Disclaimer: I own nothing anyone recognises.

A/N: So, this is the last part. Hope you enjoy.

Acid Shadows

Part Three

Loud, obnoxious klaxons never signalled good news. They most especially never signalled good news when heralding an unexpected activation of the wormhole around which the activities of Stargate Command were centred. So the two generals of the United States Air Force that were overseeing events at the base were to some degree prepared for the coming of unfortunate – to word it mildly – news.

And it was clear, even at a glance, as their people stepped out of the wormhole, that the news was rather more than unfortunate. The state of the team was a far cry from that in which they had left Earth.

Hank felt his heart sink, his stomach knot itself into a fair representation of a noose. More of his people were dead, and he hadn't done anything to prevent it, and he couldn't have done anything to prevent it. And Hank wasn't sure which was worse.

Standing next to him, General O'Neill didn't say anything. They both knew they were thinking the same thing anyway.

The frozen moment ended, and the SGC moved on. Within the hour, the whole of the base will know that they had lost people (again, Hank carefully didn't think). But now isn't the time to drop everything, to stop and mourn, because the world (the galaxy) moves on, and they have to try to move with it (to keep up).

Events of the recent past were a bit of a blur to Major Lyons, who had not been at the time concentrating on them clearly. There had been the cold of the wormhole, the gateroom, handing over his weapons. Just flashes, bits and pieces of the scenes making up his life. Landry saying something. The infirmary, post-mission check-up, making sure that none of them had anything hiding in their systems, to unexpectedly rear it s head and burn its way – no. Corridors.

And then there was the briefing room, and the conference table, and he had managed to (tell the story, he thought, because stories aren't real) explain, to recount the events of the mission.

He hadn't stumbled (too much) over the words (no more than could be expected), mostly because he had been trying, desperately, to distance it all from him (it wasn't working, and he had wondered if he deserved that, for leading them and messing it up). But that was, he had gathered over the time he had worked here, okay, that he couldn't quite keep it out of his voice, okay that it affected his "professional demeanour", or whatever. Even if Landry didn't know what it was like, how it felt to lose one (more than one) of your team to what was out there, beyond the wormhole, General O'Neill did understand (and that was what counted, right?).

Lyons took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying not to be too obvious about it. Enough. Concentrate, now.

Sitting at the head of the table, General O'Neill's eyes narrowed.

'Kid,' he said abruptly, drawing a glare from his clone, 'hands on the table.'

The death-glare continued, but the younger O'Neill pulled his hands from underneath the table, plonking them palm-down on the dark surface, pulling off a remarkably realistic impression of a sulking teenager.

Then again, by all accounts the General could be pretty childish himself at times; now he just rolled his eyes at the display his clone was putting on, before redirecting his gaze to the clone's hands, so obligingly placed in full view of all four men seated around the table. The backs and sides of his hands and fingers, along with part of his wrists – all that could be seen extending from his unrolled sleeves – were liberally covered in what looked almost like flickering black shadows.

Upon closer inspection – which all at the table embarked upon immediately – the "shadows" were in fact made up of black ink, moving in intricate, interwoven – almost Celtic – designs over his skin. It looked almost – not quite natural – but as though it was somehow meant to be there. But the ink...didn't look like ink, not like regular, mundane human tattoo-ink. It was darker, more...it looked, Lyons thought, almost as though the twisting shadows were not so much a colour as they were the absence of light. They looked alive.

Under the stares of the older men, Jack shifted, pushing his left sleeve up towards his elbow, revealing as he did so that his palms were just as covered, and the designs – almost mesmerising in their movement – continued up past his forearms.

Lyons and Chapman had been sneaking glances at Jack's hands and arms all the way to the gate, unable to stop their wandering eyes, but the glimpses they had managed hadn't been in any way sufficient to see the detail. But however little the pair had previously seen, it was enough to render them at least partly immune to the lure of the shifting ink – or demon's blood, or whatever the natives had called it – that comprised the alien tattoos.

So it was made easier for the two soldiers to look away when they heard General O'Neill's voice; it was somewhat harder for Hank Landry to tear his near-unblinking gaze away to attend to the practical question put bluntly by his fellow general.

'How far up do they go?'

A fair question, Hank thought. The ink-stuff could have spread nearly anywhere, hidden beneath clothing.

'Up to my shoulders,' came the answer, and Hank couldn't help but feel peculiarly relieved.

And then he realised that it didn't really matter how far the stuff had spread where it couldn't be seen; it was where it could be seen that was the problem. A pretty large problem, in fact, one that O'Neill – both of them – appeared to have grasped with ease.

It might have been possible to deny the alien origin of the tattoos, and pass them off as normal, no matter how much of the teen's body was covered in them; if only it weren't for the fact that the tattoos moved. No Earth-based tattoos moved, and the placement of the ink-stuff was just too obvious to have a hope of hiding it. Even if normal, Earth-style tattoos could be removed through some form of acid, Hank doubted that these would submit to such a treatment. They looked as though they were here to stay.

But if the patterning on Jack's skin existed where it could be seen, then equally Jack couldn't be allowed to be seen by the public – moving tattoos were a bit much for the general population to accept as normal, whatever else they had swallowed in terms of cover stories over the years. And somehow, Hank didn't think that Jack O'Neill would enjoy being cooped up as a result of – well, anything, really.

He had hardly allowed himself to be put in one place when the SGC had kicked him off to attend high school; Hank still didn't know exactly where the clone had disappeared to after rejecting that idea, but he also a faint suspicion he didn't want to know.

Plausible deniability did have its uses, occasionally.

Wherever it was the younger O'Neill went to live – and presumably, make a living – it was doubtful he would be able to get there without the backing – or at least not the active discouragement – of the Air Force. But it seemed that the clone had an answer to this problem, too; he really was determined not to have other people decide what would happen to him, wasn't he? Then again, no one really wants to be told what to do, how to live.

'Don't worry,' the kid said calmly, more or less casually. 'Apparently there's a way to hide them.'

And that made everyone around the table sit up straighter. It appeared as though not a single one of them had been privy to this bit of news before, not even the pair who had actually been on the planet.

'Care to explain?' General O'Neill asked, nearly as casually, complete with raised eyebrow. Almost.

The clone responded by staring into the distance, his eyes removing their focus from his immediate surroundings. And then, as though in response to his actions – and when Hank thought about it later, it would have been in direct response to the clone's actions – the moving tattoos on his skin stilled, and then slowly faded from view.

The men stared at Jack's now-shadow-free hands and arms, surprised yet again. And why was it, again, that they even bothered formulating ideas about what the teen was going to do next when they were always, inevitably wrong? And then as they watched, Jack's eyes focused again on them, and the tattoos reappeared, moving slowly to begin with, and then speeding back up to their former glory.

'And are you going to be able to do that for more than a couple of seconds? Because if you can't make them disappear for longer, it won't help you in the slightest.'

At first, the only response that this achieved was a thoroughly disgusted look.

Then: 'It just takes practice.'

Lyons imagined that the teenager left an "apparently" off the end of that sentence, because really, the attention garnered by those freaky new tattoos was not the sort of attention due to a regularly-occurring phenomenon. But General O'Neill, who must have surely picked up any unsaid words, left the statement be, and moved on. It seemed that the subject of alien tattooing-inducing had been sufficiently dealt with for the present moment.

The younger O'Neill dropped out of the conversation, no longer subject to staring, and let the rest of them get on with the process of finishing up the debriefing, very possibly relying on his youthful appearance to get him out of actually having to participate. Lyons, acting more or less on default and pre-programmed responses, just as he has been since he came back through the gate, watched the kid fiddle absentmindedly with a pen. A few minutes later, the major realised that, firstly, the kid was putting up a good act of being bored out of his mind and not paying attention, but it was only an act; and that, secondly, General O'Neill had been fiddling with a pen in exactly the same way for at least the past five minutes.

It was at about that point that Major Lyons came to the conclusion that he should spend a little more time paying attention to what his superiors were saying, and less to their pen-twirling habits. But however much attention he had been paying events, he managed to make it out of the debriefing without collapsing in some way, which his subconscious had been strongly urging him to consider as the correct course of action. On the other hand, neither he nor Cochrane managed to escape without reminders (orders, really) to visit the resident shrink.

Those reminders were pushed, almost immediately after the aforementioned escape, to the hind-brain to take up near-permanent residence there. Lyons and Chapman had mutually and independently concocted, somewhere in the time between returning to base and leaving it again, a plan that included in no uncertain terms a night of becoming steadily and increasingly drunk, preferably in good company, though they didn't especially care where it happened.

It would be sometime later, after his lengthy and painful recovery from his resulting hangover that Lyons would realise that not once had anyone mentioned that the kid visit a shrink. That insight, however, at whatever speed it was or was not discarded, was far from Lyons' mind at the close of the debriefing.

There were times when Landry had a great and near-overwhelming urge to ask Walter what exactly was in those betting pools he pretended not to know about. He never did, though – behaviour befitting a general and all that – but he did wonder. Just like he sometimes wondered what his teams left out of their reports – he knew they did – but he didn't know what, or how much, or why. And that worried him.

He may not be as close to the people he commanded as General Hammond – or O'Neill for that matter – had been, but he found himself a good deal closer than he had been to others under his command in the past. And so he cared about them. And if he didn't know what was troubling them – especially those troubles resulting from off-world missions – then he couldn't do anything to try and help them and it didn't matter how subtly he tried.

It didn't usually enter his thoughts overmuch, this inability to connect with the people under his command, not often beyond worrying moments in the middle of the night. But this lack of connection, which seemed so vital in the SGC, was far more apparent – apparent to himself if not to anyone else, and he hadn't asked anyone else, for fear of the answer he may receive – when either General Hammond or, more commonly, General O'Neill, made a visit to the base. The current situation was no exception.

General O'Neill had left, unwillingly returning to the Pentagon, but the SGC had yet to forget this most recent of his visits. Hank couldn't quite find it in him to be jealous (if that was the right word, even), but it was a close-run thing. The task of suppression of envy was not helped, in this instance, by the continuing presence of O'Neill's clone.

The clone had become something of an object of fascination, in part due to the tattoos of moving darkness continuously twisting around his arms and hands, and in part due to his uncanny – and so far unexplained, though this had not prevented rumours – resemblance to General O'Neill. He had taken this attention surprisingly well, reacting with good humour to the obvious curiosity of the SGC, and quite clearly forming what could become friendships were they given enough time.

The teenage O'Neill was also, it became equally obvious, taking advantage of his time at the base to discover exactly what had been happening since he had last been there, blatantly ignoring any regulations that may have otherwise prevented him from doing so. Obeying orders to refrain from poking his nose into matters was, apparently, not high on O'Neill's list of priorities.

Then again, Hank didn't much begrudge him the opportunity to catch up on events. If nothing else, it kept the clone mostly out of Hank's hair whilst he was at the SGC.

Some days later, General Hank Landry was seated in his office, having been securely ensconced there since the early hours of the morning, and was somewhat half-heartedly occupied with the task of completing paperwork. It was only later that he realised he had been sub-consciously waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop it surely did, brought to Hank's attention, once again, by Walter, who was probably by this point in his career at the SGC a fervent believer in the don't-shoot-the-messenger mentality.

Standing before Hank's desk, Walter didn't look especially apprehensive, but Hank had by this point known him just long enough to read certain aspects of his body language.

'Jack O'Neill is, uh, missing, sir. He isn't in his assigned quarters.'

'He left?' Hank asked, somewhat resigned. He should have seen this coming.

'Yes, sir,' Walter confirmed. 'He left this, sir,' he said, proffering a folded sheet of paper in outstretched hand.

General Landry took the paper.

'Do you want me to try and find where he went, sir?' Walter asked.

Hank genuinely considered the question for a moment, and then said 'No.' He was about to add more, considered an inquiry into whether anyone had seen the teenager leave (or had helped him do so), but then merely said, a touch distracted, 'Thank you, Walter.'

Walter lingered a moment, making sure he wasn't needed, and then left the General to it. Hank unfolded the single sheet of paper, and scanned the handwritten lines.

The note – it wasn't long enough to be called a letter – was brief and to the point.

Hank;

Yeah, I left, got the hell out of Dodge, whatever. Things to do, places to be, you know the deal. Don't bother looking. The old man'll be able to find me if it's real important.

Don't get migraines about tattoos and national security. I'm hardly gonna tell anyone. Not looking to get put up against a wall and shot, here.

If anyone comes asking, I was never here.

See you around.

It was unsigned, but the identity of the author was obvious. The note had quite clearly been written in his usual irreverent tone. Hank crumpled it up and tossed it onto his desk, feeling, he thought, rightfully irritated. He took a moment to fume at the clone's arrogance, at disappearing and then plainly assuming Hank would just go along with it.

But then, it was entirely possible – reading between the lines – that the choice to leave hadn't been wholly up to the kid. And even if it had, Hank didn't know everything that was going on in the kid's life, that he felt he had to cover his tracks so thoroughly that even Walter hadn't been able to find out where he had been. There could easily be far more factors than those of which Hank knew.

General Landry ran over his options in his head, and then sighed. There was nothing he could do. The clone had said – written – as much himself. And – unsettling as the mention of "if anyone comes asking" was – the kid could take care of himself. Knowing Jack, he wouldn't appreciate it at all if Hank stuck his nose in O'Neill's business.

He picked the paper up from his desk, smoothed it out, and tore it into increasingly smaller pieces, and then put those pieces into his pocket for later disposal. There was no point leaving evidence hanging around when it had been written by someone who had never been here.

He sat back, reset his thoughts to the completion of paperwork, and waited for the next crisis.

And if Hank was being pessimistic, there, then it was no more than what life in the SGC seemed to almost require by at least someone much of the time, and the rest of the universe would just have to learn to cope.

-end-