Disoriented, Jack felt water dripping down his face as he ploughed forward through the storm. He could somehow sense the event horizon rippling behind him despite the fact he was too distant to actually feel its effects. The wind cut into him viciously and left him with no sense of direction other than the fact he must be moving further from the gate. He was confused why he was trying so hard to shift away from the gate. Surely, he wanted to get to the gate and escape from this planet? As he turned back, he saw the event horizon still rippled away and went to head back towards it but something stopped him.
There was something wrong with this whole picture. The wind was driving right towards the gate so heading back would be so much easier and he could almost feel the gate itself sucking him back towards it. But there was a reason he was here even if he couldn't remember it... and there was a reason that going through the Stargate was exactly the thing he didn't want to do right now.
Trusting the unsettling feeling in his gut, Jack abandoned plans to head back through the gate. However, just as he went to turn back into the wind, he became aware that the DHD was oddly-shaped. Moving back closer to it, he felt the pull of the gate grow ever more irresistible. As the rippling pond threw a blue glow across the landscape, he saw that the DHD was perfectly normal but had some lumpy plant growing upon it.
Nearing it, though, he gasped. This odd plant had slender arms that were pinned to the side of the DHD. Stooping closer, barely believing the evidence of his own eyes, he saw the faint blue energy crackling softly just above the porcelain-white flesh of what might once have been Samantha Carter.
White vines, so similar in colour to her skin, obscured all but her head, neck and arms. They seemed so merged to her that it was hard to judge if they were her bonds or she had truly put down roots. As he, tentatively, bent down to touch that porcelain cheek, he found only ice. His questing fingers shifting to her neck, he could find no fluttering within to forestall his only conclusion. She was dead. Lost to him forever.
Angrily, he reached down to wrench her free of the vines encircling her when, oddly, they shrank back from his fingers. Retracting his hand, he watched as they grew up again. Experimentally, he reached to wrap his arms around Carter.
"Wait..."
Jack froze. Had it been the wind? No, surely, that was Daniel's voice. Yet it seemed to have come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Then, suddenly, he was aware of an overpowering glow in the periphery of his vision. Snapping his gaze across, he saw the form of his ascended friend wearing a white robe.
He couldn't get his head around this. He was on this weird planet for some reason he couldn't remember and now his friend appeared to be one of the glowing ones again. How the hell..?
With an oddly fixated gaze, Daniel said, "You know why you're here, Jack. Grelmin's trying to make you forget; make you leave again. You've got to remember; got to fight it."
A tendril of light flicked softly against his skin with a sensation like electrified cotton wool and, suddenly, it all came rushing back.
McKay announcing the device was operational again, Carter and Teal'c struggling against their bonds as they were dragged into the building, their venomous cries that becoming a Ha'ranas had been his plan all along, Fraiser's pained expression as she forcibly sedated them both, all three of his friends unconscious on the ground, the cables connected to him as he lay down amongst his friends, the energy building in the device before...
Stunned, for a moment, he rallied quickly.
"Yeah, I know why I'm here. I'm here to sort this damn mess out..."
The moment of bravado was short-lived, however, as he turned far enough for the still, white form of Carter to come back into view. He continued, deflated, "If that's even possible."
Daniel walked towards his, by-all-appearances, dead friend. With pure admiration in his tone, he breathed, "She kept the connection open..."
Indicating some vines that seemed to trail from the DHD to the gate, he continued, "...if she hadn't, we wouldn't even have had this chance and you'd be a Ha'ranas by now."
Jack asked the question he didn't want to know the answer to.
"I... couldn't find a pulse. Is she...?"
Knowing what he needed to know, Daniel replied shortly, "She's... not alive but not dead either. She's on a type of symbiotic life support. Once she's free of it..."
That was all the information he needed right now. Leaping forward, he went to wrench her from her organic prison.
"Jack, wait..."
Halting, he turned to Daniel who said, seriously, "Look, if you free her, the gate will shut off and we'll all be trapped in here unless we can reverse the process. This is the point of no return, Jack."
Yeah, like he was gonna turn tail and run. The pull of the gate all but forgotten, he wrapped his arms tightly around Carter and felt an odd pulse run through him before he watched the vines vanish into the ground. Laying her against the DHD, he checked her over again. This time, he felt the faintest of flutterings beneath his fingers. Sighing with relief, he pulled her up into his arms.
"Now what?"
Looking around as if hearing something Jack couldn't, Daniel replied, "You have to get her to the pedestal room. And I have to go."
With that, Daniel glowed brightly for a moment then was gone leaving Jack staring at empty air. Gaze falling to the form in his arms, he shifted her over his shoulder, dipped his head down and walked through the driving rain towards the building. Walking along with his head bowed, he nearly fell right over something.
Disturbed beyond words, he said, "T?"
His Jaffa friend was buried up to his waist in the mud with those white vines obscuring everything. They were even bound around his neck as if having choked him. Even with his naturally darker skin, he looked as pale as death.
Torn, he glanced up at his laden shoulder; no way could he carry both of them. Gingerly crouching, he took a moment to steady his balance before placing his free hand on the vines. As they shrank back from Teal'c's neck, he pressed his fingers down on the carotid; couldn't feel a pulse but, then, he hadn't felt one on Carter until she was free of the vines. However, whether dead or alive, Jack already knew what he had to do.
Straightening up, he muttered, "I'll be back, T. Hang in there, big guy."
Mentally mapping this point for fear he would never find it again, he reluctantly headed onwards.
After what seemed like an eternity, he reached the exterior of the building. Finding the door again, he headed inside.
When he'd last seen this room in the real world, Grelmin's device had sat atop the pedestal and the naquadha reactor had hummed gently in the corner. This, however, looked exactly as the room had looked when he'd first awoken to find his friends in a ‘trance'. Including, his heart falling, a broken crystal where the power source should be
Jack could hardly dare to breathe.
"It's broken..."
Walking into view as if he'd been a pace behind him the whole way, glowing Daniel explained, "No, Jack, it isn't... because this isn't real, okay? This place is just the best representation you have of the neural link between the four of us. If you believe that it'll work then it'll work. This is the only way to take the aspects of everyone and reconnect them with their bodies. I'm not sure I can explain it to you any better than that."
Long past the point of incredulity, Jack merely shrugged before carefully laying Carter down. Still crouched, he turned to see Daniel had vanished again. Letting his hand brush across the icy cheek of his snow-white second-in-command, he reached down for her hand and gently squeezed it before getting up again and turning, with steely resolve, back towards the entranceway.
As Jack pushed out through the storm again, he tried to make his way back to the point where he'd left Teal'c caught in the mud. However, the wind had picked up and kept blowing him off-course. Pushing forward anyway, he narrowly avoided tumbling into the river as he failed to notice approaching its bank. Steadying himself, he turned to head back toward Teal'c when a horrible realisation struck him. The thing he'd steadied himself against... was the shoulder of his final friend.
The entangled Daniel looked even paler than Carter had. His skin was so white as to be translucent and that blue glow seemed to crackle beneath it as well as above. Dropping to his knees, he felt the mud squish unpleasantly beneath him as he looked over what little of Daniel was not obscured by vines or entombed in mud. Unlike Teal'c, his arms were free and they hung awkwardly at his sides like some ghoulish scarecrow. As before, he tried to make the vines shrink back to check for a pulse but these ones stayed stubbornly fixed in place. Going to manually wrench them aside, his plan was rather rudely interrupted by an unexpected trip to meet the ground as he was zapped by the lightning wrapped around the vines. Dazed, he became aware that the world around him had become brighter. Half-turning, he saw the fabric of a white robe before a healthier and more animated, if rather glowy, Daniel came into view. Until now, he'd seemed almost self-assured when he'd appeared but his expression was both lost and helpless as he looked upon his own, lifeless, form. The expression lasted only a moment, however, before a wall of steel came down behind the eyes.
Even the noise of the storm couldn't wholly disguise the shakiness of his voice.
"Sam kept the connection open and it slowed the whole process down. She's not connected anymore. You have to get to Teal'c before it's too late."
Gesturing at the vines, he said, "How come these ones aren't coming loose and how come when I tried to touch them I got zapped?"
There was another brief waver of composure before, Daniel turned to him.
"I'm not gonna make it, Jack."
Jack halted.
"What?"
His friend closed his eyes and, after a moment, a bubble of clear air appeared around them. The sounds of the storm overhead seemed suddenly distant.
Opening his eyes again, he said more quietly, "I'm not gonna make it out of here."
His brain not quite ready to process Daniel's statement yet, he gestured at their pocket of clear air.
"How did you...?"
Seeming to understand that he wasn't ready to deal with what he'd just said, Daniel obligingly replied, "I understand this place better than you do. This isn't just a carbon copy of reality. It was created based on your perceptions and your understanding. The laws of physics don't really apply here. I can see past this representation and it lets me affect things in ways that would be physically impossible."
His brain just wasn't able to process that statement.
"Huh?"
A trace of a lazy smile, Daniel replied, "We're in the Matrix; I'm Neo."
Great, Jack thought, like I didn't get confused enough just watching those films.
After a pause, he continued, "Grelmin's device doesn't have the capacity to process me so if I extend my aura then anything within it becomes almost impossible to process as well."
Jack decided that the conversation was too confusing so he turned back to try and pull the vines from the pale Daniel.
Daniel turned back to the avoided topic.
"They're connections to you, Jack. For now, all the facets of their minds are still connected together but, as their awarenesses diminish, they'll begin to fully merge with you. I extended my aura around her to help you free Sam. That's why the vines came loose."
Not understanding why the man who looked like his friend was saying these things, he replied, "So do that here."
"I'm dead either way. Look, ‘Daniel' has been unravelling since he was split from me. Combined with the morphine overdose, it's... The only way for me to survive now would be to merge myself back into him."
"So do that."
There was a tinge of anger to the impatient retort.
"But if I do that, Jack, then I'll be ‘him' again and the ascended knowledge will be buried too deeply to even access unconsciously. That means I won't be able to break the rules of this place anymore. I won't know anymore than you do about how to get us out of here. And we'll end up stuck in the same situation all over again. Only they'll be no way out for any of you either."
"Daniel, leaving you in here is not an option."
"I have to be able to stop Grelmin interfering, Jack. I won't be able to do that if I'm him again."
"So we'll find a way anyway. Work with me here."
Daniel shook his head obstinately. Turning to the pale version of his friend, he pressed down on his shoulder and closed his eyes for a moment. Addressing that version, he said, "I won't leave here without you. There has to be another way out of this."
"I'm telling you, Jack, there isn't."
Tersely, but heavily laced with emotion, he snapped, "I wasn't talking to you! I will not let my friend die here. So why don't you just go away and let me and him figure a way out?"
He knew that the glowy guy had as much right to be called real Daniel as the half-buried scarecrow did; hell, probably more...but...
More softly, sounding slightly stung, the glowy one said, "All right."
Surprised at the response, Jack turned to lock eyes with him. His glowing robes had vanished and had been replaced with a set of fatigues and his expression was one of anxious uncertainty.
Sitting down and crossing his legs, he shut his eyes. In their bubble, silence reigned for almost a minute before Jack finally grew impatient.
"Well?"
Daniel half-opened an eye.
"There's one way this could work. But it'll be dangerous. You'd be better off leaving me here."
"Already told you that's not an option."
In the manner of Teal'c, Daniel inclined his head slightly in acceptance and closed his eyes again. After several more minutes of silence, he raised his hand out in front of him, fingers outstretched. As he waved it slowly, a campfire sprang up out of nowhere.
Opening his eyes to look upon it, he said, "This will protect you from Grelmin until the embers die out so long as you don't leave the circle."
After a slight pause, he continued, "You need my knowledge to get out of here. If I bring back Daniel then that knowledge becomes too deeply...."
"Haven't we been over this part already?"
"Yes, but I... I can keep the essential knowledge close enough to the surface that it'll affect ‘Daniel's' actions. Instinct; odd impulses; a funny feeling... that's as much as I can give him but it might just be enough."
"Okay, let's do it."
"Thing is, Jack, at this point without going completely dormant, I'm still going to be a drain on him. That's why I need to bind him to you."
Utterly confused now, Jack replied, "Isn't that Gizmo's idea?"
"No, but it's even more dangerous. I bind him to you and he can survive but it's gonna cost you, Jack. It could be the death of us all."
"What d'you mean?"
"I mean that you are the only intact awareness we've got. If you get compromised then there's nothing to stop Grelmin making us into his monster. Keeping me going could all but lose you your advantage. You'll be totally at the mercy of Sam and Teal'c."
Remembering the gazes of the two sociopaths glaring at him before the sedative kicked in, he shivered inwardly. Without much hope, he said, "But they'll play along soon as we pull them back in here, right? Cos they won't be all messed up anymore?"
"Afraid not, Jack. The parts in here will take time to reconnect even if we can keep Grelmin out of the way long enough. Plenty of time for either one of them to seize control and, if either does, that's it. We'll be a Ha'ranas and you already know what that means."
"So what do I do?"
"Keep the fire going until he wakes up. Get Teal'c to the chamber. After that..."
Climbing to his knees, he continued, "Well, after that Daniel should know what to do."
"Shouldn't you just tell me? You know, in case ‘he' doesn't?"
"Not much point in that."
"Why?"
"Cos if he doesn't know what to do then what I'm about to try didn't work and you're already screwed."
Flatly, Jack replied, "Oh. Okay then."
Turning to the scarecrow that might once have been Daniel, his doppelganger reached out a hand and then dropped it down again.
"If he's... too far gone then this could all be too late... Are you sure you...?"
Jack nodded almost imperceptibly and yet with total conviction.
Bowing his head slightly in reply, his friend closed his eyes. Slowly, an aura of light began to build around him whilst at the same time his mass diminished until he was nothing but a glowing ball of light again. The glowing tendrils reached out towards the half-buried scarecrow and licked around him until it was impossible to discern the tendrils from the vines. Then, for a moment, the tendrils became wrapped with blue electricity before - with an unnatural noise - the glowing form of Daniel seemed to be sucked into the vines.
In this bubble of impossibility, little of the sound of the storm could be heard and Jack was achingly aware of the otherwise deathly silence. The ghoulish scarecrow, only just recognisable as his friend, still hung, lifeless and still with crackling blue energy all but engulfing it. As the seconds became minutes, he began to wonder if something had gone wrong. He'd lost his would-be guide and didn't appear to be getting the compensation of getting his friend back. Maybe he'd just thrown away his only chance of any of them making it out of here in one piece.
Absentmindedly feeding stray twigs into the fire, he stopped to wonder about the fact that neither he, nor his silent companion, was even slightly wet. Something to do with the not-really-physics of this place, he guessed.
Shifting away from the fire and back to his friend, he brushed his hand through Daniel's short hair and tried not to wince at the icy chill of the skin beneath it. He looked so goddamned dead but he knew, if he tried to find a reassuring pulse, he was likely to be disappointed. If Daniel didn't wake up then he was as good as a Ha'ranas right now...
Gingerly, he tried to shift the vines from around his friend again but it ended the same way it had the last two times he'd tried it...
"Goddamnit!"
As he sprawled backwards on the ground clutching at his stinging hand, he cursed several times before something distracted him even from the pain.
There was a bright blue flash and, suddenly, the buzzing energy around his scarecrow friend seemed to vanish. Nothing else seemed to happen for a moment but then, freakishly, the eyes opened whilst the rest remained motionless. Climbing back to his knees to stare into those eyes, he saw the same tortured gaze that he'd seen when, during the Stromos incident, Daniel had arisen from his coma to find himself host to a dozen voices. Then, all he had wanted was to be able to grab a hold of his friend to reassure him with his presence. Now, he unconsciously went to do the same. His hand pressing against one of his pale shoulders, he said, "Daniel?"
His friend's terrified eyes swivelled round to lock with his but not even a muscle twitched otherwise. He hung, frozen and terrified, with vines still encircling him. Now there was no energy buzzing around, Jack went to pull the vines apart but found they were unnaturally tough. As those eyes pleaded with him to do something, Jack's own eyes scanned desperately around for something he could use on the vines. There was nothing within the circumference of the campfire and he had no idea what would happen to either of them if he dared to venture past the curtain of raindrops. He was about to despair when he realised that there was one thing he'd discounted...
Reaching over to the fire itself, he jostled the sticks and pulled a lit one from the fire. He had no idea if this would even work but it was his best shot right now.
The reaction of the vines was... unexpected. He'd visualised that they might flinch away from the flames, as they'd originally flinched away from his touch, or that they might scorch more conventionally and weaken to the point they were breakable. Instead, to his horror, the flame seemed to jump from the stick to the vine then, instantaneously, all the vines were ablaze. As unbearable heat washed over him, Jack reactively shifted backwards and could only watch in stunned disbelief as his friend was engulfed in flames.
"Daniel!"
God, what had he done? He had to do something! Leaping to his feet, he pulled off his jacket and went to throw it around Daniel to try to beat down the flames.