Title : The Gift
Author : ELG
Author Page: ELG
Rating : NC-17
Category : Slash (Alternate Universe)
Pairings : Daniel/OMC, Jack/Daniel, Sam/McKay UST, Sam/Teal'c UST
WARNINGS: Includes m/m Non Con (by OMC), violence, physical abuse, murder, explicit rape (by OMC), and references to child abuse (from age twelve and over).
Summary: In a different universe Jack O'Neill left Special Ops to join the police force and is now a Detective in the Chicago PD. Doctor Daniel Jackson is heir to the Ballard millions but a virtual prisoner in his luxurious home, a victim of psychosis and depression. Is he truly as mentally ill as his medical records suggest or a victim of the controlling behavior of his stepbrother, Tony Ballard-Green? Who, if not her husband, killed Sha're, the beautiful Egyptian maid? Why do Colonel Makepeace and Captain Carter of the very modern Air Force need Daniel Jackson's help so urgently with transcribing an Ancient Egyptian inscription from a dead Pharaoh's tomb? And who is the mysterious 'gardener', Ray Teal'c, and why is he really at Gray Gables?
Spoilers : AU but could be said to contain spoilers for the Stargate Movie and The Curse. It is a completely different universe however, although it does have a few things in common with the Stargate universe we know.
Characters : Jack O'Neill, Daniel Jackson, Samantha Carter, Teal'c, Rodney McKay, General Hammond, Kawalsky, Makepeace, Bra'tac, Sara O'Neill. (Plus various Original Characters.)
NB: This story was originally published as a zine by jmas and is still available in that format at Ancient's Gate Slash Zines
NOTE: I would be the last person to want to take away from Daniel's achievement in being the person who opened the Stargate but I've always assumed that some of the things Daniel worked out in the Movie, were already known to the people who were working on the project. It was already set up to dial out, for instance, and they seemed to know it was a means of transporting people across space. What didn't seem to be known was what the symbol for Earth was or how the symbols to get home again could be calculated from the destination once reached. For that reason only, in this story, Sam and McKay explain some of the astrophysics which Daniel explained in the original Movie.
Disclaimer: Stargate Sg-1 and its characters are the property of Stargate (II) Productions, Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money exchanged hands. No copyright infringement is intended. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the authors. This story may not be posted elsewhere without the consent of the author. 

The Gift

Prologue

The pains were coming quickly now and the backache had turned into a lower body numbness that, if she hadn't known better, she would have thought was a sign of something terminal. On the wall the unfaded golden eye of Thoth looked down upon her and her swollen belly.

Doctor Claire Jackson felt the sweat pour down her skin in company with the pain. And it was true that she had never known a pain like it, each contraction feeling as if she was being ground against shale. Like a shipwreck taking place within her.

She concentrated on the golden eye of Thoth and tried to clear her mind, thinking what she wanted for this child. To be born safely, of course. To be loved. But that didn't need to be wished for. She had never seen herself as the Victorian heroine type who would expire in childbirth. She had every intention of giving birth to a healthy baby and getting back to this dig at the first possible opportunity. And there was no question that she would love him or her. So, what did she want for this son or daughter whose expulsion was tearing through her body with such force? Closing her eyes she whispered in her mind to Thoth and asked him to grant her son or daughter the gift of communication, to understand the written and the spoken word of the past and present. To comprehend the speech of the ancient scribes, to see the truth in every kind of script, to find a means to communicate where others perhaps could not.

And then the baby was coming so fast and with such determination that there was no room for any more thought. Only the pain, and then the wet head, the squirming shoulders, the wriggling wet infant, and the tears in her eyes as she held her baby son in her arms and kissed the miraculous perfection of his fingers over and over again.

***

ONE

Daniel woke and the smoke of his dreams dissolved into birdsong and a thin crack of sunlight trying to slice its way into the bedroom through the black velvet drapes. He lay still for a moment, relishing the clouded clarity of these first waking moments, cobwebbed with dream memories but not yet muffled by medication. He reached for his glasses from the nightstand and as he put them on his mind sharpened another degree. It was difficult to keep your thoughts clear when your vision was a blur. Today, he was going to be thirty, which meant it was thirty years since he'd arrived, a little early, in the desert mystery of Egypt, born in the darkness of a Pharaoh's tomb to a mother who had kept on sketching hieroglyphs until the last possible moment. The surprised wail of a newborn baby had caused his father, working in a different tomb at the time, to drop the skull of a slave girl he'd been examining. It had cracked on the stone. Eight years later it was his parents' skulls that had been shattered when a cover stone had crushed them. There had been mutterings of a curse.

His parents had weaved such bright dreams for his future in their minds and none of them had involved money, or even love, but the dust of dead Pharaohs and the script of dead scribes. Had a fairy godmother been available to bless him they would have asked for him the gift of languages and the eyes to see what others could not. Perhaps his mother – as his grandfather had always told him – had asked some blessing from Thoth as he watched over her son's birth. If it had been asked for, it had certainly been given: letters after his name and titles before it, papers published, digs completed, theories formulated, but so many other things had been taken away.

Daniel switched on the bedside lamp and looked around his room. It was too big for comfort, like everything about this mausoleum of a house. The marble floors were cold, the paneling too perfect to disturb. At night, phantom breezes made the chandeliers tinkle sadly, and he would feel melancholy sweep through him to the rhythm of their lament. His aunt Zinnia – who was not his aunt or a blood relation of any kind yet who made him call her that anyway – had insisted the house had to be restored with all due sympathy for the period. Daniel could understand her reverence for the past. He just wished the period had not demanded so much chill marble and velvet and gilt and sunless bronze.

The floor of his room was made from dark-stained boards, and creaked authentically. He thought sometimes of a modern apartment with cream walls and a honey-colored pine floor, where the ceiling wasn't painted with dingy cherubs and the lighting didn't gleam drearily from dusty chandeliers. Or of a house somewhere with French doors to a yard of friendly proportions, some decking, and perhaps a back bedroom from which it was possible to see the stars.

His walls had been painted a blue so dark they looked black as a starless night sky. Many of his artifacts were barely visible against the somber background, African masks only visible as an unnerving semi-reflection in the darkness, clay tablets almost lost against the flapping of some tapestry that made his asthma threaten another attack. Although the room was supposedly his and almost everything in it was a much-loved heirloom left to him by his dead parents or his murdered grandfather, he was always aware of what this suite of rooms truly was: his bedroom and his 'sitting' room and his bathroom, in all their oak paneled, marble-tiled, velvet draped luxury, a penthouse prison in a house he hated. He would have preferred almost any room in any concrete apartment block where the key to his door was kept on the inside and the windows were unbarred.

His pills were on the nightstand next to a glass and a bottle of Evian water. Lots of pills. Red pills, yellow pills, green-and-white pills, and blue pills. Even a few of the green ones that didn't mix well with others, a bit like him really. One could build the model for half a DNA molecule out of them or a pattern of the solar system. He wondered if they were made up in those enticing colors to try to make them appear more palatable. If so, it didn't work, because he simultaneously hated his dependence on them and the way they made him feel: muffled and clouded and as if someone had wrapped a blanket around his brain. Of course, they stopped the horrors too, stopped the ghosts and the visions and the writing on his skin and the corpses who sat on the end of his bed and dripped blood onto the comforter, but they also made him drowsy and compliant and it so difficult for him to concentrate. The way he felt right now, he could research a paper, read a book and fully understand it without having to go over and over the same paragraph looking at words he'd seen a hundred times before and wondering why their meaning seemed so elusive, once he swallowed the pills that luxury was lost. Then he remembered some of the visions he'd had that had sent him scuttling under the bed, too afraid even to scream, remembered the antiseptic smell of the asylum – everything so white, and his fear a ghost that held his hand in a clammy paw and whispered horror in his ear.

It was genetic, of course. His grandfather had gone insane, before he'd been bludgeoned to death in a pool of his own blood. Daniel had inherited the madness from him along with all that money.

Daniel shivered. He was afraid of the money. It was the King's ankus with the power to corrupt anyone who touched it. In another universe he suspected he was too poor to bother with and as a consequence happier and free to come and go as he pleased. He had always known, although it was never spoken of, that Aunt Zinnia would never have taken him in if he hadn't been Nick's sole heir. In another world she would have thrown the letter from social services onto the fire and gone back to cooing over her only son. Only in this world, he hoped, had Daniel's potential wealth made him worthy of adoption.

Nick's younger brother, Paul, had been happily married for many years to a woman called Rosemary but after her death had insisted on marrying again, much too fast, a woman younger than him and recently divorced. The marriage had never been happy, but, still, at the time of his death, Zinnia had been his wife and Uncle Paul had left his widow comfortably off. Within two months of her husband's death, Zinnia had married again.

Daniel couldn't think of Tony without wincing. The handsomest man in Chicago, Aunt Zinnia always called her son, just like his father. Tony's father had been a tennis coach to women of advancing years but attractive incomes. Nick had always said Zinnia was a fool to marry him but that there was no fool like an old fool. Although Nick's words had proven prophetic and the tennis coach had quickly absconded with a younger and wealthier widow, Zinnia had not been inclined to forgive her brother-in-law for his words. They had quarreled and Nick had left her nothing of his dead wife's fortune, yet Zinnia and Tony – for the mother did nothing without consulting the son – had adopted Daniel all the same. There was no actual blood tie but there was a distant connection and no one else had wanted him. He reminded himself of that often when Tony was prowling like a cat on the lookout for an injured mouse. They hadn't had to take him in. He could have been sent to the orphanage when his grandfather had committed himself to the asylum, could have washed their hands of him forever after Nick had been killed by that burglar. Yet, try as he might to feel grateful, it didn't come naturally where Tony and Zinnia were concerned. For Nick, though, the gratitude was unforced. His will had been full of stipulations about Daniel's trust fund and how he had to go to college. Even then Zinnia had made faint murmurs about Daniel being too mentally fragile, prone to nightmares and fancies, but the lawyers had insisted and Daniel had been, if not free, at least given a very long leash.

If his mother had asked of that painted Thoth on the tomb wall for her son to get his doctorate in archaeology, it had been granted, as had a separate PhD in linguistics and another in anthropology. Daniel was widely accepted as someone brilliant in his chosen fields. Unfortunately, he was also widely accepted as insane.

As he brushed his teeth, he missed Sha're. Maids never stayed for long. Too much work, perhaps, or maybe Tony left bruises on their arms also. He wished she hadn't left, whatever her reason had been, she'd been one genuinely friendly face for him to look at in the mornings, and the fact it was such a beautiful face probably hadn't hurt either. He wished at least that before she left she had come to say goodbye. Perhaps the kiss had made it awkward, although it had been a very chaste kiss. She had been crying again and he'd wanted to comfort her as she'd comforted him through the last episode of winged creatures sliding down the drapes. He'd meant to kiss her forehead but she'd pulled him down and their lips had touched, so briefly, like a child's kiss, although his mouth had tingled with it for hours afterwards. She was a married woman, even if the marriage was in trouble, disagreements about a child she wanted and her husband didn't, poisoning everything. It had been such a pleasure to be able to speak Egyptian to someone again after so many years of only hearing English snapped at him or purred in soothing tones.

He ran the faucet for a long time to wash away the toothpaste and the blood and then shaved first before he showered – wincing a little as the water stung those small circles of seared flesh – and then went back into his bedroom to get dressed. It was automatic to press the keyboard of his sleeping computer. He liked the way it came back to life so silently, light out of darkness, color from blackness, then it opened to him: his window onto the world.

Time slipped from him as he read the latest papers from conferences he could no longer attend, mentally blessing the Internet for giving him a means to keep one tentative toe in the water of current archaeology. No one seemed to have followed up on his research since that disastrous lecture he had given. Steven had told him once that no one would ever be interested in reading a detective novel where the murderer was never revealed. It wasn't enough to say who hadn't built the pyramids, he needed to reveal who had, but there was no data to support that. Those strange inscriptions were intriguing but they were just more pieces for the puzzle, more clues he couldn't follow up because he couldn't –

"Why aren't you dressed?"

Daniel jumped as Tony asked the question, wrapping his arms around himself at once, abruptly aware of the way he was wearing only a towel around his waist. There was mockery in that question, of course, because getting dressed was something that Tony didn't allow him to do. But he usually made sure he was wearing underwear, pajamas and a robe by this time of the day, three layers between his tender body and the outside world, or more honestly, between his tender body and the man who had bruised it last. He hadn't heard Tony come in. He never did hear Tony, despite the creaking floorboards, and not just because the man moved like a panther, so much controlled power there, those muscles rippling under his golden skin, but because Daniel was always too wrapped up in the dust of the pyramids, the lost warmth of Egypt and those strange hieroglyphs whose meaning he didn't understand. Too abruptly he was back in his dark draped bedroom uncomfortably trapped inside his own skin. He could feel the dampness of the towel, feel how fine his wrists were, the heated areas on his skin he tried to ignore. Setting his jaw he said, "You could knock."

"I could." Tony's fingers dug into his shoulder. "But I wouldn't hold your breath."

Zinnia was right, of course. Tony was certainly the best-looking man in Chicago, if not the whole of North America. Six foot three with slate blue eyes and dark brown hair, broad shouldered and frighteningly fit with a six pack stomach and pectorals a Greek athlete would have envied. He was perfect. On the outside anyway.

Daniel pulled away from him as if Tony's was a hand that easily shaken off but the grip just tightened.

"We may have visitors today."

Daniel darted him a look of surprise. Visitors weren't allowed. That was the house rule and it was for his sake, that was what they told him. He was too crazy, flaky, and certifiable to talk to anyone else. Strangers would lock him up as soon as look at him.

"Why?"

Tony glowered at him but he refused to flinch. His parents had told him that was a good question and he was going to keep asking it, even if it did occasionally give Tony that red mist in front of his eyes.

"If they ask you about Sha're, you don't know anything."

Daniel blinked in confusion. "But I do. I know where her father and her brother live. She told me."

Tony smacked him around the back of the head with the heel of his hand and it rung dully. Daniel felt the resentment flare at the injustice. Tony had always been older and stronger than he was but that didn't make it right for him to hit him, only possible.

"I won't lie," he muttered.

Tony's eyes were very cold. "Do you want to go back to White Towers? Do you want to wear a strait jacket and a diaper and have to lick baby food from the end of a spoon?"

"It was only because of Nick." Daniel bowed his head in shame because he hadn't taken the loss of his grandfather well. He'd gibbered uselessly and sobbed inconsolably and seen things that weren't there and made Tony so angry that stars had exploded in both their minds.

"It was because you were and are a stupid, fucked up weirdo with shit for brains. Did you take your fucking medication this morning or did you forget as usual?"

"I don't like it. It makes everything…unreal." Daniel braced himself for another blow but the warm hand on his thigh was worse. He jumped and shuddered. "Don't."

There had been a time, in Egypt, when it was Tony who had seemed unreal and impossible. Daniel had known himself to be free then, Tony a bad memory left behind. He was a doctor of archaeology. He had a career and a life of his own. The boy whose grandfather had been too insane to understand when he tried to tell him the true reason he didn't like living with Aunt Zinnia had seemed like someone else. Working in the sunlight on the ruins of a dead pharaoh's scattered dreams of the afterlife, Daniel had felt the calluses on his fingers, seen the lean muscle on his sunbrowned arms, and known he would never be that person again – never be powerless. He was an adult male with a responsibility to those weaker than himself not to abuse the power being an adult male gave him, he could not be a victim, that was the lot of women and children and his role now was to offer such potential victims his protection. Orphaned little boys and skinny teenagers with scraped knees might have to suffer at the hands of bullying stepbrothers but never adult males.

He pulled away from Tony's hand. "I said 'don't'."

They looked at one another for a long moment, Tony's eyes lazy with confidence, both of them remembering all his past victories.

Tony was too strong to evade for long, Daniel had found that out years ago and relearned it many times since in struggles he had always lost. His grip was like iron and it would take so much force to subdue him that it would leave them both fragmented. There was a bronze statue on the table. It was one of the many beautiful things Nick had left him. One blow and he would be free of Tony forever, but he couldn't do it. He knew what a smashed skull looked like, the white hair ugly with drying blood, gray matter leaked out taking all memories with it, turned someone warm and living into something cold and dead. He couldn't do that to anyone, not even Tony at his worst. His hands began to shake just at the thought.

Tony smiled. "Time for me to give you your birthday present."

Daniel wrapped his arms around himself, wishing he were dressed, wishing the door was open, wishing there was somewhere to run to except miles of echoing dark corridors that Tony controlled. "I don't want it."

No snake could strike faster than Tony could move. The hand shot out and fastened around his wrist, yanking him off balance and pulling him against the solid wall of his hardened body. "Don't be ungrateful, you little shit."

He struggled and a hand fastened around his throat. He knew this dance too well, remembered the steps – Tony's heels on his bare toes, those hands that could always find new ways to hurt, fingers that pinched and bruised and squeezed and stabbed. Every time this happened he told himself that struggling was futile, and panicking absurd, and every time he panicked because the world was going dark for him, stars exploding behind his eyes. He hit out blindly, telling himself as he struggled and punched that he was six foot tall and thirty years old and that meant he couldn't be a victim, that this time he would win. Pain stung his face, bruised his body, then fingers tightened around his throat and the darkness covered him like a shroud.

Gray Gables. A grim name for a grim place. He had been expecting Oak Park but this area wasn't much less 'desirable' in realtor speak although it certainly was a lot less Frank Lloyd Wright. This was more like Glessner House, only less cozy and welcoming. The heat was sweltering, a blast furnace of a day but there was nothing summery about this mausoleum. Detective Jack O'Neill looked up at the house and thought he had never seen anything so damned depressing, it was a huge square building with any number of steep roofs. The amount of rooms it must contain boggled his mind, hell to keep clean no doubt, and built facing north. Some of those many windows looked as if they never saw the sun. The gardens were still being meticulously restored to their former formality, all dingy statues, dusty shrubberies, and spraying fountains. Even the pool, when he passed it, looked as if it was only for show, never to be enjoyed. He caught a glimpse of the gardener through the trees – a big black guy with an athlete's build. For a moment their eyes met and O'Neill felt himself assessed, stripped bare, like passing through an X-ray machine en route for a government building. Brown eyes bored into him and then something clicked behind them, like a roulette ball falling onto the number bet on last. He had never been made for a cop so fast before. Then the gardener was turning away and going back to whatever he was doing with that rake and O'Neill was left wondering what the hell that was about.

He exchanged a glance with his partner Charlie Kawalsky, who was also looking at the gardener. Kawalsky knew him pretty well by now and murmured, "You take the house, I take the grounds?"

O'Neill nodded. What neither of them had admitted aloud was that O'Neill wasn't good at being in company these days, even the company of his partner and friend, someone who had known the wife who'd left him and the son he'd lost. He was too raw and too angry and too damaged for anyone to want to be around him right now.  His wife hadn't understood that sometimes the only way forward was silence, but Kawalsky did. There was nothing the man could have said to him that wouldn't have made him angry, no benefit in dragging out the darkness inside of him and examining it in the light. A good friend knew when it was time to take a step back and that was what Kawalsky had done. One day O'Neill might even get around to telling him he appreciated it.

The maid who answered the door looked Hispanic and didn't seem to speak a lot of English, trying to tell him there were no visitors today until he showed her his badge, that at least she recognized and her eyes widened.

"Just tell Mrs Green I'm here, would you? Thank you." He gave her his best reassuring smile but she still looked flustered as she hurried away.

Zinnia Green was so thin he wasn't sure she was actually visible if she turned sideways. Her narrow pointed face had been lifted, expertly no doubt, but the effect was still grotesque, the ghastly immobility of her waxy features cadaver-like under its painted-on color. The reddish hair sprayed into a question mark helmet added to the general effect that he was talking to a walking corpse. She had to be seventy if she was a day, but she was striving hard for thirty-five and scaring the hell out of him in the process.

O'Neill introduced himself and asked for confirmation of who she was.

"That's Mrs Ballard-Green," she corrected at once and he made the alteration without comment.

She had shown a flicker of animation, or at least irritation, at the way her surname had lost a barrel, but when he mentioned the name of the dead maid, Zinnia Ballard-Green's face didn't flicker. Perhaps with her chin hooked behind her ears it wasn't easy for her to do so but he noticed the look of weariness that washed over her face when he said the magic word 'murdered'. She said, "The servants are so tiresome. None of them speak English these days."

It was on the tip of O'Neill's tongue to say that no, they probably didn't, not if you wanted them to work sixteen hour days for third world pay, then you tended to have to employ illegal immigrants. Heroically, he conquered the urge and asked her politely for a list of all the inhabitants of her house.

"Is there a problem, Detective?"

Relief washed over Zinnia's face at the smoky timbre of this newcomer's voice. "My son, Anthony. He can deal with this. You can deal with this, can't you, darling?"

O'Neill turned to find a tall dark-eyed man in the doorway. He was impeccably dressed although his near-black hair still looked damp from the shower. Aged about thirty-five. Intelligence yet to be determined. O'Neill waited for Zinnia to introduce him and when she didn't said, "Detective Jack O'Neill. And you are…?"

"Tony Ballard-Green." There was a hint of impatience in the man's voice. "What's the problem?"

"One of the maids has gotten herself murdered." Zinnia's tone suggested the girl had done it just to spite her.

Tony looked down his nose at O'Neill. "Don't you people usually travel in pairs? Where's your partner, Detective? I didn't think we had a Dunkin' Donuts in this part of town."

O'Neill kept his face blandly unreadable. He had elevated passive resistance to an art form and took a particular pleasure in being as polite as possible to the most unlikable people. "He's talking to your gardener. We were trying to get a list of everyone in the house on the day in question."

"I'm sure one of the servants could tell you that better than I can. Let me send for the house keeper." Tony had an affected drawl with a slight imprecision over the placing of the vowels, faux Bostonian with a hint of insecurity. He looked nothing like his mother – supposing she was his mother, for he had the dangerous air of a kept younger man, frustrated power without responsibility. O'Neill wondered if Zinnia controlled the purse strings, if Tony was on a leash that was soon liable to snap.

Talk of servants and housekeepers made him wonder if he had wandered into an Agatha Christie. Even as an avid reader of detective novels, he would have to say he had found his everyday existence in the police force bore a much closer resemblance to Joseph Wambaugh than Edgar Wallace. He tended to find more bodies in dumpsters than drawing rooms. He sometimes got sick of the grit and wind of Chicago, wondering what had possessed him to move to this part of the country, wondering if he wouldn't have done better to get a transfer out of this city as well as out of his wife's house – as if grief was something that could be deposited in a grave and left behind.

While they waited for the housekeeper he asked them about Sha're. Both of them seemed to have trouble placing her although Zinnia offered that she thought she was a pretty girl. Tony shrugged as if he hadn't noticed. Asked if they had ever heard anything about disagreements with her husband, Zinnia looked mildly affronted that he could accuse her of knowing anything about her servants' private lives. Asked about their movements, Zinnia was maddeningly vague. Even though O'Neill was convinced the woman probably never did anything except shop, attend coffee mornings with her equally vapid friends, and then shop some more, she pressed a finger to her lips and a hand to her head while she thought, as if the effort of making her brain work was physically painful. He wondered if it was healthy to have so much contempt for a fellow human being who had never done him any harm. He remembered his grandfather telling him that was always the risk when you came back from a war – that you would despise the people around you who hadn't seen the things you had been forced to see. You looked for proof in their eyes of some splinters of horror left there, and when you didn't find it, you turned away in barely concealed disgust.

In contrast to his mother, Tony was clipped and economical, with words, and for all O'Neill knew, the truth as well: "Breakfast at nine, the gym at ten, tennis at eleven, a business lunch at twelve – that ran late. I had to run into town for a few things. You can check my credit card statement for details if you need confirmation of what I bought. I dined at my club. I was back here by nine. It was the servants' night off, but my mother can confirm when I got back."

Zinnia nodded at once while O'Neill made notes and polite noises, thinking all the while that all the earlier activities were irrelevant as Sha're had been killed in the evening, which meant Tony's only alibi was his mother.

The housekeeper was plump, Hispanic, and earnest. He wondered if she was really called 'Maria' or if that was what Zinnia Ballard-Green had decided she was called because it was easy to pronounce. It was clear that she took her job seriously. O'Neill wondered what pride you got in making the lives run smoothly of people who had no worth. Then he wondered who he was to denote who was and who wasn't of worth. He made a list of the names she gave him. Not an American name amongst them, or perhaps everything was an American name, given the melting pot of the forced and fled who had emigrated here to create this sprawling mass of contradictory ideals. Thou shalt not kill. Except in the states that considered themselves the most God-fearing, and there one shalt kill with impunity, especially if the defendant is black, mentally subnormal, or could only afford a public defender. No one said 'shalt' any more, did they? Perhaps they never had. Perhaps God was a poor grammarian and had never learnt to conjugate his past participles properly. What was a past participle anyway?

His mind ran on while his fingers took notes and his mouth asked intelligent questions. He felt too often these days that all he did from dawn to dusk was give a good approximation of sanity – an act he performed for an unappreciative audience who had no idea of the effort it cost him.

"So, this is a complete list of everyone in the house on the day in question?"

Maria nodded. "Yes." Another glance at the list then a darted look at Tony.

O'Neill saw the uncertainty and gave her his most charming smile. "Have I missed someone?"

She responded to the warmth in his eyes. "Doctor Jackson. He is also here on the day. He is here all the time." The glance she darted at Tony then was slightly defiant, slightly triumphant, slightly fearful.

"He's an invalid." Tony shrugged. "I didn't think he was relevant."

Relevant? O'Neill wondered idly what an irrelevant life looked like. "I'd like to see him all the same. If that's not going to inconvenience anyone? Is he well enough to answer a few questions?"

Tony gave him a slow assessing look. He'd been mildly irritating until now, O'Neill got the impression he had abruptly become more annoying and more interesting, like a snake this man wasn't long going to be able to avoid poking with a stick. Tony picked up the phone on the table, a reproduction from some era when telephones were decorative as well as useful and pressed one button. His fingers drummed as he waited with the receiver to his ear, saying in his slightly affected drawl: "He's mentally incapacitated, not physically. He can answer any questions you like. Whether he will or not is an entirely different matter. He's very stubborn."

Zinnia was fluttering slightly, slight movements of tiny wrists suggesting agitation. "My nephew had a breakdown. He has to be kept calm. We try to keep the house quiet for him to avoid…episodes. My late brother-in-law was never mentally very well and unfortunately his grandson inherited the same…instability."

At last, an interesting wrinkle, someone un-stereotypical to talk to. He wondered if the mentally unstable Doctor Jackson drooled, cursed, threw things or was simply obsessive about the size of the food he ate, the way he passed through a door. Or dangerous. So far the strangling of Sha're Farouk was looking as straightforward as any case could be. She and her husband had quarreled in recent months. The husband was shifty, evasive, admitted to unreasoning fits of jealousy, admitted he was afraid she had been planning to leave him and that he had been reading all her letters from her father and brother which had suggested that she did so, admitted the brother had been going to visit next week with a possible intention of taking her back to live with him and his father. The father and brother had confirmed they had never really cared for her husband, and had been worried about Sha're for some time. The husband was hardly a big bruiser, quite delicate in his good looks, in fact, and seemed to be genuinely grief-stricken, but that didn't mean he hadn't strength enough to strangle a ninety pound woman. In such cases it invariably was the husband who had committed the crime, and O'Neill thought it was probably the case here. Zinnia and Tony Ballard-Green were annoying and superficial, but that didn't make them murderers

Tony was speaking rapidly into the telephone, tone clipped, irritation barely disguised: "There's a detective here to talk to you about that maid who went missing. No, you'd better come down. Make sure you're dressed." He didn't wait for the person on the other end to answer, replacing the receiver as soon as the last words were out of his mouth.

Zinnia twittered some more – hard to tell if she was apologizing for her son's brusqueness by emphasizing the mysterious Doctor Jackson's mental instability or trying to prepare O'Neill for the newcomer so he wouldn't take offence or jump to the wrong conclusion.

"As long as he takes his medication he's quite well," she insisted as if O'Neill had somehow questioned it.

O'Neill gave her his most reassuring smile. "And if he doesn't take his medication?"

Tony took a cigarette from an antique silver case and placed it between his lips. "One way trip to the loony bin."

"Darling…"

O'Neill wasn't sure if Zinnia was objecting to her son's words or actions, but the way he hissed with annoyance and placed the cigarette back in its case suggested the latter. O'Neill persisted quietly: "If Doctor Jackson fails to take his medication, how does his particular form of mental instability manifest itself?"

"He sees things that aren't there," Zinnia sighed. "Ghosts and dead people and the like."

O'Neill resisted the urge to point out that using 'ghosts' and 'dead people' in the same sentence could be considered tautology. Perhaps she was being less careless with her words than he imagined, perhaps she meant that he saw corpses and saw ectoplasm. "Just delusional then? Not violent?"

Tony glanced up at him with no particular interest. "He killed his dog once. Stabbed it. Didn't remember doing it, just woke up with it dead on the bed next to him and the knife in his hand. We had to lock him up for a while after that. But that was years ago."

"He was just a child then," Zinnia protested.

O'Neill couldn't work out if she was so eager to defend the Jackson character because she was fond of him or because she disliked any hint of melodrama being attached to her family.

"He was fifteen." Tony looked up and sighed in irritation. "About time. Where are your shoes?"

O'Neill also looked up and through the open doorway saw across the marble hall to a sweeping marble staircase down which a young man was descending, barefoot, and dressed in pale clothing, his head haloed with light brown hair which a shaft of sunlight from a high window somewhere was turning to gold. He was dressed in an old pair of tennis pants, their whiteness faded to a dusty cream, like paper left in the sun, and a thick white cotton shirt three sizes too big for him, which revealed a glimpse of smooth bare chest and as he jumped down the last stair slipped off his left shoulder, exposing the furrow of his collar bone. Glancing across at Tony Ballard-Green, O'Neill guessed the clothes had probably been his once. He noticed that the pants were held up by a length of knotted string that looked as if it had once been used to tie a parcel.

Tony looked at the approaching Jackson without any discernible patience. "Shoes?"

Jackson returned Tony's gaze without rancor, an odd stillness about him that tantalized an old memory in O'Neill's subconscious: a tactician used to losing battles yet doggedly stubborn in refusing to submit. "I prefer them with laces."

O'Neill found himself looking at the string around Jackson's waist, noticing that Zinnia and Tony were both looking at it also. Jackson stroked the fraying end with nervous defiance and O'Neill noticed how fine his wrist bone was. Physically, Jackson was an odd mixture of an athlete's build narrowed and thinned by an invalid's demeanor, a combination of resilience and delicacy that was oddly beguiling, vulnerable as the tangle of a child's hair. O'Neill looked at his bare feet and they were long and elegant, perfectly shaped. The nervous fingers matched them, tapering to a piano player's sensitive point. The face too warred between handsome and pretty, oversized blue eyes with long lashes set beneath strong brows and in sockets stained purplish from lack of sleep, a slightly girlish mouth, too perfect for absolute masculinity nevertheless fringed by a smattering of very male stubble. It occurred to O'Neill that what you got when prettiness and handsomeness combined was beauty, he was looking at something beautiful, albeit crumpled, winter pale, and mentally unstable.

Tony reached for the string and there seemed to O'Neill to be nothing protective in that movement, just exasperation, a regulation flouted too obviously to ignore. Jackson caught his wrist, movement swift, and held Tony's dark blue gaze. "My pants will fall down."

There was a moment when Tony seemed to make some motion, stifled almost at birth by a strangled plea from Zinnia and his own self-control, yet redolent of savagery, like the jerk of a cannon just before it fired. Then he stood with his arms by his sides, breathing lightly. O'Neill imagined the inhalations licking around the edge of a red rage, although his face was impassive, indifferent. He shrugged. "Hang yourself then. Just speak to the inspector first." He turned away and O'Neill wondered if he had been doing him a terrible injustice, if he was worn ragged from wrestling with an unstable psyche, fighting delusions that threatened to claim someone he cared for. He had seen the parents of anorexics reach this place of stoic endurance, trying to find a way to hate the ailment when would-be murderer and potential victim were both a person that they loved.

Seen in that light, Jackson's blank expression appeared heartless, but the look he turned on O'Neill was very different, wary yet not hostile, assessing him before essaying a tentative smile, like a child given leave to accept sweets from a visitor. He said, "Have you contacted her father? Sha're was thinking she might go to stay with Kasuf. I may have his address somewhere."

"She's dead," Tony told him brusquely. "Strangled then dumped in an alleyway."

Watching Jackson's reaction, O'Neill thought that if he was acting his shock and dismay he was Oscar-worthy. Or amnesiac, of course. If Jackson had done this he certainly didn't remember doing so and his grief seemed genuine. Unlike Tony or Zinnia, he was evidently truly upset.

"But, how…? Why…? She was such a gentle person."

He, at least, certainly seemed to know who the girl was, and as more than an indistinctly remembered face, to her she had apparently been a 'person'.

O'Neill found himself taking his arm, as he would have done with a younger brother or old friend. "Let's go outside. Get some fresh air."

As he led him towards the front door he was aware of that stifled motion from Tony again, an action suppressed, leaving behind a carbine whiff of anger in the air. A servant hurried to open the door, and he felt the young man beside him flinch from the daylight, blinking rapidly as the overcast sky was reflected in his eyes. The sun had gone, although the heat was still oppressive. The sky looked bruised, yellowing, sullen with unspent rain, the clouds an angry gray, while the atmosphere crackled with the foretaste of lightning, air thick with expectation of a storm.

Jackson breathed deeply, broad chest sucking in the air as if it had been starved for some time. Looking down in surprise, O'Neill realized Jackson had laced his fingers through O'Neill's and was gripping him so tightly it hurt. He was like someone with vertigo on a balcony in a thunderstorm and it occurred to O'Neill belatedly that he was probably an agoraphobic – that would explain the prison pallor, the lack of shoes, the uncoordinated clothing. He said, "Do you want to go back inside?"

"No." Jackson snatched another nervous breath. "Not the house. Maybe the shed…" The blue eyes were beseeching and his free hand flickered those long elegant fingers in the direction of a moldering outbuilding in which O'Neill imagined wheelbarrows might be kept.

"Somewhere with a roof?" O'Neill enquired, not unsympathetically.

"Yes." Jackson snatched another breath before daring a glance at the sky. "It's low today and…wide."

"And gray." O'Neill felt the first fat drop land on his arm. Jackson's snatched breath warmed his cheek and O'Neill felt a faint crackle of electricity. "Let's get undercover."

Jackson needed no encouragement. Despite the raked gravel beneath his bare feet he ran lightly for the dilapidated building, his fingers never once slackening their grip on O'Neill's hand. There was nothing proprietorial in his grip, nor threatening, it reminded O'Neill rather of the way the friends of his dead son had always trusted him so unquestioningly when he was the one doing the school or little league run, children thinking themselves adults yet still innocent at heart. Remembering Charlie, he laced his fingers more comfortably through Jackson's and pulled him away from a towering tree that might attract lightning and down the cinder path to the derelict shed.

The sound of the rain on the roof was thunderous, it torrented down the outside of the grimy panes, further muffling the outside world and unbalancing two of the senses. Inside, the shed smelt of beaten earth and compost, of neglect and slow decay. Jackson sat on a rickety chair, wrapping his bare feet around the legs of it hard enough for the wood to leave an imprint against his bony ankles. It was dark enough for dusk although O'Neill's watch insisted it was only ten in the morning. He could see the flickerlight of the raindrops slanting into the swimming pool, dancing on the surface upon which a cigarette pack was floating.

"What do you want to know?"

He turned to look at Jackson who was eerily pale in the dim light. His skin had an unlined look, like a child's, but the purplish shadows under his eyes made him look more like an addict.

O'Neill leaned against a work surface on which old flowerpots waited to be filled with soil and seed, the process of growth and rebirth still continuing all around in heartless profusion, even here in this grimy gloom, new blooms being conjured whose scent the Ballard-Greens would probably never even notice, whose colors they would barely see. As clearly as though it was still in front of him, O'Neill saw the bare footprint his son had left in the flowerbed in the house back in Chicago. The footprint he had covered with a bucket, as if it was something at the scene of a crime, in the hope of preserving some part of Charlie even though the rest of him was lost.

We keep him alive in our minds, Jack. In our hearts and memories. He's still alive in here. Sara touching her heart and reaching across to touch his, O'Neill stepping back because he couldn't bear anyone to touch him now, not even her. He didn't know if it was because their touch was painful to him or because he feared the dark hollow inside him could be contagious in some way. Had he been protecting himself or Sara when he shut her out? He still didn't know.

"Are you okay…?"

His response to concern was instinctive now, a flare of rage. Don't touch me! He looked at his feet to hide the anger in his eyes before looking at Jackson again. The anger died then and as his eyes adjusted to the gloom and the battering of his other sense from the sound of the storm, he noticed the dark marks across the pale throat. He watched as Jackson swallowed, a motion at his neck. Bruises. Had Jackson tried to hang himself? To throttle himself? Or had someone does this to him? Sha're perhaps?

Voice steady, O'Neill said, "Tell me about yourself."

Jackson shrugged as if it was no more than he expected and spoke without emotion: "I was born in Egypt. When I was eight my parents were killed. My grandfather took me in and I lived with him until I was twelve when he committed himself to a mental institute. Aunt Zinnia took me in." A muscle flickered in his jaw. "When I was fifteen I had a kind of breakdown and I was admitted to a mental institute as well. When I was sixteen I went to college."

"That's very young," O'Neill interjected.

Jackson gave him a flicker of a smile. "Well, I'm very smart."

O'Neill looked at the bare feet, now dusty with cinders, the piece of string around the oversized pants. "If you say so."

Instead of appearing affronted, Jackson darted him a quick surprised grin. "I got my first doctorate at the age of twenty-one, the other two at twenty three and twenty five."

"What are you?"

Some might have called it a cosmic question and there was a brief acknowledgement in Jackson's eyes that he could easily have strayed into philosophy had he wanted to be annoying. Evidently he didn't, as his answer was straightforward: "I'm an archaeologist, specifically an Egyptologist and a linguist. I study ancient languages and civilizations."

"You like dead stuff then?" O'Neill liked to be crass on occasion, just as he liked to be sophisticated on occasion. When everyone in your family was smarter than you were sometimes the only thing you could do was keep them guessing about exactly how much you knew. Show your workings, the math tests had always said. He preferred to keep his workings hidden, yet sometimes a part of him wanted them to be glimpsed all the same.

"You could say that." Jackson's glance was unexpectedly penetrating. "Dead languages written on the walls of the tombs of dead pharaohs generally do it for me."

O'Neill had lost track on which one of them was setting the tone of this conversation, for a while he'd been sure it was him but he was starting to suspect it might be Jackson. He decided to return to the formality of interrogator and interrogated. "After you got all those qualifications, what then?"

Jackson seemed unfazed by the sidestep back into the routine of question and answer. "In between working on my doctorates, I spent time in Egypt doing fieldwork and lecturing in college. When I was twenty-six my grandfather was murdered. I found the body. I had another breakdown. I was admitted to a mental institute again and stayed there for a year. Since then I've lived with Aunt Zinnia and Tony." The jaw clench again around the name 'Tony' although the expression was bland apart from that, determinedly so, for Jackson seemed to have a naturally expressive face.

O'Neill took out his cigarettes. "Are you dangerous?"

"I don't know."

"Did you kill Sha're Farouk?"

Jackson blinked in surprise. "Um, no. I'm sure I didn't. Am I a suspect?" He seemed more intrigued by the idea than affronted.

"Everyone's a suspect." O'Neill lit his cigarette. "I'm naturally suspicious."

"Only the dead are innocent?" Jackson pressed.

O'Neill's hand trembled almost imperceptibly on his zippo and then he summoned the flame and made the end flare, that orange glow before the nicotine fix hit home in a satisfying coil of death-bringing smoke. Every inhalation another step closer to oblivion. No wonder he loved Lady Nicotine. "Sometimes not even them." Another drag of smoke into his lungs and he could exhale. "How did your parents die?"

"They were killed in an accident at a museum. They were setting up an exhibit – a cover stone – the chain snapped and they were crushed to death." Jackson's face flickered then, almost imperceptible but O'Neill saw it and realized then what the younger man wasn't telling him.

"You were there." Not a question.

"Yes."

"And you saw everything."

Jackson looked right at him, defiance and reproach a perfect balance in his oversized blue eyes. "Yes." His gaze seemed to say: What are you that another's pain can give you pleasure? What did this to you?

Abruptly ashamed, O'Neill looked away first. "I'm sorry."

He glanced back in time to see Jackson's eyes flicker in surprise. "It was a long time ago. I was lucky to have my grandfather to take me in. I could have been sent to an orphanage."

He was probably right but O'Neill disliked the patness of it, recycled platitudes parroted back at him by someone who now believed they were original thought. Why should anyone who had lost someone they loved have to count his blessings? Have to take on the responsibility for his own grief so that no one else should be burdened with it? Who had decided it just wasn't sporting to rage at the unfairness of death? People said they worried you were bottling it up, internalizing everything, but it was what they wanted and expected. You weren't truly meant to rage against the dying of another's light.

"Tell me about Sha're."

Jackson's expression was soft. "She was very kind, a very gentle person."

"What happened to your neck?"

Jackson blinked at him in confusion. "What?"

"You have bruises on your neck."

The younger man looked at for a long moment, eyes slightly narrowed, then said conversationally, "And you want to know if Sha're left them there while she was fighting me off as I strangled her?"

"Kind of an open and shut case for me if she did." O'Neill took another drag on his cigarette.

Jackson was looking pissed with him now and something sparked inside him, a reaction, a faint flicker of a flame he'd thought dead, it was the way he'd felt in the past when one of too many children of clever, busy parents, he couldn't be as smart as Eric or Gillian, or cute like Beth, or artistic like Ben, but he could be annoying enough that they couldn't ignore him.

"You wouldn't be so blasé about it if you'd met her." Jackson unwrapped his feet from the legs of the wooden chair. "Why did you become a policeman in the first place if it doesn't bother you when people get murdered?"

"Oh, but it does." O'Neill ignored the ice cocoon in which he'd been wrapped recently, his chrysalis of numbness. "It bothers me a lot. How did you get the bruises?"

"Tony and I had a fight." Jackson threw the words at him defiantly, but there was that flicker in his cheek again, a tensing of his jaw. "Brothers fight sometimes. It happens." There was a hesitation before 'brothers'. Jackson had tried the word out cautiously, like someone with no French making his way through an haute cuisine menu.

"I thought you were cousins?"

"His mother was married to my grandfather's brother. Does that make him a wicked uncle?"

"Is he wicked?" O'Neill smiled as he said it but he knew it went nowhere near his eyes.

Jackson looked away, that muscle flickering in his cheek again. "I told you, we don't get along. That's all."

"Does it happen often? The bruising?" He kept the enquiry casual, as if it didn't matter, as if he was too full of weary cynicism to believe anyone any more, certainly as if he didn't hold a moral position on people of Tony's size and musculature fighting with people of Jackson's mental health.

Jackson shrugged. He had a stubborn jaw. The mouth was definitely a little on the pretty side, the full lower lip the kind that invited you to bite it, but the jaw and cheekbone were chiseled, classically handsome, undeniably masculine even without their light dusting of stubble. "We fight sometimes. We always have."

O'Neill noticed the way Jackson's fists were clenched so tightly his knuckles were white. Jackson steadied his breathing deliberately, as if it was an exercise he had been taught, then unclenched his fingers slowly, spreading them like a piano player about to play a tune – a relaxation technique. Another steadying breath then Jackson spoke quietly in his unexpectedly deep voice, "We get on each other's nerves. It's nothing serious."

O'Neill wondered which one of them Jackson was trying to convince and felt a sudden impulse to be a knight on a white charger again – to save someone.

Abruptly, Jackson said, "Life's so precious, isn't it? Every life I mean? All that effort that goes into giving birth. And babies are so fragile. All that energy exerted into keeping them breathing in and out and all the time anything could intervene. A falling tree, a swerving car, someone whose brain chemistry isn't quite right." He snatched a breath. "Sha're wanted children. She said she wanted to listen to their heartbeat at night, hear it ticking in the darkness like a clock that would never stop."

O'Neill was too cold to move, his bones turned to salt. Thunder rumbled overhead and lightning flickered listlessly, a brief whiplash of silver that turned Jackson's skin moonlit pale.

The lightning had exposed him too – when he looked back at Jackson he saw his mouth was open and his eyes wide with comprehension. For a miraculous second O'Neill saw tears in his blue eyes. Jackson said softly, "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

He still couldn't move or speak. It was terrible, this paralysis, when it happened. Everything went numb and he would wonder if this time it was death. A tingling that spread along his arm then up his face, jaw locked in immobility, throat frozen. It took every ounce of effort he had to put the cigarette to his lips and inhale, but his fingers were shaking. Grief was a faithful dog that stalked him and when he sat down it laid its head upon his lap. Perhaps in its way it even loved him. They spent enough time together.

"It happened this morning." Jackson abruptly pulled up the shirt that didn't fit to reveal a ribcage decorated with bruises and O'Neill understood and appreciated the gesture. Jackson had accidentally broken open a half-healed wound, seared him, stumbled on his secret, and now he wanted to make amends by displaying his own scars, making himself equally vulnerable. O'Neill didn't know if he cared though. He could still see his son's footprint in the flowerbed, the rawness of black letters on a white headstone.

"It was nothing to do with Sha're but it's okay if you don't believe me."

O'Neill blinked and the immobility passed. He looked at Jackson's bare torso and something flickered inside him again, a brief flame of anger. Then he looked at Jackson's face for confirmation of what he'd known he'd find there. It felt strangely fitting that there was neither shame nor that furtive pride of those who delight in being victims. Jackson didn't even know how strange it was. He had wandered too far from reality for too long. He had lost his grip on the normality of others because his own normality had become too removed.

He moved closer and Jackson waited with a strange kind of trust, again reminding him of his son's friends, only when O'Neill was standing over him and Jackson realized O'Neill was bigger than he was did he look a little uncertain, but then it passed and he was passive, displaying himself for inspection. O'Neill's role was to be objective, non-judgmental. To nod perhaps and make the occasional note. O'Neill touched Jackson's throat and the younger man turned his head obligingly so he could see the bruises more easily, exactly as if O'Neill was his doctor and had a right to this impersonal examination. Being institutionalized had certainly left its mark.

O'Neill could see where the thumbs had dug into the skin, pressure applied to the carotid artery, the red marks already darkening to purple. There were matching marks on Jackson's wrists, although those had a faded gilt gleam – as if someone had spilled saffron on his skin. The marks on his ribs were red and yellow and purple, heat was still radiating from them and when O'Neill placed his hand upon them he could feel it, oddly comforting against his chilled skin. The imprint of a man's boot sole was unmistakable – he could see the fine detail of the tread. When he looked back at Jackson, there was uncertainty in the blue eyes, and Jackson abruptly pulled his shirt back down. "I shouldn't have shown you."

"I have to take you in for questioning."

"What?" Jackson darted him a look of surprise as the shirt fell over his narrow hips to reach halfway down his thighs. His wrists were so fine, that line of his collar bone so vulnerable, yet his chest was broad, with plenty of heartroom, like a racehorse.

O'Neill didn't meet his gaze. "A girl who works here was strangled. You show clear signs of having recently been involved in a struggle. I have to take you in and get the evidence photographed before it fades. I'd be deficient in my duties if I didn't."

"Oh." Jackson looked obscurely relieved and O'Neill thought his faith in the criminal justice system was touching. Jackson knew he hadn't killed Sha're so he thought he had nothing to fear, and this meant a trip away from the house. O'Neill suspected Jackson was rarely allowed out of the house.

"Can you cope with a car journey without medical supervision?" He took a kind of twisted pleasure in the small cruelty of referring to Jackson's mental illness so baldly, refusing to adhere to the social niceties with this guy despite having stuck to them so rigidly with the Ballard-Greens.  Cowardly bullying perhaps because Jackson was clearly a powerless person who wouldn't think to complain and he felt like kicking someone, and yet it didn't feel as if it was coming from a place of hostility, more like a test he was performing, wanting to see how Jackson reacted.

Jackson blinked again. He had long eyelashes, again, a little pretty for a guy, as were the big blue eyes, although the overall effect was certainly more pleasing than not, but definitely not someone to leave in a holding cell with any persistent offenders.

"I'm not agoraphobic." He looked out at the sullen light of the passing storm, the livid sky. "I'd just forgotten. How…"

"Wide the sky is?" O'Neill finished expressionlessly.

Jackson nodded. "There are more stars in Egypt."

"No." O'Neill tossed his cigarette onto the dirt floor and trod on it. "Just less light pollution. Shall we go?"

"Okay." The flicker of something he glimpsed in Jackson's eyes looked more like excitement than apprehension, like a kid playing hooky from school. "I mean I don't have any choice, do I?"

Definitely, like a kid skipping class. No real sense of proportion, the way children were. He remembered Charlie and his friends thinking aloud it would be good to find a dead body on the way to school as it would get them out of that math test. Sara had been horrified by their callousness. O'Neill had delivered the obligatory lecture then taken them to school in the station wagon. But he'd understood how big the small things became when your life consisted of them. Adults had no idea how high a math test could loom for an eight year old – a monolith towering over the landscape of life – to those boys the cost of a human life had seemed a reasonable equivalent.

But when he looked at Jackson he didn't see any lack of compassion in his eyes. Jackson said, "Sha're loved her husband. She said that he wrote poetry. She said in Egypt he was a teacher. Over here, she said, we never see the value in any language but our own."

O'Neill said, "Movies with subtitles suck. Europe is full of dust and dirt and warm beer. And nothing and no one would ever get me to go back to the Middle East."

Jackson sighed as if O'Neill's crassness somehow reflected badly on him. O'Neill wondered in what way Jackson was accepting responsibility for him, as a fellow American, or just as someone male and breathing. Did he see the whole of the human race as something he was connected to? If so that ruled out Asperger's. He couldn't be one of those brilliant autistic kids who knew everything about the way chemicals reacted and mathematics unfolded but didn't understand what a smile meant or the value of a tear. Sara had once said grimly that she thought every man on the planet had some degree of Asperger's. It was such a short step for men to take to reach autism, she would observe. Anyone with a y chromosome was already halfway there.

O'Neill opened the door of the shed, it creaked and more cobwebs tore resentfully. He smiled at Jackson, a bright false smile, as if he was family and they had quarreled, as if they had the kind of intimacy that made it acceptable to argue and tease. "Shall we go?"

"Okay." Jackson was pretending fake enthusiasm to hide what looked like a genuine flicker of excitement.

O'Neill held open the door for him. "You really don't get out much, do you?"

Jackson gave him a seraphic smile, like someone floating past calmly in the serene lane of life. "Are you going to put the siren on?"

"I'm not arresting you. You're just helping us with our enquiries." He thought he ought to try to sound more like a policeman.

"That's nice of me, isn't it?" Jackson ducked out into the rain and shook back his hair. It hadn't been cut very well, undecided as to what style it was meant to be in, an urchin cut with uneven bangs that zig-zagged across his forehead. He tried to tuck it behind his ear but it was too short. O'Neill wondered when it had been cut. He watched the rain spattering on Jackson's glasses.

"You're over twenty-one, right?" He felt that he should inform the people in the house, but after all if Jackson was an adult, did the Ballard-Greens really need to know?

Jackson darted him a reproachful look that was, O'Neill had to admit, kind of cute. "I'm thirty today."

O'Neill opened the back door for him. "Happy Birthday."

Another smile, mocking both of them. "Thank you."

As Kawalsky came up carrying a notebook whose pages looked thoroughly sodden, he cast an enquiring look at Jackson. O'Neill said, "He wanted a ride in a police car. It's his birthday."

Kawalsky had used to be quicker than this, or perhaps O'Neill had just been an unpredictable stranger for too long. His face suggested that he feared his partner had finally lost it. "What?"

O'Neill sighed. Oddly enough, communication had been easier with Jackson, they could both move sideways in the same elliptical patterns, like juggling with words. He tossed a non sequitur to Jackson and Jackson tossed it straight back. Perhaps only the mentally incapacitated now felt at one with him. "He's helping us with our enquiries."

Jackson leant forward and said helpfully, "Sha're talked to me more than anyone else. I'm the only person in the house who can speak Egyptian so I'm probably the best person to ask about her anyway."

  He didn't explain the 'anyway'. O'Neill thought about trying to do so and then realized it was too complicated: the bruises and the white charger impulse and the way Jackson hadn't seemed to want to go back to the house nothing to do with the official reason – which was that Jackson's injuries made him a suspect.

"And I liked her," Jackson added with more emphasis. For the first time O'Neill saw some anger in his eyes. "I think it's important the people who care about her try to find out what happened, don't you?"

Kawalsky gave O'Neill a look of confusion and O'Neill carefully didn't make eye contact, getting into the car to avoid an explanation. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw Jackson studying him intently. When he realized O'Neill had noticed, a faint hint of color tinged his cheeks. O'Neill said, "Fasten your seatbelt."

He was shocked by the speed with which Jackson snatched at the belt, thinking for a moment that what appeared to be uncharacteristic obedience must have been beaten into him by Tony until he realized it was a response to a wrongful assumption. He winced. Jackson was too empathetic by half and horribly vulnerable to other people's pain. Emotional blackmail would be a cakewalk with this guy. O'Neill almost said, "My son didn't die in a car crash" but Kawalsky was getting into the car now so he held his tongue. Jackson snapped the seat belt shut and sat back like someone trying to be good. Kawalsky darted O'Neill an anxious glance, trying to work out if he really had lost it.

O'Neill said quietly, "Doctor Jackson has some bruising that may or may not be relevant to this case. He's agreed to an examination by a police doctor and for the injuries to be photographed for future reference."

It was almost a relief when Tony rapped angrily on the window. O'Neill let the glass wind down slowly, still enjoying small acts of unpleasantness like letting a Ballard-Green get spat on by the rain for two whole seconds longer than was strictly necessary.

"What are you doing? Where are you taking him?"

On an impulse he couldn't have explained, O'Neill said, "Sha're left some papers we need translated. We need Doctor Jackson's expertise as an Egyptologist."

Kawalsky managed to freeze his features into a determinedly blank expression, although his eyes still betrayed a glimmer of astonishment he wasn't quite fast enough to conceal, but Jackson's jaw dropped in obvious confusion. Not a natural poker player, clearly. In some surprise, O'Neill realized he was enjoying himself.

Tony's lip curled. "You couldn't find an Egyptologist who was sane?"

O'Neill tapped his fingers gently on the steering wheel and looked straight ahead. "We're very grateful to Doctor Jackson for agreeing to help us out in this matter."

Tony lowered his head to look into the back of the car. Jackson had his mouth closed now, O'Neill was glad to notice, and was frowning a little in a scholarly way. As O'Neill watched, Jackson used the edge of his shirt to clean his glasses while not meeting Tony's eye. He looked serious and professional and old enough to order a drink without being carded. Still not looking at the dark-haired man, he said, "I won't be long."

"You'd better not be."

O'Neill waited for Tony to move out of the way and when it become apparent he wasn't going to, eased the car past him with perfect politeness and absolute precision even though spitting gravel from the drive onto his shins could have been accomplished so easily.

Jackson watched Tony in the rearview mirror and only when they turned the corner of the drive said, "Now he's really pissed." He sounded neither pleased nor concerned, just assessing. O'Neill thought he recognized a fellow traveler along the road of stubbornness. Some people's behavior could be modified by outside influences. Some were so fixed in who they were they might as well have been set with quick drying cement. He'd never got why men beat their wives but he got an inkling of it now, perhaps they were looking for the proof they'd made an impression, for proof of their own existence in the bruises reflected on another's skin. He suspected Jackson was a past master at making Ballard-Green disappear. Perhaps the guy had started hitting him for the same reason O'Neill had acted out when he was a teenager and his younger brother was always getting better grades, just trying to remind everyone he was still around.

Kawalsky looked to O'Neill for an explanation, his eyes asking expressively if Jackson was a suspect or an assistant, if he needed a lawyer or his rights read to him, if O'Neill knew what he was doing. O'Neill didn't really have an answer to any of those questions. He suspected he was dangerously out of control, a mind-slip away from playing chicken with oncoming traffic or Russian roulette with a loaded revolver. He heard the gunshot again, heard his own heartbeat hammering as he ran up the stairs, opened the door to that terrifyingly rapid stream of warm blood. Closing his eyes tightly for a moment, he gripped the steering wheel until his fingers hurt. Kawalsky and Jackson both sat there in perfect silence, and he became aware of them breathing shallowly, trying not to impinge on his moment of piercing grief. Their breathing had unconsciously found the same rhythm and he listened to it curiously. It was oddly soothing. He waited for a car to go past, an elderly woman driving it who looked petrified inside her own skin, face set, eyes dead, he wondered if she too had lost a child, if everywhere around him other people's tragedies were rolling past unnoticed, then pulled out with great care. Kawalsky and Jackson both exhaled again, and he became aware of their relief. They had probably made eye contact while they waited for him to recover his composure, a connection made.

He could snuff them both out in an instant. His mind was hanging by a thread as fine as one strand of a child's blood-soaked hair and yet he carried a loaded gun and a badge that gave him permission to use it. One twist of the wheel and they were all annihilated and the white noise of grief in his head would finally be silenced. But as he drove he reminded himself that he could die alone without involving them, and that the true reason men became murderers was not for money or love or jealousy but because they wanted to play god, and therefore as an atheist he should deny himself a license to kill.

He thought of that Peckinpah film set on the Russian front, with desperate German soldiers bayoneted in their dugouts, the army officer saying 'I think God's a sadist and He doesn't even know it'. Except even that suggested a plan of some kind, whereas he believed now it was just chaos, events random and inexplicable. Did it matter if a girl had been strangled, probably by her husband, for some squalid little reason, and that he would rot in prison for the next twenty years, and her father would weep and her brother would weep, and in the end everyone would die, as they would have died anyway if the murder had never taken place? He could still remember why it mattered, intellectually, but he couldn't feel it any more. Something in his heart had stopped working, an emotional bypass. Almost panicking, he snatched another glance in the rearview mirror and saw Jackson studying him intently, a frown on his face as if he had been following every thought and disapproved. In his blue eyes O'Neill thought he saw the certainty that he had lost.

Jackson said, "It was her life and no one had the right to steal it. Whoever killed Sha're took her future from her when it wasn't theirs to take."

Then he could feel it again and the relief was excruciating. Just a flicker of the old emotion, but at least it was still there beneath the permafrost. He tried to smile but his face had forgotten the motions, still he saw Jackson nod.

Kawalsky said, "We'll get the bastard, don't you worry." There was no doubt in his voice. As he drove them all to the station O'Neill played the words over and over in his head like a favorite record and found in them a thin core of comfort.

***

It had been interesting at first, almost embarrassingly so, the car ride and everything he could see out of the windows, and then the police station, and the bustle and noise and color of it all. O'Neill was right to say he didn't get out very often. But it had become too much very quickly and now he was poised on the very edge of an uncomfortable chair with all his flight instincts engaged and only a fear of looking foolish stopping him from running. He had pills to calm his nerves as well as pills to send him to sleep or stop him crying in corners or seeing bloodstains on the pillow and his dead dog's glassy eye. He'd surreptitiously taken what was supposed to be one of the blue ones in the car when he felt his pulse getting jumpy and started to snatch his breaths. Panic attacks felt scarily like heart attacks, there was the same breathlessness, the same nauseated feeling. When they went past a certain point they were unstoppable so he'd fumbled for a pill and swallowed it dry. Only then, when he'd checked his cache of them, sticky in his palm, had he realized he'd taken a green one by accident and that was why the colors outside the car were smearing like a child's painting left out in the rain, and why, when they reached the station all the sounds had been too loud and slightly out of key.

Daniel took a nervous sip of coffee. It was almost cold. O'Neill had left him in a room full of desks and noise and other policemen, asking him politely to stay there until he got back. Daniel had watched O'Neill walk all the way down the length of the long room and felt bereft when he passed out of sight. That was when this had begun to seem less like an interesting change from his usual routine and more like a bad idea that was going to stretch his nerves thinner than piano wire, not to mention make Tony mad as hell. He still told himself it was an act of triumph to make Tony totally lose it, chalk up another score for Passive Aggressives R Us, but the truth was it was occasionally frightening and invariably painful.

He was here because he'd wanted to stay with O'Neill a little longer. He hoped it was the pills that were making him feel so removed from reality because he was ashamed of the way he kept forgetting Sha're was really dead. It was difficult to grasp because the last time he'd seen her she'd been very much alive and possibly even pregnant at last so it was natural to still think of her that way. It was different for O'Neill, he'd presumably seen the body. And then Daniel thought of Sha're lying naked on a slab somewhere, her skin discolored by death, and how cold that must be, quite apart from the coldness of being dead, and found the sadness and anger were strong enough to blot out even the babble of noise around him and the slightly streaky faces of people viewed through the filter of the wrong kind of pill.

He was sure it was a child O'Neill had lost. The man seemed to be stumbling around in a bitter haze of grief. He was possibly even more insane than Daniel was, and perhaps that was what had drawn Daniel to him so strongly – recognition of a fellow traveler. Something had certainly drawn him to the man because he hadn't been able to stop himself gaping at him from that first meeting. He'd walked down the stairs and waited for his eye to go to Tony, the way it always did, but Tony had faded into the reproduction wallpaper, Zinnia had been a vague fluttering on the periphery of his vision, and all he could see was the stranger with his impossibly long legs, hypnotic brown eyes and his scar bisecting one eyebrow. He looked tough and fragile all at once, his body leanly athletic from his broad shoulders down to his narrow hips, but the look in his eyes had been raw with grief and compassion and an inexpressible sadness. Daniel had wanted to put his arms around him and tell him things would get better, and then he had wanted the man to do the same for him.

He felt comfortable with him and challenged by him and excited by him all at once, which he supposed was another way of describing romantic attraction, if that was what he was feeling. It had never occurred to him he might be attracted to a man. He'd assumed Tony would have killed any latent tendency on his part to look upon his own gender in that way.  He knew what sex with men was like and he knew he didn't like it, so having his heart go pitter patter because a tall handsome stranger strolled into his life seemed like a pointless exercise. Women had always seemed much safer, wiser, more comforting and more appealing to him. They had rounded curves where men had painful corners. Their voices were softer, their hands were gentler. There was a whole shopping list of things women not only didn't do but couldn't do that made them seem much pleasanter to be around.

He thought of how soft Sarah's mouth had been. She had the kind of tall slender beauty that had made him want to get down on his knees and worship her, although she only laughed when men tried to do that and told them they were absurd, a golden goddess, when she wore heels he had to look up to make eye contact, which, given his instinctive tendency to want to put her on a pedestal had seemed only fitting. Sarah shoving him up against a wall had been nothing like Tony doing it and her love bites had left very different bruises. He'd loved how spontaneous she was, how brave, the way she'd just wake up in the morning and decide she wanted to be on the other side of the world by evening and carry him along in her slipstream. Brilliant and funny and possibly a little crazy. She'd been as exciting as a shipwreck with all hands saved. Apparently she'd come to see him in the asylum but he didn't remember. He'd imagined her visit many times since, the way she would have looked seeing him like that, the sound of her voice, the expression on her face, but it wasn't a true memory, just a fantasy. For all he knew she may have cried but it was a lost memory for him, along with all the other lost memories from that time. He wished the way Nick had looked with his skull fractured had been lost with them.

"Would you come this way, Doctor Jackson?"

Daniel started in surprise. He hadn't seen O'Neill come back. The man was just there, a tangible warmth close at hand. His face was in focus in any case. There were those eyes again. He had thick black eyelashes and straight brows. His hair was a mixture of different colors under the fluorescent tubing, brown with lighter streaks where the sun had got into it and then the delicate gleam of the occasional silver strand. Daniel wondered if O'Neill was forty yet. He looked as if he could be forty. His face wasn't really lined, but it looked as if a lot of life had passed in front of it, a lot of sunlight fallen on it. It was the kind of face you could look at over and over again and still see something new in it, some nuance you'd missed, some flicker of expression that told you how he would look when he was eighty, how he'd looked when he was a kid banging a tea tray against a chair leg just to get attention.

"How many pills did you take?"

Daniel obediently opened his hand to show the way his palm was streaked with different colored dye, the red pills now only pink, the blue ones eggshell pale, the white ones pinkish and bluish at the same time.

"I took a green one by accident. They don't go with the yellow ones."

O'Neill's formality dissolved and he crouched down to bring himself level with Daniel's eye-line, as if he was talking to a kid. Daniel had a close up of his eyes and they were certainly very brown and surprisingly warm for someone as crazy as he suspected O'Neill truly was. O'Neill held out a handkerchief, not a Kleenex, a real cotton one and said, "Why don't you give them to me for now?"

Daniel obligingly turned his hand onto its side and watched the smeared pills patter onto the handkerchief, apart from one of the red ones that had stuck itself sweatily to his palm. O'Neill tapped that one gently to make it fall and it landed with the others. Daniel smiled and licked the dye from his palm, glancing across at O'Neill as he did it. When O'Neill beckoned to him, he followed, and thought nothing of it, despite the doctor's offices, institute vans, and padded cells he'd been tricked into over the years. He followed O'Neill, keeping close by his left shoulder because, now he was up and walking, the trails were streaky as a windshield in the rain and the color and noise and motion of the people in the room was making his palms sweat and his head begin to buzz. But he liked the way O'Neill moved, all that controlled energy and defiance, like someone with a nail in his foot who refused to acknowledge it, and he liked the way his arms weren't thick with muscle yet looked as if they were full of strength.

O'Neill was murmuring to him as they walked, as if he knew he needed some distraction as they passed all those desks where people were being interviewed and other people were doing paperwork or shouting to one another or slamming filing cabinets closed with a jarring crash of metal that scraped through his nerves. People looked up at them as they walked past and Daniel saw them notice his bare feet and the piece of string holding his pants up. What had seemed an interesting piece of defiance that morning now just seemed a little silly. He'd been determined not to appear downstairs in his pajamas so had grabbed these clothes from under the mattress where he kept them hidden. Except they didn't fit, of course, and belts were denied to him – except as something Tony used as a weapon – in case he hanged himself. His shoes were all devoid of laces so he'd decided to go barefoot, and all in all the appearance he now presented had probably just reinforced Tony's insistence that he wasn't right in the head. O'Neill seemed to be explaining again about the doctor and how they would have to take some photographs and ask him a few questions. Something about a lawyer?

"No, I don't want one." Daniel was clear about that anyway. Lawyers were another of those many things that set Tony off and made Zinnia flutter ineffectually like a moth trying to influence a landslide.

O'Neill looked at him in surprise and Daniel wondered if he'd misheard and just turned down some caffeine. If so that was definitely a mistake. "Unless you were offering me coffee," he amended quickly. "In which case, yes I do. Want one, I mean."

He couldn't read O'Neill's expression, but it seemed more gentle than not. The man said, "Three PhDs, eh?"

Daniel was determined not to let his mouth twitch. "Are you questioning my qualifications, Officer?"

"Detective." O'Neill opened a door into an interview room. "And I wouldn't dream of it. This is Doctor Fraiser, Doctor Jackson. She'll be examining you."

Daniel hadn't expected the doctor to be a woman and felt suddenly shy. He tried to smile at her but was further disconcerted to see that she was young and pretty with huge dark eyes and the sort of figure it was hard not to look at even when she was wearing a white coat, especially as he was a lot taller than she was, making it almost impossible not to look down her front. He opened his mouth to say something intelligent but nothing came out even when she held out a hand and said, "Pleased to meet you."

Daniel opened his mouth again but felt the chill of the linoleum against his bare feet and the tickle of the string against his crotch and realized he had done this to himself, arrived here as a patient instead of a colleague. He shook her hand but didn't say anything, ducking his head so as not to meet her eye.

"He doesn't get out much," O'Neill explained to the doctor. Daniel felt a surprisingly gentle nudge against his shoulder from O'Neill. "Say hello to Doctor Fraiser. I promise you she doesn't bite."

"Hello," Daniel murmured and wrapped his arms around himself for comfort. He felt like an idiot.

O'Neill seemed aware of his confusion and took his arm, steering him over to an examination bed, talking over his shoulder as he did so. "We need a photographic record of Doctor Jackson's injuries."

"Yes, you explained." The petite doctor gave Daniel a smile, which she probably thought was reassuring, but he still felt absurdly shy. She really was extraordinarily pretty and it really was much too long since he'd been in a relationship. He remembered Sha're kissing him, how soft her lips had been, the scent of her a brief intoxication before they both remembered she was married and pulled apart like naughty children. Thinking of Sha're lying on that slab in the morgue or in a drawer somewhere, like something filed away until it could be solved, proved the only distraction he needed.

He winced as a penlight was shone in his eyes and as O'Neill made to leave the room gave the man a begging look, or possibly a panicked look of sheer terror. Either way it stopped him in his tracks. "I can stay," O'Neill said reassuringly and then gave the doctor a look of enquiry, "Can't I?"

"If you keep out of the way."

Daniel flinched from the flashlight of the camera. She took a lot of photographs of his neck, then used a measuring tape and wrote a lot of things down, then beckoned O'Neill over to consult with him. They both nodded a lot and put their hands on the table next to one another. O'Neill's hands were surprisingly elegant, Fraiser's small with a hint of clear varnish. Daniel looked at their fingers and realized Fraiser was explaining that her hand was the same size as Sha're's. When she put her fingers up to his throat, he didn't flinch but he imagined her trying to fit her hand into the impression Tony had left, her fingers so pale and neatly rounded beside the ugly red smudges on his throat.

He felt a lot more inhibited about taking his shirt off in front of her than he did in front of O'Neill but he obeyed when she asked him to and then flinched from the flash of the camera again, tried not to react to her breath against his skin as she got in close to point things out to O'Neill. More photographs – there seemed to be dozens – his ribs, his back, his shoulders, his chest, then his arms, his wrists.

Then they went outside, O'Neill saying something reassuring to him, a smile that didn't go near his eyes which were suddenly full of anger, jaw so tightly clenched he could hardly get the words out. Daniel felt chilled as he sat on the examination bed, not sure if it was okay for him to put his shirt back on, his skin prickling with cold. What if there was something on his body that showed he had killed Sha're after all?  What if he was far crazier than he'd ever realized? What if when O'Neill came back in he looked at him the way men looked at murderers.

"…If he was someone with special needs we probably could, O'Neill, but as you've just said yourself the man has three doctorates. He can walk out of that house any time he wants to. The fact he chooses to stay…"

"Examine the rest of him. You said it yourself, if he was a child you'd be assuming…"

"But he isn't a child. He's thirty years old. Unless he chooses to lodge a complaint, it's not our problem…."

"If it was a woman you'd want me to do something about it."

"What makes you think I don't want you to do something about this? But your hands are tied unless…"

He was surprised when it was O'Neill who came back into the room. He'd stopped listening to their conversation, doing simple math on the number of letters in each poster on the wall instead. One of them had twenty-seven letters and was divisible by nine as well as three, but the other had thirty-one and didn't seem to be divisible by anything without some letters left over. He wondered if that meant thirty-one was a prime number or he was just really bad at math, and thought that if he was autistic, like O'Neill had initially seemed to think, he would have known that and probably the square root of the square mileage of the capital of Chile or something as well.

O'Neill said abruptly, "I want you to file a complaint against Anthony Ballard-Green for assault."

Daniel gaped at him. "What?"

"I don't think there's anything wrong with your hearing."

"No. Don't be silly. Of course I won't." File a complaint? It was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. Unsporting too. Like calling in the Fraud Squad to settle a family disagreement about a game of Monopoly.

"Why not?"

"Because it's not like that."

O'Neill picked up his shirt and held it out to him. "You have his boot marks on your ribcage."

"I told you, we fought."

"I don't remember seeing any bruises on him."

Daniel shrugged. "He's better at it than I am."

O'Neill picked up his wrist and Daniel winced at even that light pressure. O'Neill turned his arm over so the light picked up the sores on his skin. "Tell me this isn't a cigarette burn?"

Daniel pulled his arm away. "Sha're didn't smoke so what business is that of yours? You said you wanted the doctor to photograph my injuries in case they were relevant to Sha're's murder. Are they relevant or not?"

"Domestic violence isn't something I can just walk away from."

" 'Domestic'?" Daniel stared at him in disbelief. "It's not like that. We're not…" He didn't know how to phrase it. They were family members, not people in a relationship. The sex was incidental, no contract had ever been agreed between them that made them a couple and therefore gave them a template of behavior to which one or the other of them wasn't conforming. They had inherited one another, through marriage and death, and they were stuck with one another, the way one was with relatives. He lit Tony's blue touch paper in small retaliation for the other man's power over him and Tony occasionally exploded. It was what they did. It was no one else's business but theirs. "You don't understand. It's just…"

O'Neill gazed into his eyes and Daniel saw frustration and compassion and sorrow all fighting one another in their brown depths. "It's just your life, isn't it? It's all you know."

Daniel remembered Egypt and Tony receding to a name from which he barely flinched. The comradeship of the dig, his mind unclouded for what felt like the first time in years, the sun and the sand and the dust of the dead, with everything to learn and nothing to hide. Jokes and sex without bruises and sharing a joint and the excitement of uncovering buried truths. Being able to joke about his original breakdown, never dreaming another one waited for him just around the corner. He thought about that person and it was like looking at someone with his face in a home movie. He could remember how it had been to be that man, but he couldn't now imagine how it felt.

"I used to…" What could he say? I used to be normal once?

"Come on." O'Neill touched his shoulder, quite gently. "Let me take you home."

They made the journey in silence, Daniel starting sentences in his head he couldn't think of a way to finish. He felt defensive and miserable at the same time. He'd thought O'Neill understood the way things were but he apparently hadn't gotten it at all. Tony was a prick sometimes, no question. Tony had a temper. Tony had done some things in the past for which, if someone had intervened at the time, he could probably have been arrested. Daniel could have been taken away, placed in a foster home, given a different kind of family in which to grow into adulthood, but that hadn't happened and time had moved on, and whatever else he was, Tony was also his buffer between the mental institute and the outside world. Tony was the one who got him out of the asylum. Tony was the one who shouted at Zinnia when Zinnia tentatively suggested it might be better if Daniel went back. Tony was the one who knew his body so well that when an orderly had marked it, he'd recognized a bruise he hadn't left himself and raised merry hell. Tony got him the medication – legally or not, Daniel had no idea – that meant he could live in his big dark room and function relatively undisturbed. And perhaps part of the reason why Tony had brought him home was because he enjoyed the games they'd been playing for so many years now, but anything was better than the asylum and the medication and the other patients rocking and wailing and screaming through the night. Perhaps Tony needed him, but Daniel needed Tony as well. The world was too big and the sky too high and too wide and the colors too bright and the noises too loud and the people too plentiful and unpredictable for him to manage without a place where he could hide. Unless someone was willing to take on the maddening burden that he represented the only place for someone like him was an asylum. Better even a boot mark on his ribcage that broke no bones and would quickly fade than the bright fake smile of the orderly bringing around his morning medication and the glint of sunlight on the needle of the sedative when he tried to tell visiting doctors he was really sane.

As he got ready for bed, Daniel found himself thinking about O'Neill. He knew he should be thinking about Sha're but the loss of her hurt, a new wound on too many old wounds, whereas O'Neill was something pleasant to think about. For all the haunted sorrow in his eyes, there had been a strength in him and a kindness to which Daniel had found himself leaning, like a divining rod towards water. The question was how crazy Daniel had behaved around him. Had he managed to seem sane enough for O'Neill to bother with? Or was being crazy a better idea when the man was a policeman looking for a murderer? Did he really want to be perceived as a suspect in such a horrible crime just to have a few extra hours of O'Neill's company? He hadn't really come to that yet, had he? Had he?

Daniel had decided a long time ago that people could choose not to be victims. One could choose not to be let oneself be compartmentalized, refuse to wear the convenient label. One could be an orphan and escape banishment to an orphanage, see and hear things that weren't there and choose not to spend the rest of one's life in an asylum, one could even have an unorthodox relationship with one's stepbrother and choose to sidestep the labels the world might try to pin on one as a consequence. If he thought of himself as a participant in some of Tony's less savory practices it made him adventurous and precocious. If he thought of himself as someone to whom things had simply been done, he was nothing other than a victim. He rejected that version of events. Tony had made additions to his life experience which Daniel would not willingly have sought. That was another way of putting it he could live with. He wasn't quite sure where the truth lay any more, it was too confused by the alcohol Tony had poured down his throat. When he thought about it for too long, he felt the panic flare of a situation overwhelming him, of someone climbing unbidden into his bed, supposedly for warmth or comfort, of their hot breath against his skin, their slurred whisper in his ear, their fingers….

Even now the memory had the power to make him stiffen with old resistance. Secret and sordid and never to be spoken of. The wetness of the sheets afterwards. The familiar ache of his unfamiliar body. But it was the only affection he ever received during that period of his life, the only time he was ever touched. Tony's fingers bruised, it was true, but not always, sometimes they were gentle, sometimes Tony liked to just hold him and inhale the scent of his hair and touch him in a way that didn't hurt, a slow caress across his heated skin, as if in his own twisted way Tony did care for him. It was hard to know what a drunken Tony was going to be: sentimental or angry, fond or brutal. The cocaine and the methamphetamines had made him horny in a way that refused to be denied, sometimes he took the time for something approximate to a seduction, sometimes just the quick fumble and jerk of near-instant release.

Two unrelated boys at the age of experimentation test-driving their hormones together. That was the version he could live with. It didn't matter if it was accurate or not. In that version he was granted a choice, a role as a participant, not just some whimpering vessel into which Tony shot his ever-ready load. Most of the time he'd just pretended to be asleep, which was acquiescence of a kind. He hadn't shouted for help or taken a blunt instrument to bed with him. He'd climbed into bed with a mouth full of minty freshness and his pajamas wrapped around him securely, knowing very well that by the morning he would be tasting and smelling of Tony, his most tender places all too thoroughly explored. But he'd never said a word to anyone except Nick, who couldn't or wouldn't understand him. So perhaps he'd wanted it, been excited by it, been so grateful for any human contact with another warm body that the pain when Tony was clumsy and the bruises when Tony was having a bad drunk day had seemed a small price to pay.

And at heart he was an anthropologist and to students of human behavior it was just another interesting case study. The way the older males had to display their dominance to reinforce their position as the alpha member of he pack, the way the younger males submitted passively either to escape the punishment resistance would bring them or because they too found some comfort in the rigid hierarchy they so swiftly came to recognize. In many ancient cultures it would have been accepted as a matter of course, the initiation of the younger boy by the older boy, just another bonding experience, just another rite of passage. What harm had it actually done him anyway? There had been no lasting physical injury. He'd contracted no disease. Suffered no true damage. What had actually been broken except a transitory social taboo of this era and this culture?

He bowed his head and remembered Tony rubbing his stubble against his cheek, taking Daniel's hand and putting it between his legs, making him touch what grew there, quick hot harsh breath against his face, Tony's eyes wide open the whole time, holding his gaze, a tongue lapping at his lips, entering his mouth, the sour taste of tobacco and beer. The stifled grunting had always sounded ugly, the contrasting sounds he made stifled by a hand or the pillow or Tony's shirt stuffed into his mouth. The aftermath could be almost pleasant. Tony touching him gently, licking his skin, wrapping himself around him as if he needed comfort now and Daniel's warmth consoled him for the guilt that chilled him. The guilt and the rage came from the same place, both the bastard children of Tony's uncontrolled libido. Tony would whisper to him harshly that he should just wait until he knew how it felt, then he'd understand why he had to, even though he'd promised last night would be the last time for at least a week, and stop that damned whimpering, he sounded like a girl, it didn't hurt that much.

Daniel found he had his fists clenched and was having to wait for the ebb tide of rage to recede. Okay, not mutual experimentation then. He'd been pathetic and Tony had been selfish, and what difference did it make anyway when seventeen years later, there was still no way of stopping him? It was the way they were. It was their life, that was all, their relationship. Brothers without a drop of the same blood in their veins trapped in a cycle of abuse neither of them seemed to be able to break. The only power he had was the means to make Tony angry, that made every beating a triumph because it signaled the other man had lost control. From those red-gold sunsets in Egypt this was what his life had dwindled to, wearing his bruises like badges of honor and taunting his stepbrother with each cigarette burn on his skin. Sometimes he wondered who exactly was mind-fucking whom, and if he was the one who had done this to Tony rather than the other way around. One thing he had no doubt about was that if Detective O'Neill ever realized just how tawdry Daniel's life truly was he'd wash his hands of him in disgust. From time to time even Daniel washed his hands of Daniel in disgust and then it was the white room and the soothing music and the pills, the pills, the pills.

***

He had the photographs spread out on his desk, the dead girl and the live man, both with their necklaces of bruises. Sha're was sleeping downstairs in the morgue, the white-skinned, gray-lipped sleep of the unjustly dead. He had looked at her and thought about how many other corpses he'd looked at over the years, far too many of them women. It affected Kawalsky differently, as the loving husband to a wife, and father to a daughter, it made him all the more convinced that he was in the right line of work, a defense between the women he loved and the men out there who might otherwise be free to prey upon them. It made O'Neill wonder what was wrong with his race and his gender that so many women ended up dead on this slab every year. He felt like lake ice after a thaw, a smooth surface that was one skate-edge away from cracking into murderous splinters. He didn't know if he could do this any more.

"Jack?"

O'Neill looked up in surprise. He thought Kawalsky had gone home hours ago.

Kawalsky held out a mug of coffee and O'Neill gave him what he hoped was a warm smile. "Thanks."

Kawalsky sat down and reached across to turn Sha're's photograph around and then turned around Jackson's as well. The imprint of Ballard-Green's boot was clearly visible. Kawalsky nodded. "The gardener's not a gardener, he's a private eye."

"What?" O'Neill stared at him blankly, wondering if they were having a 'the geese fly south from Moscow' moment for which he had forgotten his codebook.

"Ray Teal'c, the gardener? He rang all my alarm bells so I made a few inquiries. He's a licensed private detective apparently. Ex-marine or something. The information is a little sketchy but his prints are nowhere in the system so I think he's legit. When I called him on it he admitted it straight away and said he was there on behalf of a client. The client's name is Gardner, which I thought was kind of funny."

"They're supposed to show their ID." O'Neill had always wondered how useful that was but it was true, nevertheless, they had procedures, just like the police force. "And what kind of a name is 'Teal'c'?"

"The client needed him to be undercover. He agreed. And I don't know. Maybe it's Native American."

"Ray 'Running Dog' Teal'c of the Shoshoni?"

"I don't know. Is it important?"

"No. It's just a stupid name.  Why did this Gardner guy hire Teal'c anyway? Is Tony schtupping his wife?" O'Neill was sure Tony would be the type of man that married women would find irresistible. He wondered if the guy ever used them as an ashtray. The rage had been on slow burn since he'd seen the full extent of Jackson's bruising and he could still taste the bitterness of it in his mouth.

"Actually, the client used to schtupp the Boy Wonder before Jackson had his second breakdown. Doctor Sarah Gardner. She's an archaeologist. She's married to a guy called Steven Rayner now but she must still have feelings for Jackson because she hired this Teal'c guy to keep an eye on him."

O'Neill sat up straighter. "Why? What's she worried about?"

"I asked Teal'c the same thing and apparently she just told him to keep an eye on him. Said she didn't want to prejudice his inquiry. She must have money because this Teal'c guy doesn't come cheap."

With an effort O'Neill dragged his mind back to their actual case. "What does he know about Sha're?"

"Nothing. He didn't see anything. He says wherever she was killed he doesn't think it was at Gray Gables. He said she was a quiet girl. Kept herself to herself. He also said he'd been doing some asking around and did we know Sha're was the second maid who worked there to be murdered?"

"What?" O'Neill couldn't avoid the realization that while he had spent the day unsuccessfully attempting to persuade an ex mental patient to lodge a complaint against a family member, Kawalsky seemed to have been doing some bona fide detecting. "How did we miss that?"

A black and white photograph revealed a pretty fair-haired woman whose smile revealed teeth with an appealing gap between them. A light dusting of freckles covered her nose. Apart from that she looked like a beauty queen. O'Neill wished they weren't always smiling in the photographs. He'd seen more pretty girls in pictures after they were dead, he swore, than he'd ever met alive.

Kawalsky pushed the file across to him. "Name of Ivana Novakovich. She wasn't working for the Ballard-Greens at the time. She'd moved onto a different family. People called Foulsham. It happened about three months ago. She was strangled too. The boyfriend swears he didn't do it but there was no other suspect and they'd been quarrelling a lot. They're still trying to build a case."

"Does Tony Ballard-Green have an alibi for the time Ivana Novakovich was killed?"

Kawalsky sighed. "Jack…"

O'Neill shoved the picture of Jackson's bruised ribs across the desk at him and tapped it imperiously. "A nice guy didn't do this."

"A sane guy wouldn't let him do that." Kawalsky examined the photograph and shook his head. "Did Jackson say whether or not he and Ballard-Green are in a relationship?"

"Jackson doesn't know what a relationship is. Jackson thinks it's normal to have the crap kicked out of him on a regular basis. Jackson…" He broke off because the rage was out of all proportion. The need to rescue someone too easily traced back to his failure to save his own son. He needed a project. Needed a bad guy to blame and an innocent to save, and life wasn't like that. O'Neill shrugged hopelessly. "I don't know if he'd even understand the question. Between all the medication he's on and his fucked up life, he's lost any grip on what normality is."

Kawalsky looked around the crowded room. "He should fit right in here then."

O'Neill bowed his head, feeling the ache of weariness in his shoulders, the old grate in his knees. "Ballard-Green has a temper and when he loses it he likes to put his hands around Jackson's neck and squeeze. The bruises on Jackson's throat are similar to the one's around Sha're's. I think he gets off on hurting people who can't fight back."

"Sha're wasn't raped, neither was Ivana. Tony lives with Jackson and maybe Jackson annoys the crap out of him. Servants aren't going to be answering back. Anyway, forensics has the photographs now and they can compare the bruises. The trouble is, if our only proof that Tony made the marks on Jackson's neck comes from Jackson's testimony then we'd have to put Jackson on the stand and I doubt he'd make the best witness in the world."

O'Neill had to acknowledge the truth of that. He also didn't doubt Jackson went out of his way to attract Tony's anger. Took a kind of twisted satisfaction in making the man lose control. Perhaps it was sexual. Perhaps their attraction was mutual. Perhaps…

"You should go home. Get some sleep. You look beat."

For a second, Kawalsky let his mask drop and there was the concern he tried so hard to conceal. Usually that was enough to make O'Neill lash out, outraged by any hint of sympathy but today it touched him, perhaps some slice of his heart had thawed out enough to be touched. The muscles in his face felt as if they belonged to someone else as he tried to remember how to smile.

"So do you. But you're probably right. See you." He never used Kawalsky's first name now. There could only be one Charlie in the world for him and that one was dead and buried. To soften the omission he added, "Say hi to Christine from me." He couldn't bring himself to mention Kawalsky's child. He hated the smallness of his own reaction but Alison hadn't been mentioned between them since the death of his son. She was the real reason why he couldn't visit Kawalsky's house. She would greet him as she always had, as if he was what he had been before, and he would explode with grief or rage.

"I'll do that." Someone who knew him less well would have pushed too hard there, tried to slip in a dinner invitation but Kawalsky was a true friend and kept his distance. "Night, Jack."

"Night." As he headed for his car he knew he should be thinking about that girl lying on her slab and that bereaved husband who was perhaps also a murderer sitting in his cell, but he couldn't get his mind to cooperate. He found himself thinking about the way Jackson had offered himself up for inspection, so full of trust despite the bruises on his skin, that little flickering smile he'd given O'Neill, wary and innocent at the same time, like an alien visitor, like a lost child.

As he got into his car he had a sudden image of Jackson lying on the bed and himself pushing up that oversized shirt to reveal those bruised ribs, then bending his head and very, very gently brushing the heated skin with his lips.

He shook his head to clear it and wondered where the hell a thought like that was coming from. Kawalsky was right. He definitely needed to get some more sleep.

***

Daniel woke abruptly to darkness and the hair on the back of his neck prickling with anxiety, heart beating fast as he realized someone was standing by the bed. For a split-second he hoped it was O'Neill and then he heard an incoherent mumble, caught the familiar scent of alcohol, male sweat, and stale cologne, and knew that it was Tony.

"I'm asleep," he muttered.

Tony crashed down onto the bed next to him. He was stinking drunk, the alcohol coming off him in a wave, like having a distillery in the room. His body was a tangible heat and he already smelt of arousal. Bottles clinked in his hand, the square outline of a whiskey bottle and the rounded brown glass of beer. The drugs didn't smell of anything tonight, suggesting Tony had injected instead of smoking them but Daniel sensed those too. Conscience dampening, libido raising, anger fuelling 'shabu', crystal meth for people prepared to pay extra for purity – the 'ice' that had burned so many bruises onto his body over the years.

Daniel's heart sank. "I'm not in a party mood right now."

Tony wasn't listening, too drunk, stoned, and fixated on whatever he was planning. He kicked off his shoes clumsily and Daniel listened to them hitting the floor, sighing in resignation as Tony fumbled with his socks, it taking him several attempts to get them off.

Always the gentleman, Tony, Daniel thought bitterly. He wondered what had brought on this outbreak of chivalry, times since all the man had done was unzip his fly never mind going to the effort required to remove his socks. Aloud he said: "Sleep in your own room. I can help you get to it." He tried to make it sound like an enticing prospect but evidently failed.

"No." Tony put a hand under the covers and Daniel started as it touched his back. The hand was warm, almost soothing as it circled his spine, fingertips searching for the tell-tale heat of bruises, proof of previous possession. Tony mumbled at his ear, licking at the lobe and Daniel slumped into the mattress in resignation. Tony was always unpredictable in this state, he could go from fond caresses to seismic explosions of rage in the time it took to flick a light switch, but maybe this time he would just curl up and start snoring, the way he sometimes did. Daniel had always suspected that half the reason Tony slept with so many women at his various tennis clubs and gyms was because he so hated to sleep alone. He'd often thought a psychiatrist would have a field day with his stepbrother, but then psychiatrists had already had several field days with him so he could hardly gloat.

"You have to take your pills," Tony muttered in his ear.

"I've taken my pills," Daniel hissed back. It was a lie. He'd been relieved to slip back into the house without interrogation from Zinnia or Tony and only a disconcertingly searching look from the new gardener, and had hurried straight back to his room to find an email from Sarah with attachments that had kept him happily fascinated for hours. It was only when the print outs of inscriptions had become too dim to see that he'd realized it was long past supper time and the food left for him on his table by someone was not just cold but congealed. He'd switched on the light but left the food to go on congealing. With an intriguing form of hieroglyphs to wrestle with there was no way he was dimming his faculties with drugs. If the visions came, let them come, at least the sane part of his mind would be unclouded.

It had been late when he showered then fell into bed, still turning inscriptions over in his mind and wondering where Sarah had found them. Everything from that dig was supposed to have been lost. The shipping company had paid out half a million in compensation and Sarah had wept when the check fell out of the letter because no money in the world could pay them back for what they'd lost. She'd always insisted the government had stolen their findings for their own sinister motives. As he'd told her at the time when she was stamping around the room spouting conspiracy theories, exactly which one of them was supposed to have paranoid delusions here? Now, he guessed she was proven right. These were the photographs she and he had taken all those years ago in Egypt and they certainly hadn't been destroyed in any plane crash.

He suspected these photographs had been stolen back from their original thieves. Sarah was proud of her ability to hack into anything and she had a stubbornness he could only admire. He wished he could have gone to her and Steven's wedding. Not that Steven was good enough for her, of course, but he could have kissed the bride. Kissing Sarah had never been anything but a pleasure and he had to admit it had always been even more of a pleasure when Steven was watching. He thought of her slender body and how limber she was, getting him in death grip between long narrow thighs and threatening to break his back with one twist of her endless legs if he didn't agree to be her sex slave for always. He didn't remember offering a lot of opposition to that suggestion.

Tony's drunken mumbling at his ear brought him unpleasantly back to reality: "Did you take your pills or didn't you?"

"Yes, I took the damned pills." Daniel shifted angrily, resenting the weight on his back, the solid wall of muscle that was Tony's immoveable body. Tony was biting his neck making him put his head back in the way Tony liked, the exposure of his throat, the submissive flex of his spine, the involuntary raising of his ass. Sarah had always played his body like a xylophone as well, but he'd preferred the music she had made.

"You're such a bad liar." A hand was clamped over his mouth and he panicked. Too many times Tony had waltzed him to the edge of death, the fingers gripping his throat or covering his nose and mouth until white lights made a firework display on the inside of his eyelids. One day, Tony often promised him, he wouldn't let him come round again and every time it happened, Daniel wondered if this was the day when Tony would be too drunk to stop in time, when the urge to keep squeezing his throat would overwhelm him, or the pleasure of feeling Daniel's panicked writhe and thrash dim to the heavy limbed passivity of defeat would keep Tony throttling him a half minute too long. He felt his heart rate begin to race, was beginning to struggle in earnest when his tongue tasted the sugar coating of a pill and he swallowed. By now he should have learned to flick it under his tongue, he supposed and spit it out later. He'd tried practicing that in the hospital, but he'd never been very good at it, and more often than not the pill had ended up in his bloodstream, that happened now.

"Drink this."

The neck of a beer bottle was put to his mouth and tipped. Daniel sputtered, coughed, but also swallowed, and the pill was washed down. A mouthful of whiskey followed the beer, and he coughed on that too as it burnt a fiery path to his empty stomach.

Tony licked the beer from his chin, then his mouth, then he was kissing him, his stubble coarse against his face. Even though the tongue pushed into his mouth tasted unpleasantly of some woman he'd never even met, Daniel submitted because it really was easier to just go with the flow when the man was in this mood. It got it over faster and with the minimum of conversation. He suspected what Tony was really doing was seeking the comfort of another warm body combined with the need to prove once again that he was the dominant male in the household. Well, he was, and good luck to him and all other alpha fucking males and their tiresome machismo. He just wished Tony could prove it quickly and then they could both get some sleep.

Tony was pulling at him clumsily, trying to maneuver him into a more accessible position, but Daniel refused to help him, not loosening the towel he'd had wrapped around his waist when he fell into bed. He gritted his teeth as Tony kissed him again then began to lick and bite at his neck, nipping harder to make him react as he turned his head away. The foreplay didn't seem to have a lot to do with making it good for Daniel, as it never was, just about making Tony feel better about himself. He sometimes thought Tony had enough self-hatred to fill the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

The tablet was kicking in now and it was one of the bad ones. He hated these. Daniel looked at his hand in the soupy darkness and it was glowing, the veins phosphorescent in the gloom. If he looked in a mirror his eyeballs would run. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the texture of the pillow, the coarseness of Egyptian cotton. Zinnia fussed about his linen. She fussed about a lot of things, expending her energies in irrelevant acts of baffling complexity. There was always some aesthetic whole she was striving for that she would never quite reach. The day she had this monolithic house restored to perfection was the day she would have to sell it and begin again. Even for Daniel, with whom she barely ever conversed, his madness frightening to her, everything about him an embarrassment so excruciating he thought he was probably the cause of most of the painkillers she swallowed to ward off her persistent migraines, even for him the room had to be perfect, the faucets in that bathroom in which he was never permitted a razor just so. She had spent days getting the powdery texture of the paint on his walls just right. Had brought someone in especially to hang the – to her ugly – reminders of his Egyptologist past, even though they were out of keeping with the rest of the décor and made her wince whenever she made eye contact with him. She often confused him with small kindnesses, offering them to him tentatively like someone afraid of being scratched by an unpredictable cat. He supposed it was displacement activity for a guilt she didn't want to examine, for not taking responsibility for her son….

Tony's fingers were under the towel now, tugging impatiently before beginning an intimate exploration. It didn't matter how drunk the man was, it never stopped him managing to get it up and get it in, if not always at the first attempt.

Daniel gritted his teeth as fingers wet with beer probed at him, prizing him open. "Use a fucking condom."

"Why? I haven't got you pregnant yet." Tony bit his shoulder, hard enough to hurt.

Daniel flinched but opened his legs all the same. "Selfish prick." He jabbed him with his elbow. Not resistance, not an actual 'Get off me, I don't want this' because that was futile and turned him into a victim, just a protest lodged. He regretted fighting back earlier in the day, it only made Tony more brutal and himself weaker in both their eyes. The only way to keep his dignity was to be an uncooperative participant. If he truly objected and it still happened anyway, that left him powerless.

Tony kissed him on the ear, breathing hot and harsh, the excitement tangible in those gusts of warm air fluttering Daniel's shorn hair, his elbows straightened, wrapping his body around Daniel's. Pain burned, a stab of it, and Daniel cried out as he was penetrated without warning. "Jesus Christ!"

"Shut up. It's not that bad." Tony mumbled something else incoherent, but he was too drunk to be anything but clumsy. He pulled out roughly, fingered Daniel incompetently while he bit at his neck, then pushed back in again. Daniel swore under his breath and bit the pillow.

"Just hurry up and finish," he hissed through the cotton. When he darted a glance at his hand he could see the bones straight through it. A snake was winding sinuously down the wall. He watched in fascination as it looped its muscular body through the bars of the bed, body glowing green and gold. He could hear Tony grunting rhythmically, those familiar jolts of pain stabbing through him, but the snake was a distraction at least. It weaved through another bar and looked him in the eye and he saw ankhs glowing in their depths. Symbols of life. Something stolen from Sha're and Nick and his parents, yet left to him. The next thrust was harder and wilder and he braced himself against it, feeling Tony's fingers digging into his flesh, hearing the slap of the man's balls against his ass, the squelching sound of flesh on flesh. Tony's grunts were getting louder, his breathing harsher. Quick climaxes weren't always a good thing with Tony. Sometimes he treated the first fuck like an aperitif before getting down to the main course, sex shot through with rage and guilt and the need to hit some switch inside himself that maybe only the whiteout of climax could ever reach.

When Tony took enough of the wrong kind of drugs he could stay in this mental place for days, one unsatisfactory fuck following another, frustration building into blows of increasing savagery as Tony tried and failed to get away from the reality of who he was and what he'd done. Sometimes Daniel believed he was undoubtedly the sanest person in this household – and he had a phantom snake now curled around his arm, its tongue heading unerringly for the fascinated confusion of his eye.

***

O'Neill had done some checking and found out that the dead grandfather of Crazy Boy Jackson had been an eccentric archaeologist called Nick Ballard. His wife had been an archaeologist as well and neither of them had ever taken any interest in her family's money, that had accrued in stocks, shares, and complicated trusts, unnoticed and unheeded by them. Saal, their old rambling house on the outskirts of the city, had filled itself with books and artifacts, and letters from solicitors had often gone unanswered. But the money had a momentum of its own, swelling and shrinking through good years and bad but ultimately always increasing, a bloated monster invisible to archaeologists who never read their mail. Ballard's wife hadn't even read the letters from her doctor telling her the lump they'd examined wasn't benign after all and she'd died fast at the end, shrinking before her husband's horrified gaze as the tumor devoured her from the inside out. Ballard hadn't learned from that experience either, had been uncontactable when his only daughter and her husband had died setting up the display that had orphaned their only son. The money had continued to gorge itself on not always ethical investments while Ballard took the boy into places where malaria and fever lurked an