Stargate SG1: What Dreams May Come (17/21)
All disclaimers, notes, warnings and summary are in the Master post: What Dreams May Come
Chapter Seventeen
"What?!" three voices asked in unison.
"Daniel Jackson, you cannot mean to ..."
"Daniel, you can't! It's too dangerous ..."
"If you think I'm going to let you do that alone, you're nuts!"
Daniel stopped in the door and turned back to face his teammates. "What are you going to do, Jack? What could you possibly do against him?"
"Well, what can you do against him? Look, I'm going with you," Jack said firmly. "And that's final. Now you wait for me, right there." He turned back to Sam and Teal'c. "Okay, you heard what he said about the glyph. Tell Ferretti first, have him tell Makepeace. And if he gives you any crap about not taking orders from me because I'm unconscious ..."
"Yes, sir," Sam said quickly. "We'll make sure it gets done."
"Okay, good."
"What of us?" Teal'c asked. "Should we not accompany you and Daniel Jackson to confront Belos?"
Jack shook his head quickly. "No. I want you two to stay here."
"But, sir," Sam interjected. "It's entirely possible, because of the beam, that Teal'c and I can leave our bodies too, just like you and Daniel. If what Daniel said is true, then the beam's primary function is loosening the connection between a body and its consciousness. Colonel, we can help."
"Absolutely not!" Jack snapped back. "Look, it's bad enough that he's got two bodies just laying here waiting for him to jump into them; we're not giving him four. Now, I'm ordering you two to stay here, in your bodies. Is that clear?"
Sam nodded. "Perfectly, sir."
"Indeed."
Jack nodded. "All right, then. We'll be back." He turned to follow Daniel out of the sanctuary.
"Colonel ..."
"We'll be back, Captain," Jack repeated without turning around. "Just be ready for us."
Jack reached Daniel's side, and together they walked back out into the large outer hall. Sam and Teal'c stared after them until they disappeared from sight, behind two of the massive stone columns. Sam sighed and turned to Teal'c.
"I guess it's time to get everyone ready."
Teal'c nodded without speaking.
Sam took one step forward, then stopped and turned back to Teal'c again. She was frowning, and Teal'c saw that she was chewing on her lower lip, as if in thought. "Teal'c, do you feel like ... well, do you feel like maybe we shouldn't have let them leave without us?"
Teal'c nodded again. "Indeed I do, Captain Carter. It was Daniel Jackson himself who was most insistent that we remain together. It seems strange to me that he would want us to remain behind now."
Sam shrugged and started walking slowly back toward the others. "I don't know, Teal'c. He seems like he knows what he's doing."
"He appears to have learned much from the short time he spent dreaming of the one called Aynad," Teal'c observed.
"You noticed that too, huh?" Sam asked. "I mean, at first he didn't seem to know anything more than the rest of us did, and then all of a sudden, it was like he knew everything. He knows how Belos got here, what he was doing here, how long he's been here ..." Sam stopped dead in her tracks and turned back around quickly. "Teal'c, how could he learn all of that so quickly?"
Teal'c simply looked back at her. "I am uncertain about a great many things, Captain Carter. However, there is one ... feeling ... that has concerned me more than any other."
"What's that?"
"When first we watched Daniel Jackson's body die, I felt as if a great void had formed inside of me. I believe it now to be the part of my mind that was tied to Daniel's Jackson's by the beam responding to his sudden absence."
Sam nodded. "I know. I felt it too. And I think you're right; I think that's exactly what it was."
"Did this feeling of emptiness leave you, Captain Carter, when you learned of the continued existence of Daniel Jackson's consciousness?"
Sam concentrated for a moment, and then shook her head. "No. No, it didn't. It's still there."
"If Daniel Jackson were truly with us at the SGC, would not the connections in our minds have recognized this fact and reacted to his presence?"
"They should have," Sam said slowly. "Unless ..."
"Yes, Captain Carter?"
"Unless ... what if ...," Sam struggled to find the right words. "What if the Daniel Jackson we took back with us wasn't the same one that got caught in the beam with us?" Sam's voice was barely above a whisper, so soft that Teal'c had to lean forward to hear her.
"Is this possible?"
"Oh, I think it is, Teal'c," Sam said. "And I think after we inform Major Ferretti of the colonel's orders, we need to speak with Dr. Fraiser. ASAP."
Jack's mind was running a million miles a minute as he and Daniel walked between two of the columns and through a smaller door, leaving the outer hall behind them. He didn't have a clue where they were going, because Daniel hadn't bothered to tell him and he hadn't bothered to ask. But Daniel seemed to know where he was going, and that was what mattered. Jack was determined to stay on his heels every step of the way, wherever they might end up. After all, if Daniel had his mind set on a duel of some sort with a non-corporeal Goa'uld, he'd need someone to protect him.
Jack looked up at the man walking beside him and suddenly realized that Daniel didn't look like he needed protecting. It was almost impossible for Jack to reconcile the Daniel that walked beside him now with the Daniel that had been shaking in his arms on the isolation room floor less than an hour before. This Daniel had hard eyes and a grim determination on his face. That Daniel had been almost delirious from pain, had claimed that he wasn't really himself, that there was another ...
Jack's mind turned over and another piece of the puzzle feel into place. The Daniel Jackson he knew would never suggest destroying a temple without so much as a hint of regret in his voice. The Daniel Jackson he knew hated the Goa'uld, there was no doubt about that, but he would never volunteer to take one on, face-to-face, alone. The Daniel Jackson he knew exuded an air of friendliness and peace, not anger and ...
Power.
The Daniel Jackson walking between the columns with Jack fairly bristled with it-a raw power, fueled by anger and hatred, which Jack had never felt before. And when Jack looked, really truly looked, at the man beside him, he saw something that he had never seen before.
"Daniel?" he said quietly. "You're um ... you're glowing ..."
"What?" Daniel sounded distracted, but when he looked down at himself, he saw what Jack was talking about. "Oh! Um ... sorry ..."
Jack stared in awe at the powerful Daniel Jackson that stood beside him now. And as he watched the tendrils of light that snaked their way around his legs, and the lightning dancing around the younger man's fingertips, he understood.
"You're not him, are you?"
Daniel smiled softly. "I am Daniel Jackson. I'm just not the one you know."
"How long have you been like this?"
"It's hard to say, really. There's no real way to measure time where I am."
Jack remembered Daniel's muttered words from the infirmary, and he ventured a guess. "And you're the twelfth Daniel Jackson to go through this?"
Daniel shook his head slowly. "No, I'm the eleventh. He's the twelfth."
Jack's eyes darted around the long corridor they were walking down and he stepped forward in sudden concern.
"Where is he?" he demanded. "Where's my Daniel?"
"He's alive," Daniel answered. "He's here. We're on our way to him right now."
Another realization dawned, and everything that had confused him over the past two days suddenly made almost perfect sense to him. "What you said back at the base, about not being able to get back in your-his-body ... that wasn't true, was it? It wasn't that you had to come back here to get back in, or that you had to read the walls, or that parts of you were missing. You can't go into that body at all because it's not yours!"
Daniel simply nodded.
"So it was all lies? Designed to convince us to bring Daniel's body back here with us?"
"Yes."
Jack erupted in anger. "Damn it, Daniel, why didn't you tell me?"
Daniel sighed. "Think about it, Jack. Think back over every word I said, over every conversation we've had. I never actually told you that I was your Daniel Jackson."
"Okay, maybe not," Jack admitted after a few seconds of thought. "But I had absolutely no idea there was more than one. Of course I never asked you, but you sure as hell never told me that you weren't!"
"Semantics, Jack. I told you what you needed to hear to get you to come back here with his body. That's all that matters. Saving Daniel is what matters."
"You don't need to tell me that," Jack growled. He let out a deep breath and shook his head. "You could have told me more, Daniel. You could have told me the truth."
Daniel shook his head sadly. "It wouldn't have worked, Jack. Look, I know you. I had a Jack O'Neill of my own, after all." Daniel's smile was filled with sadness, but it was only there for a second, and then he had pushed it away. "You were so ready to think that you'd gone insane rather than let yourself believe that I just might be real ... What if my 'ghost' had appeared and said, 'Hey, Jack, there are two Daniels now. Yours is trapped on 759, and I'm a different one-one from three weeks in the future. Oh, by the way, it's a future where the three of you are dead and Belos killed you with my hands after he took over my body, but that's not important right now. Anyway, let's go back to the planet now ... ' What would you have thought? What would you have done?"
Jack considered Daniel's words for only a moment before nodding. "I'd have called MacKenzie myself."
"And your Daniel would have been trapped here forever, with no chance to fix anything, because instead of staying with him and teaching him what to do, I went to the SGC with you to try and save him." Daniel shrugged and tried not to look upset, but to Jack, the gesture only made the fact that he was upset that much more obvious. "I was so sure that I could do it on my own, that I could stop it all right here, right now, forever. It was arrogant and foolish, and I almost got him killed. I did get Aynad killed ..."
"Daniel, slow down!" Jack interrupted. "Remember that I'm just finding all this out for the first time, okay? How were you doing this? How did you get this Aynad person killed?"
Daniel let his head fall toward his chest, and he sighed deeply. "The first time SG-1 came here, the first Daniel Jackson that lost his body to Belos ... after it was over, after Belos had killed the rest of you and left for Earth, Daniel begged Aynad to help him. He knew that Aynad had the same abilities that Belos had, and he hoped that it included the ability to warp time. He was right. So he explained to Aynad that he thought that if he could just go back in time, just a few days, and warn himself, that he'd be able to stop it from happening again."
"And it didn't work," Jack said.
"No, it didn't work. So it happened again. The first Daniel ceased to exist and the second took his place. Two weeks later, Aynad took the second Daniel back in time with him, and they tried again. Aynad taught us things, how to use some of the power that we gained in this form, and we kept trying. Again, and again, and again..."
"Until the eleventh," Jack interjected.
Daniel nodded. "Until the eleventh. Until me. Until I let a promise that I made interfere with my ability to do what needed to be done."
"What promise?" Jack asked.
"I made a promise, Jack," Daniel answered softly. He lifted his head to look Jack straight in the eye. "To you. I swore to you that I'd never let you die again, that I'd keep Sam and Teal'c alive, and that I'd protect the next Daniel Jackson from Belos, no matter what I had to do. I promised you that I'd save you. I thought I'd figured out a way to do it... You see, the rest of us got caught in the beam alone. But I knew that if you got caught in it with him, that you'd be connected to him, that your consciousnesses would merge, and I thought that Belos wouldn't be able to separate you in time." Daniel sighed again. "I was wrong. So I had Aynad give Daniel the dream, knowing that he'd tell you what he'd seen."
"He sure tried," Jack said sadly. "We didn't listen to him."
"Belos wasn't letting you understand the importance of what he was saying. And if you didn't understand, then you wouldn't act on it."
"Which we didn't."
Daniel nodded again. "I was so desperate to keep my promise to you that I ... I made a rash decision. I knew that I couldn't get Daniel away from Belos in time to send him back with you, but I also knew that if someone didn't go with you, to convince you to bring his body back here, then he'd die, and not only would I have failed, I'd have been the Daniel Jackson that killed the next one instead of protecting him. So ... I left him here with Aynad, and I went with you. Aynad managed to get him away from Belos, and they hid from him for a while. I was talking to Aynad when Belos found them..." Daniel closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Belos killed Aynad, and he brought Daniel back here. And he's been here, alone, with no one to protect him, no one to help him..." He opened his eyes and looked directly at Jack once more. "I'm sorry, Jack. I shouldn't have interfered. I should have done what all the others did, ceased to exist, and let him take his chances with the thirteenth."
Jack looked around the corridor for a few seconds, using the time it bought him to absorb everything Daniel had told him. After he had, he nodded his head and turned back to Daniel again. "And if you'd done that, he'd have been stuck here, right? There'd have been no one to tell us what had happened, we wouldn't have come back, and he'd have been trapped, right? Until he just ceased to exist?"
Daniel nodded. "But the next one ..."
Jack shook his head quickly. "No. If the alternative to what has happened would have been Daniel trapped here forever and us not knowing that he was still alive, then I'm glad you did it. I wouldn't have wanted you to do anything else."
"But, Jack ..."
"Nope. It's exactly like you said," Jack continued. "It's saving Daniel that's important. And because of you, we can." Jack smiled and patted Daniel's arm. That one small gesture, so personal and comfortable, expressed without words everything that Jack was feeling. He wanted to find his Daniel, save him, take him home ... and he trusted this Daniel to help him. "So let's go do it."
Daniel smiled, overcome with relief that Jack had accepted his explanation and truly believing, once again, that as long as they did it together, they would win. He realized that he'd made a mistake by allowing Jack to leave Sam and Teal'c behind, and he knew that he'd have to return for them. SG-1 was four people, but more than that, it was the sum total of those four people, and what they meant to each other and what they would do for each other, that made it what it was. Maybe Jack had been right about the inscription-maybe all four souls had made it out of this temple together because, after all ... wasn't he Daniel Jackson?
Daniel nodded quickly. "Let's do it."
Jack released Daniel's arm, and together, they turned and continued down the corridor in silence. As they neared the door at the end, Jack felt the void in his chest that he'd been ignoring for more than twenty-four hours starting to fill back up, and he knew without a doubt what-or rather who-was waiting for them on the other side. It took every ounce of self-control that Jack possessed to keep himself from running.
Chapter Seventeen
"What?!" three voices asked in unison.
"Daniel Jackson, you cannot mean to ..."
"Daniel, you can't! It's too dangerous ..."
"If you think I'm going to let you do that alone, you're nuts!"
Daniel stopped in the door and turned back to face his teammates. "What are you going to do, Jack? What could you possibly do against him?"
"Well, what can you do against him? Look, I'm going with you," Jack said firmly. "And that's final. Now you wait for me, right there." He turned back to Sam and Teal'c. "Okay, you heard what he said about the glyph. Tell Ferretti first, have him tell Makepeace. And if he gives you any crap about not taking orders from me because I'm unconscious ..."
"Yes, sir," Sam said quickly. "We'll make sure it gets done."
"Okay, good."
"What of us?" Teal'c asked. "Should we not accompany you and Daniel Jackson to confront Belos?"
Jack shook his head quickly. "No. I want you two to stay here."
"But, sir," Sam interjected. "It's entirely possible, because of the beam, that Teal'c and I can leave our bodies too, just like you and Daniel. If what Daniel said is true, then the beam's primary function is loosening the connection between a body and its consciousness. Colonel, we can help."
"Absolutely not!" Jack snapped back. "Look, it's bad enough that he's got two bodies just laying here waiting for him to jump into them; we're not giving him four. Now, I'm ordering you two to stay here, in your bodies. Is that clear?"
Sam nodded. "Perfectly, sir."
"Indeed."
Jack nodded. "All right, then. We'll be back." He turned to follow Daniel out of the sanctuary.
"Colonel ..."
"We'll be back, Captain," Jack repeated without turning around. "Just be ready for us."
Jack reached Daniel's side, and together they walked back out into the large outer hall. Sam and Teal'c stared after them until they disappeared from sight, behind two of the massive stone columns. Sam sighed and turned to Teal'c.
"I guess it's time to get everyone ready."
Teal'c nodded without speaking.
Sam took one step forward, then stopped and turned back to Teal'c again. She was frowning, and Teal'c saw that she was chewing on her lower lip, as if in thought. "Teal'c, do you feel like ... well, do you feel like maybe we shouldn't have let them leave without us?"
Teal'c nodded again. "Indeed I do, Captain Carter. It was Daniel Jackson himself who was most insistent that we remain together. It seems strange to me that he would want us to remain behind now."
Sam shrugged and started walking slowly back toward the others. "I don't know, Teal'c. He seems like he knows what he's doing."
"He appears to have learned much from the short time he spent dreaming of the one called Aynad," Teal'c observed.
"You noticed that too, huh?" Sam asked. "I mean, at first he didn't seem to know anything more than the rest of us did, and then all of a sudden, it was like he knew everything. He knows how Belos got here, what he was doing here, how long he's been here ..." Sam stopped dead in her tracks and turned back around quickly. "Teal'c, how could he learn all of that so quickly?"
Teal'c simply looked back at her. "I am uncertain about a great many things, Captain Carter. However, there is one ... feeling ... that has concerned me more than any other."
"What's that?"
"When first we watched Daniel Jackson's body die, I felt as if a great void had formed inside of me. I believe it now to be the part of my mind that was tied to Daniel's Jackson's by the beam responding to his sudden absence."
Sam nodded. "I know. I felt it too. And I think you're right; I think that's exactly what it was."
"Did this feeling of emptiness leave you, Captain Carter, when you learned of the continued existence of Daniel Jackson's consciousness?"
Sam concentrated for a moment, and then shook her head. "No. No, it didn't. It's still there."
"If Daniel Jackson were truly with us at the SGC, would not the connections in our minds have recognized this fact and reacted to his presence?"
"They should have," Sam said slowly. "Unless ..."
"Yes, Captain Carter?"
"Unless ... what if ...," Sam struggled to find the right words. "What if the Daniel Jackson we took back with us wasn't the same one that got caught in the beam with us?" Sam's voice was barely above a whisper, so soft that Teal'c had to lean forward to hear her.
"Is this possible?"
"Oh, I think it is, Teal'c," Sam said. "And I think after we inform Major Ferretti of the colonel's orders, we need to speak with Dr. Fraiser. ASAP."
Jack's mind was running a million miles a minute as he and Daniel walked between two of the columns and through a smaller door, leaving the outer hall behind them. He didn't have a clue where they were going, because Daniel hadn't bothered to tell him and he hadn't bothered to ask. But Daniel seemed to know where he was going, and that was what mattered. Jack was determined to stay on his heels every step of the way, wherever they might end up. After all, if Daniel had his mind set on a duel of some sort with a non-corporeal Goa'uld, he'd need someone to protect him.
Jack looked up at the man walking beside him and suddenly realized that Daniel didn't look like he needed protecting. It was almost impossible for Jack to reconcile the Daniel that walked beside him now with the Daniel that had been shaking in his arms on the isolation room floor less than an hour before. This Daniel had hard eyes and a grim determination on his face. That Daniel had been almost delirious from pain, had claimed that he wasn't really himself, that there was another ...
Jack's mind turned over and another piece of the puzzle feel into place. The Daniel Jackson he knew would never suggest destroying a temple without so much as a hint of regret in his voice. The Daniel Jackson he knew hated the Goa'uld, there was no doubt about that, but he would never volunteer to take one on, face-to-face, alone. The Daniel Jackson he knew exuded an air of friendliness and peace, not anger and ...
Power.
The Daniel Jackson walking between the columns with Jack fairly bristled with it-a raw power, fueled by anger and hatred, which Jack had never felt before. And when Jack looked, really truly looked, at the man beside him, he saw something that he had never seen before.
"Daniel?" he said quietly. "You're um ... you're glowing ..."
"What?" Daniel sounded distracted, but when he looked down at himself, he saw what Jack was talking about. "Oh! Um ... sorry ..."
Jack stared in awe at the powerful Daniel Jackson that stood beside him now. And as he watched the tendrils of light that snaked their way around his legs, and the lightning dancing around the younger man's fingertips, he understood.
"You're not him, are you?"
Daniel smiled softly. "I am Daniel Jackson. I'm just not the one you know."
"How long have you been like this?"
"It's hard to say, really. There's no real way to measure time where I am."
Jack remembered Daniel's muttered words from the infirmary, and he ventured a guess. "And you're the twelfth Daniel Jackson to go through this?"
Daniel shook his head slowly. "No, I'm the eleventh. He's the twelfth."
Jack's eyes darted around the long corridor they were walking down and he stepped forward in sudden concern.
"Where is he?" he demanded. "Where's my Daniel?"
"He's alive," Daniel answered. "He's here. We're on our way to him right now."
Another realization dawned, and everything that had confused him over the past two days suddenly made almost perfect sense to him. "What you said back at the base, about not being able to get back in your-his-body ... that wasn't true, was it? It wasn't that you had to come back here to get back in, or that you had to read the walls, or that parts of you were missing. You can't go into that body at all because it's not yours!"
Daniel simply nodded.
"So it was all lies? Designed to convince us to bring Daniel's body back here with us?"
"Yes."
Jack erupted in anger. "Damn it, Daniel, why didn't you tell me?"
Daniel sighed. "Think about it, Jack. Think back over every word I said, over every conversation we've had. I never actually told you that I was your Daniel Jackson."
"Okay, maybe not," Jack admitted after a few seconds of thought. "But I had absolutely no idea there was more than one. Of course I never asked you, but you sure as hell never told me that you weren't!"
"Semantics, Jack. I told you what you needed to hear to get you to come back here with his body. That's all that matters. Saving Daniel is what matters."
"You don't need to tell me that," Jack growled. He let out a deep breath and shook his head. "You could have told me more, Daniel. You could have told me the truth."
Daniel shook his head sadly. "It wouldn't have worked, Jack. Look, I know you. I had a Jack O'Neill of my own, after all." Daniel's smile was filled with sadness, but it was only there for a second, and then he had pushed it away. "You were so ready to think that you'd gone insane rather than let yourself believe that I just might be real ... What if my 'ghost' had appeared and said, 'Hey, Jack, there are two Daniels now. Yours is trapped on 759, and I'm a different one-one from three weeks in the future. Oh, by the way, it's a future where the three of you are dead and Belos killed you with my hands after he took over my body, but that's not important right now. Anyway, let's go back to the planet now ... ' What would you have thought? What would you have done?"
Jack considered Daniel's words for only a moment before nodding. "I'd have called MacKenzie myself."
"And your Daniel would have been trapped here forever, with no chance to fix anything, because instead of staying with him and teaching him what to do, I went to the SGC with you to try and save him." Daniel shrugged and tried not to look upset, but to Jack, the gesture only made the fact that he was upset that much more obvious. "I was so sure that I could do it on my own, that I could stop it all right here, right now, forever. It was arrogant and foolish, and I almost got him killed. I did get Aynad killed ..."
"Daniel, slow down!" Jack interrupted. "Remember that I'm just finding all this out for the first time, okay? How were you doing this? How did you get this Aynad person killed?"
Daniel let his head fall toward his chest, and he sighed deeply. "The first time SG-1 came here, the first Daniel Jackson that lost his body to Belos ... after it was over, after Belos had killed the rest of you and left for Earth, Daniel begged Aynad to help him. He knew that Aynad had the same abilities that Belos had, and he hoped that it included the ability to warp time. He was right. So he explained to Aynad that he thought that if he could just go back in time, just a few days, and warn himself, that he'd be able to stop it from happening again."
"And it didn't work," Jack said.
"No, it didn't work. So it happened again. The first Daniel ceased to exist and the second took his place. Two weeks later, Aynad took the second Daniel back in time with him, and they tried again. Aynad taught us things, how to use some of the power that we gained in this form, and we kept trying. Again, and again, and again..."
"Until the eleventh," Jack interjected.
Daniel nodded. "Until the eleventh. Until me. Until I let a promise that I made interfere with my ability to do what needed to be done."
"What promise?" Jack asked.
"I made a promise, Jack," Daniel answered softly. He lifted his head to look Jack straight in the eye. "To you. I swore to you that I'd never let you die again, that I'd keep Sam and Teal'c alive, and that I'd protect the next Daniel Jackson from Belos, no matter what I had to do. I promised you that I'd save you. I thought I'd figured out a way to do it... You see, the rest of us got caught in the beam alone. But I knew that if you got caught in it with him, that you'd be connected to him, that your consciousnesses would merge, and I thought that Belos wouldn't be able to separate you in time." Daniel sighed again. "I was wrong. So I had Aynad give Daniel the dream, knowing that he'd tell you what he'd seen."
"He sure tried," Jack said sadly. "We didn't listen to him."
"Belos wasn't letting you understand the importance of what he was saying. And if you didn't understand, then you wouldn't act on it."
"Which we didn't."
Daniel nodded again. "I was so desperate to keep my promise to you that I ... I made a rash decision. I knew that I couldn't get Daniel away from Belos in time to send him back with you, but I also knew that if someone didn't go with you, to convince you to bring his body back here, then he'd die, and not only would I have failed, I'd have been the Daniel Jackson that killed the next one instead of protecting him. So ... I left him here with Aynad, and I went with you. Aynad managed to get him away from Belos, and they hid from him for a while. I was talking to Aynad when Belos found them..." Daniel closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Belos killed Aynad, and he brought Daniel back here. And he's been here, alone, with no one to protect him, no one to help him..." He opened his eyes and looked directly at Jack once more. "I'm sorry, Jack. I shouldn't have interfered. I should have done what all the others did, ceased to exist, and let him take his chances with the thirteenth."
Jack looked around the corridor for a few seconds, using the time it bought him to absorb everything Daniel had told him. After he had, he nodded his head and turned back to Daniel again. "And if you'd done that, he'd have been stuck here, right? There'd have been no one to tell us what had happened, we wouldn't have come back, and he'd have been trapped, right? Until he just ceased to exist?"
Daniel nodded. "But the next one ..."
Jack shook his head quickly. "No. If the alternative to what has happened would have been Daniel trapped here forever and us not knowing that he was still alive, then I'm glad you did it. I wouldn't have wanted you to do anything else."
"But, Jack ..."
"Nope. It's exactly like you said," Jack continued. "It's saving Daniel that's important. And because of you, we can." Jack smiled and patted Daniel's arm. That one small gesture, so personal and comfortable, expressed without words everything that Jack was feeling. He wanted to find his Daniel, save him, take him home ... and he trusted this Daniel to help him. "So let's go do it."
Daniel smiled, overcome with relief that Jack had accepted his explanation and truly believing, once again, that as long as they did it together, they would win. He realized that he'd made a mistake by allowing Jack to leave Sam and Teal'c behind, and he knew that he'd have to return for them. SG-1 was four people, but more than that, it was the sum total of those four people, and what they meant to each other and what they would do for each other, that made it what it was. Maybe Jack had been right about the inscription-maybe all four souls had made it out of this temple together because, after all ... wasn't he Daniel Jackson?
Daniel nodded quickly. "Let's do it."
Jack released Daniel's arm, and together, they turned and continued down the corridor in silence. As they neared the door at the end, Jack felt the void in his chest that he'd been ignoring for more than twenty-four hours starting to fill back up, and he knew without a doubt what-or rather who-was waiting for them on the other side. It took every ounce of self-control that Jack possessed to keep himself from running.