when you're in hostile territory with no support staff and no resources, playing at a disadvantage so great you might never be able to recover, the only smart thing to do is to beat a tactical retreat until you can claw your way back into the game.
Walk away cold. Don't look back. Don't give anything away. Don't let them think you're gearing up to put yourself back in the running, not until you're rested, toned, conditioned. Locked and loaded. Ready for bear.
Revelations are no more peaceful than revolutions, and this is a fucker of a bitch to swallow: for the past six months, half his subconscious has been stalling for time and gearing him up to fight (for his life, his history, his self-identity). And the minute he realizes it, the minute he realizes what the other half has been doing: trying to pull him away, self-sabotage so stunning it's a wonder he's even still breathing, because in a showdown between him and the other guy over which one of them gets to claim the title (which one of them gets to be the O'Neill), he knows the only winners would be the bad guys and the losers would be Earth and everyone on her, and he's not fucking selfish enough to want to play for those stakes.
Thank God at least half his subconscious is smarter than he is. Because, yeah, it's truth and it sucks; Jack O'Neill is one of maybe ten people in contention for the title of Earth's last, best hope. He and the other guy might have the same knowledge, remember the same things, but the other guy wins on points and he doesn't have access to any of the resources, the connections, the respect he spent so long building up. There isn't a man alive, from General down to Sergeant, from politician to snake, who'd take one look at him and see anything other than a teenager in need of some fucking acne medication.
He can't afford to let himself emperil everything for the sake of his own wants and desires. Duty is one thing -- duty to his country, duty to his planet, duty to the entirety of the human race spread across the face of the galaxy. But even if it weren't, even if he could somehow summon up the fortitude to discard decades of programmed patriotism, he can't let himself endanger the people he loves.
Carter. Teal'c. Daniel, his own perpetual temptation, his own cross to bear, and none of them will ever know what he's given up, what he's walking away from, because he's never been able to tell any of them. Won't ever be able to tell any of them. If he ever sees them again, he'll be nothing more to them than the copy, the heedless mistake; he'd already seen it in their eyes, standing next to the other guy and watching them turn their faces to him like flowers seek sunlight. Thank God you're all right. Thank God we have you back. Any thought he'd had of sticking around, doing what he could in the body he's wearing and making the other guy accept the fact that there was two of them, had flown straight out the window when he'd seen that, because he couldn't have lived in that shadow, that lacuna, without going mad.
So he'd pulled himself away and gotten up, gotten out, gone to ground and to regroup, and half of him had meant it as getting him out of the way so he didn't cause trouble and the other half had been taking the first steps towards building an identity with which he could get back in the game, and he hadn't realized any of what he'd been doing, because he'd been acting on fucking pre-programmed routines the whole fucking time. Now he can see it. He has two choices: he can prepare himself to re-start the fight, or he can give in gracefully and figure out some way to make absolutely fucking certain he can't resume it, even subconsciously. And he's pretty fucking confident that he'd lose the fight if he started it up again, but that doesn't mean he couldn't do a hell of a lot of collateral damage on the way, and that cost would be simply fucking unacceptable.
James had been right: he can't keep running forever, and there is nobody on this planet or any other who can rein himself in but himself.
Eventually he realizes he's been sitting in the grass for a long damn fucking time, staring at his hands, lost in thought; he surfaces, blinking, to realize that his subconscious is (once-a-fucking-gain) smarter than he is, because there's a beat cop a couple hundred yards down the park, and he can tell from the cop's body language that she's thinking about wandering over, striking up a conversation, seeing if he's something she needs to be worried about. You in any trouble, honey?
He's fucking sick of that conversation, fucking sick of the need to keep proving himself, and the last thing he wants is to have it all over again. He pushes himself to his feet, making sure his body language doesn't register on her radar, making sure he doesn't look like he's even noticed she's there. Shoulders his backpack, which is starting to show signs of wear and tear, and feels the knocking of his clam-shelled laptop case against the ridges of his spine. He left Wichita with a flush enough bankroll, enough for him to take a room for the night -- if he can find someone who'll rent to him; the places that are willing to take in a teenager are the places he'd like to be too fastidious to patronize, seedy motels where it's best not to think too much about who was there before him. But it's getting late, and it's getting colder. He won't have time to find someplace else to spend the night. Better to shell out the cash and take the room, start out fresh in the morning.
Once he figures out where the fuck he's going next.
He can't even say what makes him pull out his phone, dial the only number he can allow himself to remember, listen as it rings. Some deep-held masochistic desire to cede the game, perhaps. Take himself formally out of the running. It's yours; you can have it. Don't fuck it up. But the phone only rings and rings, and eventually he's listening to his own voice (not his anymore) explaining that he can't come to the phone right now so leave a message at the beep.
He hangs up before the message finishes playing. He knows what it says. He recorded it himself.
He spends his first birthday on his knees.
Wake-up bell at 0350, and he's the fastest at morning ablutions out of everyone in residence; he's in the zendo by 0415, arranged in seiza, eyes open but unfocused and waiting for the bell to chime for zazen. He's already halfway to no-mind as the others start filing in; the monks calm and peaceful, his fellow residents a mixture of thoughtful and sleepy, the two newest short-term residents stifling yawns and stumbling blearily to their zafu. He folds his hands into their proper mudra and imagines the surface of his mind as the waters of a pond, still and undisturbed, as he counts the measures of his breaths.
Shikantaza: "don't just do something, sit there," and if anyone had asked him a year ago if he could ever draw strength and peace from sitting around and staring at nothing for hours a day he would have laughed himself stupid, but stranger things have happened. Stranger things have happened to him, even. It had taken him weeks before he could stop fidgeting through zazen, taken him conjuring images of Teal'c and candles and kel'no'reem, but six months of practice makes anything easy, and he'd found, as he stripped away each of the layers of mental armor he'd built himself year after year, that the silence and stillness lying beneath wasn't as frightening as he'd always believed it would be.
Today, he is thinking -- as he allows his breath to settle deeper into his chest, feels his heartbeat slowing and calming -- of how far he's come since the night (six months ago, a lifetime ago) in St. Louis when he opened his backpack to find that Pastor James had tucked two things inside: a note and a brochure. I've known since the start that I wouldn't be the one to help you, but maybe they can teach you to help yourself, that old man had written. And maybe it had been Pastor James's clear forthrightness, and maybe it had just been that it had come hard on the heels of a series of gut-punch realizations, but either way he'd looked at the brochure with its glossy photographs and its talk of wisdom and compassion and thought: well, what I'm doing clearly isn't working, so why the hell not?
He'd come in through the Zen monastery's front doors with a chip on his shoulder the size of a world, expecting to be turned away before he even made it through the gates, and instead they'd taken him in and taught him the first steps towards figuring out who he is, underneath all the invisible scars and the implausible circumstances, underneath all the lies he started telling himself so early he can't even remember where they began. They've taught him how to dismantle all the defenses he'd built for himself, stare into the depths of his own personal abyss and not flinch at the flaws and the failings he sees reflected back at him, and he hasn't been able to tell them a damn thing about the battles he's waging inside his own mind, but it doesn't matter.
This isn't about confession and it isn't about therapy; it's about understanding, and not the kind of understanding someone might think it's about. It's about the fact that he's realized a few things. He isn't O'Neill anymore; they took that away from him the moment he woke up and found someone had rolled back his own personal clock and forgotten to wipe his memories clean. O'Neill won the heads-up showdown, and he was left holding second best, and that means he has to build himself a new life out of the ashes of the old. A real life, not a cover identity, not a story that will hold for just long enough to get him to the next battle. A life he can call his own, from now until his end of days.
And it would be easy, so easy, to steer by the star of not, define himself by negative space: not O'Neill, and therefore not anything O'Neill is or does or believes or stands for. But defining himself by negatives would be no more of a clean break than following slavishly in O'Neill's footsteps, re-living his own life as closely as he could through the lens of years and circumstances, and there were good things about that life -- so many good things -- but there were also a lot of things that just plain sucked.
He's come to the conclusion -- hard-won and painful though it might be -- that the only way to get through this, to come out the other end with any chance at living a life that doesn't make him want to shoot himself, is not to re-build, but to build. The outward manifestation of his entire fucking life has been torn away from him, and the only way to come up swinging is to tear down everything else stright down to foundations and build it back up until it's solid enough to hold.
And in order to tear down and build clean, he has to know what he's discarding, sift through the pieces of his psyche -- tangled and brambled with the thorns of years of getting by -- and decide what to hold and what to throw away. For him not to be O'Neill (in order for him not to be not-O'Neill), he first needs to know who O'Neill is, who O'Neill was, who he was when he was O'Neill. Fifty-some years of unconscious reactions and subconscious decisions, fifty-some years of instincts and impulses and motivations, and he's needed to examine each and every single fucking one through the lenses of compassion and wisdom that his teachers have been trying to give him.
After a while, facing down the inside of his head had stopped making him want to put his fist through a window, and that's when he'd known he was probably going to be okay.
So today he's thinking about what's left, about what's important, about what he believes in and what he values now. He took jukai last week, feeling like a fraud through the entire damn ceremony, waiting for someone to stop him and say no, you can't, you're not worthy -- but no one had, and when Keller-roshi had hung the rakusu around his neck and blessed him with the water of wisdom, he'd looked up and realized: this is me, this is for me; this is the first thing I've done that he wouldn't have.
Not in a million years would O'Neill have ever come to this place, taken those vows. I will not kill, but respect all life. I will not steal, but respect the things of others. I will not misuse my sexual being, but be honest and loving with those whom I partner. I will not lie, but speak the truth, to others and to myself. I will not misuse drugs or alcohol, but keep my mind clear in moderation. I will not speak of others' faults, but be compassionate and understanding. I will not praise myself at the expense of others, but seek to overcome my pride. I will not withhold aid, but give freely when I see the need. I will not allow free rein to my anger, but seek its source and channel its power. I will not speak ill of the Three Treasures, but cherish and uphold them.
It's a far cry from do you renounce Satan and all his works, but something inside of him -- some pale shoot of spirituality, stunted all these years, reaching now for the sun -- is soothed by the simplicity: do no evil, tend all goodness, help others, cultivate loving kindness and mercy in all its forms. And mercy to others has never been impossible across the board -- hard some times, impractical others, but never completely out of the question -- but mercy to himself has been off the table for years. He's learning it now.
It isn't a do-over. It isn't reparation. Nothing he can ever do, no words he can say and no actions he can take, can ever erase the things he's done and the things he's been, the harm he's caused by what he's done and what he's failed to do. But it's all right. Part of why he likes this place and these teachings so much is that they don't promise absolution. Saying the words, making the promises, doesn't wash you clean and offer you a do-over. It just means that you know how goddamn hard you have to work, for the rest of your life and every day within it, to make the world a little bit better, because you've seen what happens when you don't.
Compassion and wisdom. He's pretty sure anyone who used to know him would laugh at the thought of him having either, but it's all right. He's not the man they used to know anymore. And every now and then, he gets a glimpse at the man he's starting to be, and he thinks he might actually like the guy.
Eventually the bell rings again, and he unfolds himself from seiza and rises to his feet for the morning service. It's his turn to serve as jisha this month -- they pass the duties around -- and he carries the peace of zazen with him as he prepares the incense, leads the chants. Once upon a time, he would have sneered at all of this as that mystical bullshit, and he hasn't precisely lost that part of himself; it will never be second nature. But he's learned to find the meaning behind the gestures, learned that the outward expression is nothing more than a reflection of the inward truth, and maybe it's enough.
He's surprised when Keller-roshi calls him for shosan at the beginning of work period, instead of releasing him to the garden he's learned to tend. They settle in Keller-roshi's office, instead of the zendo, and Keller-roshi offers him a cup of tea.
"You've come a long way," Keller-roshi says, after they've gotten the pleasantries out of the way.
He wraps his fingers around the mug of tea -- he's already taken the obligatory sip for politeness and he won't drink it again, but the ceramic of the mug feels nice and solid in his hands -- and recognizes it for the question it is. "I've learned how much I still have to learn," he says.
He's always wondered what Keller-roshi knows, or has deduced, about the sum total of his life up until now; Keller-roshi hasn't ever said a word, but he's pretty certain the man can see all the years, all the bad choices and worse scenarios, that he carries with him still, even if his teacher doesn't know what it is that he's seeing. But Keller-roshi merely cocks his head, gives him that penetrating stare he's learned to be wary of because it usually means a bombshell is coming, and says, "Are you ready yet to go out and learn what there is to love about the world?"
It's the kind of question he's not supposed to answer immediately, and he turns the mug around in his fingers, staring at the liquid's surface and watching the ripples that form there. It's the kind of question that has layer after layer, waiting for him to sink through and examine, and he sits and thinks them through. He knows what Keller-roshi means, what Keller-roshi has intuited about him: learn what there is to love about the world, because when push comes to shove, he never has. He's walked through the world, and he's lived in the world, and there have been times when he was happy and more times when he was miserable, but the times when he's actually been able to see have been few and far between.
Anyone else might think he was being kicked out, but he knows that's not it. Coming here, learning here, has shaken his world down to its core and re-assembled it in new and different ways, and he could stay -- would be welcome to stay, to learn and grow and work toward enlightenment -- but he knows what Keller-roshi is trying to tell him: he needs to take his new perspective and go out in the world and use it before he takes the further vows he was contemplating working toward. He was a different person when he came here. It's time to take the person he is now out for a test drive.
So after a period of contemplation, listening to the silence and stillness inside his mind, he looks up. "I think I am," he says, and Keller-roshi smiles.
"You will always find a home here," Keller-roshi says, with grave formality. "Be blessed in your journey."
He stands and bows. "Be blessed in your wisdom," he says, and goes to pack.
He doesn't know where he's going, and Keller-roshi does him the courtesy of not asking -- he's always been treated here like the adult he remembers being, once Keller-roshi and the other abbots had satisfied themselves that he was legally his own person -- but once he's realized it's time to leave (go-you-forth, from-your-land, from your kindred, from your father's house) he's suddenly vibrating with the need to move. He sleeps one last night in the dormitory, and in the morning, after zazen and morning service, he bows again to the abbots and formally requests (and is given) permission to leave. A quaking of nerve as he steps across the threshold has him poking at the thought, trying to divine its source, and after a moment he realizes: he's afraid that everything he's learned, everything he's made of himself, will blow away like smoke on the wind outside the otherworldly serenity of the monastery.
It's a new sensation, being able to recognize not only the emotions he's feeling but the cause beneath them, and he realizes -- thinking it through the way he's learned to do -- what it portends: he's been given the tools. Now it's up to him to learn how to put them into practice.
At the Greyhound station, he buys his ticket based on random whim and the little voice nudging him to try the other coast for a while; it comes down to Baltimore or Charleston, and he was stationed at Charleston for six months back in '81, so he picks the city he's never spent much time in instead. While he's waiting for the bus to arrive, he sits on the bench with his backpack between his feet and watches the people around him.
Eventually, he becomes aware of the small impulse singing in the back of his mind and bends over to rummage through his things; his cell phone is at the bottom of his bag. It's been turned off for the past six months, but he charged it before he left. It's picked up on the third ring.
"O'Neill," O'Neill says, sounding tired, sounding weary, and he's seized by a sudden rush of compassion; did he ever sound that old, that defeated?
"It's me," he says. "I just wanted to ..."
He trails off, not knowing how to finish that sentence. See if you were all right? Let you know I was all right? Yes, and no, to both, to neither.
"Great," O'Neill says. "Just peachy. They really could have used you a few weeks ago, you know. If they'd had any way of finding out where you were."
The Ninth Precept: I will not allow free reign to my anger. He breathes, slowly and carefully, fixing his eyes on the cracked linoleum of the floor. Compassion and wisdom. Maybe it's his first test.
They, not we; whatever happened, whatever O'Neill's referring to, must have been bad, and O'Neill must have been out of the running for it. And he realizes, with his new-found perspective, that if the SGC had called him in, he would have gone: answered the call, done what he could. I will not withhold aid; no matter what it might have cost him, no matter how painful it would have been, he would have gone.
It's an important thing to know about himself. And he's glad, so glad, that he didn't have to. That's another important thing to know about himself. Maybe it's even more important.
"I'm sorry," he says. It doesn't cost him anything to apologize. "I was ... trying to learn something. Is everything all right?"
"Now it is," O'Neill says, short and clipped. "We're still cleaning up. Little mess down in Antarctica. If you didn't see it or hear about it, it means that we managed to get the cover story right. Look, I don't have time to chat; they promoted Hammond, sent him to DC, and put me in his place, and I swear to God, I don't know how he did it for so long. What do you need?"
A part of him is shocked by the news; a part of him isn't shocked at all. "Nothing," he says. "I just wanted to..." He trails off again. Trying to figure out how to convey a message he isn't even sure of is leaving him tongue-tied, inarticulate. There's a part of him that wants to say look, I did this, I found the closest thing I've ever found to peace, and here's how I did it, and you could do it too. There's another part of him that knows O'Neill wouldn't hear a word of it.
So instead he lets it go, and in that moment of letting-go, he realizes what he's saying: I forgive you. I forgive us both.
Compassion and wisdom. Maybe he's getting the hang of it after all.
"I just wanted to let you know that I was back," he says. "I'll stay away. But if you need me again, call me, and I'll do what I can."
The offer is no less sincere for the knowledge that O'Neill won't ever take him up on it, and maybe O'Neill can hear it in his voice, because all O'Neill does is make a small and irritated noise of agreement. "Pray that we don't," O'Neill says. "Need you, I mean. Now go away. There's a desk full of paperwork with my name on it waiting for me."
"Better you than me," he says, and it's a joke, but he means it. This is his life now. He's not living O'Neill's life anymore.
When he hangs up the phone, he realizes there's a young girl -- eighteen, nineteen -- with tears running down her face standing at the counter, pleading with the ticketing agent to get her as far away from here as possible with the money she has spread out on the counter. It's not enough to take her anywhere, and she's looking over her shoulder, frantic and terrified the entire time. He can see the faint yellowing of a bruise, several days old, across her cheekbone.
He doesn't have to think twice. He stands and heads over to stand beside her, making sure to look as young and as harmless as possible, and reaches for his wallet. "Here," he says. "Let me help."
They ride to Baltimore together, and by the time they make it there, she's starting to remember how to smile.
"Nielson!" Katelyn yells, and he puts down his copy of O'Reilly's How Not To Program In C++, which is a fucking useful resource that's driving him fucking nuts trying to solve its problems, and goes to see what she wants.
She's standing in the storeroom with her arms folded across her (ample) bosom, staring at the rack of supplies; when he saunters in, she turns her head to glare at him, the beads of her braids clicking faintly. "How many times do I gotta tell you?" she demands. "Not all of us are as tall as your beanpole ass." She points at the top of the wire rack. "Reach me down another box of 3 tights, a box of 7 rounds, and I need a refill on the orange, teal, and grey."
He stands on his tiptoes and takes down the boxes of needles and ink she points at. He's not that much taller than she is -- only a couple of inches -- but those inches count; he'd forgotten, when he re-organized the storeroom for her last week, to take her height into account. He's shot up quickly enough in the last year or so that it's disconcerting. Every fucking time he thinks he's got the sense of where his arms and legs are, they fucking move on him; he's been trying to remember when the hell he stopped growing last time, and he can't. All he remembers is that the summer before he went off to Basic he went through three different lengths of pants.
"Suzanne was running low on the shaders on station three this afternoon, too," he says, while he's already stretching. "Did she --"
"Hell," she says, sounding grumpy. "Knew there was a reason I kept you around; you remember shit better than I do. Might as well grab down everything; we'll restock once we shut the doors. Then run on over to the Subway and pick us up some dinner before you do your rounds."
He nods and passes over the supplies. Katelyn is the premier artist, general manager, and den mother of Tattoo Vinnie's (there is not, and never has been, a Vinnie), a fine establishment that fits right in to Baltimore's "Block", a ragtag collection of sex shops, strip clubs, and bars; the streetlights aren't red but the neon is, and the stretch of Baltimore Street from South to Gay teeters between "burlesque" and "sleazy" depending on which way you squint. He's inordinately fond of it, and not only because Katelyn and the other proprietors up and down the street are willing to take in a stray and pay cash under the table for any and all services rendered; only in Baltimore can the red-light district be anchored at one end by police HQ and the strip club patrons be forced to fight the triple-parked squad cars out front for parking.
He likes Baltimore. It's got character.
He hands Katelyn the supplies she needs for her 1730 appointment -- they get walk-ins aplenty, drunk tourists stumbling in from the Harbor or from Power Plant Live, but the locals (and some not-so-local) know to book ahead if they want anything custom-done from the woman herself, because Katelyn doesn't take walk-ins and hasn't for years. He's been here for six months, so by now he knows what all three of the artists will want for dinner. (Katelyn, in her late forties, whose ink is done in a thousand shades of black and grey and hides against the midnight of her skin until you're close enough that you blink and suddenly there isn't an unmarked inch of her; Suzanne, twenty-seven, rail-thin and pale and spiky-haired, a Goth who never grew out of her Goth phase, heavily pierced and wearing a full sleeve in riotous color up her left arm that she's been doing herself, inch by inch, for years; Tom, in his thirties and balding already, whose knuckles are scarred and thickened over but whose hands are so steady he's the one to do all the finest of work, whose tattoos are like delicate spiderwebs across his chest and back.) He stops at each station and asks them anyway, and waves off their offers to pay. Katelyn doesn't pay him much, and neither does any one of the dozen establishments he runs errands and deliveries for, mops floors and stocks shelves and fetches change, but he doesn't have many expenses, and he likes Katelyn and Tom and Suzanne.
Light's fading, outside when he runs down the stairs, and the neon signs that look sleazy in daylight are starting to look vivid instead, although there is no amount of night's cover that will make the fucking Hustler club look anything other than an eyesore and an abomination (no matter how nice Razor, the general manager, has always been to him). He stands in line at the Subway -- hey, strippers and bouncers gotta eat too, and he knows from talking with the counter people that the place does booming business -- with mellow patience. He doesn't have any particular time clock to punch. He's not on any payroll -- easier that way -- and his employment arrangements are less "off-the-books labor" and more "gentleman's agreement"; he's made himself useful, not out of a need to earn living expenses (he's one of six squatting in an abandoned rowhouse over on Eastern Ave), but out of a need to have something to do.
He's fortunate enough that the cops don't give a flying fuck about his presence in-and-out of the bars when they're open -- sometimes he thinks you could deal crack on the sidewalk of the station and none of them would blink an eye, like these two blocks are somehow outside the normal play of law and order -- and it hadn't taken him long to make himself indispensable; he'll do anything for anybody, as long as it doesn't involve running drugs or laundering money, and it had turned out that enough places needed an extra pair of hands that he's never short of occupation. He considers Tattoo Vinnie's his home base, and Katelyn encourages that perception, but she doesn't begrudge him his hours here and there: an ice run for the Club Pussycat, a dash out to pick up quarters when the Big Top runs out for change for the peep show booths, his 0300 post-last-call-and-cleanup escort runs to the parking lots and cabstands for the dancers who are nervous about walking without someone there to take care of any problems that arise. "Good neighbors", she calls it, something she says their little countercultural community could use more of; he just calls it "being a human being", and he's happy to oblige.
He runs the sandwiches back upstairs to Vinnie's, drops them off and goes wandering. Quiet night; Sunday nights usually are, after the riot of the weekend, although the Block never really sleeps. About the only interesting thing he runs into is Marina at the 2 O'Clock Club asking him to swing over to the Whole Paycheck and pick up an emergency bag of limes; apparently the bachelor party the club got saddled with has been going through tequila like it's water.
"You want me to stick around a few?" he asks Marina, voice just loud enough to be heard over the music, as he hands the spoils of his errand, along with the change from petty cash, over the bar. "Just in case, since Gerald's off tonight." The bachelor party's raucous, and they seem mostly well-behaved, but he's seen tequila turn men from gregarious to vicious with only a few seconds to herald the transition.
She smiles at him. (They all smile at him, like he's their fucking pet, like he's a lost kitten who wandered in and never wandered out again, and it only bothers him in a few stolen moments when he's trying not to remember the man he used to be, underneath the teenager's skin.) "Nah, it's all right, hon. We got it covered. Could use you before opening tomorrow to help move some tables around, though."
"You got it," he says, and -- since the guy at the end of the bar has "off-duty cop" written all over him, and is staring at him as though tonight might be the night that one of them decides to get shifty about the liquor laws -- departs.
He gets back to Vinnie's around closing, twenty hundred, although 'closing' usually depends on whether or not anybody's still doing work when the clock ticks over. Tom and Suzanne are gone when he comes whistling in, though, and Katelyn's just giving her 1730 his aftercare instructions. He tosses her a wave, loose and sloppy, and goes to strip down the tables in each of the private cubbies, take out the trash and restock the work stations. Simple task, mindless and soothing, and he catches himself humming "Back in Black" (it had been playing at the 2 O'Clock when he'd popped back in) after a few minutes of labor.
"Thank fuck he's gone," Katelyn finally calls, and he can hear her locking the front door and turning off the lights in the lobby. A minute later, she saunters back into the cubby he's working in, resting a shoulder against the door. "Had to charge him the asshole tax. I swear to you, I am running away and joining the circus, 'cause a circus'd have fewer freaks."
"You should have said something," he says. "I would've come in and kept you company."
She shakes her head, links her hands together and turns her palms out to stretch her shoulders, shakes the cramps out of each of her wrists. "Nah," she says, easy and dismissive. "Just an asshole, not anything I haven't dealt with. Take it nobody needs you tonight?"
He shakes his head. "Quiet. Marina's got a bachelor party drinking their way through the tequila, that's about it. Was gonna just do the restock and then maybe go for a run."
She snorts. "Well, strip on down and hop on up, then. I ain't got nowhere to be tonight; we can get some more of your work done."
Katelyn knows he's under 18 -- can't fucking miss it -- but she doesn't care, says she got her first ink when she was fifteen and stupid and she doesn't regret it, says he's smarter than she was when she was sixteen and if he says he wants ink, she'll do it for him. He hadn't intended to ask; he'd come in for a landing here by accident, not design. But three months ago, he'd been sitting on the bed in one of the private cubbies, book in hand, and he'd heard Suzanne say something about how her tattoos are her stories put under her skin, and he'd put down the book (quantum computing, picked up on a whim at the library, and it had been sparking ideas he knows just enough to know he's not going to be able to chase down fully for years) and he'd thought about it for a minute, and then he'd gone to talk to Katelyn about the practicalities of design.
Never wanted a tattoo before. Never thought of them as anything other than posturing and posing, some bragging boast to the universe or to an observer, but new lives bring new rules and new rules need new ceremonies, new symbols, new rites and rituals. The next step, maybe. Six months to grieve. Six months to rebuild. Now it's time for his six months to remember, designing all the horrors he's survived -- all the stories, all O'Neill's stories, all the things that made him who he was before he remade himself into who he is now -- and putting them under his skin, where he can wear them like the scars and badges he'll never wear again and learn to cherish and embrace every last piece of his history.
Katelyn's never asked what any of them mean, but when she looks at the sketches, when she looks in his eyes, he wonders if she might sense the vaguest hints of the lost lives she's etching into him.
So he kicks off his sneakers, strips off his shirt; after a minute -- because Katelyn keeps the place too damn hot in deference to the thermostats of people who aren't him and he always overheats the minute the needles pierce his skin -- he pushes down his jeans as well, leaving him only in his boxers. He folds his clothes neatly and stacks them on the chair. Any last lingering modesty he hadn't had ripped away by years of locker rooms and infirmary visits has tiptoed quietly into the sunset in the past few months; body-modification workers have no sense of shame, because they spend so long creating their bodies as works of art that to hide them away is the shameful thing, and he hasn't quite managed to absorb that attitude entirely, but he's getting closer and closer. Katelyn's fussing with ink and needles, setting out her tray, pulling on gloves. He stretches out facedown on the table, pillows his chin on his crossed arms, and watches.
"What part do you want to work on?" he asks. They're about half through the patterns they've created together; when finished, they'll stretch from elbow to shoulder, along his collarbone and an inch or two below, down his back all the way to his hips, around his sides to shade into nothingness along the sweep of his ribs. The design leaves his chest nearly unmarked, his back a sweeping sea of symbols. With a t-shirt on, there'll be nothing visible but hints peeking from underneath the sleeves and around the collar; in a long-sleeved shirt, with a proper neck, no one will ever see them but the people he chooses to show.
Fitting, really. He'll ink his lessons on his body in a language of symbology as plain as hieroglyphics to anyone who holds the Rosetta-Stone key, except the key exists nowhere but inside his own memories, and so no one who sees them will ever understand. O'Neill will. If he ever shows the man. If O'Neill would ever be willing to open his eyes to see.
Katelyn takes the design sketches out of the bottom drawer, spreads them out on the desk. "Let's keep going down the back," she says; they're just past his shoulderblades, half an hour here, an hour there, and with every line of memory they codify it's like another piece of his weight is lifted from him, like shifting the burden of his history from internal anchor to external coloring is freeing him, step by painstaking step.
"Sure," he says. Grabs the pillow to rest his face against. Puts his arms down at his sides so nothing's stretched out of place. (The patterns will shift a little, as he finishes growing, but he had the advantage of knowing what his dimensions will be, when all is said and done, and he drew the references for Katelyn in proportion; still, they're being careful.) "Don't tickle."
She slaps him on the ass as she goes by, opens the drawer of the workbench to root around for straight-edge, compass, razor to shave him bare, pen to make her outlines on his skin. She's doing his work freehand, not with a transfer. Too complex to work from a pre-drawn model, she says, and he'd be more wary that she wasn't using more to guide her, except the results he's seen, on others and on himself, are stunning. Brilliant line-work, rising and falling with the splay of muscle, the shadows of hollow and swell. Her art lives, shifting and breathing like a second skin, and with every inch of him she decorates, every inch of him she turns into something he never would have ever wanted before, his body starts to seem more and more like his.
Until he'd seen the first results in the mirror, he hadn't realized how much it would help. How much he'd needed it to help. If he carries the pieces where he can see, it frees him to stop carrying them in all the places he can't. O'Neill would never have done this, but he's not doing it because O'Neill wouldn't. He's doing it because he can.
As she works, drawing her references, he closes his eyes and centers himself, breathes in and then out and it's not quite shikantaza, but it's very much the same: making himself still and open and receptive, getting his front-brain thoughts out of the way so his mind can do its own thinking. Drift a little. Rest a little. He barely notices when Katelyn finishes drawing out her lines, picks up the gun and settles its needle against his back, except to breathe in and out until they're breathing together, two bodies connected by one pinpoint line, her hand strong and steady.
Katelyn's working on the bottom of the right shoulder tonight, along the lines of all the things that made him, celebration and condemnation all at once, a recollection and a warning. He can feel the needle slide under his skin, and his senses are so hyper-sharpened that he imagines he can feel the ink burning as Katelyn limns him with sentences that aren't sentences to anyone but him. East Berlin. Nicaragua. Poland. Iraq. The feel of a rifle in his hands, a foreign language against his tongue, a cockpit's cradle beneath his thighs and back.
Too much of the former, too little of the latter. He'd joined the Air Force to fly (loved the stars too fondly) and they'd taken his skill and put him where they needed him, and this had led to that before he'd looked up and realized his dear and gentle masters would be quite content if he never flew again. Too useful elsewhere. Too valuable on loan and on the ground, doing the things decent people thought their government didn't do, and he'd gone and he'd done it because someone had to, but from those days he'd thought of patriotism as a dual-edged sword. You protect your country because it deserves protecting, because it's made up of good men and women who need protection, but in the process of doing that you become painfully aware that some of the things you're defending are things you'd rather let pass away.
It's why he's holding onto these stories now, no matter how much they hurt to remember and to have memorialized for him. He still believes (how could he not?) in serving and protecting, but he's made himself a promise. Is making of himself a promise. Never again will he let anyone else, man or woman, living or dead, dictate the terms of his service. He'll answer to no one's call but his own.
Taken him this long, but he finally understands the joy and vivid triumph Teal'c can take in a single statement: not defeatist at all, but defiance and exhilaration and promise and prayer. I die free.
Eventually, he becomes aware that Katelyn's wiping down his skin, and the buzz of the tattoo gun has long since faded into nothing. "You still in there?" she asks, nudging his hip with her elbow.
He makes a little noise of agreement; not really an answer, more of a carrier wave for future communication. Yeah, in here if you need me, otherwise leave a message at the tone. His mind's been elsewhere, but his body hasn't been; the hiss and buzz of the vibrations have taken up residence at the base of his skull, leaving him feeling pleasantly wrung-out, floating on a cushion of endorphins and resonance. Not sexual, not precisely, but there's something about it that feels like the aftermath of orgasm anyway; he's never been a masochist (in any sense other than the professional) but the feel of tattoo needles entering his skin isn't pain, just sensation, and it's sexual enough that more often than not, he winds up hard enough to break glass by the end of a session. (Then again, he's sixteen; anything can make him hard enough to break glass, and he's a virgin in this body -- hasn't even begun to consider how to find a solution to the problem that any sex he could have would mean that either he'd be left feeling like a pedophile or the other party would be behaving like one -- but he and his right hand have been spending some serious quality time.)
Katelyn laughs. "Yeah, okay," she says. "Sit on up, let me get the mirrors for you."
And Katelyn's used to men and boys sporting wood while she's working on them, and her policy is to ignore it as long as she can and as long as the client doesn't try to take it further -- he'll lay ten bucks that's why she charged the asshole tax for her 1730, since it's the most common cause -- so he doesn't feel too awkward rolling over and sitting up; she pretends he isn't hard and he pretends she hasn't noticed and we all pretend together tra-la. Except tonight she doesn't turn to reach for the mirror for him to inspect his new adornment; she hesitates for half a second, nothing more, and then her eyes flick down his body and she puts two fingers on his knee.
It's a chaste and wholly innocent touch, less explicit than half the ones she bestows upon him on a daily basis, but this one has subtext, has an invitation, and not the kind of invitation that would have him (were he as young as he fucking looks) leaping backwards and protesting for his maidenly virtue. It's an offer, not a pass; she is telling him, wordlessly, that she would not say no if he made a pass at her right now, and if he misses the offer or chooses not to accept it, they can both pretend the touch is only to offer comfort and steadiness. It's a subtle and refined difference, the communication of a state of receptiveness rather than any attempt to force her desires onto him, and it's the closest fucking thing he's found to an offer he could ethically accept since the day he woke up to this brave new world, because she's making the offer to him, not to some social construct of the nymphet or the teenaged gigolo.
She's his friend, and he feels affection for her, and she is beautiful and vibrant and generous and giving, talented and smart and savvy and self-possessed, and she is everything he ever wanted in a woman from crown to toe, physical, mental, attitude and carriage. He should be tempted.
He's not. The most he feels is annoyed that she's changed the rules on him.
The realizations hit him, one by one, like a brick to the fucking skull, like supernovas behind his eyes, and in half a heartbeat he knows why.
"I can't," he blurts out, before he can catch himself, before he can pretend he didn't notice the touch or what it was trying to convey. "Not -- not you --"
Something in his face, in his voice, must hit her where it hurts, because her face shutters over and she takes a step back, and fuck, fuck, he's doing this all wrong. "Yeah, okay," she says, cold and chilly. "What's the matter, too old for you or too black for you?"
And okay, being in the middle of a personal revelation apparently makes him talkative, because he opens his mouth to reassure her no, neither, and what comes out is, "Too female."
She freezes, he freezes, it's a regular popsicle convention in here, and fuck, because thirty-five fucking years he's been training himself to never ever breathe a fucking word and --
He doesn't have to anymore. No more pretending. No more pretending to anybody.
He's always known there are boys who do boys and he's always known he's wanted to be one of them, and he's always hated knowing that about himself, because queer might not be a dirty word now but it sure as hell was the last time he was sixteen and the Air Force frowns on recreational sodomy besides. So he'd promised himself, way back at the beginning, that he'd learn to appreciate women instead -- as partners, as people, the only way he'd been able to convince himself that it wasn't exploitation -- and he'd been successful. Mostly. A few slips here and there, giving a buddy a hand, and he'd loved his fucking wife goddamn it, shouldn't have let himself give in to the desires, should have given his dick a stern talking-to and told it to get with the program and he'd managed. He had. It hadn't been a hardship. (Much.)
No more pretending anymore. Not to anybody. Not even to himself. His realization isn't that he likes boys, that ship had well and truly sailed when he'd caught himself jerking off over Tommy MacGregor back when he'd been seventeen and stupid, it's that he doesn't have to coax himself into liking girls too, not anymore, and it's like driving into a brick wall at two hundred kph and finding out that you can fly.
He's gaping. He must be gaping, because whatever Katelyn's feeling, whatever personal traumas his rejection has stirred, he can see her setting her emotions aside, one of her people in need. She steps in close again and wraps an arm around his shoulder, careful to avoid the fresh ink, pulls him closer and tucks her chin over the crown of his head. "Well, you shoulda just said so in the first place," she says, apology and gentle chiding all at once, and he's frozen stunned for a minute (can't let them know, can't let them suspect, they might've stopped shooting faggots outright in most places but in the military they don't have to, just come running a second too slow) until he breathes out and turns his face to rest against her shoulder, closing his eyes and making himself relax.
"I kinda didn't know until I said it," he says. "Kinda did. It's complicated."
She chuffs a little -- not quite laughter, but almost. "Yeah, well, with you, there's a shock," she says. "Now look at your damn ink so I can bandage it up and you can put your goddamn clothes back on."
Later that night, in the building he's squatting, with his shoulder pulsing in time with his heartbeat and his history, he pulls out his phone and turns it over in his hands. It weighs more than it should, somehow. For a minute he considers putting it away and letting the occasion go unremarked, settling in for his nightly session of meditation and then sliding into sleep once he's dealt with the last aftershocks of revelation -- last aftershocks for now; he's positive he'll be dealing with this one for a while. But something makes him flip it open instead, dial the numbers. 0400 here on East Coast time, 0200 back in the Springs, and O'Neill is no-doubt keeping General's hours these days, no more badly-broken circadian rhythm and equal odds of it being relative midnight or midday, so he calls the house number, not the cell phone. O'Neill shuts off the ringer when he goes to sleep; it's safe enough to call that number and not fear waking him.
He wants to leave a message on the answering machine. Not a thank you. Not a neener neener, either, come to think of it, and he's not sure what he's going to say, not sure why he wants to say it, just that there's something inside him that wants to commemorate this realization with the only other person in the universe who'll understand why it's shaken him so badly. But the phone gets picked up after the second ring, a woman's voice, a burst of irritated Spanish, and he sits straight upright and stammers out a lo siento, número equivocado before hanging up and staring at the tiny phone display.
Won't let himself worry. Not until he knows what's happened. There could be a thousand reasons why O'Neill doesn't live there anymore, and only about ninety percent of them involve disaster. He can start calling around in the morning; he still knows a couple of people who'll answer him, a couple of places he can go for the hints and whispers that aren't supposed to leak out and always do.
Still takes him a long time to get to sleep.
Being back in the Springs is a little weird, a little nostalgic -- all right, a fucking hell of a lot of weird, just like all of this is a fucking hell of a lot of weird, but it's interesting to see that even after two years gone, he can spot them, in the restaurants downtown or in the stores or on the streets.
He and General Hammond had always driven themselves crazy over the loss-rate figures -- seventy percent in the first twenty-four months of duty, half of them dead on the ground and the other half cracked under the strain or cashiered for idiocy, and even if a man survived his first two years with the Program he had even odds of being dead or wishing he was before seeing five -- and those odds had always meant an influx of new faces, an endless stream of strangers parading through the doors. He's been gone long enough that the crop of newcomers he'd just finally learned the names of when the incident had happened are all either buried or reassigned or veterans by now. (At the SGC, if you make it past your burn-in without getting crazy or dead, no one will ever think of calling you anything other than 'veteran'.)
He doesn't see any of them, or any of the oldtimers who'd managed to stick around and defy the odds; no one he knows, no one he recognizes. The longer you spend under alien suns, the less effort you're willing to spend on the trivialities of daily life. Commuting every day from weird to normal is fucking hard enough without the crowds. (Culture shock, Daniel had always called it. Culture shock, and he'd told Daniel that culture shock happens when you're far away from home, and Daniel had smiled a little sadly and said aren't we?) But there's something about the Program that puts a certain look in a man or woman's eye, and once you've learned to look for it, you can't un-see it if you try. He spots a few of them. Ones who are still new enough to still try to cling a little to normal.
No Carter, no Teal'c, no Daniel. Wasn't expecting to see any of them; he's been told where they all are now, what they're up to. Only reason he was willing to come back here, no matter what the lure. Still. Stings a bit. And a bit of relief, too, yes, no, maybe so, answer hazy try again. He doesn't think about it too much.
Fuck, this is the stupidest fucking idea he's ever had. Or the smartest. Who knows.
He'd called General Hammond, eight months ago when he'd tried to call O'Neill and gotten whoever'd gotten O'Neill's phone number reassigned to them. Could have called any of a hundred names he still keeps on his mental list, comrades and friends and siblings-in-arms, but that would have required explanations he's not willing to give and answers he can't provide. (Would have risked him finding out information he doesn't want to know. He'd already had one dead-letter call; he hadn't wanted to risk another.) Hammond, though, was safe. A day to follow all the trails, cadge what information he could without giving up any of his own, and when he'd finally heard Hammond's voice, it had been a rush of relief; he hadn't realized until that very moment how much it makes him weary to keep pretending so fiercely to everyone he comes inside the orbit of.
Hammond had briefed him: O'Neill's in DC (God save the poor bastard), Carter's at Area 51, Teal'c is on Dakara. Daniel's on Atlantis. And, the news most welcome: Anubis is dead. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, and Hammond hadn't told him much beyond the basics, but those basics are enough to let him know why his kids have scattered. Day is done, gone the sun, ain't gonna study war no more. Time to let someone else hold the front lines. He can get behind that. Happy fucking endings all around.
But Hammond had closed the conversation with something that had made him think, dammit, delivered in that same tone of gentle reproof he's heard a thousand times when Hammond thought he was doing something stupid again: "Don't you think it's time to stop running, son?" And he'd taken a breath to argue, caught himself and let the breath out, slow and steady, and yeah, okay. Maybe is is.
So he'd stuck around in Baltimore long enough to tie up loose ends, finish up his ink, finish glutting his brain on the reading list he'd built at the library, and then he'd boosted a motorcycle from a dealership in Glen Burnie and cracked the DMV database to tidy up the records. Feels more than a little guilty about it -- I will not steal, but respect the things of others, but it would have been stupid to fade back onto the grid without being able to bug out in a hurry if he has to, and he wouldn't have been able to afford it in a month of Sundays without the money from the account the SGC set up for him, the account Hammond says is still getting its monthly deposits. Catch-22: can't tap the money for his getaway ride without risking a knock on the door from the boys in the black suits, can't be sure of being able to escape the boys in the black suits without having a getaway ride. He'd apologized to the Universe, promised himself he'd send the money anonymously later. Then he'd said his farewells and gotten his ass on the road.
Five months of drifting between then and now, and he's been sticking his head out of his shell a little, here and there, this and that. There's no replacement identity he could create for himself that would hold up half as well as the identity Bobby Browning created for him. And he doesn't want to give up his name.
He baited Carter into making touch by releasing some code on Sourceforge under his own name; he knows she watches the Open Source community for useful packages to adapt and modify for the SGC's purposes, and he'd angled for something to push all her buttons. She'd been shocked to figure out he knew which end of the computer to turn on. He'd always enjoyed peeling back the village-idiot routine for her just a little, taunting her with the tantalizing hints that he really was doing it on purpose, and he's a little disappointed that he couldn't see her face when she realized that nobody teaches himself C++ and perl and MySQL to that level in two years from a cold start, but they haven't so much as exchanged phone numbers yet. Email is safer.
She'd been the one to give him the name and address he's here to find, and he hesitates in the alleyway, lingering over parking the bike a little bit longer than he can comfortably justify to himself, because he's already decided he's going to play this one honest. Could lie to the man he's here to see as much as he's been lying to everyone from can to can't, but if he's going to try to build himself a life he can live in, it'd be really fucking nice not to have to watch his cultural references like a fucking hawk. (Tripped himself up in a thousand subtle fashions, despite his best efforts, with nearly everyone he's spent more than an hour or two with, and he's getting steadily better -- enough to usually remember when we have always been at war with Eurasia, though most of the more subtle nuances of a Millennial's emotional attachment to and detachment from history still elude him -- but it's fucking exhausting.) So an SGC veteran it is, or at least one from Homeworld-at-large, someone who won't find this whole thing fucking unbelievable -- six impossible things before breakfast -- and hey, whattaya know, Carter knows just the guy.
Doesn't mean he particularly wants to have this conversation. But General Hammond's right. He can't keep running forever, and the boys in black might not have found him yet, but he'd really rather choose the time and place and manner in which they do.
So he takes a deep breath and tells himself to get over himself. The building's your standard downtown real estate, mixed commercial and residential. Thai restaurant on the ground floor. It's packed full, and it smells pretty decent; he stands there for a minute, the memory rising of a thousand wars waged over pizza-and-beer vs. more esoteric cuisine, and he tries to remember if this is the place Daniel was always trying and never succeeding to get him into, and he can't. The failure of memory bothers him for a minute, and then he sets it aside.
There's a door to the side of the restaurant that presumably leads up to the second-floor apartment he's here to visit. The little sign taped next to the doorbell, faded and ripped and weather-beaten, announces that the doorbell's broken and visitors should come up and knock. He tries the door and finds it unlocked, the stairs leading up to another door, the stairwell dark-wood-paneled and under-lit. The railing's shit. He's got no idea how Carter's guy manages, with what Carter's hinted that he's dealing with. He leaves his duffel in the vestibule and climbs up.
The sound of his knuckles rapping against the door seems too loud in the tiny space.
After a long minute, he hears the sound of two locks being undone. The door opens. And it would have been fucking nice if fucking Carter had fucking mentioned that her friend could probably pass for Daniel's brother in shitty light, because this is shitty light and it's not fucking fair.
Oh, it's not perfect; the resemblance isn't exact. Face is more square, jaw's more pointed, cheekbones less angular, no glasses. But the hair's the same color, and the haircut is the same, and the eyes --
He makes himself stop staring. (At least the guy's staring back at him, with a faint layer of put-upon overlaying those strong features.) "Mitchell?" he asks.
Dumb question. Carter told him Mitchell's history -- leader of the 302 squadron, and the name had rung faint bells, though looking at the man he can't decide if he's ever seen him before -- and she'd told him Mitchell's fate, and the man standing in front of him is clearly half wrecked: leaning most of his weight on the doorframe in a way that says he's used to having some kind of physical support to walk, bundled up in grungy sweats and a long-sleeved shirt like he can't quite stand looking at his own body anymore, dark circles under his eyes. He looks like someone who used to be built and has been holding onto the last remnants with tooth and claw; the clothes hang on his body like they hide hollows and shadows where the body's skin is still trying to recover from lost muscle definition. Hasn't shaved in a couple of days. Looks like he probably hasn't showered, either. There's nobody else the guy could be.
But the guy nods. "Yeah," he says, and dammit, he knows that sound; it's the sound of a man who's half a step away from giving up.
So he nods and shoves his hands in the pockets of his jacket, because if he doesn't he's going to want to reach out and grab: steer Mitchell to a chair or a couch or something, fuss and flutter and make a fucking nuisance of himself, because with one look at Mitchell it's as though he's straight back to the days when an entire command full of good men and women, the absolute fucking finest, looked to him to take care of them. Worst fucking set of instincts to wake. Because Mitchell's looking at him and seeing seven-fucking-teen, no way he can hope for Mitchell to see past it, and it leaves him fucking pissed.
He pushes through the door, strides past Mitchell. Better to get inside before Mitchell can come out with some bullshit line like "shouldn't you be in school right now". The apartment's cluttered, both with furniture and with stuff everywhere, which can't be good for Mitchell's ability to avoid tripping over things and hurting himself; that pisses him off too, because fucking hell, there's "not letting being crippled change old habits", assuming packrat tendencies and an inability to tidy are some of Mitchell's old habits, and then there's refusing to face reality, and arranging your furniture like a deathtrap and leaving clothes and books everywhere falls more on the willfully-stubborn end of the scale. Maybe this won't work out after all.
Still, won't know unless he tries. He turns back around and looks at Mitchell, really looks at him, pulls out that instinctive weather eye that's always served him well over the years in figuring which ones will crack and which ones will stand. Takes him a second to see underneath all that lost-and-drifting, but the core of iron is there, underneath the overlay of despondency. So, what the hell. "Seems like you and I could help each other out," he says.
And holy fucking hell, because he knows Carter didn't tell Mitchell he was coming, much less tell Mitchell who he is -- was -- and yet, Mitchell is staring at him. Tiny frown, visible mostly in the lines of his forehead and between his brows, like he's trying to place some song he last heard twenty years ago from only a few notes.
He'd swear Mitchell can see straight through him, is looking straight through the skin and down to the person inside. It is the first time in two years, three months, and eleven days that someone has looked him in the eye and not shown one fucking glimmer of seeing him as a kid in need of protection or salvation, and it makes him shiver and leaves him full of equal parts wanting to stick around forever and wanting to walk straight out the door and never look back.
"You don't exist," Mitchell says, firm and flat, like disavowing the fucking Easter Bunny.
And he has to gape for a second, because really, does the man fucking read minds? He's said two lines in five minutes and the man's made him, made him in a way it took Hammond and Carter and Daniel and Teal'c hours to come around to believing, and it's possible that Mitchell and O'Neill became bosom buddies sometime in the past two years, enough for Mitchell to have learned O'Neill's mannerisms and intonations enough to recognize the vestiges of those mannerisms he still carries, but it's about as likely as snow in August on Abydos and seriously, what the fuck?
It weirds him out. He's spent two years trying to root out which parts of him are him and which parts are O'Neill's bequest. Built the scaffolding in his head necessary to view every-goddamn-thing that he did or was before two goddamn years ago through a lens of distance, is-and-was-and-never-will-be-again. Jumped through the mental hoops necessary to make O'Neill's life, O'Neill's memories, his memories from every minute before that moment, into something he remembers through a glass darkly. He'd thought he had it down. Thought he had it cold.
But he's standing here in the living room of another man who's lost his body, lost his old life, had everything he ever knew stripped away from him and thrown away, and that man is looking at him and seeing O'Neill.
Carter said she's been friends with this guy since the dawn of recorded history or something, and he dimly remembers that Carter used to disappear sometimes when they'd had liberty longer than a weekend and surface afterwards talking about the 302 program. He remembers thinking that vacation meant vacation, Carter, so pick somewhere other than Area-fucking-51, and now he wonders if she'd been going down there to spend time with her friend. He also knows, just looking at Mitchell, that Carter hasn't come anywhere near the man since the accident. Because he knows Sam Carter, knows her reactions and her inability to keep a single damn thing from showing on her face, and if she'd been to visit Mitchell, Mitchell would have seen her looking at him and only seeing what he'd lost.
If Mitchell had seen that, there's no fucking way Mitchell would be doing it to someone else.
So his tone's more than a little snappish when he says, "Yeah, that's what the old man would tell you. I'm Ja --"
He cuts himself off, hearing his own voice, hearing what he was about to say, horrified. Jack O'Neill. Not anymore, for fuck's sweet sake, and he's been answering to his own name for two goddamn fucking years and he will by God not let someone shove him back into picking up the identity he'd left by the wayside just because the man's got a pair of eyes that's capable of seeing more than just the surface.
"Jonathan Nielson," he says, and Mitchell is staring at him like he's something that squirms when you turn over a rock, and fuck, he's got no earthly fucking clue why he thought this was a good idea, but the time to change your mind is before you bail out of the fucking plane. So he keeps going. Cards on the table. "You can call me JD. And yes. I'm exactly who -- and what -- you think I am."
Is-and-isn't, story of his fucking life, or at least the new one, and Mitchell grips the back of the recliner he's standing next to like it's the only thing between him and eating dirt (which it probably is; there's a cane lying next to the couch where Mitchell was clearly sitting and the way Mitchell's wobbling that cane is necessary) and gapes like a fucking fish. "How?" Mitchell asks.
Some smartass corner of his brain supplies well, son, when a renegade Asgard loves a Colonel very very much, and he nearly loses it right the fuck there. "The Asgard," he says, instead, neat and clipped. "And yeah, I've got his memories --" O'Neill's memories, his memories, their memories, and he suddenly resents the fucking hell out of this man, standing in front of him, demanding an explanation with those eyes that look so goddamn fucking much like --
He catches himself. Reins himself in. Starts over again. Breathe. "And yeah, it sucks about as much as you might imagine, and yeah, I really don't want to talk about it. And you're another one."
He means another victim, another remnant of the Program that chews men up and spits them out and can't even feel sorry for having to do it because needs fucking must when the devil drives and when the stakes are that high, compassion goes out the window. But he can see Mitchell take it wrong, watch the panic take hold and start to spread, and fuck, he's doing this all wrong. "No," he says, shaking his head to stave off Mitchell's thoughts before they can creep in. "Not another clone." (Clone; the word echoes in his ears. Clone, copy, thing, inhuman and unvalued. Words have power, Daniel always insisted, and he hasn't said that word in two years, hasn't thought that word in two years, and he wishes he hadn't now.) "Another person who got fucked over and tossed out. And now you're looking for something to do with your life, aren't you?"
God only knows what must be in his voice, his face, because Mitchell's chin comes up tight and for a minute, just a minute, he can see the flicker of a bedrock stubbornness that's gotta mean hell to pay when the man decides he won't be moved on an issue. "Yeah," Mitchell says. "But if you're looking for revenge, I'm not your guy."
Fucking hell he is fucking this up.
He shakes his head, slashes his hands through the air like he's trying to shake water off of them, quick negation. Mitchell's swaying on his fucking feet, looks half an inch from toppling over. He takes a step forward as Mitchell's weight shifts, thinking he's going to have to catch the man, and turns it quickly into the first motion of a back-and-forth pace when it turns out Mitchell's just trying to take some weight off of what must be the bad leg. If they're not both the bad leg.
It's fucking hot in here -- April outside, still cold and snowy, but Mitchell's got the heat cranked up to 'sauna', and he runs hot enough to begin with -- and he takes off his leather jacket before he dies. Realizes half a second too late that he doesn't have anything more than a tank top underneath it. He should have realized, should have remembered -- he's willing enough to show the ink to random strangers and people he'll never see again, but if this works out, he's going to be working with Mitchell day in, day out, and God only knows what conclusions Mitchell will draw from it. Most of it is symbols, abstracts, but there's language written in there too, and none of it's in English but God knows what languages Mitchell can read.
So he pitches the jacket at the chair and turns and heads for the kitchen. Rude as hell, to be making himself at home in someone else's space without express invitation -- and he's pretty sure it'll grate on Mitchell more than it would on someone who isn't struggling to keep some fucking sense of control over his own life, his own space, in the face of doctors and therapists and well-wishers the way Mitchell must be -- but he can't stand there and watch Mitchell's eyes widen at the sight of him, watch Mitchell try to figure out what this new information means. In the kitchen, he puts his hands palms-flat on the fridge and bends over them for just a second. Breathes. Breathe.
God, he really hasn't thought this through. Any of it. He'd been thinking about what he could do to keep himself occupied, what he could do to stop himself drifting, and he'd thought that having someone he wouldn't have to lie to constantly would be easier. But he'd forgotten that the price of having someone that you don't have to lie to is having someone you can't always lie to. Someone who knows all the things you're lying about, someone who can see and guess and fucking piece things together, and he's just invited himself into the life of someone who knows at least bits of all the things he used to be. All the things he's had to leave behind.
He's spent the last two years (three months and eleven days, and he's tried to stop himself from counting every last one of them and he can't) moving through a world of endlessly-renewing strangers, even the ones he stopped to stay with for a while, and even the ones he came to care for, the ones he's come to call friend, were strangers to the end, because they only saw the face he showed them. No matter how hard he works, no matter how many terms he comes to, JD Nielson is a cover story he's going to be living for the rest of his fucking life. He's started to get comfortable with the pretense, but he hadn't realized it had been comfortable only because nobody had enough information to see what was lying underneath.
And it's like the whole damn road he's taken to get here is stretching out behind him, from the road to Pueblo he'd been walking down when he'd had the first hints of revelation for all the work he'd have to do to the cessation of vibration as Katelyn had put down the tattoo gun and pronounced the pattern finished. Pastor James had told him can't build a life out of running from and Keller-roshi had asked him Are you ready yet to learn what there is to love about the world? and General Hammond, Hammond, the only commander he's ever respected enough to give his full loyalty and allegiance, the only man he's ever truly consented to be commanded by, had asked: Don't you think it's time to stop running, son?
It all led here, and in his end is his beginning, and in that instant it all becomes clear: this isn't a curse. It's a chance. It's an opportunity knocking and a blessing in disguise. He's spent two years building himself, always wondering when will I be done. And he's realizing, now, that the answer is never, that he'll spend the rest of his life learning and integrating and living, fucking it up and trying again, always moving forward. Stability and happiness aren't things you build once. They're things you tend as you go. He's made a hell of a fucking start, and this is a chance to stand up before someone who knows both the Before and the After and prove that all of it is going to fucking hold.
All the work, all the effort, every single fucking piece he dragged into place and nailed there: this is his final exam.
And I get it now. I get all of it. And I'm ready.
So he calls back to Mitchell, "Revenge is stupid," and he can hear himself, giddy laughter in his voice, and he wonders if Mitchell can hear it too. Wonders if Mitchell has any clue what's going on inside his head. Doesn't matter. He opens the refrigerator door. Takes out two beers, because hey, they'll need them to make a toast: to him, to them, if Mitchell agrees to this wild and wonderful plan, and he's pretty sure he can make Mitchell agree, because Mitchell looks like a man who could use a kick in the pants. And yeah. He can work with the guy. And more than that, he thinks he's going to be able to let the guy work with him.
So he grabs the first box of leftover takeout he sees -- the one on the top, which is probably the least old -- because he is suddenly fucking starving, and he takes it all out to the living room, and he tells Mitchell the plan. Within five minutes, Mitchell's leaning forward, listening intently. Within ten, Mitchell's asking questions. By the end of the night, they've got a handshake agreement on all the important things, and he's got a couch to crash on.
That night, he stretches out on the couch, his laptop on his chest, catching up on Slashdot and The Register and Boing Boing before he sleeps, while Mitchell moves around preparing for bed. Takes him a second to realize that the part of his mind that always counts steps and follows sounds when there's someone moving around him has flashed a quiet warning: Mitchell's stopped in the hallway in between the bathroom and the bedroom, wearing nothing but a towel and a few droplets of water and a whole litany of scars and broken places.
He looks up. Mitchell's staring at him, and he can't quite read the expression on Mitchell's face, not exactly, but he can guess at the shape of it. Five hours ago he'd taken off his jacket, forgetting it would show Mitchell more than he was ready for Mitchell to see, and Mitchell's just come smack up against the exact same moment.
Doesn't matter what he says out loud, because Mitchell's watching him for what he doesn't say, chin coming up (again) in that stubborn defensive pride more visibly than if Mitchell had shouted it from the rooftops. So he's careful what he shows, careful what he lets Mitchell see, and the past two years of constantly choosing the face he wears serves him well, because it means he can communicate the message with every line, every angle: I do not pity you.
When he does speak, he tries for understanding without pity, empathy without cloying sympathy. Mitchell must hear it, because Mitchell gives back acceptance without defensiveness, and that means they're going to be able to make this work. Eventually. It'll take some effort.
The big things always do.
And Mitchell smiles a little sad smile and says goodnight, and he shuts his laptop and clicks off the light and stretches out on the couch that's just a little too small, in the room that's just a little too warm. He can hear the cars outside on the street below, and in the distance, a faint and fading siren. After what seems like far too long, the city-noises are joined by the sound of Mitchell's sleep, half-snore, half-exhale, rough and broken.
In the darkness, he thinks of the droplets of water on Mitchell's broad shoulders, the crinkle at the corners of Mitchell's eyes when Mitchell smiles, the slowly-growing light of life resurrecting in Mitchell's face. He thinks about wanting what he shouldn't want, about the likelihood of getting what he shouldn't hope for, about work life and home life and all the times he's kept himself from crossing that divide. He thinks about good ideas and bad ideas and how his mistakes should be, have to be, nothing but his own.
He doesn't once think to wonder where he left his phone.
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