Chapter Text
1.
“Sooner or later, you have to face reality.”
“… no I don’t.”
It’s always the same: clear morning light on the lake water, the woods so still that his senses expand into the silence, hearing so sharp that every snap of a twig, every twitch of a leaf within a kilometer makes his heart stutter and race.
And Daniel, hands shoved into his pockets, walking through the tripwires without disturbing them, perfectly ordinary and perfectly dead.
Given sufficient trauma, the human brain (weaker) will hallucinate. This is empirical fact, documented through the centuries.
Once, he’d tried ignoring Daniel, for a day or two. Could have been a week. Hard to keep track of time there; he’d have kept a tally if he’d had anything he could use to scratch lines into the walls. If he’d had anything to count except the number of times he was returned to his cell; if he wasn’t afraid that the walls would be wiped clean too each time, smooth and unmarked as the skin under the scorch-holes in his clothes, as if nothing had happened, nothing to prove it was real, no wound no scar no memory —
— an effort to pull out of the thought, like wrestling a plane out of a spin, the controls sticking as you begin to hurtle into the ground.
Once, he’d tried ignoring Daniel (cut off the thought there). Holding onto his mental discipline, clarity through the waking dream. But he doesn't dream, doesn't sleep, so this cannot — and everything tilts and blurs, sliding away before he can grasp it, before he can think about what he is doing (think about what he is thinking). This is not real, therefore I do not perceive it.
Holding onto his sanity.
Okay, so maybe that part didn’t work out so well.
Everyone breaks, sooner or later. If not by disclosing information, then in other ways. This too is empirical fact.
These days, he doesn’t bother trying to ignore Daniel. It’s always the same conversation, or variations on the theme, Daniel pacing beside him or crouched next to him in the hut, frustration simmering under the surface of his Zen calm. Sometimes he argues; sometimes he begs.
“You need to go back,” Daniel says. “They can help you, they’re looking for you. You just have to go back.”
On today’s menu: patient repetition. Careful kindergarten-teacher tones. Put down the scissors, sweetie, you don’t want to do that.
“Back where?”
“Home.”
Home is grey concrete walls is grey crystal tunnels — he clamps down on the rising panic, swallows it down like nausea, shutting off the thought before it can take hold. Take him places he doesn’t want to go.
Instead, he spreads his fingers out flat on the floor — rough wooden boards over hard-packed dirt — and considers them.
The place was abandoned when he got here; probably had been for years, already decaying back into the woods, planks warping and rotting. Must have been a hunter’s shelter; the soil here’s heavy clay, be a bitch to farm, and there aren’t any traces of a settlement around. But the woods are full of game; there are even fish in the lake (and isn’t that the irony to end them all). Out in the wilderness, a long long way from any of the piss-poor excuses for civilization around here. Off the map.
He remembers this from before: curled up on this floor shaking, every cell in the body screaming that it was dying, every system failing, knowing that he'd have given in if he'd had the choice. Knowing that he would have hiked back to the gate and gone searching for a sarcophagus if he wasn’t too weak to stand, would have taken the tel’tak from the hill if he hadn’t spent an afternoon pulling out every crystal from the controls while his hands were still steady enough, shattering them one by one, before the withdrawal kicked in, while he was still strong enough to remember why he had to. He remembers staring at his fingers then, from a long way away, wondering if he could move them, and not being able to remember why the color of the skin was unfamiliar, why this body was wrong —
Floorboards. Simple things. Real. You can’t go far wrong with floorboards.
Somewhere, Daniel is still talking.
It’s always the same.
He doesn’t sleep these days. Only the half-sleep he remembers from combat zones, catnaps where your mind goes on working, monitoring every explosion, every footstep, and deciding whether you need to be awake or not. Dreamlike and lucid at once; you wonder why things aren’t quite right then realize that of course it’s because you’re fast asleep.
Sometimes it’s only the gaps that give it away, like a needle skipping on a record, jump-cuts in a film, time lost between one thought and the next. Shut your eyes and open them again. Cut: the fire’s lit, and at first you don’t remember lighting it.
Cut: you’re walking into the woods.
Something’s kicking in the third trap, one of the little animals that looks like a cross between a lizard and a rabbit. Caught by the neck this time, and already half-strangled. It’s better than when the noose catches a leg and they try to chew through their own flesh to get free, look up at him with bright mad eyes and bloody mouths.
He loosens the wire cutting into the soft skin of its throat and smoothes a hand over its head, brittle quills trembling against his fingers, then snaps its neck. Small mercies.
“Does it bother you?” Daniel says from behind him, in that oh-so-casual tone that means he thinks he’s got something. “I mean, that we’ve been talking in Goa’uld for the past ten minutes.”
“No we haven’t.”
Okay, so maybe it’s not one of his finest ever conversational moments. Daniel ignores it anyway, ploughs on remorselessly. “You see, Jack O’Neill doesn’t understand Goa’uld.”
“Hey. I can say kree in five different languages.” He pulls his knife and begins gutting the critter before the meat can spoil. Weird creature, neither fish nor fowl. Intestines spool out in steaming purple coils over his hands. He doesn’t like knives so much these days (careful) but you can’t skin a lizard-rabbit with a zat.
The woods smell wet and harsh, like wild garlic.
“You know there’s something wrong here. You know this doesn’t make sense.”
The thing about Daniel is — is, was, yadda — he’s never believed there were things it was better not to know, safer not to examine too closely. Just like he never quite got that there are things you shouldn’t touch. Daniel wants to see everything in perfect light, imagines infinite radiance instead of the merciless white light of an operating room: no shadows, no dark corners, nowhere for a wounded thing to crawl and hide.
“Daniel, let me explain something to you.” He lets the knife dangle between his fingers, sheened with blood and scales, and looks up from where he’s crouching. “You’re dead. You’re a hallucination. You’re my hallucination. Of course I can understand what you’re saying.”
“I’m not dead. Not, ah, as such.” Daniel pinches at the bridge of his nose, the place where his glasses would rub, if death wasn’t a cure for near-sightedness (who knew?). “We’ve been over this.”
Empirical facts. The human body cannot survive exposure to over thirty sieverts of radiation (and he should have gone with him to the research facility, he should have —).
The human body cannot survive planetfall in an escape pod with malfunctioning inertial dampeners, organs rupturing, bleeding out inside so fast, blood pressure dropping lower the harder he drove the heart and not enough oxygen reaching the brain, slipping away in the blackness in pain and fear and he should have done, he should have said, he should have known how to say goodbye —
“Ascension is a myth,” he snarls. “A superstition fostered by the Goa’uld to keep the Jaffa subservient.”
“Yeah.” Dry, appraising. “That didn’t even sound like you.”
Cut.
It’s late afternoon by the time he circles back toward the hut. Light slants down through the trees, heavy and golden as syrup, congealing like molasses as the day cools and the sun drops down.
The days are getting shorter. He’s got no idea what the seasons are like here, but it's got to be heading towards the cold end of the year. Winter’ll be tough, but he’s got enough supplies to hole up for a while.
Demeaning, to live like a beast in the woods, but he has done worse before, to survive, to escape — and the thought breaks up like light on the water when something stirs beneath the surface, scattering hard glints too bright to look at.
Daniel’s back again, strolling beside him, immaculate clothes untouched by the mud and the blood. The soggy grass is undented by his feet. He comes and goes; ignoring him never works for long. It shouldn’t be a relief when he comes back (a delusion, evidence of his failure, his insanity), but it always is.
“You can’t stay here forever, you know,” Daniel says, glancing up through his eyelashes. Soft, almost conciliatory, as if he’s apologizing for earlier.
“Why not?”
A risky tactic; if he asks questions, sometimes Daniel will try to tell him things, and then he has to stop paying attention for a while. Days, sometimes.
But this time, Daniel doesn’t push. “You know why.”
“What, a guy can’t retire, do a little fishing?”
“Not like this.” Daniel doesn’t even crack a smile, just shakes his head, all seriousness. “This is a dead end.”
(At first, it had taken him a while to work out why everything Daniel said sounded wrong, the intonation a fraction off. An empty beat at the end of every other sentence where another word should be.
Finally, he’d lost it. “Would it kill you to use my name once in a while?”
“Well, it can hardly kill me if I’m already dead, can it?” Daniel had said thoughtfully, as if he’d been distracted into pondering the question. Then, innocent and lethal, “And which name would that be?”)
That’s Daniel for you: always certain that he knows what’s best for other people. Right from the start, a tornado of arrogance disguised as a sneezy geek: These people don’t want to die. It’s a shame you’re in a such a hurry to.
But Daniel’s dead, Daniel left. You don’t have the right anymore, he wants to say. You don’t get to have it both ways, claim non-attachment and non-interference and all that Oma Desala crap then drop by on alternate Sundays to tell people what to do.
Instead, he says, “You got a better offer?”
“Let them help,” Daniel says, like he always says. “They can fix this. It doesn’t have to be like this, you can get back to … being yourself again.”
But it’s half-hearted this time, as if his attention’s somewhere else. When even your imaginary friends have got better things to do, that’s when you know you’re screwed.
“Daniel, did you leave the gas on or something? Because I’m starting to wonder —”
— down, down, hitting the ground and rolling behind the cover of a tree even before the faint purr of rotors registers on his conscious mind.
He lies flat in the muck and dead leaves, trying to listen past the sound of his heart slamming into his ribcage, then twists over awkwardly, the hard curve of a branch digging into his back. He shields his eyes with one hand and squints upwards at the patch of sky between the lattice of bare branches.
It’s only a minute or two before the UAV comes into view, its silhouette crisp and unmistakable as a bird heading home to roost, mellow light striking a blinding gleam off its metal skin.
SGC. Tau’ri. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He went through ten different gates before he even slowed down, used every trick he knew to keep from leaving a trail, there’s no way they can have found him without — “You sold me out,” he hisses, and knows before he turns his head that Daniel won’t be there. “You bastard, you sold me out.”
He counts off sixty seconds after the UAV’s out of sight — part of his mind calculating how long before they can turn it, bring it back this way again if they’ve seen anything — then he’s on his feet, pushing up smoothly in a way that would have killed his knees before, and into the hut.
A quick scan of the tiny space confirms that there’s nothing he needs that’s not already in his pockets, nothing that’s worth the time it’d take to pack. Nothing he can’t make, or steal once he gets off-world again, the same way he picked up the tel’tak and the rest of his bag of tricks before he went to ground (using his knowledge of a hundred trading planets, even raiding a decades-old cache of materiel). The only things he needs are in his head.
He kicks at the remains of the fire, knocking the ring of hearth stones apart, then kneels with a handful of kindling, wood-shavings and dry moss, and holds it to the embers until a flame catches. One breath, another, then the fire's caught hold, and he tosses it onto the pile of bedding in the corner.
The place is nothing more than rickety boards, mostly held up by the dead tree they’re propped against. Everything’s still damp from the last big rain; it’ll smoulder for a while but burn soon enough. Hell of a beacon if they’ve got infrared pointed this way, but if they’re searching on this planet at all they already know too much. By the time they come looking, he’ll be a long way from here, and the fire will destroy any traces he’s left behind. Let them think it’s a false alarm.
Then he ducks out of the shack and into the trees, moving at a steady jog until something catches at him and he breaks into a headlong run —
— lifting an arm to shove a branch out of the way, raindrops clinging to the bark, a cold spatter across his face in the darkness, her small hand icy in his, slipping behind, and he clamps his fingers round her wrist and pulls hard, brutally, yanking her off her feet to keep her stumbling after him, not fast enough (human, weaker) and he knows how far the gate is, how close the guards are, knows there’s no way this can work, the parameters of the equation don’t change no matter how many times you run the numbers, and for a moment he understands that this is actually happening —
— gone.
Night falls fast here.
He makes good time, even once he slows down, but he’s taking the long way round, circling through the woods to head for the chappa'ai from an angle. Doesn't hurt to take precautions. A compass’d be useful sometimes (assuming this place even has a magnetic pole) but he doesn’t need it; he knows these woods like the back of his hand.
By the time he’s close to the gate, the last of the light is fading, down to smears of yellow and grey above the treetops.
The sound of movement stops him cold. Too big for any of the wildlife he’s seen around here; too many to be a bunch of lost peasants. Therefore I say unto you: fuck.
Evidently someone up there (and he’s not counting Daniel) is even more pissed at him than usual, because would it hurt the universe to cut him a break once in a while? He’d figured they'd take more time to analyze the visuals from the UAV before sending personnel through, but it looks like that was too much too hope for.
Too much to hope that he’d be left alone.
They’re making as much noise as a platoon of Jaffa, and judging by it, they’ve got a decent number of boots on the ground already, fanning out through the trees. He could try to get around them, make it to the gate behind their backs, but if they’ve got a brain between them they’ll have left it guarded.
He moves away from the gate as fast and as silently as he can, looking to put some distance between himself and them. Buy himself some time to think before they hunt him down.
In a few hours, the last of the light’s gone.
His eyes have adjusted (night vision sharp as a sniper’s scope; he’s not thinking about that either), and he picks his way easily. There’s no moon, but constellations he can’t name grey the sky, making it a fraction lighter than the branches and the tree-trunks. Enough for him to tell one shade of black from another.
Old training (survival evasion resistance escape) says get clear, find a hole-up site and stay put. But he can’t quite make himself do it; something tugs at him, draws him back towards his pursuers. He’d rather keep an eye on them, keep the enemy where he can see them. Better than cowering blind in a cave or under a screen of branches, waiting for them to come and drag you out.
He kneels to smear a double handful of dirt across his face — bitter mineral taste on his lips — then doubles back, ghosting closer to them in the dark.
The flare of light through the branches freezes him, nauseous with fear. But the light is cold white, electrical. The flicker of flashlight beams. Not torches, not the flames of braziers. There are no horns sounding this time. He thinks.
At best, they’ll have a map patched together from the aerial scans. But he’s had the time to learn this place, learn the things that a map won’t show, and he can keep dodging them for a long time. There’s a limit to the resources that even the SGC will pour into a manhunt (no one gets left behind, and his mind wrenches away from the thought, yank-and-bank and we're up and away).
If the worst comes to the worst, he’s laced areas of the woods with enough traps to slow anyone down, a maze that only he knows the way through. Area denial: Insurgency 101.
The beams of their flashlights swing and bounce, casting Halloween shadows through the trees. They’re not even trying for stealth, crashing through undergrowth and calling out, to each other and into the night. As if they imagine that he wants to be found.
Primitives. Like children.
It makes it easy for him to edge closer and still keep out of range of their lights. Habit makes him test each step before he shifts his weight, feeling for twigs that might crack or rotten wood that could shear wetly underfoot, but he never mis-steps. He remembers this place by daylight, and the memory overlays the darkness like an X-ray, telling him where there’s a clear path between the trees and where it’s fouled by fallen branches and thick brush.
Close enough now that he can hear the crackle of their radios. He drops back and to the side and lets one of them pass him, eavesdrops on the chatter: no luck yet; keep searching. Might as well be invisible.
Then his skin prickles, pins-and-needles, as if the white noise of the radio is running through his veins. The familiar (familiar?) sensation of naquadah in the blood.
Shit.
A snake in SGC patches. Infiltration? He should warn them, Christ knows what the thing’s planning — but for all he knows, the whole fucking op’s Goa’uld.
Something tugs at him again, an undercurrent of yearning, and he forces it down, breathes out anger.
If they’ve got lifesign detectors — hell, if they’ve got infrared, or a decent tracker among them — he can lead them right where he wants them to be. Let them learn the hard way that he’s more trouble than he’s worth.
He cuts across the trail, dodging a flashlight beam, then retreats, pulling away into the night again. There’s a flurry of radio traffic, urgent whispers and commands, and then he can track them blind as they wheel round to follow him.
If you go down to the woods today …
Half a klick takes them past the perimeter of the danger zone.
Within ten minutes there’s an undignified yelp and crash as one of them goes down over a tripwire. The plain kind; he didn’t have enough of the monomolecular filament to go round. The regular wires only trip and tangle, while the monofilament slices through anything like wire through cheese. His early warning system.
After that, there’s a brief burst of traffic before they go to radio silence. Decent precision, too, he’ll grant them that: a few of them advancing at a time, testing paths through the trees, while the others hold back to keep them covered.
No more calling out, now. Instead, he hears the unmistakable sounds of zats being armed. Which means they want to take him alive, and — no. He can’t allow that.
In the night, his hearing expands until he can hear their ragged breathing, the clench of his own heart, until he’s nothing but his senses, the instinctive awareness of predator and prey, dilated black pupil of an animal watching death. He doesn’t have to think, then; reflexes and training carry him, reacting faster than his conscious mind could, stepping effortlessly through the minefield.
Safer, easier, if you don’t think.
One of them comes to an abrupt halt, teetering on the edge of a pit trap, and he feels the man's body sway, imagines that he could reach out and brush the tips of his fingers across his face in the darkness and vanish again. Invisible.
They slow down then, moving forwards warily.
Still, it’s not long before the next one goes down. He hears the crash of a body hitting the forest floor hard, close by him, and a choked-off scream. Not just a bad fall, but real pain.
He circles round, knife slipping automatically into his palm. That’s the other problem with zat’nik’katels: they make noise.
The enemy’s a huddled shape on the ground, doubled up around the pain. Looks like he went down at an angle over one of the monomolecular wires, turning as he fell. His leg’s slashed to the bone; lucky it wasn't taken off altogether.
But there’s no prickling in his fingers, no naquadah in the guy’s blood; this one’s clean, not a snake, and —
Reynolds. He recognizes him. Fuck. That’s Reynolds.
Man down — aww hell, the blood’s spurting. Arterial.
The knife’s back in his belt before he thinks about it; he gets Reynolds under the arms and drags him a few paces — dead weight, too stunned to fight — then props him with his back against a tree.
Then he grabs Reynolds’s hand and shoves it down against Reynolds’s thigh, heel over the femoral artery, his own hand clamped over it, keeping it there, keeping the pressure on. Wishes he had a med kit handy, but it's not like he's needed one lately.
“Hold it,” he says, and Reynolds stares, struggling to see him in the dark, then nods, trained response to command voice. He won’t be able to, not when the shock kicks on, but it’ll give him something to focus on instead of how badly fucked he is. “Good man.”
Where the hell the rest of this bunch of clowns are, why they aren’t here yet, he doesn’t know. They must have heard Reynolds go down. Jesus. This rate, the poor guy’d bleed out before they even got a medic near him.
He sucks in a lungful of air and bellows, “Hey! Over here!” before he can think about it. “You’ve got a man down, get your asses over here with a med kit now!”
There’s a frozen pause, dead silence when all he can hear is his own voice ringing in his ears, before they start floundering towards him, making even more noise than before. A flashlight beam skips over him, then away again, and he hollers again — “Over here, morons” — and waves his arm for good measure.
Then all the beams of light swing towards him at once, dazzling him, as if the glare is exploding in his eyes.
The first one to stumble into view is a woman, Air Force uniform and pale hair scraped back and tucked under a cap, and all he can think is how much she looks like Shallan. Except she doesn’t, not at all. He doesn't know why he'd have thought that.
“Carter?”
It comes out as a hoarse whisper. Been a long time since he talked to anyone who isn’t dead.
Carter stares at him. Her zat wavers and dips, before she brings it up sharply, keeping it trained on him. “Colonel?”
More uniforms behind her. Daniel and Teal’c must be on their way over — but no, Daniel’s dead. Daniel’s a hallucination, which is why he’s not here, except when he is. Teal’c and Jonas, it should be. But he can’t see either of them.
Carter lowers her flashlight, beam dropping from him to Reynolds, and he can see her face more clearly without the light shining in his eyes. She snaps, “Malek,” sideways, not taking her eyes off him.
Malek’s got to be the snakehead stepping into the clearing beside her, pale pinched face and curly brown hair. He slings his pack to the ground and pulls it open; apparently Carter’s the one in charge.
Never seen the guy before, and he knows every snake they’ve run into, of either brand, but somehow he’s sure this one’s meant to be somewhere else: not here, not in an SGC uniform, following Tau’ri orders, kneeling on the sodden ground to pull a Goa’uld healing device out of a standard-issue Air Force pack.
The snake stands and takes a step towards him (boot-heels clicking on a stone floor, but no, there’s only the faint squish of mud and leaves). He lets go of Reynolds without thinking about it, pushing onto his feet and taking a step back as the snake gets closer.
They all tense, and he sees the business ends of their zats tracking him as he moves.
The odds suck; no real chance he could dive for cover before at least one of them hits him, but he nearly takes the chance anyway. He’s already braced, knees bending a fraction, stance shifting to look more casual: not about to try anything, just relax, take your eyes off me for a millisecond, damn you —
“It’s okay, sir,” Carter says, trying for reassuring and managing the tone that says that nothing’s okay at all; she’s always been a lousy liar. “It’s okay. We’ve come to take you home.”
Home is — he jams the heel of one hand hard against his forehead, hoping maybe it’ll jar his brain back into place.
Malek’s crouched by Reynolds now, light collecting in the stone in his palm, pouring down like water. The bleeding is slowing, down from a gush to a dribble that looks black in the light. Reynolds has stopped trying to sit up, but the lines of pain on his face are softening. Still creepy as hell, watching Goa’uld toys being used on people he knows.
More snakeheads have appeared in the gaps between the trees now, and he knows them too; Carter hasn’t said their names, but he knows them anyway — Jalrow, Itet — he recognizes them, and that thought leads — things are coming apart in his head. This is what he’s afraid of, and he can't think properly, can’t — it feels as if he’s underwater, struggling for the surface with no light to tell him which way is up, drowning —
— can’t think properly, on his hands and knees in the freezing mud, shoulder burnt through to the bone by the staff blast, boots of the Jaffa splashing through puddles towards him — mustn’t be taken alive — and one hand’s halfway to the pocket with the neurotoxin, except he can’t — not this host, not — there's something he can’t remember, a sudden desperate impulse to flee the body, get out where he can think clearly, but by then it’s too late, he's surrounded and the butt of a staff weapon hits him in the back, knocking him down into the mud, bone shattering, and he can’t get his legs under him and he shuts his eyes and —
— he shuts his eyes as Jalrow says, “We are here by authority of the council, to vouch for your safety.” Snake voice, all eerie harmonics and distortion.
But the council would not risk so much to retrieve a single operative; he would not expect them to. Unless perhaps they want him back to punish him for his failure, to make an example of him. Then Carter’s voice jerks him back again.
“We’ve been working with the Tok’ra,” she says, in the nervous voice that means she’s revving up for an explanation which is going to be three times as long as it needs to be.
This close, he can feel the residue of naquadah in her blood, like a scar. Jolinar’s host, and something twists inside him, a spasm of distaste.
“There was an agreement, pooling resources was the only hope of finding you —"
A rustle behind him. He turns his head and finds that little Asian kid — linguist, had a crush on Daniel, oh, what was her name, Satterfield — is trying to get round behind him, get a clear shot.
She jumps when he looks at her — and who the hell thought it was a smart idea to put her in a combat situation, and can he get that person fired? she’s about twelve, for chrissakes — but she lifts her other hand and settles it on the butt of the zat, keeps her aim steady.
They’re all looking at him like he’s crazy now, like he’s an animal gone feral and vicious. And suddenly he’s watching himself from the outside, ragged and dirt-smeared, at bay in a forest at the end of the world. A bloody-handed scarecrow, pupils blown wide and black.
Bugfuck nuts.
“You’re not thinking straight, sir,” Carter says, and he doesn’t manage to stifle the bark of laughter. No shit, Carter.
Yeah, you could maybe say that. Just a little. Just a little bit fucked up in the head. That can happen, if you get tortured to death enough times.
“You need to come back with us now, sir,” she says.
“And if I don’t feel like it?”
She holds his gaze, and there’s something unfamiliar in her eyes, brittle and steely at once. Her voice is hard.
“Then, with respect, we zat you and carry you. Sir.”
He’s almost impressed. This is a different Carter, as if he’s fallen through a quantum mirror. She looks thinner, older, as if she’s been pared down to bone since — he doesn’t know. Shit, he doesn’t know.
Hard to keep track of time. “How long’s it been? Since I …” He trails off and waves a hand, as if he's trying to sketch a shape in the air. A hole in reality.
That’s when she cracks, a tiny tremor in her face before she locks it down again, as if she doesn’t know whether she's going to burst out laughing or crying.
“You’ve been missing for more than five months, sir.”