AN: Interesting fact. The number of people reading the story has gone up, but the number of reviews per chapter has gone down. This constitutes the mandatory authorial whining about lack of reviews. I'd particularly like to know two things: what you think of the Jack/Sam interaction and if you have any notes on the technical aspects of military and medical terminology (both in this chapter and the story as a whole). On the bright side for all you readers out there, this chapter is a bit longer than normal.

Jack opened his eyes. He was in a HAZMAT suit. He had not been in one when he went to sleep, that was for sure. It was all kind of unclear, but he seemed to recall a blonde, and dancing, followed by dancing of the horizontal kind. He groaned. Sam was going to kill him. But—how had he gotten from Kynthia's room to—he glanced around—the temple? And into a HAZMAT suit? And where was everyone?

Damn, this suit was uncomfortable. His skin crawled, and he wondered how long he'd been in it. He sat up, or tried to, and was surprised by a wave of pain from several of his joints. His knee hurt worse than usual, and damn, he was stiff. After a few seconds to check himself out and figure out what hurt and what didn't, he sat up more carefully and stood up, joints creaking, to check the vicinity. There was no one else in the temple. He'd been lying on the stairs leading to the Stargate. A stretcher was there, too, looking like it had simply been shoved through the wormhole from the other side. With him on it? They hadn't had full HAZMAT suits with them, so either he'd been taken back to the SGC and returned in the suit, or someone had brought it to Argos and put him in it. Either way, something had happened while he was out, and where was his team? The MALP was no longer there, but a FRED was, loaded down with supplies.

There was a note attached to the FRED in Daniel's distinctive scrawl. Jack started down the stairs towards it when a gasp drew his attention. There, standing in the doorway, was the dancing blonde, a young boy clutching her for protection. Both were obviously frightened. She turned to run.

"Wait," Jack said.

She stopped and turned around.

"Do you know what happened to me?" Jack asked.

"Jack?" The woman frowned and stayed where she was.

"Yeah, it's me." What the hell was her name? He'd slept with her, for crying out loud! The last time he'd slept with a woman and not known her name he'd been nineteen, fresh out of Basic, and drunker than a skunk. "Kynthia." That was it! "What's going on?"

Kynthia edged closer to him for a better look. The boy clung to her skirts and peeked out at Jack occasionally. "Is that … why are you wearing that …" words failed her "… thing?" She gestured at the HAZMAT suit.

"It's a hazmat suit," Jack explained. "It's designed to protect the person wearing it from harmful things in the environment. I woke up in it, just now, and I'm not planning on taking it off until I know why I'm in it. Which brings me back to my original question, actually. What the hell's going on? My team and I were sitting at the fountain, you gave me the cake stuff, which—" he frowned, thinking back to how out of it he'd felt after eating the cake, and looked at her suspiciously "—what was in that thing, by the way? We went … off together, and then I woke up here in a HAZMAT suit."

Kynthia bit her lip and looked down. "Jack, I am sorry. The cake I gave you was marriage cake. I didn't know you wouldn't understand what it meant."

"Marriage?" Jack asked raising an eyebrow. "As in, Angel Food in layers with little dolls on top?" Oy. At this point, he was kinda hoping there had been something in that cake; he didn't know Sam all that terribly well, but he could just imagine how Sara would have reacted if he'd ever accidentally gotten married to a local while on a mission. Being drugged would give him such a great alibi.

"I do not know what that is, Jack," Kynthia said, drawing his attention back to her. "But by the customs of our people, we are married." She paused, biting her lip. "The next morning, I woke to find you gone. Your friends had taken you." She glanced away at the statue of Pelops.

Jack followed her gaze, frowning. Damn Goa'uld. They always got their snaky fangs in things somehow. Had to be his fault, whatever it was that was wrong. He suppressed a surge of rage at the snaky bastard.

" … and then Daniel told us you had not woken."

Jack blinked and forced himself to focus on Kynthia again. He'd missed a sentence or two there. "And?"

Kynthia shrugged. "And then Daniel and Teal'c went back to your world to help care for you, and we have heard nothing since. I have been worried about you. Dan-el was playing by the temple and heard the Stargate engage, and came to find me so I could question whoever came about you." She frowned. "Must you wear that thing, Jack? It looks uncomfortable, and I can't see your face."

"It is uncomfortable," Jack shot back, "but I'm not taking it off until I know why they shipped me back here alone, unconscious, in it." He paused, thinking back. "Wait—­­Dan-el came and got you? He's only, what, a couple of days old at the most?"

"I'm five days old," the boy said proudly, holding up one hand with all the fingers splayed out to display the number. Jack had forgotten him.

"Five … days old?" Jack said incredulously. He looked back to Kynthia.

She nodded. "Yes, Dan-el is five days old." She wrapped an arm around him. "Thetys and Alekos are very proud of him. I am thirty-six days old. Why are your people so interested in our ages? Daniel asked many questions about that before he left."

"I don't know what's going on, but I'm gonna find out," Jack said grimly. He walked to the FRED and picked up the note taped to it. Something was massively screwed up, here.

It was several pages long, neatly typed. Daniel had written most of it, explaining what had happened while he was unconscious. "Damn," Jack said as he skimmed it. He fumbled with the hood of his suit; there was no way he was wearing it for ten seconds longer than he needed to, and from Daniel's explanation there wasn't any way he could get more infected than he already was.

A gasp drew his attention back to Kynthia. She was staring at him, eye's wide with horror. "Jack, what has happened to you?"

"I don't know," Jack responded testily. "I haven't been awake, remember?" His voice, he noticed, was a bit quaverier than he remembered it. Granted, he hadn't used it in a couple of days, but …. He removed a glove and put a hand to his cheek, and felt the skin there. It was noticeably less firm. And he'd had a lot more aches and pains since he'd woken up than he was used to. Put together with Daniel's explanations in the note …. "I need a mirror," he muttered to himself.

"Dan'el, go get a mirror," Kynthia said.

Jack glanced over to see her shoving the boy towards the door. "Thanks." He turned back to Daniel's note, stripping off the other glove. The rest of the suit could wait. He read it through more carefully, trying to figure out what all had happened while he was asleep.

"What are you doing?" Kynthia asked, coming to stand by him.

"Reading," Jack said absently as he flipped the page.

"What is 'reading'?"

At that, Jack looked up. "Reading is…" He stopped, wishing Daniel were here. This was his type of stuff. If she didn't know what reading was, she probably didn't know what writing was, either. And how the hell did you explain one without the other? He rubbed his nose absently. "You see the markings on the page?" Actually, he'd been having a bit of trouble with that one. Did that mean he was now an old coot who needed reading glasses?

"Yes." Kynthia touched it gently, then rubbed softly to see if the ink came off. "They have some meaning?"

"Yeah. They're words that Daniel wrote—that is, put on the page—to tell me what happened while I was out."

"The markings speak to you?" Kynthia said in some awe.

"Yeah," Jack said. "Most people can read, where I come from." Wait a minute, why re-read the note when he could dial up the gate and talk directly to them? He was getting forgetful in his old age. He didn't seem to have his radio, but the FRED had a two-directional one.

Kynthia flinched a little at the gate's kawoosh; evidently, she'd never seen it before, because she stared at the puddle in awe.

"SGC this is O'Neil," Jack said into the radio mike. Unlike a MALP, the FRED didn't have a camera. He thought that was a plus, considering he had no clue what he looked like.

"Jack, it's good to hear your voice!" Daniel said. "How are you feeling?"

"Geriatric," Jack replied. "Couldn't you have given an old coot some reading glasses?"

"Sorry, Jack," Daniel said, voice falling in dismay. "I guess nobody thought of that. We'll send some through to you, along with anything else you need. Is there anything else you need?"

"I don't know, I haven't had time to go through all the stuff in the FRED. Do you want me to send it back through once I get it unloaded?"

There was a pause and a rustling sound as Daniel asked someone else. "No. They don't want to risk contamination."

"You can speak to someone who is not here, and they here you and reply?" Kynthia said, in some awe. Her eyes were wide.

"Yeah, it's called a radio." Jack paused, trying to think how to explain it "It's a machine that transmits words to other machines like it. They've got another radio back at the SGC, and the signal is sent through the gate."

"Who's that you're talking to, Jack?" Daniel asked.

"Kynthia."

There was a pause. "Jack, Sam's here." His words were heavy with meaning, and Jack winced. He'd been trying very hard not to think about her, knowing how pissed off she was going to be with him over this. Of course, under the circumstances, it didn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things if she was mad, seeing as how it didn't look like he was ever going home and he'd be dead of old age before the baby came anyway. "Do you want to talk with her?" Daniel said, breaking his reverie.

"What?" Jack blinked. "Oh, yeah, sure." He glanced at Kynthia and jerked his head towards the door, but she didn't take the hint, just looking at him with her wide-eyed stare. He forced his teeth to unclench as he turned back to the radio.

"Jack, I'm so glad you're awake," Sam said.

He blinked. Funny, she didn't sound mad. "Sam, I'm sorry—"

"For what?" She cut him off. "It's not your fault. You didn't know what that cake was laced with the equivalent of a date-rape drug." She paused. "You were infected with the nanites by means of … bodily contact, as far as we can tell. You seem to be aging much faster than the Argosians do; we're hoping that's only because you weren't in range of the transmitter that controls them, and that now you're back on Argos the aging will slow down to, well, 'normal' for lack of a better word. Or, at least, normal for an Argosian. That will buy us more time."

It was good to hear her voice. Familiar. Soothing. He couldn't for the life of him think why he'd been annoyed with her the last time they'd eaten at O'Malley's; he thought he could listen to her talk for hours. He shook himself as he realized he'd drifted off.

"One of the samples they were working on in a containment lab ate through the rubber gloves the researcher was using," Sam was saying. "Nobody was infected," she hurried to add, "but General Hammond made us destroy all the samples to prevent the base from being contaminated. We're still running simulations on the data we collected before they were destroyed, but it probably won't yield any useful results until it's too late to help you."

"I understand," Jack said, stomach sinking. The last thing they wanted was this thing let loose on Earth.

"You need to look for the control device," Sam went on. "If you can find it, you can probably turn off the nanites. Teal'c says it's probably somewhere there in the temple. He didn't see any sign of it, but he says there's probably a hidden room or two—or maybe several—somewhere in the temple to serve as Pelops's lab, and the control device would probably be there. If you can find it, we'll probably be able to get permission to come through the gate in HAZMAT suits to see if we can turn it off."

"You said this stuff eats through rubber. I don't want anyone else getting this … shit." Jack cut himself off, and rubbed a hand through hair that was no longer military-short. God, there was so much he wanted to say to her. But even if he were as good at talking as Daniel, there wasn't much he could say with an audience of whoever happened to be in the control room. Especially when Sam didn't want word getting out yet.

"We think the risk will be minimal," Sam said, oblivious to his distress. "Besides, even if they do get exposed somehow, if they have the control device they can turn it off so it won't matter."

And that assumed they could figure out the alien doohicky, which was a pretty big 'if' in Jack's book. But he didn't want to argue with her in what might be the last time he ever spoke with her. "Okay," he said, secure in the knowledge that even if she could convince Doctor Frasier and General Hammond to send her through the gate somehow despite her pregnancy, they'd never let her come to a place that was contaminated like this.

There was a silence on the other side, and Jack wracked his brain for something to say. He had nothing. At last, Sam broke it. "Take care of yourself."

"You too," he replied, trying to put everything he was feeling into his words, pretty sure he was failing miserably. Maybe he could write something that would work. "Look, I'll check out the temple, see if I can find anything, and call you back."

"Okay," Sam replied.

"O'Neill, out," Jack said, switching off the radio. The gate disengaged seconds later.