Chapter 4
Disclaimer: As much as I wish, I do not own Stargate: SG1, Highlander the Series, or any recognizable characters. Any character that you do not recognize are mine to use and abuse as I see fit. Everyone else will eventually be returned, but they might be a bit scuffed.
Minutes? Hours? Days? Years later, Daniel jerked back to life, taking in a sucking gasp of air. He quickly sat up and looked around, trying to assess his current predicament.
His clothes were gone, replaced with dull, beige scrubs. His shoes and socks were gone, leaving his feet bare. Even his glasses were gone, causing Daniel to squint slightly to compensate for everything being slightly out of focus. Squirming slightly, he was able to determine that he hadn't even been given underwear; going commando was apparently his new normal.
Daniel took a look at his current quarters: a cage made of cinder blocks on three sides, with glass, or more likely a plexiglass, front, looking out onto an empty hallway that was painted a sickly yellow. The glass was framed out in metal, hiding a lowering and rising mechanism. Above him was a metal mesh grating that allowed someone to observe him from above and allow air to circulate into the cell. The floor was cool, smooth concrete.
In the cell was a cement formed bunk and a small pony wall that blocked the sight of a toilet/sink combo. As a token nod to personal comfort, he had been given a scratchy woolen blanket and a cheap pillow.
"Fuck," was all Daniel could mutter, as he shook his head, trying to clear it. He felt weird somehow. He also felt the near-by presence of other Immortals. He could not see them, but Daniel could easily pick out over a dozen different Quickening signatures that were setting off his internal alarm system. They didn't immediately feel like they were people he had known well or had been close to for a long time, but their signatures didn't feel unfamiliar either.
"You're awake. I was beginning to worry that you weren't Immortal and we had killed you for nothing," a disembodied voice called.
"Lucky you then," Daniel snarked back. "Where the hell am I? You have no right to hold me like this. I have rights! This is a violation of a person's basic human rights!"
Cruel laughter played over a hidden speaker. "You don't have any rights here Dr. Jackson, or shall I call you by your old name, Danil? To have rights, you have to exist and you do not exist anymore. Also, you'd have to be human to have human rights and you are certainly not human."
"Asshole," Daniel muttered, wondering if and when his friends would get him out of this place.
"They aren't coming," the disembodied voice said. "I know you are counting on the other members of SG-1 to pull off one of their miracles and get you out of here, but that will not happen. This place does not exist. You do not exist."
Daniel glared at the hallway wall, through the glass door. "We'll see," he said, grumpily, refusing to believe that the others would just let this go.
~SG1SG1SG1SG1SG1~
The days became waking nightmares, one flowing into the next. Each day involved him being experimented upon by the people running the prison.
It would start soon after breakfast was served. Once the last bite of cereal was finished, guards would show up outside of his cell. They would wave one of their cards in front of a card reader off to the side of the cell and the glass wall would rise, allowing the men to enter.
Early on, Daniel decided to use that moment to try to overpower the guards and escape.
He sprang to his feet and rushed the guards, knocking them over. One guard grabbed at him, but Daniel got hold of him first from behind, snaking his arm around to the guy's front, grasping him across his face. With the other hand, he looped his arm across the chest, then twisted in opposite directions, snapping the man's neck. It didn't kill the guy, but left him screaming, while his body lost all tension, unable to support itself.
Daniel then threw the paralyzed body at a fourth guard and sprinted out of the cell, only to be tased from the left and right sides of the cell in the hallway. Unable to do anything else, he fell to the floor, shaking and screaming as fifty thousand volts shot through his body.
Once the electricity finished coursing through his body, another guard shot him in the chest, ending his life.
Unfortunately for him, the guards just drug his lifeless body down the hall, past other similar cells, filled with other Immortals, and into a lab, where they strapped him down to a metal table and waited for him to revive. Once he revived, lab time began.
It first started out with taking blood and saliva samples. Then it moved to hair and skin cell scrapings. None of these tests were overly invasive and Daniel had been told that he was strapped down for his safety, not that was reassuring to hear. Eventually it moved on to tissue samples and bone marrow sample extraction. He was also naked.
That was extremely painful, the sample procurement – not the nakedness. Normally it was done under anesthesia, but not this time. Needles were jabbed deeply into either side of the back of his pelvic bone, specifically the iliac crest, where the marrow grows. The liquid marrow was extracted and sent off to who knows where. Daniel did his best to not give his torturers any sense of satisfaction to hear him cry out. While he was pretty much silent, he did give a slight hiss as the needles punctured his bones.
After that, the tests and experiments only got worse.
First, he was deliberately infected with diseases, like typhus, measles, and polio. The doctors would infect him and wait for him to develop symptoms, all while hooked up to monitors. They would watch his heart rate, respiration, brain waves, and kidney he started recovering from the illnesses they inflicted upon him, numerous blood and tissue samples were taken.
Eventually they moved on to more complex diseases like SARS, anthrax, and ebola. The mad scientists infected him and watched as his body tried to fight off the diseases. A couple of times, he was unable to fight off the illness before his body gave up the fight and died. As always, he revived and was "cured" by his Quickening. Bleeding out of every major hole in his body as his internal organs necrotized was not a fun experience for him and, unfortunately, he was conscious of every moment up until his body couldn't take it any longer and he died. Once he recovered, blood samples were taken and the scientists gleefully talked about harvesting antibodies to further their research.
From there, it moved on to horrific experimentations involving healthy teeth being extracted, with little thought towards hygiene and the pain experienced by their Immortal guinea pig.
They had strapped Daniel to a table, fully immobilizing his arms and legs. The scientists then secured his head into place and forced his jaw open. Once that was done, one of the masked people used what looked like a pair of pliers and inelegantly yanked a back molar out, root and all, ignoring any whimpers and screams of pain.
"Damn," one scientist remarked to another after watching the bleeding hole in Daniel's mouth heal over, "they don't regrow their teeth."
"What if we remove one and then put it back in?" another coldly asked. "Do you think it will reattach itself?"
The other scientists shrugged and agreed that it would be an interesting idea to test. After they were done, five teeth were extracted and four were successfully reimplanted.
Eventually the scientists tired of playing dentist and moved on to examining his major organs. They had fun probing his liver, dissecting it, while it was still inside his body, watching it regrow over and over. It didn't matter how much he screamed, it was as if the doctors didn't hear his pleas for them to stop, or, more likely, they didn't care. He was a scientific puzzle that the doctors were determined to solve.
Soon after that, Daniel was handcuffed and dragged, literally, back to his cell. On the way back there, Daniel took the opportunity to look at the other Immortals that were being held. Most of them looked vaguely familiar. He even swore that he saw Eban ben Ranen, but what little of his ability to rationalize that still existed told him that was impossible since he had killed the man over five years prior.
Once in his cell, Daniel sat there on his bed, holding his head, doing his best to not cry. There had been a part of him that had hoped that his friends would come and rescue him from this living hell, but in the days and weeks that had passed, that glimmer of hope died like a flame being deprived of oxygen. He had given up that they would find him and end this misery. There was nothing he could do to stop the constant testing and torture. He had no weapons at his disposal, nothing that would even allow him to kill himself, permanently. The thought of his Quickening being lost was horrifying, but so was the idea that his suffering would never end.
~SG1SG1SG1SG1SG1~
The days melted into weeks and the weeks melted into months. Daniel had no idea how long he had been held captive. For all he knew, he might have been there for years.
The experiments grew harsher. He had his legs and arms broken, while the mortals watched his body try to heal itself. Sometimes they set the bones, timing the healing, while comparing it to the times they didn't realign the bones. At one point, the scientists broke both legs, setting one leg and letting the other leg heal on its own.
Blood was everywhere in the operating rooms, coating the walls and floors. Daniel was fairly sure that most of it was his. The room looked like it could double for the scenery in a slasher movie.
He had been drowned repeatedly and electrocuted. The scientists even starved him a few times, letting him die and then revive, only to start the process over again.
They also experimented with illicit drugs, wanting to see how his body would react. Pot, heroin, LSD, 'shrooms, coke, you name it, it was used on him. His hallucinations were categorized and recorded. The paranoia was fully explored. Colors and sounds were introduced to get a reaction that could be studied. His veins felt like they were on fire, unless they overdosed him, letting him die, revive, and start the process all over again.
His least favorite way to die was when the insane scientists decided to test Immortal healing against fire. The burning hurt, his skin roasting as the flames licked his body, his hair catching fire. It felt like the time he had been killed by Ivan the Terrible in his giant frying pan. What killed him in the end was suffocation. He suffocated on the intense smoke that literally choked the life out of him. Once the scientists decided he was dead enough, they used a fire extinguisher to put out his blacked corpse and watched in fascination as his Quickening slowly healed his body. Of course, his Quickening didn't regrow his hair, leaving him bald and without eyebrows and eyelashes.
It got to the point where Daniel didn't care anymore. He didn't care if he lived or died. He held out no hope for anyone to come and save him. All he could do is lie curled up in a ball on his bunk and wait for the next round of torture to arrive. Daniel didn't even have enough energy to cry. He didn't talk anymore, simply stared at the wall across from his cell. Nothing mattered to him anymore. Not his friends, not the SGC, not learning about new or old cultures spread out across the galaxy, nothing from his old life mattered to him.
The days melted into each other. Maybe it was the drugs, but every so often, when he was being brought out of his cell and down the long hallway, he would see people from his past, Immortals that he had killed. Eban ben Ranan was one of many. He saw Kevin O'Sullivan, the twit from Circuit City. Later he glimpsed Matthew Price, the Immortal that the members of SG-1 had witness him kill when they first found out about him, peeking out of a cell similar to his own.
At one point, he would have sworn on every holy book available that he saw Cassandra, the witch of Dongal Woods, former slave to the Horsemen. Daniel knew it was impossible for her to be there, in the same prison as he was, since he had killed her maybe ten years previous. However, he saw her, felt her Quickening. She looked the same from their last meeting: long, reddish-brown hair, angular face, hate crazed eyes, wearing the long brown dress she had died in.
What little part of his sanity remained was bothered by the fact that she was allowed to wear regular clothes while he was forced to wear beige, cheaply made scrubs for clothes.
He later recognized Tupkish of Urikesh, the very first Immortal he had beheaded was also in an adjoining cell. The man, dressed in desert garb, looking dusty and out of place in the relatively clean prison. He glared at Daniel, hatred, born from centuries of old resentment, filled his eyes, but powerless to do anything about his situation.
"This can't be real," Daniel moaned as he was taken from his cell once again. "They're dead. I won. They can't come back."
All he heard was a dark sinister laughter, telling him that he was horribly, horribly wrong.
A/N: Well, what do you think? Hit the shiny review button and let me know. I always appreciate constructive criticism. It helps me improve my writing and storytelling.
I want to especially thank WhiteElfElder for their suggestion about organs and vivisection. I couldn't get into it like I had planned, but I want you to know how much I appreciate your ideas. I did some research and almost threw up.