Daniel’s body— if he could even call it his own anymore— was numb. But it wasn’t numbness, not really, because he recognized sensation, the way he would know that the punching throb against his eardrums on a crowded dance floor was music even if he couldn’t hear it. It was as if the world was too loud, so loud that his body was full to the point of being empty, overloaded to the point of white noise and nonsense, and all he had in his head to name it was ‘numb.’
He was too small for all that feeling.
Sebek thrashed inside him, and Daniel saw the floor close to his face, black stone with a blue sheen from some light source he couldn’t place. He saw his own hand splayed a few inches from his eyes, the fingers stiffly straining, the pads of each one white, and the nails white, too, except with a rim of red at the quick because of the way the hand was pressing hard against the stone. Sebek was trying to lever himself upright, but Daniel’s body was heavy and numb and full of noise, and he fell again— the floor right next to Daniel’s eye now, his face pressed against stone. Sebek made a sound with Daniel’s throat, a growl of frustration that Daniel felt inside his head and not in the body at all, but it was some kind of coherence to cling to, and so he did. The noise and numbness started to resolve again into thought and feeling, distantly: the cool stone against his cheek, a cold ache inside the globe of his knee, and the jutting bone of his hip where he’d fallen. Flares of color in the whited-out landscape of his being.
He could hear Aris’s voice, Jack’s, and a moment later, a heavy hand fell on the back of his neck, squeezing and then shifting to his shoulder. A wall loomed in front of him, with shadowed etchings, dancing figures, then skewed away into the blankness of ceiling. He was on his back now. Aris’s face came into view, wearing an expression of unconvincing concern, or so it seemed to Daniel. Those pale eyes held a distinct glimmer of satisfaction as he looked down at his Goa’uld master.
“My lord,” Aris said, the honorific colored by barely suppressed mockery.
Sebek was not in the mood for amusing ironies, it seemed, and his anger scraped a livid path through the static inside Daniel’s head. Daniel’s hand, the one without the ribbon device, passed through his field of vision as Sebek raised it. Aris gripped his hand and leaned back against his weight to pull him up; the walls angled around him, and Jack was suddenly there, on his ass with his legs askew and his fists pressed to his temples, broken finger sticking out with incongruous daintiness.
Jack must have known he was being watched, because he dropped his hands and followed Sebek’s progress. In the dim ambient light Daniel was close enough that even without his glasses he could see the red rash left by the ribbon device there between Jack’s eyebrows, the broken blood vessels a fine webbing on the skin on either side of his nose and around his bloodshot eyes. Jack rested his weight on his broken hand and then, with a hiss of pain, sat up again and cradled it for a second against his chest. Something about the gesture seemed to clarify the numbness in Daniel’s body— some memory of pain, maybe— and he could feel his legs again, fully, the weight of the ribbon device on his dangling hand, the fleeting touch of Sebek’s attention along his limbs as the bruises on his knee and hip were repaired and erased. Sebek drew his body up straight.
Jack screwed up his face in that expression that usually preceded a smartassed remark and, true to form, said, “Nice impression of a fish on the bottom of a boat. Not very godlike, though.”
Daniel could feel the rage in the middle of his chest— Sebek’s chest— a tightening that started under the sternum and spread outward along the muscles and into his arms, tendons going taut and fingers curling, clenching into a fist, and if that feeling had a color it would be seething red. His centre of gravity shifted, his weight moving from his left foot to the right as Sebek pulled his left arm back and up. There was a sudden release of energy as the arm and its fist swung down and smashed Jack across the mouth. Daniel felt the give of muscle and the resistance of teeth and bone before Jack spun away with the force of the blow, and the shifting of weight again in the follow-through, anger boiling away and leaving behind the oily residue of satisfaction.
Daniel felt it all, a detailed parsing of his own body, because that was what Sebek could feel. Sebek enjoyed the violent art of the machine.
His mouth stretched into Sebek’s smile as Jack, knocked onto his shoulder, rolled to his knees and stood up, using Aris for balance. When Jack turned to face Sebek, the back of his hand was red with blood from his lip.
“This is godlike,” Sebek said, low and warning. “We are infused with the power of this place, and we are strong.” A tremor of fear rippled through the sharpening space of Sebek’s mind. Daniel tried to follow it, but Sebek smoothed it away.
“Strong enough to hit a guy when he’s down, anyway,” Jack answered, dabbing his lip with his sleeve.
The satisfaction wilted to disdain as Sebek turned away. Daniel watched Jack in his peripheral vision while Sebek turned his attention to Aris. Jack leaned to the side, one hand on Aris’s shoulder, and spat blood onto the floor. No teeth with it, at least. Daniel wondered what it would feel like to strangle himself— to strangle his own body. Serve Sebek right.
Sebek’s answer to that was immediate; there would be a price for insubordination. Daniel shrank back from what Sebek showed him— promised him— a threat, enacted from the twisted wreckage of Daniel’s own memory— Jack falling— and Sebek’s vision— a snake’s-eye view of a host being taken. Jack’s contorted face, now, as no worked its way between his clenched teeth. Sebek got that image from Daniel, Daniel’s memory of Jack in Hathor’s bunker, tied in the cryo-bed while the snake took him. Daniel could feel the tusks as they carved their way into flesh, Sebek’s experience relived time and again, the slight pressure of resistant skin giving way and then muscle quivering, resisting but unable to keep him out; the sideways slither around bone, the sinewy body winding, slick with excreted enzymes, ducking between tendons, sliding over the points and angles of vertebrae, seeking the way to the brain, already starting to divide, ganglia extending into the spinal column. Daniel heard the echo of distant screaming, the host mind recoiling, and that became a picture, Jack crabwalking backward, scrambling away, away from Sebek, from Daniel, nowhere to go, and there was no place in Daniel’s memory where Sebek could have got that image because Jack never crawled in panic like that. Daniel’s mind had created this from fear, had made that picture out of the screaming, made Jack crawl, and there was nowhere to go. Sebek would take Jack, and Daniel would be dead, and there would be no way of stopping him, then.
Inside, Daniel went blank.
When he could see again, they were walking, Jack up front, Aris behind. The hallway curved to their left, dark beyond ten or fifteen feet or so. Wherever the light was coming from, it seemed to be rationed, because it faded behind them and crept ahead of them reluctantly, tantalizingly. Their boots clattered on the black stone, and echoes ricocheted along the narrow space so that sometimes it seemed like there was an army in here with them. On either side, the walls were alive with those still figures, caught midway through their dances.
Sebek hummed inside with satisfaction as he carried Daniel long between the murmuring walls, but the purring smoothness was deformed a little, silk folded around the shape of something underneath. It wasn’t precisely fear, but the symbols on the wall seemed to vibrate in his head, below the threshold of understanding, and it was a fine-toothed abrasion of his control. He strode on faster than the blooming light, pushing them toward…something.
Daniel watched Sebek as he traced a worn path through a list of grievances, lost opportunities, humiliations, felt the Goa’uld’s anger, his self-righteous conviction that he deserved more, always more. It was as though the place were singing in sympathy for his outrage, and each step they took brought Sebek closer to— revenge— fulfillment. Sebek, Daniel realized, believed that the silence was speaking to him, and the path that started in his failure wound its way inward, forward, toward promise. Aris was at his back, and Sebek knew that his hold on the bounty hunter was slight. Again, a shiver of fear, but Sebek crushed it. He was a god. A sudden, grotesque series of images slid up out of Sebek’s memory and assaulted Daniel: a crying child, a dead woman, Aris falling under the raining blows of mailed fists. A god would never fall to a slave. There was no thought of going back without his prize, no matter what risks were to be faced, or how terribly the place ravaged his host. And in any case, Sebek had options. With his gold-capped hand, he reached out and gave Jack a shove.
When Daniel tried to follow the contours of that uneasiness in Sebek, he found himself looking at the back of Jack’s neck above his collar, the slight indentation at the base of his skull below the brush of silver-grey hair. He tried not to, but Sebek kept his eyes on it. Eyes on the prize. Sebek’s threat was clear. If Daniel didn’t want to feel Sebek’s predatory gaze on the entry-point in his next host’s body, he’d have to retreat. He didn’t want to retreat. He was afraid that if he did, he’d lose his way. So he watched the back of Jack’s neck while Sebek caressed memories of takings, a snake charmer holding up his darlings in front of an appalled, fascinated audience. That weird, inside-out metaphor should have made Daniel falter, but Sebek walked steadily along, his boots on Jack’s shadow.
Sebek shoved Jack again.
This time, Jack was braced for it and, instead of staggering forward, halted and turned to face Sebek with an irritating expression of calm affability. He smiled tightly and stepped to the side, sweeping his arm wide to show the way. “If you’d like to go first, be my guest,” he said, still smiling with his own threat in his eyes.
“You will continue…” Daniel could feel Sebek searching Daniel’s own vocabulary. “On point. Aris will watch our six.” That hum of satisfaction keyed up a bit when Jack’s smile faltered as he heard those familiar words in Daniel’s warped and unfamiliar voice. Their language, stolen, to make a point. “And we will move faster.” That agitation in Sebek was a thin whine, and it seemed to spin out like a ribbon along the hallway, into darkness. “Move.”
Jack pointed ahead of them to where the wall curved away, its lines of symbols dancing away, luring. “I don’t think faster is necessarily the best strategy,” he said, as he put his hands in his pockets, and then, wincing, pulled the one with the broken finger out again. “I mean, didn’t you see any of the Indiana Jones movies?” Tilting his head back and cocking a finger gun at Sebek with his splinted hand, he added, “Wait, I forgot. Of course you didn’t. Take my word for it. Caution is what we learn from Dr. Jones.”
Impatience prickled along Daniel’s skin as the ribbon of agitation went taut, urging Sebek forward. But he took a fraction of a second to rummage through Daniel’s memories again and came up with the image of Indiana Jones running from a giant rolling boulder, dodging poisoned arrows. Sebek grunted out something like a laugh. “That is why you are on point, O’Neill,” Sebek answered with a smile of his own. “If there are traps, you will know about them first.”
Behind them, Aris let out a brief gust of laughter. “Sounds like an excellent plan. Plus, I didn’t get any lunch, so I’d love to wrap this up as soon as possible.”
Shrugging, Jack turned around and kept walking, at the exact same pace he’d set before. “Whatever,” he muttered and then waved an admonishing hand at them over his shoulder. “But you really should see the movie first, is all I’m saying.”
Sebek could see it, or at least what Daniel could remember of it, scattered fragments, lost in the clutter of associations: hot asphalt under his sneakers reflecting the summer heat into his face as he walked to the theater; Sarah, reading over his shoulder faster than he was, reaching down and turning the page of his book to reveal a full-page image of the South American jungle, impenetrable green and a startle of tropical bird-red at the top of the canopy; the smell of dust and cobwebs in the ziggurat on P2X-338, a skittering in the darkness, and the sarcophagus heavy and silent, pried open and empty but for gnawed bones; the lingering scent of Russian cigarettes, and the burn of vodka in his throat. Sebek had all this to assimilate, with Daniel’s low-grade annoyance at the piratical archeology of Indiana Jones and his own feelings of hypocrisy as the relics of a hundred worlds accumulated in his lab in the mountain and at Area 51, waiting to be cracked open and— exploited— explained.
Sebek watched the settling layers of Daniel’s experience with the bored attention of someone thumbing through the pages of the phonebook.
“Your friend’s mind is undisciplined,” Sebek said to the back of Jack’s head.
“You should see his office.” Daniel could tell from the sudden, barely-perceptible flexing of the tendons in the back of Jack’s neck that he regretted saying that.
Daniel regretted it too, because now Sebek was in his office with Daniel’s books, his files. Before he could imagine hiding it, the pang of protective homesickness shot through him, sharpening Sebek’s idle searching. Daniel tried to focus on miscellany, ritual objects without strategic significance, requisition forms piled messily on the corner of his desk, the volumes of Budge’s Egyptology still on the bookshelf behind a forgotten mug half-full of stale coffee. But he thought of the way Jack’s neck tensed, belated, the words already out when Jack, Daniel knew, had sworn not to give the snake an inch, not a word, and it was like that in Daniel’s head now, where trying not to think about things that needed protecting only pointed Sebek toward them. The slope of Jack’s shoulders as he paced ahead of them was the same now as it had been the day of the summit at the SGC, when the Goa’uld System Lords sat around the conference table with Thor and debated the best way to— subjugate— protect the Earth. On the break, Jack in his dress blues had stood wordlessly in Daniel’s office, perfectly ironed on the outside and crumpled with fatigue and frustration on the inside. Daniel knew Jack hated politics. He hated talking. He hated being the one it was all resting on. Jack had said as much when he’d hinted it should have been Daniel spinning the whole world on a thread of words and lies.
Daniel tried to forget the lies. But of course, trying to forget only brought them to the surface where Sebek snatched at them. The Asgard were besieged in their own galaxy. The Protected Planets Treaty was based on a bluff. Sebek laughed out loud.
“Something’s funny?” Aris asked. The ‘my lord’ was conspicuously absent, but fortunately for him, Sebek was feeling generous and let it slide, keeping his eyes on Jack.
“Your friend is a source of much useful information,” Sebek taunted.
“Oh, he’s full of it, all right,” Jack answered without turning around.
It took Sebek a second to scan Daniel’s store of idioms and appreciate the double-entendre. “It seems your protectors, the Asgard, are not as powerful as they purport to be.” Jack slowed to a halt and turned to face him, his face impassive. Sebek pulled Daniel’s lips into a satisfied smile. “I’m sure Lord Yu would pay handsomely for this information.”
“I’m sure.” Jack sounded so disinterested that Daniel couldn’t stop himself from thinking about Yu, crazy Yu, whose host body was beginning to deteriorate. Soon he wouldn’t be able to keep his host alive, and he would no longer be a threat to anyone. Sebek seized that idea, turned it around in triumph. Now was the time to strike, and once Sebek had acquired the appropriate weapons, he would dispose of his infirm master. Daniel’s despair deepened.
“Yes, your friend is useful. He gives up easily.” Sebek waved Jack on, an implied order to get moving.
Ignoring Sebek’s command, Jack narrowed his eyes at him. “I doubt that.” His expression softened into mock pity and he added, “He can be a real pain in the ass. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in there with him.” The softness hardened again into serious lines and planes of shadow. “But if he’s so useful, you might want to treat him nicely.” The threat was implicit, and ironic: Jack could kill Sebek, but he’d have to come through Daniel first— literally.
A part of Daniel’s mind thought that might be a good idea. But another part, a part he hoped was small enough to go unnoticed, was struck by what Jack said about usefulness.
He considered the ribbon of agitation that ran through Sebek and down along the hallway ahead of them, a keen thrumming of desire that was verging on physical pain, like the irresistible drag of addiction. That was a familiar feeling. He could understand that. The memory of the sarcophagus coalesced, bringing with it the ghost of elation, a wash of wellbeing, of strength and power. And anger and hatred and need. How many times had Daniel gone through the cycle of death and life, injury and repair, and finally hunger and fulfillment while Shyla waited for him to become bound to her by dependency? He’d deliberately not kept track. How many times had Sebek crawled into the gold coffin and waited to cheat time? A hundred? A thousand? Power and elation, anger and need. They coursed through Daniel now, barely attenuated by the years, and he realized, suddenly, that he didn’t know if these were Sebek’s remembered feelings or his own.
Daniel struggled to keep his focus, and to do it quietly, if that were even possible. But this could be useful. Sebek’s need could be just the thing. On all sides of them, broken only by the occasional empty column, the cryptic symbols marched on, luring Sebek down into what Daniel believed to be an elaborate maze. It had a structure, a symmetry; nothing about the patterns they were following was accidental, and it certainly wasn’t intended to get people lost. Confuse them, perhaps, or slow them down— that was possible. But whatever was behind the design here, it wanted to be found. Even Daniel could feel it, the seduction of it. The Ancients knew something about this place; they’d been here, left a warning, locked the door. The answer to the place had to be, at least partly, with them. And what the Ancients had was once his, though he couldn’t access it consciously.
Once before, he’d gained control of his body, and Sebek had been pushed aside. But why? The external dissonance of this place had helped, but there had to be a way to open the door, to gain some advantage. If only he could find it.
Sebek could sense Daniel hiding his thoughts. He gave Daniel pain, a long, slow burn of sensation across his nerve endings— Sebek seemed immune, but Daniel’s agony bloomed through every portion of his consciousness. Then came the vision again, the image of Jack, scrambling away from the horror of being taken as host.
You won’t, Daniel thought as clearly and as loudly as he could.
A tiny tendril of Sebek’s attention turned from the symbols and their progress along the gloomy hall to wonder, not terribly intensely, why Daniel thought so, because clearly, Sebek would do whatever he chose.
You won’t because of this, Daniel thought again, and this time, he didn’t resist when the scent of ripe, pink flowers flooded his mind. It was like throwing himself backward off a cliff, falling through the smell of rot and the exquisite singing of pain and death and dissolution, all the way to the brink of all that was the Ancient in his memory, everything his conscious mind refused to remember. He could feel Sebek following him, the way he’d followed him into his office, along the winding way from Indiana Jones to Sarah to the Asgard, to the edge of the disorienting swirl of Ancient knowledge Daniel could barely feel because it was too vast and his body was so small. This is why, he snarled into the noise. Because you need me.
Jack didn’t bother to stop walking when he tossed his reply over his shoulder. “Believe me, I could muddle through fine without you. In fact, the galaxy took a vote and we’d all like to try getting along without the whole lot of you.”
“What?” Daniel said numbly as he faltered to a halt. Aris, not paying as close attention as he should have been, managed to pull up before running into him. His armored chest brushed Daniel’s back before he stepped to the side and leaned around to look at him expectantly.
Jack continued along for a few steps until he noticed that no one was following and turned around. “What?”
“What?” Daniel repeated.
Shooting Jack a quizzical look, Aris said, “What?”
“It worked,” Daniel said and the relief and the excitement at the sound of his own natural voice pushed the air out of him in a startled, incredulous laugh. “It worked. Jack.”
Jack cocked his head and folded his arms. He needed a P90 to rest his hands on though, to complete the familiar ‘cut the bull’ posture. His suspicion seared through Daniel. Of course. Jack had no reason to believe, no reason to trust. A new kind of despair caught at Daniel’s throat. He had information Jack needed, that he had to give him, even if Jack didn’t believe. If only he would listen and remember what Daniel said.
Daniel held out his hands, remembering too late that one of them was still in the ribbon device, which was now aimed at Jack’s chest. He dropped it hastily and took a step toward him. “I know. I know. Just…just listen to me. I don’t know how much time I have, so just listen.”
Jack shifted his gaze to some spot on the wall and sighed out a weary, “We danced this dance already.”
“I know. You have no reason to believe it’s me. But it is, Jack.” Daniel’s heart was pounding so hard he could barely hear his own voice. He wondered when Sebek would tamp that down again. But he didn’t want to think of Sebek. Speak of the devil. He felt Sebek pressing, shoving, battering at him; he ignored it, and the small waves of pain beginning to track through his body. “Remember all those times we’ve seen the symbiote suppressed by…by technology or…design. When Sha’re was pregnant and, and, and when…at Skaara’s trial, the Tollan had that disengagement device that allowed Skaara to speak freely. Remember?” Jack’s face was expressionless, his eyes still staring at nothing. “You remember. And this, this is like that. Something here is doing it, like we saw before, in the way the Jaffa were affected.” Daniel took another step and Jack moved away, keeping his distance. “Okay, fine, then you can listen, just listen to me.”
Aris was keeping pace with him, his forehead wrinkled in an eloquent frown that was part confusion and part bemusement.
“Sebek isn’t in complete control. I don’t know why for sure. But he’s obsessed with this place and whatever he thinks is in here. A weapon, something that will make him powerful, that he can use to challenge Yu, maybe. It doesn’t matter. He’s…broken somehow— of course, they all are, but he’s extra broken. There’s something wrong with him. He’ll threaten you. He’ll threaten to take you as a host, Jack, but he won’t follow through. Not unless I become too weak to support him.”
Now Jack’s gaze stabbed through him again.
Daniel smiled and shook his head. “He says he’ll take you. He says that to keep me quiet, but he won’t do it, because he needs what I know, what the Ancients left in me. The threat’s empty, Jack. You can use that.” Tapping himself sharply on the temple, Daniel came forward again and this time Jack stayed put. “Everything’s there, Jack. We can use it. We can use Sebek to get it for us. Everything that happened to me. The meaning of life st—”
He didn’t have a chance to finish his sentence because Jack was moving fast, stepping into his space. Jack grabbed his pleading hand and twisted it behind his back, using his momentum and his weight to propel Daniel forward, away from Aris, face-first into the wall, his other wiry arm pinning Daniel across the back of his neck. Daniel could feel the vibration of Jack’s rage as he leaned in and pressed him harder against the stone. Fighting his own reflexes, augmented now with Sebek’s power, Daniel forced himself not to resist. Distantly, he noticed that he was leaning against one of those blank columns, and above his head, a watery light glowed from a narrow groove where the ceiling met the wall. One mystery solved.
Jack’s breath was hot against the side of Daniel’s neck when he spoke, a low, furious whisper. “You listen. I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’m not as stupid as you seem to think I am. And if you use Daniel’s voice to talk to me again, I swear, Aris will not get to me before I get to you.”
To make his point, Jack twisted Daniel’s arm a little harder, enough to make Daniel’s mouth fall open in a silent gasp of pain. External pain was bad. Pain threatened static and loss of focus, and Sebek was close to the surface. Daniel considered throwing Jack off of him. He could do it. Sebek was strong enough.
“Jack, please,” he managed, but the words were drowned out by a click and rising whine. Out of the corner of his eye, he could make out Aris’s looming shape, and the gleam of light along the muzzle of his blaster. It was resting against the side of Jack’s head.
“Yes, Jack, please,” Aris repeated with a mocking sneer, then pulled back and shot him.