Symbols glowed whitely, inner ring spinning with unstoppable force and sound. The magnificence of it had caught her, the first time she had seen it. To watch it work – Sam didn't much believe in destiny, but she knew this was hers. Right now, though, there was only one thought on her mind. Just one more, just one more!

"Chevron Seven . . . will not lock."

Davis looked up helplessly from his console. The team behind him was tense, down to the last man, woman, and Jaffa.

Sam checked over the dialing system one last time.

"I'm sorry," Davis offered to the man staring expressionlessly at the 'Gate.

Daniel shook his head. "It's all right."

Jack swore under his breath, giving one last look to the linguist's disappearing back. "Any chance this is a dialing error?"

Carter twisted to look at him, from where she was running a system diagnostic. "We tried it three times," she pointed out. Blue eyes hardened in determination. "There's probably a problem on the other end."

Jack nodded. "Figure it out," he ordered tersely.

She gave him a terse smile of perfect understanding. The colonel turned and headed after one errant, and frustrated, and God knew what else, linguist.

She focused in on the system. The dialing address that Daniel had brought back to them from the depths of the NID's plottings wouldn't work, and she was going to find out why. Failure was not an option.

"It's . . . fuzzy," Daniel had admitted only yesterday. Back from another mission with SG-2, she'd brought up the idea of trying the address Daniel had deciphered from the mysterious canister during his time as a prisoner of the NID. She'd wanted to send a MALP, do some recon and possibly mission prep. She'd hoped that it might pull SG-1 together for a mission; the four of them, for the first time in months . . .

That it might not work had never crossed her mind.

Daniel was good at his job – there was no one with his aptitude or ability. Even hurt, drugged, or upset, he'd never let the team down. She'd been completely confident that Daniel had had a handle on the translation he'd done; that he'd deciphered the meaning of the message.

When she'd cautiously asked him how it had felt, what he'd remembered, he'd admitted that he didn't, really. He'd as much as admitted that he'd thought the entire episode burned into his brain, scorched there by the power of the drugs they'd forced on him. So he hadn't given it much thought.

When he tried now, though, the sharp edge of clarity that had traced each memory had softened, blurring words and faces into a morass of emotions and impressions.

Janet hadn't been surprised, when she'd asked. Out of her patient's hearing, she had explained, "Neuronal death."

"What!"

She wasn't a doctor, but you didn't need an M.D. to know that that was a very bad thing.

And then Janet had sat her down and told her, straight and dirty, just what had happened to Daniel.

And the worst part is, most of it's conjecture. Sam pushed away from the terminal, nodding to Davis on her way out.

Janet came across a lot of strange things from her work with the SGC – viruses and diseases no one had seen before, in addition to the frantic, ER-like working conditions. There were only so many tests she could run to determine what was wrong, and results were rarely conclusive about anything but the effects, certainly not the cause. The fact that it was a homegrown drug narrowed down the playing field considerably, but there was just so much that wasn't known about the human brain . . .

According to Janet, the drug the NID had concocted was a strange paradox. It crossed the blood-brain barrier to bind to ion channel inhibitors in the neurons. In lay-speak, the NID's doctors had jammed the off-switch that allowed the brain to rest. From the effects Daniel had described, Janet also suspected a strong stimulant or two had been thrown in the mix as well, but so far she'd had little luck identifying the possibilities.

So overworked gray matter had been damaged, and they were only now seeing the effects. She stifled a scowl, and the urge to shoot something. She'd be better off applying the frustration to a few of the projects sitting in her lab. Or the main focus of what remained of SG-1, sitting in his office.

Pushing open the door, Sam found Daniel sitting behind his laden desk. He glanced up on hearing her.

"Where's the colonel?" She'd thought for sure Teal'c and the colonel would be here; but the room was empty.

Daniel gave her a thin smile. "Lost them at the commissary."

Not for long, if Sam was any judge. But long enough.

She wandered in, taking a moment to relish the feel of an office cluttered, brimming with books and artifacts and the feel of her friend. Leaning against his desk, she looked down at him. He was avoiding her eyes, staring at a familiar, lined and wrinkled piece of yellow paper.

She picked it up, and scanned the scribblings there. It was no use; they were as indecipherable as before. That was the point, she reminded herself. A code only Daniel understood, to protect what knowledge he could.

"I wanted to double-check, see if there was a mistake," he told her softly.

There wasn't.

He shook his head. "Whatever the glitch was, it was made before I wrote this down."

"Daniel." She hurt for him.

He shook his head. "I'm sorry, Sam."

Anger, inexplicable and undeniable, grabbed at her. "It's not your fault." Argument was not an option. As Daniel opened his mouth to respond, she rode right over him. "Did it cross your mind that there could be something wrong on the other end of the gate? We know a lot of reasons why 'gates go inactive." Coverstones, black holes, and massive explosions, to name a few. There was nothing that said that the gate on the other end hadn't been buried or broken. Though given the remarkable properties of naquadah, complete destruction was unlikely. But DHD's were much more delicate than the rings they controlled.

"Yes," he sighed. But he shook his head, twitching the paper from her fingers. "But I keep getting the feeling that there was something . . . ."

"Daniel?"

He pushed up his glasses. "I can't really remember what happened as clearly as I could a week ago." A painful admission, that left her unprepared for the sudden twisting of her heart. "But I get the sense that I was so focused, so – honed in, on what I was doing, that there was something I was missing. At the same time my mind was jumping all over, from detail to detail – but I couldn't see the big picture."

So she asked him again, to describe to her what he could remember of the strange cylinder, distracting him from his blurred memories with questions. As he tried, details seemed to refocus for him, though they slipped just as easily from his grasp. And they did what the two scientists of SG-1 did best; they tossed ideas and conjectures around, fitting their knowledge in pieces around probabilities and what-might-be's.

"Daniel -"

The phone rang.

Sam bit her tongue, moving to the bookshelf while she waited.

"Jackson . . . It's great to hear from you! . . . You found a – you're kidding! . . . . No, I wouldn't know unless I could see it . . . . Of course, I know that, Mac."

Mac was the name of the supervisor of the Ein Gedi dig. Apprehension swamped her.

"No – everything's fine here. . . . . No, I'm serious. It's going to take time, and I don't know that I want to . . . ."

And the silence here was very long indeed.

"Thanks, Mac. I'll think about it. Can anyone take the time to copy out a few pages, get into the city, and fax or email them to me? Ziv? Great. Here's the number -" and he rattled off a string of numbers into the telephone.

"It's great to hear from you. Now get to bed, it's got to be some ungodly hour – Ah. Yes. And tell Galya, who's no doubt the one listening over your shoulder and breathing into the phone, to get to bed as well. Of the two of you, she's much more in need of beauty sleep."

A strangled sqwack of outrage echoed through the room; Sam winced at the high-pitched noise.

Daniel was holding the phone at arm's length with an expression of patient forbearance, and a mischievous grin.

A few teasing barbs and gentle placations later, Sam was alone with her friend once more.

"Daniel, I don't think there's anything wrong with your translation," she told him.

He looked at her warily. "Sam, it's more than likely that something is incorrect. I was . . . most decidedly under the influence when I was working on the damn thing."

"Irregardless, Daniel," she had to point out, "You're usually right."

He winced.

She wasn't proud of herself for that. She couldn't count the times Daniel had been pushed aside, ignored – and then been found right and forgotten, regardless. She had played a role in it, caught up in the race, in the thrill, and in the push of the military. But no more.

"I'm human, Sam," he said softly. "Yes, I've been right about certain issues, and been ignored because I'm civilian, and not military. But I've also been wrong my fair share as well. Don't ignore that because you're in a hurry to rectify your own mistakes."

This time, she was the one who flinched. But Daniel had never shrunk from the truth. She could do no less.

"Maybe you're right," she said softly. "And maybe I am trying to right past wrongs. But then again, maybe we're both right, and there's nothing wrong with the address or your translation."

Blue eyes were untrusting; not of her, but the assessment. The silence was uncomfortable for only a moment, though, before Daniel changed the subject.

"Did you see the MALP readings for N79-458?"

And another half-hour was swallowed by that. Daniel's going on missions with another team didn't bother her, precisely. It was that he felt he had to. But more, it was that she agreed. Sam knew the colonel was watching Ferretti, and SG-2, very closely. Enough to have Lou snapping back at them all, in between bouts of chastising and understanding.

But it kept close tabs on the wayward, roaming, and not-yet-theirs archaeologist. Just for a little longer, she hoped. She could see it in Daniel's eyes; the rebuilding of a broken trust. An echo of it was growing within her, as well. The scar on his arm would never go away, but it was healing. They all were. And she could be grateful for that, at least.

"See you for lunch?" Daniel offered.

Sam beamed. "Commissary, around two-thirty?"

The archaeologist nodded, already entranced by the next project sitting on his desk. It was so good to see Daniel's fire and enthusiasm come back. She hadn't recognized the person they had beaten him down into, and she didn't think she much liked any of the people she and her friends had become, in the process.

She hadn't known what was happening, then. But she could see it now, more clearly than she wanted to, at times. And she wouldn't make the mistake of forgetting, just because it hurt. She'd seen her father do that, watched what had happened to her family because of it – and no way in hell would she stand for it again.

When she had to pry Daniel away from his project, a few scant hours later, with the lure of coffee, she didn't mind in the least.

A/N: Sorry for the excessive delay. I'm not having much fun with this, since I'm wildly attempting to dig myself out of the pit I seem to have constructed, but I will finish this fic, I promise. 1 chapter left!