It started with a low vibration, a kind of bone deep hum that made Jack's teeth hurt. After exchanging a glance with Daniel, he started gathering up their clothes.
"What's happening?" Daniel asked, one hand on the wall to steady himself, eyes darting around the room in confusion.
"I don't know," Jack said, tossing Daniel's uniform to him, "but I bet we'll need pants."
They got dressed, stuffing uncooperative limbs into clothes that didn't feel familiar anymore, and the vibration increased, rattling them both off their feet. Food began to fall on the floor, and the little bowl of lube wobbled its way off the shelf and landed face down with a splat. Jack made a tactical decision and tucked himself under the food shelf, motioning for Daniel to join him.
They crammed together in the tight space, watching the water splash and slop over the rim of the sink basin, covering their ears against the noise. It reached a crescendo, eye-wateringly loud, and then suddenly stopped . Jack wiggled his jaw, popped his ears, and wondered if he had gone deaf.
"Hello?" Daniel called tentatively.
Silence, and then--
Chunks of white not-plastic fell to the floor, but before they could assume it was a collapse, the distinctive five step hum of a ring transporter whooshed down into the rubble. Rings down, light, rings up, leaving Sam and Teal'c standing in the middle of the cell. Sunlight slanted down from the gaping hole in the ceiling, illuminating swirls of dust hanging in the air and glinting off Sam's hair.
"Colonel?" Sam called, bending down to squint through the dust at Jack and Daniel, still huddled under the shelf. "Daniel? Are you alright?"
They stared at her, and at Teal'c, who was still scanning the room suspiciously, both hands on his staff weapon. Unreal, Daniel thought, and then corrected himself, because unreal was the wrong word. Sam and Teal'c were actually there, it was real, but they seemed so out of place. Like strange, exotic creatures. Surreal. That was better.
"Carter?" Jack called, disbelief clear in his voice. He cleared his throat and tried again, surer, stronger. "Carter. Teal'c. Nice of you to drop in."
Daniel shook his paralysis off and scooted out of his cramped position, picking gingerly over the rubble on the floor. He was only wearing one boot. He sneezed three times in close succession, and waved a hand in front of his face, trying to chase the dust away. "Hi," he said, gaping at them. "Um... good to see you guys."
Jack was busily working the kinks out of his back, rising to his full height and brushing the dirt off his uniform. He peered up at the hole in the ceiling, and saw a long tunnel, with the white material of their cell comprising the bottom twenty feet or so. After that, it was ordinary dirt, the same ordinary dirt that was still raining down on them in little clumps. At the very top of the tunnel, sunlight, bright enough to make him blink and look away, his eyes stinging.
Teal'c gave them both one of his rare smiles, and clapped his hand on Jack's shoulder. "O'Neill," he said, nodding. "Daniel Jackson. I am pleased to see you well."
Jack cocked his head back, his eyes wide and a bit unfocused. "Yeah. Ditto," he murmured, his voice flat and weak.
Daniel was still having unreality issues. He looked at the sink and toilet combo, the place where he and Jack had their first connection. It was their water source, their cleanup site. It was essential, important, vital. Except that now, the water had stopped coming from the seemingly inexhaustible place on the wall. It had all swirled away. Dust clung to the damp white surfaces, no longer pristine. We won't have water now, Daniel thought, and the idea was frightening, until he remembered that they didn't need it. They were leaving.
Leaving.
The word bounced around in his head, searching for some context, some frame of reference to give it purpose and definition. Leaving. It was like a word in a language he didn't know. Just a meaningless sound.
"Daniel?" Sam asked, fighting the urge to wave a hand in front of his face. Daniel's vacant stare was beginning to worry her.
Daniel blinked a few times, and then took a quick breath. He focused on her, a slow, dazed smile on his face. "Hi, Sam. You have amazing timing."
Across the room, Jack abruptly started coughing. He waved off all attempts at assistance. "It's fine," he wheezed. "Swallowed some dust." And when he caught his breath, he shared a quick, embarrassed smile with Daniel. Rescued in the nick of time, he thought. He wasn't disappointed. Of course not.
Daniel was looking up at the tunnel now, pushing aside the unreality--there was a hole in their ceiling, the perfect cube was gone, unreal, surreal--but not important. Time to adjust to a new reality. He could do that. "How, ah...?" He waved vaguely at the circle of sky visible high above.
"That is a lengthy tale," Teal'c said, moving to the center of the room.
"Long story, Teal'c," Jack corrected, out of habit. He allowed himself to be herded inward, where the rings could reach him.
Daniel stared at the overturned bowl of lube on the floor and for a moment, considered telling them to wait. Because he had to grab something before they left. But the moment passed quickly, and he decided that under the circumstances, a few less than sane impulses were understandable.
The four of them tucked into a little group, and Jack kept his mouth firmly shut, aware that he hadn't had toothpaste for god knew how long, and the last thing he had in his mouth was Daniel's cock. Surely the others must know that just by looking at him. It felt like he had "I had sex with Daniel" written in neon on his forehead.
He looked up at the distant sunlight, making his eyes threaten to water again, and then the rings hummed down around them and they were in the light.
Fraiser was waiting for them on the Alkesh, and so was Jacob. There was a brief flurry of celebration and excitement. Sam hugged her father, and Jack was startled to see the shimmer of tears in her eyes. He was aware, of course, that people would be worried about them. He knew that his team would never give up the search. He could sympathize, really. It's just that he'd been so preoccupied with his own situation, he hadn't spent a lot of time wondering how Carter and Teal'c were doing.
Daniel accepted a hug from Janet, and another from Sam. Teal'c did his forearm-clasping handshake with both of them, accompanied by a small, dignified bow. Jack nodded approvingly at Carter, holding her eyes with his own. "Nice work," he told her, and she lit up, holding her back straight and her chin high.
"Thank you, sir," she said, smiling fiercely. He pretended he didn't see the little extra shine in her eyes.
"Teal'c," Jack said, grinning at him. "Buddy. Thanks." Teal'c gave his little bow again, and Jack turned to Fraiser. "Doc. Taking a field trip?"
"We didn't knew what condition you would be in when we found you," Carter said tightly. The fine lines around her eyes, the draw to the sides of her mouth; those suggest that she did plenty of speculation on the subject. None of it pleasant.
"We were very concerned for your well being," Teal'c added, with the kind of gravity that suggested anything that made him very concerned must be dire indeed.
"We're fine," Daniel said. He had a hand for Janet, another for Sam, a reassuring, understanding smile for all of them. "You guys must've been worried sick."
Teal'c raised an eyebrow and inclined his head. Sam nodded slightly, then shrugged, trying to smile. "Oh, well, you know. We were confident."
Fraiser allowed them all a moment to grin stupidly at each other, and then she cleared her throat imperatively. "I need to examine both of you. Do you need anything? Did you have enough food and water?"
They tell her that they did, indeed, have enough. More than they could ever possibly want. So she got down to the business of examining them, in a cursory sort of way, since they didn't have very much room or privacy on the little ship. While this was going on and Teal'c was digging the dessert items out of MREs for them, Carter explained their rescue.
Jack listened, skimming for the pertinent facts. Carter and Teal'c delivered back through the gate unconscious, the iris rendered inoperative by some force on the other side. Nobody ever saw the aliens, or whoever they were. Gate wouldn't dial the planet after that. Luckily, they had the Alkesh that Teal'c and Jack picked up during the debacle with Felger's DHD virus. Not so luckily, their scans of the planet found two human life signatures way too deep underground for the ring transporter.
That's when things got tricky. Apparently, the ring transporter on the Alkesh had to be modified to dig a big hole first, and then to transport through that hole without the benefit of a ring receiving station on the other end.
"The Tok'ra were very helpful when it came to designing the modifications," Carter said, nodding toward her father. Jacob, sitting up front and steering the ship, grinned and waved back at them.
"How long did it take?" Jack asked, because his time sense in that place was screwed.
Carter seemed to take this as an indication that she had worked far too slowly. "Well, sir, the ring transporter was never intended to be used as an excavation tool. We had to completely overwrite the control programs with our own, and then augment the power source of the energy beam so that it would have enough force to bore through the ground. The material that your... room was made out of was particularly difficult, some kind of polymer that I've never seen before and we only had the readings from the sensors to go on which was rather limiting--"
"Major." Jack shook his head, smiling slightly. "I'm sure you worked miracles. I'm just wondering how many Simpsons episodes I missed."
Clinging firmly to the thin edge of her professionalism, Sam managed to avoid bursting into slightly hysterical laughter. Because the Colonel and Daniel were here, they didn't have a scratch on them, and the Colonel was making jokes like nothing had changed, like everything was normal again. If Daniel could read her mind just then, he would understand. She was having the same unreality issues as he was.
"A little over ten weeks, sir," she said, and the 'sir' at the end helped her stay calm and grounded. "Seventy three days, to be exact."
"Huh," Jack said, because the number was meaningless. Seventy three days. Ten weeks. Two and a half months. He wondered how long that was in light cycles.
"I hope somebody fed my fish," Daniel said. He thought of his fish, going around in circles in their little tank. He thought of their automatic feeder, their nice, safe, controlled environment, and the way he sat outside, above, and watched them, had complete power over them. He felt slightly ill. Maybe, if they were still alive when he got home, he would let them all go.
Then he remembered that tank fish would die if they were released into the wild, and felt more than slightly ill.
"So," Sam said brightly, when she had finished telling the tale of their rescue. "What have you two been doing?"
Jack, who had been eating MRE cookies like they were finely cooked filet mignon, froze mid chew. Daniel passed him a canteen, and he gulped water, his face reddening. He didn't look at Daniel, which was fine, since Daniel was fiddling with a hole in his sock. He was still only wearing one boot. He had the unsettling feeling that everyone could see through his clothes and somehow sense the stickiness that Jack's mouth had left on his inner thigh.
"Sir?"
"Ahm..." Jack cleared his throat, glanced at Daniel for help. Got a wincing sort of half smile in response. "Well, you know, there wasn't much to do in there," Jack said finally. "Lousy accommodations, slow room service, and they only had basic cable. Really, I'm thinking of asking for my money back."
Carter's lips twitched, and she blinked rapidly several times. "You do that, sir," she said thickly. Then she turned to Daniel, obviously expecting a real answer.
Daniel licked his lips and smiled slightly, eyes downcast. "Well, I'm not entirely sure what our actual purpose there was, but I do have a... theory."
"Daniel." Jack drew the 'el' sound way, way out, rising at the end. He raised his eyebrows at Daniel, gave him a meaningful look.
"From what I could tell, we were part of an experiment in conditioned behavior," Daniel said, holding a hand up to quiet Jack's objections. He looked at Jack, widened his eyes slightly, and twitched his eyebrows. Trust me, his look said. I'm not stupid.
"Really?" Carter asked, her scientific curiosity engaged now that her worry for her teammates had been assuaged. "What led you to that conclusion?"
So Daniel started to discuss lights and sounds and stimuli and response, and how their environment made him think of a lab, and soon Sam was hip deep in an evaluation of alien scientific method versus their own, and why they should even assume that aliens would think the same way, and whether the idea of conditioned responses would even exist on other planets. Sam suggested that it was Daniel's ethnocentric reasoning that assumed a culture on another planet would have laboratories and perform experiments on specimens in the same way that earth scientists would, and Daniel countered that all human behavior they had so far observed in the universe had held certain parallels with earth humans.
Daniel was thrilled to exercise his mind with an equal who could fully appreciate what he was talking about, and Sam was happy to see that Daniel was unchanged, and it was like the last ten weeks never happened. Jack listened long enough to realize that Daniel was never going to explain exactly what behavior was being encouraged, and tuned them out, secure in the knowledge that Daniel wanted this to stay just as secret as he did.
Jack left them to it and wandered over to the front of the ship. He dropped into the copilot's chair, reveled in the upholstery and the fact that he wasn't sitting on the floor for the first time in months, and watched the streaky colors of hyperspace slide past the window. Teal'c had taken the stick, and Jack gave him a nod. Teal'c nodded back, one corner of his mouth curling upward, and Jack wriggled into the chair a little bit, sighing happily. He was going home, and it was finally starting to seem real.