Mathématique: On Lethe Fixed

To leave, Val will have to shoot him. He’s made that the price of the door.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

On Lethe Fixed

In the small back room of an unassuming diner run by a man with a heart larger than his finances, Val curls herself around a thin pillow, settles between threadbare sheets, cracks her gum, and changes the channel on the tiny TV next to her cot.

She smells the aerosolized grease that clings to her hair even after showering. Perhaps she’ll spend her next paycheck on shampoo that smells like fruit or flowers.

A familiar redhead flashes onscreen and Val stops her channel surfing. The X-files. Jackpot. Oh please, she thinks, let it be a marathon.

It says sad things about whomever “Val” is (or was) that the most familiar feature of American Suburbia is a TV show about fictional people chasing fictional monsters.

She’s probably spent a life in front of a television, watching these two, watching horror, watching science fiction.

It would explain her dreams of stars and space battles, of enclosed spaces and devouring insects.

She wishes a sensitive FBI agent or two would show up at Sol’s Diner to discretely tell her who she is.

She loves Mulder. He’s so tall and so handsome and so interesting and so open to new things. He’s always asking the native humans—

Native humans?

He’s always asking the people he meets to educate him about their beliefs, about their ways of life and their cultural explanations for phenomena not so easily explained. He places no trust in authority, he takes on gods and angels and demons and devils. She adores a denied godhead. It reminds her of something. But every time she tries to turn that vague connection into a real memory—

She fails.

Her past is nothing but gray mist that won’t lift. So she remains Val, watching The X-files.

Val loves Scully even more than she loves Mulder. Val wants to be Scully—beautiful and fiery and competent, running in stylish heels and a flowing black coat, holding a weapon right next to her perfectly made-up face—the crack shot, the cool thinker, the compassionate heart, the firm voice. Her bright eyes reveal all she feels.

Val has studied her own face in the mirror. Her eyes give away none of her secrets, no matter how long she stares into them. Her build is slender, but she’s strong, stronger by far than she looks, and she’s fast. She thinks about exits to rooms and she smells the air for the scent of chemicals; she doesn’t like to eat food she doesn’t see Sal prepare or that she doesn’t open herself from a sealed package. She doesn’t like faint lights that glow in the darkness, and when she feels frightened, she drops her center of gravity and lifts her hands.

At night, she wakes with her own fingers at her throat, trying to claw something away.

Or, maybe, trying to claw something out.

So, yes, she loves Fox Mulder and she loves Dana Scully, but she watches the show for Alex Krycek.

Krycek who doesn’t seem to know who he is; Krycek who’s trying to survive; Krycek who wishes to be Scully just as Val wishes for it; Krycek who knows too much and too little about the game he’s playing but who plays it anyway; who comes back time after time after time to help the people he’s hurt so badly; Krycek who must be important because it’s Krycek who stays, Krycek who, even after death, points the way to salvation.

His story must be something like Val’s story. Why else would she be here, with no memory, with so much strength and speed and skill? There must be a place she’s fallen from; there must be someone for her to haunt.

Val spits out her gum and falls asleep to the real sound of fictional screams. 

In the morning, she wakes to rain and the trill of a small travel alarm, her second gift from Sal. She pulls off the Sol’s Diner T-shirt that she wears as pajamas. She hooks her bra into place—her secret, expensive, underwear that says interesting and promising things about whomever she’d been. Her bra is black. The straps are thin. Its material is scalloped lace. It’s beautiful. It’s meant to be looked at.

She wonders, whom, if anyone, she wore it for.

Maybe she’d wore it for herself. That feels right to her.

She drops her dress into place over her underwear. It, too, is its own kind of armor, as all uniforms are. This one is green and yellow and marks her as a thing she’s not. Or, as a thing she isn’t yet. 

A waitress. It still feels wrong.

Her dreams are full of torches and the screams of supplicants, the sound of insects crawling and clicking in darkness, the curve of gold decor, bold and shining. In her dreams, her hands glow. Her eyes glow. She takes gods as lovers.

Sometimes, she dreams of kinder things. Of supernatural restoration under a white light. A boy with dark hair beside a lotus-covered pool. A shell-covered beach. A man with glasses.

They’re harder to hold on to—they lack the edge of horror that burns them into her waking mind.

Val divides her hair in two and ties each half in place. She dabs inexpensive cosmetics on her cheekbones and eyelids. She draws a fake beauty mark on her left cheek with an eyebrow pencil in a good-natured tribute to a personality that’s gone incognito even from itself.

Then, she goes to work.

By the time she enters the diner, the rain has given way to a bright mist that will turn to sunlight before long. It’s October, and when the glass door opens and shuts with the passage of Sal’s clientele, she feels crisp air on her bare calves.

She worries she’s too bright-eyed in this persistent absence of memory. Her smile is too wide, her pitch too modulated, but no customer notices, or if they do, they don’t say anything. She pursues the ideal of “waitress,” holds it in her mind, builds it from television, from her co-worker Mary Catherine, from the expectations she senses in people she serves. 

Only Sal knows she’s not the face she presents to the world, but he doesn’t press her. Sal is a righter of all the wrongs he finds, and Val is always on the edge of tipping into darkness. Sal can see that, which is why he gives her things and doesn’t ask questions.

Impossible man.

When she’d shouted, “No hospitals” in a blind panic, he’d let her be. He’d given her a back room, a waitress uniform, a toothbrush, a t-shirt, an alarm clock, and plenty of space.

In return, Val learns diner slang and flirts with his customers. She talks up the daily special. She pours coffee and clears tables between flashbacks to the sound of synchronized steps on stone, the blur of stars, battles fought over vast distances represented with golden pieces on a massive board.

“Val,” Sal says, midmorning, when he sees her with her eyes closed, one hand braced against a wall in the back of the diner. “Val, you okay, honey?”

She nods first, smiles second, swishes her hair back third, pulls it forward again fourth, then, finally, looks at Sal. “Yes,” she says. “Yes I’m fine.” It’s the only thing she knows how to be.

At the beginning of the lunchtime rush, two men enter the diner. From the moment she sees their dark silhouettes against the sun in the glass door, she feels a sense of error—of disappointment in herself as they begin shouting and brandishing a gun. She watches them, confused by her own guilt, because where is her failure in this? Where could it be? She’s a waitress in the bad part of town; this isn’t her fault; she owes Sal’s clientele nothing but two weeks of her meager livelihood—

But Val, whomever she is, was born fully grown, strapped to a gurney in the midst of a firefight, struggling against bonds in beautiful clothes with beautiful hair that’d smelled of perfume she can barely recall. In her first moments of life, Val had pulled a metal device off her head, freed herself from a burning building, and run blindly into the street.

Val had lived. She’d lived through gunshots and streams of strange blue energy, through an explosion that had killed anyone and destroyed anything that might’ve helped her find her way.

And so, when one of the men points a gun at her, she looks at the weapon, she looks at him, and she breaks his wrist.

She breaks his wrist first.

She steps in and takes both of them on in a blaze of newly discovered instinct, twisting joints the wrong way, bringing a heel into a crotch, ramming her elbow into an unprotected face, crashing a napkin dispenser into the back of a skull.

By the time Sal makes it out of the kitchen, meat tenderizer in hand, by the time the local detective has raised his own gun, Val is standing over two incapacitated men.

A plate spins, unbroken, on the floor.

“What did you do?” Sal asks her.

“I don’t know,” she admits.

The detective takes her to the police station to make a statement.

Val doesn’t want to go. She tries to get out of it. Sal tries to help her, but the detective is impressed and insistent, so she goes with him before she’s charged with a crime herself. Before they leave, she changes out of her waitress uniform into a T-shirt and jeans—acting on an instinct for anonymity. Too many people would remember a girl in a green and yellow dress with a name-tag that reads: VAL.

The longer she stays at the precinct, the more questions they ask. It’s not long before she feels like a caged animal beneath a fraying exterior. She doesn’t know what might burst out of her with the right provocation, but there are things in her mind and motor programs in her nerves she doesn’t understand.

“Your name is Val?” the detective asks.

“You’re a regular,” Val says, edgy, flirting, smiling, twisting loose hair around two fingers. “You know my name.”

“Val is short for Valerie?” the detective asks.

“Yes,” Val says. “That’s it. Valerie.”

But it’s not Valerie. In a dream, the man with glasses had said it. She can almost hear it. Exasperated. Pulling that first syllable into something like “Vahl,” rather than “Val.”

“Last name?” the detective says, like she’d missed the first time he’d asked.

“Oh.” Val snaps back to the present. She scans the room, too obvious. She’s being too obvious. “Todad,” she says, smiling brightly, shifting in her chair, dying a little inside at how pathetically transparent a single off-balance moment had made her.

The detective turns around, looks pointedly at a picture from his child hanging on the wall, on which the words, “To: Dad” appear.

Val smiles wider. The detective doesn’t smile back. He holds her there until someone responds to the APB he puts out on her, asking for identification.

It’s the Air Force that answers.

Three people in uniform show up in less than an hour. The alacrity frightens her. It frightens the detective as well.

She doesn’t recognize any of them. Their faces are grim, their badges are quickly flashed, and though she begs him not to—begs him, tears in her eyes but not falling, calling out his title and her plea into the growing space between them as she’s dragged away—the detective releases her into their custody.

They cuff her.

They march her outside.

She knows she’ll never see Sal again, never see her blue shirt, which she knows for certain she owned.

Perhaps they’ll let her watch The X-files in whatever Air Force prison they’re taking her to.

Somehow, she doesn’t think so.

They force her into a car. “But what did I do?” she asks. “At least tell me what I did.”

They don’t answer.

Val spends minutes in taut silence.

She needs to escape. This, at least, feels familiar, as though “escape” is a concept she’s mastered.

Options, ideas, scenarios, tactics, take rise in her thoughts like a flock of birds, wheeling and diving and changing direction all at once.

She makes her move on an untrafficked road that cuts through a wooded area. She leads with a question, follows with an elbow to the face, then hooks the short chain of her cuffed wrists around the neck of the car’s driver. He brakes and yanks the wheel, sending the car into a ditch. She’s braced against the driver’s seat—unsurprised and ready. As soon as the vehicle comes to a stop, she plunges a hand into the driver’s pocket, finds the keys to her handcuffs, and unlocks herself.

She dives from the car, rolls, and comes up on her knees, her muscles shaking.

There’s a man standing on the road.

He’s dressed in a brown leather jacket, sighting down the barrel of a gun. Behind him is a running motorcycle.

She raises her hands, palms open. Her throat tightens with despair.

Almost, she thinks, breathing hard. Almost.

They’d had a rear-guard. Someone following on a bike.

“You okay?” The steel-eyed man glances at her, then away. As though she’s no threat.

Val doesn’t answer. She gets to her feet.

The man looks back at her, confused by her silence.

Is it possible he knows her?

The sharp report of a gunshot comes from behind. She ducks.

The man in the road fires at the car, then falls to the asphalt, clutching his arm.

Val looks back and forth between the car and the man in the road.

Bleeding quite a lot, the man in the road drops his gun.

Val edges forward, watching him, watching the car.

She should run.

But she wants that gun.

She needs that gun.

No one stops her or shoots her as she creeps forward. After a short hesitation, she commits, darts forward, and picks up the gun lying on the asphalt. She’s points it first at the man in the road, then at the still car, then back at the man in the road.

“Vala,” says the man at her feet. “What are you doing?”

Vala?

She likes that.

Much better than Valerie.

“You know me?” she asks.

“What?” the man in the road says.

“Get up,” Val says.

“What?” He looks insulted.

“Get up,” Val repeats.

The man doesn’t get up.

Another car skids to a stop and its driver gets out, his engine a dull throb in the stillness of the afternoon. “Is everyone okay?” he asks.

Val swings her body and points the gun at him. “Run away,” she says.

The driver takes her advice and makes a break for the tree-line, on foot.

“Get up.” She turns to the man in the road. By the time she drags him to his feet, he’s shed his surprise and his wounded look.

“Drive.” She forces him into the running car.

“You realize I’m bleeding.” His eyes are a grim and icy blue.

“Drive,” she snarls.

They have to stop after thirty miles because her hostage is losing consciousness. She spends minutes in agonized indecision in the parking lot of a cheap motel, and then, again, after she’s cuffed him to the bed, as she debates leaving him.

What if she knows him?

What if he dies?

What if he’s a friend?

“Hey, handsome,” she says, but the nickname sounds wrong. “Hey. What’s your name?”

His eyelids flicker, but he doesn’t answer.

Is he the man in glasses she dreams of? Val tries to picture him with glasses, but it’s no good—he’s too real.

She decides she’ll look at his arm before she goes, just in case. She uncuffs him, removes his jacket and his shirt, then his pants for good measure. She lets him keep his boxers. She pulls up the covers so he won’t get cold. 

The bullet graze is deep, cutting through his deltoid. It’s still bleeding, and between the blood on the road, the blood in the car, the blood on his clothes, and the blood on this bed—

She worries he’s lost too much.

She decides to dress the wound.

She cleans it as best she can, drawing on an innate store of knowledge, common sense, and a dream of her hands clamped to her own bleeding calf beneath trees with silver-blue leaves.

The man regains consciousness while she’s in the bathroom, ripping cheap linens into strips with the aid of the small knife she’d found in his pocket.

“You really don’t remember who you are,” he says, half revelation, half skepticism.

She doesn’t care for his tone, but she doesn’t show it. She smiles and lets him spin a story worthy of The X-files as she ties strips of bedding around his injured arm to stop the flow of blood. He tells her that they’re teammates; that they travel to other worlds through a magical gate, like on Wormhole X-treme.

He tells her she isn’t from this planet.

She doesn’t dismiss him, but she doesn’t trust him. 

Without her memories, she can’t trust anyone.

“Vala,” she says, when he’s finished. “That doesn’t sound like an alien name.”

The man sighs.

Much as she’d love to stay, to learn more, to sort through what she believes and what she doesn’t of his narrative, she can’t. She’s already lingered too long. She buys him a collection of snacks with his own money and leaves him cuffed to the bed, ignoring the rising pitch of his words, the panic in his tone as he realizes she’s about to walk out the hotel room door.

The freedom of the quiet parking-lot comes as a relief.

Val considers getting back in the car, but the little hairs on her neck prickle in warning she only half understands—as though by thinking of using the vehicle she’s already being tracked.

She sets off down wide, pale sidewalks, her head down, her hair loose and hiding her face. The blue and white of police cars crisscross the street, and she turns to avoid them, her eyes scanning for a car she might steal, for a building she might enter, for anywhere she might hide.

Everywhere she turns flashing lights hem her in, cut her off.

They’re heading for the motel she just left.

In desperation, she slides into an abandoned warehouse, knowing she’s been spotted, hoping she can pass through the building, and lose her pursuit.

The warehouse is large and dim and cluttered. She ducks into shadow and creeps from shipping container to shipping container, beneath steel beams and through narrow aisles.

It was in a place like this that Val came roaring into panicked existence from a past she can’t recall; a past she fears and longs for.

Behind her, the door creaks.

Val looks back through a slit between boxes and sees three people enter, dark silhouettes backlit against the day. They move together, soundless in the dim light. They don’t speak.

Val hears the whine of a charging energy weapon.

She crouches in the shadow of a crate, her breathing shallow and silent, the balls of her feet and her fingertips pressed against the grit of cool cement.

She doesn’t move.

From another door, a second group enters. Four people. They’re not quiet.

“Vala? Vala, it’s me, Daniel.”

She bites her lip, trying to pair the voice with a half-remembered dream.

She can’t answer.

She won’t answer.

Don’t speak, she advises. You’re not the only ones here.

She holds her position and listens as both teams fan out, one seeking, the other stalking. Soon, very soon, they’ll encounter one another. That will be her chance, likely her only chance, to make it out of this building.

“Colonel Carter!” A deeper voice this time. A warning.

The air overhead erupts with gunfire and energy.

She flinches at the deafening reports of projectiles ricocheting off metal and cement, at the high-pitched whine of discharging capacitors. She back-traces shot trajectories to map the locations of the two teams in the warehouse. She plots her sprint to the back wall, where she hopes to find an exit.

A gun slides across the cement and comes to rest near her hand.

She picks it up.

One can never have too many guns.

She weaves across the room, staying low, staying silent, staying out of sight, working her way free.

She can see the door.

A straight shot.

She bolts for it.

She’s nearly there.

A man is coming up on her left, trying to intercept her—no, trying to get ahead of her.

His angle is better, his distance is shorter. He makes it with space to spare.

He faces her, breathing hard.

Val snaps her gun up, sighting down the barrel at the man’s blue eye. He’s holds a weapon that curves in his hand like a snake. His expression is a neutral mask over deep and terrible strain.

He’s wearing glasses.

“Drop it,” Val says, everything gone but the steel at her core.

He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at her and sees her there.

Even though they’re on the opposite ends of guns, sighting down different barrels, he’s not watching her hand, he’s not watching her finger on the trigger, he’s not attending to the firefight behind her, to the shifts of her movement.

He knows her. He must. But what does he want with her?

She feels the tremor of fine muscles in her face.

Better to run. Safer.

She squares her shoulders, clamps her jaw and glares her resolution down her gun.

He nods subtly at whatever he sees in her face, reads in her body. He angles his weapon away. Slowly, he puts it down.

“Step aside,” she demands.

He does not step aside.

“Step aside,” Val repeats, “or I will shoot you.”

“You won’t,” he says.

Already, she’s terrified he’s right.

Val shakes her head, widens her stance, shifts her grip, clenches her jaw, doubles down on her resolve and says, “You don’t know that,” with all the strength she has in her hands and throat and heart.

“Yes,” he says, pouring assurance into the air, “I do.”

And he’s standing there, just standing there, facing down her gun, ignoring her gun, with calm that hits like a wall.

No one should be so brazenly confident about the heart or head of another person.

Maybe it’s not confidence.

Maybe he’s ready to die.

To leave, Val will have to shoot him. He’s made that the price of the door.

“If I let you go,” he says, his hands up, his voice low, “I know you’re going to make yourself disappear.”

She shakes her head. Her hair flies out of her face and falls back.

She could shoot him.

She can shoot him.

She will shoot him.

Just in the shoulder. Not the eye, not the heart.

He’ll be fine.

He’ll be fine and she’ll be free.

She shifts her aim from his eye to his shoulder to his thigh and back to his shoulder. Back to his eye.

“You’ve been running so long, it’s almost second nature to you,” he continues.

She thinks wildly of Krycek, her only friend for weeks.

The firefight rages behind her. All she has to do is squeeze the trigger beneath her index finger. One time. A short, sharp pull.

“You don’t remember it,” the man in glasses says, “but you made a decision to stop running.”

No one makes a decision to stop running. The Long Run is all there is, that’s life, running and running and running to stay clear, to stay ahead of the wolves at heel, to die reaching for places where no one has ruined anything, where the water and the air are unpoisoned, where her name is unknown.

“It’s over,” he says.

It isn’t over. It isn’t over. Val wants to scream at him; she wants to kill him; she wants to shove her way past him and run for the daylight beyond the door.

“Now it’s time to come home.” His voice breaks on the last word.

He isn’t as sure as he seems.

He’s ready to die.

He cares that much.

Her gun dips.

Her gun comes back up.

A snippet of dream flashes across her mind: he runs the final few steps to the elevator. She extends a hand to stop the door from closing. He smiles, drops his eyes, strangely shy for a man who’s never at a loss for words, for a man who shouts down gods, for a man who’d pulled her free from iron chains, from stone, from her own burned body beneath a gray sky.

“Daniel?” she whispers.

The gunfire behind her stops.

Daniel steps forward, takes her gun, pulls her into an embrace she’s too overcome to return.

She’s trembling. She’s dreamed of screaming his name in terror. Dreamed of a wall of flames between them. Dreamed of dying on a cloudy afternoon.

“It’s all right,” he murmurs into her hair.

Behind her, she hears footsteps. She feels the pressure of eyes on the back of her neck. Daniel nods at someone she can’t see and doesn’t know.

When he lets her go, she turns to find three people watching her with roving eyes and weapons in hand. There’s a woman with blonde hair; a handsome, muscular man in a hat; and her flint-eyed former hostage, his right hand clamped to his left arm.

“Vala?” the woman says.

“Hello, beautiful.” Val wipes her eyes. “Do I know you?”

“Yeah.” The woman smiles an adorable, tiny smile. “You do. Or, you will, once you get your memories back. I’m Sam. Sam Carter.”

“Are you an alien too?” Vala asks with as much dry confidence as she can muster.

“That would be Teal’c.” Daniel indicates the man beside Sam.

Teal’c removes his hat. On his forehead, a gold symbol gleams in the light streaming from the door behind her.

“Oh,” Val says weakly. “Hello.”

Teal’c inclines his head.

“Did I or did I not tell you that we were teammates?” Her former hostage gives her an exasperated look. “Mitchell? Does that ring a bell? Cam? Colonel? You’re my wing-woman, for cryin’ out loud. Does any of that even register? No. Of course it’s Jackson you remember.”

“I see you found your pants.” Val arches her eyebrows. “Who’s Jackson?”

“That would be me,” Daniel says. “Daniel Jackson.”   

“Ah,” she says.

They leave the building in a group. The four of them cluster around her without speaking, arranging themselves like points on a compass as they escort her toward waiting cars with flashing lights.

She tenses, but Daniel puts a hand on her shoulder and says, “It’s okay,” too quiet for anyone else to hear, even grouped as closely as they are.

When they arrive at the police line, a group of uniformed personnel surge forward, but they stop when Sam says, “Back it up, people,” her hands out. “This completes a classified Air Force operation. You’ll need to come this way and fill out a few forms.”

Teal’c, his hat back in place, leads them to a car. It’s black, with government plates.

“You can drive?” Val asks, squinting into the sun. “I thought you were—” she leans in to whisper, “—an extra-terrestrial?”

Daniel laughs.

“It was Daniel Jackson who taught me to drive,” Teal’c replies.

“It was also Daniel Jackson who taught you to drive,” Daniel tells her. “Daniel Jackson has a low index of self preservation and teaches all the aliens to drive. You want to take us back to the base?”

“Oh,” Val says, surprised, reassured, relieved that he trusts her enough to make the suggestion, given she’d locked a teammate to a hotel room bed in his underwear only hours before.

“You are an excellent driver.” Teal’c offers her the keys.

“If you say so.” Val takes them. She unlocks the car and slides into the front seat. Teal’c opens the back door. Daniel rounds the hood to take shotgun.

Val starts the car, and follows their directions until she hits the throughway, accelerating smoothly, the afternoon sun flitting through trees, the road winding in front of her towards the distant mountains. 

“So,” Val says, into the strange and promising silence. “How’ve you two been?”

Daniel laughs, a short, sharp exhalation that’s almost a sob. When she glances away from the road, he’s looking at her, his eyes lined with red and a bit too bright, just like the day itself.

She knows then that she must have loved him.

Because she loves him now. So much more, she thinks, than she’s ever loved anything.

He drops his eyes.

She hits a button and opens the sun-roof. 

Daniel tips his head back as the wind lifts pieces of his hair. “Oh, you know,” he says. “Same old, same old. Holding up the cracking edifice until the day we die.”

“I cannot disagree,” Teal’c adds from the back seat.

“Sounds right,” Val replies.

“Does it?” Daniel asks.

She smiles, glittering and real.

“How much do you remember?” Daniel asks.

“Small things,” Val replies, speaking slowly. “All of them from dreams. A dark-haired boy under trees with narrow leaves. The sound of my mother’s voice. A pool of white flowers. I remember being buried alive. I remember being burned alive. A lover with glowing eyes. A little girl who grew up too fast. You, in an elevator.”

Teal’c laughs, brief and loud.

“What’s so funny, muscles?” Val asks.

“Wait. Me? Me in an elevator?” Daniel cuts in before Teal’c can reply.

“You were smiling.” Val drops her voice to a stage whisper. “I think we were having a moment.”

“Indeed,” Teal’c says.

Daniel’s look is sharp and layered, like Damascus steel. 

Val grins at the road in front of her. “Does any of this make sense to you?”

“All of it makes sense,” Daniel replies.

“Good. I can’t wait for it to make sense to me as well.”

“Vala.” Daniel gives her name the slow momentum of a warning. “We can help you get your memories back, but I—I think it’ll be difficult.”

“Difficult how?” Val asks.

“Mentally difficult,” Daniel says. “Emotionally difficult.”

“That’s all right,” Val decides, the sun on her face and the wind in her hair and a wheel under her hands.

She thinks she remembers driving through space, where there’s no friction, where stars streak into lines.

“No, it’s not,” Daniel says.

“What I mean is that I don’t mind.” Val glances at him.

Daniel looks pained. “We’ll need to do it soon.”

“All right,” Val says.

“There’s another person missing,” Daniel says. “A man went missing the same night you did. We’re trying to find him as well.”

“All right,” Val says.

“It would be better if you had some time to recover. Some time to adjust.”

“What’s to adjust?” Val asks. “Everything will be new, until it isn’t anymore.”

Daniel looks unhappy.

Teal’c is silent.

“Can I ask you something?” Val says, looking again at Daniel.

“Of course,” he replies.

“How did you know what to say?” Val asks. “So that I wouldn’t go?”

“Knowing what to say is pretty much my only talent.” Daniel’s smile is small and warm and almost makes her forget he didn’t answer her question. “Don’t tell anyone.”

Val asks again, in different way. “I belong here? With you?”

“Yeah,” Daniel says. “You do.”

Teal’c taps her gently on the shoulder with a pair of sunglasses. Val slips them on and drives through cool air, beneath changing leaves.