By later that night, everyone was still shaken. Elizabeth had briefed her senior staff, who had passed the information along to their teams, and pretty much the entire city was still talking about what had happened.

"I'm not sure if I like the fact that the Ancients can get into our heads that easily," one Lieutenant was telling another at dinner. "I mean, they were pretty much rewriting people's lives and we had no idea that anything was going on!"

Teyla, Ronon, and Rodney were sitting at the other end of the table, and overheard the conversation. "I'm tempted to agree with Mr. Air Force over there," Rodney told the other two. "There are certain lines that shouldn't be crossed. I mean, what if he'd done permanent damage while he was messing around in my mind?"

"He was an Ancestor, McKay," Ronon pointed out. "He probably had some idea of what he was doing."

"It must have been very difficult for him," Teyla pointed out. "To have felt such a strong longing for home for so long."

"That's part of ascending," Rodney replied. "You leave all humanly things behind and can't interfere."

"Would you be able to live for ten thousand years, Dr. McKay, knowing that you had the power to do anything that you wished, but could not use it?"

Ronon snorted. "He can't even keep himself from playing God now."

McKay glared. "Okay, when are we going to forget about the solar system thing?"

"It'll still be a good joke for at least another year," Ronon informed him.

"Lovely," he sighed.

"Multiply your feelings on that prospect by ten thousand," Teyla told him, "And perhaps you will have an idea of the strength of emotion that Jadin felt."

Elizabeth and John were discussing the same topic in her office. "I still have the memories of the past few days," she told him. "But I know it wasn't real."

"It was real enough. You still thought you were someone's mother."

"Yeah…I never imagined that I would be missing that now…"

"Sergeant Williams to Dr. Weir," a voice came over her headset before John could come up with a reply.

"Go ahead, Sergeant."

"I think there's something you should see, ma'am."

She frowned. "Is there a problem?"

"I'm not sure. I'm five levels below the control room."

"I'll be right there." John gave her a curious look.

"What was that about?"

"I don't know. Let's go find out."

By the time they got down to Sergeant Williams' position, a medical team was arriving as well. Everyone was surprised to see what the man had found – Jadin's unconscious form lying in the hallway.

"What happened?" Beckett asked him.

"I don't know; I just found him here as I was doing rounds."

The team began loading him onto a gurney. "I'll let you know what I find out," Beckett promised John and Elizabeth as he followed them back down the hall towards the infirmary.

"He's in perfectly good health," Carson reported a few hours later. "However, his memory has been wiped clean." Elizabeth sighed.

"He was banished."

"It would seem that way. He's got no idea of who he is, where he is, or what's happened to him. For now, I've given him something to help him sleep, but he has to be told something in the morning."

Elizabeth nodded. "Thank you, Carson," she said before leaving the infirmary with John, heading back towards the control room. "I can't understand how they could do this," she finally spoke up once they were almost halfway there. "He's a little boy, and he's been ascended for millennia. How is he supposed to just start over again?"

"He messed with the minds of hundreds of people, Elizabeth."

"Don't you think that I know that? But he wasn't trying to hurt anyone, and he wasn't giving away knowledge we shouldn't have. He just wanted to go home."

"Maybe this isn't really a punishment, then," John realized.

"What do you mean?"

"You just said it yourself. He wanted to go home. And now he is, and he can live out the life that he never had before. Maybe his 'punishment' is really just giving him what he wanted. And yeah, it might not be fair to make him our responsibility, but…no one seemed to mind him so much a couple days ago."