Radek sighs, flattening his palms out against his thighs. He's been meeting with Kate every other Thursday since the beginning of this expedition, he shouldn't be so nervous anymore.

"Good morning, Radek," Kate says in the exact same way she's said it ever other Thursday for two years. She always looks him straight in the eyes and smiles immediately after the words come out of her mouth. They must have taught her that smile in school.

"Good morning. How are you?" He's not usually the first to ask this question, but today she looks tired. She's not wearing makeup like she normally does, her hair is flat and listless and she has dark circles under her eyes.

"I'm fine, Radek. Thank you for asking." It's a deflection, but Radek lets her have it. If he were her, he wouldn't be able to sleep either. They were experimenting on another being. So what if Michael wasn't always human, for someone who'd taken the Hippocratic oath, it had to have been an awful thing. And then to fail – to prove that there really is nothing to stop the Wraith from their homicidal behavior, even after they were no longer able to feed – Radek knows that he wouldn't be able to live with that.

"So," Kate continues. "How are you today?"

Radek shrugs. It's been a quiet day in the lab, despite the fact that Michael may put them on the Wraith's radar yet again. McKay is doing his usual ‘we're all going to die, save my brilliance' routine, Kusanagi has finally recovered from the Athosian mumps and is able to make her amazing coffee again, and Radek has been pulled from jumper maintenance with a brooding Colonel Sheppard to work with Rodney on boosting power to the shield. "I am actually quite well, Dr. Heightmeyer."

"I'm glad, Radek. That's so good to hear. Now, these sessions are for you to speak about what you'd like, so if there's anything else you might like to discuss . . ."

Radek frowns. There's not really anything in particular.

"What about yourself and Dr. McKay? We discussed your friendship after what happened with Project Arcturus. Do you feel as though you've been able to recover from that?"

He and Rodney? Well, he and Rodney were fine. A lengthy note of apology and a few glorious months of getting to dictate his own projects had solved that one. Sure, it still stung that Rodney had accused him of being jealous, but that was McKay. What was Radek to do? The only one with any control over the man was Colonel Sheppard, and the two of them . . . they were like children – one lead the other astray, and before you knew it you were fighting off alien shrubbery and digging people out of Ancient trash compactors.

In truth, the incident on Doranda wasn't unexpected. If McKay begged, of course Sheppard was going to listen. In Sheppard's world, things always worked out – his harebrained schemes always saved the day, McKay always pulled something out of his ass to get them out of the mess they'd gotten into, the hero always rode in on his white horse and saved the kingdom and got the girl too.

Before that, there had been the incident with the nano virus. Yes, Radek was very happy that his brains hadn't be eaten up by little miniature robots, but he'd later heard (from Rodney of all people) what exactly Sheppard had done to get them there. It was a terrifying thing to know that Elizabeth had absolutely no ultimate control over the man.

In fact, she was increasingly buying in to the whole Sheppard/McKay tag-team of dramatics and heroing rescues and moral principles continuingly twisting in order to justify so-called ‘necessary actions.' Elizabeth had agreed to torture a Wraith first, and then a human? Sure, it was only Kavanagh, but it could have been anyone – any civilian scientist who fit the profile. Radek was still old enough to remember the old days of the occupation – the fear, the uncertainty, the knowledge that you were just a number, a replicable cog in a system that would be played like a piece on a chess board, with no guarantees whatsoever. He didn't want that.

And he doubted it had all been Elizabeth's idea, just as he doubted Carson and Kate had been the one to come up with the idea of doing what they'd done to Michael.

"Can I ask you something?" Radek almost whispered. Everything said here was done in confidence. He trusted Kate that much at least.

"You can ask me anything, though I won't promise you an answer."

Radek nods. "Sometimes, do you think that . . . is it possible that certain . . . er . . . leadership decisions on this expedition have . . . well, haven't recent events crossed a line?"

Kate frowns, not looking at him or at her notepad, but out her long windows, the sun catching the doubt in her features. It's a long moment before she answers, as sure as she's always seemed. "Yes, sometimes I do."

Radek doesn't know a lot about psychology, but he's pretty sure that the right answer would have been: ‘do you think we've crossed one?'

FIN