She packed his uniforms and drove him to the base
She was crying all the way; the world looked her in the face
and said "roll with it, baby, make it your career,
keep the home fires burning 'til America is in the clear."

+ 2 hours

The trick to winning is to make it seem as though you've lost.

R'cher is furious at the report of Nielson's desertion, more furious at the realization that he and his fellow Jaffa failed to protect the other thirty-seven Goa'uld who died to allow Nielson his escape. Ba'al allows the self-recrimination to go on for an entertaining twenty minutes before waving a hand. "It's all right," he says, and R'cher shuts his mouth with a snap. "I won't miss them."

"My lord --"

Ba'al closes his mouth against an irritated bark of just shut up and think what I tell you to think. It isn't R'cher's fault that he isn't Nielson, who would have immediately seen through the facts of the situation to the reality lying underneath. "That will be all, Richard," he says instead, picking up a file folder from his desk and pretending great interest in it. "It's nothing you need to concern yourself with. I'll have your new orders by the morning, once I have a chance to consider what our next actions will be."

R'cher's face goes wooden. "My lord," he says, stiffly, and turns on his heels to go. Most likely intending to go down to his basement lair and review all the tapes and reports from the past six months, wondering if there had been some sign of Nielson's treachery that he and his Jaffa had simply missed. Ba'al makes a mental note to think of something for R'cher to do halfway across the galaxy before the man takes it upon himself to launch some form of complicated revenge on his lord's behalf. Wouldn't do for Nielson to think Ba'al isn't upholding his end of the bargain, after all.

Left alone, Ba'al steeples his fingers and rests his chin upon them. Much still to do, much of it cleanup. He has to check to see if Nielson left any stone unturned in his quite-thorough trashing of the company system, reorganize and re-staff the digital penetration team, find someone suitable to take over Athena's role. Has to determine who'll get promoted, who'll get demoted, and who will simply disappear, in the grand new direction Farrow-Marshall will be taking. Has to make arrangements to have another sarcophagus brought in from one of his other systems. (He doesn't use it regularly, but it would be stupid not to have it on hand; he should have expected Nielson would destroy it, and the fact he hadn't makes him wonder what else he'd missed.)

A thousand tiny details, and he has to keep stopping himself; his hand keeps reaching for the phone, to call Nielson and delegate them. He'd known from the first moment that Nielson wouldn't be staying, but it doesn't stop him from wishing Nielson had, wondering if there was anything he could have said or done to persuade the man to stay. Truly, a lost cause from the start, and he'd known it. Ethics are such a problematic thing in an ally; it means the alliance will forever and always be on the ally's terms.

He wonders if Nielson ever thought of himself as his ally, or if Nielson had taken so long to say him yea or nay because it had taken him that long to rearrange his internal reality until cooperation didn't mean alliance. No way of telling, really, short of taking Nielson as his new host and using the man's mind as he'd used his body. Which would be such a waste; Nielson is far too valuable a tool to use up and carelessly destroy, cast aside and broken the way it would be necessary to break him should Ba'al choose him for a host. He's known that for quite some time.

Besides, he likes this body; after so long, it's become a comfortable friend, a pair of shoes perfectly broken in or a pair of jeans perfectly worn.

Still, he's given much in the way of concessions in order to win his place as the only one of himself left standing, not in the least being that he is now only one pair of hands instead of thirty-something. It truly is a pity he couldn't persuade Nielson to remain with him; he could have used the help. He has some useful Tau'ri in his employ, but none so useful as Nielson was, with his intelligence and his initiative and his competence. Competence is a skill in short supply.

Ah, well; it can't be helped. He is the superior species; he'll simply have to make do. He has plenty of time to arrange things; it will be decades before Nielson shuffles off this mortal coil and frees him to act again, and with a little bit of planning, he'll be well-poised to put his plan into motion the minute his bargain expires. The extra time will only allow him to prepare more carefully. He has all the time in the world.

Before he begins, he remembers to send his executive assistant out to pick up a postcard of downtown Seattle. When she returns, he scribbles "having a wonderful time, wish you were here" on the back and addresses it to O'Neill's office. He leaves it unsigned. O'Neill will know who sent it, after all.

+ 4.5 hours

Spence had spent the last three hours promising himself everything would look much better as soon as he could get away from JD, away from that too-knowing look in that too-young face, and yeah, okay, he'd known it to be a lie even as he'd been telling it to himself but that doesn't make it suck any less when it doesn't.

He's trembling as he strips out of the wreckage of his clothes, and there's a part of him that thinks he's been trembling for a while and just hasn't let himself notice. He feels cold, despite the muggy weather, despite the fact that the motel air conditioner kinda sucks, and he tries like hell not to think about it, because if he thinks about it, he's gonna have to think about all the things that've just happened to him and he'd really like to have a hell of a lot more booze on hand before he faces that.

Faces. Ha. That's a good one, whispers the little voice inside his head that always sounds so much like his twin -- people always accuse them of being able to read each other's minds, but really it's just knowing each other well enough to be able to predict what the other one's going to do or say or think, and oh, God, he misses his brother so goddamn much and this all would have been so much fucking easier if Skipper hadn't been in another fucking galaxy, but them's the fucking breaks. He wonders what Skipper's heard about all of this. He'd done what he could to cue Skipper that all was not what it seemed, and he knows Skipper would have understood, but Skipper has to be going bugfuck nuts wondering what the fucking fuck. Just another thing to clean up.

Oh, God, this is going to take fucking forever.

(You don't have to do this, you know, General O'Neill had told him, and he'd said I know, and he'd gone and done it anyway. And he's glad he did; JD is family, and he's not thinking about how that means O'Neill is family too, and really, maybe he should just make a list of all the things he's not thinking about now so he can make sure he's not missing any.)

The person who looks back at him from the bathroom mirror doesn't look like someone who just went through ... what he went through. (And maybe someday he'll be ready to think about what all those things were, and that day is not today, and tomorrow isn't looking all that good either.) He stares at his face for a long time, trying to reassure himself that he's all right. See? It doesn't matter what you remember happening, or what you think you remember happening. You're fine now. Everything's fine. It won't be long until this is all just a distant memory.

The pep talk doesn't help, though, and it takes Spence a few minutes to realize why.

When he was six years old, he'd been running up the walkway of Aunt Annabeth and Uncle Stephen's house in South Carolina, in the rain, barefoot, and he'd slipped and fallen. Cracked his forehead against the stone steps out front hard enough to knock him out for a few seconds, or so Skipper, wide-eyed, had assured him. Scalp wounds always bleed like a motherfucker. It had needed four stitches. He's always been grateful that the resulting scar had faded to white and tended to disappear into his hairline unless someone was looking for it.

It isn't there now.

Spence beats back the panic that rises at the sight (no man should be forced to look into the mirror and see a stranger staring back at him, and it doesn't matter that he's used to looking at Skipper, because he and Skipper look nothing alike on any level other than skin-deep) and forces himself to make a methodical inspection. Lower torso, knife fight in a back alley in Berlin that he'd had to do some serious tapdancing to explain to his CO: gone. Left bicep, the remnants of the chicken pox he'd had six times worse than Skipper had: gone. Right knee, where he'd gashed himself open on a rock in the stream behind Ned Hutchinson's house when he was twelve: gone. All of his scars, erased as though they'd never been.

When his inspection proceeds further, and he realizes that he isn't even fucking circumsized anymore, he has to sit down on the grungy bathroom tile and put his head between his knees and just shake.

Knowing intellectually that the sarcophagus functions by restoring your body to the genetic blueprint carried in your DNA is entirely different than seeing the evidence before your own eyes.

The SGC, like any command, has developed its own shorthand and injokes over the years, and Major Benton had warned him, when he'd first arrived, that it would take him a while to understand them. And really, as things go, the people at the SGC have been welcoming enough, but he's spent the last year or so always feeling like there was some kind of distance between him and everyone else, always feeling like he was missing something. Joe Langley from SG-15 had finally filled him in, one night over beer and a pool table: nobody around here bothers to get too close to anybody new until we're sure they're going to make it past their burn-in. At the time, Spence had thought it was remarkably callous. Then he'd looked up the actual numbers: seventy percent didn't make it out of a two-year tour. (Crazy or dead or crazy and dead.)

The casualty rates have dropped like a rock since the defeat of (most of) the last of the System Lords. And all of the old-timers have been relaxing since then, like letting out a deeply-held breath and looking around to see what's going to happen next, but the culture that kind of pressure created won't go away for a long time, if ever. Spence had been wondering if he'd ever have a chance of understanding it. Now, he thinks, a lot of things are suddenly going to start making a hell of a lot more sense.

One of the research assistants in Xenoanthropology & Linguistics -- scuttlebutt has it that he's not from around here, nudge nudge wink wink -- produces and distributes a monthly base-gossip newsletter. Supposed to be underground, but everyone knows who's behind it anyway. Spence has seen the back issues. Every year, there's an unofficial awards ceremony, recognizing all of the crazy and stupid things people have done that year. The award that nobody had ever been willing to explain to Spence, the award everyone got tight-lipped and evasive about, was the "Order of the Golden Coffin". At the time, he'd decided it was given out for the most death-defying stunt. Now he's starting to think it's for something else entirely.

Base gossip had told him about Daniel Jackson, dying and being reborn. He'd thought it had been a joke. Everybody always tries to confuse the new guy with as many outrageous stories as possible, and he's always made it a point of not falling for the practical jokes, and oh, God, what if none of it was a joke after all.

For a minute, Spence wants to go next door, knock on JD's door and demand... something. Answers. Reassurance. Hell, just a goddamn shoulder to cry on. If it had been two months ago, he might have, but two months ago he wouldn't have needed it, and two months ago he hadn't known who JD is.

Was. Is. Because he'd known JD was older than he looks (and being told that had explained so goddamn much and he doesn't know how JD and Uncle Cam can keep it secret, except of course he does, because everybody in this family understands classified and that's so classified Spence hasn't ever even heard a breath of gossip about it under the Mountain), but there's "older than he looks" and then there's holy fuck my cousin is sleeping with Batshit Jack O'Neill. And Spence hadn't missed the way JD had clammed up and refused to talk about it, and he wishes there was some way of saying your secret's safe with me that wouldn't also remind JD that Spence knows what his secret is, and tomorrow or the next day or the day after that JD is going to put him on a plane back to DC and Spence is going to have to look General Jack O'Neill in the face and try not to let on that he knows. Even if he isn't sure what he knows. Even if he never will be.

It's cold in here. He's cold. Like his own personal thermostat is broken, and he can't help but wonder what else is broken, wonder when the world will stop feeling so bright and loud and overexposed with his skin itching like there's spiders underneath it and --

C'mon, Spence, can't lie down yet. You still got shit to do. It's amazing how much his inner pep talk sounds like Skipper. Skipper, the one who's always out front and center, dealing with people so Spence has time to plot and plan, the one who's always brash and bright and cheerful, the one who runs interference with everyone around them so Spence doesn't have to. Skipper's always the one on stage, and Spence is always the one behind him, and dammit, he fucking misses his brother.

He wishes he could call his father and hear him offer reassurance, but the way things stand now, he'd probably get hung up on. And oh, God, that hurts too, for all that General O'Neill had promised he'd take care of getting him right with his family afterwards, because the fact that his family was willing to believe he'd do something that was worthy of court-martial, the fact that his family would believe he'd have that little honor --

Yeah, add another thing to the list of things he's not thinking about.

Eventually, he realizes that he's shivering, sitting on the floor of the bathroom, half-jammed in between the toilet and the tub. He doesn't know how long he's been there, or even what time it is. All he knows is that he's cold, and he's tired, and he's hungry, and he feels like he's been hit in the face (don't think about your fucking face, Spencer) and then hung out to dry.

Shock, he supposes. Wouldn't be the first time. Probably won't be the last.

The pipes of the shower hiss and bang as he turns the faucet. He's covered in ... things he isn't thinking about. Needs to shower clean before he can stare at the door of the motel room and wonder whether or not he can bear to leave this room in search of food. (No. He doesn't have a choice; he can't let that fucking snake win now, or else all of this will be for nothing, and the longer he puts it off, lets it build up inside his head, the worse it'll be. There's a McDonald's across the street. It's close enough to food. He can do this. He can.)

Then he can sleep. If he's lucky, the shock won't have worn off before then. If he's really lucky, he'll make it through at least one night before the dreams start waking him.

+ 6 hours

Sam's just sitting down to a late dinner (frozen pizza is still better than the stuff they serve in the cafeteria on base and claim is food) when her cell phone rings. It's Jack's ringtone ("Somewhere Over The Rainbow", and she always has to remind herself to change it before they're going to be in the same vicinity, because otherwise he'd kill her), so she takes a bite of the pizza before she flips it open, because Jack wasn't scheduled to call her today and that's usually a bad sign; if he's calling to give her orders, one bite of pizza might be all she'll get.

"Hang on a second," she says, mouth full. She looks around, trying to remember where she left her jammer, trying to remember if she'd left it turned on or not. She finds it (shoved into her silverware drawer, and yes, on) just as she's finished the bite of pizza. "Okay, back."

Jack sounds tired. Really tired, and it isn't just the kind of tired that comes from being two hours ahead of her. "You sitting down?" he asks.

Her mouth goes dry, because that can't be good. "Yeah," she says, doing so. "Is everyone --"

"Yeah, mostly," he says. "Kid called me a little while ago. Everyone's still alive, at least. Look, how fast can you get your stuff packed up? I need you out here. For at least a few months, probably more."

A thousand questions spring to mind -- chief among them being what the hell happened -- but for all that they're still trying to figure out this weird thing they seem to be trying to build in their personal life, Jack is going to be able to command her professionally for the rest of her life. So she shoves all the questions aside; she can ask them later. He doesn't sound like he's in the mood to dispense any answers right now, either, and she's proud, she's so goddamn proud of the fact that after ten years, she's finally learning when she can push him and when it's better for them both if she just backs off.

So instead she just says, "It depends on how secret you need me to be about things. If I can have someone clear up the loose ends for me, I can be out the door in fifteen minutes, tops. If you need me to just disappear without letting anyone know, it'll take me longer."

"Cat's out of the bag now," Jack says. "Need you out here for the task force. Kid says there are no actual snakes in town, just humans who do what the snake tells them to do, but he's not actually positive, so we're going to have to check. And the President wants us to check quietly, which means no MRIs." He sighs, and she can hear something in his voice that she can't identify. "And I've got a list of things longer than my arm to do, and they all need to be done right now, and I need you. I can send you back this weekend to prep for a longer stay, but the quicker you can get here, the better."

She winces. That can't be good. "Okay," she says, cramming another bite of pizza into her mouth and talking around it, taking the phone with her into her bedroom. She keeps a go-bag packed -- they all do; Jack's old lessons, all the things he drilled into them over the years -- so she doesn't even have to scramble to pull her things together. "I can be back over to base in about, oh, give me an hour, hour and a half. Traffic shouldn't be too bad, but I'll need to --"

"Don't worry about it," Jack says. "Just grab your shit and tell me when you're ready. I've got Odyssey on standby to bounce you. We can overnight your keys back to somebody --"

He must really need her if he's calling in favors; the use of Odyssey as a transport relay is frowned upon, but Sam's work with the fleet development program is enough of a reason for her to have had the transporter lock beacon implanted, and she's one of the few people she knows who doesn't get transport-sick. "It's okay," she interrupts. "Sergeant Muñerez is my in-case-of. She's no Walter, but I can give her a call from the office tomorrow; she'll know what to do." Laptop, shoes, and she's glad she didn't change when she got home; she's still in BDUs, which will have to do. Her go-bag has a service dress uniform in it, but she takes a second to grab another, if she's going to be at the Pentagon for a while -- oh, there are a hundred things she should be bringing with her, but she can have Alicia overnight her anything critical. Her years on SG-1 taught her to make sure that she always has a backup who can go over and water her plants and clean out her fridge if she happens to get stuck somewhere for longer than she'd been expecting to.

She'd thought it was paranoia when she'd set things up like that at Area 51. The worst she gets called away for is a few days in orbit on whatever ship has limped in. Now she's glad she never lost the habit.

On the other end of the phone, Jack sighs a sigh of relief. "Thanks," he says. "I hope you're ready to be up all night. We have to move fast. Dunno if the snake's relying on zatarc programming, but we want as many people as possible in custody by morning. Lemme know when you're ready."

Sam hefts her go-bag up one shoulder, her laptop bag up the other shoulder, and shoves her feet into her shoes. Back to the kitchen. Rest of the pizza goes down the garbage disposal, so it won't rot in the trash. She takes a look around her, with the weather eye of eight years of practice in returning to a house that was abandoned unexpectedly. It's surprising how few things stand out as being a potential problem. She's been off the line for two years now, and yet she still keeps her house ready to be put on pause at a moment's notice.

"Okay," she says, into the phone. "Tell 'em go."

She flips the phone shut just before the room around her goes white with the sparkle of dematerialization. High Earth Orbit is a little bit out of Verizon's range.

+ 6.5 hours

It's still muggy outside, even though the sun's finally set, but Spence doesn't notice; he's got two shirts and a hoodie on, and if he had a heavier jacket, he'd wear it no matter how much it would attract attention. He's freezing. There's a part of him that worries about it, except he knows the biology behind what's happening. Part of the SGC orientation, and JD had mentioned it again. The sarcophagus uses the body's own resources to heal you. He'll be tired, cold, and hungry for a while. There's nothing wrong with him. Nothing that time won't fix.

Nothing that can't be fixed.

He shoves his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and dashes across the state highway from the motel to the McDonald's. Everything around him seems too loud, too sharp, too fast. He feels like he's moving slowly, sluggishly, but when he's halfway across the four lanes of the westbound side and a car speeds up instead of slowing down, he finds he's on the shoulder without even consciously thinking about ducking out of the way. The driver leans on the horn and flips him off. Maybe he shouldn't have worn the black hoodie.

There's a line at the counter of the McDonald's, and he steps up to the back of it. The person in front of him hasn't showered in a few days; he smells like stale sweat and a little bit like urine. Spence's nose wrinkles, and he tries to figure out why the other people around the guy aren't giving him a wide berth. Maybe he's the only one who can smell it. Maybe the thing did something to his senses. Maybe this is the way he's going to perceive the world from now on.

(Shock, his brain tells him. Shock. Nothing more.)

His stomach flips as he gets up to the counter, and he ignores it as much as he can. (It's the smell of grease that does it.) He orders a plain Quarter Pounder and fries, and then, obeying some small siren of biology in the back of his head, asks for another two burgers and an extra large fry as well. When he gets the food, something wakes up in the pit of his stomach, something rapacious and demanding, and he stands on the sidewalk outside and bolts down a burger in three bites. It nearly makes him gag, but he sets his jaw and keeps going anyway. The fries taste better. Maybe it's the salt.

He's not going to stand here and eat a couple thousand calories standing in the parking lot of a fucking McDonald's, though, so he darts back across the highway, takeout bag in hand. His mouth is watering, but he's not sure if it's a sign of hunger or a sign of nausea.

Just as he's unlocking the door to his room, fumbling to get the reader to recognize his keycard, the door of the room next to him opens, and JD steps out, wearing fresh clothes of his own and carrying one of the bags he'd bought at the Target.

Seems startled to see him, more startled to see the white paper bag in his hand. "Hey," JD says, after a hesitation of just slightly too long, eyes flicking over him, trying to read his cues. He holds up the plastic shopping bag. "Realized I had them put this stuff in the wrong bag. You've probably got about another hour before the shakes set in; drink this and then try to sleep through them if you can."

Spence takes the bag, juggles things so he can look into it. Four bottles of what looks like juice, until he reaches in and takes one out, checking the label. Pediatric electrolyte solution. Apple flavored. "Sorry," JD says, catching the half-twitch of grimace he tries to keep from his face. "Only flavor they had. Woulda gotten you Gatorade, except it's not as effective."

"Yeah," Spence says, his own voice sounding off in his ears. "They told us, but I, uh, forgot. GT&O was a while ago." A while ago, and everyone had thought can't happen here, can't happen anymore, even though standard equipment includes a package of Pedialyte powder in your tac vest and, yeah, a couple of salt tablets in your gear. He grasps for what pieces he can remember. Drink lots of water, with Pedialyte if you can, just plain salt if you can't. Eat something high in carbohydrates and protein. Get to the infirmary as soon as possible. Apparently his body knows what it wants, even if he hadn't remembered at all.

JD nods, accepting it at face value, somehow managing to avoid any hint of censure. "You don't really start to remember until your second or third ride on the Magical Mystery Tour," he says. Nods to the takeout bag. "You remembered enough, at least. Shoulda waited. I would've run over for you."

"Didn't know the offer was open," Spence says, as carefully as he can. The last thing he wants right now is to imply that he's offering any kind of rebuke. Tried that in the car. Didn't work out too well. His ears are still ringing from the revelations.

"You're still mine for a little while yet," JD says. "Until I hand you over."

Too much there to even begin to think about. Spence sighs. Transfers the Target bag into the same hand with the McDonald's bag, swipes his keycard again. Thank fuck it works this time; he isn't left struggling with it in front of JD. "You might as well come in," he says. And I might as well make the offer before you invite yourself.

JD follows him, and if Spence notices the way his eyes sweep the room and clear it quickly, well, it's only because he's doing the same thing himself. JD leans on the doorframe. Polite of him, really, giving Spence as much space as possible, and Spence takes it as politeness even though it means JD is between him and the door.

Fuck, he doesn't even know what's wrong with him. JD is not a threat. JD is family.

(JD is Jack O'Neill, the man the SGC still tells campfire tales about, the man half the SGC wants to grow up to be, and he's looking at Spence like he can't decide if there's going to be trouble or not, and Spence doesn't want to know what JD might define as trouble after six months of living with trouble in his b -- at his doorstep.)

"Here's the thing," JD says, slowly, flat and uninflected, staring across the room at nothing in particular. "It doesn't matter how much combat you've seen before, or what kind of missions you've run, or how many times you've watched the guy next to you get his insides splattered over your nice clean uniform, because that's not the danger at the SGC. Never has been. And I don't know what it's like right now, and I don't know what kind of things Benton's had you running and what kind of missions you've been on that've blown up in your face, and I don't know what you've seen and what stories you've heard, so I don't know if you need this talk or not. But in case you do. Standing toe to toe with a snake and trying to figure out how to deal with it and come out sane on the other end is something that you can't predict, and it's something you can't plan for, and it's something they can't train you into. It either happens or it doesn't. You start thinking about it, you start dwelling on it and replaying it and trying to shuffle things around so you can make sense of your reactions, and you're going to be one of the ones where it doesn't."

Spence opens his mouth to say something. JD shoots him one quick glare, and he shuts his mouth while JD keeps going. "I know your family. You like to process. You like to poke and prod and think about it and try to map out what you did and what you felt and why. And you're not going to be able to do that this time. Because standing in the same room as one of them has nothing to do with your feelings, and nothing to do with any kind of logic or sense. It hits you in the back of the brain where the ape still lives. The more you try to make sense of it, the more you're going to think that you must have been overreacting, that you must be too weak to handle it, that there's gotta be something wrong with you. You weren't, you aren't, and there isn't. That's the most dangerous thing you have to face. Not the danger of running into a platoon of Jaffa and getting yourself fried. The danger of looking inside your head and losing your nerve. First seven years of the program, we lost three hundred and eleven people, dead or crazy, and about half of them had gone through something like what you just went through in the six months before they went. Don't let yourself be one of them. You're worth too fucking much."

The burger Spence ate is a rock in his stomach. "I --" he starts, and JD makes a quick slashing gesture in midair, and he shuts his mouth again.

"Shut up," JD says, still quiet and matter-of-fact. Spence gets the impression it's the only way he can get through this.

JD crosses the room, slower on his feet than Spence remembers him being, looking run-down and weary and like all he really wants out of life right now is for this to be all over. (Spence can sympathize.) He picks up a bottle of the electrolyte solution, uncaps it, puts it in Spence's hand. Spence drinks it, automatically. He remembers the taste sucking, and it still does, somehow sharp and chalky at the same time, but as soon as it hits his tongue he finds that he's shuddering in revulsion and draining half the bottle all at once.

JD only stays in front of him until he sees Spence drinking; once he's satisfied, he takes up his perch at the door again. Shoves his hands into his pockets. Stares at the carpet. "The other guy isn't gonna think to take you through this. Not his fault. Been a long damn time. And it's the kind of talk your team leader's supposed to give you, after the first time you trip it, but Benton's not here and I am, so I will: they're going to make you go see a shrink, check out how you're dealing, check out whether you're coping. They try to help. None of 'em has a single fucking clue, because they've never been there. Smile and nod and lie through your fucking teeth, and then go find Benton or Nat Reynolds or Stan Kovacek and tell 'em Jack said to take you out and clean you up. And then go up to 18 and tell Nyan Jack said you might not be eligible for the Order of the Revolving Pearly Gates, but you damn well earned your Golden Coffin. Couple of years, you'll realize that the unofficial awards are worth more, anyway."

Spence finishes the first bottle. Feels like someone else's hand, reaching out for the second, uncapping it, drinking again. JD looks up at the motion, and nods with something very much like approval. Spence tries not to let it get to him, one way or the other. It's harder than he thought it would be.

"Mitchell and I told you two when you said yes," JD says. "Most important command in the history of the service. Hasn't changed. Never will. And being able to get through it has nothing to do with being fast and nothing to do with being smart and everything to do with whether or not you can handle commuting from the normal to the fucking insane six times a week and twice on Sundays. I recommended you two because I thought you could. Haven't seen a damn thing to change my mind. What I have seen is someone who could be the one standing between us and a smoking crater of burnt-out rock, without backing down and without fucking up. And I'm damn well going to sleep better at night knowing you're there." He does meet Spence's eyes then, calm and in command, and the shape of his body seems like nothing more than a uniform he's wearing around those tired old eyes. "Don't let it break you. Or I swear to God, I will fucking well walk across the country to beat some sense into you myself if I have to."

Spence can't even tell what he's feeling. Elated, and proud, and terrified, and wary, and over all of it a veil of numbness, like he's viewing the world through a haze of non-emotion, like his brain and his endocrine system aren't quite on speaking terms. "I won't," he says, even though he has no idea how he might accomplish that. Except JD's just told him. Or given him the outline, at least. Maybe it'll have to do.

JD lifts a hand to scrub at his face, for one instant seeming impossibly translucent in the reflection of the shitty fluorescent light, faded around the edges like there's barely nothing left of him. "I'm putting you on a plane to DC at fifteen hundred tomorrow. I don't know how long he'll want to keep you. Checkout here is twelve hundred. I'll knock around eleven forty-five. Eat the rest of the food that's in that bag; force yourself if you have to. Drink the rest of the Pedialyte, sack out as soon as you can. You're going to be tired, cold, and hungry for the next, oh, eighteen hours or so. Pile all the blankets on the bed and turn up the heat. If you're the type who sleeps with the light on, the night after, don't leave on the overhead. If you wake up in the middle of the night and see the light over you, it'll probably trip your tripwires. The weird sensory shit will be fading by the morning and should be gone in forty-eight. It's normal. Don't freak. I think that about covers it. Anything else you need to know?"

So many things Spence could ask, so many questions he could give voice to, and he doesn't ask any of them. What he asks, sounding broken and halting but still somehow like himself, is: "Are you gonna be all right?"

The question surprises JD. He can see it surprising JD, the split-flash shock of blankness that spreads outward from JD's eyes, like the blast radius of a detonation. Then JD smiles, and it's the most terrifying look that Spence has ever seen on his face. "I'm always fine," JD says.

Spence wonders how long it'll take him before he can lie to himself that well.

+ 6.5 hours

Jack's office in the Pentagon is nicer than any of the offices Sam ever worked in when she was stationed there, but that's what you get when you're a two-star general, she supposes. He's waiting for her behind his desk when Odyssey beams her in. She's always thought it was a nice touch that the transport operators try so hard to calibrate the rematerialization so you arrive facing whomever else is in the room. It's a little touch, but she knows how long they spent on the code to get it right.

He looks as tired as he'd sounded on the phone, but he stands as soon as the pixie-dust sparkle recedes from her field of vision and comes over to take her bag from her. "Hey," he says, clutching the strap of her duffel bag in both hands, not quite meeting her eyes.

They've spoken two, three times a week since that afternoon out in the desert. Personal, professional. She's learned more about him in the past six months than she learned in the whole ten years before. It's the first time she's seen him since then, though, and the physical reality of him, standing so close that she'd be able to feel his presence even if she closed her eyes, is something new and different. It's the first time, she realizes, that he's ever been in her orbit without radiating some essential closed-offness, without his body language shutting down any hope of kinaesthetic awareness. He doesn't know what to do, and she doesn't either, but at least he's there with her, fully, completely. The wary receptiveness puts her a little in mind of the way Daniel used to look, when he was just waiting for another of his brilliant ideas to be shot down, and she thinks of Daniel on Atlantis and the terse four-line replies she receives to her ten-page emails and wonders how long she's going to be seeing echoes of each other in them all.

"Hi," she says, biting her lip, knowing she probably sounds asinine, and Jack's lips quirk, just a little. He sets the duffel bag down on the chair behind him and takes a step forward, closer, closer. She barely has time to register the fractional hesitation, the indrawn breath, before he puts his arms around her shoulders, stiff and awkward, heartfelt anyway. He doesn't linger, but he doesn't draw away too quickly, either. She has time to put her arms around his waist and squeeze lightly, feeling the layer of softness developing over his whipcord-thin frame, the rasp of his overstarched dress shirt.

"Thanks for coming so quickly," he says, into her hair, and then lets her go and takes a step back.

The hug makes her feel lighter somehow, like they've re-set their boundary markers, like the Jack whose halting voice keeps her company through the arid summer nights is still there underneath this awkward stranger. She tries to think of how Cam might handle this, what the best and most kind thing to do for the Jack-model she's trying to build inside her head would be, and she knows, now, that what he's looking for, what he values most, is understanding without having to ask for it. She doesn't understand him. Not yet. But she's working on it.

So she nods, and tries to communicate -- with her face, with her voice, with the way she looks around herself and the way she looks at him -- that she's here, without question, without restriction, for as long as he needs her. "Always," she says, and is rewarded with a little more of a smile, this one less stilted. "Show me what you need me to do. I'm yours as long as you need me."

Relief flashes in his eyes for half a second; she wouldn't see it if she weren't studying him so closely. "You might regret saying that," he says, as lightly as possible, and gestures to a stack of file folders on his desk. Well, really, it's more like a heap. "We have a lot to get through. Irene's promised to keep the coffee coming." He takes a deep breath. "But first I have to tell you what the kid pulled this time."

He gestures to the visitor's seat, and Sam sits down in it. She promises herself that she'll keep her mouth shut -- because anything Jack has to brace himself so clearly for can't be good -- but it's hard, especially when he gets to the part about JD's unlikely ally. "You didn't --" she blurts, and then stops herself. He stops talking and raises one eyebrow, makes a little "go on" gesture. "You didn't mention any of this to me," she says, feeling strangely hurt. She'd thought he'd told her everything. As much as possible, at least.

Jack sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose and shutting his eyes. (Daniel's gesture, again, and she wonders which gestures of her own Jack's adopted and she can't see, because they look too familiar to her.) "I didn't know most of it," he says. "Some of it. Very little. And believe me, I'd like to kick him into next week for failing to mention most of the critical parts, but ..." He sighs again. "I know why he didn't brief me. I probably wouldn't have briefed me either."

It only takes her a second to realize what he means. Ba'al. She'd thought, back at the very beginning, that it was going to be hard for JD to live under Ba'al's thumb for however long this operation lasted, and then she'd forgotten. She still doesn't know what happened when Jack was Ba'al's prisoner -- she's never asked; Jack's never offered -- but she's known for a while that he's not rational on the subject. If she'd been on a mission undercover, dealing with Ba'al, she might have trusted her own judgement over Jack's too.

Except -- no; her own judgement is Jack's judgement, most of the time, and has been since the days she realized that she could learn more from him than she's ever been able to learn from any superior officer before and probably any superior officer subsequent, and while she'll push and she'll prod, pry into his thinking and stand up to him when she thinks he's wrong, she always caves in the end. It's not a comfortable realization, somehow. Loyalty is one thing, but she knows Jack has never wanted a junior officer without a spine, without the courage of her convictions, and she frowns, biting her lip, thinking back -- ah, but he's not her commanding officer anymore, even if he's putting her on detached duty with him again for the coming weeks or months, and it's something she won't have to worry about. But she files it away anyway.

(It only takes her a few seconds after that to realize what the problem after that is. It's been a long time since she's been able to think of JD and Jack as being the same person, as even coming from the same place, and no matter how much she tells herself that there's the mind of a man in his fifties looking out from behind those child's eyes, it doesn't help. But JD and Jack are the same person, or were, and the man who's sitting across the desk from her and the man who's sitting across the country both share the same memories of Ba'al's prisons, whatever those memories might be, and she doesn't understand this. At all.)

Jack is watching her thinking, and she wonders how much of what she's thinking shows in her face, because he's gone still and quiet and dangerous. She licks her lips. "I'm sorry," she says. She doesn't know what she's apologizing for.

Neither does he -- she can tell -- but he drops his eyes to his hands anyway, nodding as though to say it's okay even though she thinks it probably isn't. Once upon a time she would have gotten angry at herself for leading the conversation down these lines. Now, she just lets it go.

"Look," Jack says, abruptly. "This is all completely new to me. And I'm not very good at it, and I'm -- I'm probably never going to be. But that doesn't mean that I don't -- that you aren't -- that we --"

Sam reaches over, across the desk that separates them, and puts her hand over his wrist. It doesn't feel awkward; it's surprising, how awkward it doesn't feel, his wristbones oddly fragile-feeling beneath her hands despite their bulk. "I know," she says, because she does, because she's uncertain about a dozen different things in her life right now, but the one thing she's somehow not uncertain of is that Jack O'Neill cares for her. It's ironic, really, that she should only have the chance for something she always thought she wanted after finding out the secrets that should have meant that she'd never get it. But why should her personal life be any less insane than the rest of her life?

Jack takes a deep breath. "When this is over," he says, and she can't help it; her heart thumps in her chest, once, so loudly that she thinks he might be able to hear it. "Not -- all of this. That'll take forever. But when this is over --" He knocks his knuckles against the smallest of the stacks of file folders. "Come back to the townhouse with me? I'd like to -- I mean, not that -- it's just --" He breaks off, and she can see the instant when he decides that all of this is utterly ridiculous. The sound of his laughter, quick and mercurial, makes her smile. "Told you I was bad at this," he says.

"I am, too," Sam says, her tone wry, her lips rounding. "But: yes. I will." She takes a deep breath of her own. "Whatever the invitation consists of."

It's explicit enough that he'll catch her meaning, and not so explicit that he'll feel pressured, she thinks, and the quickly-shuttered look of surprise in his face tells her she's right. Then he smiles. "Okay," he says, turning his hand over in her grip, pulling his fingers through hers (and squeezing, briefly) before letting them slip free. "Then let me finish briefing you, and then we'll divvy up the files and get started. I'll get Irene to bring in the coffee. And remind me to call Colonel Fisher in the morning and tell him I stole you, before you get listed as AWOL."

"Yes, sir," Sam says, still smiling, and for the first time in as long as she can remember, the honorific is a joke between them, not a shield at all.

+ 7 hours

He's dialed five numbers of Nielson's phone number before he catches himself and clears the keypad with one sharp gesture.

He is smarter than this. Nielson's nothing but a human. For fuck's sweet sake (and there's Nielson in his vocabulary, too; say what you will about these creatures, they know how to swear), he's run systems and empires for tens of thousands of their years without the assistance of one skinny, mouthy, obnoxious little twit. He'll just have to put extra attention towards remembering that Nielson was never his to command in the first place. He's known that all along. Wouldn't do to place too much trust in the hands of one who refuses to grip it.

(Trust. Such a human concept. It's one of the things he could almost learn to respect them for.)

Instead, he calls Melissa. Who knows nothing, although he's never been certain what she suspects. "Pull some files for me," he orders her. There are three or four people whom he's been considering as Nielson's replacement; he'll need at least two people to fill Nielson's shoes, but that's not unexpected. Nielson was quite exceptional, after all.

+ 9 hours

Malcolm Barrett is sound asleep and dreaming of vacation somewhere with ocean breezes (and no work) when his phone rings. He doesn't know what ring it's on when it finally wakes him, so he sits bolt upright and clutches for it quickly before it can go to voicemail. He doesn't usually get the phone call in the middle of the night, but when he does, it's important. "Barrett," he says.

Pause for a second, just long enough for him to wonder if it's a wrong number, and then the voice he's come to recognize pretty damn well in the past six months. "Agent Barrett? Jack O'Neill. Sorry to wake you at this hour."

Barrett sneaks a glance at the clock. Two in the morning. Goes to figure. "S'okay, General," he says, stifling a yawn. Better to be formal; O'Neill hasn't fed him any of the code-words that say they're surveillance-proof, but he hasn't fed any of the code-words that says there's an emergency, either, so Barrett will wait to panic until he knows what's going on. "What can I do for you?"

"We've had a little incident over here," O'Neill says, and whatever bit of sleepiness was left burns away, because when O'Neill says incident he makes it sound like Earth's likely to be toast in three point two seconds, so listen up while I tell you how we're going to keep it from getting there. "It's not the end of the world --" and Barrett barely avoids choking, because the man says it with such bland grace that you'd never know there were times when it could be the end of the world, whatever 'it' is -- "But it can't exactly wait until morning, either. I hate to drag you out of bed --"

But Barrett's already setting his feet down on the floor; saw that coming. "S'okay," he repeats. "If I wanted a guarantee of a good night's sleep, I wouldn't've joined the department."

O'Neill snorts. "Say that twice," he says. "Look, I need you to keep your mouth shut about this. Put your pants on, put your shoes on, grab your briefcase, and get out the door without calling anybody. I'll brief you when you get here, but until then, don't tell anybody where you're going or what you're up to. Not even your partner. Got it?"

"Got it," Barrett says, because that's enough of a clue. They've both known his partner Martinson's as dirty as a dollar bill dropped in a sewer, and working with the guy for the past six months has been excruciating. O'Neill's telling him, without telling him at all, that something's up with the op that's supposed to go down next week, and all he can do is pray that whatever it is won't keep Nielson from pulling off the miracle he's promised he can pull off. "Your office?"

"Actually, no," O'Neill says, and damn if the man isn't laughing at him. "Slightly rounder one. Come in through the OEOB, through Seventeenth; we'll make sure someone's there to pick you up. And Barrett?"

Barrett's pulling on his pants, one-handed, as fast as he can. "Yeah?"

"Don't bother to stop to do your makeup. We're in a bit of a hurry."

O'Neill hangs up the phone, and Barrett snorts and shoves his own phone into his pants. A year ago, he'd thought of Jack O'Neill as the slightly crazy, burned-out old soldier who'd been pushed upwards to get him out of the way and off the line, given a sinecure job (by people who knew exactly to the inch how much he'd hate desk work and were doing it to repay him for years of making their lives miserable) and serving out the last years until his retirement with quiet resignation. After nine months of working with O'Neill on this operation, he knows that the only part of that impression that's true is the crazy part. O'Neill's exactly where he wants to be, doing exactly what he wants to be doing, and he's brilliant at it. The most brilliant part is the way that everyone in DC thinks of him as the crazy, burned-out old soldier with a sinecure job and no desire to rock the boat.

The fact that O'Neill feels comfortable enough with him to tease him, the fact that he knows O'Neill's act is just an act, makes Barrett feel pretty darn good.

This time of night, there's no traffic, so he arrives at the Eisenhower building -- which everyone in town still calls the Old Executive Office Building, and probably will for at least another generation -- within half an hour. Getting through security is a snap; he clips the visitor's badge to his shirt, and the security guard (who's wide awake and alert, though disinclined to conversation, which is good, because Barrett didn't have time to make a pot of coffee before he came over and he wouldn't have been allowed to bring a coffee mug in even if he had) tells him to wait for his escort. He shoves the hand that's not holding the briefcase into his pocket and leans against one of the columns, stifling another yawn. O'Neill had better have coffee waiting for him. (Especially if he's here to actually meet with the President, which is what O'Neill implied -- and why else would they be meeting here if not? -- and if O'Neill was yanking his chain, he's going to kill the man.)

It's only a few more minutes until a voice interrupts his thoughts. "Agent Barrett?"

He opens his eyes to see one of the Pentagon liaisons to the SGC -- Davis, he remembers after a second of searching his memory banks -- smiling at him. Davis looks tired, mostly around the eyes, but his uniform is immaculate. "Yeah," he says, or tries to; the yawn catches him again, and he covers it as fast as he can, blushing a little. "Sorry."

"It's okay," Davis says, his eyes crinkling up a little in a smile. He holds out a hand to shake. "Paul Davis, if you don't remember. The General sent me to bring you on over." He pauses for a second. "There's coffee, I promise."

"The magic words," Barrett says, returning the handshake.

Davis laughs. "Trust me, I think General O'Neill needs it more than you do. Come on."

Davis leads Barrett through the hallways; Barrett gets lost nearly immediately, but he's always had a horrible sense of direction. He's never been this far into the complex; he's certainly never been in the Oval Office itself, which is where they wind up. He's a little startled to see how quiet and subdued the White House is, even though it is two in the morning; if whatever crisis he's been brought here to help handle is bad enough to pull him out of bed, there should be people awake and around, but the halls are empty except for a few Secret Service agents, who don't say a word and don't meet their eyes.

It takes him a minute, when Davis shows him into the Oval Office itself, for him to even recognize the people in the room; they all look wiped and wired at the same time. One is General O'Neill, in his uniform but without the jacket or tie; one is Sam Carter, in BDU pants and a black t-shirt. His brain refuses to quite admit that the third person in the room is President Hayes, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a plain white undershirt, barefoot. He's never seen the man in anything less than full business regalia. (Then again, he's never seen the man in the White House proper, either; for all he knows, Hayes wanders around in his pajamas whenever there aren't people around.) They're sitting at the couches, with file folders piled on the coffeetable between them and spilling over onto the floor.

"Agent Barrett," President Hayes says, getting up and coming over to offer his hand to shake. "Thanks for coming. I'm sorry we had to get you out of bed."

"Quite all right, sir," Barrett says, automatically -- when the President calls, you come running, no matter what time of day it is. "What can I do for you?"

"Kid jumped the gun," O'Neill says, sounding crabby and overtired. He leans his head back, over the edge of the couch, blinking upside-down at Barrett and Davis. "Pulled the trigger about nine, ten hours ago now. Which means that we've got a list longer than my arm of people we have to take into custody before sunrise if we want to have any chance at all of doing this undetected. You're going to be up most of the night, I'm afraid."

It's a bit of a shock to hear; he'd thought he would have another week to prep things. "Great," he says. He takes a deep breath. "I, uh, take it that Director McFadden --"

"Cheer up," O'Neill says. "How often does a guy get to say that he arrested his boss?"

+ 14 hours

"Here," Jack says, nudging Sam's elbow, and she opens her eyes to find that he's holding out an extra-large paper cup of coffee. No steam rising from it, so it probably isn't anywhere near as hot as she'd like, but at this point, 'hot' takes a backseat to 'contains caffeine', so she takes it from him and gulps down half. It's doctored precisely the way she takes it, half a milk and two sugars, and she takes a second to appreciate his attention to detail; it's one of the small things they all know about each other and have for a while. To this day, she always forgets, when she's stopping for coffee before heading into work in the morning, that she's picking up one cup and not four.

"Thanks," she says, belatedly, remembering her manners. "How're you doing?"

"Eh," he says, as though it's enough of an answer, and sits next to her on the steps. Bolling AFB is quiet in the early-morning hour; there's enough humidity that she can tell it's going to be a scorcher once the sun is fully up, but in these few moments of dawn, it's almost pleasant out here. Certainly, after so long in Nevada, it's nice to be somewhere where the back of her throat doesn't hurt from the aridity. "How'd your last run go?"

"Came quietly," she says. They're holding their suspects in Bolling's on-base lockup for now; there'll probably be some screaming about that, since three-quarters of the people they've arrested so far are civilian, not military, but Jack had said -- and President Hayes agreed -- that a military holding cell would probably be better security. The base commander hadn't been all that pleased to find he was being invaded, but a phone call from Hayes had smoothed things over. "How's yours?"

Jack snorts. "Next time I say I miss the thrill and excitement of field work, remind me that I'm too old to be getting punched in the face on a regular basis," he says. She squints at his profile in the yellow-orangish streetlights; sure enough, his cheekbone is starting to bruise. "The MPs I brought with me got him cuffed and calmed down, at least. And he was the last on my list, at least for the time being. You?"

"Yeah, I'm done too," she says. "Barrett has another three, and Major Davis has one more. I think that gets us through the list of ones that we're sure of."

Jack nods and steals her cup of coffee for a sip; she watches, amused. He drinks his black, and he makes the ritual face as he hands it back. "Kid promised to send the list of Ba'al's agents back with Griffith tonight. Pretty sure there'll be some we missed on it, so I'm betting we're going to get to repeat the performance tonight," he says. "You about ready to go catch some sack time so you're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for round two?"

Sam clutches at her cup of coffee. "I'd really like to be here for the questioning," she says, trying to keep her voice neutral. "If you don't want me sitting in directly, I'd like to at least watch through the security glass."

To his credit, he frowns. "Of course," he says. "Why wouldn't -- oh. No, Hayes put me in charge of things, and we don't want to move on things until we get the kid's list and can make sure that the guy Hayes has in mind as Special Prosecutor isn't dirty. With charges of treason, sedition, and aiding and abetting, we can hold these guys for a little while, at least. I'm not going to start the interviews until tomorrow." He makes a face. "I feel dirty doing it, but there's no way I'm going to be on the top of my game until I get some sleep. Figured you could use some downtime, too."

"Well, when you put it that way," Sam says. The backs of her eyeballs feel gritty, in the way that says she's too out-of-practice with twenty-four hours straight of work. It's been a long time since the fate of the world rested in her hands. She doesn't miss it. She bites her lip. "I could go find on-base housing if you --"

"No," Jack says, speaking over the top of her sentence before she can even finish it. "I've got a guest room, if you --"

"I --" Sam starts, and then they both fall silent, making rueful faces at each other. They've been working together just fine all night; in front of other people, they've had no problems being General O'Neill and Lieutenant Colonel Carter, professional colleagues, long-term coworkers. Jack and Sam are different people wearing the same skins, and she thinks neither of them knows how this is supposed to go. Oddly, the mutual discomfort makes it easier to bear, somehow; it's nice to think that she isn't the only one floundering.

"Lemme try this again," Jack says. "C'mon back to the townhouse with me. We can get a good five hours down before we have to be up and running again. Where you sleep is up to you."

Sam nods, hesitant, uncertain. She finishes off the cup of coffee and rises from the steps; Jack follows, taking the cup from her and tossing it into the nearby trashcan. He drove them both over here; he doesn't use a car-and-driver, which she wasn't at all surprised to realize. It's a quiet walk back to the parking lot where he stowed the truck. When they get there, he holds the door for her, which she would find annoying in just about anyone else and finds charming in him.

He has the truck radio tuned to NPR; he fiddles with the volume until it's just a low buzz, loud enough to keep the truck's cabin from silence, soft enough that she'd have to strain to hear it if she actually wanted to follow any of the stories. She doesn't, really; she's content to rest her cheek against the passenger's side window and watch the other cars fighting for road space in the grey and misty dawn. Traffic is moderate-to-heavy, already clogging the highway as they drive up 295 and the streets as they make their way into downtown proper, but it's not bad enough to actually make them sit; it manifests mostly in a steady thirty-five miles an hour and a constant muttered stream of imprecations from the driver's side. "Sorry," Jack says, when she looks over at him after a particularly vehement hissing. "I hate this town."

"It's all right," Sam says, laughing. "I do too." She won't ever, in a million years, tell him that she thinks it's cute, how he'll grumble without swearing in front of her, even though she knows all the words and has heard him use them a thousand times before.

He's living in a brick-fronted townhouse in Georgetown, a nice enough neighborhood but nothing like anything she would have imagined he'd pick for himself. When he parks the car, he's the one to take her bags from behind the seat; she considers making a token protest, but it wouldn't get her anywhere, so she lets it go. "I'll warn you," he says, as they walk up to the front door. "The place came furnished. It's ... bad."

'Bad' is an understatement -- the foyer looks like an explosion in a colonial museum, about as far from her understanding of Jack's sense of decorating as it's possible to get -- and he catches her looking around herself as she toes off her shoes and he locks the door behind them; the face he makes is entertaining. "Told you," he says.

"I didn't think you meant it was this bad," Sam says, and then bites her lip; she probably shouldn't insult his house, even if he was the one to start it.

But he only laughs. "You should've seen it before I had the worst bits sent to storage. You, uh, want something to eat before --"

Sam shakes her head. "I'm really wiped," she says. "If you don't mind, I think I'd like to head straight to bed." She takes a deep breath; she's been thinking of ways to say this for the entire drive over here, and none of them sounded right in her head, so it's probably better to just say it straight out, without trying to be coy or demure. "You, uh, don't need to put me in the guest room."

For a second she thinks he might say something, standing there in his foyer with one shoe off, his keys still in his hand, her bags slung over his shoulder; she wonders if she's said the wrong thing, failed to catch some hint or cue. Then he seems to shake himself, just a little, and nods. "Okay," he says, calm and quiet, and toes off the other shoe. "Come on, then. Upstairs and to the left."

She trails along behind him, craning her neck as she goes; what she can see of the house is just as bad as the foyer, but the master bedroom, when he leads her into it, is blessedly free of fussy antiques. Looking at the bed, she thinks it might be the furniture from his house in Colorado; the sheets are still tangled from the last time he slept in them, and that seems odd, since she would have guessed he'd be the type to make his bed every day unless pressed for time.

Jack sets her duffel on the chair by the door. "Bathroom's through there," he says, making an awkward gesture. "Take your time. I'm going to just --" He transfers the wave so it's indicating the hallway they came in through. "Not going to be able to sleep unless I eat something to soak up all of this coffee. I'll be back up in about five, ten minutes."

Sam nods. "Okay," she says, standing here in his bedroom, in his house, in his space, feeling uncertain and a little out-of-it and more than a little ready to drop facefirst into the covers and sleep until tomorrow. "You, uh, mind if I take a shower?"

"Not at all," Jack says. "Soap and shampoo's in the shower. Towels in the linen closet in the bathroom. If you need a toothbrush, there's a new one in the medicine cabinet." He stands there for a second after he finishes speaking, like there's something else he's trying to figure out how to say, and then he turns on his heel and walks out again without further instruction. She can hear his feet on the steps a minute later.

Left alone in his bedroom, she doesn't give in to the temptation to open drawers and poke through knicknacks; she just opens her duffel bag and rummages through it until she finds clean clothes to sleep in. What those clothes should be gives her a moment's pause, but he's seen her in every stage of dress and undress possible over seven years of serving on the front lines together; when she catches herself holding a pair of sweatpants she'd never in a million years sleep in (too heavy), she swears at herself, quietly, and puts them back down.

She brought a few pairs of the women's boxer shorts she tends to use as pajama bottoms. She takes one out, and adds a lightweight tank top as well. Swap the boxer shorts for gym shorts and they're what she'd wear to work out; nothing sultry, nothing seductive, but nothing overly-concealing, either. He can take her the way she is. Somehow, she doesn't think that'll be a problem.

She brushes her teeth and takes a five-minute shower, the water warm and lulling, just scrubbing off enough of the day's grunge and grime that she won't feel like she's getting the sheets filthy just by lying on them. She catches herself dithering about whether or not to shave her legs, and shuts the shower off with a snap of the wrist before she can work herself up about it. Sleep. Nothing more.

When she comes out of the bathroom, her hair toweled as dry as she can get it, dressed in her boxers and tank top, Jack is back upstairs; he's in the process of pulling the curtains across each set of windows. They're dark and heavy, and with them shut, almost nothing of the early-morning light makes it through. Must not be the first time he's had to catch some sleep during the day, she thinks, and then realizes that she actually doesn't know much about what precisely he's doing here, what kind of work his daily routine consists of. He seems to have had much the same thought as she had, about the choice of clothing; he's wearing a pair of boxers too, plain grey cotton, and a white undershirt that's so threadbare she can see the lines and shadows of his muscles beneath it.

"Hey," she says, quiet and uncertain, and he turns as he finishes closing the last curtain. His eyes flick up and down her body, and the smile he gives her warms her belly.

"Hey," he says, just as quiet. Something's changed in the way he regards her, though, and she realizes what it is; this is Jack looking at Sam, not General O'Neill looking at Lieutenant Colonel Carter, in a way it hasn't been since she first arrived here eight madcap hours ago. "Brought you up a bottle of water, in case you were thirsty. On the bedside table."

"Thanks," Sam says, following his wave, going over to uncap the bottle and drinking from it. "I, uh, guess this is my side of the bed?"

"Don't really have a preference," Jack says. He runs his hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end. Silence for a second. "So," he says, just as she's about to try to think of something -- anything -- to break it. "This is awkward."

Oddly, hearing him say it breaks a little bit of the awkwardness for her. "I could get my phone and call you," she offers. "We could say goodnight that way. We're used to that, right?"

It makes him laugh, the same choppy barking laugh he uses in their phone conversations when she's said something that genuinely amuses him -- she's not sure she's ever heard him actually full-out laugh, not while not under alien influence of some sort. "Might work better," he says. Then takes a deep breath, bracing himself, and crosses the room so he's standing in front of her. "Or we could just do this and get it over with."

He telegraphs his moves well in advance, slow and steady, like he's trying to give her a chance to pull away if she wants to. She doesn't want to pull away. Her heart is thumping like it's about to leap out of her chest: all her dreams, all her fantasies, from the years when they were nothing more than a pipe-dream to the past six months when they've become more and more possible, all narrowed down to this moment. He fits one hand against her cheek, his thumb stroking her cheekbone as though he doesn't even know he's doing it, and leans, slowly, to kiss her.

His mouth is warm, and his lips are dry, and it's neither too rushed nor too demanding. It's not the kind of kiss she's dreamed of, where he claims her mouth and makes promises against her tongue, but it's not the kind of kiss you give your maiden aunt, either. It's just a sweet, soft introduction, a careful testing of the waters, and she tries to kiss back enthusiasm without urgency even as she's forcing herself not to read his body for further cues about how much he is or isn't enjoying it.

She's promised herself that she isn't going to read too much into his confessions about Daniel, into JD's relationship with Cameron. She's promised herself that she's going to trust him to tell her the truth. If he's kissing her, if he's said that he wants to try to see whether or not they can work, she'll trust him to know his own mind, and tell her if anything changes. She'll give him that much faith. She might be setting herself up for heartbreak, but she's always known that his hands can handle the fragile and tender things with care.

When he pulls back, after a few warm minutes, he's smiling. "So, that didn't suck," he says.

Sam licks her lips and laughs. "Is that the best you can do?" she says, daring to tease, liking the laugh she gets in return. "'Didn't suck' isn't exactly the best compliment I've ever gotten."

The smile fades from his face, and she'd worry, except the look he's giving her in return is dark and warm and full of affectionate promise. "Gimme a break, Carter," he says, and she'd worry that he's still calling her by last name, except she thinks that's just how he'll think of her until their end of days. Hell, JD still calls Cam 'Mitchell'. "I've been up for over twenty-four. Come on. Sleep: it does a body good."

"I'm pretty sure that's milk," she says, deadpan -- biting back the 'sir' that still feels like it should belong at the end of the sentence -- and is rewarded with another laugh. He steps back, and it's like the tension has been broken; she watches him fold back the covers without feeling awkward or uncertain at all, and he climbs into the bed and pats the other side in invitation.

"C'mere," Jack says, settling himself down so he's lying on his side on the far side of the bed, facing her, and she clicks off the light on the bedside table and spoons up against him in the mostly-dark. He drapes an arm over her side, pressing his palm up against her belly and burying his nose in her still-damp hair, and the touch doesn't feel sexual at all. It just feels good, being held like this, being close to him, clean and warm and comfortable on sheets that smell like his skin, the heat of him snuggled up against her back.

"Good night, Jack," she says, closing her eyes, and she can feel his nose nuzzling her scalp a second before his lips press against the base of her skull, and it makes something warm flutter in her chest.

"Good night, Carter," he says right back, soft in her ear, and she falls asleep to his thumb stroking over the edge of her belly, so slow and gentle she doesn't think he even knows he's doing it at all.

+ 17 hours

The phone rings right at the stroke of 0700, just when he's getting ready to put down his paperwork and go gear up for SG-3's mission to P79-XC2, and Nat Reynolds is an old soldier down in the bones, down where it counts, so he knows damn well that it's the sound of trouble calling. Not that he hasn't been expecting it, all the way through all of this, and keeping it off his face has been the hardest part. He's no stranger to secrecy and he understands classified -- couldn't have gotten this far without that understanding -- but never the way Jack was. Doesn't know how the man does it.

General Landry's face is sour when Nat reports as ordered, and Nat's not just an old soldier but an old Marine, and Marines know their cues. He draws himself up into his best posture and stares at a spot just over Landry's shoulder. "Sir," he says: careful, neutral. Reporting for duty and not going to give you cause to yell at me, all at once.

Landry doesn't say anything for a long minute, long enough that Nat has to run through a list of all SG-3's latest missions to see what he might have fucked up so badly that he deserves a chewing-out. Nothing comes to mind, so he starts going through what his boys might have gotten up to in the Mountain, comes up blank, and is all the way down to wondering if someone's gotten into shit down in town before Landry finally breaks his stare and says, "Would you care to tell me what the hell is going on in my command, Colonel?"

A hell of a lot of things you don't know about, sir would probably get Nat shoved in a deep dark hole for insubordination, so he keeps his face carefully neutral. "I'm sorry, sir, could you be more specific?"

"Oh, don't give me that," Landry says, but it's just griping -- he's worked with Landry long enough to know when Landry's yelling about something in particular and when Landry's just yelling -- so Nat keeps his mouth shut. "I had a very interesting request on my desk when I came in this morning. Seems that the pleasure of your company is being requested in Washington for a few weeks. You wanna tell me why Jack O'Neill wants you in particular?"

"Couldn't say, sir," Nat tells the bookshelf behind Landry. It's not even a lie; he couldn't say, not yet, not without talking to Jack. Last he heard, Tiresias/Cyllene wasn't scheduled to go down until closer to the end of the month. "Perhaps you should ask General O'Neill?"

Landry snorts. "Which I would, if Jack didn't have his phone off the hook. And at ease, man, you're making me think you have something to hide." Nat settles down into textbook parade rest, still not looking at Landry; out of the corner of his eye, he can see that Landry's shuffling through papers on his desk. "Does this have anything to do with those two weeks he stole you back at the beginning of the year? And does it have anything to do with the disappearance of one Captain Spencer Griffith from my command?"

"Couldn't say, sir," Nat repeats, although this time it's another kind of answer, and he knows Landry will hear the difference: couldn't say without permission from General O'Neill to read you into the op. "I'm sure the General would be happy to answer your --"

"Contrary to the popular opinion of this command, Colonel," Landry says, tight and irritated, "I am not an idiot."

There's not much Nat can say to that, so he settles on a completely neutral "Sir." Not agreement, not argument. He's pretty sure Landry isn't an idiot -- or rather, not a complete idiot; complete idiots don't get trusted with command of the most important operation in the service. But Jack had told him not to tell Landry anything, and Landry might be his direct CO, but Jack O'Neill not only outranks Landry but will always, always hold a hell of a lot more of Nat's personal loyalty than this man standing before him.

"I don't like this," Landry grumps, which Nat doesn't have to say anything to, because -- really, self-evident. "And when all of this is over, believe me, we will be having words about what is and is not appropriate for members of this command to withhold from the General who signs your orders. I'm scrubbing your mission to XC2. Go put together a bag and get someone else from your team to drive you over to Peterson as quickly as possible; there's a flight on standby. And no, before you ask, I have no idea how long Jack is going to keep you for."

"Sir," Nat says, and takes it as a dismissal; he turns on his heel and escapes before Landry can grump at him some more.

Dave Baker is the first member of SG-3 that Nat runs into in the gear-up room. "Hey, sir," Baker says. "I wanted to -- hey, that isn't your mission gear."

"Nope," Nat says. "Mission's scrubbed. General O'Neill wants me in DC for something. Guess you guys will have to wipe your own asses for a while."

He doesn't have to say anything else; Baker's an SGC vet, four and a half years on the line and hasn't shown any signs of cracking, and he remembers Jack's command just as fondly as everyone else does. Baker whistles, low and tight. "Big?" he asks.

Nat makes himself shrug. "For all I know, he just can't find a fourth for bridge," he says, and Baker hears it as the warning he means it to be. "Need you to give me a lift over to Peterson, if you can take the time out of your busy social calendar."

"Sure thing," Baker says. "Lemme give you a hand with your shit."

Baker doesn't say anything else until they're halfway to Peterson, and even then it's low-key. "You need any help with anything?" he asks. "You just say the word and we'd all come running. Especially if it's for General O'Neill."

Nat knows, and to be completely honest, the fact disturbs him, just a little. He's known Jack O'Neill for years, on the personal and the professional level, and he knows Jack would be the first to decry the kind of hero-worship that some of the men regard him with; Jack knows that command has to rest in the office, not in the person, and Jack's always been vaguely uncomfortable with the cult-of-personality worship that he seems to attract.

But Nat also knows that the SGC is a command unlike any other he's ever served in, and he knows that a lot of the veterans are uncomfortable with Landry as a commanding officer. They accepted Hammond because nobody could doubt, not for an instant, that George Hammond (and damn, but Nat misses the man) had the best interests of everyone on base at heart, from the Gate Team leaders all the way on down to the guy mopping the floors on level 14. They accepted Jack, because Jack knew who they were, what they wanted, and what made them tick, and everyone knew that Jack had been there, done that, just like they had. Landry's been in command of the SGC for over two years now, and he came in from the outside without a single clue about what serving at the SGC is like, and everyone's still tiptoeing around waiting for him to crack under the pressure, because they've given up on waiting for him to have an epiphany.

If anyone asked Nat, not that they do, he'd say that Landry should have spent a week or two on a Gate team getting his ass shot at halfway across the galaxy on a planet with a red sun and purple grass before he could ever hope to give an order to the men and women who do every day, as part of their jobs, and have it obeyed instantly and without question. The people of the SGC will forgive a lot in a commander when they're certain that commander knows where they're coming from. He's never gotten so much as a hint that Landry views the other side of the Gate as anything other than a tour of duty anywhere on this world -- and not even the unpleasant ones.

But that's for later -- he's mentioned it to Jack a few times, here and there, and Jack keeps making faces like he's just bit into a lemon and muttering about how he knows, he knows -- and Baker's watching him for an answer. "I'll pass on the message," Nat says. "In the meantime, eyes on the road."

Major Davis is waiting for him on the other end of the flight, which is only an hour and a half -- there are advantages to borrowing one of the F-15s -- and it's the first time Nat's ever seen the man look anything other than perfectly put-together; his tie is sloppy, like he's been pulling at it, and he looks exhausted around the edges. He's holding two extra-large cups of coffee; he hands one over to Nat, and then salutes. Nat returns it. It always feels weird when he leaves the more freewheeling manners of the SGC, where salutes only happen when Landry's standing on ceremony again. "Morning, sir," Davis says. "Good to see you again."

"You too, Major," Nat says, peeling back the lid and inspecting the coffee; it looks like it's done up exactly how he takes it, which makes him wonder if his preferences are noted down in a file somewhere or if Davis really does just have that good a memory. "What's the news?"

"General O'Neill is catching some downtime," Davis says. "Let me take over to the building we're using for HQ; I'll brief you on the way. We're going to be at this for a while."

+ 19 hours

The sound of the phone ringing wakes Sam up; it takes her a few seconds of groping at the nightstand where her sleep-fogged brain insists that the phone is (which it is, in her house, but this isn't her house) before she realizes where she is, what's going on, and who the weight on the other side of the bed is (no longer cradling her, but he's lying face-down with his ankle twined with hers). The noise Jack makes as he reaches for the phone is the sound of a man who was not ready to wake up yet. She can sympathize.

"O'Neill," he says, stifling a yawn. Sam buries her face in the pillow; the phone ringing almost always means that it's time to get up and hit the ground running, so she'll take the last few seconds she can steal. "Yeah," Jack says, after a minute. "Okay, good. Let him have whatsisface. O'Canlon. And tell him he doesn't have to be all that gentle about asking." Pause. "Shit. Yeah, okay. So, take him over to Hayes, get him sworn, then let him have O'Canlon. Hell, I'll probably be there by then, anyway. I just need to throw my ass in the shower, grab something to eat, and then I'll be over. I'll grab Carter, too." Pause. "Yeah, sounds good. Actually, have one of the MPs that we already cleared take him over to Bolling. You, I want to catch at least four hours of sleep before I see you again. I mean it."

Jack hangs up the phone, and then rolls over (she thinks) to face her again. She's just wondering if maybe she should do something or say something when his hand falls on her shoulder, sweeping lightly down her arm, then back up and continuing down her back. "I hate to say it," he says.

Sam makes a noise that she knows he'll have no problem interpreting as I'm awake and I don't really want to be. He laughs. "Yeah, I know," he says. "Come on. I'll start the coffee. Reynolds just got here. We need to be out the door in fifteen minutes or so; plan accordingly."

She sits up, dragging her legs over the edge of the bed and running a hand through her hair. She wasn't asleep long enough for her mouth to taste as bad as it could, but she still desperately needs to brush her teeth. She yawns again. "'Kay," she says. "Ugh. Morning."

"Afternoon by now, I think," Jack says (and she will never in a million years cease to hate how awake he is within two minutes of his eyes opening; she and Daniel had always despised him for it, when it wasn't saving their lives). He runs his hand along her shoulder again, this time more tentatively, as though he's trying to see what he should be doing, how they should be interacting. She brings her hand up to squeeze his, briefly, and then hauls her sorry ass out of bed and into the bathroom.

Her hair's a fright, dried every which way, and there's no way she can tame it by just dunking it in the sink, so she makes a face at herself in the mirror (at least Jack has seen her with morning hair before), brushes her teeth, and throws herself in the shower for a quick scrub-down. She's just rinsing off the soap when Jack knocks on the door. "Okay if I come in?" he calls through.

For a minute she's tempted to say no, because this should be weird, but the more she thinks about it, the more she realizes it isn't weird at all. It's just them, and if they're in his house instead of in a VIP suite or a campsite halfway across the galaxy and if they're two instead of four, well, it doesn't change things much. "Yeah," she calls back, and through the tiny holes of the shower-curtain, she can see him coming in with mug in hand.

She snaps off the water as he's soaping up his face to shave, reaching out for the towel hanging on a hook next to the shower, and he turns and puts it in her questing hand before she has to ask for it. "Brought you coffee," he says, gesturing to where he'd left it on the back of the toilet tank, as she's toweling her hair and herself dry and then wrapping herself in the towel to step out. "We can hit the Dunkin' Donuts drivethrough on the way to grab something that can pass for food, but I figured you'd want the coffee first."

His face is half-covered with shaving cream, and he looks impossibly weary, like he'd really rather just climb back in bed and sleep the whole day away, and there's a small nick along his jawline that's produced two or three drops of blood, no more. She transfers her grip on the towel to one-handed and lifts her hand to thumb away the blood. His eyebrows draw together, a question unasked, and she says, "You cut yourself."

Jack's face eases, and he smiles a little. "Good morning," he says.

"Good morning," she says, and means it, because for the first time, she's starting to believe that it really can be this simple.

For a second she wants to kiss him -- a repeat of last night's promise, a renewal of the unspoken agreement that yes, they are doing this, that they will try, that once the immediate crisis has receded (not ended -- somehow, she thinks, it won't ever end, but there'll be a time when they both aren't running full-out) they will take the time and work out what this is, what this can be, what they can be for each other. But he's covered in shaving cream, and now isn't the time. She brushes her fingertips against his lips instead, and is rewarded by a deepening of his smile, and then she takes the mug of coffee he brought for her, and she goes to get dressed so they can get moving.

+ 21 hours

Spence isn't expecting to sleep the night straight through, especially after what JD had said, but he's out cold by 2100 and the next time he catches himself stirring it's 1100. He wakes quickly and cleanly, unconscious one minute and sitting straight up in bed the next, and the way his heart is pounding tells him he was dreaming but he shies away from remembering what it was. He's sweating and shivering all at once, and the inside of his chest feels bruised and battered even though he knows he's fine (fine, dammit, fine), but his knees are steady when he climbs out of bed.

The shower last night hadn't bothered him. Or, to be scrupulously exact, the shower last night hadn't bothered him any more than everything else had been bothering him, but this morning he sticks his hand underneath the spray to test the temperature and --

oh God it hurts it hurts it hurts so fucking much and he can't let it break him, can't let it stop him, because JD needs him to fucking finish this and he isn't done yet and he's dead, he has to be, he knows that the shock will kill him if the damage doesn't, but if he just gives up and lies down now he won't just be killing himself, he'll be killing JD and he will not do that and our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name --

I've got you, and it's JD's voice in the darkness, thy kingdom come thy will be done and he's trying to hold on to what JD's saying to him, clinging to the knowledge that JD is here, JD has made it, he can stop fighting now, except now JD has to worry about him and he's going to be dead weight the whole way out (forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those) and he won't, can't let it happen that way, and then JD is making him tilt his head back and there's a shower of water on his face which is burning which is melting away like cotton candy in the rain and it hurts, the water isn't helping at all, and he's going to have to make JD understand that it's important that one of them get out of this to carry the message back and oh please God he doesn't want to die alone --

He comes out of it when he cracks his head against the frame of the bathroom door, scrabbling backwards, away, and the floor is soaking wet with the water spraying out of the shower. Which is probably why he slipped.

"Fuck," he says, and his voice sounds loud in the room, and he fixes his eyes on the dingy off-white of the tile and the puddle of water creeping across the floor (not darkness, not blankness, his eyes are working perfectly fucking fine dammit). "Okay. Come on, Griffith. Into the water. You stink."

He manages it by standing outside the bathtub and sticking one body part in at a time, staring firmly and fiercely at whatever he's washing, not looking to the left or to the right, and when he's finished, it takes all the towels in the bathroom to mop up the overflow. He stares at his reflection in the mirror (wrong, and he wonders how long it's going to be, wonders if he's ever going to start looking like himself again) and decides that shaving is a little outside of his current capabilities. Even if he's headed to DC to report to General O'Neill. They can damn well deal with a little bit of five o'clock shadow.

(I'm putting you on a plane at fifteen hundred, JD had said, like he has the right to give orders, the right to make decisions, and Spence knows that he will never again be able to look at JD and see nothing more than his cousin's teenaged lover, because there are men and women he's served under who look straight at you and you know they were born to command, know that they would be commanders for the rest of their lives even if they had no troops to follow them, and he's known JD was one of them for a long damn time but for a while he'd managed to forget. He won't forget again.)

The knock comes on his door just as the clock is ticking over to 1145, just when JD had promised it would. Spence opens the door and squints. (Bright and sunny out there. Not a raincloud in the sky.) It takes his eyes longer to adjust than it should. JD looks tired, like he hasn't slept at all, like everything he's done and had to do is finally catching up with him and weighing him down.

"Hey," JD says, calm and quiet, no hint of judgement in his voice or eyes. "You sleep okay?"

Spence clears his throat. "Okay enough," he says. "Didn't keep waking up, at least."

JD steps into the room. He has a backpack slung on his shoulder, which he hadn't had yesterday; it's cheap and plastic and full of zippers and mesh and bungees, the kind that people who never go outdoors buy so that they can feel like genuine hikers, and it looks like it's stuffed full. He's wearing a pair of jeans and a white tank top. Spence has never seen him in anything but a long-sleeved black t-shirt before, and this must be why: his arms and shoulders and chest are covered in tattoos, dark and dense, breathtaking. Spence tries not to stare. He doesn't know why JD has hidden them over the past two years and he doesn't know why he's showing them now, but if there's one thing he's figured out by now, it's that JD doesn't like answering questions.

"This is yours," JD says, shoving the backpack at Spence. "I went out shopping again last night. If I'm not mistaken, you're going to be in DC for a while, and you're going to want some stuff of your own. I somehow don't think you're going to want to go out shopping for yourself for a while, and I'm sure O'Neill will have people who can do it for you, but this way they won't have to. There's a laptop in there. Make sure you don't let anyone but O'Neill touch it. And I mean anyone."

"Thanks," Spence says. He takes the backpack; for a second he doesn't know what to do with it, do with his hands, so he just hangs it awkwardly off one shoulder. "And I will. I mean, I won't. Do you, uh, do you have any idea what I'm going to be doing next?"

"If O'Neill's not an idiot, he'll keep you on the task force for cleaning this mess up," JD says. "And O'Neill's not an idiot." He crosses the room, opens the bathroom door. Spence winces. The towels are still on the floor; they'll tell the tale of his momentary freakout more clearly than if he tried to explain it in words. "Come on," JD says, turning back, a hint of brisk impatience showing in his voice. "We have to be out of here in fifteen minutes."

Spence has no idea what JD wants, but he drops the backpack on the bed and follows JD across the room anyway. JD turns on the water in the sink with a snap of one wrist and points at the toilet. "Sit," he says.

Spence does. It's only when JD wets a washcloth and picks up the can of shaving cream that he realizes what JD means to do, and he opens his mouth to protest. JD pins him with knowing eyes. "It's all right," he says, curiously gentle, completely free of blame. "I'm pretty impressed you managed to make it into the shower. You'll feel better with a clean shave. Trust me on this one."

When JD says it, Spence is suddenly aware of the way his cheeks itch, the way that itching transforms itself in the back of his head into something wrong, and he bites his lip. "I can do it," he says.

"No," JD says, still in that same tone of honest understanding, and Spence shivers, because in that one second, he can see not only the commander JD used to be, but the man his cousin loves so fiercely, the man who went out and faced down insanity every day for the better part of a decade, the man who knows what it's like to have to learn to live with damage. "You really can't. Not yet. And that's all right, and it's going to keep being all right, for at least a little while. With shit like this, there are things you have to force yourself through and things that you can go ahead and let other people deal with for you until you can deal with them yourself. And if you don't let it be all right, that'll break you too."

He cups Spence's chin with one hand, stroking the wet washcloth over Spence's cheeks, and Spence keeps his eyes open and his breathing even and listens to JD talk. "And it'll be the craziest fucking things, too. For three months once I couldn't put the milk in my own coffee, so I learned to take it black. Took me forever to break the habit. For, oh, about a year or so, I had to carry twice as much ammo as I thought anyone could possibly need, or I'd flip out and panic. For six months, the only person I could stand to let cut my hair was D -- one of my team. Keep your eyes open, when you get back to the SGC. You'll start to see it."

"Major Benton won't go into the armory without someone there with him," Spence says, quietly.

JD picks up the shaving cream. "Foothold. Fourth year? Third year? I've forgotten. Anyone who's been there long enough picks up a few quirks. Anyone who's been there long enough is gonna take care of yours, because they know you're gonna turn around and do the same." The shaving cream is cold, and it smells like nothing at all, and Spence makes himself keep breathing, because it's only fucking shaving cream and it's not going to fucking do anything to him. "That's when you know that you're really part of the project, and not just someone who's wandering through."

"They gave us the loss rate figures in GT&O," Spence says. He can feel the foam moving on his cheeks as he talks. "Eighteen to twenty-four months."

"They weren't lying," JD says, and in his voice is a whole sea of regret. "Tip your head back. Keep your eyes on mine. We'll do this quickly, but I don't want to nick you. And you really will feel better after."

And JD was right; he does, even though there are a few minutes (razor traveling over the planes of his cheeks, over his chin, down his throat) where he almost panics, where he has to hold his eyes on JD's and breathe, breathe, breathe. But when it's over, and JD is wiping the last bits of the shaving cream from his face with the washcloth, Spence thinks that wasn't so bad; maybe I can get through this after all.

"Thanks," he says, when it's all over and JD is rinsing out the razor one last time. JD looks up, meeting Spence's eyes in the mirror, and for a second, Spence shudders, because JD looks nothing like himself. Mirrors lie. Mirrors are going to be lying to him for a long damn time.

"You're welcome," JD says. "You're going to get through this. It won't seem like it for a while. But you are going to get through this." He pauses. "When you show up in DC, ask O'Neill to have Skipper pulled back from Atlantis. O'Neill can use you both, you work together better than you work apart, and ... it'll help."

Oh, God, it really would help to have Skipper there with him (a flash, a screaming, oh God please don't let me die alone, and he batters away the memories; not now, not here). "I'm kinda persona non grata in the family right now," he says. Not that he thinks Skipper will believe it, but he doesn't want Skipper in the middle.

JD shakes his head. "Won't last long. If O'Neill hasn't gotten Hayes to call your parents and clear you yet, it's only because he's up to his ass in alligators and they've all been trying to bail out the swamp. He'll remember soon enough. I'd be surprised if he hadn't by the time you show up. We don't leave our people behind. And we don't fuck them over, either." He chucks the disposable razor and the shaving cream into the bathroom's trash can, and Spence tries not to wonder at the familiar way with which JD refers to the President. "Come on," JD says, and with that he's back to being closed-off, tightly-guarded, brisk. "I don't want to get charged for a second day in this rat-trap."

Spence can see the briskness now for what it is: JD's own defense mechanism, honed over years and years, and in that moment, he starts to understand what JD meant about accomodating quirks and defenses. JD shaved his face for him, because he couldn't. He won't take offense at JD's prickliness, because it's necessary. Just a thing. He can do that.

"If anybody asks," Spence says, as they're locking up the room behind them and heading to the office to turn in their keycards, "where should I tell them you've gone?"

Not where are you going. With those words, he's promising JD that he'll lie for him if he has to, that he'll keep the faith and spout the company line, and it's (probably) not something he would have done before, but he's not the same person he was two months ago, and he never will be again. And he's all right with that. He has to be. He doesn't have any other choice.

JD pauses, his hand on the doorknob of the motel office, squinting against the sun. "Tell them I'm off figuring out how to go back to my own life," he says, and that's the last Spence can get out of him.

+ 24 hours

When Theo shows up at the house, she's expecting what she's been getting for pretty much the past few months -- AJ screaming his head off, Cam trying to hold it together with every last bit of strength left in him -- but what she gets is almost enough to make her back up and check that she has the right house. She lets herself in the front door (she has a key and the security code now, for days when she might need it) to the sound of Bruce Springsteen playing so loud that she couldn't be heard if she shouted over it to figure out where Cam and the baby are. It's all right, though, because she can also hear the sound of someone singing in the kitchen, and it isn't her, so, well, it's gotta be Cam, and he sounds --

He sounds happy.

She follows the sound of music, listening to Cam's voice (and it's a pretty good voice, too) belting out "well, I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk", and she finds that she's smiling already, like his good mood is contagious, like he's managing to imbue the entire house with whatever impulse has prompted him to turn the music high. When she sticks her head in the kitchen, AJ is sitting in a babyseat on the counter banging his hand on the plastic frame and gurgling along happily, and Cam has the oversized cutting board on the counter and what looks to be half a gallon of strawberries spread over it, half of them already trimmed and sliced and piled to the side. He's not quite dancing -- she knows enough about his injuries now to know that he'll probably never dance again -- but his motions as he quarters the strawberry beneath his knife have the extra flourish of joy in motion.

It's beautiful.

He looks up -- at some noise, at some motion -- and when he sees her, the smile that spreads over his face is just as beautiful. "Hey!" he yells, and as she watches, bemused, he grabs the kitchen towel tucked into his waistband, dries the strawberry juice from his hands, and reaches over to turn off the music. It seems to echo in the space once he has. "Didn't realize it was so late already. I tried calling you to say I was gonna skip PT today, but you didn't answer at the office and your cell phone went straight to voicemail."

"Oh, crap," Theo says, reaching for her back pocket, where she usually keeps her cell phone, and discovering that it's off. "The ringer's still stuck on full and I haven't had a chance to stop in at the store and replace the phone yet, and I was in the library this afternoon and I forgot to turn it back on, and I guess --" She runs out of words and flaps her hands, knowing he'll know what she means. She likes him because he's never once made her feel like an idiot when she's going through an attack of babbling or scatterbrainedness again.

"S'fine by me," Cam says. He picks up the strawberry he's slicing and holds it out to her; she takes it and pops it into her mouth. Just tart enough; she'll bet it's never seen the inside of a storage warehouse in its life. "It's not like I mind the company. Just thought I'd let you know that you could bail today if you had to without leaving me high and dry." He grins at her a little more. The corners of his eyes crinkle when he's smiling like that, Theo notices. It's not at all like the crinkle around his eyes when he's trying to keep from showing pain. "An' believe me, I'm gonna hear about skipping PT from now until the end of days, but I figure: a guy can't take a day off to celebrate, what's the world coming to."

"Oh!" Theo says. "What are we celebrating?"

AJ catches sight of her and launches into a stream of the nonsense syllables he's mostly replaced his screaming with. (He is merely trying, she thinks, to inform the world around him about whatever issue is vital to his worldview at any given time, and now that he can mostly command his tongue to do what he wants it to do, the screaming isn't as necessary.) She crosses the kitchen and scoops him up out of the baby seat. "Really?" she asks him, with as much dignity as she can manage, and is rewarded with another spate of babble.

"Sunrise," Cam says, and for a second she can't follow him, until she realizes it's an answer to the question she'd asked him, and it doesn't really answer anything at all. She turns. He's still grinning at her. "C'mon. We got tarts to make. You wanna stick around, you can even help eat 'em."

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