He could feel them again. They were everywhere. So close it made him want to scream...
"No! Please!"
"Chak. Da. Minal kara."
"Please, I don't understand what you're saying. What... what are you doing?"
Pain seared through his entire body, like someone had fired a bullet into the top of his head and it had journeyed right down to his toes. He screamed like he'd never screamed before.
Moments later, the fog settled over his mind for the first time. He almost welcomed it.
The alarm was ringing. Who was escaping this time? He knew it wasn't him. He'd just been brought back. He would never get away. Not again...
"Minal kara!"
"I wish you'd just tell me what you want," he groaned. "I'm not one of your animals. I would understand you if you'd just try to communicate with me."
It wasn't interested in communication. It threw him back on the metal slab he'd been given for a bed and held him there while another one started poking around at his most sensitive area.
He finally snapped. He'd had enough. If they wanted to treat him like an animal, he'd start behaving like one.
With a loud scream he lashed out, kicking and scratching and biting and doing whatever was necessary to get free. The pain in his head was intense, but he didn't care. He started to run.
He didn't get very far before he was surrounded. The pain in his head escalated until he felt it would explode. Then everything went black.
He heard voices. So many voices. He felt he should know them, but the pain in his head was too much. He heard the moaning, too. Even his own gasps for air couldn't drown them out. Then the screaming... oh God, the screaming...
Screams from the other rooms were growing louder. He sat up as the fog began to lift, and looked down at his arms. More boils, slowly fading to red.
He heard someone at the door, and knew it was now or never. He readied himself to attack.
He never got the chance. As soon as the door opened, the alarm started to ring. One of the other prisoners had escaped. He was driven to the ground by the sudden pain in his head and the darkness that settled over his eyes.
The screams and howls of pain and fear were deafening until someone closed the door to his cell. Even then, he couldn't block them out no matter how hard he tried.
"Daniel? Daniel, it's okay. Just try to relax. It'll be over soon."
Janet? Was that Janet? No, it couldn't really be Janet. It was just a figment of his imagination...
He saw her standing in the corner, looking so beautiful he could cry. He focused on her face and tried to block out the pain from his mind. They were hovering over him. Always hovering, like gnats. Stealing little bits of his soul every time they touched him.
But they couldn't take her away from him. She was always there. She never left his side.
They could never touch her.
"No! Colonel, no!"
"You said it yourself, Doc. If they won't help Daniel willingly, we'll just have to persuade them."
"Sir!"
Daniel's eyes flew open at the sudden bang. Janet was covering his face with her body, so he couldn't see what was happening. He could hear screaming, yelling, moaning, running...
He ran and ran, keeping his eyes on the Stargate the entire way. He could feel the drug wearing off, and he knew it was only a matter of seconds before the overwhelming pain and blindness took hold.
"Chak! Pinna da."
He knew that voice. It wasn't cold and detached like the others. It was the only voice that had spoken to him like he was capable of understanding it...
"You... go."
"Wh... you speak English? I don't understand."
"You," the alien said, gesturing towards him. "Go." It motioned towards the door. "Me... help... go."
He squinted in the bright light as Janet moved away from him. Then he saw it. The one who had helped him escape.
"Cape," he whispered.
The alien glanced over its shoulder and then back at him. It nodded. "Sleep," it said into his ear. "Me... help."
He felt a needle pierce his skin, but this one didn't bring him pain. It made him feel calm... sleepy.
The last thing he saw as his eyes closed again was Janet's pale face, and the blood on the wall behind her.
Janet had never felt so scared in her entire life.
She finally had some small understanding of the nightmare Daniel must have lived while he was here. From the second they'd disembarked from the ship, they had been surrounded by aliens that were gruesome and disgusting at best, and this place... she shuddered as yet another animal scream echoed through the hallways.
"So much for these guys not being sadistic monsters, eh, Doc?" Colonel O'Neill said under his breath.
He was standing right next to her, but his voice was so low that she barely heard him. She chose to pretend she hadn't. She really didn't want to talk to him right now. Not when the image of him firing a shot a matter of inches from Daniel's head to kill one of the aliens was still fresh in her mind. She knew he'd felt there was no other choice - the aliens had swarmed them as soon as they'd arrived, and one of them had seemed intent on punishing Daniel for his escape - but it was a risk she felt he shouldn't have taken.
Still, even she couldn't argue with the end result. The aliens had screamed and panicked for a minute, but soon they had them under control. Then one of them had stepped forward and meekly approached Daniel in what they hoped was an attempt to help him.
With Teal'c and Sam holding their weapons on close to a dozen of its friends who now lay prostrate on the floor, she didn't see how it would dare to do anything else.
Janet took a deep breath and tried to ignore the awful stench of the dead and dying all around her. More than ever, she was starting to appreciate the sterile smell of hospitals on Earth. This was just too much.
Not to mention the sound of a dozen aliens wheezing and moaning in stereo was driving her insane. At least that obnoxious alarm had been turned off. She'd realized as soon as she'd heard it why Daniel had been so afraid of the off-world activation alarm back on the base. They sounded more or less the same, only it seemed ten times more shrill in this place.
She winced and covered her mouth with her hand when she saw the alien bring out some sort of tool to use on Daniel. She couldn't believe she was actually allowing that disgusting creature to operate on her husband. Especially after all he'd been through at the hands of these people already.
"I just... keep getting this feeling that this is a dream, and any second now I'll wake up back there again."
"That won't happen, Daniel. I promise."
She couldn't believe she'd been so quick to break that promise. Now here Daniel was, at the mercy of a creature that might not even have understood what they told it to do. Would Daniel understand why they'd had to bring him back to this place, or would he hate her for the rest of his life?
Would he even make it home alive?
Janet impulsively stepped forward when she saw droplets of blood appearing on Daniel's scalp where the alien was applying the strange device. "What are you doing?" she demanded.
The alien glanced over at her for a second, but then turned its attention back onto Daniel.
Janet mentally kicked herself for being so stupid. Whatever it was doing, it couldn't tell her even if it wanted to.
"Take... out."
Janet was sure she was imagining things. The alien hadn't made any movement except for the work it was doing on Daniel, but she could have sworn she'd heard it whisper those words. She moved a little closer to it. "Did you say something?" she asked in a low voice.
"Take... out," it whispered as it worked. "Put... in. Help."
Her mouth fell open in surprise, and she turned back to Colonel O'Neill to see if he was hearing what she was hearing.
He just shot her a puzzled look. "What's he doing?" he asked.
Janet returned to Colonel O'Neill's side and said quietly, "Colonel, I think this is the alien that helped Daniel escape."
He glanced over at the aliens lying on the floor on the other side of the room. "What makes you say that?" he asked.
"Well, for one thing, he speaks English," she said.
Colonel O'Neill sucked in a breath of air and nodded. "What did he say?"
"Just 'take out,' 'put in,' and 'help,'" she said. "I think it's taking the dead device out of Daniel's head and putting a new one in."
"Wait a second," Colonel O'Neill said, his eyes darkening with bitterness, "didn't that thing cause him all kinds of pain and make it so he couldn't think?"
Janet shook her head and turned to watch the alien again. "I don't know, Sir," she said. "Maybe there's some way of preventing it from doing that. Presumably, this alien wouldn't have had an opportunity to take this device out of his head and implant him with another one before he escaped. Maybe that's all that needs to be done - implant him with a device that will do the job of keeping this illness at bay with none of the side effects."
"That's a pretty big leap of logic there, Doc." Colonel O'Neill sighed and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Besides, 'keeping the illness at bay' is gonna be too little too late. We need them to reverse the damn thing, and from the looks of them, I'd say they haven't quite figured out how to do that yet."
Janet didn't reply to that. The colonel had put into words exactly what she'd been fearing all along - that Daniel might be like these aliens for the rest of his life. That was an eventuality that she was hoping desperately to avoid.