His breath rasps down his throat to burn his lungs like wildfire. His legs tremble and ache from overexertion as he stumbles over rocks and roots. His glasses rest forgotten some ways back; his clothes hang in ribbons on his battered frame. His mind repeats over and over Keep going don't stop keep going. He can't let them catch him.
He'd lost Jack and Sam and Teal'c hours ago, when the sun's strong rays had cast green-tinted sunbeams onto the leaf-littered ground. He doesn't know if they had been caught. If they are alive. He doesn't think about it.
Keep moving.
He crashes through a thicket of wild thistles, leaving threads of green and black hanging on thorns and acquiring new injuries on his already wounded arms and legs. The toe of his boot hooks on a root, pitching him into the loam. He forces himself upright, ignoring the bright flare of pain in his ankle. It feels sprained.
Don't stop.
He blunders onward, the black spots in his vision winking in and out of existance, growing larger with every faltering step. The firestorm in his lungs comsumes his gasped breath; he drowns in it.
A scrap of his sleeve catches on a branch and he jerks out of its grasp.
He must not stop.
Leaves and branches scrape across his arms, chest, face. His elbow glances off a tree trunk: he clutches it, staggering forward. He trips again.
Keep moving get up don't stop get up GET UP!
His body feels like marble, sinking into the dirt and decomposing leaves. He cannot move. He can barely think for lack of energy.
An eternity—or an instant—passes with his face pressed into the earth. Then his pursuers circle around him, snarling in a language he no longer understands. He hears a metallic ssshk and the voices rise in a tsunami of destruction. Cold steel bites into his back, cuts through his stomach, pierces the ground below him. His cry of pain dribbles past his lips in a weak whimper of sound.
Jack, he thinks,Jack.
And as if summoned, Jack appears, P-90 spitting death while the electric discharge of a staff weapon wreaks firy ruin upon his enemies. Unintelligible words become inarticulate screams as blood gushes from his stomach.
Then the forest echoes with silence.
"Jack," he whispers, and the ocean crashes in his ears, floods his veins, quenches the fires in lungs and ankle and stomach. Much-loved voices filter faintly through the rush of water, and he smiles. Jack.
He says, wants to say, "I love you."
He lets the ocean take him away.