Chapter 8

The next time Daniel was aware of his surroundings, he was lying in the back of a carpeted van under a blanket, his head on a rolled-up jacket. He could feel the hum of the road beneath him, and he knew they were moving fast. A woman sat at his side, reading a book. He could see little out the dirty window in the back doors of the van, only that it was dark. The van went over a bump, and the sudden motion jolted his arm and back. He must have groaned, because the redhead put down the book and leaned over him.

"Ah, you're awake," she said. "I'm sorry you're in pain. Your shoulder is swollen, and you have quite a bit of bruising, but we don't think you have any internal injuries. We'll get a doctor to look at you as soon as we can."

Daniel squinted his eyes at her, trying to remember who she was and where he was, then remembered the ranch house and this woman answering the door. And he remembered falling on top of her.

He tried to talk, but his mouth was so dry the words wouldn't come out.

The woman, still in jeans and a sweater, grabbed a bottle of water from a case next to her and opened it, then helped him to sit up. She handed him the bottle and he drank a long draught of it, then she gave him two Tylenol, which he dutifully swallowed.

"I'm sorry for before," he said finally, his voice sounding rough to his own ears, as if someone had rubbed sandpaper on his vocal cords. "Did I hurt you?"

"Hurt me?" the woman blinked at him in confusion for a moment, then her expression cleared and she smiled. "Oh, that. Well, the landing was a little rough, but no, I'm O.K. . . . Is there anything else you'd like to know?"

Daniel gave that some thought. He was in a van, speeding to someplace God only knew where, with people he'd never met. They didn't seem to want to kill or maim him. Beyond that last, he realized, he didn't really care where he was going or what would happen next.

"No," he said, "nothing."

The woman, who was still supporting his back, nodded as if there was nothing at all surprising in that, and started to lower him to floor. He was about to protest, but he realized how tired he still was and how much everything just . . . hurt, and he let her help him back down. Ignoring the pain as best he could, he closed his eyes and let the hum of the motor and the feel of the road beneath him carry him back to sleep.

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Later, Daniel didn't remember much of those early days. The redhead called herself Susan; her partner, a large bear of a man who always seemed to have a couple of days' growth of beard, was Jeff. Those were not their real names. He never understood entirely who they were or the organization they belonged to, only that they lived in a shadow world where governments turned on their own people after they'd outlived their usefulness or possessed knowledge deemed too dangerous or even if their continued existence could prove an embarrassment. The were mostly "ex-spooks," as Susan put it, some ex-military. Daniel supposed they were like the mirror image of the men who had been in his house the night his life ended. They had all experienced and done things in the name of justice or honor or patriotism that had taken a piece of their souls, but this group, unlike the men who'd tortured and killed so easily, had somehow retained their humanity, and now they tried to help.

Like Jack, he supposed, and Teal'c. He wondered if Jack had ever been a part of these people that helped him now. He wondered how General Hammond even knew they existed. Those questions Susan and Jeff, and those who replaced them, never answered. There were rules, and the paramount rule was secrecy.

They were kind to him, but kept a polite distance. In some little town somewhere, a doctor told him his shoulder was sprained and that he should keep it in a sling and ice it four times a day. He handed Daniel an unlabeled bottle of painkillers and told him not to take more than three a day. Ordinarily Daniel avoided painkillers at all cost, not liking the brain-numbing side effects, but right now brain-numbing sounded good to him, so he popped one as he stood in the doctor's office. The doctor knew without asking that Daniel would not be staying in one place long enough to seek physical therapy, so he gave Daniel a list of exercises, some he could do alone, some he'd need help with, and sent him on his way. He never asked how Daniel had injured his shoulder, or how the rest of his body had come to be so bruised and battered, or where he'd gotten the cut over his eyebrow.

The next few days, as far as he could remember, Daniel slept like the dead as his body and mind tried to recover, waking up only to eat and drink or move from place to place, vehicle to vehicle. He gradually stopped taking the painkillers and became alert enough to be introduced to his companions and listen half-heartedly as they explained who they were, but he always welcomed the sleep that would grab him unexpectedly day and night.

Until the nightmares started.

Screaming, terrifying, heart-wrenching nightmares. Jack, his brains seeping out, reaching out to him; men in black masks whispering, Goodbye, Dr. Jackson, as they smother him beneath his pillow; lying helplessly on a metal table in a tiny room unable to move while a shadowy figure pushes a long needle through his eye and into his skull.

And the old favorites: Sha're screaming his name as a symbiote pierces her neck; Nem shouting, over and over, What fate Omoroca? as water fills the room; the Honduran rebels coming toward him with the sparking cables, ready to electrocute him again. . . .

And the worst one, because it was his living nightmare, Sam and Teal'c lying bloodied and broken on a planet somewhere in another universe, whispering as they died: "Daniel?"

It was one night after that nightmare that he jumped out of bed in whatever "safe house" in whatever town they were in and woke Susan in a panic, saying he'd made a mistake and he had to go back. His friends needed him; he couldn't leave them.

Susan, who was immediately alert, sat up and grabbed his arm, saying, "Daniel, you need to calm down," and Jeff, who had been keeping watch in front of the house, appeared in the doorway and said, simply, "You can't go back," and turned and left the room.

Daniel, still gasping for breath, pulled away and said, "What does he mean, I can't go back? Am I your prisoner? You can't keep me here!"

"Daniel," Susan said. "No, of course you're not our prisoner. You can leave whenever you want. Jeff means, if you go back, you'll be imprisoned, tortured or killed."

Daniel's shoulders slumped, but he said, looking at his feet, "You can't know that."

"You really doubt it? After what happened to you?"

Daniel shook his head, and looked away. "I need to help them," he whispered.

Susan pulled herself up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. "Sit down, Daniel," she said, gesturing toward the wooden chair near the bed.

Daniel sat, and waited.

"Maybe we can help your friends. It's what we do. If they need to disappear also. . . ."

Daniel bowed his head. "No, you can't help them." He raised his head and stood up. "Look, I'm sorry I woke you. It was stupid. I know it's hopeless. I just. . . ." Daniel gave a small shake of his head, and turned to leave the room. "I'm sorry," he said again, walking out of the room. "Go back to sleep."

Days passed. Daniel's shoulder started slowly to heal and the bruises began to fade. Trying to avoid the nightmares, he lived on little to no sleep and coffee, and the question of why he bothered at all was not often far from his mind. Yet he kept going, because he always had. And because he remembered Jack when he'd first met him, how he'd been ready to destroy a world to end his own life, and how Daniel had somehow talked him down. To give up now, to end his life, it seemed to Daniel, would be a betrayal of Jack. And his missing friends.

He needed to work. For as long as he could remember he had used work to survive. As a child he threw himself into his schoolwork and, when school wasn't enough, tried to learn everything he could about . . . everything. As an adult, he'd worked to solve a puzzle, to save a world, to save his wife, to save his friends. . . .

Now he sat up long nights in motel rooms and houses, apartments and boats, drinking coffee and trying to remember everything he could about the Asgard's home galaxy, anything that he could think of to help in a search that he hoped was continuing, allies they may have overlooked, technology or a fail safe that Sam or Teal'c may have mentioned. He felt lost without his books and journals, but he did his best, reconstructing what he knew, listing questions for what he didn't. Among the questions that nagged him the most were what the distress call, the one Thor had spoken of, had said, how long it had taken the Asgard ship that received the transmission to respond and what planets were within range of Sam and Teal'c's ship at its last-known location.

Jeff had wandered up to him one night, one of the last before Susan and he had handed him off to the next set of competent strangers, and silently watched him work. Finally, he'd said, "You know, you have to let the old life go. That's the past."

Daniel had inclined his head and given a little shrug, as if to say, "Maybe so," and turned back to his notes. Jeff had sighed and said, "Well, at least make sure no one can read what you're writing, unless you plan to swallow all that paper when you're done."

Daniel had looked up that time and caught Jeff's eye. His notes, as usual were in random languages, Earth and other. "You're right," he said after a moment. "Thank you." And from then on he wrote in a combination of an obscure off-world language that no one, not even the experts at the SGC, was likely to recognize, and a shorthand he'd invented as a child to hide his words from the prying eyes of foster parents and social workers.

When he had thought it out as much as he could, he asked "Angel," one of the men who replaced Susan and Jeff and who sometimes sat in the early morning hours and played chess with him, for access to a computer and printer, but Angel brought him an old portable typewriter instead. Then he typed the following: 1) Tka spoke of px—2 and travelers. Contact?; 2) ship from Melna?; 3) Gt to bylia gt; 4) if Tr returns: what last message; how long to respond; land close enough? He didn't sign it. The note wasn't much, but it was something. He then wrote down General Hammond's home address on a scrap of paper and handed it and the note to Angel, and asked him please to find a way to mail it, knowing he and his colleagues would make the letter untraceable.

"This is not a good idea, friend," Angel said. "If you disappear, it is best to disappear."

"Please," Daniel said. "If I don't do at least this, I can't live with myself."

"Will it help with the nightmares?" Angel asked, quietly.

Daniel winced a little and looked away. None of the others had mentioned the nightmares, allowing Daniel the self-deception that they hadn't heard his screams. He forced himself to look Angel in the eye. "Yes," he said, "it might."

Angel looked back at the man who stared at him now, troubled blue eyes pleading, and sighed. "All right," he said. "This is my deal. You start eating real food and try to get some sleep, and I will have someone mail this note. I still think it is unwise, but I will let you make that choice."

Daniel let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He wasn't sure what he would have done if Angel had refused. "I'll eat," he said. "The sleeping thing hasn't been working out too well. . . . "

Angel nodded and took the letter. "That's a start. You go make a sandwich, then, and I'll set up the chess board. You can try sleeping later."

More time passed. Angel and his partner were gone and two others took their place. Daniel, without another way to help his friends, floundered for a while until, finally, to escape his tortured thoughts and his still-nightmare-plagued nights and with considerable pressure from the people who were hiding him, he started taking an interest in where he was going and what he would do. A tall, thin man with a receding hairline and a small scar under his eye whose name Daniel never learned, not even a fake name, came and sat with him for two days straight, in some small, cold town in Alberta, and they hammered out an identity. The man told him it was unusual to have so many choices but that with Daniel's linguistic abilities and breadth of knowledge of other cultures and lands, the possibilities were almost limitless. He said Daniel should pick a language and identity he was comfortable with, and a part of the world where he was unlikely to come into contact with anyone from his past life. He and his "associates" would take care of the rest: passport, other documents, computer records. . . .

Daniel had come up with a scenario that he thought he could survive. The facilitator, as Daniel came to think of him, balked at only two points, the first a big one. Daniel wanted to join up with a dig somewhere as an amateur archeologist, but the facilitator was adamant that this was too dangerous. Daniel had been equally adamant, pointing out that there were thousands of small digs all over the world, and that many of them would take on students or others who were interested with little documentation and no background check. After leaving Daniel for several hours to "look into" what Daniel had said, the man had come back and agreed that perhaps Daniel's plan was not a bad one, especially since the people looking for him would not expect him to do something so obvious, as he put it.

The second dispute was a minor one: his name. The facilitator had suggested Michel Perrault, and Daniel had acquiesced to the surname but told the man that his given name would be Jacques. The facilitator's objected that it was too close in sound to Daniel's real surname, but Daniel stuck to it stubbornly. He knew he was being perverse, but it was his small way of hanging onto his old life. He knew that Jacques wasn't "Jack," but he knew, also, that he'd always hear the name when it was being called, would never forget to look up and answer.

So Daniel became Jacques Perrault, from Montreal, an amateur archaeologist who had never finished college but whose parents had recently died and left him enough money to spend it as he pleased. Daniel searched the databases and looked in the magazines until he found what he was needed: a small, remote dig in Brazil, where the less-than-ideal living conditions and the time constraints of having to work within the dry season kept the directors in constant need of "extra hands." It was as far away from his roots in Egypt as he could get, yet in the past decade great strides had been made in the understanding of pre-Columbian rain forest societies. Maybe, Daniel thought, the work would provide enough distraction to keep him from losing his mind.

So it was settled.

Daniel did have one last question, though, and he was embarrassed that it had taken him so long to consider it. Where was the money coming from to pay for all this? He had saved a good deal of money over the years with the SGC, but he had no idea how he could access his accounts.

Harrison, the last of his "handlers" before he was sent off on his own, told him not to worry, that it was taken care of. When Daniel persisted, Harrison had finally told him that a fund had been set up in his name some time ago, but that he couldn't tell him how or by whom.

Daniel had stared at the man, open-mouthed. He didn't need to be told who had set up the fund, and now he didn't think he needed to be told how General Hammond had known this organization existed or how they knew to pick Charlie's grave.

Jack.

Jack had known it might come to this someday; he'd known. For a moment Daniel was angry that Jack had never told him, but he realized that if he had, Daniel never would have believed him, in the same way he had laughed at the untraceable cell phone and protested at keeping a gun in the house.

And Daniel's anger was replaced by an ache that he would carry with him into the Amazon and beyond.

God, he missed him. He missed his friend.

Two days after the conversation with Harrison, Daniel, his arm finally out of the sling, said goodbye to his old life and boarded a flight for Brazil.