It's cold in New Mexico. He'd forgotten that. Or maybe not. Is it possible to forget things you never knew? On the other side, he thinks that maybe he did know them once. Or he will know them. Time makes no sense anymore. If it ever did. He knows that time is a hollow illusion. It can be bent to his will or the will of a God, if such a thing exists. He thinks about Steven Hawking and freight trains, the Lorentz transformation - time as a function of velocity. He thinks he once knew someone who loved going fast - someone who could bend time to his will, but the memory slips and slides as ball bearings do in a vat of oil, like electromagnetic fields pushing against each other.

But, even looking at the spaceship passing you in the void, elongated like the molasses that drips from the maple trees in those magic months of late fall when you can smell it in the air, sweet and syrupy and so tempting, the person sitting across from you looks exactly the same, even when they're traveling the same speed. Everything is relative - you can never escape the slow march forward, your own reference frame. Even when time seems near frozen to those outside, the minutes ticking by on our own watch grind out the same relentless pace. Time only slows in comparison to others. If you have no one back on earth holding a clock and growing old in your absence, what does speeding into the future get you? You might age in millennia, earth time, but you will feel no more immortal if you have no one left to outlive.

He has no one. But maybe someday he will. Or someday he has.

He pulls the blanket tighter around him. It itches - like most things military issue, uncomfortable. Maybe one day a beautiful woman with golden hair and a warming steady gaze will give him a real quilt - woven with the pattern of wondrous new constellations. Maybe one day he will stand in a warm breeze in the dead of night with strong arms to protect him.

For a second the blanket melts and folds, forging itself into a statue, the unmoving heat of another body, soft hair and skin stretching themselves over taunt muscles. Then he blinks and reality returns.

He is in New Mexico. Night has fallen and he can hear the motions of the night creatures, awakened from their daily siestas, coming back to the cold the way he has, with memories of the heat of the day still flowing around him, despite the fact that the warmth has all escaped into space, deep into the ethereal darkness of this cloudless night.

He's so tired. He's been working himself to death, trying his hardest to polish every hint of intelligence until it all shines brilliantly through. He hates the desert. And he hated the empty wasteland of the Siberian plain. He even hates the thick pines and the mild winters of Vancouver. None of it feels right, too slick - like the skin of a snake velvety soft even as it chokes you. He needs to be smart enough. He needs to escape because this reality is all wrong.

He feels outside time sometimes, watching the other scientists scurry around him, leaving him to his own thoughts, like the river of time that fuzzy-scientists and science fiction authors talk about because they want to believe that you can accomplish something . . . or maybe even that time travel might be fated. They don't want to believe that in millions of billions of trillions of universes out there, they are dead, or suffering, or not themselves at all. They want to believe that there is some sort of plan. But that means he'd have to admit that things are the way they're supposed to be, right here, right now. He finds solace in the fact that in one of the universes through the mirror he's been tempted to step through ever since he got here, he or someone like him, is happy.

He closes his eyes. He's so tired. And, for some reason, he hasn't eaten.

He hears gunshots around him . . . the staccato so intense that they incite his heart to motion. He thinks about waves, sinoid curves dancing across the bland black screen of an EKG. And he thinks about sympathetic vibrations, speeding and multiply those waves at just the right frequency. Someone once told him about flying in a huey. They said that the beat of the rotor blades were enough to make you want to kill . . . head to war. He said the pace of the blades probably scarred as many people as the bullets themselves.

He opens his eyes and there is someone above him. His voice is rough and commanding as he barks into a radio. "We're pinned down by the gate. We need backup. We have a man down. Repeat, requesting backup."

He wonders who this man is - his bright green eyes darkened with urgency. They are crouched behind some sort of stone structure. He hears something pounding against it, but it doesn't chip. The man jumps up, firing over the top of their protective covering for just a second. He admires the tight line of the jaw, determined and strong. And the compact energy to him . . . the grace.

What was it they said about the grace of God? That there was never enough human beings could do to save themselves. It was all dependent on fate . . . on the love of some detached being, operating outside the realms of the multiverse. Maybe that's why the Ancients have all those rules about non-intervention. It doesn't change anything. For every world where they intervene, there's one where they don't. But he doesn't ask questions of why. 'Why?' is for philosophers and theologians. He's a physicist and a genius. He's transcended 'why?' and arrived at 'how?'

He shivers. The thick stone of this floor sure is cold, despite the brilliant blue sky above his head.

But it's rapidly darkening to midnight, like ink flooding the thick pores of a page. When the light's gone, he can't be sure it was ever there at all, dissolved like a dream upon waking.

He sits down awkwardly, joints creaking in protest. He's getting old and it scares him, but it takes too much to stand. Somewhere . . . sometime, he thinks there would be someone to massage the pain away, to soothe the cold ache from his bones with a smile or a pat on the back, a praise, a kiss. He remembers hands so rough but firm - fingers spindly and precise, moving on him, in him, around him. He remembers fingers with a Midas touch that could light up his body, the world, the universe. But that hasn't happened yet. Maybe it never will.

Right now, in this moment, he feels as though he'll never be loved.

So he sighs.

And the sigh melts through him like a river . . . time flowing down from the stars and washing away the past and the future and anything but this warmth flowing through him like the sun.

And someone is smiling down at him. It's not a happy smile. It doesn't set his soul alight. It's not passionate or beautiful or symmetrical even. But it warms him, like the dying embers of the fire. "Hang on, Rodney, everything's going to be all right." There's such conviction in those words. He wants to believe them. He wants to believe them with everything in his soul.

But he needs evidence. Reality is collapsing in around him, folding in upon itself like those sketches with impossible stairs and multi-dimensional shapes and black and white geese flying against each other until you don't know the background from the fore. He wants to know what right.

He looks up into those concerned green eyes and knows that this man knows what's right. He has all the answers.

"What . . ." He tries to speak, but the man presses as blood-stained finger to his lips.

"Shh . . . Rodney, save your strength. Everything's going to be fine." But how can it be with such sadness in those hypnotic eyes? He can see the weight of the world there, as if each pixel, each little grain of color in the sea of hazel green, were its own world, like each bit of algae blooming in a tranquil sea he's never seen.

And this man, his hand cupping Rodney's cheek . . . the touch seems familiar, like a lover's caress months or years or decades past awakening you from a dream or maybe a memory. But his own skin feels wrong - crinkly somehow.

And there's this pain in his chest.

He must have heartburn, he thinks, but he doesn't rise to alleviate the pain fast fading into the night. There are so many pains in life. He thinks that, as this is not his first, it will not be his last.

Today in the lab he had the strangest feeling. He was staring transfixed into the perfect glass of that mirror, wondering the infernal question of 'what if' when he felt this warmth in him . . . like being filled with a cool fire . . . something that can only heal, not burn. And for a second he was bathed in light, each atom singing out, like he was a pitchfork humming in great waves as someone struck just the right note, light all the loneliness had been shaken from him in a snap - the sound of the last piece of a puzzle snapping into place.

Daniel Jackson keeps telling him about myths, leaping off the bland white of the page to pull his eyes away from the seductive red of the word 'classified.' He likes that word. It makes him feel special, classy. He laughs to himself, shivering under suddenly unfamiliar stars. In his reports Daniel wonders about all the stories of humans trying to outdo their gods and the horrible punishments they receive. He wonders if they have not done the same in opening up the Stargate. He thinks that Daniel must be mad, to talk of Pandora and Eve and Prometheus when surrounded with so many wonderful and powerful things. Even the Goa'uld do not outweigh the pure promise that traveling among the stars represents.

It pains him to sit here reading Jackson's rambling reports about cultures and mythologies and things of the past when he wants nothing more to step through that gate and find the future.

He imagines the ominous stone ring, remembers the rippling blue, the light that spills from it, from god knows where. He wonders why it looks like shimmering water. He can tell you a million ways to calculate what happens to your atoms as the wormhole twists time and space to send them flying through, but he can't tell you why it looks like an ocean, even though he thinks he remembers one so vast it stretched across nearly and entire planet. He thinks he remembers being deep under that ocean, watching bubbles rise through the deep green to metallic melting of the surface shimmering above. He remembers looking into it emptiness after the wormhole disengaged and feeling cut off from destiny.

But there is no such thing, he knows - even as he looks at the Gate in his mind and thinks that it is wrong . . . wonders about the hieroglyphs instead of glowing families of dots, blinking, winking at him.

He blinks and he sees this gorgeous man again, like David, melting out of the marble cast of history to bring back myth and life and beauty to a world of metal and silicon not stone. He feels those hands, slicked with blood clasping his, and they feel so familiar, so perfect that he cannot grasp them. And he sees those thin lips and somehow knows they will be soft in a kiss. He never knew that about Major Carter or Jonas Quinn or Mary Arrant, to whom he lost his virginity. He never knew any of them, though he idolized them, but he knows this man and it's killing him that he can't remember.

He realizes that the firing has stopped, leaving behind only the pounding in his head. He feels the other man's anxiousness. He looks into his eyes and knows that this is a chance for escape. Once upon a time he must have come to know this man well enough so that he could sense that from just a glance. But the knowledge is all that remains after history itself has burned away.

And this man can obviously read him, because he looks down and shouts. "I'm not leaving you!"

"Please," he tastes blood on his tongue as he chokes the word out. For some reason it is vital to his existence that this marvelous stranger survive. He knows how Michelangelo felt when he committed his dream to stone, opened it up to the eyes of history.

"I'm not leaving you." Quiet and defeated this time.

But he has to go. He has his own velocity, traveling through time and space, and slipping away as the shadows lengthen . . . matter and light and time all stretch to accommodate his overwhelming velocity. Time blinks past.

Flashing . . . a warning. The blue glow pulling shadows into his already moonlit room, painting contrast onto the nothingness of night. And there's a message waiting for him in his inbox. He scans it quickly. He's being transferred to Antarctica. And he didn't think he could get any colder. He sighs and lies down against the hard lumps and angles of his bed. He misses the comforting leather of his couch. And he wonders what happened to Copernicus, hoping he hasn't sneaked off into the night to get bitten by scorpions or rattlesnakes or some other desert horror . . .

. . . monsters with catlike eyes and skin a tumescent blue, like dried bones in the moonlight, hair pale and teeth sharp like shards of glass. They stalk towards him and he struggles to stand, but the pain in his chest is too great.

"I will feed upon you as I have fed upon your companion." One says, and he is both surprised and horrified that it can speak, its voice resonating in his chest like the voice of doom, echoing through every empty space in his soul. He needs something to fill it. Anything . . . he shuts his eyes, and the man grips his hand again. And now he's full. Now the voice cannot hurt him, with all the strength flowing through that confident grip.

The hand releases and he feels loss, but not emptiness as the man steps between him and the monsters, matching their deathly grace. He stares at that profile and remembers night and days and years seeing the familiar silhouette against a pale sky or a field of wildflowers, an ocean, a room lit by the glow of a column of rise bubbles, a fire, a beach, a bed of silken sheets, a forest, a night of nameless constellations. It is as though the picture is branded upon his soul, an afterimage like the burn of the sun on your retina if you stare too long and hard into its intensity.

He thinks that maybe this is the last image he will see, that it will eat through his brain and rip open the gates to the past to write itself into whatever his essence is outside of fragile time, so easily manipulated by the charisma of speed. He closes his eyes.

"Rodney!" Someone screams. And he thinks, that maybe, there is someone in some universe somewhere who will hold his hand, and hold their breath for eons, keeping time as he speeds through space - that maybe there is some constant, something anchoring time and history, something to be relative to. Something Right.

But that is the dream, as vast and illusory as God.

His eyes are still, no longer even daring to blink and there is no air left in those lungs, no electrons jingling down neurons in waves, splitting and converting their signals . . . analogue to digital, dendrites to axons. But this is an odd kind of nothingness. "This isn't how it's supposed to be." The voice says, choking. And then he sees a flash of white and he dreams a dream so real it might as well be reality, because it's all he knows.

And sometime in that dream Major John Sheppard shows up to fly him to the Lost City. His eyes show the wisdom of universes and the weight of their suffering and his hands look so familiar.

FIN