There are times-- just every so often-- when he's sure he's in the wrong place; but he knows he's right where he should be.

A man of action, General O'Neill-- he sees the lay of his life like land on a tactical map. There's youth in Chicago, memories of sitting on a stone wall with time stretching out like jaws to snap him up. And yeah, he gets that feeling these days, too. Childhood is a blur, too simple and easy and painful to remember; adolescence is anger looking for a place for blood to let. 'Wild,' he remembers his mother hissing over the phone, 'that child is simply running wild.' He snorted, turned away-- came in at all hours like an alley cat, stinking of where he'd been and strutting his independence. There's pain back there, too. The streets like enemy territory, in school he was a secret agent scrambling for cover-- so he figured, why not join the army and make it official. Jonathan O'Neill, a soldier; the young man who found structure and purpose in those barracks. He was a little less wild, but still kind of crazy. He had to be something of a lunatic, to rattle all those missions around in his head. He wasn't a bad boy, but people were still surprised when sweet, nice Sara Morrow took him home to meet Mom and Dad.

Dad, father-- there's that word, a title you earn, almost. Something he wanted to live up to. He held that squirming, red faced baby in his wide hands, amazed by the perfection of toes and fingers and eyes that were a mix of his own brown and Sara's green. Like childhood, he doesn't touch on this too often. He keeps it locked away, protected, and he can keep on moving so long as he knows it's there. Because, he knows, you can't think of that young boy's life branching out without thinking of the abrupt end. Of gunshots in the bedroom, child-sized coffin and the taste of his gun in his mouth.

They practically asked him if he wanted to die on that Stargate mission, but hey. Go figure, 'cause it's the army, right? And when he came back from the other side of the galaxy with nary a scratch, he found it so unfair and funny that he laughed when Sara took that last step out the door. Sometimes, it surprises him that he ever stopped laughing-- in the endlessness between two-fifty-nine and three a.m., he lifts a hand to his mouth to make sure he's not laughing still.

There's this... thing. He doesn't know what it is, but it's missing and he's hunting around for it in the dark, bumping into and breaking things in his haste to get his hands on it. It's not there, it's fallen down somewhere between the wall and he'll never find it now.

He's giving it a second try, the whole domesticity thing; grabbing for some normality because what he sees outside his office window is not an alley or a parking lot, but a wormhole. An event horizon, portal to other worlds, shimmering blue like eyes he's never seen. Even when he sits still, he's moving, though he tells himself this isn't because he's afraid to stop. However, on those rare occasions he does pause, it comes to him that he's lost-- he got off at a foreign station and all the signs, every direction is in some language that is familiar to him without letting him understand it. Sara used to say stuff like that, used to pause sometimes with her lips half-painted or eyelids half-shadowed in blue or dark gold, and say-- 'hey, Jack, if we weren't here now, were would we be?' A reality check, a look in the mirror-- that's why those panes of silver are so dangerous, because they make you see where you really are. Of course, he didn't give her credit. Just asked if it was that time of the month, brushed it off, 'where else would I be?'. Laugh a little, even if it wasn't funny.

It's even less funny now.

So yeah, everyone's got to feel that way, on occasion. If I'd just called in sick that day, or gone to see Mom before the surgery, or put that gun under damn lock and key-- things would be different.

They're not, and you can't do squat to change it. Why bother thinking about it?

So he doesn't.

He's got Samantha-- she's bright and pretty, smart under her high cheek bones. They work well together, though she's a scientist and he's career military. Yeah, they make a good team, a nice match. When he retires, they'll have a condo out where he can fish, maybe a child. There will be no guns in the house. He'll do it right this time. He won't have to hide things, 'cause Sam's got the clearance-- their vision of the universe will be consistent with each other. In the future, she'll probably work part time and they'll live the rest off his pension-- he'll convince her that she doesn't need to give up her job to have a baby. He won't mind changing diapers when he's in his fifties, when most other retirees are migrating to Florida and playing the casinos. He wants a girl this time, he thinks-- maybe a boyish one that plays soccer and has freckles all over her nose, but a girl never the less. Girls, even the 'modern' kind, don't seem to want to play with guns.

But it's still there, that off feeling-- a sense of possibility hanging like a branch just out of reach. Maybe he's being fanciful. Maybe he's making it up.

One time, he asked Samantha if she had that feeling-- 'you know, that deja vu thing, except you know it hasn't happened before'. They had a long discussion about quantum reality as she pocked her fork into their chicken-and-rice dinner; he missed most of it, decided that she was probably saying 'yes, but...'. He looks into her eyes-- which are blue-- and there are just those moments when he knows it ought to be someone else.

Senility, it's got to be senility. Old age-- day dreaming. It's time to think about that retirement.

Only he looses his chance-- there are pyramids in the sky, like out of one of those crazy pulp science fiction novels. The world is wavering in lunacy, only this to him is sane. He's known all along things could go this way with the Goa'uld, he'd just thought they'd have more time to prepare, a childish hope that the 'gods' would loose interest and let the little humans play in their blue-green box of sand. Sitting in the command room, he wonders with a feeling of ice in his spine why he never let the scenario play out all the way, in his own mind. Why did he never let himself think about what would happen, in the end? He's going to play the hand he's been dealt; even if he ends up tilling soil on another planet-- instead of retiring in Minnesota-- and helps sire a first-generation extraterrestrial human.

At first, he holds out some hope. He thinks maybe they can beat this thing.

Then he knows they can't.

He thinks they still have a fighting chance.

And sees Egypt and Europe and the Eastern seaboard flood and flare with red on the map.

He thinks they need a miracle.

And maybe he gets one.

"Unauthorized incoming traveler!"