Extended Summary: SG-1 goes to an alien planet where Daniel unearths an ancient tablet with his name on it. He takes it home, steps through the Stargate and arrives on Earth not breathing. Jack tries to shoot things and says "Oh fer cryin' out loud" a lot. Carter tries to stop Jack shooting things and is frustrated. Teal'c plots revenge. One of Janet's nurses gets a larger than usual role to play in the action. Butterflies and snakes are of importance, as are Greek Gods, chocolate bars, a Goa'uld called Minthe and Homer. This story has its seriously dark moments but they are clearly signposted.

This occurs in late season 5 (probably). Daniel's not dead, Jonas is never around, Jack is still a Colonel, Carter is a Major, Jacob's not dead, Hammond's still in charge of the SGC, Janet's not dead, and Teal'c still has Junior. Spoilers for seasons 1-5 but (I think) not beyond.

The title of the story is from Emily Dickinson's poem which gets thoroughly mangled. The title of this chapter comes from the movie where the original translation of Stargate is Door to Heaven, which set me thinking. Because I prefer the spelling and the writing of the character, Sha're is Shau'ri.

I disclaim.

Door to Heaven

Daniel Jackson, doctor of linguistics and archaeology, stepped into the Stargate event horizon on P5X-606 and exited it on Earth 21 grams lighter.

The 21 grams fact had far less impact on O'Neill than the sudden realisation that his pet Egyptologist was dead.

Bellowing for Janet, Jack dropped his kit and lunged to catch Daniel's falling body. The softest expiration of air he'd ever heard marked the last breath of his friend. Training kicked in and Daniel was on his back with his pulse checked and his airway open in seconds. Forcing air back into his friend's lungs, Jack caught Carter's eye and jerked his head towards Jackson's chest. CPR resumed, sirens screaming around them, they fought for the life of their friend.

Dr Fraiser pushed the Colonel out of the way, her expression as cold and stony as the marble tablet that the MALP carried through the 'Gate and her heart rate fluttering as rapidly as Jack's.

The stream of orders drifted over Teal'c's head surreally. With his gentle strong-armed help, Daniel Jackson was loaded onto a gurney. Then the body was propelled towards the Infirmary and the former First Prime could do nothing but watch as the tiny doctor straddled Daniel and pounded his chest, willing him to breathe, yelling commands and demanding vitals, her entire force of being focused on his friend as his was.

Beside him, Major Carter tried in vain to explain what had happened to a shocked General Hammond. O'Neill was already gone, a streak of camouflaged lightning after the blue-eyed, blue-lipped corpse.

Five minutes before Daniel Jackson had been translating an Earth joke into Goa'uld for Teal'c to better understand it while Major Carter and O'Neill had exchanged looks of mutual exasperation. Four minutes before Daniel Jackson had finally understood the Jaffa joke, so witty when spoken in the language of the false gods, and his laughter had not diminished even when he stumbled near the DHD. Three minutes before Teal'c had hefted Daniel Jackson's pack onto his back and raised an eyebrow at the number of artefacts the archaeologist bore. Two minutes before Daniel Jackson had breath to answer Jack's teasing about the "stuff" he carried. One minute before he had been alive. Now he was dead and Teal'c could not understand why. There was no blood, no gaping wound, nothing to indicate what had killed him, but dead he was and despite SG-1 and Janet's best efforts, dead he stayed.

Well, mostly-dead anyway and as everyone knows, there's a big difference between mostly-dead and all-dead.

The Stargate glimmered in the moonlight brightly. Moonlight – that couldn't be right, Daniel thought, there was no natural light in the Gate Room, not 28 floors below ground level and with a mountain in the way.

The stupidity of the thought hit him as he realised that this wasn't just Not the Gate Room, but also Not Colorado, probably Not the Earth and possibly Not the Galaxy. He hadn't been Colonel Jack O'Neill's pet archaeologist for six years for nothing, though, and he quickly sought out and completely failed to find a DHD.

"Oh bqllr," Daniel swore as he realised that something had, yet again, gone horribly wrong and he was stranded, yet again, on an alien world with no way home. Jack would be muttering about trouble-magnet-accident-prone-downright-careless-about-karma-archaeologists if he was around, but a quick glance showed Daniel what his ears had already told him: Jack wasn't here. Nor was the rest of SG-1 or the MALP.

Looking around, he saw rocks, rocks and more rocks. There were no trees between here and the horizon, a fact Jack would have appreciated, and the monotonous landscape was broken only by a dark river that flowed sluggishly half a mile from where he stood. Assessing the situation, he sat down on the steps and thought about his assets as Jack had taught him to do: He had his day-pack, some covertly smuggled chocolate and a very limited supply of coffee. What he didn't have was a GDO, DHD, Plan B or even a P90. The only acronym he could add to the mission's credit slate was SNAFU although FUBAR was also soon to be a contender.

He snorted as he realised that Jack had finally taught him military parlance when he wasn't around to hear him use it. Shaking off the brief touch of homesickness, he took stock of his surroundings. This world was dark, cold and devoid of other life. The water might, or might not, be drinkable. The night skies bore no resemblance to any heavens he'd ever seen and he couldn't pick out a single familiar constellation. Wherever he was, he was far from home and completely alone.

The last world he had been on with SG-1 was P5X-606. It was an archaeologist's dream: unspoilt, a gorgeous desert planet with the dry heat of Abydos and only slightly more vegetation, just enough trees to lead Jack to make another sarcastic remark about their universality. Better yet, his pangs of homesickness were alleviated by the discovery of a lost city, abandoned and ruined true, but in better condition than any ancient Earth city other than Pompeii. If he'd been excited before he found the Temple though, he was on a hyperactive-child's-sugar-high-of-a-lifetime when he reached the inner sanctum.

Jack had pouted, but then Jack always pouted when he started in on one of his brief lectures about the possible history of whatever world they were on. He knew Jack found them dull sometimes, but he'd also seen the glint of amusement in his Colonel's eye whenever certain names came up. Jack thought he didn't know but Daniel was well aware of his fondness for Homer and anything regarding gods getting their asses kicked, even if it was by other gods. Such instances were rare so Daniel made sure to include plenty of detail when they did arise.

Jack. Jack was going to kill him for this, not that it was Daniel's fault, no sir. Not that he ever called Jack 'sir'. Perish the thought. He'd been following Jack across P5X-606, being a dutiful linguist-cum-foot-soldier and keeping his side-arm strapped and his attention on the surroundings and not just on his fascinating new artefacts. The city's Hellenic ruins had suggested a whole new interpretation of the Greek myths and he'd been torn between staying to study them more thoroughly and rushing back to the SGC to discuss the possible implications of the finds with his archaeological colleagues. In the end, Jack's urgings to return in time for a hockey game had led Daniel to abandon the site, gather up as many of his finds as he could and dart after the Colonel.

Jack had been keeping a steady stream of bantering comments on the way back to the Gate, most of them about the pornographic mosaics they'd discovered and how lecherous the ancients were, but Daniel hadn't bothered replying to most of them. He'd been too absorbed in the consequences of his find. The tablet, heavier than it looked, had been carved roughly 3,500 years before, if the Linear A script found all over the ruins were a reliable indicator. 1500BCE Linear A was still in use, a few centuries later and it would have been Linear B and by the time of Homer, early antique Greek. He wondered if these people had been brought from that time by the Goa'uld and never evolved the later languages like the Abydonians don't think of Shau'ri, damn it, too late, just don't start crying now, concentrate on the tablet, think of the origin of Linear A – Goa'uld, not so good. Quick, Latin: Amare: Amamus, amaverimus, amatus est… Not that one, vitskertr! OK, recite the early Greek alphabet backwards, that's better, just remember to breathe or if they had moved beyond the Linear A and that this last surviving script was an historical document from early in their colonisation.

His scriptural problem was simple: the tablet was a Rosetta stone linking Linear A, ancient Greek and a weird mix of Greek and Latin letters. The last made no sense unless read phonetically with a Chicagoan accent when they became comprehensively modern English.

The utter incompatibility of ideas astounded him. Despite Jack's belief that everywhere evolved the English language despite having none of the Romance or Saxon languages it was rooted in, Daniel knew how unusual it was to find it spoken anywhere off Earth. He'd been laughed out of academia because of his belief that the Pyramids showed that written language was much older than anyone previously thought. He didn't even want to think what would happen if he ever announced that little grey aliens were speaking modern English before Shakespeare ever penned the immortal lines "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

It wasn't just the language of the tablet but the content that was bothering him though that was troubling in and of itself. The scribe who had carved this marble spoke of the son of a King who had lived long ago, of his deciphering of the Labyrinth, his defeat of the false-god, his brief marriage to the local princess, his journey to his homeland, the loss of said-princess to a God of another land, his tragic return home and his quest to save his kingdom from the evil usurper that had claimed his throne. So far, so Theseus. That wasn't what was troubling the young archaeologist the most though.

The chalice he'd found next to the tablet bashed against his hip and he winced, momentarily distracted. The wedding cup - which reminded him so much of his own that lurked on the shelf in his apartment, ready to spring out at him, a tiger with claws of sharp memory and teeth of impossible regret - bore similar signs of loving care dedicated to its preservation. That wasn't why he'd personally carried it instead of putting it with the tablet and the dozen other artefacts on the MALP. Like the tablet, it had caught his eye for a foolishly simple reason and yet he hadn't been able to let either of them go. Like the tablet, it depicted an historic battle between a hero and a monster, the hero emerging triumphant and the fair Princess won and lost in a few brief scenes. Unlike the tablet, it carried only two words and it was these two words that had made him refuse to abandon it even when Jack had "Oh for crying out loud" him as he stumbled under the weight of the artefacts.

Despite being different materials, styles and even possibly eras, the tablet and the chalice had one property in common: they were carved with the same name that was as impossible as it was familiar to him because it was his own.

Even as he faced his new Robinson Crusoe Gate-wreck life, Daniel still found his breath taken away by that simple fact.

Breathing the cold dry air deeply, he put the thought to one side. Solving archaeological mysteries weren't going to get him home. There was nothing to do, he decided, but start walking in the hopes of finding some help, or at least some shelter. He wasn't getting anything done standing around here that was for sure. Shrugging his pack onto his shoulders and pushing himself up off the Stargate's plinth, he started to walk. "It could be worse," he murmured, "It could be raining."

The Gods' sense of humour is not subtle at the best of times. The words were barely out of his mouth before the monsoon started.

"Mostly dead."

Janet wasn't sure how the Colonel managed it, but the words fell like stones through her mental lake of equanimity, breaking her out of her carefully enforced serenity. The sarcastic ripples were only on the inside and she winced as she heard the scorn in his voice.

"Exactly how can he be 'mostly dead'? I mean, even for Daniel-Lazarus-Jackson, that's got to be tough." Teal'c was standing next to Jack and in a less serious time, she would have sworn his lip twitched into a partial smirk.

Janet sighed and wondered why they'd never covered dealing with sarcastic, worried, mother hen Colonels in her many years of training. "He's not dead, but he's not alive either. It's not a coma, it's not a hypnotic trance, it has nothing to do with the biofeedback mechanisms that can force a person into deep unconsciousness, he hasn't been knocked out. He just isn't there."

She chose not to tell Jack that she herself had declared Daniel dead or that his body had been wheeled down to the isolation room they kept for those SGC members who died of unknown causes. She'd been on her way to tell the Colonel that the fourth member of SG-1 was dead when the scream of one of her nurses had caused her to spin around and run back the way she had come.

She had finished cleaning Daniel up for viewing, removing more tubes and needles than Janet wanted to think about, and was tying the toe-tag on when the nurse had noticed a mark on the body. Her gloved fingers brushed lightly against it, noting the two deep puncture wounds, and Ellen leaned closer, her breath caressing the mark feather softly.

Then Daniel inhaled.

The nurse's scream was loud enough to rouse the rest of the facility, if not to wake the mostly-dead. By the time she got a grip there was no need to call a medical team – most of the Infirmary staff were in the room. What could have been the settling of the body into death became a resurrection. The nurse had almost had a heart attack and the fight for Daniel's life had begun again, even more desperately than the last time.

"Right." O'Neill drew the word out to twice its natural length and left its harmonics twanging on Janet's violin string nerves.

"Do you have any idea what could have caused his condition?" Janet shot Carter a surprisingly grateful glance. She could deal with worried Majors.

"Snakebite." The word snake was perhaps ill chosen because at it O'Neill's back went ramrod straight and his expression switched from open concern to barely suppressed horror.

"Goa'uld?"

There it was, the most feared word in her dictionary. She smoothed herself into calmness and looked the Colonel in the eye as she said, "No, but whatever it was, we don't have an anti-venom for it. There's a bite mark on his left ankle, two deep fang wounds and the area around the wound is infected. The teeth must have gone right through his boots. We've tried to draw the infection out but nothing is working."

"But… mostly dead?" Jack's expression was one she had seen too many times, confused and afraid and not quite willing to admit to just how scared he was for his friend.

Janet intertwined her fingers and gripped until the knuckles whitened, keeping her face carefully impassive. If she let herself feel now, she'd break down and weep. She couldn't watch him die, not again. "He's not breathing on his own. His responses are slow. His heartbeat is so erratic that it's stopped several times and I've only just managed to get it back. We have him on a ventilator and an experimental form of a pacemaker that Anise loaned us." She stopped short of saying that it was the only thing still keeping the archaeologist's heart beating steadily. None of them needed to hear that. "The machines may be the only things keeping him going. From a medical perspective, he should be dead."

"But he isn't," Sam said it in a half questioning tone, as if the notion was fragile and would break if too much reliant weight was placed upon it.

"No, he isn't, but he isn't responding to stimuli and his EKG patterns are flat-lined. If there were a definite cause, I'd say he was brain dead, but as it is, I just don't know what's wrong with him. The venom from the snakebite may have caused this, but we've had enough alien devices affecting personnel for me not to discount something else at this stage." Janet looked down at the table and then forced herself to face Jack. "Was there anything on the planet that would have caused his condition?"

"No, nothing," Jack answered, but even as he spoke the words Carter gave him a sharp glance and he knew he was lying. He just wished he could remember about what.

The river was further than he'd thought; either that or the strange event that had led him to this place was affecting his perceptions of the passage of time.

The sun was rising by the time his feet found the damp river bank and he sank gratefully to the ground as he found the water clear and pure smelling. Dipping a hand in, the feel of the cool liquid against his colder skin soothed him. He cupped his hands and leaned forward to drink.

"Stop!"

His lips brushed the liquid and stopped. He turned his head to see a young boy running towards him, arms waving frantically, face contorted in fear.

"Don't drink that," the boy fell to his knees next to Daniel and pushed his hands so that the water flew across the river in an arc of rainbow coloured drops.

Daniel raised an eyebrow. "Why not?"

"It's the River of Lethe," the boy said if the fact was patently obvious to anyone with half a brain. "Drinking the water makes you forget."

Only on the word forget did Daniel realise that the boy wasn't speaking Goa'uld, Abydonian, English or any of the living languages he spoke, but Homeric Greek. That he was standing by the River of Lethe talking in Ancient Greek to a boy who, he had just realised, bore a striking resemblance to a minor Goa'uld he and Teal'c had once despatched would have bothered him a few years ago, but not any more. Deciding against giving his peaceful explorer(s) speech, Daniel looked down at the water and saw dazed fish flit by under the reflection of clouds that were perfectly fluffy and white.

"Where is this place?"

The boy, a mop of light brown hair set above a piercing pair of brown eyes, considered the question thoughtfully. "Don't know."

"OK, so where did you spring from?" Daniel sat down on the bank and gripped his hands in front of his knees, tucking himself up into a small and unthreatening ball. It was not a move that Jack would like, but then Daniel didn't see much of a threat coming from an eleven-year-old boy and even if it did, he wasn't in much of a position to defend himself anyway. He might as well make himself comfortable. "I didn't see a village as I was walking here."

The boy laughed. "There isn't a village for miles, not until you reach the sea. There's just me and the others at the Haven."

"The Haven?" Rapidly sorting through every historical mention of the word, Daniel found himself adrift on a sea of options.

None of his thoughts, as it turned out, were anything near the truth.

"Yes," the boy smiled brightly, "the Haven, it's where I live with Iannis and Mazda and Shau'ri, and all the others who was once possessed by the false gods."