Stargate SG1: What Dreams May Come (18/21)
All disclaimers, notes, warnings and summary are in the Master post: What Dreams May Come
Chapter Eighteen
They walked through the door and into the room, with its eerie shadows cast by the torches that illuminated it. It took a few seconds for Jack's eyes to adjust to the change in lighting, but when they did, what he saw made his breath catch in his throat.
He was across the room, standing against the wall, his arms straight out at his sides. His eyes were closed and there was a look of pain etched deeply in his face. He seemed to be held there by something that Jack couldn't see-no one that pale could be standing under his own power. The self-control that Jack had been fighting to maintain evaporated.
"Oh, God," he muttered.
The Daniel beside him saw the look on Jack's face, and knew immediately what the older man was thinking. "Jack, don't!" he warned quietly, but it was too late.
Jack was already running.
"Daniel!" he called out as he crossed the floor toward him. "Daniel!"
He skidded to a halt directly in front of the younger man against the wall, and he knew at once that this was his Daniel Jackson. The void had vanished. If that weren't enough, there were marks on his face, and visible through rips and tears in his shirt, that matched the ones that marred the body lying in the sanctuary.
"Damn it," Jack muttered gently. He reached out and carefully placed his right hand against Daniel's face. "Daniel, can you hear me? Daniel?"
Daniel's eyes fluttered briefly before opening. They darted around the room in wild confusion, glazed and unfocused. He tried to pull away from Jack's touch, and gasped out a terrified, "No!" that made Jack freeze in near horror.
"What did he do to you?" he whispered to himself. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and forced himself to continue.
"Daniel!" he said again, louder and more insistent. He forced himself to ignore Daniel's flinch and continued. "It's me. Daniel, it's Jack. Look at me."
Daniel turned his unfocused gaze toward Jack's voice, a look of desperate hope on his face.
"Jack?"
"Yeah, Daniel," Jack answered. "It's me. I'm here."
Daniel swallowed hard, and Jack could see the effort he was putting into concentrating.
"Real?"
Jack smiled softly. "Yeah, I'm real."
Jack expected happiness, or relief, possibly confusion, maybe even tears. He did not expect Daniel's face to harden or his eyes to turn cold and bitter.
"You left me!"
Jack's stomach jumped into his throat. "Hey, now ..."
"I told you," Daniel continued, his voice still weak and shaky but the expression of betrayal clear on his face. "I told you ... you wouldn't listen." The words were punctuated by Daniel's ragged gasps for breath and frantic shakes of his head. "But it ... it happened, and you left me. I watched you ... watched you leave, watched you go home ... home, where it was safe. I yelled for you ... to help, to stop, but Belos ..."
"Daniel, calm down..."
"No! Belos grabbed me, but I ... I couldn't get away, and I screamed, and you ... you just left!"
"We couldn't see you, Daniel," Jack insisted.
"Couldn't see me? Belos grabbed me ... pulled me away ... like I told you ..." Daniel gasped for breath and tried to lean forward, and Jack saw that his earlier assumption about invisible bonds around his wrists was correct. "I was right there ... right in front of you. How could you not see me?"
Jack glanced around the room almost frantically, noticing that the other Daniel had disappeared and hoping that he would make an appearance and help him explain the situation. It was obvious that this Daniel had absolutely no idea what had actually happened to him, and having the other Daniel there as proof would go a long way toward helping him understand, but he was nowhere to be seen. "Damn it, Daniel," he muttered.
Jack drew a deep breath and turned back to face Daniel again. "Look, I don't have very long to explain, because Belos is around here somewhere, and we've got to get you out of here, but you need to know something."
"What?" Daniel croaked.
"You're not quite as ... solid ... as you think you are."
"What?" Daniel was exhausted, confused and in pain, and he slumped back against the wall, all thought of further protest dying before it reached his lips.
"Belos pulled you away, you said. You think he just pulled you off the stretcher?"
Daniel nodded slowly and closed his eyes, squeezing them tightly shut against the remembered pain that Jack saw written so plainly on his face.
"He did a little more than that, Daniel. When he pulled you away, he left your body where it was."
"My ... what?" Daniel opened his eyes again and looked directly into Jack's. "My body?"
"See, what to you felt like Belos grabbing you and pulling you away, to us, Daniel ... it looked like you were having a heart attack. We thought you were dead."
Confusion began making its way back onto Daniel's face, replacing some of the anger and betrayal. "Wait, I ... I don't ..."
Jack glanced around once more. The back of his neck was beginning to prickle at him, and he knew he was running out of time.
"Okay, here." Jack reached back out and grabbed Daniel's face between his hands. Daniel flinched almost immediately. "You feel that?"
"Yes," Daniel answered, his voice once again shaky and fearful. Jack realized immediately that he'd misinterpreted Daniel's recoil from his touch; Daniel hadn't been pulling back from him. He'd been flinching from a memory, a sense memory-Belos had been the only one who'd touched him since he'd been removed from his body. Daniel had thought Jack was Belos.
"What does it feel like to you?"
"Weird," Daniel answered slowly. "Kind of ..."
"Muted, like? Sluggish? Like it feels when you touch something ..."
"... in a dream," Daniel finished. "It feels like I'm dreaming, like it's not real." Daniel closed his eyes and shuddered. "That's what it felt like when Belos touched me too."
Jack had to smile, albeit only briefly, that he'd been right. "That's because he's no more corporeal than we are, Daniel. He's exactly like us. He doesn't have a body either."
Daniel's eyes flew open. "You don't have ... He got you too!"
"No!" Jack denied. "No, he didn't get me. I left mine on purpose, to come get you."
"You can do that?"
Jack shrugged. "Well, I can right now. I don't know how much longer it's going to last, but ..."
Jack turned away quickly, both seeing and feeling the dark shadow that had appeared in the corridor and was making its way slowly in their direction. "Oh, crap."
He spun back toward Daniel. "We're outta time here, buddy," he said. "Tell me how to get you off this wall, because we have got to get out of here."
Daniel looked from one wrist to the other quickly, Jack's obvious urgency having pushed most of his disorientation, and most of his questions, to the back of his mind. "I ... I don't know. I never saw ... I don't see anything."
"Okay," Jack said. "Okay, we'll figure it out somehow. We've just got to ..." He looked back over his shoulder again. The shadow was still moving toward them, even more slowly than before, almost as if it were enjoying the desperation taking place in front of it.
"Damn you, not yet!" Jack yelled at the shadow. "You can't have him!"
Daniel's eyes widened when he saw the shadow looming in the hallway over Jack's shoulder. "He's here," he whispered fearfully. He shrank back as far against the wall as he could. "Belos is here!"
"Daniel, I kinda need you here. Don't freak out on me."
"No!" Daniel came to life, struggling futilely against his invisible bonds. "Leave him alone! I
won't let you do this!"
The shadow laughed, and Jack spun back toward it just in time to see the two glowing circles where the thing's eyes would have been. "Oh, great," he muttered. "That's just what I needed to see right now."
"Jack!" Daniel's voice wasn't as frantic as it had been before, but it was insistent.
"What?"
"What?" Daniel asked, confusion and fear again evident in his voice. "I didn't ... that wasn't ... Jack, what's going on?"
Jack smiled and looked toward the ceiling. "There you are!" he said. "It's about time you decided to show back up."
"I had something to take care of," Daniel's voice answered.
"Jack?" Daniel asked softly. "What ... who is that?"
Jack shrugged. "Well, Daniel, that's you. He's just not your you." Jack shook his head at the statement, and seeing no greater understanding on Daniel's face, decided not to push it any further. "He'll explain it. Daniel, can you get him free?"
"You cannot defeat me!" the shadow suddenly bellowed. "You pitiful, insignificant child! How dare you defy your god!"
"You're not a god!" Daniel's voice boomed back. "You're nothing but a God damned snake!"
Jack and Daniel both looked up toward the direction the voice seemed to be coming from, surprised to hear any Daniel Jackson speaking so harshly. Jack remembered something the other Daniel had said in the corridor; he'd said that Belos had used his body to kill his SG-1. One more glance at his own Daniel, still shaking in fear and pain, was enough to put any other questions to rest. If anything like what had happened to his Daniel had happened to the other one, then Belos deserved the hatred.
"You cannot hope to defeat me, child."
The air between Jack and Daniel shimmered slightly and then was split by a bright, blinding flash of light. Jack blinked it away and wasn't surprised to see the other Daniel Jackson standing there, fatigues replaced by simple robes, anger and determination on his face.
"Try me."
Belos roared in anger once more, and then the shadow disappeared through the wall.
Daniel blinked in astonishment at what stood in front of him-another Daniel Jackson, standing tall and defiant in the face of Belos' anger, repeating the words that he himself had spoken in his dream of the future.
"My dream," he whispered. "This is my dream or ... or my nightmare."
"Funny you should say that ..." Jack began.
"O'Neill!"
"Colonel!"
Sam's and Teal'c's voices echoed down the corridor and into the room. Jack rolled his eyes and sighed angrily. "I told them to stay put!"
"Yes," Daniel said with a smile. "But I told them not to."
"Why did you do that?" Jack demanded.
"You need back-up."
"I thought you were my back-up!"
"No," Daniel said with a crooked grin. "You were mine, remember? Besides, Teal'c was meditating when I got there, and Sam had already had Dr. Fraiser sedate her. They were coming anyway."
"Isn't anybody following my orders today?" Jack grumbled.
"No," Daniel answered simply.
Sam and Teal'c burst into the room. They both noticed the three men across the room immediately-Jack and Daniel and ...
"Daniel?" Sam asked. "Sir?"
"No time to explain, Carter," Jack answered with a quick wave of his hand as he crossed the room toward them. "Bottom line-the one stuck to the wall is ours. We've got to figure out a way to get him out of here." He looked around the area where the shadow had been, tracing the path it had followed out of the room with his eyes. "Where'd he go, Daniel?"
"Sam and Teal'c surprised him; he's regrouping. He'll be back soon," Daniel answered. "You need to be ready when."
"Ready for what?" Sam asked.
Daniel tilted his head to the side slightly. "For all hell to break loose," he answered before turning away from them and toward their Daniel.
"O'Neill, what is our objective?"
Jack sighed. "I'm not really sure. I think Daniel wants us to keep Belos busy so him and ... Daniel ... okay, this is so not going to work. I'm going to confuse myself." He shook his head and continued. "I think the other Daniel wants us to keep Belos busy if he comes back. He's going to get our Daniel loose, and then I think they're going to do ... something."
"What are they going to do?" Sam asked.
"How are we to keep Belos' attention diverted?" Teal'c asked at the same time.
"I don't know, and, um ... we'll make it up as we go."
"Is that a real plan, sir?"
"No, Carter, it's not," Jack answered with a shrug. "But it's going to have to do, because it's all we've got."
Chapter Eighteen
They walked through the door and into the room, with its eerie shadows cast by the torches that illuminated it. It took a few seconds for Jack's eyes to adjust to the change in lighting, but when they did, what he saw made his breath catch in his throat.
He was across the room, standing against the wall, his arms straight out at his sides. His eyes were closed and there was a look of pain etched deeply in his face. He seemed to be held there by something that Jack couldn't see-no one that pale could be standing under his own power. The self-control that Jack had been fighting to maintain evaporated.
"Oh, God," he muttered.
The Daniel beside him saw the look on Jack's face, and knew immediately what the older man was thinking. "Jack, don't!" he warned quietly, but it was too late.
Jack was already running.
"Daniel!" he called out as he crossed the floor toward him. "Daniel!"
He skidded to a halt directly in front of the younger man against the wall, and he knew at once that this was his Daniel Jackson. The void had vanished. If that weren't enough, there were marks on his face, and visible through rips and tears in his shirt, that matched the ones that marred the body lying in the sanctuary.
"Damn it," Jack muttered gently. He reached out and carefully placed his right hand against Daniel's face. "Daniel, can you hear me? Daniel?"
Daniel's eyes fluttered briefly before opening. They darted around the room in wild confusion, glazed and unfocused. He tried to pull away from Jack's touch, and gasped out a terrified, "No!" that made Jack freeze in near horror.
"What did he do to you?" he whispered to himself. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and forced himself to continue.
"Daniel!" he said again, louder and more insistent. He forced himself to ignore Daniel's flinch and continued. "It's me. Daniel, it's Jack. Look at me."
Daniel turned his unfocused gaze toward Jack's voice, a look of desperate hope on his face.
"Jack?"
"Yeah, Daniel," Jack answered. "It's me. I'm here."
Daniel swallowed hard, and Jack could see the effort he was putting into concentrating.
"Real?"
Jack smiled softly. "Yeah, I'm real."
Jack expected happiness, or relief, possibly confusion, maybe even tears. He did not expect Daniel's face to harden or his eyes to turn cold and bitter.
"You left me!"
Jack's stomach jumped into his throat. "Hey, now ..."
"I told you," Daniel continued, his voice still weak and shaky but the expression of betrayal clear on his face. "I told you ... you wouldn't listen." The words were punctuated by Daniel's ragged gasps for breath and frantic shakes of his head. "But it ... it happened, and you left me. I watched you ... watched you leave, watched you go home ... home, where it was safe. I yelled for you ... to help, to stop, but Belos ..."
"Daniel, calm down..."
"No! Belos grabbed me, but I ... I couldn't get away, and I screamed, and you ... you just left!"
"We couldn't see you, Daniel," Jack insisted.
"Couldn't see me? Belos grabbed me ... pulled me away ... like I told you ..." Daniel gasped for breath and tried to lean forward, and Jack saw that his earlier assumption about invisible bonds around his wrists was correct. "I was right there ... right in front of you. How could you not see me?"
Jack glanced around the room almost frantically, noticing that the other Daniel had disappeared and hoping that he would make an appearance and help him explain the situation. It was obvious that this Daniel had absolutely no idea what had actually happened to him, and having the other Daniel there as proof would go a long way toward helping him understand, but he was nowhere to be seen. "Damn it, Daniel," he muttered.
Jack drew a deep breath and turned back to face Daniel again. "Look, I don't have very long to explain, because Belos is around here somewhere, and we've got to get you out of here, but you need to know something."
"What?" Daniel croaked.
"You're not quite as ... solid ... as you think you are."
"What?" Daniel was exhausted, confused and in pain, and he slumped back against the wall, all thought of further protest dying before it reached his lips.
"Belos pulled you away, you said. You think he just pulled you off the stretcher?"
Daniel nodded slowly and closed his eyes, squeezing them tightly shut against the remembered pain that Jack saw written so plainly on his face.
"He did a little more than that, Daniel. When he pulled you away, he left your body where it was."
"My ... what?" Daniel opened his eyes again and looked directly into Jack's. "My body?"
"See, what to you felt like Belos grabbing you and pulling you away, to us, Daniel ... it looked like you were having a heart attack. We thought you were dead."
Confusion began making its way back onto Daniel's face, replacing some of the anger and betrayal. "Wait, I ... I don't ..."
Jack glanced around once more. The back of his neck was beginning to prickle at him, and he knew he was running out of time.
"Okay, here." Jack reached back out and grabbed Daniel's face between his hands. Daniel flinched almost immediately. "You feel that?"
"Yes," Daniel answered, his voice once again shaky and fearful. Jack realized immediately that he'd misinterpreted Daniel's recoil from his touch; Daniel hadn't been pulling back from him. He'd been flinching from a memory, a sense memory-Belos had been the only one who'd touched him since he'd been removed from his body. Daniel had thought Jack was Belos.
"What does it feel like to you?"
"Weird," Daniel answered slowly. "Kind of ..."
"Muted, like? Sluggish? Like it feels when you touch something ..."
"... in a dream," Daniel finished. "It feels like I'm dreaming, like it's not real." Daniel closed his eyes and shuddered. "That's what it felt like when Belos touched me too."
Jack had to smile, albeit only briefly, that he'd been right. "That's because he's no more corporeal than we are, Daniel. He's exactly like us. He doesn't have a body either."
Daniel's eyes flew open. "You don't have ... He got you too!"
"No!" Jack denied. "No, he didn't get me. I left mine on purpose, to come get you."
"You can do that?"
Jack shrugged. "Well, I can right now. I don't know how much longer it's going to last, but ..."
Jack turned away quickly, both seeing and feeling the dark shadow that had appeared in the corridor and was making its way slowly in their direction. "Oh, crap."
He spun back toward Daniel. "We're outta time here, buddy," he said. "Tell me how to get you off this wall, because we have got to get out of here."
Daniel looked from one wrist to the other quickly, Jack's obvious urgency having pushed most of his disorientation, and most of his questions, to the back of his mind. "I ... I don't know. I never saw ... I don't see anything."
"Okay," Jack said. "Okay, we'll figure it out somehow. We've just got to ..." He looked back over his shoulder again. The shadow was still moving toward them, even more slowly than before, almost as if it were enjoying the desperation taking place in front of it.
"Damn you, not yet!" Jack yelled at the shadow. "You can't have him!"
Daniel's eyes widened when he saw the shadow looming in the hallway over Jack's shoulder. "He's here," he whispered fearfully. He shrank back as far against the wall as he could. "Belos is here!"
"Daniel, I kinda need you here. Don't freak out on me."
"No!" Daniel came to life, struggling futilely against his invisible bonds. "Leave him alone! I
won't let you do this!"
The shadow laughed, and Jack spun back toward it just in time to see the two glowing circles where the thing's eyes would have been. "Oh, great," he muttered. "That's just what I needed to see right now."
"Jack!" Daniel's voice wasn't as frantic as it had been before, but it was insistent.
"What?"
"What?" Daniel asked, confusion and fear again evident in his voice. "I didn't ... that wasn't ... Jack, what's going on?"
Jack smiled and looked toward the ceiling. "There you are!" he said. "It's about time you decided to show back up."
"I had something to take care of," Daniel's voice answered.
"Jack?" Daniel asked softly. "What ... who is that?"
Jack shrugged. "Well, Daniel, that's you. He's just not your you." Jack shook his head at the statement, and seeing no greater understanding on Daniel's face, decided not to push it any further. "He'll explain it. Daniel, can you get him free?"
"You cannot defeat me!" the shadow suddenly bellowed. "You pitiful, insignificant child! How dare you defy your god!"
"You're not a god!" Daniel's voice boomed back. "You're nothing but a God damned snake!"
Jack and Daniel both looked up toward the direction the voice seemed to be coming from, surprised to hear any Daniel Jackson speaking so harshly. Jack remembered something the other Daniel had said in the corridor; he'd said that Belos had used his body to kill his SG-1. One more glance at his own Daniel, still shaking in fear and pain, was enough to put any other questions to rest. If anything like what had happened to his Daniel had happened to the other one, then Belos deserved the hatred.
"You cannot hope to defeat me, child."
The air between Jack and Daniel shimmered slightly and then was split by a bright, blinding flash of light. Jack blinked it away and wasn't surprised to see the other Daniel Jackson standing there, fatigues replaced by simple robes, anger and determination on his face.
"Try me."
Belos roared in anger once more, and then the shadow disappeared through the wall.
Daniel blinked in astonishment at what stood in front of him-another Daniel Jackson, standing tall and defiant in the face of Belos' anger, repeating the words that he himself had spoken in his dream of the future.
"My dream," he whispered. "This is my dream or ... or my nightmare."
"Funny you should say that ..." Jack began.
"O'Neill!"
"Colonel!"
Sam's and Teal'c's voices echoed down the corridor and into the room. Jack rolled his eyes and sighed angrily. "I told them to stay put!"
"Yes," Daniel said with a smile. "But I told them not to."
"Why did you do that?" Jack demanded.
"You need back-up."
"I thought you were my back-up!"
"No," Daniel said with a crooked grin. "You were mine, remember? Besides, Teal'c was meditating when I got there, and Sam had already had Dr. Fraiser sedate her. They were coming anyway."
"Isn't anybody following my orders today?" Jack grumbled.
"No," Daniel answered simply.
Sam and Teal'c burst into the room. They both noticed the three men across the room immediately-Jack and Daniel and ...
"Daniel?" Sam asked. "Sir?"
"No time to explain, Carter," Jack answered with a quick wave of his hand as he crossed the room toward them. "Bottom line-the one stuck to the wall is ours. We've got to figure out a way to get him out of here." He looked around the area where the shadow had been, tracing the path it had followed out of the room with his eyes. "Where'd he go, Daniel?"
"Sam and Teal'c surprised him; he's regrouping. He'll be back soon," Daniel answered. "You need to be ready when."
"Ready for what?" Sam asked.
Daniel tilted his head to the side slightly. "For all hell to break loose," he answered before turning away from them and toward their Daniel.
"O'Neill, what is our objective?"
Jack sighed. "I'm not really sure. I think Daniel wants us to keep Belos busy so him and ... Daniel ... okay, this is so not going to work. I'm going to confuse myself." He shook his head and continued. "I think the other Daniel wants us to keep Belos busy if he comes back. He's going to get our Daniel loose, and then I think they're going to do ... something."
"What are they going to do?" Sam asked.
"How are we to keep Belos' attention diverted?" Teal'c asked at the same time.
"I don't know, and, um ... we'll make it up as we go."
"Is that a real plan, sir?"
"No, Carter, it's not," Jack answered with a shrug. "But it's going to have to do, because it's all we've got."