There's someone in the bed with him. He can hear the breathing: soft, even, melodious. The sound of someone who belongs there, confident and self-assured.

It doesn't even bother him anymore.

*

He wakes up on Saturday morning, and it's not until he's halfway through his shower that he realizes he's waiting for the other fucking shoe to drop.

The feeling persists as he brushes his teeth, forces himself to eat a bagel, and heads down to the building's gym for half an hour of weightlifting and self-recrimination. By the time he's done and running back up the stairs, back up to his apartment, he's resisting the urge to look over his shoulder every two seconds to see if there's someone bearing down behind him, coming to carry him away.

It isn't that he thinks the snake was trying to lure him into confessing (quia peccavi nimis cogitatione verbo, et opere; mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa; forgive me, Father, for I have sinned; it has been twelve years since my last confession and about thirty years since I last meant it and I'm not sure what I'd do with absolution anyway, so why don't we just forget I ever said anything?) so much as he thinks they might both be under the gun and under the wire. If the snake were just trying to get him to give himself away, he's done that already. Has been doing that, piece by piece, week after week, and he's pretty sure the snake would have had enough to justify removing him from the playing field a long damn time ago. But if they're both being played, if the rest of the Ba'als (baalim, yeah, he knows the fucking plural, Daniel made sure of that, and the last name Ba'al's adopted on Earth is just very fucking funny ha ha fucking ha) have suspected and are waiting for proof --

But nothing happens. (Or nothing happens yet.) He drinks a quart of Gatorade, is startled when it tastes fucking fantastic, drinks another. Laces up his running shoes. Runs down the stairs, knocks on Griffith's apartment door. Griffith answers, blinking sleepily, after several minutes' pause.

"Come on," he says. "Shoes on. We're going walksies."

"Fuck," Griffith groans. "What is this, basic?"

Underneath the mouth, though, Griffith's giving him the eagle eye: you okay? He answers back with a toss of his head, a twist of the lips: as okay as I can be; get your ass in gear. They don't say anything else as Griffith disappears into the bedroom, comes out in shorts and a plain grey "Beat Navy" t-shirt (and the sight of it makes his heart stop for half a second, because Mitchell owns one or two or a dozen of the fucking things and Griffith fills it out the way Mitchell probably used to, once upon a time). Griffith waves to the guy on the concierge desk as they go through the lobby. Probably knows the fucker's life story by now.

"Stretch," he orders, the minute they're out on the sidewalk. As Griffith obeys, he's watching the crowds around them, watching the ebb and flow of the Saturday-morning tourist trade, squinting against the sunbeam that peeks from behind a cloud. Griffith's not wearing his earpiece, not carrying his phone. No place to put it; the shorts have no pockets, and he woke Griffith up and dragged him out before Griffith could remember to put the earpiece in. It's all right. His phone, his earpiece, are both upstairs in his apartment too.

The snake called off his Jaffa escort weeks ago. He's still not sure which snake gave the order. Doesn't matter. He'll take it either way.

He rocks on his feet -- heel, toe, heel, toe, marching up and down again -- and tries to conceal his impatience as Griffith bends over, rubs his calves, stands up and goes through stretch and contortion and gyration. Bites back the exhortation to hurry the fuck up. Last thing he wants is Griffith hors de combat, or worse, to give the snake a reason to suggest a ride in the magical mystery box. He can wait five fucking minutes for Griffith to stretch out first.

When Griffith looks over and opens his mouth to say ready-steady-go, he sets the pace, bruising and brutal, before Griffith can get a word in edgewise. Only takes Griffith half a second to kick himself into gear, following along beside. It's not like running with the snake (perfectly paced, perfectly synchronized, always with the impression that the snake is holding itself back); Griffith's pushing himself flat-out, balls-to-the-wall, breathing rough and ragged and the occasional grunt when his heel comes down a bit too hard. Running with a human at his side is different than pacing a snake. Running with a human who hasn't been doing 10k a day for God only remembers how long is more than a little unfair.

(In another world, in another lifetime, it would be Mitchell here, at his side, day in, day out, setting the pace and nipping at his heels and laughing the whole way, tag, you're it and what's the matter, old man, can't keep up? and a whole host of friendly rivalry, teasing, taunting --)

Griffith doesn't object to the pace, for all that the kid's struggling. Tries his fucking best to keep up. (Here they come, zooming to meet our thunder -- oh God, if he gets that fucking song stuck in his head he's going to have to fucking kill something. Probably himself.) After about four miles, with Griffith gasping and sucking down air like they're going to stop making it any day now, the kid wheezes, "I fucking hate you."

He dials the pace back. Not a lot, just enough so that Griffith's not about to asphyxiate himself. "It's good for you," he says, cheerfully unsympathetic. "You can't run ten K without dying, Benton's been going damn easy on your ass."

He can feel Griffith jerk beside him -- Major Eli Benton, commander of SG-9 (Griffith's unit, and he knows damn well that it doesn't matter what's written down in Griffith's records about the past month, Griffith still considers himself part of Benton's team) has been with the SGC for a damn long time, and anyone doing even minimal research on the SGC -- which the snake has done -- would know the name. "I --" Griffith begins.

He takes pity on the kid. "Relax," he says. "You left your earpiece back at the roach motel. So did I. Snake pulled off the tail on me weeks back, I am the tail on you, and I'd spot anyone pacing us in a heartbeat. Not to mention that I take a different route every day, so they can't have a directional mike set up in advance, and the traffic's too fucking bad for them to have a car keep up with us. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for a little chat. Meant it about Benton going easy on your ass, though. You shouldn't be this out of shape."

"Diplomatic team," Griffith shoots back at him. "As in, sitting on your ass and negotiating."

He snorts. "As in, sprinting back to the Gate with a bunch of pissed-off natives on your tail when you accidentally say the exact wrong thing," he says. "Hasn't happened to you yet, you just haven't been there long enough. Give it time."

Griffith doesn't say anything, just gives him one of Those Looks again, and he catches himself before he accidentally outs himself to the kid in the name of busting his ass. He changes the subject. "How you holding up?"

"Aside from wanting to fall the fuck over right now?" Griffith says, then gets serious. "I'm holding. No fucking clue how you've managed this long."

It irritates him. Not that he doesn't want the kid to know how tough things are -- if Griffith thinks this is a Sunday stroll in the park, he's way more likely to fuck this up -- but this line of questioning is treading uncomfortably close to Griffith asking him how he's managed to hold up this long, and that's something he doesn't particularly feel like sharing. "My natural charm and talent," he snaps, and changes the subject. "Look. Had a visitor. Snake wanted an answer, yes or no. Couldn't stall any longer. We're committed."

Griffith nearly misses a step. Recovers neatly, no more than a hitch-in-stride, and he's gotta admire the kid's ability to keep moving when he's just gotten slapped in the face with particularly unwelcome news, but he doesn't like the way the kid glances over at him, once, twice, through lowered lashes like the only thing going through the kid's head is what the fucking fuck. Still, when Griffith speaks, he sounds like he's asking what fucking time it is. "Okay. What's the plan?"

Dammit, keeping his pace down to something that Griffith won't die from is like running half-hobbled. "You got a problem?" he snaps. Hearing himself overreacting. Can't stop himself from doing it.

Griffith's voice is quiet. "No sir," he says. "You brought me here to do a job. Your call what that job is."

He makes himself breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. There's a part of him that wants to shake Griffith by the shoulders (don't you ever, kid, don't you ever dare take someone else's word for it, you always fucking think for yourself no matter what line of bullshit the officer in charge tries to feed you, because to do otherwise is to wake up one morning and discover you've been fucking played) and a part of him that wants to fucking clap Griffith on the back and say thank you, because he's going to need another pair of hands in all of this and he's not sure why the fuck Griffith trusts him but the course ahead is going to be rocky enough without having to worry about whether or not Griffith's on board.

"I can't give you these orders," he says. "Not morally, not ethically, not legally. This is the best plan I can come up with. But that doesn't mean it's going to go down smooth with the boys who call the shots. I can only protect you so far once it's all over. If you're not willing to take the risk, and I'm not going to lie to you about how much of a risk it is, you tell me now."

There's a flare of temper from the man beside him, and it's curious (he thinks, dispassionately) how he can read it in Griffith just as easily as he can read it in Mitchell, the storm clouds gathering and about to unleash, the force of Griffith's anger as palpable and tangible as the ground his feet are striking.

"I'm cutting you slack because you're going through a lot of shit," Griffith says, heavy and forceful. "But don't you fucking insult me by insinuating I can't hold up."

His blood is roaring in his ears, enough so that he can barely hear the belated "Sir" that Griffith tacks onto the end.

He stops running. Griffith stops too. Stupid, crazy, suicidal to stop here, to stop now, to give whoever might have realized by now that they've dropped off the grid a chance to catch up with them and listen, but it's either stop and re-center himself or haul off and pop Griffith in the mouth, and that wouldn't really go over well. "You stupid fucking idiot," he says, soft and vicious. "This isn't a game. This isn't a mission. This isn't a game of Capture the fucking Flag. I'm telling you that we're about to go in and get our hands dirty. Dirtier than you've ever gotten them before."

Griffith's looking back at him, still gasping for breath, eyes dark and tumultuous. "You don't know enough to say that."

"I know enough," he snaps. And yeah, pissing off the one person who's here to help him isn't a smart fucking idea, but this is real, this is important, he has to make the kid understand. (Wishes someone had given him this talk, back in the days when he'd still been cruising on hero worship and the desire to be a genuine hero his own goddamn self, back when all he'd needed was someone to tell him what to do --) "I know that I'm asking you to be a goddamn contract hitman on my fucking say-so, and you're not giving this anywhere near as much thought as you should by God be giving it."

The anger in Griffith's eyes is fading, replaced by what he's sickly sure is pity. Or maybe sympathy. He's not sure which one would be worse. "I know," Griffith says, and his voice is like a shutting door. "He briefed me before I came. I told you. You brought me here to do a job. I did my fucking thinking already. I might not know all of what you're up to, but you don't think I can see the big picture?" Griffith's chin comes up. "And besides. You're family."

For an instant he thinks Griffith's choice of pronoun is a clue, that Griffith's referring to O'Neill as he because Griffith knows, but his common sense catches up with his paranoia a second later. They're undercover. Even if he's using names, Griffith won't, not trusting himself not to slip at some later point when a slip would mean disaster. Then the rest of what Griffith said sinks in, and he almost has to bend over or sit down or something, because it's like a punch in the chest, like a knife to the stomach, like waking up and finding your whole world's crashed down around your ears while you were dreaming.

It must show on his face. It has to show, because Griffith takes a step forward and reaches for his shoulders to shore him up and keep him from pitching over, and he takes a step back before he even realizes he's doing it.

"Don't say that," he says, and his voice, that treacherous bastard (heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping) keeps speaking without him telling it what to say. "I can't let myself think that. Don't --"

Griffith's face changes again, understanding flashing for half a second before it's wiped clear and replaced with nothing more than calm. "Okay," he says. "We'll leave that part out. But I fucking know you, all right? I don't know who you used to be, and I don't know what you've seen and what you've done, but I know who you are now. If there were another way, you would have found it. If there were another choice, you would have taken it. You hate this and you're doing it anyway, and that tells me that there is no other way. I'm not going to say this again. I'm not going to get the chance to say this again. Whatever you fucking need me for. Whatever."

His eyes are stinging. It's the sweat rolling down his brow, his body's attempt to cool him in the early June heatwave, nothing more. He takes another step back, and a man pushing a baby stroller cuts between the space it makes between him and Griffith, and when the man is clear again, Griffith's not looking at him anymore.

"Come on," Griffith says. "Let's get moving again. You can tell me what to do."

*

He spends Saturday afternoon in the office. Sitting in his office, the glass walls enclosing him tinted to opaque, headphones on his ears and the music turned up loud. Writing line after line of code. The bitch is to make it just flawed enough. Ashes to ashes, we all fall down, but he's been falling for a long fucking time and by now there's nothing he doesn't know about how to make the fall look good.

The timing on all of this is so fucking critical. Sixteen different pieces that all have to happen, one-two-three, a place for everything and everything in its right place. Better to err on the side of too fucking subtle than to risk this cracking early. Doesn't want the show to start without him.

Letting the snake have a line in to the live system is the most insane part of a fucking insane plan. If this whole thing has been one long con trying to con the con-man, this is the point where he's handing the Snake Army the keys to the candy-store and telling them to help themselves. But nothing less would serve as justification for Delta summoning the troops, all the troops, and getting them all in the same room. Just the thought of it makes him want to put his fist through the panes of glass around him. (For want of the nail the shoe was lost, for want of intel the war was lost, and nations thrive and nations die, from Cynoscephalae to Bletchley Park and beyond, based on what you know and what you've failed to notice.)

Still. No other choice. There's no way Carter could have faked something reasonable, something with enough depth and enough breadth, to convince the snake that it was looking at live data. Not with the lead time he gave her. Carter's good but she's not that good, and she can't enlist an army of her own to help her generate gigabytes of fake reports and dummy email and the fucking cute cat pictures that every intranet spawns like salmon when users get left unattended for any length of time. Entropy's a bitch, and people left unattended with a computer and too much fucking free time (where that free time came from while they were all in the middle of fighting for their fucking lives six days a week he'll never know; these unanswerable questions and more, brought to you by --) are the greatest force of entropy ever fucking discovered, and Virta would spot a fake even if the rest of them wouldn't and none of his justifications make him feel any fucking better.

The sun's just setting across the Sound (objectively, he notices that the sunset is beautiful; it startles him when he realizes that he's still capable of noticing) when a knock comes on the door to his office. With the glass walls looking out on the hallway opaqued, he can't tell who it is, so he ignores it. (Busy here. Saving the world, knock again later.) A minute later, the door opens anyway. Fucking non-lockable doors.

It's Suzukimo. She's changed her hair, blue instead of purple, and he wonders, with the corner of his brain that isn't occupied in thinking of ways to get the fuck rid of her, whether it's got anything to do with Griffith preferring one over the other or if she just changes colors every now and then for shits and giggles.

He pushes the headphones off his ears, raises an eyebrow at her. "Saw you logged into the mainframe," she says, leaning a hip against the doorframe. "You running down anything interesting?"

"Little here, little there," he says, trying to convey go away with everything from tone of voice to tilt of head. "Sick and tired of dealing with men in suits. I wanted some hack time."

She laughs. "Fair enough. Hey, I was just about to go get something to eat. Come with me."

He really fucking doesn't want to, but as soon as she says 'eat' his stomach reminds him that he hasn't eaten anything since that bagel for breakfast, and he's pretty fucking sure the growl was loud enough for her to hear across the fucking office, because she raises an eyebrow and laughs again. No graceful way out.

So he locks his terminal and swivels his chair around. "Yeah, okay, fine. But we've gotta make it quick. I don't want to lose my train of thought."

No conversation on the way down -- she pops in her iPod earbuds the minute he hits the call-button for the elevator and doesn't even bother looking at him once, which just pisses him off, because why would she want company if she didn't want to fucking talk to him? When they get out on the street, though, she waves a hand and says, "Dragonfish okay? Bit of a hike, but if you don't mind --"

He tries to hide the sigh. "Yeah, that's fine," he says. "Lay on, MacDuff."

They walk up Seneca. When they pass Fifth, she makes a little frustrated noise. "Hang on," she says. "I wanna grab my hoodie from my car in case it gets colder now that the sun's down. You go ahead, I'll catch up." He rolls his eyes -- this is not how he particularly wanted to spend his evening -- but he does. And hey, speaking of ways he didn't want to spend his evening, a couple of minutes later as he's just turning over onto Sixth, Suzukimo says, in his ear, "There's a gun aimed at the base of your spine right now. Lift your left hand, slowly, and take the earpiece out of your ear. Drop it. Then keep walking."

Once upon a time, statements like that made his heart rate spike and his mouth go dry, no matter how fucking much experience he had. He can't quite say when it stopped, but he does remember, clear as bells, five years in, one delightful little afternoon in one delightful little jail cell halfway across the fucking universe when Daniel had frowned and said, "You know, I'm pretty sure I remember when getting shot at used to scare me." (Three weeks before Kelowna, and he'll never know if a little bit of fear would have saved Daniel in the end or if Daniel would have been Daniel even with his hands shaking and his heart aflutter.)

He lifts his left hand. Slowly. Unclips the earpiece and lets it fall to the ground, doing what the crazy woman wants him to do, because even if you're outgunned and outmaneuvered, as long as you're still standing, you've still got a chance to win. "Don't suppose we can talk about this, can we?" he says. "If you wanted me to buy you dinner, you could have just --"

"Shut up," she says. From the sound of her voice behind him, he can tell that she's stooped to pick up the earpiece, and for a second he debates turning, attacking -- but no, there are civilians on the street, even if nobody's stopped to look, and he will not fucking endanger them. He has to hope she won't either. "Into the park. I can shoot you faster than you can pull anything. Don't try."

He keeps walking. Slowly. Carefully. One foot in front of the other. Something nagging at the back of his mind. World's narrowed down. Click-click, single frame, Polaroid and Kodachrome (everything looks better in black and white). Park's a maze. Slabs of concrete, copses of trees. Roar of the freeway and of artificial waterfalls and water-fountains to cover up any stray noise. Couldn't have asked for a better place to kill someone.

"I get to know why I'm dying?" he asks. Even though, hey, he's not planning on being the one who isn't walking out of this. (Get ready. Get solid. Breathe.)

"I am sorry," she says, and the bitch of it is, she sounds like she actually is. "But I can't let you crack that system for him."

He turns around. (Slowly.) She's got her right hand in the pocket of her hoodie, and yeah, that really is a pistol in her pocket; she's not just happy to see him. Should have fucking realized something was wrong when she mentioned wanting a fucking hoodie in the middle of a fucking heat wave, but it hadn't fucking clicked and his own fucking stupidity means he's going to have to --

Something goes click.

"What agency?" he says.

She'd readjusted her aim when he turned. Even through the hoodie he can tell she's got the shot; won't kill him, not instantly, not if he can move fast enough, but it'd put him in a world of hurt and he doesn't particularly relish the thought of waking up in the snake's magic box. But she doesn't pull the trigger. Instead she frowns. "What?"

Oh, for fuck's fucking sake. God fucking deliver me from goddamn fucking amateurs. "What agency?" he repeats, a little more snappish, a little more fucking irritated. "NID? NSA? I know you're not SGC."

The frown gets deeper. "How do you --"

He wants to close his eyes for patience, but he doesn't dare. Doesn't dare look at the expression on her face with anything other than his peripheral vision, either; he's watching the center of her chest, the curve of her shoulder, because he's never fucking once met an agent who could avoid telegraphing a shot in advance by bracing for the recoil. (If she'd been smart, she wouldn't have let him turn around. He can disarm her now. Or at least make sure they're both equally hurting.) "And who the fuck thought it was a good idea to send someone so fucking young? I know you've been here for like a year and a half. I read your fucking file."

Her shoulders ease in her confusion, and that's it, that's the signal he was waiting for. He could take her now; she's relaxed her guard enough. Feint right, lunge left. (Nearly everyone instinctively dodges right; people are primed to expect it.) Get around her, arm around her neck, chokehold and slide his hand into her pocket for the pistol. (Small enough that it's probably a .22; bulky enough that it's got to have a silencer.) From there, his weight will probably win it. He's fought with her enough, in their afternoon team bonding expeditions -- ha ha fucking ha -- that he can probably predict her. All it would take would be one quick motion.

He doesn't. Instead, he waits, because everyone deserves a fucking chance, even fucking interfering idiots who nearly give him a fucking heart attack, and sure enough, she demands, "Who the fuck are you?"

"Yeah, you see," he says. "There's a reason I know where you're not from. What agency, woman?"

She's got ten seconds to answer him before he goes for her anyway, and he's on four counting backwards before she shakes herself and says, "I'm with the IOA. Nobody fucking told me they were sending somebody else under."

"Yeah, well," he says. "Nobody fucking told me there was somebody under already, so I guess we're fucking even. Take your hand out of your pocket, sweetheart. You're making me nervous."

She does, and he breathes a little easier (not going out to die to-day, but hey, there's always to-morrow). "What's your mission?" she asks. "Intel, infiltration, or neutralization?"

Part of him wants to tell her she's a fucking idiot for letting down her guard -- news flash, honey, bad guys fucking lie, and even if he'd been the snake's most loyal minion he'd be singing the same song right about now -- but hey, her idiocy means he's not going to have to kill her today (probably), so he'll take it. "Six of one," he says. Canny, cagey. If she is what he thinks she is, he'll need to pick her brains, find out whether or not she can be useful. (And hey, fuck, if she is what he thinks she is, he could have had backup the entire time he was here and that thought makes him want to shoot himself.) If she's loyal to the snake, he hasn't said anything he can't explain (he knows she isn't SGC because he himself used to be; everything else could be a cunning lie). "What's yours?"

She heaves a disgusted sigh. "Long-term surveillance and trying to figure out how many people Ba'al has in the IOA. And who. We know he's got people, but I've only managed to finger half of them. I'm not on the books. I'll take it you aren't either."

"Oh, honey," he says. "You have no idea."

*

She puts the fucking .22 back in her car. They go to fucking dinner. While they're there, he worms her real name out of her. Not Suzukimo Hiroko, but close enough, Suzuki Haruka, and yeah, okay, if you're building a long-term cover it's better to go for something you can train yourself to answer to quickly, but there's "train yourself to answer to quickly" and then there's "close enough to be a fucking liability" and a little competence is all he asks. (Give us this day our daily mask.)

Still, the fact she's lasted this long means something. Last guy O'Neill sent lasted a couple of weeks, and nobody will ever fucking know what it was that queered it. (Sick suspicion, opening the door and gesturing her through, not willing to let her get behind him: it might have been her. He doesn't know the guy O'Neill sent, not personally or by reputation, but if O'Neill's agent had been about to fuck something up, he has no trouble believing Suzuki might have played Delilah to save her own skin. Fuck.)

He puts his cellphone on the table in between the soup and the sushi (she gave him back his earpiece; he adds that, too) and excuses himself to the restroom. Grabs the busboy as he goes. Pays twenty bucks for the loan of his cell and ducks out the back door. God, this is fucking sloppy of him and he hates to have to do it, but he doesn't have a choice.

Dials the panic number. (One-time use, and he's blowing it, but his nerves are shot and his judgment's fucked and he has no fucking confidence in his ability to read what's what; Griffith likes her, and that counts for something, but they're this fucking close and he's not going to let something get in the way.) Lets the phone ring twice. Hangs up. Waits.

Two minutes later the phone vibrates in his hand. Caller ID's blocked. It's all right, he knows who it is. He flips the phone open and says, without preamble, "I've got like two minutes. Don't ask. Need you to run a name without tripping any tripwires."

O'Neill sounds tired. (Later there than it is here.) "Go," he says, nothing more.

He gives O'Neill Suzuki's name, the date of birth that was in her employment file with Farrow-Marshall. Which might be a fucking lie, but hey, who knows, it might cough up something. Hears the keys clicking. Anybody else would worry that O'Neill would fuck something up, give something away, but he of all people knows what O'Neill's capable of when the chips are on the table and if he tells O'Neill no tripwires, no tripwires it will be.

"Japanese national," O'Neill finally says. "Huh. That's interesting."

He realizes he's clenched his hand into a fist when he feels his fingernails biting his skin. Doesn't demand O'Neill explain what 'that' is, because if O'Neill doesn't explain himself in thirty seconds or less, he's going to reach straight through the phone and kill the man where he stands.

O'Neill clears his throat. "She's the step-grand-niece of the Japanese Minister of Defense. Dropped off the grid about two years ago. Looks like --" Click, click. Click. "Japanese government's paying her, though. Through a double-blind intermediary, but it's there if you dig. No other activity in the account for the past two years, but the checks are coming in regular."

Japan joined the IOA two years ago, O'Neill had told him. Mostly-silent member, doesn't bother even sending a delegate half the time, but they signed the treaty and they get the reports. (Eleven member nations and O'Neill's told him they can't even agree on where to have lunch much less what should be done with the greatest secret humanity's ever kept, and three can keep a secret if two of them are dead, and he wonders how many fucking other people have decided to send guests to the masque in the abbey.) "Thanks," he makes himself say. "That's what I needed. We're go for a week from Monday."

He hangs up before O'Neill can say anything else.

The sushi's on the table when he makes his way back. Suzuki looks up. "Long line for the men's room?" she asks, dryly.

"Yeah, stuff it," he says, tightly wound and weary. "Here's the deal. I'm not going to brief you. But I'm not going to let you fuck me, either. You've got two options. One, you do one thing for me, and I'll get you your list, turn it over free and clear. I won't tell you what that thing is for, or what the plan is, or what's going to go down; you're just going to have to trust me to do my job and do it right."

She taps a chopstick against the table. "I don't like the sound of that. What's two?"

He smiles, and he can see her recoil at the sight of it. "Two, we walk out of here like we're best fucking friends, I march you straight across town, into Balim's penthouse, and blow your cover sky-high."

He can see the fucking instant when she realizes that she let him talk her into putting the pistol back in the car. Let him talk her into sitting down to table with the hatchet buried. Her face goes taut and sickly, and he feels bad, a little, but not a whole fucking lot, because he is so fucking close and he is not going to let her blow it.

"Nothing stopping me from fighting you," she says, putting a brave face on it.

He smiles again, or at least shows her his teeth, and there's a part of him that knows you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar but right now he doesn't fucking care. "I don't think you'd win," he says. "I'm having a very bad year."

She puts her chopsticks down and says, her voice full of venom, "I could do the same thing. Find evidence that you and Spence are sleeper agents and take you in to Balim myself."

And yeah. That must have been why she was cozying up with Griffith; Griffith's made no bones about his service background, and it must have piqued her interest. Just like he would have done, if he'd been under and someone with a suspicious history had turned up, and fuck this all, fuck all of it, he could have had help from moment fucking one and he hadn't, because nobody fucking shares. It's fucking Poland all fucking over again, never know who's an enemy and who's a friend, and he is not fucking going to let it end the same fucking way.

He leans over the table, makes his voice soft and deadly. "You could," he agrees. "But you'd be fucking yourself sideways if you did. Look, honey, you're good enough to have gotten this far, but I'm better. I've got advantages and benefits you can only fucking guess at, and I am about three moves away from winning this for everybody. I can give you everything you're here for wrapped up in ribbons and bows, if you stay the fuck out of my way and play along. If you've gotten this far, you're smart. If you want to get further, stay smart."

He waits a second to see how she's going to take it, because if she doesn't decide -- here and now -- to play along, she's not going to make it back to the office and he's going to have to figure out how he can do it and not get fucking caught. There's a minute of silence, where he thinks he might have to fight her after all, and then her mouth twists. "So I guess I'm taking option number one, then."

"Good choice," he says. "Here's what you're going to do."

*

He's starting to feel like a fucking ringmaster (step right up, one week only, the amazing juggling man; step right up, it's only a dollar, the large print giveth and the small print taketh away). Once upon a time he was trained for this, moved men and munitions around like chess pieces, every detail of a theater a shining beacon in his head. This is harder. He doesn't know why.

He knocks on Griffith's door at midnight. A pause. He's just lifting his hand to knock again when he hears Griffith yell, muffled and sparse, "It's open. Come in."

Suspicious like fuck, and fuck it, this day has actually fucking made him fucking reconsider his decision to stay mostly unarmed while he's here. (Carrying a pistol just invites trouble from the cops, which is the last thing he needs; carrying a zat invites trouble from all sorts of other directions. He carries a clip-point knife, ankle-sheathed, its blade a quarter-inch less than Seattle's city-code definition of 'dangerous weapon', and he knows it's nothing more than a security blanket; he hadn't even thought to go for it when Suzuki threatened him, which tells him how fucking useful it wouldn't be in a showdown.) Split second to threat-assess, and he plasters himself against the side of the wall, not against the door itself, and reaches out a hand to turn the doorknob.

Feels kind of fucking stupid when he whips his head around the doorjamb to get a quick-flash sit rep, prepared to stop drop and roll if someone's got a pistol (another pistol) pointed at his head (or Griffith's), only to discover the reason Griffith didn't want to answer the door is just because Griffith's standing in the middle of the living room, two feet from the snake staring back at him. But hey. He'll take alive and feeling stupid over dead (temporary or permanent) any day; it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you and The Computer Is Your Friend, Friend Citizen and it's better to be a live jackal than a dead lion but it's better still to be a live lion and fuck this all, he really needs a fucking nap.

The air is charged, like they've been fighting, like Griffith wants nothing more than to get away but doesn't want to turn his back on anything that might go squirming when the rock is lifted or come crawling out of the dark the minute he takes his attention away. For a second he wonders if they're fucked, can't bring himself to care, even, and he knows that's probably a bad sign, until the snake turns its head and smiles, delighted to fucking see him, and there's only one of them that can smile like that.

He shuts the door behind him, lifts a hand to his ear, takes off the earpiece for the second time today and drops it on the hall table. Griffith's eyes are wide and wild (for he on honey-dew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise), and he knows why (had forgotten until just now, had forgotten so fucking much), but they don't have time for Griffith to indulge it. "My invitation to the party got lost in the mail, I see," he says.

Griffith licks his lips. Rallies a little. "You only would have said you had to wash your hair."

He's proud of the kid. Excessive sarcasm under pressure is usually a skill that you don't pick up until your second or third year at the SGC. If you survive that long.

Delta takes a step back, and he can see Griffith draw an easier breath. "I merely came by to confirm some last-minute details," it says. "I've taken the liberty of arranging for a convenient electrical problem with the surveillance in Mr. Griffith's apartment for the duration. They won't be able to get someone up to fix it until at least tomorrow."

"Yeah?" he asks. "You sure about that? If I were you people, I'd find a failure like that awfully convenient."

It laughs. "My dear JD, it's the best-kept secret among those in the know: the damn surveillance system in this building shorts out at least once a month. Something about the humidity. Technology designed for a climate-controlled ship does not fare well in a temperate rainforest." It looks back over at Griffith. "And with that, I believe I'll take my leave. Good evening, gentlemen."

Yeah, yeah, hurry up please it's time, goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight goodnight, and Griffith's watching the snake as it swans out the door, and the minute the door closes behind it, Griffith's sinking down onto the Ikea-hideous couch. Hands shaking. "Fuck," he says, half benediction, half imprecation. "Fuck."

He crosses the room and is about to drop down on the couch next to Griffith when he realizes: the last thing Griffith probably wants right now is someone or something else in his fucking personal space. He beats a several-step retreat (doesn't miss the way Griffith's eyes go sick and thankful, just for a second) and lowers himself to the floor, arranging himself in seiza and looking Griffith over carefully.

"You okay?" he asks.

For a minute he thinks Griffith's going to say no -- is ready to tell Griffith to go stick his head under the tap in the kitchen and hope the cold water yanks him out of it -- but after a few breaths, Griffith passes one hand over his face, his hair. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah. Fuck." He breathes out again, shifting and exhausted-sounding. "Do you ever fucking get used to that?"

And yeah, okay, it's a fair question, but it's one he really doesn't want to think about, because the last thing he can afford right now is a fucking centipede's dilemma. Still, Griffith deserves an answer, an honest answer, not meaningless platitudes and lies. "No," he says. "But after a while, you stop noticing."

(You can try to prepare them, you can tell them what it's like, and there are, used to be, entire days of lectures in the SGC's General Training and Orientation curriculum about the reactions humans have, and none of them fucking help. You can put two, three, four humans in the room with a snake and they'll have even odds of being okay, but the first time you find yourself facing down a snake all alone, no backup, that slick and unctuous reptilian-fascination charisma focused nowhere in the world but on you and you alone, all that preparation flies straight out the fucking window. Hundreds of myths have arisen to explain why ophidiophobia is one of the deep fears; hundreds of studies have been done to find why it's one of the ones rooted in evolutionary biology; answers to these questions and more, coming to a channel near you as soon as the Program goes public and the whole world gets to Monday-morning quarterback.)

"Yeah," Griffith says, after another second. (Yeah, okay, I think you're fucking crazy, but I'll take your word for it, and he doesn't have the heart to tell the kid that we're all mad here.) Griffith's eyes dart over to the door the snake slithered out of, then back to him, and -- fuck, fuck -- he can see Griffith adding up the numbers, putting two and two together to make mauve or fucking pineapple or something else inside that brain. "You --"

It's Griffith realizing exactly what he's done, what he's been forced to do, and seeing it (finally) through the lens of perspective: he can see Griffith bringing that tremendous imagination to bear on the problem, conjuring the thought of being alone in a room, in a bed, with that, imagining what it must be like to have to pretend -- and he can't stand to hear it, can't bear to listen to it, can't let himself open the fucking box he's shoved it all into. "Don't," he says, hard and fast, before Griffith can get more than that single syllable out. An order, as firm and as binding (more so) than any order he's ever given.

Griffith shuts his mouth. He watches the evidence on Griffith's face, watches the contortions (realization, understanding, slowly-spreading horror) and tries not to let any of them reach him, touch him, because he is fucking drowning here and sympathy and pity aren't a lifeline, they're a fucking anchor that will drag him under. He pins Griffith with his eyes. "If you need a minute," he says, and he tries to remember how to keep his voice gentle, "take it."

He watches as Griffith gets it together, grabs for control. Proud of the kid. He didn't flip out the first time he came face to face with a snake, but only because he'd been too fucking stupid to know what he was facing, and after that, well, once you've nuked one of them, all the others lose a bit of their thrall. "No," Griffith says, looking down at his hands. "No. I'm okay. I'm okay. Did you --"

Stops mid-sentence, eyes flicking to the door, up to the light fixture, and hey, another reason to be proud of the kid, because he never told Griffith where the bugs were, which means the kid's smart enough to figure it out on his own. Good man. "Fuck it," he says. "If the snake's lying to us about the surveillance, we're fucked anyway, because if it's lying to us about that, it's lying to us about everything."

"Yeah, forgive me if I fail to find that comforting," Griffith says. He breathes out, long and edged. "Sorry. Anyway. You're later than I thought you'd be. Did you manage to get the code almost ready?"

"No, actually," he says. "I got sidetracked. By your girlfriend. With a .22."

The look Griffith gives him is entertaining, at least. The explanation only takes a few minutes. Griffith's about as happy with the situation as he is, which is to say, not at all, but at least having Suzuki be the one to crack the system, instead of him, adds another layer of misdirection. (Nothing up his sleeve.) She'll break in. They'll use her distraction. Once everything is rolling, she'll be the one to shut the door behind, release the worm that will destroy any hint of anything the snake has saved. The offsite backups only go once a week. If they time it right, and he'll fucking time it right, they'll be able to make sure the snake doesn't keep any long-term profit.

"What'd the snake want?" he finally asks. "Wasn't expecting to come back and find the two of you having a tea party."

Griffith had almost relaxed; the mention of the snake makes him tense up again. He watches as Griffith's hands flex. "I think he wanted to see if I was on board with the plan," Griffith says. "Check if I was planning on getting out of the way and letting you two work things out, or if I was going to cause problems."

It must have been a delightful little conversation. He has no trouble interpreting what the snake really meant. "Wanted to see if I'd brought you in deliberately, or if you being here is as much of a coincidence as it looks like," he says. He hasn't told the snake everything. Hasn't even told the snake anything, really, just that Griffith will back whatever he decides in the end. Snake must have been angling to find out whether or not he really does have a channel out.

Griffith nods. "Yeah," he says, and then seems to notice his fingernails biting into the fabric of his jeans, makes his fingers loosen but doesn't look up. "Look," he says, abruptly. "I have a question to ask, and you're not going to like it."

He closes his eyes. He doesn't like any of this, really; why should this be any different? "Go ahead," he says, his voice clipped.

When Griffith looks up, his face is taut, and he looks much older than he has any right to. "You don't really need me here," he says. "Not for any of the reasons you've said you did. And I'm not having second thoughts, and I'm with you until the end on this, but I need to know what the real reason was."

It's a good thing he's already in seiza; the position is familiar, soothing, comforting. If he'd been sitting next to Griffith, he might have decked the man; if he'd been standing and pacing, he might have put a fist through the fucking wall. The depth of his anger, the short stab of fury slicing through his pasted-on serenity, frightens him. It's not -- precisely -- that he resents having his motivations called into question, although that's part of it. He can't tell what the rest of the source of his anger is, and that tells him Griffith's stumbled on a tripwire and he's fucking going to have to fucking disarm it before they all get fucking fragged.

Griffith's watching him, and there's fear in Griffith's face, which means he's fucking forgotten to watch his fucking body language again, which means he's fucking slipping further than he fucking thought he was. He holds up a hand. "Wait," he says, and Griffith's chin dips, one-half of a nod, enough for him to be okay with closing his eyes and going spelunking solo.

Breathe.

He can feel Griffith's eyes on his face, and he fucking hates having to do this with an audience, has always hated giving anyone cause to think that he's weak enough to need to think things through so painstakingly before taking action or speaking further. It's why he has important conversations with Mitchell after the lights have gone down on Broadway, why he drags himself out to run himself stupid every time they're in the middle of a fight. And he's not thinking about Mitchell, he knows he's not supposed to be thinking about Mitchell, but he is and he has been and with Griffith here he can't not and it's fucking killing him, and if he'd been actually looking for someone to keep him from cracking the way he'd thought he had been, Griffith should have been the last fucking person on this planet -- the second last fucking person on this planet -- for him to call.

There's an answer in that.

He opens his eyes again. It's only been a couple of seconds; Griffith hasn't even had time to start fidgeting yet. Owes him the truth. Owes him an apology. Owes him a hell of a lot more, but right now, the truth is all he has to offer.

"Because you were the closest thing I could call to the only person who could make sure I stay human," he says, and -- fuck, fuck -- his fucking voice cracks halfway through and he will not fucking break.

And fucking hell, he sounds like some kind of bad melodrama, and he can only hope Griffith takes it as meaning that he's looking for someone to keep him unsnaked through all of this, but he can see in Griffith's face that Griffith's smart enough to hear what he really means. He keeps himself still. Makes himself look Griffith in the eye. Makes himself not flinch. When this is over, if this is over, he's going to have to live with knowing that Griffith has seen this, all these parts of himself that he hides away and never fucking wants to show, and it serves him fucking right.

"This isn't the first time you've done something like this, is it," Griffith says. Quietly. So quietly.

Breathe. "No," he says, matching quiet for quiet. "No, it's not. Said I wouldn't ever do it again. Doing a lot of things I said I'd never do again."

Griffith closes his eyes, a second longer than it would take for a blink. Opens them again. "Yeah," he says, and it's not agreement with what he just said, it's the answer to a question he hasn't even asked. "Yeah. Okay. I can see how much you hate this, so I'll make this quick. And you don't have to answer me, but I have to ask it anyway, because if that's my job here, I'm damn well going to do it." Griffith's braced for impact, loaded for bear, and that tells him just how bad it's going to be. "I'm sure you've asked yourself this a hundred times already, but I'm going to make it a hundred and one. Keeping everything safe is worth it. I know you'd agree. But are you sure this is the only way?"

Hearing it from outside his own head is like a bucket of ice water in his face, like a steel bar to the back of his skull. His own little nightmares, his own perpetual conscience whispering in his ear. He waits for the anger to follow, hard on the heels of the shock, and he's so braced for it that he almost doesn't realize it hasn't arrived.

There's an answer in that, too. If there's one thing he's learned -- if there's one thing he's still fucking managed to hang on to from all the things he'd learned, in all those months of striving to better himself, all those months dedicated to learning compassion and wisdom, learning that he could have compassion and wisdom -- it's that anger is almost always fear or shame in disguise. And he's come so far into this that he can't even be afraid anymore, and shame only happens when your hidden mind knows you're doing something wrong.

He's done so many things wrong, in all of this. Enough that he'll be picking up the pieces for months. Years. Enough that there are some pieces he won't ever be able to fit back together, and it's just going to be another item on the list of scars he's inflicted on the world around him. But he's confident of this.

So he looks Griffith in the eye, and he says, holding as steady as he still can, "Yeah. Yeah, I am."

It feels like a promise. Like a vow, even if he's the only one who knows he's taking it. And he realizes, hearing it, that this is what he needed, someone to ask that question without confrontation and without conflict, because he didn't know his answer was truth and not self-delusion until he gave it to someone outside his own head.

His words hang between them, in the silence, until Griffith finally nods. "Okay," Griffith says, and the simple trust in that single word is baffling. Griffith unfolds himself from the couch. Stands in a flutter of directed kinetic effort that's so smooth and graceful, so effortless, that it makes his heart hurt to see it, because it's what Mitchell should command and never will again. "Then I'm going to go get some sleep. I'll be ready."

He breathes out, and they aren't the slow and controlled breaths of shikantaza anymore. Maybe haven't been for a while. He hasn't noticed. Still feels better than he has in a long damn fucking time, and it's temporary peace at best -- a respite won from having a weight he'd barely noticed taken off his shoulders -- but hey, he'll fucking take it.

"I'll be ready too," he says, and for the first time in a while he thinks he might mean it.

*

Tuesday morning: another fine day in the Worker's Paradise. Timing on this bit's fairly critical. Monday had been calm and peaceful, same old same old, until twenty minutes before end-of-day, when Suzuki had come through for him and walked into the snake's office with the news that they had liftoff.

Didn't get a lick of sleep -- the snake had pulled him into its office too, and they'd spent the entire night trawling through as much information as they could take in: him because he knew the information architecture (or as close to information architecture as a system that sprung up freeform over ten years can have), the snake because it knows what it's looking for. That bit was a deviation from plan, and he's hoping like hell that it's not a bad omen. Supposed to have been Delta in there with him, because Delta needs to be the one to beat the bushes and flush out the game, but Suzuki had picked the precise wrong time, the half-hour when Delta was downstairs dealing with the Jaffa and Echo had wandered up to warm the desk chair, and so it was three to the races and he'd spent the entire fucking night with his skin crawling from being so close to not one snake, but two.

Griffith's fault for reminding him, calling his attention to the primal twitch from the back of the hindbrain; he'd been doing all right with not letting himself notice it up until then. Still. Can't be helped. None of this can.

Cracking the SGC's system is worthy of an all-hands briefing, and that's what he needed Delta for: to push and prod and maneuver so that all hands means all snakes, the whole set and nothing but the snakes, keeping everyone away whose contributions to the whole enchilada have been nothing more than being a little bit greedy and a little bit weak. There isn't a snake in heaven or earth that understands the concept of avoiding collateral damage -- shooting off a cannon to kill a gnat is a hell of a lot more impressive when it's tearing down a solar system to deal with one annoyance -- but Delta had actually been the one to bring up the point when they'd been planning, and it had nagged at him until he'd realized why. Delta wants to keep its pet humans out of the line of fire, because it doesn't want to have to train up a new executive team.

Turns his fucking stomach. (Let it go. By now there isn't a fucking thing he doesn't know about the costs you have to bear up under.)

He'd been paroled as the sun started to rise, dismissed back to the Hotel California for an hour or two for a chance to shower, shit and shave. Echo never has seemed to give a fuck about whether or not he gets to sleep. If it had been just Delta (the way it was supposed to have been, and he will not think about that, because once you start adding up all the ways the fucking plan is crashing, you lose the ability to recompile on the fly) he would have been able to catch at least a few hours down, but it can't be helped. Once upon a time he could have caught forty winks no matter where, but today he's wired. Edgy. Old soldiers never die, but their habits fade away; sleep is food and food is sleep and he isn't getting either.

0600. Twelve hours left. Sixteen, tops. He can make it.

Shikantaza is out of the question, but he can settle himself down properly for twenty fucking minutes at least, arrange himself in kekka fuza and go over the plan a few more times. Daniel had asked him, once upon a time, how he could always have another option, waiting in reserve. Way back in the beginning, back when the world was young again and new. Before Daniel had learned to see all the hesitations, the false starts, the wheels spinning while he tried to figure out what the fuck next. He hadn't had the heart to tell Daniel about the part of himself always watching, waiting, calculating, planning. He'd been trying to preserve that sense of wonder, that sense of trust, that Daniel had brought to the table, and Daniel hadn't realized --

Enough. The past is another country (and long ago, and besides, the wench is dead). He's got worst-case scenarios to plan.

Delta has called the All-Clone Conference for 1400 (after the market closes in New York; can't fuck with business, after all). Here, instead of any one of Ba'al's other pieds-à-terre halfway across the galaxy, because they need to have the data at hand, need to be able to see the information they're discussing, and even Ba'al hasn't been able to figure out how to interface Goa'uld data crystals with USB or FireWire yet. All, because there isn't a single one of the snakes that would tolerate being left out of the fray; Delta's told him they're far from being a unified front, and the squabbling for pecking order is brutal. The regularly-scheduled executive team meeting is at 1600; it usually runs long. The honor of his presence has been requested in the Bat Cave down in the basement for most of the day, as he helps the snake -- snakes -- trawl through the wealth of data they've uncovered.

Not going to be a lot of time later to get away and prepare -- physically, mentally. Time to do the preparation now. He's got lists of all the things that are going to need to be cleaned up, and some of them are obvious and some of them are agonizing.

The snakes: that's obvious. He's known how he'll handle that for a while; the symbiote poison Griffith smuggled in will handle that problem nicely. The problem there had always been getting them all in the same place. Could aerosolize the poison into the HVAC system, and he'd thought about it, but he still doesn't know for sure who all the snakes are, and the last fucking thing they need is a rash of mysterious deaths throughout the building; medical emergencies lead to cops and paramedics and the medical examiner would be be fucking fascinated by what turned up on autopsy. The cleanup on that would take months, if they wanted to keep the program and all its associated fact quiet instead of coming clean, and he knows full well that O'Neill's been holding off full-disclosure with tooth and claw for years. O'Neill had ordered him, coming into this situation: clean up the problem, but clean it up as quietly as you can. There's no guarantee that any snake would die alone, and even in this company it's something to be concerned about when your next-door cubicle neighbor topples over and goes into seizures; the public-health panic would spread too fast for them to contain.

The Jaffa: obvious too, really; he knows Teal'c has been trying to lead his people to freedom for a long damn time by now and he knows there are plenty who haven't taken him up on it, like lab rats cowering in the back of the cage even after the door's been opened. But hell, he's got a hell of a fucking lot of sympathy for people who don't know how to take freedom when it's offered and instead dive back into the burning building because it's the only home they've ever known. The Jaffa can be someone else's problem; they aren't going to cause trouble here. He and Delta reached an agreement on that point.

But there's too much knowledge floating around in that building, and most of it is in the wrong hands.

All of this, so much of this, has been an exercise in figuring out what he can live with and where his absolute lines are, and this is one of those points he won't compromise on. He's negotiated a truce he can live with, and if the snake holds to it, it won't be happily-ever-after but at least it won't be game-over-insert-quarter-to-continue, either. He doesn't have any idea if the snake's going to hold to it, and that means he has to do what he can to cripple as many as possible of the ways by which the snake could start over again.

I will not kill, but respect all life. Yeah. So much for that one. Again.

Mayfield's a snake; she'll get caught up in the dragnet. He's quizzed Delta about the rest of the executive team. Bezian and Cocumél know the score; Roberts and Yao and Rickowski don't. But even Bezian and Cocumél have imperfect knowledge; they know about Ba'al and they know about the Goa'uld, but they don't know about the cloning. They'll take orders from Delta and never notice the change from command-by-committee to solo direction, and while they might have a bit of a problem with the change in company mandate, Delta assures him that they're suitably cowed by now. Enough not to cause trouble, at least.

There's one group of people he can't leave in the snake's hands, though, and that's the team of tame mad scientists downstairs in the basement, the snake's personal Manhattan Project building guns and butter both. Humans. All of them. Humans who know what the snake is. Humans who know what the snake wants. Humans who've been building better mousetraps anyway. Snake doesn't need them -- it's capable of playing with the cool toys itself -- but there's no doubt they're useful. Snake can't be everywhere, after all. At least not without Xeroxing itself again.

And once upon a time, he'd been the kind of guy who took those types of people in and offered them a chance at rehabilitation. Still could. Almost. Maybe. But it's not just a weapons manufacturing lab down there; it's not just a technology research facility; it's not even just a biological weapons incubator. All of those, yes. But more. It's also where the snake does its cloning, and the O-chem boys have been playing along the whole time. And there's absolutely nobody he could turn them over to and be certain their information wouldn't get into the wrong hands at some point. Not even O'Neill. O'Neill -- for all his dedication to doing what's right -- has orders to follow. People to pull his strings.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And yeah, he's read Plato -- news to Daniel, always was; he's half-convinced Daniel always thought you got to be a Colonel by keeping your uniform neat -- and he knows damn well that's the origin of the whole set of military programming and conditioning, all the things they drill into you early and often: service, not power. You do it because someone has to, and afterwards you wash the blood off your hands but never off your soul, and the chain of command is there because that way someone, somewhere, has thought of all the tough questions so you don't have to. There are no right orders and wrong orders, just lawful orders and unlawful orders, and if you have to get yourself through it by thinking that the guy all the way up the chain is good and noble and bright and idealistic -- well, you do what you have to do. He always has.

No chains of command, here. There's just him, deciding who lives and who dies and who knows too much for him to be willing to turn them over to the black-suit boys with their suspect loyalties. Because all it would take would be for one, just one fucking idiot to think, hey, surely a cloned symbiote wouldn't be as dangerous as the original, all it would take would be one fucking idiot tracking down one of the lab boys and offering wealth power fame, and they'd be right back where they motherfucking started.

He can't let that happen. Can't leave them for the snake. Can't take them in with him. Only one thing left when you take the other options off the table.

O'Neill's going to get the lists of which of the boys from the Three Letter Agencies have been waving the "Go Team Snake" banner all the way, and it'll be his fucking job to clean that end of things up. Doesn't know how O'Neill's gonna do it. Doesn't care much, either. He's pretty sure O'Neill won't embrace the Borgia's solution; pity, probably, but not his fucking problem anymore.

By then, at least. He's not there yet.

So he sits on his cushion on his floor, and he watches his breathing and tries to still his mind, and he uses all the techniques he was taught in service of a different ideal entirely to bring himself to a state of quiet readiness. Ignoring how dirty it makes him feel, filth not of body or mind but of spirit, to profane his vows like this again, because it doesn't matter. He can't let it matter. He's got a job to do, and not quite enough time in which to do it, and he's broken every vow he's ever taken in his life except for one, the first one, the one that's shifted and expanded and slid over the years but has never faltered or fallen: do what you need to do to bring your people home.

Eventually, the clock in the back of his head lets him know it's time to rise. (Year's at the spring, day's at the morn, and after that the dark, and may there be no sadness of farewell when I embark.) He unfolds his legs. His hands. Stuffs his plans back into the back of his head, where they can sleep until he needs them, and even if there are no atheists in foxholes, he's never let himself pray that the contingency plans won't be needed.

0800: showtime.

Here's Johnny.

*

He skips his morning run. Skips his coffee stop. The run will only exhaust him and the coffee will only leave him wired, and he doesn't need to check in today; either he'll be out of this by sundown or he'll be dead. Or snaked. Either one.

O'Neill still thinks Der Tag is next week. Did that deliberately. Takes a couple of days for the ping to wend its way Washington-ward (latency's a fucking bitch). If he fucks this up today, the fact he's been on radio silence should be getting there just around the time O'Neill was expecting fireworks; O'Neill won't have to wait to know that things went south. And hey. Call it his last little bit of paranoia. He trusts O'Neill, as much as he can trust anyone, but he doesn't trust the people O'Neill has to answer to. He's pretty sure O'Neill hasn't shared any of the details of his plan; he's pretty sure O'Neill has only told the President what the President needs to know, no names, no dates, no strategy. But pretty sure isn't sure enough. Better to get forgiveness than permission. Better to hand over a gift-wrapped package, situation neutralized, all's quiet on the western front.

Better that O'Neill not know the details of what he's planning either, because if O'Neill doesn't know, O'Neill can't be prosecuted for it later.

The morning sucks. He copes. Makes it into something that's happening to someone else, makes it dim and distant, some Impressionist painting: Still Life With Windowless Underground Bunker And Snake. Snakes, to be precise; as they trickle in from hither and yon, they can't seem to resist coming down for a peek at all the gardens of earthly delights, down here to a sunless sea. He sits cross-legged on the conference table with his laptop on his knees and tries not to look like he's wishing they could be upstairs in the executive conference room, with its windows and its glass walls, instead of down here where secrets won't be plain to anyone who walks by. Can't let the proletariat think they're seeing double (or triple, or sextuple), after all.

Virta spends the whole day down here with them too, helping him organize and catalog and sift. He makes himself smile when Virta cracks jokes at him. It's easier than he thought it would be.

Some of the snakes watch him, curiously, as they drift in and then away again. They're all dressed in Earth-normal, but he thinks he can tell which ones have lived here from the ones who have been minding the store in the galaxy at large. The ones who haven't been stationed here are the ones that are looking at him like they're trying to decide what he'd look like naked and pleading, and it makes him want to shudder even though he knows he can't let them see.

Surprise. The ones who live here are the ones who have learned how to think of humans as something other than meat, than clothing to wear, than puppets or cattle. (Surprise. The tangible palpable weight of a snake's regard that he thought he remembered, that he thought he was coping with, was the dilute version.)

Eventually, when the clock in his head ticks over to 1300, he stands and stretches. "Gonna go find my minion and make sure he hasn't burned the building down while I wasn't paying attention," he announces, to nobody in particular. "Then get some lunch before the thing. Anybody want me to bring back a pizza?"

Seven clones in the room, plus him. None of them look up. Tough crowd.

Out the door, laptop tucked under one arm, and the air down here in the basement -- the Bat Cave is tucked down behind the boiler room -- smells faintly of damp and mold, but he doesn't give a fuck. Feels like he's breathing freely for the first time in hours.

Up-up-up the stairs, and he drops his laptop off in his office. Griffith's not at his desk, but that's all right; he's not supposed to be. He finds Griffith over in the Happy Hacker Haven, leaning a hip on Suzuki's desk and chatting her up with that sweet Southern affability. "Lunch," he says, pointing at Griffith, then looks at Suzuki. "Stealing him, sorry."

Suzuki gives him a death glare -- yeah, she's still holding a grudge about that threat thing, but that's fine, because he's still holding a grudge about the held-at-gunpoint thing, so they're even -- and nods. "Fine," she says, and then it's all smiles and sighs back in Griffith's direction. "I'll see you later, Spence."

"Sure thing," Griffith says, easy and amiable, and falls into step behind him as they head back over to the elevator.

They hit up the Market for lunch -- okay, okay, he's really going to miss Sabra's falafel; he keeps forgetting about food but theirs is pretty good when he remembers -- and Griffith, thank fuck, is smarter than to even hint that it's anything other than every day ever. He's halfway through giving Griffith a list of things he wants the kid to work on for the rest of the week (entirely invented, but well within the realm of plausibility) when he stops and snaps his fingers. "Just remembered. Your girlfriend mention anything about that project I asked her to look into for me?"

Griffith rolls his eyes. "She's not my girlfriend," he says, and hey, the irritation doesn't even sound fake. "But yeah, she said she'd have it done for you this afternoon. By after the exec meeting, at latest."

He nods, like it's barely important, even though Griffith's just given him Suzuki's confirmation that she's sure she can clear out anything the snake shouldn't have. "Great, thanks," he says, and it's back to discussing budgets and spreadsheets and all the other things he's going to be thrilled to be able to leave behind -- part of the things he's going to be thrilled to leave behind, anyway -- for the rest of the meal.

They're back to the building by 1355, and they're past security and halfway through the lobby when he snaps his fingers again and stops their forward progress. "Forgot that I was supposed to stop down in the lab before Meeting Hell this afternoon," he says. "If I do it now, I'll be late. Here." He hands Griffith his keycard, the one that'll get him anywhere in the building. "Go get those reports for me and put them on my desk, willya?"

"Yeah, no problem," Griffith says. "I just need to go upstairs first."

He's already counting off the seconds in his head as they part.

*

1400. He hits the Bat Cave right on the nose. Supposed to be a Jaffa standing guard outside the door; there isn't. Good sign. Means the snake hasn't fucked him yet. (Ha. Ha.)

The nest of vipers doesn't even look up as he enters the room. For a second it feels like there's hundreds of them, but of course there isn't. Triple dozen, all told, Ba'al-embodied and otherwise. More of them look like the Ba'al-body he's come to know and love than not, but there are others in the room, too; Mayfield, Virta. A few others, faces he doesn't recognize. He doesn't know which ones are the snake, which ones are just a snake, but it doesn't matter. He slides into a seat at the end of the table, folds his hands together, and waits.

The snakes are arguing in quiet voices, catching up on the gossip from the great out there, bitching about the quality of the coffee from the refreshments table that Esmeralda the Wonder Secretary set up on the sidebar this morning. Talking about strategies and goals and plans and galactic domination. Like every single pre-meeting mill of people from now back to the dawn of time. None of them try to loop him into their conversations. It's all right; he doesn't particularly need them to.

He should feel out of place here, among the mill and crush of bodies passing bodies, voices murmuring annoyance at being made to stay waiting for the last remaining member of the guest list. He should feel itchy and sensitized, uncertain beneath the weight of so many snakes in such small space, his primitive hindbrain flashing danger, danger, danger. He should be nervous, counting up all the ways this could lead to disaster, adding up the tally of potential pitfalls and preparing to meet them all. He's not. He's counting down instead, and somewhere in the back of his head, there's an LED readout glowing red, ticking by each second. T-minus five. 4:59. 4:58.

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves, be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. Yeah. Got the serpent part. Give him long enough and he might even make it back to wisdom. Little fuzzy on the concept of 'harmless' these days, though.

4:32. 4:31. Just him and the snakes, alone in this room where they've come to speak of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings, and he's been pointed straight at this moment for six fucking months like a spear loosed from the hand of a charioteer, O'Neill's right hand (lámh dhearg abú), armed again, his red right hand to plague us.

The tiny canister's been sitting in his jeans since he rose from his cushions this morning. None of the snakes look twice at him as he stretches his legs out under the table, slides his hands into his pockets like he's just slouching sullenly. The metal is warm with the heat of his body by now, radiant, ambient. He's always been good at sleight of hand; even if one of them were watching him, they wouldn't notice. He palms it out, thumbs it active, sticks it to the underside of the table. He can't hear it hissing at all, and he knows the sound of the voices around him will cover the noise for any of the snakes that might.

"He called this meeting," one of the Ba'al-snakes says, sharp and irritated. "Jack. Go find our last straggler. I'd like to get on with this."

(1:31. 1:30. 1:29. 1:28.)

He slouches to his feet, saunters over to the door. "Sure," he says. Turns back around as soon as his hand hits the doorknob, in his very finest Columbo impression; all he needs is the overcoat and the slouch. "There's just one thing you can do for me, first."

The aerosolized symbiote poison's already starting to hit the ones closest to where he was sitting. The snake who'd been standing next to him, one of the ones he'd never known to name, pitches over, seizing uncontrollably. Froth of spittle and blood on its lips. Foxtrot's farthest away; it takes a step, then another, but a third is too much for it to manage. Alpha's quick enough to see that something's wrong, but not quick enough to reach its phone. That's the biggest danger. There's enough time between when they know and when they stop moving, and he's watching, watching, but none of them manage to get close to calling down the alarm. :39. :38. :37.

He leans against the door, comfortably blocking the room's only escape, his arms folded over his chest, watching. Waiting. It's an anticlimax.

He always knew it would be.

Zero.

"Thanks," he tells the silent room, the grotesque bodies, lying twisted and distorted wherever they fell. "'Preciate it."

Then he bends down, pulls his knife out of its ankle-sheath, and goes around the room. Quickly, but not rushed; haste makes waste and hurry makes for fuckups. In through the base of the neck, right between C7 and T1, the point of the knife slipping through flesh and sinew to bury itself (sickening, satisfying) in the swollen and bloated symbiote-body lurking beneath the surface. Flick. Slice. He keeps his knife sharp.

You don't leave an enemy behind you, not without making sure it's dead first.

He'll be back with a zat as soon as he can -- nobody knows this room is here but the Jaffa and the snakes who are dead on the floor, but you don't leave bodies behind you, either, not if the discovery of those bodies could raise a hue and cry. For now, it's rise up, my fair one, and come away, come away. He wipes the knife clean on the shirt of the last snake he makes sure of. (Echo. The ThinkGeek t-shirt today says there's no place like 127.0.0.1.)

Re-stows the blade. Checks the clock in his head. 1415, and the seconds are ticking up and not down now: 4:21, 4:22, 4:23. He takes one last look around him, turns for the door. Stops. Turns back.

Virta's body is halfway down the room, sprawled out on the floor, one hand flopped as though it had been trying to push itself back up even as it had been dying. He stands over it for a minute. Can't quite tell what he's thinking. Something about snakes, and hosts, and how you can't save everyone, and how he's not supposed to believe that some people don't deserve saving in the first place. Then he pulls back one foot and drives it into Virta's side, so sharply he can hear dead ribs cracking beneath his toes.

Doesn't make him feel better. Hadn't thought it would.

5:05, 5:06, and he grabs the first access card that comes to hand (Griffith has his) and turns around to go again, but something's wrong. Something's fucked. He's always had a warning klaxon in the back of his head, the tiny sixth sense alerting him when the natives are restless or the ship's about to blow, and it's caroling now. Not loud enough to make him think they've been betrayed, but loud enough to make him break into a lope (not a run, never a run; running attracts attention, even down here where the only company comes from rats and cockroaches and minions of the snake) through the basement and towards the rendezvous.

Griffith's not there, not waiting for him, and that's enough to tell him they might be running on borrowed time.

Past the pipes, past the boilers, and there's a door back there that nobody's supposed to notice, tucked away in the corner. He cards it open. Flight of stairs behind it, and he's running now, two and three at a time, vaulting around the turn and landing catlike on his feet halfway down. Another door at the bottom.

It's a rabbit warren down here, tunnels crossing and criss-crossing, dug out of the earth by any means fair or foul, butting up against the fire-destroyed remnants of old Seattle and shored up and tucked away. Half the time you can't get here from there. The Bat Cave is on the fourth subterranean floor. O-chem lab is two flights down, behind doors and doors again; cloning lab behind the O-chem lab, tucked away through another door. (He's been in there twice; there's something revolting about all the little snakes in all their little vats, all the Ba'al-bodies, grey and lumpen and still, floating in their tubes and waiting for the breath of life.) Corporate security's on Underground One, the security offices that are above-board and legit. The real security's on three. If anyone's managed to figure out what's going on -- if he missed a snake in the Schlangendämmerung, if Delta's been playing them all along and is about to end the game -- there's a whole floor full of Jaffa between them and freedom.

He'd given Griffith directions. Instructions. Fuck it, he's given Griffith orders, and Griffith hadn't been where he was supposed to be, and that means something's fucked.

Through another tunnel-corridor, down-down-down the stairs, the map of the land shining in his head -- last thing he fucking needs is to take a wrong fucking turn -- and the door to the O-chem lab is shut, and he knows damn well the room is soundproofed. No window to peek through. No way of knowing what's on the other side of the door. And fuck it all to hell and back, he forgot to check the snakes before he left, forgot to look for a weapon better than his fucking switchblade, and if that's the fucking mistake that fucking kills them both he might have to kill himself again, because it's a fucking amateur's mistake. No time to fix it. He drops low as he cards through the door. Hey, Griffith. Cavalry's here.

And Griffith's job in all of this was simple, fucking child's play really; sweet-talk his way past Esmeralda the Wonder Secretary, get into the snake's office, liberate the zat from the desk drawer (third down, on the left). Take it down to the lab with him. Zat the mad scientists into oblivion, ziptie them while they were unconscious, smash what he could, and get back up to the rendezvous. Surgical strike, while the snake (last snake standing) is distracted. Couldn't do this all at once, not by himself, and the way to make sure that you hit all the targets before they come to take you out is to sow the maximum amount of chaos and confusion all at once. Sometimes you need an extra pair of hands.

Last snake left didn't know about this part of the plan. Hell, Griffith doesn't know all of this part of the plan; he's told Griffith enough, and he's pretty sure Griffith deduced he was planning on coming back down and finishing off the job, but he fucking wasn't going to ask the kid to be his contract assassin. Still. If the snake figured out what's going on down here, there's a pretty fucking good chance it's decided the deal is off. If it hadn't decided that already.

He's not expecting what he sees when the door does clear his line of sight.

The scan of the room is automatic. (Where are the threats?) Only takes him a second to place Griffith: on the floor, other side of the lab, back to the door. Kneeling over a face-down, faintly-struggling body. One knee in the guy's kidneys. One arm looped around the guy's neck. Pulling him back: textbook choke hold. Blood on the floor; no knowing who it belongs to. He flicks his eyes around the room, adding up numbers, drawing his tactical map. Six stationed in the lab. He places five, unconscious or dead, ziptied and secure. The one Griffith's fighting makes six. There are overturned vials and flasks everywhere the eye can see.

The kid wasn't supposed to fight a battle here. One of the lab boys must have woken up from zat-stun before Griffith could get him secured.

As he straightens up, shuts the door behind him, the man Griffith's choking makes a tight sound. The hands clawing at Griffith's forearms slacken, fall. He's already moving forward to take care of the cleanup -- his job, his problem, and he will not allow himself to be responsible for some other good man's nightmares -- when Griffith bears his weight down on the guy's shoulders. Twists sideways. Quick, practiced. The snap of the man's neck breaking echoes sharply in the space between them.

It's not the only sound. There's some soft gurgle, and a keening whimper, and he can't tell where it's coming from.

"Nielson, at the door," he says, because Griffith would have heard the sound of the door opening and he knows, knows, that in the few seconds straight after someone wins and someone loses the instinct is to look around for the next threat and it's hard to tell friend from foe. He's stepping closer, getting ready to move in and take over, when Griffith turns his head at the sound of someone speaking and --

Jesus fucking Christ.

Acid. Has to have been. Face swelling, necrotic skin giving way, blisters rising and breaking open, charred white. Flecks of bone, visible beneath the black and the red, blood pooling and pouring free, flesh being eaten away still. Tears flowing down Griffith's face, or not tears at all, because --

Jesus, his eyes. Two soft puddles, deflated balloons, shriveled grapes. The viscous jelly is smeared down Griffith's face, aqueous and vitreous, mixing with blood and pus and lymph.

His stomach heaves, and he catches himself a scant second before he vomits.

No time to stop and think. No time to let himself be affected by the sound of Griffith's whimpers, by the smell (oh Christ the smell), by the way (sweet fucking Jesus) Griffith's hanging on, holding up, not clawing at his face or rolling on the floor or shrieking loud enough to raise the alarm. Just flailing one hand around, blindly, feeling for something (anything) to make it stop hurting.

"Stop that," he snaps, because there's shit puddled on the floor and he has no idea what it might be, and he's there at Griffith's side before Griffith can finish trying to figure out where his voice is coming from. "I've got you. Stop moving. Christ, stop fucking moving," and he's been here before, watched men suffer and die, bleed out beneath his fucking hands and he couldn't fucking save them and he fucking will not fucking let it fucking happen here.

No way of knowing what chemical it was. No way of knowing what'll neutralize it. The only thing he can think of is to get it away, get it off, stop it from getting any worse, and thank fuck there's a chemical shower hose (because OSHA will come and inspect your secret fucking lab) on the wall. "Shower," he says. Trying to keep his voice even, nothing to worry about here, I'm in control, I'm motherfucking in control. "Tilt your head back --"

And Griffith swallows, hard, and for a second he thinks he's lost the man, but then Griffith shudders and heaves and does, wrecked face tilting upwards. And good God, he knew the man was good; now he knows the man is amazing. Griffith's shivering and gasping, the last of the battle-adrenaline slipping away, and he can't even find a safe space to put his hand on Griffith's shoulder while he sluices the acid from Griffith's skin.

By the time he's got Griffith as hosed down as possible, they're both shuddering, and Griffith's whimpers have turned into moans. "'ad s't?" Griffith manages, how bad is it through what's left of his lips, and even if they got him to a hospital in the next fucking thirty seconds there's no road that leads to him coming out of this even in the same zip code as okay.

He will not let that happen.

"Bad," he says. Never believed in lying to a man down, and Griffith knows full fucking well how bad it is. He tosses the shower aside. It hits the dead guy as it goes, still spraying water. He knows what he has to do. "But not permanent. Come on. On your feet. I'll take your weight. I just need as much help as you can give me."

Must take a second for the words to penetrate the haze of agony Griffith's in, but he hopes the tone (calm and controlled and not fucking panicking) helps. "Can't ... lobby," Griffith wheezes. "'eole."

Can't go out the lobby, there are people, and Jesus fucking Christ if you gave him a whole unit full of men like this, he could conquer galaxies.

"We're not going out the lobby," he says, looking for two places he can put his hands, looking for two places where he won't be touching parts of Griffith's skin that are blackened and oozing. "We're not going to the hospital, either. I've got you. We're going to fix this. Come on. Coming around, your five. Hands under your armpits. Dead guy's arms at eleven and two; don't trip. On three. One, two --"

He gets Griffith to his feet, ducks under his arm, takes his weight. Griffith slumps against him. Sags. For a minute he thinks he'll have to get Griffith up in fireman's carry, and that would fucking suck because Griffith's got forty pounds on him easy, but a second or two and Griffith rallies. Just enough. "Okay," he says, calm and controlled, telling Griffith (with touch, with words -- all Griffith has right now, the only parts of Griffith's world beyond the pain and the darkness) that there's nothing to be worried about. (Lie. There's plenty to be worried about. He's not going to show it. Not going to show any of it, not going to let himself feel any of it, not going to think about --)

"Clear shot straight there, nothing else in the way," he says. "Not far to go. I'll steer. You lean. Just lean your weight against me and I'll get you there. Come on. Come on, Griffith, stay with me five minutes more. Just a little bit to go, and then it'll all be okay."

The pain must be unbearable, but Griffith bears up under it. Takes a step, or maybe a stumble, pitching forward, and thank fuck he's had a fuck of a lot of practice in fitting his steps to someone else's in the past few years because he needs every fucking inch of it now. He holds Griffith up, steady stream of words flowing from his lips, encouragement and description and strength: we're clear, you're good, twenty more steps, ten. Five.

Door to the cloning lab is in the corner of the O-chem lab.

Sarcophagus is in the corner of the cloning lab.

*

Ding.

*

Griffith sits up the minute the little miracle box spits him out. Hands clawing up to his face. Eyes blinking wildly. Chest heaving like he's trying to remember how to scream.

"You're clear," he says, the minute Griffith rises. Calm, controlled. Competent. He's sitting on the counter across from the sarcophagus, zat in his lap, waiting, one eye on the door. Helps to have a trusted face there for you when you come back from the light, and he's the closest thing to a trusted face Griffith's going to get here.

Griffith's face is smooth and unmarked. Whole. Complete. He's swinging his eyes around the room, enough to confirm he can see, even if his brain's not quite processing yet.

"Fuck," Griffith says, on a shuddering breath. "Fuck."

"Pretty much, yeah," he agrees. He puts a hand down on the lab bench, uses it as a pivot to leap down. The clock in his head is ticking, siren's-song of urgent, danger, busted fucking timelines strewn in pieces across the floor. Doesn't matter. They have to take time for this. "You're going to be a bit shaky. Look at me."

Griffith does, slow and cautious. Blinks. Blinks again. Eyes watering, fingertips questing across healthy skin as though they can't quite credit what they're touching. He remembers that part. You go into the box with parts of your body flaring out and dying, and you come out of the box with everything re-set to factory default, and it doesn't matter, because the brain remembers.

"Jesus," Griffith says, but it's a prayer, not an oath. And yeah: not quite a Glorious Resurrection, but if he'd been five minutes slower, it might have been. "They told us about -- I didn't think --"

He cuts Griffith off. Hates having to do it, because in a just and righteous universe Griffith would have earned a chance to fucking recover, but in a just and righteous universe Griffith wouldn't have fucking been through this in the first place. "I know," he says. "I know. You have no idea how much I know. But we're on negative time." He holds out a hand. "You can stand up. I know it doesn't feel like it right now, but you can. Come on."

Griffith stares at him, blankly, and for a second he fears Griffith might be one of the ones who come out of the box whole in flesh but not in spirit. "Come on," he repeats, gesturing impatiently. "I've only cleaned up what I could from here. More to go. But we're almost out of here."

Another second, and he knows that part too, remembers that part, the way you come out of the box feeling slow and stupid and full of haze. But Griffith shakes himself, gets a fucking grip, and it takes both of them to get Griffith out of the fucking box but they finally get him clear.

Moving just fine -- slow, but steady -- and that's what he was looking for, because it means the box did its fucking job all the way. Griffith takes a cautious and uncertain step, and when his knees don't collapse out from under him, another. As he watches, Griffith stands up straight. Squares his shoulders. He can see Griffith conquering the freak-out, writing his brain an IOU for the nervous breakdown later.

"Okay," Griffith says looking around the cloning lab as though he's seeing it for the first time. (Because, hey, he is.) Room's small, but it looks larger now than it had when they'd come in. While Griffith had been in the box, he'd taken the zat to this room, the room outside, triple-shooting vats and tubes and bodies to oblivion. The box is the only thing left. "How are we gonna --"

He doesn't wait for Griffith to finish asking the question. Just lifts the zat he's still got in his hand and shoots the sarcophagus. Once. Twice. "Hey --" Griffith's protesting, loud in his ears, as he shoots the third like a dead man's match flaring into darkness, and the room is filled with the sudden electric-ozone tang of abused atoms all releasing their stored energy at once and flying apart.

Griffith slams into his side, intending to foul his aim, but it's too late. It was too late from the moment he was satisfied that Griffith was as all right as he could be. Couldn't let himself wait to do it, or else he might not have done it at all.

"What the goddamn fuck?" Griffith demands. "What -- why did you -- you could have --"

And he knows exactly what Griffith means, knows exactly whose set of injuries Griffith was thinking of trying to heal, because he'd thought it too. In the basement of his enemy's stronghold, waiting and watching, alone with his nightmares. And oh, God, he'd wanted --

But every tool is a weapon in disguise. And the tools that make you want to use them most, the ones that lure you with their siren's promise and their shining potential, are the ones that you can't ever let anyone, even yourself, use as a weapon. Against you. Against anyone.

He remembers that now. It fucking took him long enough.

And now is not the fucking time for this, and later might not be the time for it either; he'll schedule the conversation for the twelfth of fucking never, but he has to give Griffith something or they'll be standing here when the cows come fucking home. "Because he wouldn't fucking thank you for it," he snaps, and Griffith's staring at him and he can tell Griffith doesn't understand.

Fuck it. He'll cut the man some slack, because it's hard to keep proper field discipline when your CO looks younger than some of your kid cousins -- not to mention the way the goddamn box leaves you feeling like the whole world's out of tune -- but it took twenty-one fucking minutes for the box to spit Griffith back out and that's twenty minutes and thirty seconds past when they should have been out of here. "Come on. I said move it. I really don't want to have to leave you here alone when I run back upstairs and dispose of the bodies."

Griffith opens his mouth, looking like a protest is forming. Something in his face must give the man pause, though, because the mouth shuts again just as fast as it opened. "Fine," Griffith says. "But when this is over, you and I are --" He cuts himself off, reins his anger in. "Yeah. Okay. Let's go."

The O-chem lab outside the door is just as bare as the cloning lab now, zatted down to nothing more than furniture and essentials; Griffith looks around and bites his lip at all the things that aren't there. (Including the bodies. He'd caught the remaining five scientists before the zat-stun wore off and they woke up; small mercies.) He's halfway through leading the charge on the door when his brain catches up to him. He detours back over to the rack on the wall, grabs two of the lab coats hanging there, shoves one of them at Griffith. "Into that," he says. There's no way their wrecked clothing will pass muster on the street for long, but in lab coats, they can at least get out of the building without acquiring too much attention.

Griffith hesitates again, and he remembers that feeling, contrast and brightness tuned all out of whack and the world around him feeling over-exposed -- so he tries to conceal his impatience, just shakes the lab coat at Griffith again: come on. And some of his urgency must transmit itself through the air between them, because Griffith takes the lab coat from him and puts arms into sleeves. He shoves the zat into the waistband of his jeans, at the small of his back, and slings his own lab coat over it.

Having a weapon to hand makes him feel better. Not by much, but some.

*

He gets Griffith up two flights of stairs, leaves the man in decent cover while he ducks back over to the Bat Cave and zats all the snake bodies into oblivion. (He's pretty sure Delta -- Ba'al, now, the only Ba'al left -- wouldn't want to raise them up again and besides the box is gone, but loose ends should be tied up lest they trip you when you least expect them to.) Only takes him a couple of minutes, and Griffith's already looking steadier by the time he gets back.

Four more flights of stairs. Going past underground three is nerve-wracking, and he's not exactly sure he has any nerves left, but once they're clear, once the Jaffa stronghold is beneath them, he starts to breathe a little easier. The human contingent of the building occupants are used to seeing him wandering around at all hours, and they all know he's the snake's right-hand whatsis. With every step, their chances of getting out of here alive get better. Still. Ain't over 'til the fat lady sings.

It's wrong, somehow. Not the skulking out on cat feet part. The part where the walls around them aren't burnished gold, the part where there aren't any torches flaming, the part where it's Griffith behind him and not Teal'c or Carter. (Daniel.)

Up the stairs. Through the last underground corridor-tunnel, past the part where concrete gives way to carpet, giving Corporate Security's headquarters a wide berth. The staircase to the loading dock platform is in the northwest corner; you can get there without having to go up to the first floor. Usually deserted, this time of the afternoon.

Usually isn't always.

Delta -- Ba'al -- is leaning against the wall, right next to the outside door, arms folded over its chest. As patient as patient can be, waiting like it could wait all fucking week if it had to. It smiles when it sees them. Its smile is still the creepiest fucking thing he's ever seen.

He can feel his hand flutter, twitch towards the zat he can feel cool and solid at the small of his back, but Ba'al isn't (visibly) armed and there isn't anyone else (visibly) present. Just it, and the two of them, fifty feet and a snake between them and a clean escape.

"There you are," it says, sounding obscurely and obscenely pleased. "I thought I'd find you here. Took you quite long enough. That was a nice trick you pulled with crashing the surveillance system; I'm surprised you managed to find the time."

Still not totally fucked yet. "Hey," he says. Behind him, Griffith's tensing up. "Temperate rainforest. You said so yourself." Just because he's pissed at Suzuki doesn't mean he wants to hand her over. Up to her to decide how she wants to make her escape.

It laughs, and the sound is like spiders under his skin. "True," it says. "Still. I somehow suspect that I should regret not having discussed the letter of the law versus the spirit." It pushes itself off the wall, unfolds its arms. Takes a few steps forward. He holds himself still as it comes nearer; it stops just outside arm's length. Cocks its head. Watches him.

He tries for bravado, because he's got nothing left. "Everything's settled. Thanks for letting me do your dirty work for you."

It laughs again. "My pleasure, really," it says. "Are you certain I can't persuade you to remain in my employ?"

The answer to that question might make the difference between getting out of here still breathing and not getting out of here at all. The temptation to lie, to tell Ba'al what it wants to hear and try again later, is heavy enough on his tongue for him to almost taste it. But no. Not even for this. He's been lying for months, and the vessel of his falsehood has cracked and broken, and the lies have all run out upon the sand. All he can be now is truth.

"I'll die first," he says, and braces himself for it to come true.

But it only nods. Stares at him, eyes hot and heavy on his face, and there's a panicked animal scrabbling its claws against the floors of his mind and trying to find purchase. "I had thought so, yes," it says. "I had hoped -- but then again, when I saw the lengths to which you were willing to go to avoid leaving me with anything that didn't quite fit into the bargain you so skillfully constructed, I think I knew the answer. Pity, really. We could have ruled the galaxy, you and I. I suppose there's a universe somewhere in which we did."

It takes a step back, and it's a mark of how tired or fried or just plain over it he is that it takes him a minute to realize the snake isn't standing between them and the door anymore. "My end of the bargain," it says, and he tenses as the snake reaches into its pocket, but it only takes out a thumb drive, tosses it at him. No, to him. An easy underhanded throw, and he catches it, and it's heavier than it fucking should be.

"Give my regards to General O'Neill," Ba'al says, and turns its back to walk down the hallway and away.

His fingers itch to reach for the zat and shoot the snake down. But the snake's right: they've made a bargain. And he won't be the one to break it.

He raises his voice. "You know that if you take one step over the line, I'll be back to hunt you down myself."

Ba'al pauses. Turns. Smiles, and it's beautiful, an expression of pure delight. "My dear JD," it says. "I would expect nothing less." It bows, and there's nothing mocking about it. "I wish you pleasant dreams."

Fucker.

His hand is shaking as he lifts it. To his ear, not to the small of his back: to the earpiece nestled there, tie and tether, anchor and anvil. It isn't heavy enough to throw properly. He makes a good attempt at it anyway, and it clatters uselessly to the floor. The phone itself has better heft, and it goes sailing straight past the snake's head. The snake doesn't bother trying to catch it, just keeps going down the hallway, its back bare and unprotected, walking away.

He watches for a minute, thinking of all the things he could do, thinking of all the things he should do, thinking of all the things he's leaving undone behind him. Then he turns and leads Griffith out into the light.

*

Downtown Seattle.

He's stuck on fucking autopilot, and Griffith's not much better, but this is one of the plans he's been holding onto for a while. Doesn't take much brainpower. He walks them up to the convention center, picks up a cab at the cab-stand, has it take them to the airport. O'Neill had sent Griffith with a few different sets of papers for him. They're probably all tripwired. Doesn't much matter. It's over, and if they want to pick him up, he'll put his hands in the air and come along peacefully.

Mostly peacefully. He doesn't need to make it easy for them.

He rents the car on one of the sets of plastic O'Neill had sent, gets Griffith into the passenger's seat and points the 4Runner (fucking ridiculous oversized thing) south on I-5. Watches the rear-view mirror the whole way. Traffic's a fucking donkeyfucker. Griffith's quiet. Too quiet. It's not the kind of quiet that comes from trauma; it's the kind of quiet that says the man's thinking about things, adding things up, coming to conclusion after conclusion. Unwanted. Unwelcome. Inevitable.

Eventually, he can't stand it anymore. "Pretty sure we're clear," he says. "You might want to put your seat back and take a nap. That thing uses your body's resources to fix you."

Griffith's voice is just as quiet as his silence was. "Think I'll pass, thanks."

He doesn't turn his head to look, just sweeps his eyes over the road behind the car. Late afternoon out there, sun shining bright and reflecting off everything, which is not the best time of day to spot a tail. He doesn't think they are being tailed -- by Ba'al, by the boys from the Three Letter Agencies, by someone O'Neill might have sent -- but the habit of paranoia is hard to unlearn. "That have to do with the adrenaline rush," he says, "or do you just not want to be asleep in a car with me?"

Griffith snorts. "Little of both," he admits.

He nods. "Yeah," he says. "Figured."

Pauses, waits to see if Griffith will fill in the silence -- most human beings, once a conversation has been started, will blurt out anything once a silence has grown large enough to acquire palpable weight -- but apparently Griffith's immune to the trick, because all Griffith is doing is staring out the window. "You got anything in particular you want to talk about?" he finally asks. There are so many candidates for "primary thing freaking Griffith the fuck out" right now. He doesn't want to assume he knows.

"Want to, no," Griffith says. "Probably should, yeah." Then he pauses too. Nice to know they both know the trick.

He pulls around a SUV with a "honk if you love Cthulhu" bumper sticker and waits for Griffith to go on. And Griffith's good at the silence game, but he can wait for a long damn time when he has to, and Griffith doesn't have enough practice in learning how not to crack. "How much of that did you know you'd have to do when you went under?" Griffith finally asks.

His fingers tense on the steering wheel. He makes himself relax them. That question is really how much of that did you know I'd have to go through when you called me in, and he's not ready to answer that yet, to Griffith or to himself. But it's been asked, and he owes Griffith a lot of things, but most of all he owes Griffith answers.

"Most of it," he says, squinting against the sunlight. Forgot a pair of sunglasses. "The snake and I have ... history."

"Yeah," Griffith says. "Got that. Kinda."

He can't tell what Griffith means by it, but he'll let it go by. Unless Griffith needs to talk. He looks over, and he's not at all surprised to see Griffith is staring down at his hands, flexing his fingers as though he's trying to make sure they're all still attached, as though he's remembering what those hands have had to do.

"You did a good job back there," he says, as the silence stretches out between them. "I was glad to have you."

It doesn't earn him a thank you, doesn't earn him anything but a tiny twitch of Griffith's lips, the kind of smile that stands in for you've said something I should say thank you for, but I don't want to lay claim to it. "How much of that did Uncle Cam know you'd have to do?" Griffith asks.

His first response is anger: that's personal, and it's none of your fucking business. But anger is almost always fear or shame in disguise, and he made it Griffith's business. That's the problem with trying to command family; the personal shit and the duty shit all gets tangled up together, until you can't keep things in their proper boxes anymore, and it's a lesson he should have fucking remembered, and please God let him never have to do it again.

(Never do any of this again, now that this is over, never step back into these shoes and never again pick up this -- no, no, not yet. They're out but they're not clear, it's ending but it hasn't ended, and he cannot let himself feel it yet.)

So he keeps his hands on the wheel and steers the car steadily away, away, away from Seattle and all it fucking stands for. "Most of it," he says, keeping his voice even. "Not all. But most."

Next to him, Griffith pulls his legs up, braces the bottoms of his feet against the dash, draws his knees up to his chest. "He loves you," Griffith says.

And he owes Griffith a fuck of a lot, and he will until the end of days, but he doesn't owe Griffith this much. "Say it," he says. "Go ahead and fucking say it."

For a second he thinks Griffith won't. Thinks Griffith has heard the warning siren in his voice, thinks Griffith is smart enough to remember all the moments when the man looked at him and saw danger. But then Griffith takes a deep breath, doesn't look over at him, and he realizes Griffith is smart enough to remember the danger, but thinks this is more important. "You could have healed him."

And, hell. Griffith's not having trouble coping with what's gone down; Griffith's angry, a quiet cold anger so unlike the Mitchell fast-and-furious flashstorm. And anger is almost always fear or shame in disguise, but sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's just rage on behalf of someone you love.

So he lifts a hand off the steering wheel, scrubs it over his face, makes himself bite back his first five possible responses. "Yeah," he says. Voice calm and even. Trying not to show how much this conversation is costing. "I did. Because it's a monkey's paw wish, and I know what it would turn him into. And I told you. He wouldn't thank you for it."

He looks over again, and he can see Griffith doesn't understand. Can't understand, not until he sees it, not until he's been there for more than just a simple healing in the heat of battle. The box is tainted, like everything that comes from the snakes. Doesn't just undo your damage. Makes you bigger, better, faster, more. Comes with a price. Everything does. Daniel called it your soul, and he doesn't believe in the soul -- not as something that can be touched or tasted or quantified, not as something that can be flensed away, fleck by fleck, by a machine. But he remembers. Waking each time, bright lights bearing down, stripping away all pretense, feeling ill-fitted. Repaired, but not untouched. Wrong, ever after, and some of the feeling had gone away, and some of it never will.

And he doesn't just love Mitchell (and oh, God, he loves Mitchell, loves Mitchell so goddamn fucking much). He knows Mitchell. Knows him, down deep. Partners. (For now, for always, forever, for everything, Mitchell's voice in his memory, and he's spent six goddamn months not letting himself think about Mitchell, not letting himself remember that conversation, because the minute he does he's gone.)

Griffith's opening his mouth. To protest, and he doesn't want to hear it, doesn't want to be having this conversation, doesn't want to fucking justify the choices he's made that weren't choices after all, because the only other alternative would be even worse.

"Think about it," he says, cutting Griffith off before he can go any further. "Box is in the basement. Assume you can justify leaving that thing in the snake's hands. Assume you can hold your position for long enough, or make a bargain with the snake to get back in." Griffith tenses at that, and yeah, okay, he knows what Griffith's thinking, knows Griffith's wondering why he'd quail at selling one more piece of his soul to the snake for a chance at the Holy Grail, but he is not fucking going there until and unless Griffith drags him.

The words rush out of him, faster and faster, and he can hear his voice starting to rise. "What then? Because that thing is poison, if you keep using it sooner or later it makes you wrong, but the thing that makes you even more wrong is having to decide who gets to, who lives and who has to die, who's worthy and who isn't, and there is a fucking line and he would hate himself for having crossed it. Assume the thing even can heal him, which is not a fucking given with injuries that old, and he gets out of the box, okay, he's fine, he's standing, and it's all fine for a day or a week or a month until he starts thinking about all the people who couldn't get there, couldn't make that bargain, and then he starts thinking about what that bargain fucking cost, and he sits up all night because it won't let him rest, until he starts blaming himself for being selfish, for being willing to take that get-out-of-jail-free card, for being grateful to a fucking snake for the fucking get-out-of-jail-free card, and when you live long enough with that kind of poison seeping into your ears, wondering what your little miracle cost you and wondering how many other people you should have saved and wondering whether the price you had to pay was worth it, wondering how you could have fucking broken all your promises to yourself about never going there again, you go fucking crazy, all right?"

He's shouting. He makes himself stop. The words echo in the tiny enclosed space between them.

"You're not talking about him," Griffith says. "Are you."

And all he wants to do is close his eyes, crawl into some dark fucking hole somewhere and sleep for a day or a fucking week, and he can't, there isn't, it's too --

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah. No. Fuck."

Silence again, and he can feel Griffith's eyes, hot on the side of his face, and he won't let himself turn to look. "So someone has to make the call," Griffith says, and it's a challenge and an understanding all at once. "And you figure better you than him, because at least you're used to living with what comes after."

"I love him," he says, and the words burn his throat. "And this is how it had to be."

Sometimes you don't have a choice. Sometimes you have a choice, and none of the options are good ones. Sometimes there's nothing you can do and still say you did the right thing.

He'll tell Mitchell what he did, and why he did it. Might fuck things for a while. Might fuck things forever. He doesn't know. But he can see the scenario playing out in his head, as clear as daylight, and he knows how it would have gone down. Mitchell would have grown to hate himself for being selfish, and sooner or later Mitchell would have grown to hate him for putting Mitchell in that position. And if Mitchell's going to hate him either way, at least he can make sure that Mitchell doesn't hate himself too.

No. Have faith. Mitchell will understand. Mitchell will understand all of it.

Please God let Mitchell understand all of it.

Griffith sighs. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Griffith hugging his knees to his chest, turning his head to look out the window. Looking young, so young, and it just drives home to him again how much weight he's layered on Griffith's shoulders, how many of Griffith's own personal nightmares in twenty years might be traceable back to his hands. His fucking fault. He feels old, old and tired and weary, weighed down with duty and responsibility and blame.

"I still don't understand," Griffith says, but at least it's not an accusation anymore. It's just tired too, tired and a little bit sad.

All he wants, out of this life or any other, is to never have to make these decisions again. Bargain with a snake, because you have to. Take another's life, because you have to. Take away your lover's only hope of wholeness, because you have to. Use a good man's trust and loyalty and commitment, use it as ruthlessly as you would use your own, because you fucking have to, because there's something you're trying to serve and it's worth it, it's fucking worth it, it's worth it because it has to be, it's worth it because it's the only thing left.

"Keep doing this job for long enough," he says, quiet and calm (like razors in the dark, like bleeding out on the floor before you even notice you've been hit, like the last breath you get to take). "You will."

Griffith takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Looks like he wants to say something. Doesn't. Thank fuck for small mercies.

Another ten miles slip away in silence. He's counting. They're past Tacoma by now; they'll make Portland by mid-evening. Not far. Nice flat boring drive, clear sailing to the next port of call. Theoretically there's nobody chasing them, and it's not even good cover -- closest major city to Seattle; it's a given they'd head there or Vancouver, and there's whole host of problems involved with a border crossing -- but he couldn't have kept them in Seattle. Emotions instead of logistics, maybe. He doesn't think he's going to be able to go back to Seattle for a long damn time.

"So what now?" Griffith finally asks, and it's the sound of someone who's ready to let the previous conversation drop but just doesn't want to fucking live with the sound of his own thoughts anymore. He can sympathize.

"Heading for Portland," he says. "We'll find a motel. I'll call in and report. You can get on a plane to DC tomorrow morning. Fuck of a lot of debrief, but you'll be able to start putting your life back together by Monday."

Won't be easy. There'll be a hundred questions and interrogations, not to mention trying to fucking explain things to the family. He'll let Griffith figure out how to handle his part of that. Take the cues from what Griffith decides. His cleanup is going to be a fuck of a lot worse.

Griffith shifts in the seat next to him, lets his legs down. "You?"

He shakes his head. "I'm not going to DC. We realized a long time ago that we shouldn't spend much time around each other. Easier that way."

Only one person he could mean.

"You are him, aren't you," Griffith says. Quietly. Not a question, not quite. "Or were."

Too much to hope for, really, that Griffith wouldn't put it together. Told Griffith he was older than he looked. Told Griffith he came from the SGC. Told Griffith he'd been Xeroxed and set aside. Has been giving himself away to Griffith a thousand ways, a thousand times, since the moment he called for help and Griffith rose to answer, and he should have realized this would happen, and he's so damn tired he can't even bring himself to care that Griffith knows. Maybe it's a relief. Maybe it's a reminder. Maybe it's just another piece he'll have to hold.

"Yeah," he says. Truth. Not-truth. He doesn't even fucking know anymore. "Once upon a time. It was a long damn time ago."

Underneath his shirt, he can feel the lines of his tattoos burning. Memory and memorial, reminder and warning. His stories hidden from others in plain view, encoded into words and symbols that only he can read. Two sentences written along his collarbone, mirroring the point-of-origin. Framing it. One of them means where you come from can never be taken away.

The other one means when the fall is all there is, it matters.

*

Over and done. Mission accomplished. Just a whole bunch of fucking bits to clean up.

Griffith eventually drifts off to sleep, restless and unsettled, head leaning against the window of the SUV. Wakes up when they pull into the parking lot of the Target; jerks straight upright, face alien and ragged in the setting sun. "It's okay," he says, before Griffith can panic. "Supply run. Back in fifteen."

Griffith's still awake when he gets back out, two bags each containing toothbrush and toothpaste, t-shirts and jeans and underwear. One eye open, sweeping the parking lot, watching for pursuit. He doesn't say anything about it, but he's glad the kid's got the instinct. Serve him well, if he doesn't decide the SGC will ask more from him than he can afford to give.

The rest of the drive is silent. He picks the first independent motel he sees. Not in Portland proper, but just outside. He's not sure if O'Neill will have Griffith flying out of Portland Air National Guard or if they'll have to detour over to Kingsley in the morning, but either way, at least there are choices.

Two rooms. He leaves Griffith at the door, and tries not to notice the way Griffith isn't meeting his eyes.

Tosses the bag of clothes on the bed, strips out of his jeans and t-shirt, doesn't think about the stains and stiff patches of dried blood and grime. Tosses the clothes in the garbage. Turns on the shower and climbs in. The plumbing here is terrible, and the bathroom is grungy in the way that clean-but-old linoleum and tile gets, and the hot water doesn't go much hotter than mildly tepid. He wouldn't trade it for the luxury of the bathroom in the Hotel California for all the naaquadah in the galaxy.

When the water runs cold, he turns it off. Ties one scratchy towel around his waist and drapes another around his shoulder. He stands in the middle of the room for a long minute, aching and empty, so blank he can't even feel his own breath in his chest.

Just a whole bunch of fucking bits to clean up, and he picks up the motel phone and he dials.

Two rings, hang up. Wait.

Two minutes later the phone rings. He picks it up. Sits down on the edge of the double bed and studies the patterns of dirt on the carpet. "It's me," he says. "Over and done."

A moment of silence, in a day full of conversations consisting of moments of silences, things that will forever remain unsaid. When O'Neill speaks, it's edged and suspicious. "You said next Monday."

He closes his eyes. "Yeah. I lied. For lots of reasons you probably don't want to know."

He remembers, a little, the first phone conversation he ever had with O'Neill, back at the dawn of this strange new life, wondering if that was how he sounded to others. What he can't remember is if he'd been wondering how much of O'Neill he was, or wondering how much of O'Neill he could leave behind, or wondering if he could ever be anything -- anyone -- else. He still doesn't have those answers. Not entirely.

"You --" O'Neill starts. Stops. Catches himself. "I'll assume you were successful."

He bites back no, I thought I'd just leave for shits and giggles. He always tells himself he's not going to let his conversations with O'Neill degenerate into petty sniping, and they always do anyway. They're too alike. O'Neill resents him for what he has and hates him for what he knows, feels threatened by all the things he is and does. Not exactly a recipe for easy conversation. "Yeah," he says. Lies back, sideways, across the bed. Weird to have to hold the phone in his hand, to have a cord tethering him down after so many months of being able to speak and be heard. "And no. The situation's neutralized. Primary mission goal all taken care of. Decided not to tell you part of the plan in advance, though."

There's a pause from the other end of the line. It's a dangerous-sounding pause, the kind that's usually followed, not by explosions, but by careful and quiet inquiry. Sure enough, when O'Neill speaks, it's calm and controlled. "And what part would that be?"

Want you out of there before you finish going native on me, O'Neill had said, the first time they'd spoken, months before. Undercover's a fucking bitch. Always has been. You have to be so careful that you don't lose track of who's underneath all those masks. And he hadn't said anything at the time, because for all he respects and resents O'Neill simultaneously, the poor bastard's never tried to see it from the other side of the Great Divide. His entire life is undercover, and will be until the end of days. Jack O'Neill went undercover as JD Nielson, who went undercover as Jack O'Neill, who went undercover as Ba'al's First Prime and chief catamite, and right now he has no fucking clue which parts are his truth.

O'Neill doesn't know either. He can tell. O'Neill thinks he's not going to like whatever comes next, and O'Neill is right. He can only hope that O'Neill can see the logic when it's presented to him.

No way to get through this without explosions. He doesn't even try. "I lied to you," he says. "I didn't take out all of them. There's one left, and I committed you to a mutual non-aggression pact."

He pauses for a beat, hears the indrawn breath that presages snarling, goes on. Realizes he's been having this conversation in his head for months, down in the dark places where he couldn't let himself overhear, bracing himself for the fallout. "Hear me out. I told you about my contact. You asked how I could trust a snake. Here's how: it was the only way. Point the first, I couldn't guarantee for sure that I'd get all of them. This way, we have the one who's against all the others, the one who'll do our dirty work for us. Point the second, if one of the other snakes left out there decides it wants to take over, we'll have an ally. And yeah, before you say anything, I know the argument about how it's better to have a whole bunch of them fighting each other than one of them concentrating on us, and I know you think it's bullshit, just like I do."

Deep breath. O'Neill still hasn't said anything. He opens his eyes again, stares at the ceiling tiles. "Point the third, the cleanup on a job like that -- if you wanted it totally undetectable the way you said you did -- would be massive. And you'd get leaks. Lots of them. You people still haven't recovered from Colson, and this would make that look like a walk in the fucking park. Point the fourth, there are a fuck of a lot of people -- human people, not snakes -- who know a fuck of a lot about what's really happening, and any one of them could have put two and two together and decided to start a jihad against you people. Against me. You might be able to protect yourself from it. I'm not going to gamble my life and the lives of a lot of other people on it. This way, the snake can control them and keep them off your back."

The longer he talks, the more time O'Neill will have to calm down. Which is good, because he's about to get to the reason O'Neill is going to like the least. "And point the fifth, I couldn't have done this without the snake's cooperation, and you don't rat out allies."

He finishes talking and waits. O'Neill knows the silence trick, too. Doesn't fall for it. The dead air on the line hisses and snaps; no other noise. It's so fucking odd to have the sound in his ears and not at the base of his skull anymore. He knows O'Neill's running down the facts and situations, examining it from every angle, poking and prodding at the reasoning. The silence is a good sign; it means O'Neill's actually thinking, instead of just reacting. It surprises him. He of all people knows how many layers deep O'Neill is capable of considering, but he'd expected more of an immediate blowup before O'Neill could get to a point where he could start the thinking process. Personal shit. Old shit. Some scars don't heal.

But maybe DC's been good for teaching O'Neill how to keep his temper, or maybe O'Neill's just as tired, just as broken, as he is. When O'Neill finally does speak, there's anger in his voice. But there's capitulation behind it. "So you're telling me you're basically the snake's whore."

"Did you fucking miss the part where that's been true for six months?" he snaps. "You knew. Don't tell me you didn't."

Hears himself giving it away, every last piece, in those scant few words. The feel of the snake's hands on his skin. The weeks, months, of lying to everyone he faced. The endless lies he received in return. (Virta. Suzukimo.) Dead people and dying people and all the fucking dreams, the pieces, the memories, losing himself into the dark and the cold, the pieces of his broken vows strewn behind him. The entirety of what he's done is a weight in his stomach, a hand around his throat, and it's all right there for O'Neill to hear.

Doesn't know if O'Neill can hear it. Doesn't know if O'Neill will let himself hear it. He has no idea what O'Neill has learned, how much O'Neill has changed, what O'Neill has made himself forget. Once upon a time he (they) had been at the mercy of uniformed old men who'd sent him out to be their hands so their hands would stay clean, and he'd always wondered whether those old men knew what they were asking, and now O'Neill has the answer.

Pity this busy monster, manunkind. (Not.) Because he's spent the past six months taking himself back to the days when he was O'Neill, turning back, undoing, unmaking. Daylight Saving the World Time, set your clock back thirty years; a memory of a memory, a ghost of a ghost. Progress is a comfortable disease. He's gone back and O'Neill's gone forward and two roads diverged in a yellow wood and now O'Neill is sitting and hearing the unspoken litany of all his trials, Lord (soon be over) and for the first time, he thinks O'Neill might know down to the last grain what it cost.

"Yeah," O'Neill says. "Yeah. I knew."

It's not an apology. It won't ever be an apology.

He breathes in. Grabs for control. Goes back to his justifications, his defenses, because if he doesn't the cracks will start to widen until the dam breaks and the water comes rushing in, and the river of Jordan is muddy and cold and the river of Lethe empties into the Styx and he can't afford to drink from any of them at all. "All right. Yeah. The goal of this op wasn't to eliminate the snake. It was to eliminate the threat. Which I did. We negotiated a truce. It says it knows that we're going to win in the end. That it's inevitable. That we won't give up as long as there's a threat. And it decided that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond than to be nothing."

Breathe in. Breathe out. Count his heartbeats, too fast and edgy. "And you trust a snake," O'Neill says.

There's no good way to answer that question, except with truth. He lifts a hand, presses its palm against one eye. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah. I do."

Another breath, another few heartbeats, and he realizes he can't leave it there. "I gave terms. It agreed. No fucking with Earth politics. No laundering offworld tech. No snakes on Earth. No Jaffa. No trying to conquer the galaxy at large, either. It says it doesn't want to rule the galaxy anymore anyway. I don't know why I believe it, but fuck me, I do. This one's different. And it could have fucked me running more times than I could count, and it never did. I had to make a call. I made it."

"You didn't have the authority to make a deal like that," O'Neill says, anger no less vicious for all that it's soft and cold. (For destruction ice is also great, and would suffice.)

And yeah. This is the last card he has to play. He's kept it in reserve for a long fucking time, against a day when he'd need to use it, to rescue himself from a bad situation or to save somebody who needed saving. Hadn't ever expected he'd need to use it to keep a fucking snake safe, and that thought galls him, because it's not a stunt he can pull twice. O'Neill resents his existence and wishes he'd just go away (wishes he'd never been created) but push has long since come to shove and in the end, when the chips fall down, he's always known he can force O'Neill to uphold a covenant he's made.

Trading on borrowed authority, except it's not borrowed at all. It's his. Theirs. O'Neill hates knowing there are others existing under the name O'Neill, under the same shared history -- robot or clone or quantum twin -- for so many reasons, and some of them O'Neill will cop to and some of them O'Neill doesn't even know himself, but the greatest unexamined reason is this: because O'Neill has always feared that someday one of them would try to make promises in that name, and now one of them has, and it's no fucking kindness to spell things out.

He does anyway. "Yes, I did. Your authority," he says, and he feels old, so old. "Because it's what needed to be done. Because it's what you would have done if you weren't blinded by shit you haven't gotten over yet."

Another of those two-minute silences. This one's honed sharp and tinged red. He's never been more glad that Portland and DC are on opposite sides of the country, because he knows that right now, O'Neill would probably reach through the phone and fucking strangle him if he could. To O'Neill, the thought of trusting a snake -- any snake, this snake -- is revolting. Was to him, too. But greatest good, greatest number, and sometimes you have to fuck some vows in order to save others and sometimes you have to fuck most of them to save the best, and nobody who hasn't been there will ever know.

"I can't fucking believe you," O'Neill finally says. "I just ... can't fucking believe you."

He sighs. "Yeah. I know." He takes a deep breath. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry. Best judgement."

"Road to hell," O'Neill counters, stormclouds gathering, and then they're both catching themselves, regrouping, moving on.

Another cycle of silence. The silences are shifting, changing, each one new and uncertain. When O'Neill finally talks again, it's not the question he was expecting. "Is it the original? Or one of the clones?"

Which one is left, O'Neill means. Gives him pause. And yeah. He knows why O'Neill would care, why O'Neill would want to know. From the moment he first opened his eyes and saw Ba'al smiling at him with acid and knives, the possibility of revenge, of vengeance, has been slumbering. Someday. And since the day he went under, since the day he went off the radar and off the grid, the possibility of revenge has been Schrödinger's Kitten to O'Neill, neither alive nor dead. O'Neill had accepted -- however grudgingly -- the necessity that he wouldn't know the deed had been done until after the bodies had been buried, had accepted -- however imperfectly -- the knowledge that he wouldn't be able to have the satisfaction of twisting the knife himself. O'Neill had, somehow, come to accept that the action was more important than the hand that did the acting. (The spirit wants only that there be flying; it matters not whose the wings.)

For O'Neill to discover Ba'al had cloned itself would have been bad enough. (No way of knowing, of ever knowing, if all of them had been conquered, if ghost and spectre had finally been put to rest.) To discover that his own clone had made a deal with a devil: unfathomable. With the devil: even worse. To know that one survived is enough to keep O'Neill in sleepless nights for years to come, and so O'Neill needs to know which is which, which is worse: knowing that the version of Ba'al that had tortured and killed him, again and again, was dead and gone, even if not by his own hands, or knowing that the original was still alive, allied, untouchable, to torment himself with hoping the snake will break the deal someday and permit O'Neill to take his revenge himself.

And he's not above lying to O'Neill to buy the man some peace of mind -- God knows, if anyone deserves it -- but he doesn't know which answer would be the proper coin. Doesn't know which one would be bad and which one would be worse, in the personal hierarchy of O'Neill's pain.

Once upon a time he would have. And then he'd woken up one morning and discovered that he didn't get to be Jack O'Neill anymore and for that price he'd purchased the liberty of not having to be Jack O'Neill again, but he couldn't have done this job, this mission, without the lessons he'd made himself forget and Jack O'Neill knows more thoroughly than he knows his own name. So he's bought himself a little piece of memory and paid for it with having to remember -- come buy, come buy, goblin pulp and goblin dew -- and the other guy had never known: that he'd built himself a self entire, that he'd turned his back on it to come back to being O'Neill's hands and O'Neill's history.

All O'Neill can see is that he's done something O'Neill wouldn't ever have done himself. (Trust a snake. Make a deal. Bow to the compromise.) O'Neill can't see all the pieces of their shared past that led him there. Maybe he can't see them either. He doesn't know; he can't tell.

So he says, "I don't know." And O'Neill makes a tiny noise -- frustration, disappointment, anger, maybe even fear. It's not even a lie. He knows what Delta told him -- what Ba'al told him -- and he knows the snake is no more above lying to him than he was above lying to the snake. He doesn't know.

Suspects. But suspicion isn't proof.

"Go home," O'Neill finally says. Flat and affectless. "Go home and let me figure out how the fuck to spin this to the appropriate parties."

"You'll think of something," he says. "You always do."

O'Neill snorts. "Yeah. Thanks for the vote of confidence. Go home. Your part's over. I've got a fuckload of cleaning up after you to do."

Truth. And a wretched one. He'd been hoping (hidden way down in the parts of him he hadn't ever let see the sunlight) that he'd be able to wrap it all up, hand it to O'Neill on a silver platter, say here you go, I fixed it. And he couldn't. At best he's given O'Neill a respite and at worst he's given O'Neill a whole fucking mess, and fuck it, he'd wanted to do so much more. Had wanted to set O'Neill free.

O'Neill had let him go. O'Neill had let him live, let him escape his minders and his watchers. A single moment, a shared glance, sitting in his/their truck in the parking lot of a high school with heedless children milling around them, and O'Neill's eyes had said I know what you're going to do. I'm not going to stop you. Don't fuck it up for me. And he's been trying so fucking hard, ever since that moment, to steer the tightrope between repaying that trust and living his own life, and he's succeeded in some ways and failed utterly in others, and there's a part of him that had been hoping to balance the books.

This conversation, this whole fucking miserable mess of a conversation, should have been a triumph. Mission accomplished. And the mission's accomplished, as much as it could be, and he's asking to be relieved and O'Neill is telling him that he is, and he's not handing O'Neill a victory, he's handing O'Neill more months and years of misery.

His turn to be silent, now. Because he can't leave it like this, not for good. And he's pretty sure that once they hang up this phone, it'll be for good. O'Neill never wanted to cop to his existence in the first place, and seeing the life he's made for himself makes O'Neill ache for all the might-have-beens, and the life O'Neill is releasing him to is a life O'Neill can never have, not while he considers himself still bound by duty and obligation. And he's just made O'Neill's duty and obligation worse.

They're both walking away from this one with fresh scars. Wounded each other again, mutual savagery: O'Neill called on him to go take care of Ba'al, knowing what it would cost him, and he called on O'Neill to accept the solution he'd found, knowing how much it would rend. But O'Neill could still call him and know he'd answer, and he could still return and know O'Neill would (eventually, grudgingly) accept. Mutual obligation.

And the burden of having to acknowledge the debts puts paid to the obligations, and in their profession, obligations are both weapons to wield and traps to circumnavigate, and that's why he'll never call again. The price of having people to call on is knowing that there are people who can call on you. The price of having people owe you favors is owing favors in return. There's a debt he will never, never be able to pay -- the debt of his freedom, the debt of his life -- and O'Neill can still call in that marker and he won't say no. But he knows O'Neill will never allow it to happen again.

Once they hang up this phone, it'll be for good. Formal debrief, on a conference call with others who are in the know: yeah. Visit to DC, make the final reports face-to-face, with others present: possibly. Messages carried through intermediaries down the years, never going so far as to be a direct relay but just enough so that they both know the road-not-taken: maybe. But this is his last chance to get O'Neill one-on-one, in a context where he can say the things that other people shouldn't overhear.

There are a lot of things he should say. He doesn't think O'Neill would be willing to hear most of them. His turn for silence, as he works it all through, and finally he settles on: "Thanks."

He can hear O'Neill sucking in air, and knows O'Neill hears it as more than sir, I stand relieved. "For?" O'Neill asks. Voice wary.

He's quiet again. Can't find the words. Spent so long trying to learn them, for all the times when it matters, and now he's back to where he fucking started. "Everything," he finally says. "Giving me this. I know what it costs you. I just wanted you to know that I know."

It's important that O'Neill knows. That O'Neill knows he remembers all the layers of pain and sacrifice his new life is built on. O'Neill didn't make him. He made himself. But O'Neill made it possible, and for that fact, he is truly grateful.

He's not sure what he's expecting. To be laughed at, maybe. To be brushed off. What he gets is silence again, but it's thoughtful silence. Considering silence. Like O'Neill has heard the click of the conversation shifting to the personal, and is considering what contribution he wants to add.

"You're welcome," O'Neill finally says. "And --" Another pause. He waits. He's said his final words; it's only fitting that O'Neill get the chance as well. And sure enough, the words are slow, dragged out over the blockade of years of not-speaking, but they eventually come. "It might be better than -- than you remember. I was fucking furious that you talked to Carter. But ... whatever you said, we're ... we're okay."

He doesn't ask what O'Neill means by 'okay'. Wants to. Doesn't. Knows O'Neill won't tell him. He'd loved Sam Carter (not the same way he'd loved Daniel, but no two loves can be the same, not in kind or in degree) and he'd always thought it couldn't possibly work between them, for oh so many reasons. And looking back at that list of reasons now, with what he knows (now) to be possible to achieve with just a little bit (a whole fucking lot) of effort, he thinks most of those reasons are surmountable. Gave Carter the nudge. Up to them both what they do with it.

"I hope it works," he says. One last gift. One last benediction. Couldn't give O'Neill freedom, but could give him the chance for a modicum of peace.

More silence. The calm of a conversation drawing to a close; the sound of two men who understand each other, both intimately and not at all. An ending. An understanding. Frater, ave atque vale; having come (O brother!) to these melancholy rites, they will never stand here again.

But all moments draw to a close. Eventually, he stirs again. Stands up and paces back and forth in the few scant feet of clear space this shitty motel room offers him to pace in while he's still tethered by the phone's cord. "I'll call you tomorrow with the full, official debrief," he says. Back to pretending that he's okay. "On the record. Right now, I want to get twelve hours of sleep, a meal, and then another twelve hours of sleep. Tell me how you want me to send Griffith back to you. You'll need him. He's solid."

O'Neill clears his throat. In it, he can hear the sound a door shutting, never to be re-opened. "Portland's probably the best shot," O'Neill says. "Easiest for you. I'll call the base commander and get a flight put on standby. Say -- fifteen hundred tomorrow?"

"Yeah," he says. He stares, blankly, at the cinderblock wall. "Sounds good."

"Probably best if you don't come along," O'Neill says. "Unless you --"

"No," he says. "No, you're right. I'm going to ... I've got some shit to do. To deal with. Hard landing. You know. I need a couple of weeks." As he says it, he knows it's true, knows it's truth, and he can feel the quiver of all the things he's been staving off shifting and muttering in the back of his mind. He shoves it out of the way. Almost there. Almost through. "I'll call you tomorrow. Write up the report as soon as I can. Then I need to take some time. I'll take care of my own travel, though. You don't have to worry there."

"Okay," O'Neill says. "Yeah." Another moment of silence. This one more awkward. "If you run into any trouble --"

"Yeah," he says. "I'll call."

He won't. They both know it. They're done now, for good or for ill. Old ghosts laid to rest, at last and after far too long. A relief.

He doesn't wait to hear what else O'Neill might say. He just hangs up the phone, so carefully he can feel the precise instant where the receiver cuts the connection between them, and across the country, he knows the dial tone is singing in O'Neill's ear.

*

Stand up. Stand down. Over and done for. (Not.)

Hundred things he should be doing. Checking in on Griffith, if Griffith's not asleep. Rummaging through his pockets, pulling out all the bits and pieces and scraps and detritus of someone else's life. Starting in on the report he owes O'Neill, because the debrief will go better if O'Neill has all the facts and explanations at hand. Getting something to eat before the fast-food joint across the highway stacks the chairs on the tables for the night. Sleeping.

He stands in the precise center of the room, staring at nothing.

Six months. Of a life on pause, of a sleep and a forgetting, and at the end of all his exploring he's arrived where he started (the second time) and he gets to do it all again. Retracing his steps. His war is over, down by the riverside, over and done, and come rain or hail or wind or snow he's not going out to Flanders-o. Time to go home to the home he's been forcing himself to forget and figure out what's left inside his head that he can call his own.

The mind is a computer, with neurons instead of circuits, and he's been programming his the entire way, and he has no idea what the fuck lies underneath.

And Mitchell is waiting for him, Mitchell has been waiting for him (Mitchell, Mitchell, oh, God, Mitchell) and he can finally think that now, he can let himself think that now, let himself conjure the smell of Mitchell's skin and the weight of Mitchell's hands and the warmth of Mitchell's body, leaning over him, touching him, bearing him down, a rock on his chest and a weight in his stomach and the crawling of his skin and --

Down on the filthy carpet, the towel coming unknotted beneath him, and he fumbles for kekka fuza and his legs won't do what he wants them to do, and there are monsters in his memory and six months' weight of horror and destruction in the back of his throat. Six months of being the snake's whore, and he doesn't know, he can't tell, if he'll take one look at Mitchell reaching out for him and flinch away before he knows what he's even doing.

Fuck.

He bends over on the floor, folded double. Stretches his legs out in front of him. Puts his forehead on his knees, wraps his hands around his ankles, half defense, half retreat. Breathe.

Once upon a time he'd tried to live in two separate worlds, commuting from home life to horror and back again even long before the days when his commute was measured in light-years instead of continents. And he'd lost Sara for it (lost Carter lost Daniel lost everyone he'd ever thought he could have loved) when he'd tried to draw the lines, tried so hard to keep things in their own neat boxes, because you can't draw those lines and expect them to hold.

The world doesn't fit into there and here. You are always your actions. You are always your own consequence.

And he'd learned his lessons and made his promises and his peace, and for his hope and his reward he'd found everything he never thought he'd have and hold -- Mitchell, Mitchell, his constancy, the rock upon which he has built his joy. Their life together is terrifying and thrilling, light against the darkness, a foundation of truth and a frame of wisdom. They've built it together. Their hands will keep tending it until their ends of days.

He could bring these pieces of him home to Mitchell -- what he's done, what he's allowed, what he's embraced, what choices he's made -- and Mitchell would hold them, Mitchell would bear them up and carry them for him until he could bear to carry them himself. He knows Mitchell would. And it would take months -- years -- for him, for them, to undo the damage it would cause. Old ghosts. Old habits. Old patterns. Failures and faults.

You don't do that to the person you love. You don't do that to the person who loves you. He won't do that to the person he loves. He's been bleeding out for months and he's field-patched the wounds and he owes Mitchell, he fucking owes Mitchell, the strength and the grace to fucking face his shit before he drags them both under.

Time to hack the inside of his head again. He's lucky. He knows someone who has the user's manual. The monks had taken him in, taught him his differentials and his integration, and then Keller-roshi sent him forth to learn how to measure the world and had told him he would always be welcome there, and it won't be the first time he's shown up on someone's door uninvited.

He will by God go home to Mitchell as himself.

And hey. Journey's never as bad the second time around.

Breathe.

Hundred things he should be doing. Hundred things he could be doing. But he stands up from where he was sitting on the floor, barefoot, naked, and he picks up the receiver and he makes himself dial the numbers: now, like this, before he changes his mind.

Mitchell answers on the third ring. "'Lo?" His voice sounds ragged, like he's been sleeping, and it's sharp with annoyance -- at being woken, at being disturbed, at the stab of panic that always comes from the phone call in the middle of the night -- and oh, God, breathe, breathe.

"Hey," he says, finally, when he trusts himself to be able to speak. "It's JD."

-30-

[ index ]