Um. This unexpectedly became a crossover with Farscape, but it doesn't change anything, and all will be explained...eventually. And it's AU as heck so don't worry about spoilers, at least not in this fic.


John was waiting for them the moment they stepped through the wormhole, SG13 standing respectfully behind him, waiting their turn to step through to the planet that had cost Earth another of its children.

John's gaze darted among those departing the Stargate hopefully, passing over Teal'c, Daniel, and Jack, before locking on the open gate behind them, hoping against hope that it had all just been some horrible, horrible prank.

He had already lost Aeryn for the third time. He couldn't lose Sam and Jolinar. Not when they were just starting to become friends. Hadn't something like this happened years before, when Sam and Jolinar had first blended? They'd been gone for an entire year. Weirder things had happened. Way weirder things had happened. They could still be alive...

"Hey, hey," he said, jumping forward so he could walk backwards infront of Jack as the man started to leave the gate room without acknowledging him, "Let's not give up hope just yet, alright? Remember that time an angry mob tried to drown Teal'c, but Junior managed to keep him alive? Yeah, I read that file, I read all the files, remember?-look, who's to say Jolinar couldn't have done the same thing?" He managed to make it all the way to where the corridor started branching off into different directions before he had to stop, not sure which way Jack was going to go, but guessing the infirmary. "She's a lot older than Junior, and has probably had way more hosts. She's probably an expert on human anato-"

"Crichton, not now." The other man growled, stepping around him and continuing down the corridor.

John looked expectantly at Daniel, who was the closest behind Jack, and when he was met with no hostility, started walking beside him, matching his pace step for step.

"Come on, Doc," he said, "Aeryn survived drowning once, and I mean actually drowning, as in dead, not the sort of drowning you can fix with CPR, and she didn't have a symbiote to help her. Now, granted, it was all because of some sort of mystical voodoo on Zhaan's part, but-"

"The water in the swamp," Daniel said quietly, interrupting him, "Is toxic to Goa'uld, which is why the society we found was able to exist in the first place. Sam assured us that she only had a headache, and our guide informed us that she would be fine unless she actually drank some of the stuff."

John's smile faltered.

Sam and Jolinar...had drowned.

"Oh." He said dumbly.

He stopped walking, his brow furrowing in thought, and Daniel continued on without him.

"Will you be alright, John Crichton?" Teal'c's voice came from behind him, and he looked up in time to see the warrior pause beside him in the wide hallway.

"Uh," he said, for a moment seeing D'argo in the Jaffa's place, and feeling a sudden stab of lonelines even as his mind still whirled, trying to think of alternate explanations for what had happened, "Yeah, yeah, sure."

He waved his team-mate on aimlessly, then stood by himself in the middle of the hallway once Teal'c had left.

He stared around him at the grey walls and floor, then turned silently, barely seeing the hallway around him, and headed toward his rooms, his steps as heavy as though the Earth were trying to pull him down, a frown still etched onto his face.


Janet Fraiser sat heavily in one of the hospital's beds, feeling weaker than she had since the moment she had woken up several hours ago.

It felt like her mind had been disconnected from her body.

It couldn't be true. It couldn't.

...Could it?

She stared down at her hands, trembling slightly against the white sheets, and imagined that her friend's hand clasped it. Sam and Jolinar should have been the first visitors she saw after waking up. She would have had it no other way. They should have been sitting next to her, laughing and smiling and sad all at the same time, catching her up on everything she had missed.

Just as she had done for them so many years ago.

But now they couldn't. They were gone. She wasn't even supposed to have known yet, but the entire hospital was abuzz with the news. Somehow, it had gotten out, and couldn't be contained.

Oh, god, Cassy. She would know soon. She would hear about it. She-she had to tell her, it wasn't just something you could learn from a random stranger. They wouldn't understand that she...that she'd lost another parent...

A breath caught in her throat, and she struggled to force it back down. She couldn't. She couldn't do that to her daughter, not again, not afterward everything she had already gone through.

She wanted to sit up, call for a doctor, a nurse, someone, and demand that they bring her daughter to her, that they tell her she was awake, but...but something was wrong. Something at the edge of her awareness, like a limb she hadn't known she'd had, something at the edge of her mind was burning, with pain, with fear, and a voice, calling out-


Somewhere, far away, a woman closed her eyes, and released her last breath in a whisper of-


The moment he was allowed to leave the infirmary, Daniel retreated to his office, the obol he had been given clutched firmly in one hand, and cold like ice against his fingers.

He hadn't had the heart to look too closely upon it before, but once he was safely ensconced away and surrounded by artifacts instead of grieving, pitying eyes...

He turned the lamp on, and held the object up to its light.

Almost completely transparent, the obol cast a pale blue shadow against the wood of his desk.

He stared at it thoughtfully for a few moments, mulling over what Deia Marouse had said, and John's almost fanatical hope that their friends were still alive somehow.

He hadn't known Crichton very long, less than a month, actually, but what had become obvious within days was that despite the calm at the surface, everything the once-missing-now-found astronaut had gone though had left him...deeply scarred, to say the least.

Not that Daniel wasn't fascinated at the stories he had to tell, but...

He could get extremely distanced from reality at times.

There was no reason for Daniel to let the man's...hope wasn't really the right word for it, but Daniel couldn't think of any others that weren't incredibly demeaning...get to him. There was no reason to believe that Sam and Jolinar could still be alive.

Except for all of the other times someone on their team had been given up for dead, only to turn up days or weeks or months later, alive at the very least, even if not particularly well or kicking.

But those thoughts only led to dangerous territory, and he clenched his teeth, trying to ward the thought of Sha're away.

Amaunet was still out there, somewhere. Even the Tok'ra couldn't be sure of her movements, but if one of the last surviving Goa'uld Queens had been slain, they would know about it. Whatever group managed to get their hands on her wouldn't hesitate to grab the bragging rights that went along with helping rid the galaxy of the Goa'uld threat once and for all.

He didn't want to imagine what would happen if anyone but Earth managed to catch her. They knew enough now about the Goa'uld for him to realize that Sha're was still concious, was aware of everything her body was forced to do without her permission. Everything Amaunet felt, Sha're would feel.

Including pain.

Breathing in shakily, Daniel let the hand holding the obol fall limply to the table, fingers curled protectively around the cold stone as he struggled to get his thoughts back under control, and just barely resisting the urge to run to the gate room, and demand that Walter allow him to go back to the planet, so that he could see for himself the poisonous water that had stolen his friend from him.

Maybe John was right after all. Maybe they were still alive. Maybe Deia Marouse's insistence that they not speak Sam and Jolinar's name was more than simple superstition.

He was on his feet and halfway out the door before the other words the old woman had spoken caught up with him.

They are now no longer as they were. You will endanger us all.

Daniel stopped walking, teeth clenched and eyes burning. Even if he was going to let John's fantasies infect him, even if he wanted to entertain the notion that it was more than superstition that prevented them from speaking their friend's names while on the other world...

He couldn't ignore the warning that had come with the other ideas.

Because even if it was more than superstition, Daniel didn't have the right to test that theory if it meant people could get hurt.

Deia Marouse had been terrified at the thought of them "calling" out to Sam or Jolinar. She had to have her reasons for why.

The warning alarm for an off-world activation interrupted the image of Sam rising from the murky swamp water as nothing more than a withered skeleton in its tracks, and, still standing in the doorway, he was in a perfect position to see Jack and Teal'c practically sprinting down the hallway back toward the gateroom.

He didn't hesitate for a second before following them, the obol still clutched firmly in his hand.


Col. Dave Dixon stepped through the Stargate, and tried not to let the cloying smell of the swamp he stepped out into show as disgust on his face.

An old woman was waiting at the bottom of the gate, as he'd been told to expect, perched on the shoulders of a muscular young girl that looked barely older than ten.

"Greetings, from Earth." He said, grinning widely as Wells and Balinsky stepped through behind him, followed shortly by Bosworth.

Cameron caught the tail end of his sentence, and sighed loudly. "Sir, is it really nessesary for you to-"

"Yes," The Colonel interrupted, still grinning, "Actually, it is."

It wasn't so much offending other cultures that he enjoyed, as it was offending people who got those he counted as friends hurt.

But still, he had a job to do, and he was going to do it. But that didn't mean he couldn't have a little fun, too.

The old woman spoke as they made their way down the steps, the girl whose shoulders she sat on moving forward to meet their pace. "You are the ones known as SG13?"

Dixon nodded, and motioned his team forward. "We are. Are you the one known as Deia Marouse?"

The woman tilted her head to the side, as though she knew he was mocking her, and nodded.

"Follow me." She said shortly.

The little girl carrying her turned smoothly around, and started off down the wooden platform that hugged the edge of the dense forest to their left without a single word, not even waiting for them to respond.

Dixon narrowed his eye, casting his gaze speculatively over the murky green water that waited beneath the supposedly-solid platform they were expected to walk across.

After a moment, he released a sigh, shrugged, and started after the old woman, knowing that his team would follow.

The moment his feet left the solid ground surrounding the Stargate, his senses were on high alert for anything out of the ordinary, determined that if there was any way of recovering Samantha Carter and Jolinar of Malkshur-whether for a proper burial, or an extended stint in the infirmary-he would find it, no matter what the cost.

He was sick of losing people.