In The Depths of Silence

by Jb

Acrid smoke from the burning village choked Daniel and set his eyes burning as he ran. He hurtled over the lower end of the first makeshift buttress, putting whatever meagre strength he had left into vaulting high enough to clear the jumbled mass of rock and timbers. He landed badly and fell, rolling, his feet tangling with the legs of the nearest villager lying on the protected side of the primitive barrier. There was no movement from the other save what Daniel's stumble created, and he looked to find the man was dead, half his head caved in. Clearly, one of the missiles in the startlingly heavy barrage of stones and arrows which had driven Daniel and the rest of SG1 back had made it over the barrier and found its mark. More impacted the wall and soared over it as he paused there captured by the mess which had once been the man's face.

He stared in horror, a burning itch in his hands, and was unable to so much as blink until a fist-sized stone sailed overhead, only just barely clearing where he lay tangled with the macabre evidence of what his life inexplicably had become all about. It thudded heavily into the ground beyond him with an impact solid enough to easily split muscle and break bone.

Jack's voice, still repeatedly calling out to him, came from somewhere over to the left behind the second long buttress built to protect the women and children. Daniel disentangled himself. He was being ordered to fall back, retreat to his left. The head of the short path from the village to the Stargate was toward the far left side of the hastily built bulwarks, and no doubt it was from there Jack was now yelling his name in an increasingly strident tone of voice. Renewed bursts of automatic weapons-fire immediately followed by assorted screams from the other side of the barrier rent his soul, and amidst his grieving Daniel understood there was nothing anyone could do to change this.

So he fell back. Ran. To the left.

He ran along the dirt fire-break between the first low barrier wall and the next, past the village defenders who launched their own stones and arrows and shouts of terrorised defiance in a battle already lost even as it was still being fought. A simple people, the natives of 485 had unquestioningly welcomed SG1, strangers, into their midst on the team's previous visit so many months ago. Before. Through having readily done so, they had rekindled within him a faint faith and hope Daniel had come to think of as all but unrevivable, and he'd longed for this return mission, especially coming after all that it did. He'd lost that tiny spark during all that had happened since they'd be here the first time, and he'd needed to find it again. Needed their welcoming smiles, their willingness to share, the pleasure of such uncomplicated company.

Finding a low spot in the wall he was paralleling, he leaped over the second row of piled rock and stumps. Went to the left, running through the huddled villagers, swerving around distraught elderly men and women who reached out to him, jerking apologetically out of the grasp of hands clutching in desperation at his sleeves and vest. Feeling as if he was wading through a waking nightmare, he was horrified by the panicky, pleading expression on the face of the small child who snagged his pantleg and stared up at him in the moment before being scooped up by an adolescent dark-haired girl, who fixed an entirely different kind of stare on him. She obviously knew he was leaving, and sneered angrily at him and spit in his face. God, no, this can't be. He clenched his hands until they hurt, and carried on in intolerable impotence, the primitive battle and the fear and suffering and death around him spawning deep inside him a pinpoint of obscene silence which grew ever louder with each step he took to the left.

He met up with Jack and the others at the trail to the Stargate. The attackers had anticipated them, many having flanked the pitifully desperate bulwarks SG1 had helped the villagers to construct, and gathered en masse in the woods all along the pathway. Daniel and SG1 retreated down it toward the DHD to the tune of angry shouting, and Jack and Sam's ear-splitting gunfire and Teal'c's staff blasts, dancing around waves of strikes from impressively effective slingshots and bows. Under cover of the rest of his team, as the native attackers swarmed to encircle the area, Daniel did the only thing left for him; he dialled out. With each glyph which lit up under his hand, with each whine-chunk of the Stargate, with each scream of a native attacker cut down by blast or bullets, the pinpoint enlarged to release more of its leaden burden, the growing cacophony of rancid, dead silence heavily and steadily rippling outward from its origin.

By the time the Stargate erupted Daniel was filled with an oppressive silence so deep and so absolute not even the arrow that made it through to him disturbed its dominion.

Daniel watched SG1 plus temporary one leave through the Stargate, then turned away from the control room window. He eyed the spiral staircase to the upper level with apathetic hopelessness as his hands strayed to the belt line of his pants. Dr. Fraiser's insistence on him wearing a pair of pants one size too large, so he could pull them right up past his waist and cinch the belt to keep them there, was simply a pipe dream. There were no solutions, no way to ease his passage through any part of this life. His pants always rode low on his hips. It was one of the basic facts of life, like breathing, and death and taxes: inevitable and inescapable. No matter how tightly he secured the belt, they'd be pulled at and slide to ride lower with each step up. He knew they would. And it might even actually hurt. And it didn't matter one damned bit if it did.

He slowly made his way up the stairs, head down and jaw tense with the discomfort radiating from the healing arrow wound low on his belly. By the time he reached the top the pants were the predictable two inches lower than where they'd started from, and the tape holding the dressing in place over the doc's handiwork pulled at his skin in protest over the waistband pushing against the bandage. He should have just worn a robe. Or, nothing at all. What did it matter? Actually, maybe he even should not have agreed to answer Hammond's summons. But Fraiser had told him the general had said it was important, and that she'd agreed he could go, and could go to work in his office afterwards, and that if he managed well enough today she'd release him to go home and sleep in his own bed tonight. He knew it was a reward he was supposed to want, so he paused on the top step to pull the pants up higher yet again, and decided to manage well. He put on the best I'm fine thanks for asking face he could dredge up, and walked over to join Hammond and SG3 at the briefing table.

The question of why he'd been asked to attend was promptly addressed as a sheath of photos was handed to him even before he'd fully seated himself. Discussion of possible technological and defensive discoveries and speculation on feasible tactical strategies for their acquisition flowed over and around him. The details were lost to him, simply blurred by apathy at first and then swallowed up completely by avoidance, as SG3 mentioned that the indigenous population didn't exactly share in the excitement over the potential finds nor the Tau'ri presence on their world. Daniel looked over the material he'd been handed and knew why he was here in the briefing room, had no question about that, but as he sat there for an indistinct period of time not seeing what he was supposed to be looking at or hearing what he was supposed to be listening to, he felt a vague disturbance, as if maybe other questions which six days ago had been usurped by the torpid silence within him might be trying to reach down into the murk to find expression. Things with question marks attached seemed to struggle for recognition, only to succumb and be drawn away just as he began to distractedly, halfway wonder if it was worth trying to figure out exactly what they were.

General Hammond tapped on the briefing room table with his pen. The signal reverberated slightly, dulled and warped by the thick gel of impassivity which newly encapsulated Daniel's waking life. He forced his attention back to the external, while ignoring the actual intrusion itself even when it was repeated with even greater force, and tried to summon enough energy and interest to truly focus on the papers in front of him. A fair portion of the language displayed in the enlarged photographs was a variant of a contemporary Goa'uld dialect he'd encountered numerous times. He could read many of the words without any difficulty, but the passage was riddled with apparently unrelated symbols, ones he had no idea of where to begin in deciphering. Even in the text he could read, significant inconsistencies in tense and infinitives made any off the cuff translation quite nonsensical.

The general cleared his throat, and as the members of SG3 shifted in their seats around Daniel, he tapped the pen against the tabletop again and finally asked the big question of the day. "How soon will you be able to provide us with a translation, Dr. Jackson?"

The mystery meat wasn't Goa'uld, nor was it Ancient Egyptian, even though most of the unfamiliar characters were faintly reminiscent of hieratic script. He didn't know what it was. He sighed, and because despite how well he was managing it was the absolute best he had to offer, settled on the simple, bare truth, lifting his eyes from the photos to fix his gaze upon the galaxy map on the window to Hammond's office as he answered, "I really have no idea, Sir." The glass was divided up into quadrants, full of sweeping lines and points of red and white obscuring the view of the inside of the office. Obscure. Shrouded. Indistinct.

The pen clattered impatiently onto the tabletop, and he heard Hammond dismissing SG3. Chairs and bodies shifted and shuffled and then they were alone, the two of them, with Hammond's gaze burning a hole in the side of Daniel's head. Daniel didn't know what to tell him, even though he knew Hammond was waiting for him to come up with something better than what he already had. Empty was empty, so he just sat there staring into obscurity.

He really had no idea. There were no other answers, and he was floating in limbo, drowned and dead in the silence beyond the missing questions.

He dreamed he'd left his body and was flying.

Soaring, arms spread and legs trailing behind him as he effortlessly swooped and glided and hovered, light as a feather. He went right through walls and ceilings as if they weren't there, gained and surrendered elevation at will to alternately dance with the stars and play amongst the treetops. He was an integral part of the night and the day and the passage of time.

At the beginning, he hadn't understood what this was. He'd felt the disconnection from his physical body as a vaguely uncomfortable rending apart; he'd been nauseatingly light-headed, and four limbs and a stomach unused to such insubstantiality fluttered uncertainly. But on some instinctive level it had felt right and he had embraced it, because he was tired of managing well and at least this was something new and unexpected. And so it felt good.

For a few moments, at first, he'd imagined he could go anywhere and everywhere for as long as he wanted, and that it was up to him whether or not he even went back, ever, and that felt good too. Then he'd realised there was a string attached, an invisible umbilical cord which stretched between the physical him, asleep in the infirmary bed below, and this spirit-self him. He'd tested the connection, and found it lax, and pliable and elastic, and with barely a second glance at the body in the bed below him he'd set out to explore its limits.

He'd left his body and he was flying. Banking into graceful turns and tucking his arms into his sides to speed straight along. Effortlessly swooping and gliding, shifting phantom weight backward to slow to a gentle hover. He ranged far and wide, flying, flying, flying, an integral part of the night and the day and the passage of time, and it felt good.

He went a long way, flying, flying free, and didn't look down, didn't dare look down, because a part of him knew if he listened hard enough he would hear a persistent, heavy, background silence that meant it was all still there, all still the same below him even though he'd travelled far away from the mountain and the state and even the country. He eventually felt a gentle tugging, and worried maybe it meant he was close to the limits of his mysterious leash, so he slowed down because he really didn't want to risk being jerked back. He didn't want it to end.

Even though he didn't want to, he had to, he couldn't not, and finally he did look down, and found himself gliding above an expanse of bare dirt behind two lines of primitive fortifications. Staring directly into the realm of the void. A silent, empty place, terrifying, a vortex whirling with names and faces and events and losses and failures. He saw motherships decimate entire worlds, friends suffering in electrified cages, and a child with a bomb in her heart; and he saw the corpse of Robert Rothman, and a brilliant, stunning display that enraptured vision but decimated minds and bodies of friends and comrades, and Sha'uri , he saw Sha'uri, and he saw genocide and slavery and countless, countless betrayals.

In the middle of it all, in a deadly calm, profoundly still centre of the vortex, stood an adolescent dark-haired girl with a small child in her arms, her head tipped back, staring straight up at him accusingly. As she spat at him and he felt it on his face he realised she looked just like Reece.

"Hey."

The word echoed oddly, no doubt a result of being received by Daniel's consciousness from two separate locations. He looked up from the translation on the desk in front of him. Jack stood in the open doorway to his office, hair still damp from his post-mission shower, hands in his pockets and casual in weathered civvies, looking just the same as always but somehow different. Just like everything and everyone else did.

Daniel pushed back from the desk and took off his glasses to rub at overworked eyes, returning the ritual greeting. "Hey." His own voice sounded even more distant and muffled to him than had the scratch of his pen on paper, than had the keyboard, footsteps in the corridor outside the office, the hum of the air conditioning. Than Jack. He tried to fix it, saying it again, only louder. "Hey."

"So you got sprung, then. That's good." Jack walked in and leaned over the desk, frowning at the photos scattered across it, focusing on one which contained obvious Goa'uld symbols. "What's that? Another snakey grocery list from another P-whatsis-wheresis?"

"No, not exactly." Not precisely. Not entirely. Not altogether... together. Apart, split apart. Oh, and, "Uh, yes, basically."

Jack straightened up, raising his eyebrows, and Daniel dutifully clarified the superficial bits. He spoke with proficiency, stringing words together fluently and rapidly, because he could. Daniel had always been articulate. "No, I haven't officially been released, or as you might say, actually as you did say, 'sprung', at least not all the way, anyway. And yes, I think that's more or less what this is – a list, or an inventory, dressed up with some generally angst-ridden ideological invective. SG3 found it on the outer wall of what looks like a Goa'uld bunker of sorts, but the structure has a definite after-market seal on it. They can't get in. It looks like it's a combination of – "

Jack had pulled one hand out of one pocket and was making a rolling motion. Yeah, right. Get on with it. Daniel closed his eyes for a moment to block it from awareness. It didn't work, and then he suddenly realised it didn't matter anyway. Fine. Whatever. "I'm having a bit of trouble fully deciphering it. Hammond and SG3 are hoping there's a magic password here somewhere, but I don't think so." Don't really know. And don't much care one way or the other, truthfully.

"Well, shit. That sure sucks. Why not?"

No, it didn't. It didn't sure anything. It just was. "Well, it's pretty clear it wasn't written by the Goa'uld. I think it was added later, probably by whoever sealed – "

Jack gave him a faintly disgusted look as he waved his hand sharply through the air and cut him off cold. "No. Not that." Oh, of course. Daniel nodded slowly. Yeah, what had he been thinking.

"Why aren't you sprung? When we left yesterday morning, it looked like you'd be out by the end of the day. Yesterday-day." Jack shoved his hand back into neutral territory, and what sounded like a set of keys jangled deep in his pocket. "We're supposed to go out to dinner tonight, you, me, Carter and Teal'c." His voice took on a teasing note. "Mind you, it's not like it's a special occasion, or anything."

They were? It wasn't? Daniel thought about it, and came up blank. No, it wasn't. Today was just... what day was it? Never mind, it didn't matter exactly what day it was. He had a dinner date, but he couldn't remember why, or where. His wrist, broken in his unsuccessful attempt to disable the robot, had finally healed; he'd rejoined his team and they'd taken Grieves and Kershaw back to the Sentinel on Latona; they'd lost Grieves and Kershaw to the Sentinel on Latona; and immediately after that they'd been involved in the latest battle which had left him laid up for the last interminable six days. And now here it was today. Nowhere on that calendar of events could he recall having scrawled or read of any social plans.

They were supposed to go out. For dinner – so, like, to a restaurant, in public. A slow, thick sludge of vacant space stirred inside, but it didn't hurt or anything, was rather a faint, almost distant sensation actually, as if whatever was responsible for it had got hung up midway along between the parts of him. He had no questions about it, so he ignored it.

Jack shook his head, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "Okay, well, it's been a while since we made the plans. And I guess I can forgive you forgetting," he took his hand out of his pocket and waved it around, the keys he pulled out with it clattering sharply as they flopped on their key ring. "What with recently being skewered, and all the drugs and whatnot." He swivelled, and reached out and wheeled Daniel's spare chair over, flopping into it. "So. Why aren't you sprung yet?"

Because, Jack, just because. "Temperature went up a bit yesterday afternoon. Low grade fever, not a big deal." Even though it really had little to do with Daniel, he lifted his left arm, showing Jack the heparinised IV needle in place in his forearm. "Apparently there's a small pocket of infection. Been ordered to report back for IV antibiotics throughout the day, and for the night." For the night. Guess what, Jack... I went away from me last night and it seems some of me didn't quite make it all the way back.

Jack's chair abruptly moved away a full six inches. "Is it draining?"

Daniel frowned and rolled his forearm to look at the insertion site. "Uhh..."

"No, not – Oh, never mind." Jack popped up out the chair. Keys jangled some more. "So, you can go out as long as you get back in time for the next dose? Or are you restricted to the base?"

Go out. Daniel splinted the area of his injury with his forearm and stood up. "Okay." A tentacle of sludge shifted, and thinking surely there had been a faint whisper somewhere accompanying that, he cocked his head and listened, but didn't hear anything. Mentally shrugging, unaccountably glad but of what he wasn't sure, he grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair and headed toward the door. He had a date to go out with Jack, Sam, and Teal'c.

Jack said so.

But now Jack said, "Wait a minute! Where are you going?"

So he immediately stopped, and with the sudden halt felt a slight tug on the tether as the parts of him didn't quite line up. He checked the floor just to be sure his feet were where he thought they were, because it just didn't feel right, the way he was standing, and then remembered it hadn't felt quite right all day, so that was okay. He told Jack, "You said we were going out. So, I'm going out." He twitched his hand to show Jack the jacket he'd slung over his shoulder – see? He was all ready to go.

Jack seemed puzzled, but this was really quite straightforward and Jack was smart, so Daniel figured that must be a misinterpretation on his part. He almost doh'd himself on the head when Jack checked his watch, and said, "Well, hang on just a minute here. How long until the next dose is due?"

Daniel realised he wasn't wearing his watch. He'd taken it off when he'd found himself more concerned with consulting it to verify that yes, things were moving along slowly today – only to find its opinion was that in fact they weren't – than he was with actually getting on with the translation he was supposed to be doing. He turned to go back to his desk, but Jack said, "It's 1810 hours. What time do you have to be back there?"

Daniel stood there, saving his place for himself, not at all surprised time actually had betrayed him. "Uh, about fifteen minutes ago."

Jack shook his head, and with what looked like amusement shining out of his eyes, took him by the arm and steered him out into the hallway. As they walked to the elevator Jack assured him not to worry about it, they had lots of time because they weren't meeting Sam and Teal'c until 2000 hours. Okay. Sure. Well, really, he wasn't worried about it in the first place, but it was nice of Jack to think of him. The car arrived, and Jack filled it with questions: how was Daniel feeling; could he see his scar, but wait, first was he sure it wasn't draining; and what food restrictions was Daniel under, because they were supposed to be going out to an Italian restaurant and would they have to change their reservation, and Daniel noticed the grey floor and walls and ceiling seemed muddy-looking and somehow too far away as he told Jack Italian was fine. Anything was fine. He'd manage well with pretty much anything.

The duty nurse cheerfully told them she'd been five minutes away from sending out a search party, and led them to the alcove where she had the IV medication all ready to go. Daniel sat on the chair at the side of the bed while she checked the patency of the heparin lock attached to the cathlon in his arm. He saw the flush of blood well out into the small syringe she was using, curling into the clear fluid in it, and for a second found himself vaguely unsettled, wondering who the damn blood belonged to, just who the hell was hurt now. His insides roiled sluggishly, feeling like what he imagined a butterfly flapping against fate in a vat of molasses might look like. It felt abstractedly familiar, and he concluded he was hungry. So, Italian. Yes, that sounded all right.

He passively watched as she attached the IV tubing and adjusted the flow rate. Jack and the nurse chatted away over his head, their words stretching out and distorting, just like the small drops of IV fluid, before disconnecting and falling, plunking into a reservoir of silence, just like the drops in the drip chamber. It was weird, this sense of disordered detachment, of hearing and viewing everything as if through a thick lens tinted with age and scarred with scratches. He was aware that today his subjective sense of the world was off-kilter from the usual, but it didn't seem wrong or anything, just different – and so what? Daniel leaned against the back of the chair, closing his eyes, and tried to reach out and locate the part at the other end of the tether from where he currently was, wondering if sights and sounds and smells and movement would seem the same from over there as from here. He didn't try too hard, though, because it really didn't matter. There was that dull curdling in his gut to take care of – he was obviously hungry, and satisfying that was what mattered.

Twenty minutes was twenty hours was twenty days and they were done, and the IV disconnected – separated, removed, isolated – and Jack was escorting him to the gear-up room for him to change into his civvies. He couldn't, though, because the only pants he had on-base weren't the right style to futilely try hauling up past their rightful place on his hips. So he didn't even bother, and instead used up what he thought might be approximately the expected amount of time with washing his face and neck and hands, and peering into the mirror, and being dispassionately dissatisfied with the angles and planes of the face he saw there.

It wasn't like he was going to a formal event or anything, but when he came out still wearing his SGC-issue fatigues and boots Jack shot him a look, which Daniel fended off by pointing to his belly and making a rueful face. Jack'd always had a soft spot for that sort of thing, for subtle reminders of pains past and present, and although in the past Daniel had never, would never, purposefully used it to his advantage, this part did so now without a qualm – he was insufferably hungry; the more imminent going out for dinner became, the more aware he grew that the coiling-sliding-shifting was slowly moving aside to reveal a pinhole of uncomfortable noise lurking in the deep silence within. A demand to be fed. He really wasn't interested in pointless conversation about his clothing. He had to eat, to subdue the need, and soon.

The climb into the cab of Jack's truck would have been all but impossible were it not for the bright aluminium running-board Daniel had always thought to be one of the more garish representations of conspicuous consumerism. The ache in his wound startlingly invasive as he lifted his left leg, he stepped up willingly enough onto it now, pragmatism winning out over the inanity of abstract value judgements and conceptualisations he'd been misguided enough ever to have thought were the least bit important. But ingrained habits die hard, and even before he'd settled into his seat he found himself looking at the ostentatious stereo AM/FM CD player with its graphic equaliser and Dolby enhanced sound controls and thinking, God, what a waste of money this is in a truck with an engine that throbs louder than the Voice of Wrath itself. And then he realised what a joke that was, because given what his life was all about now, the value of money was probably the most incoherent subjective conceptualisation of them all.

The truck fired up and moved forward, and there was an initial distant tugging sensation just before the other part of him caught up and settled into place, wherever that was. After they'd cleared the checkpoints Jack turned on the power to the stereo and slid a CD into the slot, adjusting dials and tapping teeny control pads before the music even started up. When it did, Daniel was faintly surprised at Jack's choice, then closed his eyes and allowed the noise and vibration of the engine, the gentle lean of the truck around the mountain curves, and the ambient threads of the alpha wave music to lull him into drowsiness. He nodded in response to Jack asking him if he felt all right, shifted over and leaned his head against the passenger side window, and fell asleep.

He flew.

Forward, ever faster and faster, speeding along, instinctively just on the edge of being out of control, toes pointed, head tucked in between arms thrust straight out in front of him. Not knowing for sure where he was going, knowing only that he was moving, being somehow guided, and that it was better than good, he cleaved into an expanse of silence and freedom, banked around curves, and swooped up the distance between him and infinity. He was the very picture and feel of power and elegance combined. And, yes, it would have been perfect, just so very perfect, were it not for the unsettling, vague sense that something which might well turn out to be terrifying was dogging him, resolutely lurking back somewhere behind him.

He ate up the camber, an airfoil and creator and passenger and integral part of the very wind itself. He finally left the curves behind to shoot along like an arrow for a time before slowing and casting a tentative look over his shoulder. There was nothing there but blue sky, tinged low down with the very faint red and pink and amber streaks of an approaching twilight. He might have outrun it, whatever it was. In any case, although he didn't quite understand why and wondered if maybe it was because he was reaching the end of the thread, he didn't seem to have a choice but to fly along more sedately now, alternately slowing and surging gently, rocking side to side slightly over rolling air currents, even coming to temporary, hovering halts from time to time. He tested control, trying to veer off to the left and speed up, but there was a wrenchingly strong tug, and even though he suspected it would be a very bad thing for whatever might be back there to catch up with him, he carefully settled into what seemed to be the natural order, not wanting to risk placing undue stress on the connection.

He gradually grew aware of the existence of a disturbance to the symmetry of detachment and silence he felt he was more than entitled to: harsh noises, voices yelling, frenetic activity. It came from below, insistently yanked at his leash from below, increasing to the point he had to struggle to keep altitude. He looked down along the invisible thread to see its far end attached to his physical-self, who sat on a dull grey floor in a dull grey room, in the eye of a hurricane of people running and screaming and failing miserably at defending themselves, a simple people, a dying people. Beside him, on the grey floor turning red with blood, lay a dark-haired adolescent girl with a small child in her arms.

And Jack was there. Jack was there standing over that him, looking down at that part of him. Jack waved his theatrically smoking weapon toward the girl and said something Daniel couldn't hear, and then stalked purposefully off to be swooped up into the circling maelstrom like that was just where he naturally belonged instead of with Daniel, instead of standing beside Daniel in the dead eye of the storm where Daniel was forced into rancid, thick, impenetrably deep soul-sucking silence.

All parts of Daniel actually felt it, felt it plain as day, all at the very same time, when the small child grabbed his pantleg. He didn't want to, he tried not to, but he had to and he glanced down at the small, dirty hand desperately clutching him, and suddenly he was being pulled down, down, down – he was falling. The dark-haired girl opened her eyes and lanced him with her stare, and he fell faster, falling, and screaming now, he was screaming and falling completely out of control. Her eyes were cavernous dark holes as she accused him, "You promised. You said you were my friend," and he felt her spit on his face as he plummeted straight down into their black emptiness.

Daniel awoke with a jolt, the side of his head banging against the window as he was abruptly yanked back into himself. He felt raw and unreal; a simultaneous and strangely offset aching and numbness confirming he must not have got all the way back together as one quite yet. He wasn't sure where he was for a moment, until another jolting bounce threatened to send his head into collision with the window again. He smelled something heavy and dark, realised he was staring at something familiar – a dashboard – and felt leather under his hand where it rested on the seat beside him. Right. He was with Jack, in the truck. He'd fallen asleep, and... and... he'd, he'd fallen –

Oh God. He'd fallen. His gut clenched. Oh, God.

Jack looked over at him apologetically. "Whoops. Sorry. Bit of a rude awakening, huh?" He tapped his fingers impatiently against the steering wheel. "Potholes, honking big huge potholes. Guess I shouldn't have come this way, but I thought they'd be done with all this by now." The truck jounced again, and Jack wrenched the wheel to the right and then quickly back to the left. They swerved, and it didn't feel anything like what it was supposed to feel like. It was supposed to be smooth and powerful and quiet and infinitely graceful, but this was sharp, and erratic, noisy and jarring. Daniel looked dazedly out the windshield.

"Daniel? You all right? You with me here?"

What? Where, here? Oh – Daniel realised he recognised this stretch of road. Amid the prolific confusion of yellow and black signs, blinking amber lights and traffic cones, slabs of torn-up asphalt, and cordoned off areas of freshly paved roadway was the southern stretch of the city bypass highway Jack often used to travel to and from the mountain, to avoid having to go through the suburbs. The thick, black smell... recently laid asphalt, today's yield apparently just fresh off the grill, steaming under a steady sprinkle of water from hoses manned by sweaty, bare-chested construction workers. And traffic. Acres and acres of almost bumper to bumper traffic wending around the no-go zones and parked dump trucks and steam rollers, the lines of vehicles popping up and down and jerking side to side as they bottomed out and bounced around on the torn up roadway.

It was crowded, hot and smelly, and ugly. So very ugly. He wasn't falling, no, he was all right now – and only mankind could ever create something so dreadfully hideous as this. He looked out the driver's side window, past Jack. "What a fucking mess. What a stupid, bloody, goddamned fucking mess." He told it like it was, because words were his thing; they were all he had left. Then he distanced himself from all of it. It was no skin off his nose.

Jack's quick glance seemed to hold an edge of tense surprise. "Okay. Yeah, you're definitely awake." Jack was distracted by a flagperson for a moment, wrestled with the steering wheel to guide the truck over to the rutted lane she directed him toward, and then flicked an altogether different, cooler, glance back at Daniel. "So. Daniel. Tell me, what's with the language?"

Daniel continued to look past Jack, out the window, not answering, as he wasn't altogether sure what the actual question was. Not that it mattered. This was just random conversation, a time-filler; not real. Not real like... falling – Ah, no. No, that definitely hadn't been real. He felt the same damned stirring start up again, deep in his gut, and for a second idly wished he had a gun. But he hauled himself up short when he suddenly realised that for the first time in six days he did indeed have a question of his own important enough to be worth asking.

He looked straight at Jack, and with what just possibly could be a faint shiver of actual interest stirring inside, asked it. "What are we having for dinner?"

Jack cast him a sidelong look, his eyes narrowed. "Ah, well, Daniel, that'd be..." he drew it out, enunciating phonetically, slowly, "Italian."

Spaghetti. Daniel wanted spaghetti. Long, pale, pliable strings elegantly curling and nesting and stretching –

"What's going on with you, Daniel?"

What? He gazed impassively at Jack. Nothing, there was nothing going on.

"Don't give me that look." Jack sounded angry, or impatient. Or both. "Either you're seriously preoccupied, or the doc put a bit of extra something into the anaesthetic she gave you. You've been zombing around ever since you came to. And that was days ago."

Ah, okay, yes, he could work with this. "Actually, as far as I know there is no intransitive verb for what you're going for here, Jack." He ignored the low growl of frustration that came from beside him, because after all he was doing Jack a favour here. Jack more often than not pretended he didn't know stuff he really did know, but in this instance Daniel was pretty sure Jack wasn't pretending anything; he really didn't know he'd made a mistake. "Even if you correctly maintained the integrity of the noun and added one of the four basic verb inflections, thus ending up with 'zombie-ing' instead of 'zombing', which you didn't, I'm pretty sure it still doesn't actually exist. You'd have to use the transitive verb 'zombify', actually, with which you need to specify a direct object."

Jack muttered under his breath, "Dammit. Okay, I specifically object," and Daniel just let it sail right on by, because he didn't think it in the least bit witty nor funny. Jack let out a long breath, whuffing somewhat overly dramatically if you asked Daniel, and then as he manoeuvred around a line of traffic cones, said, "Fine. For the last six days you've been behaving as if you'd been 'zombified'. A case of the walking dead, a freaking automaton, Daniel, and I want to know why."

Daniel closed his eyes and breathed in deeply through his nose. Kel'nor'eem seemed a very attractive idea. He released the breath slowly through his mouth, focusing intently on searching for his centre. For that quiet, still place within which had been conveniently readily available of late.

"We had no choice, Daniel. The idea of going through the 'gate scared them even worse than trying to defend the village against impossible odds. There's no way they were going to change their minds, and the longer we stuck around trying to help, the more damage we did just by being there."

"I know that." Daniel reached into himself, dipped into the knowledge, and found what he was looking for quickly enough, even before all the fetid waste of this body had even been fully expelled. A deep well of nothingness – no, no, not nothingness; it wasn't nothingness because Jack was wrong. It was solace, a virtue of pacifism long overdue, was what it was, and Jack didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

"Okay, so if you know there wasn't anything else we could have done, then what's with the frontal lobotomy audition? What's wrong?"

He opened his eyes, because he could look now, it was perfectly safe, and blew out the rest of the breath quickly, the right words riding along on it. "There's nothing wrong, Jack. If anything, things are better than they have been for a long time."

They jounced over a particularly bad series of ruts, and Jack cast him a sidelong glare full of negativism. "Yeah, sure they are," he said sceptically, and then as they bounced violently once again turned his eyes back forward to the mess he was driving through. Daniel nodded in commiseration, because he could understand how Jack might feel that way, considering the roadwork. It was hell on the truck's suspension. Jack loved his truck.

He pointed to an upcoming exit ramp. "What about there?"

"What?" Jack's glance at him housed a confused, irritated frown, until he saw Daniel was pointing off to the right. "Oh, yeah, good idea. Even going through residential streets is bound to be faster than this."

The truck swerved between cones, onto the shoulder, following and leading other drivers who'd also had quite enough. Daniel looked out his side window and noted that the snick-tick, snick-tick, snick-tick noise of the turn signal was in perfect synch with the speed at which they were forced to drive past each of the dirty, lumpy sandbags marking the far right edge of the dirt shoulder. Then they were clear of the mess, on the off ramp. Jack selected a street to aim for, and the turn signal abruptly flicked off as they cruised around the chosen curve and surged ahead into completely unfamiliar suburbs. And wasn't life just like that? You manoeuvre haphazardly as best you can through the mess, time and events beating out their rhythm in an excruciatingly precise harmony you have no control over, and then the second you actually think it might be possible to make a choice, it's all over with. You think you're free and clear, but really you aren't – the beat ends, silence falls, and you find yourself flying along in alien territory, not knowing where the hell you are.

Jack slowed down the truck, and muttered, "Okay, so just where the hell are we?" and Daniel just looked at him. There, see, even Jack understood the futility of it all. "There's a city mapbook in the glove box, Daniel. Pull it out for me." Daniel reached forward, but hadn't even popped the latch when Jack crowed, "Yeah! Okay, yes, that was La Junta we just passed, so if we go left and just keep on that heading we should eventually meet up with Cheyenne Road."

Daniel felt the transmission gear down as Jack slowed the truck and turned left down a gently curving, suburban residential street lined with wide sidewalks. Modest homes nestled on mowed lawns bordered by gardens and shrubs, and the occasional low fence line, and a number of parked cars dotted the curbs on both sides of the road. Ever the good driver, Jack dropped the speed even more as it became clear the neighbourhood was a family one. They passed a couple walking hand-in-hand, the man with a baby in a Snuggly on his chest, and then walking toward them not on the sidewalk but on the street itself was a young girl with bright orange streaks in her hair who had a dog on a leash and who wore a halter top so tight and small that as they drove by her Daniel saw the uppermost part of the areolas of both nipples poking out the top. It wasn't the least bit attractive. A couple of kids sat on the steps of one house, and here were two more children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk in front of another home.

It was peaceful-looking, and admittedly pretty with its green grass and flowers in full bloom in many of the yards, and each and every one of the homes stared at Daniel with dark, wide, empty, windowed eyes, and one of the parts of him knew without a doubt they rightly had him pinned as an impostor and an intruder. And all of the parts of him couldn't wait to get out of this place.

"So how far is it to Cheyenne Road?"

Jack glanced at him. "I don't know. This should intersect with it up ahead somewhere. Check the mapbook."

Daniel didn't want to check the mapbook. He'd have to open the glove box, paw around in there to find it, and then he'd have to find the right page, and... and it wasn't worth all that trouble. He leaned against the back of his seat and closed his eyes, wondering if there might be time for a nap before they got to wherever they were heading, and morbidly wondering how much of him would make it through it if there was. "Is the restaurant on Cheyenne?"

"No, it's on Seneca, just off Cheyenne." Jack turned off the CD that had been quietly playing in the background. "Okay, look, Daniel..."

Because if he slept, he might fly, and if he flew –

"All right, so, neither of us are very good at this, but I think we have to try. Something's obviously wrong..."

Daniel noticed that the black behind his closed eyes was tinged with a deep maroon. To fly or not to fly?

"...and I gotta tell you, Buddy, Fraiser and Hammond are this close to sending you for a psych eval."

They what? Daniel snapped his eyes open to see Jack holding up his right hand, his thumb and forefinger held a scant inch apart. The urge to close his eyes again and surrender to the sudden pull to take off and launch into the infinite space between Jack's fingers was so strong, Daniel imagined he felt himself straining at the boundary of his own chest wall for release. But when he blinked hard and shook his head and checked himself out, he was still more or less stuck together, still sitting there in the truck, and he swallowed the inexplicable lump in his throat and simply asked Jack, "Why?"

"Why?" They were going slowly enough that Jack actually got a longish disbelieving stare in. "Because you're not yourself, Daniel, and they think you aren't coping with what happened on 485."

Daniel frowned. "Not myself, Jack? What's that supposed to mean?"

Jack manoeuvred the truck around a group of teenagers spilling out onto the street. "I can't speak for anyone but me, but hell, it was a bad situation there, and it's not hard to notice you're, ah, not exactly firing on all cylinders since we got back. One plus one equals two, Daniel."

Oh, right, how typical. "I see. So I can't win for trying, is that it, Jack? When it all goes sour but I can understand and accept how things went down, and live with it, there's something wrong with me." Daniel kept his voice level, dispassionate, because the truth really shouldn't be a surprise, not after all this time. "But when things go sideways and I fight against the inhumanity, and I can't accept how it turns out, and people hate most of what I say and do so much they want to throw me through a wall, well, that's all right. That's Daniel being Daniel."

"Agh, Jesus, Daniel. Finally." Jack shook his head, sighing loudly. "I've been waiting for you to do whatever equivalent of calling me a stupid son of a bitch again. Actually, for once, getting so that I was hoping for it." He reached out and lightly slapped Daniel on the upper arm. "That one was on the lame side, though. Not up to your usual standard. So go for it, then. Let it out, and we can try to clear the air and get back on track."

Uhh, excuse...? Get back on track? The best Daniel could come up with was, "I don't know what the hell you're talking about." Even as he spoke, he decided he didn't really want to hear it. It was too late for this nonsense. Past dinnertime. His stomach was lurching, hunger doing a noisy forward roll inside him and all the windows were staring darkly at him, daring him to stay here any longer. "Jack, can we just get going, please? I know you don't believe me, but I'm not angry at you, or anyone, or anything. Everything is just fine. Everything except that you promised me dinner and I'm starving."

The truck followed the gentle bends of the road, and Jack was answering him, he knew, but all the words were lost under a rushing, roaring sound in his ears as they entered an S-curve and Daniel saw that on his side of the road there was a young girl with short dark hair standing on the sidewalk. He saw she had a small child nestled in her arms, and the child was reaching out, and as they passed her she nailed him with her coal dark eyes, turning her head to follow his progress past her, and he heard her silent condemnation. He saw what she looked like, and what she wore, and the grisly evidence of her passing in her eyes and on her chest and my God, no, it was impossible –

All breath suspended, his heart like a stone in his chest, Daniel wrenched his head and shoulders around to keep track of the sighting, to look back as they carried on, to see this impossible vision of his Reece who had not in fact but had in effect held a distraught, doomed child reaching out in terror to him. The truck eased around the curve further and he blinked hard at seeing a teen-aged girl standing by the curb, dark-haired, wearing a dark red top and a pair of jeans, holding nothing, and he was so confused. They entered the second curve of the S, and he felt the other part of him yank at its attachment, wanting to fly away and not have to look, as he saw her suddenly dash out into the street behind the truck. He heard himself gasp, and felt his hands reach and grasp at the upholstery as he craned himself around one-hundred-eighty degrees, not wanting to witness the inevitable but helpless to do anything but.

"Daniel!" Jack? Jack was yelling at him. "For crying out loud, what the hell is wrong with you? Don't do that again."

Oh, Lord. She wasn't cut down, or overrun, or, or – No. Not destroyed.

She jogged across the road, calling out and waving, and just before they drove all the way around the bend and she disappeared from view, Daniel saw out of Jack's window that people in a yard were waving back at her. Jack was muttering about how with all the kids and pets and people out in the neighbourhood, having a passenger leap up and twist around gasping in alarm was enough to scare a driver half to death. Daniel turned back around to face forward, and saw Jack's hands on the steering wheel were white-knuckled.

Daniel opened his mouth to apologise, and Jack turned his head to look at him, but before he could get a word out Jack's eyes widened and he swore, a huge yell of  "Shit!" and suddenly Daniel was jostled forward and sideways as Jack turned the wheel and jammed on the brakes. The truck skidded, tires screeching. Daniel's seatbelt locked, and his hands automatically reached forward to impact the dash in front of him. There was a flash of pale-something way down low to his right, just at the edge of Daniel's peripheral vision, and he sat there rooted to his seat, hands gripping the dash as the truck slewed to the left in a short, controlled skid.

It was too late. There was a thudding impact, and the right front of the truck rolled up and back down again with a sickening, obscenely gentle bounce. Too late, too late, oh God, too late. They lurched to a halt, Jack bolting out of his door around to Daniel's side, bending over to disappear from view. Daniel sat impotently frozen in place, not looking down, don't look down, never look down... looking straight out the passenger-side window, his breath torn away by the sight of the children. The children, lining the roadway, standing stock still beside their abandoned big rubber balls and tricycles and Tonka trucks, staring in shocked terror, eyes wide, mouths open in a startled oh shape, a few of them already understanding well enough to start to cry.

He heard Jack say, "Oh, crap, no," and knew he was supposed to get out of the truck, go see if he could help. But he couldn't move; he was rigid, like a block of stone. Children were sobbing, now. One of them let out a high pitched wail of utter anguish, and suddenly there wasn't just one thread going from the one this-part to the one that-part of him, but more, more, more, and they all started to tug at their points of attachment. They pulled and ripped at him, and the child howled on and they pulled harder, and then he heard Jack's raw, miserable "No, oh no, no," through the half-open window. His heart thudded against his ribs, and with each beat the thread anchored there yanked at it, so it was going to snap right out of his chest, and then there were dozens of them, no, hundreds of threads, pulling at his arms and legs and his skin and his hair, and on all his teeth clamped so tightly and – God! – suddenly hurtling away from his rigid jaw in huge pops –

And then all the rest of him burst out and he was free and away, and suddenly this felt right, his only chance – but he bounced off the window, and realised the cab of the truck was a prison; he couldn't get out. Oh God! He couldn't get away! He frantically beat at the dash and the roof and windows, sat frozen in place and flew at them, only to feel himself fly apart into bits, all the bits of him chaotically rebounding off the barriers, each one to be split, torn asunder, and flung in a thousand different directions with each flailing impact. The truck rocked on its suspension with the chaos within, and there was no way out and he was shattering, splintering into millions and millions of pieces. The passenger door jerked opened and instantly all the bits of him were sucked over to that side to violently crash into the wall of open air and into each other, and as all the shards came together to consolidate into a disfigured jigsaw of himself, he became aware of Jack standing there in the opening, a limp, bloody form in his arms, his eyes tortured and his voice like unwashed gravel as he urgently demanded the utterly impossible. "Daniel. Take her."

Daniel gaped at Jack's heavy burden, frozen in his seat, hands nailed to the dash. He couldn't move, didn't fully understand what he was looking at. Didn't understand how he could even still be sitting here like this. "Daniel! Hurry! Take her!" He tried, but his hands wouldn't move. No, no. This couldn't be. What was this? Was he falling? Please don't let him be falling! He watched himself as he felt himself agonisingly slowly turn his head, the tendons in his neck grinding like a rusty screw, to stare at his hands. Intact hands. Shouldn't they be in pieces, bleeding at least? "Oh for God's sake! Daniel!" They probably weren't his real hands, he realised. They wouldn't move because he wasn't really there; not falling, he wasn't falling, but fallen – he'd shattered apart, and the hands he was seeing were just an after-image, or maybe a place-holder for when he got back together. "Dammit, you little shit, Daniel. Don't do this to me now!" Yes. That fit. That was why he had no control over the hands. "Daniel!" He was just a jigsaw image, a blueprint showing where all the bits of him belonged, for when, if, he, they, came back.

Noises. Voices? His head creaked slowly back around, not intentionally – and how weird was that? – and it took him a second to understand someone had just joined Jack, now. A man.

"Oh no, ohhh..."

"I'm sorry. God, so sorry. Couldn't stop in time. I'll take her to the vet... the truck's running..."

A dog. It was a dog. Not a child. God, not a child, but a dog. Something moved, started barely rocking. A dog, it was a dog... oh God a dog... a dog. Back and forth ever so slightly, rocking... it was a dog, a dog...

"No. Give her to me. Oh damn, oh no..." Crying. The man was crying.

"Please, please let me do this. Get in, come with us – we have to hurry."

"No, no, there's no point, it's too much. Give her to me. I need to hold her. Ohh fuck, oh, it's too much." Crying, crying, dying.

Faint, broken, distant in space and time with the rocking. "I'll pay for it." Too far away. Jack and the man turned their heads and stared at him uncomprehendingly, and he knew it must be because it had come from too far away, from one of the little bits of him that was lost so far away from here, so he tried it again. "It's won't be too much. I'll pay for it." Daniel had money. Lots of money. He didn't need it.

The man gawked at him, and then his face twisted in a combination of disbelief and dawning anger. "It's not the cost!" He had his dog in his arms now, clutching the bloody, spasming animal to his chest, and it suddenly went limp. The man squeezed his eyes shut for a second and then backed off, choking out, "Fuck you. Just... go. Go! Fuck you!" And then he was hurrying across the sidewalk onto a pristine green expanse of lawn, huddled in grief over his loss as the children looked on in shock.

The retreating figure seemed to dwindle too quickly, all too remarkably, the green of the grass and pale hues of approaching twilight swirling to follow as it grew smaller and smaller ever faster and faster. The whole lot moved with ever-increasing frightening ease, funnelling down to a barely visible pinpoint. Daniel felt himself being sucked in toward it, caught up in the inexorable venturi effect; he was falling, falling...

No! No, he wasn't falling. He was here in the truck, sitting in the truck, his hands gripping the dash in a painful enough rigour that it brought him back and grounded him. And the man, he wasn't shrinking in a cascade of bizarre colour; he was there, right there, crossing the lawn. Two of the children were following him now, running disjointedly, like baby mannequins on strings. The others were being swept up into the arms of adults who had swooped down God knows when from God knows where onto the scene, casting baleful glances over their shoulders at Jack and him as they bore their little ones away.

The after-image of their leaving burned Daniel's eyes. Jack stood by the open door also watching them leave, and dragged a bloodied hand through his hair. He abruptly whirled around and with an intense, ragged, "Jesus!" violently struck out at the door, sending it slamming shut on Daniel. The truck was still recovering from the impact when he climbed through the open driver's side door and literally threw himself onto his seat. He repeated it, "Jesus," holding both hands out in front of him, not touching anything else, and began searching the inside of the cab with his eyes, his head swivelling from one side to the other.

Daniel felt the pain in his hands, saw the blood on Jack's, and for a moment blanked out, unable to reconcile the incongruity. Then he remembered it was the dog's blood, and only Jack had touched the dog. Daniel hadn't touched the dog, had he, so it was all right – everything was as it should be after all.

There was no blood on his hands.

Every time he saw his hands and his fingers move against the dash, it was like he was watching a film running at the wrong speed. Sometimes too slow, other times just a hair too fast to be real, and the colour changed from frame to frame, giving them an almost mottled appearance. The sun was low on the horizon now and hidden behind the trees lining the road, so dusk had fully invaded the interior of the truck, making it difficult for Daniel to visually discern much in the way of detail. That was all right. By now he knew what they looked like: the length and shape of each finger, the lines of tendon and muscle, how big and small the individual veins were and the paths they followed across the backs of his hands and down into his forearms. And his fingernails, neatly trimmed and clean – not like Jack's, which had blood under them.

The truck bounced, then slowed almost to a stop, then sped up again slightly, and he knew they'd arrived even without looking up to see. Although he hadn't consciously thought about it, hadn't discussed it with himself, he absolutely knew just how important it was for Jack's sake that he stay focused, keep to his centre, and not let anything disturb his breathing, breathing, breathing in and out the calm silence. His hands, so capable and defined, with their long fingers and strong grip and clean fingernails, so clean, anchored him and he held onto them as they did to him, keeping all the parts of him in their proper place in the crazy jigsaw that was him. So he watched them and they guarded him, and helped him hold onto the calm silence within.

Because that's what hands were for, after all. For holding on.

He was holding on. Doing just fine. Helping Jack.

The truck shivered as the driver's door opened and closed, and an instant or an hour later his own door was yanked open, and Daniel almost felt Jack's hand where it clamped onto his arm. He definitely felt the pebbly vinyl of the dash under his sliding fingers as he was pulled out of the truck, and as he emerged and lost all contact with it he clasped his hands tightly together. Took a deep cleansing breath, relieved to find he could feel the pressure of his hands against one another as well as he had them against the dashboard. Jack's grip was a faint buzz on his biceps, and he had to look down to manoeuvre the running-board and then the curb, because just like they had earlier in his office his legs felt out of place, and he didn't want to trip and... fall.

They were inside, and Jack asked him something he didn't quite catch. The words were there, but the meaning escaped him, and there was a flare of thick movement inside as he realised he'd missed it and Jack would probably be upset by his lapse of attention. Jack'd had a bad evening so far. He wrung his hands slightly, and the strong sensation of dry, so dry, skin sliding over skin was calming, so he did it again.

"Oh, for God's – Wait just a... here." Wait here? Okay, Jack. Sure.

The bzzt on his arm disappeared and he thought there was a pull on his jacket, from somewhere. Jack doing something, he guessed, and Daniel hazarded taking his eyes off his hands to glance around him. The checkpoint, they were at the topside checkpoint inside the mountain, and Jack needed his ID. But it wasn't in his jacket pocket, it was in his wallet in his pants pocket, and so Daniel reluctantly unclasped his hands and reached around to slide his fingers in to retrieve the wallet. His fingers latched onto it and he started to pull it out of his pocket, lost his grip, found it again, and Jack snapped at him, "Sometime tonight, Daniel." Yeah. Bad evening. Poor Jack.

Jack seemed especially impatient for some obscure reason, almost dancing around on his toes, and as Daniel pulled the wallet out of his pocket the SF at the checkpoint asked, "Are you all right?"

Daniel paused and looked over at Jack, waiting for his answer to the guard, but Jack didn't say anything, just ignored both the question and the man and instead looked back at him. Daniel frowned as the guard leaned forward looking at them both, and said, "Sir?"

In a confusing flurry of movement Jack reached around and pushed his fingers off his wallet, pulled it the rest of the way out of his pocket, and flipped it open. "He's fine, Airman. Thank you." The man nodded, and then the bzzt was back on Daniel's upper arm and he was being pulled along the corridor and into the first elevator.

Something shrieked inside, a quick burst of noise from out of a small hole, and Daniel clasped his hands, interweaving his fingers together, and stared at them to quiet it. He was fine. Elevators went down. This is what elevators were supposed to feel like. He gripped hard enough that he saw his fingers go white and felt the pain, and almost, almost, almost felt the muscles in his arms working, and almost was better than not at all, so he was fine. He closed his eyes, leaning back against the wall, and focused on his hands, and with a bit of effort that led him back to the quiet stillness, he was fine. Holding on. Managing well, helping Jack through this with determined strength and calm.

Through corridors with walls too far away and doorways which slid disconcertingly quickly aside, they made their way through the base, Jack's hand around his upper arm a constant dullness that would have been fine except for the knowledge there was blood under the fingernails of that hand. Then they were in the infirmary, and Jack released his arm and went and sat on a chair at the far end of the room away from where Daniel stood uncertainly, wringing his hands for the quietude it brought.

The duty nurse came over and stood between them, looking back and forth at them with her eyebrows raised, and said, "Weren't you going into town? That was a quick dinner trip," and then peered more closely at him, and frowned. "Dr. Jackson? Are you all right?"

Daniel wasn't sure why people were asking that of him, when it was Jack who was in trouble here, not him. It wasn't his bad evening. He hadn't killed anything. He looked across the room toward Jack, and then refocused on his hands as he broke the bad news to the nurse in a voice which sounded just as far away as the walls looked. "We had to come back. There was an accident."

"Sir?" She sounded alarmed. "Are you two all right?"

There was noise from across the room, the chair shifting. "It's fine. No one was hurt."

Something shrill leaked out of the pinhole within, spurts of 'not true!', 'not true!' erupting like jets shot from a watergun nozzle, and with a quiet gasp and a firm clench of his gut Daniel pushed it down and sealed it up. Hands closed on his, soft and warm and light, and he looked up from the conjoining into the concerned face of the nurse. He aimed past her to Jack, loafing on the chair almost glowering, his stained hands lying carelessly in his lap, and Daniel knew he ought to try to help Jack in a more concrete way than he already had.

So he told the nurse the truth, in a whisper befitting the gravity of Jack's situation. "Jack killed a dog. In front of the children."

She looked at Jack for a very long moment, intense worry on her face, and then turned back and so very gently asked, "Did he?"

Daniel nodded, feeling a lump forming in his throat at the great caring he heard in her voice and saw in her expression. He went back to regarding his own hands as he answered her, reassured by the way the lump dissolved when he did that, and by the knowledge he'd been right – that she understood and would help Jack deal with what he'd done. "Yes. He stopped at a gas station to wash his hands, but I don't think he got it all out."

There was a pause of pregnant silence in the room, a thing Daniel appreciated for the gift it was, and then she was moving her hands to his shoulders, and guiding him to his left. "I see," she said, and he knew she did, "I can help him with that. First, though, you both look so tired, and you're probably hungry. Why don't you get changed and climb into bed, and I'll send for some dinner for both of you."

He wasn't hungry at all any more, and he could get into bed any old time, but Daniel didn't object to her solicitous behaviour even though one of the parts of him easily recognised there was a patronising, subjectively insulting aspect to it. She kept glancing back at Jack, obviously worried, and Daniel knew she understood and was trying her best. So he let her lead him to the bed and sit him down on the side of it, and even let her pull the white scrubs from under the edge of the pillow and unfold them for him, knowing that as soon as he let her scratch this particular professional itch of altruism she'd go to Jack, and do the right thing.

She did. She pulled the curtain around his bed, and a second later he heard soft bubbles of sound coming from across the room. Low and rumbling, high and tinkling, the indistinct voices mingled and wafted on the air currents and were joined by footsteps, and then got fainter as she and Jack left the room. Daniel fumbled to undo his boot laces, and hoped she would be able to get all the blood out. That thought raised a harsh whisper in the dark, and he rubbed his hands together, feeling the dry friction with appreciation, until the noise was swallowed up by the void again. He watched his fingers closely as they moved across his clothing, baring body parts and skin surprisingly unblemished considering their nature as rough approximations, placeholders. He took off all his clothes, and lost and found himself in the depths of the silence.

She came back too quickly, almost immediately in fact, long before he was done, and stood on the other side of the curtain politely letting him know without words that she was about to poke her head inside. He didn't bother getting in a flap over it; he just held the scrub bottoms in front of him, covering up his groin, and waited for her. She was obviously surprised to see that he wasn't ready, and offered to help him. He let her, because it was easier than opening his mouth and saying, no, can't she see he was naked here and he could do it himself thank you very much and what's the big hurry anyway? It wasn't worth pointing out, or asking; not worth disturbing the peace with useless comments and questions.

She was dizzyingly efficient, and had him dressed in the scrubs and in bed with a blood pressure cuff wrapped around his arm before he'd even had a chance to figure out which pantleg was which. She took his blood pressure and pulse and counted his respirations – and even though they were always sneaky about it when they did that, piggybacking it onto their pulse rate count, he always knew when they were doing it. There was a meal tray on the table next to the bed, and she apologised that the food had probably gotten stone cold while he was changing, which confused him for a second. But it really didn't matter because he didn't want it anyway.

He ignored the meal she set up for him, and instead, once she'd gone, burrowed under the covers. One part of him blanked everything out so he could concentrate only on the well of silence, and another part stood watch for noise, while the rest of him simply struggled to stay in place. He clasped his hands together under the sheet, holding on tightly, and desperately tried not to fall asleep.

He dreamed of flying. And of falling.

He'd clung to himself with a fervour born of intense fear, but he'd been torn apart and yanked out of himself despite his tenacious grip. And he didn't fly so much as hurtled in an uncontrolled tumble of arms and legs, upward and onward, the shrieking of air and his own screaming filling the backwash behind him. He flew, too fast to support any real understanding of what was happening to him – flew to the limits of time and space and then beyond, and was afraid, deathly afraid he'd never find his way back this time.

The hurricane was there and it hauled him to itself, demanded him, this time not to hover over or fall into its dead eye, but to be viciously sucked into its whirling, buffeting wall of chaos. He struggled against it, but was helpless and found himself flung around and around in ever dwindling concentric circles, surrounded by and slamming into all the losses and terrors and betrayals that dwelled there. Kawalski was there, half his head missing, and Robert and Sha'uri flew by and pointed and laughed at him as maggots crawled out from the holes in their bodies. There was a cacophony of sound, deafening, as all at once and for forever constant voices called out, screaming, laughing hysterically, sobbing. Bombs went off, and submachine guns and staff weapons and zat guns fired, and the stench of smoke and charred flesh and blood was nauseating.

The vortex snatched at him, pushing and pulling and battering him, and he shattered under the pressure, screaming again as he felt himself break up into a myriad glittering pieces, the sharp shards of him cutting and lancing into him as they joined him in being sucked into a swirling, descending mass of pain and self-destruction. He closed his eyes but they were pulled open by the force of the winds, and he tried not to look down, but he had to, he had to, and he saw the tunnel of the vortex narrowing, funnelling down to the same barely visible pinpoint which had captured the man and his dead dog, and once again he was caught up in the same venturi effect and helpless to stop the falling.

Below him, he saw the centre, the void, and it was filled with people. She was there, the dark-haired girl, standing there with her head tipped back staring straight up at him, and her eyes were huge, dark, empty holes, and suddenly he was roughly ejected from the swirling periphery into the centre, and was falling straight down into them. All the bits of him fell with him, were pulled down with him, but not into the bottomless black of her eyes – he was falling, and screaming, and then he was lacerated into one as he and all the shards of him abruptly collected together to form a whole, leaving him re-united and trembling at the apex of the vortex cone, terrified and bleeding and disoriented, standing right next to her.

In sudden and absolute, utterly malevolent silence.

She tipped her head and he followed her gaze as she mutely introduced him to where he was and who else was there, and oh God, it seemed somehow familiar, as if he'd been here, done this, before. Had he? Jack was there, and Ronach, the village leader from 485, and these rough men with the long blades and thick bows in the forefront of a large crowd of hostiles were the leaders of those who had attacked the people of the village on 485. And cowering in a row alongside Daniel he recognised three more of the villagers, in addition to the girl and Ronach.

Hostages.

Oh, oh, hell. He stared at her with wide eyes; oh God, how did he know this? She nodded ever so slightly in confirmation and directed her eyes downward, and he followed and saw the child, the baby, sitting on the ground at his feet, and bile rose up in his throat. The child tugged at his pantleg, and Dahnia, oh please no her name was Dahnia, swiftly knelt and scooped the little girl up, cradling her in her arms, and stood back up – and God! He did know this! No, no! Oh please, no!

They were speaking, arguing in the void of complete silence, Jack and the men, and Daniel heard in his mind what had been said and read the matching words from their lips, and knew what was coming. He leaped forward, raising his arm to protect her, and shouted at the top of his lungs into the void to try to correct the mistake he'd made which had led to disaster on 485. "No! No! We'll go! I promise, we will leave, we'll go right now, we will!"

It was useless. The passage of time slowed to an infinitesimal pace as the past played out, the nod given and the blade swung. He felt the wetness smack him on the face as Dahnia's body jolted, her head canting, and her eyes stared wide with shock into his in the infinite millisecond it took for the top of the baby's head to slide off and Dahnia to drop the suddenly dead child. Then she toppled, the spray of blood that had hit his face now wetting his chest and legs and the ground, and instinctively, without thought or foreknowledge, just as he'd done before, Daniel's hands came out and he caught Dahnia and supported her head and shoulders as she fell. He crouched there with his burden, frozen in place, the blood pumping from her deeply slit neck filling his hands and flowing up under his jacket sleeves.

No. Please. The noise. Quiet. Be quiet.

Daniel opened his eyes to dim light and deep shadows. His heart pounded against his ribs, desolation hovering just one beat away from the next. His body trembled. He couldn't breathe. He wasn't sure he even wanted to.

He realised he had been dreaming; he was in the infirmary; he was safe. But he wasn't safe, because he'd fallen from the grace of silence into the noise and he remembered. He'd failed badly, had let himself remember, and it was every bit as horrible as the part of him he'd buried deep within the emptiness had known it would be. On the edge of panic, he reached out and searched for what had just been stripped from him, but the reservoir of silence was gone, and the noise was terrible. It filled him, all the parts of him, rushed up from a gaping hole within to flow into every corner of his being. The noise was pain and anger and grief, and most of all it was guilt, and a heart broken surely beyond repair.

He clenched his hands together, struggled against it, trying to blank his mind of all awareness, telling himself over and over again he was all right, he was fine, everything was just fine, but it was a damned lie and all of him knew it now. Something even worse than the noise was looming, and he recognised it as the thing which had been chasing him in his dreams as he flew. And oh God, were he only able to fly away now he'd do it no matter the risk and the fear, because if the thing caught him he knew it'd be even worse than the falling, and he was a sitting duck here.

Ghostly words formed in the core of the noise, nebulous at first and then solidifying and rising even as he closed his mind and his eyes against them, knowing they were it, they were the thing, dark and filthy and degrading. He cringed away from it, not wanting to acknowledge the magnitude and grim finality of the burgeoning admission. But the truth came anyway, rising up out of the wretchedness to ruthlessly force its way into his consciousness, and he pushed his head back into the pillow hard and wished to die as he was forced to hear it. His secret. The thing.

I can't do this any more.

The deep, black, terrible secret he'd carefully hidden away from himself in a void of silence and emptiness now irretrievably lost. I can't do this, can't do this, can't do this any more. Daniel raised his hands to cover his face and allowed himself a single luxury, one sob only, to mourn the passing of all that he was, had believed he'd stood for, had tried to accomplish these last five years. One sob only, to acknowledge the ultimate failure in giving up.

"Dr. Jackson?" A bustle and swish of limbs and fabric and a soft whisper preceded the nurse to his bedside by a scant few seconds, but it was long enough for him to take a deep breath and scrub his hands over his face. To hide the trauma of his inadequacy from public view. "Sorry to wake you, but it's midnight. I have to hook you up." She touched his arm, the one on the side she stood on, and as she turned on the overbed light fear and shame rushed over him, and he quickly rolled fully over to face away from her.

She reached across him and took his arm, and he let her do what she had to do, keeping his head turned into the pillow. For each second she was there, fussing around and intolerably touching him to the point he came close to striking out at her, he felt the pressure build ever more in his chest and head, and had to fight to hold himself to the one single cry he'd allotted and already used up. Can't do this any more. The loss was huge, the room closing in on him, the air stifling and sour, and as soon as she left a strangled whimper escaped, and he stuffed his fist against his mouth. Rocked, in an age-old rhythm that did him no good whatsoever now. Because it was over. It was all over now. He was over... done, all done in.

Daniel tried to hide when he realised he was there, pulling both hands to his chest and his knees up, shrinking and pressing himself into the mattress, but Jack found him anyway, gliding softly through the semi-darkness to circle the bed and perch on the edge at its foot. Neither of them spoke for what seemed a long time – Daniel because he was speechless in his accumulated grief and rising terror; Jack, for who knew what reason. Then Jack shifted on the bed and cleared his throat lightly, and Daniel's mind shrieked, no! don't! please, go away, go away, go away, go away, even as his own voice hoarsely croaked out, "Jack. What are you doing?"

"What are you doing, Daniel?"

Crying, crying, dying.

Please go away. But he knew Jack wouldn't go away of his own accord; Daniel would have to send him away. But he didn't know how. The strength that was his words had been the thing to betray him – and her, and her, his mind screamed at him and he rubbed his thumbs against his fists and screamed back, shut up! shut up! – and he had no words for Jack now, nothing left to fight with. He had no way to deal with Jack any more, and he knew that meant Jack was going to discover his awful secret, and suddenly understood he was looking forward to that just as much as he was afraid of it, because it was the next step and one particularly damned part of him knew it had to be taken.

He answered, told Jack exactly what he was doing, because it would be cowardice not to tell him. "Giving up." The dismal secret came out on a whispered breath of air, sounding far away and as pitiful as it really was, and it turned out tragically. There was no sense of a responsibility well met, no relief, no release at all in having shared it and made it real. There was only grief and shame, and a grim heat rolling inside him. He felt tears spill over from his eyes, and had to push his hands into his chest hard and shove his face into the pillow to keep control, because the noise was pushing outward, the pressure of it becoming too much to contain inside.

Jack simply said, "Are you," his tone noncommittal, and there was silence for a bit of forever before Jack casually dropped Daniel from his precarious perch on the edge of composure into an abyss.

"Okay. Can't say I'd blame you."

His heart ripped, shredded itself at the confirmation, and all the failures and losses and betrayals, oh God Jack the betrayal, joined together and welled up into an impossible burden which utterly swamped him. The noise was deafening, crippling, and he shuddered and gripped himself lest he shatter into a million sharp fragments like he had in the truck. Only this time it was real, he really was falling apart, even though the jigsaw parts of him weren't budging, and it was worse, so much worse for not having the outlet of breaking up into pieces. The pressure went on and on, and came out of him in a single raw, ragged wail not entirely stifled by the pillow, and at the sound of it he felt so ashamed, and oh, oh, what was this? – angry, so very angry.

Angry! "Fuck you, Jack," he heard himself cry out, and it was so feeble he couldn't stand the pathetic sound. He thumped his fist down on the bed, and the IV line pulled, restraining him, so he yanked his arm away. The tubing disconnected from the needle hub and sticky fluid flowed all over him and the bed, and he hated it, hated everything, and pulled the taped tubing off of his arm and flung it across the bed away from him.

"Jesus, Daniel!" Jack grabbed at the tubing, then at him, but he twisted away, because fuck the IV. Daniel slowly sat up in the bed, staring at the needle still in his vein, watching the steady stream of dark blood freely well from the hub and run down his forearm, onto his hand, onto the bed. He felt something blooming deep inside him, the sensation itself an indefinable welling up of some kind, of something. Something important. Something he needed.

Jack's hands were there, going for the needle, and Daniel batted him away. "No! No. Wait. Leave it, Jack." Please, just... just for a minute. Just wait.

Jack was swearing at him, gripping his wrist. Daniel placed his fingers on the needle hub so Jack couldn't do anything with it. It was right that this should happen. He watched, almost hypnotised by the blood emerging from the needle and trailing down his arm, and suddenly the welling up inside found its way to the outlet and flowed along with the blood, a catharsis of words tumbling out freely.

"I told her it would be all right. I promised. I stood there and told her I was her friend, that I'd stay and help her and her people. I killed her with my words, and then I saw her, Jack, oh God, I saw her, just before we left. At the village, behind the ramparts, her and the baby. And I saw her again in dreams..." He lifted his eyes from the blood-letting, and Jack was staring at him. Jack was taking him seriously, letting him bleed, listening hard. "And it was because I saw her on the street corner, too, that I distracted you, just before the accident. So it was my fault."

He'd felt her blood on his hands, and then he'd pushed her out of his mind and buried himself in a cocoon of emptiness, in order to save himself facing the ultimate failure of admitting he'd reached the end of the line. But she hadn't let him get away with it, and that same one particularly damned part of him knew the time for honesty was here. He owed that to her, and to Reece, and Sarah, and Robert. To Sha'uri, and to his team. He stared back at Jack, the welling up of debt somehow lending him just enough fleeting strength to admit to the magnitude of his shortcomings, this time loud and clear. "I can't handle it. It's too much. I can't do this any more. Jack, I..."

He had tears on his face again, another failure, and he clenched his hands together to form a single giant fist and slammed it down onto his lap, all bitter anguish and rage over bleeding out his grief and guilt and his pitiful secret for all to see. "I give up, Jack. I give up." Can't do this, can't do this any more.

"Oh, for fuck's sake." Jack stripped the needle from his arm and pressed his thumb down hard on the site, then leaned forward and wrapped his free arm around Daniel's shoulders and pulled him close, rocking him, gruffly whispering into his ear, "Daniel, listen to me. Giving up means fully giving in to despair. It means letting it all go. Giving up means not fighting any more. Is that really what you think you're doing here?"

Yes. Yes! That's what he was doing. Daniel's hands wound round and round in his lap, and he felt the blood slick on his palms and between his fingers as he rubbed his hands together, and his heart shredded anew and the anger was washed away, leaving immense sadness and regret in its place.

"I know what happened was hard, Daniel. And it was just the latest in a long string of crap. It's been hard for a long time." Oh, yeah, no shit, Jack. "But I gotta tell you, Buddy, that's not what I see happening here. I don't see a man who's surrendered. No way." Uncertain and afraid, Daniel felt as though he was suffocating. He shook his head against Jack's shoulder, and wrung his hands.

Jack pulled back from him, let off on the pressure on the puncture, and grabbed his hands, stilling them. "Stop. Just stop with the OCD stuff, okay? It's weirding me out." He felt fingers on his chin, tipping his head up and back, "Daniel, look at me here," and then they were looking into each other's faces. He closed his eyes tightly, because he had to escape and Jack wouldn't let him pull away. "I don't see a guy who's anywhere near giving up, Daniel. I see a man who's been under siege for a long time but is still stepping up into the breech, fighting as hard as he can in whatever way he can. Doing a really, really flaky job of it just now, mind you, but still doing it all the same."

Jack cleared his throat roughly, and released his hands. "Same old, same old, Daniel. Shit happens. I'm sorry, but you know how we can both be pretty bad at this. And I gotta tell you, as much as I want to help, right now, well – " The bed bounced, and there was a scraping noise. "Oh, hell. Never mind. Here... this is for you." Daniel opened his eyes to see Jack had stood up and pulled the overbed table close to him. There was something on it, a dark lumpy package that Daniel really couldn't care less about trying to identify. He felt dizzy, and wrung out, and too impossibly confused to care.

"Carter came while you were asleep. Ate Italian without us. She said to tell you the Roman Pecker is to die for." The right words, Pecorino Romano, Italian sheep's-milk cheese, floated up through his sorrow, and a vague, brief sense of normalcy flitted through Daniel's mind. It was immediately swept away by an intense melancholia, though, and Daniel looked away from Jack, down at his blood-streaked arm, mourning yet another loss.

"She left this for you. Your birthday present. Look, I have to – I'm going to get the nurse, to clean up this mess." Then he was turning away, walking away, but quickly turned back just before he disappeared into the murk beyond the circle of light cast by the overbed lamp. "Daniel... just don't try to run away. It won't work. It never works. And, it's not you."

His birthday. It was his birthday? He hadn't remembered. A year of his life over; a whole new year of his life starting. He looked up to find he was alone, and had to push away an urge to call Jack back, to ask Jack not to leave him alone with the noise. But that wasn't him, and he couldn't do it. So he just sat there in the greyness, exhausted in the midst of a riot of irreconcilable emotion and sticky, bloody sheets, and even though he knew it was a lost cause he tried to find his centre, to if not send the noise away at least blunt it a little. But he couldn't do that either.

The nurse came, without Jack. She told him Jack had left for the night, and she saw the present on the bedside table and quietly wished him a happy birthday, her compassion his undoing. He knew he was mutely crying in front of her the whole time she gently cleaned up his arm, helped him up and into new scrubs, and sat him in the chair and changed the bed, and finally changed his wound dressing. But he had to let the silent tears and shudders free anyway, because he just couldn't help it. She was good about it, though, circumspect and kind, and tucked him in, and he found once he was back under the covers and not so exposed he was able to damp down the waterworks.

She warned him they'd be restarting the IV early in the morning, and asked him if he'd like something to help him sleep until then. "Like what?" he wanted to know, actually glad to have a question, any question, to ask, and she told him he could have a sleeping pill if he wanted one.

"Is it very strong?" he asked her, and she gave him a sympathetic look that almost set him off again.

"Yes, if you have two. You can have one or two; it's up to you."

She stood patiently while he tried to focus on making a decision, and in the end he really couldn't, so she decided for him, saying, "You look pretty worn out. I'll bring two."

And she did; she brought two capsules, red and yellow ones in a little paper medicine cup, and a glass of water. He sat up in bed, and she poured the capsules into his palm, and he hesitated, not altogether sure he really wanted to risk taking them. Another question struck him, one which might solve the problem, and he asked it. Thank God for questions.

"Will I dream, on sedatives?" And she shook her head, no, no probably not, not on these pills, and he felt himself on the very edge of crying again, not sure if it was out of a sense of loss or of relief or some bizarre combination of both. He desperately didn't want to start that in front of her again, and she seemed to know, could tell, because she supportively touched him on the shoulder, said good night, and padded away from him.

It was his birthday, and he knew that on the first day of this fresh, new year of his disastrous life, first thing in the morning, Fraiser would come in and receive report and she'd order an immediate psych consult. She'd tell him it was post-traumatic stress, and just like the other psych consults they'd all been through in the past it was not a threat or a punishment nor an ordeal to be suffered, but could be whatever he chose to make it. An opportunity. And he'd nod, and instead of telling her his dirty secret he'd cowardly tell her, sure, he knew that, sure it could, and they'd put all that work and effort into him while he lied to them and just went through the motions.

Exhaustion rolled over him. God, he was tired, so tired, and so uncertain, and given what awaited him in the morning a deep, dreamless sleep was the only way to go here, all things considered, right?, he told himself, as he tossed the sedatives into his mouth. The capsules stuck to his tongue and upper palate, and it felt disgusting.

Shit happens. Daniel... just don't try to run away. It's not you.

No, Jack, no. Shut up! A fresh wave of guilt, and a sense of wrongness – and was that bitterness? – rolled up from the pit of his stomach, and suddenly he was angry. Jack could take his Roman Pecker and peddle it somewhere else, because it wasn't funny; this was no laughing matter, and Daniel's ability to carry on was something Jack had no right to take for granted like that.

Gagging, he spit the contemptible meds back out into the cup. He scrunched it up, and tossed it out of reach. Snapped the light off, rolled onto his stomach and shoved his arms under the pillow, and hugged it to himself. He buried his face in it, and promised himself he wouldn't cry any more.

He stood beside the bed and looked down at himself, a chimera of defeat, lying so still, and then looked up, reached up with both arms, and despite the intense thrill of fear in his gut launched himself into flight.

He knew exactly where he was going; knew he had no choice in the matter, and accepted it. He slipped easily through space and time, feeling the very essence of existence part and curl aside in deference to his passage. He looked down, suddenly wanting, needing, to see every detail: every moment, every event, every fact and fantasy and truth and lie; every loyalty and treachery, every victory and defeat, every gain and loss.

When he got there they were all waiting for him, all of them whirling madly, circling in the chaos. Teal'c, and Jack and Sam. Sha'uri and Sarah, Kawalski and Robert; Alar and Farel were there too, and Chaka, a weapon in his clawed hand and a fevered determination in his eyes which spoke of grim retribution and death. They surrounded him as he dove like an arrow directly into the funnel, toes pointed, head tucked in between arms thrust straight out in front of him. They joined him in his descent, gravely silent, leading and following and accompanying him, reaching out as if to pluck at his clothing and arms and legs, but stopping just short of touching him.

Then he was at the apex of the eye, somehow not at all surprised to see they'd come all the way to the centre with him, to come to rest on the periphery of the fearful, grey clearing where he stood next to the dark-haired girl Dahnia and the small child. Jack was there, and the group of hard men with their spears and arrows and rough-edged swords, and he knew what was coming. There was a light touch on his shoulder, and he turned to find Reece staring up at him, pain and betrayal in her eyes and carved into hard lines on her face.

Reece stared at him, accusing him, "You told me you were my friend," and Dahnia's eyes complained, "You promised you'd help us." The men around him mutely initiated the same argument he'd been party to before, and he knew what was about to happen and knew too the past would play out no matter what he did. So the only answer he could come up with was utterly inadequate, dreadfully wrong, but he sent it anyway because it was all he had to offer. "I know. I'm so sorry. So very sorry," and his heart lurched and tore in his chest as within the rancid, dead silence the nod was given and the blade swung, and bursts of fire leaped from Jack's weapon and the girls, the girls, the children, they fell and they died.

Noise, fearsome noise – pain and anger and grief, guilt and heartbreak – erupted into the silence and it was terrible. It filled him, all the parts of him, ripped a gaping hole open inside him and rushed up to flow into every corner of his being. He reached out, went down with them and held them as they fell; held them to his chest, to his heart, to his very being. He felt their blood on his hands and the memory of them forever imbed itself deep into his soul.

He gathered them and the noise to him, and all the parts of him moved together to form one as he cradled his burden and cherished it. He cried unashamedly for them and for himself, the outpouring spawning deep within the terrible noise a tiny pinpoint of quietude which grew ever so slightly louder with each heartfelt sob of goodness of intent and compassion and regret.

Then he released them, stood up, and started the long walk home.

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Within the context and limitations of the site Disclaimer, Any and All original characters, situations, story line, dialogue and narrative © August 5, 2002, the author