Disclaimer: I don't own Leverage or Stargate.
Eliot was sparring with Ronon when Dr. Weir came to collect him. Dr. Weir—that was what everyone still called her, but only because they were too busy licking their wounds to deal with titles and the like. But in his head Eliot called her President Weir, because that's what she was—President of the surviving people from Earth.
Ronon landed a blow to Eliot's gut that knocked the breath out of him. He retaliated by elbowing the younger, taller man in the face. When Ronon reeled away, Eliot snatched a towel off the bench and used it to wipe sweat from the back of his neck as he walked to the door, where Weir was waiting for him.
"My turn already?" he said.
She smiled sadly. She'd aged about ten years in the week since Eliot and the others had poured through the Stargate. Over a hundred of them had assembled in the gate room under Cheyenne Mountain for the last wave of the evacuation. Only twenty had gotten safely to Atlantis before the order had come through from the other end: "Close the iris!"
It was Hardison's voice that had given the order.
"Mr. Spencer, you were second on the list," Weir told him.
All the evacuees—seven hundred twenty-eight total, which did not include any heads of state since they had all been killed off in that first terrible strike—had been debriefed by one of the senior members of the Atlantis expedition within the first four days of their arrival, but those meetings had been brief and Eliot doubted they'd been very useful. He'd been debriefed by a scientist named Rodney McKay, and it had only been the timely intervention of General O'Neill that had kept Eliot from ripping McKay's oversized brain out through his nose.
("McKay's pissed that Carter didn't make it," O'Neill had told Eliot, trying and failing to keep his tone light.
O'Neill thought he'd been able to hide how Carter's death had gutted him. He hadn't, but none of them were going to disillusion him.)
Eliot and Weir ended up in Weir's office, which had a clear view of the gate room down below. Major Lorne's team was preparing to go off-world, probably hoping to trade for more food. Atlantis was well-stocked, but it hadn't been prepared for an influx of this magnitude.
"I don't know what you want me to say," Eliot said, shifting uncomfortably on the visitor's chair.
"Take your time. I'm trying to construct as detailed and accurate a timeline of events as possible."
He suppressed a growl of frustration. "What's the point?"
"Haven't you ever heard the phrase 'those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it'?"
Eliot stiffened. "You don't mean…"
Weir leaned forward, her eyes locked with his. "Mr. Spencer, it is entirely possible that he is on his way here as we speak."
He'd known there was a chance that the destruction wasn't over. Of course he had. But he'd refused to consider the possibility, as if that could prevent it from ever coming to pass.
Weir was a diplomat. She gave Eliot a few seconds to absorb the blow; then she gave him the opportunity to strike back the only way he could. "Just start at the beginning, Mr. Spencer," she said. "What happened?"
"What happened?" He shook his head, laughed humorlessly. "What happened was, Nate Ford was possessed by a Goa'uld. And that was the beginning of the end."
After they ditched the Italian, it took them half a year to bring down Moreau. None of them had counted on him being quite so clever or well-protected. It was an exhausting six months, travelling around Europe, Africa, South America, Australia, and parts of Asia, taking down Moreau's minions one after the other.
If Eliot had thought that the five of them knew each other well before then, he was soon proven wrong. He hadn't known that Parker screamed like a banshee in her sleep; that Hardison still called his Nana every three days like clockwork; that Sophie wasn't royalty after all, and he'd been right to think he heard a trace of Cockney in her accent. Nate was the only one who didn't surprise Eliot, but that was because Eliot had studied Nate for years.
Anyway, it took six months, but finally they managed to bring Moreau down. He had no more hideouts left, no more money squirreled away. And Nate, in typical Nate fashion, had insisted on rubbing his victory in Moreau's face so the villain would be left with no doubt about who brought him down.
So Eliot waited outside while Nate sauntered into the bar in Casablanca where Moreau was attempting to drown his sorrows in cheap whiskey—the only kind he could afford. And when Nate came back out…something had changed.
It took Eliot an unforgivably long time to realize that the shift in Nate's character after that meeting was not just a manifestation of his relief at having achieved the impossible. Though, to be fair, at the time he hadn't known about the Goa'uld.
In hindsight, he thought that Parker had been the first to suspect that Nate was no longer himself. She'd been crazy, but maybe her peculiar way of looking at things had allowed her to see what Eliot had missed. She'd started getting antsy not long after they returned to Boston. She began to avoid Nate, which she never had before. She'd laugh at things he said that weren't funny. (Not that she hadn't done that in the past, but it was a lot more frequent now.) And then one day she didn't show up for a team dinner.
At the time, they'd assumed that she had pulled a Parker and gone off to do her own thing. That was still what Eliot liked to believe. But he doubted it. (Hardison had never believed it.)
Nate began to let Hardison orchestrate some of the team's cons. It seemed to make sense; the hacker had been interested in learning to run a team for a while, and now that Parker was gone he needed something to take his mind off her. None of them noticed that it gave Nate a lot more time to himself, too, time that someone with his intelligence could put to devastating use.
Sophie was the next to go. "There's something different about him," she'd told Eliot, tears in her eyes.
He figured that that was her way of saying that Nate hadn't been paying as much attention to her as she was used to.
"Won't be much of a team left if you leave," he pointed out.
"You could go too," she said, smiling tremulously. "Hardison would come if you did. Maybe we could even find Parker."
Eliot shook his head. "I made a promise to Nate, once, that I'd stay with him 'til the end. He hasn't done anything to make me want to break my word."
"You're a good man," Sophie said, and pulled him into an embrace. That was the last time he saw her.
Nate didn't seem bothered by Sophie's departure, and that was what alerted Eliot to the fact that something was very wrong. Before he had a chance to talk to Nate about it, to try to understand the change in his friend, Hardison dragged Eliot to his secret lair (Hardison called it the Bat Cave) to show him a display of numbers and charts that looked familiar but which Eliot didn't know how to read.
"There's something hinky going on," Hardison said, pacing back and forth, gesticulating wildly.
"What the hell am I looking at?" Eliot said.
Hardison stopped in his tracks to stare at him. "That's Damien Moreau's money. All of it. Well, not exactly all of it. See, there's about two hundred million dollars missing."
Even then, Eliot hadn't wanted to see the truth. "Who has access?" His mind conjured wild scenarios, images of Parker using the money to buy a gold brick the size of Mount Everest, or Sophie needing it to pay for that casino in Monte Carlo she'd always wanted to buy.
"Just me and Nate," Hardison said. "And it wasn't me."
Before Eliot could really think through the implications of what Hardison was saying, ten Goa'uld motherships appeared in orbit around the planet and Nate's first strike pulverized the Earth.
Nate always had liked to deliver the death blow before his victims even realized they were being targeted. Some things never changed, not even when one was possessed by an evil snake.
Not long after that first attack, Nate's face had been on every television around the planet. He'd looked just like the man they knew, except that his eyes glowed. "I am your god, Nate Ford," he'd said. "Surrender or die."
Even with the world's infrastructure in tatters, General O'Neill hadn't had much trouble tracking down Eliot and Hardison. They were in every law enforcement database as known acquaintances of Nate's. Normally Eliot wouldn't have cooperated with men in uniforms dragging him to an undercover base, but after seeing what Nate had done—what he'd become—he was going to go along with whatever plan got him some answers.
So he and Hardison had gone to Cheyenne Mountain and answered every question O'Neill and his team had asked. And then they'd learned about the Goa'uld.
"It's odd, though," Dr. Jackson said once the explanations were done. "All of the Goa'uld we've met have had names out of mythology. Why is Ford different?"
There was a long moment of silence as they all puzzled over the question.
"I'm no expert," Eliot said finally, "but one thing I do know: if there's anyone with the knowhow and smarts to take over the world, it's Nate Ford. Maybe the Goa'uld figured out that he'd win more followers acting like a human than an alien."
Five groups had already been evacuated through the Stargate to Atlantis using a nearly-depleted ZPM by the time Eliot and Hardison had come to the mountain. Another two went through by the time Nate's fleet finished wiping out every aboveground military base and government building on the planet. One group, escorted by Dr. Jackson, was demolished not two miles from the mountain.
Eliot and Hardison, by virtue of being Nate experts, were chosen to go through to Atlantis with what would almost certainly be the last group of evacuees. O'Neill and Colonel Cameron Mitchell, it was decided, would go through if there was time. Colonel Carter, disregarding O'Neill's direct order, was staying behind to sabotage the Odyssey, a nearly completed spaceship that Nate could never be allowed to get his hands on, lest he mimic its hyper drive technology and enable his motherships to reach the Pegasus Galaxy.
O'Neill had planned to be the last to go through the gate, but Eliot and Mitchell decided that O'Neill was too vital to humanity's survival to be allowed to go down with the planet. Together they tossed the general through at the head of the pack, Eliot following right behind. Mitchell had elected to stay until the last of the evacuees, including Hardison, had made it out.
A hitter is never meant to outlive his makeshift family.
The alarm sounded at the same time as someone began to pound on Eliot's door.
"Spencer, wake up!" That was Colonel Sheppard's voice. Eliot had a lot of respect for Sheppard, whose ridiculous hair and lazy eyes couldn't hide his ruthless competence.
Eliot always slept fully dressed, so he slipped out of bed and jammed his feet into a pair of combat boots, then jerked open the door. "What's going on?"
Sheppard shook his head, his grip tight on his P90. "Ford's here. He's jamming our comm frequencies somehow. Weir wants you in the gate room."
So Nate had allowed them four months of relative peace before he'd decided to finish them off. Four months in which they'd begun to hope that maybe they'd been spared the slaughter that had killed everyone they had ever known. Nate always had been a little sadistic.
By the time they reached the control center it was already packed. When Weir saw Eliot and Sheppard she gestured for them to join her in front of a row of computer screens, all of which showed Nate standing on the bridge of a Goa'uld mothership. He was dressed in simple black slacks and a white shirt—Nate's clothes—not the gaudy costumes most of the Goa'uld preferred.
"You'll never get past our shield!" McKay was saying. "We have a zed PM that's stronger than any power source you've got."
Nate smiled. Eliot's gut clenched. He'd seen that smile from Nate before and knew what it meant. Checkmate.
Nate said, "I've done a bit of wandering over the past few months—visiting old friends of the Tau'ri, quashing the Jaffa rebellion, that kind of thing—and in my travels, I came across a number of delightful toys."
He snapped his fingers. Three Jaffa lumbered into view, each cradling within their arms a ZPM.
There was a collective gasp from the people in the control room. "Damn," O'Neill muttered.
"I wonder how long your one ZPM will hold up against my three. A day, maybe? Less?" Nate's eyes flashed. It was that flash, that brief but terrible physical manifestation of the Goa'uld inside the man, that suddenly filled Eliot with a desperate need to speak.
He seized the microphone and looked into Nate's eyes, though he knew Nate couldn't see him. "Nate," he said. "I'm so sorry, man. I should have seen."
The people surrounding him looked at him like he was crazy, but O'Neill nodded. He'd been with the Stargate program from the beginning, had seen too many friends—and enemies—possessed by the Goa'uld. He understood why Eliot had to apologize.
Because as bad as this was for them, how much worse must it be for Nate—the real Nate, the one who'd lost a son, who'd turned Eliot into a good man—to be forced to watch helplessly as his own body committed genocide?
For a moment, Nate's face twisted in rage. Maybe the host had tried to fight off the Goa'uld, or maybe the Goa'uld was simply infuriated at the thought of being the subject of a human's pity. In either case, the rage was gone soon enough, replaced by an anticipatory grin.
"Eliot, how wonderful to hear your voice," Nate said. "It's nice to know that someone down there will understand the delicious irony of my parting words—the last words you'll hear from me before I blow your pathetic city to bits." He stepped out from behind the control panel to take a ZPM from one of the Jaffa, pressing it to his cheek. "You Tau'ri put up a decent effort, but you were doomed from the beginning. However strong you might have been, however seemingly unconquerable, I have always been good at providing…leverage."