Shadows and Siege 9
Apr. 27th, 2008 08:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lit_galOkay, Taming the Muse is going for Chimera this week. *glares at sparrow2000 for picking it*
Yep, I can work that into my Shadow!verse story, but not for many chapters. So, I'm going to try to force some spurting here so I can get to where I need to get to. If I don't make it, I will be writing some last minute, crappy story with Xander killing a Chimera. We'll see.
Two years ago, a secret covert ops organization (Section One) showed up in Jim's loft to force Jim and Blair to help rescue an agent named Nikita. (~Shadows of the Past~). Now, Section's new head, the same Nikita, tells him that he's supposed to work with traitors from Stargate Command to get rid of a group of invading aliens called goa'uld. Jim really, *really* wishes he could just pretend none of this ever happened.
Shadows and Siege part one
Shadows and Siege part two
Shadows and Siege part three
Shadows and Siege part four
Shadows and Siege part six
Shadows and Siege part seven
Shadows and Siege part eight
Jim sat on the end of the bed and listened as Dr. Jackson turned the pages on some book. Since Teal'c, Jackson, and Carter were in the other room, he didn't know whether the man was reading a mystery or Jim's covert ops file, but from the slow, regular rub of page against page, Jim was willing to bet he was engrossed in it. Someone, probably Carter, was making little clinking sounds, one piece of metal sliding against another in a distinctly mechanical noise. Teal'c made no sound, but Jim could still track him from the squelching sound of the snake in his stomach. The very sound of the alien made Jim's skin ache like it had touched something frozen.
Blair, meanwhile, was back to madly flipping channels, this time on the bedroom television. "Asshole," Blair grumbled again. For the last hour, he'd been randomly blurting curse words, and Jim was guessing they were all for Colonel O'Neill. Jim wasn't feeling particularly fond of the man himself, but he understood the colonel's need to be a soldier. Blair lacked that perspective. Suddenly, Blair stopped flipping and the television settled on a news station showing images from a protest with a lot of Asian people. "Oh man, we should short-sheet his bed or put all his clothes in the bathtub and turn on the shower," Blair said in a pretty vicious tone of voice. And since they'd been confined to the room O'Neill and Jackson shared, Blair could do it.
"What happened to turn the other cheek?" Jim asked.
"I'm Jewish. We don't have to turn the other cheek. We are so totally still on the eye for an eye."
Jim crossed his arms and just looked at Blair. The sense of righteous anger drained, and Blair slumped on the end of the bed.
"Fine," Blair finally groused. "No torturing the colonel, but he's still an asshole," Blair relented. "He's an asshole, and my karma is growing by the second. I'm risking a lifetime as a cockroach here."
With a sigh, Jim reached over and draped his arm over Blair's shoulders. "He's a commanding officer looking out for his team."
"And doing it by showing off his amazing power of being an asshole," Blair snorted. Jim just continued looking at Blair until the man finally sighed in exasperation. "Fine!" he growled. "He's looking out for his team, but that does not mean that he has to act like we're public enemy number one."
"From his perspective we are dangerous. We work for what is possibly the only agency in the world more secretive than his, only our boss doesn't answer to the President."
"Work for?" Blair made an amused sound. "Work for would imply we get paid, and the only things I've ever gotten from Section are a concussion and a tracker buried so deep in my back that I'm surprised I didn't cough it out when I got pneumonia. Jim, do you ever wonder if we could get those trackers surgically removed before Nikita or some retrieval team showed up?"
"No," Jim said firmly, "And Chief, not here," Jim looked quickly toward the door out to the outer area.
"You think the big one has Sentinel-sharp hearing?" Blair asked as he followed Jim's gaze. With a smile, he mock whispered loudly, "Jack O'Neill is an arrogant son of a bitch."
"Colonel O'Neill is looking out for his own team, and we are the ones who broke into their hotel, targeted Jackson at the conference…" Blair opened his mouth and Jim stood up and held out his hand to stop Blair from interrupting. "Even if you didn't target Dr. Jackson, you've been around police work long enough to know that it appears that you targeted him. And we work for an agency outside the United States which may or may not have the same agenda as O'Neill. I can't even offer him any reassurances that we're working for the good guys because I don't know for certain that we are. Are you really sure that you can blame him for not liking this situation?"
"Oh man, do not go there. I do not want to be reasonable and consider this from his point of view. He fucking called you obsolete," Blair complained, but Jim knew that frown. It meant that Blair was thinking … really thinking about something he didn't want to think about. At least now O'Neill's wardrobe wouldn't end up in the bathtub—hopefully.
"He's coming back," Jim said quietly as looked at the closed door to the main room. In the hotel room, O'Neill had limited himself to asking the general for the location of the nearest secure phone, which meant that Jim had no idea what O'Neill and his general had decided. However, he couldn't hear extra guards coming with the colonel, so hopefully that meant that they weren't going to get dragged off to the nearest Air Force base and thrown into a cell.
"He's alone," Jim reassured his partner. Blair closed his eyes and nodded, and Jim could almost see the fear drain from Blair.
"Man, I do not want to end up under some military jail. I like my life. Do you know how long I worked for that PhD?" Blair whispered Sentinel-soft as he stood and stepped to Jim's side.
"I know, Chief," Jim said, resting his hand on Blair's arm. Hopefully this time the meeting would go a little better, but Jim wasn't counting on it. "Just don't poke at him, okay?"
"Man, if he plays his alpha games with me, I am so poking him right back," Blair snorted, and Jim had to roll his eyes. For someone who insisted that he didn't play 'alpha games', Blair spent a whole lot of time making sure that he didn't end up at the bottom of the pile.
"I'm back, kids," a cheerful voice called and within a couple of seconds, the door came open. Colonel O'Neill stood there in his jeans and a casual shirt and a wide smirk that made Blair tense up immediately. Jim tightened his hand around Blair's arm. "Why don't we have a little talk?" O'Neill invited them into the main room, stepping back without ever blocking Teal'c's line of fire, a fact Jim certainly didn't miss. He stepped forward, watching the jaffa as he moved to the side of the room and leaned back against the desk. Blair crossed his arms and glared at everyone in the room as he took a position just in front of Jim.
Jim's instincts screamed at him to pull Blair back, but Jim knew that the danger here wasn't from physical violence. These people weren't going to shoot them; they might, however, lock them away, and that was a threat Jim couldn't defend against. If he and Blair went fugitive, they wouldn't last long and they would lose everything that they had built.
"So…" O'Neill drawled the word out cheerfully, "I have permission to do whatever I want with you two. I think now would be a good time for you to convince me to not throw you under the nearest stockade," O'Neill grinned as he sat on the arm of the couch.
"You're an asshole," Blair immediately snapped, and Daniel half turned away and started cleaning his glasses with an expression that came close to amusement. O'Neill, however, did not look amused. "Man, we offered to help. We offered to identify the two goa'uld for you, but you have to play your fucking games. We're offering the same thing now that we offered before, so what exactly did you gain, here?"
Jim rested his hand on Blair's shoulder.
"I'm guessing you truly aren't military," O'Neill commented as he considered Blair with a tight smile.
"Jack," Daniel jumped in, "they're offering to help us identify the goa'uld, so maybe we could start with that."
O'Neill sat on the couch, his gaze still locked on Blair. Blair just crossed his arms and glared right back.
Jim had to stifle a sigh of frustration. "Sir, our objectives are not at cross purposes. If you know about Sentinels, then you know there's an…" Jim hesitated, hating to even say the next part, "instinctive drive to protect the tribe. I want to help you identify and eliminate this threat."
"And your handlers? Are they always this accommodating?" O'Neill asked as he leaned forward.
Jim frowned as he scented the air softly drifting from O'Neill and toward him in the lazy drafts from the ventilation system. "Did your commanding officer give you permission to question us about our handlers?" Jim asked as he studied the man.
O'Neill's heart thumped steadily and his eyes remained steady and focused as he raised an eyebrow. "In case you didn't get a thorough briefing, I'm the officer in charge of security for the whole planet," O'Neill said, "So, yeah, I get to question you on anything I want. And when I'm through, the general is going to question you, and then the president. Or, you might not rate the actual president. I'm guessing a presidential flunky will get that honor."
When Blair's heart rate soared, Jim gave his friend's shoulder a quick squeeze. "You're lying," Jim said confidently.
Almost immediately, Blair's fear-sharp scent took on the musk of anger. "He's lying?" Blair almost squeaked in his outrage. "Oh man, you are officially the biggest asshole I have ever met. A walking hemorrhoid!"
O'Neill's mouth tightened into a straight line, and Daniel coughed and spluttered as he tried to clear his throat.
"Look, Squirt, I'm cutting you some slack because you're obviously a civilian, but I know more about Sentinels than you think, and there's no way—"
"You smell like you're lying," Jim interrupted. "You're right, your heart rate and pupil dilation are steady, but no human can control his smell."
"And no Sentinel can smell truth," Jack countered.
"I can."
"Oh man, he so busted you," Blair laughed. "And we are so testing this when we get home. Why didn't you tell me that lying makes a person smell different?" Blair demanded as he looked up at Jim. "It has to be stress hormones, cortisol or norepinephrine. Seriously, why didn't you ever tell me?"
"Because most people give themselves away with heart rate and pupil dilation." Jim looked down at his guide fondly. The anger and fear had almost instantly vanished, and now he had the bounce that Jim associated with him getting stuck doing a lot more testing. "However, even your training can't make a lie smell like the truth," Jim told O'Neill with confidence. He could see O'Neill waver, his pupils dilating now as he considered what to do now that his bluff had been called.
"Sir, if they identify the goa'uld, Teal'c or I could confirm the identification. We wouldn't need to rely on their information," Carter offered softly.
Blair snorted. "This is so not fair. I finally offer to help the military instead of picketing against them, and I still get treated like shit."
"Not a fan?" Daniel asked with a smile.
"Are you kidding? The military is like secret central. I could go on for hours about how screwed up the U.S. military is, and that's not even counting the whole hiding-the-aliens conspiracy."
"Crap," O'Neill sighed. "I just totally lost control here, didn't I?"
"Indeed you did not," Teal'c offered with a calm assurance, and O'Neill looked at him with an expression Jim couldn't read, it looked something like resignation.
"Fine," O'Neill told Blair as he stood up and went for the refrigerator. "The president apparently believes that we should have a handcuffs-free policy toward you two. He seems to feel that your agency is more likely than not to help us on this mission. He also doesn't trust either of you as far as he could throw you, and with his recent heart trouble, that wouldn't be far. I doubt he could even throw you, Sandburg," O'Neill dug in a little bit. Jim could have told the man to give up trying to insult Blair about his lack of muscle or size, but he figured as long as O'Neill was focusing on that, he wasn't hitting any of Blair's real hot buttons.
"Whatever," Blair said dismissively.
O'Neill glared a little harder, obviously annoyed that Blair wasn't even a little offended. "And this is highest security clearance. That means that the details of this mission or anything regarding Stargate Command cannot appear in any of your mother's crackpot conspiracy theory groups."
Jim still had his hand on Blair's shoulder, so he could feel the man tense up the second O'Neill mentioned Naomi. That would have been part of a standard background check, but it had obviously caught Blair off-guard.
"You do see the irony here, yes?" Blair demanded. "I mean, you're calling Naomi a crackpot for believing in conspiracies, which would be way more convincing if you weren't part of a government conspiracy."
"And you aren't?" O'Neill demanded as he pulled a bottle of water out of the refrigerator.
"Government conspiracy? No way. Well, not until now. Our conspiracy is totally non-governmental," Blair said, and Jim tightened his hand in warning. O'Neill had to suspect Section, so they really didn't need to give him any clues. As usual, Blair totally ignored him. "And you don't have to worry about your precious secret, because while I would love to piss you off, being tortured to death is so not on my list of life experiences to try out."
"Tortured?" Daniel abandoned the wall where he'd been doing a good impression of unobtrusive and stepped closer. O'Neill just gave Blair a particularly searching look.
"We have a job to do," Jim said as he stepped forward and not-so-subtly pushed Blair back behind him. "If you have a map of the city, I'll show you where we identified the two goa'uld. If we stake out the area, we might be able to identify them again. I'll recognize the feeling of having one near me the second time around," Jim said, quickly distracting all of them from Blair's little announcement. Jackson looked ill. Carter was just standing there with her eyes wide. O'Neill's narrow-eyed look pretty much suggested that he had just put 'torturing their own operatives to death' together with 'Section,' even if he didn't know the actual name. And Teal'c… well, the alien looked pretty much like he always looked. However, Jim could see the tension on either side of the man's eyes that suggested the idea of a group torturing their own operatives to death bothered the man.
"Blair?" Jackson asked, and Blair looked over. "Are you in danger?"
Blair snorted. "Nietzsche would have loved me, man. I'm all about living dangerously."
"And we're all in danger until we find out what the goa'uld are doing here," Jim interrupted. "Map?"
"Yeah, I have one here," Carter offered as she went to the desk and pulled out a map of Maribor. Laying it out on the coffee table, she glanced toward O'Neill, but he was back to watching impassively. Jim gave Blair's shoulder one last squeeze before he walked over and sat on the couch.
"We encountered two hostiles here," Jim said pointing at the street. "The two were walking east, and we confirmed that they ended up at this hotel. We don't have information about when they left."
"You lost them?" O'Neill asked as he finally left his casual slouch against the wall and came over to stand by the coffee table. It left him perilously close to Blair, and Jim had to fight his instinct to get between the two of them. Right now, Blair wanted to punch O'Neill. And since Blair wasn't one to solve his problems with fists, he was probably trying to figure out how to verbally eviscerate the colonel, and O'Neill wasn't the type to take that kindly.
"We were ordered to break all contact with our team, so we have no information on when they left or if they left," Jim corrected the man. "Nor will either of us identify other members of our former team."
"Yet you left them," Teal'c said. The words may have been a simple statement of fact, but Jim felt the sting of them anyway. Of course, Teal'c didn't know that it was even worse than that. Jim hadn't just left his team, he'd left them with an impostor in their midst and no way of identifying her. He'd left them when the team was so fragmented that no one person could take command, not without Nikita's specific sanction. Makepeace would never listen to any other member of the team, and neither Bruhn nor Knudsen would take orders from Makepeace. They weren't a team Jim had chosen, but neither was the group he'd led to their deaths in Peru.
"I wasn't asked for my opinion on the feasibility of leaving the team," Jim said as he tried not to clench his jaw with only limited success.
"Don't go there," Blair warned as he practically shoved O'Neill aside in order to reach the couch and sit next to Jim, but O'Neill's glare of death was lost on the younger man.
"Look," Jim said as he leaned back and looked up at the members of SG-1 who had gravitated closer, Daniel standing just behind O'Neill, Teal'c near the television cabinet, and Carter half way between Teal'c and O'Neill. "You want the aliens dead, yes?"
"Yeah," O'Neill said suspiciously.
"I really want the aliens dead, so let's work together so that we can get this done and never see each other again," Jim suggested.
O'Neill was silent for a moment before he nodded. "I can work with that."
Yep, I can work that into my Shadow!verse story, but not for many chapters. So, I'm going to try to force some spurting here so I can get to where I need to get to. If I don't make it, I will be writing some last minute, crappy story with Xander killing a Chimera. We'll see.
Two years ago, a secret covert ops organization (Section One) showed up in Jim's loft to force Jim and Blair to help rescue an agent named Nikita. (~Shadows of the Past~). Now, Section's new head, the same Nikita, tells him that he's supposed to work with traitors from Stargate Command to get rid of a group of invading aliens called goa'uld. Jim really, *really* wishes he could just pretend none of this ever happened.Shadows and Siege part one
Shadows and Siege part two
Shadows and Siege part three
Shadows and Siege part four
Shadows and Siege part six
Shadows and Siege part seven
Shadows and Siege part eight
Jim sat on the end of the bed and listened as Dr. Jackson turned the pages on some book. Since Teal'c, Jackson, and Carter were in the other room, he didn't know whether the man was reading a mystery or Jim's covert ops file, but from the slow, regular rub of page against page, Jim was willing to bet he was engrossed in it. Someone, probably Carter, was making little clinking sounds, one piece of metal sliding against another in a distinctly mechanical noise. Teal'c made no sound, but Jim could still track him from the squelching sound of the snake in his stomach. The very sound of the alien made Jim's skin ache like it had touched something frozen.
Blair, meanwhile, was back to madly flipping channels, this time on the bedroom television. "Asshole," Blair grumbled again. For the last hour, he'd been randomly blurting curse words, and Jim was guessing they were all for Colonel O'Neill. Jim wasn't feeling particularly fond of the man himself, but he understood the colonel's need to be a soldier. Blair lacked that perspective. Suddenly, Blair stopped flipping and the television settled on a news station showing images from a protest with a lot of Asian people. "Oh man, we should short-sheet his bed or put all his clothes in the bathtub and turn on the shower," Blair said in a pretty vicious tone of voice. And since they'd been confined to the room O'Neill and Jackson shared, Blair could do it.
"What happened to turn the other cheek?" Jim asked.
"I'm Jewish. We don't have to turn the other cheek. We are so totally still on the eye for an eye."
Jim crossed his arms and just looked at Blair. The sense of righteous anger drained, and Blair slumped on the end of the bed.
"Fine," Blair finally groused. "No torturing the colonel, but he's still an asshole," Blair relented. "He's an asshole, and my karma is growing by the second. I'm risking a lifetime as a cockroach here."
With a sigh, Jim reached over and draped his arm over Blair's shoulders. "He's a commanding officer looking out for his team."
"And doing it by showing off his amazing power of being an asshole," Blair snorted. Jim just continued looking at Blair until the man finally sighed in exasperation. "Fine!" he growled. "He's looking out for his team, but that does not mean that he has to act like we're public enemy number one."
"From his perspective we are dangerous. We work for what is possibly the only agency in the world more secretive than his, only our boss doesn't answer to the President."
"Work for?" Blair made an amused sound. "Work for would imply we get paid, and the only things I've ever gotten from Section are a concussion and a tracker buried so deep in my back that I'm surprised I didn't cough it out when I got pneumonia. Jim, do you ever wonder if we could get those trackers surgically removed before Nikita or some retrieval team showed up?"
"No," Jim said firmly, "And Chief, not here," Jim looked quickly toward the door out to the outer area.
"You think the big one has Sentinel-sharp hearing?" Blair asked as he followed Jim's gaze. With a smile, he mock whispered loudly, "Jack O'Neill is an arrogant son of a bitch."
"Colonel O'Neill is looking out for his own team, and we are the ones who broke into their hotel, targeted Jackson at the conference…" Blair opened his mouth and Jim stood up and held out his hand to stop Blair from interrupting. "Even if you didn't target Dr. Jackson, you've been around police work long enough to know that it appears that you targeted him. And we work for an agency outside the United States which may or may not have the same agenda as O'Neill. I can't even offer him any reassurances that we're working for the good guys because I don't know for certain that we are. Are you really sure that you can blame him for not liking this situation?"
"Oh man, do not go there. I do not want to be reasonable and consider this from his point of view. He fucking called you obsolete," Blair complained, but Jim knew that frown. It meant that Blair was thinking … really thinking about something he didn't want to think about. At least now O'Neill's wardrobe wouldn't end up in the bathtub—hopefully.
"He's coming back," Jim said quietly as looked at the closed door to the main room. In the hotel room, O'Neill had limited himself to asking the general for the location of the nearest secure phone, which meant that Jim had no idea what O'Neill and his general had decided. However, he couldn't hear extra guards coming with the colonel, so hopefully that meant that they weren't going to get dragged off to the nearest Air Force base and thrown into a cell.
"He's alone," Jim reassured his partner. Blair closed his eyes and nodded, and Jim could almost see the fear drain from Blair.
"Man, I do not want to end up under some military jail. I like my life. Do you know how long I worked for that PhD?" Blair whispered Sentinel-soft as he stood and stepped to Jim's side.
"I know, Chief," Jim said, resting his hand on Blair's arm. Hopefully this time the meeting would go a little better, but Jim wasn't counting on it. "Just don't poke at him, okay?"
"Man, if he plays his alpha games with me, I am so poking him right back," Blair snorted, and Jim had to roll his eyes. For someone who insisted that he didn't play 'alpha games', Blair spent a whole lot of time making sure that he didn't end up at the bottom of the pile.
"I'm back, kids," a cheerful voice called and within a couple of seconds, the door came open. Colonel O'Neill stood there in his jeans and a casual shirt and a wide smirk that made Blair tense up immediately. Jim tightened his hand around Blair's arm. "Why don't we have a little talk?" O'Neill invited them into the main room, stepping back without ever blocking Teal'c's line of fire, a fact Jim certainly didn't miss. He stepped forward, watching the jaffa as he moved to the side of the room and leaned back against the desk. Blair crossed his arms and glared at everyone in the room as he took a position just in front of Jim.
Jim's instincts screamed at him to pull Blair back, but Jim knew that the danger here wasn't from physical violence. These people weren't going to shoot them; they might, however, lock them away, and that was a threat Jim couldn't defend against. If he and Blair went fugitive, they wouldn't last long and they would lose everything that they had built.
"So…" O'Neill drawled the word out cheerfully, "I have permission to do whatever I want with you two. I think now would be a good time for you to convince me to not throw you under the nearest stockade," O'Neill grinned as he sat on the arm of the couch.
"You're an asshole," Blair immediately snapped, and Daniel half turned away and started cleaning his glasses with an expression that came close to amusement. O'Neill, however, did not look amused. "Man, we offered to help. We offered to identify the two goa'uld for you, but you have to play your fucking games. We're offering the same thing now that we offered before, so what exactly did you gain, here?"
Jim rested his hand on Blair's shoulder.
"I'm guessing you truly aren't military," O'Neill commented as he considered Blair with a tight smile.
"Jack," Daniel jumped in, "they're offering to help us identify the goa'uld, so maybe we could start with that."
O'Neill sat on the couch, his gaze still locked on Blair. Blair just crossed his arms and glared right back.
Jim had to stifle a sigh of frustration. "Sir, our objectives are not at cross purposes. If you know about Sentinels, then you know there's an…" Jim hesitated, hating to even say the next part, "instinctive drive to protect the tribe. I want to help you identify and eliminate this threat."
"And your handlers? Are they always this accommodating?" O'Neill asked as he leaned forward.
Jim frowned as he scented the air softly drifting from O'Neill and toward him in the lazy drafts from the ventilation system. "Did your commanding officer give you permission to question us about our handlers?" Jim asked as he studied the man.
O'Neill's heart thumped steadily and his eyes remained steady and focused as he raised an eyebrow. "In case you didn't get a thorough briefing, I'm the officer in charge of security for the whole planet," O'Neill said, "So, yeah, I get to question you on anything I want. And when I'm through, the general is going to question you, and then the president. Or, you might not rate the actual president. I'm guessing a presidential flunky will get that honor."
When Blair's heart rate soared, Jim gave his friend's shoulder a quick squeeze. "You're lying," Jim said confidently.
Almost immediately, Blair's fear-sharp scent took on the musk of anger. "He's lying?" Blair almost squeaked in his outrage. "Oh man, you are officially the biggest asshole I have ever met. A walking hemorrhoid!"
O'Neill's mouth tightened into a straight line, and Daniel coughed and spluttered as he tried to clear his throat.
"Look, Squirt, I'm cutting you some slack because you're obviously a civilian, but I know more about Sentinels than you think, and there's no way—"
"You smell like you're lying," Jim interrupted. "You're right, your heart rate and pupil dilation are steady, but no human can control his smell."
"And no Sentinel can smell truth," Jack countered.
"I can."
"Oh man, he so busted you," Blair laughed. "And we are so testing this when we get home. Why didn't you tell me that lying makes a person smell different?" Blair demanded as he looked up at Jim. "It has to be stress hormones, cortisol or norepinephrine. Seriously, why didn't you ever tell me?"
"Because most people give themselves away with heart rate and pupil dilation." Jim looked down at his guide fondly. The anger and fear had almost instantly vanished, and now he had the bounce that Jim associated with him getting stuck doing a lot more testing. "However, even your training can't make a lie smell like the truth," Jim told O'Neill with confidence. He could see O'Neill waver, his pupils dilating now as he considered what to do now that his bluff had been called.
"Sir, if they identify the goa'uld, Teal'c or I could confirm the identification. We wouldn't need to rely on their information," Carter offered softly.
Blair snorted. "This is so not fair. I finally offer to help the military instead of picketing against them, and I still get treated like shit."
"Not a fan?" Daniel asked with a smile.
"Are you kidding? The military is like secret central. I could go on for hours about how screwed up the U.S. military is, and that's not even counting the whole hiding-the-aliens conspiracy."
"Crap," O'Neill sighed. "I just totally lost control here, didn't I?"
"Indeed you did not," Teal'c offered with a calm assurance, and O'Neill looked at him with an expression Jim couldn't read, it looked something like resignation.
"Fine," O'Neill told Blair as he stood up and went for the refrigerator. "The president apparently believes that we should have a handcuffs-free policy toward you two. He seems to feel that your agency is more likely than not to help us on this mission. He also doesn't trust either of you as far as he could throw you, and with his recent heart trouble, that wouldn't be far. I doubt he could even throw you, Sandburg," O'Neill dug in a little bit. Jim could have told the man to give up trying to insult Blair about his lack of muscle or size, but he figured as long as O'Neill was focusing on that, he wasn't hitting any of Blair's real hot buttons.
"Whatever," Blair said dismissively.
O'Neill glared a little harder, obviously annoyed that Blair wasn't even a little offended. "And this is highest security clearance. That means that the details of this mission or anything regarding Stargate Command cannot appear in any of your mother's crackpot conspiracy theory groups."
Jim still had his hand on Blair's shoulder, so he could feel the man tense up the second O'Neill mentioned Naomi. That would have been part of a standard background check, but it had obviously caught Blair off-guard.
"You do see the irony here, yes?" Blair demanded. "I mean, you're calling Naomi a crackpot for believing in conspiracies, which would be way more convincing if you weren't part of a government conspiracy."
"And you aren't?" O'Neill demanded as he pulled a bottle of water out of the refrigerator.
"Government conspiracy? No way. Well, not until now. Our conspiracy is totally non-governmental," Blair said, and Jim tightened his hand in warning. O'Neill had to suspect Section, so they really didn't need to give him any clues. As usual, Blair totally ignored him. "And you don't have to worry about your precious secret, because while I would love to piss you off, being tortured to death is so not on my list of life experiences to try out."
"Tortured?" Daniel abandoned the wall where he'd been doing a good impression of unobtrusive and stepped closer. O'Neill just gave Blair a particularly searching look.
"We have a job to do," Jim said as he stepped forward and not-so-subtly pushed Blair back behind him. "If you have a map of the city, I'll show you where we identified the two goa'uld. If we stake out the area, we might be able to identify them again. I'll recognize the feeling of having one near me the second time around," Jim said, quickly distracting all of them from Blair's little announcement. Jackson looked ill. Carter was just standing there with her eyes wide. O'Neill's narrow-eyed look pretty much suggested that he had just put 'torturing their own operatives to death' together with 'Section,' even if he didn't know the actual name. And Teal'c… well, the alien looked pretty much like he always looked. However, Jim could see the tension on either side of the man's eyes that suggested the idea of a group torturing their own operatives to death bothered the man.
"Blair?" Jackson asked, and Blair looked over. "Are you in danger?"
Blair snorted. "Nietzsche would have loved me, man. I'm all about living dangerously."
"And we're all in danger until we find out what the goa'uld are doing here," Jim interrupted. "Map?"
"Yeah, I have one here," Carter offered as she went to the desk and pulled out a map of Maribor. Laying it out on the coffee table, she glanced toward O'Neill, but he was back to watching impassively. Jim gave Blair's shoulder one last squeeze before he walked over and sat on the couch.
"We encountered two hostiles here," Jim said pointing at the street. "The two were walking east, and we confirmed that they ended up at this hotel. We don't have information about when they left."
"You lost them?" O'Neill asked as he finally left his casual slouch against the wall and came over to stand by the coffee table. It left him perilously close to Blair, and Jim had to fight his instinct to get between the two of them. Right now, Blair wanted to punch O'Neill. And since Blair wasn't one to solve his problems with fists, he was probably trying to figure out how to verbally eviscerate the colonel, and O'Neill wasn't the type to take that kindly.
"We were ordered to break all contact with our team, so we have no information on when they left or if they left," Jim corrected the man. "Nor will either of us identify other members of our former team."
"Yet you left them," Teal'c said. The words may have been a simple statement of fact, but Jim felt the sting of them anyway. Of course, Teal'c didn't know that it was even worse than that. Jim hadn't just left his team, he'd left them with an impostor in their midst and no way of identifying her. He'd left them when the team was so fragmented that no one person could take command, not without Nikita's specific sanction. Makepeace would never listen to any other member of the team, and neither Bruhn nor Knudsen would take orders from Makepeace. They weren't a team Jim had chosen, but neither was the group he'd led to their deaths in Peru.
"I wasn't asked for my opinion on the feasibility of leaving the team," Jim said as he tried not to clench his jaw with only limited success.
"Don't go there," Blair warned as he practically shoved O'Neill aside in order to reach the couch and sit next to Jim, but O'Neill's glare of death was lost on the younger man.
"Look," Jim said as he leaned back and looked up at the members of SG-1 who had gravitated closer, Daniel standing just behind O'Neill, Teal'c near the television cabinet, and Carter half way between Teal'c and O'Neill. "You want the aliens dead, yes?"
"Yeah," O'Neill said suspiciously.
"I really want the aliens dead, so let's work together so that we can get this done and never see each other again," Jim suggested.
O'Neill was silent for a moment before he nodded. "I can work with that."
