Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. -- Marcus Porcius Cato

["And yet I declare: Carthage must be destroyed."]

Jack saves the phone call for what should be the end of his day, the part where half of everyone else in the offices around him is packing up and starting to trudge home. He'll be here for another few hours, at least; he hasn't left the building before twenty-one or twenty-two hundred in longer than he cares to think about, unless it was to head off to another stupid party with another bunch of ignorant people, all of whom Jack can't stand. DC is no place for him; he knew that when he took the job. But he doesn't have to like it to do it.

Few months back, Irene-the-unflappable had quietly left a headset on his desk, the kind used by those poor schlubs, the ones who have to tell idiot callers that it works better if you plug it in, to save their ears from falling off. Sign of the times, really. Once upon a time, not very long ago, a P90 had been his essential office equipment. He plugs the headset in and dials a number and an extension from memory.

Out at Groom Lake, it's Carter's late afternoon, and he has no problem imagining her scowling at the telephone when it rings and yanks her out of her contemplation of whatever gizmo she's deconstructing this week. End of the afternoon is always when she finally gets settled. Nothing wrong with Carter's telephone manners, though; when she picks it up, there's nothing angry in her voice, even though interrupting her had always been good for at least a brief snarl back when he'd been doing it in person. "Colonel Carter speaking," she says.

Jack settles back and puts his feet up on his desk. "Carter," he says. "Didn't get to call and wish you a Happy New Year."

He can hear her smiling. "New Year's was three days ago, sir," she says. "You're a little late."

"And yet I notice that you didn't call me either," he counters. "I don't think you have the moral high ground here."

Anyone listening in will hear nothing more than two old friends bickering, which is, of course, the point. They're on a secure line, which prevents eavesdropping as well as any Earth technology can. But both of them know full well that Earth technology isn't the only technology out there, and Jack knows his office is bugged; there's three he can find and that means at least one he can't. It's okay. They've got resources.

"I'm not looking for the moral high ground," Carter says right back. "I'm just looking to score a few points every now and then. Which I think I just did, so I guess I'm ahead for the year so far, right?"

He likes this new version of her, the one that banters right back at him. He just doesn't think too hard about where it came from. He opens the bottom drawer of his desk without getting up or dropping his legs, makes a long arm to reach down beneath the strata of yo-yos, Koosh balls, and Silly Putty that he keeps around to have something to do with his hands while he thinks. "Year's just started," he says. "You got time still." He roots around in the bottom of the drawer; his fingers touch the ball he's got buried under there, size of a baseball or so, looks like just another one of his inexplicable toys. His fingers find the right combination of buttons and switches by touch and then withdraw. "Got any good New Year's resolutions?" he asks. "Me, I'm thinking of ripping out the wallpaper in my living room and painting it instead."

His eyes find the clock. 19:53. Check.

Carter keeps going exactly as though he hasn't just fed her one of their old code words. She's got between three and five minutes to signal him back, else they'll try again. "Oh, God, tell me about it," she says. "That's the problem with renting furnished, right? The place I'm in out here is all white walls, and it's driving me nuts. I didn't bother redecorating, though, because -- you know, supposed to originally be a six month tour, too much effort, and now it's way too much trouble. I was thinking of maybe going out and buying some nice fabric, doing some wall hangings, even if it'd be a pain in the neck to get them all hung right. Still, it'd be something, and I'm starting to get resigned to the fact that I'll be out here until the cows come home. Then again, that would mean I'd have to find the time to do it, which is kind of in short supply, and I can't really find anything I like enough to go through all the effort, and -- I've got my jammer on too, now, sir, so you can stop listening to me babble about my living room."

"Actually," Jack says, "I was kind of interested about the living room thing. Drapes or tapestries?"

Then he kicks himself, because that's a pretty fucking queer thing to say, and -- circumstances being what they currently are -- he's feeling hyper-aware of those delightful little matters. 'Queer' might not be a dirty word anymore, not like it was when he was a kid and making the decisions he's been sticking to ever since, but that doesn't mean he wants people to think it now any more now than he did then, and Carter's already got reasons to be thinking about it in the first place.

Which he's not thinking about. Nope. Nuh-uh. And he isn't going to say a word about it. Carter's got a right to have friends, even if those friends happen to be fucking the Mini-Me, which Jack is not thinking about at all, God damn it, because Lt. Colonel Cameron Fucking Mitchell, Retired, is a good man and a nice guy and currently possessed of more information about Jack than any one human being has any right to have, him and the Mini-Me both, and there is not a single goddamn thing Jack can do about it if either one of them has decided to get talky with Carter.

Which is not outside the realm of possibility. Apparently the kid has learned to share.

But Carter's laughing. "Tapestries, actually, but I'm still thinking about how I'm going to get them hung without them pulling off the walls. And it really is way too much effort to think about. What's the news, sir?"

With the jammers going on both ends, they can talk freely. His bugs, her bugs, won't make a difference, and Jack's no idiot. He knows full well that whoever's listening to him has probably been able to get bugs in her lab too, and she's not as good at spotting them as he is. All of them make it a point to switch the jammers on and off at varying intervals throughout the day, every day, no matter what; it used to drive George and the security staff inside the Mountain crazy, and Jack's pretty sure that Walter and Siler took apart the closed-circuit monitoring system no fewer than six separate times. Jack's pretty sure they finally just threw up their hands and blamed it on naquadah in the blood, ignoring the fact that Daniel never --

Stop. Rewind. Jack's good at censuring those thoughts; he's had a lot of practice. "Kid's in," he says, instead. "Snake's got him working on electronic intrusion, trying to break our security. We're tracking him through the systems. Thought you might want to confirm that through to Mitchell, next time you talk to him; all I could give him was a 'pretty sure'."

"I will," Carter says, suddenly serious. "Do we -- can you tell if --"

If they're fucked six ways to Sunday without lube, she means, and Jack winces again, hearing himself make the mental metaphor, because -- because. Carter means if they can tell if Mini-Me is still himself, or if he's currently playing host to one of Ba'al's minions. Because if Ba'al decided to put a snake in the kid's head, the security breach is so massive that they might never be able to recover from it. The kid's information might be two years out of date, but that doesn't mean it can't do a hell of a lot of damage.

"Can't tell," Jack says. He drums his fingers on his thigh, takes out the yo-yo and starts winding the string. Anything to have something to do with his hands. "Pretty sure the snake wouldn't be able to resist gloating, if he were, though. You know them."

"Yeah," Carter agrees, and then falls silent.

It's an uncomfortable silence, the kind that Jack always wants to fill with a joke or a deflection or something, but he's not sure what would work here, because -- for the first time in longer than he cares to think about -- he has no fucking clue what Carter's thinking. Usually, figuring it out is as easy as breathing, because for all her big beautiful brain, Carter's got the emotional intelligence of a turnip and the bluffing skills of a three-year-old trying to pin the mess on her imaginary friend. But this time even her silences are opaque, unreadable.

Dammit.

"You run into any problems on your end?" he asks, finally, and it comes out too harsh, too defensive. Too accusatory. Too something. Dammit. He's off his stride and off his game and even Carter is going to be able to hear it, especially if she's had a few conversations with the Mini-Me, which Jack knows she has. And God knows what the kid's told her. God knows what her friend has told her, Lt. Colonel Cameron Fucking Mitchell, Retired, who is thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, an officer and a fucking gentleman, a fucking paragon of fucking virtue who loves his momma and loves his country and probably loves to talk to people about his fucking feelings, because God knows where else the Mini-Me might have learned to do it.

Jack makes himself breathe. No point in freaking out. (Barn door. Horse. Shut. And the barn's burned down to fucking nothing, 'cause all his secrets are an open book to anyone who wants to add up two and two, and he never thought about what he'd do if it happened, no contingency plans in place for this particular contingency, because it wasn't him who did it.)

"Not really," Carter's saying, his little freakout passing her by. That's his girl. Stay oblivious, Carter. "I've been doing some subtle inventory once everyone else leaves the building, and we're definitely missing stuff, but it's nothing more than the stuff we've already figured out was gone. I'll let you know if I come across anything else. It's pretty quiet out here, and not in the ominous, shoe-about-to-drop kind of way. In fact, it's so quiet that I was actually thinking of --"

She breaks off, like she's just said something incredibly tactless, and while Jack's no stranger to Carter saying something tactless -- it used to happen with incredible frequency, after all -- he can't quite figure out what it is, this time. "Thinking of?" he prompts.

"Taking some time off," she says, in the little-girl voice she always uses when she's been caught thinking out loud again. "Cam asked me to. He, uh. Needs someone to help him out with the R&D on the contract he's on. And I think he's..."

She trails off, winding down. This conversation is kind of like gargling broken glass, and yet Jack can't back away, can't let it all fade into quiet oblivion. The last thing he cares about right now is Cameron Fucking Mitchell's state of mind, but the need to ask is like a bruise under his skin, hard and knotted and tense. "He's what?" he asks.

But instead of some demurral, Carter sighs. "He and JD really love each other," she says. "And he's hurting like hell." Quiely and without fanfare, but it hurts. Hurts more because Jack's seen them together, seen Cameron Fucking Mitchell half an inch from breaking down with fear and still managing to hold himself together enough to do the necessary and unpleasant thing. He's seen Cameron Fucking Mitchell threaten Jack's life and mean it, honestly and sincerely and with (Jack knows) full and complete knowledge of what Jack is capable of, because Jack had done something to threaten the kid. The kid that Cameron Fucking Mitchell is in love with, the kid that loves him back. The kid that didn't stop to think what that love might say about one Brigadier General Jack O'Neill, who's the one stuck cleaning up the kid's messes.

(No. It's not love. It's just acting out, the kind Jack had expected of the kid, the kind that involves rebelling against all the things that held him -- them -- so long and so tightly. He'd known the kid was going to lash out against all the rules they'd learned so painstakingly over the years. He'd know the kid was going to go a little bit crazy.)

(It's love. The kind of love that makes you a little bit crazy.)

If Jack could stick his fingers in his ears and chant "la la la" to his own mental voice, he would.

He makes his voice hard, sparse. "That have any bearing on the op?"

And he's expecting her to shy back, apologize and move on. It's what she's always done when he barks at her like that. Carter's no shrinking violet, but (he knows) she can't handle the thought of his disapproval, even now when they're technically so far away in the chain-of-command that his disapproval doesn't mean anything. Except he knows it always will, and he even knows why, and that's another one of the things he isn't thinking about.

But this time, her voice might get quiet, but it's not the kind of quiet that presages one of Carter's guilt trips. It's the quiet that says she's thinking about things. And when she talks again, he thinks it might be the sound of Carter figuring things out, and Jesus flaming Christ on a pony, because what she says is, "No. But it doesn't mean it isn't bothering you, and I don't blame you that it does. I just think it'd be smarter for you to give in and admit that it's bothering you."

Even her belated "sir" can't alleviate the shock, because -- that was Carter (always Carter, never Sam, even in the privacy of his own thoughts, and he's got good reason for it) suggesting that he talk about his feelings and that means she knows. Even if he can't tell what, exactly, she knows. But she knows enough to know that this is bothering him, which means she probably knows enough to know why, and they're right back around again to her knowing way too fucking much.

Fuck.

"Out of line, Carter," he snaps, fast and decisive, hating himself for giving into it, hating himself for giving her that much corroboration.

There's a pause. He drops his head into his hands, rubbing at his temples, trying to ignore the headache that's screeching up on him. "No," she says, slowly. "No, I'm not." There's a sort of iron-clad resolve there, one he's heard from her before but never directed at him. "I think we're past that now, si -- Jack. Or if we're not, we should be."

It's too much for him to think about. At all. Because this is Carter, and the two of them have spent the past ten years lying to each other about their emotions with face and voice and words, and there has been a mutal non-aggression pact to never ever talk about it and he's been so fucking careful to keep from piercing those lies and even so much as hinting that there's something underneath the face he offers her. And now, apparently, someone has given her the X-ray fucking glasses that let her peek behind the curtain, and this is so not the time for this conversation.

Maybe next Christmas. Maybe next decade. Maybe a week from never.

He checks the clock. 20:06, and that's not quite as long as he likes to leave the jammer on -- he tries to vary the length of time, anywhere between twenty minutes and three hours, but if he doesn't stop this right now he's going to lose it. "My time's up," he says. "Coming off of secure --"

"Sir --"

"-- in three, two --" He reaches down into the drawer again.

"You can't just --"

"-- one --" Click.

She picks up the cue, quick like burning, and it's just another one of the reasons why he lo -- appreciates her. "--finally figured out they weren't instructions after all," she says. "They were graffiti. He talked me into wasting a good week and a half on that one."

He makes himself laugh, but it sounds hollow to his ears. "Happens sometimes," he says. "Just like the good old days, right?"

"That it is." And he takes back everything he'd just been thinking about appreciating the quick, because the next thing out of her mouth is, "You should come on out. Drop by and visit. You said you weren't all that busy, and I know everyone out here who came from the SGC would love to see you. And the advice you've been giving me about all the problems I'm having has been really helpful, but nothing beats seeing the situation in person, and I think it'd really help. I'd love to have you tell me how to avoid doing something like that again."

Feels like she's kicked him straight in the gut. Because she knows how busy he is, but most of his 'busy' is the kind of thing that doesn't -- can't -- show to the people who are almost certainly now listening in again. Hoist on his own fucking petard; if he hadn't turned off the jammer, she wouldn't have been able to spring this on him. And they are playing for an audience now, and he's pretty sure who that audience is, and there is absolutely no way he can get out of it. Not without fucking this beyond repair. He doesn't know what he'd do if the consequence would be just (only) endangering the kid's life, but he's saved from having to figure it out by the knowledge that it's not just the kid who's at risk here; it's everything. Everything he's served, everything he's saved, everything he's lived for. Everything he's been willing to pay the price of.

He tries to get out of it anyway. "Oh, I'm sure you don't need me to come and get in the way. You're smart. You can handle things."

There's a warning in his voice, and he knows she can hear it. But it doesn't seem to bother her. "No, really," she says, bright and brilliant, and he spent years, years, wishing she'd grow a spine and stand up to him now and then instead of deferring to the faces he was showing her, but this isn't exactly what he had in mind. "It's been at least six months since you were out here, and we are technically a subsidiary of Homeworld, if you go through enough layers. You should come. It'll be good for morale. I'll have Irene check your schedule."

There's nothing more he wants than to switch his jammer back on and express sympathy for her obvious head injury, but he doesn't know if she's got hers on still or not, and the last thing they can afford is to get into any of the reasons why he wants to go have a happy cheerful visit with Carter about as much as he wants to get shot in the foot.

Although it might not suck as badly as he's thinking it will. Or it will, but it might be useful, too. At least if he's looking her in the eye, he'll be able to tell more of what she knows. Or thinks she knows, at least. Carter's learned a fair bit of the fine and classic art of subterfuge over the years -- and if he's looking for someone to blame for the fact that he can't read her as well as he used to be able to, well, he probably can't lay all the blame at the kid's feet; Jack's put in a lot of work in teaching her how to lie with open eyes and earnest face, how to take that awkwardness at lying and transform it into something that looks like honesty to unknowing eyes, and he never expected she'd turn it back around on him.

But it's got another side to it, too. Like it or hate it, and there are times when he's felt both, he can't deny that he (accidentally, deliberately) programmed a hell of a lot of buttons into Carter, and he knows where all of them are for the pushing. And if he's standing toe to toe with her, he'll be able to look into her face and see all the knowledge she's trying to hide.

So he groans. "All right, fine," he says, and it's not gracious at all, and it's not kind and it's not nice and it's exactly the kind of tone of voice she'd have shrunk away from. Before. And it says something about him -- something small and rigid and ugly, something that he usually keeps down in the places where he never lets himself go -- that he wishes she would.

Carter's never stood up to him before. Carter doesn't stand up to people; she's mostly patient and mostly sweet and generally just awkward when the sweet and the patient fall through. They've been dancing around their feelings for -- years, really, he realizes, and the thought of it makes him feel suddenly uncomfortable, because he knows full well that she deserves more, she deserves closure and she's not going to get it while he's still pretending he's the kind of man she thinks he is -- and in that whole time, he's never pushed. Never sat her down and said the things he's wanted to say.

Part of it's because he doesn't like talking about anything that comes close to feelings. Part of it's because he can't come near to thinking about what he does feel for her, not even in the quiet of his own head when nobody else is listening. Part of it's because he doesn't think he can stand to watch the expression on her face as she realizes. What he really is. What he's done, and what he's been, and all the parts that can't stand being held up for examination.

But it seems that only one of them can have a backbone at any given time, because he doesn't argue with her. Doesn't give her any one of the hundreds of polite excuses he could come up with -- now that he's had a few seconds to stop and think -- and doesn't feed her any of the bullshit he can spin as easily as breathing. He hangs up the phone, and he goes home and climbs into his cold and sterile bed, and he doesn't think about any of the reasons why Carter's picked this particular moment for her St. Crispin's Day, because that way lies madness. And when he gets back into the office in the morning and Irene hands him a printout of his itinerary along with his morning coffee, he doesn't say a word.

Irene booked him military, on a Sunday morning special. To give him time to rest after travel, she says, and he can't see any other reason lurking behind her face, but he doesn't go looking very hard. She booked him into temporary base housing at Edwards -- Nellis is closer, and Nowhere Field is attached to Nellis, but technically Groom Lake belongs to Edwards -- and once he gets settled, he stares at the painted-brick walls for approximately three point four seconds before he goes down to the motor pool to sign out a car. Best to get this over quickly.

The house Carter's renting is an anonymous box in a sea full of anonymous boxes, just at the edge of Vegas. Somehow, Jack thinks she didn't pick it for the ambience. He's a little surprised that she's renting, that she still keeps the house in the Springs: like she's expecting to get called back there any second, like she's just waiting for this phase of her life to be relegated to the status of temporary anomaly. Jack can sympathize. He put his house up for sale the minute he accepted the transfer, at a price so low as to almost be insulting; his real estate agent nearly had a heart attack. But if he hadn't let go quickly, he would've done just what Carter did, waited forever in limbo for something that wasn't ever going to go back to being the way it should be.

She's barefoot when he arrives: blue jeans, Academy sweatshirt, no makeup. Any one of them alone wouldn't be something for him to take notice of, but all of them together is something he hasn't ever seen. She's always been scrupulously careful to appear presentable in front of him, even when it involves putting on eyeliner in a tent halfway across the galaxy. But she just holds the door open for him when he knocks, smiling a smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes, and he sticks his hands in his own pockets and follows her into the kitchen.

"Coffee?" she says. He knows that sound in her voice; it's Carter's nervous-fuss tone, the one she gets when she's trying to remember how normal people do business with each other. "Or I've got some sandwich ... stuff. If you're hungry. I don't know, were you flying military or commercial?"

"Carter," he says, quietly. A warning. She's not facing him, is busy bustling around the cabinets and taking out two mugs, two spoons.

She stops, her hand in the middle of reaching for the sugar; her shoulders tense. But her voice is steady and calm. "No," she says. "I get to start. I get to go first. But you're damn well going to drink a cup of coffee first."

Jack can't think of any way he can possibly respond to that statement. It didn't even sound like her; she's never known the way to put certainty and snap into her voice before. He's still not sure if he likes Carter Mark Two or not. He remembers her being ... pliable. Pliant. And it's small and it's petty and he hates himself, but he wishes she still were, because if she were, he wouldn't be here. He'd be sitting at his desk, halfway across the country, waiting to figure out whether or not they were about to all ride to war.

And he spent the entire length of the flight -- military, yeah, and he's not entirely sure what particular lies Irene told people to get him out here and he only glanced at the itinerary for all the things he's supposed to be doing while he's on site, and that makes him wonder what Irene knows, or thinks she knows, and really, how many more fucking people are going to conspire to make his life miserable this week -- thinking about how he was going to handle this. About how he was going to let her down easy, gently deflect any and all of her attempts to say anything they're both going to regret later. And they all go out the window the minute she says, following up hard and fast with another gut-punch while he's still reeling, "You don't get to pretend anymore. I don't get to pretend anymore. And it's a bad time for this and it's a bad place, but we've spent seven years, give or take, telling ourselves that there'd be a better time and a better place and there never has been. And there never will be. So. Here. Now."

She turns around. Her face is serene and open, and he can't find a hint of the awkwardness that's always been there before, until he notices that her hands are shaking where she's holding the mug of coffee she just poured. And Jack feels sick to his stomach, because there's knowing in her eyes and she's had weeks, months, for the fucking Xerox to spill all of his secrets and somebody forgot to hand him the script.

"Carter," he says. Shut up, Carter. Back off, Carter. I could love you if I just gave myself half a chance, and I never have, because you deserve better and I know damn well what I deserve, Carter.

This kitchen really is too damn fucking small.

"The jammer's on," she says, quietly. A tiny rivulet of coffee spills over the rim of the mug; she looks down, seemingly startled at the fact she's still holding it, at the fact that her hands are shaking. She sets it down on the counter. "I made sure it was. Sit down, please. Jack."

The sound of his name on her lips is like a bullet. He's never invited the familiarity from her, always kept her (himself) safe behind the refuge and shield of formality. It sits wrong now. "I shouldn't --" he starts.

"I said, sit down."

Her eyes round a little as she hears herself, as he hears his own echo in her tone, all the lessons he never knew she'd absorbed from him about how to lead with face and voice and eyes. There's a sudden stab of pride lingering underneath the shock. She's a damn fine officer and a damn fine soldier, and she might have learned the textbook lessons before she ever came to him, but textbook isn't practice and he knows how much of both textbook and practice he put underneath her skin. It's respect for the officer he made her, the officer she made herself, that has him sitting instead of turning on his heel and walking out.

She knows. She knows, and she'll have put it all together, and this is going to be the conversation he never wanted to have, the one full of accusations and recriminations about how he's been using her to shield him, and Jack would like to string the fucking kid up and use his intestines for Christmas garland for not having the decency to go crawl in a hole and die instead of spilling all Jack's secrets by nothing more than what he is and what he's doing.

Fucking faggot, the voice hisses in his ears, and Jack doesn't know which one of them he's tarring with the epithet, but for all that Carter won't ever let the word past her lips, he wonders how many times she's thought it.

There's quiet for a minute, and she takes a step back, until she's flush up against the counter. She closes her eyes and runs both of her hands through her hair. It's left standing on end in the wake of their passage. "Okay," she says, distantly, with a tone to it like she's trying to talk herself into something. "Okay. This isn't how I wanted to do it. This isn't how I wanted to say it. But. Okay."

He closes his eyes too, and takes a deep breath. Last words of the condemned man. "Just say it, Carter," he says. Better for all of them if the knife goes in quick and clean.

But the words he's expecting to hear don't come. Instead, she takes another deep breath and lets it out on a shuddering sigh. "I don't understand you," she says. "I never have. I thought for -- a really long time that it was something I was doing wrong. That I wasn't trying hard enough, or that I wasn't seeing enough, or that I just was missing something big and important that everyone else could see. I'm not -- I'm not always the smartest person in the world about things like that. And then I thought that no, you were deliberately keeping me from being able to understand you, because you wanted to protect me, or because you wanted to protect yourself, or -- something. I don't know. I still don't. And it took me a while to realize that you were deliberately keeping me from being able to understand you, but it wasn't me you were keeping away. It was everyone. I get it now. I get that part."

It's as though the words are unlocking inside of her, spilling from her lips in fits and starts with the rush of a tsunami behind them. "You don't -- I mean -- This isn't -- I didn't think I was imagining it, this -- this thing, this you and me thing, this --" She breaks off, makes an unidentifiable hand gesture. "Seven years. At least. I tried to move on, I tried to tell myself it wasn't ever going to work, it wasn't ever going to happen -- it couldn't happen -- and the whole time I couldn't tell if it was just me, or if it was you, too, and I told myself it wasn't. Just me, I mean. And I thought, the whole time, that if we could just -- sit down and talk about it, you and me, just like this, we could agree that it was there and we weren't going to stop pretending anymore, or it was there and we'd both agree to ignore it, or something. And we never did, and I told myself it was because you didn't want to put any kind of pressure on me, or didn't want it to seem like you were pressuring me, and I put it away and I tried not to think about it."

It's coming, it's coming on like a head-on car crash skidding into Jack's field of vision, and he can't swerve away. She's right. He owes her this much, at least. "But I get it now," she says, and her eyes are open and terrified at what she's about to say. "You weren't trying to protect me. You were trying to protect yourself. Because you're a little bit in love with all of us, and you have been for a long time, and I was the only one you could let yourself think about being in love with, so you put all of it on me. But I wasn't the only one you were in love with, so you couldn't ever let it go any further, and you told yourself it was because you were trying to protect me. And I get it now."

Carter wouldn't have been able to put these things together on her own. "What did he tell you?" Jack says. He only realizes his hands are gripping the edge of the table when a sliver of the cheap wood slides under his skin; it burns as it goes.

She holds up a hand. "Shut up," she says, frantic and desperate. She closes her eyes, like she's still got half a script to get through and she's not done yet. "If you interrupt me I'll never have the nerve to say the rest of it."

Right now, that's not sounding like a bad idea.

"You don't get it," she says, and Jack makes himself uncurl his fingers, makes himself put his hands in his lap. She's shaking. He's shaking, tremors deep in the knees and the elbows, and he wants to get up, wants to get out, but she's talking, and her words are hot and bright and burning with anger, with clarity. "You poor, stupid bastard. You don't get it. It's all right. I told you. I understand now. We've all been half-crazy for the past God knows how many years and we've all been at least half-crazy in love with each other for at least half of that time and I get it now. You don't have to hide. You don't have to pretend to me anymore. Because you've been playing a role for me since the moment I met you -- for everybody, really, and I always knew you have been and I think I've even figured out why by now and I don't care. You could have told me. You could have shown me. Anytime. Because if you think I just love you because of who you pretend to be, you're twice as much of an idiot as you've been trying to convince everyone you are. And you know what? I don't care who you love and who you want to sleep with and who you have slept with and who you're going to sleep with from now until the end of time, I just want you to look me in the eye and admit to me that I'm not goddamn imagining it."

Her words echo in the kitchen between them. He never would have suspected Carter had that pair of lungs on her. He doesn't know how he could have ever possibly thought he could get through this conversation. "What did he tell you?" he says again, and if he's not yelling right back at her, it's only because he can't seem to catch his breath.

She closes her eyes; her shoulders slump. It's her posture of defeat. Recognizing the elephant in the room, and that she's going to have to deal with it, even if she doesn't want to. "Nothing," she says. "Nothing at all. He said I wasn't imagining things. He said that he can't speak for you, but the one thing he wants in this world, the one thing he'd never admit to wanting, is someone who can look at him and see all the things he pretends aren't there, and can accept them. He said that I probably could, if I tried hard enough. And he said that if I didn't think I could handle what I saw when I peeled back the layers, I shouldn't ever start it, but if I thought I could look behind all the pretty pictures I've built up in my head and see what's really there, I should put my foot down and refuse to take no for an answer. And then he clammed up."

She opens her eyes again, and they're anguished. "And I went away and I thought about it, for a long damn time, because that hurt like hell to hear, and I finally realized that he was right. I have been pretending. As much as you have been. And either we walk away from this and we never talk to each other again or -- I don't know the 'or', but either way, seven years is too damn long to pretend."

There's so much in there that Jack doesn't even know where to start. If that's the only thing the little fucking shit told her, he'll run naked through the halls of the Pentagon -- except, no; he doesn't know all the ways the kid's diverged from him by now, which of their self-promises and self-delusions the kid's thrown out the window and tried to learn to live without the shield of, but he's pretty sure that, for all they've been cats and dogs hissing at each other every time they've stood face to face, the kid wouldn't betray that one. Maybe that really was all he told Carter. Maybe Carter -- maybe Sam -- figured the rest of it out on her own.

Maybe she'd already been thinking about some of it. Maybe he's been pretending to himself as much as he's been pretending to her. Maybe she could have figured it out sooner, if he'd ever done anything to make her suspect. Maybe Daniel could have --

Maybe Daniel --

It all comes crashing in and down and around his ears, all the things he never lets himself think about, all the things he tries to tell himself in the silence of the dark and midnight introspection, all the lies that get him out of bed every morning. Sam. Daniel. Wanting and having and never-having, never even letting himself want to have; forgiveness, forgetting, peace. The kid went off and spent two years staring into his own bellybutton and somehow managed to cut through the whole damn tangled knot of duty-burden-honor, managed to do something -- and Jack would kill to know what, even if he knows he couldn't ever take the time, couldn't ever put down what he's picked up and go do it too -- to reconcile what he was with what he is and what he always wanted to be.

Jack's spent thirty-five years telling himself that he made his choices and he could live with them, and what he really meant was that he made his choices and he'd have to live with them, and there's pain in knowing that, but there's also comfort, because it means that he doesn't have to question what comes next. Everything leading up to every moment in his life past some unidentified, unidentifiable point, the point past which all his options narrow down, by duty and burden and honor, into one option, one path -- there's only one easy outcome. One set of choices he could have made and still lived with himself in the morning in the mirror, one set of choices that didn't involve his world falling apart. And he made those choices, and he did his duty, and if -- in the middle of the night, when there's nobody else to hear -- he knows that maybe having had his world fall apart might not have been a bad thing, might have made him pick up the pieces and put them together in a different, more stable way, he's never let himself actually think that out loud.

And here's Carter -- Sam -- standing in front of him and telling him that some fucking copy of him, some little fucking punk who took every scrap of equilibrium Jack fought and bled and died for and threw it out the window, not only told her to pull out the keystone, the little shit slapped a big red X-marks-the-spot over it.

"Say something," Carter says. She's got her arms up and around herself, each hand cupping the opposite elbow, and Jack knows that body language, knows it like he knows his own slouch or Teal'c's enigmatic little smiles, and it hurts like he's being flayed alive. They've all left pieces of themselves in each other, and five years from now or fifty, the scars won't have faded. She's paler than he's ever seen her before. "Please. I'm sorry. Say something."

Jack opens his mouth, and what comes out of it is, "I can't do this."

She's looking at him, eyes wide and stunned, and he doesn't know what she was expecting, but he pushes the chair back from the table (it crashes back against the wall; it will leave a scar, but everything leaves scars, every place he's ever been) and stumbles his way out of the kitchen. Down the tiny hall, out the anonymous front door, out into the scrub-brush front yard. He's fumbling with his keys, trying to get them into the lock of the car, when she bursts out onto the porch, and her voice echoes in the warm dry air. "Look me in the eye."

He turns. Slowly. His knees aren't working right now. The sun is hot and bright and she's squinting against it, one hand up to shield her eyes, and her spine is straight and true. They're being watched. He has to assume they're being watched, because as far back as he can remember, there's been someone watching him and waiting for him to fall.

He has no idea what she's going to say. Every roadmap he thought he had to this conversation has been thrown out the window to flutter on the wind. So it doesn't really surprise him when she lifts her chin, stares him down, and says, "If you get in that car, I'm going to shoot out all four of your tires."

The words hang in the air between them for half a minute, spun out like cotton candy, and there are easy choices and hard choices, but this one's a fucking demon.

"Come back inside, please," she says. Soft and quiet, and the words only reach his ears because sound carries in a desert and his whole damn life is parched. "I'm sorry. You don't have to say anything. But I'd like for you to listen a little more, because this might be the only chance I have to say it."

Her eyes are only watering because of the sunshine. It's what he tells himself. But he takes a step forward, and another step after that, and by the third, she's turned around and walked back into the house, so at least she doesn't stand witness to the way he's moving like a zombie. He shuts the door behind him, shuts out all the listeners and all the world that wants a piece of him, and then it's just him and Sam alone in a house together. Again.

She's standing in the hallway, thre or four steps away from the door into the kitchen, with one hand on each wall as though to brace herself and her head hanging down between them. The look of a distance sprinter who's just had to run a marathon. She doesn't look back. It's a little easier, without the weight of her eyes on his face. He's hurt and he's angry and he wants to lash out, wants to hurt her the way he's hurting too, and if there weren't misery written into every line of her shoulders, he might.

She deserves better. She deserves so much better, so much more, and God help him, but he's never wanted to let her go. Let any of them go. He called them his kids, because he thought that if he called them his kids then maybe he convince himself his feelings were paternal, and there's a part of him, even now, that's swelling with pride.

"I never wanted to hurt you," she says, and it sounds so small and sad. "I just want you to know. This is it. This is what I had to say. This is what I should have said years ago, but it took me this long to realize. I spent so long trying to make you into the image of what I thought I wanted. And I failed. Because you're not that person, and I didn't know what I wanted. And I still don't know what I want, and I know that you're -- that I'm -- that there are things -- and I know, and I -- You can tell me. You can talk to me. I can't see what you're hiding, not yet, because I'm just not that -- I don't think like that. And I'm sorry I can't be that for you. But I spent years dreaming about what you could be for me and I never once thought about what I could do for you and it was selfish and stupid and I am so damn sorry. And even if I can't be what you need in a partner, I can -- I want to -- I can try."

Her shoulders are quivering, and her voice is thick with all the things she isn't saying, but he doesn't think they're tears. He hopes they aren't tears, because making Carter cry would just be another tally-mark to add on the chalkboard of his sins. And he'd really like to know where she got the balls to say this, to actually open her mouth and say this, but he doesn't ask, because two weeks ago he was sitting in a barn with her friend Cameron Fucking Mitchell throwing Daniel in his face, and the kind of courage it takes to do that is so huge it has to be contagious.

Then she takes her hands away from the wall, scrubs them over her face, and he thinks she might be crying after all. Whatever wave of courage she was riding, whatever otherworldly spirit and strength she was channeling, has melted away. "I'm sorry," she says again. "I shouldn't have done this. I thought I was ready."

The space between them is ten paces and ten years wide. Jack remembers what Cameron Fucking Mitchell said to him, not two weeks ago: He said that the best thing he figured out how to do was to be honest with himself. It's the thing that saved him. He wonders how much honesty is costing Sam right now. He wonders how much it would cost him. He wonders if he'd even recognize it if he saw it.

He's got a rage pinned up inside him that's deeper than anything I've seen before. And Cameron Fucking Mitchell had thrown it into Jack's face like a challenge, like a fucking dare, you could do it too, what's keeping you? unspoken behind his sneer of disdain. No, of pity, and sympathy or empathy, it doesn't matter, and only the fact that the man's a cripple had kept Jack from driving a fist through his face. No, because like it or not, the man's one of the only things keeping the kid from going around the bend, and Jack hates the kid -- because the kid is him, because the kid has all the things Jack never can, because the kid is him and there's always going to be a part of him that hates himself -- but he doesn't hate the kid that much and one of them should by God get a chance at things.

One of them.

Carter's waiting.

Ten paces. Her head snaps up when he's got two left, and she's half-turning, but he's faster than she is. Always has been. Has always had to be. And even he doesn't know what he's going to do until he does it, but her skin is warm and her shoulders are tense through the sweatshirt when he puts his hands on them (always been a toucher, always had to stop himself; can't don't shouldn't and Daniel made him break his rules for so fucking long) and from there the only possible step is to pull her close. She's barefoot. She fits right up against his shoulder when she's barefoot, and her hair smells like apples and strawberry.

"No," he says, quietly, against her hair. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have let it get to the point where you had to."

She breathes out and relaxes, just a little. Not enough. "It takes two people to ignore something that thoroughly," she says. "It isn't just you."

So many things he doesn't want to think about. So many things he doesn't want to confront. "I haven't been lying to you," he says. There's something he can't put his finger on, something he can't identify, that makes him want to make sure. "I haven't -- I do. Care about you. I want you to know that."

He has been using her as a shield. As a defense. Everyone knows that he and Carter have a thing, a thing they're not talking about; it's always been one of the worst-kept secrets of the SGC. Late at night when the demons come to rise, Jack knows that the reason he hasn't been more careful, the reason he's let other people see, is because having her there (suspended in perpetual animation) is a proof, a token, of his own perfect heterosexuality. Divorced wife, dead child; all the signal-flags he used to be able to fly have been taken away from him, through his own misdeeds and all his failures, and the only thing he'd been left with was the way he looked at Daniel, always looked at Daniel, will always look at Daniel, and there's a part of him (small and secret and shameful) that was hoping to hide in plain sight.

Carter's skin is warm; the sweatshirt she's wearing is soft and threadbare. An old familiar friend. He's done his best to do right by her, but there are a thousand-odd people who think that the two of them have been carrying on in secret for years, and that's the kind of thing that makes his reputation and might break hers. It hasn't, so far. But only because she's so goddamn good at what she does that she's risen above it.

The worst part is, there's no way to fix it. Nothing he could say or do.

But she's laughing against his chest. "I know," she says, and her voice is shading through to giddiness. "I never -- I never doubted that. Or if I did, it was only here and there. Do you think we could have gotten through the last ten years and not cared about each other?"

To hear it dismissed so casually sparks anger in his heart. "What do you want me to say, Carter?"

She pulls her head back and looks him in the eye, crisp and clean. "Tell me you love Daniel too," she says.

Panic seizes him, and he'd pull away -- get out, get gone, get away from her forthright gaze and her lips that are spilling all his secrets -- except that she still has her arms around him, holding on. And he could get loose, but he couldn't get loose without hurting her. She's stronger than she looks. Jonathan Nielsen is fucking a man, and Jack O'Neill has spent his entire adult life pretending he doesn't want to fuck men, and she knows. Carter knows. There's no ducking this and no dodging it and she's seen the truth of all his lies. He's always known there'd come a time when he had to stop running, but he hadn't thought it would be like this.

"Yeah," he says. "I do." It's a surrender. White flag, flown high: I surrender. Stick a fork in him. Jack O'Neill is a faggot and a coward and there's no place else for him to hide.

But she doesn't even flinch. All she does is nod, slowly, carefully. "I'm so sorry," she says. "That you had to hide it for so long."

He does try to pull away, then, but she keeps holding on. "Did you hear me, Carter?" he snarls. "I said --" Faggot. Cocksucker. Queer. All the ugly hard words for an ugly secret shame, all the insults and slurs he grew up hearing, never directed at him, but only because he never let them be. All the back-alley stolen minutes, the few times when need overcame common sense, swollen lips and fumbling hands and knees that ached from kneeling against the stone. All the back rooms where nobody admitted what everybody wanted and nobody ever turned on the lights, so everyone could pretend they hadn't been there in the morning.

"I heard what you said." She licks her lips. "And you know what? I knew it. I knew it already. And -- Jack, listen to me. It's all right."

He laughs. It's an ugly sound. "Didn't think you were that much of a saint."

He hears the sound before he feels anything: her palm, his cheek, the crack of flesh striking flesh. There's a second where he can't believe what she's done, and then his skin begins to sting, nerves flaring up and firing. She's got an arm on her. He's glad it was an open palm and not a closed fist. He's still staring at her, eyes wide, when she says, "Don't insult me by insinuating that I think there's anything wrong with being gay."

Gay. The word, spoken, has more weight than one syllable, three letters, should have.

"Not that I think you are," she adds, clinically. "But I suspect that it would take a miracle for you to be able to even think the word 'bisexual'."

All he can do is gape at her. He forgets, sometimes, that she's fifteen years younger than he is. It's amazing what a difference it can make.

She's starting to get frustrated with him now. He can see it, in her eyes, in the tightening of the lines of her mouth. "All right, look," she says. "Go. Go drive around or stop and kick things or go back to Edwards and borrow some time on the line and kill paper targets for a while. Anything. Because I just dropped a hell of a lot on you, and I know you've been trying to hide from it for years." She tilts her head back, her chin up. "And you know what? JD said I should nail your feet to the kitchen floor and not let you get away until you'd started to talk to me, but -- It's up to you. Because I've been chasing you for years. And I'm done now."

She lets him go and takes a step back. "Go," she repeats. There's no anger there, not anymore, and even the sadness is starting to dissipate; now he can see a strength behind it, hard and unyielding. "Here's my offer. I love you. Or I think I could. If that's good enough for you, you know where to find me."

Another step back. She turns, down the hallway, and his voice stops her just as she's about to reach the kitchen. "Nobody should," he says. "Not when they know." Who he is. What he's done. Why his hands will never, ever be clean again.

"Jack," Carter says, boundless exasperation tied up behind her tight shoulders. "I was there for part of it. And the reason nobody's ever been able to forgive you for the rest -- including you -- is because you've never told anyone." She turns back to him, halfway, her face in profile. He wants to think it's because she can't look at him, can't face who and what he is, but for the first time ever, he thinks that might be wrong. He thinks she might be giving him room to hide, if he wants to take it. Out of kindness. Out of respect. "Secrets like that only have power over you for as long as they're secrets. And I already know what you can do when you're trying to protect something you think is worth protecting."

She turns back, walks into the kitchen and around the corner, and a minute later, he hears a door shut, halfway across the house. He stands in the hallway for a long minute, and then he turns around and walks back out. Autopilot.

Vegas is a boomtown that just kept booming, but it's still easy enough to find flat empty land once you get beyond the reach and stretch of the suburban tentacles. Jack points the car west, toward the Spring Mountains and Red Rock Canyon, dimly aware of the strip malls and housing developments falling away behind him until he's on nothing more than bare and barren road. So long hiding. So long running. He's spent years running away from what he can't have, telling himself he didn't really want it anyway, and Carter -- Sam -- just cut through all of it with a single sword-stroke. And the thing about Carter is that there's no pretense in her; she says what she means and she means what she says, and she --

-- and she --

She knows. She knows, and she wanted him to know that she knows, and she wanted to tell him one simple message: it's all right.

Naive to think it could be. Jack's been holding onto his secrets for years, and any one of them, taken alone, should be enough to fell a world. He's spent years shoving his life into compartments. Home life, work life, the life led behind enemy lines and holding a weapon in his hands. Layers of classification inside his brain and all the spots marked "here be dragons". He was Sara's husband and Charlie's father and a contract killer-for-hire belonging to a series of uniformed men whose smooth hands only pushed paper, and once, once, he'd made the mistake of letting Sara see a piece of the life he led on their behest, and once had been enough.

Carter's seen him with a weapon in his hands more times than he can count; she knows the shape of their calluses. He's always tried to keep those calluses away from her own.

There's some part of him that's annoyed at the anticlimax of realizing that Carter fits into too many of his compartments, that Carter's put too much of it together, and she doesn't seem to care.

And she's not the only one.

Somewhere a thousand miles away, north and west in a grey and rainy city, there's a teenaged boy (who isn't a boy at all) with all of Jack's carefully-guarded secrets behind his eyes. And Jack's spent three years ignoring his presence, ignoring the terrifying fact that someone knew it all, because if he'd thought about it, he would have been driven mad by the Damoclean sword: what if he talks?

But the kid has. No, not 'the kid', not anymore; JD. It's time to give him his own identity, the one JD's made for himself: him-and-not-him, self-and-not-self, the road not taken. The decisions always feared. JD is his own mirror image, and part of the reflection means that the things Jack's always feared come easy to him by now. Jack and JD have spent a sum total of less than an hour in each others' company since the moment they made the break clean, snarling at each other the whole way, and Jack knows damn well why JD keeps trying to push him further gone. JD knows it would be like leading him up to the mountain and letting him look down over the promised land, knowing Jack would have to hold the line of defense up there and never step down.

It's an act of mercy. It's something Jack would do himself. Has done himself, because JD is him, in all the places that truly count: the halls of memory, the sum total of all their shared scars.

And those shared scars, those memories, reside in a stranger's hands now, because there's not a lick of doubt in Jack's mind that JD's offered them up to Cameron Fucking Mitchell, because if Cameron Fucking Mitchell knew enough to throw Daniel in Jack's face, he knows it all. Or enough of it. And the thought makes Jack's skin crawl, makes him want to pick up a weapon or perhaps go steal the puddlejumper that's under lock and key at Area 51 and make this all never have happened (suicide, whispers Cameron Fucking Mitchell's accusation in his head; suicide, and don't you fucking dare) -- but the longer he thinks about it, the longer he turns it over in his head, the more he realizes: Mitchell knows, and Mitchell hasn't turned away.

Jack's spent years thinking that if anyone knew, if any person of honor and steadfastness knew the entirety of him, the only possible response would be disgust. And Mitchell's got the honor and he's got the steadfastness, and he's a good man and a credit to his family and his country, and Jack's seen him look at JD with nothing but understanding in his eyes.

So has Carter. And JD didn't spill to her. Maybe easier if he had, but no; JD wouldn't have. But Carter's seen pieces of it, in Mitchell, in JD, and maybe she doesn't know what the secrets are, but she's seen that her friend knows them and that they haven't driven him away.

So goddamn fucking long since Jack's allowed himself to have hope.

He clicks on the jammer before he calls, this time. When Carter answers, he says, "Still sorry I dropped that cup of coffee in your living room."

"It's okay, I have mine on, too," she says. Careful, guarded. Nothing more than that.

Jack takes a deep breath. "Tell me what else you want to know."

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