Spoilers for "Threshold"
Two Months Later
"Are you sure you want to be here when he comes?" Janet asks Shelby.
"Of course I want to be there, my husband was brainwashed by his former boss, I have to be there."
"I just mean… it might be pretty hard, and we can take care of him. You don't need to be here."
"I do."
"Shol'va!" Teal'c's voice shouts down the hallway. "Your god will punish you for your disobedience."
"Teal'c!" Shelby scolds, somehow believing that her voice is all her husband is going to need to bring him back to reality.
"Woman! Your god is weak in comparison to Apophis!" Teal'c decrees.
Shelby blinks in shock. She knew that Jaffa considered the Goa'uld to be their gods, but she had never considered her husband worshiping snakes with the same fervor with which she worshiped God.
"Come on, Apophis is just a parasite. It's exactly like the parasite that you carry around in your stomach."
"You will die for your insolence, woman!" he says, lurching at her. It takes four airmen to hold him down, and then they pick him up and tie him down to a bed.
They wrap the straps around his arms, and someone rushes for another one for around his neck.
Shelby stands by in shock and horror. She is beginning to believe that Janet was right about her not really needing to be here.
Jack come up, and put a hand on her arm, "Are you ok?"
"I guess that depends if the effects of this are reversible," she replies.
"Oh come on, Shelby, it's Teal'c."
"It's Teal'c who is calling his teammates 'Shol'va' and worshipping the snake in his belly."
"It's temporary," Jack assures her.
"It sounds a little bit like what he was like before."
"Before?" Jack asks.
"Before me, before you, before Teal'c of Chulak became Teal'c of the Ta'uri."
"So what, you think this is the 'real' Teal'c, and then man we've all gotten to know in the last FOUR years was a lie?"
"Not exactly. I'm just saying that it's possible there are a lot of sides of Teal'c, and that this one might just be a true and as real as all of the rest of them."
"Teal'c, the real Teal'c, is going to be coming back soon," Jack assures her.
The Next Day
"Tek'ma'te, Master Bra'tec," Shelby says, bowing low before the Jaffa as he comes through the gate.
"Are you the wife of Teal'c?"
"Indeed," she says in Goa'uld.
Bra'tec responds with something that that is much too fast for Shelby to catch. Her attempts at learning her husband's language are going slower than she intended. It turns out that she's even worse at this than she is at Jaffa Martial Arts.
"Maybe we could do English," Shelby says with a sheepish smile.
"Has Teal'c recovered?" Bra'tec asks.
"Dr. McKenzie thinks that he has recovered," Shelby says.
"And what does his wife think?" Bray'tec asks searchingly.
"I think that… he's not the man I married," she says.
"I would like to see him," Bray'tec says.
"Jaffa don't show many emotions. I think it makes you guys a lot better at reading the few things that you do show in each other," she says.
"I think that is an accurate picture of our culture," Bray'tec says, "Take me to him."
-0-0-0-
Bra'tac walks up to his Teal'c, grabbing his arm in a Jaffa form of a hug, "Hello, old friend."
"Master Bra'tac, it has been too long," Teal'c says, with warmth in his voice, if not in his face.
"So it has. Your friends of Earth took great pains in bringing me here," Bra'tac says with a wide smile. He keeps holding Teal'c's arm, even though Teal'c is trying to walk away. "You are correct in your assertion that your husband is deceiving you," he says to Shelby.
Teal'c breaks away from his Master, and starts running down the hall at full speed. Shelby hits the wall, trying to avoid all confrontation. Two airmen step out to try to stop him, but Teal'c pushes them aside without much effort.
Shelby stay against the wall for a couple of seconds before she get the courage to go around the corner. Sam is standing there with a zat pointed at Teal'c.
Teal'c tries to turn around, but not only Shelby, but Bra'tac and a row of airman are preventing his escape from that direction.
"Shol'va!" Teal'c shouts at Bra'tac again. Bra'tac zats him, and pulls his shirt aside to reveal the stomach pouch. Shelby looks away, because it's still a part of her husband that she likes to pretend does not exist.
When she turns back, she sees the symbiote in Bra'tac's hand.
"What are you doing? You have to put that back! He's going to die without it," Shelby protests.
"If Teal'c won't hear the truth in words, he must learn of it another way. The only way left to us."
-0-0-0-
Shelby has never got to sit in the briefing room before. It's not exactly the sort of place that nurses go. Usually it's just for people that go off world, and General Hammond. If anyone from the infirmary sat at this table, it was Janet.
But she's Teal's wife, and she's the only one that can make medical decisions on behalf of her husband.
"Please explain to me what it is you hope to achieve by depriving Teal'c of his symbiote," General Hammond says, looking at the Jaffa.
"I hope to save him," Bra'tac says.
"By killing him?" Daniel asks.
Shelby flinches at the harshness of the words. It's not like she didn't know that her husband could die, but she really doesn't like it being pointed out so obviously.
"If necessary," Bray'tac says.
"See, I think we disagree on the meaning of the word 'save'," Jack says.
"You would have him remain this way, loving a false god, spitting and cursing?" Bra'tac asks.
"At least he's alive," Shelby says.
"There may be other methods we haven't considered," Sam offers.
"I have seen your methods. You underestimate the hold Apophis has on Teal'c's heart. In time, you will have little choice but to lock him away, for he is far too dangerous an enemy to have in your midst. The Rite of Malsuraan is the only way," Bra'tec says.
Shelby's stomach sinks as the word "malsuraan" translates in her head as Daniel translates it out loud. "Last Rite."
Suddenly Shelby realizes how much is at stake. If she doesn't do this, he's going to go to jail, forever. Teal'c was a warrior; he was a man of action. There was no way that he would choose sitting around and waiting over doing something active to try to save himself.
"To save Teal'c's soul, first we must take him to the very threshold of death. On Chulak, it is said that when a warrior is dying, the events that forged him wash over his mind like a great wave," the Jaffa explains.
"His whole life passes before his eyes, we have a similar… uh, where does that get us?" Jack asks.
"Through his fever and hallucination, he will re-live his true path, buried beneath this lie," Bra'tac explains.
"You've done this before?" Jack asks.
"Twice, in my 137 years."
Shelby takes a quick breath of relief. Ok, so this isn't totally uncharted territory. Maybe her husband is going to make it out of this completely unscathed.
"Did they remember the pain?" Shelby asks. A few of the times that her mother detoxed, there was a lot of pain involved, but her mother hadn't even remembered the pain afterword. She wouldn't feel so bad about allowing them to do this to her husband if she was sure that he wouldn't remember it.
"Neither Jaffa had the strength to turn back from the precipice. But I am content they died free. Teal'c would ask for nothing more. I owe him that. Do you?" Bra'tec asks, looking right into Shelby's eyes.
"I don't like this, but I know it's what he would have picked if he was in his right mind. And that's what a medical proxy is supposed to do, right? Speak for people who can't speak for themselves."
-0-0-0-
Teal'c is screaming in pain with his eyes closed at some memory that no-one else can see.
"You have to give him something for the pain!" Shelby says.
Janet rushes over to obey the order of her subordinate.
Bra'tac puts up his hand to stop her, "Pain is what we seek. Teal'c's path was laid down with suffering. It is the path he must take to return to us."
Shelby squirms. She finds herself wishing that she knew more about her husband's past. For the most part they don't talk about the decades that he lived before he met her. They only served to remind them of how much older he was than her.
"He's unconscious," Shelby says, rubbing her husband's hand right above the strap.
"All the better," the Jaffa says.
"What?" Shelby asks in shock.
"It is his unconscious mind we must reach. I know my ways are foreign to you, but I have known Teal'c longer than any of you have lived. I have walked his path. You cannot hope to understand the darkness in his heart as I do," he says sadly, meeting the eyes of each of the people around Teal'c's bed, but lingering on the eyes of the young wife who cannot even begin to understand her husband, "Trust in me. All of you."
Shelby nods her head, slowly and carefully. She has to trust him, this man who knows more about her husband that she ever can.
"For the moment, I must meditate in Kel'no'reem. This rite will take most of the night and I am tired from my long journey here. In the meantime, stay with him, speak to him."
"He can't hear us unless he wakes up."
"Perhaps not in his mind. But in his heart. Even in silence, he will know of your presence, but your words will force him to remember. Challenge him when he does, question his beliefs. Without his symbiote, he will not resist reason so readily."
-0-0-0-
"O'Neill. What is happening? Why am I restrained?" Teal'c says, looking around, confused, and then up at his wife.
"Well, you were sort of… trying to kill everyone these past few weeks," Jack says from his place in the chair.
"I could never have harmed you. The Rite of Malsuraan has been successful. Please release me," Teal'c says.
"I would like to be able to trust you," Shelby says carefully.
"I am not your enemy. We are married."
"Tell us about Va'lar," Daniel says.
"I have not heard that name in years. I trained with him under Bra'tac. We served in the personal guard of Apophis," Teal'c replies.
"What happened?" Shelby asks lightly touching his arm. She doesn't miss the fact that his arm goes slightly tense under her touch.
"What happened to him?" Daniel asks.
"He failed his god," Teal'c says calmly.
"His god? You mean that scum-sucking, over-dressed, boom-box-voiced snake-in-the-head? Latest on our long list of dead bad guys?" Jack says with spite.
Shelby looks over at the heart monitor, and notices the rate is racing. Teal'c strains against his restraints, an says , "Ka'shak! No Jaffa can survive the Rite of Malsuraan. You are allowing Bra'tac to kill me! Where is he? Shol'va! Where are you?" Teal'c shouts.
The monitor is going the other way now, and Shelby reaches over to put an IV into her husband. He closes his eyes, and she knows that another whole world is going on beneath his lids, but it is a world that she cannot reach.
-0-0-0-
"Do you not know the meaning of faith?" Teal'c asks Shelby.
"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the assurance of things not seen."
"Then you should know that my faith in Apophis is beyond question," Teal'c says.
"But if you remember me, and our life together, you remember a time when you abandoned that faith."
"Never! Apophis is a god," Teal'c proclaims.
"False god. Dead, false god," Daniel says.
"Your words cannot change the truth," Teal'c says.
"They're not my words, Teal'c, they're yours. Of course, you were wrong at the time because he wasn't… actually dead. But that's neither here nor there…" Daniel says.
"Lies!" Teal'c says, straining.
"Come on, Teal'c. You carry a symbiote within you, all Jaffa do. Each one of those would take a host, and become a Goa'uld. How can they all be gods?"
"Do not test my temper, woman!" Teal'c says.
"I hate it when he calls me that," Shelby mutters to Daniel and Jack, knowing that her husband is already deep into a flashback.