Sorry ya'll, but we left to go south to visit family, and I didn't have time to get another chapter written and posted so i could tell you we were going. Right now I'm at a grandparent's house that has high speed, so that's how I got this written and up. We won't be back home for another few days though, so it'll be next week before I can post the last chapter. Sorry! But this should keep you goind. ;)

Can't wait to hear what you think of this chapter; it was a lot of fun, hehe. You'll see. Thanks to all who review in advance!

Chapter 6

When the white faded back to color, Daniel knew immediately that he wasn't in his room at the SGC anymore. He could still feel Vala sitting behind him, still feel her arms wrapped around him, but they weren't sitting on the bed anymore. Instead of looking at the dull tones of walls and ceiling of the underground base, with the lights dimmed, wherever they were now was much brighter.

That was all he managed to gather before he toppled backward when Vala fell.

They both tipped over onto what looked like a hard, marble floor. Having been sitting, they didn't fall far, but since they weren't where had been before, he assumed that without the support of the bed headboard she'd been leaning back against, Vala was too surprised at their change of location to keep herself from falling over when it disappeared. They landed in a tangle of arms and legs, and Daniel quickly extracted himself and scooted a foot or two away on the floor so that she could get herself upright as well.

Daniel almost forgot about her then, when he glanced around at the room they were in now. The walls were bright, smooth poloished stone. To one side of them heavy double wooden doors marked the entrance, and just in front of them…metal grated gates were closed in front of the controlled flames that raged on the other side. He stared at them in shocked horror.

"Where are we?" Vala asked from just behind him.

"Celestus," he gulped, standing.

She stood too, and came forward to stand beside him. "What?" she said incredulously.

He answered her, but he was still staring at the gate distractedly. "When that prior led me out of the room they'd shut us in when we were here, this is where he took me. But there was someone else here then."

"Wait a minute. How could we be in Celestus? That's in the Ori galaxy, and that must be millions of light years away."

"Actually, it could be more like billions, and it probably is; we don't know for sure."

"What does that have to do with anything!" Vala exclaimed in frustration.

"Look, I don't know how it happened, but I know where we are," Daniel shot back, finally looking at him.

She glared at him briefly, and he didn't blame her. She couldn't be very happy with him right now, but he didn't mind. After all, he'd only done what he'd done for her own good—not letting her help him before. He hadn't wanted her to get hurt.

"Okay…then how did we get here? That device we used last time got vaporized," she pointed out, crossing her arms.

He sighed and spun, searching for any clues.

"Uhm…Daniel?"

"What?" he asked, turning to look at her. Vala was staring at him bug-eyed. "What is it?"

"Well….you turned, and your hand should have smacked into that wall beside you, but it went right through it," she explained calmly.

Now he stared at her. "What??"

"Don't ask me." She took a couple of steps closer and poked him in the shoulder.

"Ow." He poked her back in the arm. She rolled her eyes.

"Maybe I was seeing things…" she admitted slowly. "But I don't think so."

Daniel rolled his own eyes and turned to the wall, swinging his hand out to touch it. "Look, see? Solid as—" He stopped when his hand didn't connect with the wall.

It went right through it.

"Yow!" he yelped, pulling his hand back. But it was only out of surprise. He hadn't felt a thing.

Vala smirked at him when he looked at her. "See?"

"Only your minds are here."

Both Daniel and Vala spun to see a prior even more elaborately dressed than usual strolling into the room through the double doors, which opened by themselves for him—or rather, by the telekinetic power he had to make them do it without touching them.

It was the same uber-prior that had been waiting in this room when Daniel had been here last. The Doci, if he remembered correctly.

This could not be good.

He and Vala looked at each other when they heard what he said. Now that Daniel thought about it, the stone floor here should have felt cold when they'd been down on it just a few moments ago. But he had felt nothing. Vala took a step sideways. There was no sound.

"Ooookay. What are we doing here?"

The doors closed behind the Doci, and he regarded them cooly. "You were the only one who was meant to arrive here, and that was accomplished by the poison a prior planted in your body. It is by the power of the Ori you are here, because your lesson is complete, and now you must make your choice. I do not know why the woman is here as well."

He'd just called Vala 'the woman'. So he didn't recognize her, or him either. They'd been in different bodies the last time they'd been here, so he shouldn't. Hopefully the Doci only knew them as part of the annoying group of humans that had been causing trouble for the priors in the Milky Way for weeks. Not that that wasn't bad enough. The prior that had done whatever-exactly-it-was to him back on the other planet had been supremely ticked-off. In a prior sort of way.

If the end of the pain had triggered some implanted, programmed action to send his mind to this place, though, then Daniel had a pretty good idea why Vala was here too. It was because she had been sharing the pain. This was exactly why he hadn't wanted her doing it; something could happen.

And something had.

"Why is the woman here as well?" This question was directed at Daniel, as if the Doci assumed he would know. Well, he was right there, but that didn't mean he was going to tell him. That could be used against them.

"How should I know?"

The Doci narrowed his eyes at them, and Daniel saw Vala gulp out of the corner of his eye.

"You are not being truthful," the Doci said finally. "But that can be helped." With no other explanation, the strode over to the gates.

"What is he doing? What is that?" Vala whispered.

"The Fires of Enlightenment," Daniel replied quietly, suddenly feeling more nervous. When she looked at him in confusion he restated. "The Ori themselves."

"What?!" she hissed.

He didn't bother to reply to that, just started back up. "You know, I would suggest we find a way out of here now; an open door, a way to wake up—"

Their whispered conversation was interrupted by the creak of the opening metal gates, and the Doci spinning to face them. "No mind can resist the power of the Ori." That was all he said, but that was when a gust of the flames burst free from the wall of fire and into the room.

Vala stumbled back in surprise. "What the—"

But the hovering flames ignored her, and shot straight for Daniel, purposefully.

"Daniel, look out!"

He tried to dive out of the way, but it was too fast. The shimmering mass slid effortlessly into his body, even though it wasn't really there, and immediately every inch of his flesh was in pain. His body wasn't even here, but it hurt like it was. Not surprisingly, it felt like he was burning. But there was no outward evidence. Just the excruciating pain. And the attack on his mind.

The Ori were searching for the answer to the question.

Daniel screamed, and kept screaming. His body trembled, and all he wanted to do at that very second was lay down and die, but his body wouldn't even collapse. The flames inside him held him where he was, standing rigid. His eyes were clenched shut tight, but that was the only control he had as the presence inside him tore at his memory, ripping and clawing inside his mind, looking for what it wanted to know.

Daniel continued to scream.

Despite how hard he tried to prevent it, after only a few moments the flames had their answer. Daniel had tried resisting, hiding the information, but trying had only caused more pain, and in the end it hadn't taken long for them to tear through his defenses. Now they knew why Vala was here, and a few other things, too.

The fiery mass slipped out of him again, and he collapsed. His screaming stopped, and the floor rushed up to meet him. He hoped for a moment that the impact would knock him out, but it didn't happen. He didn't feel the impact at all. He wasn't here.

But he felt Vala's hand on his shoulder a moment later, demanding that he talk to her, say he was all right. All Daniel could manage was a half nod.

Back at Stargate Command, millions, or maybe billions of light years away, twenty-something floor under Cheyenne Mountain, something unusual happened on the screen in the security office that was being fed by the camera in the room that Daniel and Vala's unconscious bodies were occupying.

Daniel's body began convulsing hard, though he made no sound.

But that screen was in a far, almost hidden corner of the room, and was almost never looked at because it was private quarters, and it was usually ignored because of its location anyway. After several moments, he went still again, and that was the end of that. All that had changed was that the convulsions caused by the attack on his mind far away had knocked his body out of Vala's grasp.

No one ever noticed.

It took a few moments before Daniel could clear his head and sit up, and when he did Vala was still looking at him with concern. He started to open his mouth to tell her that he was fine, but then closed it again. Even he had to admit that he wasn't. He was sitting up, but his head still hurt horribly. His brain felt like Swiss cheese.

"Daniel…?" she questioned quietly.

He didn't have an answer to give her that would satisfy her, and he knew it. So he ignored her and used her shoulder to help pull himself to his feet. One might have thought that would be easy, since his body wasn't really here in the first place, but it wasn't easy. Not in the slightest. By the time Daniel was standing, Vala had stood and helped pull him up by one arm, and he was breathing hard again.

His eyes scanned for the Doci, and found him standing just on the other side of the gates, arms open wide as a fiery mass the same as the one that had attack him came out of his body and retreated into the wall of flames. But, of course, it hadn't hurt him.

The Doci backed out of the gated area and closed and locked the gates themselves again. Then he straightened and turned to them.

"So that is why both yours and the woman's minds were brought here: this strange connection caused by malfunctioning technology. It is for such reasons that we have no need of such machines."

"Well, we like our technology just fine, thank you," Vala glared.

The Doci glanced at her for a moment, silent, then looked back at Daniel. "Now you must both make a choice. But be warned: because of this connection between you, either you must both accept the teachings of Origin now, or you will both die."

"What??" they echoed together.

"You can't do that," Daniel added.

"The enemies of Origin must be exterminated. If you will not accept the truth, you will be killed. But if I understand this connection correctly, if only one of you dies, so will the other. Thus, you must both accept Origin if you are to live."

"Now would be another of those good times to leave, wouldn't it?" Vala whispered out of the corner of her mouth.

Daniel swallowed. "Yep. Pretty much."

"You must decide. Now!" The Doci couldn't hear exactly what they were saying, but he obviously didn't like their hesitation.

Daniel glanced at Vala, and she looked back. He could read her expression clearly. Maybe they were good at annoying one another, but there were some things that came easy to agree on. Just a tiny few. Or maybe just this one. Whatever. He knew what to do. He looked back at the head prior, setting a determined expression on his face despite the fatigue the attack had left with him.

"Then we decide not to accept Origin. You can do whatever you will to us for it, but we will not compromise what we know to be true just because you threaten to kill us if we don't see things your way. All I know is that the Ori are not gods, and I'll tell you again that you can never change my mind."

He glanced at Vala again, and she nodded firmly in agreement. "You tell him, Daniel," she said, smiling just a bit.

By now the Doci was scowling deeply. "You both hold this opinion?" he demanded, looking back and forth between the two of them.

"We do," Vala answered. Daniel nodded.

The scowl disappeared, but apparently the Doci's intentions id not. "Then you will both die."

They didn't know exactly how he planned to try to accomplish that, but at the same time both of them started to back up slowly. Vala tapped his arm urgently.

"Pinch me; maybe I'll wake up. Then I'll wake you up from there."

Out of sheer lack of ideas, Daniel did it, pinched her arm hard, even though he suspected that if he could have gone through as much pain as he had just a few minutes before and not woken up, that wouldn't wake her up either. It didn't.

"Ow! Not that hard!" Vala yelped, slapped his hand away.

"You asked for it."

"You cannot escape. Your minds cannot leave here now unless I send them away," the Doci informed them. "And I will not do that until your fates have been sealed."

"Huh interesting. And how did you plan on doing that again?" Daniel asked, licking his lips nervously.

The Doci's answer was given when he swept his arms forward them. Before either of them could react, a flash of orange-golden light sprung from the prior and took Vala down. She didn't yelp, didn't scream, didn't anything. She just went down.

Daniel spun. "Vala!" She was on her back, staring up at him in wide-eyed shock and trying to breathe. But it wasn't working. "What did you do to her!" he shouted angrily, glaring over at the Doci. The head prior only looked back at him calmly.

"You will watch her die, and then you will die with her," was his only answer. Then he strode for the door.

"No! Come back here! Stop this!"

The Doci ignored him. Daniel glanced back uncertainly at Vala, who was still struggling for air, or something—he wasn't really sure what was happening to her, since it was their bodies that needed to breathe, not their minds…But he didn't know what else to do. He lunged at the Doci.

His body passed right through the prior. He stumbled to a stop on the other side of him, next to the door. The doors opened, the nearest one going right through him as well. The Doci turned his head for only a moment, giving him a look that was almost smug, and then he was gone, and the doors closed again.

That wouldn't help. There was no help. They were on their own. He was on his own. If either of them was going to live, it was up to him now.

"D-Dan-l…"

Daniel spun and ran back to Vala, dropping to his knees besides her. It still didn't hurt. He didn't feel the floor.

Vala looked up at him weakly, and he knew she was slipping away. And strangely the fact that he would die too once she was gone wasn't what he was worrying about at all at that moment. But what could he do?

Without hesitation, he grabbed her hand and held it tight. He wasn't really sure what that would do, but if they were already in physical contact back in the SGC, maybe being in further contact here would help more. He didn't know. All he knew was that he didn't have any other idea for keeping her alive.

"Listen, Vala, stay with me, okay?"

She wanted to fight it. Daniel could see that. But her eyes were drifting shut.

"Vala, come on!"

Her lips formed a word that looked like 'sorry', but there was no sound. Then her eyes closed, and she went limp.

Daniel's eyes went wide. "Vala!"