In a world of grey she is colour. She’s touch and taste and scent when there had never been any before. Her mouth is wet and her lips soft and underneath it all he can feel something else.

She tastes like memory. He tells her so, or at least thinks he does.

“Do you think--” a pause, because with so much skin it’s hard to remember words at all, much less these words – “do you think we’ve done this before?”

When he can he thinks of the tattoo on his arm. He remembers, like she remembers, the sharp sting of a needle that left the number 323 behind. He remembers what they told them when they were young – when they actually answered their questions. You’re special; your parents died; we’re looking after you; what you’re doing is helping us all. Carefully he pulls her grey sweater over her head revealing the small singlet she wears beneath. Her number is the same, but he already knew that. Their numbers have always been the same.

She tastes like memory, time and time again.

“Yes,” he whispers against her ear. “No,” he murmurs into her collar bone. Both are equally true.

“You’ve said that before,” she says against his lips. There’s anger in her eyes, a tiny spark that glows brightly for a second, and he doesn’t understand why. He closes his eyes and kisses her. This he knows just as he knows integers and primes and the sum of a triangle. It’s engrained in his DNA, as unavoidable as brown eyes and the mole beneath his eye. He knows her taste, like—

like expensive wine, lipstick, tobacco, vodka and PEZ.

-- like things he’s never tasted, and he knows them anyway.

“Tell me again,” she says. This is the first time, he wants to reply, I’ve never said... But the words are already there, formed in his mouth and slipping from his lips without his permission or there even being a question. He knows this too, as he knows she will hiss if he touches her just so, that the number 323 is the product of twin primes, and that this is not the first time they’ve done this, except it is.

His hand against her breast, touching through light material. “Sunlight.” Slipping underneath, rubbing his thumb against a nipple. “Snow.” Tracing her ribs, just shy of tickling. “Fresh air.” Slipping beneath her grey track pants. “Grass. Sky.”

She arches up against him when he touches her and mumbles her own litany of prayers, if that’s what these are.

“Scotch,” she breathes. “Gucci. Prada. Stilettos…”

- the click, click, click of heels behind him. The flick of a safety. “Going to shoot me, Parker?”

Names that are not theirs in lives they did not live.

She’s still murmuring words, some of them meaningless and others that mean everything, when he enters her. She’s hot and wet around him. He’s drowning in it. Drowning in her and being pulled under the weight of all those lives before him.

“Freedom,” he grounds out as he moves with her. The rhythm is familiar, and the feel of his skin against hers. She pulls him closer to her and drags her nails up his back. The pain is just another memory. He remembers… The sudden knowledge and his orgasm bind together into white noise and it’s better than anything he’s ever felt before.

Beneath him she makes an impatient noise – “I don’t have the patience for this, Jarod” – and he touches and licks and sucks until she whimpers and comes. They lie still for a while, lost in thoughts not entirely their own.

“We can escape,” he tells her, his voice low and rumbling against her hip.

“You’ve said that before,” she says. “Many times.”

He has. He’s said it over and over and never before. He has said it in the same way he takes breath; vital, imperative, done without thought.

“I’m you?”

This is their dance. This is their fate.

You run; I chase.

Three hundred and twenty three. Maybe they’ll try to escape, the two of them, as he imagines they have time and time before. Maybe The Centre will kill them for it, or maybe they don’t. Maybe they just make a copy. A copy of a copy of a copy all the way back to their own Adam and Eve. 324 will try as well. He’ll think about how he knows she’ll hiss if he touches her just so, that the number 324 is the largest possible product of positive integers with sum 16, that this is not the first time they’ve done this, except it is, and they’ll press words without context against each other’s skin.

“What if we change the story?”

There’s an air vent in the corner of the ancient Sim Lab. He knows this without ever having explored the room. The air vent is not sealed, even though this room belongs to a closed down section, one built with old materials of cold steel and concrete. If he looks for it he knows it will be big enough for a man to climb through. He knows too that if he climbed in it he would know the way like he knows her skin.

There’s a flicker of fear in her eyes, but she’s always been daring; has dared, he guesses, 323 times before. “How?”

He thinks of sunlight he’s never felt, snow melting on his skin, fresh air not from a vent, grass beneath his feet and sky. Freedom, he thinks, and he aches inside. But he thinks of her, beautiful, familiar in a way that’s not familiar enough and three hundred and twenty three times his, but never for long. Never long enough.

“What if we stayed?”

notes: This is the combined effort of far too much SGA fic, the movie Aeon Flux (which is cracktastically bad) and so much love for both versions of the SGA fic “You Must Remember This”. And yeah I know how cloning works. I just choose to ignore it. Up next: gravity. Thanks to Stickmarionette for looking it over and Cassy for not killing me with facts after I showed her it.