"Level 28"

By "AriadneInLove"

DISCLAIMER: This Fanfic is based on Stargate SG-1 right after Daniel returned from Ascension and before Mitchell joined the team and Jack O'Neill became a general. (Circa Season 7, Death Knell) I did not invent Stargate or own any part of it or its characters.

SUMMARY: (Sam has recently been MIA and has just been rescued. This takes place as soon as she gets back to Stargate Command and 48 years after.) A powerful stranger from the future seeks asylum at Stargate Command. What will happen when SG-1 discovers she's the daughter of one of their own and wants to kill her parent before she can be born? What will Daniel's feelings for her develop into when he realizes who and what she is? READ and REVIEW!

MAJOR 'SHIPS: Jack/Sam, Daniel/Adrienne.

And now…

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PART FIVE: Now or Never

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Daniel went to see Adrienne in the infirmary the following day. He hadn't slept since he completely collapsed at Sam's house and he was pretty sure he was never going to sleep again after what he saw in her bed.

Nothing.

"Where's Adrienne?" he asked a day nurse on her way out.

"Who?" she asked back.

"The girl that was in that bed last night. Where did they take her?"

The nurse shrugged and kept on walking. He swore under his breath and went to find Sam or Jack or anyone able and willing to find her. When he finally reached Sam's lab, the Major was already hard at work on her next experiment… alone.

"Have you seen Adrienne?" he asked but worry only rose to her eyes. "She's not in the infirmary."

"Have you checked with Colonel O'Neill or Teal'c?"

"No. I'm worried, Sam."

Sam nodded as if saying "ditto" and picked up a small rock from her desk before running after him to find Jack.

He was either in the mess hall or the control room talking with Hammond so Daniel and Sam split up.

On the way there, Daniel felt the sirens begin to sound once more. In the other side, Sam heard it as well. They both ran to the control room but Daniel was mere seconds away.

The technicians had all been knocked out, Walter's hand fallen atop the emergency button before collapse. Daniel ran to the boards and opened the blast doors. Adrienne was in the process of beating up an armed airman and had just hit him straight in the face with the butt end of a P-90. He went tumbling down among the others.

Daniel ran down the stairs to Level 28 and ran in through the wide open door.

"Adrienne!" he yelled. "Stop!"

She already had a foot on the ramp but she stopped mid-step and turned around at the sound of his voice.

"You caught me," she said wryly. "What are you doing, Danny? Just let me go."

"No, if you go now, I'm never going to see you again, am I?"

"Danny, the thing in the vents didn't mean anything. I-"

"It's not that! Think about Jack and Sam. And don't even think we can just let you run around changing history of your own free will… Please, Ree," he said coming towards her slowly, his hand on her arm. "You can read me, right? You know you can't go alone. No matter how much you know, you can't expect to survive out there."

She looked at him with teary eyes and whispered hoarsely, "I can't stay. I stayed too long as it is. I've come too far back, Danny. I have to stop them before they reach you."

He didn't bother asking who "they" were. "At least tell me where you're going," he pleaded with concern in his eyes.

She looked at the open Gate and said, "Dionysus awaits," and a smile lit up her face. "Come with me!"

He let go of her arm and she ran to the event horizon.

"Now or never, Danny."

He looked back at the control center. Sam was already there trying to track the Gate address. He saw Jack come up behind her and she ran down the stairs as quickly as she could.

"There's 39 seconds left before the Gate shuts down. I'll wait for you on the other side," she said and stepped through.

Just as he was about to go after her, Sam opened the door to the Gate room and ran after him.

"Here! Take this and I'll find you!" she yelled, throwing the rock from her lab in his direction. He caught it just in time to run in; the Gate shut down just as he disappeared into the shimmering horizon.

"Watch her for me, Daniel," Sam whispered to herself after watching her friend and her daughter step through the Gate to who-knows-where.

Jack came running down behind her. Sam felt weak. It could have been the booze. It could have been the stress. It could have been the fear of losing them. But she felt her legs weaken under her and she collapsed on the ramp.

Jack ran up to catch her but she was already on the ground.

"Sam! Sam, wake up!" he yelled but she her eyes refused to open. He cradled her in his arms before lifting her up and running her over to the infirmary.

"Set her down on the bed," Janet said calmly, but before he could see her wake up, a nurse led him outside.

He spent an hour pacing outside. He wasn't the kind to pace but both women in his life were gone and his best friend was following his daughter to another planet and he didn't feel like chewing on his toenails in his office waiting for news. He was never one to wait for news. Now, in situations when his helplessness overwhelms everything else, he found his compulsive, take-action nature drive him towards madness. He had to do something.

Just as he turned back into the room, he ran right into Teal'c. "You must not enter, O'Neill," he said.

"I gotta see her, T. I have to see if she's ok."

"It would be best if you remained here."

"What are you talking about? Why can't I see her? …Is it serious?"

Teal'c face was more grim than usual. It did not bode well on him. "Perhaps it is she that does not wish to see you, O'Neill."

This made Jack freeze, wide-eyed. He knew he shouldn't ask further but instead, he stared Teal'c down until the poor man took a large step aside and Jack went left through the door, straight into the infirmary.

And there she was. And there was Pete, sitting beside her with a hand atop hers. A smile turned to frown and Jack's worry turn into jealousy and hatred.

"Colonel O'Neill, right?" Pete said like the giddy schoolboy he was around Sam. Jack nodded. "Hey, thanks for getting Sam in here so quick. I guess she had a few too many last night."

Jack gave another nod of acknowledgement. He still refused to speak, nervously playing with his hands. It was awkward for a moment but Pete still smiled like a fool. Jack looked at Sam, Sam looked at Jack. Loathe flew threw the air, and Pete began to notice.

He was about to say something when Sam broke the silence. "Don't you think you should go see where Ree went? Her coordinates are still locked on the computer, I assume."

Jack narrowed his eyes. "You're sending me… to read a computer… for alien symbols?"

"Well she's your daughter. You go look for her. I'm a little busy here," she said through gritted teeth.

Jack smirked sinisterly. "Technically, she's your daughter. I don't raise her. You do. So get up and come on!"

Ha! Sweet revenge, he thought. He wasn't sure why he'd mention their child in front of Pete but now he had his payback. For what, he didn't know either. For making him jealous? For making him worry? For making him regret…

Pete's eyes seemed to escape their sockets by now. He looked at Sam and at Jack and back to Sam and back to Jack and by now his neck would most surely hurt in the morning.

"So you two… and you had a… with him?" he stuttered slightly incoherently.

"Correction: will have a daughter," Sam clarified. "She technically hasn't been born - I mean made yet…" His face was still dumbstruck. Sam feared he'd never blink again and his face was permanently frozen like that.

"Uh… My genetically-engineered clone from the future, born from her, came back to the past to apparently kidnap Dr. Jackson and make us all extremely uneasy. Any questions?" Jack made it perfectly clear he was in no way supportive of Pete.

Sam put on a face like she'd given up. But just then, her eyes lit up and she put on a smile. Pete noticed it and was taken aback. Jack was just surprised and raised an eyebrow.

"What?" he asked.

"I know where she went."

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As soon as Daniel walked through the Gate, he found himself submerged in a great blue-green, endless sea. His glasses floated up from his ears just as he realized he couldn't breathe.

Just when he looked up and saw no end to his soon-to-be watery grave, he felt a hand clasp his wrist and turn him around.

Ree…

She smiled at him and kissed him, and for a moment, he felt his lungs fill up with air once more and then slowly he closed his eyes and saw the final reminder of his short life.

When he woke up, he was on his back on a shore looking straight up at what appeared to be a pair of bright suns. He closed his eyes quickly but the pain from the bright lights had already started.

He felt something drop on top of him, sucking the life from his lungs. "Hello, darling. Late night?" he heard someone say from on top of him. He painfully opened an eye again and saw Adrienne straddling him on the sand, the light from the suns forming a perfect halo behind her.

He opened both eyes fearlessly and looked at her brilliant smile and her innocently tilted head. Her hands were firmly pressed on his chest but he didn't care that he couldn't breathe. She was dripping wet but the look of her hair alone, pushed back behind one ear by a simple flower was enough to make him smile back.

"Am I dead?" he asked.

"No… why?"

"Because I see an angel."

"You know what? For a twenty-first century geek, you're pretty good with pretty bad lines."

"Any form of charisma is purely your father's influence, I assure you."

Their smiles faded away at the mention of an outside world. She lifted a leg over and fell on her back beside him with her hands on her stomach. She looked up at the suns without a single wince and said, "We've a long way to go. It's waiting for us."

Daniel got up from the sand and looked around. The sand was a white color as if no one had ever stepped foot upon it. Their shapes were still imprinted, the only ones for as far as the eye could see.

On one end, the sea swayed in all its greatness. On the other, trees for miles. "I guess I should start making us a little tiki hut somewhere and gathering up some berries."

Adrienne laughed. He extended a hand for her to get up. "No need. The palace is just a couple miles away."

Daniel said with a puppy dog look, "But… But… I was about to do the macho provider thing!"

"Oh honey, with me there's never a manly and a girly. I'm always the man. And I can handle myself," she responded, patting him on the shoulder. She left him looking like a statue and walked right by him up into the trees to a palace in paradise. What else had he left if not her? So he followed her into her abyss.

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Sam had gotten up from her bed at the infirmary so quickly that Pete was still contemplating the situation for 10 minutes before he noticed she wasn't there. She'd pulled Jack along with her, almost giving whiplash, and pulled him down the stairs to Level 28.

Still in her hospital gear, she sat down in the command chair of the control room and began to mess with the computers. Jack sat beside her but it was just for company, getting her coffee and things like that. He monitored some computers for when they finished their scans but she was running about 6 diagnostics at once.

"I thought you said you had it saved," he said.

"I did. Well the computer had it saved. When it shut, the address was saved to our files but when I… collapsed… the Gate shut off and Adrienne's eraser program went into effect before I could counteract it. She's good. This thing's almost perfect."

"Almost?"

"She erased it from the records but the computers still have a network log written in the computer's mainframe. The problem: it's written in code. So I'm setting up my own program to read it. But that means millions of lines of code and it takes a bit of time. So in the meanwhile, you're keeping me company."

"Ah, gotcha," Jack said as Sam concentrated nonstop on the computer screen before her. When she spoke, she didn't look at him and her voice was slightly monotone as if she couldn't dare focus on anything else.

A few hours later, she had a program running the diagnostics for her and all that was left was waiting. Jack had fallen asleep on the console. She didn't realize it had become night but underground, it wasn't like she could look out a window.

She pushed back her chair to rest her feet on the console when the squeaking of her chair woke him up. He groaned slightly and turned his head still on the console to face her.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey yourself," she responded.

"What time is it?"

"You know I actually have no idea. Late, I guess."

He paused for a second before responding. She'd pushed a coffee mug mere centimeters from his nose. "Where's Pete?"

"He left. For good, I think."

"I'm sorry." He sounded sincere.

"No you're not. And I'm not sure I am either."

He threw her a grin, slowly lifting his head from the cold steel and plastic of the console and keyboard and looked at her with his usual kind eyes.

"I'm sorry. I know how much you wanted to escape this place."

"I didn't want to escape here. I wanted to escape you."

He knew she didn't mean it to seem callous and didn't respond right away. If anything, he took it as a compliment.

"I stopped trying to escape you a hell of a long time ago, Sam." She smiled back sleepily and yawned. "Why don't you go to sleep? I'll watch the computers," he continued.

She nodded with a smile and went to get up when the computer started beeping. She sat back down and rolled her chair closer to the computer. Two words blinked on and off on the screen: "Address Found".

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To be continued in PART SIX:

--What is Adrienne looking for?

--What are they going to find when they reach the palace? Ruins or Harem girls?

--Who's going after her and Daniel now that they have the planet address?

--Is Pete really gone?

--Did Jack forgive her for what he thinks happened at her house the other morning?

--And… why did Sam really collapse?

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Keep tuned in! It gets a little scary for a while and then someone dies. Stories develop between characters. We finally understand the natural abomination that is "Adrienne O'Neill." The snogging begins! Someone retires, someone gets married, someone dies, and someone goes all the way down the rabbit hole… READ & REVIEW!