The Dirt of Sowing and Reaping
Daniel swings his sickle, close to the ground, severing the stalk in one stroke. It sounds a little like breaking bones. With each stroke he hears the brittle snap: wrist, shin. As his arm sweeps back and then down and the blade lops away another stalk, he doesn't wonder how he became a man who knew the right way to twist an assailant's arm so that the knife would fall from nerveless fingers, and how to twist a little further until there was a snap. He knows that once, back in The Day, if he'd voiced that connection between corn and bone he'd have earned a raised eyebrow, a forced smile. That kind of observation would have made a regular person change the subject, recoiling a little as though they'd stepped off a well-worn path into nettles. It would have been an indication that he had lived a strange life.
The sickle rises and falls, gleaming. Now, though, everyone knows the sound of breaking bones, on an intimate and a more general scale. Here in Carole, where they are surrounded by pasture and cornfields at the crossing of roads that no longer go anywhere, the knowledge is worked into the lines of their hands like the dirt of sowing and reaping. There are no regular people.
In the next row, Sam swings her sickle and the stalks sigh as they fall. Jack collects them and binds them at their crowns, stands them on end like teepees to dry. He pauses, leaning from side to side to stretch his back, a gloved hand swiping across his brow under his cap. He's thin and straight against the blue, cloudless sky.
Daniel swings his sickle in an elegant, efficient arc. The corn falls, snapping, sighing.
CHAPTER ONE: RAINING IN JULY
We fall like wheat
And lie like stone
("Harvest Night," Brighid E. Stone)
The way Jack remembered it, that July in Colorado Springs was wetter than normal, with endless days of penetrating rain, needles against the skin. Outside, the world was continually drippy and sort of sunk in a listless gloom under a clamped-down lid of grey clouds. Inside the mountain it was clammy, the usually crisp, recycled-tasting air heavy and hard to take in almost, like they were all breathing it through a damp towel. It was cool enough in the controlled conditions of the complex, but everyone was sweating anyway. He remembered that his hand left a perfect palm print on the table in the briefing room. He remembered that he was looking at the palm print, tilting his head a little to catch it in a different angle of light, while Daniel was talking about Baal. Jack didn't want to tune out important things like plans for kicking System Lord asses, but the Baal thing... his mind wandered, the way a kid retreated to another room and the television when parents started fighting.
So, he was looking at his palm print and trying to pay attention to Daniel when he heard, very clearly—although how he could have was still a point of debate—a young voice say, "I'm Michael."
Jack stood up abruptly—causing Daniel's voice to trail away mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open a little—and looked down into the Gateroom. Standing on the ramp, looking up directly into Jack's eyes, was a boy, maybe ten years old. He was wearing jeans rolled up at the ankles, a t-shirt that said "Sea World" on it, and a jacket, standard issue olive drab just like the one hanging in Jack's locker, right down to the SG-1 and Earth glyph patches on the shoulders. The sleeves were way too long, and they covered the boy's hands.
"What the—" Jack began.
"—hell?" he finished a heartbeat later, only now he was standing with his team on a dusty road. They were in the shade of a grove of leafy trees and the road wandered out across an open field into the glare of a hot July sun. According to Jack's watch, four days had passed. By then, they learned later, the war was already over and the world had already come to an end. One full kit, including a 9mm, sat in a backpack at Jack's feet. Daniel's mouth was still hanging open.
Lying on his side half in the ditch, the boy was twitching, white foam from the seizure drying around his lips. When Carter sat him up, he opened his eyes and looked at her glassily. He didn't say a word. He didn't say a word for four months. When he finally found his voice, it ribboned out of him, the unfurling of a coiled wail of anguish in the middle of the night.
"Try it now."
Crouching down again, Daniel flipped the toggle on the side of the generator. Nothing happened. He flipped the switch back and forth a few more times and then slapped the housing with the flat of his hand. "Sonofa—"
"Shit." Sam's voice was sharp enough on the edges to cut steel. "Shit, shit, shit." There was a clanking sound that didn't seem quite finessed enough to be involved delicate repair work and then two spark plugs shot out from behind the generator and clattered against the wall. "Can I murder Junst, Daniel? Can I just murder him a little tiny bit?"
"Murder him all the way if you want to," Daniel offered generously as he dragged himself upright and leaned over the dead machine to look at her. "I'll hold him down."
Lying on her back, Sam threw both arms over her eyes, a wrench in one hand, a rag in the other. "One ounce of naqada,and I wouldn't need Junst at all," she said for the two millionth time this month. "I'm not asking for the whole frigging galaxy, now, am I?"
"No, just an extremely rare and valuable part of it." Pushing her arms out of the way, he offered her a hand and pulled her awkwardly to her feet. Her face was smeared with grease and dirt, her hair escaping her braid and sticking in curling strands to her sweaty face. He swiped a hand across her cheek, gathering up the hair and tucking it behind her ear. "You'll get it to work," he told her.
"And if I don't?"
Then the hospital stays dark and the patients die. He said instead, "Then we put Junst on a treadmill and you get to hold the whip."
"Oh, man, you are so gonna get fucked snakewise," Tam crowed, his eyes bright with admiration and the anticipation of doom. "Fucked. Snake. Wise." He punctuated each word by jabbing Michael at the base of his skull with a stiff finger, ignoring the shocked, slightly frightened glances cast their way from the circle of women crouched in the doorway of the school. They were sorting nuts and bolts from a bucket, dropping them into smaller pails, their hands moving swiftly, the rattle of metal against metal drowned out by the din of the market.
Following them to the doorway, Ingram watched them go, her arms folded across her ample chest, her round, girlish face caught in an undecided expression somewhere between indulgent affection and exasperation. Michael tossed her a grin and turned away without waiting to see if it worked.
"Shut up, Tam." Michael deked around the end of a scavenge stall, but paused to line up a row of blackened spark plugs neatly along the edge of the wooden door that served as a table, switching the plugs around deftly so that they were arranged smallest to largest. As he was reaching for the messy stack of o-rings, Tam took his wrist and gently pulled him away, one hand on the back of Michael's neck steering him in a new direction and making sure he didn't look back. Michael's fingers were itchy. He put his hands in his pockets. Behind him, Junst, the stall owner, cackled. The old bastard was messing up the plugs, Michael knew it, but Tam's hand on his neck kept him moving through the crowd. "At least I'll get fucked somewise," Michael went on, shrugging Tam's hand away. "Which is more than we can say for some people."
Laughing, Tam patted the side of Michael's face with a calloused hand. "What? Mind-fucks don't count now?" As he met Michael's eyes, Tam let the laugh die, his mouth going grim, mirroring Michael's expression.
Finally, the corner of Michael's mouth quirked up, his dark brown eyes sparkling. "What's the last Law of Service, Mr. Ng?"
"The last Law of Service is—" Tam began solemnly.
"—to take it snakewise!" Michael shouted the last word triumphantly, turning in a circle, hands outstretched, daring anyone in the crowd to call him on his blasphemy.
Giving them a wide berth, the crowd parted around them and flowed onward. Michael stuffed his hands in his pockets and was starting to move on but found his path blocked by the stocky bulk of an old man, his jaw out-thrust in anger. Michael smelled sweat and dust and smoke; the old guy was crumpled and smoldering like paper on coals. When he opened his mouth to speak, ashes puffed out and drifted away on the wind, smearing the air with a greasy grey plume. Tam was listening to him, nodding his head with exaggerated politeness, and didn't seem to notice the way the ash was staining him, streaking his skin and hair.
Looking away, Michael squeezed his eyes shut and counted rapidly to ten and back. When he glanced up again, the man was still talking, but now only words stumbled out of him. Without bothering to listen (he'd heard the tirades about the wages of sin before), Michael stepped up and put his face close to the old man's. "Whatcha gonna do?" he demanded belligerently. They stared at each other for a long moment and Michael wouldn't let himself look away as the man darkened, going greyer around the edges. Finally, as the coot shuffled away with an angry swat at the air, Michael shouted, "Yeah, I know, I know. The god will have me for dinner."
"Well, you are a tasty piece of flesh," Tam observed.
"A delicacy, Mr. Ng," Michael agreed, and started off again against the flow of traffic.
Dropping the cutlery onto the table with a clatter, Daniel sorted through it, putting aside the matching pieces, the ones with the rosettes on the handle. Once he had a full place setting, he arranged them tidily, lining them up from shortest to longest—spoon, fork, knife. Finally, he ran his palm along the edge of the table to make sure the ends of the utensils were aligned perfectly. Then, he repeated the exercise with the mismatched cutlery, carefully laying out three more settings. His hand hovered over the last one, undecided, and then gathered up the cutlery. After a moment, he sighed and reset the place.
"Acceptable. But you know he's going to want to fix that one," Sam said as she set a bowl of mashed potatoes down in the middle of the table, indicating the row of utensils at her place, two rosette pieces and one with a squared handle.
Grabbing her wrist, Daniel sucked a daub of potato off of the side of her hand and then, releasing her, switched the square-handled spoon for one with a curly-cued end. Not a perfect match.
"Better," Sam approved and went back to get the stew pot from the fire in the little courtyard. She was humming softly, chuckling as she dodged Yana Maio from next door, who was collecting her own steaming pot. Daniel smiled.
"What are you grinning at?" Sam asked as she ducked through the slightly canted doorway, pausing halfway across the room to hiss at the heat of the pot handles on her fingers and then double-timing it to the little breakfast nook by the window. Some of the grey broth splashed over the edge onto her hand when she dropped the pot gracelessly on the table.
For the second time in two minutes, Daniel closed soft lips around the side of her hand, soothing the slight burn with his tongue. "You, with the humming," he answered finally. "I'd've thought you'd be grouching about the generator."
"Ah." Sam nodded as she swung her legs over the bench and pulled him down beside her. "I'm looking on the bright side."
"Which is?"
"That side of Junst's ass I'm gonna be kicking from here 'til Sunday." Her smile was high on wattage and as happy as it was deadly.
Pouring half a cup of water into his mug, Daniel raised it in a salute: "To Junst, the soon-to-be unhappiest sonofabitch in Carole. May his ass be ever ripe for kicking."
"I get dibs," Michael said from the doorway, loping in and leaning between them to switch Daniel's knife for one at the fourth place-setting and carefully adjusting it against the edge of the table. "He laughed at me today." Coming around to the other side of the table, he slumped onto the bench, his bony wrists protruding a good inch from the grimy olive drab sleeves of his jacket. In the four-plus years since he'd appeared wearing it in the Gateroom, the jacket had taken a beating and was definitely on the way out. Not that Michael was going to let anybody lay a finger on it, though. He tugged the sleeves down self-consciously. "In other news, Ingram wants to expel me."
Sam ladled out a bowl of stew for each of them, adding a dollop of potatoes, before answering. "Ingram always wants to expel you, Michael. It's what makes you alluring to all the girls."
"There are no girls," Michael reminded her glumly as he stirred his stew, poking at it with careful attention. "The only one left is Lizzie Borden and she's wobbly on six levels at least, besides being, like, a foot too short." He lifted a lump of something brown on his spoon and held it out to Sam. "Is this meat?"
"Sort of."
Dropping the lump back into his bowl with a scowl, he stretched a gangly arm across the table and helped himself to a chunk of coarse, brown bread. "And if I have to list those fucking laws one more time I'm gonna rip my tongue out."
"A-ah, Lizzie Borden?" Daniel asked, his spoon poised halfway to his mouth, eyebrows going up and then down in confusion.
"Took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks," Michael recited. He aimed his spoon at Daniel's face, "You can see it in her eyes: practically spirals in there." Scooping up a mouthful of potatoes, he laughed humourlessly. "She'd be a good snake-fuck, make a real scary overlord type." He swallowed the potatoes. "'Cept the snake'd prob'ly be too scared of her. Ha. Lizzie Borden, humanity's secret weapon."
Sam shook her head and dropped her spoon into her bowl. "Gee, and I wonder why Ingram wants to expel you?"
Michael's shoulders hunched up defensively as he aimed his reply at the table. "You're the ones who wanted me to go to that stupid mind-fuck school and get mind-fucked and recite mind-fuck laws and—"
"You need a new word," observed Daniel mildly. "That one's losing its shock-value pretty quick."
"Bullshit," Michael said flatly.
"That's better."
Closing her eyes, Sam caressed her lips with the flats of her fingernails for a long moment, visibly counting, her nostrils flaring. Daniel pressed his leg up against hers under the table, moral support. Finally, she opened her eyes and leaned forward. Michael was carefully lining up his cutlery at the edge of the table, rocking a little.
"You're obviously not being mind-fucked," she began patiently, "because you're too smart for that." Michael grunted and ran his palm along the table edge, fine-tuning his alignment. "But you have to go to school. You have to play the game. We're not asking you to believe it, but you have to understand it. You have to learn—"
"In the belly of the beast, in the belly of the beast, I know I know I know." He reached out to adjust the ladle in the stew pot so that it was on the same angle as the spoon in the potato bowl.
"It's dangerous to be who you are, Michael," Daniel added gently, catching him pointedly by the sleeve of his jacket. "You just have to try to fly under the radar a little longer, that's all."
A wry smile twisted up the corner of Michael's thin-lipped mouth. "You guys are seriously mixing your metaphors."
As it had for the better part of the summer, the fourth place setting came out again the next night, and the next six nights. At the end of each dinner, Daniel put the cutlery in the box on the shelf, blew out the candles, and crawled into bed, raising his chin so that he wouldn't be breathing in Sam's face, and puffing her hair out of his mouth. She curled toward him, her arms folded between them, fists knobby against his chest, one knee between his thighs. Her breath was only a little hotter than the August air that seemed to lurk, still and stagnant, in their room as though it, too, were waiting. In the next room, the one that had been the dining room back in The Day, Michael talked in his sleep. Although Daniel listened carefully, his eyes wide in the dark, he couldn't quite make out what Michael was saying. He'd only been able to conclude that the boy wasn't speaking English anymore.
On the eighth day, Daniel spent the morning listening to an argument between a man who ran a very successful brothel and the next door neighbour, who had opened her back door one morning to find a tangle of drunken, naked bodies on her porch. She had no real problem with that, but if the brothel-owner was going to use her tiny yard as an overflow room, she wanted compensation. There were negotiations, outrageous demands and more outrageous counter-demands and, finally, an agreement for the exchange of a weekly quantity of liquor and access to free services. The neighbour got a new, screened-in porch, and the brothel-owner got an extra room with herb tea and sliced tomatoes for his customers. Everybody was happy, especially Daniel, who collected a nice, red chicken and six eggs for his fee.
Weaving his way through the crowds at the market, dodging the occasional cart laden with vegetables, Daniel stroked the bird's head with his finger. "What will I call you, hmmm?" he asked her. Since she didn't have any good ideas of her own, he decided to call her "Dinner." She didn't seem to have much of an opinion about that.
He left the chicken at the butcher's stall and went to do some work in the public building, namely, the office spaces at the back of a mostly-sturdy movie theatre. As he passed through the auditorium, keeping close to the south wall where the floor was most stable, he wondered how long this place would last before the goons came and razed it like they had the last two. The goons were not big on home-grown civilian governance.
Noting his arbitration in his log book, he opened up the heating grate above the battered desk and slid the book inside the duct. Then, he read the minutes from the last meeting of the public works committee, which were hand-written in Jenny Peskadillo's defiant capital letters, and equally defiantly tacked up on the bulletin board for any passing squad to see. He grinned a little as he took the paper down. This time, he noted, the minutes were written on the back of a flier for a restaurant that was now a pit of black glass. "On special this week," the flier shouted. "Get mango shake for free!" Daniel's mouth only watered for a minute before he managed to put the idea of pad thai out of his mind. Number one on the agenda for the next meeting were Sam's plans to get the town water system running again. Daniel smiled, even though he knew that the plans would get vetoed as too ambitious. He was beginning to suspect that the committee chairwoman had some kind of monopoly on rain barrels.
By the time he was done puttering at "the office," dinner was waiting for him wrapped in a reasonably clean square of cloth at the butcher's stall. Daniel exchanged two of the eggs for the efficient service and headed back to the edge of town, walking down the middle of the cracked asphalt road to the sprawl of listing row-houses that they called home these days. Shooing a goose and a pink-white piglet off of his front step, he shouldered open the door, waving at Yana's little boy who was solemnly trying to herd the goose-and-pig team back onto his own lawn. As always, Lu blinked wide brown eyes at him and said nothing. Daniel smiled anyway. He was so busy wondering what a pig could possibly see in a goose that he didn't see the boots in the front hall until he tripped over them.
Catching himself with one hand against the wall, he swore softly as the sack of provisions swung from the handles looped over his wrist and connected sharply with the hall closet door. He was already working on the reaming he was going to give Michael for leaving his crap around again when he looked down and recognized the boots. The wave of relief that rose up in him made him close his eyes.
Leaning down to put the boots in the closet, he paused to run his thumb over one battered toe and into the creases at the ankle before shaking his head and tossing the boot in with its partner. He made himself go to the laundry room and lift the ceramic tile and put the chicken and the eggs down in the cool hole under the floor with the butter and the jar of milk. Need more milk, he thought. One of the eggs had a fine crack in it so he rummaged in the cupboard above the inert washing machine until he found another jar, cracked the egg the rest of the way, then put the jar in the cold cellar, too, with a saucer over it to keep the egg clean. Then he stood in the hallway, suspended.
It was the sound of water that got him moving again. He followed it out through the kitchen and into the courtyard. A duffel bag lay unzipped on the cracked paving stones by the kitchen door, half crushing the thyme and basil growing in a pot there. He lifted the bag and stroked the herbs upright again as the patter of water echoed in the small space. The sound raised gooseflesh on his arms as though it were trickling across his skin. Finally, he raised his head.
In the corner where the sun was bright and hot against the yellow brick, Jack was leaning over a basin on the workbench, squeezing a wet rag over his hair. The water streamed in quicksilver ribbons off of his bent head and back into the basin, and ran in serpentine rivulets down his back, leaving streaks of sunburned red showing through the grime. Spitting a little as the water ran into his face, he dropped the rag into the basin, squeezed the dirt out of it and raised it again. The waistband of his jeans was soaked. His feet were bare. He looked real, defined sharply by dark shadows, highlighted at the curve his neck and the slight jutting of his hip by the glare of the sun, substantial, undeniably there. Daniel closed his eyes again and the afterimage burned behind his lids, red and hot blue.
Rising, Daniel crossed the short distance in two strides and then his hand was reaching out before he even knew what he was doing, his fingers gently touching the back of Jack's neck, settling into the small, familiar indentations between his vertebrae. Jack didn't turn around, but he paused, and then a slow breath leaked out of him, softening the rigid lines of his shoulders. He dropped the rag back in the basin again and lifted it, dripping. Taking it from him, Daniel wiped at the dirt Jack couldn't reach between his shoulder blades, careful not to chafe his burned skin too much.
"You're late," Daniel said finally.
"Yeah. Got an invitation I couldn't refuse."
Daniel's fingers trailed down along Jack's spine and over the red sickle of a wound that curved across the small of his back, twice as long as Daniel's hand. It hadn't become a scar yet, was livid and puckered, and whoever had done the stitching hadn't been too concerned with aesthetics, but it didn't look infected, only sore. "Yeah, I can see that." Jack's skin twitched under Daniel's careful probing.
Reaching back to grab Daniel's wrist, Jack turned to face him. His eyes were tired, the lines around his mouth deeply etched in the afternoon glare. The skin of his forehead and between his eyes was a rash of red and flaking, dried blisters.
"Looks like it was a close one," Daniel observed, reaching out to touch his face.
Jack leaned away. "Isn't it always?" Bending to pick up his shirt from the ground, he used it to wipe his face and to scrub away the excess water in his hair. Daniel grinned at the silver-grey the makeshift towel left standing up at jaunty angles, but managed to keep his hands at his sides this time.
Gathering up the up the duffel bag, Jack disappeared through the door. "Carter?" he asked once they were inside.
Daniel followed, blinking hard in the relative dimness of the kitchen. "Hospital," he answered, and then, when Jack's head jerked up, he added, "Fixing the generator."
"Still?"
"Again."
"Oh." Once more, Jack moved away and Daniel followed, trailing him down the hallway to the front of the house and into the living room that now served as their bedroom. Jack stood in the middle of the worn carpet, the duffel bag dangling from his hand until Daniel took it from him and stowed it on the bottom of the massive entertainment unit that covered one wall. The stare of the gutted tv was almost as blank as Jack's. Reaching inside the bag, he pulled out Jack's 9mm and slipped the magazine, putting the gun in the top drawer next to Sam's and the clip in a box on top of the unit. He stood on tiptoe to push the box back out of sight.
"Where's the kid?" Jack's hands were hanging at his sides like they were still weighted down, pulling his shoulders into a subtle slump of fatigue.
"School."
Again, Jack's posture straightened. He raised his eyebrows. "Would that be the mind-fuck school?"
Daniel didn't know whether to laugh or to sigh so he managed a breathy hybrid of both. "Jack, we've been over this—"
Waving his arguments away, Jack lowered himself stiffly to sit on the edge of the mattress and scrubbed at his hair again, yawning. "I know. I'm just surprised you got him to go, that's all."
Daniel confessed with an uncomfortable shrug, "Sam said we'd kick him out if he didn't. I guess he's still young enough to fall for coercion and threats of abandonment."
Jack nodded noncommittally and flopped back against the pillow. "Whatever works." After a second he added, "Ow," but didn't bother to turn over and take the pressure off his lacerated back. He threw his arm over his eyes.
Hesitating, Daniel watched him a moment longer before turning to go. As Daniel was pulling shut the French doors, Jack murmured, "Hey," and stretched an arm out across the bed, palm up, fingers waggling an invitation. Daniel sat on the edge of the bed and let Jack grope blindly for his hand for a second before reaching out and lacing his fingers with his. In less than two breaths, Jack was asleep. Measuring a perfect square around him, the sunlight that fell between the open curtains bleached the bruises across his ribs almost to nothingness. Daniel traced them with his fingers. Then he bent and touched them with his lips. Jack didn't wake, but he dropped his arm from over his eyes and wrapped it protectively around his body. Daniel's jaw tightened. With a final squeeze of Jack's hand, he stood, leaned over to pull one of the curtains a little to shade Jack's eyes, and then crept to the door.
"So-o, I guess you'll be here when I get back, right?" he whispered. "Good. That's... that's good."
When Jack opened his eyes again the hot, white square of sunlight had slipped off of the bed and scaled the wall at his feet, going ruddy and turning the wallpaper with its tacky border of polo ponies to a slightly more respectable dry-desert spaghetti-western sepia. As he'd done a hundred times before, Jack counted the ponies he could see from his position on his back, letting his vision blur until he could almost imagine the horses moving, cantering along above the chair rail and out of sight. Beside him, Carter was breathing shallowly through her mouth, turned away from him, her loose skirt pulled up high on her thighs. Her tanned legs were sheened with a fine sweat. Moving carefully, Jack rolled over, feeling every single joint and muscle creaking like rusty hinges.
As if she heard it too, Carter said, "You forgot your oil can again, didn't you." There was a smile in her sleepy voice. "Tin Woodsman," she mumbled, in case he didn't get it.
Sliding his hand across her damp thigh, Jack rested his forehead between her shoulder blades and groaned instead of making the patently unromantic crack he wanted to about lube jobs and who needed one. As if she'd heard this, too, she leaned back against him a little, shifting to give him more thigh to explore. Lifting his head, he looked at her face over her shoulder, able to see only the curve of her cheekbone and the tips of her lashes. He worked his hand under the skirt and up to her hip.
"Since when do you sleep in the middle of the day?" he countered, his lips against the back of her neck.
"Since when do you?"
"I have an excuse. I was cudgeled."
She leaned back further and craned her neck to look at him. "'Cudgeled?' What have you been reading?" The smile faded, replaced by a frown as she rolled over the rest of the way to face him. Slipping out from under her skirt, his hand skimmed over her hip and found its way comfortably to the small of her back. "You look like hell," she observed.
"Cudgeling does that to you. You don't want to try it."
"I've been cudgeled. And pistol-whipped and bludgeoned. I've been bludgeoned lots of times." Coming from anybody else, the pride in her voice when she said that would've struck Jack as more than a little sick. Of course, over the years he'd gotten a look at the other guys, the ones who weren't standing when she walked away, and the score was definitely in her favour, skirts and long hair notwithstanding. She moved to touch the blisters between his eyebrows but pulled her fingers back again and, instead, tucked her arms in, her knobby knuckles against his chest. "I guess you didn't meet up with Teal'c, then," she said finally, her voice dropping low with disappointment.
"Oh, I met him. Hence my belated but lively return." As she started up onto her elbow, he folded his hands around hers and she settled back again. "I put the offer to him, but he decided he'd better stick around there in case any other colonels—"
"Former colonels—"
"— needed their sorry asses saved." He felt it as the disappointment seeped deeper into her body, made her heavier against the thin pillow. He recognized that weight because he felt it, too, only he'd had more time to get used to it. "He's not coming. Or not anytime soon, anyway."
"But he's okay, right?"
Jack shrugged. "Sure, if you can call playing pet Jaffa to some ass-hole collaborator 'okay'." He plucked a strand of her hair from where it was caught in the corner of her mouth and wound it around his middle finger. "He's a secret agent man. We should be proud."
"We are."
"Speaking of secret agents... why don't you just come in instead of lurking like that?" Jack raised his head and pinned Michael with a glare as he was doing a quick fade into the shadows of the hallway. "Come on." Heaving a dramatic sigh, Jack pushed himself up to a sitting position and swung his legs over Carter's to get out of the bed. The slash on his back was visible in his head as he moved, a taut, pulsing line of red, stinging with the strain and itching like a bastard. He rubbed his eyes with he heels of his hands instead of scratching at the wound, swaying a little with the headrush.
"Dinner's ready," Michael announced, still hovering in the doorway.
As he started to back away again, Jack caught him by the sleeve and pulled him in for a quick hug, holding him until he felt Michael's hands pat tentatively at his back. Then Jack let him go with a gentle slap on the side of his face.
"What'd I tell you about wearing that jacket in public?" Jack demanded, tugging at the collar critically. It was a serious question, but he couldn't quite keep the grin from surfacing and ruining the menacing parental effect he was going for.
Michael shrugged and pulled free, but there was a glow in his eyes that he wouldn't let become a full-fledged smile. "Do you want dinner or what?"
"Is it meat?"
"It was a chicken. Daniel cooked it."
Michael set the table, carefully aligning Jack's set of matching cutlery. Since it was a special occasion, Michael got a whole glass of milk with dinner. It was warm and clung to the back of his throat and was better than candy. They didn't do much talking, but Michael could feel them, Sam and Daniel, watching Jack, noting how his movements—stretching for more bread, getting up to put his plate in the sink—were pretty much like normal, except with a kind of hitch in them when the gash across his back reminded him that he wasn't fully healed yet, no matter if he felt a lot better. The burns on Jack's forehead were faded, but Michael didn't miss how Daniel's gaze tended to rest there and slide away when Jack looked up. Jack wasn't going to tell them anything right then about what he'd seen or done or what had been done to him, but they were reading the story, anyway. The intensity of their attention prickled on Michael's skin, made him itchy and jumpy.
So, he talked too much, filling up the space where Jack's story wasn't. He talked about Tam and his message delivery venture, but not the spin-off blackmail venture. He talked about Ingram and the way she happily droned on day after day about the Laws of Service and Proper Obeisance and blah blah yadda yadda as if the god was ever going to come here himself to check up on them and let them bow at his stolen feet. And because he was angry about Ingram and the laws and school, he started to talk about the girls in his class, the ones who were gone, but when Sam's eyes went dark and her head bowed low over her plate, he wished he had ripped his tongue out, after all.
After dinner, they let him escape without doing dishes. He left them together in the kitchen, moving around in the small space, bumping into each other on purpose, the air around them practically sparkling, a ghost light around their bodies that intensified the closer they got to each other. When he closed his eyes he could feel it like a hum in his bones, just beyond the threshold of understanding. It was warm and bright and it scared him the way it opened him up and went right through him like that.
Slamming the door, his jacket half on, he ran down the road, counting his footsteps under his breath. Something like voices murmured in his head like a hive-full of lazy bees, inarticulate and insistent, waxing and waning as he passed along down the row of houses, and so he ran faster, counted louder. At the end of the street he cut into the cornfield, feeling the high, green walls folding shut behind him, muffling the noise with a cool, vegetable silence. Bursting out into the open suddenly, he crossed the cracked red earth to the shrunken summer river and splashed across a sandbar and up the opposite bank. Then he fell on his back into the scrubby, sunburned grass and counted out loud from one to five hundred and back to one again. By then the stars had started to wink with pinprick brightness in the east, and it was quiet in his head again; he was alone again. He got up, carefully brushed the dust off of his jacket, and wandered home the long way, upriver and across the bridge and down the street past one of Carole's three sets of dead, dark stoplights. He was sweating, his feet cold in his wet sneakers.
Jack's body was leaner than when he'd left, with a kind of sharpness at the wrists, the hips, the cheekbones, ribs that showed, the spaces between them wide enough for Daniel's fingers to lie there comfortably. Within the blurred contours of his fatigue there was a tightly coiled wire of tension his body wouldn't give up, as though it were giving him shape, as essential as bone. Daniel and Sam kneaded his muscles, kissed him, demanded his tenderness, reminded him what that was. But before gentleness there was struggle, force against force, Jack pushing and the two of them pushing back. Jack's muscles were ropy on his too-thin arms as he pinned a wrist, or balanced above them in turn, testing their solidity against his own. Sam knew when to match his strength with strength and when to give in. Daniel knew how to take him to the edge and when to let him fall. And when they did finally fall, crossways on the mattress in a tangle of sheets and limbs, the full moon was low and fat and orange in the sky, glowing like an erstwhile streetlight through the crack between the curtains and casting a long, thin blade of gold across their sweaty bodies.
Jack lay on his stomach between them while they studied him with fingertips and lips. Sam shared a pillow with him, almost nose-to-nose, and stared into his eyes, traced her fingers along his lean cheek, his jaw, his throat, comparing this new topography with the one in her memory. Daniel leaned on one elbow and caressed Jack's spine from the hair at his nape to the small of his back, following each valley between ribs until the bones touched the mattress on one side or Sam's stomach on the other, or until Jack's skin started to twitch on the verge of ticklish. Then Daniel doubled back to the spine again. It was like mapping the veins of a leaf, testing structural integrity. When he finally made it as far as the wound, Jack seemed relaxed, unwound and undone, but Daniel's fingers were shaking.
Running his middle finger along the uneven slash, feeling the fishing line stitches catching on his calloused fingertip, Daniel asked, "Knife?"
"Gauntlet," Jack answered, and Sam kissed the word away.
Daniel's neck muscles tightened as in his imagination Jack arched his back, straining away from pain, and the talon broke through skin and muscle and rattled along bone, seeking something vital.
"Jesus," Daniel hissed. "Damnit. Goddamnit, Jack." Jack rolled over, hiding the wound, but Daniel kept talking, words hot in his mouth, throat tight enough to raise the pitch of his voice. "Goddamnit, Jack. You fucking goddamn sonofabitch." His fingers glided along Jack's chest from sternum to stomach, reading the map of bruises there, his touch a gentle contradiction to the whispered harshness of his voice . "Damn you." His throat was burning.
Awkwardly pulling his arm out from between them, Jack put his hand on the back of Daniel's head and pulled him down onto his chest, heedless of bruises or Daniel's resistance. Sam didn't say "shhhh" but it was there in her fingers, cool on Daniel's temple, stroking back his hair.
"You are such an asshole," Daniel muttered, resenting the fact that his anger and fear were bleeding out of him when he wasn't done with them yet.
Jack groped for Daniel's hand, but it curled into a fist at his touch. Unwilling to let him work the fingers loose, Daniel made Jack settle for squeezing his wrist. "Yeah," Jack admitted, his voice vibrating through bones and bruises against Daniel's cheek. "So you've said."
After awhile, the pounding of Daniel's heart slowed until finally it wasn't competing with the sound of Jack's and he could listen to their breathing, the slow, measured swinging into the greyness between waking and sleep. "You're not going back out there alone again, by the way," Daniel announced with finality.
"Not your call."
"Well, I've seen you naked—"
"Me, too," Sam interjected, words indistinct, muffled against Jack's shoulder.
"—and nobody's saluted you in awhile, so whose call is it, really?"
"—sir," Sam finished, balancing on the line between respect and irony.
Jack said nothing, his fingers tight as a vice on Daniel's arm.
As was usual these days, Michael's sleep wasn't restful. The rhythmic breathing from the next room followed him into his dreams and became the harsh rasp of breath that tasted like blood, the endless sawing of smoke-sharp air through overtaxed lungs, counterpoint to the pounding of his feet against pavement, two stumbling steps for each of Daniel's sure ones. In the puddle of water that spanned the whole width of the alleyway the town burned upside down, livid and wavering, until Daniel's boots splashed through it and then there was only the brighter fire in the air above their heads, and the percussion of explosions Michael could feel in the marrow of his bones before the shock waves battered at his ears. A dark wing passed across the wedge of sky, chased by the wail of its engines. A truck crept across the alley mouth, flatbed full of men. Narrow-beamed in the smoke, flashlight speared into the alley's darkness, angled and danced crazily as the truck bounced and rattled along the pitted street.
"They want me," Michael said, only he said it without voice.
Turning to him, Daniel crouched and dragged him down to the wet pavement. One of Daniel's eyes was lit with guttering orange, the other hidden behind the blank lens of his glasses. "They want us, not you," he corrected as though he'd heard him, and leaned them both deeper into the shadow of a dumpster. "Because of who we are. For what we know."
His face muffled in the scratchy wool of Daniel's sweater, Micheal shook his head. "For what I know," he tried to say, but he didn't know what he knew and there were no words to say it.
And somewhere in the centre of things, behind Michael's fear-wide eyes, in the dark core of dreams, there was something darker scrabbling at the back of his gritted teeth, wanting words to give it shape, wanting out.
By the time the moon had set, the room was cooler and a sluggish breeze stirred the edge of the curtain, bringing with it the smell of distant rain. Moving very carefully, Jack inched his way down the mattress a bit until he could duck out from under Daniel's arm, pulled his legs out from under Carter's and shimmied off the end of the bed onto the floor. Neither one of them woke. Outside, a bird was singing in the softening dark, an endless tumble of notes that reminded Jack of Daniel, back in The Day, rattling out passages in arcane languages meaningful only to him. The bird paused. In the momentary silence, Daniel rolled over and Sam fitted herself into his hollows, her cheek against his shoulder blade, her arm draping around his waist, hand finding his. Daniel's fingers twined with hers as his mouth moved around an unvoiced reassurance. His own mouth as dry as sandpaper, Jack pulled on his jeans and padded into the kitchen in search of drinkable water.
He didn't jump when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye, but his muscles snapped to attention, making his wound keen with a thin, stinging redness behind his eyes. Michael was sitting in his underwear on the bench in the breakfast nook, his narrow back a pale curve in the gloom. He was rocking slightly, chewing the edge of one thumbnail. On the table in front of him all of the cutlery was spread out in disarray. Michael wasn't crying, but his breathing was harsh and uneven, a prelude to tears.
Coming slowly up behind him, Jack could see what the problem was: Michael had begun to arrange the cutlery by size—spoons, the lone dessert fork, dinner forks, knives, serving spoons—but the patterns on the handles had derailed him. Forks matched forks, but the patterns were wrong, a kaleidoscope of difference and disorder. The fact that Jack recognized this was proof positive in his mind that he'd been hanging around with the kid for too long. Straddling the bench beside him, Jack sorted the cutlery into piles of matching or similar patterns. Leaving the biggest pile in front of Michael, he swept the rest into the box.
"We don't need these ones," he said, and leaned over to put the box on the counter, stretching to nudge it out of sight behind a sack of flour.
Nodding vaguely, but not in thanks, or even acknowledgment, really, Michael began to arrange the remaining pieces from smallest to largest, lining them up carefully against the edge of the table. His fair hair fell over his eyes but he didn't brush it away, so Jack did it for him, fruitlessly, as it turned out.
"Time for a haircut," Jack observed.
Michael's hands slowed to a stop, his body becoming still. "I'm not fifteen," he said, head bowed, shoulders hunched, as though he were confessing, expecting punishment.
Jack's stomach tightened to a knot. "Oh?"
"I'm older." Michael nodded, confirming this, and then shook his head slightly in denial. "And I'm younger." Raising his head, he searched Jack's face, his eyes afraid. The unshed tears there seemed to distill the wan, grey light so that his eyes gleamed like polished metal for a moment before he blinked and the tears coursed down his cheeks. "These aren't my hands," he concluded, bowing his head again to look at them, limp in his lap.
The skin prickling on the back of his neck, Jack cast a longing glance over his shoulder in the direction of Daniel and Carter. He cleared his throat. "Well," he began without any clear idea what was going to come next, "possession is nine tenths of the law." He cupped Michael's chin and made him look up. "They're your hands now." Again, he was rewarded with that strangely neutral nod. "C'mon. Back to bed. No school today." He grinned a somewhat brittle grin. "We'll go fishing."
"I hate fishing," Michael complained as he let Jack usher him back into his room. "It's boring." Obediently, he lay down and pulled the sheet up to his chin and didn't look like a fifteen-year-old at all.
"We fish, we eat. Unless you want Daniel to provide all of your meals. Or—" Jack paused for chilling dramatic effect, "—Carter."
This time, when Michael made an expression of mock fear, he looked like himself again.
"Go to sleep," Jack said. He waited until Michael closed his eyes before continuing through the room and slipping past the curtain that separated the old dining room from the living room. On the mattress under the window, Carter and Daniel had shifted again, were fitted like puzzle pieces, her head tucked under his chin, his knee between her thighs. Pulling the sheet up over them, Jack resisted the urge to wake them, to make them bitch about being alert before sunrise in a world without coffee. Instead, he threw his shirt on and went back to the kitchen, his mouth twice as dry as before.
The water in the "boiled water" bucket (easily identifiable by the neat, block letters in Sam's handwriting on the side) smelled invitingly clean, and he was reaching in with a glass to ladle some out when, in the next room, Michael started to whisper in his sleep. Pausing, fingers touching the tepid water, Jack listened until the hairs were standing up on his arms. Whatever the kid was saying, he wasn't saying it in English. Jack put the lid back on the bucket and opened up the cupboard over the stove instead. There was one bottle there, the existing label customized and edited in black magic marker to turn it into a succinct love letter: "Jack: Daniel's Special Blend—8000 proof. Use only under doctors' supervision." Taking the bottle down, Jack closed the cupboard and let himself out the kitchen door.
The flagstones of the courtyard were slick under his bare feet and cold with morning dew. In the square of sky visible above the close walls, the clouds were low and ominous, seeming to glow from inside somehow, and darker in the shadows because of it. Somewhere, the bird was still working its endless litany, variations on variations on a theme. Jack thought of harpsichords and fugues as he shouldered open the wrought iron gate and followed the path around the side of the neighbour's unit and into the garden.
Stretching out in both directions to the limits of the row of houses, the gardens were whispering, all the leaves turned his way on one side of him and away from him on the other, showing their undersides as the wind swept along close to the ground. Tomato plants clung heavily to their frames, gangly stems drooping under the weight of their fruit. Lettuce unfurled and bowed away from the wind, while cabbages were unmoved, stoic lumps. Further out, potatoes ruffled their leaves and kept their real opinions to themselves, underground, colluding with radishes and carrots. Pressing against the frost fence, the swaying, rustling cornfields marked the furthest margin of the town. Jack walked along the nearest row, the bottle dangling from his hand, and felt a little proprietary pride in the lushness of their own sliver of the garden, even though he'd been away for most of the growing season. By the time he made it to the fence, his pant legs were soaked with dew and his feet were cold.
There, at the end of the row, a pole-straight cottonwood bowed slightly toward him, hush-hushing, its tear-shaped leaves cutting the air. Below it, a wobbly plastic lawn chair sat next to a wooden crate. On the crate was a mason jar filled with withered dandelions. Slumping down onto the chair, Jack turned his face to the wind, tilting his head back, closing his eyes. The air was heavy with impending rain, and the smell of it, a cool, slippery gleam floating on the lingering warmth of dry, hot days, brought with it images, memory, things he felt in his skin.
He remembered lying on his stomach on a prickly blanket, his arms folded under his head. He was looking out over the scrubby undulations of foothills, and the sudden flatness of prairie, looking down on them, actually, from the height of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a ridge with history going back to before white men came and rewrote what they didn't erase. Below him, off close to the horizon, a grey sheet of rain was wavering in the wind like a billowing curtain, sometimes advancing, sometimes retreating, hovering for a long time at the yellow crest of the next hill, as though uncertain about taking the plunge into the shallow, flat-bottomed valley below. A dozen cattle were huddled in the lee of this hill and their agitated lowing came to him intermittently on the advancing curl of wind, dropping away again to leave only the uneven hissing of his breath through clenched teeth and the singing of the woman who was stitching him up. She sang the whole time she worked, telling an important story in a language he didn't understand, her deft hands pulling his flesh together with his own fishing line. Jack concentrated on the rain, the metallic smell of it, its elusive, seductive whisper, and tried not to flinch each time the darning needle pierced his skin. Above him, the sky was blue and the grass around him was dry, the soil warm against his body.
When Teal'c's shadow fell across him, he started, blinking up at the silhouette.
"You are in good hands, O'Neill," Teal'c said, crouching beside him, and Jack knew that what he meant was goodbye.
Finished her stitching, the old woman—a Peigan, and, apparently, one in Teal'c's expanding network of friends—slapped Jack gently on the rump and declared him "done!" As his tense muscles relaxed into this verdict, he tipped into an exhausted sleep where he drifted on the front of an uncertain storm, advancing, retreating, hesitating. When he woke up in the blue light of a half moon, the tents of the Peigan were gone, his spool of fishing line was short an extra 30 feet or so, not counting the length used to sew him up, and his backpack had been replaced by a duffel bag, all of his possessions—even his gun—carefully transferred over and neatly packed. The duffel bag wasn't as good as the backpack for long hauls, but on the other hand, slung over his shoulder, it didn't ride against his stitches, either. Not a bad exchange for his life, he figured, as he set off down into the valley, heading east away from the mountains and into the rain.
"Ah, I thought that was you I saw half-naked in my courtyard," a voice said, emerging like a brightly coloured bird from the cool green-grey cover of rustling wind.
Without opening his eyes, Jack said, "I'd've been all naked except that you were watching."
"Yes," the voice conceded with a touch of sadness. "In the tiny world of shared courtyards, I suppose I'm the Acteon to your Diana." There was a short pause and then the voice came again, this time from his knee level. "Acteon was—"
"I know who Acteon was." He opened his eyes to find Yana Maio sitting crosslegged on the grass in front of him, looking like a country and western buddha in jeans and a checked bowling shirt with a galloping horse on each breast pocket. Her straight, black hair whipped around her face as she looked up at him, smiling.
She blinked slowly at him, then raised a hand to pull the hair out of her eyes. "Huh," she said with a hint of admiration, the kind usually reserved for horses who did arithmetic. "I didn't picture you knowing mythology."
Jack reviewed about half a dozen witty responses to that and settled for a change of subject. He held the bottle out to her.
"Nuh-uh," she refused, shaking her head so that the hair fell over her eyes again. "I learned my lesson about that stuff. You weren't here to see it, thank the god-du-jour." Leaning back on one hand, she felt around in the front pocket of her jeans, pulling out a thin, slightly crumpled joint. "Besides, isn't it a bit early for that rot-gut?" Twisting to turn her back more fully to the wind, she cupped her hand around the lighter and lit the spliff, sucking in a long breath and holding it for a second before letting it out. The wind carried the sweet pungency of the weed away before Jack could appreciate it. When she held the joint out for him, he hesitated, then, shrugging, put the bottle down, giving it a twist to anchor it in the thick, soft grass.
The smoke bit his lungs and his throat, making him cough out the first toke. He did better with the second though, holding its heat in while he leaned forward and handed the spliff back to Yana. During a brief pause in the wind, he sat back in the chair and let the smoke wreathe out from between his lips, sucking the last of it in again and then letting it go. The high came from behind him, rolling over him like a wave with a frothy crest. As it swept through him, it seemed to lift his bones away from each other, loosening his joints in sequence—neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, fingers—so that he was subtly floating on the passing swell, lingering tension washing out of him from spine to fingertips and coursing onward and away from him. With the wind in his face, then, he seemed to be looking the wrong way, or, maybe the weather was coming from the wrong direction.
"When I was a kid, I thought the trees made the wind," he said.
Yana's cackle was delayed and arrived finally mixed with the scent of illicit smoke. Only it wasn't illicit anymore. Like a lot of things. Thanks to the gods-du-jour, or at least the Jaffa who'd blasted the old world, the old rules, to dust.
"I'm glad you're back," Yana said. "Your boy Will did a good job negotiating my territory, but there's a guy over on Spruce been selling wheelchair weed—I think he swiped some clippings off me, the rat-bastard—and he's creeping into my zone. Maybe you could go ask him nicely to honour the contract." When he didn't answer, she tapped his foot with hers. "Or, y'know, not-so nicely."
"Jesus, Yana," he snorted. It was bad enough that Daniel was acting as chief negotiator; Jack wasn't sure he wanted to be remembered as the enforcer for the new world's incipient drug barons. Of course, he wasn't sure he wanted to go down in history for what he actually was, either, so it was a good thing nobody was too interested in writing history these days.
"C'mon, Johnny," she cajoled, nudging him again.
"John," he corrected her.
"John. What good are contracts if there's nobody to make sure people stick to them?" Deterred by his silence, she stopped nudging and turned to unwrapping the little roach—hunched low to shelter it from the wind—and dusted the remaining bud into a zip-lock bag from her pocket. "You know," she went on musingly once she'd tucked the bag away again, "back in the day, my, ah, horticultural skills were going to put Lu through university." She flopped back on the grass and folded her small hands on her stomach. "Back in The Day," she repeated, adding capital letters with emphasis.
Jack asked, "How is Lu these days?"
"Same," she told the sky. "Back in The Day I'd've moved out of this town and taken him to Vancouver or Calgary or maybe even Toronto—Sick Kids' Hospital was good, had a good rep, anyway—and I'd've found some hot-shit doctor with thirty letters after his name and he'd've told me what the problem was and Lu would've been in a special school and maybe someday he—" Her voice getting thin with suppressed tears, she stopped and cleared her throat. "But you don't get special treatment for being damaged anymore. Being damaged doesn't make you special."
Jack thought of Michael and his hand fell to the bottle beside his chair. He hooked it between his middle two fingers and lifted it onto his lap but didn't open it. Behind him, the sun was turning the sky to a paler grey, reflecting on the windows of the row houses, a long line of blind, unblinking eyes.
"Speaking of damage," Yana said, raising her head to inspect him. "What the hell happened to you this time?"
His mouth automatically started say "classified," but he caught it with a bit of a smile and a dismissive wave of a hand. "Long story," he answered.
"Why do you keep doing this to yourself?" she asked with the kind of weary, sympathetic condescension mastered only by mothers.
Standing, he plucked the dandelions out of the mason jar and tossed them over the fence into the cornfield, emptying the brackish water after them. "I'm good at two things, Yana. One of them is getting beat up."
As he walked away she called, "Plenty of ways to get beat up here, you know, at home with your friends and your kid."
He waved over his shoulder with his newly appropriated mason jar and headed back toward the house. He just made it to the kitchen door when a thin, cold rain began to fall.
CHAPTER TWO: GHOSTS IN THE EYE
A sheaf fallen and grain scattered
these few last apples
that are bitter to the tongue
("Harvest Night," Brighid E. Stone)
After Canadian Forces Base Suffield, they were silent in the lurching pick-up truck. It had been bad. Carter and Teal'c scavenged the base administrative area with grim efficiency while Daniel packed the plunder neatly into truck, one eye on the kid, and Jack prowled, keeping everyone in sight, the grip of the 9mm sweaty in his hand. It didn't take long to determine that they'd find no survivors, and, including the time it took to load up what little they could find of use, they were there for less than an afternoon.
Getting out of the base town of Ralston was more time-consuming, though, as they had to pick their way down back streets, often doubling back to find clear passage around the craters of black glass and the shifting hulks of collapsed buildings, stopping to gather supplies from any shop left standing. There was no shortage of loot there and no-one left alive in the town to claim it. It wouldn't be long, though, before survivors from outflung communities made their way here. In the last store, Carter paused on the way out and unloaded her pack again, leaving a line of canned vegetables and three bottles of water on the cashier's counter. She met Jack's eyes defiantly for a second before ducking her head and carrying the rest of her stuffed bags out to the truck.
Finally making it to the main road, they found a school bus on its side blocking their way, a dozen cars accordianed into its underside and scattered out around it, crumpled, blackened and, often, mostly blasted away, mangled remnants emerging from craters like creatures in some kind of B-movie. Around them, the air was greasy with sinuous wisps of smoke, cloying, heavy with the sickly-sweet smell of roasted meat. Leaving the road, Jack navigated around the wreckage and then stopped to check the map. While the truck was still rolling, Daniel scrambled out of the back bed and threw up on tarmac still hot to the touch from the strafing and fires. Then, he crawled back in without a word and they moved on.
The dirt road meandered in and out of stands of trees and arrowed forthrightly across empty plains and still didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular except generally south. Carter sat up front with Jack on the bench seat, the boy's head on her lap. His feet were pressed up against Jack's thigh, twitching as though he were dreaming, even though his eyes were open. Jack watched the road and didn't think too hard about where Michael got those sneakers, or if he'd ever been to Sea World before materializing out of thin air on the ramp in the Gateroom. He tried not to think about other questions like who or how or why, but they prowled at the edges of his attention like wolves. The truck's radio gave them only static on a wide selection of channels.
On the third day they came to the first marker. It stood at the top of a hill beside the road, black against the dark billowing of smoke that had smudged the sky to the south for the last day and a half. They'd been driving with the windows closed, the vents shut, taking turns in the back bed, hunching low with bandannas tied over their faces to filter the thick, churning air.
Skidding to a stop, Jack pulled the emergency brake and they all got out and climbed the hill, soot-stained grass brittle under their boots and crumbling when they grasped at it for purchase with their hands. They hadn't reached the crest when Jack looked over his shoulder at Teal'c and then nodded toward the standard.
"That looks familiar," he said, his voice muffled behind cloth.
It was goa'uld. Nailed to the pole beneath it was an upside-down ReMax real estate sign, the translation of the goa'uld warning spray-painted in black, uneven block letters: "DON'T."
Squinting above his bandanna, Jack continued upward, the rest of the team straggling behind him, Daniel with Michael bringing up the rear. Jack staggered a little when he crested the hill and looked down the other side.
"Ho-lee fuck."
The valley, the low hills beyond it, the plain beyond them, were black, all the way to the horizon to the south, to the east and west. It looked like a sea, slowly shifting swirls of ash drifting ahead of the restless wind, plumes of smoke curling sideways along the ground before dispersing upward to billow against the grey bellies of rain-heavy clouds. If you stepped onto that plain, Jack thought, you'd disappear up to your neck in ash. You'd drown in it. To the west, the sun peered blearily between banks of clouds, spreading a ruddy stain of light for just a moment before winking out, leaving the land without contours. The heat that rose up and pressed against Jack was dry, pulling moisture from his skin. The earth was still burning under there. Maybe it would burn forever.
Carter was breathing heavily beside him. He felt her turn, look back toward the standard, its makeshift cardboard sign rattling intermittently against the pole.
"Radiation?" she asked.
Teal'c answered from Jack's other side. "It is most likely."
Jack turned then. Daniel was behind him, Michael pressed close and clinging to the hem of his work shirt. For a moment, Daniel's hands closed into white-knuckled fists before he hid them under his arms. His eyes, grey and expressionless behind his glasses, were on the sky. Grinding his teeth, Jack looked left, then right. "We'll go west," he decided. "Maybe we can get around it."
They couldn't get around it. Every ten miles they passed another standard, and the ash sea rolled on and on beside them, making its own weather, churning up the sky. The first night, Carter sat hunched by firelight over the broken Geiger counter she'd scavenged from CFB Suffield, the shadows of her hands wavering around its dissected innards. As the sun was turning the black to grey in the east, she was rewarded with a stuttering chatter from the box that made Daniel raise his chin from his chest, eyes suddenly bright and naked in the pale light.
"Levels are good here," she reported, the relief a brittleness under the smooth, professional surface of her voice. "But we shouldn't get any closer.
Jack nodded. Daniel's tongue traced his lip and then he nodded too.
They stayed as far away as the road allowed. On the third day, the sea lapped listlessly against the flanks of the Rockies as far up as the treeline. At the Frank Slide in the Crow's Nest Pass, they were stopped by a wall of stone, the rock faces on either side of the pass scarred by the plasma blasts that had collapsed the mountains into the valley.
Climbing over boulders the size of buses, Daniel pried half of the tourist information plaque from under a heap of grey scree and wiped its face with a gloved hand. The old slide had buried a whole town, leaving then only one baby amid the rubble. "The miracle baby," he said, showing Jack the corner of the plaque where one tiny eye remained of the photograph.
No-one spoke as they backtracked and Jack turned the truck north, leaving SG-1 behind them, dwindling in the rearview mirror, like the mountains, lost in smoke.
By the time they presented themselves to the citizen's patrol on the outskirts of Carole, they'd become John and Will and Alison Baker (brothers, husband, sister, wife; they didn't really specify unless pressed). Teal'c was already gone, leaving behind him an absence they could feel like a phantom limb. Michael was Michael and they didn't specify much about him either. For a long time, Carter's sentences had gaps in them where the "sir" used to be.
Daniel watched Jack cross the courtyard, his figure blurred by the rain. Jack came in, brushing water out of his hair as he pulled the door shut, slamming it twice when it bounced open again after his first attempt. "Oops," he muttered. "Gonna wake everybody."
Pointing with his knife toward the street, Daniel said, "They went to meet the water truck," and went back to making breakfast. He was chopping fruit without his glasses on, a little exercise that drove Sam crazy, but that he considered essential skill-building: his prescription was already five years out of date and he wasn't getting any less astigmatic, even if the myopia was slowly being balanced by age-related far-sightedness.
"Ah. No harm, then."
As Jack leaned around Daniel to put the mason jar in the sink, Daniel turned his head and kissed him on the mouth. When he pulled back, he licked his lips. "Hm," he said, peering into Jack's slightly bloodshot eyes. "You taste... like you met up with Yana, actually."
Jack grunted and, putting down the bottle of Daniel's Special, took the paring knife out of Daniel's hand. Holding an apple in his palm, he sliced it in half, turning the cool, red fruit as the knife bit into the juicy flesh. Twisting the two halves apart, he put half in one of Daniel's hands and returned the knife to the other.
"Kind of early in the day for that, do you think?" Daniel went on lightly, slicing his half of the apple into cubes and dropping them into the pot at his elbow. "Yana's product, I mean, not the apple."
"You said it yourself," Jack responded, his mouth full. "Not like anybody's gonna be saluting me around here or anything."
Jack's tone was equally light, but there was a sharp edge of challenge in it—that razor in the apple mothers are always warning trick-or-treaters about—that made Daniel's hands pause, unsure. He didn't turn around, but he could feel Jack's gaze on the back of his neck. He was waiting, but Daniel didn't know whether stepping up to this would help Jack work through his frustration or if it would just lead them around in circles like it usually did. Daniel finished chopping another apple and said nothing.
The rain was coming down harder now, drumming on the window and the ceiling over the breakfast nook where the upper story of the house was partly blasted away. Daniel could hear the tarp up there snapping in the wind. He'd have to go later and weight it down again. Slicing the tiny rubies of a few late wild raspberries in two with careful strokes of the knife, he went through his weekly inner debate about moving on, finding someplace where the roof wasn't likely to collapse on them one day. But there weren't any such places in Carole, or not right now at any rate, with winter creeping closer every day and the scattered families coming into the town looking for someplace to wait out the impending bad weather. They were lucky to have this place to themselves. Yana would be sharing her house with at least two other families by harvest time. He scooped the berries off of the cutting board into the pot.
"You know she wants me to go rough up some guy on Spruce Street," Jack said at last, his tone inviting Daniel to join him in his disapproval. Jack's way of apologizing for his earlier testiness.
"Oh yeah. Him."
"Yeah, well Ms. Mini-Godfather over there wants I should teach him a lesson." The goodfella impression was marred by the mouthful of apple. Daniel measured water into the pot. "You should go talk to him," Jack advised.
Daniel shook his head. "My job is to arbitrate and memorize. Enforcement is not my branch of the municipal government. If we ever get a municipal government." He crouched to pull a bag of oatmeal out of the cupboard under the sink, checking the bottle of moonshine on the way down and noting that it was still full. "You know, that guy has a hell of a library. Too bad he has to keep it buried in his garage. Jenny Peskadillo is dying to get her hands on it." Standing, he propped the floppy bag on the counter and reached in up to his elbow with the measuring cup. "Maybe he'll let me get a look at it sometime. I should ask, make it part of my fee if he wants a new contract negotiated with Yana."
"It's heartwarming to see that you're so close with the local crime syndicates," Jack observed acidly, making Daniel's hands stop again.
Daniel smiled and dumped the oatmeal into the water. "It's not a crime anymore, Jack. They're just people making a living. Besides, I think this town could use a little mellowing out." He knew Jack certainly could. He looked over his shoulder at him, ran his eyes up and then down his body, braced against the counter, arms folded across his chest, head bowed. The calm they'd managed to massage into him last night was hardening into tension again. Sighing as he stirred the pot, Daniel decided to get it over with. Once more into the breach.... "So, speaking of crime bosses, I gather you met up with the king of the hill."
"Yeah."
"And?"
"And."
"And?"
"And," Jack started to look shifty. "He's not so bad, really."
Daniel tried not to guffaw his disbelief and was only partially successful. "And?"
"And he sold me to the goa'uld."
"No, he's not really bad, really."
Jack waved his hands. "It was a big misunderstanding. We got off on the wrong foot."
"Clearly."
He waved his hands again like he was trying to wipe Daniel's skepticism out of the air. "Anyway, the precise degree of badness isn't the point. The point is, Teal'c thinks we can use this guy."
"Use him. The guy who sold you to the goa'uld?" Daniel raised his eyebrows. Jack dropped his hands and shook his head, fixing his eyes on some spot in the middle of the floor. "Use him for what, exactly?"
Now Jack looked incredulous. "What the hell kind of question is that? To kick goa'uld ass, that's what."
"Joshua Mason is a thug, and a collaborator."
"I'm not saying we trust him, but he's got resources. Connections, and I mean underground Jaffa connections. You think he gets tretonin just by asking for it?" He waited, but Daniel made no answer. "He's a businessman. He'll do whatever serves his interests."
"Including biting the hand that feeds him?" Jack's gaze was back on the floor. A muscle was jumping in his neck. Resisting the urge to still it with his lips, Daniel opened his arms to include the kitchen with its water-stained ceiling, the house with its mostly missing top floor, the town with its dark streetlights and subsistence gardens. "What could we possibly have that he would want?"
Jack took a step across the kitchen and, backing Daniel against the refrigerator, pinned him there with his lean, hot weight. By reflex, Daniel's hands came up and gripped Jack's forearms. As intense as Jack' eyes were, though, the hands he placed on either side of Daniel's face were gentle, smoothing away his startled frown with a gently stroking thumb across the cheekbone. "We have this," Jack whispered, squeezing Daniel's head. "Brains. Experience. We're the best experts on the goa'uld this planet has to offer."
Daniel stared. Jack stared back. When Daniel spoke, his voice was quiet. "He's already made Teal'c into a slave—"
"He's got tretonin—"
"And we've spent four years hiding from him and the Governor—who already tried to fry your brain, by the way—and now you want us to—"
"As long as there's a goa'uld up there—" Jack let go of Daniel's face to point at the ceiling, his voice a low, furious whisper. "—we're all slaves."
"I know that."
"They're gonna keep coming."
"I know—"
"They're gonna keep coming here and blowing up your libraries and stealing kids out of school." He pushed away from Daniel. "What do you think a goa'uld wants with nine teen-aged girls, huh? Think about that when you're feeling complacent."
Daniel's laugh was unbelieving and bitter. "I was here. I was the one who held Sam when she cried all fucking night." He closed his eyes against the memory, Sam's anger, his fingers crushed in her fist, her voice hollowing him out—"They're just little girls"—and the vision of a smoke-stained Jenny Peskadillo kneeling in the rubble of the library. Jesus. Jesus Christ.
Running his hands through his hair, Daniel turned away and listened to the slowing patter of the rain, the goose kicking up a ruckus in the courtyard, Yana shouting from inside her kitchen,"Squeeze him like that, Lu, no wonder he squawks. Let him go." Normal sounds in a fucked up world. Finally, he slumped down on the bench with his elbows on the table and rested his forehead in his hands, working to bring his voice down to the typically conspiratorial murmur they used for these kinds of conversations. "Say we go against the goa'uld and we fail. Or even if we succeed. They'll just send another, and that's a best-case scenario." He met Jack's eyes. "What happens to Michael, then?"
Jack looked at him for a long moment, his hands going lax at his sides, then sat across from him. As he leaned forward, his body took on that painful, contradictory posture of weariness and tension, the slightly bowed shoulders, ropy muscles in the arms taut. This was Jack, these days, worn down by withheld action. His voice was a keen, insistent blade. "There's got to be a reason we're alive when everyone else in the mountain is dead."
Daniel bowed his head. The weight was so heavy he thought he could feel his bones splintering. But that was a familiar feeling. He wanted to take Jack's hand, but he didn't. "Maybe we're not meant to save the world, Jack. Maybe we're just meant to survive it."
Jack sat back, his expression unreadable. After a long moment, he stood and walked away.
Daniel was... smeared. The look of it—like someone had tried to erase him with a dirty rag, leaving him streaked and blurry—made Michael stumble in the hallway, spilling some of the water out of his bucket.
Looking up from where he sat at the kitchen table, hands limp and open on in front of him like they were birds shot on the wing, Daniel said, "Hey, careful there, Michael. That's your ration, too." Then he fished in his breast pocket for his glasses and put them on.
Putting her own bucket down in the middle of the floor, Sam brushed a hand through Daniel's hair and kissed him on the temple, leaving some of her own glow on him like a lopsided makeshift halo. As he leaned into her, the smearing faded a little, but left its mark on her, too.
"Okay?" she asked. He nodded, his eyes flitting over to Michael. Glancing back over her shoulder to where Michael still stood in the hallway with his bucket, she said, "Okay" again and turned to get the big pot down from the counter. As she knelt and started ladling water into the boiling pot, that glow that had surrounded her all morning, a brighter, smoother light than the one that had sparked between the three of them last night, dimmed and wavered. Daniel seemed to absorb it, and it lightened him a little and darkened her, until there was a kind of equilibrium, banked coals.
Michael's head was splitting.
Getting a rag out of one of the drawers, Daniel came to wipe up the spill in the hallway. "I got it," he said as he nodded Michael past him into the kitchen. Michael slipped by close to the wall, but felt the smear slide across his skin anyway. Like the light in Sam, this smelled like Jack. Michael spilled more water.
"Whoa!" Sam reached out to steady his bucket. "We're gonna be licking it off the floor if you have your way," she added. "Just set it here." Then she pointed to the pot. "You can put that one out on the fire. Don't forget the lid."
In the courtyard, Lu was wrestling with the goose. The bird was a flurry of panicky feather-shaped sparks; Lu was blank except for a blue wavering, a cool flare that enveloped the goose like the ghosted edges of aurora borealis. Closing his eyes, Michael took a deep breath and counted to twenty and back again. When he opened them, Lu was just Lu and the goose was just a goose struggling in the too-tight grip of a little boy.
Swallowing hard with relief, Michael put the pot on the flat rock at the edge of the smoky fire and crossed to Lu. "Easy," he said, kneeling beside him on the wet flagstones. "You're hurting him."
Looking at him with wide, black eyes, Lu opened his arms and dropped the goose, who flapped and waddled to the other side of the courtyard, his ruffled feathers settling. Lu's eyes were swimming with tears, but his face was otherwise expressionless. Michael took his hand and together they inched across the courtyard to the goose, who turned away, watching them with one suspicious eye. Pulling Lu down beside him, Michael guided his pudgy fingers to the goose's back, helping him stroke the white feathers.
"See? Gentle. He likes you, but you got to be gentle."
The chill of Lu's yearning flickered down Michael's arm and, for a moment, turned the feathers to glass.
"Gentle. Okay?"
Lu nodded and kept petting the goose after Michael stood and went back to the kitchen door.
Inside, Sam and Daniel stopped talking abruptly. Michael managed not to see the swirl of grey between them, but he felt it briefly, clammy against his face. "Where's Jack?" he asked.
"He went fishing," Daniel answered. "You could probably catch him if you run."
Michael didn't need any extra encouragement to get out of the kitchen. He jogged down the sidewalk with his eyes on Jack, who was almost at the end of the street, loping along at an easy pace with his fishing rod and tackle box swinging from one hand. Even at this distance, Michael could see that he was askew, like somebody had pulled him from square. He looked like a dislocated shoulder felt. In this, he was pretty normal, since there were more skewed people in Carole than otherwise, everyone to a lesser or greater degree yanked out of alignment, some part of them straining toward a world that was gone, people who were dead.
One of the more notable exceptions was waiting for him at the corner.
"Baker!" Tam shouted as he broke into a run to intercept him. "Hey, was that John?" he asked when he was close enough to talk normally. At the intersection, Lizzie was hesitating, a lock of dirty red hair in her mouth, trying to decide whether to follow or to keep going around the corner toward school. After a moment she started slowly toward them.
"Yeah, he got back yesterday," Michael answered.
Tam wasn't skewed. Tam fit seamlessly into the new world order like it had been made for him. His black hair was raggedly cut, his Roughrider's sweatshirt baggy around his thin frame, jeans rolled up at the ankles and sagging from his narrow hips, and still, for all that, his outline was sharp, etched clearly and precisely against the grey morning. Looking at him was like standing on solid ground after spending a long time clinging to icy shingles on a slanted roof. It was such a relief that Michael wanted to rest his head on that reassuring solidity for a moment, just to catch his breath. But Lizzie was there now, looking like somebody had cut her into uneven strips and put her back together again carelessly. Michael backed away a little.
"Hey, Michael." Her hand fluttered up in a little wave, but she looked away before he could answer.
"So what wagon ran him over?" Tam was saying, ignoring Lizzie's arrival.
"Goon squad."
"No shit!" Tam's eyes lit up with a kind of ghoulish admiration. "Did he see the snake?"
Michael nodded. "He got hurt pretty bad. A whole lot of stitches and burns." He covered Tam's forehead with an open hand. "Ribbon device."
"No shit!" Tam repeated, swatting his hand away.
Apparently unimpressed, Lizzie was looking askance at Michael, still chewing on her hair. Her dress was too small, the collar tight around her throat. Shifting to put Tam between them, Michael thought suddenly of Teal'c, wondered what he would look like now. Teal'c would tell him how not to see this way, how not to see the gaps in Lizzie where her pain leaked out. A wave of longing rose in him, leaving tears behind as it ebbed. Tam frowned to see them, but did them both a favour and didn't say anything about it.
Michael put a hand on Tam's chest. Steady. Steady. "I got to go," he said, careful to keep his eyes on Tam's, away from Lizzie's pale, obliquely penetrating stare.
"Ingram's gonna want to know where you are," Tam warned.
"Tell her I'm with my dad," Michael called over his shoulder as he took off running.
He caught up to Jack just as he was stepping over the sagging frost fence into the cornfield.
"I thought you hated fishing," Jack said without turning around. He did, however, keep a partially broken corn stalk from whipping back into Michael's face, holding it with his elbow until Michael took it himself. Then he set off down the row, tilting his head this way and that to avoid dripping leaves.
"Better than school," Michael answered, his head lowered, watching his own sneakered feet fitting into Jack's bootprints. He hardly had to stretch his gait anymore to do that. For some reason this made him feel a little sad. "Besides, Lizzie's back today." For a moment their footprints gleamed with the ruddy wetness of blood. "Farther away from her the better," he finished, looking up instead at the back of Jack's shirt, the grey checks interrupted at one shoulder by a green denim patch. Michael could see the jaggedness of Jack's wound low on his back, a sinuous red, flaring occasionally as Jack sidestepped a puddle or ducked low under a leaning stalk. Michael counted their paces silently.
Instead of following along the bank of the river, they splashed across the sandbar and cut across the prairie, the yellow, knee-high grass hissing against their pantlegs in a steady rhythm in time with their steps. In the distance to their left, the morning's storm was crowded up against the horizon, as if it could go no further, steel-blue clouds stacked high above skirts of rain. To their right, the river cut the plain in an arc, curving around in front of them as it disappeared into a coulie. Pausing at the top, they looked down into the ravine, the river's black band winding between red sand walls twenty feet or so below them. As they zigzagged down the bank, their feet turned sideways against the slope, they dislodged a dozen miniature avalanches, stones and sand cascading downward into deeper shadow. The cold air of night time was still lurking down there, and they lowered themselves into it like they were wading into water. Going down on one knee to steady himself, Michael zipped up his jacket and then half giant-walked, half surfed the last few yards, beating Jack to the one flat area of the bank.
They were silent as Jack settled down and prepared the tackle, choosing a hook and float from the neatly ordered box. The filament of line gleamed against the backdrop of black water when Jack cast into the middle of the river, out to where the shadowed reflections of the two steep coulie walls were separated by an uneven swath of silver sky. Michael stood with his hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his jacket and listened to the slow clack-clack-clack as Jack reeled in the line a little, taking up some slack.
"Stay awhile," Jack said finally, tilting his head toward the patch of gravel next to him.
Obediently, Michael sat down on his haunches, his arms across his knees. He watched Jack out of the corner of his eye, noted that he seemed less skewed now, overlaid with a gentle glow, almost the same colour as the red sand around him. "Huh," Michael said before he could catch himself.
"What?" Clack... clack... clack went the reel.
"Nothing." He could see Jack watching him, even though Jack's eyes were on the river. He shrugged. "I guess I sort of understand why you like fishing, that's all."
"Ah." Clack... clack...
Hesitating, Michael steepled his fingers, twined them, played "here's the church" a couple of times, wondered if it was worth it to open his mouth and risk skewing Jack again. Sighing, he dropped back to sit on the gravel, leaning back on his hands, then sat up again and looped his arms across his knees, fingers digging into his elbows. "I... brought you here... from the mountain." He rested his forehead on the back of his wrist, talked into the hollow of his body. "Didn't I?"
The reel made a zipping sound as Jack cast again, line looping out, a silver thread across shadow and light in Michael's mind's eye. Jack paused a long time. Michael thought of the cowboys in the round pen at the corral, sidling up to the nervous horses, advancing and waiting. Jack's curiosity was leaning pretty heavily on the facade of nonchalance, but he took up the slack on the line slowly, and Michael pictured the float turned sideways into the pull, bobbing at the notch of a silver V of wake. Clack... clack... clack.
"You brought us here. Yeah, that's a theory," Jack answered at last. Michael decided Jack would make a good cowboy.
Rolling his head to rest his cheek on his arm, Michael watched him. The glow was a little sharper around the edges, but Jack was still just Jack. "And now you're stuck here." He wasn't sure what he meant by "here." Carole, this planet, this life.
Lifting one shoulder a bit, Jack said, "Worse places to be," and something black twisted down through him, from head to earth, colder than the night air at the bottom of the ravine.
Michael closed his eyes, counting rapidly, up and then down. His arms came up around his head as he willed himself not to start rocking. "What am I?" The question forced itself out of him, from a tight throat, through clenched teeth.
"You're Michael."
"Not just Michael. Something else. Something..." He couldn't stop the rocking now, because it was that or running, and the walls were too steep and he was too tired for flailing.
"Look, you've been a good person. So far, anyway. Whatever else you are..." Jack's hand rested on the back of his neck, warm. "We'll deal with it."
Michael raised his head. "Doesn't that freak you out? What if I'm, like, I dunno, some kind of alien or something?"
"Hey," Jack retorted sharply. "Some of my best friends are aliens." A lopsided grin brightened his eyes and softened his face. Giving Michael's neck a final squeeze, Jack turned away and picked up the fishing rod again.
"I wish I could remember."
"I know."
"I want to remember."
"I know." Jack slowly reeled in the line. Clack... clack... clack.
CHAPTER THREE: REFRACTION
... there should
be a moon
but there is none.
("Harvest Night," Brighid E. Stone)
Michael's howl yanked Jack out of an empty sleep and he was on his feet beside the truck before he was fully awake, Carter beside him, her eyes wide and searching. Daniel was already at the passenger door, pulling it open and crawling inside the cab. In the dim glow of the dome light, Michael was sitting up, hands over his eyes, mouth a wide, black circle. Drawing in a breath, he wailed again, fists now clutching at his hair. He recoiled from Daniel's touch and cracked his head against the driver's side window, the shock of it cutting off his scream abruptly.
"It's okay, Michael," Daniel was saying in a low voice. "It's okay."
Opening his eyes, Michael started to talk, words spilling out of him like the dam was broken.
Daniel froze, one hand extended toward Michael, the other on the dashboard. "Wow... that's Sumerian... Greek... Old High German... Arabic... no... some kind of derivative—" He was listing the languages mechanically, his brow furrowed with concentration as he tried to keep up. "—that's Egyptian." His eyes turned on Jack, wide and harshly blue through the cab's back window. "Goa'uld. Asgard. Latin. Anglo Saxon—"
"What's he saying," Jack demanded, coming around to lean in the passenger door behind him, knuckles white as he gripped the frame.
"It hurts."
Jack blinked. "That's it? What hurts?"
"Everything!" Michael cried, finally making his way to English, putting his hands over his ears, and then over his eyes as he started to rock. "Everyone!"
So, after four months of silence, Michael talked for three hours straight. At first he wouldn't let anybody touch him, screaming "It hurts!" in twenty languages if any of them even looked like they might be thinking about getting closer. But at 2 a.m., when Jack swore under his breath and opened the driver's side door, Michael slumped out into his arms, his head lolling, eyes rolling up to show whites. By then, his voice was a rasping whisper. He stopped talking long enough to swallow an aspirin with water out of the canteen, and then started again.
Sitting on his sleeping bag near the fire, Jack cradled Michael in his lap while Carter stirred soup and Daniel sat across from them, his glasses opaque with firelight. Jack's left leg was asleep. He shifted and banged the heel of his boot on the packed dirt until the pins and needles started. Then he stretched out the other leg and flexed the ankle as much as he could. Somewhere at the back of his mind a memory stirred: a hospital waiting room, Sarah having her appendix out, Charlie curled up like this on the uncomfortable plastic chairs. Jack started listing all the things he'd give for one of those chairs right about now.
"I can take him," Daniel offered again, but when Jack nodded and started to lift Michael up, the boy clutched at his jacket and spoke more rapidly, eyes squeezed shut.
"I'm okay for awhile longer."
Daniel nodded and added more wood to the fire. The log popped and sent a spray of sparks up toward the bare branches of the cottonwoods. Michael opened his eyes and watched them, suddenly silent.
Then: "Jack?"
Jack had been awash in what seemed like an endless stream of gibberish for so long that he didn't recognize his name at first. "Me?"
"I'm cold."
Carter tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot and hopped up on the tailgate to grab the Hudson's Bay blanket. Daniel put another log on the fire.
Tucking the blanket around Michael, Jack asked, "You okay now?"
Michael shook his head slowly. "Who am I?"
A weary sigh of disappointment forced its way out of Jack and he didn't bother to look at Carter and Daniel. "We were kinda hoping you could tell us. You don't know?"
Another solemn shake of the head.
"Well, you called yourself Michael, so that's what we've been going with. But you know me?"
A nod.
"What about them?"
Michael craned his neck to see better. "Sam and Daniel," he answered. "Teal'c's gone. Deal with the devil."
"So you know us but not you? That's... that's...."
"Inconvenient," Daniel finished half under his breath. Carter flicked him on the knee with her spoon. He caught her wrist and, taking the spoon away, laced his fingers with hers.
In Jack's arms, Michael shivered. Jack pulled the blanket up a little more and pressed the kid more tightly against his chest. "Does it still hurt?"
A nod.
Closing his eyes, Jack squeezed him, drawing up his legs to hold him closer. "Okay. Now you're a little more... lucid, we can give you some more aspirin, but since we don't know what's wrong, I don't know if that will help." Daniel was already rummaging in his pack, his flashlight between his teeth. "What hurts?"
"Everything."
"Yeah, we got that."
"How do you stand it?" Turning his face to hide his eyes in Jack's flannel shirt Michael started to cry, the thin, voiceless sobbing of someone exhausted by pain.
"Okay, okay." Jack took the aspirin from Daniel, who stood to make room for Carter to hold the canteen to Michael's mouth. He swallowed the pills, coughed and fell back again. Carter brushed Michael's hair back with one hand, capping the canteen and holding it between her knees to tighten the lid with the other. Her eyes were a mirror for Jack's own, reflecting back his frustration and confusion and helplessness. "Okay. I'll tell you something." He waited until Michael opened his eyes and looked up at him. "I get banged up a lot. All the time."
"Why?"
"What? Oh. I dunno. I guess people are jealous of my good looks." He grinned and felt about as far from good looking as it was possible to get. And his left leg was asleep all the way to his butt. He ignored it. "Anyway, you know what I do when I'm in pain? I count. You do remember numbers, right?"
A nod.
"Okay, so I count, say, up to ten. So when the pain is big, like bigger-than-you kind of big, you count to ten and that's as big as it can get and you can see it all there, sorta get a grip on it, like you get bigger with each step until you've got it all in your sights, right?"
"Okay."
"And then you count back down again, dial it down, make it smaller, each step dialing it down further and further until it's not bigger than you anymore. You can handle it. See?" Jack's mind did a familiar swerve around memories—dark places, hot places, pain way beyond a scale of ten.
Michael was watching him closely, his eyes black in the firelight.
"You want to give it a try?"
And, so they counted up and then down. Michael's shivering settled a bit as they made their way back to one again. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack could see Carter and Daniel counting too. Jack drank his soup one-handed and felt the pain ebbing and swelling in Michael's body as his tired whisper climbed the ladder of numbers and descended, paused for a long moment and started again, over and over until Jack's back was a single ache beginning at his tailbone and tightening up across his shoulders and his eyes were burning with smoke and sleeplessness. Reluctantly following his orders, Carter crawled into the bed of the truck and curled up tightly against the cold, her head toward them, her boots on inside her sleeping bag.
Gathering up his own sleeping bag, Daniel came and settled down inside it behind Jack, supporting him back to back. Gratefully, Jack let him take his weight, dropping his head against Daniel's neck and shoulder. Slipping into the black pool of sleep, he could feel Michael's breath against his chest, and the thrum of Daniel's voice against his back, as the two of them counted together, up and down... up and down... and when he floated up again and broke the surface of his shallow dreams, it was Carter who braced him, Michael had shifted so that only his head was resting on Jack's lap, and pale October sun was bruising the darkness in the east.
"So, Michael," Jack said with an air of making idle conversation as he ducked under a listing cornstalk, "what about the languages?"
Pausing for a second, Michael cast a quick, confused look over his shoulder and then started walking again. "What languages?"
Jack hesitated, chewing the inside of his lip. In four years, Michael had never brought up the issue of his origins on his own and had met their questions with a blank stare and a withdrawal into glassy-eyed silence that could last days. They'd stopped asking after the first few tries, worried that their probing would derail him for good. But now it was Michael doing the asking and Jack couldn't help but go through the door. "When you first started talking, you did it in every language under the sun... several suns, actually. And then after that you only spoke English."
Michael was silent for a long time. Then, he shrugged. "I don't remember that." Another pause. "Freaky, though."
"A little." Jack thought suddenly of interrupting Daniel when he was hunched over some scrap of ancient writing in his lab. The way he'd look up when you started talking and you just knew he was thinking in Arabic or something weirder, and then that rapid blinking as he shuffled things around in his head and found the right language to say, "Hey" in. For Jack, those few seconds were always low-grade freaky, watching Daniel step from one world to another like that, out of the one where he was alone with the dead and into the one he shared with the rest of them. Now that he thought about it, Jack realized that Daniel only spoke English now, too, even when he was cursing. The realization brought a little stab of regret to the middle of his chest.
"Alien languages?" Michael asked, still pacing evenly along between the rows of corn. Jack knew that he was counting and let his own steps fall in time.
"Yeah, a few."
"Snake?"
Again, Jack hesitated. "Yeah."
Michael's steps faltered. "Fuck."
"And Asgard," Jack added hastily. "Good guys."
Michael stopped, his hands groping at the corn on either side of him until they settled, one twisted in a long, green leaf, the other wrapped around a stalk. His head hung between his shoulders as he swayed a little, taking this in.
Jack stood behind him and waited. In the field jacket (insignia long since torn away), Michael looked familiar, now that he was filled out a little more, was more comfortable with his new height (he'd grown almost four inches since last summer), and with his longish fair hair falling, no doubt, into his eyes as he bowed his head. It was Daniel, of course, way back when he'd first gone through the 'gate, before his shoulders had learned to lean the right way under a heavy kit, before he'd cut the hair off like he was getting rid of some obsolete version of himself. Michael was thinner, more like Jack had been at fifteen, but the hands that were steadying him were Daniel's, broad in the palm, not narrow and long like Jack's. That hunch in the shoulders was so typical of Daniel—that absorbing, and retreating, and regrouping Daniel used to face bad news—that Jack half-expected to see the gleam of Daniel's glasses when Michael finally raised his head and looked at him over his shoulder, his dark blond hair covering one eye.
"That's pretty fucked," Michael whispered hoarsely. Turning to face Jack, he started backpedaling down the row away from him, his hands pulling at the front of his shirt like he was trying to peel it away, like he was trying to tear himself away from himself. "That's so fucked, Jack."
Jack held up a hand. "Take it easy. We don't even know what it means."
"It means I'm—" He stopped walking, both hands stretching his shirt away from him, his jacket thrown off at one shoulder. His eyes were wide. "—what? What what what what—" He clutched at his hair and closed his eyes, his lips moving around the question until it erupted in a wordless growl of frustration.
Dropping his fishing gear and the stringer with its two fish, Jack caught him as he was falling and they crumpled to the damp earth together, Michael's face against Jack's chest.
"It hurts," Michael gasped, his body stiff in Jack's arms. He wound his fists into the front of Jack's shirt. "It hurts."
"Hang on." Leaning him back, Jack looped an arm under Michael's knees and lurched to his feet. By the time they broke out of the cornfield into the glare of the afternoon sun, Michael's head was lolling and his eyes showed only white.
"He brought it up, not me," Jack was saying when Daniel drew back the curtain and stepped into the kitchen from Michael's room.
"I'm not accusing you—" Sam protested in a strained whisper.
"I know."
"—I'm just trying to figure out what happened."
"I—" Jack broke off and came to stand behind Daniel as he pulled the curtain closed across the door. "How is he?"
Stuffing his hands in his pockets, Daniel shrugged. "He's sleeping."
Jack frowned. "Sleeping sleeping or comatose sleeping?"
"Sleeping sleeping, I think." Daniel jerked a thumb over his shoulder and bowed his head for a second. "He's talking a blue streak, so it's not normal sleeping, but...." His voice trailed away uncertainly and they all listened to the sibilance of Michael's whisper, eyes distant.
"What's he—" Jack began and then retracted the question with a grunt, lowering himself onto the bench beside Sam and rubbing his face with his palms. "I know: 'it hurts.'"
Sam reached over and pulled one hand away, lacing his fingers in hers. On the table at her elbow was another argument waiting to happen. She pushed the red-and-gold device aside with a sliding glance in Daniel's direction.
Leaning up against the refrigerator, Daniel folded his arms, listening carefully. After a moment he gave an irritated shake of the head. "I don't know. I think there's more to it than that, but I don't—" He raised his eyes to the ceiling, looking for something blank on which to let the words coalesce into meaning. "I don't understand. This isn't...." He let his head drop back against the freezer. "Shit."
"You don't even recognize it?" Jack's voice was strained with the effort of sounding less angry and frustrated than he was. Daniel appreciated the intent if not the result, which was kind of painful to listen to.
"It started a couple of weeks after you left," Sam began. Her thumb was making little soothing circles on the back of Jack's hand. "At first he was talking in English—"
"Just regular disjointed dream stuff," Daniel interjected.
"—but recently he's been doing this." She nodded in the direction of the curtain.
"He said he wanted to remember," Jack said.
"Well, maybe he is." Daniel considered the blank spaces in his own memory. He was pretty sure that what lurked there would drive him to worse than talking in his sleep. His eyes rested on the curtain, Michael's rasping whisper sawing persistently in his brain. Rubbing his forehead vigorously with the heel of his hand, he sat down across from Jack and Sam and picked up the hand device, holding it up with a pointed look in Jack's direction. Wryly, he wondered at the depths of his own masochism, but his head was swimming from listening to Michael talk and he needed the diversion. "Maybe we can talk about this instead."
Jack looked blankly at him, unreadable, too tired, maybe, even for defensiveness.
"Were you going to tell us about it?"
"I hadn't decided."
Sam looked over at Daniel, her jaw set. "So, if I hadn't decided to compromise my deep-seated feminist principles to do your laundry, we might never have known you brought home a goa'uld healing device. That's what you're saying?"
"I thought you weren't being accusing," Jack responded testily.
She closed her eyes wearily, "Jack—"
"Look, I wasn't exactly at my best," he said, pulling his hand from hers and pointing at the burns on his forehead. "It was there so I took it. But I know, I know that now you have it you're going to hear about some puppy or grandmother in dire need and you won't be able to stop yourself and then—" he made an exploding gesture with stiff hands, "—there's goes our cover. And this time it'll be your neck in the noose instead of Teal'c's."
The real fear there behind the anger made Daniel's hands ache. "Okay, it's an issue, but we'll work through it together. It's—"
"Not my call, I get that." Jack was shuttered, not even angry anymore.
They sat staring at the oval hand device, its red jewel dull in the dim light of the kitchen. Finally, Sam started to reach for it, let her hand drop, and then picked it up, slipped her hand into it and aimed it at the table. Immediately the device started to glow, a tongue of red flickering down from her palm.
"I could fix up your back I think," she said to Jack. "Even though you aren't a puppy or a grandmother."
"No thanks." Getting up, he went to look out the kitchen door. "My fish are probably toast by now," he said. "But I should go get the tackle at least. Those hooks are worth something."
Daniel was about to offer to go with him when Michael reached over his shoulder and picked up the hand device from where Sam had left it in the middle of the table.
"How'd you do that?" Michael's face was pale, his eyes bloodshot and sunken. His mouth was pinched, lips white and pressed tightly together. He was obviously still in pain. What kind of pain was a question Daniel wished Michael could answer. "Sam? This is snake stuff, right?"
Crossing to the table in a stride, Jack snatched the device from his hands. "It's nothing to do with you." Softening, he ruffled Michael's hair, peered into his face. "You okay?"
Ignoring his question, Michael pointed at the device. "That's snake stuff. How'd you do that?"
"It has nothing to do with you," Jack repeated.
"Right. I'm speaking snake and it has nothing to do with me?" Michael was belligerent, stepping closer so that he and Jack were chest to chest. "That is me." He reached for it again. "Let me try."
"You were speaking Greek, too, but that doesn't mean you can run the marathon." Holding the device out of Michael's reach, Jack stared steadily, unmoving, until Michael looked away.
Stepping between them, Daniel put a hand on Michael's chest and gently pushed him back. "It won't work for you. You have to have naqada in your blood."
"Which you don't," Jack pointed out.
"And she does?"
"Actually, yes."
"How?"
"From when I was a host." Sam's voice was steady.
Michael's mouth dropped open as he looked at her over Jack's shoulder. "You got snake-fu—?"
"Hey! Watch your mouth!" Jack stepped forward and Michael fell back until he was against the counter.
"It's okay—" Sam was on her feet, her hand on Jack's shoulder. Daniel started to step between Jack and Michael again but Jack's glare warned him away.
"I can't believe you got sn—" Michael's eyes skittered nervously over Jack's face and then back to Sam. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Spreading his hand gently against the side of Michael's head, Jack asserted again, "Because it has nothing to do with you."
Swallowing hard, Michael seemed to collapse a little inside. "Did..." He swiped at his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket and swallowed again, speaking to some point in the middle of Jack's chest. "Did it hurt?"
Before Sam could answer, Michael stepped sideways around Jack and ran.
Daniel looked up as Jack banged through the kitchen door, leaned his fishing rod next to the refrigerator and threw his tackle box onto the table.
"He come back yet?"
Shaking his head, Daniel lifted the tackle box off of the book of matches and tried to strike one. The head of the match snapped off and rolled under the table, so he had to lie down on the bench to feel around for it on the floor. Someday Tim Merchant would get better at making matches. Not soon enough, though, in Daniel's opinion. Finding the match head, he tucked it into the book and struck another to light a stub of candle. Jack hadn't moved, a dark silhouette against the kitchen door's square of rusty evening light. Daniel rose and used the candle to light the lamp in the middle of the table and the pillar candle in the kitchen window.
"Son of a..." His hands on his hips, Jack glared around the kitchen as if his scowl alone could make Michael materialize out of the shadows. Lit from below, his face was craggy, the lines around his mouth and between his eyebrows etched deeply.
"Maybe Sam had better luck." Daniel stepped up close and kissed Jack's mouth, pressing firmly until Jack's lips started to soften a little, opening a bit to admit Daniel's tongue. Daniel could almost taste the fatigue in him, and the unyielding tension that made Jack's jaw bunch under Daniel's fingertips. Dropping his hands to squeeze his biceps, he tilted his head back so he could see Jack's eyes. "He'll be okay."
Jack let him kiss him again, his head dropping forward after so they were brow to brow, and his shallow breaths caught on the edges of unvoiced groans when Daniel worked his fingers into the knots of his taut muscles, up his shoulders to his neck. Eyes closed, Jack leaned into him, one hand on Daniel's hip.
"How do you know?" he said at last, pushing away a little and sitting down on the edge of the table, Daniel standing now between his knees. "Really. How do you know he'll be okay?" The question might have been mockingly accusing, but Jack's tired eyes were searching.
"I guess I don't." Sighing, Jack dropped his head with a thud against Daniel's chest and Daniel stroked the back of his neck and up into his hair. "You know," he began reluctantly, "we have to consider that he's right on some level."
"He's not right." Jack's voice was muffled by Daniel's shirt.
"Okay, he's not a goa'uld, but he's something, maybe fallen, like me—"
"How many times are we gonna have this conversation?" He tightened his arms around Daniel's waist, but Daniel wasn't going to be distracted.
"—and we can't let our feelings cloud our judgment about this."
"My judgment isn't clouded. I'm threat-assessing as we speak." He paused, assessing. "He's a fifteen-year-old boy," he concluded.
"Who just happens to speak a number of alien languages."
"So do you."
Daniel smiled down at him and yanked gently on his hair. "Yeah, but I had to learn them the old fashioned way."
Leaning back, Jack nudged Daniel out of his way and went to get a couple of glasses from the drying rack and then the bottle from the cupboard above the fridge. "Well, we can't all be geniuses." Pouring two fingers of moonshine into each glass, he handed one to Daniel, downing his own in one swallow. "Maybe he learned it in space school, up on Alpha Centauri before he teleported here and zapped us out of the mountain. Back when he was an intergalactic jellyfish or something." He put the lid back on the bottle and closed it up again in the cupboard. "And what difference does it make now except that it's making him nuts? Has he hurt anybody? Is he building a giant ray gun in the garage?"
"We don't have a garage."
"Well then, there ya go."
Daniel was considering pointing out that Jack was supposed to be the suspicious one, leaving Daniel to generously award the benefits of the doubt, when the door banged open again and Sam came in, bringing the sound of crickets and the smell of impending rain with her. Dropping her jacket on the bench, she took Daniel's drink out of his hand.
"That's not—" Daniel began.
"He's not at the school or at Tam's house," she reported, swallowing half the hootch and then coughing and wheezing as her eyes teared up.
"—water," Daniel finished.
"Yeah, I noticed that, thank you." She wiped her eyes with her knuckles and handed the glass back.
"He wasn't at the river, either." Grimacing, Jack put his hands back on his hips and tried glaring at the kitchen again, with a similar lack of results. "Crap."
"I did, however, pass a goon squad."
"Crap," Jack said again, without much feeling.
"Is there any chance they're looking for you?" Daniel asked.
Jack shook his head, his eyes distant. "They think I'm dead. Plus, I never told them I was from here."
"Must be a routine roust and rattle," Daniel speculated hopefully, although a sweep by the squad was hardly something to feel hopeful about. Nice range of options there. "Did they find the office?" He thought of his ledger hidden in the heating duct, Jenny's minutes most likely tacked up again on the bulletin board like a red flag.
"Don't think so," Sam answered.
Daniel put his glass down on the table and stared at the starburst of refracted candlelight that spiked out from its base. He gave it a quarter turn, realigning rainbows. "Okay," he said finally, "So, Sam and I can go look for Michael."
"And I'll stay here in case he comes back." Jack nodded, his eyes on the door. "Lay low, play dead," he murmured more to himself than to Daniel. He looked at Sam. "Take the 9mil."
Her face said, "Yes sir" as she turned away.
She was stepping back into the hallway, stuffing the pistol into her waistband at her back, when they heard the truck rumbling down the street. It was such an unusual sound now that it pulled Daniel's memory in two different directions: back to his old life, (how absurd to think of it as "secure" and "normal"), the hollow hissing of traffic on Crescent St. outside his house, headlights sweeping in predictable arcs across the ceiling above his bed; and, to the more recent past, another town, hunched in the shadow of a brooding, grey-flanked mountain, the trucks careening down the street across the end of the alley where he crouched, Michael beside him, watching. Joshua Mason's army was ranked in rows, sitting on the sides of the pick-up beds, rifles pointed in parallel lines at the sky. He remembered the way the lurid light of the burning town hall flickered between the gun barrels as the convoy passed, and that he'd thought then of sunset through aspens. Above them, the death glider wheeled in a slow arc and came in to strafe the empty street, Jaffa back-up making sure the huddled masses got the point the absent goa'uld governor was making: fear Mason as you would fear me. Michael's hand in Daniel's was clammy with fear.
Now the headlights, a cold and alien halogen white, crept up the hallway floor, the pattern of the leaded glass in the front door window stretching toward Jack's feet in the kitchen doorway. Sam stood unmoving, criss-crossed by shadows, one hand still on the gun at her back. Jack took two steps and, parting the curtain to Michael's room, disappeared into the darkness inside. Then the light on the floor narrowed to a wedge and slid up the wall, the sound of the revving engine and grinding gears stretching thinner as the truck passed on.
Releasing a slow breath, Daniel closed his eyes. When he opened them, Sam was at the front door, her hand cupped around her face as she peered through the beveled glass.
"They're here!" she announced and pulled open the door.
Stepping out of their bedroom, Jack aimed his Beretta at the floor. He let Daniel pass him with the lamp and followed them out onto the front steps where Tam was waiting, chewing nervously on his thumbnail. Beside him, hunched over his knees on the front step, Michael was rocking slowly back and forth. A girl about Michael's age stood in the middle of the walk, her hands folded at her waist, her eyes dark holes of shadows in her narrow face.
"Lizzie found him at Junst's place in the market," Tam began without preamble, stepping down onto the walk to make room for Sam to crouch in front of Michael. "The place was trashed. Junst was so pissed." He looked over his shoulder the way the truck had gone. "And the squad's in town."
"Wait a minute. You say Michael trashed Junst's stall?" Jack looked skeptical.
Tam shrugged. "Could've been goons. I dunno. But Michael was there, that's all I know. Lizzie came and got me."
"He was making rows," Lizzie said. Her hands fluttered out, marking parallel lines in the air, and then settled again, folded at her waist. She was wearing a blue checked dress with a white collar tight around her throat. Daniel thought of a sort of darkside Alice in Wonderland and decided not to look at her too much.
Motioning to Daniel to lower the lamp, Sam brushed Michael's hair off of his brow. "Michael, what happened to your face?"
The sound of cold shock in her voice rose gooseflesh on Daniel's neck. Sitting on his haunches, he held the lamp closer as Sam tipped Michael's chin up to the light. Around his eyes was a spidery pattern of cuts, black in the lamplight, his cheeks and temples and forehead scraped and seeping.
"Scratched 'em," Lizzie said in a sing-song voice. "Scratched 'em."
"Shut up, Lizzie," Tam hissed.
"He did. I saw." She pointed a thin finger at Michael and then raised her hands to her face and mimed scratching at her eyes. "He scratched 'em."
"Jesus," Jack muttered, so low only Daniel heard him. Bending, Jack put a hand under Michael's arm and helped him to his feet. "C'mon inside. We'll clean you up."
His eyes glassy, Michael nodded and turned clumsily, his fingers resting lightly on Daniel's shoulder for a moment for balance. His toe caught on the door frame and Jack wrapped a steadying arm around him as he stumbled.
"Easy," Jack murmured. "Go slow."
Making way for Sam to follow them, Daniel handed her the lamp and turned to Tam. "Thanks for bringing him home."
"Junst was so pissed," Tam repeated and started on his thumbnail again. His eyes were wide black circles in the new darkness.
"We'll deal with Junst." Daniel patted him on the shoulder. "It'll be okay."
Tam hesitated, one foot on the step. Leaning around Daniel, he called down the hallway, "'Bye Michael!" He waited but here was no answer.
"You can come back later to check up on him." Daniel looked down the street. There was no sign of the truck. "Do you want me to walk you home?"
Tam shook his head. "Naw, I think they're gone. We can go down the gardens anyway."
A cold wind lifted Lizzie's hair and blew it across her face. Daniel's hand passed across his own forehead, brushing phantom hair away, but Lizzie didn't move.
"I'll tell Ingram Michael's...." Without finishing, Tam turned and brushed past the girl, who still stood as before, primly upright with her hands folded, watching Daniel through one eye. "Let's go, Lizzie," Tam ordered, and she turned on her heel like a cadet and followed him down the walk.
Stepping backward into the house, Daniel swung the door closed and watched them go. The fancy glass of the window broke them into a dozen pieces.
He couldn't close his eyes.
Twisting, he rolled so that he could look up through the undulating green translucence of water plants—broad leaves like dessert plates balanced on the ends of thin, ropelike stems, narrow, veined leaves like blades aimed at the diffuseness of sun—and the water's surface was the wrong side of a mirror, silvered motion and shadows that weren't shadows but trees looking down, bystanders at a drowning.
He was so lonely.
He couldn't close his eyes.
He opened his mouth to scream but water rushed in.
Michael woke with a start, hands pressed to his eyes, his knees jerking up as he recoiled from the vague suppleness of floating and curled into the fetal position, all bones and angles. Still, he could feel the slick groping of weeds around his ankles, across his exposed back. He groaned softly.
"It's okay," Jack said, his hand on the top of Michael's head. "You're safe." Gently he pried Michael's hands away from his face.
Resisting, Michael hunched down lower toward his knees, but he couldn't help the way his fingers curled around Jack's and he shuddered out a sob between clenched teeth when Jack squeezed back. After a long moment Michael raised his eyes to look at him.
Kneeling beside the bed in the darkness, the light from the kitchen leaking around the curtain in a thin frame of orange, Jack should have been invisible; instead, he was outlined by a narrow halo of blue-white light. Michael thought of Lu, the way his yearning flickered around his blankness. But this was different, more focused. It was like the spectrum of Jack's light were honed, turned on edge and aimed precisely.