Title: Zymotic
Author: MegTDJ
Category: Angst/drama, hurt/comfort
Rating: T
Pairing: None; Jack/Daniel friendship. Slight mention of Jack/Sara, Daniel/Sha're.
Spoilers: Anything and everything up to early season 7.
Summary: When Jack is stricken with an alien virus, he finds he can no longer distinguish past from present and fact from fiction.
Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1, its universe and its characters are not mine. The story itself is, however, so please don't archive without my permission.

Author's notes: Phew, this was hard to write! I've never written a fic this long entirely from Jack's POV before, so I hope I did the character justice. There isn't enough Jack fic being written these days, so for those of you who have missed him... here ya go! I hope you enjoy. :)

The title, Zymotic, refers to a type of infectious disease, and can also mean "of, relating to, or causing fermentation", and since Jack has an infectious disease and is in a constant state of fermentation (or agitation) through the whole fic, I figured it fit. But really, I just wanted to be the first to have a novel uploaded to the SG novel archive under the letter Z. ;)

Many thanks to Misty and Kerri for the constant encouragement and kicks in the butt, and to Heleen for providing me with the perfect soundtrack when inspiration was running dry. You guys rock!

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

Zymotic


Chapter 1

The first thing he heard was a scream. That was shortly followed by a scuffling sound and voices whispering above his head.

"Take him! Quickly!"

Someone grabbed him around the waist and hauled him to his feet. He couldn't open his eyes, but he was awake and aware enough to realize that this probably wasn't a good thing.

He tried to fight against whoever it was, but there must have been more than one of them as his arms were soon pinned to his sides and he felt himself being dragged helplessly along. "No," he groaned as soon as his voice would cooperate.

"Shh!" one of the men hissed in his ear. "We are trying to help you."

Help him? What the hell was this? Where the hell was he?

His eyes finally opened as he was lowered onto the ground again. Though it wasn't the same hard ground this time... it was soft, like he was lying on a cloud.

A cloud? He gave his head a sharp shake to help clear his thoughts, and then looked up at the two men who were now hurriedly pushing on a huge wooden door to close it. They were in a smallish room of some kind, dark except for a primitive torch attached to one wall, and bare of furnishings except for the downy blankets arranged as a bed underneath him. Nothing rang any bells of recognition in his head, and it was starting to creep him out.

"Who are you?" he asked as the men closed the door and turned back to face him. "Where am I?"

"I am Marzun," one of them said, "and this is Derya. I know you are feeling frightened and abandoned right now, but you need not fear. We are friends. We will help you."

"Help me?" He struggled to sit up, though he felt as though he could pass out again at any moment. "If you want to help me, get me out of here."

The two men looked at each other in confusion. "Where... would you go?" Derya asked.

That was a good question. Where would he go?

He raised a hand to his forehead as he started to feel progressively dizzy, and soon Marzun was crouching by his side, offering him water from a small bowl. He took a few sips, but then pushed the man away.

Marzun stood up and looked down on him sympathetically. "You must be feeling very disoriented," he said. "That is often one of the first effects. Your mind will soon clear, and you will remember everything."

"First effects? Of what?"

"Of the Death. You have been stricken, and so you have been sent here to us... to the Colony. Think carefully. You will remember."

Death? Stricken? Colony? No, no, no, there was some mistake...

"Do you remember your name?" Marzun asked.

His name? Of course he knew his name. It was right on the tip of his mind...

"Do not rush him, Marzun," Derya murmured. "Can you not see he is in shock?"

Shock... yes, that would explain it, he thought. But he didn't have the luxury of giving in to shock. He had to think... think about where he'd been, what had happened leading up to arriving in this place...

"Jack," he said. "My name is Jack."

And then it all came flooding back.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxox

"Jack? I, uh... I think we're in trouble."

Jack rolled his eyes and gave a frustrated sigh as he leaned against the bars of his cell. "Yeah, I kinda noticed that, Daniel. But hey, thanks for the confirmation."

"What are we going to do?" Daniel asked. Even though his cell was a few feet away from Jack's and the light coming through the room's one window did nothing but scatter creepy shadows across the floor, Jack could see that Daniel's face was pale and strained. He was genuinely scared. As they all were.

Jack's only reply was another sigh. He didn't need to say it out loud for the rest of his team to know the answer - there was nothing they could do but wait.

"How are you feeling, sir?"

Jack glared at Carter, which wasn't easy given that her cell was the farthest from his. "I feel fine," he said. "I am fine. I barely even touched that guy. How could I have caught this... this..."

"Death," Daniel said quietly.

"Very helpful, Daniel. Thank you."

Daniel shook his head and stepped away from the bars of his cell to escape the reach of Jack's glare. He was being so damn depressed and mopey that Jack was ready to throw something at him.

"Will you get over feeling guilty, for God's sake?" Jack said. "Save it for if I actually do get sick. Which is not going to happen, by the way."

"I'm the one who insisted we stay an extra day to visit those ruins," Daniel said from somewhere in the shadows of his cell. "If we hadn't..."

"The crazy plague guy wouldn't have taken offense to us raiding his hideout, and we wouldn't have ended up in quarantine," Jack finished for him. "But if it hadn't been us who'd found the crazy plague guy, it would have been a bunch of school kids who wanted to turn those ruins into a playhouse, and they wouldn't have had the means of bringing the guy down like we did. Personally, I think saving a bunch of kids' lives is worth spending a few hours locked up, don't you?"

Daniel didn't answer, which Jack took to mean that he'd made his point. He nodded in satisfaction and went back to leaning against the bars in silence.

"Have you yet to experience any hallucinations, O'Neill?" Teal'c asked a few moments later.

Jack growled in annoyance and kicked the bars of his cell. "Will you people shut up about the whole Death thing already?" he snapped. "Trust me, if I start hallucinating and going out of my mind, you'll all be the first to know."

He stomped over to the dark side of his cage and sat down on the narrow bench that was supposed to serve as a bed. "Bad day," he muttered as he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. "Very, very bad day."

"Mmm," said a voice from somewhere close beside him in the dark. "And it's only going to get worse."

Jack's blood ran cold as the deep, distorted voice echoed through his cell, but he refused to open his eyes. It couldn't be real. It was his imagination. All this talk about hallucinations was causing his mind to play tricks on him.

"Are you alright, O'Neill?" the voice asked in amusement. "You look scared to... death."

Jack finally opened his eyes at the sound of the cruel laughter he'd come to know well. He turned his head in the direction of the voice just in time to see a pair of dark eyes flash as only those belonging to evil snakeheads do.

Baal.

Jack cried out and jumped to his feet, but he knew he had nowhere to run.

Baal leered at him as he slowly rose to his feet, playfully toying with the knife he held in his hand. "Shall we begin again?"

Jack was seized with an intense feeling of terror as the memories of being tortured by this Goa'uld a year earlier suddenly flooded into his mind. He felt an overwhelming need to get as far away from that face as possible. "Somebody let me out of here!" he yelled, grabbing the bars of the cell and shaking them with all his might. "Let me the hell out of here!"

"Please! Stop! You will only hurt yourself!"

Jack turned around and swung at the body connected to the hand that had just grabbed his shoulder. Baal could kill him again if he wanted, but there was no way he was going down without a fight this time.

To his surprise, however, it wasn't Baal's face that was staring back at him.

"Please, calm down," Marzun said. "I mean you no harm. Whatever you thought you saw, it was not real."

Jack gaped at his surroundings in disbelief. He was back in the little room with his two nervous companions, even though he could have sworn he'd been in the quarantine room with the rest of SG-1 just seconds before. "I..." he began, but he hadn't a clue what to say.

"Believe me when I tell you," Marzun said gently, "this is real. These walls, these blankets, myself and Derya... for now, we are all that is real. Everything else is untrue. It is the Death taunting you with what is not really there."

Jack blinked as he watched Marzun's mouth moving with the words he spoke, but somehow his brain just wasn't taking it in. Real... untrue... Death... those were the only words he seemed to recognize. He could feel himself sinking again as Marzun rushed forward to catch him and ease him down onto the blankets.

"There," Marzun said, his voice sounding more and more distant as Jack's eyes drifted closed. "Rest now. You will understand soon enough."

To be continued...