KANAN
Kanan's human form hit the ground hard, pain radiating from the staff blasts in his back. Face down in the mud, he realised that he wasn't going to make it out of there, and neither was Shaylen. A flood of emotions threatened to drown him before his training took over, reminding him that he could not allow the information he held about the Tok'ra to get into Ba'al's hands. And he couldn't let them find out about Shay, either.
He swiftly snapped all links to the body he inhabited and weaved his way into the host's mouth, making a desperate leap for it. His natural body landed in a puddle, and he wriggled away from the area as fast as he could, knowing that the Jaffa were only a few steps away.
He didn't look back until he was a safe distance from the Stargate. From his vantage point he couldn't see much, but he knew that the human had been captured – it was inevitable. Without the healing powers of a symbiote keeping him alive, his injuries would have rendered him incapable of resistance, if not killed him altogether.
Never leave a man behind.
The human's voice echoed in Kanan's mind, a remnant of their blending, and he flinched, curling in on himself. Feelings of guilt and shame overwhelmed him.
I did it again. I left Shay in the hands of that beast. And the human... O'Neill... I left him too. I left them both behind...
Kanan had seen what Ba'al did to his prisoners. He knew that the Goa'uld had a sarcophagus that would be used to restore O'Neill's health for the sole purpose of ripping it from him again. The human would be killed again, and again, and again, until he divulged whatever information Ba'al desired. Like why Kanan had returned to the fortress.
It would take a while for O'Neill to remember. Once he did, how quickly would he betray Shaylen? Immediately, in the hope of saving himself from endless torture?
No, he is a better man than that, Kanan realised, and his heart was caught between leaping for his lover's chance at survival and sinking for the knowledge of what it would cost O'Neill.
Kanan finally understood O'Neill's conviction, why it was so fundamentally important to him to go back for anyone lost along the way. The human had tried to tell him, but Kanan had ignorantly believed that the moral standard he had been confronted with only required him to save a woman he loved. He realised now that it was so much more than that. What made O'Neill so unique was his self-sacrificing nature, his willingness to put his own life on the line to save the lives of others – whether he knew them personally or not, whether they would know and thank him for his efforts or not, whether they would have done the same for him or not... He viewed himself as a protector of innocents, and could never live with himself if he didn't do everything he could to fulfil that role.
Kanan knew that he couldn't live with himself, now. He physically ached with horror at what he had done, and there was no way for him to reverse his wrong. He had used, abused, and then irrevocably abandoned the human to a terrible fate. O'Neill was going to suffer horribly, until everything that made him who he was eroded under knives and acid and death and revival in the destroyer of souls.
I am no better than the Goa'uld.
Without a host, Kanan was going to die. He welcomed death. His only thought before he exhaled his last breath, was:
Somebody help him.