Journeys (4b/5)
Title: Journeys (Table of Contents)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Nothing you recognize is mine. I gain nothing of material value from this.
Part I a b Part II a b c d Part III a b c d e Part IV a
13 May 2003; SGC, Earth; 2200 hrs
The Ancients, Jonas thought, should have picked a phonetic system and stuck to it.
Well, that wasn't fair. He didn't actually expect languages and societies to stay static over time. It was just that Ancient, more than any other language the SGC cared about, was a constant guessing game. There was a longer gap between Ancient and the closest attested Earth equivalent than between most other languages, and, with Ayiana dead, there weren't any living people on Earth to ask about it.
The whole thing was rather discouraging. Jonas could remember things exactly--equations, conversations, idioms, vocabulary, grammatical exceptions, technical specifications--but this, with the Ancient tablet...
Daniel Jackson's notes on the tablet and the conclusions he'd drawn made sense--the way a puzzle made sense after someone else put the pieces together--but even after hammering out a bit more of the translation, Jonas still couldn't figure out what to do with the rest of the pieces.
Teal'c came in while Jonas was feeding the fish and hoping that their careless circuits around the tank would bring him some inspiration.
"I must be missing something," Jonas said, rubbing the back of his neck.
"You said that the dialect is very old," Teal'c offered. "What do you know thus far?"
"Well..." Jonas returned to his desk to look at his notes, "I know that there's a city that the Ancients built--Daniel Jackson translates it in his notes as the 'city of the lost'--and that there was a plague that killed most of the Ancients. Maybe the thing Ayiana had, remember?"
"Indeed," Teal'c said, scowling. Jonas winced. None of them liked remembering what had happened in the aftermath of that disease--Colonel O'Neill's implantation and subsequent capture by Ba'al was not a highlight of his time at the SGC.
"Anyway," he went on, "they Ascended to escape the plague. And..."
He stopped. And...and...something. Something about the plague and the city.
"What is it?" Teal'c said.
Jonas narrowed his eyes, trying to catch some thought that was eluding him. "I don't know," he said, shuffling back through a pile of notes and reports he'd set aside. "That reminded me of...I don't know. Maybe I read something once and it's registering in my mind somewhere..."
"I am certain the answer will come to you," Teal'c said.
"Yeah," Jonas said, frustrated, then forced himself to slow down and go back through the notes in order. "You think maybe they never finished the city?" he asked. "If there was that plague..."
Teal'c raised his chin, looking thoughtful. "It is possible," he said. "If it held great technology, perhaps they were building it to shelter themselves from a plague or defend themselves from an enemy who would have taken advantage of their weakened state."
"Maybe," Jonas said. "But the plague killed them first."
"Why do you think the city was not completed?" Teal'c said.
Frowning, Jonas flipped quickly through his notes and wondered if he'd simply imagined seeing that somewhere, because he couldn't find a reference to it now. "It just...sort of came to me." He sighed. "I don't know."
"Perhaps you should begin again tomorrow," Teal'c suggested, glancing pointedly at the clock. Jonas followed his gaze, surprised to find that hours had passed since he'd last looked up.
"Yeah. I'll think about this again in the morning. Any change with Abydos? I know Skaara's been getting restless."
"None yet. We received word from Tagrea, however--the Prometheus will not be ready to return for months. The Tok'ra remain our only source of ships capable of interstellar travel."
Jonas nodded. "And anything from the Jaffa?"
"Anubis has recovered from his brief defeat," Teal'c said grimly.
"Anubis was beating them even before he really had his own army," Jonas said. "Even before anyone knew he was back. Losing one ship and the Eyes probably wasn't a setback so much as it was a...a lack of a step forward, right?"
Teal'c seemed to consider that for a while. "He is undoubtedly foremost among the Goa'uld."
"So how is this going to play out? Anubis knows the other System Lords turned on him, so is he going to keep his head down until he's strong enough that they can't defeat him easily all at once, or is he going to strike now before they can recover?"
"He does not yet have the power to defeat them all at once," Teal'c said. "But I am certain that he will begin to attack the others one by one to ensure that they never become too strong."
"The others have four of the Eyes, though," Jonas pointed out.
"However, some of the Jaffa have spoken of strange behavior from Yu's forces."
"Strange how?" Jonas said.
"They say he is accusing other System Lords of crimes that never occurred," Teal'c said. "He spends much of his time near his homeworld, sequestering the other armies under his command there as well. There is talk that the other Goa'uld are planning to replace him, or to steal the Eyes that he holds."
"I don't understand," Jonas said. "Yu has been the most reasonable Goa'uld I've heard of, and now, he's...what, going mad?"
"I do not know," Teal'c said. "But it has begun to sow more dissent between the other System Lords at a time when we need them to ally against Anubis. Unless," he added, "we find the city of the lost and defeat Anubis ourselves."
"If things continue as they have been, Anubis's victory is only a matter of time," Jonas guessed.
"Perhaps," Teal'c said, reluctantly, in the tone that really meant 'indeed.' "I believe he may bide his time until the other System Lords have resolved their current disputes."
"Let's hope so," Jonas said. Hopefully, by then, they would have a miraculous plan to defeat the System Lords--a massive strike using some derivative of the symbiote poison, maybe, once they found a way not to kill Jaffa. Actually, speaking of that... "How...uh...have you been talking to other Jaffa about tretonin, too?"
Teal'c's entire body tensed. "They know of its existence," he said, almost calmly, but Jonas knew enough about body language to know that his friend wanted him to shut up.
"Oh," Jonas said, uncertain of how much to push. He knew Teal'c had had trouble adjusting to the new drug, but he didn't know how to ask about it, or even if it was all right to ask whether the problem was more physical or mental. "So, you..." He tried to find the right way to phrase it and settled on, "You and Dr. Fraiser have found the right dosage for you by now, right?"
"We have," Teal'c said. This time, he added a scowl whose meaning was unmistakable.
Jonas made a face. "Right. Okay. You should get some rest--"
Teal'c's glare turned to ice.
Swallowing, Jonas added, "--and so should I. There's still a lot to do in the morning."
Finally, Teal'c relented a little and turned away. "Indeed," he said.
"Teal'c, you know...if there's anything--"
"There is not, Jonas Quinn," Teal'c said.
Jonas sighed. "Okay," he answered unhappily. "Good night."
Teal'c nodded once and left. Jonas made his way to the office door and peeked out to see Teal'c touch his abdomen where the symbiote pouch had once been before he walked out of sight.
...x...
17 May 2003; Major Carter's Lab, SGC; 0700 hrs
"You're here early," Jonas said when he saw Sam already in her lab.
She glanced away from her laptop, waving him in. "I just can't shake the idea something's going to go horribly wrong. You know, what with the fleet of motherships in our orbit a couple weeks ago."
Jonas made a face. "At least you're staying cheerful," he said. She rolled her eyes, but it made her smile, too. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure," she said, not looking up from her work.
"It's about Ra," he added, taking a seat.
"I'm probably not the best person here to ask about Ra," she said. "I wasn't exactly present at the Abydonian Great Rebellion. Colonel O'Neill or Teal'c--"
"Not about him personally," Jonas said. "Ra was the most powerful System Lord until he was defeated, right? He must've been a powerful symbol for the Tok'ra to use him in their name."
"As far as we know, he was one of the bigger ones," she said, nodding. "At least in this part of the galaxy, although it's possible other parts were dominated by...by Lord Yu, for example."
"But Ra still didn't know what the Ancient tablet said."
She folded her hands on her desk, looking thoughtful. "Well, he could have, I guess. Teal'c says he hasn't heard about anything like a lost city, so if Ra did know anything about it--"
"And we have to assume he would've looked for it if he'd been able to read it," he added.
"--then he kept it pretty quiet," Sam finished. "That's par for the course for powerful Goa'uld, though; it was kept in a secret chamber, after all."
"How much do the Goa'uld know about the Ancients, anyway?" Jonas asked. "How much would someone like Ra have known?"
"It's hard to say," she said. She closed her laptop, turning her attention fully to the question. "But if they knew a lot, they'd probably be using more Ancient technology."
"Maybe they didn't understand it enough to capitalize on it," he suggested. "Maybe that's why Anubis's technology seems so different--he's half-Ascended and probably picked up a lot from the Others--Ascended Ancients."
"You're right--I bet that's what Khonsu had noticed and was going to tell us before Herak killed him," Sam said, wincing. "But it could be even be simpler than that. Most of the 'gate addresses in the Ancient database are not in the Abydos cartouche data, and we've rarely found traces of the Ancients except on addresses from the Ancient database; in fact, the only definitive present connection we know of between them is that the Goa'uld didn't dare to go to Kheb. Maybe the Goa'uld were never really exposed to the Ancients except on the battlefield."
"The battlefield?" Jonas asked, and then answered his own question. "Right. When Colonel O'Neill had that repository of knowledge in his head, the Asgard told him the Ancients used to be one of the four races fighting the Goa'uld. But...hold on, when did the Goa'uld first start taking hosts?"
"Our best estimates put Ra's first contact with Earth about ten thousand years ago, give or take, but there were Goa'uld regularly using other-than-human hosts for...ten, even twenty-five thousand years before that. But that's just a rough estimate based on some very fuzzy translations of Unas oral history."
"Sometime in the last forty thousand years," he summarized. "Less than a hundred thousand."
"That's the right order of magnitude, yes."
"So how did they ever meet the Ancients," Jonas said, holding up his translation notes, "who Ascended about five million years ago?"
Sam chewed on her lip, thinking, then said, "Well...it's possible the Ancients themselves weren't part of that war, but they left technology or knowledge that were used to fight the Goa'uld."
"Okay, that's reasonable," he said, making a mental note to review intergalactic history when he had some free time. "So where did Ra get that tablet?"
"Could've been anywhere," she said, shrugging. "We've found abandoned technology lying around, and we haven't spent thousands of years exploring. Ra might have just picked the tablet up somewhere, whether or not the Ancients had already Ascended by that time--in fact, it could explain how little the Goa'uld seem to know about them, other than the basics. The other three races of the alliance would've tried to keep Ancient knowledge out of Goa'uld hands."
"Like leaving Ancient knowledge in databases mounted on walls," Jonas said, and then, "Huh." Something jangled in his mind again, but he still couldn't quite catch what he was looking for.
"What?" she said.
"I don't know," he said. "Can you say all of that again?"
Giving him an odd look, Sam said, "Uh...not word for word."
"Ancient database," he said, thinking backward. "The alliance of the four races...which were Asgard, Ancient, Nox, Furling. The Asgard...no. Wait, yes, Colonel O'Neill found out when the Asgard took the database out of his head, because it was programming his brain to do...things..."
The answer fell into place.
"That's it," he said, standing up. "He...and the Ancient repository of knowledge--that's it!"
"What's it?" she said cautiously.
Excited, Jonas explained, "The city! It's the city of the lost! We don't know the 'gate address!"
"Right," Sam said. "Yeah."
"No, no--we don't need it," he said. It was only when he was at the door that he realized she wasn't beside him. "Sam, c'mon!"
Wearing a bemused smile, she said, "Jonas, what are you talking about?"
"Come on!" he repeated, and ran out the door toward the general's office.
XXXXX
17 May 2003; SGC, Earth; 0745 hrs
"So," Jack said as he walked Skaara slowly toward the infirmary, "anything fun planned today?"
"I do not know," Skaara said, not quite managing to walk casually as he manfully pretended he didn't have a hole healing in his stomach. "It is...a bit boring."
"Dr. Fraiser thinks you can step up your physical therapy soon," Jack offered. "So the good news is it won't be as boring as sitting in a bed all day; the bad news is it'll hurt a lot more."
Actually, the good news was that Skaara wasn't going to be crippled for life, and that there was a 'life' involved in the equation. That staff blast had done a lot of damage, and he might not ever be quite as strong as he had been, but Jack was just glad the kid was on his feet.
Skaara made a face. "I know," he said. "Have you heard from the Tok'ra about Abydos?"
"You know, funny you should ask..." Jack said, then held up a hand when Skaara looked up with wide eyes. "Now, hold on. They've got someone on a mission who might be wrapping things up soon. If he finishes as planned and if he gets away in a ship with a working hyperdrive, they'll have him swing by Abydos and take a look around. It might be a couple of days; it might be a couple of weeks or even more if things go pear-shaped on the Tok'ra's mission."
Skaara swallowed, but nodded. "Will you come with me when I return to Abydos?"
"Well, sure," Jack said, smiling in what he hoped was an optimistic way. "I said I'd go to your wedding, didn't I? I want to meet this girl of yours."
He earned a grin for that. None of them mentioned the other possibility: that Skaara's fiancée, his father, his sister, his friends, and everyone else might not have made it through. Their own curiosity aside, they had to go with Skaara so that someone could bring him back to Earth if it turned out something was wrong on Abydos.
"Maybe Dan'yel will be there," Skaara said wistfully, as if he didn't know that if Daniel had been on Abydos all this time, he could have been here on Earth, too. Ascended people didn't need functioning Stargates to zip around.
"Are you trying to replace me as best man?" Jack said.
Skaara laughed and rolled his eyes, and as selfish as it might be, Jack couldn't help wishing just a little bit that he were walking and talking with someone else instead. He had no doubt Skaara felt the same.
"Colonel O'Neill?" an airman said just as they reached the infirmary. "You're needed in the briefing room, sir."
Skaara looked up at him, looking torn between trepidation and anticipation, so Jack made sure he showed neither on his face as he said, "All right, Skaara, here's your stop. Take it easy, you hear?" He caught an nurse's eye, tilting his head toward the still-unsteady Skaara.
"I will, I will," Skaara grumbled obligingly. Jack started off, but glanced back in time to see his worried face still watching from around the doorframe until he was firmly ushered to a bed.
Hammond, Carter, and Jonas were already in the briefing room when Jack arrived. Before he could open his mouth to ask what was going on, Jonas turned to him with a rather maniacal grin and said, "I got it!"
"Hope it's not contagious," Jack said automatically, and realized it wasn't about the Tok'ra mission or a ship at all.
Jonas paused, then said, "That--that's a good one, sir."
"What has happened?" Teal'c said as he hurried up the stairs.
"Jonas thinks he knows where the city of the lost is," Carter said.
"The city of the what?" Jack said.
"The city on the Ancient tablet," Jonas explained excitedly. "Now. I couldn't figure out how the tablet was supposed to help us, because all it seemed to be was a...a history of sorts. And I couldn't figure out why something would be called 'city of the lost,' but I realized: they were building some great city and then they started getting infected with a plague before the city could be finished."
"Okay," Jack said. "Do we know where this city is?"
"No...but I know how to find it," he insisted. "Colonel, you put a lot of 'gate addresses into the dialing computer when you had the Ancient database in your head."
"Apparently," Jack said. "And?"
"And we haven't seen nearly all of them, even with probes," Jonas went on. "But if they were building some great, central city when they all died or Ascended, wouldn't it stand to reason that it might be the last address on the list?"
Jack stared at him, then looked at Carter and Teal'c. "Wouldn't we have thought of that?" he asked. It sounded too simple not to have thought of it. Then again, it also sounded too simple. The one thing he knew about the Ancients was that nothing was simple with them.
"Well...no, sir," Carter said. "We didn't think of it."
"Did you not say the Ancients were killed by a plague while building this city?" Teal'c said.
"Yeah, why do you say that again?" Carter said, setting her hands on her hips.
"Because...because...well, we know they ended up being killed by a plague, and I think this might have been their last city," Jonas said, frowning. As Jack tried to decide whether that was circular logic and where it actually connected, Jonas added, "Colonel, I realize it's not hard evidence, but I think this is worth a shot."
Carter shrugged. "It wouldn't hurt to look, sir."
"Okay...but I also seem to remember being almost killed the last time we found an Ancient with the plague," Jack said, barely stopping a shudder as he remembered Kanan and Ba'al.
"Actually, we might be okay there," Carter said. "The pathogen Ayiana carried was presumably preserved in her body. Otherwise, after such a long time and with no living hosts, I suspect the disease wouldn't have lasted. After all, the Ancients of P4X-639 were killed by a plague thousands of years ago--maybe the same one--but we were perfectly fine there."
Jack racked his brain for P4X-639. "The planet that caused the time loop," Teal'c told him.
"Ah," Jack said. "So...possibly dangerous Ancient technology, but not Ancient diseases."
"Probably," Jonas said. "We're hoping for dangerous Ancient technology, aren't we?"
"Okay," Jack conceded. "But I thought you said I didn't finish putting the addresses in after the whole...head-sucker thing."
"To be honest, sir," Carter said, "we don't know. You might have, and even if it turns out not to be the right place...well, Ancient planets that aren't listed in the Abydos cartouche are a good place to start looking for more clues."
"If I'm right about the order of the planets, starting at the end will at least give us more of a chance that we'll find references to the very last planet," Jonas pointed out. "Or a direct link from there to the city of the lost. Sir, I don't know if there's much more I can do from here."
"The coordinates are already being recalculated," Hammond said. "If the MALP doesn't detect any immediate threat, you'll check it out. Take SG-3 and -5 with you."
...x...
17 May 2003; Village, P4T-3G6 (Vis Uban); 1500 hrs
The people they met spoke Egyptian, more or less. Actually, they spoke quite a few things, including a bit of some very old-sounding English that was all but incompatible with Tau'ri English. They were travelers, they said--Jonas called them nomads--and had met many people of many cultures, just as SG-1 did themselves.
And then, the man who had greeted them--Khordib--returned with an old man called Shamda, who gave them all a vaguely suspicious look and said something that Teal'c translated as, "No one can be a friend if you know not whether to trust them."
"You should not judge a book by its...first...page," Jack retorted in what he felt was passable Abydonian.
A glint appeared in Shamda's eye. He straightened and countered, "The promises of one's enemies are made to be broken."
Carter ducked her head, looking bemused, but how often did Jack get to play any sort of intellectual patty cake off-world? Rising to the challenge, he said, "But honesty is still best."
"He who has too many friends has none," Shamda answered swiftly.
"Ah," Jack said, raising a finger, "but birds...uh...that have feathers that look...the same..."
Shamda tilted his head, squinting interestedly. "I am unfamiliar with that story. What lesson does it teach?"
Uh... "It's about...groups," Jack said. "Being...in a group. And...I don't know it well myself," he said, surrendering what would otherwise turn into a linguistic struggle too complicated for him to get out in favor of turning the conversation around. "But we are not your enemies. If you give us a chance, we can prove it."
"Colonel!"
Jack turned to see Colonel Reynolds and his team walking toward SG-1. He tensed slightly, but aside from the fact that the man wasn't assessing the site and the perimeter as he'd been ordered to do, all of SG-3 looked more excited than anxious.
"We found something you might want to see," Reynolds said.
Weapon, Jack thought first. Maybe an Ancient stronghold.
But instead, there was a regular person following them, wearing a faded blue robe in the style of all of Shamda's people and looking a lot like--
Jack's thoughts ground to a halt.
A familiar face looked up at him, a familiar blue gaze roving over all of them in that familiar way. "Daniel?" Jack heard himself say.
"Arrom," Khordib corrected, but Jack wasn't listening anymore.
Daniel was watching all of them curiously. Jack opened his mouth to ask very loudly where the hell he'd been for the last few weeks and why the hell he hadn't at least contacted the SGC to tell them he was okay and was, by the way, sitting around in the Ancient city of the lost...
But then Daniel shifted his feet, and Jack noticed a light puff of dry dirt rising from under his sandal to settle gently on Daniel's rather dusty toes, and all Jack could think was that people who were made of energy and were immaterial weren't supposed to get dusty but Daniel was, so he was real and solid this time, and the only thing that came out of his mouth was, "What?"
"It is what we call him," Khordib said. It took Jack a minute to realize he meant 'Arrom.'
"It means 'naked one'," Shamda added.
"We found him naked in the forest, a short time ago," Kordib said.
So why had Daniel been walking around naked in a forest, and why was he going by another name?
The sudden, sickening thought occurred that Jack could be imagining all of this. So soon after that disaster on Abydos, maybe Jack's mind was playing tricks on him and he was just seeing Daniel's features on some stranger.
Then the new arrival lowered his eyebrows the way only Daniel could do, the way that meant I'm-confused and I'm-waiting-why-aren't-you-talking and hold-on-wait-I'm-thinking. He folded his arms over his chest, looking for all the world like he had when he'd been about a foot shorter than he was now, back when...
When he hadn't recognized anything around him.
Daniel's gaze met Jack's again and moved away, like Jack was part of the surroundings and not the person who knew him best in the entire universe, so Jack knew, even before Reynolds said, "He doesn't seem to remember anything. I'm not sure he even understands English."
Annoyance flitted across Daniel's face. "I saw that," Jack said immediately, pointing an accusatory finger at him. "You do understand us. What is this, some sort of game?"
The annoyance became confusion, not recognition. "Who are you?" Daniel said, in Abydonian.
By habit, Jonas started to answer in the same language, "We are--"
"No," Jack interrupted sharply. "He's our translator. He doesn't need a translation." Jonas shut up.
Carter stepped forward. "Daniel, it's okay," she said, reaching toward him. "It's me, Sam--" Daniel's hand blocked hers before she could make contact. She pulled back slowly.
"Do you not recognize us, Daniel Jackson?" Teal'c tried.
In answer, Daniel backed away two steps, his expression wary, then walked quickly past all of them. Jack watched him go until he ducked into a tent.
"Do you truly know who he is?" Khordib said, calling Jack's attention back.
Jack opened his mouth, but apparently his mouth was being as stubbornly disobedient today as Daniel on a bad day, and nothing came out. Carter was looking at her hand, as though she wasn't sure whether to feel more hurt or astonished that she'd actually touched him. "Yes," Teal'c said quietly when neither of them answered. "We thought him lost forever."
"You say he 'appeared?'" Jonas asked. "No one knows where he came from?"
Shamda shook his head. "No one--not even Arrom himself." He cocked his head to the side, looking all of them over. "If what you say is true...you cannot think this meeting happened purely by chance?"
That was a good point. "No, we don't think that," Jack said, and broke away from the group, striding toward the tent where Daniel had disappeared.
When Jack ducked down to see into the entrance, Daniel looked up, startled. "Leave me alone," he said, still sticking stubbornly to Abydonian.
Jack ignored him and stepped inside, letting the edge of the canvas drop again behind him. "I know you know what I'm saying," Jack said. Daniel didn't move from where he was sitting on a pallet, but he glanced up again, briefly. "Think about that, Daniel. Even you can't know an entire language the first time you hear it. What do you think that means, huh?"
Daniel twisted his hands together, sitting even more stiffly than before, his eyes following as Jack sat down on opposite him. Finally, he said, "Dan..." He paused to clear his throat. "Daniel?"
Amnesia, Jack firmly reminded himself. Be patient. "Your name is Daniel Jackson. You were born in the village of Nagada on the planet Abydos. You're officially a foreign volunteer serving with the SGC on Earth. Unofficially, we picked you up once and just never got rid of you." He waited for that flicker of recognition, but nothing happened. "I'm Jack O'Neill, commander of SG-1. Until about a year ago, you were part of my unit. Any of this sound familiar?"
No answer.
"You were--are a friend of ours," Jack went on. "You died about a year ago--well, no," he amended when Daniel's eyes flicked up and said, Yeah, right. "You just...sort of died. Actually, you...Ascended to another level of existence. The last time we saw you, you convinced us to help you fight Anubis and then had to try to save our asses."
This time, Daniel glanced at the gun still clipped to Jack's chest and pursed his lips skeptically.
"Don't ask me why you could do some stuff and not others," Jack said. "Pissed me off, too. Anyway, since then you've obviously retaken human form somehow..."
Daniel raised his eyebrows.
"I can see how this might sound a bit unusual," Jack said. Daniel didn't answer. Impatient, Jack said, "Look, I'm not just gonna sit here talking to myself."
Daniel tilted his head and looked back at him pointedly. I didn't ask you to come, Jack read in his expression. You could go away.
"C'mon--say something," Jack said.
Daniel said something in his native language far too fast for Jack to understand. If the complete amnesia hadn't been obvious, Jack would have suspected him of having said it that way on purpose, just to annoy him.
"I meant in English," Jack said. "If you're gonna speak in Abydonian, you'll have to slow down."
"Jackson," Daniel said.
"That's you," Jack said warily.
Daniel pointed to him and said, "Jack."
"And that's me."
"Jack...son?" he said, pointing his finger between the two of them.
"No," Jack said quickly, realizing what the question was, not even calling Daniel on the fact that obviously he knew the word 'son' and could probably explain the roots of his own name; correcting the misunderstanding took precedence. That seemed to confuse Daniel even more, though. "It's just a name. They really wouldn't've let me be your commanding officer if you'd been my son."
"Commanding officer," Daniel repeated blankly, his eyebrows drawn low. He didn't say it like someone repeating meaningless foreign sounds--he knew what the words meant and wasn't admitting it, maybe still puzzling over it himself.
"Look," Jack said, "don't you at least want to know who you are?"
Instead of answering him, Daniel looked at the ground. Jack waited a full minute--okay, it was at least ten seconds--for him to say something, but he didn't. "Daniel--"
"Arrom," Daniel said quietly.
"Daniel," Jack insisted.
Jack, Daniel didn't say.
XXXXX
18 May 2003; Village, P4T-3G6 (Vis Uban); 1600 hrs
Teal'c stopped at the entrance to Daniel Jackson's tent and watched him light one candle using the flame from another. He moved in the same way--he even tilted his head the same way, watching a thin line of smoke rise until the wick caught fire. He remembered, Teal'c thought; perhaps he simply did not know that he remembered.
"May I enter?" Teal'c said in the Egyptian language, suspecting that it would feel more comfortable and less alien at the moment--O'Neill and Major Carter both said that Daniel Jackson would not speak to them in English.
Daniel Jackson's head turned to look at him. His eyes lingered on the tattoo on Teal'c's forehead, but his expression was one of curiosity, not of recognition or even fear. "You know me also?" he said in his own tongue.
"I know you very well. I am your friend, called Teal'c."
"Do you not have many names like the others?" Daniel Jackson said.
Teal'c smiled, remembering another conversation like this that they had had, though it had been in reverse that time. "I do not," he said, resisting the urge to step forward and sit, as they had done so many times before. Caution was needed now.
When he remained outside, Daniel Jackson said, almost as a question, "Jim didn't wait for my permission to come in."
Teal'c felt his smile falter. "Perhaps you mean to say 'Jack?'"
"Jack," Daniel Jackson repeated, furrowing his brow. "The man who was here earlier--?"
"Jack," Teal'c said firmly. "Jack O'Neill."
"Did I know someone else called Jim?"
"It is possible," Teal'c said. "You knew and worked with a great many people." Daniel nodded faintly but still did not seem to understand. "If Colonel O'Neill--Jack--did not ask your permission, that is because he is accustomed to overlooking some courtesies with you. The two of you were very close."
Daniel Jackson nodded slowly. "You may enter," he added.
"Thank you," Teal'c said as he bent and ducked inside.
"But I don't know what you want from me," Daniel Jackson said.
"Only to allow us to help you," Teal'c said, lowering himself into a seat. "I know that my friend would have wanted us to help him if ever he forgot who he was."
"Then my wishes don't matter?" he answered. "Only his?"
Teal'c paused. He had not thought of it in such a way. "You are not two different people," he pointed out. "Part of you is simply hidden from your own mind. Do you truly wish not to remember all those years of your life?"
"Perhaps I don't like who I was," Daniel Jackson said.
Something about the words made Teal'c suspicious. "Have you remembered something?"
"No," Daniel Jackson lied, because he did not remember that he could never lie to Teal'c.
"A name?" Teal'c prompted. "An image? Perhaps in a dream?"
"No!" he repeated, and then, the words directed toward the ground, "I don't know. I couldn't remember when I woke up, but it...bothered me at the time."
"It will always be so until you know what happened and why," Teal'c said, curious about what kind of thing Daniel Jackson had remembered on his own, even in a dream, but asking now would only distance them further. "I told you once before that you should not allow fear of what you could be to impede the good person that you are."
Biting his lip, Daniel Jackson looked up from under his eyebrows, considering. "I don't know what to say to that," he finally said.
"If you try to remember," Teal'c said, "perhaps you will understand."
"These people have been very kind to me. This place is all I know."
"But it is not," Teal'c countered. "You know much more. Before we lost you, the SGC valued you greatly for your knowledge and your intellect. It was with the help of records you left that we were able to find this planet."
"I left records to tell you where to find me...and then forgot that I would be here myself," he said, looking confused.
"Perhaps you did not know this would happen to you," Teal'c said. "But I cannot believe it was solely chance that brought us to this planet such a short time after you were found here."
"Then what do you think it was?" Daniel Jackson said.
Teal'c had not asked Jonas Quinn whether the inspiration to search this planet had been his own and suspected he would not have been able to say for certain in any case. "That remains unclear," Teal'c admitted. "But there must be a connection. While we were preparing to fight Anubis, you told us of this place where we could find great treasures--we believed we would find devices here to help us in our war."
"What devices?" Daniel Jackson said, looking interested--looking like himself--for the first time. "Who is Anubis?"
Teal'c stood. "Perhaps you would like to rejoin us and find out," he invited, moving toward the tent flap.
Daniel Jackson was quiet for a minute. "You are trying to trick me into joining you," he accused.
"It was you who asked the questions," Teal'c pointed out. "I only answered them. My friend, I would not force any choice upon you, but I also do not believe you will choose ignorance for fear of knowledge."
Before he could leave, Daniel Jackson said, "Teal'c, was I happy there?"
It pained Teal'c that he could not say 'yes' as simply as he wished he could, and yet, neither could he lie to lure Daniel Jackson to Earth. "You were loved by many," Teal'c finally said. "You have shared good times with us, and you truly believed that what we did was important."
"You do not say 'yes,'" Daniel Jackson observed.
"Would you hide from the truth because it displeases you?" Teal'c asked. This seemed to surprise Daniel Jackson into silence again. "We are likely to remain on this planet for some time," he added. "I ask that you consider returning home with us. Come to us when you wish."
...x...
O'Neill was waiting impatiently outside the tent. "He talked?" he said when Teal'c approached. "I saw talking going on."
"Indeed," Teal'c said.
"Well?"
"He will come with us."
"Really?" O'Neill said, hope lighting his expression. "He said that?"
"He did not," Teal'c said. "Nonetheless, I am certain."
This did not seem to be nearly enough for O'Neill, who scowled at the ground. "If Oma was the one who did this..." he started, warning in his tone.
"Daniel Jackson is alive," Teal'c reminded him. Only a day ago, that would have been more than any of them would have ever asked for. "Perhaps we have Oma Desala to thank."
"Yeah," O'Neill said, but before they could go on, Major Carter returned with Jonas Quinn.
"We, uh...we sent up a UAV," Jonas Quinn said. "But it'll take weeks for us to scour this place properly."
"What about Daniel?" Major Carter asked worriedly.
From behind them, Daniel Jackson said, "He is going home."
Teal'c turned around to see him step out from under the tent, adjusting a simple bag over his shoulder. For a long moment, no one spoke, and the determined expression on Daniel Jackson's face faded slowly into uncertainty. "No?" he asked.
"Yes," O'Neill said immediately, emphatically. "Yes. Home. God, Daniel, you really had us worried there for a second."
"Worried...where?" Daniel Jackson said.
His speech was oddly careful for someone who usually spoke too much rather than too little and O'Neill stared at him doubtfully, but Major Carter seemed relieved. Teal'c thought that teaching Daniel Jackson Tau'ri turns of speech again was a small price to pay for having him back. "Never mind," O'Neill said, looking unnerved.
"Will I learn what the...the devices are?" Daniel Jackson said eagerly, looking around himself.
"What?" Major Carter said.
"I believe you must relearn other things first, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said. "We will have much time on this planet to see what is here."
"One step at a time," Jonas Quinn said, almost managing to sound more cheerful than awkward.
XXXXX
18 May 2003; SGC, Earth; 1800 hrs
Arrom-who-was-Daniel Jackson looked down at himself when he felt his foot land on a hard, cold surface instead of the sand he had been expecting. When he stopped, the person behind him--Major Samantha Carter whom he called Sam--placed a hand on his back and pushed gently. Daniel lifted one foot and took a step, then lifted the other and took another step, and by then, the fascinating view before him had caught his attention.
He had hoped that seeing things that he was supposed to know would remind him and that he would suddenly remember. Now, it felt as though he would understand if he could simply reach a little further, but every time he tried to catch some memory lingering just out of reach, it disappeared.
"Welcome back, Mr. Jackson," said a man at the bottom of the ramp. Jonas had talked nearly the whole time while they had walked back to the Stargate, perhaps because no one else to know what to say, so Daniel knew that this must be General Hammond.
It took the sharp noise of someone's cough before he remembered that he was Jackson. It took him another moment to remember that he did not need to be frightened of the fact that he knew this language without remembering that he knew it. "Thank you," Daniel said carefully, but the words tumbled easily from his lips, so he tried again. "Thank you very much."
There was a man beside the one who had spoken, this one with long, black hair and a face that was beaming delightedly. "We did not think to see you again, brother," the man said.
Daniel narrowed his eyes, trying to bring the man's features into sharper focus. "Am I Brother?" he asked hesitantly. A second later, he remembered what the word 'brother' meant.
He looked in question at the man next to him--Jack? Jim? he could not remember which--who made a face that looked embarrassed and disappointed and almost angry, the same way that he had sounded angry before, even as he insisted that he was a good friend. Daniel did not understand what this meant.
"You have no memory of us?" Hammond asked.
Daniel shook his head. "No. I don't remember."
He looked back at the brother he did not know, standing at the bottom of the ramp, who suddenly did not look much older than Daniel assumed himself to be. Daniel looked at Jim-Jack-Colonel-O'Neill, who was giving the young man a commiserating look. Daniel wished he knew what he was supposed to do.
"This way," Sam said, touching him on the arm. Daniel turned readily away from the unhappy expressions he knew he was at fault for putting on several faces and followed her gentle tug, leading him away from the room and into a long corridor outside.
"I'm sorry," he said, not completely sure what he was sorry for. He looked over his shoulder, but the others did not seem to be following.
"It's okay; they're just briefing the general," Sam said, still walking. He realized he was lagging behind in his attempts to see everything and hurried to catch up. "Were you hurt when they found you?" she said abruptly.
"Hurt?" Daniel repeated. "I do not--I don't think so."
"Hm," she said, turning her head slightly to frown at him. "Have you had headaches? Anything unusual in... I mean, is it harder to do certain things, or bring some kinds of thoughts to mind? Not just memories, but everyday things."
He puzzled over her questions, then said, "You think that my brain was injured. That's why I remember nothing?"
"Well..." she hedged, and for a moment, he nearly stopped breathing with horror at the idea. "No, not necessarily."
"But it is possible?"
"Look," she said, offering a small, forced smile, "you were badly injured when you Ascended, but since you're not anymore, there's no reason to think you're hurt at all. Maybe there's another explanation--we already have a few ideas. It'll just be nice to be able to rule out some things."
"Oh," Daniel said.
"In fact, do you have a scar on...um, let's see...on your leg?" she said.
Daniel pulled his robe high enough to see his leg. "No."
Sam bent and pointed to his other leg with her finger, where there was a thin, faint line that ran messily from his knee and halfway down to his ankle. "I meant this one. And see? Yeah, you do. I noticed it in the ready room once."
"I never noticed," he said, unnerved by the fact that she knew his body better than he did.
"You said you got the scar horsing around as a kid," she explained. "Fell into a pile of rocks, I think. Your brother might know exactly how it happened."
Brother. There it was again. He had a brother he didn't know, even when faced with him. "What does that mean?" he asked. He let go of his robe and placed his hand on the wall beside him instead, trailing his fingers over the rock-like surface of the walls.
Concrete, he thought, although he couldn't have said what was so concrete about any of it. The wall was very steady, though. Daniel knocked tentatively on it with a fist, then ran his fingers over it to feel the texture--it was like fine sand, the roughness even and controlled in a way that was nearly impossible in walls cut from stone. It had somehow been molded, perhaps, like clay, and then coated with something that dulled the roughness and made it a single color.
Sam was waiting, so he stopped exploring the wall and hurried to catch up to her. "I'm not sure, except that Dr. Fraiser's going to need to examine you to find out exactly what condition you're in," she said. "I spoke to her before we all came back, so she'll be expecting you--she's going to have you sit through some neural scans, too, for completion."
"Scans?" he echoed. "Who is Dr. Fraiser?"
Sam bit her lip. "Um. She's...a friend, too. Our chief medical officer. And she's going to...use machines to take a look inside your head so that--no, no, it's perfectly safe," she said quickly when he felt his eyes widen. "You'll be awake the whole time, and you won't feel a thing. People here do these things all the time--in fact, you've had brain scans before, too, pretty regularly. It's just to see if there's anything we can do to help you remember."
"Oh," Daniel said.
"We've got cat and pet facilities here on base," she said, and before he could figure out why she was suddenly talking about animals, she went on, "At some point, Janet will probably want the full spectrum of what we can see of everything in your body, but for now, she's going to start with an emar eye, maybe coupled with pet. We've got a high resolution ephemer rye, too, but--"
"What--wait--what?" he interrupted, unable to pretend anymore that he had any idea what she was saying. "Ephemer rye?"
"Yeah," Sam said, nodding.
"I don't know those words," Daniel said, feeling embarrassed. "Or...that word? Is it one word?"
Her brow furrowed before she quickly smoothed her features and said, more slowly, "Oh. You. They're letters. M...R...I. And fMRI. It's a way to image...the inside of your body. Dr. Fraiser is going to want an 'MRI' of your brain to start with, and then we'll try other modalities."
"Like cats," he said.
"Uh, not exactly," Sam said, and bit her lip. A moment later she said, "That's a kind of scan, too. Nothing to do with cats."
He bit his lip. That still didn't tell him what any of that meant, only that it wasn't about animals. "How does...MRI see inside my body?"
"Magnets," she said. "But, uh, maybe we should wait if you want a more detailed explanation."
"I wouldn't understand, yes?"
She glanced at him, then away. "It's...a little complicated without the background. But don't worry about it. She'll explain as you go."
"Go? Am I going somewhere?" Daniel said.
Sam sighed. "That's just an expression, Daniel. She'll explain...while she works."
He swallowed, sensing her impatience, even though she was careful not to show it. Sam Carter was all anticipation and expectation he didn't know how to fill, and it felt like he was killing her friend all over again every time he didn't understand what she expected him to. "Oh," he said. "Did Daniel--did I understand all of that before?"
"Probably not the physics behind it, but yeah, you knew the general idea. It's not hard to pick up when you're around it all the time."
The corridor was very long. He wondered if he had always thought the corridor was so long or if it only seemed long now, because he didn't know where it went.
"What is it?" Sam said.
"What?" Daniel said, and it came out too quiet. The walls were coming closer. He reached out to touch them and discovered that it was only his imagination that made them seem that way.
"You stopped," she said.
"Did I?" he said. He looked down and noticed that his feet were not moving.
Looking so hopeful that he what she must be thinking and that she would be disappointed by his answer, she said, "Did you remember something?"
"No," he said. "Could we stop talking, please?"
She stared at him, then shook her head and gestured for him to continue walking with her. "Yeah--yeah. I'm sorry. I'm overloading you, aren't I? I've just been thinking about this ever since we found you. There has to be some explanation..." She trailed off. "Anyway."
"Okay," he said, but he found it was less of a relief than he had expected, because now he was thinking about all of those things, and he wanted to know, too.
Continued in Part IVc...