Mathématique: Chapter 55

“You in love with her, Jackson?” Young asked, quiet in a quiet room.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Panic attacks. Mentions of torture. Depression.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 55

About an hour after Camile Wray had managed to snag some real quarters for the LA Defector, Young was in his new office space, filling out the seventh form Wray’d insisted was “absolutely necessary.”

His phone buzzed. He checked the caller ID.

It was Jackson.

“Hey.” Young didn’t bother to conceal the urgency in his tone. “Jackson. What’s happening? You get her?”

The line was quiet.

“Jackson?”

There was a long pause. 

And then, “Yeah, I’m here.”

“Shit. What’s wrong?” Young was half out of his seat, his back spasming in protest. He tried to relax. Sit back down. Slowly.

“Nothing.” Jackson’s voice cracked. “Nothing’s wrong.” He paused, and Young heard the wind hiss across his phone speaker. “We, um, we have her. We got her. She’s here. On the base.”

“Good.” Young’s heart hammered in his throat. He wasn’t sure why Jackson’s voice was so unsteady, wasn’t sure how to force down the fear and the hope that was rising in his mind, not sure what to do, not sure how factor Vala might factor into the search for Rush, not sure what kind of shape she might be in—

“She’s in the infirmary,” Jackson said. “The team’s with her.”

And, yup. The guy was crying.

“Is she—is she okay?”

“Yeah.” Jackson was unsteady, hard to hear over the wind. “Yeah, physically, I guess. She, um, she has no personal memories?” He stopped, drew a shuddery breath.

“Jesus. Okay. Hey, Jackson, where are you? You sound like you’re outside.”

“Yeah. I am. I’m topside. I, uh, needed a minute. Because.” There was another long pause. And Young could almost see the guy, one arm wrapped around his chest like he’d taken a knife to the solar plexus.

“Topside where?”

“Right outside the main entrance. I’m not going anywhere. I just. I think. Sam said—” The archeologist’s voice broke against itself. There was a long silence. “It’s a nice day, y’know? So I’m outside. I went outside.”

“I’m gonna come meet you.” Young found his feet a little more carefully this time. He wished he hadn’t fallen so far behind on his physical therapy.

“I just,” Jackson sounded like he was dying, his pitch high and tight. “I needed a minute. Because. Because she was waitressing?” The guy broke off, breathing hard. “She worked at a diner? She has no personal memories. None. None beyond eight weeks of learning diner slang and saving for nice shampoo.” Jackson’s voice cracked again.

“Jackson,” Young said. “Daniel.”

“Just—dreams.” Jackson continued in a whisper. “Dreams of gold hallways. Dreams of silent space battles she watched from great remove, sitting on a throne. Dreams of math. The arc of lines through space and through time, which was sacred to them.”

“What ‘them,’ Jackson? Sacred to whom?”

“The Goa’uld,” Jackson said, his voice cracking. “They built a culture of worship. To themselves. But they worshiped as well. The stars. The astral roads the Ancients built. Ballistic trajectories. The perfect circle of the gate.”

Young heard the man weeping quietly, probably into his hand, probably into the wind.

“And Landry.” The name frayed with anger and the tears Jackson was trying like hell not to shed. The man stopped, took a shuddery breath. “Landry says we have to do it today.”

“Do what?” Young asked smoothly, scrambling to close windows, save his work. “Do what today, Jackson?”

“Get them back. Get her memories back. With the Tok’ra device. And her memories. Her memories aren’t only hers? She’ll see—she’ll think—it’ll  be long. We’ve never done it on a host. Not on anyone who was a host for more than days. She may—she may carry memories from Q’tesh that stretch beyond her lifetime.”

Young felt a chill along his spine. He paused. Fingertips braced atop his desk.

Jackson drew a ragged breath. “It’ll be terrible and it will take—” His voice cracked. He started again. “It will take a long time. We’ll pull things from her mind that aren’t even hers. That stretch for millennia.”

“Stay there, Jackson. I’m coming up.” Young shut his laptop. “Where’s Carter? Or Teal’c? Why aren’t they—”

“You think I can talk to them about this?” The question was barely understandable. “They already know. They’ve seen it. They’ve gone through it. And if I—if I seem upset—already they want to—there’s only so much they can take—” Jackson broke off with a strangled sound.

“Okay.” Young reached for his cane and felt an uncomfortable pull in his back. “Got it. I’m—”

He broke off at the static of an overhead page. “Colonel Young, please report to General Landry’s office. Colonel Young, please report to General Landry’s office.”

“Shit.” Young stared at the ceiling. “You hear that?”

“Yeah.” The man swallowed, his voice still thick with tears he was fighting down. “What’d you do?”

“Oh, you’re gonna love it,” Young said gently. “I’ll tell you later. Something to look forward to.”

The line was silent.

“Look, Jackson, I gotta see Landry, but I’ll find you right when I’m done, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jackson rasped.

“You did good.” Young leaned into his cane. “You’re doing good. You know that, right?”

“All the time,” Jackson said, cracked wide open. “All the time, trying. Hitting the mark maybe fifty percent?”

“C’mon now. More like ninety-eight percent,” Young said. “I’ll find you after my meeting with Landry.”

“Right,” Jackson said, like a guy trying to build back armor out of shell and paper.

“You’re not alone,” Young offered, at a loss.

“I know.” Jackson’s tone, still teary, took on a darker note. “I don’t think I’m ever alone.”

Young pictured the guy staring bleakly into autumn air, looking at ascended beings he couldn’t see.

“Hey. Daniel.” Young kept his voice low. “We’re gonna get through this. You and me. We’re gonna get through this, and we’re gonna get everyone else through this.”

“You sound so sure,” Jackson breathed.

“That’s because I am sure,” Young growled. “You’ve saved me, I don’t know, twice over. At least.”

“I nearly killed you, Everett.”

“Exactly,” Young said. “Exactly right. So you’ve got me in your corner. Forever. We want the same things.”

“Oh yeah?” Jackson asked, ragged as hell. “How do you know?”

“We’re peaceful fucking explorers,” Young said.

Jackson laughed, once, through tears. “Don’t let Landry fire you.”

“I’d better get down to his office then,” Young said. “I’ll find you after.”

“Okay.” The line went dead.

Young stood, staring at the dark screen, most of his weight on his cane, his chest aching. 

Vala was back. He’d as good as written it off as a possibility. But maybe, maybe, when she retrieved her memories, they’d find something to lead them to Rush. What did it mean that she’d been on her own? Out in the world? Free, but locked away from herself? Waitressing, for god’s sake. Under no one’s control. How could that possibly have happened?

Young pocketed his phone.

He left his office and made his painful way through the corridors, trying not to get jostled by passersby.

“Good luck,” someone called, as he hit the button for the elevators. He turned to see Wray giving him a dry look. She eyed the ceiling, silently indicating the general’s overhead page.

“Thanks.” Young felt a spark of kinship with the woman, even if only because they’d been thrown together in the midst of Ginn Keeler’s bureaupolitico-nightmare.

“The IOA will have your back on this one,” Wray told him, her arms full of—

“Are those civvies?” Young asked.

“I thought Ginn might like a few more things to wear,” Wray said.

And yeah. Ginn probably would like a few more things to wear. Ginn would probably like a few more of a lotta things, but he suspected what Ginn needed was a friend. With about the same degree of intensity Young needed a pristine spine.

“Maybe you’ll get her to join your governance club after all,” Young said, as the elevator doors slid open.

“A woman can dream,” Wray replied.

He made his way to Landry’s office, was waved through by Harriman, and took the seat the General indicated.

They eyed one another over the wide expanse of the desk.

“You,” Landry said, frowning at him, “pulled a Jackson.”

Young raised his eyebrows.

“I don’t like it,” Landry growled.

Young cleared his throat. “Sir,” he began, but that was about as far as he got.

While he wanted to give a good explanation of why, exactly, he’d stuck his neck out so far for Ginn Keeler, it wasn’t coming easily. It was difficult to explain to Landry how terrible it had been to see her there, in that holding cell. Not just a young woman trapped between two literal parasites, but—

An LA operative? A high level one at that? Stuck between two of the worst oppressors of her people? For thousands of years, the LA had opposed the Goa’uld. All the terrible drugs the LA manufactured, all the intelligence gathering, all the torture, all the hampering of their own scientists—were a reaction to millennia of atrocity, attrition, repression, and enslavement at the hands of the Goa’uld.

They built a culture of worship, Jackson had said, weeping.

“Colonel?” Landry prompted.

Young tried to get some professionalism to come out of his mouth, but there was an obstacle in the way. Some block sitting at the back of his throat that James MacKenzie and his SSRIs had yet to touch. The turning of Telford, however it had happened. The shattering of his spine in a speeder (on a table). The way Young would always, always, until he died, remember that lie of a second story as if it had been first; the way he’d found David, the way he’d come to get him out, the way he had, the way that David had refused to die, had laughed under a falling cloud of ash and dragged Young up a mountain.

“I wasn’t gonna leave her there,” Young ground out, not a “sir” in sight. 

Maybe he’d have been able to muster up more professionalism if Landry had caught him before that little slip of a girl—with unwashed red hair and a curve starting to bend its slow way into her spine—had asked him if he was gonna execute her.

Maybe he’d have been able to muster up a little more professionalism if Landry had caught him before Jackson’s phone call, before he’d had to imagine the guy, leaning against an exterior wall, the wind in his hair, crying, by himself, because he couldn’t stand to see what his own despair would do to his team.

Landry propped his elbows on his desk and interlaced his fingers over the file that rested there. He stared at the weave of his own hands. “We need to talk about Jackson.”

“Jackson’s got nothing to do with this,” Young said quickly. Too quickly.

“No?” Landry replied, in slow, mock surprise. “Going to Wray? That has Jackson written all over it. The man walks a fine line. He walks several. Tell me, Colonel, why do you think Jackson still has a job?”

Jackson’s beyond hired or fired, Young had the urge to say. Jackson is this place. The concrete of it was poured around the frame of the guy’s bones. But that wasn’t true. Cheyenne Mountain had existed, had housed an arsenal, long before it had housed Jackson’s stargate.

Jackson can’t be stripped of his power because it comes from who he is, Young wanted to say. But years ago they’d locked Jackson up in the Psychiatric wing of CS General, and the man still wouldn’t talk about it, when he’d talk about everything else—about his body being stolen, about the way he’d failed to free his wife, about the way he’d brought the Goa’uld down on humanity, the way he’d brought the Ori down on humanity. MacKenzie had looked away when Young had asked him about it, had said, “It was a mistake, Colonel, the worst mistake I’ve ever made, and it won’t just be me who’s never free of it.”

Because he’s always right, Young tried, thinking of Telford, of Rush, of himself, of the way that Jackson had intuited the bedrock beneath them all.

“He’d get into too much trouble if he were fired,” Young said, after a long pause.

Landry laughed, quiet and low and real. “There’s some truth to that,” the general admitted. “But that wasn’t the answer I was looking for.”

“You want me to guess?” Young asked.

“He still has a job because he’s not military. He never was. When he’s ‘insubordinate’ he can’t invoke the chain of command. Were Jackson to have command in the way you have it, he’d’ve set his own options on fire years back. He wouldn’t have been able to help it. But he’s not under military jurisdiction at all. The IOA view him as their champion. They’ll never view you that way. So if you feel the need to pull this crap? Pull it differently next time, because I’ve had one hell of a year, Colonel, one hell of an awful god damned year. Everyone has. I’d rather not bench you for good because you’ve gone off the deep end, so do me a favor and pull yourself together, son,” Landry growled.

Young wasn’t sure what to do with the block in his throat and the gray coat of paint on the inside of his skull, a spring full of pain, a summer full of slow-burning menace, an autumn dragging into something confused and long and colder every day.

He nodded and tried to give Landry something the man could understand. “It wasn’t a Jackson move. I see why it read like one. But it wasn’t.”

“Oh no?” Landry asked.

“No,” Young said. “She’s a kid. Doesn’t look like much, but she’s a mini-Carter, or something. And if you’d been to the holding cells, if you’d seen her between Nerus and Ba’al, if you’d ever seen the LA’s ships, the way they deface everything that reeks of Goa’uld, if you’d seen how angry they are about those snakes that ground them down for so long, if you’d had any idea of the way she must have grown up, drafted into a war that started as underground smuggling and biochemistry and morphed into outright battle when we upset the power balance, if you’d had any idea how deeply FUBAR’d that whole thing would’ve had to be for her, then maybe it would have seemed less to you like a situation that could be solved with two weeks of committee meetings and votes behind closed doors. Maybe. Maybe not.”

Landry sighed. “The LA’s taken enough from you already. Don’t let them tank your career.”

“I guess I think of my career as already tanked,” Young said. “I guess, in the grand scheme of things, riding a desk for thirty years doesn’t seem worth much. Not worth leaving that kid in that cell. Not for half a day. Not for half a morning.”

“Get your head on straight.” Landry picked up a pen, opened a folder, and glared down at a form.

“Am I dismissed, sir?” Young tried to make the words a question.

“I don’t dismiss consultants,” Landry growled.

Young pushed himself painfully to his feet. He picked up his cane, leaning into its support as he made headed for the door. He was deconditioned enough that half a day of anything other than lying on his couch was more than his back could handle.

“Keep your little team,” Landry called, like an afterthought. “I’ve reassigned them to Ginn Keeler’s personal security detail.”

“For how long?” Young asked.

“For as long as it takes this mess to sort itself out. They’ll report to you, you’ll report to me. Oh and Colonel?” Landry looked up with the hint of a smile. “Dismissed.”

“Understood,” he replied.  

Young found Jackson pacing in a back room of the infirmary, glancing repeatedly and often at the isolation room behind a one-way mirror where Carter and Lam showed Vala the Tok’ra memory recall device, as if it weren’t something to fear.

Young stepped up to the one-way glass.

Vala watched Carter and Lam with a disquieting innocence, at once bold and afraid. She cracked a smile at Carter, her face blazing with unreal wattage that made Carter smile right back. It turned them into kids, somehow, talking about whatever smart girls talk about, treehouses or boys or secrets or magical devices that rip your mind open and pour the shard-filled sludge of past horrors all over the floor. 

 

“Hey,” Young said, sure the archeologist had noticed him by now.

“It’s so awful.” Jackson came to stand at his shoulder. “Losing who you are. It rips you open. It puts everything out there that you’d otherwise know to hide. And look at her. She has no idea how much she’s revealing. I didn’t, when it happened to me. But I’ve seen the tapes.”

“What did it look like?” Young watched Vala toss her hair over one shoulder then pull it forward, running her hands over a hank of it, again and again. “You, on the tapes, I mean?”

“I was quiet,” Jackson said. “They could all, they could all see—” the man broke off and brought a hand to his face.

“See what?” Young asked.

“How afraid I was. Of what I might say. That’s what Sam told me. Later. She said—she said was…sad.” Jackson swallowed hard.

“You being afraid, you mean?” Young asked.

“The sad thing,” Jackson said, like he was breaking each word out of his own bones, “was she could see I understood. I understood I should be terrified of the things that come out of my head. Out of my mouth. She didn’t know I lived like that. With so much fear.”

Young nodded. “She thought you were some kind of interspecies savant, or something?”

“You’d think,” Jackson continued, “that if you lose your memory—you’d think so much of who you are would be gone. But it’s not. It’s right there. You don’t know how to hide it. You don’t even know that you should.”

Young turned to look directly at Jackson.

The man had his arms wrapped around his chest. His eyes were raw and red-rimmed. “People don’t understand,” he said solemnly, “how personally revealing it is to be stripped of memory. It’s the last thing you’d expect.”

“Yeah.” Young’s gaze flicked to Vala. She tracked Carter and Lam hungrily, as if she’d need to rebuild them later, in her head, from scratch. “I’m getting that, a little bit.”

“I hate myself,” Jackson whispered. “I really do, sometimes.”

“I hear that,” Young said.

Jackson laughed, short and sharp.

“You gonna elaborate?”

“She religiously read Cosmo,” Jackson said.

“Yeah.” Young shifted his weight, redistributing more of it to his cane. “I noticed.”

“What did you think of that?”

Young shrugged. “I didn’t pay it much mind. Probably a combination of liking Earth shoes and figuring a way to blend as much as possible as fast as possible. She had fun with it.”

“Yeah,” Jackson rasped. “Well, I thought it was stupid. She had all of countless cultures to learn about and she picks Cosmo. Typical, I thought. Typical of her. But she played me. Or tested me. Or straight-up didn’t trust me. And why would she, really, I guess, after of the kind of stuff that comes out of my mouth? And, ugh, even that take on it is so egocentric it makes me sick.”

“Jackson,” Young said, “cut yourself a break for the love of—”

“She outed herself in the car,” Jackson plowed over him. “On the drive back. The way she’s outing herself right now. Look at her face. She’s studying them. She’s learning from them. She good at it. She’s not hiding it. At all.”

“Yeah,” Young said cautiously.

“She hid that exact aspect of herself from me for the whole time I’ve known her and why?” Jackson released a shaky exhale. “I have no idea.”

“What did she say in the car?” Young asked.

“There’s a strange aspect to this particular drug that the LA has developed. We haven’t seen it before. At least, not in isolation. Personal memories are lost, but skillsets are retained. She’s good at math, she realized. Really good. She was telling us about it.”

“Math,” Young repeated.

“I’m guessing that’s what she talked to Rush about every day. Don’t you think? I’m guessing she had pads of equations hidden under Cosmopolitan magazines. And why? Because she thinks it’s something worthy of disdain? Yes? No? Because she wanted it badly and she thought someone would use it to hurt her? There’s no way to tell. But she deliberately waved Cosmo in my face because she thought I would disdain it. And she was right. Imagine how interesting I would’ve found it if she’d revealed an interest in calculus. But she didn’t want me to know. She’s hidden this from all of us for months, beneath Cosmo and consumerism and cosmetics. Do you realize how incredibly careful she’s been about this? How much it must mean to her, especially given how the Goa’uld view numbers? How incredibly stupid I am? Do you realize that I’ll probably never find out why she did it, because she can’t tell me now and she won’t tell me later?”

“You in love with her, Jackson?” Young asked, quiet in a quiet room.

“No,” Jackson said, flat and final, the truest lie Young had ever heard.

He hesitated, looking at Jackson, how he was holding himself—his shoulders hunched, his arms crossed, but his chin up, his eyes icy, half dead and half impersonating Cam Mitchell. Doing it badly.

“You saying that because you think some higher plane of existence doesn’t already know?” Young growled. “If they’re watching you all the time, you think they haven’t seen how you nearly killed yourself to get her back? The way you look at her?”

“Shut up,” Jackson snarled. “You don’t know a thing about it.”

“Uh huh. Here’s the kicker though: what about the way she’s looking for you, right now? When she doesn’t know who she is but she still, somehow, knows that any minute here, you’re gonna walk through the damned door?”

Jackson bent forward, his hands braced against his knees, trying to eat the air. “I’m not. I can’t. Sam and Carolyn and Cam will do it. They’ll go in shifts. They—”

“Bullshit,” Young said. “She’s looked at that door fifteen times since I got here and she’s not looking for Cam. Cam’s a lotta things and he’ll step up and be there for her because he’s that kind of guy, but he won’t know what’s coming, what’s down there, lost in her head. You’ve got every kind of idea.”

“I don’t love her,” Jackson said, agonized, announcing it to the empty air, “any more than I love anybody else.” He sank into a crouch.

“Sorry, buddy.” Young dropped to his bad knee to get on eye-level with Jackson. He put a hand on the archeologist’s shoulder. “You can’t save it. They already know.”

“Why are you doing this?” Jackson breathed into his hands. “Why are you saying this, out loud.”

“Because, Daniel.” Young jostled his shoulder. “They’ve already got it in for her. In for you. Because she was with you when you found them, right? She carried that prophet of theirs to term, and why? Because you loved her?”

Jackson shook his head.

“Yeah. I doubt it. She killed their supergate. Not you. Her. And you know what? Maybe it wasn’t even you that found them. Maybe it was her. She’s got her own slot on the Ori shit list that she, personally, earned.”

Jackson shook his head.

“She’s someone you’d like to protect, sure” Young continued, “but she’s never asked that of you. Never wanted that. That’s not her. She’s not your first wife. She’s on your team. She’s your partner. She’s the one who was with you at the critical moment. And they’ve always known that. If they’re ever gonna know anything, right from day one, they’ll know that.”

Jackson looked at him, his expression agonized.

“So you gain zero from standing in this room with a poker face you can’t even hold. And she? She loses a  hell of a lot.”

“She does.” Jackson stared into a distance Young couldn’t see. “Doesn’t she.”

“Yeah.” Young clamped a hand over his aching hip.

Jackson straightened, looked through the one-way mirror, then turned to Young, still kneeling on the floor at his feet. He reached down to help Young stand, then steadied him against a wave of pain from deconditioned muscles.

“Thanks,” Jackson said finally, still not looking at him.

“For what?” Young ignored the fire in his hip. “You were going in there anyway, Jackson. I saved you about three minutes.”

Jackson smiled at him, sad and unbearable. “A lot can happen in three minutes.”

Young nodded, looked away.

“Text Cam for me, will you?” Jackson asked. “Tell him to let Teal’c know.”

“Yeah,” Young said. “I’ll head them off at the pass.”

SG-1 stood in a line. It was the damnedest thing Young had ever seen. Mitchell, on the left, crossed his arms over his chest. Carter, in the middle, pressed one hand flat against the place where Brightman had cracked her chest to dig out an LA round. Teal’c, on the right, stood at parade rest, his gaze fixed on the one-way glass.

Landry leaned against the back wall, listening to the audio coming from the mic in the adjacent room. Harriman, beside him, took notes.

Young was half-perched on a table, taking his weight off his back and hip and leg.

“Q’tesh,” Vala said, breathy and terrified, on the other side of the one-way glass. “That was my name.”

“No,” Jackson said, low and quiet. “Your name is Vala. Vala is before and after.”

Young had started out watching Jackson, watching the man set up an array of candles, watching him turn down the lights, strike match after match. He watched him climb onto the gurney where Vala sat. Watched him cross his legs and reach out, his hands opening into empty air.

No one could do anything but take them.

But it got too hard to watch Jackson.

Young switched to watching Vala.

“You saw.” Vala eyes glittered in the candlelight. “You saw. I did terrible things. All those people, I—”

“Don’t evaluate,” Jackson said. “You can’t see all of it. I can tell you it wasn’t you. And it wasn’t. But don’t—”

“Don’t evaluate?” Vala demanded.

Over the past hour, Young had watched her learn to hide what she was feeling, had watched her get better and better at it, had watched her face down things that made Jackson shut his eyes and turn away from the monitor. Jackson, who’d been sealed into a nightmare by an ascended Goa’uld and forced to confront the darkest aspect of its legacy. Even Jackson hadn’t been able to stay with the third memory.

At the fourth memory, Young had watched Vala yank her hands away from Jackson midway through. He’d watched her face as she asked Jackson to leave after the seventh.

“Vala,” Jackson said.

“My name is Q’tesh,” she hissed, venomous, powerful, bitter, afraid.

“No it’s not,” Jackson said gently. “Of course it’s not.”

And Young couldn’t watch Vala anymore.

So he watched Lam.

Lam with her white coat like armor and her unflappable demeanor and her cool competence. Lam, who’d stayed with him, who had held his hand during the rite of M’al Sharran. Lam who had the best professional armor Young had seen in a long time. 

But Lam was feeling it. He saw it getting to her—Jackson and Vala and that terrible coin-shaped device beneath Vala’s hair—saw it start to seep in and freeze, cracking her cool. She’d begun at Jackson’s shoulder, but as memory after memory played over the display she crept toward Vala.

Young wasn’t sure why he was here.

Young knew exactly why he was here.

Lam stiffened, her eyes widening at something she and Jackson saw on the monitor. She stepped in as Vala arched her back and screamed in terror, maybe in agony. “No,” Lam said, frightened, her arms around Vala’s shoulders. “No no no no no,” Lam said, disavowing everything on the monitor, “not real, not real, not real, it’s not real; it’s not happening now. You’re with us. You’re still here. You’re not in there, you’re here. You’re with us.”

Young decided it was no good watching Lam.

Back to Jackson, then.

“Vala.” Jackson repeated her name until the memory was over. “Vala.”

“I’m sorry,” Vala gasped. “I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you, beautiful?” She reached up to her own shoulder, covering Lam’s hand with her own.

“No,” Lam said. “No, of course not. We could try something else. We could try something new. We could wait. Take off the device.”

“The waiting is the worst part. I’d rather—” Vala broke off as the thing on her head pulled another memory free and Young looked away from the room. At the floor, trying to think of something else, of anything else, of Wray, who was a few levels up, talking to Ginn about the US Constitution while Greer and James quietly bullshitted outside the door and someone from housekeeping put sheets on a bed in the room next to Teal’c’s.

“It’s okay,” Young heard Jackson say. “You don’t have it yet. You don’t have your full context.”

“Will they all be like this?” Vala asked.

“I think we should stop,” Lam said. “That wasn’t even from her life; she still retains fragments from Q’tesh that predate her time as host; who knows how long this will last; I can’t—I don’t feel comfortable with this, I—”

“Nicholas Rush,” Jackson said.

Young looked up. 

Jackson had Vala’s hands again, and the man’s eyes shone in the candlelight. “He’s a mathematician and he’s missing. Do you remember him? Nicholas Rush.” Jackson smiled, small and warm. “You called him ‘gorgeous.’ He’s about Dr. Lam’s height. Great hair. Square glasses. Attitude to spare. Says ‘fuck’ more than you’d think an Oxford man would.”

Vala stared into the distance, her brows pressed together.

“Yes,” Jackson said, his eyes on the screen. “That’s him.”

“That was the first day.” Vala smiled faintly at nothing Young could see. “You built a bed. For Colonel Young. You measured the space. To see if it would fit. It came out of a box that was much too flat. I’d never seen such a thing.”

“IKEA is, arguably, humanity’s greatest achievement,” Jackson agreed. “We built that bed together. You and me.”

“You left the apartment,” Vala said. “I made lemonade. Like a real Earth Girl. I drank it with Colonel Mitchell. And with Colonel Young. Then you knocked on the door. Loudly.”

“I kicked it.” Jackson watched the monitor, where, presumably, he could see the inside of Young’s apartment from Vala’s perspective. The way she’d darted to the door and flung it open for Jackson, who’d stood there, Young’s neighbor in a sloppy fireman’s carry, a put-upon expression on his face. “I didn’t have a free hand.”

“And I said,” Vala murmured, “that doesn’t look like the last of the furniture.”

“And I said, I don’t understand why this always happens to me.” Jackson gave her a watery smile. “And you said—”

“Don’t you?” Vala whispered, smiling back at him. Then she pressed her eyes shut. “Osiris, I thought. That night I stayed with you, slept on your couch.”

Lam turned her eyes away from the monitor and stepped back from Vala, moving towards Jackson.

“Osiris,” Jackson repeated, taken aback, looking at the screen, seeing himself there, or, maybe, seeing a handsome, gilded System Lord.

“Killed by Set over and over, pulled apart, sealed into a sarcophagus, driven mad there, reassembled by those who loved him.” A tear escaped Vala’s eye. “Q’tesh wept for him when he left his host and returned to the Great River. His host, too, wept for him. And that was a thing Q’tesh had never seen, except among the Tok’ra. But it happens.” There was a wistful note in Vala’s voice. 

Jackson turned away from the monitor and bowed his head, holding her hands as she cried, her eyes looking at something else, her face impassive. “You remember now?” he asked her. “You see how it was? How she let you go?”

“She could have killed me. Ridden me into the afterlife she was never sure was there,” Vala said.

Young shifted his weight, fighting the ache in his back, fighting the ache in the room. There was something terrible about this Tok’ra recall device, about watching it work, about a life compressed from years to hours—how much of what came back came back in the right way? How could it come back, how could it possibly come back right? Even with someone like Jackson catching the pieces as they came, looking at them, trying to put them where they belonged. But how could Jackson, how could even Jackson, do that for Vala, who’d kept so much about herself unmentioned beneath the exterior armor she showed the world?

“She let you go, in the end.” Jackson dropped the words like an ancient prayer, like an incantation, like Vala was special for having been spared. Like that was a place someone could stand.

And, maybe, she could. Or, maybe, Jackson had understood she’d always stood there, in some little lee of a merciless, ravenous god, catching and using whatever kindnesses had trailed in the thing’s wake.

“Do you remember when you told me that?” Jackson asked, just an uncertain guy on a hospital bed this time, not some reader of lost scrolls.

Young stared determinedly at the gray concrete of the floor.

“It was late,” Vala said, “four days after you came back from Vagonbrei. You were the last to wake. Colonel Carter said it was because you’d been so tired before the mission had even started. Colonel Mitchell said it was because you had a tolerance to stimulants at baseline.”

“I hated the idea of sleeping,” Jackson said, “so I taught you to play checkers.”

“But I’d learned the game before,” Vala replied, like she was smiling. “I beat you.”

Young swallowed, staring at the floor, thinking of them in the infirmary, a board set up between them. Trying not to see it, seeing it all the same.

“What about the second time?” Jackson asked, like maybe he was smiling too.

“I let you win, darling.”

“And that’s when you told me,” Jackson said, voice tight as he looked at something on some screen Young never wanted to see. “About Q’tesh. What she said to you at the end.”

Vala cried out and Young’s eyes snapped up to see her face contort in grief, one hand at her throat, one hand gripping Jackson’s with strength enough to crack bones. 

Lam stood with Jackson now, her expression locked, her eyes burning with everything that wasn’t on her face.

“It’s all right,” Jackson said, so quietly that the speakers nearly didn’t pick it up. “It’s all right to grieve for something that hurt you. We do it all the time.”

And there it was.

Right there.

The thing that Jackson would’ve said if Young had asked him what to do, not about Telford, the defecting bastard, but about David. The guy who carried a little notebook and wrote down interesting physics facts he’d picked up from the science staff, the guy who’d spent seven hours with Cam’s foot in his lap on a cramped car ride to Vegas.

Jackson’s words were destabilizing, threatening, shifting landscapes, undermining psychological crutches of all kinds, because beneath Young’s anger and beneath Young’s dread was something vast and horrible. A sea of loss more than deep enough to swallow everything he’d built over the ice on its surface. He’d lost everything—his wife, his body, his health, his confidence, more than a handful of friends to this place, to these very walls. And he’d lose more before his story was done. Maybe just his life. But maybe his family, his culture, all cultures, his planet. The damned dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico that Emily loved so much. All of it was on the chopping block. All of it was always on the chopping block—to the Goa’uld, to the Ori, to the Lucian Alliance.

And who is Jackson’s damned ‘we’ anyway? Young snarled internally, his mental voice sounding of David Telford, of something imagined, coming off a typewritten, transcribed page.

But it was nothing, a last gasp, a last grasp, a last attempt at hanging onto the only thing he’d ever known how to hang onto—whatever it was Jackson cracked apart wherever he went. What was the man doing to Vala, who’d built her whole soul around denying a grief Jackson had let in the front door? Or maybe he’d seen into her that night he’d thought he was teaching her checkers, when he’d been half dead and she’d been worried and she’d said something to him. 

Something that’d hit the guy across the face, cracking like a slap, something that let him understand that a part of her had loved that snake in her head, loved what she’d learned, loved the life she’d lived, loved parts of the whole, the math and the civilization and the art the Goa’uld had built atop a grotesque and oppressive culture.

Jackson’s whole life must be full of those moments.

They must happen once a week, once a day, once an hour. It must be terrible; it must hurt like a bitch going in and hurt worse coming out. Because he’d never seen this kind of agony in a set of two rooms. He hadn’t thought anything could break that unified, stone-faced front SG-1 was displaying to the wrong half of a one-way mirror but—

“It’s all right to grieve for something that hurt you,” Jackson said, again, louder, more sure of himself, gathering Vala’s hands together, looking into her eyes. “We do it all the time.”

And SG-1 shattered out of alignment like the guy had fired a round through the window. Mitchell spun toward the far wall, pacing a few steps and then leaning his forearm against planar cement; Carter dropped into a crouch, her eyes red, one hand pressed to her face like she was trying to keep it intact; it was only Teal’c who stayed in front of the one-way glass, his head inclined as if in agreement, one hand pressed over his heart.

“All the time,” Jackson whispered.

“She said ‘forever’,” Vala breathed.

“Why?” Jackson asked. “Why did she tell you it would be forever?”

“Because there is an element of blending,” Vala explained. “Because they find it a burden to live with unchanging horror. Native indifference. Because they find it a joy to live with curiosity. That’s why she told me forever. That’s why Ba’al hasn’t changed his face in five thousand years. Why Apophis and Hathor lived for millennia in the same bodies but Athena changes once a decade.”

“God damn,” Mitchell breathed, pacing the back of the room.

Carter, back on her feet, pressed fingertips to her face, her eyes red-rimmed. “He can’t. He can’t take this. It’s not fair.”

Young looked back at the room to see Jackson leaning forward, his hands clasped with Vala’s, looking like she’d ripped out his heart and handed it to him.

“Yeah, Sam’s right,” Mitchell said. “He needs to tap out. I’m goin’ in there.”

“You will not interfere,” Teal’c said.

“Teal’c, the guy is NOT gonna make it through another round of this. Look at him. His wife—”

“Do not speak to me of Sha’re.” Teal’c turned to Mitchell, full of poise and ice and carven anger.

“Teal’c,” Carter said, her voice thick, her eyes brimming. “He doesn’t know.”

“I don’t know what?” Mitchell asked.

“It’s not in any of the mission reports.” Still, Carter addressed herself to Teal’c.

“Seven years ago,” Teal’c began, a slow build toward something Young didn’t want to hear the end of, “Daniel Jackson watched as I fired my staff weapon into the heart of the false god Amaunet, who wore the face of his wife. He offered me words of forgiveness before he even left her tent. He offered me words of forgiveness before he rose from the ground where she had put him. You will say nothing in this matter. He will decide of what he is capable. He will decide what he wishes to do.”

Teal’c turned back to the window, breathing heavily.

“Teal’c.” Carter gathered herself, real steel beneath the raw note in her voice. “This year. It’s been so much for him. So fast. You know it has.”

Teal’c inclined his head toward her and she looked at him, just looked at him, and there was so much there that, even halfway across the room, it hit Young like a truck, an up-close and personal glimpse into what Carter’s life must’ve read like for a decade. He felt sorry for her because there was a hurricane in the back of her eyes; sorry for Teal’c who looked like he’d like to rip out someone’s spine; sorry for Mitchell who was trying to look out for a guy he wished weren’t the trashcan for all the shit in the universe but somehow always was anyway; sorry for Landry who’d lost control of whatever command he’d ever had over this place that leaked like a sieve and was full of people who wouldn’t fall in line; sorry for Lam who stood there in her low heels without her goddamned kidneys and bore witness to the nightmares cooked up on those monitors; sorry for Vala, trying to pick up the broken glass of her memory and make it into something before it cut her to death, and for Jackson who was trying to help her; for Rush wherever he was, halfway across the galaxy or under the ground; for David, for the man who’d crawled up the slope of an active volcano and who’d been brave, the kind of brave that would break your heart, the kind of brave that was too good to be true, the kind of brave that no one ever was or could be, maybe.

And so that’s what Young decided he’d ask Jackson, one of these days, in a bar somewhere, over beers or coffee or coffee and beer—he’d say, Jackson, if it’s okay to grieve for a thing that screwed you over, what do you think about grieving for a thing that wasn’t real in the first place? Can I get a yes/no on that one?

“I’m sorry,” Mitchell said into the air, in formless, hopeless apology, looking at Teal’c, who wasn’t looking back.

Inside the room, Jackson eyes glittered with tears that didn’t fall. He said, “You were special to her.”

“Yes,” Vala breathed.

“Of course you were.” Jackson smiled his small smile. “How could you not be?”

“But it’s terrible,” Vala said. “It’s terrible, you must see that.”

“It’s not terrible.” Jackson freed a hand and brushed Vala’s hair out of her eyes. “That Q’tesh loved you is a reflection on her. It’s neither good nor bad. It implies nothing about your nature. What we do defines us. The works of hand and mind.”

“But so little of it is mine,” Vala said. “I didn’t think there would be so little. I didn’t think that what there was would be so petty.”

“Not all of it is petty,” Jackson said. “I promise you it’s not. Do you remember when I took you out to dinner?”

“Our date,” Vala’s voice caught in her throat. “I wore blue.”

“Yeah,” Jackson whispered. “You had a flower in your hair. We sat down and you got up to go to the ladies room and you didn’t come back. Do you remember what happened after that?”

“A man,” Vala said. “He came from behind, injected me with something.”

“And then what?” Jackson looked at the monitor now, rather than Vala. “Where did you wake up?”

“On a Tel’tak,” Vala said. “In a modified cargo bay. The ship had belonged to Ba’al, but his cartouches were defaced. It was an Alliance ship. There was something running across the back of my hand. An IV.”

“Were you alone?” Jackson asked.

“No. I was with Rush.”

“Yes,” Jackson said, his tone still light, “you were.” He hit a button, and the monitor on the far wall of the observation room snapped to life, doubling the feed Jackson and Lam had been watching.

On the screen was the dark gold of a deserted cargo bay. The perspective was nauseating, shifting with movement he couldn’t control, focusing on elements he wouldn’t’ve focused on, wavering with dizziness, or nausea, or a tenuous grip on consciousness, but, finally, Vala looked at Rush, laid out on a gold pallet.

The image hit with the strange crispness of the real guy, not the half-romanticized memory Young had been trying not to hang onto. He felt his heart beating at the back of his throat.

He’d been there all right.

His shirt was a mess. The cortical suppressors were at his temples. He was bleeding sluggishly in a few places, and—

Vala’s vision swung away from Rush as she stood, ripped the IV out of her hand, and steadied herself as her vision swam. The image wavered.

Gently, Jackson said, “Try to stay with this one. Don’t let it fragment. You got up. You pulled out your IV. Talk me through it.”

“I—” The image sharpened. “I pulled his out as well.” 

On the monitor, Young watched as she yanked the IV from Rush’s arm and pressed the edge of his bloody shirt against the place it had been.

“I said, ‘gorgeous’,” she continued, and Young saw her shake him, her attention flicking from his arm to his face and back. “I—I couldn’t think of his name,” she said. “Every thought slipped away as it formed, the way they’re coming back now.”

“Hang onto this one,” Jackson said, tight and urgent. “Hang onto everything you can. You tried to wake him up and it didn’t work. Then what happened?”

The image on the screen turned crisper as Vala crept to the door of the cargo bay, her eyes darting around the room. Young watched as she rubbed her hands on her thighs and unfastened her belt, pulled it free, twined it around her hands. Then she punched a series of numbers into the panel next to the door.

“An override code?” Jackson asked.

“Yes,” Vala said. “I remember thinking I should have told you—I should have—” the image wavered. A white underlay beneath the gold began fading in.

“The Tel’tak,” Jackson reminded her. “Stay with the Tel’tak. You opened the door with an override code.”

The image on the monitor sharpened into the image of Vala, soundlessly strangling a man in Lucian Alliance leather. The image blurred again—into water this time, water beneath blue willows on an alien world.

Young pushed to his feet, as though he might, somehow, stop the change in context.

“Don’t back off from it.” Jackson’s words fell like rain. “It’s okay. Stay.”

“I don’t want you to see,” Vala said, “I—”

“Don’t back off,” Jackson continued, “this is who you were in that moment. Don’t back off from what scares you.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Mitchell breathed.

On the monitor, Vala lowered the dead LA operative to the deck of the Tel’tak.

“I killed him,” she breathed. “I did, not Q’tesh.”

“Don’t evaluate.” Jackson kept his voice low and soothing. “You don’t know yourself yet. You can’t. You’ve hardly seen anything. Stay with it. Stay with it. We need this memory. That’s why we’re doing this now. Today. Hang onto this one.”

“I dragged his body into the room.” On the monitor, Vala’s gaze angled up as she rocked her weight back and dragged the LA operative out of the hall. “In the hallway, with the door open, I heard voices. They were in the forward compartment, talking about Athena.”

The image on the screen wavered again and this time the dark roar of fire threatened beneath the quiet interior of the ship and Vala gasped, pulling in a breath like she was about to start screaming but—

“No,” Jackson said, the word a calming pull. “The Tel’tak. Stay with the Tel’tak.”

“You’re afraid of something,” Vala said, high and terrified. “You’re afraid of me. You’re afraid of what you’ll see.”

“No.” Jackson’s voice cracked on the word. “That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

“You’re afraid of something,” Vala said.

“You heard them in the forward compartment,” Jackson continued, his voice smooth and controlled, at odds with his eyes, the shaking grip he had on Vala’s hands. “Who? How many of them?”

“Three,” she said. “A woman and two men. One of voices was familiar to me.  But I couldn’t see them. They were talking about me. And Rush. I wanted to get off the ship. To get back to you.”

On the monitor, Young watched her run, barefoot and silent, back to the cargo bay. Watched her cross the room to Rush, watched her make a fist and lean into the man’s chest with her full weight on her knuckles, trying to wake him up.

“I wanted to get us off the ship. I was having trouble remembering who he was, why I should help him. I was losing everything. I can’t hold this memory; there are too many others trying to come—”

“Vala,” Daniel said, his voice cracking. “I know. But please try. He needs you now just as much as he needed you then.”

“Nicholas Rush?” Vala breathed.

“Nicholas Rush,” Jackson confirmed. “He needs you right now. What happened to him?”

Young’s arms folded over his chest, his heart pounding in his throat, in his temples, he watched Vala drag Rush into a fireman’s carry and get him to the transport room on the Tel’tak. He watched her scan through blurred maps of the ground beneath the ship.

“Our guys will get a location from this,” Cam muttered, standing at Young’s shoulder. “They have to. You can see enough.” They watched as Vala selected a location. Zooming in on a coastline, glittering with the gold lights of civilization at night, a patch of ground near dark water—

“Did you get him there?” Jackson laced his hands with hers, their foreheads nearly touching.

“Yes,” Vala whispered. “Yes.”

“Okay. Let it go.” Jackson pressed his forehead to hers. “Let it go. Let the next one in.”

“How long will this last?” Vala rasped

“I don’t know,” Jackson said, “but I’ll be here.”

Young stared numbly at the monitor, where Mitchell had paused the screen. 

Rush’s beam-down point. 

The LA didn’t have him.

The LA had never had him. He had a chance. A better chance than Young had dreamed possible.

He was still staring at the screen, thoughts slow with shock, when Carter pressed a flash drive into his hand.

“Get this to the Orbital Imaging Department,” she said. “Right across the hall from the Infrared Spectroscopy Unit. It was dark, and the image was blurred, but—I gotta say, that looked a lot like the Eastern Seaboard of the US. Somewhere between New York and Portland, maybe?”

Young stared at the flash drive in his palm. “Yeah.” He closed his hand around the drive. “Yeah,” he repeated, still numb.

“It’s gonna be a job finding him,” Carter said, “and if he’s lost his personal memory, that’ll complicate his extraction. But.” She gave him a watery smile. “He has a real shot at surviving this. His odds just went from a functional zero to—I don’t know, if he managed to stay out of LA hands and on the East Coast of the US…maybe 80%?”

“I was so sure,” Young said, choking on the hope he felt. “So sure they had him. The LA. That he was being tortured.”

“A lot can happen in eight weeks.” There was a note of caution in Mitchell’s voice.

“I know,” Young replied. “But—this changes things.”

“It does,” Carter said. “It really does.”

Behind the glass, Vala shrieked, high and terrified.

“Can you stop this?” Young asked Carter, wincing. “Now that we’ve got what we need?”

“When your memories are bad,” Carter replied, “stopping halfway is worse than never starting. Daniel told me that. You lack context. It makes the good things lose their meaning. It makes the bad things unendurable. He’s one of the few people who understands what this is like. He’s lived it.”

“Yeah,” Young rasped.

“Maybe,” Mitchell said, looking at Young, “drop the drive with Orbital Imaging and maybe—maybe come back. We could, probably use a little help with—” he paused, his eyes sweeping over his team. “I don’t know, man. Everything.”

Young nodded.

Behind the one-way glass, Jackson spoke quietly to Vala as the candles burned their slow way down.