A/N: Hey, guys. I know it's been like...almost three years now? Hopefully I can recapture your attention. I had some pretty bad stuff happen, but I'm back in a place right now where I feel good enough to continue this story and I'm even working on publishing my own poetry works soon! So, I hope you're still interested in reading, and I hope I can finish this story and make the wait worth it.

Jack groaned as the infirmary lights leaked through his closed eyes. His head pulsed, like his brain was knocking violently against his skull, and he wasn't able to lift his arms to try and massage away the pain. His arms didn't feel numb...or heavy, or light. They tingled, almost like a shuttering tickle, like when they're coming back to life after being asleep for so long. Come to think of it, his entire body tingled. It was a subtle pain that crescendoed and quickly overcame the pain in his head. The machine beside his gurney began to beep wildly and he started to convulse. Blood filled his throat as he bit his tongue and soon it was dark again.

Her hands were cold. It was as if long ago her body forgot how to keep itself warm. She shuddered underneath the dim light of the holding cell. She'd been sitting here, naked, for days now. She was starving. She was dehydrated. Every time the guards ran past her cell in a hurry, her heart fluttered with hope. Hope that her team had found her.

She knew it was Baal that had taken her, but he hadn't spoken to her yet. He hadn't even visited her. She'd woken up in this spot, unclothed, and not a single guard had even looked her way. If she didn't know any better, she'd have assumed that they'd simply forgotten she was there.

She tried to remember the timeline of events. They were in the Tok'ra tunnels. Daniel had been shot. Then she went down. And now she was here.

It was odd for Baal to keep his captives waiting, and as much as she tried to ignore it, fear coiled like a snake in the bottom of her belly.

Baal was asking her for information. He began with his usual repertoire of torture, but he quickly grew tired of hand devices and pain sticks. He ended each session now by ripping away a personal memory of hers. She never knew exactly how he did it, but each time she woke in her cell, there was a new empty spot in her past. It started with small things – the street she lived on growing up, her phone number, the college graduated from – then she forgot her mother's face, the day she died. Soon though, she forgot her friends, her father, her team, Jack.

She tried to fight. Damn it, she was trained to fight. But her memories unraveled faster and faster, like a ball of yarn, and eventually she wasn't even sure if Baal was doing anything anymore to rid her of them. Maybe forgetting who she was was just the inevitable ending to this. The information Baal was searching for drowned in the vast blackness of her past, and soon she wasn't useful to him anymore. But he was Baal, and if she had remembered who he was, she would have known he would find other ways to use her.

Jack woke again; this time when he opened his eyes, the room was dark and he wasn't strapped down. He tried to sit up, but his arms gave out and he landed back down in a huff. Across the room, Janet shuffled over and raised the back of his bed.

"Sir?" She eyed him warily, and looked at the guard across the room, as if to confirm he was watching for any sign of trouble.

Jack tried to respond, but it came out in a dry croak, and Janet quickly grabbed a cup of ice and slipped them down his tongue.

"Careful, Colonel. You've been through a lot. How are you feeling?"

"What happened?" He tried to think back, but everything was shrouded in fog.

Janet shifted her feet and looked down at her chart. "Well, what's the last thing you remember?"

Jack was finally able to raise his arms and rub his temples. The fog wasn't clearing, and the IVs in his arms pulled slightly. He shook his head.

"It's probably better you rest, Sir. If you're feeling up to it, we can brief you in the morning..."

"Janet," he said sharper than he meant to, and he heard the guard start to move towards him. Janet raised her hand to put him at ease.

he sighed and laid a hand on his arm. "Jack, I need you to try to rest, okay? I promise to talk to the General tomorrow."

He signed in resignation and she gave him a small smile. She patted his arm with the hand that rest there and finished taking his vitals.

"If you need anything, I'll be in my office." She walked away from him and he looked at the guard. He had stepped back to his previous position, but Jack still felt a little uneasy with the way he looked at him.

"I don't suppose you're going to tell me what happened? No? Of course not." He laid back down and closed his eyes.

He wasn't going to be able to sleep. He needed to remember what was going on. He tried to work his way through the fog – and it felt like the harder he fought, the denser it got.

Janet stood in General Hammond's office. "I took his vitals and ran another EEG and it came back conclusive: there was only one brain wave, and it was definitely the Colonel's."

"That's good to hear, Doctor." Hammond felt tired, jaded, and he wasn't surprised by Janet's follow up observation.

"However, when I spoke to him last night he didn't remember anything. I advised him he wait until I debrief with you for information, but I think we should consultant with Doctor MacKenzie before we move forward."

"You think it's psychological?"

"I'm not entirely sure, Sir. It doesn't look like there are any potential medical causes, so my best professional guess is that it might be trauma-induced dissociative amnesia. I just don't know if it's temporary or more permanent."

"Okay, thank you, Doctor. I'll contact Mackenzie and see if we can get him here today. You're dismissed." He looked away from her and went to grab his phone.

Janet nodded her head slightly but hesitated. "General..."

He looked up at her expectantly.

"It's about Major Carter. Now that we know the electric current from the zat worked on Colonel O'Neill, I'd like permission to try it on Sam."

"But?"

"Well, Sir," Janet look up at him from her notes. "I'm not entirely convinced it's going to work on her. We're looking at a completely different set of circumstances. With the Colonel, he simply took on Baal's personality, but Major Carter believes she is Hadad. As we experienced with Jolinar, when the symbiote died, Sam still had her memories, her feelings."

Hammond sighed. "Do what you need right now, and let's she how she reacts. Make sure to take Teal'c with you. I'll bring in MacKenzie; maybe he'll have more insight."

"Thank you, Sir."

Hammond gave her a slight reassuring smile and watched her leave. He sighed and picked up his phone.

Jacob watched his daughter from behind the glass of the observation room she was held in. She lay in her gurney, machines beeping rhythmically next to her, and he felt Selmak give him a nudge of support. He smiled internally and thanked his symbiote.

Watching the rise and fall of his daughter's chest, he coughed back a small sob. Sam was never a large woman, but she was so small now that the skin that clung to her bones was gaunt and bruised. Jacob remembered her as a child, the bruises that'd cover her knees as she fell off her bike, and this was not the same.

She was pale, and he couldn't stop thinking about what Jack had said to him. He knew that Baal was an awful son of a bitch, and he was under no illusion that for six months Sam had been on vacation, but...raped? By her commanding officer? And he had seen the glances exchanged between them. He knew how they really felt about each other.

Selmak reminded Jacob that it was probably actually Baal using the drug, and not actually Jack, that had hurt her, but it didn't make him feel any better. Sammy was his little girl. He should have protected her better. He shouldn't have let the Jaffa take her in the first place.

They still didn't know exactly what information Baal had wanted, and as empathetic as the Tok'ra pretended to be, Jacob knew they allowed him to stay here mostly in part because they wanted him to find out from Sam what it might have been.

The doors opened to the room and Jacob stood up. He watched as Teal'c and Janet walked up to Sam's bedside. Janet was taking vitals and Teal'c looked up at him.

"What's going on?" Jacob asked through the mic.

"Colonel O'Neill woke up last night, and he seems to be himself again," Teal'c responded.

Jacob didn't want to think about what that meant for Jack, or for Sam.

"Are you going to try it on Sam?"

Janet looked up at him. "I'd really like to wait until she regains consciousness, but yes."

Teal'c turned toward the doctor. "What is the prognosis, Doctor Fraiser?"

"She should wake up any moment now. I guess we wait."

Fire. Hot, burning her skin, melting it off her bones. She tried to scream, but her vocal chords had been shredded long ago.

Laughter. Dark, low, maniacal.

"You can make this stop, you know," the voice crooned, a hand brushing her ashed hair off her forehead. "All you need to do is give me what I want."

She tried to open her eyes and look at the him, at Baal, but everything was dark. She was blind.

"I can make you feel better. I can make the pain stop."

She tried to reach out to him. He laughed again, but the fire was doused. "Good girl, that's a start."

She crawled toward him, or toward his voice, and she could hear him step away.

"Ah, ah. Not so fast. You know better than that."

She stopped, and did her best to kneel. She bowed her head, but her skin began to peel away and the blood that pooled around her nostrils and in the back of her throat choked her.

"Darling, let me help you." He touched her chin and raised her head, and she winced in pain. "We've been together for so long, I think you've started taking advantage of me. And this host...doesn't look so good anymore. Oh, my dear Hadad, how beautiful you used to be."

She heard the sound of a ribbon device activate, and the next time she awoke, she could see. But she wasn't in her host's body. She swam in a tank, and from behind a wall, Baal revealed his gift to her. His promise. A new host.